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.

Simak's "Answers"

When I picked up Clifford D. Simak's short story collection Strangers in the Universe to continue reading where I had left off, turned the page, and discovered that the next story was called "The Answers", a shiver ran through me. (I'm not being dramatic, it really did.) It is difficult to imagine anything more exciting lying unread ahead of one than a story called "The Answers" written by Simak—author of such beautiful enigmas as A Choice of Gods and The Visitors and the agonized, hilarious masterwork City. A title like this from him, you can tell, would come in quotation marks even if that weren't the convention for short story titles. "The Answers", he calls it. With many writers we would expect something tiresomely triumphant to follow such a title. With Simak, though triumph of some sort is not entirely out of the question, we feel certain that it will be much more complicated than that, that the very notion of "answers" will be thrown into, if you will, "question."

Even in the first sentences we are already shifting disconcertingly between certainty and uncertainty, groundedness and the lack of it. (In a typically playful Simakian move, this last is both figurative and quite literal.) Unlikely as it may sound, the opening sentences put me in mind of no one so much as Heidegger, both in what they're saying and how they say it:

They knew it when they stepped out of the ship and saw it. There was, of course, no way that they could have known it, or have been sure they knew it, for there was no way to know what one might be looking for. Yet they did know what it was, and three of them stood and looked at it and the fourth one floated and looked at it.

The location of this knowledge is uncertain: "each of them, in his brain or heart or intuition, whatever you may name it, knew...". The subject of their knowledge—the home, which they have just stumbled upon, of a quasi-legendary "fragment" of humanity that millennia ago separated themselves off "to make their way into the darkness of the outer galaxy"—is itself uncertain, for whether this separation actually occurred (and if so why it did) has been, we learn, a matter for contestation for a thousand centuries (for this story works with that delightfully absurd time scale that was once common in science fiction). And even the mode of this contestation, in Simak's witty description, seems uncertain, self-contradictory, even if only for humorous effect—for, we are told, "the matter had become an academic question that had split into several cults of erudite belief and still was fiercely debated in a very learned manner."

That's the first paragraph. It continues; in the second paragraph we read, of the sight that the four stand (or float) and look at: "It was a place. One hesitated to call it a city, though it was probably a city." Just a moment later, "one knew that he had been wrong in thinking this a city" (hesitant though the thought was!) "—that this was no city, but an extensive village, with all the connotations that were in the word." "There was a greatness about the place," but not in any of the terms in which we are accustomed to thinking of greatness; indeed, we are told that it is "the greatness of humility," which to the story's first readers, if not necessarily to us (who after all pride ourselves on our sophistication, and at any rate have benefited from the intervention of Le Guin's taoism, among other things), must have sounded very much like another self-negating phrase.

I could keep going—the story certainly does—but perhaps that is enough. The point is that in these passages, Simak begins to blend many of his characteristic concerns: uncertainty and inconclusiveness; the simultaneously beautiful and melancholy decentering of the human perspective, without losing sight of the human; the valorization of the pastoral (for the humility and essential "villageness" of the non-city arise from its oneness with the landscape, its "blend[ing] with the trees and grass of the hills on which [it] stood"; significantly, in addition to humility it gives a sense of "the greatness, too, of a well-ordered life"). He does this in such a way as to lead us to see the essential unity of these concerns: his keeping us alive to mutually contradictory possibilities, we sense, is one with his emphasis on the inadequacies of positivist humanism, and both are one with his insistence on the value of living "a well-ordered life" close to—for lack of a better word—nature. And if all this uncertainty seems incompatible with an ordered life, and if all this pastoralism seems inconsistent with space travel and "high technology," well, he told us we were on shifting ground from the very beginning, didn't he? For nothing in Simak is absolute (even his pastoralism is often terribly ambivalent); and there is a question in every statement, a defeat in every victory, a sadness in every moment of happiness.

All of this worries academic critics, who stay away from Simak in droves. I've seen one critical "discussion" of his work: M. Keith Booker, in his thoroughly wretched book Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964, brings up Simak's name briefly only immediately to dismiss him as "muddled." For though Booker (mostly correctly) suspects Simak of being anticapitalist, he can detect in him no doctrinaire Marxism; Simak is therefore ipso facto muddled, QED, see you later. (One wonders what these critics would think of Marx, were they ever accidentally to read him.)

