In the hospital a month before he died, he confided to Arthur Burns that he intended to settle permanently in Australia.
He spent his final months in bed, inactive but clear-headed, weaving the plots of stories that he would never write.72 In a letter from early 196673 he mentioned some of the themes he had in mind. He planned to tell “how the Instrumentality first came up...How Brain Gibraltar finally died...A runaway planet which maintained total radio silence in order to survive but which was picked up by telepaths and occasionally called ‘the house of the dark magician’...”
Finally, August 6, 1966, on the eve of an operation he may not have survived, Paul Linebarger succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. He was barely fifty-three, and the fullness of his powerful style had just begun to emerge. His remains were interred at Arlington National Cemetery, not far from the tomb of John F. Kennedy. In 1981, his widow Genevieve joined him. She is buried at his side.
When Linebarger died, the political situation had already begun to take a different turn. The civil rights movement had grown more radical and the notion of Black Power was on the rise. By then, American troops were fighting in Vietnam. The violent seventies were looming, but the Kennedy-esque utopia of Cordwainer Smith had already received its most serious blow three years before in Dallas, when President Kennedy was assassinated in an act that amounted to a kind of coup d’état.
Paul Linebarger, political theorist and secret agent, had engaged in his own private meditation on power and injustice under a pseudonym and in the least expected medium.
The prologue to Space Lords, his key book, contains several lines that are equivalent to a genuine program. If one knows how to read them, everything becomes much clearer:
“This is science fiction, yes. But it comes from your own time, from your own world, even from your own mind.
All I can do is to work the symbols.
The magic and the beauty will come of our own past, your present, your hopes and your experiences. This may look alien but it is really as close to you as your own fingers.”
1 Burns (1973).
2 Elms (1984).
3 Norstrilia, chap. “The Department Store of Heart´s Desires”
4 “The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal.”
5 Burns (1973).
6 Psychological Warfare, Prologue.
7 Burns (1973).
8 Cf. Who was Who in America, sv. Paul Myron Wentworth Linebarger - “Paul Myron.” Chicago, The A.N. Margum Co., 1942, vol. I (1897-1942).
9 Cf. Background, in Exploring... pg. 33.
10 J. G. Ballard. Miracles of Life. Shanghai to Shepperton. An Autobiography. London, Fourth Estate 2008.
11 Norstrilia, chap. “At the Gates of the Garden of Death”.
12 Norstrilia, chap. “The Department Store of Heart´s Desires”.
13 H.G. Wells, “What’s happening in China? Does it foreshadow a New Sort of Government in the World?” in The Way the World is Going, London, Ernest Benn, 1928.
14 Burns (1973).
15 Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) wrote Expressionist novels set in China such as Die drei Sprunge des Wang-lun (1915), Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfmaschine (1918) and Berge, Meere und Giganten (1924, reissued as Giganten in 1931).
16 According to Richard Polenberg and Joanna H. Louis, quoted by Guy Durandin in L’information, la désinformation et la réalité, P.U.F., Paris, 1995, pg. 53.
17 Cf. Durandin, op. cit., pg. 90.
18 Psychological Warfare, chapter XIII, pg. 211, footnote.
19 Psychological Warfare, chapter IV, pg. 56.
20 Psychological Warfare, chapter IV, pg. 52.
21 Psychological Warfare, chapter IV, pg. 50.
22 Psychological Warfare, chapter XI, pg. 201.
23 Elms (2000).
24 Psychological Warfare, chapter V, pg. 68.
25 Ria, pg. 118.
26 Carola, pg. 300.
27 Ria, pg. 11.
28 Ria, pg. 134.
29 Carola, pg. 35.
30 Carola, pg. 21.
31 Carola, pg. 237.
32 Carola, pg. 39.
33 Carola, pg. 39.
34 Carola, pg. 223.
35 Kim Chum Kon, The Korean War, Seul 1959, pg. 809.
36 Atomsk, pg. 17.
37 Ria, pg. 218.
38 Ria, pgs. 4-5.
39 Cf. Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree. A history of SF, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1973. Footnote 7: “I am indebted to Dr. Leon Stover for evidence that ‘Kirk’ is in fact the pseudonym for the politician who later wrote science fiction himself under another pseudonym: Cordwainer Smith.”
40 Robert Lindner, “The Jet-propelled Couch” in Fifty-minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales, New York, Rinehart 1955.
41 Best Fantasy Stories (1962), published by Brian Aldiss.
42 Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The history of science fiction. London, Gollancz, 1986
43 Robert Lindner (1915-1956), Rebel Without a Cause (1944). Another instance of a book made into a film such as Pressure Point (1962), starring Sidney Poitier and Bobby Darin.
44 Burns (1973).
45 Foyster-Burns (1973).
46 In the anthology A Touch of Infinity (1972).
47 Cf. Lee Weinstein, “In Search of Kirk Allen”, The New York Review of Science Fiction, April 2001.
Alan C. Elms, “Beyond the Jet-Propelled Couch. Cordwainer Smith and Kirk Allen”, The New York Review of Science Fiction, May 2002.
