Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  4. The thesis concerning the structural impossibility of utopian representation outlined above now suggests some unexpected consequences in the aesthetic realm. It is by now, I hope, a commonplace that the very thrust of literary modernism—with its public introuvable and the breakdown of traditional cultural institutions, in particular the social “contract” between writer and reader—has had as one significant structural consequence the transformation of the cultural text into an auto-referential discourse, whose content is a perpetual interrogation of its own conditions of possibility.10 We may now show that this is no less the case with the utopian text. Indeed, in the light of everything that has been said, it will not be surprising to discover that as the true vocation of the utopian narrative begins to rise to the surface—to confront us with our incapacity to imagine Utopia—the center of gravity of such narratives shifts towards an auto-referentiality of a specific, but far more concrete type: such texts then explicitly or implicitly, and as it were against their own will, find their deepest “subjects” in the possibility of their own production, in the interrogation of the dilemmas involved in their own emergence as utopian texts.

  Ursula Le Guin’s only “contemporary” SF novel, the underrated Lathe of Heaven (1971), may serve as documentation for this more general proposition. In this novel, which establishes Le Guin’s home city of Portland, Oregon, alongside Berkeley and Los Angeles, as one of the legendary spaces of contemporary SF, a hapless young man finds himself tormented by the unwanted power to dream “effective dreams,” those which in other words change external reality itself, and reconstruct the latter’s historical past in such a way that the previous “reality” disappears without a trace. He places himself in the hands of an ambitious psychiatrist, who then sets out to use his enormous proxy power to change the world for the benefit of mankind. But reality is a seamless web: change one detail and unexpected, sometimes monstrous transformations occur in other apparently unrelated zones of life, as in the classical time-travel stories where one contemporary artifact, left behind by accident in a trip to the Jurassic age, transforms human history like a thunderclap. The other archetypal reference is the dialectic of “wishes” in fairy tales, where one gratification is accompanied with a most unwanted secondary effect, which must then be wished away in its turn (its removal bringing yet another undesirable consequence, and so forth).

  The ideological content of Le Guin’s novel is clear, although its political resonance is ambiguous: from the central position of her mystical Taoism, the effort to “reform” and to ameliorate, to transform society in a liberal or revolutionary way is seen, after the fashion of Edmund Burke, as a dangerous expression of individual hubris and a destructive tampering with the rhythms of “nature.” Politically, of course, this ideological message may be read either as the liberal’s anxiety in the face of a genuinely revolutionary transformation of society or as the expression of more conservative misgivings about the New-Deal type reformism and do-goodism of the welfare state.11

  On the aesthetic level, however—which is what concerns us here—the deeper subject of this fascinating work can only be the dangers of imagining Utopia and more specifically of writing the utopian text itself. More transparently than much other SF, this book is “about” its own process of production, which is recognized as impossible: George Orr cannot dream Utopia; yet in the very process of exploring the contradictions of that production, the narrative gets written, and “Utopia” is “produced” in the very movement by which we are shown that an “achieved” Utopia—a full representation—is a contradiction in terms. We may thus apply to The Lathe of Heaven those prophetic words of Roland Barthes about the dynamics of modernism generally, that the latter’s monuments “linger as long as possible, in a sort of miraculous suspension, on the threshold of Literature itself 1 read, in this context: Utopial, in this anticipatory situation in which the density of life is given and developed without yet being destroyed through its consecration as an [institutionalized] sign system.”12

  It is, however, more fitting to close this discussion with another SF-Utopian text from the Second World today, one of the most glorious of all contemporary Utopias, the Strugatsky Brothers’ astonishing Roadside Picnic (1977; first serialized in 1972).13 This text moves in a space beyond the facile and obligatory references to the two rival social systems; and it cannot be coherently decoded as yet another samizdat message or expression of liberal political protest by Soviet dissidents.14 Nor, although its figural material is accessible and rewritable in a way familiar to readers who live within the rather different constraints of either of the two industrial and bureaucratic systems, is it an affirmation or demonstration of what is today called “convergence” theory. Finally, while the narrative turns on the mixed blessings of wonder-working technology, this novel does not seem to me to be programmed by the category of “technological determinism” in either the Western or the Eastern style: that is, it is locked neither into a Western notion of infinite industrial progress of a non-political type, nor into the Stalinist notion of socialism as the “development of the forces of production.”

  On the contrary, the “zone”—a geographical space in which, as the result of some inexplicable alien contact, artifacts can be found whose powers transcend the explanatory capacities of human science—is at one and the same time the object of the most vicious bootlegging and military-industrial Greed, and of the purest religious—I would like to say Utopian—Hope. The “quest for narrative,” to use Todorov’s expression,15 is here very specifically the quest for the Grail; and the Strugatskys’ deviant hero—marginal, and as “antisocial” as one likes; the Soviet equivalent of the ghetto or countercultural anti-heroes of our own tradition—is perhaps a more sympathetic and human figure for us than Le Guin’s passive-contemplative and mystical innocent. No less than The Lathe of Heaven, then, Roadside Picnic is self-referential, its narrative production determined by the structural impossibility of producing that Utopian text which it nonetheless miraculously becomes. Yet what we must cherish in this text—a formally ingenious collage of documents, an enigmatic cross-cutting between unrelated characters in social and temporal space, a desolate reconfirmation of the inextricable relationship of the utopian quest to crime and suffering, with its climax in the simultaneous revenge-murder of an idealistic and guiltless youth and the apparition of the Grail itself—is the unexpected emergence, as it were, beyond “the nightmare of History” and from out of the most archaic longings of the human race, of the impossible and inexpressible Utopian impulse here none the less briefly glimpsed: “Happiness for everybody! . . . Free! . . . As much as you want! . . . Everybody come here! . . . HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!”

