Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

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      To avoid misunderstanding, we must note one further point about the Bakhtinian problematic. Bakhtin’s exaltation of novelistic prose over poetry cannot be entirely separated from the general historical circumstances of early twentieth-century literary criticism, in which the supremacy of poetry among literary forms was still a commonplace, and the novel was still widely regarded as something of a scruffy parvenu. The critical revolution that would challenge this hierarchy had been launched as early as Turgenev, Flaubert, and Henry James, but was far from victorious. Though it is a matter of some controversy to what degree such victory has been won even now, yet it is certainly true that the undialectical binarism—the flat, somewhat reactive privileging of prose over verse—toward which Bakhtin’s dialectic too often tends must be seriously qualified, especially in our late twentieth-century theoretical universe where, on the one hand, the post-Flaubertian “art novel” of modernism and postmodernism is a commonly accepted part of the literary landscape, as are, on the other hand, the efforts by poets from T. S. Eliot, Brecht, and William Carlos Williams onward to expand the accents of poetry beyond the sonorous monologism that for Bakhtin was particularly associated with verse of the late-Romantic type. In other words—and applying, in effect, a Bakhtinian critique to the letter of Bakhtin’s own work—monologism and dialogism cannot be taken as simple attributes of poetry and prose respectively. Both (in this way like genre itself as discussed in chapter 1) must be understood as tendencies strongly or weakly operative within texts and classes of texts; and there is less reason now than in Bakhtin’s time to associate monologism with poetry and dialogism with novelistic prose to quite the same extent that Bakhtin himself frequently suggests. Yet such historical adjustment is largely unnecessary in the context of science fiction, the scruffiness of which remains prominent. Indeed, the place assigned to the science-fiction novel by currently hegemonic aesthetic ideology is in many ways remarkably comparable to the place of the novel generally during the period when Bakhtin’s insurgent views were formed; thus Bakhtin may be considered in many ways a science-fiction critic avant la lettre. Bakhtin requires that style be understood in a radically social, referential way, as attuned to the heterogeneous roughness of discourse and history so significantly foregounded by Dick. Not only the general spirit of Bakhtin’s work but even many of his original formulations still directly apply to the prose of Dick and his science-fiction colleagues. The link between dialectics and the dialogic is, as we have seen, more than merely etymological; if science fiction enjoys a privileged affinity with critical, dialectical theory, then it is only to be expected that its style should be, in Bakhtinian terms, most radically novelistic.

      Bakhtin’s emphasis on the embracing of the alien in novelistic style has an obvious special relevance to the language of science fiction, and it is in this light that I shall consider one more sample of Dickian prose. In the following passage of free indirect discourse from A Scanner Darkly (1977), which Dick himself considered his masterpiece, the protagonist, an undercover police drug agent named Bob Arctor, muses on the installation of police scanning devices in his own home:¹⁷

      To my own house, he thought. Arctor’s house. Up the street at the house I am Bob Arctor, the heavy doper suspect being scanned without his knowledge, and then every couple of days I find a pretext to slip down the street and into the apartment where I am Fred replaying miles and miles of tape to see what I did, and this whole business, he thought, depresses me. Except for the protection—and valuable personal information—it will give me.

      Probably whoever’s hunting me will be caught by the holo-scanners within the first week.

      Realizing that, he felt mellow.

      Like the passages from Ubik and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, this one seems, on the most evident level, to be little more than solidly competent. It differs in registering not much in the way of technological innovation, the only noteworthy item in that regard being the scanners (themselves only a revision and updating of the Orwellian telescreens in Nineteen Eighty-four [1949], or, indeed, of the police listening devices so familiar in Dick’s world and ours). Nonetheless, its style is profoundly dialogic. As with the other Dick novels examined above, the play of heteroglossia, the presence of the alien and of alienation, involves both the conceptual structure of the novel as a whole and an elaborate network of extratextual referentiality—although the key historical reference here is less the economic reality of commodification (as in Ubik) than the political reality of conspiracy. Much of the complexity of the style derives from the ironic fine-tuning possible in free indirect discourse, an instrument that Dick can at times play with near-Flaubertian precision. In the earlier sentences of the passage, the accent of the narrator and that of Arctor himself seem almost at one, the evident identity wholly appropriate to the novel’s sympathetic treatment of its hero. At the same time, however, the discourse is fissured by the paradox of self-alienation at the heart of the narrative. Not only does Arctor possess a doubled self as both hippie and nark; in these sentences he envisions the practically infinite replication of himself on holographic tape. The repressive state apparatus that employs Arctor assigns him to survey himself, and this assignment amounts to a hyper-Lacanian splitting of the subject, a construction of the very self as alien. This construction is to be understood, in a more general sense, as paradigmatic for the subjects of a conspiratorial, bureaucratized regime. Arctor’s musings thus have an estranging significance beyond his own intentions as a character, which are here limited to his personal situation.

      The regime of conspiracy is estranged even more complexly, however, as the style switches gears, so to speak, with the last sentence of the first paragraph quoted above. At this point the narrator begins to withdraw his ratification of Arctor’s viewpoint, not out of lack of sympathy but on account of superior knowledge. Arctor believes himself to be persecuted by a single enemy, and hopes the scanning of his house will reveal the enemy’s identity. The hope is naive, and the text regards it ironically. It is Arctor, not the novel, who believes the information acquired from scanners to be “valuable,” and in the following two sentences the dialogic irony trained upon Arctor intensifies, climaxing with the word “mellow,” which is scripted as if from within a drug haze in this deeply antidrug text. The irony thus powerfully anticipates the ultimate plot development of the novel; that is, the collusion of the highest levels of the police with the criminal drug syndicate and their joint conspiracy to destroy the mind of Bob Arctor. The shifting voices in this passage resonate strongly with Dick’s overall attempt in A Scanner Darkly to estrange the bureaucratic conspiracies of both the state and the latter’s nominal opponents, and to trace the connection between such conspiracy and the alienation (ultimately the obliteration) of the hapless individual subject. The stylistic device of free indirect discourse, in the science-fictional inflection given it here by Dick, in this way conveys, on the molecular level, Dick’s overall and highly innovative attempt to suggest a critical political theory of conspiracy and bureaucracy in the late-capitalist state.¹⁸

      In conclusion, our examination of Dick’s prose—so unstriking to the casually formalist or precritical reading and in this way, as in others, so profoundly characteristic of science-fictional prose generally—powerfully suggests the extent to which, even (or perhaps especially) according to the stylistic grounds on which it has traditionally been judged most harshly, science fiction maintains a critical superiority, a privileged relationship with critical theory itself. One more point in this connection may be emphasized. As we have seen, the dialectic since Hegel has an irreducibly historical character; thus the dialogic multiaccentuality of science-fictional style must amount to a radically historical style as well. This point is abundantly illustrated by the three major Dick novels discussed above: not only in the sense that these texts all bear unmistakable historical traces of their productive matrix in the cultural and political radicalism of the American 1960s and 1970s, but, more importantly, in the sense that their novelistic representations, even including the smallest details of everyday subjectivity from Rick Deckard’s irritability to Bob Arctor’s mellowness, are repeatedly shown, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, to depend upon the material realities of specific (and estranged) times and places.

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