Noted: Delany on sf's "fictivity" and "double futurity"

As I begin slowly to make my way through Samuel R. Delany's recently reissued The American Shore, I am gratified to see him approaching — from his very different directions, for his very different reasons — many of the same issues I discussed recently in my two posts on what I called the fictional writer and the fictional reader. (I'm also glad that I wrote those posts before I read this passage, because if I hadn't they probably would have turned into still more thoughts-on-passages-from-Delany lingering in my drafts and notes, along with countless others; and too I might have lost some of those aspects of my thought not directly relevant to Delany's here.)

From the commentary on lexia 2:

With the reader located firmly at the only real present, and the object and the speaker organized out from that present, we see that the fictivity of the science fiction story is structured differently from the fictivity of the mundane fiction story. In a third-person, past tense tale of mundane fiction, the incidents are "false" but the telling is "true." The incidents take place "before" the telling; the telling takes place "before" the reading. In a third-person, past tense mundane fiction, therefore, a simple temporal path leads away from the (present) reading back through the telling into a past that becomes more and more fictive (i.e., "false") the further back it goes. In a third-person, past tense science fiction tale, however, this path is looped into a bizarre knot in which we find the first tensions of that special charge unique to the s-f genre; we find it with the occurrence of the first verb. The incidents, which are false, occur in the future. But as the narrative voice places them in its past, the telling must (fictively) occur farther in the future than the incidents. Therefore, the ordinary fictive voice of science fiction is even more fictional than the incidents; the telling is less true than the incidents recounted. The narrative voice of science fiction (unlike the narrative voice of mundane fiction) is more fictional than the incidents it recounts. (A number of s-f writers have conscientiously exploited this: the "telling" of Asimov's Foundation series takes place specifically several thousand years after the incidents — the series posits itself as an historical reconstruction. Several of Cordwainer Smith's tales launch from a distance at least a generation beyond the major fictive occurrences.) The futurity of science fiction is not single, therefore: it is essentially doubled, supporting itself, interwoven with itself, creating a dense fiction by the same process with which it severs itself from the substance of the mundane. In one sense science fiction is a discursive image of futurity speaking of its own exhaustion. In another, it is a luminous interim, where projections from the past may dazzle us in transformation, hung between a real and a virtual limen, a reading and a telling, displaced about a proairetic axis. (The temporal fictive framing of other modes — first-person mundane fiction, for instance, where the telling is fictive, and so forth — is all suggested here: but we must progress.)

[At the word proairetic, Delany provides this footnote explaining the term as he's using it: "Proairesis (Greek, προαίρεσις pre-choice), largely through Barthes's S/Z, has become the term for the acts of fictive characters, e.g., going to the park, plotting, taking pills, dancing, etc.)"]

Adventures in Time and Space: Don A. Stuart's (John W. Campbell's) "Forgetfulness"

Adventures in Time and Space series table of contents

An anthology that opened with a story named for the mass for the dead, held in remembrance, now continues with a story named "Forgetfulness." Where the Heinlein remembered one life which it insisted was extraordinary, what has been "forgotten" here are the achievements of a species (or, as we can say who try to be conscious of barely-submerged ideology, a single culture) over the course of millennia. Adventures in time, these stories about the pain of its passage?

Along with his earlier "Twilight" (not in this anthology, sadly) Campbell's "Forgetfulness" makes up a sort of diptych of ambiguously melancholic stories, written under the Don A. Stuart name, about The Fate Of Man [sic] in the almost obscenely distant future. In both stories our view of humanity in the future is heavily mediated, and we are deliberately prevented from gaining much sense of what it would be like to live in these future societies which we see only from the outside. "Twilight" was mediated through a complex formal structure involving multidirectional time travel and several layers of reported speech; here it is a formally much simpler — but equally peculiar and suggestive — matter of perspective.

"Forgetfulness" opens with a team of explorers from a planet called Pareeth landing on a world three and a half light years from their home; it is apparent almost immediately that this alien world is Earth. The earliest sign that this is the case, reinforced beyond all doubt by the second page (where among other things we learn that the people here call their planet "Rhth"), appears in the first paragraph, as "Ron Thule, the astronomer," stands in the airlock looking "out beyond" and sees that

above the western horizon, a pale ghost of the strange twin world of this planet, less than a third of a million miles distant, seemed a faint, luminous cloud in the deep, serene blue of the sky.

