Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

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СКАЧАТЬ is of course appropriate to what The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) regards as the comic conclusion of the bourgeois revolution (loosely patterned after the American War of Independence) staged in and by the text. The more saliently science-fictional point, however, is that this optimism is no metaphysical or merely individual attitude; rather, it is directly based on the historic specificities of life on twenty-first-century Luna, specificities that include significant alterations in human life expectancy and other biomedical realities. In general, indeed, we may go so far as to say that, stylistically and otherwise, science fiction is of all genres the most devoted to historical concreteness: for, after all, the science-fictional world is not only one different in time or place from our own, but one whose chief interest is precisely the difference that such difference makes, and, in addition, one whose difference is nonetheless concretized within a cognitive continuum with the actual (thus, as we have seen, sharply distinguishing science fiction from the irrationalist estrangements of such essentially ahistorical modes as fantasy or the Gothic, which may secretly work to ratify the mundane status quo by presenting no alternative to the latter other than inexplicable discontinuities).

      It may appear, then, that science fiction is, perhaps paradoxically, a version of historical fiction, and that the affinity for which I argue between science fiction and critical theory is a rewriting of the privileged relationship maintained by Lukács between Marxism and the historical novel. This analogy does, in fact, imply a good deal of what the current essay is concerned to establish. And, in advancing my argument for the critical impulse of science fiction from the molecular level of style to the molar level of narrative structure, it is indeed necessary to engage the problems of critical insight and novelistic form posed most tellingly by Lukács. Such will be the initial task of the following section.

The Critical Dynamic: Science Fiction and the Historical Novel

      Though Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel remains the most completely achieved critical analysis of any particular novelistic genre, its accomplishment is closely connected to Lukács’s considered denial that the historical novel is really a special genre at all.²⁰ More precisely, Lukács maintains that the historical novel becomes a specialized genre only in its decadence, when it has lost the critical features that define its classical, fully vital phase. For Lukács, the classical historical novel as practiced by Sir Walter Scott and his authentic successors understands historicity in a dialectical, as opposed to an antiquarian, way. History, for the historical novelist, is no matter of exoticism or inert factuality; rather, it involves a dialectic of difference and identity (though Lukács himself does not employ those terms), a sense of both change and continuity. The society of the past is portrayed with full awareness of the temporal and social distance that separates it from the society in which the novel is produced, but with equally full awareness of the driving historical forces that link the two eras in a concrete continuum that is social, economic, political, and cultural in nature.²¹ Thus it is, for example, that Scott’s representations of eighteenth-century and medieval Scotland stress the enormous differences between his country’s gentile Highland past and the bourgeois, largely Anglicized Lowland society in which the novelist himself lived—but never in a way that makes the former a mere matter of costume and scenery. The Highland past is never a mere binary (and thus, in the long run, stigmatized) Other counterpointed to the Scotland of Scott’s own day. On the contrary, Scott’s main focus is consistently on the historical forces that rendered irresistible the supersession of gentile by bourgeois Scotland and—respectable Tory gentleman though Scott was—without glossing over the terrible cost in human suffering. The historical novel, then, is, to use the term that the philosophically erudite Lukács himself repeatedly employs with full intent, an eminently critical form, a form that constructs societies as radically historicized and complexly determined totalities.

      All this is to say that the historical novel, when fully itself, represents for Lukács a triumph of realism, and the latter, not the former, is in Lukácsian terms the most salient generic category. For the defining characteristics of historical realism like Scott’s are equally to be found in the genuinely realistic novel set in a society contemporary to the novel’s production. The novel of contemporary realism understands the historicity of the present; that is, it represents contemporary society as a mutable, historical totality, the result of complex but comprehensible social developments and one that has by no means arrived at any sort of finality or stasis. Despite the extreme closeness of contemporary society, a realistic representation does not cast it as “natural” or unproblematically given, but as part and parcel of the historical flux. Of course, there are obviously all sorts of minor differences between novels set in the past and those set in the present, but not what Lukács would define as an essential difference, or what we might designate a radically generic difference. Thus it is that Lukács considers Balzac to be the most legitimate immediate heir to Scott (a relationship, indeed, of which the French novelist was quite consciously aware). Thus it is—to choose perhaps the most prominent single example—that Tolstoy practices fundamentally the same kind of art in Anna Karenina (1878) as in War and Peace (1866).

      There is, however, a radical break in the history of the novel as construed by Lukács. It comes not between historical and contemporary realism, but between realism itself and what might be termed the postrealist novel that emerges out of what Lukács sees as the disintegration of realism into naturalism (and later, into impressionism and modernism). The crucial loss here—closely connected, in Lukács’s reading, to the increasingly reactionary role assumed by the European bourgeoisie after the failed revolutions of 1848, and the concomitant abandoning of the progressive, democratic elements within bourgeois ideology—is the occlusion of the vital critical perspective of totality. Instead of portraying society as an interconnected whole in which objective and subjective elements are dialectically bound together—thus making possible the “typical” characters of realism; that is, psychologically individuated characters who also incarnate objective trends of sociohistorical development²²

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