A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A FUTURE MAN: TECHNOLOGY, MEMORY, AND THE KÜNSTLERROMAN IN SCIENCE FICTION

By

REBECCA L. MCNULTY

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2014

1 © 2014 Rebecca L. McNulty

2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For this project, I cannot give enough thanks to Dr. R. Brandon Kershner and Dr.

Phillip Wegner, for their time, help, and guidance. Thank you Dr. Wegner for your willingness to join this project on such short notice, for your invaluable suggestions, and for you background explanations of the Künstlerroman that I could not have gathered on my own. Thank you Dr. Kershner for allowing me to begin this project last summer, for following it through so closely, and for your invaluable, incomparable knowledge of

Joycian text, scholarship, and culture. It has been a privilege to work with each of you.

3 TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... 3

ABSTRACT...... 5

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION...... 7

2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE KÜNSTLERROMAN IN SCIENCE FICTION BEFORE THE FUTURE SHOCK...... 21

3 AN OVERVIEW OF THE KÜNSTLERROMAN IN SCIENCE FICTION AFTER THE FUTURE SHOCK...... 42

4 CONCLUSION...... 78

WORKS CITED...... 82

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH...... 87

4 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master of Arts

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A FUTURE MAN: TECHNOLOGY, MEMORY, AND THE KÜNSTLERROMAN IN SCIENCE FICTION

By

Rebecca L. McNulty

May 2014

Chair: R. Brandon Kershner Major: English

My thesis examines the narrative line drawn between James Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and how it has affected the tradition of Künstlerroman within twenty and twenty-first century science fiction stories. My project explores the ways that Joyce writes the story of a young man's growth into an artist in a society devoid of the technology available in future iterations. By exploring the shift in narrative tradition possible in the rapid technological change described by Alvin Tofler's Future

Shock, where we have experienced “too much change in too short a period,” I have traced threads of the same transition as necessary precursors to a systematic progression in the genre as a fusion between the traditions of literary and science fiction stories.

Using Stephen Dedalus as model for the young artist's coming of age, I argue that the Künstlerroman in science fiction explicates the rapid change that revolutionized culture and memory during and in response to the massive period of cultural anxiety. I use Portrait as a model of the definitive treatment of what existed in the early twentieth- century and how this baseline has contributed to the definition of the memory and

5 artistic preservation within the basic Künstlerroman. With this basis, I explore the progression of the Künstlerroman in science fiction through the twentieth, into the twentieth-century, and explore the way they expand on the definition of the artist archetype that Joyce so thoroughly defined in 1916.

6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

In 1904, Dana, A Magazine of Independent Thought rejected James Joyce's first attempt to publish the essay-story "A Portrait of the Artist." Joyce's story began, “The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait for, so capricious are we, that we cannot or will not conceive the past in any other than its iron memorial aspect.” The twenty-two year old aspiring artist was then and continued to be preoccupied with the mechanics of memory, both within his own mnemonic games and the inner dialogues of his narration. John S. Rickard’s comprehensive examination of

Joyce’s Book of Memory summarizes the extent to which memory affected Joyce’s personal life, culminating in his memorization of “The Lady of the Lake” as a coping technique in his recovery from painful eye surgery (1). For the young writer intent upon escaping infancy, repressed adolescence, and his own past, the portrait of an artist included an escape from the iron-clad memories that remained encased within his own personal history.

In his thwarted essay, Joyce continues, “Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only.” Joyce bleakly fantasized over a time when we could “conceive the past in any way other than its iron memorial aspect.” He craved a mechanism by which the past could be explored as a “fluid succession of presents” rather than a stone-clad decree of historical events.

After drafts of his essay became the unfinished Stephen Hero, it finally progressed to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which exemplifies the genre of the

Künstlerroman – the growth as an artist. As a branch of the Bildüngsroman, the

7 Künstlerroman focuses on how the stories of childhood grow into future artistry; however, unlike the traditional Bildüngsroman, the Künstlerroman concentrates on both character growth and the creation of the art itself: how art turns into memory in order to preserve both characters and their art objects. The Künstlerroman values the truthful creation of art within a narrative. The preoccupation with a truthful past raises the question of where truth fits into fiction, which David Richter summarizes as the obsession of narratologists since “Plato exiled the poets from the Republic for telling attractive lies about gods and men” (3). Richter further argues that if fiction were purely hypothetical, like fantasy, then truth would be impossible. That, however, does little to categorize what Richter calls the “aesthetically designed simulations of real life, autobiographies presented in the form of fiction,” such as Joyce’s Portrait and Virginia

Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (5).

On occasion, the Künstlerroman falls victim to the autobiographical presuppositions of its readers. Too often, the artist as character is confused with the author as character in what becomes a highly stylistic memoir disguised as fiction.

These autobiographical quandaries create a unique question for their author: should

Joyce's Stephen, for instance, know the Platonic exile that Joyce himself would have studied as a part of his Jesuit education? Should Stephen grapple with the same concepts of truth in fiction while still at Clongowes, years before his decision to pursue artistry as a profession and identity?

One answer is that the Künstlerroman captures the truth of an experience rather than that of individual history. This distinction would violate a definition of the genre proposed by Roberta Seret, who argues that the Künstlerroman must include

8 autobiographical elements of its author as “either an extension or revision of the artist's own personality”(23). Unfortunately, Seret's definition implies an intentional fallacy that unfairly limits the genre. Evy Varsamopoulou notes that Seret's definition can create only a “more or less autobiographical Bildüngsroman”(xiv). This definition inspires a

“purely thematic reading” of the genre, leaving no room for the appeal of a fictional narrative. I would instead point to Ernst Bloch's pinnacle essay “A Philosophical View of the Novel of the Artist,” in which he describes our desire to emphasize a character, particularly one whose “life assumes a more colorful aspect than what is usual,” or one whose life creates fictional interest (227). Bloch argues, “Whereas the detective novel requires a process of collecting evidence, penetrating backward to a past crime, the novel of the artist requires recognition of and interest in the creative person who brings out something new instead of something past”(229). Definitions of any literary concept are inherently problematic. Barry Malzberg treats the problem simply, with an old

Yiddish proverb where "fifty experts will produce fifty one definitions" (14). However,

Künstlerroman lends itself to a generally overarching theme of what will exist between its pages: an artist will grow and his art will change with that growth.

Art uses an artist's past experiences to create a new representation of the present. Even art that mimics present reality creates a newly performed artifact that transcends the present of its creation. If we fuse the definitions posited by Joyce and

Bloch, the artist “brings out something new instead of something past,” which “implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only.” Using this definition of the Künstlerroman, we can begin to see the

9 possibilities of the genre acting as a bridge into stories that speculate on the newness of technological innovations and the possibilities of future forms of artistic preservation.

The Künstlerroman depends upon the concept of memory to preserve both the artistic journey and also the art object encased within its text. By the nature of this journey, the young artist must appeal to the concept of memory for her art to exist beyond her lives in the narrative, to remain permanent and justify her creation. Even in realistic fiction, the Künstlerroman has long struggled to find a narrative structure that facilitates the internal dialogues and also the technological changes that have preserved these works of art. The genre encounters both the artistic growth of its characters but also the society that facilitates his artistry. As such, the genre of the Künstlerroman has evolved to meet the new inventions that have changed the creation and distribution of art itself. The periods of rapid change facilitate the creation and also the preservation of art – the Künstlerroman depends upon the technology available to preserve contextual art within the cultural memory.

In realistic fiction such as Joyce's Portrait, the line between character and technological environment mimics that which readers have experienced or could imagine experiencing themselves. Stephen internalizes Joyce's environment to fuel his poetry, and readers relate to his experience. In the period between 1893 when Joyce began to study at Belvedere College and 1916, when he published Portrait, technological inventions had already begun to change the tasks of daily life. From the first motion-picture camera in 1895, the motored vacuum cleaner in 1899, the first radio transmission in 1901, the theory of relativity in 1905, and color photography in 1907, the very nature of how we interacted with the world had changed. Much has been made of

10 Einstein's theory, for instance, and how it may have impacted Joyce's early writing.

William McManus summarizes:

In the pre-relativistic world there was generally only one correct answer to any given question. The same applies to Stephen Dedalus's world before he learned to think for himself. The beginning of the novel is told from an objective third- person point of view. The reader is presented with every side of an argument. A prime example of this is the Christmas dinner, where each side of the political discussion is presented with equal weight. As the novel progresses the story is presented form a viewpoint that steadily turns from objectivity to relativity. Soon we hear only Stephen's opinion on important matters.

At first glance, McManus' argument seems overly simplistic: Einstein explains relativity;

Joyce applies relativity to the free indirect discourse of Stephen's narration. I would, instead, temper the argument to describe not Stephen's internal struggle expressing the truth in his future, but rather his internalization of the change in his society. The technological inventions and innovations of any one period represent that change and its inherent consequences.

In response to the auditory recordings and transmissions of Joyce's age,

Stephen pays close, obsessive attention to recording the sounds around him. Angela

Frattarola argues in her 2009 article "Developing an Ear for the Modernist Novel:

Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and James Joyce" that the modernist writers

"represent subjectivity as constructed in part through auditory" (137). She continues, "To represent subjectivity, they not only had to think about how we listen to the world and are shaped by the sounds we hear, but they also had to get a feel for the sound of 'inner speech,'" where the authors must use "poetic devices to make their text sound out in the reader's ear" (138). Stephen's moment of artistic desire culminates in the question: “Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour?” (180). Frattarola points to Joyce's eye surgery to explain a preoccupation

11 with sound; I would, instead, point to the influx of auditory recording possible and also more available than photographs, none of which been easily accessible previously, and the effect this technological innovation has upon the Künstlerroman.

Imagine, for a moment, the technological change Joyce would have experienced as he was drafting Portrait. The photograph – particularly in color – is gaining popularity, and suddenly, artists are not the only individuals charged with preserving visual records of events. Alexander Graham Bell has created a commercially successful telephone., and the radio has begun to transmit vocal reports. Suddenly the world is able to communicate more quickly than it had through letters. The automobile has become more commercially available to the middle class. An individual may move more quickly, preserve photographs, listen to radio broadcasts, and hear the voices he had only read on paper. The technological change was so overwhelming that it hardly appears within

Joyce's Portrait, although he does grapple with it more directly in later Ulysses. Instead,

Stephen encounters the early, unnamed stages of technological change as well as the subjectivity in the actual sounds he hears throughout the novel. Stephen encounters many “pictures” but no “photographs.” When his parents leave Clongowes for the first time, “the car had driven off with his mother and father in it.” They call, “Goodbye,

Stephen, goodbye!” and repeat, “Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!” but Joyce attributes no names to the words. Instead, we hear disconnected salutations that could as easily be radio broadcast as his parents words. The automobile literally carries his parents away as their words linger, and Stephen is left alone, removed from his family and the voices he has grown accustomed to hearing. The sounds he remembers becomes the memory images young Stephen associates with his parents and the fuel for the sound of

12 language that inspires his artistry. Joyce, influenced by the influx of auditory technology, literally preserves recorded voices within his text.

In realistic fiction such as Portrait, the young artists respond to the same technological innovations as their authors. However, this leads us to ask: how might the story react to an environment as fictional and speculative as the narrative itself? What if the reader could not have imagined the setting or futuristic technical advancement?

Traditionally, science fiction explores the speculative changes that may exist in a future world, rather than the one its author currently inhabits. The difference between the Künstlerroman in realistic fiction and the Künstlerroman in science fiction exists in how a young artist responds to the possibility of future (rather than present) technology.

Where the realistic Künstlerroman explores the past as a fluid succession of presents, the Künstlerroman in science fiction explores the present as a fluid succession of possible futures.

The young artist in a work of science fiction internalizes technological innovations not present in the world of his reader, and in doing so, he familiarizes the strange newness into familiar art. Where realistic fiction explores the internal journey from young person to artist, science fiction instead explores the external relationship between future technology, art, and the young person who comes of age embracing the specific, artistic exploration.

As a rule, science fiction works to make metaphor literal within a narrative. In the case of the Künstlerroman, it encounters the construct of a world notably different from the one its author inhabits. Rather than the traditional “coming of age story,” science fiction explores what John Clute calls the “conceptual breakthrough,” which he defines

13 as the scientific revolutions that break down real and unreal to construct another paradigm where the world of narrative turns out to be nothing more than a construct.

The Künstlerroman in science fiction requires this reversal of paradigm to allow its protagonist to create real art in an unreal environment. The paradigm between real and unreal creates a new world with which a protagonist must learn to interact. When this protagonist is also an artist, the paradigm irretrievably changes the art.

Science fiction has a long history of stories about the science behind art, including dedicated anthologies edited by James Blish, Thomas Monteleone, and Ian

Watson, among others. Clute explains, “By virtue of its nature, sf has one foot firmly set in each of C P Snow's 'two cultures,' and sf stories occasionally exhibit an exaggerated awareness of that divide, including the “emotional richness of art [which is] necessary to temper and redeem the cold objectivity of science.” The progression of the genre from the 30's pulps, through World War II and the Golden Age, and into the 70's new wave, exacerbated the connection between the emotional richness of art and character. In his

2004 Archaeologies of the Future, Frederic Jameson republishes his argument for the difference between “old wave” and “new wave” SF to be emblematic of the change in what he calls “the lost-spaceship-as-universe” story. He uses stories by Robert Heinlein

(old wave Orphans of the Sky) and Brian Aldiss (new wave Starship) to illustrate the nuances of his argument. In each, he writes, “the basic narrative line [describes] the experiences of the hero as he ventures beyond the claustrophobic limits of his home territory into other compartments of a world peopled by strangers and mutants” (254).

Jameson articulates the difference between old and new wave as “the way in which each deals with the principal strategic problem of such a narrative” (256).

