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2. Articulations

Genre, Theory, and Phases of Canon-Formation

The question of the canon is one of the liveliest and most hotly debated in literary studies today, and the—at best—marginal position that science fiction occupies with regard to the most widely influential canons of literary value makes explicit consideration of canon-formation urgent. It is not difficult to understand why challenges to the received canon and even critical investigations into the mechanics of canon-formation have provoked precritical ire. John Guillory, one of the most acute theorists of canonization, has pointed out that despite the social decline of aristocracy, “the canon has retained its self-image as an aristocracy of texts,” and that “the pure authority of great literature may be the only image of pure authority we have.”¹ He further notes: “The canon participates centrally in the establishment of consensus as the embodiment of a collective valuation. Hence it is in the interest of canonical reformations to erase the conflictual prehistory of canon-formation or to represent such history as the narrative of error” (358). The quasi-reverence with which the canon is widely regarded in conservative and precritical literary ideologies can be further elucidated by giving Guillory’s thesis a more specifically institutional inflection. For the whole position of the humanities in the modern—especially the modern American—university cannot be understood apart from the invidious position that humanities departments occupy with relation to the much better funded and more publicly respected departments that specialize in the natural sciences. The latter owe their prestige not only to industrial and military utility but also to the image of solidity that they project, to the objective public knowledge that scientific investigation is widely supposed to attain. Literary studies can display nothing precisely comparable, because none of its more or less rigorous methods—from Germanic philology and positivistic literary history to New Criticism and even some varieties of critical theory itself—has won endorsement or respect comparable to that enjoyed by natural science. In this situation, the canon, as an “aristocracy of texts” projecting an “image of pure authority” may well seem the most solid thing that literary studies has to offer. There is a real sense, then, in which the question of the canon must be at the heart of any critical literary investigation.

Much conservative ideology would forbid the question from even being asked. Nonetheless, sufficient critical energy has been directed to this matter during the recent past that not only have we witnessed a great deal of reformist tinkering with and revision of the canon, but—more important—we also possess a considerable body of work that radically problematizes canon-formation itself. Writers like Guillory, Paul Lauter, Herbert Lindenberger, Richard Ohmann, and Lillian Robinson (among others)² have investigated various ways in which canonization does not simply respond to the degree of “value” immanent in texts but rather refracts (if not necessarily reflects) a wide variety of objective interests—personal and, more especially, social—dependent upon the specificities of particular times and places. In other words, genuinely critical analysis of the canon does not simply display the “unfair” exclusion of certain texts maintained to be “great” according to the same criteria by which other texts are included. Nor does it, in a weird parody of affirmative action, lobby for the inclusion of texts in order to “represent” the various groups responsible for the production of the texts. Instead, it interrogates the presuppositions implicitly governing the criteria and mechanisms of canon-formation itself. What is most radically at stake is not the empirical content of any particular canon but the form of canonization. As with much else in current critical theory, the founding insight of rigorous canon critique was originally voiced (with characteristic hyperbole) by Nietzsche: “As in the case of other wars, so in that of the aesthetic wars which artists provoke with their works and their apologias for them the outcome is, unhappily, decided in the end by power and not by reason. All the world now accepts it as a historical fact that Gluck was in the right in his struggle with Piccini: in any event he won; power was on his side” (emphasis in original).³ It seems to me, however, that what might thus be designated neo-Nietzschean canon critique, although it has grasped that the structure of canon-formation is a more fundamental issue than the content of specific canons, has not been sufficiently sensitive to the canonical importance of the structure—particularly the generic structure—of individual texts themselves. For genre is not in the least a politically innocent category, and if—as is now fairly widely accepted—the ideology of a text inheres at least as much in its form as its manifest content, then genre must surely be reckoned at least as important a factor for canonization as, say, the stated “moral” of a poem or the kind of life experience that ultimately provides the raw material for an autobiographical novel. In any case, because my concern here is partly with a particular genre—science fiction—the problem of the canon with regard to the latter cannot be considered apart from the relation between canon-formation and genre.

We can approach this matter by recalling that the process of reading itself, though by no means always critical, is inevitably theoretical; no better illustration of this point can be cited than the frequently noticed tendency of any school of reading (critical or precritical) to privilege, whether implicitly or explicitly, a particular area of the literary terrain. Two widely diverse examples may be noted. Lukácsian criticism, which is certainly a critical theory, is overwhelmingly oriented toward the novel of classical realism. Balzac and Tolstoy provide Lukács with his essential models, and, despite the immense range of his empirical erudition, he seldom strays far from them in any conceptual sense. His intense admiration for Thomas Mann—one of the most consistent enthusiasms of Lukács’s very long career—is based on his ability to theoretically construct Mann as the authentic successor of the nineteenth-century realists. Conversely, literary modernism seldom figures in his work save as an object of denunciation or (as with his late recognition of Brecht) an object assimilable to the basic principles of realism after all. Lyric poetry scarcely even exists for Lukács.

But lyric poetry (to take our second example), especially the lyric poetry of T. S. Eliot and his seventeenth-century precursors, is the central genre for American New Criticism, a school of considerable technical sophistication but one whose conceptual orientation is predominantly precritical. (There is some irony here, as the more philosophically schooled of the New Critics were directly indebted to Kant himself. But they tended to understand Kantian aesthetic contemplation as the empiricist apprehension of works existing on a Wimsattian “objective” level, rather than as constructive or radically interpretative in character.) Engaged in working out pedagogically convenient styles of “close reading” on short and highly wrought poetic artifacts, the New Critics have far less to say about prose fiction (Cleanth Brooks’s work on Faulkner is exceptional and not, indeed, a particularly New Critical project), and they would be hopelessly at sea with a work like Finnegans Wake (1939), not to mention, say, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1932–33).

