Gothic Dimensions

Moira Martingale

Description

IAIN BANKS was one of the finest writers of his generation. The Wasp Factory appeared in 1984, to great and gratifying controversy (one reviewer helpfully described it as "a work of unparalleled depravity"). There were a further 27 works of fiction from the prolific Banks before his untimely death in June 2013 at the age of 59, his customary method being to alternate between contemporary fiction and science fiction - the latter genre published under the name of Iain M. Banks. In 2008 The Times named Banks in their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. This book by Moira Martingale is the first full-length comprehensive analysis of Banks's oeuvre and the thematic - and very Gothic - interests which preoccupied him. These interests include human monstrosity, religious belief, the fluidity of identity, the evolution of humankind and the technological adaptations which may order our future. At the outer limits of time and space can be found Banks's Utopian space civilization, The Culture. With its emphasis on the distant and unearthly - and the opening of the mind to imaginative possibilities - science fiction shares common ground with Gothic fiction of former centuries, and the Gothic is inherent to all Banks's fiction, dealing as it does with the ambiguities which wriggle uncomfortably and uncannily around the boundaries between good and evil, life and death, victim and villain, past and present, civilization and primitive barbarity, organic and machine or artificial technology. In most of Banks's work, conventions of the Gothic boil or simmer, whether it be the barbarities of the past entering the present, the ambivalent literary device of the Doppelganger or the blurred boundaries between the life of the dreaming unconscious and "real" life. Banks incorporates the fantastic, the mythological and the psychological to re-sculpt the Gothic's early fictional motifs and ethical concerns for our own time, and then he projects them star-wards, enabling him to elaborate a futuristic myth of socio-political salvation through technological expertise. With reference to many other writers, including J. G. Ballard, Stephen King, Doris Lessing, Mary Shelley and Banks's fellow-Scot Alasdair Gray, this book, rather in the style of the Gothic itself, straddles the boundary dividing the scholastic from popular writing. The style is clear and accessible and should appeal to both the academic and the general intelligent reader of Banks's work. MOIRA MARTINGALE is a journalist, author and former columnist for national and regional newspapers. Her previous books were published in the UK by Robert Hale and internationally by various publishers. She has a doctorate in Gothic Literature.

Sujets

• Sciences et techniques
• Astronomy

Informations

• Publié par: eBook Versions
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781843962021
• Langue: English

Extrait

GOTHIC
DIMENSIONS


Moira Martingale





QUETZALCOATL PUBLISHING
Published by Quetzalcoatl Publishing

Copyright © 2013 Moira Martingale

Moira Martingale has asserted her right
under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

ISBN-13 978-1-84396-202-1

Also available in paperback
ISBN-13 978-1-49041-402-7

ePub ebook production
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All rights reserved. No part of this
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Contents


Title Page
Copyright Credits

Chapter One
Past, Present, Future Tense: Iain Banks s Gothic Timeline
Explanatory Notes and References

Chapter Two
Perhaps the dream is a bridge ... perhaps The Bridge is a dream.
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
Explanatory Notes and References

Chapter Three
Double Agents
The Ambivalance of the Gothic
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Explanatory Notes and References

Chapter Four
Redesigned Monsters:
Crisis of Identity in The Wasp Factory
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Explanatory Notes and References

Chapter Five
Cyber-Females
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
Explanatory Notes and References

Chapter Six
Gods and Barbarians
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Explanatory Notes and References

List of Abbreviations
Bibliography
Film References
Website References
Acknowledgements
Dedication



IAIN BANKS
16 February 1954 - 9 June 2013

It hardly needs saying, but this book is doubly dedicated to Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks.

In July 2013, the International Astronomical Union officially named an asteroid located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter after Iain Banks.
Chapter One

Past, Present, Future Tense:
Iain Banks s Gothic Timeline


I





Hamish went on: There was a very strange noise, a sort of humming noise seemed to come from under my feet, from the stones of the church it got louder and I felt my hair stand on end. I shouted up to Kenneth; he was about halfway up, still climbing. Then there was a flash, a blinding flash.
Saw a glowing red line in front of me, like a vein of burning blood, like lava, in front of me. Noise terrific. Smell of sulphur smell of the devil Fell down. Half blind, thought a bomb had gone off. Heard ringing, like the church bells all going on at once Realised it had been lightning. I still couldn t believe it; found Kenneth behind me, lying on the grass and a sort of slab thing, over a grave. Hands burned. Been climbing the lightning conductor, blew him off. Don t know if that would have killed him, but he d landed on the stone. Dead. Blood from his head. Hamish looked slowly over at mum, who was crying silently. Sorry, he told her. - Iain Banks, The Crow Road , 315-6).

