Sunday 20 August 2017

Early treatment of the supernatural and weird, focusing specifically on Hoffman's "The Sandman" and Coleridge's “The Ancient Mariner"


     
While much of my work is surrealistic, irreal or "bizarro" in nature, even my most straightforwardly realist work is informed by my lifelong love of genre fiction, whether that be the multiverse of super-beings in Marvel Comics or twist-in-the-tale stories from The Twilight Zone or 50s EC Comics.  This was later further informed and developed by my love of the New Wave of SF (Ballard, Aldiss, PKD, Disch et al) and early weird literary fiction or Absurdist works such as Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gogol's The Nose and Ionesco's Rhinoceros.  Yet, I am ashamed to say, despite my love of such work and despite my love of Romantic poetry, with the exception of Poe and Lovecraft, my knowledge of early "weird" fiction is frankly woeful.  As such, I thought it might be worthwhile to go back to the Romantic roots of that early work and to focus on two works in particular, Hoffman's "The Sandman" and Coleridge's “The Ancient Mariner."

Many Romantic writers inherited themes and styles that had once been popular in the genre known as romance, common features of which were medieval and exotic settings, "doubling" of characters, fantastic/supernatural creatures and events, long quests, and an idealised love between idealised characters, and, this romance narrative style was also a common feature of the Gothic novel. At first glance there are few similarities between "The Sandman", a prose short-story originally written in German, and The Ancient Mariner, a narrative poem written in English, apart from their times of writing, a focus on the strange or "uncanny", and the fact that both pieces use a "frame" as a narrative device. However, it can be seen that both "The Sandman" and The Ancient Mariner share several romance characteristics despite their different forms. For example, they both make use of certain narrative devices (romance convention and Gothic-style imagery, framing, allegory, unreliable (because of madness, dream or delusion) points of view), and they both share common themes of powerlessness and alienation.

"The Sandman", whilst contemporary, is mostly set in a significantly nameless University (that it is away from "home" is enough - the Italian lecturer's and the Piedmontese barometer-salesman's names hinting at "foreign-ness"), but it also features such Gothic/romance mainstays as "distant mountains" (143), a "high steeple...casting its gigantic shadow..." (143), and secret "alchemical experiments" (119). Similarly, The Ancient Mariner involves a ship's long journey "to the cold country towards the South Pole....(then) to the great Pacific ocean" (167). (The similarities of both works (secret alchemical experiments, foreign Universities, simulacra of living beings, quests through the Poles etc) with Frankenstein, are clear). Also, it is worth noting that in both works the main character suffers when away, and tends to be healed at home.



Similarly, they both feature fantastic, supernatural creatures, Hoffman's story the eponymous Sandman (who is "wicked" and "throws a handful of sand into (children's) eyes so that they start out bleeding from their heads" so that he can feed his children who "have crooked beaks like owls" (111)), and Coppelius, who whilst not "supernatural" is certainly described as being inhuman - "his whole figure was coarse and repulsive", and he has "coarse brown hairy fists" (114) with which he delights in touching the children's food with so that they will not eat it. Similarly, Olympia is an unnatural man-made (the only things Nathaniel relates to being, that sings and dances yet has no soul. The Ancient Mariner on the other hand contains personifications of Death ("his bones were black with many a crack, all black and bare" (191-182), Life-in-Death (a kind of spiritual death) ("her skin is as white as leprosy, and she is far liker death than he" (188-189), as well as visions of the crewmen dying then rising in death (333), of spirits guiding the ship (381-385), "two voices in the air" (402), etc.



The other romance conventions used by Hoffman (but ignored by Coleridge as he seemed to be more concerned by the spiritual import of the poem) is the use of doubling and idealised love. Coppelius and Coppola are described by the narrator as doubles; they could in fact even be the same man. But there is also the identification of the Sandman figure with Coppelius, the doubling of Nathaniel and Olympia (there are strong parallels between Nathaniel's father and Coppelius with regard to Nathaniel, and Spalanzani and Coppola with regard to Olympia - even down to both of the "child" characters having their limbs and organs "screwed off" or removed).

Similarly, the concept of ideal love is explored in Nathaniel's all-consuming wooing of Olympia which fulfils the romantic stereotype of the lover perfectly (although Hoffman seems to say that such love is ultimately egocentric and narcissistic, as Nathaniel's later disinterest and dismissal of Clara because she refuses to listen to his continuous outpourings of love seems to prove. Indeed, even the vocabulary of the pieces are highly Gothic and romantic At random, in The Ancient Mariner you can find words like "dismal" (54), "plague" (78), "slimy" (120 and 121), "charnel" (184), and eldritch" (233), while "The Sandman" contains words like "uneasy", "horrible", "disturbing", and phrases like "dark forebodings", "threatening fate" and "laughing like a madman" in the first page alone (109).