14 Ultimately, Jameson concludes that the key difference in narrative involves the role of the reader in discovering the nature of the plot. In Heinlein “all the discoveries take place within, and are predicated on the existence and stability of, the narrative frame.” In Aldiss, a twist ending “returns upon the opening pages to transform the very generic expectations aroused there. It suddenly re-identifies the category of the narrative in a wholly unexpected way, and shows us that we have been reading a very different book than the one we started out with” (Archaeologies 257). Although Jameson does not explicitly refer to the phenomenon, his new wave observation speaks to Clute's theory of the conceptual breakthrough, where the paradigm of real and unreal reverse to construct another paradigm in which the world of narrative turns out to be nothing more than a construct. I plan to explore observations similar to Jameson's on the role of the artist, rather than the space explorer, between the narrative strategies of each period and how these strategies became more tangible within and after a period of rapid technological change.

Science fiction criticism pays close attention to the divide between old and new wave stories that have also evolved within the century, often characterized as the shift in the early sixties from hard sf, intent upon the scientific tropes of physics and astronomy, to soft sf, that privileges the psychological characterization of individuals who find themselves in the science fictional environment. David Higgins explains the difference in writers of new wave, who “were highly experimental” and “wanted to develop a modern literary science fiction with advanced aesthetic techniques.” Like every other literary movement, hard dates have no place in distinguishing the old from new, and in regards to the artist story, I would instead like to consider the technological

15 implications rather than the “old” and “new” designations. I will instead analyze the artist stories, individually, as those that require technology integrally within their narratives and those that refer to technology as setting rather than integral plot. Building from this observation, I will use definitions posed by Alvin Toffler's Future Shock as a flexible point of division between the role that technological innovations play in the development of the artist.

In 1971, Future Shock explained the inherent anxiety experienced by individuals in the midst of too much technological change in too short a period of time. At the same moment in history, science fiction was attempting to make sense of these changes. My paper will examine the role that rapid cultural change has played in that ultimate divide beyond the early 60s. Using Future Shock as a dividing point, I will explore the overall history of notable examples of the genre on either side of Toffler's 1971 publication.

Science fiction pays particular attention to the historical period in which it is written, partially as a chronological response to its frequent rejection from the place of high culture.

This fear is particularly poignant when readers and critics realize that we cannot avoid the change science fiction describes. Barry Malzberg articulates both the fear and the consequences of rapid change, writing "the effects of a changed technology upon us will be more profound than change brought about by psychological or social pressure.

What technological alteration, the gleaming or putrid knife of the future, is going to do will cut far deeper than the effects of adultery, divorce, clinical depression, rap groups, consciousness-raising, encounter sessions or even the workings of that famous old law firm of Sack, Pillage, Loot & Burn” (16). Malzberg, like Toffler, limits rapid change to

16 technology, but it really spread to all aspects of social, political and yes, technological culture. Rapid change alters our understanding of culture, and culture predictably fights back against that pillaging and recreation. Science fiction refuses to let us forget that change is both ominous and inevitable. Malzberg continues, "It will be these changes -- those imposed extrinsically by force -- which really matter; this is what the science fiction writer is saying, and in their inevitability and power they trivialize the close psychological interactions in which most of us transact our lives (or at least would like to)" (16).

In response to culture's rejection of science fictional predictions, I will explore chronologically the key examples of Künstlerromane in science fiction as a connection between the predictions of science and the acceptance of culture. This divide is a key feature to the science fiction stories. As Malzberg writes, "This is what was being said, implicitly, in all of the crazy and convoluted stories of the thirties and forties behind the funny covers; more sedately, and occasionally in hardcover, it is being said today." This vision, he argues, "is inimical to the middle class," which trivializes its worth and causes the genre to have been "perceived almost from the beginning as the enemy of culture"

(16). The perception has hardly changed, from the pulp culture to the eighties and beyond into the twenty-first century. As Malzberg writes, "Science fiction is hardly, at the outset of the decade of the eighties, much more of a reputable and critically accepted genre than it was thirty years ago" (17). However, the Künstlerroman acts a small bridge between science fiction, the middle-class enemy of culture, and the high art on which we build our cultural expectations.

17 Rather than the enemy of culture, I would instead point to the French “iongue duree,” which F. S. Schwarzbach defines as “the movement of history over hundreds and even thousands of years, the subtle influences of climate, topography and technology upon the shape of human culture” (167). Science fiction speculates, articulates, and defines that alteration of the shape of human culture. Culture may buck against the articulation, but technological change does not stop simply because culture fears its consequences. Ultimately, this thesis will argue that the technological environment of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century create an environment of rapid change, producing social anxiety. Science fiction has responded to the technological anxiety by postulating the relationship between art and science in near and far future narratives, where the technological change is even more advanced, and where young artists come of age as a means of internalizing the cultural environment.

Despite their potential for interesting interpretation, I will not be discussing reincarnated artists, through technological means or through time travel; these stories consider an artist that comes into a different age rather than the story of how they mature in their art. I will also not discuss the creation of new art forms in response to new technologies, despite the artistic and literary beauty of JG Ballard's rendition of

“The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D,” and the later blatant pastiches of his Vermilion Sands collection in 1971, such as Michael Coney's The Girl with a Symphony in her Fingers or

Eric Brown's "The Girl who Died for Art and Lived."

Instead, I will concentrate on the art forms to which a contemporary reader will relate and recognize and how these artists respond to the technological innovation of a near or far future society. I will touch on a combination of what Clute has called “artists'

18 colonies of the future,” and more importantly the stories of individual artists in future environments. Ultimately, this thesis will discuss the line between the science fiction story that includes art and the science fiction story that redefines the artist. This line will exist most explicitly in the tradition, if not the actual stories, of Ballard's Vermillion

Sands. While the new technology within the famous Cloud Sculptors falls beyond the scope of my research, it has inspired the stories of future artists using technology to create art a contemporary reader could more easily imagine.

I will concentrate on the stories that reproduce the features of infancy and redefine the “iron memorial aspect” of past and therefore present. The nature of science fiction is that it uses the present of its moment to speculate on life in the future, what

Jameson would explain as the differentiation between “the 'real future' and the 'mock futures' that transform “our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come” (Archeologies 288). Ultimately, the iron memorial aspect of the past in science fiction concentrates on the technological change occurring in the moment of its conception and the way anxiety toward that change has affected the author, the characters, and the concept of memory within each narrative.

When defining a story as a Künstlerroman, I will use a story in which an artist grows in some notable way; defining science fiction, a world whose plot and setting require some element of scientific development. Rather than investigating a more specific definition of the Science Fiction Künstlerroman, I will point instead to Gary K.

Wolfe's discussion of the intersection of science fiction and myth, where he questions the place of defining either term and chooses instead to discuss why they so often find themselves connected. I will follow this same theory and discuss the ways in which

19 science fiction connects to the Künstlerroman, rather than proposing “a list of definitions” for each before picking “out the ones that match,” as Wolfe agrees would be futile and “unacceptable to students of both fields in the long run” (94).

For the sake of this exploration, I will use as a model of the Künstlerroman

Joyce's Portrait – arguably the most famous English artist story of the 20th century.

Using Stephen Dedalus as model for the young artist's coming of age, I will examine examples of the Künstlerroman in science fiction before and after the defined future shock to explicate the innovations that revolutionized technology and memory during and in response to the massive period of technological change and cultural anxiety.

While it might at first seem unusual to use Portrait, published in 1916, as a model for the historical change in two periods of science fiction, I will point to Maurice Beebe's 1964

Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts, a discussion of “the Artist as Hero in Fiction,” where he argues that Stephen has so often been imitated “because Joyce succeeded in giving definitive treatment to an archetype that was firmly established long before the twentieth century” (260). I will, therefore, use Portrait as a model of the definitive treatment of what existed in the early twentieth-century and how this baseline has contributed to the definition of the memory and artistic preservation within the basic Künstlerroman. With this basis, I will explore the progression of the Künstlerroman in science fiction through the twentieth, into the twentieth-century, and explore the way they expand on the definition of the artist archetype that Joyce so thoroughly defined in 1916.

20 CHAPTER 2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE KÜNSTLERROMAN IN SCIENCE FICTION BEFORE THE FUTURE SHOCK

Science fiction examines, uses, reconfigures, and judges every piece of cultural change it can find, experience, or imagine. Albert Berger summarizes the history, writing:

First, by direct intention SF is about change; and since the 1930s, it has particularly concerned itself with the social change associated with scientific and technological development. SF writers have never been as single-mindedly celebratory of technology as critics often think they were before Hiroshima, but many (or most) of them did (and do) celebrate the beneficial power of new sciences and associated technologies (12).

Science fiction depends on the power behind newness and the themes that emerge from these technologies. However, science fiction still reacts to the practical application available at the time of its conception, and it reacts to the rate at which culture changes in any given period. The more culture changes, the more the genre changes in response.

Borrowing from Jameson's “old wave” definition, I would argue that science fiction before the period of rapid future shock shares the same tendency to encase all aspects of its narrative within the text itself, allowing its reader to follow succinctly without looking for meaning outside the linear narrative. Science fiction has not redefined the Künstlerroman so much as it has created the environment to explore the artist's story in the midst of innovation its present readers can only imagine.

Nevertheless, even in these technological evolutions, the Künstlerroman in science fiction must remain interested in the same conceptions of preservation that preoccupied

Joyce in the early twentieth-century.

21 As Joyce drafted A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he remained interested in the question of memory and how it functions and fluctuates as art within his narrative.

Ultimately, he concluded that technology – the memory of recorded sounds – represents the mimetic elements of the artist's journey. In the 1916 published version of Portrait,

Joyce alternates between a free indirect discourse in which Stephen narrates his story and the omniscient narration that informs his reader about Stephen's own thoughts. This ambiguous duality constitutes an attention to the relativity between actual and remembered sound, and also what John Paul Riquelme defines as a “double perspective, the perspective of memory.” He continues:

By means of this double perspective we can experience simultaneously both skepticism and the deeply-felt impact of thoughts and events in the central character’s changing sensibility. The inherently double, or multiple, interiorized style is the vehicle Joyce invents to render the deep ambivalence and dissonance of Stephen’s mental life, especially in the interplay of critical self- scrutiny and vivid recollection. As Joyce complexly presents them, ambivalence, dissonance, and interplay inform the mental process of creativity (108).

The double perspective of memory allowed Joyce to come as close as possible to the fluid succession of presents explored in Stephen’s past, which is facilitated by the alternation between critical self-scrutiny and vivid recollection. While Riquelme illuminates the contrast between deeply-felt impact and a changing sensibility, he only opens the door to how this double perspective influences the way memory has been facilitated by the evolving technology in the twentieth century.

Science fiction has long used technology – both in its present advancement and presuppositions of its future abilities – to arm and foil its characters and their conflicts.

However, the extent to which these technologies actually affect these characters speaks to the shift in the Künstlerroman in science fiction beginning in the second half of the

22 twentieth-century. Clute mentions that the science fiction stories concerning art occur almost exclusively after World War II. While he notes several examples that could fit into the genre, I will point interested readers to his encyclopedia entry for further study. To that end, we will begin our exploration of notable works in the pre-Future Shock category with Robert Heinlein's Double Star, whose very title explores Riquelme's theory of the double perspective of memory within the artist story.

Published in 1956, Double Star is a prime example of the science fictional trope of creating a literal plot from a metaphorical idea and the conceptual breakthrough it inspires. The story is built upon the actual mechanics of the actor assuming a false identity: The Great Lorenzo is hired to impersonate John Joseph Bonforte, the Chief, the Former Supreme Minister, leader of the loyal opposition, and head of the

Expansionist coalition: “the most loved (and the most hated!) man in the entire Solar

System” (33). Heinlein gives us a beautifully constructed world that is more concerned with setting than character and hides behind a first person narration to give the illusion of character progression. Other than the hard scientific details, we have very little changing technological culture, and that which we do have is taken for granted and does not affect individual characters any more than they might be affected by a coffee maker or a pot-bellied stove.

Heinlein's storyline relies on two forms of technology: the space travel that allows for colonial ambassadors to reach Mars, and the makeup that allows Lorenzo to impersonate the Chief. Heinlein takes great care to underscore these actual technological developments. He writes what “Broadbent could not realize was that the grease paint really was not necessary. It makes it easier, of course, but I had used a

23 touch of it primarily because he expected it; being one of the yokels, he naturally assumed that make-up consisted of paint and powder”(15). Instead, Heinlein argues, the technique of the acting – not the technology he uses – makes a worthwhile performance. Heinlein privileges the artistic struggle above the technological innovation to preserve the methodological importance for his character. It is much the same as the artistic struggle that Bloch articulates when he writes that “nothing stands in the way of this kind of struggle, nor in the way of the depicted struggle, to investigate that which cannot be solved” (235). For Heinlein's Lorenzo, that which cannot be solved is his ultimate transition between actor and the man he impersonates. The Künstlerroman exists not in the coming of age as an actor – he is mature when the story begins – but the growth between acting for craft and believing in that which he portrays.

Rather than a technological innovation, the space ship that carries Lorenzo from

Earth, to Mars, and back to the interstellar empire serves as an intermediary between the world Heinlein's reader understands and the world that has yet to be experienced.

The spaceship as a symbol in science fiction, Wolfe argues, “nearly always fills the role of the vessel of the known or the vessel of the unknown.” He continues, “In stories dealing with the exploration of space by people from earth, the interior of the ship is an image of the known world and the exterior an image of the unknown world, with its threatening and fearful associations” (97). The ship acts as an intermediary vessel, a closed universe in which the characters and readers exist in the stasis between the familiar and the extraordinary. The transition between these known and unknown spaces leads to what Clute will call the conceptual breakthrough, when the paradigm reverses and what the world the reader believed to exist becomes a construct, but

24 Heinlein's narrative has not reached that point of stylistic narration – he concentrates on character. Instead, Double Star uses Lorenzo's personal growth in response to his own xenophobia and the transition from earth to set the stage for later examples of science fiction that will more fully examine the reversal of paradigms.