There is, of course, a major difference between Lukács and the New Critics. Genuinely critical in the sense defined in the preceding chapter, Lukács knows what he is doing with clear self-consciousness. He is constructing a theory of realism for determinate ends both philosophical (the justification of orthodox Marxism as Lukács understands the latter to be the heir of the classical metaphysical line from Aristotle to Hegel) and political (the struggle against fascism). The New Critics, by contrast, seem to imagine, though doubtless with some degree of neo-Agrarian mauvaise foi, that they are simply and innocently “reading.” But it is noteworthy how both posit a privileged generic space, and it could readily be shown how equivalent generic spaces are assumed or stated by other schools as well: organicist English fiction, especially that of Lawrence, by the Scrutiny school; symbolist poetry like Mallarmé’s by Derridean deconstruction; high modernist drama and fiction by the Frankfurt School and by Althusserian Marxism; the Bible and the Prophetic Books of Blake (as well as much Shakespearean and Spenserian romance) by the myth criticism of Northrop Frye; Romantic and neo-Romantic poetry by the influence criticism of Harold Bloom; and so forth. Science fiction, it must be noted, has been overtly privileged by relatively few influential readers.

What this pattern of generic privileging suggests, I think, is not simply the importance of genre to the reading of literature but a way in which genre must be thought as a more fundamental category than literature itself. Genre is a substantive property of discourse and its context, a tendential mode whereby signifying practices are organized. Literature, by contrast (understanding the term in any sense more specific than that of all written documents whatever) is a formally arbitrary and socially determinate category. Literature, in other words, is a wholly functional term.⁴ Those works are literature that are designated literature by the minority of readers who, in a given time and place, possess the social and institutional power (as Nietzsche would say) that enables their views on the matter to prevail. In our present historical situation, these authoritative readers include academic critics and teachers, publishing executives, librarians, editors of journals and reviews, and others. Such agents, acting in a determinate social context and toward determinate (if often unconscious) ends, decide that a certain relatively small number of texts, out of the much vaster number that actually exist, shall be considered—that is, shall be canonized—as literature. They judge, for instance, that the poems, essays, and some of the letters written by Wallace Stevens are literature, while the insurance policies and office memoranda also written by him are not. But, of course, such judgments vary greatly in various historical situations, as the most cursory acquaintance with literary history reveals. Paradise Lost (1667), to be sure, was literature on the day of its first publication and remains so today. In 1776, on the other hand, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was literature in a sense in which it probably no longer is and in which the last scholarly publication by the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in economics almost certainly is not. Conversely, the plays of Shakespeare have progressed from being minimally or hardly at all literature to being more centrally literature than any other texts in the language.⁵ The attempt to construct an essential or transhistorically substantive definition of literature is, accordingly, in vain. Reading, one might say, does not merely respond to literature: reading (of a certain sort) creates literature.

This kind of reading, then—this process of creation—may be understood as at one with the process of canon-formation itself, which, as becomes evident, comprises three overlapping but distinct phases, in each of which genre plays an important role. In the primary phase of canonization—the construction of the very category of literature out of all verbal documents extant—genre is a nearly all-powerful factor. To put it another way, in this phase the ideology of canon-formation makes itself felt mainly through generic mediation. So it is that the business memoranda of so conservative and respectable an author as Stevens are denied the title of literature, while a poem by a militant and unknown slumdweller, if it obeyed a few simple conventions, would not be denied the title. It is in this sense that genre must be understood as a category logically prior to literature: the very existence of the latter is radically enabled by the former. Indeed, generic determination operates so functionally on this primary level of canon-formation that the same verbal construction may be literary or nonliterary depending upon the material context. The sentence, Walk with light, would be literature in a book of spiritual aphorisms but not on a metal sign at a street intersection.

Most works of literature, however—like the slumdweller’s poem, probably—are generally considered bad or negligible literature, and are relegated to near-invisibility at the periphery of the canon. There is, then, a secondary phase of the canon-constructing process, which is devoted to forming a secondary canon: a canon-within-the-canon that distinguishes “good” literature, literature that deserves to be taken seriously, literature that is literature in more than the bare bibliographic sense, literature worth studying and teaching and writing articles about. Though nongeneric ideological considerations are more important here than in the primary phase of the process, the power of genre is still strong. Shakespeare’s contemporaries were generally convinced of his personal genius, and there was a dawning awareness that the scripts of English stage plays might in some sense be literature; there was, however, widespread resistance to considering such scripts as literature in quite the same honorific sense that applied to ancient drama or to English odes and sonnets. The boom in Shakespeare’s reputation was directly dependent upon the collapse of this inhibition. Somewhat similarly perhaps, academic critics in our own time seem to be deciding that autobiography belongs more centrally to the literary canon than they would have allowed only a generation or two ago. In practice, there is bound to be overlapping between the primary and secondary phases of canon-formation, if only because of the inevitable semantic slippage between the concept of membership in a grouping and the concept of exemplifying the grouping favorably; all groupings have a tendency to absolutize themselves, to deconstruct the distinction between descriptive and eulogistic (or dyslogistic) signification. Still, the two phases remain in principle tolerably discrete.

Finally, there is a tertiary phase of canon-formation as well: the tendency, already discussed above, of every distinct school of reading to privilege a distinct kind of reading matter. This phase of the process, which distinguishes not merely literature or even “good” literature but the best, the most important literature, is, as we have seen, also largely governed by generic factors (though no doubt more crudely ideological forces are here stronger than in either the primary or secondary phases). Science fiction is certainly literature in the primary sense, but often not in the secondary and—in any explicit fashion—very rarely in the tertiary sense.

Two conclusions may, then, be drawn. First, it is evident that the affinity a mode of reading has for a particular literary object is by no means a matter of taste or judgment within an unproblematically predetermined field of literature. Rather, it is the most subtle moment or what I have called the tertiary phase within the project of constructing literature itself, of determining, out of all the verbal material available for inspection, which works possess the peculiar power that all respecters of literature from Plato to Paul de Man have attributed to the object of their devotion or fear—which is to say that it is, like the primary phase of the same process, a functional act involving, in the long run, determinate social ends. Genre plays a large role in all phases of the canon-forming process, and genre is of course (as shall be discussed in some detail below) not in the least an ideologically neutral factor. Accordingly, if science fiction has rarely been a privileged genre, this means that the literary powers-that-be have not wished science fiction to function with the social prestige that literature in the stronger senses enjoys. It cannot be too emphatically stated that the marginally or dubiously canonical status of science fiction has nothing to do with a series of unfavorable judgments on a series of individual texts—as a conservative empiricist ideology of canon-formation might imagine—but results from a wholesale generic dismissal of a kind organic to canonization as a practice. Plausible reasons for the general disinclination to eulogize science fiction will become clear in the course of this study.

