Roger Luckhurst - The Many Deaths of Science Fiction - A Polemic

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htm
Science Fiction Studies

#62 = Volume 21, Part 1 = March 1994
Roger Luckhurst The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A Polemic

How many times can a genre die? How oen can the death sentence be passed down, and when do repeated stays of execution cease being moments of salvation and become instead sadistic toying with the condemned? SF is dying; but then SF has always been dying, it has been dying from the very moment of its constitution. Birth and death become transposable: if Gernsbacks pulp genericism produces the gheo and the pogrom of systematic starvation for some, he also names the genre and gives birth to it for others. If the pulps eventually give us the Golden Age, its passing is death for some and re-birth for others. If the New Wave is the life-saving injection, it is also a spiked drug, a perversion, and the onset of a long degeneration towards inevitable death. If the 1970s is a twilight, a long terminal lingering, the feminists come to the rescue. But then the feminists are also partially responsible, Charles Pla argues, for issuing one nal vicious twist of the knife. And what of cyberpunk? Dead before it was even bornor rather dead because it was named. Requiem for the Cyberpunks aims to nally kill the label (5). And what now? Christina Sedgewick asks Can Science Fiction Survive in Postmodern, Megacorporate America? A new decline, or rather a circling back: SF dying because of its re-commercialization. This is also the thrust of Charles Plas claim that we nd ourselves wedded to a form that was once provocative and stimulating but is now crippled, corrupt, mentally retarded, and dying
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nd ourselves wedded to a form that was once provocative and stimulating but is now crippled, corrupt, mentally retarded, and dying for lack of intensive care (45). This is a parodic history, no doubt, and yet it seems integral to any putative history that SF is haunted by its own death, that it constantly passes through this state of terminal disease. Why? Is this unanswerable? In this I am echoing Derridas speculation on philosophy at the opening of his essay Violence and Metaphysics:
That philosophy died yesterday...and philosophy should still wander towards the meaning of its deathor that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying...; that philosophy died one day, within history, or that it has always fed on its own agony ...; that beyond the death, or dying nature of philosophy, thought still has a future, or even, as is said today, is still entirely to come because of what philosophy has held in store...all these are unanswerable questions. (79)
Is SF also only surviving, dwindling in its last days, or paradoxically living on aer its death? And is this the fast-fading ghost or the longed-for re-birth? Is it, like philosophy, living on, an SF aer-living SF? And yet unlike philosophy, there is no determinable phase of life: its death is there from the beginning. SF indeed seems to be always feeding on its own agony. In what follows, I want to analyze the narrative of death integral to SF and perhaps aempt to answer the puzzling question of its constant, haunting presence in critical considerations of the genre. It is my polemical proposal that these regularly issued panic narratives, these apocalyptic warnings and calls to arms, in fact
genre. It is my polemical proposal that these regularly issued panic narratives, these apocalyptic warnings and calls to arms, in fact conceal the opposite concern: that SF wants to die, that it is ecstatic at the prospect of its own death and desires nothing else. As a way of entry, let me begin with the work of J.G. Ballard. There has been a systematic re-vision of Ballards work in recent years. His uneasy relation to the genre was initially gured in terms of his unrelenting pessimism, his perversion of the teleological narrative of scientic progress so central to hard SF. Blish objected to the passivity in Ballards disaster novels: you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship it (128). Peter Nicholls condemned Ballards oeuvre outright: Ballard is advocating a life style quite likely to involve the sudden death of yourself and those you love (31). Ballards nihilism is exemplied by his obsessive representations of mutilation, suicidal passivity, and the embrace, the positive willing, of death. One interpretive possibility remains: that the disaster novels focus on the perverse desires, mad ambitions, and suicidal manias of aberrant personalities now free to fulll fatal aspirations devoid of any rational motivation (Barlow 32). However, the re-vision began with Ballards dismissal of this false reading:
I dont see my ction as disasteroriented...theyre...stories of psychic fulllment. The geophysical changes which take place in The Drought, The Drowned World, and The Crystal World are all positive and good changes...[that] lead us to our real psychological goals.... Really, Im trying to show a new kind of logic emerging, and this is to be embraced, or at least held in regard. (Pringle and Goddard, 40)
be embraced, or at least held in regard. (Pringle and Goddard, 40)
Peter Brigg and Warren Wagar have subsequently oered the inverted perspective and perverse argument that the literal catastrophe is metaphorically transvalued into positive narratives of psychic transcendence: that these are fables of selfovercoming in perilous confrontation with the world (Wagar, 56). Gregory Stevenson, in Out of the Nightmare and into the Dream, has taken this position to its most religiose extreme: all of Ballards work is to be encoded into a pseudo-Jungian-Christian mish-mash of transcendence. Death as the terminus, as liminal facticity and the problematic of nitude, is to be re-gured as the metaphorical transgression of the bounds of the bodily into an ultimate, ecstatic (re-)unication and (re-) integration. In adjudicating on these competing frames, death is undoubtedly pivotal. The issue comes down to what form of death the Ballardian text proposes. Clearly the narrative of transcendence is aempting to shi from the wrong (literal) death to the right (metaphorical) death. Being-towards-death is replaced by Being-beyond-death. But it is not as simple as this straightforward substitution of deaths suggests. There is a certain violence in trying to elide Ballards oeuvre into a singular narrative, which tends to erase important dierences between The Drowned World and The Crystal World, where textual evidence for transcendence is clear, and The Drought, which is more rigorously existential in concentrating on what Jaspers would call the unreadable and unaainable cipherscript of the Transcendent.1 Such a narrative is also uncomfortable with The Atrocity Exhibition where the concern for violence and death is displaced onto the gure of the Woman. It is also useful, I think, to retain Ballards clear debt to Freuds speculations on the literal fact of human aggressivity and violence in Civilization and Its Discontents,2 especially as it is central to the book which so inuenced Ballard, Bernard Wolfes Limbo.3
