Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

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 in the end nothing other than the (primarily Marxian) dialectic as manifest in literary (and linguistic) form.

      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