Polemicists & Science Fiction

[truepenny]

John Scalzi is getting awesome coverage in the NYT Sunday Review of Books. More power to you, John.

He observes in his commentary on this event that the reviewer is disappointed in him for not making Old Man's War into a political credo (and embarks on a lovely metaphor about monuments and rooms which I shan't recap here--go read!), and this has cross-connected in my head with the book review I've spent most of today writing.

Here's the thing.

Academic (and therefore "highbrow") literary criticism does not know what to do with science fiction. Or fantasy. Or horror. It never has.

This is because academic literary criticism, on which "highbrow" or "mainstream" literary criticism is modeled, has evolved to deal with a particular kind of writing, which has particular goals and particular methodologies. New Criticism is our bête-noire, here, and the New Critics considered imagist poetry the pinnacle of human artistic endeavor.

Now, take this mindset, and confront it with stories who, as a habitual gesture, literalize and concretize metaphors. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress doesn't contain lovingly crafted metaphors about alienation and the difficulty of surviving as a minority population and the hostility of the universe. No, it's literally about living on the Moon. We don't need to be told what Heinlein is "really" talking about, because he tells us himself.

In other words, literary critics are out of a job.

Response #1 to this dilemma is for the critic to announce that sffh isn't worth his time. This is becoming more and more problematic, as more sffh readers and writers are insisting that it is so, dammit.

Response #2, rather than trying to figure out a new vocabulary and methodology for literary criticism, is to change the arena of discussion. Feminist theory does this, and does it very well, which I suspect is one reason feminists and science fiction writers get along so well, sometimes even in the same skin. And, of course, you can do it with other kinds of politics, too. There are many great works of science fiction that positively demand this approach. 1984, to name one.

In other words, the chosen compromise is to treat science fiction as allegory. John is causing difficulties by not playing by those rules, by not knuckling under to the idea that sffh has worth proportionate to its higher calling as a brightly colored stalking horse for Serious Political Ideas.

In other words, critics would be much happier with the genre if it would sit down quietly and be didactic, instead of running around like a swarm of anarchic fools playing literary Calvinball.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

...what about those of us who are crafting metaphors for alienation. And, yanno, blowing up planets?

[cleverthylacine]

Everything of yours I've read is much too true to be didactic. There is nothing contrived in your work, nothing that reminds me I'm in a book, and this isn't really happening, it's a conceit that someone made up to prove a point.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

You're not playing by the rules, either.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

BOOM!

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

But I keep my stuff there!

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Itzkoff is about what you'd expect the Times Book Review to choose as its sf reviewer, he said viciously.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

the New Critics considered imagist poetry the pinnacle of human artistic endeavor.


Oh God yes so do I.

[branchandroot]

Well, gee, thanks for that inaccurate blanket statement that further marginalizes the work of critics who are "trying to figure out a new vocabulary and methodology for literary criticism".

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, because I'm SO speaking from a centralized position of power here.

Also, please tell me which academic and mainstream critics I'm marginalizing. I'd like to read them.

[lalouve.livejournal.com]

I find Lucie Armitt's work interesting - very theoretical, very sffh-oriented. I'm not sure she's mainstream but she's definitely academic.

Chip Delany

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

You also might want to take a look at Adam Roberts (author of the Palgrave Companion to Science fiction or something like that from Palgrave). And Stanislaw Lem and Jonathan Lethem.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

I suspect you mean "In other words, literary critics are out of a job." I had the same reaction. As if all literary critics agree on these issues, and it's all just a big racket to guarantee their permanent employment. How smart we are to have figured this out!

As a further quibble, the New Critics weren't the alpha and omega of all "literary criticism," and moreover it's news to me that they considered Imagism "the pinnacle of human artistic endeavor." That's kind of a generalization, don't you think?

In the details, I had a lot of the same reactions that truepenny did to the Itzkoff review of Scalzi. I said so in several conversations this past week. I was particularly struck by Itzkoff's evident belief that Dirac-and-co's reaction to the novel Starship Troopers represents John Scalzi's view of the novel Starship Troopers, as opposed to a nice piece of characterization of Dirac and his fellow soldiers. In general I was happy that Itzkoff and the Times paid serious attention to Scalzi, and also much reminded that, frequently, mainstream readers really don't get the SF game of "let's suppose."

