Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

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 “the sub-literature of the mass media”⁹ (specifically, an episode of All in the Family) with real literature 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