Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Such is the achievement of The Two of Them. The novel is structured on two theoretical moments: first, liberal feminism, and, second, the sublation of the latter into dialectical or radical feminism. The liberal moment is represented primarily by the encounter of the Trans Temp agents Irene Waskiewicz and Ernst Neumann with the society of Ka’abah, the economically important but culturally regressive planet to which they are dispatched on a secret mission, and the dominant sexual ideologies and general accoutrements of which are based upon those of the Islamic, especially the Arab, world. Irene is effortlessly appalled (as the reader is meant to be) by the oppression of women on Ka’abah, and, in particular, by the desperate plight of the young would-be poet Zubeydeh, whom the novel presents as a kind of typical case-study of victimization by overtly brutal sexism: but Irene’s outrage and sympathy are initially framed by the secure sense of superiority with which liberal First World feminism typically regards the gender relations of Third World—especially Middle Eastern—societies. The text shifts gears when Irene—acting against Ernst’s gentle cautions, against his general “yes, but—“response to Irene’s anger at Ka’abah misogyny— moves beyond attitudinal sympathy and takes action to rescue Zubeydeh. After this break, not only does Irene’s relationship with Zubeydeh (the nature of which is never wholly clear in any familiar terms) become more interesting and important to her than her well-defined relationship with Ernst, her lover, partner, and professional superior (and thus the significance of Russ’s title is shifted). Even more importantly, though not unrelatedly, Ka’abah begins to function not as a locus of opaque otherness and evil, but as a negative utopia which effects a cognitive estrangement of the much more subtle but equally widespread sexism that dominates Irene’s own sphere of Trans Temp (whose general cultural ethos recalls that of the Western middleclass professional world inhabited by Russ herself and by most of her readers). Irene’s bond with Ernst becomes increasingly unsatisfactory, as the condescending and fundamentally oppressive character of many small turns of phrase, tones of voice, and unspoken assumptions becomes clear to her for the first time; the text even suggests an analogy between the domination of Zubeydeh by her father and the domination of Irene by Ernst (a good many years her senior). Finally Irene is moved not only to leave Trans Temp but, in a scene of grisly violence characteristic of Russ, to murder Ernst.

  The attitude of the novel towards the killing is deliberately ambiguous. Irene may be seen either as a feminist heroine battling for freedom or as a psychotic killer; but such a binary opposition is just what the text aims to deconstruct. Irene herself, as her rage towards Ernst grows, questions her own sanity, but also, in a kind of Foucauldian feminism, questions her own questioning:

  It occurs to her that they may even be right, that nothing in her life accounts for the intensity of her anger, that Center [the Trans Temp headquarters] is not Ka’abah, that Ernst is a man who loves and respects women. He has good judgment; once he judged her worthy and now he judges her mad. The gentlemen always think the ladies have gone mad. (p. 147)

  The thrust of the text is political rather than moral, and to ask whether Ernst’s murder is morally justifiable (which it obviously is not) is somewhat beside the point. The point of The Two of Them is, rather, to demonstrate the complex gender relations that link social power, everyday details of routine and intimacy, and the formation and deformation of psychic balance.

  I have attempted to demonstrate, then, that, in each of the SF novels which I have considered, a major conceptual topic—the structure of theoretical knowledge; the contradictions of capitalism and of anarchistic socialism; the variety of gender oppression—is subjected to critical, dialectical interrogation. In concluding this section, I will discuss Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, a metageneric text whose aim, inter alia, is both implicitly and explicitly to interrogate the structure of SF itself.

  The Man in the High Castle was not originally marketed as SF and probably never would have been if the author had not previously established a reputation in the field; for the setting is the apparently mundane one of postwar America, and no technological marvels are prominent. The difference, of course, is that the Second World War is supposed to have been lost by the Allies, and the US has been conquered and dismembered by the victorious Axis nations. Germany and Japan are now the superpowers, and the status they enjoy subtly estranges the character of victory and world dominance. The post-Hitler Nazi hierarchy has remained intact and preserved its essential nature, but it commands the respect and respectability which winners normally possess. The genocide of the Jews has been nearly completed, and has been followed, against equally little opposition or outrage, by the even more enormous project of depopulating Africa. Germany is pursuing a vigorous space program, and is widely admired as the world’s technological leader. Tensions have developed, however, between the wartime partners, and by the end of the novel we learn that Germany is planning to attack Japan and exterminate the Japanese. It is the difference between Germany and Japan—which figures, for Dick, partly as a difference between Western and Eastern philosophies, and which evidently seems to him more fundamental than the actual difference between the historical victors of the war, the US and the USSR—that the text exploits in its main critical cutting edge.

