The Gothic Origins of Science Fiction

Author(s): Patrick Brantlinger

Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 30-43
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345322 .
Accessed: 20/09/2011 22:04
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to NOVEL: A
Forum on Fiction.
http://www.jstor.org
The Gothic
Origins
oJ Science Fiction
PATRICK BRANTLINGER
Whether science fiction can achieve the stature of "mainstream" fiction
may
depend
on the
possibility
of its
developing
into a "realism of the future." Accord-
ing
to Robert
Scholes,
we don't now have such a
realism,
except maybe
in the
forecasting
done
by
banks and insurance
companies.
But if science fiction could
become a form of realistic
prophecy,
it
might
rival mainstream fiction
esthetically,
and it would excel it in social relevance.1 A
difficulty
for this
argument
arises
from the fact that the conventions of science fiction derive from the conventions
of
fantasy
and
romance,
and
especially
from those of the Gothic romance. Science
fiction
grows
out of
literary
forms that are antithetical to
realism,
so that the idea
that it
may
evolve into a "realism of the future" is at best
problematic.
At the same
time,
science fiction has been
moving
in the direction of increased
realism,
or at least of increased
seriousness-John
Brunner's novels
may
be read
as
approximations
of a "realism of the
future,"
and other recent writers-Ursula
Le
Guin,
Anthony Burgess,
William
Golding,
Stanislaw Lem-have been
making
it
respectable
if not
exactly
realistic.2
Something
like the same movement towards
realism can also be traced in the
history
of the Gothic romance-in
Britain,
all the
way
from that frivolous
original,
The Castle
of Otranto,
through
such
great
works
as
James
Hogg's Confessions of
a
Justified
Sinner and
Emily
Bronte's
Wuthering
Heights,
down to the domestication of Gothic in the sensation novels of the
1860s,
and in America from Charles Brockden Brown
through
Poe to Hawthorne
and Melville.3 But it is also true that the more realistic a Gothic romance or a
science fiction
story is,
the more it ceases to be a Gothic romance or a science
fiction
story,
because
contradicting
the conventions of these forms.
Wuthering
Heights
is an
example among
Gothic romances-if it is a Gothic romance. And
Golding's
Inheritors and
Burgess's
Clockwork
Orange
are
examples among
science fiction-if
they
are science fiction. I intend to focus more on the conven-
tions that define the two
genres
than on individual works that break
through
the conventions to new forms or that bend them into
paradoxical shapes. By
doing so,
I
hope
to
suggest why
it has been
difficult-maybe impossible-for
science fiction to become a "realism of the future." If it is
going
to rival main-
stream fiction in artistic seriousness and social
relevance,
it
may
have to do so on
grounds
other than realism.
Of course "realism"
may
refer to structural features of
artworks,
but it
may
1
Robert Scholes made this
argument
in a lecture on "Fiction and the Future"
given
at Indiana
University,
February 28, 1978. See also his Structural Fabulation
(Notre Dame, Indiana:
University
of Notre Dame
Press, 1975) and,
with Erik S.
Rabkin, Science Fiction:
History, Science, Vision
(New
York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1977).
2
Scholes cited
John Brunner's The
Sheep
Look
Up
as at least an
approximation
of a "realism of the future."
3
A
good
account of the
development
of Gothic in Britain
may
be found in
Joan McTigue Zirker, The Gothic
Tradition in
English Fiction, 1764-1824
(Indiana University
Doctoral
Dissertation, 1974).
PATRICK
BRANTLINGERIGOTHIC
ORIGINS
also mean
cognitive
or
epistemological validity. Depending
on their skill,
authors
can invest
any literary genre
with such
validity.
But the conventions of
genres
also
impose
limits and
carry
a
significance partly
traditional and
partly structural.
The conventions of both Gothic and science fiction work
against
realism in both
senses.
Although
some authors have
produced
stories in one
genre
or the
other
that are
fully
realistic in the second sense-works of
great
esthetic
power and
profound meaning-most
stories in both
genres necessarily
fail to be realistic
in
either sense. The awkwardness of Darko Suvin's recent defense of science
fiction
as "the literature of
cognitive estrangement"
derives
partly
from this fact.4 Suvin
acknowledges
that "90 or 95
percent
of SF
production
is
strictly perishable
stuff."
His term
"cognitive"
can therefore
only
refer to "the 5 to 10
percent
of SF that
is
aesthetically significant" (vii). By making
the
exceptional
"5 to 10
percent"
the
rule for science
fiction,
Suvin cannot
explain why
so much of the
genre
fails to be
cognitive
and hence falls outside his definition.
Though
some works of science fiction achieve a
very high
level of
meaning
and
esthetic
quality, "cognitive"
is
simply
the
wrong
word for the
genre
as a whole.
The central
message
of the Gothic romance
form,
involving
an assertion of the
power
of the irrational over the
rational,
is also the
message
of most science
fiction. The Time
Machine, 1984, Perelandra,
Dune all continue the romantic
reaction
against
the secularization and rationalization of life that
began
in earnest
with the democratic and industrial revolutions of the late
eighteenth century.
Science fiction is thus
really
anti-science
fiction,
a form of
apocalyptic fantasy
verging
on
religious myth.
"The dream of reason
produces monsters,"
reads the
title of one of
Goya's etchings.
That sentence
might provide
a better clue to
the nature of science fiction than either "realism of the future" or
"cognitive
estrangement."
I am
suggesting
that the conventions of both Gothic and science
fiction involve a
rejection
or a
symbolic putting
to
sleep
of
reason;
they
are both
forms of
apocalyptic nightmare fantasy
characterized
by
themes of demonic
possession
and monstrous distortion
(Darko
Suvin's
"estrangement").
