Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  How do we account for such wide discrepancies of privileged reading material? The problem cannot be resolved by lapsing into pluralism, where we happily agree to maintain some sympathy for and some distance from all competing schools, availing ourselves of particular insights and freeing ourselves from particular limitations and blind spots. Instead, it is necessary to recall that the category of literature (in sharp distinction to that of genre) has no meaning other than a purely functional one. As Eagleton has argued with great cogency (pp. 1-16), those works are literature which are called literature by the minority of readers who, in a given time and place, possess the social and institutional power which allows their views on the matter to prevail. In our present historical situation, these authoritative readers include academic critics and teachers, publishing executives, librarians, editors of journals and reviews, and others. Such agents, acting in a determinate social context and toward determinate (if often unconscious) ends, decide that a certain relatively small number of texts, out of the much vaster number which actually exist, shall be canonized. They judge, for instance, that the poems, essays, and some of the letters written by Wallace Stevens are literature, while the insurance policies and office memoranda also written by him are not. But, of course, such judgments vary greatly in various historical situations, as the most cursory acquaintance with literary history reveals. Though it might be difficult for us to imagine a circumstance in which the Homeric poems would not be literature or in which our daily shopping lists would be, variations almost as wide have actually taken place;2 for which reason, the attempt to construct an essential or transhistorically substantive definition of literature is vain. Whereas genre is a substantive property of discourse and its context, literature is a formally arbitrary and socially determinate category. In this sense, reading does not merely respond to literature: reading (of a certain sort) creates literature.

  But, if it is vain to try to define literature other than functionally, it is not vain to describe the process by which the category “literature” is constructed. Though the process is fundamentally ideological, in its primary phase it is ideological not in any straightforward or obvious sense, but, for the most part, as mediated by generic considerations. So it is that the business memoranda of so conservative and respectable an author as Stevens are denied the title of literature, while, on the other hand, a poem by a militant and unknown slumd-weller, if it obeyed a few simple conventions, would probably not be denied the title. Indeed, generic determination operates so functionally on this level that the same verbal construction may be literary or non-literary depending upon the material context: the sentence, “Walk with light,” would be literature in a book of spiritual aphorisms but not on a metal sign at a street intersection. Most works of literature, however—like the slum-dweller’s poem—are generally considered bad or negligible literature, and are relegated to near-invisibility at the periphery of the canon. There is, then, a secondary phase of the canon-constructing process, which is devoted to distinguishing “good” literature, literature worth studying and teaching and writing articles about. Though directly ideological considerations are more important here than in the primary phase of the process, the power of genre is still strong. Shakespeare’s contemporaries were generally convinced of his personal genius, but they doubted that the scripts of English stage plays could be considered literature in the same eulogistic sense that applied to ancient drama or even to English odes and sonnets; similarly, in our own time academic critics seem to be deciding that autobiography belongs more centrally to the literary canon than they would have allowed only a generation ago. Finally, there is a tertiary phase of canon-formation as well: this is precisely the tendency, discussed above, of every distinct school of reading to privilege a distinct kind of reading matter. This phase of the process, which distinguishes not merely literature or even “good” literature but the “best,” the most important literature, is, as we have seen, also largely governed by generic factors, though no doubt more crudely ideological forces are here stronger. SF is certainly literature in the primary sense, but often not in the secondary and—in any explicit fashion—very rarely in the tertiary sense.

  Two conclusions may, then, be drawn. In the first place, it is evident that the affinity which a mode of reading has for a particular literary object is by no means a matter of taste or judgment within an unproblematically predetermined field of literature. Rather, it is the most subtle moment within the project of constructing literature itself, of determining, out of all the verbal material extant, which works possess the peculiar power which all respecters of literature from Plato to Paul de Man have attributed to the object of their devotion or fear: which is to say, furthermore, that it is, like the primary phase of the same process, a functional act involving, in the long run, determinate social ends. Though genre plays a large role in all phases of the canon-forming process, genre is, as we shall see, not in the least an ideologically innocent factor. Accordingly, if SF has rarely been a privileged genre—despite the fact that much of it clearly possesses the kind of purely formal attributes (intellectual complexity, stylistic felicity, narrative sophistication, and the like) generally held to characterize “great” literature—this only means that the literary powers-that-be have not wished SF to function with the social prestige that literature in the stronger senses enjoys. Some plausible reasons for the general disinclination to eulogize SF will become clear later in the present argument.

