UBC: The Year of Decision: 1846. Also comments on Rabkin.

[truepenny]

I finished listening to Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind: Literature's Most Fantastic Works before we went to Tennessee for Thanksgiving--which was a saga in and of itself: we sat down to Thanksgiving dinner 12 adults, 4 children (ages 12, 10, 10, and 4), 1 three-month-old Standard Poodle, and (on the deck) 2 raccoons--and I have some observations.

1. This is not for you if you are a sf fan of long, or even recent standing. It is geared toward people who don't know anything about science fiction and maybe aren't sure they're interested. Especially in the last lectures, where he's actually talking about twentieth-century science fiction, and a person might possibly have been hoping for something chewy and thought provoking, what he gives are book reports. He explains the plots.

2. It is also not for you if you love twentieth century Anglophone fantasy (using the term here to encompass speculative fiction OTHER than science fiction), because he ignores fantasy and horror almost entirely, except for children's literature. When talking about the literature of the fantastic in the twentieth century, he eschews the Anglophone tradition and talks about Robbe-Grillet instead. The attempt to plaster some academic credibility onto science fiction is transparent, especially if--as I have--you've seen the move umpteen bazillion times before. This also applies to the roping in of Woolf (see below).

3. Of the twenty-four lectures, three focus on women--Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Ursula K. Le Guin--and he mentions maybe one or two other women writers in passing (Charlotte Perkins Gilman gets a nod, for instance). The only non-white writer mentioned is Samuel R. Delany.

4. Professor Rabkin tends to be cavalier about details. Wherein, as we all know, the devil resides.

5. I think that many of his more insane contentious ideas about science fiction can be explained by his wholehearted and uncritical admiration for Heinlein and vice versa. The others can be explained by his attempts to graft some respectability onto the genre by claiming it for post-modernism. In his hands, science fiction becomes the extension of the canon of Great Dead White Males (I think Delany and Gibson are the only authors he talks about who are still alive). His analyses don't mention race hardly at all, but they do talk about sex, and especially about masculinity, and I can't help hearing a coded message to other believers in the ineluctability of male superiority: Psst! Over here! You can still talk like that over here! Which isn't true, but his version of science fiction makes it sound like it is.

---

De Voto, Bernard. The Year of Decision: 1846. 1942. Sentry Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, n.d.

This is a tremendously ambitious and entertaining book. De Voto's project is to examine, explore, and explain what happened to America in A.D. 1846, and he does an excellent job of it, from the politicians in Washington, to the army in Mexico, the Mormons fleeing Missouri, and of course the Donner Party descending to cannibalism on the verge of California. He uses lots and lots of primary sources, has a magnificently entertaining and snarky prose style (personal to mrissa: he has no use for Bronson Alcott and does not hesitate to say so), and not only explained mid-nineteenth century American politics so that I could understand it, but convinced me to find it interesting as well. No small feat, I assure you.

The flaw in this book--and it's a big one--is its treatment of Indians. De Voto (not surprisingly for his era) persistently Others the Sioux and Cheyenne and other Plains Indians, simultaneously demonizing and infantilizing them. I object to this, of course, on the grounds that it's racist, but also because, in terms of De Voto's own project, it's a catastrophic failure. He's so carefully concerned to pay attention to what people's motives were, both the politicians and the pioneers, the Mormons and Zachary Taylor and everyone in between, but with the Indians, he doesn't even try. He essentially says, "No one knows why Indians do anything, not even the Indians themselves," and thus there's a great gaping hypocritical hole in the middle of his beautiful, elaborate, interdependent structure of motivations and causes and pure human cussedness, and it makes me very sad.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Library has it, so I can read Bronson Alcott snark without having to pay money for the racist stuff. Go library.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Sensible. Especially as there isn't a lot of Bronson Alcott snark. But when he mentions him, he is scathing.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

When Devoto pulls out his Sharp Knife of Scathification, he doesn't mess around.

I felt that he also Othered the Mormons to some extent--and he grew up as a non-Mormon in rural Utah, so that may have something to add to his issues there. You're right that a lot of it the effect of the time he was raised and wrote in, and he certainly doesn't begin to compare to Francis Parkman in that regard, but it is most annoying, at the very least.

