Confusion and understanding: one post about The Stone Boatmen

[For those who care, fair warning: this post contains what probably amount to spoilers.]

Though I try always to extend sympathy at least, it is difficult for me to approach any new work of sf with anything other than suspicion. But very early on in my first reading of Sarah Tolmie's The Stone Boatmen — I am no longer able to say when or where, exactly — I decided to trust: to have faith in the work, and in Tolmie's ability and above all responsibility in pursuit of it. Or — can this really be characterized as a decision? Perhaps better to say that I found myself trusting her, that something palpable but not quite locatable in or between her words made such trust not only possible but natural, even unavoidable. Tolmie does not betray this trust.

The Stone Boatmen sets itself in, and in the ocean between, three coastal cities, none of which have names, none of which have been in communication with the others for a millennium prior to the events of the novel. Each has staked its being on one semi-mystical, semi-rational organizing principle, each carrying with it its own contradictions. There is the city of ceremonies, in which not only do elaborate rituals mark certain days and certain events in life, but smaller rituals attend almost every quotidian moment of every day; these ceremonies give the people of this city a physical (and therefore mental) connection with tradition, with the knowledge and power of "the ancestors" (on whom more to come), and yet the people often find the constant adherence to ceremony stifling. Then there is the city of poetry, in which the power of the word is almost — but not exactly — worshiped; this city understands the ability of art, specifically literary art, to create a world, but it lives perhaps too much in the world of mere art, has perhaps too much of a misleading, superstitious (even frantic) belief in the identity of the word with the thing. And finally there is the city of the golden birds, where priests study the behavior of a peculiar breed of bird in order to govern and advise the people according to what they divine therefrom; the actions of these birds are, explicitly, only a pretext, an arbitrarily ordered set of otherwise formless information focusing on which allows the bird-priest's mind to explore and to conclude; and yet these birds are no ordinary birds, and they do in fact possess authority — of some kind.

Each city, in short, has its own particular way of ordering and understanding the world, all of which have many appealing, crucial facets which it would be disastrous to lose but which nonetheless work also to conceal the world, to prevent the people from, as it is described later on, hearing what the world has always been saying to them. The relationship between these systems, once they encounter one another, is no simple, easily graspable thing. They are not complementary in the sense that some facile combination of them would result in enlightenment. There is a kind of trajectory to the order in which we encounter them: ritual, with its mystique and secretiveness, conceals words; words conceal what the birds, perhaps, reveal; and what the birds reveal conceals...well, whatever it conceals — "reality"? "being"? ..."truth"? — is what the book could, in a way, be said to be "about." But it would be a terrible mistake to take this trajectory as indicating a hierarchy, some kind of progressive step-by-step sense in which words are "better" than ritual, bird-divination "better" than words. Indeed it could be thought of as a circle (or as a closed chain consisting of three interconnected links, the form the cities choose to symbolize their new relationship), as the connection to ancestral ways of being and knowing that the people of the first city experience through their ceremonies is intimately tied to this world-speech to which the characters, and the book itself, seek to be attentive.

On a first reading it is tempting to think The Stone Boatmen is about — or perhaps better it is tempting to try to make it be about — a society becoming modern, much as, in our world, Europe did in the period centered around 500 years ago (proceeding as it did to steamroll that modernity catastrophically over the entire world). And indeed at first it seems to be so; the book opens with Prince Nerel alternately embracing ceremony and chafing against its restrictions; it then moves on to Mahar, a man of the next generation, who, as Maureen Kincaid Speller puts it, is "bored by the emphasis on ceremony and ritual in his own city. He is also acutely aware that he does not belong fully either to the city or the palace and his determination to be a sailor and boat-builder is a deliberately calculated expression of that uncertain status" — impatience with tradition, questing for novelty, and struggling for self-definition in the face of the confusions of uncertain status being of course some of the major characteristics of modern life.

But, as Speller notes in her insightful review, Tolmie's book "seems constantly to fold itself into new shapes in the reader’s mind." Even before the opening section — before Nerel's story — there is a prologue, bearing the title "The Ancestor's Tale" (the Chaucerian resonances are entirely appropriate, as we shall see in a moment), which haunts any attempt to make such simple meaning out of the narrative that follows. These two pages sketch in the planned death and mystical transformation of "the senior technician," Harel, who occupies a position of some power in a high-technological society (these are the people who will come to be known as "the ancestors") and, seeing disaster (of the type we ourselves are about to face?) approaching, decides to take action. It is not clear exactly what this action is, but it is obviously this that leads (singlehandedly? immediately? it is, deliberately, forever, unclear) to the relatively static, mostly "low"-technological societies we encounter in the novel proper, a millennium later. In light of this any attempt to view the three cities as we encounter them in the novel as "pre-modern" is necessarily a distortion of what the novel gives us — indeed, it would be more accurate to call the societies "post-modern," were the term not already taken by something to which it is much less suited.

The events of the prologue have complex ramifications on everything that is to follow, in the shape both of the cities and of the events that occur within and between them (to the extent that these two things are separable elements of the novel). Even in the first two sections, dealing with what could be misread as Nerel's "pre-modernity" giving way to Mahar's modernity, things are not so simple; and as we then progress first to the section dealing with the poet Rose and then of her daughter, the seer Fjorel, the novel "performs the remarkable feat of maintaining a permanent tension between tradition...and modernity or modernization" (as Thomas Foster puts it in his review in The Cascadia Subduction Zone). This is a work that recognizes the value and the problems with both, admitting it all into itself, refusing propaganda, resolute in its determination not to place one over the other.

A digression may make clearer what I mean, and clearer too how Tolmie manages to perform her remarkable feat. Tolmie says (in fact it is quite apparent that she wants the reader to know) that William Langland's poem Piers Plowman was heavily on her mind as she wrote The Stone Boatmen. Not yet having read that poem, I turned for assistance to Gabriel Josipovici's The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction and its discussion of Langland alongside Dante. Josipovici’s subject in this book is what it means to become modern, which means he will be useful in exploring the ways in which modernity and non-modernity interpenetrate in The Stone Boatmen. He writes that both Piers Plowman and the Commedia

open with the hero-narrator’s sudden awareness of being lost and his asking a figure of authority (Virgil, Holy Church) who appears before him what it is he needs to do to find salvation. Both poems then provide an answer to this question not in terms of logic or metaphysical argument, though there is plenty of both in the poems, but in terms of experience. The hero undergoes a number of experiences which lead him eventually to see that the universe and his own life make sense. … In Langland too the public and the private, his own history and that of the world, come together when he wakes up on Easter Sunday to hear the bells ringing for ‘God’s resurrection’. Here, for the first time in the entire poem, the dream vision and the waking reality coincide, significantly enough in the one event which stands outside human time and yet gives meaning to all human history: the Passion and the Resurrection, eternally re-enacted in the sacrament.
        It is as if both journeys had been undertaken to cleanse man of the stiff and stubborn man-locked set, the private vision of the foolish natural man* which led only to the dark wood of chaos and confusion, and to give him back himself by revealing to him the reality of the world and the meaning of God's plan. But this is not simply a matter of listening to what people have to say to you. Virgil and Beatrice and St Bernard have much to say to Dante, but they are important to him primarily for what they are and for where they lead him, rather than for what they teach. Similarly, in passus XII of Piers Plowman Imagination warns the dreamer that 'learning and intelligence are both worthy of praise', for 'without the use of learning, bread could not be changed into the Body of Christ' ... and without intelligence, which 'springs from men's observations of many things — of birds and beasts, and of experiments both true and false', man could not come to the Truth. ... For the world is a book and all the parts fit and yield forth God's meaning. Dante and Langland thus both construct their poems so as to elicit from the hero (and hence from the reader) the exclamation: 'Now I see how it is!'

* "Stiff and stubborn man-locked set" is a reference to a previously-discussed Wallace Stevens poem, and "foolish natural man" to a passage from the twelfth-century Hugh of St Victor, also previously-discussed; this type of man is contrasted against "he who is spiritual and can judge all things," aware of the way God works through the world.