In "Twilight" too Campbell had used the moon as a signal of the strange mixture of familiarity and unfamiliarity in his futures, but while there it was because the moon had changed, here it is because it is the same — familiar to us, but unfamiliar to those with whom we are asked immediately to identify. Seeing it through this alien-not-alien astronomer's eyes at the same time as we see it with our own, the moon takes on for the sympathetic reader a marvelously strange air in more ways than one. When I read this, for a moment I am able to see the moon as not just "the moon" but as the "strange twin world" it truly (or rather also) is; and too I am brought to find new beauty in its routine appearance in the sky through its description in terms that, however trivial, would not normally occur to me.

This familiar-unfamiliar perspective* continues, or rather repeats — and expands, spiraling outward through these repetitions — throughout the story. In the terms I have begun to lay out recently, the fictional writer and the fictional reader here are both people of Pareeth; everything is given us from their perspective, and we are expected to understand. Engaged as they are in the expansionist agenda typical of this colonialist brand of sf this perspective is, for those accustomed to the ways of American magazine sf and its successors, immediately familiar, for better or worse easy to slip into; and Joanna Russ's push-and-pull of belief and disbelief becomes a kind of double image, almost a palimpsest. What is curious, then, is that their expansion pushes them precisely onto Rhth — which is to say Earth, where "we" are; and though the Rhth-humans of this distant future are presented as being so massively removed from us as to be alien the story does not let us forget that they are, in some sense, us — that we should be concerned for their well-being in the face of the potential threat these also-human** newcomers pose, still more that we should be proud of their accomplishments: for these are The Triumph of Man.

*I would call it "estrangement" but I do not wish to invoke the specific baggage that term carries with it from outside of sf or from the sf criticism of Darko Suvin and his followers. Some of that baggage is relevant to what I'm talking about; much of it is not.
**There's some scientifically nonsensical fluffery explaining away their also-humanness, which is in itself interesting and deserves attention, but for my purposes here it need not concern us beyond the fact that their humanity is a factor in the issues of (un)familiarity I am discussing.

Just past the middle of the story there comes a moment where a second mission from Pareeth (made up of some but not all of the same people as well as many new ones), following the recommendations of the first mission and the orders of "The Committee of Pareeth," tell Seun, the representative of the Rhth people, that they intend to settle permanently in an abandoned city (clearly New York) near the Rhth people's small countryside settlement. Seun reasonably points out that the planet is full of empty cities, that he and his people would prefer that the people of Pareeth settle a bit further from them. The colonizers respond that they have their hearts set on this city, and anyway if they're near the Rhth people's settlement they can "help" them in their "development," or if not they can relocate them, because one place is surely as good as another to such simple folk — and then, ever so reluctantly, they threaten the Rhth people with annihilation if they do not acquiesce to Pareeth's whims.

The logic of colonialism. It dawned on me as I read this that what we have here is American magazine sf, early on, attempting (probably by accident) to form a critique of its own violent, genocidal, colonial urges: what happens when the reader is asked — and is able — to "identify" with the colonized and the colonizer equally? Of course, this is Campbell, and no matter how far he pushes himself, no matter how obviously some small part of him understood the problems with his ideology, no matter even how far he distances himself from himself with the Stuart name and brand (for it was a brand, and a perplexingly popular one at that), he cannot bring himself to let go of his "Earth people (read: white westerners) are always superior" dogma, and so "what happens" is that the colonized make a sudden show of overwhelming force in terms the colonizers understand and have to respect that, outside of science fiction, no colonized peoples have or would ever have access to, that forces an accommodation on their terms. The critique stalls; from "these violent impulses might be wrong" it turns into "these violent impulses are wrong, and will fail, only when enacted on us."

Despite this, though, the contradiction, even the paradox, remains; and it is one of many. To begin with, everything in the story is attended by a bizarre mixture of melancholy and triumphalism: even before the first paragraph gives us the moon it gives us Ron Thule with "something of a vast triumph in his eyes, and something of sorrow," and like the familiar/unfamiliar perspective introduced by that glimpse of the moon this triumph/sorrow will spiral in repetition and expansion throughout the story. In parallel to this (parallel spirals? — oh, I'm just not going to worry about it) is a presentation of the then-new state of constant technological advance as both permanent and impermanent: the Rhth humans have abandoned high technology (the forgetfulness of the title) because they are beyond it; their technology has, inevitably as the story would have it, progressed so far as to become non-technological.*

*Along these lines it is interesting to note that where this story presents The Triumph Of Man in the abandonment of technology, at first appearing to be The Decline Of Man, the other half of the diptych, "Twilight," presents The Decline Of Man surrounded by technology, at first appearing to be The Triumph Of Man. On the face of it this is hardly what one would expect of Campbell!

