BOOKS IN REVIEW
A
Monumental Achievement.
Everett F.
Bleiler (with the assistance of Richard J. Bleiler). Science-Fiction:
The Gernsback Years: A Complete Coverage of the Genre Magazines
"Amazing," "Astounding," "Wonder," and Others from
1926 through 1936. Kent State UP, 1998. xxx + 730 pp. $65 cloth.
Anyone who is familiar with Everett
Bleiler’s magisterial book Science-Fiction: The Early Years (Kent State
UP, 1991) will need no further recommendation: this later volume, in effect a
"sequel," is just as essential a purchase for all serious scholars of
sf. The Gernsback Years, which concentrates solely on the genre sf
magazines from the founding of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories in
April 1926 to the folding of his Wonder Stories in April 1936 (and
slightly beyond), is structured on the same pattern as the earlier volume: the
main body of the book is arranged alphabetically by author, with each story
detailed in chronological order. As before, there is a lengthy introduction and
very full sets of appendices and indices. Given its more limited scope (the
earlier volume dealt with non-genre sf "from the earliest times up to
1930"), it is a somewhat smaller book—730 pages as opposed to 998, and
with less dense type—but it is still a mightily impressive tome.
The Early Years ,
for all its immense size, was selective in that it covered only those stories
and novels, up to 1930, that fell within Bleiler’s (generous) definition of sf.
The Gernsback Years, on the other hand, is fully comprehensive within its
scope—that is, it sets out to describe every story in every English-language
sf magazine published during the eleven years in question. It covers the
complete fiction contents not only of the three major magazines mentioned in the
subtitle—Amazing, Astounding, and Wonder—but also of
all the associated Quarterlies and Annuals, and of such minor
magazines as Air Wonder Stories (July 1929-May 1930), Flash Gordon’s
Strange Adventure Magazine (December 1936), Miracle Science and Fantasy
Stories (April-July 1931), and the sole British title represented, Scoops:
The Story Paper of Tomorrow (February10-June 23, 1934). It even details the
contents of the first three issues of the pulp Thrilling Wonder Stories—the
downmarket successor to Gernsback’s failed Wonder Stories—in order to
bring the narrative up to the end of 1936. One of the appendices, "Magazine
Histories and Contents," gives very full publishing details of all these
magazines, with individual issue contents, cover artists’ and internal
illustrators’ names, size, pagination, and much other matter.
In short, this book is the product of a
breathtaking achievement in sheer reading: Bleiler has pored through
hundreds of issues of (for the most part) bulky pulp magazines and, in a sense,
has relieved the rest of us from the necessity of ever having to do likewise.
His plot summaries and motif descriptions are clearly and cogently done, and
sometimes very funny; his evaluations are pithily expressed and (I am convinced)
rest on a reliable judgment. The readings and summaries are all the work of
Everett Bleiler alone; his son and collaborator, librarian Richard Bleiler,
appears to have confined himself to researching dates and biographical details
of some of the more obscure authors.
Although some will have access to runs
of the relevant magazines in libraries, the great majority of students of sf
will not have the Gernsback magazines (and the early Astounding Stories,
initially published by Clayton, later by Street & Smith) in their personal
collections. Those crumbling pulps have become too rare, and too highly priced.
For most of us, then, knowledge of the contents of the sf magazines of the
1926-1936 period will come mainly from book reprints—a few novels and
story-series that have been preserved in hardcover or paperback, and a few
useful anthologies. The latter include Mike Ashley’s The History of the
Science Fiction Magazine, Part 1: 1926-1935 (1974), Isaac Asimov’s mammoth
Before the Golden Age (1974), Damon Knight’s Science Fiction of the
30's (1975), James Gunn’s The Road to Science Fiction #2: From Wells to
Heinlein (1979), Forrest J. Ackerman’s Gosh! Wow! (Sense of Wonder)
Science Fiction (1982), and Martin H. Greenberg’s Amazing Science
Fiction Stories: The Wonder Years (1987). Some of those anthologies recycle
several of the same stories, the handful of acknowledged "classics" of
that period by Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, John W. Campbell, Stanley G.
Weinbaum, and a few others. The vast majority of the stories from the Gernsback-era
sf pulps remain unreprinted, and it is for the detailed second-hand knowledge of
these that it provides that Bleiler’s book will be particularly valuable.
In fact, with Bleiler’s guidance, it
would be possible to compile (in the mind’s eye, at least) another fat
anthology of historically interesting but hitherto unreprinted stories from that
period, a sort of "Best of Bleiler’s Gernsback Years." The
contents could include work by writers almost forgotten today, such as Fred M.
Barclay, Bernard Brown, Patrick Dutton, Roscoe B. Fleming, Walter Kateley,
Festus Pragnell, and G. Peyton Wertenbaker. Perhaps an adventurous publisher
should give some such anthology serious consideration. Would it be of historical
interest to students of sf? Most certainly. Would it be of literary value?
Probably not. One has to bear in mind that Bleiler’s favorable judgments on
stories by the above writers (and some others, more familiar and reprinted) are
best appreciated in context—and that context, as numerous other
annotations in this book make abundantly clear, was one of mediocrity. Most
"Gernsbackian" sf was ill-written and poorly thought-out, and much of
it was downright puerile—indeed, a good deal of it was written by teenagers.
Some of it is marred for modern readers by racism and other now-reprehensible
social attitudes. And yet, and yet... The best of these old stories, even when
viewed at second hand through Bleiler’s lens, have the virtue of freshness,
the sense of a whole new genre a-borning. They give off crackles of youthful
excitement. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
Sf was not quite as "young" a
genre, however, as many of the Gernsbackian authors and their readers perhaps
thought. The very existence of Bleiler’s previous book, The Early Years,
gives the lie to the notion that sf was born in 1926, as does the fact, amply
evidenced in The Gernsback Years itself, that the first
two-and-and-a-half years’ worth of Gernsback’s original sf magazine, Amazing,
was dominated by reprints of pre-1926 material, and in particular by reprints of
stories by one author—H.G. Wells. As Bleiler states, "A story or serial
part by Wells appeared in each of the first twenty-nine issues of the
magazine" (546). Something was born in 1926, a marketplace category
(initially called "scientifiction" by Gernsback, modulating into the
more pronounceable "science fiction" by 1930), a self-conscious genre
of popular fiction, a hothouse for the exchange of ideas and enthusiasms and
hence the forcing of further generic growth—but the genre itself, in a wider
literary sense, was not new. In looking through the nearly 60 pages of Bleiler’s
"Motif and Theme Index," one appreciates that there was very little
there that had not been invented prior to 1926. Sf came to be seen as an
American creation, and certainly the great majority of the sf pulp magazines
were US-published, but the shadow of that earlier, non-American, writer looms
over the Gernsback years, both in the sense that he was present, in reprinted
form, in the pages of Gernsback’s first magazine, and in the more important
sense that one can see, emerging from many of this book’s story synopses,
traces of his direct influence, however crudely reflected. The early genre sf
writers read each other’s jejune stories, and they read Gernsback’s
editorials; but they also read Wells. No doubt many of them also read Poe and
Verne and Bellamy and Jack London; but Wells—I feel sure, after reading Mr.
Bleiler’s excellent book, and after reading many stories of the 1926-1936
period in collections and anthologies—was the paramount influence, the writer
who above all others conquered the territory and first drew the borders of a
major twentieth-century literary genre.
Though Bleiler shows a remarkable
command of detail throughout this volume, he does make the occasional error. He
lists, for example, Clark Ashton Smith’s "The Eternal World" (Wonder
Stories, March 1932) as an unreprinted story, when in fact it was gathered
in Smith’s 1948 collection from Arkham House, Genius Loci. But any
attempt to list such small mistakes would be mere quibbling with what is
obviously a brilliant and monumental achievement. —David
Pringle, London
For
Fans or Scholars?
Frank M.
Robinson. Science Fiction of the 20th Century:
An Illustrated History . Collectors
Press, 1999. 256 pp. $59.95 cloth.
Brian
Stableford. The Dictionary of Science Fiction
Places. Fireside/ Wonderland, 1999. 384 pp. $19.95 paper. Dist.
by Simon & Schuster.
These two odd reference works are like
mirror images of one another: Robinson’s title presents his book as a
"history" of sf when in fact it is an album of glossy pictures with a
thin threadwork of text that basically amounts to a series of extended captions,
while Stableford’s seems on the surface to be a coffee-table volume, replete
with drawings commissioned especially for the book, yet in fact is a densely
conceived and original critical study of the genre. Both books are worth having
for their various—and contrasting— excellences, but the way they have been
packaged and promoted is somewhat misleading.
Science Fiction of the 20th Century
would be more accurately subtitled "A History in Illustrations." The
hundreds of reproductions of sf artwork cramming the book—pulp covers and
interiors, movie posters, hardcover and paperback jacket designs—are glorious,
perhaps the most sharply pristine ever assembled in one place, and they are
generously supplied: virtually every page carries at least one full-color image,
and many pages gather a number of them. Artwork from even the most ancient of
pulps has been meticulously spruced up; indeed, all the illustrations are so
technically flawless—entirely lacking in creases and discolorations—that
when the cover of Jonathan Lethem’s novel Gun, with Occasional Music
(1994), with its intentionally tattered, weathered look, is reproduced, Robinson’s
observation that it attempts to capture the flavor of the pulps comes across as
rather ironic. As a treasured gift for a youthful fan (or for oneself), one
could hardly do better than this magnificent museum of imagery.
The discursive accompaniment to this
visual compendium—Robinson’s "history" of the field—suffers by
comparison. In part, the problem is that this material breaks no new ground,
repeating the basic "consensus" view of the field to be found in
previous coffee-table histories, such as James Gunn’s Alternate Worlds: The
Illustrated History of Science Fiction (Prentice-Hall, 1975). Robinson draws
greater attention to the publication chronology and editorial procedures of the
pulps than other historians have done, but this focus seems a direct result of
needing to gloss the spate of images, rather than a major critical
reorientation. His almost ritualistic mention of film versions of sf texts, when
available, indicates the presumed audience for the book: those for whom the
genre exists basically as a visual medium, a collection of brilliant icons
rather than a canon of memorable stories. Indeed, aspects of sf history not
easily accessed through image repertoires—e.g., transformations in narrative
aesthetics or sf’s evolving relationship to scientific culture—are
essentially elided. Robinson is a pleasant enough companion throughout the
volume, often serving up hilarious anecdotes or arresting sidelights (such as
Hugh Hefner’s relationship with William Lawrence Hamling, editor of a number
of 1950s sf digests), but his level of commentary does not run very deep.
This lack of depth is evidenced in his
ready recourse to critical bromides (the 1960s New Wave involved "a drastic
departure from the safe and familiar turf of rayguns and rocketships and wasn’t
welcomed by everybody" [156]) and his perpetuation of debatable truisms
(Harlan Ellison’s "City on the Edge of Forever" was "the best
episode of the original Star Trek series" [116]). There are also
occasional mistakes: The Door into Summer (1957) is not generally listed
among Robert Heinlein’s juveniles (110); Snow Crash is not Neal
Stephenson’s first novel (182). But these errors hardly matter, since the book
really does not deserve to be judged by scholarly standards, but by the abiding
fannish taste for bright, startling imagery—a form of appreciation that, I
suspect, still lurks in all of us.
Brian Stableford’s Dictionary of
Science Fiction Places, by contrast, seems clearly geared for the fan, with
its oversize coffee-table format and its generous helping of black-and-white
illustrations by Jeff White. Yet upon closer examination, it turns out to be a
carefully constructed, cleverly layered argument about the importance of place
in the genre’s history—indeed, perhaps the most useful extended discussion
of narrative setting in sf literature ever produced. And the book is quite
obviously focused on the literature: sf based in visual media is eschewed
entirely, though one could imagine Stableford might easily have integrated
settings drawn from sf film and television (Metropolis, the Deathstar, Babylon
5, etc.) into the matrix of his discussion.
This matrix is, as the title suggests,
constructed alphabetically: the format of the book is a list of major locations
in sf’s textual history ranging from isolated architectural structures (the
Hall of the Grand Lunar), to sub-planetary habitats such as islands and cities
(Noble’s Isle, Diaspar), to space-based artificial environments (Lagrange-5,
Ringworld), to planets both real and fictive (Jupiter, Arrakis), to larger-scale
galactic systems (the Rim Worlds), to abstract venues such as cyberspace. While
admitting that these locales have been drawn from a multitude of texts and could
not possibly co-exist in one coherent universe, Stableford does seek to
"retain some sense of the connectedness of the whole enterprise";
indeed, his book amounts to an ambitious mapping of sf’s megatext, its overall
generic system conceived here as a "multiverse full of alternativerses"
(7). The extensive cross-referencing featured throughout the book—following in
format from the Clute/Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (St.