If we make allowances for large differences in theological orientation from work to work, Josipovici could almost be describing The Stone Boatmen here. Just as Dante and Langland present a journey from confusion to understanding, so too does Tolmie*, though here the confusion and understanding, and the experience that leads from one to the other, are those of a whole society over multiple generations rather than one individual within one lifetime (this difference is, as I have discussed, typical of sf). The characters speak rarely if ever of a God or gods, and never of salvation per se, but nearly all of the action of the novel is driven by the attempt to regain the ability of the revered ancestors to listen to the speech of the world, to understand the nature and plan of these ancestors, and to discover what place the lives of individuals and of communities have in the context of that plan. And to read the book is to experience this attempt, to try along with the characters to listen to what the world is saying.

*With a lot of "logic and metaphysical argument" as well, to the point that it almost obscures the necessity of experience. I will not have the space here to explore this seeming contradiction — which is in fact the very soul of sf — but I hope to do so in a follow-up.

But this book is neither written nor read by people with medieval understandings of the world; though in it modernity and tradition always coexist, it is itself a product of the modern world, and so things are not so simple as the above might lead one to believe. But neither are they in Josipovici, who is discussing Dante and Langland in order to lead into an examination of the radically different worldview one finds in Chaucer, for whom the crises that would lead to what we think of as modernity were already well underway:

Instead of making experience reinforce what old books say Chaucer seems to be at pains to pull the two apart. The perpetual concern with dreams is just another aspect of this problem, since the question whether dreams are prophetic or not is really the question of how far God impinges on this world and how far we can tell what kinds of relation exist between this world and God’s providence. In Dante and Langland, we saw, there was an answer to these questions, and an answer that had to be sought for, but which was connected with the public facts of the Incarnation and the sacraments of the Church. But Chaucer’s poems make no mention of this. Instead they merely raise the question and leave us more puzzled than before.

Once again Josipovici could almost be describing The Stone Boatmen, and reading this passage with this book in mind it can be tempting to say that Tolmie is more "Chaucerian" than "Langlandian." This is particularly so in the early parts of the novel’s final section, the one dealing with Fjorel and her dream-visions. These dreams come from Maleki, the current temple bird* — who is also, Fjorel comes to realize, the current incarnation of Harel, the senior technician whose transference into a bird we witnessed in the prologue, known to the people of the cities as the last king of the ancestors. In a sense, then, it is possible to take Maleki/Harel as a stand-in for God (or rather for His role in the Josipovici passage) and say that there is no doubt as to "how far God impinges on this world" — there is no question as to whether Fjorel’s dreams are true visions — which would seem at first to set Tolmie’s enterprise against Chaucer’s. But as ever it is not so simple. For one thing, Harel was not God, or a god, or even supernatural in any way; he was merely a man, different from others only in the extent of his technical know-how, possessing no transcendent authority. Then too Harel’s mind, inhabiting the body (which emphatically includes the brain) of a succession of birds over the course of a millennium, is no longer that of a human. Though it retains much of the same factual information it possessed when he was a living human, along with the urgency that led him to abandon the technical way of life while also ensuring that a record of it would exist**, its perspective on this knowledge, its interpretation of this urgency, and its ability to communicate any of it, are now that of a bird, not a human — and as such Fjorel’s dreams cannot be a transparent window onto the truth of things. "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him," goes the line from Wittgenstein that serves as one of the novel’s two epigraphs, and the same is true of this bird — indeed, the problem of comprehension is more pronounced, as Maleki cannot even speak, has no language. Fjorel spends most of her time in the novel being confused, frustrated, even resentful at what is happening to her; she knows that her visions have meaning, but she can find no way to grasp this meaning.

*Low-budget bookblogging problems: I had to return the book to the library, have not yet been able to buy my own copy, and my notes as always have frustrating lacunae — so I’m not quite getting the terminology right here. In the city of birds all birds are "sacred" (or some near equivalent), but there is always one mated pair which occupies a central place, physically and otherwise; Maleki is the male of this pair at the time the novel takes place.
**In multiple ways — the books of the ancestors still exist, the rituals of the city of ceremonies descend from the ancestors, and Harel himself seems to have been waiting all this time for a mind, Fjorel’s, that is in some mysterious way "ready" to receive his messages.

Later on, Josipovici looks at Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and finds it emblematic of the modern worldview that rose up to deny the (Chaucerian) uncertainty and anxiety that had followed in the wake of the collapse of the (Dantean and Langlandian) medieval worldview.* Where the "I" in the medieval poems is "moving slowly towards understanding (and leading the reader with him)," in Bunyan it is more as though "he passively records a film which passes before his eyes." In the medieval poems meaning is something that must be searched for; "in Bunyan the meaning is there from the start." Rather than learning "how to make sense of the world," Bunyan’s Christian "learns how to flee from it ... his task is to escape the World, the Flesh and the Devil" where in Dante and Langland what must be escaped is not the world but "a false and subjective view of the world; what they discover is not a new set of facts, but a new understanding of the nature of that false view." Bunyan’s work is a presentation of a set worldview and morality "which we either accept or reject, depending on our prior allegiances and our own fear of damnation," rather than a process in which the reader as well as the writer and the "I" all take part. And rather than there being a tension between the real event, the real being, and what it allegorically "stands for," Bunyan’s "story is meaningful in so far as it is reducible." But what is on the surface for the Calvinist Bunyan but is increasingly obfuscated as modernity progresses is that "this is true of the story because it is true," for the person with a modern perspective, "of the world as well." Looking ahead to later forms, we can put this another way: that no matter how much secular modernity insists it has no need to see the world as "meaningful," the shape of what is by now traditional narrative puts the lie to this insistence, indeed subtly but powerfully propagandizes for a particular interpretation of what the world "means."

*As discussions of these issues are always open to accusations of oversimplification and nostalgia, I would like to stress here that I am summarizing very roughly in the interest of keeping this post to some reasonable length. Josipovici is very aware (as am I) that "the medieval era" was neither a monolith nor some golden age of perfect harmony; but in Europe during these centuries a shift did occur in the prevailing ways of relating to the world, and this shift, especially as "Europe" metastasized across the face of the planet, does continue to govern our own prevailing ways of doing so. Any discussion of such phenomena must engage in generalization to some degree, which by no means must entail losing sight of the fact that generalization is what is going on.

I bring this up to emphasize once again the degree to which Tolmie avoids such propaganda. If Bunyan's "story is meaningful in so far as it is reducible," Tolmie's is meaningful in so far as it is not. The Stone Boatmen is practically overflowing with elements that seem to mean, to carry some set allegorical meaning (the recurrence of twins and doubles, for instance, or the encounter between Rose and the fox that eats her pears), but Tolmie, much like Kafka though reading her otherwise feels nothing like reading him, takes great pains to undercut the allegory, to insist that what is presented to us is itself, not some reduction of itself.

And as we saw before, The Stone Boatmen incorporates the Langlandian (or at least what I am interpreting through Josipovici as Langlandian) insistence on process, on coming, through experience, to the truth, with the Chaucerian emphasis on the absence of a knowable truth. The Chaucerian anxiety in the face of this absence (which, lest the point be lost, is very close to the anxiety that runs through those works called "modernist," at least when the term means more than some simplistic periodization) is present, in its way, again most especially in Fjorel’s story. In a conversation between her and the bird-priest Herodias, Fjorel’s mentor, the talk turns from the confusion of her visions to the mysterious event that not only started the novel proper but set in motion all of the events that follow the prologue: the discovery that among the commoners there is a man who, despite being unrelated to him, looks exactly like Prince Nerel, and who therefore also looks exactly like the ancient stone boatmen in the city’s harbor, the Prince’s resemblance to whom has long been a source of amazement in the court. Herodias says,

"It must mean something. Two men born in one generation, exactly alike but not twins, both looking just like those statues more than a thousand years old. All have wondered about it since. Who knows? Maybe the birds will tell you why and solve a long mystery." Fjorel looked anxious.

Fjorel’s anxiety, as a character in the novel, is not quite that of Chaucer-the-writer. One feels that she would have been fine going through life simply experiencing, feeling no need for the world to have meaning (this perhaps is how one can read "the stillness," the state of semi-meditative hyper-awareness in which she, for the most part comfortably, spends much of her life); but suddenly she finds the demand to find meaning thrust upon her. It is this responsibility, and her lack of faith in her own ability to live up to it (perhaps because of personal failing, perhaps because to fulfill this responsibility is by its nature impossible) that makes her anxious. The position of the book itself, I think, to the extent that it can be said so simply to have one, is to be found in Herodias’s response to Fjorel’s anxious look:

Fjorel looked anxious. "But if they don't it doesn't matter. We do not need to know everything," he added hastily, apologetically.