I am also
suggesting
that both
genres
involve the idea that reason taken to extremes
"pro-
duces monsters." In the Gothic
romance, extreme reason
may
take the form of
revolutionary
or
religious fanaticism,
though
it is more often dissociated from
social context and related to individual madness. In science
fiction,
extreme
reason takes the form of science itself and of its chief
manifestation,
technology.
The
subjective
imagery
of
lunacy
and
nightmare
becomes the
imagery
of the
external world of machines and mass
society.
The thesis that Gothic and science fiction are
historically
related forms of
apocalyptic fantasy
has been
ably explored by
David Ketterer in New Worlds
for
Old,
and
by
several other writers.5 In his
popular history
of science
fiction,
Billion Year
Spree,
Brian Aldiss declares that the first science fiction novel was
4Darko
Suvin, Metamorphoses of
Science Fiction: On the Poetics and
History of
a
Literary
Genre
(New
Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1979).
5
David Ketterer, New Worlds
for
Old: The
Apocalyptic Imagination,
Science
Fiction, and American Litera-
ture
(Bloomington:
Indiana
University Press, 1974).
See also several
of the
essays
in Thomas
Clareson, ed.,
SF: The Other Side
of
Realism
(Bowling Green, Ohio:
Bowling
Green
University Popular Press, 1971).
31
NOVEL
IFALL
i98o
Frankenstein,
which
happens
also,
of
course,
to be a classic of the Gothic
romance
genre.6 Many
other romance writers can also be counted
among
the
pioneers of
science
fiction, perhaps especially
in
America,
where
Hawthorne, Poe, and
Melville all
produced hybrid
works somewhere between Gothic and
modern
science fiction-works like Hawthorne's "The Artist of the
Beautiful,"
in
which
the hero rivals nature
by creating
a mechanical
butterfly,
and Melville's
"The
Bell-Tower,"
which has been called "one of the first robot stories in
English."
7
Of course one can
push
the
origins
of science fiction back much farther
than
Frankenstein. Robert Philmus's
survey
starts with Francis Godwin's The Man in
the
Moone in 1638
(in
which the
hero, Gonsales,
rides to the moon in a sedan
chair drawn
by swans).8
And
according
to some SF-ish
speculators,
those
wheels
of
light
that Ezekiel saw were
really UFOs,
an idea that fits in
very nicely
with
what
might
be called Star Wars
theology.
It is also
possible
to make the
origins
of science fiction more recent than Frankenstein. The first writers conscious of
producing
a
special genre
were
Jules
Verne in the 1870s and H. G. Wells in the
1890s. But Wells
himself,
as Aldiss
notes,
believed that he had
merely transposed
elements of Gothic into what he called "scientific romances." "It occurred to
me,"
Wells
writes,
"that instead of the usual interview with the devil or a
magician,
an
ingenious
use of scientific
patter might
with
advantage
be substituted ... I
simply brought
the fetish stuff
up
to
date,
and made it as near actual
theory
as
possible."
9
If we
regard
Frankenstein as at least a
clear,
early example
of cross-fertilization
between the Gothic romance and science
fiction,
two facts about it are worth
stressing.
One is that
Mary Shelley's
fictions
express
a reaction
against
the
Promethean radicalism of her
husband,
and of her father and mother-William
Godwin and
Mary
Wollstonecraft-as well. The fate of her "modern Prometheus"
is the
contrary
of the fate of the
mythological
liberator
depicted
in Prometheus
Unbound.10 While the
very phrase
Gothic romance
suggests
a reaction
against
things
modern and
rationalized,
there is also an
important
sense in which the
whole
development
of science fiction from Frankenstein forward has been char-
acterized
by
an
anti-Promethean,
anti-utopian,
anti-scientific
pessimism.
And the second fact worth
stressing
is that
Mary Shelley's story
contains
many
of the
patterns
that show
up
in modern science fiction. Most
obviously,
there is
the incarnation of
reason,
Victor Frankenstein
himself,
the
progenitor
not
only
of
his monster but also of a
long
line of mad
scientists,
through
Stevenson's Dr.
Jekyll
and Wells's Dr. Moreau down to the Dr.
Strangeloves
of the
present. These are
6
Brian W.
Aldiss,
Billion Year
Spree:
The True
History of
Science Fiction
(New
York: Schocken
Books, 1976),
pp. 20-31.
7 H. Bruce
Franklin, Future
Perfect:
American Science Fiction
of
the Nineteenth
Century (New
York: Oxford
University Press, 1966), p.
xi.
8
Robert M.
Philmus, Into the Unknown: The Evolution
of
Science Fiction
from
Francis Godwin to H. G.
Wells
(Berkeley: University
of
California Press, 1970), pp.
13-14.
9
Quoted by Aldiss, Billion Year
Spree, pp.
8-9.
10
See Lee
Sterrenburg, "Mary Shelley's
Monster: Politics and
Psyche
in
Frankenstein,"
in The Endurance
of
Frankenstein:
Essays
on
Mary Shelley's Novel, ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher
and
George
Levine
(Berkeley
and
Los
Angeles: University
of
California Press, 1979).
32
PATRICK BRANTLINGER|GOTHIC ORIGINS
the
rationalizers,
the would-be
straighteners
of the
crooked, the followers
of
Blake's Urizen
(a
name to be translated as either "horizon" or
"your reason").
Lo,
a shadow
of
horror is risen
In
Eternity!
Unknown,
unprolific,
Self-closed, all-repelling:
what Demon
Hath
formed
this abominable
void,
This
soul-shuddering
vacuum? Some said
"It is Urizen."
11
The Book
of
Urizen
might
be read as a Gothic
romance,
in which Blake's
version
of the mad scientist dreams
up
monsters: "his world teemed vast enormities
. . .
