Visions and Revisions: (Re)constructing Science Fiction (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

VISIONS AND RE-VISIONS: (RE)CONSTRUCTING SCIENCE FICTION

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Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies General Editor DAVID SEED Series Advisers: I. F. Clarke, Edward James, Patrick Parrinder and Brian Stableford 1. Robert Crossley Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future 2. David Seed (ed.) Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors 3. Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten (eds) Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference 4. Brian W. Aldiss The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy 5. Carol Farley Kessler Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia, with Selected Writings 6. Patrick Parrinder Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy 7. I. F. Clarke (ed.) The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914: Fictions of Future Warfare and of Battles Still-to-come 8. Joseph Conrad and Ford Modox Ford (Foreword by George Hay, Introduction by David Seed) The Inheritors 9. Qingyun Wu Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias 10. John Clute Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews 11. Roger Luckhurst ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard 12. I. F. Clarke (ed.) The Great War with Germany, 1890–1914: Fiction and Fantasies of the War-to-come 13. Franz Rottensteiner (ed.) View from Another Shore: European Science Fiction 14. Val Gough and Jill Rudd (eds) A Very Different Story: Studies in the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman 15. Gary Westfahl The Mechanics of Wonder: the Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction 16. Jeanne Cortiel Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ/Feminism/Science Fiction 17. Patrick Parrinder (ed.) Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia 18. Jeanne Cortiel Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism Science Fiction 19. Chris Ferns Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature 20. E. J. Smith (ed.) Jules Verne: New Directions 21. Andy Sawyer and David Seed (eds) Speaking Science Fiction: Dialogues and Interpretations 22. Inez van der Spek Alien Plots: Female Subjectivity and the Divine 23. S. T. Joshi Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction 24. Mike Ashley The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 25. Warren G. Rochelle Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le. Guin 26. Christopher Palmer Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern 27. Peter Wright Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader

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VISIONS AND RE-VISIONS (RE)CONSTRUCTING SCIENCE FICTION

ROBERT M. PHILMUS

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

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First published 2005 by LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU © 2005 Robert M. Philmus The right of Robert M. Philmus to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A British Library CIP record is available. ISBN 0 85323 899 5 cased

Typeset in Meridien by Koinonia, Bury, Lancashire Printed and bound in the European Union by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

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To David Clayton, David Hughes, and David Ketterer

We are on each other’s hands Who care. John Berryman

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Contents Key to Abbreviations Acknowledgments

viii ix

Preface

xi

§1.

Swift, Zamyatin, and Orwell and the Language of Utopia

1

§2.

Generic Configurations of A Story of the Days to Come

28

§3.

Re-visions of The Time Machine

49

§4.

Stanislaw Lem’s Futurological Congress as a Metageneric Text

66

§5.

Karel C”apek’s Can(n)on of Negation

79

§6.

Olaf Stapledon’s Tragi-Cosmic Vision

114

§7.

C. S. Lewis and the Fictions of ‘Scientism’

135

§8.

Kurt Vonnegut, Historiographer of the Absurd: The Sirens of Titan

150

§9.

Jorge Luis Borges and the Labyrinths of Time

173

§10.

‘Elsewhere Elsewhen Otherwise’: Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomic Tales

190

§11.

Ursula K. Le Guin and Time’s Dispossession

224

§12.

Time Out of Joint: The World(s) of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle

250

Afterword: A Revisionary Construction of Genre, with Particular Reference to Science Fiction

284

Notes

312

Works Cited

388

Index

401

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Key to Abbreviations

EW

Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction by H. G. Wells, ed. Robert Philmus and David Y. Hughes HGW’s Lit. Crit. H. G. Wells’s Literary Criticism, ed. Patrick Parrinder and Robert Philmus SFS Science-Fiction Studies TTM First (1895) Heinemann edition of The Time Machine § The symbol for ‘chapter’ when preceding an Arabic number, and for ‘section’ when preceding a Roman numeral. This list includes only abbreviations that figure pervasively in the following pages. The initialisms used in connection with parenthetical chapter:page references to other works should be readily decipherable from the context. Complete bibliographical data for the above-mentioned books can be found in the Works Cited.

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Acknowledgments Two of this book’s essay-chapters I have altered very little from their original published form. I am referring to ‘Re-visions of The Time Machine’ and ‘Stanislaw Lem’s Futurological Congress,’ which appeared, respectively, English Literature in Transition (ELT 1998) and Science-Fiction Studies (SFS 1986). The remaining five essay-chapters not making their debut in this volume I have revised more or less substantially. My revisions have for the most part also been re-visions – which is in part to say that they haven’t been local and are therefore not readily specifiable. With my analyses of Borges and Le Guin, however, the nature or drift of whatever other alterations I have made in the version hitherto printed – again, respectively – in SFS (1974) and Science Fiction Roots and Branches (ed. Rhys Garnett and R. J. Ellis, 1990) can be gathered from the concluding section of each, which in both instances is new. ‘Generic Configurations’ (§2) is more than five times the length of its ELT precursor (1987), which barely hints at that development; ‘The Language of Utopia’ (§1) is about a third longer than the essay with that title in Studies in the Literary Imagination (1973), mostly because I have here brought Zamyatin’s We into consideration and reworked my entire argument accordingly; and my discussion of C. S. Lewis I changed almost everywhere in an attempt to clarify what the Extrapolation-published original (1972) had in mind (but surely didn’t convey). The other six chapters and the Afterword, constituting well over half of Visions and Re-visions’ pages, have never appeared in print anywhere before even in Ur-form. In preparing this book for publication, I have been the beneficiary of help from a number of people. My thanks should go first of all to the science-fiction writers who have allowed me to encroach on their time: Stanislaw Lem, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Kurt Vonnegut, each of whom reviewed my chapter on his or her work. (I am particularly thankful to Ms. Le Guin for her careful reading and marginal comments, some of which I cite both in my essay on The Dispossessed and in my Afterword.) I am grateful, too, for the cooperation of a small multitude of colleagues (as I think of them as being). Tom Moylan communicated to me his latest thinking about utopian categories; Robert Crossley kindly looked over my Stapledon chapter and shared his expertise on its subject; Elizabeth Maslen, Irena Murray, and Milada Vlach were likewise cooperative with

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C”apek; Oriana Palusci and Louise Clubb obligingly perused my chapter on Calvino; and Veronica Hollinger and Linda Duchamp provided extensive critiques of the screed that now stands as the Afterword. My special thanks I must reserve for five others: Nicola Nixon and Peter Fitting, who commented on two of this book’s chapters (including the one on P. K. Dick, Fitting’s particular area of expertise); David Ketterer, who scrutinized five of them; my sometime collaborator, David Y. Hughes, who, painstakingly going over four chapters, not only offered his usual thoughtful criticisms but caught many of my could-have-been embarrassing mistakes; and David Clayton, who beyond conveying suggestions about two essay-chapters, uncomplainingly permitted me to ply him with endless questions and thereby draw upon his almost bottomless supply of knowledge about almost everything. It will be evident to those readers who already have some conversance with the theorizing of science fiction that this book in significant part owes its possibility to two other colleagues of mine: Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin. Both of them have influenced my thinking in ways that are not localizable, but will in the one case be apparent from the word possibility as I’ve just used it, and in the other from the authors whom I have chosen to deal with (except, of course, for C. S. Lewis). Jacques Derrida’s influence is also visible at a number of points, though what I take to be a coincidence in our views of genre is just that, a coincidence. Not readily discernible is the impact of two of my teachers: Sigurd Burckhardt and John Berryman. From them I acquired my ability to read (such as it is); but neither they nor anyone else I have named is responsible for whatever misunderstandings appear in the following pages; those are all my own doing. Above all, I should express my appreciation for the support and assistance both of my wife, Maria, and of the equally indefatigable Andrew Kirk, Liverpool UP’s Managing Editor. She carefully examined my pages, sometimes in their umpteenth draft, while he, in taking on the burden of editing this book, showed unusual indulgence of my quirky style. Permission to quote H. G. Wells comes from A. P. Watt Ltd., the agents for the Wells estate; Lewis from C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd., the copyright holder of his works; Olaf Stapledon from Robert Crossley as agent for the Stapledon estate; Kurt Vonnegut from the author himself, who has given that license ‘throughout all eternity’; and J. L. Borges’s Other Inquisitions from the University of Texas Press. I might add that every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, and errors and omissions will be corrected in future editions. Montreal May 2004

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Preface [B]ooks are real to me . . . they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (9:148) Before you can deconstruct a text … you have to be able to construe it. Samuel R. Delany1 Each of the next twelve chapters should be intelligible from a conversance with the text(s) being analyzed. But while readable as independent essays, those same chapters co-operate in making a case for science fiction as a ‘revisionary’ genre. Visions and Re-visions, in other words, proposes a kind of megatextual construction on the basis of a series of close readings; and it would thereby reconcile New Criticism with many of its post-Modern opponents. According to post-New Critical theorizing, texts are the products of diverse pre-scriptive contexts, and their meaning varies from one community of readers to another. Neither of those propositions is deniable. Nor is either of them readily compatible with Angel Archer’s faith in the power of books to put one in touch ‘with the vision of other minds.’ Quite the contrary: each promotes a truth about textual construction that leaves no room for immanent meaning – which is also to say that each refuses Angel’s unstated premise and hence in effect preemptively dismisses her belief in books, and with it, the Le Guinian possibility of communicating with an Other.2 Yet every capable reader knows that Angel’s view, naïve though it be, is not entirely delusional. Moreover, it certainly has enough truth in it to warrant my working assumption: that any given text may in fact have a mind of its own. The mind which I have just posited as a textual attribute, or presence, manifests itself, above all, in – and is therefore most readily ascertainable from – what I call the text’s governing conception. That term names the most fundamental of the three theory-components of this book as such. But like its two companions – genericity and re-vision – I theorize (about) governing conception only in the Afterword, the one section of this volume which, by reason of its references to all of the chapters preceding it, may not be wholly comprehensible by itself. My deferral to its end of this

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book’s rationale for being something more and other than a gathering of essays is consistent with what my own practice of close reading dictates: that I not fit my authors to a procrustean thesis. Moreover, the same postponement may have a ‘revisionary’ effect for readers who in the meantime have worked out meaningful connections of their own among the following chapters – above and beyond those which I intermittently point to, sometimes in endnotes. On the other hand, I am aware that some readers, even if they be subscribers to Barthesian ‘authorlessness,’3 will be uncomfortable with such freedom or will hold that the responsibility it comports with should, in this case, properly be mine. I shall therefore proceed to abstract what my Afterword has to say about governing conception, genericity, and re-vision as those co-operate in making the next twelve chapters collectively coherent. The first of the three terms signifies a fiction’s inherent principle of cohesiveness, or what the eighteenth-century mind, say, understood by ‘Design.’ ‘Governing conception’ is not amenable to a sound-bite-size definition; but the one chapter (§3) which gives prominence to it should also convey enough of an understanding of what it covers to make it apparent that it names what all of my analyses have in view. At the same time, they point to governing conception as being itself (re)constructible in more than one way (a reality which I tacitly acknowledge by subsequently dropping ‘governing’). Furthermore, I contend that this is so because its determination (from the writer’s as well as a reader’s standpoint) is to a significant extent a generic (or generically conceivable) matter. My argument on the subject of genericity turns on the proposition that genre is a variable by reason of its inscription. This understanding of genre is diametrically opposed to all of the basic rules of what I sardonically call generology, a dogmatic approach to genre which finds its most unambiguous exponent in Tzvetan Todorov (rather than in Aristotle). My first move regarding genre is to demonstrate that Todorov’s book on the fantastique amounts to an unwittingly self-deconstructive enterprise conducive to Jacques Derrida’s position, that genre has everything to do with particular textual meaning. I then go on to reinstitute what Derrida, in the two-stage argument which I take his ‘Law of Genre’ and ‘Before the Law’ to be constituting, tends to deny: genre abstractions. Unlike Todorov, however, I conceive of these as being both textually inscriptive and the outcome of intertextual configurations. This means that genres in the abstract belong to texts, rather than the other way round (as Todorov would have it). That derivation has two anti-generological consequences. First of all, it not only inevitably provides for any number of generic constructions of a given text; it justifies their multiplicity on the grounds that any one of them largely owes its persuasiveness as the ‘right’ category to its power of

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PREFACE

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obliterating certain textual details as well as to its privileging of others. Secondly (and moreover), the same holds for any nominally given (abstract) genre itself: it, too, is liable to multiple conceptions correlative to (feedback from) the intertextual formations on which it is predicated. That understanding of genre proves to be conducive as well as amenable to ‘re-vision’ as I define it. Of the three term-concepts informing this book as such, re-vision is the only one to appear with any frequency (often in adjectival or adverbial form, neither of which I hyphenate). According to my sense of the word, re-vision involves the eliciting from some already-given text of a meaningful possibility which the successor persuades us is there but which the precursor-text is, to some extent, not conscious of.4 By the same token, ‘re-vision’ is not my term for what others have called ‘recursivity’; indeed the two are antithetical in so far as the latter applies to works whose referencing of other texts is wholly self-interested – i.e., purposes to make use of them regardless of whatever meaning they may hold in themselves. As with genre, I arrive at my basic idea (again, in the Afterword) by way of an opposition – in this case between Harold Bloom and Adrienne Rich. For Bloom, re(-)vision is a dictate of an anxiety of influence, itself the byproduct of ‘the sublimation of aggressive instincts’; hence it appeals to most or all of the motives underlying ‘poetic misprision’ (from which standpoint, ‘poetic’ counts as only a minor qualification). Richian re-vision, on the other hand, comes from a present self’s retrospect on a former self seen both as promising the self-to-be and as different from that, ergo an Other. Her view of re-vision thus depends on a counter-truth to Bloom’s aggressive instincts – namely, the truth of cooperation, or collaboration, as paradigmatically figured in the just-outlined relationship between Self and Other. ‘Re-vision’ in my usage differs from Rich’s only in respect to my theorizing of it. In that department, I refer it to Olaf Stapledon’s dialectic of Self and Other as presented in my chapter on his work. But I also bring in (as already hinted) Borges’s understanding of ‘precursor,’ and thence relate re-vision to his Garden of Forking Paths, also as the latter is connectable with (and elucidated by) Le Guin’s concept of Causal Reversibility (her term) and Dick’s of Alternativity (mine). By my analysis, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Dick’s The Man in the High Castle are both (though in different ways) self-revisionary; so that while supplying a theoretical basis for re-vision, they also offer themselves as models for the revisionism that I otherwise display as operative in some given text’s evincing a meaningful possibility latent in another (no matter whether the precursor be by the same author or someone else). My understanding of genre would have re-vision be one way of

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conceiving science fiction. I am also contending, however, that revisionism names a generic vocation – i.e., that science fiction is singularly predisposed to re-vision,5 by reason of certain factors made prominent in other constructions of the genre. The foremost of those factors, the rationalizing of an impossibility, I represent in terms of pretext and pre-text. With Calvino’s cosmicomic stories as exemplum, I point out that even in prototypical works of science fiction, the pre-text (at least notionally, if not actually, some book, and far more often than not a scientific volume) doubles as the pretext for some Other World which as such exhibits a possibility that the pre-text itself does not (fully) foresee. This revisionary predisposition gets reinforcement both from the formulaic character of science fiction and from its preoccupation with ‘ideas’ (in the sense that Kingsley Amis intends, but doesn’t quite convey). These cooperate in enduing science fiction with its peculiar temporal consciousness – which is also to say, with its generic self-consciousness. My chapters by any arrangement of them display the varieties of revisionary consciousness science fiction is capable of. But in their given order, §4 is pivotal in that it both looks back to the case which §§1–3 have collectively been making for science fiction as a revisionary genre invented (as such) by Wells, while proposing Futurological Congress’s re-vision of The Time Machine as one model for the inward-turning of that consciousness in the works canvassed in §§5–12. The Afterword whose main argument I have just summarized concludes with the acknowledgment that science fiction is generically (re)constructible in other ways than mine here. ‘Here,’ moreover, may be taken as referring not just to this book, but to its chapters in their given order. By the same token, this book itself may be regarded as something like a hypertext – meaning that whatever revisionary insights it yields may well vary relative to the sequence in which its constituent chapters are read. Nor would ‘re-vision’ would have it otherwise.

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§1. Swift, Zamyatin, and Orwell and the Language of Utopia Of course it is clear that in order to establish the true meaning of a function one must establish its limit. Evgeny Zamyatin, We1 I. Utopia, Anti-Utopia, Dystopia George Orwell tries to rationalize his conflicting attitudes toward Gulliver’s Travels (though it is ‘a great work of art,’ its ‘world-view … just passes the test of sanity’) by positing a dichotomy between politics and literature.2 But what Orwell seems most uneasy about, Book Four of the Travels, is often thought of as utopian fiction;3 and the utopian mode, if it admits Orwell’s distinction between politics and literature at all, does not admit it readily. As Northrop Frye indicates by identifying conceptions of utopia as the counterpart of theories of social contract (the latter being ‘myths’ of the origin of society, the former ‘myths’ of its telos),4 utopias represent normative models of social order and are therefore, in that sense, political by their very nature rather than by historical accident. As normative models, utopias are analyzable in Kenneth Burke’s terms of dialectical and ultimate order.5 The utopian order is dialectical in that it necessarily defines itself, at least implicitly, against a status quo; it is ultimate in so far as it purports to be not only antithetical but also superior to the status quo (that is, more or less ideal). The ratio between these two components determines the orientation of the utopia, which is satirical to the extent that dialectical outweigh ultimate considerations, visionary to the extent that the reverse is true. Plato’s Politeia (389/369 BCE) is primarily visionary.6 It stresses the ultimateness of the Republic, or Commonwealth, as an absolute norm; and it does so in part by rigorously subordinating or suppressing potentially ‘dialectical’ elements – notably the various notions of Justice that open Book One, the disparate levels of perception suggested in Book Seven’s Allegory of the Cave, and the competing varieties of polity discussed in Book Eight – according to a logic of hierarchic supersession,7 whereby the higher purposes of clarifying the Platonic ideal totally subsume any satiric effect of ‘dialectical’ contrast.

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Thomas More, on the other hand, relies on dialectical contrast as the inherent structuring principle of Utopia (1516) and thus attains an equilibrium of visionary and satiric impulses. Though advertised as ultimate in the full title of More’s work (De optimo republicæ statu – i.e., ‘Concerning the optimal commonwealth,’ the last word being English’s nearest synonym for republic in its root meaning), Utopia, as Hythloday describes it in Book Two, is essentially the antithesis of the England More presents to the reader in the first book. The one is truly a commonwealth inasmuch as ‘nothing is private property’ (More 121); the other is a commonwealth only in the ironic sense that no one’s property is secure. In Utopia the wealth rightfully belongs to all; indeed, that is its chief moral premise as an imaginary ideal world. England, by contrast, figures as an actual place where the avaricious and powerful wrongfully act as if the common wealth, the land, were theirs to enclose and expropriate.8 This dialectical involvement of the two books with one another resists efforts to isolate Utopia as an ideal in itself, an absolute. If Utopia effects a balance between vision and satire, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), at the opposite extreme from the Politeia, outlines a utopia that approaches the limits of purely dialectical order. Butler’s utopia proceeds from contrariety.9 Its generating principle, negation by reversal, has as its paradigm the very name Erewhon. Though anagramatically transposing ‘nowhere’ so that it designates a place, the eponym continues to depend for its significance on the originary negation which it has transformed into a seeming positive – in the way, for example, that the Erewhonians’ criminalizing of illness does. This governing principle tends toward outright parody (as in ‘The Book of the Machines’), and generally reduces Erewhonian institutions to satiric means rather than ultimate ends. The transformational procedures operative in Erewhon resemble those whereby utopia, also through transvaluation, becomes anti-utopia. The anti-utopian social order is a utopian order that is speciously dialectical and ironically ultimate: in anti-utopia, the apparent antitheses turn out to be real analogies, while the final solutions constitute a negative ideal, something to be avoided rather than sought after. Satiric elements in utopian fiction serve to reinforce the desirability of a utopian order that may be achievable, the usual intent being suasive and reformative; in anti-utopian fiction the undesirability of the would-be utopian order serves satiric purposes as the extrapolative reductio ad absurdum of alreadyexisting socio-political inclinations, the usual intent being informative and cautionary. If the utopian model is normative, often prescriptive, the anti-utopian model is prognostic and often descriptive.10 At the same time, the latter is inherently ‘stereoscopic’ in H. G. Wells’s meaning of the

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term: it casts a critical eye on historical actuality, or the tendencies thereof, but in connection with some particular utopian scheme, if not with the very ideal of utopia. Anti-utopian fiction, then, normally lives up to the promise of its prefix: generically considered, it defines itself through its antagonism to a/the conception of utopia so as to constitute the antithesis of ‘utopia’ in both meanings of that Morean play on words. By this understanding, Evgeny Zamyatin’s We (My, or Muy, 1920/22)12 undeniably qualifies as anti-utopian fiction, properly speaking, while Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) does not. Both depict a bad place which already exists somewhere, at least potentially or to some degree; but for all that Orwell owes to Zamyatin’s book (in its French translation), Oceania profoundly differs from the One State by reason of the near-total absence, or invisibility, of any informing ideal recognizable as utopian. Moreover, the difference thus exemplified stands as the basis for distinguishing anti-utopian from dystopian fiction rather than treating the two terms as if they were interchangeable.13 Orwell’s rewrite of We suggests – accurately, I think – that dystopia derives from anti-utopia, thus recapitulating the latter’s evolution from utopia. Both of these generic developments were in part the product of historical experience. Anti-utopian fiction gets much of its impetus from the perceivable impact of nineteenth-century technology on the natural and social environments, on which evidence anti-utopists pit dreams of material progress against the natural world and human nature. Twentiethcentury totalitarianism, especially as embodied in the Police-Surveillance State, subsequently prompts a review of the utopian project for regulating human behavior. The dystopian visions thus motivated are decidedly more nightmarish than those of their anti-utopian cousins. The latter centrally problematize any via media between nature and technoculture; but in their search for a tertium datur, they preserve something of utopian hope. Dystopias, by contrast, abandon all (such) hope: their question instead is whether the ‘definitive realization’ of utopia is ‘avoidable,’ on the understanding that ‘utopia’ is synonymous with ‘Hell.’14 This transition from utopia to dystopia is the outcome not just of historical factors, but also – and perhaps even more – of literary influences. A tendency toward anti-utopia is observable, at least in retrospect, in Edward Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), for example, and in much of the work of Albert Robida (beginning with Le vingtième siècle, 1883); but its defining moment surely lies with H. G. Wells’s A Story of the Days to Come (1899). Deriving largely from his critical reading of William Morris’s utopian vision, both directly and by way of Wells’s own rendering of it in The Time Machine (1894/5), Days to Come establishes the basic model for subsequent anti-utopian fictions. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

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(1932) follows its example both in structurally opposing the natural world to a futuristically technologized and disciplinary social order15 and in staging the (ideological) intervention of the one into the other. The same can be said of its other notable successor, We, wherein (however) Zamyatin reinvents Days to Come’s schema by superimposing on its nature– technology antinomy the Dostoevskian alternative of freedom vs. happiness. Another kind of literary analysis reveals that the difference between utopia and anti-utopia (and dystopia) finally comes down to point of view (in all senses of the phrase). B. F. Skinner all but designs Walden Two (1948) to demonstrate the truth of this assertion. He depicts as utopian a technocratic social order whose intrusive methods of behavioral engineering most readers would regard as anti-utopian, if not downright dystopian. Anticipating such a reaction, Skinner adopts the proleptic measure of permitting some criticism of Frazier’s utopian notions. One of Frazier’s antagonists, Augustine Castle, is a mere foil who objects for the sake of being objectionable, while the other, Professor Burris, the doubting narrator, in the end concludes that Walden Two is far preferable to the world outside it (and thereby actualizes the resemblance with his author potential in their homonymic identification; Skinner’s first name is Burrhus). Despite the half-heartedness of this presentation of dissent, Walden Two does deliberately counter the strategy typical of anti-utopian fiction so as to itself qualify as being anti-antiutopian. And by the same token, it serves to make it quite apparent that anti-utopia rhetorically discredits its would-be utopia by internalizing the opposition to it – i.e., by showing utopian civilization through the eyes of its discontents. Within the visionary utopia, such discontent rarely appears. Indeed, conviction that the social order is the best of all possible worlds is oftentimes universal. Both anti-utopian and dystopian fiction focus on how such a consensus can have been obtained. From their standpoint, this is a moral problem that admits only immoral – i.e., coercive – solutions. That objection to utopia calls attention to a real moral predicament, as the Politeia illustrates. Plato provides two methods of persuasion within his utopia, indoctrination and ostracism. He proposes a system of education designed to engineer habits of thinking and feeling that will lead citizens of the Republic to regard it as the only true, or just, and natural order; and toward this end, he would heuristically refashion the substance of available myths into ‘noble lies,’ like the Allegory of the Three Metals, to justify the utopian scheme of things. Poetry, which in a similar way creates educative fables that would compete for credence with those sanctioned by the State, is for that very reason to be regarded as inherently subversive. Because it induces and encourages habits of thought and

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feeling contrary to those which the Republic deems desirable, it is an alienating as well as an alien force.16 Hence the same motive that dictates Plato’s program of indoctrination requires him, however reluctantly, to proscribe those poets – Homer chief among them – who would destroy the unanimity utopia demands (see Politeia 607B–608B). The more nearly absolute a social order claims to be, the more absolutist and compulsive its demand for unanimous assent becomes. Such a degree of unanimity is not attainable in a society open to the influence of heterodox ideas. Hence utopia, in so far as it pretends to be ultimate, aspires to closure, whereby alternative ideas of order would be, if not unthinkable, at least inexpressible. The ‘closed society,’ in other words, can afford to tolerate only a language of assent.17 Plato’s expulsion of poets from the Republic is symptomatic of a tendency toward this kind of closure. By excluding all poetry except hymns to the gods and encomia (Politeia 607A), he in effect rules out certain uses of language, thereby limiting the universe of discourse within his visionary utopia. The Politeia, however, in its program for constricting linguistic possibilities, only hints peripherally at a connection between language and utopia, without undertaking to examine that connection as a central concern in the way that ‘A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms’ (1726/35), We, and Nineteen Eighty-Four do. Swift and Orwell had touched explicitly upon the politics of language elsewhere: Swift most notably in his A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), Orwell especially in his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946). Published some years before Swift began writing Gulliver’s Travels,18 the Proposal for Correcting … the English Tongue establishes between political and linguistic corruption a logical correlation manifest for Swift in the percept or precept that the historical moments wherein the English language deteriorates coincide with those of political degeneration. The Period wherein the English Tongue received most Improvement, I take to commence with the Beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s Reign, and to conclude with the great Rebellion in Forty-two…. From that great Rebellion to this present Time, I am apt to doubt whether the Corruptions in our Language have not, at least, equalled the Refinements of it…. During the Usurpation [i.e., Oliver Cromwell’s], such an Infusion of Enthusiastick Jargon prevailed in every Writing, as was not shaken off in many Years after. To this succeeded that Licentiousness which entered with the Restoration; and from infecting our Religion and Morals, fell to corrupt our Language… (Prose Works 4:9–10)19

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To arrest the process of decline, Swift petitions the Tory Ministry, in the person of Robert Harley (newly created Earl of Oxford), to set up an English Academy somewhat similar to that of the French (established by Cardinal Richelieu in 1634, in part as a means for surveillance and political control). With allowances made for more than two hundred years of history intervening between the two essays, Orwell’s notions in ‘Politics and the English Language’ bear a remarkable resemblance to Swift’s. Orwell, too, perceives a deplorable connection between political abuses and abuses of language; and like Swift, he proposes corrective measures: it is clear that the decline of language must ultimately have political and economic causes…. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely…. [Thus, the English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. (‘Politics and the English Language,’ CEJL 4:127–28) Orwell then demonstrates how to reverse the process by disabusing words so as to discover how their ab- or mis-use involves them in the effect-andcause syndrome of totalitarian rationalization. Zamyatin offers no comparable essayistic statement. Those extant writings of his of would-be relevance are either the texts of rather pedestrian lectures delivered to a proletarian audience of (presumably) aspiring authors or commentaries on particular contemporaries whose generalizable bearing, if any, on the politics of language does not lend itself to succinct translation (if they be translatable at all).20 His brief remarks ‘On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters’ (1923) are somewhat to Swift’s and Orwell’s point, but not nearly as much so as is the work which that short essay – as its date suggests – takes its thought-content from: We itself. That book’s linguistic peculiarities, to some extent evident even in an English rendition, bespeak the same connection between linguistic usage and political constructs that Swift and Orwell expatiate on discursively. Swift, Zamyatin, and Orwell, in Houyhnhnmland, the One State, and Oceania, respectively, provide precisely defined contexts for testing the limiting conditions of language as a function and guarantor of the sociopolitical order. All three are hypothetical models of societies which would have language approach the extreme of total assent, so as to be capable of doing no more than reflect, and thus under-stand, the social order. As the fates of Lemuel Gulliver, D-503, and Winston Smith variously reveal, the

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near-perfect congruence of language and order exacts closure as a matter of logical necessity. Houyhnhnmland cannot long tolerate a Lemuel Gulliver, nor the One, the Only, the United State21 a dissident D-503, nor Oceania a Winston Smith. Once they perceive him to be a subversive alien, the Houyhnhnms must banish Gulliver to preserve their utopia; D503 cannot resist the societal pressure to have his Imagination lobotomized; and in the dystopia of Oceania, where the basis of order is a coercion more outright and brutal than the One State’s (at least as D-503 sees it), O’Brien must reduce Winston Smith to a love of Big Brother. Gulliver’s exclusion and Winston Smith’s inclusion define the nature of two different social orders, somewhere between which stands the One State’s as identified by D-503’s ‘voluntary’ reintegration. II. Gulliver in Houyhnhnmland: The Limits of Utopia Behind Orwell’s condemnation of what he supposes to be the politics of Swift’s vision in Gulliver’s Travels is the notion – hardly his alone – that the Houyhnhnms are ‘Swift’s ideal beings.’22 But any such contention, assuming as it must that the Houyhnhnm utopia is simply an ultimate order per se, overlooks the dialectical complexities of Book Four – and above all, its dialectical relation to the preceding three books of the Travels. In the other ‘remote nations’ Gulliver comes upon, the omnipresent signs of decay attest to a universal law of degeneration that admits only local exceptions. Lilliput, for instance, by and large manifests moral and political decay, while in Brobdingnag the decay is mostly physical.23 The ‘original [utopian] Institutions’ of the Lilliputians, Gulliver reports, some time ago gave way to ‘the most scandalous Corruptions into which these People are fallen by the degenerate Nature of Man’ (I.vi.60; emphasis added);24 and in Brobdingnag, where Gulliver finds the evidence of bodily corruption inescapable, he reads a treatise which moralizes on the proposition ‘that Nature was degenerated in these latter declining Ages of the World, and could now produce only small abortive Births in Comparison of those in ancient Times’ (II.vii.137; that the Brobdingnagians are twelve times larger than human beings contributes to the poignancy of Swift’s irony). As the last-quoted clause implies, decay in the body, as in the body politic, has moral significance. Contrary to what might be adduced by abstracting the Brobdingnagians from their dialectical context, their moral significance does not come down to the proposition that the body itself is the primary source of corruption. Nor is Swift merely saying (to paraphrase the opening line of Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe [ca. 1678]), ‘All bodily things are subject to decay.’ This instead furnishes the basic premise of Swift’s argument. It establishes

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a universal and ineluctable law which he then applies a fortiori to any ‘spiritual operations’ that can adequately be accounted for in material or mechanical terms. Such an explanation necessarily reveals – and perforce satirizes – the extent to which mind has been reduced to body and is therefore corruptible, if not already corrupt. Thus, for example, the translation of a religious controversy into a dispute between Big-Endians and Little-Endians or of the criteria governing preferment into those of a ropedancing contest exposes the corruption inevitably resulting from lapsarian humanity’s tendency to abuse reason by endeavoring to eliminate the need for that faculty. The inclination that Swift detects elsewhere to do away with esprit, and therefore with human duality, pervades the Academy of Lagado.25 The schemes of the projectors there, when they do not in themselves indicate a complete absence of mind, aim to replace ‘spiritual’ with ‘mechanical’ operations. Thus one projector proposes to employ an ‘Engine’ to ‘write Books … without the least Assistance from Genius or Study’ (III.5:182– 84), while another pretends to deduce the state of people’s minds from ‘a strict View of their Excrements’ (III.6:190). The projectors would also apply their reductive procedures to language by substituting things for words. Lagado accordingly functions as the complement of the previous two books of the Travels. In Lilliput and Brobdingnag, the descriptive adequacy of satiric reduction serves as a test of the degree to which mind has already been reduced to body, the metaphysical to the physical, the real to the nominal;26 and in that way it is an index of corruptibility and inevitable corruption. On the other hand, those projects at Lagado which aim at the abolition of mind as a desirable end, though they perpetrate corruption, demonstrate by their prescriptive inadequacy the final irreducibility of mind to matter or words to things.27 This is also to say that the attempt to dispense with the ontological duality of mind and body, words and things, though that attempt be the fundamental source of degeneration, can never be wholly successful so long as humankind is capable of reason and words capable of expressing what is not. In contrast to the first three books of the Travels, Book Four defines the conditions for exemption from the universal law of decay. The state of the Yahoos – anti-utopian in its dialectical relation to the Houyhnhnm social order and in itself virtually Hobbesian – exemplifies the ironic possibility. To all appearances totally devoid of reason, the Yahoos embody the essence of brutality which lends itself to translation as the quintessence, or lowest limit, of degeneracy.28 At the opposite extreme, the utopia of the Houyhnhnms resists degeneration because they are by nature rational, not merely capable of reason.29 Whereas the Yahoo social order (if it can

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be called that) cannot be any more degenerate than it already is, the Houyhnhnms’ cannot degenerate so long as they remain perfectly rational, ‘endowed by Nature with a general Disposition to all Virtues, and hav[ing] no Conceptions or Ideas of what is evil in a rational Creature’ (IV.8:267). Unlike the immortal Struldbruggs, whose minds become impaired by the infirmities of age (III.10:211–13), the Houyhnhnms ‘feel a gradual Decay, but without Pain’ only ‘Some Weeks before their Death’ (IV.9:275). Moreover, they ‘are subject to no Diseases’ (IV.9:273; see also IV.7:262). Thus for most of their lives they have no firsthand experience of physical decay and do not suffer from its debilitating effects on mind. Nor do they seem to have had any significant experience of historical change: The Houyhnhnms have no Letters [Gulliver reports], and consequently, their Knowledge is all traditional. But there happening few Events of any Moment among a People so well united, naturally disposed to every Virtue, wholly governed by Reason, and cut off from all Commerce with other Nations; the historical Part is easily preserved without burthening their Memories. (IV.9:273) By contrast with what he reports of the Lilliputians and the Brobdingnagians, Gulliver mentions nothing that would lead one to suppose the Houyhnhnms, as he finds them, any different from what they always were. Furthermore, because ‘Reason among them’ is not ‘a Point problematical as with us … but strikes you with immediate Conviction,’ the Houyhnhnms have no inherent notion of ‘how a Point could be disputable’ (IV.7:267); so that it is hard to imagine how the Houyhnhnms could change if left to themselves. The nature and use of language among the Houyhnhnms reflects the nature of the Houyhnhnms themselves. ‘[T]heir Language doth not abound in Variety of Words, because their Wants and Passions are fewer than among us’ (IV.4:242); nor do they deem it natural, or rational, to speak of anything other than what, to their way of thinking, has real existence. I remember in frequent Discourses with my [Houyhnhnm] Master concerning the Nature of Manhood, in other Parts of the World; having Occasion to talk of Lying, and false Representation, it was with much Difficulty that he comprehended what I meant; although he had otherwise a most acute Judgment. For he argued thus; That the Use of Speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive Information of Facts; now if any one said the Thing which was not, these Ends were defeated; because I cannot properly be said to understand him; and I am so far from receiving Information, that he

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As their application of the italicized phrase reveals, the Houyhnhnms consider false any statement that does not assert a truth – which is also a ‘Thing’ – about their own island. Thus when Gulliver gives his master an account of whence he came, the Houyhnhnm replies: That I must needs be mistaken, or that I said the thing which was not…. He knew it was impossible that there could be a Country beyond the Sea, or that a Parcel of Brutes could move a wooden Vessel whither they pleased upon Water. He was sure no Houyhnhnm alive could make such a Vessel, or would trust Yahoos to manage it. (IV.3:235) The Houyhnhnm here would seem to be guilty of the very charge that he levels against Gulliver. But by the same token, his use of ‘sa[ying] the Thing which was not’ is not simply, or locally, ironic. His assertion is evidence not so much of a reprehensible dogmatism (let alone irrationality) as of the nature and limitations of his reason. His certitude about the impossibility of there being ‘a Country beyond the Sea’ indicates that Houyhnhnmland is a closed universe, not merely by virtue of its status as an island ‘cut off from all Commerce with other Nations,’ but also in the more significant sense of its being conceptually closed. It is on this account that his master has such ‘Difficulty’ in understanding what Gulliver says and is: the Houyhnhnms cannot come to terms with Gulliver because the only pertinent categories that their closed conceptual universe admits are those of Houyhnhnm and Yahoo.30 This conceptual closure has its counterpart in their universe of discourse. Indeed, from a logical point of view, what guarantees the boundaries of the Houyhnhnm utopia is the general limitation they impose upon language, their avoidance of saying ‘the Thing which was not.’ The rationality of the Houyhnhnms thereupon proves to be strictly tautologous. As they stipulate that ‘no Person can disobey Reason, without giving up his Claim to be a rational Creature’ (IV.10:280), so ‘Houyhnhnm’ cannot justly denominate any individual not ‘wholly governed by [Reason]’ (IV.8:267) as long as the word retains its aboriginal, or etymological, meaning. Swift thus refers the particular utopian status of the Houyhnhnms to the word. Given that ‘Houyhnhnm’ means ‘the Perfection of Nature’ (IV.3:235), and given also that ‘Nature’ among the Houyhnhnms is virtually synonymous with ‘Reason,’31 the proposition of their perfect rationality is as much an a priori truth as Alexander Pope’s ‘Whatever is, is right.’32

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Their utopian perfection, that is, does not differ from any other kind in being purely stipulative, subject to no empirical confirmation. By the same token, however, the claim to that superlative comes with the logically necessary condition that being perfect always imposes: that any change in the qualities constitutive of perfection must, ipso facto, entail a fall into imperfection. The Houyhnhmns’ liability to such disaccreditation depends especially on (their) language: as long as their linguistic usage remains unaltered, there is no danger that the word Houyhnhnm will lose its original meaning, and with it the guarantee that they are by definition perfect. For the Houyhnhnms, then, saying the thing which is not is more than a contradiction of (their) reality: because it threatens to open their universe of discourse, to speak thus imperils their self-defined existence as perfectly rational beings.33 The hypothesis that the Houyhnhnm utopia logically depends upon and requires a closed universe of discourse is validated by its ability to account for Gulliver’s expulsion. When he first encounters the Houyhnhnms, his imitation of their speech ‘visibly surprise[s]’ them (IV.1:226– 27). In fact, it is from the ‘Capacity for Speech’ that his master deduces Gulliver’s ‘Capacity … for Reason’ (IV.3:237). His aptitude for learning the Houyhnhnm language puzzles Gulliver’s master: Gulliver is obviously not a Houyhnhnm, as anyone can see by looking at him; neither does he fit the Houyhnhnms’ closed conception of Yahoo, which excludes the least power to reason. What Gulliver says is a source of still greater perplexity. Through an unnatural use of the Houyhnhnm language, Gulliver acquaints his master with ideas unfamiliar to the Houyhnhnms. In saying as much, he divulges, inter alia: I remember it was with extreme Difficulty that I could bring my Master to understand the Meaning of the Word Opinion, or how a Point could be disputable…. Controversies, Wranglings, Disputes, and Positiveness in false or dubious Propositions, are Evils unknown among the Houyhnhnms. (IV.7:267) It put me to the Pains of many Circumlocutions to give my Master a right Idea of what I spoke. (IV.4:242) I had made Use of many Circumlocutions in describing to … [my master] the Nature of the Several Crimes, for which most of our Crew had been forced to fly their Country. (IV.4:244) By resorting, time and again, to circumlocutions, Gulliver is able to get around the restrictions which the Houyhnhnms impose on themselves in their use of language. He thus subverts – and in their view perverts – language. Indeed, his circumlocutory manner of speaking is itself

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subversive, as indicated by the fact that the Houyhnhnms, who ‘have no Word in their Language to express Lying or Falsehood’ (IV.3:235), use a circumlocution, saying ‘the Thing which was not’ – presumably as awkward in their language as it is in English – to condemn the expression of any idea contravening the conceptual limits of Houyhnhnmland. Despite the Houyhnhnm’s indignation, Gulliver does manage to impart to him a dark notion of something ‘worse than Brutality itself’: as my Discourse had increased … [my master’s] Abhorrence of the whole Species [of Yahoos], so he found it gave him a Disturbance in his Mind, to which he was wholly a Stranger before. He thought his Ears being used to such abominable Words, might by Degrees admit them with less Detestation. That, although he hated the Yahoos of this Country, yet he no more blamed them for their odious Qualities, than he did … a sharp Stone for cutting his Hoof. But, when a Creature pretending to Reason, could be capable of such Enormities, he dreaded lest the Corruption of that Faculty might be worse than Brutality itself. (IV.5:248) Gulliver’s ‘abominable Words,’ that is, induce an apprehension of evil into a being who inherently ‘ha[s] no Conceptions or Ideas of what is evil in a rational Creature.’ The result is that the Houyhnhnm affirms before the Grand Council: that the two Yahoos said to be first seen among … [the Houyhnhnms], had been driven thither over the Sea; that coming to Land, and being forsaken by their Companions, they retired to the Mountains, and degenerating by Degrees, became in Process of Time, much more savage than those of their own Species in the Country from whence these two Originals came. (IV.9:272) Gulliver’s account of himself thus provides the basis for what his master advances in public defiance of timeless tradition and in contradiction to the assumptions that had once caused him to dismiss what Gulliver told him as ‘the Thing which was not.’ Instead of reiterating the consensus that the Yahoos arose on the island as an indigenous product of spontaneous generation, Gulliver’s master offers an alternative explanation which would open the Houyhnhnm universe and admit the possibility of degeneration. ‘The Country from whence these two [Yahoo] Originals came’ cannot be Houyhnhnmland; hence the Houyhnhnm is implicitly asserting that there is ‘a Country beyond the Sea.’ ‘No Houyhnhnm alive’ could make a vessel wherein these Yahoos ‘had been driven thither over the Sea’; hence the power to reason which that capability bespeaks has declined, either in the Yahoos or in the Houyhnhnms themselves.

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Unconscious of the corrupting effect he is having, Gulliver proudly observes ‘that my Presence often gave … [the Houyhnhnms] sufficient Matter for Discourse, because it afforded my Master an Occasion of letting his Friends into the History of me and my Country’ (IV.10:278). He is shocked to learn that the Grand Council, after hearing his master, has decided to expel Gulliver from Houyhnhnmland: ‘in my weak and corrupt Judgment, I thought it might consist with Reason to have been less rigorous’ (IV.10:280). But less rigor would indeed be a sign of ‘weak and corrupt Judgment,’ for the Houyhnhnms have slowly come to understand that Gulliver’s presence among them ‘[i]s not agreeable to Reason or Nature’ (IV.10:279) because it threatens the very basis of their perfect community. The menace he poses to the Houyhnhnm utopia exactly parallels the poet’s disruptive impact on Plato’s Republic. Were Gulliver to be allowed to continue seducing the Houyhnhnms into conversing about ‘the Thing which is not,’ they would all soon confound it with reality as they know, or conceive, it; and thus, like those deluded (according to Plato’s epistemology) by poetic imitations thrice-removed from Truth, they would be left ‘worse than in Ignorance.’ They would also suffer those derangements of reason for which Plato holds tragedians particularly responsible:34 the Houyhnhnms would be afflicted by ‘Disturbance’ of ‘Mind’ to which they were wholly strangers before. In other words, once the speech of his master before the Grand Council enables the rest of the Houyhnhnms to assess the nature of Gulliver’s influence, they realize that permitting Gulliver to remain among them would soon lead to change and its logical concomitant, the loss of their title to perfection – in short, to the destruction of their utopia. The Houyhnhnms must banish Gulliver because only in a closed universe – and at bottom, a linguistically closed universe – can they continue to agree upon what is true, or real, as clearly differentiated (in their minds) from ‘the Thing which was [and/or is] not.’ By their own definition, so long as they confine themselves to speaking of what exists in their closed society, they cannot lie. But for the same reason, whatever truth they utter is tautological: their standard of truth must be so rigidly self-determined and restrictive that their claim to veracity cannot extend beyond the boundaries of their own island without their becoming fallible.35 As an ultimate order whose rigorous isolation would protect the logos from corruptibility, the Houyhnhnm utopia represents the imaginary antithesis of the human civilized world with all its mortal corruptions of words and reason. In its dialectical context, that is, the Houyhnhnm utopia is ‘the Thing which is not.’ (Some readers, says the indignant

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Gulliver in the prefatory letter to ‘Cousin Sympson,’ ‘have gone so far as to drop Hints, that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more Existence than the Inhabitants of Utopia’ [8].) As such, it discloses the ironic equivocality of that circumlocution. Saying ‘the Thing which is not’ can be a periphrastic synonym for lying; but it also covers another kind of utterance ‘invented … out of … [one’s] own Head’: literary fiction.36 The distinction is lost on Gulliver as it is on the Houyhnhnms – on them because their utopia depends on a (for them) natural congruence of ideas, words, and things; on him by reason of his Puritanical aversion to fiction. Gulliver’s Travels, on the other hand, unmistakably recognizes what Gulliver’s Travels Into Several Remote Nations does not: that fictions, though amounting to lies when taken literally, may none the less convey some species of truth about human existence. Accordingly, the real author has designed Gulliver’s Travels to bring home the consequences, at once epistemological and moral, of what being human means, both actually and ideally – this through the indirection of ‘the Thing which was not.’ Houyhnhnmland is crucial to that (satiric) project. As the most novel – and alien – of all such ‘Things’ that Swift verbally creates (it is the only world in the Travels that is dominated by non-anthropomorphs), it supplements the book’s previous satiric discoveries. Staging the collision of the Houyhnhnms and Gulliver, it demonstrates that the ideal of reason which they embody strictly requires hermetic closure, but by the same token it exposes the moral limitations of the open universe that Gulliver represents. The two worlds are thus co-definitional in a way that reveals the Houyhnhnmns to be humanly unattainable while at the same time holding out in them the theoretical possibility inscribed in Gulliver’s Travels as itself a (satirically reprehensive) realization of ‘the Thing which was not’: that civilized society may yet become utopian enough for the behavior of humans collectively not to be reducible to that of Yahoos. Orwell, then, is right about the Houyhnhmns being ‘Swift’s ideal’ to this extent (only): that the Travels does invest them with utopian import. On the other hand, the Houyhnhnm fiction – and especially its ‘secret’ plot (which most readers have followed Gulliver in not noticing, let alone fathoming) – inscribes the limiting conditions of the rational ideal which it incorporates. Houyhnhnmland on the whole (both along with and as the culmination of previous utopian moments in the Travels) thus shares something of the hope of the first Utopia so called; but far more certainly than in More, that hope is qualified – indeed, undermined – in a way that anticipates anti-utopias like Zamyatin’s in We.37

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III. D-503 and the Language of Anti-Utopia There is no clear evidence in We that it owes anything to Swift’s example.38 None the less, it is instructive to compare Zamyatin’s fiction with Book Four of the Travels, beginning with D-503’s kinship with Gulliver. Both, first of all, are politically naïve. The chief difference between them in this regard is that Gulliver never gets to the bottom of what he in effect presents as the Houyhnhnms’ plot against him – never recognizes why logical rigor dictates his explusion – whereas D-503 does, eventually, reckon that I-330 has thrown herself his way because he is the Builder of The Integral (though the thought that I-330 has been using him does not enter D-503’s mind until the Well-Doer, or Benefactor, puts it to him – and as a fact rather than a hypothesis). Under her tutelage, D-503 becomes a rather less steadfast proponent of the One State’s Utopian ideal than Gulliver is of the Houyhnhnms’; but for that very reason, his service for exposing Utopia’s limits is almost as unwitting as Gulliver’s. He does, of course – again via I-330 – achieve a self-consciousness which Gulliver does not approach. But the moment wherein this obviously first occurs is susceptible of confusion with the import of Gulliver’s ‘behold[ing] my Figure … in a Glass, and thus if possible habituat[ing] my self to … the Sight of a human Creature’ (IV.12:295; emphasis added): I’m in front of a mirror. And for the first time in my life, I swear it, for the very first time in my life, I get a clear, distinct, conscious look at myself; I see myself and I’m astonished, like I’m looking at some ‘him’! … I am looking at myself, at him, and I am absolutely certain that he with his ruler-straight eyebrows is a stranger, somebody else…. And I’m the real one. I AM NOT HIM. (We 11:59)39 The ‘he’ reflected back at D-503 – the image of someone whom he would dissociate ‘myself’ from – is not exactly the Yahoo that Gulliver presumes every human being save himself to be; but the eyebrows do identify D503’s ‘him’ with the savage and ancient world beyond the Green Wall, especially in their imagistic connection with the hairy arms that D-503 becomes acutely conscious of having shortly after his ‘chance’ encounter with I-330 (2:8–9), whom he associates with his own hirsutism by thinking of her in part as an ‘eyelash’ (e.g., 7:33). And while his ‘reflective’ thought-process is almost dizzying in the rapidity of its modulations – with D-503 (1) seeing ‘myself,’ (2) as a ‘him,’ then (3) as not-‘him’ – the end-result is a Gulliveresque alienation from the mirror-image.40 D-503’s schizophrenia is more obviously ideological (at least in the usual understanding of that term) than is Gulliver’s (and perhaps for that reason it does not come across as comic). It is at once correlative to and expressive of the ambivalence that D-503 develops toward the One, the

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United, the Only State.41 Under the direction of the Benefactor, this sociopolitical order aspires to the kind of (en)closure which Houyhnhnmland naturally enjoys as a remote island. Not being isolated by nature from oppositional influences, the selfstyled Only State must set up artificial boundaries to make them inaccessible. One measure already taken, sometime in the legendary or quasi-mythical past, has been to erect the Green Wall as a barrier against the inimical terrestrial forces associated with the natural world (which gives the wall its name, as it were) and with the historical past (represented by an Ancient House, or House of Antiquity). But apart from proving permeable (and otherwise vulnerable to destruction), this wall will not keep out the Alien from future outer space, so to speak, understood as an alternative locus of an Otherness not clearly delineated but having at least this much in common with what lies beyond the Green Wall: that it, too, potentially threatens the One State’s pretensions to ultimacy. Hence the project reported at We’s outset centers on a rocketship named for its intended purpose of ‘integrat[ing] completely the colossal equation of the universe’ (1:4): that is, The Integral will extend the boundaries of the One State into the Solar System (if not beyond) not for the sake of colonization per se, but to eliminate the possibility of other worlds’ actualizing any basis of community differing from the One State’s, and thereby challenging the latter’s very (self)designation as well as its inherent claim to being uniquely the dictate of reason. In short, even though Swift doesn’t figure among the conscious influences on We, Zamyatin could have titled his fiction Houyhnhnmland Revisited, particularly with regard to the One State’s two (self)defining projects: the Green Wall intended to solve the aboriginal Yahoo problem, as it were, and The Integral project which would preclude the Gulliver problem of a potentially invasive subversional Elsewhere. The conceptual basis of the One State is not, of course, of Swiftian derivation. We itself more or less expressly informs readers that its regulatory scheme comes from Frederick Winslow Taylor, the author of The Principles of Scientific Management (1912) who thought up and put into practice what are now known as time-and-motion studies for promoting assembly-line efficiency. The esteem that ‘We’ have for him as ‘the genius of antiquity’ (7:34) no doubt reflects that of Lenin, who (in 1918) extolled Taylor as much as any capitalist had.42 The reflection, perhaps needless to say, is parodic: as the inspirer of the time-tabling of all human activities which lies at the core of the One State’s Oneness, We’s Taylor is at least roughly equivalent to the Henry Ford whom Huxley turns into the source of Brave New World’s equally massive experiment in social engineering.43 (Especially in so far as Tayloresque thinking underlies the neologistic

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concepts of ‘unifs’ and ‘Numbers,’ Zamyatin satirizes it long in advance of any mention of Taylor or his Tables: in the early exchange between D-503 and I-330 on the subject of noses. I-330 suggests that these, too, should be made uniform. D-503, under the general delusion that they are having a meeting of minds, misunderstands only [!] her reductio ad absurdum intent. But inasmuch as her proposal enters as the kind of ellipsis typical of We, many of those outsiders who are the readers of the book may require a clarification which D-503 doesn’t need – this from the story wherein Zamyatin had first considered, satirically, the project for standardizing noses: Islanders.44) What is now regardable as the One State’s ironic version of glasnost – that it be a world of glass buildings – may also be taken as a logical extension of (its) Taylorism. But the worship of the ‘straight line’ which that architecture expresses – the compulsion to ‘unbend the … [primitive] curve, to straighten it tangentially’ (1:4) – instead has its source in another of Zamyatin’s abominations: it bespeaks the imagistic impact of Futurism.45 The same is true for The Integral, a name which (contextually) calls into question the positive value of the rocketship as the Futurists’ emblem of their faith in technology. Neither of these two sources of the One State inherently, or automatically, supplies a standpoint external – and inimical – to it. Their adversarial effect comes in significant part by way of their tie-in with the Dostoevskian influence on We. Several times Zamyatin has R-13 echo certain memorable passages in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpol’ya, 1864) – e.g., in a poetic tribute to ‘the multiplication table’ for ‘never … mak[ing] a mistake’ (12:65). These, however, are relatively incidental compared with We’s use of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ from The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ya Karamazovy, 1879–80). Again through R-13, Zamyatin rehearses, at some length, the Inquisitor’s argument, with its alternative of freedom vs. happiness (11:61).46 Subsuming those historical features of Tsarist and Soviet Russia that enter into the One State as a pervasively surveillant political order, these term-concepts preside over much of We from the moment that D-503 introduces ‘the instinct of nonfreedom’ (2:6), which in turn engages the earlier reference to ‘the primitive state known as freedom’ (1:3). Futhermore, Zamyatin takes a Dostoevskian understanding of them for granted (else D-503’s just-quoted phrases would not be totally comprehensible). Only rather late in the fiction, when I-330 contests D-503’s belief in a Final Revolution, does Zamyatin refashion freedom vs. happiness into the analogous term-concepts of energy vs. entropy (28:159) and thereby make the dichotomy his own. Meanwhile, however, Zamyatin has appropriated Dostoevsky’s opposition in another way: by synthetically incorporating it in a two-world

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structure that he takes from H. G. Wells.47 Here his particular model is A Story of the Days to Come (1899). This ‘sociofantasy,’ ‘the sharpest, most ironic of Wells’s grotesques,’ has much more prominence in Zamyatin’s long essay on its author than is usually accorded to it; and it also figures among the ‘logical fantasies’ by Wells that Zamyatin translated into Russian.48 As rewritten into We, Days to Come’s divide between technological society and primitive nature materializes as the Green Wall. At the same time, Zamyatin infuses into Dostoevsky’s conception of freedom a quantum of (neo)Wellsian instinct (which in We is virtually devoid of a Darwinistic component), with the world beyond the wall standing as the site of their fusion. Far more than Days to Come, We lends itself to (re)constructions which are not only generically various, but susceptible of mutually contradictory formulations. Why that should be so makes this book unparallelled in Zamyatin’s other writings and nearly unique among those works which can be thought of as science fiction. We countenances not only different, but differing interpretations through a kind of information overload. No reader can concentrate at once on all of the sets of meaningful elements that We comprises; yet the meaning, along with the genre, of We is strictly a function of some one of at least four of these – point of view, ideational content, style, and plot – with no two of them yielding precisely the same results. As if further complication were called for, We cannot properly be said to have levels, or layers, of meaning by reason of their refusal of such a separation, their tendency to interpenetrate and subvert one another. Thus attention to point of view can be conducive to an anti-utopian or an anti-utopian understanding, depending principally on how much attention one gives to D-503 as a loyal ‘number’ rather than as a somewhat discontented potential recruit to the ‘Mephi’ cause. Either of those readings may be to some extent congruent with the overt thought-matter preoccupying D-503. But the somewhat Wellsian Novel of Ideas (or Discussion Novel) which comes from that ideational content need not preserve We’s dialogue with Utopia at all: here ‘utopia’ could just as well be dropped altogether in favor of one or more of those terms which D-503 actually employs (e.g., reason vs. imagination or the irrational). Meanwhile, his style or manner of (self)expression makes for something akin to the psychological novel of the stream-of-consciousness sort, its postImpressionist imagism translatable into insights which need have nothing to do with We’s utopian discourse or even with We’s Dostoevskian dichotomies. Finally, focusing on the plot of the fiction – out of focus in what now appears as an account by an ‘unreliable narrator’ – produces We as a kind of spy story (which is not to say that it regresses or is reducible to that or any other popular literary type, unlike William Gibson’s Neuromancer,

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49

for example). It is especially as such, with concentration on its plot(ting), that We’s historical origins become evident. The fiction thereupon appears perhaps as an eerie prophecy of Stalinism50 and certainly as the prototype for Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet the fact that the ‘secret’ plot centers upon the subversive activities of the Mephi and the measures of the One State’s Guardians to counteract them suggests instead that We is reflecting (upon) more than it is looking beyond the Soviet Union’s actual chaos at the time when Zamyatin was writing the book. The fact that any one set of We’s meaningful elements can generate more or less conflicting understandings is traceable to the contradictoriness of D-503 himself. Indeed, that is what We is centrally, or fundamentally, about: appropriating (ironically enough) the driving principle of the Marxist dialectic, it demonstrates that D-503 is inherently self-contradictory, and not just as a human being, but more importantly in his selfidentification with the One State and its conception of the Rule of Reason.51 This import of We is most evident with regard to D-503’s diary as he originally conceives of it: as a project answering to the Benefactor’s call for ‘compositions … [extolling] the beauty and grandeur’ of the One State (1:3). The diary does not for long – or even perhaps for a moment – unequivocally fulfill that mission; but it does finally serve the State’s cause in providing evidence for ‘liquidating’ I-330 as a Mephi.52 With regard to We’s plot, then, it is accurate to represent D-503’s autobiographical record(s) in the way that Orwell does in his re-vision of We, when he has Winston Smith realize that he is writing his own ‘diary for O’Brien – to O’Brien’ (1.7:80). On the other hand, D-503’s project is intrinsically subversive. Intended as it is to explain the One State and its rationality to the inhabitants of a spatio-temporal Otherness which knows nothing of them, it is an enterprise in (self)definition, and as such is inevitably subject to the Shandean law: ‘To define – is to distrust.’ Why Laurence Sterne’s principle necessarily operates comes out of a passage in Record, or Entry, Five, which also clarifies what his proposition means: Imagine a square, a splendid, living square. And [suppose that] he has to tell about [or give an account of] himself, about his life. You see – the last thing on earth a square would think of telling about is that he has four equal angles. He simply does not see that, it’s so familiar to him, such an everyday thing. That’s me [or: And so with me]. I’m in the situation of that square all the time. (5:21)53 The last sentence leaves no doubt that D-503 is conscious of using an analogy drawn (as is usual with him) from mathematics to describe the difficulty of explaining the One State (and with it, himself) to his putative

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readers. It is ideo-psychologically improbable, however, that he is fully aware at this point (if ever) of what he is in effect having his voluble square say: that recognizing, for the sake of explaining oneself, one’s constitutive assumptions must bring with it some awareness of what one is not, and thence of one’s limits and limitations. This import finds its supplement in his (above-quoted) account of looking in a mirror and finally taking from that self-contemplation the conclusion that ‘I’ am ‘nothe.’ Thus self-identified, D-503 remains the upstanding ‘number’ which his place as Chief Engineer of The Integral implies that he be. But especially in regard to a diary which perforce must prove, willy-nilly, to be an exercise in Shandean definition of the Only State, the fact that he momentarily acknowledges himself as an Other – or the Otherness in himself – qualifies him as a candidate for Mephi-ism. This same self-division, both actual and potential, appears not just in what he says but in how he says it. He habitually expresses himself in mathematical terms, a dictate of his occupation which is also quite suitable to a State claiming to be the only socio-political order based on reason. Yet even as those terms aim to be totalizing in the way that the One State does, they dialectically generate their antithesis54 – paradigmatically, the square root of minus one. This for D-503 instantly signifies the irrational in its non-mathematical sense. It eventually comprehends imagination and soul as well (terms which – under the ægis of the square root of minus one, in mathematics the constant defining imaginary, not irrational, numbers – We renders pretty much synonymous with irrationality in their common refusal of the Only State’s reason). Meanwhile, D503 identifies ‘the world of square roots of minus one’ not merely with, but as ‘the ancient delirious [or nightmare] world’ beyond the Green Wall (14:76) – this in the context of the idea of belonging to someone that O-90 evokes in saying, ‘You aren’t mine’ (14:76). In short, ‘the square root of minus one’ as a verbal formula becomes inclusive of everything that D503’s ‘he’ had previously signified, and then some – indeed, of just about every thought inimical to the One State. Thus the ‘mathematical’ language which would reproduce such a State’s aspiration to ultimacy instead tends to subvert it(self), generating its antithesis in pretty much exactly the way that the One State gives rise to the Mephi. So regarded, the relationship between the Mephi and the One State reveals itself as being largely reciprocal. The Mephi, that is, define themselves in opposition to that state (and vice-versa, as is visible in the Green Wall). Whatever they may owe to what their name suggests – the Mephistopheles of Goethe’s Faust (1808) – their identity, logically considered, derives from precisely the same dialectic that leads William Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), to choose to be of ‘the

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Devil’s party’ (taking Milton with him): viz., because the forces of reason have (re)created God in their image, co-opting Him (now an inhuman It) as the Principle of Limitation that would bind or circumscribe Energy, or Desire, or Imagination (all figuring as equivalents in Marriage; see especially Plates 4–5), and thereby negate them. Whether by Blakean influence on their author or merely in effect, the Mephi are exactly like Marriage’s ‘Devil’s party,’ but with one re-vision: that Zamyatin allows for their having a pronomial origin. In other words, the Mephi can be perceived as rebelling essentially against the One State’s maxim, ‘We comes from God, I from the Devil’ (22:124). In view of the name which Zamyatin bestows on the fiction, that ‘I’– ‘We’ antithesis might well head the list of dichotomies whereby the Mephi and the One State mutually define themselves. The One/Only State The Collective ‘We’ The Technological City-State Transparency/Clarity 2+/x 2 = 4 Mathematical (Geometrical or Algebraic) Reason Happiness Entropy

The Mephi The Individual(istic) ‘I’ The World Beyond the (Green) Wall = Nature Impenetrability/Unclearness 公–1 Imagination, the Irrational, Instinct, Emotion (‘Soul’) Freedom Energy

Again, however, D-503 presents a problem for this schema – a problem stemming from another aspect of his self-contradictoriness and one which, again, can be looked upon as being fundamentally linguistic. He jeopardizes any neat ideological division of Mephi from Guardians in part because he in effect functions as a kind of double-agent (though not exactly of S-4711’s type), associating with Mephi while professing allegiance to the One State so as to mediate as well as be torn between the two.55 He is perhaps even more subversive (of both) by virtue of another way in which he traduces the distinction implicit from We’s very outset. His diary, despite its stated purpose of speaking for ‘we,’ begins with the Russian pronoun for ‘I’ even though an ‘I’ is there avoidable (as Zilboorg’s translation of We’s opening words in effect indicates).56 Furthermore, D503 presently exhibits some self-consciousness of this: having written that ‘I shall attempt … to note down what I see, what I think,’ he instantly corrects himself to read ‘what we think,’ wherepon he adds that ‘WE’ shall accordingly be ‘the title of these records’ (1:4; my emphasis in ‘we think’). Nevertheless, his pages are replete with I’s, even in cases when Russian

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(unlike English) does not strictly require any pronoun. In this respect, it is worth remarking that D-503’s unwitting subversion of We’s dichotomies (though not necessarily of the dialectic generating them) may already be inscribed in the book-title which he says he is responsible for. The Russian word for ‘we,’ that is, sounds enough like ‘me’ to countenance the possibility that Zamyatin (resident in England for much of the First World War) intends it to be apprehended as a bilingual pun.57 Particularly in point of its use of language, then, We at once articulates the Only State’s (would-be) utopian vocation of being the rational sociopolitical order and embodies Zamyatin’s counter-entropic ideal of perpetual revolution. D-503’s ‘Reason must prevail’ (Ginsburg’s translation, 40:232) accordingly admits, but hardly compels, the construction that Orwell puts on those concluding words in rephrasing them as Nineteen Eighty-Four’s last (‘He loved Big Brother’). The latter is an accurate rendition of D-503’s own ideological state of mind following the enforced excision of his soul or imagination, and it is also consistent with Orwell’s overall understanding (or somewhat Harold Bloomian ‘poetic misprision’) of Zamyatin’s book as anticipatory of Stalinism. Yet just as such a reading of We fails to take proper cognizance of the persistence of political chaos at the fiction’s end (and into the bargain would betray itself, as it were, by in effect justifying Stalinist paranoia about a conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet State), so – correlatively – it is unfaithful also to the futurity, the wishfulness, of D-503’s final statement, which he would have stand as his book’s epitome.58 In that sense, Zamyatin’s We – here as strenuously opposed to the lobotomized D-503’s – has no more belief in a last, a final, word than it does in a last, or ultimate, revolution (or truth). IV. Newspeak and the Limitations of Dystopia Unanimity in the utopia of the Houyhnhnms depends upon the natural correspondence of word and thought. Their language, as Gulliver’s use of it demonstrates, is capable of expressing what their reason tells them is not; but to speak in this way is contrary to their nature and to the dictates of (their) reason. The limits of customary linguistic usage among them reflect the cognitive limitations inherent in their nature and thereby ensure their rationality from corruption and preserve their utopian social order. Oceania reverses the logical priorities. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the program of the Party is to close off existing possibilities of cognition, to make what has been thought in the past unthinkable, by constricting the universe of discourse. The intent of Newspeak is to perpetuate ‘Ingsoc’ (i.e., ‘English Socialism’ – and hence a fairly exact translation of ‘Nazi,’ an acronym for Nazional Socialismus) by impoverishing the lexicon to the

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point where heretical notions first become inexpressible and eventually inconceivable. More than just a bare hint for all this comes from Orwell’s reading of We. Reviewing the French translation (as Nous autres, 1929) in The Tribune for January 4, 1946 (i.e., some time before he actually began work on Nineteen Eighty-Four), he speaks of Zamyatin’s ‘intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism – human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is credited with divine attributes’ (CEJL 4:75). This remark leaves no doubt as to the literary source of Big Brotherism, especially as O’Brien embodies it. So, too, it suffices to make Nineteen Eighty-Four’s virtual obliteration of Utopia accountable to Orwell’s take on Nous autres. As for what is perhaps the most remarkable of his own work’s features, Orwell says nothing to suggest that D-503’s totalizing aspirations for language entered into his conception of Newspeak; but that, at the least, is not improbable on the grounds that Orwell was one reader who might well have brought to We some understanding of the sort of thing which Zamyatin is up to linguistically. This is also to say that the theory behind Newspeak perverts the meliorist concept underlying Orwell’s prescriptions in ‘Politics and the English Language’: the idea ‘that language is … an instrument which we shape for our own purposes’ (CEJL 4:127).59 The Party regards language as the primary means of controlling history and retaining power. On the basis of the principle that ‘if … [history] was intelligible, then it was alterable’ (2.9:204), the Party proposes to understand the historical process in order to arrest it;60 and to accomplish this objective, it is necessary to divest language of its ability to formulate alternatives. As the lexicographer Syme explains: the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought[.] In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten…. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller…. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak. (1.5:53) Through ‘the destruction of words’ (1.5:52), Newspeak shall immediately preclude the possibility of saying ‘the Thing which is not,’ and it would finally remove even the possibility of thinking it.61 When Newspeak ‘is perfect,’ ‘a heretical thought … should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words’ (Appendix:

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303). But beyond this, the goal of Newspeak is to get rid of higher thought-processes altogether: ‘Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all’ (Appendix: 311). Emanating, as it were, from the language section of Gulliver’s Travels’ Academy at Lagado, The Principles of Newspeak calls for the transforming of language, grammar, and syntax so that words ‘can be uttered almost without taking thought’ (Appendix: 310). Thus, by the year 2050, Newspeak will have effectually eliminated consciousness of language as a means to self-awareness, as a way out of what O’Brien terms the ‘[c]ollective solipsism’ (3.3:269) of Oceania. Meanwhile, the end of precisely defining words in order to abolish meaning(s) – to exclude reference to anything outside the closed universe of Ingsoc – has not yet been achieved. In 1984, language can still open the way to oppositional political consciousness: the ‘anti-social’ act of recording one’s thoughts in a diary can eventuate in outright defiance of the dystopian social order. As long as opposition can exist (i.e., until Newspeak is perfected), the Party, as an interim measure, institutionalizes it. To control recalcitrant energy, the Party invents the conspiracy of ‘Emmanuel Goldstein.’ ‘I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it,’ O’Brien reveals (3.3:264), referring to ‘Goldstein’s’ Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, a treatise which really offers no hope of any alternative to Ingsoc. The moment of ‘Hate,’ early in Nineteen Eighty-Four, when ‘the hostile figure [of Goldstein] melted into the face of Big Brother’ (1.1:17) prepares for the terrifying discovery: ‘We’ are ‘They,’ the conspirators are the Party. The linguistic paradigm for this kind of inclusiveness is the Ingsoc formula ‘WAR IS PEACE.’ That slogan, rather than being paradoxical, is anti-paradoxical. It does not affirm the validity of opposites; it negates them so as to make the oppositional terms both meaningless. The Newspeak word for this negation of antithesis is blackwhite, which ‘Goldstein’ glosses as follows: Like so many Newspeak words, … [blackwhite] has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. (2.9:213–14)

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‘Blackwhite’ is therefore the linguistic equivalent of ‘doublethink,’ ‘the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them’ (2.9:215). Together, ‘blackwhite’ and ‘doublethink’ form a ‘system of thought’ which perverts contradiction, in both the logical and the Hegelian sense, in such a way that it ceases to exist as a source of conflict and becomes instead a mode of self-deceptive rationalization. ‘Black’ can be ‘white’ only when language itself becomes a closed system of symbols without referential meaning apart from itself. This is the purpose of blackwhite and doublethink: to destroy any ground outside the world of Oceania that could be a basis for opposition to it. ‘Nothing exists except through human consciousness’ (3.3:268), declares O’Brien, but the qualifying ‘except’ seems superfluous. The enormity of the negation goes beyond Winston Smith’s assessment – ‘Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by … [the Party’s] philosophy’ (1.7:80). The consciousness Ingsoc enforces, far from being the Cartesian cogito on which reality might depend, comprises merely a flux of collective deceptions which do not assume or posit the real existence of anything. Similarly, Newspeak, as the linguistic analogue of self-deceptive consciousness, neither carries nor affirms any existential claims. The Houyhnhnms reason that something is either black or white, and for them to assert that it is one or the other necessarily entails the proposition that it exists. Newspeak, at the opposite extreme, does not acknowledge any ‘external reality’ whatever, so that from a Party pronouncement no existential deduction is possible (or else it must be foolish). Winston Smith imagines that he can escape from Ingsoc into the world of ‘primitive emotions’ (2.7:166). He seeks refuge in the notion that ‘What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter’ (2.7:167). Instead, however, he finds that there is no real way out. Closure in Oceania is cosmic. Illicit sexuality holds nothing of the potent political subversiveness that We attributes to it; nor does the natural world, despite its investiture with much of the significance that the world beyond the Green Wall has in We. Moreover, Ingsoc, unlike the Brave New World that Aldous Huxley envisions, does not permit exile, not even the exile to be had by retreating into some remote region of the mind. O’Brien says something to that very effect. He tells Winston Smith: You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out…. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him…. [W]e bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make

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VISIONS AND RE-VISIONS him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. (3.2:258; emphasis added)

In the ‘Ministry of Love,’ O’Brien can torture the ‘erroneous thought’ from Winston Smith’s mind; he can destroy Winston’s last ground of resistance to Ingsoc. He can do so because the same kind of self-deception which directs Winston to write his ‘diary for O’Brien – to O’Brien’ (1.7:80) also haunts his love for Julia. (Self-deception, more or less precisely of Winston Smith’s rationalizing sort, is not only Orwell’s perennial theme; it is central to the meaning of almost all his writings, fiction and non-fiction alike.) Even before he protests, and she agrees, that their love is inviolable (2.7:167), Winston suffers – again – from a recurring nightmare wherein ‘his deepest feeling was always one of self-deception.’ It should therefore not come entirely as a surprise that when his nightmarish fear, ‘too dreadful to be faced’ (2.4:146), no longer seems groundless and remote – when O’Brien, that is, threatens him with hungry rats that will gorge on Winston’s eyes – he repudiates Julia to save himself from this dread which he has kept secret from his own consciousness. In the end, after O’Brien has reduced him to the shell of a man, Winston’s ‘inner mind’ has been recaptured: ‘He loved Big Brother’ (3.6:300). Newspeak can destroy words for the same reason Ingsoc can destroy human beings: because significant words are, as it were, self-deceptive – that is, ambiguous. Newspeak can therefore ‘convert’ and ‘reshape’ them by removing undesirable meanings so that only ideologically tolerable meanings remain. Extirpating from ‘free,’ for instance, ‘its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free’’’ leaves only the meaning that word has ‘in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds’’’ (Appendix: 303). In this manner, Oceania becomes the ironically ultimate totalitarian order of unreason whose guarantor is a language incapable of formulating significant statements to which criteria of truth and falsity apply. A society pretending to ultimacy requires closure. ‘A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms’ and Nineteen Eighty-Four demonstrate that the limits of a closed social order, utopian or dystopian, coincide with the limits where language becomes intractable as a means of expressing ‘the Thing which is not.’ We in the meantime confirms the point by showing how the imposition of totalitarian aspirations on language can dialectically effectuate a liberatory counter-movement. *

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*

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Orwell should get most of the credit or blame – and certainly rather more than Arthur Koestler, say, as author of Darkness at Noon (1948)62 – for supplanting utopia with its dystopian negation. That fact, in connection with We’s profound influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four, makes the literary history of Utopia’s recovery after two decades of Orwellian obloquy rather ironic. Such a recovery is evident – to cite but a few of the most notable examples – in Stanislaw Lem’s Futurological Congress (1971), the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic (1972), Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). It is equally evident that while all of these exhibit a cognizance of the Orwellian (if not precisely Orwell’s) case for Dystopia that qualifies them as ‘ambiguous utopias,’63 their strategy for dealing with dystopian objections of that sort arguably comes from Nineteen Eighty-Four’s sine qua non: We. There Zamyatin provides the model for reinventing Utopia obliquely, for repossessing it by way of its anti-utopian or even dystopian negation. In doing so, he takes his cue from Wells’s A Story of the Days to Come.