  In part, the critical power lies simply in the foregrounding of historical mutability. The outcome of the Second World War remains the largest fact of the postwar era, and, in American ideology, has generally been represented as inevitable and almost metaphysically sanctioned. It is therefore salutary to be reminded that the Allied victory was the result of quite specific sociohistorical forces and that the evil of Nazism in no way guaranteed Germany’s defeat. But The Man in the High Castle also has more specific aims in view. The eastern part of America is pointed to as living under a Nazi terror similar to that which many European countries actually experienced, while, in the western US, life under Japanese rule is comparatively tolerable. There is a certain austere discipline, inevitable given the presence of an occupying foreign power, but the Japanese officials—especially the one who appears most prominently, Mr Tagomi—are on the whole cultivated and humane individuals, with considerable private contempt for their German counterparts and even with a measure of sympathy for the victims of Nazism (whose offense, after all, was to be, like the Japanese, non-Aryan). This contrast between the Axis nations resolves less into a difference of political system than into one of culture and philosophy. The Oriental approach, with its stress on enduring values, on fate, on received non-utilitarian wisdom (typified in the novel by the I Ching),6 is represented as naturally moderate. On the other hand, Nazi atrocity is seen as the logical extension of the typically Western valorization of incessant activity, of achievement, of expansion and acquisition. But these latter are, of course, precisely the values which characterize the actual postwar US. If there is a certain uncritical (and in the long run unconsciously racist) romanticism in Dick’s attitude towards Asia, it may be understood as an estranging device to highlight the implicit filiations between German fascism and the imperialistic activism of American monopoly capitalism (it is not accidental that the novel was first published in the early days of the American assault on Vietnam).

  The structural device of an alternative present is complicated by the presence of a novel-within-the-novel, an immensely popular though partly banned work called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Written by the title character of Dick’s novel, it is a precise equivalent of The Man in the High Castle itself, and presents in fictional form an America which did not lose the war (though its details are not precisely the same as those of actual history). At one point, a young Japanese couple, over dinner with a visitor, discuss the book’s generic status:

  “Not a mystery,” Paul said. “On the contrary, interesting form of fiction possibly within genre of science fiction.”

  “Oh no,” Betty disagreed. “No science in it. Nor set in future. Science fiction deals with future, in particular future where science
has advanced over now. Book fits neither premise.”

  “But,” Paul said, “it deals with alternative present. Many well-known science fiction novels of that sort.” To Robert he explained, “Pardon my insistence in this, but as my wife knows, I was for a long time a science fiction enthusiast.” (7:108)

  Betty presents the ordinary Philistine view, Paul a more critical one. Betty sees SF exclusively as narratives of the future (a widespread view in Germany, as it happens), and takes a progressivist and positivistic view of “science” (i.e., the physical sciences). Paul, on the other hand, understands—what Dick himself implicitly suggests throughout the novel—that the identity of the genre lies neither in chronology nor in technological hardware, but in the cognitive presentation of alternatives to actuality and the status quo. Though it may seem ironic that Dick won his only major SF award for a novel that its original publisher did not even consider SF, the irony is in fact much finer: namely, that Dick won his Hugo for a novel which demonstrates how the essential conceptual structure of the genre may be preserved while discarding the comparatively superficial trappings with which Hugo Gernsback tried to identify it. In its critical estrangement of Dick’s own America, The Man in the High Castle is certainly SF.

  4 Conclusions

  If SF and, in the last quarter century or so, overt SF has the critical importance which I have argued it has, then it must compare favorably (to put the matter gently) with most other literature currently being produced in the West. The historical context of this literary situation is not difficult to understand. Since the Second World War, the societies of Western Europe and North America have been on the whole frozen: domestically, in various forms of (usually) democratic capitalism; geopolitically, within the anti-Communist Cold War alliance. Such stasis, with its inevitable pressure to eternalize the status quo and to minimize awareness of historical difference, is hardly conducive to the production of genuinely critical literature—as the actual literary trends of the era, in all their mundane narcissism, generally attest. Where exceptions have emerged, it has usually been in works by authors from groups marginalized within the West, or, as with SF, in works whose generic determinants tend to discourage conformism and the uncritical acceptance of actuality. But the achievement in SF, it seems to me, remains unmatched even by the rich traditions of Jewish-American or Afro-American fiction (though there is indeed some overlap here).