violence in Civilization and Its Discontents,2 especially as it is central to the book which so inuenced Ballard, Bernard Wolfes Limbo.3 It needs re-emphasizing that the literal and gural readings of death are inextricable and intertwined; transcendence of the bodily clearly depends on the facticity of the body in order to have any productive meaning. Why is this so important? Because in terms of SF criticism this re-visioning of Ballard forms a kind of meta-commentary on the project of legitimating SF as a whole genre. Elsewhere I have argued that the araction of postmodernism for SF critics is its apparent transgressive aesthetic, its erasure of the borders between disciplines, discursive regimes, and crucially for SF the boundary between the high and the low. With postmodernism, it would appear, the gheo walls of the popular can be dismantled and SF can (re)join the mainstream of ction, no longer being equated with the embarrassing and degrading label of popular genre ction. The longing for (re)entry to the mainstream is the enduring central element of SF criticism. Ballards texts in eect perform this desire gured both as literal death (of genre) into a transcendent unity (with the mainstream). In The Voices of Time, the language of Powerss dissolution is crucial: he felt his body gradually dissolving, its physical dimensions melting into a vast continuum of the current, which bore him out into the centre of the great channel, sweeping him onward, beyond hope but at last at rest (39-40). This is the literal entry into the main stream. Indeed, rather than criticism reading Ballard, Ballards text could be seen to read and expose the fantasy of criticism: release from the bondedness of genre into the undivided stream of Literature. One could read the texts evocative description of the terminal lapse into narcoma as the death throes of generic SF and this nal vision as the ecstatic release, the abandonment of generic boundaries. In Derridas terms, Ballard exposes the generic law by performing that very law: SF is marked by, and Ballard
generic boundaries. In Derridas terms, Ballard exposes the generic law by performing that very law: SF is marked by, and Ballard re-marks, the genres desire for its own death. This might seem a provocative and peculiarly perverse argument, but I intend to demonstrate that this fantasy of death is crucial to how SF critics legitimate SF as a genre. It is vital to emphasize that this death-wish is the result of the structure of legitimation. The paradigmatic topography of gheo /mainstream marks a border on which is transposed the evaluations popular/serious, low/high, entertainment/Literature.4 One might expect SF critics to formulate evaluative criteria specic to the site of SF and the generic. However SF critics tend to take their criteria from the high and then proceed to denigrate SF in its relational, constructed position as low, as failing to achieve literary standards. That this topography is imposed by largely invisible and unexamined categories of worth (the evaluative designations of high, as I demonstrate below, are the products of an historical moment) is le unquestioned. The only way, it is proposed, to legitimate SF is to smuggle it across the border into the high. And for the genre as a whole to become legitimate paradoxically involves the very destruction of the genre. Before the tribunal of the high, SF legitimates itself in three ways: by the implementation of internal borders; by a certain narrative of its (in/ glorious) history; and by the appeal to the rigor of the scientic. The rst two apply for citizenship in Literature, whilst the laer claims partial guilt on the grounds of diminished responsibility. And one could polemically argue that these, in very dierent ways, all propose a form of death. SF critics oen want to make grand claims for the genre. For Scholes and Rabkin, it create[s] a modern conscience for the human race (vii); it ts, indeed supersedes, the great humanistic claims for literature as a whole. At the same time, and on the same page, they are equally
a modern conscience for the human race (vii); it ts, indeed supersedes, the great humanistic claims for literature as a whole. At the same time, and on the same page, they are equally aware that SF is constituted out of trivial, ephemeral works of popular ction which is barely literate, let alone literary. Most of the subsequent work of their text is dedicated to arming these two contradictory statements by separating them out, divorcing them from each other as distinct and pure sites within SF. An internal border is constituted whereby, on the one hand, the grand claim is asserted and so entry to Literature can be gained, whilst on the other, SF can, in alliance with the categories of the legitimate, be condemned. Scholes and Rabkin justify their own critical text on the basis that SF has ceased to be wholly popular now that a sucient number of works of genuine merit have been wrien from within it (vii). The logic of legitimation through the implementation of internal boundaries can be stated thus: SF is a popular genre which yet contains within it a movement of profundity; in order to secure that serious element a mark, a line of division, must be approved, by which the gheo can be transcended. If, as Darko Suvin insists, The genre has to be evaluated proceeding from the heights down, applying the standards gained by the analysis of its masterpieces (Poetics 71), and yet these very heights transcend the genre, such texts could be said to no longer belong to SF. SF-whichis-not-SF is the apotheosis and judge of SF. The internal border is usually implemented at the site of the denition. It involves isolating a central denition through which all other cases can be rejected or shied to the edges as impure. These marginalia are, unsurprisingly, identical with precisely the elements that might mark the genre as popular; their displacement de-contaminates it of the pulp, leaving the serious works as the central representatives of the genre. Darko Suvin is the exemplar of this strategy. SF as cognitive estrangement defamiliarizes the empirical environment by foregrounding the articiality