The second conclusion involves recognizing that, at least in the most rarefied—the tertiary—phase of the canon-forming process, the operative generic judgments may be implicit rather than explicit. Usually, this distinction is relevant when considering both the positive and negative choices of precritical schools of reading. The Leavisites, for instance, would have hotly denied that they had any special (or certainly any ideological) attachment to the sort of fiction produced by George Eliot or D. H. Lawrence, except insofar as such a preference expressed an innocent recognition of what was worth reading at all (and favorable, of course, to “life”). But what I maintain here—and this is, indeed, the central claim of the entire current essay—is that critical theory itself, especially in its most central, Marxian version, does implicitly privilege a certain genre; and the genre is science fiction. This is a large claim. But it should be clear that I am not trying to “revalue” any particular canon in order to beg admission for science fiction. Instead, I have described canon-formation itself, and I now maintain that the most conceptually advanced forms of criticism unconsciously privilege a genre that has been widely despised and ghettoized.

Such an assertion raises two difficult questions. How and why does critical theory privilege science fiction? And, if it does, why do most critical theorists seem to have been unaware of the fact? I tackle the first question in the following three sections of this chapter, in which I explore various dimensions of the affinity between critical theory and science fiction. I then take up the second question in the final section, where the question of the canon once again becomes paramount.

The Critical Dynamic: Science Fiction and Style

In examining the affinity between critical theory and science fiction, there is tactical as well as methodological economy in beginning with the specifically stylistic dimension of science fiction. Style is widely taken to be a privileged category in the analysis of any literary kind, a kind of touchstone of the literary itself. The critical or precritical status of this privileging, and its special relevance to the study of science fiction, will be discussed below. But the precise language characteristic of a genre can hardly fail to be a salient aspect of the latter, and we may begin by analyzing the language of the following passage, which opens a major science-fiction novel, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968):⁶

A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised—it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice—he rose from the bed, stood up in his multicolored pajamas, and stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again.

In some of its particulars, the passage could be the straightforward opening of a mundane novel (that is, a novel in which the generic tendency of science fiction is reduced to the barest minimum): a married man, lying in bed beside his wife, awakes and is, presumably, about to start the day. The stylistic register of the paragraph, however, marks it as unmistakably science fiction. The key factor here is the reference to the mood organ—evidently a technical device somehow connected to emotional states and one that, though unknown in our own empirical environment, is an ordinary accoutrement of everyday life in the world of the text.

In fact, the mood organ does figure as an important motif in Dick’s novel as a whole. But in the context of the opening paragraph, its chief function is to signal the science-fictional character of the language, and thus to impel us to read the latter differently than we would read the language of mundane fiction.⁷ Because technology and emotions are apparently connected in ways unfamiliar to us (though not wholly unfamiliar or unpredictable, because we do know of mood-altering drugs, not to mention television itself), the adjective merry, as applied to a surge of electricity, may have a sense other than the expected metaphorical one. What does it mean to be “awake without prior notice”? We understand the difference between being jerked from deep sleep to full consciousness and gradually passing through intermediate stages; but the context suggests that a more specific meaning may be operative. Nor is the grammatically simple phrase “his wife Iran” free of ambiguities. Are we here in a world where a man can be married to an entire country? And what of the fact that Rick and Iran seem to sleep in different beds? As in mundane fiction, it may be a detail without profound significance, or it may signify certain sexual problems between the couple. It might, however, also signify some completely novel arrangement of sexual relations that is normal in the society portrayed. In any case, the whole topic of human feelings, sexual and otherwise, is estranged, and the question of a technology of emotion is posed. A few lines following the above paragraph is this bit of conversation:

“Get your crude cop’s hand away,” Iran said.

“I’m not a cop.” He felt irritable, now, although he hadn’t dialed for it.

This exchange might be completely mundane, until the final clause. But that clause, though formally subordinate, makes the crucial science-fictional point.

It would be possible, in a full-scale reading of the novel, to show how the first paragraph does function as an appropriate overture. Of course, not all of the possibilities raised there are actually developed. But the relations between technology and emotion do constitute the principal focus of the text, not only with regard to such household appliances as the mood organ, but also in connection with the state of virtual war between human authorities and androids, the latter presumed (though one cannot be completely certain) to have no emotions at all. But the opening of the novel may also stand alone as paradigmatic, on the molecular level, of the science-fictional generic tendency. The point to be stressed about the language is its profoundly critical, dialectical character. For undialectical theory, the most familiar emotions—love, affection, hatred, anger, and so forth—tend to be unproblematic categories, assumed to be much the same in all times and places, and to exist on an irreducibly subjective level. They may of course manifest themselves in a practically infinite number of permutations, and the precritical reader may relish such psychological fiction as that of Dostoevsky or Flaubert for the subtlety and acuteness with which those authors portray the (presumably universal and static) varieties of affective experience. A dialectical approach, on the other hand, would adopt the kind of perspective suggested by Dick. Because the paragraph shows an emotional dynamic of a future age operating quite differently from what we ourselves empirically experience, the question of the historicity of feelings is raised, and the possibility of a historical periodization of emotion in coordination with other aspects of social development (such as technology) is at least implied. The technical emphasis of the paragraph also tends to remove emotion from idealist notions of spirituality or the unproblematically individual, and to suggest that psychic states may be reducible to concrete and transindividual material realities—a reduction that Freud, after all, held to be the ultimate conceptual goal of psychoanalysis and that Lacan (substituting language for neurobiology as the grounding of psychoanalytic materialism) claimed to have achieved through the mediation of neo-Saussurian linguistics. We may also note that, if the phrase I used above, “technology of emotion,” has a strongly Foucauldian ring, it is not by chance. Dick’s paragraph does indeed resonate with Foucault’s concern to show that power does not merely repress or distort the subjectivity of individuals, but actually constitutes human subjectivity, from the ground up, so to speak, and in historically variable ways.

