Title: Love Stage!! Genre: Yaoi, Romance Publisher: Viz/Sublime (US), Kadokawa Shoten (JP) Artist/Writer: Taishi Zaoi, Eiki Eiki Serialized in: Asuka Ciel Original Release Date: May 12, 2015 Due to his discreet personality and otaku-like features, people usually don’t give Izumi Sena a second glance on the busy streets of Tokyo. But things would have been ... Read more
By: Helena Palmer,
on 12/17/2014
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.
A large portion of the beginning of The Mysteries of Udolpho is taken up with Emily and her father traveling through the Pyrenees of France. It seems on nearly every page there are comments on the “sublime charms of nature” with long descriptions on the craggy mountains, the deep valleys, rushing torrents, and the quality of the light. In fact, there is so much of this I began to think Radcliffe was up to something. So it wasn’t long before I found myself borrowing a copy of Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. And now this early sentence in the book makes so much more sense:
This landscape with the surrounding alps did, indeed, present a perfect picture of the lovely and the sublime, of ‘beauty sleeping in the lap of horror.’
I have vague recollections of reading Burke back in college as part of a class in literary theory but my memory has been wiped out to save myself from the trauma that was Hegel, Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva. Poor Burke never had a chance. Since he is associated in my mind with that class I assumed he was going to be hard going and I’d be scratching my head. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Burke is so very concerned with everyone understanding him that large portions of the essay are given over to explaining his words. I appreciated his precision to a point, after that point I found myself muttering, okay okay, can we just move on? All that to say that if you ever feel inspired to read Burke, you don’t need to worry about not “getting him” because if this essay were a math problem, he’d be getting full credit for showing his work so his readers can follow along with his arguments and not be left in doubt.
If you are like me you equate sublime with beautiful, maybe not every day beautiful but startlingly beautiful, the kind of beauty that moves you to tears. But no, beauty and the sublime have nothing to do with each other. Beauty, you see, inspires pleasure and love in the beholder. It is sunshine and rainbows.
The sublime? It is composed of delight derived from terror, pain, distress and danger. It is a feeling far more intense and elevated than mere beauty. The sublime, according to Burke, is the “strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling.” This is because pain, the root of the sublime, is more powerful than pleasure.
Now the pain Burke refers to is not necessarily physical pain caused from tumbling over a cliff while hiking in the mountains in search of the sublime. It is a physical pain but more of one caused by extreme emotion than a broken leg. It’s a hurts so good kind of pain caused by an “unnatural tension of the nerves.”
What elements go into producing the sublime? Burke is kind enough to explain each one in great detail but I will spare you and just list out a few for you:
Can you kind of see a little how Emily and her father’s travels through the mountains was so sublime? And why Radcliffe might want all that in a gothic novel? Because the whole point of a gothic novel is horror (and romance) and since the source of the sublime is terror, perfect combination, right? Radcliffe didn’t write a book based in the supernatural so she pulls much of her gothic horror in early on by using the sublime. We don’t feel it like the readers in 1794 would have, but no doubt much of the scenic descriptions would have been terrifying.
Also of note is that Radcliffe uses the sublime to clue us in to who the good and bad characters are. The good ones all experience the sublime at one time or other while out in nature. The bad characters, not one has a sublime experience. They are too small-minded and petty and the sublime scene that moves Emily so produces nothing but boredom to those who are not good.
That is a bit of what Radcliffe is about with so much mention of what is sublime. While it gets a bit repetitive for a modern reader, she wasn’t just rambling on and on to add padding to the story. Instead, the sublime is an integral part of her approach to the gothic, at least in this novel. I’ve not read any of her others so I can’t say whether it holds true for them. Perhaps next RIP Challenge I will read Romance of the Forest and find out.
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