However, as well as these genre (or sub-genre) similarities, there are other similarities, namely that they can both be read as allegories which are concerned with alienation, and which express this horror and anxiety through the use of external "supernatural" occurrences. "The Sandman's" Nathaniel is alienated from his home and his family, studying at University even though he wants to "return to his native town forever" (129). He is described as having been alienated from his father (in that he had a secret alchemical life (itself mysterious and alien to him) with Coppelius), and he later finds himself alienated from both Clara and Lothaire after she tells him to burn one of his poems (128). Indeed, he only finds "love" with Olympia, an automaton that is in reality nothing but a mirror for his own egocentric self-obsession. He is alienated not only from society (at Spalanzani's party "quiet, scarcely suppressed laughter....arose among the young people (and) was manifestly directed towards Olympia" (135)) but from reality, which the frequent references to madmen, lunatics and madhouses reinforces.



Similarly, the Ancient Mariner is similarly alienated, first from his crewmates ("instead of the cross the albatross/ About my neck was hung" (137-138) and "each turned his face....and cursed me with his ee" (206-207)), then from Nature and the Natural Order, and then perhaps even from Death ("And yet I could not die" (254)) and perhaps also Life itself, as well. Thus the alienation expressed in the poem is more spiritual, perhaps even metaphysical than the more psychological alienation and anomie of Hoffman's Nathaniel, yet it is a common theme to both, in that the mariner mentions the loneliness (hinting at spirituality by hinting at the absence of God (630-634), and says "...'Tis sweeter far to me/ To walk together to the kirk/ With a goodly company", an idea of loneliness mirrored by Nathaniel's anomie at University and at home as a child. Similarly, Nathaniel declares it impossible "to do anything....according to our own independent will...for the principle does not proceed from within ourselves, but is the effect of a higher principle without" (125-126), an idea certainly mirrored by the ancient mariner who is literally guided, uncontrollably by an external force.

Another similarity between the two text's treatment of the supernatural is that they are both "framed", and that in both pieces the main narrative point of view is unreliable, as much is made of madness, dreams and delirium (another preoccupation of the Romantic artist), and so they could both be read as tales of lunatics, their insanity being the only real "story". The mariner is described as early as the fourth stanza as a "grey-beard loon", the spirit that follows the ship from "the land of mist and snow" is only given existence in "dreams" (127), and the voices of the two spirits are heard while, dehydrated, he lies in a "trance" (434) and a "swound" (297). Similarly, Nathaniel's childhood vision of Coppelius screwing "off my hands and feet" (115) happens before he "regained his senses" (115) after "delirium and fever" (116) which Clara and Lothaire also recognise - "we ourselves kindle the spirit, which we in our strange delusion believe to be speaking to us." (120) Thus it could be argued that both works are not objective tales of the supernatural, but the hallucinations and fancies of disturbed people told from their point of view, although this reading does have problems with the automaton Olympia - if she is read as a metaphor for a submissive "doll-like" woman, then why should Splanzani be expelled from the University? (Although it could be argued that he and Coppola had assaulted her).

Is it coincidence then that both works, despite their different forms and languages of composition, should share the same subject (the supernatural, the uncanny), the same theme (alienation, lack of control), the same kinds of gothic imagery, and the same mode of writing (allegory)? The answer can perhaps be seen in that the Europe of the early nineteenth century was fragmented, warring, and many countries were on the brink of revolution (both industrial and social), and the ruling powers were dealing with this upsurge of revolutionary sentiment (and those who wrote supporting it) brutally and intolerantly. Also, science was finally emerging from alchemy to explain many aspects of the world and thus alter lives. In addition, the Germany in which Hoffman lived was politically fragmented, and many nationalists were trying to rediscover (or invent) a common unifying culture. In this atmosphere it is hardly surprising that both writers should resort to allegory to "disguise" their works as "tales of the uncanny” or that they should seek to describe the kind of alienation, powerlessness and sense of paranoia and anxiety that many people felt. In both stories too, there is a sense of irrationality - there is little cause or effect. Why does the mariner kill the albatross? What is his final fate - is he cursed to tell his story, is he mad, or is he simply accosting a passerby? How does Coppolla find Nathaniel in his second lodgings? Why does Coppelius return to the town at the end of the story? Things just happen because they do and they will - it is futile looking for reasons, a feeling many victimised people in such societies (especially perhaps intellectuals and writers) would recognise.

This mood is also emphasized by the fact that both works have down-beat, inconclusive endings, in that Nathaniel dies and the mariner could be cursed to tell his story forever - "...at an uncertain hour....the hour comes and makes me tell my ghastly aventure" (617-618).


