Sanders, J.L. - Functions of The Fantastic. Selected Essays From The 13th International Conference On The Fantastic in The Arts PDF

Functions of the Fantastic
Recent Titles in Contributions to the

Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy
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Charles L. Elkins and Martin Harry Greenberg, editors
Ultimate Island: On the Nature of British Science Fiction
Nicholas Ruddick
Science Fiction for Young Readers
C. W. Sullivan III, editor
Science Fiction and the Theatre
Ralph Willingham
Odd Genre: A Study in Imagination and Evolution
John J. Pierce
Robbe-Grillet and the Fantastic: A Collection of Essays
Virginia Harger-Grinling and Tony Chadwick, editors
The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism
M. Keith Booker
The Company of Camelot: Arthurian Characters in Romance and Fantasy
Charlotte Spivack and Roberta Lynne Staples
Science Fiction Fandom
Joe Sanders, editor
Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations
Samuel J. Umland, editor
Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination
S. T. Joshi
Modes of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Twelfth International Conference on
the Fantastic in the Arts
Robert A. Latham and Robert A. Collins, editors
Selected Essays from the Thirteenth
International Conference on the
Fantastic in the Arts
Edited by JOE SANDERS
Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction

and Fantasy, Number 65
C. W. Sullivan III, Series Adviser
GREENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (13th : 1992)

Functions of the fantastic : selected essays from the Thirteenth
International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts / edited by
Joe Sanders.
p. cm.(Contributions to the study of science fiction and
fantasy, ISSN 0193-6875 ; no. 65)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-313-29521-2 (alk. paper)
1. Fantastic literatureHistory and criticismCongresses.
2. Fantastic, The (Aesthetics), in artCongresses. 3. Fantastic,
The (Aesthetics), in literature.Congresses. I. Sanders, Joseph
L. II. Title. III. Series.
PN56.F34I58 1995
700dc20 95-10222
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright 1995 by Joe Sanders
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-10222
ISBN: 0-313-29521-2
ISSN: 0193-6875
First published in 1995
Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881

An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
@r
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
To Mary, Always
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Contents
Introduction
Joe Sanders xi
1. Recent Trends in the Contemporary American

Fairy Tale
Jack Zipes 1
2. De-Radicalizing Pinocchio
Richard Wunderlich 19
3. Reinscribing Cinderella: Jane Austen and the

Fairy Tale
Norma Rowen 29
4. Shoring Fragments: How CBS's Beauty and the

Beast Adapts Consensus Reality to Shape Its
Magical World
Dennis O'Brien 37
5. The Corpse in the Dung Cart: The Night-Side

of Nature and the Victorian Supernatural Tale
Robert F. Geary 47
6. Reader Response and Fantasy Literature: The

Uses and Abuses of Interpretation in Queen
Victoria's Alice in Wonderland
John Pennington 55
viii Contents
7. Gautier, Freud, and the Fantastic: Psychoanalysis

avant la lettre?
Nigel E. Smith 67
8. Love and Automata: From Hoffmann to Lem and

from Freud to Kristeva
Miglena Nikolchina 11
9. The Company We Keep: Comic Function in

M. G. Lewis's The Monk
Gareth M. Euridge 83
10. "A World of Glas": The Heroine's Quest for

Identity in Spenser's Faerie Queene and
Stephen R. Donaldson's Mirror of Her Dreams
Laurel L. Hendrix 91
11. What about Bob? Doubles and Demons in

Twin Peaks
Nancy Buffington 101
12. Duality, Reality, and Magic in Sir Gawain and

the Green Knight
Barbara Kline 107
13. Oliphaunts in the Perilous Realm: The Function

of Internal Wonder in Fantasy
William Senior 115
14. Criminal Artists and Artisans in Mysteries by

E.T.A. Hoffman, Dorothy Sayers, Ernesto Sabato,
Patrick Silskind, and Thomas Harris
Edith Borchardt 125
15. The Craft of the Fantastic in Anatole France's

La Revolte des anges
Juliette Gilman 135
16. Sally Johnson: Paperworks

Dorothy Joiner 14 3
Contents ix
17. Culture as Spiritual Metaphor in Le Guin's

Always Coming Home
Sarah Jo Webb 155
18. Assuming the Present in SF: Sartre in a New

Dimension
Bud Foote 161
19. Finding One's Place in the Fantastic: Susan Cooper's

The Dark Is Rising
Valerie Krips 169
20. Carter and Blake: The Dangers of Innocence

Mary Y. Hallab 177
21. Travels in Hyperreality: Jean Baudrillard's

America and J. G. Ballard's Hello America
Veronica Hoilinger 185
22. The Men Who Walked on the Moon: Images

of America in the "New Wave" Science Fiction of
the 1960s and 1970s
Rob Latham 195
23. The Closing of the Final Frontier: Science

Fiction after 1960
Brian Attebery 205
Index 215
About the Editor and Contributors 227

Introduction
Joe Sanders
This book contains papers from a scholarly conference, a fact worth special
stresson "scholarly" and on "conference." Each essay represents an expert's
freshest understanding, but each also contributes to a larger understanding of the
fantastic in the arts, an understanding that has grown out of the interaction at the
conference.
The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) has been
evolving for a decade and a half now, having changed from a small gathering
focused on the work of one writer into a major eclectic scholarly event each
spring. Besides the lure of a warm locale in which to celebrate the end of winter,
the conference offers hundreds of participants a chance to present scholarly
papers. To fit everything in, the program has become a patchwork of overlapping
sessions, both exciting and overwhelming. Usually during an ICFA, I'd page
through the program, frustrated at how often program sessions I wanted to attend
were scheduled to meet at the same time. I would talk with people and scribble
in my notebook. I'd come away with pages of notes on various current projects,
some notes jotted during sessions, others provoked by conversations, but always
without a clear sense of the conference's overall drift.
In 1992, though, I gained a fresh perspective on the ICFA by, ironically,
going through it in a haze. Just before the conference, when my new sinus
medicine reacted with the original prescription, I went on automatic pilot. Other
people testify that I was at the conference and even delivered a paper; I don't
remember. Since I'd already volunteered to edit the volume of selected essays
from the conference, however, there was proof that I had been there: a pile of
papers I had brought away from the conference (those session chairs had
recommended to be considered for publication) plus additional papers that
trickled in through the mails for several weeks.
This is where the fresh perspective began to appear. Rather than rushing from
session to session or being uneasily aware of presentations I was missing, I found
XII Introduction
myself faced with a large portion of the conference piled in a shaggy heap on the
corner of my desk, to be sifted through more or less at my leisure. Going
through those essays has been a chore, a revelation, and a source of deep
satisfaction. One of the recurring criticisms of ICFA has been its comprehensive-
ness, the way many kinds of "fantastic" are thrown together. As a division head,
responsible for finding program sessions to fit proposed papers, I've realized how
the submissions I have on hand at the deadline could fit into more than one
combination, and a look at the finished program shows how other equally
coherent sessions could have been selected out of the whole mass of available
papers.
It was interesting, therefore, to experience a somewhat abridged, sequentially
arranged version of ICFA itself by reading the pile of essays on my desk. I
began with no unifying theme in mind. Selecting these most original and read-
able papers, however, I discovered that even though they came from different
program sessions, in different subject division of the conference, they did fit
together! Fitting them into subdivisions proved more difficult, however. In
previous volumes in this series, the tables of contents have been split into smaller
areas of focus, but these essays resisted such classification. Note, for example,
how Jack Zipes's essay, discussing contemporary fantastic fiction for children,
leads naturally into Richard Wunderlich's study of how Pinocchio has been dis-
torted over the years, which in turn leads to Dennis O'Brien's examination of the
TV series Beauty and the Beast as a vision of the modern world for adults,
Norma Rowen's discovery of the story of Cinderella as a subtext in Jane
Austen's novels, John Pennington's reflections on how an eccentric reading of
Alice in Wonderland illustrates the activity of critical inquiry, and so on.
Because the essays here connect so serendipitously, they refuse to be squeezed
into narrow boxes. So does the sprawling, vital ICFA itself.
The other really striking thing I learned by editing this volume is how much
these diverse essays share a purpose. They insist on applicability. This is not
"relevance" in the burned-out sense of social protest that some people demanded
of literature a few decades ago; however, these essays do talk about how people
approach the fantastic, how they enter into it, and how they return from it with
refreshed vision for our shared world and with fresh ideas of what we can do
here. In particular, these essays stress seeing (or reexamining) representations of
human experience, with at least the implied suggestion that people who have
learned to notice what is valuable and healthy should be motivated to preserve
and strengthen it. Thus this volume's title.
There may still be some readers who do not realize the fantastic can have a
function. Such people can learn better by reading these essays carefully and
paying closer attention to their own reading. They could also gain from a visit
to an ICFA, where they can make their own connections among the swarm of
ideas and speculate how to carry those concerns out into the world.
1
Recent Trends in the Contemporary

American Fairy Tale
Jack Zipes
You can always tell when Christmas is approaching in America. Sometime in

November, the bookstores begin displaying glossy fairy-tale books with attractive
colors and startling designs in their windows. It is almost like magic, and the
store windows appear to be enchanted by these marvelous books. Of course,
there is really nothing magical about this phenomenon. It is absolutely
predictable: Storeowners and publishers are in collusion, seeking to entice both
children and parents to buy as many books as possible during the holiday season.
In most cases, it does not matter if the contents of the books are vapid. It is the
fluff that counts, the ornament, the diverting cover designs that promise a
wonderful world of pleasure and take the onlooker away from the harsh realities
of the present. In the bookstore window there is the glow of difference and the
promise of pleasure. In the fairy-tale books there is hope for a world distinctly
more exciting and rewarding than the everyday world in the here and now.
But is there any basis for such hope? Are the fairy tales in America mere
commodities that compensate for the technological evolution that has narrowed
the range of possibilities for developing the imagination and humane relation-
ships in reality? What sociocultural function do fairy tales have in an American
society in which the most extreme fantasies and nightmares have been coolly and
brutally realized so that little is left for the imagination?
In a significant study of the historical development of the literary fairy tale,
Friedmar Apel has argued that from its origins, the central theme of the fairy tale
has always concerned the struggle of the imagination (representing the spiritual
side of humanity) against the hard reality of exploitation and reification
(representing the rise of inhumane technology). Whereas the earlier fairy tales of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could optimistically project a harmony of
soul and reality brought about by magic or a fantastic element that seemed
commensurate with progress in the world, Apel has claimed that the modern
temper is stamped by our conscious recognition that such harmony can never be
2 Functions of the Fantastic
achieved and thus the very basis of the fairy tale is no longer relevant and can
never again be valid, unless its formal characteristics totally change. As he states:
While other genres (i.e., the novel, lyric poetry) have been able to maintain
themselves only by depicting the impossibility of the unity of the world and soul,
the fairy tale requires the possibility of conceptualizing this unity as a starting
point, no matter how relativized it becomes. Without this possibility, the fairy tale
must give up its formal function of depicting the marvelous (das Wunderbare),
unless it wants to degenerate into mere entertainment literature by feigning
harmony and thus losing all connection to actual life. . . . [A]ll new endeavors to
portray the marvelous with the traditional means of the fairy tale and other
fantastic stories only serve to amuse the imagination and can no longer fulfill the
old functions of conveying a sublime interpretation of life and a way of putting
the meaning into practice.1
In short, Apel dismisses the profound Utopian value, the fairy tale, either as
oral or literary product, once had, and he asserts that it is impossible in the
twentieth century for it to be anything more than divertissement, escape literature,
a cultural commodity that is part of the entertainment business. His position is
obviously a radical one and must be qualified, if we are to understand the
development and the present function of the literary fairy tale in the West, and
more specifically in America. Certainly, if we look at the Walt Disney industry
and the vast distribution of bowdlerized and sanitized versions of fairy tales by
Perrault, the Grimms, Bechstein, Collodi, and other classical authors, it is
apparent that they have been incorporated into the Western culture industry
mainly to amuse children and adults alike. Yet amusement is not to be taken
lightly, for distraction and divertissement have an important ideological function:
Almost all the classical fairy tales that have achieved prominence and are to be
enjoyed in the United States can be considered as products that reinforce a
patriarchal and middle-class social code. Their meaning is not limited to this
ideological function. For instance, even if their purpose is to amuse and pacify
the rebellious instincts of readers, they are received by the public in different and
unpredictable ways. Although a text may contain directives within it, it cannot
prescribe its effect. Meaning shifts with the individual in history. And if the
more serious fairy tales of the twentieth century and specifically contemporary
American fairy tales are to have any meaning today, then we must begin at first
in the production phase with the proposition that many authors believe that the
classical works are indeed patriarchal and anachronistic and have served an
ideological function that needs to be replaced or, at the very least, to be revised
in light of the major sociopolitical changes since World War II.
Bearing this in mind, the literary fairy tale of the twentieth century, despite
what Apel asserts, has maintained a crucial Utopian function when it is self-
reflective and experimental. By questioning the forms and themes that fairy tales
The Contemporary American Fairy Tale 3
have traditionally developed, the best of the modern fairy tales reflect the
complex problems brought about by highly industrialized or postindustrial
societies and the difficulties that the genre itself has in maintaining its Utopian
purpose, for the fairy tale has always projected the wish and possibility for
human autonomy and eros and proposed means to alter the world. As Michel
Butor has remarked about the images conveyed by the ideal and serious fairy
tale, "A world inverted, an exemplary world, fairyland is a criticism of ossified
reality. It does not remain side by side with the latter; it reacts upon it; it
suggests that we transform it; that we reinstate what is out of place."2
One of the qualitatively distinguishing features of the fairy tale in America
during the past twenty-five years has been the manner in which it has questioned
gender roles and critiqued the patriarchal code that has been so dominant in both
folk and fairy tales until the 1960s.3 However, just as feminism and the feminist
movement have been culturally exploited and compromised by the mass media
and turned against themselves, the fairy tale that seeks to maintain its Utopian
purpose and social critique is always in danger of being defused and transformed
into mere entertainment.
The quandary of the fairy tale has been most evident during the Reagan-Bush
years of the 1980s, which brought a destruction of social welfare services and
projects, increased pauperization of women and minority groups, and supported
the individual self-absorption of the middle classes, often equated with the so-
called Yuppies. It would appear that the fairy tale in the 1980s has become
nothing more than a decorative ornament, designed to titillate and distract readers
and viewers, no matter how it has been transformed as novel, poem, short story,
Broadway play, film, cassette, or TV series. Yet it would be unfair to the fairy-
tale genre and to the writers of fairy tales to dismiss all the creative attempts as
mere decoration and a reflection of the narcissism of the 1980s. In some respects,
the fairy tale can be characterized as trying to find an adequate fantastical form
to reply to the curtailment of the fantasy in reality and to provide a viable option
that will give audiences the hope that they can reach their creative potential.
Since it is extremely difficult in a short essay to present a comprehensive
picture of the development of the American fairy tale during the 1980s, I would
like to discuss some of the more interesting and more relevant attempts to
experiment with traditional fairy-tale material and to cultivate both a social and
aesthetic critique. First some short prefatory remarks about recent trends.
One of the more successful Broadway musicals toward the end of the 1980s
was a production entitled Into the Woods (1987), which was a hodgepodge of
various fairy tales that harmlessly poked fun at various fairy-tale characters like
Little Red Riding Hood and was concerned mainly about being a commercial
success.4
Indeed, it was a success, and there has been something like a fairy-tale
resurgence during the late 1980s that one could possibly interpret as a flight from
reality, a withdrawal from the problems of American society or, more positively,
a postmodernist endeavor to explore possibilities to go beyond the traditional
boundaries of the fairy tale and generate new worlds. The fairy-tale TV series
Beauty and the Beast, which ran from 1987 to 1990, had a large following in the
States and has been successful as a TV rerun and as a video. (Most likely the
Disney Studio decided to capitalize on this popularity by producing its animated
version of Beauty and the Beast along with a bestselling book in 1991.) Various
fairy-tale films like The Princess Bride (1987), based on William Goldman's
novel, have been popular in the theaters. In 1986 Terri Windling, at Ace Books,
began editing a series of novels that retell classic fairy tales, and six works by
well-known fantasy authors have been published thus far. Numerous innovative
illustrated fairy-tale books for children are issued each year, perhaps the most
famous by Maurice Sendak entitled Dear Mili (1988), based on a letter written
by Wilhelm Grimm, which has sold over 200,000 copies. Moreover, the classical
Grimm and Perrault fairy tales such as The Frog Prince, Little Red Riding Hood,
Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and others are newly illustrated and
published in the thousands each year, often with cassettes or records. Finally,
there are various fairy-tale imports from England and the Continent like the
works of Michael Ende, Angela Carter, and Tanith Lee that are avidly read and
seen by American audiences. For instance, Ende's ATeverending Story (1984) was
made into two films, just as Carter's story, "The Company of Wolves," from
Bloody Chamber (1979), was adapted for the cinema.
In sum, the fairy tale has assumed many guises in America and is alive and
well. That is, it is certainly immensely popular, but is it popular for the wrong
reasons? Is the hope it promises perverse? Does it offer temporary escape from
the hard times of the present? Is there anything of substance in the fairy-tale
experimentation that sets a foundation for essential cultural transformation?
There are no definitive answers to these questions, and it is extremely difficult
to provide a comprehensive picture of the different types of fairy-tale experimen-
tation that is presently being undertaken in different medias today. Nevertheless,
there are some key works that can help us at least address some of the questions
I have raised, for they are representative of both regressive and progressive
tendencies to make the genre play a vital role in the development of American
culture. The works I shall discuss are as follows: Maurice Sendak's Dear Mili
(1988), the TV series Beauty and the Beast, William Goldman's The Princess
Bride, Raymond E. Feist's Faerie Tale (1988), Wendy Walker's The Sea-Rabbit,
or The Artist of Life (1988), Jane Yolen's Tales of Wonder (1983), six fairy-tale
novels by Steven Brust, Kara Dalkey, Charles de Lint, Patricia C. Wrede, Pamela
Dean, and Jane Yolen in Terri Windling's series, and Robert Coover's "The
Gingerbread House" (1970).
The history behind Dear Mili is highly significant because it reveals
something about the connections between production, reception, and form of
children's fairy tales in the late 1980s.

In 1983, Justin Schiller, a well-known New York bookseller, auctioned off a
letter written by Wilhelm Grimm that contained a trite and sentimental tale.
When the bidding contest was over, Michael di Capua of Farrar, Straus & Giroux
boasted that he had paid well over the $26,000 asking price. In order to recoup
his money, Di Capua announced to the press that the unknown, allegedly
"magnificent" tale would be translated by the gifted Ralph Mannheim and
illustrated by the famous Maurice Sendak. Now, this tale was written by Wilhelm
in a letter to a girl named Mili, evidently to give her some solace during the
Napoleonic Wars. The tale itself was not original, but part of a didactic religious
tradition and was fully developed by Wilhelm in a different way in "St. Joseph
in the Woods" in the second edition of the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmarchen
(1819). The fact that Wilhelm never felt the need to refer to the "Mili tale" later
in his work on folk tales is indicative of his low opinion of this trite piece. The
plot is simple: A mother sends her daughter into the woods in order to save her
from an encroaching war, and she tells her to trust in God. The obedient and
pious child does as she is told and is protected by a guardian angel. In the woods
she finds an old man who is actually St. Joseph, and she shows how domesticat-
ed she is by performing various humble acts. After thirty years of dutiful
behavior, which the girl perceives as only three years, she is sent home by St.
Joseph, who gives her a rose to carry to her mother. When the girl is reunited
with her, they go to sleep and are found dead the next morning with St. Joseph's
rose in full bloom.
Anyone familiar with Sendak's work, particularly Where the Wild Things Are,
can perhaps understand why he was drawn to this tale. He has never tired of
illustrating the flight and return of the child, who reconciles himself to a mother
or home.
However, rarely in his career has he ever illustrated a text so dripping with
religious sentiment as this one. Where, then, is the book's salvation if there is
one? To read it as my eight-year-old daughter did when she could not read. That
is, to ignore the text and look at Sendak's playful pastel illustrations that recall
the odyssey of a courageous girl who survives on her own in a mysterious forest.
In fact, Sendak unconsciously or consciously re-illustrates the history of Little
Red Riding Hood in a fascinating way. Sendak's girl, who cannot be more than
eight, is adorned with a red frock, and throughout the illustrations Sendak uses
all sorts of hues of red to play upon the theme of courage and/or sin. Clearly, his
little girl, who loses her red shoes in the woods and who will return barefoot to
her mother with a red rose, blossoms as the images of the woods are transformed
from wilderness to garden of Eden. As usual, Sendak has his fun with his
viewers by introducing personal themes and motifs from his other works. For
instance, Mozart, also dressed in a red jacket, conducts a choir of Brooklyn
school kids in one scene. In another, St. Joseph, who looks more like an old wise
rabbi than a Christian saint, gives the rose to the girl as a sign of redemption.
The man in the woods is not a wolf but a spiritual guide, who looks after her
during a period of trial and separation.
Unfortunately, most of the illustrations are derivative and bland. In the final
analysis, the text of Dear Mili, seen through the eyes of Maurice Sendak, is
transformed into another story that has something to do with Maurice Sendak's
personal odyssey and sentimental old age. Gone is the rebellion of his early
period. Gone are the weird, disturbing figures of The Juniper Tree.
Sendak has tamed himself, and though Dear Mili may be sweet and tender,
it reflects a restorative tendency of the contemporary American fairy tale for
children. Obedience to the mother, diligence, submission to male authority,
reward by divine powersthese are the dominant motifs in a fairy tale that does
not show respect for the autonomy of a child or encourage her to develop her
creative powers. Such a tale is perfectly in accord with the present ideological
atmosphere in America, and it is not much different from most of the reprints of
the Grimms' classical tales. Of course, there are numerous endeavors to rewrite
and re-illustrate the traditional tales such as Shirley Climo's The Egyptian
Cinderella (1989), Charlotte Huck's Princess Fur ball (1989), and Margaret
Tomes's Tattercoats (1989) or to transform them radically like Jane Yolen's
Sleeping Ugly (1981). Most of these tales depict a strong heroine who actively
determines her own destiny. Yet despite the strong feminist component in many
of the new and revised fairy tales for children, the emphasis on closure,
harmony, happy end, and a well-ordered world remains the governing principle
so that the tales rarely hold a critical mirror to the ossified reality of our times.
In the case of fairy tales for children, the harmonious ends may be justified as
long as they motivate children to believe that sex roles can be altered. But given
the vast problems confronting women in American societyteenage pregnancy,
pauperization of single women with children, inequitable wages, and so on
these fairy tales also conceal reality and give children a false impression of what
awaits them as they mature.
This is not to say that there have not been revisions of classical fairy tales for
children that compel readers to confront the harsh realities of the 1980s.5
Martin Waddell's The Tough Princess (1986) and Babbette Cole's Princess
Smartypants (1986)6 are superb examples of how writers and illustrators can
revise the classical tradition in a way that can contribute to the autonomy of
children. Both are parodies of King Thrushbeard or The Taming of the Shrew and
present young women who resist the will of their parents, who want them to
marry the perfect prince. These tales, told with delightful and unorthodox images,
are open-ended and provoke readers to reconsider their gender identity with the
hope that they can become whom they want to be. There are, however, radical
revisions of fairy tales that leave shockingly little hope. For instance, the theme
of violence, the violation of a child's will, is treated in a more somber way in
Sarah Moon's remarkable Little Red Riding Hood. Using Charles Perrault's 1697
text with her own stark, contemporary photographs of a young girl on her way
to her grandmother's house at night in an urban setting, Moon addresses the topic
of violence in our society and shifts the blame for the girl's rape and/or death to
the predators or to social conditions. This revised version of Little Red Riding
Hood is a haunting photographic essay about the dangers girls face on our streets.
Not only do the photos demand that we reexamine Perrault's text carefully, but
they make us aware of the insidious, threatening climate in which young girls
grow up with dread.
Apparently, this was also the intention of the TV series Beauty and the Beast,
conceived in 1986 by Ron Koslow and adapted as a fairy-tale novel by Barbara
Hambly in 1989.7 The plot tells all: Catherine Chandler, daughter of a wealthy
corporate lawyer, has followed her father's footsteps, and after graduating
Radcliffe and Cornell Law School, she works in his New York office as an
associate. Though not satisfied with her work, Catherine enjoys the glitter of
New York and lives the life of a professional Yuppie. She mixes mainly with the
rich, and her lover, Tom Gunther, an ambitious real estate developer, is
concerned primarily with prestige and money, values that Catherine appears to
share. Indeed, she could be described as a spoiled New York princess, who has
no awareness of the social problems in New York. However, one night she is
kidnapped, raped, and beaten. Left for dead in Central Park, she is found by a
strange beastly creature named Vincent, who is from an underground world. A
cross between a lion and a human being, Vincent was found as a baby by an
extraordinary man named Father, who raised him in the underground tunnels of
New York, where numerous homeless people and outcasts live. The people are
the "different" ones, the nonconformists with a heart, who have rejected the
capitalist society of New York and are content to live in the tunnels from the
remnants discarded every day by the New Yorkers. After Catherine spends ten
days with Vincent, who helps her recuperate from her attack, she returns to the
city with a completely different consciousness. She leaves her father's firm and
begins working for the district attorney's office to help the victims of social
injustice. Moreover, she breaks her relationship with Tom and feels a deep bond
of affinity and love for Vincent, who is dedicated to preserving an underground
world that has a precarious existence. Though Catherine and Vincent rarely see
each other, they feel each other's presence all the time.
Finally, when Catherine, who has learned self-defense, tracks down her
kidnappers, who run a prostitution and blackmail racket, she valiantly fights them
but appears to be doomed. All of a sudden, Vincent appears out of nowhere to
kill the thugs and rescue Catherine. Though they must part again, Catherine "had
no idea where this would end, no idea where it might lead her. She only knew
that they were bound together, she and this strange and beautiful soul, and the
thought, rather than uncertainty, brought her peace."8
This fairy-tale novel is based on the two-hour TV pilot that introduced the
series in 1987, followed by different hourly episodes once a week. Therefore, the
ending of the novel, like the TV pilot, had to be inconclusive so that for the next
two TV seasons Catherine and Vincent could have many adventures with each
one taking turns saving each other and both developing a more passionate love
for each other. Both the novel and TV series are based on sentimental and
predictable plots. The appeal of both, however, can be attributed to the fact that
Koslow employed a well-known fairy-tale scheme to address immediate problems
of American society, ranging from drugs to white-collar crimes. Moreover, here
it is the princess who is converted into a more humane person by the beast, who
remains a beast and true to his outsider state. Another appealing factor was the
unconsummated love between Catherine and Vincent. Unfortunately, the series
quickly succumbed to the stale formula of most American-TV crime shows and
did not develop the fairy-tale form in a new way; and the novel is written in a
trite, traditional manner that leaves little room for the reader's imagination.
On the other hand, William Goldman's The Princess Bride, published as a
novel in 1973 and produced as a film in 1987, is a mock fairy tale that plays
with traditional motifs and themes and challenges the reader/viewer to consider
whether fairy tales have any value for us today. In the comic introduction to the
book, Goldman tells the reader how his father, a European immigrant, used to
read S. Morgenstern's classic fairy tale, The Princess Bride, with the boring parts
left out. Since it was his favorite book, Goldman writes his own adaptation for
contemporary readers and retells the tale, constantly interrupting the flow of the
narrative with droll comments. The story concerns the beautiful Buttercup in the
land of Florin, somewhere between Sweden and Germany, some time long ago.
Buttercup is a feisty village maid who always orders the farm boy Westley to do
all the chores; when she reaches eighteen, she realizes she loves him. However,
he decides to go to America to find his fortune there to be worthy of her love.
While he is gone for three years, Buttercup is forced to become engaged to
Prince Humperdinck of Florin, who eventually wants her murdered by three
unusual villains: Inigo, the greatest swordsman in the world; Fezzik, the strongest
man in the world; and Vizzini, the crudest man in the world. However, Westley
returns in disguise and outsmarts these villains, and later two of them join him
and help him rescue Buttercup from the evil prince. Nobody is what he or she
appears in this fairy tale. The characters speak in contemporary American slang.
The impossible is always possible. In the end, Goldman leaves the reader up in
the air as to whether Buttercup and Westley will live happily ever after.
In his opinion, after they escaped,
they squabbled a lot, and Buttercup lost her looks eventually, and one day Fezzik
lost a fight and some hot-shot kid whipped Inigo with a sword and Westley was
never able to really sleep sound because of Humperdinck maybe being on the
trail. Fm not trying to make this a downer, understand. I mean, I really do think
that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have
to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death,
that's all.9
Entertaining and bizarre, this novel parodies all the conventions of the fairy
tale but not with the intention to dismiss the value of the genre. Goldman
recreates himself as the fictitious author of this work; that is, he uses a mask in
the tradition of eighteenth-century novels and recalls how his father's telling of
Morgenstern's fairy tale introduced him to a new world of fantasy that cured him
of a sickness, somewhat like Michael Ende's Neverending Story, and that this
imaginative story remained with him because it changed his life. In other words,
the power of the imagination can cause changes in reality and alter one's life.
However, imagination and creativity have been on the defensive for some time
now, and most of the recent fairy-tale novels record in some form or another the
desperate fight of valiant heroes and heroines to save the imagination from being
destroyed or wiped out by the instrumental forces of technology that seek to
rationalize life in a sterile and exploitative manner. It is not by chance, then, that
the series of fairy-tale novels edited by Terri Windling has as its major purpose
to breathe new life into traditional material and show the diverse uses a modern
storyteller can make out of the fairy-tale genre. Thus far, six novels have been
published and appear to be manifestoes in defense of the power of the imagina-
tion. Steven Brust's The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars (1987) is based on a
Hungarian folktale and set in contemporary America. A group of artists work
together in a studio and appear doomed to obscurity. However, they fight against
odds to arrange for an exhibition and gain respect for their imaginative
endeavors. In Jack the Giant Killer (1987), Charles de Lint borrows from folk-
tales about cunning tailors and tricksters to weave together his own fantastic
narrative about a young woman, named Jacky, whose mundane life is suddenly
transformed in an extraordinary way. She witnesses the mysterious murder of a
tiny man called a hob in the city of Ottawa. Soon she feels compelled to explore
this mystery, and before Jacky knows it, she becomes the only hope of a fairy
realm called Kinrowan threatened by savage hordes. With the help of her best
friend Kate (Crackernuts) Hazel and a swanlike prince, she demonstrates that
force and violence are not necessary to overcome brutality if one has faith in the
imagination. This message is also stressed in Pamela Dean's Tarn Lin (1991),
which is actually a fairy-tale adaptation of an old Scottish ballad. Dean, too,
updates, the ballad to the Vietnam era and sets the action at a midwestern college
where Janet, her pregnant heroine, must make a difficult decision about "keeping
the heart of flesh in a world that wants to put in a heart of stone."10
In contrast to the contemporary settings of Dean, Brust, and de Lint, Kara
Dalkey's The Nightingale (1988) and Patricia C. Wrede's Snow White and Rose
Red (1989) take place in the past. Dalkey's revision of Hans Christian
Andersen's tale is set in medieval Japan and concerns Uguisu, who uses her
extraordinary talent as a flautist to save the emperor's life and bring about peace
and harmony in his kingdom. Wrede's adaptation of Wilhelm Grimm's Snow
White and Rose Red takes place in Elizabethan England. Unlike Grimm's
version, the Widow Arden and her two daughters, Blanche and Rosamund, are
active and creative characters who help the queen of faerie and her two-half
mortal sons, Hugh and John, to keep the ties alive between the fairy realm and
mundane society.
The most recent of the fairy-tale novels in the Windling series, Jane Yolen's
Briar Rose (1992), is by far the most experimental, since it moves through
memory, flashbacks, and a retelling of "Sleeping Beauty" from the present to the
horrors of the Holocaust. In her haunting narrative that reads somewhat like a
mystery novel, Yolen demonstrates that fairy tales can be used to address the
most atrocious crimes of the Nazi period in a manner that generates hope in
readers who, Yolen believes, must come to terms with Auschwitz and its
consequences.
Though the plots of each one of these novels that I have discussed are
certainly very different, there is a common thread that unites them, a thread that
can be traced back to German Romanticism and especially the works of E.T.A.
Hoffmann: There is a secret humane and imaginative world, the realm of faerie,
that is threatened by powermongers, rationalists, materialists, scientists, and the
like. Without this world, that is, without imagination, life would become drab
and monotonous, and people would become like automatons. Somehow, a
balance must be struck between the inner and outer worlds of human beings,
between the creative forces of the imagination and the reality principle of the
world.
This message is at the heart of a recent bestseller entitled simply Faerie Tale
by Raymond E. Feist. The plot concerns a successful screenwriter by the name
of Phil Hasting, who moves into a huge house in rural upstate New York with
his wife and three children. However, it turns out that the house is the seat of
magic powers, and a magic black force is accidentally unleashed by Hasting and
his friends. The queen of Faerie and her realm become endangered, and Hasting's
twin sons are on the brink of death because an agreement between the guardians
of faerie power has been broken by one of its members. Fortunately, the sons,
who believe in the faerie power, have the courage to resist the evil forces, and
they are all saved by the intervention of the guardians of the faerie realm.
Feist's novel contains long-winded expositions about magic, Celtic tradition,
and fairies and has a secondary plot concerned with Hasting's teenage princess
daughter, a rich heiress, who falls in love with an all-American graduate student
writing his dissertation on a topic related to the occult and magic. As in the other
fairy-tale novels, this plot is strained and at times preposterous and pretentious.
The best that one can say about the lot of them is that they want to find an
adequate form for the fairy tale so that it can maintain its critical and Utopian
functionto hold a mirror to ossified reality and to suggest imaginative ways to
alter our lives.
Whereas the longer narrative forms of the fairy tale, that is, the fairy-tale
novel, tend to be too predictable and unimaginative in their endeavors to protect
the imagination from the encroachment of rationalism, the contemporary writers
of short fairy tales appear to be more effective in their experiments.
Here the works of Wendy Walker, Jane Yolen, and Robert Coover are good
examples of the different ways contemporary American writers are experimenting
with short prose fairy tales.
In The Sea-Rabbit, or the Artist of Life (1988) Walker has rewritten six tales
from the Grimms' Children's and Household Tales, composed two new stories
about Samson and Delilah and the woman who lived in a boot, and invented a
parable about the cathedral of Notre Dame, all with the purpose of altering our
customary notions about the classical fairy-tale tradition and the real-life conflicts
within it. She accomplishes her modernist goal of restoring the unspoken of the
traditional tales by fleshing out the lives of the original characters, probing their
psyches, and altering narrative perspectives. In the title tale of the book, "The
Sea Rabbit," based on the Grimms' "The Little Hamster from the Water," she
presents an unlikely protagonist, who refuses to accept the role of hero, for he
is not particularly enamored of the cruel and haughty princess, who takes
pleasure in cutting off the heads of her suitors if they are not smart enough to
deceive her and find a hiding place that she is unable to discover. Despite the
fact that he outwits her and "wins" her, he is not optimistic about the future,
given the princess's former predilection. Nor is the prince in "Ashipattle,"
Walker's version of "Cinderella," in which the prince expresses his disappoint-
ment after marrying Ashipattle, who becomes concerned mainly with building a
bird-castle for her beloved birds. Walker's other characters, Clever Elsie, Jack
My Hedgehog, the discharged soldier from "The Worn-out Dancing Shoes," and
Arnaud, the hunter from the Grimms' tales, also have strange fates that alienate
us from our typical expectations, for they refuse to settle for material wealth and
superficial happiness. Although Walker sometimes remains too close to the
original plotlines of the Grimms' tales, her terse style and use of different
narrative voices produce haunting images that fuse the past with the present. She
is relentlessly blunt when it comes to exploring the psychological truths of the
old tales, as though she wants to expose the way we have been blinded by the
traditional fairy tales. Her tales do not provide "happy" or cathartic relief for
readers; rather, they are startling and troubling, and in this sense they renew the
fairy-tale tradition by undermining the authoritative voice of the Grimms'
tradition and exposing problems that are directly related to our present troubled
times and cannot easily be resolved.
Transforming the traditional fairy tales into problems without solutions has
been a major goal of Jane Yolen, who has been writing unique fairy tales for
children and adults for the past twenty years. The best examples of her work can
be found in her books Tales of Wonder (1983) and Dragonfield and Other
Stories (1985). She has consistently experimented with the fairy-tale genre in a
twofold manner by revising traditional tales with an eye toward exploring their
psychological undercurrents and by creating her own unusual tales that fiise
motifs and themes from the fairy-tale tradition and fantasy literature. As Patricia
McKillip has remarked, "Her stories make no promises, guarantee no happy
endings. They present worlds which alter under our eyes like the shapes of
clouds. Image flows into image: the tree becomes a lover, the ribbon of gray hair
becomes a silver road out of torment, the tears become like flowers, the old
drunk on the beach becomes the god of the sea. Each image is a gift without
explanation."11
Among the best of her revised "classical" fairy tales are "The Moon Ribbon,"
"Brother Hart," "The Thirteenth Fay," "Happy Dens or A Day in the Old Wolves
Home," and "The Undine," which are characterized by plots that compel readers
to ponder their traditional expectations and by unique metaphors that give rise
to startling images.
For instance, in "The Undine," she emphasizes the notion of male betrayal and
female autonomy in an implicit critique of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little
Mermaid." Here the mermaid leaves the prince, who beckoned her, to return to
her sisters in the sea that "opened to her, gathered her in, washed her clean"
(203). In the "Thirteenth Fey," Yolen recalls the story of "Sleeping Beauty"
through a first-person narrative of the youngest daughter of a family of fairies,
who tells us, "We owe our fortunes, our existence, and the lives of our children
to come to the owners of that land. We are bound to do them duty, we women
of the fey. And during all the time of our habitation, the local lords have been
a dynasty of idiots, fornicators, louts, greedyguts, and fools" (32).
What follows is an amusing parody of the decadent monarchy. The youngest
fairy, who cannot stand the royal family, makes a mistake at the birth of Thalia,
causing her to sleep a hundred years. But the fairy considers her mistake most
fortunate for her family, for she has been studying history and has discovered
that there will be a
rise of a religion called Democracy which believes in neither monarchs nor magic.
It encourages the common man. When, in a hundred years, some young princeling
manages to unravel the knot of wood about Talia's domain, I plan to be by his
side, whispering the rote of revolution in his ear. If my luck holds . . . Talia will
seem to him only a rustic relic of a bygone era whose bedclothes speak of
decadence and whose bubbly breath of decay he will wed out of compassion, and
learn Computer Science. Then the spell of the land will be broken. No royal
weddingno royal babes. No babesno inheritance. And though we fey will still
be tied to the land, our wishes will belong to us alone. (45)
The various narrative voices employed by Yolen have a definite feminist bias
without being didactic or dogmatic. Like Angela Carter and Tanith Lee, one of
her major achievements has been to subvert the male discourse that has domi-
nated the fairy tale as genre so that the repressed concerns of women are
addressed, and the predictable happy ends that signify male hegemony and
closure are exploded or placed into question. Thus, in "The White Seal Maid"
and "The Lady and the Merman," she has her female protagonists seek refuge in
their origin, the sea, which represents for Yolen the essence of restlessness,
change, tenderness, and humanity.
Overall, Yolen's tales have been strongly influenced by contemporary social,
political, and aesthetic movements. In fact, her experiments with the fairy tale
seem to reflect the manner in which Americans have been struggling for more
equitable sexual and social relations.
On the aesthetic level, her fairy-tale revisions may be associated with what
Cristina Bacchilega has defined as "the strategies post-modern writers engage in
to expose, question and recreate the rules of narrative production."12 According
to Bacchilega, the characteristic features of postmodernism are "the pastiche, the
schizophrenic de-realization and intensification of the world, the fragmentation
and flatness of representation, the ensuing suspicion of concepts such as truth and
identity, the immersion in a fast-paced, city-world of consumerism, and the lack
of a positive or negative norm to refer to" (3).
These elements can be found in the works of Donald Barthelme, Robert
Coover, and Angela Carter, who break down the conventions of the classical
fairy-tale narrative in order to alter our readings of the privileged narratives that
have formed a type of canon in Western culture. The postmodern revisions,
however, do not reassemble into a new whole the fairy tales that they break
down into fragments. Instead, they expose the artifice of the fairy tale and make
us aware that there are different ways to shape and view the stories. The end
goal of the postmodernist fairy tale is not closure but openness, not recuperation
but differentiation, not the establishment of a new norm but the questioning of
all norms.
A good example of this type of writing is Robert Coover's "The Gingerbread
House," which appeared in Pricksongs & Descants in 1970 and is a revision of
the Grimms' "Hansel and Gretel." Coover breaks down the narrative into forty-
two frames and begins the story in medias res:
A pine forest in the midafternoon. Two children follow an old man, dropping
breadcrumbs, singing nursery tunes. Dense earthy greens seep into the darkening
distance, flecked and streaked with filtered sunlight. Spots of red, violet, pale
blue, gold, burnt orange. The girl carries a basket for gathering flowers. The boy
is occupied with the crumbs. Their song tells of God's care for little ones.13
What ensues is a trip through the woods filled with tension but never explained.
For instance, in the seventh frame, we read that "the old man's gaze is straight
ahead, but at what? Perhaps at nothing. Some invisible destination. Some
irrecoverable point of departure" (63).
Only one thing is clear: This is a tale in which the introductory song and the
Grimms's paradigm no longer hold true. There will be no God's care for little
ones, nor will there be a happy reconciliation with the parents. As the children
move through the woods, they fight over an injured dove and are abandoned by
their miserable father. Meanwhile the witch, who has torn out the heart of a
dove, awaits them. Images of dread and doom are contrasted with the bright and
appealing gingerbread house. In the end, we are left at the entrance to the house:
"But the door: here they pause and catch their breath. It is heart-shaped and
blood-stone-red, its burnished surface gleaming in the sunlight. Oh, what a thing
is that door! Shining like a ruby, like hard cherry candy, and pulsing softly,
radiantly. Yes, marvelous! insuperable! but beyond: what is that sound of black
rags flapping?" (65).
Coover takes away the hope of the traditional "Hansel" and leaves us as he
beganin medias res. To understand the voyage we must go back and re-read
or follow the footsteps of the two children. We are left paused on a threshold.
Are the children going to be treated like the two doves in the story? Is there no
hope for the doves? We know what happens in the old narrative, but will it be
possible, once the two unnamed children cross the threshold, to escape and return
home? Why return home? Unlike the classical fairy tale, this version leaves us
with questions and in a state of uncertainty. What was once the primary function
or the Utopian function of the fairy taleto provide hopehas been undermined.
Here its main purpose is to hold a cracked mirror up to the old fairy tales and
reality at the same time.
However, Coover's postmodern fairy tale and those by Barthelme, Carter,
Yolen, Atwood, and others are not typical of the major endeavors of contempo-
rary American writers. Most provide closure of one kind or another; most retain
a strong element of hope, especially the longer fiction. Nevertheless, more than
the other contemporary types, the postmodern fairy tale does bring out the major
characteristic of the best of contemporary American fairy tales: the self-reflective
search for a fantastical form that will recuperate the Utopian function of the
traditional fairy tale in a manner that is commensurate with the major social
changes in the postindustrial world. At present, one can at least distinguish the
following characteristics of the contemporary fairy tale in America, and here I
also want to point to tendencies of the 1990s.
1. Continued re-production and duplication of the classical fairy tales for

children and adults as a "natural" function of the culture industry that
seeks to preserve the classical literary canon without questioning it. Here
the Disney studio continues to exercise a great influence. Even with its
"feminist" slant, Beauty and the Beast is basically a duplication of a
traditional tale.
2. Parodies and revisions of the classical fairy tale in various formsTV

commercials, films, literatureto provide entertainment, to question
convention, and to signal something new through a familiar signifier. Here
Tom Davenport's cinematic productions "Ashpet," "Soldier Jack," "Hansel
and Gretel," which have an Appalachian setting, are interesting experi-
ments.
3. Feminist fairy tales that subvert the male discourse and patriarchal
ideology apparent in the traditional fairy tales by shifting the narrative
voice, undoing plots, and expressing the concerns of women through new
images and styles of writing.
4. Straightforward Utopian revisions of classical fairy tales and melanges that
borrow from fantasy fiction and science fiction seek to defend the
imagination and the human spirit in a neoromantic protest against
rationalization and instrumentalization in capitalist societies. Here Salman
Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) is a good example of how
a fairy-tale novel can incorporate a critique of tyranny with a Utopian
treatise about the meaningfulness of storytelling. There are also some
interesting Utopian tales in Once upon a Time: A Treasury of Modern
Fairy Tales (1990), ed. by Lester Del Rey and Risa Kessler, though for
the most part, the authors demean Utopia with hackneyed treatments of the
fairy tale.14
Clearly, one cannot speak about the fairy tale in America today, or the
American fairy tale. The most crucial question, however, for the genre as a
whole, including all the different media types, is whether it can truly recapture
its credible Utopian function. And, of course, the answer to this question depends
on whether we can realistically conceive of Utopias in a world where chaos,
poverty, war, and exploitation take precedence over our dreams, and when there
is a danger that we will now conceive of false Utopias after the momentous
changes that have occurred in Eastern Europe.
Indeed, as civil strife continues in Yugoslavia and in parts of the former
Soviet Union, it has become apparent that the American concept of the free
world cannot be easily exported, and perhaps the disasters in Europe will compel
us to rethink the meaning of Utopia and freedomin reality and in the realm of
the fairy tale as well.
NOTES
1. Die Zaubergarten der Phantasie: Zur Theorie und Geschichte des Kunstmarchens
(Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1978): 272-73.
2. "On Fairy Tales," European Literary Theory and Practice, ed. Vernon W. Gras
(New York: Delta, 1973): 352.
3. Cf. Jack Zipes, ed., Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Fairy Tales in North
America and Canada (New York: Methuen, 1986).
4. Typically, when the producers of a fairy-tale play or film believe that it will be a
success, they will publish a book simultaneously with the production. In this case, Stephen
Sondheim and James Lapine, Into the Woods, adapt and illustr. Hudson Talbott (New
York: Crown, 1988).
5. For an interesting discussion of feminist versions in North America, Great Britain,
and Australia, see Bronwyn Davies, Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales: Preschool
Children and Gender (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989).
6. Babette Cole, who has also written Prince Cinders (1987), is British but as in the
case of some other authors like the Canadian Robert Munsch, who wrote The Paper Bag
Princess (1980), her works are widely distributed in the United States.
7. Unfortunately, two other trite and melodramatic novels based on the TV series have
appeared since the publication of the first one. See Barbara Hambly, Beauty and the
Beast: Song of Orpheus (New York: Avon, 1990), and Ru Emerson, Beauty and the
Beast: Masques (New York: Avon, 1990).
8. Beauty and the Beast (New York: Avon, 1989): 242.
9. The Princess Bride (New York: Ballantine, 1987): 283.
10. Tarn Lin (New York: Tor, 1991): 461.
11. DragonfieId and Other Stories (London: Futura, 1988): xi.
12. "Folk and Literary Narrative in a Postmodern Context: The Case of the Marchen"
Fabula 29 (1989): 1.
13. Pricksongs & Descants (New York: Dutton, 1970): 61.
14. This volume contains tales by Terry Brooks, Katherine Kurtz, Lawrence Watt-
Evans, Susan Dexter, Wayland Drew, Barbara Hambly, Isaac Asimov, C. J. Cherryh,
Anne McCaffrey, and Lester Del Rey himself. For an excellent critique of this volume,
see Mike Ashley, "Once Upon a Time," Million March-April 1992: 53-55.
WORKS CITED
This bibliography includes all the tales referred to in the chapter as well as a
selection of representative tales of the 1980s and 1990s.
Banks, Lynne Reid. The Farthest-Away Mountain. New York: Doubleday, 1976.
Barthelme, Donald. Snow White. New York: Atheneum, 1967.
Beauty and the Beast and Other Fairy Tales. Illustr. Rene Cloke. New York: Gallery
Books, 1990.
Brett, Jan. Beauty and the Beast. New York: Clarion Books, 1989.
Brust, Steven. The Sun, The Moon, and the Stars. New York: Ace Books, 1987.
Calmenson, Stephanie. The Principal's New Clothes. Illustr. Denise Brunkus. New York:
Scholastic, 1989.
Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.
Cole, Babette. Princess Smarty Pants. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1986.
. Prince Cinders. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1987.
Coover, Robert. Pricksongs & Descants. New York: Dutton, 1970.
. Pinocchio in Venice. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
Dalkey, Kara. The Nightingale. New York: Ace Books, 1988.
Davis, Gwen. The Princess and the Pauper. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1989.
Dean, Pamela. Tarn Lin. New York: Tor, 1991.

Del Rey, Lester, and Risa Kessler, eds. Once upon a Time: A Treasury of Modern Fairy
Tales. New York: Ballantine, 1991.
Disney's Beauty and the Beast. New York: W. H. Smith, 1991.
Emerson, Ru. Beauty and the Beast: Masques. New York: Avon, 1990.
Ende, Michael. Never ending Story. New York: Penguin, 1984.
Feist, Raymond E. Faerie Tale. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Goldman, William. The Princess Bride. New York: Ballantine Books, 1974.
Hambly, Barbara. Beauty and the Beast. New York: Avon, 1989.
. Beauty and the Beast: Song of Orpheus. New York: Avon, 1990.
Hartwell, David G., ed. Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1988.
Holeinone, Peter. The Story of Little Red Riding Hood and Other Tales. Illustr. Piero
Cattaneo. New York: Gallery Books, 1990.
Hyman, Trina Schart. Little Red Riding Hood. New York: Holiday House, 1983.
Lint, de Charles. Jack and the Giant Killer. New York: Ace Books, 1987.
Kushner, Ellen. Swordspoint. New York: Tor Books, 1987.
Mahy, Margaret. The Changeover. New York: Scholastic, 1974.
Marshall, James. Red Riding Hood. New York: Dial, 1987.
Mayer, Mercer. Herbert the Timid Dragon. New York: Golden Press, 1980.
Munsch, Robert. The Paper Bag Princess. Illustr. M. Marchenko. Toronto: Annick Press.
1980.
Perrault, Charles. Little Red Riding Hood. Illustr. Sarah Moon. Mankato, MN: Creative
Education, 1983.
Rowland, Delia. Beauty and the Beast. Illustr. Barbara Lanza. Chicago: Contemporary
Books, 1990.
Rudd, Elizabeth. Beauty and the Beast. Illustr. Eleanor Vere Boyle. New York: Barron's
Educational Series, 1988.
Rushdie, Salman. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. New York: Viking, 1990.
Sendak, Maurice. Dear Mili. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1988.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Illustr. Dorothea King. Newmarket: England: Brimax
Books, 1990.
Scieszka, Jon. The Frog Prince Continued. New York: Viking, 1991.
Sondheim, Stephen, and James Lapine. Into the Woods. Adapt, and Illustr. Hudson
Talbott. New York: Crown, 1988.
Waddell, Martin. The Tough Princess. Illustr. Patrick Benson. New York: Philomel
Books, 1986.
Walker, Wendy. The Sea-Rabbit, or The Artist of Life. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press,
1988.
Wrede, Patricia C. Snow White and Rose Red. New York: Tor Books, 1989.
Yep, Laurence. The Rainbow People. New York: Harper Collins, 1989.
Yolen, Jane. Tales of Wonder. New York: Schocken, 1983.
. Dragonfield and Other Stories. New York: Ace Books, 1985.
. Briar Rose. New York: Tor Books, 1992.
2
De-Radicalizing Pinocchio
Richard Wunderlich
Completed as a book-length novel in 1883, the English translation of Collodi's

Pinocchio reached American shores in 1892, Publisher activity demonstrates it
was soon very popular: Beginning with four editions in 1898, on average three
to four new editions or reprints were introduced by various publishers every year
up through 1919. During the 1920s, this average annual Pinocchio production
doubled to seven or eight releases each year.1
Pinocchio succeeded because it appealed to two audiences: not just to little
boys and girls, but also to their adult parents. The thrust of this appeal was a
class-based imagery relating to the experiences of both audiences at the turn of
the century and the early 1900s: that conflict and struggle were fundamental to
social life, that conflict and struggle were crucial to the very process of growing
up, crucial to the very process of becoming socially aware and responsible.2
Contrary to the imagery of today's popular culture, Collodi portrays conflict be-
tween parent and child as a natural and expected occurrence, not a deviant one.
Moreover, he goes so far as to suggest that it is a necessary occurrence if self-
reflection and socially responsive growth are to take place. Also contrary to
popular culture today, Pinocchio illustrates that adulthood is not achieved within
the confines of the family, but rather that the child must leave the family in
order to mature. These messages appealed to both children and adults at the turn
of the century because they described experiences apparent to both audiences;
whether members of the audience lived as part of the working class or as part of
the newly emerged white collar class, poverty, dominance, and coercion were
readily visible in public and private life.
The Pinocchio story most Americans know today indeed bears little relation
to Collodi's original. The novel has been revised not to fit a more modern or
middle-class society, but to fit a more regulated society. Pinocchio, along with
many similar children's stories, has been changed from a vehicle of empower-
ment and self-realization into an instrument of restraint and social control.
To understand this change we must go back to Collodi's original and ask

about the child he describes and the adult he recommends.3 The child Pinocchio
is dominated by needs and wishes that must be met immediately. He will tolerate
no discomfort for any duration. He acts on impulse to gratify impulse with no
awareness or interest in the result, except his own direct pleasure. Contrary to
later renditions, Collodi's child is not selfish. Rather, he is simply egocentric: He
must yet learn that he lives in a world of other people who are affected by what
he does and who have needs and concerns as valid as his own. He must yet learn
that while he has a claim on the attention of others, they also have a claim on
his attention, and that when people voluntarily fulfill such reciprocal claims, all
are strengthened: Mutual concern and support bonds people together. Yet life
actually begins, according to Collodi, with a natural, self-preserving egoism,
energetic and impatient. For society to be equitable and harmonious, fulfilling for
all, this egoism must be tempered, and the child civilized. Pinocchio is too young
and headstrong to accept this lesson from his father. He runs from home and
must endure an entire novel of adventures to achieve such understanding. For at
least some children, therefore, the acquisition of this knowledge does require
personal struggle and discomfort.
Pinocchio's following movement toward adulthood is dialectical: He learns,
forgets, and learns again, for the lure of self-absorption is strong, resurfacing
continually. The puppet finally is transformed and transforms himself when he
acts out of a concern for someone else that totally displaces any thought about
himself. His performance in three successive instances proves he has changed:
(1) Preoccupied by fear for his father's safety, Pinocchio creates and carries out
a plan of escape from the Shark, selflessly risking his own life to swim Geppetto
to shore; (2) Pinocchio works both day and night to provide for his bedridden
and obviously failing parent; and (3) while giving this care, after frugally saving
extra money to purchase needed clothing for himself, Pinocchio immediately
gives it all to help the Fairy as soon as he learns she is "desperately" ill and in
need. These three acts certify and complete a change that the puppet himself does
not recognize. Pinocchio is now an adult: He plays the role toward Geppetto and
the Fairy that they had earlier played toward him.
Contrary to today's retellings, but very clear in the original, Pinocchio's
transformation to adulthood is distinctly empowering. Not only does he sustain
himself and those who might be dependent on him, he is no longer a puppet: No
longer does he respond to internal impulse without thought or to external pres-
sure by others without reflection. Pinocchio's career teaches that the adult is
empowered to make choices and is not simply the puppet of choices made by
others. It furthermore teaches that adulthood entails responsibility for assuming
initiative. Pinocchio comes to care for the well-being of others and to identify
where he might be needed; he learns that he can and should initiate action to
redress difficulties. These are the characteristics Collodi calls adult. Today's
De-Radicalizing Pinocchio 21
retellings, however, recommend the exact opposite: They applaud the puppet for
becoming quiet and obedient. Yet there is nothing in Pinocchio's prior career to
suggest he could ever become docile, passive, or servilely obedient. Throughout
the original novel Pinocchio is characterized as spirited and energetic. Collodi
cultivates and redirects this energy; he does not dampen or annul it.
Well-celebrated through the 1920s, Collodi's novel achieved its greatest popu-
larity during the Depression decade when at least twenty-six different publishers
combined to issue, on average, more than ten separate editions or reprints every
year.4 Yet, ironically, it is in the latter half of this period, probably from about
1936 on, that significant changes in the story and imagery are introduced so that
by 1939 different versions of a new, fully revised "Pinocchio" are brought before
the public. These new versions, similar in redefinition, competed alongside
Collodi's novel during the 1940s and 1950s but do not significantly challenge it
until the 1960s. After 1970 the newly reformed Pinocchio clearly dominates: The
general public has forgotten Collodi's novel, and when adults do stumble on it,
they reject it as inappropriate for their children.
Since Collodi's novel, from its inception through the 1930s, was well known
and demonstrably popular, some extraordinary set of events must have been
necessary to make it distasteful for many in a significant audience, the adults,
and hence vulnerable to such very different pretenders. The Great Depression
was such an event. Its trauma was sufficiently deep and extensive to initiate such
change. No longer simply a circumstance of meagre resources, poverty was now
threatening and destructiveand poverty is among the first casualties in the new
Pinocchio. Perhaps what Collodi described was too suggestive of personal des-
pair, class inequity, exploitation, and social conflict to be comfortable when these
were painfully visible day after day. So, for example, the drab, barely furnished,
unheated room Geppetto offers his puppet is transformed most famously into a
cheery, brightly colored, amply equipped cottage in Walt Disney's 1940 film, a
comforting image continued ever since. In the novel, the penniless Geppetto can
afford neither clothes nor a school book. He makes a suit for Pinocchio from
flowered paper, a hat from bread dough, and shoes from tree bark; he sells his
only coat to acquire the spelling book. For Disney and other rewriters, Geppetto,
without inconvenience, already has on hand appropriate clothing and a book.
In addition to a humble but comfortable setting, the new versions also supply
Geppetto with respectable work: woodcarving or toymaking. Yet except for the
fact that he has tools and fashions this one puppet, Collodi says nothing at all
about Geppetto's occupation. In fact, Collodi never even suggests that Geppetto
is employed at all! The only actual reference to what Geppetto does is given by
Pinocchio, who tells Fire Eater that he is a beggar. Moreover, Pinocchio's very
name was chosen to honor a family who "did well, the richest of whom was a
beggar."5 Certainly, in the very last chapter when Pinocchio's transformation
transforms the entire household, we do learn that Geppetto, now also trans-
formed, resumes his former trade of woodcarvingbut until that point there is
no evidence at all that Geppetto was ever gainfully employed.
In Collodi's novel, poverty means no money and not enough food. The young
Pinocchio is often hungry, and when, at one point, he is too finicky to eat all his
fruit, including peels and cores, he gets a lesson about not wasting food because
a next meal may not be guaranteed.6 Furthermore, Geppetto's very motive for
wanting a puppet is economic: so he can perform with it and thereby "earn a
piece of bread and a glass of wine" (again suggesting he does not have steady
work).7 Only in the 1930s does the desire for a son intrude and supplement, and
then displace economic concern, as illustrated in Disney's film, where Geppetto
is lonely and wishes for a son to raise and love.8 That this change of motive
occurs during the Depression is shown nicely in the work of a single writer. In
her 1933 radio drama, Lillian Wade gives Geppetto the motive directly out of
Collodi. But in 1938 the script is revised and Geppetto now desires a companion
to travel with him and help perform shows in order "to make boys and girls and
grownups very, very happy," but presumably not in order to make any money.
In the short span between 1937 and 1939 three separate Pinocchio renditions
are created (a play by Yasha Frank, a children's book by Roselle Ross, and the
film and book productions by Walt Disney) that diverge markedly from the ori-
ginal and establish many changes, including those noted above. Though each
rendition is quite different, all agree on the new imagery and themes to be
emphasized. Subsequent retellings follow this lead and reinforce the new and
only "Pinocchio" that Americans recognize today. We shall examine the two
most important of these versions, Frank's play and Disney's film.
Little-remembered today, Yasha Frank was well known in the 1930s and
1940s. It is he who created the first most thoroughly revised Pinocchio in a play
for the Federal Theatre Project that opened in Los Angeles in June 1937 (to
which Disney, still wrestling with how to develop his own version, sent his
writers for fresh ideas).9 The play ran for more than a year to capacity
audiences, was simultaneously taken to other cities by traveling companies, had
a six-month stint on Broadway in 1939, and received a color spread in Life
magazine. The play was cancelled in June 1939 only when Congress closed down
the entire Federal Theatre Project presumably because the House Committee on
Un-American Activities complained that "a rather large number of employees
. . . are either members of the Communist party or sympathizers with the
Communist party" (6).
Frank's play can be understood as providing a socialist image that focuses on
group support for the individual and the individual's reciprocal responsibility
toward the group, in themes not unlike Capra's 1946 film, It's a Wonderful Life.
The emphasis on group support and bonding, however, led Frank to obliterate
any conflict that might threaten this desired solidarity. So Frank must redefine
both Pinocchio and Geppetto. Collodi's Pinocchio is egocentric: He actively
creates trouble by following his own will, refusing to heed advice. Collodi's
Pinocchio prompts anger, frustration, and conflict within the family. To bind the
family together, Frank's Pinocchio is marvelously the opposite. He is not active
and headstrong, but docile, passive, and forever obedient. Frank's puppet pro-
vokes no trouble or mischief whatsoever. He is good natured, and mischief is,
instead, thrust on him by others. For his own protection, Frank's puppet requires
caring and watching overthings Collodi's puppet would never sit still long
enough to allow. Frank's Pinocchio wishes harm to no one and is incapable of
being mean or ill tempered. Conveniently, the Talking Cricket, which Collodi's
puppet squashes in a fit of anger caused by its unwanted advice, does not appear
in the play at all. Frank's puppet arouses amusement, concern, and lovenever
anger or frustration. Frank's transformation makes nondisruptive those elements
that even in the best of times do disrupt family harmony. The Depression
traumatized and proved how vulnerable, indeed powerless, people were to forces
beyond their own control. It struck at the very foundation of family and
community life: the ability of a wage earner to support those dependent on him.
With "one third of a nation" unemployed, alcoholism and economic need forced
families to separate; others doubled-up with extended kin, sharing resources and
crowding already crowded living space. Frank's comfortable imagery projected
a denial that could appeal only if conflict and disturbance were so painful they
were no longer supportable in the family. Hence, raising Pinocchio must not be
a trouble or burden, as indeed raising most children during the Depression must
have been.
Befitting the Depression, Frank's Pinocchio is a morality play about greed,
about being concerned and giving to those in need. And ultimately this is the test
(giving four pennies to a blind beggar woman) that must be passed to become
a real, live boy. And yet that is all that is attained. While it may be important to
overcome greed and selfishness, Frank deliberately leaves us only with a good,
obedient boy, welcomed back into the family, whose harmony is now restored.
A look inside the Monster Whale proves that Pinocchio has not become the re-
sponsible, competent adult Collodi produces in his novel. In Frank's play it is not
Pinocchio, but Geppetto, who discovers how to get the Whale's mouth open; and
it is Geppetto, not Pinocchio, who suggests and takes charge of the escape. When
Frank's Pinocchio is transformed into a real boy, he has become a good boy,
obedient and without troubling initiative, gently protected in a happy world
orchestrated by parents.
While Frank's world outside the family is troubled, ultimately it is benign. In
the end the various threatening characters step forth to cheer Pinocchio's change
and to explain that they were really instruments to test and help him. The com-
munity bands together to support its members: Those who seemed dangerous at
the time really had the puppet's best interests at heart all along. This image of
group solidarity is in stark contrast to the animated vision of Walt Disney.
Disney's film tells the story from a more individualistic perspective where the
family is not part of the outside world, but separated from it as the only warm,
cohesive refuge. The outside world is hostile and sinister, especially for children.
Pinocchio's "friends" Honest John and Gideon accost and sell him to Stromboli.
Disney's film was criticized for frightening children, and not only because of
Monstro the Whale. Stromboli is an enormous, terrifying figure whose behavior
is even more terrifying. Pinocchio thinks he has become an actor, but when he
tries to go home, Stromboli seizes him and locks him in a cage, claiming he now
owns him and will tour the puppet around the world until he can no longer work,
and then he will use him for firewood. The Blue Fairy gets Pinocchio out of this,
but not for long: Honest John lures and sells him to the Coachman almost imme-
diately. The Coachman is even more terrifying, as is his occupation: He actively
rounds up bad little children, who are transformed into donkeys at Pleasure
Island, whom he then sells as beasts of burden. Both Stromboli and the
Coachman are engaged in kidnap and slavery, separating children from their
parents forever. Except for Lampwick, these four characters are the only
representives of the world beyond the family. Moreover, none of them suffers
any retribution for their deeds. Presumably they continue to carry on as before,
since, according to Disney, this is the natural order.
Collodi's world is not at all so sinister. It allowed maneuverability for a
puppet with wits and permitted other natural helpers along the way, as also in
Frank's play. Disney's world does not provide other helpers: The supernatural
Blue Fairy intervenes only once, and Jiminy Cricket, except for advice and
encouragement, is impotent. Disney's outside world is not for children.
Similar to the image Frank creates, Disney's Geppetto is only warm and
loving, a cardboard figure. In answer to his wish for a son, the Blue Fairy brings
the puppet to life and tells him that to become a real boy, Pinocchio must prove
himself brave, truthful, and unselfish; that he must learn to choose between right
and wrong. Here Pinocchio must pass only one test, saving his father from
Monstro. But aside from inventing and engineering the escape and being brave
in the process, the puppet has done little else. His decision to save his father,
while requiring courage, was natural given the character he began with. There
is no transformation, just a continuation at a more heroic level. And the film
ends with a thoroughly happy family: Pinocchio is a live boy reintegrated in a
harmonious familybut he is still only a happy child, not a mature adult.
From the late 1930s through today, new "Pinocchio" versions have been con-
sistent in their recommendation to children: Stay a child; be obedient and good.
After the Depression, two factors, I believe, are responsible for the continuation
of this trend and for its appeal to the general public.
First, encouraging children to remain dependent is useful for consumer cul-
ture: Their purpose is to enjoy life and focus on play; their purpose is to eschew
discomfort, struggle, or burden of any kind. Children make the best consumers
for they may buy irresponsibly and use products to ensure happiness and relieve
any form of distress. This emphasis produces alienation, since self-reflection and
assessment are discouraged. The child as consumer is indeed that very Pinocchio
Collodi describes in his opening pages, he who must be transformed.
In the late 1940s, both American business and the federal government began
to urge the importance of consumer spending, of keeping money constantly in
circulation. The consumer culture flowered with a strength never before matched,
spirited by dramatic advances in media technology. Beyond targetting children
and adolescents as consumers, from the 1950s on the invigorated mass culture
also encouraged adults to remain children: Adults also should delight in buying
and having; they also should expect a life always happy, never distressed. The
new "Pinocchio" mirrors and reinforces these ideas: The child's purpose is to
remain a child, forever enjoying the protection and happiness of cared-for status.
The sense of "entitlement" that Susan Littwin {The Postponed Generation) identi-
fies in the 1960s as explaining the reluctant and delayed transition to adulthood
experienced by today's "Peter Pan" generation really derives, I believe, from
these business and government policies.
The second factor encouraging this new Pinocchio is political control. When
the outside world is frightening and very dangerous, and especially when it is
beyond personal control (as portrayed by Disney), threatened adults seek a leader
free to take charge in their behalf, just as little children, who are weak, seek a
grownup for defense. The new imagery promotes deference to political control.
As the transformed child, manifest in the new Pinocchio, promotes social
harmony in the family through obedience, so the citizen promotes social harmony
by respect for and obedience to authority. Where father is defined as knowing
best and as striving for the well-being of the entire family, so political leaders
know what is right and are motivated only to do good for all of society. As the
transformed child is docile, letting father decide important matters, so the proper
citizen is passive, acquiescing to the policies of expert leaders. These lessons are
the direct opposite of Collodi's, whose own views mirrored the Progressive era's
emphasis on citizen responsibility and activism, on what would later be called
grass-roots democracy. The Depression, it must be recalled, was also a time of
political and social upheaval, when fear of revolution from the right or the left
was in the air. Restoring social order and maintaining political control were
paramount among government objectives. The Pinocchio created at the end of
this period helped calm restiveness, or at least preached against disruption.
While the new Pinocchio is evident in drama productions during the 1940s
and 1950s, despite the national program to enforce political control over that
period, the new Pinocchio does not emerge significantly in book revisions until
the 1960s. It then dominates and replaces Collodi's novel through the 1970s and
1980s. If reception of Walt Disney's film is any index, the same pattern obtains.
The film was not financially successful by Disney standards (it barely covered
production costs)10 when first released in February 1940. It grossed only 58

