Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

business, he thought, depresses me. Except for the protection—and valuable personal information—it will give me.

      Probably whoever’s hunting me will be caught by the holo-scanners within the first week.

      Realizing that, he felt mellow.

      Like the passages from Ubik and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, this one seems, on the most evident level, to be little more than solidly competent. It differs in registering not much in the way of technological innovation, the only noteworthy item in that regard being the scanners (themselves only a revision and updating of the Orwellian telescreens in Nineteen Eighty-four [1949], or, indeed, of the police listening devices so familiar in Dick’s world and ours). Nonetheless, its style is profoundly dialogic. As with the other Dick novels examined above, the play of heteroglossia, the presence of the alien and of alienation, involves both the conceptual structure of the novel as a whole and an elaborate network of extratextual referentiality—although the key historical reference here is less the economic reality of commodification (as in Ubik) than the political reality of conspiracy. Much of the complexity of the style derives from the ironic fine-tuning possible in free indirect discourse, an instrument that Dick can at times play with near-Flaubertian precision. In the earlier sentences of the passage, the accent of the narrator and that of Arctor himself seem almost at one, the evident identity wholly appropriate to the novel’s sympathetic treatment of its hero. At the same time, however, the discourse is fissured by the paradox of self-alienation at the heart of the narrative. Not only does Arctor possess a doubled self as both hippie and nark; in these sentences he envisions the practically infinite replication of himself on holographic tape. The repressive state apparatus that employs Arctor assigns him to survey himself, and this assignment amounts to a hyper-Lacanian splitting of the subject, a construction of the very self as alien. This construction is to be understood, in a more general sense, as paradigmatic for the subjects of a conspiratorial, bureaucratized regime. Arctor’s musings thus have an estranging significance beyond his own intentions as a character, which are here limited to his personal situation.

      The regime of conspiracy is estranged even more complexly, however, as the style switches gears, so to speak, with the last sentence of the first paragraph quoted above. At this point the narrator begins to withdraw his ratification of Arctor’s viewpoint, not out of lack of sympathy but on account of superior knowledge. Arctor believes himself to be persecuted by a single enemy, and hopes the scanning of his house will reveal the enemy’s identity. The hope is naive, and the text regards it ironically. It is Arctor, not the novel, who believes the information acquired from scanners to be “valuable,” and in the following two sentences the dialogic irony trained upon Arctor intensifies, climaxing with the word “mellow,” which is scripted as if from within a drug haze in this deeply antidrug text. The irony thus powerfully anticipates the ultimate plot development of the novel; that is, the collusion of the highest levels of the police with the criminal drug syndicate and their joint conspiracy to destroy the mind of Bob Arctor. The shifting voices in this passage resonate strongly with Dick’s overall attempt in A Scanner Darkly to estrange the bureaucratic conspiracies of both the state and the latter’s nominal opponents, and to trace the connection between such conspiracy and the alienation (ultimately the obliteration) of the hapless individual subject. The stylistic device of free indirect discourse, in the science-fictional inflection given it here by Dick, in this way conveys, on the molecular level, Dick’s overall and highly innovative attempt to suggest a critical political theory of conspiracy and bureaucracy in the late-capitalist state.¹⁸

      In conclusion, our examination of Dick’s prose—so unstriking to the casually formalist or precritical reading and in this way, as in others, so profoundly characteristic of science-fictional prose generally—powerfully suggests the extent to which, even (or perhaps especially) according to the stylistic grounds on which it has traditionally been judged most harshly, science fiction maintains a critical superiority, a privileged relationship with critical theory itself. One more point in this connection may be emphasized. As we have seen, the dialectic since Hegel has an irreducibly historical character; thus the dialogic multiaccentuality of science-fictional style must amount to a radically historical style as well. This point is abundantly illustrated by the three major Dick novels discussed above: not only in the sense that these texts all bear unmistakable historical traces of their productive matrix in the cultural and political radicalism of the American 1960s and 1970s, but, more importantly, in the sense that their novelistic representations, even including the smallest details of everyday subjectivity from Rick Deckard’s irritability to Bob Arctor’s mellowness, are repeatedly shown, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, to depend upon the material realities of specific (and estranged) times and places.

      But the historicity of science-fictional style can also be illustrated much more briefly, for instance with this sentence that concludes one of the best novels by Dick’s stylistic precursor, Heinlein: “My word, I’m not even a hundred yet.”¹⁹ The tone of lighthearted optimism 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,