Iain Banks does his damnedest to avoid being pigeonholed. For a start, he adopts two separate personae for his work. Whether there is more to divide the two genres of mainstream - sometimes called naturalistic - and his science fiction (SF) than the letter M (and several thousand imagined light-years) is something to be explored - and some works prove difficult to place in either category with clarity. I am thinking here of Walking on Glass (1985), The Bridge (1986) and Inversions (1998), where the two genres overlap at unstable boundaries, challenging traditional methods of SF at the human realistic level and, likewise, confronting naturalistic fiction at the level of the fantastic, using layered narratives incorporating dream, myth, magic and mental instability, thus blurring distinctions beween fantasy and reality.
There is further difficulty in allocating a genre label to Banks. Is he, for example, a producer of unputdownable thrillers, or a horror-writer? Those who find it hard to stomach the graphic scenes of bloodletting and gut-wrenching violence which pepper his work may say he is the latter; others argue a much greater subtlety in Banks s escalation of terror in his fictions. This horror/terror argument, which has its roots buried deeply in the Gothic, extends well beyond Banks, but applies to his work. Is horror necessarily Gothic or, indeed, can we state the reverse? What is the difference between terror and horror? Does Gothic fiction, to be so defined, always have to contain the decaying castle, demons, haunted houses or symbolic representatives of these? Can a Gothic interpretation be applied to science fiction, utopian or dystopian fantasy-writing and if so, how? Is the historic Gothic conservative or radical by nature? And where does magic realism - mostly, but not exclusively, harnessed by Banks when he wears his added M 1 - stand in all of this?
As an example, my introductory tableau is taken from The Crow Road , one of Banks s mainstream works, and describes the death of Kenneth McHoan, the father of the novel s narrator, Prentice. It is particularly apposite in that it contains many conventional trappings of the Gothic - the looming church, the literary device of pathetic fallacy contained in the lightning storm and the ominous similes of elemental destruction, the references to supernatural threat and, of course, a melodramatic death. The fact that the doomed McHoan is a committed atheist who, while inebriated, climbs the church-tower to disprove the existence of heavenly vengeance to his God-fearing brother Hamish is the unsettling and darkly-comic paradox in this cameo presented by Banks with, as we learn from both the text and our knowledge of Banks himself, oxymoronic intent.
For, while such a scene of death in an 18th or 19th century Gothic novel may, arguably, be included as an uncanny attestation to divine justice (a belief which Hamish fervently embraces), within the context of this particular novel, Banks uses the same literary strategies to try and demonstrate the exact opposite, particularly by presenting Hamish as a ridiculous, closed-minded figure throughout the novel. Typically Gothic vignettes like this one litter the landscapes of Banks s other texts, and sinister plot motifs which would, 200 years ago, have been attributable to supernatural or paranormal causes are evidence, for Banks, of the uncanniness or capriciousness of coincidence which evokes latent superstition, unconscious archetypal pathways or psychological depth. Here is a case in point, from Complicity (1994), in which the protagonist, Cameron, experiences exquisite terror while in an underground chamber where, in the 16th century, plague victims had been entombed and which is now an Edinburgh tourist attraction. As a joke, his friend Andy has arranged for the caretaker suddenly to switch off the lights:

But in those moments of blackness you stood there. As though you yourself were made of stone like the stunted. buried buildings around you, and for all your educated cynicism, for all your late-twentieth-century materialist Western maleness and your fierce despisal of all things superstitious. You felt a touch of true and absolute terror, a consummately feral dread of the dark; a fear rooted back somewhere before your species had truly become human and came to know itself; and in that primaeval mirror of the soul, that shaft of self-conscious understanding which sounded both the depths of your collective history and your own individual being, you glimpsed - during that extended, petrified moment - something that was you and was not you, was a threat and not a threat, an enemy and not an enemy, but possessed of a final, expediently functional indifference more horrifying than evil. - Complicity , 310 (author s emphasis).

So how far does Banks comply with the required attributes of a Gothic writer in the conventional genre, particularly with regard to the allegation that he is a writer of horror? As an obvious first step, I will broadly outline some of the themes and motifs which characterise the Gothic, both in its traditional and modernist forms, together with some of the critical discussion it has provoked, before looking in depth at Banks s major recurring themes in his work to demonstrate why I believe that Banks qualifies for membership of the genre.



In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. 2

The instabilities of boundaries between the safe and the unpredictable, the unsuspected quicksands, hidden trapdoors and dark, deluding labyrinths, the tortuous paths haunted by the unknown and the unthinkable, the sinister forests of a shadow-world where Death skulks and where Reality collides with Dream: these are the traditional provinces which beguile the Gothic explorer in fiction.
Tricky though it is explicitly to define Gothic literature through an evolution which has spanned two centuries - a steady progress paralleled by change and transformations in social, political, technological and psychoanalytical areas of anxiety-provoking thought - there are stock features and conventional motifs which appear in contemporary Gothic fiction and which resonate with the traditional Gothic exemplified by the earliest seminal works by Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole and others in the 18th century, continuing to develop over time. In bare terms, one may list the conventional superficial trappings of the genre from its early days. We see the extreme atmospherics of the natural landscape: tangled forests