  Notes

  1. See, on Verne, Pierre Macherey’s stimulating chapter in Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (Paris, 1966).

  2. The literature on Wells is enormous: see, for an introduction and select bibliography, Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, 1979). This work is a pioneering theoretical and structural analysis of the genre to which I owe a great deal.

  3. See The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: 1981).

  4. An important discussion of Scotland’s unique place in the development of capitalism can be found in Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London: New Left Books, 1977).

  5. Fredric Jameson, “On Raymond Chandler,” Southern Review, 6 (Summer 1970): 624–50.

  6. A fuller discussion of these propositions and some closer analyses of More’s Utopia in particular, will be found in my review-article of Louis Marin’s Utopiques (which also see!), “Of Islands and Trenches,” Diacritics, 7 (June 1977): 2–21. See also the related discussion in “World Reduction in Le Cuin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative,” SFS, 2 (1975): 221–30.

  7. Ivan Efremov, Andromeda (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), pp. 54–55.

  8. Compare “Of Islands and Trenches” (see note 6).

  9.
In other words, to adapt Claudel’s favorite proverb, le pire n’est pas toujours sûr, non plus!

  10. See my The Prison-House of Language (Princeton, 1972), pp. 203–05.

  11. That the author of The Dispossessed is also capable of indulging in a classical Dostoyevskian and counterrevolutionary anti-utopianism may be documented by her nasty little fable, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (NY: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 275–84.

  12. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London, 1967), p. 39.

  13. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, trans. A.W. Bouis (NY: Macmillan, 1977).

  14. This is not to say that the Strugatskys have not had their share of personal and publishing problems.

  15. Tzvetan Todorov, Poétique de la prose (Paris, 1971).

  19

  Science fiction and critical theory

  Carl Freedman

  To change the world is not to explore the moon. It is to make the revolution and build socialism without regressing back to capitalism.

  The rest, including the moon, will be given to us in addition.

  —Louis Althusser

  1 Definitions

  If by theory is meant an intellectual framework, a problematic which, by the structure of its questions even more than by the content of its answers, defines a certain conceptual terrain, then all thought whatever is theoretical; and it may be added that few theories are more narrow and dogmatic than those, like commonsense empiricism, which attempt to deny their own theoretical status. Keynes’s aphorism about his colleagues—that those economists who think they dislike theory are simply attached to an older theory—is generally true as well. By critical theory, however, I mean something far more specific: something broader than Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School sense, but not unrelated to it. Indeed, a key passage from the founding text of the Frankfurt usage, Horkheimer’s “Traditional and Critical Theory,” is quite pertinent here:

  Critical thinking is the function neither of the isolated individual nor of a sumtotal of individuals. Its subject is rather a definite individual in his real relation to other individuals and groups, in his conflict with a particular class, and, finally, in the resultant web of relationships with the social totality and with nature. The subject is no mathematical point like the ego of bourgeois philosophy; his activity is the construction of the social present. Furthermore, the thinking subject is not the place where knowledge and object coincide, nor consequently the starting-point for attaining absolute knowledge. Such an illusion about the thinking subject, under which idealism has lived since Descartes, is ideology in the strict sense, for in it the limited freedom of the bourgeois individual puts on the illusory form of perfect freedom and independence. (Horkheimer 210-11)

  Horkheimer also suggests the social and political ramifications of critical theory:

  The hostility to theory as such which prevails in contemporary public life is really directed against the transformative activity associated with critical thinking. Opposition starts as soon as theorists fail to limit themselves to verification and classification by means of categories which are as neutral as possible, that is, categories which are indispensable to inherited ways of life. (Horkheimer 232)

  Critical theory, then, may be defined as dialectical thought: that is, thought which (in principle) can take nothing less than the totality of the social field for its object, and yet which not only regards the social field as a historical process, constantly in material flux, but which also conceptualizes its own methodology as deeply imbricated in that flux rather than as a passive intellectual instrument by means of which an unproblematic Cartesian subject extracts absolute knowledge from pre-given objects; and which, furthermore, by dissolving the reified static categories of the ideological status quo, constantly shows that things are not what they seem to be—but also that things need not eternally be as they are—and thus maintains a cutting edge of social subversion even at its most rarefied and abstract.