Dread
terrors,
delighting
in blood."
The mad scientist is one item that shows
up
often in modern science
fiction;
the monstrous invention that
destroys
life instead of
enhancing
it is another.
In Urizen's
case,
that invention is Urizen
himself,
or the universe viewed ration-
ally. Frequently
in science fiction the destructive creation is
organic,
homicidal
clones,
mutant
insects,
and the like. But
perhaps
more
frequently
the monster is
mechanical,
clearly disorganic
or
anti-natural,
like the treacherous
computer
HAL
in
2001,
or Dr. Rossum's robots in
R.U.R.,
or the deviant
machinery
in Stanislaw
Lem's The
Futurological Congress.
In the
hallucinatory year 2039,
Lem's
pro-
tagonist
discovers that
computers
and robots run
by
the law of least resistance.
If it's easier to evade a task than to
perform it,
a smart machine will evade the
task. And since all the machines are
smart,
Lem
presents
us with a vast comic
array
of
perverse technology.
There are
"fudgerators"
and
"drudge-dodgers,"
"malingerants"
and "dissimulators." And there is even an
extremely
clever
machine called a
"mimicretin,"
which is "a
computer
that
plays stupid
in
order,
once and for
all,
to be left in
peace."
12
In Lem's
novel,
as in a
great
deal of science
fiction,
technology
backfires.
Instead of a
single
homicidal
monster,
Lem's future world is full of mechanical
lemons-clockwork
oranges-not
homicidal
ones,
it is
true,
but nonetheless
deviant,
crazy, demonic,
synecdoches
for the failure of
technology
as a whole.
And instead of one mad
scientist,
Lem's novel is full of them also. One can think
of science in
general
as Lem's version of Victor
Frankenstein,
or one can think of
the members of the
Futurological
Association who assemble at the Hilton Hotel
in Costa Rica to
pool
their
prophecies
and thus save the world from the various
crises that unbridled scientific
technology
has caused. The
salvage
schemes of
Lem's
futurologists
all contradict each other. And their conference ends cata-
strophically
when the Hotel is
accidentally
blown
up by
the Costa Rican armed
forces
battling
revolutionaries in the streets. Not
only
do Lem's scientific
prophets
fail to save the
world,
but
they
fail even to make it
through
a
single
11William Blake, The Book
of Urizen,
in Selected
Poetry
and
Prose, ed.
Northrop Frye (New
York: Modern
Library, 1953), p.
164.
12
Stanislaw Lem, The
Futurological Congress (New
York: Avon
Books, 1976), p.
84.
33
NOVEL
FALL
1980
day
of their
agenda.
So much for
prophecy-let
alone for
actively planning
the
future-by
science.
The Frankenstein
pattern,
in which the dream of the mad scientist
produces
monsters,
is an
unfailing
formula for
catastrophe.
Susan
Sontag
has
suggested
that the whole
genre
of science fiction is based on "the
imagination
of disaster."
Rather than with
science,
she
says,
"the science fiction film ... is concerned with
the aesthetics of
destruction,
with the
peculiar
beauties to be found in
wreaking
havoc,
making
a mess. And it is in the
imagery
of destruction that the core of a
good
science fiction film lies." 13 I would
qualify
her assessment
only by insisting
that the
genre
is indeed about
science,
or rather about the failures of science that
lead to disaster.
Perhaps
the
quintessential
work of science fiction is the
report
given by
one of Lem's
futurologists
before the Hilton
collapses.
He
gives
it in a
numerical
code,
because overcrowded conditions necessitate an acceleration of the
proceedings:
Stan Hazelton . . . threw the hall into a
flurry by emphatically repeating:
4, 6,
11,
and
therefore
22; 5, 9,
hence
22; 3, 7, 2, 11,
from
which it
followed
that 22
and
only
22!! Someone
jumped up, saying yes
but
5,
and what about
6, 18,
or
4
for
that matter; Hazelton countered this
objection
with the
crushing
retort
that,
either
way,
22.
And then Lem's
protagonist, Ijon Tichy,
turns to the number
key
in Hazelton's
paper
and discovers that 22 means "the end of the world."
To the
argument
that number 22-or the
imagination
of disaster-is the
governing principle
of science
fiction,
the
objection
can be made that
many
science fiction stories are
optimistic-even utopian-about
the future. Those two
recent box office smashes, Star Wars and Close
Encounters,
are far from
being
dystopian
fantasies. Darth Vader
may
live on after the end of Star
Wars,
but
there can be no doubt that the
Force,
and
good
all-American
boys
like Luke
Skywalker,
will
triumph
in future star
wars-although
the
thought
of future
star
wars,
even of the movie
variety,
is a
dampener.
And in Close
Encounters,
the
threat of demonic invasion that makes the first
part
of the film
suspenseful
degenerates
into a kind of saccharine mush at the
end,
when those
spindly,
well-
behaved,
ghostly embryos
come
traipsing
down from their
big
chandelier to
return the lost and to waft the
happy
hero off into unknown-or
perhaps only
ill-defined-beatitudes.
Anyway,
much other science fiction seems also
opti-
mistic,
perhaps especially space flight
stories that show
people using
future
technology
to
explore
the
universe,
conquering
the unknown
through
science.
Captain
Kirk and Dr.
Spock
don't
conjure up
or create
monsters,
they only
blunder into them. And there are numerous stories in which scientists
appear
as
heroes-even saviors-of
mankind,
using
their
knowledge
to ward off
disaster,
or the
irruption
of the
demonic,
or number 22. Rather than the scientist as
Faustian
magician invoking demons,
we
get
the scientist as exorcist.
13
Susan
Sontag,
"The
Imagination
of Disaster," in
Against Interpretation (New
York:
Dell, 1969), p.