In common with many Romantic works Nature plays an important part in both pieces, as the supernatural is used in the truest sense of the term - the more than natural, the unnatural; and at times the absence of Nature and natural things are important. In The Ancient Mariner many of the "supernatural" occurrences are preceded by a breakdown in the Natural Order (again echoing the ides of revolution). The spirit ship that sails without wind, and several times the sea is described as "burning" (126, 163, 262), and, like a malevolent person revelling in his power the wind and rain seem to possess sentient action. The "sky and ocean smote" his ship (584), the sea is gendered as masculine ("His great bright eye most silently/ Up to the moon is cast" (421-422), and one of the spirits even asks "What is the ocean doing?" (418).

Similarly, in "The Sandman", Clara's eyes are compared to "a lake by Ruysdael, in which the pure azure of a cloudless sky, the wood and the flowery field....are reflected." (124), whereas insane Nathaniel is described as having "a perception in art and science" (man-made subjects) that is "clear and strong" (125), the only references to Nature in his personality being "dark clouds, which no friendly sunbeam can penetrate." (109). Again, Nature is personified, and associated with positive qualities.

Thus, beyond a few superficial differences between the two pieces' treatment of the supernatural, it can be seen that they both make use of certain narrative devices (romance convention and Gothic-style imagery, framing, allegory, unreliable (because of madness, dream or delusion) points of view), and they both share common themes of powerlessness and alienation, themes which were more likely than not inspired by the uncertain times in which they lived.  In addition, having looked at these early examples of weird and supernatural fiction, it is pretty clear to see how established some of these tropes were, so that a clear lineage can be determined from them through the likes of Blackwood, Poe and Lovecraft, through Bloch and Campbell to the likes of Barker and King.  While I admit I generally prefer the more recent fiction, I can still admire a decent spooky tale from the 19th Century, particularly on a frosty November night.....



BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Allen, G. (1996) "Romantic Verse Narrative" in Bygrave, S. (ed) (1996) Romantic Writings (Approaching Literature), Routledge in association with the Open University, London.

Allen, G. (1996) "Romantic Allegory" in Bygrave, S. (ed) (1996) Romantic Writings (Approaching Literature), Routledge in association with the Open University, London.

Allen, R. (1996) "Reading Kleist and Hoffman" in Bygrave, S. (ed) (1996) Romantic Writings (Approaching Literature), Routledge in association with the Open University, London.

Freud, S. (1955) "The Uncanny" in Bygrave, S. (ed) (1996) Romantic Writings (Approaching Literature), Routledge in association with the Open University, London.

Hoffman, E.T.A. (1951) "The Sandman" in (1996) Klein and Hoffman Texts, A210: Supplementary Material, The Open University, London.

Coleridge, S.T. (1798) "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere" in Wu, D. (ed) (1994) Romanticism: An Anthology, Blackwell, Oxford.

Kelly, G. (1989) English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 (Longman Literature In English Series), Longman, London.

Sunday 13 August 2017

The Frankenstein's Monster of Realism, Surrealism and Irrealism



Sometimes, such as when getting your latest script rejection from the BBC, it’s easy to say, “These idiots are just realism-loving idiots! They’ve never moved beyond the Kitchen Sink dramas of the 50s so you won’t get anything accepted by them unless it is set in 1) a Council estate; 2) a Welsh ex-mining village; or 3) somewhere “post-colonial” – it doesn’t matter where; Africa is good but the Indian sub-continent is better.” And while this is undoubtedly true (as it also is for some of the more established literary journals such as Granta), sometimes it is worth examining what realism actually is rather than just concluding, “I write surrealistic/irrealistic fiction so must therefore concentrate on slipstream and Bizarro publishers or the more adventurous genre publishers."  After all, doesn’t a lot of genre fiction actually take advantage of a lot of realist styles and tropes? So, when I am ranting at the BBC, what exactly do I mean by “realist?”

To try and make sense of it, let’s go back to one of the earliest examples of genre fiction (as at least we can then differentiate between what is realist or not and what is just weird whilst still retaining realist features). Frankenstein is often regarded as the first Science Fiction novel. However, when considering how realist this tale of reanimated dead flesh is, it is first important to discuss what the realist novel is, and then settle on a definition. Duranty, who edited a journal called Realisme, defined realism as a type of writing based on the everyday experiences of ordinary men and women, using the simplest possible language. Clara Reeves agreed, and wrote that the realist novel should describe events:

"...such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves....so (as) to make them appear so probable (that we can believe)....that it is all real." (Reeves cited in Allcot, 1965, p.47)

This definition of realism has much in common with that of Ian Watt, who agreed that realist texts should individualise the characters and give full accounts of the times and places of their actions. These definitions are limited however, as much of J.G. Ballard's, and Philip.K. Dick's work adhere to these rules, despite being overtly surreal, as is, for example Kafka's Metamorphosis .

