The Stoning of Adam Roberts, Part II: Science Fiction and the Picaresque-esque

Rich's characterization of Stone as a "Vancian picaresque" seems fundamentally sound to me . . . so long as you drop the "Vancian."  Much as I appreciate Vance as a stylist, his novels lack the narrative drive and voyeuristic characterization typical of a picaresque.  Without delving into the horrors determining whether the picaresque is a mode or a genre would entail, the two identifying characteristics of a picaresque are:

1. a sympathetic rapscallion for a protagonist who
2. moves from place to place as he or she (but really mostly "he") wears out his or her (ditto) welcome

Simple enough?  The picaresque allows an author like Henry Fielding—whose Tom Jones is considered the finest example of the picaresque in English—to forefront the novelty of places from which his pícaro is sequentially expelled while showcasing his authorial wit without falling into the trap of the modern picaresque-esque: the collapse of the protagonist into an authorial persona.  Now I call this "modern," but it originates with the Romantic lionization of the author as life-experiencer extraordinaire.  The prototypical contemporary picaresque-esque would be something like Kerouac's On The Road: an abundance of pointless movement by a narrator/author who's sympathetic without being particularly likeable.

I have -esqued the picaresque here because On The Road points to the reasons why the picaresque cannot survive outside of science fiction anymore.  How many millimeters of narrative distance does Kerouac establish between himself as author and Sal Paradise as narrator?  Four?  Fourteen?  Metaphorical imprecision aside, Fielding never had to worry that people would mistake him for Tom Jones.  Kerouac encouraged people to mistake him for Sal Paradise.  The distance required by the picaresque is absent because "I Am Author Hear Me Roar" has become a defining assumption in contemporary literary fiction.  Not so in science fiction.

In Stone Adam is able to create a narrator for whom direct authorial identification begins as "unlikely" before quickly veering into "impossible."  (Unless Adamette has something she would like to share with the class.)  He estbalishes the distance necessary to create a viable picaresque narrator then proceeds to toy with the reader's sympathies for the better part of 316 pages.  The tension between flat declarations of genocidal tendencies and the sympathy Stone's sharp and knowledgeable narrator provokes always resolves in favor of the latter over the former.  We sympathize because facts are facts but people in piteous situations are people.

In piteous situations.

That Ae is a charming wit aids in this identification immensely.  The identification is now with Adam via Ae's proxy.  It is with Ae.  Directly.  Despite ourselves.  To state something boldly: I believe this kind of narrative can only exist in science fiction novels now.  (Prove me wrong.  I dare you.  And would appreciate the feedback.)  I now yield the floor to commenters . . . since I think the sheer length of Rich's post may have dissuaded some people from commenting on it. 

Comments

[Timothy Burke]

I think a lot of Vance's post-Dying Earth work is picaresque in that sense, except that there's no differentiation in character between the protagonist and anyone else. Araminta Station and its sequels felt picaresque to me, for example.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Yeah, Vance's Cugel the Clever (a Dying Earth character) is pretty much a picaresque by your definition. James Branch Cabell also wrote some noteable fantasy picaresques, but fewer people have heard of him than Vance.

I was surprised at how much the rest of your reading differs from mine. I didn't find Ae sympathetic, obviously -- he's a serial thrill-killer, and crazy characters generally equate to boredom for me, though I did bring up the noteable counterexample of _Pale Fire_. And Ae only looks witty, I think, because everyone he meets is rather foolish by our standards.

As for lack of authorial identification, well the Post That Dare Not Be Commented On holds to the contrary, in a complex fashion. (I'm surprised that no one commented on, at least, the Mieville paragraph of that. Probably no one reached it.)

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Tim, I admit I haven't read much Vance other than the Dying Earth series. Anything in particular I should read?

Rich, I suppose I'm working from within a particular definition which excludes the possibility of the reader identifying Ae with Adam. Historically (and I can't find the sources, but I know they're around here somewhere), one purpose of distancing one's authorial self from one's fictional protagonists has been to get away with saying things one ought not say in polite, overly litigious societies. I'm assuming that because Adam wrote a picaresque the odds of him courting such an identification are slim.

Then again, your argument about Mieville's relation to Judah in Iron Council makes too much sense for me to ignore, largely because it simultaneously solves two shortcomings of the revolutionary novel without calling too much attention to itself. Gnostic Demiurgic Guilt, indeed...but I still think the reader relates to Ae differently than Adam does, if Adam does at all. (Paging Not Dead Author, Paging Not Dead Author...) Another way to say this is that our points aren't mutually exclusive: Ae could spring from Adam's Gnostic Demiurgic Guilt but still be a picaro/a. (Sometimes such slashes are pretentious. Here it's merely practical.) You're talking about production, I'm talking genre and reader response (I think).