the exemplar of this strategy. SF as cognitive estrangement defamiliarizes the empirical environment by foregrounding the articiality of its natural norms. This cognitive utility of SF is based on the rigor of applying scientic laws; such worlds must be possible. Suvin presents a denition that appeals to the specicity of hard SFwhich is also asserted by Scholes in Structural Fabulation, Charles Pla, and many others. The law of science, however, superimposes on the law of genre; this strict denition is the basis for a wholesale deportation of categories which surround, indeed interpenetrate inextricably, SF. Hence SF retrogressing into fairy tale...is commiing creative suicide (Poetics 62); fantasy is a sub-literature of mystication (Poetics 63). What is truly astonishing in Suvins system is his dismissal of virtually all, if not all, SF in itself. Narrative Logic, Ideological Domination and the Range of SF draws a fan-shaped diagram, in which the boom point, the convergence of the range, is marked as the optimum SF. Above it are borderlines marking good and most SF. This most is debilitating confectionery, and, he asserts, there is only one ideal optimum (Positions 70). Is the ideal here a Platonic one? Does it imply that the optimum is unaainable in fact? Those falling short of this ideal are discussed under the titles banal, incoherent, dogmatic, and invalidated: all uses of SF as prophecy, futurology, program or anything else claiming ontological factuality for the SF imageclusters, are obscurantist and reactionary at the deepest level (Positions 71). Suvins nal and deathly judgments are proscriptions which result from the desperate desire to decontaminate and inoculate SF. If the rigor of his denitionalism is an aempt to isolate a singular utility for SF, it is also a logic that prescribes a death. The cordon sanitaire of legitimacy constricts so far as to annihilate SF. Suvins writings on the history of SF are more valuable than this harsh imposition of borders, yet in some senses they are also exemplary of the strategies of legitimation that
valuable than this harsh imposition of borders, yet in some senses they are also exemplary of the strategies of legitimation that operate in the histories of SF. SF history serves two functions: that of embedding SF in the mainstream (the historical erasure of the boundary) and of serving to eliminate, or at least displace, the illicit site of the naming of SFAmerica. This narrative can be parodically summarized in the following way: once there was an Edenic time when SF swam with the mainstream, was inseparable and unidentiable from it; then came the Americans who walled it up and issued a proclamation of martial law. This is the self-imposition of the gheo, the 40 years (rather than days) in the wilderness (see Merril, 54). This narrative ends prophetically: there will come a time when the walls will be demolished, when SF will rejoin the mainstream and cease its disreputable existence. Conclusions to such histories are the sites where the longing for death becomes most explicit. Historical legitimations can in fact begin in prehistory; SF is merely a modernized version of the innately human need for mythology by which to orient experience. The biological need for SF is asserted by Scholes, who argues that the desire for narrative, once satised by myth, can now be provided by popular forms, given the decadence and abandonment of narrative by the mainstream. This explains why normally respectable readers resort secretly and guiltily to lesser forms for that narrative x they cannot do without (Roots 53). SF, it is seemingly argued here, is restoring an imbalance aicted by the loss of narrative (the language of chemical compulsion is also used by Kingsley Amis, although in a dierent context: SF is an addiction which is mostly contracted in adolescence or not at all [16]). The more properly historical mode, however, aempts to embed and entwine SF into the mainstream. Legitimation comes from appropriating, say, Swi, Thomas More or Lucian to SF; history saves the illegitimate child by discovering its true parentage. This is a fascinating strategy:
Swi, Thomas More or Lucian to SF; history saves the illegitimate child by discovering its true parentage. This is a fascinating strategy: it is not the aempt to nd a xed identity or essence of SF; it is concerned precisely with constructing a non-origin, to disperse it, to deny specicity. SF does not begin anywhere as such, and the disreputable generic can be displaced to become a mere bit-part in a larger historical unfolding. The suppression involved is that of a name: Gernsback. I am not suggesting that the origin of SF lies with him, but his originating of the site is crucial. Gernsback is ritually vilied: for Aldiss, he was one of the worst disasters ever to hit the science ction eld (63); for Blish, he is solely responsible for gheoization (118); for Clareson, he initiated the abandonment of literature to propagandize for technology (20); for Merril, the 40 years in the wilderness begins in 1926 with Amazing. What follows is a movement either backwards to predate a baleful inuence, or forward to celebrate his supersession. The aempt at erasure, however, cannot ignore Gernsbacks initial elaboration of the conditions on which the genre has come to be dened: to publish only such stories that have their basis in scientic laws as we know them, or the logical deduction of new laws from what we know (scientic rigor/extrapolation); that the ctions would supply knowledge...in a very palatable form (legitimation through educative rolealso seen by Janice Radway to be a crucial mode in which women readers of popular romance ction legitimate their reading); the grand claim for its cultural signicancePosterity will point to [the SF story] as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and ction, but progress as well (my emphasis).5 These have all been widely used subsequently. Amazing was also instrumental in constructing a community through reader participation. Whether seen positively or negatively, SF as a genre can only be understood with reference to where its conventions and limits were inscribed, despite the constant aempt to displace it. It might seem to be the most naive SF