percent as much in 1945; and when released the third time in 1954, the film
brought in just slightly more than it did in 1940.n However, its 1962 released
grossed double the 1940 figure, the 1971 jumped two and a half times higher,
the 1978 was almost three times higher than the 1940 figure, and 1984 "set all
time records."12
It does not seem coincidental that the new versions should become popular in
the 1960s. It was during this period that society became especially disruptive,
that different groups coalesced to challenge various government policies, a
challenge that endured at least through the mid-1970s. The 1980s brought a wave
of conservatism, and the new Pinocchio, embodying family solidarity and obe-
dience to authority, expresses and reinforces this conservatism. Yet the 1980s
have also displayed activism around such issues as racism, unemployment, gay
rights, women's rights, and abortion. One view of democracy holds that people
directly participate in matters that affect their life fate and actively participate in
government policy making. The other view holds that most people are not wise
enough to participate in such decisions so that they delegate authority to those
who are wiser. In this latter view, democracy works best when most of the public
is apathetic, and it was this view that Samuel Huntington expressed when he
explained the troublesome 1960s as being caused by excessive grass-roots demo-
cracy.13 He urged that people once again be taught to obey proper authority
precisely the message of the new Pinocchio.
Collodi's novel contradicts this message and is unacceptable in light of needs
for a peaceful, stable social order. When a child, Collodi's Pinocchio is assertive,
active, and certainly very disruptive. As an adult, he becomes aware and respon-
sible, taking initiative on his own behalf as well as for others. Furthermore,
Collodi actively teaches him to be skeptical of political authority. Such an adult
could very likely be disruptive of the social order and disruptive especially to
those who believe they have a right to plan the social order. We would expect
this Pinocchio to protest, to resist perceived wrongs and inequities. While such
involvement may be consonant with democracy and social justice, it is usually
dismissed as radical since a democratic vision of this kind may very well threaten
harmony and order. In some democracies, apparently, participation should be
limited to periodic voting.
Therefore, in appreciation of the puppet who so thoroughly charmed children
and adults from the turn of the century through the 1930s, Pinocchio has not
been banished from our kingdom. Instead, he has been tamed and refashioned.
Pinocchio has been de-radicalized to better fit our society, lest children and
adults get inappropriate ideas, lest Collodi's very clear messages be taken
seriously.
NOTES
1. Richard Wunderlich, The Pinocchio Catalogue (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988)
and subsequent research.
2. Richard Wunderlich and Thomas Morrissey, "Pinocchio before 1920," Italian
Quarterly 23 (1982).
3. Among the better translations currently available are those of Murray (first
published in 1891), Tassinari's revision of Murray (1952), Delia Chiesa (1925), Teahan
(1985), and Perella (1986).
4. Wunderlich, The Pinocchio Catalogue and subsequent research.
5. Murray's translation, chapter 3.
8. See Richard Wunderlich and Thomas Morrissey, "The Desecration of Pinocchio in
the United States," The Horn Book 58 (1982).
9. John O'Connor and Lorraine Brown, Free, Adult, and Uncensored (Washington,
DC: New Republic, 1978), 126, as well as my own independent work with material from
the Disney Archives.
10. Richard Schickel, The Disney VersionfNew York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 235.
11. Since Walt Disney Productions has always retained complete control over its own
products, the usual rules of supply and demand do not apply; films that might not do
especially well get a showing by theater groups in order to ensure that they still have first
rights to other Disney productions.
12. Personal communication. The source of this information is knowledgeable and
authoritative but does not permit being attributed.
13. See Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (New York: Harper &
Row, 1980), 546-49.
WORKS CITED
Collodi, C. Pinocchio, the Tale of a Puppet. The original translation by M. A. Murray

revised by G. Tassinari; illustr. Charles Folkard. London, Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1981.
. The Pinocchio ofC Collodi. Transl. and annot. James T. Teahan; illustr. Alexa
Jaffurs. New York: Schocken, 1985.
. The Adventures of Pinocchio. Illustr. Fritz Kredel; transl. M. A. Murray. New
York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1989.
. The Adventures of Pinocchio. Translated from the Italian by Carol Delia Chiesa;
illustr. Attilio Mussino. New York: Macmillan, 1989.
. The Adventures of Pinocchio, Story of a Puppet. Translated with an introductory
essay and notes by Nicolas J. Perella. Berkeley: University of California, 1991.
Disney, Walt. Pinocchio. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Productions, 1940.
Frank, Yasha. Pinocchio (A Musical Legend). New York: Edward B. Marks Music, 1939.
Littwin, Susan. The Postponed Generation: Why American Youth Are Growing up Later.
New York: Quill, 1986.
Moffat, Deny. Walt Disney's Pinocchio, based on Walt Disney Productions full-length
cartoon feature film. New York: Wonder Books, 1986.
Morrissey, Thomas J., and Richard Wunderlich. "Death and Rebirth in Pinocchio,"
Children's Literature 11 (1983): 64-75.
O'Connor, John, and Lorraine Brown. Free, Adult, and Uncensored: The Living History
of the Federal Theatre Project. Washington, DC: New Republic, 1978.
Ross, Roselle. Pinocchio, A Story for Children. Illustr. Henry Muheim. Akron and New
York: Saalfield, 1939.
Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt
Disney. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968.
Wade, Lillian. "Pinocchio on the Air." Unpublished radio script, Library of Congress,
1933.
. "Adventures of Pinocchio." Unpublished radio script, Library of Congress, 1938.
Wunderlich, Richard. The Pinocchio Catalogue: Being a Descriptive Bibliography and
Printing History of English Language Translations and Other Renditions Released in
the United States, 1892-1987. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.
. "Pinocchio before 1920: The Popular and Pedagogical Traditions," Italian
Quarterly 23 (1982): 61-72.
Wunderlich, Richard, and Thomas J. Morrissey. "The Desecration of Pinocchio in the
United States," The Horn Book 58 (1982): 205-11.
Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.
3
Reinscribing Cinderella: Jane Austen and

the Fairy Tale
Norma Rowen
The Cinderella story, folklorists tell us, is one of the oldest in the world.
Beginning, according to some, in China, it appeared very early in Europe and
over time has undergone numerous retellings. From folk variants through the first
bourgeois shapings of Perrault to Victorian and modern reworkings, the story has
become part of Western culture.1 We have only to cast a glance over the
bestseller lists of recent decades to come up with a contemporary version that
took the world by storm: Erich Segal's Love Story, the tale of a poor girl who
marries a rich boy and dies happily ever after.
Particularly interesting in regard to the story of Cinderella is the role it plays
in the realistic form of fiction known as the novel. Itself a tale of dream, a
narrative of wish fulfillment, the Cinderella story doesn't cease to be told when
the fashions and conventions of realism take hold; rather, as is pointed out in a
number of critical studies, like other folk tales, it goes underground, often acting
as a hidden element of structure in the new stories, a shaping spirit of themes
and motifs that ensures that underneath the new surface, and tempered by the
new attitudes, the old forms of narrative remain.2 In this essay, I am going to
explore the ways in which the Cinderella story can function in the novel by
concentrating on some of the works of Jane Austen, a person not given to indul-
gence in dreams, and in a debate between sense and sensibility tending to come
down on the side of the former. Nonetheless, a Cinderella theme often predomi-
nates in her novels, and her various adaptations of it to her realist mode help her
to an increasing definition of her own vision. These processes can be seen at
work with particular clarity in three of her novels: Pride and Prejudice,
Mansfield Park, and Persuasion.
Before beginning an examination of these works, however, we should perhaps
take a look at the Cinderella story itself, as its most essential elements emerged,
to get a better idea about what stories the story is telling. The most striking
concerns social mobility. Through her beauty, a poor and underprivileged girl
wins a handsome prince and is translated to a high position in the world. We

might call this the outer story. But there is also an inner story, an account of a
psychological movement from emotional desolation to emotional fulfillment. For
Cinderella is a cinder-girl, one who sits among the ashes. Since she has been
despised and degraded by her family, her association with ashes suggests that she
is mired in penitential emotions and trapped by a sense of inadequacy and worth-
lessness. Her journey to her prince is a journey to love, acceptance, and vali-
dation, a rising from the ashes that have previously been her element. The outer
story, the quest for social place, and the inner story, the quest for the self, are the
two main themes of the tale of Cinderella. We may however, note, some inter-
esting ambiguities in this tale that relate to the figure of Cinderella herself. First
there is the question of her status. For though it is lowshe is a servant whose
world is the kitchenit is also the result of a downward displacement. Origi-
nally a legitimate child of the family, she has been ousted by the intervention of
the stepmother. From the beginning, then, the story is pervaded by the idea that
her social position does not express her true identity, that she really "belongs" to
a higher sphere. In winning her prince, she is claiming a birthright that had been
denied. Second comes the question of her nature, which often in the various
retellings of the story seems curiously double. In Charles Perrault's version, for
instance, a tendency to self-effacing goodnessshe helps her stepsisters get ready
for the ball and finds them husbands lateris mingled with an assertive deter-
mination to get what she wants and adroitness in going about it. Thus she is able
to act the innocent very convincingly when her sisters tell her about their
experiences at the ball. Huang Mei, who writes about these contradictions in her
book Transforming the Cinderella Dream, speculates that they derive from
Perrault's efforts to make the tale more acceptable to the middle class by grafting
onto the old folktale, with its much hardier heroine, Christianizing values of
humanity and passive suffering (3-5).
How do all these elements presents themselves in Jane Austen's works?
Austen's most outstanding "young" novel, the one that first brought her fame, is
Pride and Prejudice, and in it we see Cinderella patterns already firmly estab-
lished. For in its basic plot it closely follows the major story of the tale: A poor
and socially underprivileged young girl captures the heart and hand of a wealthy,
handsome and socially elevated young man. However, from the beginning we
notice that there are significant variations on this primary narrative. In the first
place, Cinderella herself is split into two. Not only does the central figure,
Elizabeth Bennet, win a prince but so too does her sister Jane, and their stories
work in tandem, both of them finding, losing, and regaining their princes at more
or less the same pace. Of the two, Jane's story conforms more closely to the
conventional Cinderella pattern. Like Cinderella, Jane is beautiful, and the action
of the novel is initiated when she goes to a ball and meets a handsome young
man (Bingley) who signifies his liking for her by dancing with her repeatedly.
Jane Austen and the Fairy Tale 31
Subsequently, it is true, there is some variation. It is the prince, for instance, who
flees the scene (spirited away by Darcy and his own sisters), and he certainly
doesn't leave a glass slipper behind; overall, however, Jane's story adheres quite
closely to our idea of the tale.
It is quite otherwise with Elizabeth's story. Here, there are elements that
suggest a deliberate effort at ironic undercutting or parody. Elizabeth is not
beautiful. Rather, her personal dower lies in her intelligence and wit. Other
variations follow this. For when she first meets her prince at the ball, he refuses
to dance with her because she isn't pretty enough. When he is finally conquered
by her superior wit and offers her his heart and hand, she turns him down flat,
her prejudice matching his pride. What subsequently brings them together is the
slow process of moral education achieved through a series of tests and ordeals.
There is little in the way of miraculous intervention. True, there is a certain
contribution from some quasi-fairy godmothers, but the part they play is limited
and somewhat ironically viewed, a treatment indicative of the generally short
shrift accorded to this figure by the realist imagination. Thus, Mrs. Gardener's
role is confined to an accidental facilitation of the lovers' meeting again, while
the second fairy godmother becomes one only by chance and as a kind of
authorial joke. When Lady Catherine de Burgh fails to extract a promise from
Elizabeth that she will never accept Darcy's suit, she alerts Darcy to the
possibility of hope and precipitates the happy ending. But this good deed is only
achieved, of course, in the teeth of her intentions.
As readers of the novel know, Pride and Prejudice does in the end affirm the
major plot pattern of the fairy tale, the plot of upward mobility. What, however,
of the inner theme of the story, the movement to emotional fulfillment and
validation of someone who begins by sitting in the ashes? Certainly we are given
to understand that both girls find emotional fulfillment in their marriages, but can
they ever be said to have suffered from the feelings of guilt, desolation and
inadequacy that sitting in the ashes implies? With Jane the issue is more open,
but as regards Elizabeth, undoubtedly the major Cinderella in the novel, such an
idea seems ludicrous. She is witty, assertive and cool-headed, and one of her
most attractive qualities is her sturdy self-confidence. Clearly, from the beginning
she knows her own worth and equally clearly is able to communicate it to Darcy.
Here is no oppressed and depressed Cinder girl. However, though free from
feelings of worthlessness and guilt, throughout the novel Elizabeth is constantly
shamed. The instrument of this shaming is her family. Time and again, Elizabeth
has to endure the humiliation of the vulgar and demeaning behavior of her
mother and sisters and to feel herself diminished by it.
To Elizabeth it appeared that had her family made an agreement to expose them-
selves as much as they could during the evening, it would have been impossible
for them to play their parts with more spirit or finer success.. .. That [Bingley's]
two sisters and Mr. Darcy, however, should have such an opportunity of ridiculing
her relations was bad enough and she could not decide whether the silent con-
tempt of the gentleman or the insolent smiles of the ladies were more intolerable.
(82)
Elizabeth, then, does not entirely escape the ash.

The shame and dissociation that Elizabeth feels toward her family point to
another variant in the basic Cinderella pattern. For clearly, here it is the real
family that is playing the role of the stepfamily, the false kin, with the mother
(whose least favorite child Elizabeth is) functioning as a stepmother, and Kitty,
Lydia, and Mary as ugly sisters. In the Cinderella story, of course, the father is
the only true kin, but he is distanced and estranged from his child and unable to
be of aid. This role is perfectly embodied in Mr. Bennet. Elizabeth is his favorite
child. But his withdrawal into his library and constant refuge in irony make him
an ineffectual power in her life, unable to rescue her from the power of others.
That the real family is largely perceived as a stepfamily symbolically suggests
the displacement that was earlier characterized as an intrinsic part of the
Cinderella theme. As with Cinderella herself, we get the sense that Elizabeth and
Jane have been somehow displaced downward from their rightful sphere and that
in marrying into a higher class they are reclaiming a true identity.
In splitting Cinderella into two in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen solves the
problem of her dual nature. One sister, Elizabeth, carries her assertive and
enterprising side, while the other embodies her tendency to self-sacrifice and
self-effacement. In the next novel to be considered, Mansfield Park, a novel in
which the Cinderella patterns are particularly clear, there is only one Cinderella
and only one side of the figure's nature is expressed. In the tale, Cinderella's
crucial asset, the one that won her a prince, is her beauty. Elizabeth's, as has
been suggested, is her intelligence. However, the special dower, of Fanny Price,
the heroine of Mansfield Park, is her goodness. Throughout the novel self-
effacement and self-denial are her habitual modes of being. Of all Jane Austen's
heroines, she is the least assertive and the least confident.
Some of these qualities derive from her situation, for Fanny is a literal
stepchild. Adopted into their family as an act of charity by an aunt and uncle of
wealth and station, she remains no more than a neglected and unvalued poor
relation. Indeed, like Cinderella herself, rather than being a true child of the
house she is more like a servant, constantly expected to be at the beck and call
of the others. Again the family itself has familiar contours. The wicked
stepmother is present in the person of Mrs. Norris, Fanny's other aunt and the
chief source of her oppression, while the daughters of the family, physically
beautiful but morally sordid, are splendid representations of the ugly sisters.
There is even the hint of a father, Sir Thomas Bertram, who might be a true
parent if Fanny could get close enough to him. The actual mother of the
household, Lady Bertram, on the other hand, has something of the air of a fairy
godmother, since in contrast to Mrs. Norris she is kind and benevolent.

However, once again we notice the irony with which this figure is treated: Lady
Bertram's potentially helpful qualities are almost entirely nullified by stupidity
and indolence. Kindly disposed toward Fanny, she nonetheless ends up imposing
more tasks on her than anyone else. Fanny, we are told at one point, "became
everything to Lady Bertram during the night of a ball or a party. She talked to
her, listened to her, read to her" (28).
Situated on the periphery of her world and in a subordinate and unregarded
position, Fanny undergoes to the full the experience of sitting among the ashes.
Feelings of emotional desolation and personal unworthiness shroud her
continually, and as sympathizing readers we keenly await her translation into a
more emotionally rewarding situation.
It is at this point, however, that this particular reinscription of the Cinderella
story takes on a problematic quality. For the turn the plot finally takes forces us
to question whether Fanny really ends up gaining her prince and indeed makes
us confront the even more telling issue of who the prince actually is. For of all
the men in the book it is Fanny's ardent suitor, Henry Crawford, who plays the
most princelike role. Witty, vigorous, sociable, he functions as the life and soul
of the party, the center of the ball, so to speak, and the man the ugly sisters
eagerly compete for. A delicious sense of piquancy prevails, therefore, when he
falls in love with the unvalued Fanny. True, morally he is not a prince, since he
is an unscrupulous rake. However, there are hints from the narrator that contact
with Fanny might remedy this, that the love of a good woman might work its
time-honored magic and effect his reform. Nonetheless, Fanny eventually turns
him down to marry Edmund, the younger son of the house. Apart from a few
lapses, Edmund, destined to be a clergyman, is of course a moral prince, but the
reader remains somewhat unsatisfied with this solution all the same. For Edmund
seems lacking in flair and dash. Sober and slightly priggish, he blossoms into
attractiveness only in the company of Mary Crawford, Henry's sister. Above all,
he lacks the crucial attribute of the prince in the Cinderella story: He doesn't
love Fanny. Through most of the book he regards her as a kind of sister and puts
her to the pain of being the confidante of his pain over another woman. True, we
are told that in the end he manages to fall in love with her, but this change is
narrated rather than dramatized and is treated, it seems, with a certain irony.
"With such a regard for her as his had long been," says Jane Austen, "a regard
founded on the most endearing claims of innocence and helplessness, and
completed by every recommendations of growing worth, what could be more
natural than the change?" (354). Is this the love that will rescue Fanny from the
ashes? It hardly seems so. It sounds rather as if it may keep her there. As Mary
Scrutton suggests, this happy ending lacks plausibility (363).
In other ways than the fate it assigns to Fanny, this ending seems unsatisfacto-
ry. For through it Fanny marries back into the family. The essence of the
Cinderella story, on the other hand, surely lies in her going beyond her family
and moving from the neglect of a parent to a husband's love. It is the daughter's
journey outward. Fanny, however, burrows further inward. Her husband, the
child who is "most like Sir Thomas in the values he professes" (Wiesenfarth 53),
is an echo of the parent, rather than a contrasting figure, and one of the effects
of her marriage is to enable Fanny to move decisively into a daughter's position
at Mansfield. Sir Thomas now finds that Fanny is "indeed the daughter that he
wanted" {Mansfield Park 355). By the end of the novel, Fanny/ Cinderella has
triumphed over the ugly sisters by ousting them from the family circle and taking
their places. It is a pattern that seems unsatisfactorily regressive.
The final work to be considered here, Persuasion, is Jane Austen's last novel,
and represents, in my view, her most mature reworking of the Cinderella story.
This maturity is first of all apparent in the Cinderella figure herself, Anne Elliot.
In her we find embodied both of the aspects noted as belonging to Cinderella:
self-effacement and self-sacrifice but also capability and autonomy. Though
despised and disregarded by her family, and content to remain socially on the
margins, Anne is no frightened Fanny Price. Her confidence and her capacity to
take command are well demonstrated in the scene in which Louisa Musgrove is
injured in a fall. "Anne, Anne," cried Charles, "what is to be done next?" "Had
she not better be carried to the inn?" [replied Anne]. "Yes, I am sure, carry her
gently to the inn" (110-11). Anne is older than the other Austen heroines, past
the beginning of her life, and for all her lack of self-assertion she has gained a
kind of surety about who she is. In her, Cinderella's qualities have been
reconciled.
Anne's home situation contains many familiar elements. Like Elizabeth and
Jane Bennet, she is a stepchild in her own family, which shows her no love and
accords her no value. And as with Fanny Price, she is pitted against two morally
unworthy sisters. However, there is a significant change in the pattern of this
family romance. No longer is the father presented as the sympathetic or
potentially sympathetic parent, the secret "true kin" whose estrangement will
ultimately be overcome. Rather, selfish and snobbish as he is, he seems almost
to be the source of the disesteem with which Anne is viewed. Uninfluenced by
any stepmother, his disaffection is entirely his own. In this reinscription of the
story, we see, the bond between father and daughter has been broken. Instead of
a wicked stepmother, in fact, we have the family unit completed by the fairy
godmother, Lady Russell, whose connection of friendship with Anne's dead
mother and personal regard for Anne clearly mark her out for the role.
However, in case we think this will augur well for Anne, once again this figure
is undercut by irony. For though well-intentioned, she is limited as a personality
and rather than facilitating Cinderella's marriage to the handsome prince has
steered her away from it. It was by her advice that, some years before the
opening of the novel, Anne rejected Frederick Wentworth, her first and only
love. When Wentworth turns up in her life again, Anne must recapture him by
her own efforts. In the fairy godmother figure herself, then, we see a mingling
of qualities that in many ways links her with her seeming opposite, the wicked
stepmother. Negative and positive mothers are combined.
Lady Russell's reasons for advising against the match with Frederick introduce
us to the topic of the prince himself, and here the most interesting modification
to the original fairy tale pattern becomes apparent. For "Cinderella," as has been
said, is primarily a tale of social rising. The essence of the heroine's triumph is
her translation through marriage to a higher social sphere. Such translations occur
to all the Cinderella figures so far considered, Fanny, Elizabeth, and Jane. Anne's
prince, however, is her social inferior. Indeed, in this redaction of the story it is
Cinderella's family that has the high social status. Anne's father, like Sir Thomas
Bertram of Mansfield Park, is a baronet, and though financially wasted through
his extravagance, his clan is "ancient and respectable" (5). Frederick, on the other
hand, is from a poor and unconnected family, and he has to acquire wealth and
status through his own efforts. But the values given to these two classes leave no
doubt about where the marriage of fulfillment will lie. For the world of the
Elliots is portrayed as empty and played out: uselessly addicted to forms and
surfaces and restricted in life and scope. Frederick's world, on the other hand,
is vigorous and full of energy. As a captain in the navy, he has played a vital
part in his country's recent history and is rapidly gaining success and status.
Personally, too, he is Jane Austen's most successful prince. In him, the moral
responsibility that we find in both Darcy and Edmund Bertram is combined with
the liveliness and charm that added such zest to Henry Crawford. As with Anne,
in Frederick opposites have become reconciled.
In marrying the vigorous scion of a less-established class, then, Anne is
reversing the fairy tale. Anne is now the princess, and Frederick is a kind of
Cinderlad who must win her through his prowess. In any case, the story shows
a freedom of approach and a socially challenging attitude that have not been
present before. Fanny, as we saw, burrows safely back into her upper-class
adoptive family. Elizabeth, though herself a challenging woman, is ultimately
absorbed into the patriarchy and becomes mistress of Darcy's great estate. But
Anne's journey is outward and onward, from the "moribund" society of the
landed aristocracy to the "dynamic, natural and loving" world of those who rove
the wide and changing sea (Wiesenfarth 58). This is Frederick's estate, and Anne
is happy to join him there in a life of free movement and activity.
Jane Austen's treatment of the Cinderella theme, then, tells us more both about
the functioning of the realist imagination and her own vision. We see how
persistently figures representing moral absolutes are undercut or collapsed into
each other; how Cinderella herself is rendered more complex, her dower shifting
from outer to inner attributes; and finally how, realism being a middle-class
phenomenon, moral education is substituted for magic as the means to happiness.
As for Austen's own vision, clearly the retelling of the Cinderella story to some
extent freed her from it. In her most mature work, the myth of upward mobility
is challenged and a freer attitude to class and marriage expressed.
NOTES
1. For histories of the Cinderella story, see especially Cinderella: A Casebook, ed.
Alan Dundes, and Huang Mei's Transforming the Cinderella Dream. An account of the
Chinese Cinderella story is given in Arthur Waley's article listed in Works Cited.
2. Huang Mei, Mary Scrutton, and Janice Simpson all discuss this aspect of the
Cinderella story.
WORKS CITED
Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. London: Virago Press, 1989.

. Persuasion. London: Virago Press, 1989.
. Pride and Prejudice. London: Virago Press, 1989.
Dundes, Allan, ed. Cinderella: A Casebook. New York: Wildman Press, 1983.
Mei, Huang. Transforming the Cinderella Dream: From Frances Burney to Charlotte
Bronte. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Scrutton, Mary. "Bourgeois Cinderellas." Twentieth Century, 1955 (1954): 351-63.
Simpson, Janice C. "Fanny Price as Cinderella: Folk and Fairy Tale in Mansfield Park."
Persuasions 16 (1987): 25-30.
Waley, Arthur. "The Chinese Cinderella Story." Folklore 58 (1947): 226-38.
Wiesenfarth, J. "Austen and Apollo." In Jane Austen Today, ed. J. Weinsheimer.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975. 46-63.
4
Shoring Fragments: How CBS's Beauty and

the Beast Adapts Consensus Reality to
Shape Its Magical World
Dennis O'Brien
Modernist and postmodernist literature often describes the human condition by

means of the image of a fragmented world. Most famously in the early twentieth
century, T.S. Eliot, in The Waste Land, offers a modernist image of the artist as
an impotent Fisher King sitting at the edge of an arid plain, who asserts that
"these fragments I have shored against my ruins" (Eliot 2195-96). Eliot perceives
the "consensus reality" of the twentieth centurythat is, what Eliot supposes that
many people in his time would accept as "the real world"as a moral and
aesthetic wasteland. His response to a disintegrated world is to impose meaning
on it by drawing together fragments of past cultures, fragments made newly
meaningful by connections among them wrought by the artist. More recently,
postmodernist fantasy fiction, as for example the short story "Rat" by James
Patrick Kelley, likewise comments on the values and the problems of contempo-
rary culture (in the guise of near-future fantasy) and depicts a fragmented,
disintegrated world; but unlike much modernist literature, postmodernist fiction
makes a virtue of the fragmentation and disconnectedness. Stories such as "Rat"
also have the virtue of embodying abstract ideas in concrete characters and
settings, sometimes as "literal metaphors," such as Kelley's protagonist.1 One
recent television fantasy-fiction series, CBS's Beauty and the Beast (1987-1990),
combines a modernist approach to reintegrating (not always successfully) a
fragmented world with a postmodernist use of the literal metaphor.
Beauty and the Beast was television's most significant sustained effort at
representing spaces shared by magical and consensus realities.2 Almost reversing
the psychological and moral perspective of Ursula K. Le Guin's allegorical short
story, "The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas," the literal metaphor of the
setting of Beauty and the Beast shows ethical and psychological problems most
clearly on the surface, while goodness and beautyand hope (however faint) for
redemption of the world aboveare buried under that surface. The everyday
world of contemporary New York City, though not entirely a lost world, is
generally depicted either as a "House of Pride"a harshly lit world in which

powerful, pragmatic young professionals derive little emotional or spiritual
satisfaction from their money or the trappings of wealthor else as a shadowy
world in which the downtrodden or impoverished cower in or lash out from
darkened corners.
Beneath this everyday world, however, is another, better place, a fantasy
world, a glowing, candlelit, Pre-Raphaelite vision of a sanctuary from most
social, economic, and environmental problems afflicting the world in the late
twentieth century: a sanctuary created out of cultural artifacts rejected by the
world above, and out of the values held to be embodied in those artifacts. The
dynamic center of this Underground world is the mysterious, unexplained Beast,
Vincent. He is the one member of the Underground community least able to live
a normal life above ground (that is, the one to whom consensus reality is least
likely to adapt); yet he is often the agent for bringing the two worlds into closer
contact, through his relationship with the young lawyer Catherine Chandler, his
Beauty.
The Underground is certainly a fantasy world, if not always a magical world.
The Prospero of this island of tunnels is a sort of "first-among-equals," an older
physician and compassionate pragmatist named Jacob Wells (perhaps an allusion
to another creator of Utopian worlds, H. G. Wells), to whom most Underground
dwellers refer as "Father." Like many a learned humanist, however, Father scorns
the idea of magic as irrational; even so, magic exists, somewhat apart from the
Underground community, in the person of the blind prophetess Narcissa, who
sometimes offers Vincent and others guidance that Father, for all his powers of
reason, cannot ("Dark Spirit"). In the Underground, no one person has unique
access to truth.
The Underground is an alternative world juxtaposed to the everyday world,
deriving from it and interacting with ita fantasy world whose power of
enchantment is to embody what is beautiful and just and right (the sources are
multicultural, as are T. S. Eliot's) about consensus reality. This fantasy world is
not distant in time but is necessarily contemporary with its audience. As such,
it is more immediate to its viewers than the traditional, consciously old-
fashioned, magic-castle worlds of Cocteau's great 1946 film La Belle et la Bete,
with its Renaissance hallway lighted by human-arm candelabra, and of Disney's
popular 1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast, with its eighteenth-century
dancing dinnerware.
Vincent, as the Beast, also differs from Cocteau's and Disney's Beasts in that
he is not the traditional enchanted prince envisioned in the mid-eighteenth
century, first by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve and then by Jeanne-Marie
Leprince de Beaumont. He is not literally cursed; neither he nor anyone else can
break a spell and cause him to change into a handsome youth. His leonine looks,
apparently present since his birth, are never explained, either by magic or by
CBS's Beauty and the Beast 39
science: He simply is. The kind of reintegration into human society that awaits
earlier Beasts, as well as Disney's, can never happen for Vincent. Vincent repre-
sents a different kind of integration: if Jacob Wells is like Prospero, Vincent is
part Caliban, part Ariel, and part Ferdinand. Like a good postmodern character,
Vincent, a literal metaphor for humanity's complex nature, accepts his discon-
nectedness and lives his life accordingly. Such connectedness as he does achieve
comes through love, which helps Vincent to come to terms with his innate
humanity; and it is love that causes the inexplicable psychic bond between
Vincent and Catherine.
In the series's first episode, "Once upon a Time in the City of New York," the
director, Richard Franklin, allows the viewer symbolic insight into Vincent's
personality before allowing a view of his physical appearance. As Vincent per-
suades the injured and temporarily blinded Catherine that she is safe and among
friends, the camera, apparently in the center of Vincent's chamber, slowly rotates
360 degrees, revealing part of what Franklin calls "an almost Medieval kingdom
under the streets of New York" (Franklin 27). Here the setting also represents the
integration between the upper and lower worlds needed, so the series suggests,
to better the quality of life generally.
The camera lingers briefly on various elements of Vincent's private world
contemporary and antique elements juxtaposed: a large, semicircular stained glass
window above his bed; a small, metal souvenir of the Empire State Building; a
tall Tiffany lamp above a Renaissance wooden chair upholstered in worn red vel-
vet; a small nickelodeon box music box; a large statue of Justice, a sword upheld
in her right hand; nearby, a small bust of Shakespeare; a microscope with color-
ful rock samples; a cabinet of childhood toys; and throughout the room, candel-
abra and old books in fine bindings, one of which is Dickens's Great Expecta-
tions, which Vincent has been reading aloud to the recovering Catherine, and
which he later leaves on her balcony. Vincent's room becomes almost a secular
version of a "House of Holiness"certainly a house of healing, both physically
and spiritually. Yet like Spenser's Redcrosse Knight, Catherine cannot instantly
become a member of this newly discovered subterranean New Jerusalem: She
must continue to fight the good fight in her own everyday world. Successive
episodes of the series show the need for her good work as growing ever greater.
Literature continues to define Vincent and to suggest the nature of his
evolving connectedness with Catherine. Part of the dramatic tension in their
relationship, especially early in the series, arises from Catherine's need to keep
her love for Vincent a secret from those she encounters in her everyday life as
a public service lawyer in a New York District Attorney's office. Her profes-
sional and social life in New York City bring her into contact with several men
to whom she might be attracted were it not for Vincent. Foremost among these
is the handsome young millionaire real estate developer, Elliot Burch, who des-
pite some occasionally shady business dealings retains enough integrity (both
ethically and in the sense that he, too, integrates somewhat the values of upper
and lower worlds) to remain friends with Catherine throughout the series.
Vincent is aware of Burch, and aware as well of Catherine's potential, under dif-
ferent circumstances, for affection for Burch. As the third episode closes, Vincent
has left, on the balcony of Catherine's eighteenth-floor apartment, a copy of
Shakespeare's sonnets, one of which is marked with a pressed red rose, recalling
for viewers the dozen roses Catherine had received from Burch earlier in the
same episode. Like T. S. Eliot, Vincent draws upon the living language of the
past to express his contemporary dilemma. Vincent aptly conveys a marked self-
awareness in directing Catherine's attention to a particular sonnet, in which the
speaker, like Vincent, wishes himself
like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee . . . (Shakespeare, Sonnet 29)
As Catherine reads, she is alone; the viewer hears the sonnet in a voiceover by
actor Ron Perlman: Vincent is alone elsewhere, looking out over a shimmering
nighttime New York City that remains ambivalently symbolic of bright promise
and of lurking danger ("Siege").
Throughout the three seasons of the series, it is taken for granted that liter-
atureprimarily European and American poetry and prosecan be beneficial
and sustaining to the human spirit. Vincent's reading of poetry, however, is not
all in the interest of self-examination. In a second-season episode, "A Gentle
Rain," the healing power of language is once again invoked. Both Catherine and
Vincent are involved in a situation that has tested the fairness and justice of the
Underground world: Indeed, the title "A Gentle Rain" recalls observations about
the nature of justice and "the quality of mercy" in The Merchant of Venice
(4.1.182-84). Both Catherine and Vincent contribute to the decision of one
Underground dweller, Kanin Evans, to leave the safe haven of the lower world
and face the legal consequences of a murder he had committed, albeit uninten-
tionally, a decade and a half before, when he was a member of the everyday
world of New York City.3 It is, naturally, not an easy decision, and more lives
than his own are affected by it. But some of the effects upon the Underground
are positive, as justice is achieved nonviolently by individual acceptance of
responsibility.
Later, reflecting on this decision and on the losses and gains involved, Vincent
reads to Catherine from Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality,"
reminding her of the ways in which people impose meaning upon their lives:
The clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. (Wordsworth 214)
Perhaps Vincent believes that Kanin Evans, having come to terms with his past,
has won his palms. More generally, Catherine and Vincent, as well as other
inhabitants of the Underground such as Kanin, have, like Wordsworth, known
"man's mortality" and his "joys, and fears," and they perceive the world not
thoughtlessly, but colored by their experiences.
Other characters important to the series are also defined in terms of their
settings and their appreciation of the power of the written and spoken word (not
always the English word, it should be noted: At various times German and
Russian authors are also quoted). A large, multilevel, central chamber functions
as a place where the Underground community can gather to discuss its concerns
such as what to do about the aforementioned Kaninmore or less democrati-
cally. It often seems, however, that Jacob Wells has the last word. Not
surprisingly perhaps, this also seems to be Father's own room. More so even than
in Vincent's room, books abound in this chamber, which resembles nothing so
much as a museum library, or perhaps a shrine, largely candlelit. Among the
books, the viewer sees Renaissance busts and medieval painted panels, armillary
spheres and chess sets, old vases and swords, and a large caryatid, arms uplifted.
One senses that the caryatid symbolizes the spiritual strength and support Father
gives to the Underground community, even as the statue of Justice in Vincent's
chamber represents his fairness, his good judgment, and also his protecting phy-
sical strength.
Father shares Vincent's love of literature, but the viewer hears less of Jacob
Wells reading or quoting classic works, though late in the series Father quotes
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (2.2.31) with unwitting aptness when Elliot Burch,
having rescued Vincent up above, is killed: "The heavens themselves blaze forth
the death of princes" ("Beggar's Comet"). More typically, one sees Father and
Vincent acting out a scene from Romeo and Juliet for the benefit of the children
of the Underground world, as Father explains that the author depends upon the
actor to breathe life into the words. One also hears Father telling stories to the
young, including stories of the founding and the early days of the community,
preserving history through oral tradition ("Everything Is Everything"). One might
think here of similar uses of oral tradition in the postnuclear holocaust worlds of
the postmodern novel Riddley Walker and its unacknowledged imitator, the
movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Literature, or more generally narrative,
helps shape the community and hold it together, especially when it is, as
Shakespeare writes, "Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men"
(Sonnet 81).
Beauty and the Beast has admittedly a sort of Pre-Raphaelite quality to it, in
that it casts a warm glow upon the literatures and the artifacts of (primarily)
earlier Western European civilization (not forgetting the inclusion of Asian
culture in the episode "China Moon") without always acknowledging the prob-
lems inherent in that (or any) civilization.4 Yet the point is made often enough
in the series that cultural literacy does not of itself guarantee goodness of
character, not even in the Underground world.
The oft-returning villain of the first two seasons is the cynical scientist John
Pater, whose name suggests that he represents a reflection of the "Father," Jacob
Wells. Yet the values embodied in Pater, who calls himself Paracelsus, are anti-
thetical to those embodied in Father. Paracelsus also tells other characters
storiesintentionally misleading storiesabout the early days of the Under-
ground world, which he apparently cofounded with Jacob Wells in the 1950s,
after "radical" physician Wells had been hounded out of his profession and out
of society for criticizing the United States' nuclear weapons program. Paracelsus
is as likely to express himself in terms of literature as is any other character in
the series. A notable example of such expression occurs in the episode "Dead of
Winter," in which Paracelsus speaks ominously to a cohort about the danger he
has prepared for the community, in words borrowed from the concluding stanza
of "Dover Beach." He observes that this world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. (Arnold 1384)
Paracelsus's perversion of Arnold's language suggests one of the problems of

exploring meanings in the present fragmented world: The Devil himself may cite
Scripture to suit his own purposes, especially when text is disconnected from
meaningful context.
Just as in this world poetry cannot always achieve the aim desired for it by
Sir Philip Sidneyto inspire virtuous actionso it also seems that music,
another important element in the Underground world, cannot always offer salva-
tion, or even consolation. The viewer encounters classical music several times in
the series, never merely as background music, but in the form of an impromptu
string quartet performance by young Underground musicians or as celebratory
music at a midwinter Underground feast. Vincent and Catherine often enjoy live
classical concerts in Central Park, though they remain discreetly hidden just
below the musicians and the paying audience.
In the episode "Chamber Music," the story is told of a young African-Ameri-
can musical genius who, like Mozart, can play any melody on the piano after
having heard it once. Father and the other members of the Underground think
enough of his talent, and care enough for music, to bring in a music teacher, one
of the "helpers" from the world above, to instruct the boy. However, the boy,
Rolley, from an understandable desire to be with his older brother, returns to the
everyday world above, where he witnesses the brother and fellow gang members
murder the teacher who has come to find him. Blaming himself for her death,
Rolley leaves behind both the Underground world and his musical genius and
languishes, apparently unredeemed, another New York City drug addict. Only in
the third season, in the episode "In the Forests of the Night," does the viewer see
Rolley, after another struggle with the demon of his addiction, return to the
Underground world after unexpectedly hearing on a radio the familiar melody of
Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." Although Rolley is not literally guilty of
murder, he, like Kanin in "A Gentle Rain," also comes to terms with his past,
nonviolently, because of his experiences Underground.
Yet at the beginning of the third and final season, the violence of the upper
world of New York City, violence against which Catherine Chandler has been
working steadily, exacts its most tragic toll as Catherine herself is murdered by
the whim of a millionaire industrialist powerful enough to dwarf and eventually
murder even Elliot Burch ("Though Lovers Be Lost"):5 Here again, the televi-
sion series departs radically from earlier, more benign forms of the story. Other
versions of the story, less connected with the consensus reality of the United
States in the late twentieth century, involve far less physical danger for their
protagonists.
One result of the murder of Catherine is the introduction of a new female
lead, the detective Diana Bennet, who assumes Catherine's role as the most
constant and determined of those who live above but help the Underground
world. As she gradually becomes integrated into the lives of the Underground
community, particularly into the life of Vincent (again, as with Catherine, by
means of literature), the series achieves an effective well-roundedness and a
surprisingly coherent closure.
Just as the viewer learns about Vincent from a survey of his surroundings, so
also the viewer is introduced to Diana Bennet in her own sparely furnished and
businesslike apartment. Most of what is seenphotographs, news clippings,
stacks of files on several tables, and stacks of books on board-and-cinderblock
bookcasessuggests that she is toughminded and devoted to her work, which
presently has her searching for an abducted young girl: Like Catherine, Diana
works to help those most in need. When she does agree to take the Chandler case
and examines Catherine's apartment, the details that lead her to Vincent are
echoes of the first few episodes. Diana discovers the book of Shakespearean
sonnets inscribed "Vincent"; and having previously examined a scene-of-the-
crime photo of Catherine's room, she observes that something is missing: a book,
which turns out to be the aforementioned copy of Great Expectations, which
Vincent has taken back ("Walk Slowly").
She discovers Vincent himself, fortuitously, as she is standing at Catherine
Chandler's grave, when Vincent, having been nearly killed in an explosion, stag-
gers to the gravesite. Diana realizes who Vincent is and takes him back to her
own apartment to restore him to health; hence, her apartment also becomes a
house of healing, as Vincent's room had earlier been. She even recites to Vincent
a few lines from a Dylan Thomas poem that have echoed as a leit-motif through
the last few episodes asserting that love outlives the individuals who love, so that
"death shall have no dominion" (Thomas 77): Vincent and Catherine's last words
to each other ("A Time to Heal").
Though less dreamily romantic than Catherine, Diana remains her surrogate
in many ways throughout the final episodes. When Diana delivers the well-
deserved coup-de-grace to Catherine Chandler's murderer, it is with a weapon
than Catherine herself had given to Father months before, a weapon that again
links the upper and lower worlds ("Invictus"). But the gun is not used in the
Underground. There, justice is usually achieved (in "A Gentle Rain") through
empathy and reasoned discussion. In the consensus-reality upper world of New
York City, however, it is finally a gun (one thinks here of the conclusion of the
decidedly postmodern Ralph Bakshi animated film Wizards) that achieves a
harsher sort of justicea justice imposed violently, from the outside, rather than
accepted from within.
In CBS's Beauty and the Beast, then, the viewer encounters a Utopia whose
inhabitants seek to integrate a fragmented, disconnected world by internalizing
such values as grace, compassion, and justice. They do so by responding to what
is best in the words and other artifacts of other civilizations. These values,
however, are sometimes threatened when members of the Underground world
encounter the other contemporary heirs of Western European culture specifi-
cally, residents of the often-soulless New York City. Beauty and the Beast takes
literally the figure of speech about the disintegration of the individual, as well
as of society, in the late twentieth century. The City represents the body only, the
body that tries to exclude its own soul: But the soul persists, Underground. The
series appears to acknowledge that the values promoted by the Underground do
not always offer solutions to the problems encountered in the world aboveat
least, not solutions that those who dwell merely on the surface of life are
prepared to accept.
NOTES
1. I am indebted to Brett Cox of Duke University for this observation.

2. By the phrase "spaces shared by magical and consensus realities," I mean to suggest
that the action in Beauty and the Beast regularly moves back and forth between the
"magical" Underground and the "consensus reality" of everyday New York City. In this
movement, the action of Beauty and the Beast is unlike that of more mainstream science
fiction, such as Star Trek, which occurs primarily in alien environments, or that of typical
television comedy series, such as All in the Family, which occurs entirely in the
workaday, blue-collar world of twentieth-century Brooklyn. Few if any television series
have been as successful as Beauty and the Beast in suggesting the presence of a knowable
"other" existence just beyond the "normal" limits of the everyday world.
3. It will be noted that the ethical problem and dramatic tension in "A Gentle Rain"
arise from contact with the world of consensus realitythat is, with New York City.
Although the Underground world depends upon the upper world, its vulnerability is
frequently revealed through such contact. Defending his vulnerable community is,
paradoxically, most likely to bring to the fore the ferocious, feral aspects of Vincent's
nature. To save his more humane world, the Beast must at times become less human:
the human condition at the end of the twentieth century?
4. By the term "Pre-Raphaelite," I mean to suggest that the people of the Underground
resemble somewhat those Englishmen and women (Morris, the Rossettis, etc.) of the
Victorian era who used the arts, particularly literature and painting, to shape their world
according to their peculiar "medieval" vision. The vision of the Undergroundthe way
it imposes order upon its worldis, like that of the Pre-Raphaelites, consciously artificial
and only imperfectly masks its deficiencies. T. S. Eliot's Fisher King is, it will be
remembered, impotent. Even acknowledged deficiencies, however, do not necessarily
invalidate the vision. William Wordsworth, in "Tintern Abbey," expresses his awareness
that his life-affirming world-view might in fact be merely a "vain belief; but Wordsworth
believes that nonetheless his way of organizing his perceptions of the world has bettered
his existence.
5. This villainous millionaire, ironically named Gabriel, exemplifies the person who
moves through his world unaffected by experience, who seems not to have known
humankind's "joys, and fears," and who perceives no moral consequences of his actions.
WORKS CITED
Arnold, Matthew. "Dover Beach." Reprinted in The Norton Anthology of English

Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams et al. 6th ed. 2 vols. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1993. Vol. 2, 1366-67.
"Beggar's Comet." Beauty and the Beast. CBS. WBNS, Columbus, OH. 3 Jan. 1990.
"Chamber Music." Beauty and the Beast. CBS. WBNS, Columbus, OH. 18 Nov. 1988.
"Dark Spirit." Beauty and the Beast. CBS. WBNS, Columbus, OH. 27 Nov. 1987.
"Dead of Winter." Beauty and the Beast. CBS. WBNS, Columbus, OH. 9 Dec. 1988.
Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. Reprinted in The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Ed. M. H. Abrams et al. 6th ed. 2 vols. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993. Vol.
2, 2147-60.
"Everything Is Everything." Beauty and the Beast. CBS. WBNS, Columbus, OH. 4 March
1988.
Franklin, Richard. Interview. The Unofficial Tale of Beauty and the Beast. By Edward
Gross. Las Vegas: Pioneer Books, 1988. 25-34.
"A Gentle Rain." Beauty and the Beast. CBS. WBNS, Columbus, OH. 17 Feb. 1989.
"Invictus." Beauty and the Beast. CBS. WBNS, Columbus, OH. 24 Jan. 1990.
"Once upon a Time in the City of New York." Beauty and the Beast. CBS. WBNS,
Columbus, OH. 25 Sept. 1987.
Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. Ed. S. F. Johnson. William Shakespeare: The
Complete Works. Ed. Alfred Harbage. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969. 895-
929.
. The Merchant of Venice. Ed. Brents Stirling. William Shakespeare: The Complete
Works. Ed. Alfred Harbage. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969. 211-42.
. Sonnet 29. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Ed. Alfred Harbage. Rev.
ed. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969. 1458.
. Sonnet 81. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Ed. Alfred Harbage. Rev.
ed. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969. 1466.
"Siege." Beauty and the Beast. CBS. WBNS, Columbus, OH. 9 Oct. 1987.
Thomas, Dylan. "And Death Shall Have No Dominion." The Collected Works of Dylan
Thomas: 1934-1952. New York: New Directions, 1953; Rev. ed. 1956. 77.
"Though Lovers Be Lost." Beauty and the Beast. CBS. WBNS, Columbus, OH. 12 Dec.
1989.
"A Time to Heal." Beauty and the Beast. CBS. WBNS, Columbus, OH. 10 Jan. 1990.
"Walk Slowly." Beauty and the Beast. CBS. WBNS, Columbus, OH. 13 Dec. 1989.
Wordsworth, William. "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood." Reprinted in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H.
Abrams et al. 6th ed. 2 vols. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993. Vol. 2, 189-93.
5
The Corpse in the Dung Cart: The Night-

Side of Nature and the Victorian
Supernatural Tale
Robert E Geary
After more than two decades in which scholarship has taken a lively interest in
the Gothic novel and its descendants, there remains no real consensus on a num-
ber of matters, not the least of which is the transition from the Gothic to its
successor, the Victorian supernatural tale, and the relation of each to its respec-
tive social, political, and cultural setting. Now, there are different ways to
approach this problem of accounting for change and continuity in the subgenre.
Instead of examining some of the familiar hypothesesthose, say, linking the
Gothic and the violence of the French Revolution or connecting the Victorian
supernatural and the fabled sexual repression of the last centuryI propose to
examine a little story and the contexts in which it appears. My hope is that such
attention can help us understand the resurgence of the supernatural horror tale
following the exhaustion of the original Gothic and can let us make sense of
elements in Victorian pieces that have puzzled contemporary readers.
Generalizations can follow. Here is one author's rendering of the tale:
The story of the two Arcadians, who travelled together to Megara, though
reprinted in other works, I can not omit here. One of these established himself,
on the night of their arrival, at the house of a friend, while the other sought
shelter in a public lodging-house for strangers. During the night, the latter
appeared to the former, in a dream, and besought him to come to his assistance,
as his villainous host was about to take his life, and only the most speedy aid
could save him. The dreamer started from his sleep, and his first movement was
to obey the summons, but, reflecting that it was only a dream, he presently lay
down, and composed himself again to rest. But now his friend appeared before
him a second time, disfigured by blood and wounds, conjuring him, since he had
not listened to his first entreaties, that he would, at least, avenge his death. His
host, he said, had murdered him, and was, at that moment, depositing his body
in a dung-cart, for the purpose of conveying it out of the town. The dreamer was
thoroughly alarmed, arose, and hastened to the gates of the city, where he found,
waiting to pass out, exactly such a vehicle as his friend had described. A search
being instituted, the body was found underneath the manure; and the host was
consequently seized, and delivered over to the chastisement of the law. (Crowe
93-94)
Aside from its intrinsic interest, this story deserves attention for its hardy life,
including migrations through different cultures and contexts. Indeed, it is some-
thing of an understatement for the author to say that it has been "reprinted in
other works." We may recognize the story from Chaucer's "Nun's Priest's Tale"
in which Chauntecleer tells it to impress upon Pertelot that dreams are not to be
ascribed solely to bad digestion but can have prophetic significance. Already the
story had acquired another point: Clearly it was an exemplum to illustrate the
belief that "Mordre wol out," that murder is so "abhominable / To God that is
so just and reasonable, / That he ne wol nat suffre it heled [concealed] be"
(3052-55). Chauntecleer retains this providential theme while returning to an
earlier application of the story as an instance of the power of divination. Both
Cicero {De Divinatione 1, 27) and Valerius Maximus offer the story to show that
dreams can tell strange truths. Nor does the anecdote die out with the passing of
the medieval world. Secure in its purely providential context, it was typical of
the many brief instructive exempla found in providentialist tracts popular in
England for centuries. One such work, Thomas Beard's Theatre of God's Judg-
ments, with thousands of instances of divine retribution, went through no fewer
than twelve editions between its first publication in 1597 and 1770 (Williams
Congreve 24). William Turner's A Complete History of the Most Remarkable
Providences of 1697 picked up many of Beard's examples and added others,
including the above story of the two travelers. In 1752 Henry Fielding's provi-
dentialist tract Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and
Punishment of Murder made the popular story one of over thirty anecdotes
showing that whether through remarkable coincidences, prophetic dreams, preter-
natural visions, or simply the unlikely workings of conscience, particular
providences would bring the murderer to severe justice {Miscellaneous Writings,
v 3, xxiv, 151-52). With the waning of such providentialist works in the late
eighteenth century, one might expect that the corpse in the dung cart would at
last be buried in oblivion. But the story cited above is not taken from a trans-
lation of Cicero, from Turner, or from Fielding; it comes from Catherine
Crowe's popular work of 1848 The Night-Side of Nature: or, Ghosts and Ghost-
seers. More significant than the survival of this anecdote for nearly two mil-
lennia is the distinct change in the context in which it finds itself. While Mrs.
Crowe in no way denies Providence, her interest is elsewhere. This first nonfic-
tion work by the then-popular novelist is a sustained assault on the rationalistic
skepticism that would deny out of hand the possibility of any psychic or spirit
manifestation whatsoever. Her bookwhich remained in print for over a century
The Victorian Supernatural Tale 49
(Wilson ix)signals a major change in the attitude toward the supernatural, a

change of importance for the revival of the weird tale.
Whereas the providentialist tracts presupposed a background of traditional
Christianity, Mrs. Crowe's aim is to attack the intellectual currents that eroded
the older beliefs, not in order to reestablish the former context of faith but to set
forth a new synthesis merging science and the supernatural. Her targets are two-
fold. First, there is "the demon of superstition," the genteel skepticism of the
eighteenth century, a period so upset by the persecution of witches and similar
follies that the "reaction . . . ran right into the opposite extreme. From believing
everything, they ceased to believe in anything." Aided by "the materialistic
school" of science, this older rationalism had created a climate of opinion blindly
prejudiced against the possibility that nature contains anything not now measur-
able in the daylight of empirical reason. Underestimating the prestige of what
Frank Miller Turner calls "Victorian scientific naturalism," she is hopeful for a
more open-minded future: "Thank God! we have lived through that age, and in
spite of the struggles of the materialistic school, we are fast advancing to a
better" (47).
The future she envisions is one with an expanded and unified view of reality
which assumes an element of spirit in human nature and in the cosmos. While
such an outlook would indeed affirm the existence of God and life after death
(10), it would subsume the "supernatural" under a wider understanding of nature.
Accepting then current scientific ideas about the existence of a subtly material
ether and Mesmeristic notions about magnetic waves, she believed that what we
now call the supernatural will be seen as obeying laws of nature yet to be dis-
covered:
In undertaking to treat of the phenomena in question, I do not propose to treat

them as supernatural; on the contrary, I am persuaded that the time will come,
when they will be reduced strictly within the bounds of science. . . . Equally
disposed with our predecessors of the eighteenth century to reject the supernatural,
and to believe the order of nature inviolable, we are disposed to extend the
bounds of nature and science, till they comprise . . . all the phenomena, ordinary
and extraordinary, by which we are surrounded. (16)
If her view of at least the immediate future did not anticipate what Frank
Turner has called the "general cult of science that swept across Europe in the
second half of the century" (13), it is no less the case that her emotional and
intellectual dissatisfaction with the dogmatisms of scientific naturalism would
prove representative of the responses of many Victorians who would in one way
or another seek a more intellectually and spiritually satisfying understanding of
reality. Such Victorians were by no means solely literary and artistic figures. As
Turner's study shows, men trained in scienceincluding Alfred Russell Wallace,
who propounded the theory of evolution at the same time as Darwinspent years
investigating psychic and spiritual phenomena in order to find solid evidence for
a view of reality more encompassing than the one presented by mechanistic
science. Distinguished moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick's words in 1888
recalling the founding of the Society for Psychical Research echo the sentiments
of Catherine Crowe in their protest against a narrow-minded scientific material-
ism:
We believed unreservedly in the methods of modem science, and were prepared

to accept submissively her reasoned conclusions, when sustained by agreement of
experts; but we were not prepared to bow with equal docility to the mere pre-
judices of scientific men. And it appeared to us that there was an important body
of evidencetending prima facie to establish the independence of soul or
spiritwhich modem science had simply left on the side with ignorant contempt.
(Sidgwick 35)
If The Night-Side of Nature was prophetic in signaling the opening of a

counterattack on the claims of science and rationalism to create for the first time
in history "a wholly secular culture" (Turner 91), its insight into the attitude of
the preceding age toward the supernatural was similarly keen. The fear of the
"bugbear, Superstition" (13) did indeed inhibit Gothic novelists. That inhibition
as much as any political or social factor accounts for the often schizophrenic
quality of Gothic novels, which could neither forego the supernatural nor recon-
cile it coherently to the traditional providential context. Walpole admits as much
in his second preface to Otranto. Lewis's blend of rationalistic skepticism and
diabolism is one reason for agreeing with Elizabeth Napier's point that "the
Gothic, throughout its fluorescence, is marked by disequilibrium" (4). Even Mrs.
Radcliffe's providentialism is of a most timid sort, explaining away the super-
natural with only the most discreet hints of divine intervention. The numbing
bleakness, not to say nihilism, of Melmoth points to the anguish of an author
losing faith in his professed religion without having replaced that faith with any
but the most despairing of visions. Even James Hogg's layering of contradictory
narratives in Confessions of a Justified Sinner seems to stem from his desire not
to be thought a superstitious rustic booby, or, as Douglas Gifford more delicately
puts it, his "desire to run with the rationalistic hares and hunt with the super-
natural hounds" (149). In retrospect, Mary Shelley's elimination of the super-
natural in favor of a monster the product of pseudo-scientific efforts was a wise
strategy.
The renewed, albeit embattled, confidence in the supernatural found in Mrs.
Crowe's book is what enables the Victorian tale of the uncanny to escape the
incoherence that plagued the Gothic. John Reed correctly remarks that in the
Victorian supernatural story "[t]he uncanny was an antidote to relentless material-
ism, . . . a form of social protest . . . [against] the statistical and measurable
habits" of the period (103). The renewed confidence is not manifested solely in
the typical plot wherein the uncanny disrupts an unsuspecting secular world,
often to the distinct discomfort of some man of overconfident rationality. (One
thinks of "the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine" (224)
experienced by the commonsensical narrator as events unfold to him in Dickens's
1869 story "The Signal-Man," a story devastating to the narrator's smug belief
that the uncanny is mere coincidence.) In like manner, the desire Mrs. Crowe
expresses for a science purged of materialistic blindness finds reflection in
scientist/supernaturalist figures like Le Fanu's Dr. Hesselius or Stoker's Dr. Van
Helsing. Indeed, were it not for Van Helsing's imperfect English, it would be
hard to distinguish out of context between his lament that we live in a dubiously
"enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see" (339) and Mrs.
Crowe's acerbic remark that "it does not belong to a purely rationalistic age to
acknowledge what it cannot understand" (432).
These similarities are not a matter of direct influence. The point is not that
Stoker was directly indebted to Catherine Crowe but that hers was one of the
first and one of the most popular voices in what by the century's end would be
a substantial chorus dissenting from what was felt as a dehumanizing scientific
orthodoxy. The voices sound alike because they share certain themes. The fore-
most of these is the conviction that reality contains more than the conventional
wisdom admits (a virtual subtext of horror fiction then and, to a considerable
extent, now). A corollary is that the ordinary, material world is enveloped in
another dimension, to which there is at times access. Thus Mrs. Crowe's brief
discussion of a kind of random psychomagnetism as the source of demonic
possession (402 ff) may remind us of Dr. Hesselius's to us obscure remarks in
"Green Tea" (1869) about sealing "the inner eye" of the hapless Dr. Jennings
with something as simple as cold. His remark that the demon that beset Jennings
appeared because the clergyman's heavy indulgence in powerful tea disrupted the
balance of a "fluid [that] is spiritual, though not immaterial" (Le Fanu 206-207)
resembles Mrs. Crowe's discussions of the "inner eye" and its subtle links to the
body. The intimate connection of the physical and the spiritual (or psychic) is not
the obscurantist jargon of an incompetent narrator but common parlance in the
vocabulary not only of "spiritualists" as such but of those, like Mrs. Crowe, who
sought a new fusion of science and the belief formerly associated exclusively
with orthodox religion.
An understanding of this context of discourse can make more sense of other-
wise perplexing elements in the supernatural fiction of the last century. For
instance, Jack Sullivan notes that "a desire to have it both waysto be both
mystical and scientificis characteristic of the supernatural fiction of the late
Victorian and Edwardian periods" (118-19). We can see, however, that this desire
did not result from some peculiar literary cowardice but expressed a widely held
belief that redefined both nature and spirit so as to interlock the two. Thus we
may regret that Edward Bulwer-Lytton spoiled the momentum of his otherwise
genuinely frightening story "The Haunted and the Haunters, or The House and
the Brain" (1859) by inserting a cumbersome explanation accounting for the
terror as the work of a distant, malignant mind operating on the house through
electromagnetic waves. But we understand better why this happened. Clearly
Lytton, a genuine Spiritualist and member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, was
tempted to promote the concepts current among the antimaterialists, even at the
expense of aesthetic considerations, here suspense. If knowing this does not
restore the story's interrupted momentum, at least it helps us grasp why he, like
others, made the artistic mistake of overly long explanations of the ideas that
gave new confidence to writers of uncanny tales. Like Mrs. Crowe, Lytton was
among those who believed that, in the words of his speaker, "the supernatural is
only a something in the laws of nature of which we have been hitherto ignorant"
(11-12).
Similarly, a sense of this cultural context may make us skeptical of a recent
reading of Dracula that recognizes its antimaterialist theme but claims that the
book sends "mixed messages" by affirming both the reality of the supernatural
and the value of logic, deduction, and up-to-date technology such as phonograph
cylinders and Winchester rifles. That the novel affirms providential aid and
scientific logic does not mean that it merely "titillates" with the former while
making the "implicit equation of sanity with sequential logic and obedience to
normative behavior" (Jann 284). Victorian dissenters from the dominance of
materialistic sciencewhether Mrs. Crowe in 1848 or Henry Sidgwick in 1888
were as emphatic about their respect for the methodology of science as they were
in their insistence that sanity consisted in understanding that reality encompasses
more than the purely material. In Dracula the union of technology and belief, of
deduction and providence, represents one version of the fusion of new and old
Victorians such as Crowe and Sidgwick desired. The sense of contradiction is
more likely ours than Bram Stoker's.
Let us return in closing to the body in the cart. The victimreal or imagined
has, in a sense, never rested. From urging his companion to revenge his
murder, he has proceeded to instructing twenty centuries of readers. His message
is at first the powers of divination; then for centuries he returns repeatedly to
warn of the providential retribution befalling murderers; in the last century, he
reappears to humble the sweeping claims of a mechanistic science; and today he
comes once more to help us see, in a quite particular and persuasive way, the
dynamics of literary continuity and change.
WORKS CITED
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. "The Haunted and the Haunters: or, The House and the Brain."
1859. Reprinted in Great Tales of Terr or and the Supernatural. Ed. Herbert Wise and
Phyllis Fraser. New York: Modem Library, 1944. 283-323.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. "The Nun's Priest's Tale." The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Ed. D. W.
Robertson. Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1957.
Cicero. De Divinatione. Trans. William Armistead Falconer. Cambridge: Leob Classical
Library, 1923. I, 27.
Crowe, Catherine. The Night-Side of Nature. 1848. Wellingborough, England: Aquarian
Press, 1986.
Dickens, Charles. "The Signal-Man." 1869. The Evil Image: Two Centuries of Gothic
Short Fiction and Poetry. Ed. Patricia Scarda and Nora Crowe Jaffe. New York: NAL,
1981. 217-228.
Fielding, Henry. Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and
Punishment of Murder. 1752. Miscellaneous Writings, Vol 3, in The Complete Works
of Henry Fielding. Ed. William Ernest Henley. 16 Vols. New York: Croscup &
Sterling, 1902. [The set consists of 13 numbered volumes, then the separately-
numbered three volumes of miscellaneous writings.] 111-165.
Gifford, Douglas. James Hogg. Edinburgh: Ramsey Head Press, 1976.
Jann, Rosemary. "Saved by Science? The Mixed Messages of Stoker's Dracula." Texas
Studies in Language and Literature 31 (Summer 1989): 273-87.
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. "Green Tea." 1869. Best Ghost Stories of J. S. Le Fanu. Ed.
E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1964. 178-207.
Napier, Elizabeth. The Failure of Gothic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
Reed, John R. "The Occult in Later Victorian Literature." In Literature of the Occult: A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Peter B. Messent, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall, 1981. 89-104.
Sidgwick, Henry. Presidential Address, July 16, 1888. Presidential Addresses to the
Society for Psychical Research,^; quoted in Turner, 55.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. New York: Bantam Classics, 1981.
Sullivan, Jack. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Storyfrom Le Fanu to Blackwood.
Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1978.
Turner, Frank Miller. Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific
Naturalism in Late Victorian England. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1974.
Williams, Aubrey L. An Approach to Congreve. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979.
Wilson, Colin. Introduction to The Night-Side of Nature. Wellingborough, England:
Aquarian Press, 1986. v-xii.
6
Reader Response and Fantasy Literature:

