Fitting, Peter 1979. The Modern Anglo-American SF Novel: Utopian Longing and Capitalist Cooptation. Science Fiction Studies 6(1): 59-76. [JSTOR]
The aim of this paper is to explore the interplay between ideology and utopian longing in the modern SF novel. Western SF is, on the one hand, a form of ideological production, one of the ways in which capitalism speaks itself and determines our ways of perceiving reality, one of the ways through which the real problems and conflicts present in society are transformed into false problems and imaginary resolutions. On the other hand, SF is also an important contemporary manifestation of what Ernst Bloch, for instance, has referred to as "utopian longing", humanity's continued striving for an "adequate future" - a tradition which took on new force and direction in the bourgeois world following the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which were attended by the belief in the possibility of cognitive progress. (Fitting 1979: 59)
The present is markedly inadequate.
SF has, of course, been defined in a variety of ways. When it si situated within certain literary traditions for thematic fields, without taking into account its social and historical context, its contemporary significance is obscured. SF has been defined as well as the literature of "cognitive estrangement"; but this definition, despite its merits, limits SF to a form of knowledge, to an understanding of the present. SF is, certainly, a continuation of various literary traditions; it does use many traditional themes; and, at its best, it is the educational, [|] cognitive literature Darko Suvin defines it to be. (Fitting 1979: 59-60)
Suvin's paper also mentions Stapledon, is already in the pile waiting to be read, so the context for these claims will become clear soon enough.
In the traditional novel, the utopian impulse is manifest in what the Hegelian Lukács described as a yearning for totality, for some lost sense of wholeness which the novelist attempts to restore to a fragmented reality - a longnig which is familiar to us in the fictional evocations of a nostalgia for some earlier, lost age. In SF this longing is often associated with the future. But the emancipatory thrust of SF, its ability to imagine alternatives, is often blunted and deformed. (Fitting 1979: 60)
Spinozist connotations.
Asimov's psychohistory is designed not to bring about a different, better world, but to preserve the already existing society for external threats. The possibility of real change and the reality of history are denied through the Spenglerian cyclical model of history and through the return to a future in which the ethics and economics of capitalism have been maintained. And this colonization of our future is not simply Asimov's response to the threat of Fascism, but also to the threat of alternative social structures - the "Communist menace" - insofar as psychohistory can be understood as Asimov's answer to dialectical materialism. (Fitting 1979: 61)
Makes sense. The Americans wouldn't have made a TV show out of it if it had taken issue with neoliberal capitalism.
But if Simak's work can be read as the continuation of the utopian impulse, akin to the utopian visions of the English philosopher W. Olaf Stapledon, the rejection of technology will become, in the SF on the 1950s, a rejection of the utopian possibility itself. (Fitting 1979: 62)
The intelligent dog thing is indeed a bit Stapledonian.
The 1950s witness the appearance, then, of a third phase where this implicit negation of capitalism is recaptured and defused through a rechanneling of the utopian impulse into another kind of imaginary resolution. For insofar as "human nature" was the illusory obstacle to utopia in the second phase (whether through innate aggressivity or Original Sin), the SF of the late 1950s takes as its certain theme the concept of a changed human nature. This is effected by depicting various parapsychological possibilities, particularly telepathy. (Fitting 1979: 63)
Stapledon was ahead of his time?
A first example is Frank Herbert's best-selling Dune (1965) which is dedicated to "dry land ecologists." In his portrayal of Paul Atreides and the desert world of Arrakis, Herbert balances a description of the ecology of Dune with an account of the "historical" forces which have led to a galactic crisis. The novel is the story of Paul's revenge for the death of his father as well as an ecological puzzle in which the reader gradually pieces together the reality of Dune. But behind the events lie neither historical forces nor individual will. There is, rather, biological determinism, "the need of their race to renew its scattered inheritance, to cross and mingle and infuse their bloodlines in a great new pooling of genes," which has brought Paul and the Fremen together to bring about that mixing of genes in the only possible way, "the ancient way, the tried and certain way that rolls over everything in its path: jihad." (ch. 1:22) History and the possibility of human endeavor and change are again reduced to "natural" forces; while ecology is, in this novel, an illusory scientific justification for a kind fo wish-fulfillment analogous to that offered by the machines which gave Van Vogt's Gosseyn (in the Non-A novels of the 1940s) the ability to transcend [|] time and space and his own death, or by the Martian language which gave Michael Valentine Smith and his followers unlimited powers in Stranger in a Strange Land. (Fitting 1979: 67-68)
I would call this a "Macedonian" reading of Dune.
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