Shuffling tropes

[With spoilers, for those who care.]

There is a moment in "Palm Strike's Last Case" — the novelette by Charlie Jane Anders that opens C.C. Finlay's guest-edited issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction — where a man, Luc, awakens from cryosleep twenty years later than the rest of the colonists who had made the century-long journey with him to the exoplanet Newfoundland. Something went wrong with his cryo-module, "the wake-up system failed," and only now has someone managed to construct a new one. In this moment Anders evokes, without having to linger on, the oddly multiple senses of loss attendant on such a moment: Luc knew going into cryosleep that he was leaving his Earth life behind, but to wake up to this truth (though he never believes it fully until the end of the story, if then) is something else entirely; not only this, but in missing twenty years he has lost the chance at anything but the most tenuous connection with the rest of colonists, the colony, and the planet itself.

The moment is one of loss specifically; more generally, it is one of disjuncture. I haven't written about it much here, but early on in my self-conscious project of trying to read sf with an actively critical eye (which predates this blog by a year or two) I hit upon "disjuncture" as a word to describe what is for me a central aspect of the sfnal experience. It is there in Joanna Russ's identification of "the Dislocated Protagonist" and "the Dislocated Reader"; it is there in older American magazine sf's traditional refusal (or, in some people's bizarre jargon, "failure") to attend to received notions of narrative progression and unity. There has always been a counter-current, a concerted attempt to smooth over sf's disjunctures in favor of seamless surfaces like those of so-called "mainstream literary fiction," * and ever since the artistic and sociopolitical explosions of 1970s sf were contained by the backlash of the 1980s, this counter-current has been in the ascendant. Today, with few exceptions, it has practically a stranglehold on the sfnal imagination.** Considering this, it is at least refreshing to read a story such as this that builds itself around multiple disjunctures, and that, though it exhibits some signs of wanting to smooth them over (e.g., that peculiarly orderly use of flashbacks that is so unfortunately common in much contemporary writing in and out of sf), in most ways steadfastly refuses to do so.

*Probably best exemplified early on by the critical work of Damon Knight and James Blish — though oddly enough at least the latter's fiction is often driven by such disjunctures (I think particularly of A Case of Conscience, which is as great a novel as it is precisely because it tears itself apart so frequently).
**All of this is why I was so inclined to defend Sandra Newman's admittedly clumsy Guardian article against what I saw as misreading and over-hasty denial.

There are other things to like, such as the story's attentiveness to ecosystems, human and otherwise, including both parasitism and symbiosis (and the difficulty in distinguishing the one from the other); but this leads me to my first real complaint (well, first in this essay, anyway; by this point in the story I already had my second complaint, which I will address in a moment). Much of the story hinges on the colonists' inability to grow crops in Newfoundland's soil, which had been rich at first but quickly became toxic; eventually Luc, a geo-engineer, figures out that it is because the colonists had nearly eradicated an insect-like creature they had thought was a pest, eating the plants, but which turns out to play a vital symbiotic role in the local ecosystem, detoxifying the soil so that the plants can grow in the first place. Anders sets up a resonance (a trivial and tiresome one, but not so much so that it singlehandedly destroys the story) between this and the drug manufacturers and dealers that have sprung up in the colony, who have a relationship with the rest of the (starving and hopeless) colonists that straddles the line between parasitism and symbiosis, and whom Luc, in an attempt to continue his pre-disjuncture life (on which more to come), wishes to eradicate. It is in the context of this latter aspect of the story that Anders, in a flashback to a conversation between Luc and the Earth-bound Josiah, introduces what you might call The Parable of Chairman Mao and the Sparrows. Criticizing Luc's simplistic crime-fighting methods (yeah...like I said, more in a bit), Josiah says:

It's like, during the Great Leap Forward, Mao sent every peasant in China out to kill sparrows, on the theory that sparrows were eating seeds and reducing the harvests. But once the sparrows were all gone, turned out they had been eating locusts, which had been eating the grain. It was an ecosystem. When all the sparrows were gone, everybody starved.

Now, it is important to remember that the list of similar cases is almost literally endless. The casualties of modern rationalization are countless, so it is important to ask why Anders chose this particular parable-from-life out of myriad options. No doubt if asked she would say she chose it because it is a particularly clear example of "pests that turned out to be essential," that like her story but in reverse it has to do with the relationship of insects to crops, maybe that sparrows are nicely poetic. All of these for me are reasons why the parable is much too on-the-nose to carry any weight. Far worse than this, though, it is yet another case of how The Horrors of Communist Central Planning are still and always the go-to example for this kind of problem — despite the fact that now, right now, it is the very real and very current horrors of global capitalist central planning that are destroying the entire world. Mao's simplifications caused a lot of destruction, it's true; but those of the stockholders, the profit margin, and the invisible hand have caused and are right now causing a great deal more. In the face of this, it is difficult to interpret the continued, overwhelming tendency, especially among people from countries that have been capitalist for as long as capitalism has existed, to raise the spectre of the Red Menace yet again, yet again, and yet again, as anything other than dangerously obfuscatory propaganda — whether conscious or not. (There is also the issue that Anders for the most part avoids asking for whose benefit this kind of "symbiosis" exists, but enough.)

My second complaint has less globe-spanning implications, but since we are dealing here with fiction (which is of limited political use at best) and it is a more "purely literary" complaint — and since it is more pervasive throughout the story — it is probably much more serious. This complaint is that everything in the story, good and bad, the positives I have identified and those I have not, the negatives I have identified and those I have not, all are subsumed to the tedious "trope"-shuffling that has if anything an even tighter stranglehold on contemporary sf than the smoothing-over tendencies I identified earlier. This is what happens when a field of literary endeavor finds itself at a certain age, weighed down by its past, having long ago closed off the possibilities that it had once been in the process of opening up for itself (I refer here once more to sf's backlash against its 1970s), and so gives itself over wholeheartedly to postmodern genre theory (as genre triumphalism) without stopping to ask at what price its renewed self-confidence comes.