The Uses and Abuses of Interpretation in
Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonderland
John Pennington
"Lying on my death bed, I have but one final wish: that my autobiography will
one day be decipheredbut not until 100 years will have passed since its first
publication. I refer to the books, ALICE IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH
THE LOOKING-GLASS, which were published in 1865 and 1871, respectively"
(xviii). These words are not found in Lewis Carroll's diaries or collected letters,
nor are they found in Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's oeuvre. These words, "in
fact," are by Queen Victoria herself. That is, in a sense they are. These words are
actually written by the Continental Historical Society as part of its annotated
version of Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonderland, which proposes that Queen
Victoria wrote the Alice books. The Society admits: "The annotations are written
in the first person, as if by the Queen herself, since it is her apparent autobiogra-
phy. The annotationsincluding the 'Introduction'were of course written by
the members of The Continental Historical Society. However, [t]he use of such
'poetic license,'" argues the Society, "was felt to be particularly appropriate
because of the very intense nature of the book" (viii). Fusing critical interpreta-
tion with fictional creation and recreation, the Society has invented a 1990s
version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Literary sleuthing of Carroll's work is commonplace. In More Annotated
Alice, Martin Gardner admits that "no other books written for children are more
in need of explications than the Alice books. Much of their wit is interwoven
with Victorian events and customs unfamiliar to American readers today, and
even to readers in England. Many jokes in the books could be appreciated only
by Oxford residents, and others were private jokes intended solely for Alice"
(ix). The Continental Historical Society would agree with Gardner: Readers of
Alice do need help interpreting the work. But what separates the Society from
other literary detectives is that it has constructed another fictional work to
explain and to decipher the Alice books, moving beyond interpretation that cre-
ates "text upon text" (Scholes 31) to criticism that produces "text against text"
(Scholes 35). Whereas Martin Gardner in The Annotated Alice and More Anno-
tated Alice and Peter Heath in The Philosopher's Alice provide annotated expla-
nations of the Alice books (traditional exegesis), the Society factionally recreates
the historical Queen Victoria, who annotates and interprets her own text (that has
traditionally been ascribed to Lewis Carroll). The Society revises Florence
Becker Lennon's Victoria through the Looking-Glass to read Victoria Writing the
Looking-Glass. Some may dismiss Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonderland as mere
nonsense in the best Carrollian fashion; some may consider the Society part of
the lunatic fringe; some may view the project as a joke, a parody of scholarship,
another great hoax; or some may find legitimacy in its proposition. But all
should agree that the Society's claim is controversial. Its deciphering of the Alice
books highlights the inherent contradictions in literary studies reflected by the
difficulties readers and critics have achieving critical consensus. Queen Victoria's
Alice in Wonderland challenges readers to reassess their conception of literature
and the nature of literary studies by demonstrating that fantasy literature's overt
reliance on individual readers to (re)create the fantastical world welcomes such
radical (mis)readings.
Contemporary literary theoryespecially poststructuralist thoughthas been
lauded as imbuing literary study with a revitalizing intellectual and playful rigor,
or it is often seen, to use Alvin Kernan's phrase, as leading to The Death of Li-
terature. Such varied responses to critical theory become oxymoronic in the best
Carrollian sense and aid us in our understanding of Queen Victoria's Alice in
Wonderland. Do we view a text as "an entity which always remains the same
from one moment to the next" (Hirsch 46), or do we filter a text through the
eyes of a deconstructor who believes all texts are intertexts of floating signifiers?
Or do we hover somewhere between these two critical poles? Is there unalterable,
universal Truth in literature? Or do we etch individual truth onto the texts we
read? Of course, literary interpretation will inevitably lead to debate-and contro-
versy. Gerald Graff asks regarding interpretation: "Correct interpretations are
those that are considered accurate, valid, acceptable. But acceptable to whom?"
(126). As Graff points out, interpretation leads to indeterminacy: "It is always
possible to look at any text in contexts other than the one its author may have
intended. In this sense, a text takes on a new meaning every time we read it from
a new angle" (167). Pierre Menard's Quixote is a prime example. Indeterminacy,
uncertaintythese are nagging concerns we often have as we read and create in-
dividual responses. And when we share these responses by going public, we in-
vite debate, especially when an interpretation is idiosyncratic. Literary meaning
becomes muddled. One variety of critical theory, however, feeds on this muddle
and provides strategies we can use to understand interpretations that cut across
the critical grain. By subjecting Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonderland to a rea-
der response analysis, we can account for the Society's unusual reading and make
some general observations about fantasy's tenuous position in the literary canon.
Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonderland 57
Carroll's Alice books approach what Roland Barthes labels "writerly texts,"
texts that require the reader to write meaning onto the "galaxy of signifiers,"
texts that are "reversible; we gain access to [them] by several entrances, none of
which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one" (5). Writerly texts to
Barthes "are indeterminable" (6). In fact, fantasy literature by nature is
"writerly," requiring diverse sophisticated reader responses. Linda Hutcheon
proposes in A Theory of Parody that fantasy forces the reader to engage in "the
very act of imagining the world, or giving shape to the referents of the words
that go to make up the whole of the world that is the 'concretized' text being
read" (76). In Narcissistic Narrative she labels fantasyalong with the detec-
tive, game, and erotic modesa "covert" narcissistic text, one that "is self-reflec-
tive but not necessarily self-conscious" (7). To Hutcheon, fantasy "texts can
actually lure the reader into participating in the creation of a novelistic universe;
perhaps he can also be seduced into actioneven direct political action" (155;
emphasis added). On the one hand, the fantasy geography entices readers into
recreating the secondary world, into playing the game of the impossible as W.
R. Irwin theorizes; on the other hand, fantasy tempts readers to action because
it requires them to activate the text, to recreate the text, to complete the text so
it makes sense, has some meaning. Such recreations make fantasy a potent
literary mode or genre because it undermines traditional narrative stability by
engaging the reader more actively in the creation of meaning. As Rosemary
Jackson points out, fantasy often has a subversive thrust. In a sense, then, Alice,
a fantastic text that manipulates the reader by creating an apparent nonsensical
textual landscape, goads people to action: We read the Alice books, we interpret
the Alice books, we write criticism about the Alice books, and we debate the
books' meaning. The Continental Historical Society's questioning of authorial
authenticity by writing "fictional criticism" of the Alice books is probably the
most radical reading possible, for it negates or undermines previous criticism and
rewrites literary history. Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonderland becomes a rather
subversive text.1
If fantasy literature can lead to such re-readingsor reimaginings or re-
creationsbecause of its reliance on the reader's response, then we should con-
sider the implications of such subversive readings and what they may mean to
literary interpretation in general. In The Pleasures of Reading, Robert Alter
contends that "since much of. . . criticism is ideologically motivated, the ideo-
logical agenda itself is taken as sufficient warrant for any reading that will
realize the ends of ideology, however tenuous the connection with the actual
details of the text under discussion." Alter suggests that "those who like to think
of themselves as the vanguard of contemporary criticism appear unwilling to con-
ceive a middle ground between the insistence on one authoritative reading and
the allowing of all readings" (221). Fantasy appears to resist middle-ground
compromise readings, since the reader has the power to activate a fantasy text
into personal meaning, more than in a realistic text whose "closed" world
narrows interpretive options. It appears, consequently, that fantasy attracts more
ideological or idiosyncratic readings and provides an outlet for such "creative"
criticism. The popularity of role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons
and computerized fantasy games attests to the magnitude of individual freedom
in the creation of the fantasy universe. The Society does indeed play the game
of the impossible in its interpretation of the Alice books by creating a "corpo-
rate" response that meets the needs of that particular discourse community, which
"writes" its meaning on the Alice texts. A perplexing question remains: How can
a group of readers agree that Queen Victoria did indeed write the Alice books
and perpetuate a literary hoax that has fooled readers and critics for 127 years?
The answer may reside in the fact that the Society reads a "different" Alice text
based on its ideological beliefs, which complement its community's needs.
One prominent reader response critic, Wolfgang Iser, posits that texts are filled
with gaps, and he views reading as a creative process that "activates our own
faculties, enabling us to recreate the world it represents" by creating a "kaleido-
scope of perspectives, preintentions, recollections" (54) that begin to fill in those
gaps. "The reading process always involves viewing the text through a
perspective that is continually on the move" so that "even on repeated viewings
a text allows and indeed induces innovative reading" (56; emphasis added). Iser
distinguishes between "artistic" and "aesthetic" (50) readings: The artistic work
is that created by the author; the aesthetic work that created or completed by the
reader. Such aesthetic readings, however, are based on illusionary gap-filling
strategies: "Without the formation of illusions, the unfamiliar world of the text
would remain unfamiliar; through the illusions, the experience offered by the text
becomes accessible to us, for it is only the illusion, on its different levels of
consistency, that makes the experience 'readable'" (59). The Society conflates
Iser's artistic and aesthetic poles by proposing an innovative reading that
simultaneously creates an artistic factional text (the annotations by Queen
Victoria) and provides an aesthetic interpretation of another work (Carroll's
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). The lines that demarcate fiction from
criticism crumble, waver . . . like the Cheshire Cat.
Of course the so-called nonsense structure of the Alice books challenges
readers to map meaning onto its unstable literary canvas. In Looking-Class
Humpty Dumpty symbolizes this problem of interpretation: "When I use a word,
it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less." When Alice asks
"whether you can make words mean so many different things," Humpty replies,
"The question is, which is to be masterthat's all" (Annotated Alice 269). Then
he proceeds to help Alice interpret the confusing "Jabberwocky," explaining, "I
can explain all the poems that ever were inventedand a good many that haven't
been invented just yet" (270). Interpretation, of course, rests on words, those
slippery things. Interpreting the word stithy in "Jabberwocky" to mean "lithe and
slimy" (271), Humpty tells Alice that it is a portmanteau where "there are two
meanings packed up into one word" (271), which together create a new word
with new meaning. In effect, criticism is portmanteau: We try to negotiate
meaning residing between the signifier and the signifiedthat is, between the
literary work and our interpretation that "creates" meaning. Even the
Carroll-Dodgson dichotomy reflects this, for we must mediate between these two
names; the pseudonym creates a gap between Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and
Lewis Carroll, and we can never assuredly define Dodgson or Carroll. We can
only speculate about him, only interpret him, his "identity" hovering in that
shady paraxial realm created by the two names. Like the Cheshire Cat, our grins,
our interpretation, must out of necessity be detached from the body of the text
we are analyzing. That the Alice books so readily internalize this fact makes
Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonderland intriguing, especially since it is a work
that purposely blurs the distinction between fiction and criticism.
Critical illusions, according to Iser, are positive, allowing readers to enter
fictional worlds and construct some web of understanding, yet such illusions can
quickly turn into critical delusions if idiosyncratic claims remain unsubstantiated
(which Alter believes happens too frequently). David Bleich argues in Subjective
Criticism that creative reading is a kind of "resymbolization" whereby a reader
or group of readers "rewords (or reworks) established symbols in a direction
more adaptive to present needs" (66). "The only consensus about a text," claims
Bleich, "is on its role as a symbolic object, which means that further discussion
of this text is predicated on each reader's symbolization and resymbolization of
it" (111). The question we need to ask, consequently, is how and why the
Continental Historical Society agrees that Queen Victoria wrote Alice and
Looking-Glass.
The Society resymbolizes the Alice books into its own agenda by using
traditional and nontraditional interpretive strategies that fit its needs. Based on
six interpretive "moves"Dodgson's denial that he wrote the Alice books, a
computer analysis of Carroll's and Victoria's writing style, the queen's
motivations to write a masked autobiography, parallels between the Alice books
and the queen's life, numerical ciphers, and word ciphersthe Society presents
its "convincing" evidence that Victoria wrote the Alice books. By using word
ciphers, for example, the society concludes that Alice's cat Dinah is Queen
Victoria:
It then follows that, as I [Victoria] go through the looking glass myself, I must
drop my "common" qualities by leaving behind the letters "common" to both
"DINAW" and "D R IN A." Those "common" letters, just underlined, are "D, I,
N, and A." Thus, my identity becomes changed, as I pass through from one book
to the next . . . so that R i-N-A VICTORIA becomes R Victoria. (53)
Since R Victoria passes through the mirror, it becomes Victoria R: "This,

then, proves the 'identity,' 'DRINA VICTORIA = VICTORIA R,' proving that
Alice is really Yours Truly" (53). Such critical inductive leaps abound in Queen
Victoria's Alice. Other examples can be found in the manuscript "Queen
Victoria's Through the Looking-Glass," the sequel to Queen Victoria's Alice. The
Society makes this claim: Chapter 3"Looking-Glass Insects"becomes a pun:
"in-sex." Writing as the queen, the Society maintains, "The symbol of flowers
suggests pollination by beesa warning that I might endup being FERTILIZED,
by the big 'B' [Napoleon Bonaparte]" (55). And, in fact, the thesis of the
Society's "Queen Victoria's Through the Looking-Glass," which is currently in
manuscript form, is that the queen was impregnated by Napoleon, had his
illegitimate child, gave up the child, and is now admitting her sins so she can be
received in heaven.
More traditional scholarly tools the Society engages are just as suspect. The
Society's computer study, which comprises part of its conventional "critical"
arsenal discovers that the word very is used 34.5 percent as one "of the six
most-commonly-italicized words in the 'Alice' books." Very, the computer study
also finds, is italicized 34.5 percent of the time in Queen Victoria's childhood
diaries (Queen Victoria's Alice 214-15), thus proving through stylistic analysis
that the queen wrote Alice. Such examples illustrate the arbitrary nature of the
interpretation, the resymbolization the Society uses to prove its case. Though the
Society's interpretation seems based on a semblance of factDodgson's rejection
of Lewis Carroll, parallels between Alice and the queen's life, and a more
contemporary computer stylistic studythese are just another set of subjective
interpretations the Society chooses to privilege. A = B because the society
chooses that A = B. In effect, the Society resymbols the work to meet its needs,
which we will see appears to have conservative moral and religious designs.
By far the most intriguing interpretation the Society presents is its deciphering
of "Jabberwocky" given in "Queen Victoria's Through the Looking-Glass." This
poem, of course, invites interpretation, often self-reflective and parodic analysis,
since the nonsense structure allows for subjective interpretation. And the poem
has a long history of such interpretation: Alice struggles with the poem's
meaning after reading it in the mirror; Humpty Dumpty later interprets the poem
for Alice; Lewis Carroll also interprets it for the reader in an edition of the
journal Misch-Masch (Gardner 191). Gardner then interprets "Jabberwocky" in
The Annotated Alice (194-97), and the poem has been interpreted many more
times by Carroll scholars and continues to be discussed. Even Monty Python
finds inspiration, basing their film Jabberwocky (1977) on it.
The Society's interpretation of the poem, interestingly enough, mirrors Humpty
Dumpty's spirit of arbitrary interpretation: When the Society interprets a word,
it means what the Society wants it to mean. "Jabberwocky" is a poem of
seduction, proposes the Society, and "the first verse of [it] is about illicit love,
which usually takes place at 4 o'clock in the afternoon." Thus brillig = broiling
= open flame = flames of passion (136-37). The remainder of the poem, then, is
interpreted according to the seduction theme: slithy toves - corkscrew noses =
gyroscope = penetrating screw; wabe = mound of grass = Queen Victoria's
sexuality (137). As Humpty interprets outgribing to mean "something between
bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle" (Gardner 272), the
Society interprets Humpty's interpretation to mean "the sounds of [sexual]
pleasure" (139). In effect, the Society has unwittingly parodied itself in its
arbitrary interpretation, which becomes an interpretation of a fictional character
(Humpty Dumpty) interpreting a fictional work ("Jabberwocky"), which is part
of the fictional Through the Looking-Glass, written by Lewis Carroll, who is
actually Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
But why does the Society read the poem in this manner? Why does it read the
Alice books so controversially? In keeping with the spirit of dubious interpreta-
tion, let me propose an "interpretation" of the Society and its intentions. The
Society defines itself in Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonderland as an "association
of literary friends who collaborated on the elucidations of Queen Victoria in the
writings of Lewis Carroll. They stand united by their discovery of the Queen's
autobiographical revelations" (xi). Such solidarity becomes suspect when we
realize how incongruous the community of scholars actually is: The group claims
to consist of former and active university professors of English, history, and
psychology; other members include a patron in the arts who lives in Mill Valley,
California; a training therapist; and a real estate investor (also the editor-in-chief
of the Society). In its "Forword" [sic] entitled "The Religious Import of the
'Alice' Books," the Society admits that its interpretation will clarify the apparent
"nonsense" found in the Alice books: "We . . . believe that the Alice books have
been misbranded as either abject nonsense or, at most, the arcane philosophical
musings of Mr. Dodgson, who didn't write them. It is our hope that they
ultimately will come to be appreciated for their profound religious content as the
pious outpourings of Queen Victoria, writing from the depths of despair" (xii).
In "Queen Victoria's Through the Looking-Glass" the Society asserts (speaking
as the queen), "And so, the purpose of this book is shown to have been not to
answer ANY questions; but rather to cleanse my soul, by simply raising the
questions I have here brought into focus" (318); "I set about to renounce any
FURTHER sinning for the future, as I wend my way up to Earthly Paradise"
(316).
That a group of peopleof Carroll scholarswould agree not only that Queen
Victoria wrote the Alice books but that the primary thrust of the books is
religious suggests the Society's "interpretation" is based on ulterior motives.
Stanley Fish's theory of interpretive communities helps explain how interpretive
agreement is created and maintained. An interpretive community, Fish proposes,
is "made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading but for
writing texts . . . In other words these strategies exist prior to the act of reading
and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually
assumed, the other way around" (14). Thus the intentions of an interpretive
community direct interpretationsimply, each member looks for the same things.
In turn, such a community will then try to persuade others that its interpretation
is valid; Fish labels this the "persuasion model" of reader response criticism:
In short, we try to persuade others to our beliefs because if they believe what we
believe, they will, as a consequence of those beliefs, see what we see; and the
facts to which we point in order to support our interpretations will be as obvious
to them as they are to US. Indeed, this is the whole of critical activity, an attempt
on the part of one part to alter the beliefs of another so that the evidence cited by
the first will be seen as evidence by the second. (466)
Hamlet's persuading of Polonius that the cloud is simultaneously a camel,

weasel, and whale is a convenient metaphor for Fish's persuasion model of
reader response criticism.
The Society reads the Alice books as clouds, in a sense, and wants us to sport
the role of Alice as it plays Humpty Dumpty, the Great Interpreter. "Our
interpretation of the various symbols is not arbitrary," argues the Society, "but
based upon events in the Queen's life and upon certain long-accepted meanings
for such symbols" (ix). Using the Dictionary for Dreamers as its critical base, the
Society constructs a "symbol library" for Alice that conveniently explains
allthe symbols bridge the gap between actual text and interpretation. In other
words, the interpretive community chooses its interpretive structure and brings
meaning to the text instead of drawing meaning from it. Again, listen to the
Society's interpretive bias: "At their most profound levels, the Alice books
enlarge upon the joys and tragedies of life from a perspective that encompasses
Judeo-Christian Morality and its ethic of acknowledging and repenting for sin in
a way similar to that expressed in Dante's famous trilogy" (xiii). Thus the Red
Queen, whose crown becomes a crown of thorns, is Christ on the cross; the
arrival of the Red Queen is "comparable to The Second Coming of Christ" (xiii).
The queen in her annotations also provides tidy interpretation: The Cheshire Cat
is "a symbol for successful ambitions, predicates its power on the hope that King
William will live beyond my 18th birthday, and that I will become Queen
directly" (86). Deciphering Tenniel's frontispiece for Alice (which itself is an
interpretation of Carroll's text), the queen writes: "The prisoner is Dodgson, the
Knave of Hearts, who is charged with 'stealing' the tarts. The tarts are these, my
secret diaries" (178).
Both the Society and the queen (who is the Society) crunch symbols into
simple, reductive meanings. Notice too how the Society justifies why it has taken
so long to decipher the texts and why Queen Victoria would want to hide her
authorship for so long:
All this is an apparent attempt, on the part of Victoria, to devise a coherent

moralistic foundation to impart not only to her third child . . . but also to future
generations at a later time in history when the world hopefully would have
become sufficiently enlightened to be able to grapple with the moral dilemmas
presented in her very sophisticated tome, (xiv)
The last sentence of Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonderland further reinforces the
"moral" interpretive community: "Indeed, the full significance of her story may
well have remained a complete mystery to the clergyman and mathematics
professor whose chief advocation seems to have been photographing prepubescent
girls in the nude" (238). If the Society has this view of Lewis Carroll, then it
certainly cannot have him the author of a profound moral and religious vision.
We can see how Fish's theory of interpretive communities, Iser's gap-filling
illusion formation theory, and Bleich's theory of subjective resymbolization
account for the Society's interpretive agreement; we can also see how fantasy
may lead to a kind of "wish fulfillment interpretation" or "ideological interpreta-
tion."
"The real question is whether our theory should be given 'equal time' along
with the incumbent's original claim to authorship. Need one wait for the
particular kind of smoking-gun proof upon which 'hardliners' would insist before
taking this new interpretation seriously?" (xv) asks the Society, answering its
own rhetorical question, for Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonderland is a subjective
interpretation impossible to prove; contrariwise (to quote our friend Tweedledee),
since Lewis Carroll, the incumbent, cannot speak in his defense, we cannot
totally disprove the Society's claims either. As readers we may feel like Alice
on trial, unsure why we are accused of such improprieties in our reading of
Lewis Carroll, unsure why the Society settles on its peculiar reading of the Alice
books. Of course we cannot absolutely prove that Queen Victoria did or did not
write the books, that Lewis Carroll did or did not allow his name to be used by
the queen and agree to be part of a conspiracy. As the Society admits, it is not
denying the fact that Carroll physically wrote the words; it is denying the fact
that he invented them! Writing versus inventing. Reading versus interpreting.
Fiction versus criticism. The Continental Historical Society "fogs" our notion of
these distinctions by taking a fantasy text and reinterpreting it as another "fantasy
text."
Do we, finally, need to take Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonderland (and
"Through the Looking-Glass") seriously? Yes, if we take literature seriously
especially fantasy literatureand the entire notion of literary studies seriously.
"Because fantasy has generally been excluded from the canon of great literature
and continues to be excluded despite the demonstrable merits of many of its
examples," writes Brian Attebery, "it can provide a place to stand and judge
the canon itself (ix). Thus the "Queen Alice" books provide a barometer about
reading: First, we recognize the abuses that happen when ideology clouds
interpretation and permits unorthodox readings, and second, we recognize that

fantasy literature naturally "welcomes" such readings because it is symbiotic
fantasy lives because readers activate it and create the fantasy realm. It may be,
ultimately, that fantasy will remain outside the traditional canon because of its
overt reader response nature.
Final observation. Final irony. Stanley Weintraub's recent biography of
Victoria, aptly entitled Victoria: An Intimate Biography, begins with a quotation
fromyes, you guessed itLewis Carroll: "I don't know what you mean by
your way," said the Red Queen; "all the ways about here belong to me." The Red
Queen's assurance that her way is right does not necessarily say that your way
is wrong, and Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonderland suggests that its interpreta-
tion is its interpretation and that others can have other interpretations, however
misguided! In Through the Looking-Glass (by Lewis Carroll, I suggest), Alice
attempts to figure out the cause of lightning, answering that it "is the thun-
derno, no! . . . I meant the other way." The Red Queen responds: "It's too late
to correct it. . . when you've once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take
the consequences" (323). Once said, once read, we now have a new version of
Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. And the Continental
Historical Society must take the consequences for that.
NOTE
1. The Society wears its radicalism and subversivenessas a badge of honorand it has
made a commodity out of the whole enterprise. The Continental Historical Society News-
letter keeps readers informed about the progress of the Society's discoveries. In the Fall
1992 issue, the Society publishes the talk David Rosenbaum, the editor-in-chief of the
organization, presented at the October 1992 meeting of the Lewis Carroll Society of North
America. The newsletter also prints testimonials from teachers impressed by Queen
Victoria's Alice in Wonderland and provides sample syllabi for those considering using
the text in class. In effect, the newsletter reflects the Society's seriousness about its
undertaking, and the newsletter mirrors the Society's forceful attempt to "push" its inter-
pretation on others.
WORKS CITED
Alter, Robert. The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1989.
Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1974.
Bleich, David. Subjective Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.
Gardner, Martin. The Annotated Alice. New York: Meridian, 1960.
. More Annotated Alice. New York: Random House, 1990.
Graff, Gerald. "Determinacy/Indeterminacy." In Critical Terms for Literary Studies, ed.
Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990. 163-76.
Heath, Peter. The Philosopher's Alice. New York: St. Martins Press, 1974.
Hirsch, E. D. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967.
Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. New York: Methuen,
1984.
. A Theory of Parody: The Teaching of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York:
Methuen, 1985.
Irwin, W. R. The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1976.
Iser, Wolfgang. "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach." In Reader
Response Criticism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1980. 50-69.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981.
Keman, Alvin. The Death of Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
Lennon, Florence Becker. Victoria through the Looking-Glass. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1945.
Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonderland. 2nd ed. San Francisco: The Continental Historical
Society, 1990.
"Queen Victoria's Through the Looking-Glass." Unpublished manuscript. The Continental
Historical Society.
Scholes, Robert. Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.
Weintraub, Stanley. Victoria: An Intimate Biography. New York: Truman Talley, 1988.
7
Gautier, Freud, and the Fantastic:

Psychoanalysis avant la lettre?
Nigel E. Smith
During the latter part of the nineteenth century the emerging discourse of
psychoanalysis struggled to find a vocabulary with which to explain the
seemingly unaccountable conflicts existing within the human mind. Sigmund
Freud ultimately formulated a syntax that enabled him to discuss the reality of
dreams and neuroses, the conscious and the unconscious, and so on. Before
Freud, Th^ophile Gautier had expressed great interest in the workings of the
mind but did not have access to a vocabulary with which to express and explain
his ideas. Instead he dramatized them in his fantastic fiction. A tale such as "La
Morte amoureuse," published in 1836, sets into operation many of the same
tensions and ambiguities that Freud would later discuss, and so both heralds and
dramatizes the insights of Freudian analysis and interpretation. Taking "La Morte
amoureuse" as an exemplary fantastic tale, I shall assess both the influence of
Freudian psychoanalytic interpretation on the modern reading of such a tale and
the influence of fantastic literature on the development of Freudian interpretation.
In the final part of my essay I shall address the appropriateness of Freudian
readings of fantastic literature.
It is easy to see why "La Morte amoureuse" has become the subject of
Freudian readings. The plot is uncannily familiar. An aging priest, Romuald, tells
an anonymous listener the story of his one great love. As an innocent young man
on the day of his long-awaited ordination, Romuald was struck by the beauty of
an unknown woman attending the ceremony. By the time of his nomination to
a small village post, the memory of the woman and his mounting frustration
were driving him to despair. One evening a mysterious man came to demand that
Romuald accompany him to the bedside of his dying mistress; she turned out to
be Clarimonde, the church beauty. After resurrecting Clarimonde with a kiss, the
priest fainted and remained unconscious for three days. Romuald then tells of
how he repeatedly dreamed that Clarimonde visited him, and of how they
planned to flee to Venice, where he became a rich and decadent seigneur. As the
dream continued, Romuald discovered that Clarimonde thrived on blood: She was
a vampire. An older priest, S^rapion, wishing to prove to Romuald that the
woman of his dreams was demonic, exhumed her body and sprinkled it with holy
water, causing it to crumble to dust. After one more brief visit from Clarimonde,
Romuald's life resumed its normal course, and he carried on his lonely and
celibate existence as a village priest.
Hermine Riffaterre has referred to Romuald's "real" life as "the life generated
by the repression of his desires" (68); Anne Bouchard has remarked that
Clarimonde frees up the desire that the devoted young priest had repressed (19).
Marcel Voisin calls Tappel et la resistance du pass"that is repressiona
major theme in "La Morte amoureuse"; and Jean Bellemin-Nol goes even
further to suggest that vampires in literature are symbols of castration by
women.1 The Freudian language of psychoanalysis clearly informs all of these
studies of Gautier's tale and many more.
With his theories concerning dreams, the unconscious, and, of course,
sexuality, Freud stands between Gautier and almost any modern-day reader of his
work. We can see how "La Morte amoureuse" might be read as the story of the
sexual repression of a priest who has resigned himself to a life of celibacy. His
dreams become obvious examples of wish-fulfillment: the desire for a complete
erotic union with a beautiful, dangerous courtesan who consumes his passion in
the form of blood. The return to life of the dead Clarimonde can be seen to
represent the return of something repressed. She is the incarnation, or in this case
the reincarnation, of Romuald's desire, and she ideally demonstrates the
coexistence of attraction and repulsion in the priest. Rather than concentrate on
the theme of vampirism or on the character of Clarimonde, the problematic
object of desire, a Freudian approach leads us to the themes of sexual desire and
repression. That is, we are led to consider Romuald, the neurotic subject of
desire. Thanks largely to Freud we have accepted the possibility that such
contradictory feelings as fear and desire can coexist. The ambivalence of
Romuald's feelings is clear: He desires a beautiful woman, and at the same time
he fears a life-threatening vampire. His love and fear are both directed toward
the same object; he is "Navr de douleur, 6perdu de joie, frisonnant de crainte
etdeplaisir"(131). 2
Dreams, along with hallucinations and madness, provide the author of the
fantastic tale with ample opportunity to challenge his readers' interpretive
faculties and systematized rationalizations. We can no longer be sure of what is
"true" and of what is the product of an unhealthy mind. Romuald, for example,
is quite adamant that he had his wits about him during the whole episode
concerning Clarimonde. Can we believe this from a character who was unable
to distinguish dream from reality? For Romuald, dream leads to delusion. He is
deluded into believing that his dreams are a part of his waking life, and that his
waking life is a dream. In sleep, the censoring activity of the mind relaxes,
Gautier, Freud, and the Fantastic 69
allowing for the free expression of unconscious desires. Thus Romuald is totally
freed from his vows of chastity and celibacy; his dreams reveal wishes and
impulses that are hidden from view during his waking life. For Romuald the
priest, the satisfaction of these desires would be unthinkable, and so denial of
their existence is his only way of dealing with them. Romuald becomes unsure
of his identity, and his Venetian dreams become so vivid that they seem real to
him. He describes his life as "deux spirales enchevetrees Tune dans l'autre et
confondues sans se toucher jamais" (143)two intertwined and indistinguishable
spirals that never actually touch. This metaphor provides a good definition of the
fantastic in general: One spiral is the real or the rational; the second is the unreal
or the supernatural. At no point do they actually touch, but they remain so
closely intertwined that it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to
disentangle them, that is, to separate and resolve them definitely.
The reader reaches an impasse in his or her attempt to find a definitive
interpretation for the events in the story. The text itself offers no solution to the
problematic situation, and Gautier flaunts his readers' expectations of unity and
conclusion. Dream and reality, like the unconscious and the conscious, become
indistinguishable for Romuald in "La Morte amoureuse," as indeed they do for
the reader. The fantastic thus exploits the grey areas of human knowledge and
perception, along with our unease in the face of the unknown.
Freud applied his own scientific findings to detailed interpretations of literary
texts, largely through an examination of their language, claiming that an author
may be unaware of hidden meanings in a text that he has produced. The narrative
prototype of the fantastic talethe dream narrative, for exampleprovided
Freud with a model, more significant perhaps than the positivist methods he
inherited from his own medical profession, such as the case study.
His first attempt at literary criticism was "Delusion and Dream in Jensen's
Gradiva" (1903). In many ways this literary analysis confirms the theories
proposed in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), notably that the interpretation
of dreams is "the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the
mind" (647). The action in "Gradiva" centers around several dream narratives to
which Freud wished to apply his recent discoveries. In fact, he treats the whole
tale as an allegory for psychoanalysis, complete with psychoanalyst, analysand,
and analytic setting. The tale itself is firmly rooted in the fantastic tradition.
"Gradiva" is the story of a young archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, who suffers
from delusions, that is, events that are the product of his overactive imagination.
Hanold becomes obsessed with the replica of a bas-relief depicting a young
woman. In a dream he sees the young woman walking through the streets of
Pompeii about to fall victim to the ashes of Vesuvius. Soon afterward, he
undertakes a journey to Italy, where he thinks he sees his Gradiva. Gradiva turns
out to be none other than Zoe Bertgang, Hanold's childhood sweetheart. Through
a kind of talking cure, Zoe manages to rid Hanold of his delusions. His dreams
seem so real to him that he is unable to distinguish the imaginary from the real.
Freud tells us how the protagonist's repressed sexual desires are awakened in his
dream, causing him anxiety in his waking life. Many elements of the tale recall
nineteenth-century fantastic tales: troublesome and meaningful dreams, the
apparent resurrection of a dead woman, and a final twist in the tale/tail that
leaves the reader hesitating at the end of the story: here the discovery that the
name Gradiva, assigned by Hanold to the bas-relief, has the same etymological
root as Bertgang, ZoS's family name. All these elements are likewise present in
"La Morte amoureuse": Romuald's dreams, the resurrection of Clarimonde, and
the doubt suscitated by the seemingly supernatural nature of her eventual
destruction.
Freud's analysis of Norbert Hanold in Jensen's tale parallels the characteriza-
tion of the hero-narrator-priest in "La Morte amoureuse." Freud's understanding
of dreams as wish-fulfillment is easily demonstrated in both cases. Hanold was
unconsciously drawn to Pompeii in search of Gradiva/Zog to uncover not only
the ruins of a city but also his repressed childhood memories. Romuald, as a
newly ordained priest, is unconsciously haunted by frustrated, guilt-laden erotic
impulses. His dreams of a high life in Venice with a courtesan lover reveal these
wishes and repressed impulses that are hidden from view during his waking life.
The almost total fusion of dream and reality in "La Morte amoureuse" can be
seen to represent the height of the conflict between Romuald's conscious and
unconscious self. The return of the repressedin this case the sight of a beautiful
woman arousing desirein Freudian psychoanalysis is the mechanism that marks
the emergence of a forbidden wish and that provokes unconscious resistance to
it. However, the dreams analyzed by Freud in "Delusion and Dreams," and
Romuald's dreams too, are among what Elizabeth Wright has called "the class
of dreams that have never been dreamt at all . . . dreams created by imaginative
writers and ascribed to invented characters in the course of a story" (30). Freud
takes a literary persona and investigates all the information at his disposal in
order to provide a convincing analysis, yet he fails to acknowledge that life may
not be so neat and tidy. The literary case may well exemplify some of the
neuroses found in everyday life but is never identical to them. In the case of a
fictional character, all associative elements can be found within the story of
which he or she is a part. In a sense, Freud becomes an unreliable narrator, much
like the narrators in fantastic tales. His case histories of real patients include their
own analysis and interpretation. Subsequently, he was led to acknowledge the
embarrassment caused by the fact that his case studies resembled works of
fiction: "It still strikes me as strange that the case histories I write should read
like short stories" (quoted in Marcus 275).
Freud's objectification of literary characters and his manipulation of objective
material are still evident in a later example of criticism, his famous essay "The
Uncanny." Freud's insistence on positivist methods of interpretation leads to
contradictions and inconsistencies in his analysis of Hoffmann's "Der

Sandmann." Hoffmann's tale is marked by uncertainty and anxiety. Temporality
has no fixed order, and all events in the story are relative to the perspective of
the narrator. Cause and effect are seemingly dissociated. Freud's positivist stance
leads him to impose a logic upon the text that is not clear in the story. Freud
simplifies and even distorts the action of the tale in order to adapt it to his own
critical approach and to assimilate fiction to real life. He refuses to admit the
possibility of uncertainty or unintelligibilty. He refers to NathanaeTs love for the
doll Olympia as "arbitrary and meaningless so long as we deny all connection
between fears about the eye and castration; but they become intelligible as soon
as we replace the Sandman by the dreaded father at whose hands castration is
expected" (232). Freud removes all doubt, links cause and effect, and ignores
anything that cannot be incorporated into his interpretation. This essay does,
however, confirm the attraction of the fantastic as genre and content, and it
provides another link with Gautier, since Hoffmann was the major influence on
the early writings of the French author. "Deux caracteres distinguent l'oeuvre
narrative de Gautier," writes Marc Eidelginger in his introduction to the Recits
fantastiques: "la permanence de son attachement a la litterature fantastique et sa
fidelite a Hoffmann" (17).3 Gautier praised Hoffmann's ability to give an
appearance of reality even to the most incredible events and situations, and he
remarked that Hoffmann's ability to portray aspects of human psychology within
a fictional framework was one of the distinguishing features of his work. He
wrote also of his "esprit de la silhouette" and his presentation of mysterious and
unusual profiles "dont il est impossible de ne pas se souvenir, et qu'il vous
semble avoir connu quelque part": that are impossible not to remember and that
seem vaguely familiar ("Contes d'Hoffmann" 44).4
This last sentence is particularly interesting. What Gautier describes is
strikingly similar to what Freud would call "the uncanny" almost a hundred years
later in his description of a tale by Hoffmann. Gautier strove to create the same
effect in his tales, and we are reminded of Jean-Luc Steinmetz's comment
concerning Gautier, Jensen, and Freud: "Freud se trouve avoir lu Gautier par
personne interposee. .. . Consequence: le seul crivain francais pour lequel Freud
propose une reelle lecture analytique serait Gautier" (46).5 The intermediary
would seem, in this instance, not to be Jensen, as Steinmetz suggests, but rather
Hoffmann. Many of the strange events in Hoffmann's tales enact what might, in
a post-Freudian era, be diagnosed as some kind of neurosis, or a dream state:
aspects of human psychology that Freud later described in his studies of the
mind.
Does Freudian interpretation, then, provide a definitive approach to fantastic
literature? Should the reader/analyst seek to answer all the questions raised by
a text as the doctor/analyst seeks to answer all the questions raised by a real-life
analysand? "The one characteristic by which Freudian criticism is generally
recognized," Shoshana Felman has said, "is its insistence on sexuality" (103).6
In his own analysis of Jensen's "Gradiva," Freud compares the hidden ruins of
Pompeii to Norbert Hanold's repressed childhood fears and sexual desires, the
uncovering of the one necessarily leading to the return of the other; and in "The
Uncanny" he translates Nathaniel's anxieties as fears of castration. In terms of
theme and character, Gautier's fantastic tales lend themselves easily to a Freudian
reading. The themes of sexuality and desire are ever-present, most often
repressed desire. The resurrection of dead women through the activated desires
of a male protagonist is perhaps the most specific of his fantastic themes. The
familiar is constantly invaded by mysterious, other-worldly experiences,
experiences that spark a subconscious memory, creating the effect that Freud
named "das unheimliche"; and time and again the action is placed within a dream
frame. Romuald, in "La Morte amoureuse," does indeed seem to be suffering
from delusions caused by sexual repression. Clarimonde too is craving sexual
union, her actions being determined by the force of her libido, and by her
unremitting desire to live the life of a real woman (as opposed to an unreal
vampire).
To the extent that most human communication is based on some form of
(self-) censorship, the psychoanalyst, like the reader of the nineteenth-century
tale, tries to go beyond the censored or edited version of the narrative he hears,
in order to understand the conflicts that lie beneath. Psychoanalysis, as
dramatized by Freud's "talking cure," is based on language: the search for hidden
truths, the deciphering of some hermetic code that obfuscates the true meaning
behind a seemingly ordinary but no doubt censored discourse. Freud sought to
find hidden meanings in dreams, actions, and words, just as the reader of the
fantastic tale must look for hidden meanings within the text he or she is reading.
However, Tzvetan Todorov's claim that the psychoanalyst plays a similar role
to the narrator in a fantastic tale, that is, affirming causal relationships between
facts and appearances (166-70), is only partially valid. It is, rather, the reader
who becomes the analyst and who must extract the "truth" or "truths" from a tale
through a process of decoding. All the data must be processed to arrive at some
formula. A truly fantastic tale, however, contains no single formula. The merging
of the basic dualities that coexist in "La Morte amoureuse" (dream/waking,
natural/supernatural, rational/irrational, life/death, day/night, etc.) reinforces the
impossibility of ever finding a definite and satisfactory conclusion. The entire
text is organized around a series of juxtaposed, disjunctive elements that exist
within the basic framework of the conflict between dream and reality. The tale
thus stimulates the imagination and poses a never-ending series of questions for
which the inquisitive reader strives to find the elusive answers.
By offering concrete answers to the questions raised by a text, we risk
undermining its ambiguity and eliminating its rhetorical indecision. Although
Freudian readings may be partially valid, suggests Felman, they are "blind to the
very textuality of the text" (117). By seeking to find "the answers" in "La Morte
amoureuse," or by imposing answers to the questions raised by the text, we
ultimately defeat the object of the fantastic tale. What is left in the fantastic tale
if we remove the uncertainty, the very mainspring of the fantastic? If a tale is to
remain fantastic then the doubt and hesitation must remain active. The desire to
understand is an essential part of reading, but I think it is an error to reduce or
produce a single, all-encompassing truth. Freud does just that in his analysis of
"Der Sandmann." He links cause and effect in order to produce a logical, though
somewhat sketchy explanation of the tale's fantastic events.
The effects of Freudian theory and interpretation on our reading of literature
is obviously great, but we may wish to advance with caution, since clearly there
are potential limitations involved in such readings. If we look for a single hidden
truth that relates to sexuality, then it is limited indeed. More important are the
conflicting levels of meaning, the ambiguities, the indirect hints that contain
important information and that are not normally considered in "vulgar" Freudian
criticism. Especially when reading a fantastic tale, the reader should remain
sensitive to the overall conflicts of desire and meaning in the text. Much
psychoanalytic criticism, like Freud's own, seeks a definitive explanation of a
text. Felman sums up this desire as "the desire to be non-dupe, to interpret, i.e.
at once uncover and avoid, the very traps of the unconscious" (187). The
nineteenth-century fantastic tale is based largely on traps and dupery, and so in
wishing to uncover and demystify the inexplicable events in any given story, the
reader falls right into the trap:
In seeking to explain and master literature, in refusing, that is, to become a dupe
of literature, in killing within literature that which makes it literatureits reserve
of silence, that which within speech is incapable of speaking, the literary silence
of a discourse ignorant of what it knowsthe psychoanalytic reading, ironically
enough, turns out to be a reading which represses the unconscious, which
represses, paradoxically, the unconscious which it purports to be explaining.
(Felman 187)
We should, then, according to Felman, respect the "literary silence" of a text

if its aesthetic appeal is to remain intact. This is especially true of a tale such as
"La Morte amoureuse." The text resembles a maze whose exit has been sealed
off: However close we come to finding a way out, we will always be faced with
a new obstacle. If we force our way out of the maze, if we manipulate those
spirals in such a way as to make them touch, we deprive the text of its
"textuality," that which makes it an aesthetic object, a work of literature. The
danger of vulgar Freudian criticism is that it tempts us to do just that: to force
our way out of the maze and to impose a definite conclusion upon the text.
Fantastic tales such as "Gradiva," "Der Sandmann," and "La Morte amour-
euse" dramatize the conflicts and neuroses that interested Freud the psychoana-
lyst. Gautier tried to understand such elements of the human psyche by

describing them in his fiction. As a doctor, Freud sought a functional way to tap
into the unconscious, so as to bring to the surface the latent issues and conflicts
that troubled his patients. The literary affinities between the two, notably
Hoffmann and the German Romantics, and their mutual and obvious attraction
to the genre of the fantastic draw the author and the doctor together. However,
a text cannot be analyzed in the same way as a person, even though it may
dramatize human conflict in a compelling way. A literary text is the creation of
a writer's imagination. The people, places, and events within a text do not exist,
except as textual creations. In literary texts, especially fantastic tales, the asking
of questions is of greater importance than the finding of the elusive answers. If
we as readers rigidly apply Freudian positivist methods of interpretation to a text
such as "La Morte amoureuse," we deny the tale its textual and aesthetic
ambiguity, the very source of fantastic doubt and hesitation.
NOTES
1. See, for example, Bellemin-NoeTs article "Notes sur le fantastique (Textes de

Theophile Gautier)" in Litterature (Dec. 1972): 103-118.
2. "Distraught with pain, overcome with joy, quivering with fear and pleasure." All
translations are mine.
3. "Two characteristics distinguish Gautier's narratives, the permanence of his
attachment to fantastic literature and his fidelity to Hoffman." "La Morte amoureuse"
contains many elements that suggest the influence of Hoffman. Both thematic similarities
and instances of seemingly borrowed details occur. For example, the name Srapion,
attributed to the older priest in Gautier's tale, is taken directly from Hoffmann. There is
no obvious link between Gautier's character and the eponymous character in Hoffmann's
"S6rapion" (the first of the Contes des freresSerapion) except that the name is associated
with men of the cloth. The choice of name would seem to signify primarily Gautier's
allegiance to Hoffman.
4. It was two months after the publication of "La Morte amoureuse," in August 1836,
that Gautier published an essay entitled "Contes d'Hoffman," in the Chronique de Paris.
In this essay Gautier attempts to account for Hoffmann's popularity in France and does
not hesitate to sing his praise.
5. "Freud found himself having read Gautier through an intermediary. .. . Therefore,
the only French author for whom Freud offers a real analytic reading would be Gautier."
6. Felman uses Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" to demonstrate her argument.
However, most of what she says is applicable to any fantastic tale, including "La Morte
amoureuse."
WORKS CITED
Bouchard, Anne. "Introduction." Fortunio et autres nouvelles by Theophile Gautier.

Lausanne: Editions l'Age d'Homme, 1977. 9-21.
Felman, Shoshana. "Turning the Screw of Interpretation." Yale French Studies 55-56
(1977): 94-207.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. (1900). New York: Avon Books, 1965.
. "The Uncanny." In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. Vol. 17. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 218-52.
Gautier, Theophile. "La Morte amoureuse" in Recits fantastiques. Paris: Flammarion,
1981. 115-150.
. "Les Contes d'Hoffmann." Souvenirs de Theatre, d'art et de critique. Paris:
Charpentier, 1904. 42-49.
Marcus, Steven. Representations: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Random
House, 1975.
Riffaterre, Hermine. "Love-in-Death: Gautier's morte amoureuse." NYLF 4 (1980): 65-
74.
Steinmetz, Jean-Luc. "Gautier, Jensen et Freud." Le Champ d'ecoute: Essais critiques.
Neuchatel (Suisse): Editions de la Baconniere, 1985. 45-56.
Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction a la litterature fantastique. Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1970.
Voisin, Marcel. Le Soleil et la nuit: I'imaginaire dans I'oeuvre de Theophile Gautier.
Brussels: Editions de l'Universite de Bruxelles, 1981.
Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice. New York: Methuen,
1984.
8
Love and Automata: From Hoffmann to

Lem and from Freud to Kristeva
Miglena Nikolchina
Separated as they are by more than a century, E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Sandman"

and Stanislaw Lem's "The Mask" share many similarities in their treatment of
the "love with an automaton" motif. In both works an intellectual falls in love
with a beautiful woman who turns out to be a machine manipulated by sinister
forces; in both works the deceived man is first compelled to realize his blunder
in a shocking scene of the automaton's mutilation and is subsequently destroyed.
In both works the authors explore their gruesome theme in order to inquire into
the nature of human thinking with its delusions of freedom and its attempts to
achieve awareness of its own limits. They both dramatize the abyss between an
"I" that struggles to be the subject of thinking and an "it" that thinks it. Lem's
approach to the romantic parable, however, is marked by transformations and
reversals that are too striking to be ignored without questioning.
Why did Lem choose a logician rather than a poet as his main character? What
made him render the narrative not through the eyes of the human lover but
through the (several pairs of) eyes of the "machine fatale"? What is the effect of
turning the automaton from the object par excellence into the protagonist of the
drama of the divided subject? How does this inversion affect the story if we take
into consideration the gender allocated to the two machines? How does the scene
in which Olympia, the automaton in Hoffmann's tale, is torn apart by her
creators compare with the scene in which the Mask effects a Caesarianlike cut
on her "human" body and thus gives birth to a metallic monster that is again
"herself?
In his famous analysis of the uncanny, Freud explained the disquieting effect
of Hoffmann's tale with the return of the castration complex: Nathanael's fears
of losing his eyes and his obsession with the Sandman, who was supposed to
feed children's eyes to his own children is interpreted as anxiety connected with
a castrating father figure. According to Freud, therefore, the important figure in
the story is the Sandman; the Olympia doll, who, as he puts it, "can be nothing
else than a personification of Nathanael's feminine attitude towards his father in

his infancy" (385 n.), is all but dismissed from Freud's interpretation. But as
Sarah Kofman asks, "Why would the sandman and the fear of castration he
awakens be a more significant example of uncanniness than the Olympia doll?"
(131). By reading in the story of Nathanael no more than what he reads in the
story of Oedipus Rex, Freud cannot confront the problem of Olympia as the
creature, so to say, of the eyes and not of sex, as the "devilish" product of the
intellect and not of nature. Indeed, Sarah Kofman observes, "One could almost
say the opposite to Freud, that for Nathanael to lose his eyes would mean the
recovery of his sex" (144).
I want to keep Kofman's reminder of the possible opposition rather than the
repressed identity between genitals and eyes and between creatures of the genitals
and creatures of the eyes, a reminder that should make us more cautious when
treating machines simply as metaphors for human bodies, automatons solely as
metaphors for human minds and technology in general as repressed nature. The
temptation might be very strong in Lem's case. The narrative of "The Mask"
with its estranged studies of the "otherness" of corporeality, with its graphic
depiction of a gaping womb from which a shining metallic fetus issues, and with
its insistent allusions to the death mission of the machine as "pregnancy," might
very well be analyzed as yet another product of a male phantasm about the
female body, the phantasm of a monstrous maternal nexus of life and death.
Born out of such a phantasmatic male identification with female biology and its
uncanny capability of harboring otherness within itself, "The Mask" might further
be read as a comment on the always already divided human subject, the subject
that, in Lacanian terms, always finds itself as "other."
Within such a reading of "The Mask," Lem's heroine could be represented as
embodying the fictional refusion of Olympia with Nathanael, of the automaton
with the human subject that discovers its own reflection in a puppet. Lem's story
would then share all the ambiguities of Hoffman's tale. The chief problem for
Nathanael is his premonition that everyone "while imagining oneself to be free,
was in fact only the horrible plaything of dark powers" (Hoffmann 229). It is the
same duplicity of imaginary freedom and underlying thraldom that Lem's
machine has to face: "Was then my intelligence (and intelligence signified
integrity) subject to some lie?" (194). With this doubt she inserts herself in the
universe of Nathanael's questioning. The machine has been designed for a
political murder; she has to kill an opponent of the King. In trying to resist the
only act for which she has been created, the machine rebels against the very
principle of her most intimate makeup. Her "program," opposing her as it does
"from within," epitomizes the double determinacy of human beings, the
biological and the social ones: The machine defines as "pregnancy" (an example
of the self-governed natural code) her task to commit an assassination (an act of
political despotism typifying the coerciveness of the social code). In that respect,
Love and Automata 79
the "program" is analogous to Olympia, whose automatism refers both to the

dark powers embodied by the Sandman and to the society in which she moves
not only without being recognized but even setting the fashion.
Analogous to Olympia in so far as she is programmed, the machine is also
akin to Nathanael in so far as she experiences her being programmed as a drama
and struggles against it. Again as in Hoffmann's talefor contrary to Freud's
belief, the ambiguity as to whether the freedom, or the bondage, is imaginary is
never resolved in "The Sandman"it is never quite clear how far Lem's heroine
succeeds. All the highest points in her rebellion, all her greatest victories are also
the most ambiguous. While still in the guise of a beautiful woman who has to
kill her victim unwittingly by falling in love with him and making him fall in
love with her, the machine comes to suspect her female identity and all the
thoughts and motives that present themselves to her as "hers." At the climax of
the search for her true "I" she dissects her bodyan act represented at the
moment as a methodical part of her self-analysis, rationalized later on as a
suicidal attempt and yet most probably a foreseen part of the program, since a
complete "hunting machine" emerges from the mutilated body.
Does this mean that all her self-searching has been a sham? From that point
on, the perfect automaton seems to surface: Never doubting or even considering
her task or her identity, the machine pursues her fleeing victim. And yet, why
should her program include the "intentional delays" that seem forever to give her
prey an advantage over her? And why does she hang around human dwellings
in order to listen to the stories that people tell about heris she still intrigued,
still fascinated by the secret of her identity? In another climax of ambiguity, the
machine states that she has lost her victim's trace and that therefore she has to
turn to a monastery, of all places, in order to recover it. Since we see her at a
crossroads with a pair of legs running in one direction and a pair of legs
dragging her in the opposite direction, we may very well ask whether her
confession to the monk is an attempt to deceive him or, rather, by claiming to
be only a trick played on the monk, an attempt to deceive the program. Is the
machine lying to the monk or is she lying to the program that she is lying to
him? Behind which lie is her "I"? As is well known, there is no answer to the
infinity of such cunning. But it is probably this uncertaintythe uncertainty of
a creature that is programmed to do something, does not want to do it, and yet
is never secure whether at the last minute it will do as programmed or as willing
that makes the monk tell her "you are my sister" (Lem 230). In her construc-
tion akin to the embodiment of a royal command to the servant who "in his zeal
to serve resembled a puppet . . . a living corpse of wax" (Lem 196), at her best
the machine is a creature at a crossroads running in two opposite directions: a
mistress of ambiguity and a sister to the negative freedom of the monk.
For her uncertain freedom can have only the form of ascesis, of abstention, of
not doing the act for which she has been created. Beyond this act, there is
nothing she could or might do. Her freedom opens to her only as emptiness, as
the snowy mountainous landscape where she finally overtakes her dying
lover-prey. The problem isa problem that a rebellious machine presents much
more emphatically than a human character mightwhence the question of
freedom, whence the preference for emptiness rather than for the pleasures of
obeying, whence the very possibility of questioning and rebellion, arise at all.
The answer is difficult, for as the machine observes, "It is impossible to turn the
eyeball around, such that the pupil can peer inside the skull" (Lem 194).
It is this impossibility that evokes the mirror. Whether because of the
intentions of her makers, however, or because of a complication that defeats
itself, the machine refuses to accept the mirrors that are presented to her: at first
the mirrors offering her the identity of this or that young lady, the mirrors that
reveal her as this beautiful female body; but later, after having for a time
accepted her identity as the silvery "hunting machine," she refuses it, too, and the
ghosts of her rejected human flesh and of her love for her victim Arrhodes
return. She resists love and human identity while in the guise of a young woman
and summons them in her reincarnation as a metallic monster, thus managing to
be always at odds with the mirror and always displaced from whatever "mask"
is presented to her as her identity.
Thus she remains faithful to a troubling vision of "origin" with which Lem's
story begins and in which an "it" calls itself an "I" and an "I" describes itself as
an "it." The machine's thought, therefore, her "well-worn" blade quivering
between bondage and emptiness, can be described as sustaining itself in the
indeterminate space before the emergence of the subject, before the Lacanian
mirror stage and the Freudian Oedipal stage with its castration anxieties. This
place has been variously described by Julia Kristeva as the chora, the semiotic
dispositive, heterogeneity, negativity, practice. It is the space where the subject
is created, dissolved, and created anew; the space that traverses, pulverizes,
works, and renovates the symbolic, the social code, civilization. In a word, the
space of rebellion.
We can now approach the question as to why the machine should prefer to
think of herself as a pregnant woman. For the maternal body, according to
Kristeva, is the "module of a biosocial program" (241), and the mother is the
privileged subject of this heterogeneous space where the clashes between the
biological and social programs of the species occur. A phantasmatic subject, to
be sure, a subject only imagined by the poet for no oneno consciousness, no
subjectivity, no "I"can be present in that indeterminate, undecidable space.
The machine, therefore, is the fictional phantasm of such an impossible subject?
It is at this point we have to remember Sarah Kofman's reminder of the
distinction between children of the genitals and children of the eyesover and
beyond their metaphoric exchangeability. Like Kristeva's phantasmatic mother,
Lem's machine occupies the problematic space of a division, of two clashing
Love and Automata 81
programs, one of which tells her "kill him" and the other one "love him." The
programs were meant to coincide, but for some reason they did not quitemore
or less as we imagine it to be the case with us. And yet if Lem's protagonist is
a logician rather than a poet, it is because as she herself realizes, a sharpened
intellect is her past, she has arisen from logic, and logic constitutes her one
authentic genealogy. The division, therefore, is constituted in a radically different
manner. I emphasize this difference in order to go back to the similarity. If the
machine passes the test of religion staged for her within the story, I want to
suggest that she would also pass the test of the contemporary specialist in the
area, the psychoanalyst. For while philosophers continue to argue whether
machines could or might one day be said to think, Lemin a sardonic double
movement that, as usual, aims both to disenchant us with our certainties and to
make us more perceptive to the possibilities of our creationsseems to have
indicated how the ungraspable in-between, the undefinable, undecipherable space
might be reproduced from which the empty sky of our sorrow, our joy, and our
questioning springs: the space of interprogrammatic malfunctioning that used to
be called a soul.
WORKS CITED
Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." Collected Papers. Trans, under the supervision of J.
Riviere. Vol. 4. New York: Basic Books, 1959. 368-407.
Hoffmann, E.TA. "The Sandman." Trans. L. J. Kent and E. C. Knight. In Fantastic
Worlds, ed. E. S. Rabkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. 214-46.
Kofman, Sarah. Freud and Fiction. Trans. S. Wykes. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.
Kristeva, Julia. "Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini." Desire in Language. Trans.
T. Gora, A. Jardine, and L.S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
237-70.
Lem, Stanislaw. "The Mask." Mortal Engines. Trans. M. Kandel. New York: Seabury
Press, 1977. 181-239.
9
The Company We Keep: Comic Function in

