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The Portrait of a Steamy, (Un)Corseted Sub-Culture

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The Portrait of a Steamy, (Un)Corseted Sub-Culture THE PORTRAIT OF A STEAMY, (UN)CORSETED SUB-CULTURE Elena Enciu Abstract: Most scholars trace the beginning of the neo-Victorian novel back to the 1960s, followed by steampunk novels some twenty years later. Also, the first critical works trying to define neo-Victorianism appeared in the late 1990s, before scholars started to write their papers on steampunk around the year 2009. Nevertheless, this does not mean that steampunk derives from neo-Victorianism, but rather, in a more realistic approach, that the two literary genres and the two critical traditions evolved separately, discussing similar themes. As steampunk does not seem to go anywhere, except backwards into the future, this article aims at exploring the main elements and characteristics of this escapist sub-genre in novels written by Gail Carriger, Kate Locke, China Mieville, W. Gibson and B Sterling. Keywords: steampunk, retrofuturism, magic, (techno)fantasy, science, steam, corsets If fantasy is a genre born in Great Britain and adopted by the Americans in the 1970s, steampunk took shape directly in the United States. In 1975 three young authors, studying at California University, Tim Powers, James Blaylock and K.W. Jeter were proposed by editor Roger Elwood to participate in a series of ten volumes about King Arthur. Coincidentally, the Arthurian source of inspiration is characteristic to fantasy and emerged stronger in Victorian England. Jeter, who writes Morlock Night to rewrite Arthur in the nineteenth century, uses Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor as his main source of inspiration and makes the study known to the other two authors. All three share a common passion for Dickens’s work. As the project fails, they are left with the already written manuscripts. Nevertheless, Jeter succeeds in publishing Morlock Knight in 1979, specifically identified as a sequel to H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). The term “steampunk”, coined by accident by Jeter, has given rise to much speculation and debate. It is baked in the evolution of science-fiction as a reaction to “cyberpunk”, an overly- technologized fictional world where the frontiers between humans and machines, between the real and the virtual worlds get thinner giving way to a liberal, cynical world. Cyberpunk is a dystopic type of science-fiction that brings to the center the hacker as both hero and anti-hero, a 22 sub-culture with higher aspirations that takes itself too seriously. Almost opposed to it, steampunk suggests a playful return to the sources, with a visible pleasure to storytelling. The “punk” elements continue to divide the community of fans. To be fair, nobody can prove that Jeter can claim the discovery of something truly revolutionary and Mike Perschon reinforces this idea when he criticises audiences for believing that everything written under this name must “have a resistance force” as it is not applicable to all works.(Perschon 50) Part of the confusion is caused by authors such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling who wrote seminal works in both genres. The Difference Engine (1990) is considered one of the most important works of the genre although it does not reflect the relaxed style of the beginnings of steampunk. Despite the definition given by numerous “fans” of the genre, steampunk is not Victorian science-fiction. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are rather the grandparents of this sub-culture called steampunk, initiated by accident by James Blaylock, Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter during the 1980s that resembles more a visual culture than a literary one. Steampunk dares to imagine to what extent the past would be different if the technological advancements of the future arrived earlier. It is a type of retrofuturist science-fiction that uses Victorian inventions and gadgets such as steam engines to reinvent this age. Retrofuturism as a trend, having steampunk as the main character, refers to more than an age that has lost its trust in the future. The exact origin of steampunk is uncertain and shows significant variations from one novel to another. Certain works, such as The Difference Engine (2011), as historiographic metafiction, move through steampunk and neo-Victorianism, suspended between the paraliterary limbo and the consecrated postmodernism. Certain journals, like “The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies”1, demonstrate a certain open-mindedness regarding steampunk and do not treat this sub-culture as an accepted branch of neo-Victorianism. In terms of literary and critical enterprise, neo-Victorian literature and steampunk have their own separate paths that occasionaly happen to cross. It is also very important to reiterate the fact that steampunk is not only or before anything a literary genre: according to Mike Perschon it is an aesthetic genre. (11) Through fashion, magic and dance shows, steampunk manifests its aesthetic