George Eliot admitted that any attempt at direct mirroring of reality was impossible because of the author's subjective perceptions distorting what could be "mirrored", an idea similar to Magritte's painting of a pipe (La Trahison des images), with the words "This is not a pipe", written below it. He is, like Eliot, right. It is not a pipe but an oil painting representing a pipe, in the same way that any novel isn't reality, but a list of ordered symbols representing the author's reality, a view proposed by the Structuralist, Roland Barthes.





Kettle regarded the realist novel as intimately linked with society, and thus a reflection and result of social upheaval, a view supported by George Levine's assertion that the moral unsettledness of Nineteenth Century England resulted in novelists trying to recreate and rediscover a moral reality through their works. This "hidden agenda" of the realist novelist was described by Marxists like Lukacs and Kettle, who argued that realism was not a passive reflection of what is.

Thus, a useful definition of realism would be that of Clara Reeves, with the addition that many realist texts should deal with controversial issues, and should possess original plots based on "real life" not fable. As Watt said, realism isn't inverted Romance (i.e. focusing on poor, immoral degenerates), but "all human experience". (Although again, there are many exceptions to this argument and as Dickens' work proves, such a loose term can be expanded on, because dreaming, and other altered states of consciousness, are subjectively valid experiences).

Kettle defined the Romance novel as being a non-realistic (presenting idealised, mediaevally chivalrous worlds), escapist genre that emphasized aristocratic and socially unchallenging attitudes, whilst diverting, entertaining and titillating the reader. Its characters also tended to be Good vs Evil stereotypes rather than "real". The Gothic Novel however, tried to combine the real and the fantastic, often containing supernatural elements and melodramatic or heightened language. Eva Kosofsky Sedgewick also described several features of the Gothic novel including: "tyrannical older men"; "sensitive heroines and their impetuous lovers"; "wild, ruined, feudal, (usually) European landscapes"; "a discontinuous involuted form in the novel"; "common topics such as doubles of characters, death-like states, dreams, and obscure family ties"; "unintellible writings", and "the possibility of incest, and the effects of guilt and shame" (Kosofsky Sedgewick, 1986).

This may seem like a lot of detail, but it is important to understand the meanings of these terms when describing how a text like Frankenstein adheres to or differs from standard realism. Is it, as The Gothic Novel attempted, indeed possible to combine the real and the fantastic?

The idea of Frankenstein being regarded as the first Science Fiction novel, is based on the idea of "picture (it) without the science, and.....no story!" (Stanley Schmidt in Analog Science Fiction, 1991). Unfortunately, on closer examination, this view is quite simplistic. The science is far from central - had Frankenstein used magic to create the monster the effect of the novel would have been much the same i.e. the main themes would still be that of Creator/Created, Moral Responsibility, Revolution of Order, and so on. Even Shelley herself does not describe "the Science" in detail.

Shelley uses Realist techniques to describe scene, to develop the characters, and the narrative is generally structured by these character's actions. However, she also draws on techniques more familiar to the Gothic novel, melodrama, and (unsurprisingly) Romanticism. For example, Frankenstein, unlike most realist texts, constantly reminds the reader that it is a piece of fiction. Its structure is similar to many Gothic novels in having "stories within stories" told by one character to another. It consciously refers to other literary works, both in the novel (the Milton, Goethe etc that the creature reads), throughout the novel (the parallels between Frankenstein and the monster to Milton's God and Satan (and also God and Man, and Eve and Sin); between Clerval and the hero of Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey; between Frankenstein and Prometheus (both positive and negative aspects of the myth); and also outside the narrative, by subtitling the novel "The Modern Prometheus".

This referral to "what has gone before" is a contradiction of what we usually think of as realism. Similarly, like a modern myth, it has a definite beginning and end, unlike Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations, with their more "realistic" open-endings.

Also, Shelley uses melodramatic "Romance" techniques - many of the settings are not forges or towns, but Arctic Wastes, mountainous ice-floes, and turbulent seas. Similarly, her descriptions of the Joys of Nature and their relation to Man (as well as their ability to torment) is a very Romantic notion. (Importantly she also quotes many Romantic poets including Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, p41), Byron's Childe Harolde's Pilgrimage (Ibid. p54-55), P.B. Shelley's On Mutability (Ibid. p75-76), and Wordsorth's Tintern Abbey (Ibid p130) amongst others).





The Gothic elements of the novel are also seen in various scenes including the death of Elizabeth (pp165-166); the destruction of the monster's mate and his reactions, (pp139-141), and much of Volume II, Chapter 2 where the Gothically menacing mountains are climbed with supernatural speed by the creature. The settings and the use of elevated, emotional language are thus highly reminiscent of the Gothic novel.

The first appearance of the Creature (p38-39) is especially interesting as it mixes the Gothic (the famous description of the Creature, and Frankenstein's dream of Elizabeth's lips "...becoming livid with the hue of death....I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms.....I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel (of her shroud)"), with the Romantic i.e. the view that proportionate limbs, each beautiful in themselves, should result in a total beauty (all p39).