215.
34
PATRICK
BRANTLINGERIGOTHIC
ORIGINS
But even
optimistic
science fiction is still about the monstrous or the
demonic,
and about at least the threat of social or cosmic disaster. Furthermore, in
most
examples
of it there is a break from
present reality,
a radical
disjunction
from
the
world as we know
it,
a
displacement
in time or
space
or both that
implies
catastrophe,
that is itself a kind of formal
catastrophe
or
abrupt
violation
of
realism,
even
though
the content of a
specific story may depict
a state of
future
bliss. This is what Darko Suvin means
by "estrangement."
In this
pattern
of
radical
disjunction
from the actual-what
might
be called the structural
expres-
sion of the
imagination
of disaster-lies the central bond between science
fiction
and the Gothic romance.
As in science
fiction,
events in Gothic romances are often distanced in time and
space, though
the time is
usually
the
past
instead of the
future,
and the
place
is
usually
another
country-sinister Italy
or wicked France-instead of another
planet
or
galaxy.
A chief difference between the two
types
of
story
is that the
scale of disaster tends to be individual and inward in the Gothic
romance,
while
it is
external, social,
often cosmic in science fiction. There is
only
one mad
scientist and one monster in
Frankenstein,
but there is an
epidemic
of them in
The
Futurological Congress. And,
while the
mayhem
caused
by Mary Shelley's
ogre
is restricted to his creator's
family
and
friends,
Lem's
dystopian
vision
paints
a future in which
political
and
technological mayhem
has become the human
condition.
The Gothic romance is characterized
by
a set of
literary
conventions that
internalize or
subjectify events,
thus
emphasizing
the break from
reality.
These
internalizing
conventions include frame-tale
narration;
the use of unreliable nar-
rators;
the
pattern
of the double or of the
ghostly,
demonic alter
ego;
claustro-
phobic
motifs of
imprisonment,
secret
passages,
coffins and
catacombs;
and
metaphors
that liken events to demonic
possession
or-what is
usually
the same
thing-to lunacy.
These are the conventions of the inward
journey,
into the heart
of darkness of the narrator or the
protagonist, through
which a Gothic romance
becomes an
analogue
for a
nightmare
or a delirious dream vision
(much
as in
Goya's etching,
which shows a
sleeping
writer surrounded
by nightmare demons).
Perhaps
the most
familiar-certainly among
the most
extreme-examples
of
these conventions can be found in Poe's tales of terror-frame narration in
Narrative
of
A. Gordon
Pym,
the use of unreliable narrators like the delirious
opium
addict of
"Ligeia," imprisonment
and burial alive in "The Pit and the
Pendulum" and
elsewhere,
the
pattern of the double in "William Wilson" and
many
other
stories,
and
metaphors
of demonic
possession
and madness in all of
them. In "The Fall of the House of
Usher,"
the break from
reality-the
dream-
like
internalization of events
suggested by
Poe's use of these conventions-reaches
a kind of
solipsistic extremity
in the treatment of the
house,
with its "vacant and
eyelike"
windows and the
zigzag
fissure that runs down it like a crack in a
skull,
as a
metaphor
for the mind of Roderick Usher. Its
collapse
mirrors
Roderick's,
a
collapse
into madness. But Roderick himself is a
shadowy
double for the teller of
the
tale,
the
nightmare
the narrator is
having.
And behind this level of
dreaming
35
NOVELIFALL
1980
appears
still another
one,
in which both Roderick and the narrator are the
ghostly
doubles of
Poe,
the demons whom he invokes
through
his obsessive art and who
possess him,
the
nightmare
that he is
having.
"Usher"
expresses
the central
message
of the Gothic romance form: internal
disaster,
the
disintegration
of
a
mind,
the
coming
loose from the real world that is madness or death or both.
It
may
seem far-fetched to
suggest
that "Usher" is both Gothic romance and
science
fiction,
but
Ray Bradbury
wrote a
story
based on Poe's tales which
he
called "Usher II" and included in his Martian Chronicles.
Everything
in
Brad-
bury's fantasy happens
much as in
Poe,
except
that it
happens
on Mars and
that
half the characters are robots. The connection between Gothic and science fiction
that is reflected
by Bradbury's
"Usher II" is noticeable in several of the features
of "Usher I."
First,
there is Roderick Usher's
insanely
reasoned
theory
of the
sentience of all
vegetable
matter.
Next,
much of Roderick's
reading
falls into a
fantastic-utopian category
close to science fiction. His books include "the Heaven
and Hell of
Swedenborg;
the Subterranean
Voyage
of Nicholas Klimm . .
.;
the
Chiromancy
of Robert Flud . .
;
the
Journey
into the Blue Distance of
Tieck;
and the
City
of the Sun of
Campanella."
14
But what is most like later
science fiction are the motivations of the narrator and of Roderick:
morbid,
demented
curiosity
on the
part
of the
narrator;
and
morbid,
demented intellectual
sensitivity
on the
part
of Roderick-diseased
reason,
in short.
Whether or not "The Fall of the House of Usher" can
reasonably
be called
science
fiction,
Poe is
important
in this context both because he illustrates the
internalizing
conventions of the Gothic romance and because he is often
cited,
along
with
Mary Shelley
and H. G.
Wells,
as the inventor of science
fiction, just
as he is often cited as the inventor of the detective
story.
What all three
types
of
story
have in common in his
practice
are the conventions of Gothic and also
Goya's paradox,
or the
perception
that at some extreme limit reason turns into
its
opposite:
into
nightmare, delirium,
ruin. In the detective
stories,
as Albert
Hutter
says,
"the
relentlessly logical process
of ratiocination is thrown into
question by
a
deeper irrationality."