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§2. Generic Configurations of A Story of the Days to Come It was his constant surprise to find that points [i.e., perceptions] that one might have expected to strike vividly at the very outset never occurred to him until some trivial detail suddenly shaped [itself] as a riddle and pointed to the obvious thing he had overlooked. H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes (20:247) Any text is susceptible of multiple interpretations. This, moreover, holds true for every understanding of ‘text’ which is not Humpty-Dumptyish. It does not require the stipulation that the word preserve its etymological investment from the Latin textus and with it, the Barthesian distinction between a work and a text.1 Nor, for that matter, does it depend on ‘the death of the author’ and the repudiation of every manner of intentionality which goes with it, including that whose locus of authority is the text itself (at least in the sense belonging to what once qualified as New Criticism). Irrespective of all such internecine critico-ideological considerations, texts are inherently polysemic, first of all because language is inherently ambiguous – even (rather than especially) if the possible referent of ‘language’ be confined to a strictly verbal medium so as to exclude any analogical extension into the realm, say, of painting or music (whose ‘languages’ in any event require verbal translation for those who are not themselves painters or composers), and even, too, if the language in question is one whose utterances would be governed by the appropriate version of the principle, ‘Si ce n’est pas clair, ce n’est pas français’ (‘If it’s not clear, it’s not French’). The ambiguity accruing to any text by reason of the nature of language itself may, of course, pass unnoticed so long as that text be exempt from ‘literary’ scrutiny. But the moment it is treated as a literary text – i.e., read with anything like the kind of attention which New Criticism inculcated – its potential ambiguity almost inevitably becomes actualized. This also means that any printed (or printable) text is open to ‘literary’ examination regardless of whether its author had any such intention (or aspiration). Implicit in that proposition is another source of ambiguity, distinguishable if not wholly separate from the seven (or seventy) ‘verbal’ types which New Criticism concerned itself with.2 That other source resides in

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GENERIC CONFIGURATIONS OF A STORY OF THE DAYS TO COME 29 the nature of reading as an act of generic construction. Such an act, I contend, involves precisely the same kind of thought-process(es) that writing regularly does.3 Whether or not a reader – in effect, if not consciously – re-creates the actual writerly process, he or she is likely to be thinking of genre in the way that writers normally do: in terms of cognate writings, or literary affinities, rather than of classificatory categories (be they ‘historical’ or ‘logical,’ according to Tzvetan Todorov’s division). This is also to say that the Linnean approach to genre (to give it an analogical name that not only epitomizes it, but locates it in the chronological vicinity of the moment when commentators on Aristotle had completed their work of rigidifying the Poetics as its basis) is largely peculiar to traditional genre criticism. Its assumptions about what ‘genre’ signifies therefore run counter to the default mode which readers (like writers) operate on: whereby genre considerations come into play as a matter of intertextuality. On this last understanding, any given work, so far from normally being assignable to its ‘proper’ category, may be generically conceived in any number of possible ways. Moreover, that theoretical conception of genre identifies one of the chief factors making for differences in interpretation. Thought of as covering what is involved in perceiving intertextual relations, ‘genre’ specifies an aspect of reading that takes precedence over language itself in dictating which textual details come into focus – be they purely verbal or imagistic or whatever. Every such generic construction therefore brings with it its own understanding. This is true irrespective of the pertinent question of intentionality (i.e., of the writer’s conversance with the intertext, so to speak); in fact, even those generic constructions on the part of a reader which should count as the equipollent of a hostile takeover may prove illuminating. H. G. Wells’s A Story of the Days to Come (1899) can be taken as a fair test case for this theory of genre. While it lends itself to more than one generic configuration, the possibilities which it immediately invites qualify it as atypical, perhaps, only in their relatively small degree of separation, not in point of their number – and this not only in contrast, say, to Evgeny Zamyatin’s We (which owes its conception in significant part to Days to Come).4 The generic constructions that I shall confine myself to for the purpose of demonstrating and illustrating their directive, or interpretatively definitional, tendency are the three that can be regarded as having authorial sanction inasmuch as they arise from connections that Wells is responsible for making with other works of fiction, including his own – largely correlative to this particular story’s publication venues: viz., with William Morris’s News from Nowhere, with Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (vis-à-vis When the Sleeper Wakes), and with Days to Come’s companion as a ‘tale of space and time,’ A Story of the Stone Age. Each of these three

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generic possibilities carries with it its own hermeneutic emphasis and bias by reason of its privileging certain fictive details at the expense of others. So too, each of the three tends to screen out certain aspects of Days to Come which some other generic inflection would make prominent, thereby also tending to construct not only what the story is about but what it is, period. I. Days to Come in Generic Relation to News From Nowhere One of these three configurations emerges in the text of Days to Come printed in the pages of the Pall Mall Magazine for 1899 – i.e., in the text which does not immediately associate itself with any other by Wells.5 Its opening sentence begins to establish a generic context by instantly bringing to mind another ‘excellent Mr. Morris’ who ‘lived in the days of Queen Victoria the Good’ (SDC 1:167).6 To be sure, what we are next told about the fictive Mr. Morris and his avatar, Mwres, does not properly fit the man to whom Wells had recently paid tribute in an obituary-cumreview of The Well at the World’s End (1896).7 William Morris, after all, was in no usual sense of the words ‘heedless and impatient of the Future’ (SDC 1:169–70); nor could he be said to have ‘nothing imaginative’ about him (1:168). Yet it is here, and not at the very outset, that Days to Come ironically misdirects us in so far as it convinces us to give up any thought of the Morris from Hammersmith. Even so, it countenances such a persuasion only for a moment. Once we learn, as we presently do, that Mwres is ‘one of the officials under the Wind Vane and Waterfall Trust’ (1:172), the significance of the disparity between him and his real-life namesake becomes clear. Its purpose, like that of the entire introductory disquisition on a character quite marginal to the events of the ensuing story, is orientational: it specifies, rather than obliterates, the connection with William Morris. The reference, that is, has nothing to do with persons, actual or fictive, or even with Morris-the-writer generally. Instead, Wells points precisely to Morris as the author of News From Nowhere (1890/91),8 with its vision of a return to an idealized Fourteenth Century,9 a vision which latterly transpires through a leisurely voyage up a resuscitated Thames. By its recollection of Morris, Days to Come appears as a type of antiutopian fiction. That is to say, it defines itself against – which also entails in relation to – Nowhere, particularly as Days to Come derives its own antiutopian possibility from the ‘pastoral’ world that Morris in Nowhere envisions as ideal. This ideal Days to Come more or less explicitly evokes in Denton and Elizabeth’s ‘dream’ of escape from the mechanized ways of the London of the Twenty-Second Century; it even locates their utopian longing for a better life in the selfsame ‘valley of the Thames’ (SDC 2:214)

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GENERIC CONFIGURATIONS OF A STORY OF THE DAYS TO COME 31 that Nowhere occupies. But as their dream in the event turns into a nightmare, so the Nowhere re-presented in the chapter called ‘The Vacant Country’ proves to be very far from an Earthly Paradise. In this regard, Days to Come extends the critique of Morris inherent in The Time Machine. The ‘ruinous’ world of the Eloi, as mediated through the hypotheses of the Time Traveller, at first paradoxically recalls Nowhere’s ‘Epoch of Rest.’ Nor is it by accident that the word epitomizing his early impressions of 802,701 occurs to the Time Traveller as he stands in ‘the warm glow of the setting sun’ after having partaken, Guest-like, of a communal banquet in ‘the great hall’ (TTM 6:45–46); for the ‘Communism’ that he speaks of (TTM 6:47) is certainly of Morris’s pastoral-utopian variety. This moment of affectionate parody, however, lasts only as long as the Time Traveller perceives the Eloi as living ‘in ease and delight’ (TTM 10:105) – that is, until he descends to the ‘underworld’ of the Morlocks. There he discovers the technological infrastructure which had hitherto been for him – and remains for the reader of Morris – a matter of problematic inference. It is true that the Time Traveller observes nothing which would contradict a premise of Nowhere: that ‘this is not an age of inventions. The last epoch did that for us, and we are now content to use such of its inventions as we find handy’ (NFN 25:357). But that congruence merely reinforces the criticism that The Time Machine, primarily by way of its topographical details, levels at Nowhere. The Time Traveller, after catching sight of the machinery underlying the ‘upper-world’ and coming face to face with the Morlocks, does not simply return with a conviction applicable solely within the confines of his tale: that his previous idea of an aesthete Utopia was superficial and illusory. Having penetrated the (up till then sunlit) surface of 802,701 and glimpsed beneath it the dark reality that (quite literally) undermines it, he also casts light on the reasons for pronouncing the very idea of such a utopia to be a delusion. This is the point that Denton expatiates on in communicating to Elizabeth his sad conclusion that they had deceived themselves when they imagined that ‘the simple old-fashioned way of living on the countryside’ (3:233) would be idyllic. ‘To each generation,’ he says, ‘the life of its time…. In the city – that is the life to which we were born…. Coming here was a dream, and this – is the awakening’ (2:229–30; ellipses in original). His ‘this’ refers, of course, to the natural elements, the wild dogs, and the perpetual struggle for existence against them and their like. The ‘awakening,’ however, has to do with more than that reality about survival in a hostile natural environment. It includes as well the recognition that history has cooperated with biology to destroy Denton and Elizabeth’s romantic idyll, that cultural conditioning has unfitted these refugees from the technological world for the hardships and dangers of (Darwinian)

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Nature – or, in short, that their pastoral utopian vision is an anachronism. In its demonstration of that point, Days to Come analytically refigures The Time Machine. The Morlocks against which the Time Traveller chivalrically tries to defend Weena reappear as the dogs that Denton battles for his life and Elizabeth’s, but with this difference: that the dogs have no proximate association with machinery.10 In this way, Days to Come isolates the biological threat which they incarnate from the other threat to the pastoral utopia, that posed by the ineluctable fact of an acquired dependence on technology. These two factors do not remain entirely separate, however. The anti-utopian possibility adumbrated in ‘The Vacant Country’s’ denial of Denton and Elizabeth’s romantic dream follows them back to London, where it manifests itself again – and perhaps more unmistakably than hitherto – in the compulsion toward violence and consequent brutalization of the ‘Underworld.’ This, in turn, marks the denizens of those lower depths – in particular, the man suggestively named Whitey – as what the Time Traveller hypothesizes such laborers to be: the ancestors of the (albino) Morlocks. Like The Time Machine, Days to Come thus equates differences in social class with evolutionary disparities and thereby confounds sociology with biology. On the other hand, it reverses their priority in the degradational scheme that Days to Come’s connection with The Time Machine brings into prominence. The devolutionary pattern informing the Time Traveller’s vision of the future entails the triumph of Darwinian ‘necessity’ over civilized order, the return of Darwinian Law as the sole arbiter of the (backward) course of life on Earth.11 The focus accordingly falls on the Morlocks as the agents for that reascendance, and especially on the brutality which from this perspective they owe to their (d)evolutionary status as a distinct species, not to their hypothetical Lamarckian (or more precisely, Gulickian) origin in the working classes.12 By contrast, the ‘degradation’ of Denton and Elizabeth (SDC 4:265) is primarily a matter of sociology; and only when they reach the lowest level of a social scale that is graphically hierarchical does the specter of Darwinian struggle obtrude itself. Furthermore, the ‘under-world’ approached by way of their social decline (and most notably Denton’s) is not The Time Machine’s but its logical antecedent: a brutalizing and brutalized, rather than a thoroughly brutal, place. This brutalization does not come across as the natural and inevitable concomitant of exactly the kind of instinct that the lovers had previously encountered in the wild dogs. Instead, it appears as a social effect induced by an oppressive class system, whose rigors have provoked an atavistic imitation of nature. None the less, it has its originary locus in the natural world, and this makes Days to Come somewhat problematic as a literary

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GENERIC CONFIGURATIONS OF A STORY OF THE DAYS TO COME 33 model for subsequent anti-utopian fiction. In so far as it apparently sets up a countryside totally apart from and alternative to the City and what that technopolis represents, it clearly establishes the topological convention which most twentieth-century anti-utopias adopt; but as that alternative proves specious, it seems to anticipate only the likes of Aldous Huxley and the dilemma of Brave New World vs. the Reservation.13 Even so, it is not difficult to imagine how Zamyatin, under the influence of Dostoevsky and by a species of poetic misprision, might have arrived at the central antithesis in We from his reading of Days to Come. After all, Denton and Elizabeth do invest their utopian hope in ‘the vacant country’; and while that site of instinct and irrationality by no means shares the positive valence of the world beyond the Green Wall, the hope first associated with it continues to attach itself to their ‘love story’ (SDC 3:233).14 By the same token, Days to Come preserves in its romance element that discernible vestige of Utopian desire characteristic of all anti-utopian fiction properly so called. In this case, however, that desire’s antagonist is not the Entropic Reason of the One, or United, State, with its mania for regularity. Instead, it is instinct energy of the sort figured by Zamyatin as a force potentially subversive of such a state, but by Wells as the symptom and index of something radically wrong with the social arrangements that encourage it and also as the motivating factor behind the revolutionarilysterile internecine conflict endemic to ‘the underways.’ To be sure, the happy ending ensuant from Bindon’s opportunely sudden bequest appears to neutralize Denton and Elizabeth’s Utopian desire as the opponent, first, of brutalizing primeval impulse and thence of the status quo that invites such Darwinian atavisms. The deus ex machina operation that prevents their being separated does, after all, restore them to their former place in the social hierarchy. Yet the idea of their social reintegration remains exactly that: a bare idea, and one at odds with what the closing tableau implicitly proposes. That final scene discovers Denton and Elizabeth, just ‘returned … from the labour servitude to which they had fallen’ (5:319), on ‘a balcony’ at ‘the very verge of the city’ (5:320). The image of their situation instantly suggests their marginality relative to the existing social order, and this fits in with the point of the spatiotemporal survey that follows. Looking at the world from the vantage of his balcony, Denton sees the ‘latter days,’ his present moment, as all-toocontinuous with the prehistoric past. But the glance which thus compresses human history into a seemingly unaltered and unaltering temporal landscape also has the opposite effect: like running a film at incredibly high speed (or instantaneously traversing whole geological epochs in a time machine), it induces a sense of changeableness, a sense of how far humankind has come from the days of ‘darkness and ignorance’ … and of

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how far it yet has to go before it fully outdistances their shadow. That is the prospect in which Days to Come ultimately locates Utopian desire; that is the Utopian horizon which Denton indicates when he says, ‘we are in the making’ (5:323). It is significant that Denton’s deliverance to that prospect requires the demise of a Bindon who has become more than a merely titular representative of the status quo. Possessed by a Huysmanite ‘imagination’ which inclines him toward sensuous self-indulgence,15 this personage exhibits in his own effete fashion ‘passions’ cognate to those which make for the ‘nightmare’ of the ‘underways’ (5:320). By a fictive given consequent upon his disease, he also serves to identify the Utopian horizon inherent in Days to Come’s romance with Science. This he does not only because the bequest of his that rescues the lovers from their ‘degradation’ takes effect in the nick of time thanks to ‘the Euthanasia,’ but also because in extending his hostility for Elizabeth to a certain Medical Man, Bindon establishes himself as the common obstacle to their apparently diverse aspirations. He thus functions to connect the ‘love story’ with the Medical Man’s forecast of a time when he and his colleagues will ‘know enough … to take over the management’ so that ‘men will live in a different way’ (5:312–13) – a forecast totally consonant both with Denton’s ‘spacious vision’ (5:322) and with Wells’s own ‘dream of an informal, unselfish, unauthorised body of workers, a real and conscious apparatus of education and moral suggestion, held together by a common faith and a common sentiment, and shaping the acts and minds and destinies of men.’16 Denton’s vision, like that of Morris’s Guest, proposes itself as an awakening from history-as-nightmare. Yet the desire that Denton educes from that shared – and fictively rendered – sense of history is not at all the one that Nowhere expresses: for ‘a time of rest’ (32:401) which must mean an end to the restlessness that is history,17 for a change which will end historical change. In this regard, the detail about Denton’s point of vantage being ‘wide open to the sun and wind’ is telling, for it is at once reminiscent of Nowhere’s pastoral stasis and critical of the impulse toward closure which generates it. This, however, is also to say that the ‘spacious vision’ which Days to Come at last arrives at dialectically proceeds from Nowhere and that whatever precision of meaning attaches to ‘we are in the making’ does so largely by way of Nowhere. II. Days to Come in Generic Relation to When the Sleeper Wakes and Looking Backward Reading Days to Come as it itself directs at its outset – i.e., as a response to William Morris, and in particular to Morris as the author of News from

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GENERIC CONFIGURATIONS OF A STORY OF THE DAYS TO COME 35 Nowhere – focuses, above all, its literally two-world structure. ‘The vacant country’ and ‘the ways of the city’ thus attain an even greater prominence than they may enjoy as featured in successive chapter-titles: they serve to specify the topoi central to the fiction’s governing conception as an antiutopia.18 By the same token – and, again, from its self-defined connection with Morris – Days to Come appears as precisely the prototype, if not the model, for anti-utopian fiction that Zamyatin with We recognized it as being. All of this, however, largely holds true only if Wells’s fiction – and its topology, in particular – be regarded as emanating from Nowhere, so to speak. The textual indicators of this are certainly clear enough to point to Days to Come as being a re-vision, or rewrite, of Morris; but even so, their import(ance) is still logically dependent on that generic connection, otherwise traceable to the ‘isolation’ of the original serial in the pages of the Pall Mall Magazine (PMM). At the same time, that kind of venue materially connects Days to Come with When the Sleeper Wakes, whose last installment in The Graphic appeared in the month before Days to Come’s first.19 And this in turn makes for a somewhat different generic construction of the latter – indeed, for more than one. That Days to Come ‘revises’ Sleeper hardly needs rigorous and lengthy demonstration. In their serialized versions the two were in fact already chronotopically identical in all but one minor respect: that Days to Come’s chapter-titles located its megalopolis at the close of the twenty-first century rather than early in the first decade of the twenty-second. That chronological given, however, is at odds with the datum about Denton’s exploring ‘the London of the twenty-second century’ (1:188; PMM 195).20 Hence by removing the parenthetical date-headings in the Tales of Space and Time reprint, Wells was eliminating a contradiction in the PMM Days to Come as much as a small chronological disparity with Sleeper. Yet even so, the deletion of PMM’s chapter-title dates can be viewed as having the same effect as an internal discrepancy which he left unaltered: that the population of London, initially put at ‘thirty million souls’ (SDC 1:188), is later reported to be ‘three-and-thirty million’ (SDC 3:236) – i.e., is revised to tally exactly with Sleeper’s figure (see Sleeper 14:168, for example). Regardless of whether it owes its persistence to oversight, this statistical self-contradiction in Days to Come surely enacts a rapprochement with Sleeper. But beyond that, it stands as a vestige of a deliberation on Wells’s part to make the one totally consonant in suchlike details with the other, and thus signals his awareness of Days to Come as a re-vision of Sleeper. The book-cover billing of one of the two editions of Sleeper available by the end of the year which saw its serialization – ‘A Story of the Years to Come’ – therefore does not evince Wells’s belated consciousness of its connection

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with Days to Come. It may, however, express an awareness that he became fully conscious of only in retrospect: that in depicting the chronotope that it shares with Days to Come, Sleeper deals in years, not in days, so to speak.21 This, of course, is to say that Sleeper’s (other) differences with Days to Come fundamentally derive from a ‘temporal’ perspective which is ‘cosmic’ rather than ‘human.’ As embodied for the most part in Graham and Denton, respectively, these two spatio-temporal standpoints do not constitute an either–or opposition. Indeed, the distinction that they make for between Sleeper and Days to Come is a matter of emphasis: Sleeper’s predominantly ‘aerial’ view of the twenty-second century finds its counterpart both in the omniscient explanatory disquisitions at the outset of Days to Come’s second and third chapters and in Denton’s final cosmic prospect of the future; and his otherwise individualistically (and representatively) human experience of life (confirmed by Elizabeth’s) finds something of a correspondent in Graham’s harrowing tour of the ‘underworld’ and his consequent engagement in the struggle to liberate the Labour Company’s slaves. So, too, this coexistence of the ‘cosmic’ with the ‘human’ point of view accords with a conclusion which Wells would soon articulate discursively in ‘The Scepticism of the Instrument’ (1903/04) and which already informed The Time Machine as a synthesis of notions that he had first advanced separately in ‘The Universe Rigid’ and ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique’: that despite their constituting the basis for determinism vs. free will, the standpoints precisely equivalent to those that Olaf Stapledon would later apportion to his Star Maker’s ‘temporal’ and ‘eternal’ ‘aspects’ can more instructively be regarded as complementary than as mutually exclusive.22 By the same token, this particular intertextual (and hence generic) construction, focusing temporal perspective as it does, recognizes the cosmic and the human standpoints as co-equals. This refusal to privilege either one thus tends toward denying Sleeper the priority that it otherwise has over Days to Come with regard to their publication dates. But while their complementarity therefore carries no directive as to the order in which the two fictions are to be read, at least one passage in Days to Come does assume that the reader is already conversant with Sleeper. The passage in question concerns the ‘development of those means of locomotion which revolutionised human life.’ In the three paragraphs that Days to Come devotes to a historical overview of this topic (2:200–01; PMM 311), the name Warming appears twice in conjunction with Eadham. Their association confers on Warming the same status that Eadham has. But whereas the one was in reality the inventor of ‘Eadhamite’ (and also what Wells here reports him to be: its patent-holder), the man whom Days to Come credits with ‘the possibility of using it … as a road substance’ and

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GENERIC CONFIGURATIONS OF A STORY OF THE DAYS TO COME 37 thence ‘organis[ing] the enormous network of public ways that speedily covered the world’ is purely fictitious. Furthermore, this same Warming is an import from Sleeper, where he is said to be, along with the equally fictitious Isbister (Sleeper 11:124–25; see also 14:172), the person ultimately responsible for Graham’s enormous wealth (for the reason that Days to Come rehearses). This dependence of Days to Come on certain fictifacts available only from Sleeper, though seemingly limited, may serve for restoring Sleeper’s priority, and not as a mere matter of chronological fact,23 but as a bibliographical datum with significant generic consequences. (Re-)establishing Sleeper as Days to Come’s precursor, that is, points toward a generic construction different from that emanating from their hitherto outlined connection (with or without reference to The Time Machine). What now comes into play is Sleeper’s own (generic) self-definition vis-à-vis Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888). That, too, puts the focus on Days to Come’s urban vision; and if it does not do so more exclusively than would be the case were Bellamy left out of the comparison, Sleeper’s re-vision of his utopia conveys a certain value-judgment about ‘the twenty-second century’ – which is also a generic inflection – that would otherwise not be at all apparent. Wells names Bellamy twice in When the Sleeper Wakes. On the first occasion he figures metonymically for Julian West, with whom Graham is identified (to the express exclusion of Rip Van Winkle – Sleeper 2:17). Nor is the duration of his sleep the only point of resemblance between Looking Backward’s focal character and Sleeper’s. The two insomniacs are also exactly the same age (i.e., 30) and come from about the same (middle-class) social stratum. These and less readily specifiable similarities between Wells’s opening chapters and Bellamy’s are quite sufficient to leave no doubt that Wells conceived of Sleeper with Looking Backward in mind. The direction of Wells’s thinking about Bellamy – and with it, the American utopist’s generic influence on Sleeper and thence on Days to Come – is determinable from Wells’s second express reference to him. This enters at the moment when Graham is witnessing close up, but with a certain detachment, the ‘conflicts’ that he had hitherto either been too caught up in to observe with any objectivity or had looked down upon (as he will again, especially in the chapter called ‘The Crow’s Nest’) from Julian West’s vantage of Dr. Leete’s balcony, as it were. The vastness of street and house he was prepared for, the multitudes of people. But conflicts in the city ways! And the systematised sensuality of a class of rich men! He thought of Bellamy, the hero of whose Socialistic Utopia had so oddly anticipated this actual experience. But here was no Utopia,

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VISIONS AND RE-VISIONS no Socialistic state…. [T]he ancient antithesis of luxury, waste and sensuality on the one hand and abject poverty on the other, still prevailed. (Sleeper 7:68–69)

This passage epitomizes Sleeper’s critique of Bellamy. But in summing up Wells’s conclusions, it also gives that critique a novel generic impetus. Though he cannot take credit for the neologism, Wells is clearly conceiving of Sleeper’s futuristic vision in its precise opposition to Looking Backward’s as being dystopian. Behind that evaluative judgment lies more than a mere difference of opinion. Sleeper, that is, does not simply contradict Looking Backward’s optimism; in its dialogue with the latter concerning the shape of things to come, it implicitly gives the grounds for deeming Bellamy mistaken or misguided. The most crucial of these has to do with the future of capitalist trusts. From the vantage of the year 2000, Dr. Leete – here, as always, Bellamy’s mouthpiece – identifies them, rightly, as the chief symptom of an economic trend dating from the time that Julian West represents (i.e., the late nineteenth century). While acknowledging the ‘régime of the great consolidations of capital’ to have been ‘[o]ppressive and intolerable,’ Leete contends that there could be no going back to ‘the former order of things’ (i.e., to the era of multitudinous small capitalists): that ‘would have involved returning to the days of stage-coaches’ (an analogy invocative of Looking Backward’s memorable epic simile [1:97–99] of class struggle in terms of a stage coach). Furthermore, ‘even … [the trustcapitalism regime’s] victims … were forced to admit the prodigious increase of efficiency which had been imparted to the national industries, the vast economies effected by concentration of management and unity of organization,’ in consequence of which ‘the wealth of the world had increased at a rate before undreamed of.’ Capital, in short, ‘had been proved efficient in proportion to its consolidation,’ though ‘this vast increase had gone chiefly to make the rich richer, increasing the gap between them and the poor’ (Looking Backward 5:126). Neither Sleeper nor Days to Come expressly disputes Dr. Leete’s argument up to this point. Indeed, the Wind and Waterfall Trust and the Food Trust not only owe their conception as much to Bellamy as to the historical actuality – less nascent at the turn of the century than in the 1880s – of ‘horizontal’ (and ‘vertical’) monopolies; as they carry over from Sleeper into Days to Come, whatever prominence they have there derives from an awareness of Sleeper, not just in itself, but as a response, in that respect especially, to Looking Backward. Wells, however, parts company with Bellamy in projecting the futuristic consequences of such a monopolistic development.

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GENERIC CONFIGURATIONS OF A STORY OF THE DAYS TO COME 39 He does so on the basis that Looking Backward itself provides. Bellamy foresees ‘[t]he nation … organized as the one great business corporation in which all other corporations were absorbed…. The epoch of trusts had ended in the Great Trust’ (5:127). This holds ‘the answer’ to ‘the Sphinx’s riddle of the nineteenth century,’ ‘the labor question’ – and, beyond that, to the entire problem of socio-economic inequality.24 As Leete explains, ‘The solution came as the result of a process of industrial evolution which could not have terminated otherwise. All that society had to do was to recognize and coöperate with that evolution, when its tendency had become unmistakable’ (5:122; my emphasis). Despite the Darwinistic terminology, however, getting from (mega)trusts (presumably of the sort that Sleeper and Days to Come envision) to ‘the Great Trust’ is only ‘natural’ from the standpoint of Bellamy’s socialist ethic. Otherwise it requires massorganized political effort – viz., a ‘Nationalist Party’ (one, that is, which will nationalize the trusts and reform them to serve the commonweal). The clause that I have set off in italics marks the crucial point of contention between Bellamy and Wells. More than a century beyond Bellamy’s date for the disappearance of private capital, trusts with monopolistic control – over water and electrical power, for example – not only (according to Wells’s vision) persist; they have ‘made more human misery during the twentieth century … than had war, pestilence and famine, in the darkest hours of earlier history’ (Sleeper 12:172). Nor is this merely a flat contradiction of Bellamy’s ‘socialist’ optimism; it follows immediately from the observation that ‘[a]ny organisation that became big enough to influence the [election] polls became complex enough to be undermined, broken up, or bought outright by capable rich men’ (Sleeper 12:171–72). Wells, then, is projecting a political reality that – ironically enough – Bellamy himself already had reason to acknowledge from his experiences consequent on his belated decision to leave his speculative ivory tower and engage in party politics for the sake of his particular utopian vision of a New Heaven and Earth.25 The Trusts of Wells’s twenty-second century may now of course be seen as presciently corresponding to the realities of megacorporate conglomeration in the late twentieth century (and beyond) much more than to the Victorian conception of private capitalism. Indeed, that is the understanding which Sleeper encourages and imparts to Days to Come – especially by reason of its ‘White Council’ of oligarchs. Yet this feature of Wells’s dystopian vision, far from being impertinent to a critique of Bellamy and thereby discouraging that very idea, engages Looking Backward’s recognition that its Great Trust requires the management of ‘functionaries at Washington’ (Looking Backward 17:212) and an ‘inspectorate’ under the President’s command (17:218). Bellamy is not troubled by the implications

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here; but Wells is, and not just because, on top of basic ideological differences of class-consciousness between Americans and Europeans, he brings to Bellamy his own firsthand awareness of class distinctions. Sleeper’s social divisions and class struggle, however, are only indirectly accountable to Wells’s real-life experience, which no doubt facilitated his perceiving in Bellamy’s utopia the basis for such divisiveness. Just as the Labour Company serfs in their blue uniforms (clearly the precursors of Zamyatin’s ‘unif’-ed ‘numbers’) come from Looking Backward’s ‘Industrial Army’ (in connection with the foreseen failure of Bellamy’s ‘Nationalist Party’), so the elite, particularly as represented by Ostrog and the twelvemember White Council that he overthrows, have their source in Bellamy’s techno-bureaucrats. In other words, Wells perceives in Bellamy’s vision of social equality the makings of what Milovan Djilas sixty-odd years later would term The New Class.26 This is also to say that Wells, despite his having himself already ‘dream[ed] of an … unselfish, unauthorised body of workers … shaping the minds and acts and destinies of men,’27 both in Sleeper and, by extension, in Days to Come,28 holds up as a dystopian possibility something very like the kind of technocracy which he is often presented as the patron saint of (as presaged, too, in the Medical Man’s scheme for ‘tak[ing] over the management’ in Days to Come). The perception that Bellamy’s New Society not only provides for the continuance of class divisions but may, in conjunction with the megatrusts, aggravate them, establishes the logical basis for Wells’s challenge of Looking Backward’s faith in evolution as opposed to revolution. It is true that the latter, as it initially figures in Sleeper, rigorously fits the dictum of ‘Plus ça change …’ Indeed, Ostrog’s proves to be a ‘palace revolution’ in the strictest sense. The only change he intends is that of usurping the White Council and installing himself as the sole dictator over what is, by a (late) nineteenth-century understanding of the term, a police state. But while Sleeper distinctly invites its readers to suppose over the stretch of several chapters that its author believes that the revolutionary forces which Graham’s awakening has set in motion can, so to speak, be confined to the palace, Wells eventually makes it apparent that he is under no such delusion. By the same token, the momentary misapprehension about this is not a case of irony for its own sake. In entertaining the prospect that Ostrog, the self-styled Overman (Sleeper 19:237–39),29 will simply be a one-man White Council, Sleeper underscores the general point of its relationship to Looking Backward – i.e., of its having educed from Bellamy’s utopia a dystopian vision. This, moreover, meets with reinforcement rather than contradiction in the genuinely utopian possibility vouchsafed to the dying Graham, whose Christlike self-sacrifice has entailed not only the personal defeat of Ostrog,30 but the promise of a truly revolutionary

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GENERIC CONFIGURATIONS OF A STORY OF THE DAYS TO COME 41 overturning of the existing social order by the erstwhile ‘serfs’ of the Labour Company. Virtually this entire critique of Bellamy is a quod erat demonstrandum as it concerns Days to Come. Thanks mostly to that story’s ‘human’ point of view, only Sleeper’s dystopian conclusions figure in it, with barely a trace of how Wells had arrived at them. But the connection to Sleeper none the less brings with it Sleeper’s (re)positioning of Morris. The principles informing Nowhere’s utopian vision, now affined with W. H. Hudson’s in A Crystal Age (1887 – see Sleeper 12:169), Sleeper identifies as Victorian, and hence backward-looking. The person so characterizing them, however, is in this instance not Wells but Ostrog. Furthermore, in contemning ‘human equality’ and ‘a socialistic order’ as the ‘worn-out dreams of the nineteenth century,’ Ostrog also makes Graham their embodiment, telling him that he, Graham, is ‘an anachronism,’ ‘a man out of the past’ (22:282–83). This has the effect of clarifying his and Graham’s mutual antagonism; but inasmuch as Sleeper unreservedly sides with Graham, it also makes for a transvaluation, or re-vision, of the critique of Morris crucial to the first-offered (generic) understanding of Days to Come (as detailed in §I above). The Morris whose vision implicitly appears as being impracticably anachronistic so long as Days to Come is read as anti-utopian fiction becomes instead the proponent of ideals that Days to Come endorses when it is viewed as dystopian by reason of its sharing the prospect which Sleeper derives from its own objections to Bellamy.31 There is at least one other meaningful feature of Days to Come that would likely pass unobserved without Sleeper as a point of comparison – again in the latter’s relation to Looking Backward. Bellamy has Julian West and Edith Leete fall in love with one another, and this by the prearrangement of Edith’s inclination to attach herself to the very man who had been her great-grandmother’s fiancé in 1887. The symbolic incest which this involves Sleeper reproduces in a different way: by making Ostrog’s niece (Helen) the collaborator (albeit somewhat passively) in Graham’s revolutionary enterprise of overthrowing Ostrog. But the promise of Graham’s romantic interest in Helen – distinct enough even without reference to Looking Backward – is not just an unrealized possibility, but one whose refusal in favor of revolutionary commitment is all the more poignant for its having been so unmistakably held out (see, especially, Sleeper 23:300– 01). Wells, in arranging all of this, is perhaps criticizing Bellamy’s design of resorting to romance merely as a way of emotionally engaging his readers in what would otherwise be a rather emotionally unengaging socioeconomic discourse of the sort all too common in utopian literature. But what Wells is certainly up to is not necessarily incompatible with Bellamy’s strategy. In fact, Sleeper in repudiating the romance replaces it with the

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adventure story. Furthermore, Wells immediately returns to the romance in Days to Come. Both that and Sleeper thus exhibit the determination which Wells repeatedly expressed in his literary criticism for the Saturday Review in the mid-’90s and which, in his own literary practice, first becomes apparent in The Time Machine as in itself at once an adventure story and a romance: to infuse a popular genre with intellectual, or cognitive, content – with what he called, in an 1894 letter to Grant Allen, a ‘philosophical element.’32 With regard to the exact meaning of ‘infusion’ here, Sleeper and Days to Come are mutually illuminating. When looked at together, it becomes apparent that each is as much a ‘framed narrative’ as is The Time Machine. The same comparison in turn revises the understanding of that term. Neither Sleeper nor Days to Come counts as ‘a tale told in quotation marks’; and by the same token, neither has the sort of ‘frame’ that is instantly evident from ‘mechanical’ inspection. In Sleeper, however, the ‘philosophical element’ mostly comes in between the opening and closing episodes narrating Graham’s successful attempts to escape the clutches of the White Council and Ostrog, respectively; and Days to Come similarly encloses its cognitive content within the story of Denton and Elizabeth as a romantic comedy.33 Both, moreover, thereby raise the generic expectations which their cognitive content proceeds to violate. In other words, they break their (generic) frame (of reference) in a way which at least foresees and complements what Wells would consciously set out to do in his later fiction, and particularly in those works dating from around the time (the 1930s) that he was announcing the breaking of ‘the frame of the present’ to be his literary program.34 III. A Story of the Days to Come and A Story of the Stone Age Wells, then, does not resort to the adventure story merely to personalize a revolutionary class-conflict as ‘a world struggle between Ostrog and [Graham]’ (Sleeper 23:304), nor to the love story just to convey the dystopian import which Days to Come inherits from Sleeper. By employing those popular generic vehicles as he does, he is also subverting them, and mostly along the lines that The Time Machine not only had already laid out but had pointed to by its very title.35 This is also to say that the framebreaking expressive of – indeed, constituting – Wells’s characteristic species of iconoclasm centrally entails the irruption of another time, or other times, into the (fictifactual) present. The Time Machine offers itself as a relatively simple, but instructive example. The Time Traveller brings home to the (Victorian) present a vision which, while ostensibly futuristic, has a temporal ambivalence about it for

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GENERIC CONFIGURATIONS OF A STORY OF THE DAYS TO COME 43 which ‘802,701’ is largely the paradigm. This as a date implies a temporal continuity between the present and the (distant) future. So, too, the component best indicative of such continuity – ‘2,701’ – has a precision which fits in with the entire date as designating the most detailed and extensive of The Time Machine’s visionary moments.36 That moment, however, is rather ambiguously futuristic, and not just by virtue of the Time Traveller’s succession of hypotheses about it – all of them assuming that the future emanates from the present – but also in a way that ‘802,701’ indicates when viewed as a numerical series. As such, the date inscribes the Victorian expectation of progress, or what Wells termed ‘Excelsior biology,’37 only in the abstract, when read from right to left; but as a Westerner would normally read (and sound) it, the number is regressive, offering itself as a countdown to the zero hour, the posthistoric return to original nothingness, which the Time Traveller glimpses 30,000,000 years hence. By the same token, ‘802,701’ epitomizes a future which is devolutionary in a way consistent with Wells’s Darwinian conviction that change is the fundamental rule or principle of the universe.38 Something similar can be said of Days to Come. Yet that is hardly evident with reference to The Time Machine alone. Comparing the two is not likely to reveal much more than what the name Whitey may be taken as signifying: viz., that Days to Come revises, in Darwinistic socio-economic terms, the essentially Darwinian – the biology-based – ‘underworld’ of the Morlocks. The full import of this, then – and with it the further and profound resemblances between the two fictions – greatly depends on Wells’s generic recontextualizing of Days to Come as one of his ‘tales of space and time.’ In the volume of his stories so called, Wells has A Story of the Stone Age precede A Story of the Days to Come. This, moreover, is a matter of conscious arrangement, as is clear from certain revisions (in the usual sense of the word) that he made. A page or two from the end, when Denton is surveying the countryside from the vantage of a balcony, the Tales of Space and Time text refers to ‘the distant hills’ as having ‘once … been the squatting-place of the children of Uya’ (SDC 5:321). This addition expressly connects the twenty-second century to the Age of Flint as Wells had dramatized that in terms of Ugh-lomi’s vanquishing of Uya and his tribe 50,000 years ago.39 So, too, ‘Uya’ is an interpolation that is virtually unintelligible except from a familiarity with Stone Age. It thus cooperates with Wells’s only other substantial change to the body of his PMM story: his insertion of a sentence wherein ‘bears and lions’ figure as instances of ‘enemies’ to be ‘overcome’40 – those being the two species of animal that Ugh-lomi ingeniously defeats in Stone Age. The revisionary interpolation of ‘Uya’ and ‘bears and lions’ spells out a relationship with Stone Age already inherent in the PMM Days to Come. But

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that is also to say that Tales of Space and Time consciously marks the latter as Stone Age’s (chrono)logical sequel as well as its bibliographical successor – an interconnection unique (in kind) to these two Wellsian ‘tales of space and time.’ That context in particular, then, deliberately entrains a generic construction whereby those elements hitherto recognized (via Morris and Bellamy) as anti- or dys-topian now appear, if at all, as having nothing to do with utopia, strictly speaking. Stone Age instead calls attention to the ‘Underworld’ and ‘the vacant country,’ not as surrogational sites for representing dystopian socio-economic conflict or an anti-utopian tension in civilization as the source of discontent, but principally as somewhat interchangeable loci of a primeval Darwinian struggle as such. The anonymous reviewer of Tales of Space and Time for The Spectator perceptively noticed this. Taking Stone Age and Days to Come to be ‘the pith of the book,’ he went on to observe that the two ‘are linked together by a common “motive”: since in each we are presented with the spectacle of a man and his mate struggling for life.’41 The last three words, of course, resonate with Darwin’s ‘struggle for existence.’ And just as ‘life’ accordingly does not exactly equate with ‘their lives,’ so it comes, in effect, from Denton’s ‘prophe[tic] … feel[ing] that there is something … that goes on, a Being of Life in which we live and move and have our being’ (SDC 4:293). Implicitly relying on the sort of biological continuity that Darwinian evolution presupposes, the Wellsian (re)conceptualizing of Divinity that Denton articulates42 attaches itself to ‘the stars’ which for him as for Elizabeth ‘had become … infinitely remote’ (3:261) the moment the couple was forced to return to ‘the ways of the city.’ These are ‘[t]he little stars’ by reason of their remoteness. But in so far as that has symbolic import, the adjective is also a transferred epithet, projecting back at and onto the stars as seen from the human standpoint the very astrophysical magnitude which they confer on the human struggle for existence. On this understanding, they are the locus of an indifference that Days to Come extends from nature to ‘Civilisation … as some catastrophic product as little concerned with men … as a cyclone or a planetary collision’ (4:290).43 The last-quoted words in particular distinctly evoke ‘The Star’ (1899). Between that and Days to Come as Tales of Space and Time, however, A Story of the Stone Age intermediates figuratively as well as literally. In doing so, it serves to focus on the stars as holding the possibility of transcending the ‘brutalisation’ (SDC 4:278) which they otherwise put in cosmic perspective. Those two different meanings in fact converge in a sentence about Eudena after she and Ugh-lomi have found refuge from Uya and his tribe in Stone Age’s version – its (p)re-vision – of ‘the vacant country’: ‘It was a splendid time, and the stars that look down on us looked down on her, our ancestor – who has been dead now these fifty thousand years’ (1:88).

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GENERIC CONFIGURATIONS OF A STORY OF THE DAYS TO COME 45 ‘Look(ed) down’ suggests a stellar condescension, so to speak, which, applying to the past and present alike, ‘cosmically’ denies their ‘human’ distinction and with it the possibility that humans will ever be anything other than ‘round Palæolithic savages in the square hole of the civilised state.’44 Yet the stars which thus belittle human endeavor also implicate ‘an opposite idea, which is its essential complement.’45 They beneficently preside over those acts whereby Eudena shows herself to be as much beyond her particular Stone Age moment ethically as her mate is imaginatively – most notably, in the altruistic risk she takes to save ‘little Si.’ Meanwhile, those same stars appear as having inspired her male counterpart, all of whose ‘inventions’ (beginning with his stratagem for killing a cave bear) demonstrate the truth of Wells’s sardonic proposition: ‘It was only that fantastic creature, man, could waste his wits skyward’ (SSA 3:116). The various meanings which Stone Age invests in the stars carry over into Days to Come, defining its connection not only with The Time Machine but also with The Island of Doctor Moreau. The stars that ‘look down on’ Eudena not only hold the same gendered moral significance as those that Elizabeth ‘wishe[s] … to see once more’; by virtue of their presiding over Eudena’s subsequent hazard of her life to protect someone else, they also belong to the same ‘symbolic cluster’46 as the ‘little blue flower’ that Elizabeth brings into the man-made world of Darwinistic ‘degradation’ (SDC 4:265). Stone Age thus serves to establish Elizabeth’s ‘wild flower’ as partaking of the import of Weena’s gift to the Time Traveller as a token of ‘mutual tenderness’ (Epilogue to The Time Machine 152). Meanwhile, the stars as the skyey locus of Ugh-lomi’s inspiration also acquire a masculine meaning which The Time Machine is hardly privy to (by reason of the fact that the stars there only dis-appear), but which figures at Moreau’s end in the evolutionary ‘hope’ – of transcending brutality – that Prendick associates with ‘the glittering hosts of heaven’ as emblematizing both ‘the shining souls of men’ and ‘the vast and eternal laws of matter’ (Moreau 22:87). A Story of the Stone Age may not be indispensable for seeing Days to Come as a re-vision of The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau. But recognizing the ‘brutalisation’ of Denton as a process of transforming him into a Morlock (also with regard to his becoming a ‘machine minder’)47 does require the focus that Stone Age puts on the place which Days to Come and The Time Machine both term the Underworld. And that same focus is strictly necessary for perceiving Days to Come not just as a rewrite of Moreau’s ‘degradation’ scenario, but one which allusively invokes Moreau’s (structural) ambivalence toward civilization: as both a fragile restraint and a protection against the brutality which, prior to Moreau’s demise, it had artificially and hypocritically concealed.48

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Such constructions of Days to Come fundamentally derive from the understanding that its predecessor in Space and Time provides by its centering of what are otherwise purely incidental references to ‘the Stone Age.’ This is especially the case with the hypnotist’s comment after Denton has assaulted him: ‘We might be in the Stone Age… . Violence! Struggle!’ (1:195).49 To those mindful of Ugh-lomi and Uya, this is no offhand comparison; it summarizes what Days to Come appears as being about when read in the context that Tales of Space and Time provides – when read, that is, as Stone Age’s immediate successor. The juxtaposition of Days to Come and Stone Age also, of course, reveals them to be moving in opposite directions. Eudena and Ugh-lomi’s is overwhelmingly a parable of ‘exaltation’ (4:144) whereas Elizabeth and Denton’s is just as overwhelmingly one of ‘degradation’ (from which only a deus ex machina involving Bindon can rescue them and restore them to their former place in the social hierarchy). But the two stories are likewise Wellsian opposites, whose complementarity depends in significant part on their having in common a certain rendering of time. In that regard, Stone Age and Days to Come together have a singular bearing on the meaning of their subsequent designation as ‘Tales of Space and Time.’ That rubric itself implies that in the six stories it covers (and in others like them) a ‘philosophical element’ is paramount. It thus differentiates them from other kinds of fiction – from the traditional novel(la) or historical romance, say – for being a ‘literature of ideas’ concerned, moreover (by reason of the geological perspective attaching to ‘space and time’), with the human species rather than with individuals. Nor does the title that Wells bestows on the six tacitly contain just two of the formulaic descriptions of what would come to be called science fiction.50 The terms suggesting as much – ‘space’ and ‘time’ – by their conjunction contextually implicate Italo Calvino’s ‘elsewhere, elsewhen, elsewise’ (which is also to say, Darko Suvin’s ‘cognitive estrangement’); but being conjoined in a way that makes them appear to be independent variables, the time component can as well be taken to entail the proposition that science fiction is fiction about the future. This last point comports with the fact that Days to Come – and, before it, Sleeper – fully anticipates the opening chapters (at the very least) of Anticipations (1901).51 Yet even as Days to Come thereby encourages emphasis on a futuristic elsewhen rather than on the elsewhere which Wells’s revisionary designation also allows for, its connection with Stone Age not only makes space a function of time; it correlates the future with the past. That those two stories occupy more or less exactly the same place is unmistakable from Denton’s retrospective survey of the lower Thames Valley, going back to the days when ‘at the foot of the distant hills … had

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GENERIC CONFIGURATIONS OF A STORY OF THE DAYS TO COME 47 been the squatting-place of the children of Uya’ (5:321). Yet the same evidence for space as the dependent of time requires the understanding that ‘Space and Time’ as it applies to Stone Age and Days to Come actually signifies ‘space-time’ (in a sense which is proto-Einsteinian at least to the extent of denying Newton’s absolutist conception of space and time). Days to Come’s geographical congruence with Stone Age, then, has a speciousness about it which is bilateral, redounding as it does upon time. The temporal considerations which differentiate Uya’s and Ugh-lomi’s hills of Surrey from those which Denton observes – or Richmond as the Time Traveller’s Victorian starting point from that London suburb as the site of the Morlocks and the Eloi – are themselves made subject to a kind of erasure by reason of the constancy of space. Indeed, this particular version of a locus communis is the correlative of a synchronicity of past and future which Stone Age and Days to Come otherwise imply in various details that their textual interconnectedness focuses: Stone Age in having the stars look down on Eudena and us alike (in a sentence from 1:88 quoted above), for example; Days to Come in its somewhat offhand observation that Victorians eat ‘still recognisable fragments of recently killed animals’ (1:174). One phrase that appears early on in both stories epitomizes the significance of such avataristic or atavistic details: ‘in these latter days’ (Stone Age 1:61; SDC 1:174). This always marks a difference between past and future. But the fact that Stone Age’s ‘latter days’ takes in the late Victorian era which lies in Days to Come’s past also relativizes the two. ‘Latter days,’ then, has a somewhat peculiarly Wellsian meaning: it points to a fictifactually given present as the ambivalent site both of primeval Darwinian brutality and of the equally Darwinian hope of evolving beyond that. At the same time, the interdependence – and interpenetration – of past and future has a generic implication which the mutual involvement of Days to Come and A Story of the Stone Age elicits, but which is hardly singular with them (or, for that matter, with those other fictions of Wells’s that these two ‘tales of space and time’ serve for connecting). Generically speaking, that is, Days to Come and Stone Age together demonstrate that the one presupposes the other: that fiction about the future implicates the ‘prehistoric’ tale, and vice-versa (on the understanding that ‘prehistory’ is fictifactually relative, and hence might refer to the reader’s present moment as well as to the Stone Age). In that regard especially, ‘Tales of Space and Time,’ at least as applied to A Story of the Stone Age and Days to Come, is a revisionary designation (in the sense I mean to give the word) inasmuch as it elicits an import already in the originals, if only latently. *

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A Story of the Days to Come thus serves to exemplify a number of consequences attending the sort of interpretative approach that I have taken to it. For one thing, construing it in intertextual terms necessarily amounts to a generic construction. For another, even the relatively limited intertextual possibilities which Wells himself invokes produce three versions of Days to Come sufficiently distinct from one another to constitute – or be reconstituted as – three different stories (which is also to say that they are inherently revisionary). Moreover, those three readings are amenable to names seemingly belonging to the realm of theoretical generic abstractions, which, however, do not here enter into consideration as preconceived ideas. The case with all of them, rather, is that which the romance and the adventure story instance as those pertain as Wellsian opposites to Sleeper and Days to Come. ‘Anti-utopian fiction,’ ‘dystopian fiction,’ and ‘sciencefictional “tale of space and time,’’’ that is, name generic concepts requiring the particular(ized) understanding that, in this case, Days to Come offers. And finally, this same particularity enhances the definition of those concepts (in the way that Space and Time’s contextual correlation of the prehistoric and the futuristic illustrates), relieving them in the process of Todorov’s charge that they are arbitrary and hence illogical.52

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§3. Re-visions of The Time Machine

He likes to be … his own Alpha and Omega … Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities1 H. G. Wells’s impulse to revise is extraordinary. From The Time Machine (1894–95) through Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), at least, he is almost as obsessive as Flaubert, except that Wells’s revisions have to do with governing conception far more than with le mot juste.2 Perhaps, however, ‘obsessive’ is a term which should be reserved to characterize a kindred, but also different, species of revisionary enterprise that Wells engages in. Especially in the years following the appearance of the Atlantic Edition (1924–27), he revisits certain of his early ‘scientific romances’ and reconceives them in the same way that he had all along been reconceiving works by various other writers.3 Returning, in effect, to his literary origins, he re-views those fictions of his virtually as if someone else had written them, giving new form and new expression to their meaningful content, and this in a manner which realizes the aspiration of Melville’s Pierre: he becomes his own Alpha and Omega. The Time Machine, in particular, offers itself as a case in point. Six years before proclaiming it to have been the book which ‘fairly launched’ him as a writer, Wells revis(it)ed it in Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928); and two years after identifying it, in other words, as his Alpha, he reconceived it again in The Croquet Player (1936). Each of those highlights aspects of The Time Machine’s significance which might not be evident solely from a reading of that (in some measure because The Time Machine does not accord them the same emphasis). By way of getting to a demonstration of this matter, I begin with the published incarnations of The Time Machine proper and argue that the fiction as Heinemann printed it in the spring of 1895 already has inscribed within it a tendency toward the sort of revisionary project that I shall be trying to describe – the project that essentially defines Wells as a writer.

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VISIONS AND RE-VISIONS I. Alpha: The Time Machine’s Original (Re)vision

The Time Machine is usually said to originate with The Chronic Argonauts. In fact, however, the resemblances between those two do not go much beyond the bare notion of time-travel and some verbal carryovers of its theoretical basis in the idea of a Universe Rigid.4 Otherwise, the story of Moses Nebogipfel that Wells abandoned after three installments (1888) in his Science Schools Journal – oriented, as it is, toward the past and centering, as it does, on an unnamable blood-crime – is a Gothic tale ‘written,’ Wells himself later remarked, ‘under the influence of [Nathaniel] Hawthorne,’ and especially the Hawthorne of The House of Seven Gables.5 The first serial version of The Time Machine so designated, though itself unforeseeable in The Chronic Argonauts, is still far from subsequent ones. The basic components of those are detectable, however – at least in retrospect – especially in the titles of the first three (of seven) installments of that National Observer serialization: ‘Time Travelling: Possibility or Paradox,’ ‘The Time Machine,’ and ‘AD 12,203.’6 But these components are not clearly delineated in the National Observer. Instead, Wells at this point conceives of the fiction along the lines of the speculative science essays he was otherwise engaged in writing: the vision of the future serves to illustrate an opening generalization that runs counter to popular belief. Such a conception facilitates the logical nexus between present and future that The Time Machine from this incarnation on spells out; but on its own it is not adequate for giving form to any fiction much longer than ‘A Vision of the Past’ (1887), say (for which, see EW 153–57). It should not be particularly surprising, then, that the Eloi remain anonymous and the Morlocks barely glimpsed, and even less so that the Time Traveller, returning directly from their world, ‘stop[s]’ his narrative ‘abruptly’ (EW 90) after giving the barest hint of what, a year later, will appear as ‘The Further Vision.’ On the other hand, in the mention of a ‘sunward movement’ (EW 89) of the planetary system, for example, and in the fact that the Time Traveller comes to be so named in episode four (up to which point, he is referred to as the Philosophical Inventor), we can see Wells working his way toward his next, and virtually final, conception of The Time Machine per se. That final conception, as originally embodied in the New Review serial, owes much to various scientific hypotheses that Wells amalgamates in a synthesis which can claim some originality as such (i.e., in addition to the novelty it has by virtue of the fiction which incorporates it and gives it life). Chief among those then-current hypotheses are three: (1) Charles Darwin’s on the evolution of species (the hiatus in which, having to do with the origin of ‘variation,’ Wells fills in with reference to Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and the Rev. Thomas

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Gulick’s theory of segregation); (2) ‘the younger Darwin[’s]’ (i.e., Charles’s son, George – my quotation is from TTM 8:76) on tidal evolution;8 and (3) Lord Kelvin’s Second Law of Thermodynamics. Furthermore, as these inform a vision of the future culminating in a solar eclipse that clearly presages the (heat)death of the Universe, the first two hypotheses are rendered subordinate to entropy. Yet The Time Machine also has a certain rigor about it that goes beyond the informative operation of those scientific hypotheses. There is a logic to the structure of the entire fiction, not just to its version of a cosmic future moving inexorably, according to a ‘devolutionary’ pattern,9 toward an apocalyptic conclusion. At the start, the Time Traveller-cum-Philosopher discourses on a theory of time in terms which represent it as a fourth dimension of space; and this, in turn, opens up time travel as a theoretical possibility. The trial realization of that possibility in the form of a miniature machine is the next logical step, not just the next fictional given, or a mere ‘fictifact’;10 and the same logic dictates the full-size vehicle on which the Time Traveller presently rides off into the future. But the same logic – of the sort that Wells makes the principle which any literary fantasy must adhere to11 – also applies more particularly than that. At the start, the Time Traveller issues a warning that the idea of time he is about to argue for ‘controvert[s] one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted’ (TTM 1:2); and it is that very quality which dictates the tenor of the future The Time Machine envisions – in cooperation, of course, with the more strictly scientific hypotheses I’ve already enumerated, which dictate that future’s shape. Nor does the contrariness of the vision of evolution à l’envers depend on the outside evidence of Wells’s comment that the book is an ‘assault on human self-satisfaction’;12 for we find that intent inscribed, and fictifactually validated, in the reaction of almost all the members of the Time Traveller’s fictive audience to his saga. By the same token, that response points toward something else about the book’s final conception, a something else perhaps most clearly marked by the one exception among the audience representing Victorian middleclass professionals: the narrator of The Time Machine as a whole (who, though seemingly anonymous, inferably is named Hillyer, a cognomen which should be pronounced as the comparative form of ‘hilly’ so as to underscore the significance that it shares with the Carlylesque ‘Nebogipfel’ of The Chronic Argonauts).13 The fact that Hillyer, in contrast to the others who hear the Time Traveller’s story, lies ‘awake most of the night thinking about it’ (TTM 16:148) unmistakably indicates that Wells designed the fiction to be precisely what its title says it is: a time machine – i.e., a vehicle for transporting its readers (and first of all, but not only, Victorians, who have their counterparts in the fiction itself) outside their ‘temporal’ mindset so

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that they might examine assumptions which they – and human beings as a rule – tend to accept unthinkingly because those assumptions ordinarily remain unconscious.14 The structural conception that goes along with that sense in which the fiction assaults human complacency is evident from the moment the New Review’s first installment appeared in January of 1895. It is therefore not particularly remarkable that Wells did very little revising of his text after the end of May 1895, when the first Heinemann edition appeared. He removed the chapter-titles and did some rechaptering for the Atlantic edition (1924);15 but the text itself he hardly fussed with, in contrast to other ‘scientific romances’ of his, and most notably The Island of Doctor Moreau, which he fussed with a good deal (indeed, he didn’t stop doing so until the text of the Essex Edition, best known as reprinted in The Scientific Romances…, came out in 1928). His last substantial go at The Time Machine was therefore the episode concerning the rabbit- or kangaroo-like creatures and things like giant centipedes that he added to the last New Review installment in response to William Ernest Henley’s belated request for more material.16 This episode, I once thought, Wells omitted from the book versions because it morally compromises the Time Traveller (who shies a rock at one of the rabbit-kangaroos, with fatal consequences for that would-be human descendant); but the more mundane – and more likely – explanation for its absence from both the first American and the first English editions (Holt’s and Heinemann’s, respectively) is that those were already in press by the time Wells wrote it … and then he forgot about it.17 II. Revisitation as Re-Vision If he did little by way of revising The Time Machine in the common or usual acceptation of that word, he did an extraordinary amount in its etymological sense, especially in the late 1920s and the ’30s. Nor is it entirely surprising that he would re-view that work of his more than any other, for the tendency toward re(-)vision is already written into the text from the moment the Time Traveller sets foot in the future. He arrives with the expectation that he will be entering a Golden Age, only to discover instantly that the descendants of present-day humankind (as he takes the Eloi to be) have degenerated in both physical and mental stature. This he explains as a consequence of the ‘triumph of a united humanity over Nature’ (6:50), an idea which allows him to hold to his preconception of a Utopian future (‘communism’ [6:47] or some other kind of ‘social paradise’ [6:52]). But his further investigations oblige him to modify that hypothesis, too: becoming aware of the Morlocks, he is prompted to the realization that ‘Man … had differentiated into two distinct species’ (8:79). Still, he persists

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in thinking that the descendants of the upper class retain their dominant position: the Morlocks, he extrapolatively supposes, derive from a working class forced underground but still totally subservient to ‘a real aristocracy, armed with a perfected science’ (8:84). Only after exploring the subterranean world is he compelled to further, radical revisions: first, that the Morlocks ‘maintained … [the Eloi] in their habitual needs, perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service’ (10:97), then that ‘the Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon – probably saw to the breeding of’ (19:105).18 This final explanation of the relationship between the Eloi and the Morlocks bespeaks the triumph of the Nemesis referred to (as) Darwinian ‘Necessity’ (see 10:105–06). By that account also, the ‘two distinct species’ that the Time Traveller had postulated ceases to be metaphoric of class division and instead assumes the Darwinian significance implicit in the term species all along. Sociology in time thus becomes utterly subordinate to biology (in the form of the selfsame ‘Necessity’ that ‘comes home to’ humankind ‘in the fulness of time’ – 10:105–06). This is not to say, however, that what the Time Traveller at last comes up with obliterates sociological considerations altogether (else the many readings, from Christopher Caudwell’s on, which persist in seeing the Morlock–Eloi relationship as a class struggle rather than as a Darwinian struggle between biological species would be wholly invalid); and the same is demonstrable for all of the hypotheses about 802,701 that the fiction itself gives us, each of which continues to serve a hermeneutic purpose that survives its supersession. Wells’s subsequent re-visions of The Time Machine are pretty much consistent with the character and intent of hypothesis-formation as it is thus inscribed in the original as of 1895 – including the effect of estranging estrangement (by offering one alien idea in controversion, more or less, of another already given). That is, the re-visions supplement rather than eliminate meanings, either by putting into relief details that The Time Machine itself leaves in the background, so to speak, or by attributing to foregrounded details a significance which would not at all be obvious otherwise. Perhaps the most curious of these re-visions – and the two I will concentrate on – are to be found in Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928) and The Croquet Player. (1936). Both have a discernible connection not only with The Time Machine but also with Moreau; so that the two later fictions mediate between the earlier ones in a way which is itself supplementary. Referring Moreau to The Time Machine serves, for instance, to bring out the ‘two-world’ structure of Moreau’s island,19 with its hierarchical-qua-spatial division between the Doctor and Montgomery in their compound and the Beast People who dwell below. Conversely, The

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Time Machine from Moreau’s standpoint exhibits biology’s eclipse of sociology as a consequence not just of class division but of the failure of evolution as an ‘artificial process’ adumbrated, for example, in the ruins of the Palace of Green Porcelain.20 Yet the chief point of comparison between those two ‘scientific romances’ no doubt lies with their respective apocalyptic visions of the return of the biological repressed; and it is this that Blettsworthy and The Croquet Player focus in the course of reconstructing certain details of their predecessors. III. Blettsworthy’s Epistemic Re-Vision of The Time Machine (and Moreau) Blettsworthy may appear to have more in common with Moreau than with The Time Machine. After all, the titular protagonist, like Edward Prendick, finds himself on a strange island as a result of a shipwreck; and as with Prendick, his passage (encompassing, in Blettsworthy’s case, most of his life to that point in time, as retailed in the first 130 pages or so of his narrative) prepares for the savagery of that island. Blettsworthy, too, drinks blood (3.2:142; cp. IDM 2.6), though only after he is imprisoned in a palisade cage on Rampole Island; and his recollection of his ‘fear of the horror of death,’ which readied him ‘to submit to anything they [the Rampole Islanders] chose to write upon my soul’ (3.2:145), may well put us in mind of Dr. Moreau’s torture chamber or the Sayers of the Law. Blettsworthy recalls Moreau, too, not simply in such local details but in the satiric meaning that Rampole Island figures and in Arnold Blettsworthy’s psychological trajectory in reaction to his experiences there. He begins life with a Candide-esque ‘faith in the civilisation of the universe’ (1.3:29) – a faith inherited, as it were, from his Uncle Rupert, who distantly echoes Dr. Moreau in his belief that ‘the more we civilise[,] the less there is of this fretting and vexation and hopelessness – and meanness…. Things get better’ (1.2:25; cp. IDM 14:48). But thanks to his parents, he also begins life with a ‘sense of internal conflict. I am divided against myself – … I am at issue with my own Blettsworthiness’ (1.1:11), a sentiment which interpretatively applies to Moreau as well, and especially to its satire of human beings as, in essence, ‘round Palæolithic savage[s] in the square hole of the civilised state.’21 What Blettsworthy witnesses on Rampole Island exacerbates that conflict to a psychopathological extent; so that he returns with the conviction, akin to Prendick’s haunting suspicion about the Beast People (IDM 22:86), that ‘we [ar]e all bloody savages and painted cannibals’ (4.2:216). As with Moreau, this fear is correlative to the fiction’s satiric content, the impetus for which in Blettsworthy probably owes more to Voltaire than to

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Swift, though Moreau’s Swiftian inspiration is in effect alluded to in the Rampole Islanders’ notion that Blettsworthy ‘came out of the sea… The sun shone on rotting rubbish and begot him’ (3.4:158; cp. Gulliver’s Travels IV.9:271–72). Rampole Island, that is, recapitulates Noble’s Isle in reducing ‘the laws and institutions of mankind’ (3.5:172) to their primitive forms. Blettsworthy’s chief re-vision of Moreau comes from its referral of those institutions to human psychology rather than Darwinian biology. To be sure, psychological considerations are hardly foreign to Moreau. That fiction, after all, ends with Prendick consulting ‘a mental specialist’ (22:86) in an attempt to exorcise the trauma, particularly, of his having witnessed and been caught up in ‘The Reversion of the Beast Folk’ (to quote the heading of §21). And that feature of its conclusion – anticipating, as it were, Dr. Minchett’s role in Blettsworthy – is prepared for by the repeated emphasis on the mental intractability of the creatures Dr. Moreau is trying to turn into human beings via hypnosis as well as the scalpel. (‘The human shape I can get now, almost with ease,’ he confides to Prendick. ‘But it is in the subtle grafting and reshaping one needs do to the brain that my trouble lies’ [14:51].) Yet ‘the mark of the beast’ that Dr. Moreau can never quite eradicate (14:48) remains fundamentally biological in origin, whereas in Blettsworthy it is, or becomes, primarily a matter of cultural psychology, or psychological anthropology. That for the most part is the sense in which ‘the story … [Arnold Blettsworthy] has to tell is at its core a mental case’ (2.5:86), especially in so far as that story has at its core an awareness of the import of Rampole Island’s Megatheria. Blettsworthy, in his lengthy and allegorizing account of those creatures, touches on this point when he observes: ‘The struggle for life can terminate in the triumph of types unfit to live, types merely successfully most noxious’ (3.5:171). As his full explanation, running to more than three pages, makes evident, he is talking here about the survival of the unfittest, about ‘the triumph’ over Darwinian evolution (at least in a Herbert Spencerian understanding of that) by all-devouring monsters which are themselves palpable embodiments of the devastating (but self-preserving) inertia of ‘states, organisations and institutions’ – i.e., of human culture in the anthropologist’s sense of the term. Yet in this same respect, Blettsworthy is to a greater extent and more profoundly an interpretative re-viewing of The Time Machine than it is of Moreau. The very name that Blettsworthy gives to its central ‘invention’ may come from a phrase in the National Observer serial whereby ‘the Philosophical Investigator’ satirically epitomizes the view which ‘the medical man’ represents: ‘You believe … that in the future humanity will breed and sanitate itself into human Megatheria’ (EW 72; my emphasis). Nor is it entirely farfetched to suppose that Wells still remembered those words

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more than thirty years later; for in the next episode, he has the Time Traveller lecturing his audience in terms which precisely foresee Blettsworthy’s: It is the fittest who survive. The point is that civilisation – any form of civilisation – alters the qualifications of fitness, because the organisation it implies and the protection it affords, discounts the adventurous, animal, and imaginative, and puts a premium on the mechanical, obedient, and vegetative. An organised civilisation is like Saturn, and destroys the forces that begat it. (EW 78) Blettsworthy invokes that same mythological analogy in making a comparable argument: ‘They [the Megatheria] devoured the food of their children and enjoyed a Saturnian Empire over their habitat’ (3.5:171). Indeed, the main difference between his allegorical explanation of Megatheria and the Time Traveller’s of ‘The Sunset of Mankind’ is that the latter concentrates exclusively on the role of ‘sanitary science’ in the bringing about of 12,203.23 Subsequent versions of The Time Machine are not as particular as the National Observer’s with regard to the cause of the ‘degradation’ that the Time Traveller finds in the future (10:106): an impulse to sanitize the environment instead becomes, more generally, ‘the dream of the human intellect’ for ‘comfort and ease’ (13:130), which in its realization makes ‘human intelligence and vigour’ (6:52) into evolutionary irrelevancies, if not liabilities. The Time Traveller’s – and Wells’s? – thinking on this point remains constant through all the vicissitudes of his hypothesizing about the future; and with it, so does the somewhat uneasy conjunction of Spencerian premises concerning the struggle for existence and the visionary critique, deriving from them, of a Spencerian survival of the fittest (see note 24 below). Blettsworthy expressly invokes those premises too, but only to repudiate them unambivalently: I had been brought up [says Blettsworthy] on the idea of a tremendous Struggle for Existence, in which every species and every creature was kept hard and bright and up to the mark by a universal relentless competition. Yet when one came to think of it, very few things were really struggling for existence and scarcely anything alive was hard and up to the mark…. I had still to realise that such a triumphant species as man can triumph only to convert its habitat into a desert. (3.5:169–70) Blettsworthy’s starting point, though not fully spelled out, is the Time Traveller’s: ‘What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions

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under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall’ (TTM 6:52).24 But in Blettsworthy’s re-vision of The Time Machine, there is nothing accidental about the suspension of that principle: the Megatheria signify an intent on the part of civilization to convert the human ‘habitat’ into a moral ‘desert’ – i.e., into an environment totally inhospitable to innovative intelligence. Correlatively, the irony attending the Time Traveller’s claim about ‘a triumph over nature’ (8:84) does not apply – or at least it does not expressly apply – to the Megatherian enterprise of self-perpetuation. Perhaps the clearest sign that Blettsworthy gives of such revisionary connections with The Time Machine lies with its recourse to a romance formula, à la Sir Walter Scott, for the Rampole Island episode.25 The name Blettsworthy gives to its damsel-to-be-rescued, Rowena, resonates not only with Ivanhoe, but also with her Time Machine prototype, in which connection with Blettsworthy ‘Weena’ clearly emerges as a diminutive form of ‘Rowena.’ It is worth noting, however, that Blettsworthy also casts a somewhat critical eye on the gender assumptions of the romance formula that it shares with The Time Machine; for in the ‘real’ world, Blettsworthy’s and Rowena’s roles are reversed: she is the one who is attempting to save him (albeit from a threat that is psychological rather than physical). A far more startling reversal has to do with the flowers from Weena that the Time Traveller brings back with him. In The Time Machine these constitute a tangible, albeit fictifactual, proof that he has indeed travelled into the future rather than ‘dream[ing] it in the workshop’ (16:145). But a diametrically opposite significance attaches to their equivalent in Blettsworthy: the ‘three flower-pots containing … lemon verbena’ (4.1:211), located as they are on ‘the window-sill’ of the real Rowena’s New York apartment, suggest that Rampole Island, redolent with their scent, is the macabre fantasy of a man who has been unhinged by his experience of the Great War.26 Nevertheless, the dichotomy between delusional fantasy and disillusioning reality in Blettsworthy is as false as The Time Machine’s of ‘prophecy’ versus ‘lie’ (TTM 13:145) – and largely by reason of the very event which has deranged Blettsworthy. This is evident both from his remarks about ‘Rampole Island … [being] no better than a wild caricature of the harsh veracities of existence,’ ‘of the cruelty of creation’ (4.7:247), and from his reversal of the just-mentioned reversal when, for instance, he speaks of Rampole Island as ‘the real world looming through the mists of my illusions’ (4.2:222). In the process of thus re-viewing the interpenetration of fantasy and reality, Blettsworthy calls attention to The Time Machine’s rupture of that distinction. To be sure, Dr. Minchett would preserve the difference. He theorizes that Blettsworthy:

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Yet this notion, despite its winning the ‘guarded consent’ of Blettsworthy himself (ibid.), not only establishes the affinity between Minchett and the Rampole Island namesake of his who apologizes for the status quo there; it also reveals the doctor to be the prototype of the psychiatrist in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and the self-styled ornithologist in The Birds (1963), both of whom would rationalize away what is all too horrifically visible. Moreover, some of the very words that Minchett chooses – and especially ‘wounded and shocked’ – traduce the dichotomy he desires to maintain. They do so not just because they evoke the spectre of the World War looming over Blettsworthy, but also in consequence of their reminding us that Blettsworthy’s physical wound has made him into an Oedipus redivivus like the Time Traveller. Admittedly, a phrase like ‘the prospect of a limping life’ (4.10:256) may not in itself call Oedipus to mind. It does so, however, the moment we understand Blettsworthy’s war wound as a point of connection between him and the Time Traveller, a similarity which in turn focuses – and revises – certain of The Time Machine’s details that would not otherwise have any prominence. Even David Ketterer, the first commentator to remark the Time Traveller’s likeness to Oedipus with respect to his injured foot, underestimates the extent to which the analogy is quantitatively overdetermined. Wells refers to the Time Traveller’s Oedipal limp not twice, but six times in the course of The Time Machine, though even that number would hardly be sufficient for indicating the Oedipus parallel were it not for the fictifact that a Sphinx (or ‘something like’ it – TTM 4:33) presides over the world of the Morlocks and the Eloi.28 From The Time Machine itself, we might conclude that the Sphinx which the Time Traveller confronts – literally from the moment he sets foot in 802,701 – reincarnates, in terms applicable to humankind as a species, a riddle concerning the course of each mortal human life. But Blettsworthy, without entirely discounting that possible meaning, emphasizes another. The same Sphinx, as it were, dominates Rampole Island; but Blettsworthy describes it as ‘a jutting mass of rock in the shape of a woman with staring eyes and an open mouth,’ adding that ‘the threat of the mouth had been enhanced by white and red paint, suggesting teeth and oozing blood’ (3.1:138). The Sphinx, that is, emblematizes the discovery that Bletts-

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worthy’s noticing of it pretty much coincides with: that the Rampole Islanders are ‘eaters of men,’ ‘savages … living on each other persistently and ruthlessly’ (3.1:136). The Sphinx’s Riddle thus appears as subservient to another mythological fictifact about her: that she is the Devourer of all who cannot fathom her conundrum. The same is true for The Time Machine (and not just in Blettsworthy’s retrospect, I think): the Sphinx, with its wings menacingly upraised, foresees the revelation that the Morlocks, ‘less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago’ (TTM 10:105), have ‘[re]turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden’ (TTM 13:131). Though Wells’s version of Oedipus antedates Freud on the subject, it is none the less tempting to psychologize about it vis-à-vis The Time Machine’s repeated allusion to parents devouring their children (in the passage about Saturn quoted above and in another wherein George Darwin’s Theory of Tidal Evolution is rendered as dictating that ‘the planets must ultimately fall back one by one into the parent body’ [8:76; my emphasis]). Moreover, and notwithstanding both The Time Machine’s and Blettsworthy’s reference to the Titanic Saturn, the Sphinx suggests that the predatory parent is primarily female. We might therefore see both the fear of darkness which the Time Traveller comes to share with the Eloi and the claustrophobia which he exhibits in exploring the Morlocks’ Underworld as manifestations of a dread of ‘fall[ing] back … into’ the womb.29 Yet whatever – probably unconscious – misogyny may be at work here, on a conscious level the womb belongs to primordial Mother Nature, a Sphinxlike Earth Goddess red in tooth and claw.30 The Sphinx, in other words, like the headless Faun that the Time Traveller encounters as ‘the darkness [of the forest] grew deeper’ (TTM 10:101), signals the resurgence of mindless instinct. From Blettsworthy’s standpoint, we can of course see something deceptive – and perhaps self-deceiving – in Wells’s earlier portrayal of the Sphinx as a genderless creature (with ‘wings … spread so that it seemed to hover’ and ‘the faint shadow of a smile on the lips’ – TTM 4:33, 34; my emphasis). Blettsworthy, after all, makes the equivalent icon out to be not only a predatory female, but the deity presiding over an island that the protagonist has in effect been driven to by a woman surnamed Slaughter. On the other hand, the social order he finds there is overwhelmingly patriarchal, and all of the individualized Rampole Islanders are male except for Rowena. Furthermore, that she is said to be ‘fragile … and … pretty’ (4.2:214) at once reinforces Rowena’s identification with her Eloi namesake and singles her out from the other denizens of ‘a land where sunshine was pleasing and grateful,’ who are generally reminiscent of the Morlocks (as well as the Beast People) in that they are ‘content to live in a

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gorge’ (3.2:144), in an ‘ill-lit narrow prison of a home,’ rather than ‘upon the soil and sunshine of the wide lands above’ (3.6:183). It is therefore arguable that Blettsworthy, in its restaging of a cannibalistic return of the repressed as a female-inspired (but male) project, is not just revealing a gender premise hidden, as it were, in The Time Machine’s Sphinx; it is also paradoxically countering assumptions inherent in ‘Mother Nature’ (renamed ‘Mother Necessity’ by the Time Traveller – 13:131), thus pointing to one more way in which neither The Time Machine nor Blettsworthy ‘fit[s] into the reader’s knowledge and preconceptions’ (Blettsworthy 3.1:139). IV. The Croquet Player’s Generic Re-Vision of The Time Machine (and Moreau) Wells’s ‘assault on human self-satisfaction’ definitely has a genre, not just a gender, component. Dr. Minchett in effect calls attention to matters of genre when he speaks of the ‘romancing complex of … [Blettsworthy’s] brain’ (4.2:219). He thereby identifies the romance formula that governs the Rampole Island plot as much as it does what happens to the Time Traveller and Weena. The dismissiveness of Minchett’s judgment perhaps reflects Wells’s self-criticism of the ‘squirms of idyllic petting’ that he had written into The Time Machine more than thirty years earlier.31 But Blettsworthy’s re-view of the romance element there also involves a measure of generic self-consciousness on Wells’s part that makes for another re-vision of The Time Machine. Blettsworthy, like the Time Traveller, comes away from the world of romance with a disturbing vision. But unlike the Time Traveller, the motive which drives him to that world is a psychological desire to escape from reality (rather than a philosophical desire for freedom). Correlatively, in the generic terms that Minchett’s words suggest, Blettsworthy is fleeing the world of the realist novel for that of romantic (and, more narrowly, Gothic) fantasy. What he finds, however, is a caricature refraction of the reality he is trying to evade. Blettsworthy thus expressly brings out something implicit in The Time Machine: it invokes the presumption that fantasy is escapist in order to refute it by having that fantasy impinge upon – and, by Dr. Minchett’s account, displace – the ‘real’ world. The mutual interpenetration of the two, generically as well as psychologically, The Croquet Player characterizes as ‘breaking … the Frame of our Present’ (3:48). Blettsworthy does this in a way that recapitulates The Time Machine. It begins in and returns to the world of the present, recounted pretty much according to the conventions of the realist novel; so that the distinction it ruptures is also one that is not only evoked but preserved through the ‘real’ world’s containment of the ‘fantasy,’ which the chapter

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divisions likewise separate from the ‘real’ world. The ‘frame,’ in other words, is a structural given, and its ‘splintering’ largely a matter of intellectually reconstructing the text.32 This is not the case with The Croquet Player; indeed, there something of the reverse is true. We can conceive of Cainsmarsh as a fantasy bounded on either side by the reality which is the milieu of the anonymous titlecharacter and all-encompassing narrator, but that is an intellectual representation – and also a misrepresentation – of what Wells actually gives us. Of the book’s four chapters, the two occupied by the ghoulish tale that Finchatton has to tell, though seemingly enclosed by two others set in the ongoing quotidian world of a French resort town, are not devoted exclusively to Cainsmarsh. Instead, §2 begins in and §3 returns to Les Noupets. This refusal to ‘frame’ the horror of Cainsmarsh exactly corresponds to the meaningful content of the fiction as that manifests itself in the intrusion of Finchatton’s haunted past into the present of Les Noupets. The meaning of The Croquet Player is also inscribed in its structure in another way. While Finchatton’s narrative is central, much of its burden of meaning is borne, not by Finchatton himself, but by the old Vicar whom he seeks out for an explanation of his feeling of dread. It is this vicar who first accounts for the sense of evil hovering over Cainsmarsh like a ‘miasma of the mind’ (3:51), infecting the village’s inhabitants and sometimes expressing itself in gratuitous acts of violence. He identifies that as a consequence of our ‘hav[ing] poked into the past, unearthing age after age’ (3:49); and he goes on to say: ‘We have broken the frame of the present, and the past, the long black past of fear and hate that our grandfathers never knew of, never suspected, is pouring back upon us…. The cave-man, the ancestral ape, the ancestral brute have returned’ (3:49–50). Finchatton’s narrative thus has within it another, equally haunted but set off from his by quotation marks. Moreover, Dr. Norbert in effect circumscribes Finchatton’s narrative in a comparable manner, especially when Norbert confesses that he suffers from the same dis-ease as his patient (4:70), at the same time appropriating the vicar’s phrase (now credited to Finchatton) about ‘breaking the frame of the present’ (4:71– 72). Norbert’s gloss on that phrase – ‘Things that had seemed forgotten forever have suddenly come back into the very present of our consciousness’ (4:74) – thus conforms to The Croquet Player’s design of having Les Noupets the site for the telling of the tale about Cainsmarsh. The point about ‘unearthing age after age,’ too, with ‘the past … pouring back upon us,’ finds its structural correlative in the succession of narratives. Norbert’s explains the dread that Finchatton’s reveals as deriving from a modern consciousness of time which has opened our minds to influxes from the past. But the psychiatrist’s rational comprehension of

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the medical doctor’s feeling of being possessed also to some extent redeems the vicar’s otherwise mad idea: that the disease has its cause in a scientific delving into the past. By the same token, the objective basis that psychology offers for the subjectivity of Cainsmarsh depends on an underlying biological reality which emerges chiefly from what the vicar has to say. Hence The Croquet Player, in its progression towards Norbert’s globalizing account of Cainsmarsh as a fantasy arising from the intellectual struggle ‘against this cave-man who is over us, who is in us, who is indeed us’ (4:75), reverts, regresses, to the terms of understanding that the vicar supplies. The Croquet Player, like Blettsworthy, can be read as expanding and commenting upon Moreau. While the name Cainsmarsh has a biblical derivation (underscored by ‘a fratricide’ among the murders there [2:20]), the ‘Ghost of Cain’ (3:51) presiding over the place is synonymous with that of ‘[t]he cave man, the ancestral ape, the ancestral brute’ (3:50). Its contagion thus comes from the same kind of Darwinian past that makes for the reversion of the Beast People. Similarly, the blood-lust which gradually takes hold of those creatures – an instinctive compulsion that Moreau’s opening chapters foresee and make Prendick an associate of – has its correlative in Finchatton’s hallucination regarding the paleolithic skull that he confronts in the Cainsmarsh museum: ‘From [the] darkness there presently oozed something … that manifestly tasted very agreeably [sic] to him. Blood’ (TCP 3:56). That image epitomizing all that Cainsmarsh stands for, however, also recalls Blettsworthy’s rendition of the White Sphinx; and The Time Machine’s vision of a future which loosely recapitulates the past in reverse may again come to mind in connection with ‘the pouring back upon us’ of ‘the past’ that causes the vicar to get ‘the children of Cain and the cave-men and the mammoths and megatheria and dinosaurs all jumbled up in the wildest confusion’ (2:34; my emphasis). Furthermore, the ‘myth’ of Cainsmarsh (4:67) locates the Darwinian threat just where The Time Machine does: ‘‘The evil was … underground.’ He [the vicar] laid great stress on the word ‘underground’’ (2:30). Nor is that doubled emphasis on ‘underground’ the only clear sign that The Croquet Player is fundamentally a rewriting of The Time Machine. A number of its other verbal details point in that same direction: the Cainsmarsh villagers, for example, have ‘an unusual [Eloilike] terror of the dark’ (2:25); the Time Traveller’s self-characterization of his tale – ‘Most of it will sound like lying…. It’s true – every word of it, just the same’ (3:25) – becomes, in Norbert’s rendition: ‘Everything he [Finchatton] told you was true and everything he told you was a lie’ (4:67); and in the end, that psychiatrist foresees that ‘[i]n a little while … there will be no ease, no security, no comfort any more’ (4:78). Ease, security, and comfort are, of course, the very words identifying the

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ideal by which the ancestors of the Eloi have brought about 802,701 (as the Time Traveller steadfastly insists). They also apply to the Croquet Player of the book so named, pointing to him as just such an ancestor.33 Moreover, the kind of socially elite game-playing that identifies him also characterizes the world that he priggishly represents, a world whose artificiality makes it seem unreal the moment that Cainsmarsh’s ‘ancestral ape’ begins irrupting into it; so that Les Noupets appears as a fantasy world which the ghostly reality of Cainsmarsh undermines. The Croquet Player, then, does not simply make express The Time Machine’s implication that the future comes, in more than a fictifactual sense, out of the ‘luxurious after-dinner atmosphere’ (TTM 1:1) of an upper-class (Victorian) abode. It also lays the reality of that present open to question, as The Time Machine itself does not, at least not in its generic representation of the frame narrative. So too, The Croquet Player recreates the succession of hypotheses about the – largely monstrous – Other in the form of a sequence of narratives each of which, again – like the Time Traveller’s ideas about 802,701 – continues to serve a hermeneutic purpose that survives its supersession. All of this is to say that The Croquet Player is a metafiction predicated chiefly on The Time Machine in something of the way that Star-Begotten (1937) depends on The War of the Worlds.34 The Hillyer who, though troubled, resolves ‘to live as though … the future is still black and blank’ (TTM 16:[152]) Wells replaces with a narrator who ironically circumscribes Cainsmarsh, who is ‘hypnotized’ by it, but only to the extent of its momentarily putting him off his croquet game. Likewise, his is one more layer of narrative – in effect, a fourth – whereby The Croquet Player explores an idea already implicit in The Time Machine’s structure: that ‘time’ is the dimension ‘along’ which ‘our consciousness moves’ (TTM 1:3). Yet another route to the same realization brings us to what is perhaps the most startling discovery that The Croquet Player makes as a rewriting of The Time Machine. The cue that The Croquet Player takes from Moreau’s final chapter, and particularly from that epilogue’s detail about Prendick resorting to ‘a mental specialist’ to treat his ‘disease,’ his ‘terror’ of his fellow-creatures (IDM 22:86), gets reinforcement from a passage in The War of the Worlds (1898). The latter’s penultimate paragraph, as it echoes Prendick’s concluding sentiments, puts them in terms pertinent to The Croquet Player: ‘I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past’ (Bk. 2.10:302; my emphasis). Those metaphoric ghosts, however, make an appearance in The War of the Worlds only here, and in Moreau not at all, whereas The Time Machine mentions them as often as it does the Time Traveller’s Oedipal limp.35 Furthermore, on two of those occasions ‘ghost’ and ‘ape-like’ are used as descriptors of the Morlocks – the same

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conjunction evident in the vicar’s sentence about the haunters of Cainsmarsh: ‘They aren’t just spirits of cruelty, suspicion and ape-like malice. But the souls of a tribe of cave-men might be … Grisly ghosts’ (TCP 2:35; ellipsis in original, but my emphasis). The Croquet Player thereby highlights a second feature of The Time Machine that might well be overlooked without their intertextual connection. The fact of their shared linkage of ape-like creatures with ghosts suggests that The Time Machine, too, owes something of its generic inspiration to the ghost story. Thanks to its generic import, the reiteration of the word ghost bears significantly on the now widely held view that The Time Machine is, perhaps above all, designed to be generically self-defining. According to that perception, the fiction intentionally establishes the boundaries of its own generic space – what would come to be called science fiction – relative to the realist novel and the romance,36 visible in its frame and in the Weena plot, respectively. This idea is perfectly compatible with a private communication, sent to Grant Allen within a couple of months of The Time Machine’s appearance in book form, wherein Wells credits him with ‘this field of scientific romance with a philosophical element which I am trying to cultivate.’37 Yet a textual allusion (TTM 8:75–76) which David Hughes has recently tracked down raises the distinct possibility that Wells was thinking not just of The British Barbarians (1895), but of another work by Grant Allen: a ghost story titled ‘Pallinghurst Barrow’ (1892).38 The Time Machine itself thus suggests that its enterprise of generic self-definition may not have been as self-assured in prospect as it seems in retrospect. The Croquet Player, as a metafictional rewriting of The Time Machine, allows us to glimpse that prospect. By accentuating the ghost story elements, it brings to the fore The Time Machine’s heterogeneity, its generic plasticity, and with it its generic uncertainty. Clear as it may be to us that ‘[a]ll significant science fiction’ – meaning also science fiction as such – ‘comes out of The Time Machine,’39 it is equally clear that what went into it were various fragments of diverse, mostly popular, genres configurable in relation to Scott, Dickens, and William Morris, but also, probably, to Wilkie Collins and the brothers Grimm (or Andrew Lang’s versions of Grimms’ fairy tales).40 V. The View from Omega Blettsworthy and The Croquet Player belong to a period – it lasted too long to be properly called a phase – in which Wells expressed certain grave doubts about his achievements, especially in the realm of the ‘scientific romance.’ Those doubts, as he first voices them unmistakably in his Preface to

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Collins’ 1921 reissue of The Sleeper Awakes, apply to his ‘prophetic’ powers; but in many of his introductions to the Atlantic Edition of his works and in his preface to the 1933 volume of his Scientific Romances, he extends the self-deprecation to his writerly abilities.41 Behind this self-criticism probably lies his quarrel with Henry James. Experiment in Autobiography suggests as much, making it likely that the Wells who defiantly proclaimed himself ‘a journalist’ had, by the early 1930s, come to understand journalist as the term of contempt which the Jamesians have all along taken it to be. Yet his rehearsal, twenty years after the fact, of his falling out with James also leads him to define himself anew as a writer who splinters the frame of literary convention.42 A similar profound ambivalence characterizes his re-visions of The Time Machine in Blettsworthy and The Croquet Player. Both re-present 802,701 as a psychopathological fantasy, with generic reference in the one case to Candide and Robinson Crusoe, say, and in the other to the ghost story. But they also hold out the possibility that the vision whose unreality they thus accentuate is more real than the everyday world, whose collective psychopathology informs – and finds its satiric reflection in – that vision. By the same token, they convince us that this possibility, along with other aspects of their meaning, is not at all alien to The Time Machine. Hence the sort of thing Wells does with his entire opus in Anatomy of Frustration (1936)43 or with his falling out with James in his autobiography he is also doing in Blettsworthy and The Croquet Player: in so far as those come out of and in turn illuminate The Time Machine, in particular, Wells is re-inventing himself in them as his own precursor, as the writer he always was.

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§4. Stanislaw Lem’s Futurological Congress as a Metageneric Text [P]erhaps I had created another … kind … [of] value[, one] that was intrinsic, like the cathedrals at Orvieto and Siena…. It was much easier, of course, to laugh at my cathedral, which was not even material, which existed not as a thing but as a metaphor – or, as a modern cyberneticist might put it, as an analog model of multivalent relations, of polysemy. Lem, Highcastle (6:115) I. Out of The Time Machine: Generic Self-Consciousness Most, perhaps all, of Stanislaw Lem’s fictions are typically postmodern in this respect (inter alia): they implicitly comment on the genre(s) in relation to which they define themselves. It might therefore seem grossly hyperbolic, if not downright false, to claim that Futurological Congress (1971) is unique in its generic self-consciousness.1 Nevertheless, I shall argue that it is a text without parallel in the rest of Lem’s opus, and not only in the degree to which it is generically self-reflexive but also in the way that it depends upon that kind of reflexivity. Unlike The Investigation (1959), or Solaris (1961), or Master’s Voice (1968), say, it does not simply license us to translate its meaning into metageneric (i.e., generically self-referential) terms, these merely representing one level of significance, analogous to and reinforcing others which are at once more obvious and less dispensable.2 Rather, it primarily demands a metageneric reading; that is, it obliges us to think of it in those terms if we would discover the fiction’s conceptual integrity. In this and other respects, Futurological Congress can profitably be compared with The Time Machine. Both, first of all, have the sort of complexity which comes from an (apparent) overabundance of meaningful elements; and this, even without Futurological Congress’s added complication of being difficult to follow literally, all but ensures that commentaries on them will be partial, and hence likely as not askew with one another. So it is that both texts are liable to be truncated, and thereby deformed, in their exegesis, particularly as a consequence of what makes them homologous:

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the enclosure of their common topos, an apocalyptic future, within a (relatively) present moment, the starting point to which the time traveler finally returns. The many readings of The Time Machine which ignore its narrative frame at least impoverish the meaning of the fiction (if they do not misrepresent it altogether), and hence they obscure the book’s further – and profound – resemblances to Lem’s. As they in effect obliterate the fictively given context for the tale-told-in-quotation-marks, they automatically rupture the immanent connection between an empirical present and the imaginary future, whose relationship to historical actuality thereupon becomes uncertain, a matter for sociological (re)construction(s) based outside the text. That, however, is not the sense in which the Time Traveller’s remark about the etiology of his own hypothesizing applies to the fiction in its entirety. ‘[T]he problems of our own age’ from which the world of 802,701 and beyond ‘proceed[s]’ (TTM 8:81–82) do not exist exclusively outside the confines of The Time Machine; they are embedded and dramatized in its opening and penultimate scenes as these focus on the responses of the fictive audience to a Time Traveller who, by his vision as well as in the argument about the nature of time on which it is founded, ‘controvert[s] one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted’ (1:2).3 The devolution which he is witness to, rather than being an arbitrary affront to his auditors’ bourgeois Victorian preconceptions about the future, dialectically originates in the closed-mindedness that their reactions variously exhibit. His vision, in other words, is the sort of antithesis that follows from, and details the consequences of, the lack of critical imagination which makes those representative types the prisoners of their ideological moment. That vision, to be sure, obeys (Darwinian) laws of its own in its passage from the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks to the premonitory glimpse of the end of the solar system.4 Yet its course also represents the ‘working to … [their] logical conclusion’ (TTM 8:84) of premises which it contains and substantiates. What dictates that course is thus the very principle which generates the fantastic future from the realistic frame in the first place: the principle of self-extrapolation. For this reason among others, The Time Machine has precisely the character its title gives it. The title immediately designates a device whose existence is purely chimerical; but ultimately it applies to the entire fiction as constituting just such a vehicle for transporting the reader in ‘time’ (as the ‘dimension’ ‘our consciousness moves along’: TTM 1:3) to an alternative (vision of the) world. It thus epitomizes the fiction that it names as an ‘invention’5 designed for the satiric and hortative purposes of exposing and counteracting the kind of mental immobility which figures in the

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narrative frame as the premise for the vision of the future. By the same token, the title also identifies and illustrates The Time Machine’s manner of meaning. It bridges the would-be ontological chasm between an imaginary realm and the ‘real’ (i.e., extratextual) world in the same way the fiction as a whole does: in and through its fictive self-referentiality. This self-referentiality is fundamentally generic. The exact bearing that the text has on a world external to it in fact derives from its generic selfconsciousness. Its discovery that ‘reality’ is a deterministic mental construct from historically given assumptions comes by way of its examining the self-extrapolative nature of its own vision, the liberatory possibilities of which likewise inhere in the text’s self-definition as it stakes out and explores its own generic space. The area it lays claim to is adjacent to that occupied by the nineteenthcentury realistic novel, yet clearly demarcated from even the Dickensian variant of literary realism exemplified in its narrative frame. This alternative ‘dimension’ it appropriates for the ‘scientific romance’ by placing in it a vision which, morphologically considered, models the structural principles of that species and thereby offers itself as ‘a grammar of [science fictional] form.’ Meanwhile, as the same vision reflects upon the present vis-à-vis the narrative frame, The Time Machine not only arrogates to itself the nineteenth-century literary-realist project of embodying ‘a criticism of fact’; it also justifies that take-over in generic terms by implicitly pointing to any empirically bound mode of literary representation as lacking the ‘dimension’ wherein an alternative world-view can be substantiated.6 In short, it does more than manifest an awareness of its literary operation and ethical vocation as time machine: it establishes (though it does not name) the genre to which it self-consciously belongs. As a general rule, then, ‘all significant science fiction since Wells can be said to have come out of his Time Machine.’7 There is, however, a special – and perhaps singular – sense in which that proposition applies to Futurological Congress. Lem’s text is not only a generic descendant of Wells’s but its logical successor, extending its exploration of the nature of science fiction into the realm of language. The Time Machine, by my account of it at least, might even appear to be Futurological Congress’s ‘precursor’ in the Borgesian meaning of the word were it not the case that the two works elucidate one another.8 Futurological Congress alerts us to the metageneric significance of The Time Machine, which in turn points to Lem’s as a fiction whose meaning is governed by its title.

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II. Futurological Congress as Futurological Congress The coherence of Futurological Congress, like that of The Time Machine, resides in its being what it is superficially about. From beginning to end, it is literally Ijon Tichy’s report of what happens to him at a certain futurological congress which he returns from ‘the stars’ to attend (7); and as such, it reads like some of the journalism of Norman Mailer, say, rewritten by Terry Southern. Yet it is equally true that Tichy’s account of his experiences, for all of its (and their) idiosyncratic particularity, in effect constitutes the Congress which the revolution in Costa Ricana seemingly aborts, and constitutes it as the type or paradigm of any like gathering devoted to futurological speculation. To be sure, the course of human events since 1971 has already obscured the speculative nature of parts of the fiction, especially in the early going. The promiscuous terrorism first surrounding and then irrupting in the Costa Ricana Hilton no longer seems comically hyperbolic, much to the consternation of Lem himself no doubt; and certain instances of it which he imagined have subsequently acquired equivalents in actuality that may make them appear unacceptable as the subjects even of (his) black humor. Such is the case both with the ‘extremists’ who arrange for ‘individual teeth of their hostages’ to be ‘delivered … to the [American] Embassy and various government offices, promising an anatomical escalation’ (4 – which promise they fulfill: see 7–8) and – perhaps to the Polish author’s greatest dismay9 – with the religious fanatic intent on ‘a great pilgrimage’ to Rome ‘to gun down the Holy Father at St Peter’s basilica’ (6). Neither of these fictive incidents now appears to be quite of a piece with the form notice that Tichy finds by his bedside upon awakening in an ‘experimental state hospital,’ for example: ‘Although it was found necessary to remove your arms, legs, spine, skull, lungs, stomach, kidneys, liver, other (circle one or more), rest assured that these mortal remains … were, with proper ritual, interred, embalmed, mummified, buried at sea, cremated … – thrown in the garbage (circle one)’ (50; italics removed). This bureaucratic document, particularly in the hands of a Tichy who has just been reassembled as a ‘little black woman’ (51), indicates a state of affairs that still seems fantastically futuristic. By contrast, ‘Operation P’ and the barbarism of Costa Ricana’s political kidnappers might by now easily be mistaken for the kind of deliberate fictionalizing of contemporary history that the government of Futurological Congress’s Banana Republic exemplifies in its policy toward its opponents. Yet if the post hoc correspondences accruing to Lem’s fiction have rendered some of its details mordantly satiric to a degree that he probably did not anticipate, they have also given those details an air of reality which reinforces the ontological distinction upon which Futurological

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Congress operates. To the extent that we follow Tichy’s mental processes (as his narrative perpetually tempts us to do), we likewise try to differentiate the world of his waking perceptions from that of his dreamhallucinations, what is objectively the case from the merely imaginary. Positing some such dichotomy, and perhaps with reference to a hypothesis about the etiology of dreams,10 we can distinguish five hallucinatory episodes subsequent to the one which is set in the middle of the frame narrative and clearly marked as psychochemically induced. These five we can demarcate (on the basis of Tichy’s return to the sewer, literally or figuratively) as follows: (1) while observing sewer rats walking erect, Tichy discovers that he has been metamorphosed into a human tree and is presently assailed by ‘bird-women’ (38–45); (2) meaning to flee to the Futurological Congress, which Trottelreiner alleges is reconvening in Berkeley, Tichy winds up in an ‘experimental state hospital’ (45–54); (3) he is executed by Costa Ricanian government frogmen and then returned to a (the same?) hospital for ‘revivification’; (4) ‘reanimated,’ ‘defrostee’ Tichy enters into the Utopia of Plenty (65– 108); (5) this, he discovers, is ‘really’ an Anti-Utopia of Scarcity (113–48).11 Parceling them out in that way, we may perceive Tichy’s psychochemically induced visions as deriving (at least generally and in part) from what he has witnessed before he (increasingly) succumbs to hallucinogens. Thus, for example, the ‘real’ hostage-taking incident involving two American diplomats has its oneiric counterpart in the kidnap of Dr. Fisher in the third of Tichy’s hallucinatory episodes (54); and in that same episode, the aerial and artillery bombardment of Nounas figures obliquely in the blowing up of the helicopter and then of the ambulance in which Tichy is being transported and reverberates directly in the ‘incessant thunder’ that assails his ears at the outset (45) and in the ‘explosion [which] rock[s] the [hospital] corridor’ later on (49). Less recognizable in Tichy’s imaginative transmutations of them are ‘the secretaries belonging to the Association of [Sexually] Liberated Publishers’ (8), ‘their limbs … painted with various op designs’ (25). They appear in the second hallucinatory sequence as the bird-women whose feathers he at first mistakes for some novel fashion; thence they become the basis for the sartorial peculiarities of the year 2039 – ‘pedestrians … dressed like peacocks’ (68), ‘suits that continuously change in cut and color … and blouses that show you movies’ (70); and these in turn open out on the possibility which that future world offers of ‘chang[ing] completely

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one’s size and shape and face, in the beauty parlors and body shops’ (83 – a possibility reflecting back upon the identity crisis which seizes Tichy during his sojourn at the ‘experimental state hospital’).12 Eventuating as it does in a vision of plasticity reminiscent of Dichotica’s in Tichy’s ‘21st Voyage,’13 this last series of transformations exemplifies one of the (complex) ways in which Futurological Congress subverts the very distinction (between the hallucinative and the real) that it principally invokes. After all, the opportunity which 2039 affords for altering one’s physical appearance at will (or at whim) belongs to a fantasy at least twice removed from the world of Tichy’s waking experience: it arises out of his past hallucinations, which gradually take the place of ‘reality’ as the source of his imaginative materials. This sort of usurpation not only makes Tichy’s hold on ‘reality’ (along with our sense of it) ever more tenuous; it also renders his hallucinations increasingly self-reflexive. Indeed, the two tendencies occur in tandem as the simultaneous results of the principle by which the narrative moves, the process wherein one fantasy generates another.14 Their connection is perhaps most evident at the point when Tichy, noting for the first time that ‘just about everyone’ in 2039 is ‘panting,’ wonders: ‘Could I be imagining it?’ (72). The question recalls his previous doubts as to whether he is ‘hallucinating’ (see, for example, 37, 39, 42, 53, and 56); but here the issue is the accuracy of his perceptions, not the ontological status of the world to which they would apply. His doubts, in other words, now refer purely to a ‘fictifactual’ realm (in the self-evident sense of that Lemian term as well as in its fictifactual meaning, ‘dreams programmed to order’ [73]), which therefore contains them totally. Moreover, the hallucination that self-referentially encloses them by the same motion assimilates – and thus nullifies – their underlying distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary.’ Generally (as in this last instance), then, Tichy’s hallucinations do not merely displace his waking concerns and thereby make his ‘real’ world more and more remote. They also absorb the ‘reality’ which they draw upon so as to reveal the speciousness of that very notion of his. It is in this regard that the sewer ‘at the lowest level of the Hilton’ (34) becomes significant as something other than a reference point for discriminating one of Tichy’s dreams from the next. His ‘guardian sewer, my only talisman and touchstone to reality’ (99) does, of course, serve the latter purpose: his fall into it marks the end of each of the five hallucinatory episodes subsequent to his bout with the psychochemical drug LTN (‘Love Thy Neighbor’), which figures by way of a prologue to them. Yet, thanks largely to its structural function, the sewer also stands as a metonym for Tichy’s ‘real’ world, which accordingly follows its vicissitudes.

