Janus: the Monstrosity of Genre
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Janus: the Monstrosity of Genre by Gianni Washington ! Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing University of Surrey Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences School of Literature and Languages Supervisors: Dr. Paul Vlitos & Dr. Allan Johnson © Gianni Washington 2018 !1 Declaration This thesis and the work to which it refers are the results of my own efforts. Any ideas, data, images or text resulting from the work of others (whether published or unpublished) are fully identified as such within the work and attributed to their originator in the text, bibliography or in footnotes. This thesis has not been submitted in whole or in part for any other academic degree or professional qualification. I agree that the University has the right to submit my work to the plagiarism detection service TurnitinUK for originality checks. Whether or not drafts have been so-assessed, the University reserves the right to require an electronic version of the final document (as submitted) for assessment as above. Signature: _______________________________________ Date: _____________________ !2 Acknowledgements I am sincerely grateful for the opportunity to conduct my research as part of the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Surrey. I am even more grateful to have worked with my supervisors: Dr. Paul Vlitos, Dr. Alan Johnson, and (for far too short a time) Professor Justin Edwards. Thank you to every teacher who encouraged my love of literature. Thank you, thank you, thank you, to the friends who kept me sane as I took up in a new country away from everything I’ve ever known. And from the very deepest part of me, thank you to my grandparents, Leila, Mary, and James, to my father, Todd, and to my greatest source of encouragement, my mother, Sharon. !3 Abstract Horror fiction, much like other “popular” genres, has many a stigma attached to its creation and enjoyment. Both experiences are considered by a number of literary critics to be less complex than that of literary fiction and, as a result, less rewarding for readers. These critics cite the repeated use of particular tropes in several works across a single genre, crediting works that introduce elements strongly associated with other genres with “transcending” their popular origins. This thesis, which is composed of both a practical and critical component, argues that such tropes do not preclude a work of genre fiction reaching the same levels of depth and originality as literary fiction, and that in fact it is the subversion of familiar tropes and their synthesis with tropes of other genres which can create opportunities for readers to alter their expectations of what each genre can achieve. The practical portion of this thesis, the novel Janus, is intended as an example of the synthesis of horror and literary fiction, including elements of sci-fi and weird fiction as well. My goals for this novel include the exploration of such themes as monstrosity, evil, love, fear, and identity through the use of a split-perspective narrative set in both the past and present. The portion of this thesis that is critical commentary will examine aspects of genre theory with respect to the horror and literary genres using Stephen King’s The Shining and Toni Morrison’s Beloved as representative of work that adheres to certain generic tropes while subverting others, with which tropes are kept to, which are reshaped, as well as the genre each novel is ultimately confined to, being predominantly dependent upon each novel’s respective goals concerning the reader. *This thesis has been composed and formatted using American spellings and grammatical style. !4 Table of Contents Introduction, 6 Janus, 15 Critical Commentary: Chapter One: Horror Fiction’s Place on the Genre Spectrum, 405 — “Literary” vs “Genre” vs “Popular” Fiction, 406 — Conventions of Horror Fiction, 417 — Stephen King and the Question of Genre, 422 Chapter Two: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Horror of History, 428 — The Apophatic Nature of Memory, 429 — Technical Obfuscation: Beloved as Gothic Romance, 435 — Subversion Through Inversion in Beloved, 440 Chapter Three: The Monstrosity of Genre, 445 — Theses On the Monster, 446 — Fusing Principles: The Shining and Beloved, 461 — The Monstrosity of Genre, 466 Conclusion, 470 Bibliography, 475 !5 Introduction In his 2003 acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Stephen King said to his audience of writers, readers, critics, and loved ones, “giving an award like this to a guy like me suggests that in the future things do not have to be the way they've always been. Bridges can be built between the so- called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction. The first gainers in such a widening of interest would be the readers, of course, which is us because writers are almost always readers and listeners first.”1 This doctoral thesis is predicated on that very idea: that there are many positive connections to be made between “popular” and “literary” fiction, and illuminating those connections can only benefit readers. The criteria for receipt of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters is “a person who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work.”2 Stephen King — whose fiction has been adapted for film, television, the stage, and even music countless times — has certainly accomplished this feat. His works have become cultural touchstones because they document culture. King’s stories are peppered all over with slang, popular ads and product placements, references to popular music of the time, sports teams, and world leaders his readers will recognize — especially readers belonging to King’s generation. Seeing oneself in media is a powerful thing. Perhaps more so when the vehicle for what we see is a genre not frequently praised for its authentic representations of humanity, like horror fiction. But King has shown us that it is not merely possible, but also important to reflect every aspect of the human experience accurately in fiction. Not only the moralizing and philosophizing over known human experiences, but also our hopes and fears in the form of the fantastical and seemingly impossible. 1 Stephen King, Acceptance speech. “Distinguished Contribution to American Letters”. National Book Foundation website, 19 Nov. 2003. 2 “Distinguished Contribution to American Letters”. National Book Foundation website. !6 Before properly beginning his acceptance speech, King mentioned the outcry among some of the literary community against his receiving an award typically reserved for authors of literary fiction. According to a New York Times article reporting on the announcement of the award’s recipient, Richard Snyder, a publishing executive formerly of Simon & Schuster, stated, “You put him in the company of a lot of great writers, and the one has nothing to do with the other. He sells a lot of books. But is it literature? No.” The same article quotes literary critic Harold Bloom as saying of King’s selection by the committee: “That they could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy.”3 However there are a great many readers of King’s work, myself included, who would steadfastly refute Bloom’s rebuke by pointing out that what sets Stephen King’s work apart from its peers in the genre is in fact a great deal of “inventive human intelligence.” I do not simply refer to the unusual monsters that often appear in his stories — a possessed car (Christine, Viking, 1983); a demon that can become whatever you fear most (IT, Viking, 1986); a suicidal, sentient train who loves riddles (Blaine the Mono — The Dark Tower: The Waste Lands, 1991 & Wizard and Glass, Grant, 1997) — but to the ways in which King is able to marry the supernatural and the ordinary. King’s protagonists are often people who feel familiar to us because they confront issues we ourselves have faced: alcoholism, abuse, unemployment, bullying, loneliness, obsession, grief. In King’s fiction, the supernatural is not the cause of a character’s problems — it exacerbates them. A father loses his son and buries him in a cemetery that resurrects the dead, but the child who returns is a murderous facsimile of the one who left (Pet Sematary, Doubleday, 1983). A morbidly obese man hits a gypsy with his car and the gypsy curses him with her dying breath, causing him to slowly waste away (Thinner, New American Library, 1984). A man who hopes to bury his authorial alter ego and be known for himself gets a nasty shock when that alter ego materializes in the real world (The Dark Half, Viking, 1989). Each of these characters is already troubled before that trouble is compounded by a supernatural force. The personalities and experiences of each character are chiefly responsible for leading them down the horrific paths they travel, not otherworldly evil alone. The creative 3 David D. Kirkpatrick, “A Literary Award for Stephen King”. The New York Times, 15 Sept. 2003. !7 portion of my thesis mimics this relationship between the everyday and the supernatural, using domestic unease as a foundation for the increasingly bizarre events of the story. My thesis will consist of two parts: a novel, Janus, that is a creative exercise in synthesizing the most compelling aspects of horror and literary fiction as well as elements of sci- fi and weird fiction to create an original contribution to literature; and a critical commentary on genres of fiction with a focus on horror, literary fiction, and the concept of monstrosity with regard to both the ways in which it manifests in fiction and also how the “monstrous” label might be applied to the idea of genre.