However, despite this, Frankenstein can still be regarded as realist because it reflects the many issues of the times. For example, Revolution, as had occurred in France, was regarded as a "monstrosity", and an affront to natural Order, in much the same way as Frankenstein's creation of the creature can be seen in attempting to usurp God, but also the creature could himself represent the revolutionary proletariat (ie from one point of view an uncontrollable destructive force, or on the other, a force that could be educated and Good, is in fact created "innocent", but is corrupted by social forces), as well as representing English attitudes to 'the foreign', the creature's narrative echoing that of a then-popular idea of "the noble savage". (He reflected the fears of the rulers if their physically powerful, but ignorant, ignoble savage was to be 'released' among polite (Western) society - the manner of his supposed death is reminiscent of the Indian custom of sati (the wife's jumping on the husband's funeral pyre), which was also regarded as either primitive or noble depending on the observer's point of view). In much the same way the monster could be seen to represent political radicalism, and working-class activity (as many sources at the time show with their own comparisons).

The responsibility of Science towards the people is still valid today, but was specially poignant to the Romantic Imagination (compare with Keat's fear that Science's explanation of the rainbow had robbed it of its natural beauty). In addition, the lack of any natural birth, the twisted creation of the monster, and the parallels between Frankenstein and the Eve myth (Gilbert and Gubar, 2000), which in turn links back to Paradise Lost, (Frankenstein creates the creature from parts of bodies, while Satan creates Sin "by his left side opening wide" (Paradise Lost, Book II,ll. 755ff), and God creates Woman by removing Adam's rib), emphasises Shelley's own unique view as a woman writer reacting against stereotyped ideas of femininity and motherhood (Moers in Walden 1995).

Thus, whilst Frankenstein can be seen very firmly as a realist text (it uses realist techniques, it addresses the above-mentioned, then-contemporary controversial issues, and its characters are 'original' and develop through the story), its use of Gothic and Romantic imagery and style, its multi-layered structure and conscious references to known Myth and Literature, stretches the boundaries of the realist novel as being about "ordinary people".

However, if we approach this issue from another angle, is there really anything as a purely “realist” novel? Let’s look at another nineteenth century novel, something that was written generations before Eliot and Joyce and Pound. Let’s look at something that has almost come to define the realist-loving BBC, Dickens’ Great Expectations. The novel does in fact show many examples of Gothicism, notably the appearance of Miss Havisham and Satis house (Dickens, Great Expectations, Penguin, p87-94), the first and second appearance of Magwitch (p36-39, and pp332-338), and the description of Wemmick's Gothic "castle" (p229), as well as convoluted plot 'coincidences' common in melodrama and Romances. However, these Gothic excesses are toned down by the unusual point of view (the adult Pip describes the thoughts of the child Pip), thus giving the reader an element of ironic distancing.

Even the burning of Miss Havisham at Satis (I've already referred to the Indian ritual "sati"), which could be seen as spontaneous combustion (believed to be caused by depression, guilt or Sin), is carefully left as possibly realistic by her sitting too close to the fire (easier than explaining the scientific plausibility of the phenomenon as Dickens did after Bleak House).

Thus while Dickens undoubtedly worked within a realist framework, he did make use of other genres such as Gothicism, exaggeration and melodrama to reinforce his realities. He disliked the realist tendency of being "frightfully literal and catalogue-like" (Dickens in Walder, 1995), and his multi-genre approach means that it can have as many meanings as his readers mean to infer on it.





The names of the characters are realistic, but not strictly realist, as they are symbolic. Pip is like a bud ready to grow; Estella is cold and beautiful like a star; Miss Havisham does indeed have a lot, but her life is a sham; and the resonance of evil in Magwitch should be obvious. Only dependable Joe and Biddy have perfectly natural names.

Elements of Great Expectations are also heavily symbolic. Parts of the body, especially the hands (Pip's coarse hands, His burning of his hands when saving Miss Havisham, his "fake" mother, Magwitch's clasping of Pip's hands at several important times including his death etc) take on symbolic meanings. (However, a point not before mentioned is Magwitch's threatening to cut out Pip's liver (the symbol of purification and regeneration), as opposed to Miss Havisham's frequent pointing to her heart (she lacks one and tries to break his)). This heavy use of symbolism, irony and heavy exaggeration, makes Great Expectations break many realist conventions. Indeed Leavis wrote that Dickens found "a freer form of dealing with experience" that enabled readers to move....from the "real" world of everyday experience into the non-rational life of....spiritual experience" (Leavis, 1970, p289), a point reinforced by Wilson, who claimed that Dicken's work touched on repressed areas of the personality, Pip thus standing, like Dickens, both inside and outside Victorian society, an idea revealed through Pip's relationships with the other characters.

