Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  This is a parodic history, no doubt, and yet it seems integral to any putative “history” that SF is haunted by its own death, that it constantly passes through this state of terminal disease. Why? Is this unanswerable? In this I am echoing Derrida’s speculation on philosophy at the opening of his essay “Violence and Metaphysics”:

  That philosophy died yesterday. . .—and philosophy should still wander towards the meaning of its death—or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying. . .; that philosophy died one day, within history, or that it has always fed on its own agony. . .; that beyond the death, or dying nature of philosophy, thought still has a future, or even, as is said today, is still entirely to come because of what philosophy has held in store. . .—all these are unanswerable questions. (79)

  Is SF also only surviving, dwindling in its last days, or paradoxically living on after its death? And is this the fast-fading ghost or the longed-for re-birth? Is it, like “philosophy,” living on, an “SF” after-living SF? And yet unlike philosophy, there is no determinable phase of “life”: its death is there from the beginning. SF indeed seems to be “always feeding on its own agony.” In what follows, I want to analyze the narrative of death integral to SF and perhaps attempt to answer the puzzling question of its constant, haunting presence in critical considerations of the genre. It is my polemical proposal that these regularly issued panic narratives, these apocalyptic warnings and calls to arms, in fact conceal the opposite concern: that SF wants to die, that it is ecstatic at the prospect of its own death and desires nothing else.

  As a way of entry, let me begin with the work of J.G. Ballard. There has been a systematic re-vision of Ballard’s work in recent years. His uneasy relation to the genre was initially figured in terms of his unrelenting pessimism, his perversion of the teleological narrative of scientific progress so central to “hard” SF. Blish objected to the passivity in Ballard’s “disaster novels”: “you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship it” (128). Peter Nicholls condemned Ballard’s oeuvre outright: Ballard is “advocating a life style quite likely to involve the sudden death of yourself and those you love” (31). Ballard’s nihilism is exemplified by his obsessive representations of mutilation, suicidal passivity, and the embrace, the positive willing, of death. One interpretive possibility remains: that the “disaster novels” focus on “the perverse desires, mad ambitions, and suicidal manias of aberrant personalities now free to fulfill fatal aspirations devoid of any rational motivation” (Barlow 32).

  However, the re-vision began with Ballard’s dismissal of this “false” reading:

  I don’t see my fiction as disaster-oriented. . .they’re. . .stories of psychic fulfillment. The geophysical changes which take place in The Drought, The Drowned World, and The Crystal World are all positive and good changes. . .[that] lead us to our real psychological goals. . . . Really, I’m trying to show a new kind of logic emerging, and this is to be embraced, or at least held in regard. (Pringle and Goddard 40)

  Peter Brigg and Warren Wagar have subsequently offered the inverted perspective and “perverse” argument that the literal catastrophe is metaphorically “transvalued” into positive narratives of psychic transcendence: that these are fables of “self-overcoming in perilous confrontation with the world” (Wagar 56). Gregory Stevenson, in Out of the Night and into the Dream, has taken this position to its most religiose extreme: all of Ballard’s work is to be encoded into a pseudo-Jungian-Christian mish-mash of transcendence. Death as the terminus, as liminal facticity and the problematic of finitude, is to be re-figured as the metaphorical transgression of the bounds of the bodily into an ultimate, ecstatic (re-)unification and (re-) integration.

  In adjudicating on these competing frames, death is undoubtedly pivotal. The issue comes down to what form of death the Ballardian text proposes. Clearly the narrative of transcendence is attempting to shift from the “wrong” (literal) death to the “right” (metaphorical) death. Being-towards-death is replaced by Being-beyond-death. But it is not as simple as this straightforward substitution of deaths suggests. There is a certain violence in trying to elide Ballard’s oeuvre into a singular narrative, which tends to erase important differences between The Drowned World and The Crystal World, where textual evidence for transcendence is clear, and The Drought, which is more rigorously existential in concentrating on what Jaspers would call the unreadable and unattainable “cipher-script” of the Transcendent.1 Such a narrative is also uncomfortable with The Atrocity Exhibition where the concern for violence and death is displaced onto the figure of the Woman. It is also useful, I think, to retain Ballard’s clear debt to Freud’s speculations on the literal fact of human aggressivity and violence in Civilization and Its Discontents,2 especially as it is central to the book which so influenced Ballard, Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo.3