The trope-shuffling is telegraphed by the story's title, with "Last Case" clearly invoking the "back for one last case" clichés of another field (in the game of trope-shuffling you get extra points for bringing in "tropes" from other "genres"). It then quickly establishes itself as the answer to the squee-bait question "What if one of the grimmer versions of Batman became a terraformer on an exoplanet?" (I could also see it as a movie pitch: "It's like The Dark Knight meets Survivor — in space!!" or something) — for Luc, geo-engineer by day, is also...a crime-fighting superhero (by night!), with a supervillain arch-nemesis he suspects may have followed him to Newfoundland.

This foundational silliness infects everything in the story, most egregiously so in the gleeful grimness of its violence. It seems to me that to create a character like Luc's son Rene solely in order to give him a particularly horrible death solely in order to give Luc a "motivation," is far more morally bankrupt in a story such as this, that seeks to impress us with its grown-up self-consciousness, than it is in the much more naïve early comics that such story elements originated in — not to mention that to fetishize this kind of personal pathos in the face of the worldwide catastrophe the story hints at strikes me as not far removed from certain tendencies in today's blockbuster movies that have come in for a lot of justified criticism lately.

Every time the story seems to be trying to break itself free from its limitations, every time it seems to be using its self-awareness to try to stop doing what it's doing, it turns out instead that it's just slamming itself back into its box even harder.

The light of the first moon draws shadows under her eyes, while a second moon sneaks up on her, illuminating her hair and her rought jacket. She looks as if she's in the middle of one of those rite-of-passage moments where you surrender some of your illusions on the way to adulthood. Something is breaking forever inside her. He has no idea what he's supposed to do about this.

She "looks as if she's in the middle of one of those rite-of-passage moments"...and she is. Nothing exists outside of the constraints of generic narrative. Events either adhere to "tropes" or they do not occur. Story is life, life is story; there is no difference between living and telling.

"Trope," in current usage, means at base a concept shorn of context in the interest of making it as interchangeable as a part on an assembly line. The colonization of an exoplanet, once a notion heavily bound up in a specific, if you will, ecosystem of ideas (or maybe better a set of such ecosystems), can be lifted out of that ecosystem and placed anywhere you like. The tragic death of a loved one and resulting quest for vengeance, ditto; et cetera. (None of this is to say that contexts are fixed, or cannot be changed — merely that one must attend to them.) The trope-shufflers, too, make no distinction between those tropes that were once interesting or worthwhile ideas and those that were not, nor do they attend to the contexts which once determined these differences. They see this practice as a triumph of personal freedom — "I can do anything I want!" "Tear down the walls!" — but to shuffle these tropes around, to mix and match them, even to "subvert" them as people are so fond of saying, not only treats that which is not interchangeable as if it were, it also reinforces, reifies them in their most dishonest form. The removal of things (in the broadest sense of the word "things") from their context is the original and ultimate act of violence; and though the scales are obviously not at all comparable it is fundamentally the same kind of intellectual error that leads to such catastrophes as that of the sparrows.

Trope enthusiasts of the world, quit it! You have nothing to lose but your chains. The correct answer to the question "What if Batman were a terraformer on an exoplanet?" is "Oh, good grief."

To take sf as seriously as those who distrust it

A lot of people write, and write about, science fiction without ever asking what science is, or what fiction is. Some also, or instead, call it speculative fiction, and though they tend to recognize a bit more that just what speculation is needs explaining, they seem always to know already how to explain it, and at any rate they are usually no more curious as to the nature of fiction. Others speak of imaginative fiction, without wondering what an image is, while others identify the fantastic, as though "it" were something simply there to be identified. People write, and read, stories set in the future, disregarding simultaneously both that this is an unreal conceptual construct and that it is something decisively other than the present.

Sometimes it seems to me that (some of) sf's outsiders and skeptics (if not enemies outright) take its premises far more seriously — and understand these premises better — than its own practitioners and readers. Steve Mitchelmore, in two posts I will probably never stop linking to, asks, through Michael Holland and Maurice Blanchot, what it would mean for sf to "think the totality of what it imagines." Blanchot himself, in an obscure essay on sf ("The Proper Use of Science Fiction"), asks a similar question in, surprisingly, more prosaic terms: "How can the advent of a world that is radically alien, a future that is absolutely futural, be communicated?" Gabriel Josipovici in What Ever Happened to Modernism? suggests that "Modernists look with horror at the proliferation in modern culture of both fantasy and realism...[n]ot out of a Puritan disdain for the imagination or the craft of letters, but out of respect for the world," drawing the connection between (here) fantasy and realism that sf's partisans too often fail to see: that both tend carelessly to rely on obscuring, as Josipovici has it elsewhere in the same book, the fact "that living and telling are not the same thing at all" — and that they do it in largely identical ways.

This post is about concerns that are always on my mind, but its immediate inspiration was my seeing Blanchot, in The Space of Literature, quote Pascal: "What vanity is painting which wins admiration for its resemblance to things we do not admire in the original!" My response on reading this, or rather part of my response, was to think: there are infinite ways to disagree, with varying degrees of vehemence, with Pascal's assessment of this as "vanity", but the phenomenon, the relationship between painting and that which it "resembles" that he identifies here is of the utmost importance, and demands the serious attention of anyone who cares about art, whether or not the art they care about seeks to resemble "things we do not admire in the original." In staking out a position opposed to a certain kind of art, Pascal takes that art more seriously on its own terms than most of its supporters.

People in the sf world tend to be very dismissive of sf's skeptics, writing them off en masse as snobs; oftentimes this is the case, but it is important to recognize those times when it is not. In my writing on this blog it is my aim, no doubt seldom achieved, to take sf as seriously as those who, with reason, distrust it — and if possible, to convince those who immerse themselves in it to do the same.

reading Russ: "Innocence" (1955)

reading Russ table of contents

Though I can’t quite place where, I'm almost certain that I’ve seen not only people writing about Joanna Russ but Russ herself as well say that it didn’t occur to her, early on, that she could write science fiction — that she had always read it, but that it wasn’t until 1959’s "Nor Custom Stale" that she realized she could do it herself.* I know I’ve seen people, and I would have sworn her, saying that writing science fiction at Cornell seemed impossible. So imagine my surprise when I first read "Innocence" and discovered that her first published prose work — appearing originally in The Cornell Writer of May 1955 — is nothing if not science fiction. So much so, in fact, that it was republished in almost identical form** twenty years later in the February 1975 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

*That she was only twenty-two in 1959 should have suggested to me that this lateness is exaggerated at best, but somehow it didn’t.
**The later version has some minor changes in punctuation, one or two of which create mildly interesting changes in effect but most of which are insignificant; two definite articles are added where their previous absence was slightly awkward; and two sentences toward the end are excised, in what I suspect was an editorial decision whose sole purpose was to make it fit on the page; the story is better with these sentences but their loss does not make any large impact.

Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that the story could be reprinted twenty years later at all. February 1975 was the same month that The Female Man appeared; one assumes that the completion of We Who Are About To… had to have been somewhere around this same time. This was the period I might hesitantly call her "peak" — only in the sense that by then she had figured out what she needed to do in her writing, and illness and time constraints had not yet slowed that writing to a trickle (or stopped it entirely, as they eventually would). But had I not known that “Innocence” was where she started, had I just come across it in F&SF, I would have had no trouble believing that it belonged to this period. Which is not to say that it’s some lost (or at least never collected) masterpiece; it’s a quick, lightweight piece (this post is about four times its length), almost like a joke, though it does have a seriousness to it; it's very good, but minor. What surprises is that it has none of the awkwardness that permeates the poetry and the other two Cornell-years stories (which I will be covering in another post, if at all), and to my eyes at least none of the writing-to-received-notions-of-acceptability that destroys those two other stories; meanwhile, many of the concerns that the later Russ would devote much of her life to are already present here.

I must be the last one in the world, because nobody else understands. Siegfried, for instance — well, his name was something like that. He had learned nothing but facts from his cradle and that made him very proud. He was a big, fair man and he drove us from here to there among the stars.

Already in these opening lines of her first story the troubling of the authoritative status of the speaker — which I am accustomed to think of as a concern that grew over the course of Russ's writing life — is here, strong (as is the humor that for Russ always accompanies it: his name was "something like" Siegfried, indeed). The narrator never quite comes out and says what "nobody else understands," but it becomes clear that what is meant is storytelling: Siegfried, or whatever his name is, proud in his facts, listens to what for the narrator is "just a story for diversion," but cannot understand:

      "Did you get that out of a book?" I shook my head. "Then you must have been there."
      "No, of course not," I said.
      He came back again to hear more. Then he said "It must be in the past. I've never seen a place like that and I've been all over the galaxy, you know."

And so forth. And here we begin to see, intimately tied to the foregrounding of the act of telling, another of Russ's characteristic concerns, albeit less explicit here: the pedantic literalism, and obsesssion with a certain narrow kind of expertise, of men. The narrator's gender is never specified, and while the introductory blurb that accompanies the F&SF version casually refers to "a story-teller of the future and his audience," the difference in status between the two is so clear, and for me at least so clearly tied up with a subtext of sexual power imbalance and potential violence ("He told me how innocent I was and how I ought not to be let out alone") that it is difficult for me not to read the narrator as a woman. The story hints at other reasons for the power imbalance, as in the sentence immediately following the description of Siegfried, prototypically Aryan, as "big and fair": "I was a passenger — that's all — and dark as a mole, but he was polite and made nothing of it." This suggests both a class difference between passengers and pilots*, and a privileging at some unspecified level of formality of certain types of appearance over others.** This alone, though, does not for me account for the type of tension in the story; and when by the end the narrator is referring to Siegfried as "the stupid hero" it seems clear to me what is going on here, even if it was not necessarily yet clear to Russ herself.

*A notion that would be immediately familiar to the average sf reader of the time, though maybe not to the average Cornell Writer reader — which is perhaps why the F&SF version replaces the dashes setting off "that's all" with subtler commas.
**If I understand the racial and gendered language of the white American 50s, "dark as a mole," especially in contrast to "big and fair," more likely indicates a white woman or possibly white man with brown hair and eyes than any man or woman of color.

It is intriguing, too, both in this story considered on its own and in the context of Russ's later work, that these two issues, the concerns with telling and with male stomping-about, are tied up with yet a third: the denial of death. As soon as he hears about this (totally made-up) place the narrator describes, with "Grassy hills around central fountains where jets of water shine," with "yellow flames that they used for beauty, to look transparent against stone," a place which "still exists," though it is "very old," Siegfried is obsessed with literally, physically finding it. At first it seems merely to be the way that men's curiosity can turn quickly into the demand for conquest — and it is this — but late in the story he confesses another, closely related reason:

"You know," he said in a low voice, "I think I might not die there. See, that's how I feel. That's what you've done."

Where the narrator is content that things — real and imagined — simply be what they are (or are not), Siegfried demands they be given him on his own terms; where the narrator is clear about what stories are and do (though still irresponsible with them, as I will discuss in a moment), for Siegfried these issues are, and must remain, mystifed. Both of these are illusory forms of mastery over the world — and both are necessary to Siegfried's effort to distance himself from death. Later this false mastery, in these three aspects (storytelling, male domination, denial of death) and others, will be one of Russ's central concerns — most explicitly in We Who Are About To..., but in many other works as well.

It occurs to me that "Innocence" is in a way the inverse of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Quest of Iranon," one of his so-called "dream cycle" stories that reads, as many of them do, like a wordier, more sentimental version of a Kafka parable.* (Russ's story too, in addition to being sf, is clearly cast in the parable mold). In that story Iranon is a beautiful young man driven by vivid memories of the idyllic city Aira, which he is certain is his home, where he is a prince; in certain ways, though, his memory of Aira is vague, and he spends his life in search of it. His obsession with it, and his retention of its (uncomplicatedly sketched-in) poetic values in the face of the utilitarian values of the world he sees around him, keeps him young even as those around him age and die — until, eventually, he discovers that Aira never existed, that it was simply a story he made up when he was a child on the streets; realizing this, he becomes an old man and dies. Though "Iranon" has points of interest, and though at the time he wrote it Lovecraft seems to have viewed it as something of a breakthrough, he himself later recognized it, correctly, as being overly "mawkish".** The innocence of youth and the enchantment of story, though common themes in Lovecraft, are far more simplistic and idealized here than in most of his work; and though he is right to try to evoke a sense of loss in the face of adult (and modern) knowledge and disenchantment, the story is so certain of its values and so heavily rigged in their favor that it feels almost smug in its sentimentality. "Innocence", precisely by undoing this confidence in its own premises, seems almost a corrective to these problems.

