book of the century

[Doug Millison]

The craze for Gothic fiction after The Castle of Otranto was grounded, I
suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythic time which
had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and less literal,
folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds of things
had been possible which were no longer so. Giants, dragons, spells. The laws
of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then. What had once been
true working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere
machinery. Blake's dark Satanic mills represented an old magic that, like
Satan, had fallen from grace. As religion was being more and more
secularized into Deism and nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence
of God and afterlife, for salvation -- bodily resurrection, if possible --
remained. The Methodist movement and the American Great Awakening were only
two sectors on a broad front of resistance to the Age of Reason, a front
which included Radicalism and Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the Gothic
novel. Each in its way expressed the same profound unwillingness to give up
elements of faith, however "irrational," to an emerging technopolitical
order that might or might not know what it was doing. "Gothic" became code
for "medieval," and that has remained code for "miraculous," on through
Pre-Raphaelites, turn-of-the-century tarot cards, space opera in the pulps
and comics, down to Star Wars and contemporary tales of sword and sorcery.
To insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of its
claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things, earthly and
otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take part in
transcendent doings. By this theory, for example, King Kong (?-1933) becomes
your classic Luddite saint. The final dialogue in the movie, you recall,
goes, "Well, the airplanes got him." "No. . . it was Beauty killed the
Beast." In which we again encounter the same Snovian Disjunction, only
different, between the human and the technological.
http://www.libyrinth.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html



CyrusGeo at netscape.net:
"Intellectuals" have also dismissed Sci-Fi as childish and unworthy of
serious discussion. [snip]