Martin’s, 1993), to which Stableford was a major contributor—reinforces this
curious sense of cohesion in diversity, so that sf comes to seem a space large
enough (both physically and ideologically) to contain Isaac Asimov’s empire of
rationality, Trantor; J.G. Ballard’s decadent artists’ colony, Vermilion
Sands; Borges’ legendary wonderland, Uqbar; and so on. The cross-references
from Borges’ playfully mystical realm show how imaginatively Stableford has
conceived his web of allusions, linking up with the planet of Delmark-O in
Philip K. Dick’s A Maze of Death (1970), with Marge Piercy’s village
of Mattapoisset in Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and with David
Lindsay’s world of Tormance in A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) as sites
whose textual existence is largely figurative or allegorical. At the other end
of the spectrum from these shadowy metafictional locales are the meticulously
crafted hard-sf worlds of Poul Anderson and Hal Clement, represented here by
twenty and six entries, respectively (a list of Works Cited, organized
alphabetically by author, is cross-indexed with the Entry List at the end of the
book).
This genre multiverse does have its
borders, however. While it includes some famous utopias and dystopias, these
tend to be the more science-fictional settings—on other planets or in the
future (e.g., Margaret Atwood’s Republic of Gilead). Also, the coverage of
fantasy venues is limited to science-fantasy locales (e.g., Clark Ashton Smith’s
Zothique, M. John Harrison’s Viriconium). Even so, there are some curious
omissions: Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover is included, but not Andre Norton’s
similarly fantastic Witch World (Norton’s work, in my view, is generally
under-represented, meriting only three entries). But all in all, this is a
remarkably complete compendium of sf’s major and minor places, and each entry
bears the stamp of Stableford’s alert, discerning, mordant intelligence.
There is some tension, in the various
entries, among competing claims to critical attention: at times, Stableford
seems simply to be describing the major features of exotic places (almost as if
they were truly extant), at other times to be summarizing the plots of stories
played out in specific locales, and at yet others to be offering abstract
observations on general tendencies in the genre’s deployment of imaginary
habitats. Despite this vacillation in focus—or perhaps because of it—the
book is a rich mosaic of information and commentary, at once a nostalgic
travelogue and an exploratory critical probe into the theme of place in sf
literature. It is highly recommended for fans and scholars alike. —RL
Here
There Be Monsters .
Joseph D.
Andriano. Immortal Monster: The
Mythological Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film .
Greenwood, 1999. xix + 179 pp. $55 cloth.
Literary and cultural teratologies, at
least when they focus on science fiction, tend to locate the genesis of the sf
monster somewhere around Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), when
the supernatural and alchemical beasts of earlier Gothic fiction gave way to
man-made marauders and science-induced transformations. But there is a much
older tradition that has had at least a comparable impact on pop monsterdom, and
it is this tradition—the legend of the leviathan or behemoth—that provides
the focus for Joseph D. Andriano’s often provocative Immortal Monster,
whose subtitle suggests a far more ambitious and encyclopedic approach than the
book actually delivers. It’s not uncommon for a monograph’s aims to be far
more modest than its title, but in this case it’s probably just as well, since
the textual universe Andriano wants to explore ranges broadly from Melville,
Pynchon, and John Gardner to killer whale movies such as Orca (1977) and
shlock classics such as The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). Any
attempt to comprehensively explain the "mythological evolution" of
such a range of literary and cinematic monsters would be the work of a lifetime,
much of it spent watching cheesy videotapes of unwatchable movies.
Andriano wisely delimits his purview in
two ways: by focusing principally on what he calls "leviathanic texts"
(of which his archetype is Moby-Dick [1851]), and by offering an
introductory disclaimer that he is attempting not to trace exhaustively any one
theme, but rather to explore "paradigmatic" texts "that seem to
redefine the monster in a way that influences other texts, which I then also
consider" (xv-xvi). More often than not, those "other texts" turn
out to be movies, so that (for example) when Andriano discusses Wells’s The
Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), he spends most of the chapter analyzing
the differences among the three film versions, but feels no need to mention
later literary treatments of the tale from Brian Aldiss, Gene Wolfe, and others;
nor, save for a brief discussion of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), does he
mention the considerable literary heritage of King Kong (1933).
Conversely, the one film that would establish a firm link between Moby-Dick,
many of these later movies, and the science-fictional notion of the leviathan in
outer space (an idea Andriano explores only tentatively) is missing from the
discussion altogether: this is the 1956 John Huston/Ray Bradbury film of the
Melville novel, which later prompted Bradbury to write a radio space-opera
version of the same tale.
There are, in other words, some odd
omissions even by the terms Andriano has set out, and some equally odd
inclusions. After discussing Moby-Dick, Jaws (1975) and its
descendants, the King Kong movies, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon,
Andriano radically shifts gears into a discussion of John Gardner’s Grendel
(1971), because the monster’s mere supposedly fills a thematic role
similar to that of the Black Lagoon. But then, are we meant to view Grendel
as a kind of high-culture response to the same late-capitalist mythic impulse
that gave us Jack Arnold movies? It’s an intriguing proposition, but it’s
never quite developed or persuasively articulated. Again, there is a whole
cluster of pop-culture redactions of the Beowulf tale (including a novel by
Michael Crichton) that goes unmentioned as the chapter slides instead into an X-Files
episode about an Appalachian lake monster, which is linked to the Loch Ness
monster, whose rich cultural history also goes unexamined. In terms of its
coverage, then, the book opens far more avenues than it is willing to explore,
and sometimes settles too easily for cataloging the failures of manifestly awful
movies such as King Kong Lives (1986). As a guide to its putative
subject, then, Immortal Monster is a bit limited in scope, and like a
number of recent studies of post-Gothic traditions, it tends to view twentieth-
century pop culture more through the lens of movies than through literary
traditions, even the traditions of genre fiction. But a good deal of what it
lacks in breadth is more than made up in the compelling substance of Andriano’s
major theses.
Essentially, Andriano sees these
various leviathan tales as post-Darwinian versions of ancient monster stories,
with the evolutionary perspective leading to a tension between anthropomorphism
and bestialization, between the more rigidly hierarchical ancient "Ladder
of Being" and the more complexly organized Darwinian "bushy Tree of
Life." This evolutionary perspective also leads to what Andriano sees as a
continuing undercurrent of racism or racial anxiety in many of these texts—a
theme that has often been noted in Moby-Dick or the King Kong movies, but
which Andriano also links to Peter Benchley’s Jaws (1974) and Beast
(1991) by noting some telling differences between novel and film versions, and
between the original film of Jaws and its sequels (1978, 1983, 1987).
This theme, in fact, is what powers the first several chapters of the book,
which falls into three general parts. The first two chapters discuss Moby-Dick
and its more or less direct heirs in Peter Benchley’s Jaws, Spielberg’s
film of that novel, the lame whale film Orca, and Benchley’s Beast
(produced as a TV-movie in 1996); the next two chapters deal with King Kong,
its sequels, remakes, and variations (such as Mighty Joe Young [1949] and
Congo [1995]); the next three chapters treat more-or-less freestanding
variations on the theme, such as the Black Lagoon movies, Gardner’s Grendel,
and Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau and its three movie versions (1932,
1977, 1996). A final chapter introduces a huge new concept of particular
relevance to sf—the effect on these evolutionary myths of the human-machine
relationships as explored in Gravity’s Rainbow—but explores the idea
almost cursorily and with little hint of the enormous range of potentially
relevant texts.
Andriano foreshadows this final chapter
by mentioning technology at various points earlier in the book; but some of
these mentions seem pretty strained, as when he claims that the planes that
bring down King Kong, since they have pilots in them, are early versions of
cyborgs, foreshadowing the next evolutionary step just as Kong’s world
suggested an earlier stage of evolution. Similarly, he occasionally falls into
the trap—not unusual in discussions of popular film—of ascribing his own
intellectual arguments to the filmmakers he is discussing. Of the 1976 remake of
King Kong, he writes, "The filmmakers are primarily concerned with
using the metonymic image of Kong as generic ape to explore the relationship
between human beings and other primate species" (69). Throughout, Andriano
has made an interesting distinction between the metaphoric and metonymic uses of
monsters, but it strikes me as highly unlikely that DeLaurentis and company were
"primarily concerned" with this sort of thing at all. Similarly, a
famous line from Island of Lost Souls (the 1933 film version of The
Island of Dr. Moreau)—"the natives are restless tonight"—becomes
evidence that the film "thus draws an ethical parallel between capturing
animals and colonizing human beings" (138). This claim rests on the fact
that the natives aren’t really natives at all, but altered animals, so why
would Dr. Moreau call them "natives" unless the screenwriters intended
such a parallel? The much simpler answer—which Andriano acknowledges—is that
Moreau merely wants his visitors to think the animals are natives.
Still, Andriano’s template of
anthropomorphism vs. bestialization, of the Ladder of Being vs. the Tree of
Life, is clearly thought out in theoretical terms, and provides a useful and
revealing way of approaching a wide variety of texts in the leviathanic
tradition. Moreover, Andriano’s insightful linking of this evolutionary theme
with such problematic issues in American culture as racial anxiety, while not
entirely original (certainly the racial subtext of King Kong has long
been observed, though few other authors have made such connections with Jaws),
is provocative enough that one wishes he might have explored it further. A sure
sign of Andriano’s acumen as a critic is that one comes away from Immortal
Monster wondering what he might have made of more recent novels such as
Benchley’s White Shark (1994)—which encapsulates many of Andriano’s
major themes, from leviathan to cyborg—or films such as Deep Blue Sea (1999).But then again, White Shark—a pretty bad novel, but no worse than
some films Andriano discusses—dates from 1994, and might easily have been
mentioned had Andriano cast his net a little further. Immortal Monster
offers enough new insights and intelligent readings to make it easily worth the
attention of anyone interested in the etiology of pop-culture monsters, but one
worries that a good deal of the landscape Andriano hopes to map may still be terra
incognita to his own research: here there be monsters indeed, and in far
greater abundance than this intelligent map suggests.—Gary
K. Wolfe, Roosevelt University
By
the Bomb’s Early Footlights.
Charles A.
Carpenter. Dramatists and the Bomb: American and
British Playwrights Confront the Nuclear Age, 1945-1964. Greenwood,
1999. xvi + 183 pp. $57.95 cloth. Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies
#91.
This is a systematic survey of all the
plays on the topic of the Bomb that the author could identify as being published
in English during the first two decades of the atomic age. And he would seem to
have done a very thorough job, since he discusses more than a dozen works that
have not been uncovered by earlier scholars, though these are understandably
extremely obscure and often quite short. In fact, there is not a really
well-known play discussed in the entire volume—because there are no well-known
plays about nuclear war from this period. The theater never produced the
equivalent of an On the Beach (1957). (It did produce an Alas, Babylon:
an exceedingly obscure 1963 theatrical version of Pat Frank’s best-selling
1959 novel written by Anne Coulter Martens; Carpenter doesn’t mention it,
perhaps because of his debatable decision to exclude plays that were merely
adaptations of books.)
Carpenter analyzes the political
context of his subject in some detail, discussing the public events that
provided the backdrop for the writings under discussion. The plays are grouped
by nationality (American and British) and by theme. Carpenter has done an
admirable job of ferreting out background information, such as how the authors
became interested in the subject, where their plays were performed, etc. One of
the more striking features of the book is its discussion of playwrights who
tried and failed to write nuclear war plays. Carpenter also recounts the
personal reactions of playwrights such as Maxwell Anderson and Arthur Miller to
Hiroshima and the arms race, noting that they did not go on to express their
concerns on the stage. He also discusses a few plays with anti-nuclear protest
themes that do not actually depict nuclear wars.
The most famous names among those whose
plays are discussed are George Bernard Shaw (a couple of brief sketches), J.B.
Priestley (Summer Day’s Dream [1949]), Herman Wouk (The Traitor
[1949]), and Doris Lessing (Each His Own Wilderness [1958]). Carpenter
concludes with a reading of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957) as a
postnuclear drama, acknowledging that the playwright strenuously objected to
such an interpretation, but nevertheless making some interesting observations
about it. When I tell you that there is extended attention paid to Robert
Nichols and Maurice Brown’s pre-Hiroshima atomic drama Wings Over Europe (1929)
and Marghanita Laski’s 1961 The Offshore Island, you will have some
notion of the level of obscurity with which we are dealing. Many of the plays
are eccentric and approach their subject with that odd irrelevance that marks so
many nuclear war novels. There is also a useful checklist of relevant plays
published in other languages.
