Concepts from Fiction

Every now and again, someone adds a concept to the human meme-pool¹. Many of these were first postulated in scientific works, but some spring from works of fiction.

Here we look at what these concepts say about the thoughts of the authors and the times in which they were formulated. If we focus on the 19th and 20th centuries, we discover several distinct themes. These concern society as a whole, individual human behaviour, and what one might call visions of the future. The concepts these individuals created or named are mostly very bleak, concerning the crushing of the individual, the shadow-side of humanity, and the unreliability of progress².

The creation of these new words and phrases suggests that traditional myths and fairy tales were no longer sufficient to interpret or explain the human condition. One example that does not fit into the list below is Tolkienesque which is used to describe any world of magical fantasy, drawing upon, in the main, European myths and legends. Tolkien was not the first to create an entire fictional world with his hobbits roaming Middle Earth, but the popularity and influence of The Lord of the Rings does suggest that the time was right for new parables and metaphors.

Politics, Progress and Dystopias

If we look at the political concerns of writers in the 19th and 20th centuries we find them dealing with tyranny and the mechanised state, and the vulnerability of individuals.

(Use URL for complete article: http://www0.bbc.co.uk/dna/360/A613054 )

Lolita

A more explicitly disturbing view of young girls is provided by Nabokov, who gave a name to something which was largely unacknowledged - at least in polite society - before the publication of Lolita. The girl of the title is pre-pubescent at the beginning of the book, and although the narrator makes the point that he is not the first to love her physically, the book caused an outrage when it was eventually published in the US in the 1950s³. There is an ambiguity in the tale: is it the girl who goes out ! to attract, or is it the man who seeks out young flesh? Who is the innocent? Is he a man who had never thought about this kind of thing before blaming a 'too-knowing' young girl for the chasm he is falling into, more or less willingly? Nabokov himself asserts, in effect, that it is simply a story he had to get off his chest.

¹ It would be really nice to be able to include meme in this list; but as it was coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, which is not a work of fiction, it doesn't qualify. A 'meme' is an idea, concept or behaviour which takes on a life of its own; Dawkins includes the wearing of baseball caps backwards in his examples.
² Pure and unrealised science fiction is outside the scope of this entry.

³ Lolita was first published in France (1955) after being rejected by a string of American publishers. After being pronounced unobjectionable by the US Customs office it was subsequently heralded by ovations from writers, professors, and critics on both sides of the Atlantic.