What in modern fiction is as transgressive or subversive as early gothic?

[HareBrain]

(I’m not confining this to SFF, though I guess that’s what most people here know about.)

There was an interesting programme on BBC2 last night in which Andrew Graham-Dixon outlined the appearance and early development of 18thC gothic literature and art. This movement was, he suggests, a reaction to both the dehumanisation of the Industrial Revolution and the horrors of the French Revolution, the decline of spirituality in the Age of Reason, and a pushing against taboos relating to sex and death. Pretty heady stuff, so much so that most of the early authors preferred to claim they were only translators of found manuscripts rather than the generators of the ideas themselves.

But it had a lot of energy, albeit that some of its output was rather ridiculous. What have we got today that’s equivalent? What taboos are left to push against? Is the endless stream of zombie material a reaction to something in the modern world, and if so, what? If the Industrial and French Revolutions were worrying enough to spark a literary and artistic genre, why hasn’t the prospect of climate collapse or overpopulation done the same? Or is it that it has, in pockets, but that so much and such varied material is published in this postmodern world that it’s impossible to discern movements any more?

 

[svalbard]

I think you might find the answer your last paragraph. The mass of literature that is widely available dilutes major trends although a few do stand out. Zombies as you have already mentioned. There is also the trend of post-appocaliptic literature and movies prevalent today. I also believe the resurgence of the Super Hero genre is a response to the corporatism and cynicism of today's world.

 

[Randy M.]

Hi, HareBrain.

I think you can generalize off zombie fiction in two directions: fear of disease and a wish for a different society. The former is a response to HIV, AIDS and more recently Ebola and like outbreaks. The effectiveness of antibiotics has diminished and our nerves are fraying while we consider re-entry into the kind of world our ancestors took for granted.

A rather contradictory urge is that for an apocalypse (of which we, for some value of "we," would be the survivors), something that wipes out current society with all of its contradictions, (perceived and real), inequalities (perceived and real) and inefficiencies (perceived and real), and posits the kind of society we could build if we had a magic reset button and could mold our political and social environment into something that more closely resembles ourselves (often, I think, for a fairly narrow valuing of who is we).


Randy M.

 

[hitmouse]

Zombies aren't exactly transgressive or subversive any more. The original Night of the Living Dead movie was pretty disturbing (pre-AIDS, pre-Ebola) but Shaun of the Dead (an excellent fillum) et al really are not.

New Wave SF fits the bill in that it made a lot of climate change, overpopulation, collapse of one sort or another. But new wave was 45 years ago.

It depends what theme you are looking for. Maybe try Brett Easton Ellis or Michel Houellebecq.

 

[Randy M.]

Zombies aren't exactly transgressive or subversive any more. The original Night of the Living Dead movie was pretty disturbing (pre-AIDS, pre-Ebola) but Shaun of the Dead (an excellent fillum) et al really are not.

New Wave SF fits the bill in that it made a lot of climate change, overpopulation, collapse of one sort or another. But new wave was 45 years ago.

It depends what theme you are looking for. Maybe try Brett Easton Ellis or Michel Houellebecq.

I don't want to belabor the issue because I agree that zombie fiction (literary or cinematic) has been around long enough to take some (a lot?) of the edge off of it, but it's been used for different things. The original Night of the Living Dead seemed to be a commentary on conformism, (that seemed clearer after Dawn of the Dead) and Shaun of the Dead I think furthers that.

World War Z (the movie; haven't read the book) and 28 Days Later look to me more about fear of disaster, apocalypse and disease and in that seems to have the pulse of the times. When mixed with apocalypse fiction, though, it seems to be another approach to pressing the societal reset button. (I get that feel to a degree from The Walking Dead TV series.)

All that said, subversive may be in the eye of the beholder: Previous incarnations of Gothic and horror have largely been reactive and pushed rather conservative political agendas. It was something of a push-back to Romanticism. Think Frankenstein and the slap down of the temerity to broach God's prerogatives, or Dracula displaying both a fear of female sexuality and of the foreigner, particularly the Eastern European foreigner. Ever since Dracula, if not before, horror fiction has punished female sexuality, from Nosferatu to Halloween to Scream. That's not subversive, it's a support of the then-current male power structure. (Granted there were counter-examples like The Picture of Dorian Grey.)

Meanwhile Lovecraft was a peculiar mix of conservative -- story structure, sentence and word level choices based on older models of story-telling and writing run counter, even aggressively so, to the literary movements of his time (i.e.: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein) -- and not-conservative (I'm choking on using words like liberal or progressive regarding HPL; they don't really fit): His movement from fantasy/horror to s.f., his implication that the Christian God is not all powerful and is probably non-existent (to which Hemingway among others would have been sympathetic), and more direct statement that mankind is less than a speck in the cosmic scheme and the universe is at best unaware of us and at worse malignant to our existence certainly ran counter to the views of his time.

I haven't read a lot of the so-called New Weird, but my impression is that the writers associated with it have appropriated some of this material for less conservative story-telling; think China Mieville and Caitlin Kiernan, among others. Certainly Sarah Monette with The Bone Key collection challenged the male-centric weird of HPL and of M. R. James.


Randy M.

 

[Mirannan]

Singularitarian SF might fit this category. The reason is that most of it also assumes a post-scarcity society, and that's fairly revolutionary. Secondary to that, posthumans might well have rather different motivations to those current in early 21st century society.

Just as an example, communications bandwidth might well be more important to first-world mid-21st century people than just about anything else. Not because food and shelter won't be important then, BTW - rather, because they might be a solved problem for most in the first world.

I find a snippet from the novel Snow Crash interesting in this context. The protagonist actually lives in an extremely spartan converted garage and lives on what is basically kibble - and doesn't care much, because most of his subjective time is spent in a rather luxurious VR.