In his interesting personal
introduction, Carpenter discusses how his own apparent obliviousness to the
nuclear threat was punctured by a nightmare that led ultimately to the writing
of this book. The problem for those who would make the postwar era an Atomic Age
loomed over by visions of mushroom clouds is that the subject was avoided,
evaded, repressed, and sublimated far more often than it was confronted. It is
to Carpenter’s credit that he does not try to inflate the importance of his
topic by claiming more currency for the ideas portrayed in these plays than they
can justify.
The choice of 1964 for an end date
makes sense, for the signing of the atmospheric testing ban in the previous
year, in the wake of the traumatic Cuban missile crisis, led to a marked
falling-off in public interest in the subject of the threats posed by nuclear
weapons. Carpenter acknowledges the revival of interest in the Reagan years, but
does not justify his decision to exclude the 1980s boom in writings about
nuclear war and weapons, many of which (such as Lee Blessing’s 1986 A Walk
in the Woods) reached a much wider audience than the 1945-1964 plays. There
is room here for a sequel.
Carpenter draws sensible conclusions
about the cultural context of the plays, drawing mostly on two of our finest
guides to the subject—Paul Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light: American
Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Pantheon, 1985) and
Spencer Weart’s Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Harvard UP, 1988)—but
generally not going beyond them. We don’t learn anything strikingly new about
how America and Britain reacted to the atomic age: this study merely fills in
gaps in well-charted territory, but does a workmanlike job of doing so. The
plays are too obscure and too few to form a school or tradition, and Carpenter
wisely resists trying to create one.
Notably rare in the book are references
to genre science fiction, which produced the majority of atomic war fictions
during the period covered. It is significant that this volume appears not in
Greenwood’s Studies in Science Fiction series, but in its Contributions in
Drama and Theatre Studies line. The book does comment on some television
productions of the plays under discussion and on Rod Serling’s script for the Twilight
Zone episode "The Shelter," but it does not cover the 1954 ABC
television drama Atomic Attack, based on Judith Merril’s Shadow on
the Hearth (1950). And Carpenter doesn’t make the allusions one might
expect to films, except for Dr. Strangelove (1963). Mick Broderick
has covered this territory in his Nuclear Movies (McFarland, 1991) and
other studies, so nuclear war film has hardly been neglected; but the absence of
Broderick from Carpenter’s bibliography indicates a lack of interest in this
related dramatic art.
Despite the various limitations noted
above, the volume admirably lives up to its title, covering precisely what it
claims to. Though not of intense interest to the average reader, this is a
valuable tool for anyone doing research in nuclear war imagery in the arts, and
is appropriate for larger research collections.—Paul
Brians, Washington State University
SF
and the Discourse of Modernism .
Richard Saint-Gelais.
L’Empire du pseudo: modernités de la
science-fiction. Editions Nota bene (fax: 418-656-7701), 1999.
405 pp. CAN$24.00 paper.
After the sociological approaches of
Darko Suvin and Marc Angenot, and the multiple universes of Guy Bouchard,
Québécois sf scholarship now offers us a new study by Richard Saint-Gelais,
professor at the Université de Laval. This book treats sf not as a collection
of particular themes or as a literary genre but as a unique type of textual
discourse closely linked to modernism—and even to postmodernism—and which
Saint-Gelais examines in great detail from a variety of perspectives.
The work is divided into three main
parts and nine chapters. In the first part, called "Quatre Motifs
Structurels," the author, in addition to comparing the basic structure of
modern sf with that of early anticipation novels, uchronias, and detective
fiction, also discusses the semiotic "speed" of the former—i.e., the
discursive short-circuit between sf’s futuristic dream and its textual
articulation (e.g., the notion of hyperspace [90]). Another element, which does
not appear explicitly in the chapter titles but is omnipresent throughout the
discussions, is a comparison with mainstream literature, allowing the author to
trace a clear evolution in sf’s signifying practices and to demonstrate, for
example, the textual originality of "New Wave" sf. Through his
incisive observations, many centered primarily on how time is used in the
narrative structure of these works, Saint-Gelais succeeds in analyzing sf as a
specific set of writing "protocols" (dispositifs, 84) which
evolve historically. He highlights the presence of certain perverse effects in
the creation of sf’s extrapolations and parallel worlds, and he invites the
reader to question the manner by which such effects become themes in the context
of a "naive" reading style. Similarly, his treatment of what Wells
once termed "scientific patter"—which adds a certain level of
verisimilitude to the most imaginative narratives—is treated pragmatically as
simple "words of science" (93) that create for the reader a
"referential illusion" (94). Rather than discussing plot or thematic
content, Saint-Gelais focuses on the mechanisms of how the sf text (much like
the "nouveau roman"—e.g., a passage from Claude Ollier is cited
[125]) conveys meaning through the destabilization of the traditional frames of
reference of place, time, and voice.
The second part of L’Empire du
pseudo, two chapters in length, is called "Science-Fiction, Discours et
Lecture" and analyzes sf from the point of view of various "reading
protocols." Saint-Gelais begins by visualizing sf as being in a constant
paradoxical tension between two poles: a fictional narrative on the one hand and
an "encyclopedia" (in the sense used by Umberto Eco) on the other.
This tension is resolved differently at different stages of sf’s evolution. In
early didactic sf texts, the technical discourse limits its narrational
possibilities. Later sf becomes progressively more free in this regard, and the
fictional worlds wherein the sf plots unfold are reconstructed by the reader
from disparate textual indices. Although certainly not the first to do so,
Saint-Gelais thus outlines an evolution in sf reader conventions from those of
"didactic strategy" sf (141) to those used for decoding more
"estranging" sf of the modern era. In so doing, he raises fundamental
questions about the sf genre’s intrinsic limits (especially as compared to
"mainstream" fiction) and the quality of the reading experience
itself.
The third and final part of L’Empire
du pseudo, composed of three chapters and called "Modernités de la
science-fiction," is somewhat more heterogeneous and unfocused. The author’s
diverse musings on such topics as sf’s "artifacts" and the "transfictionality"
of Star Trek, although they might make interesting stand-alone articles,
seem disjointed and poorly integrated into what precedes them. In this part,
Saint-Gelais addresses a number of questions related to the putative
"postmodern" aspects of sf. His basic thesis might be summarized,
albeit perhaps too simply, as follows. Sf of the "golden age" was
characterized (sometimes falsely, as Saint-Gelais also points out) by its naive
portrayal at the "zero degree of writing" of fantasized treatments of
scientific themes. As a result of and following the "New Wave," sf was
promoted as a locus for and a means to the exploration of subtle narrational
effects (the "science-fictional" experience), as evident in the texts
of Ballard, Dick, or Delany (247). As a direct result, the sf field is now
polarized: on the one hand, there is genre sf that portrays in mimetic fashion a
future whose signs are immediately recognizable and clear and where the
adventures of type-cast protagonists are elaborated within the framework of a
linear plot; on the other hand, there is literary sf, whose reading is oriented
more toward an appreciation of "textual protocols" and whose generic
relationship to sf, although not in doubt, remains nevertheless a marginal
aspect of its identity.
Some unanswered questions linger: do
these two types of sf (narrative vs. textual) address the same type of reader?
Have readers also evolved in the same fashion as sf? Is there an "ideal
reader" (Eco) of sf? Despite such reservations, one can only be in favor of
a book that adds to our perception of the sf genre. It should nevertheless be
noted that the author, in putting such a heavy emphasis on textuality, has
perhaps lost sight of the discursive specificity that is unique to sf. Moreover,
throughout the book, certain concepts are used without sufficient explanation:
for example, the distinction between "fictive" and
"fictional" is not clarified until page 310—and, given the
complexity of the problem, it still remains quite debatable.
But, overall, Richard Saint-Gelais’s L’Empire
du pseudo: modernités de la science-fiction is rich, copious, and generally
well argued. It builds upon a large number of earlier sf critical works in both
English and French, and it boasts an excellent bibliography. Regrettably, it has
no index.—Roger Bozzetto, University d'Aix
Slipstreaming
with Lacan.
Fred Botting. Sex,
Machines and Navels: Fiction, Fantasy and History in the Future Present.
Manchester UP, 1999. vii + 240 pp. $69.95 cloth; $29.95 paper. Dist. in
the US by St. Martin’s.
I have never been too bothered by the
fact that, in many visual representations of the Book of Genesis, Adam appears
to be the proud owner of a navel. As any good poststructuralist knows, it is
precisely this type of thing that motivates cultural criticism. If it turns out
that the most famous origin story of them all bears traces of impossible events,
this merely provides more ammunition against those currently campaigning to have
the teaching of evolution outlawed. In the beginning was another beginning that
someone is not telling us about. Some genesis. As a cultural critic with an
interest in sf, however, I have always been troubled by the scene towards the
end of Blade Runner (1982) in which Roy Batty strips to the waist and, in
doing so, reveals that he has a navel. Why would a being who has not been born,
not been separated from the maternal body, need such a thing? There are, of
course, two simple answers: first, and somewhat pedantically, the actor who
plays Roy is human; second, replicants are designed to be physically
indistinguishable from humans, and an unmarked belly would give the game away
(no need for the Voigt-Kampff test; simply lift the subject’s shirt).
While Fred Botting shares my
fascination with Roy Batty’s navel, his book resists such a convenient
"common sense" explanation. The whole of Sex, Machines and Navels
is, in fact, obsessed with the persistence of the navel in our apparently
posthuman, postnatural moment. Why, it asks, does this entirely useless flap of
flesh continue to figure in contemporary culture? What might it have to say
about culture itself, particularly at a moment when, so the story goes, all
traces of the natural have been erased? Could it be that the navel—at once
"a sign of natural reproduction" and "a scar forming the first
mark of culture on the body" (3)—confuses the very opposition between
nature and culture? As if to preempt predictable put-downs (and, moreover, to
deny reviewers the perfect title for their articles), Botting mischievously
describes his own project as "navel-gazing." This, he writes,
"may not, after all, prove so idle or pointless an exercise as it is
popularly assumed to be. Examining an object simultaneously so visible and so
overlooked reveals not only the variety of navel appearances on the textual
bodies of culture but also diverse networks of significance in which the navel
emerges as a crucial node" (12-13).
The book gazes at navels from a
perspective informed by psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Jacques Lacan.
The first two chapters, accordingly, provide an exhaustive summary of the place
of the navel in Freudian and Lacanian theory. With a remarkable eye for detail,
Botting relates how, from out of the belly of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900),
Lacan develops an entire theory of the navel, in which this nexus becomes
"the limit of mediation, the point beyond which imaginary and symbolic
registers fail, open[ing] on to the unsymbolisable real, glimpsed only in its
unknown, abyssal relation’ to analysis" (35). More confusingly, he
continues, it "lies at the point where meaning both threatens to evaporate,
to unravel beyond the knot that covers a hole, and emerges, particularly
condensed, in the fullness of sense. Beyond the knot, in the locus marked by a
hole, there is the real, the core of being" (57). But this beyond is truly
beyond: it cannot be captured, assimilated, known. The knot, however, remains.
The third section, again principally
devoted to staking out the theoretical terrain, considers the relationship
between postmodernism and jokes. If humor is, as Freud suggested, a momentary
release of repressed anti-social desires, then postmodernism—that
"thrilling release from systems of authority, the pursuit of numerous
artistic, social, sexual and economic freedoms, and a loss of control
experienced as a delirious, aesthetic flight of and from meaning" (70-71)—quite
clearly has something of the joke about it. While some cultural critics might
denounce the postmodern for privileging navel-gazing and in-jokes over the
serious work of changing the world, Botting refrains from rushing into
moralizing value judgements. And that is precisely one of the main strengths of
this book: through a careful observation of a diverse range of cultural
productions, Sex, Machines and Navels highlights connections between
seemingly disparate phenomena. It is rare to find a writer who can move
seamlessly among the high theory of Lacan, cyberpunk sf, the apparently non-sf
"serious" literature of Graham Swift and Julian Barnes, Hollywood
cinema, and even the world of fashion (at times the leaps of imagination recall,
in method at least, the work of Marjorie Garber). No form of signifying practice
is privileged over another: making connections is what counts, and in its finely
crafted tying together of things, this is criticism as navel.
