Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

274.

      22. The terminological situation here is complicated, since Brecht, when arguing against Lukács, did occasionally call himself a realist. He used the term tactically, however, and meant it not in any literary or generic sense but in the sense of one concerned with reality—a concern, in Brecht’s view, that necessitated a sharp break with the literary realism praised and prescribed by Lukács. For a useful summary of the Brecht-Lukács controversy, see Henri Arvon, Marxist Esthetics, trans. Helen Lane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 100–112. Some of the relevant documents in the controversy are collected, along with some related material and a retrospective analysis by Fredric Jameson, in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: New Left Books, 1977).

      23. In the following discussion of genre I am indebted to Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), esp. 103–150, and equally to Etienne Balibar, “The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism,” in Reading Capital, by Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1979), 201–308. It is something of a mystery why Balibar’s pathbreaking reconceptualization of the crucial Marxist category of mode of production (surely one of the most original, fruitful innovations in critical theory during the past few decades) has never, in my view, received quite the celebrity that it deserves.

      24. The reference, of course, is to Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974).

      25. Consider the following Samuel Delany anecdote, concisely summarized by Paul K. Alkon: “A historian gradually stopped reading anything but science fiction in his spare time. Finally he began to doubt that he could ever again read anything else. Worried, he picked up an old favorite, Pride and Prejudice, to see what might happen. To his relief, he enjoyed it more than ever. But he saw it in a different way: whereas before he appreciated Austen for her masterful portraits of human nature acting as it might in the real world, now, as he read he asked himself what kind of world must be postulated in order for the events of her story to have happened as she relates them. The answer, somewhat to his surprise as an expert in early nineteenth-century history, was that for the tale of Elizabeth and Darcy to unfold as it does in Pride and Prejudice one must assume a world quite different from that in which Jane Austen actually lived”; Alkon, “Gulliver and the Origins of Science Fiction,” in The Genres of “Gulliver’s Travels,” ed. Frederik N. Smith (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 163. In my terms, what happened to Delany’s friend is that, trained by reading a great deal of literature in which science fiction was the dominant generic tendency, he was able to appreciate its presence in a text where it played a subordinate but significant role. The relation of science fiction to realism will be discussed further in the third section of chapter 2.

      26. Cf. C. S. Lewis, who maintains that, while in The Lord of the Rings “the direct debt … which every author must owe to the actual universe is here deliberately reduced to the minimum,” it is nonetheless true that “as for escapism, what we chiefly escape is the illusions of our ordinary life”; Lewis, On Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt, 1982), 84–85.

      27. Cf. John Rieder, “Embracing the Alien: Science Fiction in Mass Culture,” Science-Fiction Studies 9 (March 1982): 26–37. Rieder persuasively argues that the Star Wars films are superior to most other blockbuster Hollywood science-fictional films of the recent past in the totalizing (as opposed to epiphanic) role that visual and auditory special effects play—a role, he maintains, that enables the special effects to convey considerable utopian energy despite the banality of the narrative line. For a somewhat different analysis of special effects in science-fiction film, see Carl Freedman, “Kubrick’s 2001 and the Possibility of a Science-Fiction Cinema,” Science-Fiction Studies 25 (July 1998): 300–318.

       2. Articulations

Genre, Theory, and Phases of Canon-Formation

      The question of the canon is one of the liveliest and most hotly debated in literary studies today, and the—at best—marginal position that science fiction occupies with regard to the most widely influential canons of literary value makes explicit consideration of canon-formation urgent. It is not difficult to understand why challenges to the received canon and even critical investigations into the mechanics of canon-formation have provoked precritical ire. John Guillory, one of the most acute theorists of canonization, has pointed out that despite the social decline of aristocracy, “the canon has retained its self-image as an aristocracy of texts,” and that “the pure authority of great literature may be the only image of pure authority we have.”¹ He further notes: “The canon participates centrally in the establishment of consensus as the embodiment of a collective valuation. Hence it is in the interest of canonical reformations to erase the conflictual prehistory of canon-formation or to represent such history as the narrative of error” (358). The quasi-reverence with which the canon is widely regarded in conservative and precritical literary ideologies can be further elucidated by giving Guillory’s thesis a more specifically institutional inflection. For the whole position of the humanities in the modern—especially the modern American—university cannot be understood apart from the invidious position that humanities departments occupy with relation to the much better funded and more publicly respected departments that specialize in the natural sciences. The latter owe their prestige not only to industrial and military utility but also to the image of solidity that they project, to the objective public knowledge that scientific investigation is widely supposed to attain. Literary studies can display nothing precisely comparable, because none of its more or less rigorous methods—from Germanic philology and positivistic literary history to New Criticism and even some varieties of critical theory itself—has won endorsement or respect comparable to that enjoyed by natural science. In this situation, the canon, as an “aristocracy of texts” projecting an “image of pure authority” may well seem the most solid thing that literary studies has to offer. There is a real sense, then, in which the question of the canon must be at the heart of any critical literary investigation.

      Much conservative ideology would forbid the question from even being asked. Nonetheless, sufficient critical energy has been directed to this matter during the recent past that not only have we witnessed a great deal of reformist tinkering with and revision of the canon, but—more important—we also possess a considerable body of work that radically problematizes canon-formation itself. Writers like Guillory, Paul Lauter, Herbert Lindenberger, Richard Ohmann, and Lillian Robinson (among others)² have investigated various ways in which canonization does not simply respond to the degree of “value” immanent in texts but rather refracts (if not necessarily reflects) a wide variety of objective interests—personal and, more especially, social—dependent upon the specificities of particular times and places. In other words, genuinely critical analysis of the canon does not simply display the “unfair” exclusion of certain texts maintained to be “great” according to the same criteria by which other texts are included. Nor does it, in a weird parody of affirmative action, lobby for the inclusion of texts in order to “represent” the various groups responsible for the production of the texts. Instead, it interrogates the presuppositions implicitly governing the criteria and mechanisms of canon-formation itself. What is most radically at stake is not the empirical content of any particular canon but the form of canonization. As with much else in current critical theory, the founding insight of rigorous canon critique was originally voiced (with characteristic hyperbole) by Nietzsche: “As in the case of other wars, so in that of the aesthetic wars which artists provoke with their works and their apologias for them the outcome is, unhappily, decided in the end by power and not by reason. All the world now accepts it as a historical fact that Gluck was in the right in his struggle with Piccini: in any event he won; power was on his side” (emphasis in original).³ It seems to me, however, that what might thus be designated neo-Nietzschean canon critique, although it has grasped that the structure of canon-formation is a more fundamental issue than the content of specific canons, has not been sufficiently sensitive to the canonical importance of the structure—particularly the generic structure—of individual texts themselves. For genre is not in the least a politically