Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Strong arguments for the logical superiority of the historical over the formal approach to genre theory have been advanced from the perspective of linguistics and on the grounds provided by the vicissitudes of translation.2 Beyond that, I would argue, the historical paradigm is to be preferred because it challenges its students to understand genre in a richer and more complex way, within parameters that are social rather than just literary.3 Confronted, for example, with the controversy over whether such acclaimed pieces as Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967) or Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See” (2002) are sf or not, a formal approach can only ask whether the story is or is not a legitimate member of the genre. Does it accomplish “the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition . . . [in] an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (Suvin, “On the Poetics” 375)? Is it a “realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method” (Heinlein 9)? Is it “modified by an awareness of the universe as a system of systems, a structure of structures” (Scholes 41)?4 Does it explore the impact of technology or scientific discovery on lived experience? And so on. An historical approach to genre would ask instead how and why the field is being stretched to include these texts or defended against their inclusion; how the identification of them as sf challenges and perhaps modifies the accepted meaning of the term (so that questions about form also continue to be part of the conversation, but not on the same terms); what tensions and strategies in the writing and publication and reading of sf prepare for this sort of radical intervention; and what interests are put at stake by it.

  Sf has no essence, no single unifying characteristic, and no point of origin

  That sf has no point of origin or single unifying characteristic is the Wittgensteinian position Kincaid proposes in “On the Origin of Genre.” The application of Wittgenstein’s thought to the notion of genre that is crucial to Kincaid was first proposed in 1982 in Alistair Fowler’s Kinds of Literature (41-44), an impressively erudite book whose central thesis is that genres are historical and mutable. As Fowler saw, Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance” is enormously suggestive for genre theory because it conceptualizes a grouping not based upon a single shared defining element. In the language game that constructs the category of games, for example, Wittgenstein says, “these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all—but … they are related to one another in many different ways.… We see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.” We extend the concept “as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres” (31-32, sections 65-66; emphasis in original).

  Another conceptual model for the shape of a genre that has no single unifying characteristic is provided by the notion of the fuzzy set (see Attebery, Strategies 12-13). A fuzzy set, in mathematics, is one that, rather than being determined by a single binary principle of inclusion or exclusion, is constituted by a plurality of such operations. The fuzzy set therefore includes elements with any of a range of characteristics, and membership in the set can bear very different levels of intensity, since some elements will have most or all of the required characteristics while others may have only one. In addition, one member of the set may be included by virtue of properties a, b, and c, another by properties d, e, and f, so that any two sufficiently peripheral members of the set need not have any properties in common. It thus results in a very similar conception of the shape of sf as one based on Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance. Either model allows sf the kind of scope and variety found in John Clute and Peter Nicholls’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

  It seems worth remembering, however, that something like such a fuzzy set was precisely the target of Suvin’s influential intervention into the history of definitions of sf. What Suvin opposed to the wide range of texts included in the category of sf was a precise concept of the genre ruled by what Roman Jakobson called a “dominant”: “the focusing component of a work of art … [that] rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components” (Jakobson 82). The categorical entity constituted by a fuzzy set or family resemblance, from this point of view, simply allows any number of incompatible versions of the textual dominant to operate silently, side by side, producing in the guise of a narrative genre a motley array of texts with no actual formal integrity. That, according to Suvin, was the state of sf studies when he entered into it his own rigorous formal definition, which directed itself powerfully against the illusion of integrity in a generic field that had allowed itself to be delineated in such a loose manner.

  I think that the conceptualization of sf as a fuzzy set generated by a range of definitions remains susceptible to this formalist critique—that it indiscriminately lumps together disparate subgenres under a nominal umbrella—because it is still ruled by the logic of textual determination, albeit in a far more diffuse way than that demanded by Jakobson’s notion of the textual dominant. A thoroughgoing theorist of the fuzzy set, rather than being pressed to identify the dominant that commands the operation of inclusion or exclusion from the generic set, would face the daunting task of enumerating the range of characteristics that merit inclusion, including not only textual properties but also intertextual relationships and paratextual functions such as “labeling.” Such a task would indeed be encyclopedic in scope, but I want to suggest that it would also be futile, because the quasi-mathematical model of the fuzzy set can never be adequate itself to the open-ended processes of history where genre formation and re-formation is constantly taking place. In this respect, Wittgenstein’s thinking is more attuned to the historical approach to genre than is the notion of the fuzzy set, because “the term ‘language-game’ is meant to call into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (Wittgenstein 11, section 23; emphases in original). Categorization, in this view, is not a passive registering of qualities intrinsic to what is being categorized, but an active intervention in their disposition, and this insistence on agency is what most decisively distinguishes an historical approach to sf from a formalist one.