But I've come to take a dim view of the kind of polemical rah-rah with which we genre insiders tell one another how great we are and how dumb everyone else is. It's hubris, corrosive to both mind and soul. "A swarm of anarchic fools playing literary Calvinball" is an apt description of all literature worth reading, not just genre fantasy and SF. It's like the old saw about how SF the "literature of ideas," as if there were no "ideas" in Voltaire or Dostoevsky.

To return to truepenny, I don't think the disconnect between mainstream readers and SF is that mainstream readers want SF to "sit down quietly and be didactic." To the contrary, it's SF's very didacticism that makes its virtues so inscrutable to a broad range of mainstream readers. And the fact that we use didacticism as a field in which to play, rather than a stage from which to conduct rallies. That's where Itzkoff loses the thread.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh.

I WAS BEING SARCASTIC.

I don't believe SF puts literary critics out of a job, any more than I believe that there's a Key To All Mythologies (or Methodologies) that will make it all make sense.

The problem with New Criticism (and I say this as someone who spent a number of semesters teaching introductory lit courses) is that it's insidious and pervasive--and its central practice, the close-reading, is both easy to teach and really kind of necessary if you're going to get students with no experience to be able to talk intelligently about a text--and that most people don't get introduced to any other critical methodologies, unless, of course, they're insane enough to go on to get an advanced degree in English or other similar-type field.

I do think SF poses particular problems for literary critics because there's a particular set of literary conventions it doesn't follow (not that this makes it special or "better"--I personally find it more interesting, but then that would be why I ended up a SF writer instead of an academic literary scholar), and I have witnessed, many times, the reactions I'm sketching in broad caricature in this post.

That's all.

[cleverthylacine]

As a general rule--I detest didacticism. Some works manage to be didactic and not suck anyway, but I really hate being told what to think, which is probably why I'm mostly internet-famous for being an ex-fan of JK Rowling, because I thought the first three books were awesome, the middle one so-so and the last two positively suckocious. I know it's why debates about racism in fanfiction (and insinuations that people who don't, frex, like Foreman on "House", or that who do like Draco Malfoy are racists) or whether or not X or Y or Z story/show is feminist enough irritate me a lot, because as important as racism and sexism are, it invariably gets down to "how you should write certain characters/topics" and my answer to that is always the same--in whatever way the story demands.

Of course, I don't think writing about oppressed people or alienated people means you have to be didactic. Sometimes, as part of a story, people happen to be oppressed or alienated or both. But if you're writing them accurately as real people, it seems to me that there's no need to TRY TO MAKE A POINT OMG, and also that whatever point you do make is made a lot better.

I think you have just identified why I prefer genre fiction.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

I think some people around here, possibly including our host, must be using the word "didacticism" to mean something other than what I understand it to mean.

A work of literature can be didactic without pounding you over the head with a cartoon Message. To my mind you can't write an SF or fantasy story without staking out a position, even if only for a single story's sake, about one issue of moment or another. It doesn't have to be your personal position. But you can't make a world without deciding, even if only on a nonce basis, on certain views about how worlds work.

Joanna Russ has observed that SF is full of medievalists, and theorized that medieval literature and SF have inbuilt didacticism in common. I think she's on to something.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I have always understood "didactic" to mean "with the intention to teach," as per its etymology. My students, the last semester I was teaching, were infected with didacticism. "In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare wants us to learn that ..." So I use the word "didactic" of texts (whether primary or, in this case, secondary) that assume we have to learn from what we read, and that this learning must be the explicit purpose of our experience.

(Because, yes, of course we learn from what we read. But I vastly prefer works in which it's show rather than tell. And I don't think the author is necessarily the person who should be deciding what we learn.)

Therefore, being didactic is not the same thing as having a position, or even as stating a position. Or as conducting a thought experiment to see what a particular position entails.