But this post is to be an appreciation, not an argument or even really an analysis, so let us leave the execrable Booker behind with these last words: no doubt Simak wrote more than, in some senses, he should have (always the curse of sf writers, particularly those of his era), which has caused the waters to be muddied with a number of works below his highest level of achievement. But he is anything but "muddled," anything but dismissible or ignorable.

For me Simak is one of the greats (perhaps in the same sense that this story's village is "great"?), one of the world's most important writers. Does anyone but me still think of him this way? Once, I know, he was greatly beloved of sf readers (a fact which, admittedly, is every bit as perplexing as his being ignored by critics is telling), but it seems to me that today he has been largely forgotten (which, if true, is again telling). Am I wrong? I would love to be wrong; if I am, please tell me so.

This post arose out of an overwhelming excitement that began vibrating through me as soon as—indeed, even before—I started reading "The Answers", an overwhelming urge to tell someone, anyone, everyone how wonderful, how wondrous, this work is. Read this, I want to shout. Everyone, read this. I want to press the book, falling apart though my copy is, into everyone's hands. I want to point out the poetry, the awe, the wonder, the humor, the terrible sadness, to make sure that no one misses a bit of it.

I want to point out this early passage, which in its onrushing sentences, in its layered reported speech, in its setting up of opposing views neither of which we can find it in ourselves to endorse, in its bitter comedy, reminds me powerfully of Thomas Bernhard. Though of course it is still no one but Simak:

There were those, too, who had said that it mattered little whether you found the missing fragment or not, since little that was of any value would come from a race so insignificant as the human race. What were the humans? they would ask you and would answer before you had a chance to speak. Gadgeteers, they said, gadgeteers who were singularly unstable. Great on gadgets, they would say, but with very little real intelligence. It was, they would point out, only by the slightest margin of intelligence that they were ever accepted into the galactic brotherhood. And, these detractors would remind you, they had not improved much since. Still marvelous gadgeteers, of course, but strictly third-rate citizens who now quite rightly had been relegated to the backwash of the empire.

There is no analyzing the humor of a passage such as this, only pointing at it. "Gadgeteers," funnier with each repetition! And "Great on gadgets, they would say"! "Strictly third-rate"! I can only hope that you laugh as much as I do, and then ponder as much as well.

I want to point out too the peculiar tone Simak is able to create in the best of his works, particularly in the dialogue; a tone somehow reminiscent simultaneously of fable and of epic (in the classical sense), but full always of a melancholy foreign to both of those forms. If you will forgive me further blockquoting:

       "I am staying," the Human said. "I am just a Human and you can get along without me."
       "I thought you would be staying," said the Dog. "Do you want me to go back and get your stuff?"
       "If you would be so kind," the Human said. "I'd not like to go back myself."
       "The Globe will be angry," said the Dog.
       "I know it."
       "You will be demoted," said the Dog. "It will be a long time before you're allowed to go on a first class run again."
       "I know all that."
       "The Spider will say that all humans are crazy. He will say it in a very nasty way."
       "I don't care," the Human said. "Somehow, I don't care."
       "All right, then," said the Dog. "I will go and get your stuff. There are some books and your clothes and that little trunk of yours."
       "And some food," the Human said.
       "Yes," declared the Dog. "I would not have forgotten food."
       After the ship was gone the Human picked up the bundles the Dog had brought, and, in addition to all the Human's food, the Human saw that the Dog had left him some of his own as well.

No doubt some of the air of fable comes superficially just from "the Human" and (especially) "the Dog", but that is certainly not the extent of it, and as I said before fable is not the only referent here. Look at the rhythms of this passage, the two-sentence utterances at the beginning of it, for instance, and the way they give way to shorter ones for a moment before returning in altered form. The way it is always "the Human said" but "said the Dog" (except for the one carefully deployed, identically structured "declared the Dog," somehow so very revealing of the Dog's ancestral affection towards the Human), which is not a programmatic distinction used throughout the whole story; elsewhere we see both "said the Human" and "the Dog said." Look at how very non-naturalistic this dialogue is, even more so than in sf in general; it is more like a call-and-response, more like a ritual perhaps, than it is like a conversation—even though the events in question are new as can be. The comparison with John Jones's comments on Aeschylean and Sophoclean dialogue that I have made in the past (and hope to make in more detail in the future) is very relevant here. And perhaps it is tragedy more than, or at least as much as, fable or epic that is at work here, particularly in the sense we get that the actions of the Human arise not out of some internal "character" so much as out of his Humanness,* and the actions of the Dog too out of his Dogness, and those of the Spider and the Globe out of their Simak-defined, alien Spiderness and Globeness, much as Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, say, do what they do not because of who they are, in our modern sense, but because of what they are.** And yet still there is that pervasive melancholy, impossible to define, every bit as foreign to tragedy as it is to fable and epic.

