Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

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СКАЧАТЬ is, accordingly, in vain. Reading, one might say, does not merely respond to literature: reading (of a certain sort) creates literature.

      This kind of reading, then—this process of creation—may be understood as at one with the process of canon-formation itself, which, as becomes evident, comprises three overlapping but distinct phases, in each of which genre plays an important role. In the primary phase of canonization—the construction of the very category of literature out of all verbal documents extant—genre is a nearly all-powerful factor. To put it another way, in this phase the ideology of canon-formation makes itself felt mainly through generic mediation. So it is that the business memoranda of so conservative and respectable an author as Stevens are denied the title of literature, while a poem by a militant and unknown slumdweller, if it obeyed a few simple conventions, would not be denied the title. It is in this sense that genre must be understood as a category logically prior to literature: the very existence of the latter is radically enabled by the former. Indeed, generic determination operates so functionally on this primary level of canon-formation that the same verbal construction may be literary or nonliterary 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 slumdweller’s poem, probably—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 forming a secondary canon: a canon-within-the-canon that distinguishes “good” literature, literature that deserves to be taken seriously, literature that is literature in more than the bare bibliographic sense, literature worth studying and teaching and writing articles about. Though nongeneric 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, and there was a dawning awareness that the scripts of English stage plays might in some sense be literature; there was, however, widespread resistance to considering such scripts as literature in quite the same honorific sense that applied to ancient drama or to English odes and sonnets. The boom in Shakespeare’s reputation was directly dependent upon the collapse of this inhibition. Somewhat similarly perhaps, academic critics in our own time seem to be deciding that autobiography belongs more centrally to the literary canon than they would have allowed only a generation or two ago. In practice, there is bound to be overlapping between the primary and secondary phases of canon-formation, if only because of the inevitable semantic slippage between the concept of membership in a grouping and the concept of exemplifying the grouping favorably; all groupings have a tendency to absolutize themselves, to deconstruct the distinction between descriptive and eulogistic (or dyslogistic) signification. Still, the two phases remain in principle tolerably discrete.

      Finally, there is a tertiary phase of canon-formation as well: the tendency, already 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 than in either the primary or secondary phases). Science fiction 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. First, it is evident that the affinity 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 or what I have called the tertiary phase within the project of constructing literature itself, of determining, out of all the verbal material available for inspection, which works possess the peculiar power that all respecters of literature from Plato to Paul de Man have attributed to the object of their devotion or fear—which is to say that it is, like the primary phase of the same process, a functional act involving, in the long run, determinate social ends. Genre plays a large role in all phases of the canon-forming process, and genre is of course (as shall be discussed in some detail below) not in the least an ideologically neutral factor. Accordingly, if science fiction has rarely been a privileged genre, this means that the literary powers-that-be have not wished science fiction to function with the social prestige that literature in the stronger senses enjoys. It cannot be too emphatically stated that the marginally or dubiously canonical status of science fiction has nothing to do with a series of unfavorable judgments on a series of individual texts—as a conservative empiricist ideology of canon-formation might imagine—but results from a wholesale generic dismissal of a kind organic to canonization as a practice. Plausible reasons for the general disinclination to eulogize science fiction will become clear in the course of this study.

      The second conclusion involves recognizing that, at least in the most rarefied—the tertiary—phase of the canon-forming process, the operative generic judgments may be implicit rather than explicit. Usually, this distinction is relevant when considering both the positive and negative choices of precritical schools of reading. The Leavisites, for instance, would have hotly denied that they had any special (or 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 at all (and favorable, of course, to “life”). But what I maintain here—and this is, indeed, the central claim of the entire current essay—is that critical theory itself, especially in its most central, Marxian version, does implicitly privilege a certain genre; and the genre is science fiction. This is a large claim. But it should be clear that I am not trying to “revalue” any particular canon in order to beg admission for science fiction. Instead, I have described canon-formation itself, and I now maintain that the most conceptually advanced forms of criticism unconsciously privilege a genre that has been widely despised and ghettoized.

      Such an assertion raises two difficult questions. How and why does critical theory privilege science fiction? And, if it does, why do most critical theorists seem to have been unaware of the fact? I tackle the first question in the following three sections of this chapter, in which I explore various dimensions of the affinity between critical theory and science fiction. I then take up the second question in the final section, where the question of the canon once again becomes paramount.

The Critical Dynamic: Science Fiction and Style

      In examining the affinity between critical theory and science fiction, there is tactical as well as methodological economy in beginning with the specifically stylistic dimension of science fiction. Style is widely taken to be a privileged category in the analysis of any literary kind, a kind of touchstone of the literary itself. The critical or precritical status of this privileging, and its special relevance to the study of science fiction, will be discussed below. But the precise language characteristic of a genre can hardly fail to be a salient aspect of the latter, and we may begin by analyzing the language of the following passage, which opens a major science-fiction novel, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968):⁶

      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.

      In some of its particulars, the passage could be the straightforward opening of a mundane novel (that is, a novel in which the generic tendency of science fiction is reduced to the barest minimum): a married man, lying in bed beside his wife, awakes and is, presumably, about to start the day. The stylistic register of the paragraph, however, marks it as unmistakably science fiction. The key factor here is the reference to the mood organ—evidently a technical device somehow connected to emotional states and one that, though unknown in our own empirical environment, is an ordinary accoutrement СКАЧАТЬ