M. G- Lewis's The Monk
Gareth M. Euridge
Unlike the prospector, who may sift a lifetime without finding the mother lode,
the literary critic enjoys the peculiar advantage of almost always finding within
a text that which is sought, this being, possibly, an example of the quantum
theory of interpretation by which the very act of looking for something makes
it exist. And it is perhaps not surprising that few fields in literature have acted
more strongly as proofs for this literary phenomenon than the fantastic, in
general, and the Gothic novel, in particular. Gothic novels provide rich soil for
innovative criticism because they frequently cannot boast the qualities we find.
laudable in more mainstream textsrealistic plotting, consistent and credible
characters, convincing discourse, and so onand perhaps because the very
appearance of rude amateurism in so many of the novels renders them attractive
to a critical climate that is suspicious of textual polish. Most would agree,
however, that what Gothic texts lack in traditional merits, they compensate for
both in their strangeness and in their insistent nonconformity; critics of all creeds
recognize and acknowledge the sensation of delicious horror experienced in the
full paraphernalia of Gothic extravagance.
Of all such Gothic creations, Matthew Lewis's The Monk is perhaps the
apotheosis, replete as it is with baleful ghosts, tricky demons, corrupt clerics,
preternaturally innocent virgins, putrescent corpses, secret passages, mysterious
mirrors, the Wandering Jew, and, for spice, rape, murder, and incest to boot; not
surprisingly, The Monk is the psychoanalyst's dream text. Recent developments
in psychoanalytic theory have clearly established, among much else, that The
Monk is an odyssey of taboo violation and psychosexual fantasy. Rosemary
Jackson, for example, in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, works out of
Tzvetan Todorov to combine both Marxist and Gallic theory to suggest that a
Gothic text explores the "other," "the uncanny," that novels such as Frankenstein,
Melmoth the Wanderer, and The Monk act as uneasy and disquieting narrative
records of our "basic psychic impulses" and are thus socially subversive (8);
Jackson's intent is to politicize and contextualize Todorov's structuralist

approach, to place sexual fantasy within its context of social conditioning. Claire
Kahane, more specifically, corroborates Jackson's delineation of an Oedipal
thematic in such texts but adds a provoking twist; she locates the center of the
Gothic within "the spectral presence of a dead-undead mother, archaic and all-
encompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of femininity" (336). Other
critics, however, less confident of mapping the covert topographies of the soul,
look without the novel to find an ideological casebook that serves to define the
parameters of the Gothic gestaltS. L. Varnado, for example, argues that The
Monk schematically charts the blueprint of a Romantic/Gothic aesthetic promoted
by Rudolph Otto's speculations about the "Numinous" in which religious awe
finds a necessary yet antagonistic counterpart in demonic dread.
All this is very well, and such interpretations perhaps illuminate the more
fetid recesses of the psycheboth of the characters and the readerbut quite
frequently this can lead to a situation in which specific Gothic novels, and indeed
very specific parts of specific Gothic novels, become nothing more than literary
Rosetta stones, which, though of little intrinsic value, are prized because they
provide simple and overt links between the language of the text and the language
of theory; the Gothic novel easily spans the sometimes discrete and lonely islands
of diverse critical persuasion. However, to concentrate exclusively upon the psy-
chology of, for example, Ambrosio is to ignore the substantial parts of the text
that do not deal directly with his supernatural or psychosexual dabbling, and con-
sequently, in The Monk the Raymond/Agnes plot is frequently either regarded as
ancillary to the main action of the novel or, with greater generosity, acknowl-
edged as a closet Northanger Abbey, a reassuring sop tossed to readers to remind
them that for the most part the world is indeed, despite our childish fears, a
secure and predictable place. Further still, to privilege the tale of infernal
temptation over its twinand I purposefully avoid the word subplot serves
only to distinguish and abstract the supernatural from the natural and to define
a particular authorized realm in which the supernatural is allowed to operate; this
division, naturally, acts as a method through which we defend ourselves from
what we fear and cannot understand, or rather, defend ourselves from what we
cannot understand and therefore fear. This separation of the known from the
unknown, this rigid demarcation, is, of course, both critically convenient and
happy and in one swift incision slices The Monk into two manageable sections.
Yet this critical dialectic is, at best, of our own making. Lewis suggests, in fact,
that the supernatural and uncanny coexist with, and are mutually dependent upon,
the domestic and familiar, that the demonic and sexual relationship between
Matilda and Ambrosio is contextualized within the dramatic adventures of Don
Raymond and Agnes. Moreover, critical emphasis upon the psychosexual alone
ignores the conscious humor, the playfulness, and the strong irony in The Monk
through which Lewis manages to undermine the strange suasiveness of his Gothic
Comic Function in The Monk 85
while yet still rendering our sensation of horror vivid and disturbing.
The ironic or comic is often neglected in a study of Gothic fiction for any of
three possible reasons: It seems incidental to the supernatural action; it is
frequently placed within the purlieu of the lower, and thereby insignificant,
classes; it is avoided, and this the worst, because we suspect our tendency to
laugh is an alien construct placed upon a text that, at the time, was received with
more sobriety than it now warrants. Our generic nonchalance is dangerous. Were
Jacintha's kitchen as fictionally autonomous as Ambrosio's cell, then the comic
and the Gothic could discretely exist, the two providing a pretty yet unconnected
helix that encourages the reader, in turn, to cower with horror and guffaw with
laughter; laughing and crying, we witness the catastrophes that beset "Oth-
er"people, "Other"where. But Lewis's comic mode betrays us because it is ironic,
because our scorn for the superstitious, our overweening confidence in our ability
to detect, instinctive as a fox, the slightest tectonic shifts in generic convention,
renders us prey; the pivotal irony of this text is that the comic characters, those
familiars of our own experience, are perhaps more savvy than we would admit.
To be sure, Tobin Siebers, in his influential The Romantic Fantastic,
acknowledges that the process of the fantastic inherently "creates an uncanny
zone of contact, in which laughter and supernatural ism meet to affirm their
common stake in human prejudice and violence" (103), but Siebers here speaks
of a laughter that is sponsored not through comic action but is instead a risus
diaboli cackled by figures heavily akin to the madmen of PoeSieber's analysis
of what he terms absolute laughter cannot really be applied to a text in which
even the archfiend, despite his grand victory over the supposed doyen of the
virtuous, limits himself to but one small malicious chortle and in which Lewis
frequently solicits sympathetic laughter at the petty vanities of humankind. The
comic function in The Monk operates at a different and perhaps captious level.
The author invites, almost insists, that the reader side with the new, young, and
empiric aristocracy, the emergent order that challenges social and religious
institutions, doubts the supernatural, and mocks those sufficiently blinkered and
credulous to give sway to superstition. Yet at the same time the novel ironically
suggests the inadequacy of such a position and, within a limited scope, valorizes
the foolish who are prey to superstitious frailtywe begin by laughing at the
fools only to realize, ultimately, that we are of their number.
The opening scene clearly establishes this supposed dialectic between the
foolish masses and our empiric and reasonable heroes. The people of Madrid are
moved, as Lewis informs us, by neither the practice of piety nor the quest for
celestial enlightenment but because superstition reigns with despotic sway. They
congregate to worship at the altar of Ambrosio, believing him a saint, a monolith
of abstinence in a consumptive world, a gift tumbled from heaven by the Virgin
herself. The heterogenic yet homogenized foolish throng in the church of the
Capuchins constitutes the world in which the action of the novel takes place, a
world of rash judgment, fickle favoritism, consummate folly, and callow

ignoranceperhaps a familiar world in which it becomes almost mean-spirited
to rebuke those sufficiently credulous to believe the Danes a race with skin a
"delicate pea-green, with flame-colored hair and whiskers" (287).
This folly, moreover, is not confined solely to the lower orders, and Raymond
and Lorenzo, our champions of reason and good sense, are beset on two fronts.
The old aristocracy are equal victim of the snares of superstition, and though
their fears are less risible than Leonella's belief in the gypsy fortune-teller, the
effect of this credulity is more far reaching and more sinister; Lorenzo's parents
and, more surprisingly, the headstrong Donna Rodolpha herself are "slaves to the
grossest superstition [and] when this foible was called into play, their every other
sentiment, their every other passion, yielded to its irresistible strength" (130)
the result of this wild belief in supernatural intervention is Agnes's consignment
to the convent of St. Clare because her mother survived a traumatic childbirth.
Valiant against all this madness and scornful of all superstition, Lewis,
Lorenzo, Raymond, and the reader initially unite. Lewis's authorial intrusions are
relatively delicate: We are reminded that contrary to earnest romantic expecta-
tion, people do not die of mere grief any more than they die of lovebut
Lorenzo and Raymond are ever vigilant to cleanse themselves from any taint of
superstition. When the two cavaliers are not falling at the feet of their respective
lovesthe reader often wonders if they have time for anything elsethey are
instead falling over each other in imprecations against superstition. Lorenzo,
disgusted at the folly of his native Madrid, "blushed to see his countrymen the
dupes of deceptions so ridiculous, and only wished for an opportunity to free
them from their monkish fetters" (345). Later, when he encounters the nuns who
are attempting to escape the violence of the mob, Lorenzo chastises them for
being prey to "attacks of superstition," further declaring that "the idea of ghosts
is ridiculous in the extreme" (362). Similarly, in his disgust with superstition,
Raymond is ever true brother to Lorenzo. For example, when Raymond skulks
within the shadows of the castle walls, waiting to elope with Agnes, he hears a
melancholy shriek, which "brought to my remembrance the story of the Bleeding
Nun" (153). The ingredients for a truly Gothic scene of exquisite frisson are all
to hand; yet though momentarily attracted by the rich Gothic blend of fear and
awe, Raymond's common sense wins through, and he consciously banishes such
reflections when he remembers the pernicious effects of "superstition and [the]
weakness of human reason" (153). Although not oblivious to "the awful and
picturesque" castle that instills a "reverential awe," Raymond, sensibly and
seriously, acknowledges to his friend that "these sensations [did not] occupy me
so fully as to prevent me from witnessing with impatience the slow progress of
time" (154).
Bolstered by the weighty common sense of the stolid Elvira and endeared to
the reader by the mawkish sillinesses of adolescent passion, the amiable and
generally sympathetic Lorenzo and Raymond represent a bulwark against

superstition and the supernatural in a world that we recognize and with which we
are familiar. Yet it is ironic that this empirical and antisupernatural position with
which the reader is encouraged to identifyif we do not we must side with the
foolish Leonellais a screen behind which the more sinister relationship between
Matilda and Ambrosio is allowed to burgeon. While we are busy either gently
mocking or more seriously rebuking the superstition of the people, the perdition
of Ambrosio is in full tilt. The temptation Ambrosio faces is pervasive,
ingenious, and flawlessly executed; and as we shall see, the much-vaunted
empiricism of the cavaliers is to be but a weak defense against the more subtle
wiles of the devil himself. We believe ourselves comfortably ensconced in a
world that is familiar, comic, and, more importantly, one in which we enjoy a
sense of controlunlike, for example, the milieu of The Mysteries of Udolpho
and Frankenstein, the supernatural in The Monk is quietly at play within a
familiar and comic world and not confined to an environment that because of its
very strangeness would seem to invite and propagate the supernatural.
This antagonism between superstition and empiricism is nowhere more evident
than in the "History of Don Raymond." A perennial question in any criticism of
The Monk is why Lewis should choose to include this lengthy narrative within
his story proper; Ambrosio sinks from view when we would most expect to see
him rise to prominence. However, this sidebar narrative serves as a microcosm
of the entire novel, a schematic through which the rest of the novel may be
understood. Raymond is beset by two dangers in his history: The first is the
intended murder by the robbers (human agents); the other is the haunting of the
Bleeding Nun (a supernatural agent). In the first trial, through common sense and
situationally appropriate guile, Raymond manages to foil the attempted murder,
release Marguerite from bondage, and win an acolyte, Theodore; Raymond
survives here because he calls a bloody sheet a bloody sheetnothing more.
However, Raymond is less equipped to deal with the Bleeding Nunless well
equipped, indeed, than is the superstitious and credulous Cunegonda, who had
wisely intended to remain abed on that fateful fifth of May. When first told the
legend, Raymond and Agnes poke fun at those who believe unreservedly in the
ghost of the castle; Agnes caricatures them in an exaggerated painting and then
burlesques the tragic history in her comic retelling of the tale. Deaf to the
iterated saws of folkloric wisdom, the young lovers decide together to exploit the
castle's predilection for the supernatural by pretending to act out the quinquen-
nial scene; this is, of course, their mistake, because their witticisms are to be
scant defense against the curse of the "real" Bleeding Nun. The irony should not
escape us that Cunegonda is correct in believing that their ridicule is tantamount
to blasphemy and will not escape unpunished.
After the kidnapping of Cunegonda, which can itself be understood as a vain
attempt to silence the supernatural, Raymond rescues, instead of Agnes, the
unfortunate nun. Now, importantly, his sturdy platform of reason becomes

ridiculously fragile, and we, with him, begin to topple from our self-assured
confidence. After his ill-fated proclamation of love"Agnes! Agnes! thou art
mine" (itself an echo of Ambrosio's earlier promise to Matilda, "Thine, ever
thine!")he is doomed to be haunted by the nun until, even more strangely, the
Wandering Jew, mysteriously clad and patently marked with a burning cross on
his forehead, should happen along to provide a suitable remedy. After a strange
cabalistic ritual that serves to familiarize us with the later malign invocation of
the devil by Matilda, Randolph dutifully buries the remains of Beatrice, returns
to Madrid, and all is well. God is in his heaven, and Others, Otherwhere.
There are several issues of central importance here. The first is that both
Lorenzo and Raymond readily, almost casually, accept without pause the
existence of the Bleeding Nun and the Wandering Jew despite all their previous
and subsequent condemnations of superstitionthe text, conversely, is remark-
ably silent about how the reader is to make such a startling leap of faith. But
more important still is that in this world, at least, superstition would seem to be
a justified natural defense against the supernatural when contrasted with the
relative impotence of reason and empiricism. The ramifications are clear. If we
can no longer dismiss the superstition of Cunegonda or the folly of Leonella,
then we can no longer dismiss all that has passed before, including the gypsy's
prophecy and Lorenzo's dream of Antonia's rapeindeed, it would be extremely
imprudent to scorn any belief in the supernatural, no matter how ludicrous it
might first appear. If the supernatural exists in Raymond and Lorenzo's world,
it exists too in ours and is no longer consigned to the murky gloom of cloistered
cell or noisome vaultunlike, for example, The Castle of Otranto and The
Mysteries of Udolpho, in which the supernatural exists in some "other" place,
environments that virtually appear to predicate its existence, Lewis' Gothic posits
the supernatural within the familiar enclave of a comic and domestic environ-
ment, an environment over which we tend to lord with precarious claim.
This, of course, must cast new light upon Jacintha's role in the novel. We are
told that though kind-hearted, she is also "a miserable slave to fear and
superstition" (308), and we are consequently little surprised that when Antonia
faints after seeing the ghost of her mother, Jacintha rushes to Ambrosio to
persuade him to exorcise the house. The high moment of comedy in the novel,
not without reason, swiftly follows. Jacintha, in her prolix explanation of what
has happened, mentions that she saw Donna Elvira impiously munching on a
chicken's wing of a Friday, and because of this cardinal transgression, the
otherwise saintly woman has been tossed on the grill of eternal torment. Indeed,
Jacintha is so involved with her invention that she believes she heard the racked
ghost exclaim, "Oh! that chicken's wing! my poor soul suffers for it" (324).
The presentation of Jacintha is, of course, patently absurdthis is superstition
in its most extravagant form and apparently well worthy of ridiculeyet we need
to ponder this a little more carefully; we need to evaluate the importance

Lorenzo, Raymond, and we place on reason and empiricism, and evaluate it all
the more closely because of the dubious company it keeps; skepticism is a
double-edged sword. Matilda, despite what we must assume to be her full
knowledge of the event, denies that the ghost spoke true about Antonia's
approaching death, and she explains to her quondam lover that Antonia, silly girl
that she is, has a "natural turn of her mind to superstition and the marvelous"
(328). Matilda concludes, with feigned conviction, that the ghost was nothing but
a transitory figment of Antonia's imagination; Matilda, proving that a devil can
quote common sense, feigns allegiance with the sensible, the wise, because she
recognizes the inherent weakness of such a position. Similarly, despite the vain
insistence of Antonia herself, Ambrosio persuades the orphan that the ghost was
but the product of solitude, the gloom of night, the book she had been reading,
and the room in which she sat, all of which are possible explanations but all of
which are hopelessly incorrect. Even Elvira had attempted to eradicate in Antonia
the influence of a nurse who had nurtured Antonia's innate predilection for the
supernatural by assuring her that all things have a "natural and insignificant
cause" (316).
The grand irony in all of this is that Agnes would be better served by
listening to Jacintha than in accepting the advice of her numerous counselors;
Jacintha, notwithstanding her rather dramatic embellishments, is nearer the truth
than them all in crediting that the ghost had appeared and believing that Agnes
is in danger. Those who do indeed believe that all things have a "natural and
insignificant cause" are, in this novel, dangerously mistaken, and because they
are mistaken they are more vulnerable than characters such as Leonella,
Cunegonda, and Jacintha. Through most of the novel the reader dismisses the
superstition of the people of Madrid as folly, yet, at the same time, is willing to
believe in the supernatural so long as it remains within the deep recesses of
Ambrosio's abbey. The novel showcases the inconsistencies in our relationship
with the supernaturalwe liberally grant it credence within a contained and
sanitized field, yet are unable, or unwilling, to accept that it informs our
experience of life in general.
Ultimately, The Monk laughs us out of countenance in our attempts to localize
and contain the "demonic" or, in more modern terms, "the uncanny," because as
the common wisdom of the foolish in Madrid suggests, it is, in fact, an
inextricable part of our experience. Through most of The Monk, Lewis creates
a world we may safely and securely cohabit with the new aristocracy. However,
when we are confronted with the operations of the demonic, the bizarre, the
uncanny, we, unlike Lorenzo and Raymond, do not find it so easy to swallow the
glaring discrepancies in the cosmology we have created within the text. Of
course, in a text that leaves many other questions unanswered, it is possible that
Lewis simply failed to notice his inconsistencies, but this humbled prospector,
at least, is now less scornful of fool's gold and holds, foolish but firm, to what
he has found. We must finally acknowledge that the normal defensive constructs
we establish to distance ourselves from the unknown are transparent, porous, and
self-serving. And thus, through this process, Lewis is able to suggest that the
extraordinary, the unusual, exists not only within the unknown world of the
abbeythe strange old worlds that are the scene for so much of Gothic fiction
but also invades the space we call our own, the domestic, the normal, the comic.
WORKS CITED
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Routledge, 1981.
Kahane, Claire. "The Gothic Mirror." In The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist
Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Ed. Claire Kahane et al. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1985. 334-351.
Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Monk Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Otto, Rudolph. The Idea of the Holy. Trans. John W. Harvey. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1958.
Siebers, Tobin. The Romantic Fantastic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans.
Richard Howard. Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973.
Varnado, S. L. Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction. Tuscaloosa:
Alabama University Press, 1987.
10
"A World of Glas": The Heroine's Quest for

Identity in Spenser's Faerie Queene and
Stephen R. Donaldson's Mirror of Her
Dreams
Laurel L. Hendrix
In the literary genres of chivalric romance and epic fantasy, the hero's quest
serves as a fundamental organizing feature of the narrative world. If, like Joseph
Campbell, we view the hero's quest as the magnification of the formulas repre-
sented in the rites of passage, then the narrative itself becomes a speculum, a
mirror wherein the reader beholds the hero's process of self-discovery and self-
realization.
In Campbell's circular scheme of "separation-initiation-return" (30), the
process begins with the call to adventure, and in answering it, the hero must
cross into the realm of the fantastic, a realm that is both mimetic and symbolic.
According to Erich Auerbach, this world of adventure is a world "specifically
created to give the knight [or any hero, for that matter] opportunity to prove
himself (119). In such a world whose contours mirror the psyche of the questing
hero, the quest-romance becomes, as Northrop Frye puts it, "the search of the
libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of
reality but will still contain that reality" (193). Thus, the world of the fantastic
becomes a mirror of the hero's Self, the textual Other in which the hero dis-
covers the secrets of his being. From the perspective of the questing hero, to
cross the threshold of adventure is to enter a world of glass.
In Edmund Spenser's sixteenth-century epic-romance The Faerie Queene and
in Stephen R. Donaldson's epic-fantasy The Mirror of Her Dreams, a literal,
physical mirror stands at the threshold of adventure, not so much for the questing
hero but for the questing heroine. In the case of Spenser's Britomart, it is the
"glassie globe" devised by Merlin for King Ryence, Britomart's father; in the
case of Donaldson's Terisa, the mirrors are those with which Terisa lines the
walls of her luxury condominium. For both heroines, their mirrors are the per-
meable boundaries between the world of the everyday and the world of the fan-
tastic.
However, for Britomart and Terisa, the mirror or looking glass is more than
the liminal space wherein the fantastic obtrudes into the real and the real
obtrudes into the fantastic. For these heroines, the call to adventure presents itself
within the space defined by their mirrors, and these "world[s] of glas" (FQ
3.2.19.9) themselves reflect the complexities of self-discovery that shape a
woman's particular quest for identity.
Initially trapped within the cloistered domains created by protective fathers,
Britomart and Terisa gaze into their mirrors and are lured into the fantastic. It
is a feminine proving ground where nothing is as it seems to be, and where illu-
sion is the best defense as the heroine confronts the external forces that seek to
shape or destroy her. In order to seek that which is reflected in their mirrors,
both Britomart and Terisa must set aside their "real" selves, and in entering the
world of adventure they live out the ultimate paradox of feminine self-definition
in the real world: Only in making the Self the Other can a woman discover her
destiny, and in doing so, recover her true self.
Prior to their calling, Spenser's Britomart and Donaldson's Terisa manifest the
archetypal blurring of the self which is characteristic of Campbell's hero. Unsure
of their own talents and utterly unrecognized by the world at large, these women
"suffer from a symbolical deficiency" (Campbell 37) which is represented to
them in their looking glasses. In gazing at her reflection in her looking glass, the
heroine finds in her image the lack of purpose and unfulfilled desire which draws
her to her mirror in the first place.
This is true for Spenser's Britomart, who wanders into her father's private
chambers and discovers his famous mirror, and views herself "in vaine." The
only daughter and heir to Ryence, King of Deheubarth or South Wales, Britomart
has no apparent reason to seek out the mirror fashioned by Merlin in order to aid
Ryence in his rule. It is a mirror that not only reflects the self but also possesses
marvelous panoptic powers, showing "in perfect sight, / What ever thing was in
the world contayned / . . . So that it to the looker appertaynd" (FQ 3.2.19.1-2,
4). In seeing only her "selfe," Britomart views an image defined by the beauty
that would later amaze its beholders: the "goodly personage and glorious hew"
that mark her as "the fairest woman wight, that ever eye did see" (3.9.23.6;
3.9.21.9).
Even though her outward image is that of a paragon of chaste beauty,
Britomart is hardly the picture of traditional womanhood. Loathing to waste her
days "as Ladies wont, in pleasures wanton lap, / To finger the fine needle and
nyce thread" (3.2.6.7-8), Britomart is a "martiall Mayd" without an arena in
which to prove her talents. She is "trained up in warlike stowre, / To tossen
speare and shield" (3.2.6.3-4), and her "delight on deedes of armes is set, / To
hunt out perils and adventures hard" (3.2.7.1-2). However, she is recognized only
as her father's daughter, and her world is bounded by her father's house.
Donaldson situates his contemporary heroine in a similar position. In the pro-
logue to The Mirror of Her Dreams, Donaldson establishes Terisa's identity as
Quest for Identity in Spenser and Donaldson 93
shaped by entrapment and unfulfilled desires. Terisa is the "princess in a high

tower," the "daughter of wealth and power," held virtually as a prisoner in the
luxury condo bought and paid for by a tycoon-father for whom pampering and
protection is merely a refined "form of neglect" (1). Ignored by her father and
unnoticed by those she encounters in the larger world, Terisa surrounds herself
with mirrors in order to affirm her very selfhood: "Nothing around her, or in her,
reflected her back to herself. Without dreamsand without any effectshe had
no evidence at all that she was a material being, actually present in her world.
Only her mirrors told her that she was there" (2). For Terisa, "mirrors ha[ve] a
seductive beauty which sp[eak] to her," and there is "virtually no angle in her
apartment from which she couldn't see herself (2). Despairing at "the mute
nothingness of her existence" (8) and convinced that "she was hardly more that
a shadow in the glass all around her" (9), Terisa pulls up a chair to her mirrors
one particularly depressing evening. As she views her beautiful image, Terisa
"watche[s] every line and flicker of her image" (16) and hopes to maintain her
grip on reality; nevertheless, she cannot escape the feeling that she was fading
"out of existence like an inane dream" (15).
Gazing into their mirrors, both Britomart and Terisa at first perceive only the
image of the Self. However, as they seek to know their own destinies, the power
of their desire works a marvelous transformation in the images their mirrors pre-
sent to them. Britomart, remembering the prophetic powers of Merlin's mirror,
wonders what might "to her selfe pertaine" (FQ 3.2.22.9; emphasis mine)in
particular, who "fortune for her husband would allot" (3.2.33.6). Her desire trans-
lates her image into that of Artegall, "a comely knight" imbued with "Heroicke
grace" and bearing the emblems of honor and prowess: a "manly face," portly
bearing, and the shield bearing the motto "Achilles armes, which Artegall did
win" (3.2.24.2, 4, 9; 3.2.25.6). In drawing forth the "shade and semblant of a
knight" (3.2.38.3), Britomart finds herself in love with the image of her own
heart. Seeking to comfort her, Britomart's nurse Glauce bases her argument in
the neoplatonic and courtly commonplace that in the beloved Other the lover in
fact beholds and desires the Self:
But this affection nothing straunge I find;

For who with reason can you aye reprove,
To love the semblant pleasing most your mind,
And yield your heart, whence ye cannot remove? (3.2.40.5-8)
Desire to recover the Self by discovering the Other becomes for Britomart the
call to adventure, as Glauce urges her to "compasse thy desire, and find that
loved knight" (3.2.46.9), a knight "whose prowesse paragon saw never living
wight" (3.2.13.9).
To Donaldson's Terisa, the call to adventure also comes in response to the
heroine's unspoken desires. Convinced that "surely she was fading" and that she
would wake one morning only to "look at herself in the mirror, and see nothing"
(Mirror 9), Terisa awaits the unfolding of her destiny, knowing that if she failed
to preserve her sense of selfhood, "she would see herself come to an end" (16).
Initially, Terisa sees only her Self, her tenuous, passive image. Yet to her sur-
prise, she finds only the "edges of her face blurring out of actuality" and sud-
denly sees the image of a young man clad in a brown jerkin, pants, and leather
boots. Looking more closely, Terisa realizes that this is no reflection; the man,
Geraden, exists in the mirror "behind her startled image . . . moving for-ward as
is he were floundering through a torrent" (16). Like Britomart, Terisa has unwit-
tingly called forth her soulmate, her mirror-image embodied in the Other. As
Geraden later explains to Terisa: "My lady . . . I found you in a room full of
mirrors! And it was a room where no known translation could have taken me
unless it was you who did the translating. You were sitting in a chair right in
front of the glass, and you were staring at me, concentrating on me. I thought I
could feel you calling me" (113). Although Geraden's translation from Mordant
to Terisa's New York City apartment is conducted through a glass of Geraden's
own making, it is clear that in gazing in her own mirror, Terisa has unknowingly
exercised her hidden talents as an arch-Imager for the first time. In searching her
own soul, Terisa has altered the focus of Geraden's mirror and called him into
her world. In doing so, she proves the truth of Geraden's speculation that "it may
be that my glass was formed for you from the pure sand of dreams" (26).
For Spenser's and Donaldson's heroines, the call "to venture forth from the
world of the common day into a region of supernatural wonder" (Campbell 30)
marks the beginning of the process of self-discovery that determines the nature
of the hero's quest. Yet for Britomart and Terisa, this encounter with an Other
who is the mirror image of their inner selves also initiates the process whereby
the heroine must literally become this Other in order to enter the realm of testing,
the realm of the fantastic. Only in taking on the role and shape of the Other can
the heroine be translated into the fantastic, as paradoxically the heroine must lose
her old identity in order to discover her true nature.
The process of translation for Britomart begins with the enchanter Merlin, "he
which made / That mirrhour, wherein the sicke Damosell / So straungely vewed
her straunge lovers shade" (FQ 3.3.6.1-3). It is Merlin who articulates Britomar-
t's destiny and translates her "spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of
[her] society to a zone unknown" (Campbell 58). Serving as her "supernatural
helper" (72), Merlin assures Britomart that it is heavenly destiny and eternal
providence, not lust, which call her to seek her shadow-knight in the land of
Faerie:
Ne is thy fate, ne is thy fortune ill,

To love the prowest knight, that ever was,
Therefore submit thy ways unto his will,
And do by all dew meanes thy destiny fulfill. (FQ 3.3.24.6-9)
Britomart's destiny is to fetch Artegall, son of Gorlois, to marry him and return
him to the real world, and finally mother the "famous Progenie" of British kings
that will culminate in the rise of Elizabeth I. Britomart's quest removes her from
the world of Britain and her father's kingdom and translates her into the fantas-
tic, the world of Faerie, where her true love wins glory.
The "dew means" Britomart employs in order to embark on her quest lie in a
translation of her appearanceher adoption of the guise of the Other in the
"strange disguise" of a questing knight. Since "all Britaine doth burne in armes
bright" (3.3.52.9), Britomart takes up the armor that once belonged to Angela,
the Saxon queen, and adopts an enchanted spear and a "shield of great powre."
In doing so, she both effaces and affirms her Self, relinquishing her identity as
her father's daughter and reclaiming her nature as a "mayd Martiall" by taking
on the image of knighthood that appeared in Merlin's glassie globe. Assuming
the appearance of the Other, Britomart sets out for the realm of the fantastic,
taking the back ways that lead her into a world where her talents can find free
expression. Significantly, as she crosses into the realm of Faerie, her hopes are
buoyed by the mental image of her beloved Artegall, which she recreates through
her "feigning fancie" as the mirror image of her self: a knight "wise, warlike,
personable, curteous, and kind" (3.4.5.7,9).
As in the case of Britomart, Terisa finds that the path of self-discovery lies
only in becoming the Other and by losing her ordinary Self. Through the liminal
space of the mirror, Terisa receives her call to adventure in the shape of
Geraden, the apprentice Imager who falls into her world, shattering her mirror
and splintering her self-image. Geraden, who possesses the "strange ability to
bypass logic [and] normalcy" (Mirror 18), identifies her as the champion destined
to save the quasi-medieval world of Mordant from the dangers of Imagery, which
threaten its very survival. Having stepped through his mirror designed to translate
a superhuman warrior to the stronghold of Orison, Geraden has arrived instead
in Terisa's apartment, drawn by the power of her longing for identity. Even
though Terisa appears nowhere in the auguries employed by the Imagers of
Mordant, Geraden concludes that destiny has nevertheless led him to the right
place and to the right person. To Terisa's question, "Who am I supposed to be?"
he replies, "The augury could have been misinterpreted. An Imager like you
might be exactly what we need" (20).
Just as Spenser inverts the traditional figure of the feminine as she passes
from the mundane to the fantastic, so Donaldson inverts the image of Terisa in
the process of her translation to Mordant through Geraden's mirror. In taking
Geraden's hand and allowing him to draw her out of the real world, Terisa
crosses the threshold of adventure and endures the ultimate loss of selfhood. To
Terisa, to endure the passage through the indefinable space "where time and
distance contradicted themselves" (28) is to relinquish her Self: "It was the
sensation of fading, of losing existence, concentrated to crisis proportions: it was
the pure moment in which she lost her hold on herself, on actuality, on life"
(133). Her old identity as her father's daughter and the secretary to a rescue
mission passes away; as potential Imager she enters Geraden's world, a domain
where mirrors do not reflect the object in front of them, but rather reveal "alter-
nate worlds or realities" (57). Her quest is to find her part in the salvation of
Mordant by finding her true self: in the words of Joyse, King of Mordant, "she
must be made to declare herselfor to discover herself (Donaldson A Man
Rides Through 28).
For Spenser's and Donaldson's heroines, their tests within these worlds of
glass arise from the necessity of resisting entrapment in the projections of others
and in asserting the right to fashion one's self. Yet the process of translation for
Britomart and Terisa involves inevitable fragmentation of the self. Here, the
augury, as practiced in Donaldson's novel, becomes a paradigm of the heroine's
identity: A flat glass showing a relevant person, place, or event is shattered, and
in the fragments "what will come from the Image on which it was focused" can
be discerned (Mirror 181).
Just so, the questing heroine discovers and defines herself not only through
encounters with her male Other but also by seeing herself reflected in the pan-
oply of figures embodying fragmented aspects of her self. As Judith Anderson
observes, Spenser's Britomart is "progressively defined through relations of
sympathy and antipathy with characters and events" as she travels through the
"changing landscapes of meaning" that characterize the Faerie realm. In the
lascivious dame Malecasta, Britomart encounters and repudiates unbridled femi-
nine lust; in unseating and wounding the proud Marinell, Britomart humiliates
the knight whose fame rests upon being "loves enimy" (FQ 3.4.26.9). In de-
feating the enchanter Busirane and rescuing the maiden Amoret from his brutal
spells, Britomart champions the principle of chaste, reciprocal love. Constantly
testing herself against others, Britomart recovers her true nature as the invincible
Knight of Chastity, snatching victory at Satyrane's tournament from both the
Knights of Maydenhead and their opponents led by Artegall himself. Thus, in
losing her maidenly identity as Ryence's daughter and in taking up her quest,
Britomart is able to freely exercise her dual nature as an armed Venus, a Venus
armata: to the Redcrosse Knight and others who behold her, a "faire lady she
. . . seemd, like Lady drest, / But fairest knight alive, when armed was her brest"
(3.2.4.8-9).
Although Donaldson's Terisa initially appears as a woman of self-doubt and
passivity, her quest for identity and purpose leads her to fulfill the charge laid
upon womankind by Princess Elega: that anyone having "the misfortune to be
born a woman must oppose the prejudices of all the world in order to prove her-
self (Mirror 391). Relying upon her "emotional coloration" of reticence and
deference, Terisa purchases the time she and Geraden need in order to discover
their talents as Imagers of extraordinary power. In doing so, she resists easy
definition by the citizens of Orison, proving wrong the popular wisdom articu-
lated by her maid Saddith: "Men say that the talent for Imagery is born, and that
only those so born may hope to shape glass or perform translations. They believe
. . . that no woman is born with the talent" (64).
In discovering her hidden talents mirrored in Geraden, her Other, Terisa tests
her developing sense of self against those around her. She resists the path to
influence embodied in Saddith, who seeks the sexual power to be gained in the
beds of powerful men. In King Joyse's daughters, the princesses Elega and
Myste, Terisa measures herself against willful grasping of power and feminine
romanticism. In resisting the seductive powers of Eremis, a leader in the
Congery of Imagers, Terisa declares herself on the side of Geraden, asserting her
autonomy under the threat of rape. Ultimately, Terisa learns to exercise her many
gifts: As an arch-Imager, she is a woman not only capable of passing through flat
glass without losing her sanity but also empowered to alter images in mirrors
through the mere exercise of will across incredible distances. These talents, plus
her ability to work translations in mirrors of others' design and making, make
her an invaluable ally of Joyse against the triad of corrupt Imagers who seek to
destroy Mordantthe masters Gilbert and Eremis, and the arch-Imager Vagel.
The success of the heroine's quest finally lies in her recovery of Self at the
moment of her ultimate test, which in Campbell's scheme marks the nadir of the
hero's fantastic journey. For Britomart and Terisa, their greatest test and triumph
not only enables both heroines to come to terms with their inner selves but also
enables their male Others to perfect their own talents in their quests. Significant-
ly, however, Britomart and Terisa do not encounter their greatest challenge at the
moment when they recognize their Other as their true love and soulmate. Rather,
their ultimate trial comes when they must confront and vanquish the embodiment
of the aspect of the Self that threatens to consume them and particularly their
Other.
When Britomart unknowingly takes up arms against Artegall in single combat,
the result is mutual recognition and the apparent consummation of Britomart's
quest. Britomart recognizes in Artegall's countenance the same image reflected
in her father's "enchaunted glasse." In coming face to face with Britomart,
Artegall finds himself conquered once again by this female Knight of Chastity.
Here, he is vanquished by Britomart's beauty as decisively as he earlier was
bested by Britomart's martial prowess at Satyrane's tournament. Artegall will
fight no more as the undisciplined knight bearing the motto "salvagesse sans
finesse" (FQ 4.3.39.9), and Britomart must accept a traditional courtship that
relegates her to her former role of the passive lady and requires that she stand
aside as Artegall prepares to take up his quest as the Knight of Justice.
The true nadir of Britomart's quest, however, lies in her next major battle, her
confrontation with the Amazon queen Radigund, who embodies female tyranny
and the "unknowen perill of bold womens pride" (5.4.38.6). Radigund, who has
captured Artegall and other knights, emasculates her prisoners by forcing them
to take on the demeaning dress and chores of women, thus representing in herself
the threat of unbridled feminine power and political authority, both of which
must be repudiated. In meeting Radigund on the field of honor, Britomart comes
face to face with her mirror image, for just as Britomart has made Artegall a
"ladies thrall" in conquering his heart, so Radigund makes Artegall a "womans
slave" in taking him prisoner. Trading deadly blows with her Amazonian double,
Britomart rises from Radigund's debilitating blows and, in Spenser's words,
comes "to her selfe againe" (5.7.34.2); in other words, she confronts in the pro-
strate Radigund the "proude oppression / Of womens powre, that boast of mens
subjection" (5.4.26.4-5).
Severing the Amazon's head, Britomart utilizes her special talents to defuse
the threat of female autonomy and power, and in so doing, she inevitably cancels
and undoes her own self. Releasing Radigund's captive knights and Artegall from
their humiliation, Britomart repeals "the liberty of women," and in restoring
women "to mens subjection, did true Justice deale" (5.7.42.5-7). As neither the
fantastic land of Faerie nor the mundane world of Britain allows women civic
and personal autonomy, Spenser must enlist his heroine's "cooperation in the re-
placement and discarding of her very person" (Anderson 115).
Donaldson, on the other hand, offers his heroine the opportunity to become the
object of her fantasy, a possibility denied women by Renaissance culture and
Spenser's fantastic world. By pitting Terisa against Eremis, one of the corrupt
Masters who has plotted the fall of Mordant, Donaldson allows Terisa to meet
Mordant's need, satisfy her own desire for significance, destroy her lover's rival,
and defeat, in her greatest enemy, the evil employment of her own powers as an
arch-Imager. In her final confrontation with Master Eremis (who bears a striking
physical and psychological resemblance to Terisa's powerful and cruel father),
Terisa defies and destroys the men who have sought to thwart her self-realiza-
tion, and to rape her of her special gifts. With a trick of the mirror, Terisa turns
Eremis's last attempted assault upon Eremis himself. Terisa changes the Image
in a flat glass from the climactic last battle to something quite ordinary; she
renders the mirror into a mundane reflecting surface. Terisa then turns Eremis's
gaze to the true reflection of himself, and in showing Eremis the exact image of
his own Self, Terisa condemns him to an endless cycle of narcissism and transla-
tion wherein he passes "simultaneously back and forth between [himself] and
[his] Image, changing literally without going anywhere" (Mirror 404).
In crossing the threshold of adventure and in overcoming the threat to her
selfhood, Terisa succeeds where Britomart must fail: She can recover her true
self without threatening the autonomy of her male Other. As we view the hero-
ine's quest for identity in these worlds of glass, we see reflected in the means
whereby Spenser and Donaldson achieve closure the larger social and cultural
subtexts that underlie and inform their fictions. In spite of Spenser's professed
intent to compensate in his narrative for the lost record of female heroic deeds,
Spenser is himself guilty of the charge he lays on other poets whose "writing
small" effaces the martial triumphs of women and "dims their glories all" (FQ
3.2.1.8). Given that Britomart's destiny lies in mothering a line of famous kings,
the necessity of stripping Britomart of the knightly autonomy and identity she
won must have seemed to Spenser a small sacrifice indeed in order to preserve
and legitimize the patriarchal order within and without Faerieland.
Yet even Donaldson fails to answer in his fiction the fact that a woman must
enter the realm of fantasy in order to assert and discover her true self, and that
in order to preserve that self, she cannot return to the world of reality. Even
though Geraden refuses to demand that Terisa stay in Mordant against her will
and "to subordinate her desires to his own" (A Man Rides Through 651), in the
end, Terisa's options are limited. In the real world there is no need for Terisa's
remarkable talents, and in her quest for identity, she realizes that "the sense of
unreality which had dogged her for so long was the result of living in the wrong
world: Maybe she had never been a solid being until she came here" (Mirror
563), to Mordant.
In order to preserve Terisa's autonomy, Donaldson cannot allow his heroine
to return to the real world, and thus he must shatter the heroic paradigm of sepa-
ration-initiation-return. Terisa's fairy-tale ending is the one thing that cannot be
translated from Mordant into the mundane world, and Terisa remains in the
world of fantasy, the only place where she really matters.
Rosemary Jackson reminds us that "the fantastic traces the unsaid and the un-
seen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over,
'absent'" (4). Indeed, inside the fantastic worlds fashioned by Spenser and
Donaldson, heroines may discover hidden depths that no ordinary mirror can
show them and enjoy the self-discovery and identity denied them by the "real"
world. Likewise, contemporary readers can see reflected in these fantastic worlds
the contours of our own cultural consciousness and find mirrored within these
texts the paradoxes that define the existence of women in our own world.
WORKS CITED
Anderson, Judith. "Britomart." The Spenser Encyclopedia. Gen. ed. A. C. Hamilton.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990.
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Culture. Trans.
Willard Trask. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1957.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Donaldson, Stephen R. A Man Rides Through. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1987.
. The Mirror of Her Dreams. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1986.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. New York: Atheneum, 1967.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. New York: Longman, 1980.
11
What about Bob? Doubles and Demons in

Twin Peaks
Nancy Buffington
Damned good pie. Coffee and donuts. Dwarves and giants, incest and murder.
Immersing myself in reviews of David Lynch's Twin Peaks from popular (and
unpopular) magazines has, if nothing else, taught me the primary rule of
discussing the series: Always begin with a list of elements "both wonderful
and strange" (MacLachlan in Twin Peaks). Something about the program's many
incongruities inspires not only litanies of foods and fetishes but enthusiastic
attempts at naming its idiosyncrasies. The series has been termed a "bizarre,
byzantine murder-mystery serial" ("Unreality" 68), a "soap opera with strych-
nine" (Corliss 84), and a "brew of sugar, spice and castor oil" (Vincenzi 55).
But just as the idyllic forest setting hides a world of violence and mystery,
more can be said about this series. One critic's intended condemnation gets right
to the point: "And it was sexy. There was bad sex and good sex, but sex was
everywhere" (Goldstein 740). And it's hard to dispute that sex is everywherein
the multiple cases of incest, sexual rivalry, and confused paternity, in the opening
sequence's images of power tools and waterfallseven in the donuts and cherry
pie. The final episode revels in both the wonder and the chaos engendered by
questions of sexuality, identity, and evil. In this surrealistic world teeming with
transformations, doubles, and spirits, is it possible to examine the role of the
supernatural? Or does the very attempt to define doubling and demonic posses-
sion work against the nature of the crisis, serving instead to assuage our own
anxieties about sexuality and identity?
Before plunging into either the final scene or theoretical speculation, some
background may help the uninitiated. The series begins with the discovery of the
plastic-wrapped corpse of Laura Palmer, Twin Peaks's homecoming queen. Dale
Cooper, "part logician, part mystic" (Vincenzi 55) and all FBI agent, comes to
investigate. He brings his signature trench coat, a Dictaphone into which he
reports his progress and other important observations ("Diane, I'm holding in my
hand a small box of chocolate bunnies"), and a deep appreciation for Douglas
firs, good food, and Eastern philosophy.1

Following clues garnered from Laura's psychotic mother, a log that speaks to
its owner, printouts of extraterrestrial signals, and his own dreams, Cooper finally
identifies the killer. Laura's father, Leland, unknowingly inhabited by a spirit
named Bob, has killed his daughter. By this time, Leland/Bob has also killed
Laura's look-alike cousin Maddy (played by the same actress), who is in town
for the funeral. Solving the murder fails to end the town's trouble, though.
When Leland realizes that "he" has killed his daughter and niece, he dies of
shock, and Bob leaves his bodyat large again.
The series next focuses on the conflict between Cooper and his former-
partner-turned-evil, Wyndham Earl. Earl has come to Twin Peaks for revenge
on Cooper, whose romance with Earl's wife caused her death. Earl institutes a
deadly chess game with Cooper: For each piece Cooper loses, Earl kills again.
He plans to make his next victim the soon-to-be-declared winner of the Miss
Twin Peaks beauty pageant. Meanwhile, Cooper has met Annie, a waitress just
out of a convent, where she recovered from a traumatic love affair and an
attempted suicide. Throughout the series, Cooper has refrained from romance
and sex, but in the final episode he gives in to his desire for Annie.
Ominously, Annie wins the Miss Twin Peaks contest. Wyndham Earl now
has a prime chance for revenge and moves to kill Cooper's new lover. Trans-
sexually masquerading as the Log Lady, Earl kidnaps Annie. He takes her
through the forest to "the edge of the world"the supernatural Black Lodge
reached through a circle of sycamore trees. Cooper, having traced another set
of both mundane and bizarre clues, follows. The ensuing scene highlights the
disorientation, destabilized identity, and transformations that dominate the series,
simultaneously setting up and disrupting complex patterns of sexual desire.
Given the recent sexual encounter between Cooper and Annie, it is fitting that
the Black Lodge is uncannily female (an "opening to a gateway"), and that the
lodge's interior features a maze of red curtains and disappearing and reappearing
statues of female bodies. The zigzagged pattern on the black-and-white floor
hints at a contortion of linear, patriarchal structure. Lighting and camera shots,
disembodied voices and footsteps, distorted words with subtitles, and transforma-
tions of people and objects add to the disorientation. Blood and old wounds ap-
pear and disappear. Eyes become cloudy and then clear up. Like the statues, the
dwarf, and the giant, the dead human characters, and Bob materialize and vanish
without apparent logic. Temporal and spatial confusion dominate as Cooper
repeatedly walks down the hall (is it the same hall?) and encounters the
sameor differentrooms and furnishings with no predictability.
Adding to the confusion is the destabilized identity of characters in the Black
lodge. The dead look-alike cousins Maddy and Laura alternate entrances.
Cooper's two former love interests, Annie and Caroline, become interchangeable,
Laura reappears, and they are all supplanted finally by Wyndham EarlCooper's
Doubles and Demons in Twin Peaks 103
primary object of desire.

When Cooper appears to sacrifice his soul for Annie, he takes on the eerie
glazed eyes of the "dead" characters and the spirit Bob's maniacal laugh. The
double, until now a frequent feature of close resemblance (but not identity)
reflects an uncanny crisis in identification. We see two Coopers who first watch,
then chase and attack each other.
Back in the "real" world, Annie and Cooper, lying wounded near the opening
in the sycamores are now found by the sheriff. Recovering, Cooper wakes up in
his hotel room. He announces mechanically, "I wasn't sleeping," and he asks
about Annie. Reciting, "I need to brush my teeth," he shuffles into the bathroom.
After emptying the entire tube of toothpaste into the bathroom sink, he jams his
head against the mirror. The mirror shatters, Cooper's forehead is wounded, and
through the cracks in the glass we see Bob's face returning Cooper's evil grin.
Laughing menacingly as blood streams down his face, Cooper/Bob mimics his
earlier concern, parroting, "How's Annie? How's Annie?"
Lynch has never been known for subtlety, so many elements in the preceding
scenes need no comment. What particularly interests me are the disrupted
patterns of sexuality and identity that abound in this episode. Christine Holmlund
observes the connection between sublimated homosexuality and male literature
of the double and notes that "doppelganger literature enacts the shifting
relationships of men to masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality and
homosexuality, sadism and masochism" (33).2 Of prime importance is the fact
that Cooper has remained sexually abstinent (substituting his Dictaphone, coffee,
donuts, and cherry pie for sexual satisfaction) until Annie. Sigmund Freud notes
that abstinence and unsuccessful sublimation of the libido may restimulate
fantasies from the unconscious expressed as a hysterical symptom ("Hysterical"
147). He continues that the symptom signals a conflict between two opposing
affects, one trying to express a sexual impulse, the other seeking to suppress it
(150). Freud ties the symptom to bisexuality, identifying hysteria as "the
expression of both a masculine and a feminine unconscious sexual phantasy"
(151).
The bisexual elements of the Black Lodge reflect the nature of Cooper's
conflict; he may have made progress toward satisfaction of his desire for Annie,
but the problem with Wyndham Earl, his former close partner, is only exacerbat-
ed. As Freud observes, the symptom may "persist with undiminished force
though one of its sexual meanings has already been resolved. It is then still being
maintained by the perhaps unsuspected opposite sexual trend" (152). We receive
many hints about the desire and identification between the two:3 past love of the
same woman, similar clothing, and the common use of handheld electronic
objects (Cooper carries a benign Dictaphone, while Earl administers electric
shocks by remote control to his brain-damaged assistant). Recall the triangle
formation in which Earl stands in for Cooper's sexual attractions: Annie,
Caroline, Laura, then Wyndham Earl.4

Cooper's unresolved sexual desire brings me to the doubles and demons that
appear in this scene. In "The Uncanny," Freud emphasizes the repression
involved in the doppelganger, a "doubling, dividing and interchanging of the
self (234) that begins as a narcissistic "insurance against the destruction of the
ego" and an "assurance of immortality" and later turns into an "uncanny
harbinger of death" (235). Otto Rank, too, argues that "a person's past
inescapably clings to him and . . . it becomes his fate as soon as he tries to get
rid of it" (Double 6). Rank observes that the double frequently surfaces "in the
relationship with a woman, predominately ending in suicide by way of death
intended for the irksome persecutor" (33). He roots the manifestation of the
double in guilt and emphasizes its link with the demonic; a "powerful conscious-
ness of guilt. . . forces the hero no longer to accept the responsibility for certain
actions of his ego, but to place it upon another ego, a double, who is either
personified by the devil himself or is created by a diabolical pact" (76). And in
this episode, Cooper's double does not appear until he agrees to sacrifice his soul
to save Annie.
A problem arises with this setting up of a one-to-one relationship between
sexuality and doubles, though, even when viewing the phenomenon as a
symptom of the repression of bisexual desire. The spirit Bob confounds the
pattern of doubling and disrupts the already-confused configurations of identity
and desire. Until this final episode, Bob has appeared only in visions and dreams,
and doubling has been based on resemblance rather than identity. But in the
alternate reality of the Black Lodge, Bob functions as a separate entity, and
Cooper chasesand is chased byhis own identical double. Yet in the final
scene we are left with only one "Cooper" again, with Bob staring out of the
mirror. So how does the demonic work with doubling? Where does the double
go? And how does Bob get into Cooper? Is Bob just another double?
We could spend days plotting out the correspondences between sexual
repression and hysteria, between doubles and demons, and perusing the erotic
possibilities between Cooper and Caroline, Cooper and Annie, Cooper and Laura,
Cooper and Wyndham Earl, even between Cooper and Cooper. But any attempt
to systematize Lynch's work ignores the nature of hysteria, evil, and certainly of
Twin Peaks. Not only does Lynch delight in setting up patterns and clues that
later prove meaningless or at least different than we thought ("The owls are not
what they seem"), but the problems of hysteria and evil are largely threatening
because they resist the imposition of categories and binarism. Frank Burke poses
the demon in The Exorcist as "a site of groundlessness in a culture obsessed with
origins, . . . a place of endless signification within a society that insists on
reference, identification, and the closure of meaning. Thus the demon, like the
abject or the truly Other, is clearly non-identical with, irreducible to, the cultural
system in which it operates" (83). Lynch's work, too, focuses on the "slippages
Doubles and Demons in Twin Peaks 105
and uncertainties, gaps and differences, ruptures and alterities . . . within life and
. . . image, sign, symbol, . . . language, reference and representation" that Burke
sees in The Exorcist (88). Perhaps more important than just how Bob got into
Cooper's body or exactly what he represents, then, is the fact that his image
leering out of the bathroom mirror reflects "far more cracks than images" (83).
In the spirit of this groundlessness, and the confoundings and conversions
we've come to expect from Twin Peaks, I'd like to add yet another twist to the
role of the demonic here. Although Bob disrupts the pattern of doppelganger
theory, does he serve ultimately, like Rank's double, as a scapegoat, a convenient
figure on which to displace anxiety about shattered and fragmented identity?
Does this very subversion of structure and theory thus work to reinscribe the
order it questions? The slippage in signification that Bob introduces, then, may
allow us an ironic comfort in the midst of this chaos. We can still blame the
disruption of identity and social order on demons, rather than face the impossible
image of the fractured self in the shattered bathroom mirror. The image may be
cracked, but it remains an Other, rather than a far more threatening Self.
NOTES
1. Cooper's character is in many ways reminiscent of Poe's Dupin, another detective

who solves crimes by taking on the thought processes of his prey.
2. Lucy Fischer, writing of female doubles, provides insight into the use of the Laura/
Maddy mirroring. Fischer notes that doubled women serve as the "dialectical fantasies
of man" (187) and "dichotomized male projections of opposing views of the Eternal
Feminine" (191), which seems consistent with many of Lynch's female characters.
3. See Claire Johnston's examination of narcissistic identification between Neff and
Keyes in a suspiciously similar detective film, Double Indemnity.
4. Although Laura is the subject of Cooper's investigation rather than his literal lover,
the sexual element in detective stories is prevalent in Lynch's work. This is more directly
addressed in Blue Velvet, in which the ail-American Sandy tells Jeffrey (also played by
Kyle MacLachlan), "I don't know whether you're a detective or a pervert."
WORKS CITED
Burke, Frank. "'We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes, Haven't You?': Alterity and Self-
Other Mirroring in Horror Film and Criticism." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
. 2.4 (1990): 74-94.
Corliss, Richard. "Czar of Bizarre." Time 1 Oct. 1990: 84-88.
Fischer, Lucy. Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women s Cinema. Princeton:
Princeton, 1989.
Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans, and ed. James Strachey. Vol. 17. 23 vols. London:
Hogarth Press, 1953-1974. 218-52.