The eager curiosity to know, to find out, paired (humorously, in this case) with the understanding and acceptance that the mastery of knowledge has limits. The tendency occasionally to forget the one in the acknowledgment or pursuit of the other. The mingling of aspects of both modernity and "pre-modernity" in multiplicitous and, unlike the modernity we actually live in, non-prescriptive, variable form. The book is after — and it is possible to interpret this, as Foster does, as "utopian," though I would call it more properly, specifically sfnal — a reconciliation between these, in reality, unreconciled (and perhaps unreconcilable) ways of being in the world. In Tolmie as in Dante and Langland, the world is an interpretable set of information, like a book (though the novel thoroughly questions that breezy "like"); but as in Chaucer there’s no guarantee that this information "means," indeed when it most seems to mean is when it can be most deceptive. In light of all this, and in light of its own nature as a (resistant) product of modernity, the journey from confusion to understanding that The Stone Boatmen otherwise shares with Piers Plowman and the Commedia necessarily occurs between somewhat different poles.

Wittgenstein, recall, provided one of the two epigraphs: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him." But before this is one from Langland: "Whan all tresores arn tried, treuthe is the beste". The movement of the novel can perhaps be understood in part as a movement from a "confused" melding of these two lines (or rather of aspects of them) to an "understanding" one. As things stand at the beginning, Prince Nerel, or rather the society he (metonymically, politically, problematically) represents, has long staked itself on the understanding that there exists truth, that it is the beste of all tresores, but there is a growing discomfort with the distance at which it seems to reside. The ceremonies continue as always, at times even leading to moments of startling clarity, but increasingly the silence, the absence of the ancestors with whom the ceremonies are supposed to be a link weighs on them; and even in those moments of clarity there is the sense that something is missing. Truth exists, perhaps, but the splendor of the ancestors is so foreign to the people of the present that it seems only a fundamentally different kind of being could ever grasp it and even then could never communicate it; Wittgenstein's aphorism is readable as expressing ultimate unknowability, the absence of truth from a world that promises to possess it.

The crisis escalates in the figure of Mahar, but then a peculiar thing happens: in his confusion, his being deeply unsettled, he acts — and through his action, the three cities, unaware of each other for a thousand years, are linked. What each possesses throws into relief what another lacks. As I said before, they do not complement, let alone "complete" one another, but the shift from mere learning to experience that their intercourse allows for allows also for the life of Rose, transplanted by choice from one city to another (and unwittingly bringing the best of her city with her), and then her daughter Fjorel, who would never have been born without the contribution of all three cities. In a sense the crisis is embodied in Fjorel to a greater extent even than in Mahar; from what I have already discussed about her role in the novel it is probably apparent that Langland's Treuthe and Wittgenstein's incomprehensibility pervade every aspect of her being.

But through her own life, her own experience — both in submission to and in reaction against the role of seer that has been thrust upon her — Fjorel is able to come to a new synthesis of these seemingly opposed elements. Not for her Chaucer's puzzlement (though she passes through it), nor Bunyan's and modernity's obfuscation (though she sometimes wishes for it), nor the anxiety and melancholy of those who struggle against modernity, whom I find it useful to call modernists (though, again, she is no stranger to anxiety or melancholy). Neither does she succumb to the glib triumphalism of much of what is called postmodernism, which, refusing to look at the problem, noisily declares that there is no problem.

When Fjorel attempts to explain the understanding she has come to, she begins by disclaiming that what she has to say is perhaps "not spectacular," not, at any rate, as exciting as people might hope the solution to ancient mysteries would be. In a sense she is right; this is no "all will be revealed" TV series finale. What she provides are not so much answers as (and someone — her father? augh, if only I hadn't had to return the book — points this out) the understanding that different questions need to be asked. The question is not: what is the ancestors' plan? for there is no plan, or at least not one that matters any longer. The question is not: how can we be more like the ancestors? how can we know what they knew, do what they did? — it is not, that is to say: how do we break through the barrier of incomprehensibility to seize the truth? Rather, the question Fjorel enables her people to begin asking (and here I want to emphasize Speller's observation that this novel has no truck with overnight transformations, that it "is less bothered about these moments of epiphany, more concerned about the responsibilities such rediscovery brings with it") is closer to: how can we be ourselves?

By the end of the novel, we, having read it, are able to hold Langland's and Wittgenstein's words simultaneously in mind in a new way. They are not opposed; they are aspects of the same thing. Truth exists, for we are all linked, with one another and with everything else in the world. But truth is truth precisely because of who we are, because of our experience. A lion, or a bird, or an ancestor, given the ability to speak to us, could not make itself understood. But this does not mean there is no truth, only that truth, consisting of everything that is, is larger than any one vision of it — and that our responsibility, knowing this, is to seek it always.

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.

Too close, too much

Interestingly, in the same passages of Delany and Josipovici that I wrote about last week I found another striking parallel. In talking about the differences between sf and what he calls literature, Delany makes the intriguing (if at first seemingly silly, or trivial) observation that "the conceptual space of science fiction is finally far closer in organization to the performance space of the circus" than to that of the theater, which he aligns more with literature. His reasons are many, all worth considering, most (for me) quite convincing; but the one that interests me right now is the last: that "the circus was the first art to insist openly that more must go on in the performance space than can possibly be seen at once". Whether the historical aspect of the assertion is factually accurate I am not competent to judge; regardless, the point is well taken, especially when one thinks of such "intensively recomplicated" * sf works as Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, to use an example Delany himself refers to in this very essay. Indeed that "more is going on than can be seen at once" is in many ways what sf readers and critics mean when they say that the fictional world created by a work of sf is thick, or deep, or full, or what have you.

* The phrase is, I believe, James Blish's.

Meanwhile for his part Josipovici, still working with T.J. Clark's arguments, brings up the marvelous chapter in Farewell to an Idea about the painter Camille Pisarro. In this chapter Clark compares Pisarro's 1892 painting Two Young Peasant Women to one with a very similar "subject matter" painted the same year by Jules Breton, June. "The latter presents us with an idealised scene of country folk at rest for us to gaze at in comfort," Josipovici writes, then quotes Clark, who finds that in the Pisarro picture things are very different:

we could worry endlessly about the peasants' actual poses, and the distance between them, and where the ground plane is; but of course the painting does not offer us sufficient clues to answer these kinds of questions, and does not mean to. It means us to be in limbo. We have to come in close—too close to get the whole picture.

Josipovici then goes on to draw parallels from this contrast, between Breton and Pisarro, to the one he has been wrestling with in his whole book, that between so-called "traditional" literature and the kind he calls Modernist. I might be stretching here, but I think I might not be—is there not a great deal of resonance between having to come in "too close to get the whole picture" in the one endeavor and there being "more going on than can possibly be seen at once" in the other? Obviously these are not the same thing; if they were, we would be talking about one literary tradition, and not (at least) two. But to me it seems that they are, perhaps, different ways of approaching the same thing.* Can I be the only one who feels that there is, or can be, a great sympathy between...what could one call it?...between restraint and excess, minimalism and maximalism, the micro and the macro, the closeup and the (unauthoritative) panorama? And do we not live our lives too close to get the whole picture, in which there is more going on than we can possibly see?

* I'm deeply uncomfortable with that phrasing, but hopefully it can serve for now as an approximation of what I mean.

I just recently read Doris Piserchia's superb, and to all appearances forgotten, 1974 sf novel Star Rider. It's a sort of baroque far future picaresque—a form with a long and wonderful tradition in sf. After I read it, I lamented on twitter that the novel revealed to me a major failing of my enterprise as an sf critic, in that I simply have no idea how to write about why I found it such a wonderful novel. And while there have been before—and will be again, no doubt—books I could not figure out how to write about, this case seems more drastic a failure—for what I loved about Star Rider is very much at the core of what I love about sf as a form, a field, a calling. I still am not prepared to write at length about Piserchia's novel, but I think what I've discovered here is a key aspect of how I feel. Something in the refractory near-chaos of her recomplications, what Delany himself might (or might not) call the "multiplex consciousness" at play in her novel—and many other sf novels both "like" and not like it—something in all of that lives.