The fourth chapter begins to show how
the theory, developed in the previous sections, bears upon fiction. Taking
Graham Swift’s Waterland (1984) as an example, Botting works through
the novel’s approach to the question of history. In this slippery text, itself
a knot of stories, "the grand model of History" (121) is forever
eroded by what remains unsaid. "Waterland’s stories," Botting
concludes, "defer the ungraspable real, repeatedly circulating around and
departing from empty vessels: even as they broach the traumatic core of events
they look away, to another story" (124). As beautifully executed as Botting’s
reading of Waterland is, scholars of sf are more likely to be drawn to
the final two chapters, where the narratives of cyberculture, and particularly
the fictions of William Gibson and Rudy Rucker, are considered at some length.
Drawing in part upon the recent work of Paul Virilio, Botting points out that
many cyberpunks and cybertheorists return to humanism, simply because they align
being digital with a state of transcendence, with being God, the One who sees
and knows everything in an instant. If to plunge into the matrix is often to
"plunge through a hole towards a site of plenitude, a jouissance in
the One akin to that associated with the original matrix" (170), the real
and its attendant desires are clearly alive and kicking.
Rucker’s Wetware (1988),
however, is singled out for attention because of the way in which it swims
against the tide, "complicat[ing] questions of the future and render[ing]
visible the matter of an inassimilable difference" (165). Here, quite
simply, the "question of the navel, of one’s relation to the meat,
remains paramount" (162). And what remains paramount in Sex, Machines
and Navels is precisely an awareness of what remains. The book comes to
resemble a litany of what contemporary cyberculture habitually represses. The
repressed, of course, always finds a way to return, and Botting tirelessly
follows the twists and turns of exactly what returns: the real.
It should be apparent that Sex,
Machines and Navels is not simply a book about sf. Yet I think that the book
asks some timely questions about the place of sf in the "future
present," that strange moment when futures past seem to be here and now. By
expanding the field of inquiry beyond sf—by reading Gibson and Rucker
alongside Swift and Barnes, for instance—Botting questions the border between
sf and non-sf literatures. Bruce Sterling has given the name "slipstream
fiction" to texts that wander between those generic spaces, and Sex,
Machines and Navels adds some surprising works to the list. To the best of
my knowledge, no one has ever made Swift’s Waterland or Barnes’s A
History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989) sound so close to sf. When
Botting discusses the latter’s refashioning of the story of the Ark, for
instance, it is hard not to think of Philip K. Dick’s "The Builder"
(1953-54) and to question the easy generic distinction between the two authors.
It is not merely fiction that gets such treatment, for theory’s proximity to
sf is also considered. Just as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. memorably identified
the "science-fictionalization of theory" in the writings of Haraway
and Baudrillard, Botting unearths it in Lacan’s "return to Freud."
There may well be, as Slavoj Zizek once pointed out, only one explicit reference
to sf in the whole of Lacan’s work, but Sex, Machines and Navels
unfolds the implicit.
This is not an easy book. It never
compromises its theoretical position and, on many counts, refuses to march in
time with a great deal of contemporary scholarship on the place of the human in
a posthumanist landscape. Lacanian theory has recently come under attack from
various camps for sounding just a little too often like a metanarrative, and it
would be easy to criticize Botting for using psychoanalysis as a predetermined
key to all mythologies. But I think that Sex, Machines and Navels
forestalls such criticism by showing how Lacanian theory remembers something
that many of the more fashionable theorists forget (or repress): the unknowable
real that dwells beyond the symbolic and the imaginary. Lacan, in Botting’s
hands, cautions against crude and totalizing declarations of the absolute end of
the human, of the body, of reality (which is not, of course, to be confused with
the Lacanian real). If the real cannot be mastered, known, made present, how can
we claim to have left it behind? How would we ever know?
It does not follow that Sex,
Machines and Navels calls for a return to humanism. What it does call for,
however, is a rethinking of our willingness to be seduced by apocalyptic
narratives about the absolute death of humanist discourse. Navels, it points
out, are everywhere in contemporary culture. They will not go away. They haunt
even the most "post-" of "post-"s. History repeats itself
not as tragedy, not as farce, but as navel-gazing. And if "Traces of
age-old romantic traditions remain in the apocalyptic romance of the
machine" (218), the story cannot be over. Know apocalypse? Not now.—Neil
Badmington, Cardiff University
Fantastic
Flora of England.
Colin Manlove.
The Fantasy Literature of England.
St. Martin’s, 1999. vi + 222 pp. $49.95 cloth.
The acknowledgments page comments that
this volume appears to be the first book on English fantasy—a fact both
undeniable and astounding, given the prominence of English writers in the
development of modern fantasy. Many works on fantasy turn out to be de facto
studies of the British tradition, simply because of the overwhelming presence of
Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, William Morris, C.S. Lewis, Mervyn Peake,
Kenneth Grahame, Edith Nesbit, E.R. Eddison, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Colin Manlove
himself has written about all of those fantasists before. He has not, however,
previously explored them in terms of their Englishness. What is there, he asks,
about English culture that has drawn such diverse imaginative work from "a
people often seen as practical and hard-headed, materialist, prudish, repressed
and insular" (1)?
A study of literary nationality can
take either of two tacks. First, it may simply assume that works produced within
a country’s borders form a natural grouping, and proceed to survey the variety
within that category. I think of this as the "Flora of Idaho"
approach, not because there is a romance by that name about an eponymous
heroine, but because botanists find it useful to categorize all the plant
species within a given region, regardless of their appearance in the next state
over or halfway around the world. In this approach, we are offered a field guide
to English fantasy: here is the sort of thing one is likely to find and where it
fits into some sort of taxonomic scheme. The second kind of national study
pinpoints common experiences and characteristics that distinguish English-ness
from French-ness or American-ness. We might call this the "New World
Symphony" approach: the attempt to construct a coherent whole from
indigenous materials, as Anton Dvořák did during his stay in America. Of
course, Dvořák’s symphony is one part American melody to twenty parts
European harmonic tradition, about as American as a batch of strudel. Similarly,
theories of national identity notoriously ignore internal differences and
external resemblances to construct neat theories of a distinct local character.
My own discipline of American Studies offers many cautionary examples of
over-generalization. Many early writings in the field are as unsupported and
misleading as a traveler’s first impressions—e.g., "The Italians are so
romantic; Parisians are rude; Swedes have no sense of humor." Yet the
traveler is sensing some sort of genuine cultural difference, and there are
aspects of American culture that differ from even such close kin as Canadians—our
guns and our religiosity, for instance.
First impressions have the advantage of
not much complicating knowledge. National characters are always more evident
from the outside, at a glance. When I tried to describe American fantasy many
years ago, I used the English tradition as a convenient contrast. It seemed to
offer a nice clear pattern, unlike the ill-assorted fragments I was finding.
Thanks to scholars like Manlove, whose Modern Fantasy: Five Studies
(Cambridge, 1975) was one of the pioneering works in the field, I was able to
define an American national character in whatever was not English. Without the
grounding in English history and prehistory, the convenient body of British
fairy lore, and what seemed (from the outside) to be the unbroken tradition of
fantastic literature that Lewis and Tolkien could draw on, American fantasists
had to convert such unlikely materials as skepticism and humor into such fantasy
worlds as Oz and Earthsea.
But what looked coherent and consistent
from across the Atlantic turns out, in Manlove’s new telling, to be more
contradictory and more interrupted than it might appear—a punctuated sequence
rather than a smooth evolutionary slope. English fantasy has been reinvented
many times and suffered as many apparent deaths. Its enemies have included both
rationalists and religious zealots, although Manlove points out that one of its
important strands is Christian metaphysical fantasy. Though there is a tradition
supporting English fantasists, it is one that has had to be reconstructed by
each generation of writers, who say, in effect, "What we’re doing is
legitimate, because it goes right back to Beowulf or Chaucer or
Shakespeare or Coleridge." As Manlove tells the story, it does go back to Beowulf
and Anglo-Saxon dream visions, which are succeeded by Anglo-French romances and
then by Renaissance pastorals and utopias. His origins chapter actually begins
with British fairy tales. This is a slightly shaky argument, since, as he points
out, the earliest surviving fairy-tale texts are Renaissance chapbooks and most
versions date from the seventeenth century or later. I agree that some version
of some magical tales were undoubtedly being told earlier, but not necessarily
in a form we would recognize.
Some of the most useful discussions in
the book deal with early literary (as opposed to transcribed oral) texts. By
focusing on their uses of fantasy, Manlove finds something new and interesting
to say about works such as "The Dream of the Rood" (?8th century AD)
and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (1604). The latter, he points out, is, in a
sense, a story "about fantasy: Faustus’s fantasy that he rules the world
is overwhelmed by the greater and true fantasy of God; and the materialist who
dismisses hell as a fable learns all too painfully its supernatural
reality" (26). I wanted to hear more about this and many other insights,
but the amount of material to be covered allows only a paragraph or two even
about major works. It is to Manlove’s credit that many of those paragraphs are
more substantial than many encyclopedia-length entries I have read elsewhere.
Only occasionally does he fall into mere cataloguing of works and authors,
despite the need to compress.
Aside from a brief introduction and
briefer conclusion, most of the historical argument comes in the chapter called
"The Origins of English Fantasy." The remainder of the book consists
of a series of chronological listings of various types of fantasy. His groupings
are labeled secondary world, metaphysical, emotive, comic, subversive, and
children’s—categories that, as he points out, are not mutually exclusive and
are based on different criteria. The first three are generally concerned with
validating belief systems of various sorts, the next two with overturning or
questioning such systems, and the last with providing representatives of all the
other categories. The bulk of the book, then, is primarily descriptive and
taxonomic: Fantastic Flora of England. Taken altogether, though, the groupings
themselves suggest Manlove’s argument about national character, his Old World
Symphony. English fantasy is that which engages religious and metaphysical
notions in a particularly intense way, either by embodying them in fantasy
worlds or by turning them loose (often with disastrously hilarious consequences)
in the real world. The apparent contradiction between these two techniques is
itself part of the pattern of English fantasy, which embraces both Tolkien and
Angela Carter. This is a relatively modest claim—that diversity itself is the
primary hallmark of the tradition—but it is a supportable and useful one. In
his conclusion, Manlove makes a few other suggestions, each of which I wish he
had developed further: that English fantasy is "crammed with life"
(192), that it involves "mind-broadening adventure" (192), that it
"has a social bias" (193) and a tendency to resolve ambiguity into
"exposure and daylight" (195). I would like to read a chapter, at
least, on each of these ideas. In fact, that is my main complaint about the book
as a whole: I want more of everything, more than is possible to fit into a
200-page study.
For me, the most valuable thing about
this volume is that it provides a context within which to read—and judge—contemporary
fantasy. In earlier works, Colin Manlove has often adopted a grumpy tone toward
fantasy writers, who never seemed to live up to his expectations. Here we see
how those expectations were formed, and why the standard is so high. The tone
this time around, though, is more celebratory than judgmental. Perhaps this new
cheer comes partly from having the chance to talk about Spenser and Milton;
perhaps from the strength of newer examples by Carter and Peter Ackroyd and
Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones. But Manlove seems to take more pleasure
here even in Tolkien and Lewis, as if by seeing their work as part of something
larger, he need not demand quite so much out of any particular instance but can
enjoy the harmonies each adds to the whole symphony. —Brian
Attebery, Idaho State University
More
on the Two Cultures.
Elmar Schenkel
and Stefan Welz, eds. Lost Worlds and Mad
Elephants: Literature, Science and Technology, 1700-1990 Galda + Wilch Verlag (fax: 03-30-56-8-01-57), 1999. Leipzig
Explorations in Literature and Culture, Volume 2. 371 pp. DM 118.
The twenty-one essays in this volume
are the selected proceedings of a 1998 conference held in Leipzig that focused
on scientific ideas in literary works. Although the subtitle indicates that the
essays are concerned with literature, science, and technology from the
eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, the book’s scope is broader than
that: the first essay, by Barbara Korte, deals with the evolving relationship of
painting (and of visual arts generally) to physical science over several
centuries, and the second, by Richard Nate, is a commentary on the writings of
Margaret Cavendish, including her Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy
(1666). Most of the literary works studied here are by British authors, but
there are also occasional American, Irish, or Caribbean authors, as well as two
Russians—A.K. Tolstoy and Mikhail Bulgakov—whose fiction is compared with
that of H.G. Wells. The essays take various approaches to the works and to the
relationship of literary and scientific cultures: Snow’s "The Two
Cultures" (1959) is inevitably invoked at several points, but never in a
narrow or reductive fashion. Indeed, what emerges most from the collection is a
healthy open-mindedness about how scientific ideas might be appropriated for use
in fictional, poetic, and dramatic works.
