The Valve

roger on: The War Between Wells and James

I like the elitist bashing. When they turned against Clinton’s gas tax holiday, I saw the fine, filthy hand of Henry James again - always against those tax holidays for hardworking, uh, Americans, who want their tax holidays and their sci fi. And would revolt if Henry James re-wrote terminator from the point of view of an android chick who comes to the wedding of her best friend with the terminator and goes on a shopping spree with him to some futurist mall, buying him a crystal computer chip with a tiny crack in it. Actually, the true influence on Proust is the sport story. Remember how, in the first book, he longs to go fishing with the Mme de Guermantes? Are we obviously talking about a subtext of big game fishing here, Marcel, Ernest and some photographer from Field and Stream, splashing through the briny deeps in search of barricuda, or what? It is fishing and cowboy stories that were the big success of the twentieth century, which modernist elites did so much to suppress, those bastards! But the common people aren’t buying it, the non-elites. Admit it - this is the Louis Lamour era.

Ray Davis on: French Theory

My “jokes” must be about as funny as Zukofsky’s “lyrics” are singable. Lawrence, considering how quickly pre-verbal infants learn to treat two-dots-and-a-line as a face, isn’t the real mystery why anyone ever bothered getting more complicated? John, Scott McLemee’s account makes Cusset sound considerably smarter. Is the book simply weaker on the virtues of the “backlashers” than on the vices of the “Theorists”? If so, I admit I’d also have a hard time trying to make Bloom, Paglia, or some of those ALSC manifestos sound broad-minded and reasonable. To paraphrase a recent comment from another thread, the Theory Wars are more a matter of institutional history than intellectual history. But if you do decide to treat the subject as a battle of Big Names, I think the canonical theorists are a sharper bunch than the best-selling debunkers.

Lawrence La Riviere White on: French Theory

& now for a tedio-academic belaboring the of obvious: Jastrow is most famous for his work w/optical illusions, which is to say, drawings. Get it? Drawings, which is to say, cartoons. Get it? And where is a famous place where his famous duck/rabbit (get it, duck, rabbit! Note how Ray was able to present this same idea as a subtle joke & not some hectoring lecture) appears? Part II of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations! Now go write that dissertation! Srsly, the question from Part II that is still under my skin: why do we take this drawing for a face? Why do we construe a person from a few primitive scratches? (& the best cartoonists are able to get maximal construal from minimal lineaments. Cue the Herriman!).

John Emerson on: French Theory

See, Theory was always already refuted: What can be seen here so visibly is a historically well-determined little pedagogy. A pedagogy that teaches the pupil that there is nothing outside the text....A pedagogy that gives to the master’s voice the limitless sovereignty that allows it to restate the text indefinitely. ("My Body, This Paper, This Fire"). HTML hates me.

John Holbo on: French Theory

This is very funny. I’m actually working on a post about Elmer Fuddish looking characters as comics icons. I’ll have it up a little later.

Lawrence La Riviere White on: French Theory

It’s twoo! It’s twoo!

Ray Davis on: French Theory

"Theory is a strange duck.” That’s because, as any damn fool can see, it’s actually a rabbit. Open your eyes, man! Rabbit! Rabbit! Rabbit! (Little-known fact: Elmer Fudd’s character design was modeled on Joseph Jastrow. Thus the high collar.)

