How to use this Page

Recently I was talking to a younger colleague, a recent PhD, about what we and our peers read for pleasure. He noted that the only fiction that most of his friends read is young adult fiction: The Hunger Games, Twilight, that kind of thing. Although the subject matter of these series is often dark, the appeal, hypothesized my colleague, lies elsewhere: in the reassuringly formulaic and predictable narrative arc of the plots. If his friends have a taste for something genuinely edgy, he went on, then they’ll read non-fiction instead.

When did we develop this idea that fiction, to be enjoyable, must be comforting nursery food? I’d argue that it’s not only in our recreational reading but also, increasingly, in the classroom, that we shun what seems too chewy or bitter, or, rather; we tolerate bitterness only if it comes in a familiar form, like an over-cooked Brussels sprout. And yet, in protecting ourselves from anticipated frictions and discomforts, we also deprive ourselves of one of fiction’s richest rewards.

One of the ideas my research explores is the belief, in the eighteenth-century, that fiction commands attention by soliciting wonder. Wonder might sound like a nice, calm, placid emotion, but that was not how eighteenth-century century thinkers conceived it. In an essay published in 1795 but probably written in the 1750s, Adam Smith describes wonder as a sentiment induced by a novel object, a sentiment that may be recognized by the wonderstruck subject’s “staring, and sometimes that rolling of the eyes, that suspension of the breath, and that swelling of the heart” (‘The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries’). And that was just the beginning. As Smith describes:

“when the object is unexpected; the passion is then poured in all at once upon the heart which is thrown, if it is a strong passion, into the most violent and convulsive emotions, such as sometimes cause immediate death; sometimes, by the suddenness of the extacy, so entirely disjoint the whole frame of the imagination, that it never after returns to its former tone and composure, but falls either into a frenzy or habitual lunacy.” (‘The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries’)

It doesn’t sound very comfortable, does it? Eighteenth-century novels risked provoking such extreme reactions in their tales of people in extremis; cast out; marooned; kidnapped. Such tales were not gory, necessarily, in the manner of The Hunger Games, and the response they invited was not necessarily horror or terror. More radically, in shape and form as well as content, eighteenth-century writers related stories that were strange, unpredictable, unsettling, and, as such, productive of wonder. Why risk discomforting your reader so profoundly? Because, Henry Home, Lord Kames argued in his Elements of Criticism (1762), wonder also fixes the attention: in convulsing the reader, you also impress a representation deeply upon her mind.

One of the works I find particularly interesting to think about in relation to this idea of wonder is Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein. Frankenstein is a deeply pleasurable book to read, but I wouldn’t describe it as comfortable. Perhaps I felt this more acutely than some when I first read it, as a first year undergraduate. The year before I had witnessed my father experience a fatal heart attack. Ever since then, any description or representation that evoked the body’s motion in defibrillation would viscerally call up the memory of that night. One description that falls under that heading is the climactic moment in Shelley’s novel in which Victor Frankenstein brings his creature to life: “I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.” If the unexpected, in Smith’s account, triggers convulsive motions, then it seems fitting that a newly created being’s experience of its own first breath would indeed be felt as a moment of wonder.

When I was a nineteen year-old reading Frankenstein, there was no discussion about the desirability of providing “trigger warnings” when teaching particular texts; and even if there had been, it seems unlikely that this particular text would have been flagged as potentially traumatic (a fact that speaks to the inherent difficulty of labeling certain texts as more likely to serve as triggers than others, given the variety of people’s experience). I found reading Shelley’s novel to be a deeply, uncomfortably, wonder-provoking experience, in Smith’s terms, but it did not, clearly, result in my “immediate death.” What it did produce, rather, was a deep and lasting impression. Indeed, perhaps that is why, more than twenty years later, I felt compelled to revisit this novel in my research, and why I found myself taking seriously Percy Shelley’s characterization of the experience of reading Frankenstein as one in which we feel our “heart suspend its pulsations with wonder” at its content, even as we “debate with ourselves in wonder,” as to how the work was produced. High affect can be all consuming, but we may also revisit and observe, in more serene moments, the workings of the mechanisms which wring such high affect from us.