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Tichy’s return to the sewer, as it becomes progressively less and less recognizable as such, likewise gradually ceases to take him back to ‘reality’ even for a moment. The incident which punctuates the conclusion of his fourth hallucinogenic episode, for example, does not cause him to wake up in the subterranean regions of the Hilton; after being cryogenically immersed in ‘liquid nitrogen’ (62), he instead revives to another fantasy world. What is true in this case, however, is not nearly so obvious with regard to his passage from that twenty-first-century Utopia of Plenty to its dialectical opposite. Again the cloacal element intermediates between one hallucination and the next; but in this – the most crucial – instance, its oneiric transformation is so radical that its presence can easily be overlooked. Nevertheless, what precipitates him into the Anti-Utopia of Scarcity amounts to yet another fall into his ‘guardian sewer,’ whose influence presides over this sordid futuristic possibility.15 Tichy’s ‘touchstone to reality’ thus becomes thoroughly and inseparably part of the world which he seizes upon as the truth behind Utopian appearances. Yet in terms of the fictive given, he perceives that ‘truth’ only after ingesting ‘up’n’at’m’ (114), a drug cognate to the ‘vigilax’ which intricates him in a dream-world in the first place and which subsequently reappears as a means for furthering the/its deception. Indeed, both substances surely belong to the family of ‘dehallucinides,’ which ‘create the illusion that there is no illusion’ (130).16 Hence the unmasking of 2039 as the antithesis of the Utopia of Plenty he originally apprehends it as being constitutes a kind of intellectual trompe-l’oeil, despite the seeming parallel with the discovery by Wells’s Time Traveller that his initial impression of having arrived in Utopia does not fit what is really going on in 802,701. In other words, Futurological Congress encourages us to accept as ‘real’ a state of affairs that is not only every whit as fantastic as the one which it apparently debunks, but is also otherwise deceptive precisely by reason of its giving the illusion of undeceiving us. Once we stand back from and assess the ‘fictifacts’ (again also meaning ‘dreams programmed to order’), it becomes incontestable that this is so: that the anti-utopian vision of 2039 is no less hallucinatory than the Utopia of Plenty which it purports to supersessively explode. Given their equality, Lem’s project can be looked upon as being in some measure akin, say, to the Strugatskys’ in Roadside Picnic (1972) and Le Guin’s in The Dispossessed (1974). He, too, resuscitates the Utopian Ideal in a manner which takes into account its literary and historical fortunes since the late nineteenth century – viz., its fall into disrepute, which perhaps reaches its nadir with the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).17 He presents us with a world which incorporates in up-to-date terms (strongly inflected by his cognizance of the drug culture of the 1960s) many of the chief

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traditional attributes of Utopia: material abundance for all, a perpetually temperate climate, and so forth. Next he doubly qualifies that vision of plenty: first through Tichy’s realization that it is drug-dependent and vulnerable to totalitarian abuse (see 79); then by making it seem a total, drug-induced illusion. Finally, having compromised it to a degree that prompts us to dismiss it altogether, Lem restores it as a utopian possibility by allowing us to understand the hallucinatory nature of Tichy’s disillusionment with it. While Futurological Congress’s trompe-l’esprit thus serves as a strategy for reinstating, in ambiguous terms, a utopian vision, it does so largely by the way. Its main function, instead, is to further the process of ‘actualysis,’ ‘[t]he breaking down, the eroding of reality’ (126). Following Tichy, we are led to believe that 2039’s ‘apparitions’ of ‘Paradise’ conceal a ‘garbage dump’ (143), and an overcrowded garbage dump at that. Yet this ‘catatrashmic’ insight differs crucially from its predecessors not in its ontological status but in its cognitive effect. As it, too, proves to be hallucinogenically based, the vision of ‘the foulness lurking behind’ 2039’s utopian ‘façade’ (104) contaminates with its unreality the sewer out of which it comes. The sewer that Tichy ultimately topples into is therefore no longer the ‘touchstone to reality’ that it first appeared as being: interpenetrating with his dreams, it has, in the course of his narrative, become continuous with them. The ‘eroding’ of Tichy’s ‘actuality’ by at once displacing and absorbing it culminates in his final plunge into his ‘guardian sewer.’ By that fall, he exposes the truth-claims of the Anti-Utopia of Scarcity as a hallucinatory pretense; but that, in turn, impugns the ‘reality’ of the waking world underlying this last, cloacal vision, into which it slowly obtrudes as its metonymic sewer-self – a return of the repressed.18 At the conclusion of Futurological Congress, Tichy is thus left ‘shipwrecked’ in an elemental ‘reality’ (143) which has ceased to be differentiable from his fantasies as it flows ‘off into the unknown future’ (149) that they virtually occupy. Yet the ‘reality’ whose very notional existence in the end becomes suspect has at best never been anything more than what the name Costa Ricana implies it is: a surrogate for the – or a – real world (sans quotation marks). Nor is its surrogate status as a realm discrete from Tichy’s fantasies beyond the reach of the ‘actualytic’ process at work outside their confines. There the ‘actualysis’ operates not by distancing and assimilating his waking world, but by erasing the boundary lines between it and his hallucinations. This erasure most obviously manifests itself, especially in contrast to the case with The Time Machine, on the level of mechanical structure. Neither chapter divisions nor anything else certainly marks Tichy’s ‘actuality’ off from his hallucinatory episodes, the first of which is situated right in the middle of what he takes to be the ‘real’ world. That absence of a

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clearly delineated frame points in turn to a far more profound continuity, pertaining to the text’s meaningful (not merely its literal) content. As we accompany a Tichy who has come back from ‘the stars’ to ‘the problems of Earth’ (1), we immediately enter a world that is deceptively familiar. Taking into account that 2039 is the year of the 76th Futurological Congress (125) and that Tichy is attending the Eighth, and allowing for one such ‘World Assembly’ per annum, we ought to be following him into a fictifactual present coinciding with the date of Futurological Congress’s publication.19 Yet the moment on which the fiction opens has a ‘hencity’ about it even now. The Costa Ricana Hilton, for example, has 106 floors (2) and is otherwise of such vast dimensions that only ‘special dumbwaiters moving at supersonic speeds’ could convey food so that it would arrive hot in the rooms farthest (‘a mile and a half’) from the kitchen (5). The hotel thus appears in ‘actuality’ as the prototype of the apartment complex that Hayakawa, Hakayawa, and Yahakawa collectively envision – a complex so huge that ‘1,000 exits’ would be insufficient for evacuating it (since ‘a whole new generation would reach maturity’ within its confines in the meantime: 22). This may count as the instance where the setting for the Congress and its reported proceedings come closest to one another. But it is not the only case in which the ‘real’ scene comports with the type of speculation that Tichy and his colleagues have gathered to engage in. Indeed, as I have already noted, Costa Ricana offers (at least relative to 1971) any number of futuristic prospects, the most important of which (from the standpoint of what ensues) appear in the incidents involving LTN and other psychochemical agents. Those goings-on do not merely bear on the content as well as the course of the Eighth Futurological Congress. They also make for an obvious connection between Tichy’s ‘reality’ and his dream-worlds, and thence point to the latter as more than the psychological outcome of his conscious prehensions. His dreams, that is, become the logical extension of his ‘actuality’; indeed, the two realms are substantially continuous by reason of their participating in the same futurological project. Furthermore, the futurological prospects figured in Tichy’s hallucinations, beyond being generically akin to those embedded in the frame narrative, all relate in one way or another to the specific question that futurologists are meeting in Nounas to address: what to do about impending global overpopulation.20 To be sure, Tichy’s fantasies are not from the first entirely and directly responsive to that problem. In retrospect, however, we can see that his early episodes are the logical by-products of the alternative ‘solution’ (Utopian vs. Anti-Utopian) that Futurological Congress finally poses. This is certainly true in the general sense that either scenario necessitates (ex post

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facto, as it were) the kinds of hallucinogens responsible for all of Tichy’s visions. But it is also true for a particular reason: that the dream-worlds he goes through before coming to the Utopia of Plenty represent (some of) the consequences tangential to or contingent on that ‘cryptochemocracy’ and its antithesis. Thus, for example, Tichy’s arboreal fantasy looks ahead to the opportunities for psychophysical freedom available to the denizens of 2039.21 At the same time, it points to the identity crisis which such freedom must entail – a crisis otherwise configured in the bureaucratically impersonal reconstruction of Tichy as a ‘little black woman’ and reconfigured, in advance, via the team of Japanese futurologists, whose anagrammatically cloned names inflect that identity crisis back toward its source in the population explosion, which is responsible for their onomastic absurdity. Similarly, the oneiric sequences wherein Tichy is spirited away in sundry vehicles that soon crash or explode (40, 43) and is then executed by Costa Ricanian government frogmen (59–60) expatiate upon the futurological prospects of a world which would deal with overpopulation by psychotechnological means. Such details, however, anticipate not 2039’s potentialities for utopian liberation but what comes with them: the licentious possibilities for terroristic violence and repressive political control endemic to the Utopia of Plenty and the Anti-Utopia of Scarcity alike as ‘chemocratic’ – which is also to say, technocratic – societies. The early instances of Tichy’s being victimized and manipulated thus tie in, say, with the assault on his person by a ‘physivisional’ ‘interferent’ (75) and with the ‘[t]orturometry[,] … tyrannology, brutalistics’ and other forms of vicarious sadomasochistic satisfaction rife in 2039’s ambiguous utopia; and, in its anti-utopian sequel, with the enforced use of ‘mascons’ and ‘supermascons’ and with the Grand Inquisitorial revelations on Symington’s part that the increasing prominence of those drugs prepares for (145). III. Science Fiction and Neology This involvement of Tichy’s hallucinatory worlds in one another has a basis in language, as does the mutual connection between them and his ‘actuality.’ Indeed, the continuity which his dreams have with his ‘real’ world – manifest through their common depiction of various futurological possibilities answerable to the problems attendant upon overpopulation – is fundamentally linguistic. Professor Trottelreiner serves to indicate as much by his discourse on ‘futurolinguistics’ – ‘Morphological forecasting! Projective etymology!’ (108). His declension of the word trash into ‘[t]rashmass, trashmic, catatrashmic,’ and ultimately ‘trashmos,’ for example (111), suggests itself as the source of the futuristic vision of the world as overpopulated garbage dump which immediately follows. Furthermore, it

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does so ‘syntagmatically,’ or structurally, as well as in respect to the putative meaning of Trottelreiner’s imaginary words. His sequence, that is, constitutes an analogue to the narratological process, already observed, whereby one fantasy leads to – i.e., generates – another. By the same token, however, Trottelreiner’s remarks imply that his ‘futuro-linguistic’ exercises represent not only a process of thinking parallel to that whereby futuristic fantasies originate, but also the very mental workings which give rise to them. That, at least, is the conclusion which Futurological Congress compels us to come to about itself, and for reasons additional to those I have just touched upon. The first of these stems from the fact that the substance of the professor’s disquisition does not come out of the blue. It is foreseeable the moment Tichy leaves the ‘revivificarium’ and confronts 2039 as a linguistically strange and novel world, whose ‘key concept’ (he right away discovers) ‘is psychem’ (67). The attention which he focuses on ‘new word[s]’ (66) in turn looks back to the opening pages of the fiction and the talk there about ‘cryptochemocracy’ (27) and the various ‘benignimizers’ and ‘phrensobarbs’ subservient to such a scheme (15). In thus giving those neologisms the prominence which they deserve, we instantly become aware that they, so to speak, encode the prospects which Futurological Congress ultimately explores. This, in context, is the point of Trottelreiner’s theorizing as it applies particularly to Futurological Congress: that Lem’s fiction spells out at length the implications of the neologisms which are its genesis.22 What qualifies it as a metageneric text, however, has to do with its self-consciousness of its neologistic operation rather than with that operation per se. This selfconsciousness is what Trottelreiner’s remarks by their mere presence make evident as they otherwise extend the fiction’s genetic principle to all futuristic fantasies and thereby indicate the common ground of science fiction and futurology.23 Characteristically enough, Lem allows us ample room to doubt how far beyond itself Futurological Congress’s metageneric claims apply; we may even wonder in what sense they hold true for that text. After all, he gives their express formulation over to a professor whose name translates into ‘complete idiot’ and who retails them to a principal bearing a cognomen that is the Polish equivalent of ‘Gulliver.’ These nominal facts, apart from their self-deprecating irony, should cause us to be hesitant about ascribing to Lem the view that all science fiction actually has a neologistic origin. That, as pure theory, might be applicable to Futurological Congress itself only a posteriori, in which case it would be true in effect rather than literally as an account of how Lem (as author) conceived of the book.24 Moreover, the skepticism attendant on the proposition that all science fiction is

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originatively neologistic also attaches to its chief corollary: that thinking in terms of neologisms is the source of science fiction and futurology alike as the two intersect in their shared project of modeling the future. The doubts which Lem permits us do have a limit though. We may balk at the text’s would-be revelations about the generative principle uniting science fiction and futurology, especially when they are put in starkly propositional form; and we may be all the more reluctant to universalize them in view of Lem’s own strictures, elsewhere expressed, to the effect that they obtain only in the highest – i.e., most self-aware – reaches of those two disciplines.25 What we cannot do, except at the certain risk of fragmenting and misinterpreting his text, is dismiss Futurological Congress’s putative findings altogether. Their dismissal is out of the question for two reasons. First, as I have been saying in other words, they amount to a generic self-discovery figured in the very substance of the fiction. In discounting them, we must therefore overlook a meaning of the text, and one which, for a reason I am now coming to, links up with the fiction’s assault on the ontological distinction between the real and the imaginary. This skeptical operation, which we have been observing in regard to dream-worlds continuous in their problematic content with the ‘reality’ that they emanate from, also takes place on the level of language. Indeed, the neologisms incorporated in the frame narrative not only anticipate Tichy’s subsequent futurological hallucinations; they also, and at the same time, infiltrate his ‘actuality,’ thereby subverting its pretensions to that distinct status so fundamentally as to make the cognate enterprise of his fantasy-worlds appear epiphenomenal, if not almost redundant. This second reason for taking the text’s metageneric revelations seriously thus has to do with the fact that as self-discoveries, they are intimately a part of (though analytically separable from) Futurological Congress’s chief cognitive project: that of ideational deconstruction. Such a project as Lem engages in it is generally comparable to that of the text he certainly had in mind when writing Futurological Congress: not The Time Machine, but Ubik (1969).26 The paranoia which finally takes hold of Lem’s ‘defrostee’ in his confrontation with Symington (144ff.), like much else about the fantasy world of Tichy’s wherein ‘Procrustics, lnc.’ looms larger and larger, is surely reminiscent of that work by Philip K. Dick in particular, as is the trompe-l’esprit which gulls us into believing that in the anti-utopian garbage dump we at last get to what is really going on in 2039. Nevertheless, there is a radical difference in what the two authors are ultimately about. Ubik, to say the least, casts grave doubts on the objective existence of any world as it relentlessly demonstrates that our ubiquitous notions of what is ‘real’ are nothing more than projections – and idiosyncratically deranged projections at that – of a sort susceptible to

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being commodified and marketed by corporate-conglomerated capitalism. Lem, on the other hand, designs Futurological Congress to expose the speciousness of the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary.’ After inviting us to fall in with their antithesis, his fiction proves that the two categories cannot stand opposed as human beings concretely think of them because so conceived they perforce enter into, and are subsumed by, the ‘imaginative.’ That, however, is for Lem an objective truth about our human subjectivity. Furthermore – and this is where he differs most from Dick – it is a truth which, as we become aware of it through a consciousness of language and of linguistic possibilities, can vouchsafe an intimation of what may lie beyond our (present) mental confines, beyond the categories that language in our obliviousness to it imprisons us in.27 This is surely the matter that Futurological Congress is finally directed toward. The fiction does more than live up to the dual promise of its title by constituting the specific congress that Ijon Tichy is attending as the type of all such symposia devoted to venting futurological speculation. As well, it reflects on how it is able to do so, and through that metageneric consciousness offers itself as a critical commentary on science fiction in general – or rather, on science fiction in its honorific designation. Nor does its discovery about its own generic possibility suggest itself as a paradigm applicable only to the likes of The Time Machine and Ubik, with their ‘Eloi’ and ‘Morlocks,’ ‘anti-precogs,’ ‘inertials,’ and ‘half-lifers.’ The neologistic process that it incorporates and draws attention to as its own model and logical source also stands as the common denominator between science fiction and futurology; and these by their connection appear as exemplary realms for the kind of imaginative thinking capable of transcending such linguistically imposed antinomies as that of the ‘real’ versus the ‘imaginary.’ This way out of what must otherwise be our conceptual prison is no mere abstraction in Futurological Congress. It is particularized in the imaginative worlds which make up the fiction. These mediate between the present and an alien future as they self-consciously exhibit language – and with it, human thought – neologistically extending itself into ‘the unknown’; and in so doing, they reveal the limits of ‘reality’ as we unreflectively conceive it. In effect if not deliberately, Lem thus resumes the self-interrogating cognitive project that Wells inaugurated and, pursuing it to its modular foundations in language, discloses that it essentially involves the kind of neologistic investigation which is properly the province of Futurological Congress-as-science fiction. The fiction’s cognitive discovery is for that reason also a generic self-discovery – a congruence which confirms Wells’s original metageneric insight as he embodied it in The Time Machine.

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§5. Karel C”apek’s Can(n)on of Negation

Within its definition an idea Contains its own negation. Josef and Karel C”apek, Adam the Creator1 Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself Karel C”apek’s life as a writer largely coincides with that of T. G. Masaryk’s Czechoslovak republic. C”apek published at least two volumes of short stories (many of which he wrote in collaboration with his brother, Josef) during the so-called Great War;2 but the bulk of his output spans the years from 1918 up until his death at the end of 1938, a few months after Chamberlain (and Daladier) met with Hitler (and Mussolini) at Munich and perfidiously awarded Nazi Germany the Sudetenland.3 Over the course of those two decades hardly a year went by without a volume appearing in C”apek’s name, thanks in no small part to his regular contributions, from 1921 on, to the newspaper Lidové noviny,4 in which a fair number of his short stories and novels (among other things) originally appeared. Two periods, however, stand out as having been especially productive for his literary imagination: the early 1920s and the mid-1930s. The second of these moments is marked by, though not confined to, what C”apek advertises as a trilogy, comprising Hordubal (1933), Meteor (Pove“tron“, 1934), and An Ordinary Life (Obyc“ejny; z“ivot, 1934). The same is also true for the earlier moment, except that its trilogy neither C”apek nor anyone else has recognized as such. Presumably the prime reason why R.U.R. (1920; rev. ed., 1921), The Makropulos Secret (Ve“c Makropulos, 1922), and The Absolute at Large (Továrna na absolutno, 1922)5 have not been regarded as belonging together is that the first two are plays and the last a roman feuilleton. That they have none of the elements in common which normally make for a trilogistic connection doesn’t help; but this is equally the case with the three 1930s’ novels. They, too, share neither characters nor plotline nor mise en scène. An argument for seeing the three immediately post-war

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works as a trilogy might therefore begin with the grounds for accepting Hordubal, Meteor, and An Ordinary Life as one. I. The Point-of-View Trilogy Hordubal tells the story of its eponym after his return from America, where he had been a manual laborer for eight years. Though told in the third person, the portion of the novel – roughly two-thirds of it – retailing events up until his wife’s lover, with her connivance, murders him (ironically just when Hordubal is on the verge of death from natural causes) is in effect a first-person narrative: it concentrates primarily on what is happening (and has happened) as Juraj Hordubal perceives and understands it; and while also disclosing by the way at least something of what’s going on in the minds of his wife and her lover (and others), it focuses on Hordubal’s motive: of trying to protect or regain his wife’s honor, and thereby his own.6 With his demise, other points of view of course take over; but these for the most part depend on his as already-given inasmuch as they directly or indirectly purport to divulge his motival thought-processes. His point of view, moreover, continues to preside as the standard for determining the extent to which other people are misconstruing and distorting ‘[t]he real truth’ (2.6:129) about him – by imagining, for example, as a police investigator does, that fear of the wife’s lover actuated Hordubal. Meteor essentially takes an approach which is the opposite of the one structuring Hordubal. The first novel in the trilogy establishes the facts, and above all the psychological truth, about its verbally and emotionally inarticulate protagonist, with the impetus of showing how various members of his rural community unwittingly falsify his identity in their ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason.’7 Meteor, on the contrary, details the efforts of three people profoundly concerned with getting at the subjective reality of the victim whom the title designates. Almost nothing is known with objective certainty about him except that he is lying comatose in a hospital bed, the casualty of an air crash and yellow fever or some other tropical disease. The first attempt to (re)construct his (psycho)biography comes via a Sister of Mercy. While sleeping in a chair at the patient’s bedside, she has an oneiric revelation, which is rendered in quotation marks as (if it were) the first-person narrative of ‘the man who fell from the sky.’ According to her series of dreams, his ‘alien and remote’ father (6:175) died when the son was still a young man. Thereafter he forsook the woman who loved him to go off to the tropics; but after the passage of many years, he was returning to her. A ‘clairvoyant’ whose mind-reading ability C”apek demonstrates and scientifically rationalizes (see 12.202–04) then offers an account which is

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virtually devoid of such romanticism, thereby discouraging the suspicion that the clairvoyant, like the nun, may be projecting repressed erotic feelings or anything else. In this second version, ‘the man who fell from the sky’ becomes ‘Case X.’ His mother, according to the clairvoyant, presumably died in childbirth or when he was an infant; his relationship to his father was antagonistic. Case X goes in for chemistry; and in the only science-fictional moment in the entire trilogy, he theorizes about ‘unknown molecules of compounds, just as Mendeléeff worked out unknown atoms for elements’ (15:214). But an ‘international luminary’ whom he consults about ‘one or two’ of these ‘formulae’ (‘in the benzole group’ – 17:223) tells him it’s all nonsense. Twenty years later, having taken ignominious refuge in Cuba, Case X accidentally comes upon a scientific journal featuring a stereochemical diagram of his imagined compound, as it were; and he thereupon determines to go home to Europe for the notebooks that may somehow establish his intellectual priority and proprietorship. The final, and most lengthy, version of the unknown aircrash victim’s life is the one that a ‘poet’ comes up with. (He characterizes it as a ‘phantasy’ [20:234]; but inasmuch as it actually resembles a Conradian novel, ‘phantasy’ presumably means ‘a product of the imagination.’) Like its two predecessors, its narrator remains anonymous; but in its course the poet arbitrarily assigns a name to Case X: Kettelring. Kettelring, too, rebels against his father; and out of rebelliousness he winds up in the Caribbean, becoming amnesiac in a drunken brawl and thereafter working as a factor for a Cuban entrepreneur mainly in the sugar business. Falling in love with his boss’s daughter, he means to win her father’s approval by striking out on his own to make his fortune in Haiti digging asphalt; but in this ambition he is finally unsuccessful. Faced with his would-be father-in-law’s rejection of him, Kettelring (having, with deliberate effort, recovered his memory, including his real name, which the poet refuses to divulge) is returning home to reconcile with his own father. These three different versions have a number of elements in common. They essentially agree, for example, that the Unknown Subject’s relations with his father were, to say the least, strained, and that his mother didn’t enter into his life. At the same time, the three contradict one another, notably in offering alternative, and hence mutually exclusive, motives for his all-too-hasty return home – out of a romantic impulse, ambition, or the desire to come to terms with his paternal past, so to speak. It would seem, then, that only one version can be true; but all come across as legitimate claimants, even the nun’s (whose sequence of dreams about ‘the man who fell from the sky’ appears as a ‘parapsychological’ projection on his part more than as a Freudian projection on hers).

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An Ordinary Life takes on this kind of discrepancy and the dilemma accompanying it. The first nineteen chapters are straight and rather humdrum autobiography, tracing the life of someone named Popel8 from childhood to his becoming a railway employee, marrying a stationmaster’s daughter, getting a station of his own to manage (probably with his father-in-law’s help), and after World War I landing a top civil-service job as a railroad planner (in part because of his involvement, marginal though he says it was, in espionage against the Kaiser). From §20 on (or at about the same point that Hordubal takes a new turn), this monolithic self becomes increasingly, and progressively, fractured. Alongside the ‘ordinary happy man’ appear a succession of selves, or rather ‘lives’:9 presently joining the first to be introduced, ‘the one with the elbows who wanted to scramble up’ the social ladder, is ‘the hypochondriac’ (22:412), followed (inter alia) by: the poet manqué (Popel in his student days wrote and published a few verses); the otherwise romantic self (making for ‘a whole series of collateral and fictitious lives, mainly erotic, heroic, and adventurous, in which he … is everlastingly young, strong, and chivalrous’ [25:422]); and the dark side of those, a man attracted (as both voyeur and participant) to some dimly glimpsed sordid and forbidden sexuality. Each of the lives which thus proliferate calls for a re-vision of the autobiography as initially given. Collectively they also invest the Czech word for ordinary with a meaning different from its original (contextual) import: Popel’s becomes ‘the story of EVERY man’ (31:445)10 in and by the novel’s demonstration that ‘Everyone of us is plural’ (34:460), that every individual human being comprises a host of sometimes mutually conflicting ‘lives’ correlative to the ‘various motives’ for our actions (22:406). The last-quoted words figure in a self-answering question which C”apek has Popel voice: ‘isn’t there in even the most ordinary life room enough for various motives?’ But this instantly generates an unrhetorical question: ‘Which of them [the ‘completely different lives’ flowing from the ‘various motives’] is THE RIGHT ONE?’ (ibid.). As may already be evident from the account I have given of them, the three novels are dialectically related to one another vis-à-vis those two interrogatories. The thesis, as Hordubal presents it, would insist upon a predominant, if not single, motive behind any given human life – a motive which others get wrong because they attend only to the outside, confining themselves to what they consider to be the (objective) facts and imposing on those their own obsessions. Or, as C”apek puts the matter in the ‘Epilogue’ appended to An Ordinary Life, Hordubal stresses that ‘[o]ur knowledge of people is restricted mainly to allotting them a definite place in OUR life systems’ (466).11 Meteor, ‘the second phase of the trilogy,’ offers what C”apek himself identifies, in other words, as the antithesis:

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the life of [a] man is [again] portrayed in a triple or quadruple way, but the situation is inverted: people now … try to discover the lost heart of a man; they have only his body [metaphorically as well as literally] and they try to fit it to a corresponding life. But this time the point is not how far they diverge in their explanations…; what strikes one is that here and there, … they agree [on] or meet with the probable reality … (Epilogue: 467) Even so, the ‘lives’ which the nun, the clairvoyant, and the poet construct do ‘diverge.’ Why, then, should they not be regarded as mutually exclusive? Why, in other words, should we not conclude from their differences what Hordubal would prompt us to infer: that two of them (if not all three) are falsifications of the reality of their Unknown Subject? That is the question which An Ordinary Life takes on, illustrating how even a Popel – someone who by his first account of himself appears as a stereotypical civil servant, or bureaucrat – consists of ‘a crowd’ (of different ‘lives’) which together constitute ‘a drama!’ (31:447). The synthesis here preserves the discoveries of Hordubal and Meteor. While accounting for – indeed, justifying – the discrepancies among the three lives of Someone Else in the latter, An Ordinary Life structurally recalls Hordubal and thereby complements rather than nullifies its thesis. The one eventuates in misconstructions of the ‘life’ originally given as a third-person autobiography; the other proceeds to deconstruct a monological rendition of a ‘life’ so as to reveal its inherent plurality. These novels do indeed belong together, then. Despite the absence of any of those shared features normally making for a trilogy, the three cohere conceptually, and not just because each of them thematizes point of view (in its technical sense) as central to its meaning, but also by reason of the dialectic (though somewhat non-Hegelian) connections among the three consequent upon their respective demonstrations about point of view. In concentrating on point of view so as to make that aspect of novelistic technique central to its meaning, the trilogy certainly counts as Modernist. Certainly, too, it does not count as science fiction, and this despite its being generically conceivable as such. C”apek, that is to say, could perhaps have cast as an extraterrestrial alien at least one of the human beings who figure as a Someone Else, an Other – Hordubal, ‘the man who fell from the sky,’ or Popel. There is, however, no basis in his entire œuvre for believing that he was capable of writing Solaris, say; and in the event, none of the three novels has anything obviously science-fictional about it except, possibly, for the moment in Meteor already mentioned. None the less, the grounds for accepting them as a trilogy are similar to those for according the same status to three earlier works of his, of which two in themselves have rather self-evident science-fiction credentials: The Makropulos Secret,

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The Absolute at Large, and R.U.R. At the same time, what Hordubal, Meteor, and An Ordinary Life have to say about point of view bears crucially on the critical commonplace that C”apek is a ‘relativist’ and hence on what he is up to in those works of his far more directly accountable to science fiction than those three are. Let us turn, then, to Makropulos, The Absolute, and R.U.R., first with an eye to the grounds for trilogizing them, and thence to the understanding deriving therefrom and redounding, also, on their re-visions as The White Plague, Krakatit, and War with the Newts, respectively. II. Relatives R.U.R., The Makropulos Secret, and The Absolute at Large are interrelated not through a self-consciousness of point of view-as-technique or the like but by reason of their originary conceptual content. The basis for trilogizing them, that is, comes from their shared connection with alchemy. In every instance their seminal idea (in Kingsley Amis’s sense of ‘idea’)12 corresponds to some one of the ultimate objectives of the alchemist; but inasmuch as each fiction assumes a different alchemical project, together they successively appropriate all three of them. Makropulos takes as its subject the Elixir of Life, a potion conferring (physical) immortality; R.U.R. the homunculus, or artificially produced human being; and The Absolute the Philosopher’s Stone (which in alchemy is not just a talisman for transmuting ‘base’ metals into gold, but what makes such a thing theoretically possible: the principle, or law, governing or underlying all matter). The means to immortality C”apek does not reconstruct; indeed, it appears as the concoction of a sixteenth-century magus, Hieronymos Makropulos, in his capacity as personal physician to Rudolph II.13 But the other two ultimate goals of alchemy C”apek does render in up-to-date and sciencefictional terms. He does so, moreover, not just through the use of ‘scientific patter’14 about ‘protoplasm’ and ‘atoms,’ but also in the mechanizing of the homunculus as the robot and the absolute as the outcome of a device called a ‘karburator,’ and – even more – by subjecting both to capitalist mass-production and its ‘laws.’15 C”apek’s linkage of present-day science with alchemy may anticipate C. S. Lewis’s. Behind Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength and giving them coherence as a trilogy is Lewis’s perception that ‘[t]he serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins,’ that ‘[t]hey were born of the same impulse,’ that ‘[t]here is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages.’16 So, too, the title under which Lewis published those remarks, The Abolition of Man, possibly owes something to

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R.U.R., a succès fou on the London stage when Lewis (eight years C”apek’s junior) was in his twenties. Yet whatever Lewis may have taken from (the implications of) C”apek’s imaginative thinking about alchemy, the two writers are worlds apart in the uses they put it to. Lewis programmatically insists that the objectives of science, at least as popularly understood, are – or rather, remain – black magical. He accordingly stages confrontations with this evil, first on a science-fictional Mars which is somewhat mythologistic, then on a Venus which is decidedly more so. These, in turn, prove to be trial runs for That Hideous Strength’s Armageddon showdown – this on an Earth whose conspiratorial goingson appear as having something unearthly about them well before supernatural powers unmistakably intervene to effect the triumph of the good. C”apek, by contrast, never leaves Earth, literally or figuratively; indeed, the locale of his fictions, in so far as it be determinable, far more often than not is somewhere in Czechoslovakia – in itself an indicator of their preoccupation not just with the this-worldly, but frequently, in part, with the journalistic here-and-now, and in any case with the phenomenal rather than the numinous (including the phenomena of Czech language use). This is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that the fictions comprising his first trilogy – and his subsequent rewrites of those – all qualify by Wells’s criterion as fantasies more than as science fiction inasmuch as they all hinge upon some imaginary innovation whose express rationale, if C”apek supplies any, is sufficiently perfunctory and mysterious to render it magical. They might therefore be expected to share with Lewis’s and those of many another fantasist a concern with the world of noumena and the supernatural, especially as the site of contestation between good and evil (perhaps fantasy’s legacy from the fairy tale). In C”apek’s fictions, however, the unexplained is almost never the rationally inexplicable. Typically, it is a fictifactual given that a full scientific account of the seemingly magical element – indeed, a formula – exists or used to exist, but is or has been made unavailable because someone destroyed or lost the only document containing its secret. This relativity, moreover, extends from the epistemological to the moral realm. In so far as C”apek’s fictions invite the kind of black-or-white ethical judgments which Lewis calls upon us to make, they do so only to refuse them, to deny their absolutistic validity. C”apek himself gave currency to some such relativistic interpretation of his work. Of R.U.R., for example, he wrote: Domin … proves that techn[olog]ical progress emancipates man from hard manual labour, and he is quite right. The Tolstoyan Alquist, on the contrary, believes that technical progress demoralizes him, and I think he is right, too. Bussman [sic] thinks that industrialism alone

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This account does justice to one of the respects in which the play is characteristic of C”apek generally: that R.U.R. gives voice (strictly speaking) to any number of diverse, and oftentimes conflicting, points of view which as beliefs are a matter of de gustibus non est disputandum – i.e., come down to a difference of opinion about how to prepare sauerkraut (according to C”apek’s literalizing of the Latin adage at the end of The Absolute). By the same token, however, C”apek’s above-quoted rendition of R.U.R.’s meaning would have been more faithful to it had he substituted ‘wrong’ for ‘right.’ The play’s driving impulse, after all – and in this his fictions mutually differ only in degree – is satiric. Or, to borrow a metaphor from Adam the Creator (Adam stvor“itel, 1927) in order to be more precise, C”apek habitually turns a ‘Cannon of Negation’ against a host of standpoints (in R.U.R., even Alquist’s, whose position this tragi-comedy most takes to its heart but in the end reveals as having the impotence that has disabled all the rest). The pluralism which his fictions give expression to is thus a democracy of error: in venting a multitude of opinions, they reflect and accommodate – indeed, cater to – the contradictory inclinations of their readers or auditor-viewers; but in so far as they privilege none of these, their basis for doing so is that all are equally mistaken, and for reasons which, though fundamentally epistemic, have moral or axiological concomitants. C”apek thereby qualifies relativism in its usual acceptation. It is true that his fictions, beyond normally allowing (for) just about whatever construction a reader may be predisposed to put on them, owe their very texture to their inscribing as much. But it is equally true that the tolerance for ideological diversity which they thus exhibit does not necessarily amount to endorsement – individually or in the aggregate – of the positions they expressly articulate. Indeed, their approval of any one of these is, at most, momentary, and hence contingent on an understanding which is partial, also in a sense not synonymous with ‘partisan’ – requiring as it does a reading which is at once fragmentary and fragmentational. Meanwhile, however, each fiction in its entirety contains its Czechoslovakia of cacophonous opinions, so to speak: in and by a structure which enforces a certain meaning not wholly congruent (if at all) with any of them. C”apek himself in effect makes a similar point at the moment in An Ordinary Life when Popel gets a visit from a student who is doing a dissertation on the Czech poetry that Popel and others published in their

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own days at university. Focusing on one particular poem of Popel’s, a ‘phantasy’ envisioning the tropics, the student tells him: ‘It’s like a dangerous game, that regular form, and that hell inside. In fact, there’s a conflict there, a terrible inner tension…. That phantasy would like to escape, but instead it’s pressed into something so regular and enclosed’ (23:415). This account may be taken as C”apek’s recognition that the relativism which he relativizes by formally containing it persists as an ‘inner tension’ between the discordant views that his fictions voice and the means of their containment. Relativism also reappears, however, through the variety of formal structures that he has recourse to. All of these have a dualism, if not a bipolarity, about them that bespeaks his essential ambivalence. But each member of his first trilogy has a model pretty much peculiar to itself, and so do his rewrites of the three. The duality which in Makropulos lies with its double plot The White Plague (Bílá nemoc, 1937) transfers to its focal personages. The Absolute’s duality is correlative to its more or less literally understood content as that displays two different sets of its title-invention’s effects; Krakatit’s to the two different objects of Prokop’s desire. R.U.R.’s duality emanates from its final shift in direction toward a meaning which may seem diametrically opposite to the one it had hitherto been exploring, whereas Adam the Creator and War with the Newts (Válka s mloky, 1936) recast that shift in terms of the ideological opposition, respectively, between Adam and his Alter Ego and the Salamanders as the Exploited vs. the Salamanders as Nazis.17 By the same token, the resolution which C”apek’s second trilogy arrives at is largely unknown to his first. An Ordinary Life, in its final, selfdeconstructive phase, at once accounts for the apparent antithesis between Hordubal and Meteor and, by means of the distinction between ‘soul’ and ‘selves,’ transcends as well as preserves the/its duality of the one (life) and the many (lives). No such synthesis is available to Makropulos, The Absolute, or R.U.R. The ambivalence which they variously incorporate remains irreducibly dualistic by reason of the modality of its inscription. None the less, all three are rather single-minded in their design of proving the truth, as it were, of the lines from Adam the Creator that I have taken as an epigraph. Or in other words, they all dramatize the undesirable consequences of some alchemical invention initially posited as offering the fulfillment of some utopian-like desire or dream. III. Visions of (Im)mortality Two plotlines more or less cooperate in structurally informing Makropulos. One of these centers on Elina Makropulos’s quest to recover (rather than discover) the Elixir of Life by repossessing the document containing its

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chemical formula. The other involves the case of Gregor vs. Prus whereby Berti Gregor aspires to get title to an estate (Loukov) that belonged to Baron Josef Ferdinand (‘Pepi’) Prus and passed into the hands of the Polish branch of the family upon the baron’s death in 1827. Like the elixir’s formula, this lawsuit is an inheritance: originating with Berti’s great-grandfather, Pepi’s illegitimate son Ferdinand Karel Gregor, it is now just short of its centennial (Makropulos being the only member of its trilogy set in the present relative to its date of composition). So, too, something of the secretiveness attaching to the elixir’s ingredients enters into the lawsuit, which owes its life not just to the Baron’s final utterance (‘MacGregor’), but even more to the parochial – and ironic – misunderstanding which reveals it to be cryptic for engendering a search for some non-existent Gregor surnamed Mach. The common noun in the Czech title (ve“c) has a polysemy that covers both plots. (‘Secret’ is evidently a contextual rendering of a word which could likewise be Englished as ‘case’ and which normally is the equivalent of ‘business’ or ‘affair.’) The two also come together through Elina, who dispels the mystery of the Baron’s testamentary intent in the process of clearing up the one attending her own identity as Emilia Marty. Yet, apparently by design as well as in effect, C”apek brings the two plots together only to disconnect them logically. Their dissociation, moreover, is doubled. Elina intervenes in the lawsuit on Gregor’s behalf so that she can repossess the papers containing the Makropulos formula. But while her evidence leaves no doubt as to Gregor’s moral right to the estate in question, the documents she provides (including Pepi’s will) are, at best, legally worthless in themselves (as she herself admits in so many words: II.143). Their legal value is contingent on proof that the person whose birth certificate lists his paternal name as ‘Makropulos’ is in fact Pepi’s bastard son; and the value of her verbal testimony on that point depends upon her convincing a court of what she gets the participants in the final scene’s mock trial to believe: that she really is 337 years old. And in any event, the final court of appeal is presently deliberating on the case of Gregor vs. Prus; indeed, it is likely to have already reached its unalterable decision (in Prus’s favor). Meanwhile, the papers she is seeking come back into her hands, not by consequence of her scheme for retrieving them – of Berti’s getting title to Loukov – but as a gift from Jaroslav Prus, the estate’s present owner, probably in return for her sexual favors. The significant connection between the two plots remains somewhat tenuous as well. It might be supposed that a lawsuit which has been dragging through the legal system for three generations would be carrying the same meaning as Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53). But the suit now reaching or already at its end in Makropulos appears as being

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of limited duration compared with the amount of time that Elina has been around. Their meaningful resemblance would therefore seem to lie not with longevity, but in their common futility or pointlessness. That is consistent, at least, with what Makropulos otherwise has to say about the Elixir of Life – chiefly (though not solely) through Elina as its representative. She is in most respects no Swiftian Struldbrugg: she can pass as being thirtysomething (I.114), or 300 years younger than she actually is, and her faculties are still fully intact (except when she has drunk herself into a stupor). But otherwise her longevity has brought her little more than the kind of firsthand information that would confirm her verdict that ‘[y]ou can’t learn anything from history’ (III.ii.164) – the knowledge, for instance, that Marat had ‘sweaty hands’ and Danton rotten teeth (II.136). In return, it has bereaved her (as it does the Struldbruggs) of any passionate interest in life, something that she lost centuries ago. Others sense this. Jaroslav Prus, reflecting on their sexual encounter, finds her ‘Cold as ice. Like holding a corpse’ (III.i.148); and Berti observes, ‘You sound bored when you’re singing…. You’re ice-cold when you sing’ (II.134). She herself says much the same thing, even resorting to the word boredom to describe what she has felt – or rather, cannot feel – ever since her ‘soul die[d]’ at age 100 or 130 (III.ii.173); whereupon she adds, ‘No language on earth has a name for’ her sense that ‘[e]verything is so pointless, so empty, so meaningless…. [Y]ou are only things … or shadows’ (ibid.; last ellipsis in original). C”apek has her voice similar sentiments repeatedly. After telling the girlfriend of Jaroslav’s son that sex ‘isn’t worth it’ and being asked ‘What is worth it?,’ Elina replies ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing’ (II.137). In a subsequent elaboration – responsive to the compliment that her singing ‘move[s] [people] to higher and better things,’ but in spirit a monologue – she declares for the benefit of all and sundry gathered together for her ‘trial’: People are never better. Nothing can ever be changed. Nothing, nothing, nothing ever really matters. If at this moment there were to be a shooting or an earthquake or the end of the world or whatever, still nothing would matter. Even I do not matter. (III.ii.174; punctuation slightly altered in the interests of clarity) So, too, her words here resemble certain of her other sentiments in that they are self-validating. Her mention of ‘a shooting,’ that is, confirms the truth of what she is saying (at least in relation to herself) for the very reason of its being ill-chosen: because it is still news that Janek Prus has blown his brains out for desperate love of her (as she knows as well as his father does). This endues her remark with something of the nature of performative utterance, as is also the case with her expressions of indiffer-

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ence even to(ward) her blood-relatives – e.g., ‘I never bothered much with my bastards’ (III.ii.162), meaning any of the twenty children she reckons she has given birth to. Then again, her further response, aimed at Berti, as to why she didn’t tell Ferdinand Gregor, her son, that his father had left a will – ‘I [n]ever gave a damn about your stupid lawsuit. I couldn’t care less that you are mine…. I wanted to get that formula’ (III.ii.163) – meets with no contradiction from what she has said to Berti Gregor from the start (see I.126). Or from anything else in the play. Indeed, C”apek confirms her ‘truth’ by having her fall asleep while Berti Gregor is protesting his love for her (II.146). Even the fictifact that she has led a cosmopolitan existence as a singer under a host of aliases – Ellian MacGregor, Ekaterina Myshkina, Eugenia Montez, Elsa Mueller, and currently Emilia Marty – fits in with her self-characterization inasmuch as all of these names in the aggregate bespeak variety without difference (according to Hegel’s distinction)18 – indeed, do so redundantly, inasmuch as the constancy or sameness of her profession and the initials of the names she goes by are each independently expressive of it. It is true, of course, that C”apek allows expression to alternative views of what the elixir might mean for humanity: those of Prus senior and Vitek, the assistant to Berti’s lawyer. Vitek, a student of the French Revolution and an admirer, particularly, of Danton, sees ‘300 years of life’ for ‘everybody’ as holding the prospect of ‘a hundred years to work and be useful, then a[nother] hundred … to be wise and understanding, to rule, to teach and to give example!,’ so that ‘[t]here would be no wars, no more of that dreadful hunt for bread, no fear, no selfishness’ (III.ii.169). Jaroslav likewise regards the elixir as instrumental to a utopian realization, but his dream is only ‘for the strong’: for an ‘aristocracy,’ ‘a dynasty,’ of ‘ten or twenty thousand supermen,’ ‘superhuman brains’ with ‘supernormal powers’ (III.ii.170–71). Both of these schemes for the elixir, however, are epiphenomenal to the import of the play, wherein they enjoy but a momentary existence.19 C”apek in fact contrives to have Elina/Emilia immediately contradict, and thereby erase and supersede, them. Her contradiction of Prus and Vitek is no mere ipse dixit, not just because she is speaking from firsthand experience, but also for a more compelling reason: that what she says about the elixir’s purely negative effects has the same status, and therefore must be accorded the same validity, as her previous evidence on the subject of the elixir – i.e., the very evidence on which Vitek’s and Prus’s dreams are predicated. Beyond that, and independent of its fictifactual status, her testimony also constitutes a logical argument: complementing and tending to confirm her assertions about the elixir’s ill effects is the perception, hardly unique to her or requiring her extraordinary lifespan, that

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‘love, greatness, purpose,’ and ‘meaning’ – all the things which make life matter, if not ‘easy … to live’ – are contingent on a self-consciousness of mortality’s imminence.20 Not only does her sentence, ‘For you, everything has meaning[,] … everything has value because [of] … the few years you are here’ (III.ii.174), meet with tacit assent from the fictive referents of her ‘you’; her position on the elixir also receives approval from the play’s ending, wherein Vitek’s teenage daughter carries out, quite unopposed, her decision to burn the only copy of the Makropulos formula (after which Elina laughs). C”apek continues to level his Cannon of Negation against some putatively utopian possibility in his re-vision of Makropulos as The White Plague (1937).21 But inasmuch as the same can be said for the other members of his first trilogy and his rewrites of those, it is no basis for concluding that The White Plague is a spinoff from that tragi-comedy. Nor can their connection be taken for granted. Indeed, to observe that nothing about the later drama instantly brings to mind C”apek’s previous critique of the hopes invested in the Elixir of Life is something of an understatement. Yet despite the absence of obvious similarities, the two plays have enough in common to warrant at least the possibility that the one recasts the other, albeit radically. The distance between them begins to diminish with the realization that both are profoundly preoccupied with death. In The White Plague death attaches itself both to the central ‘invention’ which the title refers to, a mysterious disease leprosy-like in appearance but almost invariably fatal, and to the man-made scourge with which C”apek pairs it: war. But death is equally prominent in Makropulos, always as the paradoxical associate of the woman personifying the Elixir of Life.22 It figures in Elina’s express wish to die as well as in her philosophic view of mortality and immortality, which as already presented, largely in her words, comes down to the proposition that life is a function of death (as Zamyatin’s D-503 might have said – in fact, almost does say – employing ‘function’ in its mathematical sense).23 So too, death appears extraverbally as a stage-prop: as the skull that Berti’s lawyer insists be displayed at Elina’s ‘trial.’ (According to his behest, ‘it doesn’t matter’ whether the skull be ‘[m]an[’s] or beast[’s]. As long as it represents death’ [III.ii.159].) And perhaps above all, death enters essentially into the (sardonic) ‘happy ending,’ not just of the plot centering upon the elixir but, more significantly, of the one involving Gregor vs. Prus. Despite the certainty that the suit will have an outcome unfavorable to Berti, he will still get possession of Loukov, which Jaroslav Prus is willing to resign to him now that he himself has no direct heir.24 This plot-resolution thus appears as the immediate consequence of Janek Prus’s suicide.

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The fact that Elina has inspired Janek to kill himself doubtlessly redounds to the (further) discredit of the elixir’s would-be utopian possibilities. And the same can be said for another datum: that death may ensue from imbibing the elixir. Pepi could have testified to the likelihood of that adverse effect had he not died instantly from the potion, which thus gave rise to the (legal) conflict which Elina, as the elixir’s personification, contributes to resolving. This is not to say that she deliberately drives Janek to suicide; but his death – and Pepi’s, for that matter – is collateral to her intent to play the femme fatale, a role which she, more than any other of the many such women in C”apek, quite apparently lives up to in the literal meaning of the term fatale. All of this enters into Makropulos’s point of connection with The White Plague. Both of the evils which the latter deals in – pestilence and war – have the effect of resolving inter-generational conflict, or the question of inheritance, and pretty much in the way that Janek’s suicide does (and also without directly purposing to do so). Otherwise, however, C”apek pits the two scourges against one another, staging their opposition chiefly as a contest of wills between Dr. Galen and the Marshal. The latter is a dictator determined to take his anonymous country to war for the sake of Lebensraum. Galen is equally determined to prevent him. He has found a cure for the title-featured plague; but he will withhold it from all save the poor and down and out until the Marshals of the world quit their present course and instead pursue peace. Just as Galen’s objective in what amounts to blackmail coincides with part of Vitek’s dream for the elixir, so the means for achieving it, a formulaic cure for death known only to Galen, is – and with his demise, remains – as much a secret as the Makropulos formula. These, however, are relatively superficial similiarities between the two dramas. Their profound spiritual kinship resides with what C”apek makes of their central ‘inventions’ as that emerges by way of their title-promises. The science-fictional designate of nemoc (whose English equivalent may be ‘sickness,’ ‘disease,’ or ‘pestilence’ as well as ‘plague’ or ‘scourge’) suggests that The White Plague will horrifically dramatize death’s dominion, perhaps in a fashion anticipatory of Albert Camus’s La Peste (1947) in its take on Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Nor does C”apek completely disappoint that expectation: the play’s ending, in particular, is intellectually and emotionally frightening enough to satisfy it. Meanwhile, however, The White Plague is destined otherwise (at least from Galen’s, its morally approved point of view): toward the preserving of life. In the process, and by virtue of that intention, it would do what Makropulos does with its alchemical premise and the equally misleading hopes about the prolonging of life which that holds: it would wrest from death a moral significance or purpose.

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In this, Makropulos, depending almost exclusively on Elina, is largely successful (as we have seen). The White Plague, by contrast, largely fails in the end, at least with regard to the moral purpose which Galen would put death to. But it does not fail for want of trying (any more than Galen does). From its outset, the information it gives about the disease whose medical name (after its discoverer) is Morbus Chengi is inflected toward some question of moral intent or purpose. As phrased in the opening scene’s exchange among three ‘Lepers,’ the question takes the form of ‘Why is this happening?’ Tacitly agreeing that the issue pertains to ‘the world’ rather to each of them individually, they abandon the idea of ‘God’s punishment’ (I.i.11) in favor of the proposal that they ‘have got to be killed off to make room for others’ on account of there being ‘too many people in the world’ (I.i.12). The leper who articulates this then tells one of his fellows, a baker, that he ‘has got to die to make room for some other baker’ (ibid.) – an application which does not merely illustrate and clarify the proposition but also modifies it, taking it in the direction of Act 1, scene 3. The latter moves toward a double confrontation: of father with daughter and father with son (all of which personages are otherwise anonymous, and hence typical). Having been clued in (by his wife) about what newspapers are reporting, the father, too, wonders why, especially with respect to the information that Morbus Chengi, now pandemic, afflicts only those aged forty-five or older. In stating his why? aloud, he probably is not looking for someone’s else’s answer; but his words none the less distract the daughter from her current distraction (of reading some unnamed novel) long enough for her to impart her view: that ‘something’s got to happen to make room for people of … [my] age’ because ‘[t]here aren’t enough jobs to go around’ (29). The son then puts in an appearance, not just to endorse the same sentiments – and with a vengeance – but also to extend them from the literal plague to war (‘I may not get a job … unless there’s a war pretty soon’ [30]). While all of these views import into the play the economic reality of its 1930s’ context, the son’s alone expressly interconnects the two scourges.25 But even as he serves to supply the analogical basis for Galen’s subsequent linkage of them, he also misrepresents an opposition as a redundancy. Like war, the literal plague does offer a solution to the unemployment problem; but inasmuch as the latter figures as a particular aspect of generational conflict, the highly contagious and lethal disease – ‘really an internal’ affliction though outwardly resembling leprosy (I.i.15) – countervails rather than duplicates the force of war. Killing off the middle-aged and elderly, the White Plague in effect targets those responsible for the decision to go to war while exempting the age-group which war itself decimates (according to the more-than-ample demonstration of 1914–18).

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This opposition the play stages mainly as Galen vs. the Marshal. For that reason, the decision to have the same actor (Oscar Homolka) play both roles in the original English production of the play is questionable. But beyond that, it may also seem outrageous, considering that C”apek has clearly modeled the Marshal on Il Duce and the Führer with regard to both the species of nationalism he espouses and his conception of himself as leader. Yet even though the text itself precludes that doubling (by reason of the scene wherein Galen and the Marshal confront one another face-to-face [II.vi]), it is not totally indefensible. Whether from ignorance on C”apek’s part or (more likely) for politic considerations, the Marshal reflects little of Hitler’s or Mussolini’s personal brutality; and while leaving no doubt that C”apek deplores his bellicose propensities, the play does pair the Marshal with Galen: as men of principle whose fates The White Plague’s plot inextricably binds together.26 It is true that the Marshal does not quite come up to Galen: that after contracting the plague himself, he finally concedes defeat, by agreeing to call off the war he has started (which is going disastrously anyway) in return for Galen’s cure. On the other hand, the play sharply differentiates the Marshal from his munitions manufacturer, Baron Krug (who disguises himself as a beggar in an attempt to get Galen to heal him [II.iv]), and even more from the head of a laboratory where Galen tests his secret antidote, Professor Sigelius (who is so far from having any principles whatsoever – he is motivated only by a drive for self-promotion – that he makes Krug look like an unimpeachably scrupulous fellow). Besides which, the Marshal’s position proves victorious, albeit at the price of his life; for as the curtain falls, the doctor he is waiting for at the end of the penultimate scene has just been pummeled and kicked to death by a hysterically pro-war mob cheering for the Marshal. The White Plague has a single informing plot; but it differs from Makropulos also in not being single-minded. On the one hand, it essentially stands behind Galen’s scheme for setting pestilence against war. On the other, it finally repudiates its longheld belief, so to speak, that he ‘can work magic’ (I.i.25) against the power(s) of death. In bringing him to a personally apocalyptic end, it dramatizes the operative import of the (nick)name that Sigelius’s predecessor (and father-in-law) had bestowed on Galen: De“tina (the Czech equivalent of ingenu). Yet this realism of acknowledging Galen’s political naïveté is itself double-sided in so far as it dictates the presentation of the violence. The fact that the doctor is murdered on stage, not off, in other words, makes for an anti-cathartic ending, in which may be seen the hope that Makropulos merely philosophizes about: that death have some value.

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IV. ‘The Absolute’ Unbound This ambivalence, perhaps the character-trait of C”apek as a writer (notwithstanding its all-but-total absence from Makropulos), is not nearly as marked in The White Plague as it is in The Absolute at Large (or Factory for the Absolute, a more exact rendering of the Czech title). There it appears primarily as the concomitant of a two-phased fictive history of the ‘Karburator,’ these phases being correlative to the two different sets of consequences emanating from that invention. The story of how this Karburator came to be distinctly recalls the opening chapters of The Time Machine (1894/95). Its inventor, Dr. Marek, ‘constructed [his] Perfect Karburator only in theory to begin with. Then [he] made … little model[s],’ succeeding in his fourth attempt in producing one that ‘really worked’ (4:26). And finally he put together a full-scale machine, which is still operating in his cellar as of (and also somewhat beyond) the moment The Absolute opens on (New Year’s Day 1943, the near future relative to the book’s original publication date). As Marek expounds it (and here, at least, he is identifiable with C”apek as author-inventor), the theory which gives rise to the Karburator lacks scientific particularity. The basic idea, that ‘a colossal amount of energy is contained in atoms’ (3:20), by itself admittedly sounds Einsteinian. Yet in Marek’s (and The Absolute’s) understanding of it, the proposition is rather more backward-looking than up-to-date – appropriately enough, considering that his Karburator is essentially a mechanical version of the Philosopher’s Stone, especially by reason of their common dependence on the discovery of the universal principle of matter. Marek’s cognitive recidivism emerges from his stated conception of how to go about exploiting matter’s potential energy. Bridging the gap between his pure theory and the practical application of it is for him a question of ‘only … know[ing] how to secure total combustion!’ (4:26); and to his mind the answer to that engineering problem lies with a coal-furnace model. He therefore does not appear entirely miscast as the Karburator’s metaphysician as well as its inventor – a role that he in effect assumes in another phrasing of his theory and what it may generate. According to this version, ‘all matter contains the Absolute in some state of confinement,’ so that it ‘is really Matter plus Absolute’; if, therefore, you ‘destroy a piece of matter,’ ‘you’re left with an indestructible[,] … chemically unanalysable, immaterial residue’: ‘what is left behind is pure God’ (3:23). The words just quoted come from a chapter headed ‘Pantheism’; the others from ‘God in the Cellar.’ In that connection, the metaphysics of the Karburator suggests, rightly, that The Absolute’s fundamental fiction literalizes the meaning of deus ex machina. The Karburator which in itself at first appears to be merely a super-efficient generator of energy ‘hurls God

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as a by-product into the world’ (4:30). Still, the satiric purposes which C”apek has in mind for this machina require someone who will be for Marek what R.U.R.’s managers are to the Rossums: someone to give the Karburator to the world. As it happens, such a person is already at hand. The theoretical explanations which Marek offers come by way of his conversation with a prospective buyer, G. H. Bondy, the CEO of MEC (the Metallo-Electric Company). Furthermore, Bondy is ideally positioned to mass-produce the invention and secure it distribution worldwide – this thanks to MEC’s vertical monopoly in coal, iron, and boiler-making. What ensues from Bondy’s enterprise is not entirely predictable. The deus-ex-machina impact of the Karburator is to inspire anyone in the vicinity of the device not just with religion, but with a kind of spiritual ecstasy. People find themselves capable of ‘levitations, prophecies, miracle-working, visions, supernatural cures, sanctification, love for their neighbours,’ and other powers ‘equally unnatural’ (14:117; see also 17:140). The Karburator in its effect(s) is thus comparable to LTN and that psychotropic drug’s cognate ‘benigmizers’ in Lem’s Futurological Congress (1971). Everyone – including Bondy, eventually – becomes possessed by the presence of divinity emanating from the machine and, with that, by an uncontrollable impulse to repudiate this-worldliness, to give away their wealth and otherwise contemn material things. Meanwhile, those very things for which the Karburators, as a byproduct, infuse human beings with contempt are what they themselves are devoted to producing. This (Rossum) robot-like vocation they owe to their ‘innate intelligence’ (14:114), and hence to a will of their own, as it were – both of these by way of the Absolute which they ‘liberate.’ ‘[F]reed of the fetters of matter,’ the intrinsically ‘creative’ Absolute ‘bec[o]me[s] Working Energy’ (14:112) and assumes control over the financial as well as the industrial world. Acting through its Karburators, the Absolute runs banks and factories alike (10:80–81). It takes ‘possession of the iron works, the rolling mills, the foundries,’ ‘the sawmills, … rubber works, sugar-mills, chemical works,’ etc., etc. (14:118), operating all of them according to a single principle which allows ‘quantitative expression for its own infinitude: over-production’ (14:119). Thus, for example, ‘install[ing] a Perfect Karburator’ in a tack factory exponentially increases productive efficiency, the result of which miracle is ‘mountains of tacks’ (14:117), immeasurably beyond the need for such and rendered totally useless by the Absolute’s ignorance of any distribution system. Initially The Absolute raises the expectation that the point of the Karburator is to demonstrate, as it were, the truth of Swift’s sentence about ‘real’ (as distinguishable from ‘nominal’) Christianity’s being ‘utterly inconsistent

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with our present Schemes of Wealth and Power.’ In the event, however, the fiction entertains Swift’s sardonicism only momentarily. It soon becomes apparent that the Karburators, in this phase of C”apek’s satire, are destined to serve something of the meaningful purpose that R.U.R.’s robots bear vis-à-vis Domin’s dream of freeing humankind from drudgery. Marek, in fact, promises as much early on, in the course of explaining his invention to Bondy: ‘my Karburator is a terrific thing. It will cheapen production to an unbelievable extent. It will do away with poverty and hunger’; and by the same token, ‘[i]t will overturn the whole world, mechanically and socially’ (4:30). The Absolute’s take on this is not instantly clear; but by the end of the chapter (14) headed ‘The Land of Plenty,’ any ambiguity has given way to an understanding congruent with Bondy’s four chapters back: when, from the perception that the Absolute ‘can’t be stopped now,’ he concludes that this ‘means the end of the world’ (10:79). Furthermore, the Absolute surely emerges as a Bad Thing independent of the analogy that Bondy’s words establish between its vehicle, the Karburators, and Rossum’s robots as they figure in R.U.R.’s ‘Last Man’ scenario. What the Absolute has ‘realized’ at the expense of destroying the status quo ante is, after all, a Utopia of Overabundance, or mechanized Cockaigne, whose particulars unmistakably represent the Absolute as a sorcerer’s apprentice. This phase of the satire, in short, C”apek designs chiefly to demonstrate that ‘[e]xcess is chaos’ (14:111), also meaning anarchy. Largely unaffected by this critique of the Absolute’s utopian possibilities is the access of charity that comes with ‘God Himself … descending on Earth’ (6:51, repeated almost verbatim in 11:89). That impact of the Absolute is the subject of the next phase of its fictive history, wherein the deus ex machina loses its universal, or undifferentiated, character and appears instead as the basis of sectarianism. This is foreseen in the chapter given over to Doctor Blahous and his dream of promoting himself as a comparative religion specialist with an article on the Absolute from that professional standpoint. Quite apart from its pedantry, what he comes up with is out of all proportion to the publication venue that he has in mind (though a cutdown version, no doubt greatly retrenched, does find its way into a newspaper, as Blahous intended that it should). Blahous’s disquisition thus proves to be but another of the Absolute’s excesses, as it were. For all its intellectual chaos, however, one sentence in it stands out as being prophetic (in retrospect, if not immediately): ‘It is possible that the present religious wave will divide into several streams, each striving for supremacy to the disadvantage of the others’ (12:101). Blahous, that is, stumbles onto the idea governing phase two of the Absolute’s history. The Absolute in this phase recapitulates the Wars of Religion and Nationalism – the one in general terms, the other with particular reference to

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Napoleon. This requires that the spirit of charity become the foundation for sectarian conflict. Exactly how that comes about remains somewhat uncertain, and therefore somewhat miraculous. And a parallel uncertainty attaches to the date of the Absolute’s transformation. We know for sure that the initiatory skirmishes take place on February 12 and that the first real bloodbath occurs on Valentine’s Day; but inasmuch as the year is withheld, how far these developments are, temporally, from the fiction’s starting point is a matter of guesswork whose only parameters are a terminus a quo of January 1, 1943 and the information that the sectarian violence has pretty much annihilated itself, so to speak, by the autumn of 1953. One dispassionate perspective on all of this comes from a chapter doubly positioned to offer it: by virtue of its being set on a Pacific island and featuring outcasts from the murderous goings-on in the rest of the world. Its (doubly) detached view of the latter events appears in the responses of the ubiquitous Mr. Bondy to a ship captain’s interrogations as to ‘what they are squabbling about over there.’ Bondy explains that people have been killing each other ‘[o]nly about the truth. The absolute truth … [which] every nation [and every religion] insists that it [alone] has’ – ‘a sort of human passion’ (27:219). C”apek, however, does not let The Absolute end with Bondy’s hypothesis of a natural propensity for ideological aggression. He instead brings the book to a close on a figurative island, Seven Cottages, a village remote from and untouched by the wars over absolute truth and one metonymically related to the place where ‘the last battle’ in those wars occurs (some place whose name leaves its geographical location open [see 29:232–34]).28 Seven Cottages does not decisively dramatize the human instinct to cooperate; but its natives do come to the verbal agreement that ‘[e]very religion and every truth has something good in it’ (30:241); and they also seem willing to subscribe to the moral imperative which perhaps is a logical consequence of such toleration: that ‘[p]eople should first of all believe in other people’ (30:240). Even here, however, there is a discordant residue of the ‘human Passion’ which Bondy speaks of; for Seven Cottages’ magnanimity does not extend to the countenancing of Karburator worship (see 30:241–42). The Absolute’s connection to Krakatit (1924) is obvious enough to be indisputable. The mysterious chemical concoction from which the latter takes its name is in essence a derivative of the same universal law on which the Karburator is founded. The only apparent difference between the Karburator and Krakatit(e)29 as inventions for liberating matter’s energy resides with the (ficti)fact that the latter is extraordinarily explosive, a kind of atom bomb; and accordingly its inherent destructiveness is self-evident. This, moreover, is what the theory behind it would

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dictate, at least as Prokop, its discoverer, propounds it: ‘E-e-everything is disintegrating…. Matter is fragile. But I can make it disintegrate all at once, Bang!… Into smithereens. Into molecules. Into atoms. And I’ve also broken up atoms’ (3:18). Yet while sharing The Absolute’s theory of matter and energy and its applied destination of destroying the world, Krakatit is otherwise as radical a recasting of its predecessor as The White Plague is of Makropulos. The Absolute remains true to its feuilleton origin. Overall its satiric content can be parceled out into two (overlapping) phases; but this structure is something of an imposition on a veritable farrago that is so prone to fly off on a tangent that the topic of any given installment is unpredictable. Krakatit in that respect is The Absolute’s diametrical opposite: obsessively focused rather than scatterbrained (in the purely descriptive import of those words). Correlatively, it concentrates for the most part on Prokop as an individual – and more narrowly still, on his obsession(s) – rather than offering a global social panorama. What C”apek does with Krakatite thus has as much in common with his treatment of the Karburator as Dr. Strangelove (1963) does with Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–74).30 Krakatit, of course, does not entirely foresee Dr. Strangelove. Indeed, C”apek’s atom bomb, a secret purely chemical compound detonatable by means of radio (or ‘Hertzian’) waves (3:25), is so far from the actual nuclear weapons which Strangelove relies on that it appears naïve even by the standard of the comparable devices described in H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free (1914) and Robert Cromie’s The Crack of Doom (1895).31 So, too, the employment of Krakatite for world-destruction is as incidental as it is abortive. Not only does this appear primarily as the project of anarchists (who thereby destroy themselves) which Prokop himself wants no part in; it also has nothing to do with Krakatit’s ending, which is personally apocalyptic (i.e., revelatory) rather than cataclysmic. None the less, the grounds for seeing Krakatit as Strangelove’s precursor (at least in the Borgesian sense) lie precisely with its being seemingly off point: with its insistence on occupying itself with something other than Krakatite – namely, with Prokop’s love life. That, as C”apek represents it, turns out to be as obsessional as the fascination with explosives with which it is twinned; and in consequence Prokop distinctly emerges as having enough of the (unconscious) mentality of Stanley Kubrick’s General Jack D. Ripper to qualify as an ancestor. Krakatit’s initial and initiatory datum is that Prokop, like Elina Makropulos, seeks to recover the formula for a chemical invention; and in this case that entails locating the supposed friend of his who made off with his notes while he was still comatose and delirious from the effects of an experimental test. But he is soon and often sidetracked from that quest as

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a result of another mission which at first promises to be congruent with it: to deliver a letter from an anonymous visitor to the selfsame ‘friend,’ her (erstwhile) lover. His efforts to realize either objective prove dilatory. In fact, Prokop – and with him, Krakatit – presently loses sight of those twin purposes and continues to forget them for long stretches of time, during which he is instead fixated first on Anni Thomas, then on Minna Wille. Each of these women has some quality which makes her intrinsically inaccessible to Prokop. Anni, the sister of the man who has made off with his secret, is redundantly epitomized as ‘a white virgin’ (83); the Amazonian Minna is Princess Wille, and therefore socially beyond him. Nevertheless, he succeeds in inspiring them with love for him – with passionate love, never quite consummated but going to the very verge of sexual arousal.32 C”apek thereby relates sexual desire to the potential explosiveness of matter, with Prokop as their nexus. Though not at all prepossessing by virtue of his looks (as the Princess confirms when she tells him that he’s ‘the most beautiful horrible man that ever had a big nose’ [33:249]), he is somehow able to get two improbable female candidates (and three women in all)33 to libinally invest in him. And so heavily that he in effect appropriates the will even of the Princess who personifies that (as her name indicates): she risks her status, if not her life, contriving his escape from a military-industrial complex (‘Balttin’) wherein he has been long confined (though ‘left free to work or amuse himself as he wished’ [27:199]). How he manages to fascinate women is kept as mysterious or magical as the formula for Krakatite. It is clear, however, that his power over them is analogous to his power over atoms. He can magically tap the former’s potential explosiveness, so to speak, in the same way that he can ‘convert’ all sorts of ‘materials’ ‘into explosives’ like Krakatite (38:284), even face powder (see 29:217ff.): because he ‘feels the vibrations of [their] atoms’ (2:14). By the same token, Prokop is not Jack D. Ripper: powerful explosives do not compensate for sexual impotence in Prokop’s case. But there is still enough of a resemblance for Dr. Strangelove’s point about Ripper to be foreseeable from Krakatit, especially in view of Prokop’s refusal to consummate his sexually charged relationships with Anni and Minna as that parallels his elective impotence with regard to Krakatite. It is possible, perhaps likely, that C”apek himself is not entirely privy to the contents of Krakatit’s psychological (or political) unconscious.34 But for sure the analogy that brings together Prokop’s twin fixations is the product of his author’s (conscious) intention. The choice of ‘Prokop,’ deriving as it does from the Czech counterpart of the verb tunnel, indicates as much even without its conjunction to an explosive mixture named after a recently active volcano.35 The plot, too, implies the libidinous fusion of Krakatite with Anni and Minna, their identity being confirmed by an

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ending wherein Prokop, under the influence of a seemingly otherworldly (grand)father figure, decisively relinquishes all desire to repossess his formula or the women who have had substantial presence for him.36 What most points to an import of the psychological – even Freudian – kind, however, is the confusion of fantasy and ‘real’ life in the narrative as such. It is something of a critical commonplace to apprehend the omniscient ‘Grandfather’ who materializes out of nowhere to set Prokop straight as a supernatural presence who doesn’t belong in this book. Yet he is no more discordant with Krakatit’s tenor than is the leader of the anarchists, Comrade Daimon (formerly Monsieur d’Hémon), whose very name identifies him as the ‘Grandfather’s’ diabolical counterpart. Both are in kind phantasmatic; and both, for that very reason (and despite their being unheimlich in the sense Freud imparts to that word), are at home in a fiction which compromises the distinction between fantasy and reality almost from the outset. At the start, Krakatit raises the expectation that it will abide by the standards of literary realism, or perhaps even those of its naturalistic variant, in its account of Prokop’s adventures, at least to this extent: that it will differentiate what objectively happens from its protagonist’s imaginings. And up to a point, it seemingly makes good on this promise, particularly as it provides clear markers as to where Prokop’s dreams or hallucinations end and his waking life resumes. But from the moment he enters Balttin, the element of dream-fantasy insistently infiltrates his sense-perceived world. In retrospect, this process has been latently operating from the outset and is already manifest in the interlude with Anni. Morover, Krakatit’s conclusion takes cognizance of that inasmuch as Princess Wille’s ‘Zahur,’ in its original appearance a wish-fulfilling dream of hers, now resurfaces independent of her, as one of the historically grounded visions which the Grandfather’s magic camera offers Prokop. Krakatit, then, initially distinguishes reality from fantasy only to confound them, and in a way that looks ahead to Futurological Congress rather more than it looks back, say, to Wells’s History of Mr. Polly (1910).37 Indeed C”apek’s and Lem’s fictions importantly differ in this regard solely in the meaningful use to which they put the collapse of ‘reality’ into the fantasized, Krakatit exploiting it for the purpose(s) of psychic revelation rather than epistemological subversion. The revelation finally entails a new understanding of the Absolute. Prokop, with the psychological help of the benevolent Grandfather, relinquishes his quest for Krakatite and at the same time recognizes that he loves only the mystery woman who visited him in his illness and whom, he now knows, he has been searching for all along. This transference effects a (re)definition of the Absolute in terms reminiscent of Goethe’s

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The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774): as the Unattainable Woman. But Krakatit leaves the issue of this (self)discovery open. On the one hand, the old man who seems to have preternatural knowledge about Prokop tells him her name (Ludmila).38 On the other hand, he becomes silent when Prokop asks, pessimistically, ‘shall I never find her?’ (54:413). Whether Prokop will even go off in conscious pursuit of this Absolute is an open question, given that in the end he is both ‘trembling with love’ and ‘free from all dreams’ (54:416). But what is certain in any event is that Krakatit makes over The Absolute’s absolute truth as the correlative of an individual human subject and, accordingly, as a matter of psychology far more than of sociology. V. Human Contra Robot R.U.R., C”apek’s first treatment of the homunculus project, he designs to have a meaning that is at once psychological and socio-philosophical. The play is arguably the most satisfactory of his science-fictional creations, his own reported dissatisfaction with it notwithstanding39 – and this from the same considerations that render it the most C”apekian of them. It apparently has all of the scatterbrainedness of The Absolute, but this is ultimately contained, if not quite controlled, by a conceptual structure which endues the drama with something of Krakatit’s concentration even as it dramatizes the robots’ essential ambivalence. R.U.R. is fundamentally the outcome of its featured neologism (according to legend, the offhand suggestion of Karel’s brother)40 as that takes over the homunculus idea. Deriving from the Czech verb for ‘drudge,’ ‘Robot’ names the invention central to C”apek’s dramatistic commentary on modern times. But as it also automatically generates the equation of worker with machine, the Robot primarily serves for exploring what it means to be human. Posing this as a two-sided question, R.U.R. has more than a limited and superficial resemblance, en passant, to Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). C”apek allusively credits Moreau only as the source of Old Rossum, an ‘eccentric’ and ‘frightful materialist’ who ‘actually wanted to make people’ (I.39) and accordingly retired to an anonymous island, the future site of R.U.R., to act out his dream of playing God. At the same time, C”apek thereby credits himself with the invention of Young Rossum, so to speak – the engineer who tacitly repudiates his biologist father’s principle of replicating ‘everything … in the human body, right down to the last gland’ (ibid.) and thereby ’reject[s] the human being and create[s] the Robot’ (I.41). But C”apek’s obligation to Moreau may go beyond what this suggests inasmuch as Wells’s fiction also offers itself as R.U.R.’s model by

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reason of its dual(istic) conception of the Beast People, who serve for demonstrating the hypocrisy of civilization up to the moment of their creator’s death, and therafter instead bring home civilization’s fragility. R.U.R. effects its own change in conceptual direction following the Robots’ extermination of humans. The Robots then begin to emerge as the subjects of hope rather than the objects of fear. This reconstruction is foreseen in Helena Glory’s exhortations that the Robots be given souls and in the various discussions pertaining thereto. But the dramatistic realization of her wish in the last act is also sufficiently unforeseeable to warrant acknowledging the rupture as an ‘Epilogue.’41 What that makes of the Robots is not, however, the only surprise that R.U.R. holds. Given a title-featured initialism standing for ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’ and the further information about that enterprise instantly imparted by the contents of the letters which Domin is dictating at the outset, we should suppose that the Robots are going to represent workers as capitalism would ideally construct them and that they will figure as such in a critique of capitalism.42 This indeed turns out to be true, but not the whole truth. R.U.R.’s Last Man scenario certainly appears as a reductio ad absurdum of capitalist ‘logic,’ whose fundamental principle – in accordance with the interests of ‘shareholders’ (III.81) – is that ‘[d]emand controls production’ (III.86).43 This makes the enterprise of manufacturing Robots robotic in a non-tautological sense which has its cognate in the datum that the Robots mindlessly minister to the material needs of humans even after they have exterminated the species.44 By the same token, it puts R.U.R. itself (as the type of capitalist enterprise) beyond human governance and moral responsibility. Hence, even with the advance warning from human sterility that the Robots are winning a Darwinistic struggle, capitalist logic dictates that R.U.R. go on turning them out, making the annihilation of humans inevitable. Yet even as R.U.R. seems conceived as a lengthy version of Lenin’s remark about capitalists being quite willing to sell the rope wherewith to hang them, it sympathizes with R.U.R.’s directors (albeit not as such, but as human beings) in their conflict with the Robots. Furthermore, the latter must be regarded as the antipathetic agents of a Bolshevik rather than a biological revolution so long as R.U.R. be read as a satiric critique of capitalism. This same ambivalence evinces itself locally in the tenor of the Robots as satiric vehicle. They undoubtedly figure, on the one hand, as surrogates for an exploited (and alienated) proletariat and as such reinforce the point of the news about the disemployment problem which they occasion or exacerbate by displacing human workers. On the other hand, once they begin rebelling against those (whom they take to be) responsible for such misery, they carry a meaning decidedly at variance with any Marxist

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understanding of the play. Here R.U.R. instead uses the Robots to ridicule communism, parodying the famous opening line of Marx and Engels’ 1848 Manifesto as the Robots’ Revolution is in prospect (II.76) and in its aftermath contriving for a Soviet-style ‘Central Committee’ of Robots (IV.97) to call on Alquist. Nor is this the only way in which the Robots continually take on new, and not entirely predictable or compatible, meanings. Just as the reported collisions over job-loss militate against identifying Robots with human workers, so Helena’s comedic faux pas of mistaking R.U.R.’s directors for Robots sits uneasily with the human vs. machine opposition, and all the more in view of her complementary error with regard to Sulla.45 Furthermore, the decipherment of the Robots in terms of a machine–human antinomy encounters interference from Alquist, Busman, Domin, Fabry, Gall, and Hallemeier for a reason related to their names. These call attention to the rule that whatever individuality their bearers have is a function of their specific directorial role in R.U.R. At the same time, an alphabetic principle appears to underlie the list of names as just given, with the initials (in a play whose very title is an initialism) covering all the letters from A through F except for C (as in C”apek) and E (as in Ellen, the variant by which he refers to Helena in his Saturday Review piece on R.U.R. as quoted above). The names thus inscribe something like the variety without difference of Elina Makropulos’s aliases, thereby cooperating with those features of plot and dialogue which countenance the impression that all except the most careful Czech readers surely have: that the human characters – the males at least – are as interchangeable as the Robots are (and conversely, that the Robots are as individuated as the humans).46 R.U.R., then, appears to be impossible (at least in the loose or colloquial sense of the word) by any preconceived ideological construction, even those which it seemingly encourages. By any such preconception, the play is profoundly ambiguous, and in a way that opens it to the charge of being mystifying or ideologically obscurantist. Its hostility to the Robots as proletarian revolutionaries runs counter to its Marxist critique of capitalism; but both of those interpretations come to grief vis-à-vis the evidence that the insurrectionaries, under Radius’s leadership, seek to attain over humans the sort of mastery which the name of R.U.R.’s chief manager, Domin, suggests he enjoys as a birthright. This same datum at once lends itself to and compromises the reading of R.U.R. as a technophobic parable, which otherwise meets with momentary resistance from Domin’s dream of ‘do[ing] away with … filthy and dreadful drudgery’ (II.80) and which can hardly sustain itself beyond the demise of Domin, Helena, et alii.47 Meanwhile, such ambiguities as to how R.U.R. is to be interpreted find a patent corollary on a basically fictifactual level with regard to Helena

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Glory’s part in the plot. Her name surely comes from mythology by way of the Edgar Allan Poe poem (‘To Helen – ’) whose concluding line speaks of ‘the glory that was Greece,’ thereby designating this daughter of R.U.R.’s President as intrinsically the carrier of the classical tradition and humanistic values. Fittingly, then, she is the one who calls attention to the historical ignorance which ‘Sulla’ involves as a designation for a female robot. By a species of logical elision with that point of hers, she also foregrounds the sexism behind gender-differentiated robots, the critique of which loses nothing by Domin’s explanation that the manufacture of ‘female Robots’ to function as ‘[w]aitresses, shopgirls, secretaries’ was dictated by ‘what people are used to’ (I.53). On the other hand, R.U.R. distinctly suggests that Helena also lives up to her namesake as Troy’s troublemaker – and to the extent of being rather more like another woman in Greek mythology: Pandora. Without a ‘soul’ somewhat like that which her sentimental humanism calls for, the Robots in all probability would not have rebelled (or so we are led to believe); and in any event she and R.U.R.’s managers would have had something to bargain for their lives with had she not acted on ‘womanly emotion,’ on the impulse of the moment destroying the only copy of the Rossum formula for Robots.48 Again, however, this sexist aspect of the play is far from one-sided. The Rossum manuscript might have proved no more efficacious in negotiations with the Robots than does the bundle of money that Busman absurdly thinks will buy them off. Nor is it clear what responsibility, if any, Helena bears for the Robots’ ‘souls.’ Indeed, in view of their behavioral manifestations, those souls are not exactly her inspiration, and may therefore be owing to a development prior to her arrival on the scene: Dr. Gall’s innovative decision (in his capacity as ‘head of [the] physiology and research divisions’ [I.48]) to ‘mak[e] pain-reactive nerves,’ to ‘introduce suffering…. For industrial reasons’ (I.50). In any case, however, Helena is to be held accountable for her Robot namesake, as it were – i.e., for the positive turn that the Robots take in the Epilogue.49 R.U.R., then, is perpetually taking back previously offered understandings and also repeatedly opening up new ones – by dint of which it has a centrifugality of meaning which may make ‘diffuse’ too charitable a descriptor. But as this very quality also renders the play resistant to interpretative possibilities for which the Robots are no more than a pretext, it does not preclude R.U.R.’s coherence in and on its own terms. Those dictate that the Robot must be the absolute antithesis, or negation, of the human only according to Young Rossum’s theoretical design of ‘chuck[ing] everything’ in ‘the human being’ ‘not directly related to work’ (I.41). This definition of the Robot, however, rather than containing in itself R.U.R.’s final purport, instead constitutes its starting point

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(which is literally, or in fictifact, a stipulation of theory). It serves, that is, as the abstract basis for the play’s concrete interrogation of the conditions, real and ideal, for being human (or for that matter, other than human). Having posited the Robot as being in principle exclusive of and antithetical to the human, R.U.R. goes on to problematize that opposition in the course of investigating it. This it does by primarily concerning itself first with the robotizing of humans, and then with the humanizing of robots.50 The one plays itself out in a Last Man scenario which dramatistically realizes the negation of humanity implicit in robotism. The other figures as an epilogue which depicts the Robots’ progress toward a humanizing (self)consciousness that otherwise goes by the name of soul, and thereby prepares for Alquist’s concluding affirmation of life. As soon as the play is so conceived, virtually all of its putative selfcontradictions disappear along with the absolute and static opposition of Robots and humans that would have the former merely stand in for workers or machines (correspondent, respectively, to a sociological or a metaphysical reading of the play). Such translations, though momentarily permissible, are finally subordinate to the use to which R.U.R. puts Fabry’s dictum that ‘[n]othing is f[u]rther from being human than a Robot’ (I.49) as supplemented by Hallmeier’s comprehensive definition of Robots as ‘hav[ing] no will of their own, no passion, no history, no soul’ – and ‘[n]o love or defiance’ (I.50). These turn out to be purely theoretical pronouncements: long before the Robots in actuality call them into question by rebelling, they are quite evidently at odds with the robotic behavior of R.U.R.’s directors. These discrepancies, however, are unlike those attendant on the various ‘dreams’ that each and every one of the managers of R.U.R. has for that enterprise. Hallemeier’s ideal of ‘precision,’ for example – his belief that ‘[t]he timetable is the most perfect manifestation of the human intellect,’ ‘greater than the Gospels, greater than Homer, greater than Kant’ (73) – is discredited, ironically, by the very occasion for that utterance: the arrival, right ‘on schedule’ (ibid.), of a mail-boat bearing news of the ‘human intellect’s’ impending demise, so to speak. By contrast, the (ficti)facts which disagree, bilaterally, with his ideal definition of the Robot problematize rather than belie it. Indeed, his prescription on the subject, along with many others to the same effect, persists as the basis for identifying the violations as such and thence for recognizing in them the rapprochement of humans and the Robot which eventuates in the extinction of humanity. Insistently (and for the most part, consistently), then, R.U.R. employs the/its conceptual definition of the Robot to explore how human beings can be and have been robotized. After that robotizing process reaches its ultimate and logical outcome with the extinction of humanity, the play starts to go in the opposite

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conceptual direction: toward the humanizing of the Robots. First it refocuses their motives for rebelling, now re-presenting these so as to emphasize a human model hitherto left implicit: the Radius who had previously contended for the Darwinistic right to exterminate humans for being rationally inferior to Robots (II.66, III.76)51 now says that ‘[w]e wanted to be like people’ and therefore – as a ‘[r]ead[ing]’ of human ‘history’ suggests – had ‘to conquer and murder’ (IV.99). Then Damon, confronting the prospect of dissection (IV.101), in effect displaces both Sulla and Radius in their indifference, respectively, to the same possible fate (I.43) or to being sent to the stamping mill (II.66-67) – parallels which foreground a personal understanding of death which Damon should not have as a Robot, but has none the less somehow acquired52 (just as some degree of collective consciousness of their impending death as a species presumably lies behind the Robots’ embassy to Alquist). Finally, Primus and Helena the Robot appear to confirm by their behavior that the transition (back) to humanity has progressed far enough to justify Alquist’s optimism in saluting them in the end as a new Adam and Eve. The two Robots are obviously reincarnations of Helena Glory and Domin (he as primus inter pares among R.U.R.’s managers):53 the one by virtue of her beauty (at least in Primus’s eyes), the other by reason of his masculinist protectiveness toward her. The Epilogue also makes it clear that these are only the superficial signs of their having souls in Helena Glory’s sense. Rather more compelling evidence of those comes from the altruism that both Primus and Helena evince by their individual reactions to Alquist’s threat to experiment on one of them. It is likewise evident that this Other-regard is in turn founded on the conscience that their previous exchanges have shown them to be in the process of achieving.54 Both have an appreciation of beauty (Primus of Helena’s, she of the natural world’s) that comports with the human, but not the Robot, ideal; and this symptom of Other-consciousness elides with the antecedent self-consciousness that Helena reveals in looking at herself in a mirror. (It is true that the self-consciousness in play is of the kind arising from vanity rather than philosophical reflection; but neither in itself nor in its sexist aspect does it radically differ in kind from the [self-] awareness that the humans in R.U.R. have displayed.) R.U.R.’s complementary projects involving robotization vs. humanization C”apek reanalyzes in Adam the Creator and War with the Newts. The one repeats the theoretical opposition of robots to humans, but stages it in problematic terms emanating from a conflict between Adam and his Alter Ego. The other is a rather more drastic re-vision: fictively reincarnating the robots as a sometime-exotic tropical species of amphibians, it reframes the robot–human as a nature–culture antagonism – and in a way that puts R.U.R.’s Epilogue out of the question.