Lorenzo experiences several moments of growth – both artistic and personal – within the novel, none of which are facilitated by technological innovations. Most noticeably, he grows past an irrational hatred of Martian image, culture, and smell. At first, he “did not fancy having a thing that looks like a tree trunk topped off by a sun helmet claiming the privileges of a man,” or “the way they grew pseudo limbs; it reminded [him] of snakes crawling out of their holes” (5). Early in the story, he sees a

Martian “looking like a nightmare toadstool,” and writes, “I was frozen, dazed, by acute xenophobia” (17). This attitude continues until he is faced with the prospect of being inducted – as the Chief – into a Martian nest and must undergo medical counseling to control his xenophobic tendencies. Notably, Lorenzo is hypnotized out of his “racist” speciesism rather than aided by any far-future technical means. The process of hypnosis would have been astutely familiar to Heinlein, rather than an invention as advanced as an interspeciary solar system. At first, Lorenzo exclaims “Doctor-you hypnotized me!”

The doctor responds, “You told me to.”

Lorenzo counters, “But I can't be hypnotized.”

“Sorry to hear it” (42).

In this tongue and cheek exchange, Heinlein considers Lorenzo's shock at having been conditioned to appreciate that which he once irrationally despised. The psychological

25 rather than technical process of deconditioned therapy thereby acts as a symbol for the way technology plays into the background, not the forefront, of Heinlein's artist story.

After Lorenzo's personal growth away from xenophobic fear, Heinlein's story climaxes when the original Chief dies and Lorenzo must decide whether or not to continue the ruse and assume his political duties or to abandon it and allow the political cause to crumble. Heinlein's story begins to describe the art of acting and ends in the actor's growth into the art of politics. Indeed, Heinlein takes great time to show, in detail, the way Lorenzo learns to act in a political setting. In learning his job, as an actor, he vicariously learns to be the Chief, to be a politician, and to grow in that knowledge. It is, as Bloch wrote, “to sketch buildings that were not built, to describe a musical composition technically that would have probably been possible in its time”(235).

Heinlein takes great lengths to limit his technological change and convince his readers to suspend their disbelief and accept that Lorenzo's method acting would have been possible in its time. The task of the Künstlerroman, in science fiction, is to articulate the works of art a reader would believe to be possible in its time, even if this time were in the future, on a spaceship, in a galactic empire.

The line between Lorenzo the actor and Lorenzo the body double makes the metaphor of the double perspective literal. In his transformation, we “experience simultaneously both skepticism and the deeply-felt impact of thoughts and events in the central character’s changing sensibility.” Heinlein never mimics Joyce's narration by straying into free indirect discourse, but instead, he makes that narrative shift a literal progression within his narrative. Even without deviating from a first-person retrospective

26 narration, Heinlein comments on and shows his central character's changing sensibility as he literally becomes another person.

Ultimately, Heinlein's Künstlerroman begins to comment on memory after

Lorenzo has become the Chief. He has transitioned from “a persona I was proud to wear” to twenty-five years later, when the narrator admits the original novel was a retrospective analysis “to try to straighten out [his] own confusion” (90; 145). He writes,

“I tried to tell the truth and not to spare myself because it was not meant to be read by anyone but myself and my therapist,” and yet in the same monologue, he refers to

“Bonafonte's body,” refusing to differentiate his former self from what he has become.

He refers to Lorenzo as “he,” who “was never a success as an actor, not really.” His wife, Penelope, “claims that she remembers him better than I do—and that she never loved anyone else.” He continues, “So time changes us” (146). The narrator has forgotten his original persona and become his artistic endeavor, and even though

Penelope claims to have remembered, Heinlein shows that the artistry has corrupted the concept of memory. Lorenzo has disappeared, and the duplicate Chief has become a new person in and of himself, redrafted by the art that Heinlein privileges throughout the Künstlerroman.

In this first example that we will explore, Heinlein succumbs to Jameson's preconception that “all the discoveries take place within, and are predicated on the existence and stability of, the narrative frame.” By the nature of the retrospective first person narration, in which we discover that 25 years have past and Lorenzo has fused seamlessly into his charge, we read the narrative chronologically, in past tense, just as

Heinlein originally wrote it. As a Künstlerroman, we watch Lorenzo actively transition

27 from a not quite successful actor to the epitome of a character actor – he who has literally become the character he worked to be. He has become what Maurice Beebe claims to have been Stephen's aspiration of godhood, where “the true artist, he said, is godlike in his role as life-creator and in his sublime indifference” (284). Lorenzo has created new life for the Chief, and once his creation was complete, he succumbed to the sublime indifference of the epitome actor: he who no longer has to act to convince his audience. He journeys to true artistry, and this journey defines his Künstlerroman.

Heinlein's novel introduces us to the sub-genre I will describe as stories of the artist set in future outer space. Unlike other stories set in future outer space, the

Künstlerroman must examine the role of art in the technology, the alien, and the far future. Obviously, as we have seen in Heinlein, artists in space face profoundly different challenges than their earthly counterparts, from the deviations in gravity to the races they encounter. As a means of communication, the art created by the growing artist works to express both the artist's growth but also a connection between the races encountered in this unknown environment.

Science fiction on Mars creates an environment that requires heightened levels of communication to maneuver between humans and Martians. Often, the character of an artist possesses the means and temperament to navigate these situations. Published in 1963, Roger Zelazny's A Rose for Ecclesiastes demonstrates the place of the historical narrative in a story of alien encounter and, more importantly, the person who transcribes that narrative. In the tradition of the new wave, A Rose focuses on the psychological predicament of the Martian people, but its narrative structure remains planted in what Jameson would call the old wave tradition: remaining self-contained,

28 encompassed within the story itself, rather than forcing his reader to look beyond the narrative. A Rose illustrates a transitionally psychological story that still limits its concern with technological change.

Zelazny's story depends on the poet who impregnates a Martian after the race believed themselves to be sterile. The story resolves so fully around character that any technology, aside from allowing humans to reach Mars, is largely inconsequential when compared to the perceived sterility. Zelazny's narrative has yet to reach the epitome of the future shock environment and the technological invasion it inspires. The most we see of the technology in A Rose is the “Jeepster” Gallinger uses to navigate the desert and the bio-genetically grown rose he has commissioned for Braxa, his Martian lover.

As is typical to my definition of the pre-Future Shock story, Zelazny uses technology in the background of his story, leaving the psychological exploration at the forefront.

The Künstlerroman within A Rose is the journey from poet on Earth to poet on

Mars, and the distinction Zelazny draws between the subsequent varieties of art. To draw this distinction, Zelazny compares two artists from two races: Gallinger the poet, and Braxa the dancer. On Mars, dance is a solemn act of history. When Gallinger is first introduced to the art, he exclaims to himself that “their damned circuits of form and periphrasis here ran worse than the Korean!” (182). However, he chides himself as he remembers “the dance was the highest art, according to Locar, not to mention Havelock

Ellis, and I was about to see how their centuries-dead philosopher felt it should be conducted” (182). And yet, after the dance, Gallinger is helplessly moved; while he is tense, sweating, and wondering if he should applaud, his host simply responds, “she is

29 good,” and “she knows all the dances.” On Mars, we are led to believe, the dance is a skill, rather than an art: it is to instruct rather than affect its viewers.

Unlike Heinlein's Martians, Zelazny describes a race so similar to humans in their looks and mannerisms that they not only wear the same clothing but also mate –we learn – interchangeably. In his shock and delight, Gallinger exclaims, “Your people live longer than ours. If our child is normal it will mean our races can intermarry. There must be other fertile women of your race” (207). Braxa only laughs, because it is foretold,

“decided, voted upon, and passed” that the Martian race would die. What Gallinger believed to have been abstract prophesy, he discovers had been closer to parliamentary procedure, yet this parliamentary procedure appears stricter than unchangeable predictions. Zelazny draws the difference between Martian and human in their willingness or lack thereof to deviate from prophesy, and he draws upon this difference to explain the unknown of the Martian culture.

Despite the similarities between Martians and humans, Zelazny still incorporates the human base camp as the intermediary between what Wolfe has defined as the known and the unknown. Gallinger is thrilled when asked to move from the base camp to the temple, as much for own ego as for the cultural implications of his acceptance.

However, Zelazny uses the Martian ecology as a dividing point between the known, the unknown, and what Gallinger leaves behind when he leaves the base camp. After hearing one referenced in Gallinger's poetry, Braxa asks for a flower, which she has never seen and cannot imagine. When he agrees, she invites him to live in the Martian city, for a while, which Zelazny uses to suggest the possibility of the two races intermixing in deep, rooted ways. Gallinger does not see the implications. Instead, he

30 embraces the idea that he will get to do what everyone at the camp had hoped and dreamed of doing. Gloating even in his narration, he describes: “Everyone back at the ship was anxious to see the Martians, poke needles in the Martians, ask them about

Martian climate, diseases, soil chemistry, politics, and mushrooms (our botanist was a fungus nut, but a reasonably good guy) – and only four or five had actually gotten to see them” (190).When Gallinger passes on the request for a flower, the reasonably good guy becomes as integral to the fusion of the races as Gallinger himself, although this fact is not something Gallinger would ever admit.

Gallinger asks Kane the botanist, “Grow any toadstools in the sand yet?” in order to degrade his work from ecological exploration to an obsession with fungus. When asked for a rose, Kane responds, “I'd have to use the tanks. It would take at least three months to get you flowers, even under forced growth.” Gallinger responds, “I'm moving up to Tirellian today, but I'll be in and out all the time. I'll be here when it blooms” (191).

By making a point that he will be in and out of the known world of the camp, Gallinger shows his reader that he is not as self-assured as he might wish them to believe. By assuring Kane he would see the bloom, he tries to make himself more influential to the botanical fusion than he actually is. Kane requires a human designed tank and forced human manipulation to produce the flower. Gallinger is simply the means of delivery.

Gallinger succeeds in his art by convincing the Martian people to believe his words as myth. However, while Gallinger succeeds in his art, he fails in his relationship with Braxa. This failure is symbolized in the rose that he gives that does not buy her love. Braxa fulfilled her duty to the man destined to change the prophesy; however, just as the Martians would never grow a rose without tanks and forced growth, Braxa would

31 never truly love Gallinger as he had hoped. The matriarch exclaims, “There has never been a flower on Mars, but we will learn to grow them” (215). She truly believes these words, but the metaphor disintegrates as quickly as flower roots in sand; flowers on

Mars are just as impossible – Gallinger finds – as Braxa's love. She compares

Gallinger's prophesy to an impossible task, where he has grown as an artist but failed as a lover. Zelazny's Gallinger deviates from Joyce's Stephen in Beebe's definition of

Stephen's aspiration, where "the true artist, he said, is godlike in his role as life-creator and in his sublime indifference” (284). Gallinger cares deeply for Braxa, and he wishes this caring were not the case. He wishes himself sublime indifference. He has literally created life by convincing the Martian people to live, but he cannot escape his own feelings of rejection.

Critics might question whether A Rose fits the definition of the Künstlerroman, seeing how its narrator was only brought to Mars – long before the story began – because of his fame as a linguist and poet. However, the novel of the artist is first and foremost a novel of character and growth. It is also an artifact preserving the art within its text. This concept contributes to the conclusion that, as Bloch argues, “There is still no existing novel of the artist that has brought to life such artistic processes in a movement forward, in an until now not-yet so that the artistic process could find its entire self-portrait: that is, the portrayal of the desire to articulate, to form the face itself of that which has never been before” (236-7). Gallinger explicitly duplicates the book of

Ecclesiastes, but articulates the duplication as an act of connection between the races: a connection to duplicate feelings. The Martian setting creates an environment where

“the face itself of that which has never been before” is possible. Zelazny reclaims the

32 tongue-and-cheek “nothing new under the sun” in an alien environment, allowing the setting of science fiction to revolutionize the artist story.

Much has been written on A Rose as a Martian story, as a post-apocalyptic story, as a mythic story – and yet, little to none on A Rose as an Artist's story. This critical hole is especially surprising since the narrator is, without a doubt, a poet. Indeed, Gallinger is what Thomas Morrissey calls "the beatnik poet-linguist of the non-nuclear masterpiece" who "tries to convince a dying Martian race to live in spite of adversity and ennui" (190).

Zelazny equates the poet to the ennui and psychological misfortune that he must solve.

Ultimately, the notable ennui has created a mythical environment in which the Martians live and Gallinger must penetrate. As poet, linguist, and translator, Gallinger decides to translate “the sentiment, as well as the vocabulary” of the Book of Ecclesiastes, to

“show them that an Earthman had once thought the same thoughts, felt similarly” to their current “tenor,” which was “couched within these elemental symbols” and “fiercely pessimistic” (181). Ecclesiastes, to the Martians, is new, and they give its credit to

Gallinger, who willingly accepts it.

Ultimately, Zelazny's story uses the story of the artist to personify the myth in science fiction. Zelazny responds to Stapledon's quote by allowing Gallinger, rather than the genre, to “achieve neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth.” Gallinger uses his translation of the Book of Ecclesiastes and his own Earthly poetry to convince the

Martians of a new myth – the myth of Gallinger, rather than of Locar, who had condemned them to death. In response to his words, the matriarchal Mothers answer,

“You read us his words, as great as Locar's. You read to us how there is 'nothing new under the sun.' And you mocked his words as you read them—showing us a new thing”

33 (214). As with the flower, this new thing represents the art, rather than the artist, who succeeds in changing the collective mind but cannot change the individual he hoped to love. Gallinger fails as a man, but Zelazny shows him to succeed as an artist. He has created myth.