*Later on, more than halfway through the story, it comes as something of a shock when the Human gives his name.
**Note how very different this is from making the characters "symbolize." Agamemnon does not symbolize kingness, he is a king, and acts as one; the Human does not symbolize Humanness, he is a Human, and acts as one.

And indeed for all this "The Answers" is not tragedy or epic or fable; it is science fiction. And being science fiction, it is able to concretize ambiguity without, necessarily, immediately, losing ambiguity. And so it introduces "the Truth." Our Human (who now has a name, being as he is among other humans for the first time in the story), is asked why he stayed behind when the Dog, the Spider, and the Globe left the planet to return to an outer space occupied by a great, inhuman empire. The suggestion is made:

       "You thought there would be things to find. Great secrets to be learned."
       "I stayed," said David, "because I had to stay."
       "But the secrets? The glory and the power?"
       David shook his head. "I don't think I thought of that. Not of power and glory. But there must be something else. You sense it walking in the village and looking at the homes. You sense a certain truth."
       "Truth," the old lady said. "Yes, we found the Truth."
       And the way she said Truth it was capitalized.
       He looked quickly at her and she sensed the unspoken, unguarded question that flicked across his mind.
       "No," she told him, "not religion. Just Truth. The plain and simple Truth."
       He almost believed her, for there was a quiet conviction in the way she said it, a deep and solid surety.
       "The truth of what?" he asked.
       "Why, Truth," the old lady said. "Just Truth."

Of course, there is no authority outside or even inside the story that can tell us if the word has really earned its capital letter.* We are back in the realm of uncertain knowledge we entered in the story's opening sentences. But just as their knowledge was good enough for the Human, the Dog, the Spider, and the Globe then, theirs is good enough now for the people on this planet, and ("spoilers", as they say) David's ends up being good enough, in its way, for him. And the tone of fable, of epic, of tragedy that I discussed above combines with sf's literalism to give that capital a great deal of weight, perhaps as much as is possible in modern writing. Leaving the question of whether we can believe in Truth aside, the rest of the story, by behaving as though we can, becomes an examination of what it would mean to be able to believe in such a thing, what it would mean for such a thing to exist.

*As an aside, note the pun in the word's first appearance, before it gains its capital: "You sense a certain truth," David says, before he realizes that these people have, or consider themselves to have, a certain Truth.

The entrance of Truth on the eleventh page of fifteen in a story so uncertain as this, even though we have been somewhat prepared by the title, is more jarring even than the sudden naming of the Human had been, and for much the same reason: Truth, like the individuality that seems to inhere in a name (even one as nondescript as David Grahame), is a concept that had seemed absolutely alien to the world of this story. But it is by, or through, or in these shocks, these contradictions, this constant shifting of the groundless ground on which the story rests, that the story lives.

Nothing, of course, is perfect; the end of "The Answers" resolves the story's ambiguities into a mere proposition, something that at last asks the reader simply to agree or disagree—complex, hesitant, and ambivalent as such agreement or disagreement may in any case be (as it is in mine). But if the story falters here at the end, succumbs at last to the tempting patness it had heretofore resisted, this in no way invalidates what came before—rather it means that the inevitable failure of the crucial but ultimately impossible endeavor Simak has set for himself is in this specific case a bit more spectacular than we might wish. Such things happen in any enterprise worth undertaking, and the failures are every bit as important as their supposed opposite.

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This appreciation has left much in the story untouched, as anything written about a story that is not a straight reproduction of the story must. I have not mentioned the books that "went to dust as soon as they were touched," leaving one only to "wonder at the magic words they had held," or the other signs of the lost and literally untouchable promise of wisdom the past seems to hold out. I have not mentioned the lovely descriptions of the old woman, with the "restful beauty of the very old," and the old man, whose face shows a calmness that is "incomplete because it was not so deep and settled" as compared with the old woman's, and so "could not as yet know the full comfort of old age." I have not mentioned the impact of Simak's careful, economical worldbuilding in the beginning of the story—the Dogs, the Globes, the Spiders, the empire, the thousands of centuries—nor have I mentioned the even more amazing impact that the story's quickly leaving all this behind has. And though I have mentioned the problems with the story's ending, I have not mentioned the marvelous, vital things it does that it would not be able to do were it not for those problems. But let us leave it at that; we have to stop somewhere.

