An incapacity to stop seeing what is not there to be seen

Ann Smock writes, in the introduction to her translation of Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature:

          The Anglo-American critical tradition might be said to elucidate, and thus to honor, the actual object which writers offer us. We take the work to be what artists make in the course of a labor, a struggle perhaps, to which they alone are equal; or perhaps they bring it back to us from the depths to which they alone descend. Attentive to masterful technique and perfected form, we seek to comprehend the profound achievement of the blackest text by Kafka, say. We try to do justice to its strong and genuine character, even if we acknowledge shifty ambiguity to be the necessary vehicle of this authenticity, or recognize playfulness as the special grace of this rigorous perfection, or understand that misery is what this treasure holds. But the Kafka that concerns Blanchot is the nameless young man who cannot seem to write at all. He is reduced to lamentable games. The author of The Metamorphosis had to suppress and surpass him. The profundity of The Metamorphosis is, for Blanchot, the infinite depths of uncertainty and futility which its perfection masks—which the work shows only by masking—but which we seem actually to see laid bare sometimes when the masterpiece, like Eurydice when Orpheus looks back, disappears.
          To see something disappear: again, this is an experience which cannot actually start. Nor, therefore, can it ever come to an end. Such, Blanchot insists, is the literary experience: an ordeal in which what we are able to do (for example, see), becomes our powerlessness; becomes, for instance, that terribly strange form of blindness which is the phantom, or the image, of the clear gaze—an incapacity to stop seeing what is not there to be seen.

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.

On Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

[Note: it takes me a while, but eventually I do discuss the book itself, I promise. Also there will be spoilers, etc. Oh, and since I'm disclaiming, I know that I get very repetitive at times with certain words. There seemed no way around it.]

My ambivalence towards Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves began with the title. It's probably unfair, but I have an automatic aversion to titles like these: clever appropriations of common expressions or phrases revealing, merely by their placement as title, hitherto, I guess, unimagined depths of potential meaning—Raymond Carver-tested, MFA workshop-approved kinds of titles. Such a title creates a particular expectation that the very tastefully clever jacket design reinforces, as does everything from the careful selection of blurbers to the tastefully enraptured jacket flap copy to the author bio that notes that all five of her previous novels have been New York Times Notable Books to, once we actually open up the book, the quietly confident typeface in which the novel is printed.

I bring all this up not out of pettiness (I hope) but for two reasons, both related to the fact that, though there is much that is wonderful in this novel, there is also much about which I have deep reservations. The first reason is that I suspect that this split in my reaction arises out of the duel between what seems to me to be, on the one hand, a desire on Fowler's part to live in and be accepted by the tastefully clever world projected by this title, this jacket, these blurbers, and on the other, an equally strong urge in her to fight against this world, to lay bare all that it covers up, excludes, looks down upon, misses. The second reason is that to some extent I'm not certain how much of my reservation is merely a hallucination brought on by all these accoutrements. Do I really have a problem with the book, or merely with—for example—the font? If I am to be honest, this type of question is often much harder for me to answer than I'd like; what follows is my attempt to figure it out.

L. Timmel Duchamp notes that, whether or not we feel that this novel is "science fiction," whatever that means, it is absolutely in dialogue with, part of the conversation created by, the tradition of feminist science fiction. She is of course absolutely right; the links between this novel and, for example, "Rachel in Love" by Pat Murphy (who Fowler thanks in her acknowledgments) or Fowler's own earlier "What I Didn't See" (and from there to Tiptree's "The Women Men Don't See") are merely the most obvious, and familiarity with these works (and no doubt with countless others I am not familiar with) enriches the experience of Fowler's novel immensely.* But I think it important too to note that this novel, both in its presentation-as-marketable-object and in itself as a work, positions itself in a very different social space. According to the flap copy, Fowler's "progenitors could be said to be" not Murphy or Tiptree but "England's Angela Carter and Russia's Nikolai Gogol—writers who made old tales new again and who fearlessly incorporated demons and devils, madmen and holy fools, into their subversive fictions."