In his article “Zelazny: Mythmaker of Nuclear War,” Thomas J. Morrissey argues,

"Zelazny pays homage to the human spirit by celebrating the essential optimism inherent in our need to create." The Künstlerroman, as experienced by Gallinger, represents the transition from poet on Earth to poet on Mars, where words transition from an appeal to emotion to an appeal to the life of an entire race. Zelazny allows

Gallinger to elevate his poetry into the realm of myth. Morrissey argues, "Humans invent myths; therefore, they are above them. Hence, periodic creative blasphemy is a necessity and a right. Myths satisfy for a time, but not forever. Each generation must examine age-old wisdom and reshape, repackage it for the present." As Bloch would define, Gallinger succeeds “to sketch buildings that were not built, to describe a musical composition technically that would have probably been possible in its time”(235). He repackages the book of Ecclesiastes for the Martian present, but the Martians do not realize that myths only satisfy for a time: the believe his words to be forever, and

Zelazny uses this preconception to separate the races from humans looking forward and Martians looking back.

As a Last Martian story, the concept of memory is paramount for the Martian history to live beyond their perceived demise and into their extended future. As much as

A Rose is a Last Martian story, it is also a First Earthling story, as Gallinger impresses upon his reader that he is the first to have entered the sacred Martian temple. As a

34 boastful, self-assured narrator, he takes great pleasure in the notoriety, writing, “No

Earthman had ever been in this room before, or I wold have heard about it” (176).

Zelazny uses that same word of mouth to explain how the humans encounter the

Martian conception of memory.

While there are many conflicting theories of memory available for discussion, I believe the Art of Memory, in its varying levels of evolution, will be most illuminating. To explore it more fully, I would like to return to Joyce's treatment of memory in Portrait and how this treatment allows technology to influence more modern iterations of memory in storytelling, on which Zelazny is building. John Rickard discusses the Art of Memory, perfected by Occultist Giordano Bruno, whose ideas of magical power are summarized by Frances Yates: “By using magical or talismanic images as memory images, the

Magus hoped to acquire universal knowledge, and also powers, obtaining through the magical organisation of the imagination a magically powerful personality, turned in, as it were, to the powers of the cosmos” (Rickard 192). Rickard continues to analyze the place of Bruno’s work within Joyce’s Ulysses, a subject also explored by Elliot B. Gose and Norman Silverstein. However, the same parallels as Rickard notes in the “triggers” of Bloom’s memory through Ulysses exist for Portrait’s Stephen as he walks through the streets on his way to class and every detail triggers a memory of his past studies:

Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it. But the nightshade of his friend's listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and be found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shriveled up sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms (160-1).

35 Stephen’s “cavern of speculation” -- his memory palace, in which his eyes cannot help but trigger memories of his friends, his relationships, his religion, and his studies. He experiences memory in the "wayward rhythms" of a society just beginning to understand audio recordings of "language and consciousness." Through Stephen’s memory images, Joyce gives birth to an artist intent upon preserving his reflections, his experiences, and that which he remembers.

Stephen’s narrative is Joyce’s attempt at creating a medium for Bruno’s universal knowledge. In his essay “The Problem of Distance in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man,” Wayne Booth references early drafts of Portrait, where “Each of the first four sections ends a period of Stephen's life with what Joyce, in an earlier draft, called an epiphany: a peculiar revelation of the inner reality of an experience, accompanied with great elation, as in a mystical religious experience” (62). Ultimately, Joyce abandoned the consecrated mystical experiences that once ended Stephen’s sections, but the attention to “magical or talismanic images as memory images” remained.

Gallinger's talismanic memory images occur in the form of his father, in the italicized sections of dialogue he remembers, shouting, “Lord, I am sorry! Daddy—Sir—I am sorry! --It couldn't be! It couldn't be. . .” The formerly first-person narrative has shifted into third person, describing “the boy” as he “graduated high school” and tried to make his own way in the world. His memory images appear when he is tutored in high

Martian, and he returns to his childhood, learning Hebrew, Aramaic, learning from his father. Gallinger's memory image literally takes him walking “on in a lane among heaps of dead language” until finally, he encounters the Martian language, which is dying, but to which he has the power to give new life. Unlike Joyce showing Stephen's artistic

36 intent, Zelazny shows a talented young linguist who only becomes an artist when he casts aside his father's own plans for his life and instead pursues his poetry. The memory image shows Gallinger's coming of age into his own art, which only accentuates as he learns Martian and applies that knowledge to his own art.

Zelazny epitomizes the potential for the features of infancy, if not the actual representation of the young child. The story revolves around the unborn Martian child destined to save its race from extinction. Joyce first wrote, “The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait for, so capricious are we, that we cannot or will not conceive the past in any other than its iron memorial aspect.” Zelazny recreates the metaphor, substituting prophecy for the past and an unborn child for the possibility of the future. The child becomes the memory image for the Martian people.

They believed themselves barren, and the child represents the past they remember and the future they image in the new interpretation of myth. Zelazny uses this memory object to connect with readers who would understand that pang of regret of the past as it mixes with hope in the future.

However, not all feel that Zelazny has used his narratology to connect with his readers. Indeed, in Theodore Sturgeon's 1967 introduction to Four for Tomorrow, a collection that includes A Rose, he argues, “writing, like elections, copulation, sonatas, or a punch in the mouth, is communication, an absolute necessity to the very existence of human beings in every area, concrete or abstract, which may be defined as that performed by human beings which evokes response in kind from other human beings”

(10). At it's surface, Sturgeon's introduction praises the communication inherent in

Zelazny's story, as a means of explaining human relationships by substituting Martians

37 as his foil to human history and poetry. The story uses art as a metaphor for communication between the races and Zelazny's readers. However, Sturgeon continues:

There is a fine line, and hazy, between following the use of an exotic intrusion with a definition, which can be damned insulting to a reader who does not understand it, and throwing him something knobby and hard to hold without warning or subsequent explanation. Yes, a reader should do part of the work; the more he does the more he participates, and the more he is led to participate the better the story (and write). On the other hand, he shouldn't be stopped, thrown out of the current in which the author has placed him, by such menaces to navigation, however apt (10).

Sturgeon argues, throws a few too many hard wooden sticks at his reader for easy navigation. “In a writer less resourceful,” he writes, “than Zelazny we readily forgive his inability” to think of a means to “maximize communication by means acceptable.”

Zelazny, however, “is a writer of such merit that one judges him by higher standards than those one uses on others” (11). Sturgeon's critique emphasizes the subtle changes already present in Zelazny's narrative. What Sturgeon criticizes as unacceptable communication, new wave writers were already beginning to privilege as creative reinvention of the narrative style. The very nature of Zelazny's “menaces to navigation” occur within the memory images and back story that create such a rich, nuanced narrative. Gallinger succeeds as an artist, growing in his perception of myth, while still failing at the romantic goal he so desired. This nuance has yet to succumb to the technological reinvention that would soon begin to infiltrate into science fiction narratives, but it sets the stage for the response to the future shock that is soon to come.

The narratives that never “[throw] a few too many hard wooden sticks at [their] reader for easy navigation” remain plentiful before the future shock deviation, but they

38 also fail to inspire the nuanced, structural criticism we will see in the next generation of

Künstlerroman. More often, these stories describe the coming of age of young, talented artists whose stories exist within the narrative, enhanced but not defined by the technology around them. One notable example of this phenomenon exists in Phillip K.

Dick's 1969 Galactic Pot-Healer, which Jameson has called “a relatively minor Jungian cycle” (349). Joe Fernwright repairs the pots left over from a world before an all- consuming shift into plastic manufacturing. Joe repairs ceramic, but very few examples exist. The story progresses through Joe's summons to raise an alien god's sunken cathedral to an offer to join the alien hive mind. Ultimately, Joe refuses, and in his refusal, we find Dick's analysis of the artist.

As a Künstlerroman, Galactic Pot-Healer only allows Joe his own creation in the last few pages of text. Before this, he worked to repair the art of others rather than making it himself. He finally begins to craft his own designs, to redefine his art from mimicry to originality, when he refuses the hive mind to maintain his own individuality.

Dick's story ends with a thorough investigation of the new-found artistry:

With an asbestos glove, he tremblingly reached into the still-hot kiln and brought out the tall, now blue-and-white pot. His first pot. Taking it to a table, under direct light, he set it down and took a good look at it. He professionally appraised its artistic worth. He appraised what he had done, and, within it, what he would do, what later pots would be like, the future of them lying before him. And his justification, in a sense, for leaving Glimmnng and all the others. Mali, the most of all. Mali whom he loved.

Ultimately, he concludes, “The pot was awful” (148). Dick's Künstlerroman begins and ends in his denouement; while Joe had always worked in art, he had never created his own works, which limited his actual artistic journey. However, Dick uses his last lines to show the value of individual art over the hive mind he turned down, despite the comforts

39 such a life might have offered. He judges his pot harshly to show that he has a long way to go on his journey to the artist. Dick, however, privileges this future journey by allowing

Joe to begin what he had long been unable to begin. Joe's journey is not complete, but he has begun, and Dick allows us to consider this beginning a victory, however “awful” that first pot may have been.

Galactic Pot-Healer privileges character over technology and uses the archaic ceramics as a symbol for the art missing from Joe's future society. As a final example of text that does allow the impending future shock to influence its structure, we can still sense an inherent anxiety of future technology that will eliminate present art forms. Joe is the pot-healer, not the space-ship healer or drawer of alien caricature. Dick privileges the archaic to show the way society must cling to present art forms even in the midst of impending change. However, Dick does still continue to write grounded deeply in his own present. Dick's use of the asbestos glove also notably comments on the historical inaccuracies of his conception of the far-future, a manifestation of what Jameson calls the “mock futures” that speak more of the time they were written than the time they predict. In Dick's universe, ceramic is obsolete, space travel is inconsequential, and alien hive minds are able to overtake a human consciousness. In every way, Dick's reader is propelled into the future of the story, and yet Dick allows his character a glove that seemed innocuous in 1969 but was publicly banned for toxicity in the 1980s. Dick hypothesized a future colored strongly by his present, which allows us to read the technology of 1969 within his novel. The asbestos transforms Dick's present “into the determinate past of something yet to come” (Archeologies 288). In retrospect, we see

40 the technology available to him, but this technology has yet to change so drastically that it would change his character's narrative or the place of the artist in that rapid alteration.

While this overview obviously has missed discussing some minor artist characters from the period, the selected works effectively illustrate the transition from the Künstlerroman that centers on character growth. It also illustrates the period that would soon facilitate a reinterpretation of the conceptual breakthrough we will see so vividly, the future shock of technological upheaval and its related anxiety.

41 CHAPTER 3 AN OVERVIEW OF THE KÜNSTLERROMAN IN SCIENCE FICTION AFTER THE FUTURE SHOCK

The massive amounts of technological change inspired and created an environment in which science fiction was able to tackle the changes with experimental, literary styles as strange and unusual as the technology they describe. Unsurprisingly, the 1970s (and early 80s) were a prime period for both new wave science fiction and for vicarious stories of the artist dealing with a future-shocking rush of cultural change. In his Archaeologies, Jameson argues that sf futures speak more of the time in which they were written than any potential prophetic application, and this point is especially appropriate for the new wave, Future Shock period.

Jameson describes the historical onslaught of science fiction to be the result of representational modernization, in which stories go about their business with the full baggage and paraphernalia of a conventional realism, with this one difference: “that the full 'presence' – the settings and actions to be 'rendered' – are the merely possible and conceivable ones of a near or far future.” He continues:

Hence the canonical defense of the genre: in a moment in which technological change has reached a dizzying tempo, in which so-called 'future shock' is a daily experience, such narratives have the social function of accustoming their readers to rapid innovation, or preparing our consciousness and our habits for the otherwise demoralizing impact of change itself (Archaeologies 286).

As early as the 30s, science fiction has dealt with change and the technology inherent in so many changes we experience. The change in science fiction brings us back to

Berger's earlier quote, that sf “particularly [concerns] itself with the social change associated with scientific and technological development,” and inherently, the way it

42 offers its readers a means of internalizing the “otherwise demoralizing aspect of change itself.”

Some science fiction pays particular attention to technological change. As

Malzberg writes, "This is what was being said, implicitly, in all of the crazy and convoluted stories of the thirties and forties behind the funny covers; more sedately, and occasionally in hardcover, it is being said today" (16). However, those funny covered stories only began to explore the instability that the rapid change of the later twentieth- century would further. This instability has created an environment of both unprecedented narrative experimentation and technological prediction. In this later period, we move away from the less technical stories, where Jameson argued narrative discoveries were “predicted on the existence and stability of the narrative frame” to the experimental forms where we, as readers, must “[return] upon the opening pages to transform the very generic expectations aroused there.” Here, we are able to consider how we may “[re-identify] the category of the narrative in a wholly unexpected way.” In this trend, I will agree with Jameson, that we find very different books than those we started reading (257). Here, we find books whose first pages are reinvented by their closing paragraphs, “throwing [their readers] something knobby and hard to hold without warning or subsequent explanation.” By privileging Sturgeon's criticism of Zelazny, we see the progress this new wave of writers have made in how they value narrative structure and reader involvement, and this progress intimately affects the artist stories that exist in the transition.

The stories of this period remain the stories to actually, definitively redefine the

“iron memorial aspect” of past in a way that entirely redefines present and, as is the

43 nature of science fiction, future. Here, I must return to Jameson's distinction between

“the 'real future” and the 'mock futures' that transform our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come” (Archeologies 288). The futures imagined in science fiction function less as predictions than as recreations of the past in which they were written: the moments that inspire the specific predictions, rather than whether or not those predictions come true.