  It needs re-emphasizing that the literal and figural readings of death are inextricable and intertwined; transcendence of the bodily clearly depends on the facticity of the body in order to have any productive meaning. Why is this so important? Because in terms of SF criticism this re-visioning of Ballard forms a kind of meta-commentary on the project of legitimating SF as a whole genre.

  Elsewhere I have argued that the attraction of “postmodernism” for SF critics is its apparent transgressive aesthetic, its erasure of the borders between disciplines, discursive regimes, and crucially for SF the boundary between the high and the low. With postmodernism, it would appear, the ghetto walls of the popular can be dismantled and SF can (re)join the “mainstream” of fiction, no longer being equated with the embarrassing and degrading label of popular genre fiction. The longing for (re)entry to the “mainstream” is the enduring central element of SF criticism. Ballard’s texts in effect perform this desire figured both as literal death (of genre) into a transcendent unity (with the mainstream). In “The Voices of Time,” the language of Powers’s dissolution is crucial: “he felt his body gradually dissolving, its physical dimensions melting into a vast continuum of the current, which bore him out into the centre of the great channel, sweeping him onward, beyond hope but at last at rest” (39-40). This is the literal entry into the main stream. Indeed, rather than criticism reading Ballard, Ballard’s text could be seen to read and expose the fantasy of criticism: release from the bondedness of genre into the undivided stream of Literature. One could read the text’s evocative description of the terminal lapse into narcoma as the death throes of generic SF and this final vision as the ecstatic release, the abandonment of generic boundaries. In Derrida’s terms, Ballard exposes the “generic law” by performing that very law: SF is marked by, and Ballard re-marks, the genre’s desire for its own death.

  This might seem a provocative and peculiarly perverse argument, but I intend to demonstrate that this fantasy of death is crucial to how SF critics legitimate SF as a genre. It is vital to emphasize that this death-wish is the result of the structure of legitimation. The paradigmatic topography of ghetto/mainstream marks a border on which is transposed the evaluations popular/serious, low/high, entertainment/Literature.4 One might expect SF critics to formulate evaluative criteria specific to the site of SF and the generic. However SF critics tend to take their criteria from the “high” and then proceed to denigrate SF in its relational, constructed position as “low,” as failing to achieve “literary” standards. That this topography is imposed by largely invisible and unexamined categories of “worth” (the evaluative designations of “high,” as I demonstrate below, are the products of an historical moment) is left unquestioned. The only way, it is proposed, to legitimate SF is to smuggle it across the border into the “high.” And for the genre as a whole to become legitimate paradoxically involves the very destruction of the genre.

  Before the tribunal of the “high,” SF legitimates itself in three ways: by the implementation of internal borders; by a certain narrative of its (in/ glorious) history; and by the appeal to the rigor of the scientific. The first two apply
for citizenship in Literature, whilst the latter claims partial guilt on the grounds of diminished responsibility. And one could polemically argue that these, in very different ways, all propose a form of death.

  SF critics often want to make grand claims for the genre. For Scholes and Rabkin, it “create[s] a modern conscience for the human race” (vii); it fits, indeed supersedes, the great humanistic claims for literature as a whole. At the same time, and on the same page, they are equally aware that SF is constituted out of “trivial, ephemeral works of ‘popular’ fiction which is barely literate, let alone literary.” Most of the subsequent work of their text is dedicated to affirming these two contradictory statements by separating them out, divorcing them from each other as distinct and “pure” sites within SF. An internal border is constituted whereby, on the one hand, the “grand claim” is asserted and so entry to Literature can be gained, whilst on the other, SF can, in alliance with the categories of the legitimate, be condemned.

