(X-posted to the Valve)
...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 it 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?
Scott, isn't what you call "registering" what other critics have called a "symptomatic" reading? It makes me think of Derrida's analysis of the Husserlian distinction between expression and indication. What our words express is very different than what they indicate. An author expresses some intentional meaning, but her work might indicate the working of forces -- psychological, economic, socio-historical -- beyond her control. (Derrida, of course, wants to show how all language upsets this binary, how it all is ultimately indicative in the absence of presence: how can we mean/express anything when at every level our intentional presence is undermined by hidden forces?)
Posted by: Luther Blissett | Monday, 19 March 2007 at 09:06 PM
Have to disagree with you here, Scott.
I'm the first to admit that Dick's dialogue and characterization often leave something to be desired, but his ideas were (and are) often stunning, and his work has been (and is) widely influential. It's far from being "garbage," even if it's not always as readable as one might like.
Posted by: Ancrene Wiseass | Tuesday, 20 March 2007 at 03:24 AM
AW, I was having a laugh with that. I thought it be obvious that I'm a PKD fan. (Adam Roberts reached the same conclusion on the Valve, however, so maybe my proclivities ain't as well-known as I think.)
LB, it certainly could be rewritten in a deconstructive vein, but I'm actually approaching this more from a Jaussian notion of horizons. The reason I didn't include any literary theoretic markers is that I'm trying to re-learn how describe what I do without them. More and more when I talk to people who aren't literary scholars, I have trouble explaining what it is I mean without shortcutting through what is, for them, wholly unfamiliar territory. So yesterday I decided to try to describe them straight, and this is the result. (As">http://waxbanks.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/what_you_want_w.html#comment-63710014">As is this, actually.)
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Tuesday, 20 March 2007 at 11:27 AM
I don't know if it quite works as a naive explanation of historicism, Scott. If you want to "witness competing theories of physical and social evolution", then why not be a historian rather than a historicist?
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Tuesday, 20 March 2007 at 07:01 PM
Ah. Sorry 'bout that, Scott.
All the raised eyebrows and mutterings about "popular literature" I encounter when I declare my allegiance to speculative fiction have probably set my knee to permanent "jerk" position on that particular subject. Especially when it comes to PKD.
Posted by: Ancrene Wiseass | Tuesday, 20 March 2007 at 07:19 PM