The technological revival the Künstlerroman in science fiction experiences after the future shock mimics the “highly experimental” authors who “wanted to develop a modern literary science fiction with advanced aesthetic techniques”(Higgins). While I am avoiding the term “new wave,” Higgins' definition speaks to both the experimental forms and aesthetic styles we will see when investigating those artist stories that have internalized the future shock environment. In 1957, C. M. Kornbluth lectured on

“Imagination in the Science Fiction Novel,” which sets the stage for elements of the aesthetic symbols seen so clearly in what others would soon call the new wave. The change is the relationship between present, future, history, and that which we take for granted in its deviation. Kornbluth writes:

Every writer of contemporary or historical fiction must tame his imagination and think almost as the world thinks, or he is lost. Nobody will take seriously a writer who asserts that Michigan Boulevard is in New York City, or that the second president of the United States was Julius Caesar. But the science fiction writer is born free. More than any other writer (except the writers of fantasy and dreams) he 'makes it all up out of his own head.'

Kornbluth explicitly draws the distinction between the writer of contemporary and historical fiction in the period of technological change and the writer of science fiction in the same period. The contemporary author is bound to that which his reader believes is real. The writer of future narratives is able and encouraged to explore what the

44 technological implications could be on society. By making it all up in his head, the writer of science fiction has the means and opportunity to introduce his reader to the period of advanced technological change in a way that will prepare them to that period of unsettling, rapid innovation.

Fiction written in response to the future shock recreates traditional symbols to show the ways technology has changed traditional life. They create an alternate future, which speaks to an alternate present and the “mock future” that alternative reality inspires. In response, Kornbluth continues, "The science fiction writer churns out symbols every time he writes of the future or an alternate present; he rolls out symbols of people, places, things, relationships, as fast as he can work his typewriter or drive his pen." The recreation of symbols speaks to what will become a paradigm of the conceptual breakthrough, where there realizes the alternate present is a construct, either in the structure of the novel or the theme it inspires. The reversal of paradigm existed before the future shock but its writers were criticized for its tendency to alienate its reader. After the future shock, this alienation began to reach a level of critical popularity, as readers began to value finding themselves by the end reading a story they did not realize they were reading at the beginning of a text.

Wolfe defines what Clute would later term the conceptual breakthrough as “the idea of the known-unknown opposition,” which provides “structural opposition or antimony” between that which the reader understands and that which the story withholds (96). Wofle points to Ketterer's creation of new worlds, where the “real” – known – must battle with the new world – the unknown – to create an environment capable of exploration in science fiction. The new world in science fiction must grapple

45 with the old world in such a way that its readers understand both the author's present and the character's future.

The experience of memory begins in Samuel Delany's behemoth Dhalgren by exploring the role of a poet in the strange, transient setting of a city, where women turn to trees and gangs employ holographic disguises. Published in 1974, Delany's novel illustrates the stylistic changes and technological dependency inherent in a text published in the new wave, in the midst of the future shock. The art changes with technology; the artist changes; the setting changes.

Structurally, Dhalgren operates in a circular narration, in which the final passage of the book ends without punctuation, only to be finished by the very opening sentence, if a reader flips back to the beginning. Dahlgren ends with the passage, “But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to...” which finishes on the first page, with “to wound the autumnal city” (801;1).

Within the narrative, the protagonist who cannot remember his own name – Kid[d] – discovers a journal, in which the opening passage mimics that of Dhalgren before splitting off into a narrative of its own. In these circles, Delaney draws the knots and hard knobs that his reader not only must grab without warning or explanation but take to also embrace as the heart of the text. The reader must grapple with the same structural ambiguities that Kid encounters, equating the reader with the young poet searching for the identity he has literally lost. In previous Künstlerromane, the protagonist figuratively loses an identity that is regained in their art. Heinlein's Lorenzo figuratively loses who he is as he drifts into the manifestation of his acting. Kid, conversely, begins in a state of

46 amnesia, where the text has stolen his memory, and the reader actively joins him on a quest for identity.

Delany pays particular attention to previous Künstlerromane, particularly Joyce's works. Joyce's Finnegans Wake famously familiarized the circular narration as a stylistic experiment. Delany also pays particular homage to the post scripts that appear in both

Portrait and Ulysses. Tobias Boes notes, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man concludes with a brief post script: "Dublin 1904 Trieste 1914."l In contrast to the similar phrase that James Joyce would later append to Ulysses,” – Trieste, Zurich, Paris, 1914-

1921 – “the two terms of this addendum aren't connected by hyphens indicating a spatiotemporal continuity, but instead remain discrete entities, as though to indicate that the work had been carried out twice” (767). Delany ends Dhalgren's incomplete last sentence with: “San Francisco, Abaquii, Toronto, Clarion, Milford, New Orleans, Seattle,

Vancouver, Middletown, East Lansing, New York, London, January 1969/September

1973,” which recreates the environment of Portrait in its terms without a hyphen, creating that same “spatiotempoal continuity” Boes argues for the Künstlerroman (801).

Delany references Joyce's later, famous novels in his ending sequence but still returns to the artist story, the model on which we must see Kid in his strange, temporal journey.

As a reader, we follow Kid's quest for identity at the same time we follow our own quest for answers on the setting Kid inhabits. Dhalgren tells the story of Bellona in the

1970s, where Seth McEvoy summarizes “some kind of unknown disaster has affected the city, and most of the people of the city have gone elsewhere” (105). When first published, Delany's novel created an uproar in the community, with hundreds of fanzines offering reviews, of which most of the very few positive praised it for being

47 incomprehensible, and thus noteworthy. McEvoy concludes “the only way to speculate on what it was that made Dhalgren into a science fiction bestseller is to examine what made it unique” (103). As strange and unknowable as Bellona is, it continues to answer just enough questions to convince its reader to continue. Dhalgren is written upon the foundation of the stilted communication criticized earlier in the century and yet privileged as a response to massive cultural change. Mark Gawron articulates that the “making of

Bellona” is “a society which, though some parts of it may be inaccessible, still bears correspondences enough with our own to allow an understanding of its peculiar why's and how's. The particular information suspensions employed here are native to science fiction.”

Here, in this native suspension of disbelief, we see a real shift from the

Künstlerroman of Joyce and the Künstlerroman of Delany. Science fiction forces a reader to understand the ways the world is different from that which they currently inhabit. Delany uses small moments of mimesis to keep his reader interested but colors those moments with the strange, unexpected details of Bellona. Ultimately, Delany writes the entire city as an exercise in the unknown, allowing only the figure of the artist to act as the bridge between the world we inhabit and that which we do not understand.

In Dhalgren, we see an extension of the theory of science fiction stretching between the known and the unknown. Jean Gawron explains:

In the mundane novel we are given events with the understanding that we know the rules they follow; the novelist then shows that, given these rules, here is what must really happen. In a certain kind of science fiction novel, we are given events in order to induce or deduce the rules; the novelist shows that, given these events, these rules must apply (77).

48 Gawron defines the known as the rules that we already understand, when our only question is what exactly happens within their limitations. Science fiction, the unknown, forces the reader to learn the rules from a character’s actions, rather than the other way around. In Dhalgren, we watch Kid interact to learn the rules of Bellona as slowly and meticulously as Delany allows. Dhalgren is what William Gibson calls “a prose-city, a labyrinth, a vast construct the reader learns to enter by any one of a multiplicity of doors.” He argues it to be “quite literally an experimental novel, an exploration of the cultural envelope of fiction” (XI). McEvoy disagrees, arguing that “literary experimentalism is not the main purpose of Dhalgren. The fundamental interest to readers of Dhalgren is the story itself and how the characters interact inside that story”

(105). In order to understand the rules within Bellona, we must rely upon the characters' interaction as a window into the strangeness we can only understand as the novel progresses.

The city itself becomes a metaphor for the tangle of prose and the art that Kid creates within its walls. Dhalgren, McEvoy concludes, works “to show how an articulate person, a writer, can go through an unknown territory, and bring back the pieces to make the territory known to others” (120). Kid's journey through the city acts as a journey between the known and unknown, with his poetry acting as the intermediary, as the space ship and colony has previously acted to divide the human world from the alien. However, the city also acts as a metaphor for the historical period in which Delany was originally writing.

Gibson places the novel in the history where “no one under thirty-five today can remember the singularity that overtook America in the nineteen-sixties, and the

49 generation that experienced it most directly seems largely to have opted for amnesia and denial” (XII). Delany writes in response to the Watts riots, the MLK assassination, the Vietnam War, and the social unrest and anxiety birthed from this period of rapid social change. Robert Elliot Fox reminds us:

Bellona is like a cyst in the American body politic, present but encapsulated. Dhalgren was written, after all, during a period when this country's general population (Seemingly a blind, rather than a silent, majority) was being surprised by sudden eruptions of an unpleasant reality which, for the most part, it had not bothered to acknowledge (98).

Delany equates the blind with the amnesiac, those separated from the sights and memories of the cultural change that has inspired instability within Bellona and the historical period it represents. Jason Haslam argues, "Kid’s amnesia is obviously tied to this lack of insight, figuring the nation’s ignorance of the city into our own through our identification with the protagonist" (92). I would argue instead that his amnesia is tied to the ignorance of a nation in a way that facilitates the art we need to understand Delany's social commentary.

Ultimately, Delany writes in a historical movement of social unrest that filters into the unrest within Bellona's walls, as gangs roam the streets and women fall in love with their rapists. Delany touches on that which Toffler questions, the time for Social

Futurism, which “[captures] control of change” (470). Toffler continues:

Nowhere is this more starkly evident than in our pathetic attempts to govern our cities. New Yorkers, within a short span, have suffered a nightmarish succession of near disasters: a water shortage, a subway strike, racial violence in the schools, a student insurrection at Columbia University, a garbage strike, a housing shortage, a fuel oil strike, a breakdown of telephone service, a teacher walkout, a power blackout, to name just a few (471).

Dahlgren responds to the instability within the proverbial city – intentionally fictional – to respond to the claims that Toffler and other writers have made that “racial violence” is

50 only one in a long succession of near disasters, as easily solved as subway strikes and incidental power outages. However, only several of these changes include the technology that Tofler himself described. Dahlgren concentrates on this social, rather than Toffler's technological, unrest. Dahlgren responds to a social-political future shock and the rapid cultural change it inspires. Technology only appears within the story when it goes wrong, when the electricity fails and Bellona's residents must find a way to live in spite of the consistent failure. And yet, the residents go on, change apartments, continue to live their lives rather than freeze in response to the disasters Toffler indicated. Delany fuses the technological with the mythic discoveries he displays within the narrative. The Scorpions – Kid's sometimes gang – project holograms of mythical beasts to disguise their identities and intimidate observers.

Here, the technological ability to project these images are literally swallowed by the mythic representations the technology facilitates. Sandra Meiesel argues that

Delany “treats myth as 'metacommunication,'” a communication of understood symbols instead of words (86). The visual manifestations of myths create the same environment reminiscent of what Morrisey argues of Zelazny, where creating “periodic creative blasphemy is a necessity and a right.” Delany's creative blasphemy exists in the mythical holograms, but are circumvented by the gang Kid joins temporarily and leaves again. For Delany, “Myths satisfy for a time, but not forever.” The holograms act as a metaphor for the thinness of the gang's power and they pillage, rather inspire art.

Delany uses the patterns of mythical beasts and artistic inspiration to ground

Bellona in a strange reality. On Dahlgren, Gawron suggests that “the patterns, of

51 course, are there to be found ,but we began by looking for them in the wrong place”

(62). He continues:

As we open to Dhalgren's first page, we do not begin with an empty field. We have, at the very least, the trained fictional expectations of those who have read novels before, perhaps of those who have read science fiction novels. We have the title, perhaps some hearsay knowledge of the work, perhaps a familiarity with Delany's previous books; in the paperback edition we have the cover and the cover matter (both are elegant and misleading)” (64).

Delany's story uses preconceptions to displace his reader and actively accentuate the deviation between known and unknown. He creates a conceptual breakthrough by consciously misleading the reader from what we have known – our expectations – to what Delany will circumvent in the newness of his narration. Ultimately, the line between the known and unknown, for Delany, exists in the line between author and character.

Gawron points us to the quote that “[epistemologically transfers] from author to character”:

Consider: if an author, passing a mirror, were to see one day not himself but some character of his invention, though he might be surprised, might even question his sanity, he would still have something by which to relate. But suppose, passing on the inside, the character should glance at his mirror and see, not himself, but the author, a complete stranger, staring in at him, to whom he has no relation at all, what is this poor creature left … ?”

As a Künstlerroman, Dhalgren questions the place between Kid and his art at the same time it questions Delany and his reader. The author understands his character, the art itself, as an extension of himself. For the author, the character is known. The unknown, however, would exist if the characters became aware of their status as characters.

Dhalgren creates a world where the reversal of paradigm occurs when the narrative acknowledges itself as fiction. Bellona is a place of conflicting information. In response to this factor, McEvoy argues, “Some people, when they cannot cope with the world and

52 all its seemingly disparate facts, become paranoid, and invent paranoid fantasies to explain events, in much the same creative way that a writer might” (115). The

Künstlerroman within Dhalgren creates an environment that replaces paranoia with productivity and social unrest with mythic re-conceptions of culture. Delaney reminds his reader to “be glad you're not a character scrawled in the margins of someone else's lost notebook” (5). The notebook itself, is a Künstlerroman inside a Künstlerroman, in which

Kid discovers his own forgotten identity and thereby an identity Delany feels has been forgotten by a wide variety of Americans within the period. The Künstlerroman, therefore, is as much a coming of age for the reader as for Kid, as both discover their intricate place in creating and understanding the art in front of them.