I liked Across the Wide Missouri as well, but The Course of Empire has been a slog and then some.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, he made me understand the Mormons better than I ever have before. Which, okay, probably isn't saying much.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I get the feeling he was familiar with Mormons and the LDS power structures, but was also very much aware that he was Not Mormon, which is a different sort of Othering, I suspect.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It made me think a little about the Great Brain books, which I haven't read in years upon years, but are sort of tangentially about being Gentile kids in Utah. But, yeah, he'd clearly been observing the Mormons from a ringside seat, as it were.

[romp.livejournal.com]

I so enjoy your reviews. Just saying.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

One of these days we will have built up a large enough body of SF scholarship that we can quit with the whole "no it's respectable really I swear" thing. It especially gets up my nose when it's specifically science fiction scholarship, and it steps on fantasy to get where it's trying to go. (Since I'm rather partial to fantasy myeslf.) I wrote a whole bit in one of my grad papers about how Darko Suvin's like the guy in high school trying to get in with the in crowd by pretending he no longer knows the people who were his best friends just last year. He really just comes across as desperate for somebody else's validation.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes. And yes. Tired of being the left-handed stepchild over here, thanks.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Also, I'm sure Ursula K. Le Guin is just as tired as I am of her being the Token Female SF Writer.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I have frequently held that if we just stopped doing that now people wouldn't smell the pimply halitosis love-meeeee desperation and the job would be a hell of a lot easier.

Not that I feel strongly. *g*

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

If we persist in playing by their rules (signifier! post-modernism! deconstruction! bricolage! subversion! BINGO!), we are never going to win.

[roadrunnertwice]

Was there a post where you talked about why you were listening to the Rabkin? It sounds like a very frustrating experience, and I seem to've forgotten whether there was some particular redeeming/justifying feature to it all, or whether it was important enough in the lit field right now that it must be engaged (adversarially or no), or what.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh good lord, no. I was listening to Rabkin because my parents loaned me the CDs and my dad wanted to know what I thought. And because I needed something to distract me while I exercised. That's all.

[roadrunnertwice]

Oh! Okay, cool.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Once upon a time, I was sneaking into what I thought was an empty lecture hall at the University of Michigan, an hour before I was supposed to take a chemistry exam. I thought I could eat the sandwich in my bag, or look at my notes one more time, or cry with nobody seeing me (it was that kind of day). But there was a class going on in the big dark room, and a professor--an actual grown-up--talking seriously about Alice In Wonderland. It blew my head off, in a way I needed very badly at the time. I honor Eric Rabkin for that, despite his saying any number of foolish things before and since.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I thought he was actually very good on the nineteenth/early twentieth century stuff, Verne and Wells and utopian fiction and the pulps and children's literature.

[loligo.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the syllabus for his SF course looks like these days, but when I took it (nearly 20 years ago), it concentrated on those areas of strength. I was already a huge SF fan when I took the course, but my reading had been mostly limited by my dad's collection, which ran heavily to Frank Herbert, Piers Anthony, Jack Chalker, that sort of thing. So taking the course not only introduced me to the whole concept of the academic study of SF, it also introduced me to some much more thought-provoking books! So I'm grateful for that. (I never had the opportunity to take his Fantasy course, so I can't comment on that one.)

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

His analyses don't mention race hardly at all, but they do talk about sex, and especially about masculinity, and I can't help hearing a coded message to other believers in the ineluctability of male superiority: Psst! Over here! You can still talk like that over here!

Oooh! ooooh!

Is there a word for that? When men talk about certain things in a certain way and you're sure it has a coded message "I know the password to the secret clubhouse where we run the continuing patriarchy". Because it's a concept I need often enough to find these three-line explanations tedious, and I'd like a word or short phrase.

[ookpik.livejournal.com]

Are you familiar with the term "dog whistle"? It came up a lot in the recent (U.S.) election, not referring specifically to patriarchy but to the coded messages of this sort in general. (I don't know of one with the specific connotation, sorry.)

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear the DeVoto book left a hole

I hate it when that happens; you come across a book so well written and rich in information you commence to devouring-only to find one of the groups of people, or fictional sentient beings, or one time, in my case, a group of animals (dolphins) and their 'so what/whatever' dismissal leaves you wanting to chew on the carpet in frustration. People are messy even when they write sometimes. Still, it always make me sad.

Oh, and why should we write by 'their' rules? I have only one hard fast rule-no allowing stupid villains just because it'd make the writing easier. Other than that, I'm a rebel. *looks for rebel flag t-shirt*