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Adam in the C”apek brothers’ 1927 play creates Alter Ego to serve the purpose that designation suggests. But instead of providing a constructively critical point of view for assisting Adam in his creative enterprise, Alter Ego instantly wants to be master. After the two of them collaborate to bring into being ‘the [N]ew [W]oman’ (3:301) according to Alter Ego’s specifications, he demands that Adam allocate to him an equal portion of the clay of life so that he can set up on his own. Adam does so, only to discover that in consequence Alter Ego has in effect turned against Adam the ‘Cannon of Negation’ which Adam had used to destroy the God-given world at the play’s outset. Alter Ego, that is, invents a ‘new method of creating. Wholesale’ (4:308): rather than designing individuals and making these one at a time, he uses a ‘mould’ and thereby generates The Masses. These presently clash with Adam’s men, who taunt them for lacking individuality: Orator: You were not created. Poet: You were manufactured! Romanticist: You’re not originals! Hedonist: You’re only numbers. (5:310) That the would-be individualists bear typical designations instead of proper names ironically minimalizes their difference from The Masses; and even more to the same effect is the dispute between the two groups over whose identically worded sign (reading, ‘Here the work of creation was completed’) is to prevail. This, however, does not prevent the opposing factions from coming to blows. The violent quarrel prompts Adam and Alter Ego to act ‘in concord and harmony,’ to ‘create one person together’ to be ‘a sort of mediator between your world and mine’ (5:314); but they find that there isn’t enough clay left to carry out that cooperative project. The ensuing scene, however, constitutes a negational version of this coming together in its reprise of the violent clash of ideologies. Adam and Alter Ego have now concerted to represent themselves as divinities to the individualists and The Masses alike. Both of the latter groups have meanwhile agreed to proclaim that such divinities do not exist. But in this last preemption the previously warring factions are themselves preempted: first by a Red Messenger proclaiming that ‘[t]he Executive Committee has taken over all rights of creation in the name of the minority’ (the equivalent of the Russian word Bolshevik), then by a Black(-Shirt) Messenger who declares that ‘[t]he Executive Committee has nominated me as creator’ and offers to shoot anyone who says otherwise (6:321). Adam, in other words, to this point arranges to override the opposition of The Masses to the individual(ist)s, itself a revisionary refiguring of robot

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vs. human; but by the same token it re-presents their usurpation in terms that ironically reinstitute their rapprochement – i.e., in the persons of a communist and a fascist who, being almost totally interchangeable in their verbal behavior, can only be distinguished from one another in degree of brutality.55 Despite its proposal that there is no substantial and enduring basis for ideological division apart from a struggle for dominance, the play does offer the tertium datur that Adam and Alter Ego had concerted on in principle. In fact, such a mediator is on the scene when they conceive of him, having frustrated as well as forestalled their intent by creating himself (at least, as it were) and five urchins from the leftover clay. Known as Oddly-Come-Short (perhaps better translated as Misfit),56 he reappears in the aftermath of the bloodletting foreseen in the conflict between Reds and Blacks – wars fought over the Doctrine of the Creators, and more precisely over whether they had beards or were clean-shaven. Adam, sharing Alter Ego’s disgust with the way the world has been going, subscribes to his plan to re-employ the Cannon of Negation. But Misfit has, again, foiled their purpose – again without intending to do so – having already fashioned the cannon into a bell. He thereby effects a happy ending. As the bell’s ringing resonates with a watchman’s hammering on an anvil and Misfit’s beating a saucepan with a spoon, Adam thrice says ‘Yes!’ in response to the ‘Voice of God’s’ question: ‘Will you leave … [the world] as it is?’ (6.325). This final affirmation Misfit has already anticipated, too, and in words which not only have precedence in that respect over Adam’s, but are also more distinctly reminiscent of Alquist’s than is Adam’s reiterated monosyllable: ‘I want to stay alive,’ Misfit announces; ‘I want to stay alive as long as I can!’ (6:323). War with the Newts comes with no such happy ending, mainly because its re-vision of R.U.R. leaves little room for a Misfit, a positive tertium datur equipollent to R.U.R.’s epilogic humanizing of the Robots. The Newts, or Salamanders, so long as they are under the ægis of their discoverer, Captain van Toch, appear as being somewhat exotic aliens whose behavior, curious and amusing in itself, primarily serves the satiric purpose of setting off the preposterousness of the human beings attempting to use them. With the death of the old-style plunderer-adventurer Van Toch, however, control of the Newts passes from a sea captain, an explorer, to a captain of industry, an exploiter:57 to the ubiquitous Mr. G. H. (‘Max’) Bondy, again as ‘chairman of the Board of … a big company making boilers and suchlike,’ but one now known by the acronym MEAS rather than MEC (1.2:27). Thus imported from The Absolute, Bondy establishes a Syndicate to exploit the Newts systematically. Like Domin, he does so under the banner of ‘promot[ing] Utopias and gigantic dreams,’ in this

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case ‘projects for new coasts and canals, for causeways linking the continents,’ and so on (1.12.105). But while many of those projects come to be realized, Bondy’s vision appears as somewhat more of a publicrelations screen for what the Syndicate is actually about than are the diverse idealistic constructions which R.U.R.’s managers impose, in effect ex post facto, on their undertaking. Judged by its modus operandi, the Syndicate has been designed as the efficient vehicle of capitalist greed, promoting the objective of its own financial gain by monopolizing the sale (and renting out) of Newt-workers, and in the process adopting practices reminiscent of the slave-trade. Bondy’s enterprise does have the inevitable side-effect of humanizing the Salamanders, but only in the ironic sense that R.U.R. anticipates with Radius (vis-à-vis the lesson which that Robot takes from human history, for instance). Their Syndicate-enforced contact with humans, that is, enculturates them to become more robotic than Young Rossum’s Robots are theoretically programmed to be. In the course of what amounts to their Wellsian Artificial Evolution,58 the Salamanders ‘have multiplied … in[to] millions and billions of identical specimens’: They have learned how to use machines and numbers, and … that was enough for them to become masters of their world. They have omitted from human civilisation everything that was aimless, playful, fantastic or ancient; as a result they have omitted everything that was human in it and adopted solely its practical, technical, utilitarian side. And that pitiful caricature of human civilisation is … building technological miracles, renewing our ancient planet, and eventually fascinating [hu]mankind itself. From his disciple and servant Faustus will learn the secret of success and of mediocrity. Either [hu]mankind will face up to the Newts in a history-making life-and-death conflict or it will be irrevocably salamandrised. (3.6.205–06) In the course of spelling out in other words the kind of pragmatism informing Young Rossum’s blueprint for the Robot,59 the just-quoted passage’s fictitious author (‘X’) inflects his descriptive account with a warning which proves to be all too prescient. From this point on, the Newts figure unequivocally as a possible threat to the human species and, even more, as a formidable menace to human civilization. To be sure, they are never creatures engaging the reader’s emotional sympathy. Under Van Toch’s regime, they inspire the same distancing necessary for the re-view of R.U.R.’s Robots that they suggest: as initially comic aliens. This detachment is otherwise preserved in those moments when War analogizes the Newts to humans. In entertaining, at some length,

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the idea of the Salamanders as proletarians, War also emphatically reproduces R.U.R.’s ambivalence on that point, particularly in the terms of an I.L.O. report on ‘the Newt Problem’ which deplores the unconscionable exploitation of ‘the Newts as a new working class’ while recognizing them to be ‘a dangerous competit[or] to the human workforce’ (2.2.159). Even when the persecution of Salamanders is likened to the lynching of ‘American Negroes’ (2.2.154n), the consignment of that information to a footnote removes its emotional impact and thus intellectualizes the parallel. This same distancing also operates on humans in their opposition to the Newts. War in fact offers no one truly worthy of admiration, with the possible exception of the author whose anonymous ‘X’ marks him as a kind of non-entity. It therefore rules out both the paradigmatic relationship of robots to humans from which R.U.R. educes its Epilogue and that of individualists to the masses which allows for Adam the Creator’s equally affirmative Misfit. In their place, War has what might be called a paradigmatically absent tertium datur60 – this by reason of the fact that one of its two crucial terms, ‘human,’ not only finds no positive fictional embodiment as an honorific but also remains, definitionally, a matter of negation (i.e., anti-Newtness). The defining moment for the fiction’s absent tertium datur coincides with the emergence of Andreas Schultze as ‘Chief Salamander.’ His prior status as ‘a sergeant-major somewhere’ ‘during the World War,’ his desire to exterminate humans for the sake of Lebensraum, and perhaps his initials as well (which are also those of the technical name of the species that he heads, ‘Andrias Scheuchzeri’) all cooperate to identify him as a stand-in for Adolf Hitler.61 The appearance of this Führer in War is not totally unforeseen. Eight chapters earlier Wolf Meynert had prepared the ground for Schultze (just as the Social Darwinist Ernst Haeckel, say – or the less well known Hans Günther, the inspirer of the Society for Racial Hygiene – had done for the actual Nazis): in arguing that the human ‘heterogeneous herd’ has disabled itself ‘in a life-and-death struggle’ with the Newts by ‘plac[ing] the moral law above the biological law,’ by ‘protect[ing] “the others” instead of getting rid of them’ (3.5.198). ‘X,’ too, prophesies a conflict between Newts and humans of the Armageddon sort that Schultze would bring about; but in his version, Meynert’s ideal of a ‘homogeneous society’ (ibid.) would be tantamount to the triumph of ‘salamanderization.’ Nor does this dialectically re-visionary process stop with ‘X.’ Schultze in effect carries it on; for with his advent, ‘X’s’ concluding alternative collapses into a both–and as humans evince a willingness to appease the Newts when the two species come to a showdown. The plot thus dramatizes the fiction’s absent tertium datur in a way that comports with a reading of the book as a satiric attack on fascism,

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especially of the Nazistic variety. That reading, however, must qualify as an imposition unless it is modified to take into account the resistance residing partly with, but not entirely in, the fact that communism also gets its lumps in War (as it does in R.U.R.) – along with a number of other ‘isms,’ some of which have no generally accepted name.62 All of the ideologies parodied make up one set of targets among many. So many that the satire appears as being scattershot63 – or as having no more coherence than a collection of newspaper clippings on a whole range of momentarily topical concerns (which, of course, is what Book 2 expressly purports to be, correlative to its typographical features). This diffuseness of War’s satiric matter finds a correlative in a diversity of styles rivalling Ulysses’ (though possibly Karl Kraus, not James Joyce, provided the influential model).64 It is also quite literally visible on the printed page, in the occasional use of Black Letter, upper case, footnotes, inserts, and the like. Nor does C”apek leave any doubt that the manner of the writing is as much a product of (self)conscious deliberation as the textual format – as is clear, for example, from his contrivance to have Bondy differentiate himself from Van Toch in terms of (literary) style (see 1.12:101, 105). The result is a disconnectedness, or incoherence, of the sort largely corresponding to the consciousness of a newspaper, so to speak. But in thus reproducing the chaos of the journalistic mind, War also presents itself as the bibliographic analogue of the heterogeneity which Wolf Meynert deplores. The book’s refusal of any interpretation which would deny its material chaoticness therefore bears on its satire of Nazism in the same indirect way that its prolonged attention to the absurd failures of disarmament conferences does in the (unstated) context of 1930s’ German remilitarization. War’s heterogeneousness, that is, implicitly constitutes a prescription against racism.65 By the same token, War with the Newts carries to its extreme the tendency which all the members of C”apek’s alchemical trilogy and their rewrites display in varying degrees: the tendency toward fragmentation. This is a consequence of the same principle that dictates the formally experimental character of his second trilogy. Each component of the latter sets up traditional expectations only to challenge them, thereby demonstrating that the ‘truth … is deeper and denser, and reality, too, is wider and more complicated than we usually accept’ (Epilogue to Three Novels, 467). The resultant ‘inner tension’ Hordubal, Meteor, and An Ordinary Life manage to formally contain, ‘press[ing] [it] into something … regular and enclosed’ (An Ordinary Life 23:415). In contrast, Makropulos, The Absolute, R.U.R., and their revisionary avatars present their ‘synthesis of’ ‘analyzed’ phenomena ‘by … abstract means’ which do not strictly qualify as

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‘synthetic formal conceptions.’ Indeed, they all more or less show the propensity for being formally transgressive that is so pronounced in War – as if their author had always meant to do what clearly he does by intention only there: direct his Cannon of Negation against form itself and the constraints that it would impose on an essentially heterogeneous reality and the pluralism which such a reality valorizes – indeed, ethically mandates.

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§6. Olaf Stapledon’s Tragi-Cosmic Vision

That which cannot be conceived through another must be conceived through itself. Baruch Spinoza1 One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human. Loren Eiseley2 I. (Re)inventing Science Fiction: ‘Idea’ as ‘Hero’ Kingsley Amis, in the course of New Maps of Hell, identifies ‘idea’ as typically occupying the place in science fiction that plot has in the ‘whodunit’: the place of ‘hero.’ As his subsequent remarks indicate, he does not mean his metaphoric ‘hero’ to refer to ideas in the abstract, and still less does he mean to say that science fiction has some special affinity for ideas in that sense. He intends his formula to apply only to what H. G. Wells calls the fantastic invention.3 Nevertheless, the literal idea of (or for) a sciencefiction story, in so far as it heroically displaces the protagonist of the traditional novel, almost inevitably directs the attention which immediately focuses on it toward ideas of another sort in or behind the fiction: toward the relatively abstract ideas that it vehiculates or that otherwise attach to its fictive substance. This process is nowhere more patent than in the science fiction of Olaf Stapledon. Indeed, it is true to say in retrospect that his example, particularly in Last and First Men (1930), Odd John (1935), Star Maker (1937), and Sirius (1944), confirms a generic vocation for dealing in abstract ideas which perhaps first becomes unmistakable in the science fiction of H. G. Wells. Nor can it come as a surprise that someone trained in philosophy and psychology and turning to fiction after having published A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929) should have continued, as Stapledon did, to write books wherein ideas of the abstract kind figure prominently. What is surprising about all this has to do with the evidence suggesting that Stapledon never thought of any of his books as science fiction. He appears to have had only a scant acquaintance with the genre, and almost

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none at all with authors in it of his bent, until the mid-1930s at least. In a letter he sent to Wells on October 16, 1931, he testifies to a familiarity with only two of his correspondent’s ‘scientific romances’; and while he no doubt read these sometime before completing Last and First Men, the Wellsian influence detectable in its overall conception of humankind’s fitful progress to the end of human time emanates from The Outline of History (1920) more than from ‘The Star’ (1897) or The War of the Worlds (1898), and elsewise exerts itself indirectly, through J. B. S. Haldane.5 Even after he became aware of its existence as a distinct genre, Stapledon did not speak of his work as science fiction (or scientific romance), preferring instead such terms as myth, fantasy, and philosophical fiction.6 His choice of any name except the most appropriate may seem perverse, but it quite accurately reflects a certain indifference on his part towards matters of genre. His foremost, if not his sole, commitment as a writer is to ‘the clarification and development of consciousness,’ or so he intimates in a 1939 essay which announces that to be ‘the main function of literature’ (306); and in consequence of this belief, the same essay on ‘Escapism in Literature’ implies, he deliberatively undertakes to write ‘propaganda’: not of the sort pieced together from dead clichés and tired slogans, but ‘propaganda’ wherein ‘the idea to be propagated is still alive and growing in the writer’s own mind’ and hence ‘may transform … [the reader’s] whole attitude to life’ (302). Those words suggest that literary purpose is for him the decisive factor and considerations of genre incidental to it. Yet the one title of his which qualifies in any restrictive sense as a novel, A Man Divided (1950), fails by novelistic standards precisely because it deflects interest from Victor Cadogan-Smith, its would-be hero, to the abstract ideas he embodies and logically subserves. The rest of Stapledon’s narratives may be accounted science-fictional; and this is all the more significant for being something of an accident. Without question he primarily aims at propagating ideas; and if, as he variously hints, he happens rather than decides upon science fiction as his principal means for doing so, his example for that very reason proves that their coincidence is not merely a literary-historical accident but a matter of generic necessity. Chancing to write science fiction, he discovers for himself the genre’s connection with ideas, and in that sense invents science fiction as their vehicle. More precisely, he invents science fiction as a vehicle for propagating what he himself might have called cognitive (self)estrangement.7

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VISIONS AND RE-VISIONS II. Darwin Meets Spengler: Last and First Men

The ideas that Stapledon deals in appear to be of the cosmic variety. Often, and most obviously in Last and First Men and Star Maker, the invention itself has a spatio-temporal scope that approaches or exceeds the cosmic in scale; and where it does not, the ideas in the story directly concern or indirectly touch upon the nature of the cosmos and especially its presiding ‘spirit.’ Yet the cosmic ideas to be met with in Stapledon are not entirely what they seem. Taken as exercises in speculative science, metaphysics, or theology, they belong to the literal content of his fictions and as such have the same status as a Sirius, an Odd John, a Bvalltu, or the Martians of Last and First Men, say. Only as they figure in Stapledon’s ‘myths’ of the ‘spirit’ do those same ideas acquire their proper – ethical – import. That the ideas he seeks to convey all have to do with ethics is the one point that is clear in Stapledon’s prefatory comments to Last and First Men on his usage of ‘myth.’ There he suggests that all myths, ‘true’ or ‘false,’ articulate the ‘admirations’ of a ‘culture.’ The difference between the two is that ‘true myth’ ‘expresses richly, and often perhaps tragically, the highest admirations possible within that culture,’ whereas a ‘false myth … expresses admirations less well developed than those of its culture’s best visions’ (0:11–12). Presumably, then, the ‘essay in myth creation’ that Stapledon characterizes Last and First Men as being falls into the category of ‘true myth’: by it, he intends to impart that ‘attitude to life’ which represents the ‘highest’ of his and his readers’ ‘admirations,’ or what he later and most frequently calls ‘spiritual values.’ What else Stapledon may have had in mind in speaking of Last and First Men as ‘neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth’ (0:11) can be elicited from that remark only by considering it in the context of the narrative which it prefaces. From the way that he constructs his ‘chronicle,’ it seems reasonable to infer that this attempt of his at myth-making, in common with most myths which are not the product of self-conscious artifice, aims at ‘a time-transcendent revelation of man’s, or the human mind’s, origins and destinies.’8 His book, after all, is not simply a compilation of the discrete fictive histories of eighteen human species. It plots the course of humanity from one ‘spiritual’ crisis to the next until it arrives at the omega of human existence, whereupon it returns to its beginnings as the Last Men establish with the First that ‘telepathic’ communion whose palpable consequence, the ‘Introduction’ by ‘One of the Last Men’ has long ago announced, is Last and First Men itself. This linkage also inheres (revisionarily) in the title. But there Stapledon does more than anticipate fictive contact: he identifies the Last Men with the First. Furthermore, in equating them, he points beyond the realm of ‘mere fiction,’ toward his narrative’s ‘mythic’ aspiration: to deliver up the last, first, and everlasting truth of la condition humaine.

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Those aspects of his ethical meaning related to content and overall structure may not have been all that Stapledon was thinking of in choosing ‘myth.’ He might also have deemed the word as good a nomenclator as any for a fictive history which traduces the usual limits and ambitions of a novel or a chronicle to the degree that Last and First Men does; and in particular he perhaps meant to call attention not so much to the book’s two-billion-year span as to the shape that he gives its vision. Under the influence of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918), the Stapledon of Last and First Men offers ‘a morphology of world history’ (Spengler 1.1:5) – indeed, of human time. Each of the species he invents he in effect describes as a Spenglerian cultural ‘organism,’ which in proceeding from ‘childhood’ to ‘youth, manhood, and [finally] old age’ (Spengler 3.7:107), fulfills ‘the inevitable destiny of a Culture,’ of ossifying into a ‘Civilization’ and thence perishing as surely as ‘death follow[s] life, [or] rigidity follow[s] expansion’ (Spengler 1.12:31). This is not to say that Last and First Men in its entirety sedulously fits within the confines of that Spenglerian model. On the contrary, the pattern to which each segment of the narrative more or less conforms as it traces a trajectory of rise and decline remains a local feature of a vision which as a whole exhibits human time not as a repetitive series of organic cycles, but as ‘a long and fluctuating adventure towards harmonious complexity of form, and towards the awakening of the spirit into unity, knowledge, delight, and self-expression’ (LFM 15.4:307). In that regard, Last and First Men owes much to Charles Darwin. It owes little, however, to the Darwin whom Spengler sets up as his chief antagonist. Stapledon may have calculated Last and First Men’s movement ‘towards the awakening of the spirit’ to evoke a conviction rife in his lateVictorian youth: that evolution is synonymous with a surely and steadily progressive ascent. But the totality of his vision hardly validates that basic tenet of ‘Excelsior biology,’9 from whose standpoint the ‘adventure’ of Stapledon’s narrative resides primarily in the quite unforeseen, if not ordinarily inconceivable, backslidings and reverses involved in the ‘fluctuating’ course he maps out. Nor does the Darwinistic idea informing his ‘history of mind in the Solar System’ (LFM 1.4:40) otherwise embrace the kind of external Necessity that Spengler sees as so inimical to his own cherished notion of ‘inner Destiny’ (vide Spengler 4.1:120–21, e.g.). Instead, what Stapledon charts is first and foremost the ‘spiritual’ evolution of humankind in its various – and variously successful (or unsuccessful) – efforts ‘to take control of … and remake [itself] upon a nobler pattern’ than it has as ‘a rough and incoherent natural product’ (LFM 7.3:150). In thus putting evolutionary theory to ethical uses, Stapledon has a certain kinship with the Victorian Social Darwinists, and particularly with

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those antagonistic to Herbert Spencer and his followers. Not only Last and First Men, but all of his other fictions, at least up to and including Star Maker, repeatedly depict instances of minds working together in terms which stress the positive value of cooperation rather than competition in the evolutionary process. Yet Stapledon does not simply moralize Darwin in the manner typical of the Spencerians and their opponents alike. His direct translation of Darwinism into the realm of (social) ethics is immediately subordinate to his concept of ‘personality-in-community,’10 and thence it is tributary to ‘myths’ whose reliance on Darwinian theory remains oblique. Biological evolution implicitly figures in connection with those ‘myths’ in their totality as a model, or analogy, for spiritual development. Furthermore, it does so by way of an understanding of Darwin that is decidedly post-Victorian. There is no law, natural or otherwise, in Stapledon’s cosmos to guarantee spiritual (or material) progress, and no inherent telos according to which the universe inevitably moves towards the perfection of Homo sapiens (a Stapledonian truth irrespective of the sense that the latter term has for most nineteenth-century Social Darwinists, who mean it to signify Caucasian – if not Aryan – man). Indeed, spiritual development as Stapledon conceives it requires an ‘Emancipation from Teleology’ (to quote a subheading from the last chapter of A Modern Theory of Ethics); for it is a matter of ceaseless ‘thinking-feeling-striving’ modeled on natural evolution as a process coterminous with life itself but elsewise admitting of no finality, no completion.11 Purpose enters into such a cosmos only as a moral imperative, through the voluntary allegiance to ‘spiritual values.’ These, Stapledon says in his most succinct and straightforward statement on the subject, are the ‘values connected with self-awareness and awareness of other selves’ (‘What Are Spiritual Values?’ [1944], 17); and they establish ‘[t]he goal or rather direction of spiritual development’ to be ‘very roughly this: precise and comprehensive awareness of the world, including oneself and other selves; precise feeling about all this; and coherent and creative action to open up ever new possibilities of the life of the spirit’ (ibid. 21; emphasis added). That those ‘ever new possibilities’ are not absolutely delimited by biological considerations is evident from the numerous examples which Last and First Men affords of a human species attempting to remake itself upon a ‘nobler pattern’ by taking control of – or sidestepping or postponing – its (biological) evolutionary destiny. But it is plainer still from a fact about the book which makes it impossible to dismiss those instances for being merely fictitious or to discount their significance: the fact that the entire invention in Last and First Men (as in Star Maker) depends upon

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the transcendence of spatio-temporal – i.e., material – boundaries, and does so for the reader as well for the real and fictive authors. To the extent that spiritual development does involve the capacity to transform or transcend what would otherwise be its biological limitations, it assimilates or subsumes natural alteration as part of its own elective process. This is also – and perhaps more plausibly – the case in a figurative sense. After all, the movement toward self-discovery which parallels Darwinian evolution in its endlessness by the same token necessarily endues its biological model with ethical import. III. Enlarging Consciousness: Star Maker Many of these abstract ideas take intellectually palpable form in Star Maker. There the unfolding of human variety in the solar system over the course of two billion years occupies only a moment (and portions of two paragraphs; see SM 10:184–85); and this is a reliable index of the degree to which Star Maker surpasses Last and First Men in its ambitions as well as in its scope. Nevertheless, Star Maker is logically the sequel to – and re-vision of – Last and First Men as much as Last Men in London (1932) is nominally so. It carries on, and extends, Last and First Men’s fundamental project: of revealing – and propagating – ‘the vast diversity of mind’s possible modes’ (LFM 0:[17]). These predominantly figure in Star Maker in terms of the diverse shapes that spirit can assume in the cosmos at large. Throughout the early going, however, those terms remain similar in kind to Last and First Men’s. From the first stop, on what is essentially (and satirically) an ‘Other Earth,’ Star Maker moves on to worlds which, though less familiar, are populated by life-forms still recognizable as variations on the human (‘Strange Mankinds’), and only then successively introduces the likes of animal symbiotes, ‘plantmen,’ stars, and whole galaxies as conscious entities. Thus it is by gradual increments that Stapledon brings the reader closer and closer to an Otherness which is decidedly extraterrestrial: alien by anthropomorphic standards not only in physical appearance but in physical scale and bio-sociological complexity. At the same time, Star Maker conduces to the enlargement of consciousness in another way: through its point of view. Its narrator is not simply the passive witness to a pageant of spiritual beings: by the very nature of his cosmic voyage, he participates in their common spiritual quest. But more than that, he serves the same mediational purposes that the scribe of Last and First Men is meant to fulfill as the mind through which the Last Men’s comprehension of themselves and all foregoing human species passes to the First (i.e., us).

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Yet while both narrators stand in for the reader, Last and First Men’s does so purely by reason of the fictional given of his being the recipient, second-hand, of the ‘comprehensive awareness’ which the Last Men have acquired ‘telepathically.’ By contrast, his counterpart in Star Maker is the sort of intermediary who must be looked to as well as through. In the course of his narrative, he demonstrably becomes what the Last Men are merely postulated to be: the source and locus of the awareness that the fiction would transmit. So, too, he represents the act of reading itself as the ongoing cognitive process for which telepathy is a rather static metaphor. Like the attentive reader, he mentally absorbs the various beings he meets with, and thereby progresses from a singular human ‘I’ to ‘I … as the cosmical mind’ (SM 13.3:223). That progress, as it involves the cumulative and corporate spiritual effort which Stapledon calls personality-in-community, also dramatizes the doublemeaning of Stapledonian comprehension: (1) an understanding (2) which moves toward ever greater inclusiveness. By the same token, the expanding of the narrator’s cognitive-affective conscience logically culminates in his apprehension of the apotheosis of Comprehensive Spiritual Awareness named in Stapledon’s title.12 This ‘hypercosmical’ mind the cosmic voyager-witness perceives as having ‘two aspects.’ The Star Maker is ‘the spirit’s particular creative mode that had given rise to me, the cosmos’ – indeed, to a multitude of cosmoses – ‘and also, most dreadfully, [he is] … the eternally achieved perfection of the absolute spirit’ (SM 13.3:224). Each of these aspects carries with it its own conception of time (as Stapledon’s appendicized diagrams indicate). The Star Maker as the Creative Spirit striving to realize itself has to do with historical time as the linear evolution of ‘ever new possibilities’; and from that temporal perspective, the Star Maker shares with humankind the agony – the frustrating uncertainties and failures – of self-expression. Unlike human beings, however, the Star Maker operates under no temporal constraint. On the contrary, his attempts at self-realization, as they bring into being one cosmos after another, are co-extensive with linear time, whose duration they determine and define. Furthermore, their completed unfolding requires the conceptual reshaping of time that the third of Stapledon’s diagrams represents. There the linearity of his first two time-scales appears as a clockwise movement, contributory to, but also subsumed in, what is to be understood as the circle of eternity. Conceived of correlative to linear time, the Star Maker epitomizes spiritual becoming; and as such, he is translatable (so to speak) into terms drawn from the human experience of the life of the spirit as a process of evolutionary self-development wherein new possibilities emerge from those already realized. Sub specie æternitatis, however, the Star Maker

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appears as the hypostasis of a spiritual being which is largely alien to his creatures. The alienating factor has to do not simply with the temporal magnitude of the ‘possibilities’ which the Star Maker embraces and by which he discovers himself but also with the significance of their configuration. In their circularity, that is, they image his ‘eternally achieved perfection’ (SM 13.3:224), a spiritual completion which ‘comprises all things and all times, and contemplates timelessly the infinitely diverse host which it comprises’ (SM 15.3:255–56). The circularity which reconfigures linear time and thereby reinterprets, as it were, the Star Maker’s spiritual becoming as his spiritual being does not entirely differentiate him from his creatures. The Last Men, for example, in returning to the First, describe a similar pattern (inscribed in the very title of the fiction), and so does the narrative ‘I’ of Star Maker itself in coming back to his point of departure (now seen, however, as just that: an infinitesimal point – and thus perceived anew).13 In those instances, too, the circle represents the stages of their spiritual progress as being like those of the Star Maker’s in respect to actualizing what exists in them ab origine. Yet his creatures’ progress, individual or collective, is perforce delimited by mortality, so that there must always remain a horizon of possibilities which they may glimpse but cannot reach. The Star Maker, by contrast, knows no such limitation; for in his ‘eternally achieved perfection’ he is that horizon, is the Beyond which his creatures perpetually strive to attain when motivated by their highest aspirations. He is, in other words, what the last of Stapledon’s diagrams defines him to be: the center and circumference of the universe – or rather, of the ‘hypercosmos.’ Those geometrical terms for abstractly apprehending the Star Maker evoke the metaphor whose history J. L. Borges sketches in his essay on Pascal: that God is an infinite sphere.14 But in graphically suggesting such a notion, ‘Time Scale 3’ also revises it by representing the center as fixed rather than everywhere. This does not mean that Stapledon denies his Star Maker ubiquity. Instead – and as the last diagram’s explanatory note in its relation to the preceding fiction makes clear – the fixed point signifies the Star Maker’s absolute contemplative detachment from his creative, or active, self. Here again, the incommensurable difference between the Star Maker and his creatures is primarily a matter of degree rather than of kind. They, too, are capable of the self-detachment that Stapledon calls ‘ecstasy,’ ‘a standing outside oneself, and an aloofness from all the familiar objects of the will, a detachment not merely from the private person but equally from the world and its claims, not indeed to deny them, but to appreciate them with a new serenity’ (A Modern Theory of Ethics 249). They may also, alternatively or by turns, be involved with or disengaged from the(ir)

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universe – may, according to a parallel distinction of Stapledon’s, be Revolutionaries or Saints.15 But unlike the Star Maker, they cannot be both at once; nor can they totally distance themselves from their role as actors in the Star Maker’s hypercosmic drama. That last analogy implicitly informs Star Maker’s culminating vision. Its eponymous presiding deity is described, at least implicitly, as a kind of dramatist, the author of cosmoses. These, taken in sequence, show him mastering his craft, maturing his powers of realizing his conceptions. But from the same linear standpoint, they are acts of self-discovery also in the sense that they reveal to him new problems to solve, and hence new ideas to express. As ‘an awakening spirit’ (SM 14:233), then, his career is comparable to Shakespeare’s, say, conceived of in similar entelechic terms. To be sure, the Star Maker differs from even the most extraordinary of mortals in having, literally, all the time in the world (and then some) to realize his potentiality. Yet Stapledon discounts that distinction in favor of another. The Star Maker, despite the scale of his artistic efforts, is still ‘the creative and therefore finite spirit.’ What makes him ‘more than’ that (SM 15.3:255) is his ability to transcend temporal constraints altogether, not only in ‘creat[ing] the later phases of a cosmos before he had created the earlier’ (SM 15.2:247), but in ‘timelessly contemplat[ing] all his works’ (SM 14:233; emphasis added). The absoluteness of his detachment contributes significantly to the Star Maker’s perceived ambivalence, but only because his cosmic dramas entail the spiritual frustration rather than the spiritual fulfillment of their actor-participants. He thus appears from the human standpoint, and even from that of the ‘cosmical mind,’ as the author of tragedies on a cosmic scale, each involving ‘the suffering and futility of a thousand races’; and in that connection his aloofness validates the narrator’s premonition that the ‘Lord of the Universe’ will prove to be ‘alien, inhuman, dark’ (SM 6:99). Into the bargain, it gives the Star Maker more than a passing resemblance to Job’s God as playwright, say – a comparison which, while it is not Stapledon’s, is quite consistent with his narrator’s hypothesis that the Star Maker’s cosmic dramas turn tragic because he ‘permit[s] an ‘‘evil” spirit … to thwart th[e] enterprise’ of the ‘‘good” spirit’ that would ‘produce creatures more highly organized, … more comprehensively and vividly aware of their world, of themselves, and of other selves’ (SM 15.1:245).16 From the standpoint of eternity, such tragedies, despite their cosmic proportions, are ultimately local components of the Divine Comedy of the Star Maker’s own spiritual perfection. Yet even as tragedies, ‘involv[ing] no … triumph of the enterprise of finite minds’ – of ‘the advancement of the spirit through personality-in-community’ – ‘but rather their [and its] partial defeat,’ they compel an ‘ecstatic acceptance of the universe’ in

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anyone ‘able … to feel all things from the universal point of view.’ Those phrases come from the ‘Conclusions’ (426–27) to Philosophy and Living (1939) – the chapter wherein Stapledon in effect comments further on the climactic moment in Star Maker epitomized by the words: ‘It was with anguish and horror, and yet with acquiescence, even with praise, that I felt or seemed to feel something of the eternal spirit’s temper as it apprehended in one intuitive and timeless vision all our lives’ (SM 15:3:256). The impulse toward ‘blind worship’ that seizes the ‘cosmical I’ as he thus glimpses the Star Maker in his ‘frosty ecstasy’ is a phenomenon that Stapledon accounts for in Philosophy and Living in terms of the ‘mystical aspect’ of (human) experience as it is ‘[m]ost strikingly … revealed in tragic art’: In watching a great play, in which the leading characters present themselves both as unique individuals and as symbols of humanity striving to mould its destiny, we are torn between human sympathy for the individual and acceptance of his tragic fate. The experience is not purely æsthetic; or if it is, then the æsthetic itself has a mystical aspect. We feel that in some obscure way the tissue of fictitious events symbolises a terrible and yet somehow a right characteristic of the universe. (P&L 423) As if to emphasize its resemblance to Aristotelian catharsis, he then reiterates the same idea in these words: ‘while one is perhaps behaving with panic terror or horror, one is also, in some strange manner, fundamentally peaceful or glad’ because ‘one sees the dread event as a revealing symbol of reality, and as such one accepts it, not merely with resignation but with a sense that even this is involved in the terrible but somehow right nature of this universe’ (ibid.). The dramatistic analogy here does not fundamentally differ from that informing Star Maker. To be sure, Stapledon now excludes from consideration that fiction’s titular being, focusing instead on the universe as tragic art. Yet in its Stapledonian purpose and import – and hence in its status – the universe as æsthetic object remains interchangeable with its (putative) tragic artist. Both, that is, are metaphoric, serving to locate conceptually an eternal perspective from which human beings may dispassionately contemplate the spiritual tragedy in which they are (otherwise) actors. At the same time, Stapledon designs Star Maker – and Last and First Men as well – to convey that cosmic point of view so as to enlarge human consciousness. Instilling an ‘ecstatic acceptance of the universe’ – if that phrase is not a figure of speech of sorts – is at any rate incidental to this enterprise, whose chief intent is to estrange readers from their habitual ways of thinking and thereby promote self-awareness.

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Odd John and Sirius are part of that same estrangement enterprise. But as those titles suggest, their standpoint is fundamentally that of the individual rather than of a collectivity. So, too, their time-span as fictive biographies is incommensurably smaller than Last and First Men’s cosmic, let alone Star Maker’s hypercosmic, vista; indeed, it is well under half that of the average human life. Nor is the difference merely a matter of temporal dimension, even if that be qualitatively considered. It is true that Odd John and Sirius largely concentrate on the Drama of the Spirit from the perspective of an ongoing participant rather than of a spectator contemplating the drama, finally, from the standpoint in eternity (or at the drama’s end) foreseen at the outset in the very titles Star Maker and Last and First Men (and in the latter primarily by reason of its implicit circularity). But it is also true that Odd John and Sirius at least glimpse a similar prospect; indeed, their momentary apprehension of their world sub specie æternitatis is what resigns them to their mortal destiny. None the less, theirs is not primarily the tragedy of finite minds doomed to inevitable frustration by reason of the infinitude of the spiritual quest that engages them – a quest whose endlessness even the temporal scope of Star Maker indicates only elliptically (though it otherwise figures in an intellectual understanding of the third of its diagrams). Theirs, in other words, is not a tragedy deriving essentially from eternity’s disproportion to time, the implications of which human and like-minded beings (as actors in the Star Maker’s Divine Comedy, so to speak) cannot escape. Instead, it emanates fundamentally from the Manichæan conflict between the call of the spirit and its antithesis, instinct brutality – or between darkness and the light – terms as incidental to Last and First Men and Star Maker as those titles’ opposition of time to eternity is to Odd John and Sirius.17 The terms in which Stapledon stages the tragedies of his ‘supernormal’ beings, then, foreground the antagonism between the spirit and atavistic drives subsisting independent of it rather than the contradiction intrinsic to an infinitely expansive spiritual awareness on the part of minds subject to temporal limitation. As a result, Odd John and Sirius revisionarily problematize the ‘ideal’ that informs Stapledon’s ‘cosmic’ fictions. Overall those ‘progress in the direction of ever-increasing personality-in-community’ based on the recognition of ‘an essential underlying kinship and identity in all possible kinds of conscious being,’ ‘no matter how foreign’ they may be to one another (P&L 403). Odd John and Sirius, by contrast, putting into relief the conflict between the spirit and the powers and impulses militating against it, emphasize how fragile any such community must be, how vulnerable it is to destruction by countervailing forces, within as well as outside the individual. And by the same token, such

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interferents with spiritual awareness and its progress also cast the(ir) shadow of doubt over the collective project constituted by individuals cooperating in the name of spirit and held together by their common allegiance to spiritual values. All of this is also to say that Odd John and Sirius are not simply rewrites of the tragedy of the spirit dramatized in Last and First Men and Star Maker. The difference in temporal perspective, inscribed in their respective titles and evident from their paired juxtaposition, involves more than that. The distinction between a cosmic point of view and an individual mind’s makes for two different tragedies. And not just in the respects already touched upon, but in this as well: that in so far as Last and First Men and Star Maker tend toward putting the reader in the position of detached observer, they likewise inculcate an attitude toward the(ir) cosmic drama which appears only momentarily in Odd John and Sirius. Their titlecharacters experience a cosmic vision comparable – and, in the case of Sirius at least, referable – to that which Star Maker, in particular, holds out; and with this also comes the thought-feeling of ‘ecstatic acceptance’ of the universe, including what minded creatures experience as its ineluctable tragedy. But in concentrating – as they by and large do – on the standpoint of the actor-participants, the fictions to which Odd John and Sirius give their names correlatively emphasize ‘moral protest’ instead. Indeed, the conflict between spiritual striving and atavistic instinct also plays itself out – or at least finds an analogue – in ‘moral protest’ and ‘ecstatic acceptance’ as competing, if not mutually exclusive, outlooks. Both of the fictions which focus (on) the latter conflict depict a supernormal mind at work. And even in his first attempt, Stapledon succeeds better than most other writers before or afterwards in obviating the problem attaching, in advance and by definition, to any story featuring a hero of superhuman intelligence: that such a mind must necessarily be more powerful than that of the author imagining it. Though he himself has no greater a claim to genius than Samuel Butler, say, Odd John does convince us – as The Way of All Flesh (1900) does not – that its protagonist’s mental capacities exceed our own.18 That conviction undoubtedly has something to do with the proleptic structure of Stapledon’s narrative as such – i.e., with the fact that he is presenting what is essentially a (spiritual) autobiography as a biography, interposing a mind of normal (albeit sympathetic) intelligence between the supernormal and us. But as this prompts us to make allowance for whatever of genius may be lost in that transmission, it may also enhance the effect of what Odd John tells us about John to a degree that transforms the mere assertion of supernormality into demonstration – perhaps most notably with regard to Odd John’s governing principle as biography: that it is a Bildungsroman detailing its

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title-character’s gradual access of an intelligence (in the somewhat archaic as well as the current understanding of the word) which is extrahuman. With respect to the conflict between ecstatic acceptance and moral protest, however, Odd John is rather unsatisfactory. Readers disposed to put critical distance between themselves and Raskolnikov or hesitant about endorsing the cognate position of the Nietzschean Übermensch about good and evil (and on enduring moral grounds as well as on the particular historical evidence which Nazism supplies) must have problems with Odd John, and especially with John’s homicide (of Smithson) and rationalization thereof. Indeed, the very existence of Sirius suggests that Stapledon himself came to see this as a problem with Odd John; for in what is largely a rewrite of that book he replaces John with a non-human superintelligence, thereby removing any justification that Odd John might be seen as providing for what is normally judged to be evil.19 V. The Seriousness of Sirius It ought to seem odd that Stapledon’s sense of the tension between ecstatic detachment and ethical discontent, and with it his sense of the tragedy of the human condition, should find its most fitting and persuasive expression in Sirius. After all, it is hard to imagine a more apparently inappropriate fictional vehicle for conveying his tragic idea than a science-fictional Bildungsroman whose protagonist is a ‘super-sheep-dog.’ Or rather, it would be hard to imagine if Stapledon had not conceived of an ‘invention’ even less inherently suitable to tragedy. For Sirius is not only the story of a ‘supernormal’ dog that sings, questions its purpose in the universe, and has mystical visions. It is also ‘a fantasy of love and discord’ between such a dog and a young woman named Plaxy. As if the bare story were not improbable enough as the raw material for tragedy (even discounting its potential evocation of sex-scenes that would normally qualify as sodomitic), Stapledon constantly jokes about his canine hero’s attempts to compensate for the lack of the ‘human advantages’ of ‘hands’ and ‘subtle eyesight’ (2:20). At one point, for example, we are told that ‘[t]he lack of hands was a handicap against which [Sirius] reacted with a dogged will to triumph over disability,’ and at another that ‘[t]he neural organization of his leg … [was] not at all well adapted’ to writing, but through ‘long practice’ he gained the skill ‘to write … in … legible characters’ (3:23, 3:30; emphasis added).20 Moreover, the ironic self-criticism that these details point to inheres in the very title. It is true that this designates a star, and one which Plaxy imagines as the apotheosis of her canine soulmate after his death. Nevertheless, the choice of name carries with it a mighty quantum of self-deprecation, which in part comes

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out of the fact that Sirius is also known as the Dog Star (wherefore the title conceals a kind of pun – beyond its play on ‘serious’), but even more because that celestial body has a long association with insanity (on the putative grounds of its ascendancy over the hottest days of the year, the so-called dog days of summer). And as if that weren’t enough to undermine Sirius’s fictional project, there is also the subversive revisionary connection with that cluster of Odd John’s fictifacts which, in retrospect, can be taken as promising Sirius: that Odd John’s narrator, himself quite far from a genius (except, of course, literally, in his attachment to John), bears the nickname-stigma Fido, is expressly referred to as being a dog or dog-like, and chiefly serves as John’s dogsbody. Having in these various ways made his task of persuasion even more difficult than it intrinsically is, Stapledon presently persuades us to accord his story a certain credibility. In part he does so by employing, again, a proleptic intermediary. Robert, however, serves chiefly as a screen against (or is it for?) the prurient imagination; and otherwise he has (even) more narrative transparency than his counterpart in Odd John. The convincingness of Sirius may therefore be said to have less to do with him than with something else conducive to our ‘suspension of disbelief,’ and in that phrase’s original, Coleridgean, meaning rather than in its common misapprehension: as something earned rather than something we automatically grant in advance.21 Sirius, that is, does not require a predisposition to believe the fictifact that one Thomas Trelone has created a canine genius ‘[b]y introducing a certain hormone into the bloodstream of the mother … [so as to] affect the growth of the brain in the unborn young’ (2:13). Instead, the fiction overcomes disbelief by imparting to us a sense of Sirius’s psychological reality. To be sure, the reality which Sirius gains for its protagonist may not be precisely of the psychological sort that Coleridge had in mind. Any such discrepancy of course has something to do with Sirius’s generic credentials as science fiction, but only by way of our realizing certain implications of the fact that the narrative as Stapledon designs it comes already metapsychologized (which is also to say that it does not depend on sympathetic commentary to make its psychological representation metapsychological).22 This tendency, furthermore, is shown to be a – if not the – defining feature of the hero’s mind, in which sense it is what both Sirius and Sirius are about. To be more exact, it becomes that defining feature. Sirius, like Odd John, acquires an unusual awareness of himself and the world by degrees, over the course of time; and as with Odd John, that process must be understood in the term-concepts of self and other. Sirius, however, makes it more evident than its predecessor that those are the termconcepts called for; and this is true in no small measure because Sirius

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himself, in his many introspective moments, either expressly employs or tacitly invokes them or their cognates. This is clearly the case with the moment of awareness following upon the vision of his which we might name The Hound of Heaven (after the poem [1890–92] by Francis Thompson which is its likely inspiration and which it reinterpretatively conceptualizes). Here, in mental colloquy with himself, Sirius reaches the conclusion that ‘[o]nly in the most articulate, precise self- and other-consciousness was the thing’ – viz., ‘the essential spirit, identical in himself and in … humans’ – ‘to be found; for instance on those rare occasions of spiritual accord with Plaxy, when through their very difference and distinctness they discovered their underlying identity’ (9:113–14). But at least in retrospect, the same (self)awareness just as clearly informs Sirius’s remark to Thomas in their days at Cambridge several years (and three chapters) earlier: ‘I’m not human, but I’m also not canine. Fundamentally I’m just the sort of thing you are yourself’ (6:77). Thus juxtaposed, those two brief quotations contain much of the import of Sirius – and not just its overt meaningful content but also the meaning attaching to how Stapledon conveys that content-meaning. Sirius is not merely the story of an extraordinary canine intelligence struggling to discover its identity in terms of self and other; it is also dramatizing that very process. As the two passages just quoted reveal, Sirius typically represents a consciousness, Sirius’s, which is at once alien and familiar. It is equally incontestable that one significant consequence – perhaps the most significant – of Sirius’s introspective lucubrations is their challenge to the very distinction they deploy, regardless of whether that be posed as familiar vs. alien or in the respectively synonymous terms of self and other. Logically considered, Sirius’s process of understanding is predicated on some such terms as naming dichotomous concepts; but as his thought-process moves along, it soon confounds, or deconstructs, any such opposition. In fact, a contextual ambiguity in the clause ‘through their very difference and distinctness they discovered their underlying identity’ tells us this. Self-discovery, that is, starts with a sense of ‘difference,’ of an objective, or external, Otherness, as Sirius most simply exemplifies by emphasizing Sirius’s ‘handicap.’ (The point of that and similar puns is ultimately referable to the fiction’s ambivalent title, with its play on ‘serious.’)23 But in the course of self-discovery, for which Sirius’s is the (Stapledonian) paradigm, difference comes to be internalized – the inevitable concomitant of the very idea of self-awareness, with its essential implication, its requirement, of more or less detached self-regard, importing as that must do that part of one’s consciousness is looking at another part and thereby assuming the standpoint of an Other. All this Stapledon in effect compresses into the double-referent of the ‘their’ in

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‘their very difference and distinctness.’ That word, after all, applies in its immediate context to Sirius and Plaxy both separately and as a tandem. Each realizes his or her identity with reference to the other as Other, and with regard primarily to species differences but also to gender (with Plaxy, as her name is perhaps intended to convey, personifying a placidity somewhat akin and evidently conducible to the ‘ecstatic acceptance’ she in the end achieves, and certainly antagonistic to ‘moral protest’ – a sort of quietism which Stapledon may well be attributing, essentialistically, to woman). But from that perception of Otherness comes the consciousness that the alien also exists inside the self. Indeed, with reference to Sirius’s comment on ‘identity’-out-of-‘difference,’ that is precisely the import of what he says to Thomas – at least when Sirius’s seeming non-sequitur is re-viewed.24 And it is also the main point of the third-party description of Plaxy–Sirius as ‘two alien but fundamentally united creatures’ (6:70). All of this applies to the effect as well as to the meaning of Sirius (in so far as such a distinction can be maintained with regard to this work). The fiction is propaganda in Stapledon’s meaning of the word; indeed, he himself designs it to be such. The book does not merely narrate a process of discovery; it dramatizes Sirius’s realization of his identity in a manner that catalyzes in the reader’s mind the very dialectic between self and other that Sirius’s progress toward spiritual awareness depends on. To begin with, Stapledon conveys the felt sense that the just-quoted summation of Sirius’s relationship to Plaxy obtains for us as well. Sirius, that is, convinces us that its hero is at once different from us – that he perceives the world differently (as the result, chiefly, of having a keener nose and weaker eyes than humans) – and our kin (by reason of his dedication to spiritual values). But thence Stapledon manages to do something more: he impresses on us something of Sirius’s self-detachment. Sirius’s ‘meaning,’ then, does not just inhere in its fantastic – i.e., remote – content as a story about a super-sheepdog; it also has to do – indeed, has more to do – with the narrative’s affective-cognitive, its transformational, impact on its readers. In other words, it engenders the (self)estrangement which is otherwise its subject – and does so more successfully than Star Maker even, because Sirius makes estrangement its central project and keeps it perpetually in view. VI. In Pursuit of the Other Sirius’s realization of his identity via self-alienation has some untoward consequences. Indeed it is the logical premise, as it were, from which his tragic end ineluctably follows. (It is also, by the way, one of the meaningful features which makes the book a revisionary outcome of Frankenstein, to which at least one passage in Sirius certainly alludes.)25

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The alien, which Sirius, through his early-acquired awareness of his difference from humans, becomes cognizant of as existing also within himself, assumes various concept-forms. One of these gets special emphasis in the chapter on ‘Sirius at Cambridge,’ where it particularly informs this reflection of Sirius’s based in the ‘identity’-from-‘difference’ principle: [N]ow his practiced nose had found out the truth about the [human] species. They were cunning brutes, of course, devilishly cunning. But they were not nearly so consistently intelligent as he had thought. They were always flopping back into sub-human dullness, just as he was himself. (8:105) Here the Other, the antagonist of spiritual awareness as the name of the process which identifies minded creatures, embodies the tendency to which Stapledon will give prominence in A Man Divided; and in fact, Sirius uses precisely the metaphor governing that subsequent novel when he presently discloses the figural content of ‘flopping back’ by speaking of ‘humanity[’s]’ ‘half-awake intelligence’ (8:106; emphasis added). A second sense of alienation, and with it a second Other, comes out of Sirius’s vision about his pursuit of the transcendent spirit. At the start, this obviously emanates from a canomorphosing imagination: Sirius sees himself as ‘hunting’ a ‘quarry,’ tracking it by its ‘scent.’ But just as the at first ‘exquisite sweetness’ modulates into a ‘pungent tang,’ into a ‘bitter, exquisite and terrifying perfume,’ so the would-be prey becomes increasingly formidable – to the degree where it occurs to Sirius that ‘surely I should not devour it, but it would devour me.’ At which point he realizes as well that ‘I was crazily hunting … the very thing that men called God, the dear and beautiful and dread’ (9:109–10). In other words, Sirius’s quest for the spirit gives him a glimpse – or rather, a whiff – of something very like the Star Maker as the apotheosis of the awe-inspiring and fearsome Other who also has a resemblance to finite minds in their pursuit of spiritual awareness. And having scented, as close up as he dare go, that presence, Sirius allows canomorphic projection to reassert itself, but not exactly in the way it had done at the outset; for in now conceiving of the deification of the spirit as his ‘Master’ (9:110), Sirius in effect recognizes that his originary self-conception, the Hound of Heaven, is also merely a dog. This second, visionary, form of the alien intermediates between the half-awake or comatose and a third type of Otherness (in relation to spiritual awareness). The fact that Sirius himself, even as he attests that his vision has impressed into his mind the desire ‘to be as quickened a spirit as possible, and to live for the quickening of the spirit everywhere’ (9:111), acknowledges its evanescence, recalls the difficulty of remaining spiritu-

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ally awake, or alive (as does one of the very words whereby he expresses his allegiance to the spiritual enterprise: ‘quicken’). At the same time, however, his vision is also informed from its start by what, some pages earlier, is described as ‘the dark power that seemed to rise up within him and control his behavior’ (8:102). Identified there as an object of his ‘[d]reading,’ this ‘dark’ impulse Sirius repeatedly refers to as its hero’s ‘wolf-nature’; and not long after Thomas’s death, that becomes the dominant, and uncontrollable, motive force in Sirius’s behavior. This last type of irruption of the Other into the self brings into relief something which otherwise would remain very much in Sirius’s background: the Second World War. That the German bombing of England claims Thomas Trelone as one of its victims is made to appear as something of an incidental fictifact; but it is above all to this fatality (and secondarily to the war’s depriving Sirius of Plaxy’s company) that the acts producing Sirius’s destruction are traceable. The war, moreover, has more than a cause-and-effect connection with Sirius giving in to his wolf nature. It also lurks as the historical objective correlative of the latter – as the symptom of a primordial impulse of humans in the aggregate which differs only in the scope of its expression from the instinct brutality which takes over Sirius as an individual. In other words, the historical context written into the fiction holds a significance which the narrative comes to foreground, particularly via Sirius’s killing of Thwaites: that man is wolf to man.26 Not only wolfishness but all of these manifestations of Otherness constitute, in diverse ways and to varying degrees, a threat to Sirius’s spiritual project as the fictive model for the human enterprise of selfdiscovery. And inasmuch as they come out of that project as it dialectically entails self and other, their common import in this regard can be epitomized by a famous line that Walt Kelly, in one of his last comic strips, gives to Pogo: ‘We have met the enemy and he is us.’27 VII. Self-Alienation It may already be evident from what has been said thus far that Stapledon’s career as a creator of fictions is essentially comparable, albeit on a human scale, to his Star Maker’s as the author of worlds. Viewed in their entirety, from a standpoint analogous to eternity’s, his works reveal a Stapledon becoming what he’s been from the start – a writer who already knows in advance what he will want to say and is seeking for the ‘language’ to say it in, for how best to communicate it.28 But while that conception of Stapledon the writer is the one most suitable to understanding how he happens to write science fiction mostly, his literary career is equally susceptible of an explanation that would account, or

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account differently, for the actual sequence of his titles – a view located in time and cognizant of its flux. From such a perspective, the Stapledon who begins, really – i.e., finds his authorial voice – with Last and First Men and moves to Sirius and beyond fits the problem-solving evolutionary model of the Star Maker as ‘a developing, an awakening spirit,’ ‘as the finite and creative mode of the absolute spirit, … bod[ying] forth his creations one after the other in a time sequence proper to his own adventure and growth’ (SM 14:233). Sirius, then, can be seen as a logical outcome of Stapledon’s previous writings. Moreover, it can be regarded as representing the culmination of the philosophical thinking embodied in and conveyed by the ‘ideas,’ the literary conceptions, of his previous fictions (and also his non-fiction). But in its new-found emphasis on the many obstacles to spiritual awareness, Sirius also represents something of a turning point. Foreseeable in it, even without the advantage of hindsight, is the self-doubt of A Man Divided, which, however, is little more than a residue of the self-skepticism he writes into The Flames (1947). Both of those late works focus on self-estrangement in a way new in Stapledon. In neither does such alienation exactly enter into a project focused on the gradual emergence of self-awareness in a fictive protagonistconsciousness and in a way designed to propagate that same awareness in the reader. Both are instead inward-turning in a quite different sense: they subject Stapledon’s former premises – and discoveries emanating from those premises – to a scrutiny that is easily caustic enough in its skepticism to qualify as self-corrosive, which is also to say self-destructive. That proposition fits The Flames in a literal sense. There the scientist who is its focal consciousness – someone named Cass (as in ‘Cassandra’) – finally perishes in a fire which, even if it be not of his own making,29 appears as the consequence of his belief in ‘the flame race’ as a species (or mode?) of spiritual being(s) (according to Stapledon’s understanding of ‘spirit’). Furthermore, the (self)destructiveness which The Flames attributes to Stapledon’s hitherto adored spiritual values is duplicated – and in that sense overdetermined – in other ways. For one thing, Cass at least momentarily blames ‘the flame race’ for ‘the[ir] evil influence … on my mind’ (58) – this on the basis of the Flames’ own admission that they influenced Cass’s mind so as to induce the break-up of his marriage (which makes them ultimately responsible for his wife’s subsequent suicide). For another, the narrative mainly takes the fictifactual form of a letter that Cass writes from the ‘Mental Home’ in which he’s been incarcerated (83), thanks, presumably, to his insistence on the reality of his visions. And just for good measure, he addresses his letter to Thos (as in ‘doubting Thomas’),30 who betrays his friend not only by disregarding the instruction to suppress the missive,31 but also by reason of his

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assuming that ‘his [Cass’s] earlier hostility to the flames’ was ‘the real Cass, the sane … scientist’ (84), and hence that any subscriber to the vision of a ‘single-minded cosmical community’ (77) must be deranged (a view obtaining credibility from Cass’s attempts to seek out Flames ‘in a kitchen fire in Stepney’ as well as in ‘industrial furnaces’ and ‘the furnaces of ocean-going steamers’ [75, 76]). As if the self-critical irony in all this weren’t enough, Stapledon has the Flames (speaking through Cass) reflect thus upon the spiritual project which they represent: We ourselves … may be said to ‘worship’ the Other; but inarticulately, or through the medium of fantasies and myths, which, though they aid worship, give us no intellectual truth about the wholly inconceivable. [S]ince intellect was never our strong point, our philosophizing was – how can I put it? – more imaginative and less conceptual than yours, more of the nature of art, of myth-construction, which we knew to be merely symbolical, not literally true. (32, 34; emphasis added). Such remarks, moreover, are clearly self-belittling not just with regard to the Flames but also on the part of Stapledon himself, particularly in view of the fact that the depreciation they evince for an allegiance to spiritual values extends to the very terms he had originally used for characterizing, or generically locating, his fictions. However foreseeable The Flames may be, it does not instantiate the only possibility emanating from Sirius, and especially from the self-deprecating ambiguity of that fiction’s title. Stapledon might, instead, have produced a different kind of self-critical book; or he might have engaged in the unintentional self-parody which repeating oneself almost inevitably entails (as, say, Hemingway found out – at the cost of his life). Nor are those purely speculative options. Stapledon did, in fact, put forward at least one more or less unwitting self-parody: Death Into Life (1946), which is essentially an abstract and temporally scaled-down version of Last and First Men.32 And prior to that he vented a skepticism which is more outwardlooking and less self-destructive than The Flames’: in Old Man in a New World (1944). There ‘an emissary from the past’ (11) finds that the new generation has allowed a world previously revolutionized by the communitarianism of the spiritual project to regress toward individualism, nationalism, and old-time religion. All of these possibilities, taken together, can be seized upon as one kind of instantiation of Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths; and some of them exhibit a self-criticism roughly comparable (except, perhaps, in degree) to H. G. Wells’s during the phase, in the late 1920s and early ’30s, when

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Wells inclined toward disparaging his own science fiction. So, too, inasmuch as all those possible paths for Stapledon – past and future, so to speak – are already (or also) inscribed in Sirius, that book can be taken as the logical center, or hub, of the ideas that he is working with – and working out. Which is also to say – what the foregoing argument has perhaps demonstrated – that the seriousness of Sirius lies in no small part not just with its confirmation of science fiction’s vocation for ideas, but also with the way that the particular Stapledonian ideas embodied in Sirius correlatively serve to propagate the self-estrangement necessary for what their author understands by spiritual self-discovery.33

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§7. C. S. Lewis and the Fictions of ‘Scientism’

In vain did Ransom try to remember that he had been in ‘space’ and found it Heaven…. The opposite mode of thought[,] which he had often mocked and called in mockery The Empirical Bogey, came surging into his mind – the great myth of our century with its gases and galaxies, its light years and evolutions, its nightmare perspectives of simple arithmetic in which everything that can possibly hold significance for the mind becomes the mere by-product of essential disorder. Perelandra (13:173) [T]he colonization of space and the mechanization of the body are obviously complementary. J. D. Bernal (61) Nevill Coghill reports that in talking with C. S. Lewis one day, the conversation turned to the topic of writing for a ‘popular American weekly.’ Coghill, in a tone of wonderment not entirely disingenuous, asked his colleague how he knew ‘what to write or what to say.’ ‘Oh,’ Lewis replied, ‘they have somehow got the idea that I am an unaccountably paradoxical dog, and they name the subject on which they want me to write; and they pay generously.’ ‘And so you set to work and invent a few paradoxes?’ ‘Not a bit of it. What I do is to recall, as well as I can, what my mother used to say on the subject, eke it out with a few similar thoughts of my own, and so produce what would have been strict orthodoxy in about 1900. And this seems to them outrageously paradoxical, avant garde stuff.’ (Coghill, 64) This retort, being itself something of a performative utterance, gives an inkling of how outrageous Lewis could be. It gives no indication, however, of the moral outrage which can motivate his outrageousness; nor does it otherwise prepare us for the ‘paradoxical … stuff’ to be met with in what he himself designates as the trilogy consisting of Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945).1

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The last-named work in particular may strike readers not predisposed to sympathize with Lewis-the-Christian-Apologist as being outré, or over the top. This becomes especially apparent from the standpoint of genre. That Hideous Strength counts, inter alia, as an Academic, or University, Novel – the earliest, and still one of the few, to deal with intramural politics rather than with student life.2 The book opens with a faculty senate dispute, of sorts,3 over the fate of Bracton, or Bragdon, Wood; and while Lewis cannot be said to insist on the connection, the concluding vision of Armageddon figures as the ultimate outcome of that disagreement. He is thus in effect representing an intramural debate among academics (qua administrators) as involving something more – and, indeed, other – than differences of opinion of the myopic kind usually operating in such instances, even when the grounds of the debate are viewed as the site of contestation between the traditionary and the innovative. Not only does That Hideous Strength globalize, escatologically, Belbury’s antagonism to St. Anne’s-onthe-Hill; in the process it stages the conflict in morally absolutist terms. The Belbury group means to ‘clean the planet’ – which in part would entail supplanting ‘natural trees’ with ‘the art tree’ (presumably made of ‘aluminium’ – THS 8:196). That, however, is far from being the most morally objectionable item on an agenda which makes the acronym that the group’s National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments goes by appear Orwellian. Even to their associates, N.I.C.E., it turns out, is ‘ready to do things … disgusting and impious’ – which is also to say ‘hideous’ – under the direction of someone compared to whom Orwell’s O’Brien seems human. In other words, Lewis goes beyond the sort of demonizing of one’s enemies which academics are perhaps more prone to than are most other human beings not on or in need of psychotropic medication; he presents the opponents of his Christian humanism as diabolic in a rather literal sense – as agents of pure Evil engaged in a war, cosmic in its implications, against more or less traditional Good. That Hideous Strength may none the less qualify as being philosophically rather than psychologically paranoid to the extent that it dramatizes an understanding about what modern science is up to which Lewis had formulated discursively elsewhere (and at a time when he was probably already working on the final book in his trilogy):4 in the Riddell Lectures he gave at the University of Durham (1943) and published the following year under the title The Abolition of Man. The crux of the argument dictating that title is that ‘[t]he serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins’ becase they ‘were born of’ – which is also to say, share – ‘the same impulse.’ In diametrical contrast to ‘the wise men of old,’ they are bent on ‘subdu[ing] reality to the wishes of men’ by

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means of ‘a technique,’ in the practice of which they are ‘ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious’ (Abolition 38). The equation here of ‘magic’ with ‘applied science’ – or with what Lewis elsewhere terms scientism5 – is crucial to his conception of Belbury/ N.I.C.E., also in the latter’s diabolical opposition to ‘the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages’ (ibid.) which St. Anne’s stands for. Cecil Dimble, in a disquisition resonating in its substance, if not verbally, with that just cited, says as much, at the same time restating the Belbury–St. Anne’s polarity in a way that invokes the distinction between Belbury’s ‘magic’ and Merlin’s (i.e., between black magic and white): [Merlin] is the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused. For him every operation on Nature is a kind of personal contact…. After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something dead – a machine to be worked, and taken to bits if it won’t work the way he pleases. Finally, come the Belbury people, who take over that view from the modern man unaltered and simply want to increase their power by tacking onto it the aid of spirits, extra-natural, anti-natural spirits. (THS 13:336) In short, Lewis’s own assertion that his ‘‘‘tall story” about devilry … has behind it a serious “point” which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man’ (THS vii) is not merely a wishful statement of intent. By the same token, however, that ‘serious “point’’’ runs through his trilogy as a whole (whose status as such would otherwise depend largely, if not solely, on Ransom’s appearance in all three books). It supplies the logical basis of the formal relationship among the three fictions, affording an ideological justification for the shift from the natural mode of explanation, appropriate to science, to the supernatural etiology invoked by magic, and for the correspondent generic transition from science fiction to extraterrestrial fantasy and cautionary Arthurian fairy tale. The gradual transition, almost completed in the course of Out of the Silent Planet, from natural history6 to supernatural myth could of course be accounted for, rightly, as a formal illustration of the general principle ‘that the distinction between history and mythology might be … meaningless outside the Earth’ (OSP 21:157). Yet the analogy between black magic and ‘scientism’ goes beyond this redefinition of categorical concepts to provide both the structural metaphor and the myth underlying the trilogy’s implicit argument – to provide, that is, the terms into which the fictions of scientism can be translated so as to reveal their true intent and character. Black magic and scientism, Lewis hints, have in common a Faustian impulse.7 For the magus, knowledge meant power: the power to reject the

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natural conditions of human life. The ultimate objectives of this magic – the Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir of Life, and the homunculus8 – epitomize the quest for the occult knowledge which might enable us humans to overcome the limitations nature confronts us with, and especially to free ourselves from the consummate restriction of our natural existence: death. To achieve his ends, the Faustian adept sought the secret knowledge and power to be obtained by identifying himself with the dark forces of nature. But the objectives themselves, to be realizable and worth realizing, entail certain ontological assumptions which finally make the whole endeavor self-defeating. Logically considered, the enterprise necessitates the view that humankind inherently in no way transcends a cosmological process which has death as its telos as well as its end. From the standpoint of ‘the wise men of old,’ in other words, this kind of ‘magic’ would reduce the human being to a soulless entity in a meaningless cosmos moving toward destruction. Meanwhile, the deluded Faust, imagining he acts in the name of life, allies himself with the Satanic forces of what William Blake had called ‘Eternal Death’ – those which Lewis gathers under the doubly deathly name Belbury.9 That Lewis is indeed thinking, revisionarily, of Faust is clear from the passage in The Abolition of Man – anterior to the one I have already cited – wherein he refers to ‘the magician’s bargain.’ Here he speaks of science’s objective not as a ‘subduing’ of ‘reality,’ but as the ‘conquest’ of ‘Nature’ equipollent to ‘reduc[ing] things to mere Nature.’ The terminological shift does not radically alter Lewis’s overall argument, but it does mark a change in direction which amounts to a bilateral re-vision. In framing the opposition of new vs. old thinking about the world as turning on their respective attitudes toward ‘reality,’ Lewis makes it conducive to his subsequent promotion of those traditional values which he associates with Tao. These are not foreign to his previous account of science’s reductivism; but there they are an informative absence, as it were, inasmuch as they implicitly preside over an entirely negative view of the human situation. As Lewis sees it, we have reached ‘the final stage’ in the process of reifying nature: that ‘of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature’ for the sake of power, of control over the thingified Other. ‘This,’ he goes on to observe, is one of the many instances where to carry a principle to what seems its logical conclusion produces absurdity…. It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, our selves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls…. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will

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be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners. (Abolition 35–36) This polemic against degrading humankind to ‘mere Nature’ to fulfill a Faustian compulsion gives the gist of the structural argument, and also the logical modus operandi, of Lewis’s trilogy. There, as in The Abolition of Man but with greater imaginative detail, the logical assault on ‘scientism’ proceeds by exposing its postulates as fictions, reducing its objectives to absurdity, and adducing its diabolical consequences. II. Scientism and Science Fiction The debunking of scientism begins in Out of the Silent Planet as Ransom gradually becomes aware of the discrepancy between his expectations and his experience. At the outset, despite the moral distance separating him from the villains of Lewis’s metaphysical melodrama (Weston and Devine), Ransom’s attitudes toward the cosmos are surprisingly similar to those of his captors. Only as he gets farther and farther away from the Silent Planet, with its terrestrial conceptions engendered in cosmic isolation, do his beliefs about the universe radically alter into the polar opposites of those obviously assumed by the two men who have shanghaied him (with the intent of handing him over as a sacrifice to what all three of them imagine will be the barbarous gods of the Martians). His first discovery is that outer space does not oppress him as a dead void: A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now – now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance…. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? (OSP 5:29) In Ransom’s mind, the scientistic fiction of ‘utter deadness’ becomes transfigured, and thereby transvalued, through a subtle strategy (with regard to Lewis’s apologetic purposes) – reorienting the metaphor of another (Darwinian) ‘fiction.’ Ransom awakes from a nightmare to find that Space is really analogous to ‘th[e] ocean,’ where, according to the theory of evolution, life on Earth began. Such an awakening is thus a crucial stage in Lewis’s design of replacing the ‘mythology’ of scientism,

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the basis of Faustian cosmic alienation, with a cosmology grounded in acceptance of a life-giving order. The next step of Ransom’s conversion occurs on Malacandra. Its premise, however, appears while he is en route to that planet. Though his journey reconciled him to Space, he had remained possessed by the fear of what he would encounter on Mars: strange creatures not simply unanthropomorphic but aggressively hostile to humanity had a strong hold on his imagination. He had read his H. G. Wells and others. His universe was peopled with horrors such as ancient and mediæval mythology could hardly rival. No insect-like, vermiculate or crustacean Abominable, no twitching feelers, rasping wings, slimy coils, curling tentacles, no monstrous union of superhuman intelligence and insatiable cruelty seemed to him anything but likely on an alien world. The sorns would be … would be … he dared not think what the sorns would be. And he was to be given to them. Somehow this seemed more horrible than being caught by them. Given, handed over, offered. He saw in imagination various incompatible monstrosities – bulbous eyes, grinning jaws, horns, stings, mandibles…. But the reality would be worse: it would be an extraterrestrial Otherness – something one had never thought of, never could have thought of. (OSP 5:33) ‘The reality,’ however, is something quite different. The Otherness Ransom meets is not Wellsian.10 The hrossa and sorns are unhuman but not inhuman: while their outward form is not anthropoid, they nevertheless have rational souls common to all hnau. The process whereby Ransom loses his sense of estrangement culminates in a pilgrim’s progress to Meldilorn. There, having overcome his phantasmagoric fears concerning the sorns and their ‘alien world,’ he again confronts Weston and Devine, this time with total antagonism to their aims and methods. The contrast between their aggressive insensibility and Ransom’s sympathetic attachment to life on Malacandra (and elsewhere) becomes evident once Weston, with Ransom as ironic mediator, starts explaining to Oyarsa his program for cosmic imperialism: ‘Life [says Weston] … has ruthlessly broken down all obstacles and liquidated all failures and to-day in her highest form – civilized man – and in me as his representative, she presses forward to that interplanetary leap which will, perhaps, place her for ever beyond the reach of death.’ ‘He says … [translates Ransom] that these animals learned to do many difficult things, except those who could not; and those ones died and the other animals did not pity them. And he says the best

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animal now is the kind of man who makes the big huts and carries the heavy weights and does all the other things I told you about; and he is one of these and he says that if the others all knew what he was doing they would be pleased. He says that if he could kill you all and bring our people to live in Malacandra, then they might be able to go on living here after something had gone wrong with our world. And then if something went wrong with Malacandra they might go and kill all the hnau in another world. And then another – and so they would never die out.’ (OSP 20:148) This scheme of Weston’s for saving the human species from death by appropriating other worlds is evil, not in some vague sense, but precisely because it is ‘bent’ (as Oyarsa observes in a passage to be examined subsequently). The latter term is – or rather becomes – a sort of neologism, whose metaphoric content takes in Lewis’s entire fictive project. Before substantiating that claim, however, it is worth taking stock of some of the literary sources which Lewis revisionarily subjects to what might be termed a hostile makeover. Weston’s design against other worlds, along with a number of other significant features of the trilogy which commences with Out of the Silent Planet, comes from Lewis’s reading, not in the sciences per se, but in their ‘popularization.’ He himself confesses as much.11 What Lewis does not spell out is that he is primarily referring not to J. B. S. Haldane (albeit he makes the confession in an unsent ‘Reply’ to Haldane) but to certain writers of science fiction. His debt to H. G. Wells he in effect acknowledges in an already-quoted passage in Out of the Silent Planet itself – though Lewis there puts his readers in mind of The War of the Worlds more than of The First Men in the Moon, albeit Weston and Divine owe much to Bedford and Cavor.12 Yet whatever he takes from Wells seems almost negligible compared to his indebtedness to one of Wells’s inheritors: Olaf Stapledon. It is true that Lewis seems to pay tribute to Stapledon: ‘I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow’ (THS viii). Yet both the wording and the context of this statement insinuate something other than admiration – or candor. Lewis’s parenthetical phrase obviously holds a serious mental reservation. Then there is the fact that notice of Stapledon comes in the Preface to That Hideous Strength, implying that for it alone Lewis may have taken a Stapledonian hint. Next is the peculiar ‘should,’ presumably explicable with reference to Lewis’s having just declared that the hint, whatever it was, he had already encountered through the direction of an anonymous friend to some unnamed writer ‘before I met a rather similar suggestion in the books of Olaf Stapledon.’ And finally, Lewis says nothing by way of

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apology to Stapledon for ‘slighting references … put there for purely dramatic purposes’ – this in marked contrast to the preliminary Note (just quoted) on the use Out of the Silent Planet makes of Wells.13 The ‘suggestion’ which Lewis leaves unspecified is in all probability for Belbury’s Macrobes. Their basic informing idea – that ‘[t]he individual is to become all head’ (THS 12:302) – already figures in Wells’s Grand Lunar and, even more pointedly, in his Martians in so far as they also represent ‘The Man of the Year Million.’14 It is also to be found – and here suggestion is the right word – in J. D. Bernal’s The World, the Flesh & the Devil (1929).15 Yet That Hideous Strength’s conjunction of the Macrobes with purportedly telephatic communion, via Alcasan’s Head, points to Stapledon’s influence, and more precisely to Last and First Men (1930). That fiction’s governing premise has it that the Last Men can communicate telepathically to the First information about the Spenglerian rise and fall of the sixteen human species intervening between them, the Fourth of which amount to Giant Brains very like the Macrobes. Stapledon’s impact, however, cannot be restricted to this defining feature of N.I.C.E. – nor to That Hideous Strength. Lewis’s depiction of Perelandra may well have come from Stapledon’s Venus, whose ‘marine plants … formed immense floating continents of vegetable matter’ (LFM 12.4:253); and the rebelliousness of Weston as the Un-man against ‘the good that is given’ perhaps owes something to the disquietude of Stapledon’s Fifth Men over having a lifespan of a mere ‘three thousand years, and ultimately [of] as much as fifty thousand’ (wherefore they ‘are peculiarly troubled by the prospect of death’ – LFM 12.1:233). Weston’s scheme for taking over other planets, though reminiscent of many such ‘alien encounters’ in science fiction, likewise bears more than a passing resemblance to the Fifth Men’s in particular. Facing extinction from a disintegrating Moon whose fragments would fall on Earth ‘in less than ten million years’ (12.3:244), the Fifth Men gradually emigrate to Venus. Haldane had already staked this out as the territory for his ‘Vision of the Future of Mankind’ titled The Last Judgment (1927); and he had supposed as well that the project necessitated by a lunar break-up would entail not only evolutionary adaptation but also the extermination of the life-forms indigenous to Venus. But Haldane, though a practicing geneticist, says almost nothing about that process, the imaginative details of which Stapledon must supply on his own. The pertinent episode in Last and First Men accordingly has the Fifth Men annihilate in particular ‘the most developed of all Venerian creatures,’ ‘beings about the size and shape of swordfish’ (12.4:250), and thereafter eventually give rise to a ‘species of seal-like submen’ (13.1:258; emphasis added). The detachment characterizing Last and First Men as a whole as it puts

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between the Last Men and the First (i.e., us) an imaginative distance of two billion years is inherently ironic. Yet just as Stapledon refrains from condemning the Fifth Men’s genocidal enterprise outright, so he allows its irony to pass without remark. He thus leaves it up to Lewis to notice the absurdity attaching to the ‘seal-men’ as beings cognate to those which their human ancestors have supplanted. Out of the Silent Planet distinctly recalls this moment from Last and First Men via the description of the first of the three species of hnau, or minded creatures, that Ransom becomes familiar with on Malacandra. The hross, with its ‘coat of thick black hair, lucid as seal-skin’ and its ‘great round head, heavily whiskered,’ is ‘something like a seal’ rather more than ‘like a penguin … [or] an otter’ (9:60) – enough so to bring to mind Stapledon’s seal-men. The point of that intertextual connection, however – and with it the precise import of ‘bent’ – only becomes clear in the exchange with Oyarsa ensuing from Weston’s declaration of his intent to exterminate the brutes on Malacandra. Under the delusion that he is dealing with a mental inferior, Weston expresses himself in condescendingly simple terms – and thereby in effect casts himself as the b-movie ‘savage’ he supposes he is addressing: ‘It is not for yourself that you would do all this’ [Oyarsa observes quasi-interrogatively]. ‘No,’ said Weston proudly in Malacandrian. ‘Me die. Man live.’ ‘Yet you know that these creatures would have to be made quite unlike you before they lived in other worlds.’ ‘Yes, yes. All new. No one know yet. Strange! Big!’ ‘Then it is not the shape of body that you love?’ ‘No. Me no care how they shaped.’ ‘One would think, then, that it is for the mind you care. But that cannot be, or you would love hnau wherever you met it.’ ‘No care for hnau. Care for man.’ ‘But if it is neither man’s mind, which is as the mind of all other hnau – is not Maledil maker of them all? – nor his body, which will change – if you care for neither of these, what do you mean by man?’ (OSP 20:149–50) Earlier in this same interview, Ransom had been acting as interpreter, translating Weston’s words in a way revelatory of the moral hideousness which their abstractions would conceal. Now, however, the given is that Weston is speaking without an intermediary; and hence the self-admitted consequence of his genocidal project makes for a reductio ad absurdum which is wholly of his own doing. By declaring, proudly, that the takeover of Mars would entail human beings’ evolving into creatures ‘All New….

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Strange! Big!’ he is virtually saying that the descendants of the original human colonizers would have to acquire the attributes of the hrossa or sorns in order to survive on Malacandra. To concede this much of course demolishes Weston’s rationale for Darwinistic imperialism. Lewis, however, is out not just to expose Weston’s Stapledonian plan for appropriating other worlds as nonsensical, but to define why it is morally hideous. Accordingly he has Oyarsa take up the question which stymies Weston – ‘what do you mean by man?’ – and then comment on the only answer inferable from and consistent with Weston’s program. Concluding that ‘what you really love is no completed creature but the very seed itself,’16 Oyarsa goes on to observe: I see now how the lord of the silent world has bent you. There are laws that all hnau know, … and one of these is love of kindred. He has taught you to break all of them except this one, which is not one of his greatest laws; this one he has bent until it becomes folly and has set it up, thus bent, to be a little, blind Oyarsa in your brain. And now you can do nothing but obey it, though if we ask you why it is a law you give no other reason than for all the other and greater laws which it drives you to disobey. (OSP 20:150) Here Oyarsa is not simply saying, in so many – other – words, that Weston’s thinking is evil. Nor is he merely spelling out why it is evil. He is also specifying what the term-concept evil as Weston represents it basically means: to be ‘bent.’ This usage of ‘bent’ is not totally of Lewis’s invention. Long before he took it up, the word was employed as a slang synonym for ‘crooked’ – i.e., criminally inclined. But in Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis rigorously exploits its metaphoric content so as to make the word his own. This is in part to assert that ‘bent’ is no more replaceable by ‘evil’ than Gulliver’s ‘sa[ying] the Thing which was not’ is by ‘lying.’ A ‘bent’ principle, after all, is not an intrinsically immoral one; instead, it signifies an ethical injunction pursued to the point where it finally twists back upon and becomes a perversion of itself, in the way that the interview with Oyarsa discloses with regard to Weston’s ‘the love of kindred.’ There are, moreover, further implications figured in the geometry of ‘bent,’ so to speak, but lost to its translation as ‘evil.’ For one, while ‘bentness’ primarily describes the result of following one moral rule to the exclusion of all others until it turns into its own antithesis, the metaphor also suggests deviancy, a turning from the Way (the term, drawn from Taoism, by which Lewis in The Abolition of Man refers to the age-old ethical consensus). But perhaps its largest import, certainly for Lewis’s trilogy, has to do with the realm of sense perception. ‘Bent,’ that is, does not just characterize the thinking of

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someone whose name homophonically suggests that he is a carrier of Western (scientistic) ideology; it also implies that the moral distortion which such thinking incorporates fundamentally derives from ocular experience. In other words, ‘vision’ as it designates the outcome of a conceptualizing process basically rests on vision as a matter of seeing. III. Retrieving the Discarded Image The Weston interview – or ‘trial-scene’ (OSP Postscript: 178) – ends with Oyarsa asserting that ‘a bent hnau can do more evil than a broken one’ (20:157). The two remaining books of Lewis’s trilogy make good on that pronouncement. Perelandra makes for a re-vision of Out of the Silent Planet in so far as it fictively reincarnates Weston as the Un-man for the featured purpose of acting as diabolical tempter of a Venusian Eve. The murderous rampage which he indulges in shortly after arriving on the planet (Perelandra 9:110–12) introduces him in this typological role as the Bent One. But it is also to be understood as manifesting the residuum of his original imperial design on Malacandra. With his project’s rationale reduced to absurdity, nothing more – or less – is left to Weston than a perverse lust to destroy for destruction’s sake. Indeed, the confrontation with Oyarsa which exposes him to be bent in principle holds the Un-man not merely in prospect but also retrospectively, revealing as it does that the Weston who claims to act in the name of life has already brought only misery and death. While Out of the Silent Planet in its divestment of Weston’s hypocrisy thus anticipates Perelandra, it also looks ahead to the trilogy’s final revisionary installment. The professor’s stammerings, when faced with Oyarsa’s ‘what do you mean by man?’ about caring for ‘what man begets’ would abolish humanity as an end-in-itself, substituting instead its negation: ‘no completed creature but the very seed itself.’ This is the basic tenet of Belbury’s scientism, that the human species is merely a transitional stage in the evolution of ‘macrobes’ (see THS 12:299ff.); and its consequences, as Lewis dramatizes them in That Hideous Strength, involve the totalitarian manipulation of humans by their ‘de-humanized Conditioners.’17 The cosmic process, as Weston views it, compels extinction or transcendence; but that alternative he renders specious: following his manic impulse to transform himself into his apotheosis, he becomes a satanic emissary, a Faustian Anti-Christ of annihilation. He fears death and seeks to elude it; yet by the bent logic of his fictions – of a vast and dead Space sparsely populated by alien and mindless beings – he would deprive both nature and individual human life of value and meaning and absolutize death’s dominion.

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Weston as the Un-man and the tutelary evil genius behind N.I.C.E. thus comes to personify the scientism for which Out of the Silent Planet had made him the spokesman. By the same token, Lewis fashions him to validate the express point of Oyarsa’s deeming him to be ‘bent’ rather than ‘broken’ while excluding him from the promise which such a distinction implicitly carries: that the bent might be straightened out.18 This promise – of redemption – none the less remains as much a part of Lewis’s project as is the critique of scientism. Indeed, the two are largely inseparable with regard to bentness as visual distortion. The ocular significance of ‘bent,’ crucial though it is to the apologetics of the entire trilogy, is something which Lewis never plainly spells out. The closest he comes to doing so is in the passage toward the start of Perelandra where his fictional namesake sees an ‘eldil’ (a being something like an angel): It was not at right angles to the floor. But as soon as I have said this, I hasten to add that this way of putting it is a later reconstruction. What one actually felt at the moment was that the column of light was vertical but the floor was not horizontal…. The impression produced … was that this creature had reference to some horizontal, to some whole system of directions, based outside the Earth, and that its mere presence imposed that alien system on me and abolished the terrestrial horizontal. (1:11) The double-perspective here is one that ‘Lewis’ is instantaneously able to resolve in favor of the perpendicularity of the eldil (vis-à-vis an unearthly reality). But this is a matter of ‘felt’ conceptualizing which corrects, immediately, the visual perception that the eldil is aslant – i.e., bent. And the same is true of Ransom’s ‘first impression’ of Perelandra: of looking at ‘something slanted’ (in this case, presently in opposite directions so as to ‘ma[k]e a peak’ that then ‘flattened suddenly into a horizontal line’ [3:37]). Bentness, in other words, resides in the eye of the human beholder – even, for an instant, that of a Ransom or a ‘Lewis’ – and opposes itself to seeing things as they are. This defect of eyesight stands as – or represents – the basis for the conceptual errors responsible for the Great Divorce of Earth from the rest of Creation. To be sure, Lewis’s mythopoetic designation of ours as ‘the Silent Planet’ refers to our having forgotten Old Solar, ‘the language spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon,’ and thus appears to be primarily a matter of speech and auricular comprehension. Yet the passage, just quoted from, wherein Lewis in the last book of his trilogy finally divulges the meaningful content of the enigmatic term in the title of his first, goes on to proffer a visual analogy to describe a language

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whose ‘meanings were not given to the syllables by chance, or skill, or long tradition, but [are] truly inherent in them’: ‘as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop’ (THS 10:265). The visual analogue, moreover, not only conveys something of the nature of an Adamic, or Universal, language; it would also lend credence to the possibility of such a language. At the same time, its implicit critique of the Silent Planet makes the lapsarian division of words from experiential reality a matter of vision. The same is true, though not quite so obviously, of the other dichotomies which enter into scientism. In Perelandra, for example, Lewis tells us: Long since on Mars, and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact was purely terrestrial – was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the Fall. (12:49; emphasis added) The significant terms here are in themselves abstractions, and so, apparently, is the idea that they convey; but the sentence in its entirety derives whatever conviction it carries from Ransom’s sense experience (mainly, to this point, of Malacandra), which the reader vicariously shares. This is likewise the case – to offer one further instance – of a remark of Ransom’s about the hrossa that Lewis may also intend as a revisionary commentary on Swift’s Houyhnhnms: when the rationality of the hross tempted you to think of it as a man … it became abominable…. But starting from the other end you had an animal with everything an animal ought to have … and …, as though Paradise had never been lost and earliest dreams were true, the charm of speech and reason. Nothing could be more disgusting than the one impression; nothing more delightful than the other. It all depended on the point of view. (OSP 8:59; emphasis added) Once again the issue comes down to truth vs. error, now formulated in terms of a ‘delightful’ appreciation of the difference in the variety of hnau vs. the ‘disgusting’ anthromorphism which would reduce the Otherness of the hross to a grotesque Sameness. And once again those opposing conceptualizations derive from ‘point of view’ in the strict, the perceptual, meaning of the term, according to which seeing the hross ‘as a man’ is decidedly bent. The underlying opposition in each of the three passages just considered is between prelapsarian and fallen vision. Lewis thus connects bentness with Original Sin so as to characterize the latter as primarily a way of seeing – of visually misperceiving – that alienates humankind from nature and (its) divinity.