That said, I'm surprised you didn't find Ae sympathetic. The only exception I can muster to the "spend 400 pages in a character's head and you'll like them, damn it, you'll like them" rule is this fucker. And maybe this chap, although I spent the first couple of books sympathetic, so that may be a poor example. I suppose this may be my humanistic weakness here, a constitutional inability not to work up some sympathetic identification with any character an author sufficiently humanizes . . . even if said humanization is in the service of a sociopath.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Also, and this is to both of you: if you want to respond at greater length, or follow anything up, I'm more than happy to post it here. I'll make this some sort of collective yet, I swear I will.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Well, yes, I'm not saying that Ae is identified with Adam in the simple way that Kerouac's O n The Road character is identified with Kerouac. Ae, whatever else he/she is, is not a Gary Stu. It's more that I think that certain characters become the repository of authorial difficulties, especially in SF, where (as Mieville has noted) metaphors tend to be concretized.

Let's get back to that initial Shakespeare quote, for example. Adam commented on the Valve that Shakespeare was low-culture in his day (I noticed this comment because of course now I'm sensitized to this issue). Shakespeare wrote plays in which people die in droves, get tortured, etc. Yet now all this blood and thunder has been sanctified as part of the highest high culture of English. There's something about that tension that I think that Ae addresses.

It's very much seen in Iain Banks' books, where he makes no bones about each book finding another dark place within his utopia. Is this because he thinks that his utopia must necessarily be flawed? No, because part of his whole political stance is that this idea that it must be flawed is pre-revolution propaganda. The flaws are there pretty clearly for dramatic purposes, because people wouldn't be interested in the books otherwise.

And that's a burden for a writer. Want to write a book that people will be interested in? Make it about violence. When you simultaneously think (or so I'd guess) that violence is not inherently that interesting, Demiurgic Guilt seems like a good concept, because you have created a Garden of Eden and also have created the snake because otherwise the story would never go anywhere.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"your argument about Mieville's relation to Judah in Iron Council makes too much sense for me to ignore, largely because it simultaneously solves two shortcomings of the revolutionary novel"

Not to make this too much about Mieville, but since you mention it -- there is an alternate, liberal, ending to Judah's story. In that one, he's confronted by his revolutionary comrade at the end, just as before, and she tells him why he had no right to make this decision for everyone. Then, just before she shoots him, he says "All right -- I'll release the train then. There, my golem is gone, it's free". So there's no need to shoot him and the two of them get up and join the revolution once more, which now is again steaming up to surprised and unprepared military forces, whose surprise may outweigh the fact of the revolution within the city being put down. Why can't this happen? Because it would solve Judah's problem, but not Mieville's.

Similarly, why can't Ae be the conscienceless killer that his/her history suggests? Because this would not address the core problem that the book is really about, I think.

Which is getting further away from the picaresque. But I think that it's why the book can not be an uncomplicated picaresque, although parts of it are trying to be.

[Timothy Burke]

Well, like the Dying Earth stories, later Vance work has the same distinctive vocabulary and the same basic character iterated over and over again, sometimes slightly more sympathetic or less hapless than Cugel. I rather like Araminta Station and Ecce and Old Earth; the final book in that trilogy was sort of a let-down. The interesting thing is to see Vance sustain a plot over three books where there is some degree of suspense, surprise, narrative development.

[Adam Roberts]

Did somebody page me?

Well, this is really interesting, in a surprisingly itchy way. I keep wanting to plunge in and start talking about this author, but feel inhibited on account of the author being me. I’m chuffed at being singled out for lapidation, mind; it just seems, on some level, to be happening to somebody other than me.

A couple of things did strike me. It seems to me (from my partial and limited perspective) that Stone was ‘about’ science fiction as much as it was ‘about’ serial killers. This may be a trivial thing to say, in the sense that literature is always ‘about’ the literature that has inspired it (that has shaped the genre or idiom in which it is working, that has spawned the memes that determine our responses to culture etc); and of course one of the ways to write good SF is to have a working understanding of how other SF writers have addressed the problematics of the genre. Or at least, one of the ways to write not-so-good science fiction is to write as if an idea (‘hey, what if time ran backwards?’) had just occurred to you, yesterday (let’s say your name is, I don’t know, Martin Amis, and your book, let’s say, Time’s Arrow), rather than an idea at least as old as Phil Dick’s Counter Clock-World. I could go on about a recent Philip Roth novel. I won’t.