15
And in the stories closest to science fiction
-for
example,
the
exploration
fantasies like "Descent into the Maelstrom"-
extremes of
curiosity
about the unknown are
synonymous
with the death-wish
impulses
of the curious.
Thus,
when the
ship
is
caught up
in the maelstrom and
death seems
inevitable,
the old man finds delirium and lucid
rationality merging
within himself. He
begins
to view the
whirlpool
with "the keenest
curiosity,"
as a
kind of scientific
puzzle,
and it is
precisely
because he starts
reasoning
about it in
the midst of his insane terror that he
escapes
to tell his
story.
Rather than
pro-
ducing monsters,
reason here would seem to
bring
salvation. But what is more
significant
than the old man's
escape
is the identification of reason and madness
at the
story's center,
in the midst of the maelstrom.
Similarly,
A. Gordon
Pym's
14
Edgar
Allan
Poe, "The Fall of the House of
Usher," in Selected Prose and
Poetry,
ed. W. H. Auden
(New
York:
Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1962), p.
13.
15
Albert D.
Hutter, "Dreams, Transformations, and Literature: The
Implications
of Detective
Fiction,"
Victorian
Studies, December, 1975, p.
191.
36
PATRICK
BRANTLINGERjGOTHIC ORIGINS
motive for
stowing away
on board the
Grampus may be seen either as an
impulse
to
destroy
himself or as an insatiable
curiosity driving
him onward into
the
unknown. The two are
really
one.
The theme of self-destructive reason in Poe
may
be
explained psychologically
in terms of the rationalization of death-wish
impulses.
The most
important link
between Gothic and science fiction
may
be the
pattern
of
necrophilia-"the
imagination
of disaster"-that characterizes Poe's fiction and that is an
obvious
feature of Gothic fantasies. In The
Anatomy of
Human
Destructiveness, Erich
Fromm defines
necrophilia
as "the
passion
to
destroy
life and the attraction to
all
that is
dead,
decaying,
and
purely
mechanical." 16 Fromm writes of a
"necrophiliac
character formation" that he associates with fascism and that he sees
spreading
"throughout
our
cybernetic
industrial
society."
He is mistaken
(he
simply
over-
looks the whole
development
of the Gothic tale of
terror)
when he
says
that "the
spirit
of
necrophilia
was
expressed
first in
literary
form
by
F. T. Marinetti in his
Futurist
Manifesto
of 1909"
(31). (Perhaps
he means
only
the
spirit
of modern
necrophilia.)
But Marinetti's celebration of
speed
and war and destructive mechan-
ism shares much with science fiction. Of course I do not mean that science fiction
is a
literary expression
of the fascist
mentality.
Genres do not have
politics,
though they certainly
do have tendencies toward
specific
sets of values. A writer
can
employ
a
genre
almost as
easily
to mock its
implicit
values as to affirm
them,
but the critical or
cognitive component
in "90 to 95
percent"
of both science
fiction and Gothic
fantasy
is
already
low or nonexistent. In
any case,
in common
with
Gothic,
science fiction is a form of
fantasy
that
expresses necrophiliac
impulses
in various
ways.
Often-in
dystopias,
for
example-science
fiction
issues
warnings
about these tendencies
(dehumanization,
destructive
technology,
ecological catastrophe, etc.).
More often it
just expresses
them without
explora-
tion of their
meaning
and hence without
criticizing
them.
These
necrophiliac
tendencies are of course irrational or even
actively
anti-
rational and
regressive.
The
internalizing
or
subjectivizing
conventions of the
Gothic romance
may
be
generally
described as
regressive-descents
into mael-
stroms or madness or
nightmares involving
the
suppression
or the
symbolic
destruction of the
waking,
rational
ego.17
The
internalizing
conventions of Gothic
do not
always apply
to later science
fiction, just
as
they
do not
always apply
to
later detective fiction. But one can still find
many
stories that
employ
them. I
have
already suggested
the
persistence
of the Frankenstein
pattern.
"Sword
and
sorcery"
fantasies and also
necrophiliac
horror stories of the H. P. Lovecraft
variety,
both often included in
surveys
of science
fiction,
are both clear descend-
ants of Gothic.
Further,
stories about invasions from outer
space,
from War
of
the Worlds
through
Childhood's End down to Close
Encounters,
recall
patterns
of demonic
possession,
but on a social instead of a
subjective
scale. Stories
about clones and
holograms,
and often ones about time
travel,
organ transplants,
and
androids,
recall the
pattern
of the demonic double. And there are numerous
16
Erich
Fromm, The
Anatomy of
Human Destructiveness
(New
York:
Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1976), p.
6.
17
See
my essay, "Novels, Romances, and
Psychoanalysis," Criticism, Winter, 1975, pp.
15-40.
37
NOVEL FALL
1980
examples
of frame narration and unreliable narrators in science
fiction, often
suggesting
that the stories themselves are
hallucinations, dream-visions, or
night-
mares.
Except
for frame
narration, just
about all the conventions of Gothic
occur in The
Futurological Congress.
Lem's
narrator, Ijon Tichy, probably
sets a
record for
unreliability;
he hallucinates three-fourths of the novel from a sewer
underneath the ruins of the Hilton Hotel-shades of the secret
passages
and
dungeons
in Anne
Radcliffe,
Monk
Lewis,
and Poe. And what he hallucinates
fits
very
well the
description
that is often
applied
to
dystopian
fantasies like 1984-
the future as
nightmare.
If the real future is
going
to be
anything
like what he has
dreamed,
Tichy
decides when he wakes
up,
he would rather
stay
in the sewer.
