<< Betrayers: The full text of the talk on Genet, Joyce, Wilde, and Dylan | Front Page | Nabokov, on why novels aspire to the condition of the graphic novel >>
Monday, March 19, 2007
The Library of America Presents…
...some “Xtre-heeemely Cheezy Sci-Fi Ga-haaarbage.” (Credit CR and Dr. Percival Cox for the words and music there.) The popular canonization of pulp writers—The Library of America doesn’t reflect academic sensibilities as much as one might think—will directly influence the way future generations of scholars view the latter half of the twentieth century, but how accurate will the resulting picture be? I ask more as an historicist than a cultural anthropologist, and largely because Daniel Green’s recent post about the relation of literary language to the world represented through it has me thinking about turn-of-the-last-century debates on the verisimilitude of “realist” and “naturalist” works.
To bandy in some gross overgeneralizations, the naturalist perspective is often shorthanded—via Tennyson—“nature, red in tooth and claw.” Jack London and Frank Norris did not represent the world as it is, but as it would have been were it not for the patina of civilization. Their work may not reflect or represent society, but it does register the fact that something shook the cultural landscape, and that this something related to the crumbling of anthropocentric conceit. Daniel invokes another metaphor, that of fiction as a window through which one peers into the past, but my three models—reflection, representation and registering—seem a more useful way to consider the relationship of literature to history. M.H. Abrams already covered reflection and representation, so I’ll focus on registering here. To pick a random example:
I consider myself a literary seismologist, scouring the written record for subtle signs of a larger catastrophe. I sometimes dream of stumbling into the literary equivalent of “a gaping open wound in the earth’s skin,” but mostly I content myself with reading rock face for signs of deformities evolutionary in origin. The rocks will reveal their secrets, but only if one speaks the language.
To choose another entirely random example, one cannot identify Silas Weir Mitchell’s influences without being familiar with the conventions of the historical romance; the development of the Darwinian and Lamarckian branches of evolutionary science; American politics, foreign and domestic, &c. Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker: Sometime Brevet Lt. Col. of His Excellency General Washington is less a window through which you can spy the nineteenth century prancing around in its unmentionables, and more an Ozarks—deceptively flat, its plateaus are all that remain of a mountain thrust high back when Bermuda waltzed into the Atlantic. Just as it takes a trained eye to look at flatland and see a mountain island surrounded by vast coral complexes, so too does it take a trained historicist to read a novel about the Revolutionary War and witness competing theories of physical and social evolution attempting to account for McKinley-era American imperialism.
To return to the top now: thinking about the present in historicist terms affords me perspective I would otherwise lack, what with the contemporary moment being so contemporary and momentous. So, presuming the eyes who scan our outcrops are trained, what will they make of the twentieth century as represented in its pulpier moments. What evidence of epochal violence will they find? Will the paranoia of Dick remain superlative, or will it be presumed endemic, his work egregiously symptomatic of a common malaise?
Comments
It’s more fun if it’s endemic. I mean, ceteris paribus, don’t you think a dissertation about a society so mad that writing to the president by leaving letters in your garbage for the FBI to find seemed like a reasonable thing to do, would get more mileage than one about one guy who did a lot of drugs and went off the deep end?
Let’s be clear at the start. PKD rocks.
I think that Scott was just twitting CR, Adam.
To find PKD’s paranoia truly endemic, you’d have to assume a situation in which PKD’s work survives, but his biographies do not, and most of the rest of the extensive documentation of the late 20th century does not. That seems possible, but unlikely.
But I expect that it’s going to be easiest to split the difference. When I read Bleak House, I’m quite willing to believe that the court of Chancery was notorious, but I don’t quite believe that lawyers were in the habit of laughing evilly and emptying their papers out to drift in the wind when the last money in the case was used up. Similarly, when I read A Scanner Darkly, I’m willing to believe that there was something very odd going on with police surveillance and paranoia in the latter half of the U.S. 20th century, but I’m not quite willing to believe that undercover cops disassociated to the point of starting to spy on themselves. PKD, I’d guess, will be judged both superlative *and* indicative of an endemic malaise.