*I am not an expert on Lovecraft's convoluted print history and have no idea if Russ could plausibly have known the story at this point, though we know definitively that later on at least she was interested in the dream cycle stories, and that she read some Lovecraft as a teenager. At any rate my interest is not in tracing influence per se so much as noting that even this early on her work is already in considerable sympathy with Lovecraft's — though, as would always be the case, pointing in quite a different direction.
**I take this information from S.T. Joshi's brief introduction to the story in its appearance in The Complete Fiction. Whether "mawkish" is Lovecraft's word or Joshi's paraphrase is unclear.

The comparison with "Iranon" helps me to understand what Russ is getting at with her use of the word innocence, which at first I found bewildering. Not only is it the title of the story, not only does the narrator early on, as I have quoted before, tell us that Siegfried finds her (for convenience I will use the female pronouns) so innocent that she "ought not to be let out alone", but the concept of innocence returns at the very end of the story. After Siegfried tells the narrator that he thinks he "might not die" if he can live in the city she describes, and particularly in the face of the accusatory "That's what you've done" (which this next passage immediately follows), she finally realizes the seriousness of the issues at hand and tries to undo the damage by at last giving the true answer to Siegfried's repeated demands to know where this city is (brackets indicate portions not present in the F&SF version):

      [He looked so earnest and bewildered that I couldn't look anything but frightened.]
      "It isn't anywhere," I said. "I made it up out of my head, every bit of it. It doesn't even exist."
      [He turned very calm.]
      "You've forgotten," he said, "Because you're a fool, but I'm going to get a ship and travel around and back and forth until I find it. I'm no fool. I'm going to find it." Then he went steadily out of the room.
      He did that, too; the stupid hero is out there now, between Antares and Deneb or somewheres — nobody has any sense. I must be the last one because nobody but me understands. Innocents! The universe is full of them.

It is, I believe, to the innocence of Iranon and those like him that Russ refers: but unlike the Lovecraft story, Russ's understands that the belief that all things can be treated in rationalized, "factual" terms (which understanding in "Iranon" is precisely the loss of innocence) in the face of a universe that cannot be so constrained (as Blanchot has it, "putting a term on the interminable") is itself a mirror-reversed form of this innocence — which, "Iranon" and etymology notwithstanding, is painful, and which, far from meaning "not guilty" as the now-common sense of the word would have it, can all too easily coexist with guilt in the sense of moral culpability.

But the guilty innocence here does not belong solely to Siegfried. Though the narrator understands what story is, what telling is, she does not include this understanding in her story (the one she tells Siegfried, that is, not the one she is telling us) and thus shares in the culpability for the distortion of the world that such telling enables. She correctly ascribes innocence to Siegfried, the "stupid hero", but she is unable to recognize her own. When Siegfried, as quoted above, tells her that she is too innocent "to be let out alone," she is right to chafe against the paternalism, but the way in which she denies the charge is telling: "That's not fair," she tells us; "I'm just not interested, that's all." My first several times through the story I found this "not interested" perplexing; it is difficult to read it in any terms other than the sexual, though even then it's hard to know quite what to make of it. And I do still think that there is a heavily sexual element to this story, but conceptualizing it also as a sort of mirror image of "Iranon" allows me to understand "not interested" as a confession, though not a deliberate one, of the narrator's own guilt: that is to say, despite all the knowledge that should lead her to a sense of her responsibilities as a storyteller, she nevertheless somehow fails to understand them — and in her failure to understand, in her lack of interest, in her innocence, she abdicates these responsibilities (whether she has taken them up again by the time she tells us the story is another question; I'm not so sure I know the answer). The deeply-felt need not to so abdicate will be central to Russ's practice as a feminist and as a writer of fiction, and it is fascinating to see it present so strongly, in so multifaceted a fashion, in so small and so early a work.

Noted: from Samuel R. Delany's "Dichtung und Science Fiction"

Also worthwhile: replacing "theme" with "trope" in this passage.

[T]he truth is...you will not find the key to science fiction in a survey of scientific, or even science fictional, themes any more than you will find the key to poetry in a survey of romantic, or poetic, themes. At best such a survey is a pretext for exposing new readers to a range of texts which will begin to familiarize them with the field's conventions, language, and semantic formalities. But to the extent that the pursuit of themes becomes a serious scholarly endeavor whose envisioned end is some goal of thoroughness, comprehensiveness, exhaustiveness, and critical mastery, the results will be more and more impoverished, the fruits more and more dessicated--less and less nourishing to the critical hunger for insight, resonance, and understanding. Themes only provide an intuitive, uncritical similarity within which true distinctions may be teased apart. But a theme itself has the same mental structure as a prejudice and must be treated, critically, with the same skepticism. Thematics--at least as we now know them--are useless for gaining any sophisticated insight into science fiction for the same reason thematics are inadequate to reveal the workings of poetics. For just as poetry may be about anything, in any number of ways, including science fiction, science fiction may be about anything, in any number of ways, including poetry.

Science fiction is no more a collection of themes than it is a collection of rhetorical devices. It is much better seen as a tension between subject and object it teaches us first to be sensitive to, then to expect--an expectation which it proceeds to exploit in as many different ways as there are different SF texts. It is a set of questions we expect to be answered about the relation of word and world, character and concept, fictive world and given world; and any given SF text can foil or fulfill those expectations in an infinite number of ways to produce exciting science fiction.

(To clarify: my feeling is that at this point the major sf discourse seldom even reaches the "inadequate" level of thematics because it is so busy concerning itself with "tropes", at least one step down the ladder of adequacy, instead.)