  The second conclusion involves the fact that, at least in the most rarefied or what I have called the tertiary phase of the canon-forming process, the operative judgments may be implicit rather than explicit. Usually, this distinction is relevant when considering the negative choices of pre-critical schools of reading: the Leavisites, for instance, would have hotly denied that they had any special—and certainly any ideological—attachment to the sort of fiction produced by George Eliot or D.H. Lawrence, except insofar as such a preference expressed an innocent recognition of what was worth reading (and favorable to “life”) at all. But what I want to maintain here is that critical theory itself—especially in its most central, Marxian version— does implicitly privilege a certain genre, and that this genre is SF. This may seem a large claim. But it should, at least, be clear from the foregoing analysis that I am not trying to “revalue” any particular canon in order to beg admission for SF. Instead, I have tried to describe canon-formation itself and am now maintaining that the most conceptually advanced forms of criticism unconsciously privilege a genre that has been generally despised and ghettoized.

  Such an assertion raises two difficult questions. Why and how does critical theory privilege SF? And, if it does, why have most critical theorists been unaware of the fact? To these questions I now turn.

  The affinity of critical theory for SF may be micrologically examined in the following passage, which opens a well-known SF novel:

  A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.

  Surprised—it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice—he rose from the bed, stood up in his multicolored pajamas, and stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again. (Do Androids. . . 1:1)

  To some degree, the passage could be the straightforward opening of a mundane novel: a married man awakes and is, presumably, about to start the day. But the linguistic register of the paragraph marks it as unmistakably SF. The key factor here is the reference to the mood organ—evidently a technical device somehow connected to emotional states and one which, though unknown in our own empirical environment, is an ordinary accoutrement of everyday life in the world of the text. In fact, the mood organ does figure as an important motif in Dick’s novel as a whole. But in the context of the opening paragraph, its chief function is to signal the SF character of the language, and thus to impel us to read the latter differently than we would read the language
of mundane fiction.3 Since technology and emotions are apparently connected in ways unfamiliar to us—though not wholly, unfamiliar or unpredictable, because we do know of mood-altering drugs—the adjective merry, as applied to a surge of electricity, may have a sense other than the expected metaphorical one. What does it mean to be “awake without prior notice”? We understand the difference between being jerked from deep sleep to full consciousness and gradually passing through intermediate stages; but the context suggests that a more specific meaning may be operative. Nor is the grammatically simple phrase “his wife Iran” free of ambiguities. Are we here in a world where a man can be married to an entire country’? And what of the fact that Rick and Iran seem to sleep in different beds? As in mundane fiction, it may be a detail without profound significance, or it may signify certain sexual problems between the couple; but it might also signify some completely novel arrangement of sexual relations that is normal in the society portrayed. In any case, the whole topic of human feelings, sexual and otherwise, is estranged, and the question of a technology of emotion is posed. A few lines after the above paragraph is this bit of conversation:

  ‘Get your crude cop’s hand away,’ Iran said.

  ‘I’m not a cop.’ He felt irritable now, although he hadn’t dialed for it. (Do Androids. . . 1:1)

  This exchange might be completely mundane, until the final clause. But that clause, though formally subordinate, makes the salient SF point.

  It would be possible, in a full-scale reading of the novel, to show how the first paragraph does function as an appropriate overture. Of course, not all of the possibilities raised there are actually developed. But the relations between technology and emotion do constitute the principal focus of the text, not only with regard to such household appliances as the mood organ, but also in connection with the state of virtual war between human authorities and androids, the latter presumed—though one cannot be quite certain—to have no emotions at all. But the opening of the novel may also stand alone, on the molecular level, as paradigmatic of the SF generic tendency. The point to be stressed about the language is its profoundly dialectical character. For undialectical theory, the most familiar emotions—love, affection, hatred, anger, et alia—tend to be unproblematic categories, assumed to be much the same in all times and places, and to exist on an irreducibly subjective level. They may of course occur in a practically infinite number of permutations, and the undialectical reader may relish such psychological fiction as that of Dostoevsky or Flaubert for the subtlety and acuteness with which those authors portray the varieties of affective experience. A dialectical approach, on the other hand, would adopt the kind of perspective suggested by Dick. As the paragraph shows an emotional dynamic of a future age operating, at least in some respects, quite differently from what we ourselves empirically experience, the question of the historicity of feelings is raised and the possibility of a historical periodization of emotion in co-ordination with other aspects of human development (such as technology) is at least implied. The technical emphasis of the paragraph also tends to remove emotion from idealist notions of spirituality or the unproblematically individual, and to suggest that psychic states may be reducible to concrete and trans-individual material realities—a reduction which Freud held to be the ultimate conceptual goal of psychoanalysis and which Lacan claims to have achieved through the mediation of structural linguistics. We may also note that, if the phrase I used above, “technology of emotion,” has a strongly Foucauldian ring, it is not by chance: for Dick’s paragraph does indeed resonate with Foucault’s concern to show that power does not merely repress individual subjectivity but actually constitutes subjectivity in historically variable ways.