  Scholes and Rabkin justify their own critical text on the basis that SF has ceased to be wholly popular now that “a sufficient number of works of genuine merit” have been written from within it (vii). The logic of legitimation through the implementation of internal boundaries can be stated thus: SF is a popular genre which yet contains within it a movement of profundity; in order to secure that “serious” element a mark, a line of division, must be approved, by which the ghetto can be transcended. If, as Darko Suvin insists, “The genre has to be evaluated proceeding from the heights down, applying the standards gained by the analysis of its masterpieces” (Poetics 71), and yet these very heights transcend the genre, such texts could be said to no longer belong to SF. SF-which-is-not-SF is the apotheosis and judge of SF.

  The internal border is usually implemented at the site of the definition. It involves isolating a central definition through which all other cases can be rejected or shifted to the edges as impure. These marginalia are, unsurprisingly, identical with precisely the elements that might mark the genre as popular; their displacement de-contaminates it of the pulp, leaving the “serious” works as the central representatives of the genre. Darko Suvin is the exemplar of this strategy. SF as “cognitive estrangement” defamiliarizes the empirical environment by foregrounding the artificiality of its “natural” norms. This cognitive utility of SF is based on the rigor of applying scientific laws; such worlds must be possible. Suvin presents a definition that appeals to the specificity of “hard” SF—which is also asserted by Scholes in Structural Fabulation, Charles Platt, and many others. The law of science, however, superimposes on the law of genre; this strict definition is the basis for a wholesale deportation of categories which surround, indeed interpenetrate inextricably, SF. Hence SF “retrogressing into fairy tale. . .is committing creative suicide” (Poetics 62); fantasy is a “sub-literature of mystification” (Poetics 63). What is truly astonishing in Suvin’s system is his dismissal of virtually all, if not all, SF in itself. “Narrative Logic, Ideological Domination and the Range of SF” draws a fan-shaped diagram, in which the bottom point, the convergence of the range, is marked as the “optimum” SF. Above it are borderlines marking “good” and “most” SF. This “most” is “debilitating confectionery,” and, he asserts, “there is only one ideal optimum” (Positions 70). Is the ideal here a Platonic one? Does it imply that the optimum is unattainable in fact? Those falling short of this ideal are discussed under the titles “banal,” “incoherent,” “dogmatic,” and “invalidated”: “all uses of SF as prophecy, futurology, program or anything else claiming ontological factuality for the SF image-clusters, are obscurantist and reactionary at the deepest level” (Positions 71).

  Suvin’s final and deathly judgments are proscriptions which result from the desperate desire to decontaminate and inoculate SF. If the rigor of his definitionalism is an attempt to isolate a singular utility for SF, it is also a logic that prescribes a death. The cordon sanitaire of legitimacy constricts so far as to annihilate SF.

  Suvin’s writings on the history of SF are more valuable than this harsh imposition of borders, yet in some senses they are also exemplary of the strategies of legitimation that operate in the histories of SF. SF history serves two functions: that of embedding SF in the mainstream (the historical erasure of the boundary) and of serving to eliminate, or at least displace, the illicit site of the naming of SF—America. This narrative can be parodically summarized in the following way: once there was an Edenic time when SF swam with the mainstream, was inseparable and unidentifiable from it; then came the Americans who walled it up and issued a proclamation of martial law. This is the self-imposition of the ghetto, the “40 years” (rather than days) in the wilderness (see Merril 54). This narrative ends prophetically: there will come a time when the walls will be demolished, when SF will rejoin the mainstream and cease its disreputable existence. Conclusions to such histories are the sites where the longing for death becomes most explicit.

