Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

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СКАЧАТЬ like A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1928). The operative distinction is precisely that Proust’s novel, unlike (or at least far more than) the dialogues of Archie and Edith Bunker, possesses style and all that.

      Of course, the category of style, as the defining canonical criterion of literary value, must be historicized in order to be truly intelligible; and such historicization must first of all notice that the de Manian use (like a great many other current uses) of the term rhetoric involves a certain historical imprecision. As Fredric Jameson has suggested,¹⁰ style is a specifically modern phenomenon, an effect of the bourgeois cultural revolution; although it is in some ways the successor to rhetoric, it operates in a manner antithetical to that of rhetoric in the strict sense. The older term implies a storehouse of linguistic figures, each with its predetermined formal integrity and all available to all aspiring rhetoricians. Actual rhetorical practice must of course vary with the various aims and abilities of different practitioners, but the shared figural infrastructure of all rhetoric guarantees a considerable degree of pan-rhetorical community. Furthermore, those differences that do emerge among rhetorical performances are understood as rhetorical differences simply and solely, as variations in the practice of a common art. They are not taken to be outward embodiments of profound dissimilarities in character or personality, as indices to the variety of human souls. But such is precisely the case with style. Style is generally assumed to be the direct expression of the middle-class ego and must be created anew and almost ex nihilo by every stylist. Fundamentally, it has little in common with such a characteristically collective and transpersonal project of the precapitalist order as rhetoric. On the contrary, it is part and parcel of the whole celebration of personal subjectivity so typical of cultural modernity—not only in the sense that the individual stylist is personally and almost solely responsible for every act of stylistic production, but also in that every particular style (understood here as an overall pattern perceptible in the work of any given stylist) is taken to be profoundly revealing of the author not merely as producer of style but as a human subjectivity in toto. The style is the person, as the well-known French proverb has it.

      Accordingly, it is not difficult to understand the primacy widely accorded to style in the formalist constructions of literature and literary value. On the one hand, because style, in formalist stylistics, is taken to inhere in language itself, in the medium in which literature has its very existence, a stylistic emphasis enables the immense methodological economy of a quasi- (or pseudo-) scientific taxonomy of literature as an autonomous system sufficient unto itself and structurally describable without necessary reference to extraformal categories. On the other hand, the danger of a merely technicist aridity that such a stylistics might imply is avoided through the considerable affective force and richness that derive from the privileged relationship assumed between style and the soul of the stylist. It is significant that the ultimate context of C. S. Lewis’s rejection of formalist stylistics is nothing other than a considered denial of the viability of the distinction between literature and what Lewis’s invented lowbrow calls not real Literature (or what Paul de Man calls subliterature).¹¹ Lewis’s position is a minority one. More mainstream and formalist theorists, like de Man or Lewis’s plain man, are generally convinced that the distinction is indeed viable and that its essence is style and all that.

      It is in this context that we may return to the prose of Philip K. Dick. I choose to focus on Dick because I consider him to be the preeminent author of modern science fiction, “the Shakespeare of science fiction,”¹² in Jameson’s phrase. By this I suggest not only his general stature within science fiction and beyond it (as the creator of an oeuvre that an increasing body of critical opinion holds to be the most interesting and important produced by any North American novelist since Faulkner), but also the extent to which his greatness, like Shakespeare’s among Renaissance dramatists, is bound up with his being radically typical of his genre—and not least on stylistic grounds, as our examination of the opening passage of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? indicates. Yet Dick’s style, while deeply science-fictional, does not, as we have already begun to see, characteristically display the evident polish, the syntactic elegance, and the allusive resonance that are stylistically valorized by hegemonic formalist criteria of value. The plain man of Lewis’s imagination would probably hesitate to attribute “style and all that” to Dick’s work, and de Man might well rank it closer in aesthetic value to Archie Bunker than to Proust. What is thus called into question, then, is not only the caliber of Dick’s style but also, given the formalist stress on style as the defining characteristic of literary canonicity itself, the magnitude of his achievement in general. We have to deal here with a contradiction between what I have argued to be the critical superiority of Dick’s style and its apparent inferiority (or mediocrity) by ordinary received canons of literariness and literary value. A further stylistic analysis of Dick’s prose is necessary, then, not merely to shed light on Dick and on science-fictional style generally, but to examine more dialectically the category of style itself.

      The following passage condenses the opening of Ubik (1969), the novel that I take to be probably Dick’s finest:¹³

      At three-thirty a.m. on the night of June 5, 1992, the top telepath in the Sol System fell off the map in the offices of Runciter Associates in New York City. That started vidphones ringing. The Runciter organization had lost track of too many of Hollis’ psis during the last two months; this added disappearance wouldn’t do….

      Sleepily, Runciter grated, “Who? I can’t keep in mind at all times which inertials are following what teep or precog…. What? Melipone’s gone? … You’re sure the teep was Melipone? Nobody seems to know what he looks like; he must use a different physiognomic template every month. What about his field?”

      “We asked Joe Chip to go in there and run tests on the magnitude and minitude of the field being generated there at the Bonds of Erotic Polymorphic Experience Motel. Chip says it registered, at its height, 68.2 blr units of telepathic aura, which only Melipone, among all the known telepaths, can produce.” …

      Runciter said, “I’ll consult my dead wife.”

      “It’s the middle of the night. The moratoriums are closed now.”

      As with the passage from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the prose is not at all conspicuously “literary.” There does not appear to be any attempt, in the proper formalist manner, to use language in a state of intensified depth, density, and difficulty. On the contrary, the style (heavily influenced by Robert Heinlein and, perhaps more distantly, by Hemingway) seems marked by little more than routine serviceability; it fluently adequates itself to the adventure narrative and does not at all scorn the characteristic formulations of the field. Something “wouldn’t do”; a character states that “nobody seems to know” something and asks “what about” something else; something is said to be true “among all the known” examples relevant. Such devices do convey a certain degree of urgency and breathlessness, but not, apparently, in a manner more complex than that attained by an action-adventure cartoon strip. The prose, it would seem, is, in de Man’s term, subliterary. Philip K. Dick is not a stylist.

      Or is he? We may first of all note that in Ubik, as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, science fiction does manifest its generic presence not only on the molar level of plot structure but also with regard to the molecular operations of language itself. The date in the opening clause suggests a science-fictional framework temporally, and the solar perspective opened up in the following clause does the same thing in spatial terms. There follow a flood of neologisms—this device being perhaps the most paradigmatic expression of science-fictional diction—that suggest the new resources of a brave new world, whether technological (“vidphones,” “moratoriums”) or human (“psis,” “inertials”) or, indeed, in terms that implicitly offer to deconstruct that all-too-familiar binary opposition (“a different physiognomic template every month,” “68.2 blr units of telepathic aura”). More generally, the passage clearly establishes, in strategically casual phrasing but also with noteworthy economy, that the setting СКАЧАТЬ