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With some such understanding of ‘bent’ in view, we can discern that much of the argument of Lewis’s trilogy – in both its satirically destructive and its positively (re)constitutive aspects – already inheres in the dream Ransom has early on in Out of the Silent Planet, after Devine drugs him.19 The dream puts Ransom together with Weston and Devine in a small sunlit garden surrounded by a wall ‘over the top [of which] you could see nothing but darkness.’ Weston and Devine scale the wall; but before Ransom can follow, ‘the queerest people he had ever seen’ bring them back through ‘a door … which none of them had noticed.’ These queer folk then depart, ‘locking the door behind them’ (OSP 2:13–14). The elements of the oneiric revelation here relate symbolically to the trilogy as a whole. As the perimeter of the garden, the wall represents both the natural limits Weston aspires to surmount and the barrier intervening between ‘the Silent Planet’ (Earth) and ‘Deep Heaven.’ His determination to go beyond the wall evinces his impulse to rebel against any restriction, no matter how reasonable or inconsequential – his refusal, in the terminology of Perelandra, to accept the good that is given. But beyond that, Weston’s rebellion against the wall appears both foolish and absurd not so much because, as the dream forewarns, he will pull ‘down Deep Heaven on their heads,’ as because the world he is attempting to escape from clearly figures Eden.20 Moreover, the presence of a door suggests that it is not the intent of Deep Heaven that the wall should be a barrier; and presumably whoever views it as such has also discarded the image of the Earth as an Edenic garden. Ransom’s dream, then, adumbrates an idea which probably owes more to William Blake, say, than to Lewis’s mother: that the fictions of scientism – what Lewis in Perelandra calls ‘[t]he great myth of our century’ – have desolated Earth as a garden, estranging us from nature by representing it as an abstraction, as something which humans must make a Faustian effort to conquer. Put one way, Lewis is contending that the Faust who feels compelled to free himself from the ‘need to be born and breed and die’ (THS 7:201) has conjured up the sepulchral vision he desires escape from, the specter of ‘organic life’ as ‘death.’21 Put another way, his trilogy embodies the argument that ‘the modern man to whom Nature is something dead’ is responsible for Paradise Lost. That this loss is the immediate and ineluctable consequence of bent vision is perhaps the most ‘outrageously paradoxical’ aspect of the case Lewis makes. It is also fundamental to his trilogy’s argument. That Earth is the Silent Planet because human beings have forgotten the ‘language’ that articulates cosmic harmony – the language expressive of the universe – would, after all, count as nothing more than a backward-looking mythological given if Lewis did not persuade us (chiefly via Ransom’s experience

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of Malacandra) that Earth remains an Eden which we no longer (are able to) perceive as such because scientism has bent our vision. Two decades after the appearance of That Hideous Strength, Lewis published The Discarded Image. He concludes that account of the medieval world-view by saying: ‘We can no longer dismiss the change of Models as a simple progress from error to truth. No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy’ (222). The trilogy I have been examining knows nothing of the equanimous relativism of that sentiment. While sharing his last book’s nostalgia for the medieval outlook on things,22 all three fictions in Lewis’s cosmic trilogy chart a fairly ‘simple progress’ from what he regards as error to what he holds to be truth – in the moral, if not the epistemological, sense of the words. This, in the clearest instance, is Ransom’s mental course in Out of the Silent Planet as it dramatizes his increasing alienation not only from the tenets of scientism, but also – and correlatively – from the kinds of alienation informing Wells’s and Stapledon’s science fiction. At the same time, moreover, the trilogy’s fantastic discovery of ‘ultimate realities’ has as its complement the outrageously paradoxical point implicit in The Abolition of Man: that intellectual history since the advent of science has largely been a progress from truth to error.

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§8. Kurt Vonnegut, Historiographer of the Absurd: The Sirens of Titan History … is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. James Joyce, Ulysses A man craves ultimate truths…. But what is ultimate truth? It’s the end of the road, where there is no more mystery, no more hope. And no more questions to ask, since all the answers have been given. But there is no such place. Stanislaw Lem, Fiasco (4:116) In a 1973 interview published in Playboy, Kurt Vonnegut declared himself to be ‘in the business of making jokes.’1 The Sirens of Titan (1959) is one sure instance of the truth of that self-description of Vonnegut the writer. The fiction amounts to a mordant joke of literally cosmic proportions, extending from Newport, Rhode Island, to a moon of Jupiter, and beyond that, to the imaginary Tralfamadore, 150,000 light years from Earth – and, elliptically, to yet farther reaches of the universe. But Sirens hardly stands as the only instance of that kind of joke-making on Vonnegut’s part. Many of his subsequent books – including Cat’s Cradle (1963), Galápagos (1985), and Timequake (1997) – can also readily be seen as extended jokes. Sirens, however, sets itself apart from those and other works by Vonnegut in two respects. First, in its overall structure it conforms rather strictly to the pattern of a joke, the punch line to which comes in Sirens’ penultimate chapter. Second, it explicitly invites the understanding that its punch line is also the answer to a question.2 It is clear from the start that Sirens’ question involves The Meaning of Life. And in that regard (among others), Sirens is very much a book of its time – of the late 1950s when adolescents, mostly, in groups as well as privately, actually did agonize over questions which ultimately came down to the meaning of life. But it is equally evident from the outset that Sirens also has something to tell us about time. And in so far as time is its fundamental subject, what Sirens has to tell us applies not just to the human desire, at a particular historical moment, for higher purpose, but also to the implications of any such thinking at whatever historical moment. This is also to say that its meaning resides with how it gets to its destination at least as much as in its concluding punch line.

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I. An Answer in Search of a Question The question to which Sirens addresses itself, though expressly broached at its outset, is never fully and precisely formulated. That task is left to us, the readers – if, of course, we want to fathom the point of Sirens’ joke. A hint as to how much depends on our getting the question right appears in the course of Sirens’ Martian interlude. Malachi Constant is now in the Army of Mars and is known by the name of Unk. He comes upon a letter written, evidently for his benefit, by his former self, also an Unk, though – thanks to the fact that his memory has been cleaned out, again – he doesn’t realize this until he gets to the signature. The letter begins by telling him that: The questions are important. I have thought harder about them than I have about the answers. That is the first thing I know for sure: … If the questions don’t make sense, neither will the answers. (5:124) The concluding proposition does double duty. Most obviously, it emphasizes the importance of properly framing the question: in the world of Sirens (and outside it), there is no shortage of answers, which typically take the form of ‘[g]imcrack religions’ (1:7); but what is often wanting are the exact questions which they are responsive to. At the same time, Unk is telling himself (as Malachi) something else: that an answer qualitatively reflects (upon) the question. On that principle, the question intimated at the start of Sirens ought to be formulated so that it corresponds exactly to its given answer – i.e., it should be as absurd, or nonsensical, as that culminating answer. Sirens’ governing question, then, as the just-quoted passage from Unk’s letter to himself perhaps also implies, is ascertainable from its answer. While amounting to a punch line, that answer comes in increments; and since some of its components tend to escape notice, it is worth spelling out. According to the revelation – or rather, series of revelations – in Sirens’ penultimate chapter, all of human history has been subservient to a design originating on a distant planet named Tralfamadore. That design is to deliver a ‘message from “One Rim of the Universe to the Other,’’’ or at least ‘as far as the technology of Tralfamadore could send’ the messenger (11:269). The message consists of a ‘single dot,’ which in Tralfamadorian signifies ‘Greetings’ (11:300–301); and the messenger’s name itself likely encodes similar, and equally momentous, information, inasmuch as ‘Salo’ seems to be a contraction of ‘Say Hello.’ Tralfamadore has enlisted the human species in this project, and in something of the way that Earthlings have been impressed into the service of the Army of Mars – i.e., usually against their will and always unwittingly. Human involvement has come about, literally, by accident: the accident disabling the messenger’s space

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ship. The contribution human beings collectively will make to the project is to furnish ‘a replacement part’ (12:297) for the vehicle. Salo, grounded on a moon of Jupiter, has been waiting for that part for something over 200,000 (Earth) years,3 though presumably it takes his cohorts back on Tralfamadore not much more than the entire span of recorded human history to contrive to get it to him. In the meantime they have communicated with him by means of Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China, Nero’s Golden House, the Kremlin, and the Palace of the League of Nations, all of which they have influenced human beings to erect for the sake of letting Salo know that they haven’t forgotten him. This is also to say that the pain and suffering that went into or is otherwise signified by those structures – the pain and suffering of all recorded human history – is like that of the fictional personages in Sirens in being, from a Tralfamadorian standpoint, nothing more than an incidental by-product of the use to which Tralfamadore has put the human race. According to the fiction, then, anyone could say what Winston Niles Rumfoord does: ‘Tralfamadore … reached into the Solar System, picked me up, and used me like a handy-dandy potato peeler’ (11:285). As if all of this were not absurd enough, Salo, too, can be regarded as something of a handy-dandy potato peeler in Rumfoord’s sense, and so can his fellow Tralfamadorians. ‘Once upon a time’ Tralfamadore did have ‘creatures’ on it ‘who weren’t anything like machines.’ But after inventing machines to find out their own ‘higher purpose’ and never getting an answer that was ‘high enough,’ they started killing each other out of selfcontempt for their purposelessness. Discovering ‘that they weren’t even very good at slaying,’ ‘they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say “Tralfamadore’’’ (11:274–75). So that the message, which in itself appears rather less momentous than the identical opening salute of an induction notice from the U.S. draft-board, can be regarded as emanating from a civilization which has been defunct for upwards of 350,000 years.4 And, just for good measure, when, against instructions, the machine which is the messenger – Salo – looks at the communication and thus becomes aware of how insignificant it is, he (or it) commits suicide by pulling himself (or itself) to pieces. To be sure, Malachi Constant eventually – and by accident5 – puts Salo ‘back together again,’ thus enabling that messenger to resume the mission. But for a moment – and ironically the moment is also that of the replacement part’s arrival – it looks as if all of the human pain and suffering represented in Sirens (albeit in somewhat cartoonish or pop-art form) is going to have been for the sake of a purpose which is not only not appreciably higher than inventing a handy-dandy potato peeler, but may never be fulfilled.

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By reason of Unk’s filiatory proposition (as analyzed above), the precise question to which all of this is answerable cannot be ‘What is the meaning of life?’ even on the understanding that ‘meaning’ here is a synonym for ‘purpose.’ Sirens, after all, proffers other answers conformable to that very same phrasing of the question. The most notable of these figure in Malachi’s assertion that ‘a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved’ (Epilogue: 313) and, by their clear implications, in Boaz’s statement about finding ‘me a place where I can do good without doing any harm’ (9:196) and in Beatrice’s ‘The worst thing that could happen to anybody … would be to not be used for anything by anybody’ (Epilogue: 310). All of those, it is true, the fiction more or less undercuts: Malachi’s mostly by the fact that his love for Beatrice, the one person ‘around’ whom he purportedly comes to cherish (shortly before her death, some thirty years into their sojourn on Titan – Epilogue: 302), is a narrative given rather more than it is a matter of demonstration; Boaz’s partly because of the nature of the harmoniums he devotes himself to, but more because he is shown capable of doing them harm, albeit accidentally (9:210–11; also 9:205); and Beatrice’s by the punch line of Sirens’ overall joke. None the less, each and every one of their propositions about ‘a purpose of human life’ remains substantially less absurd than the replacement-part hypothesis which they stand alternative to. Hence any question fitting that hypothetical answer should (again according to Unk’s advice) preserve that difference by ruling out the alternatives which Malachi, Boaz, and Beatrice articulate. The question, that is, ought to take in ‘higher purpose’ in the Tralfamadorian sense – which is also to say that it should take into account the distinction that appears in Sirens’ opening paragraphs: between ‘find[ing] the meaning of life within [one]self’ and ‘look[ing] outward’ for it. Sirens’ extended joke, then, addresses itself to the meaning of life as an ‘outward’-directed question, one in search of a transcendental answer – as to the purpose, or telos, beyond human being itself (collective as well as individual) that human life (the given answer assumes) was created to subserve. That is the question which Sirens, by its punch line, is primarily responsive to; and its response, as reflective in its way of the Existentialist thinking of its time as the Theatre of the Absurd is, amounts to saying that human life as the question conceives it is meaningless. II. ‘Cheers in the Wirehouse’ of Punctuality In its jocose rendering of Stephen Dedalus’s proposition about history, Sirens largely anticipates Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker series. (Given that ‘Tralfamadore’ means ‘the number 541’ as well as ‘all of us’ [11:268], it can

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be said that Adams has more than a vague spiritual affinity with the Vonnegut of Sirens. After all, the first three books, at least, in Adams’s series climax in a super-computer’s revelation that ‘the meaning of life, the universe and everything’ is 42.)6 But Vonnegut, unlike Adams, is not bent merely on laughing his readers out of a belief in a Meaning Out There, totally extrinsic to living itself, which can be found by ‘push[ing] ever outward’ in (or as in) space exploration (Sirens 1:7). Whatever Sirens may leave to be desired in its execution (especially with respect to how well its parts fit together), in conception it certainly has the distinguishing quality of great satire: of not simply holding up some belief to derision, but also of intimating why it is ridiculous. That why is at least somewhat implicit in Sirens’ exact question, and maybe even in the realization that a precise question is called for. The why also takes in all or most of the other details of the fiction. These reveal that the quest for transcendental purpose inevitably and ineluctably carries with it a certain kind of thinking about time.7 Sirens makes this evident in the course of its first chapter, ‘Between Timid and Timbuktu.’ This, according to one of Sirens’ fictifacts, is also the title of Beatrice Rumfoord’s ‘slim volume of poems,’ and it ‘derive[s] from the fact that all the words between timid and Timbuktu in a very small dictionary relate to time’ (1:12). Almost immediately following that explanation we meet Malachi Constant, who apart from being perfunctorily identified for the moment merely as ‘the richest American,’ is revealed to be conscious of a double-meaning in Mrs. Rumfoord’s admonition that he ‘be punctual’: To be punctual meant to exist as a point, meant that as well as to arrive somewhere on time. Constant existed as a point – could not imagine what it would be like to exist in any other way. That was one of the things he was going to find out – what it was like to exist in any other way. (1:13) Despite that last promise, Constant is not going to experience right away any alternative to punctual existence – at least not firsthand. He will live out most of his life as the equivalent of a point, as a virtual entity tantamount to a non-entity (to postmodernize Euclid). He will be living in an evanescent – an instantaneously evanescent – present, largely uninformed by memory or desire, even in The Waste Land’s mordant sense of those words, up until the appointed time that his existence, such as it has been, and that of every other human being according to the fiction, reaches its elliptical endpoint, the dot that Salo is to transport to the far side of the Universe. Conceiving of human existence as higher purpose-oriented, then, necessarily reduces human beings, collectively as well as individually, to

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Euclidean points, albeit generating a history line which spirals or zigzags rather than heading straight for the higher purpose. The irony in this inscribes itself in the course that Constant takes to his first appointment with the Rumfoords. Upon entering the grounds of their Newport estate, he is confronted with two paths which ‘fork’ around a multi-tiered fountain.8 He chooses ‘neither,’ instead climbing up and finally over the empty fountain which he later ‘imagine[s]’ – in inverse form, as it were – as ‘a cone described by descending bowls of increasing diameters’ (1:16– 17; 8:188). But rather than thereby making for a straight line, his trajectory suggests, synecdochically, a different image of time: as ‘a roller coaster’ (2:57). Moreover, like Sirens’ other figures of time – notably, the spirals and whirlpools associable with the fountain itself – the roller coaster is no mere geometrical abstraction; it also images an emotional reality. History for Constant, and for everyone else individuated in Sirens, will be something of a roller-coaster ride, in significant part because it is beyond human control. Or, as the one person who seems to be in charge puts it: ‘I didn’t design the roller coaster [of life/history], I don’t own it, and I don’t say who rides and who doesn’t. I just know what it’s shaped like’ (Winston Niles Rumfoord, 2:58). Along with possessing no such foreknowledge of the shape of time, Malachi Constant proves to be the exemplary victim of Sirens’ irony in another way. Knowing that his name means ‘faithful messenger’ (1:17, 35), he aspires to fulfill his nominal destiny: Constant pined for just one thing – a single message that was sufficiently dignified and important to merit his carrying it humbly between two points…. What Constant had in mind, presumably, was a first-class message from God to someone equally distinguished. (1:17) Instead, he will discover that he’s been ‘ruthlessly … used, and … to … disgustingly paltry ends’ (2:64). And unlike Winston Niles Rumfoord, who delivers the just-quoted verdict and applies it to himself, Constant will not be in on Tralfamadore’s manipulation of Earth; nor is he the Messenger he dreams of being. His indispensable role in furthering Tralfamadore’s cosmic design consists primarily of fathering a son whose name is Greek for time. Chrono in effect denominates the conception of time predominant in Sirens at least up to the moment that he arrives on Titan with the ‘goodluck piece,’ cut from ‘a spiral of steel strapping’ (6:142–43; emphasis added),9 that will serve for repairing Salo’s space ship. That is to say, he stands for time as punctuality in the double-sense which Constant specifies early on: existing as a point as well as keeping appointments (in subjection

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to a chronometrically determined and instantaneously evanescent present). To such punctual existence Sirens does offer various real alternatives, those figured by Malachi in his caretaker role, Chrono in his cosmic worship of the Titanic bluebirds, and Beatrice in her rewriting of history. But these appear only in the thereafter of the Epilogue.10 Until then, the sole escapes from punctuality are the ones which Winston Niles Rumfoord and Boaz represent; and these are either specious or unacceptable. The latter’s devotion to Mercury’s harmoniums has a mindlessness about it which makes it as much a travesty of Chrono’s religion of Being as it otherwise is of anthropology.11 As for Rumfoord, the chrono-synclastically infundibulated state which qualifies him as a denizen of ‘Newport and Eternity’ (1:28) differentiates him from (other) prisoners of punctuality chiefly because he exists at and as more than a single point. It is true that his multiple vantages endow him with a prescience which no other human in Sirens has; but his severe, even fatal, limitations in this regard tend to obliterate that difference. He himself acknowledges as much in response to Malachi’s question as to whether he ‘really can see into the future’: ‘In a punctual way of speaking – yes.’ ‘When I ran my space ship into the chrono-synclastic infundibulum,’ Rumfoord continues, ‘it came to me in a flash that everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been’ (1:25–26). But while this Tralfamadorian realization is not merely in the abstract, Rumfoord’s awareness of what will happen proves not to extend beyond the arrival on Titan of Malachi and Beatrice and the child of their maculate conception; nor does he ever find out what message Salo is carrying. In short, he leaves the solar system feeling as thoroughly used as anyone – and rightly so. Punctuality, then, and the absence of awareness comporting with it, is one logically inevitable concomitant of the kind of teleological thinking that Vonnegut satirizes. Another – or, perhaps, a different way of looking at the same consequence – is inscribed in the title of Sirens’ second chapter: ‘Cheers in the Wirehouse.’ The phrase comes from a fictional – or fictionalized – speech by a U.S. President. Vonnegut is parodying Dwight Eisenhower, who in his reading of prepared remarks, especially, had an uncanny knack for mispronouncing even rather common words. Sirens, however, does not require that bit of outside historical information. It is sufficient to know what Sirens expressly tells us: that in addition to giving ‘the word “progress” a special flavor by pronouncing it prog-erse,’ the President ‘also flavored the words “chair” and “warehouse,” pronouncing them cheer and wirehouse’ (2:59). ‘Cheers in the Wirehouse’ thus takes on multiple meanings, all of which supplement the ‘punctual’ aspect of the higher purpose mindset. ‘Wirehouse’ offers an image for the sort of manipulation that all of the

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characters in Sirens, as representative of real-life human beings, are subject to: everyone is in effect a marionette, even those who imagine that they are the ones pulling the wires. At the same time, the way in which everybody serves the higher purpose renders them the equivalent of chairs, of mindless objects – and objects warehoused, in effect, like Malachi and Boaz on Mercury: until the moment when they can be of (further) ‘use’ in the fulfillment of higher purpose. The very notion of higher purpose necessarily entails a Universal Will to Become, a term-concept whose facetiousness Sirens accentuates by recourse to an initialism, UWTB. Fictifactually considered, UWTB powers all the space ships in Sirens, including The Whale. By logical extension as well as metaphorically, it therefore denominates the drive toward the sort of higher purpose which Tralfamadore’s message fictively exemplifies. Sirens’ reductio ad absurdum, moreover, bears not simply on the presumption of a Meaning Out There, but also on the UWTB which, by psychofactual definition, would get us to There. The UWTB requisite for reaching any higher purpose that can be conceived of as humanly reachable must make subscribers to that end extremely vulnerable, if not downright amenable, to being used, or controlled, though no such necessity dictates that they be conscious of the fact. UWTB, in other words, privileges becoming at the expense of being in a way that makes people susceptible to ‘cheer manufacturer[s]’ (2:59) like Bobby Denton, the President of the United States, or C. Horner Redwine, all of them mountebanks selling feel-good Space Age nostrums, though the last of those – that of the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent – is (as the name suggests) largely compounded of ingredients which normally make people feel like ‘something the cat drug in.’12 The underlying reason for the power of these mountebanks lies with their specious appeal to UWTB. The pure fictifact that ‘the Tralfamadorians … were able to focus and modulate’ ‘impulses from the Universal Will to Become’ ‘so as to influence creatures far, far away, and inspire them to serve Tralfamadorian ends’ (10:272) corresponds to a psychological reality: that belief in a higher purpose, largely because it goes along with UWTB, is a Siren inasmuch as it makes people open to being used in a way conducive to their destruction. And not just or predominantly in the way that the Earthlings lobotomized into ‘Martians’ are thereafter physically destroyed in their foredoomed invasion. The rather more common – indeed, universal – result of such teleological thinking is that human beings turn themselves into interchangeable chairs in a warehouse … and into dimensionless points doomed to non-entity unless the line they collectively generate goes somewhere, reaches a purposeful destination. (And even then, a million years of human history might be dismissable as ‘a period of readjustment’ – 2:50.)

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Sirens is not nearly as closed-ended, especially in (its) conceptual terms, as the focus on its joke-structure would make it appear. This is particularly true with regard to the plot as conceptual vehicle. Salo’s rededication to delivering Tralfamadore’s message to the far side of the universe undoes a potentially fatal setback to that higher purpose; but by then Tralfamadore has no further use for Constant and the rest of humankind. This, as Rumfoord opines, may leave ‘Earthlings … free to develop and follow their own inclinations, as they have not been free to do for thousands of years’ (12:298); but by the same token, the withdrawal of Tralfamadore from human affairs deprives history of any purpose, or telos. We thus seem confronted with a Swiftian choice: between the ‘wirehouse’ and a world wherein we are free to devote ourselves to the likes of harmoniums. In Vonnegut, moreover, understanding only aggravates the dilemma, rather than offering an escape from it. That very few of the human beings represented in Sirens are aware of having wires that Tralfamadore is pulling (let alone to what end it is doing so) appears to be of no consequence – a fact which itself attenuates the distinction between freedom and control. Timequake offers something of a parallel to Sirens in this respect. There the inexplicable (or at least unexplained) phenomenon named in the title compels human beings to relive and reenact in minute detail everything they did and said in the decade ending on February 13, 2001. But no one save the author (in the person of Kilgore Trout) is aware of this, and even for him an intellectual cognizance of the timequake’s interruptive effect hardly makes a perceivable difference in his life. Much the same can be said for the bulk of humanity in Sirens vis-à-vis Tralfamadore. Apart from – or along with – the satirical point of Salo’s dot, the fiction offers no real alternative: just as absurdly trivial purpose gives way to aimlessness, so Sirens sets a mindlessness of being against the Tralfamadorian abjection of mind. This is not to deny Tralfamadore’s impact, even – or especially – on the lives of those who are sooner or later privy to its secret. But it is to say that the would-be opposition which Tralfamadore introduces, freedom vs. the wirehouse, is one that the fiction finally traduces. How, in conceptual terms, it does so Vonnegut subsequently specifies elsewhere: at the outset of Slaughterhouse-Five (1968/9). There he reports on a postcard sent to him and a friend of his by a taxi driver whom the two of them had commerce with when they revisited Dresden, the site of their wartime internment. The concluding words of that Dresdenite’s message of greetings are ‘If the Accident Will.’ The unexpected upper case, even if it be attributed to a German original (as it were), turns ‘will’ from a verb into a substantive and thereby makes for what would normally be an

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oxymoron. In Sirens, however – as elsewhere in Vonnegut – accident and will, or intention, are not polar opposites. This is apparent from the (fictifactual) accident befalling Salo’s space ship – an accident which, by its interruption of the Tralfamadorian intent of conveying ‘Greetings’ to the far end of the universe, inextricably gives rise to humanity’s higher purpose. This and other cases wherein accident usurps purpose prove tributary to the subversive questioning of that distinction which pervades Sirens’ plot. That plot indeed seems to be the literary equivalent of a Rube Goldberg device, a contraption deviously designed to bring about a more or less mundane or otherwise trivial result, whereby its ludicrous complexity produces both surprise and amusement.13 In contrast to the typical Rube Goldberg mechanism, however, Sirens perpetually leads us off on a tangent, often with the additional complication of tangentially conducing to the – i.e., Tralfamadore’s – objective. Bobby Denton’s sermon stands as a typical instance. That Evangelist appropriates Buckminster Fuller’s notion of space-ship Earth to promote a Space-Age version of Christian Fundamentalism whose sense of (moral) purpose at least parallels the predominant secular thought of ‘the Nightmare Ages’ (1:8) which Sirens overall is satirizing. But Vonnegut then elicits from Denton’s message an inadvertent implication of its metaphor: that we’re on ‘an enormously pointless voyage through space … expected to take forever’ (3:87). Yet in its plot-context, this meaning – though unintended, or accidental, on Denton’s part – subserves Tralfamadore’s purpose, especially by helping to conceal the existence of such a purpose. And this is likewise true for the other pronounced tangent that Sirens flies off on: the worship of an Utterly Indifferent God. That divinity belongs to, or emanates from, an accidental universe; and at least one feature of belief in such a deity comports with that universe: the abasement, or leveling, which adherents to an Indifferent God subject themselves to. This practice qualifies as a logical dictate of the credo about being ‘the victim of a series of accidents’ (10:229 et al.), but only via a Russellian paradox: it can be taken as essential or necessary to a religion of accident solely by reason of its being arbitrary, or accidental. (The fact that Vonnegut spun off this aspect of the episode as the short story ‘Harrison Bergeron’ supports the argument here.)14 The confounding of accident and purpose that emerges from scrutiny of Sirens’ invented religions operates on the level of plot-elements as well. If Sirens’ plot doesn’t precisely qualify as a Rube Goldberg device, it is nevertheless rather closer to such a contrivance than to a clockwork mechanism like Tom Jones’s plot. In Fielding’s masterpiece of plotting (1749), every incident in and by itself is, from the human standpoint, an accident, and irreducibly so; but from the vantage of the author, every accident is a piece

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of the providential design. Thus, for example, there is literally providence in the fall of a sparrow – or rather, in the flight of Sophia’s thrush. Bliffil’s malicious act of liberating the bird and Tom’s ineffectual attempt to retrieve it together constitute an accident which in the end (but only then) acquires the status of necessity, as we realize once we have become privy to how it figures in the author’s design as that essentially involves the uniting of Tom and Sophia.15 This ought to be the case with Sirens’ accidents as well. Instead, however, something of the reverse is true. We are regularly assured that everything that happens, at least up to the arrival of the replacement part on Titan, happens of necessity, or with a purpose; but that purpose sometimes doesn’t extend to the gross details, and never really extends to the details of such details. It is necessary to Tralfamadore’s grand design, for instance, that Malachi be warehoused somewhere to allow for the appropriate interval before his Second Coming. But his being put in storage on Mercury, and in company with someone who is expressly dropped from the plot afterwards, remains something of a pure accident, a detail unaccountable to purpose, especially given that the one available explanation – Mercury’s proximity to Earth – is in effect foreclosed by reason of the fictifact that the site for warehousing Beatrice and Chrono is an Amazon rainforest. The likelihood that imaginative considerations dictated Mercury is beside the point here, which is that Sirens, variously and perpetually, compromises the opposition of accident to purpose. Vonnegut thus takes on, in an unusual way, a question that science fiction has perennially addressed itself to from the moment that H. G. Wells confronted it in and via The Time Machine (1894–95). While taking cognizance of the challenge to the notion of free will which any fiction envisioning the future inevitably inscribes, only in passing does Vonnegut resort to the traditional term-concepts for purchasing that challenge. Rumfoord’s abstract, quoted above, of the Tralfamadorian vision of the co-existence of present and future (and past) is totally along the lines of Wells’s awareness (antedating his writing of The Time Machine in any recognizable version) that futuristic fictions are, in effect, the predicate of LaPlacean determinism, with its Rigid Universe.16 Vonnegut, however, primarily reformulates the putative opposition of determinism to free will in terms of accident and purpose, and then employs the latter term-concepts in a way that makes them mutually subversive.17 Thus, to add one further example to those already given, the very last words of Sirens – Stony Stevenson’s ‘somebody up there likes you’ – carry an import which they do not have in their original appearance as Malachi’s thought about himself. The difference has little to do with whether they are self-applied or represent the view of someone else, but everything to do with the (self)consciousness which Sirens has offered us in the interim:

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that what initially was a mindless expression of a belief in blind luck now appears as infusing accident with purpose, and thereby reconciling those terms in a manner that tends to render them self-destructive (or deconstructive) of the distinction which, taken together, they would make. Given Vonnegut’s frequently cited reservations about being classed as a science-fiction writer (thanks first of all to Sirens), it may well be worth noting that he himself implicitly acknowledges that he was writing with an eye to the genre, or in that generic connection. This is clear from at least one detail in Beyond Time and Timbuktu, or Prometheus-5 (1972), a drama (of sorts), scripted for television, which (as its title indicates) is largely a rewrite of Sirens. There one of the TV commentators covering the blastoff of Stony Stevenson into ‘chronosynclastic infundibulation’ regularly misnames the latter as ‘time warp.’18 And that testimony, outside the strict confines of Sirens, of Sirens’ debt to a particular stock-in-trade device of pulp science fiction has correlatives within the book – perhaps most saliently in the mechanical implants allowing for mind-control of the ‘Martians.’19 More importantly, Sirens in effect defines itself as science fiction by reason of some of its literary references or allusions. Vonnegut expressly mentions Alice in Wonderland twice, both times as a descriptor for the door leading into the Rumfoords’ mansion, and on another occasion he invokes Alice’s Cheshire Cat.20 Meanwhile, the scene wherein Malachi, standing on a platform with Beatrice and Chrono, has the ignominy of his past exposed to the crowd below recalls the climactic tableau in The Scarlet Letter. And almost the same degree of certainty about that allusion to Hawthorne obtains for Melville, and not only because the name of Constant’s rocketship (i.e., The Whale) brings to mind Moby-Dick (as well as the biblical Jonah as the type of Malachi as prophet-despite-himself), but also because Bobby Denton and C. Horner Redwine are somewhat reminiscent of Father Mapple.21 Sirens is surely not a work of fantasy, even of the Carrollesque sort; nor is it exactly a historical novel or romance, despite Vonnegut’s (outrageous) assurance that ‘[a]ll persons, places, and events in this book are real.’ The significance of these referencings (apart from indicating Vonnegut’s literary ambitions) still has to do with Sirens’ generic (self)location. But that is true because the Alice books, The Scarlet Letter, and Moby-Dick function to establish the coordinates of Sirens’ generic space – viz., science fiction – without themselves occupying it.22 IV. The Dresden Effect That Vonnegut’s only literal conjunction of ‘Accident’ and ‘Will’ (with a capital W at least) occurs in the fiction of his which directly retails his wartime internment in Dresden is no mere coincidence. After all, it has

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long been something of a commentorial truism that what happened to the inhabitants of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945 had a decisive formative impact on Vonnegut’s thinking, not to say his psyche, and that the impact was all the greater for his being a third generation American of German extraction. But while Vonnegut’s radical questioning both of purpose and of accident as its would-be alternative no doubt owes much to the personal trauma of Dresden, the connection is not nearly as straightforward as it is usually represented as being. The grounds for skepticism about a simple causal relationship between the firebombing of Dresden and Vonnegut’s worldview, including his historical outlook, are worth connoitering, and not just for what may be revealed about the autobiographical imagination (generally as well as his in particular), but also because we thereby arrive at a different view of Tralfamadore and its higher purpose. On the way, moreover, we cannot avoid confronting the most problematic aspect of Vonnegut’s œuvre: the suspicion it raises of his being a nihilist. Reason for such skepticism comes in part from his rendering of his experience as a Witness to Dresden in Slaughterhouse-Five. The very fact of the intervention of more than twenty years between the experience and Vonnegut’s account of it in its own terms (for the first and perhaps the last time) is in itself symptomatic of profound psychic trauma. Nor does the absence from Slaughterhouse of any certain reference to the most horrific effects of the firebombing cast any substantial doubt on that supposition. Habituated as we now are to scenes of mass slaughter, mostly in the form of television-mediated genocidal images, we may still be able to conceive of that prospect as inducing severe intellectual as well as emotional distress (even if Vonnegut remained incognizant of the fact that the heat from the firebombing was so intense as to cause human flesh to liquefy and flow, sometimes knee-deep, through the streets of Dresden). On the other hand, Vonnegut’s reaction, particularly in so far as Billy Pilgrim may be taken as his stand-in, has a neurasthenia about it which seems accompanied by moral apathy (in the root sense of that last word). The film version of Slaughterhouse is good at conveying this apathetic quality,23 which also appears in looking at the fiction as a rewrite, partly, of Sirens. Central to Slaughterhouse’s conception is a Billy Pilgrim whom the Dresden horror has chrono-synclastically infundibulated, but not in the manner Skip Rumfoord exemplifies. Slaughterhouse does refer en passant to Rumfoord’s Tralfamadorian apprehension of time-as-eternity, as the coexistence of past, present, and future;24 and Dresden and Ilium are the geographical loci of Billy’s past and present, respectively. But Slaughterhouse’s Tralfamadore is no more exactly identifiable as the future than Sirens’ is. It exists as a place of refuge, the site of benevolent warehousing,

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and as an escape from the respective nightmares of Dresden and Ilium; but it also constitutes a(nother) place of internment, corresponding to a zoo except that in this case the caged animals that the Tralfamadorians come to impassively observe are humans (Billy and his would-be mate, Montana Wildhack). This is also to say that Vonnegut’s experience of Dresden, even as Slaughterhouse renders it, is decidedly convoluted, not just because it is subject to the mind, the imagination, of Vonnegut the man, but because it is mediated through Vonnegut’s (revisionary) literary imagination as that has previously figured his Dresden experience: in Sirens. That the places Billy’s consciousness oscillates among are locatable in terms of past, present, and (possibly) future is somewhat beside their meaningful function, if not contrary to it. As Billy goes from one spatiotemporal locale to another – accidentally on purpose, but in a fashion generating doubts about both accident and purpose as well as about their difference – his travels serve to illustrate the import of his being a ‘spastic in time,’ with ‘no control over where he is going next’ (2:23). But beyond that, they thereby impart to Slaughterhouse a (temporal) structure objectively correlative to the book’s fundamental meaning: that the time is seriously out of joint. And more so in Hamlet’s original sense than in Philip K. Dick’s rendition of the idea (though Vonnegut shares some common ground with both). Taken from Sirens and moved to the foreground, the disjointing of time in Slaughterhouse is implicated in and psycho-logically consequent on mass murder, rather than on Hamlet’s single originary homicide. Moreover, Vonnegut in his subsequent fictions multiplies examples so that Dresden becomes the type for a twentieth-century historical nightmare whose other (real-life) episodes include the genocidal massacre of Turkish Armenians at the outset of the century, the atom-bombing of Nagasaki, and, of course, the Holocaust (aptly so called as far as Vonnegut is concerned).25 Each of these is in and of itself quite sufficient to compel a Why? which inevitably comes down to a question of and about morality, and with it an impulse to set things right. It is in this context, especially, that Vonnegut’s putative nihilism obtrudes itself. To the moral problem which Dresden typically embodies he offers various solutions, all of them comparable to what Hamlet, somewhat unintentionally, achieves in that they would bring the – or at least a – world to an end. (After all, Hamlet by his actions, and inaction, effects Denmark’s takeover by the son of a man who is its mortal enemy.)26 The difference with Hamlet resides in the immediate unacceptability of solutions which Vonnegut fictively poses. Ice-Nine in Cat’s Cradle, for example, and evolutionary lobotomy of two-thirds of human brain capacity in Galápagos, do not merely rival Tralfamadore’s dot in point of

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absurdity; they also go so far beyond the normal bounds of pessimism as to reach the outer limits of black humor. This is all the more disquieting in connection with Vonnegut’s statements about Dresden in his interview with Playboy. Following up on Vonnegut’s admission that his memory ‘was a complete blank’ when it came to ‘the bombing of Dresden,’ the interviewer asked whether ‘the experience of being interned – and bombed – … change[d] you in any way?’ (Wampeters 262). To which Vonnegut replied, ‘No,’ and then expatiated thus: I suppose you’d think so because that’s the cliché. The importance of Dresden in my life has been considerably exaggerated because my book about it became a best seller. If the book hadn’t been a best seller, it would seem like a very minor experience in my life. And I don’t think that people’s lives are changed by short-term events like that. Dresden was astonishing, but experiences can be astonishing without changing you. (Wampeters, 263) Peculiar as these remarks are, we could chalk them up to an impulse to say the outrageous – of which Vonnegut surely has a Wildean quantum. Or we could slough them off as a momentary reaction against what he himself characterizes as an all-too-prevalent view of his work (in which case ‘Dresden’ could just as well read ‘science fiction’). But no special pleading can totally obviate the suspicion of nihilism which Vonnegut here (and elsewhere) generates.27 Let’s put that another way. H. G. Wells, in his Experiment in Autobiography, divulges that he ‘assembled’ ‘a considerable accumulation of material … in a folder labelled “Whether I am a Novelist’’’ (7.5.410). Were Vonnegut similarly inclined to such record-keeping (which doesn’t seem likely),28 we could rightly expect that his file on ‘Whether I am a Nihilist’ would bulk equally large – also, certainly, in comparison with any file headed ‘Why I am Not a Misogynist.’ And while everything therein would be autobiographical by definition, much of it would resemble or reproduce the autobiographical elements in Vonnegut’s fictions.29 V. Back to Tralfamadore: Hocus Pocus It is therefore appropriate that the work of Vonnegut’s which least raises the suspicion of nihilism – indeed, seems designed to answer the charge – should be a fictive autobiography: Hocus Pocus (1990). The book offers itself as Eugene Debs Hartke’s account of the experiences which have rendered him ‘so powerless and despised’ that the great American Socialist whom he is ‘named after’ (and to whose memory Vonnegut dedicates Hocus Pocus) ‘might at last be somewhat fond of me’ (1:8). It is far less a

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narrative, however – let alone a straight narrative – than it is a journal of Hartke’s thoughts (including those he gets from friends, chance acquaintances, or whomever). Formally, then, it justifies its characteristically Vonnegutian self-indulgence, his aversion to leaving out a tangential joke. It does, however, show more discipline in this regard than does many another fiction of his – though not as much as Sirens – in that most of what it contains at once (fragmentationally) depicts and reflects upon postVietnam War America. In doing so, it exhibits Vonnegut’s usual irreverence, but not the insouciance, real or studied, which often attends it. In fact, he relegates that attitude to Hartke’s brother-in-law, Jack Patton, one of the most memorable personalities in the book, despite his fleeting appearances, because of the one phrase he has to suit any and every occasion, dismaying or horrific as well as absurd: ‘it made me laugh like hell.’ The reason he can ‘laugh like hell’ is that he ‘can’t care about what might happen next to me or anyone’ (9:72) – or so he tells Hartke. Regardless of whether this is the truth (Patton, to Hartke’s knowledge, never actually laughed), it certainly does not identify Hocus Pocus’s presiding spirit. Hartke provides much to laugh at – if, that is, we are inclined or persuadable to taking his side against Jason Wilder, a right-wing media pundit who appoints himself Star Chamber-type prosecutor in order to get Hartke sacked for being an ‘‘‘unteacher” … somebody who takes things out of young people’s heads instead of putting more things in’ (14:125 – which is also to say: for confronting students with a smattering of what constitutes Hocus Pocus). But the sensibility behind the laughter is a whole lot closer to Eugene Debs’s than to Jack Patton’s (at least on his own sayso), and closer still to Michael Moore’s.30 Hocus Pocus’s autobiographical destiny, so to speak, is to account for how Hartke has come to be incarcerated, awaiting trial for allegedly having masterminded a prison break. Toward that end, however, it temporally zigs and zags, conflating or otherwise confounding past, present, and future, causing them to interpenetrate even more than they do in Sirens. In the process of reading, it distinctly conveys the impression of an ongoing present, covering Hartke’s twenty-five years as a teacher, with interruptive flashbacks to his own past, mostly to his activities as a more or less gungho officer in Vietnam, but also to (other) episodes in the history of infamy that do not involve him personally as a participant (the Alamo, for instance, puts in an appearance as a monument to ‘the right to own Black slaves’: see Hocus Pocus 36:275). At the same time, such irruptions of the historical past (impersonal or personal) tend to subvert its differentiation – and, more importantly, the distancing of it – from the present. Which is fully in keeping with something we are given to understand virtually from the start: that Hartke’s view is almost entirely

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retrospective, coming as it does from the vantage of 2001. The choice of date has to do, of course, with ‘Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer who wrote … about humanity’s destiny in other parts of the Universe’ (23:173). But Vonnegut’s (calculated) evocation of Clarkean spiritually evolutionary optimism proves to be highly ironic. The futuristic elements infiltrating Hocus Pocus – ‘infiltrate’ is the right word, since the fictifactual date of composition is the most obtrusive of them – are not at all of the sort that Clarke himself would ever envision. They are, however, consistent with an overall intent which is strictly comparable to (part of) Sirens’. Hocus Pocus, that is, stands in commentorial relation to Reagan’s America as Sirens does to Eisenhower’s.31 Haunted by Vietnam and, equally, by his wife’s hereditary insanity, Hartke’s life – which is (also) to say, Hocus Pocus – centers around two institutions: Scipio’s Tarkington College and the Maximum Security Prison in nearby Athena, New York. The one began its existence as the Mohiga Valley Free Institute, intended ‘to offer a free … education to persons of either sex, and of any age or race or religion, living within 40 miles of Scipio’ (2:15); but it was soon rechristened Tarkington College and given a mission in sync with an America characterized as much by the divide between the wealthy and the ‘nobodies’ as by its ‘color-coding’: the mission of catering to the mentally impaired scions of the plutocracy. Some of the Trustees now controlling the place are alumni; currently all are Rich and White and Male (the one half-White female having recently tendered her resignation); and all presumably share values consonant with their having named college buildings in honor of Nicaragua’s Anastasio Samoza and the last Shah of Iran as well as Norman Rockwell.32 Across a lake from the college, but otherwise a world away, is a prison dating from the year that Tarkington received its new name (1875). The college’s population reached the 300 level about half a century ago, and has stayed there ever since; but the prison’s has been increasing, and now stands at 10,000, or merely triple its designed capacity (9:64) – symptomatic of the fact that the U.S. ‘ha[s] a higher percentage of its citizens in prison than [does] any other country’ (38:285),33 largely as a consequence of a war on drugs which Hocus Pocus allusively represents as realizing that billing literally: it is now being conducted by elite military units. All 10,000 inmates at Athena are black, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling that ‘it was cruel and unusual punishment to confine a person to a place where his or her race was greatly outnumbered by another’ (10:77).34 The jailers, however, from the warden on down, all come from Japan (and on a temporary basis) because Athena’s prison, one of many that have been privatized, was among those which Sony contracted to run. Moreover, since just about the only going concerns still in American hands, and

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likely to remain there, are those which the (Italian) Mafia owns (see 32:243), the number already sold is of a such a magnitude as to require a Japanese ‘Army of Occupation,’ uniformed ‘in business suits’ (36:236), to manage Japanese corporations’ American properties. The meaningful burden which the prison bears as a now-Japanese enterprise and the one Tarkington carries as a bastion of white privilege (and idiocy) come together, at least momentarily, in the Black Cat Café. The basis for their doing so is a geographical proximity to the campus which makes the café a favorite resort of Tarkington’s students and faculty (even though ‘the townspeople considered [it] their private club,’ a ‘place they could go [to] and not be reminded of how dependent they were on the rich kids on the hill,’ 13:111). But the meaningful connection with Tarkington, and thence with the sellout of America, comes out of the owner’s reluctant acknowledgment of the café’s actual role: his admission that it ‘really … [is] a whorehouse’ (28:216). In that capacity, it significantly applies (or is applied, also through Hartke’s linkage of it to the weapons-producing chemicals corporation that his father worked for) to all ‘industrialized nations during the 20th Century,’ where ‘so many of the jobs … ha[ve] to do with large-scale deceptions, legal thefts from public treasuries, or the wrecking of the food chain, the topsoil, the water, or the atmosphere’ (29:217). Here and elsewhere, Hocus Pocus fundamentally operates by metonym more than by metaphor – as is typical of Vonnegut. It is the collocation of Tarkington, the Maximum Security Prison, and the Black Cat-as-whorehouse that makes for, insinuates, their meaningful connection, which, in other words, depends rather less on logic than it does on a psychologically associative process. This is fully consistent with Hartke’s own thinking. The only sense he deliberately seeks to make of the world of Hocus Pocus is of the sort epitomized in the careful reckoning by which he discovers that the Vietnamese whom he, for certain, killed numerically equal the women with whom he committed adultery.35 Moreover, his stated conviction that everything (except the human eye) is accountable to ‘Time and Luck’ (10:81), ‘[t]he 2 prime movers in the Universe’ (3:21), virtually restricts him to calculations of this numerological kind, engendering as they do relationships as elusive in their meaning as they are suggestive of possessing such. Like another believer in luck – Malachi Constant – Hartke is willing, if not exactly prepared, to deal with the ‘booby-traps’ which come his way without asking Why? But, again like Malachi, he does accidentally encounter an explanation of the sort that he isn’t inclined to look for. Indeed, he fortuitously happens upon no fewer than three which would have his world be the product of something other than mere coincidence.

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One comes out of a conversation that Hartke has with a black woman physicist. This we can call the Plantation Theory: that the white oligarchs (represented by the Tarkington Trustees who interview her for the teaching position which Hartke formerly had) are the true descendants of the ‘Europeans … who went all over the world stealing other people’s land, which they then called their plantations,’ making ‘the people they robbed their slaves’ (37:280). That historical understanding would account for many of the features of America which Hartke himself, without such a hypothesis, has noticed – e.g., that ‘even our natives, if they had reached the top or been born at the top, regarded Americans as foreigners’ (37:282; perhaps needless to say, ‘natives’ here doesn’t mean ‘aborigines,’ while ‘Americans’ takes in everybody not covered by the concessive clause). Competing with the Plantation Theory is an idea which the Japanese warden at Athena presents to Hartke: that America’s owners ‘ha[ve] managed to convert their wealth, which had originally been in the form of factories or stores or other demanding enterprises, into a form so liquid and abstract … that there were few reminders coming from anywhere that they might be responsible for anyone outside their own circle of friends and relatives’ (36:238). This might be termed the Liquidation Theory, also with reference to its expounder’s previous remark that the American ‘Ruling Class’ has ‘looted your public treasuries, and turned your industries over to nincompoops,’ thereby finding ‘a way to stick other countries with all the responsibility their wealth might imply, and still remain rich beyond the dreams of avarice’ (36:236). Such an explanation, far from precluding the Plantation Theory, by and large complements it. Yet by the same token, each points up inadequacies of the other, respectively emphasizing either the responsibility or the irresponsibility of the Ruling Class. Nor do the two theories in combination completely explain why America has turned into ‘a country in such an advanced state of physical and spiritual and intellectual dilapidation’ that it’s a wonder the Japanese – or anyone else – would want anything to do with it (38:283; the Japanese wonder about this too, and pull out before Hocus Pocus ends). Together they take cognizance of the sociological and the economic, but not the ecological devastation (though the Liquidation Theory, especially, could be extended to include the latter; indeed, a passage at 29:217, as quoted above, has already done so). The Plantation and Liquidation Theories thus leave room for another, which Vonnegut in any event is not only going to provide but gives precedence to, at least in order of appearance. This theory is a bequest, as it were, from Hartke’s brother-in-law: it figures in and as ‘a remarkable science fiction story’ (16:135) appearing in a ‘very rare copy of Black Garterbelt’ (35:268) that Patton gives Hartke shortly before a sniper’s bullet

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finds him. (The porn magazine withholds authorship; but judging from the story’s publication venue, readers of Vonnegut can be sure that it is the work of his Kilgore Trout, whose science fiction, Vonnegut informs us elsewhere, is only available in ‘adult’ bookstores, which display secondhand copies of Trout to conceal their illegal wares.) The story’s title, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore,’ parodically recalls the infamous anti-Semitic diatribe that made its English debut (from the original Russian) courtesy of Henry Ford (see Hocus Pocus 33:248–49; it will also presently surface in Hocus Pocus as recommended reading for Athena’s inmates under the direction of ‘the Black Brothers of Islam,’ 33:249). So, too, the science-fiction story centers on a conspiracy theory, but one which, unlike its insane namesake’s, is from some other planet in a literal sense of the words. According to the story (25:196–97), ‘intelligent threads of energy’ known as Elders, ‘intersecting near a planet called Tralfamadore’ and deciding that ‘the spread of life’ ‘through[out] the Universe’ was ‘a hot idea,’ also realized that the only means to that end, germs, weren’t yet ‘tough enough’ to ‘survive’ the rigors which intergalactic travel involves. The Elders thereupon selected Earth as a proving ground, a place where humans with their ‘extra-large brains’ ‘might … invent survival tests for germs which were truly horrible.’ (The Elders would therefore regard the Black Cat’s condom-vending machine as ‘a threat to their space program,’ 27:212.) And to ensure that these ‘tests’ will involve conditions horrible enough to really toughen up the germs, the Elders implanted in the extralarge brains such ideas about God and man’s dominion over nature as would inspire the Earthlings to ‘ma[k]e life a hell for each other as well as for what they called “lower animals’’’ (26:200; thus the Elders, we are told, are responsible for the pertinent passages in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible – see Hocus Pocus 25:198 and 26:200). By contrast with the Tralfamadorians, into whom the Elders had tried to zap similar notions, humans lack the sense of humor – i.e., the ironic self-regard – which would recognize such self-aggrandizement for the preposterous nonsense it is (26:199–200). Hence on Earth ‘the Elders’ scheme of having the misery of higher animals trickle down to microorganisms worked like a dream’ (26:202): ‘this planet became as sterile as the Moon,’ save for a few germs capable of withstanding whatever space might throw at them (26:201). This conspiracy theory can explain any number of twentieth-century developments as Hocus Pocus depicts them, along with others which that book merely alludes to or doesn’t mention at all. The theory’s debility, of course (which the alternative Plantation and Liquidation Theories don’t share), lies with its being as purely fantastic as its namesake’s, The Protocols

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of Zion – or, in other words, with its qualifications for being an example of the hocus pocus that Vonnegut’s title is referring to. But this is not necessarily to deny it any cognitive value whatever. Hartke tells us that the story ‘confirm[s] what I had come to expect toward the end of the Vietnam War’ (26:203); and he also reports that the issue of Black Garterbelt which figures as its synecdoche was ‘[o]n top of everything else’ in ‘a sort of casket … contain[ing] the remains of the soldier I used to be’ (25:196). At least for him, then, ‘The Protocols’ constitutes a religious fiction according to Vonnegut’s understanding of the function of such: it makes living endurable.36 But apart from that, the datum that it comes out of Vietnam implies that this re-vision of the Tralfamadore Hypothesis, like its original counterpart in Sirens, corresponds to a common human outlook at a particular historical moment. Such a correspondence does, of course, require an act of appropriation. Hartke, after all, calculates that the story of the Elders dates from ‘after World War II but before the Korean War’ (26:203). Yet inasmuch as the re-vision necessary to make a fiction putatively emanating from the Second World War applicable to Vietnam is not radically different from what Vonnegut does with Sirens’ Tralfamadore in Hocus Pocus, it may not be merely coincidental that this same calculation of Hartke’s would place ‘The Protocols’ at the time that Vonnegut himself quit his job in ‘publicrelations hocus pocus’ for G.E. to become a writer.37 In either case the re-visionary process entails the displacing of the original, not its obliteration. Vonnegut locates his Elders in the vicinity of Tralfamadore, a planet, moreover, which they fail to control. So, too, there is correlative absence of control over Hocus Pocus, whose plot the Tralfamadorian fiction barely impinges upon, let alone informs (unlike the case with Sirens’ plot). Sirens thus, finally, becomes Hocus Pocus’s precursor in the Borgesian meaning of the word38 – and especially in so far as the 1990 book’s own, unmistakable, moral outrage qualifies the amused detachment of the original Tralfamadore. This, however, is consequent not on Hocus Pocus’s evidence of Vonnegut’s capacity for moral commitment per se so much as in relation to the difference between the purpose redounding on humankind from Sirens’ Tralfamadore and that subsequently imparted by the Elders. With Earth as a laboratory for producing space-travelresistant germs as the alternative, assisting in getting a dot to the other end of the universe doesn’t seem all that worthless or demeaning. This realization might even prompt us to reconsider Tralfamadore’s message so as to discover that, through its connection with those autobiographical elements in Sirens which otherwise appear as irrelevancies, it holds a hitherto overlooked significance.

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VI. ‘Greetings,’ Again Vonnegut tends to be more obviously autobiographical than most other authors of note. Beginning with Player Piano (1952), he has fashioned something of a private mythology out of personal real-life materials – as signalized by his use of the mythologistic Ilium in place of Troy (the New York State Troy, that is, near enough to Schnectady to be its metonymic surrogate, just as the General Forge and Foundry Company stands in for General Electric, in whose Schnectady public relations department Vonnegut worked for a couple of years after the war). Sirens, however, counts among the least obviously autobiographical of his writings. While finally setting Malachi down in Indianapolis (Vonnegut’s own hometown, and a recurrent autobiographical site in his fiction), it is one of the few which does not even mention Ilium; nor does GF&F figure in the alphabet soup of companies that Malachi’s father invests in. Yet Sirens may also be read as the most self-revealing of Vonnegut’s writings – as what once upon a time would have been termed ‘spiritual autobiography.’ This contention has little to do with Sirens’ Martian interlude, the only episode in all of Vonnegut which can be read in direct connection, presumably, with his felt experience as a member of the U.S. military.39 But it does depend on a host of details in Sirens which, unlike its Martian dystopia, are largely irrelevant to its extended joke. Those irrelevancies have mostly to do with the childhoods of three of the principals, Malachi, Boaz, and Beatrice, and especially the relationship of the first two with their parents. Malachi in particular cannot even properly be said to come from a dysfunctional family: the outcome of an intermittent union with a chambermaid, he meets his father face-to-face only once, and his contact with him otherwise consists of a single, impersonal letter. What Malachi finds in the end, on Titan – but by a serendipity which is the accidental by-product of Tralfamadorian design – is the family he never had known before, just as Boaz in sacrificing his life to his beloved harmoniums ‘bec[o]me[s] for himself the affectionate Mama and Papa he never had’ (9:214).40 The desire (dis)figured here – albeit quirkily, and in minimalist fashion – appears repeatedly in Vonnegut. Perhaps its clearest expression is to be found in Timequake, the book of his which most overtly incorporates autobiographical materials. There he proposes that the U.S. constitution be amended to include these propositions, among others: ‘Every newborn shall be sincerely welcomed and cared for until maturity,’ and ‘Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage’ (45:152). These, moreover, are harmonious with a sentiment of his pediatrician son, Mark, which Vonnegut repeats, with evident approval, as the epigraph of Bluebeard (1987): ‘We are here to help each other get

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through this thing, whatever it is.’41 The undermining irony is intrinsic to its concluding three words rather than emanating mostly from a fictive context; but otherwise the moral imperative sounds very much like the propositions of Boaz, Beatrice, and Malachi quoted earlier.42 So, too, all of them can be regarded as psycho-autobiographical inasmuch as they bespeak the desire for a true, a familial, community, of the sort that Vonnegut (by his own account) did not have as a child – as opposed to its parody: a granfalloon predicated on foma (i.e., an organization-like group whose cohesiveness depends upon ideology, or ‘comforting lies’ [Wampeters, 239]). Somewhat in spite of himself, then, Vonnegut really does believe in something. And because of as well as despite what can be seen as Vonnegut’s critique of the teleological (including the utopian) mindset, that something as it inscribes itself in The Sirens of Titan may properly be termed utopian longing, involving as it does the desire for the kind of community central to any project which is really worthy of being designated ‘utopian.’ Even without reference to Hocus Pocus’s revisionary Tralfamadorian alternative, this line of interpretation should prompt us to re-evaluate Sirens’ message. As a dot, it conveys the absurdity of higher-purpose thinking, and thus – literally – represents the point of Sirens’ satire as a revelation of the nightmare which is history. But in that dot’s translation as ‘Greetings’ we may also hear an appeal for – and to – true community. ‘Greetings,’ after all, is synonymous with ‘Hello,’ and not just in Sirens’ context. Hence it is susceptible to the construction that Vonnegut has Rabo Karabekian put on its companion word, Good-bye: ‘the emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages’ (Bluebeard 24:198).

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§9. Jorge Luis Borges and the Labyrinths of Time … and so on to the end, to the invisible end, through the tenuous labyrinths of time. Borges, ‘Avatars of the Tortoise’ (1939)1 I. The Garden and the Library as Self-Conscious Metaphors ‘For years I believed I had grown up in a suburb of Buenos Aires, a suburb of random streets and visible sunsets. What is certain is that I grew up in a garden, behind a forbidding gate, and in a library of limitless English books’ (Obras 4:9).2 Those words, which begin the Prologue to the second edition of Evaristo Carriego (1955),3 evoke, with characteristic concision, the universe of metaphors that their author, Jorge Luis Borges, inhabits.4 The geography is deliberately, symbolically, indefinite: Borges locates the garden and the library that created him in an unnamed labyrinthine Buenos Aires suburb whose relation to him he is perhaps no longer certain of, and in any event does not choose to specify beyond saying that it was aglow with the light of the setting sun.5 Where he is definite or circumstantial, the details reveal one of those secret plots he delights in puzzling out, and perpetrating: the enclosed garden and the library of (ambiguously) infinite books appear in his parables (mostly his ficciones) as metaphors of the world. ‘The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries’ wherein human beings seek, among a practically infinite number of volumes, the one book which may contain their ‘Vindication’ (Labyrinths 51ff.). That model of humankind’s perplexity, and of extravagant futility, Borges offers in ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941 – now viewable as envisioning Derrida’s ‘il n’y pas hors de texte’). In ‘The Wall and the Books’ (1950) he suggests elaborate explanations – as tentative as they are mutually exclusive, if not self-contradictory – of the metaphoric significance of ‘the two vast undertakings’ of the emperor Shih Huang Ti: ‘the building of the almost infinite Chinese Wall’ and ‘the burning of all the books that had been written before his time’ (OI 3).6 The emperor may have begun these monstrous projects at one and

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the same moment; hence the walling in of space and the incinerating of the past might have been ‘magic barriers to halt death’ or to delimit the world so that all things might have ‘the names that befitted them’ (OI 4).7 Perhaps the two acts ‘were not simultaneous,’ in which case possibly ‘the burning of the libraries and the building of the wall are operations that secretly nullify each other’ (since the one is destructive and the other creative – OI 5). Another of Borges’s versions of this crepuscular analogy between the wall and the books, the garden and the library – a mysterious correspondence that is ‘trying to tell us something,’ or has ‘told us something we should not have missed,’ or is ‘about to tell us something’ (OI 5)8 – had appeared earlier, in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (1941). There Borges postulates an identity the basis of which is a tautology: the infinite book and the labyrinthine garden nominally come together as The Garden of Forking Paths, an imaginary novel by the hypothetical Ts’ui Pên,9 predicated on the idea of time as a labyrinth. Ts’ui Pên [opines the sinologist Stephen Albert] must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and maze were one and the same thing. The Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude stood in the center of a garden that was perhaps intricate; that circumstance could have suggested to the heirs a physical labyrinth. [T]s’ui Pên died; no one in the vast territories that were his came upon the labyrinth; the confusion of … [his] novel suggested to me that it was the maze. (Labyrinths 25) Ts’ui Pên conceived of a book whose labyrinthine structure depends on the notion of bifurcations in time. Stephen Albert gives an account of that book’s mystery to Yu Tsun, a descendant of Ts’ui Pên and a man who, pursued as a spy for the Germans (the story is set during the First World War), has – to elude capture temporarily and to communicate a military secret – conceived of a labyrinthine plan of evasion based on the bifurcations of space.10 (The labyrinthine nature of Yu Tsun’s journey to Stephen Albert’s becomes explicit as Yu Tsun reflects on the unsolicited directions given him at the Ashgrove railroad station: ‘The instructions to turn always to the left reminded me that such was the common procedure for discovering the central point of certain labyrinths’ [Labyrinths 22]. A road that ‘forked among the now confused meadows’ takes him to the ‘rusty gate’ which opens on Stephen Albert’s garden: ‘Between the iron bars I made out a poplar grove and a pavilion’ [Labyrinths 23] – suggesting Ts’ui Pên’s

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‘Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude.’ Thus, Borges insinuates, The Garden of Forking Paths and the Garden of Forking Paths converge at the center of Yu Tsun’s labyrinth – a spatial correlative to Ts’ui Pên’s idea of ‘an infinite series of times … divergent, convergent and parallel’ [Labyrinths 28].)11 At the center of that labyrinth, which is also a garden of forking paths, Yu Tsun’s pursuer will discover the labyrinth-maker and his atrocious mystery, the murdered Stephen Albert, victim of Yu Tsun’s monstrous and efficacious attempt to outwit the confines of space. The various labyrinths in the story – Ts’ui Pên’s, Yu Tsun’s, Borges’s – fit each inside the next like a series of Chinese boxes; each is a Garden of Forking Paths and a Garden of Forking Paths. The coincidence supposes a clandestine analogy, perhaps an identity; Borges has created both the garden and the library as models, ostensibly, of the labyrinths of space and time. Thus in saying ‘I grew up in a garden… and in a library,’ he is esoterically confessing himself to be the creature of his own creation. (The parable ‘Borges and I’ [1957] sets out to distinguish between the two – ‘I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me’ – but concludes in mock despair, ‘I do not know which of us has written this page’ [Labyrinths 246–47].) The self-consciousness involved in portraying oneself as the creature of one’s creation is, I would say, essentially baroque. It is the sort of selfconsciousness that Velásquez renders graphically in his masterpiece Las Meninas (1656). The scene is the artist’s studio. In the foreground the maids of honor assume various attitudes. On the rear wall hangs what at first looks like, but is too luminous to be, another of the many paintings adorning the room. This proves to be a mirror reflecting two figures who do not otherwise appear in the ‘fictive’ space of Las Meninas. They belong to the ‘reality’ outside the spatial limits of the canvas. All the same, the presence of their mirror images has the intellectual effect of confounding any nice discrimination of life from art or/as the simulation of life, a confusion Velásquez deliberately intensifies by placing the mirror symmetrically in balance with a door opening on interior space also outside the confines of the space depicted. (The symmetry calls attention to this baroque analogy between mirror and door.) Initially, the maids of honor detract from the viewer’s perception of an artist who stands selfdeprecatingly to one side, in partial obscurity, poised with brush and palette before a canvas whose dimensions, it can be inferred, approximate those of Las Meninas itself. This artist, of course, is Velásquez, who has portrayed himself in the act of painting Las Meninas from a different angle.12 Las Meninas is a compendium of Baroque predilections and conceits: the

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fondness for paradox (which the mirror of art and life typifies); the metaphysical tricks of perspective and point of view (illustrated by the – inferably – divergent angle of vision of the Velásquez who depicts himself vis-à-vis the self-portrait within Las Meninas); the tendency toward infinite regress (consciousness of being self-conscious tends toward consciousness of being self-conscious of being self-conscious, ad infinitum; perhaps in the painting within Las Meninas – whose contents the viewer is not allowed to be privy to – there is another self-portrait of Velásquez delineating the maids of honor from yet another angle). Borges shares this baroque fascination with paradoxes, metaphysical games, and infinite progressions and regresses. He titles one essay ‘A History of Eternity’ (1932), another ‘New Refutation of Time’ (1947). He defends Berkeleyan idealism and also quotes with relish, twice, Hume’s dictum that ‘Berkeley’s arguments do not admit of the slightest refutation nor do they produce the slightest conviction’ (Obras 6:67 and Labyrinths 8). He returns again and again to the paradoxes of Zeno the Eleatic and cognate regressus ad infinitum.13 And in his formulation of some thoughts provoked by the Quixote, paradox, metaphysical speculation, and the idea of an infinite series converge: Why does it make us uneasy to know that the map is within the map [a reference to Josiah Royce’s The World and the Individual] and the thousand and one nights are within the book of A Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disquiet us to know that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote, and Hamlet is a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the answer: those inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833 Carlyle observed that universal history is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they too are written. (OI 46) The dreamer who is himself dreamt (in ‘The Circular Ruins’ [1940]) and the chess player who is a pawn in the hands of gods who are pawns in the hands of higher gods (in the poem ‘Chess’ [1960]) afford Borges other metaphoric disguises for similar metaphysical paradoxes. His ultimate theme – perhaps the logical consequence of the tendency of baroque self-consciousness to engender self-irony – is self-betrayal. Nils Runeberg finally concludes that God ‘was Judas’ (‘Three Versions of Judas’ [1944]). Of Donne’s Biathanatos Borges writes: Christ died a voluntary death, Donne suggests, implying that the elements and the world and the generations of men and Egypt and Rome and Babylon and Judah were drawn from nothingness to destroy Him. Perhaps iron was created for the nails, thorns for the

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crown of mockery, and blood and water for the wound. That baroque idea is perceived beneath the Biathanatos – the idea of a god who fabricates the universe in order to fabricate his scaffold. (OI 92).14 The detective Erik Lönnrot infers from what he believes to have been three murders the existence of a cabalistic pattern analogous to the tetragrammaton, the hidden name of God; he arrives at the point of the compass where he calculates the fourth and last murder will occur and finds that he is the victim of the homicidal labyrinth he has imagined; the name of the murderer (which, redundantly enough, is Red Scharlach) secretly corresponds to his own (‘Death and the Compass’ [1942]).15 And Borges himself, having attempted to demonstrate the factitiousness – or at least the sheer ideality – of space, time, and the self, eventually must admit: And yet, and yet – To deny temporal succession, to deny the ego, to deny the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret assuagements. Our destiny (unlike the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not horrible because of its unreality; it is horrible because it is irreversible and iron-bound. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes, but I am the fire. The world, alas, is real; I alas, am Borges. (OI 186–87) For Borges, ‘universal history,’ the history of all people and of one person,16 is the history of the human mind, lost in the labyrinths of time, conceiving labyrinths of vast simplicity wherein to betray itself. II. Borgesian Precursors In an essay on Kafka (1951), Borges remarks that ‘Every writer creates his precursors.’ By way of explaining this paradox, he adds: If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous selections I have mentioned [Zeno, Kierkegaard, etc.) resemble Kafka’s work: if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other, and this fact is the significant one. Kafka’s idiosyncrasy, in greater or lesser degree, is present in each of these writings, but if Kafka had not written we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. (OI 108) Some of the authors Borges has talked about, most of whom he read in his paternal grandmother’s library of ‘limitless English books,’17 are his precursors in that sense. Among them figure: the Hawthorne of ‘Earth’s Holocaust’ and perhaps ‘Wakefield,’ but not the Hawthorne who imagined a

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utopian ‘celestial railroad’ that goes to Hell (OI 53–58); Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Kipling, the writer of short stories, especially those in The Finest Story in the World and Many Inventions (Obras 6:73n); Oscar Wilde (OI 79–81), a translation of whose The Happy Prince was Borges’s first published work; and G. K. Chesterton in certain of his Father Brown stories (OI 82–85). In that same sense Poe is perhaps not a precursor (though he is more interested in the mere effect of a bizarre idea than is Borges), and H. G. Wells is certainly not.18 Rather, a Wellsian reading of Wells exhibits his affinity with the Argentine writer; so that – his repeated praise of him notwithstanding – Borges has not ‘created’ Wells as he has, for example, ‘created’ the Chesterton he describes as ‘a monstrorum artifex’:19 In my opinion, Chesterton would not have tolerated the imputation of being a contriver of nightmares…. but he tends inevitably to revert to atrocious observations. He asks if perchance a man has three eyes, or a bird three wings; in opposition to the pantheists, he speaks of a man who dies and discovers in paradise that the spirits of the angelic choirs have, every one of them, the same face he has; he speaks of a jail of mirrors; of a labyrinth without a center; of a man devoured by metal automatons; of a tree that devours birds and then grows feathers instead of leaves; he imagines (The Man Who Was Thursday, VI) ‘that if a man went westward to the end of the world he would find something – say a tree – that was more or less than a tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself – a tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked.’ (OI 83) Here Borges, by enlarging details out of all proportion to their original context, has perceived an image of Chesterton that, as he admits, Chesterton himself would not have recognized. By contrast, the Wells of the ‘scientific romances’ (Wells’s term) is recognizable even in the slightest circumstance Borges singles out. His remark that ‘the conventicle of seated monsters who mouth a servile creed in their night is the Vatican and is Lhasa,’ accords with Wells’s own summation of The Island of Doctor Moreau as a ‘theological grotesque’;20 and Wells’s book-length parable (1897) of Griffin, a man who, as a consequence of the most banal of oversights, must dissipate his godlike power of invisibility in futilely trying to satisfy the most basic animal needs, encompasses the significance Borges discovers in a minute detail: ‘[t]he harassed invisible man who has to sleep as though his eyes were wide open because his eyelids do not exclude light is our solitude and our terror’ (OI 87). Borges has recorded his admiration for:

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The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Plattner Story, The First Men in the Moon. They are the first books I read; perhaps they will be the last. I think they will be incorporated, like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written. (OI 88) He has acknowledged his specific debt to Wells’s short story ‘The Crystal Egg’ as the inspiration for ‘The Aleph’ (1945) and ‘The Zahir’ (1947).21 Other ‘inventions’ of Wells’s (Wells’s term again), most of which Borges never mentions, further evince their mutual attraction for ‘atrocious miracles’:22 the vampiric plant in ‘The Strange Orchid’; an imperishable Apple of Knowledge, obtained accidentally, which cannot be located again after it has been carelessly thrown away (‘The Apple’); the fanatic barbarian who sacrifices another, and then himself, to the dynamo he worships (‘The Lord of the Dynamos’); a country whose topography its congenitally blind inhabitants know so well that they can move through their world as if they could see (‘The Country of the Blind’); eyes whose field of vision is geographically antipodal to the body they belong to (‘The Story of Davidson’s Eyes’); a man who returns from somewhere – Nowhere or hell – ‘inverted, just as a reflection returns from a mirror’ (‘The Plattner Story’).23 Although Wells as a writer of science fiction is far more neo-gothic than baroque, Borges does not have to ‘create’ him as his precursor: the disposition they share to pursue rigorously the ‘opposite idea’24 – the conception each, independently, has of his ‘fantastic’ project as a mode of subversion – establishes the basis of their affinity. So, too, the fact that Wells stands out from the others Borges enlists as principal collaborators for not needing Borgesian reconstruction to qualify as such makes it all the more warrantable to think of Borges’s own ficciones in the way that the very prominence he gives to Wells indicates he himself does (and presumably did when writing them): viz., as being, at least, generically connectable with science fiction.25 Only in what he says about The Time Machine does Borges come close to refashioning Wells. The Time Traveller, he asserts: returns tired, dusty, and shaken from a remote humanity that has divided into species who hate each other… . He returns with his hair grown gray and brings with him a wilted flower from the future… . More incredible than a celestial flower or the flower of a dream is the flower of the future, the unlikely flower whose atoms now occupy other spaces and have not yet been assembled. (OI 11) Wells’s is a parable of guarded hope (in an early published draft the Time Traveller confronts the ‘Coming Beast’26 in the one-hundred-and-twenty-

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first century; in the final version that encounter is postponed still further): the future is real, possibly catastrophic, but not beyond redemption; this is the testimony the flower of the future mutely offers. Borges, on the contrary, seems to regard that flower as a hieroglyphic of despair: the future is already inexorably configured in the particulate structure of the present, what will happen is already destiny.27 What for Wells is an obvious application of the theory underlying time-travel – a man who can journey into the future can also come back, into the past as it were, with a flower from that future age – Borges transforms into the metaphysical paradox of a future coexisting with the present.28 Borges inverts the significance of the flower of the future by not assuming, as Wells does, that time is a function of space. That assumption is of course the ground of the Traveller’s demonstration in the opening chapter of The Time Machine. Time, he argues, constitutes a fourth dimension; that is to say, ‘Time is only a kind of Space.’29 To define time as a variable and space as the constant obviates any philosophical paradox: the flower then occupies the same space at two different times; space, in that view, is continuous, and in that sense retains its identity through time – a proposition which, while it is vulnerable to theoretical objections of the sort Borges raises in citing Heraclitus’ ‘You will not go down twice to the same river,’30 is hardly startling to common sense. However, by reversing the subordination – by supposing, as Borges does, that space is ‘an episode of time’ (Obras 6:43) – a paradox, symbolized by the flower, does emerge: the basis of the flower’s self-identity then becomes the identity of time, the contemporaneousness, so to speak, of present and future. III. The World as ‘Tlön’ The essay wherein Borges advances his notion of space as an episode of time, an essay entitled ‘The Penultimate Version of Reality’ (1932), clarifies the central, but usually implicit, postulate of his fictions. In that discusión Borges takes any ‘opposition between the two incontrastable concepts of space and time’ to be delusory, notwithstanding the illustriousness of some of its proponents, such as ‘Spinoza, who gave his undifferentiated deity – Deus sive Natura – the attributes of thought, that is consciousness of time, and extension, that is [consciousness] of space.’ ‘According to a thoroughgoing idealism, space is nothing but one of the constitutive patterns in the replete flux of time’; it is ‘situated in [time] and not vice-versa.’ Moreover, space is an accident in time and not, as Kant posited, a universal modality of intuition. There are whole provinces of Being that do not require it: those of olfaction and hearing. Spencer, in his critical

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examination of the arguments of metaphysicians (Principles of Psychology, VII, iv) has elucidated that [notion of] independence and also reinforces it with this reduction to absurdity: ‘Whoever thinks that smell and sound implicate space as intuitive concept can easily convince himself of his error simply by [attempting to] seize the right or left side of a sound or by trying to imagine a color in reverse.’ (Obras 6:42–43) The consequence Borges deduces from this reasoning is that a belief in the reality of space can be dispensed with: without spatial referents, without an awareness of corporeality, humankind would still continue ‘to weave its history’ (Obras 6:44). Time alone is the universal substratum of perception. Borges’s conception of space accounts for, and perhaps also reflects, his mature concern for geography only as the geometry of space.31 ‘Death and the Compass’ is an instance where this is clearly the case. Less obviously, in a story like ‘The Immortal’ (1947) the cartographical details conform to a geometrical pattern. The antiquary Joseph Cartophilius, a manuscript of whose history is found in his copy of Pope’s translation of The Iliad, begins his quest for immortality in Berenice, a seaport in Eritrea, as the Roman tribune Marcus Flaminius Rufus, and recovers the mortality he longs for ‘in a port on the Eritrean coast,’ the name of which Borges ostentatiously withholds.32 The circularity of the geography thus presents itself as an objective correlative of the circularity of the immortal’s search.33 That image of eternal recurrence, in ‘The Immortal’ as in ‘New Refutation of Time,’ represents a negation of time. Such a repudiation may afford the ultimate version of reality; at least Borges sees it as the final, perhaps logically inevitable, extension of idealist philosophy.34 Its paradoxical consequences he adumbrates in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,’ an encyclopedic account of a world which mirrors – that is inverts – the model of the universe philosophic materialism proposes. (The story opens, ‘I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia’ [Labyrinths 3].) The inhabitants of Tlön are ‘congenitally idealist.’ Their idealism entails the privileging of time over space, the denial of the latter’s continuity, and with it other notions which human beings would normally take to be paradoxical: the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time. Spinoza ascribes to his inexhaustible divinity the attributes of extension and thought; no one in Tlön would understand the juxtaposition of the first (which is typical only of certain states) and the second – which is a perfect synonym of the cosmos. In other words,

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VISIONS AND RE-VISIONS they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of [the] association of ideas. (Labyrinths 9)

Here the equivalent of the Eleatic paradoxes, which call into question the (orthodox) spatial continuum by assuming the infinitesimal divisibility of infinite time as a series of discrete moments, is ‘the sophism of the nine copper coins.’ The latter insinuates the (in Tlön, paradoxical) existence of spatial continuity as the ideational adjunct of temporal continuity. To obviate the need for supposing what would subvert idealism – that it is possible for Y and Z to find certain coins that X lost at a previous time because space does persist in time independent of its being perceived – one of the philosophers of Tlön formulates ‘a very daring hypothesis’: This happy conjecture affirmed that there is only one subject, that this indivisible subject is every being in the universe and that these beings are the organs and masks of the divinity. X is Y and is Z. Z discovers three coins because he remembers that X lost them; X finds two in the corridor because he remembers that the others have been found…. The Eleventh Volume [of A First Encyclopedia of Tlön] suggests that three prime reasons determined the complete victory of this idealist pantheism. The first, its repudiation of solipsism; the second, the possibility of preserving the psychological basis of the sciences; the third, the possibility of preserving the cult of the gods. (Labyrinths 12; ellipsis in original). In other words, the solution to the paradox of the coins ontologically postulates a single, or unitary, Mind which all ‘individuals’ (X, Y, and Z) participate in, or partake of. ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,’ by reason of its labyrinthine Borgesian construction, proves to be the clandestine analogue of such a mind. Gradually it becomes apparent that Tlön is a world in the flux of time, an amorphous world in the process of conforming to the full implications of its idealist premises. Gradually it also becomes apparent that the incidental details of Borges’s fiction reflect that process. (The words descubrimiento and descubrir, meaning ‘discovery’ and ‘to discover,’ recur frequently in the story; the conversation at the outset that leads to the ‘discovery’ of Tlön concerns ‘a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers – very few readers – to [divine] an atrocious or banal reality’ [Labyrinths 2].) The intellectual voyage imaginaire in search of Tlön begins with Bioy Casares’s putative discovery of certain pages in Volume XVI of the 1917 edition of what is ‘fallaciously called’ The Anglo-American

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Cyclopaedia, pages which appear in some copies of that book (at least in one) but not in others. (Casares, of course, is a real-life author and a friend of and sometime collaborator with Borges – whose actual existence, however, ‘Tlön’ renders fictive, and hence an ideal entity in the Tlönian, or Berkeleyan – which is also to say, the Borgesian – sense of the word.) Later, following the demise of one Herbert Ashe, a Volume XI of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön adventitiously comes into Borges’s possession. Its contradictions, when one considers the ‘lucid and exact … order observed in it’ (Labyrinths 8), constitute a proof that companion volumes must exist. In a postscript it is revealed that forty volumes of the encyclopedia were subsequently located ‘in a Memphis library’ (Labyrinths 17). The Postscript tells of a vast and labyrinthine conspiracy to disintegrate this world by perpetuating and spreading the habits of thought of an ‘imaginary planet’: ‘The World will be Tlön’ (Labyrinths 17–18). The Postscript itself enters into the conspiracy which that just-quoted sentence announces. Though dated ‘1947,’ it first appeared (so dated) as part of ‘Tlön’ as originally published in the May 1940 issue of Sur. What must have then – and for the next six or seven years – been a highly perplexing fictifact no longer counts as that for any reader unaware of the text’s bibliographical history. But an equally – if not more – perplexing fact has displaced it: the fact that ‘Tlön’ is replete with allusions to as-yetunpublished ficciones far enough in its (bibliographical) future to give credence to the supposition that Borges had yet to write them (as of 1940).35 This persistent clandestine feature of ‘Tlön’ is subversive for importing Tlön’s other-worldly view of time: not because the allusions are presciently futuristic, but because ‘Tlön’ incorporates them in a way which makes it its own precursor as well as theirs (in a sense which mediates between the usual and the Borgesian meaning of the word). In the process, it also locates ‘Tlön’ at the center of Borges’s revisionary enterprise.36 The fictifacts of ‘Tlön’ that I considered earlier accordingly admit – indeed, demand – something more than the previously offered credulous and literal rehearsal of them. Their true, their ‘secret,’ meaning discloses itself only when certain other details of Borges’s account – mostly belonging to the ‘futuristic’ Postscript – are carefully examined. The discovery of Tlön begins in the revelation that certain pages occur in some copies of a particular book but not in all; later it is learned that the encyclopedia of Tlön has, as it were, disappeared at times. Those details call to mind Ts’ui Pên’s delphic clue to his labyrinth – ‘I leave to various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths’ (Labyrinths 25, 26) – and with it his idealist conception of the multiplicity of time. The article purportedly contained in Volume XVI of The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia deals with

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Uqbar and supplies ‘fourteen names’ as its geographical coordinates; a note to ‘The House of Asterion’ (1947) alleges that, ‘as used by Asterion,’ this number stands for infinity (Labyrinths 4–5, 138). The language of Tlön, in accord with idealist thought, excludes all substantives: ‘‘‘The moon rose above the river” is hlör u fang axaxaxas mlöi, or literally “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned’’’ (Labyrinths 8); Axaxaxas mlöi is also the title of a book in one ‘of the many hexagons of my administration’ (Labyrinths 57) in ‘The Library of Babel.’ A Princess Faucigny Lucinge figures in the Postscript to ‘Tlön’ in connection with a compass; in ‘The Immortal’ Joseph Cartophilius (whose name, of course, means ‘map-lover’) offers ‘the Princess of Lucinge the six volumes … of Pope’s Iliad’ (Labyrinths 105). The elusive pages of The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia inform readers ‘that the literature of Uqbar was one of fantasy and that its epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön’ (Labyrinths 5). The self-allusive pages of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ thus insinuate that Borges’s fictions themselves comprise – and revisionarily constitute – the definitive encyclopedia of Tlön.36 This is also to say that ‘Tlön’ revisionarily (re)constructs any number of Borges’s other ficciones in accordance with the basic tenets of Tlönian idealism. The world of Borges’s fictions generally, like the world of Tlön, is a predicate of idealist philosophy, which postulates that nothing exists independently of perception. But if space does not exist outside the human mind, then the perceptions the mind has when waking and the visions arising in a dream become indistinguishable from one another. It becomes as impossible to differentiate the imaginary Uqbar from the real world as it is to differentiate Uqbar from Tlön, the fantasy from the fantasy-within-a-fantasy.37 (Borges illustrates this point elsewhere with the parabolic anecdote about a certain Chuang Tzu who ‘dreamed that he was a butterfly and when he awakened… did not know if he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it was a man’ [OI 184].) The confusion of real with imaginary names which proliferates in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ and everywhere else in Borges’s fictions is another (deliberate) example of this consequence. To suppose that time as well as space is not absolute is to relinquish the temporal coordinates of individual identity. In a world where space is merely a perception, during Chuang Tzu’s dream ‘he was a butterfly’ (OI 195).38 In a world where time is merely a sense of time, whoever dreams he is Chuang Tzu dreaming he is a butterfly is – at that moment, which is identical with the moment of Chuang Tzu’s dream – Chuang Tzu. Any chronological determination to the contrary, inasmuch as it belongs to the realm of absolute (or materially objective) time, is inadmissible. For similar reasons, anyone who imagines that s/he is immortal is immortal; if

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s/he chooses as well to think of himself/herself as Homer, even as that poet conceived of as an almost speechless Troglodyte, then s/he is Homer; and Pierre Menard, the symbolist poet who undertakes to write Don Quixote without becoming Cervantes, has as good a claim to its authorship as Cervantes.39 These consequences inhere in the ‘idealist pantheism’ of Tlön. ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ to a large extent imitates an idealist universe. The unstated premise of the fiction posits the narrative order as the order of discovery: its narrative sequence, manifestly at variance with absolute chronology, supposedly follows exactly the sequence of the author’s perception of events. The story abounds in accidents because causality requires that space persist in time; in apparent irrelevancies because the sequence of human perceptions is not logical but random. The idealist universe wherein a sense of time derives from a web of perceptions which contradict or coincide with or complement one another is a Garden of Forking Paths, a vertiginous universe of ‘divergent, convergent, and parallel times.’ So, too, it is the labyrinthine universe analogized as the Lottery of Babylon, which consigns identity to chance, or the Library of Babel, with its indefinite, virtually infinite, number of books composed of all the possible combinations of twenty-five orthographic symbols. These labyrinths the mind constructs are a mirror that reflects itself and also a map of the world. ‘Work that endures … ,’ Borges asserts, ‘is a mirror that reflects the reader’s own traits and … is also a map of the world’ (OI 87). He speaks of Wells’s enduring legacy as a ‘vast and diversified library’: ‘he chronicled the past, chronicled the future, recorded real and imaginary lives’ (OI 88). His metaphor suggests that Borges identifies this ‘vast and diversified library’ of fantastic books in which Wells plausibly traces the absurd consequences of an idea, with the ‘library of limitless English books’ in which Borges himself has sought a model of the universe. IV. Science Fiction as a Temporal Genre; or, Time’s ‘Atrocious Reality’ The entire foregoing account of Borges’s ‘fantastic’ revisionary enterprise is amenable to a re-vision giving ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ a place equal to that of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.’ Such a recentering of Borges’s project also brings it to bear on the compelling case that Fredric Jameson makes for ‘science fiction as a spatial genre’ in a so-named essay (1987), which could deservedly be called seminal had it not gone largely ignored. His argument there – based on a close analysis of Vonda McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting (1975) – is foreseeable from an earlier essay of his, of equally far-reaching theoretical import, which fundamentally considers Brian

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Aldiss’s Starship (1958) as a rewrite of Robert A. Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky (first serialized in 1941). By way of getting to the ‘generic discontinuities’ correlative to Starship’s departure from the Orphans model, Jameson establishes their resemblance in these – spatial – terms: the two writers give us a synoptic view of the basic narrative line that describes the experience of the hero as he ventures beyond the claustrophobic limits of his home territory into other compartments of a world peopled by strangers and mutants. He comes at last to understand that the space through which he moves is not the universe but simply a gigantic [space] ship in transit through the galaxy; and this discovery – which may be said to have all the momentous scientific consequences that the discoveries of Copernicus and Einstein had in our own [time] – takes the twin form of text and secret chamber. (‘Generic Discontinuities’ 57; my emphasis) The point that Jameson is making appears to be (and perhaps, in his view, is) diametrically opposed to an inevitable implication of the commonplace that science fiction comprises stories about the future and is therefore essentially a temporal, not a spatial, genre. Clearly, however, science fiction usually does deal in space, not just with it. Indeed, the examples which McIntyre, Aldiss, and Heinlein provide Jameson with could be multiplied endlessly to demonstrate that space, far from being merely an astronomical backdrop (equivalent to a prop), is the matrix of the fiction – that space, not time, is what most science fiction imagines (which is also to say images). Whether the claims of space and time be competitive, or complementary, or instead stand in some relationship which is both or neither is a question about which Borges’s fictions have something to tell us. And because what they tell us bears on the generic nature of science fiction, this line of inquiry may also supplement the Borges–Wells connection in justifying my having in effect considered a number of ficciones alongside titles (i.e., in other chapters of this book) whose science-fiction credentials are not liable to dispute. (Any such dispute must, of course, depend on the assumption that genre involves a classificatory scheme, and hence that the primary, if not the sole, function of generological criticism is to assign – or should I say consign? – a work to its proper category.)40 Of obvious pertinence to Jameson’s favoring of spatiality over temporality is the discovery which Tlön’s version of the Eleatic paradoxes conveys. For Tlönians, the logico-mathematically irrefutable doubt which the historical Zeno brings to bear against a faith in continuity comes from a restatement that makes a temporal rather than a spatial continuum the object of the paradoxical doubt. This is consistent with Tlön’s philosophical

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idealism; and just as that defines itself against the materialist assumptions of the ‘real’ world (or – to be exact – the world within which Tlön is, fictifactually, situated), so Tlön’s paradox about the finding of nine copper coins serves to expose the belief in spatial continuity, whose basis is a faith in the material reality of space itself, as being a tenet to which human beings naturally incline as one consequence of a ‘congenital’ disposition toward philosophical materialism. It immediately follows from this Borgesian revelation that writers of science fiction would not automatically be exempt from the human presumption of space’s reality simply by reason of their working in a genre characterized by estrangement. Furthermore, the fact that Borges is patently conscious that materialism is not self-evidently true and indubitable, and more particularly, that the reality – the continuous reality – of space cannot be taken for granted, emerges from fictions which, just as patently, appear to be spatial. And spatial in precisely the sense and way that Jameson is interrogating. Indeed, Borges, more than any of the science-fiction writers Jameson instances, is explicitly working with what Jameson identifies as science-fictional space – i.e., not with the astronomy, but with the topography and geometry of space as objectively correlative to its psychology (which in Borges, for one, is primarily philosophical). That even in Borges space figures in a way not obviously incompatible with the materialism which he obviously inclines to refuse does not detract from Jameson’s discovery as a profound Bachelardian insight.41 Borges’s example does, however, generate a substantial doubt as to whether science fiction valorizes space in a way that validates its material reality. This query in turn bears on the possibility that science fiction is, somehow, uniquely a spatial genre – a possibility inherent in the title of Jameson’s 1987 essay, but one which his approach to McIntyre discourages inasmuch as it could apply just as well to most of Dickens’s novels, say. With the question of validation in view, it should be recognized that what I have previously observed – from the outset – about Borges is amenable to this reprise: that space in his (mature) fictions more or less lacks geography, which he usually displaces by geometrizing space. The effect is a Berkeleyan idealization; and in that sense it can also be said that he renders space unreal (or gives it ‘irreality’).42 ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ offers a clarification of this ‘actualytic’ process,43 and not only in its reduction of experiential space to a geometrical – and philosophic – labyrinth, but in analogical terms as well. The fiction commences with a reference to a certain history of World War I; and anyone who recognizes that Liddell Hart’s book is not an invention may be led by a miscited date (July instead of June 16, 1916) to realize that Borges’s spy-thriller has something to do with the Battle of the

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Somme, one of the bloodiest chapters of a horrific war. Correlatively, we may also thereby discover that many of the fictive names correspond to or resonate with those of historical or novelistic personages, and that they carry with them the baggage of various historical realities, mostly of the atrocious sort.44 The meaning of Borges’s fiction, however, does not ultimately lie in the discovering of those realities, but with their concealment (by way of their representation as unrealities). In other words, an understanding of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ does not reside in deciphering its details to expose a reality that is truly banal (in the sense congruent with Hannah Arendt’s vis-à-vis Adolf Eichmann); instead it has to do with the fiction’s encryptment procedure, whereby that banality is deformed – or better, re-formed – into, and thus displaced by, the æsthetic object which the title of the fiction designates (and which the fiction itself constitutes rather than signifies).45 Something of the same process is operative on Borgesian space. Central to a comprehension of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ is the awareness of mistaking Ts’ui Pên’s temporal-ideal labyrinth for a spatio-material object. And this in itself suggests a ubiquitous truth about Borges which applies almost as widely to science fiction from The Time Machine on: that space is the principal generic means for figuring time. In context, however – as ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ makes clear – what is being figured is not exactly space or time, and certainly not in the physicist’s understanding of either (or of space-time, for that matter). Instead, space stands in for time as the structuring principle of a fiction which, like the fictive book it constructs and takes its own name from (The Garden of Forking Paths), is ultimately about the human mind’s labyrinthine workings as it attempts to come to terms with (human) reality – for Borges, as for other Modernists, an æsthetic operation. With Borges, as with the John Keats of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819), coming to terms with human ‘reality’ entails its denial – i.e., the negation, the refutation, of time, and with it of mortality. Keats does this by defining a space expressly disjoined from the real, the mortal, world, wherein ‘youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’ – a space, accessible (only) to the (poetic) imagination, over which his deathless nightingale presides. (That this bird is super-natural is at once a datum of Keats’s ode and a consequence of his representation of the nightingale; and in either case its basis is the Romantic idea, which Borges appropriates and makes central to his Idealism, that all poets are the individual embodiments of The Poet and all poems are the Many, the partial, articulations of One Poem.)46 In the end, the mortality of the poet-as-human-being drags ‘Keats’ back to the world which was his point of departure, but which he now sees through the eyes of Chuang Tsu, as it were – i.e., not knowing whether it, rather

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than his vision of the nightingale, be the dream. (The ode concludes: ‘Do I wake or sleep?’) Something of the same skepticism resides in ‘The world will be Tlön.’47 Borges, however, differs from the Keats whose ode surely attracts him in the effacement of the boundaries which Keats, at least at the outset, expressly acknowledges and starkly demarcates.48 At least two of the dates in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,’ 1914 and 1917, may be taken as signs for the outbreak of World War I and the start of the Russian Revolution, respectively;49 but even as such, they mark the absence of ‘una realidad atroce o banal,’ a ‘reality’ which Tlön otherwise subversively infiltrates. Like Borges’s other ficciones, ‘Tlön’ constitutes an ‘epistemological metaphor’ conveying the discovery of ‘the fictitious character of culture’ – i.e., of all our cognitive-imaginative constructs – and with it ‘the impossibility of Reason’s accessing reality.’ But to suppose therefrom that Borges is saying that those constructs are ‘nothing … but fictions’ – or ‘endgames’ (gestos finales) – which, as such, ‘exacerbate the inaccessibility of the real,’ is to ignore the impetus of Tlön’s project: of demonstrating that ‘the real’ is itself a fiction.50 Indeed, the very story which might seem to refute that finding – ‘Death and the Compass’ – applies it to the most atrocious and banal ‘reality’ of all, death, as that figures in a labyrinthine fiction which is at once of (the fictive) Eric Lönnrot’s and (the immortal) Borges’s making – a labyrinth, also, which represents (Mortal) time spatially . Employing space as a surrogate for time as (in turn) the dimension of a kind of hermeneutic consciousness may be somewhat peculiar to science fiction (though the example of Marcel Proust, say, perhaps bars any claim to such displacement as a unique characteristic of the genre). But in any event, Borges’s fictions, in featuring that surrogacy, take in much science fiction holus bolus as their precursors. Even The Time Machine is to some extent a precursor in the special Borgesian sense. Not because, from a Borgesian perspective, it is essentially a Book (the Time Traveller’s narrative) which centrally contains a Garden (the world of the Eloi) so much as for this reason: that while designed as a time machine, Wells’s device does not intentionally carry Berkeleyan idealism as part of its project to put imaginative critical distance – which is, after all, estranging æsthetic distance – between its readers and their familiar (mental) world. Yet the Wells of The Time Machine is – again – also Borges’s precursor in the usual meaning of the term; for the book premises itself on the express translation into spatiality of time defined as the dimension along which our consciousness moves (see TTM 1:3). Borges not only gives prominence to that aspect of The Time Machine; he also works out certain of its (æsthetic) implications, and in ways that are as revelatory of what science fiction is about as they are of the Borges who is both creature and creator of a Library and a Garden.

