Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

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 of the novel is one in which such uncanny phenomena as extrasensory perception and communication with 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