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Paranoia and Polarization
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13112 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1987 |
2,937 Words |
| Author
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Robert F. Geary
Robert F. Geary is head of the English Department at James
Madison University. His academic interests include the gothic
novel and its literary descendants. |
INTERNAL DEVICES
A Mad Victorian Fantasy
K.W. Jeter
New York: Bluejay Books and St. Martin's Press, 1987
277 pp., $16.95
DR. ADDER
K.W. Jeter
New York: Bluejay Books, 1984
231 pp. $7.95
Since the sixties, the divisions (never entirely clear) between categories of popular fiction and between popular entertainment and serious novels have become increasingly blurred. Writers seeking to render serious themes have often moved away from the conventions of realism to employ, for instance, elements associated with science fiction or fantasy. Under the assault of the drug and sexual revolutions and hostility toward "the system" engendered by the Vietnam War, a widely shared moral and political consensus weakened in America. For some writers associated with the counterculture, the "normal" reality of America was in truth a nightmare best depicted by techniques emphasizing the grotesque, the fantastic, and the surreal. For others, normal reality edged into the formerly unreal, bizarre, or horrific. Joyce Carol Oates' popular short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" captures the eerie quality of those times when utopian dreams of free love and mind expansion through chemistry turned into the dark and bloody orgies of the Manson cult. Her story of a teenage girl's awakening slides from the convention of fictional realism to those of the supernatural horror story as the girl is visited by a demonic figure who no more belongs in "realistic" fiction than Manson belonged in the definition of American reality we fondly held in the fifties.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Thomas Pynchon achieved wide popularity in the sixties for their surreal, darkly comic visions of apocalypse. In The Sirens of Titan (1959), Vonnegut used staples of science fiction, such as alien visitors, to create a mock theodicy. In his best-known work, Slaughterhouse Five, the timeless perspective of space travelers lends a despairing comfort to a vision of the bombing of Dresden, an emblem of the hopeless barbarism of humanity. Pynchon favored grotesque characters, intricate allusions, and rapid pacing in fables of paranoia and alienation. Vonnegut's facile despair has not worn well in a less emotionally charged period, and Pynchon has produced only a collection of short stories since Gravity's Rainbow. Yet their influence can
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