Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  The early career of the more fully subversive talent of Dick tells a similar story. Beginning in the early 1950s with no special ambition to become an SF author, he found that SF magazines were usually the only outlets willing to publish his work—a circumstance which owes less to overt radicalism among SF editors than to generically intrinsic potentialities. We need, of course, to distinguish between utopia and Utopia: that is, between. an SF generic tendency and a Marxian-Blochian hermeneutic which construes fragmentary prefigurations of an unalienated future in the cultural artifacts of the past and present. But even mere negativity is an indispensable moment in the dialectical process, and utopian narrative is a particularly fertile field for Utopian speculation.

  Such speculation, and the concomitant “transformative activity associated with critical thinking” of which Horkheimer writes, is the telos of critical theory: the elaborate and powerful demystifying apparatus of Marxist (and Freudian) thought exist, ultimately, in order to clear space upon which positive alternatives to the existent can be constructed. No doubt SF authors, like critical theorists, have been more extensively occupied with the negative or demystifying aspect of the dialectic. But this aspect, the aspect of critique in the strict sense, contains its own implicit positivity; and, for overtly Utopian work, one would today turn, for the most part, to such self-consciously SF narratives as Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, or perhaps Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand—to name but a few examples.

  It would be possible to detail the affinity between SF and critical theory at much greater length than is feasible here: I have only attempted to sketch the major lines of conceptual force. But an unavoidable question, mentioned earlier, remains. Though the continued marginalization of SF by the literary governing class is explicable in terms of the hostility which all genuine criticism can expect, it is less clear why critical theorists themselves, committed to dialectics and radical transformation, should have done so little to resist this marginalization. To be sure, the oversight is far from total. In addition to Suvin and Delany, both vocationally tied to SF and both critical theorists of considerable sophistication, one could also cite, for example, the importance ascribed to SF by Jameson, the most noteworthy critical theorist active in the US today and not, in the professional sense, primarily an SF critic—not to mention a large number of younger critical theorists who are more and more finding SF a crucial field in which to work. Yet it is nonetheless true that, in the voluminous pages emanating from the great names in critical theory, overt references to SF tend to be few and far between. If SF has the importance for critical theory which I have maintained it has, the neglect seems astonishing.

  To some degree, the explanation is historical in a quite specific way. It was hardly possible to define clearly what I have called the SF tendency until it was strongly embodied in a large amount of work explicitly published and marketed as SF: that is, the work, all of comparatively recent vintage, of such writers as Lem, Dick, Le Guin, Disch, Delany, Russ, Ballard, et alit. Though writers like Beckett and Kafka certainly belong more to SF than to any other genre; though the Joycean method, especially in Finnegans Wake, incorporates something of the SF tendency in its radical estrangement of the apparently smooth surface of everyday perception and consciousness; though the “theoretical fictions” of Freud, such as the description of drives in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, are in a real sense SF; yet it would have been extremely difficult to produce such formulations before the era of the British New Wave and Dangerous Visions. Even so, the comparative belatedness of radical conceptualization in overt SF, itself explicable in terms of the internal sociology and political economy of the SF industry, cannot fully explain the critical ignorance of SF. For one thing, it does not explain the neglect of such individual authors, integral to the SF tradition, as Wells and Stapledon and even Mary Shelley, nor, for that matter, of the Bester of The Demolished Man and the Sturgeon of More Than Human. If critical theorists have on the whole been more at home with Sophocles or Shakespeare or Balzac, the reason also partly lies in the nature of canonization itself.

  It ought to be clear from my earlier discussion that canon-formation is an essentially conservative process, though not in a wholly evil sense. To conserve what seems of value from a particular point of view is, at least, a practical necessity, for no individual has the time to read all the texts available, and no library has the money to buy them. But the conservatism of canon-formation, whose first and most decisively conservative phase is to separate the literary from the non-literary, is, if to some degree necessary, also something which critical theory must be wary and skeptical of. The procedure is intrinsically repressive, and, given the inevitable hegemony of precritical thought in class society, the repressions involved are by no means unselective.