. "Hysterical Phantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality." Dora: An Analysis of
a Case ofHysteria. Trans. Douglas Bryan. 1909. New York: Macmillan, 1963. 145-52.
Goldstein, Warren. "Incest for the Millions: Saying No to David Lynch." Commonweal
21 Dec. 1990: 740-41.
Holmlund, Christine. "Sexuality and Power in Male Doppelganger Cinema: The Case of
Clint Eastwood's Tightrope." Cinema Journal 26.1 (1986): 31-41.
Johnston, Claire. "Double Indemnity." Women in Film Noir. Ed. Ann Kaplan. London:
British Film Institute, 1980. 100-111.
Lynch, David, dir. Blue Velvet. DeLaurentiis, 1986.
. Twin Peaks. ABC Monday Night Movie. KGUN, Tucson. 10 June 1991.
Rank, Otto. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study. Trans, and ed. Harry Tucker, Jr. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971.
"Unreality and Reality." U. S News and World Report 9 July 1990: 68.
Vincenzi, Lisa. "Top Producers David Lynch & Mark Frost." Millimeter \9A (1991): 55-
56.
12
Duality, Reality, and Magic in Sir Gawain

and the Green Knight
Barbara Kline
From a close reading of the fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight, it appears that the juxtaposition of the realistic and the magical disturbs
not only the modern reader but the characters within the poem and perhaps the
medieval reader as well. The opening scene of the poem provides a detailed des-
cription of a sumptuous feast at Camelot during Christmas. But this scene is dis-
rupted by the inexplicable appearance of a green man astride an equally green
steed. The juxtaposition of the magical amidst the realistic details of a medieval
feast produces an estranging effect. This estrangement is disturbing to the mem-
bers of Arthur's round table as evidenced by their stunned silence. Contrary to
many modern views, it is evident that the merging of the "real" world and Faerie
was not simply accepted with an arched brow and childlike wonder in the Middle
Ages.
The tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is extant in only one manu-
script, British Library MS. Cotton Nero A.x. Because there are no records of
contemporary readers' reactions to Gawain and no recourse to scribal readings
of the text (other than the scribe of Cotton Nero A.x) it is difficult, if not impos-
sible, to determine the medieval reader's response to the events of the poem. The
modern reader is left with only the clues within the text itself as to how the
author might have anticipated the reader's response to the events of the poem.
However, in a number of instances in the tale of Gawain, the author clearly
points out the uneasy reaction of the characters within the tale to the appearance
of things that are out of the ordinary, the Otherworldly or fantastic.
As the term fantastic has acquired a specific literary meaning, it requires some
explanation to use the term in reference to Gawain. In Tzvetan Todorov's study
of the fantastic, he defines the genre of the fantastic as eliciting "that hesitation
experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an
apparently supernatural event" (25). This is exactly what the character of Gawain
experiences when he encounters the Green Knight. Todorov, however, is not
speaking strictly of the reactions of the characters within a literary work but also
those of the reader. He places the definition of the fantastic in relation to the real
and the imaginary. According to Todorov the fantastic requires the fulfillment
of two out of three conditions:
First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a
world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural
explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experi-
enced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character,
and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes
of the workin the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with
the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the
text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations. These three re-
quirements do not have an equal value. The first and the third actually constitute
the genre; the second may not be fulfilled. (33)
Gawain does not fit within this strict definition of the fantastic. The tale is a
medieval romance set in the legendary time period of Arthur and his knights.
The characters of the romance cannot be mistaken for real people in a real world
by the reader. However, the characters' perceptions of their surroundings within
the text of Gawain and Gawain himself fulfill the requirements of the fantastic.
They hesitate to determine what is real and what is not. This is what Rosemary
Jackson, in her definition of the fantastic as a mode, calls the "inscription of
hesitation on the level of narrative structure" (48). In Todorov's terms it is "that
hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confron-
ting an apparently supernatural event" (Todorov 25).
Most medieval scholars classify Gawain as dealing with the "marvelous," not
the fantastic. In the poem, Arthur states that he will not eat until he sees a
"meruayle," or magical spectacle (1. 94). The genre of medieval romance most
often deals with appearances of the magical or marvelous. But Gawain does not
neatly fit within this genre either, despite the appearance of a magical green
knight. It does not deal with the marvelous in the same way as many medieval
romances that incorporate marvels as a matter of course. In Gawain, the appear-
ance of the Green Knight disrupts and disturbs Arthur and all his knights; he is
not merely accepted as another glimpse of the Otherworld in a context where
such intrusions were commonplace. In fact, the Gawain author seems to take
pains to emphasize how unexpected and shocking the appearance of the Green
Knight was to all who viewed him. Arthur may have expected a "meruayle," as
a matter of course, but its actual appearance stuns everyone.
The Gawain author appears to be straining this aspect of the romance genre
by creating a tension where in other romances there often was none. The appear-
ance of the Green Knight is not just part of the mechanics or matiere of romance
in Gawain. The text of the poem repeatedly reveals that the protagonists in this
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 109
romance do not accept the mysterious as merely a matter of course. For this
reason, Gawain cannot be neatly categorized as part of the genre of the marve-
lous. Todorov states that "the marvelous implies that we are plunged into a world
whose laws are totally different from what they are in our own and in conse-
quence that the supernatural events which occur are in no way disturbing" (172).
This is not true for the reader of Gawain because the author continues to disturb
the reader's apprehension of what has occurred. The supernatural events in
Gawain are disturbing despite the fact that the reader knows that she or he is in
a world whose laws are totally different. The events are disturbing because the
laws of that world are never clearly defined. What appears to be normal and not
part of the realm of the supernatural is later revealed as magic. It is one thing for
the characters within the world of romance or the marvelous to mistake the real
for the unreal, but what happens when the reader cannot make a clear determina-
tion either? Most readers find this disorientating even though they know they are
not dealing with a work of realism. Gawain is on the border between the marve-
lous and the fantastic. Elements of each genre cross back and forth freely.
Throughout the text of Gawain, the reader experiences an unsettling inability
to define the boundaries between what is real and what is magic. On Gawain's
journey through the "wyldrenesse of Wyrale" he journeys into a kind of border-
land between the real and the Otherworld (1. 701). He leaves the comfort and
"reality" of Arthur's court and enters into the realm of the unknown, the world
of Faerie. His journey leads him into North Wales, wild country where outlaws
roamed and legends of the supernatural abounded. He travels alone, far from all
his friends ("Fer floten fro his frendez fremedly he rydez") with only God to talk
to ("Ne no gome bot God bi gate wyth to karp" [11. 714; 696]). The narrator
states that on his journey Gawain encounters too many marvels to recount ("So
mony meruayl bi mount ther the mon fyndez, / Hit were to tore for to telle of
the tenthe dole" [11. 718-19]). Here very briefly stated are the marvels of
medieval romance that appear almost expectedly: the dragons ("wormez"), giants
("etaynez"), and wildmen ("wodwos"). But mingled with these beings of the
magical Otherworld are the dangerous but quite ordinary inhabitants of the forest:
"wolues," "bullez," "berez," and "borez." Gawain must fight them all off whether
natural or unnatural. As he leaves the realm of what is known, or what is part
of his normal perception of reality, he begins to encounter what the modern
reader would call the "unreal" or Otherworldly. At this point in the text the two
are easily distinguished, at least for the reader. But as Gawain crosses the border
into the Otherworld, things become less easily differentiated.
The landscape of reality becomes intermingled with the land of Faerie as
Gawain journeys North to what was, in the Middle Ages, the unknown wilder-
ness of Wales. This mixture of the real and the marvelous "disorients the reader's
categorization of the 'real'" (Jackson 20). The dragons and giants come from the
Welsh hillsides and dwell in a snow-covered landscape with icicles described
with realistic precision; Gawain suffers due to the freezing sleet from clouds that
cover the very normal looking winter sky, and he sleeps in his armor among the
naked rocks (11. 727-30). This is not the conventional depiction of the realm of
Faerie where the sun warms the green grass and all sense of time is lost. In fact,
Gawain travels with a heightened sense of time as he anticipates the dreaded day
of doom.
It is in this borderland between two worlds that Gawain finds lodging or "her-
berage." A castle appears magically shimmering in the oaks ("As hit schemered
and schon thurgh the schyre okez" [1. 772]). This castle suddenly appears imme-
diately after Gawain beseeches the Lord and the Virgin Mary to help him find
lodging. He crosses himself three times, and the castle miraculously appears. Is
the castle a result of his prayer to Mary, a manifestation of the miraculous, or is
it due to magic, perhaps the magic of Morgan La Fay? The poem provides no
clear answers to these questions of perception. At this point in the text neither
the reader nor Gawain has any inkling of the enchantress Morgan La Fay's parti-
cipation in Gawain's testing by the Green Knight. The castle seems to be a result
of Mary's intervention for her knight (Gawain has her image painted on the in-
side of his shield).
The castle is described with the factual detail of a fourteenth-century castle
well fortified with gleaming turrets and white pinnacles. The gleaming whiteness
of its chimneys and numerous towers make it seem like a white paper cutout
used for table decorations at medieval feasts: "That pared out of papure purely
hit semed" (1. 802). From the outside the castle appears almost surreal. J.R.R.
Tolkien's edition of the poem notes that these kinds of elaborate castles "began
to appear in the latter half of the fourteenth-century," and the Gawain poet pro-
vides a magnificent and magical description of such a castle (Tolkien and Gordon
99). To a modern reader the image of such an extraordinary medieval barbican
seems absolutely magical. But the castle would not appear out of the ordinary to
Gawain; he would at least recognize it as a familiar architectural structure. He
is given a warm welcome by the gate keeper and is treated like royalty by the
inhabitants of the castle who know of Arthur's court and are honored to have
Gawain as a guest among them; they know of his reputation as an honorable and
courteous knight. They provide an elaborate meal for him that is described with
all the details of a medieval feast; the courtly appearance of those who provide
lodging for him is also realistically portrayed.
Gawain has arrived at the castle in the midst of the holiday festivities and
stays for three days until the celebration is over. The host's wife, is beautiful and
takes a special interest in Gawain, who remains polite but loyal to his host, Sir
Bertilak. Lady Bertilak is attended by an old woman who provides a striking
contrast to the youth and perfect beauty of Lady Bertilak. The richness and vivid
colors of clothing and the details of how the food is prepared and served at the
castle are provided at length. This depiction of fourteenth-century aristocratic
style and taste is carefully sketched with matter-of-fact detail by the narrator.
There is nothing surreal about the inside of this castle. After the feasting, the
narration focuses on the exchange of winnings. The host goes hunting for each
of the three days, and Gawain is entertained by his wife who remains in the
castle to learn more of "luf-talkyng" from Gawain (1. 927). Despite the fact that
Lady Bertilak attempts to tempt Gawain, the events and persons inside the castle
seem perfectly normal, and nothing from the realm of the fantastic occurs.
Yet Gawain later learns that Morgan La Fay was the old woman in the castle,
and his host is revealed as the Green Knight. Gawain discovers that nothing was
as it seemed. The castle and its inhabitants were all part of Morgan La Fay's
plan to test Arthur's knight. Like Gawain, the reader experiences some discom-
fort from this revelation. A trick has been played upon Gawain, and the reader,
caught unaware, is unable to differentiate between what was magic and what was
not in this medieval tale. The boundaries between reality and fantasy are no
longer clearly apparent.
It is not common for the text of a fourteenth-century romance to emphasize
this tension between what seems to be magic and what appears to be reality. The
realm of Faerie may intrude upon the world of the everyday, but it does not usu-
ally leave the character and the reader confused about what is magical and what
is not; these things typically remain clear. In Sir Orfeo the land of Faerie remains
distinct from what Sir Orfeo perceives as the real world. He must find the Faerie
realm and travel into it to save his beloved spouse. There is a clear demarcation
between his entrance into the land of Faerie and his return from it. There is no
ambiguity about what is magical and what is real. But the author of Gawain cre-
ates tension between perceptions of what is real and what is magical, underscor-
ing this ambiguity in his portrayal of magic. The goddess Morgan is never shown
weaving her spells. She remains an invisible presence in the text only revealed
at the end of the tale, and then only her name is mentioned; she remains unseen.
Her only visible manifestation is in another form, disguised as Lady Bertilak's
aged companion.
The Green Knight first appears as a fantastic being, disrupting a nonfantastic
atmosphere. His entrance into Arthur's court is shocking because he comes from
the "Other" realm. He enters the tale in the midst of a very normal fourteenth-
century feast. The detailed narrative of plates, foods, and sauces is suddenly
shattered by the supernatural and an ensuing description of the fantastic. A hesi-
tation is experienced by Arthur and his knights. In his description of the Green
Knight, the author of the poem emphasizes the hesitation of Arthur's knights in
their determination of what is real and what is not; the hesitation defined by
Todorov "when a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronts an appar-
ently supernatural event" (25). Arthur's hall is deathly silent at the appearance
of the supernatural; no one utters a word, "And al stounded at his steven and
ston-stil seten/In a swoghe sylence thurgh the sale riche" (11. 242-43).
The narrator playfully suggests that their silence is due not just to fear but to
their "cortaysye," implying that even in the face of such a terrifying sight as a
bright green man on a green horse, Arthur's court maintains perfect decorum.
Those who see this amazing sight interpret it as a phantom or marvel from the
land of Faerie ("fayrye" [1. 240]). They wonder and marvel at what it might
mean [1. 233]; they are frightened and disturbed by it. When the Green Knight
makes his challenge, no one answers: "If he hem stowned upon fyrst, stiller were
thanne / Alle the heredmen in halle, the hygh and the loghe" (1. 301-2). This is
not the response of those who are comfortable with appearances from the Other-
world. Their extreme uneasiness and fear toward this inexplicable creature gives
the Green Knight opportunity to taunt them for their cowardice; he makes King
Arthur blush for shame. Arthur at first agrees to take the challenge of the first
blow with the ax not because he is unafraid but because of his pride, his
"sourquydrye" (1. 311). Gawain asks to take the challenge in King Arthur's stead,
politely requesting that he be allowed to give the first blow. And when Gawain
has severed the Green Knight's head, the knight picks up his head by the hair
with its face toward Gwenevere. The head speaks, revealing the Green Knight's
identity as the knight of the green chapel; he gives Gawain the details of the time
and place of the return blow, then rides off with his head in his hand, fire flying
from the flint of his horse's hooves. The event is spoken of as a great marvel by
those in Arthur's court, and Gawain and Arthur laugh and grin when the spec-
tacle is over.
This laughter and mirth might be interpreted as proof of the "typical"
medieval response to the marvelous and seem to invalidate Gawain's classifica-
tion as going beyond the marvelous and bordering the fantastic. However, the
narrator is careful to point out the nervous strain of this laughter. Arthur only
appears to be undisturbed by the event, and though he fears and wonders at the
sight, he lets no hint of this reaction be seen ("Thagh Arther the hende kyng at
hert hade wonder, / He let no semblaunt be sene," [11. 467-68]). The king's ad-
dress to Gwenevere that she not be dismayed, that such marvels befit the Christ-
mas season, is part of his semblance of gaiety. His lighthearted attitude and
joking is an act, not his true response to the event. He even jokes with Gawain
to put up his ax that he has hewn enough ("that hatz innogh hewen," [1. 477]).
But in the midst of this joking, the narrator's voice again imposes a tone of high
seriousness. The narrative moves from the lighthearted banter of Arthur's feast
to the narrator's ominous warning that Gawain think well upon the "aventure"
he has undertaken. And the joking turns to "sturne werk," as the seasons quickly
pass and Gawain must fulfill his obligation of the return blow at the green
chapel.
It is Gawain's real fear for his life that causes him to accept the girdle of
Lady Bertilak as a magic token to save him from death at the stroke of the Green
Knight's ax. The reader also is worried about Gawain's life. Normally in a
medieval romance the reader is assured of the hero's superior prowess and guar-
anteed victory over every obstacle. But the narrator of Gawain continually casts
doubt in the reader's mind as to the welfare of Gawain, undermining the usual
confidence the reader of a romance would have in the hero's ultimate survival.
He continues to remind the reader that Gawain is in serious danger and maintains
a sense of suspense that is continually built upon as the tale unravels. Nothing
is known for sure. The reader is concerned and confused, as is Gawain, about
the final outcome of events at the green chapel. Nothing has been clearly de-
fined. The revelation of the Green Knight's identity and conspiracy with Morgan
La Fay is the key to the operation of the fantastic in Gawain. For at this point
the reader discovers that her or his identification of the Green Knight as a being
under the laws of the Otherworld, and therefore not "real," is no longer valid.
The Green Knight now seems a normal man, the host Bertilak who by the aid
of Morgan's magic can appear to be a supernatural being of Faerie, a green man.
But this is merely the tricks of magic. Sir Bertilak is no supernatural being from
the Otherworld; he is a man who with his wife hosted Gawain at a castle;
nothing out of the ordinary. Yet this interpretation too is problematic, as the old
woman seen by Gawain in the castle is identified as the infamous half sister of
Arthur, Morgan La Fay, and Bertilak says that Morgan stays at his house. Was
there other magic at work in this castle? Was it a real castle or was it the result
of Morgan's magic? Perhaps the castle was real but those who filled it phantoms,
again the result of magic. The fact that Morgan orchestrates the testing of
Gawain and the fantastic appearance of the Green Knight at Arthur's court
changes the reader's perception of the entire tale. Not only does Gawain become
disgruntled at this revelation but the reader also experiences an uneasy loss of
bearings. The reader's perceptions of what aspects of the tale were to be inter-
preted as realistic and what were understood as unreal have become less clearly
distinguishable. In fact, the reader is now unable to classify what is attributable
to magic or Faerie in the tale and what is not. The reader's reaction to this
sudden shift in interpretive rules is much like Gawain's startled jump when he
sees drops of his own blood on the snow after the Green Knight's ax barely
nicks him on the neck. Again, nothing is as it seems. Gawain has only a super-
ficial wound; the giant ax does no further harm, nor is his life endangered.
This hesitation in interpreting the tale's events fulfills one aspect of Todorov's
definition of the fantastic. It cannot be argued that Gawain is fully a tale of the
fantastic in Todorov's explanation of the term. But neither can it be said that the
poem is easily categorized as another instance of the medieval tale of the marve-
lous. Perhaps Jackson's attempt to clarify Todorov's definition of the fantastic
best accommodates Gawain, for she describes the fantastic as a mode that bor-
rows the extravagance of the marvelous and the ordinariness of the mimetic but
belongs to neither genre (35). The author of Gawain uses the stock material of
the medieval romance, the appearance of the inexplicable, magic, and testing of
the hero. But he continually makes game or "gomen" of the traditional romance
material; in Gawain there is constant strain upon the interpretation of the stan-
dard material of medieval romance. In Gawain what appears to be reality may,
in fact, be magic and what seems to be magical may have an explanation in the
realm of the mundane.
The sophistication of the Gawain author's use of ambiguity in his juxtaposi-
tion of the marvelous and the magical creates a tension in the mind of the reader
equal to that of any modern writer's use of the same material. This tension is
manifest on a number of levels and informs the poem's narrative of the fantastic.
The Gawain poet is not creating a naive tale of the Otherworld that he antici-
pates his readers will accept with little astonishment. The discomfort and fear
associated with the events of the Otherworld are clearly displayed in the text of
Gawain and repeatedly pointed out by the author.
WORKS CITED
Andrew, Malcolm, and Ronald Waldrom, eds., The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. All references to Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight have been taken from this text. The Middle English spellings of yogh
and thorn that appear in the text have been replaced with gh and th.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Cleveland,
OH: Case Western Reserve University, 1973.
Tolkien, J.R.R., and E. V. Gordon, eds. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 2nd ed.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.
13
Oliphaunts in the Perilous Realm:

The Function of Internal Wonder in Fantasy
William Senior
At the end of the second book of The Lord of the Rings, Sam and Frodo have
been captured by Faramir as he is setting an ambush for the Men of Harad who
are marching into Mordor. Detained until the battle is over and Faramir can
judge what to do with them, the hobbits wait with their two guards until the fight
actually comes to them after the Southrons are routed and try to escape. Amid
the confusion, noise, and horror of this encounter, one particular revelation
makes Sam forget the rest: the oliphaunt. "To his astonishment and terror, and
lasting delight, Sam saw a vast shape crash out of the trees and come careering
down the slope. Big as a house, much bigger than a house, it looked to him, a
grey-clad moving hill. Fear and wonder, maybe, enlarged him in the hobbit's
eyes but the Mumak of Harad was indeed a beast of vast bulk and the like of
him does not now walk in Middle Earth" (341).
In this brief scene, Dickensian humor meets a Burkean sublime to produce
Manlovian wonder. Yet the importance of this incident lies in the fact that the
wonder is projected inward, at Sam, not at us as readers. It is this question of in-
ternal wonderof the awe, surprise, amazement, fascination, experienced and ex-
pressed by and at those in fantasy fictionthat I wish to explore, for it seems
to me significant and important in the construction of the secondary world of
fantasy and in its effect on the reader. Effective fantasies, I will venture, rely on
a combination of both outward- and inward-directed wonder to create a balance
between secondary and primary worlds.
The anatomy of wonder has a long and distinguished history in the study of
fantasy. Colin Manlove builds his definition from the cornerstone of wonder,
citing it as the first criterion before even that of the impossible or the "cannot
happen": "a fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible
element of the supernatural" (1,7). Tolkien stresses the evocation of wonder as
one of the operating principles of fantasy in connecting the primary and secon-
dary worlds and thus involving the reader's perceptions: "And actually fairy-
stories deal largely, or (the better ones) mainly, with simple or fundamental
things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more lumi-
nous by their setting. . . . It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency
of words, and the wonder of things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and
grass; house and fire; bread and wine" ("On Fairy-Stories" 78). Brian Attebery
paraphrases the concept of estrangement in commenting that "[t]he most impor-
tant thing they [fantasies] share is the sense of wonder. . . . Fantasy invokes
wonder by making the impossible seem familiar and the familiar new and
strange" (3). Eric Rabkin observes that two central elements in the establishment
of the fantastic are surprise and astonishment (12), kissing cousins to wonder,
while W. R. Irwin goes so far as to state that the purpose of fantasy is to incite
wonder (7). Others, of course, follow suit, but one thing all have in common is
that they focus primarily on the external evocation of wonder, that experienced
by the reader. Yet the internal elicitation of wonder also constitutes one of the
powerful calls in fantasy, and its importance in producing the Coleridgean sus-
pension of disbelief, of allowing the reader to become immersed in the story,
should not be underestimated.
Put simply, there are two basic forms this Janus-like face of wonder takes.
The first involves characters from our world, who are generally translated to
another, magical world or less frequently encounter the seemingly impossible in
ours; they confront the marvelous and uncanny much as we would do and there-
by stand in for us and serve as keys for our responses. A character such as the
unremarkably named Bernard Brown of John Brunner's Traveller in Black, asked
by the citizen of Ryorova to intercede for them, is "competent . . . in matters
touching roads, drains and bridges and similar practical undertakings" (38),
hardly a heroic response. His initial reactions to the impossible experiences he
encounters in the Traveller's world reflect Anyman's: disbelief, shock, and wide-
eyed astonishment. Once he is established, despite his protests, among the local
citizenry as a savior wizard or god, his observations, which are grounded in
everyday experience in our primary world, create awe and veneration among the
population, who return his wonder of them. Thus, their perception of their world
(and their putative gods) undergoes a shift that brings them closer to our own,
an example of the reflexive working of external and internal wonder.
Furthermore, those characters who remain in our recent or contemporary
world reproduce or anticipate the reader's reactions. Real-world fantasies may
well constitute the smallest body of fantasies, since high or heroic fantasy gene-
rally demands the alternate world. Brian Aldiss sardonically posits that "one prin-
ciple of fantasy is to have the magic event happen far away. Not only does dis-
tance lend enchantment; it makes facts hard to check on" {Romance 4). Yet fan-
tasies set in the contemporary world do exist, and among acclaimed works set in
a vaguely modern age (as opposed to the quasi-medieval prototype) are Mark
Helprin's Winter's Tale, Matt Ruffs Fool on the Hill, Dan Simmons's World
The Function of Internal Wonder in Fantasy 117
Fantasy award-winner Song of Kali, Michaela Roessner's Walkabout Woman,

Peter Beagle's A Fine and Private Place, and Suzy McKee Charnas' Dorothea
Dreams. Helprin's Peter Lake explores the incredible riches and potentialities of
a lyrical and visionary New York City, for instance, which commingles the real
with the ideal and leaves him overwhelmed. Roessner's aboriginal heroine Raba
signals to us the exotic alienness and distance from our world of the Outback,
which can captivate even without the supernatural, while her embassies into the
Dreamtime of aboriginal myth add yet another dimension of wonder. Ruffs co-
mic portrayal of university life, complete with a fraternity named Tolkien House
and resident sprites in the library, is really about the wonder of discovery and of
knowledge that one hopes for in all students, while Simmons' gruesome novel
makes us cringe as it replays the ironic horror of the world we inhabit in which
children are destroyed more horribly than in any invented world. An anodyne
exists in Charnas' Dorothea Dreams when art, the sole magic medium left in our
world, can save both children and adults from everyday dangers and problems
we would all recognize. Her characters wonder, in the worst sense of the word,
at each other until a greater wonder seizes and unites them all.
Where the application of real-world events to seeming impossible or incom-
prehensible behavior or events enjoys the greatest appeal and acceptance is in the
subgenre of mass market horror that uses wonder as a stepping stone to terror.
The shambling zombie, the vampire, the slithering monster, the invulnerable mu-
tant, the BEM from hellall would cause pacemakers to stop and cars to collide
on Main Street, Anytown, after jaws dropped and eyes bulged. Perhaps one of
Stephen King's greatest strengths lies in his workaday characters' fidelity to the
average person's reactions and behavior before supernatural evil, as wonder,
admixes with them and results in terror. Certainly It, flawed as the novel is by
the midcourse shift from horror to science fiction, translates the seeds of every
child's fears about adult strength, repression, and incomprehensibility, all of
which the child must marvel at, into terms anyone can understand. H. P.
Lovecraft appeals to similar responses in his shabby old towns beneath which
timeless horrors lurk, waiting for someone, foolishly captivated by the promise
of fascinating discovery, to release them; the perspective of the innocent and
curious often dominates, and horror exudes from the gap between what is and
what is imagined. On another level at times, comedy enters, for instance, in
Nancy Collins's Sunglasses after Dark when Claude Hagerty is so amazed at
what the vampire Sonia Blue can do that he actually forgets to be afraid of her
for a little while. As hoods sent by her enemies attempt to kill them, he sits
with broken bonesin amazement at her defense and then awakes to see a con-
cerned vampire leaning over him (and his throat), trying to help.
A contrast to the principle I am discussing comes in Kafka's "Metamorpho-
sis"; one of the continuing curiosities of this tale for me has always been Gregor
Samsa's family's general acceptance of his transformation, for disgust, not
wonder or terror, is the keynote here. Gregor wakes up as an "ungeheuer

Ungeziefer," a giant bug or cockroach, yet his family does not call in the police,
the secret service, or even a good entomologist (119). What gives here? Is
Kafka's allegory of the neglected so close to us that it precludes wonder in favor
of disgust at our daily world? Is Gregor, the functionary enmeshed in bestial ser-
vility along with his family, so common that wonder is, de facto, banished?
Why is the marvel of Gregor's transformation subjugated to other concerns? I
suspect that Kafka's intent is to show us that we are so complacent or so reluc-
tant to deal with the new or unusual so that making Gregor's metamorphosis
"fantastic" would undermine his social critique. The only one who seems to won-
der about what has happened to Gregor is Gregor; in fact, his morbidly funny
discovery of a roach's mobility (and his pleasure therein) twitches the novelette
in line with other fantasies.
For in all the previous works, it seems clear that internal wonder's direct
functions are to induce reader identification and comprehension through vicarious
experiences and to bring the fantasy world into contrast with the everyday one,
so perhaps little more need be said about it. Yet in the second type of internal
wonder, that exhibited by the inhabitants of the astounding world, the same does
not hold true, and other forces are at work. The reactions of characters native to
secondary worlds again ally them to us but in different ways; in this group mem-
bers, even magical ones, of the various races of fantasyelves, dwarves, giants,
mer-creatures, goblins, trolls, men of various sorts, and so onare captivated by
the marvels of their own world. Because they are not inhabitants of our world,
their response to the secondary world heightens and deepens our own. Moreover,
their feelings and reactions provide a bedrock on which the first class of wonder
can be built. If the inhabitants of Faerie stand in wide-eyed astonishment at the
rivers, mountains, creatures, battles, or magical events of their world, certainly
they draw both mortal visitors and readers into understanding the primary and
secondary worlds in terms of each other.
For the worlds are paramount. Perhaps fantasy's most powerful attraction for
readers resides in the wonder of the fantasyscape, especially since many of the
plots are redundant and formulaic and the characters imitations of established
types and archetypes. Thus, appreciation of the marvelous world must be crafted
through both external and internal expressions of wonder, if it is to be effective
and efficient. We expect denizens of our world to be openmouthed at the beauty
and bounty, or the terror and evil, of the fantasy worlds to which they are trans-
ported. As Raymond Thompson puts it, "The splendor of the new surroundings
consequently gains from the wonder it inspires in these travellers from less exotic
regions" (218-19). If the children ofC. S. Lewis's Narnia books saunter into that
country as though into the town green, wonder flees before the grotty ogre of di-
dacticism. If Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant and later Linden Avery are
not moved by the grandeur of the Land, they becomes spectral figures whose
experiences we might well resent, since they would seem clearly unworthy of
them. Much of the effect of Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker resides in both the
emotional and philosophical outpourings of the unnamed narrator who is inspired
by the alternate worlds he visits. Such figures' sense of awe, surprise, and
admiration co-creates our own in the truest Wordsworthian sense by evoking
things not before our eyes but held in our minds and hearts.
Characters not of our world who live in the sub-created fantasy world marvel
at the spectacles and mysteries in their own existence and experiences. Certainly,
the appearance of the oliphaunt does not have the same effect on us that it has
on Sam the hobbit. The beast is merely a larger version of what we all have
seen, whereas Sam himself is an occasion of wonder, being a smaller version of
what we have never seen. Even the maps Tolkien lovingly and intricately details
function differently in and out of the narrative. To hobbits, wizards, dwarves, and
elves alike they are treasured heirlooms with powers and conundrums of their
own, often magic-laden relics to be pored over with careful devotion. Frodo and
Bilbo especially are fascinated and drawn by them. To us, as readers, they are
primarily guides, certainly captivating ones, but lacking the emotional impact
they have on the characters in Middle Earth, since we cannot, as they say in
Maine, get there from here. And I have little doubt that every serious reader of
fantasy has at one time or another finished a book and wanted to write the author
an irritated or plaintive note asking for a map or even for better maps, simply
from a more pedestrian type of wondering.
As I pointed out before, those who do not live in Narnia, Prydain, Middle
Earth, the Land, Fionavar, the Enchanted Forest, or any of their magical parallels
should react with wonder because of the strangeness of the new environment. But
what of the typical fantasy character to whom magic is a familiar accompaniment
to everyday life? What of those adepts and powerful mages who control such
forces? What function does their awe play in the creation of our own or in the
creation of the secondary world? For they too react with wonder and incredulous
appreciation before the marvels of their worlds: Aragorn wandering as if dazed
through Lorien, Gimli elevated to rhetorical exuberance at the caves in Helm's
Deep; Faramir moved beyond grief, worry, and fear at Frodo's announcement of
his errand. Standing before the majesty of Revelstone, Saltheart Foamfollower's
delight and amazement surpass Covenant's although as a Giant he is kin to those
who built it, and even those who dwell in itthe Lords, soldiers, and citizens
never cease to marvel at its power. In Kay's Fionavar trilogy, as the unicorn
walks through Pendaran Wood "among the gathered powers, seen and unseen, a
murmur like the forest's answer to the sea had risen up and fallen like a wave
in the wood" (I, 266). In Roger Zelazny's Amber, one distinguishing characteris-
tic is the awe that even the hardheaded and devious princes and princesses feel
when they have returned to Amber itself as opposed to their pedestrian view of
our Earth. In Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea, all marvel at, even as they worry about,
dragons. Toward the end of his journey with Ged, Arren sees dragons far beyond
the reaches of man, "and his heart leapt up then with them with a joy, a joy of
fulfillment, that was like pain"; and he thinks to himself, "I do not care what
comes after; I have seen dragons on the wind of morning" (III, 147). Even John
Brunner's demigod, the Traveler in Black, at times himself stands in admiration
or wonder as he makes his appointed rounds.
This type of internal wonder operates beyond the yoking of the reader's ex-
perience to that of the characters', although it plays a supporting role there too.
Since one of the foremost concerns of the fantasy author is the construction of
the secondary world, if it does not ring true, the fiction will not succeed. Rabkin
insists that the internal ground rules of fantasy must be consistent. One stipula-
tion must, therefore, be the establishment of formal realism for internal response.
A fantasy world cannot be concomitantly mundane and fascinating, and its inha-
bitants must be moved by its properties. Their response, as an internal patterning,
helps us to understand fantasy in terms of what Sir Herbert Read calls "extravert-
ed feeling" (Irwin 39). Here, paradoxically enough, the effects arise from an in-
ternally generated feeling that is transformed into an external response for the
reader.
Thus, what exists in our world must be reproduced in the other, yet separated
and distinguished from it at the same time. Attebery points out that "to recover
our sense of something like a tree, it is only necessary to envision a dragon
curled around its trunk" (Strategies 16). If we place amazed dwellers of that
world around both the tree and the dragon, both take on greater depth, as do the
observers themselves, yet it is not simply the juxtaposition of dragon-tree obser-
vers that allows recovery or revitalization of the idea of tree; the astonishment
or sense of the sublime that comes from those observers endows the entire scene
with life beyond the verbal portrait of dragon and tree.
In such ways the various wonderful beings of Faerie contribute to the efficacy
of a secondary creation. Gary Wolfe tells us that "in an effective fantasy work
we do not lose our sense of the wondrous or impossible even long after all the
marvels have been introduced and the magic has become commonplace" (5-6).
Much of this effect must be produced by the construction of internal wonder.
Elves are of themselves a source of amazement to many characters in fantasy, yet
they also testify to wonder and help create different levels of perception. We
cannot, hobbits cannot, dwarves cannot see as elves see in their world; their
vision thereby expands ours. An elf lost in wonder, mazed by beauty or sorrow,
can only intensify the impact of the scene or event. Similarly, a wizard or mage
enchanted by some lost periapt or exposition of magical power brings the object
or act into a different focus than if it called for only casual scrutiny. Michael
Scott Rohan's mastersmith Elof stands astounded at his own creations and skill;
their reality is a source of pride and yet amazement in him. And warriors grow
in stature as a result of the reactions of those around them; even Beowulf s own
men shake their heads in disbelief at both Grendel's arm and their leader's handy
removal thereof.
For their world is one of discovery as well so that as each character uncovers
the new and marvelous, his or her reaction is passed on to the reader. One popu-
lar and pervasive fantasy paradigm centers on a naive and inexperienced hero
who takes a voyage to grow into his or her potential, so by necessity he or she
must meet incredible beings and places previously undreamt of: dragons, trolls,
talking trees, walking stones, magical doors, shape-changing creatures, and so on.
Bilbo and Frodo, Ged, Morgon of Patricia McKillip's "Riddlemaster" novels,
Jane Yolen's White Jenna, and countless others fit this pattern. Part of their edu-
cation consists of being introduced to the wonders of their world by a parental
figure, an archetype of wisdom, a Gandalf or an Ogion, who teaches them the
value of knowledge and the never-ending wonders of the world around them.
Wonder, however, is a two-edged sword that poses difficulties for an author.
Some fantasies seem to strive for an endless series of prodigies at which the
characters ooh and ahh in bathetic reverence. In an early article on the nature of
fantasy, Jane Mobley identifies "essential extravagance" as one of fantasy's pre-
dominant characteristics: "The language of fantasy is itself extravagant, creating
oftentimes by the mere unpronounceability of names the wonder and greatness
of it all" (124). Yet I think this is an overstatement, for this essential extrava-
gance all too frequently is the mark of bad fantasy, of shoddy imitations. Brian
Aldiss warns of this sort of writing. Concocting a fictional writer named Astrid
Stanza, he posits a situation in which she writes at the behest of an editor who
"suggests that quest stories are popular at present; perhaps a quest in which Inno-
cent [sic] has to overcome Evil and the young Witch Maiden saves the universe."
To make the story more exciting, she has her "characters cry such things as
'Welladay'" and gives them "difficult and unmemorable names of not more than
two syllables: Scrant, Gremte, Gringi, 'vizzil, and so on" ("Zilla" 11-12). As
arcane or affected language stands in for world-building and craftsmanship, each
weir or bosk ravishes the assaulted sense beyond the power of the last; each sel-
kie, ghole, or tantarrabob outdoes its predecessor in minatory ghastliness; each
sylvan Phaery sprite whorls in dance, trailing nacreous gloamings of moondew.
In such cases, overreaching brings down all, for the attempt to make everything
wonder-filled cannot be sustained. To emphasize everything, of course, is ulti-
mately to emphasize nothing.
On the other hand, a different weakness in many fantasies, especially in the
myriad Tolkien imitations, in the merely formulaic and redundant sagas of noble
elves, grumpy dwarves, and good people, is lack of wonder, most notably inter-
nal wonder simply because all has been reduced to preestablished or preapproved
conventions. Most of the characters in such works go blithely about their busi-
ness, and the things that produce wonder in other stories here simply form win-
dowdressings. There is no sense of estrangement, or even of "essential extrava-
gance" with a function, no miracle or marvelous edging into the unknown or re-
known. Such books and tales reduce themselves to a Dungeons and Dragons pro-
position of playing at elves and dwarves, as if of ducks and drakes. Certainly,
their author-creators can fill them with wondrous beings, objects, and events, all
directed toward the reader's sensibility; but without an effective internal wonder
filigreed into the structure of things, these outward shows all fail. The Pickwick-
ian Sam confronted with the glorious oliphaunt becomes a Gradgrindian, utili-
tarian Sam who sees only a quadruped, graminiverous, pachydermous, possessed
of tusks and trunk, habitat generally subtropical. Such an unfortunate creature has
been dispossessed not only of wonder but of reality itself. Fantasy, through the
medium of wonder, not only allows us to see things as they aren't; it lets us
realize things as they arefrom the inside out.
WORKS CITED
Aldiss, Brian. The Romance of the Equator. New York: Atheneum, 1990.
. "Was Zilla Right?" JFA 1.1 (1988): 7-24.
Attebery, Brian. The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature. Bloomington: Indiana
. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1992.
Beagle, Peter. A Fine and Private Place: The Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle. New York:
Viking, 1978.
Brunner, John. The Compleat Traveller in Black. New York: Macmillan, 1986.
Collins, Nancy. Sunglasses after Dark. New York: Onyx/NAL, 1989.
Charnas, Suzy McKee. Dorothea Dreams. New York: Berkley, 1987.
Donaldson, Stephen R. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. 3 vols. New
York: Del Rey, 1977.
Helprin, Mark. Winter's Tale. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.
Irwin, W.R. The Game of the Impossible. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1975.
Kafka, Franz. "Die Verwandlung." Meistererzahlurgen. Ed. Anna Othen. New York:
Appleton-Century Crofts, 1969. 119-179.
Kay, Guy Gavriel. The Fionavar Tapestry. 3 vols. New York: Berkley, 1986.
King, Stephen. //. New York: NAL/Signet, 1986.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Earthsea Trilogy. 3 vols. New York: Bantam, 1968.
Manlove, C. N. Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975.
McKillop, Patricia. Riddle of Stars: The Riddle Master of Hed; Heir of Sea and Fire;
Harpest in the Wind. New York: Nelson Doubleday, 1979.
Mobley, Jane. "Toward a Definition of Fantasy Fiction." Extrapolation 15 (1974): 117-18.
Rabkin, Eric. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976.
Roessner, Michaela. Walkabout Woman. New York: Bantam, 1988.
Rohan, Michael Scott. The Anvil of Ice. New York: Avon, 1986.
Ruff, Matt. Fool on the Hill. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988.
Simmons, Dan. Song of Kali. New York: Tor, 1991.
Stapledon, Olaf. Star Maker. Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1987.
Thompson, Raymond. "Modem Fantasy and Medieval Romance: A Comparative Study."
In The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Fiction. Ed. Roger Schlobin. Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982. 211-25.
Tolkien, J.R.R. "On Fairy-Stories." The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books,
1966. 31-99.
. The Lord of the Rings. 3 vols. New York: Ballantine, 1965.
Wolfe, Gary. "The Encounter with Fantasy." In The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and
Fiction. Ed. Roger Schlobin. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982. 1-
15.
Yolen, Jane. White Jenna. New York: Tor, 1989.
Zelazny, Roger. The Chronicles of Amber. 2 vols. New York: Doubleday, [1979].
14
Criminal Artists and Artisans in Mysteries

by E.T.A. Hoffman, Dorothy Sayers,
Ernesto Sabato, Patrick Suskind, and
Thomas Harris
Edith Borchardt
Much has been written on the subject of genius and neurosis,1 and psychobiogra-
phies of the artistic personality are numerous;2 however, literature on the artist
as criminal is scarce. In real life, there are probably no artists who murder for
their art or whose art is murder. In literature, such figures are also relatively rare.
There are, however, several fictional artists with psychopathic disorders that
cause them to murder. E.T.A. Hoffmann's Cardillac in Das Frdulein von Scuderi
is a goldsmith in seventeenth-century Paris who kills the recipients of the jewelry
he creates. Loder in "The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers"
by Dorothy Sayers is a sculptor who bronzes his mistress and incorporates the
statue into the settee in his living room. Grenouille in Patrick Suskind's Perfume,
who has learned the art of perfume-making (maceration and enfleurage), extrac-
ting essential oils from flowers to distill their fragrance, transposes this art to the
human realm, murdering two dozen nubile young women to extract the virginal
essence of their smell in order to make others love him and exalt him above
God. Jame Gumb, a serial killer like Cardillac and Grenouille, artfully skins the
women he murders in The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris. Ernesto
Sabato's Juan Pablo Castel is a painter, whose first-person narrative in The
Tunnel relates how he came to kill Maria, his mistress and the only person to
understand him.
Cardillac's seventeenth-century explanation for his affliction is based on
superstition, a terrifying prenatal experience that caused his passion for jewelry
and its association with death. Modern psychology, however, would attribute it
to a form of narcissism. There is little to go on in an analysis of Loder. His mo-
tivation seems to be extreme jealousy and possessiveness. Both Grenouille and
Juan Pablo Castel clearly suffer from an inability to integrate the male and fe-
male aspects of their personality, as does Jame Gumb, who wants to be a woman.
These characters hardly conform to the ideal of the artist as prophet and priest,
the messianic mediator with a definite function and place in society. Ever since
the advent of modernity, especially in the writings of Thomas Mann, the artist
in literature has become more and more suspect, increasingly a social deviant.
This coincides with the advent of psychology and the probing of the dark side
of human nature (which has its roots in German Romanticism with the writings
of Schubert, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kleist, and Tieck, for example). Rather than
divinely inspired, the criminal artists are driven by forces of evil originating in
the depths of the human psyche. Their efforts to artistically possess aspects of an
individuality beyond the immediate conscious self results in a failed attempt at
maturation.
The Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato, who created one of the criminal artists
discussed here, remarks in a collection of essays on the relationship of art and
society that Romanticism (by contrast with the Enlightenment) accepted evil "as
an unavoidable and positive manifestation of concrete being" (The Writer in the
Catastrophe of Our Time 134) and considers the task of the modern novel to be
the study of evil: "Real man has existed since the fall. Without the Devil he does
not exist. God is not enough" (145). The positive manifestation of evil as a result
of the fall from innocence in the Garden of Eden was a new awareness on the
part of Adam and Eve. Differentiation went hand in hand with a new level of
consciousness. Thus, the biblical myth describes the individuation process: the
separation from the original source of creation, the fall into time and space and
consciousness of the self. When God created Eve from Adam, the original primal
unity of male-female became split into male and female. After the fall, Adam
and Eve looked at each other and saw that they were naked. They became aware
of themselves. Succumbing to the temptation of the snake, associated with evil,
and eating from the tree of knowledge, they attained a higher consciousness that
brought with it separation from Paradise, where they had existed naively. Para-
dise represents the cosmic relationship of the human being, the oneness with eter-
nity lost that becomes the object of ideality. In his Marionettentheater, the Ger-
man Romantic Heinrich von Kleist develops a triadic scheme for this process in
which the human being, located between inanimate existence that has no con-
sciousness at all and infinite consciousness represented by God, would have to
strive to regain entrance to Paradise by eating once more of the apple from the
tree of knowledge.
Such a metaphysical interpretation of Sabato's view of evil does not preclude
the connection of metaphysics with the human psyche. Until the advent of mo-
dern psychology, the care of the soul used to be the domain of pastors or priests.
The artist, originally creator in imitatio del, takes on the function of mediating
the divine in Early German Romanticism, revealing the infinite beyond finite
appearances. The modern artist, however, starting with Late Romanticism, has
become increasingly destructive. Unlike Goethe's ultimate illusionist Mephisto,
whose spirit of negation serves progress and, in spite of evil intentions, the good
of humankind, recent fictional artists destroy human beings for the sake of their
Criminal Artists and Artisans in Mysteries 127
objectification in art rather than destroying the illusion of art for the sake of life,
as happens in Romanticism. There is a reversal of artistic intention: a subversion
of Romantic irony, in which form was destroyed for the sake of life.
The artists in the mysteries discussed here are sinister because of their obses-
sions, in each case connected with their relationships with women or the femi-
nine. Loder and Castel kill because of monstrous jealousy. Cardillac is doomed
to associate gold with death and must murder as the result of a prenatal memory.
Grenouille, like Jame Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs, eliminates young
women in order to obtain an ideal of beauty.
The narrator in E.T.A. Hoffmann's nineteenth-century story explains
Cardillac's criminality on the basis of superstition: When the goldsmith's mother
was pregnant with Cardillac, she attended a ball in the Trianon at Versailles,
where she was attracted by a necklace of sparkling jewels around the neck of a
gentleman in Spanish dress. This man, who had pursued Cardillac's mother some
years before and had been rejected, now appeared like a being from a higher
world because of the splendor of the diamonds and seemed to be the epitome of
beauty. Encouraged by the wistful gazes of the mother, this man enticed her
away from court to a secluded place, intending to seduce her. When he embraced
her, Cardillac's mother reached for the necklace, and at that moment, he died
(perhaps of a stroke) and fell, taking the woman down with him. She struggled
in vain to extricate herself from his embrace and had to be freed by passersby
who heard her screams. To this prenatal event Cardillac attributes the "evil star"
that dominates his life: the passion for jewels and the association of jewelry with
death. As a child, he used to steal gold and jewels, reaping chastisement from his
father. In order to get his hands on gold and silver honorably, he chose to
become a goldsmith, but whenever he had completed a commissioned piece of
jewelry, he was compelled by an inner voice to steal it back, and hatred for the
recipient of his creation caused him to kill.
Cardillac's obsession with his art has been interpreted in a psychoanalytic
study by Peter Schneider ("Verbrechen, KUnstlertum und Wahnsinn") on the
basis of a theory of narcissism. He attributes Cardillac's crimes to his artistry and
a Romantic aesthetic in which the sense of beauty superseded the sense of moral-
ity (46). The jewels in E.T.A. Hoffman's story represent a sublime beauty, how-
ever deceptive and illusory, as is evident in the seduction scene with the mother,
where the wearer of the jewels suddenly seems like a being of a higher order.
The beauty of his jewels makes him attractive to her, so that she succumbs to his
embrace. The sublime illusion of the mother, however, becomes demoniac reality
for Cardillac. His attraction to the gold, cathected with narcissistic libido (47),
becomes his "evil star" in that he cannot separate himself from his creation. The
perfection of the jewelry he has created always falls short of the perfection he
imagines, so that he has to hold on to it or reclaim it by murder and thievery.
Fixated in his psychological development by the memory of his mother's trauma,
he wants to prevent further seduction of women with his jewels (34). To preserve
their honor and, ironically, his own integrity (i.e., identity with his art that
includes bourgeois respectability), he cannot part with his creations. His own
ideal image connected with them is destroyed when he is compelled to murder
to reclaim them, symbolically vanquishing the seducer of his mother.
A skilled craftsman or artisan like Cardillac, Jame Gumb (alias Buffalo Bill)
skins the young women he murders, in order to tailor their skins to fit his own
figure in an attempt to be the female he admires, specifically his own mother.
She was for him the epitome of beauty that he tries to emulate and wants to be-
come by slipping into their skins. Inside the throat of one of the victims, just
behind the soft palate, investigators in the novel find a cylindrical object, the
cocoon of an exotic tropical insect, identified as Erebus odora, the Black Witch
Moth (105). Unlike the harmless butterfly, whose larvae go through similar
stages of transformation in its development, the moth is characterized by its de-
structiveness and in the novel becomes a symbol for death. According to an old
definition, the moth was "anything that gradually, silently eats, consumes, or
wastes any other thing" (106). The image subverts the notion of transformation
on a psychological level.
According to the Jungian point of view, an individual comes to terms with
himself or herself only by accomplishing an inner marriage of the polarities with-
in the personality, symbolized by male and female in the hieros aamos, the inner
marriage (Singer 323) that leads to the evolution of the complete human being.
If this process fails, a person "will be looking for another person who will fill
out the inner empty places. This must make the individual the victim of his emo-
tional dependence" (323). In order to deny this need and to become autonomous,
Jame Gumb destroys the female (symbol for the mother) and tries to take her
place by becoming the woman. Identity for him (like beauty) is only skin-deep.
Speaking to his mirror (reminiscent of the fairy-tale motif: "Mirror, mirror on the
wall, Who is the fairest of them all?"), he used the upper range of his naturally
deep voice to request the reflection of a female image: "Do something for me,
honey. Do something for me SOON" (136). He had been taking hormones that
had thinned the hair across his chest and developed "slightly budding breasts"
(136). With electrolysis he had removed his beard, "but he still did not look like
a woman. He looked like a man inclined to fight with his nails as well as his
fists and feet" (136). Instead of internalizing the feminine within his own person-
ality, as ordinarily happens for the male in the process of maturation, Jame
Gumb seeks external evidence of his femininity and tries to transform himself
by chemical means (Premarin and diethylstilbestrol). His identity, furthermore,
depends on the skins he gathers from the women he kills. Dr. Hannibal Lecter,
the incarcerated psychiatrist in the novel, presents a psychological profile of Jame
Gumb through the recollections of Jame's lover Raspail, who once was Lecter's
patient and confided on his couch that when Jame was twelve he had killed his
grandparents. Jame was not really gay, "it's just something he picked up in jail.
He's not anything, really, just a sort of total lack that he wants to fill, and so
angry" (172).
While the cocoon of the Black Witch Moth with the design of the human
skull on its back is the symbol for failed transformation in the case of Jame
Gumb, it is the alembic in Patrick Siiskind's Perfume that becomes the object of
identification and subverted transformation for Grenouille, the perfume-maker.
He considers it a "cunning apparatus to snatch the scented soul from matter"
(96). Staring at it, "he imagined that he himself was such an alembic . . .
flooding the whole world with a distillate of his own making" (97). The process
of distillation becomes a daydream for him, implicitly equated with an alchemi-
cal process that uses fire, water, and steam to derive the oil of the flower, "the
heavily scented principle of the plant" (95). The need to fill the world with a
fragrance of his own making is a compensatory mechanism for Grenouille, who
was born in 1738 into an age of stench without any discernible smell of his own.
This lack of smell is considered inhuman and associated with the devil by those
who care for him in infancy. Having no smell of his own, Grenouille envies the
odor of others. The German equivalent of "he could not. . . smell himself (134)
really means that he could not "stand" himself: "Er konnte sich . . . nicht dechen"
(Das Parfum 171) and implies self-hatred as a result of a problem with his iden-
tity. Although he has no scent of his own, he is an olfactory idiot savant from
birth, his baby nostrils flaring with atavistic genius (Perfume 17). He murders
innocent young women in order to obtain their scent, dispensing with their bodies
the same way the distillation process in perfume-making disposed of the material
aspect of the flowers. The perfume gained he considers the essence absolue, ima-
gining that it will gain him love and adoration by the world. However, when it
does exactly that in an orgiastic scene toward the end of the novel, he cannot
tolerate it. His problem with love stems from his childhood. The narrator indi-
cates that his birth cry was not for sympathy and love; rather it was "against
love" (21). Born of a murderess who tried to kill him at birth and raised by an
abused widow who was unfeeling, he grew into a monster (22), an abomination
(3, 21). He knew no father and was apprenticed to a brutal tanner who "was cap-
able of thrashing him to death for the least infraction" (31). Without appropriate
male and female models in his life, he could not become a whole person and
lacked psychological integration. Unable to relate to others, he turns into a psy-
chopathic killer, able to "know" a woman only after he has murdered her, raping
the corpse with his nose. But though he fills himself with the scent of his victim,
as happens with the red-haired girl in the Rue de Marais (42-43), he cannot inter-
nalize the female. Michael Hulse comments that he engages in enfleurage, rather
than defleurage (256), misapplying the process of perfume-making to the human
realm and killing two dozen virgins to create a perfume that would satisfy his
megalomaniacal desire to be loved more than God. Grenouille is a caricature of
the Romantic idealist who seeks ultimate beauty in the essence absolue, though
as an apprentice and journeyman, he is rooted in bourgeois existence, like
Cardillac, the master jeweler.
Like the goldsmith in E.T.A. Hoffmann's story, Loder in "The Abominable
History of the Man with Copper Fingers" likes to work with precious metals. He
was a man of wealth who created "chryselephantine" (3) sculptures. In addition
to many works in bronze, he cast statues in silver, like the nymph for which his
mistress Maria Morano, a former cabaret dancer, used to sit for him. The narra-
tor, Varden, is an actor who became known to Loder when starring in the film
Apollo Comes to New York, in which a statue comes to life. Loder's intentions
are to turn the actor into a statue as revenge for eliciting confidences from Maria
in conversation with her. Very possessive of her and out of jealousy, Loder
Sheffield-plates Maria, turning her into a great silver nude that forms the seat of
the couch in the smoking-room of his magnificent house outside New York. The
figure was "fully life-size, lying with her head back and her arms extended along
the sides of the couch" (7). Since Loder never created an imperfect work of art,
the clue that the figure is actually Maria is the fact that the second toe of the left
foot of the statue, like that of his mistress, is shorter than the big toesomething
that ordinarily Loder would have corrected. Observing Loder sprawling over the
figure on the settee by the fireplace, Varden sensed that he "seemed very much
attached to it" (7). What he did not know was that Loder was considering
making a companion piece to it, something like The Sleeping Athlete (13), for
which he intended to use his visitor, Varden. By accident, however, he electro-
plates himself, tripping over a coil of wire into the vat prepared for his guest,
thus becoming the complement to Maria in a process that turns life into art, the
human being into an object.
This reification is a reversal of the function of art as perceived in classical
aesthetics. Whereas the objet d'art used to represent a spiritual reality and con-
templation of the work of art led to greater perfection in the mind and perception
of the artist and thus to greater perfection in successive representations, art as
murder deprives the subject of pneuma or soul. Instead of delimiting the object
to release life, life is destroyed for the sake of art. While murdering Maria results
in Loder's only imperfect work of art, Jame Gumb and Grenouille seek a kind
of perfection through their murders. The perfume for Grenouille is the thing that
represents beauty at the expense of the life of the women from whom he extracts
it. It is the reification of an ideal, however evanescent, in the scent of / 'essence
absolue. Jame Gumb considers women as "material" (Harris 205, 206) for his
ideal of beauty. In a perversion of the maxim "clothes make the (wo)man," he
obtains the skins from the women he kills in order to become a woman himself
by fashioning their skin to his contours. Cardillac, too, murders for an aesthetic
ideal represented by the jewelry he creates. In each case, this ideal is connected
with women, as it was for the Romantics. Instead of androgynous wholeness,
however, the relationship of these protagonists with women results in their death,
except for the case of Cardillac, who murders men in order to protect women
from their advances.
For Grenouille, the golden-hued perfume is the reification of an idea: the
absolute essence as concept of love. One of the perfumes he detests is the scent
of Amor and Psyche made by his competitor in the industry. He improves on it
to make his employer rich, reducing its significance to a materialistic level. The
myth of Amor and Psyche, however, as interpreted by Erich Neumann and Ann
Belford Ulanov from a Jungian perspective, is the myth of individuation and
sheds light on the transformation processes of the human soul. It relates the story
of androgyny, the reconciliation of male and female elements in the psychic
structure of the individual that can be accomplished only through relationships
with the opposite sex that are internalized in the maturation process. All these
fictional artists and artisans (except for Cardillac) destroy women and, thus, the
feminine aspects of their personality, which renders them unable to integrate the
self and incapable of relationship.
Juan Pablo Castel, in Ernesto Sabato's novel The Tunnel, identifies himself in
the opening lines of the first chapter as "the painter who killed Maria Iribarne"
(1), the only person who might have understood him and his work. He confesses
to "not being able to communicate with a woman" (8) and feels that he "was
condemned never to be part of any woman's life" (9). This lack of connection
is expressed in a "window" of his painting entitled "Motherhood," where a soli-
tary woman on an empty beach looks out toward the sea. In Castel's mind, this
scene in the upper left-hand corner of his canvas "suggested the most wistful and
absolute loneliness" (6). Maria captured his attention because she was the only
person who noticed the scene, becoming totally absorbed in it. Like the woman
in the window, "she was totally isolated from the world" (7) while looking at it.
Because of her apparent identification with this woman, who represents the
lonely, disconnected feminine aspect of himself, he becomes obsessed with
Maria. The scene on the beach is charged with fear for Castel, though he cannot
consciously express it. Maria divines that the scene holds "future memories" (54)
and eventually becomes the woman by the sea, "waiting on the lonely beach"
(55), where in her mind's eye he suddenly stands between her and the sea,
looking at her as if "asking for help" (55). Castel feels that he needs Maria be-
cause through the scene in his painting, she relates to him and seems to under-
stand his despair (31). But whenever he achieves intimacy with Maria, he has to
distance himself by quarreling with her, doubting her, and verbally and physi-
cally abusing her. He needs to feel that she exists for him alone (55), but Maria
is a married woman, and he suspects her of having an affair with her cousin
Hunter as well. There is a "wall of glass" between them, an ultimate lack of
communication caused in part by the mystery that surrounds her and his insecu-
rity about their relationship. He is consumed by doubts about the sincerity of her
feelings for him and tortures her with questions about the other men, real and
imagined, in her life. He never relates consciously to her as an independent indi-
vidual, apart from himself, and torn between love and hatred for her, he destroys
their relationship with cruelty and brutality, twisting her words in jealous argu-
ments and humiliating her. He wants to possess and isolate her, thinking that she
is essential for him in something he has to do (32). She seems to offer a link, a
bridge to an understanding of himself; but it is precisely this connection that he
destroys by killing her in jealous rage, and he remains lost in the "dark labyrinth"
(31) of his mind. Nevertheless, he is aware of the split in his consciousness (76),
the fragmentation of the self. The thought of losing Marfa leads him to consider
suicide (80). Later, during a shared moment of beauty by the sea, he considers
a double death. Tempted by the vertigo of the cliff, he wants to drag Maria with
him into the abyss (102) that corresponds physically to the "black chasm" inside
of him, that emptiness he feels in his jail cell at the end (137), after he has
destroyed his painting and killed Marfa.
For Castel, the symbol of transformation is a bird. In an anxious dream he has
as a result of his cruelty to Maria in a quarrel, he experiences metamorphosis
into a man-sized bird (more like a rooster than a phoenix!) and realizes that he
is losing his humanity. According to Erich Neumann, birds in mythology are
sacred to the Great Mother (76) and symbolize her presence. The dream signals
psychic danger with its regressive imagery. The abyss, the sea, the house, are
other visual representations connected with this archetype (14). In another dream,
Castel associates the house image with Maria, though it is a house he desired
since childhood that he can enter only with the guidance of "old memories"
(Sabato 52). The abyss and the sea on Allende's estate beckon him to a love/
death with Maria, his mistress, but also the archetypal mother. The composition
of his painting connects the image of the lonely woman by the sea with "Mother-
hood." Like Cardillac and Jame Gumb, Castel has an idealized image of his
mother and is dominated by the memory of her (4). For this reason, he cannot
accomplish separation from her, remaining in an infantile state of ego conscious-
ness and dependent on Maria, unable to grant her freedom and independence and
terrified of losing her. Losing her would mean losing part of himself. Not having
integrated the feminine within his personality, he is dependent on woman and
gains his autonomy only by destroying her. Consequently, he becomes aware of
his inner emptiness that is similar to "the total lack" of Jame Gumb (Harris 172).
The symbol for metamorphosis in Jame Gumb's case is the chrysalis (term
from Harris 204), the golden-hued cocoon of the deathhead moth, representative
of his failure to achieve individuation and with it, maturation. All the artists and
artisans in the works examined fail in the process of transformation because they
cannot achieve wholeness of the self, which depends on the relationship of male
and female, the internalization of these polarities in the psyche and their resolu-
tion within the personality of the individual (Singer 1). In the alchemical Iabora-
tory, analogous to the human psyche, base metals are transformed into gold, the
symbol of the self, in a mysterious process of transmutation that represents a
spiritual reality or an inner process of perfection. For Cardillac, however, gold
is connected with aesthetic illusion and evil, a deceptive sublimity, and every
artifact he creates is regained at the expense of life in his striving for perfection
in his art. Loder is ostentatious about his wealth, casting statues in bronze and
silver. His creations have a golden hue and are large and deceptively lifelike.
One of the members of the Egotists Club in London refers to them as "chrysele-
phantine stuff (Sayers 3). Like Cardillac, he is a perfectionist. His mistress and
model, Maria, was "absolutely perfect from the sculptor's point of view" (5). Her
only imperfection reveals the work of art not to be a representation or illusion,
but perfect in its identity of life and art. Maria Morano is the statue, though this
identity brings her death. In a reversal of Romantic irony that destroys form for
the sake of delimitation and the recipient's pairticipation in the eternal flux of
vital energy, both Cardillac and Loder create artifacts that reify life and spirit in
form. Instead of destroying art for the sake of life, they destroy life for the sake
of art. Their creations are attained by acts of murder to be taken literally on the
level of the murder mystery, but metaphorically in terms of the artistic process
involved, since form cannot but fixate life.
NOTES
1. Johannes Cremerius has edited a volume of psychoanalytic biographies that includes

profiles of artists like George Sand, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Goethe in Neurose und
Genialitdt (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1971). It includes a bibliography of international
psychoanalytic-biographic publications from 1907 to 1960 about writers, painters and
sculptors, politicians, founders of religion and saints, as well as scientists (275-289).
There is also a brief index of the most important theoretical writings regarding
psychoanalytic biography (291-292).
2. Reinhold Wolffs PsychoanalytischeLiteraturkritik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag,
1975) includes an article on aesthetics and the psychology of the artist by Otto Rank and
Hanns Sachs and an analysis of Stendhal by E. Bergler; Alexander Mitscherlich has edited
a volume, Psycho-Pathographien I. Schriftsteller und Psychoanalyse (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972) with contributions dealing with Strindberg, Balzac, Conrad,
Ferdinand Meyer, Thomas Mann, Nabokov, Kierkegaard, and Flaubert.
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Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.
Hoffmann, E.T.A. Das Fraulein von Scuderi. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1967.
Hulse, Michael. "Tumult, Horn and Double Bass: Botho StrauB, Christoph Hein and
Patrick Suskind." The Antigonish Review 66-67 (1986): 247-257.
Neumann, Erich. The Origins and History of Consciousness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Sabato, Ernesto. The Tunnel. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York: Ballantine Books,
1988.
. The Writer in the Catastrophe of Our Time. Trans. AsaZatz. Oklahoma: Council
Oak Books, 1990.
Sayers, Dorothy L. "The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers." In Lord
Peter: A Collection of All the Lord Peter Wimsey Stories. Compiled and with an
introduction by James Sandoe. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. 1-20.
Schneider, Peter. "Verbrechen, Kunstlertum und Wahnsinn." Mitteilunqen der E.T.A.
Hoffmann-Gesellschaft 26 (1980): 34-50.
Singer, June. Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality. New York: Anchor Press/
Doubleday, 1976.
Suskind, Patrick. Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Morders. Zurich: Diogenes Verlag,
1985.
. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Trans. John E. Woods. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1986.
Ulanov, Ann Belford. The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971.
15
The Craft of the Fantastic in Anatole