Reading this story was a marvelous antidote to the disillusionment I've been feeling with sf. It is possible. What I love about sf does not exist solely in my mind. There are works of sf to stand with the greatest works of other literatures. To me, the question facing the contemporary sf writer should be: using "like" as broadly as possible, am I to write like Simak? Is such a thing still possible? If not, why not? And how, then, am I to write in the awareness of this impossibility?

Explication and the inexplicable

In his fascinating review of M. John Harrison's Empty Space: A Haunting, Matthew Cheney writes:

At its core, science fiction is a genre of belief and SF writers specialize in producing belief in readers (or, as is more commonly said, they provoke the reader's "willing suspension of disbelief"). Thus, SF is the style of writing most shackled to notions of verisimilitude, most needing the reality effect. Hence the peculiar power of objects in science fiction: things metonymically create worlds in the reader's mind. Any world (no matter how specific, no matter how narrow) is never the sum of its words, and so by imagining worlds through words, traditional SF is an anamorphic format, framing future histories through the light of present language, hoping to project a wide image across the reader's brain screen.

But science fiction that seeks to elaborate worlds through words will always fall short. This is the failure inherent in the promise of SF, the fact that skewers the ideal.

He goes on from there, writing about uncertainty and inexplicability, and is extremely interesting.

This is very much the territory that I try to explore, fitfully, on this blog; Cheney's words have lit up my brain with excitedly conflicting reactions ranging among "Yes I agree wholeheartedly!" and "No I disagree vehemently!" and "Isn't that a bit beside the point?" (and beyond...). I know, however, that I'm not going to have the ambition or energy to explore these thoughts fully, at least not here, at least not for a while, so for now: this note.

Where I disagree, I think (and I mean that "I think" to carry as full a weight of meaning as the phrase can), is that I find sf's relationship to the reality effect, to verisimilitude, more complex than Cheney allows. For me much of the best sf explores precisely the failure he identifies: it dwells in it. He suggests a sort of alternate "lineage" of sf in which to place Harrison, a lineage including Stapledon, Lem, and Tiptree, among others; all are vital, but for me the lineage Cheney places them in opposition to (or perhaps tangential to), the Campbellian tradition for lack of a better word, often explores much the same territory, if not always as radically.

Or perhaps not "much the same"--but related. Something I've been struggling for some time now to write about is my feeling that the central tension in most of the best sf is that between explication--its pleasures, its successes, its linguistic forms--and the inexplicable, those infinite places where explication can do nothing but fail. Emblematic for me in this sense is Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, where the intricate and joyous cataloging of artifacts, the endless explication of the effects of acceleration and distance, finally fail in the face of ultimate unknowability. Rama, contra Gentry Lee, is essentially inexplicable, and in the face of this inexplicability Clarke's novel sputters into silence.

And this is what is at stake when Clifford D. Simak writes, in "Paradise" (the fifth tale in City, an agonizingly self-questioning work), "Fowler had written in his report: I cannot give a factual account because there are no words for the facts I want to tell." It is what is at stake when Van Vogt's supermen, far from the "power fantasy" they're usually dismissed as, spend entire novels being confused and overwhelmed; and it is what is at stake when mere paragraphs in to The Weapon Shops of Isher the character who is our point of entree--who we shortly leave behind almost forever--feels "a sense of being balanced on a tight rope over a bottomless abyss." Even Campbell himself, in the stories he wrote as Don A. Stuart, tried to explore this territory, though he was it seems constitutionally incapable of realizing what he was doing. (And though, sadly, it's probably a stretch to consider her a part of the main line of sf, I can't resist bringing up Joanna Russ, whose narrator in We Who Are About To... says that "A scientist might be able to make up theories about this cave, but I can only look at it.")

The best of the main line of sf, then, I find deals precisely with these questions of when explication is appropriate, and when it is not; what it might mean to apply the forms of explication to the inexplicable; and what it means, what happens, when explication fails, or simply does not apply. (It is, incidentally, in this area that I consider the so-called "sense of wonder," which I still consider central to the sfnal experience, to lie--another thing I've been struggling to write about.)

I've got nowhere to go with this, and I hope none of it comes across as forceful assertion or anything of the like. All of this requires considerable investigation, or at least I think it does (and I'm the one writing about it, so hey). Consider this, perhaps, notes towards a real essay, one which most likely will never be written.