John Emerson on: French Theory

Steven Augustine on: The War Between Wells and James
Science Fiction, with its many, ever-shifting definitions (and canons; what, Ray Bradbury no longer cuts it?), won’t stabilize into a well-defined genre until “it” stops being so popular (ie, more “entertainment” than “art") that everyone wants to claim it. I think we may be missing the point that in our highly-militarized Hegemony, hardware is power and power is sexy and “Sci Fi” is the narrative-fetishization (subtle or not) of hardware. Wells’ romance of hardware is powerfully resonant with the actual modern use of it to “defend” against, and dominate, brownies and nature alike… what is “progress” but the spiritual essence of this “defend against/dominate” meme in the Euro-Industrial soul? That said, collating the various definitions of Sci Fi as presented above, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that we’ve missed (unless I’ve missed something) the chance to trace the whole thing back to its obvious source (predating Proust by a nice long stretch). Or, as I commented (semi-facetiously) in a Guardian thread: “I read part of this collectively-written, space-opera-type book once… a wee bit like Dune… in which the parthenogenetically-created protag was immortal, could teleport as well as being telepathic and could alter matter on a molecular level with his mind, heal the seriously ill, reanimate the dead, see into the future, had hovercraft feet, etc. His dad, who invented light, gravity and matter (the protag was half-earthling, half-alien; his mother got pregnant via a ray of light) was locked in this millennia-old battle with another superbeing (a former chum or lover, the reader gathers)... the battlefield was bronze-age earth (would’ve been much cooler, though, set in the stoneage, or the wild west). “Somehow (in a way the book never really made clear), the son’s appearance on earth was a tactical move of the dad’s against the enemy superbeing. Anyway, the son gets killed but soon enough reanimates. It turns out (through a time-travel subplot, I guess), the protag and the protag’s father are the same character! “Sounds exciting, I know, but, truth is, it was dead boring, plus being poorly-structured, weirdly illogical, overly-moralistic in some places and surprisingly pornographic (and bloody) in others. A little light on the tech. The various unreliable narrators are a trifle *too* unreliable. And the damn thing is *way* too long. “Oh, and, it’s fatally implausible; I mean, the writers weren’t *nearly* able to persuade me to suspend my disbelief… not for a sec. Popular bloody book, though! Not up there with “Harry Potter” but, still, sold millions...”

Nick Hubble on: The War Between Wells and James
Having digested this for several days (while ostensibly dealing with marking deadlines) I have realised that I should actually get on with it and read The History of Science Fiction because viewing modernism as sf is an idea that has also crossed my mind. As commented on above, modernism can be seen as a dialectical shift between Wells and James, but it is one in which Wells is too frequently hidden. It’s analogous to Zizek’s parallax shift argument: two is not just something other than one but the actual shift from one itself. You get a more symmetrical view if you look at the relationship between Wells and Ford Madox Ford. Not that I don’t like James, but as Stevenson said of Portrait of a Lady, his endings are so often simply horror. Zizek claims that this horror has exemplary value as it demonstrates James’s preparedness to confront unflinchingly the deadlock when two sides of a parallax view cannot be brought together and, therefore, demonstrates his awareness of the crisis of modernity. However, I don’t see this horror as going anywhere, whereas Ford’s Parade’s End takes us into horror and beyond it, which is what differentiates sf from horror. So those (high) Modernists who want to remain steadfastly confronting the horror can continue in what I suggest is an increasingly unstable pursuit; the rest of us should get on with configuring modernism and sf into a more productive paradigm. Having read the previous comment though, I see this doesn’t really do things justice – really we also need a fictional history of the last 400 years with sf, Wells, James, the CIA, TV book shows etc – now who could do that justice I wonder?