My first draft woke up like this: a ramble

A good chunk of Samuel R. Delany's essay on Theodore Sturgeon* is devoted to an explanation of why sf writers of the American pulp tradition (and their descendents) would so often wish to downplay the amount of effort they put into their writing: why they would positively brag that they write quickly and never revise, and insist that what you read is entirely first draft. He gives a number of reasons—all, of course, interlinked. Some I buy, some I don't.

* "Sturgeon", as collected in Starboard Wine. It's a great piece of writing, very worth reading—even if it doesn't particularly convince me about Sturgeon, who strikes me as intermittently interesting at best and whose influence seems largely responsible for many of my least favorite aspects of Delany's own fiction. But anyway.

He talks about sf's historical disreputability (and, implied, the lingering ridiculous inferiority complex left behind now that that disreputability has long evaporated), in contrast with the perceived virtues of "high art", literature, pointing out that to work long and hard at something "good for you" can be played off as heroic, while to do so at something disreputable can only be the action of "an outright criminal"—but someone who just dashes off something disreputable can perhaps be "a more or less lovable scamp." As an explanation of a part of what goes on in these writer's minds this makes a lot of sense to me—and is a great help in reading their personal writing fruitfully—though of course both sides of the equation are ludicrous in any real sense (as Delany himself is likely aware).

He also asserts that sf "is a highly affective mode of writing. Our audience gasps, applauds, rises stunned from the seats, falls back limp with hanging jaws—so that the writerly stance of the virtuoso is a valid one for us." I think he is right to bring up the "stance of the virtuoso" here, but the rest of this seems highly questionable. I do not deny that sf readers become highly involved with what they read, but (and perhaps this is just me?) Delany's description of the mode of this involvement rings false. For me if there is one near-universal constant in the sf of the tradition and era Delany is describing, it is what I would call serenity, a feeling of calm that is almost impossible to explain in the midst of all the pyrotechnics and wonder and awe and terror and planets blowing up that sf tends to deal with, a feeling that somehow manages not only to avoid feeling inappropriate to the grand subject matter but even to feel exactly right.* And even beyond this (what strikes me as a) misrepresentation of the readers' reaction, I'm not buying Delany's "so that"; even if an audience reacts as though something virtuosic had been accomplished, this does not necessarily justify the virtuosic stance itself. One would need to interrogate just what virtuosity is, and what problems might be inherent in it, in much greater depth** before having the right to make any such claim; but these are some of the questions Delany seems constitutionally uninterested in asking, and which I find to be of extraordinary importance.

*Remind me sometime to talk about this through Rendezvous with Rama, which though it was written later than the bulk of the work I'm talking about (and despite its more disgustingly Clarkean moments) is my favorite example of it, and of a lot of other things.
**And here perhaps a number of passages from Thomas Bernhard's The Loser might serve well for the opposition; at any rate I won't be carrying out the interrogation here.

Delany mentions early on—and then, curiously, drops—the fact that this tradition we're talking about is one of commercial writing, that for these writers the "work" they put into their writing is—explicitly—work in the economic sense of the word at least as much as in any other. It's their job, or at least one of their jobs. In light of this (which Delany does not go in to!), the claims of the sf writer look very different. Being lazy at work is an entirely different thing, socially and (if you will) morally speaking, than being lazy while making art; and indeed we do see a reflection of this in sf writers bragging about being lazy—but getting the work done anyway, by gum!—while talking about their work as "work" in this sense, then turning around and talking up all the hard work they put in when talking about it as "art". See for example Heinlein's famous (and from my perspective fatuous) comment that writing sf is intrinsically harder (and therefore somehow better) than writing other kinds of fiction. He bases this claim on all of the rigorous scientific and technological knowledge and thinking that (for him) must go on before the writing even begins; and this, to writers of Heinlein's type, is where the "art" of sf writing is located.

Considering sf as commercial writing I think also sheds some light on Delany's "stance of the virtuoso", particularly if we also factor in the peculiar sociality of the sfnal world, the extremely close relationship between writers, critics, and fans that, so far as I know, has no parallel in any other field of artistic endeavor.* Under these circumstances, the writer, whose role in other situations is more closely analogous to that of composer, takes on also much more of the role of the performer than most writers traditionally have.** And what performer is not tempted to make it look easy?

*And in those fields in which the situation comes close, it usually seems to have been semi-deliberately modeled after that of sf.
**Though this seems to be shifting, as the capitalist celebrity cult extends its machinations into every realm it can possibly think to; and at any rate, the distinction I've set up has never been totally accurate—cf. Victor Hugo's celebrity, for example. As a broad generalization, though, I think it can stand.

Delany structures much of this part of his essay as a critique of something Stanisław Lem wrote in (I believe a letter to) Science Fiction Studies, and so it seems a bit mean to go after Lem here as well, but all of this did put me in mind of some comments of his that have always irked me. Lem is a wonderful writer of fiction, of course, a giant; but his science fiction criticism, though at times enjoyably cranky (a stance I obviously have much sympathy for!) and occasionally incisive, obsesses so much over the social milieu of American sf—a milieu of which Lem has no understanding whatsoever (nor has he any reason to)—that it more often becomes next to useless, and mostly just purposelessly infuriating (this is not to say that there is nothing to criticize in this milieu, simply that Lem does not know what it is). In his essay "On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction" (which I quote in Franz Rottensteiner, Bruce R. Gillespie, R.D. Mullen and Darko Suvin's committee translation, as collected in Lem's Microworlds), seemingly without noticing, he leaves behind structural questions to get in this gripe:

A quite general symptom of the sickness in science fiction can be found by comparing the spirit in ordinary literary circles to that in science-fiction circles. In the literature of the contemporary scene there is today uncertainty, distrust of all traditional narrative techniques, dissatisfaction with newly created work, general unrest that finds expression in ever new attempts and experiments; in science fiction, on the other hand, there is general satisfaction, contentedness, pride; and the results of such comparisons must give us some food for thought.

Indeed they do, but Lem seems to me to be eating a thought-apple and declaring it a cheeseburger. To begin with, I'm not certain I trust Lem's characterization of "the" (which?) "contemporary scene". Perhaps in continental Europe, perhaps even in the Anglophone literary world of the 1970s*, which was a highly abnormal time in that world, he is correct; but in general it is my sense that, while most of those doing work worth reading are filled with this kind of self-doubt and questioning and unrest, "ordinary literary circles" are for the most part filled with precisely the kind of self-satisfied triumphalism Lem claims to find in sf.

*I don't know when Lem wrote the article, but it appeared in Science Fiction Studies in 1973.

Much worse, though, Lem is wholly unaware of the various situations I have been discussing, through Delany's comments, in this post; and as such he takes the comments of American sf writers wholly at face value. But when we consider those writers as working in relative isolation, having to sell the products of their work (and therefore themselves as well), and working in extremely close quarters with their immediately-responsive audience, their words take on quite different meanings. A fruitful comparison might be made with Arnold Schoenberg's self-adulation in his letters, which I happen just to have read; at no point in the published letters does he (openly) express anything other than the utmost certainty in his enterprise and indeed in his primacy over all other living composers; he positions himself as the carrier of the flame of the European, particularly the German, musical tradition (a stance which does not stop him from being extraordinarily generous to other composers when he is in a position to do so). He also talks a good deal about money, of which he never has much, and about persecution—personal, artistic, and (as an Austrian Jew in the interwar period) religious. Are we to believe that Schoenberg, of all people, was never dissatisfied with his work, never distrusted traditional techniques (!), never doubted himself? Of course not. Self-doubt, though almost never explicitly spoken, runs painfully and palpably through all the letters alongside the self-assuredness and self-promotion. In a position like Schoenberg's, all of these strains are inevitable, and all are essential for survival.

An observation I'd like to just throw in here without feeling the need to connect it explicitly to anything: we tend to call sf of the American pulp tradition "popular" literature, because it was bought and sold, but it was never broadly popular in the usual sense of the word until the sudden attention brought by media properties like Star Trek in the mid 60s and, much more so, Star Wars in the late 70s. At the time that both Delany and Lem were writing their essays things were shifting substantially, the beginning of the trend that would lead to the situation we have today in which at least certain strains of sf are totally indistinguishable from "the mainstream", but until then both writing and reading sf were, despite being commercial, a rarefied pursuit of a tiny minority (with a large proportion of the readers also being writers), distrusted and not at all understood by the vast bulk of people.* Sound like anything else?