  Historical materialism, psychoanalysis, Foucauldian archeology—I do not mean to suggest that such elaborate theoretical structures are actually present, even embryonically, in the short and unpretentious paragraph which opens Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It is, rather, a matter of the shared perspectives between SF and critical theory, of the dialectical standpoint of the SF tendency, with its insistence upon historical mutability, material reducibility, and, at least implicitly, Utopian possibility. In a sense, SF is of all genres the one most devoted to historical specificity: for the SF world is not only one different in time or place from our own, but one whose chief interest is precisely the difference that such difference makes, and, in addition, one whose difference is nonetheless contained within a cognitive continuum with the actual (thus sharply distinguishing SF from the irrationalist estrangements of fantasy or Gothic literature, which secretly work to ratify the mundane status quo by presenting no alternative to the latter other than inexplicable discontinuities).

  It may appear, then, that SF is an inverted or paradoxical version of historical fiction, and that the affinity for which I argue between it and critical theory is a rewriting of the privileged relationship maintained by Lukacs between Marxism and the historical novel. The analogy is valid, but the comparison cuts in both directions at once. On the one hand, much SF, especially of the more conformist sort, is a kind of historical fiction in disguise: witness the nostalgic reconstructions of entrepreneurial capitalism in Heinlein’s novella The Man Who Sold the Moon or in the section on the merchant traders in Asimov’s Foundation, both classic works of “Golden Age” SF which, however liberal in overt ideology, do find Utopian traces in the entrepreneurialism which the monopoly capitalism of the postwar US was, at the time of writing, rendering more and more obsolete. On the other hand, it might also be argued that some historical novels contain an SF tendency: consider the estranging but rational reconstruction of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 in Scott’s Waverley, a reconstruction quite different in method from that of normative middle-class historiography. But if SF shares with historical fiction the dialectic of difference and identity celebrated by Lukacs, there is nonetheless reason to grant the critical superiority to SF. For historical fiction, paradoxically, is the more vulnerable to an unhistorical fetishism of the past, a fetishism in which the merely aesthetic relish of costume and exoticism triumphs over the genuinely conceptual issues of historical specificity and difference; and this danger is of course amply illustrated in the post-Tolstoyan historical novels which regularly figure in current best-seller lists. Though SF is not immune to equivalent temptations—Heinlein’s apotheosis of early-20th-century America as the apogee of human civilization is a notorious case in point—its general tendency is essentially anti-nostalgic and more conducive to a Marxian “poetry of the future.”

  The matter may be put in another way—concentrating on the macrocosm of SF narrative structure rather than the microcosm of SF language—by considering the virtual identity of the SF and the utopian fictional traditions. The most genuinely critical element in Thomas More’s pioneering text lies not in the empirical content of his fictional country but in the neo-Greek coinage that produces his title. Though not completely unprecedented, the mere act of writing an entire work about no place—that is, no place actually locatable—was an immensely liberating act, as the huge success of More’s coinage might suggest.4 The freedom from the actual thus attained—a rational and hence true, as opposed to a fantastic and therefore false, freedom—opened up new literary possibilities, which, perhaps, could only first become visible in the bright morning of mercantile capitalism when, for the first time in history, the efforts of human beings were not only leading to the discovery of new worlds but were being seen to restructure social life in fundamental ways. These new possibilities are coterminous with the SF tendency. For every work of SF is a utopia, a text whose initial act (however severely the act may ultimately be compromised) is to refuse the status quo in favor of a social alternative which is not ours but which, for better or worse, could, at least in principle, become ours. Like critical theory, SF, generically considered, can never limit itself 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.” Indeed, though many texts classified as SF make major retreats from the conceptual radicalism of the SF tendency, a surprising amount even of “Golden Age” SF, if read with adequate historical perspective, does display something of the oppositional cutting edge which Horkheimer’s words attribute to the Frankfurt inflection of Marxist philosophy. The flat Skinnerian rationalism of Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy and of his robot stories, or the synthesis of romantic technologism with vulgar Nietzschean evolutionism in Clarke’s major works, however unacceptable in themselves, gain considerably if they are understood as refusals to join in the Cold War anti-Communism predominant in postwar America and (though to a lesser degree) Britain: in that impoverished intellectual culture, merely to insist that a manichaean struggle between a diabolical Moscow and an angelic Washington was not the only or most important factor shaping human affairs in itself constituted a significantly critical act.