There is not space enough for me to
comment in detail on each essay, but a sampling will at least indicate how the
collection might interest readers of SFS. Silke Strickrodt’s paper on
Jane Loudon’s The Mummy! (1827) summarizes a neglected novel and shows
how it uses contemporary scientific ideas. Hermann Josef Schnackertz argues that
several of Poe’s stories, especially "The Business Man," "The
Imp of the Perverse," and the Dupin stories, reveal Poe’s interest in and
knowledge of phrenology. Kate Flint outlines approaches to hallucination from
St. Augustine through the late nineteenth century, then shows how these ideas
underlie stories by Margaret Oliphant ("The Open Door" [1881]),
Rudyard Kipling ("The Phantom Rickshaw" [1885]), and H.G. Wells
("The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes" [1895] and "The
Crystal Egg" [1897]). These stories, she argues, were influenced both by
theories of sensory perception and by the emerging field of psychoanalysis.
One of the best essays,
"Invisibility: Strategies of Encounter" by Elmar Schenkel, makes a
good companion piece for Flint’s study of hallucination. Schenkel looks at
ways in which invisibility is used in fiction, relating it to scientific
interest in the range of chromatic perception, gaps in space, and the fourth
dimension. Another fine piece is Eckart Voigts-Virchow’s overview of the
evolving portrayal of mechanization in late nineteenth and early twentieth-
century novels. John S. Partington’s "The First Men in the Moon
and the Corporative State’" investigates the influence of F.W. Taylor’s
models of scientific management on Wells’s portrayal of the Selenites and
draws intriguing parallels with Fascist Italy.
For other examples of what is best in
the collection, we might turn to the last three essays, each quite compelling in
its argument. Klaus Peter Müller’s "Constructionism in the Sciences, in
Literature and in Literary Theory" outlines the nature and implications
(both for scientific and for literary discourse) of constructionist theory,
which defines reality neither simply as "a creation of the human mind"
nor as "totally independent of the mind" (312), thereby avoiding both
the empiricist claim of objectivity and the arbitrariness of postmodern theory.
Jürgen Meyer examines the way black holes and other concepts from physics are
used to good effect in Salman Rushdie’s early sf novel Grimus (1975).
Dirk Vanderbeke draws both upon G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown (1911,
1914) and on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1962) in examining the sort of "narrative" implicit in Stephen Jay
Gould’s essays on contingent evolution.
The list of works covered here is so
long, and includes so many that are not widely known, that I think I can be
forgiven for not being familiar with, say, William Henry Bates’s The
Naturalist on the River Amazons [sic] (1864), or Morrison’s Machine
by J.S. Fletcher (1900), or Athol Fugard’s play Dimetos (1977). The
synopses of the various works are generally clear and helpful; some—like Maria
and Elena Kozyreva’s summary of The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin (1925;
revised 1934) by A.K. Tolstoy—are so interesting that I plan to look for
copies of the books. Even when they deal with such well-known authors as Poe,
Dickens, Kipling, Wells, Conrad, Chesterton, and Pound, the essays have
something new to say: take, for example, Christine Fingas’s comments on Pound’s
use of electromagnetic images, or Christoph Houswitschka’s contention that
Chesterton’s critique of scientific monism resembles ideas in recent writings
on science by Brian Goodwin and Lewis Wolpert. I could quibble about a point
here and there, but the arguments seem to me generally plausible and often very
strong; indeed, the book’s only serious drawback, in my view, is its lack of
an index. This is, in short, a well-chosen and substantial collection of
inquiries into relationships between the two cultures.—Patrick
A. McCarthy,
New
Feminist Cultural Criticism.
Sherrie A.
Inness. Tough Girls: Women Warriors and
Wonder Women in Popular Culture. U Pennsylvania P, 1999. viii +
228 pp. $47.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.
Lisa Maria
Hogeland. Feminism and Its Fictions: The
Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Women’s Liberation Movement .
U Pennsylvania P, 1998. xxi + 200 pp. $39.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.
These two works provide intriguing and
valuable additions to feminist scholarship on the fantastic. Sherrie Inness’s Tough
Girls analyzes the increasing number of powerful women that have appeared
during the last thirty years in a wide range of American media: television,
women’s magazines, film, and comics. The book begins by questioning
definitions of "toughness" in American society, identifying the extent
to which this aspect of identity has been automatically associated, in the
popular media, with the white male hero. While traditional images of masculinity
and femininity serve to shore up norms of heterosexuality and patriarchal
authority, many Americans—male and female, straight and gay—have, Inness
argues, become increasingly fascinated by images of strong women as represented
in the media.
The book is organized chronologically
to show how "New Tough Women" figures developed over a period of three
decades. The first part of the book (Chapters 1-4) examines
"pseudo-tough" women, characters whose superficial toughness supports
rather than disrupts social conventions of gender. Starting with popular
television shows of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., The Avengers, Charlie’s
Angels, The Bionic Woman), Inness argues that these programs
presented contradictory images of women. While the female central characters
were tougher than many of the women in popular media at the time, the shows also
repressed or contained tough women by a variety of means: the use of masquerade
or disguise, emphasis on the characters’ sexuality and traditional femininity,
and the nature of their relationships with men.
This notion that popular media create
images of tough women as commodities while simultaneously acting to control or
contain their toughness runs throughout Inness’s analysis of women’s
magazines, film, and comics. In a chapter on "Lady Killers," Inness
discusses films about women who kill, tracing the image of the femme fatale back
to the 1940s. Her discussion of more contemporary materials focuses primarily on
the films The Professional (1994), La Femme Nikita (1991), and The
Quick and the Dead (1994)—with some attention paid to Thelma and Louise
(1991), Galaxis (1995), and The Demolitionist (1995). Killer women
are contained, Inness argues, by presenting them as sex kittens, as insane, as
lesbians, or as forced into killing because of the lack of a stable family.
Their punishment by the end of the films contains their toughness and reinforces
social norms.
In Part II (Chapters 5-9), Inness moves
on to examine what she sees as the more authentically tough women of the 1990s.
In a close examination of Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling in The Silence of
the Lambs (1991) and Gillian Anderson’s Dana Scully in The X-Files,
Inness analyzes the extent to which these characters are figured as tougher than
the earlier women but are also undercut by the emphasis put upon their
femininity, vulnerability, and size. As Inness notes, despite the attempts to
soften their characters, they are both strong intellectually and ethically.
Inness focuses on science fiction
in two chapters of this section, primarily working with television and film,
although she does mention some novels. Pairing the ALIEN films (with
Sigourney Weaver playing Ellen Ripley) with the TV series Star Trek: Voyager (with
Kate Mulgrew playing Kathryn Janeway, the first woman starship captain), Inness
contrasts Ripley’s physical toughness with Janeway’s leadership qualities.
The film and television series, while presenting tough women, contain this
toughness by presenting them as maternal and contrasting them with minor female
characters who are more obviously tough than they. In a chapter focusing on
post-apocalyptic sf, Inness analyzes the tough women of the TERMINATOR films
(1984, 1991), The Blood of Heroes (1989), and Nemesis 2: Nebula
(1994). Arguing that these films depict increasingly tougher women, Inness shows
the extent to which the three mainstream films repress this toughness by
depicting the characters as vulnerable, needing to be rescued, or contained by
maternity, while the third film, released only on video, projects a heroine who
would not be seen on the big screen because of how much she transgresses social
norms.
Inness includes comics, a genre she
notes is even more marginalized than science fiction, examining a number of
characters and series ranging from Wonder Woman (which appeared in 1941)
to mainstream series such as X-Men and recent graphic novels. While more
tough women have been appearing in the comics of the 1980s and 1990s, Inness
argues that they are still vastly outnumbered by men and are often portrayed as
buxom sex toys rather than tough girls. One important exception is Martha
Washington in Give Me Liberty: An American Dream, one of the few tough
black women in popular culture. Inness argues that Washington is not only
physically strong but also a leader who subverts traditional comics conventions
by her prominence, complex character, morality, and lack of worry about her
appearance. Washington is, however, a minority in more ways than one.
Inness devotes her last chapter to Xena:
Warrior Princess, arguing that the success of this character marks a shift
in the portrayal of tough women in the mainstream media. Travelling with her
horse Argo and her companion Gabrielle, Xena rebuffs male reinforcements and
comrades, and the show blurs the boundaries between depicting Xena and Gabrielle
as friends and as a possible lesbian couple. Additionally, the self-reflexive
and parodic nature of the program, Xena’s status as a flawed hero, and the
show’s use of camp techniques that question social conventions, all function
to create a different kind of tough woman, no longer as constrained as other
such characters in the media. As Inness notes, however, there are two ways in
which the show continues to affirm social norms: the continuing ideal of
physical beauty/sexual appeal and the convention of the hero as white.
Inness concludes with an Epilogue that
summarizes the achievements of women who participate in the Iditarod and other
physically taxing sports assumed to be the province exclusively of men, thus
challenging the social convention that women are not tough. Yet Inness also
questions whether or not it is desirable for women to adopt the brutality and
violence that is often associated with the toughness of men. Noting the
existence of underground or alternative cultural productions that are more
radical in their creation of tough girls and women than the mainstream media,
Inness points to the fact that such figures are still outsiders in a culture
that continues to hold to the "cult of femininity" that functions to
keep women outside the spheres of power and authority.
Lisa Hogeland’s book Feminism and
Its Fictions is an ambitious study that focuses on a historically specific
group of novels, what she calls consciousness-raising (or CR) novels, discussing
their connections with the Women’s Liberation movement and with feminist
struggle generally, as well as the role they played in introducing feminist
ideas to a wider public. Hogeland identifies her central task as theorizing and
historicizing the "high feminist renaissance" of the 1970s (xi), as
part of a process of feminist scholarship that could lead to a richer
understanding of the present, especially the recent shift in the feminist
movement to include issues of ethnicity and class. Hogeland focuses on popular
novels in English by American, British, and Canadian writers rather than the
"canonical feminist metafiction" of the 1970s (xiii). This focus
includes a number of works of science fiction, as well as more realistic novels:
authors such as Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, Suzy McKee Charnas, Sally Miller
Gearheart, and Ursula K. Le Guin are included. From the start, Hogeland
specifically notes the extent to which CR novels have been written by white
women (with Alice Walker’s The Color Purple [1982] being an important
exception), as well as the extent to which current feminist literary criticism
has had problems including women writers of color.
Hogeland begins by summarizing feminism’s
growth in the seventies, with an overview of the media attention paid to women’s
accomplishments in sports, academia, television, film, and politics. According
to Hogeland, the growth in feminism had both positive and negative results: more
women began learning about and identifying with the movement, but this growth
also led to deradicalization. Hogeland traces multiple networks of seventies
feminist activity and theory, arguing for feminism as a new form of literacy—a
series of strategies for interpreting texts and society—rather than as
participation in specific groups. Hogeland’s complex reading of the seventies
feminist movement and its relationship with contemporary fictions not only
analyzes representations of women in the texts, but also addresses important
contextual questions (such as the suspicion of "famous" writers in a
movement with an egalitarian philosophy).
Main chapters are organized
thematically around "Sexuality," "Men," "Strategies of
Futurity," and "The Sex/Race Analogy." Hogeland draws on original
publications by feminists, on historical scholarship about seventies feminism,
on CR novels, and on reviews and scholarly studies devoted to them.
Distinguishing between "feminist writers" and "women
writers" (terms that Hogeland argues against conflating), she makes the
case that the consciousness-raising novel was the most important genre, during
the 1970s, for both feminist and women writers alike. Hogeland describes a
spectrum from "hard" to "soft" CR novels that parallels the
shift in the women’s movement from "hard" to "soft" CR
strategies. Hard CR links women’s personal situation to the politics of
patriarchy in order to change society, while soft CR stays focused on individual
women’s psychology with the goal of enhancing self-esteem and providing
individual support. Hogeland argues that both science fiction and lesbian novels
tend to critique social and political institutions and are thus more
"hard" than realist novels that focus on individual women’s
psychology and relationships.
Hogeland examines how sexuality is
dealt with in the CR novel, specifically through the critique of vaginal
orgasms, the issue of abortion rights, and the exploration of lesbianism.