Gothic romancers based their works on the
eighteenth-century theory
of the
sublime,
the chief end of which was to arouse terror. Hence the
phrase,
"the Gothic
tale of terror." Science fiction writers have
perhaps forgotten
about
eighteenth-
century sublimity,
but of the two main theories that most of them
adopt
to
explain
their
work,
one still comes close to it. This is the idea that science fiction
aims at
arousing wonder, apparent
in such
early magazine
titles as
Amazing
and
Astounding
and
Thrilling
Wonder Stories. "It is
good
to renew one's wonder,"
says Bradbury
at the start of the Martian Chronicles.
"Space
travel has
again
made children of us all." 18 And whether in Gothic or in science
fiction,
fear and
wonder are seen at least
vaguely
as the
opposites
of
reason,
as when Brian Aldiss
writes that "the sense of wonder is in essence a
religious state,
blanketing
out
criticism"
(158).
The
wonder-arousing theory
contradicts the other main
theory
that science
fiction writers often
adopt,
which is that their work is in fact
scientific,
a rational
or
"cognitive" activity.
Darko Suvin offers
perhaps
the most
complex
and
formidable version of this
theory.
And Isaac
Asimov, John
W.
Campbell,
and
some other writers
might
almost be accused of
imitating
Emile Zola in
insisting
that their stories work on the model of
laboratory experimentation.
An offshoot
of the
cognitive theory
is the idea of
extrapolation, according
to which the
writer,
cognizant
of current theories and of scientific
method,
traces some
aspect
of the
present
into the
future,
into some
hypothetical
time and
space, observing
the results
through
the lens of his fiction. It is on the basis of the
extrapolation
theory
that the most
extravagant
claims are made for science
fiction,
as for
instance that it is real
prophecy,
not
just prophecy
of the
tea-leaves, cocaine,
loose-minded
variety. Thus,
Isaac Asimov
(who ought
to know
better,
of
course,
both as a scientist and as a
writer)
declares that science fiction is "the
only
literature of relevant ideas." "When Aristotle
fails,"
says Asimov,
"try
science
fiction."
19
Somewhat closer to the truth
might
be the remark of
John
W.
Campbell,
who
says
that the "fundamental
purpose"
of science fiction is "to
make
accurate,
loose
prophecies
of
general
trends."
20
Drop
the word
"accurate,"
18
Ray Bradbury,
The Martian Chronicles
(Garden City,
New York:
Doubleday, 1958).
19
Isaac Asimov
quoted
in
Tomorrow, and
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. . .
, ed. Bonnie L.
Heinte, Frank
Herbert, Donald A.
Joos, and
Jane Agorn
McGee
(New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), p. vii.
20
John W.
Campbell,
"Science Fiction and the
Opinion
of the
Universe," Saturday Review, May 12, 1956, p.
43.
38
PATRICK BRANTLINGER GOTHIC ORIGINS
stress the word
"loose,"
and
perhaps
one can
extrapolate
from his remark a true
definition of science fiction. In New
Maps of
Hell,
Kingsley
Amis also
adopts a
version of the
extrapolation theory,
or at least of the
theory
that science fiction
must somehow be
scientific,
but he adds that "most of the science is
wrong
anyway,
and its amount is such that one
might
as well be
reading
Westerns
in
the
hope
of
finding
out about
ranching
methods." 21
Proponents
of the
cognitive theory
of science fiction and the related idea of
extrapolation
must make so
many qualifications
to accommodate
"estrangement"
that
they
wind
up
in
illogicalities.
An
example
that
proves
Amis's
point
is Thomas
Scortia's
essay
on science fiction in which he tries to define it as "the
imaginary
experiment."
Scortia has to make the
damning
admission that "the conventions
of science fiction often violate fundamental
logic."
This
happens,
he
says,
in time-
paradox
stories like David Gerrold's novel, The Man Who Folded
Himself.
Scortia
then makes the even more
damning
admission that
"many
of the conventions of
science fiction
betray
basic errors of science."
Thus,
the
expansion
of
living
creatures
beyond
their normal
size,
as in the case of the
giant
ants in the movie
Them,
contradicts the
square-cube
law:
Doubling
the linear dimensions
of
the beast will
quadruple
the cross-sectional
area
of legs
and the
absorptive
area
of lungs
and
gut
while
multiplying
the
mass
of
the creature
by eight
times. It becomes obvious that
after
several such
expansions,
the beast's
legs
will not
support
it while the
lungs
will not be able
to absorb
enough oxygen
or the
gut enough food
to sustain the mass
of
the
creature22
If
only Gregor
Samsa had known the
square-cube law,
one
thinks,
he would have
had no
problem. (It
is at least a relief to know that we don't need to add
giant
ants to our list of
worries,
no matter what future
nightmare
our mad scientists are
concocting
for
us.)
What is
interesting
about the
extrapolation theory-quite apart
from its
intrinsic weakness as a defense of science fiction-is that
it, too,
betrays
the
structural link between reason and madness that characterizes all science fiction.
Ursula Le Guin seems to
recognize
this
when,
in her
preface
to The
Left
Hand
of
Darkness,
she writes that
"Strictly extrapolative
works of science fiction
gener-
ally
arrive somewhere between the
gradual
extinction of human
liberty
and the
total extinction of terrestrial life"-in other
words,
at number 22.23 She then
likens the
extrapolation process
to
feeding
food additives to rats to see if these
cause cancer. "Almost
anything
carried to its
logical
extreme becomes
depressing,"
she
says,
"if not
carcinogenic"-which
is of course another
way
of
saying
that
reason taken to extremes
produces
monsters.
Extrapolation
in science fiction is a
21
Kingsley Amis, New
Maps of
Hell
(New
York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1960), p.
63.
22
Thomas N.
Scortia, "Science Fiction as the
Imaginary Experiment,"
in Science
Fiction, Today
and
Tomorrow,
ed.