conventions and limits were inscribed, despite the constant aempt to displace it. It might seem to be the most naive SF historiography to mark Gernsback as the initiator; naming, however, is dierent from origin. Gernsback did not appear sui generis. The constitution of the site of the specic SF magazine in the 1920s was a product of some 40 years of socio-cultural re-alignments around the literary. H.G. Wells has been cited as both the progenitor of generic SF and the last instance of an SF text being accepted into an undierentiated eld of Literature before the gheoization eected by Gernsback. This is inaccurate, however; the laer decades of the 19th century were the crucial phase of the development of the categories of the high and low as they now operate institutionally. This is an incredibly complex moment in the construction of cultural value in, as Peter Keating observes, a publishing eld that had explosively expanded into a bewildering diversity. The popular or low was not simply the demonized Other, the dening negative, of an emergent Modernism;6 moral panic over the links between penny dreadfuls and working-class criminality had developed in the 1870s (see Bristow). If Thomas Wright had divided the high from the low in 1881, and 20 years later the Times Literary Supplement was set up to distinguish the beer authors from the rubbish heap of incompetence,7 it should not be forgoen that there was an equally belligerent assertion for the moral superiority of the re-vivied Romance. Largely in the pages of The Contemporary Review, Andrew Lang, Rider Haggard, and others aacked the eete etiolation of the modern serious novel and argued for the muscular romance or adventure story. Against the diseased interiority of the analytic novel, the romance deliberately reverted to the simpler instead of more complicated kind of novel, and, in an inversion that pregures Scholess aempt to displace the mainstream, Saintsbury also argued that romance is of its nature eternal and preliminary to the novel. The novel is of
displace the mainstream, Saintsbury also argued that romance is of its nature eternal and preliminary to the novel. The novel is of its nature transitory and parasitic on the romance (415-16). Literary histories tend to emphasize this late Victorian phase as the construction of the Modernist Art-work in opposition to the now degraded low. It was also, just as signicantly, the moment in which the sites (increasingly low priced, increasingly specialized ction magazines), terminology (Wright entitled his essay Popular Fiction in 1881; bestseller was coined in 1889), and the very forms and genres of the modern concept of popular literature were founded. Two things require clarication about this in relation to SF. Firstly, it cannot be said that texts that could be nominated as SF at that time existed in an undierentiated mainstream; the very spaces in which they found publication were products of a rapidly fragmenting concept of ction, quickly becoming gured in terms of civilized high and degenerate low.8 Wellss anxiety to depart from being identied solely with the scientic romance and his deference (at least in their leers) to Henry James mark his awareness of the emerging equation between the popular and the degenerate. Secondly, the very use of the term SF is already a retrospective extraction of texts out of a mass of romances. Cross-fertilizations between juvenile adventure stories, imperialist narratives, Gothic revivalism, and the supernatural, as well as pseudo-scientic adventures deriving either from simple technological advance or sociological inections of Darwin have been traced by Patrick Brantlinger and Judith Wilt. A text like Jekyll and Hyde could be said to be premised on a scientic novum, but it is equally overdetermined by Gothic, melodramatic, and imperialist elements; this is no less the case for Wells. Even if this was the moment in which modern popular genres gradually emerged (in the sense of specialist sites, formulated conventions, formulated plots, and reader coteries), SF was a relatively late
emerged (in the sense of specialist sites, formulated conventions, formulated plots, and reader coteries), SF was a relatively late development in relation to the detective genre, the spy novel, or even the Western. As Andrew Ross notes, even the pulp term science ction had to ght, in the 1920s, for predominance amongst other magazines publishing what were variously termed pseudo-science, weird science, o-trail, or fantascience ction (415). What must be asserted here concerns two stages: that SF is elaborated as a distinct genre only with Gernsbacks and other subsequent specialist magazines, and that its pre-history is one of fundamental impurity. This impurity, however, does not mark an undif-ferentiated mainstream, but is an impurity within the emerging concept of the popular. It seems vital that this material production of spaces for the constitution of the modern popular be addressed; SF histories, however, either pass over it in the search for legitimate parentage or mark it as the precarious latency of gheoization.9 Notions of impurity also contravene the operation of internal borders. Sourcesa historical continuity that would embed SF in the mainstreamare sought that would manipulate an isomorphism of method between the legitimate and the generic: utopic estrangement, say, or extrapolative rigor. And yet it is plain that the aempts to claim Swi or More as SF can only be retrospective ones; they are only SF insofar as they intersect with generic conventions. Such histories have to arrive (and then pass over) the moment of the historical constitution of the pulps because SF as a demarcation is only comprehensible in relation to them. Even if More and Swi historically predate, in the internal temporality of the genre they can only arrive subsequently into the arms of an SF genre determined aer they were wrien. The SF history strenuously seeks to elaborate a fantasy of non-origin, of being indistinguishable, identical, to the mainstream: in such narratives of embedding SF into a larger historical unfolding there is clearly a desire to return to