Lost time

[This post, in which I mention another post languishing in my drafts for a year, has been languishing in my drafts for months. But my goodness, it's already long for a blog post, and in the interest of teaching myself that not every single goddamn point has to be run into the ground in order for a post to be "finished," I've decided to post it largely as-is, adding only a few bits gesturing at empty places in it. Part of me thinks I'm on to something vitally important here, while part of me thinks this is as trivial and missing-what-matters as a half-assed 10th-grade term paper. The last paragraph in particular seems now almost embarrassingly grandiose, and yet these ideas continue to nag at me so that I can't find it in myself to get rid of it.]

A passage from Gabriel Josipovici's The Book of God: A Response to the Bible in which he approaches the Jewish and Christian liturgical traditions through a look at Marcel Proust will I think give some helpful background for the ideas I want to talk about here.

         As every reader of À la recherche knows, Proust makes a fundamental distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory. Voluntary memory is the memory of the historian. It tells us that the French Revolution broke out in 1789; that the First World War lasted from 1914 to 1918; that when I was five years old my family moved from X to Y; that I went to such and such a school, took such and such a job, married such and such a person on such and such a date. For Marcel this kind of memory is worse than useless. For what does it do for me to know such things? ... Yet Proust, unlike Nietzsche, was not forced by this insight into the position of having to opt for the memoryless life of the beast. Experience had taught him that there is another kind of memory, quite different from that of the historian, and so important had been this discovery that he made the whole of his giant novel develop out of the insight provided by this involuntary memory.
         Involuntary memory is the memory unleashed by eating again in adulthood a biscuit one had tasted as a child, when the taste brings back the entire world of that time, not as something consciously recalled but directly, physically, in an overwhelming flood. It is as if this memory were lodged inside the body yet sealed off until some chance taste, smell or motion releases it, like the genie from his bottle. Thus Marcel, bending down to tie a shoelace, suddenly finds himself re-experiencing the entire scene of which this movement had been an insignificant part, when his grandmother had helped him to dress. And as he experiences the living reality of his grandmother, her death hits him truly for the first time; before, he had only remembered her as the historian remembers; now he experiences her living presence and so her terrible final absence.
         But the important point about Proust's novel is that Marcel does not remain the mere passive victim of such occurrences. It is true that they cannot consciously be brought into being, but there does not remain for him, as for Nietzsche, an unbridgeable gap between a consciousness which is devoid of meaning and an unconsciousness which is fully meaningful, 'alive'. What bridges the gap is writing. À la recherche is in the end less about spots of time or moments of true being than about uniting the lost fragments of the body through the act of writing which tells of the dispersal of such fragments. And I would suggest that the liturgy, in both the Jewish and the Christian traditions, works in rather the same way: it makes accessible to our daily selves a memory which is alive, which is quite other than the historian's memory. This, I think, is the point of [Yosef Hayim] Yerushalmi's book, Zakhor, which tries to answer the question of why Jews had to wait until the nineteenth century to manifest any real interest in history. The reason, he suggests, is that until then they had no need of history; that it was only with the loss of a traditional way of acceding to the past that the way of the historian became necessary. And we can see the same thing happening in the Christian world at the end of the Middle Ages: the rise of modern historiography goes hand in hand with the collapse of a communal liturgy.

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Works of science fiction, by basing their interest precisely in the alteration of — broadly speaking — the environment, implicitly understand that the situation and problems of the individual are shaped by that individual's surroundings. They do not always, or even often, understand this in what strikes me as any significantly accurate or incisive way, but the shape of the understanding, at least, is there.

Specifically because the alterations sf works propose are necessarily alterations to the conditions of modernity — both because these are quite simply the conditions under which we find ourselves and because science and "high" technology (as we currently understand them) are peculiarly modern phenomena — sf is singularly well-placed to explore the problems modernity gives rise to in the individual (hence my insistence on placing sf alongside those works I think of as modernist, at the risk of homogenizing these very different literatures). If, again, sf in practice rarely does this in any significant way, the potential is there. And this problem, this fracturing of memory and therefore of the self that has to be reconstructed through chance encounters with involuntary memory — for, as Walter Benjamin points out in discussing the same issues in his essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire", for Proust "it depends entirely on chance whether we come upon it before we die or whether we never encounter it" — and then through the struggle of writing, is another peculiarly modern phenomenon, the product (as Benjamin explores in that same essay) of the breakdown of community and tradition that is one of the foundations on which modernity is built (and please note that when I say "modern" I'm speaking of a much longer time-scale than, say, "since WWI").

For well over a year now, the thought has been bubbling in my mind that it could be very fruitful indeed to examine the works of many sf writers through the lens of Proust's meditations on time and memory. A perhaps quarter-written post doing just this with Clifford D. Simak's City, Cordwainer Smith's "Instrumentality" stories, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, and Octavia E. Butler's Kindred has been languishing in my drafts for nearly that long, and most likely will never be finished. The gist is that what is in Proust an individual struggle becomes a societal and/or communal (and sometimes literally universal, or transcendental) one in the sf works, while what is metaphorical, conceptual, or non-physical becomes literal, embodied, and physical.

In Simak, Proust's finding that deliberate, conscious investigation of memory can never conjure up the past in its totality is transformed into the scientific discovery that time travel to the past is impossible — because the past literally does not exist (which, incidentally, puts the reader — who lives in that past — in an odd position); meanwhile the robot Jenkins, the living communal memory of a family and, by extension, humanity, for thousands of years, embodies Proust's explorations of the way a physical object or sensation can involuntarily call up the presence of the past in a way that conscious effort never can. For Simak, what exists instead of the past when it is sought after intellectually is vague and nebulous, either a "figment of remembrance that flit[s] like a night-winged thing in the shadow of one's mind" or the more flatly-stated inconceivability of "another world" existing "where there should have been the past". Both of these options are so obscure and ungraspable precisely because the characters here refuse to trust the embodied memory available to them in the form of Jenkins — indeed their entire reason for seeking travel to the past is to discover for themselves whether what the robot remembers is true or not. It is characteristic of Simak's sense of irony that Jenkins is himself, as a robot, the product of intellect (though his immense longevity and thus his embodiment of communal memory are much more the products of chance), while the "other worlds" discovered scientifically bring with them their own flitting things: ghostly and often malevolent presences. Here, it seems, neither kind of memory is unproblematically available.