The people of Pareeth misunderstand Seun's constant "we have forgotten" refrain for the vast bulk of the story, thinking they have encountered a tragically diminished version of Rhth's former glory; only toward the end does Ron Thule realize that Seun's forgetfulness is the equivalent of the way he and his people (and we reading the story) have mostly forgotten how to make a fire without a match (or a heat ray), how to carve an effective flint knife, how to make a coat from an animal skin. Reading this I was put in mind of a moment in Karl Ove Knausgaard's marvelous novel A Time for Everything (which, as I must say every time I mention it, all sf readers should read, though it is not sf):

Everything we know is inextricably linked with loss and oblivion. And what knowledge does conquer is so infinitesimally small in comparison with what it jettisons that we might reasonably suspect it of being in retreat: why else does it always set its abandoned landscapes on fire? (trans. James Anderson)

What Knausgaard's scholar-narrator posits as retreat, Campbell/Stuart's narrator, like all committed positivists, sees as victory. But because this narrator is implicitly of Pareeth, a high-technological and highly self-regarding society, with this vast triumph comes sorrow. The landscape Rhth has set on fire is equivalent, even "superior" to that of Pareeth, and seeing this the people of Pareeth cannot help but see what they themselves have set on fire. In defeat their own victories take on a tragic tone, and not only because of the "sour grapes" attitude intrinsic to any self-regarding society faced with unaccustomed defeat.

All these contradictions and paradoxes pervade the story down to the smallest level of the language, and the "something of a vast triumph, something of sorrow" of the opening paragraph, followed by the "mighty cruiser"/"little band" (the spaceship, its crew) of the second, begins a pattern of contrast and self-contradiction that accelerates as the story goes on, ramping up until it seems hardly a sentence can go by without some construction like "dimly sparkling" or "tiny clatter" or "swift immobility"; in these surroundings even an otherwise innocuous phrase like "long moment" takes on something of this aura of paradox, of multiplicity. This tendency, which continues to the end of the story, reaches its climax just before the midpoint, when the men from Pareeth encounter the technologico-mystical source of Rhth's energy, "the sorgan unit," from which "flowed the power of the generator, instantaneously, to any ship in all space" back in the days when Rhth had such ships (it is this unit which has a "swift immobility"). As Seun explains with his silent telepathy:

"It created a field rotating" — and the minds of his hearers refused the term — "which involves, as well, time.
      "In the first revolution it made, the first day it was built, it circled to the ultimate end of time and the universe, and back to the day it was built. And in all that sweep, every sorgan unit tuned to it must follow. The power that drove it died when the city was deserted, but it is still making the first revolution, which it made and completed in the first hundredth of a second it existed.
      "Because it circled to the end of time, it passed this moment in its swing, and every other moment that ever is to be. Were you to wipe it out with your mightiest atomic blast, it would not be disturbed, for it is in the next instant, as it was when it was built. And so it is at the end of time, unchanged. Nothing in space or time can alter that, for it has already been at the end of time. That is why it rotates still, and will rotate when this world dissolves, and the stars die out and scatter as dust in space. Only when the ultimate equality is established, when no more change is, or can be will it be at rest — for then other things will be equal to it, all space equated to it, because space, too, will be unchanged through time."

(The oddity of this time-spanning device's appearance in a story about what time obliterates could be the subject of another essay; perhaps some other time.)

Looking on the sorgan unit, a single location encompassing all of space and time, a source of infinite power which literally is the powerless end-state of absolute entropy, a thing in eternal movement precisely because its lack of movement is so complete, the minds of Pareeth rebel; Ron Thule's "eyes twisted and his thoughts seemed to freeze," and this is even after Seun has exerted some telepathic force on him to prevent him from going insane.

It is too much even for the story itself. To this point, even with its contradictions and sorrow, "Forgetfulness" had been proceeding magisterially on its way (what else written in English at this time had this tone? did anything, in or out of sf?) as though nothing could disturb it, but here it begins to break down. Almost immediately after the encounter with this sfnal relative of Jorge Luis Borges' aleph it breaks off with a long dash and is suddenly interrupted by the interpolation of the "Conclusion of the Report to the Committee of Pareeth, Submitted by Shor Nun, Commander of the First Interstellar Expedition," which is itself fragmented, beginning as we're allowed to see it with the second half of a sentence, followed by the "Unanimous Report of the Committee of Pareeth on the First Expedition to the Planet Rhth," equally fragmented, cutting off mid-sentence before the story proper resumes.