Tony Christini on: The War Between Wells and James
Given that science fiction, as Adam usefully defines it, bears coherence by way of the scientific revolution - since that is such a specific delimited possible realm of focus for literature - it makes makes sense for, one might expect that, writers interested in exploring the more full human condition to tend toward, even fix on, elements of belief, opposite of science, such as “questions of atonement, salvation, transcendence.” To begin to approach the more full human condition, it may be a necessary counterbalance, and it all gives a certain spin. First half of the twentieth century fiction (the “moderns,” then later the “postmoderns") seems to me to be an innovative decline from nineteenth century fiction ("Victorians"). The progressive diversity of fiction is possibly the main new hallmark of second half of the twentieth century fiction, if not its key essence. By roughly mid twentieth century, Henry James was being held up as a good Cold War author, while, say, Richard Wright was being censored, for being too progressive, by prominent literary magazines (funded by the CIA). Meanwhile, saccharine “libertarian"/right wing/status quo SF writers like Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand filled a void left by Wells, seems to me. Take a look at what happened to once prominent liberal-turned-progressive literary critic Maxwell Geismar. As I’ve written elsewhere: The father of current editor of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel, William vanden Heuvel, tag-teamed with current regular FOX political pundit William Kristol’s father Irving Kristol (who has come to be known as the “father of American neoconservatism”) – these two figures of the social and political establishment hastened to appear on national TV over four decades ago to attack directly to the face of the silenced progressive literary critic Maxwell Geismar, on the occasion of the publication of his book of criticism about Henry James (“a primary Cold War literary figure”), Kristol and vanden Heuvel, two exemplars of the status quo, serving the retrograde interests of the state, executed a prominent role in destroying Geismar’s highly accomplished literary career and ending his run on a national literary television show, Books on Trial (“or something similar,” in Geismar’s recollection). Geismar posits William vanden Heuvel as “a rich, cultivated, charming, and liberal member of the upper echelons of the CIA [who] had a large hand in embroiling [the U. S.] in Vietnam,” while Irving Kristol “as it later turned out was almost always affiliated with many State Department or CIA literary projects in editing, publishing, and the academic world…a hired hand of the establishment.” This combined liberal and reactionary political literary attack against the increasingly progressive literary stalwart Maxwell Geismar, having occurred on national TV no less, is one of the most significant moments in all of American literature in the second half of the twentieth century – yet it remains virtually unknown. Details may be found in Geismar’s decades-delayed, invaluable memoir, Reluctant Radical (2002). Also see, “Art, Literature, and the CIA”: http://apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com/2007/01/26/art-literature-and-the-cia/

Adam Roberts on: The War Between Wells and James
Apologies for appearing to have absented myself from this thread: I’ve been having connectivity problems with my home machine. Grr. Charlie, H.: I’d say the Recherche does more than simply ‘parsing remembering’; it tries textually to embody and excavate time as a dimension (think of the last sentence of Temps Retrouvé). But yes of course there’s a polemical element in the appropriation of the book for SF. Charlie: you’re right about textbooks picking crime as the Modernist pop-genre: supposedly to do with epistemological rather than ontological cultural logics. Of course, textbooks are sometimes wrong. Aaron B. I find ‘I’ve scanned this thread in vain despair for an more in-depth explanation of what exactly is at stake’ to be a particularly eloquent phrase, full of the pathos of contemporary internet textuality. Ray: Joyce, like Neela from Futurama, only had one eye. Coincidence? I think not. Jonathan M. “I take your approach to defining SF to be not a social one but an essentialist one, allowing you to have stuff be SF without it being aware that it is SF and without having any causal social relationship with the stuff we generally think of as being SF.“ Hmm. You’re probably in a better position to judge this than I (having read my book, I mean); but I’m of a generation where ‘essentialist’ is kind-of fighting talk. If you’d asked me I’d have said my approach was exactly social: which is to say, I take ‘literature’ to be, broadly, Fantastic (Realism being a relatively late, relatively minor branching off); and SF to be a particular variety of Fantastic Literature that gains effective coherence as a result of the impetus given to culture by the scientific and Copernican revolutions. SF, I argue, is therefore shaped, whether individual writers of SF are consciously aware of it or not, by the cultural determinants of the Reformation and the rise of science: questions of atonement, salvation, transcendence, infinity (’the Sublime’, ‘sense of wonder’) and so on. Certainly SF is a relatively minor branch of Literature from about 1600 to about 1900; and certainly it explodes in popularity and cultural penetration in the twentieth century—to do, I think, as much with increasing levels of literacy as with the acceleration of industrialisation. But the body of literature thus produced is still surprisingly marked by the metaphysical problematic of the Reformation. Or that’s what I reckon. I may be wrong, of course, and most of the reviews of the book didn’t agree with my argument; but that’s not to say I was trying to identify an ‘essence’ of SF.