Card's story “Unaccompanied Sonata” explores a young man who is groomed as a musical prodigy, raised as an only child by a group of servants who cannot sing to ensure the purity of his musical abilities. Card's story climaxes well after his protagonist

Christian has achieved his musical destiny. The story begins with Christian, an isolated prodigy, learning his gift. Card writes, “In the world were violins, trumpets, clarinets and crumhorns, as there had been for centuries. Christian knew nothing of that. Only his

Instrument was available. It was enough” (245). Facetiously, Card understates “enough” as a combination of Christian's gift and the limits imposed on his creativity. He must be isolated to preserve his originality, and yet his originality is hampered by the censored instruments. Card's story relies upon this ironic duplicity, which fuels the story's climax.

When offered an mp3 device by a Listener – one specially selected to listen only to

Christian's prodigal creations – Christian first parrots, “That's forbidden. I can't have my creativity polluted by hearing other musicians' work. That would make me imitative and

53 derivative instead of original” (248). When he finally succumbs, he thinks, “At first it sounded strange, like noise, odd sounds that had nothing to do with the sounds of

Christian's life. But the patterns were clear, and by the end of the recording, which was not even a half hour long, Christian had mastered the idea” (250).

After discovery of his secret introduction to Bach, he is legally barred from making music and must come to terms with the musical suppression. Unlike the traditional Künstlerroman in which the character must transition into the artist, Card shows a story in which a musical genius must archive the reverse: a life without music, and an artistry in the suppression. When he, inevitably, slips and begins to sing again, his vocal chords are silenced so he may never make a sound again. His friend pleads,

“Watcher, he done no harm,” but is rebuked. The official answers, “It's the law that finds where people will be happy. But Christian Haroldsen broke the law. And he's gone around ever since making people hear music they were never meant to hear” (263).

Card describes a society that self-identifies as perfect. The watcher explains, “The world is too perfect, too at peace, too happy for us to permit a misfit who broke the law to go about spreading discontent” (250). Card uses the story of the artist to show the dystopic elements of a society that considers itself to be utopic in every way. Christian, in infancy, is selected as a musical prodigy but censored from all that might inhibit his creative freedom. Card shows his reader that freedom that is militantly enforce by censorship is simply censorship of another name. Ultimately, the story makes the metaphor of the

“iron memorial aspect” of the past a literal description of Christian's infancy. His infancy is carefully guarded, and when the iron softens, he loses his status as the artist.

54 Throughout the story, Card shows us the professions of others that stretch from mechanical crew to enforcer of the police state, but he shows us no other artist.

Ultimately, Christian's Künstlerroman follows his journey – as the only pictured artist – from intellectual censorship to physical, muted censorship, and finally to a point where he realizes the common workers with whom he broke the law to share his music influenced the musical world more than Christian ever could, even if he had remained a prodigy. The story ends with Christian hearing songs he recognized, by the man who once defended him, sung by common boys in joyful voices. And in these songs,

“Christian thought he recognized his voice” (268). Card uses the dystopic world to show the power of unrestricted art. The Künstlerroman exists within the realization that prodigy is spreading music rather than keeping it captive for those selected for its appreciation.

The tradition has continued into the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and as contemporary technology has evolved, so have interpretations of the artist in still further futures. Technological innovations have created a means of communication in which the reader may actually experience not just the imitation of art but the actual creation. This evolution leads me to what I would argue is the most interesting Künstlerroman of twentieth-century science fiction.

Published in 1977, in the tradition of Dahlgren, John Crowley's Engine Summer remains one of the most sophisticated and advanced examples of the post-Joycian

Künstlerroman. However, Crowley's art is only possible hrough, with, and in response to the futuristic technology. Engine is a post-apocalyptic work of science fiction that explores the place of memory in technology and the writer in an oral society. While

55 Engine is set a post-apocalyptic America and Portrait in early twentieth-century Dublin, the two share an examination of the writer's journey in an era of advanced technological change.

While it would have been unintentional, Maurice Beebe articulates the place of gothic fiction that subsequently leads to the place of science fiction in the artist story. He writes,“The Ivory Tower concept owes something at least to the haunted castle of Gothic fiction; and the new artist derives in part from the type of the mad scientist in that both invoke magic and rituals a means of penetrating to a secret that will result in their mastery over the universe” (117). He considers Portrait to be a response to “the beginning of a literary movement rather than its climax,” which solidifies my desire to use Portrait as a model for the future science fiction reinventions of the Künstlerroman

(260). Joyce solidified the archetype that existed long before he began Portrait, but in this solidification, he established a tradition that has extended beyond his own lifetime and into scientific explorations of the twentieth-century and solidly into the twenty-first.

If the goal of art is to extend a life beyond the artist's lifetime, to leave something behind, then technology has served to create new forms of art, and new ways of preserving their creation. In the beginning of Future Shock, a section appropriately titled the 800th Lifetime, Toffler begins, “Western society for the past 300 years has been caught up in a fire storm of changes”(9). The future shock he describes is most useful to explain the flurry of technological innovation that Joyce felt as early as 1914 when

Portrait was first serialized and instability was erupting throughout Europe. The mechanical inventions necessary to facilitate the clash between nineteenth century war techniques with twentieth century telephone, wireless communication, and armored

56 tanks created a ripple of technological innovation within Joyce's theories of past, future, and memory. Indeed, even in that first rejected essay on a “Portrait of the Artist,” Joyce showed an uncanny premonition for the literal firestorm ahead as he wrote on the

“urbanity in warfare” and eerily referenced “the messages of citizens” that “flashed along the wires of the world,”from which emerged already the generous idea of “thirty years” war in Germany. Years before the unprecedented Great War, Joyce sensed the political instability of metaphorical warfare, the very real changes in the German empire, and the technological advancements that rose to meet that instability.

While grounded heavily in mid-twentieth century culture, Future Shock remains helpful to explain the beginnings of a climate of technological unease with which Portrait subtly grapples. In Pericles Lewis' Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, he argues that

Stephen experiences a premature agedness, seen most specifically in his obsession with prostitutes. Lewis highlights, "after hearing the catalogue of his sins, 'a squalid stream of vice,' at confession, a priest asks him his age and Stephen responds:

'Sixteen, father.'"

Stephen’s premature agedness foreshadows a phenomenon of the future shock that Toffler describes as breeding “odd personalities, too: children who at twelve are no longer childlike; adults who at fifty are children of twelve” (9-10). The premature agedness within overly grown children is contrasted with undergrown adults who have failed to create the self-identity with which Stephen grapples throughout Portrait. John

Rickard summarizes, “The reader follows Stephen’s attempts to redefine himself throughout A Portrait as he experiments with the roles of sensualist, of religious

57 devotee, and so on, finally settling on the persona of the artist as the most appropriate”

(18). He continues, however, that:

Stephen’s problems in constructing a self cannot be solved through a simple choice of vocation. Joyce’s novel constantly and ironically undercuts Stephen’s exhilaration and sense of certainty, even in the last lines of the book, where Stephen unwittingly identifies himself with Icarus rather than with Daedalus as he prepares to "fly" into exile (19).

We watch with glee as Stephen chooses a vocation and yet with unease as we recognize his narrative mistake implies his inherent failure. Will he succeed as an artist?

Will he fail, like Icarus, having flown too close to his metaphorical sun? Joyce leaves us few definitive answers. Wayne Booth asks the question that each reader must answer individually: "Which Portrait do we choose, that of the artistic soul battling through successfully to his necessary freedom, or that of the child of God, choosing, like Lucifer, his own damnation?" (63). Stephen only has his own life to live, and because of it, his story retains the same iron-clad past of his narration. Externally, set apart from the story,

Joyce’s reader judges Stephen, who exclaims: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (223-4).

We have examined what Joyce created in the firestorm of innovations in transcontinental communication in the last years of the nineteenth century. To explore what he might have experienced in another technological age, we will continue to explore another text written in another firestorm: the 1970s, when Toffler published

Future Shock and New Wave science fiction emerged as medium of exploring what story might be if technology allowed a reader to actually experience a memory. How

58 might Portrait have changed if Joyce had written later in the century? My answer is

Engine Summer.

In the collection Snakes Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley, Alice K. Turner first writes on "One Writer's Beginnings: Engine Summer as a Portrait of the Artist." She examines the connection but concentrates on qualifying Crowley's novel as a

Künstlerroman rather than exploring ways that Crowley's novel uses science fiction in response to Joyce’s preoccupation with fluid interpretations of memory. From Turner’s essay, we can take for granted that Engine Summer is actually a Künstlerroman: the story culminates when Crowley’s protagonist becomes a storyteller and, vicariously, a writer. As so little has been written on Crowley's fiction, Turner's essay opens one of the only doors to this connection but does not continue to examine the larger implications on the genre and Crowley’s place within it.

As we have explored previously, Toffler’s Future Shock argues that the period between 1960 and 1970 created "too much change in too short a period." This change then overwhelms, creates social change, and leaves society in "shattering stress and disorientation." The shift in narrative tradition possible in the world described by Future

Shock, creates the necessary precursors to a systematic between the traditions of literary and science fiction stories. Forty years later, Toffler’s predictions have either been validated or disproven, but the climate he described within Future Shock paints the same climate of cultural change in which John Crowley completed the strange, rambling world of Engine Summer.

Engine tells the story of Rush who Speaks, who wants to become a saint: a writer that leaves behind stories that will then instruct, inform, and amuse future

59 generations. Rush wishes to be a saint who "means what he says and says what he means" until the meaning becomes crystal clear -- literally. He wishes to find the things that have been lost in his society and return them with his stories. Eventually, he leaves his home to find Once a Day, the girl he hopes will be his lover; instead, he finds his own ability to create stories that will literally, in Crowley’s world, last for the next six hundred years.

The novel begins with Rush living in a strange, warren-like community called little

Belaire, where every child is segregated among groups known as “cords” based on traits of their personality. Above all else, the society values truthful speaking. The greatest truthful speakers are known as “Saints,” storytellers, who speak so truthfully that their stories are passed through the generations. Crowley's novel describes the race of pre-apocalyptic humans as "Angels," who were nearly exterminated by their own genetic alteration and whose few survivors live in a floating city in the sky. The angels retain the crystals that allow others to experience Rush’s life for hundreds of years after

Rush has died. Rush’s story exists within the crystal in a technology so all-inclusive that those temporarily inside the crystal -- the temporary reincarnations of Rush -- do not realize that they are reincarnations. They experience his memories as their own memories and his feelings as their feelings. The culture facilitated by the Future Shock facilitates an actual technology of meta-narration that is impossible within Portrait and yet the epitome of Engine’s success.

Joyce writes the story of a young man's growth into an artist in a society devoid of the technology available in Crowley's iteration. In Portrait, Stephen’s childhood leads to a moment of artistic anticlimax in which the decision has been made but the art has

60 yet to be created. In Engine, Rush’s story preserves his childhood inside certain special crystals that allow others to relive his life and experience the climactic artistry themselves. While Crowley drafted Engine, the society that Joyce captured in Portrait was hurtling towards the computers that we speculate will eventually create the technology necessary for Engine to exist. As a Saint, Engine’s Rush is equal to

Portrait’s Stephen, only with the crystals to keep the story alive and re-livable. Engine

Summer is to be a modern writer with technology unavailable to Joyce’s characters.

Structurally, Engine Summer operates in the same circular narration as Delany's

Dahlgren, in which the last page of the book immediately precedes the very first.

Ultimately, Crowley provides his reader with the moment of climax in the very first paragraph of his text, but the reader does not realize the importance of this climax until she has finished learning Rush’s story for herself. At this moment of self-realization, the temporary Rush exclaims, "I've found you, then. I've found the greatest thing that was lost.”

“Yes,” the angel says. “We were lost and you found us. We were blind, and you made us see. Now. You can only -- stay -- a short time, so …”

“What is it you want from me?”

“Your story” (3).

As the reader is experiencing Rush’s story for the first time, he does not realize until it has finished that the story has been relived three hundred times in six hundred years. Such is Crowley’s circularity. Such is the meta-narration, where Crowley forces his reader to believe that Rush’s story exists again, relived inside the one who experiences it.

61 As a reverse of Stephen’s Premature Agedness, Rush’s story is defined by the man who relives it six hundred years later, a man who presumably is much older than

Rush within the crystal, yet still experiencing the life of a child. He is, as Toffler would say, the man at 50 who is experiencing the life of a teenaged budding writer, and the crystals facilitate that change. Every time a new person enters the crystal, Rush resets.

He was seventeen, dead for countless ages but still, ironically, remains seventeen. The original Rush decided to pursue the life of the artist, just as Stephen does, but even if he failed in his own life (as Stephen might), the preserved crystal facilitates his sainthood -- he achieves his goal in the lives of other people, if not in his own. Without the angel’s technology, Stephen only exists within his own lifetime, read about remembered by, but never experienced within his readers.

The Angel and the Present-Rush, her lover, allows for the transition into meta narration. The speaker asks, “Will you tell me about him, the one who I am? Is it a man?” The angel answers, “It is.” Rush asks, “Do you love him?”

She answers, “Yes” (115).

In the transition between the temporary Rush and his own reality, the speaker says, “only . . . wait, wait. Listen: The one who I am, you must be gentle with him, angel, when he returns, remember. Here, take my hand, take his hand.” She answers, “Yes.”

“Don’t let go,” he says. “Promise,” he says. She promises. “Stay with him.” She answers, “Ever After,” just as Once a Day, Rush’s lover once answered Rush (182).

Thus Crowley completes his cycle of lovers, of stories, and of memory.

Ultimately, the Künstlerroman must grapple with the technology available to its protagonists at the time of its inception and the place of memory within that cultural time

62 period. Where Joyce writes in a time of recent auditory innovation, Crowley’s science fictional account speculates what memory would be like if a reader could truly live someone else’s story. Eric Rabkin explores a definition of science fiction that includes "a fantastic literature [that] claims plausibility against a background of science" (459).