Historical materialism, psychoanalysis, Foucauldian archeology: I do not suggest that such elaborate theoretical structures are actually present, even embryonically, in the short and apparently unpretentious paragraph that opens Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It is, rather, a matter of the shared perspectives—here as manifest on the level of style itself—between critical theory and science fiction. What is crucial is the dialectical standpoint of the science-fictional tendency, with its insistence upon historical mutability, material reducibility, and, at least implicitly, utopian possibility. Yet it must be noticed that the quoted sample of Dick’s prose, like the prose of most (though certainly not all) science fiction, is far from what is ordinarily considered “fine” writing or the work of a “stylist” in the usual eulogistic sense. If, then, a deep affinity between critical theory and science fiction can be detected on the molecular level of style, the question of stylistic quality or value must somehow be engaged. Although science fiction is certainly not without its “stylists” in the normative sense—Ursula Le Guin and Samuel Delany come readily to mind—most of the prose in most of the works where the tendency of science fiction is strongest has rarely received stylistic commendation; indeed, canonical hostility to science fiction has often justified itself on specifically stylistic grounds.

It is necessary, then, to analyze the nature and function of literary style, most urgently in the general context of the ideology of style that has developed within hegemonic criteria of literary value. If a genuinely critical dynamic is to be understood in the conjunction of the categories of style and science fiction, then both categories must be subject to dialectical interrogation. With regard to science fiction, such interrogation was offered in the second section of chapter 1. We may now turn to the category of literary style.

A convenient point of departure is provided in an essay by C. S. Lewis about what today would be described as the problem of the canon or the crisis of literary canonization. Lewis claims to know how “the plain man” distinguishes between those texts that are “real Literature” and those that are not (the distinction evidently corresponds to what in the preceding section was designated the secondary phase of canon-formation). Texts that fail to make the higher grade, it seems, “‘haven’t got style’ or ‘style and all that,’” in normal lowbrow opinion. As a robustly neo-Christian critic and novelist, Lewis maintains an antiformalist viewpoint, and he therefore goes on to chastise his imaginary lowbrow friend for “a radically false conception of style.”⁸

Despite Lewis’s tone of class-based condescension, it is nonetheless worth noting that the apparently hapless “plain man,” far more than Lewis himself, is supported by the most influential (if, as we shall see, largely precritical) modern theories of literary form. The key reference here is to Russian Formalism, with its extremely various, detailed, and ingenious attempts to prove that the essence (or necessary and sufficient condition) of literature as such is a certain specifically “literary” use of language formally distinguishable from all nonliterary uses and definable in properly stylistic ways. (And here, of course, we are dealing with the primary as well as the secondary phases of the canon-constructing process). Only relatively recently, to be sure, have the particular innovations of Viktor Shklovsky and his colleagues attained a worldwide impact commensurate to their intrinsic intellectual force. But ideas related directly or indirectly to Russian Formalism, especially with regard to the conviction of the latter that literature must be understood in terms internal and specific to itself, without dependence on the referential status of the literary text, have resonated throughout most of the most widely prestigious Anglo-American literary theorizing of this century: from certain elements in the work of I. A. Richards, through much of American New Criticism, to such a relatively late epigone of Russian Formalism as Paul de Man—who, in one of his most widely known oracular gestures, proclaims that he does “not hesitate to equate the rhetorical, figural potentiality of language with literature itself.” Indeed, it is in just this context that de Man significantly contrasts what he himself terms “the sub-literature of the mass media”⁹ (specifically, an episode of All in the Family) with real literature like A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1928). The operative distinction is precisely that Proust’s novel, unlike (or at least far more than) the dialogues of Archie and Edith Bunker, possesses style and all that.

Of course, the category of style, as the defining canonical criterion of literary value, must be historicized in order to be truly intelligible; and such historicization must first of all notice that the de Manian use (like a great many other current uses) of the term rhetoric involves a certain historical imprecision. As Fredric Jameson has suggested,¹⁰ style is a specifically modern phenomenon, an effect of the bourgeois cultural revolution; although it is in some ways the successor to rhetoric, it operates in a manner antithetical to that of rhetoric in the strict sense. The older term implies a storehouse of linguistic figures, each with its predetermined formal integrity and all available to all aspiring rhetoricians. Actual rhetorical practice must of course vary with the various aims and abilities of different practitioners, but the shared figural infrastructure of all rhetoric guarantees a considerable degree of pan-rhetorical community. Furthermore, those differences that do emerge among rhetorical performances are understood as rhetorical differences simply and solely, as variations in the practice of a common art. They are not taken to be outward embodiments of profound dissimilarities in character or personality, as indices to the variety of human souls. But such is precisely the case with style. Style is generally assumed to be the direct expression of the middle-class ego and must be created anew and almost ex nihilo by every stylist. Fundamentally, it has little in common with such a characteristically collective and transpersonal project of the precapitalist order as rhetoric. On the contrary, it is part and parcel of the whole celebration of personal subjectivity so typical of cultural modernity—not only in the sense that the individual stylist is personally and almost solely responsible for every act of stylistic production, but also in that every particular style (understood here as an overall pattern perceptible in the work of any given stylist) is taken to be profoundly revealing of the author not merely as producer of style but as a human subjectivity in toto. The style is the person, as the well-known French proverb has it.

Accordingly, it is not difficult to understand the primacy widely accorded to style in the formalist constructions of literature and literary value. On the one hand, because style, in formalist stylistics, is taken to inhere in language itself, in the medium in which literature has its very existence, a stylistic emphasis enables the immense methodological economy of a quasi- (or pseudo-) scientific taxonomy of literature as an autonomous system sufficient unto itself and structurally describable without necessary reference to extraformal categories. On the other hand, the danger of a merely technicist aridity that such a stylistics might imply is avoided through the considerable affective force and richness that derive from the privileged relationship assumed between style and the soul of the stylist. It is significant that the ultimate context of C. S. Lewis’s rejection of formalist stylistics is nothing other than a considered denial of the viability of the distinction between literature and what Lewis’s invented lowbrow calls not real Literature (or what Paul de Man calls subliterature).¹¹ Lewis’s position is a minority one. More mainstream and formalist theorists, like de Man or Lewis’s plain man, are generally convinced that the distinction is indeed viable and that its essence is style and all that.

