Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

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СКАЧАТЬ fact, the mood organ does figure as an important motif in Dick’s novel as a whole. But in the context of the opening paragraph, its chief function is to signal the science-fictional character of the language, and thus to impel us to read the latter differently than we would read the language of mundane fiction.⁷ Because technology and emotions are apparently connected in ways unfamiliar to us (though not wholly unfamiliar or unpredictable, because we do know of mood-altering drugs, not to mention television itself), the adjective merry, as applied to a surge of electricity, may have a sense other than the expected metaphorical one. What does it mean to be “awake without prior notice”? We understand the difference between being jerked from deep sleep to full consciousness and gradually passing through intermediate stages; but the context suggests that a more specific meaning may be operative. Nor is the grammatically simple phrase “his wife Iran” free of ambiguities. Are we here in a world where a man can be married to an entire country? And what of the fact that Rick and Iran seem to sleep in different beds? As in mundane fiction, it may be a detail without profound significance, or it may signify certain sexual problems between the couple. It might, however, also signify some completely novel arrangement of sexual relations that is normal in the society portrayed. In any case, the whole topic of human feelings, sexual and otherwise, is estranged, and the question of a technology of emotion is posed. A few lines following the above paragraph is this bit of conversation:

      “Get your crude cop’s hand away,” Iran said.

      “I’m not a cop.” He felt irritable, now, although he hadn’t dialed for it.

      This exchange might be completely mundane, until the final clause. But that clause, though formally subordinate, makes the crucial science-fictional point.

      It would be possible, in a full-scale reading of the novel, to show how the first paragraph does function as an appropriate overture. Of course, not all of the possibilities raised there are actually developed. But the relations between technology and emotion do constitute the principal focus of the text, not only with regard to such household appliances as the mood organ, but also in connection with the state of virtual war between human authorities and androids, the latter presumed (though one cannot be completely certain) to have no emotions at all. But the opening of the novel may also stand alone as paradigmatic, on the molecular level, of the science-fictional generic tendency. The point to be stressed about the language is its profoundly critical, dialectical character. For undialectical theory, the most familiar emotions—love, affection, hatred, anger, and so forth—tend to be unproblematic categories, assumed to be much the same in all times and places, and to exist on an irreducibly subjective level. They may of course manifest themselves in a practically infinite number of permutations, and the precritical reader may relish such psychological fiction as that of Dostoevsky or Flaubert for the subtlety and acuteness with which those authors portray the (presumably universal and static) varieties of affective experience. A dialectical approach, on the other hand, would adopt the kind of perspective suggested by Dick. Because the paragraph shows an emotional dynamic of a future age operating quite differently from what we ourselves empirically experience, the question of the historicity of feelings is raised, and the possibility of a historical periodization of emotion in coordination with other aspects of social development (such as technology) is at least implied. The technical emphasis of the paragraph also tends to remove emotion from idealist notions of spirituality or the unproblematically individual, and to suggest that psychic states may be reducible to concrete and transindividual material realities—a reduction that Freud, after all, held to be the ultimate conceptual goal of psychoanalysis and that Lacan (substituting language for neurobiology as the grounding of psychoanalytic materialism) claimed to have achieved through the mediation of neo-Saussurian linguistics. We may also note that, if the phrase I used above, “technology of emotion,” has a strongly Foucauldian ring, it is not by chance. Dick’s paragraph does indeed resonate with Foucault’s concern to show that power does not merely repress or distort the subjectivity of individuals, but actually constitutes human subjectivity, from the ground up, so to speak, and in historically variable ways.

      Historical materialism, psychoanalysis, Foucauldian archeology: I do not suggest that such elaborate theoretical structures are actually present, even embryonically, in the short and apparently unpretentious paragraph that opens Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It is, rather, a matter of the shared perspectives—here as manifest on the level of style itself—between critical theory and science fiction. What is crucial is the dialectical standpoint of the science-fictional tendency, with its insistence upon historical mutability, material reducibility, and, at least implicitly, utopian possibility. Yet it must be noticed that the quoted sample of Dick’s prose, like the prose of most (though certainly not all) science fiction, is far from what is ordinarily considered “fine” writing or the work of a “stylist” in the usual eulogistic sense. If, then, a deep affinity between critical theory and science fiction can be detected on the molecular level of style, the question of stylistic quality or value must somehow be engaged. Although science fiction is certainly not without its “stylists” in the normative sense—Ursula Le Guin and Samuel Delany come readily to mind—most of the prose in most of the works where the tendency of science fiction is strongest has rarely received stylistic commendation; indeed, canonical hostility to science fiction has often justified itself on specifically stylistic grounds.

      It is necessary, then, to analyze the nature and function of literary style, most urgently in the general context of the ideology of style that has developed within hegemonic criteria of literary value. If a genuinely critical dynamic is to be understood in the conjunction of the categories of style and science fiction, then both categories must be subject to dialectical interrogation. With regard to science fiction, such interrogation was offered in the second section of chapter 1. We may now turn to the category of literary style.

      A convenient point of departure is provided in an essay by C. S. Lewis about what today would be described as the problem of the canon or the crisis of literary canonization. Lewis claims to know how “the plain man” distinguishes between those texts that are “real Literature” and those that are not (the distinction evidently corresponds to what in the preceding section was designated the secondary phase of canon-formation). Texts that fail to make the higher grade, it seems, “‘haven’t got style’ or ‘style and all that,’” in normal lowbrow opinion. As a robustly neo-Christian critic and novelist, Lewis maintains an antiformalist viewpoint, and he therefore goes on to chastise his imaginary lowbrow friend for “a radically false conception of style.”⁸

      Despite Lewis’s tone of class-based condescension, it is nonetheless worth noting that the apparently hapless “plain man,” far more than Lewis himself, is supported by the most influential (if, as we shall see, largely precritical) modern theories of literary form. The key reference here is to Russian Formalism, with its extremely various, detailed, and ingenious attempts to prove that the essence (or necessary and sufficient condition) of literature as such is a certain specifically “literary” use of language formally distinguishable from all nonliterary uses and definable in properly stylistic ways. (And here, of course, we are dealing with the primary as well as the secondary phases of the canon-constructing process). Only relatively recently, to be sure, have the particular innovations of Viktor Shklovsky and his colleagues attained a worldwide impact commensurate to their intrinsic intellectual force. But ideas related directly or indirectly to Russian Formalism, especially with regard to the conviction of the latter that literature must be understood in terms internal and specific to itself, without dependence on the referential status of the literary text, have resonated throughout most of the most widely prestigious Anglo-American literary theorizing of this century: from certain elements in the work of I. A. Richards, through much of American New Criticism, to such a relatively late epigone of Russian Formalism as Paul de Man—who, in one of his most widely known oracular gestures, proclaims that he does “not hesitate to equate the rhetorical, figural potentiality of language with literature itself.” Indeed, it is in just this context that de Man significantly contrasts what he himself terms СКАЧАТЬ