*This being said, I'm not trying to universally valorize the persecution complex of these writers, which can get pretty distasteful, particularly coming from such a predominantly straight male WASPy group, many (but far from all) of whom, though they apparently didn't recognize it, in their day jobs occupied positions of considerable power in the emerging American technocracy. (On the other hand, the sizable minority of them who were Jewish or other "ethnic" immigrants, like Isaac Asimov, or living lives of grinding working-class desperation, like Philip K. Dick, should not be ignored.) All I'm trying to do is contextualize their comments on their own enterprise.

I set out on this ramble because the other day, shortly after reading Delany's essay on Sturgeon, I picked up Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened To Modernism? to look up a comment of his on something totally unrelated (I no longer even recall what it was I was looking for). As so often happens with this little book that, despite its seemingly restricted subject-matter, seems somehow to encompass everything in the world, I found myself engrossed in re-reading whole passages and finding wholly unexpected, totally new-to-me things in them (this even though I just re-read the whole book a month ago—a completely accidental re-read sparked by a similar situation: I picked it up to look up one specific thing and then was unwilling to put it down again). This time it was the final chapter, the section in which Josipovici summarizes and extends an argument T.J. Clark makes in his (excellent) Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. Layer upon layer upon layer, Clark himself refers back to Hegel; forgive me for this extended blockquote:

Clark rightly recognizes that modernity is bound up with disenchantment, which is linked to secularism. He quotes Hegel in his Aesthetics: 'Art, considered in light of its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.' This does not of course mean that art ceases after 1820, only that its ability effortlessly to articulate the world has gone. Viewing Modernism through the prism of Hegel's chapter on the Unhappy Consciousness in the Phenomenology, he argues that for art to remain meaningful in these changed circumstances it has to accept what he calls contingency, and I call arbitrariness. Art's being able to continue, he argues, has depended on its being able to make Hegel's dictum in the Aesthetics 'specific and punctual'. 'That is to say, on fixing the moment of art's last flowering at some point in the comparatively recent past, and discovering that enough remains from this finale for a work of ironic or melancholy or decadent continuation to seem possible nonetheless.' This he calls, invoking Beckett, the 'can't go on, will go on' syndrome. And he understands that once the Hegelian view is accepted technique will always be seen as 'a kind of shame', while at the same time artists, desperate for something stable beneath their feet, will tend, like Flaubert, to fetishize the notion of the sheer hard practical and technical work involved in making art.

I hope to have a post soon (hah!) on the role of "contingency" or "arbitrariness" in sf considered as a field phenomenon (because it's not as though this one paragraph sent my mind going in only one direction!), but for now I think Josipovici's comments here through Clark (through Hegel) can illuminate for us the similar-but-different situations of the "modernist" writer and the sf writer, and why these situations give rise to such seemingly different self-evaluations. Simultaneously, technique is "a kind of a shame" and hard work is something to be fetishized (the example of Flaubert is probably the obvious one, and Delany mentions him too, along with James Joyce). A peculiar, obviously contradictory situation, but one which does arise quite naturally out of the disenchanted world in which we find ourselves. The modernists, writing for the most part not for money and largely in isolation from their audiences, react with agonized statements of the kind Lem implicitly lauds, and with endless attention to the work; the sf writers, writing for money* and in close quarters with their audiences, react with bravado (often palbably uncomfortable, which Lem also misses) both in downplaying the amount of work that goes into the writing and in overstating the amount of work that comes before it.

*But, importantly—and I think this gets overlooked—not for very much of it. The sf writers of this tradition cannot, I think, be dismissed as mere crass commercialists, for if they were, they surely would have chosen a more lucrative field. A love of what they were doing and a need to do it had to have been involved, and clearly were.

Viewed this way, it seems to me that what's going on here is not actually all that different—that it is not some intrinsic "sickness in science fiction" that creates the seemingly different (and oh so vulgar!) behavior of the sf writers, rather a difference in the material conditions under which the writers worked. In an interview collected in her Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt, Marge Piercy compares the process of writing and selling novel after novel to that of building a house, selling it out from under you, and then building another. Asked if moving out of one house and immediately on to another is not terribly difficult, she sardonically replies:

Capitalism is a great assistance in that. Since you sell your labor, in this case you sell the novel, it is literally bought by someone else and belongs to them, so you had better cut your ties. Once the book goes into production, you must cut the ties.

And that seems as good a place to end this ramble as any.

When I call science fiction a "field"

"Field", in one of its common senses, is sometimes used as a quasi-metaphorical description of collective endeavor, of a group of people working together, though usually individually at any given moment, not toward a specific or shared goal, but for many different reasons, along individual but nevertheless somehow parallel lines. In this sense sf most definitely is a field. But also:

Martin Heidegger, very roughly paraphrased, speaks of us, beings contemplating Being, as finding ourselves thrown into an open space, a clearing: a field?

Gabriel Josipovici, discussing Robert Pinget's novel Passacaglia, writes:

It leaves one, as one finishes it, with the sense of having lived through half a dozen or more potential novels... of having lived through them or half lived through them, and through so much else.... But more than that, the book leaves one with the sense of having participated in the birth of narrative itself. And, naturally, having no beginning, the book has no end, no third part, as Kierkegaard would say. When the field has been thoroughly plowed the book stops, for nothing more can or needs be said.

In terms of the single life--which of course ends, is bounded--the field can indeed be "thoroughly plowed" with nothing more able or needing to be said; but what of a field of such fields?

And Joanna Russ writes: "A story is closer to the interaction of magnetic fields than to what we think of as life. And perhaps life is, too." And stories themselves interact with one another, in the way of magnetic fields; and we must try to grasp, too, the relationships between the way we think of stories, "what we think of as life", and what, "perhaps", life is.

PS Come to think of it I think we can pick up resonances from almost every definition wiktionary has for the word.

Noted: Gabriel Josipovici on contingency

I had hoped to have a follow-up to my last post written by now, but it was not to be--I'm working on it and it'll appear sooner or later, just not quite yet. In the meantime, here is a passage from Gabriel Josipovici's "The Bible Open and Closed" which I find relevant to both of my pursuits here (i.e., sf and poetry).

In his essay Josipovici has been discussing several of the Hebrew Bible's odder moments--those that seem to defy our sense of what narrative should be--and finding very fruitful ways of reading them which seek to take this defiance on its own terms rather than paper it over or consider it a fault. Two in particular are relevant to this passage. The first is the character Phalti, who appears once, very briefly, in both First and Second Samuel--very slightly longer than is required for his part in the story--just long enough for us to feel his humanity but no longer. The second is the appearance, in the midst of the portion of Genesis which concerns the life of Joseph, of a seemingly irrelevant episode concerning his brother Judah and Judah's daughter-in-law, Tamar--an episode whose significance only reveals itself to the attentive reader much later on, long after Genesis is over, as Judah's line comes to more prominence.

I quote this passage as it appears on pages 14 and 15 of Josipovici's collection of essays, The Singer on the Shore.

In both cases the modern reader is disorientated by the reticence of the narration. This often has to do with brevity, but not necessarily. The text can be prolix and yet deny us information we feel we cannot do without. We want the text to say more, to explain, to take sides; but what if this non-explanation, this not taking sides, were, like the inexplicability of the call, the mystery of the father's love, part of what this book is about and not a weakness or a lack? Phalti's sudden and disconcerting eruption into the story, saying nothing but going weeping behind his wife to Bahurim before turning back, still without speaking, when told to do so--this helps make us aware of the fact that the story teems with silent figures, some mere names in genealogical lists, yet each no doubt with his or her own life and joys and sorrows. Even more, though, it makes us aware of the fact that even though the story told here is that of the Israelites, there are other stories which we might have entered had we not entered this one. In other words, just as the various stories of election alert us to the contingency of life--it needn't have been me, but it is,--so the story of Phalti alerts us to the contingency of stories, even stories which, like this one, start with the creation of the world.