*I will not be talking much directly about the feminism of this novel in this essay, which should not be taken as meaning that the feminism is not there, or that it is not important; rather that a) others can write and have written about it much better than I, and b) I am here concerned primarily with my reservations about the novel, most of which are not located in the feminism per se.

I don't say they're wrong (I haven't yet read either Carter or Gogol, so really I wouldn't know), and I bring this up not to make some kind of genre-snot point, some kind of "if it's good it isn't sf" sarcasm. But I think the anonymous Marion Wood G. P. Putnam's Sons Random Penguin employee's decision to name these two writers out of all the others who "could be said to be" Fowler's "progenitors" is not without significance—nor is their decision to identify the countries of origin, simultaneously harking back oddly to a past era of artistic nationalism that seems a bit irresponsible to invoke now and attempting to establish an international pedigree for this very specifically American novel.* We are being encouraged to read Fowler in one context rather than another, and the problem is not that the one context is "better" than the other, or "more right," but that the action of the rather than is to restrict, diminish, domesticate. We are told by the authorities at Marion Wood G. P. Putnam's Sons Random Penguin that Carter and Gogol's "fictions"—and by extension Fowler's as well—are "subversive." But if this is the case, what could they be subverting but precisely (if metonymously) the authority and authoritativeness of Random Penguin itself?** I spot a problem.

*I may seem to be contradicting myself here but I don't think I am.
**I am also uncertain what is "fearless" about incorporating demons and devils etc. into fiction, and even more uncertain why such incorporation is relevant to the novel at hand, which does no such thing.

I would consider all of this merely unfortunate advertising, akin to the tv ads that made Eyes Wide Shut out to be some kind of sexy romp, did the novel itself not seem to wish so much to occupy precisely the position being carved out for it—despite its ambitions to deal with issues simply inaccessible from that position. It is these ambitions that make the novel very much worth our attention despite its problems; looked at another way, it is these ambitions that make it necessary to talk about the problems.

The novel takes the form of the reminiscences of Rosemary Cooke, our first-person narrator. From the very beginning we sense that she will be different from most such: things seem a little more out of her grasp, and she has none of the confidence of most first person narrators. The first page sees her referring to a home movie for evidence of what she was like as a child, rather than simply asserting that she was that way, and with no mention of whether she herself remembers being like the child portrayed in the movie. And as things go on, her uncertainty becomes more and more explicit, indeed becomes more and more one of the central issues in the novel. For this narrator asks herself—and us—questions that most first person narrators cannot afford to ask and avoid at all costs. These are very specifically writers' questions. They do not, of course, always come literally in the form of questions, but this passage in which they do might suffice to give some idea of what I'm talking about:

Still, there are reasons for suspicion. I was only five. How is it possible that I remember, as I seem to, a handful of conversations word for word, the exact song on the radio, the particular clothes I was wearing? Why are there so many scenes I remember from impossible vantage points, so many things I picture from above, as if I'd climbed the curtains and was looking down on my family?

These questions do not come up in most novels, in which the narrator simply tells us: I said, she said, I did, she did, with a certainty that is quite alien to the way we actually live and remember our lives. For memory is not certain, nor is it always accessible. It comes at us in vague flashes, conflicting and contradictory, unreliable, unverifiable, easily altered. And the novel deals very heavily too in two particular ways in which memory can be distorted: first from too much reinforcement (at one point Rosemary repeats for us a story she has told so often that "I honestly don't know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it"), and second from no reinforcement at all in the face of repression, family silence, and denial ("So who knows what revelries, what romps my memories have taken with so little corroboration to restrain them?"). The book, then, is about elusiveness. And not just the elusiveness of memory, but also of language, of storytelling and of our reasons for engaging in it, of self, of other, of humanity—all of these elusivenesses, of course, being linked. In talking about elusiveness it is often wonderful—but there is a problem here: for though it is about elusiveness, the book itself is not elusive. It is often evasive, which is interesting in itself, but is not the same thing (more on this later). Let us take, for example, a passage about language. In what follows Russell is an older boy who had helped Rosemary's older brother break into the Cooke family's former home, and Fern is (we'll just say for now) the third Cooke sibling, who has been taken away from the family—a fact which the child Rosemary both knows and yet cannot quite comprehend.