  The term “family resemblance” has its shortcomings, however, when it comes to thinking about the problem of generic origins. Historians of sf are all too fond of proclaiming its moment of birth, whether it be in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories (1926), or elsewhere according to one’s geographical and historical emphasis; and the term “family resemblance” encourages the construction of the history of sf as some version of a family tree of descendants from one or more such progenitors.5 It is not quite enough to argue, as Kincaid does, that there is no “unique, common origin” for the genre (415); the collective and accretive social process by which sf has been constructed does not have the kind of coherent form or causality that allows one to talk about origins at all. Even without reference to Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialism, the historical approach to genre proposed in Hans-Robert Jauss’s reception theory exposes the logical problem with identifying the moment of origin for a genre insofar as, for Jauss, the notion of genre is based on repetition and is strictly opposed to his notion of originality. In Jauss’s reception theory, there cannot be a first example of a genre, because the generic character of a text is precisely what is repeated and conventional in it. A text can violate established generic expectations, but it can only be said to have established new expectations when other texts, in imitating its strategies, solidify them into the features of a genre. In order for a text to be recognized as having generic features, it must allude to a set of strategies, images, or themes that has already emerged
into the visibility of a conventional or at least repeatable gesture. Genre, therefore, is always found in the middle of things, never at the beginning of them.6

  A model that helps to better conceptualize the absence of origins in an historical approach to genre is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of the rhizomatic assemblage.7 What Deleuze and Guattari call a “collective assemblage of enunciation” (22) is constituted by “lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification” (3). It has no center, no “hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, [but rather] the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system … without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states” (21). The most important feature of the rhizomatic assemblage in relation to genre theory is that it is an “antigenealogy” that “operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots.… [I]t has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills” (21). The movement of texts and motifs into and through sf does not confer a pedigree on them, then, but instead merely connects one itinerary to another. The paths that connect those itineraries are not given in the “acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying” structure of the genre, but rather have been and must be constructed by writers, publishers, and readers out of the conjunctures they occupy and the materials at hand.

  The notion that sf’s history is one of “variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots” rather than a lineage of ancestors and descendants is nowhere more important than in the study of what, following the hint in the title of Everett Bleiler’s indispensable bibliography, Science-Fiction: The Early Years (1990), I would call early science fiction. Studying the beginnings of the genre is not at all a matter of finding its points of origin but rather of observing an accretion of repetitions, echoes, imitations, allusions, identifications, and distinctions that testifies to an emerging sense of a conventional web of resemblances. It is this gradual articulation of generic recognition, not the appearance of a formal type, that constitutes the history of early sf. Thus, rather than sorting out true sf from the genres in its proximity or trying to find its primal ancestors, it is far more useful to take stock of the way that sf gradually comes into visibility in the milieu of late nineteenth-century narrative: imperial adventure fiction, the extraordinary voyage, the romance revival of the 1880s and 1890s in England, the boy-scientists of the American dime novel, utopian writing, the future-war motif, and so on.8 One is not looking for the appearance of a positive entity but rather for a practice of drawing similarities and differences among texts, which is the point further elaborated by the third proposition.

  Sf is not a set of texts, but rather a way of using texts and of drawing relationships among them

  All those involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of sf—writers, editors, marketing specialists, casual readers, fans, scholars, students—construct the genre not only by acts of definition, categorization, inclusion, and exclusion (all of which are important), but also by their uses of the protocols and the rhetorical strategies that distinguish the genre from other forms of writing and reading. John Frow, at the beginning of his excellent and concise recent summary of the current state of genre theory, writes: “I understand genre as a form of symbolic action: the generic organization of language, images, gestures, and sound makes things happen by actively shaping the way we understand the world.… Texts—even the simplest and most formulaic—do not ‘belong’ to genres but are, rather, uses of them” (Genre 2). Genre requires “symbolic action” rather than being inherent in the form or content of a text, illustrated by the way generic difference can reside within verbal identity. Consider the example offered by Samuel R. Delany, who juxtaposes realist and sf readings of the sentence, “He turned on his left side”; the realist reading understands that someone has changed the position of his body, but the sf reading might mean that he has activated the left side of his body by turning on a switch (Delany 103). The point of this example is not so much that the sf reading exploits the grammatical and semantic possibilities of the language in a different and richer way, as Delany argued, as that the second reading depends upon the reader’s familiarity with and use of sf conventions—in particular, here, the expectation that the distinction between organism and machine is going to be blurred or violated. Both the writer and the reader of the sentence in its sf sense are using the genre to actively shape their understanding of the world—that is, the world depicted in the text in question, and its relation to both an empirical environment and to other generically constructed worlds (the world of fantasy, the world of comedy, and so on).9