It is as if the story is trying to combat the sheer magnitude of the irruption of the incomprehensible by retreating to these legalistic documents, with their pretense to authority and objectivity.* Afterwards, though nothing is the same (it is here that the break of several years between missions occurs, and the similar-but-different crew appears, with its similar-but-different approach to Seun and the Rhth people), the story seems able for a moment to regain its footing — but it is only a moment. Before long Shor Nun presents Pareeth's ultimatum, setting off Seun's response: to dislocate the many ships of the second mission in time and space, trapping them in some distant realm of entropy and timelessness at the end of the universe, altering and limiting forever their people's ability to perceive and move through space before returning them to their home at a time before they even left it.

*An authority whose problems, an objectivity whose falseness I have already touched upon above, in the discussion of Pareeth's colonialist agenda — which is laid out explicitly in these reports.

In this final section the story, in terms of event, becomes almost incomprehensible; it took me several re-readings to get my bearings enough to be able to summarize even this roughly the what-happened. The change is visible to the eye even at a quick glance at the page: the paragraphs shrink, dashes proliferate. On reading, one finds that sentences have been replaced by fragments; the earlier stateliness and clarity has been replaced, on the part of the characters and of the story itself, with panic and confusion. And things never really fully settle down; the final pages of the story have enough of a stillness for Ron Thule and Shor Nun to explain to themselves, and to us, what they think has just happened, but even the confirmation of their speculations in the penultimate sentence comes so unexpectedly and from so wondrous a source that the inattentive reader could easily miss it, or misunderstand it; and all that is left for "Forgetfulness" to do is to vanish with a sigh.

An addendum to yesterday's post

I'm writing this quickly and distractedly at work, so my apologies for any awkwardnesses.

The largest part of what I was hoping to get at in my post yesterday was indeed the kind of issues raised by this excellent little post, which I am honored to have inspired however indirectly; related issues of epistemology and ethics in writing, the relationship of style and form to structures of power, and so forth, were raised in the exciting conversations I had with several people yesterday on twitter. But last night I started to wonder if perhaps I should have brought out more clearly a much more rudimentary aspect of what I was talking about — a very basic point that I worry may be lost* in the focus on these, if you will, higher-level problems.

*To be clear, I'm not saying any of the people who responded to the post were "missing the point"; I just want to make this more explicit, in large part for my own benefit.

Science fiction, as Joanna Russ argues, is a literature in which the work's insistence on itself-as-truth and on itself-as-lie is by necessity in a constant state of flux. The work's position on the status of the fictional writer and the fictional reader — does it seek explicitly to make us aware of their fictionality or not? in what way does it do this, or not do this? to what degree? are the "non-fictional" writer and reader implicated? etc. — is one of the major factors driving this flux. It is the work telling us what it is pretending it is possible for the writer and the reader to know — which is not necessarily the same thing as what is possible to know — or even what the work is actually asking us to accept as knowable.

To lead towards the famous example:

Someone writing in, say, the 19th century, from their everyday experience, has the authority to describe an action such as "She turned the knob and opened the door" (whether they have the authority to write this is a different question); a 19th century reader, from everyday experience, has the ability to understand this action uncomplicatedly. Someone writing today has this same authority and adds to it, again from everyday experience, the authority to describe an action such as "She walked toward the door and it slid open"; and the reader of today has the ability, from experience, to understand. Robert A. Heinlein, from everyday experience, does not have the authority to describe the action in his sentence "The door dilated." He knows this; the reader (who does not have the ability-from-experience to understand the sentence) knows this. But Beyond This Horizon, as a work, behaves as though* it were written by someone who did have such authority, and also behaves as though it will be read by someone who can understand.

*Or at least I'm told it behaves as though; I haven't read it. If reports are lying, the hypothetical work-that-behaves-as-though is a close enough approximation to a large enough body of science fiction that it still serves as a decent example.

It is attention to this sort of behavior, and investigation of what this behavior in any given particular work is doing, that I was urging in my post. Now, obviously, in pursuit of these questions we will very quickly come up against those issues of epistemology, ethics, and power that yesterday's discussions were concerned with (the word "authority" is a big clue) — but (and again I want to make clear that I'm not saying anyone yesterday "misunderstood" or was distracted by trivial points, far from it) we will also come up against other issues, other questions; and at any rate the investigation must start, as always, and as of course we all know, with a lively (and wherever possible sympathetic) attention to the work at hand.