It is in this context that we may return to the prose of Philip K. Dick. I choose to focus on Dick because I consider him to be the preeminent author of modern science fiction, “the Shakespeare of science fiction,”¹² in Jameson’s phrase. By this I suggest not only his general stature within science fiction and beyond it (as the creator of an oeuvre that an increasing body of critical opinion holds to be the most interesting and important produced by any North American novelist since Faulkner), but also the extent to which his greatness, like Shakespeare’s among Renaissance dramatists, is bound up with his being radically typical of his genre—and not least on stylistic grounds, as our examination of the opening passage of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? indicates. Yet Dick’s style, while deeply science-fictional, does not, as we have already begun to see, characteristically display the evident polish, the syntactic elegance, and the allusive resonance that are stylistically valorized by hegemonic formalist criteria of value. The plain man of Lewis’s imagination would probably hesitate to attribute “style and all that” to Dick’s work, and de Man might well rank it closer in aesthetic value to Archie Bunker than to Proust. What is thus called into question, then, is not only the caliber of Dick’s style but also, given the formalist stress on style as the defining characteristic of literary canonicity itself, the magnitude of his achievement in general. We have to deal here with a contradiction between what I have argued to be the critical superiority of Dick’s style and its apparent inferiority (or mediocrity) by ordinary received canons of literariness and literary value. A further stylistic analysis of Dick’s prose is necessary, then, not merely to shed light on Dick and on science-fictional style generally, but to examine more dialectically the category of style itself.

The following passage condenses the opening of Ubik (1969), the novel that I take to be probably Dick’s finest:¹³

At three-thirty a.m. on the night of June 5, 1992, the top telepath in the Sol System fell off the map in the offices of Runciter Associates in New York City. That started vidphones ringing. The Runciter organization had lost track of too many of Hollis’ psis during the last two months; this added disappearance wouldn’t do….

Sleepily, Runciter grated, “Who? I can’t keep in mind at all times which inertials are following what teep or precog…. What? Melipone’s gone? … You’re sure the teep was Melipone? Nobody seems to know what he looks like; he must use a different physiognomic template every month. What about his field?”

“We asked Joe Chip to go in there and run tests on the magnitude and minitude of the field being generated there at the Bonds of Erotic Polymorphic Experience Motel. Chip says it registered, at its height, 68.2 blr units of telepathic aura, which only Melipone, among all the known telepaths, can produce.” …

Runciter said, “I’ll consult my dead wife.”

“It’s the middle of the night. The moratoriums are closed now.”

As with the passage from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the prose is not at all conspicuously “literary.” There does not appear to be any attempt, in the proper formalist manner, to use language in a state of intensified depth, density, and difficulty. On the contrary, the style (heavily influenced by Robert Heinlein and, perhaps more distantly, by Hemingway) seems marked by little more than routine serviceability; it fluently adequates itself to the adventure narrative and does not at all scorn the characteristic formulations of the field. Something “wouldn’t do”; a character states that “nobody seems to know” something and asks “what about” something else; something is said to be true “among all the known” examples relevant. Such devices do convey a certain degree of urgency and breathlessness, but not, apparently, in a manner more complex than that attained by an action-adventure cartoon strip. The prose, it would seem, is, in de Man’s term, subliterary. Philip K. Dick is not a stylist.

Or is he? We may first of all note that in Ubik, as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, science fiction does manifest its generic presence not only on the molar level of plot structure but also with regard to the molecular operations of language itself. The date in the opening clause suggests a science-fictional framework temporally, and the solar perspective opened up in the following clause does the same thing in spatial terms. There follow a flood of neologisms—this device being perhaps the most paradigmatic expression of science-fictional diction—that suggest the new resources of a brave new world, whether technological (“vidphones,” “moratoriums”) or human (“psis,” “inertials”) or, indeed, in terms that implicitly offer to deconstruct that all-too-familiar binary opposition (“a different physiognomic template every month,” “68.2 blr units of telepathic aura”). More generally, the passage clearly establishes, in strategically casual phrasing but also with noteworthy economy, that the setting of the novel is one in which such uncanny phenomena as extrasensory perception and communication with the dead (not to mention polymorphously perverse sexuality) have not only become routine but have been thoroughly integrated, economically, into the consumer capitalism of the 1990s. The language of the passage, in sum, emphatically establishes what we have seen to be the sine qua non of every text in which the tendency of science fiction is strong: cognitive estrangement, a clear otherness vis-à-vis the mundane empirical world where the text was produced—which is, however, connected (at least in principle) to that world in rational, nonfantastic ways.

A somewhat closer examination of the passage may reveal the workings of otherness to be yet more complex than we have seen thus far. Most crucial here is the way that the style of the passage critically manages difference and differences, the way in which the unfamiliar and the familiar are held in suspension and related to one another through the operations of a radically heterogeneous and polyvalent prose. The overall critical agendum of Ubik as a whole—the satiric and rationally paranoid estrangement of the commodity structure of monopoly capitalism¹⁴—is here enforced through a complex multiaccentuality on the level of sentence production. For example: “‘We asked Joe Chip to go in there and run tests on the magnitude and minitude of the field being generated there at the Bonds of Erotic Polymorphic Experience Motel.’” On the simplest plane, this is a casual, serviceable, unadorned bit of adventure fiction, the loyally efficient report of Runciter’s subordinate concerning the field operations of Runciter’s top subordinate, Joe Chip. At the same time, the sentence introduces such novelties as the quantification of telepathic power and the institutionalization of polymorphic perversity, the air of things new and strange supported by the logical but striking coinage “minitude.” What is even more complex and important, however, is the way that casualness and estrangement work together to suggest the routine commodification of telepathy, anti-telepathy, and perversity, and therefore the assimilation of these moments of uncanniness to the quasi-familiar commercial structure that includes Runciter Associates, Hollis’s competing organization, and the incidentally mentioned motel. The strange is to some degree thus de-estranged, but the more powerful tendency is the complementary one to estrange commodification itself, to evoke the fetishistic weirdness on which this superficially familiar process is based.¹⁵