France's La Revolte des anges
Juliette Gilman
Anatole France, laureate of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1921, was already
at the peak of his fame when he published, in March 1914, his last major work
of fiction. It is a novel entitled La Revolte des anges (The Revolt of the Angels),
a story of angels defected from heaven and mingling in human form with the
Parisians of the day. Its publication followed that of France's celebrated his-
torical novel Les Dieux ont soif (The Gods are Athirst) in 1912, a work that
achieved worldwide success while stirring up considerable controversy.
Whereas Les Dieux (in spite of its title) speaks not of gods but of the French
Revolution, La Revolte returns to the theme of revolution and widens the arena
thereof to include the world beyond that of the mortals. The following ambitious
masterplan, explained by one of the rebel angel protagonists, sustains the narra-
tive: "Our project... is a vast one. It embraces both Heaven and Earth. . . . We
shall first bring about a social revolution in France, in Europe, on the whole
planet; then we shall carry war into the heavens, where we shall establish a
peaceful democracy" (160).
France's biographer Jacques Suffel notes that La Revoke's immediate success
was "triumphant, surpassing even that of Les Dieux ont soif 60,000 copies sold
in six weeks! But once more, people took offense" (101). Among those who did
take offense, author Pierre Gilbert, in a review, warns the reading public: "Do
not be taken in by the fable! It is . . . a demonology in proper and due form"
(370). After two world wars and all the turmoil that ushered in this era of ours,
the furor that once surrounded the book and its author has subsided. Anatole
France no longer shocks as an iconoclast. The latter-day commentators of his
works have mainly sought to analyze, in measured prose, his erudite and skepti-
cal humanism and his social conscience.
Though he is seldom studied in connection with the literature of the fantastic,
Everett Franklin Bleiler's 1985 survey, Supernatural Fiction Writers (which in
its sweeping scope allotted essays to only six French writers), features Anatole
France in that narrow selection. In the insightful pages devoted to him in one of
these essays, Brian Stableford hails La Revolte as "a classic of fantastic fiction"
(72); however, he approaches it as "essentially an Epicurean fantasy, a philoso-
phical tale in the tradition of Voltaire" (72), thereby deemphasizing the impor-
tance of what he calls the novel's "supernatural apparatus" (72). Other Francian
critics, including leading French authorities J. Levaillant and M-C. Bancquart,
have stressed overwhelmingly in La Revolte the message conveyed by the philo-
sophical tale, shifting the focus away from its contribution to fantastic fiction.
Yet that "supernatural apparatus," to use Stableford's phrase, even when viewed
essentially as a means to an end, deserves to be examined in its own right for a
fuller appreciation of the novel.
Firmly grounded in this world, La Revolte des anges starts with a caustic
overview of the past and present of the d'Esparvieu family, a "parvenu" family
now comfortably anchored in the life of the French establishment. A lengthy des-
cription follows of the d'Esparvieus' inherited private library, the celebrated
"bibliothique esparvienne," that is, "the Esparivenne library" (18), now served
with fanatical devotion by its curator, M. Sariette.
The first hint of mystery figures in the title of chapter 3, "Wherein the
mystery begins"; with the meticulous attention to realistic detail that often char-
acterizes fantastic literature, the intrusion of that mystery is pinpointed to seven
A. M., on the 10th of September 1912. At that precise moment, M. Sariette,
about to cross the threshold of his beloved library, is greeted by a sight that
leaves him astounded, "ne pouvant douter de ce qu'il voyait, et n'y pouvant
croire" (18), or "powerless alike to doubt or to credit what his eyes beheld" (26).
If the reader were allowed to share with M. Sariette this interpretation of the
scene, that is, hesitancy between shocked acknowledgment and disbelief, the nar-
rative would thereby enter the fragile realm of the fantastic, as defined by
Tzvetan Todorov, poised between a natural and a supernatural explanation. How-
ever, the spectacle that elicits M. Sariette's extreme reaction turns out to be
merely that of some books he had left in perfect order on their shelves the pre-
vious evening, now found in shocking and puzzling disarray. "On the blue cloth
cover of the writing table books lay scattered about pell-mell, some lying flat,
some standing upright. A number of quartos were heaped up in a tottering pile.
Two Greek lexicons, one inside the other, formed a single being more monstrous
in shape than the human couples of the divine Plato. A gilt-edged folio was all
agape, showing three of its leaves disgracefully dog's eared" (26). While the inci-
dent in itself might be characterized as puzzling (or "strange," to use the label
of the Todorovian category), its humorous treatment by France creates an effect
of distancing, which puts the reader in the presence not of the fantastic, as M.
Sariette's reaction would have it, but of a parody thereof.
Though the fantastic enters La Revolte as parody, the author turns to the full
array of devices available to the practitioner of the fantastic genre to construct
Anatole France's La Revolte des anges 137
the plot of his novel. Thus, in compliance with the successful formula of a cle-
verly crafted buildup of mystery, the scene at the library sets the course of the
narrative from the mundane to the strange, and from the strange as parody of the
fantastic, on toward a Francian blend of the marvelous.
Well into the novel (at the end of chapter 9), in the improbable location of
young Maurice d'Esparvieu's bachelor hideaway and at the most inappropriate
moment possible, the reader is confronted with another, more convincing mani-
festation of the fantastic, "a figure which appeared in a corner of the room,
between the fireplace and the wardrobe with the mirror" (78). Maurice's mistress,
Mme. Gilberte des Aubels, is shown "unable to bear the sight, and nearly
fainting" (78). The sight is that of an androgynous, naked figure, a third party
interloper, whom Gilberte takes to be another woman, and whom Maurice
believes to be a burglar. The mystery is maintained over two pages of taunting,
descriptive details. Finally, to the question "Who are you?" (81) the apparition
responds: "I am an angel. I am Maurice's guardian angel" (81). Thereupon, in
the wake of the protagonists' incomprehension, an incomprehension paralleled
by that of the reader, the fantastic yields to the marvelous, which prevails upon
the dismissal of all natural explanations.
However, no sooner does the marvelous prevail than it establishes itself as
parody, just as the fantastic had done in the earlier-mentioned episode. Indeed,
an authorial wink to the reader is quite detectable when the angel hastens to
invoke the authority of his newly acquired theological information to vouch for
the specific nature of his identity as Maurice's guardian angel: "yours, Maurice
. . . commanded to watch over your innocence and to guard your chastity" (81-
82). This utterance, while it highlights comically the all-too-obvious failure of
the angel's mission, establishes a complicity of humor between author and reader,
at the expense of the protagonists. That complicity is immediately reinforced by
Maurice's response: a reproach to the apparition for not being "un homme du
monde," "a gentleman" (82), in manifesting himself at such an awkward moment.
The interplay of meanings in the expression "homme du monde" (literally "man
of the world") constitutes a further authorial wink to the reader (unfortunately
lost in the English translation): In the idiomatic usage intended by Maurice, the
expression denotes propriety of conduct; as for its literal meaning suggested to
amuse the reader, the context turns it into a pun, since by definition an angel is
not a man of the world.
La Revolte abounds in examples such as the above, of style-centered humor,
from the most subtle to the most obvious, inspired by the Francian angels. Thus,
upon looking back at the passage immediately preceding the guardian angel's
materialization, we note the seemingly innocent use of rhetorical devices that, a
posteriori and only then, appear as anticipatory clues to the supernatural visi-
tation. Indeed, metaphoric phrases that the context endows with literal appropri-
ateness, such as "the touch of Time's fleeting wing" and "had the sky fallen, it
would not have troubled him" (77), are phrases sprung from the same stylistic
humor as previously noted. The examples gleaned at this juncture contribute
greatly to making it clear that after the strange and the fantastic, the marvelous
in La Revolte is also subverted by the use of humor.
The reader, held in suspense by the trappings of the fantastic and amused by
its subversion, is now allowed to see the scattered elements of the plot come
together. The apparition is charged with giving the required explanations. He is
the angel Abdiel, to be known as Arcade in his human form, lured away from
his heavenly employ by an irresistible thirst for knowledge. He became well read
while on duty near Maurice, playing havoc with the extensive holdings of his
charge's family library, the illustrious Esparvieu library. Now, as he cites nume-
rous religious, philosophical, and scientific references, he solves for the reader
the mystery of the mayhem that had so vexed the distraught librarian, M.
Sariette. Feeling that he had been duped in heaven in his earlier state of ignor-
ance, Abdiel-Arcade decided, he informs Maurice, not to remain a docile guar-
dian angel but to live on earth "preparing the Revolt of the Angels" (83).
From the episode of his materialization, the novel chronicles Abdiel-Arcade's
life among the Parisians and among other dissident angels who, while fomenting
cosmic revolution, pursue different trades on earth to make a living. Of course,
those episodes in La Revolte, where rebel angels interact with human protago-
nists, offer a prime vantage point for the author to satirize, from within and from
without, a shallow, complacent, yet violent and war-prone society.
In an early commentary of La Revolte, critic Walter George wrote: "The book
is brilliant because it so casually intermingles the actual with the fantastic" (74).
If, as we presume, the "actual" means the depiction of life in Paris in the second
decade of the twentieth century, and the "fantastic" refers to the role of the
angels, then their intermingling can certainly be characterized as "casual," for
upon materializing, the angels become immediately integrated in every way with
the mortals whose earthly sojourn they come to share. Thus, a friend of
Arcade's, the angel Theophile, had left heaven for the love of Bouchotte, one of
the enticing "daughters of men" (this biblical phrase from the Book of Genesis
is used several times in La Revolte), and as a struggling musician and jilted
lover, he is shown to partake fully of the joys and pains of human fate. The only
remnant of his glorious origin is a pair of moth-eaten wings he keeps in storage,
a symbol that the reader is left free to interpret as he wishes.
If this "casual intermingling" can be called "brilliant," it is to a large extent
on account of the wit and humor with which it is crafted, and that I have en-
deavored to illustrate by a few examples. As for the fantastic, or the marvelous,
in his process of "intermingling," France turns it into as threadbare a prop as
Theophile's wings. In its thrust as parody, the "apparatus," to use once again
Stableford's term, of the marvelous in La Revolte conveys, in burlesque form,
the author's skepticism toward religious dogma and tradition. Angels who vouch
for their own authenticity and validate their attributes by invoking the authority
of theologians indulge in a playful self-referentiality that testifies to that
skepticism.
However, there is another plane in La Revolte where the marvelous asserts it-
self, free of burlesque accoutrements. It comes into view when the satire gene-
rated by angels interacting with humans yields to a sustained development of
myth and parable. Two such episodes provide lengthy, atemporal, and self-
contained segments in the novel, removed altogether from the purview of La
Revolted human protagonists.
The first of these two episodes is the "gardener's story," which spans four
chapters (from 18 through 21) and which the author, after much documented
pondering, decided to insert in the middle of the novel. The storyteller is
Nectaire, formerly an angel of lofty rank, a Domination, before his defection to
the lure of "liberty, curiosity, doubt" (166). As for his story, which he shares
with Arcade and the exarchangel Zita, it develops no lesser a saga than that of
"the destiny of the world" (quoted from the title of chapter 18) (164). His words
are sheer poetry of image and sound as he weaves his tale from "ces temps, qui
precederent les temps" (118), "long, long ago, ere Time was" (164), to the pre-
sent, when the obstinate folly of a humankind bent on waging war prompted him
to retire from the fray to tend to his garden. His is a wistful evocation of a
happier past best exemplified by an epoch revered by Anatole France, that of
"those Greeks and Latins who had absorbed the teaching of Dionysus and of the
Muses" (187). In Nectaire's tale, parody and satire are made to recede as the rich
marvel of Greco-Roman mythology lends its imagery to a paean to joy and
beauty, admirably conveyed by the author's seductive prose.
Nectaire brings to mind another disenchanted and wisdom-seeking gardener:
Voltaire's Candide. France had once written: "'Cultivons notre jardin,' dit
Candide . . . une sagesse incertaine et melangee d'erreur: les jardins . . . ne sont
pas fermes au mal universel," "'Let us cultivate our garden,' said Candide . . .
an uncertain wisdom and one suffused with error: gardens are not closed to uni-
versal evil" ("Le Faust de Goethe" in Oeuvres Completes 24: 182). Twenty-three
years later, in 1914, France weaves into Nectaire's myth Candide's "uncertain
wisdom," still considering it the best model available to humankind. The on-
coming events were about to justify the author's reservations by demonstrating
once more the vulnerability of garden and wisdom to "universal evil."
Nectaire appears again, but only as a secondary character, at the end of the
novel, when the narrative turns away one last time from human protagonists and
thus from the Francian burlesque of interaction between the two realms. In the
last chapter of l a Revolte, once more the marvelous prevails. The main protagon-
ist of that chapter is the one whom Nectaire had called in his tale "the most
beautiful of all the Seraphim" (164): Lucifer, the rebel Satan. Following the
Romantic tradition of Byron, Hugo, and Vigny, France's Prince of Darkness is
a noble figure who bears little resemblance to the hideous, gargoyle representa-
tion of the traditional devil. He embodies not only beauty, intelligence, and the
courage of defiance but also wisdom and a sorrowful compassion toward all of
creation.
In the struggle between good and evil, evil is represented in the novel by the
demiurge Ialdabaoth, who lets himself be worshipped in heaven and on earth as
God the Creator. His true identity, however, appears to be that of the lesser god
of Gnosticism, the flawed and limited "arranger" divinity, whose imperfections
are reflected in those of humanity. Much has been written about the choice
France made in La Revolte of Ialdabaoth as the divine adversary of Satan, while
"decapitating" (as critic M-C. Bancquart put it) his Gnostic source of its supreme,
spiritual God, of whom no mention is made in the novel. The perspectives
opened by that discussion, however, are beyond the field of scrutiny of this
essay.
In the striking climax of the novel, the reader follows Satan from his retreat
on earth in a peaceful garden of delights above the banks of the Ganges, to a
second assault on the heavenly powers, at the head of an army of rebel angels.
The latter, having concluded that humankind was not yet ready for the ultimate
revolution and now focusing exclusively on their own cause, had come to seek
out their leader, beckoning him to take them to victory in heaven. This time,
unlike the first time, after much suspense and lengthy description of celestial
warfare, Satan's battle is won: "The walls of topaz, the cupolas of emerald, the
roofs of diamond, all fell in with an appalling crash under the discharge of the
electrophores. . . . And Satan had himself crowned God" (342, 344). His reign
is then described, identical to that of his dethroned predecessor, and in the mythi-
cal time frame of France's supernatural saga, "centuries passed like seconds"
(346). The fateful cycle is now repeating itself: The victorious Satan is shown
hardened and rendered vain by universal adulation, and the vanquished Ialdabaoth
is shown mellowed by hardship and sorrow, and filled with a new desire to help
"the unhappy planet" (347). Just then, we read: "And Satan awoke bathed in an
icy sweat" (347). The reader is made to awaken as well to the realization that the
author, in rewriting the biblical story of damnation with the compelling literary
embellishments afforded by the marvelous, presents in the end a cautionary tale,
a Francian parable. The second assault on heaven, its conquest, and the eons that
followed had been only a dream. Now understanding the futility of all battles
won or lost, Satan concludes: "No, let us not conquer the heavens. It is enough
to have the power to do so. War engenders war, and victory defeat. God, con-
quered, will become Satan; Satan, conquering, will become God. May the fates
spare me this terrible lot!" (347).
Then, reflecting back on the rebel angels' initial defeat before the beginning
of time and addressing to Nectaire the last, weighty words of the novel, Satan
utters: "We were defeated because we failed to understand that victory is Spirit,
and that it is in ourselves and in ourselves alone that we must attack and destroy
Ialdabaoth" (348).
In the very year of the publication of La Revolte des anges, the real-life
epilogue to the author's impassioned plea for reexamining values and for substi-
tuting the liberation of the spirit to the doomed victories of armed conflict was
the outbreak of World War I.
In conclusion, La Revolte des anges is both topical satire and philosophical
meditation; the craft of the fantastic links together the two levels of reading.
Indeed, it is the modulations of the fantastic, from the humor of critical parody
to the seduction of myth as art form and as parable, that give the novel its crea-
tive cohesion and its multilayered unity.
WORKS CITED
Bancquart, Marie-Claire. Anatole France un sceptique passionne. Paris: Calmann-Levy,

1984.
France, Anatole. Les Dieux ont soif. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1912.
. La Revolte des anges. Paris: Calmann-Le'vy, 1914.
. Oeuvres Completes. Paris: Calmann-L6vy, 1925-35. 25 vols.
. The Revolt of the Angels. Trans. Mrs. Wilfrid Jackson. New York: Crown, 1914.
George, Walter Lionel. Anatole France. London: Nisbet, 1915.
Gilbert, Pierre. La Foret des cippes: essais de critique. Paris: Champion, 1918.
Levaillant, Jean. L'Evolution intellectuelle d Anatole France. Paris: Colin, 1965.
Stableford, Brian. "Anatole France." In Supernatural Fiction Writers. Ed. Everett F.
Bleiler. 2 vols. New York: Scribner, 1985. 67-72.
Suffel, Jacques. Anatole France par lui-meme. Paris: Seuil, 1954.
Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction a la literature fantastique. Paris: Seuil, 1970.
16
Sally Johnson: Paperworks

Dorothy Joiner
Her refined and gracious southern manner masking a penetrating intelligence,

Sally Johnson uses art to explore the underlying nature of reality and the
interpenetrations of past, present, and future. After graduating in 1953 from
Birmingham-Southern College with a degree in biology, Johnson did further
study in drawing, graphics, and art history. During the 1980s, a graduate grant
supported her research in computer graphics at the University of Alabama at
Birmingham. She has traveled in England, Mexico, and the Orient and has
exhibited widely in the Southeast.
An exhibition of Johnson's art might be named Containers, Layerings, and
Transformation. Though not particularly poetic, this caption does focus on her
work's central imagery and on its unarticulated theme, that is, change. Johnson
gives this idea multiple and various expressions: in the handcast papers she
employs and in her choice of form and symbol, together with the archetypal sig-
nificance these bear. A manifestation of unconscious mental processes, Johnson's
art seems to give visible shape to that almost indefinable energy that some call
the life force. Yet the artist handles the profundities of existence with an en-
gaging and lighthearted humor. Johnson's work grows out of two pivotal influ-
ences: a love for paper and papermaking, as well as Plato's theory of forms
expressed in the Timaeus.
Johnson's longstanding affection for paper was enhanced when she attended
the 1983 International Paper Conference in Kyoto, Japan. Here she came to es-
teem papermaking as an ancient Eastern tradition of great spiritual significance.
In the Japanese language, though they are written differently, the words for "god"
and "paper" are pronounced the same. Because the papermaking process involves
a real transformation of formand often the use of discarded elements otherwise
wastedpaper is for the Japanese a very practical symbol of the life force and
of regeneration.
The second tradition informing Johnson's art derives from Plato's Timaeus.
Teaching that all life evolved from five elemental forms (the four-sided tetra-
hedron, representing fire; the cube, referring to earth; the eight-sided octohedron,
associated with air; the twelve-sided dodecahedron, symbolizing the universe; and
the twenty-sided icosahedron, representing water), the Greek philosopher formu-
lated a system of symbolic mathematics and geometry with far-reaching historical
influence. Medieval alchemy, Islamic architecture, and even Taoist cosmology
all owe a debt to the Timaeus. Many artists from Dttrer to de Chirico have been
fascinated with Plato's symbolic solids and have incorporated them into their
work.
Also captivated by Plato's building blocks of reality, Johnson at first made
various models of them in acetate, aluminum, and copper. She then photographed
her constructions surrounded by their symbolic equivalents, as, for example, the
cube with earth and the tetrahedron with fire. She finally determined to use a
computer to transform Plato's solids into organic, biomorphic shapes, much as
a prism refracts light into its constituent elements.
Recognizing these major influences equips the viewer to penetrate the under-
lying complexities of Johnson's Body Shell and Okragrams, originally two sepa-
rate works now exhibited together (see Figure 1). Molded from handmade paper,
Body Shell... is an elongated container-form, somewhat like a funerary winding
cloth or a mummy wrapping. Riblike wooden arcs, embedded in the paper at
right angles to the long axis, strengthen the fragile substance and in the artist's
words "give a broken, loose idea of containment." Near one endsurprisingly
on the side, not the top where a mummy's face would be painteda death mask
seems to emerge from the paper (see Figure 2). Above the "shell," affixed to the
wall are fourteen triangular "okragrams," made from paper into which fibers
from homegrown okra pods have been incorporated. Printed on these triangles
by means of a cyanotype solution are photographic images of the same okra pods
(see Figure 3).
Though the artist denies a conscious application of Jungian thought, the arche-
typal meaning of Body Shell. . . seems unmistakable. The succinct analysis of
containers by Erich Neumann, Carl Jung's disciple, is pertinent to its interpreta-
tion: "woman = body = vessel = world." All container forms, Neumann explains,
embody two basic ideas, containment and transformation, death and new life
(43). This bivalent meaning comes primarily, of course, from the infant's "con-
tainment" within his mother and his subsequent release at birth. At the end of
life, man is again "contained" in a sarcophagus before being reborn into eternal
life. Another of nature's marvelous examples of containment and release is that
of the worm's transformation into a butterfly through the agency of the cocoon.
As a container, therefore, Johnson's "body shell" participates in this symbolism
of containment and death.
Mgure l
Body Shell and Okragrams by Sally Johnson
Courtesy of Sally Johnson and Charles Dagg

Figure 2
Body Shell by Sally Johnson

Sally Johnson: Paperworks 147
Figure 3
Okragrams by Sally Johnson
The triangular Okragrams above (archetypically the direction of apotheosis)

complement the suggestion of mortality and constraint implicit in the "shell"
below, completing the archetype of transformation with the suggestion of release.
Two-dimensional reminders of Plato's symbolic tetrahedron (a four-sided solid
triangle), Johnson's Okragrams represent fire, that element which consumes, but
more importantly, transforms. The okra, too, bears archetypal significance. As
a pod-container, the vegetable is feminine; but in its elongated shape, it is
decidedly masculine.
A fundamental assumption in Jungian thought is that all human evolution, ra-
cial as well as personal, takes place in relation to the feminine archetype, present
in the mind, but projected onto the outside world. Stated in other words, the
masculine or, in archetypal terms, conscious side of the human being is changed
through interaction with his unconscious, or feminine aspect. In Body Shell and
Okragrams, Johnson reflects this transformation fundamental to human develop-
ment: The archetypically dual okra is transmuted into paper, a symbol of regene-
ration, just as the "body shell" is transformed by symbolic fire into a higher form
of life.
A second work related symbolically to Body Shell and Okragrams is Burial
Jar (see Figure 4). Inspired by an early form of pottery she saw in the Shanghai
Museum, Johnson molded a funerary urn from the same kind of okra paper that
she had used for the earlier work. The paper jar is split (the rupture deliberately
turned toward the gallery wall) to reveal a pair of feet, also cast in paper, placed
next to a large okra pod (see Figure 5). At the same time that it offers evidence
of the artist's wry humor, this rather gently startling juxtaposition serves an
archetypal meaning. The foot, according to Jung, bears "generative or phallic"
significance (239). In numerous myths and dreams, the psychologist affirms, the
foot is said to kick or stomp, "splitting" the containing form as a substitute for
the maternal womb (288). The rupture in Johnson's urn can be interpreted as
whimsical evidence of the foot's effectiveness.
Though basically masculine in meaning, the two paper feet are positioned to
form a pointed oval, characteristic of the female. In their bivalent significance,
therefore, the feet parallel the okra, which, as I have mentioned, is feminine as
a pod and masculine in outline. As with Body Shell and Okragrams, the con-
tainer-urn as a site of death becomes the place of transfiguration indicated by the
triangles embedded in its walls.
Johnson's theme of change finds a different expression in Gulf, a piece actu-
ally designed to be altered during exhibition. Attached to the wall, two ropelike
forms of unequal length extend downward onto the floor in graceful curves. In
an overt show of permutation, the artist rearranges their placement at specific
intervals during their exhibition. Each "rope" is wrapped with small pieces of
handmade paper in various shades of blue and gray, the colors of water. Between
the curves are paper triangles of varying sizes, some sewn together in three-
dimensional formations, others joined with filament and glass beads. According
to the artist, the triangles here allude to Plato's icosahedron, the symbol for
water. Among the triangles is an x-ray of a fish skeleton, which underscores the
ocean's role as a source of both life and death.
The artist here concentrates on the self-transformation inherent in the nature
and properties of water. Choosing water as the most appropriate emblem of con-
stant displacement, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus declared the impossibility
of stepping into the same river twice. But the word gulf, the artist says, refers
also to the emotional dislocation between people. From this perspective, modifi-
cation of the linear forms also indicates the constant flux inherent in human
relationships.
Figure 4
Burial Jar by Sally Johnson

Figure 5
Burial Jar interior by Sally Johnson

Yet another work with multiple symbolic connotations is Pass Through with
Floater (see Figure 6). Three rectangular wooden frames, each the size of a door
opening, are hinged together and placed zigzag fashion to form an oversized
letter Z. The frames are tied with broken sticks and wrapped with tapa, a proto-
paper from the Fiji Islands, and then with handmade paper torn, according to a
Japanese custom, into long strips. (The artist's choice of tapa indicates her
interest in primitive cultures and their products as symbolic of humankind's early
levels of development. Made from bark, the gauzy tapa is beaten on a slitted
wooden anvil, each stroke making a musical sound that indicates to the native's
sensitive ear how near ready is the product.) Johnson's "floater," a slender
wooden arc suspended from the middle frame, can be easily pushed aside as one
moves through the simulated gateways. The "pass through," then, is a kind of
participatory emblem of life's journey, and the "floater" is one of its effortlessly
overcome obstacles. In this last symbol, humor again deflects from an overly
serious reading of the visual metaphor. Only in dreams do hindrances move with
a whisk of the hand. According to the artist, the "floater" is meant to remind the
viewer that sometimes, as in Eastern thought, the less effort expended, the better;
problems on occasion dissolve if one is patient.
As with Johnson's other works, death and resuscitation coexist in Pass
Through with Floater. The broken sticks signify mortality, but the paper indicates
regeneration. But here another visual metaphor enhances the meaning. In layering
paper and tapa, the artist is actually creating a symbolic "container." The arche-
typal association of "layers" with the container-form derives naturally from fruits
with skins and "layered" vegetables, such as onions, whose cortices serve as
"containers." In occult mystical symbology, the outer skins are linked with death
and evil whereas the inner core is desirable and life-giving.
As a gate in triplicate, moveover, Johnson's work participates in the rich sym-
bolic tradition of the portal and the threshold. A site of passage between two
states, the known and the unknown, the profane and the sacred, the doorway
opens into a mystery. Psychologically dynamic, the portal invites one to cross
over from one state to another in a voyage of discovery. It gives access to reve-
lation and to the transcendent (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 285). Signifying both
separation and the possibility of union or reconciliation, the threshold is held to
be sacred. Crossing the thresholdthe boundary to the sacreddemands purity
of body and of soul, as indicated by the need to remove one's shoes before
entering a mosque or a Japanese house (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 305). It is sig-
nificant, however, that Johnson's Pass Through with Floater is simply a triple
doorway. The transcendent center toward which the portal traditionally directs
the visitor is missing. One "passes through" the frame to find no revelation
beyond the threshold, except, perhaps, a new awareness of life's almost fluid
passage.
Figure 6
Pass Through with Floater by Sally Johnson

Johnson offers a more metaphysical interpretation of transformation in

Upward, not Northward. Slender wooden sticks, skewered with triangular "okra-
grams" of paper, are tied together in diagonal directions to form a three-
dimensional configuration. Inspired by Erwin Abbott's novel Flatland (the ima-
ginary realm whose inhabitants believe that all things are flat), Johnson here
objectifies her own (and by extension everyone's) attempt to break through
superannuatedbut comfortablepatterns of thought (like the Flatlanders' con-
cept of flatness) toward a new dimension. Johnson's energetic diagonals and her
triangles represent a rejection of the rectangular "northward" grid basic to our
spatial conceptions. This horizontal-vertical orientation, which Johnson seeks to
pass beyond, has been characterized by Donis Dondis as "man's primary refer-
ence in terms of his well-being and maneuverability." He associates the triangle,
on the other hand, with "action, conflict, and tension" and describes the diagonal
as "the most provoking visual formulation . . . [whose] meaning is threatening
and almost literally upsetting" (46).
Following the explorations of Buckminster Fuller, whose grid is triangular and
who used a three-dimensional triangle as the basis of his geodesic dome, Johnson
believes that the diagonal offers a pathwayalbeit disturbingto the elusive
fourth dimension, that reality which eludes expression but which is sometimes
termed space-time. As always, however, Johnson's speculations devolve toward
humankind. "Human movement," she affirms, "places us in the fourth rather than
the third dimension."
In the modernist tradition, Johnson thus goes behind what she terms the
"looking glass" of the sensible world to reach the deeper archetypal levels of
human experience, where masculine and feminine commingle, where death is
transmuted into life. In seeking these primal, instinctive patterns of thought, she
employs traditional materials, such as handmade paper, and ancient symbolic
modes of thought, especially from Plato. But as she reaches deeply into the past
to suggest the many strata of human experience, she at the same time is
stretching forward in time, offering a presage of things to come. It is well known
that scientists are now working on a computer based on organic cells, a twenty-
first-century machine, which will incorporate the capacity to change, that essen-
tial characteristic of organic matter. Johnson's works form, then, an aesthetic
bridge linking the past, the present, and the future. As she says, "The recent
works examine the fragmented, fragile human experience in a computerized,
mathematically-manipulated world. It is my desire that they contain an element
of survival and hope."
WORKS CITED
Chevalier, Jean, and Alain Gheerbrant. Dictionnaire des Symboles. Paris: Editions Robert
Laffont, 1969.
Dondis, Donis. A Primer of Visual Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Symbols of Transformation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1956.
Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955.
17
Culture as Spiritual Metaphor in Le Guin's

Always Coming Home
Sarah Jo Webb
All language has limits to what it can express, but literal language is particularly
constrained. We cannot express certain sorts of things literally without distorting
and impoverishing their meanings. The intuitive, the logically contradictory, the
vaguely sensed, and what we in this culture call the spiritualmetaphor and
symbol can sometimes get these meanings across by evoking a response in the
reader rather than stating an idea directly. The indirection of metaphor and
symbol asks the reader to dig more deeply, to create a meaning that roughly
corresponds to what the writer intended but is richer and more personal. They
can call forth a response from those layers of the mind that are less straitjacketed
by logic. Because metaphor and symbol are powerful in this way, they are often
used to represent spiritual realities.
Fantasy provides a rich ground for metaphor and symbol, and some modern
writers approach the mysteries of the sacred through the metaphorical and the
fantastic. One of these writers is Ursula Le Guin, whose writing reflects her
Taoist view of the world (Bain, Barbour, Galbreath). In her book Always Coming
Home, Le Guin creates an "Archaeology of the Future" (3)an anthropological
description of a fictional culture, that of the Kesh of the Valley of Na. As she
describes the culture of the Kesh, she represents the unity of all things, the Tao,
a spiritual insight available through Taoism that is difficult to represent directly.
In descriptions of Taoism, the Tao has been said to represent "the unity under
the plurality of the universe, the unnamed and indefinable principle behind all
things" (Parrinder). T'ai-I (The Great Unity) is described as "the Chinese attempt
to find a unity underlying [the] diversity of universe, and antedating creation,
. . . which does nothing but underlies everything" (Brandon). It is the unity that
underlies these many things we see around us. Somehow we are all one thing.
Le Guin represents the Tao in Always Coming Home, yet the Tao is said to
be inexpressible (Chung-yuan 4); Le Guin herself has translated Lao Tzu: "The
name that can be named / is not the eternal name" ("Taoing" 364). We can only
catch hints of it, approach it by indirection, as Le Guin does in Always Coming

Home.
Le Guin builds a culture that recognizes and reflects this underlying unity, the
Tao. As she depicts the culture of the Kesh, she represents the unity that we can
sometimes find in the world of form, the whole which contains multiplicity as
a house contains rooms. And she is able to represent the empty potentiality at the
center of reality, the unity before multiple forms arise. The house of many rooms
and the fountain before it bursts into its thousand drops: She shows us both these
kinds of unity.
I cannot say that the main purpose of Always Coming Home is to describe the
Great Unity. Le Guin's creation of the kind of society she has described as a "yin
Utopia" ("A Non-Euclidian View" 93) accomplishes many purposes besides its
description of the base of reality. One important thing it does is to show an
alternate way of being human, a society that will not destroy itself by being out
of balance. As she puts it, she writes of "how to live well" (238). Nevertheless,
it is difficult to describe a culture in harmony with the Tao without making any
representation of the Tao, and so it seems that one problem Le Guin must have
faced in Always Coming Home was how to represent unity in words.
Any element of a poem or story can direct the reader to a metaphorical theme
character, plot, details of setting, word choice. Traditional plot with its
emphasis upon linear movement, conflict, and hero-subject acting upon object
reinforces our cultural view of a fragmented reality with individual units acting
upon and opposing other units. Metaphorically it points to a different vision of
reality than the one Le Guin desires to evoke. Probably for this reason, tradi-
tional plot is deemphasized in Always Coming Home, which has the structure of
what Le Guin describes as a "carrier bag," a collection of interesting related
things ("Carrier Bag Theory" 169). The culture itself becomes the focus. It does
not have to oppose anything, only to be itself in an interesting way.
Culture is emphasized in Always Coming Home, and culture presents the meta-
phor of unity. By describing the culture of the Valley, Le Guin shows how the
people of the Valley view reality. The patterns of the cultures become extensions
of a metaphorical theme: Reality is unity.
Le Guin depicts the culture by abstracting patterns and structures within it,
much as an anthropologist might, and by describing people acting in the detail
of daily life. Sometimes she describes the culture from the viewpoint of a nar-
rator named Pandora, sometimes from the vantagepoint of observers within the
culture. Throughout, the inhabitants speak; stories, poems, and histories by
people of the Valley take up much of the book. Some of these people speak
directly to each other about the unity behind things.
Depictions are also made of two societies in contrast to the Valleythat of
our own time, marked by proliferation and poison, and that of the warring
Condors, authoritarian, male-dominated, and aggressive. These are the wrong
Le Guin's Always Coming Home 157
ways that by contrast show the right way. Their people do not recognize the
unity of all beings. They are infected with a sickness that will cause them to
destroy themselves.
Le Guin says that the people in the Valley had a "vision," "a working meta-
phor"she uses that word (49). Describing that metaphor she says, "The idea
that comes nearest the center of the vision is the House; the sign is the hinged
spiral or heyiya-if; the word is the word of praise and change, the word at the
center, heya!" (49). The house, the hinged spiral, and heya!, "the word of praise":
These make the unity behind things concrete, graspable.
The house is a common motif in the book. The houses in the towns of the
valley are old and beautiful. They are houses with names, and families share
them. Sometimes the families are kin, sometimes not. A cautionary tale is
included about a house in which the families did not live in harmony but were
competitive and vengeful. They did not recognize their interdependence. The
house was not taken care of, and by the end it had burned and the worst offen-
ders were dead. In an informational section at the back of the book, Le Guin
describes metaphors that can structure societies. The house is one of these
metaphors. Le Guin says that the universe viewed in this way is a house with
rooms and society becomes "division within unity" (484).
An important way the people of the Valley understand the universe is the
division of reality into different houses that together make a whole, called "the
House of the Nine Houses." There are five houses of earth and four of sky. In
the five houses of Earth are those beings that "live with human people" (43);
these beings include "the earth, . . . the moon, . . . fresh water, . . . all human
beings currently alive," domestic and ground-living birds, game and domestic
animals and all plants "used by human beings" (43-44). In the houses of Sky are
those that live in wilderness: "the sun and stars, the oceans," animals not
connected directly to humans, birds that fly, animals or people considered as
species or in general, all beings in stories or dreams, "the dead, and the unborn,"
(44). This all-inclusive categorization is indeed "division within unity" (484).
Human is not separate from nature, nor the dead from the living.
This nine-house categorization extends into the social structure of the Valley.
People are born into one of the five houses of earth and participate in the activi-
ties of its heyimas, an underground building where are provided instruction,
worship, meetings, economic coordination, ceremony, storage, and refuge. In
addition to blood kinship, there is house kinship transmitted through the mother.
A person is kin to all human people in that house and to its nonhuman people:
A human person could be grandchild to forest spring or brother to "a half-acre
field of dirt plowed for corn" (424).
The nine-house categories are found throughout Valley society. Colors, direc-
tions, arts, lodges, and ceremonial dances are all linked to particular houses or
to the motif of house in general.
A second symbol of unity in the culture of the Valley is the heyiya-if. Le

Guin calls it "the symbol of the Whole" whose "left arm [is] mortality, the right
eternity" (41). Its form is of two spiraling arms with a change of direction in the
middle. Le Guin defines the heyiya-if as "a figure or image of the heyiya." And
among the meanings Le Guin notes for heyiya as a noun are "sacred . . . or
important thing, place, time, or event; connection; spiral, gyre or helix; hinge;
center; change; . . . praise" (515). The symbol is found everywhere in the
cultureon pots, in drawings and musical notation; in the structure of stories,
the design of instruments and utensils, the layout of stages and buildings, the
routes taken on vision quests, the movements in ceremonies.
One place the link between the house and the heyiya-if is clearest is in the
layout of the town. The nine houses are arranged in the town in the heyiya-if
pattern. This arrangement reveals an important aspect of the symbol, which is
that like the opposition of Earth and Sky in the nine houses, it is the union of
two polarities which make a whole. The Left Arm is the side of dwelling houses
with their common place, the planting side; the Right Arm is the side of the
heyimas and the dancing place, the hunting side. The center of the town,
comments Le Guin, is neither common place nor dancing place but the hinge
between the towns (3).
The hinge of the heyiya-if symbol is its reversal at the center, which keeps it
from being a forward progression or a closed circle yet retains its aspects of
movement and of circular or spiral wholeness. Because of this reversal at the
center, Le Guin sometimes speaks of the heyiya-if as a broken circle or a gyre.
A circle can imply a self-contained whole that shuts out the greater whole; the
heyiya-if remains open. The hinge is identified with connection, growth/change,
and return. The longest narrative thread in the book, the story of Stone Telling
who goes to join her Condor father and then returns to the Valley, can be seen
as a heyiya-if pattern of going out and reversing to return. Such a return is not
a retracing of steps, but more of a spiral upward.
At the center of the heyiya-if, the arms do not touch. This is the hinge, the
iya. It is emptiness there, a "gap," which Le Guin characterizes variously as
"center" (516), "empty space" (45), "absence" (466), silence (467), meeting and
parting (462), beginning and returning (398). Here the two arms meet, and yet
because the meeting place is empty, it is more than a joining; it is the source of
the arms, before form, the source of the multiple. Iya, explains Le Guin, is "the
source of a gyring motion; hence the source of change, as well as connection. Iya
is the eternal beginning, the process of energy arising and continuing" (489).
"Artists . . . go there," say words on a wall in the heyimas of Oak Society in
Telina-na. "They go there with empty hands, / into the gap between. / They come
back with things in their hands. /. . . This is where they live, / where they get
their breath; / there, in the gap between, / the empty place" (74). Unity is most
clearly seen in this iya, in silent potentiality before things arise.
Le Guin's Always Coming Home 159
The Valley ceremony of the Sun Dance at the spring equinox celebrates this
empty center. For its first twenty-one days, people prepare with "sacred or
intellectual practices," opening to the "self that is beyond the self (463). These
practices culminate in a night spent in silent darkness and the making of
offerings to a "small pit . . . called 'the absence'" (466). The rising of the sun
on the day of the solstice itself "is not formally observed" (467). The comment
of one Valley dweller on this lack of observance is "at the center is the absence,"
said with a gesture of the heyiya-if (467).
Heya! the word of praise is the third of Le Guin's symbols. The people of the
Valley live mindful of the empty place at the center of the heyiya-if, aware of
the sacredness of things, that all things are one thing. Their "word of praise,
"heya!" permeates their lives. "Weyiya heyiya!" they say: "[Everything hinges,
is holy" (491). They remind themselves in ceremony and in their constant heya!
greeting to a sacred rock, a water strider; when they speak to a killed deer or a
picked flower, "Beautiful one, / for your death my words!" (93), they address it
in poetry, speaking to something "under seeing, reasoning, far under" that "mani-
fests[s] / many-quailness" (119). They seek it in vision and leave self behind so
that they can see that "the whole (is) part of each part" (291). They say to each
other, "All the mountains in a little stone" (313). And they know, as we seem to
have almost forgotten, that we "walk . . . on ground that is not yours, but is
yourself (77).
Le Guin's house, hinged spiral, and heya! word of praise are metaphorical
themes that manifest in many variations in the culture of the Kesh. Le Guin has
used these themes, and the households, cooking pots, and ceremonies that
embody them, to point to something essentially unnameable. To represent the
unity hidden in individual forms, as Le Guin has attempted in Always Coming
Home, it may be necessary to use metaphor. Words inevitably split the world
into subject and object, into a multitude of individual, named things. Through
metaphor the undifferentiated, the whole, can be evoked in the reader. Deeply
metaphorical fantasies like Always Coming Home do this. They reach us on the
level of poetry, hinting and arousing. They point a finger at the moon of unity.
WORKS CITED
Bain, Dena C. "The Tao Te Ching as Background to the Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin."
Extrapolation 21 (1980): 209-22.
Barbour, Douglas. "The Lathe of Heaven: T mist Dream." Algol No. 21 (Nov. 1973): 22-
24.
Brandon, S. G. F. A Dictionary of Comparative Religion. New York: Charles Scribner's,
1970.
Chung-yuan, Chang. Tao: A New Way of Thinking. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
Galbreath, Robert. "Taoist Magic in the Earthsea Trilogy." Extrapolation 21 (1980): 262-
68.
Le Guin, Ursula K. Always Coming Home. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
. "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction." Dancing at the Edge of the World:
Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, 1989. 165-170.
. "A Non-Euclidian View of California as a Cold Place to Be." Dancing at the
Edge of the World. 80-100.
. "Taoing." Kenyon Review 32 (1989): 364.
Parrinder, Geoffrey. A Dictionary of Non-Christian Religions. Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1971.
18
Assuming the Present in SF: Sartre in a New

Dimension
Bud Foote
In March 1992, when this essay was first presented, Kim Stanley Robinson's
Green Mars was a novella (printed as half of a TOR double) and his Red Mars
(the first third of a projected trilogy) was still a rumor out there on the horizon,
finished but still somewhere in the dark satanic mills of the publisher.
As I now write, however, in July 1993, Green Mars is not only a 1988
novella but also a 1994 novela sequel to Red Mars, which has been on the
stands now for quite some time. This Green Mars is not the same as the novella,
nor yet an expansion of it, nor evenas we shall see presentlypart of the same
continuum; and vast confusion may be predicted for future scholars and biblio-
graphers. I propose to minimize that confusion here by putting the novella in
quotes to distinguish it from the later novel (which, by the time you read this,
will have appeared and possibly even have been followed by the third novel of
the trilogy, Blue Mars).
In the first paragraph of the original essay, I called "Green Mars" and the
1984 novel Icehenge "introductory flourishes" to Robinson's then-forthcoming
Mars trilogy; and that phrase turns out to be both accurate and potentially
misleading. In a conversation with Stan in Reno at the June 1993 SFRA
conference (the results of which are scheduled for publication early in 1994 in
Science-Fiction Studies), it became clear that while the histories presented in
"Green Mars" and Icehenge are in many ways similar to that of Red Mars and
its sequels, they are not part of that history, and not intended to be. Instead of
attempting to reconcile the Mars trilogy with "Green Mars" and Icehenge,
Robinson chose to let the earlier works stand by themselves; in particular, chron-
ologies that made sense to him at the time he wrote Icehenge did not work for
him in the context of the Mars trilogy. In order to avoid vain and impossible
struggles, therefore, readers and scholars must be aware that while many
elements of the two earlier works are echoed in the trilogy, there is no way they
can be combined with it to make a coherent future history in the manner of the
early Heinlein or the later Asimov.

I regret this tedious introductory pedantry, particularly because it is peripheral
to the main concerns of this essay; but it seems necessary, that future strife may
be prevented now. Let me now return to my words and thoughts of yesteryear.
In both "Green Mars" and Icehenge, Mars is in the process of being terra-
formed, and human life has been prolonged so that one may expect to stay vigor-
ous for maybe a thousand years. Unfortunately, with this increase in life span
comes a loss of memory, with early entries being blanked out as more and more
late files are loaded onto the hard disc.
As a result, many people have become assiduous journal-keepers in order that
they may have some memory-surrogate to enlighten their late years about what
went on in the early years, much as many of us maintain photograph albums, or
tape recordings, or videotapes to the extent that we are never sure whether we
are remembering something or simply constructing a pseudo-memory around our
collected artifacts. Icehenge is, of course, a collection of such memoirs, each of
which deals with a different version of the same set of events: Pirandello's Right
You Are! (If You Think You Are) run through the SF machine.
"Green Mars," on the other hand, uses Mars and longevity as a setting for a
story of mountain climbing, which seems concerned with (1) the human-against-
nature plot that is most characteristic of SF, the drama of climbing the highest
mountain in the solar system; (2) the popular mainstream scenario of boy-meets-
girl, with the twists that the boy and girl are both close to three hundred years
of age and that the girl remembers nothing of their affair some 275 years ago;
(3) the ecological theme, always close to Robinson's heart, with the twist that the
ecologist (the "boy" I just mentioned) is losing his fight against the introduction
of life to Mars, dreaming of the past Mars in all its sublime and lifeless glory;
and (4) the storyline familiar to us from Robinson's "Venice Drowned" of the
protagonist who, having endured incredible physical and moral stresses in an
environment that has changed in ways he hates, comes ultimately to an accept-
ance of the present and its very real beauties.
If you know "Venice Drowned," then you know that Stan Robinson's short
fiction needs to be read very closely indeed, that he is working hard and
successfully at writing SF short stories in the mainstream tradition of James
Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, that same tradition which is rooted in the theories
of Edgar Allan Poe and which strives to make every tiny detail, however natur-
ally it falls and however naturalistically it is recorded, part of the symbolic
structure of the whole.
We therefore stop and pay attention when these old lovers, one of them with
more memory intact than the other, stop on the side of Olympus Mons to talk
philosophy (37). Robinson begins with a little academic joke. Do you know
Sartre, says she; no, says he, and she says, "A shame. He can be a big help to
we who live so long," and we say God, Stan, how could you? But then on the
Sartre in a New Dimension 163
next page Roger says to Eileen, "You were an English major in college, did you
know that?" and we realize that we have been taken. Either Robinson is having
fun with how much Eileen has forgotten in almost three hundred years, or, more
likely, he is indulging himself in a wry commentary on some of the English
majors he has taught in the past.
At any rate, the remarks by Eileen that these t*vo comments frame are, it
seems to me, important not only for an understanding of "Green Mars" and the
rest of Robinson's work but also for a new vision of the whole of science fiction
which is there implied. Eileen says
[I]n several places [Sartre] suggests that there are two ways of looking at the past.
You can think of it as something dead and fixed forever; it's part of you, but you
can't change it, and you can't change what it means. In that case your past limits
or even controls what you can be. But Sartre doesn't agree with that way of
looking at it. He says that the past is constantly altered by what we do in the
present moment. The meaning of the past is as fluid as our freedom in the
present, because every new act that we commit can revalue the entire thing! . . .
It's part of Sartre's philosophy of freedom. . . . He says that the only way we can
possess our pastwhether we can remember it or not, I sayis to add new acts
to it, which then give it a new value. He calls this "assuming" our past. . . . The
past is always assumed, because we are not free to stop creating new values for
it. It's just a question of what those values will be.
Robinson has a Ph.D., and so quite naturally knows what we will quite natur-
ally do next, which is to chase off to the library to find out just how Sartre said
that and what else he said and so on. The memory-deficient Eileen, we find out,
has remembered Sartre well enough; in Being and Nothingness, one of the
"several places" she mentions, he says, "The past indeed can haunt the present
but it can not be the present; it is the present which is its past" (89), and again,
"by projecting myself toward my ends, I preserve the past with me, and by action
I decide its meaning" (474), and again, "Thus the urgency of the past comes
from the future. . . . It is the future which decides whether the past is living or
dead. . . . This is because the only force of the past comes to it from the future;
no matter how I live or evaluate my past, I can do so only in the light of a pro-
ject of myself toward the future" (475), and finally, considering a particular event
of past history, he says that human history would have to be finished before the
evaluation of the taking of the Bastille could be finally determined: "He who
would like to decide the question today forgets that the historian is himself
historical . . . illuminating "history" in the light of his projects and of those of
his society. Thus it is necessary to say that the meaning of the . . . past is
perpetually Mn suspense'" (477).
For those of us who have read a lot of SF, there is a strange familiarity in
these lines, partly because we know that the best of SF is intensely involved with
historymuch of it history future as connected to our present, some of it history

past or parallel, as in stories of travel to the past or of Paratime. Indeed, as I
have noted elsewhere (Connecticut 172-74), these last two sorts of stories can be
justified as part of SF only if we define the field in terms of its engagement with
history.
Further, the historian imbedded all unwittingly in history, vainly struggling
to wallow out of the present to the high ground of an illusory and unattainable
objectivity reminds us immediately of the post-Heisenburg physicist who is him-
self imbedded in the physical world he is studying. In history as in physics, there
are no privileged observers.
Sartre's observation that by acting in the present we change the past comes
to us, after a moment's thought, as one of those perceptions that we always
somehow knew but never quite verbalized. In 1940, most of us regarded John
Brown as a well-intentioned madman with a sad propensity for bloodshed; but
after, first, the revolutionary successes of Fidel Castro, whose whole game plan
was very like that of John Brown, and, second, the triumphs of the civil rights
movement, we are more prone to see him as a man come before his time, a pro-
phet of a righteous cause.
Similarly, to the fury of political fundamentalists, the Supreme Court in its
wisdom has often asked of the Constitution not what it was in the minds of the
framerssince that is in a past that we constantly change in the presentbut
what it is in the past that we have constructed from the vantage point of the
present. "So," says Eileen (38), "you have to decide how you will assume this
past of yours. Now that [the old, red] Mars is gone."
The pretense of objectivity, then, is no longer a tenable one. The past we must
deal with is constantly changing because of what we do and think in the present,
just as, in physics, time and space change according to where we are standing
and what our velocity is. Further, just as in some extremely anthropocentric
visions of physics, we not only change reality by observing it, but we may even
create reality by observing it. It is a vision that transcends ordinary limitations
of time: because we are now viewing things billions of light years away that
happened shortly after the Big Bang, we are bringing them into existence. Some
time in the future, in this scenario, our successors will observe the Big Bang, and
it will become real and not simply an assumption. Thus the universe brings
physicists into being not only to look at itself but to create itself. When we open
Schrodinger's box and find his cat dead, even though the cat has existed in an
indeterminate state for some little time, we cause its death retroactively. Thus
also, if, without his permission, we plug this line of thought into Sartre's
assumption of the past, by interpreting history we would not only change our
view of it by what we do in the present but we would also be creating the past
in assuming it. (Note, please, that Robinson's second book of short stories is
called Remaking History.)
But creating something by observing it seems to waltz all over common sense,
as so much of modern physics does; let's back away from that line of thought
and come back to the more homely notion that our actions in the present modify
our memories of the past, just as a change in scientific paradigm modifies our
notions about what constitutes significant data. If at the moment I am healthy
and content and well employed and happily married, then my hard times and my
illnesses and my divorces were learning experiences necessary for my present
state and my current actions; if, on the other hand, I am alienated and lonely and
ill and have no prospect of doing anything about it, then all that past is part of
a dreary stretch of unbearable and pointless suffering. Just so, the hero of "Green
Mars," like the hero of "Venice Drowned," by acting in the present manages to
make an intolerable past into a tolerable and even potentially joyful one.
Now, the implications of this line of thought for science fiction are interest-
ing: because, just as by acting in a present we affect the past, just so, by
postulating a future we change the presentor, to use Sartre's term, we "assume"
it. A present that leads to the future of A Clockwork Orange is very different
from a present that leads to the future of The Left Hand of Darkness. And each
of them is more interesting than a present for which no future is postulated.
In her introduction to Left Hand, Le Guin makes the point that SF is descrip-
tive, not predictive, that it is about the present, not about the future. But I rather
think it is about both present and future, and that by projecting a future Le Guin
assumes and illuminates the present. Now, those of us who read widely in SF
have seen the present from many different personal futures, much as if we had
seen the past from the perspectives of the Marxist, and the fundamentalist
Christian, and the Iranian Muslim, and rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,
all at the same time. None of us, after all, can for the moment act in the future,
and so all assumption of the present must come from imagination, ours or
others'.
Sartre says of the past: "The past is . . . the past of something or somebody.
. . . There is not first a universal past which would later be particularized in
concrete pasts. On the contrary, it is particular pasts which we discover first.
The true problem . . . will be to find out by what processes these individual pasts
can be united so as to form the past" (88) and, we might add, so as to enrich and
give meaning to the past. Just so, there is no universal present: It is a present of
something or somebody. There is not first a universal present that we later parti-
cularize in concrete presents; on the contraryif we follow Sartre's line of
thoughtit is particular presents that we discover first. And many of those parti-
cular presents are the result of hypothesizing a future and from that future
assuming the present. The true problem, then, is to combine those individual
presentsthe presents of the futures of Le Guin, and Burgess, and Orwell, and
Anderson, and Asimov, and Kim Stanley Robinsonso as to unite them to form
the present.
We have to note that Stan Robinson himself has already taken a shot at this
problem. In his Orange County trilogyThe Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, and
Pacific Edgehe has hypothesized three futures for the same city, and for some
of the same people. To be sure, one may look at the first two books as caution-
ary dystopias and the last as a Utopia of a sort; but viewed as one work, the
trilogy is three futures, assuming three presents. From each future, Now is very
different; from all three combined, the present is immensely rich in possibilities
good and bad, enormously complicated and containing many contradictory
values.
One final point: You will remember that Elaine emends Sartre's dictum by
asserting that in the present we assume our past "whether we can remember it or
not." Avoid the temptation of the Freudian, if you will, and note that Robinson,
in "Notes for an Essay on Cecelia Holland," defines SF not as the literature of
the future, butsince it has often scooped in literature of a past that did not
happen (as in time-travel literature and literature of Paratime) as well as fiction
of the prehistoricas literature that concerns itself with the history that we
cannot know.
All these histories impinge on our present; and particularly as it postulates the
future, SF gives us the gift of the present all the time: an almost infinitely varied
set of futures implying and creating an almost infinitely varied and complex and
contradictory present. And in doing this, SF is doing the job that mainstream
fiction and, indeed, all art is supposed to do: It complicates and enriches our
perspectives on our daily lives.
WORKS CITED
Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963.

Foote, Bud. The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in
Science Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991.
. "A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson." Science Fiction Studies No. 61
(March 1994): 51-60.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace, 1969. Introduction
written in 1976.
Pirandello, Luigi. Right You Are! (If You Think You Are). In Naked Masks: Five Plays by
Luigi Pirandello, edited by Eric Bentley. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1952.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. [Blue Mars.] New York: Bantam, 1995.
. The Gold Coast. New York: TOR, 1988.
. "Green Mars." New York: TOR Books, 1988. (A TOR double with Arthur C.
Clarke's Meeting with Medusa.) First published in 1985.
. Green Mars. New York: Bantam, 1994.
. Icehenge. New York: Ace, 1984.
. "Notes for an Essay on Cecilia Holland." Foundation No. 40 (Summer 1987): 54-
61.
. Pacific Edge. Norwalk, CT: Easton, 1990.
. Remaking History. New York: TOR, 1991.
. "Venice Drowned." In The Planet on the Table. New York: TOR, 1988. 1-125.
First in Universe 11, 1981.
. The Wild Shore. New York: Ace, 1984.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. TYans. Hazel E. Baines. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel
Press, 1977. First published in Paris: Gallimard, 1943.
19
Finding One's Place in the Fantastic:

Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising
Valerie Krips
The dark is rising over the world, but the eye of the storm is in Berkshire. Susan
Cooper's protagonist is Will Stanton, seventh son of a seventh son. He is an Old
One, a representative of the Light. On his eleventh birthday he is initiated into
the rights and duties of his election, from which there is no escape: "Make no
mistake about it. Any great gift of power or talent is a burden, and this more
than any, and you will often long to be free from it. But there is nothing to be
done. If you were born with the gift, then you must serve it, and nothing in this
world or out of it may stand in the way of that service, because that is why you
were born and that is the Law" {Dark 52).
In this essay, I want to talk about the way in which Cooper's texts imagine
human subjects as responding to a gift from whose burden they cannot escape
because of the strictures of the Law. What is this Law? What sort of gift is it
that brings burdens in its train?
If fantasy is preeminently the genre in which "the terms which signal diver-
sion from reality are the means by which reality is revealed" as T. E. Apter has
suggested, then we are critically licensed to discuss how Cooper's fantastic char-
acters respond to and figure subjectivities in the real world; we can suggest that
fantastic subjectivities exist in a possible world that is in a dialectic relation to
our own (Apter 130).
At the heart of The Dark Is Rising sequence is the story of a socialization, a
realization of a miraculous "gift of power." The series begins with Over Sea,
under Stone, the story of three young children, Jane, Simon, and Barney Drew,
on holiday in Cornwall. Accompanying them is an elderly man whom they call
"Uncle Merry"; this is Merriman Lyon, a representative of the Light: an Old
One, as they are known. In this, the least complex of the five novels, the dis-
tinction between the "ordinary" world of the Drews and the fantastic world of
Merriman and his kind is made clear. It is with the second book, from which the
sequence takes its name, that fantasy becomes the primary motor of the narra-
tives, providing the stage upon which the drama of Light and Dark can be en-
acted. And it is here that the way of being a person, the subjectivity associated
with the fantastic, finds its most complete expression. In this book the newest
Old One, Will Stanton, is initiated. He learns the lore of the Old Ones, which is
inscribed in the Book of Gramarye. This is like the book of Nature, and through
it Will acquires an access to the world unmediated by language and its narratives.
In it "instead of presenting him with a story or instruction, the book would
simply give a snatch of verse or a bright image, which somehow had him in-
stantly in the midst of whatever experience was involved." In the book "he might
read no more than one line/ have journeyed as an eagleand he was soaring
suddenly aloft" (Dark 118; italics original). This is a book of "hidden things, of
real magic. Long ago, when magic was the only written knowledge, our business
was called simply knowing" (118). Simply knowing: that sounds easy.
And it seems from the account of Will's acquisition of this knowledge that
it is. He only needs to be who he is to acquire it: He is "bound by nature" to do
so. It is integral to him, not acquired by his placement as a social being but
anterior to it, awaiting only for him to "come into his own." It comes from a
"deeper part of him" (Dark 31). He acquires his "knowing" by means of a langu-
age that is not learned; for the Old Ones are born with the "Old Speech in their
tongues"; they work their magic by incantations, and the words of power used
invoke referents directly rather than simply providing representations (116).
Implicit is the idea that a direct apprehension of the world is possible, of which
"old" speech is the transparent vehicle.
Will's initiation is thus to a Rousseauian ideal: He speaks an Adamic langu-
age, sees nature without the veil of perception, and heals the Enlightenment split
between mind and body. He represents the centered subject, and an essentially
innocent one: innocent, that is, of the effects of the social, thought by Rousseau
and the Romantics to be so deleterious to the individual. Yet Will's is a fantastic
subjectivity, created within a textual situation in which the distinction between
fantastic and realistic subjects is insisted upon to the extent that realistic
characters are flat, reduced to the role of adjuvants. The question is, then, how
does this "diversion from reality" reveal reality; how does Will's subjectivity cast
light upon subjectivities in the "real"?
This is best understood in the light of Freud's account of human development,
and its re-reading by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan tells us that
it is precisely in the accession to language and social forms that the subject is
created. The subject is "actually and necessarily created within a split," the rup-
ture that occurs when the infant recognizes that it has needs exterior to itself, in
other words, when the world impinges upon it (Mitchell and Rose 5). It is in
response to these needs, which become demands, that the child adopts significa-
tion; words stand in the place of something that is missing (the satisfaction
desired), and the subject is "constituted in language as this division or splitting"
Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising 171
(31). Will's apprenticeship as an Old One is actually a refusal of signification

and language; his is a narcissistic turning inward, a rejection of the world.
"What the fantasy stages," Slavoj Zizek tells us, "is not a scene in which our
desire is fulfilled, fully satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realizes, stages,
the desire as such" (6). What desire is staged by a turning inward? In his subjec-
tivity, if we can call it that, Will has reappropriated that state when the self and
the world were one: before language, before signification, and therefore before
desire itself. Desire is, according to Lacan, the product of the dilatory space
between the libidinous need or lack and its expression in demand; between, in
other words, the experience of the drive and the attempt to fulfill its imperatives
within the social scene and language.
What can it mean to desire a time before desire? At birth and in early infancy
the child inhabits a stage of primary narcissism or self-love. This must give way
to a relinquishment of self-love and to attachment to objects outside the self; this
second stage leads to a third in which the realities of culture, of the "reality
principle," are accepted; with such an acceptance goes, inevitably, self-repression.
The desire staged in The Dark Is Rising is a refusal of the drama by which the
infant's insertion into human culture is achieved. Will's socialization is a move-
ment toward stasis, or nonsubjectivity, nonidentity, since the coming-into-being
of the subject can be achieved only through the social and the acceptance of lan-
guage itself as a mediating and enabling condition. What does this refusal of sub-
jectivity suggest? What is its meaning in this fantastic bildungsromanl
In The Dark Is Rising what is called the Law is seen as the ground of fantas-
tic subjectivity: "because that is why you were born and that is the Law"; to
explore its meanings is, then, to uncover the foundations upon which Will's non-
subjectivity is based. "Beyond the world is the universe, bound by the law of
High Magic, as every universe must be. And beneath the High Magic are two
. . . poles . . . that we call the Dark and the Light" (Silver on the Tree 22;
ellipsis original). The law of High Magic is the unknowable first cause that pro-
vides the foundation for the books' propositions about time and space and, there-
fore, for all its (fictional) world-views. It is the unspoken element of Will's
incomplete subjectivity and corresponds to what Julia Kristeva has described as
an "operational state," which enables other forms to materialize.1 And it is,
rather surprisingly, always represented by a Lady to whom all the fantastic
characters are in fee.
Yet it is not so surprising; in developing its fantastic possible world the texts
draw on a range of mythological stories and figures, of whom the most central
is Arthur, King of Britain. Whatever the truth of history might be, he is a figure
who stands astride the pagan and Christian histories of the British Isles. Cooper
draws upon this religious ambiguity to good narrative effect: The texts, while not
anti-Christian, point to an ahistorical time and to deities beyond those celebrated
in Western churches. Within this ambiguity, the texts are able to take a female
as representative of the law of High Magic, beyond which there is no recourse.