The fictional writer, the fictional reader

[See also my addendum to this post.]

Written works of science fiction that take place in the future or in alternate versions of the past or the present*, in addition to whatever fictional characters may appear explicitly in the narrative, also implicitly create two others: the fictional writer and the fictional reader.

*Concepts we should never allow ourselves to think of as natural or always-already-understood or just-given are in italics.

The fictional writer: the story pretends that there exists someone who could be aware of these events that have not occurred yet or at all, who in that awareness could write about them (this is true whether the story is in the first person or not). The fictional reader: one can only read about events after they are written about, which can only be done after they occur, and these events have not occurred yet or at all.

(There is of course a sense in which this is true of all fiction; it could possibly be fruitful to pursue the questions I hope to raise here in all written works. But at this point at least it seems to me that no other kind of writing demands the pursuit of these questions the way sf does.)

The relationship(s) between these two characters, the relationship(s) between both of them and the work, and the relationship(s) between all these and us, the work's "non-fictional" readers, are one of the fundamental determining factors in everything that the sf work does, can do, seeks to do — and the converse: everything the work does not do, cannot do, does not seek to do. (One could also, perhaps better, put it in another converse way: that what the work does and does not seek to do is what determines these relationships.)

Some works address these relationships explicitly. Joanna Russ's We Who Are About To and Clifford D. Simak's City, for example, both insist that if there is a reader, it is certainly not us, even that we certainly do not exist. The Russ presents itself as a found document that manifestly could never be found, at least not by anyone human and probably not by anyone at all (and its fictional writer — or more accurately its fictional speaker — knows this, discusses it). In the Simak, the impossibility of the reader becomes apparent when the characters we are reading about discover that their past (in which we in our present are living) literally does not exist (this not to mention what the "essays" do to the status of the fictional writer).

There are other ways than to assert the impossibility of the reader. I think for example of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which pretends, without telling us how, that texts from the future are as available to present-day translators as texts from the past, or Henry Kuttner's (and, probably, C.L. Moore's) "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," which begins by declaring the impossibility of describing the future from the vantage point of the present. Even such seemingly naïve (and, in sf, commonplace) devices as the appendices in Frank Herbert's Dune or Isaac Asimov's ploy of opening the Foundation stories with entries from an encyclopedia that does not exist yet even in the vastly future world of the stories themselves, stake out relationships between the work, these implicit fictional characters, and the actual reader that contour everything the work does and everything about how we read it.

But such relationships are staked out, in different ways, even in the remaining vast bulk of sf works that do not make any explicit issue of the fictionality of the writer and reader, that simply take it as a given (or pretend to take it as a given) that it is possible for someone to write about these events, and possible for someone else to read about them. And again these relationships countour everything about the work and our response to it. (Among many other things, consider the ways they affect the choice of verb tense, a choice whose ramifications are quite different in sf works than in others.)

These issues are inescapable in sf. It is perhaps (perhaps) not too much to say that the work's demand to deal with these issues is the larger part of why a writer might choose to write sf rather than something else, whether the writer would put it this way or not. These issues are implicit in everything that sf is, and in everything that is said about it. It seems to me that careful attention to them is vital if any critic's, any reader's, approach to any sf work is to have any chance of coming to terms with that work.

reading Russ: "The Wise Man" (1955) and "Martyr" (1957)

reading Russ table of contents

The young Joanna Russ, it seems, felt Wagnerian certainties to be a force she needed to counter; and the second of her three Cornell Writer stories, "The Wise Man" (November 1955, later appearing in revised form in the October 1970 Cimarron Review, never collected or anthologized) begins much in the way that "Innocence" did before it — with some playful fiction-calling-attention-to-itself surrounding an invocation of the name Siegfried:

All characters are purely coincidental, and to prove it, her name was not Sigrid or Ingrid or even Siegfried, but very simply Jennifer (abominable, lacy name!) — Jennifer Valerian in Chicago, but that was not her real last name.

(I am quoting from the significantly cleaned-up Cimarron version.)