A similar stylistic heterogeneity may be detected in this seemingly very simple sentence a few lines later: “Runciter said, ‘I’ll consult my dead wife.’” Again, the unadorned functionality of neo-Heinleinian prose—the boss is taking decisive but fairly routine action to deal with a crisis—clashes with what is for the reader the intensely strange content of the action. Also again, however, this multiaccentuality problematizes the relation of familiar to unfamiliar in two directions at once. As the sentence introduces communication with the dead, but only in the context of corporate management, it suggests that the commodity structure can make even the reversal (or partial reversal) of the ultimate finality of death seem routine; at the same time it reminds us that this very commodity structure is after all a fundamentally weird network in which dead and living labor interact with one another. It may be added that the point is reiterated almost immediately by the reference in the following line to “moratoriums,” which turn out to be commercial enterprises for the maintenance of “half-lifers” like Mrs. Runciter. In this passage, then, Dick’s style does more than move his plot along and insinuate the general cognitive estrangements that generically define science fiction. Even more important, the style, in its heterogeneous complexity, enacts on the molecular level the most searching critical-theoretical juxtapositions and interrogations that the novel in toto is concerned with implementing. If this style be “subliterary,” then that category itself certainly needs to be rethought—especially within the general context of science fiction. It is time, in fact, to consider more deeply the ideological functions of formalist canons of stylistic value.

Such a rethinking is implicit in the work of the Russian critic who in recent years has emerged as the most eminent modern theorist of novelistic style: Mikhail Bakhtin. The essence of what I have suggested concerning the style of Dick’s science fiction can be conveniently expressed in the terms given critical currency by Bakhtin. Dick’s is a radically dialogic use of language, one that exploits to the utmost what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia; that is, the primacy of linguistic polyvalency, of the irreducible multiaccentuality of meaning, as against any concept of singular, closed, monologic discourse. Furthermore, the foregrounding in Dick of the interinanimation of form and content, of text and context, of sentence production and the economic realities of generalized commodity production, strongly recalls Bakhtin’s insistence on the impossibility of detaching style from the sociality that it registers and his correlative brilliance in relating the smallest linguistic turns to the most general movements of culture and society. For Dick and Bakhtin, style is an intrinsically social category.

This privileging of the contextual, however, this rejection of any attempt to construct literature as a self-sufficient autonomous system, is only one way in which both Dick and Bakhtin mount a powerful challenge to all formalist conceptions of style. For both, the internal structure of style is no less important than, while closely related to, its radical referentiality. With regard to the former, it has far too rarely been noticed that formalist accounts of a specifically literary use of language, from the Russian Formalists themselves onward, have tended to assume an unacknowledged synonymy between the literary and the poetic, and thus a putative superiority on the part of the older literary mode: an assumed superiority whose presence can be heard to this day in the eulogistic accent that almost invariably accompanies the descriptive use of terms like “poetry” and “poetic.” Bakhtin, however—an unswerving though respectful opponent of the Russian Formalists who were his contemporaries and compatriots—reverses the conventional hierarchization of poetry over prose, arguing that poetic style, for all its apparent verbal richness, tends by its lyrical, rhythmic flow to repress otherness, to occlude difference, and thus to approximate to the authoritarian single-mindedness of monologue: “The natural dialogization of the word is not put to artistic use, the word is sufficient unto itself and does not presume alien utterances beyond its own boundaries. Poetic style is by convention suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse.”¹⁶ In fundamental contrast, the style of the prose novel is one that welcomes and glories in heteroglossia, highlighting and contextualizing rather than repressing otherness: the novelistic word “break[s] through to its own meaning and its own expression across an environment full of alien words … variously evaluating accents, harmonizing with some of the elements in this environment and striking a dissonance with others” (Dialogic Imagination 277). These words exactly describe the style of the opening of Ubik. Bakhtin’s stress on harmony and dissonance corresponds with complete precision to the Dickian dialectic of familiarity and strangeness. Though Bakhtin may never have heard of Dick and seems to have had little or no personal interest in science fiction as such, his insurgently critical standards of novelistic style might well have been formulated specifically to justify Dick’s science-fictional style.

Accordingly, it follows that novelistic style, when most capable and most powerfully novelistic (and in that sense, indeed, most literary) may eschew certain properties of polish, of well-roundedness, of fluently controlled density and resonance proper to the poetic; and, correspondingly, that novelistic prose that does display such qualities, however “literary” it may seem in normative terms, is perhaps to be suspected of contamination by the monologic authoritarianism of poetry. Returning to the terms most generally privileged in the current essay, we can say that Bakhtin’s ultimate critique of formalistic stylistics—and in particular of the precise ways that style is valorized by the latter—is that formalism, for all its technical richness and complexity, remains essentially precritical. Its aesthetic preference for poetic monologism is the final, inevitable result of the idealist and empiricist epistemology that absolutely autonomizes literature and concomitantly forecloses context and referentiality. The stylistic markers most commonly taken as indices of the literary in the eulogistic senses may, in fact, therefore be signifiers of conceptual conservatism and regression. Conversely, the dialogic, novelistic style endorsed by Bakhtin and exemplified by Dick is above all critical and dialectical; its “prosaic” quality may signal substantive, as opposed to merely technical, complexity. Indeed, the entire category of the dialogic in Bakhtin’s sense is in the end nothing other than the (primarily Marxian) dialectic as manifest in literary (and linguistic) form.