David, isn’t that always the case, by which I mean, don’t we already do this? If we consider Henry James any sort of bellwether than we’re of necessity creating a rather odd portrait of his time? Slot it into the present, then, and you’ll see where the oddity with Dick arises.
Adam, Rich is right. To be honest, I didn’t intend on twitting CR. The phrase had stuck in my memory, but (for obvious reasons) I’d associated it with the Troll of Sorrow.
Rich:
but I’m not quite willing to believe that undercover cops disassociated to the point of starting to spy on themselves.
Well, you have the wide-spread institution of the IAD come into being in the 20th century, so you could see A Scanner Darkly as registering the paranoia implicit in a police force which feels the need to police itself. (I admit, it’s fun to speculate on the homologies future historicists will draw when they read literature of our period.)
Oh, we totally already do that. I mean, is there any chance Dick’s paranoia will remain superlative, in historicist eyes? Pace Rich, you don’t have to argue for the literal truth of Dick’s work to call it a potent metaphor for its time, whether it really is or not. (VALIS, for instance, is more a potent metaphor for temporal-lobe epilepsy. If you can call that a metaphor.)
Which isn’t to say, Adam, that PKD doesn’t rock. :)
I read all of PKD in high school and have never really gone back, in force, to reread the whole corpus. (One college summer I was very poor and I sold my collection of vintage PDK paperbacks, along with all my Byrne/Claremont “X-Men” and Frank Miller “Daredevil"s for a decent price. And I’ve never really had the heart to restock my SF shelf with less desirable editions. Maybe I should invest in the Library of America.)
I think one of PKD’s greatest gifts - one that will be enduring - is, paradoxically, the unevenness of his prose. It makes reading him much more disturbing than, say, reading Kafka, who always writes so well, even when he is turning into a giant bug. The fact that he writes well sort of insulates us, whereas in PDK’s case, the madness is evident in the unsteady prose stylings, and so feels more contagious on our fingertips. I think.
PKD is such a good social observer, though, too. I don’t mean in the sense of a current of paranoia in society that only he could express etc. I mean in his depictions of human interaction in the midst of grandiose reality breakdown. Take the suicide scene in Martian Time-Slip, for instance, which I’ve probably quoted here before. In the conversation below, Norbert Steiner has just admitted that he has a sequestered, autistic child to a bartender who has spoken approvingly about killing the “defective” camp children for eugenics reasons:
“"Let me buy you a drink, Norbert,” the portly man said, “to show you how sorry I am; I mean; about the way I talked.”
Steiner said, “If they close B-G it will be a calamity too great for us to bear, we who have children in there. I can’t face it.”
“I see what you mean,” the portly man said. “I understand your feeling.”
“You are superior to me if you understand how I feel,” Steiner said, “because I can make no sense out of it.” He set down his empty beer glass and stepped off the stool. “I don’t want another drink,” he said. “Excuse me; I have to leave.” He picked up his heavy suitcases.
“You’ve been coming in here all this time,” the owner said, “and we talked about that camp a lot, and you never told me you had a son in there. That wasn’t right.” He looked angry, now.
“Why wasn’t it right?”
“Hell, if I had known I wouldn’t have said what I said; you’re responsible, Norbert—you could have told me, but you deliberately didn’t. I don’t like that one bit.” His face was red with indignation.
Carrying his suitcases, Steiner left the bar.
“This is not my day,” he said aloud. Argued with everybody; I’ll have to spend the next visit here making apologies ... if I come back at all. But my business depends on it. And I have to stop at Camp B-G; there is no other way.
Suddenly it came to him that he should kill himself.”