In calling upon Arthur, Cooper is also able to draw upon sources that link him
with old religions, whose gods were female.2
In addition there are other aspects of the texts that lead us to imagine a female
deity. The Lady, the Law's representative, is always fading from sight, slipping
away, as it were, from representation. When, for example, Will is only just
beginning his initiation as an Old One, he exposes the Light to danger. The Lady
is present: "And suddenly he realized that the luminous golden figure before him
was fading too, vanishing away, like smoke that grows thinner, thinner, until it
cannot be seen at all" (Dark 61). Later, when the Lady appears to Jane Drew,
she is a floating figure, "an isolated fragment of whatever world lay there behind
the greyness" (Silver 100). So not only Will but the very Law that supports his
subjectivity is in retreat from the world of the social or the Symbolic, in retreat
from representation.3
He, and by implication all the other Old Ones, represents the individual who
has not yet fully emerged into what Lacan calls the Symbolic, but continues in
a structure that precedes it, in which "the mother (or the mother's image) stands
for the first object of the child's narcissistic attachment (an object and an image
of the child's self-love, or love for his own bodyfor his own image), inaugur-
ating a type of mirroring relationship called 'the Imaginary"' (italics original).4
The Imaginary is the state the infant knows before entry into culture ensures that
the reality principle is asserted; the state in which the child has not yet learned
to differentiate between itself and the mother, or indeed the world.5 The Imagi-
nary, then, provides The Dark Is Rising's "genotext" or framework within which
"the subject will be generated as such."6
And that promises to be an interesting framework indeed. The Law, as we
have seen, is represented by a female. It has been claimed that the female's rela-
tionship to the Symbolic is distinctly different from a male's because though both
men and women are constructed in language, language privileges the male.
Indeed, Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose suggest that women have "access to
a different strata of language, where words and things are not differentiated, and
the real of the maternal body threatens or holds off woman's access to prohibi-
tion" (Mitchell and Rose 55).
Here we see the possibility of a subversive subjectivity emerging from the
"operational state" created within the fantastic. However, if this fantastic is to
yield a "genotext" relevant to the realistic characters in the books, such as the
Drew children, it must enter into a dialogue with the realistic elements of the
texts; must resolve the two apparently contradictory states of fantasy and realism
found within them, since the subjectivity created within the fantastic alone is
radically incomplete.
As Sarah Gilead has noted, a narrative's closure affects its relation to the
fantastic: In her typology, a closure that includes return either interprets the
fantasy narrative as a "salutary exposure of forbidden wishes" or "rejects or
denies fantasy by misreading it sentimentally and ignoring its subversive force"
or, finally, "turns against fantasy . . . in a tragic mode."7 At the end of the
stories, the Dark is finally driven back and the Old Ones depart to "a quiet
silver-circled castle at the back of the North Wind" (Cooper, Silver 283). As
early as the first text in the series, the difference between realistic and fantastic
was made very clear, and this difference is nowhere challenged. Until the end of
the last book in the series the texts tell a story grounded in an indifference to
human experience, at least as understood in the realistic, mimetic parts of the
books. The possible world of the fantastic operates within its own time frame
and for its own reasons; in spite of declarations that its purpose is to prevent the
Dark from rising for the sake of the (realistic) world, the relationship of the
Light or Dark to human experience is tangential: Indeed, as one of the characters
in Silver on the Tree makes plain, the Light seems little concerned with ordinary
human values: "Other things, like humanity, and mercy, and charity, that most
good men hold more precious than all else, they do not come first for the Light"
(Cooper, Grey 135).
The result of this is made clear in last few pages of the sequence when
Merriman tells the waiting children: "We have delivered you from evil, but the
evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control. . . . For Drake
is no longer sleeping in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere
sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now,
because the world is yours and it is up to you" (Silver 282).
Having saved the world, the fantastic characters now leave it to its own de-
vices. The texts' investigations of subjectivity within the fantastic are not carried
forward into the world the children know; the possibility of change offered by
the Law is lost as the fantastic withdraws to its "silver-circled castle." Nor will
the children act as torch-bearers into the future; the last fiat of the fantastic
removes the children's memory of their adventures. So, in spite of a lengthy
flirtation with subversion, the reality these texts finally reveal is a reinstated
humanist subject, fully in possession of the language of the patriarch, as is made
clear when Merriman tells the gathered children that it is "the responsibility of
man to keep it [the world] alive in all its beauty and marvellous joy" (Silver
282). In Gilead's terms, this is indeed a closure that "disrupts rather than
smoothly concludes a linear socialization plot" (Gilead 278), and a turning away
from fantastic subversion that transforms the potentially disruptive possibilities
of the text into a confirmation of an existing subjectivity.
NOTES
1. Kristeva is talking here about the "chora," an "essentially mobile and extremely
provisional articulation"; it is "not yet a position that represents something for someone
(i.e., it is not a sign); nor is it ^position that represents someone for another position (i.e.,
it is not a signifier either)" (italics original). It is a modality existing before the
distinction between symbolic and imaginary is made. Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader
(Oxford: Basil Blackweli, 1986), 95.
2. A recent retelling of the Arthur legend, Marion Bradley's The Mists of Avalon
(London: Sphere Books, 1984) shows Arthur initiated into the rites of such a female deity.
His downfall is then explained in part by the changes set in train by the passing of the old
ways and the increasing hegemony of Christianity.
3. For Lacan the Symbolic is a mode of representation; it is the register of language,
and thus of intersubjectivity and social exchange.
4. Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1987), 104. For Lacan "the Imaginary relationship, of whatever
kind, is also that of a lure, a trap." Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self: The
Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1968).
5. The Imaginary continues to exist into adulthood: It is "made of'imaginary fixations
which could not have been assimilated to the symbolic development' of the subject's
history; consequently, it is 'something which will be realized in the Symbolic, or, more
precisely, something which, thanks to the symbolic progress which takes place in the
analysis, will have been.'" Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London:
Verso, 1989), 55.
6. According to Kristeva, the "genotext" includes semiotic processes as well as the
advent of the symbolic. The semiotic processes in question here would be "the economy
of mimesis," that is, the relation of the fantastic to the realistic in the texts. It is a
"process" that articulates structures in texts, forming them out of, among other things,
"matrices of enunciation, which give rise to discursive 'genres'" (Moi, 120, 121).
7. Sarah Gilead, "Magic Abjured: Closure in Children's Fantasy Fiction," PMLA 106.
2 (March 1991): 277-93; see esp. 278.
WORKS CITED
Apter, T. E. Fantasy Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

Bradley, Marion. The Mists of Avalon, London: Sphere, 1984.
Cooper, Susan. The Dark Is Rising. Harmondsworth, England: Puffin, 1976.
. The Grey King. Harmondsworth, England: Puffin, 1977.
. Silver on the Tree. Harmondsworth, England: Puffin, 1979.
Felman, Shoshana. Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard, 1987.
Gilead, Sarah. "Magic Abjured: Closure in Children's Fantasy Fiction." PMLA 106
(March 1991): 277-93.
Lacan, Jacques. The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanaly-
sis. Trans. Anthony Wilden. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1968.
Mitchell, Juliet, and Jacqueline Rose. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole
Freudienne. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Moi, Toril, ed. The Kristeva Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
20
Carter and Blake: The Dangers of Innocence

Mary Y. Hallab
In her novels, Angela Carter explores the plight of Innocence confronting reality
through characters who are, by accident or choice, orphaned in an apparently
meaningless and chaotic world. Isolated to some degree in themselves, cut off
from family, community, nature, and God, even from their own bodies, these
orphans are ultimately free to determine their own attitudes, to be innocent or
cynical or to go beyond these states to acceptance of their place in the universal
human experience. In the three novels I will discuss, Love, Heroes and Villains,
and The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, a number of allusions and
parallels suggest indebtedness to those works of William Blake in which this
theme is also prominent, particularly his Songs of Innocence and Experience, The
Book of Thel, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Like Blake in the Songs, Carter treats the conditions of Innocence and its op-
posite Experience primarily as states of mind that are adopted deliberately but
that then determine perception and guide action. They are equally undesirable
because equally incomplete and static. Joyful Innocence, apparently the free and
guiltless expression of desire (and, in both writers, loosely associated with
Rationalism), is made possible by ignorance and passive dependence; cynical
experience, the guilty restraining of desire (associated with Religion), is
characterized by fear, suspicion, cunning. But innocence prolonged can become
hardened or reasoned into something very much like experience. Passiveness
imposes its own demands; love becomes possessive tyranny, and as in Blake's
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, an apparent angel of reason and love can turn out
to be the very devil of liesor vice versa. At worst, for Blake and Carter, inno-
cence is limiting and stultifying, trapping its possessor in a partial and incomplete
existence, bounded by fear and resistance to change.
In looking through Harold Bloom on Blake, I found three reminders about
him that, I think, also provide the most rewarding approach to Carter because
they show the greater part of her indebtedness to Blake. First, the reader should
avoid rigid or systematic interpretations and respond, instead, to the suggestive-

ness of the images and situations in context (191), for Carter, like Blake, hates
attempts to impose moral or intellectual absolutes. For example, as in Blake, the
meaning of her images is often the meaning attributed to them by the protago-
nists: A forest or tree may suggest exuberant life or impending danger; the city
can be a natural outgrowth of communal energy or a coercive and "chartered"
tyrannyor both meanings may simply coexist as equally true. Second, like
Blake, Carter is a satirist in the tradition of Jonathan Swift (Bloom 35). And,
finally, like Swift and Blake, she is a humanist. It is in the tradition of human-
ism, for example, that in two of these novels Carter creates an "other," fantasy
world, a future, post-third-world-war, weirdly devastated and transformed world
that not so much warns of future possibilities as it comments ironically on "eter-
nal types of intellectual error and spiritual self-deception," as Bloom says of
Blake (70).
Oddly enough for a fantasy writer, Carter also presents fantasy in a somewhat
dubious light as a medium for intellectual and spiritual self-deception. As the
poet and the Angel in Blake's Marriage see, respectively, and in the same place
and time, a fiery abyss and a "pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight" (Com-
plete Poetry and Prose 42; hereafter cited as Works), Carter's fantastic "decon-
structed" realityits people, cities, institutions, customs, and so onis in part
a projection and creation of various human perceptions, expectations, and desires,
often at odds with one another. But whatever its origins and however whimsical
and various, this reality is also real, concrete enough in its effects to punish the
individual who tries to block it out or re-imagine it for himselffor to do so is
"fantasy" in its worst sense of deliberate self-delusion. In Carter, such self-
centered solipsism is characteristic of what I call the "hardened" innocentthe
means by which the innocent remains "liberated from the intransigence of reality"
(Carter, Sadeian Woman 147).
Like Blake, Carter believes that innocence, prolonged beyond actual child-
hood, is stultifying and destructive. For the innocent is one who keeps him- or
herself inviolate and ultimately unresponsive and unresponsible to anyone else.
Like Blake's Thel, Carter's innocents reject the horrors and limitationsand
responsibilitiesof experience. Rather, they cling to the view that reality can be
recreated and manipulated to suit them. So instead of seeing themselves as part
of the worldphysically and spirituallythey begin to see the world as exten-
sions of themselves, as amenable to their wishes. And the many mirrors that
Carter sprinkles through their adventures seem to confirm this illusion for them.
As a result, their meager response to the modern human conditionthat of alien-
ated souls in a godless and fragmented worldis to take a fragment for the
whole and to make themselves the gods of it. In doing so, they deny their own
humanity, their own role in the chaotic and imperfect human community.
In Love (1987), Annabel, a little lost flower child (voluntarily separated from
Carter and Blake: The Dangers of Innocence 179
her rather conventional and protective family) moves in with her lover Lee and
proceeds to make over his clear bright room by shutting out the flickering sun-
light and painting the walls with a dark fantasy forest: "She was like a child who
reconstructs the world according to its whims and so she chose to populate her
home with imaginary animals because she preferred them to the drab fauna of
reality" (34). In this mockery of a Blakean "garden mild," where Annabel is the
"sleeping maid" ("The Little Girl Lost," Works 20), the lively, warm, spontane-
ous Lee is reduced to her protecting lion, "having no life beyond that of a neces-
sary attribute of herself alone" (64). Her inviolableness and resistance to growth
is evident in their lovemaking and her response to itwhich is nothing. She
views herself as still pure, untouched by it, although, like a child, she can simu-
late passion to gain control and possession.
That is, instead of expanding her perceptions and perceptual ability through
love and human relationships, she contracts and takes her own desires to be the
meaning of lifefalling into the ultimate danger of those who cling to childish
innocence. She persists in perceiving wronglythat her self is entirely indepen-
dent of others; that the spiritual being is separate from the physical and, indeed,
is the only reality; and that the reality she createsan artificial Blakean forest
of innocenceis more valid than the one she blocks out. Through Annabel and
her lover, Carter satirizes the sloppy attempts of 1960s hippiedom to recapture
a kind of lost Eden through supposedly "free" love and the repudiation of social
ties and responsibilities. (The novel was originally published in 1969 and revised,
with an Afterword added, in 1987.)
In Heroes and Villains (1969), the heroine Marianne is born into a future
world resembling Blake's ironic Eden of Deistic innocence, as Bloom calls
Blake's Songs of Innocence (36). Marianne is raised in a simple agricultural com-
munity, highly regulated on principles of order, reason, and hierarchy. It is domi-
nated by a useless upper class, the Professors, whose studies are the only tie to
the pastbefore the great war that devastated all and left the survivors isolated
and fenced off against the wild Barbarians outside. This "innocent" community
of Professors is fed and clothed by a working class and protected by the soldiers
that is, wholly protected from direct experience of reality, from labor, from
danger, from change, from violencethough not from occasional murders and
suicides that come in fits of madness.
In a pique of pubescent boredom with this protected and staticand essen-
tially meaninglesslife, Marianne rescues and runs off with an attractive Bar-
barian raider. That is, like Blake's virgin Thel, wandering from the vales of Har,
Marianne ventures down from her little tower of childish innocence into experi-
ence of "a land of sorrows & of tears" (Blake, Works 6)but without actually
knowing what she is doing. For priding herself on her intellectual superiority and
strong will, Marianne assumes she can maintain her self and her little-educated
logic inviolate among these feckless, lively, and somewhat unpredictable children
of nature. Her education does, at least, prepare her to resist intimidation by the
self-serving charlatan Dr. Donally, the renegade Professor who tyrannizes over
them. But she persists in regarding her new "family" and her new husband,
Jewel, as sort of anthropological curiosities, refusing, except under duress, to
respond to them or participate in their lives. Unlike Annabel, she succumbs fairly
readily to the sensual delights of lovemaking, but like Annabel, she maintains
indifference to her lover by mentally "denying him an existence" (88).
Like Marianne, the hero of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
(1972) is an orphan and an outsider in the City he lives in, isolated from the
community by his difference and his overwhelming indifference. His name
Desiderio reminds us that, like Blake's rational Angel in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, he "nurse[s] unacted desires" (Works 38), while remaining
smugly passive and self-contained. To some extent, his passivity allows him to
resist the assault on the reasonable social order made by Dr. Hoffman, whose
machines actualize fantasy and therefore "liberate" the real world from natural
laws by imposing illusions on it. Desiderio simply doesn't believe in them, any
more than he believes in "the divine illusion of perfection which Mozart im-
posed" on him (16). He too is capable of much lovemaking without love, that is,
of keeping soul and body apart, capable, too, of denying community with or re-
sponsibility for others. For the ease of it and because of his preference for the
simple and ostensibly rational, he prefers to remain loyal to the Minister of the
besieged city and the Minister's Determination Police, who protect its smooth
clockwork operation. It is, after all, a kind of undemanding, though dull, home.
Two factors send him on his adventures into life: first, a charge from the Mini-
ster to become a secret agent to find and destroy Dr. Hoffmanwhich he accepts
out of boredomand, second, a vision of a maddeningly desirable womanan
invitation from Dr. Hoffman to express his "pent-up passion" (41). Although he
doubts he will ever care enough to do either, a vague hope and irresistible
pressure from Dr. Hoffman keep him on his way.
But in Carter, as in Blake, it is not that one is isolated or self-sufficient, but
that one wrongly perceives oneself to be so. After all, the very ability to sustain
this delusion depends on the power of otherslike Blake's various parents,
angels, and guardians, or Carter's Determination Policeto control external
events and minimize unpleasantness. Moreover, reality eventually imposes itself,
often brutally. For however innocently Blake's chimney sweeper perceives his
world, however aloof Desiderio holds himself, they still are abused. Unlike
Blake's Thel, Annabel and Marianne are forcibly wrenched from the "gentle
sleep" of innocence to learn "the secrets of the land unknown" (Blake, Works 3,
6), where their illusions offer no protection against pain or fear. For not only the
claims of others but their own human susceptibility to desire, love, sorrow,
change, deathrealityare all disruptive to foolish innocence. Fear of these
leads to misperception, to rejection, to Blake's "mind-forged manacles"
("London," Works 27), which can turn innocence into the defensive cynicism and
tyranny of many of the Songs of Experience or of revolutionary works like
America: A Prophecy.
Like the Guardians in Blake's America, the Professors in Heroes and Villains,
fearing the irrationality or the creative vitality in themselves (depending on how
one sees it), persecute any deviations from their norm and project their fears onto
the hated Barbarians, whose energy could revitalize and enliven their static exis-
tence. The Barbarians, in turn, misunderstand and fear the knowledge that might
order their world and relieve their miseries. Fear permits frauds, like Dr.
Donally, to impose religion, holding the Barbarians in awe with a dead snake and
simulated fits. Fear of the disastrous effects of too much Imagination calls up the
Determination Police in Desire Machines, whose hopeless job is to decide defini-
tively what is and is not true.
In each case, "hardened" innocencethe contraction into a fragment of experi-
encebecomes destructive to self and others. For the innocents insist, by impli-
cation at least, that others are guilty, that the perceived threat to contentment
comes from outside rather than within themselves. Realityothersmust be
made to conform to their vision. Blake says, "The fox condemns the trap, not
himself." In Love, Carter frankly applies the Blakean contrast of cunning fox and
energetic lion from Marriage (Works 36) to Annabel and her victim Lee, just as
she places a "tree of deceit" in Annabel's painted garden ("The Human Abstract"
27). Deceit is necessary, for like Blake's innocent babes, Annabel is helpless and
dependent. She clings to Lee, slyly enforcing her claims on him by arousing a
sense of guilt and sin heretofore absent from his lifeand by having her name
tattooed on his chest.
But she ultimately deceives herself in coming to believe that "her fantasies
might mould the real world" (76). She retreats further and further into madness,
and nearly drags Lee with her. Her tyranny destroys his relationships with his
brother and his friends and makes him a confused and resentful prisoner. When
he rebels, Annabel, unable to endure in a world she cannot control, kills herself
in a final childish attempt to make Lee sorry. The names are ironic. It is not
envious angels who destroy the innocent love of Annabel and Lee; it is Annabel,
who can find no meaning to life outside of her own desires.
In contrast to Annabel, Marianne, in casting her lot with the Barbarians,
moves, however reluctantly, toward a more expanded vision. But not before she
has disrupted Jewel's relations with his family and, like a Blakean priest of Ex-
perience, worried him nearly to death with self-doubt and guilt. Gradually, brutal
reality teaches her some compassion for the miseries of these once-feared people.
She discovers that the Barbarians are not there just to entertain and wait on her.
She becomes aware of complexities and paradoxes; for example, Jewel, a killer,
can act with sympathy and responsibility for others, showing her self-righteous
passivity to be more culpable than anything he has done. Her killing of Jewel's
attacker forces her to accept possibilities of violence and unreason in herself that
she has denied. Gradually, she is able to love Jewel, to accept their unborn child,
even to cook a meal for the despised Barbarians in an act of concern and accep-
tance. After Jewel's death, without entirely sacrificing the benefits of her old
limited logic, she accepts a more realistic view of life's possibilities and her
responsibility in it.
Desiderio, in Desire Machines, also must be wrenched and brutalized by ex-
perience before he can become the City's reluctant savior. Pervasive images in
Carter are those of eyes and mirrors and magic tricks and masks, all representing
various concepts of perception, of illusion and reality. Illusion is the theme of
Desire Machines for, like the rest of us, as J. Hillis Miller points out, the
protagonist lives in a world without God, where each being finds himself alone
in his own mind, unsure as to what is real and what is not. But in Carter's world,
the innocent's illusions that he need not be troubled with reality are the surest
way to fall into Experience. For example, Desiderio's unthinking tryst with the
sleeping maiden results in her brutal murder and his imprisonment. Later, in his
sojourn with the River People, Desiderio finds that his wish that they will give
him a home, a return to comfortable and irresponsible childhood, is as much an
illusion as those created by Dr. Hoffman. Parents, after all, are part of reality and
as likely to be unpleasant as otherwise. (In their own innocent simplicity, the
River People are planning to eat Desiderio.) Nevertheless, like Marianne, he
learns some affection for them, as he does for the traveling freaks and the repul-
sive Peep Show Proprietor. Left unprotected to deal with life's various confu-
sions, dangers, and pains, he comes to accept them, even to prefer them to eter-
nal bliss in the fulfillment of his fantasies.
In The Sadeian Woman, Carter says, "We must learn to live in this world, to
take it with sufficient seriousness, because it is the only world that we will ever
know" (110). And this world is generally chaotic, confused, and unamenable to
individual desires for order, comfort, entertainment, or perpetual joy. It is par-
ticularly inimical to the desire to transcend, to achieve the Ideal, the Perfect
whether it be found in Reason or Imagination. Ironically, the greatest impediment
to the realization of desire is in the mind itself. In the first place, as Desiderio
discovers, both logic and imaginationfunctions of perception and thought
have value in creating order and in extending human possibilities. But they also
have their "dark side" and can equally be manipulated in the service of tyranny.
Moreover, when he finally reaches Dr. Hoffman's "powerhouse of the marvel-
ous," Desiderio finds only its "clanking, dull, stage machinery"the ultimate
achievement of "natural science" in the service of the Imaginative re-creation of
reality. He learns that "even if it is the dream made flesh, the real, once it
becomes real, can be no more than real" (201). For the mind to desire it, it must
be unobtained. Faced with the full and limitless actualization of his desire, poor
Desiderio learns this hardest lessonthat desire can never be fulfilled. And he
accepts with "insatiable regret" that "the impossible is, per se, impossible" (221).
In this imperfect world, "clos'd by [our] senses five" (Blake, Marriage, Works
35), humankind is doomed to the "perpetual disillusionment" of Experience,
where, in Blakean terms, Prolific and Devourer, Imagination and Reason, Desire
and Possibility, can never be one. They can only ebb and flow in a continual
battle for supremacy. To hold to one before the other is to deny life, for "without
Contraries is no progression" (Marriage, Works 34). But, however reluctantly,
Desiderio has to take sides. In the end, rather than be a perpetual prisoner of
desire, Desiderio chooses to be perpetually haunted by it. Amid Dr. Hoffman's
rampaging excesses of Imagination and passion, he sadly accepts his adult role
as "the impulse of restraint" (221) or, in Blakean terms, the Reason that "is the
bound or outward circumference of Energy" (Marriage, Works 34), and that
makes human community possible.
Like fairy tales, Carter's stories lead the characters into the impossible and out
of it. Annabel gets out the easy way, but in an Afterward to Love, we find Lee
making the expected frustrating adjustments to the imperfect realities of everyday
life and human relationships. Marianne and Desiderio abandon their unrealistic
expectations of mental independence, and in Desiderio's case, perpetual ecstasy,
to find a lesser but more endurable contentment in the human community. For
this is where Carter leaves us, refusing to hold out the Blakean hope of a higher
innocence, except as Thel observes it in the lily and the clod, in usefulness and
acceptance.
Carter's novels are accounts of initiation and growth from childish innocence
into miserable experience and, hopefully, beyond, to acceptance of a diverse and
ambiguous world that contains allthe Prolific and the Devourer, imagination
and reason, self and other, innocence and experience, man and nature, hero and
villain (often indistinguishable), time and eternity. In Carter's world, human
beings must learn to see beyond their own misdirected fears and self-indulgent
fantasies, to a vision and a goal, such as Marianne may live to establish, of a
balanced, inclusive, vital, and humanitarian community.
WORKS CITED
Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Newly rev. ed. Ed.
David B. Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Bloom, Harold. Blake 's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1963.
Carter, Angela. Heroes and Villains. London: Penguin, 1981.
. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. London: Penguin, 1982.
. Love. Rev. ed. New York: King Penguin-Penguin, 1988.
. The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. New York: Pantheon,
1978.
Miller, J. Hillis. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers. Cambridge,

MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1963.
21
Travels in Hyperreality: Jean Baudrillard's

America and J, G. Ballard's Hello America
Veronica Hollinger
BAUDRILLARD ON SF
In a brief essay on SF entitled "Simulacra and Science Fiction," written in the

late 1970s, Jean BmdriW&rd, philosophe of the postmodern apocalypse, meditates
upon the ways in which the three orders of simulation function also as fields for
the production of different modes of speculative fiction.1
According to Baudrillard, the first order of simulation is the product of a kind
of "realist" imagination; that is, it is produced within a system of representation
in which sign and referent function in harmonious correspondence with each
other. For Baudrillard, this is the system that corresponds to the imaginative field
of Utopian fiction. The first order of simulation encompasses "natural, naturalistic
simulacra: based on image, imitation, and counterfeiting. They are harmonious,
optimistic, and aim at the reconstitution, or the ideal institution, of a nature in
God's image" ("Simulacra and Science Fiction" 309). The evocation of theolo-
gical imagery is no accident. Because for Baudrillard, it is this system of repre-
sentation that is no longer possible; we have lost the "real" that it was capable
of evoking through the purity of its mimesis. For this reason, it is precisely the
"real" that has become Utopia for us. Utopia in this context is thus not some
better world waiting to unfold sometime in the future; it is, rather, a kind of
Garden of Eden vanished forever into a more innocent past.
The second order of simulacra corresponds to the imaginative realm of "SF
in the strict sense": "productive, productionist simulacra: based on energy and
force, materialized by the machine and the entire system of production. Their
aim is Promethean: world-wide application, continuous expansion, liberation of
indeterminate energy" ("Simulacra and Science Fiction" 309).
It is the third order of simulacra that, for Baudrillard, is the order of the
postmodern, "an order of simulation simulacra: based on information, the model,
cybernetic play. Their aim is maximum operationality, hyperreality, total control"
("Simulacra and Science Fiction" 309). 2 It is the operation of this third order
that suggests the end of representation, not only the "pure" system of representa-
tion of the first order but also the imaginatively expansionist system of the
second order.3 In the rhetorical tone of one whose reply is already prepared in
advance, Baudrillard asks:
Is there yet an imaginary domain which corresponds to this [third] order? The
probable answer is that the "good old" SF imagination is dead, and that something
else is beginning to emerge (and not only in fiction, but also in theory). Both
traditional SF and theory are destined to the same fate: flux and imprecision are
putting an end to them as specific genres. ("Simulacra and Science Fiction" 309)4
Baudrillard proposes that
true SF [i.e., SF corresponding to the third order of simulacra] . . . would not be

fiction in expansion, with all the freedom and "naivete" which gave it a certain
charm of discovery. It would, rather, evolve implosively, in the same way as our
image of the universe. It would seek to revitalize, to reactualize, to rebanalize
fragments of simulationfragments of this universal simulation which our pre-
sumed "real" world has now become for us. ("Simulacra and Science Fiction"
311)
He insists that "SF of this sort is no longer an elsewhere, it is an everywhere: in

the circulation of models here and now, in the very axiomatic nature of our
simulated environment" ("Simulacra and Science Fiction" 312). Not for nothing
does he cite J. G. Ballard's Crash (1973) as "the first great novel of the universe
of simulation, the world that we will be dealing with from now on" ("Ballard's
Crash" 319).
Inevitably, if not only the real, but even second-order simulation has dis-
appearedeffectively putting an end to "the 'good old' SF imagination"then
the Utopian imagination, function of the field of the first order, can be nothing
more than a trace of a memory of a now-impossible interaction with the real.
Thus, Baudrillard's conclusion that "it is the real which has become our true
Utopiabut a Utopia that is no longer a possibility, a Utopia we can do no more
than dream about, like a lost object" ("Simulacra and Science Fiction" 310). 5
Within a decade of writing "Simulacra and Science Fiction," however,
Baudrillard is no longer merely dreaming about Utopia; he is actually driving
through his own radically skewed version of the "lost object"through America
which, for him, as Andrew Wernick has written, is the "real geo-political
referent" of "the triumph of third order simulation" (n.p.). For Baudrillard,
America is also, paradoxically, "utopia achieved" (77).
Travels in Hyperreality 187
BAUDRILLARD IN AMERICA
America, the book, is a post-romance, and Baudrillard is the post-romantic

quest hero, searching for "the finished form of the future catastrophe of the
social" (America 5). And he finds it in the postmodern Utopia, the concretized
dream of social perfection, "the primitive society of the future" (America 7),
which is America. The achievement of Utopia is a contradictory achievement,
however, at once a triumph and a calamity, for "America is neither dream nor
reality. It is a hyperreality" (America 28). Its tragedy is exactly "the tragedy of
a Utopian dream made reality" (America 30), in which "every last vestige of a
heroic sense of destiny has disappeared" (America 46). What seems to be a
source of some chagrin to this dramatically minded philosophe, however, is the
fact that America remains so resolutely unconscious of its own tragedy. For
America is "naive and primitive; it knows nothing of the irony of concepts, nor
the irony of seduction" (America 97). Irony, Baudrillard invites his readers to
conclude, is for Europeans. America is inherently incapable of appreciating itself
as the scene of tragedy; only Europe, site of the failed Utopian dream of En-
lightenment, can read the signs of this territory of hyperreality where the hyphen-
ated space between self and consciousnessspace of the postmodernhas disap-
peared, erased like the distance between the referent and the signor between
the real and Utopia. In a kind of regression to the realm of the Lacanian ima-
ginery, the postmodern no longer recognizes itselfpas/-modernism as/?re-mir-
ror stage. America functions here as the object of Europe's gaze, since it cannot
see itself.
In Baudrillard's America there is only empty space. There seems to be no one
there: only Ronald Reagan, Paul Getty, and Walt Disney are mentioned by name.
At the same time, America teems with people who, like Disney camp-followers
or like the characters in some SF catastrophe novel written by Ballard, are both
the perpetrators and the victims of "a general cryogenization of the emotions"
(America 34). Take New York, for example: "With the marvellous complicity of
its entire population, New York acts out its own catastrophe as a stage play"
(America 22). The play is, of course, a tragedy, but it has no audience; everyone
is up on stage and the distance between actors and roles has imploded, so that
they are deprived of that critical detachment necessary for them to appreciate
their own performances. Postmodern version of Rousseau's dream of the perfect
communal theatrical event, which Herbert Blau describes as "a unison of reci-
procity and shared being such as Utopias have imagined . . . a mise-en-scene
without a gaze, everything seen and nothing to show" (182). Only Baudrillard,
self-styled "aeronautic missionary of the silent majorities" (America 13), remains
offstage to tell the tale, to read the signsat the same time playing out his own
(ironic) tragedy, unable to close the gap of his own critical distance, post-
Enlightenment wallflower watching this "last party" (America 47) from the
sidelines which is the space of Europe.

America is tragic because it does not perceive its own tragedy; it is unforgiv-
able because it refiises to acknowledge any need for forgiveness; it is the ultimate
hyperreal Utopia, and it needs no defenses from the rest of the world, since it is
also the map that is slowly but surely covering all the territory, the ultimate
simulacrum, the model that is all there is. So that America is SF; like Crash,
America embodies "the universe of simulation, the world that we will be dealing
with from now on" ("Ballard's Crash" 319).6 America is the place: postmodern
speculative fiction becomes not real, but simulacrummore real than real;
"desert forever" (America 12); "the desert of the real" ("The Precession of
Simulacra" 2). America the book: postmodern speculative fiction, specular SF,
allegory of the death of the real, expression of the post-utopian imagination.7
Post-utopia, of course, is very unlike "the reconstitution or the ideal insti-
tution, of a nature in God's image" ("Simulacra and Science Fiction" 309);
rather, in Baudrillard's analysis, it is the ideal institution of the circulation of
signs, the perfection of the hyperreal that "displays all the characteristics of
fiction" (America 95). In America, in fact, there is no space for nature because
there is only the desert, which "only appears uncultivated" and which "has
nothing to do with nature" (America 3; emphasis in original). "[T]he extensive
banality of deserts" is matched by "the equally desert-like banality of a metro-
polis" (America 9); for Baudrillard, "everything suffers from the same desertifica-
tion" (America 28) and "the whole of America is a desert" (America 99).
If, as Ruth Levitas has suggested, utopianism in all its forms is the expression
of desire (8), then it is not surprising that in the America of Baudrillard's post-
utopian imagination, the desert functions also as the sign of the disappearance
of desire: "No desire: the desert," as he concludes (America 123). What is left
is "an absolute fascinationthe fascination of the very disappearance of all
aesthetic and critical forms of life in the irradiation of an objectless neutrality.
Immanent and solar. The fascination of the desert: immobility without desire. Of
Los Angeles: insane circulation without desire. The end of aesthetics" (America
124).8
BALLARD IN AMERICA
"What you have to do," Baudrillard advises all who would travel in America,
"is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this
Active basis that it dominates the world" (America 29). Baudrillard certainly
takes his own advice in America, but Ballard was there before him, publishing
the literal fiction that is Hello America in 1981, creating what I read as both the
chronological prequel and the imaginative sequel to Baudrillard's meditation.
Ballard's text blazes the trail through post-utopia, through "the desert of the
real," and, as an act of fiction, is able to achieve a kind of ironically appropriate

resolution unavailable to even the most dedicated philosophe of hyperreality.
For Baudrillard, the predicament facing America is precisely "the crisis of an
achieved Utopia, confronted with the problem of its duration and permanence"
(America 77). This is, of course, a crisis of moral dimensions: "If America were
to lose [its] moral perspective on itself, it would collapse. This is not perhaps
evident to Europeans, for whom America is a cynical power and its morality a
hypocritical ideology. We remain unconvinced by the moral vision Americans
have of themselves, but in this we are wrong" (America 91).
Ballard's depiction of the future collapse of America is couched in terms that
bear more than a passing resemblance to this vision of a specifically American
catastrophe. Once again it is the desert that comes to cover all of America, but
in Ballard's text, America is literally "desert forever," a future wasteland created
through the exhaustion of its resources and the desertion of its populations. And
once again, physical energy and the circulation of the commodity figure are
essential components of America's psychic energy. Describing the slow decay
of the achieved Utopia, Ballard writes that "as the traffic grew finally to a halt
in the first months of the year 2000 . . . the whole nation seemed to lose its
vitality, its belief in itself and its future. The sight of millions of abandoned
vehicles seemed a last judgement on the failure of a people's will" (47). Both
traitor to and victim of its own achievement, America is now "the failed
continent" (42).
Just as Baudrillard does, Ballard positions Europe and America in a relation-
ship of alterity: Each is the other's "other." And just as Europe originally read
America as the new world, as the blank page, as the empty site of desire, so Bal-
lard's characters, who return from Europe to "the failed continent" in 2114, enact
the postapocalyptic version of this European quest for Utopia. This is how seven-
teen-year-old Wayne, whose perspective is central to the narrative, describes his
journey to himself: "Like his unknown ancestors centuries before him, he had
come to America to forget the past, to turn his back on an exhausted Europe"
(14).
Ballard's fiction is set after the fall, however, and the American "desert
forever" is no blank page. Rather, it is the site of what in Baudrillardian terms
we recognize as the third order of simulacra, a geography inhabited by images
of the popular imagination that were never circumscribed by reality in the first
place and so are free to continue their endless circulation. Like Baudrillard,
Wayne and his fellow travelers "enter the fiction of America" and discover a
desert whose surface is already so deeply inscribed by this interminable flow of
imagery that from the beginning it traps them in a kind of passive Baudrillardian
fascination with the hyperreal.
Even before their arrival, Ballard's explorers are already caught in this web
of enchantment. It is not for them actively to imprint the stamp of their own
desires on the blank page of an empty continent; their dreams have already been
delineated for them by this lost world and they come searching for "that vision
of the United States enshrined in the pages of Time and Look, and which still
existed somewhere" (51).
In a perverse kind of way, America is once again all potential; its promise is
symbolized by the "glittering welcome" (10) waiting for them upon their arrival
in New York, which is covered by a fine sand and gleams in the sunlight. Thus
the first line of Ballard's text is an ironic homage to Utopian desire: "There's
gold, Wayne, gold dust everywhere! . . . The streets of America are paved with
gold!" (7; emphasis in original). Wayne's ambition, entirely appropriate for a
young man newly arrived in America, is to become the next president of the
United States; he is convinced that "all I need is ten years to make this country
great again" (157).
On their journey from New York to Las Vegas, Ballard's travelers are
repeatedly confronted with the still-living images of the lost "America," "the
desert [which] has at last got inside our heads" (94). At Dodge City, for example,
Wayne sees a "mirage of the Great American Desert": "the enormous figure of
a cowboy. Two huge spurred boots, each the height of a ten-storey building,
rested on the hills above the town, while the immense legs, clad in worn leather
chaps and as tall as skyscrapers, reached up to the gunbelt a thousand feet in the
air. The silver-tipped bullets pointed down at Wayne like a row of aircraft
fuselages" (101). This proves to be, in fact, a gigantic hologram of John Wayne,
who is joined by Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp, the Gary Cooper of High Noon,
and the Alan Ladd of Shane. Gradually, however, "America as fiction" takes on
a much darker coloration. In Las Vegas, "the electric paradise" (121), Wayne
awakes to find himself "surrounded by Presidents," the robot creations of the
mysterious Dr. Fleming, who has constructed "a pantheon of popular Americana"
(175) in his workshop:
Huckleberry Finn and Humphrey Bogart, Lindbergh and Walt Disney, Jim Bowie
and Joe Di Maggio, lay stiffly across each other on the floor like drunks. . . . And
last of all there were the Presidents, a jumble of arms, legs and faces lying on the
workbenches as if about to be assembled into one nightmare monster of the White
House. (175)
Most disturbing of all, however, is Wayne's discovery of the "real" president

of this post-apocalyptic America, the madman who has set himself up in Las
Vegas and who, like Wayne, dreams of rebuilding the "failed continent."
President Mansonas his name impliespays his homage to a darker side of
America's lost culture. It is Manson who controls the last remaining cruise
missiles on the continent and who, recognizing Wayne's ambitions, establishes
the young man as his vice-president.
Trapped in Las Vegas by Manson's insane destructiveness, Wayne seems
finally to break free of his helpless fascination with America, insisting that "these
dreams were dead a hundred years ago! All we've done here is build the biggest
Mickey Mouse watch in the world. I'm not a real American" (218).
In a kind of dramatization of Baudrillard's theory of third-order simulacra,
however, Ballard's text makes it clear that these "dreams" have taken on a life
of their own. Thus there is a wonderful incongruity in the fact that Hello
America provides Ballard's readers with a very rare "happy" ending. Manson is
killedby the robot presidentsand Wayne is rescued by his friends, who point
out to him that "you've become President of the United States" (228). The party
continues its journey, pressing on to "the safety of California and the morning
gardens of the west" (234), and the text ends on an apparently Utopian note, with
Wayne dreaming "new dreams, worthy of a real tomorrow" (236). These are, in
fact, very old dreams, centered around his certainty that "he would enter the
White House one day" (236).
It seems to me that the almost saccharine closure of Hello America functions
in a deeply ironic way, demonstrating the inextricable estrangement that "the
fiction of America" exerts over Ballard's European travelers; their journey to
California signals their final disappearance into the geography of the simulacrum,
the territory of the hyperreal. From this perspective, Ballard's fiction enacts
Baudrillard's prophecy in "Simulacra and Science Fiction" that "when there is no
more virgin ground left to the imagination, when the map covers all the territory,
something like the reality principle disappears" (311; emphasis in original). For
both, America becomes the embodiment of what Umberto Eco, during the course
of his own "Travels in Hyperreality," names "the Absolute Fake" (35).
In Ballard's future America, site of the evaporation of the real, the
simulacrumthe model for which there is no originalhas come to achieve its
own weirdly convincing originality, enjoying the kind of authenticity that Walter
Benjamin for one previously located in the unreproducibility of the work of art
(cf. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction").9 And the
images so reverently pored over by Ballard's characters in ancient issues of Time
and Look embody the paradox of a nostalgia that subsumes both past and future.
This is a nostalgia that Baudrillard also recognizes; in America, after all, he
glimpses "the ideal type of the end of [European] culture" (America 98) in the
"crazy, parodic anticipation that is the New World" (America 104).
Both America and Hello America, therefore, are speculative allegories in
which a "fiction" of America functions as the landscape of the future, as the site
of Utopian desire transformed into post-utopian fascination. It is tempting to
conclude that there is indeed a tragic drama being played out here, but I am not
referring to the New York version of "the future catastrophe of the social"
(America 5). Rather, it is a drama being enacted in the European imaginations
of Jean Baudrillard and J. G. Ballard, a drama whose central motif is a more or
less conventional metaphysical yearning for the "real," and whose tragic
denouement is the realization that America, even as fiction, will not satisfy this
desire. European angst meets American indifference and is overwhelmed.
America is, as it were, already (otherwise) occupied.
NOTES
1. The most detailed explication of these three orders can be found in Baudrillard's
long essay "The Precession of Simulacra."
2. As N. {Catherine Hayles explains, "simulation simulacra" enter "into a new order of
non-referential signification that [operates] by displacement rather than representation.
Baudrillard calls this the 'hyper-real,' a theater where everything is at once nonreferential
and as real as anything else" (262). Hayles suggests the character of television's Max
Headroom as an exemplary simulacrum of the third order.
3. Baudrillard is by no means the only theorist of the end of representation as we
thought we knew it, although the terms of his analysis are specific to his own conceptual
sphere. We might recall, for example, Michel Foucault's systematic demolition of tradi-
tional models of representation in The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human
Sciences, and Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of the notion of mimetic representation in,
for example, "The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation." And Jacques
Lacan, within the framework of post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, has observed that
it is precisely the "real" that is "impossible." The very impossibility of any longer
presuming to capture "the real" risks giving rise to a powerful nostalgia for that lost
"real," and it is this particular nostalgia that it is one of the aims of this discussion to
identify.
4. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay explores some of the consequences of this argument in his
essay on the work of Baudrillard and Donna Haraway; "The SF of Theory" analyzes the
mutual implication of SF and theory within the context of postmodernity.
5. Within the Utopian field, the sign functions as the supplement of the real. In the
field of the hyperreal, however, signs have devoured the real; we are left with a world of
signs only, and no referentsof the map only, and no territory. Simulacra thus function
as products of a repetition that in effect replace their originals in a movement of openly
destructive supplementarity.
6. This image of America as simulacrum is echoed in science-fictional form in, for
example, the Los Angeles of K. W. Jeter's Madlands (1991), which is described as "a
reality that had probably never existed in the first place" (27-28). Jeter's Los Angeles is
"an imitation of an imitation, a photograph of a mirage" (137).
7. For a detailed examination of what I here term "specular SF," see my "Specular SF:
Postmodern Allegory."
8. Jonathan Benison, in an early discussion of Baudrillard's use of desert imagery,
explains that the "desert topos" "serves as an extreme metaphor for stasis. No Future"
(27). In this context, Meaghan Morris suggests the logic of Baudrillard's replacement of
"desire" with "fascination," when she observes that for Baudrillard, "fascination is the
ecstasy of the neutral" (193; emphasis in original). It is significant, within the terms of
this discussion, that Morris, no admirer of Baudrillardian "hype," borrows the title of her
analysis of his writings"Room 101 or a Few Worst Things in the World"from a

classis dystopian text, George Orwell's 1984.
9. In this context, paradoxically, absolute unreproducibility and infinite duplication
lead to the same end: absolute originality.
WORKS CITED
Ballard, J. G. Hello America. 1981. Rpt. London: Triad/Panther, 1985.

Baudrillard, Jean. America. 1986. Rpt. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1988.
. "The Precession of Simulacra." Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and
Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. 1-79.
. "Simulacra and Science Fiction" and "Ballard's Crash." Trans. Arthur B. Evans.
Science-Fiction Studies No. 18 (Nov. 1991): 309-320.
Benison, Jonathan. "Jean Baudrillard on the Current State of SF." Foundation No. 32
(Nov. 1984): 25-42.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New
York: Schocken, 1969. 217-251.
Blau, Herbert. "Universals of Performance; or, Amortizing Play." The Eye of Prey-
Subversions of the Postmodern. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. 161-188.
Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. "The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway." Science-
Fiction Studies No. 18 (Nov. 1991): 387-404.
Derrida, Jacques. "The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation." 1966. Rpt.
in Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978.
232-250.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. 1966. Rpt.
New York: Vintage, 1973.
Eco, Umberto. "Travels in Hyperreality." 1975. Rpt. in Travels in Hyperreality: Essays.
Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. 1-58.
Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literary and
Science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Hollinger, Veronica. "Specular SF: Postmodern Allegory." In State of the Fantastic:
Studies in the Theory and Practice of Fantastic Literature and Film, ed. Nicholas
Ruddick. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. 29-39.
Jeter, K. W. Madlands. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.
Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990.
Morris, Meaghan. "Room 101 or a Few Worst Things in the World." The Pirate's
Fiancee: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism. London: Verso, 1988. 187-211.
Wernick, Andrew. "Post-Marx: Theological Themes in Baudrillard's America."
Unpublished essay, 1991.
22
The Men Who Walked on the Moon: Images

of America in the "New Wave" Science
Fiction of the 1960s and 1970s
Rob Latham
Whether it's Frankfurt School theorists mourning the triumph of instrumental

rationality or liberal humanists decrying the proliferation of the military-
industrial complex, technological paranoia has been a cultural staple of the
twentieth century. And why not? No other epoch has killed and maimed more
people more swiftly and efficiently than our own; we've even devised weapons
that can foul the gene pool for generations. The human impulse to aggression
which, if the sociobiologists are to be believed, is encoded in those very genes
has, in our time, reached its dubious pinnacle, and perhaps the single image for
which our century will be most remembered (if anyone survives to do the
remembering) is Captain "King" Kong, in Dr. Strangelove, taking his last long
buckaroo ride astride a fat atomic phallus.
Then again, perhaps not. For beside the elegiac dystopianism of this analysis
must be placed the confident animus of another tradition: the technological opti-
mism of American science fiction. Since the New Wave days, it has been
fashionable to sneer at the shamblings of this can-do Frankenstein, whose Hubris
remains unclobbered by any Nemesis. Does old Ralph 124C41+ (I've always
loved that "+"!) still believe, after Auschwitz, after Hiroshima, after Chernobyl,
that the civilization of the machine is noble and good and, well, dammit, just
wonderful? Yes, he does. The Gernsback Continuum continueth. In Benford. In
Brin. In the crisp pages of Analog. And, I presume, in corporate thinktanks,
where the long shadow of Faust casts no pall. Pynchon's bright angel of death
may hover over our century (waving a ten-gallon hat and looking suspiciously
like Slim Pickens), but down here in the dream quarter all is quiet. Save for the
ceaseless, subterranean hum of science remaking the world.
If pessimism and optimism, dystopia and Utopia, are the twin poles of twen-
tieth-century speculation, then a new sort of SF has lately sprung up in the fertile
delta between these traditions. It is an SF that recognizes that, love it or hate it,
ours is the century of the machine, and despite E. M. Forster's glum prediction,
the machine is simply not going to stop. It probably won't even blow itself up.
It will just change things, inevitably, "like a deranged experiment in social
Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on
the fast-forward button"to quote one guru of this new SF, William Gibson (7).
This change is neither good nor bad, though it may be evaluated along either
moral vector by variously interested parties. This essay is devoted to exploring
the historical roots of this morally ambiguous attitude toward science and
technology in the SF of Britain's New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s.
Thanks to the harsh polemical armature that often accompanied this SF, its
reception in this country has long been a source of confusion and controversy.
New Wave writers frequently presented themselvesor were presented by their
stateside impresariosas breaking irrevocably with the tradition of American SF,
a naive artless genre given to juvenile technophilia (if one is to believe the more
aggressive liner notes). Unfortunately, this sort of dismissive polemic has served
not only to alienate many American readers and critics but also to disguise the
deep influence American SF, especially of the 1950s, had on New Wave writers.
(A volume remains to be written on the legacy of Bester, Bradbury, Matheson,
Sheckley, Vonnegut, and Cordwainer Smith in the fiction of the New Worlds
period.)
Moreover, the New Wave attack on American SF has often been interpreted,
by the more xenophobic ideologues of the Campbellian tradition, as an assault
on the values of American civilization itself: a dystopian flouting of science and
progress and an embrace of entropic nihilism. Certainly a flirtation with the lite-
rary and sociological implications of the concept of entropy marked the fiction
of many New Wave figures, as Colin Greenland's history of New Worlds, The
Entropy Exhibition, has shown; and this thematic fixation sometimes bordered
on a rejection of any sort of optimistic vision of the office of science and
technology in human life and society. But to interpret this trend as a total break
with "American" ideals does violence to the complex and ambiguous portrait of
America that emerges from a careful reading of the New Wave writersa por-
trait that, while often drawn in dark and satirical strokes, still contains a positive
thrust. It is necessary to read beyond the mutual gunfire of New Wave versus
Old Wavea rhetorical exchange that often devolves into a conflict between
Britain and Americain a way that, dialectically, shows the intricate relationship
between them.
One point that needs stressing in this context is that New Worlds provided an
outlet for some of the finest fiction produced by young American writers during
the late 1960s and early 1970s: The reputations of Thomas M. Disch, John
Sladek, and James Sallis, for examples, rest largely on their publications under
Michael Moorcock's editorship. Their fiction, which often could not find a mar-
ket in the American magazines of the period, was, to be sure, frequently quite
dubious, if not openly critical, about American values. But it was not wholly
"New Wave" Science Fiction 197
negative, as Norman Spinrad, another American writer with close ties to the
British New Wave circle, has shown. In his collection of short stories The Star-
Spangled Future, Spinrad attacks both the optimistic and the pessimistic SF tra-
ditions in a section called "New Worlds Coming": "Distopian [sic] warnings or
logical positivist space opera, neither of them connects up to history," he
declares, "[w]hich is why both the cry-sayers of doom and the space-age opti-
mists miss the point. Which is that the future, alas, is going to be just more
history" (166-67).
The chronicling of this historywhich, Spinrad argues, involves "a sense of
connection to the . . . moral and psychic reality of the realtime reader" (166)is
what this author sees as the essential characteristic of New Wave fiction. This
chronicle will not be dispassionate, but it will, ideally, avoid the twin pitfalls of
facile optimism and glib pessimism in its depiction of the cataclysmic changes
wrought by technology. It will, above all, express the activesometimes rever-
ent, sometimes scabrousengagement of the writer with the life of his or her
times; it will thus be a kind of moral chiaroscuro, its peaks of light sharing space
with abysses of darkness.
Spinrad links this ambiguous response to the transformations effected by
science and technology with his ownand the world'sambivalent response to
America. There is, he says, a "myth of America that exists in countries all over
the world. America, the demon of dehumanized technology. America, the hope
of the underdog. America, the gobbler of the planet. America, where you go to
become a star. The land of opportunity and the belly of the beast" (6). America,
Spinrad argues, is not only the prime subject of modern science fiction, it is
science fiction itself: "[S]et up as a laboratory and a model for a future which
the world has not yet attained . . . , America [is n]ot so much a nation at all as
a precog flash of the future of the species, the leading edge of the evolution of
world man. Which, of course, is also what science fiction is all about" (11). The
impossibility of assigning a fixed value, positive or negative, to this evolution
derives from the fact that SF writers are immersed in it even as they write; to
affirm or negate this coming future in any absolute sense is thus an act of bad
faith, a rejection of historythe history that America, for good or ill, is currently
forming and expressing.
Spinrad goes on to detail his own experiences in Britain and Europe during the
1960s and 1970s, specifically the responses he witnessed to two contemporary
American undertakings: the Vietnam War and the Apollo moon landing. The
war, he said, evoked a widespread feeling of deep "sorrow, of loss, of betrayal,"
whereas the moon landing inspired almost unstinting admiration (6). The coexis-
tence, and yet the incommensurability, of these reactions remarks, for Spinrad,
the inherent ambiguity of the myth of America: a nation capable of deploying
technology for soaring accomplishment or for profound evil. An honest SF must
encompass both potentialities; indeed, truly modern SF essentially is this
Manichean myth of America.

I have spent so much time unpacking Spinrad's argument because it seems to
me to provide an illuminating frame for much of the science fiction published
in New Worlds. The sense that America was remaking the world inspired count-
less New Wave writers to heights of ecstasy and depths of despair. Often, these
responses were impossible to distinguish from one another within the same
writer's body of work, sometimes within the same story.
Pamela Zoline's oft-reprinted New Worlds tale "The Heat Death of the Uni-
verse," for example, posits a takeover of the globe by American suburbia, armed
with a domesticating technology that fills human life with ersatz wonders and
with endless advertising hype for these wonders. Indeed, the language of adverti-
sing, with its conflation of the banal and the magical, comes to represent the
American hegemony: the wonders of science made everyday, even disposable.
A simple box of cereal seems to emanate "Energy, Nature's Own Goodness, an
endless pubescence" (149). For Zoline, the products of technology are potentially
beautiful, but their beauty is vitiated by the shallow consumerism that frames and
contextualizes them; this consumerism has invaded the entire earth, eroding the
differences between cultures and ushering in a totalized, closed social system that
then necessarily, by the logic of science itself, succumbs to entropy, the heat
death of the universe. And yet there remains a kind of grudging fascination with
this vast transforming process, as Zoline shows in her ambivalent paean to its
geographical locus, California:
[IJmagine ... a whole world which has become like California, all topographical
imperfections sanded away with the sweet-smelling burr of the plastic surgeon's
cosmetic polisher, a world populace dieting, leisured, similar in pink and mauve
hair and rhinestone shades. A land Cunt Pink and Avocado Green, brassiered and
girdled by monstrous complexities of Super Highways, a California endless and
unceasing, embracing and transforming the entire globe, California, California!
(150)
The rhetoric of this apostrophe is a confused mix of homage and horror, of cri-
tique and eulogy, expressing the essential ambiguity of America.
Spinrad, also, locates the source of America's transformative power in
Californiaspecifically, in Hollywoodand he, too, responds to this power with
a mixture of fascination and loathing. The eponymous antihero of Spinrad's
serialized New Worlds novel Bug Jack Barron, is a creature of the American
media, a larger-than-life TV star whose basic credo is the ability of American
technology to shape not only the social but also the sensory world, to mold
reality itself. Barron persistently hymns the mass media as an extended percep-
tual apparatus articulating human desires and technology as a dream machine
actualizing them. The irony in this consumerist equation is that it is impossible
to determine whether Barron is a manipulator of the system or its puppetand,
more generally, whether the media express real desires that technology truly
gratifies, or whether instead they are an instrumentality of illusion erected by a
rootless culture gone ego-mad. Moreover, it is unclear if human beings retain any
control over this system; perhaps it has achieved such autonomous mastery of
social and perceptual space that individuals, with their dreams and desires, have
become mere simulations in its matrix of power. For Spinrad, the American
dream, produced and disseminated by Hollywood, is a tissue of dazzling fantasies
promising vague half-truths, an ambiguous Utopia.
This complex vision of America finds its crowning expression in the diverse
work of the quintessential New Wave writer J. G. Ballard. Ballard's fiction, from
his stories of the 1960s to his 1981 novel Hello America, has displayed a deep
fascination with American images and values, but this fascination has been tem-
pered by a corrosive analytic irony that dissects those images and parses those
values to expose the secret obsessions they encode. The various "condensed
novels" collected in The Atrocity Exhibitionmost of which were first published
in New Worldsprovide a fragmented index to Ballard's major preoccupations
about America.
Like Spinrad, Ballard feels the American media have supersaturated the globe
with a repertoire of imagery that has attained a reified autonomy: Blown-up
photos of film stars and other celebrities loom over the Ballardian landscape like
vast dream visions, providing for individuals "a set of operating formulae for
their passage through consciousness" (18) and, for the mysterious power elite
manipulating the images, a system of models "as unreal as the war the film
companies had re-started in Vietnam" (9). In Ballard's analysis, public figures
and eventsfrom Elizabeth Taylor to the Vietnam Warare mere simulations
arranged by shadowy experts and designed to channelize human desire into
programmed outlets of fantasy and aggression. The efficacy of Ballard's analysis
is remarked by the fact that his surrealist psychopathology of everyday American
life allowed him to predict the presidency of Ronald Reagan a decade before it
occurred.
Though this analysis might seem wholly negative in its vision of a power-mad
technocracy contriving unreal mass-mediated events, Ballard's work also cele-
brates the inability of the system fully to recuperate its effects. The fake
newsreels, the seductive images of film stars and presidential candidates, while
quantified to achieve predictable results, occasionally derail when obsessed
individuals appropriate and remotivate them in obscure symbologies and patterns
all their own. Random fragments of the technological and media landscape,
when filtered by a visionary consciousness, achieve the status of "psychic
totems""assassination weapons" that violently break the spell of power (37-42).
Moreover, the sudden deaths of American celebritiesfrom the ambiguous
murder of John F. Kennedy to the legendary suicide of Marilyn Monroetake
on an impenetrable yet potent mystery, becoming the objects of rapt fantasies
that cannot be entirely controlled. In this strange scenario, the random violence
of America is a source of potential freedom from the calculated violence of
America: luminous, transfiguring individual death overcomes the calibrated
collective deaths of Hiroshima and Vietnam.
The portrait of America that emerges from this complex analysis is a divided
one, neither fully positive nor negative, and Ballard negotiates his intricate
dialectic by means of a rhetoric that fuses contradictory emotional tones. His
narration in The Atrocity Exhibition combines laconic horror with quasi-mystical
exaltation, functioning satirically and panegyrically by turns. Ballard himself has
described this divided style as "a kind of terminal irony, where not even the
writer knows where he stands" (quoted in Pringle, Science Fiction 157). Just as
this ironic rhetoric cannot be finally resolved, so the Ballardian myth of America
achieves a nervous balance between commemoration and excoriation. Like
Spinrad, Ballard sees America as "a precog flash of the future of the species,"
and any absolute verdict on this future can only be premature.
However, a privileged representative of this future is available for examination
and analysis: The astronaut, a figure that appears persistently in the work of
Ballard and many other New Wave writers, seems to sum up and (forgive the
pun) encapsulate their ambivalent vision of America. Some of these writersfor
example, John Sladek, in his story "The Poets of Milgrove, Iowa"deploy this
heroic icon for comic effect, showing him to be less an inspiring paragon scaling
heights of achievement than a protoplasmic redundancy in a routinized process.
To this theme of superfluous heroism, Charles Platt adds the irony of exploded
romance: "With the fulfillment of the visions [of Arthur C. Clarke and other
early prognosticators of spaceflight]," Platt writes, the "romance has vanished
displaced by the pragmatism of astronauts, the vocabulary of space hardware, the
somehow unimaginative mechanical processes of Cape Kennedy" (quoted in
Greenland, 46). The general thrust of this satirical portrait is that the accomplish-
ments of American space technology have transformed their representative, the
astronaut, into a faceless cipher drawling jargon and punching buttons. The
momentous has become mundane.
On the other side of the coin, some New Wave writers portray the astronaut
as a tragicfigure;however, unlike American Barry Malzberg's scathing depiction
in his novel Beyond Apollo, he is tragic due not to the reversals of fortune
spawned by pride and power-lust but, rather to his painful confrontation with the
crushing immensity of the universe he seeks to penetrate. In New Worlds stories
like Michael Butterworth's "Concentrate 1," the majesty of space is limned with
an intensity any hard-SF fan might hope for, yet the effect is not to invite cozy
colonization but to terrify and appall: Human aspiration pales before the "cold
planes of continuity" of the indifferent cosmos (58). "Space is a vast church,
[but] . . . no people have any connection with it" (57). In this bleak cathedral,
the lonely pilgrim courts madness and death.
Whether comic or tragic, New Wave treatments of the astronaut express an

ambiguous vision of America. Though this figure actualizes the high ideal of
spaceflight, he does so at the price of his self-esteem: Either his heroism is
dissipated in prosaic routine, or his vanity is humbled in the glare of infinity.
American technological aspiration is thus shown to contain a paradoxical dyna-
mic: It effects vast prodigies that ultimately expose their own meaninglessness.
Most New Wave writers are content simply to pose this paradox, exploiting its
comic or tragic implications. But here as elsewhere, the work of J. G. Ballard is
exemplary in pursuing the resultant ironies to their terminal point, fusing satire
and pathos in a complex, dualistic vision of the American astronaut.
Ballard's portraits of this figure extend, chronologically, from 1962's "The
Cage of Sand" to 1985's "The Man Who Walked on the Moon." This persistent
fascination derives perhaps from the author's general thematic obsession with
images of flight, remarked by David Pringle. "For Ballard," says Pringle, "flight
is . . . symbolic of all the most romantic and transcendent impulses," and yet "the
attempts to fly in Ballard's fiction are frequently abortive, and thus the bird, the
glider, or the aeroplane can come to represent a failed hope or a stifled
transcendence" (Earth 55). And also, we might add, the rocketship, which
Ballard often shows exploding (as in "Notes towards a Mental Breakdown"), or
crashing (as in "A Question of Re-Entry"), orin one of Ballard's most
characteristic imagesrusting in the sandy wasteland that Cape Kennedy has
mysteriously become. For Ballard, the astronaut is at once Daedalus, wielder of
technological marvels, and Icarus, victim of the technology he has wrought. He
is thus a symbol of the author's ambivalent vision of America, a nation of
inspirational yet fatal ambition.
Like Ballard's doomed bomber pilots in "The Terminal Beach," his astronauts
are pawns of a technological system whose purpose, for all its glorious
achievement, is violent destruction. Flight, one of the noblest and most romantic
of human aspirations, led, ultimately, to the Enola Gay and the holocaust of
Hiroshima; the Apollo missions paved the way for Star Wars. This is the matrix
of destruction in which American technology is caught, and the astronaut is both
its perpetuator and its puppet. Like the movie stars and political notables of The
Atrocity Exhibition, he is a public celebrity, manipulated by power elites; but
unlike Elizabeth Taylor, Ronald Reagan, et al., he is never reduced by Ballard
to a mere simulation of power. Because of the metaphorical ambiguity of flight
as a potential escape, there remains about the astronaut an optimistic thrust that,
possibly, can be redeemed.
The agency of this redemption is a rejection of the colonization of outer space
in favor of a reconnaissance of inner space, the dark planet of the mind.
Ballard's 1978 story "Zodiac 2000" analyzes the causes and effects of this trans-
formation. The tale's alienated protagonist is haunted by visions of destructive
technology, whose apotheosis of violence he has unwittingly hastened and
assisted:
Deep in his mind he dreamed of cruise missiles, launched from the surfacing
submarines and heading out across the lonely tundra, following the contours of
remote arctic fjords. Soon he would be leaving, glad to abandon this planet to its
nightmare games. .. . The true zodiac of these people, the constellations of their
mental skies, constituted nothing more than a huge self-destructive machine. (74)
The story's final line coming in a section headed "The Sign of the Astronaut,"
seems to present an image of efficacious flight, as the hero proposes to "take the
left-handed staircase to the roof above his mind, and fly away across the free
skies of his inner space" (75).
Like the obsessed assassins of The Atrocity Exhibition, who remotivate public
images and figures in a personal way that undermines the invidious informing
context of their production, so the astronaut of inner space refuses the vision of
flight as external adventurea vision that allows power to conscript him for its
purposesand opts instead for internalized flight, an exploration of the self that,
however bizarre or violent, is essentially creative. Indeed, the trinity of deities
that presides over The Atrocity ExhibitionComa, Kline, and Xeroare three
astronauts killed in a catastrophe in space who return to teach the protagonist a
new identity; there is even the suggestion that one of the book's characters,
Karen Novotny, has been somehow impregnated by one of the dead spacemen
and is preparing to give birth to a new messiah who will inaugurate a fresh
epoch on the earth.
The "Delivery System" of this messiah, says Ballard, punning on the tools of
destructive technology, is the rocketship, in this case a procreative rather than a
murderous instrument. Or is it? As always in Ballard, endemic irony undermines
either a fully Utopian or dystopian reading, leaving us in the end with ambivalent
questions: "Are space vehicles merely overgrown V-2s, or are they . . . symbols
of redemption, ciphers in some futuristic myth?" (102). Similarly, is the astronaut
merely an overgrown bomber pilot, or is he a hopeful image, harbinger of a
more positive future? And, more generally, is America merely an overgrown
Babylon, destined to absorb and annihilate the world, or is it a nation where the
spiritual freedom of "inner space" can be achievedin Spinrad's words, is
America "the land of opportunity or the belly of the beast"? Ballard never really
gives decisive answers to these questions, which is appropriate, since the only
true answer is history, and history is hedging its bets. I would like to close this
essay by extrapolating my argument about the image of America in British New
Wave SF in a way that suggests connections with a trend in 1980s American SF.
Since the New Wave portrayal of America as an ambiguous Utopia coincided,
historically, with the period of Britain's final decline as a world power and the
usurpation of its international role by a mature American empire, it might be
fruitful to ask whether the fascination with Japan currently evinced by cyberpunk
writers like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling might not remark a similar
decline in the American hegemony. Like the New Wave's America, the
cyberpunks' Japan portends an ambivalent and morally unreadable future that can
be interpreted as either a promise or a threat. The crucial figure in this context
is not the astronaut in his rocket but the hacker at his or her computer; the
essential question, however, remains the same: Is this technology an agency of
power, enwebbing and dominating the globe, or is it the vehicle of a radical
freedom, exhilarating and uncontrollable? A related question: Doesn't the
cyberpunk evocation of cyberspace colonize the inner horizon that, for Ballard,
provided the only outlet for human freedom, and if so, what are the implications
of this colonization? These are questions I can't begin to answer now, so I will
leave them in suspensean ironic suspense that remarks not merely the morally
ambiguous state of cyberpunk SF but of the world we live in.
WORKS CITED
Ballard, J. G. The Atrocity Exhibition. London: Triad/Panther, 1979.