In Wolfe and Smith, meanwhile, these explorations of time and memory play out against even vaster swathes of history: Wolfe's four novels come down to us from a future so far removed that our sun is dying, while Smith's "Instrumentality" stories (making up nearly all of his sf output) flit about in one continuous imagined future, any given story alighting here or there almost at random, however many hundreds or thousands or occasionally millions of years from now. In both cases, most of the history and traditions, the known memory, have been lost, but still the immensity of time is felt, the traces of its passage compressed into strange physical presences; to put it in one insufferably cute phrase, the past is present in these futures.

In Smith, no one person is ever aware of the totality — seldom even is anyone aware of even a small sliver — of the ways the past weighs on (what is in any given story) the present; and even we, in our privileged position as readers, can only become aware of any of it by means of the fleeting, disjointed glimpses we get of it all — as this story alights in this moment, that story in that, seemingly at random, by chance. To read a Cordwainer Smith story is, to some extent, to share the feeling with the characters that while one is simply trying to live out one's own small life, one is also participating in some half-felt, never-understood fashion in the immense impersonal sweep of history. The fragmentary nature of this history, or rather of the traces of it available to us and to the characters, is key to this feeling.* Equally key is the embodiment of these traces in physical and ritual presences rather than in written history (think of the lingering danger of the Manshonyaggers, left over from some ancient Fourth Reich, or the rituals performed at the meetings of the Confraternity of Scanners). The vastness of time past, indeed one's place in all time, is felt, not rationally known.

*For this reason, NESFA's The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith, admirable labor of love though it is, and though I am all in favor of his work reappearing in print, does Smith a disservice. I tend to feel that the word "complete" is never appropriate when applied to his work, that his stories are best encountered buried in and scattered across anthologies and magazines, perhaps sometimes some — but never all — of them gathered into single-author collections. If one wishes to reconstruct Smith's whole future history, to the extent that it is possible (hint: it is not), one should ideally be forced to delve into archives, to search, to hunt, to be a historian. The decision to present the stories in order of "internal chronology" is even more catastrophic; publication or even random order would have been better.

Wolfe's four-volume novel, composed as it was as a single work, is more contained, more "linear" in its decidedly nonlinear way, but its sense of the traces times past leave on the present is surprisingly similar. In this world however many millennia in the future, civilizations and technological and scientific knowledges have come and gone unknowably many times over. There has been time enough for the residues left behind by each of these waves to build and build, even if most is effaced — like a kind of fossil record. Scientific understanding that for us came too late to affect everyday speech is here unspeakably older than ancient, and so for example the characters speak of, to paraphrase (I don't have the books to hand), the west rising up to cover the sun, rather than the sun setting in the west. A method for faster-than-light travel that we can vaguely recognize as an (admittedly fanciful) extrapolation on relativity theory is presented as a quasi-magical ritual with mirrors and "living flame". The citadel in which the protagonist grows up is a rooted, integral part of the city in which it is loacted — and it is also a grounded space vessel. The notion of leaving Earth is absurd, unknown, or at best legendary, to most of the characters, but there are forests on the moon. Whole mountain ranges are statues (or maybe more accurately vice versa). And because of time dilation, there are people recently returned to Earth who left not far in our own future. Once again, the fullness of historical memory, not knowable through intellectual effort, lingers on inescapably, sometimes bringing itself unbidden to the fore, in physical presences.*

*And I haven't even mentioned the method depicted in the books of literally taking onto oneself the full memories of a dead person by eating portions of their flesh.

And of the four writers I've named, it is in Butler that the personal search for lost time most explicitly becomes political through its projection beyond the individual. At the novel's start, Dana is aware, in the sense that she knows the facts, of the United States's history with slavery; though she might in some ways deny it, she is even aware, in a vague sense, that her dehumanization as a waged worker and as a black woman — as a multiply-oppressed member of society — in the present bears some remarkable similarities to this past in its form, if not usually in its degree of physical brutality. But involuntary memory comes to her, as she begins to shift unpredictably between her own time and that of her enslaved ancestors; by the end of the novel, whip scars on her back and an arm lost when she reappears for the last time in the present partially inside a wall form the inescapable stigmata of the living memory and history of slavery, genocide, and oppression, the physical embodiment of the damage this past continues to do to the present.

The final points in Josipovici's discussion through À la recherche, that writing his novel is for Proust a way to reconstruct this modern fragmentation of memory (and therefore of the self), and that this role was once served by (among other things) the liturgy, I find I am not quite able, right now, to address fully. But think of the role of the "essays" in Simak (and in Wolfe); of ritual in Smith; of autobiography and eidetic memory in Wolfe. And think of Andrea Hairston's comments in her essay "Octavia Butler — Praise Song to a Prophetic Artist" (one of the precious few good essays in Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the 20th Century), where she defines a "prophet" not as someone who merely "predicts" the future but as one who attempts to channel the authority of the past through her body and writing in order to "illuminate the immanent possibilities of the here and now", in the process perhaps enabling a future to come to be — a role I suspect is not available to those at the center of modernity (i.e., white people, men) even in the partial sense in which it was and is to writers like Butler, who attack the center from the margin. For all four, though, writing seems to matter desperately, no matter how they may (to varying degrees) try to cover it up with the priorities of the "commercial" writer; they write, to be sure, for money, but they also write (rather than or in addition to doing other things for money) because of these problems. They write, it seems to me, not to "solve" these problems in any positivist sense, but rather to make the problems intelligible.

The four examples I've chosen perhaps leap readily to mind because in them involuntary memory is almost wholly traumatic, or at best deeply problematic, but this is not always the case in sf. In Doris Pisierchia's novel Star Rider, the members of an atomized, individualistic culture are finally brought together by the rediscovery of the physical legacy of their forebears, and though they are forced to incorporate its memory into their selves and move on because living with it would be literally deadly, there is no mistaking the salutary effects of the encounter. Consuelo in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time is herself a physical manifestation of history — our present — within the future into which she is brought, a physical manifestation without which that utopian future likely will not exist. And, more quotidian if not less intriguing, William F. Touponce suggests in his (otherwise routine) study of Isaac Asimov that the gradual transformation of event into legend is one of that writer's central subjects; for Asimov, while this process may sometimes be amusing or sad or even dangerous, it is mostly just the way things work.