Technically, some of this is exceptionally clunky writing. Do we really believe that Norbert says things like “it will be a calamity too great for us to bear, we who have children in there” or “You are superior to me if you understand how I feel”? Those are sentences that echo the explicitly fascist topic of the conversation. But as a mechanism for human action, it feels exactly right. The anger of a bartender who says that Norbert is responsible for the bartender not censoring himself—that’s the perfect impetus for Norbert’s suicide. Kafka has always felt solipsistic (to me, anyway); PKD’s unsteady prose goes along with the unsteadiness of actually being influenced by other people.
I should say, I suppose, that
1) what Scott was quoting was intemperate, aimed more at Holbo back during the dark old days than SF.
2) I really try with SF, and, well, I have a very hard time. What was the last thing I read? Stross’s Accelerando, I think. And I was disappointed. Short version: if you’re going to describe a universe gone that strange, the prose itself really does need to, um, adjust a bit to keep up.
I’m better off sticking to the speculative. That’s more my cup of tea, and occassionally produces stuff that formally lives up to the task its set before itself.
3) John, that’s just crazy, what you said above about Dick vs. Kafka. Look, culture abounds in whacky, uneven stuff about uneveness. It more or less produces itself. The really horrifying thing about Kafka is the control itself, despite what he’s writing about. Just as K. worries about breakfast when the guys are in his room, what does it mean to worry about writing so lucidly, even calmly, about such terrible dislocations etc.
Yes those were dark days. We are glad you have seen the light, CR. (And let it go at that.)
Re: Dick. I’m not saying that just writing unevenly about unevenness automatically makes for great art. PKD’s signature unevenness, however, seems to do so. The fact that outsider art more or less produces itself, because most people are outside - with respect to formal training, certain sorts of basic competence, so forth - is no argument against the possibility of brilliant outsider art. PKD has the knack for writing badly in such a way that every one of his characters inhabits that uncanny valley, even in cases in which he was probably trying to write a human being. Somehow this works, rather than just resulting in poorly drawn characters. Reading “Ubik” or “Valis” is much more disturbing than reading Kafka - but I speak only for myself. (I’m not saying that therefore Dick is a greater artist than Kafka. But he is more disturbing to read.)
Rich’s passage is a good example.
Every critic of SF is forced to write one of two pieces: Why PKD Is Great Despite His Writing Style or, more rarely, Why PKD Is An Overrated Hack After All. These last, to me, seem to be flavored with envy; I remember some comments by Delany on PKD that were incomprehensible until I read this, which confirmed my earlier impression that Delany is not a trustworthy critic of his contemporaries. (By the way, anyone who has ever pissed off Tom Disch might want to wait a few years before connecting to the Internet again.)
Of course Philip K. Dick is garbage—and of course he rocks. Being garbage is a precondition of rocking: rock is garbage. AC/DC’s Angus Young once said, regarding the nature of rock, that if a fifteen-year-old kid can’t figure out what you’re doing with your guitar, you might want to reconsider what it is you are doing. If a fifteen-year-old kid can figure out what you’re doing with your guitar, what you are doing is basically garbage.
“Garbage” is not necessarily a term of disparagement. Garbage may be where it’s at. Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman, a garbaggiated little sci-fi cartoon many of you probably remember as “Battle of the Planets,” did wonders for Japan’s postapocalyptic anxiety by having a ship called the Phoenix rise from the ashes of nuclear holocaust at the end of each animated episode. A spoonful of garbage helps the medicine go down.
It’s been a coprophagic couple of years at the Library of America. They’ve also lent their name to the orchidaceous crappiness of H. P. Lovecraft—ex: “Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulses will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck may glimpse.” (That’s a reasonably representative sentence, insofar as it doesn’t contain something like “Ph-nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”) But despite his florid stiltedness, Lovecraft did what may be greatest in art. He achieved a Promethean aim: he brought a creature to life. Cthulhu is real, as Sherlock Holmes is real. Would you believe I once saw “Cthulhu” written in urine in a snowbank on Brattle Street? You let me know the next time you see Lambert Strether’s name written in urine in a snowbank.
I like to tell people how to shelve their books. John, you should not have a separate SF section. Classification structures our world, and you must free yourself from the generic prison. Put Nothing next to Nova.