Focusing primarily on Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Marge Piercy’s
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying
(1973), Hogeland shows the extent to which these novels reflect feminist ideas
about sexuality. She then examines seventies feminist debates about the role of
men and the CR depiction of male characters, as well as how reviews (in
mainstream, mainstream-feminist, and oppositional-feminist periodicals)
evaluated "feminism" as a movement by evaluating the characterization
of men in novels. Hogeland shows how race played an important part by
contrasting reviews of Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977) and
Walker’s The Color Purple. The extent to which racial differences were
seriously neglected in feminist discourse at this time is shown by how some
feminist reviewers criticized the portrayals of white heterosexual men in novels
by white women as "unrealistic" but did not question the portrayal of
black men in Walker’s novel.
In her discussion of feminist futures,
Hogeland analyzes both feminist science fiction and realist CR novels, spending
more time on the sf texts. According to Hogeland, narrative strategies linked to
imagining the future involve unfinished/suspended endings, the exploration of
generational relationships, and the evocation of historical "mothers"
(feminist role models or heroic figures). As noted above, Hogeland argues that
sf novels are the only kind of fictions that can show major political change;
realist novels, because of genre conventions, focus more on personal change.
Hogeland’s analyses of classic works of feminist sf are both original and
deeply informed by previous scholarship in the field.
Hogeland concludes with an extended and
provocative reading of Thelma and Louise and other texts from the 1980s
and 1990s, arguing that the CR strategies used in feminist novels of the
seventies became so conventional that it was possible for post- (or anti-)
feminist texts to deploy them. The success of the earlier novels spread the
knowledge of the conventions but softened them, and the underlying theories of
feminism shifted from an evocation of sisterhood (based on a false universality
of women) to coalition politics (acknowledging the racial, ethnic, and class
differences among women). The CR strategies in Thelma and Louise,
according to Hogeland, involve the characters’ perceptions of crossing into a
new understanding of their personal future as well as their refusal to return to
an oppressive past; a split view of sexuality (as oppressive yet potentially
liberatory); a parody of patriarchal discourse; and the portrayal of men as
villains (a point of criticism in mainstream reviews of the film). Hogeland
argues that, although Thelma and Louise does feminist work (and
mainstream feminists have appropriated its images), the film is limited in its
usefulness by its reliance on other film conventions (buddy films, road films,
and Westerns). Finally, Hogeland extends her consideration of CR strategies to
activities on the Internet (especially grrrl culture), contemporary music, and
Women’s Studies in order to argue for reclaiming CR as an "intellectually
sound" and "politically and theoretically sophisticated" mode of
feminist thought and writing (168).
Inness’s and Hogeland’s books
are important contributions to scholarship on the fantastic. Approaching a wide
variety of texts and genres (ranging from mainstream to marginalized), both
authors show how fantastic texts question social conventions about gender and
sexuality, explore feminist ideas, and invoke possibilities for social change.
They are significant additions to any collection of feminist cultural criticism.—Robin
Reid, Texas A&M, Commerce
An
Indispensable Writer.
Jeanne Cortiel.
Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ/Feminism/Science
Fiction . Liverpool UP, 1999. viii + 254 pp. £32 cloth; £15.95
paper.
Joanna Russ. What
Are We Fighting For?: Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism.
St. Martin’s, 1998. xx + 476 pp. $27.95 cloth.
Jeanne Cortiel offers a
single-author study of Joanna Russ’s works in the context of the history of
late-twentieth-century feminism. The book is well-written and elegantly argued,
even in the sections that depend on difficult theory. Cortiel explores relevant
definitions of science fiction in the introduction, and divides the study into
three sections based on Russ’s career as writer and as feminist. In the 1960s
and early 1970s, Cortiel sees a Russ who, in works like the ALYX stories, is a
materialist, advocating political equality, and less experimental in prose than
she will become. In the mid- to late 1970s, Cortiel proposes a Russ who, in
works like The Female Man (1975) and We Who Are About To... (1977),
is influenced by cultural feminism, with its emphasis on essential differences
between the sexes, a writer arguing for sexual equality and experimenting with
cyclical time in narration. In the 1980s, Cortiel advances a Russ who, in works
like Extra(Ordinary) People (1984), moves towards postmodernism and
explores multiple identities and the indeterminacy of categories as an aid to
politics. Cortiel links her brief overview of the recent history of feminism
(one of the best I’ve seen, though she needs to qualify her periods by
acknowledging that they are less discrete than she proposes) to Russ’s
interest in female agency, female sexuality, and the fluidity of self and
political strategies.
In the three chapters of the
first section, Cortiel covers the early Russ, in chapters on narrative,
androcide, and the dialectic movement of The Female Man. Following a
superb close reading of the short story "My Dear Emily," Cortiel
rereads Russ’s criticism to suggest that, in her early fiction,
"life" and "lyricism" are not two alternatives to male
myths, but one—a simultaneous creation and disruption of plot deriving from
female personal experience. With great persuasiveness, Cortiel explores
androcide, not as a political strategy in Russ’s ALYX stories, The Female
Man, and The Two of Them (1978), but as a narrative device
representing women’s claims to agency. Especially interesting is Cortiel’s
formulation of the death of Boss at the hands (claws?) of Jael: the orgiastic
death of Boss is "just" punishment for a rapist, a vengeful violation
of the male body in return for male violation of female bodies. Cortiel
postulates, quite appropriately, a link in Russ’s works of this period to
Shulamith Firestone’s proposal that women seize the means of reproduction.
Finally, she poses the characters of The Female Man as not only versions
of the self, but also different stages of the self in a dialectic: selfless
Jeannine, self-obsessed Jael, and utopian Janet, whose self is in balance with
society. Thus, Russ is moving away from seeing exceptional individual women such
as Alyx as models, towards seeing agency as based on collective acts, with
characters’ agency tied to women as a social class.
In the three chapters of the second
section, Cortiel covers Russ’s middle career, treating the motif of the rescue
of the female child along with issues of lesbianism in Russ’s works. Cortiel
offers a nuanced discussion of how essentialist discourses interpenetrate
social-constructionist views of gender in Russ’s vocabulary, especially in her
efforts to express the "liberatory potential of the female
body-community" (101). In an extremely helpful reading of the
intertextuality of The Two of Them, based on Arthur Conan Doyle, the
stories of the Arabian Nights, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow
Wall-paper" (1892), Cortiel argues that Russ aims not for a monolithic
authority as a writer, but for an authority that is fragmented, decentralized,
temporary. In Russ’s many stories where an older woman rescues a younger one,
Cortiel finds an interest in narrative itself as liberation: androcide, for
example, is fundamental to Russ’s thinking, since it restores women’s
speech. In addition, Russ explores the older woman as a mother figure reuniting
with self, providing a link both to women’s history and to the utopian desire
to give birth to a new society. In a fascinating excursus through the sex scenes
in Russ’s works, Cortiel elucidates the politics of rejecting penetrative sex
as oppressive, so that clitoral sex (including masturbation) can be reformulated
as women’s agency.
In the three chapters of the third
section, Cortiel covers recent Russ in chapters on Sapphic models, fragmented
identities, and postmodernist disjunctions of sex/gender roles. Cortiel argues
that Russ’s representation of lesbian pleasure as performance allows her to
present lesbian sex as also a claim to power, one that is not essential but
"contingent and situational." Throughout this most recent period of
Russ’s works, Cortiel finds her "consistently partial" in her
affiliations, resisting the universalization of her characters’ experiences.
Returning to the multiple selves of The Female Man, and examining the
narrator-as-committee in On Strike Against God (1980) as well as the
narrative deconstruction in We Who Are About To..., Cortiel proposes
fractured identity as a means Russ uses to be able to tell new stories that
escape patriarchal constraints. Following Donna Haraway’s reading of Russ,
Cortiel suggests that Russ’s vampires, ghosts, and aliens offer impersonations
of humanness and femaleness in order to explode the concept of the
"natural" female body on which earlier feminism rested (and
foundered). Russ’s utopias look forward to futures where sex and gender are
pretexts for playful performance, rather than oppressions.
My complaints are few about this
stunning exposition of Russ’s works. There is nothing in the bibliography
published after 1995: the author needed to update her scholarship. It is
especially unfortunate that Russ’s own exposition of her politics, What Are
We Fighting For? (discussed below), is missing. And at times, Cortiel is a
bit too laudatory—as in her dismissal of charges that Russ stereotypes Arab
culture in The Two of Them. I especially appreciate the clear, carefully
defined progress of the argument, and the perceptive use of Russ’s own sf
criticism to analyze her writings. Cortiel does not impose her own or someone
else’s theory on Russ, as evidenced by the numerous cited letters from Russ
written in response to Cortiel’s explications. I recommend this book to any
reader interested in Russ’s fiction, or in women’s science fiction
generally.
I also recommend Joanna Russ’s What
Are We Fighting For?, although it is not science fiction or science fiction
theory. This hefty book is a socialist-feminist-antiracist manifesto, Russ’s
own working-out of her theory in relation to the last twenty years of feminist
theory and activism. In chapers 1-7, Russ sets out arguments for positioning
herself as a feminist, retrieving the erased history of women, criticizing
feminist psychology and specifically Freudianism as offering insufficient
explanations of women’s oppression, exploring separatism and lesbian
invisibility, exposing the myths of heterosexuality, and excavating women’s
unpaid or underpaid work and their poverty. In chapters 8-11, Russ positions
herself as a socialist, discussing women as a sex-class, seeing women’s
oppression as material (not ideological), attacking state control of
reproduction, and defining the family as an institution linked with the
institutions of capitalism. Finally, in chapters 12-15, Russ positions herself
as an antiracist, critiquing feminism as a white women’s movement, showing the
interaction of oppressions and the creativity originating in multiple
identities, advising white women on how to stop taking charge of feminism so
that all women can build coalitions, and linking socialist analysis of the
oppression of women with the oppression of people of color as classes.
Some readers will want to use this book
in undergraduate women’s studies courses, since the arguments are clearly and
accessibly articulated and the extensive notes send readers to specific studies
of the supporting pieces of Russ’s argument. Readers interested primarily in
Russ’s science fiction and utopias will benefit from this book as an overview
of her political development, but also will find enlightening her view of the
process of feminist organization and scholarship as "webwork" (xix),
her requirements for utopian societies (193, 242), her view of the exploitation
of wives and non-dominant groups as feudal practices (257-58, 372), her
prediction of the end of kinship as an organizing principle (281), and her
appreciation of the creativity resulting from conflicting loyalties to multiple
identities (322). Her definition of feminism is especially useful—"the
study of the patriarchal system of unrecompensed labor and the politics and
propaganda that maintain it" (253). What all readers have come to rely on
Russ for is generously given again in this book—unstinting honesty about
herself and about all of us she has to live with. This is not a comfortable
book, and that is good news.—Jane
Donawerth, University of Maryland
Imperial
Gothic Fantasies.
Jennifer
DeVere Brody. Impossible Purities: Blackness,
Femininity, and Victorian Culture. Duke
UP, 1999. xii + 257 pp. $49.95 cloth; $17.95 paper.
In "The Half-Breed as Gothic
Unnatural" (in Shearer West, ed., The Victorians and Race [Ashgate,
1996]: 101-11; reprinted in Shadows of Their Own Creation: Gothic Images of
Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain [Stanford UP, 1996]), H.L. Malchow has
persuasively argued that Anglo-America regularly employed Gothic discourse to
codify and pathologize the other at home and abroad—the effect of "a
concurrent gothicization of racial discourse and a racialization of Gothic
fiction" (102). In particular, Malchow claims that it was the partially
white "half-breed"—once seen as the highest category of a colored
race, an "eternal victim raised from the bestial" through "the
actual blood of the white paternalist" (103)—who increasingly became an
object of fear and scorn at the fin-de-siècle. Indeed, the narratives
that evoked these monstrous hybrids often did so in an attempt to suppress,
punish, or kill off the specter of biological and associated cultural impurity
that had haunted the European imagination since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818). As hybrids of colonizer and colonized, altern and subaltern, subject and
abject, the liminality of these fantastic bodies represented the ontological
fluidity and social indeterminacy of even those categories of identity that had
once seemed safely certain: human and animal, civilized and savage.