[cija.livejournal.com]

Therefore, being didactic is not the same thing as having a position

This is true. (But I've always kind of liked the sort of didacticism that I think people have in mind when they say they hate it, the whole 'your crotchety old uncle sitting you down and telling you what life is all about and what to think of it' Heinleiny kind of thing. I mean, I hate it too, like everybody else, but still, I like it.)

[pnh.livejournal.com]

"I mean, I hate it too, like everybody else, but still, I like it."

I think this is a deep and true description of the relationship many of us have to a certain mode of SF.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

The definition I learned in studying theo-philosophical treatises was that a didactic text is one whose intention is to teach, regardless of content, but with a connotation of moralistic teaching (and often with an implication of 'excessive', at that). So it's almost like it's standing between both your definition and the ones I think I'm seeing elsewhere in the thread: didactic text as informing as it relates to a moral code (that is, a world-view).

(Woah, it's like being in Feminist Existentialism all over again, cries of "define your terms!")

That aside, I wonder if I'm missing something. Yes, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is about being on the moon, and therefore one wouldn't necessarily talk about the moon in the story as a metaphor for A, B, or C, if the moon is (am I getting this right?) an actual setting/character.

But we can talk about alienation in Harlem Renaissance, and the metaphors in Invisible Man, and Harlem Renaissance is right there, and so is the white woman who just wants to use the invisible man for her own sake and interest without seeing him as human, that really happens 'in the story' -- how is this any different from SF writing about being on the moon with alienation and struggling as a minority?

To someone who's never experienced Harlem, let alone has any cognizance of the powerful phenomenom known as the Harlem Renaissance, wouldn't that be as fantastic as the moon?

I mean, I suppose one could say that Ellison is being marginally didactic in his work, by trying to teach us about the black man's non-place, and drawing a moral conclusion (regardless of whether the author agrees wholly or in part or not at all), but wouldn't this be true in any successful work -- although hopefully without the 'excessive' element? Wouldn't pertinent criticism be to judge whether a story can be considered didactic, and to what extent it was successful, and whether this helped/harmed the story?

I have the strangest feeling this impinges on the old fallacy of authorial intentionality.

[matt-ruff.livejournal.com]

To my mind you can't write an SF or fantasy story without staking out a position, even if only for a single story's sake, about one issue of moment or another.

Save the cheerleader, save the world.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

Good example. Heroes stakes out a whole bunch of positions about how the world works, although it's clever enough to include ambivalence in the mix.

[matt-ruff.livejournal.com]

Good example.

Actually I was being facetious. I've only seen three episodes, but Heroes doesn't strike me as didactic. Can you be more specific about what sorts of positions you think the show is "staking out"?

[heresluck]

You will not be surprised to learn that I've been spending much of the past week or so cogitating along these lines myself. When a given critical apparatus, confronted with actual texts, fails to provide significant explanatory power, it's time to start tinkering with the apparatus -- or coming up with a different apparatus altogether, which is one way of thinking about what Response #2 does.

If one possible Response #3 is in fact to try to figure out a new vocabulary and methodology for literary criticism, it seems that a possible Response #4 would be to return to older vocabularies and methodologies -- some of which have developed in interesting ways since falling out of the critical mainstream in the wake of New Criticism, so that rhetorical criticism, for example, is at this point an occasionally precarious combination of the very very old and the quite new. To return, that is, to some of the concerns that predate New Criticism -- that predate, for that matter, the hegemony of literary realism -- and wind those suckers up and see whether they still go.

I'm honestly not sure whether it's possible, either theoretically or practically, to propose a Grand Unified Theory Of All Things Literary that accounts for SFFH rather than marginalizing it, but it certainly seems like a possibility worth investigating.

Now if only the backlog of older projects would write and submit themselves. dammit.

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

Cannot resist jumping in here since I'm part of the remaking effort (although am now pursuing the fantastic into other genres and media such as fanfiction and the internet).

That is, I am a full professor, did my dissertation (defended in 1992) on feminist theory/narratives in the last half of 20th century which let me sneak in sf (which none of my committee read), and have been doing something with sf/f ever since (my academic position actually is titled "creative writing and critical theory"--small university--which lets me do all sorts of weird stuff). I define my literary areas as marginalized/emergent literatures. (And I not only allow but encourage sf and other popular genres in my creative writing classes.)