          A few days later, the cops busted Russell. Grandma Donna told me that he'd thrown a Halloween party at the farmhouse. Every window in the place had been broken, she said, and an underage girl had spent a night in the hospital.
          Language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it. Here is what I heard: that maybe Fern had reached, like a poltergeist, across time and space and destroyed the home in which we'd all lived. A few broken windows might have signified a party to me. Fern and I had thrown a croquet ball through one once and had good fun doing it in spite of what came after. But every window in the place? That didn't sound larkish. That had the precision and persistence of fury.
          Here's what Grandma Donna thought she was telling me: that I was not too young to understand the dangers of mixing alcohol and drugs. That she just hoped she'd never live to see the day I had to have my stomach pumped. That such a thing would break our mother's broken heart.

And so a chapter ends. Some of this, particularly in the second paragraph, is very fine. The line about language being "such an imprecise vehicle" is marvelous, and Rosemary's reconstruction of her childhood thought processes is evocative and, in its literalism and logic, devastatingly recognizable. But even in the first two paragraphs something feels off for me, something feels a little too straightforward, too easy—something reinforced by the wholly inappropriate third paragraph, in which we are given "what Grandma Donna thought she was telling me." Oh really? How does Rosemary know? For that matter, how does Fowler know? To be sure, we are free to think about and wonder why Rosemary thinks she knows this, and may even be encouraged to do so by what comes before it. But nothing in the novel requires us to do it, and her exegesis of what-Grandma-Donna-really-meant "seems right" to such an extent that it even runs counter to such questioning. This apparently self-evident correctness, presented with such quiet authority (strengthened by both the high emotional tone and the immediate chapter break), discourages us from asking of the novel the very questions Rosemary insists upon asking.

Much the same happens with memory. A few pages after the just-quoted passage, we read: "When I was about eight, I recovered what seemed to be a memory." This is interesting. The verb, "recovered," tells us that despite her equivocal "seemed to be" Rosemary on some fundamental level feels this as memory. And regardless of whether this recovered seeming memory is of something that "really happened" or not, we have entered in this sentence into the peculiar realm of recalling recollection; the adult Rosemary is remembering the experience of, long ago, remembering something that happened (or perhaps did not) longer ago still. "It came one piece at a time, like a puzzle I had to fit together." But again something seems amiss; in that blandly narratorial "When I was about eight" introducing a simple, past-tense, declarative statement, we have no sense of the recursiveness of remembering a memory; surely, we feel, the adult Rosemary's recollection of herself at eight should be, perhaps not as elusive as that child's memory of her earlier childhood, but more elusive than this? But in what follows the work of fitting the puzzle together has been done already, and instead of a memory of a memory of something that may not have happened, we get an anecdote. "We were on a narrow country road.... My father stopped for a cat...." To be sure, a phrase here and there periodically informs us that we are in memory rather than event ("I remembered my shock"), but though the memory of eight-year-old Rosemary is in question, the memory of adult Rosemary is not. That verb, "remembered," is always in the indicative.

We are thus again, as with the passage above about language, given Rosemary's uncertainty, rather than living through it with her—in much the same way that we are given the then-this-happened-and-then-this-happened of any ordinary novel.

I said before that the novel, though it is not elusive, is evasive. Normally I find evasiveness (as for example in its most egregious form, the "surprise ending") coy and annoying, feeling that what so much energy is being expended on evading is what should be the very substance of the work. But here things are different, as for Fowler the evasiveness itself is that substance, and here I find the book much more successful than in its dealings with elusiveness. Though at times there is a residual annoying coyness to the novel (though whether this residual resides primarily in the book or in me, I cannot say), on the whole Fowler transforms her evasions into something quite interesting.

Take for example the nature of Rosemary's sister, Fern. Throughout the first 70-odd pages, Rosemary talks about Fern as a sister no different from any other (except of course in the sense that she is one individual person, not any other), though hints creep in that something unusual is going on: references to places—a movie theater, say—that Fern cannot go, activities she cannot take part in; casual mentions of "the grad students" that were always around in their early childhood. These hints take almost the same form as those that lead up to a surprise ending (though perhaps a bit more obtrusive than those usually try to be), but fortunately Fowler has other, better concerns than merely surprising us.