indistinguishable, identical, to the mainstream: in such narratives of embedding SF into a larger historical unfolding there is clearly a desire to return to an earlier state of things, before the genre divide, before the boundary of high and low. To restore an earlier stage of things: this is how Freud formulates the death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The pleasure principle operates according to an economy of stabilization: excitation causes imbalance and disturbance; this energy is bound and neutralized. Prior to this, Freud hypothesizes, are instincts which do not belong to the type of bound nervous processes but of freely mobile processes which press towards discharge (306). The instincts are not concerned with a homeostatic economy, but seek to entirely evacuate from the organism: It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things (308)that state being the inorganic, the inanimate: death. This rst instinct is seeking a quick return to the organic state; however, external stimuli keep arriving to disrupt this path of return to the immanent proper death. External inuences oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated detours before reaching its aim of death (311). Life is in fact merely the result of the detours enforced by external stimuli, and the threat of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. Freud can thus state: the aim of all life is death (311). Peter Brooks has already proposed Freuds essay as a model for the process of reading: for the classic realist text at least, the opening of the novel causes excitation which the text then aempts to expel, to return to zero, at the close. To nish, to complete the text, is to restore an earlier state of things. Narrative is, in eect, the detour between two states of quiescence: The desire of the text (the desire of reading) is hence desire for the end, but desire for the end reached only through the least minimally complicated detour, the intentional deviance, in tension, which is the
desire for the end reached only through the least minimally complicated detour, the intentional deviance, in tension, which is the plot or narrative (292). But this is also the desire of SF as a genre. Placing generic SF in a historical trajectory, in which there is no origin or name or site of SF, sees the imposition of the gheo as an intolerable blockage to energy which is seeking absolute discharge, the return to zero. The history of the genre is the history of the aempt to die in the proper way. This gives a new importance to the question of whether it is the right or wrong death represented in Ballards disaster novels; it also questions the more Jungian interpretations of his texts as movements towards wholeness and plenitude. That Powers constructs a huge Mandala at the center of which he nally transcends his body can be taken as a Jungian image; equally the circular mandala could be seen to draw a zero, a gure which is the precise opposite of plenitude, signaling rather emptiness, nothing, the return of the inorganic. This is the double-edged death of SF, as literal destruction and metaphorical transcendence: the return to the mainstream. The history of SF is a history of ambivalent deaths. The many movements within the genrethe New Wave, feminist SF, cyberpunkare marked as both transcendent death-as-births, nally demolishing the gheo walls, and as degenerescent birthas-deaths, perverting the specicity of the genre. To be elevated above the genre is a transcendent death and the birth of Literature, but as these movements harden, coalesce, are named, they fall back as subgeneric moments of SF. They become detours on the road to the proper death of SF. History as the passage between two equivalent states of quiescence displays, evidently, that birth and death become interchangeable. If the projection back, as a fantasy of non-origin, is SFs past, its complement in the future is the fantasy of non-being. This is the circular detour back into the mainstream where the fantasy of
complement in the future is the fantasy of non-being. This is the circular detour back into the mainstream where the fantasy of non-origin had situated it before the interregnum of the generic. The most enthusiastic claims for approaching non-being came with the New Wave. The explosion of the New Wave was the explosion of the genre itself. Aldiss senses a rapprochement with the mainstream, the return from the gheo of Retarded Boyhood and asserts Science Fiction per se does not exist (306-07). Scholes and Rabkin end their history with the problematic place of Ballard and Vonnegut: A writer like Vonnegut forces us to consider the impending disappearance of the category upon which a book like this depends... science ction will not exist (98-99). The introduction to Harlan Ellisons Dangerous Visions evokes two deaths: that of the Golden Age being superseded by science itself, and that of the New Wave, which has been found, has been termed good by the mainstream, and is now in the process of being assimilated.... Science ction is dead (xxii). That death is so central to the history of SF, that death propels the genre is, I must insist again, the eect of the structure of legitimation: SF is a genre seeking to bury the generic, aempting to transcend itself so as to destroy itself as the degraded low. The third strategy of legitimation, however, that promoting the rigor of the scientic, apparently refuses this deference to the mainstream. Nevertheless, it posits its own kind of death. Robert Heinleins denition of SF as realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and signicance of the scientic method, allows him a rigorous future projection, one prediction of which is the disappearance of the cult of the phony in art.... so-called modern art will be discussed only by psychiatrists (Worlds 22, 17). Contemporary literature is sick, wrien by neurotics...sex
modern art will be discussed only by psychiatrists (Worlds 22, 17). Contemporary literature is sick, wrien by neurotics...sex maniacs...the degraded, the psychotic (Science Fiction 42). The poles are inverted, as are imputed pathologies. One suspects, however, that this adversarial disrespect is a defensively aggressive response to illegitimacy. Legitimation by science continually fails by its own allegedly rigorous demands. If Heinlein places a border between SF and fantasy by declaring that fantasy is any story based on violation of scientic fact, such as space ship stories which ignore ballistics (Science Fiction 19), his point that time-travel stories are legitimate because we know almost nothing about the nature of time is exceedingly weak. The depressing litany of rejections and exclusions of certain texts because their science doesnt work (as Aldiss chastises Ballard [Wounded 128]) insists on a purity that, by the very standards of the science it invokes to judge, fails. The science element of SF is of interest, in fact, exactly as it fails, as it misses rigor; as Andrew Ross maintains, Gernsback and Campbells claim to be at the cuing edge of science is not so much anachronistic as mediated and ideological. The adherence to a positivistic, technocratic science was scientically outdated but politically current: the populism of technological futurism, the scientist as social engineer. Stableford is right, I think, to assert that the rhetoric of scientic rigor was a crucial palliative for early SF: What seems to have been essential is the illusion of delity to science and responsibility to the principles of logical extrapolation, probably because it is this illusion that permits...the suspension of disbelief which allows the reader to participate in the ction by identifying with its endeavour (59). Science must miss its mark, because to be accurate is to risk destruction. With a ceaseless regularity in this mode of legitimation, the name of Cleve Cartmill is invoked. Cartmills atom-bomb story, Deadline, published in Astounding in 1944,