UK reviews of Stone were divided between the praising and the very snotty indeed; the (very few) American notices tended to be more positive – SF Site picked it as one of their ten top books of the year, for instance. But over my side of the water several critics cremated the book for the sins of ‘postmodernism’: the waning of the old affect, the tricksy tone, the unlikeable narrator, the heavy-handed intertextuality. (The novel that followed, Polystom, got even more raked-over-coals for its ‘postmodernism’). There’s not a lot an author can do with those sorts of reviews except distract his/herself by wondering how we might go about translating de gustibus non disputandum est into Klingon.

Because, to take the example of intertextuality, what critics were attacking as a flaw seemed to me to be (speaking generally of literature, rather than about my own novel) exactly a strength. One problem with allusive intertextuality, I suppose, is when it becomes that Ezra Pound thing of quoting other texts so abstruse that your reader can’t possibly know them and feels a proper sense of inferiority before your godlike learning. But I didn’t think I was doing that: the salients in Stone are surely SF staples. Rich noted the Banks-ish-Culture stuff; which is certainly and very deliberately there … which is to say, Stone is writing in dialogue with all those Culture novels. I’m flattered by Scott’s Vance reference, because I revere Vance. Slightly nonplussed by the mention of American Psycho, because there’s something very viscerally unpleasant about his nasty killings. And I wonder, I wa-wa-wa-wa-wonder: is that the way this subject happens in SF? Is it viscerally unpleasant when, say, the Death Star is exploded by Star Wars’s whooping rebels? Course not. Now, that sort of mass-murder is all over SF.

Here’s one example from amongst very many: Doc Smith’s Skylark series. To cite it I’ll stoop so low as quoting directly from another book what I wrote (my Palgrave history) because the word file are here on my machine, and it saves me typing the whole thing out again if I just cut and paste from that source:

“At the climax of the series the clean-cut hero Richard Seaton teams up with his human arch-enemy Marc C. DuQuesne to repel an invasion by the malevolent alien Chlorans. This resolves into a battle of psionics, a team of humans against ‘rabid Chloran attackers … minds that thundered destruction at them’. The result is a genuinely startling holocaust of alien life, reported in an even more startlingly offhand manner: Seaton and DuQuesne move whole stars (fifty thousand million of them) across millions of light years, colliding them together to turn them into weapons: the Chlorans ‘died in uncounted trillions … their halogenous flesh was charred back and desiccated in the split second of the passing of the wave front from each exploding double star’. Humanoid are spared: since for each sun destroyed ‘an oxygen-bearing, human-populated planet was snatched through four-space into the safety of Galaxy B’ [Smith, Skylark, 244-7]. The book finishes with DuQuesne declaring his love for, and being accepted by, the beautiful, jutting-breasted, narrow-waisted nuclear physicist Stephanie de Marigny: there is no backward glance at the stupendous genocide of Chloran life.”

I go on to say that ‘this takes the fantasy of the individual empowerment by Will to a hyperbolic and extraordinarily distasteful extreme’ and to reflect on the ‘borderline-psychopathology of this adolescent fantasy of mind-power’; but the point is that it’s a standard feature of all sorts of SF writing. Which is to say, the point is that generations of enthusiastic SF fans have seen nothing distasteful or psychopathological in this sort of thing at all. Killing billions of Starship Trooper bugs? Celebrate! They’re a threat to humanity, and besides they’re only vermin. Insects. Viruses. The elders of Zion. Well, not that last one, but you get my point.

So, Stone: in part an attempt to inhabit this fantasy a little more fully. Reducing genocide to intertextuality is always going to be a dangerous business, much more so in these days of emotionally-distanciated warfare, so there needs to be a personal and, I suppose, more visceral element to it. There needs to be conscience, though it’s unlikely, in such a character, to be what passes for conscience in most people. But still it’s there. We might claim that ‘my heart is turned to stone’ but, as Shakespeare so cunningly puts it, even a hardened heart can pain us (‘I strike it and it hurts my hand’).

Very few people noticed the (to me) really obvious Iain M Banks indebtedness. Hardly any noted any relation to the generic form of the ‘whodunnit’ or ‘crime novel’, although that seemed to me really obvious, and indeed too obvious, when I was writing it. Most whodunits start with a murder, and a list of suspects and you have to work out who committed the murder. There are neat twists on the form, like the Columbo-shaped whodunit, where you know murderer in advance and the narrative satisfaction is in how the policeman will solve the crime. I wanted to start from the position of: everybody knows the crime, and who the murderer is, and that the murderer gets caught: but the murderer himself does not know why s/he committed the crime, and wants to find out. This I took to be a new twist on the familiar whodunit template: the murderer is also the detective. Myabe it's not new at all; maybe it's only my ignorance of crime fiction that thinks so. But the other point about the whodunit is that, like Doc Smith, it's lavishly careless of human life: it’s slap-happy about taking life from some, or many, people in the service of narrative excitement and suspense. That's dodgy.