Fern is a chimpanzee. Her species is revealed to us on page 77, almost exactly a quarter of the way through the novel—thus allowing the remaining three quarters to do what suprise-ending stories are too cowardly and lazy to do, namely to deal with the consequences of what is revealed—and in the passage following the revelation Rosemary makes clear her motives:

          Some of you will have figured that out already. Others may feel it was irritatingly coy of me to have withheld Fern's essential simian-ness for so long.
          In my defense, I had my reasons. I spent the first eighteen years of my life defined by this one fact, that I was raised with a chimpanzee. I had to move halfway across the country in order to leave that fact behind. It's never going to be the first thing I share with someone.
          But much, much more important, I wanted you to see how it really was. I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren't thinking of her as my sister. You're thinking instead that we loved her as if she were some kind of pet. After Fern left, Grandma Donna told Lowell and me that when our dog Tamara Press had died, our mother had been devastated—just the way she was now, being the implication. Lowell reported this to our father and we were all so offended Grandma Donna had to give it right up.
          Fern was not the family dog. She was Lowell's little sister, his shadow, his faithful sidekick.

I fell, to some extent into both the "some" and the "others" camps that Rosemary lays out in the first paragraph: I did figure it out (in large part thanks to the cover illustration, which depicts Fern hanging from a tree), and I did, as I've mentioned already, find the withholding irritatingly coy. But I was won over as Rosemary described her reasons. To begin with, the mere fact of any explanation at all is unusual, for a standard fictional "surprise", whether at the end or not, cannot afford to explain its reasons for being left a surprise any more than a standard first-person narrator can afford to ask herself how she remembers the dialogue so precisely.

And just as with those previously-discussed questions, Rosemary's reasons (possibly excluding the "never going to be the first thing I share" one) are, once again, writers' reasons. In this case, Rosemary (and Fowler) are struggling with one of the central problems facing a writer, namely how to convey accurately the "reality" one seeks to convey. To do so is of course impossible, and in explaining why she has held back the information that Fern is a chimpanzee this long Rosemary is in effect telling us which course to failure she ultimately decided was least untenable, and why. Her candidness is, in context, deeply moving, and when she goes on immediately to describe more fully than before her experience of having a chimpanzee as a sister, to a certain extent it does feel as though she's been successful; we begin to understand what this alien experience really was, truly to see Fern as "not the family dog", and so on; and though these passages can never really "take us there", their being ushered in by the acknowledgment of the impossibility gives them a power they could not have had otherwise, creating a shift in perspective even in those of us who did "figure it out" that is, again, deeply moving.

Similar clusters of reasoning and feeling surround other of the novel's evasivenesses, as for example regarding what Lowell, Rosemary's fugitive brother, did. This is all very powerful. But I wonder if Fowler has on some level confused the evasiveness, which she deals with remarkably, with the elusiveness that her material requires but is not a living presence in it. The two are not the same, but such is the power of the novel as a form (i.e., The Novel, the "genreless" genre), able to consume, digest, and incorporate anything that it encounters, that both are subsumed into one smoothed-out thing—with evasiveness, naturally the more graspable of the two, retaining much more of its own character than the elusiveness is able to. As I mentioned way back at the beginning of this essay, I sense in Fowler a powerful urge to fight against her form, to fight against The Novel and its all-consuming appetite; but in this case at least I find that she has not fought hard enough, or that she has allowed a conflicting urge—to give in, both to her form and to the cultural position she finds herself in at this point in her career—to take over.

Intimately related to all of this is the question of this particular novel's sfness, the "Is it or isn't it?" question that, as a question, ultimately I am not interested even in asking, let alone answering. But sf or not, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is obviously relevant to the sf reader in a number of ways, from the fact that Fowler has written much before it that is "incontestably" sf, to the dialogue Duchamp identifies between it and previous works of feminist sf, to—my immediate interest—the formal issues within it. Specifically, I am referring to the way it deals with the tension I have identified as central (though not exclusive) to sf: that between explication and the inexplicable. For this is a novel that aims itself squarely at the heart of modern science's moral, philosophical, and indeed methodological failures.