That "Innocence" was science fiction where "The Wise Man" is not is in part signaled, I think, by the fact that in the earlier story the character's name was not Siegfried but could remain "something like that," while here the non-Siegfried in question must have her name, or at least her first name, reduced to an abominable, lacy mundanity. Indeed both "The Wise Man" and the last of the early stories, "Martyr" (in the April 1957 Cornell Writer and, as far as I can tell, never reprinted in any form, anywhere) are much more what I expected from the teenage, Cornell-going Russ than was the surprising "Innocence": awkward attempts at entirely ordinary stories that earn the tendentious term some in sf circles use, "mundane fiction." Despite the unusual opening of "The Wise Man" (and the story settles down considerably as soon as that unsettled sentence has passed), these stories are pretty much exactly what you'd expect of a young white Jewish American woman writer in the latter half of the 1950s, beginning to chafe against most of those adjectives, the noun, and the time, but as yet knowing no alternative and so throwing herself into a received understanding of all of them.

"The Wise Man" is, in most technical terms, the "better" of the two stories, but for me is marginally the less interesting; it attempts to be a witty tale of a masculine-leaning "college girl" from a working-class ethnic-white background in frustrating but mutual love with an un-self-consciously effeminate college boy ("I keep telling him You have an Oedipus complex and he keeps saying So what" — rather startling and not particularly believable in 1955) but, though there are flashes of Russ's later wit and many precursors to the particular tics and techniques she would use to great effect later on (the parenthetical commentary in the opening sentence, the unpunctuated dialogue-in-dialogue of the sentence I just quoted), the story mostly succumbs to a kind of undifferentiated quirkiness, and at any rate is so firmly beholden to a form (the standardized American short story form, already well-established, about to be endorsed, promoted, and ossified by the CIA through the academic creative writing programs it would soon begin fostering) in which any given work can only distinguish itself by technical virtuosity — the skill with which the form is filled in — that this story, written by a woman who has not yet developed anything approaching viruosity, is ultimately forgettable even in its own terms.*

* "Innocence," though better-written by my lights, is also far from virtuosic, but both in its science-fictionality and in its own specific terms it does not need to be.

Perhaps a feminist scholar with a focus on this particular time, place, and milieu would be interested in the story. Certainly, a biographer looking for evidence of the young Russ's psychosexual development or sociopolitical awareness levels or whatever would find many passages ripe for underlining, but ultimately they reveal nothing Russ doesn't tell us herself in any number of essays (and in much of the later fiction). One point of minor interest for me is that, given the timing of the story's second appearance in 1970, it seems likely that Russ would have been doing the necessary revisions (substantial but not transformative) for that publication very shortly before beginning work on "When It Changed" and The Female Man; with this in mind, it is tempting to wonder if she came across her by then fifteen-year-old sentence, "She had often thought how pleasant the world would be if it consisted entirely of her and men," and felt the need to...revise it. But this is merely a curiosity. Even if we could say with certainty that yes, this is one of the roots of Whileaway,* I don't think it has much power to shed any light on the works set there that they don't already shed on themselves.

*And it could only be one of many, especially given the prevalence of women-only societies imagined in men's sf. Russ's own "Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction" is the classic survey of such stories.

"Martyr" would no doubt possess similar mild scholarly or biographical interest to the right researcher. Its attempt to portray a woman stifled is palpably important to its writer, but as with "The Wise Man" it, and its main character, end up lapsing more into mere quirkiness. Part of the problem, I think, is that Russ has yet to figure out just what is being stifled. Of course this is itself a symptom of the problem she's trying to get at, but where "Innocence" and the soon-to-come "Nor Custom Stale" (not to mention much of her life's work!) would address themselves directly to these kinds of foundational difficulties (How is one to understand a problem from inside of it? How can one portray what was never allowed to exist? What am I doing, writing?), "Martyr" just as much as "The Wise Man" is so devoted to the merely-given form of the American short story as Russ found it in the 1950s that all she can do is try to "straightforwardly portray" even though she has no way of knowing what to portray.

But that she seems to come close to understanding these problems is what makes "Martyr" ever so slightly the more interesting of the two to me. Throughout the story, the viewpoint character Judith (another of Russ's many J-named woman protagonists) thinks about "the novel she was going to write," which sounds like a kind of Gothic, Gormenghastian kind of thing (he said, never having read Gormenghast), about "beautiful people" who "lived in a house on a marsh, lived there eternally and could never come out of that prison," people who, variously, have visions, live in the tower, have "eyes that could catch on fire" and suffer beautifully in their sexy-sensitive-youth sweaters, and so forth. "They were all trying to get out and they never would," we're told, in a line that would be far too on-the-nose, too much an amateurish attempt at self-awareness — in this story of a woman trapped by marriage, by academic "friends" and community, by being a woman in a world belonging to men — were it not for the fact that Judith does not know how to write her novel.