legitimation, the name of Cleve Cartmill is invoked. Cartmills atom-bomb story, Deadline, published in Astounding in 1944, was deemed to be so accurate with respect to the research program of the Manhaan Project that the FBI raided Astoundings oces. The frequent appearance of the anecdote indicates its utility for claiming the scientic accuracy and importance of SF. This may be true, but it also marks a death. Cartmills ction was overtaken within a year; it survives only as an anecdote, not as a read text. There is a sense, in the insistence on scientic rigor, that SF is ghting a limited shelf-life: one danger threatening science ction is that the progress of science itself answers so many questions raised by science ction, thereby removing one idea aer another (de Camp, 128-29). This may be banal, or trivializing of SFs vitality in its consistent confrontations with contemporaneous technological issues. However, the scientic legitimation aims to sidestep the claims of the mainstream on the ownership of the proper text through another, far more important strategy: Even if every work were on the lowest literary level...the form would still retain much of its signicancefor the signicance...lies more in its aitudes [the scientic method], in its intention, than in the perfection of its detail (Bretnor, 287). This retreat, this surrender of ction for the claims of science, shis the emphasis from science ction to science ction: one wonders how SF as such can survive this shi. In Lyotards model of language games invoked in The Postmodern Condition, the scientic statement is a denotative, an assertion of a truth claim on a real referent. Its conditions of acceptance are that it must be open to repetition by others, and that the language of the statement is judged relevant and good by the consensual community of experts. Science is, on rst glance, a pure game in that the conditions of proof can only be established through denotatives. If the legitimation of SF emphasizes science such denotative proofs are invoked. As ction, however, this claim is problematic; invoking the agonistics of language games, Lyotard says: This does not
invoked. As ction, however, this claim is problematic; invoking the agonistics of language games, Lyotard says: This does not necessarily mean that one plays in order to win. A move can be made for the sheer pleasure of its invention: what else is involved in that labour of language harassment undertaken by popular speech and by literature? (10). The purity (or at least minimally determinable conditions) of scientic legitimation murders the fundamentally ludic and impure statements of the ctional. How could proofs ever be established for the ctional? For Roland Barthes, having no real referent is something like the torment of literature: that it is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble saying it. However, at this point, everything turns around, for out of its impotence to prove, which excludes it from the serene heaven of Logic, the Text draws a exibility which is in a sense its essence (495). The essence of the ctional is its inessence. The insistence on the rigor of the scientic, then, negates the very condition of ction; another kind of death. It cannot be so, it will be objected. But, to return to Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this objection can already be found inscribed there: It cannot be so (312). Beyond the Pleasure Principle is wrien as a complex shuing dancetaking one step forward, withdrawing it, stepping forward again. Indeed the essay ends with the image of limpingas if this extension and retraction of wild speculations had made Freud footsore.10 Freud partially withdraws the sole dominance of the death instinct: the whole path of development to natural death is not trodden by all the elementary entities (312); there is also the question of the sexual instincts. This begins to elaborate the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, the life and death instincts. And once again this leads us to a merry dance:
It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One
It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the nal aim of life as swily as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey. (313)
It may have been a misreading, then, to have seen the history of SF as the detour between two deaths: who is to say that this continual renewal, these new movements, cycles of regeneration within SF are not a clawing back from the abyss of death rather than a passage towards it? And yet how would it be possible to tell the dierence? The death instinct has not been recognized, Freud posits, because it masquerades as an apparent propulsion forward, the assertion of life. The vacillating rhythm between instincts, between death and life, recalls the structure of the fort/da game that Freud analyzes in an earlier chapter of Beyond. The child throws the bobbin out of the cot, shouting fort, then reels it back in, shouting da. Freuds interpretation is that this stages the absenting and return of the mother: it opens the suggestion of a beyond to the pleasure principle because there is more investment in the unpleasurable absenting of the mother than in her pleasurable return. One can see a structurally similar game played by David Pringle with the name of Ballard. Pringle wants to assert that Ballard is a writer without that embarrassing pre-modifying SF aached to the title. Lists of plaudits, from Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, and Susan Sontag, are emphasized because what almost all of these accolades have in common is that they do not refer to Ballard primarily as a SF writer. Ballard has performed the fantasy desire of ecstatic death: he transcends genre stereotyping (Bibliog.