  Historical legitimations can in fact begin in prehistory; SF is merely a modernized version of the “innately” human need for “mythology” by which to orient experience. The biological need for SF is asserted by Scholes, who argues that the desire for narrative, once satisfied by myth, can now be provided by popular forms, given the decadence and abandonment of narrative by the mainstream. This explains why normally respectable readers “resort secretly and guiltily to lesser forms for that narrative fix they cannot do without” (“Roots” 53). SF, it is seemingly argued here, is restoring an imbalance afflicted by the loss of narrative (the language of chemical compulsion is also used by Kingsley Amis, although in a different context: SF is an “addiction” which is “mostly contracted in adolescence or not at all” [16]). The more properly historical mode, however, attempts to embed and entwine SF into the mainstream. Legitimation comes from appropriating, say, Swift, Thomas More or Lucian to SF; history saves the illegitimate child by discovering its “true” parentage. This is a fascinating strategy: it is not the attempt to find a fixed identity or essence of SF; it is concerned precisely with constructing a non-origin, to disperse it, to deny specificity. SF does not “begin” anywhere as such, and the disreputable generic can be displaced to become a mere bit-part in a larger historical unfolding.

  The suppression involved is that of a name: Gernsback. I am not suggesting that the origin of SF lies with him, but his originating of the site is crucial. Gernsback is ritually vilified: for Aldiss, he was “one of the worst disasters ever to hit the science fiction field” (63); for Blish, he is solely responsible for ghettoization (118); for Clareson, he initiated the abandonment of literature “to propagandize for technology” (20); for Merril, the 40 years in the wilderness begins in 1926 with Amazing. What follows is a movement either backwards to predate a baleful influence, or forward to celebrate his supersession. The attempt at erasure, however, cannot ignore Gernsback’s initial elaboration of the conditions on which the genre has come to be defined: “to publish only such stories that have their basis in scientific laws as we know them, or the logical deduction of new laws from what we know” (scientific rigor/extrapolation); that the fictions would “supply knowledge. . .in a very palatable form” (legitimation through educative role—also seen by Janice Radway to be a crucial mode in which women readers of popular romance fiction legitimate their reading); the grand claim for its cultural significance—“Posterity will point to [the SF story] as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well” (my emphasis).5 These have all been widely used subsequently. Amazing was also instrumental in constructing a community through reader participation. Whether seen positively or negatively, SF as a genre can only be understood with reference to where its conventions and limits were inscribed, despite the constant attempt to displace it.

  It might seem to be the most naive SF historiography to mark Gernsback as the initiator; naming, however, is different from origin. Gernsback did not appear sui generis. The constitution of the site of the specif
ic SF magazine in the 1920s was a product of some 40 years of socio-cultural re-alignments around the “literary.” H.G. Wells has been cited as both the progenitor of generic SF and the last instance of an “SF” text being accepted into an undifferentiated field of Literature before the ghettoization effected by Gernsback. This is inaccurate, however; the latter decades of the 19th century were the crucial phase of the development of the categories of the “high” and “low” as they now operate institutionally. This is an incredibly complex moment in the construction of cultural value in, as Peter Keating observes, a publishing field that had explosively expanded into a bewildering diversity. The “popular” or “low” was not simply the demonized Other, the defining negative, of an emergent Modernism;6 moral panic over the links between “penny dreadfuls” and working-class criminality had developed in the 1870s (see Bristow). If Thomas Wright had divided the high from the low in 1881, and 20 years later the Times Literary Supplement was set up to distinguish the “better authors” from the “rubbish heap of incompetence,”7 it should not be forgotten that there was an equally belligerent assertion for the moral superiority of the re-vivified “Romance.” Largely in the pages of The Contemporary Review, Andrew Lang, Rider Haggard, and others attacked the effete etiolation of the modern “serious” novel and argued for the “muscular” romance or adventure story. Against the diseased interiority of the “analytic novel,” the romance “deliberately reverted to the simpler instead of more complicated kind of novel,” and, in an inversion that prefigures Scholes’s attempt to displace the “mainstream,” Saintsbury also argued that “romance is of its nature eternal and preliminary to the novel. The novel is of its nature transitory and parasitic on the romance” (415-16). Literary histories tend to emphasize this late Victorian phase as the construction of the Modernist “Artwork” in opposition to the now degraded “low.” It was also, just as significantly, the moment in which the sites (increasingly low priced, increasingly specialized fiction magazines), terminology (Wright entitled his essay “Popular Fiction” in 1881; “bestseller” was coined in 1889), and the very forms and genres of the modern concept of popular literature were founded.