For all this, I have only sketched out here the rudiments of what I've been thinking about. I haven't even begun to explore the implications of all of this: what it means that what is in the one literature a personal struggle is extrapersonal in the other, for example, or whether it is even feasable to consider these problems on such a level, whether it makes any sense to project an individual (or even a societal, or political) struggle onto such a broader canvas. Consider this then a platform from which to launch further investigations, whether my own or (I flatter myself) yours, whether in essay, fiction, or some other form. For myself, I doubt I'll ever be able to explore these ideas to my satisfaction in writing, at least not in essays. But it is always in my thoughts both when I read and when I try my hand at writing sf.

Toward the eternity

Not much probably need be said about it, but I'd like to take a moment to look at a wonderful sentence from the beginning of the Ixtl episode of A.E. van Vogt's The Voyage of the Space Beagle. (I imagine this was originally a standalone short story, as the Coeurl episode from the same "novel" was originally "The Black Destroyer", but I don't know the story in question.) It is the second of these sentences I am interested in, obviously, though I've included the first to give a (tiny) bit of context.

Ixtl sprawled unmoving in the boundless night. Time paced slowly toward the eternity, and space was fathomlessly black.

Again, not much need be said about it, no doubt, though also no doubt whole volumes could be written on it. But for now at any rate I just want to point out the fascinating, marvelous oddness of casting what is, almost literally, an eternal truth into the form of a standard narrative sentence. At the moment that Ixtl sprawled unmoving, time indeed paced slowly toward the eternity, and space was fathomlessly black; but time right now paces, space right now is, and as near as the word "always" has any meaning, they always have and always will. In the face of such constancy, verb tenses — so important in narrative — become simply arbitrary. Something outside of narrative is happening here.

I'm tempted to go on (to examine, say, what such a sentence does to Delany's model of sf's subjunctivity, or superficially similar oddities in verb tense that are not doing what I see this doing). But anything else I could say would ultimately be superfluous, so I will leave it at that.

Sturgeonblogging: E. Lily Yu's "The Urashima Effect" and closing comments

We join a man, Leo Aoki, as he awakens from hibernation three subjective years, halfway, into a journey at relativistic speeds to a planet in another solar system. He is, according to plans at any rate, part of a research mission — the first of several people, including Leo's astrophysicist wife Esther, who will also be making the same journey, though the others will be two years behind. The story alternates between Leo's sort of puttering around his small vessel (playing chess and go and other games against the computer; looking out the ports at the stars, "gathered by aberration into a glittering disc eight degrees across" in an otherwise entirely black "sky"; and so forth) and his listening to a recording Esther made for him, most of the portion we hear consisting of her rendition of the folk tale of Urashima Taro, the fisherman who journeys to the bottom of the sea for what he thinks are only a few years but finds when he returns to land that centuries have passed*; she (a third generation Japanese-American) knows the story where he (fifth generation) does not because she is "inquisitive and knowledgeable about the cultural inheritance he had never claimed."

*The story may be familiar to sf readers from Ursula K. Le Guin's use of it in "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea", there as here a metaphor, naturally, for time dilation.

Leo thinks at first that the recording is a standard part of the mission, part of the "sixty hours of audio recordings by family and friends" each member of the team must bring with them, "to keep them sane and functional in their isolation." Once she finishes the story of Urashima, though, Esther tells Leo that shortly after he was put into hibernation "the US and Japan came to the brink of war"; there is talk in the US of bringing back internment camps. Because of these events, the flight that would have brought her to the planet — a collaborative US/Japan effort — has been scrapped, in favor of a "unilateral program that will not have the funding" to send her. Leo, over Esther's protests, has been sent anyway. Esther says that she "broke into your ship's systems and altered these recordings so that you would know what happened" — telling him the story of Urashima Taro first in order to give him time to recover from hibernation, and to prepare him for the news — and that she has rigged his ship so that, should he decide to, he can eject and, decades later, return to Earth to see Esther again, even though she will have aged enormously, become a different person in the intervening time. At story's end, it seems Leo has decided to continue the mission — for if he were to turn around, all that has already been lost would still be lost, and he would additionally be losing everything that, in terms of the mission, has been gained.

Now that I've dithered for two paragraphs in plot summary, I have to confess: I have basically nothing to say about this story. In theory I approve of its stasis, and of its talkiness. It is clear that Yu has thoughts in her head that I like, thoughts about loss and loneliness, time and distance, the melancholy beauty of Relativity, the need for roots, the shifting course of a life; and I'm sure I would nod in agreement to most anything she might say about the overwhelming racism of the United States. But one does not read stories in order to agree or disagree with them (or rather, this is but one part of reading among many), and however many marks I may make on my scorecard while reading this story the fact remains that the story itself is, for me, mostly uninspiring (which is to say, it inspires in me no strong feeling, whether positive or negative). It goes from point A to point B (with perfectly skillful zig-zagging and detours to points C and D along the way), but it gives me no feeling that anything has happened — in me, in the writer, in the world, even in those abstract concepts we call "characters". I'm not talking about plot or lack thereof, I'm not talking about "dynamic characters," I'm not talking about the busy-ness that many people are referring to when they say that things "happen" in a work of fiction; I mean that the work of art "The Urashima Effect" does not feel to me like an event of any consequence. It's fine. It's good enough, as far as that goes. I'm not sorry I read it, but neither am I happy I did. I spent most of my last post defending a story against the RUMIR title (for those just joining us: "routine, unoriginal, mildly interesting, and readable" — from Joanna Russ), but this time it seems to me that the acronym fits extremely well, so long as one doesn't forget the MIR along with the RU.