Fowler here displays a typically sfnal interest in the forms of explication, the modes of language we use to convey information, to explain things; like all good sf, her novel implicitly understands that mixing these particular kinds of stories into what we're more used to thinking of as a story performs strange transformations on both, carrying the potential of tremendous power as these modes clash, cooperate, engage in dialogue with one another.

          Episodic memory has certain subjective features. It comes with something called "a feeling of pastness," and also a feeling of confidence, however misplaced, in the accuracy of recollection. These interiorities can never be observed in another species. Doesn't mean they aren't there. Doesn't mean they are.
          Other species do show evidence of functional episodic memory—the retention of the what, where, and when of individual experiences. The data has been particularly persuasive with regard to scrub jays.
          Humans are actually not so good at remembering the when. Extremely good at remembering the who, though. I would guess chimps, social as they are, might be the same.
          Does Fern remember us? Does she remember but not recognize us as the people she remembers? We certainly don't look the way we used to, and I don't know if Fern understands that children grow up, that humans grow old, same as chimps. I can find no studies that suggest what a chimp might remember over a period of twenty-two years.
          Still, I believe Fern knows who we are. The evidence is compelling, if not conclusive. Only the exacting ghost of my father keeps me from insisting on it.

This is, again, very fine. But I find, and here I have difficulty putting my finger on my objection, that something is off. Perhaps it is the very fineness of the writing. Perhaps it is the overly frequent and too-precise paragraph breaking—for me this passage, like many elsewhere in the novel, would gain much in power were it one single paragraph. Whatever the specific technical causes, what I feel here and in many similar passages is The Novel smoothing over the disjuncture between the "scientific" sentences ("The data has* been particularly persuasive...") and the "story" sentences ("...the exacting ghost of my father..."), in a way that the sf I love and that moves me—whether the naïve works of a Clarke or a Stone or an Asimov or the more self-aware efforts of a Delany or a Russ or, indeed, a Tiptree—leave rough. Novels like Rendezvous with Rama or Trouble on Triton, short stories** like "Nightfall" or "Painwise", live in the tensions and the contradictions; they leave the seams visible and do not allow us to forget them.

*Incidentally—"have", surely?
**And here I feel it is time for a periodic reminder that all forms of narrative have, in contemporary culture, been so thoroughly "novelized" for so long that when I talk about The Novel, most of the same or at least very similar issues apply as well to, e.g., short stories.

Lorrie Moore, whose fussily perfect and witty stories with nothing to say usually repel me, has one truly excellent story: "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk," originally published in that hotbed of fussily perfect and witty repulsion, The New Yorker, later collected in her Birds of America. In this remarkable story, "the Mother"—a writer for publications like The New Yorker, indeed a writer much like Moore herself—finds that, in the face of a sudden life-altering disaster (the discovery that "the Baby" has cancer), she can no longer go on pretending that her enterprise as a writer is in any way adequate, in any way acceptable. How can I go on forming these perfect sentences, she asks herself, these clever turns of phrase? How can I go on creating these finely observed portraits of nothing at all, when what matters, when something happens that really matters, is ultimately unsayable, certainly unwriteable? And yet it seems that, as much as she struggles against it, as much as she finds herself unable and unwilling, she can (like anyone) only be the writer she knows how to be (and anyway, as "the Father" points out, "We are going to need the money"), and so we see her writing those perfect and witty sentences like "She has already started to wear sunglasses indoors, like a celebrity widow," even going so far as to give the story not one but two of those Raymond Carver-tested MFA workshop-approved titles I started this essay complaining about — this story that is precisely about how inappropriate this detached perfection is in the face of a life and a world that involves us all intimately and messily whether we want it to or not. The story is devastating.

