"Science Fiction and the Sublime"
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"Science Fiction and the Sublime" Darren J Jorgensen B.A. (Hons.) This thesis has been awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy with Distinction at the University of Western Australia. English, Communication and Cultural Studies 2005. 2 Acknowledgements With immense gratitude to all the staff in the Department of English, Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, whose support during the writing of this thesis was unfailingly warm and constant. Especially to my supervisor, Van Ikin, as well as to Sue Lewis, James Toher, Judith Johnson and my fellow postgraduates, Jo Gray, Lorraine Sim, Duc Dao and Tama Leaver. For crucial intellectual feedback, thanks to Ian McLean in the Department of Architecture and Fine Arts, who co-supervised my final two years. For an updated version of the arguments herein, please see the published version, which I hope should be out sometime in 2007. 3 Abstract This thesis makes three assertions. The first is that the sublime is a principal pleasure of science fiction. The second is that the conditions for the emergence of both the sublime and science fiction lie in the modern developments of technology, mass economy and imperialism. Maritime and optical technologies; the imagination that accompanied imperialism; and the influence of capitalism furnished the cognition by which the pleasures of both science fiction and the sublime came into being. The third claim is that a historical conception of the sublime, one that changes according to the different circumstances in which it appears, offers privileged insights onto changes within the genre. To make such extensive claims it has been necessary to make a cognitive map of the development of both the sublime and science fiction. This map reaches from the Ancient Romans, Lucian and Longinus; to Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Johannes Kepler, Voltaire and Immanuel Kant; to Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. This thesis then examines how the features of these fictions mutate in the twentieth-century fiction of A.E. van Vogt, Clifford Simak, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Ivan Yefremov, the Strugatsky brothers, J.G. Ballard, Pamela Zoline, Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Stephen Baxter, William Gibson, Ken MacLeod and Stanislaw Lem. These writers are considered in their own specific periods, and in their national contexts, as they create pleasures that are contingent upon changes to their own worlds. In representing these changes, their fictions defamiliarise the anxieties of the reading subject. They 4 transcend the contradictions of their times with a sublime that betrays its own conditions of transcendence. The deployment of the sublime in these texts offers a moment of critical possibility, as it betrays the fantasies born of a subject's relation to their world. Specifically, the hero is a psychic avatar for the reader in these narrative situations. The hero of science fiction narrative passes through the disorientation and supersensible moments of the Kantian sublime, and thus represents the experience of the new and cognitively excessive that distinguishes the subject's relation to the modern world. The overcoming of this disorientation, the realisation of the cognitive powers of the supersensible, represents this subject's fantasy life. Through the extraordinary powers of the mind of the hero, the reader enters into the pleasures of thinking on the scale of the world or universe, and thus transcends the contradiction of the mind with this world or universe. This universal imagination is coextensive with the ideologies of modernity as they manifest in different periods of science fiction production. Yet the pleasures of the sublime also exceed these ideologies, and exists in a dialectical tension with them. These narrative and aesthetic structures are historically constituted, in so far as they mediate the relation of a text to its context, and trace the circularity of relations between the science fictional imagination and its times. "Science Fiction and the Sublime" uses the methodologies of dialectical Marxism, with the concrete categories of space, technology and economic relations to mediate the relation between a historically bound subject to the world. From the field of science fiction studies, I 5 engage the work of Peter Fitting, Carl Freedman, Fredric Jameson, Louis Marin and Darko Suvin. For their insights upon the sublime, this thesis also draws upon the insights of Longinus, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Weiskel and Alenka Zupancic. 