In Minneapolis for a conference a few weeks ago, I mentioned to my panel’s chair that I had run around Lake Calhoun. He asked if I had stopped at the Bakken Museum (I had not), which is on the lake’s west shore. He proceeded to explain that it was a museum about Earl Bakken, developer of the pacemaker, whose invention was supposedly inspired by seeing the Boris Karloff 1931 film of Frankenstein, and in particular the scene in which the creature is brought to life with the convulsive electric charge.

As Bakken’s experience suggests, the images that disturb us can also inspire us. Mary Shelley affirms as much in her Introduction to the 1831 edition of the novel, which suggests that the novel had its source in a nightmarish reverie. Shelley assumes that Frankenstein’s power depends upon the reproducible nature of her affect: “What terrified me will terrify others,” she predicts. Haunting images, whether conjured by fantasies, novels, or films, can be generative, although certainly not always in such direct and instrumental ways. Most of us won’t develop a life-saving piece of technology, like Earl Bakken (my father, in fact, had a pacemaker, and, although it didn’t save his life, it did prolong it) or write an iconic novel, like Mary Shelley. But that is not to say that the impressions that fiction can etch into our minds are not generative. If comfort has its place and its pleasures, so too does discomfort: experiencing “bad feelings” enables us to notice, in our re-tracings of them, the unexpected connections that emerge between profoundly different experiences—death; life; reading—all of them heart-stopping in their own ways.

The post Heart-stopped: Fiction and the rewards of discomfort appeared first on OUPblog.

        

Related Stories

• The Lerner Letters: Part 2 – Lerner and Loewe
• Touchy-feely politics
• Excusing torture

 

Tweet

Afterlife with Archie has proven to be one of the biggest successes in recent years for the 1/3 eponymous publisher, with Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Francesco Francavilla’s take on a zombie-infested Riverdale proving to be a surprisingly reflective take on the characters – putting them in a different genre of story in a mature, smart, and darkly comic manner. Following the critical and commercial success of the book it’s no surprise, then, to hear that the company are going to continue pushing the boundaries for a new take on Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ sees Aguirre-Sacasa once more penning a spooky take on the sorceress, but this time in a very different genre of horror – dropping the zombies for a more psychological horror as he’s joined by Robert Hack for a re-imagining of her origin story. Gone is the Lovecraftian-styled horror and in its place stands a story more influenced by Rosemary’s Baby and The Amityville Horror.

As styled by Hack, this is a really invigorating take on Sabrina as a character – thematically resonant, artistically off-kilter, and with a real sense of menace within each page. I’ve been new to Archie as a publisher, but what’s quickly emerged over the last year for me is how carefully they’re able to reinvent themselves and their characters – it wouldn’t have seemed likely that the characters could stand within a mature-only storyline, and yet here we are! So to find out more about what we can expect from this creepy new take on Sabrina, I spoke to both Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Robert Hack about the book! Read on!

Steve: When did the idea of doing these horror-themed takes on Archie come to life… to excuse the pun?

Roberto-Aguirre-Sacasa: “Afterlife” came first, inspired by the variant cover Francesco did for an issue of “Life with Archie.” Jon Goldwater, his son Jesse, and I were having breakfast, talking about the cover, and then we were all like, “This has to be a series!” A lightning-in-a-bottle a kind of thing.

Steve: At what point following Afterlife with Archie did the concept of a Sabrina series come about? Was that always something you had in mind once AwA started?

Roberto: “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” came up after the first or second issue of “Afterlife,” we were chatting about a potential spin-off or companion book, and Sabrina made such an impact in Issue One of “Afterlife,” but I knew she wasn’t going to be the lead, so that seemed like a no-brainer. She’s also such a comic book character, it felt crazy that she was only occasionally guest-starring in other people’s books.