Reginald
Bretnor
(Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1975), pp.
138-39.
23
Ursula Le Guin, "Introduction" to The
Left
Hand
of
Darkness
(New
York: Ace
Books, 1976).
39
NOVEL FALL
1980
structural correlative of
Goya's paradox, something
like the
distorting
and
exag-
gerating processes
in satire and also in
dreams, a rational
technique
for
conjuring
up nightmares.
It is because of
extrapolation,
which bends the
complexity
of
the
real to the one line of
logic
that it
obsessively pursues,
that science fiction
stories
often take on the monstrous and
uncanny properties
of
dreams,
even when
they
don't
employ any
of the
internalizing
conventions of Gothic. And when
they do
employ
those
conventions,
the
nightmarish
or surrealistic
qualities
caused
by
extrapolation
are
strengthened.
The
irony
is that
many
science fiction
writers
unconsciously play
the role of Victor Frankenstein: the monsters that
they
create
are their
stories,
their dreams of reason.
They
stand romanticism on its head
by
insisting
that the main
principle
of their art derives from reason rather than
from
imagination.
But instead of
Zolaesque naturalism,
or even a "realism of
the
future,"
what
they
have to show as the result of their
supposedly
rational tech-
nique
is a
crop
of the most
irrational,
nightmarish, entertaining
but
perhaps
also
carcinogenic
fantasies in
literary history-a
surrealism of the future rather than a
realism of it.
But the
nightmare
of reason has
expanded
and turned outward in the evolution
from Gothic to science fiction.
Again,
the scale of disaster is individual and
inward in the earlier
form,
but social and often cosmic in the later one. This fact
might suggest
that science fiction makes more rational connections with the real
world than does the Gothic romance. Isaac Asimov and the
extrapolation people
seem to think so. And it is also
easy
to show that the Gothic romance often has
very
little to do with
objective reality.
As D. H. Lawrence
says,
Poe "has no truck
with Indians or Nature. He makes no bones about Red Brothers and
Wigwams.
He is
absolutely
concerned with the
disintegration processes
of his own
psyche."
24
No doubt other romancers tried harder than Poe to connect with
reality-certainly
Hawthorne did. And there is a social dimension to disaster in the
Spanish Inquisi-
tion and the riots in Matthew
Gregory
Lewis's The Monk and Charles Maturin's
Melmoth the Wanderer. But what is
perhaps
more
striking
about these Gothic
romances than their
depiction
of social violence is how little
they
have to do with
actual
politics.
Even
though
Lewis wrote The Monk at the
height
of the
Reign
of
Terror,
finishing
it in
1794,
he seems to have seen no connection between
Ambrosio and the
Spanish Inquisition
on the one
hand,
and
Robespierre
and the
Committee of Public
Safety
on the other. Two
years
later Lewis entered Parlia-
ment,
but more as a
family
ritual than because of
any
interest in affairs of state.
As
John
Berryman says
in his introduction to The
Monk,
Lewis "had no
political
ambition,
he never addressed the House."
25
William Godwin
put
Gothic con-
ventions to didactic and
political
use in Caleb
Williams,
and so did his
daughter
in Frankenstein and The Last Man. And there is a
very
direct and
powerful
social
relevance in the treatment of the
theological politics
of the Scottish Kirk in
James
Hogg's Confessions of
a
Justified
Sinner. But reflections of real events in
many
24
D. H.
Lawrence, "Edgar
Allan Poe," from Studies in Classic American
Literature, reprinted
in The Portable
D. H.
Lawrence, ed. Diana
Trilling (New
York:
Viking Press, 1947), p.
671.
25
John Berryman, "Introduction" to The Monk
(New
York: Grove
Press, 1959), p.
22.
40
PATRICK BRANTLINGER GOTHIC ORIGINS
Gothic romances are
oblique
or nonexistent.
I do not
believe, however,
that the
expansion
and externalization of
nightmare
that have occurred in the
history
of science fiction have made for
many more
rational connections with real issues than in Gothic romances. In both
forms, the
conventions that
express
the
imagination
of disaster tend to enforce a
separation
from
reality
that
only
the best writers
manage
to overcome.
Extrapolation
takes
us to other times and other worlds
just
as
surely
as do the
internalizing,
dream-
vision conventions of Gothic.
In a
very general way,
of
course,
most Gothic romances can be
interpreted,
like
Frankenstein,
as
responses
to democratic revolution and to the threat of
Promethean individualism. At their centers are
usually
hero-villain
overreachers,
like Victor Frankenstein or Melmoth or
Ambrosio,
doomed to failure but never-
theless
challenging
established institutions and received
morality
in
ways
that
endow them with a diabolical
tragic grandeur.26
In science
fiction,
while the
nightmare
conventions of Gothic often
reappear,
the focus has shifted from
the threat of Promethean individualism to the threat of the eradication of indi-
vidualism
by
industrial
technology
and the institutions of mass
society.
The
pattern
in Gothic is to
present
the hero-villain as
having supernatural powers:
he is in
league
with the devil. The
pattern
in science fiction is to
present people
as
dehumanized,
having
little or no
power,
sub-natural rather than
super-natural,
turned into machines or
machine-tenders,
while machines
acquire power,
take on
personalities,
and behave
demonically.
The diabolic hero of Gothic himself
exhibits
vampiric
or
necrophiliac
traits. The mad scientists and technicians in
science fiction often do so as
well,
though
the
necrophiliac tendency
of the
genre
is more
widely
evident in the
pattern
of
subordinating people
to
machinery,
the
organic
to the
inorganic,
life to death.27
The conventions of both Gothic and science fiction of course reflect
important
features of the real
world,
and both can be
employed (by
the best
writers, anyway)
for
purposes
of conscious
psychological exploration
and social criticism. Much
Romantic
culture,
even in
pessimistic
and often inferior forms such as Gothic
fiction,
reflects democratization
through
the theme of Promethean or Faustian
individualism,
while much modern
culture,
including
science
fiction,
reflects the
loss of individual freedom in
mass,
industrial
society.