Did Russ realize this yet? Judith's unwritten novel, about a group of people trapped in a shared situation but each suffering individually, mirrors her own (naïve) sense of herself as individually different, individually stifled, underneath it all individually superior (particularly superior to other women, at whom she frequently lashes out in her mind) — a sense common to many women in many times who have understood that they live in a society that seeks to rob them of their life but who have been denied the resources and perspective to see that they are not the only one so dispossessed — sort of the women's counterpart to the Angry Young Man.

Is Judith's inability to write at all a sign of what's been suppressed in her, or is her inability to write that novel a sign that what has been suppressed is beginning to come to light? Or is it both? Is not-writing the antithesis of writing, or are they more closely linked than that? Is the absence of writing in itself a kind of writing (or vice versa)? In Russ herself we can see the act, even the fact of writing to be inextricable from these questions (even when, much later, she will come quite firmly to answer some of them), which indeed will contour the remarkable story of stasis and entropy that is soon to come. "Martyr" is ultimately not a particularly good story, nor a particularly interesting one. But that such questions can even be asked of it is, perhaps, a sign that the writer of "Nor Custom Stale" — the writer we know as Joanna Russ — is about to come into being.

Atavism, degeneration: one reason (among many) to read Lovecraft

For Lovecraft the present (for him, a period of approximately 200 years even during which there is notable decay and which ends decisively precisely at the moment he writes [he also makes some exceptions for classical Greek and Roman civilization]) is livable, acceptable — except that if you look even slightly under the surface the unbearable past is still horribly there, and the unbearable future is already horribly prefigured.

The past and the future are one for him, and they are horrible — time runs from chaos (particularly in the original Greek sense of the word) to chaos (the end state of the entropy thermodynamics alerts us to).

"Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void . . ." The story named for that being begins with an utterance of its name, the word's pronounceable unpronounceability and recognizable unrecognizability (along with the fractured ellipses) a signal reminiscent of the grammatical oddities following the letter beth, ב, at the start of Genesis or the not-quite-reconcilable longtemps that Proust begins with*: a signal of a rift between the world (or what we think of as the world) and the word, that with this word we have left the world of appearances and have entered — something else. (Characteristically, the story's narration proper, the human "I", begins in the next paragraph with uncertain recollection: "I do not recall distinctly when it began..." Uncertainty, horror, dissolution: like his notion of the universe, Lovecraft's stories very often begin and end with these, and have much of them in the middle as well.)

*The observations about the openings of À la recherche and the Bible, and the connection between them, I owe — as I do so much — to Gabriel Josipovici, this time in The Book of God. (At any rate, full disclosure, I certainly am not capable of reading either of them in the original. The significance of beth's appearance as the very first letter of Genesis, according to Josipovici's account of some Talmudic interpretations, is that it is closed on all sides except that which faces the text that follows, marking the separation and distinction of the Bible from everything else.)

In encountering Lovecraft it at first seems peculiar, even laughable, that he has an equal terror of anything too new (subways) or too old (ancient temples). The immediate response is to think, this weirdo doesn't realize these are different things, and both innocuous. Bearing in mind what I've said so far, I think the more appropriate response is: we may not, but he realizes: these are the same thing, and both pose a fundamental threat.

He is famous, often ridiculed, for his tics, certain words that he repeats over and over like a kind of incantation against disintegration (his own? that of his work? of what he took to be the world?), some for more obvious reasons than others: "nameless", "squamous", "non-Euclidean"... I find it significant that among these, with equal weight given to both and both appearing often in what amounts to a single breath, are:

atavism

degeneration

Any discussion of Lovecraft must come to his racism at some point; and here I will throw myself into it, reminding the reader and myself as I do that in what follows I am addressing only one aspect of the encounter with his work. If a terrible metaphor will help, what I've written thus far (what cries out for expansion) is for me the trunk of the Lovecraft tree, and the racism is just one (very large) branch — or root — or both.