48 “On the Sand Planet.”
49 Robert Lindner, Psychoanalytic Stories... pg. 293.
50 Pierce (1975-b).
51 This is the hypothesis Sam Moskowitz attributes to signs given by the author: “Kirk´s” real name would be “Jim Carter” and his imaginary world the Mars of Burroughs. Cf. Sam Moskowitz, Strange Horizons, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976.
52 Pierce (1975-a).
53 Cf. Robert Crossley, Olaf Stapledon. Speaking for the Future. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1994.
54 Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men. Last Men in London. London, Penguin Books, 1976, pg. 400.
55 Ria, pg. 70.
56 Carola, pg. 223.
57 “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”
58 “On the Storm Planet ”
59 From the Indonesian gunung, “mountian”
60 “On the Sand Planet”
61 Pierce (1976).
62 “Under Old Earth”
63 Cf. Knoll-MacFadden (comp.), War Crimes and the American Conscience (1970).
64 Ria, pg. 70.
65 Stillman - Pfaff, The New Politics (1961) Quoted by T.A. Kozlowski, Nuevos potenciales de la política mundial. Buenos Aires, Pleamar, 1967.
66 Psychological Warfare, chapter XIV, pgs. 242-243.
67 Psychological Warfare, chapter XIV, pgs. 242-243.
68 Ria, pg. 100.
69 Dwight Eisenhower, “Farewell Address to the Nation” in The Liberal Papers (1962), Kozlowski, op. cit., pg. 102.
70 Epilogue to Space Lords.
71 Foyster-Burns (1973).
72 Frederik Pohl, personal communication, collected by Marcial Souto.
73 Elms (2000).
FIGURES OF RUPTURE
FIGURES OF RUPTURE
“Mooreeffoc” is a fantastic word, but it could be seen in every town of this land.
It is“Coffee Room”, viewed from the inside through a glass door
As it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day;
and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angl
e.
—J.R.R.Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories
It should be clear by now to anyone who has followed this exploration of the fiction of Cordwainer Smith and its references thus far that what we are dealing with here is something more than merely escapist literature. These fantasies are considerably more grounded in their historical circumstances than is commonly the case in a genre such as science fiction.
Like other genre literature and sub-literatures, science fiction is the child of Romanticism.
Romanticism was one of the first eruptions of discontent at the heart of modernity -the despair of artists and intellectuals seeking a place in bourgeois society.
Emancipated from the servitude they had been subjected to in the courts, artists sought to overcome both the values of the Ancien Régime and the bourgeoisie, existing within the rupture of the two. Their descendants would include ideologists whose sole desire was to reform, in the image and likeness of their utopias, the society they scorned.
With its veneration of freedom, heroism and adventure, Romanticism took refuge in the medieval past, ultimately celebrating the conquests of colonialism. Yet this nostalgia, which would continue nurturing “westerns” and adventure novels well into the twentieth century, was nothing more than an escape.
Twentieth century artists and intellectuals were also ambivalent about the new society of the masses, oscillating between elitism and populism, between the sobriety of the aestheticized “beautiful soul” and the consensual humiliation of the “organic intellectual”.
While the Romantics had sought refuge in the past, artists that came in their wake found solace in the future. Some followed the path of revolutionary utopias, while others committed themselves politically to building a better world.
Reduced to being mere suppliers of cultural services for a shrinking segment of the market, today they seem to exhibit an unprecedented conformism, though it is impossible for us to know at what point they will grow weary of worshiping the rich and famous. It may very well be that they disgusted them as much as their predecessors.
As an offshoot of Romanticism, science fiction experienced the vertiginous quality of escape. If it were no longer possible to find refuge in the past, there was always the future. If terrestrial geography had been denuded of all mystery, then space, the planets and parallel worlds seemed to open up an infinite domain for escape. Paradoxically, science fiction often reflected a longing for monarchies, empires, adventure and exoticism.
Yet whenever science fiction sought to be something more than entertainment, it was forced to accept historical time. Even when projecting itself into the future to emphasize the rupture, it could not elude a commitment to the present.
Two possibilities emerged from the break-up of the quotidian world of the author and the reader: “escape”, which includes the spectrum that runs from mere entertainment to dignified literary expression, and something that might be called “the mediation of reality by fantasy”. “Science fiction, infected and sometimes destroyed by fantastic literature, is the only literary trend which has been capable of bringing about a rupture without escaping from the world; to the contrary, it has invented a utopian future in order to give more vigorous expression to this original rupture.”1
The work of Cordwainer Smith appears to fit this definition, since it entails critical reflection on the present world and a recovery of everything excluded by instrumental rationalism.
Cordwainer Smith expresses the distancing effect achieved via the utopian projection of certain contradictions of the present through the figures of the Instrumentality and the underpeople. The texts he wrote beginning in 1960 celebrate the emancipation of the underpeople, a mystical enterprise with its own Gospel and martyrs aimed at redeeming both the oppressed and their oppressors.