Thus, it can be seen that in some ways, an over-eagerness, either on my part or on publishers and broadcasters, to too readily categorise my work as “surreal” or “irreal” or “bizarre” should be avoided as even old stalwarts like Great Expectations or early genre fiction like Frankenstein do, to both lesser or greater extents, seem to break many of the realist "rules" by using techniques stolen from other genres, they enlarge the meaning of the realist novel through this cross-fertilisation. This creates multi-layered works, that while they are good examples of "real" people developing because of their actions, their use of allegory, symbolism, and Gothic techniques such as the "doubling" of characters, create a deeper emotional response through wider points of reference. Indeed, this could explain my own reticence to identify my own work as Bizarro, as much later Bizarro now seems to have become mired in its own tropes, clichés and stereotypes and are, for want of a better expression, “weird for the sake of being weird.” I rarely write material like that, instead using surreal or irreal elements to highlight or magnify issues that the protagonists are feeling, using those weird elements to make their emotional states manifest in physical reality.

Still, I doubt such insight will help when it comes to submitting radio drama to the BBC. So perhaps I may just write my next play about a menopausal Indian woman who lives in a Welsh ex-mining town now that her children have left the nest. That sounds like the BBC all over.




BIBLIOGRAPHY.



Allen, R, (1995), "Reading Frankenstein", in Walder, D. (ed) The Realist Novel (Approaching Literature), London, Routledge in association with the Open University.



Barthes, R. (1986), "The Reality Effect" from The Rustle of Language Blackwell, pp141-8.



Dickens, C (1965), Great Expectations, London, Penguin.


Gilbert, S. and Gubar, S. (2000) The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press.


Kettle, A. (1977), "Realism and Romance" from An Introduction to the English Novel - Volume One: Defoe to George Eliot: 1, pp28-36.


Kosofsky Sedgewick, E. (1986) Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Methuen & Co.


Levine, G. (1981), "The realistic imagination" from The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley, University of Chicago Press, pp5, 6, 8, 15-22.



Regan, S (1996). "The Language of Realism", in The Language of Realism, A210 The Open University Audio Cassette 1, Side 1, Bands 1 & 2, The Open University.



Said, E. (1994), "Culture and Imperialism" from Culture And Imperialism Vintage, ppxiv-xvii, 73-5, 77-8.



Shelley, M (1818), Frankenstein, Oxford, Oxford World's Classics Edition.



Tomlinson, N (1995) Study Guide 1, Shaftesbury, Dorset, Blackmore, Longmead, The Open University.



van Ghent, D. (1961), "On Great Expectations" from The English Novel, Form and Function, Harper & Row, pp128-38.



Walder, D. (1995), "Reading Great Expectations", in Walder, D. (ed) The Realist Novel (Approaching Literature), London, Routledge in association with the Open University.



Watt, I. (1972), "Realism and the novel form" from The Rise Of The Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, pp9-23, 33-36.



Sunday 6 August 2017

RETROSPECTIVE: The Truman Show - Tour de Force or Plagiarism?



"They've gone to a great deal of trouble to construct a sham world around me to keep me pacified.  Buildings, cars and entire town.  Natural looking, but completely unreal......Sixteen hundred people, standing in the centre of a stage.  Surrounded by props, by furniture to sit in, kitchens to cook in, cars to drive, food to fix.  And then, behind the props, the flat, painted scenery.  Painted houses set farther back.  Painted people.  Painted streets."