  The distinction between a text’s using a genre and its belonging to it also changes the relationship between the individual text and the genre, so that it is no longer one of simple exemplification, where the text stands as a metonym or synecdoche of the genre. The character of genre as “symbolic action” implies that genre is one of the many kinds of codes that, as Roland Barthes pointed out so relentlessly in S/Z, a text activates. Generic hybridity is not a special case, then; any narrative longer than a headline or a joke almost inevitably uses multiple generic conventions and strategies. Distinctions between sf and fantasy typically, if tacitly, acknowledge this fact, since they so often turn upon the status afforded to realist conventions in relation to the rest of the narrative. Because of the way that multiple genres play upon and against one another in individual texts, pigeonholing a text as a member of this or that genre is much less useful than understanding the way it positions itself within a field of generic possibilities.10

  Sf’s identity is a differentially articulated position in an historical and mutable field of genres

  Frow, after postulating the thesis that texts use genres rather than belong to them, goes on to say that the uses of genre in a text “refer not to ‘a’ genre but to a field or economy of genres, and [the text’s] complexity derives from the complexity of that relation” (Genre 2). To speak of an “economy of genres,” as Frow does here, is to think of the generic codes activated in a text or by a reader as a matter of making choices with values attached to them by virtue of their difference from other possible choices. Such an economy depends crucially on the system of genres in play at a given time and place. Genres—like phonemes and words in Saussure’s lectures on linguistics—are here considered values that signify by virtue of their difference from the other values in their field, and may change or lose their meaning if transposed into a different system. Thus, as Tony Bennett puts it, generic analysis must always take into account “the system of generic differences—conceived as a differentiated field of social uses—prevailing at [a given] time in terms of its influence on both textual strategies and contexts of reception” (108), because every generic choice constitutes what Pierre Bourdieu calls a position-taking with respect to the positions and values that structure the contemporary field of choices. Understanding the dynamics of genre in a given text depends upon being able to understand the field that offers the writer or reader its range of generic possibilities and determines the values attached to them.

  Problems of generic economy are absolutely crucial to sf studies in two ways, the first having to do with questions of prestige and the second with writing the genre’s history. Roger Luckhurst has written very entertainingly about sf’s “death wish,” which is to say its desire to stop being sf and become “literature.” The source of that desire is the way positions and values line up in the contemporary economy of genres to produce the negative connotations often attached to “genre fiction:”

  The paradigmatic topography of ghetto/mainstream marks a border on which are transposed the evaluations popular/serious, low/high, entertainment/Literature.… 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. (Luckhurst, “Many Deaths” 37-38)

  The conceit of the death wish actually refers to something rather different than an instinctual drive, of course—the fact that, although one can make choices (in this case, about genre), one can only choose from the options that history makes available. Many scholars (and editors, writers, and readers) of sf would like to have their sf and their literature too, but that is an option that the distinction between high and low culture has tended to foreclose.

  The obsession with definite boundaries that once abounded in discussions of genre rested, not on a widespread desire for precision in making genre distinctions, but rather on the effects of prestige attached to positions in the contemporary genre system; and this is the source of the recurrent drawing and redrawing of sf’s borders that Luckhurst writes about. The fact that genre boundaries are so frequently described as prescriptive and constricting derives, similarly, not from their really being that way, but rather from the fact that in modern Western artistic practices more prestige accrues to violating these boundaries than to conforming to them. Hence the concept of “literature” as such has repeatedly been formulated as the category where every work constructs its own unique genre (e.g., by Friedrich Schlegel, Benedetto Croce, and Maurice Blanchot; see Frow, Genre 26-27, and Altman, Film/Genre 4-7). What this understanding of “literature” puts at stake is much less the prescriptive force of generic boundaries than the play of expectation and surprise in a text’s handling of them, as in the stark opposition in Jauss’s reception theory between innovative strategies and the understanding of genre itself as a set of predictable and eventually worn-out conventions. Yet, although distinctions between high and low modes of narrative can be expected to exist wherever class differences attach themselves to the production and distribution of narratives—which is to say throughout history—the particular way that high and low are connected in contemporary genre practices with innovation versus imitation is a more recent and specific development. The peculiar sense of “literature” as the category whose members defy categorization is an integral part of the history of the sense of “genre” that is one of sf’s conditions of existence. Thus writing the history of sf has to involve, at a minimum, attending to the historical change in generic systems that produced that distinction.