While he continues to claim that definition to be too simplistic, it properly defines

Crowley in relation to Joyce. Crowley makes the "magical or talismanic images as memory images" that I have argued that Joyce includes within Portrait. The crystal technology facilitates those memories considered magical in the early seventeenth century and are used to judge characters in the twentieth.

In Portrait Stephen’s childhood is preserved within the story, but the reader is free

-- encouraged -- to speculate on his life beyond the narrative: his emigration, and his art. Within Crowley's story, Rush can never grow up. We can speculate on his life outside of the crystal, but the story does not care about that life. It cares about the sainthood, the story that is preserved. Here is the difference. Stephen's reader is led to care greatly about what will happen when Portrait has finished. Rush's reader concentrates on only the story and the one experiencing it for himself. In Wayne Booth’s essay “Distance and Point of View, he summarizes:

The report we are given of what goes on in Stephen’s mind is a monologue uninvolved in any modifying dramatic context. And it is an infallible report, even less subject to critical doubts than the typical Elizabethan soliloquy. We accept, by convention, the claim that what is reported as going on in Stephen’s mind really goes on there, or in other words, that Joyce knows how Stephen’s mind works (186).

Joyce’s narrative requires us to trust that Joyce knows how Stephen’s mind works. In practice, Crowley’s novel -- and all fiction -- requires a similar element of trust. However, in the post-apocalyptic world of Engine Summer, this trust in an author has become

63 vestigial to the actual experience of a saint: the person inside Rush’s crystal lives as

Rush lived, experiences Rush’s heartbreaks as his own, and also lives his memories.

In Jennifer K. Stevenson’s “Memory and the World of John Crowley: Technology and the Art of Memory,” she summarizes, “John Crowley’s fictions often concern memory, sometimes in the context of Renaissance mnemotechnics, sometimes using science-fictional devices. Crowley uses organically-based memory models like the Art of

Memory, or fictional variations on it, to illustrate the beneficent, expansive, even healing aspects of memory” (243). In Crowley’s crystals, memory has become the healing recreation of his life in ways that the original Rush could never have imagined. Joyce was influenced by an influx in technology that began with the auditory communication that Crowley makes a point to discourage in his universe. At a young age, Rush learns that “to talk to someone on a phone is not like talking to him face to face. You can say things to a phone you wouldn’t say to a person, say things you don’t mean; you can lie, you can exaggerate, you can be misunderstood, because you’re talking to an engine and not a man”(27). Crowley calls these misunderstandings “knots” and uses the structure of his novel to meta-physically eliminate the knots that a reader’s trust in a narration inherently creates. Joyce’s reader must trust that Joyce knows how Stephen’s mind works, but countless volumes of criticism act as proof that there have been misunderstandings, conflicting evaluations, and knots, which Crowley postulates that

Engine's crystal technology could eliminate.

The question of memory returns to the question of judgment: how a reader is to judge both Stephen and Rush. Wayne Booth argues:

We may judge falsely, we may judge unconsciously, but we cannot even bring the book to mind without judging its elements, seeing them as shaped into a

64 given kind of thing. Even if we denied that the sequence of events has meaning in the sense of being truly sequential, that denial would itself be a judgment on the rightness of Stephen's actions and opinions at each stage: to decide that he is not growing is as much a judgment on his actions as to decide that he is becoming more and more mature" (65).

As readers, we must judge whether or not to trust Joyce’s narrative on Stephen’s internal dialogue and also Stephen’s success as an artist. Does he successfully complete the Künstlerroman and emerge as Daedalus? Do his mistakes overshadow his potential and cause his Icarus-like fall? These are the knots that remain in Stephen’s story that we do not have the technological innovations to unravel. Perhaps one day we might.

In his essay “The Great Knot Unraveled, or Not,” Michael Andre-Driussi argues that Crowley has created characters who are mechanic, unknowable and masked rather than transparent (85). He argues that the Rush-speaker has been aware of his awakening since the first page of the novel, “even if we have not,” which creates an impenetrable narrative (87). I would argue instead that the brilliance of Engine Summer is the transparency created for the reader, which would make “even if we have not” both the measure and proof of his success. Rush’s story changes as our interpretations of

Stephen could change if Stephen had the technology to live in a similarly fluid succession of presents, rather than the iron memorial aspect of his story and his past.

In response to this fluid succession, I would like to return to Wolfe's essay, where he concludes, “the known exists in opposition to the unknown, with a barrier of some sort separating them. The barrier is crossed, and the unknown becomes the known. But the crossing of the barrier reveals new problems, and this sets the stage for a further opposition of known and unknown. This barrier is crossed, yet another opposition is set

65 up, and so on. The 'sense of wonder' grows in part out of the tension generated by awareness of this opposition, and the images of the sense of wonder are those which most strongly reinforce this tension, images that stand at the barrier” (114). Crowley's story creates a sense of wonder simply in its ability to create the conceptual breakthrough: the reader finally understand that the crystals he has been reading have placed them in the role of Rush himself, that we are experiencing Rush's story as the

Angel's lover is experiencing that story, that what we thought we knew is actually a construct of a recreated narrative, and the story on page one is not what we originally thought it to be.

Ultimately, Crowley's novel achieves what Joyce hoped to achieve in his very first draft of the essay on "A Portrait of the Artist." He hoped for a fluid succession of presents, which is exactly what Engine Summer delivers: each rereading relives the present in subtle differences, facilitated by the person inside the crystal and the angel who encourages the story. Crowley has created a Künstlerroman where his reader experiences life as an artist, and his character's story lives on in the lives of others as moments within the present, rather than iron clad, unchangeable memories of the past.

Crowley's triumphs served to open the door still further for wider interpretations of

Künstlerromane as the century continued. Unchangeable memories, in the far future, create an environment that is entirely based upon the conceptions of memory in how it affects the game of social order. We cannot escape the future. As Malzberg argues,

"Lasting, significant change, science fiction says, is uncontrollable and coming in uncontrollably; regardless of what we think or how we feel, we have lost control of our lives" (16). In 1980, Malzberg concludes, "As the technology becomes more

66 sophisticated and intrusive, as our lives in the postindustrial twentieth century came to be dominated in every way by technology, science fiction became more cunning in its template. We know not what we do; the engines can eat us up -- this is what science fiction has been saying (among other things) for a long time now (17). While I believe

Crowley's story to be one of the pinacle examples of the Künstlerroman in science fiction, it would be unproductive to end our study in a story written just at the turn of the future shock environment. The progression has and will continue as technology continues to erupt, even more quickly than it originally began.

As part of the technological explosion felt by Joyce before the first World War and continuing through the twentieth-century, advanced weaponry has gradually infiltrated even the mechanics of the artist story. In 1988, Iain Banks’s published Player of the

Games, which tells the story of a famous master of boardgames who travels to the

Empire of Azad to try his talents at the game that determines all aspects of social and political status. Banks' text alludes to Franz Werfel's translated Star of the Unborn, from

1946, where he described a society dominated solely by game aestetics; yet, in 1988, it encounters far more advanced weaponry than Werfel was able to articulate. Rather than indulge in every noteworthy definition it posits of the Künstlerroman – I will focus singularly on the mechanical revolution within the narrative itself, what Christopher

Palmer describes as "the ability of technology to encompass and alter reaches of space and time" (73). The Künstlerroman in Bank's narratives exists most explicitly within the machinery, weaponry, and communication that facilitates the actual playing of games.

Jernau Morat Gurgeh must face both the cultural and social elements of the game but also the technological weaponry that colors the culture and background of the

67 world in which he plays. Palmer argues, "Progression is destruction, movement into the unknown is actually fulfillment of a plan that was already elaborated, though not disclosed to the main character" (85). By fusing his argument with Wolfe's definition of the space between the known and the unknown, we see the way Banks has fused technology into the conceptual breakthrough, where the reader and protagonist discover the main points together; the novel foreshadows the technological implications, but the conceptual breakthrough and ultimate progression of Gurgeh's coming of age as an artist exist in the tension between what Gurgeh does not know, what his reader discovers, and what Banks allows us to understand. Bank'sf consciously withheld information forces his reader to look outside of the narrative to understand both the plot and the subtle technology that facilitates its progression.

Gurgeh lives in a world that has progressed beyond monetary limits. He writes,

“If somebody wanted a house like this they'd already have had one built; if they wanted anything in the house, they'd have ordered it; they'd have it. With no money, no possessions, a large part of the enjoyment that people who invent this game when they played it just... disappears” (21). Gurgeh craves the instability of gambling, of rapid change, in a world whose initial stability reads as an uneasy utopia. He plays a game in which “the gun was quiet in his hands” and yet the the rules exist implicitly within his environment (3). Gurgeh, on his home planet, experiences no acute danger.

The technology that facilitates the games serves as Gurgeh's stable environment; however, Banks creates instability in the requests Gurgeh receives to play elsewhere, which eventually culminate in his trip to the Empire of Azad, where

“movement into the unknown is actually fulfillment of a plan that was already

68 elaborated” in an experimental, unexpected structural decision. I will point to an early passage, where Gurgeh sifts through correspondence: “Mostly it was in the form of requests; to visit other worlds, take part in great tournaments, write papers, comment on new games, become a teacher/lecturer/professor in various educational establishments, be a guest on any one of several G S Vs, take on such-and-such child prodigy” (29).

The ease with which Banks lists the unfathomable technology necessary to facilitate these mundane requirements speaks to the rapid technological change that has occurred and which Gurgeh must now face within his growth as an artist. His

Künstlerroman requires both the stability of his world – which bores him – and the instability of still more technology he has yet to imagine.

The Künstlerroman in science fiction uses vast galactic settings to understate and allow its readers to suspend their disbelief in the technology necessary to travel such distances. However, the understated technology also serves to show a vast canvas for new forms of physical art. Joe Haldeman's 1995 “For White Hill”shows the explicit transition between the technology influencing the writer and the exponential way it has risen in the late twentieth-century.

In Haldeman's novella, a group of famous artists are summoned to a dying Earth to memorialize the death and destruction that occurred after an alien attack. The Earth is dying, and the artists have been commissioned to preserve its last moments. Like

Player of Games, “For White Hill” is set in a far future in which individuals may travel constantly between planets to pursue their art, whether that art is game play or sculpture. However, “For White Hill” articulates the reminiscent depression of a world whose culture – art, and artist – is dying. To preserve the last moments of history,

69 Haldeman's narrator Water Man writes a memoir “in the language of England, an ancient land of Earth, whose tales and songs White Hill valued.” He continues, “She was fascinated by human culture in the days before machines—not just thinking machines, but working ones; when things got done by the straining muscles of humans and animals” (69). Haldeman begins his story with the machines available at the time of his writing – working, not thinking – that have become ancient in the far future retelling.

As the story progresses, Water Man and White Hill are summoned to old Earth, to a preserved dome, on the invitation to create a work of art that represents the destruction that drove humanity from Earth so many years before. White Hill is both an artist and a therapist trained in connecting herself to unwell brains in the attempt to give them closure. She believes the science to be effective, while Water Man simply wonders: “what is it like to actually be another person; how much of her, or him, do you take away? If you do it often enough, how can you know which parts of you are the original yoü” (80). His question and Haldeman's construct ask the same question as

Crowley's angels: what is it like to be another, to experience another set of thoughts?

And for the artist, the question becomes: what is the place of the physical art object when a connected mind could understand its pure, unfiltered intentions?

Haldeman does not answer the question, but instead he leaves us with Water

Man's decision not to enter White Hill's deconstructed mind. She sacrifices herself to save a small sojourn of humanity, of which he could be a part, but he cannot bear to live within her, rather than with her company. Ultimately, Water Man's Künstlerroman exists in how he relates to the actual mental idea of art, rather than the physical object. His begins by wondering about the process and progresses to one who shuns it, choosing

70 to die rather than to enter and subsequently destroy another artist. Haldeman allows

Water Man to value his autonomy, the nature of himself as an artist, rather than to exist inside another and wonder which parts of his future art were really him. As Crowley's narrator has changed Rush's story in his re-experience, Water Man detests the idea of changing White Hill with his own presence. His journey culminates in autonomy, but

Haldeman shows that autonomy to be a lonely, unseen work of art.

The Künstlerroman in science fiction often encounters the far future, and in this future, it often encounters the staggeringly rich, like Gurgeh and Water Man, who live in worlds where money does not limit material progression. Haldeman, however, uses the story “Four Short Novels” to describe a world where money can buy immortality.

Haldeman's story shows the place of the artist in a world without age. In his universe, technological regeneration has eliminated the limits of time: upon aging, an interested individual pays for the revitalization of his own youth. Haldeman uses the technological innovation to create a monetary value for artistic skill. He writes:

One way people made money was by swapping knowledge around. Skills could be transferred with a technology spun off from the immortality process. You could spend a few decades becoming a great concert pianist, and then put your ability up for sale. There was no shortage of people with two million dollars who would trade one million to be their village's Van Cliburn. In the sale of your ability, you would lose it, but you could buy it back a few decades or centuries later.

Haldeman fuses skill and commodity to show change implicit in one small technological change. After “spinning off” from the immortality process, individual skills became marketable not for their internal knowledge but for the purchasable artifact they contain.

Haldeman images a world that has fused the material and the intellectual, thereby valuing the artist more than the art itself, but reducing the entirety of an artist to one purchasable commodity rather than the potential for infinite artistic production.

71 Ultimately, Haldeman introduces a prodigal artist to the equation to show the extent of the commodification process and the price it has taken from its art. He introduces, “Jutel Dicuth, the paragon of his age, a raging polymath.” Haldeman continues:

He could paint and sculpt and play six instruments. He could write formal poetry with his left hand while solving differential equations with his right. He could write formal poetry about differential equations! He was an Olympic-class gymnast and also held the world record for the javelin throw. He had earned doctorates in anthropology, art history, slipstream physics, and fly-tying.