What I can add to this discussion is what while attending a lot of academic conferences (Pop Culture and International Association of the Fantastic -- which I *would* love to get you to attend!), I've seen interesting splits among scholars who work with the fantastic (I'm taking "science fiction" above to be in the broadest sense, not the narrow sub-genre of "hard" science fiction).

The academics started dealing with sf in the seventies -- and there's a generation of male academics many of whom apparently got stuck with teaching the sf class because they were junior men on the hierarchy when English departments were starting "popular" courses to get bums on seats. Some of them started working on scholarship. A bunch seemed to think that the way to get sf accepted by the academy at large was to pick out the most *literary* (by New Critical Definitions) examples and promote them (that was the case in a class I took as an undergrad in um 1977). They've also spent a lot of time pointing out the structural brilliance of said authors (there's a book on chaos theory and Isaac Asimov's Foundation series if you can believe it--all fractals I think) -- to little effect. That is, as far as I can tell, sf is still marginalized in the academy. Additionally, those male scholars only looked at male writers (no surprise here). Many of them (fondly known to some of us as the fossils!) consider all current sf and all scholarship in this area to be "popular crap."

In recent years with the growth of the new theories (and really, they're not all that new - there's a Norton Anthology of Theory which shows it arrived a while ago), you have a newer generation of scholars set free by feminist, gender, queer, linguistic, political/Marxist, sociological, and more types of methodologies which don't rely on a single type of aesthetic criteria and a strict focus on the text as object working happily away--but many of them aren't doing anytihng as fuddy duddy as working with books--they're doing film, television, gaming, fanfiction, a whole host of other texts. I like to joke I used to be oh so cutting edge by doing sf, then became out of date by doing BOOKS.

Some of the guys are kinda grumpy that the newer generation of scholars aren't working with the Big Male Names; certainly, most of the feminist and gender and queer scholars are working more with well female and queer and complexly gendered authors/texts.

It's a complex field out there (and I wouldn't consider the NY Times at the cutting edge of theoretical approaches but then I may be biassed), with a lot of competing areas.

So, interested in coming and talking about all this at the conference?

http://www.iafa.org/

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

a slight p.s. -- what you say above, even being sarcastic (sorry didn't pick up on that) -- there's probably a reason why the one sub-genre of the fantastic that's sort of halfway literarily respectiable is the dystopia!

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

I move that we adjourn the game for a day or two and modify the Calvinball rules until we are playing moopsball instead.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

How do such critics react to the work of 1) Raymond Carver (recommended reading for those who consider Hemingway's style too ornate); 2) Jorge Luis Borges?

Changing topics a bit: There is metaphor in science fiction. Theodore Sturgeon's "Mr. Costello, Hero" is one single metaphor for Joe McCarthy's career. In Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon, the Control Natural who explains that he and his wife didn't have a selected-genes child because there was nothing in their genes to select for is a metaphor about the society and its malaise. I'm not sure what percentage of political science fiction contains (or is built around) metaphors for contemporary politics, but it's not exactly rare.

[kythiaranos.livejournal.com]

Well said.

Although now I want an icon that says, "I play literary Calvinball."

E-ducare...

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I think I want to murmur something here about 2 kinds of didacticism - one of which is 'telling people what's what and they better believe it' (the Gradgrindish putting information into the pupils paedogogic model) and the other of which is 'trying to get people to think by suggesting some questions, or by thwarting their preconceptions'.

Having recently been doing some critical writing on an author who at first reading appears to be writing transparent 'good reads', that turn out to have a lot going on under that deceptive surface, I am all for the second kind, which doesn't necessarily tell the reader what they should think, but tries to shake up their ideas.

Also, as an archivist, it has occurred to me that certain principles we learn of 'provenance' and 'diplomatic' - who created this document for what purpose? does it have certain features that mark it as a particular kind of document, which may include some completely standard formal verbiage? what rules are normally observed in this kind of document? etc - might also be useful tools in literary analysis, particularly when moving outside a 'comfort zone' of canonical type texts.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

25 argumentative messages, and not one of them appended a post with, "And by the way, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress sucked!!1eleventy!"