To avoid misunderstanding, we must note one further point about the Bakhtinian problematic. Bakhtin’s exaltation of novelistic prose over poetry cannot be entirely separated from the general historical circumstances of early twentieth-century literary criticism, in which the supremacy of poetry among literary forms was still a commonplace, and the novel was still widely regarded as something of a scruffy parvenu. The critical revolution that would challenge this hierarchy had been launched as early as Turgenev, Flaubert, and Henry James, but was far from victorious. Though it is a matter of some controversy to what degree such victory has been won even now, yet it is certainly true that the undialectical binarism—the flat, somewhat reactive privileging of prose over verse—toward which Bakhtin’s dialectic too often tends must be seriously qualified, especially in our late twentieth-century theoretical universe where, on the one hand, the post-Flaubertian “art novel” of modernism and postmodernism is a commonly accepted part of the literary landscape, as are, on the other hand, the efforts by poets from T. S. Eliot, Brecht, and William Carlos Williams onward to expand the accents of poetry beyond the sonorous monologism that for Bakhtin was particularly associated with verse of the late-Romantic type. In other words—and applying, in effect, a Bakhtinian critique to the letter of Bakhtin’s own work—monologism and dialogism cannot be taken as simple attributes of poetry and prose respectively. Both (in this way like genre itself as discussed in chapter 1) must be understood as tendencies strongly or weakly operative within texts and classes of texts; and there is less reason now than in Bakhtin’s time to associate monologism with poetry and dialogism with novelistic prose to quite the same extent that Bakhtin himself frequently suggests. Yet such historical adjustment is largely unnecessary in the context of science fiction, the scruffiness of which remains prominent. Indeed, the place assigned to the science-fiction novel by currently hegemonic aesthetic ideology is in many ways remarkably comparable to the place of the novel generally during the period when Bakhtin’s insurgent views were formed; thus Bakhtin may be considered in many ways a science-fiction critic avant la lettre. Bakhtin requires that style be understood in a radically social, referential way, as attuned to the heterogeneous roughness of discourse and history so significantly foregounded by Dick. Not only the general spirit of Bakhtin’s work but even many of his original formulations still directly apply to the prose of Dick and his science-fiction colleagues. The link between dialectics and the dialogic is, as we have seen, more than merely etymological; if science fiction enjoys a privileged affinity with critical, dialectical theory, then it is only to be expected that its style should be, in Bakhtinian terms, most radically novelistic.

Bakhtin’s emphasis on the embracing of the alien in novelistic style has an obvious special relevance to the language of science fiction, and it is in this light that I shall consider one more sample of Dickian prose. In the following passage of free indirect discourse from A Scanner Darkly (1977), which Dick himself considered his masterpiece, the protagonist, an undercover police drug agent named Bob Arctor, muses on the installation of police scanning devices in his own home:¹⁷

To my own house, he thought. Arctor’s house. Up the street at the house I am Bob Arctor, the heavy doper suspect being scanned without his knowledge, and then every couple of days I find a pretext to slip down the street and into the apartment where I am Fred replaying miles and miles of tape to see what I did, and this whole business, he thought, depresses me. Except for the protection—and valuable personal information—it will give me.

Probably whoever’s hunting me will be caught by the holo-scanners within the first week.

Realizing that, he felt mellow.

Like the passages from Ubik and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, this one seems, on the most evident level, to be little more than solidly competent. It differs in registering not much in the way of technological innovation, the only noteworthy item in that regard being the scanners (themselves only a revision and updating of the Orwellian telescreens in Nineteen Eighty-four [1949], or, indeed, of the police listening devices so familiar in Dick’s world and ours). Nonetheless, its style is profoundly dialogic. As with the other Dick novels examined above, the play of heteroglossia, the presence of the alien and of alienation, involves both the conceptual structure of the novel as a whole and an elaborate network of extratextual referentiality—although the key historical reference here is less the economic reality of commodification (as in Ubik) than the political reality of conspiracy. Much of the complexity of the style derives from the ironic fine-tuning possible in free indirect discourse, an instrument that Dick can at times play with near-Flaubertian precision. In the earlier sentences of the passage, the accent of the narrator and that of Arctor himself seem almost at one, the evident identity wholly appropriate to the novel’s sympathetic treatment of its hero. At the same time, however, the discourse is fissured by the paradox of self-alienation at the heart of the narrative. Not only does Arctor possess a doubled self as both hippie and nark; in these sentences he envisions the practically infinite replication of himself on holographic tape. The repressive state apparatus that employs Arctor assigns him to survey himself, and this assignment amounts to a hyper-Lacanian splitting of the subject, a construction of the very self as alien. This construction is to be understood, in a more general sense, as paradigmatic for the subjects of a conspiratorial, bureaucratized regime. Arctor’s musings thus have an estranging significance beyond his own intentions as a character, which are here limited to his personal situation.

The regime of conspiracy is estranged even more complexly, however, as the style switches gears, so to speak, with the last sentence of the first paragraph quoted above. At this point the narrator begins to withdraw his ratification of Arctor’s viewpoint, not out of lack of sympathy but on account of superior knowledge. Arctor believes himself to be persecuted by a single enemy, and hopes the scanning of his house will reveal the enemy’s identity. The hope is naive, and the text regards it ironically. It is Arctor, not the novel, who believes the information acquired from scanners to be “valuable,” and in the following two sentences the dialogic irony trained upon Arctor intensifies, climaxing with the word “mellow,” which is scripted as if from within a drug haze in this deeply antidrug text. The irony thus powerfully anticipates the ultimate plot development of the novel; that is, the collusion of the highest levels of the police with the criminal drug syndicate and their joint conspiracy to destroy the mind of Bob Arctor. The shifting voices in this passage resonate strongly with Dick’s overall attempt in A Scanner Darkly to estrange the bureaucratic conspiracies of both the state and the latter’s nominal opponents, and to trace the connection between such conspiracy and the alienation (ultimately the obliteration) of the hapless individual subject. The stylistic device of free indirect discourse, in the science-fictional inflection given it here by Dick, in this way conveys, on the molecular level, Dick’s overall and highly innovative attempt to suggest a critical political theory of conspiracy and bureaucracy in the late-capitalist state.¹⁸

In conclusion, our examination of Dick’s prose—so unstriking to the casually formalist or precritical reading and in this way, as in others, so profoundly characteristic of science-fictional prose generally—powerfully suggests the extent to which, even (or perhaps especially) according to the stylistic grounds on which it has traditionally been judged most harshly, science fiction maintains a critical superiority, a privileged relationship with critical theory itself. One more point in this connection may be emphasized. As we have seen, the dialectic since Hegel has an irreducibly historical character; thus the dialogic multiaccentuality of science-fictional style must amount to a radically historical style as well. This point is abundantly illustrated by the three major Dick novels discussed above: not only in the sense that these texts all bear unmistakable historical traces of their productive matrix in the cultural and political radicalism of the American 1960s and 1970s, but, more importantly, in the sense that their novelistic representations, even including the smallest details of everyday subjectivity from Rick Deckard’s irritability to Bob Arctor’s mellowness, are repeatedly shown, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, to depend upon the material realities of specific (and estranged) times and places.