  Unfortunately, critical theorists have not, on the whole, been sufficiently alert to this danger. Swayed, no doubt, by the socially normative conservatism into which the most rigorously critical mind is bound at times to lapse (and which is not completely separable even from the basic constitution of individuals as subjects of a repressive society), they have tended to work with the received literary canon, though with the proviso that canonical texts need not be read in received ways. To be sure, the Benjaminian project of rereading the cultural monuments of the past is, in itself, perfectly legitimate. But it becomes illegitimate to the extent that it leads theorists to neglect the ideological function of canon-formation and the ways in which the latter is wont to stigmatize those texts distributed from marginalized sectors of the literary market or even denied direct access to the market altogether; for, pace Adorno, such texts may, as in the case of SF, contain much material of the highest importance from a critical-theoretical point of view. Accordingly, though the canonization of SF and the construction of canons within SF are certainly to some degree implicit in the present essay, it must be stressed that these (practically unavoidable) processes are potentially in conflict with the most radical intent of my argument. If SF is read seriously, then SF will inevitably have its internal canons and its place within the general canon as a whole: but the danger will always exist that SF-canonizing may repress much that is genuinely new and critical within and beyond the genre. There is, indeed, a certain correct sense, as well as a good deal of reactionary anti-intellectualism, in the alarm that many older SF writers and editors, especially survivors of the Campbell era, express at the currently increasing though still slight academic respectability which SF enjoys. For the cutting edge of SF may well be blunted to the extent that the genre becomes at all official.

  3 Excursuses

  In the following section, I will offer brief analyses of several SF novels. My aim is to demonstrate, with more detail than has heretofore been feasible, the (different) ways in which each of them resonates strongly with concerns proper to critical theory. I do not offer exhaustive readings, partly for reasons of economy, but also in order to warn against the empiricism which the notion of “practical criticism” often implies and the concomitant naivete which holds the minute examination of particular texts to be the ultimate test or telos of literary theory. These readings are not proposed precisely as examples of the argument in the foregoing section, still less as proof of it. Rather, I am continuing the argument in a somewhat different register.

  It may be convenient to begin with Lem’s Solaris, a novel in which cognition and estrangement figure not only as conceptual qualities but as overt themes. Though the novel can boast an exciting plot, a protagonist of some depth and complexity, and a remarkable pseudo-naturalistic mode of representation which is characteristic of Lem (one thinks of Return from the Stars, a closely observed and unsensational tale “about” advanced space travel and the radical reconstitution of humanity), the chief interest of Solaris lies less in action or psychology than in epistemology. Indeed, one of the features that marks Lem’s work in general as strongly S-F is its unblushing devotion to phil
osophical speculation, a novelistic element that can be found in George Eliot and Tolstoy but which has become largely extinct in the European and Anglo-American mundane fiction of today. The central subject-matter of Solaris is dialectical thought itself or, more specifically, the dialectical nature of even the physical or “hard” sciences. Though Lem’s invented science of Solaristics—the focus of which is the attempt to establish communication with the immense sentient ocean of Solaris—is presented with such pseudofactual solidity that one almost believes the research articles and academic controversies “really” to exist, this presentation is primarily the vehicle of an elaborate theoretical fable.