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Since I do find myself with so little to say about the story, and since this is the final chapter of Sturgeonblogging, I may as well use this space for a wrap-up. I had originally planned to write a summation post with thoughts on the award in general, lists of the stories I would hate to win and those I wouldn't mind if they did, and maybe predictions. But the cat's out of the bag; I had been under the impression that the winner would be announced this coming weekend, but it actually happened on Tuesday (which means this post would have been something of an anticlimax even if I had had anything useful to say about the story at hand). But just for the hell of it, why don't I say something like what I would have said if it hadn't happened yet.

First, links to my posts.

1. Gregory Norman Bossert's "Bloom"
2. Vylar Kaftan's "The Weight of the Sunrise"
3. Alaya Dawn Johnson's "They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass"
4. Will McIntosh's "Over There"
5. Alan DeNiro's "The Wildfires of Antarctica"
6. Val Nolan's "The Irish Astronaut"
7. Sarah Pinsker's "In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind"
8. Robert Reed's "Mystic Falls"
9. Kenneth Schneyer's "Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer"
10. E. Lily Yu's "The Urashima Effect" (duh, scroll back up)

Ten stories. Five I wouldn't have minded winning ("Bloom", "They Shall", "Mystic Falls", "Selected Program Notes", and, perhaps surprisingly given the negativity of my review, "Wildfires" — which at least is trying for something). Five whose winning would have bothered me (and one whose winning did), to varying degrees (had "Urashima" won, I would have said "Really? Why? OK then," and shrugged; had "Over There" won, I would have known the jury was trolling us). If I were picking a winner from this list? I'm not sure. Probably "Selected Program Notes", though "Mystic Falls" and "They Shall" would be close contenders. (I'm also sure that if there is a best science fiction story of last year, whatever it is it wasn't on the shortlist at all.)

Looking over the list, I'm impressed in some ways with the variety. "Bloom", "Weight", "Over There", " Wildfires", and "Irish", say, ignoring for the moment their varying virtues, all go about being (or, in the last case, not being) sf in very different ways. In a contemporary field that can often feel claustrophobically homogeneous, it's nice to see that at least some kind of difference is being rewarded here. On the other hand, though, three notable formal departures aside, there is a great deal of homogeneity in how the stories go about being stories. You might be able to slip a piece of paper into the stylistic space between "Bloom", "Weight", "Irish", "They Shall", "In Joy", "Mystic Falls", and "Urashima", but it would have to be that really thin paper they print the unabridged OED on; and even "Over There", for all its two-column technique, is fully, if incompetently, committed to the same kind of storytelling.

I've been debating with myself whether to get sassy about the jury (and if so just how sassy to get). I have no particular opinion of Noël Sturgeon (who I know nothing about), James Gunn (I think all I've read of him is his terribly pointless but mildly charming book about Isaac Asimov), or Kij Johnson (I loved "Spar" when I read it a few years ago but suspect I might not now, and that's all I know of her). But everything I know about Elizabeth Bear and Andy Duncan leads me to believe that they are precisely the kind of artistically bland, timid, and contented people that I think are the bane of sf's contemporary existence (whether as writers, readers, critics, or editors), not to mention their equally bland, timid, and contented brand of liberalism and lily-white "anti-racism".

Given this, and given the general tenor of the choices, I have a strong suspicion that even those stories on the shortlist that I liked were chosen for reasons I would find unacceptable. Where I liked "Bloom" despite its "human story" (as I put it in my review), I suspect that that human story is precisely why it is on the shortlist, that if the story had committed to what I found lively in it it would not have been nominated at all. (Actually, it might never have been published at all, but though it's related, that's a different question.) Where I found the luminously poetic moments of "They Shall" questionable, I suspect they might be all the jury noticed. And so on.

If I had gotten this in before the announcement of the winner, I would have predicted that "Weight" would win, precisely because its inability to commit to its own conceit and its white-liberal-anchored "understanding" of other races and cultures are both so much in alignment with what I know of Bear and Duncan, and seem to epitomise the criteria I think I see driving the choices. As it turns out the winner was "In Joy", which would have been my second guess. In a way it's a relief; I really do find "Weight" not just bad but reprehensible, and for it to win a second award (after the Nebula; it's also currently up for the Sidewise, which singlehandedly makes a farce of that award) would have been unbearable. Despite that dodged bullet, though, it's hard to keep the despair at bay. It would almost be better if the jury had selected "Over There" — I could at least write the whole thing off as a farce and have a good laugh. As it is, though, this further recognition of an immaculately skillful story that is very deliberately miles and miles away from where I wish the field would let itself stray verges on heartbreaking.

On the other hand, no one actually seems to care much about the Sturgeons...?

Anyway. Sturgeonblogging is over, thank god. Actually, though I've been known to tease, and though it has been at times very exhausting and dispiriting, the project has also been fun and, for lack of a better word, useful; on balance I'm glad Niall Harrison convinced me to do it, though don't tell him I said so. From exploring what I think is good in stories like "Bloom" and "They Shall" to allowing "Mystic Falls" to lead me to a discussion of some very fundamental points of sfnal poetics; from teasing out the multiplicitous badnesses of "Weight" to stomping gleefully on the ashes of "Over There"; even throwing my hands up in despair at "Irish" and "In Joy": it's all helped me to articulate much of what I need to articulate, or at least to point in that direction. And though I know it's a skewed one, I feel like I have a better picture now of where contemporary short sf is at than I did before I started.

Never again, though. Sorry. Unless I somehow manage to forget how grueling this was, there's no way in hell I'm doing it again next year. On the other hand, the good parts have been good enough that I'm thinking I need to start reviewing new short sf more often. Maybe as some kind of irregular series, once a month or so, I could pick a story from a different venue and write a thing about it. Even with the extremely desultory nature of my new short sf reading I've read four stories so far this year that I think would make fine additions to any award shortlist or year's best collection (if you're wondering, they are Margaret Ronald's "The Innocence of a Place" in Strange Horizons, Dominica Phetteplace's "Through Portal" and Robert Reed's "The Principles" in Asimov's, and Sofia Samatar's "Ogres of East Africa" in Long Hidden), and if I can shine my lustrous spotlight on stories such as these for the benefit of my score [sic] of irregular [sic] readers, or try to explain why less admirable stories are less admirable, then I'd like to do so.