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§10. ‘Elsewhere Elsewhen Otherwise’: Italo Calvino’s ‘Cosmicomic’ Tales [H]e was seized by that compulsion of those who recount stories and never know which are more beautiful: those that truly happened and that, recalled, bring back with them a whole sea of hours gone by – of minute feelings, tediums, happinesses, uncertainties, vainglories, [and] self-loathings [nausee di sé]; or rather, those one invents, … but then the more one varies [the invention], the more one is aware of returning to speaking of the things that one has experienced or known in real life. Italo Calvino, Il barone rampante (16:309/193)1 I. Writer vs. Critic Italo Calvino was a prolific writer of criticism – mostly appreciations of individual books and authors, reflections on the current state of literary affairs (particularly in Italy), and/or theoretical pronouncements about literature’s rapporti with the world. Those essays, lectures, prefaces, interviews, and whatnot which have been collected and reprinted – at least six volumes’ worth of them2 – commentators on Calvino have continued to rely on, more or less, as a guide to his fiction. The problem with any such approach derives from the fact that Calvino the critic and Calvino the fiction writer are for the most part two different personages. The difference is partly a matter of degree. The critic, for example, shares the writer’s passionate engagement with literature, mostly in terms of particular books; but eclectic as the critic’s reading is, it still doesn’t quite measure up even to that of the author of Il barone rampante (‘The Baron Rampant,’ 1957), 3 let alone of Calvino’s entire fictional opus. At the same time, the critic generally evinces neither of the qualities which, mostly by their fusion, give Calvino his peculiar literary identity as the author of ‘cosmicomic’ stories: (1) a humor generated by incongruities, and (2) most of all by those linguistic incongruities that make for his distinctive style. The critical pronouncements, if they reveal anything of that Calvino, do so chiefly by contrast with their own moral earnestness and lack of stylistic distinction. Calvino’s habitual solemnity in addressing the

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public in propria persona as a critic confirms his comic vocation as a fiction writer not just because these two Calvinos appear to be at odds with one another, but more because they together fit the usual psychological profile of the comedian (as conveyed, incisively, in W. C. Fields’s bon mot about Bert Williams, the black vaudevillian whom Fields acknowledged as his role-model: ‘he was the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew’).4 Meanwhile, the fact that much of Calvino’s critical prose could, in point of expression, have been written by someone far less verbally aware than he simply contradicts his fictional practice and thereby underscores the latter’s linguistic consciousness as being that of a poet, and especially of a lyric poet.5 This does not primarily mean that the Calvino of the prose fictions writes lyrically – or anti-lyrically (and rarely, if ever, non-lyrically); but rather that he thinks like a poet much more than – if not instead of – like a novelist:6 that he puts his fictions together as a poet would (something which becomes utterly unmistakable with Le città invisibili [Invisible Cities, 1972]), demanding the kind of concentration on their precise words in their self-referential resonances which an understanding of poetry normally demands (or, to put the point differently: Calvino, at least first of all, calls for a ‘poetic’ rather than an ‘allegorical’ reading in Todorov’s oppositional sense of the two). It is therefore not entirely an accident that Calvino the writer of verbally self-conscious fictions is to a certain extent ‘working’ – or arriving – ‘at the same place’7 as Jorge Luis Borges and (even more) Stanislaw Lem, with due (i.e., considerable) allowance for what is not merely a nominal difference among the languages which each of them is working in.8 This ‘place’ is evident from one of Calvino’s essays which is a partial exception to the rule that his criticism knows virtually nothing of the style and humor of his fiction. ‘Cibernetici e fantasmi’ (‘Cybernetics and Ghostly Presences,’ 1967)9 follows a subtle dialectic whose initial thesis comes from an amalgamation of diverse theoretical approaches to cultural, and particularly literary, artifacts – formalist, structuralist, and semiological. Calvino represents these (and at a slightly later date he could have added deconstruction to the mix) as realizing Raymond Lull’s medieval dream of an ars combinatoria. All of them propose that literature is the product of a finite set of principles, which could therefore be the basis of a writing machine, a computer that would make ‘the death of the author’ more than a kind of figure of speech. Against this thesis Calvino sets another: that literature, rather than being bound by a certain number of generative formulaic rules and hence doomed to repeat the already-said in ways which, however various, do not make for difference, is ‘aiming continually to get out of this finitude … [of permutations], is continually seeking to say what it cannot say, something that it doesn’t know and can’t know’

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because ‘the words and concepts for saying it and thinking it haven’t yet been used in that manner [posizione], disposed in that order, in that sense’; in short, that literature is ‘struggl[ing] to escape from the confines of language.’10 Calvino then proceeds to make this oppositional idea a true antithesis: first, by identifying the desire for the ineffable with the unconscious, and then by suggesting that the unconscious works very much like the literary computer he initially imagined. Except that such a machine now contains a ghost, the fantasmatic presence of the author, who having made those choices among the possibilities that (a given) language offers which constitute the text, has no existence apart from it (his [or her] burdens now devolving on the reader). This synthesis allows for literature’s being a ‘combinatorial mathematical game,’ but of what sort: Does it offer a way out of the world-labyrinth which is also of its own construction or does it instead act to dissuade us from understanding it? Or, in the terms of Calvino’s ‘Il conte di Montecristo’ (‘The Count of Montecristo’), does literature of the self-conscious, verbally labyrinthine sort ‘tend toward realizing the perfect escape or … imagining the perfect prison’ (‘Cibernetici’ 180)? The skepticism, the ‘attitude of systematic perplexity’ (Pietra sopra viii), thus informing the dialectic of ‘Cibernetici’ resembles that of Calvino’s fiction – also for being so radical as to turn, ultimately, against itself (though without becoming its antithesis). It is telling, however, that the essay concludes with a liberal quotation from Ti con zero (T Zero, 1967), and one whose import Calvino the critic does not expressly take account of in itself, let alone as it figures in his alter ego’s metatextual rendition of Dumas the Elder’s Le comte de Monte-Cristo. This indicates that the critic’s seeming comprehension, like his radical skepticism and the flashes of verbal humor early on in the essay, derives from Calvino the fiction-writer. This is not the rule with writers as self-commentators. T. S. Eliot, for instance, offers in his essay on Hamlet (1919) a theoretical understanding of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) which Eliot the critic alone makes available – i.e., even readers aware that Prufrock is a re-vision, chiefly, of Hamlet (to be precise, of a Romantic interpretation of Shakespeare’s hero as an indecisive, because self-divided, intellectual) would likely never come up with the concept of ‘objective correlative’ (let alone with that term-concept) solely from Eliot’s poem. Nor does it matter that Eliot the poet may well have had some such idea in mind in writing Prufrock. In that case, it would still be true that the critic reveals something that the poem itself isn’t conscious of (though it can be said to belong to its ‘unconscious’): namely, that the journey which Prufrock imagines, especially by reason of his refusal in the end to risk taking it, expresses his otherwise unperceivable state of mind. The same can be said for Stanislaw

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Lem’s cybernetic model of biological evolution in ‘Metafantasia’ (from Fantastyka y futurologia, 1970). His conception there of the evolutionary process as an ‘inexorabl[e] striv[ing] to exploit every possible organic combination inherent within a given [‘structural’] prototype’ (60) no doubt owes much to Solaris (1960), and more particularly to its imaginary/ imaginative eponym. So, too, ‘Metafantasia’ articulates in another way the understanding which its near-contemporary, Futurological Congress (1971), evinces. But for all that it has in common, especially vis-à-vis Trottelreiner’s ‘futurolinguistic’ exercises, with Calvino’s author as language-processing machine, Lem’s commentary (like Eliot’s) offers a conceptual reformulation in terms quite independent of the fictions to which it is relatable. With Calvino, on the other hand, everything that the critic knows of the fiction writer he knows from him – i.e., any insights that ‘Cybernetics and Ghostly Presences,’ for example, may provide depend upon, presuppose, a prior understanding of the fictions that they would interpretatively apply to. (Indeed, the very titles Calvino bestows on his two authorized collections of essays derive much of their sense from his fictions – Una pietra sopra [‘The Stone Above,’ 1980] from ‘Il cielo di pietra’ [‘The Stone Sky,’ 1968], Collezione di sabbia [‘Collection of Sand,’ 1984] from ‘cosmicomic’ tales such as ‘Le conchiglie e il tempo’ [‘Seashells and Time,’ 1968], in which the sedimenting of sand images time’s creation, not just its passage.) II. ‘Ancestors’ One of the things that Calvino the critic does not know is that Calvino the fiction writer changes so as to become what he’s always been (in precisely the open-ended and problematic sense that Shevek exemplifies in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed). The critic instead imagines a divide, at the end of the 1950s. No doubt prompted by reviewers eager to categorize a new talent, and thereby in effect neutralize or diminish his novelty, Calvino occasionally endorsed the notion that everything he had written up until and including Il cavaliere inesistente (‘The Inexistent Knight,’ 1959) constituted a ‘neorealist’ phase from which he broke away with Le cosmicomiche (1965).11 What on earth this alleged ‘neorealism’ might have in common with the term’s original referents – viz., the bianco e nero films that Visconti, DeSica, and Rossellini made in the late 1940s and early 1950s, mostly, but beginning with Visconti’s Ossessione (1943) – neither Calvino nor anyone else has troubled to specify. Nor do I think it likely that they could have. The label was surely a dictate of fashion, and just as surely no one would have thought of fixing it on Calvino had ‘magic realism’ – a more appropriate, but still somewhat uninformative, term – been available.

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This stricture against the neorealist label at the outside extends to the three early works that Calvino subsequently grouped together as I nostri antenati (Our Ancestors, or ‘Our Forebears’). It is true that each of these has some basis in historical reality (which in fact dictates Calvino’s arrangement of them as republished in a single volume): Il cavaliere inesistente (1959) in Charlemagne’s crusade against the Moors besieging Paris, Il visconte dimezzato (‘The Split-in-Half Viscount,’ 1952) in Prince Eugene’s battle against the Turkish infidels, and Il barone rampante (1957) in the Eclaircissement, or Age of Enlightenment, culminating in the Napoleonic Wars.12 At the same time, however, each of the three fictions is predicated on an existential (and hence historical) impossibility, named or at least alluded to in their respective titles. They are also – all of them – unrealistic in another sense of the word which is perhaps more pertinent to ‘(neo)realism’: though informed by and conveying an experiential sense of the world (also as a matter of sense experience), they distinctly give the impression of deriving far less from that than from ‘literary tradition’ in something of T. S. Eliot’s understanding of it (as he expresses it in The Waste Land [1922], say, as well as in his essay on ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ [1919]).13 In other words, there is something decidedly bookish about Calvino’s early trilogy – in a purely descriptive sense of ‘bookish,’ which would exclude pejorative connotations and with them any synonymy with ‘academic.’ Correlative to the extent that ‘nostri’ counts as an editorial or royal ‘our,’ ‘antenati’ finally designates literary rather than historical ancestors. None the less, there is one detail, obtruding itself by reason of its seeming improbability, which tends to point to ‘ancestry’ as a matter of personal history: that Visconte, the earliest component-to-be of I nostri antenati in point of composition, momentarily features an Italian colony of Huguenots. It is true that, against all likelihood, some Huguenots – a relatively small number – fled France for Italy in consequence of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) and, later, of the repeal of the Edict of Nantes (1685). But their presence in Visconte has rather more to do, I think, with the possible ‘ancestral’ import of the name Calvino than with an obscure historical fact which an author not named (putatively) for Calvin is unlikely even to have known, let alone made use of. (Calvino himself confirms his Huguenot ancestry as ‘a kind of familial esoterica’; and while he speaks of it as the ‘hypothetical origin … of my cognomen,’ ‘still unverified down to this day,’14 the fact that he is aware of and willing to entertain the idea makes its otherwise dubitable status irrelevant.) At the same time, the use that Calvino does make of it typifies his treatment of historical antecedents. Visconte initially epitomizes its Huguenots as being ‘little expert in what sin was,’ wherefore ‘they multiplied prohibitions to

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avoid mistakes [per non sbagliarsi]’ and ‘ey[ed] one another critically [con occhi severi] to spy out the smallest gesture betraying a culpable intention’ (5:138/27); and later they are revealed to be more than willing to profit from their neighbors’ misfortunes brought on by crop failure. Calvino, that is, satirizes his Huguenots to the point of lampooning them, thereby distancing them even as he represents them. This is not the case with the trilogy’s literary ancestors. References and allusions to those are invariably affectionate (at least as far as I can tell). None the less, an ‘anxiety of influence’ in something vaguely akin to the (Harold) Bloomian sense is detectable in the fact that these fictions rarely preserve those traces of their literary sources which delight the traditional hunters of such. Whatever Visconte and Cavaliere may owe to Calvino’s beloved Ariosto, for instance – and certainly their debt to Orlando furioso (1516/32) is greater than that to any and all medieval Romances – is not easy to specify; and one detail that Calvino obviously appropriates, the name Bradamante, he applies to a character (in Cavaliere) who, beyond being a female warrior, is no mere carryover from Ariosto’s epic.15 So, too, Calvino rewrites other ‘sources’ to the point where they become barely recognizable. Agilulfo and Gurdulú in Cavaliere, for example, bring to mind Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as their paradigm; but by making his Knight the (dis)embodiment of Ideas (and those restricted to regimental order) and Gurdulú the embodiment of the world of Things (more or less of a natural sort), Calvino interpretatively reworks his Cervantean model in a way that makes it his own (though the Quixote still arguably qualifies in that respect as Cavaliere’s precursor in a non-Borgesian sense).16 The same can be said for Barone, the most eclectic member of the trilogy with regard to its (literary) ancestors. Given that the narrative occupies the period from just before the coming of the French Revolution through the aftermath of Napoleon’s Russian campaign, and given also that it has something of the character (inter alia) of a conte philosophique, it is of course reminiscent of Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire, though it resists any attempt to specify which writings of theirs it reflects (its mention of La nouvelle Héloïse [18:318/202] notwithstanding). But Barone also resonates with a host of other texts, some of which it names or all but names (e.g., Le Sage’s Gil Blas [12:273–74/159–60], Richardson’s Clarissa [12:279–80/ 166–67], and Fielding’s Jonathan Wild [12:281/168]), and others which it clearly alludes to (e.g., Stendhal’s La chartreuse de Parme [The Charterhouse of Parma] and Tolstoy’s Voyna i mir [War and Peace]). Yet it is arguable that Barone more extensively and more profoundly reflects the impact on Calvino of two further works which are as different from those just mentioned as they are from each other: Tristram Shandy and The Prelude.17 Barone, after all – in this respect, read as a Bildungsroman – more or less

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corresponds in its outline to that of Wordsworth’s epic spiritual autobiography, wherein ‘love of Nature’ conduces to a love of humankind, a process of socialization which must then survive or recuperate from the shock of the French Revolution (though with Cosimo di Rondò, that shock does not comprise the Reign of Terror). Meanwhile, the fact that Cosimo is primarily a creature not just of the arboreal existence that he has rigorously chosen, but also of words – his own as well as his brother’s, the fictifactual narrator’s, being indispensable to his socialization in every possible sense – tends to position him as a Tristram Shandy in relation to a father and an illegitimate uncle who in that connection bring to mind Walter Shandy and his brother, Toby, and their respective preoccupations with ideas and things. The difference, however – and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, for Barone’s other ‘sources’ – has to do with Calvino’s blurring of Sterne’s distinctions. Cosimo, despite his own penchant for storytelling as well as his status as the subject of a narrative conscious of itself as such, is not univocally a logocentric being; he also comes to involve himself sympathetically with a ‘natural’ uncle obsessed by his apiaries and his schemes for engineering the (fluid) world of (natural) things and with a father equally obsessed by ideas for restoring the family’s social prestige. Indeed, Cosimo carries out the projects which neither his CavaliereLawyer uncle nor the old Baron ‘knew how to realize’ (11:268/155). This proposal of oppositions for the sake of calling them into question is not nearly as pronounced in Barone as it is in Visconte and Cavaliere. The Medardo whom a cannon ball initially splits down the middle is only the most visible instance of Visconte’s ‘symmetry,’18 of an insistent and pervasive pairing that discloses the incompleteness not only of entities which obviously lack something found in their counterpart (the case with the ascetic Huguenots and the correspondent colony of hedonistic lepers, for instance, as well as with the two Medardos, of course), but also of others who without such a counterpart would pass as being whole (most notably Pamela and Sebastiana). By the same token, such pairings figure a meaning which is at once of the kind appropriate to the allegorical fable that Visconte appears as being and contrary to what is usual with such fables in that it also resists any single and simple moral which it (none the less) tempts readers to elicit from it. It presently gives the impression of being a fairytale-like story of good vs. evil, and then a fable about human duality comparable (in its import) to R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).19 But while definitely having a metatextual connection with the latter (and of the sort which looks ahead to Calvino’s ‘Il conte di Montecristo’ vis-à-vis the Dumas title whereon that is predicated), Visconte’s rewrite by its outcome evokes from the Stevenson another idea: that the reunion of the Jekyll with the Hyde Medardo, so to

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speak, though purely fortuitous, expresses a desire for and pursuit of the wholeness whose loss is Visconte’s foundational starting point. These readings are complementary, but mostly in a way that makes them mutually problematic (a process extending to Calvino’s re-vision of Jekyll and Hyde): the whole Medardo is in theory preferable to his good as well as his bad half (both of whom are judged to be morally intolerable); but apart from the fact that his integrity remains as nebulous at the end as it was at the beginning (and hence is definable only in terms of his two halves), it is also the case that Visconte’s fascination (including its humor) derives from the extremism of Medardo dimezzato – or, in other words, from the dimidiamento, the splitting-in-half, which the fiction incorporates as its structural-psychological principle.20 The same principle operates with comparable insistence in Cavaliere, ‘schematic[ally]’21 generating not only the featured distinction between Agilulfo and Gurdulù, but also Torrismondo vs. Rambaldo, Bradamante vs. Sofronia, and so on. Yet just as these oppositions never make for outright hostility between paired entities, so – again, in contrast to Visconte – Cavaliere compromises them early on as well as at its end. Thus, for example, the Inexistent Knight, despite his being rather less substantial than air, enjoys – correlative to, yet independent of, the empty suit of armor which locates him – a kind of formal existence which his all-too-substantial would-be squire, Gurdulù, does not have. At least equally paradoxical, however, is the fact that Gurdulù derives his identity precisely from his perpetual tendency to lose himself in the things around him which occasions his formlessness, while his master confirms his identity as the Inexistent Knight by resigning his chivalric title and his armor and in consequence vanishing, prematurely convinced as he is that the woman he rescued was not a virgin and that he has therefore failed in his quest to exonerate his knighthood.22 In short, Calvino compromises the polarities informing Cavaliere in advance of its final revelation, that the Amazonian Bradamante is ‘the same woman’ as the Sister Teodora ‘who narrated this (hi)story’ (12:108/381). This ending may none the less come as more of a surprise than the reunion of the two Medardos. The conflating of the nun, whose penance for an unspecified sin is to tell stories (7:94/333), with a female warrior whom she imagines as being libidinously fixated on Agilulfo, remains amenable to an ‘allegoric’-psychological interpretation; but the same fictifact, taken literally, duplicates in its own way the perplexity ultimately emanating from Lem’s Futurological Congress: it collapses into the chivalric fantasy what we had hitherto been given to understand (at the start of §5, for example) was the fantasy’s (cloistered) real-world source.23 In this respect, Cavaliere makes part of its narrative consciousness the confounding of the real with the imaginary implicit in Barone virtually

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from the moment that Cosimo rebels against the socio-familial order and takes to the trees. That access of awareness, conjoined with Cavaliere’s play on oppositions inherited from Visconte, looks ahead to the ‘cosmicomic’ Calvino. But the author of Cosmicomiche and Ti con zero is not entirely foreseeable without three elements which are either peculiar to Barone or visible in its ‘ancestral’ companions only through the re-vision of them which Barone effects. One such element, the concomitant of Barone’s eclecticism, might be termed generic fluidity or slippage. Barone lends itself, by turns, to so many diverse generic readings (as Bildungsroman, conte philosophique, adventure story, love story, historical novel, etc.) that it finally appears as being sui generis. At the same time, and by more than one generic construction, it centrally thematizes the desire, born of a feeling of loss, for what once was – or perhaps never really existed, but was only imagined or fantasized (possibly the case, as the concluding paragraph suggests, with Ombrosa itself, Barone’s fictifactual locale). This desire first obtrudes itself as the bastard uncle’s, Enea Silvio Carrega’s, fixation on the nebulous Zaira, a woman (presumably) whose name is the last word he pronounces before he dies.24 But it figures far more pervasively in Cosimo’s relationship with Sinforosa Viola Violante, daughter of the neighboring Marquis of Ondariva. Cosimo’s obsession with her does not really enter his (or the narrative’s) consciousness until she returns to her ancestral home; but upon seeing her again, Cosimo realizes that his longing for her dates from their first (and only previous) encounter as children. Unlike his sister, the now-widowed Viola still has the spirit of the girl who taunted Cosimo in his tree. This is compatible with their being soulmates (she, too, has ‘always done what pleases me’ [21:343/226]); but it primarily indicates that she is his Significant Other in the strict sense of the term. All that she and Cosimo have in common, that is, only accentuates their difference (evident, for example, in a disagreement about the nature of love [23:364/245–46] which may bring to mind William Blake’s ‘The Clod and the Pebble’). Viola in fact incarnates the female Otherness dimly implicit in ‘Zaira’: she remains the forever elusive locus of memory and desire. Despite their sexual union, Cosimo can ‘never … have her only to himself,’ ‘shut[ting] her in the confines of his kingdom’ (22:352/234), because, ‘dominat[ing]’ ‘a world vaster than his own,’ she finally stands for ‘the very idea of distance, of unfulfillability [incolmabilità], of the waiting that prolongs itself beyond life’ (20:337/220). A hint of the import of the Cosimo–Viola relationship can be seen in Visconte, but only if that in turn be read as a fable about the ineluctable and irreducible tension between dimidiamento and wholeness rather than the adventitious and ultimately successful pursuit of the latter. Similarly,

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Bradamante’s unfulfilled desire for Agilulfo, for example – or its variant, the nymphomaniac widow Priscilla’s Platonic orgasm with him – (re)figures the kind of unattainability that Viola represents; but were it not for Barone, this aspect of Cavaliere’s meaning would be far from apparent. The same is true for a third feature of Barone: its awareness of its own narrative alterity. This derives primarily from the Otherness of Cosimo himself (to which Viola’s, by this generic understanding, becomes tributary). Even at the start of the process of his becoming a ‘man-bird’ (27: 387/268), he is observed to be ‘strange’ because ‘lost to the usual affective life’ [la consueta vita degli affetti] (5:224/112). The ‘need’ he feels from ‘his nature as bird’ (25:377/258) ‘to enter into an element possessable with difficulty’ [un elemento difficilmente possedibile] (6:233/121) – i.e., the natural world – leads him to ‘rediscover everything around him as if new,’ to ‘experiment with new cognitions’ (13:286/172). The sense of estrangement that goes with this expresses itself, inter alia, in his imagining ‘a place without location, … like a world reached by going up, not down’ (16:310/ 194); and that in turn affines him to the man who ‘made him understand many things about being alone’ (11:269/156): to the uncle who seems to Cosimo to be seeking ‘to be reborn other, or in another time, or elsewhere’ [rinascere altro, o in altro tempo, o altrove] (11:265/152). Those last words clearly anticipate a phrase recurrent in Ti con zero’s ‘Mitosi’ (‘Mitosis’). There we are insistently told that Qfwfq desires to possess ‘everything elsewhere elsewhen otherwise possible’ [tutto l’altrove l’altravolta l’altrimenti possibile] (Ti con zero 71/64, 74/67, 81/74). And as with Barone, this expression of Otherness applies to the nature as well as to the subject of the narrative. ‘Mitosi,’ however, is more self-conscious of this/its alterity than is Barone (or, indeed, than is any of the ‘cosmicomic’ fictions which precede ‘Mitosi’). This is also true for all of the other ways in which Nostri antenati anticipates Calvino’s subsequent progress as a writer, which is always in the direction of an ever greater awareness of his presuppositions. III. ‘Cosmicomics’ Most of Calvino’s ‘cosmicomics’ date from the early to mid 1960s, but he apparently continued to write such stories off and on for the next twenty years. A dozen of them (about half of which had appeared in magazines starting in the fall of 1964) he collected as Le cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics, 1965), and another eleven as Ti con zero (T Zero, 1967).25 He subsequently recollected some of these (adding others) twice: first as La memoria del mondo e altre storie cosmicomiche (‘The Memory of the World and Other Cosmicomic Stories,’ 1968), then as Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove (‘Cosmi-

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comics Old and New,’ 1984). ‘[I]n the process of selecting and deselecting stories, Calvino expended considerable care, and the overall architecture of all these collections … reflects his evolving poetics … as well as his conviction that the structure of any collection of texts is an integral part of its meaning.’26 This remark should be taken as purporting not only that his cosmicomic re-collections constitute re-visions of his original two volumes, but also that Ti con zero revises Cosmicomiche. Here I shall concentrate mostly on Calvino’s original conception, the one I have latterly characterized as self-containedly revisionary. I do so mainly for two reasons. First, an appreciation of the revisionary structure of this project of Calvino’s as evinced in the initial ordering of his cosmicomic fictions must be the ground for an understanding of whatever change(s) in meaning accrue(s) to them in consequence of their rearrangement(s) to accommodate La memoria’s and Cosmicomiche … nuove’s ‘new’ tales. Second, Calvino’s subsequent re-ordering of selected stories from the original two volumes co-operates with his addition of new tales to make for a re-vision which, to my mind, somewhat betrays his original vision. It is true that it does so by a combinative-permutational principle inherent and operative in his first selection of ‘cosmicomics’ (inclusive of Ti con zero as well as of Cosmicomiche) in its given sequence. So, too, the revisions Calvino effects by his two later regroupings as well as by his dropping of some ‘old’ cosmicomics in deference to ‘new’ ones27 are not necessarily different in kind from the self- and other- re-visions on the part of the authors we have already looked at (though only with Wells’s A Story of the Days to Come have we found these re-visions to be a function of altering the bibliographical context). Still, the cognitive movement inscribed both intertextually in Ti con zero as a whole relative to Cosmicomiche and intratextually in the arrangement of the cosmicomics within each of those volumes independent of the other is not simply ‘erased’ (in the phenomenological sense) but virtually obliterated in Calvino’s bibliographical reconstructions. We might therefore be less hesitant to speak of his re-vision(s) as a (self)betrayal than we would, say, of Wells’s rewrites of The Time Machine as Blettsworthy and The Croquet Player (let alone Stapledon’s recasting of Last and First Men as Star Maker or Odd John as Sirius). The specter of self-perfidy that I have just raised brings with it a question as to Calvino’s artistic integrity; so before proceeding any further, we would do well to dispose of that issue. Here we should have in mind two general truths. One of these, in Dr. Johnson’s forceful words, is that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’28 The companion truth is that no one but a knavish scribbler ever wrote only for the money. With those complementary propositions before us, we can acknowledge the likelihood that Calvino’s re-collections of his cosmicomics were in

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significant part a dictate of commercial pressures – and to be more precise, of his publisher’s (Einaudi’s, then Garzanti’s) demand for new titles to capitalize on Calvino’s growing reputation as the greatest living prose writer that Italian had produced. That Calvino answered such a (continual) demand in the way already indicated hardly redounds to his discredit, given that his alternate course would have been to write something ‘new’ that was made to order, as it were. Indeed, from his perpetual resistance to the latter temptation, we would be surely right to hold him up as an, if not the, apotheosis of artistic integrity. (I, for one, would be hard-pressed to come up with any other writer whose work, at least from the moment its unique identity declares itself, is so evenly of high – not to say, the highest – literary quality.) In short, we can be quite secure in thinking that with Calvino we are dealing with someone who, being quite conscious of what he up to, is not about to sacrifice his literary project to purely worldly considerations.29 Turning, then, to the cosmicomical tales as originally given, we immediately encounter in the first of them – ‘La distanza della Luna’ (‘The Moon’s Distance,’ or ‘Distancing’) – an epigraph traceable to a scientific text. Either through direct quotation or by way of Calvino’s paraphrase (as with ‘Distanza’), this will prove to be characteristic of all the fictions in Cosmicomiche and also of those in the first two parts of Ti con zero, up to (but not including) that volume’s title-story: i.e., in the two original collections of them, all the cosmicomical tales except Ti con zero’s last four feature an epigraph. What the absence of an epigraph from Part Three of Ti con zero might signify we shall discover in due course. For the moment, however, it is helpful to notice the ‘Priscilla’ trilogy’s deviation from the rule about cosmicomics’ epigraphs already set forth. Here what is meaningful (vis-àvis Cosmicomiche) is not the fact that the three ‘Priscilla’ stories come with seven epigraphs, the first three of which (moreover) are applicable, oneto-one, to each of the three stories in their given sequence (with the remaining epigraphs not readily assignable to any single narrative, suggesting that all seven also collectively relate to the ‘Priscilla’ trilogy as such – i.e., as a whole). Rather the import of those seven epigraphs for Cosmicomiche’s resides with ‘Priscilla’s’ being epigraphs in the usual literary sense of the term and at the same time not strictly figuring as epigraphs at all (by reason of their relegation to three pages which they alone occupy).30 The reverse is the case with the epigraphs to Cosmicomiche and the stories in Part One of Ti con zero. There the epigraphs appear as such, right above the text proper; but unlike the ‘Priscilla’ stories’ (or for that matter The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’s), they do not anticipate the meaningful direction that the tale they thus preface is going to take. The matter of the epigraph’s bibliographical, or physical, location can accord-

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ingly be taken as a prime example of those literary facts which are so obvious that we tend to overlook them. By either not making that error at all or correcting our mistake (with an eye to the visible difference between Cosmicomiche and ‘Priscilla’ already remarked), we may reach the following conclusion even before we finish reading the very first of these cosmicomic tales: that just as each of them stands under its epigraph, so it brings to the latter text an understanding which the epigraph neither possesses in itself nor reciprocates. The truth of that proposition becomes instantly evident from the sentence which opens ‘Distanza.’ Here, as in all the other cosmicomics featuring such pre-texts, the epigraph – in this case, Calvino’s summation of the Theory of Tidal Evolution as propounded by George Darwin (‘the younger Darwin’ of Wells’s Time Machine [TTM 8:76]) – generates the expectation that the story proper will be in the same scientific vein in its portrayal of a past wherein ‘the Moon was very close to Earth.’ But any such preconception does not entirely survive Qfwfq’s very first words: ‘How well I know it!’ [Lo so bene!]. This shift from scientific to colloquial discourse – somewhat more striking in the Italian than in any English translation – presages an analogous incongruity on a (seemingly) much larger scale.31 Up until the last sentence of the second paragraph, the incongruity insinuates itself for the most part linguistically: in Qfwfq’s continual resort to homey similes to convey his/the sense of the moon’s nearness (e.g., ‘the Moon revolved through the sky like an umbrella borne on the wind’: 4/3).32 But thereafter the dissonance appears also at the content level: i.e., the entire story is predicated on the folk belief that the moon is made of cheese (in this case, ricotta – what else?). With ‘Distanza,’ the incongruity between the science and the fiction depends mostly on Calvino’s shifts in lexical register. It does not operate credibly on the macro-level of content. Nor is it meant to: the cheesegathering expeditions are designed to be fantastic, a source of cosmical farce. But while Cosmicomiche exhibits certain constants, this isn’t one of them. The very next story, ‘Sul fare del giorno’ (‘At the Daybreak’),33 demonstrates as much. Consistent with its epigraphical promise, the story describes the cataclysmic contraction of the solar system into what we now know it as being, a process bringing with it the difference between night and day (also figuratively speaking). Or rather, as typically with cosmicomics, the narrative details the impact of this change on Qfwfq and a number of other individuals, mostly representing three generations of his own family (counting him). By the same token, however, this particular tale has a familial social context, which by reason of the narrative’s (and hence the reader’s) focus on the astrophysics of what is happening, can also be called its sub-text. We are permitted to pay little attention to

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this at the outset; but well before the finale, we lose much of the comedy (along with the social implications of this story, among others) if we fail to appreciate what here is quite believably farcical: that Calvino has staged the impact of the cataclysm by analogy with people getting utterly lost – and confused – on their way home from a dinner party, say. Audible as they are on the level of discourse and visible as they are in point of content, these discrepancies between science and fiction might suggest that Calvino’s cosmicomic project is directed toward utilizing the one to satirize the other.34 But such a hypothesis, like that engendered at first by the epigraphical scientific pre-text, cannot be sustained for long without ignoring what the fiction is about. While the whimsy which all of the cosmicomics bearing scientific epigraphs share has, for sure, a deflationary impact on scientific intellectualizing, that is entirely a byproduct of their design: to convey the experience, at once sense-perceptual and emotive, of an alien world, whose difference is conceptually derived from some scientific theory or other, which accordingly functions as the cosmicomical pretext. The stories in Cosmicomiche, then – and with them, those four comprising Part One of Ti con zero whose epigraphs announce the kinship – are designed to convey the feel of ‘new’ worlds (new, that is, to the reader, and perhaps as well to Calvino in the act of composing them; otherwise, as the epigraphs indicate, their ancientness is largely beyond the purview even of geological time, belonging instead to that of astrophysics). It is therefore no accident that the most recurrent verb in these fictions (leaving aside the obligatory essere and avere, ‘to be’ and ‘to have’) is in all probability toccare, one of Italian’s most polysemous words, but one which in its cosmicomical contexts is mostly englishable as ‘to touch’ or ‘to feel.’ Conveying the feel of an alien world is far from being all that Cosmicomiche is about, however. Nor will it do just to modify – or rather, supplement – that sense of alienation by observing that the cosmicomics register what it feels like to live at and in a moment of transition from an old world, familiar to Qfwfq (and often to any cohorts of his as well), to a new one that is presumptively our own but which is defamiliarized for us in and by the manner of its emergence, or emanation, from a ‘pre-existent’ alien world which thereupon figures as its anti-world, or anti-type. Calvino has designed these fictions of his also to have another ‘theme,’ or subject, which overrides, or governs, the two already mentioned: namely, the nature of human desire. The initiatory story reveals as much. It principally focuses on Qfwfq’s libidinous obsession with Mrs. Vhd Vhd. Thanks to the commencement of the moon’s unforeseen distantiation from Earth, he confronts the prospect of fulfilling that desire: ‘as in my dreams, I was alone with her’ on the

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moon (Cosmicomiche 21/13). But rather than enjoying a moment ‘beyond my most luminous hopes,’ he ‘instead’ – ‘and instead, and instead’35 – counts himself an ‘exile’ from an Earth which he believes he has irretrievably lost (21/14). Conversely, once he has contrived to return, but without Mrs. Vhd Vhd, he still regards himself as an exile, now from a moon ‘forever unreachable’ (24/16) – the moon, that is, as the site of the irretrievable object of his desire, the aforesaid Mrs. Vhd Vhd, who in the meantime has come to identify herself with the moon, desires ‘to become the Moon’ (‘to assimilate herself to the object of that extrahuman love’ [assimilarsi all’oggetto di quell’amore extraumano]: 22/14). This nostalgia of Qfwfq’s for a world lost – a world that he never in any sense possessed because when the opportunity offered itself to him, he had no desire to seize it – emotionally informs all of those cosmicomic narratives that readily subscribe (relatively speaking) to the usual narrative conventions. In that sense, the first string of words we meet with in Cosmicomiche proper – viz. ‘La distanza della Luna’ – inscribes what all of these stories have in common: they are all about the untraversable distance between us humans and the object and locus of our desire, a distance which is always absolute, maintained as it is by the psychological fact that we humans always desire – or most profoundly desire – what we cannot have.36 On that understanding, too, ‘La distanza’ constitutes Calvino’s basic cosmicomic paradigm. ‘Basic,’ however, is not synonymous with ‘constant.’ Indeed, Cosmicomiche can instructively be thought of as challenging the reader’s capacity for making precisely that (species of) intellectual discrimination – for recognizing that just as each of these twelve stories operates on a different pre-textually given basis, so each of them constructs the desire for the Other in its own way. We may thereby come to appreciate what Cosmicomiche as a whole realizes: that its only constant is such an act of construction, whose variable results render it a selfcritical project. The most readily available way of getting to the center of Cosmicomiche virtually obtrudes itself in the first of these cosmicomic stories. There Calvino gives us seemingly quite solid grounds for believing that he is blatantly sexist. For one thing, Mrs. Vhd Vhd is presented to us mostly as Qfwfq sees her: as the female object of male (lascivious or sexual-like) desire. For another, her presentation implicitly conveys a number of essentialist stereotypes, most notably of female passivity and Earth- (in this case qua Lunar) Motherness. And just for good measure, her infatuation with the moon comes across, for all its charm, as being decidedly fatuous. The suspicion of sexism resurfaces again, with equal insistence, in the fourth entry, ‘Tutto in un punto’ (‘All at/in a Point’), where it attaches to Mrs. Ph(i)Nko. The fact that she, in contrast to Mrs. Vhd Vhd, is decidedly

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the object of infantile desire is no obstacle to our supposing that we are dealing with an author whose view of women is all too proximate to male chauvinist piggism. Indeed, ‘Tutto’ may well lead us to imagine that, as is the case with a multitude of other authors of the male persuasion, we have been permitted an unwittingly self-revelatory glimpse into the depths of Calvino’s psyche. Yet even the two stories thus put in evidence should make us pause before concluding that Calvino is an out-and-out sexist. After all, what we have just in effect observed is that ‘Tutto’ reconstructs the female as given in ‘La Distanza.’ This still permits us to suppose that ‘the Other [in Calvino] is always female’37 – in support of which we can quote the Qfwfq of ‘La spirale’ (‘The Spiral’) the moment after he becomes aware that there are ‘the others [altri], … hostilely different from me or disgustingly similar’: ‘there were altre,’ i.e. female others, also. This, however, is a peculiar case of selective evidence: Qfwfq – or rather, especially in the present context, Calvino through him – is not identifying the Other with the female; he is discovering that the word altri, though grammatically the masculine form, only appears as such with the recognition that its originally neuter function (in ‘c’erano gli altri’) potentially contains (but initially also occludes) female Otherness. What we therefore confront here is not at all a static equation of female and Other. Instead, ‘La spirale,’ like all its companions in Cosmicomiche, is fundamentally about the engendering of Otherness. Nor does this engenderment invariably involve gender differentiation. To hold to that conviction, we would have to dismiss in advance at least half of Cosmicomiche – i.e., all of those tales which stage Otherness in terms of male rivalry rather than as a male–female conflict. (‘Distanza’ foresees that alternate possibility: in Qfwfq’s perceived relationship to the cousin of his whom he refers to as ‘il sordo,’ the deaf one, and otherwise leaves nameless.) Even where the engendering of Otherness does turn on gender distinctions, Cosmicomiche varies, significantly, from one story to the next. It does so, moreover, largely in accordance with the inherent dictates of the particular fiction. All that is morally objectionable about Mrs. Vhd Vhd as the representative female in ‘Distanza,’ for example, derives from her being a creature of a ricotta moon – i.e., it belongs to the belief-system which the latter notion imports. So, too, the difference between her and Mrs. Ph(i)Nko is accountable to the latter’s personifying the comforts of ‘Tutto’ existing ‘in un punto’ prior to the onset of Tutto’s/All’s fragmentation and the ensuant diaspora. (In conceptual terms, she embodies the positive aspect of Tutto’s claustrophobia and the countervalent to its xenophobia.)38 So, too, she is the nostalgic object of desire as much for her pasta as for any sexual satisfaction that her person may afford – which is

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also to say that the sexual gratification she holds for Qfwfq (et al.) is subliminal, a byproduct of her motherliness. This may prompt a re-vision of Mrs. Vhd Vhd as the lunar-based Earth Mother whom Qfwfq longs for desperately (in the root sense of that last word). But the sexist inferences from both stories can easily survive such a review. The same, however, cannot be said of the immediately succeeding story, ‘Senza colori’ (‘Without Colors’). Its female representative, Ayl, presents a variation on the ‘Distanza’ paradigm so radical as to reconstitute it. Ayl refuses the world of colors in preference for the subtle distinctions of the antecedent bianco e nero world. She thereby in effect establishes herself as Qfwfq’s antagonist. As in subsequent cosmicomics (‘new’ as well as ‘old’), this opposition is an intellectual matter, a question of (and for) æsthetics. (It also, in this case, cannot rightly be styled an antagonism inasmuch as Ayl appears at the start as the woman whom Qfwfq loves and in the end becomes his absolutely Lost Love, the object of a feeling rather closer to agape than to eros.) But in the conflict between Ayl and Qfwfq over whether the old world is (æsthetically) better than the new, Ayl’s position hardly emerges as untenable. On the contrary, her view is, at worst, as defensible as his (as is clear both on the fictifactual level and with reference to the cinematic analogy that I hitherto alluded to in using the filmic term bianco e nero to describe Ayl’s [preferred] world).39 Furthermore, her choice receives the endorsement of Calvino’s title. ‘Senza colori’ surely sides with her: if it does not immediately adumbrate the brave new world of color as being, in effect, not only tawdry but paradoxically drab, then it does so by way of epitomizing a fiction whose ending implicitly proposes that its title-name is an ‘erasure’ of ‘Senza colore’ (‘Colorless’). Put another way, this narrative could just as well have been called ‘Senza Ayl’ (‘Without Ayl’).40 As each of the stories in Cosmicomiche is visibly different from its companions in content, so each is unique in its engendering of the Other. ‘Senza colori’ should perhaps be the case in point. It is also perhaps the only entry in Cosmicomiche where Otherness comes down to a three-word utterance: ‘Tu non io’ (‘You not I’: 66/53). Addressed to Ayl, that remark of Qfwfq’s, occurring almost three full pages into ‘Senza colori,’ is the first passage to use any personal pronoun. The pronouns in question, moreover, expressly bring with them a distinction between an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ which (despite the latter’s being the familiar form of ‘you’) marks a separation of Qfwfq from Ayl in the process of differentiating Self from Other. The next exchange, eight mostly quite short sentences later, is equally noteworthy: ‘Fuoco. Capelli – le dissi. – Fuoco uguale capelli’ (’‘‘Fire. Hair,” I said to her. “Fire hair same’’’). By reason of his primitive

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syntax, Qfwfq linguistically reproduces his surprise at the connection he discovers. He thereby distracts us from a far greater surprise: that for the first time in ‘Senza colori,’ he is resorting by the way to a gendered pronoun (le, ‘her’).41 The ‘I’ vs. ‘you’ distinction between persons here turns into ‘he’ vs. ‘she,’ but without losing the intent of its original neuter inflection – i.e., of defining (the sense of) difference. In a double sense of engenderment, then, Otherness is pronominally insinuated well before the new world of colors comes into focus – and hence well before color usurps the world of contrasting grays, revalues its former familiarity as Other, and relegates it to the (‘irrecoverable’) past (which ‘Senza colori’ imaginatively revives). Accordingly, what was hitherto construable as sexism appears (from here on) as being instead one of the many and diverse ways in which the Calvino of Cosmicomiche dialectically constructs ‘epoche di trapasso’ (‘epochs of transition’ – Barone 1:11/78). (If any further argument need be made against a sexist construction of Calvino, we can put in evidence the cosmicomic tale which opens Ti con zero: ‘La molle Luna’ [‘The Soft Moon’]. This, as its title intimates, is a rewrite of ‘La distanza’; indeed, the earlier story has a better claim to being its real pre-text than ‘La molle’s’ own epigraph does.42 In ‘La molle,’ the moon is ‘getting closer’ [è avvicinat[a]: 11/5] to Earth and at the same time is ‘becoming a thing’ [10/4]. By far the most striking diametrical difference with the Cosmicomiche moon story, however, has to do with gendertyping. Qfwfq and Mrs. Vhd Vhd in ‘Distanza’ finally occupy implicitly antagonistic positions that are all too readily construable as untenable gender stereotypes. ‘La molle,’ in re-presenting some such conflict over the moon, does not merely make it quite overt. Its restaging fundamentally turns on a role-reversal. Qfwfq’s declared opponent, Sybil, being by profession an astronomer, is scientifically informed and rational, whereas now the redoubtable Qfwfq, whom ‘Distanza’ allows us to understand as finally a creature without illusion – or more precisely, a creature of his disillusionment – and in that sense a rational being, appears instead mostly as a bundle of ungoverned emotions, chiefly revulsion and anxiety.) Cosmicomiche, as is perhaps most evident from a gender reading of its tales (more or less in their given order), subjects itself continually to a kind of paradigm shift. This variability – and the variousness that comes with it – is referable to the single constant and perpetual feature of all the tales in the volume: the constant we first encounter seven words into the first of these stories (not counting its epigraph). That word is Qfwfq, the seeming jumble of letters designating the ever-present narrator – or rather, the narrative consciousness. ‘Qfwfq’ is every bit as paradoxical as the (non)person it applies to. Its signified is perversely polymorphous: most of the time we are permitted to think of Qfwfq as (if) fictifactually human (in which case,

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definitely a him); but in ‘Lo zio acquatico’ (‘The Aquatic Uncle’) ‘he’ is amphibian, in ‘I dinosauri’ (‘The Dinosaurs’) a dinosaur, in ‘La spirale’ (‘The Spiral’) a mollusc, in ‘Tutto in un punto’ something just short of a Euclidean abstraction, and so on. In every case, moreover, the humanity of this ‘him’ is a scientific impossibility. His signifier inscribes as much: by reason of its being unpronounceable (except, perhaps, by a Welshman),43 it qualifies as a non-name – or rather, an anti-name. We should also notice that ‘Qfwfq’ is even more impossible – if impossibility in this case admit of degrees – in Italian than it is in English (inasmuch as in Italian, as in other Romance languages, the letter w is a foreign import, belonging to very few words, most of them take-overs from German). By the same token, ‘Qfwfq,’ when considered as nothing more than an alphabetically derived sequence, constitutes itself as a self-referential signifier: both because it can be viewed as incorporating the combinative-permutational principle whose operation on the cosmicomic theme of desire we have previously glanced at and also by reason of Qfwfq’s enjoying the self-containment of a palindrome (whose usual verbal forms it can likewise be seen as reproducing algebraically).44 Meanwhile, the very impossibility of Qfwfq as a name redeems it as a true name in the Shakespearean understanding of that subject – i.e., viewed as a notational representation, it essential(istical)ly fits a fictive entity whose existential impossibilities we have already catalogued. Into the bargain, that same understanding fits in with the outcome of another paradox: that the non-person Qfwfq is every bit as humanly real as just about any (other) personage we can meet with in fiction (or outside its realm, for that matter) – this thanks to the fact that his style of address endues him with a personality. In short, Qfwfq is humanly real to us for the same reason Hamlet is: because of the way he uses language. Put another way, he owes his existence to authorship – ultimately, of course, to his author rather than to himself as author: i.e., to Italo Calvino and his mastery of the Italian language. What that last phrase really means for Calvino’s cosmicomics as a whole remains something of an intuition in Cosmicomiche proper, where it is registered mostly in the shifts from moment to moment from relatively formal to highly idiomatic discourse – and even more, in the sudden (and continual) obtrusion of some striking metaphor into its quotidian speech. To the rule about Cosmicomiche’s ‘intuitiveness,’ however, there are at least two exceptions. The most obvious of the two concerns ‘Un segno nello spazio’ (‘A Sign in Space’) in its entirety. The other instance involves something not nearly as prominent about ‘Sul fare del giorno.’ The latter title heads a story which, as we have seen, is not only ultimately about, but literally brings home the experience of a solar system in transit to affording the distinction between night and day. Moreover, the

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story-title dictates the construction of the fiction as having as its subject the ‘making of day’ both as a human reality and as a term-concept. The phrase which I have just set off in quotation marks is one possible rendering of ‘far del giorno’ that an anglophone might come up with using an inadequate dictionary. Any Italian, on the other hand, would have no such understanding.45 Hence anyone who really knows Italian would not automatically see from Calvino’s title where the story it names is actually going; nor, for that matter, would any usual linguistic competence conduce of itself to the connection. Perceiving it requires a special consciousness of language which may sometimes (as in this instance) be more available to those outside the particular language at issue than it is to insiders. What I am referring to here is a consciousness of language’s (self)consciousness as the (pre)condition for its self-referentiality. ‘Sul far del giorno’ illustrates the precise import of that proposition: as a story which discovers in its title a sense that is otherwise as opaque or invisible to someone competent in Italian as it is in ‘at daybreak,’ a rendering which exactly reproduces in English the normal understanding of the idiomatic phrase which Calvino is cosmicomically reconstructing as ‘at the making of day.’ In the instance we have just looked at, such a (self-referential) consciousness of/about language is implicit (but not entirely a matter of subliminal intuition). This is always the case with Cosmicomiche in itself, prior to its re-vision by Ti con zero. There is, however, one story in the earlier of the two companion volumes which comes close to expressing – or rather, conceptualizing – Ti con zero’s consciousness of language: ‘Un segno nello spazio.’ ‘Un segno’ has been widely interpreted as allegorizing Calvino’s present dissatisfaction (as of 1963) with his very first (book-length) work of fiction, Il sentiero dei nidi (The Path of the Nests, 1947).46 The mistake of such a reading of the cosmicomical tale resides with its particular allegorization. It is true that this appears to comport with Qfwfq’s (mostly averse) reaction to his original ‘sign in space’ after he succeeds in rediscovering it – and more, with the critical distance he puts between his present self and that sign (along with its imitators). But any such allegorical conception of this tale can account for very little more than that. For one thing, it overlooks the (for Qfwfq) inferential presence of Kgwgk, whose mutual antagonism to Qfwfq in the ‘sign’-making department is what first calls attention to the significance of such name-designations as literally inscribing at least a (if not the) generative principle of Cosmicomiche.47 More importantly, the particularized allegorizing of Calvino’s parable immediately personalizes it and thereby obliterates its general application rather more efficiently than (the notional) Kgwgk (putatively) obliterates Qfwfq’s

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signs. If, instead, we take the story to concern what it appears to be about, we can ultimately retrieve its ‘allegorical’ – i.e., self-critical – import by way of taking in what Calvino is telling us about language-as-segno/sign. The story’s opening gambit appears to be wholly facetious. With an eye, as it were, to the epigraph, Qfwfq corrects its datum as to the time the Sun takes to complete its galactic revolution: not ‘about,’ but ‘exactly’ 200,000,000 years. Qfwfq knows this because he ‘once … made a mark in space’48 for the purpose of marking the passage of galactic time (or spacetime). The initial difficulty – how to even conceive out of Nothingness what a sign might be – is but one of many; and while it is a given that Qfwfq somehow overcomes even the problem of how to think a sign in a universe which offers no objects for thought and hence is thoughtless, the rather casual disclosure of these ‘minor’ obstacles – especially by their given sequence – renders the opening pages of ‘Un segno’ the complement (by reversal) of the ‘perfect vacuum’ of Lem’s named ‘Rien du tout, ou la conséquence.’49 That resemblance, however, is somewhat by the way. To the focal point of ‘Un segno’ is the realization that Qfwfq’s sign-making is an idiosyncratic as well as egocentric exercise in that he also means by it to locate and (in that sense, at least) identify himself – in which regard, his marking of space is initially reminiscent of John Keats’s self-composed epitaph (‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’). We are not given to know what exactly this mark looks like, only that it is, emphatically, his sign (‘the sign was my sign, the sign of me’: 43/33). ‘Segno’ in Italian, like ‘sign’ in English, carries what we might call (but with a certain amount of hesitancy in the present context) a Saussurean import; indeed, that is the very basis for the interpretation of this cosmicomic tale as a personal allegory – i.e., as having to do with languagesigns, with (literary) writing, rather than with sign-posting. By the same token, then, ‘Un segno’ instantly reveals itself to be rather eccentric in what it is saying about language. Indeed, its opening point is so far from being cliché that it doesn’t, so far as I know, enter Ferdinand de Saussure’s thinking on the subject – or even, perhaps, Jacques Derrida’s.50 Implicitly, that is, Calvino is obliterating any difference between the signs which collectively constitute a language and those other signs, bearing no resemblance to an alphabet-based language whatever apart from their signfunction, by which human beings as a species mark the passage of time and thence record its passage. This, in turn, brings with it – as perhaps more than a mere suggestion, and surely not a facetious one – the idea that language owes its invention to the very end which Qfwfq would put his ‘signs’ to: that of marking time, and thence recording its passage. That same idea comports with the most plausible hypothesis as to the purpose of those petroglyphs dating from the neolithic age which, not being

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obviously pictorial, must be something other than mimetic representations of sublunar realities. Nor, I think, is it far-fetched to make such a connection vis-à-vis ‘Un segno’; for in having language be at once a consequence of the natural human desire to mark the passage of time and an integral part of (or substitute for) that project, Qfwfq’s enterprise reveals itself as being cognate to the Derridean (neo-Gödelian) impossibility of establishing a standpoint hors de texte – i.e., a demonstration of Derrida’s best-known dictum. It is this discovery on the part of the cosmicomic Calvino that separates him from the Calvino of Il sentiero dei nidi. But for the very same reason, the cosmicomic Calvino, especially as we encounter him through the mediation of Qfwfq in ‘Un segno,’ is just as surely not Derrida – or, at least, not the Derrida who professes, ‘Il n’y pas hors de texte’ (‘There is no outside-the-text,’ a.k.a. ‘the prison house of language’). After all, Calvino’s parable subjects the absolutism of that slogan to a principle of relativity, and in two respects. First, Qfwfq informs us that he drew his sign a little ‘outside’ the bounds of the Galaxy so that it might serve to mark ‘the only point … in relation to which other points could be defined’ (42–43/32). This hors de textualité could, of course, be dismissed as merely fictional were it not also a matter of narrative, or fictifactual, demonstration. Qfwfq, that is, by dissociating his present sign-maker self from the one responsible for his original sign (and from Kgwgk and his sign-imitations as well), places himself outside that earlier text of his. Furthermore, in the process, Qfwfq has gone enough of the way toward establishing an identity to have in some measure fulfilled his original intent, as it were – i.e., that of selflocation, which at this tale’s outset we had been given to believe was also an impossibility (and one which we’ve perceived as being cognate to Derrida’s hors de texte).51 Sketchy and incomplete though it is, this interpretation of ‘Un segno’ allows it a meaning nearly approaching the overall argument of Calvino’s essay on ‘Cibernetici e fantasmi’ and hence of the Ti con zero fiction which supplies both that essay’s basis and its direction, ‘Il conte di Montecristo.’ The third story in Cosmicomiche thus appears as having an affinity with the very last entry in Ti con zero. In that regard, it is crucial to stress that the understanding of ‘Un segno’ given above is not readily available at the stage of cosmicomic apprehension correlative to its place in Cosmicomiche – or that it is accessible there only perhaps as we have accessed it: by way of its allegorical misconstruction. Alternatively, the connection between ‘Montecristo’ and ‘Un segno’ can be looked upon as re-visionary – which is, of course, to say that the one reveals an import which the other in itself only ‘unconsciously’ bears (though in this case it may well be the reader alone, not Calvino even at the time of his writing of ‘Un segno,’

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who is oblivious to the latter’s Derridean significance until ‘Montecristo’ discloses it). Of those two possible ‘sources’ of a Gödelian reading of ‘Un segno,’ revision is more instructive than allegorization for appreciating what Calvino is up to in Ti con zero. We have, after all, made ‘Un segno’ out to be what it (just as) surely is not: almost a duplicate of ‘Montecristo.’ We have therefore incurred, as an inescapable demand, the obligation to identify, particularly, the difference between the two – and hence the difference(s) between Cosmicomiche and Ti con zero. IV. ‘Defining’ T Zero What immediately and quite visibly offers itself as a difference is an absence: ‘Montecristo’ has no epigraph. This fact might seem to be as inconsequential as it is obvious. If, however, we entertain the hypothesis that it is not a nugatory factoid, we instantly notice an apparent inconsistency between the last section of Ti con zero and the two preceding parts. Judged only by physical appearance, the first four of Ti con zero’s fictions take up where Cosmicomiche’s had left off – i.e., those four, also, depend upon epigraphs. The last four, on the other hand, offer no such thing; and with Part Two, as noticed earlier, the epigraphs, correlative to their placement, are of a different kind from Cosmicomiche’s. This obvious and presumptively meaningless feature of Ti con zero is, instead, what that entire volume is about: the disappearance – or rather, the disappearing, or disparition – of the epigraph.52 That way of putting the matter hardly recommends it as holding any truth. We must therefore reformulate a previous finding about Cosmicomiche. We had hitherto observed that its epigraphs (pre)establish the basis for another world, one that is alien to our present. Now we need to recognize that by reason of their very function, those same epigraphs are at once pre-textual and pretextual vis-à-vis the fiction which they stand before.53 This is likewise the case with Ti con zero at its start, which we can now also view as its set-up. The last four fictions in Cosmicomiche’s successor accordingly present us with a mystery: The Case of the Disappearing Pre-text. ‘Montecristo,’ the fiction most evidently preoccupied with a cognate kind of problem-solving (i.e., as a variant of the detective story), is as well the one most answerable to our quest. Clearly, that is, Calvino’s abstract version of the elder Alexandre Dumas’ 1844–45 romance whose title it appropriates, not only draws the names of its two personages and their circumstances from the Dumas; it also, in doing so, identifies Dumas’ Le comte de Monte-Cristo as both its pre-text and its pretext. The same is true,

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though hardly self-evidently so, with the other fictions in Ti con zero which seem to want a pre-text. Those Ti con zero narratives where no such text is visible in the way and the sense that Cosmicomiche’s (epigraphically) are, instead have done what is evident from ‘Montecristo’: they have internalized their pre-text. This does not mean that their pre-text is necessarily what we would think of as a text, let alone a literary text. Indeed, part of the point of ‘Montecristo,’ in making it apparent that it has just such a text as its pre-text, is to alert us to look for the pre-text of every other Ti con zero entry whose pre-text is bibliographically invisible – and thereby to discover, for example, that the pre-text of Ti con zero’s title-fiction is Zeno the Eleatic’s notorious paradox concerning the temporal continuum.54 That the fictions in the last part of Ti con zero internalize their pre(-)text is informative only when we realize that the entire contents of this companion to Cosmicomiche, in the order those contents are given, enact a process of disparition which amounts to ‘the inward turn of narrative,’ and with a vengeance. The ‘Priscilla’ trilogy, as its place in Ti con zero would suggest, is central to that inward turn. By way of getting to that, however, we should first look into at least one of its predecessors: ‘L’origine degli uccelli’ (‘The Origin of Birds’). In point of content, that story resumes the theme recurrent in Cosmicomiche. It is, on that level, a(nother) parable or fable about the course and fate of human desire, constructed (as is usual with Cosmicomiche) as a male desire having as its object a female Other – here Qfwfq’s desire for OrgOnir-Ornit-Or, the ‘beautiful’ Queen of the Birds. On that understanding, the only thing new to this story’s rehearsal of the perpetual frustration of desire comes from the last syllable of the Bird Queen’s name (which subsequently serves as her only cognomen): ‘Or,’ that is, resonates with l’Age d’Or, the Golden Age, and hence imparts to desire a Utopian dimension which, at least, is not particularly evident from Cosmicomiche by reason of the latter’s emphasis on personally psychological constructions of desire. In other words – these from ‘L’origine’ itself – this text reconstructs desire as the utopian possibility arising ‘[f]or a fraction of a second between the loss of everything I knew before and the acquisition of everything I was going to know afterward’: of ‘embrac[ing] [abbracciare] in a single thought the world of things as they used to be [erano] and that of things as they could have been,’ and ‘discover[ing]’ as well ‘that a single system comprehended all’ (31/26). Clearly, however, a thematic analysis of ‘L’origine’ has severe limitations. Most of all, it cannot account for the long stretch wherein Qfwfq details how he reached the Kingdom of the Birds in comic-strip fashion (or another explaining how, by the same means, he returned there). Nor can ‘theme’ take in any of those other textual-stylistic features which signal,

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unmistakably, that ‘L’origine’ is a metafictional narrative (as are all the contents of Ti con zero, more or less) – i.e., it is (self)conscious of its own (im)possibility (above all, at its comic strip-like moments). What further license ‘L’origine’ has as a metafiction comes from one of the three ‘Priscilla’ narratives, which for that reason (among others) likewise qualifies as metafictional. The narrative I am referring to is ‘Mitosi’ (‘Mitosis’), the first of the three. There the (self)consciousness distinguishing Ti con zero from Cosmicomiche is invested, and hence locatable, in what might count as a mere verbal formula in some other writer by reason of its insistent recurrence. The phrase in question is ‘altrove altravolta altrimenti,’ ‘elsewhere elsewhen otherwise.’ It appears initially toward the midpoint of ‘Mitosi,’ four times in all (Ti con zero 71, 74, 81), and twice within a single paragraph, after which the presence of members of the trio, singly or in pairs, at once obtrudes itself and insinuates whatever particular Otherness (among the three specified) is nominally absent. The phrase fictifactually describes – indeed, epitomizes – the nature of Qfwfq’s desire for ‘tutto’: not (only) as his desire for having all, but the manner of that having. It is also to be properly understood – and for the most part has been – as applying to the entire contents of Cosmicomiche as well as of Ti con zero. In short, ‘altrove altravolta altrimenti’ is cosmicomically self-reflective, or self-reflexive. And not just in point of its immediately apprehensible conceptual content. What also needs our notice is a peculiarity about its punctuation – viz., that this string of words doesn’t have any. This for an anglophone reader cannot count as an overlookable obvious fact because William Weaver (as translator) has obliterated it. His insertion of commas can, however, be taken as testifying to the Italian original’s blatant want of them.55 What is otherwise an egregious mistranslation may thereupon serve for revealing that ‘altrove altravolta altrimenti’ does not merely conceptualize Calvino’s cosmicomic ‘theme’; it elides three modes of Otherness, and in making them into one while preserving (by the spaces between the words) their separation, pretty much covers all of Otherness’s conceivable modalities. ‘Elsewhere elsewhen otherwise’ thus becomes something like a ‘performative utterance.’ It does not merely reproduce on the level of language what all of the cosmicomics finally come down to or what they are ultimately about; it is what they are ultimately about. The other sorts of self-consciousness that the cosmicomic narratives evince – mostly psychological and generic – Ti con zero refers to language. An apprehension of what this really means comes out of the realization that the cosmicomic consciousness (re)produced in language reaches its climax – i.e., the moment of fullest self-consciousness – in the ‘Priscilla’ trilogy. This is also to say that those three narratives meaningfully occupy

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the position which their bibliographical placement, at the center of Ti con zero, would suggest. The three, both singly and in their relationship to one another, are not just the nodal point of that collection of narratives; they are also at the center of what Calvino’s cosmicomical project is all about. They refine and (re)define, or revise, the import of all the stories that precede them, inclusive of those in Cosmicomiche; and they predefine as well as anticipate their successors in Ti con zero. This is true by reason of the fact that ‘Priscilla’ is a Shandean enterprise. To be more precise, the Calvino of ‘Priscilla’ stands in relation to the Laurence Sterne of Tristram Shandy exactly as that Sterne stands in relation to Jonathan Swift as the author of A Tale of a Tub56 – i.e., just as Sterne is the chiefest beneficiary and inheritor of Swift’s Tubbian deconstructionism, so Calvino is of Sterne’s. In lieu of a global demonstration of that hermeneutic hypothesis, it may be sufficient to examine two passages and establish them as the paradigm(s) for what Calvino is variously up to. The first of these comes from ‘Mitosi.’ That narrative begins in medias res, as signaled by the ellipsis points at its very outset. It thereupon concerns itself with a twofold project (which, thus conceptualized, is viewable as a logical extension of what Calvino is doing with dimidiamento, or splitting-in-half, in Nostri antenati). It initially intimates that it will be investigating the meaning of ‘innamorato da morire’ (‘enamored to the point of dying’ or, in the usual English idiom, ‘dying of love’). It presently discovers, however, that this investigation entails the attempt on Qfwfq’s part to determine his beginning, which both would be and also is the logical beginning of this narrative. The (ficti)fact that Qfwfq is here a unicellular being on the verge of mitotic division, coupled with the narrative’s (re)production of his as its apparent informing consciousness, thoroughly infuses ‘Mitosi’ with an irony most evident in the narrative’s ‘unforeseen’ conclusion. At that point, we are meant to recognize (what Qfwfq gives no indication of being conscious of) that his quest for a/his beginning has ineluctably conduced to his end(ing) – his sudden appearance as a multicellular entity, apparently a human being – which also coincides (not accidentally) with his narrative’s elliptical ending by inference from its anticipated get-together of Qfwfq and Priscilla Langwood. With that much in mind of what ‘Mitosi’ is up to, we can begin to appreciate the significance of the narrative’s manner of meaning as it exhibits itself in this excerpt from a paragraph at whose commencement Qfwfq announces: ‘Let’s begin, then, thus’ (which, by the way, reveals his unconsciousness of having already begun). Immediately thereafter positing his existence as a ‘unicellular organism’ (self)identifiable for being ‘content’ (‘contento’ – i.e., happy) as such, he goes on to ‘say,’ in part:

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This passage is predicated on Qfwfq’s prior derivation of time and space from self-reflection on his unicellular existence – a generative process dictating that time and space be relative to the unicellular him. That temporal relativity inscribes itself in the given quotation, and in a way which extends to space (via the dialectic between container and contained). But it is at least equally pertinent to notice that the extract we are confronting is in itself typical of ‘Mitosi’ in two respects: for being Shandean with regard both to its proportions (I’ve omitted more than forty subsequent words from the original’s single sentence) and in the way that it does its work. As for the latter, Calvino is not merely engaging in a jeu de mots (here with contento-contenuto/contenente); he is also engendering a narrative consciousness of such wordplay as a linguistically narcissistic exercise – correlative, of course, to Qfwfq’s putatively essentialist narcissism as a unicellular being ‘dying of love’ which originates as a feeling of self-sufficient plenitude but rapidly modulates into the desire for ‘everything possible, everything elsewhere elsewhen otherwise possible,’ a desire which brings with it a sense of emptiness (‘vuoto’ – see 71–72/63– 64). The text thereby necessarily – and to all intents and purposes, at one and the same instant – posits (or rather, [re]produces) and calls into question a given (bi)polar distinction, in this case via a dialectic whereby an initial (self)contentment generates (self)discontent. Immediately at issue here is the (would-be) antithesis of container vs. contained. But as is the case everywhere else in the ‘Priscilla’ trilogy where such oppositions come into play, their deconstruction is unconfinable, subject as it is to a species of (ana)logical extension. This is a capacity which the text acquires from its given, or surface, consciousness: that of a Qfwfq who, while he is himself aware of his as a project of selfdefinition, has little or no foreknowledge that in setting the boundaries for his being a self, he must also establish the (possibility of the) Other (in the form of his future ‘self’ as well as of Priscilla Langwood). All of this needs to be spelled out in another way if we are to understand the cosmicomic Calvino. ‘Mitosi’ cannot rightly be described as a linguistically comic narrative whose ‘theme’ is a series of oppositions of the sort we have already identified. It is instead a narrative whose meaning is indissociable from its manner of meaning. What seem to be its

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verbal games constitute a/the drama of language, and more precisely of language discovering its own possibilities of ‘being’ (hence, of meaning), inclusive of (self)contradiction. This is also to say, among other things, that the meaning of ‘Mitosi’ is self-contained (narcissistically, as it were). This is evident the moment we become aware that none of the epigraphs to ‘Priscilla’ supplies more than a superficial pre-text, at least when compared with the pre-text inscriptively present in the narrative itself – once we realize, that is, the actual import of what we are told at the very outset of ‘Mitosi’: that overall it is a deconstructive exploration of what it (really, literally) means to ‘say “innamorato da morire’’’ (67/59). Our other exemplary passage comes from ‘Meiosi’ (‘Meiosis’). Juxtaposed as it is with ‘Mitosi,’ this second title promises a narrative that, rather than being focally self-absorbed, will be concentrated toward the engenderment of the Other. (Here the biological pre-texts to ‘Priscilla’ are a pertinent reminder that mitosis concerns the diploid and meiosis the haploid division of chromosomes.) It is therefore appropriate that ‘Meiosi’ does not contain its own pre-text or at least doesn’t do so immediately: instead of having an exact correspondent of ‘innamorato da morire,’ ‘Meiosi’ takes ‘Mitosi’ as its pre-text. Like its pre-text, ‘Meiosi’ is largely concerned with defining its beginning. And, again, it does so via Qfwfq’s consciousness. In this case, however, Qfwfq is aware from the start of his own limitations. He is also conscious, as his mitotic self apparently is not, that he is engaging in a linguisticconceptual enterprise. His meiotic project none the less proves to be as (seemingly) self-defeating as his mitotic one was. This is evident, for instance, from the following sample: [O]nce [it is] established that what I call ‘I’ consists of a certain number of amino acids which line themselves up in a certain way, it follows that inside these molecules all possible relations [rapporti]57 are already foreseen, while from the outside comes only the exclusion of some among the[se] possible relations in the form of certain enzymes that block certain processes. Thus one can say that it is as if everything possible has already happened to me, including the possibility of its not happening: [that] from the moment that I’m I, the game is over, disposing of a finite number of possibilities and that’s it; [that] what’s going on outside counts for me only if it translates itself into operations already foreseen by my nucleic acids; [that] I’m immured inside myself, chained to my molecular program(ming); [that] outside of me I neither have nor could have relations [rapporti] with anything or anyone. (86/79) This passage fulfills the promise of the topic clause which introduces it: ‘the more one simplifies the terms of the problem [questione], the more

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they insist on complicating themselves.’ Qfwfq, after all, here manages to do what he does everywhere else: confound the distinctions he is laboring to make – in this case, chiefly the boundary-difference between ‘interno’ and ‘fuori,’ inside and outside. So, too, his is a truly (Tristram) Shandean project, with allowance for a contrast in scale (but not in scope). Tristram’s self-appointed task is to retail – to write in the manner of saying, or speaking – his life (inclusive of his opinions) in something very like ‘real time’ – an enterprise that would no doubt be futile even if he didn’t insist on beginning at the beginning (i.e., at the moment of his biological conception), given that the time it takes to record his (would-be) present self entails that he fall ever further behind from where he was at the outset. Qfwfq sidesteps that particular problem by dealing with his existence in purely conceptual terms (basically drawn from genetics, as illustrated above). But his project is still liable to self-de(con)struction for the same kind of reason that dooms, say, the Shandean project for obviating the possible consequences of Original Sin by referring baptism to the moment of fertilization – i.e., because all such projects are subject to the peculiar and inescapable governance of the Shandean Law that ‘to define – is to distrust,’58 or to call into question. This linguistic reality of ‘Meiosi’ and also, in just about equal measure, of ‘Mitosi’ – that each of them at once proposes and erases difference(s) – applies as well to the relationship between them. As the above-quoted passages indicate, ‘Meiosi’ tragically dwells on impossibilities or lost possibilities, while ‘Mitosi’ concentrates on a diametrically opposite construction. Yet, taken in their entirety, no such opposition fully holds for either narrative. When, for instance, they are generically considered, ‘Meiosi’ alone has for sure a com(ed)ic ending, concluding as it does with the union which Qfwfq would all along convince us is impossible (but one which in the event turns out to be so only in the sense that it involves the sexual congress of Qfwfq and Priscilla as a couple of camels). ‘Mitosi,’ on the other hand, offers nothing more than the prospect that Qfwfq and Priscilla may some day meet. Nor does all this allow for the preservation of the generic antithesis of ‘Mitosi’ and ‘Meiosi’ in reverse. Read as tragedy rather than as comedy (or tragi-comedy), ‘Mitosi’ becomes intolerably and unconscionably self-pitying, while ‘Meiosi’ as comedy inevitably tends to degenerate into farce. The last of the ‘Priscilla’ narratives confirms the trilogy’s dialectic of identity and difference. It also makes apparent the revisionary nature of the whole ‘Priscilla’ enterprise. The title of this last entry, ‘Morte’ (‘Death’), proposes that it will not only negate the life-giving possibilities of its predecessors, but in the process will also deny the immortality that ‘Mitosi’ and ‘Meiosi’ had (diversely) promised. In that last respect, this

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final revisionary twist on the biological reality of genetics which is the entire trilogy’s metaphoric substratum and pre-text proves to be highly paradoxical; for by the time Calvino is finished with it, ‘morte’ has come to signify genetic immortality. This, however, is tantamount – if not, indeed, exactly equivalent – to death in that the immortality in question involves the exact re-production of nucleic acids in their genetically already-given sequence, and hence would have every human being enchained chromosomatically to a set of pre-established possibilities (to the absolute exclusion of others, which by genetic definition must be impossibilities). ‘Morte,’ then, refashions the fullness of the mitotic and the emptiness of meiotic Qfwfq so as to turn them into an Otherness which is the absolute negation of those foregoing ‘altrimenti,’ or modes of being/becoming an/the Other.59 Yet the pessimistic conclusion thereby drawn from ‘Mitosi’ and ‘Meiosi’ – that, in the terms suggested by the epigraph from Sartre’s Les mots, we are condemned to living with the burden of Anchises, the archetypical ancestor/father, on our backs – is likewise one whose re-vision they demand. For just as ‘Morte’ reconstructs ‘Mitosi’ and ‘Meiosi,’ so it itself becomes vulnerable to their reconstruction. The fundamental reason for this liability has to do with its implicit proposal about ‘Qfwfq,’ a designation which by the end of ‘Morte’ must be comprehended, in accordance with my earlier gloss, as an algebraic representation of a nucleic acid chain (of DNA rather than RNA). Qfwfq, then, is a sepulchral presence in ‘Morte’ despite his nominal absence there; so that the positive Otherness attaching to him, which expressly or covertly informs ‘Mitosi’ and ‘Meiosi,’ subversively inscribes itself in ‘Morte’ as well. Throughout this account of ‘Priscilla,’ we have been encountering more than nebulous intimations of the four narratives which follow. In fact, the central trilogy anticipates the turn that Ti con zero will thereafter take as much as it looks back to and revisionarily reconceptualizes Calvino’s previous cosmicomical findings. Whereas Cosmicomiche primarily affords the sense experience (and especially the tactile experience) of an abstract, scientific hypothesis, the Ti con zero narratives – the last four of which can barely be called that – reverse the ratio between the two: i.e., the intellectual abstraction (from ‘real-life’ experience) occupies the foreground. Thus, too, from the retrospective standpoint, ‘Mitosi,’ ‘Meiosi,’ and ‘Morte,’ both separately and in tandem, revise all previous cosmicomical constructions of desire – and not only Cosmicomiche’s, but also those of ‘Priscilla’s’ Ti con zero antecedents, which are likewise themselves reconstructions of Cosmicomiche (as already instanced with ‘L’origine’). Put another way, Ti con zero, operating with and on Cosmicomiche’s variety, reconstructs that as difference.60

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At the same time, ‘Priscilla,’ while allowing for the continuance of a characterological understanding of Qfwfq (et al.), distinctly holds the prospect of the subsequent reduction of such human(like) entities to components of some species of information-exchange (or rather, nonexchange) system (with the genetic model as its paradigm). In that regard – to take but one of the possible revisionary examples from Part Three of Ti con zero – ‘Il guidatore notturno’ (‘The Nocturnal Driver’) algebraically represents Cosmicomiche’s ‘Giochi senza fine’ (‘Games Without End’). The original version finally has Qfwfq and Pfwfp, both atoms, chasing one another around the universe as if in (light-speed) race cars. The ‘t-zero’ re-vision re-presents the ‘game’ in terms, primarily, of ‘X’ and ‘Y.’ Seeking to communicate to Y his regret for the lovers’ quarrel they’ve just had and being unable to reach her by phone, X is driving (by night) toward her place, imagining all the while the various scenarios that will frustrate their encountering – and hence their communicating with – one another. X finally decides to return home in the expectation that Y has already arrived there or has turned her own car around and gone back to her own home. Either way, their actions would be mutually correspondent, so that X and Y would in effect have made themselves an information system capable of communicating – or, in other words, X and Y would in principle be on the same wave-length. But while X regards both possibilities as equally hopeful, the fictifactually overwhelming probability that Y, too, has returned home – or its realistic counterpart, that she never left her house but refuses to answer her telephone – makes for a ‘gioco senza fine’ in reinstating X in his initial situation. Otherwise, the game can end only if Y has a ‘communicational’ encounter with Z, X’s rival – an encounter of the sort that prompts her to break off with X. This last is a possibility as logically unnecessary as it is untoward for ‘Guidatore’ in itself (from X’s, its narrative standpoint). But it is hardly uncalled for vis-à-vis ‘Giochi’ (with its prominent male rivalry) as this Ti con zero narrative’s pre-text; and it is likewise pertinent to ‘Guidatore’ as a pre-write, as it were, of ‘Montecristo.’ This is also to observe that all of the narratives in Part Three of Ti con zero feature variants of ‘Morte’s’ chromosomal prison, and all of them more or less expressly pose the problem implicit in ‘Morte’: Is there any escape? Ostensibly there isn’t, as is most evident from Montecristo’s/Edmond Dantès’ and the Abbé di Faria’s futile efforts to find, respectively, a conceptual or a material way out of the fortress of If.61 Meanwhile, however, the not-so-evident fact that the Qfwfq of ‘Mitosi’ and ‘Meiosi’ actually realizes the would-be impossibility of ‘altrove altravolta altrimenti’ – and, more tellingly, that all of the cosmicomic narratives more or less do likewise as tours de force of language – demonstrates that If’s prison

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(as its name is probably meant to suggest) may not be as inescapable as it appears. Be that as it may, this much we can be certain of: that the cosmicomic Calvino has wrested from language possibilities – visions of ‘altrove altravolta altrimenti’ – which for sure Italian, and arguably any other language, never knew before (or – what amounts to the same thing – never knew it knew). V. Re-Visions of Re-visions Before going into Calvino’s first two gatherings of his cosmicomic narratives, I characterized his re-collections of them as a betrayal of their vision. The grounds for that assertion of mine as it applies to the cosmicomic recollection brought out the year after Ti con zero will be quite evident if I have to any extent succeeded in showing why ‘Priscilla’ is central to Calvino’s entire project as he originally conceived it. For not only is that trilogy as such absent from La memoria del mondo; that volume does not contain so much as one of its three components.63 This absence is largely a dictate of La memoria’s new principle of ordering its contents. Presumably to accommodate the volume’s title-story and seven other hitherto uncollected cosmicomics, Calvino chooses an arrangement which is in one sense or another ‘topical.’ To be precise, he groups the cosmicomics by fours either according to their setting (the Earth, the moon, and the Sun, stars, and galaxies) or under the subject-headings of ‘Stories About Evolution’ and ‘Stories About Time and Space.’ What, at least in effect, is a repudiation of the logical principle governing, especially, Cosmicomiche in its holistic relationship to Ti con zero carries over to Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove. To be sure, that anthology restores ‘Priscilla.’ But again adopting a ‘topical’ order – in this case univocally of the sort that La memoria latterly evinces (e.g., ‘Priscilla’ falls under the ægis-rubric of ‘Biocomiche,’ or ‘Biocomics’) – this last volume licensed by Calvino likewise forswears Cosmicomiche’s and Ti con zero’s logic. And not just ostensibly: Ti con zero’s’ ‘La molle Luna,’ for example, here takes precedence over Cosmicomiche’s ‘La distanza della Luna’ – this in defiance of ‘La Distanza’s’ claim to (logical) priority. As a theory of re-vision would have it, these re-orderings wring meaningful changes from the narratives that they bibliographically reconstruct. In my view, however, this return for what they lose counts as ‘abundant recompense’ only in the unintentionally ironic sense that the Wordsworthian phrase has in the context of Tintern Abbey. The defect of such a comparison is that it gets things the wrong way round. La memoria, in particular – and Cosmicomiche vecchie to a somewhat lesser extent – sacrifices the intellectual effect of Calvino’s original vision for the sake of

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emotional impact. Accordingly, some of the new stories in Memoria contain his most poignant and plaintive expressions of cosmicomic ‘nostalgi[a] del niente’ (‘nostalgia for nothing’), on the understanding that ‘niente’ denominates a lost possibility momentarily retrieved by and through language.64 By the same token, the revisionary impetus of the two later cosmicomic gatherings is toward making them re(-)collections in a double sense. (The pun is somewhat more farfetched in Italian than it is in English, but it is warranted by the etymology of raccolta/raccogliere.) In fact, the title of the first of these re-collections is analogously ambiguous, as is clear from an exact English rendition, ‘The Memory of the World,’ a phrase whose import depends upon whether World be understood as the subject or the object of the remembering. This bibliographical re-collection, in particular, accordingly puts a revisionary emphasis on those cosmicomic tales, inclusive of all the ones which come furnished with visible epigraphs, that expressly or implicitly emanate from (Qfwfq’s) memory – which in one way or another is always questionable – of the more or less distant past and its now-defunct world. La memoria thus elicits a meaningful possibility barely noticeable without it: that one object of Cosmicomiche’s and Ti con zero’s co-operative project, especially as it has to do with the (de)constructing of time, is to unite memory and desire and thereby dubiate memory’s opposition to imagination. In that exemplary regard, Calvino’s re(-)collections are foreseeable as of Ti con zero at the latest. So, too, Memoria can be viewed as extracting from that predecessor-volume the principle which is at the core of Le città invisibli’s manner of meaning – this by reason of the view of Memoria’s ordering as a dictate of the species of (mathematical) permutationalism that structures Le città.65 All of this has a further consequence: that Calvino does not neatly fit either of the models which, singly or together, account for the careers of almost every other author with any real claim to integrity. From the works of his that we have surveyed, it is clear that he is not the kind of writer who has some idée fixe and is laboring to invent the one language suitable for conveying it – the model which finds its travesty in the literary hack perpetually repeating the same thing the same way in an attempt to reproduce some commercial success. Nor does Calvino precisely conform to the problem-solving model of artistic development – the model that Wells in effect proposes in his Anatomy of Frustration in urging that the solution to one problem is the genesis of another. To some extent, it is true, both of these paradigms apply to Calvino – separately and in tandem. None the less, they prove inadequate for being impotent to predict the direction that Calvino might have taken had he not died at age sixty-

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three. By this I mean in part that Le città and then Palomar serve to elicit the difference, at least with Calvino, between ‘foreseeable’ and ‘predictable.’66 With those later books actually in view, we can recognize that in them Calvino is working out on the narremic level discoveries that he makes in organizing and re-collecting his cosmicomic stories; but by the same token, none of Calvino’s subsequent titles, from Le città through Palomar, denominate fictions which any critic (at least) could have conceived solely on the basis of (understanding) the cosmicomic Calvino. (The latter, by contrast, is predictable from Nostri antenati, at least for a reader conversant with the eighteenth-century English satirists whom I’ve brought in – i.e., it is clear from Swift’s and Sterne’s example that the Calvino who in his ‘Nostri Antenati’ trilogy undertakes to deconstruct concepts as such would next do so on the linguistic level.) Meanwhile, the fact that Calvino did not afterwards go beyond his cosmicomic exploration of the Self- and Other-consciousness of and in language per se suggests that he himself might well have assented to what he persuades us of: that the cosmicomic Calvino takes his altrove altravolta altrimenti as far as he (or any other author) enables us to imagine it can go.