            Some may recognise the above scenario from the 1998 film, The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey as the unfortunate Truman Burbank, a man whose every move is captured by thousands of hidden television cameras and broadcast all around the world for the viewing pleasure of an adoring populace.  Truman is the star of the show, unaware of his celebrity, and perhaps even more disturbingly, unaware that his wife, his friends, his neighbours, everyone he knows in fact, are nothing more than actors, and that his home, his street, his town is nothing more than a gigantic film set in which he unwittingly lives his life. 
            They would undoubtedly be surprised therefore, when one tells them that it isn't a quotation from the film, but from a little-known 1958 science-fiction novel, by Philip.K. Dick, the author of Blade Runner and the story that later became Total Recall.
            While it is to be applauded that in The Truman Show Hollywood eschewed millions of dollars of computer-generated special effects, and the lure of marauding alien invasions/200 feet tall monsters/rubber-clad superheroes (delete as applicable), one can't help but deplore the fact that a film that was hailed at the time as a zeitgeist-capturing comment on the power of the mass media was in fact little more than a re-tread of a novel written some forty years before. 
            Of course there was a convincing argument for the film's contemporaneity.  Writing in The Daily Express at the time of its release, Peter Sheridan argued that The Truman Show wasn't too far removed from the likes of the Jerry Springer Show where guests laid bare their personal lives for the delectation of the braying audience, or even the Internet phenomenon of the JenniCAM, where, via a video camera link to her computer, Jennifer Ringley's web-site offered a 24 hour view of her as she ate, slept, read and (as most of her then 500,000 daily on-line visitors undoubtedly hoped for) had sex.  And as the much maligned proliferation of fly on the wall documentaries, CCTV clip shows, supposed “reality” shows like Big Brother and Love Island, and even semi-scripted so-called “reality drama” like TOWIE or Geordie Shore show, the general public has an insatiable appetite for watching others at work, rest and play.
            And there is also undoubtedly some truth in the arguments of Gary Ross (the director of Pleasantville, a contemporaneous film that explored similar themes), who believed that there is a "blurring between entertainment and news", that results in a "cultural entropy that takes place when you take what's important and turn it into a carnival and trivialise it.  Television has robbed us all of an innocent sense of wonder."
            But while all this may be true, there is the feeling that Hollywood was again being cynical, and that the makers of the film were in some way hoping that we are all the vacant TV-vidiots that they apparently think we are, as there is a strong case that the Truman Show, far from being a ground-breaking analysis of the late 90s was in fact plagiarizing a number of Science Fiction stories from four decade earlier.  Is this just an innocent case of synchronicity, yet another example of predictive writing, like Arthur Clarke's stories about information satellites, or H.G. Wells' tales about armoured warfare, or is The Truman Show an example of out-and-out plagiarism?
            It must of course be remembered that science fiction has had a long history of paranoia about the media and the new technologies that it employs (one only has to think of Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984, who lives in fear of Big Brother watching him through the large TV screen in his room), and there are many examples of stories that have fortuitously predicted future media trends.  For example, in his story "Panel Game", Brian Aldiss described a couple living in a television-obsessed world who help an anti-television subversive who knocks on their door.  They give him food to last his journey to a less media obsessed country like Bali or India.  After the husband throws him out they decide to watch the TV and see a programme where they see the man, a kind of future Jeremy Beadle, duping them out of their food, before discussing his escapades in the studio, the couple's own TV screens being used to record the incident.  (There are certainly shades of everything from Candid Camera to Beadle’s About to YouTube pranking shows like Prank vs Prank or NQTV/Remi Gaillard here).
            But there are a number of short stories and novels which have so much in common with The Truman Show that it is surprising that there was never any legal action.  In another story in his Space, time and Nathaniel collection, Aldiss tells the tale of a twentieth century lecturer who has to live the same day of his life again and again, all for the edification of a half-seen future audience.  Unlike Truman he is aware of the people viewing his activities but he can do little about it.
"Guiltily Rodney rose and performed several timid exercises to flex his backbone.  The audience had its first laugh there........Under the notion that Valerie disliked seeing him in spectacles, he refrained from reading at breakfast.  How the audience roared when he slipped them on in his study!  How he hated that audience!......  Sometimes he caught snatches of talk from the onlookers.  "If he knew what he looked like!" they would exclaim.  Or: "Do you see her hair-do?"  Or - how often he heard that one: "I just wish he knew we were watching him!""
            A few years ago Aldiss told me that he had considered taking legal action against the producers of Groundhog Day (1993) for stealing this story's basic premise of having to knowingly live the same day again and again and again, but had decided against it.  Perhaps he should have contacted his lawyers again.
            But it is Philip.K. Dick's 1958 novel Time Out of Joint where the real similarities with The Truman Show lie, and this novel that raises the questions of plagiarism, or at the very least, some familiarity.  It is from this novel that the quotation at the opening of this post was taken, and in this novel that Dick tells the story of a man named Ragle Gumm, an unassuming man who lives with his sister and her family, in a small American town in 1959.  However, after a series of strange events, Gumm eventually finds out that it is really 1998 and that the military have built a fake 1959 small town (based on his own childhood memories) so that he can help them tactically without his knowing it.  However, there is more in common between the two works than this.
            In The Truman Show, all of Truman's family, friends and neighbours are actors playing out their respective roles.  In one scene Truman confides in his best friend about how he has felt since his father died, not knowing that his father isn't his father, or that his friend's advice is actually being fed to him from a director via an ear-piece.  The same is true in Time Out of Joint.  Near the end of the novel Ragle's "sister" (who is also unaware of the deception) confronts Major William Black, who up until that point she thought was simply Bill Black, their nosy neighbour.
            " "Is he really my brother?" she said.
            Black hesitated.  "No," he said.
            "Is he any relation to me?"
            "No," Black said, with reluctance.
            "Is Vic my husband?"
            "N-no."
            "Is anybody any relation to anybody?" she demanded.
            Scowling, Black said, "I -"  Then he bit his lip and said, "It so happens that you and I are married.  But your personality-type fitted in better as a member of Ragle's household.  It had to be arranged on a practical basis." "