primarily as a SF writer. Ballard has performed the fantasy desire of ecstatic death: he transcends genre stereotyping (Bibliog. xii). Elsewhere, however, Pringle notes that Ballards earliest (unpublished) aempts as ction in the mainstream failed because Ballard needed science ction: the pressure of his imagination demanded a freer outlet (Alien Planet 7). Pringles criticism reveals an anxiety which presents itself as a kind of fort/da game, whereby SF reveals its legitimate ospring, who, in the processes of legitimation is orphaned from its parents, and so is reeled back to the hands of SF once more. Freuds question, the impetus for his extreme line of thought (310), is why there is this constant repetition of unpleasurein the childs game, in traumatic neurosis constantly returning to the traumatic event, in the repetitious acting out in transference. And equally it might be wondered why the SF community, so oen belligerent in its defense of the genre, nevertheless constantly entertains fantasies of death. For it remains a fantasy. The fatality for this death is that to push towards it is forever to defer it, to perpetuate the detour. In Freud, the detour that is life is in fact propelled by death; in a curious way death ceases to be an end, the termination of the system, and becomes inscribed within the economy. And if life is a transitional state between two deaths, this ultimately subverts the very notion of beginning and end, suggesting that the idea of the beginning presupposes the end, that the end is a time before the beginning.... Analysis, Freud would eventually discover, is inherently interminable, since the dynamics of resistance and the transference can always generate new beginnings in relation to any possible end (Brooks, 279). The death of SF is that which is endlessly desired and yet endlessly deferred. What, then, can be said about this death? One can either view it positively as, paradoxically, the very motor of SF. But one can also suggest that such fantasies are produced out of the structure of legitimation, SFs perpetual deference to the criteria of worth elaborated for mainstream literature. The death of the
structure of legitimation, SFs perpetual deference to the criteria of worth elaborated for mainstream literature. The death of the genre is the only way in which SF could survive as literature. We have grown used to the language of crisis in relation to SFbut the term, as in so many other disciplines, has had its urgency, its punctual (and punctural) immediacy eroded. SF moves from crisis to crisis, but it is not clear that such crises come from outside to threaten a once stable and coherent entity. SF is produced from crisis, from its intense self-reexive anxiety over its status as literature, evidenced partially here by Ballards re-marking of the law of genre. If the death-wish is to be avoided, we need to install a crisis in crisis, question the way in which strategies of legitimation induce it. The panic narrative of degeneration might then cease its tediously repetitive appearance, and its inversion, the longing for ecstatic death, might be channeled into more productive writings. If this is polemic, it rests on a conceit: the analogy of SF criticisms thrust and Freuds hypothesis of the death instinct. This is not, however, as bizarre a linkage as it may at rst appear. Just as SF was the guilty secret, an unanalyzed and repressed element of the ctive, so the institution of psychoanalysis sought to repress Freuds embarrassing speculations. Like the death drive itself, the disruptions caused by Beyond the Pleasure Principle had to be reduced to zero, to be excluded, expulsed. Now, for Pefanis at least, the death instinct forms a major underlying thematic (108) to much contemporary theory. And perhaps this has an equivalence to the growing visibility of popular literary forms in the academy. There is one more link, then: Freud wrote to Eitingon, For the Beyond I have been punished enough; it is very popular, brings me masses of leers and encomiums. I must have made something very stupid there (Gay, 403). To be popular is somehow to be denied entry to the legitimatefor SF, for Freud. If the economy of such legitimations, the deathly equation of the popular and the stupid, is exposed, perhaps analysis can move into more
of such legitimations, the deathly equation of the popular and the stupid, is exposed, perhaps analysis can move into more constructive areas.
NOTES Thanks to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. for his advice and support. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers of an earlier dra of this piece for their invigorating hostility; I have tried to meet some of their concernsto meet them all, however, would have negated the very purpose of a polemic. 1. The long closing section of Jaspers Metaphysics is called The Reading of Ciphers. It presents a fascinating prospect to read The Drought, a text obsessively remarking on the unreadable ciphers that lier the desert, against Jaspers. The cipher-script is the tremulous evidence of the Transcendent, but it remains only a signier; to aempt to grasp the meaning of the cipher, to convert it into any form of knowledge, is immediately to see its destruction. In a sense, to decipher Ballards texts in a single explanatory model is to eect a violent de-cipherment. On this, see Roger Luckhurst, Between two walls: Postmodernist Theory and the Problem of J.G. Ballard, Ph.D. diss., University of Hull, England, 1993. 2. Ballard has a long citation from this work in the marginal comments to the Re/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, ed. Andrea Juno and Vale (Re/Search Publications, 1990), 76. 3. Wolfe, of course, theorizes 20th-century man as The Masochistic Man, bent on a course of self-destruction. 4. This is of course an overly rigid structure, which is not meant to impose a xed topography. Passages between are always possible; the border could be determined by the elements which transgress it. However, transgression is meaningful only once an interdiction has been elaborated. The border presupposes transgression just as transgression presupposes the border. 5. Citations from Gernsback from Andrew Ross, Geing Out of the Gernsback Continuum, Critical Inquiry 17:419, Winter 1991, and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. Peter Nicholls (London, 1979), 159. 6. This is Andreas Huyssens thesis in Mass Culture as Woman: Modernisms Other, in his Aer the Great Divide (London, 1986), 44-62. Huyssen is perhaps too formalistic in suggesting that the low was constituted by the high; in Britain, at least, the equation of mass literacy with degenerating literature was part of the anti-democratic discourses of the time, prompted by the 1870 Education Actsome time before a
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/62/luckhurst62art.htm by the high; in Britain, at least, the equation of mass literacy with degenerating literature was part of the anti-democratic discourses of the time, prompted by the 1870 Education Actsome time before a determinable modernism could be said to have come into existence. 7. This was in fact the project of the immediate precursor to the TLS, the Literature journal, set up in 1897. Quoted from Keating, p. 76. 8. The specic moment of equating the low with the degenerate at this time is eectively established when Keating notes that both Thackeray in the 1830s and Payn in the 1850s looked upon the Unknown Public that read cheap ction as laudable and sowing the seeds of a potential democracy of literary taste (401-03). 9. On the laer, see the opening comments in Introduction to Newer SF History, Suvins Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, 1979), 205-07. 10. See Jacques Derrida, Speculationson Freud, in his The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1987), 257-409. WORKS CITED Aldiss, Brian. Billion Year Spree. London, 1973. . The Wounded Land: J.G. Ballard. Clareson, ed. (q.v.). 116-29.Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell. London, 1961. Ballard, J.G. The Voices of Time. London, 1974. Barlow, George. Ballard. Twentieth-Century ScienceFiction Writers. Ed. Curtis C. Smith. 1981. 2nd ed. Chicago & London, 1986. Blish, James. More Issues at Hand. Chicago, 1970 Barthes, Roland. Deliberations. Trans. Richard Howard. Barthes: Selected Writings. Ed. Susan Sontag. Oxford, 1983. Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830-1914. Ithaca, NY, 1988. Bretnor, Reginald. The Future of Science Fiction. Bretnor, ed. (q.v.). 265-94. Bretnor, Reginald, ed. Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Future. 1953. Rev, ed. Chicago, 1979. Brigg, Peter. J.G. Ballard. Starmont Readers Guide 26. Mercer Island, WA, 1985. Brooks, Peter. Freuds Masterplot. Yale French Studies 55-56:280-300, 1977.
