Why Goth and Romance Are Still Taking Over Fiction
Hey Friends,
Lately, I've been thinking it's a very good thing we had Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe and Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins and others to formulate both the Goth sensibility and the Romantic sensibility for us way back in the day. It's also really wonderful how the Goth thing and the Romantic thing, once launched, have just continued to roll along year by year, reusing the same tropes of star-cross'd loves and castles, flashy rides and darkness and evil, bubbling cauldrons, melancholy and madness, and falling-down mansions and thunder and lightning again, again, again. And despite the fact we left the Romantic period long ago, Romance remains nigh on unstoppable, accounting for $1 billion in sales or a full third of the entire fiction market.
As for the Goths, they've recently been able to depend on heavy hitters like Anne Rice, Stephen King, and J.K. Rowling, not to mention the Twilight Series and the Underworld Series. Though maybe the Goths have started to come into troubles. A high school down in Texas did recently ban the wearing of all-black clothing. But the Gothic had its detractors from the start and people tend to forget Poe did more than write spooky stories: he also wrote the essay that formulated Modernism. That's irony. Because as soon as it could, Modernism dumped the Goths and the Romantics and declared itself the true Literature with a big "L" and the only serious Art with a big "A." But in doing so, Modernism somewhat painted itself into a corner. By banishing these two founding schools and pledging its allegiance to Realism, Modernism wedded itself to the notion that real literature is a portrayal of the world as it most seriously and certainly is, not the world as we might playfully wish to portray it. That dirty job -- making playful use of the imagination -- was then left to the genres of Romance, Mystery/Crime, Thriller, Horror, and Sci-Fi/Fantasy.
For a time, for literary writers, it seemed that all might be lost. But then fortunately, someone happened to recall Gulliver. And Alice. Back before the advent of Goth and Romance, Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels (1726), which offered slightly serious social commentary but was mostly playful fantasy. Then in 1865, Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, also slightly serious, also mostly playful fantasy. Though they behaved like children's books, they inadvertently pointed the way for literary writers to get back in the game. Aldous Huxley was among those who followed suit, writing the fantasy Brave New World in 1932 which, for imaginative play, was also serious social commentary and was not playing. George Orwell then wrote Animal Farm in 1945, disguising it as imaginative play though it was about as playful as a police dog. The first edition actually bore the subtitle "A Fairy Story." That was followed by 1984, deadly serious, playful as a landmine. Since then, there've been many others and a few of the noteworthies are Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1973) and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985). And now at last, after a century or three of not knowing what in the hell to call these mostly serious, sort of playful literary books, a new term for this old genre has entered: Speculative.
This year, two new speculative books have been generating a lot of buzz: Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro happens to be the author of chilling tales you already know such as Never Let Me Go and Remains of the Day. Both Beautyland and Klara feature characters who are young throughout most of the action, but neither fit the Young Adult genre, probably because the heroes are sexually aware and the storylines are more serious than playful.
Adina Giorno is the hero of Beautyland and she's an alien in touch with her handlers from childhood on via a fax machine. Bertino's book is the kinder of the pair as Adina composes her regular reports to her home planet about her travails as a middle-schooler and daughter of a single earth mother. As traumas and disillusions mount up, Adina's desire to get off this godforsaken rock grows. But the citizens of Planet Cricket Rice where she's from (the name is a story in itself) are themselves in such dire straits, they can't do much but offer sympathy. Overall, Bertino's book is more playful than serious, but it's got a solid stranger-in-a-strange-land vibe. Is it just me or are contemporary books growing ever more upbeat and hopeful?
Klara, of the speculative tale Klara and the Sun, is a robot or an AF (artificial friend) and the life companion of a girl named Josie who has a wasting illness, the same one that killed her sister some time back. Klara is apparently solar-powered and so her higher power is the sun, a deity who she feels is a sentient and reasoning creature with the power to heal should such special help be earned through some remarkable effort. Josie also has a boyfriend, Rick, who is kind, loyal but of lower intelligence and so is a social outcast. Klara is also lesser, an older B2 model at a time when B3's are the hot product. Not everyone can afford an AF and initially we think Josie was the one demanding to have Klara. But later we see that Josie's mom was the real shotcaller. She picked Klara because she expects Josie to die. Because she can't face life with no daughter, she grooms Klara to take Josie's place right in front of her. Meanwhile, Klara perceives what's happening and maneuvers to try to save Josie rather than just give up, causing us to wonder how Klara, a robot, manages to be so useful in this very human life-or-death situation, and Josie's mom does not. Ishiguro's book is more serious than playful.
A movie I would recommend this time is His Three Daughters about sisters from two mothers (one oldest, one youngest, one mess) home to watch over their dying father, cast wonderfully with Natasha Lyonne as the mess.
For any new readers: My novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.