The X-Files and Literature: Unweaving the Story, Unraveling the Lie to Find the Truth
Sharon R. Yang, Editor.
ISBN 1-84718-239-9
The X-Files and Literature contains fifteen essays on the popular television series, all written by academics. Including the Introduction by the editor Sharon R. Yang, there are sixteen contributors. According to the biographical information on each contributor at the end of the book, nine of the contributors are students, mostly pursuing PhDs. As a civilian, I was initially concerned that the prose would be too dense or specialized for me to enjoy. My trepidations were allayed upon reading Sharon Yang’s introduction, which was entertaining and informative.
In the first part of Sharon Yang’s introduction, she begins by demonstrating the importance of the X-Files in modern Western culture. The three famous slogans of the X-Files, “I Want to Believe”, “The Truth is Out There”, and “Trust No One”, concisely capture the contemporary zeitgeist. Yang points out that there have already been at least two critical studies of the X-Files: PopLit, PopCult and The X-Files by Jan Delasara and Deny All Knowledge edited by Lavery, Hague and Cartwright. According to Yang, Delasara’s book is “geared for a nonacademic audience” while Deny All Knowledge contains one essay that is “an insightful Lacanian analysis of The X-Files”. Yang also mentions Peter Knight’s Conspiracy Culture. Yang then claims that this latest book goes where “the others have stopped short, to interrogate the significance of the X-Files imbuing itself with the varied manifestations of literature”.
What follows in the second part of Yang’s introduction is a fascinating attempt to define the term “literature”. “Contemporary critical schools continue to converge and clash over the meaning and value of literature”, says Yang. She provides useful explanations of what Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructionist critics do. Can we come to terms with these clashing schools of criticism to understand what is meant by the term “literature”?
The answer lies in what distinguishes literature from the other arts. By way of answer, we get a quote from the oft-quoted episode “José Chung’s From Outer Space” (Third Season): “words – mere words”. Unfortunately, as Foucault pointed out, words have lost their stability. Words are determined by other words, themselves determined by other words, unto infinity. The meanings of words shift, influenced by when and whom they are used. Lyrics set to music weaken the distinction between literature and music. Film incorporates words. Ultimately, argues Yang, The X-Files are literature.
Traditionally, says Yang, literature is a “vehicle for searching out truth”. As times change, this literary truth is expressed in new forms, such as popular television series. At the same time, the X-Files makes fun of literature’s conceits. “[…] the perception of literature as didactic, high culture, and confusingly complex, joining with science, economics, and social morés as tools of the ‘intellectual and political elite’ makes this art form an apt subject for the X-Files to subvert […].”
The earliest form of literature is myth, and mythology is the first category into which the fifteen essays are divided. Part I of The X-Files and Literature is “Mythologies”, and the first five essays look at the X-Files through the refracting lens of myth- specifically Christian myth, American myth, and folklore. Part II, “Gothic Redux” looks at the X-Files through the lens of "Gothic"- itself a slippery term. Yang’s introduction provides a useful explanation of what is meant by the term “Gothic”. Part III “Narrative Innovation,” examines the X-Files through the lens of the Postmodern- “[…] the unmooring of the authority of the ‘Word’[…]”.
One of the fifteen essays that immediately aroused interest was The X-Files: Continuing the Psychic Detective Legacy by Sage Leslie-McCarthy. This is a solid, well-written and informative essay that traces the history of a sub-genre known as “psychic detective fiction”. Although a fascination with paranormal phenomena has recently become manifest again in popular culture, this sub-genre initially resulted from a cross-pollination between the Gothic and detective genres in the nineteenth century.
In 1872 Sheridan Le Fanu published his stories of Martin Hesselius, “[…] arguably the first literary character of the type […]”. Spiritualism had fascinated British society since the 1840s, and eventually the claims of Spiritualism were put to the scientific test. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in England in 1882, and remains active. Past presidents of SPR include Arthur Balfour, William James, and Andrew Lang. In 1887 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes story. Gothic literature, with its interest in supernatural beings, was already well established. The forms combined to produce the psychic detective, who investigates paranormal events using the tools of science. The best known of these nineteenth-century psychic detectives is Abraham Van Helsing from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
An X-Files innovation was the splitting of the psychic detective into two roles- Mulder and Scully. This split provides the series with a compelling dynamic, as we see the evolving interplay between the “debunking detective” Scully and the “I Want to Believe” Mulder. As the series progresses, Scully is slowly won over to Mulder’s position. This dynamic was examined in the Delasara book, which Leslie-McCarthy quotes: “[…] this dynamic tension between Scully and Mulder constructs their dual identity as a richly complex one, similar to that of a well-developed character in literary art, whose contradictory traits and conflicting loyalties and beliefs make the individual seem more believably human.” Adding more tension to this dynamic, traditional gender roles are reversed. The female Scully represents skeptical male science, whereas the male Mulder represents feminine intuition.
There is more to this interplay between skepticism and belief than character development. The twentieth century has different concerns than the nineteenth. As scientific advancement occurred at an increasing pace and society became more secular, the New Age movement that emerged in the 1960s reinvigorated interest in the paranormal and the occult. The “Truth” that Mulder seeks is post-modernly ambiguous. Sometimes the bad guy wins.
It is beyond the scope of this review to comment on the fourteen remaining essays. However, those interested in the intersection of the X-Files with academe will apprehend much merely from a recitation of the essay titles. The five essays that comprise Part I: Mythologies are The Last Temptation of Mulder: Reading the X-Files through the Christological Lens of Nikos Kazantzakis by Amy M. Donaldson, Whosoever Believeth: Rereading the Bible through the X-Files by Karen Wolf, The Grail of Truth: The X-Files as Modern Day Arthurian Quest by Joan R. Vredenburgh, Vanishing Americans: James Fenimore Cooper’s Detectives and the Trauma of Alien Invasion in The X-Files by Brian Hauser, and The Folklore Files: In(corp)orating Legends in the X-Files (sic) by Mikel J. Koven.
The three essays that comprise Part II: Gothic Redux are The Truth is Back There: The X-Files and Early Science Fiction by Jason P. Vest, The X-Files: Continuing the Psychic Detective Legacy by Sage Leslie-McCarthy, and The X-Files and the Science Fiction Gothic by Robert L. Lively.
The seven essays that comprise Part III: Narrative Innovation are Post-Modern Prometheus, Postmodern Voices: The X-Files and Subjective Storytelling by Cary Jones, The Influence of Poe’s Mad Narrator on The X-Files Narrative and Mythology by Tamy Burnett, Believing the Lie: Interpretive Strategies and Epistemic Choices in The X-Files by Margaret Kaner, Trying to Tell ‘The Truth’: Metafiction and Historiographic Metafiction in the X-Files by Sherry R. Truffin, The X-Files Meets Vineland by Thomas Argiro, Tennyson’s ‘Tithonius’ and the Exhaustion of Survival in The X-Files by Matthew VanWinkle, and finally The Ending is Out There by Suzanne Speidel.
Written entirely by academics and priced at $80, this book is not aimed at the casual X-phile. Hardcore X-philes will find at least one (and perhaps more than one) of the essays in the book engaging.