            And indeed, as well as the idea of a false home and a false family, Gumm is also observed day and night by hidden cameras, and workmen who never quite seem to repair the road outside his house.  After he first leaves the town (despite being denied by a taxi driver because of "permit restrictions", and by the local coach company because of a queue that never seems to move), Gumm finds an isolated house where he finds a television and a video recorder.  On working out how to use it, he is shocked to find what is on the tape.
"On the television screen appeared Ragle Gumm, first a front view then a side view.  Ragle Gumm strolled along a tree-lined residential street, past parked cars, lawns.  Then a close-up of him, full-face.
            From the speaker of the TV set a voice said, "This is Ragle Gumm."
On the screen Ragle Gumm now sat in a deck-chair in the back yard of a house, wearing a Hawaiian sports shirt and shorts.
"You will now hear an excerpt of his conversational manner," the voice from the speaker said.  And then Ragle heard his own voice.  ".......get home ahead of you I'll do it......"
            They have me down in black and white, Ragle thought.  In colour, as a matter of fact."

            But remember, this passage was originally written in 1958, not only before colour TV, but also before video recorders and certainly before the kind of television desensitisation that The Truman Show producers argued that their film analysed.



            However, perhaps the aspect of the film that most people found eerily pertinent to television's obsessions was the fact that a normal person can not only be a TV star, but also be one without knowing it.  Surely that was a comment on the Jerry Springer/Police, Camera, Action/Beadle/Driving School times, and not merely lifted from Dick's novel?  Although sadly, in the years since the film’s release we seem to have gone full circle so that with the likes of TOWIE, Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Made in Chelsea we actually view a reality show that is in actuality a scripted drama pretending to be a reality show, “starring” real people whose reality is composed of taking part in a scripted reality TV show.  Even Dick would have considered the Russian Doll nature of such a reality to be implausible although one can only wonder if the likes of Kim Kardashian can sympathise with the character of Ragle Gumm when he finds a magazine and sees:
            “On the cover of Time....was his picture.  With the words underneath it:
            RAGLE GUMM - MAN OF THE YEAR
            Photographs of him as a baby.  His mother and father.  He turned the pages frantically.  Him as a child in grammar school."
Although arguably the fact that she knows she is part of a TV reality show makes the scenario even more preposterous.

            Of course, it could all have been an unhappy coincidence.  Brian Aldiss has himself said that Dick, of all 50s science fiction writers, "is the one who is seen as immensely contemporary."  It could indeed be that we are all living in a world that Dick, working in the fifties, considered to be a nightmarish future world (Time Out of Joint, lacking robots, aliens etc was originally published not as a science fiction novel but as a "novel of menace").  And, similarly, the novelist and poet Thomas Disch said in a 1994 episode of the BBC arts programme Horizon, that Dick was often writing about what it was like "to live in a media-soaked world", his short-stories and novels often being obsessed with media disinformation, Governmental conspiracies and Cartesian doubt.  In Dick's novels historical figures did not really exist (after all, he had never seen them) but were the creation of later hack writers and computer programmers; the President was not real but a computer generated image spouting meaningless homilies to rob the population of their own opinions; and the population was duped by an American-Soviet agreement into thinking that each side is maintaining a status quo in the Cold War by continually developing new and fearsome weapons - weapons which the leaders of both sides know are actually nothing more than Blue Peter-style sticky-back plastic constructions.  And indeed, in a society where sociologists have shown that the constant stream of Crimewatch-style programmes on TV tends to make the public's fear of crime far greater than its reality, is Dick's 1964 novel The Penultimate Truth really so far-fetched?  In this classic tale of media manipulation, the entire population is forced into underground bunkers because of an impending nuclear war, and once there are fed hours of news broadcasts showing the nuclear devastation on the surface.  It is only when one citizen accidentally makes it above ground that he realises that the whole war is a sham, the government leaders living on huge estates surrounded by thousands of acres of lush vegetation, while beaming down the faked images of destruction to the hapless populace in the cramped bunkers below.
            So perhaps it is just a coincidence that The Truman Show was so much like Time Out of Joint, a novel by a writer who examined and re-examined the power of the media and its representations of reality.  After all, Dick wrote over forty novels and two hundred short stories in his thirty year career.  Or it could be that the makers of The Truman Show were hoping that this no-one would remember any of these works so that any possible plagiarism would remain uncovered; that as they assert in the film, TV rules everyone's life to such an extent that books are of only minor importance to many, so who would discover that they have ripped one off? 

            Or there is perhaps another explanation that Dick would almost certainly have found amusing.  Andrew Niccol, screenwriter of The Truman Show said, "people are starting to question our relationship with television.  Some film-makers are thinking about it more.  The topic is unavoidable."  Here he only mentions television and film.  Could it be that these film-makers, the media-meisters of our time and people who grew up in the television-soaked world that Dick found so potentially dangerous in 1958, are actually unaware of the many novels and short-stories that have addressed the theme, their upbringing being based solely around celluloid and nitid TV screens?  For if so they made a far more profound statement with their film than they could possibly ever have intended.