A post/human digression

This week is another departure for me – and one that’s related to what I posted about at the end of September. Tomorrow I am going to the ANZ Shakespeare Association conference in Perth, WA – it’s themed Shakespeare and Emotions. The paper I’m giving argues that Caliban offers an emotional template for the kind of monster used to work out/on post/human anxieties in fantasy. I compare Caliban with Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the truth may be that I really wanted to write a paper about the musical episode from Buffy). It’s not about the singing episode – although that would make for a very interesting paper at an emotions conference, one which I still hope to write. I talk about Spike’s emotions – and Caliban’s of course – as indicative of humanity. A monster that feels the right things stops being a monster and becomes more and more human the more it feels. Caliban mostly feels anger, and fear, but he also has that beautiful speech about the “thousand twangling instruments.” Can he be a monster (he’s called one more than 40 times in The Tempest, although never by Prospero) when he cries to dream again? Spike’s equivalent speech might be the one about people “walking around like billions of happy meals with legs” but the sentiment is, literally, the same: it’s love. Love for another person isn’t the point, although Spike of course feels that, it’s the feeling that matters not who inspires it, or what. The core of humanity in these texts is the ability to feel love.

Many fantasy texts work through post/human anxieties with this type of approach. I've also been thinking about the ways the dragons in Robin Hobb's Rain Wilds Chronicles slowly develop character and a particular kind of emotion. Science Fiction gets a most of the attention with its robots and cyborgs and hyper-ration Dr Spock and the rest, but fantasy offers a different perspective, one without that obvious overlay of technology. It engages with anxieties that existed long before modern technology made us worry about genetic manipulation and biotechnology and cybernetics and... and... and... I think what really interests me, and what is perhaps important to my bigger project as well as this paper, is that all the monsters which have become more humanised in fantasy over the past decade or more - vampires, orcs, werewolves etc - get closer to humanity, less threatening, when they are given not just agency or a backstory or a voice, but the right kind of feelings, love in particular.

A slight departure

I haven't blogged here much lately, but I'm not completely absent from the internet. Today I have a guest post "Caliban: On the Edge of Humanity" appearing at 'Performing Humanity,' an Early Modern blog. The post is about the humanity - or otherwise - of Caliban in The Tempest and the ways Shakespeare is influenced by medieval material. It's a departure from my usual time-periods, but is part of what I've been thinking about for a conference paper I'm giving at a conference on Shakespeare and Emotions in a couple of months. That paper will look at Caliban as an emotional model for hybrid figures in modern fantasy, not just in works that reference him explicitly like Tad William's Caliban, but more broadly. Hybrids are a staple of all kinds of fantasy - from Elrond Half-Elven in Lord of the Rings on - and Caliban with his combination of rage, fear, and love for his island with its "noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not" (The Tempest, III, 2, 148-9) is an literary antecedent for many of them.