6 7 Contents Introduction 9 to 31 Chapter One 33 to 110 The Ship and the Telescope: Cognitive Preconditions for SF Chapter Two 111-193 The Economy and the Spaceship: from Pulp Magazines to the Moon Landing Chapter Three 195-239 Other Ways to Space: The Russians, the New Wave and the New Utopian Novel Chapter Four 241-303 The Sublime and Recent SF Conclusion 305-308 Works Cited 309 to 334 8 9 Introduction "Space awaits its poets." Second Cosmonaut Herman Titov (114) This thesis makes a historical reading of science fiction (sf) alongside that constellation of ideas known as the sublime. It situates both of these synchronic classifications within the diachronic developments of technology, imperialism and capitalism. With Roland Barthes, it recognizes that "the more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism" (120). It also maintains that the synchronic and diachronic are not so easily separated, that after Karl Marx their dialectic is one that reproduces "the concrete in the course of thought" (qtd in Mandel, Late 14). After all, an understanding of history can hardly take place without concepts by which this history is understood. The terms used in this thesis are attenuated by the conditions under which they first appeared, and their subsequent changes in historical time. To begin marking the territory that this project will cover, I want to open it to a text that is not usually considered to be sf or sublime. Thomas More's Utopia (1516) is well known for coining the term "utopia", and for inaugurating a lineage of utopian fiction. It is useful to think about this text as a precedent for sf for two reasons: firstly, because it figures those historical processes of technology, imperialism and capitalism that are of such significance for the development of the genre; second, as an early example of the imagination of another land or world. The difference of this new world is accomplished by rendering a cognitive operation upon the world that More lived in. Abolishing private 10 property and unemployment with a participatory community and the right to work, More's Island of Utopia resolves a set of contradictions established by the sixteenth- century "European world-economy" (Wallerstein). Louis Marin describes Utopia's "ideological critique of the dominant ideology" (xiv), while Fredric Jameson thinks of it as a "system to end all systems" ("Politics " 43). This synchronic quality is complemented by its diachronic context. While the second book of Utopia, containing the description of the island and its organization, responds to the systemic structure of the capitalist economy, the first book addresses the specific ills that this system had produced in More's own time. For capitalism is historically distinguished by its expansion, as it extends private property and the labour market to as many parts of the world as it can reach. This was taking place in More's England. When the process of territorialisation that he witnessed reached beyond Europe to globalise the division of labour, it became known as imperialism. While Utopia is critical of this expansion, its Island of Utopia lies remote from known lands. Its discovery partakes of the territorial imagination of imperialism. These two aspects of More's Utopia--its critique of capitalism and its mobilisation of imperial expansion--are joined by a third, technological aspect. Allowing a movement over the globe in More's time were improvements to the ship and new navigational techniques. These new technologies join capitalism and imperialism as constitutive of the historical appearance of this novel, as the movement of the ship over the ocean enabled the expansion of capitalism and, in More's case, its criticisms, into the non-European world. The triad imperialism, technology and capitalism is also the scaffolding upon which sf built its imagination. The difference between Utopia and sf is that the latter does not 11 necessarily privilege capitalism in its refraction of the "dominant ideology" or "systems" of the world-system. The first book of Utopia explicitly addressed capitalism, while sf may reflect any one of a myriad of the historical faces of modernity. The most enduring definition of sf, Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), unifies the genre by describing it as a response to these multiple alienations. While Suvin's work acknowledges capitalism as a determining cause of these changes, it is not necessarily foregrounded by sf. From the negative experience of these changes, sf creates other worlds as a positive strategy for thinking them through. From alienation sf turns to estrangement, from changes in the actual world to an alternative world that is itself changed. As such, sf's "main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment" (8). To estrangement Suvin adds cognition as a second "necessary and sufficient" condition for sf (7). This is the "scientifically methodological" reasoning that has come to discursive power alongside capitalism (66). The relationship between this reasoning and capitalism is mediated by the "novum", an invention or innovation that is "validated by cognitive logic" (63). For Suvin the novum, mostly technological but sometimes an idea or sociological change, structures the sf narrative by producing its alternative world. The function of cognition, as he makes clear in a later essay, is to distinguish between real novums and the plethora of "fake novums" produced by capitalism, a world that is truly different from one that only appears to be so ("Novum" 38).