Come on, people! This is the internet! Inappropriate outbursts are our stock in trade!!

I could think up some lit crit about Moon, but it's all through lenses, as you've described response #2. (Environmental crit, anthropology, and maybe somebody somewhere has already written one going into depth on the "Hawaii sends its laundry to the mainland" subtext of the economic system.) But the one thing an ordinary critic can say is, Wait, actually, the moon isn't a very harsh mistress at all, is it? Kind of a cakewalk, I would have said.

(And we're back to the part where I thought that book sucked. There! I said it!!)

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

*heh*

I kinda liked TMHM when I was a kid (I read and liked Heinlein when I was a kid--meaning before I hit puberty, back in northern Idaho, in the sixties). And for its time (interracial group marriage), it seemed kinda radical.

After I found Joanna Russ and some other writers, I grew out of Heinlein (but I still have a copy of that book because it was my favorite--although there are books of his I totally loathe).

I want Michelle! I loved Mike/Michelle!

Maybe I should write some feminist fan fiction filling in the gaps there....

But as I continually point out to my students, liking or not liking is not critical analysis.

And I am a bit of a contrarian in my profession (english prof, scholar) because I don't see my main job as "evaluating" and picking out Teh Great Literature -- in fact, although I admit canons exist, and I guess I cannot help but participate by assigning books to read in classes, my scholarship is not about what is good/great/sucky in literature.

I teach Harry Potter (book and film) and graphic novels in my introduction to literature courses. I assigned a book about fanfiction in my latest women writers class. I routinely upset students in that class my assigning sf: a fantastic book, Reload (http://home.pacific.net.au/~lcarroli/text/reload.htm). They tell me they are freaked out to have to read sf in a literature class (and many of them are not very good at it, not having learned the conventions. About a third of the class thought McCaffrey's story, "A Ship Who Sang," was about programming an AI -- they missed the human baby/cyborg aspect entirely, and never did really figure out what cyborg meant).

Years ago, I assigned the Heinlook book as well in a class on sf -- but I also assigned Sheri Tepper, Elizabeth Scarborough, Ursula K. LeGuin.

[aoibhe-chan.livejournal.com]

With all due respect to the NYTBR, if its reviews are supposedly modeled on academic style it is doing a very, very poor job.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

Good point. Inside the SF community we have a bad tendency to conflate the annoying habits of academia with the annoying habits of middlebrow book-chat.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Just for the record.

Up until two years ago, I was an academic. I was an academic before I knew the first thing about the sf community, and I was an academic longer than I've been a member of the sf community. I vastly prefer the sf community to the academic community, and that is, believe me, a painfully well-informed choice.

So when I talk about academic and non-academic mainstream criticism in the same breath, that's because I see a particular line of descent from one to the other, shared beliefs about what makes "great" or "significant" literature. And those shared beliefs are what I was seeing at work in the NYTSRB discussion--as redacted through John--of John's work.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

There certainly are shared beliefs between the two. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise, or to imply that you're one of the people who doesn't know the difference.

Introducing the Company one Muslim Dating plat on the Internet.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi, i am Abdul.

IF you would like to be first encounter beautiful arab singles and women.
please visit my orientation www.muslimamericanview.com.

It has hundreds of [url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]single muslim[/url]
and beautiful [url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]muslim brotherhood[/url]
you can also find Arab and muslim girls and I mean fair [url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]muslim porn[/url]
[url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]muslim holidays[/url]
[url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]muslim beliefs[/url]

[url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]muslim request times[/url]
[url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]muslim names[/url]
[url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]muslim women[/url]
[url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]muslim prayer[/url]
[url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]muslim girl[/url]
[url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]muslim jokes[/url]

[url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]muslim ass[/url]
[url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]muslim greeting[/url]
[url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]muslim sex[/url]
[url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]muslim pro[/url]
[url=http://www.muslimamericanview.com]muslim commingling dresses[/url]




Thanks and please call often.