But even that is not quite right. It makes contingency sound too much like relativity. Relativity is rather a safe concept, at least in the abstract. It says that there are other ways of seeing things than ours, other worlds than ours. But we can easily accept this and yet remain locked up in our world, merely imagining other worlds like ours, only, somehow, different. Contingency, however, is radical. To experience it is to experience the frailty of life and also its wonder: this, now, and not something else. Contingency decentres one, and the Phalti episode shows how the Bible is a radically decentred book: it seems to go in a straight line from Adam to David to exile to return, but every now and again it opens a window onto another landscape, even if, as here, only for a moment. We are thus made to feel that we are not, as Joseph imagines himself to be, the centre of the universe, but only a tiny part of it.

(Incidentally, I'm not sure yet how directly I'll approach the issues raised here in the post I'm working on, which is an attempt to apply the methods discussed in my last post to Cordwainer Smith, but it does occur to me that Josipovici's points are very useful when approaching Smith's infinitely peculiar stories.)

Coincidentally, About 5,175 Words

L. Timmel Duchamp recently linked to and discussed a post by Jonathan McCalmont entitled "Annoyed With The History Of Science Fiction." It is (as Duchamp says) a very useful rant inspired by yet another post, this one a naïve and frankly unnecessary reappraisal of Robert A. Heinlein by Gary Westfahl. McCalmont's subject is not so much Westfahl's arguments regarding Heinlein as the broader critical naïveté in the sf field which Westfahl's essay, to McCalmont, represents, and a call for a more sophisticated, "technical" sf criticism. The problem, he says, is that too much sf criticism relies on simplistic historical approaches and catalogs of plot synopses, resulting in a so-called criticism that is more an accumulation of half-baked, unsupported assertions and superficial natterings about personality and "influence" than any kind of attempt to come to terms with the texts at hand--and their relationships to the world. A better approach is emblematized for McCalmont--and me, and, it would appear, Duchamp--by Samuel R. Delany's famous essay "About 5,175 Words," which, McCalmont argues, issued a vital call for more that was, for all the attention the essay received and continues to receive, never particularly answered.

McCalmont's essay and Duchamp's brief but provocative response (in which she issues her own call for more analysis of sf's "special, particular aesthetics and sensibility," particularly as it is currently changing, and as relates to feminist sf) both contain a wealth of important material. I was immensely excited to see them, as much in them seemed to cut right to the heart of what I've been feeling about sf, but have only rarely seen discussed. Most exciting of all, for me, is that they have given me a point of entry to get into a discussion of all these issues, which until now I have been struggling to find. There is more going on here than I will be able to cover in a single post, no matter how long (and I do tend to go on), and so I hope to begin here a series of essays prompted by these posts (and perhaps, to a lesser extent, the original Westfahl essay that started the whole thing, as it in its own way brings up some very important points). Topics for future posts will hopefully include (probably some but not all of) the following: a discussion of "sense of wonder," which Duchamp understandably but I think wrongly dismisses in her post; an exploration of some aesthetic issues particular to feminist sf (a necessarily rudimentary exploration, given my apparently incurable dudeness and the still woeful state of my reading in this area); the continued, systematic marginalization of the voices of women and other marginalized people within the sf field; the stylistic and aesthetic features of sf by virtue of which it nevertheless possesses considerable value for these marginalized populations; my difficulties with contemporary sf; and a number of other aesthetic and social issues raised by these extraordinary posts; along with, I hope, many more such issues not raised in them but which I have been considering for some time now. For now, though, I would like to focus on a section of McCalmont's post which Duchamp also highlights, in order to enter into a discussion of the implications of methods of exposition in sf.

McCalmont objects to Westfahl's assertion of Heinlein's influence on the sf field for many reasons which need not concern us at the moment; but what he feels is particularly "frustrating" is that this influence is

not only taken for granted but assumed to be positive. For example, the received opinion is that Robert Heinlein pioneered a number of techniques that are now used widely within the field but when you attempt to ascertain what these techniques might have been you will struggle to find anything more involved than an airy assertion that Heinlein's fondness for sentences such as "the door irised open" marked a radical improvement over the field's historical reliance upon a form of lead-footed exposition now dismissively referred to as 'info-dumping'.

Terms like 'info-dumping' are the science fiction equivalent of the film critic's 'deep focus', 'long take' and 'dynamic editing'. However, while film critics are able to draw upon a rich technical lexicon, the few technical terms used by SF critics generally come bundled up with their own unexamined assumptions about how best to write science fiction. For example, the lionisation of show-don't-tell at the expense of the info-dump assumes that the aim of science fiction is to tell a story that is immersive in that it never causes the reader to break from the story and think about what they have just read.

My own critical interest in the style of sf arose originally from my attempts to understand, both as a reader and as a prospective writer, why it was that writing typically described, even by many of its devotees,* as "clunky" or even just "bad" could have such a profoundly moving impact on me; and McCalmont's comments regarding the infodump,** which to a certain extent mirror many of my own thoughts, are crucial to this enterprise.

*Among whom a common, and to me infuriating and nonsensical, formulation is "They're a terrible writer, but their ideas are great."
**I prefer to write it without the hyphen, which is probably an American thing; your mileage, as they say on the internet, may vary.

Before I go further, a word about terms. To begin with, McCalmont is entirely correct when he says that the term "infodump" comes laden with a lot of negative baggage; however, I see no reason why a hopefully more sophisticated critical language cannot rehabilitate it. It has the advantage of being nearly universally understood among sf readers (i.e., though most readers might assume reflexively that it is a "bad thing," they will all at least know what you mean when you say it), beyond which, frankly, I like it as a word, not least because it really does convey an essential aspect of the feeling one gets on actually encountering an infodump in a work of fiction. So I will use it throughout, in the understanding that it is to be taken as a value-neutral term: indicating only the technique of placing passages of straight exposition into a narrative, implying no assessment of the validity of this technique--beyond, of course, what I state explicitly. Next, though McCalmont uses the familiar phrase "show-don't-tell" (and I shudder, as I imagine he may have, merely typing it) to describe what those who oppose the infodump suggest should be used in its place, to me this is inadequate. Mostly this is because show-don't-tell is a technique typically advised not only for exposition but for "action" as well.* As we are speaking specifically of expositional techniques--and of expositional techniques unique to sf--a more particular term seems desirable to me, and an appealing one I've picked up from somewhere (I have a vague impression I might have first picked it up from Jo Walton) is "incluing": that is to say, the process of gradually "cluing the reader in," indeed by showing-not-telling, revealing information through action which the reader then pieces together as they read to form an evolving picture of the world of the story.** Thus, Heinlein's famous "The door dilated" is incluing, where if he had written something along the lines of "The door was constructed out of a number of separate panels, which by a mechanism were made to etc.," it would have been infodumping.

*Here I find I am running into a problem of terminology myself. To a large degree, every word in a piece of fiction is "exposition," in that it is these words that give us the information out of which we construct the story--and in discussion of non-sf fiction this sense of the word is often the most fruitful. But in this discussion, and in general all discussions of sf, with its highly particular expositional problems, it is useful to distinguish between narrative action--the "what is happening" of the story--and what I will here refer to as exposition, by which I mean the relation of information which we are meant to take as existing in the imaginary space outside of the story, but which is being brought into the story for the purpose (usually) of increasing our understanding of the events of the story. As I am about to discuss, the two goals can be achieved simultaneously, but even in these cases they are worth distinguishing as, to some extent, different goals. There are, I am aware, many problems and limitations in this model, but I think it will serve well enough as a starting point.
**Another advantage of the term "incluing" is that it avoids the tendentious and frankly nonsensical implication (which I am not, to be clear, imputing to McCalmont) that it is ever possible, in the medium of the pure written word, to "show" the reader anything rather than to tell them, and thus in itself contains, I hope, none of the naïve critical assumptions I am trying to avoid. Additionally, the word's formation is roughly parallel to that of infodump, which is nice.

There is, I think, to some extent a general understanding among readers, writers, and critics of sf that these are the two primary methods of exposition, and that the central importance of exposition in sf means that these techniques are themselves important. However, understanding and discussion of what the techniques actually are, and more importantly what they actually do, seems generally limited to matters of preference: incluing as "good writing," infodumping as "bad writing," for example, with little discussion of why this might be other than appeals to the supposed virtue, as McCalmont mentions, of a smoothly flowing narrative in which readers can lose themselves.