Brooks, Peter. Freuds Masterplot. Yale French Studies 55-56:280-300, 1977. Clareson, Thomas, ed. SF: The Other Side of Realism. Bowling Green, OH, 1971. De Camp, L. Sprague. Imaginative Fiction and Creative Imagination. Bretnor, ed. (q.v.). 119-54. Derrida, Jacques. Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Writing and Dierence. By Derrida. Trans. Alan Bass. London, 1987. Ellison, Harlan, ed. Dangerous One-volume ed. London, 1979. Visions. 1967.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. On Metapsychology. Trans. James Strachey. Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 11. London, 1988. 269-338. Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time. London, 1988. Haggard, H. Rider. About Fiction. Contemporary Review 51:172-80. Feb 1887. Heinlein, Robert A. Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults, and Virtues. The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism. Ed. Basil Davenport. Chicago, 1959. 17-63. Keating, Peter. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914. London, 1989. Luckhurst, Roger. Border Policing: Postmodernism and Science Fiction. SFS 18:358-56, #55, Nov 1991. Merril, Judith. What Do You Mean? Science? Fiction? SF: The Other Side of Realism. Ed. Thomas D. Clareson. Bowling Green, OH, 1971. Nichols, Peter. Jerry Cornelius at the Atrocity Exhibition: Anarchy and Entropy in New Wave Science Fiction. Foundation 9:22-44, Nov 1975. Pefanis, Julian. London, 1991. Heterology and the Postmodern.
Pla, Charles. The Rape of Science Fiction. Science Fiction Eye 1:45-49. July 1989. Pringle, David. Earth is the Only Alien Planet. Milford Series. San Bernardino, CA, 1979. . J.G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Englewood Clis, NJ, 1976. and James Goddard. Interview Ballard. Vector 73:24-49, March 1976. with
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance. London, 1987.
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/62/luckhurst62art.htm and James Goddard. Interview Ballard. Vector 73:24-49, March 1976. with
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance. London, 1987. Requiem for the Cyberpunks. Editorial statement. Science Fiction Eye 1:5, 1987. Rose, Mark, ed. Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood, NJ, 1976. Ross, Andrew. Geing Out of the Gernsback Continuum. Critical Inquiry 17:411-33, Winter 1991. Saintsbury, George. The Present State of the Novel, Fortnightly Review 49:410-17, Jan 1888. Scholes, Robert. The Roots of Science Fiction. Rose, ed. (q.v.). 46-56. and Eric S. Rabkin. Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision. London, 1977. Sedgewick, Christina. The Fork in the Road: Can Science Fiction Survive in Postmodern, Megacorporate America? SFS 18:11-52, #53, March 1991. Stableford, Brian. The Sociology of Science Fiction. San Bernardino, CA, 1987. Stevenson, Gregory. Out of the Nightmare and Into the Dream. Westport, CT, 1991. Suvin, Darko. On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre. Rose, ed. (q.v.). 57-71. Wagar, Warren. J.G. Ballard and the Transvaluation of Utopia. SFS 18:53-70. #53, March 1991. Wilt, Judith. The Imperial Mouth: Imperialism, the Gothic and Science Fiction. Journal of Popular Culture 14:618-28, 1981.
Abstract.One notable element of SF criticism is the constant repetition of pronouncements suggesting the impending death of the genre. From academic criticism to magazine columns, the threat of the death of SF is a persistent motif. The polemical proposal of this article is that these panic narratives are not aempting to arrest this death, but in fact desire nothing else. SF is ecstatic at the prospect of its own death. This is argued by aending to the way in which SF legitimates itself according to criteria derived from high art. In accepting these criteria SF accepts the equation of the generic with the low, and thus must proceed to kill itself in order to be considered legitimate literature. In the three modes of legitimation that are considered, a particular emphasis is given to narratives of the history of SF which posit some kind of prior mythic moment of
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/62/luckhurst62art.htm itself in order to be considered legitimate literature. In the three modes of legitimation that are considered, a particular emphasis is given to narratives of the history of SF which posit some kind of prior mythic moment of SF as undierentiated from the mainstream of Literature. In that the prospect of death promises a return to that state, the desire of SF is to restore an earlier state of things. This in fact proves to be the exact denition Freud accords to the death drive. The article proposes, then, to follow the curious logic of the detours that constitute the death drive of SF. (RL)

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Science Fiction Studies

Roger Luckhurst The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A Polemic

be embraced, or at least held in regard. (Pringle and Goddard, 40)

Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance. London, 1987.

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