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Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Weird Monster Issue!
You couldn’t call it exactly Christmassy; but if you do want to see the loathsome beast and the beautiful woman then go below the fold.
It’s an image that is, of course, about sex. That’s such an obvious point it’s really almost not worth making. The flame haired woman with her pronounced breasts, the alien reaching with grasping hands, a beast just human-masculine enough in appearance to figure as a symbolic externalisation of the lust that is in the heart of the target-audience fourteen-year old boy ... desire, but also shame. He wants to grope the woman, as the monster is doing; but he disgusts himself because he wants it. And then there’s the phallic rocketship placed exactly in between them. She has hooked her arm around the shaft of it, and he is transferring some of his hideous glans-coloured purple to the otherwise pristine silver of the head of it. The wrist band she is wearing looks just enough like a manacle to add spice to the fantasy of sexual compulsion, as does the look in her eyes. Nobody looking at this image (or, at least, nobody past the age of puberty) could possibly assume that this monster wants to devour this woman.
But take a second look. What I love about this image is its simple and effective balance of formal elements. Her flame hair, flowing down from and to the right of her head, appears to be made of exactly the same substance as his forky devil’s tongue, flowing out and to the left of his open mouth. It looks almost as if he’s bitten off a piece of her hair; except it’s obviously not that ... it’s a point of symbolic connection between them. Her angular pose mimics, or fills in the space of, his angular pose. The curl of his right thumb-claw exactly inverts the final curl of her red locks. The green of her clothing echoes the green of the monster’s sky; and the twin downward notches of his fangs echo the support struts at the base of her rocket ship. It is, in other words, a study in parallelism; an interlocking two-tone arrangement (or two tone-fields: one the pink-red-purple of face, hair, tongue, monster; the other the cream-yellow-green of rocket, clothing, sky). Very lovely indeed, aesthetically speaking. Even if sex is, yes, a nasty and shameful business in which the man inevitably becomes a hideous purple monster.
So, top marks to whichever copyeditor decided on ‘Weird Monster Issue!’ at the top there. What bizarre hybrid monster would issue from such a coupling, we wonder?
Comments
Why are you always thinking about sex, Adam? It’s just a monster comic.
I’m sure that there are any number of fanboys who would deny that an appeal to adolescent violence-linked sexuality has anything to do with their favorite series. And not only fanboys, but also “sophisticated” critics who think that literary appreciation of SF involves denial that it is a genre written for a particular audience. Look at what happened with the Acephalous threads on Gene Wolfe. It ended up with someone comparing Wolfe to Nabokov, to which my reply was something like, sure, if Lolita ended with Humbert Humbert using his special pedophile’s disciplinary paddle to heroically defeat Quilty.
In short, you can’t understand a lot of SF, even “literary” SF, without reading Norman Spinrad’s _The Iron Dream_. Plus perhaps a more modern supplement if Joanna Russ ever writes up that piece that analyzes The Left Hand of Darkness as slash fic.
Parenthetically, I noticed that Wolfe is also getting recognized on Tom Disch’s blog:
“Yes, Gene Wolfe can be credited with being first with the most, and softening up the next generation of tomorrow’s soldiers and policy makers to accept the notion that a Christian nation (Gene is nothing if not Christian) can legitimately use torture on enemies of state, which, as it turns out, is every fucking asshole who disagrees with His Wholeness.” Plus additional clarification in comments.
What a great little post: a non-heavy handed but predictable psychological reading that swerves into an unexpectedly aesthetic analysis. Nice.
John: “Why are you always thinking about sex, Adam?“ Quite right. To quote Freud himself, ‘sometimes an enormous befanged purple-headed ravening monster chasing a beautiful curvaceous woman in a tight fitting top across an evidently dream landscape is only an enormous befanged purple-headed ravening monster chasing a beautiful curvaceous woman in a tight fitting top across an evidently dream landscape.’
Rich: “In short, you can’t understand a lot of SF, even “literary” SF, without reading Norman Spinrad’s _The Iron Dream_.“ I agree with the sentiment, although I have to say I blow hot and cold about Spinraid’s book itself. It’s not that it’s bad, or that its satirical spin on SF (certain sorts of SF) as Hitlerian is obtuse. It’s just that it’s a bit obvious. WWII didn’t explode the appeal of fascism, after all, however much we might have wanted it to. All it did was to explode the idea of vulgar, obvious fascism. No more night rallies and swastikas ... or, rather, some people still go through those motions, but we laugh at them and in their hearts they know they’re risible. But fascism, provided only it be more suave and less in-the-face, is thriving.
I’m going off the point of your comment.
J J: thank you!
Well, what I’ve read of Spinrad often seems a bit too obvious, but in _The Iron Dream_, it works. No one in its target audience would get it if it weren’t obvious. Its obviousness is also sadistic in nature, or perhaps mock-therapeutic, like the aversion therapy in _A Clockwork Orange_. And yes, the discrediting of obvious fascism didn’t discredit many of its components now used as SF tropes: look at the “innocent”, “justified” genocide of _Ender’s Game_, say.
Adam, this was delightful. It occurs to me that the illustration is probably an illustration for “The Loathsome Beasts,” which suggests how much the imaginary language of the feminine (how the target audience here imagines women speak to themselves) overlaps with “Victorian” language: hence the feminine, Victorian, absurd adjective “loathsome” (instead of “The Dangerous Beasts” or “The Creatures From Outer Space").
Rich, unless I’m missing something, Ender’s world is shattered by his realization of the genocide, and his decision to become a “Speaker For The Dead” is an act of atonement. I have other problems with Card, mostly because of his post-apocalyptic Mormon novels, but his stance on inter-species murder is as grief-stricken as that of Battlestar Galactica.
Now I must go see if “locke&demosthenes.blogspot.com” is already taken.
John, why are you always thinking about Mussorgsky? They’re just pictures at an exhibition.
Don’t get me started on _Ender’s Game_, Joseph. Suffice it to say that I think that the whole book is constructed around a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the “innocent genocide”—which includes an burst of adolescent self-pitying guilt afterwards. I haven’t yet read “Speaker For The Dead”, but I’d guess that Ender’s world is not shattered, that he remains an important and Romanticized person, and that in fact his connection with the genocide is what makes him important.