Joe Camhi on: Organizing Abraham Lincoln
Thanks for quoting my play. It is nice to know that it was performed in Portland. I didn’t know that until I read your article. How was the production?

Charles on: The War Between Wells and James
I sit corrected. Joyce is as sci-fi as Gene Roddenberry. ‘All modernities have within them the kernel of postmodernity’ (or thereabouts). Thomas Docherty, maybe? Talk about cake and eating it. I assume it’s just me who’s developing a notion of writers as action figures a la Action Man/GI Joe. You get the bog standard regular version, say moustachioed Joyce replete with hat, cane, spectacles and jauntily-angled trilby, but then find your pocket money has to stretch to sundry other variations. Sci-fi Joyce (with spacesuit and ray gun), detective Joyce (six-shooter) etc. I’m saving up for postmodern Henry James (with adjustable arms to demonstrate incredulity toward metanarratives) and, when somebody gets round to it, kung-fu Ezra Pound.

Luther Blissett on: The War Between Wells and James
Charles, that is why I’d argue for a criticism that is completely descriptive. I wouldn’t argue strongly, but I’d argue. It’s an impossible, and impossibly boring, vision for literary studies, but it highlights the problems with any idea that ventures beyond the minute particulars of a text. At the same time, as long as these terms are defined, I think they can work as heuristics or maps for describing certain elements various texts share. So modernism can be a stylistic description. That’s fine, provided we’re upfront that we’re going to be excluding a bunch of work that is generally called “modernist.” For every Woolf there’s a West, and stylistically, I see few connections. Or, following Jameson, we can see terms like “modernism” as highlighting certain social dialectics that unfold in texts. That’s my preferred model, because it gives us a way of thinking about Woolf and West, Stein and Millay, in the same thought. But the James/Wells way of putting it doesn’t work for me precisely because I don’t think the same social dialectic is at work today as then. James/Wells marks the site of a conflict that simply doesn’t exist today in the same form.

Ray Davis on: The War Between Wells and James
While I was looking for those quotes I bumped into someone who even wanted to claim Henry James for postmodernism. You’re just kidding about Joyce, though, right? So far as I know, he’s totally sci-fi.

Charles on: The War Between Wells and James
Are we not taking this taxonomy more seriously than it deserves? Modernism, postmodernism, even naturalism surely do little more than serve as convenient shorthand for approximate historical periods or, at a push, writing that share certain characteristics (yes, even the epistemology/ontology canard). Investing these terms with much more significance is too easily undone by, for instance, the case that can be made for Tristram Shandy being postmodern, Beckett being high modernism, Raymond Chandler pursuing epistemological ends in writing detective fiction, Raymond Chandler actually pursuing ontological ends in writing such poor detective fiction (excellent books, but poorly wrought mysteries), and so on. Unless we’re always in orbit about T.S. Eliot and Joyce. They were definitely modernists.

Aaron Bady on: The War Between Wells and James
For my groats, I like this as the definition of modernism: artists who are concerned with the problem of modernity. Says nothing about what “the problem of modernity” actually is, of course, but that’s the point, to kick the unsolvable problem upstairs.

rob on: The War Between Wells and James
Do people (i.e. of the mod and contemp lit camp) not generally make sense of modernism and modernity in terms its differential affirmation of an Enlightenment and Romantic heritage and in terms of the social and cultural changes manifesting as “the great transformation”? Hm. Judging by the above commentary, the answer to my question would have to be that most do not…

Luther Blissett on: The War Between Wells and James
To make matters stupider—and to show the futility and fun of proliferating genre heuristics—we can consider Brian McHale’s modernist/postmodernism dialectic as a shift from epistemology to ontology. From that perspective, science fiction was postmodern from the start, insofar as it pushed the ontological bent of the realist and naturalist novel to an extreme far earlier than the postmodern art writers who detoured through the epistemological emphasis of Woolf, Joyce, Proust, et al. All this reminds me why my ideal school of criticism would be purely observational and descriptive of texts. The minute the inductive impulse strikes, we just start making shit up.