  It is indicative only of the widespread confusion of science with positivism that some readers have interpreted the novel as an attack on, or at least a demystification of, science. The text does indeed mention the work of the anti-Solarist Muntius—who has denounced Solaristics as a religious faith camouflaged as science and who implicitly would deconstruct the distinction between religion and science in general—but his views, while seriously and somewhat sympathetically considered, are decisively rejected. Lem’s purpose is quite different and considerably more complicated: namely, to demonstrate the ever-provisional rigors of science in all its dialectical complexity. The second chapter of the novel, in which the protagonist Kris Kelvin summarizes for himself (and the reader) the history and current state of Solarist studies, insinuates a mood of weighty frustration, a frustration motivated partly by the occasional degeneration of science into dogma as different schools of Solarists establish varying degrees of institutional hegemony, but more fundamentally by the refusal of genuine science to yield definite onto-theological answers:

  The situation seemed much worse now than in the time of the pioneers, since the assiduous efforts of so many years had not resulted in a single indisputable conclusion. The sum total of known facts was strictly negative. (Solaris 2:29)

  As in all dialectics, much depends upon the position of the theoretical investigator, and Solarists with different methodological leanings—mathematical, cybernetic, biological, and others—frame the problem in different ways. At the same time, the various specialized endeavors are haunted by a more basic conceptual problem which constitutes the major crux of the novel: given that all known models of communication derive from the relations among humans, does the category of communication itself have any meaning when dealing with nonhuman intelligence? In more general terms, is the radically Other a concept perhaps intrinsically beyond the power of the human mind to grasp?

  The text offers no final answer, but it does suggest that any positivistic form of thought is utterly inadequate to the task. For one sort of “communication” between the ocean and the scientists does take place, and it foregrounds the necessary involvement of the latter: most of the plot concerns the creation by the ocean of phantom humans, each a simulacrum of someone remembered from the erotic past of each of the Solarists in the experimental station suspended above the planet. These phantoms, though products of the ocean, attain some degree of autonomy from it and seem progressively more human: but, of course, it is just at this point that the overfamiliar category of the “human” is estranged and problematized.5 The issues with which Lem deals—the nature of communication, of humanity, of thought—are thus fundamental; and it is in this regard that his careful attention to pseudo-mundane detail is most crucial. For the device of phantoms created from memory is, after all, more common in fantasy than in SF, and may easily resolve into mysticism. Lem avoids such irrationalism not only by the general cognitive structure of the text, not only by attention to the technical mechanism of phantom-creation (for instance, the use of neutrinos instead of atoms), but also (and perhaps most importantly for the texture of the novel) by the deliberately understated tone and mode of representation. The most staggering phenomena are, in one sense, all in the day’s work—think, in contrast, of what a fantasy writer like Lovecraft would have made of such a theme. The novel ends by suggesting that the largest questions of the universe may time and again defeat the best efforts of dialectical reason, but also that only dialectical reason is capable of genuinely posing such questions at all.

  Epistemological issues also figure in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. The narrative structure of the novel—with its alternating chapters relating Shevek’s past on Anarres and his present visit to Urras—is designed to mimic both the controversy in physics between the competing theories of sequency and simultaneity, and Shevek’s insight into the resolution of the problem as well: “The fundamental unity of the Sequency and Simultaneity points of view became plain; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe” (9:225). But Le Guin’s main stress, as compared with Lem’s, is much more directly political; and Shevek’s dialectical approach to physics, his synthesis of diachrony and synchrony, reflects the dialectical view of political theory which the text is most centrally concerned to uphold.

  Much of the force of the novel is based on its estranging and near-Marxist critique of our own world, particularly the consumer capitalism of the US as satirically represented by the invented nation of A-lo. Seldom in modern fiction has the sheerly unnatural character of the economic system which we most take for granted been portrayed more powerfully than, for instance, in the scene where Shevek (functioning as an inverted version of the usual mundane Everyman—the Raphael Hythloday or Gulliver—of utopian fiction) wanders through an ordinary shopping district and is nearly driven to a nervous breakdown by what he sees:

  And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the draftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made’? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession. (5:107)

  On Urras, the bourgeois culture of A-Io is challenged, structurally, by the Stalinist communism of Thu. whose representative, Chifoilisk, offers accurate critiques of capitalist society but whose own system is almost equally unacceptable. The lotic ethos is also challenged, idiosyncratically, by the aristocratic ethic of blood and military glory upheld by Shevek’s colleague Atro. But the major alternative which Le Guin offers to American actuality is of course the anarchist society of Odonian Anarres.