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§11. Ursula K. Le Guin and Time’s Dispossession We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, 241–44 The Dispossessed, like The Four Quartets, centers problematically on the human meaning of time. Taking as its focal consciousness – and conscience – the point of view of a ‘temporal physicist’ and telling of his quest (as he finally regards it) to redeem his past and the future, the book is above all else a science-fictional Bildungsroman. But the uncertainties attending that quest make for a Bildungsroman whose Bildung remains in doubt almost to the very end. Oscillating meanwhile between seemingly antithetical worlds, The Dispossessed describes ‘the waste sad time / Stretching before and after’ Shevek leaves Anarres for Urras.1 I. The Broken Promise: Anarres as Utopia Lost Those two worlds are polar opposites in a strictly – which is not to say merely – nominal sense. Indeed, Anarres acquires its precise, honorific meaning only when understood as the negative form of Urras. Thought of in that way, and not simply as deriving from ‘anarchy,’ the name points to Odo’s original (i.e., an-archic) intent rather than to the chaotic state of affairs actually prevailing on Shevek’s home planet at the moment he boards the Mindful bound for Urras. Furthermore, Anarres in the same manner establishes – or educes – the significance of Urras. The latter in itself evokes the Cold War model for the fictional world on which two mutually hostile powers precariously co-exist and over which each seeks exclusive hegemony. Yet the name of that world, in its semantic opposition to Anarres,2 appears not as a kind of anagrammatic compound of U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. but as an amalgam of the two.3 After all, A-Io and Thu, despite the enmity that they have for one another and whatever differences in thinking may underlie it, agree in regarding Anarres as an

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ideological threat, and this policy joins them together as an ‘I-You’ confronting the Anarresti ‘Them.’4 For their part, the Anarresti in general reciprocate that animosity. Not only do they make no distinction between A-Io and Thu as embodiments of a ‘propertarianism’ they despise and of the ‘statism’ consequent from it; they by and large look upon all Urrasti as an undifferentiated Them inimical to an Anarresti Us. In doing so, however, they perforce ignore the Odonian dissidents still on Urras and thus in effect absolutize and implicitly sanction the status quo there. Nor is brotherhood the only Odonian tenet they subtly betray by assuming a stance which simply reverses that of official Urras. They also subvert another – and perhaps the most fundamental – of Odo’s principles with respect to Anarres itself. Their community as Odo conceived it was one whose an-archism would serve the maximizing of individual freedom. But her putative ideological descendants, defining themselves in terms of what they are against, have dialectically involved the identity of Anarres with that of Urras as they perceive it. They have thereby done worse than lose sight of their essential Odonian purpose. Though in theory they continue to repudiate property and the political control that goes with it, they have put into practice a principle of social cohesion which at once undermines their community’s ideal basis and perverts its distinct raison d’être. What at present unites them is not the socio-political objective that Odo had in mind, but ‘fear of the stranger’ (12:292) – and of whatever they regard as strange, alien, or new. Their xenophobia, while it logically binds them to the object on which they primarily fix it, also prompts the Anarresti to cut themselves off from that world. Their resolve, however, does not extend to breaking the compact whereby the Urrasti leave them alone in return for the mineral riches of Anarres. Their attempt to dissociate themselves from Urras is therefore hypocritical, and not just by ordinary standards but also on the peculiarly Odonian grounds of collectively violating ‘the ethical imperative of brotherhood,’ the injunction against ‘keeping [one]self for [one]self’ (6:126). Yet beyond its hypocrisy, their locking out of Urras amounts to an act of mass self-deception. The measures which the Anarresti suppose insulate them against that exploitative world are not merely ineffectual for disconnecting them from it; they threaten to ensure that they will repeat its oppressive example. Without disrupting an ongoing, if unacknowledged, complicity with the ‘profiteers’ of that planet, they otherwise impose on Anarres itself a closure which would exclude the kind of ‘permanent revolution … [that] begins in the thinking mind’ (10:267; see also 6:142). Hence the metaphoric wall which the Anarresti erect to immure themselves from Urras and from the past which it represents instead separates them from their own – their Odonian – past and thereby jeopardizes their

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(Odonian) future. A barrier to the very ideas which Odo intended Anarres to stand for, it at the same time serves as the foundation for the increasingly despotic power of the council for Production and Distribution Coordination (or PDC). The danger of bureaucratic tyranny is all the greater because most Anarresti on principle do not and can not recognize it. Indeed, that sense in which it is both ‘unadmitted’ and ‘inadmissible’ explains how it can be that a ‘government … rules the[ir] … society by stifling the individual mind’ (6:134). Their Odonian assurance of the impossibility of such a government on Anarres has allowed this creature of their misoneism and their ‘fear of the stranger’ to make its way imperceptibly into their world, where its tenure depends upon their refusal to see it for what it is. So long as they remain blind to it, what is happening to their community – the changes which the Sabuls of the PDC are inadvertently or unwittingly bringing about – cannot be something for them to decide on. Against a prospect which is far from utopian their Odonian past can give the Anarresti some ground for hope. Nevertheless, their past cannot secure them from such a prospect; for that past itself is at stake in their future, which by reason of ‘causal reversibility’ (9:222; cf. 2:37) presides over the past. Nor does a world as ‘dry’ and ‘inimical’ (4:95) as the Arrakis of Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) guarantee their Odonian vocation. It is true that the climate and geography of Anarres at first seem to exact cooperation as the price for human survival. But the events ensuing from the ‘[l]ongest drought in … forty years’ (8:190) – and especially those incidents that Shevek witnesses en route from Southrising (8:205-06) or hears about from the driver who takes him to Chakar (10:250-51) – prove that an ecologically privative world is as conducive to ‘mutual aggression’ as it is to ‘mutual aid’ (7:167).5 Then again, non-propertarianism appears to be inevitable on a planet which offers no thing that an Anarresti would desire to appropriate. Yet this same consideration which makes propertylessness a matter of natural necessity rather than ethical principle nullifies it as an Odonian virtue.6 Besides, the nature of Anarres exempts it only from a propertarianism of the form operative on Urras. Even there, however, material possessions have importance chiefly as signs of the power to possess them – and hence of power in the abstract. Logically considered, the Urrasti system therefore requires things solely for the symbolic value they are invested with – an investment which, as it idealizes its object, is all the more readily transferable to what the Anarresti do not lack: ideas. That, of course, is exactly what Sabul and his ilk are in the process of doing: they are establishing a ‘power structure’ (6:134) based upon the possessive control of ideas. The Anarresti thus seem doomed to become the ‘dispossessed’ in every pejorative sense. In so far as that word applies to ongoing economic fact

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and past historical circumstance, their desert-planet inherently warrants no synonyms for it except material poverty and eviction (Anarres in this view being a Planet of Exile). To be sure, dispossession, even as their world immediately imparts a negative value to it, still indicates the distance between their community and Urras. But any positive meaning that distance can have must come from an Odonian inheritance which the Anarresti are in imminent peril of losing forever. Indeed, the participial noun dispossessed, in so far as it implicitly retains the past tense it has as a verb, suggests that they may have already and irrevocably forfeited their Odonian ideals. To the extent that seems true, their literal and figurative waste land points to utopia not as a receding horizon but in terms of what it is not. Even so, it is Anarres, far more than Urras, which points toward utopian possibilities and especially those of a socio-political order; and that is a paradox well worth enquiring into. What makes for the paradox are certain undeniable facts about Anarres as Le Guin has imagined it. The inhospitability of its environment, the open social strife provoked by food shortages consequent upon persistent drought, the struggles for power tending toward oppressive bureaucratization, the hypocritical collusion with Urrasti ‘profiteers’ and the self-deceptive blindness to it, the treatment of dissidents like Tirin (reminiscent of horror-stories about Soviet psychiatric prisons) – all of these are features which in themselves ought to qualify, if not overdetermine, Anarres as a dystopia, while otherwise rendering it anti-utopian in view of its foundational principles.7 Yet easy as an account of that sort would be to construct, all readers of The Dispossessed except the most obtuse and obdurate right-wing ideologues must be uneasy with it, recognizing it as the kind of part-truth which is tantamount to falsehood. And they have good reason for their uneasiness; for the Anarres which thus appears as the negation of utopian possibilities also – indeed, by the same movement – identifies them. They do not reside in some ethereal and extraneous Nowhere, having a dubious connection with the text and an even more uncertain relation to the – or rather, any other – empirical world.8 Instead, they enter into The Dispossessed from the Elsewhere that is the historical or legendary past of Anarres itself, and they do so in significant part through an Anarres which in its denial of them brings those utopian possibilities into definition. That is chiefly why utopian prospects, particularly of a socio-political kind, are immanent in The Dispossessed and not some figment hovering outside the text in need of fleshing out according to the subjective inclination of any given reader: because they are the very possibilities which Sabul’s Anarres (let us call it) seems to deny. In fact, it is that denial which enables the fiction to figure and articulate such possibilities persuasively and precisely – and in terms

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of precisely the principles which are failing to operate in Anarresti actuality. Those principles, furthermore, do not appear merely as a species of palpable absence; like the Analogy (the book by Odo that is their fictively-given source), they also have a real presence as they inform Shevek’s – and with him, the reader’s – judgmental perception. Hence, the inherent standards by which we gauge the Anarresti social order, the standards that authorize us to see it as dystopian (or, more accurately, as anti-utopian) prove to be Odo’s – i.e., the very ones holding Anarres’ utopian promise. II. The Burden of Time It is the burden of The Dispossessed to redeem that promise, and to do so in and through the person of Shevek. By the same token, however, this is a burden properly speaking, a burden in the philosophical as well as in an honorific sense, and one belonging to the narrative as much as to its focal character. It does not fall to Shevek automatically or from the outset, and it is no foregone conclusion that he can or will assume it. And correlatively, it is not something which Le Guin posits by mere authorial fiat or asks her readers to take for granted, but rather what her chronosophical fiction must demonstrate. In other words, it is a responsibility which Shevek must earn – and be shown to earn – through certain painful realizations about his Anarresti past and his present life on Urras. His process of realization is both problematic and dialectical. He ultimately comes to look upon his native planet as a locus of utopian hope, but only by way of perceptions which represent Anarres as the antithesis and betrayal of such hope as they indicate how precarious and imperilled Odo’s legacy is there. Moreover, the Anarres which gradually appears as the negation of its original heritage emerges as such through a narrative that adheres rather rigorously not only to Shevek’s point of view, but also to the terms of his own experience – terms which duplicate on a personal level the selfsame dialectical and problematic movement operative with regard to the could-be utopian status of the Anarresti social order. This is to say that Shevek’s future, and with it his past, are as parlous as those of Anarres itself. Indeed, they are ambiguated by similar factors. He arrives in A-Io literally empty-handed, to be welcomed as the alien and ambassador that in time he conceives himself to be. Yet in the course of the unfolding, in alternating narrative sequences, of his Anarresti past and his Urrasti present, the full irony of his being thought of – and thinking himself – a representative of his home planet slowly becomes evident. For one thing, the circumstances of his departure for Urras (beginning, in the narratological order of events, with the rockthrowing send-off that some

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of his compatriots give him) leave the motive for that undertaking radically uncertain in a way that makes his exodus a kind of mirror-image recreation of Odonian history. Whether he is fleeing into exile or being driven out of Anarres makes little difference, and not only because he is therefore apparently recapitulating – mutatis mutandis, in his own person – the collective past of the escape or eviction from Urras of Odo’s followers over a hundred and fifty years earlier. The ambiguity as to his motive for leaving Anarres is only one of many that Shevek carries with him to Urras aboard the Mindful. Indeed, the man who disembarks in the land of his biological and would-be spiritual ancestors does so as a representative of all the ambiguities of Anarres that threaten to disable and nullify its utopian vocation. He comes to Urras, he thinks, as the proverbial Anarresti beggarman; but in this he is selfdeceived in a manner similar to his fellow Anarresti when they imagine they have no truck with Urrasti profiteering. Though he arrives on Urras with virtually nothing by way of material possessions, he in time discovers that he in part owes his existence there to the rather large sum of money accruing to him as Seo Oen Prize Laureate. His sponsors, of course, have given him leisure to pursue his work because they intend to appropriate his theory, exploit its practical application, and thereby get a considerable return on their investment in him. In fact, their expectations in this regard are great enough for the Ioti Establishment to have risked importing a man who could prove to be a rallying point for the Odonian revolutionaries on Urras. And if they have reckoned the degree of that risk on the basis of Shevek’s being an exemplar of Anarresti attitudes toward and ignorance of Urras, their calculation by no means instantly appears to have been wrong. Shevek, after all, largely keeps to himself for most of his sojourn; and it is a long while before he sees that he has unwittingly been playing into the hands of those who would exploit him: that he has been isolating himself from the Odonians indigenous to A-Io and thus in effect has cooperated with profiteers – just as the Anarresti have collectively been doing by immuring themselves against Urras. So, too, Shevek stands in for the Anarresti generally in what he brings with him to Urras. Although he goes there a man dispossessed of his country and literally empty-handed, he is also a man possessed. It is appropriate that he makes his journey aboard a spacecraft called Mindful, for he departs with much to think about, and most of it painful. An exile from a planet of exiles, he brings with him both his virtually lifelong obsession with an idea and a personal past that continues to haunt him. These ghosts, moreover, are the personal correlatives of those looming over the Anarres that he has left behind, the Anarres which aggregatively seems to be failing the very foundational principles which absorb it.

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That Anarres is one of the things on Shevek’s mind; indeed, as it is his own life which chiefly supplies the terms for revealing Anarres’ problems – the negative ambiguities attaching to it – so his public concerns intersect with his personal worries. And like the Anarres reflected in his experience of it, his own promise seems very much in jeopardy. His seemingly enforced exit has meant his having to abandon Takver and his daughters; but the exigencies of the Anarresti drought had already placed his wife and him at antipodes to one another (Takver remains at a fisheries laboratory in the Northeast while he is posted to Southrising and then volunteers to work in the Dust of the Southwest). And that may be somewhat the case between them not merely in a literal, geographic sense and for the moment; for the ostracism that his theoretical work has brought him is clearly putting a strain on their marriage, not only by reason of the guilt he feels for the social hostility that Takver and their eldest child, Sadik, are being subjected to on his account, but also because those same pressures (in the person of Sabul) have frustrated his work in temporal physics to the point of putting an end to it.9 External constraints, however, are not the sole factors incapacitating his professional endeavors. He is blocked as well by his own inability to conceive how the temporal synthesis that preoccupies him might be worked out and demonstrated. In short, he goes to Urras with his life, to all appearances (at the time), in a near-total shambles, on every side confronting a wall that would cut him off from his past and bar the way to any emotional and intellectual fulfillment. The youthful hopes that circumstances seem to force him to detach from Anarres he projects onto Urras. To be sure, he has long known that the latter world leaves much to be desired in its socio-political arrangements. But his knowledge of such matters has been in the abstract, not the result of first-hand experience; and it does not begin to trouble him seriously until Chifoilisk, himself a spy from Thu, causes Shevek to have the paranoid shock of recognition that Ioti secret police and their informers have been clandestinely monitoring his activities. Meanwhile, Shevek is also in the process of discovering that even the Urras he has thought of and witnessed to be an ecological utopia has ambiguities as such in the same pejorative sense which applies to Anarres. Long before his interview with the ambassador from Terra makes him aware that that devastated planet may forewarn of the future that Urras itself is in for (if the profiteers have their way),10 he starts to realize that another deathly Ego presides over the would-be Urrasti Arcadia. He comes to see that the pleasures this Arcadia offers – the sensual gratification he first experiences from the accoutrements of the Mindful – are inextricable from a sensate culture which is every bit as debilitating to his lifework as its Anarresti antithesis has proved to be.

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In this regard, it is no accident that he becomes fully conscious of the perils of Urras’s seductive luxury while he is still in the throes of a profound self-doubt: that near as he is to the General Temporal Theory the Ioti want him for, he ‘had not achieved it and might never do so,’ either because the ‘goal’ may be ‘illusory’ or because ‘he was not the man to do the job’ (7:165). Wandering alone through Nio Esseia to escape such thoughts, and feeling for perhaps the first time the danger of a society ‘where the basic moral assumption was … mutual aggression’ (7:167), he suddenly espies Vea sitting next to a pool (of the kind having a purely ornamental civic purpose). His reaction, however, is not what would be expected under the circumstances. Instead of being relieved at the sight of a familiar face, he perceives her as the embodiment of the sublimated sexuality inhering in all the artifacts that the Ioti ‘haves’ surround themselves with. The image conveying this to him – ‘He saw Vea across the broad, bright circle of … water’ (7:171) – seems to prepare for an epiphany of an altogether different sort; but as she is instantly revealed to him as a ‘body profiteer,’ he recognizes the reflected sunlight as a mirage and both she and it as figures of Urras’s false promise. And at the same moment, his connection with Vea – now appearing as a travesty of a true bond, the sort of bond he has had with Takver – typifies the speciousness of the contact he has so far made with Vea’s world, and especially of his human ties there. Shevek thus confronts two worlds which, for all their mutual antagonism, converge in subverting his deepest impulses and aspirations. The events on Anarres leading up to his departure tend toward realizing the long-standing anxiety that he first becomes conscious of in late adolescence, that ‘I’m cut off’ (2:40); and this also seems to be the direction that his life is taking on Urras. By such an account, his history on the one world essentially repeats that on the other: both are stories of alienation, particularly from the human environment and above all from his seemingly past self and what he ideally might have been. And this is the case as well for the worlds with which his life is interfused: theirs, too, appears as a story of lost hope, of broken promises. Even so, hope and promise abide, and not simply as a measure of personal and social failure, but in the very telling of the story of failure, especially as it relates to Anarres. After all, the flashbacks to Shevek’s life there amount to more than the usual device for filling the reader in about his past; they also re-present that past, and hence make it as accessible to change as the future is. But the latter statement is something of an equivocation. Not only can we take it to mean that the future is as unalterable as the past; we are logically obliged to do so in reading Shevek’s as a story of ‘waste sad time,’ of irrecoverably lost promise. That change is possible is not at issue here. Le Guin grants – what we readily assume to be true from

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historical experience since early on in the First Industrial Revolution – that the objective world is changing. Nor does she cast doubt on the introspectively-based conviction that we can change our minds about it and ourselves. Indeed, it is in view of Shevek’s rethinking of his life vis-àvis an Anarres heading away from its Odonian ideals that The Dispossessed poses its central problem, the urgency of which appears all the greater by reason of the fact that the changes Shevek undergoes or bears witness to seem to be for the worse, if not the worst. Put one way, the question Le Guin addresses is whether this course of events is reversible. The hope that it is comes out of Shevek’s despair; for in revaluing his identity and that of an Anarres forgetful of Odo’s dream, he instances the future’s altering of the past. This last notion, however, is hopeful only when we recognize it as the paradox which it must strike us as being to the extent that we suppose, with the Orwell of Homage to Catalonia, that History is an absolute, a concatenation of immutable facts.11 Otherwise, we can easily reconcile ourselves to the idea of temporal malleability by taking it to bear solely on human psychology, not on the universe at large. That would maintain the past as unalterable, and thus remove any paradoxical content accruing to metanoia and historical change correlative to Causative Reversibility. But to do so, we must invoke exactly the kind of disjunction making for the problem that Le Guin faces, and faces up to – a problem which we can now articulate in terms of the connection(s) between the objective and subjective realms. Their obvious connection is not in itself problematic. What makes it so is its fictive illustration. External factors, as they impinge on Shevek’s thinking and even appear as determining his scientific pursuits,12 contribute substantially to the wrecking of his life and hence to the poignancy of The Dispossessed’s real question: Can we intentionally influence our environment so as to have some control over the course of our lives? The evidence for the reciprocity of influence – especially of the kind fictionally exemplified by a Terra whose ecological desolation is humanly made – does not suggest an easy and affirmative answer. On the contrary, it serves only to sharpen the question as applying to the chances of our avoiding or undoing our destructive impact. Indeed, given the disastrous effects of human activity on the natural (as well as the human) world, we have all the more reason to wonder if our actions are – or can be – the result of deliberative choice, of the weighing of consequences. That phrasing emphasizes the political aspect of a question which centrally involves our responsibility also to ourselves as individuals. Furthermore, responsibility as the ethical imperative that Shevek conceives it to be will not countenance any disjunction of the political from the personal. Yet by the same token, and also because it extends to

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the past along with the future, responsibility in its normative sense offers itself as a(nother) way into, not out of, the problem that Le Guin raises; and it does so for practical as well as theoretical reasons. Willing as we may be in principle to join Shevek in his insistence that we hold ourselves accountable, individually and collectively, for both the private and the historical course of events, we may well be reluctant in practice to deem ourselves entirely responsible for our own lives (let alone any wider sphere) even if we are not encountering setbacks as chronic and extensive as those which Shevek experiences.13 More often than not when the alternative entails considering an unhappy outcome to be our own doing, we automatically incline toward laying blame on others or on impersonal circumstances – this according to a motive whose strength is directly proportional to the degree of failure (as we perceive it) and which is almost irresistible where the failure is of the magnitude Shevek contemplates. Nor is it difficult to rationalize our actual behavior in this regard by appealing to traditional tenets of moral philosophy. As these would have it, it is tautologically true to say that we are exempt from responsibility for whatever is not of our doing or could not have been otherwise. The problem with this line of self-justification as it tacitly enters into The Dispossessed is not that it is logically circular so much as that in theory (as in practice) it tends toward excluding ethical responsibility altogether, and thereby puts our personal and collective destiny beyond our control. That is so from a sequentialist as well as a simultaneist perspective on time. Whether the present and future be perceived as having the same status as what has already happened or as proceeding from a past gone forever and thus forever unalterable comes down to a meaningless difference between the past and future’s never having been amenable to free human choice or their no longer being susceptible to such. Responsibility as Shevek understands it does not admit of exceptionable instances, in the rationalizing of which we in effect evacuate the concept of its real function by forfeiting real choice completely. To his mind, we become responsible beings, capable of ‘mak[ing] a pulley, or a promise’ and accountable for the consequences of our actions, the moment we can see ‘the difference between now and not now’ (7:181). Yet if responsibility as the globally operative principle Shevek would have it be depends on nothing more than ‘[s]eeing th[at] difference,’ it likewise depends on nothing less than the validation of such a temporal difference as real – depends, in other words, on the theoretical proof which Shevek has still to arrive at. His predicament, then, parallels and reproduces in apparently fictive terms the one we get ourselves into as soon as we appeal to responsibility in any sense which would allow it to designate a solution to the problem of whether we can shape and alter the future (or

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the past) in accordance with our ideals. Indeed, the question-begging here has to do with our direct positing of what is implicitly entailed in Shevek’s ‘seeing the difference’: the sort of free and intentional act whose possibility is at stake. In Shevek’s case, the logical circle seems inescapable. He comes to recognize that any hope for redeeming his life rests with his taking responsibility for what has happened to him. But he also realizes that responsibility in the sense required is theoretically impossible without the temporal synthesis to which he has devoted his life, whose course appears to have put such a synthesis beyond his reach. He thus finds himself in the bind of not being able to recuperate his life’s promise unless he first or simultaneously fulfills it. III. Always Coming Home By putting the question of human responsibility in fundamentally temporal terms, Le Guin does not alleviate its burden on Shevek or ease her own way toward disposing of it. On the contrary, she makes it appear all the more intractable by reason of its circularity. Those same abstract terms, however, allow us to remove ourselves from the problem and doubt its urgency. We can have some understanding of Shevek’s intellectual struggle with the competing notions of time imaged, for example, by the river and the circle, and still not be troubled that each entails its own unacceptable paradox, the outcome of which Shevek summarizes by the instance of ‘throwing a rock at a tree’: ‘if you are a Simultaneist the rock has already hit the tree, and if you are a Sequentist it never can’ (7:182). Even conceding that such objections are fatal to Sequentist and Simultaneist thinking alike for their not admitting of human causality, we may remain untroubled, secure in our conviction of Sequence; and this may be the case despite our awareness that the paradoxes of Zeno the Eleatic which Shevek rehearses constitute an ineluctable reductio ad absurdum for any concept of time as an infinitesimally divisible composite of discrete moments.14 On similar grounds we may also dismiss the ethical concomitant of this logical absurdity: that the Sequentist ‘now,’ receding from us at the speed of light, allows no time for us to reflect upon our actions, past or future. This objection, too, we may regard as merely theoretical inasmuch as it contradicts what we know from experience. Yet our very reasons for not taking such arguments seriously reinstate Shevek’s problem in both its specific and its general form. The same common sense which assures us that the universe as we objectively perceive it unfolds sequentially also lends equal weight to our introspectivelyderived belief that through memory and forethought we can hold the past

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and the future together in our minds. Simultaneism, then, is as much a truth of and about our common experience as is Sequentiality.15 This fact is the basis for Shevek’s chronosophical dilemma in regard to the apparent incompatibility of Sequentialism and Simultaneity: that the one allows the flow of events to be open to our direction but no time for us to think about what choices we have, while the other affords an eternity for such cogitations but to no real purpose whatsoever. If we attempt to sweep away the dilemma as being only theoretical, we in effect – and thereby – restate the problem in somewhat broader terms: those of the disparity between theory and practice, the ideal and the actual, the vita contemplativa and the vita activa. Shevek’s, in other words, is a chronosophical version of a problem perennial in Western philosophy since the age of the Pre-Socratics at least. There is, however, this difference: that his version, as it ramifies analogically to take in his entire life, loses the abstractness of traditional formulations. Le Guin does not require that we be chronosophers to empathize with his difficulties; nor does she demand that we conceive of them by reference to any purely intellectual dichotomies. To appreciate what Shevek is up against, we need only identify with his frustration, and perhaps with the despair that accompanies it, as he looks helplessly on his life and his world moving ever farther away from their original promise. Following Shevek out of frustration and despair is another matter. To do that, we must have some mental grasp of their logical source: in a series of oppositions typified by the alternative of Simultaneism or Sequentiality. These Le Guin makes intellectually available to us through their instantial embodiment in Shevek’s story as he reflects upon his past, his present, and his future. It is his ‘spiritual suffering’ over ‘seeing’ his and others’ ‘talent, … work, … lives wasted’ (as Bedap points out, 6:135) that brings home the human meaning of abstractions like ‘is’ vs. ‘ought,’ memory vs. desire. Nor does Le Guin permit us to understand them otherwise, as pure ideas unconnected with the world of our daily experience; for to do so necessarily involves ratifying the kind of discrepancy from which, by her analysis, our personal and political malaise arises. And acknowledging this, we also become aware that Shevek’s project for reconciling temporal opposites stands as both the precondition and the paradigm of what we must realize to have any hope of ministering to our dis-ease. The bare possibility of such a reconciliation is doubly inscribed in The Dispossessed as a narrative of broken promises. As Anarres seen through Shevek’s eyes appears heading in the socio-political direction of Urras, so Urras is gradually approaching the Anarres he has found to be ‘a place of disaffection’ (Burnt Norton iii.1). This converging of antithetical worlds is not in itself hopeful, of course; but as it comes about irrespective of human

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intention, it contributes to defining by contrast the reconciliation of opposites that Shevek is seeking as one which human beings deliberatively bring about. Furthermore, in reflecting upon his existence, Shevek becomes conscious not only of the fact that as he enters into it, the actual rapprochement of Urras and Anarres constitutes a via negativa pointing to the kind of synthesis he is after, but also that the same rapprochement – again by virtue of his part in it – instances the universal operation of a principle of radical instability, which is the necessary condition for his enterprise to have any ameliorative impact. Recognizing that he has all along been mediating between mutually hostile worlds that are fundamentally changeable, he decides to bring them together in a positive sense by throwing in his lot with that of the Ioti rebels. He thus deliberately assumes the role which the Ioti popular press had assigned him in advance, a role which has, as it were, been waiting for him from the moment of his arrival in A-Io: he incarnates the ‘myth’ of the ‘Forerunner,’ ‘the one who comes before the millennium – ‘a stranger, an outcast, an exile, bearing in empty hands the time to come’ (7:186). By joining the General Strike, then, he takes a step towards making his, but also its, promise in regard to Urras a reality: the promise of a revolution which would refashion that world according to Odonian precepts. Certain though the prospect of revolution may be, its success is as open to doubt as is that of the reforestation project by which Anarres would verge towards utopian promise located in (and by) Urras. Yet whatever the outcome, Shevek’s remains a redemptive act, and not only for him. When he tells the enormous gathering in Nio Esseia’s Capitol Square, ‘It is our suffering that brings us together,’ he is speaking ‘out of his own isolation, out of the center of his own being’ (9:241) and from the selfrealization that suffering has supplied the bond between Anarres and Urras as far as his own life is concerned. Representing the emotional concomitant of his alienation as the basis for human solidarity, he breaches the wall separating individual from collective existence. But beyond that – and as the occasion makes clear – the (speech)act by which he does so involves the sort of revaluation of time that lets in ‘causal reversibility.’16 He had gone to Urras, Anarres’ historical past, thinking that it was his future and that he had put Anarres, his personal past, behind him along with its shattered dreams. But the Odonian sentiments he gives voice to in Capitol Square presuppose that he has come to believe otherwise. Indeed, he expressly identifies the promise that he is there to deliver – ‘You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give’ – as the one ‘made two hundred years ago’ and ‘kept … , on Anarres’ (9:241). By this apparent change of mind, this reversal, he restores his homeland to its

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original place in relation to Urras – as the future – and not only through his words and in his own mind, but by a gesture which itself promises that Anarres may yet become what it always potentially was. Both the paradox and the promise derive from the discoveries that Shevek has been making about time. In this regard, it is no accident that he learns of the events behind the planned mass protest in Capitol Square from one of the ‘birdseed papers,’ so called because they are written in ‘the verbal mode of the Nioti, past and future rammed into one highly charged unstable present tense’ (7:162). The last phrase applies to the selfunderstanding he has reached as much as to his sense of what is going on in consequence of the Ioti government’s move to intervene against the rebels in far away Benbili. Furthermore, these two areas of his awareness are intimately related to one another in and through their bearing on his revolutionary gesture. Viewing the situation as ‘highly charged’ because it is a moment in which the oppressive past converges on and reinforces the possibility of an Odonian future for Urras, he judges that some gesture of moral protest would be timely and appropriate; but in its particulars, that gesture is possible only because he is already conscious of a similar convergence of his own past and future. In other words, he is able to speak as he does – is able to articulate A-Io’s Odonian prospects and in that way enter into them as a catalyst – because he has seen how the fragments of his own life fit together, because he has already made the temporal connections informing the details of his verbal public act. The circumstances preceding that act compel the same conclusion. His commitment to an Odonian revolution on Urras immediately follows a moment of insight in which he sees his way toward the temporal synthesis he has long been searching for. Just before that, however, his thoughts were of how to escape. Believing that ‘to do the work he was individually called to do’ meant ‘serv[ing] … the [Ioti] State,’ he thinks that he ‘had made a mistake in coming to Urras,’ that by doing so he has ‘locked himself in jail’; and this leads him to ask, ‘how might … [I] act as a free man?’ (9:219). In context, the question is surely desperate in its expression of his desire to disengage himself from A-Io. That he determines upon the opposite course right after his instant of chronosophical illumination cannot, then, be a case of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. That instant, as it apparently supplies the answer to his question about freeing himself, is also apparently the turning point of his life. But how it indicates the way out of the prison he has gotten himself into is no more obvious than why it should prove pivotal, and for the same reason: the seeming privacy of Shevek’s moment of illumination. We are told that ‘[h]e had seen the foundations of the universe, and they were solid’ (9:226); and these words, as they call to mind the thinking behind the most famous

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of ‘Ainsetain’s’ obiter dicta (‘God does not play dice with the world’),17 also imply that Shevek’s glimpse into the unity of ‘successivity and presence’ (9:225) has something of the character of a supernatural revelation. Yet the experience which in its effect on Shevek appears as mystical may seem from the details we are given about it to be merely mystifying. We may incline to look upon such statements as ‘The coexistence of succession could be handled by a Saeban transformation series’ as so much mumbo jumbo intended to obscure the fact that Le Guin understands the whole subject or simul-sequentiality no more than we do. To much the same purpose, we might seize upon Shevek’s assertion of ‘the unprovability of the hypothesis of real coexistence’ (9:225) as meaning that no demonstration whatever is given of the point. We may thereupon either condemn the author for not delivering on a promise or excuse ourselves for not troubling our brains any further as to what all the palaver about time might signify. This, to judge by what has been written about The Dispossessed, would appear to be the alternative for a good many readers. It is also as specious an alternative as Sequency vs. Presence with regard to the rock thrown at a tree; for whether we fault Le Guin or exonerate ourselves, we wind up tacitly dismissing all temporal matters (at least as such) from consideration. Yet there is something highly implausible about supposing that Le Guin would shirk the onus of proving ‘real coexistence’ while making it clear that the life of her central character depends upon its validity. Only upon envisioning such a synthesis does Shevek see ‘the way home, the light’ – ‘The wall was down’ (9:225). Nor need we look far for why this is so. The answer lies, somehow, with the reality of temporal coexistence; and the demonstration of that reality is in front of us. But it does not come into the fiction in the form of mathematical equations involving ‘Saeba variables’ (9:224) or ‘the lovely geometries of relativity’ (9:225) – abstractions of the kind which, as we have seen, make for the moral and epistemological problem confronting us through Shevek. And the demonstration does not otherwise figure in a manner that would permit its detachment from (the rest of) his story: although the signs of its presence are everywhere, and perhaps have their greatest concentration in the very paragraph persuading some readers that Le Guin has given over the attempt, it is not contained in (or by) that passage describing Shevek’s moment of inspiration or any other single narrative instance. Still, it is literally – and always – before our eyes: right where Le Guin, through Shevek, has in effect told us to look for it. His temporal synthesis, that is, resides in The Dispossessed by virtue of the readerly construction which Le Guin has designed this book of hers to call for. Speaking to Dearri, but also clarifying his thoughts about time for himself (and us), Shevek says:

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we think that time ‘passes,’ flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. (7:178) The point of this version of the time-honored analogy between the book and ‘the universe’ (7:178) holds for any text whose narrative or logical cohesiveness exacts an incremental understanding. Such a text, from the standpoint of its having already been read (or written), corresponds to the Simultaneist idea of time as Presence, to the idea that past and future are forever ‘now’ and eternally unalterable; but in the reading (and writing) of it, that same text is the correlate of Sequentiality, of the idea that time is synonymous with perpetual change, perpetual movement away from the no-longer and toward the yet-to-be. Furthermore, we have no warrant for supposing that one or the other of these seemingly antithetical notions of time is merely a matter of appearances: both, in the terms of the analogy, are equally real. What those terms do allow, however, is the conclusion that, in regard to both time and books, the Simultaneous understanding we finally reach supersedes and obliterates our Sequentist understanding. It is this imbalance, and the problem for ‘real coexistence’ which goes with it, that Le Guin designs The Dispossessed to obviate. With the moment on which the fiction opens as our point of reference, we can look upon Shevek’s life as emerging in two sequences: one taking him up to the instant of his departure for Urras from his earliest recollection of childhood, and hence moving from the past to the present; the other unfolding from that present moment into the future as the series of events leading to his decision to go back to Anarres. From this same account, however, it is evident that the two sequences which separately appear as exactly that, as sequential, together constitute a circle imaging Simultaneity, and not just by reason of their converging on the same geographical point, the spaceport at Abbenay. After all, the circularity of Shevek’s spatial voyage is the objective correlative of the mental process by which he recuperates his original ideals, both for himself and for Anarres, and thus returns figuratively to his Odonian beginning place. Yet the Sequentist reading which thereby eventuates and subsumes itself in Simultaneity ignores a textual fact so obvious that we can easily overlook it: namely, that no such continuity objectively exists in this book. What Le Guin gives us instead are discrete moments from Shevek’s past and future made even more fragmentary by their mutual interruption as the scene regularly shifts back and forth from Anarres to Urras.

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This is not to say that The Dispossessed flatly denies the very connections which it thus calls upon us to make and by which we arrive at the Simultaneist understanding of ‘true voyage is return’ (3:68): ‘that the end precedes the beginning, / And the end and the beginning were always there / Before the beginning and after the end’ (Burnt Norton v.10-12). Rather the purpose of the discontinuity is to make us aware of the insufficiency of such a reading. We cannot take Shevek’s narrative as an exclusive affirmation of Simultaneity without disregarding the disconnectedness built into his story and hence misrepresenting both the text and its universe. Nor is that the only respect in which our purchase on certainty comes at the expense of meaning; for as the text compels us to supply the connections which necessarily entail the Simultaneist position, it allows us to be absolutely secure in a Simultaneist truth that is merely tautological. And our cognate assurance that Shevek is destined to return to his point of origin, that the ending of the narrative is indelibly inscribed in its beginning, likewise comes down to the empty proposition that any outcome is inevitable after the fact. A rigorously Sequentist reading, on the other hand, while it does justice to Shevek’s as a voyage into perpetual possibility, does not allow for the coherence of the (narrative) universe. In its faithfulness to the physical text, so to speak, such an understanding emphasizes the truth of contingency by isolating every moment in Shevek’s life as a potential turning point, an end and a beginning. But by the same process, it at once denies meaning to those instants and distorts our reading experience of them in its refusal to admit not only their connection, but also the consciousness that goes into and comes out of the connections which we actually make. A strictly Sequentist perspective, then, opens on the prospect of radical indeterminacy: it would have events totally evitable, but solely inasmuch as they be totally arbitrary; and it permits our going anywhere (figuratively speaking), but not to any purpose or with any destination in mind. The consequence is essentially similar when we moderate the rigor of Sequentism by introducing ‘the concept of interval’ (9:225). We can thereupon proceed to re-form the discrete narrative instants into two series. But if we would preserve the dichotomy between Sequence and Presence, we cannot go so far as to link the series leading Shevek to the Anarresti Dust and ending in his exile with the one eventuating in the suppressed rebellion on Urras. We therefore give Shevek’s life a direction which is hardly preferable to none at all. All of this brings us back to Shevek’s chronosophical dilemma, but now with the perception that it involves and is involved in The Dispossessed as a narrative whole. Moreover, the manner of its involvement answers to the need that the dilemma in itself indicates: the need for reconciling tem-

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poral opposites. The answer abides in the fiction; and it does so because Le Guin has constructed a text which we cannot properly construe so long as we hold to the alternative of Sequency or Presence. Any reading that sides with the one against the other must falsify the narrative in respect either to the real continuity of Shevek’s life or to its real disruption. So, too, we cannot endorse Sequentialism or Simultaneity as the sole truth without sacrificing either our sense of Shevek’s Being, that ‘What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present’ (Burnt Norton i.9-10), or our sense of his Becoming, that ‘What might have been’ is not ‘an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation’ (Burnt Norton i.6-8). Nor can we understand the text as alternately validating those ideas of time, and with them those versions of Shevek’s life. This should be evident in regard to the aphorism epitomizing his story: ‘You can go home again, … so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been’ (2:68). That statement does not express the Sequential and Simultaneist points of view serially any more than it presents them as an alternative. Its meaning is not compound or dichotomous, but complex: not only does it assert the reality of permanence and change, it recognizes them as aspects of one another.18 This is likewise true for the entire fiction. Its ‘static and dynamic aspect[s]’ (9:225) are as indissociable as are those of the universe it models. That is why the text is so resistant to paraphrase, with its inherent tendency to hypostatize a course of events which in this case is radically unstable, forever changing direction. Indeed, any kind of analysis focusing singly on each fictional moment – on, say, that of Sabul’s ascendancy – must point us away from ‘home’ in its aphoristic sense, even – or rather, especially – if the analysis then takes account of that instant’s momentum. To arrive at the conclusion that Shevek has always been coming ‘home,’ we must therefore follow him on a journey that he ultimately sees as one of continuous self-discovery. In doing so, however, we are making a voyage which is as fundamentally simul-sequentist as his own. We return to his and our starting point, but with the understanding of Heraclitus’ dictum, ‘You shall not go down twice to the same river.’19 In fact, any conviction we have that it is Shevek’s destiny to go back to Anarres finally depends on the inner necessity which compels him to return to the locus of his Odonian ideals; and that ethical compulsion derives from the simul-sequentist truth about his life: his discovery that he has never lost his ideal self. This truth, his sudden awareness of which comes out of prolonged reflection on his temporal existence, coincides with the General Temporal Theory he has been looking for because it carries with it the perception that Being and Becoming, Presence and

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Process, Permanence and Flux, are indispensable to defining Shevek’s identity and hence to one another. Their complementarity, moreover, is not simply an idea; it is a ‘functional’ idea, in the Odonian sense of the word, by reason of its pointing to what neither Simultaneity nor Sequency by itself allows: the possibility that seemingly broken promises can be kept. This is the possibility that Shevek brings back to Anarres in his empty hands. Yet even though his prospective return to Anarresti soil implies that his compatriots are now willing to break ‘[t]he Terms of Closure of the[ir] Settlement’ (12:287),20 the only guarantee we have that their xenophobia and their misoneism lie behind them is Shevek himself. Still, the very fact that their renewal of Anarres’ Odonian promise is, by his example,21 an open possibility is sufficient for transforming the Simultaneist eternal cycle into the ongoing Circle of Life. Such a transformation perhaps figures its simul-sequentist significance most clearly as it applies to a boyhood nightmare of Shevek’s. He dreams that walking along a road, he sees ‘a line’ which, on closer inspection, turns out to be ‘a wall’ stretching ‘from horizon to horizon across the barren land’ (2:26). He knows that ‘[h]e had to go on or he could never come home again,’ but the wall blocks the way (2:27). What he ultimately recognizes, not at the moment but long afterwards – what enables him to perceive the unity of Sequence and Presence which means coming ‘home’ – is that the wall is the way.22 As an image of Sequential experience, the wall of Shevek’s nightmare is like the ‘glittering rails’ that he rides from Chakar (10:247) or the ‘metalled ways’ (iii.37) of Burnt Norton’s Underground: it takes him to spiritual death. But as it extends ‘from horizon to horizon,’ it also images Simultaneity and thus becomes instead the road ‘home.’ So, too, it figures what would otherwise be a mere abstraction: that the way to time’s dispossession, to redeeming the past, goes ‘Only through time’ (Burnt Norton ii.43) – indeed, runs concurrent with it. As Shevek himself bears witness to this transformation, he also stands as its ‘undemonstrable proof’ (9:237). The sense in which this is true takes us from an obvious fact about our real-life experience to an obvious fact about our reading experience: from the fact that he cannot appear before us in the flesh to the fact that within the confines of the book to which he wholly owes his existence, his temporal (self)discovery is nowhere plainly and fully spelled out. This last, self-imposed, limitation, morever, finally appears to be as inescapable as the first, the external, constraint, which thereupon becomes as much a dictate of artistic necessity as is Le Guin’s withholding an explanation of simul-sequentialism. Why this should be so she hints at in Shevek’s words about his Principles of Simultaneity: ‘I am that book’ (8:194). Through its context, the statement applies even more

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emphatically to The Dispossessed as the expression of the redeeming synthesis of which his Principles is only a small part. For that reason, his synthesis must, at least as much as Odo’s Analogy, remain prominent in and by virtue of its absence. It cannot appear in The Dispossessed, cannot be merely a moment in the book which holds his identity; it must be that book, coextensive with it, just as he is. And, as we have in effect been seeing, his ‘holorganismic’ discovery is coextensive with the book, not only in the Bildung the narrative leads to, but in The Dispossessed’s very structure as it demonstrably incorporates the promise that through time a redemptive dispossession of time is possible. IV. The Way of Dispossession Everything that we have observed thus far about The Dispossessed accounts for its structure, as correlative to its ‘ethical’ content (in the chronosophical sense), much more than it accounts for its genre. After all, the simul-sequentialist ‘pattern’ of Shevek’s spiritual voyage is one that could just as well have informed a relatively conventional work of realistic fiction on the order, say, of Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1969). Why that cannot be the case – why the same necessity born of choice, the same ‘responsibility’ dictating Shevek’s return to Anarres and with it his story’s construction, also requires that Le Guin write science fiction – has to do with her title as it ultimately comes to apply to Shevek. The negative ambiguities of ‘dispossessed’ – impoverishment, homelessness in the sense of isolation, estrangement from the ideal, and so forth – all originate in the desire to possess dramatized in Shevek’s earliest memory of childhood: his impulse to appropriate the sunlight in the nursery he shares with ten other infants (2:22). His spiritual desolation, in other words, ultimately has its source in his mistaking what he seeks, in his supposing it to be (like) an object which he can hold in his hands. His error is essentially the one that William Blake first identifies in ‘There Is NO Natural Religion’: the error of a propertarian Reason that would reduce the human desire for ‘the Infinite’ to the bounds and dimensions of the finite, the world totally available to ‘organic perception.’ To be sure, Shevek’s attempt to reify desire differs from that constitutive of Blake’s ‘Natural Man’ in being primarily temporal rather than spatial. All the same, so long as Shevek remains obsessed with grasping an idea of time as if it were ‘something he could possess’ (9:225; emphasis added), ‘despair must be his eternal lot,’23 not by accident, but as a necessary consequence of his having to conceive of time as fixed in order to ‘possess’ what he thereby makes inaccessible: the simul-sequentist synthesis which his reduction of time to unalterable Presence precludes.

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That he finally recognizes his mistake is evident from his words to Ambassador Keng: You don’t understand what time is…. You say the past is gone, the future is not real, there is no change, no hope. You think Anarres is a future that cannot be reached, as your past cannot be changed. So there is nothing but the present, this Urras, the rich, real, stable present, the moment now. And you think that is something which can be possessed! (11:280) Here he gives the exclusive belief in Presence its logically appropriate location: on Urras, where it serves, in effect, as the official ideology because in its denial of change it rationalizes the violent suppression of the forces of change. Nor does Shevek’s implied awareness of how doctrinal Simultaneism connects with propertarian domination simply come out of the events that prompt him to take asylum in the Terran embassy. It also derives from the larger awareness, the temporal self-discovery, that had impelled him to Capitol Square in the first place. This is clear both from the fact that he now attributes to Keng his own past thoughts about Anarres and Urras and from what immediately follows his disavowal of those thoughts – his telling her: Things change, change. You cannot have anything…. And least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future. Not only the past but also the future, not only the future but also the past! Because they are real: only their reality makes the present real. You will not achieve or even understand Urras unless you accept the reality, the enduring reality, of Anarres. (11:280-81; ellipsis points in the original) His declaration in part seems to echo what he had said to Takver at the moment when they decided to form their ‘bond’: that ‘unless the past and the future were made part of the present by memory and intention, there was, in human terms, no road, nowhere to go’ (6: 148-49). Those words, however, have since acquired new meaning. At the time he originally uttered them, he was not fully conscious of the problems he would soon encounter in his personal and professional life; for which reason, his thought in its context anticipates his discovery of the obstacles blocking his ‘road’ – and with it, his sense of going ‘nowhere.’ That he now (in speaking to Keng) feels, justifiably, that he is headed somewhere – to the Anarres whose ‘enduring [Odonian] reality’ he has recovered sight of – is the outcome of everything that has happened to him in the interval, and particularly of the inspired instant wherein he sees that he can attain ‘the hypothesis of real coexistence’ only through the kind of acceptance

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accompanying a cognitive act of dispossession. This act apparently begins with his realization that the idea of temporal coexistence, could he grasp it with the ‘certainty’ he has been ‘groping after’ (9:225), would have no Odonian revolutionary value whatever. This, in fact, is a consequence of the principle that the ethical character of the means determines the end.24 An idea accessible to a certainty which is itself equivalent to the propertarian impulse – to a Baconian assurance which is the epistemological counterpart to and concomitant of politicoeconomic, or imperial, acquisitiveness – must naturally and inevitably lend itself to ‘private profit,’ ‘to get[ting] power over … others, to get[ting] richer or to win[ning] more wars’ (11:277). Recognizing this, Shevek sees as well that everything he has hitherto perceived as standing between him and such a certainty – all of the events in his personal and professional life as they made for what he regarded as his failure – instead were pointing the way to his conceiving ‘the validity of real coexistence’ (9:225). Indeed, they have constituted the via negativa which alone could lead him to that conception in a manner which would valorize it. This same coup de conscience brings with it the synthesis which he has been in search of. His Anarresti past, now that he views it as conducing to his present moment of chronosophical insight, partakes of a Simultanist ‘reality’ which likewise extends to the future: he can go on because he sees that ‘he had already gone on. He was there’ (9:225). Yet Sequentism, too, perforce inheres in this very process of re-vision, which requires that Shevek see ‘the difference between now and not now,’ and see it as the basis of more than what proves to be the fugitive and (hence) specious distinction between the present, on the one hand, and on the other a past and a future which finally become part of that present. He must also recognize that (temporal) ‘difference,’ even as that form of it effaces itself and disappears once it has served for apprehending time’s ‘enduring reality’ in terms of the continuity of his ideal self, abides in the discrepancy between the past (and future) integral to that ‘now’ – to that self – and the past (and future) which he had ‘stared at … for ten years’ in dismay (9:225) and regarded as entropic. The ‘difference,’ that is, persists in the transition from one past to another as it affirms the ‘reality’ that ‘[t]hings change’: in order to glimpse the ‘permanence’ of his life and the universe, Shevek has to alter his view of the past in a manner which alters his past – and hence demonstrates time’s real mutability. In that transition, ambiguity itself, while remaining a function of time, takes on a positive inflection. So long as Sequency had admitted only of such changes as jeopardize Shevek’s and Anarres’ Odonian inheritance, its opposition to Presence had come down to the empty difference between a wall which gradually comes into being and one which has been

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there all along. But as soon as Shevek realizes that because time is unstable it also has mobility, a real alternative in temporal standpoints emerges, carrying with it a positive ambiguity. His previous understanding of time, according to which Presence, as it were, imparts rigidity to Sequence, does not disappear; but now it is both opposed and displaced by an understanding which conveys to Simultaneist time the perpetual movement of Sequentiality. This difference in temporal perspectives figures in The Dispossessed in terms of the wall vs. a mobile. The wall, in so far as it continues to embody a distinction of Simultaneity from Sequence equivalent to that between walling out and walling in, at this point becomes only one side of a radical ambivalence whose other side represents the possibility of ‘turning freely’ (10:260), of ‘moving yet not moving, … timelessly circling, creating time’ (13:306). Those last phrases, while in effect describing the ‘Occupation of Uninhabited Space’ called ‘Inhabitation of Time’ (the mobile that Takver makes for Pilun [12:295]),25 actually refer to Anarres as Shevek views it from the Davenant. The process of displacement at work here operates in many directions. Confirming the mobile as the same kind of image of simulsequentiality as a cyclically rotating and revolving planet (see 7:179-80), it immediately reinvests that significance in the planet Anarres. But by the same token, the displacement extends backward in time also to Anarres as Shevek had looked upon it from the Mindful. He had then seen ‘his world’ presently overspread with its half-blackness and thereby revalued, its ‘reflecting’ becoming a ‘rejecting [of] light’ (1:5). In a vision virtually allegorical in its foreshadowing of his despair, Anarres had thus appeared to be as indifferently ambiguous as the wall of the book’s opening sentence, say – a wall which is (thus) more than literally co-substantial with the ‘stone plain’ that Shevek is looking down upon from the Mindful. That Anarres, however, is again revalued from the vantage of the spaceship whose name, Davenant, in effect turns the French noun for ‘future’ (avenir) into a verb-form of devenir (‘to become’). At a distance roughly comparable to the Mindful’s, he once more sees Anarres as a ‘bright rock’ (13:306); but now, on the Davenant, he is conscious of a mobility that redeems his initial impression of its being ‘like a huge bowl full of sunlight’ (1:5).26 The Anarres he had first perceived as an arid concavity filled with ‘the brightness of light upon water’ in many respects holds the meanings of the ‘dry concrete’ ‘pool … filled with water out of sunlight’ at the center of Burnt Norton’s Rose Garden (i.34-35). Both appear at once as the locus and object of primary desire; but so, too, they quickly come to figure that desire as an Edenic or utopian longing for a mirage, for an illusion having essentially the arid status of might-have-been. The desire is still redeemable, and so is the bright vision to which it originally attaches, but

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only through the realization that the latter is commensurate with such a desire in its very illusoriness. Given its nature, that is, the object of the desire is possessable solely ‘by way of’ – and in the sense governed by – ‘[its] dispossession’ (East Coker iii.41). For Shevek, the ‘way of dispossession’ goes through the cognitive act we have already remarked upon, and this eventuates in his decision to deliver up his General Temporal Theory to ‘the rest of humanity’ ‘for the common good’ (11:277). Before all that, however, he must submit to the manner as well as the fact of his – and the – alienation of Odonian desire from its ideal ‘object.’ This manner of his dispossession in that sense symbolically figures in and as the overshadowing of the Anarres he views from the Mindful, and particularly in the sentence: ‘The blackness reversed the whole picture, made it negative’ (1:5). To redeem his promise, Shevek must, as it were, rigorously construe those words and perceive his life up to the present moment in analogous terms: not merely as the (hypo)static negation of its original possibilities, but also as the ongoing result of a process of negation. Seeing his past life thus, he is perforce distancing it as the Other, and hence dispossessing himself of it in precisely the way that it has alienated him from his Odonian identity. What he thereby envisions is – to revert to a metaphor recurrent in the fiction – Anarres’ first ‘light’ as he had never seen it before. Perceived by way of his negating of its negation, it now appears as ‘the left hand of darkness,’ so to speak. Into this process of recovery, the very past that Shevek had hitherto looked upon in despair enters as the original negation. It is by way of negating its negation – of alienating himself from its alienation – that he experiences the human reality of the difference between now and not-now so crucial to any temporal synthesis which would preserve the dynamic of Sequency. The past which dispossessed epitomizes – in every pejorative sense accruing to the word as a synonym for ‘alienated’ – thus becomes instrumental to the understanding of time which Shevek reaches, and so does the suffering which the past comprehends. But beyond that, his alien encounter with his past also redeems it otherwise: in regard to the practical application of his theory to the ansible. Reumere’s published plans for the ansible prove that it is conceivable without Shevek’s synthesis. The connection between the two would therefore seem to be merely theoretical, not to say purely fictive – the case of a figmentary idea about time justifying ex post facto an imaginary means for instantaneous communication. But their relationship is also theoretical in the sense that chronosophy privileges. It is, in other words, the instance of ‘causal reversibility’ that Shevek pronounces it to be (9:222), and for a reason which goes beyond (but through) the fiction. As his

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reconciling of Presence and Sequence allows in principle for the annihilation of temporal distance which the ansible would accomplish in effect, it also implicitly establishes the conditions without which such a device would be meaningless – i.e., it inherently defines the nature of the opposition which makes real communication possible. Viewing his past as such and hence as alien, Shevek at once distinguishes the Self from the Other and provides for the commonality which must exist if such differences are to be bridgeable. The ansible, then, is far from being an incidental accessory of The Dispossessed. Depending in the theoretical way that it does upon Shevek’s General Temporal Theory and owing its purpose to the manner by which he traduces opposition to arrive at that conceptual synthesis, this imaginary device is logically bound up with the structure as well as the substance of the fiction. To both it thus not only conveys its own science-fictional status, but makes their implication in it a matter of necessity. Nor is that the only respect in which the ansible signals an inalienable correlation between genre and meaning dictating that The Dispossessed be science fiction. As the fictive means for ‘mak[ing] a league of worlds possible’ (11:277), the device otherwise marks that generic determination by linking The Dispossessed to Rocannon’s World (1966), Planet of Exile (1966), City of Illusions (1967), and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969).27 At the same time, it points to Shevek’s as the alien encounter on which theirs are predicated and thereby reinforces what the internal chronology suggests: that the last-written of Le Guin’s Hainish stories logically comes first. The claim which The Dispossessed has to that place ultimately rests not with those fictive givens but with the nature of its demonstration about time. Constructed so as to transcend the apparent contradiction between Sequence and Simultaneity while preserving their difference, the fiction stands as the paradigm for Le Guin’s previous attempts at bringing opposites together.28 But more than that, it works out the basis for her entire ‘Ekumenical’ project. Revealing alien-ation to be a function of time, it discovers that her efforts at communicating (with) the alien crucially depend on the truth of a proposition that she had hitherto taken for granted, even in The Left Hand of Darkness: that time, or history, is humanly alterable, is subject to responsibility. This is the assumption that The Dispossessed examines and finally validates. It is therefore no accident that in negotiating temporal concepts alien to one another so as to prove that their compatability essentially derives from their mutual opposition, Shevek finally appears as what he has always been: a mediator of seemingly antagonistic worlds, or – to use the term describing Genly Ai in that same capacity – a ‘Mobile.’ Indeed, his story, as a science-fictional Bildungsroman, an alien encounter leading to self-discovery, justifies the word

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Mobile even as it reclaims for ‘dispossessed’ a positive meaning inclusive of the idea of mobility. Submitting to the pain that ‘dispossession’ names, Shevek frees himself from the spectre of ‘the waste sad time stretching before and after’ and returns home holding in his ‘empty hands’ an Odonian ideal which is no longer a utopian absence but the promise of ‘the time to come.’

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§12. Time Out of Joint: The World(s) of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.) Wallace Stevens, ‘Connoisseur of Chaos’ It is my job to create universes…. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes that do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novel cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. Philip K. Dick, ‘How to Build a Universe …’ In other words, an entire new world is pointed to, by this. The Man in the High Castle (11:164) The Man in the High Castle (1962) would seem to stand apart from the rest of Dick’s science fiction. In regard to its literary construction, it is only barely foreseeable from Eye in the Sky (and from that alone, I would say, among PKD’s previous published fictions);1 nor, from the retrospect of his subsequent books, does it appear to be inevitable that he would have managed to construct any such work. He said that he labored over it for a solid year, and that may not include research time. The result is indisputably the most artful (though not the most art-full) book he ever wrote.2 The fact that High Castle has been the subject of more attempts at close reading than any other PKD title – and possibly more than all the rest combined – tacitly supports that judgment, and suggests as well that High Castle is not only the science-fiction book of his most amenable to such treatment, but also the one most appealing to readers who aren’t sciencefiction addicts (let alone AdDicks). For precisely the same reason, the enthusiasm that High Castle originally met with – it was the only Dick title to win a Hugo Award – has worn exceedingly thin among fans of PKD’s later fiction. Characterologically and ‘thematically,’ it is representable as being typical of Dickian science-fiction, and all the more so in view of those points at which an alternate ‘reality’ irrupts into the world-

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construct on which the fiction mainly focuses. None the less, many readers partial to Dick class High Castle among his half dozen or so greatest achievements only with reluctance because (I would suppose) they sense that it subverts the general rule that Dick is subversive of the very idea of Literature. Both of these judgments (viz., that High Castle is literary and that it is untypical of Dick for being so) lend some support to an argument that PKD’s books, amenable though they be to a ‘synoptic’ analysis predicated on their sharing in a single, albeit complex, vision,3 are no more interchangeable in their fictional substance than their titles would suggest they are. Furthermore, as that wording of the point may already convey, the same consideration specially applies to High Castle, and does so for a reason emanating from the passage wherein Dick himself raises the question of the book’s science-fiction credentials. I am referring, of course, to the oftquoted exchange between the Kasouras – meant, incidentally, for Robert Childan’s edification, but clearly having as well a proleptic intent vis-à-vis High Castle’s science-fiction readership – as to whether The Grasshopper Lies Heavy should count as science fiction (7:103–04). If there be just one single peculiarly Dickian moment in High Castle, this – rather than Tagomi’s subsequent confrontation with the fragmentary ‘reality’ of the Embarcadero Freeway or Hawthorne Abendsen’s with the ‘Inner Truth’ of Grasshopper – is it. It is the moment at which Dick misdirects, and thereby disorients, the reader as to how (in the first instance) High Castle is to be generically construed, and hence (here anticipating the ending) what it is really about – disorients the reader, in other words, as to its reality, or ‘Inner Truth.’ The Kasouras, of course, are as little participatory in the deception as they are in the PSA plot(s). Paul Kasoura, in informing his wife that there are ‘[m]any well-known science-fiction novels’ ‘deal[ing] with an alternate present,’ cannot himself be speaking about High Castle; that would exact from him the consciousness that he enjoys only a fictive existence.4 It is therefore up to the reader to take Paul’s and Betty’s notions seriously, even though those notions would appear rather simpleminded even if they weren’t retailed in a Japanese English which (on grounds I shall come to) is a mark of High Castle’s artistry. Taking them seriously means, above all, accepting the invitation to equate Grasshopper with High Castle, to regard them as exactly homologous, if not isomorphic. This view proves to be as reductive as the Kasouras’ exchange would – and should – suggest. It is true that Dick himself more than once gave it external reinforcement, repeating (from Juliana Frink’s standpoint, as it were) the ‘Inner Truth’ she presents to Abendsen: that ‘Germany and Japan lost the war.’5 But if he indeed means only to reiterate, in propria persona, Juliana’s ‘insight,’ his sentence must count as one of the many textbook

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illustrations of the intentional fallacy that Dick on Dick in effect provides.6 To connect High Castle and Grasshopper as ‘alternate histories’ of a strictly comparable sort, readers must willfully ignore the evidence of their senses. From the verbatim extracts as well as from the fragmentary summaries of its historical plot, it is clear that Grasshopper is pretty much what the term alternate history would lead us to expect: a book that focuses on historical events and their tendencies. Indeed, from those same extracts and out-ofjoint summaries, it is also safe to infer that Grasshopper on the whole resembles, say, Last and First Men (1930), with allowance for a difference in temporal horizon whose vastness is proportional to how much of Olaf Stapledon’s imagined future our comparison takes in. High Castle in that regard is Grasshopper’s antithesis: steadfastly, though not solidly, grounded in the present, it concentrates on the inner lives of a small number of individuals. None of these can accurately be characterized as a witness to history (in contrast to Karl and Eric, who otherwise figure as little more than names in the excerpts from Grasshopper – see MHC 8:117–18, 120); nor can they properly be said to play a crucial and decisive part even in High Castle’s fictive history – i.e., on the book’s alternate-history world-stage. This same point is worth restating in apparently hyperbolic form with reference to what the two fictions incontrovertibly have in common: a seven-syllable title. For corrective purposes, that coincidence, if it does not exhaust the respects in which Grasshopper and High Castle are strictly alike, can serve as the type, or analogue, of all their supposedly profound resemblances. By insisting on the difference(s) between Grasshopper and High Castle, I may appear to be denying the latter any historical purport and, by the same token, disputing its science-fictional credentials. Instead, however, I am in the process of demonstrating what I have just implied: that High Castle’s science-fictional construction all but inevitably depends on what it has to say about history. Toward that end, my starting point is that readers have generally mistaken High Castle’s import because they have overlooked its manner of meaning, thanks largely to the already-referred-to generic misdirection which profoundly distinguishes this book from any other by Dick. I. High Castle’s Generic ‘Reality’ Read in the way that its own proposal about Grasshopper as ‘alternate history’ indicates, High Castle proves to be as impenetrable as its title would suggest it is. To access it as the Book of Changes which it in fact constitutes itself as being,7 we must realize that High Castle is not immediately a work of science fiction. It is first of all what it appears to be at its outset: a (mainstream) novel,8 a psychological (and/or anti-psychological) novel to

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be exact – i.e., a book whose manner of meaning is fundamentally novelistic. It is true that its premise is not exactly realist. But like all twelve of the books by Dick that no one would categorize as science fiction,9 High Castle’s world (in contrast – and in more or less direct opposition – to Grasshopper’s) is primarily the product or outcome of its human subjects and their interaction (such as it is, both here and always in Dick’s fiction). This means as well that the objects – the props, the gadgets, the pseudoscientific powers – which typically generate a Dickian science-fictional world have no equipollent responsibility in High Castle. Objects, of course, do contribute, significantly, to the construction of its world, and even more to Robert Childan’s, Nobusuke Tagomi’s, and the Frinks’ diverse attempts to come to terms with that world. But while the role that objects have countenances the view that High Castle bridges the divide between Dick’s novels and his science fiction, the objects themselves – notably, a Colt .44, an Edfrank pin, the I Ching, and (even) Grasshopper – are not science-fictional objects of the usual Dickian sort. Whatever animation, or mindedness, they apparently possess accrues to them solely in consequence of a human psychological investment in them.10 Read as a (species of) novel rather than as an (alternate) history, High Castle ranges itself with those other books by Dick – by far, in the minority – that make diagetic sense. It has a parsable plot, so to speak – or rather, plots. It may also be the only PKD title wherein plot accords with governing conception in a way that makes plot a primary conveyer of meaning.11 If I have used the singular for a fiction which discernibly offers multiple story-lines, that is because High Castle’s import depends upon their connection. So long as we think to enquire, the basis for such a connection is not difficult to discover (though the same cannot be said of its underlying pattern or principle). Of the six or more stories that High Castle offers, the three centering on Childan, Tagomi, and Juliana instantly stand out, not because they offer an interior view of those personages (which is a difference of degree), but because each culminates in a ‘heroic act.’ In that respect, plot itself fully cooperates with High Castle’s other (kinds of) indicators that the three main stories constitute a triad of variations on their common theme. To that triad, in that (High-Castle given) order, each of the other stories – Frank’s, Baynes’s/Wegener’s, and Joe Cinnadella’s (and Hawthorne Abendsen’s, if he be accorded his own story in that same sense) – are, respectively, tributary. The overall plot, however, demands a pairing of these ‘secondary’ characters, now comprehended as a foursome: Baynes/Wegener is to be thought of in connection with Cinnadella and Frank in connection with Abendsen. Those pairings will take us to High Castle’s core of ambiguity concerning its ‘moral ambiguity’ (to use

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Tagomi’s vague, and therefore comprehensive, phraseology [12:177]). First, however, we must look into Childan’s, Tagomi’s, and Juliana’s ‘heroic acts’ in their order of appearance. Childan’s ‘heroic act’ is, by Western thinking, the least ‘morally ambiguous’ of the three. We need only recognize his ‘heroic act’ as such to comprehend it instantly in ethical terms, which, at that particular moment, do not at all appear as being morally problematic. The act at issue centers upon a particular pin that he has passed on to Paul Kasoura – one of the pieces of jewelry that Frank Frink (né Fink) created and that Childan has custody of thanks to a maneuver consistent with his suspect business practices.12 These same (un)ethical circumstances that bring Childan into possession of the pin – and even more, what they betoken about his moral character – qualify him for serious (American/Western) consideration as the most heroic of High Castle’s ‘heroic actors.’ Of the three such actors, he is the one most readily conceivable as a morally responsible agent, according to a Western understanding of the subject going back at least to Socrates – not solely because he is acting, somewhat (self)consciously, contrary to his (moral) nature (a proposition applying as well, albeit ironically, to Tagomi), but also by reason of his being the most conscious of his ‘heroic act’ as such (and at the moment he performs it). But while High Castle here offers no grounds for the reader to withhold moral approval of Childan, those same Western ethical standards by which we deem his act laudable collide in this instance with the Western idea of literary-psychological realism. Not only does Childan refuse Paul’s lucrative proposition of licensing mass-production of the jewelry (this, after momentarily struggling with his initial inclination to accept it); he also instantly undergoes a self-transformation of the sort normally reserved for popular romances of the Harlequin sort. Up to now he has not just outwardly been kowtowing to the Japanese; he has also internalized that attitude, as reflected in the (stylistic) fact that he thinks as well as speaks in pinoc English.13 Moreover, even when, after his sudden – and miraculous – change of heart, he ‘demands’ an ‘apology’ from Paul for the insult to ‘American proud artists. Myself included’ (11:170), his syntax remains that of (High Castle’s) Japanese-English. Yet the next, and last, time we see him, we are apparently being asked to believe that his ‘heroic act’ has brought about a permanent radical transformation. This, again, is reflected both in what he says and in how he says it (now without the slightest trace of the pinoc) – in the fact that by Sino-Japanese standards, his aggressive verbal behavior toward Tagomi is (as he knows as well as Tagomi does) even more insulting than is his refusal to take back the ‘fake’ Colt .44 that Tagomi had purchased from him – the gun being the occasion for the one and only meeting wherein the plotlines of any two principals

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meaningfully intersect. An ethical ambiguity thereby attaches to Childan. At the instant of his sudden moral conversion, he was unequivocally ‘heroic’ in a way readily comprehensible by East and West alike: not so much for standing up to his human oppressors, representing as they do the Powers That Be, or for miraculously mastering his ‘karma’ (to put the matter as Dick would have), but because he repudiates the sort of mechanical reproduction which would devalue art into just another commodity. Childan’s self-transformation in its outcome, however, while not deplorable, exhibits itself in an attitude which has enough in common with American racism as High Castle glimpses it to generate moral discomfort (but not in him).14 Tagomi’s motive for wanting to return the gun bespeaks the ‘moral ambiguity’ of his ‘heroic act,’ especially as he sees it. That last clause descriptively fits just about every personage in the book, even most of its diagetically marginal characters; indeed, it specifies the ground for reading High Castle primarily as a psychological novel. With Tagomi, however, ‘as he sees it’ has a singular import (also literally) inasmuch as it identifies the object of his ‘heroism’ as being Baynes/Wegener. If the case were, in that respect, as clear as Tagomi thinks it is, the moral computation which impels his desire to get rid of the gun would hold: he has taken two lives to save one (MHC 12:187).15 In Western eyes, of course, he has done nothing wrong in killing two would-be assassins; on the contrary, his act is wholly commendable. This judgment, moreover, gets support from what Tagomi is oblivious of: that the calculus attributable to him can morally justify him in view of the (ficti)fact that it has psychologically disposed him to refuse to sign the Nazi extradition request that would have licensed Frank’s Zyklon B-gassing and incineration for being a Jew. Dick, however, doesn’t allow us to free ourselves so easily from Tagomi’s compunctions. At the moment when Tagomi acts, by some kind of reflex, to shoot the would-be Sicherheitdienst-commissioned hitmen, we have been given to understand that their target is Wegener alone, not Tagomi or General Tadeki (whom the SD had previously tried to ‘intercept’ [see 8:117]). And since Wegener has already told those two about ‘Operation Dandelion’ (the Nazi plan for an atomic-weapon sneak-attack on Japan), High Castle would allow Tagomi’s act no moral value beyond the killing of a couple of thugs freelancing for the SD.16 Tagomi’s qualms are thus reinstatable with reference to the most accessible aspect of the conflict between Western and Eastern value-systems in High Castle: he cannot view his act as unequivocally good because he recognizes that doing so would necessarily entail a repudiation of the Taoist view of the relativity of evil in favor of the absolutist Western idea of which Nazism is an (or the) extreme consequence, at once a perversion and a reductio ad absurdum of Western

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black-and-white thinking on the subject of evil.17 His act therefore sends tremors through his world. He has a mental breakdown, experiencing ‘reality’ as a confused (and confusing) succession of value-systems. For an instant he is in the world of wu wei, which (however) he enters by contemplating what to him is a strange (American-made) triangular silver pin. But the ‘reality’ of this particular ‘satori’ experience,18 initiated as it is by the irruption of the Embarcadero Freeway, is for him delusional – ironically enough, inasmuch as readers of High Castle in 1962 could have recognized Tagomi’s ‘delusional’ world not only as their real world in some vaguely referential sense, but as coming from the headlines of the San Francisco Chronicle, as it were.19 From this bad dream, Tagomi at last extricates himself by deciding to ‘utter startling noise,’ a self-instruction to wake up. But inasmuch as the word he hits upon, automatically, for this purpose is German (Erwache),20 we cannot – and should not – be assured, as he apparently is, that the ‘reality’ he returns to is precisely congruent with the one which had been his (self-conceived) starting point. The psychological narrative which has Tagomi at its center, then, if it be read as such, brings us to the (Dickian) science-fictional moment where High Castle’s otherwise askew narrative-ideational lines intersect as a complex of their ‘realities.’ What meaning(s) this might hold must, however, remain as elusive for us as Tagomi’s experience is for him unless we take into account the last ‘heroic act’ in High Castle and the considerations emanating from it. That last act is the least heroic of the three.21 It easily qualifies as that because it appears as being a totally unconscious act. Indeed, it is overdetermined to be such. Not only does Juliana cut Cinnadella’s throat by pure reflex, as a kind of physical re-action to her immediately prior attempt at suicide (13:196–97); she also represents her state of mind as hallucinatory (hers being the mainly-given point of view of the incident). Yet Juliana also serves to evince two meaningful possibilities whose presence in High Castle might be thought hallucinatory without her. One of these arises from consideration of the unconscious quality of her act itself. The other, attaching to her actions after she kills Cinnadella, I shall get to only when I come to focus on the ostensible purport of her mission: to divulge the I Ching’s role in the authorship of Grasshopper (in that context a surrogate for High Castle). For the time being, then, I will observe only that it is with regard, most of all, to what she sees as a pilgrimage to Abendsen’s that High Castle’s Borgesian quality becomes apprehensible; i.e., it is chiefly thanks to her that High Castle may properly be viewed as a Garden of Forking Paths with respect to all three of its ‘heroic acts.’

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II. High Castle of the Absurd The significance of Juliana’s unconsciousness of what she is doing at the moment she murders Cinnadella makes for the only real sense in which she can be said to have a ‘meaningful relationship’ with her ex-husband. That is to say, it establishes a meaning-full nexus between them. Here one of the two separable grounds for pairing Frank with Abendsen proves to be instructive. The importance of Frank and Abendsen as a pair is most immediately apparent from a novelistic appreciation of the full point of their shared identity as (would-be) artists: that the fictive author and the jewelry maker are each, unbeknownst to the other, responsible for a thing which holds the three main plots together, or ‘symbolically’ implies a (meaningful) connection among them. With Abendsen this is quite evident: his Grasshopper is a book that every one of the three principals (inter alios) knows, at least from hearsay. That this last qualification applies for certain to Childan provides a (further) warrant, if such be needed, for making the same claim about Frank’s triangular silver pin. By that warrant, we are surely justified in taking Juliana’s Mexican-made pin (also silver – see 15:231) as a surrogate for a magical object of Frank’s which passes into Childan’s hands and finally into Tagomi’s.22 To appreciate the ‘value’ of these object-connections, it is necessary to recognize one other similarity between Frank and Abendsen: that they are more or less equally bystanders in the PSA and RMS plots, respectively.23 In the fiction’s reality as well as literally, Abendsen does not actually occupy the High Castle position which, up until the book’s (pen)ultimate moment,24 we are led to believe he has – except in this regard: that he is no more an actor in High Castle than he is in Grasshopper. This, however, does not clearly distinguish him from Frank, whose only act (in any diagetic sense of the word) is the one that he performs to carry out his scheme for blackmailing the Wyndham-Matson Corporation. By that act, Frank serves as a catalyst in the Childan plot; but thereafter, he is markedly less an actor than he is the byblow (as it were) of someone else’s act. What most sets Frank apart from the ‘real’ actors is his narrative’s (psychological) implication that he is the one personage in High Castle who is gradually losing rather than gaining consciousness. (It will, of course, be noticed that in this phrasing of the point only the word gradually stands between him and his ex-wife at her ‘heroic’ moment.) Surely he ought to have some idea of why he was arrested; but at the moment when he appears to be asking himself (without awareness of doing so) how his miraculous release from police custody came about, he tells us that he can think of ‘no real reason’ for either event, both of which he finds equally ‘[u]nreal’ (14:223–24). It is precisely this unconsciousness of his that

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justifies the feeling which many readers have that Frank is High Castle’s central character. Thus far, my construction of High Castle has been just about the exact inverse of that of other interpreters of the book – by which I mean, in part, that I have barely taken account of the history and values which obtrude themselves at every turn. My grounds for having done so come first of all from Frank. By virtue of his progress toward obliviousness, he serves to call attention to something in High Castle which without that mental absence of his might pass unremarked: namely, that the history and valuesystems which High Castle makes such a fuss about appear (to the Western mind) to have as much to do with the three ‘heroic acts’ as they do with Frank’s morally unadmirable, and hence unheroic, one – i.e., virtually nothing. To be sure, he himself says otherwise: ‘Oy gewalt!,’ he exclaims, ‘you can’t fart without changing the balance of the universe’ (4:52). That sentiment, however, figures early on in his/the narrative, before he himself makes evident that his preachment ill accords with his own practice; in other words, he is the last person in the book to whom such a thought should be given if High Castle means that to be its unambiguous ‘message.’ Moreover, Frank’s thought does not pass without (self)opposition even in its very utterance: for the first idea he has after his Yiddish interjection comes in the form of a question, ‘What’s happening?’ whose scope is not (expressly) restricted by a ‘to me.’ The fundamental point I am getting at here will immediately be clarified by a comparison with the book which almost demands it, also because it ought to be the one most agreeable with High Castle: The Dispossessed. After all, as I noted by the way in my previous chapter, Le Guin’s fiction likewise insists (above all, pictogramatically) that it is deeply informed by Taoist thinking. What emerges from their juxtaposition, however, is an awareness of how antithetical the two fictions are in their respective representations of moral heroism. Le Guin’s masterpiece leaves no doubt whatever that Shevek in the end is as fully conscious of what he is doing as any human being can possibly be and that his final act – ‘dispossessing’ himself of his chronosophical discovery and returning home ‘emptyhanded’ – is the intentional outcome of the insight he has reached with regard to the meaning of his personal history in its collective historical matrix. By contrast, High Castle appears as being Absurdist. Nor, I am about to argue, is this a misimpression occasioned by too much emphasis on (the absurdly named) Frank Frink. According to the most enlightened Western thinking (of the sort which profoundly structures The Dispossessed), High Castle is Absurd. Frink at the end of his progress differs from Juliana, Tagomi, and Childan only in degree, not in kind, with regard to his lack of historical consciousness as a moral agent. In other words, none of the acts which

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High Castle holds out for the reader’s moral approbation qualifies as being intentional in Shevek’s and Le Guin’s (or any other Western) sense (which is why I have been surrounding heroic act with advisory quotation marks). The same conclusion is reachable in another way, taking up history and value-systems separately. Here we can begin by observing that not one of High Castle’s three ‘heroic acts’ has any historical consequences whatsoever. The only candidate for a consequential act of that sort is Tagomi’s – on the understanding that the object of his act is to save Wegener’s life and thereby potentially frustrate Operation Dandelion. That same assumption, however, factors into High Castle’s denial of historical meaning to Tagomi’s reflex response to the pair of Nazi would-be assassins he is confronted with. The Wegener who must reckon in any such calculation has, after all, already fulfilled his ‘historical’ mission. That chronological fictifact may not in and of itself be sufficient to deprive the ‘heroic act’ at issue of historical significance. But it is not operating alone inasmuch as it inevitably evokes High Castle’s ‘synchronicity’ principle,25 which establishes a parallel, with regard to their historical pointlessness, between Tagomi’s fait accompli and Cinnadella’s unsuccessful plot to murder an author whose ‘offensive’ book is already a matter of public knowledge as well as being public property. We may thereupon also notice that the historical figures who populate the book-as-‘alternate history’ have no active part whatsoever in High Castle-as-novel. As a matter of fact, all of them – including such lesser-knowns as Baldur von Schirach, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Rex Tugwell, and John Bricker – are to be found somewhere else, outside the confines of the PSA and RMS. High Castle’s real-life names, then, have a speciousness about them which threatens to infect the book’s value-systems with their fictive unreality. Particularly at issue are the values that are most obtrusive as such, the ones most immediately and directly connected to history: ‘historicity’ and ‘authenticity,’ along with their negations, the ‘fake,‘ the ‘artificial,’ and the ‘ersatz.’26 Two salient plot-details immediately make this valuescheme suspect: first (in order of appearance), the fact that Frank finds his ‘authentic’ self (as a handcrafter of jewelry) through the fakery of impersonating a Japanese naval officer; and next, the fact that the Colt .44 which Tagomi purchased from Childan proves quite serviceable for shooting the SD hirelings even though it is in all probability a fake in High Castle’s ubiquitously commodifiable sense. Nor is this the sole respect in which ‘authenticity’ and ‘historicity’ appear as being nothing more than the Existentialist buzzword-concepts which they actually were around the time that Dick was writing High Castle. They are further compromised by the discovery that all the history in High Castle is historistic in exactly the sense that FDR’s Zippo lighter is. That history, to be sure, is documentable

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(as Dick’s Acknowledgments page attests). But so, according to WyndhamMatson, is the Zippo lighter, which as it happens, points toward what I am getting at because it stands in for the real historical incident to which I suspect High Castle owes its genesis. The event at issue involved an attempt on the life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His would-be assassin was Giuseppe Zangara, by most accounts an acute dyspeptic (also literally) who afterwards gave hatred of presidents as his motive. On the day in question, Zangara was among the spectators at Miami (the venue for the deed), watching the FDR motorcade and waiting for his moment. Seizing it, he got off five shots. Four of them found a human mark, but not his intended victim: the only fatality (dying from his wound three weeks afterward) was Anton Cermak, the recently elected Mayor of Chicago (as of 1931) who, it was widely believed, had plans for ridding his city of its (well-deserved) reputation as organized crime’s U.S. capital. High Castle unmistakably alludes to this incident by name-dropping ‘Joe Zangara’ (see 5:65).27 It thereby signals that his assassination attempt is the point on which its ‘alternate history’ turns – and appropriately so, since it constituted what, as a matter of public knowledge, was arguably the closest call which twentieth-century American history had with a rather different destiny.28 But High Castle also ‘fakes,’ or falsifies, it in a respect which impugns historicity and authenticity as fictionally operative values: not because it represents Zangara’s as a successful attempt on his intended victim’s life (that, after all, is the premise from which the rest of High Castle’s ‘alternate history’ follows), but because it quite unnecessarily postdates by a full year (5:54) an incident which actually occurred on February 15, 1933.29 Furthermore, the same kind of subtle falsification is inscribed on the Zippo lighter in the form of a scratch suggesting that one of Zangara’s bullets grazed it. (One bullet in fact struck the hand of the security officer sitting right next to FDR; but while that fully warrants regarding this as a close call indeed, it is not near enough to valorize the Zippo lighter as authentic or historistical.) The ‘rule’ at work here operates throughout High Castle (and to the extent that it be comparable, in Grasshopper, too):30 the historical names are real enough, but the events they are associated with (along with some of the identities in consequence attaching to the names) are more surely fake (in part by reason of their subtle, or nearly invisible, misrepresentation, bespeaking as that does the artifact-dealer’s intent to deceive) than is FDR’s Zippo lighter or the Colt .44, which may now be put in evidence as their analogue.31 These two kinds of fakery cooperate in suggesting that High Castle’s history and values, too, are an imposture. That, moreover, is an understanding which High Castle expressly holds out, twice: first through

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Wegener, then through Juliana. With Wegener, the book’s Absurdity emerges from his philosophical reflections, en route to an ‘interview’ with SS Commandant Heydrich, on his recent experience as a would-be historical actor – reflections whose tenor and tendency come down to ‘all alternatives are the same’; ‘Why struggle, then? Why choose?’ (15:227).32 As if this weren’t enough, the same idea is in effect conveyed, unwittingly (as usual), by Juliana, an ideologically less suspect source; and it is conveyed in a way which at once epistemologically inflects Wegener’s fundamentally moral proposition and makes it even more inescapable. I am referring, of course, to the moment when she reveals to Abendsen – or, to be precise, elicits from him – a truth about Grasshopper which is world-shattering (literally so in its connection with Tagomi’s Embarcadero experience). Here the pertinent fact is her (Abendsen-)stated belief that ‘Germany and Japan lost the war.’ She thereby introduces a chasm between historical reality and the ‘reality’ that she shares with every other character in the book (along with those historically based figures who nominally appear in High Castle via hearsay, as it were). At the same time, she in effect abolishes the reality of that ‘reality’ – and with it the history which had hitherto appeared as the contextual ground for all of the book’s ‘heroic acts.’ As if that were insufficient for making the Absurdist point, her undermining of her own reality is not only a consequence which she is oblivious of; it also is novelistically inconsequential (for High Castle, that is, which Abendsen’s ‘anger’ distinguishes from Grasshopper). The removal of history, in other words, far from effecting her disappearance or anyone else’s, has no discernible impact on the diagetic world of High Castle, as a psychological novel at least.33 The Absurdist meaning of High Castle, then, could be expressed thus: that even with respect to those acts which qualify for being seriously considered as heroic-extraordinary, history is as subphenomenal and values as epiphenomenal as they usually are in our daily routine. According to this interpretation, Frank is indeed the book’s central character, the one whose story most clearly dramatizes the meaning less obviously attributable to the rest (all of whose ‘protagonists’ resemble Frank as well for being more or less equally ordinary despite relative differences in social station or status). He is just about as unaware of the history and values of his world as any human being could plausibly be. And, it would appear, justifiably, given High Castle’s apparent – and multiple – demonstration, not only of the disconnect between ‘heroic acts’ and moral and historical consciousness, but also of its corollary: their reciprocal disjunction. That is to say, just as such a consciousness does not appear to enter directively into the ‘heroic acts’ themselves, so, too, the latter seem to be void of historical or political consequence (wherefore they may also be judged

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morally insignificant, if not vacuous, vis-à-vis the Res publica). So, too, this construction of High Castle elicits the basis for likening the book to Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan.34 Frank by that comparison remains important, but now as the (co)beneficiary of Tagomi’s saving act, which in turn at once appears as being completely in accord with the private moral principles that Beatrice Rumfoord and Malachi Constant arrive at and also roughly equal to their actions in its impact on the course of the universe. III. High Castle as ‘Alternate-History’ Yet even as we thereby become aware of High Castle’s Absurdist meaning (also in its positive, or constructive, aspect), we may begin to suspect that, at most, we have reached only the fiction’s penultimate ‘reality’ (or rather, one such), not its Inner Truth. One reason for this suspicion comes from the Vonnegut connection, in particular with Sirens.35 High Castle certainly has its comic moments, as darkly absurd as any which Vonnegut offers;36 but they are neither visible enough nor sufficiently numerous to give High Castle an Absurdist feel. The near-invisibility of the humor is partly accountable to a second reason for being skeptical of the reality of High Castle’s Absurdist construction: history, especially as pertaining to Nazism, is far too obtrusive to be dismissed, with a Henry Fordian wave of the hand, as bunk. Moreover, the very filiation of history and moral values which engenders their mutual contamination also problematizes an Absurdist understanding of High Castle by removing any basis for a simple Vonnegutian resolution of the question which hangs over High Castle: the question of how to justify the book’s and our sense that the three ‘heroic acts’ are indeed so, that they are all worthy of our approbation for being unambiguously morally good. Especially for that last reason, High Castle itself demands a construction which does not in effect sweep away roughly half the text as being nothing more than mere palaver about history and values. In restoring those to the place which they actually appear as occupying in High Castle, we shall finally discover not only the precise sense in which the fiction may properly be called what it advertises itself to be, an ‘alternate history,’ but also why it must be that. This may immediately suggest that such a (re)construction will diminish quite appreciably, perhaps to zero, the distance between High Castle and Grasshopper, and by the same token negate everything having to do with the former as Absurdist novel. That, however, is a false expectation. The relationship between High Castle and Grasshopper will essentially continue to be what the ocular evidence implies it is: i.e., Dick’s book will continue to encompass, subsume, and preside over Abendsen’s. So, too, the High Castle we have already

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constructed will still be standing, albeit as one among a number of such ‘realities.’ We will, as that last word insinuates, be perceiving High Castle’s fractures. But these will not make for a text like Grasshopper as Dick retails that to us, piecemeal. Some thought-assembly will be required if the construction of High Castle as ‘alternate history’ is to have coherence; but this is not to say that readerly participation in this building enterprise differs in kind from what High Castle calls for with Grasshopper (or for that matter, from what Dick’s science fiction normally demands as of High Castle at the latest). Even so, for Grasshopper to offer any instructions as to how to put High Castle’s history and values together, we must make ourselves conscious of the conceptual nature of such a project. Recognizing that, we eventually become aware that High Castle as ‘alternate history’ operates on the very principle of alternativity whose largest inscription is to be found in High Castle’s historical world vis-à-vis Grasshopper’s. We probably don’t need the notification which comes via Juliana to realize that those two worlds appear as being mutually exclusive, and hence that alternativity imports an either–or. We must also take into account, however, something which neither she nor anyone else within the confines of High Castle qua historical world can rightly be said to be privy to: the reality that Tagomi experiences as delusional – our reality (imported metonymically or synecdochally through the given [Embarcadero Freeway] reality-fragment of early 1960s’ San Francisco). This we have previously glanced at as having a cognitive effect on us comparable to its emotional impact on Tagomi – i.e., as ‘irrealizing’ our world. Now, however, we must understand that our reality, appearing as it does within High Castle, marks both Grasshopper’s and High Castle’s historical realities as being equally ‘fake.’37 From that standpoint, the two fictional worlds are equally impossible. The alternativity principle operative in High Castle is accordingly to be thought of as a both–and as well as an either–or (which means that alternativity comes down to that ‘as well as’). An ‘alternatehistory’ construction, in other words, must make High Castle out to be a Borgesian Garden of Forking Paths. It should also be cognizant of another function of the Wegener–Cinnadella twosome: as one of the (novelistic) features of High Castle that serves for its balancing of its own Taoist balance, and hence for its (self)interrogation of the values it may (otherwise) appear to be unhesitantly, unambiguously, subscribing to. The three ‘heroic acts’ taken as a triad give some inkling of what High Castle’s Borgesian proposition actually means. But since an inkling is not good enough, we should regard it only as promising that the kind of novelistic reading which has already proved useful in the construction of an Absurdist High Castle may also offer a way into the fiction as ‘alternate history.’

