Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

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СКАЧАТЬ the dead (not to mention polymorphously perverse sexuality) have not only become routine but have been thoroughly integrated, economically, into the consumer capitalism of the 1990s. The language of the passage, in sum, emphatically establishes what we have seen to be the sine qua non of every text in which the tendency of science fiction is strong: cognitive estrangement, a clear otherness vis-à-vis the mundane empirical world where the text was produced—which is, however, connected (at least in principle) to that world in rational, nonfantastic ways.

      A somewhat closer examination of the passage may reveal the workings of otherness to be yet more complex than we have seen thus far. Most crucial here is the way that the style of the passage critically manages difference and differences, the way in which the unfamiliar and the familiar are held in suspension and related to one another through the operations of a radically heterogeneous and polyvalent prose. The overall critical agendum of Ubik as a whole—the satiric and rationally paranoid estrangement of the commodity structure of monopoly capitalism¹⁴—is here enforced through a complex multiaccentuality on the level of sentence production. For example: “‘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.’” On the simplest plane, this is a casual, serviceable, unadorned bit of adventure fiction, the loyally efficient report of Runciter’s subordinate concerning the field operations of Runciter’s top subordinate, Joe Chip. At the same time, the sentence introduces such novelties as the quantification of telepathic power and the institutionalization of polymorphic perversity, the air of things new and strange supported by the logical but striking coinage “minitude.” What is even more complex and important, however, is the way that casualness and estrangement work together to suggest the routine commodification of telepathy, anti-telepathy, and perversity, and therefore the assimilation of these moments of uncanniness to the quasi-familiar commercial structure that includes Runciter Associates, Hollis’s competing organization, and the incidentally mentioned motel. The strange is to some degree thus de-estranged, but the more powerful tendency is the complementary one to estrange commodification itself, to evoke the fetishistic weirdness on which this superficially familiar process is based.¹⁵

      A similar stylistic heterogeneity may be detected in this seemingly very simple sentence a few lines later: “Runciter said, ‘I’ll consult my dead wife.’” Again, the unadorned functionality of neo-Heinleinian prose—the boss is taking decisive but fairly routine action to deal with a crisis—clashes with what is for the reader the intensely strange content of the action. Also again, however, this multiaccentuality problematizes the relation of familiar to unfamiliar in two directions at once. As the sentence introduces communication with the dead, but only in the context of corporate management, it suggests that the commodity structure can make even the reversal (or partial reversal) of the ultimate finality of death seem routine; at the same time it reminds us that this very commodity structure is after all a fundamentally weird network in which dead and living labor interact with one another. It may be added that the point is reiterated almost immediately by the reference in the following line to “moratoriums,” which turn out to be commercial enterprises for the maintenance of “half-lifers” like Mrs. Runciter. In this passage, then, Dick’s style does more than move his plot along and insinuate the general cognitive estrangements that generically define science fiction. Even more important, the style, in its heterogeneous complexity, enacts on the molecular level the most searching critical-theoretical juxtapositions and interrogations that the novel in toto is concerned with implementing. If this style be “subliterary,” then that category itself certainly needs to be rethought—especially within the general context of science fiction. It is time, in fact, to consider more deeply the ideological functions of formalist canons of stylistic value.

      Such a rethinking is implicit in the work of the Russian critic who in recent years has emerged as the most eminent modern theorist of novelistic style: Mikhail Bakhtin. The essence of what I have suggested concerning the style of Dick’s science fiction can be conveniently expressed in the terms given critical currency by Bakhtin. Dick’s is a radically dialogic use of language, one that exploits to the utmost what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia; that is, the primacy of linguistic polyvalency, of the irreducible multiaccentuality of meaning, as against any concept of singular, closed, monologic discourse. Furthermore, the foregrounding in Dick of the interinanimation of form and content, of text and context, of sentence production and the economic realities of generalized commodity production, strongly recalls Bakhtin’s insistence on the impossibility of detaching style from the sociality that it registers and his correlative brilliance in relating the smallest linguistic turns to the most general movements of culture and society. For Dick and Bakhtin, style is an intrinsically social category.

      This privileging of the contextual, however, this rejection of any attempt to construct literature as a self-sufficient autonomous system, is only one way in which both Dick and Bakhtin mount a powerful challenge to all formalist conceptions of style. For both, the internal structure of style is no less important than, while closely related to, its radical referentiality. With regard to the former, it has far too rarely been noticed that formalist accounts of a specifically literary use of language, from the Russian Formalists themselves onward, have tended to assume an unacknowledged synonymy between the literary and the poetic, and thus a putative superiority on the part of the older literary mode: an assumed superiority whose presence can be heard to this day in the eulogistic accent that almost invariably accompanies the descriptive use of terms like “poetry” and “poetic.” Bakhtin, however—an unswerving though respectful opponent of the Russian Formalists who were his contemporaries and compatriots—reverses the conventional hierarchization of poetry over prose, arguing that poetic style, for all its apparent verbal richness, tends by its lyrical, rhythmic flow to repress otherness, to occlude difference, and thus to approximate to the authoritarian single-mindedness of monologue: “The natural dialogization of the word is not put to artistic use, the word is sufficient unto itself and does not presume alien utterances beyond its own boundaries. Poetic style is by convention suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse.”¹⁶ In fundamental contrast, the style of the prose novel is one that welcomes and glories in heteroglossia, highlighting and contextualizing rather than repressing otherness: the novelistic word “break[s] through to its own meaning and its own expression across an environment full of alien words … variously evaluating accents, harmonizing with some of the elements in this environment and striking a dissonance with others” (Dialogic Imagination 277). These words exactly describe the style of the opening of Ubik. Bakhtin’s stress on harmony and dissonance corresponds with complete precision to the Dickian dialectic of familiarity and strangeness. Though Bakhtin may never have heard of Dick and seems to have had little or no personal interest in science fiction as such, his insurgently critical standards of novelistic style might well have been formulated specifically to justify Dick’s science-fictional style.

      Accordingly, it follows that novelistic style, when most capable and most powerfully novelistic (and in that sense, indeed, most literary) may eschew certain properties of polish, of well-roundedness, of fluently controlled density and resonance proper to the poetic; and, correspondingly, that novelistic prose that does display such qualities, however “literary” it may seem in normative terms, is perhaps to be suspected of contamination by the monologic authoritarianism of poetry. Returning to the terms most generally privileged in the current essay, we can say that Bakhtin’s ultimate critique of formalistic stylistics—and in particular of the precise ways that style is valorized by the latter—is that formalism, for all its technical richness and complexity, remains essentially precritical. Its aesthetic preference for poetic monologism is the final, inevitable result of the idealist and empiricist epistemology that absolutely autonomizes literature and concomitantly forecloses context and referentiality. The stylistic markers most commonly taken as indices of the literary in the eulogistic senses may, in fact, therefore be signifiers of conceptual conservatism and regression. Conversely, the dialogic, novelistic style endorsed by Bakhtin and exemplified by Dick is above all critical and dialectical; its “prosaic” quality may signal substantive, as opposed to merely technical, complexity. Indeed, the entire category of the dialogic in Bakhtin’s sense is СКАЧАТЬ