Where the shift in
emphasis
occurred would be difficult to
specify, though
as
good
a
turning point
as
any
might
be seen in another of Poe's
stories,
"The Man of the
Crowd,"
a fable about
the
anonymity
of
city
life that Walter
Benjamin
has
interpreted
as the
quintessen-
tial detective
story.28
I cannot deal
fully
here with social
meanings
in
particular
stories. I have tried
to show
only
how the conventions and values of Gothic have carried over into
26
For more on Gothic
conventions, see Robert D. Hume, "Gothic vs. Romantic: A Reevaluation of the Gothic
Novel," PMLA, 85
(1969), pp.
282-90.
27
For a similar
argument,
see the excellent
essay by
Scott
Sanders, "Invisible Men and Women: The Dis-
appearance
of Character in Science Fiction," Science Fiction
Studies, March, 1977, pp. 14-24.
28
Walter
Benjamin,
Charles Baudelaire: A
Lyric
Poet in the Era
of High Capitalism (London:
New Left Books,
1973).
41
NOVEL FALL
1980
science fiction, and
why
both
types
of
story
can be described as
apocalyptic
nightmare
fantasies. Both tend to have more to do with their writers'
subjective,
often unconscious
responses
to
experience
than with their more conscious
ones.
And both
repel
rational
analysis
rather than
encourage it-they
are both
evoca-
tions of wonder of a sort that "blankets out criticism." This is not to
deny the
very great significance
of Gothic romances and science fiction either as
cultural
symptoms
or as forms of
literary expression.
Nor does literature have to
be
realistic or even
directly cognitive
to be valuable. Ursula Le Guin's defense of
all
fantasy writing
in The
Language of
the
Night
makes much better critical
sense
than
attempts
to discover a rational
potential
in science fiction distinct
from
Gothic and other
types
of non-realistic literature.29
The best science fiction that I have read has been
by
writers who are aware
that
they
are
constructing
fantasies and who
exploit fantasy-romance conventions,
sometimes for satiric
purposes.
This is true of Ursula Le Guin and Stanislaw
Lem,
and it is also true of a number of writers close to science fiction who
produce
what
might
be called
philosophical
fantasies-for
example,
Kafka's
Metamorphosis,
Borges' Labyrinths,
and Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. The funniest Gothic
ghost
story
that I have read
(not many
of them are
funny,
of
course,
except by accident)
is Calvino's The Nonexistent
Knight,
which
happens
also to be a weird sort of
robot or mechanical man
story.
It features a suit of
shining
white
armor,
perfectly
empty except
for the
Quixotic spirit
of
knighthood
that inhabits it and that sends
it
clanking
about the
countryside
in
quest
of honor and
glory.
To
try
to
classify
such a
fantasy
as either Gothic or science fiction would
only
diminish
it,
as would
any argument
that it must be inferior to realistic fiction because it is not realistic.
Cognitive rationality
and realism are
perhaps always
the
wrong things
to
expect
from literature.
Ray Bradbury's
"Usher II" deals with the
nightmarish
results of
realism taken to extremes. Like Fahrenheit
451,
"Usher II"
presents
us with a
dystopian society
in which the
imagination,
and most forms of
literature,
have
been declared
illegal by
the
Society
for the Prevention of
Fantasy.
As a revolu-
tionary act,
Bradbury's protagonist
has an exact
replica
of Poe's haunted mansion
constructed,
stocks it with robot
vampires
and witches and a robot version of the
killer
ape
from Murders in the Rue
Morgue,
and then invites the most
important
anti-fantasy
Realists to a sort of Halloween
party
at it.
During
this
shindig
he
sets the robots loose on the
guests
and bricks
up
the most
repressive
Realist in
the wine
cellar,
whom he takes there on the
pretext
of
looking
for a cask of
Amontillado. Toward the
end,
as the red death
spreads through
the
rooms,
the
protagonist escapes by helicopter, looking
back
just
in time to see the house cave
in on
itself,
burying
the
remaining guests
alive:
my
brain reeled as I saw the
mighty
wall
rushing
asunder-there was a
long
tumultuous
shouting
sound like the voice
of
a thousand waters-and the
deep
29
Ursula Le
Guin, The
Language of
the
Night: Essays
on
Fantasy
and Science Fiction
(New
York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons,
1979).
42
PATRICK BRANTLINGER GOTHIC ORIGINS
and dark tarn at
my feet
closed
sullenly
and
silently
over the
fragments of
the
House
of
Usher.
After an
ending
like
that,
who would side with the Realists
against
the
Fantasy
people?
But at the same time it should be noted that
Fantasy
in all its
shapes
has
at least as much to do with the
place
that Poe calls "dreamland" as with
objective
reality,
and that
any
defence of its
significance ought
to start from that fact. The
mode of
argument
that seeks to defend science fiction
by claiming
for it the
prop-
erties of realism is
just
as
illogical
as the mode of
argument
that criticizes it
because it isn't realistic. Insofar as reason is the assumed basis of
realism,
then
science fiction-which like the Gothic romance involves an
exploration
of the
limits of reason-must be understood as an anti-realism or surrealism.
By
defini-
tion,
science fiction has less to do with the here and now than with that
other,
longed-for
or dreaded future world that Poe describes as
a wild wierd clime that
lieth,
sublime
Out
of
SPACE-out
of
TIME.
43