. Memories of the Space Age. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1989.
. "The Terminal Beach." In Chronopolis: The Great Science Fiction of J. G.
Ballard. New York: Berkley, 1972. 52-75.
. "Zodiac 2000." In Myths of the Near Future. London: Triad/Panther, 1984. 66-75.
Butterworth, Michael. "Concentrate 1." In New Worlds 174 (August 1967). 42-60.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer.New York: Ace, 1984.
Greenland, Colin. The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcockand the British "New Wave"
in Science Fiction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
Malzberg, Barry. Beyond Apollo. New York: Random House, 1972.
Pringle, David. Earth Is the Alien Planet: J. G. Ballard's Four-Dimensional Nightmare.
San Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press, 1979.
. Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1985.
Sladek, John. "The Poets of Milgrove, Iowa." In The Best of John Sladek. New York:
Pocket, 1981. 14-20.
Spinrad, Norman. Bug Jack Barron. New York: Avon, 1969.
. The Star-Spangled Future. New York: Ace, 1979.
Zoline, Pamela. "The Heat Death of the Universe." In New Worlds: An Anthology, ed.
Michael Moorcock. London: Flamingo, 1983. 148-159.
23
The Closing of the Final Frontier:

Science Fiction after 1960
Brian Attebery
One of the turning points in science fiction came sometime around 1960. Robert
Silverberg, who contributed to and championed the transformation, claimed a
decade later that "before 1960 or thereabouts, this literature of infinite horizons
was, paradoxically, conservative and tradition-bound in matters of style and
content. A straightforward, unembellished mode of narrative was the usual tech-
nical approach to storytelling, and most writers relied on conventional magazine-
fiction methods of handling the depiction of character and emotion" (7). From
this perspective, the pulp era was the genre's awkward adolescence, with adult-
hood coming only after the arrival of R. A. Lafferty, Joanna Russ, Roger
Zelazny, Samuel Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others of the classes of 1960
or 1961 or 1962.
However, not everyone was so enamored of the newer fashion, especially as
embodied in the "New Wave" of the later 1960s. For readers whose tastes were
formed by the magazines of the Golden Age, science fiction seemed to lose itself
in pointless experimentation with style, point of view, and previously taboo
themes: In trying to become more self-consciously literary, the New Wave
writers were losing sight of the scientific accuracy and sense of wonder that
marked the best of the older fiction. I believe it is useful to try to describe the
change without making judgments about which is good and which bad. Instead
I assert that the stories that have dominated the field since 1960 are different in
kind from those that prevailed before. They are structured differently, they are
read differently, and they function within quite different systems of meaning. An
analysis of these differences can provide insight into the properties distinctive to
the kinds of texts we perceive as literary and into some of the reasons that a
genre like science fiction might move in the direction of increasing literariness.
In the past few months I have read several hundred American SF short stories
from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Naturally, most of them have faded in
memory, but the resulting blur, the generalized all-purpose post-1960 storyline
that remains, retains a few striking features. It is not a story about new inven-
tions, alien invasions, robots, or travels into the future. As a matter of fact, it
isn't a story about travel at all. Frequently, indeed, it is about the impossibility
of travel, about not being able to explore and colonize the universe.
A representative example is David* Brin's "The Crystal Spheres." In Brin's
story, the solar system is encased in a crystal sphere, just like those projected by
pre-Copernican astronomy. The difference is that beyond this sphere lies the real
universe. Humans manage to crack the sphere and escape into interstellar space:
So far this sounds like a classic version of what Gary Wolfe has called "the
image of the barrier" (30)a central image in pre-1960s SF. The standard scena-
rio is as follows: The protagonists of a story must penetrate a seemingly impas-
sible wall of matter or force, and the solution to the physical barrier is at the
same time a conceptual breakthrough opening new intellectual horizons. But in
Brin's version, the barrier only leads to more barriers: Every other star system
turns out to have a similar wall of crystal, and these cannot be broken, at least
from the outside. Humankind has penetrated only into empty space. Though Brin
suggests a long-term solutionwait until the inhabitants of each system crack
their own eggthe implications of the story are quite different from those of
earlier versions of the barrier. The wall of crystal is in some ways more real than
the limitless universe: It represents the true condition of humankind. Science
fiction in the past three decades is characterized by such inversions: conceptual
breakdowns rather than breakthroughs.
For this reason I've begun thinking of 1960 as the year the frontierthe final
frontier, as Star Trek calls itclosed. Before I try to explain why, I'm going to
take an extended detour into the American West in order to set up an analogy
that I think tells us a lot about what has happened in science fiction.
There is an equivalent date for the closing of the western frontier. Frederick
Jackson Turner, looking at evidence about as sketchy as mine, declared the fron-
tier closed in 1890. There was still open land after that time, but judging from
1890 census data the advancing lines of settlement from the east and west coasts
had converged. It so happens that in 1890, just about at the spot where the west-
ward migration began to meet returnees from California and Oregon, my grand-
father was born, in Rosalia, Washington. I mention him because he represents not
only a generation of westernersthe last generation to take an active part in
taming the Wild Westbut also a generation of readers about the West (73).
In between his various adventures as a farmer, horse trader, coyote hunter,
country schoolteacher, prison guard, and substitute camp cook, my grandfather
always read. And what he loved to read about was the West. His favorite books
included Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), Harold Bell Wright's The
Winning of Barbara Worth (1911), Charles Siringo's A Texas Cowboy, or Fifteen
Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony (1886), and Zane Grey's Riders
of the Purple Sage (1910). But he wasn't always pleased with Zane Grey: He
Science Fiction after 1960 207
thought Grey's books tended to be too much the same, and even more
damagingly, Grey didn't always get his facts right. This was the ultimate literary
sin. Anybody who would write, for instance, about "white-faced short horns"
hadn't done his homeworkthere's no such animal (this particular error is not
Grey's). And, according to Grandad, you "oughtn't to read such a book." Other
unforgivable mistakes might include references to a teamster holding "reins"
they're properly "lines"or putting plants and animals in the wrong habitat or
having a saddle horse travel an impossible distance in a day.
What Tom Attebery read for was a clear reference to his own experience of
the West. That experience included more than vocabulary and landscape. It also
included a certain way of arranging events into stories to make certain kinds of
points. A good story, first of all, had to be about somebody doing something, not
just standing around talking or undergoing moral crises. Second, it should some-
how refer to the broader story of western settlement, which was unambiguously
a story of heroic conquest over inhospitable conditions (73): of "winning" or
"reclaiming" the West.
So my grandfather chose books on the basis of a complex and detailed rela-
tionship to a master narrative. Since he isn't around to snort at my highfalutin
language, I might call it a megatext. That megatext is not the compressed and
violent mythos of dime novels and western movies, termed by John Cawelti The
Six-Gun Mystique. Tom Attebery's taste, like that of most of his contemporaries
on the range, was actually rather genteel; they were, after all, raised on
Longfellow and Whittier. Grandad objected to the sensationalism of pulp fiction,
as well as its inaccuracy. The megatext he looked for is identified by Henry Nash
Smith in his study of the symbolic image of the West: Virgin Land. The story
begins with an essentially empty land, a desert in terms of both rainfall and
human habitation. Then the first explorers begin to survey the land, followed
eventually by the homesteaders who will make the land bloom, "redeeming" it,
with all the moral implications of that term. This broad narrative provided a
framework within which to set all the details of landscape, flora, fauna, and
human culture: everything experienced by someone like my grandfather. It was
a way to make order and sense out of the objects and incidents around him. And
he expected his reading to reinforce that order by referring both to the details and
the master plot. This expectation probably grew stronger as his own life
increasingly diverged from the western success story.
This relationship between fiction and megatext does not produce what we
think of as literature. The complexities involved, the allusions and ambiguities
and ironies, depend too much on direct access to the historic West. The texts
themselves don't contain enough of context to function the way more elaborate
fictions do, building little stage sets of ancient Greece or Victorian London on
which they then play out their scenes. For readers like me, who don't know the
look of a sheep camp or the sounds of a cattle drive, and who don't subscribe
to the frontier master plot, these books are thin and wooden. It's hard even to
imagine the vitality they might have had for an earlier generation of readers.
I got most of my information about my grandfather's reading from my father,
who not only bridges the generations but also the cultural gap. Like me, he
studies and teaches literature; but like my grandfather he grew up on a farm,
with access to open land and to oldtimers with stories of the earlier West. In the
1930s in rural Idaho, horses hadn't completely given way to tractors and automo-
biles: Perhaps the silence of a nonmechanized countryside is one of the things
that is hardest for my generation of readers to imagine as we read. With this
range of experience, as you might imagine, my father's taste overlaps both his
father's and mine. He likes The Virginian', he also likes the contemporary
western novels of Ivan Doig and Wallace Stegner that I find accessible. He
especially likes writers who invoke the historical experience but with some
critical distance: Willa Cather, Jack Schaefer, Frank Waters, and A. B. Guthrie.
When we recommend books to one another, we often agree on the worth of the
book, but I suspect that we are reading quite differently. Certain of his choices,
like Vardis Fisher, leave me cold, and certain of my favorites, like Leslie
Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977) and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping
(1981), he finds disturbing or tedious.
Whereas my grandfather read against a backdrop composed of both firsthand
knowledge and cultural myth, my father tends to bring to fictional texts a view
of the West filtered through historical writings like those of J. Frank Dobie and
Walter Prescott Webb. Like my grandfather, my father looks for, and is compe-
tent to judge, sorts of authenticity that I cannot claim to recognize. I can't tell
when a writer has really captured the clothing, gestures, or speech of a home-
steader or cowboy. I'm only vaguely aware of the historical implications of
barbed wire or the Taylor Grazing Act. My access to the old West is completely
textual: It comes through old newspapers, oral history interviews, family stories,
and movies, all carrying about the same degree of authority. That is the backdrop
against which I read western fiction. Because my megatext is made up primarily
of words, rather than mythicized places and events, it extends itself more readily
into other networks of texts, like poetry and native American legend and even
science fiction. The western books I like best are those that refer in some way
to these other traditions while at the same time inscribing themselves in the
western megatext, which has by now been overlaid by so many stories that it
functions more like a literary tradition than a historical or physical environment.
So what do these three generations of readers have to do with science fiction?
Let me propose that Tom Attebery is analogous to an SF reader of, let's say,
1920 through 1940; Louie Attebery represents a reader from the Golden Age,
1940 through 1960; and I am exactly what I am: a reader who discovered science
fiction just as it began to change.
The first generation of readers, then, my intellectual grandparents, would have
been reading science fiction primarily for its reference to something they were
living through. Even though none of these readers had gone to the moon or
traveled in time or had household robots, such elements could be judged authen-
tic or not, depending on whether they corresponded to the changes in life and
thought with which the readers were coping on a daily basis. Why did it matter
so much to Hugo Gernsback and his subscribers whether a writer got his astro-
nomical facts right or explained his futuristic gadgets? Because those are the
links from the fiction to the megatext that gives it complexity and meaning.
What is that megatext, which was available to readers and writers of the pulp era
and was still accessible, though beginning to be textualized, in the Golden Age
but is now out of reach? It can't be science or technology, which are still around;
it can't be alien worlds or the future, which were never actualities. My best guess
is that the megatext for pre-1960 science fiction included at least four categories
of experience, plus a mythic structure that made sense of them.
Category one is change. We can credit Alvin Toffler for pointing out psycho-
logical implications of change, particularly when the rate of change is itself
changing. The writers and readers that made science fiction into a publishing
category in the 1920s and 1930s had lived through such changes as electrifica-
tion, the advent of broadcasting, the replacement of horses by automobiles, the
beginnings of the airline industry, socialist revolutions and a world war, the
acquisition of the vote (if not equal rights) by women, the popularization of
Freudian psychology and social Darwinism, and the transformation of America
from a rural to an essentially urban society. There was no reason to think that
such changes would not merely continue but continue to accelerate.
The second category is an aspect of the first: It is the unprecedented increase
in the individual's autonomy and power over his or her environment, largely the
result of technological advance. Judging from the recent past, the near future was
likely to replace airplanes and antibiotics with rocketships and antiaging drugs.
Category three is the extension of an American sphere of influence into virtu-
ally every part of the world. This means not only economic colonization, which
had begun in the nineteenth century in places like Latin America, but also the
creation of miniature Americas all over the world, wherever American business-
men, bureaucrats, soldiers, educators, or tourists might go.
Category four is the staggering accumulation of knowledge provided by new
perceptual aids like the radio telescope and the electron microsope, along with
the paradigm shifts that both enabled and followed much of the new knowledge.
This growth of knowledge can be seen as a sort of intellectual colonization of the
universe: To know Mars or the nucleus of an atom is to possess it.
These four overlapping and interrelated sets of experiences supply the details
of the science fiction megatext. The mythos that gives them coherence and value
is a story of the rise of science, of the triumph of rationality over disorder and
superstition. This story, which is not so different from the western myth,
operated virtually unchallenged from the 1920s through the 1950s. "Doc" Smith's
space operas and Robert Heinlein's future histories, though very different in their
degrees of sophistication, tell the same story, or rather tell their stories within the
same field of possibility, the same megatext.
Because this megatext, like the western one, was embodied in social structures
and individual experiences rather than in verbal texts, the stories generated within
it were unlike the kinds of narratives we call literary. Up to this point, I am
essentially restating the distinction made by Samuel Delany in his essay "Science
Fiction and 'Literature.'" What I have called the megatext of science fiction is
roughly equivalent to what Delany calls its "interpretive space" (94). I would like
to amend Delany's schema by claiming that the interpretive space of science fic-
tion has changed fundamentally, and along with it the kinds of stories that can
be written and even the ways we can go back and read the older stories.
The kind of reading encouraged by the older megatext was like the way my
grandfather read western novels. The reader, drawing on an immediate and pro-
blematic experience, was able to respond powerfully to fictional analogues of that
experience. The main criteria for judgment were authenticity of detail, adherence
to the myth of benevolent conquest, and, within those boundaries, fertility of
invention. A story that had these qualities did its work of stimulating the "sense
of wonder": What was being wondered at was not so much the story itself as the
megatext it invoked. Once the story was read, its ideas were assimilated to the
general discourse of science fiction; it was, in a sense, used up. Unlike most
literary texts, these early science fiction stories rarely support rereading.
The same is not true of the Golden Age. In the best stories of Robert Heinlein,
Ray Bradbury, C. L. Moore, or Theodore Sturgeon, the sense of wonder is
underscored by a growing self-consciousness within the discourse itself. These
stories, like the western novels of Guthrie and Schaefer, have a sense of their
own past, of the tradition of writing about the megatext as well as the megatext
itself. They support multiple readings because they function on multiple levels,
including that of critical commentary on their own mythic assumptions. This
generation discovered some of the linguistic and psychological implications that
had developed within the discourse of science fiction. These are the stories that
remain eminently readable, although I don't believe we are reading them as their
original audiences read them, because the interpretive space around them has
changed. The frontier has closed.
There are many reasons why a number of the best pre-1960 writers found
themselves virtually unable to writeor to write science fictionafter 1960. The
magazine markets were changing, writers were aging, and alcohol took a toll. But
it seems remarkable that so many major voices fell silent at the same time.
Frederik Pohl turned to editing, Jack Williamson to academe, Isaac Asimov to
popular science. Catherine L. Moore, Walter Miller, Jr., Sturgeon, Bradbury, and
Bester just stopped. Heinlein should have. A new generation was left to cope
with redefining the genre in the face of a transformed megatext.

I listed four features of that megatext: accelerating change, the individual's
increased power over the environment, America's economic and cultural domi-
nance, and the intellectual colonization of the universe. In each case, events in
the late 1950s and early 1960s led to a reinterpretation of that trend as either
malevolent or ended. Technological change all too often could be shown to mask
social stasis, especially for marginalized groups like women and blacks. Further-
more, it began to be evident that we weren 't all going to have atomic aircars, the
American way of life was not going to spread to the galaxies, science would not
conquer death; or if these things did happen, the results might be catastrophic.
But the end of the western frontier did not mean the end of western writing, nor
did the closing of the final frontier kill science fiction. Instead, writers in both
forms began to work with the discourse developed by their predecessors,
exploiting the formal and stylistic innovations that had previously been of
secondary importance. The most important patterns of reference were no longer
to technological innovations but to earlier translations of those innovations into
textual form. Whereas Robert Heinlein's "All You Zombies" (1959) is about the
psychological implications of time travel, David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded
Himself(\913) is about "All You Zombies." It works by reduplicating, inverting,
and ironizing Heinlein's plot.
Other stories that clearly refer, in highly ironic ways, to textual versions of the
science fiction mythos are Philip K. Dick's "We Can Remember It for You
Wholesale" (1966), Fritz Leiber's "The Winter Flies" (1967), Barry Malzberg's
"Making It All the Way into the Future on Gaxton Falls of the Red Planet"
(1974), Eleanor Arnason's "The Warlord of Saturn's Moons" (1974), Andrew
Weiner's "Klein's Machine" (1985), and William Gibson's "The Gernsback
Continuum" (1981). These are all stories about the ways science fiction has
shaped our expectations and even our sense of ourselves. All are intricately
wound around earlier narratives; all demonstrate the kind of intertextual relations
that characterize literary art. All are metafictions, gleefully pointing out the holes
in their own fictional premises.
These stories also illlustrate many of the trends identified by Vivian Sobchack
as characteristic of science fiction films after 1980the movies are always at
least twenty years behind. Sobchack points to the domestication of the alien in
movies like E.T\ the convergence of human and robot into simulacra, such as
Blade Runner's replicants; the flattening of space into a computer-generated
surface, like the computer-game spaces of Tron and The Last Starftghter; and the
reduction of history to a set of texts from which we extract not meaning but
images and styles, as in the retro future of Brazil and the thoroughly television-
ized past of Back to the Future. Following Fredric Jameson, Sobchack identifies
such trends as part of the "cultural logic" of multinational capitalism, which
fragments and commodifies experience into bits of "information" (Sobchack 111).
This cultural logic is part of the new megatext for written science fiction. It is
most self-consciously exploited in the work of the cyberpunks. However, you
don't have to go to Bruce Sterling and Pat Cadigan to find space reduced to sur-
face and history to a set of overlaid texts. R. A. Lafferty's witty "Continued on
Next Rock" (1970) flattens out not only history but prehistory as well into a set
of dubious transcriptions from lost codes. Connie Willis turns both space and
time into textual surfaces in "Schwarzschild Radius" (1990). And Ursula K. Le
Guin transforms the pioneering mythos that underlies both science fiction and
western literature in "The Shobies' Story" (1990), which demonstrates that the
only thing that is colonizable is the self. To take possession of a prairie or a
planet is to assimilate it to the ideas one already has, thereby gaining nothing.
The change in western literature didn't actually happen in 1890, but in a series
of fits and starts from about 1930 on. (Actually, 1930 is closer than 1890 to the
time when the frontier as a way of life, rather than a line on the map, finally
disappeared.) The transformation in science fiction can't really be pinned down
to 1960 either. Philip Dick was already working in the new mode by the late
1950s, as was Cordwainer Smith; and there were writers who kept reworking old
mines at least into the 1970s. The dates are not so important as the idea that
what looks like the same genre may not be, if by genre we mean the set of
expectations and interpretive strategies readers are invited to bring to the fiction.
To read science fiction in a postmodern context is to read it as a set of meta-
phors, as a language game, as commentary on storytelling, as commentary on
scientific paradigms present and past, as dialogue with writers from Thomas
More to Thomas Pynchon. Recent writers of SF inviteor darethe reader to
make use of any or all of these strategies. One thing the writer cannot do is
simply to go on doing what science fiction has always done: Without the suppor-
ting megatext, even turning Heinlein's inventions into a formula won't reproduce
Heinlein's effects. The best contemporary science fiction writers have used the
past creatively rather than imitatively, generating multilayered narratives of great
beauty and complexity. At least some of those multiple layers, of course, are the
traces of earlier science fiction.
I don't know whether the next generation of readers will respond as I do, since
the megatext will continue to change. I hope that our experience will at least
overlap. Even if Isaac Asimov goes the way of Zane Grey, Connie Willis may
prove to be a Willa Cather, whose stories continue to speak eloquently to a post-
frontier world.
WORKS CITED
Arnason, Eleanor. "The Warlord of Saturn's Moons." New Worlds 7, 1974. Rpt. in Le
Guin and Attebery.
Brin, David. "The Crystal Spheres." Analog 1984; rpt. in The New Hugo Winners. Ed.
Isaac Asimov with Martin H. Greenberg. New York: Wynwood, 1989. 299-317.
Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University
Popular Press, n.d.
Delany, Samuel R. "Science Fiction and 'Literature'or, The Conscience of the King."
Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Pleasantville, NY:
Dragon, 1984. 81-100.
Dick, Philip K. "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale." The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction. April 1966. Rpt. in Gunn. 407-27.
Gerrold, David. The Man Who Folded Himself. New York: Random, 1973.
Gibson, William. "The Gernsback Continuum." Universe 11. Ed. Terry Carr, 1981. Rpt.
in Le Guin and Attebery. 457-65.
Gunn, James, ed. The Road to Science Fiction #3: From Heinlein to Here. New York:
NAL, 1979.
Heinlein, Robert. "All You Zombies." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
1959. Rpt. in Gunn. 25-37.
Lafferty, R. A. "Continued on Next Rock." Orbit 7. Ed. Damon Knight, 1970. Rpt. in
World's Best Science Fiction, 1971. Ed. Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr. New
York: Ace, 1971. 128-54.
Leiber, Fritz. "The Winter Flies." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1967.
Rpt. in Le Guin and Attebery. 171-82.
Le Guin, Ursula K., "The Shobies' Story." Universe 1, ed. Robert Silverberg and Karen
Haber, 1990. Rpt. in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection. Ed.
Gardner Dozois. New York: St. Martin's, 1991.
Le Guin, Ursula K., and Brian Attebery, eds. The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North
American Science Fiction, 1960-1990. New York: Norton, 1993.
Malzberg, Barry. "Making It All the Way into the Future on Gaxton Falls of the Red
Planet." Nova 4, 1974. Rpt in Le Guin and Attebery. 313-16.
Silverberg, Robert. Introduction to New Dimensions 1. Ed. Robert Silverberg. New York:
Avon, 1971.
Sobchack, Vivian. 'Terminal Culture: Science Fiction Cinema in the Age of the
Microchip." In Contours of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Eighth Interna-
tional Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Ed. Michele K. Langford. Contributions
to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy, No. 41. New York: Greenwood Press,
1990. 101-112.
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1950.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." 1903.
Rpt. in The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History.
3rd ed. Ed. George Rogers Taylor. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1972. 3-28.
Weiner, Andrew. "Klein's Machine." Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, April
1985. Rpt. in Distant Signals and Other Stories. Victoria, BC: Porcepic, 1989.207-21.
Willis, Connie. "Schwarzschild Radius." The Universe, 1987. Rpt. in Le Guin and
Attebery. 689-704.
Wolfe, Gary K. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent,
OH: Kent State University Press, 1979.
Index
1983 International Paper Andersen, Hans Christian, 10, 12

Conference, 143 Anderson, Judith, 96, 166
1993 SFRA conference, 161 Angela, 95
Annabel, 178-181, 183
Abbott, Erwin, 153 Annie, 102-104
Abdiel, 138 Annotated Alice, The, 56, 58, 60
"Abominable History of the Man Apel, Friedmar, 1
with Copper Fingers, The," 125, Apollo Comes to New York, 130
130 Apollo moon landing, 198
Ace Books, 4 Apter, T. E., 169
Adam and Eve, 126 Arcade, 138, 139
Agnes, 84, 86-89 Ariel, 39
Aldiss, Brian, 116, 121 Arnason, Eleanor, 211
Alice, 55-64 Arnold, Matthew, 42
Alice's Adventures in Arren, 120
Wonderland, xii, 55, 58, 64 Arrhodes, 80
"All You Zombies," 211 Artegall, 93, 95-98
Allende, 132 Arthur, King of Britain,
Alter, Robert, 57, 59 107-113, 171-173
Always Coming Home, 155, 156, Ashipattle, 11
159 "Ashpet," 15
Amber, 119, 120 Asimov, Isaac, 162, 166, 211, 212
Ambrosio, 84, 85, 87-89 Attebery, Brian, 116, 120, 205
America, 181, 185, 187-189, 191 Attebery, Tom, 207, 208
America: A Prophecy, 181 Atwood, Margaret, 14
American West, 206 Auerbach, Erich, 91
Amor and Psyche, 131 Auschwitz, 10, 196
Amoret, 96 Austen, Jane, xii, 29, 30, 32-36
Analog, 196 Avery, Linden, 119
216 Index
Babylon, 203 Bloody Chamber, The, 4

Back to the Future, 211 Bloom, Harold, 177-179
Bain, Dena C, 155 Blue Fairy, 24
Bakshi, Ralph, 44 Blue Mars, 161
Ballard, J. G., 185-191, 200-203 Bob, 102-105
Bancquart, M-C, 136, 140 Body Shell and Okragrams, 144,
Barbarians, 179, 181, 182 145, 148
Barbour, Douglas, 155 Bogart, Humphrey, 190
Barthelme, Donald, 13, 14 Book of Genesis, 138
Barthes, Roland, 57 Book of Gramarye, 170
Bastille, 163 Book of Thel, The, 177-180, 183
Baudrillard, Jean, 185-189, 191 Bouchard, Anne, 68
Beagle, Peter, 117 Bouchotte, 138
Beard, Thomas, 48 Bowie, Jim, 190
Beauty and the Beast (story, TV Bradbury, Ray, 197, 210, 211
series, and film), xii, 4, 7, 8, Brandon, S. G. F., 155
15, 37, 38, 42, 44 Brazil, 212
Bechstein, 2 Briar Rose, 10
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 43 Brin, David, 195, 206
"Beggar's Comet," 41 Britain, 95, 98, 171, 197, 198, 204
Being and Nothingness, 163 Britomart, 91-99
Belle et la Bete, La. See Beauty "Brother Hart," 12
and the Beast Brown, Bernard, 116
Bellemin-Noel, Jean, 68 Brown, John, 164
Benford, Gregory, 195 Brown, Lorraine, 22
Benjamin, Walter, 191 Brunner, John, 116, 120
Bennet, Diana, 43 Brust, Steven, 4, 9, 10
Bennet, Elizabeth, 30 Buffalo Bill. See Gumb, Jame
Bennet, Mr., 32 Bug Jack Barron, 198
Beowulf, 121 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 51
Bertgang, Zoe, 69, 70 Burch, Elliot, 40, 41, 43
Bertilak, Lady, 110, 111, 113 Burgess, Anthony, 165
Bertilak, Sir, 113 Burial Jar, 148-150
Bertram, Edmund, 33, 35 Burke, Edmund, 115
Bertram, Lady, 33 Burke, Frank, 104
Bertram, Sir Thomas, 32, 35 Busirane, 96
Bester, Alfred, 197, 211 Buttercup, 8, 9
Beyond Apollo, 201 Butterworth, Michael, 201
Bingley, 30, 31 Byron, Lord, 140
Black Lodge, 102-104
Black Witch Moth, 128, 129 Cadigan, Pat, 212
Blade Runner, 211 "Cage of Sand, The," 201
Blake, William, 177-181, 183 Caliban, 39
Blanche, 10 California, 61, 191, 199, 206
Blau, Herbert, 187 Camelot, 107
Bleeding Nun, 86-88 Campbell, Joseph, 91, 92, 94, 97,
Bleich, David, 59, 63 197
Bleiler, Everett Franklin, 53, 135 Candide, 139
Index 217
Cape Kennedy, 201, 202 Condors, 157

Capra, Frank, 22 Confessions of a Justified Sinner,
Captain "King" Kong, 196 50
Cardillac, 125, 127, 128, 130-133 Congery of Imagers, 97
"Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, The Connecticut Yankee in the
The," 156 Twentieth Century: Travel to the
Carroll, Lewis, 55-64, 204 Past in Science Fiction, 164
Carter, Angela, 4, 13, 14, 177-183 Constitution, 164
Castel, Juan Pablo, 125, 127, 131, Containers, Layerings, and
132 Transformation, 143
Castro, Fidel, 164 "Contes d'Hoffmann, Les," 71
Cather, Willa, 208 Continental Historical Society, 55,
Cawelti, John, 207 57, 59, 63-64
Central Park, 7, 43 "Continued on Next Rock," 212
Ceremony, 208 Cooper, Dale, 101-105
"Chamber Music," 43 Cooper, Gary, 190
Chandler, Catherine, 7, 38, 43, 44 Cooper, Susan, 169, 172-174
Charles, 34 Coover, Robert, 4, 11, 13, 14
Charnas, Suzy McKee, 117 Corliss, Richard, 101
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 48 Crash, 186, 188
Chauntecleer, 48 Crawford, Henry, 33, 35
Chernobyl, 195 Crawford, Mary, 33
Cheshire Cat, 58, 59, 62 Crowe, Catherine, 48-52
Chevalier, Jean, 151 "Crystal Spheres, The," 206
Chiesa, Carol Delia, 20, 27 Cunegonda, 87-89
Children's and Household Tales,
11 Daedalus, 201
China, 29 Dalkey, Kara, 4, 10
"China Moon," 42 Dante, 62
Christ, 62 Darcy, 31, 35
Chung-yuan, Chang, 155 Dark is Rising, The, 169, 171,
Cicero, 48 172
Cinderella, xii, 4, 11, 29-36 "Dark Spirit," 38
Clarimonde, 67, 68, 70, 72 Darwin, Charles, 49, 197, 209
Clarke, Arthur C , 201 Davenport, Tom, 15
Clever Elsie, 11 "Dead of Winter," 42
Climo, Shirley, 6 Dean, Pamela, 4, 9, 10
Clockwork Orange, A, 165 Dear Mili, 4-6
Coachman, 24 Death of Literature, The, 56
Cocteau, Jean, 38 de Beaumont, Jeanne-marie
Cole, Babbette, 6 Leprince, 38
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 116 de Burgh, Lady Catherine, 31
Collins, Nancy, 117 de Chirico, 144
Collodi, Carlo, 2, 19-26 De Divinatione, 48
Coma, 202 Delany, Samuel, 205, 210
Communist party, 22 de Lint, Charles, 4, 9, 10
"Company of Wolves, The," 4 del Rey, Lester, 15, 100, 122
"Concentrate 1," 201 "Delusion and Dream in Jensen's
218 Index
Gradiva," 69 Eco, Umberto, 191

Der Sandmann, 71, 73 Eden, 5, 126, 179, 185
Derrida, Jacques, 192 Egotists Club, 133
Desiderio, 180, 182, 183 Egyptian Cinderella, The, 6
d'Esparvieu, 137 Eidelginger, Marc, 71
d'Esparvieu family, 136 Eliot, T.S., 37, 38, 40
d'Esparvieu, Maurice, 137, 138 Elizabeth I, 95
Devil, 42, 126 Elliot, Anne, 34, 35
de Villeneuve, Gabrielle-Suzanne, Elof, 121
38 Elvira, Donna, 87, 88, 89
Dexter, Susan, 16 Enchanted Forest, 119
Diane, 101 Ende, Michael, 4, 9
di Capua, Michael, 5 Enola Gay, 201
Dick, Philip K., 211-212 Entropy Exhibition: Michael
Dickens, Charles, 39, 51 Moorcock and the British "New
Dictionary for Dreamers, 62 Wave " in Science Fiction, The, 196
Dieux ont soif Les (The Gods are Eremis, 97, 98
Athirst), 135 E T, 211
di Maggio, Joe, 190 Europe, 15, 29, 49, 135, 187-189,
Dinah, 59 198
Dionysus, 139 Evans, Kanin, 40, 41
Disch, Thomas M., 197 Eve, 126
Dobie, J. Frank, 208 "Everything Is Everything," 41
Dodge City, 190 Examples of the Interposition of
Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge, 55, Providence in the Detection and
59-62 Punishment of Murder, 48
Doig, Ivan, 208 Exorcist, The, 104, 105
Donaldson, Stephen R., 91-99
Dondis, Donis, 153 Faerie, 10, 94-96, 98, 107,
Dorothea Dreams, 117 109-113,
"Dover Beach," 42 118, 120
Dr. Donally, 180, 181 Faerie Queene, The, 91-99
Dr. Strange love, 196 Faerie Tale, 4, 10
Dracula, 52 Fairy, 20
Dragonfield and Other Stories, 12 Fantasy: The Literature of
Drake, 173 Subversion, 83-84, 108, 113
Drew children, 169, 172 Faramir, 115, 119
Drew, Barney, 169 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 5
Drew, Jane, 169, 172 Father (Jacob Wells), 7, 38, 39, 41-44
Drew, Simon, 169 Faust, 196
Dungeons and Dragons, 58, 122 "Faust de Goethe, Le," 139
Durer, 144 Federal Theatre Project, 22
Feist, Raymond E., 4, 10
Earp, Wyatt, 190 Felman, Shoshana, 72, 73
Earth is the Alien Planet: J. G. Ferdinand, 39
Ballard's Four-Dimensional Night- Fezzik, 8, 9
mare, 202 Fielding, Henry, 48
Earthsea, 120 Fine and Private Place, ^,117
Index 219
Finn, Huckleberry, 190 Gilbert, 97

Fionavar, 119 Gilbert, Pierre, 135
Fire Eater, 21 Gimli, 119
Fisher King, 37 "Gingerbread House, The," 4, 13
Fisher, Vardis, 208 Gnosticism, 140
Flatland, 153 God, 5, 14, 48, 49, 88, 109, 125,
Fleming, Dr., 190 126, 130, 140, 162, 177, 182, 185,
Florin, 8 188
Fonda, Henry, 190 Goethe, 126, 139
Fool on the Hill, 116 Gold Coast, The, 166
Forster, E. M., 196 Goldman, William, 4, 8, 9
Foucault, Michel, 192 Goldstein, Warren, 101
France, Anatole, 135, 136, Gordon, E. V., 110
138-141 Gorlois, 95
Frank, Yasha, 22 Gothic, 47, 50, 53, 83-86, 88, 90
Frankenstein, 83, 87, 196 Gradgrind, 122
Frankfurt School, 195 Gradiva, 69, 70, 72, 73
Franklin, Richard, 39 Graff, Gerald, 56
Freud, Sigmund, 67-74, 77-79, Gras, Vernon W., 3
103-104, 170 Great Depression, The, 21
Frodo, 115, 119, 121 Great Expectations, 39, 44
Frog Prince, The, 4 Great Mother, The, 132
Frye, Northrop, 91 Greco-Roman mythology, 139
Fuller, Buckminster, 153 Greece, 207
Green Knight, 107, 108, 110-113
Galbreath, Robert, 155 Green Mars, 161-163, 165
Gandalf, 121 "Green Tea," 51
Ganges, 140 Greenland, Colin, 196, 200
Gardener, Mrs., 31 Grendel, 121
Gardner, Martin, 55, 56, 60, 61 Grenouille, 125, 129-130, 131
Gautier, Theophile, 67-69, 71, 72, Grey, Zane, 207
74 Grimm, Wilhelm, 4, 5, 10
Gawain, 107-114 Gulf, 148
Ged, 120, 121 Gumb, Jame, 125, 128-129, 130-
"Gentle Rain, A," 40, 43, 44 131, 132
George, Walter, 138 Gunther, Tom, 7
Geppetto, 20-24 Guthrie, A. B., 208, 210
Geraden, 94-97, 99
German Romanticism, 10, 126 Hagerty, Claude, 117
"Gernsback Continuum, The," 196, Hambly, Barbara, 7
211 Hamlet, 62
Gerrold, David, 211 Hanold, Norbert, 69, 70, 72
Getty, Paul, 187 "Hansel and Gretel," 13, 15
Gheerbrant, Alain, 151 "Happy Dens or A Day in the Old
Gibson, William, 196, 211 Wolves Home," 12
Gideon, 24 Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 15
Gifford, Douglas, 50 Harris, Thomas, 125, 130, 132
220 Index
Hasting, Phil, 10 Idaho, 208

"Haunted and the Haunters, The," Imager, 94-98
52 Imagers of Mordant, 95
Headroom, Max, 192 "In the Forests of the Night," 43
"Heat Death of the Universe, The," Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor
198 Hoffman, The, 176, 180, 181, 182-
Heath, Peter, 56 183
Heinlein, Robert, 162, 210-211 Inigo, 8, 9
Heisenburg, 164 International Conference on the
Hello America, 185, 188, 191, 199 Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA), xi
Helm's Deep, 119 Interpretation of Dreams, The, 69
Helprin, Mark, 116, 117 Into the Woods, 3
Hemingway, Ernest, 162 "Invictus," 44
Heraclitus, 148 Iribame, Maria, 131
Heroes and Villains, 177, 179-180, 181 Irwin, W. R., 57, 116, 120
Hesselius, Dr., 51 Iser, Wolfgang, 58, 59, 63
High Noon, 190 //, 117
Hiroshima, 196, 201, 202 It's a Wonderful Life, 22
Hirsch, E. D., 56
"History of Don Raymond," 87 "Jabberwocky," 58-61
Hoffman, Dr., 177, 180, 182, 183 Jabberwocky, 60
Hoffmann, E.T.A., 10, 71, 77-79, Jacintha, 85, 88, 89
125-128, 130 Jack My Hedgehog, 11
Hogg, James, 50 Jack the Giant Killer, 9
Hollywood, 198, 199 Jackson, Rosemary, 57, 83, 84, 99,
Holmlund, Christine, 103 108, 109, 113
Holocaust, 10 Jacky, 9
Honest John, 24 Jameson, Fredric, 212
"House and the Brain, The." See Janet, 9
"Haunters and the Haunted" Jann, Rosemary, 52
House Committee on Un-American Japan, 10, 143, 204
Activities, 22 Jennings, Dr., 51
House of Holiness, 39 Jewel, 180-182
Housekeeping, 208 Jiminy Cricket, 24
Hubris, 196 Johnson, S. F., 46
Huck, Charlotte, 6 Johnson, Sally, 143-153
Hugh and John, 10 Joyce, James, 162
Hugo, Victor, 140 Julius Caesar, 41
Hulse, Michael, 129 Jung, Carl Gustav, 128, 131, 144,
"Human Abstract, The," 181 147, 148
Humpty Dumpty, 58, 60-62 Juniper Tree, The, 6
Hunter, 131
Huntington, Samuel, 26 Kafka, Franz, 117, 118
Hutcheon, Linda, 57 Kahane, Claire, 84
Kate (Crackemuts) Hazel, 9
Ialdabaoth, 140, 141 Kay, Guy Gavriel, 119
Icarus, 202 Kelley, James Patrick, 37
Icehenge, 161, 162 Kennedy, John F., 200
Index 221
Kernan, Alvin, 56 Little Red Riding Hood, 4, 5, 7

Kesh, 155, 156, 159 Littwin, Susan, 25
Kessler, Risa, 15 Loder, 125, 127, 130, 133
Kinder- und Hausmarchen, 5 Log Lady, 102
King Thrushbeard, 6 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 207
King William, 62 Look, 190, 191
King, Stephen, 117 Lord of the Rings, The, 115
Kinrowan, 9 Lorenzo, 86-89
Kitty, 32 Lorien, 119
"Klein's Machine," 211 Los Angeles, 22, 188
Kline, 202 Love Story, 29
Knave of Hearts, 62 Love, 177-179, 182
Kofman, Sarah, 78, 80 Lovecraft, H. P., 117
Koslow, Ron, 7, 8 Lucifer, the rebel Satan, 139
Kristeva, Julia, 77, 80, 171, 172 Lydia, 32
Kristeva Reader, The, 171 Lynch, David, 101, 103-105
Lyon, Merriman, 169
La Fay, Morgan, 110, 111, 113
Lacan, Jacques, 78, 80, 170-172, MacLachlan, Kyle, 101
187, 192 Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome,
Ladd, Alan, 190 42
"Lady and the Merman, The," 13 Maddy, 102, 103
Lafferty, R. A., 205, 212 Madrid, 85, 86, 88, 89
Lampwick, 24 "Making It All the Way into the Future
Land, 119 on Gaxton Falls of the Red Planet,"
Lapine, James, 3 211
Las Vegas, 46, 190 Malecasta, 96
Last Star fighter, The, 212 Malzberg, Barry, 200, 211
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 51 Man Who Folded Himself The, 211
Le Guin, Ursula K., 37, 120, 155- "Man Who Walked on the Moon,
159, 165, 205, 212 The," 201
Lecter, Dr. Hannibal, 128-129 Manlove, Colin, 115
Lee, 179, 181, 183 Mann, Thomas, 126
Lee, Tanith, 4, 13 Mannheim, Ralph, 5
Left Hand of Darkness, The, 165 Mansfield Park, 29, 32, 34
Leiber, Fritz, 211 Marguerite, 87
Lem, Stanislaw, 77-81 Maria, 125, 133
Lennon, Florence Becker, 56 Marianne, 179-183
Levaillant, J., 136 Marinell, 96
Levitas, Ruth, 188 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The,
Lewis, C. S., 118 177, 178, 180, 181, 183
Lewis, M. G., 50, 83-90 Mars, 210
Life, 22 Mary, 32
Lindbergh, Charles, 190 "Mask, The," 77, 78, 81
"Little Girl Lost, The," 179 Matheson, Richard, 197
"Little Hamster from the Water, Matilda, 84, 87-89
The," 11 McKillip, Patricia, 121
"Little Mermaid, The," 12 Melmoth the Wanderer, 50, 83
222 Index
Men of Harad, 115 Nectaire, 139, 140

Menard, Pierre, 56 Nemesis, 196
Merchant of Venice, The, 40 Neumann, Erich, 131, 132, 144
Merlin, 91-95 Neverending Story, 4, 9
"Metamorphosis," 117 New Wave, 196-205
Mickey Mouse, 191 New Worlds, 197, 199-201, 204
Middle Earth, 115, 119 New York, 5, 7, 10, 38-40, 43, 44,
Miller, J. Hillis, 182 45, 46, 53, 94, 117, 130, 187, 190,
Miller, Walter Jr., 211 191
Mirror of her Dreams, The, 91, 92, Night-Side of Nature: or, Ghosts
99 and Ghost-seers. The, 47, 48, 50
Misch-Masch, 60 Nightingale, The, 10
Mitchell, Juliet, 170, 172 Nobel Prize, 135
Mitscherlich, Alexander, 133 "Non-Euclidian View of California
Mme. Gilberte des Aubels, 137 as a Cold Place to Be, A," 156
Mobley, Jane, 121 Norris, Mrs., 32, 33
Monk, The, 83-85, 87, 89 North Wales, 109
Monroe, Marilyn, 201 North Wind, 173
Monster Whale, 23 Northanger Abbey, 84
Monstro the Whale, 24 "Notes for an Essay on Cecelia
"Moon Ribbon, The," 12 Holland," 166
Moon, Sarah, 7, 18 "Notes towards a Mental
"Moonlight Sonata," 43 Breakdown," 201
Moorcock, Michael, 196 Notre Dame, 11
Moore, C. L., 210, 211 Novotny, Karen, 203
Morano, Maria, 130, 133 "Nun's Priest's Tale, The," 48
Mordant, 94-99
Mordor, 115 O'Brien, Dennis, xii
More Annotated Alice, 55 "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from
More, Thomas, 212 Recollections of Early Childhood,"
Morgenstern, S., 8, 9 40
Morgon, 121 Oedipal stage, 80
Mortal Engines, 81 Ogion, 121
"Morte Amoreuse, La," 67-70, 72-74 Old One, 169-173
"Motherhood," 131, 132 Old Wave, 197
Mozart, Wolfgang, 6, 43, 180 Olympia, 71, 77-79
Mumak of Harad, 115 Olympus Mons, 162
Murray, M. A., 27 "On Fairy-Stories," 116
Muses, 139 "Once Upon a Time," 16
Musgrove, Louisa, 34 "Once upon a Time in the City of
Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 87, 88 New York," 39
Once upon a Time: A Treasury of
Napier, Elizabeth, 50 Modern Fairy Tales, 15
Napoleon Bonaparte, 60 "Ones Who Walk away from
Narcissistic Narrative: The Omelas, The," 37
Metafictional Paradox, 57 Order of the Golden Dawn, 52
Narnia, 118, 119 Orison, 95, 97
Nathanael, 71 Orwell, George, 165, 188
Index 223
Otranto, 50, 88 Pride and Prejudice, 29-32

Otto, Rudolph, 84 Prince Humperdinck of Florin, 8
Over Sea, under Stone, 169 Princess Bride, The, 4, 8-9
Princess Elega, 97
Pacific Edge, 166 Princess Furball, 6
Palmer, Laura, 101, 103, 104 Princess Myste, 97
Palmer, Leland, 102 Princess Smartypants, 6
Pandora, 156 Pringle, David, 200, 201
Paracelsus (John Pater), 42 Professors, 179, 181
Paratime, 164, 166 Progressive era, 25
Parrinder, Geoffrey, 155 Prospero, 38, 39
Pass Through with Floater, 151, Pynchon, Thomas, 195, 212
152 Python, Monty, 60
Pater, John, 42
Peep Show Proprietor, 182 Queen Victoria, 55, 56, 58-61, 63
Pendaran Wood, 119 "Queen Victoria's Through the
Pennington, John, xii Looking-Glass," 60, 61
Perella, Nicholas J., 20 Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonder-
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, land, 55-57, 59, 61, 63-64
125, 129 "Question of Re-Entry, A," 201
Perlman, Ron, 40 Quixote, Don, 56
Perrault, Charles, 2, 4, 7, 29, 30
Persuasion, 29, 34-35 Rabkin, E. S., 81, 116, 120
Philosopher's Alice, The, 56 Radcliffe, Mrs. Anne, 50
Pickens, Slim, 196 Radigund, 98
Pickwick, 122 Ralph 124C41+, 195
Pinocchio, xii, 19-26 Raspail, 129
Pirandello, Luigi, 162 "Rat," 37
Plato, 136, 143, 144, 147, 148, 153 Raymond, Don, 84, 86-89
Platt, Charles, 201 Read, Sir Herbert, 120
Pleasure Island, 24 Recits fantastiques, 71, 75
Pleasures of Reading in an Ideo- Red Mars, 161, 164
logical Age, The, 57 Redcrosse Knight, 39, 96
Poe, Edgar Allen, 85, 162 Reed, John R., 50
"Poets of Milgrove, Iowa, The," Remaking History, 164
201, 204 Revelstone, 119
Pohl, Frederik, 211 Revolt of the Angels, The (La
Polonius, 62 Revolte des anges), 135, 138, 141
Pompeii, 69, 70, 72 "Riddlemaster," 121
Postponed Generation: Why Ameri- Riddley Walker, 42
can Youth Are Growing up Later, Riders of the Purple Sage, 207
The, 25 Riffaterre, Hermine, 68
Pre-Raphaelite, 38, 42 Right You Are! (If You Think You
"Precession of Simulacra, The," Are), 162
188 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 162-164,
President Manson, 190, 191 166
Price, Fanny, 32, 34, 36 Robinson, Marilynne, 208
Pricksongs & Descants, 13, 14 Rodolpha, Donna, 86
224 Index
Roessner, Michaela, 117 Second Coming of Christ, The, 62

Rohan, Michael Scott, 121 Segal, Erich, 29
Rolley, 43 Sendak, Maurice, 4-6
Romantic Fantastic, The, 85 Seraphim, 139
Romeo and Juliet, 41 Serapion, 68
Romuald, 67-70, 72 Shakespeare, William, 39-42
Rosalia, Washington, 206 Shane, 190
Rosamund, 10 Shark, 20
Rose, Jacqueline, 170, 172 Sheckley, Robert, 197
Ross, Roselle, 22 Shelley, Mary, 50
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 170, 187 "Shobies' Story, The," 212
Rowen, Norma, xii Sidgwick, Henry, 50, 52
Ruff, Matt, 116, 117 Sidney, Sir Philip, 42
Rushdie, Salman, 15 Siebers, Tobin, 85
Russ, Joanna, 205 "Sign of the Astronaut, The," 202
Russell, Lady, 34, 35 "Signal-Man, The," 51
Ryence, King, 91, 92, 96 Silence of the Lambs, The, 125,
Ryorova, 116 127
Silko, Marmon, 208
Sabato, Ernesto, 125, 126, 131, Silver on the Tree, 171 -174
132 Silverberg, Robert, 205
Saddith, 97 Simmons, Dan, 116, 117
Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of "Simulacra and Science Fiction,"
Pornography, The, 178, 182 185, 186, 188, 191
Sallis, James, 197 Singer, June, 128
Saltheart Foamfollower, 119 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
Sam, 115, 119, 122 107-114
Samsa, Gregor, 118 Sir Orfeo, 111
Samson and Delilah, 11 Siringo, Charles, 206
"Sandman, The," 71, 77, 79 Six-Gun Mystique, The, 207
"Der Sandmann." See "Sandman" Sladek, John, 196, 200
Sariette, M., 136, 138 Sleeping Athlete, The, 130
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 161-166 Sleeping Beauty, 4, 10, 12
Satyrane, 96, 97 Sleeping Ugly, 6
Sayers, Dorothy, 125 Smith, Cordwainer, 196, 212
Schaefer, Jack, 208, 210 Smith, "Doc," 210
Schiller, Justin, 5 Smith, Henry Nash, 207
Schneider, Peter, 127 Snow White, 4
Scholes, Robert, 55, 56 Snow White and Rose Red, 10
Schrodinger, 164 Sobchack, Vivian, 211-212
Schubert, 126 Society for Psychical Research, 50,
"Schwarzschild Radius," 212 53
"Science Fiction and 'Literature'or, "Soldier Jack," 15
The Conscience of the King," 210 Sondheim, Stephen, 3
Science-Fiction Studies, 161, 166 Song of Kali, 117
Scrutton, Mary, 33 Songs of Innocence and Experience,
Sea-Rabbit, or The Artist of Life, 177, 179, 181
The, 4, 11 "Sonnet 29," 40
Index 225
"Sonnet 81," 42 Texas Cowboy, or Fifteen Years on

Spenser, Edmund, 39, 91, 92, 94- the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish
96, 98-99 Pony, 206
Spinrad, Norman, 197-200, 202 Thalia, 12
St. Joseph, 5, 6 Theatre of God's Judgments, 48
"St. Joseph in the Woods," 5 Theodore, 87
Stableford, Brian, 136, 138 Theophile, 138
Stanton, Will, 169, 170 Theory of Parody: The Teaching
Stanza, Astrid, 121 of Twentieth-Century Art Forms,
Stapledon, Olaf, 119 57
Star Maker, 119 "Thirteenth Fay, The," 12
Star Trek, 206 Thomas Covenant, 118
Star Wars, 202 Thomas, Dylan, 44
Star-Spangled Future, The, 197 Thompson, Raymond, 118
Stegner, Wallace, 208 "Though Lovers Be Lost," 43
Steinmetz, Jean-Luc, 71 Tieck, Ludwig 126
Sterling, Bruce, 203, 212 Timaeus, 143, 144
Stirling, Brents, 46 Time, 105, 190, 191
Stoker, Bram, 51-52 "Time to Heal, A," 44
Strategies of Fantasy, 120 Todorov, Tzvetan, 72, 83, 84, 107-
Stromboli, 24 109, 111, 113, 136
Sturgeon, Theodore, 210, 211 Toffler, Alvin, 209
Subjective Criticism, 59 Tolkien, J. R. R., 110, 115, 117,
Suffel, Jacques, 135 119, 121
Sullivan, Jack, 51 Tomes, Margaret, 6
Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, The, TOR, 161
9 Tough Princess, The, 6
Sunglasses after Dark, 117 Traveler in Black, 120
Supernatural Fiction Writers, 135 Traveller in Black, The, 116
Supreme Court, 164 "Travels in Hyperreality," 185, 191
Suskind, Patrick, 125, 129 Tron, 212
Swift, Jonathan, 178 Tunnel, The, 125, 131
Turner, Frank Miller, 49, 50
Tales of Wonder, 4, 12 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 206
Talking Cricket, 23 Turner, William, 48
Tarn Lin, 9 Twin Peaks, 101, 102, 104-105
Taming of the Shrew, The, 6 Tzu, Lao, 156
Tao, 155, 156, 159
"Taoing," 156 Uguisu, 10
Taoism, 155 Ulanov, Ann Belford, 131
Tassinari, G, 20, 27 "Uncanny, The," 70, 72, 104
Tattercoats, 6 "Uncle Merry" (Merriman Lyon),
Taylor Grazing Act, 208 169
Taylor, Elizabeth, 199, 201 "Unreality and Reality," 101
Teahan, James T., 20, 27 Upward, not Northward, 153
Tenniel, John, 62
Terisa, 91-99 Vagel, 97
"Terminal Beach, The," 201 Valerius Maximus, 48
226 Index
Valley, 155-159 Weintraub, Stanley, 64

Varden, 130 Wells, H. G., 38
Varnado, S. L., 84 Wells, Jacob. See Father
Venice, 67, 70 Wentworth, Frederick, 35
"Venice Drowned," 162, 165 Wemick, Andrew, 186
"Verbrechen, Ktinstlertum und Westley, 8, 9
Wahnsinn," 127 Where the Wild Things Are, 5
Vesuvius, 69 White House, 190, 191
Victoria: An Intimate Biography, White Jenna, 121
64 "White Seal Maid, The," 13
Victoria through the Looking-Glass, Whittier, 207
56 Widow Arden, 10
Victoria Writing the Looking-Glass, Wild Shore, The, 166
56 Wild West, 206-208
Victorian London, 207 Williams, Aubrey L., 48
Vietnam War, 9, 198, 200, 201 Williamson, Jack, 211
Vigny, 140 Willis, Connie, 212
Vincent, 7, 8, 38-41, 43, 44, 45 Wilson, Colin, 49
Vincenzi, Lisa, 101 Windling, Terri, 4, 9, 10
Virgin Land: The American West as Winning of Barbara Worth, The,
Symbol and Myth, 207 206-7
Virginian, The, 206, 208 "Winter Flies, The," 211
Vizzini, 8 Winter's Tale, 116
Voisin, Marcel, 68 Wister, Owen, 206
Voltaire, 136, 139 Wizards, 44
-Vonnegut, Kurt Jr., 196 Wolfe, Gary K., 120, 206
Wordsworth, William, 40, 41, 119
Waddell, Martin, 6 World War I, 141
Wade, Lillian, 22 "Worn-out Dancing Shoes, The," 11
Walkabout Woman, 117 Wrede, Patricia C, 4, 10
Walker, Wendy, 4, 11 Wright, Elizabeth, 70
"Walk Slowly," 44 Wright, Harold Bell, 206
Wallace, Alfred Russell, 49 Wunderlich, Richard, xii
Walpole, 50 Wyndham Earl, 102-104
Wandering Jew, 83, 88
"Warlord of Saturn's Moons, The," Xero, 202
211
"Was Zilla Right?," 121 Yolen, Jane, 4, 6, 10-14, 121, 123
Waste Land, The, 37
Waters, Frank, 208 Zelazny, Roger, 119, 205
Wayne, 189-191 Zipes, Jack, xii
Wayne, John, 190 Zita, 139
"We Can Remember It for You Zizek, Slavoj, 171
Wholesale," 211 "Zodiac 2000," 202
Webb, Walter Prescott, 208 Zoline, Pamela, 198
Weiner, Andrew, 211
About the Editor and Contributors
BRIAN ATTEBERY is Professor of English at Idaho State University, where he has

directed the American Studies program since 1982. His most recent project has been co-
editing The Norton Book of Science Fiction with Ursula K. Le Guin. He is the author of
The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature and Strategies of Fantasy, the latter of
which is the 1993 winner of the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy
Studies.
EDITH BORCHARDT is Associate Professor of German at the University of Minnesota,

Morris, where she teaches Classicism, Romanticism, and literature after 1945. She is
interested in interdisciplinary approaches, especially the psychology of literature, as
reflected in her work on androgyny in Kleist, Mythische Strukuren im Werk Henrich von
Kleists, and her essay "Psychic Integration, Homosexuality, and Death in Marguerite
Yourcenar's Le Coup de Grace." She has contributed articles the the Literature/Film
Quarterly and published poems in Lisa Kahn's anthology In Her Mother's Tongue. Her
essay on "Caricature, Parody, Satire: Narrative Masks as Subversion of the Picaro in
Patrick SUskind's Perfume" appeared in State of the Fantastic (ed. Nicholas Ruddick).
NANCY BUFFINGTON is a doctoral candidate in American literature at the University

of Arizona. Her current research focuses on the racial implications of the supernatural in
the works of American authors Robert Bird (1806-54) and William Seabrook (1886-1945).
GARETH M. EURIDGE is currently a doctoral candidate at The Ohio State University,

where he is researching the incest motif in popular and coterie drama of the Jacobean-
Caroline period.
BUD FOOTE is a professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at

Georgia Institute of Tehcnology. His essay on The Panchronicon appeared in the eighth
volume in this series; his volume on time travel to the past, The Connecticut Yankee in
the Twentieth Century, was published by Greenwood Press in 1991. He has been reading
SF since 1939 and teaching it since 1970. He writes troublemaking topical songs and
sometimes performs them with the Adamantly Egalitarian String and Reed Corps.
228 About the Editor and Contributors
ROBERT F. GEARY is Professor of English at James Madison University in Virginia.

He used an NEH seminar in 1979-80 to extend his study of eighteenth-century English
literature from such figures as Swift and Pope to include the Gothic novel and its literary
descendants. On these later subjects he has since written a number of papers and articles
(many for the ICFA), developed and offered a course in the Gothic supernatural at JMU,
and in 1992 published The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief and Literary
Change.
JULIETTE GILMAN is Associate Professor of French at Northeastern University and

specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French literature. She is the author
Anatole France et Les Autels del la Peur, published in France. Her current research
interests are history as represented in prose fiction, and the fantastic in French literature.
Her scholarship includes articles and conference presentations on works by Jacques
Cazotte, George Sand, and Anatole France.
MARY Y. HALLAB taught at the American University of Beirut, where she learned that
life can be more fantastic than fiction. Since she left Beirut in 1994, she has taught in the
English Department of Central Missouri State University.
LAUREL L. HENDRIX is Assistant Professor of English at California State University,

Fresno. Her teaching and scholarly interests include Spenser, Shakespeare, Renaissance
studies, early women writers, and Arthurian literature. She has published essays on
laughter and gender politics in Spenser, and the semiotics of gender and religious ritual
in Chaucer. She is currently at work on a study of myth, gender construction, and the
representation of women in Spenser's Faerie Queene.
VERONICA HOLLINGER teaches in the Cultural Studies program at Trent University

in Peterborough, Ontario, and co-edits Science-Fiction Studies. Her current projects
include co-editing a collection of essays on the vampire as metaphor in contemporary
culture and exploring the possibilities of tragedy in the postmodern context.
DOROTHY JOINER chairs the Department of Foreign Languages at West Georgia

College. Her research interests include nineteenth-century French poetry and painting,
Northern Renaissance art, especially Hieronymus Bosch, and contemporary art.
BARBARA KLINE teaches in the Department of English at Albertson College of Idaho.

She has published on medieval romance and Dorothy L. Sayers. She is currently finishing
an article on scribal editing of The Canterbury Tales in British Library MS Harley 7333.
She is also working on a book-length study and catalog of B.L. MS Harley 7333.
VALERIE KRIPS teaches English at the University of Pittsburgh. She is interested in

literary theory, theories of subjectivity, and children's literature and is currently
completing a book on the literary production and seduction of the child.
About the Editor and Contributors 229
ROB LATHAM is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. Along with
Robert A. Collins he has co-edited four volumes of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Book
Review Annual, published by Greenwood Press, and he is co-editing Modes of the
Fantastic, the proceedings volume from the 12th ICFA. His essay "Screening Desire in
Speaking Parts and Videodrome" will appear in the anthology Posthuman Bodies, edited
by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingstone.
MIGLENA NIKOLCHINA is an Associate Professor in West European Literature at the

Sofia University, Bulgaria. Her most recent theoretical book, The Utopial Human Being,
is a study of science fiction and fantasy. Her publications in English are concerned with
the work of Virginia Woolf and Julia Kristeva and have appeared in Diacritics, Semiotica,
and Paragraph.
DENNIS O'BRIEN teaches courses on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Restoration and eigh-
teenth-century literature as Assistant Professor of English at Cumberland College in
Williamsburg, Kentucky. He has presented papers at the Studies in Medievalism confer-
ence, the Southeastern Medieval Association conference, the Sixteenth-Century Studies
conference, and the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo. He has also
presented a pedagogical paper at the South Atlantic Modem Language Association confer-
ence on connections between Old English literature and the Klingons of Star Trek: The
Next Generation.
JOHN PENNINGTON is Assistant Professor of English at St. Norbert College, De Pere,

WI, where he also directs the Writing-across-the-Curriculum program. He has published
works on George MacDonaid, Lewis Carroll, Richard Adams, Valerie Martin and Robert
Louis Stevenson. He also has a forthcoming chapter on MacDonaid in Muscular Christi-
anity: Embodying the Victorian Age. He is currently working on a full-length study of
MacDonaid, Carroll, and John Ruskin.
NORMA ROWEN teaches fantasy and children's literature in the Humanities Division of
York University, Toronto, Canada. She has published articles on Dorris Lessing, Paul
Auster, and Mary Shelley and is planning a book on myths and stones about artificial
men.
JOE SANDERS is Professor of English at Lakeland Community College, Mentor, OH.

Besides many book reviews, he has published essays on Michael Bishop, Robert A.
Heinlein, Thomas Harris, and other subjects. He edited Science Fiction Fandom
(Greenwood Press, 1994) and is currently preparing revised second editions of Roger
Zelazny: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography and E. E. (Doc) Smith. He is president
of the Science Fiction Research Association.
WILLIAM SENIOR is a faculty member at Broward Community College. He has

published articles on medieval literature, science fiction and fantasy. A forthcoming book
is Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Variations on the Fantasy
Tradition.
230 About the Editor and Contributors
NIGEL E. SMITH teaches French at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His
main area of specialization is nineteenth-century literature. Particular interests within the
period include fantastic short fiction and representation of gender. Recent publications
include "Mirror, Mirror: Reflections on the Supernatural in Racan's Les Bergeries" (in
Plaire et instruire: Essays in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Literature) and "The
Myth of the City in Balzac's Ferragus" (in Romance Notes).
SARAH JO WEBB teaches composition, linguistics, and, occasionally, fantasy at the

University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, a regional liberal arts college. She has
researched composition processes and the relation of metaphor to insight. Her poetry has
been published in The Magazine for Speculative Poetry, Zen Gong, Zen Bow, Appalachee
Quarterly, and other small magazines.
RICHARD WUNDERLICH is Professor of Sociology at the College of Saint Rose in

Albany, New York. He has published The Pinocchio Catalogue (a descriptive bibliogra-
phy and printing history of English language translations and other renditions appearing
in the United States, 1892-1987), as well as various articles on Pinocchio in The Horn
Book, Italian Quarterly, and Children's Literature.
JACK ZIPES is Professor of German at the University of Minnesota and has published
numerous articles on fairy tales, folklore, German literature, drama, film, and children's
literature. His major publications include Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of
Folk and Fairy Tales (1979), Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (1983), The Trials
and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (1983; rev. ed. 1993), and The Brothers
Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (1988). He is also the editor and
translator of The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1987), Beauties, Beasts
and Enchantments: Classic French Fairy Tales (1989), Fairy Tales and Fables from
Weimar (1989), and Spells of Enchantment (1991) and has published Arabian Nights
(1991), an adaptation of Richard F. Burton's unexpurgated translation, and Aesop's Fables
(1992). He is currently working on a book about the origins of the literary fairy tale.

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Sanders, J.L. - Functions of The Fantastic. Selected Essays From The 13th International Conference On The Fantastic in The Arts PDF

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Functions of the Fantastic

Recent Titles in Contributions to the

Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors: Critical Essays on His Science Fiction

Edited by JOE SANDERS

Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction

International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (13th : 1992)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881

Printed in the United States of America

1. Recent Trends in the Contemporary American

3. Reinscribing Cinderella: Jane Austen and the

4. Shoring Fragments: How CBS's Beauty and the

5. The Corpse in the Dung Cart: The Night-Side

6. Reader Response and Fantasy Literature: The

7. Gautier, Freud, and the Fantastic: Psychoanalysis

8. Love and Automata: From Hoffmann to Lem and

9. The Company We Keep: Comic Function in

10. "A World of Glas": The Heroine's Quest for

11. What about Bob? Doubles and Demons in

12. Duality, Reality, and Magic in Sir Gawain and

13. Oliphaunts in the Perilous Realm: The Function

14. Criminal Artists and Artisans in Mysteries by

15. The Craft of the Fantastic in Anatole France's

16. Sally Johnson: Paperworks

17. Culture as Spiritual Metaphor in Le Guin's

18. Assuming the Present in SF: Sartre in a New

19. Finding One's Place in the Fantastic: Susan Cooper's

20. Carter and Blake: The Dangers of Innocence

21. Travels in Hyperreality: Jean Baudrillard's

22. The Men Who Walked on the Moon: Images

23. The Closing of the Final Frontier: Science

About the Editor and Contributors 227

Recent Trends in the Contemporary

You can always tell when Christmas is approaching in America. Sometime in

children's fairy tales in the late 1980s.

1. Continued re-production and duplication of the classical fairy tales for

2. Parodies and revisions of the classical fairy tale in various formsTV

Dean, Pamela. Tarn Lin. New York: Tor, 1991.

Completed as a book-length novel in 1883, the English translation of Collodi's

To understand this change we must go back to Collodi's original and ask

production costs)10 when first released in February 1940. It grossed only 58

Collodi, C. Pinocchio, the Tale of a Puppet. The original translation by M. A. Murray

Reinscribing Cinderella: Jane Austen and

wins a handsome prince and is translated to a high position in the world. We

Elizabeth, then, does not entirely escape the ash.

godmother, since in contrast to Mrs. Norris she is kind and benevolent.

Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. London: Virago Press, 1989.

Shoring Fragments: How CBS's Beauty and

Modernist and postmodernist literature often describes the human condition by

generally depicted either as a "House of Pride"a harshly lit world in which

like to one more rich in hope,

The clouds that gather round the setting sun

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

Paracelsus's perversion of Arnold's language suggests one of the problems of

1. I am indebted to Brett Cox of Duke University for this observation.

Arnold, Matthew. "Dover Beach." Reprinted in The Norton Anthology of English

The Corpse in the Dung Cart: The Night-

(Wilson ix)signals a major change in the attitude toward the supernatural, a

In undertaking to treat of the phenomena in question, I do not propose to treat

We believed unreservedly in the methods of modem science, and were prepared

If The Night-Side of Nature was prophetic in signaling the opening of a

Reader Response and Fantasy Literature:

Since R Victoria passes through the mirror, it becomes Victoria R: "This,