Gothic fantasies such as Stevenson’s The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1888), Stoker’s The Lair of
the White Worm (1911), or Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)
provide ample support for such a thesis. At the end of the third chapter of Impossible
Purities, Jennifer Brody suggests that such works show a growing
late-Victorian sense that people could not be separated into neat categories but
indiscreetly took on multifarious attributes. Malchow’s work will perhaps be
of more interest to scholars of the fantastic than Brody’s, which also
considers tropes of fantastic hybridity in its discussion of nineteenth-century
racial ideation. Brody’s more narrowly focused book is directed toward
Victorianists, feminist theorists, and specialists of "black Atlantic
studies"—audience orientations that lead her to discuss fantastic tropes
tangentially and with a modicum of fantastic theory. Her stated purpose is to
problematize nationalistic nineteenth-century English formations of blackness
and whiteness that presupposed a static, pure ground, one that supposedly
rendered associated subjectivities distinguishable and discreet. Brody’s
special interest is in the "miscegenated’ coupling" of white men
and black women, through which she examines the erasures and exaggerations,
distinctions between and conflations of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
There can be little question that
Jennifer Brody’s first book makes a significant contribution to studies of
race in nineteenth-century Britain. She often finds surprising intersections
between cultural phenomena as she applies her own hybrid, theoretical
perspective to an impressive range of sources, which include Greek statuary,
political cartoons, playbills, popular and canonical novels and poetry,
journalistic accounts, illustrations, painting, and theatrical performances. Her
study’s prologue, four chapters, and epilogue each provide an arresting series
of close readings of disparate phenomena, as well as a relentless enumeration of
racialized tropes.
It has become de rigueur for
projects employing a cultural studies approach to draw upon fantastic texts,
especially those that have canonical or near-canonical status. Impossible
Purities is no exception. Brody’s prologue touches lightly (and
unsatisfactorily) upon the caucus-race scene in Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland (1865), but it is her fourth and final chapter that provides,
through a reading of The Island of Dr. Moreau, her most sustained
discussion of fantastic hybridities. The novel, she writes, "registers as
well as reinscribes the belief that the fate and status of the English race
itself is in jeopardy of becoming monstrously hybrid, blackened, and
feminized" (130). Brody sees Prendick’s self-consciousness of difference,
surrounded by beast-men as he is on the island, as symptomatic of the
middle-class Englishman’s growing awareness of his own racial identification
at the height of British imperialism. The vivisected puma’s blackness and
femininity are read as significant sources of anxiety, for they render her
"a defiant daughter, the source of the threatening downfall" (131).
The beast-men in general suggest how evolutionary thinking led to a blurring of
the categories between animal and human that had once seemed fixed and distinct
in the early-modern Great Chain of Being. Brody argues that Moreau’s
experiments—after the growing scientific fashion of eugenics—represent an
attempt to extract Englishmen symbolically from the primordial chaos of
corrupted evolutionary origins, metaphorically taming the beast within through
literally transforming the beast without.
As the island may be seen as a
microcosm of an England that no longer exists in splendid isolation but has
indefinite geopolitical borders, Brody suggests that Moreau’s experiments also
represent a colonizer’s desire to tame and purify the colonized subject, and
that the beast-men’s reversion to their natural state reveals an English
belief in subjugated and inferior populations’ resistance to civilization. In
her view, what makes Moreau unpalatable to its contemporary audience is
that the doctor’s otherwise appealing doctrine of progress presses for a
too-rapid, revolutionary change, one that does not respect the slow, inherent
caution of natural adaptation. In this, Brody believes readers will hear the
echo of the ideological in the biological. She suggests that Moreau’s failure
to successfully transform the beast-men may be read either optimistically, as an
inability of the lower orders to achieve equivalency, or pessimistically, as the
inability of the white man to master the abject. The failure, she argues, may
also have reinforced the idea that the pain-insensitive flesh of dull brutes
could not be mixed effectively with that of a higher order.
Jennifer Brody identifies hybridity as
the real source of anxiety in the narrative, one that the ending points up and
may seek to contain. Yet I would find her reading even more satisfying if it did
not so simply and swiftly convert the animal into the savage human; assume that
the animal, as a category, is necessarily abject in Wells’s fiction; or slide
the treatment of a black race (as her prologue suggests) into one that includes
"island races" more generally (an elision of racial and ethnic
categories that Brody avoids elsewhere). Further, a more careful and extended
account of why evolution, rather than the more common concept of devolution, is
the source of horror here would also be more satisfying. Even given these
concerns, I recommend Impossible Purities’s reading of The Island of
Dr. Moreau for the ways it enriches our understanding of how racial,
gendered, and scientific discourses may intersect with the colonial in this
novel and in other Victorian fantasies of dark (in)difference.
In her epilogue, Brody treats one last
fantastic work: Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm. Brody argues
that "Stoker’s text trades explicitly on unequal, asymmetrical pairings
of white and black, English and American, masculinity and femininity, Christian
and heathen," opposites that "come together as the novella obsessively
describes dangerous tropes of miscegenation" (172-73). The feminized
English landscape is tainted, just as the Lady Arabella has been both
"invaded" and "impregnated" by a primordial white worm.
Arabella’s fascination lies in her blending the outward purity of superlative,
aristocratic whiteness with inward corruption. In worm form, she is black and
foreign, her whiteness only a thin veneer of virgin English clay. Oolonga, the
local lord’s African retainer, is read as a civilized savage, a hybrid figure
whose dangerousness is rooted in his unwholesome desire for a white woman. In
contrast, Mimi, the mixed-race bride of Adam Salton, is idealized for her inner
whiteness, providing a sentimentalized portrait, popular at mid-century, of a
tamed or refined multaroon (a term coined by Brody to stand for "the
figment of the concept of pigment" that the "woman of color"
represented [16]). She is purified through her association with whites and with
Christian symbolism. It is in the reading of this final fantastic work that
Brody succeeds most fully. Her convincing treatment suggests most directly how
pervasive symbolic associations of whiteness with good and blackness with evil
reinforced an imaginative imperative for English racial purity.—Kelly
Searsmith, Appalachian State University
[Editor’s Note: Another recent
volume that provides valuable perspectives on late-Victorian fantastic texts is
Kirby Farrell’s Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the
Nineties (Johns Hopkins, 1998), which contrasts "traumatic"
theories and cultural practices of the 1890s and the 1990s. The earlier section
includes chapters on Doyle, Haggard, Wells, and Wilde, while the later section
covers "prosthetic fantasy" in Gibson’s Neuromancer, among
other topics. The Wells chapter, entitled "Traumatic Prophecy," offers
provocative readings of The Time Machine and other scientific romances.—RL]
A
Blurred Close-up .
Brian W.
Aldiss. The Twinkling of an Eye: Or, My
Life as an Englishman .
St. Martin’s, 1999. 484 pp. $32.50 cloth. First published in the UK by
Little, Brown in 1998.
Within this latest compilation of
Brian Aldiss’s autobiographical writings, one may identify at least three
basic texts, plus extracts from a dozen others. In the effort to understand
himself, and of course to invite others to do so, Aldiss has reshaped the
materials of his life repeatedly, in fiction as well as autobiography. Besides
the present account, the previous autobiographical texts include
(chronologically) "The Glass Forest" (1986)—an expanded version of
an essay originally done for Gale Research Press’s Contemporary Authors
Autobiography Series that appeared in Aldiss’ ...And the Lurid Glare of the
Comet (Serconia, 1986)—and Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith’s: A Writing
Life (Hodder & Stoughton, 1990). The novels that contain extensive
autobiographical passages include the HORATIO STUBBS SAGA (The Hand-Reared
Boy [1970], A Soldier Erect [1971], A Rude Awakening [1978]), Life
in the West (1980), Forgotten Life (1988), Somewhere East of Life
(1994), and others. For the Aldiss fan, reading The Twinkling of an Eye
presents an almost continuous sensation of déją vu: phrases, sentences,
paragraphs, even whole pages one has read before turn up in the narrative. Yet
the net impression of this reshaping is new.
As Aldiss comments in "The Glass
Forest":
It is the duty of the writer to fumble
his way towards truth.... At the same time, truth is elusive; if the future is
fluid, so is the past.... Were I to write this article in a year’s time, or
had I written it a year ago, no doubt the emphases would be different, and those
in turn interpreted differently by the reader.... (...And the Lurid Glare of
the Comet 97)
On this particular occasion the tale of
the author’s life might be said to have a "happy ending," and so the
text of Twinkling differs markedly from earlier versions of Aldiss’s
story (like "The Glass Forest") in which pain and insecurity seemed
dominant. In broad outline, the new book in fact resembles those Freudian
psychodramas of the midcentury, in which a central epiphany banishes the dark
night of the soul and the protagonist’s life is changed "in the twinkling
of an eye."
Not without plenty of Sturm und
Drang, however. In its earliest appearances in the text, the title’s
Biblical allusion is mostly grim. Recalling a moment of childhood terror, Aldiss
recounts the death of a family cat, treed by two yard dogs:
My arrival startles the cat. It decides
to make a run for it.... It has gone only a few feet before the dogs are on it.
Next moment—in the words of Handel’s Messiah, Behold I show you a
mystery ... we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.’
The cat is changed ... it becomes an incoherent red mess, stretching,
stretching, as the two dogs rush past me, each fastening on to a strand of flesh
... growling in parallel. (63)
Abrupt, traumatic change, often
regretted, occasionally welcomed, is the recurrent motif of these scenes from
the author’s formative years.
Part One of the volume, subtitled
"Necessitations," begins with the author finally going off to war in
1944 and then moves backwards, covering the family’s wartime move to Devon,
Brian’s earlier "exile" to public school, then the familiar scenes
of his childhood in East Dereham, Norfolk. At the center of this section is a
couple of chapters on the witless cruelty of his parents, who are the source of
his deepest fears and insecurities. When he is yet an infant, his gruff,
insensitive father stops his crying by dangling his little body out of a
second-story window, upside down. Both parents laugh about this when they tell
the child about it later. Baby Brian laughs with them, albeit very nervously. At
the time of his birth, his mother is still grieving over a stillborn baby
daughter, for whom she fantasizes a short life and an angelic nature; she then
uses this fantasy to denigrate Brian for his comparative shortcomings, always
threatening to withdraw her love if he is bad, or go away and leave him, or
both. She constantly prays for a daughter in his place, and makes him pray for
her also. When his little sister is finally born, Brian, who at that moment has
whooping cough, is instantly banished to Peterborough. He sees it as fulfillment
of his mother’s threat: he has been abandoned and replaced by the daughter she
wanted all along. Miserably lonely at boarding school, he concludes his mother
does not love him and hardens himself against her. So deep-seated is the
resulting conviction that he is both unworthy and unwanted, that when his own
daughter is born, he again leaves home, recapitulating the childhood trauma. His
mother’s apparent betrayal is the wound at the source of all his domestic
instabilities, not to be resolved until the "twilight years" of his
career.
Happily, perhaps, Aldiss also senses
that his life has begun afresh on several occasions. One of these is his entry
into World War II as a signalman in the "Forgotten Army," sent to
dislodge the Japanese from Burma. His experiences there occupy the rest of Book
One, which ends with his return to England and his flight from home to Oxford.
(These experiences are also treated in Forgotten Life and A Soldier
Erect, as well as in passages of Bury My Heart and "The Glass
Forest.")
The middle section of the book shifts
from personal to public reminiscences for the most part, incorporating much of Bury
My Heart, and the tone changes. This is the Aldiss we all know, the world
traveler, the goodwill ambassador, the acerbic critic of life and literature,
the historian of science fiction, the author of a series of critically and
commercially successful books, and the winner of numerous awards. Much of his
account is perforce a name-dropping exercise. But here and there the seeds of
his psychodrama continue to sprout:
Margaret [his wife] and I had a falling
out about something or other. Feeling hopeless, I turned my back and was going
to leave. She said ... Don’t turn away from me.’
Don’t turn away! I did not recall
anyone ever saying that to me before. I turned back to her and took her in my
arms.
Margaret’s words showed me how I had
learnt to behave. Always, the sense of being unwanted.... A harsh word and I was
off. What Margaret said showed me how Bill and Dot [his parents] had never
called me back. Bill would have speeded me on my way with a parting jibe. I
would have retreated to my room, to solitude and a book. (352)
As the final section of the book, which
is largely new material, begins, Brian’s marital infidelities have brought on
a domestic crisis. "There followed mental breakdown, succeeded by
illness" (386). Along with clinical depression, a "fog" veils
much of his memory. The medical diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome offers no
practical help, and a psychiatrist is recommended. On his last trip to Dereham,
to bury his Aunt Dorothy, Brian had already discovered that his supposed sister,
whose image as a "steel engraving angel" had haunted him much of his
life, had in fact never lived. Now, telling the story of his life to the
psychiatrist, Mrs. Green, "a cohesive, sometimes diffuse tale, such as I
have told here" (401), "the past was transformed. In the twinkling of
an eye, it became something valuable to me, worth having. My personal
mythology" (402). The peak experience of this period concerns what he calls
a "visitation" from his anima, a voice that convinces him that his
mother did love him, and that having rejected her in childish hurt, he has
discounted the very real evidence of her love. From his new conviction comes a
miraculous personal reassessment and the ability to forgive. At last, he says,
"the parents were laid to rest.... I had stepped out into the sunshine. I
was changed" (409). The book ends with a return to the newly confident
persona of the world traveler.