Steve: Do the two books interlink in any ways, or are these separate worlds, separate takes on the character?

Roberto: At this point, they’re separate universes, separate takes on the same character. But, ever since the three witches in “Macbeth,” witches have come in three, so who’s to say there might not be a third incarnation of Sabrina, waiting in the wings—and that we might not see them all together? The “Afterlife” Sabrina, who is Cthulhu’s Bride now, remember; the “Chilling Adventures” Sabrina, who is a student of the occult; and the mainstream, bubblegum pop Sabrina…that would be a FASCINATING crossover, don’t you think?

Steve: What tonally is your goal for Sabrina? Stories about witches have been done so often – in comics alone, you have occult stuff going on in several books, like Coffin Hill and Wytches – was it important to find a new approach for this series?

Roberto:  Witch stories are some of the oldest stories, so there is a concern, “Have we seen all this before?” And witches are absolutely having a moment, with those comic book series you mentioned—not to mention the last season of “American Horror Story: Coven,” but to me, it’s all about the characters and the journey they’re on. If that’s compelling and fresh and emotional, then I’m onboard.

As for tone, it’s a bit more of a slow-burn that “Afterlife.” I keep referencing certain movies like “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane,” but more recently, Ti West did a great horror movie called “House of the Devil,” that really captures the creepiness and dread—as well as the sly humor—of what we’re going for with “Sabrina.”

Steve: Has the series required you both to do a lot of research on the occult? Has there been anything cropping up in the research which you’ve become particularly interested in bringing to the book?

Roberto: Yes, there’s been a lot of research. A few years ago, I wrote a play about the Abigail Williams character from “The Crucible,” and the Salem Witch Trials, so I did a ton of research for that, which has fed, directly, into “Sabrina.” And I’ve been watching tons of witch movies, reading tons of witch stories, and really just letting my imagination ramble a bit, through this dark history of American occultism, in all its manifestations…

Robert Hack: I already have a library and head full of otherwise useless arcane information, it’s nice to have a respectable outlet for it.  I’ve been making notes of interesting visuals from old books and films.

Steve: The tone may be suggested in the script, but it’s in the art that it really hits readers. What was it about Robert’s art that made him the best fit for the project?

Roberto: Francesco (Francavilla) introduced me to Robert’s art, which I immediately loved. We became Facebook friends, and I started to see more and more of his work. Covers, pin-ups, he did a great variant for “Life with Archie” that was in the style of an old movie poster—“Riverdale Confidential.” (He also did this insanely intricate drawing based on the “Quartermass” movies, which I became obsessed with.)

When I started thinking that “Sabrina” was going to be a retro-book, set in the 1960’s, Robert was the first artist I thought of for it.

Steve: Robert, how did you come aboard, yourself? You’d already contributed a variant cover to AwA, right?

Robert: Yeah, I’d done a variant cover for Afterlife #1 and a few other covers at Archie last year.  I was starting to get informal questions from friends at Archie about my schedule and if I would ever want to work on a monthly book.  It was when I congratulated Roberto on his appointment as CCO that he told me about the new Sabrina book and I jumped at it.

Steve: What’s been your approach to the series, as artist? Are there any influences on your storytelling from film, literature, anywhere else? The preview I’ve seen suggests a sort of realistic horror aesthetic, like something similar to Rosemary’s Baby?

Robert: There’s quite a bit of that.  Rosemary’s Baby and The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane were the first things Roberto used to describe the tone and I picked up on that right away.  There’s a definite 60′s-70′s horror film vibe running through here.  It was a great time for boundary pushing in film and that actually feels a bit what it’s like within Archie’s new approach.

Steve: On that, actually – there’s also a sense that the series is going to be an exploration of womanhood, like in the Polanski film; as the preview makes it very clear that Sabrina’s father is the one with power here, and has been wielding it since before she was born. Is it fair to suggest that this is a theme in the series?

Robert: Yeah, that’s fair.  I think you have to, or you’re leaving a massive chunk of the human experience on the cutting room floor.