But the historicity of science-fictional style can also be illustrated much more briefly, for instance with this sentence that concludes one of the best novels by Dick’s stylistic precursor, Heinlein: “My word, I’m not even a hundred yet.”¹⁹ The tone of lighthearted optimism is of course appropriate to what The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) regards as the comic conclusion of the bourgeois revolution (loosely patterned after the American War of Independence) staged in and by the text. The more saliently science-fictional point, however, is that this optimism is no metaphysical or merely individual attitude; rather, it is directly based on the historic specificities of life on twenty-first-century Luna, specificities that include significant alterations in human life expectancy and other biomedical realities. In general, indeed, we may go so far as to say that, stylistically and otherwise, science fiction is of all genres the most devoted to historical concreteness: for, after all, the science-fictional world is not only one different in time or place from our own, but one whose chief interest is precisely the difference that such difference makes, and, in addition, one whose difference is nonetheless concretized within a cognitive continuum with the actual (thus, as we have seen, sharply distinguishing science fiction from the irrationalist estrangements of such essentially ahistorical modes as fantasy or the Gothic, which may secretly work to ratify the mundane status quo by presenting no alternative to the latter other than inexplicable discontinuities).

It may appear, then, that science fiction is, perhaps paradoxically, a version of historical fiction, and that the affinity for which I argue between science fiction and critical theory is a rewriting of the privileged relationship maintained by Lukács between Marxism and the historical novel. This analogy does, in fact, imply a good deal of what the current essay is concerned to establish. And, in advancing my argument for the critical impulse of science fiction from the molecular level of style to the molar level of narrative structure, it is indeed necessary to engage the problems of critical insight and novelistic form posed most tellingly by Lukács. Such will be the initial task of the following section.

The Critical Dynamic: Science Fiction and the Historical Novel

Though Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel remains the most completely achieved critical analysis of any particular novelistic genre, its accomplishment is closely connected to Lukács’s considered denial that the historical novel is really a special genre at all.²⁰ More precisely, Lukács maintains that the historical novel becomes a specialized genre only in its decadence, when it has lost the critical features that define its classical, fully vital phase. For Lukács, the classical historical novel as practiced by Sir Walter Scott and his authentic successors understands historicity in a dialectical, as opposed to an antiquarian, way. History, for the historical novelist, is no matter of exoticism or inert factuality; rather, it involves a dialectic of difference and identity (though Lukács himself does not employ those terms), a sense of both change and continuity. The society of the past is portrayed with full awareness of the temporal and social distance that separates it from the society in which the novel is produced, but with equally full awareness of the driving historical forces that link the two eras in a concrete continuum that is social, economic, political, and cultural in nature.²¹ Thus it is, for example, that Scott’s representations of eighteenth-century and medieval Scotland stress the enormous differences between his country’s gentile Highland past and the bourgeois, largely Anglicized Lowland society in which the novelist himself lived—but never in a way that makes the former a mere matter of costume and scenery. The Highland past is never a mere binary (and thus, in the long run, stigmatized) Other counterpointed to the Scotland of Scott’s own day. On the contrary, Scott’s main focus is consistently on the historical forces that rendered irresistible the supersession of gentile by bourgeois Scotland and—respectable Tory gentleman though Scott was—without glossing over the terrible cost in human suffering. The historical novel, then, is, to use the term that the philosophically erudite Lukács himself repeatedly employs with full intent, an eminently critical form, a form that constructs societies as radically historicized and complexly determined totalities.

All this is to say that the historical novel, when fully itself, represents for Lukács a triumph of realism, and the latter, not the former, is in Lukácsian terms the most salient generic category. For the defining characteristics of historical realism like Scott’s are equally to be found in the genuinely realistic novel set in a society contemporary to the novel’s production. The novel of contemporary realism understands the historicity of the present; that is, it represents contemporary society as a mutable, historical totality, the result of complex but comprehensible social developments and one that has by no means arrived at any sort of finality or stasis. Despite the extreme closeness of contemporary society, a realistic representation does not cast it as “natural” or unproblematically given, but as part and parcel of the historical flux. Of course, there are obviously all sorts of minor differences between novels set in the past and those set in the present, but not what Lukács would define as an essential difference, or what we might designate a radically generic difference. Thus it is that Lukács considers Balzac to be the most legitimate immediate heir to Scott (a relationship, indeed, of which the French novelist was quite consciously aware). Thus it is—to choose perhaps the most prominent single example—that Tolstoy practices fundamentally the same kind of art in Anna Karenina (1878) as in War and Peace (1866).

There is, however, a radical break in the history of the novel as construed by Lukács. It comes not between historical and contemporary realism, but between realism itself and what might be termed the postrealist novel that emerges out of what Lukács sees as the disintegration of realism into naturalism (and later, into impressionism and modernism). The crucial loss here—closely connected, in Lukács’s reading, to the increasingly reactionary role assumed by the European bourgeoisie after the failed revolutions of 1848, and the concomitant abandoning of the progressive, democratic elements within bourgeois ideology—is the occlusion of the vital critical perspective of totality. Instead of portraying society as an interconnected whole in which objective and subjective elements are dialectically bound together—thus making possible the “typical” characters of realism; that is, psychologically individuated characters who also incarnate objective trends of sociohistorical development²²