Dicuth excels in every conceivable manner of art, but the art itself is not valuable.

Instead, his society values the skill that allows him to create it. Rather than, it values his skills, and he cannot both keep them and enjoy their accolades. Instead, Dicuth purchases his own regression to live as a one-year-old, and he ensures this process continues yearly and indefinitely. Haldeman responds, “In a world where there were no children-where would you put them?-he was the only infant. He was the only person with no useful skills and, eventually, the only one alive who did not have nearly a thousand years of memory.”

Dicuth represents the “features of infancy” Joyce once described, but only as a way for Haldeman to turn those features into literal metaphor. No artist can accurately re-imagine his own past, and yet with Haldeman's reconstructive process, Dicuth can and does “conceive the past in any other than its iron memorial aspect.” Every year,

Dicuth repeats his past. He relives the first year of his life, in a perpetual loop of potentiality. That one year old child has the potential to become a prodigal artist, and he re-experiences that potential indefinitely. In response to his youth, Dicuth becomes “like unto a god. People came from everywhere to listen to his random babbling and try to

72 find a conduit to the state of blissful innocence buried under the weight of their wisdom.”

More than anything, they search for wisdom in the potential this child has to becomes the most capable artist the world had seen of his own making. Dicuth learned on his own, rather than purchasing his knowledge, and in a world of commodity, this potential made him the deity of creative wisdom. Dicuth remains “immensely wealthy but bereft of any useful ability” to represent the artist stripped of his creativity, tenacity, and potential.

William Gibson uses the potential in his present-day to redefine our conception of

“future” in the Künstlerroman. In 2003, Gibson published Pattern Recognition, the first in a trilogy which describe the life of an advertisement agency and the fine line between artists, businessmen, and financial profit. Ultimately, it fuses Bloch's definitions of the

“artist novel” and the “detective novel,” as protagonists spend the novel searching for the artist behind a set of mysterious film clips that have circulated through the Internet.

Much like Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, Pattern Recognition explores unusual forms of art, from commercial advertisement, to copyright brands, and gorilla, independent film releases. Cayce Pollard, whom Phillip Wegner has called the "stand-in for the novelist within the novel,” reacts to brands' logos as others react to allergens; she finds herself assigned to investigate anonymous video clips that have a profound affect on her psyche (187). Ultimately, she discovers that the filmmaker is a woman who suffered brain damage and as a result can only express herself through her art.

Ultimately, despite Gibson's tendency toward thriller-like chase scenes and assassination attempts, the aspects of his Künstlerroman waffle between Cayce and

Nora and the conflicting definitions of their art. Cayce would not describe herself as a traditional artist; rather, she consults, channeling her artistic tendencies through her

73 psychosis rather than through tangible means. Nora, conversely, channels her communication through the medium of art, literally using the film technology only beginning to exist when Joyce was writing to express herself . Cayce connects profoundly with all visual media she experiences, contrasted with Nora, who can only communicate through media. Gibson uses the two as foils for conceptions of technology, communication, and art itself. Gibson's art is more about contemporary innovation than about art itself: he explores the relationships between art, marketing, the psyche, and the human tendency toward Apophenia – searching for connections.

As a Künstlerroman, Gibson's Pattern Recognition uses the character foils to show the way technology has changed the way humans relate to and through art. He uses Cayce to epitomize the way mass media has changed the human conception of art. Cayce has internalized the pattern recognition and experiences them synesthetically, as others might experience sound or taste. She has evolved into the technological implications of mass media. In contrast, Nora's trauma has created a technological dependency, a future-present in which Nora's films have overtaken her voice, and she has arguably become one with the technological communication. While it is not a novel of the future, in Pattern Recognition Gibson incorporates the science fiction of the present future shock – that which he experienced in 2003 internalized within the text. Gibson's attempt to grapple with present events has, as Wegner argues,

"transformed the 'present' into a site of interpretive struggle, upon the outcome of which the very future of global society and culture rests" (198). Gibson himself once argued to

Newsweek that he “never bought that conceit that science fiction is about the future”

(“Interview,” 75).

74 Ultimately, Gibson responds to the world that Delany has created in Dhalgren, where memory has created a new, self-reflective concept of the present. Jason Haslam argues:

Both Delany and Gibson use a thematic focus on a past that has gone missing (the protagonist’s amnesia in Delany’s text, a missing father in Gibson’s) to discuss the ways in which the American national narrative, in order to maintain a self-cohesive vision of the nation, needs to repress its very creation of and relation to a silenced other (represented through the inner city by Delany, and the history of global conflict by Gibson) (73).

However unlike Delany, Gibson questions that which is external, rather than internal, within his characters. Cayce looks for a person, while Kid looks for himself. Cayce finds a new conception of art, but Kid grows and finds the actual art that he creates.

Ultimately, Pattern Recognition only reinforces the historicity of science fiction written in response to the implications of a present technological change and social instability. Gibson rejects Jameson's definition of the “mock future” to instead represent the actual present-day ways the tropes of science fiction have permeated society in the early twenty-first century. Pattern Recognition explores the present – rather than the past or the future – as that “fluid succession” Joyce originally called for in the examination of the young artist. Gibson uses the available technology to make that dream a present reality, in which technology preserves the work of the artist while actively communicating and affecting the present psyche in a way that would have been impossible without the technology available in his own present and the present of the characters he writes.

While Gibson reevaluates his own present-day, I would like to also look at reevaluation of the past within this period. Daryl Gregory's 2008 Pandemonium describes a 1950s in which a few select individuals are possessed by spirits ranging

75 from the angel of death to Philip K. Dick. As the artist character – possessed by Dick – is a minor character within the novel, this text will also occupy a minor role in my argument, but it still acts as a foil to Gibson's text, which writes of the very specific aspects of his present. Gregory, conversely, writes of a changed period of time, thereby reversing the historicity of the narrative. Gregory recreates a period of American history before the future shock, and yet, while writing the narrative in the early twenty-first century, he maintains a level of experimentation in his narrative as he implants the

Dick's style within the text to comment both on the 1950s, when Dick wrote, and the future where Gregory re-imagined.

In a still further vein, I would like to finish with a work that reverses Gregory's paradigm, imagining a future from the lens of the early twenty-first century, rather than reinventing the past. Published in 2009 in Asimov's Magazine and then republished in

2013, Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Broken Windchimes continues the tradition of an artist coming of age not through his art but as a redefinition of that art and of the place of the artist in society. A castrated soprano misses a solo note, which exiles him from an alien performance ring. Devastated, he travels to a human outpost and learns the history of human music. Gradually, he regains his sense of himself in response to the technology in instruments he did not know existed.

Rusch's narrative works in response to Card's “Unaccompanied Sonata,” except on a much wider scale. A young prodigy experiences music that is displeasing to an alien race, improvised and human, rather than modular and clear. When his voice cracks, once, and he is barred from his life as a performer, he discovers human music and improvisation for himself. Rusch touches on many of the same themes Card

76 originally articulated, and there is no need to move through them again. However,

Rusch shows a far future world beyond the scope that Card imagined in his story.

Rusch shows “human” music that caters to a human history, rejecting alien preferences.

In response to the culture shock still raging in the twenty-first century, Rusch's conceptual breakthrough appears when her narrator returns to the past, to the music of human history, and improvises that history, recreating the past as a fluid conception of present notes.

Through the twentieth-century and into the twenty-first, the artist in science fiction must deal with and articulate the technology that culture feels is its inherent enemy. As

Malzberg so beautifully articulates, "As the technology becomes more sophisticated and intrusive, as our lives in the postindustrial twentieth century came to be dominated in every way by technology, science fiction became more cunning in its template. We know not what we do; the engines can eat us up -- this is what science fiction has been saying (among other things) for a long time now,” and continues to do until the present moment. Technology has not stopped changing. The artist story continues to bridge that technological divide in an attempt to show that art remains, even when technology has changed the world in which we live.

77 CHAPTER 4 CONCLUSION

Whether it is to really live in someone else's story or to be a character scrawled in the margins of someone else's lost notebook, the Künstlerroman explores the way any reader may experience the life of an artist regardless of when that artist lived. I have concentrated less on qualifying each example as a Künstlerroman rather than taking, at face value, that any worthwhile artist story has an area of growth inherent in its progression. To this end, I have sought to articulate the ways in which rapid cultural change has affected the Künstlerroman in its characters, narrative lines, and ultimate themes.

The Future Shock, ultimately, created a period of change that created a period of anxiety, which an exploration of the Künstlerroman in science fiction both confirms and denies, as science fiction replaces the current anxiety with one of far future change we could not otherwise imagine. The Künstlerroman values the truthful creation of art within a narrative, but the Künstlerroman in science fiction values the truthful emotions of characters experiencing speculative anxieties in response to speculative changes in their environments. As Richter has argued, if fiction were purely hypothetical, like fantasy, then truth would be impossible (3). I would further his point and say that the truth exists within the characters and the human emotions they display. Even with purely hypothetical settings, the truth within the Künstlerroman in science fiction allows its readers to embrace change without the inherent anxiety of the Future Shock.

Here, I will return to my original definition of the Künstlerroman, as fused by

Bloch and Joyce: the artist “brings out something new instead of something past,” which

“implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual

78 present is a phase only.” From the transformation of Heinlein's Lorenzo, through

Zelazny's rose, Crowley's narrator, and Haldeman's art installation, we see a pattern of artists who bring forth something new instead of something past in the Künstlerroman, but also create the environment that reconfigures the present in which their authors originally drafted their stories. Ultimately, Ernest Bloch concludes, “In this way artists have their next existence before them, the silence of the sea and happy journey, those phenomena of resistance and of a possible victory” (237). The Künstlerroman exists within the potential for possible victory; the Künstlerroman in science fiction revolutionizes that potential to show a triumph in the human spirit in which art, the creation of art, and the growth of an artist is strong enough to withstand and even embrace any potential for rapid change and technological innovation. In fact, the artist can embrace the rapid change and grow, using the technological innovation to revitalize even the most traditional forms of art.

The Künstlerroman in science fiction creates an environment where science becomes art, and art becomes science, subsequently bridging the gap between what we know and what remains unknown. In 2007, the line blurred into real life, when artists

Howard Boland and Laura Cinti began to explore "a symbolic delve into poetic imagery whose beauty merges with the harsh conditions of its destination" (Boland). The Martian

Rose experiment used a planetary simulation chamber to expose a rose to the Martian environment in the Mars Simulation Lab in Denmark. When removed from the simulation, the two collected a frozen rose whose "darkened petals [were] wrinkly, and once [thawed, it] could not hold itself up, collapsing like a limp wire." Where the artists had hoped the rose would live, instead, it succeeded in "reminding us of Mars's in-

79 hospitality." While the article fails to reference Zelazny directly, an exposed reader cannot fail to see the shadow A Rose for Ecclesiastes has left upon our “symbolic delve into poetic imagery” when we consider life on Mars. Zelazny has created a symbol of the known so vivid that it has created an environment of scientific exploration where to consider growing plants more suitable to Martian temperatures seems “perhaps less romantic” even if it could “allow life under Martian conditions” (Boland).

The Martian Rose installation fuses the science of Martian terraforming with the symbolic recreation of Zelazny's symbolic representation of human science, art, and romance. Boland continues, “ Our longing for "the other" somewhere out there is deeply rooted. Whether we gaze at the stars or into a chamber, we seek to bring aliens and extreme life closer to our experimental sphere.” We can read the future of humanity within the future of the art and also the artist. Essentially, humanity exists in the tension between the known and unknown, of what we know, imagine, and seek to create in our art and our world. The emotion fits into two conflicting halves of the artist, as Jameson discusses:

It is clear that we already have at our disposal two different ways of visualizing the future and that well before any conceptual formulation our emotions themselves have evolved two quite different and distinct ways of living time. This is the sense in which Bloch distinguishes between 'filled affects or emotions' and 'expectation-affects': the former (greed, envy, adoration, for example ) are to be sure fully as temporal as the latter, in that they also ask something of the future, they also are at their very heart a type of wishing or desiring (Marxism and Form 126).

The future of the artist, therefore, has two avenues that it can pursue: it can create an environment of filled emotions, in which humanity has succumbed to greed for technological innovations and adoration of physical art forms, or it can pursue expectation, where the “heart” of “wishing or desiring” creates an art from technology

80 that embraces an environment of innovation and eliminates the anxiety inherent in too much rapid change over too short a period of time.

The barrier between the art of the present and the art that science fiction imagines essentially exists in the same divergence as Wolfe's theory of known and unknown, and the conceptual breakthrough it inspires. He concludes, “The ways in which these barriers between the known and the unknown may be manifested in science fiction are as numerous as the imaginary situations available to the genre – in other words, almost limitless” (103). The genre of the Künstlerroman lives in the world of limitless applications, as it tells the story of the artist who, within its texts, can create an environment of “metacommunication” where the art they create within the story itself becomes a part of the novel. The Künstlerroman creates an environment for change, both in embracing the change inherent in their creation but also in acknowledging that art is never stagnant. The artist comes of age but does not stop growing. Even those

Künstlerromane whose artists were already proficient in their mediums portray growth and change within the artifacts, the techniques, and the artists themselves. The

Künstlerroman in science fiction creates an environment even more limitless than in realistic fiction, as the artist may encounter anything its author could conceivably imagine, and in these encounters, they revolutionize art, revitalize character, and allow their readers to embrace, rather than fear, the potential for rapid future shock.

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86 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Rebecca McNulty received her MA in English in the spring of 2014 from the

University of Florida. In 2012, she graduated with a BA in English, including minors in international studies and creative writing, from the College of New Jersey. She has previously presented at the International Conference on the Fantastic, the North

American James Joyce Conference, and the McMaster Conference of Science Fiction; her current work continues to concentrate on the place of John Crowley in the tradition of the Künstlerroman.

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