McCalmont clearly thinks that this is not in itself a virtue, and though all my sympathies are with him in this matter, I find that I cannot agree with his implication (whether it is what he intends or not) that the preference for incluing over infodumping merely needs to be reversed. I think that what is first needed is an examination of what these techniques do, what effect they have upon the experience of reading--and it is my belief that such an examination will reveal that, while the two techniques are indeed vastly different, the opposition between the two is illusory and, indeed, untenable; and that what is needed is not an argument over which is the more valid or useful or beautiful or "realistic" or whatever value-oriented adjective one wishes to apply, but rather an appreciation of the formal/structural issues involved in their deployment: that is, the reasons why a writer may choose here to inclue, here to infodump, and what impact these choices have on the reader.

In Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?, a work surprisingly applicable to the study of sf (and every bit as central to my own current understanding of it as the critical works of Delany and Russ), he says of Robert Pinget's Passacaille:

The narrative is both much slower and much faster than in a traditional novel. Like a piece of music by Birtwistle it spirals forward via repetitions which are never quite repetitions, until we find ourselves in possession of far more information than would have been the case in a conventional narrative or symphony... There is this insistent counterpoint to the detail... The narrative goes calmly on its odd way, as more and more elements are dropped in... [T]he book leaves one with the sense of having participated in the birth of narrative itself...

Our response to it...is likely to be precisely that which Malcolm Bowie posited [in Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult] of the reader of a Mallarmé poem: either to try to get 'with panic stricken rapidity' at 'what it means', or to abandon it for ever. 'The double effort required to allow Mallarmé's gaps their full disjunctive power', we recall Bowie saying, 'yet at the same time remain attentive to the multitude of invisible currents which pass back and forth between the separated segments, will strike many readers as inexcusably arduous and unrewarding.' Yet, he concludes, 'the view I shall propose is that time spent learning to read Mallarmé is amply repaid.' I would only add that Bowie is perhaps a little too defensive, or at least that reading Pinget, Simon or Robbe-Grillet is infinitely easier than reading Mallarmé, and that it is exhilarating rather than arduous. But then I imagine Bowie really believes this holds true for Mallarmé as well.

Now, the techniques of Pinget and of Mallarmé are, clearly, enormously different from those of most sf writers (and from one another), and where with the modernists Bowie is correct to speak of the perceived "arduous and unrewarding" nature of the works, and of the value of "time spent learning to read" them, in sf we might replace these phrases with, respectively, "clunky and simplistic" and "giving the writer the benefit of the doubt" (the latter of which in many ways amounts to the same thing). But for me, despite these immense differences in surface-level style and affect, there is a striking resonance between Josipovici's and Bowie's analysis here and the feeling I get from sf novels.

As so often happens, I find that I am having difficulty going on, because my thoughts on these matters shoot out in so many directions simultaneously; all I can do is ask that you try to bear with me as I attempt to put them into some kind of order.

For me, one of the things that fundamentally makes sf, sf, is that it goes out of its way to require more exposition than other literary modes. One cannot just "tell a story" in sf; one must also carefully and complicatedly establish the world in which that story "takes place" in order for the story to be in any way understandable. When you think about it, this is actually quite astonishing, especially considering that it is commonly agreed, or at least commonly asserted, that sf grew out of and to a certain extent remains "popular adventure fiction," in which the straightforward relation of incident, one would presume, should be paramount. But instead, sf by its very nature frustrates the reader's continual desire to "find out what happens next." Is it not truly remarkable that, from the very beginning (wherever one places this: with Gernsback and Amazing, with H.G. Wells or Jules Verne, with Mary Shelley, what have you), we find sf stories repeatedly stopping dead in their tracks while the narration lectures the reader on various matters of fact, real or imagined?

Looked at this way, we could perhaps say that a strength of the infodump is that it delays narrative. It encourages us to stop allowing ourselves to be swept away in fictional incident, to look up from the book and think about what we are doing by reading, what is being done to us, and to examine the difference between the fictional world we are building up in our minds and the world in which we live--in a way that a typical realistic novel never does (indeed, cannot afford to), but very similar to the way that modernist novels do. More, infodumps sometimes allow the stories that contain them to become boring for a time, and here it is perhaps useful to recall Susan Sontag's comment* that boredom can be a valid literary technique, analogous in some ways to the use of silence in music--which use can range from simple, but powerful, punctuation, as in "The Little Girl I Once Knew" by The Beach Boys, to a radical effort to recontextualize the everyday world outside of the artwork by allowing consideration of it to become part of the work, as in 4'33" and other compositions of John Cage.

*Which I unfortunately do not have to hand, but I believe that it is in the essay "On Style," collected in Against Interpretation.

In a way, the notion that the infodump is somehow a "primitive" technique which has been superseded by the more "sophisticated" inclue is reminiscent of the commonly held notion that the chorus of ancient Greek tragedy was a primitive device, and that the reduction of its importance in Euripides and its elimination entire by later playwrights was a progressive innovation to be admired as such, no more, no less. Both narratives rely on an assumption of teleological progress which treats the past as no more than some sort of a trial run for the present, which is parochially assumed to be both universally "better" and the only way that things could have "ended up." In the process, not only the techniques seen as belonging to the past but also those of the present are underestimated, treated not as the responses of artists to the pressures and needs of their worlds but rather as steps in some process of objective "improvement," as though, say, the chorus-free drama was in beta when Euripides wrote (or the infodump-free sf, perhaps under John W. Campbell?), and after the bugs were worked out it was ready for full release later on. In both cases, the actual experience of the audience of the time--past or present--not to mention that of the individual artist, is lost.

What, then, of the inclue? Well, just because I think the "evolution" away from the infodump is not something with which we should be pleased (and that its continued gleeful use by writers who ignore misguided advice should not be denigrated), it does not mean that the inclue is by some see-saw motion necessarily a "bad thing." I doubt that this is what McCalmont thinks, either, or at least not in any strong sense; however, there is a strong implication in his essay that the primary use of incluing is to create the kind of "immersive" narratives that he suggests should not be the goal of sf--as when, after mentioning Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Stanislaw Lem as examples of writers who "make frequent use of info-dumps as they believe that wading through densely written expositional text is an integral part of the science fiction experience," he goes on to suggest "that Lem's approach to info-dumping is so effective and idiosyncratic that it not only forms an integral part of his novels' literary affect, it also makes his work substantially more complex and interesting than anything written under the purview of show-don't-tell," or what I am referring to as incluing. His comments on infodumping and these author's uses of it are, as I have said, very important, and I agree wholeheartedly with them; where I differ is in the opposition McCalmont sets up between infodumping and incluing, and the notion that incluing is, or can only be, contributory to simplistic "immersion."

As McCalmont makes reference to both Heinlein's sentence "The door dilated" and the critical works of Delany, it will not be too much of a leap to go to Delany's remarks on this very sentence. In that same essay which McCalmont praises, "About 5,175 Words" (or, in the revised version that appears in the latest edition of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, from which I quote it, "About 5,750 Words"), Delany quotes Harlan Ellison on Heinlein's sentence--and for once, Ellison has something valuable to say:

...Heinlein has always managed to indicate the greater strangeness of a culture with the most casually dropped-in reference: the first time in a novel, I believe it was in Beyond This Horizon, that a character came through a door that...dilated. And no discussion. Just: "The door dilated." I read across it, and was two lines down before I realized what the image had been, what the words had called forth. A dilating door. It didn't open, it irised! Dear God, now I knew I was in a futuristic world...

(All italics and ellipses are present in Delany.)

Delany, bringing to bear his concept of sf's subjunctivity, comments that the sentence "is meaningless as naturalistic fiction...As SF--as an event that hasn't happened, yet still must be interpreted in terms of the physically explainable--it is quite as wondrous as Ellison feels it." Elsewhere, at "Shadows" 38, Delany has more to say about this sentence:

Science fiction is science fiction because various bits of technological discourse (real, speculative, or pseudo)--that is to say the "science"--are used to redeem various other sentences from the merely metaphorical, or even the meaningless, for denotative description/presentation of incident. Sometimes, as with the sentence "The door dilated," from Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon, the technological discourse that redeems it--in this case, discourse on the engineering of large-size iris apertures, and the sociological discourse on what such a technology would suggest about the entire culture--is not explicit in the text. Is it, then, implicit in the textus? All we can say for certain is that, embedded in the textus of anyone who can read the sentence properly, are those emblems by which they could recognize such discourse were it manifested to them in some explicit text.