influence. It is close to impossible to name all movies that show steampunk elements (Sherlock Holmes of 2009 and 2011), but their growing presence underlines the strength of holmesian adaptations. Steampunk is everywhere: in fashion, art, music, accessories, literature and film. A steampunk novel can be written under the influence of its predecessors, but it is written first and foremost in strong connection to the present and within a material culture: Want your steampunk to have more punk? Fill the aesthetic with your activism. Want your steampunk to have more steam? Make your aesthetic accurate. Just looking for a good time? Then add some absinthe to your aesthetic, and let loose the dirigibles of war (or exploration) and head for the horizon. Implicit in retrofuturism’s malleability as either nostalgia or regret is the elasticity of steampunk as an aesthetic: these three lenses can be trained upon myriad types of stories, serious and whimsical alike. (Perschon 241) When discussing steampunk, the problematic derives directly from the aesthetic approach, relying on the notions of “bricolage” and “detournement”, defined by Patrick Novotny in his article “Chapter 6: No Future! Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration”. When discussing cyberpunk, an earlier form of science-fiction, 1 In the special issue from 2010 of “The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies”, Jason B. Jones is one of the authors who makes a clear distinction between steampunk and neo-Victorianism, setting the two ideologies apart in his analysis of Alan Moore’s works. 23 Novotny makes a distinction between the two forms of appropriation stating that “detournement is the appropriation of existing cultural fragments in such a way as to alter and invert their meaning” (Novotny 100) while “bricolage is the transgressive activity of individuals who are able to appropriate cultural styles and images for their own ends.” (102) Perschon uses the term “bricolage” instead of pastiche to describe the checkered style of steampunk authors who bring together a multitude of elements in order to imitate a particular author and designates “detournement” to texts with a powerful revisionist potential. He insists that “the spectrum should not be read as valorizing one of these positions over the other” (Perschon 98), but at a closer look, it is “detournement” that enables a closer perspective on the social and political structures, left in confusion after the technological revolution. Mike Perschon, therefore, offers a perspective on steampunk that is both scholarly and personalized. He cites the works of Hadley, Kaplan and Gutleben and revisits the criticism against the too limited definition of neo-Victorianism (226), formulated by Heilmann and Llewellyn in their seminal study Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009 (2010), who argue that neo-Victorian texts must be “self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery, and (re)vision concerning the Victorians” (4). Maybe the definition of neo-Victorianism that he provides in The Steampunk Aesthetic seems too vague: neo-Victorianism indicates steampunk’s evocation but not accurate re-creation of the nineteenth-century. […] steampunk is the suggestion of this period, but not necessarily place or even time. Steampunk can occur in any time, and any locale (in this world or a secondary one), but it repeatedly suggests the nineteenth-century and early twentieth- century to us in one way or another. (Perschon 238) This statement does not include the intention to redefine the national or temporal limits, to rewrite history from a different perspective. To him, neo-Victorianism is an element in his area of research, an element of lesser importance. Thus, one of the characteristics of the genre is precisely the fact that it lacks a clear theoretical ground: it does not have a clear definition that unites all fans and critics. At its origin, the novel is all about a playfulness that an entire body of works chose to take seriously. Steampunk is ludic and manages to encompass the magic of the past. This fact, rarely mentioned by other critics other than Perschon is more visible in Gail Carriger’s trilogy The Parasol Protectorate (2009) and less in The Difference Engine (1990), where the supernatural is absent. This shows that steampunk has always been fantasy masked as science-fiction, or a hybrid genre that ignores generalizing boundaries. Characterized as a mode, a sub-genre, an aesthetic, steampunk is an extremely flexible term, both on a grammatical and conceptual level and this flexibility is reflected by its perspective on time, gathering in just one word many different kinds of retro-futurisms. Steampunk is another face of retro-futurism. Perhaps, when it comes to the contemporary production and the comprehension of the audiences, steampunk is retro-futurism. Steampunk is not just about otherness: the term is part of a ramification of names that, on the one hand, colonizes the twentieth century with its dieselpunk and atompunk, and on the other hand, glances into the past through clockpunk.
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