Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

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СКАЧАТЬ because none of its more or less rigorous methods—from Germanic philology and positivistic literary history to New Criticism and even some varieties of critical theory itself—has won endorsement or respect comparable to that enjoyed by natural science. In this situation, the canon, as an “aristocracy of texts” projecting an “image of pure authority” may well seem the most solid thing that literary studies has to offer. There is a real sense, then, in which the question of the canon must be at the heart of any critical literary investigation.

      Much conservative ideology would forbid the question from even being asked. Nonetheless, sufficient critical energy has been directed to this matter during the recent past that not only have we witnessed a great deal of reformist tinkering with and revision of the canon, but—more important—we also possess a considerable body of work that radically problematizes canon-formation itself. Writers like Guillory, Paul Lauter, Herbert Lindenberger, Richard Ohmann, and Lillian Robinson (among others)² have investigated various ways in which canonization does not simply respond to the degree of “value” immanent in texts but rather refracts (if not necessarily reflects) a wide variety of objective interests—personal and, more especially, social—dependent upon the specificities of particular times and places. In other words, genuinely critical analysis of the canon does not simply display the “unfair” exclusion of certain texts maintained to be “great” according to the same criteria by which other texts are included. Nor does it, in a weird parody of affirmative action, lobby for the inclusion of texts in order to “represent” the various groups responsible for the production of the texts. Instead, it interrogates the presuppositions implicitly governing the criteria and mechanisms of canon-formation itself. What is most radically at stake is not the empirical content of any particular canon but the form of canonization. As with much else in current critical theory, the founding insight of rigorous canon critique was originally voiced (with characteristic hyperbole) by Nietzsche: “As in the case of other wars, so in that of the aesthetic wars which artists provoke with their works and their apologias for them the outcome is, unhappily, decided in the end by power and not by reason. All the world now accepts it as a historical fact that Gluck was in the right in his struggle with Piccini: in any event he won; power was on his side” (emphasis in original).³ It seems to me, however, that what might thus be designated neo-Nietzschean canon critique, although it has grasped that the structure of canon-formation is a more fundamental issue than the content of specific canons, has not been sufficiently sensitive to the canonical importance of the structure—particularly the generic structure—of individual texts themselves. For genre is not in the least a politically innocent category, and if—as is now fairly widely accepted—the ideology of a text inheres at least as much in its form as its manifest content, then genre must surely be reckoned at least as important a factor for canonization as, say, the stated “moral” of a poem or the kind of life experience that ultimately provides the raw material for an autobiographical novel. In any case, because my concern here is partly with a particular genre—science fiction—the problem of the canon with regard to the latter cannot be considered apart from the relation between canon-formation and genre.

      We can approach this matter by recalling that the process of reading itself, though by no means always critical, is inevitably theoretical; no better illustration of this point can be cited than the frequently noticed tendency of any school of reading (critical or precritical) to privilege, whether implicitly or explicitly, a particular area of the literary terrain. Two widely diverse examples may be noted. Lukácsian criticism, which is certainly a critical theory, is overwhelmingly oriented toward the novel of classical realism. Balzac and Tolstoy provide Lukács 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—one of the most consistent enthusiasms of Lukács’s very long career—is based on his ability to theoretically construct Mann as the authentic successor of the nineteenth-century realists. Conversely, literary modernism seldom figures in his work save as an object of denunciation or (as with his late recognition of Brecht) an object assimilable to the basic principles of realism after all. Lyric poetry scarcely even exists for Lukács.

      But lyric poetry (to take our second example), especially the lyric poetry of T. S. Eliot and his seventeenth-century precursors, is the central genre for American New Criticism, a school of considerable technical sophistication but one whose conceptual orientation is predominantly precritical. (There is some irony here, as the more philosophically schooled of the New Critics were directly indebted to Kant himself. But they tended to understand Kantian aesthetic contemplation as the empiricist apprehension of works existing on a Wimsattian “objective” level, rather than as constructive or radically interpretative in character.) 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 prose fiction (Cleanth Brooks’s work on Faulkner is exceptional and not, indeed, a particularly New Critical project), and they would be hopelessly at sea with a work like Finnegans Wake (1939), not to mention, say, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1932–33).

      There is, of course, a major difference between Lukács and the New Critics. Genuinely critical in the sense defined in the preceding chapter, Lukács knows what he is doing with clear self-consciousness. He is constructing a theory of realism for determinate ends both philosophical (the justification of orthodox Marxism as Lukács understands the latter to be the heir of the classical metaphysical line from Aristotle to Hegel) and political (the struggle against fascism). The New Critics, by contrast, seem to imagine, though doubtless with some degree of neo-Agrarian mauvaise foi, that they are simply and innocently “reading.” But it is noteworthy how both posit a privileged generic space, and it could readily be shown how equivalent generic spaces are assumed or stated by other schools as well: organicist English fiction, especially that of Lawrence, by the Scrutiny school; symbolist poetry like Mallarmé’s by Derridean deconstruction; high modernist drama and fiction by the Frankfurt School and by Althusserian Marxism; the Bible and the Prophetic Books of Blake (as well as much Shakespearean and Spenserian romance) by the myth criticism of Northrop Frye; Romantic and neo-Romantic poetry by the influence criticism of Harold Bloom; and so forth. Science fiction, it must be noted, has been overtly privileged by relatively few influential readers.

      What this pattern of generic privileging suggests, I think, is not simply the importance of genre to the reading of literature but a way in which genre must be thought as a more fundamental category than literature itself. Genre is a substantive property of discourse and its context, a tendential mode whereby signifying practices are organized. Literature, by contrast (understanding the term in any sense more specific than that of all written documents whatever) is a formally arbitrary and socially determinate category. Literature, in other words, is a wholly functional term.⁴ Those works are literature that are designated literature by the minority of readers who, in a given time and place, possess the social and institutional power (as Nietzsche would say) that enables 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 that actually exist, shall be considered—that is, shall be canonized—as literature. 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. Paradise Lost (1667), to be sure, was literature on the day of its first publication and remains so today. In 1776, on the other hand, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was literature in a sense in which it probably no longer is and in which the last scholarly publication by the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in economics almost certainly is not. Conversely, the plays of Shakespeare have progressed from being minimally or hardly at all literature to being more centrally literature than any other texts in the language.⁵ The attempt to construct an СКАЧАТЬ