Steve: In AwA, Sabrina damns herself by taking on forces she can’t control – a classic Lovecraftian horror. In contrast, what kinds of horror are the influences on this series?

Roberto: Witch-horror, psychological horror, themes of revenge, themes of blood, themes of family… “The Amityville Horror,” that kind of thing. And the betrayal between Guy and Rosemary—the scariest thing in “Rosemary’s Baby”—that’s a huge influence on “Sabrina,” what happens between Sabrina’s mother and father, there will be hell to pay…

Steve: What do you both think moves your take on Sabrina away from other versions of her we’ve seen before? What defines her as a character?

Roberto: Well, this is fully a horror story, for starters. And it’s really epic. It starts when Sabrina’s a baby and just keeps going, so the canvas is bigger. Sabrina is the most powerful character in the Archie universe—as powerful as Dr. Strange, let’s say, or the Scarlet Witch—so let’s really explore that power—and how difficult it would be for someone to control it while they’re coming-of-age, hormones raging…

Robert: Yeah, the tone of this version is so vastly different.  The characters are completely recognizable, but it’s a dramatic shift from the comics, or the sitcom.  There is real, palpable terror here.

Steve: Robert, how did you go about designing her look? She’s got to pull away from the iconic ‘Archie’ look, but also remain distinctive. Was it difficult to find a new approach to her, or did you find it actually rather easy to find a new direction for the character’s look?

Robert:  I started with something very traditional, very classic Sabrina.  My first sketches had the big, iconic Sabrina hairdo, and we pulled back from that.  It would have worked if the series was set in the early 60′s, but seemed out of date by the late 60′s we’re in.  Or as Roberto put it- “It’s a little too John Waters.”.  Despite my love of John Waters, I gotta admit that Roberto was right; it’s all about the tone of the series, and it just wouldn’t have worked.  Once we slightly deflated the hair, it really came together.

Steve: You’re colouring the series as well, so you have a complete hold over how it looks and the mood it sets. What are your immediate goals as colourist, to set the tone and mood of this book?

Robert: ​We’re taking an interesting approach to the colors here.  Roberto and everyone at Archie were keen to bring some of what I’d done elsewhere to the interiors.  A unique, limited palate thing that feels a bit vintage and yet new. – and within that, keeping it suspenseful and terrifying.

Steve: How’ve you found working together so far? I know that on AwA, Francesco Francavilla’s interest in Lovecraft found a way into the series – have you both found any shared interests which might filter into Sabrina down the line?

Roberto: RAS: It’s still early days, but the way “Afterlife” is Francesco’s book, I want “Sabrina” to be Robert’s book. He knows—or should know—(and will know, after this interview)—that if there’s a story he wants to tell, or something we wants to draw, it’s a total free-flowing collaboration. He sends me images, I send him references, it’s been great and exciting, finding the exact right tone…

Robert: It’s been great, and the ideas I’ve brought have been met with genuine enthusiasm.  And have been dovetailing with Roberto’s vision.  And editors and everyone at Archie have been great about that to, totally behind us creatively and eager for us to push the limits of horror.  Which is pretty much the weirdest, best thing ever.

Steve: The immediate storyline for Sabrina seems focused on her ancestry and history – but what else awaits her in the series? What do you hope readers take away from the book?

Roberto: The first arc is Sabrina’s dark origin story, from when she was a little girl to her sixteenth birthday, when she finds herself at a crossroads. After that, there will be high school stories, stand-alone stories, we’re going to explore all of her supporting cast in a deep way—Salem’s going to get his own issue, detailing how and why he was turned into the cat—the aunties are going to get the spotlight, we’re going see them as young women…

We’ll see rival covens, we’re going to tell a big possession story, it’s going to be a bit more free-ranging than “Afterlife,” I think, the tapestry’s going to be a bit more unexpected and weird…

-

Thanks to Roberto and Robert for their time! Thanks also to Archie for helping to set up the interview. ‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ #1 is out next month…