  There is, however, a world beyond the West. In order to suggest a more global contextualization of SF and critical theory, I will, in a kind of coda to this essay, briefly consider the situation of Third World literature. The critical importance of the latter is beyond dispute. In Africa and Latin America especially, literature is today being produced which possesses a conceptual sophistication and critical acuteness far beyond the “mainstream” literature of the West. Analysis could easily show that a work such as (for instance) One Hundred Years of Solitude is imbricated in the concerns proper to critical and dialectical thought in a way similar to that which I have tried to demonstrate in the case of SF. Yet the Third World has produced little or no SF, which is still the domain of the West (and the Soviet bloc). How is this apparent paradox to be explained?

  I am tempted to say that, if the Third World has no SF—i.e., no work explicitly and self-consciously in the SF tradition—it is because the Third World has no need of SF. Admittedly, the very phrase “Third World” is deeply problematic, conflating as it does a great many vastly different nations. But if the term is understood to mean those social formations on the increasingly integrated periphery of the multinational capitalist system whose centers lie in the West, and which stand to the metropolitan economies of the West somewhat as proletariat stands to bourgeoisie in classical 19th-century capitalism, then at least one important generalization may be ventured: that in the Third World, historical difference and specificity are not abstruse concepts but urgent and unavoidable facts of life. From the perspective of San Salvador or Kampala, First World life—not only as it exists in Paris or New York, but, more importantly, as the First World commodity structure penetrates the social field of El Salvador or Uganda—must seem as radically different and estranging as the imagined planets and futures of SF seem to readers in the West. And yet, as with the worlds of SF, the differences, however complex, are not ultimately mysterious: they are dialectically explicable in the critical terms of political economy and geopolitics. It may be added that Third World authors presumably feel little temptation to universalize empirical actuality, which for their nations means grinding misery and oppression. We might say, then, that in the Third World realism itself is, as it were, naturally SF. It is not mundane because the mundane, in the First World sense, does not exist. It is no accident that “cognitive estrangement,” the Suvinian term for SF, finds its precise counterpart in “magical realism,” Márquez’s term for his own literary practice and that of many of his colleagues. From the Latin American coign of vantage, North American commodity capitalism appears on the scene with the immensely estranging force of magic, and “magic” not as a matter of irrationalist fantasy, but understood in cognitive and (in that sense) “realistic” terms. To live in the Third World is virtually to live in an SF situation, and this obviates the need to write what we in the West would immediately recognize as SF—just as in a genuinely classless society there will be no need for Marxism in any currently understood sense.

  But if Third World literature can be conceptualized in terms of SF, the reverse formulation is also viable and perhaps more powerful: SF is the Third World literature of the First World (and, to some degree, of the Second World—the Soviet bloc—as well). Once the affinity is recognized, a number of useful analogies suggest themselves; for instance, it is noteworthy that the familiar post-Romantic “alienation” between author and audience is considerably smaller in the Third World and in the SF community. But the most important analogy is the most political. Whereas most literary practice and study in the First World is generally regarded as a trivial game by nearly all those not professionally involved in it (and even by many who are), the situation is much different in the Third World, where the political importance of cultural practice is widely recognized. Revolutionary movements and governments generally place literary culture high on their agenda of priorities, while subfascist regimes tend to murder left-wing cultural workers with a special thoroughness and glee. Nor is it by chance that so many of the major literary figures of the Third World (Neruda, Neto, Cesaire, among many others) have been major political figures as well. Though one can hardly claim that a comparable situation actually exists as regards First World SF, this entire essay has been devoted to maintaining that SF does possess the critical potentiality to play a role in our own liberation. That is why SF is worth writing about.

  Notes

  1. The terminological situation here is complicated, since Brecht, when arguing against Lukács, did occasionally call himself a realist; but he used the term tactically. and meant it not in any literary sense but in the sense of one concerned with reality. For a useful summary of the Brecht-Lukács controversy, see Henri Arvon, Marxist Esthetics, trans. Helen Lane (Ithaca, NY: 1973), pp. 100-12. Some of the relevant documents in this controversy are collected, along with some related material and an important retrospective analysis by Fredric Jameson, in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London, 1977).

  2. A nice illustrative anecdote concerns the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, which was presented with a copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare upon publication but discarded it shortly thereafter during routine house-cleaning: a book of English scripts was hardly considered appropriate for a proper university library. In more recent years, however, the prevailing Oxford attitude towards Shakespeare has changed.

  3. Samuel Delany is probably the critic who has dealt most interestingly with SF language, and my own discussion here is indebted to him. See especially Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. See also the interview with him in Charles Platt, Dream Makers (NY
, 1980), pp. 69-75. Interesting work in the same area may also be found in Kathleen L. Spencer’s “‘The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low’: Towards a Stylistic Description of Science Fiction,” SFS, 10 (1983): 35-49.