So few noticed the Bank refs, and fewer the games with the form of the whodunnit; but nobody at all noticed the intertextual Bible thing in the novel: the game that John Updike’s The Centaur plays with mythic antecedent (or in its way, Ulysses). Again as I was writing it worried me that I was being to crashingly obvious about this; and maybe I was … maybe it’s not that nobody noticed, but that everybody noticed and nobody thought it worth mentioning. But the novel is underpinned, structurally, by a intertext Bible, moving from a SF-ized Garden of Eden through to a SF-ized global apocalypse through the key points inbetween; the idea being that the selection of which points from that fat book constitute ‘key’ is revealing about the nature of the central character’s values. Assuming that nobody noticed all that, I suppose I can’t complain: those sorts of games may well be more entertaining for the writer than the reader (and The Centaur is hardly one of Updike’s most celebrated books). But the Bible was important, at least in my mind, as yet another book lavishly careless of human life.

Enough. Time for me to go back to being Dead again. It is, after all, almost dawn …

[Rich Puchalsky]

"nobody at all noticed the intertextual Bible thing in the novel"

Hey, wait a minute -- I brought out an interpretation that depends on you being the Demiurge *and* made a comparison between the mock-Banksian utopia and the Garden of Eden. That doesn't count? Although I didn't notice the intertextuality with the Bible in a more detailed sense, no; ending with an apocalypse is so common in SF that it hardly seems Biblical any more.

As for it being 'about' SF, I think that I understood this intent. Case in point: _Ender's Game_. It's a rule of thumb for me that whenever a large group of fans mysteriously likes some tawdry, only adequately written SF book, the author must have tapped into some obvious S/M fantasy that fans can enjoy because they are too socially inept to recognize it. _Ender's Game_ is a book that justifies genocide with both utter necessity and complete innocence -- even with the teenaged luxury of feeling moderately bad about it afterwards. In my not-commented-on piece I point out that you explicitly tap into this tradition with your "they were contaminating the purity of our waveform" comment, a bit of fascist racialism translated into SF techogibberish. Truly _The Iron Dream_ ought to be required reading for anyone who gets up to a certain number of SF books, because it sensitizes you to this aspect of SF like nothing else.

I think that I've addressed the specifically Banks aspect of the SF-book-ending-in-mass-murder. It's something that he seems to think is required for dramatic purposes. And hey, Shakespeare's works and the Bible support that, so who is he to disagree? Where the dialogue with Banks in _Stone_ doesn't go as far as I'd like is that I think that his books are conscious of this already, and _Stone_ has a Banksian utopia that is apolitical, which I think drains his work of most of what makes it interesting and coherent.

[Adam Roberts]

"...nobody at all (until, that is, Rich) noticed the intertextual Bible thing in the novel ..."

Sorry bout that.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"So, Stone: in part an attempt to inhabit this fantasy a little more fully."

Well, let me try this from another angle. I brought up the concept of Demiurgic Guilt to represent the consciousness of the author who has written a book that depends on a certain type of drama, and suspects that this drama will have bad results either aesthetically or on his or her readers, but feels that it is necessary. So much of the book is about guilt (since, as you write, the crime has already been committed, right from the start, and the only question is why it was committed) that I think that any interpretation must address this guiltiness in some manner.

But Demiurgic Guilt is a very individual thing. With an emphasis on intertextuality, on dialogue with famous existing authors who almost have the status of types, and with the book being a comment on SF as such, perhaps some type of communal guilt would be more apt. (Is there an existing term? Help me out, literary studies people.) Here the "crime" is committed by SF as a sort of reified entity, and the guilt consists of participation in it. What's a good comparison -- hip hop, perhaps? No matter how much you might have an uneasy feeling that homophobia, glorification of violence, and misogyny are not qualities that should be part of the effective definition of an art form, you can't argue that in hip hop, they pretty much go all the way to the top of the field, though they don't exist in literally every performer. (Hey, maybe this comparison is better than I thought.) So by being an MC or even merely enjoying hip hop, you participate in that even if you deplore it.

But there's a problem, really. There's a contradiction between wanting to inhabit this fantasy more fully and between "There needs to be conscience, though it’s unlikely, in such a character, to be what passes for conscience in most people." Because, as you say, the typical fan has no guilt about this. In terms of imaginary genocide, they are perfect conscienceless sociopaths, capable of vicariously blowing up a few million one day and radiation-dusting a billion or so the next with unhindered enjoyment. That is why I keep returning to implied authorial consciousness rather than reader response as such. Ae is not a reader, because readers don't read Ender's Game and then agonize about it. He's much more like a writer.

I'm repeating myself, oh well.