  The central instance of critical theory is, of course, the Marxist tradition, of which Horkheimer himself was primarily thinking. But I would widen the term so as to include Freudian psychoanalysis—for such fundamental concepts of the latter as the unconscious, the drives, transference, and the Oedipus and castration complexes are profoundly dialectical categories—and also, given some qualifications, what might be called the post-dialectical theories of thinkers like Foucault and Derrida. In what follows I will be concerned with critical theory mainly in its cultural and, still more, its literary contexts: but any procrustean disciplinary division is of course profoundly contrary to the spirit of critical theory itself.

  Any serious attempt to define SF must begin by considering Suvin’s already classic formulation: “SF is. . .a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.” He usefully adds:

  Estrangement differentiates SF from the ‘realistic’ literary mainstream extending from the eighteenth century into the twentieth. Cognition differentiates it not only from myth, but also from the folk (fairy) tale and the fantasy. (Suvin 7-8)

  This definition seems to suffer, however, from a sacrifice of descriptive to eulogistic force. Can we accept a definition by the logic of which the Star Wars films, or most of the pulp SF of an earlier age, are not SF, but the plays of Brecht are? The latter objection is perhaps met if we recall that for Brecht historical materialism was not only cognitive but positively scientific in the strongest sense, and Marx fully as much the founder of a science as Galileo. But Suvin does, in fact, seem to find Brecht a difficult case: well aware of the latter’s status as the major theorist and practitioner of literary estrangement (Verfremdung), he remarks that estrangement is “used by Brecht in a different way, within a still predominantly ‘realistic’ context” (Suvin 7). The assertion is surely false, for Brecht is in no sense a literary realist, not even in inverted commas—as Lukacs angrily charged and as Brecht himself proudly admitted.1 The apparent problems with Suvin’s fundamentally sound definition may be resolved, however, by clarifying the nature of genre criticism itself: specifically, by displacing the category of genre from a static and classificatory to a dialectical sense. A literary genre—SF or any other—ought to be understood not as a pigeon-hole into which certain texts may be filed and certain others may not, but rather as an element or, still better, a tendency, which is active to a greater or lesser degree within a literary text which is itself conceptualized as a complexly structured whole.

  Accordingly, there is probably no text which is a perfect and pure embodiment of SF but, on the other hand, there are perhaps relatively few texts which lack the SF tendency altogether. Brecht might be seen as an author in whose work the SF tendency is strong, but who lacks interest in the specifically technological version of cognition that has usually figured (though today it figures to a decreasing degree) in those works commonly called SF. Star Wars might be described as a work in which the SF tendency is visually strong but conceptually weak. It follows that, in the strictest sense, it is incorrect to say that any given text “is” or “is not” SF. But it is nonetheless justifiable to make an at least provisional discrimination on the basis of whether, in any actual text, the SF tendency is sufficiently strong to be considered dominant—just as no one but a pedant would object to describing the US as a capitalist nation, even though capitalism is not the only mode of production operative within the US socio-economic formation.

  Given these definitions of SF and of critical theory, I will now attempt, in the remainder of this essay, to bring the two categories together. My aim is not to read SF “in the light of” critical theory (itself a suspiciously positivistic metaphor) but to articulate certain structural affinities between the two terms. As I will try to show, the conjunction of critical theory and SF is not fortuitous but
fundamental.

  2 Articulations

  The process of reading, though by no means always critical, is inevitably theoretical; and no better illustration of this point can be cited than the frequently noticed tendency of any mode of reading (critical or precritical) to privilege, whether implicitly or explicitly, a particular area of the literary terrain. Two examples may be noted. Lukacsian criticism, which is certainly a critical theory, is overwhelmingly oriented toward the novel of classical realism. Balzac and Tolstoy provide Lukacs with his essential models, and, despite the immense range of his empirical erudition, he seldom strays far from them in any conceptual sense. His intense admiration for Thomas Mann is based on his ability to theoretically (re)construct Mann as the authentic successor of the 19th-century realists. On the other hand, literary modernism seldom figures in his work save as an object of denunciation—or, as with his late recognition of Brecht, an object assimilable after all to the basic principles of realism. Lyric poetry scarcely even exists for Lukacs. But lyric poetry, especially that of T.S. Eliot and his 17th-century precursors, is the central genre for American New Criticism, a precritical school, though one of considerable technical sophistication. Engaged in working out pedagogically convenient styles of “close reading” on short and highly-wrought poetic artifacts, the New Critics have far less to say about fiction and would be hopelessly at sea with a work like Finnegans Wake or Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. There is, of course, a major difference between Lukacs and the New Critics: whereas he knows what he is doing—he is constructing a theory of realism for determinate philosophical and political ends—they seem to imagine that they are simply and innocently “reading.” But it is noteworthy how both posit a privileged generic space, and it would be easy to show how equivalent spaces are assumed or stated by many other schools as well: organicist English fiction, especially that of Lawrence, by the Scrutiny school; symbolist poetry tending toward self-referentiality by Derridean Reconstruction; modernist drama and fiction by the Frankfurt School and by Althusserian Marxism; Spenserian and Shakespearian romance (and the Prophetic Books of Blake) by the myth criticism of Northrop Frye; Romantic and neo-Romantic poetry by the influence criticism of Harold Bloom; etc. SF, it may be noted, has been overtly privileged by relatively few readers; Suvin and Delany are perhaps the most important examples.