  The finest dialectical subtlety of her intelligence, however, lies in the fact that in producing a positive alternative to existing society—a utopia in a strong and self-conscious sense—she incorporates a critique of her own production. Despite her clear sympathy with the basic Odonian principles—the abolition of law, of government, of private property, of the division of labor to the maximum extent possible; even the weakening of the very concept of possession to the point that possessive adjectives are dropped from the language—Le Guin’s outlook remains strictly critical, forcing a rigorous self-examination. Anarres is a harsh world, poor in natural resources and desperately underdeveloped, and the violence and regimentation (the latter substantive though not formal) which erupt during periods of extreme scarcity recall Marx’s and Trotsky’s doubts as to whether a genuinely egalitarian society can ever be achieved except in the context of overwhelming material abundance. Anarres is also an insular world: determined to insulate itself as completely as possible from Urrasti corruption and injustice, it eventually becomes chauvinistic to the point that it denies entry to a group of latter-day Odonians from a “Third World” nation on Urras. Here again a specifically Trotskyist dialectic is at work, for the question is whether Socialism in One Country (or one planet) may not be, in the long run, a contradiction in terms. But the worst features of Anarres are those which seem most intrinsic to its anarchistic premises. The elimination of all governmental and legal systems opens the way to an elaborate tyranny of public opinion and in
formal pressure, a tyranny which is all the more difficult to fight precisely because it is officially nonexistent. Shevek himself, always something of a misfit on Anarres, suffers considerably from conformist pressures and quasibureaucratic stupidity; and the text suggests that anarchism may be not only difficult to implement but, at least to some degree, internally destructive of its own stated goals. There is here a complex recognition that, although law in class society ultimately functions as an instrument of class coercion (law in AIo is devoted mainly to the sanctity of private property), law also works to offer some measure of protection from arbitrary power. For all its criticisms of Anarres, however, the text by no means resolves itself into a stance of liberal neutrality. The general superiority that anarchistic socialism (with all its faults) has over capitalism is rarely in doubt and is firmly vindicated by the novel’s end. The text’s dialectical interrogation of its own official ideology finally strengthens rather than weakens the cognitive integrity of its utopian and Utopian project.

  One secondary feature of Odonianism concerns the breakdown of middle-class norms governing gender roles and sexual preferences. But The Dispossessed is in fact only very moderately feminist (even in comparison to the same author’s The Left Hand of Darkness). Though Shevek is appalled by the sexism in A-Io, he (and his own society) are, as Delany has persuasively argued (pp. 218-83), considerably less free from sexism than Shevek and the novel itself seem to think. For a more radically feminist inflection of SF—for a more rigorous examination of the dialectic of sex—we may turn to Russ’s The Two of Them. Indeed, the fusion of SF with radical feminism is the dominant project of Russ’s work in general. But the term fusion is perhaps misleading here. The viability of Russ’s project depends upon certain potentialities always intrinsic to SF, but rarely exploited until recently, and largely occluded by the almost exclusively masculine and sexless ethos which dominated magazine SF from the Gernsback through the Campbell eras. SF, however, is a uniquely appropriate vehicle for feminism. Because of the peculiar nature of the social contradiction which it addresses—women being the only subaltern group whose members typically live with members of the corresponding hegemonic group—feminism is, of all forms of critical theory, the most concerned with the ideological inscriptions of everyday life, with the imbrication of the political in the personal. Unfortunately, everyday life remains perhaps the least satisfactorily theorized moment of the social field, and current feminist theory has only partially made up the deficiency. Furthermore, it may be the case that concrete narration, with its necessary attention to the details of living, is capable of a more adequate critique of everyday life than can ever be attained, even in principle, by discursive theory. SF narration, then, with its special resources for estranging the familiar and suggesting alternatives to the given, is particularly well equipped to deal with the penetration of sexism into the quotidian world.