I was tempted to say that it is so powerfully moving because it "strikes the right balance" between these contradictory impulses (not so far off from Beckett's "can't go on, I'll go on"), but that phrase is I think exactly wrong. "People Like That " is so moving precisely because it does not strike a balance, because it lives in the impossibility of balancing. And because in this story Moore has shown us that she is aware of this impossibility, all of her other stories, or at least all those that I have read, none of which show an ounce of this awareness, none of which leave any room for self-questioning or self-doubt, all of which seem blithely certain that there is nothing wrong with what they are doing, are not just bad stories but a betrayal, a lazy and cynical admission that Moore is willing to coast merely on her prodigious but empty technical skill, even though she has shown that she knows such coasting is irresponsible and unacceptable.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, I find, tries too hard to balance what Moore refused to balance in "People Like That", that she refuses to acknowledge even exists in her other stories. Fowler has always known that these problems exist; I admit I am new to her writing and have as yet read very little of it, but the handful of earlier short stories I have read deal very much in these problems, as indeed this new novel does as well. But now it is as though Fowler wants to have it both ways, to find some middle ground between the stark knowledge of "People Like That" and the breezy ignorance of the rest of Moore's career.* And though her efforts in this direction are emphatically not a betrayal, and though there is much, so very much, to admire in this novel, I nevertheless find it all very distressing.

*To be super-clear, I'm not suggesting that Moore and Fowler's careers are in any way linked; I don't even know if Fowler has ever read Moore, and it's irrelevant.

The series of questions I blockquoted oh so terribly long ago ("How is it possible that I remember, as I seem to, a handful of conversations word for word" et al) actually contains one more that I originally left off, one which may seem at first to be taking us out of the metafictional realm of the rest of the paragraph and back into, as it were, the fiction proper: "And why is there one thing that I remember distinctly, living color and surround-sound, but believe with all my heart never occurred?" But this is perhaps the one question out of the series that cuts closest to the heart of the fundamental bad faith of all fiction. Because of course none of the events of the novel ever occurred—despite Fowler's rendering them distinctly, in living color and surround-sound, and make us believe with all our hearts did happen.

But this is complicated by Fowler's political concerns. For there is factual—even propagandistic, if such a word is usable in a non-pejorative sense—information in this book. Rosemary, and behind her Fowler, is terribly and righteously concerned that we become aware of some of the horrors committed in the name of "science," with the backing of industry. We are introduced to forms of animal testing, for example, that are horribly real. But Fowler cannot find it in herself to fight against the homogenization of The Novel as hard as she sometimes seems to want to. And as she works so hard at touching every sentence equally into life, the "political content" of her novel becomes, as Richard puts it in a fine meditation on the presence of racism in Flannery O'Connor's fiction, contained by her novel. It's a thing that happens between the covers, the same as any of the other witty or funny or sad or moving incidents or observations made in the course of its 308 pages; and when we turn the last of those pages and put the book down, so too do we put down its politics.

It is of course asking too much of Fowler to expect her to solve the problem of The Novel's containment single-handed. But for every step she takes toward acknowledging the problems, toward examining them and living with them, she seems to take one or sometimes two steps in the other direction. Her writing is extremely good. I very much enjoyed her language, her wit. How could we not enjoy such turns of phrase as when Rosemary describes her first college roommate as being "appallingly gregarious—so outgoing she was practically incoming," or when CIA men come by her apartment, telling her that her aggressively unhelpful landlord has applied for a job at the agency, "which struck me as a terrible idea no matter how you looked at it, and I still gave him the best recommendation I could make up on the spot. 'I never see the guy,' I said, 'unless he wants to be seen.'" This is genuinely funny; Fowler is similarly skilled in moments of pain and deep feeling. Her novel truly is written in living color and surround-sound; her efforts in these directions are sometimes astounding. But it is in these efforts, indeed in their notable success, that my problems with the novel lie. The jacket flap states, forthright and certain, that this "is Fowler's most accomplished book". I fear that it is.