While this rupture is manifested very hermetically and with highly inexplicit codes, it is not merely escapism, rather it acts as a mediator in the construction of our vision of the world.
Here the split is the product of the antagonism that arises between the religious conscience of the author and his proximity to the world of power. It is expressed in a symbolic construction that sheds light on the historical present and, decades later, continues to illuminate our reality today.
Beyond the conflict between communism and capitalism that dominated discourse at the time, Smith underscored to the ethical vacuum of a civilization that, a quarter of a century later, Francis Fukuyama would still depict as representing the end of history.
This challenge, fused to a Christian meditation on the hubris of human institutions, came to be Smith’s central theme. As such, he could introduce the Instrumentality as a humanist utopia that became so perverted it ultimately betrayed its principles and succumbed to nihilism. The underpeople, like the early Christians, symbolize the excluded, the negativity for which a technocratic utopia has no response.
The Instrumentality
Shortly before he began writing science fiction, Cordwainer Smith had already used the expression “the instrumentality of man”. In the final pages of Ria, the main character has a hallucination in which she thinks that she hears the echoes of many voices. It was “something which sounded like ‘the instrumentality of man’, not like the unplanned noises of nature and the sea.”2 “Instrumentality” might represent human “ingenuity”, “judgment” or “resources”: something like the “common sense” of the species. J. J. Pierce3 sees a religious element in it, recalling how in Catholic theology the priest that performs the sacraments is the “instrumentality of God”.
In fact, “Instrumentality” is not a specifically theological concept but an Aristotelian category recognized by Saint Thomas Aquinas. In the philosophical context of the 20th century, it reappeared in Critique of Instrumental Reason (1967) by Max Horkheimer. Prior to that, and more explicitly, Hannah Arendt had used it in The Human Condition (1958). For Arendt, “instrumentality” is an anthropological category that includes all the technical-instrumental activity of humankind, from basic tools to automatic machinery.
The Instrumentality, already mentioned in “Scanners Live in Vain”, emerges as a police force in the service of the Jwindz and gains its independence from them thanks to Carlotta Vom Acht. Its primary objective is to return humankind to its essence, jettisoning the dreams of perfection that ended up producing monsters.
The “Instrumentality of Mankind” was created “to keep man man”, in other words, after the insane experimentation that the Jwindz had subjected human nature to.
Secondly, the Instrumentality sought to avoid the concentration of power so as to ensure peace among the different worlds: “A very few men have governed the world for a little while. The Instrumentality has made that impossible.”4
The Instrumentality governs from the shadows, in the wings of local powers, like a sect of enlightened manipulators.5 Smith takes pains to differentiate it from the terrestrial State or government, which is the autonomous administrative apparatus. Paraphrasing the Gospel, he states that it is necessary to give “to the state or the Instrumentality whatever belongs to the state or the Instrumentality.”6
The means it employs are strictly political. The Instrumentality prohibits information (only the circulation of personal news is allowed), knowledge of history (to avoid the formation of public opinion) and religion (to prevent fanaticism). It is a flawless intelligence power that “does the things for mankind that a computer cannot do. It leaves the human brain, the human choice in action.”7 Its slogan is: “Watch, but do not govern. Stop war but do not wage it, protect, but do not control; and first, survive!”8
With its wealth of experience, the Instrumentality orchestrates the reconstruction of civilization and expansion into the cosmos, yet ultimately establishes itself as a “super-government” whose authority is deferred to throughout all the worlds.
Rather than intervening dir
ectly in domestic affairs, it exercises effective diplomacy. When the Empire creates a penal colony on the planet Shayol to house political dissidents, the Instrumentality intervenes only to alleviate the prisoners’ suffering.9 Meanwhile, it conspires to bring about the collapse of the Empire, putting an end to punishment altogether when this is accomplished.
As its decision-making center continues to be on Earth, the Instrumentality views itself as an earthly power. Yet its connection to the government of the planet is merely geographical, similar to the bond between the Vatican and Italy.
Its headquarters are in Earthport, the main city of Earth, in a place called Bell & Bank. The Council chamber, called Bell because of its cupola, is here, as is its Central Intelligence, the Bank. While Bank would seem to suggest financial power, here it refers to the Instrumentality’s monopoly on information, which it keeps in an immense Memory Bank.
The Instrumentality is a classic Kafkaesque bureaucracy, concerned solely with self-perpetuation. It acts as a collegial body, with no visible leader. It is a hierarchy of Lords and Ladies, of Chiefs and Sub-chiefs. The title of Magnate appears only two times, in “Scanners Live in Vain” and Norstrilia.
When several Lords and Ladies are on a planet and decisions need to be made by consensus, the oldest Lord serves as the Presiding Lord.10 Three Lords make up an Emergency Court. While their decisions are immune from legal sanction, they can fall into disgrace or be demoted to civilian status. The decisions of Seven Lords cannot be contested, though it is possible to review their actions and judge them.11 Generally speaking, Lords act independently, and interference of one in matters being handled by another is frowned upon.
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