He sees the presence of non-white (and inappropriately "ethnic" white) people in "his" society as a sign — literally a sign, not the thing itself in its full reality — of the irruption into the superficially livable present of both the ancient (atavism: the primitive) and what is to come (degeneration: what he would designate "decadence", what I would designate, with different significances and in the recognition that it is not arriving but accelerating, already having arrived, "modernity"). He is of course wrong, morally and factually, but his is a wrongness deeply rooted in "Western civilization" and its self-conception, and like many deeply held terribly wrong beliefs it is a recognizable distortion of the truth: in that modernity has built itself on the destruction/exploitation (two aspects of the same thing) of the foundation that non-"Western" people laid before modernity rolled over them (the past); and could not continue to stand without the constant rebuilding of that foundation through labor squeezed out of these same people through continual, well- or poorly-hidden violence (the ongoing present, for Lovecraft in my scheme "the future").

To put it mildly, I can certainly understand why any given person of color might not want to read Lovecraft; why go out of your way to expose yourself to more vicious racism? (I can equally understand why other people of color would want to read him.) But when white people refuse to read him specifically for this reason (I would not want to elide the fact that there are other reasons not to want to read him, though I likely would object to them all!) it often strikes me as a form of the liberal insistence that there is no problem (anymore), or that there will be no problem (soon), or that there would be no problem (if everyone would just ignore it), or that sure, there is a problem, but it lies anywhere-but-in-me. Part of what Lovecraft does is to lay bare — precisely by hurling himself into them! — the mystifications of liberal modernity. The racism is in us, and we are in the racism.

If this were all he did, to read him would be nothing more than to wallow in guilt (that ineffectual pleasure). But this is not all he does. Another part of what he does (emphasizing that he does much more still; remember the tree — I am staying on this same branch/root) is to remind us, to throw his very life and body into the understanding that the-way-things-are is not, emphatically not, permanent, that it is only a temporary and quite probably illusory state of being that has overtaken the past and will be overtaken in its turn by the future. The seeming stability of this way of life is merely the most superficial of disguises. I would call it modern and capitalist ideology covering for the profound instability of these systems; Lovecraft, no doubt, would not. We would both agree, though, that what it hides, what tearing it away might reveal, is as of now nameless, and indescribable.

(So as not to close with seeming to read hope into Lovecraft, I wish to clarify that this is not exactly what I'm trying to do. There is no hope in Lovecraft unless it is that sometimes our dreams may be pleasant. I suppose I am simply trying to say: the radical and the reactionary are not always as mutually exclusive as we'd like to think; and Lovecraft's insistence that modernity's appearance of inevitability, permanence, and stability is nothing but a lie is, despite and even as part of his most horrifying and hateful beliefs, again I say it is a radical movement.)

(A hypersimplified version of what I'm saying might be: for those of us who are not its direct victims and who are indeed in many ways its direct beneficiaries, haughtily to refuse to read what we find ideologically incorrect for this reason and this reason only is not a path even to purity of mind, let alone to righteousness of action.)

Different things do different things

Ted Gioia wrote a characteristically nincompoopish piece on Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics for The Millions, in which he makes some sweeping claims — based on his usual unexamined premises, misapprehensions, and philistinism — about that work as some kind of a "science fiction masterpiece" that is not recognized as such because, he insists, "almost no science fiction fan has read it, or even heard about it" on the one hand, and on the other the supposed snobbery of literary-types keeps them from recognizing it as being "in the sci-fi genre." This prompted a (characteristically) cranky comment from me. Since it will probably remain buried there and I think it's an important issue, I reproduce it here (where it will also remain buried):

1. Science fiction people talk endlessly about how Calvino “is” science fiction. To say that “sci-fi readers” haven’t read him is absurd, unless you specify what group of “sci-fi readers” you mean.

2. Unless you define what you mean by the term, to say this or that work “is” science fiction (even more so, to say that it is “in the sci-fi genre”!) is equally absurd. Though parallels can be drawn, and certain aspects of his writing will appeal to the same people to whom science fiction appeals, there is no reason to aggressively claim Calvino, and every other writer of whom the same can be said, for science fiction. To do so is to erase the very different things Calvino (and others) are doing. Even in your own extremely superficial description of Cosmicomics, let alone in the book itself, it’s clear that the reason Calvino doesn’t “show up anywhere near Heinlein and Asimov on a bookshelf” is not that he “is deemed” (by who exactly?) “too respectable” (science fiction has not been disreputable for decades now, and it’s time its more aggrieved partisans realized that), but rather that he is doing something entirely different.

That such basic, aggressively incurious pieces that refuse to ask even the most beginner-level questions of themselves continue to get published is a mystery, and a shame.