Some observations on Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

• Dick's misogyny is vicious. He is utterly incapable of mentioning a woman, any woman, in any context, no matter how briefly, without stopping to demean, belittle, ridicule, and/or objectify her. It is to the point that the word misogyny alone is insufficient to describe it; adding gynophobia helps some, because there is a palpable element of fear to his hatred, but in all, language, even the misogynist patriarchal language we have, sputters into shocked silence in the face of woman-hating this...dedicated. And yet he consistently puts some of his most interesting thoughts and writing into the mouths of women characters. Ruth Rae, for example, is a monstrous caricature that only particularly virulent misogyny could come up with; and yet her sudden disquisition on animals, love, grief, and so forth in chapter 11 contains some of the most fascinating and sensitive writing Dick ever produced, and is the first time that this until then only intermittently decent novel really comes to life. I'm not saying any of this makes up for the misogyny—Christ, far from it—merely that it is very peculiar, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it.
• It is impossible to "get a fix" on any of the characters in this novel. It is impossible to "like" or "dislike" any of them in the sense that most novels encourage us to like or dislike their characters. We spend most of our time basically inside Jason Taverner's head, but who is he? At times he seems a vacuous celebrity; at times, a philosopher. Early on we see him wholeheartedly supporting a genocidal sterilization policy, but we are given no hint of any kind of internal architecture that would support such a belief. He is an unquestioning beneficiary of a police state who can immediately articulate complex objections to the nature of that state. He is cruel and unfeeling; he is sentimental. He is a Van Vogtian superman who, as in Van Vogt, spends the entire novel in over his head; unlike in Van Vogt, it is impossible to imagine him in any other situation. (Can we really see him as the host of a variety show? even one that features dramatic presentations of scenes from Proust?) Who is this man? Certainly not a "character" in the usual novelistic sense; the same goes for all of the other characters. Nor are they Asimovian "labels for the different parts of the story machine", for the parts of this story machine are resolutely unlabeled.
• Flow My Tears takes place in "the future"—it was published in 1974 and takes place, as the first sentence establishes, in 1988—but it is such a wholly impossible future from the vantage point of that 1974 that it has to be considered an "alternate future." There are things that did not exist in 1974 that have been going on in the novel's present for much longer than 14 years. The 1974 the characters in the novel lived through had to have been a different 1974 than the one in which Dick wrote. The novel rarely, if ever, makes this explicit, but it is consistent. I don't have much to say about this, no theorizing or analyzing to do, but I find it interesting, a seldom-used approach that strikes me as having a great deal of potential, though I am not certain at the moment what exactly I think that potential to be.
• I have to say, I have no idea what Dowland is doing in this novel, aside from the obvious fact that Dick, like all those with any sense at all, loves him. I don't object to his presence, I just don't see the reason for it. That said, I've learned as much about music from the brief but inexplicably illuminating comments scattered throughout Dick's works as I have from anyone, so I suppose I should thank him.
• And finally, all those people who consider Philip K. Dick a genius—well, he might be, or at least he pretty definitely was sometimes, but I hope they all realize that he was also, fundamentally, kind of a dumbass.

Proposal for an sf writers' strike

Though I know I have no authority whatsoever with which to make this proposal, nevertheless: I propose that all sf writers should go on strike, effective immediately. I don't mean that they should stop writing, or even that they should stop submitting what they write to publishers and magazines.

Instead, they should all immediately stop writing, and certainly stop submitting what the publishers and magazines want. Imagine it: all the big science fiction publishers suddenly find themselves without a single bloated first volume of a trilogy in their submissions piles, without a single plucky teen protagonist, without a single paranormal police procedural. What would they publish? When none of the publishers have even a single thing they know they want to publish before they even receive it, what will they do? Why, they'll have to publish something they didn't want to publish, or stop operating entirely.

Or imagine: one day, all of a sudden, maybe even today, all of the online sf magazines stop receiving stories with hooky single-sentence opening paragraphs.* What would they publish then?

*That last one technically doesn't count but I had to include it because in a way it's even MORE what I'm talking about than the rest.

UPDATE: On Twitter @waterandfruit pointed out to me that the majority of the stories I link to in my final complaint are written by women. First off I want to straight-up apologize for that. My "method" was just to pick the most recent story at each magazine that met the criterion (and in no case did I have to back far to find one!); I didn't even look at the stories themselves or who wrote them. I should have thought to, though, because coincidence (or, as @waterandfruit speculated, possibly the greater pressure on women to conform and pigeonhole themselves) led to the sample being heavily skewed. I also want to clarify that I'm not by any means complaining about the specific stories linked, most of which I haven't read, or even saying that no good story can start this way. I'm just complaining about the current ubiquity of that specific way of opening.

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?