In his famous book For a history of the imaginary Professor Lucian Boia identifies the alterity (the otherness) as one of the recurring patterns in the human
culture, upon which the entire mythology of the alien man is founded. At present the radical forms of this pattern
are related strictly to the imaginary, but could they ever become a reality?
A few weeks ago I read a book that marked the
emergence of a new genre in the Romanian culture. Until recently, among the
fiction genres of the Romanian literature, we could find fantasy fiction,
science fiction, magical realism fiction and surrealism fiction but, however,
no horror fiction, as it simply did not exist. This is the novelty brought by
Oliviu Crâznic and his debut novel ...And Then The Nightmare Came At Last (a novel which has received a lot of important
awards in a relatively short time span):
the appearance of the gothic genre within the Romanian literature.
As I went through the book, the first thought that
came into my mind was that the author writes very well: a writing style which
is elegant, alert and dynamic, despite the elaborate depictions and the almost
pedantic attention to details. Throughout the entire story, up to the very last
page, Oliviu Crâznic is playing with the attention of the reader, in a
captivating game of appearances and unexpected twists in the plot that capture
the imagination, the mind being simply glued to the narrated events. Just as in
a Hitchcock’s film, Crâznic’s novel makes you follow his path so as to see what
will happen next and what lies behind the masks apparently worn by almost all
characters. And, in addition to all of these, beyond these sharply defined
profiles of the heroes, beyond the dark mise-en-scene,
we can permanently see an ineffable love story which is somehow
ethereally permeating the entire plot.
Then, after I finished reading it, my mind flew
inevitably to the analysis of the archetypal structure that dominates the whole
novel, the radical alterity (ie the
human prototype distorted beyond the boundaries of humanity) and its classical
representations within the universal culture (Pan, Minotaur, Frankenstein, Dracula, lycanthropy, mermaids, fairies,
Yeti etc.). I thus came to think of a relatively recent film, I am Legend (2007) whose plot proposes
that we should accept that, at some point in the not too distant future, our
darkest imagination may become a reality on account of a science which gets out
of control.
Could it be possible that the hypothesis proposed by
this film to become a reality someday? Might there come a time when things
could be reversed, when the fantastic
biology and the nightmare creatures „painted” by Oliviu Crâznic in his
novel (creatures deemed to be merely myths nowadays) predominate and the common
man becomes, instead, only a legend, a thing of the past ?
Could this dystopia be the ultimate outcome of the
science of biotechnology ?