There is much to explore here. A good starting point might be to examine the experience Ellison reports with Heinlein's sentence, which it seems to me safe to assume is fairly representative; I know I, at least, have had very similar experiences with similar sfnal sentences. The key here is that the experience Ellison describes is not one of immersion in the story--rather, it is one of being pulled, abruptly and quite startlingly, out of the story. Even more specifically, it is an experience of having been prepared for immersion, of perhaps expecting or even desiring immersion, to the point where the startling element goes unnoticed...until some process in the mind slower than reading forces one to stop, suddenly, to go back and consider what one has just read--and then to marvel.* At this point, the reader, aware (on whatever level) of the subjunctivity of the text at hand, must construct the various absent discourses to which Delany points in the quote from "Shadows"--otherwise, the sentence must necessarily remain meaningless.

*More on this aspect, I hope, in a future essay on sense of wonder.

A common aspect of naïve discussions of these techniques is the assertion that incluing is "more realistic" than infodumping.* Even putting aside the fact that sf, like modernism, is not a realist literature, and that therefore one would think realism would not even be a criterion for judgment,** this is at best a deeply questionable assertion. It is questionable because, and this tends to get overlooked, what incluing ends up doing is turning the quotidian into a mystery or a surprise. People for whom dilating doors are a part of everyday life would not have anything like Ellison's reaction; they would consider Heinlein's sentence every bit as ordinary as we would consider "The door opened." But for us it is startling; it pulls us for a moment out of the story to consider the differences between the fictional world and our own. More, it forces us to reevaluate every prior appearance of doors in the work, should there be any. At this point, I must admit that I have not read Beyond This Horizon (indeed, I have read very little Heinlein, and have not much cared for what I have read); but let us suppose that the sentence before the one under discussion is something like, "She walked to the door." Leaving aside for the moment any consideration of felicitous writing, I find it remarkable that in a case such as this the bizarre readjustment enforced by the definitively sfnal sentence casts its strangeness back onto the more mundane sentence before it, forcing us to retroactively change our apprehension of that prior sentence.

*This is particularly, but not exclusively, the case when the infodumping takes place in dialogue, specifically in the form often referred to as the "As You Know, Bob" dialogue. This specific form is another topic I hope to discuss at length in the future.
**Admittedly the issue of realism in sf is more complicated than I am allowing here, especially as regards scientific verisimilitude; but that, sigh, is again a topic for some hypothetical future essay.

Another way to put this might be to say that where infodumping, as we have seen, delays narrative (what "happens"), incluing delays knowledge (what "is"). In this connection, we should perhaps keep in mind Josipovici's comments on Pinget. Once again:

The narrative is both much slower and much faster than in a traditional novel... [I]t spirals forward via repetitions which are never quite repetitions, until we find ourselves in possession of far more information than would have been the case in a conventional narrative... The narrative goes calmly on its odd way, as more and more elements are dropped in... [T]he book leaves one with the sense of having participated in the birth of narrative itself...

It would perhaps be taking Josipovici too literally if I were to point in triumph to the word "information" here; and yet I cannot help but feel that, though the methods under examination are radically different, Josipovici's words can apply equally to the best sf novels. The reference to "repetition," too, puts me in mind of Delany's assertion at "Shadows" 37, that "Everything in a science fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts)." Delany leaves this deliberately unexplored, and I will for the moment follow his lead; but I wonder if I am entirely off-base in thinking that this analysis of expositional technique, with the assistance of Josipovici's comments, has taken us quite close to what he means.

Though I do not agree with it, I think I can understand the source of the confusion that leads people to praise incluing as realistic, and others like McCalmont to denigrate it for the same reason. This is because formally, if one leaves aside the transformations wrought upon a text by its being sf, the inclue is very similar to the "telling detail" which is so central to the practice of so-called realist fiction. Josipovici is of much assistance in understanding why readers like McCalmont and myself might be skeptical of the telling detail. Again in What Ever Happened to Modernism?:

The notion that the new reality inhering in novels depends on their attention to detail fails to distinguish between 'reality' and what theoreticians call 'the reality-effect'. In fact [Adam] Thirlwell [whose criticism Josipovici has been discussing as representative of this failure] uses the two terms indiscriminately. But putting a faint scar on a face or alerting us to the fact that the carpet is turned up in the corner, like describing the smell of sweat and semen during the act of sex, no more anchors the novel to 'reality' than writing about stars in the eyes of the beloved. The novel is still made up of words, is still the product of a solitary individual, inventing scars, carpets, smells or stars. Of course we warm to a novelist who surprises us with his attention to detail... Too often though...detail seems to be there as a way of convincing us (and the authors themselves?) that what we are dealing with is the stuff of life.

There is much more in Josipovici's subsequent comments on the telling detail that is extremely relevant to sf, but once more I will have to leave it for another time.* What concerns me now is, as I have said, the superficial similarity between realism's "telling detail" and sf's inclue, which I think has led many commentators astray. But when Heinlein says "The door dilated,"** we are not meant to think that we are faced with reality; rather, we are meant to realize how unlike reality the world of the book is.

*I find myself wishing that everyone had read Josipovici's book, and, more improbable, understood it better than the majority of its professional reviewers, so that I would not feel that I was doing its vitally important arguments a massive disservice by leaving them--for now--largely unmentioned. For the interested who perhaps do not have the time right now to read the whole book (though it isn't all that long!), I recommend Stephen Mitchelmore's review, which admirably summarizes and meditates on the central themes of the book, and blog friend Richard's post reviewing the book and connecting some of the points it raises with more directly political issues gleaned from another essential thinker whose name ends in -ici, the feminist historian and organizer Silvia Federici. Another post of Richard's is relevant in exploring some of the reasons all this "matters."
**And I hope it is clear that I keep returning to this example only out of convenience, for the reason that it is discussed both in McCalmont's essay and in the Delany essays, not because I think it is the last word in masterful incluing. I could just as well be speaking of, say, Delany's casual mentions of the crumpling coffee bulbs in Trouble on Triton, or any number of other examples.

In "Speculations: The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction," which begins as a response to "About 5,175 Words," Joanna Russ speaks characteristically perceptively of the peculiar relationship of reality to sf:

In science fiction the relation between the "secondary universe" of fiction and the actual universe is both implicit and intermittently more or less perceivable. It consists not of what is on the page but in the relation between that and the reader’s knowledge of actuality. It is always shifting.

One does not suspend one’s disbelief in reading science fiction --the suspension of disbelief (complex to begin with, as it is with satire) fluctuates constantly. That is, the relation with actuality--what Delany would call the subjunctivity of the story -–fluctuates constantly.

(I posted a longer excerpt, including this portion, here, and if you have your doubts about her conclusions here, I refer you to the rest.)

The method by which this fluctuation is achieved is precisely the interplay of infodumping and incluing. At times we find that the narrative has been delayed, that the book is reminding us that we are living long before the story it describes takes place (or in a different universe, or what have you), and we perhaps struggle to stay interested, or on the other hand become differently engrossed, in what is suddenly no longer narrative; at other times we find that our knowledge has been delayed, that the book behaves as though we are living in the future (or in the other universe, etc.) with the characters, and we struggle to keep our knowledge at a level which will allow us to function in this unfamiliar world.

All fiction lies. For Josipovici and those of us who take seriously the issues he discusses, fiction must be, and must make the reader, aware of the lie in order to have any chance at approaching anything like truth. To speak overly programmatically and risk eliding the experiences of and differences between individual writers in the interest of brevity (hah!), modernism does this by acknowledging the lie, admitting to it, in any number of ways; sf does it by lying so simultaneously audaciously and rigorously that the lie cannot be ignored, by lying in so complex a way that our awareness of the lie fluctuates, as Russ says, constantly (note too that these methods which I am ascribing separately to modernism and to sf are not mutually exclusive). Whether this works in anything approaching a majority of sf texts is debatable at best, as is the question of whether the average sf author is aware of or cares about any of these issues. But nevertheless it is there--latent, perhaps, but there--in all works of sf; and in the best it is tremendously powerful.