EN420: Gothic Tradition

Last night, after work, I drove over to Berlin, to Wonder Cards and Comics, where I was able to indulge in a bit of a pastime that I haven't kept up on: comic books. In particular, I picked up a trio of Hellboy one-shots: In the Chapel of Moloch, The Bride of Hell and Hellboy In Mexico. Hellboy's been a longtime favorite of mine. It's not a book that I read obsessively, but when I begin thinking that I need to get back into comics, it's the one series that I make sure to catch up on. It doesn't help that I met Mike Mingola a couple of weeks ago at Boston Comic Con.

Reading through the comics that I picked up yesterday, I was reminded of one of the college courses that I consider one of my best, more formative and interesting while in college: EN 420, Gothic Tradition. Taught my F. Brett Cox, Gothic Tradition was a class that I never intended to take, but proved to be one of the few courses that I draw upon, years after I've taken it. The course's content, looking at the literary history and themes behind one of the earlier roots of the modern speculative fiction genre, provided a heavy basis for my understanding of what I've come to read an enjoy.

The course was a surprise to me, because while in college, I had desperately hoped to get into a similar class on Science Fiction literature, which had filled up. A friend of mine had taken the last slot (and ultimately dropped the course a week in), and when the next semester came up, Dr. Cox began to teach Gothic Tradition, the next class in his rotation. While I'm still somewhat annoyed that I never got into the course, I'm ultimately very thankful to have taken it. Over the course of the seminar, it rapidly became my favorite, looking at a wide range of works, from John Keat's La Belle Dame Sans Merci to Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, but also up to more modern works of horror, such as the works of H.P. Lovecraft and William Falkner, up to Stephen King. It's a class that I wish that at times, I wish that I could take again, or more similar classes in literature theory.

Mainly, the course helped to instill an appreciation for not only the story, but the history and events that lead to different stories, and in a very real sense, helped to define my interests in the science fiction genre and history together, something that I frequently read and write about. Taken in that context, I largely see Gothic literature as a precursor to the modern day science fiction and fantasy genres, with supernatural or speculative elements ingrained into a story, helping to form a larger basis for fiction in general, and sparking the imagination. To quote one of the branding exercises of the then SciFi channel, Imagination Lives. This is one of the fundamental points of entertainment, where imagination spurs on entertainment, and as such, makes the speculative fiction genre one of the strongest in terms of literary value, variety and following.

Picking up my Hellboy comics yesterday afternoon, I was struck once again at the elegance and mix of genres within the comic. Of the three, my favorite was In the Chapel of Moloch, which sees the titular character, Hellboy, in Southern Portugal, helping a man who has lost track of a partner in an abandoned Church, now inhabited by a demon, who takes control of the artist inside, helping to inspire him, but sapping his life away. The comic is a rich blend of pulp, gothic and horror literature, complete with some fantastic artwork, and a story that draws upon a number of different sources. As such, Hellboy is a pointed reminder, (as well as several other recent things, such as Anias Mitchell's Hadestown and Josh Ritter's So Runs The World Away) at the influences of works written three hundred years ago. It goes to show that there is still a fascination with the unknown, the macabre, decay and fragility of mankind in all that we create.

The history and background of the genres is something that is extremely interesting, and the study of it, and the underlying literary theory helps to provide a good look at the present day, showing how the modern works of science fiction and fantasy have been influenced and formed. As I've learned, art is formed in the context of its surroundings, and in this instance, literature is no different, with the past shaping the present environment. In addition to a better understanding of what we read, watch and consume, it's also a good way to read some truely outstanding, fantastic and interesting stories.

Sex and Science Fiction

The other day, while I was checking up on science fiction news sites, I came across an article that SciFiWire posted: "Fringe's Anna Torv As You've Never Seen Her Before: Topless (NSFW)", with a couple of photographs that weren't actually revealing or anything too distasteful - no shirt, but she was definitely covered, and on the whole of things, pretty light fare compared to other websites out there - just take a look at some of the late night titles that io9 will post up every now and then.

What really got me was reading the comments in the article. A number of posters were pretty annoyed by this article: "I'm getting really tired of this site displaying low level porn on it. You must've recently hired some juvenile male to run the site.", "Yeah, it's fun, and it probably increases web traffic significantly, but it's really annoying to us ''real' science fiction fans, and that's why we came here: science fiction." There's a bunch of others as well, but that is the basic flow of some of the comments, although there were some good comments that went the other way as well. While some of the commenters were complaining more about the site's propensity to post up related Science Fiction and Fantasy news, there were certainly a number of comments relating to the actual content of the article.

Sex has long been a part of science fiction, either as a ploy to get young, male readers to part with their money in the early 20th century and incidentally, read magazines and novels, or as a direct plot point, science fiction is hardly a genre that is as innocent as a lot of people seem to think that it is, along with horror and comic books. Going back to the American Depression in the 1930s, Science Fiction magazines, under Charles Gernsback and Mort Weisinger, often featured and objectified women and men alike on the covers of magazines and novels, as well as in their content. (Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 132-133). As major comics such as Superman moved into the markets, much of the same moved with it. Looking at Superman, the relationship between Lois Lane and Superman/Clark Kent is a good example of this objectification, on both sides: Lois rejects Clark because he isn't perceived as man enough, especially compared to Superman. It's an ironic twist that holds a number of lessons in identify and judgment, but it also holds up a standard when it comes to gender roles: the strong, not the weak are desirable, while women are attracted to the image of a person, not necessarily their character behind it. (Jones, 143) Women and men are both heavily objectified in comics: just look at some of the art work when it comes to the Marvel and DC comics - characters are exaggerated in their proportions to the extreme.

This says nothing of the deeper roots of the genre, which science fiction historian and author Adam Roberts asserts, comes from the tradition of Gothic literature that far predates the materials cheaply available to wide-eyed boys in the Great Depression. "Gothic fiction is a popular category of academic pedagogy and research: a usefully delimited subgenre of fantastic literature... typically, a gothic novel includes mysterious and sinister goings-on, usually involving supernatural agency such as ghosts or devils ... located in distant, wild places, castles or monasteries in inaccessible portions of central Europe, where innocent young women are terrified, men have commerce with the devil and there is much to do with graveyards, ruins and madness, all flavored by a distinctive atmosphere of eroticized suspense, shock and horror." (Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, 82) Look no further than Bram Stoker's Dracula for a good example of this sort of eroticized atmosphere, something that has carried into the modern day with similar elements of the genre, such as True Blood or Twilight.

This is why I find the shock and appalled nature of a number of a lot of people so ridiculous, simply because it represents a sort of high-minded elitism, either from somebody looking down on the collective genre of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror as something insignificant and childish, or from within, with people taking the highbrowed route that scrubs the genre clean by removing anything mildly offensive to the common viewer/reader to fit their needs. Both approaches do the genre a disservice, either by rejecting it or by selectively looking back on it for an inaccurate look. It's even more ridiculous in the internet era, where advocates of free choice insist that everybody must be protected from everything offensive.

The point in all of this is that sex and science fiction have never been all that far apart, no matter what shocked and appalled commentators believe to be the case. Used either for selling extra copies or for story content, there is a reliance on character types that have prevailed throughout literary history to become fairly resilient staples in our books, movies and television shows. If there is anything really worth getting offended over, or at least looking more closely into, is gender objectification, as well as our own outrage over seeing what is usually heavily implied.