This life record is a sprawling
compilation, often uneven in mood and tone, most interesting when most personal,
evoking both the delights and the traumas of growing up. Aldiss reveals along
the way the biographical significance of much of his fiction, even the
forbiddingly abstract Report on Probability A (1968), which he says
reflects the "paralysis of feeling" that followed his father’s
"terrible act" in dangling him out the window as an infant.
"There had been another probability world, the world of Probability A,
where everything had remained frozen, without emotion, without future.... how
true to my inner self my fiction was!" (408) Aldiss also presents us with
several recurrent dreams that seem significant at various moments of his life,
and that form part of his persistent mythologizing, seeking meaningful
connections among kaleidoscopic events.
The life revealed in Twinkling
is certainly not an unexamined life. And yet, perhaps, some of the connections
seem a bit contrived. The Index is admirable, though I wished the titles of
Aldiss’ novels had been included in the alphabetical listing (they are lumped
under the entry for his name). The dust cover features a photo of the youthful
Aldiss swimming with his army mates in the Mu River. Below that is a blurred
close-up of the mature Aldiss, with his friend Ursula Kiausch reflected in the
lens over his right eye.—Robert
A. Collins, Florida Atlantic University
On
Looking into Chapman’s Silverberg.
Edgar L.
Chapman. The Road to Castle Mount: The Science
Fiction of Robert Silverberg .
Greenwood, 1999. xiv + 209 pp. $59.95 cloth
This book has many strengths and one
perhaps vitiating weakness. The main strength is Chapman’s great skill as a
reader which, combined with his obvious respect for Silverberg’s work,
produces some excellent interpretations of key texts in American New Wave sf—Dying
Inside (1972), The Book of Skulls (1972), "Born with the
Dead" (1974), and many others. Indeed, Chapman essentially covers all of
Silverberg’s immense output in the fantastic genres, making this the most
wide-ranging overview of the author’s career available (easily supplanting
Thomas Clareson’s 1983 study in the Starmont House series). When Chapman is
engaged with the fiction itself, I have very little quarrel with his judgments:
he has an unerring eye for Silverberg’s key themes, tracking them across
several decades of disparate work. Indeed, his linked contentions that
Silverberg has been consistently working towards "a maturing vision of
human aspiration and tragic human limitations" (12) and that this progress
has been marked by an abiding "conflict between his visionary and ironic
selves" (1), seem quite cogent (especially as worked out through the
readings), and are likely to provide a valuable critical template for assessing
the author for some time to come. Moreover, Chapman shows an admirable ability
to identify literary influences on Silverberg’s writing, displaying, for
example, the broad range of materials Silverberg synthesized in Dying Inside—from
traditional sf tales of mutant outcasts (Van Vogt’s Slan [1940],
Stapledon’s Odd John [1935]) to American Jewish modernist depictions of
alienated "schlemiels" (in the work of Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow,
and Philip Roth). As a guide to Silverberg’s evolving repertoire of ideas and
influences, Chapman could hardly be bettered.
The main weakness of the study is
Chapman’s larger evaluative animus, which is driven by a defensive anxiety
about the putative stigma of generic "hackwork" on the one hand and a
reverential aspiration towards canonical enshrinement on the other. In other
words, Chapman is caught in the conventional—and by now quite boring and
useless—critical bind of either depicting Silverberg as a capable genre
craftsman or arguing for his more general aesthetic worth. Chapman attempts to
do both here, but this results in some peculiar rhetoric and strained argument.
The oddest rhetoric is the guild
metaphor of literary production Chapman deploys throughout: Silverberg’s
career is anatomized into "four logically distinct divisions ... an
apprentice period [during the 1950s], a journeyman period [during the early and
mid-1960s], a climactic period of mastery [during the late 1960s and 1970s], and
a second period of mature work [since 1980]" (6). The effect of this
metaphor is to impose a dubious continuity on a career that has been notoriously
marked by violent interruptions—most famously, Silverberg’s angry
"retirement" from writing in the late 1970s, in disgust that his
serious sf was not reaching a very large audience. In fact, this moment provides
the most difficult crux for Chapman’s argument, since he is forced to minimize
Silverberg’s rage at the genre in order to mitigate accusations that his
subsequent return to the field was motivated by cynical commercialism. Chapman
does the best job possible arguing that Silverberg’s late-career fiction
represents a period of creative growth rather than a mere retrenchment, but he
is ultimately unconvincing (though he does provide fine readings of novels such
as Gilgamesh the King [1984] and At Winter’s End [1988]). Yet
rather than seeing Silverberg’s developing genre production as evidence of a
growing artistic craftsmanship, it might perhaps be more fruitful to view it as
a series of exasperated feints and shrewd adaptations, all driven by the
exigencies of a boom-and-bust marketplace.
Chapman’s other goal, of defending
Silverberg as a literary genius with a uniquely brilliant aesthetic vision,
exists rather uneasily with the portrait of him as a solid genre-guild member.
As if in compensation for the latter depiction, Chapman stretches credulity in
his comparisons; Silverberg’s recent tendency to refer to himself merely as an
"old pro" is downplayed by Chapman in favor of absurd assertions such
as the following: "we may find it useful to regard Silverberg’s current
period as one when he further refines his role as a maker of sophisticated
fables, like a prolific twentieth-century Hawthorne, or a modernist novelist
sharing affinities of vision with Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster and the James
Joyce of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
(11). Is this sort of inflated rhetoric really necessary to convince us that
Silverberg is a serious talent worthy of careful critical study? Chapman’s
readings of Silverberg’s fiction—especially that of his "climactic
period of mastery"—make this fact abundantly clear, and the persistent
allusions to Eliot, Yeats, Kafka, etc., are at best mere window-dressing and at
worst embarrassing hyperbole.
The capping bibliography is not
complete—my 1992 essay "Some Thoughts on Modernism and Science Fiction
(Suggested by Robert Silverberg’s Downward to the Earth)," in The
Celebration of the Fantastic, eds. Donald E. Morse, Marshall B. Tymn, and
Csilla Bertha (Greenwood, 1992), is not cited—and there are some irritating
errors (such as the consistent misspelling of Samuel R. Delany’s name). But
still this book stands as the best critical work to date on Silverberg’s sf,
despite its major and minor flaws. —RL
A
Mixed Bag .
Gary Westfahl
and George Slusser, eds. Nursery Realms:
Children in the Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.
U Georgia P, 1999. xiii + 223 pp. $40 cloth. $20 paper.
All but one of the essays in Nursery
Realms were presented at the Fifteenth Eaton Conference in 1993. The volume
clearly illustrates both the possibilities and the perils inherent in assembling
a collection from the proceedings of a narrowly focused conference. On the
positive side, the restrictive topic— children in fantastic literature—has
produced a concentrated array of essays that juxtapose classic and unfamiliar
works in strikingly fruitful ways. Unfortunately, the negatives one might expect
are here as well: the contents are highly uneven; many individual selections are
too short to be read without the author present for an extended Q&A designed
to fill in the glaring gaps (or gaffes, in some cases). Finally, while some
authors (Heinlein, King) and approaches (parallels with fairy tales and
folklore) are well covered, other topics are embarrassingly absent. In a volume
on children in fantastic literature there is, for example, no examination of Le
Guin’s EARTHSEA trilogy, of the work of C.S. Lewis or Suzy McKee Charnas, or
of the recent trend in horror for children by the likes of R.L. Stine. Not only
are these subjects not discussed, their absence goes apparently unnoticed.
Still, there are some fine works here,
of which two very different essays in particular stand out. The first, by Eric
Rabkin, examines a sweeping range of examples drawn from several traditions
(fairy tales, the pulps, Shakespeare). Using theories of psychic development
from Freud to Fromm, Rabkin argues that portrayals of children and the childlike
(Caliban, Frankenstein’s monster) offer readers the vicarious experience of
disempowerment. According to Rabkin, the chance to return to a more limited
perspective and to surrender to the "oceanic feeling" of
self-sublimation (a state that recalls the unified self of childhood) pulls at
all of us in those moments of psychic fatigue produced by the divided self of
adulthood. This intriguing premise generates new readings of works such as
Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1956), often simplistically read as
merely an individualist power fantasy. Gay Barton’s "Child Vision in the
Fantasy of George MacDonald" provides a rich context for the figure of the
child in MacDonald’s complex works. The essay is quite brilliant, covering the
linguistic, literary-historical, and biblical origins of MacDonald’s imagery
in clear and evocative prose.
The rest of the works in the volume are
more mixed in their ambitions and accomplishments. Stephanie Barbé Hammer’s
reading of parallels in male psychic development between Barrie’s Peter Pan
(1904) and Anne Rice’s Lasher (1993) is provocative but is limited by
the truncated ending demanded by a conference-length paper. Many of the works
cry out for a stronger editorial hand. Some, like Gary Kern’s examination of
teen propaganda films, make a string of strong points, but include lines that
fall dead in print: "[Samuel Z.] Arkoff was the chief producer; his AIP
[American International Pictures] made more than five hundred movies. As one
might expect, he was a baldheaded man with a big cigar." Is this supposed
to be humor? Casual anti-Semitism? Whatever its purpose in the original
presentation, it certainly has no place in a scholarly article. A majority of
the papers assembled here accomplish their core readings well, but stumble when
attempting to theorize them. Jung’s theories of psychic development are
repeatedly invoked, usually without much display of understanding. Other
critical leaps are stranger. Andrew Gordon, for example, succeeds at his core
argument in "E.T. as Fairy Tale"—reading narrative logic and
parent-child-alien relations in Spielberg’s movie; however, he brackets this
reading with a frankly bizarre projection of a Cambodian refugee in America
viewing the film for the first time. Meant to suggest the universality of the
film’s appeal, this strange approach succeeds instead in casting Western
critics of the fantastic as neo-Orientalists secure in their ability to read the
mind of the cultural other.
Three curious works deserve individual
mention, two of them because they don’t belong in the volume at all. Both are
well-crafted, coherent, and interesting essays; but neither provides the full
argument needed to make inclusion here legitimate. Alida Allison offers an
intelligent reading of the clash between faith, fantastic stories, and
"rational thought" in the childhood home of Isaac Bashevis Singer; but
she does not address how these clashes play out in Singer’s fiction or how her
definitions might shift when moving from the situated tradition of Jewish
storytelling to a larger "fantastic" audience. Likewise, Howard
Lenhoff’s argument that the "little people" of many folklores may
have a basis in physical reality—namely, individuals who suffer from Williams
Syndrome—is fascinating; but ancient folklore is not modern fantasy, and the
processes of imaginative transformation of Williams Syndrome children into
cultural icons are scarcely addressed. Finally, "Coming of Age in
Fairyland: The Self-Parenting Child in Walt Disney Animated Films,"
co-authored by volume editor Gary Westfahl and Lynne Lundquist, gives evidence
of exhaustive and impeccable research. Yet its argument—that Disney films,
generally thought of as promoting "family values," instead promote a
complex set of values that subvert traditional notions of family—never
adequately examines its core terms or the larger context in which popular genre
films function. For example, even a mildly feminist perspective can reveal how
Disney’s depiction of evil stepmothers actually supports family values, or why
films promoting such values may be structured around the absence of functional
families. Ultimately, Westfahl and Lundquist’s readings are circular and
unconvincing.
This failure to examine basic
definitions is, alas, endemic to the volume. May teenagers profitably be viewed
as children? Is folklore interchangeable with mass-produced genre fiction? Such
important methodological questions are never even raised, much less
intelligently adjudicated. If the Eaton is to continue its practice of producing
volumes of conference proceedings, some changes, I think, must be made. Stricter
guidelines, better definitions, and a stronger hand at the editorial tiller seem
called for; cutting a few essays and requesting that the remaining authors
expand theirs would also improve future volumes. Otherwise, this series will
remain a mixed bag at best.—Gregory
Beatty, University of Iowa
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