Comments on: Seasons of horror - John Clute interviewed about Darkening Garden

By: jeffprucher.com » Blog Archive » Two things of scientiphilological note

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 04:18:19 +0000

[...] The other thing is an interview with John Clute, regarding his recent book Darkening Garden, which is billed as a lexicon of horror. I haven’t seen it yet, but based on the interview I think I’m going to have to check it out. (Not that I’m not already generally interested in his writing as a matter of course, mind you.) The vocabulary of horror and fantasy criticism seems to be just coming into its own now. (Besides Mr. Clute, Farah Mendlesohn has also done work in this area, although I only know her work second-hand.) Apart from some terms created by J.R.R. Tolkien (subcreation, primary and secondary world), there doesn’t seem to have been much interest in this. I don’t know whether it’s because critics were content with using the standard lit. crit. terminology of myth and romance (a la Northrop Frye) or whether it’s taken this long for fantasy and horror to get any respect in the academy. In the late 60’s - early 70’s, there was a fair amount of interest in pinning down SF (as distinct from fantasy — and often with an air of superiority), and we got some very nice terminology out of it. My favorite might be novum, which was coined by Darko Suvin and which refers to what he calls a “strange newness” — that thing in a story which is different from the reader’s world and which indicates to the reader that the story is science fiction and not mimetic realism. I have my fingers crossed that Mr. Clute’s use of “polder” will catch on — it’s a beautiful term for a central idea in fantasy. [...]

By: Jonathan Vos Post

Jonathan Vos Post — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 19:15:04 +0000

Brilliant interview!

I laughed out loud at the quotation excerpted from “Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.” — W. S. Gilbert (1836 - 1911) . Could not help but recall the scene in which this is corrected in rehearsal in the play within the film of “Topsy-Turvy.”

Needless to say, I’ve been reading John Clute at every opportunity, attending all his panels at Worldcons, corresponding now and then by email as encyclopediasts, and having the pleasure of his company at times. This is clearly a “must buy” book — and the fact that a Major Publisher didn’t snap it up is further corroborative detailing of how badly broken is the Publishing industry.

By: About 1988-2006 at bibliography

About 1988-2006 at bibliography — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 13:01:47 +0000

[...] 2007 Interview with Iain Emsley (not the 2006 draft interview) Title: “Seasons of Horror - John Clute Interviewed about Darkening Garden” Yatterings (8 September 2007) « Letters 1962-2006 Articles 2005 » [...]

By: John Clute

John Clute — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 10:40:49 +0000

In the interview above, when I refer to my cobbling together of an SF model from various sources, I could have mentioned for its intrinsic interest Farah Mendlesohn’s similar assembling of material , in an article I saw some time ago, from the same general sources. Her four-part breakdown reads DISSONANCE, RUPTURE, RESOLUTION, CONSEQUENCE, which in fact, by introducing a set of terms of her own devising, conveys a sense of the seriousness of the task for her. I think that both sets of terms are both clearly compatible with the writers she cites extensively in her piece (and whom I cite in an essay on the subject), and that both sets of terms can be modeled into each other, though I’d tend to think of DISSONANCE as enveloping rather than preceding RUPTURE . Her article is:
“Is There Any Such Thing as Children’s SF: A Position Piece” in
The Lion and the Unicorn, A Critical Journal of Children’s Literature.
Vol. 28, no 2, April 2004, 1080-6563. pp. 284-313