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Careful attention to Juliana’s story fulfills that promise at least to this extent: it allows us a genuine grasp of High Castle’s Borgesian import. This realization begins with an incontrovertible (ficti)fact: that after killing Cinnadella, Juliana proceeds to the destination which she originally owes to his guidance. She does not, of course, go to Abendsen’s with Cinnadella’s bloody intent. Quite the contrary: she is something of an Abendsen groupie. But whereas she imagines that she comes to him as an admirer and a friend, his reaction to what she tells him suggests the diametrical opposite. Furthermore, while a Borgesian understanding of this episode requires that both ‘realities’ have some truth to them, Abendsen’s is for certain ‘truer,’ or more comprehensive, than Juliana’s. In fact, a perusal of their exchange points to her view as (self)delusional; for, her intention notwithstanding, she in effect is carrying out Cinnadella’s murderous design – or rather, a variant thereof. Instead of assassinating Abendsen the man, the supposed ‘Inner Truth’ she eagerly brings him would do away with Abendsen the author (so long as he – and we – take that ‘truth’ as she does). This begins to become apparent from the moment that his actual abode comes within her purview as being an ordinary suburban dwelling: so much for Abendsen’s (authorial) identity as ‘The Man in the High Castle’! That, however, signals just the start of her unwittingly ‘de(con)structive’ enterprise. The next step, in her interview with him, is to get Abendsen to admit, albeit with reluctance, that the I Ching, not he, wrote Grasshopper (15:236) – meaning (in this context, or for the moment) that Grasshopper is the product of pure chance rather than of authorial intention or design.38 She completes the demolition job by finally informing him, in other words, that Grasshopper is true in some more or less strictly historical, or literal, sense, thereby removing the ground for his (self)conception as a writer of fiction. In short, the brilliant dénouement of what may well be Dick’s most brilliant book virtually enacts the Death of the Author,39 with particular reference to Abendsen-as-author – from a standpoint essentially belonging to Juliana, even though she is totally oblivious of the consequences of her words, her ‘truth.’ The ‘moral ambiguity’ attaching to this comprehension of Juliana’s pilgrimage to Abendsen, and even more that attending Tagomi’s ‘heroic act’ and its aftermath, finds its complement (but not its duplicate) in the pairing of Rudolf Wegener with Joe Cinnadella. This might seem to make for a very odd couple indeed. In the event, however, their connection is virtually indispensable for getting to an alternativity which is, at least ostensibly, quite different from the Borgesian proposition just illustrated – one that is possibly lurking in Borges’s ‘The Garden of Forking Paths,’ but for sure is at the core of High Castle-as-‘alternate history.’ Within the confines of High Castle, the most solid basis for associating

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Cinnadella and Wegener would seem to lie with the fictifact that each goes by an assumed identity; and even that resemblance doesn’t hold for long (since Cinnadella never reveals his ‘real’ name). It is worth remarking, however, that their similarity in this respect is twofold: in addition to going by a pseudonym, both Baynes and Cinnadella pretend to be nationals of supposedly ‘neutral’ countries (Sweden and Switzerland, respectively). Cinnadella, to be sure, is a Nazi (Heydrich-SS?) assassin,40 not the least of whose credentials for being counted as High Castle’s epitome of Nazi evil is his purely vindictive scheme for doing away with an author whose book is already not only common knowledge, but also a common possession. Wegener, on the other hand, is one of the good guys, most of all by virtue of his being the informative source of High Castle’s critique of the Nazi Weltanschauung – this in contrast to Cinnadella’s favorable exposition of fascist ideology (see 10:150–51).41 If, moreover, this view of Cinnadella and Wegener as polar opposites were in need of further ratification, it is supplied by the fact that the one is the deserving victim and the other the deserving beneficiary of a ‘heroic act.’ All of this amounts to saying that High Castle goes to some lengths to ‘erase’ (in Derrida’s Husserlian sense) a reality inscribed in the (otherwise) seemingly pointless episode whereby we are first introduced to Wegener as someone with a penchant for playing sadistic mind-games with other people – an episode, it is worth noting, which affines Wegener and Cinnadella precisely by reason of the ambiguity of describing it as seemingly pointless. For the most part, that is, we are encouraged to believe that Wegener is acting, to all intents and purposes, as a ‘loose cannon,’42 according to the directives of a subversive organization. We may thus lose sight of a matter of historical fact: that it is no more (but also, perhaps, no less) accurate to characterize the Abwehr globally as having been subversive of official Nazi policy in the 1940s than it is to speak of the CIA as subversive of official American policy in the 1950s and ’60s. Nor is that reality about the Abwehr news to High Castle. But given the thoroughness of the book’s ‘erasure’ of this point (inter alia), we might easily mistake it for an omission, no doubt overlooking as well the significance of the fictifact that Baynes’s/Wegener’s detached essentialist analysis of Nazism figures as being introspective. The consequence of those facts about Wegener and the Abwehr – the recognition that he is a Nazi – is not lost on High Castle. On the contrary, it is indispensable to one of the (Empsonian) ambiguities which constitute the fiction’s reality. The truth about Wegener, that is, has two global (and also complex) implications for High Castle’s world(s) – both of which come with the recognition that the ‘reality’ elicitable from the pairing of him with Cinnadella obtains on a much larger scale (apropos of the internecine

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power struggle in which Wegener’s mission is deeply involved): with the real-life Nazi higher-ups who put in a fictional appearance (as it were). One ‘reality’ emerging therefrom supplements the comprehension of Nazism which we get from Wegener’s self-interrogation. Here Wegener’s comparability to Cinnadella is relevant for highlighting the difference between them so as to allow for the belief that there is such a thing as a Good Nazi. It thus at once puts a ‘human face’ on and reproduces in clear(ly) moral terms the ‘historical’ project which Wegener (12:175–79) as well as Cinnadella (6:83–84) participates in, with lesser contributions from Juliana (ibid.) and Childan (7:102): the hair-splitting exercise of calculating (mostly on a realpolitik basis) which of the half dozen or so more or less maniacal Nazi bigwigs (surveyed at 6:89–91) scheming to succeed Martin Bohrmann as Reichskansler would be the most preferable from a moral standpoint. The operative premise of such a calculation – the means by which High Castle entices the reader to participate in this exercise – comes from the (mis)perception of Wegener and Cinnadella as polar opposites. High Castle, however, does not rely solely on an ‘erasure’ amounting to a subliminal enticement. Through Tagomi, the one personage with whom High Castle unambivalently instructs us to identify, we are also supplied with intellectual grounds for imagining that there is indeed a moral choice to be made among Goebbels, Göring, Heydrich, et al.43 In so far as we are thus persuaded to side with a Taoist or Confucian (or, for that matter, Buddhist) view of the relativity of evil,44 we are irresistibly led to conclude that the undifferentiated equation of any and every Nazi is morally unacceptable because it necessarily imports evil as an incarnate absolute even as it reduces flesh-and-blood realities to such moralistic abstractions – in short, because it logically conduces to what Wegener critically retails as the Nazi Weltanschauung. This Taoist understanding of High Castle-as-‘alternate history’ does not pass unopposed, however. On the contrary, it meets with formidable contradiction, above all from the very personage who most sustains it: Tagomi himself. He flees from the briefing which a Foreign Office bureaucrat is giving him because the résumés of the leading Nazi contenders to replace the recently defunct Bohrmann make evil so real a presence for Tagomi that he wants to vomit. High Castle thus dramatizes for us its awareness that his idea of evil’s relativity is exactly what it otherwise appears to be: a preconception. Furthermore, the very idea that evil’s existence is delusionary, that it depends (so to speak) on a mistranslation of ‘yin’ in its relationship to ‘yang,’ collides with those textual details concerning what the Nazis have been up to which point instead to that Eastern idea as the delusion. These details – most notably, the projects,

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completed or ongoing, for drying up the Mediterranean, making a ‘holocaust of [the] African continent’ (6:91), and setting up concentration camps on Mars – are all the more destructive by reason of their being mostly ad hoc (Dickian) inventions.45 They accordingly serve to expose the calculations about Bohrmann’s successor as fallacious: the choice we are invited to make comes down to one in which the candidates’ differences over Operation Dandelion – the only ‘moral’ criterion for distinguishing among them – appear as being a dictate of nothing other than political strategy. As this reasoning process diametrically negates the one that the Wegener–Cinnadella opposition initiated, it ends with an awareness of the fundamental resemblance between those two. Any such construction of High Castle-as-‘alternate history’ must eventuate in a (moral) crisis that threatens the book’s (moral) integrity.46 Indeed, confronting (as we now do) an intractable conflict between the book’s Taoist and Nazi conceptual elements, we are in a position to sympathize fully with Tagomi in his moment of ethical despair. But we may thereupon realize, as a fictional character cannot (at least not in High Castle), that this crisis is subject to High Castle’s alternativity principle, which in turn calls for three different understandings. The most readily available of these is the one that Tagomi’s emotional reaction points to: that we are victims of a collision of value-systems. Not just through him, but in various other ways as well, we have been led to believe that High Castle entirely subscribes to Taoist values, that the denial of evil is as much the book’s fundamental preconception as it is Tagomi’s. This, however, is totally incompatible with the quite palpable presence of Nazi evil in the book. In consequence, we confront the very problem Tagomi does, experiencing it as a collision of irreconcilable world-views. Like Tagomi, too, we can see no resolution, and for a rather good reason: because in this construction of High Castle there is none. Indeed, it is the sign of Dick’s intellectual honesty that he (everywhere) recognizes the problem of evil to be even more intractable than is the conflict between free will and determinism, a conflict which High Castle’s debate over the reality of evil ultimately imports.47 The fact that we have been, in effect, reproducing what High Castle itself gives us (in the person of Tagomi) should be reason enough to recognize that the book has more to say on the subject of its own moral crisis. Here, again, Tagomi proves to be helpful. Confused though he is (thanks, in some part, to his having internalized Western thinking), he still serves to direct us to the experience that his crise de conscience precipitates. This experience of multiple worlds we have already looked at, but our previous view allowed ample room for the supposition that the three worlds Tagomi finds himself inhabiting in quick succession are all predicated on

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some Dickian variant of the age-old distinction between appearance and reality. That is not at all the case. Through Tagomi, we are not penetrating an illusionary surface to reach the bedrock reality of the Embarcadero Freeway; nor are successive reality-levels being uncovered for us. Instead, we come up against what can surely be styled the discovery of Dickian science fiction: the discovery that what/anything we think of as reality is in fact an ideological construct.48 By that understanding, the term reality carries no privilege; all such ideological constructs are equally (un)real. Which, in full accordance with High Castle’s alternativity principle, also means that this second construction of the book’s alternate-history crisis preserves the Absurdist ‘reality’ of the first. We can now understand not only the sense in which High Castle is to be taken as science fiction, but also why it is virtually inevitable that it would be science-fictional49 – viz., because of its presentation of multiple mutually alien realities. At the same time, the introduction of multiple and mutually estranged ‘realities’ which qualifies High Castle as science fiction cannot rightly be understood as a Dickian stratagem for ‘evad[ing] the issue’ raised by High Castle’s first construction of its problem of evil.50 On the contrary, by incorporating that first view as one of its new ‘realities,’ High Castle – exercising its alternativity principle – not only reinstates the problem, but exacerbates it. (Here, again, Tagomi, the unconscious agent or vehicle of both constructions, shows us that: from a crisis which at its onset is largely emotional, he takes us to another which is also – and primarily – intellectual.) As now conceived, that is, High Castle allows the problem to be uniquely applicable to itself, a book whose reading experience dictates that we inhabit a plurality of worlds (which we help construct, as is most obviously the case with Grasshopper’s), all of them equally real projects of one or another value-system. Moreover, the understanding that those worlds are value-constructs is itself alternative to the Absurdist High Castle which would have ‘historicity’ and ‘authenticity’ be vacuous. ‘Historicity’ accordingly now takes (on) meaning as the term for whatever truth-value High Castle and Grasshopper offer in common despite their ubiquitous falsifications of historical fact – a truth which must factor in the reality which the Embarcadero Freeway synechdochally imports inasmuch as that signifies the basis for any determination of High Castle’s and Grasshopper’s historical fakery. (To put that point another way: ‘historicity’ enters the moment we ask the question that Dick, in propria persona, raises apropos his discovery that the God-created universe is a fake: ‘Fake in comparison to what?’)51 A rather surer, albeit still intuitive, grasp on the meaning of ‘authenticity’ likewise becomes trigramatically available with reference to the alternativity principle, here applying to the novelistic realization that each of High Castle’s three ‘heroic

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acts’ is uniquely suitable to its particular actant. Yet from all of the justgiven considerations about High Castle’s alternative ‘realities,’ we might well ask what grounds such a book could have for its privileging of one of them, the I Ching’s, as the reality? IV. A Book of Changes Any further understanding of High Castle depends upon our putting that question to it. It is not just a question that some readers might ply the book with; it belongs to High Castle itself. Indeed, it can be termed the question which the book itself ultimately poses.52 Nor is there any way of avoiding the/its issue. High Castle will not allow that. It is the book’s ‘Chinese finger trap.’53 In other words, every seeming way out is a way in and/or a dead end. This becomes evident from either of two attempts to refuse the I Ching its special status. We might try, first, to seize upon the ‘moral’ that Wyndham-Matson, apropos of Grasshopper, draws from World War I and claim that as High Castle’s ‘message’ – i.e., that ‘[e]very country … was ruined in th[e] war, morally and spiritually’ (5:67 – for present purposes, in the Second World War).54 We thereby reach something very close to the conclusion of an Absurdist High Castle, but without accounting for the particulars which that Absurdist construction takes in. If, instead, we simply dismiss the I Ching as being High Castle’s superstition, the consequence is even worse; for we thereby willfully ignore a good portion of what an Absurdist construction debunks, but without the recompense of salvaging an Absurdist or any other import. Furthermore, the sweeping away of the value-system to which High Castle accords a privileged position – the I Ching’s – inevitably tends to evacuate all such systems in the book. And since those, at least by implication, cover all the possibilities that East and West together have on offer, we thereby leave ourselves without a moral leg to stand on – i.e., in exactly the condition that the Grasshopper way out leads us into. This is particularly, perhaps uniquely, a problem with High Castle, a book which – as we have been observing almost from the outset – is perpetually asking us to make moral evaluations. A reader (like myself) predisposed to deny or short-circuit the I Ching’s High Castleinscribed pretensions thus faces a dilemma which can be put in interrogatory form: How can one deny the I Ching’s truth in High Castle and still justify the ethical judgments that surely any and every reader of the fiction makes? The answer that High Castle brings us to is that we can’t. An understanding of what the book is actually up to strictly depends on its taking us to that conclusion, preferably later rather than sooner. This is also to say

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that readers who more or less preconceive of High Castle as Taoist are as likely to misconstrue it as are those who persist, against all the ocular evidence to the contrary, in denying the I Ching any meaningful part in the fiction. Returning, then, to the three ’heroic acts’ that High Castle itself, especially when read novelistically, establishes as the foci for its and our moral verdict, we can seemingly warrant our moral approbation of them in two distinct ways, neither of which would seem to require the I Ching’s or any other such institutional, or regulatory, value-system. We could, for one, say that our judgment is a matter of taste – here in a sense not usually covered by de gustibus inasmuch as any individual’s taste is in this instance also that of High Castle’s community of readers. Or we could look again at the three ‘heroic acts’ themselves with an eye to some commonality in them that we hitherto failed to observe. In which case, the reward of our (re)search is a discovery which the calculus concerning Tagomi’s killing of the SD hirelings conduces to: that the same principle operates in all three acts, each of which involves the taking of a life for the sake of the saving of a life. (Childan’s act is no exception to this rule: in the earlier account of his heroism, we were in effect observing that the act by which he redeems himself – his refusal of Paul Kasoura’s lucrative proposition – is one in which he does away with his own past self, at least momentarily.) Both of these solutions to our dilemma would seem to obviate any recourse to the I Ching. Instead, however, they ultimately necessitate it. High Castle demonstrates as much at the moment when the moral calculus we have just resorted to comes to the fore. That this calculus immediately appears as being questionable is not an enduring problem: the fact that Tagomi ultimately saves two lives (Wegener’s and Frank’s) in return for the two he takes redeems the principle at issue; and the fact that neither he nor any other character party to his story realizes this has an irony which redounds only to the benefit of an Absurdist High Castle, not to the discredit of the morality of life-saving. But that assurance is easily overbalanced by two other considerations. One of these is indubitably textbased. We are given to understand that the moral calculus in play is indeed Tagomi’s; but at the textual point where it appears (12:187), it is – peculiarly enough for his narrative – given to him rather than by him. It comes in as if it were an authorial intervention; but since that is not a possibility for High Castle, we should instead say that it appears as the common moral property of Tagomi and the two witnesses to his heroism, Wegener and Tadeki.55 High Castle is thus offering it as a principle that East and West can agree on – an idea reinforced by a similar consensus concerning the ethical purport of ‘some Anglo-Saxon philosopher[’s]’ presumably rhetorical question, ‘Of what use is a newborn baby?’

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56

(5:71). But barely a page earlier than that whereon we make acquaintance with the global moral calculus of taking a life to save a life, High Castle advises us that the ‘applicable’ ‘joint mind’ is ‘five thousand years old’ (12:169), exactly the longevity that High Castle allows the I Ching.57 Why the I Ching – or rather, the collective thinking which it contains – should be pertinent becomes apparent from (self)reflection on the difference between High Castle’s moral calculus as it is given to Tagomi and ‘some Anglo-Saxon philosopher’s’ formulation of what we might imagine is its underlying principle. East and West may well agree that human life is of value in itself; but for this very reason, that ethical precept hardly licenses the taking of a human life. Nor is this problem soluble by rewriting the Sixth Commandment or removing it entirely. We then still face – if anything, in starker form – the reality that the moral calculus itself defies Western logic, that it is self-evident only to a Zen mind or that of the I Ching (which in this context can be regarded as having just one).58 The Western mind must fall back on the proposal we had left dangling: of moral taste (or moral intuition). But if we think to enquire – as no Logical Positivist subscriber to any such view has, so far as I know – what Western-comprehensible basis there can be for such taste (or intuition), Western thought offers only one answer (which even now hardly qualifies as a commonplace awareness): that ‘Ethics … must appeal to Esthetics,’ ‘and logic [read: epistemology] to ethics for its principles.’59 Thus, in pursuing the very question which initially generates a moral crisis profoundly threatening to High Castle’s conceptual and artistic integrity, we have instead been brought to the point where we must take the book’s claims about the I Ching seriously. We have in effect confirmed that High Castle’s self-styled ‘Inner Truth’ must reside where that term itself would – and should – direct us to look for it: with High Castle’s I Ching. At the same time, our interrogation has disclosed the ground for those claims, or where to look for any confirmation. That is, we now know that any warrant High Castle may hold for its privileging of the I Ching as the reality of the fiction must reside in the realm of æsthetics – i.e., in High Castle as a literary rather than, say, a philosophical text. Whether the I Ching, then, represents a reality quite apart from High Castle’s multiple ‘realities’ (which, via Tagomi, it is certainly a part of) – and, hence, whether it constitutes yet another of the alternativity principle’s constructions of the book, the third such – must remain pendant on the outcome of our further investigation.

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VISIONS AND RE-VISIONS V. A Book of Changes (Yet Again) ‘I wonder why the oracle would write a novel. Did you ever think of asking that?’ Juliana in MHC 15:236

On our way to constructing High Castle as an Absurdist fiction, we turned up two reasons for giving credence to the hypothesis that the I Ching enjoys special status as the fiction’s reality. First of all, that tome is the only historical reality in High Castle which an exposure of the book’s ‘historical fakery’ or imposture left untouched. Second, it is also the only object among the four holding High Castle together which can lay claim to having within the fiction’s confines essentially the same reality that it has outside of them.60 On the other hand, two further reasons for seizing upon the I Ching as High Castle’s (ultimate) reality might well make us wary of that last proposition. The fact that a similar thought arises by way of Grasshopper is hardly propitious (given Grasshopper’s profound differences with High Castle), especially as it comes via Juliana. Nor is Dick’s own statement to the effect that the I Ching wrote High Castle particularly encouraging.61 In reiterating the admission that Juliana wrings out of Hawthorne Abendsen, Dick would appear to mean (and, I think, does) something totally congruent with the apprehension of Juliana’s proposal, originating with Caroline Abendsen and tacitly endorsed by her husband, about Grasshopper: that the author (Abendsen or PKD) relied on the I Ching to determine the direction that his alternate history qua fiction would take at any given moment.62 This possibility, we shall find, is not entirely impertinent to High Castle’s Inner Truth; and for sure it is appreciably closer to the truth so designated than is the interrogative proposition, ‘Germany and Japan lost the war?’ But in view of the overwhelming evidence that (as we have been noticing all along) High Castle is not the work of chance, such an interpretation of Dick-on-Dick would not likely pass a sanity test. Even of Grasshopper as that is given to us – in discrete and discursively unconnectable fragments – we would probably hesitate to conclude that it has no ‘design of any intentional sort’ (11:147).63 We can therefore begin to construe the I Ching’s High Castle by taking Dick’s testimony as one of his signal commissions of the intentional fallacy – or, in other words, as proof that Dick the critic hasn’t a clue about the meaning of his book.64 This hypothesis immediately finds support in two of High Castle’s recurrent features, each of which, independently of the other, would seem to indicate that the I Ching is being satirized. One set has to do with the fact that High Castle everywhere represents the I Ching as a misreadable book. Fact, moreover, is the right word: High Castle unmistakably inscribes the misreadings as such; they are as much a part of the fiction’s reality as they

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are of the I Ching’s. High Castle is everywhere conscious of what Dick himself was surely aware of (as someone who regularly consulted the I Ching, at least from the time he began writing High Castle): that the I Ching’s (reallife) procedural rules dictate the participation of the subject(ive)-user. Impersonal chance operates only in the casting of yarrow stalks or coins so as to establish which of the I Ching’s sixty-four hexagrams holds the answer to some question which the user must formulate beforehand; and once the hexagramatic determination has been made, it is again up to the user to interpret the guidance, not only according to his or her lights but also depending on whether the kind of information being sought be practical or theoretical. In High Castle as in real life, then, the I Ching would appear (at least from a Western standpoint) as a variant of astrological divination. High Castle at every turn makes this (would-be) satiric point evident;65 but perhaps its most salient instance is the one which brings it home to the reader (and, in the person of Abendsen, to the author as well): the moment toward the very end of High Castle which is predicated on the question of its Inner Truth. This is surely the question that just about every reader already has in mind well before Juliana presents the I Ching’s answer. Nor is it hard to find evidence that this answer is liable to more than one interpretation. Even if the inscribed difference(s) between Juliana’s and Abendsen’s understanding of what Inner Truth comprehends be overlooked,66 the divergence is reproducible from the outside, from the disagreements among commentaries purporting to get inside the text – disagreements not only as to High Castle’s meaning, but also about what kind of ‘truth’ it holds. The possibility which I have just gone some way toward attenuating by transvaluing the I Ching from an object of High Castle’s satire into its vehicle is fully reinstatable (and then some) from another source: the quite visible (we might say, Calvinoesque) incongruousness of the I Ching in High Castle’s world(s). Here, again, High Castle reproduces a reality about the I Ching – literally reproduces it inasmuch as Dick has transcribed I Ching passages verbatim. Probably the clearest illustration of the problems this raises for the I Ching in High Castle comes from the moment when Frank poses the selfinterested question of whether he should accept Ed McCarthy’s proposal that they start up a jewelry business. He obtains from the I Ching two mutually contradictory responses, the inauspicious one coming in this form: The wall falls back into the moat. Use no army now. Make your commands known within your own town. Perseverance brings humiliation.67

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The fact that the I Ching in effect does not answer the question Frank puts to it is just one of three problems attaching to this supposèd, or preconceived, source of wisdom. It is also the least of the three. It is readily dismissible by reason of the difference between Frank’s use for the book at this point and the one that he sometimes and Tagomi usually puts it to – a difference, High Castle implies, between thinking American and thinking Chinese.68 In the first instance, Frank (and Tagomi as well) treats the book as if it were some kind of horoscope, whereupon the I Ching always proves to be ambiguous in the pejorative sense of the word – e.g., self-contradictory. But when they instead consult it to determine ‘the moment,’ its answer always turns out to be right. That they remain unaware of this enters into High Castle’s Absurdist construction, but in no way impugns the I Ching; on the contrary, it contributes (mightily) to the fictive validation of the I Ching’s ‘Inner Truth’ (and in the process signals what quality of truth the I Ching holds). Two other problems, both of them quite evident in the above-quoted text, won’t go away so easily. One comes from the I Ching poem’s inherent incongruousness, the other from its temporal incongruity with High Castle’s (or any other) present world(s). The first three lines, singly as well as together, at once put us in mind of this reality: that the I Ching’s wisdom dates from the time of King Wên, say, and still (quite visibly) belongs to a feudal age.69 And just for good measure the poem supplements that disconnect with another: in its abrupt and unforeseeable passage from the concrete to the abstract. Given this evidence, it may tempting to conclude that the case with the I Ching is rather worse than we had up to now suspected: that it is not only one among many ‘realities’ and (as such) a major contributor to High Castle’s as well as Tagomi’s moral-cum-epistemological crisis, but also the leading contender for the title of High Castle’s chief satiric victim (with allowance for those horoscopic moments when it serves as a satiric vehicle). Before terminating further enquiry, however, we would be well advised to follow Dick’s example by being skeptical of our skepticism.70 High Castle, after all, gives us reason to pause, especially with regard to what we have thus far taken to be the I Ching’s disabling incongruities. If we re-examine our preliminary finding as to the incongruousness inherent in the above-cited I Ching poem, we will notice that it holds the answer to one of the questions which we should be putting to High Castle. (In so far as this, or any other, particular question does not obtrude itself into our consciousness any more than it does into High Castle’s, that ‘absence’ is an index of the book’s/Dick’s influence over us. Always he is offering purported answers to never-precisely-specified questions – which is also, of course, a description of how most readers [mis]understand High

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Castle and the rest of his science-fiction books, with Ubik easily qualifying as Exhibit A.) The question in this instance emanates from High Castle’s unmistakable proposition of the I Ching as the embodiment of the antithesis of Nazi thinking. The latter Wegener describes for us in terms that, we imagine, fully define it. From his introspective analysis, we are expressly given to understand that the Nazi’s is an abstracting mind. But the Taoist counterpart of that given, an exactly correspondent exposition of Nazism’s antithesis, would seem to be withheld – until we realize that it resides in citations of the I Ching of the sort we are now (re)considering in respect to what we first took to be their intrinsic absurdity. What had hitherto appeared as High Castle’s satire-minded revelation about I Ching thus becomes subject to radical re-vision – and not only as supplying an apparent not-given, but in the process also refining Wegener’s discourse. The latter in and by itself suggests that the Nazi mentality passes, albeit imperceptibly, from the flesh-and-blood particulars of individual human existence to lifeless abstractions such as Blut and Volk. The I Ching example that we are looking at is obviously the product of a quite different mind, but not (it would seem) a mind exactly antithetical to the Nazi’s. The mind that the I Ching (as quoted) displays appears to be one that radically disconnects abstractions from flesh-and-blood (or in the case before us, bricks-and-mortar) realities. On second thought, however, the Nazi mind makes a comparable disconnect – a reality which the word passes (above) doesn’t just elide but obliterates (and which we might therefore miss without the I Ching for comparison). Moreover, the fact that the I Ching’s disconnect is (to Western thinking) quite apparent as such while the Nazi’s is not conduces to High Castle’s proposition of these two mentalities as mutually antithetical – and exactly so. Which would dictate that we have been drastically misreading the I Ching, taking its disconnection as that rather than as what it is: a connecting of the abstract and the concrete. That this is indeed the case is, literally, apparent (and all the more so if we mentally delete lines two and three of the poem quoted above, leaving ‘The wall falls back into the moat …/ Perseverance brings humiliation’); in fact, it has been the basis for our sense of the I Ching’s inherent incongruity. None the less, for a Westerner to grant as well that the I Ching in its juxtaposing of the object-world with that of (ethical) ideas somehow per se entails meaningfully connecting the two requires an act of (blind) faith. Or does it? The I Ching by itself is certainly inscrutable enough in this respect, among others, to anyone who is not an adept. But we are not confronting the I Ching by itself; we are dealing with High Castle’s I Ching. In making that distinction, we almost instantly become conscious that the case with us as readers of High Castle is like Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme’s: in that the connection of concrete matter with abstract meaning

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which we may well despair of really seeing in the I Ching per se is precisely of the sort we have perpetually been making – without realizing it – in (re)constructing Dick’s book in accordance with its dictates. Moreover, the novelistic reading which has underwritten that project in effect reveals High Castle to be rather like the I Ching it samples: a narratively fragmented text which none the less exacts and achieves diagetic coherence.71 While High Castle thus doubly appropriates the I Ching’s inherent disconnect as its own principle of meaningful connection, it also represents the I Ching as the paradigm for the disconnections incorporated in High Castle’s own ‘alternate-history’ construction(s). Here the very incongruity which first appeared as figuring in a High Castle project for satirically victimizing the I Ching instead emerges as the type for all of the disjunctures among High Castle’s ‘multiple realities.’ For this and the other reasons we have already educed, it may not be premature to think that the I Ching’s reality is not just a fictive proposition of its privileged place but High Castle’s Inner Truth, which is first of all and fundamentally the truth about High Castle itself – a truth, or meaning, co-extensive with some such process of discovering it as we are now engaged in. In other words, the prospect which the I Ching’s status in High Castle holds out for the fiction – viz., of the I Ching’s reality in the book – is not merely hypothetical; it is actualized in and by a certain textually-called-for construction of the book as ‘alternate history’ – the third such, separable but not entirely separate from High Castle’s moral conflict-crisis and multiple reality model(ing)s. The complementarity those three have obtains as well for what we have up to now been treating as (if they were) the I Ching’s mutually opposing forces of connection and disjunction. Antithetical though these are to the Aristotelian mind, High Castle would be impossible, at least as what it actually is, without their co-operation: the book is so constructed that its connections (logically) depend on its disjunctures, and vice-versa. This last point may appear to be a quite unnecessary complication of an analysis which by now surely offers enough such to test the exasperation threshold-level of just about any reader of it. Yet without the awareness that logical opposites co-operate in High Castle, we cannot fully appreciate the I Ching’s reality as this book inscribes it – which is also to say, we cannot properly understand what we may think we have already understood. To be specific, we still do not know why an Absurdist High Castle is a Western construction; nor have we fathomed the truth that Abendsen (and through him, PKD) acknowledges at the end of the book. This also means that we do not yet have a Gestalt view of the I Ching as the reality of High Castle as a literary construction. The favorite word of Dick’s I have just emphatically used I have selected for its wooliness, to serve as a forewarning that the Inner Truth of High

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Castle, while it is intuitively evident to just about every reader of the book, is resistant to Western intellective analysis. High Castle is conscious of that problem – most fully so at the end, when Abendsen concedes that the I Ching wrote Grasshopper. Most readers find this admission incredible, especially in its implications for High Castle. But, then again, most readers logically compel themselves to take Abendsen at his authorial word when they accept his ‘Germany and Japan lost the war?’ as a non-interrogative statement of Grasshopper’s ‘Inner Truth’ extendable, mutatis mutandis, to High Castle. Those who have resisted the last of those authorial utterances of Abendsen’s are under no such logical obligation. Accordingly, they may ignore High Castle’s ultimate revelation about the I Ching or let it pass as irony. The mistake of doing either is correctable, however. The epistemological crisis that High Castle comes to, while owing to Abendsen (as its catalyst) its equipollence to the moral crisis ensuing from High Castle’s mutually contradictory constructions of evil, is also fashionable from elements conducing to an Absurdist High Castle. As previously encountered in its Absurdist version, the crise de conscience at issue attends the apparent disconnect generated by the putative moral agents’ lack of consciousness of what they were doing in their moment of ‘heroism.’ Abendsen’s reluctant admission about the I Ching’s role in the writing of Grasshopper comes down to the same thing: denying that the act has intentionality. But inasmuch as this connection of Abendsen with Childan, Tagomi, and Juliana points as well to Grasshopper as a ‘heroic act,’ High Castle licenses us to formulate the epistemological problem with all of these acts in the terms instantly evoked by a statement-cum-rhetorical question from Juliana: ‘The oracle wrote your book. Didn’t it?’ (15:236). At this moment we are expressly called upon to believe what Caroline Abendsen spells out: that a book like Grasshopper – and ‘like,’ according to Dick’s ‘alternate history’ misdirection (as the Kasouras retail it), covers High Castle – can be entirely the product of (cosmic) chance, not of (human) intention. The degree to which this defies all Western thought is measurable by the strength of our inclination to reject the proposition. But as it happens, we have already given it our emotional assent, especially in sympathizing with Tagomi and, more particularly still, in bestowing moral approval on his ‘heroic act’ vis-à-vis Wegener and Frank Frink. (We should notice, by the way, that the ‘oracular’ word about Grasshopper’s true authorship is exactly as much a ‘joint’ enterprise as is the calculus of lifesaving that morally justifies Tagomi’s ‘heroic act’: in each case, three characters cooperate in conveying it.) At this point, what intuition has told us about High Castle – that this is indeed a book deeply informed by Eastern thought – becomes intellectually available. The proposition that Juliana presents to Abendsen (potentially)

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generates an epistemological crisis for us at least as much as it does for him. Along with him we are asked to subscribe to an idea that, especially as applied to authorship, madly defies Western logic. Whether or not this idea lives up to its advertisement as High Castle’s ‘Inner Truth’ depends on our taking it seriously. If we do, we indeed arrive at that Inner Truth, but only by way of a dilemma. We find ourselves invited to reject the Western logic that holds chance to be antithetical to intention – and with it the Western notion of causality.72 To refuse that invitation outright entails rejecting High Castle altogether (in favor of a book which we construct for ourselves from its materials). That dilemma, however, proves to be specious by reason of this paradox: that with High Castle, Western logic compels its own rejection by obligating us to accept an Inner Truth which we have in effect been subscribing to all along, possibly without our having been conscious of doing so. ‘Inner Truth,’ after all, covers precisely the intelligence about itself which High Castle, through the surrogacy of Grasshopper, conveys at its climactic moment. There we are given to know, in other words, that this truth resides in – indeed, is – High Castle’s construction. It thence coincides with the import of the manner of reading that this book demands if it is to be intelligible (in which sense, the medium is the message). So, too, the very act of construing a book which irresistibly dictates that the reader make connections which ignore, subvert, or defy Western logic validates the I Ching’s privilege as the authorizer of High Castle’s manner of meaning.73 This is not to say that High Castle unrestrictedly validates the I Ching. By the same token, however, High Castle’s Inner Truth is not simply selfreflexive, a truth about its own generative-structural principle. It also applies to our world, and not just to our own life-experience of reading High Castle. The two (other) respects in which it does so come from its Inner Truth as we have latterly encountered it. The one most immediately available accompanies the revelation that the I Ching has all along been functioning as High Castle’s æsthetic, or ordering, principle. This moment we have framed in a way that High Castle, at the least, surely permits: as ensuing from an epistemological crisis (most saliently, Tagomi’s) which, if it be not in itself an overlay on what is also an ethical crisis, emanates from and/or is referred to those earlier moments wherein the question of morality is paramount.74 In short, High Castle can be (properly) understood as demonstrating the truth of Peirce’s proposition: that epistemology, and especially what we seek to know (also as that eventuates in human praxis), is sooner or later founded on and governed by æsthetic considerations. The second reality which is not only High Castle’s comes with the fact that the aspect of its Inner Truth we have been emphasizing – the fiction’s

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hermeneutic requirement to suspend Western logic – is subject to the reciprocity variant of High Castle’s principle of alternativity. To the Western mind as such, the I Ching is impenetrably alien.75 But to the Eastern mind Western thinking is equally inscrutable. High Castle makes this apparent when Tagomi (though himself conversant with Western culture) mistakenly attempts to ‘graft’ a Mickey Mouse watch on Wegener. Furthermore, the significance of that episode is not containable. It is as globally operational in High Castle as its antithesis is. Without this counter-truth, High Castle as an Absurdist construction would be entirely impossible and High Castle as ‘alternate history’ largely so. This realization about High Castle brings with it another: that the book is indeed what it appears to be, one that brings East and West together. But it does so in a peculiar way, via its alternativity principle’s dictate that juncture come by way of persistent disjunctions. Possibly this Inner Truth of High Castle also belongs to the I Ching itself. But even if it doesn’t, it certainly true to say that Dick found it there. We can be confident of that because the principle of joining-by-disjunction is already operative (but on quite another basis) in many of the science-fiction books he had published before he made the I Ching’s acquaintance – perhaps most notably, in Eye in the Sky (1955/7) and Time Out of Joint (1959). Indeed, the same principle counts as the primary Dickian invention, the generic vehicle for all his science-fictional demonstrations of ‘reality’ as an ideological construct. In that regard, the I Ching, though it uniquely informs High Castle, functions as a means to the same end that Dick elsewhere achieves by following van Vogt’s ‘800-word rule,’ for example.76 The possibility that Dick was unaware of his own principle-invention until he got into the I Ching is pertinent to one further discovery about High Castle’s seemingly outrageous proposition that the I Ching wrote it. This discovery is retailable by way of Dick’s own authorial endorsement of the idea as it enters into two hypothetical essays: one titled ‘Authorial Self-Misprision,’ the other ’The Author Who Drove Himself Mad Trying to Understand His Own (Science) Fictions.’ In the first, Dick would figure as a prime exhibit among the writers this book of mine deals with. But, as we have in effect seen, Dick’s extratextual endorsement of ‘the oracle’s’ authorship of High Castle would offer ambiguous testimony as to his misunderstanding of the book’s Inner Truth. On the other hand, the wackiest interpretation of what Dick-on-Dick might have meant (the one which Caroline’s gloss [15:236] facilitates) could be put in evidence – but as a global admission of Dick’s nescience about all his books’ import, not just High Castle’s. For that same reason, in the essay on how Tricky Dick tricked himself into the notional loony bin,77 his ascribing High Castle to the I Ching ought to figure as a counter-example. After all, the presump-

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tively insane point of Dick’s remark depends upon our interpreting quite literally the words of an author who habitually thinks in metaphors.78 Taken in the latter way, his pronouncement about the I Ching comes down to an admission that he doesn’t know where High Castle came from. Nor, I would suggest, do any of us, authors and interpreters from East and West alike. We do, of course, have theories on the subject of human creativity generally; but in their particular application to those cultural products which we take to be in some (significant) part intentional, attributing their Gestalt to the I Ching is arguably no more question-begging than crediting the Freudian Unconscious, say. Indeed, any theory of the latter sort is not as sustainable as is the I Ching-underwritten idea that creativity is more or less the direct product of intuition. That same analogy suggests that chance in High Castle’s I Ching sense is not synonymous with the purely random. Instead of being the antithesis of intention, it co-operates with it in the way that the Unconscious does in Freud’s (or, for that matter, just about any neo- or quasi-Freudian) theorizing. The fiction’s three heroic acts are accordingly reconcilable with a Western conception of moral responsibility. Indeed, it can be said that the three are worthy of our approbation by reason of, rather than despite, the fact that Childan, Tagomi, and Juliana are all more or less unaware of what they are doing – i.e., because their heroic acts are the product of a sub-conscious intuitive moral reflex. The I Ching figures not only as the inspirational source of those reflexive acts but also as the model for that understanding of them. The supposedly loony claim that High Castle makes about itself through the surrogacy of Grasshopper insinuates as much. But that pronouncement about the genesis of the fiction also establishes the I Ching’s ethical reality on an æsthetic basis, re-presenting (and thereby appropriating) the Chinese Book of Changes as the author(iz)ing pre-text of High Castle’s own governing conception. The fiction, in other words, incorporates the I Ching as both metaphor and model for precisely the kind of undertaking which we have discovered High Castle to be in the course of our threefold (re)construction of it: a fiction whose meaning inherently lends itself to perpetual re-vision (even with respect to its Inner Truth, as just illustrated). Furthermore, in staking its own self-revisionary possibilities as a Book of Changes on the I Ching, High Castle warrants in principle the very theory of re-vision which actually informs it as a multiplex construction.

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V. ValeDicktion That epitome of its (manner of) meaning aligns High Castle with the other consciously self-revisionary science-fiction texts we have surveyed. In particular, it indicates High Castle’s profound kinship with The Dispossessed: not on the grounds that the import of both has a decidedly ethical inflection (thanks to the common influence of Taoist thought), but by reason of the fact that each invests its significance in the analogy between the way it is put together and the readerly experience of the book as such a construction. It is likewise evident, however, that Dick’s allegory of reading radically differs from Le Guin’s. Regularly alternating between worlds, The Dispossessed (as we have seen) offers two narrative sequences which finally converge and become circular (but without losing their linearity). Its universe thereby subscribes to and substantiates Shevek’s intuition about ‘the universe’: for all its ambiguities, its ‘foundations’ are ‘solid’ (Dispossessed 9:226). The same can hardly be said of High Castle. No discernible rule or formal pattern presides over the fiction in its passage from one moment to the next. Its narratological ruptures, then, remain exactly and irreducibly that, making for a ‘universe’ which appears as being homologous to the one Tagomi enters by way of contemplating the Edfrank pin. That is the most obvious respect in which High Castle reads as if the I Ching ‘wrote’ it – as if Dick accidentally hit upon the narrative-determining moments that he quotes, either by consulting ‘the oracle’ in the prescribed manner or by opening the tome at random without employing yarrow sticks or coins. The exchange between Juliana and the Abendsens on the subject of authorship, like Dick’s own gloss on it, is therefore to be understood as ascribing to the I Ching’s influence not only High Castle’s intellectual cohesiveness, its self-revisionary Inner Truth, but also the felt sense of incoherence that its narratological fractures generate. In other words, the fiction co-opts the I Ching for its own intuitive negotiations of order and disorder, illustrating in the process the truth of Wallace Stevens’s dictum that ‘These / Two are one.’79 Thus conceived as a text which the I Ching author(ize)s, High Castle has no Dickian rivals; as I said at the outset of this chapter, it stands apart from all of his other books. That, however, is a truth which High Castle in effect balances against a counter-truth about it: that the book constitutes itself as the epitome of Dickian (science) fiction. We have already turned up this truth in discovering that the I Ching supplies the principle for doing what Dickian science fiction is always up to: joining, by disjuncture, competing ‘reality’-constructs. We can think of this Dickian dialectic in terms of order and chaos. High Castle is to be seen as a book into which chaos enters in a number of ways; indeed, our multiple constructions tend to that view. Its mode of entry, however, can be thought of as singular: it always comes in

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by way of contradiction. In that respect (among others hitherto remarked), High Castle is typical of Dickian science fiction. The only thing exceptional about it (in this regard) lies with the I Ching’s responsibility for making order from the chaos whose appearance within High Castle is likewise fundamentally the I Ching’s doing.80 To the extent that High Castle can be taken as the epitome of Dickian science fiction, his importance as a science-fiction writer can be staked on it alone. The grounds for doing so come from the book’s self-consciousness, which is not only at least equal to that of any of the other fictions I have canvassed in this volume, but also can be regarded as largely comprehending theirs. We have been noticing something of this by the way in the course of constructing High Castle: in our momentary pursuit of the comparisons that High Castle itself invites with Stapledon, Borges, Calvino, and (above all) Le Guin (whose authorship of The Dispossessed qualifies her as the stand-in for H. G. Wells). As for our remaining authors, Dick’s self-description of his overall science-fiction project establishes a contiguity: all of his ‘published’ ‘novels and stories,’ he insists in ‘How to Build a Universe … ’ (1978/85), ‘have investigated … two interrelated topics over and over again’: ‘‘What is reality?’ and ‘What constitutes the authentic human being?’’ (Sutin, ed. 260). Lem especially, but also C”apek and (even) Lewis could have said the same thing about Futurological Congress (and Solaris), R.U.R., or Out of the Silent Planet. Moreover, The Man in the High Castle is almost alone among Dick’s works in obviously addressing itself to both of the questions Dick specifies.81 It thus becomes quite apparent that Dick’s own view of his sciencefictional enterprise, while useful for indicating certain affinities, will not do at all for locating our sense of (his) difference. For that, we must look to what is peculiarly, if not uniquely, Dickian about High Castle’s consciousness. This Dickian peculiarity resides primarily with its ‘metafictional quality’82 – and more precisely, with what I would call its generic selfconsciousness (signaled in its ‘alternate history’ self-designation). ‘Peculiarly’ rather than ‘uniquely’ is, I think, the right word, for the same reason that dictates my adverbial qualification of ‘resides.’ After all, in our third construction of High Castle’s Inner Truth, we considerably diminished its distance from The Dispossessed as a text whose meaning resides in the (self-revisionary) manner of reading it dictates; nor can metafictional or metageneric serve as a term exclusive, most notably, of Futurological Congress. What sets Dick apart, then, has to do with a generic (self)consciousness of the sort High Castle exhibits in conjunction with those respects in which this book of his imparts the sense of comprehending the other kinds of (self)consciousness that we have previously encountered. Put another way, High Castle makes Ubik foreseeable,83 on the understanding that the

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difference in their consciousnesses comes down to this: that High Castle is pluralistically metageneric, and hence in (significant) part meta-science fictional, while Ubik is PKD’s masterpiece of meta-Dickian science fiction.84 If Dick thereby qualifies as a primus inter pares, he is not, precisely in respect to his very credentials, the sole claimant to the title. He occupies a position strictly comparable to Wells’s, which makes for this difference: that Wells offers a precognition of the science fiction’s possibilities (including its Dickian possibilities),85 whereas Dick retrospectively resumes them. On that same basis, Dick is conceivable as the End of science fiction as much as Wells is of its true Beginning. That proposition, I submit, surely has its quantum of truth(s), perhaps in proportion to the extent that Valis be regarded as Dickian science fiction’s inevitable terminus – with or without the Le Guinian, or Eliotic, understanding that an End can be a Beginning.86

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Afterword: A Revisionary Construction of Genre, with Particular Reference to Science Fiction [T]he opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth. Niels Bohr1 This book as originally conceived was to be largely a gathering of essays of mine on science fiction and related matters. The seven which had already appeared in various venues over the past twenty-five years or so I reckoned would need rewriting, also with a view to clarifying at least some of their interconnections. That the project would involve substantial changes for the sake of cohesiveness I did not entirely foresee. Nor, for that matter, was I fully aware at the outset of the extent to which my recasting of previous essays would both direct and be directed by the drafting of the six entirely new to this book.2 In other words, I did not know from its start that this enterprise would itself prove to be revisionary in the sense which is fundamental to one of the theories recurrent in the foregoing chapters, and in a way which bears on re-vision’s nexus to genre, the other principal subject-theory of this book as such. Even those few essay-chapters which retain more than a titular resemblance to some previously published formulation will derive a different emphasis from their present context. In fact, that proposition qualifies as an anticipatory instance of the main point I make later on about the genre implications of any critical practice of textual association, and thus can draw support from my argument on that subject. So, too, both my general finding there – that meanings become apparent from certain (inter)textual connections while remaining invisible with others – and its particular application to the preceding chapters in their given arrangement, can be taken as corollary to a postulate which perforce holds true for literary criticism as it does for the subject of such: that what is being said is largely a function of how it is constructed.3 At the same time, the corollary I have just educed would open the ‘how’ of meaning not just to such ‘leading’ juxtapositions of texts,4 but to various (other) bibliographical, or intertextual, considerations, inclusive of those which I characterize as revisionary and/or generic. It would thus add to a by now long list of challenges to New Criticism’s understanding of the principle which it can be credited with having discovered. On the other hand, I

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subordinate genre and re-vision to a text’s governing conception. I therefore want to maintain most of the premises built into text as a New Critical term-concept distinguishable from textus in its neo-Romantic Barthesian sense or in any other that would have a work be a fragment of a megatext,5 thus denying what the New Critics, almost without exception, all too facilely took for granted: textual integrity.6 This book has not been given over to critical theory. Whatever theorizing previous chapters have engaged in has an ad hoc quality in that it either arises from or is instantly referred to some particular text or body of texts with regard to their governing conception. By the same token, however, governing conception, as it names the basis which all of my analyses have in common, generates a justificatory burden that they do not expressly or entirely assume – not even in the one chapter (§3) whose thesis overtly concerns ‘governing conception.’ I. Governing Conception In taking up that burden now, I shall start with the most fundamental of my working assumptions, the one which requires no precise meaning for ‘governing conception’ beyond its signifying some textual property. This, of course, involves ‘text’ in something of its New Critical sense, which I therefore must rescue from its current disrepute. Since text is the issue, I can properly ignore the mutual antagonisms among its diverse opponents by continuing to represent the conflict as bilateral. This also happens to be suitable to my argument: that text vs. textus identifies a Bohrian opposition, a case of competing but ultimately complementary truths. On one side is the truth that all cultural phenomena, with regard to both their production and their reception, are necessarily social constructs, and as such depend for their meaningful existence on the matrix of ‘presuppositions’ wherefrom they historically derive – or on whatever substitute for that their consumer or critical observer may bring to them.7 Embodying the tendency of Western thinking that becomes quite apparent, in retrospect, toward the end of the nineteenth century, textus owes its ascendancy also to its colonizing of text so as to have it signify a cultural product no different from any other – or, indeed, from anything that can be construed in textus’s sense. The counter-truth which textus has thereby obscured is recoverable only from the New Critical referents of ‘literary text.’ As a moment’s reflection reveals, these already come with their own construction. Hence text is able to revive the meaning of a word to which textus would allow solely a more or less architectural import: ‘reconstruction.’ If, furthermore, one thinks of the book as its paradigmatic container, it is equally evident that the literary text has pre-established

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boundaries whereby it is self-delimiting. Admittedly, the decision to respect those boundaries is arbitrary inasmuch as they themselves are artificial; but at least it has an intrinsic warrant which provides some defense against any objection of the sort that H. G. Wells raises in arguing that a single line of enquiry cannot be properly pursued irrespective of its intersection with totally other lines, thereby necessitating ‘a comprehensive conception of human [cultural] ecology.’8 By contrast, textus’s otherwise comparable delimitations of its particular field of study are inherently vulnerable to that objection by the very understanding inscribed in ‘textus’ itself. This in turn conduces to a restatement of textus’s and text’s respective truths: the one proposes that meaning is (de)constructible in any number of ways, and is therefore endlessly referable and deferrable; the other maintains that any text, by virtue of its own construction, possesses a meaning which is determinate (though, on principle, only approachable because any reconstruction of it must inevitably be an act of translation). Each side in this debate has made its position into a kind of selffulfilling prophecy in that its truth – purportedly the truth – is predetermined according to whether the subject of study be dealt with centripetally (as a text) or centrifugally (as a textus).9 This is also to observe that the two must be mutually exclusive only in practice, and even there only to the extent that something cannot be centered and decentered at one and the same (interpretative) moment. Otherwise the two must be allowed ‘real co-existence’ for the very reason that Ursula Le Guin in The Dispossessed identifies as the exigency for reconciling simultaneity and sequentialism: that neither can discountenance the other without incurring a reductio ad absurdum. Denying the truth of textus entails the severing of the text from the social, or discursive,10 context of language which makes it intelligible; denying the truth of text evacuates the space for the freedom of intention and critical distance which the proponents of textus would surely want to claim for themselves. So, too, text and textus are coreliant inasmuch as the latter owes its substantial reality, its status as more than a conceptual abstraction, to the interchange among texts, which in turn discover their individuating possibilities of meaning from the textus that they contribute to constituting. In the process of having thus made room for the truth of text and with it, for the validity of the sort of analysis that I have mostly been engaging in,11 I have also established the theoretic possibility of intrinsically meaningful textual attributes. What I call governing conception is among these. But as the participial qualifier indicates, ‘conception’ – whatever it may exactly cover – is not co-equal with any number of other such textual properties; on the contrary, it designates the one which controls the meaning of the rest. It specifies the whole to which the parts (howsoever

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discriminated) are answerable, the intrinsic context from which they derive their textual import; or alternatively, it is a function of the text’s principle for selecting and ordering its constitutive elements. In other words, its meaning largely coincides with what the eighteenth-century mind understood by ‘Design.’ If none of those statements conveys an understanding much beyond what ‘governing conception’ in itself may suggest, that is because the term does not lend itself to definition in the abstract. Indeed, just as the question of its precise import is co-dependent on whether such a thing as governing conception exists, so the tasks of clarifying the one and demonstrating the other must devolve chiefly on my exegeses. From the illustrations they provide, it will also be apparent that governing conception is not susceptible of the sort of methodizing which pedagogues delight in because it may basically reside with any one of a number of textual features. The Time Machine, even more than Wells’s Anatomy of Frustration, chiefly inscribes it where most philosophical treatises do, in the structure of its argument; but it may instead attach itself primarily to point of view, say (as is normally the case in a Henry James novel and sometimes so with C”apek and Borges) or to controlling metaphor (as in Dickens’s Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend or in Lem’s Solaris). Even when governing conception is to be found in its usual location, the plot, it may figure there in more than one way. This is evident from three examples that I examine at length which also best illustrate the meaning of governing conception: The Sirens of Titan, The Dispossessed, and Futurological Congress. Sirens’ governing conception becomes apparent in an outline concentrated, as single-mindedly as the book’s zigzags and spiralings will permit,13 on the dénouement of the (Tralfamadorian) plot (here in the political as well as the literary sense of ‘plot’). With The Dispossessed it instead emanates from the plot’s formal shape as two linear sequencings of events disjoined by their alternation but coherent by reason of their equally real circularity as they co-operate in returning Shevek to his beginning place. By contrast, the plot-feature of Futurological Congress paramount to its governing conception has to do, not with its shaping of its events or with their fictively given destination per se (in this case, a sewer), but with their unfolding from one another, a plot-process that perplexes the distinction between the hallucinatory and the real. Governing conception is not in the abstract a genre-specific property. It is not even the case that a text’s particular governing conception need be regarded as generically decisive. In fact, each of the three just-offered examples is (re)conceivable on the basis of a ‘mundane’ rather than a ‘fantastic’ situation: Futurological Congress from the drug culture of the 1960s which already substantially provides its context; The Dispossessed

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from any psychobiographical materials amenable to an arrangement which figures ‘[t]ime past and time future / Point[ing] to’ – and away from – ‘one end, which is always present’;14 and Sirens from the same historical annals of political intrigue or of espionage that, say, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les mains sales and John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold respectively rely on. Those re-presentations cannot, of course, accommodate such fictive-ideational elements as futurolinguistics, the ansible, and Tralfamadorian mind-control, all of which virtually disappear from view. By reason of their very inadequacy, however, they point to genre as both a variable determinant and a product of textual (re)construction.15 II. Genericity That last statement epitomizes the principal understanding of genre which this book (as a revisionary enterprise) is designed to convey. But the very point which the foregoing chapters collectively insist on, that genre is a variable, also makes for incongruities among them. That they indeed engage one another on the subject of genre therefore remains to be demonstrated. Every other respect in which they are mutually conversant derives from their common opposition to the basic tenets of what can be called generology. That sardonic term’s warrant comes from the Poetics, in part by reason of the diverse and ill-sorted purposes that Aristotle there provides for any such study (viz., definitional and taxonomic, regulatory and evaluative, descriptive and analytic), but more because he repeatedly and variously demonstrates the presuppositional, selective, and generalizing tendency of abstract genre constructs. Even so, the most revealing exposition of generology’s basic principles is to be found, methinks, not in the Poetics but in Tzvetan Todorov’s Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Todorov, like every other student of genre, is a legatee of the Poetics. His Introduction (or, in its English translation, The Fantastic) stands apart from otherwise comparable books largely by reason of his forthright insistence that ‘a work’s inclusion within a genre … teaches us nothing as to its meaning’ (The Fantastic 141). The sense of this statement, though seemingly transparent, depends on another: that the province of genre criticism is to establish the ‘rule by which the work in question … [is] governed,’ in common with all the other works to which that ‘rule’ is applicable (ibid.). Todorov, in other words, fundamentally presumes, first, that any work belongs to one and only one genre; and second, that the relationship of belonging is such that genre can have nothing to do with a work’s particular, or singular, meaning. Into the bargain, he must also suppose that genre concepts themselves, if not by any and every understanding invariable, can be made so, a requirement which he satisfies by estab-

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lishing them on a logical basis. Those three assumptions about genre are hardly unique to Todorov. On the contrary, they are usually thought to inhere in the very definition of genre, thanks in large measure to commentators on the Poetics from the Italian Renaissance on. It is not at all certain, however, that they establish Aristotle’s intent as they do Todorov’s. It is arguable, for example, that Aristotle desires to come to terms with at least the exact manner of meaning of his privileged text, Oedipus Tyrannos, even though he does not speak of its irony, let alone recognize how pervasively ironic Sophocles’ tragedy is from its outset.16 (Why else would Aristotle identify the drama’s moments of peripetia and anagnoresis, term-concepts which traduce his presumed scheme of eidetic distinctions by reason of their being transgeneric?)17 So, too, contrary to a widespread impression, Aristotle’s genres – or rather, species (eidon) – of poetic mimesis are not entirely given in advance, traditionally, conventionally, or stipulatively, as immutable categories. While his names for these (epic, tragedy, comedy, etc.) conserve that idea, he is perpetually reconceiving them, mostly on the (implicit) basis of his fourfold theory of causality. When, for example, he addresses himself to its material and formal causes, his eidon appear as logical deductions of Todorov’s sort (albeit applying to character, mode, and metrics rather than to incident). But in turning his attention to their final cause, or telos – catharsis in the case of tragedy at least – Aristotle establishes them on a sociological instead of a logical foundation.18 This restores rather than maintains their (temporal) immobility, which they have in the meantime lost in consequence of his locating their efficient cause in the natural propensity for mimesis, a move that compels him to historicize them to account for their differences, and thence to allow not only for their development, but also for the emergence of new species.19 The Poetics, then, can be read as calling into question the very generological principles which it supposedly authorizes. Ironically enough, the case against generology’s premises to be made from the Poetics is not nearly as formidable as the one emanating from Todorov’s book. Intending to provide a ‘scientific’ (i.e., structuralist) model for genre criticism, Todorov analyzes the fantastique in terms of the binary opposition of the natural vs. the supernatural so as to reveal that (like ‘fantasy’) the word ‘historically’ compounds – and confuses – three separate, albeit ‘adjacent,’ genres.20 He thereupon (re)defines it to comprise only those literary works wherein the nature of the purely imaginary event qualifying them for consideration remains unresolvable. In theory, then, the ‘fantastic’ is clearly distinguishable from the ‘marvelous’ and the ‘uncanny’ (étrange), which sooner or later determine the imaginary event in question to have been, respectively, a supernatural or a natural occurrence.

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Yet even with this scheme, predicated as it is on a logical antithesis which should enforce generic boundaries and calling for only superficial enquiry to decide which genre a given fiction is assignable to, Todorov cannot hold on to his generological principles. Although he excludes any text wherein the imaginary event is determinately both natural and supernatural,21 he does (belatedly) notice in one of his carefully selected examples – Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ – ‘the coincidence of two apparently incompatible genres’ (172; my emphasis). Moreover, he is compelled to relinquish the absolutism of generic discreteness, and with it the tenet that any given literary work belongs to one and only one genre, because he somehow finds himself obliged to discourse on the ‘themes’ of the fantastique (a subject to which he devotes four chapters), and hence cannot manage to avoid totally (or construe rightly) the particularities of meaning which he supposes to be generically impertinent. Although he in effect shows his principles to be untenable, Todorov barely acknowledges the fact that he has abandoned any of them. To discover why they cannot be maintained, we must therefore look elsewhere: to Jacques Derrida’s ‘The Law of Genre’ (1980/86) and its (logical) sequel, ‘Before the Law’ (1982/85). In the first of those two essays, Todorov is Derrida’s unwitting (and unnamed) accomplice in deconstructing ‘the law of genre.’ Derrida’s overall argument, as I see it, is that such a law traduces itself because the very boundaries it would set up invite as well as establish the possibility of their transgression. He begins by granting the principle of generic propriety as Todorov would have it: as dictating not only that genres in the abstract are not to be mixed, but also that critical practice should preserve their separation by insisting on the assignment of a text to the one and only genre proper to it. This ‘law of genre,’ however, is belied by its very statement, at least in French (‘Ne pas mêler les genres’), which Derrida reveals to be amenable to at least three different genre-like interpretations.22 One component of the law of genre as Todorov articulates it thereby militates against the other inasmuch as genre turns out to be correlative not just to the kind of meaning an utterance has, but to its particular meaning. By the same token, while ‘there is no [such thing as a] genreless text,’ ‘a text cannot belong to any genre’ (‘un texte ne saurait appartenir à aucun genre’ – literally, ‘a text wouldn’t know how to belong …’).23 This, Derrida contends, holds true even with Maurice Blanchot’s La folie du jour, a text which announces the particular genre actually in play. That firstperson account expressly calls for a reading of it as a récit, or short narrative; but it also steadfastly resists such a construction because the doubt as to whether the fictive author has been hospitalized with an eye problem or institutionalized for sociopathic behavior renders the few

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‘events’ and other such fictifacts he proffers radically indeterminable in nature. It is therefore appropriate that La folie at its end expressly problematizes its initial genre proposal: ‘Un récit? Non, pas de récit, plus jamais’ (‘A récit? No, not a récit, not any more’: Blanchot 33). Thematizing its own (im)possibility as a récit, La folie re-presents the always potential conflict between the presuppositions endemic to genre by its very definition and the cognitive experience of textual meaning. Genre, in short, always comes with a question mark, even if there be no disagreement as to which genre is at issue. ‘Before the Law’ supplements that understanding of ‘the law of the law of genre.’24 Here Derrida’s exemplar is the text from which this essay of his takes its title: Kafka’s ‘Vor dem Gesetz,’ best known from its posthumous appearance in Der Prozess (The Trial, 1925), but first published separately in 1914. The fiction as Derrida interprets it is finally about its own Gesetz, the law in obeisance to which it derives its meaning. He understands this law to be at bottom generic. Once again, that is, ‘the law of genre’ is in question. But now, in contrast to La folie, the question pertains to a thoroughgoing generic undecidability. The only certainty the text allows is that (its) construction is possible only by virtue of the generic law which it obeys. At the same time, that law is as elusive as its legalistic counterpart is for the anonymous supplicant within Kafka’s fiction. The bar to it, however, is not a visible guard like the one within the parable, but the paradox emanating from the word vor (before) in Kafka’s title. So placed, ‘before’ indicates that the text itself must somehow be antecedent to the (generic) law which it can be obedient to only if that law precedes it.25 The text thus has a self-referentiality which makes its (generic) law as inaccessible as the (juridical) law which it is ostensibly about. But given that its meaning depends on its generic law, its self-determination of that law’s inaccessibility can be taken as a caveat about the inadequacy, rather than the sheer illicitness, of any generic construction of ‘Vor dem Gesetz.’26 In this second proof that genre inevitably involves not just the kind of meaning a text has but its particular meaning, Derrida takes as his instance a fiction which, so far from being typical, evinces Kafka at his most Kafkaesque. From the same consideration, however, ‘Vor dem Gesetz’ appears as being par excellence the sui generis text. That realization brings with it a supplementary understanding – or, in my sense of the word, a revision – of Derrida’s entire two-stage argument. By this new account, he first takes a text (Blanchot’s) which establishes its generic novelty in opposition to a genre it proposes, and then moves on to another (Kafka’s) whose genericity is determinately indeterminable, in order to reveal what ought to be a self-evident truth: that the sui generis depends for its very definitional existence on the genre (pre)conceptions which it refuses.

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This, as we shall see, is just one of a number of undeniable propositions of genre itself which generologists like Todorov fail to recognize. But it is also the one which appears to erase genre – and not just in Derrida’s Husserlian sense of the word – inasmuch as it would seem to dictate that the sui generis text be generically unnamable. In that regard, what Derrida is saying is amenable to a further re-vision whereby it co-operates with at least three of the foregoing chapters (§§3, 4, and 12) as they exhibit the way(s) in which fictions are generically self-defining. Futurological Congress and The Time Machine offer themselves as the most pertinent instances by virtue of the fact that the title of each specifies not only the imaginary thing or phenomenon whose possibility the text fictively realizes, but also the generic self-definition that is concomitant with its constituting itself as that virtual ‘thing.’ From Derrida’s analysis, it is evident that ‘Vor dem Gesetz’ similarly lends its name to its otherwise nameless genre, and thus differs from my examples only in that the ‘thing’ it verbally gives existence to is more ideal – and hence, appropriately, more elusive – than is a futurological congress or a time machine. This view of a text’s self-determination with respect to genre depends upon a more comprehensive truth to be gleaned from any number of writers’ notebooks: that genre is both a dictate and a determinant of some particular rudimentary literary idea. Such ideas, as I pointed out at the start of my chapter on Olaf Stapledon, are not generically indifferent: almost from the moment one arises, it normally presents itself as demanding a specific generic (and also modal) treatment – e.g., as an idea for a lyric poem, a tragic drama, a satiric science-fiction story. That is how Stapledon ‘happens’ to write science fiction without meaning to, and also why others (Vonnegut and possibly Calvino among them) do so without wanting to. But the writerly sense in which genre is pre-scriptive also dictates that it be inscribed, and hence subject to modification. On that understanding, the generic self-determination accruing to The Time Machine and Futurological Congress as metageneric texts and enduing them with a measure of generic autonomy,27 is peculiar to them chiefly by dint of its being referable to their titles. Otherwise, the sort of generic self-consciousness they display also (variously) informs the governing conceptions of Sirius and The Man in the High Castle, for instance. Thus modified, Derrida’s idea of generic autonomy becomes reconcilable with two truths that he tends to obscure, both of them pertaining to genre in the abstract. The first truth is that no one of these is specifiable without at least implying what it is not and thereby positing ‘adjacent’ genres (to adopt Todorov’s term). The second truth is that ‘genre,’ according to any theoretical practice, essentially signifies a construct whereby particular texts are related or relatable. This factual proposition

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about the word’s meaning, while covering prescriptive categories, identifies genre with – indeed, as – their effect; and this in turn makes generic abstractions (re)conceivable as the outcome, rather than the predeterminant, of intertextuality. The first truth, explaining as it does why genres are often to be found in threes (as in Todorov’s scheme), thereby comes within the governance of the second, which would have these belong to what Todorov calls ‘faits littéraires’ (‘literary facts, or phenomena’) rather than the other way round (as he presumes). This book’s first two chapters together constitute my express argument to that effect. In their given order (which, however, is reversible), I begin by positing three genres in the abstract as dialectically involving one another. This approach to genre would seem to accord with Todorov’s as well as with usual generological practice. But as the generic formation of utopia, anti-utopia, and dystopia serves as the preconceptual basis for linking Gulliver’s Travels, We, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, it ensures – indeed, prearranges for – what he precludes: that the texts instantiating theoretical genres will have something to say to each other. Furthermore, the mutual conversation between Swift’s Houyhnhnmland and Zamyatin’s One State, for instance, disputes the boundary theoretically dividing utopia from anti-utopia (and in the process exposes the taxonomic ends of generology as being both specious and antagonistic to genre’s hermeneutic uses). At the same time, the intertextual (re)formation of the complex of utopian genres as initially postulated elicits from them a new possibility, antidystopian fiction, thus imparting to abstract genres a dynamic which even Todorov, bent though he is on immobilizing them, must (finally) recognize as according with literary-historical reality. Generic novelty, while definable only with reference to genres in the abstract, cannot plausibly be attributed to their interaction alone. Indeed, it is primarily accountable to the default mode common to writers and readers when not under the influence of generologists: of thinking about genre in particular intertextual terms. The titles I cite in the coda to ‘The Language of Utopia,’ for instance, though theorizable as the anti-dystopian outcome of a collision between utopia and dystopia, more probably originate from an engagement of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four vision (or its like). A similar argument holds for the novel, a genre whose very name, belated though it is, proclaims its newness. Its agreed-upon inventor, Cervantes, surely conceived of it from his reading of the Lazarillo and Amadis de Gaul (and its ilk), though at some point in Don Quixote’s composition Cervantes may well have thought of it abstractly as the miscegenous product of the picaresque and the romance. (Conversely, Henry Fielding, in declaring Joseph Andrews to be a ‘comic epic in prose,’ makes it clear that this theoretical genre concatenates the Quixote and

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Homer.) H. G. Wells testifies to the same effect about the ‘scientific romance’ as his invention. Most of his 1890s’ pronouncements on the subject suggest that he regarded the genre as occupying the space jointly indicated, but left vacant, by the historical romance and the social-realist novel.28 But from the same evidence it is apparent that he fundamentally has in mind particular romancers and novelists – the successors of Sir Walter Scott on the one hand, and Thomas Hardy, Ivan Turgenev et alii on the other.29 Such considerations make genericity conceivable in primarily intertextual terms.30 That is the thesis of my chapter on A Story of the Days to Come. This case in point proves to be analyzable in three distinct ways, each of them correlative to intertexts whose inscription is either apparent from Days to Come’s outset or becomes so from the bibliographical contexts indicated by its publication venues. The three, I contend, amount to ‘generic configurations,’ and are sooner or later namable as such. Two of those terms, anti-utopian and dystopian fiction, already figure prominently in ‘The Language of Utopia’ as abstract concepts; but with We and Nineteen Eighty-Four as illustrations, not in a way that would allow them to be clearly distinguishable from the third, the futuristic (or prehistoric) ‘tale of space and time.’ By contrast, as names attaching to three intertexual constructions of Days to Come they derive a differential power – and hence a precise import – from the fact that the details which any one of those generic configurations foregrounds as meaningful are hardly or not at all observable from the other two (a fact all the more significant in view of their small degree of separation). The difference ultimately allows for genre abstractions of the sort which ‘The Language of Utopia’ retails. But ‘Generic Configurations,’ while establishing their basis, also re(in)states them. Nor is that the only respect in which it qualifies as the logical sequel to the chapter preceding it. Its entire demonstration that generic terms derive their precise import from the ‘literary facts’ they take in can be seen as coming out of ‘The Language of Utopia,’ which not only prepares for that development, but anticipates it in an aside concerning generic constructions of We alternative to anti-utopia. The understanding that any intertextual connection potentially entails a genre-proposal inevitably discountenances the dogma of generic propriety; it provides for a multiplicity of constructions, well beyond those which generology would regulate. At the same time, it supplies the grounds for rejecting generological dogma. It reveals that genre (howsoever conceived) is both exclusively and inclusively selective: that it comes with directions (or ‘expectations’) not only as to how to take some textual feature, but also about whether to notice it at all. On principle, then, a text’s meaning cannot be fully accountable to just a single generic construction, which (moreover) – like any generalization – owes any

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persuasiveness to the contrary to its power not only of explaining certain details, but of obliterating others. The intertextual construction of ‘literary facts,’ as it necessarily mediates between the opposing truths of text and textus, recognizes genre as the chief translatorial factor operating on (and in) governing conception. But while imparting that sense to the proposition that ‘understanding is genre-bound,’31 it also insists that a given genre in the abstract is itself constructible in any number of ways. Genre thus conceived thereupon becomes inherently revisionary. III. ‘Re-Vision’ From that and other contexts in which the word re-vision has already appeared, some sense of what I intend it to convey will no doubt be evident. This is not the case with the theoretical investment that gives the word its precise meaning. On that subject, the first thing to be said has to do with the hyphen. The difference it signals obtains principally in so far as revision be thought of – as it often is – in a way that makes ‘stylistic’ an overdetermining or redundant qualifier. Otherwise ‘re-vision’ and ‘revision’ are mutually compatible term-concepts. In fact, their crucial distinction is that the one names a process of re-viewing which inevitably involves a degree and/or scope of critical self-awareness that even a writer’s wholesale verbal alterations do not necessarily exact or entail. Much as they can have in common, re-vision has a broader reach than its unhyphenated sibling. The ‘self’ to which revision normally applies is the writer’s own text as a literary artifact improvable in the verbal execution of what it already more or less consciously conceives.32 Re-vision, by contrast, stresses rewriting as a process of reconceiving the already-written so as to elicit meaningful possibilities that the original was either not fully conscious of or not, strictly speaking, conscious of at all. So, too, re-vision identifies a process of discovery operable not only in the final version of a given title vis-à-vis its prior verbal incarnation(s), but also in the successional relationship between ostensibly quite different works, and this irrespective of their nominal authorship. The ‘other’-regard that H. G. Wells’s Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island and The Croquet Player, for instance, bring to bear on The Time Machine (along with The Island of Doctor Moreau) may likewise be exercised on a ‘self’ belonging to another author’s textual conception. Such is the case with Karel C”apek’s R.U.R. vis-à-vis Moreau (and hence Frankenstein); with C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet vis-à-vis The War of the Worlds, and with his entire trilogy vis-à-vis Stapledon’s Last and First Men; and with Le Guin’s The Dispossessed vis-à-vis T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton.

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Even that short list, drawn from the preceding essays, should suffice not only for illustrating the dialogical character of re-vision, but also for evincing science fiction’s propensity for such dialogues. These are quite different, but not entirely separable, propositions. The second, while it states an independent empirical finding, comes within the jurisdiction of the tautological truth of the first. Science fiction’s perpetual tendency toward dialogue thereupon appears as being a consequence of its generic vocation rather than an adventitious fact. The theoretical grounds for claiming revisionism as a generic vocation have yet to be mapped out (in the next section). But even without them, it is evident that re-vision imparts to dialogue its sense of intertextual discovery. This in turn allows dialogue the kind of generic import that Futurological Congress, for example, conveys in its conversance with Ubik. Lem particularly implicates the latter (his favorite work by Dick) in the neo-Dickian disclosure about ‘reality’-as-construct which finally ensues from his own fiction’s narratological ruptures. But he also makes that disclosure tributary to a project which, like that of Ubik itself (or so Futurological Congress would persuade us), is primarily metageneric. By virtue of that dialogical connection, Futurological Congress, as it proceeds toward the awareness that ‘futuro-linguistics’ identifies, discovers not only its own generative principle, but also science fiction’s as a generic name for those texts which have (or are perceivable as having) the same neologistic basis that Futurological Congress identifies as its own. By the same token, ‘re-vision’ comprehends possibilities beyond those which ‘dialogue,’ even in its Platonic practice, may instantly bring to mind. Futurological Congress, as it relates to Ubik, does not come down to a personal(izable) exchange of views between Lem and Dick; nor does the one dialectically supersede (or, for that matter, inevitably conduce to) the other and in that sense obliterate it. Instead, Lem gives us an insight which in its metageneric dimension is certainly consistent with Dick’s and which just as certainly belongs at least to Ubik’s cognitive unconscious in so far as Ubik explores a Baudrillardian virtual reality verging toward utter entropic disintegration.33 A similar qualification is called for with the word that I frequently use outside the confines of this Afterword as a synonym for ‘re-vision’: ‘rewrite.’ The latter, here cooperating with ‘dialogue,’ would allow ‘re-vision’ to take in the literary equivalent of designer knockoffs and Hollywood adaptations. This, in theory, is admissible. Indeed, such extensions lend support to the claim for science fiction’s being extraordinarily revisionist. On the other hand, the science-fiction exemplars whom ‘rewrite’ immediately evokes – John Wyndham and Brian Aldiss, say – are, in the sense I am in the process of delimiting, only marginally revisionary at (their) best.

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Wyndham made virtually an entire career from knockoffs of Wells. To be sure, The Midwich Cuckoos (1953) is not as evidently indebted to Star Begotten (1937) as The Kraken Wakes (also 1953) is to The War of the Worlds (1898) and ‘The Sea Raiders’ (1896). None the less, it remains true that Wyndam is pretty much doing little more than reproducing Wells in terms which are not sufficiently Other to carry an import that they can lay claim to as their own.34 Nor – what is most to the point of ‘re-vision’ – do they convey some real insight about their originals that is not already selfevident in them. Aldiss ostensibly approaches the opposite extreme. His Frankenstein Unbound (1973) and Moreau’s Other Island (1980), for instance, by the very titles advertising their ‘sources,’ also intimate their fundamental intention of differentiating themselves from those. This they do by distancing the host fiction in terms which at once anachronize it and establish their own contemporaneity. Thus in making over Moreau’s island as the site of a Norman O. Brownian conflict between the forces of repressive reason and the liberatory impulses of the Id, or Unconscious, Aldiss resituates it in a Cold War context. Such a move is hardly the inevitable dictate of a desire to reveal the latent meaning of the designated predecessor. It does, however, bespeak an anxiety to mark it as predecessor – i.e., as belonging to the past. This same anxiety is particularly pronounced in Frankenstein Unbound. By opening his rewrite in the year 2020 and then, by the quasi-Dickian device of a ‘timeslip,’35 transporting Joe Bodenland – in this regard his surrogate-as-author – to meet Mary Shelley in the midst of her drafting of Frankenstein, Aldiss first of all arranges for two full centuries to intervene between her text and his. He also has Bodenland tell us, twice (2.4:40, 2.5:45), that his understanding of Frankenstein comes not so much from (his childhood reading of) Mary’s book itself as from its popular (and, I would add, its critical) reception.36 These givens subserve an argument, reminiscent of C. S. Lewis’s, attaching to Aldiss’s characterization of the Frankenstein story as ‘myth’: that as such it is truer than the reality which ‘scientism’ conceives of (here with P. B. Shelley as its spokesman; cp. my §7), especially in so far as the ‘myth’s’ truth applies to that reality (in a way that clearly foresees Moreau’s Other Island). But those same chronological fictifacts at once separate Bodenland from the author of Frankenstein and vouchsafe to him a cognitive perspective which makes him her superior.37 Meanwhile, Bodenland has met Dr. Frankenstein, glimpsed his monster, witnessed the trial of Justine, and so forth – all this in May of 1816, the date of Frankenstein’s inception. Hence the distancing operation whereby Frankenstein Unbound asserts its posterity cooperates with another whereby Aldiss insinuates his own fiction’s priority (vis-à-vis Bodenland’s discovery on his own of Frankenstein’s supposèd basis in historical fact).

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With regard, especially, to the distance that Frankenstein Unbound thereby establishes between its author and Mary Shelley, Aldiss’s fiction is rather more ‘recursive’ than it is ‘revisionary.’ This is also to say that those two term-concepts stand opposed to one another in point of their positioning of the author vis-à-vis some anterior text(s) – which means as well, in point of their writerly motivation. ‘Recursivity’ covers a number of allusive practices, ranging from the equivalent of name-dropping to the recycling of literary materials by way of lengthy citation; but all of these bespeak a postmodernist ‘literature of exhaustion’ in that their common object with regard to whatever previous titles they have recourse to is to fashion something ‘new’ from them (in the trivial, or marketing, sense of the word, not in Ezra Pound’s). ‘Re-vision’ is instead concerned, not with what can be made from some publicly available text, but with what can be made of it, with its intrinsic or latent meaning – in which respect, the object of re-vision is hardly distinguishable from that of meaningful revision. Aldiss in Frankenstein Unbound has ‘so stationed the precursor … that … [her] work seem[s] to be indebted to [his] own achievement.’38 In other words, he anticipates Harold Bloom on ‘the Anxiety of Influence.’ That anxiety as Bloom theorizes it at once haunts and motivates artists as they strive to ‘achieve a style’ that will free them from (the imputation of) precursorial influence to the extent of conveying the impression ‘that they are being imitated by their ancestors’ (141). Bloom presents this as a patricidal project founded in Oedipal rivalry and manageable only by ‘the strongest poets’ in their exercise of ‘poetic misprision,’ with its ‘insist[ence] that [the predecessor took] a wrong direction at’ ‘a certain point’ (29). Accordingly, he not only confines ‘revisionism’ to the adversarial sense accruing to it from such misprision as a ‘sublimation of aggressive instincts’ (115); he also, in effect, makes it an Alpha Male prerogative.39 It is arguable, however, that Bloom’s fundamental sense of revisionism can survive without its gender bias. The grounds for such a case lie with an essay by Adrienne Rich first published at about the time Bloom started to work on Anxiety: ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.’40 Unlike Bloom, Rich features ‘revision’ (and always in hyphenated form) as a term-concept; but, again in contrast to him, she offers little by way of purely theoretical discourse on her meaning beyond saying that ‘re-vision’ designates ‘the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction’ – which ‘for women … is an act of survival’ (35). That statement encourages the presumption that her idea differs from Bloom’s only in the respect that her influence on the rewriting of (literary) history would also suggest: viz., in its/her feminist slant. Her examples of re-vision, however – all of them autobiographical – are not only inconsistent with Bloomian

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anxiety; they implicitly contradict the truth he would promote. Reviewing certain poems she had written by her early twenties, she sees in them the consciousness of the woman she has become as well as that of her convention-bound youth. This idea of re-vision is antithetical to Bloom’s, and not by its emphasis on continuity alone (rather than ‘swerve’), but by reason of what goes with that: the sense of co-operation which comes from realizing that one’s past Self is (also) an Other. It thereupon becomes clear that Bloom’s revisionism, amounting as it does to aggressive self-assertion, appeals to the complex of motives not just for poetic misprision, but for misprision period. Bloom, that is, in effect valorizes those psychological factors which conduce to our misunderstanding of one another – indeed, to our construction of the Other as an alien, an enemy. Rich, on the other hand, implicitly relies on a countertruth which, while it is perhaps more tenuous for being less historically visible than his, also happens to be the logical prerequisite for a Bloomian ‘swerve’: namely, that human beings are capable of understanding one another, at least to the extent that they are conscious of themselves as an Other.41 Indeed, that truth – and with it, the value of co-operation, or collaboration – cannot be denied without imperiling the notional existence of the (aggressive) self that Bloom would assert. By that account, Rich’s sense of ‘re-vision’ – also as a collective enterprise – differs from mine only in its degree of theorization. Some of my theory is implicit in her autobiographical revelations as I have already epitomized them. From these it is apparent that re-vision is the outcome of an other-awareness of one’s self. ‘Self’ in this case paradigmatically refers to the mind of the writer in the act of writing, and the ‘other’ to that mind as the reader, the critic-interpreter, of what has been or is being written. From that standpoint, re-vision – or, for that matter, meaningful revision – has as its fundamental premise a distinction analogous to that between performing any (other kind of) act and reflecting on its significance, its consequences, or its motive(s). This is also to say that such a theory has its basis in the psychological reality which Stapledon takes as his central subject, especially in Star Maker and Sirius. Stapledon’s dialectic of Self and Other (as analyzed in §6) is not the only theory-component of re-vision as this book conceives it. I rely as well on Borges’s understanding of ‘precursor’ as it bears on the otherwise elusive meaning of his Garden of Forking Paths. This in turn points to the alternativity principle (my term) informing The Man in the High Castle as a variant of the Causal (or Causative) Reversibility (Le Guin’s term) operative in The Dispossessed. The Borgesian dictum that writers create their precursors immediately stands the progenitorial relationship on its head, subjecting literary fore-

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bears to the (re)creative – i.e., revisionary – influence of their literary successors (in a way that Frankenstein Unbound dramatizes vis-à-vis Mary Shelley). That paradox brings with it another, concealed in Borges’s observation that writers engender affinities among their predecessors which would not otherwise be ‘perceive[d]’ and hence ‘would not exist.’42 From the capacity of ‘every writer’ to do this, it follows that two or more of them will occasionally have certain precursors in common but ‘perceive’ them differently. The past, then, is not only alterable, but alterable in multiple ways – i.e., it is a Garden of Forking Paths. In other words, Borges is at once asserting and showing how the future changes not just the perception of the past but the past itself. That this paradox is to the point of ‘re-vision’ is clear from The Dispossessed’s extended demonstration of it in terms of Causal Reversibility. The latter in effect compounds the Borgesian import of ‘precursor’ with that of his Garden of Forking Paths. But while ‘working at the same place’ as Borges,43 Le Guin offers a comprehension of his ideas that takes in all the others mentioned above, including Stapledonian alienation. The prospect which The Dispossessed holds out, that history is humanly ‘reversible,’ that human beings can be the morally responsible agents of historical change, is predicated on the Le Guinian discovery that the future is always altering the past. Historical facts themselves are immutable only in so far as they are meaningless. Otherwise they are continually acquiring new and different significance from the future (or disappearing from view altogether, supplanted by hitherto unobserved facts). This is not just to say that the American Civil War, the French or Russian Revolution, and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, for instance, are no longer perceived as each was at some now-past moment either contemporaneous with the event itself or in some previous future; it is also to observe that, like their imaginary counterparts in Le Guin’s fiction, their reality has changed. But in revealing that the future determines the past as surely as the past dictates the future, Le Guin is demonstrating as well that former perceptions, previous realities, persist (a truth perhaps more self-evident in its application to individuals than it is for societies). She does so by expressly referring Causal Reversibility to the readerly experience of The Dispossessed as a book which, in the course of its perusal, continually calls for reinterpretation of its past yet refuses to invalidate entirely the contrary understandings previously offered. In the process, successive chapters make their predecessors precursors in Borges’s sense of the word. Le Guin’s version of Borges’s paradox thus entails the realization that her book has already contemplated the possibility of its subsequent reconstruction – which exactly corresponds to what re-vision’s discovery of meaning normally involves.44

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Dick’s The Man in the High Castle operates precisely to the same (Borgesian) effect, but in a somewhat different way. As a self-revising text, it works on a principle of alternativity rather than of Causal Reversibility. This enables three (self)constructions that are at once quite distinct from one another and mutually cooperative as alternate ‘realities’ which together constitute the reality of High Castle, its governing conception (of itself) as a meaningful text.45 As with The Dispossessed, these three constructions unfold sequentially. Each of them thereby makes for a moment or level of understanding, according to which they must inevitably be thought divergent (in time and/or space, as it were, depending on whether they are conceived as being moments or levels or both). Yet the logically inescapable rule with Borgesian (or any other) paths – that they cannot properly be said to fork unless they also have a point of convergence – is one that High Castle willingly subscribes to. This it does in its privileging of the I Ching. As fictively given, that ‘oracle’ generates but one of High Castle’s many ‘realities,’ all of which are objectively correlative to the value-systems that the fiction incorporates. Yet inasmuch as High Castle thereby constitutes itself as a Book of Changes, that textual fact makes the I Ching (at least as represented in Dick’s book) High Castle’s reality (sans advisory quotation marks). By the same move, differential time is ultimately abolished in favor of what High Castle terms synchronicity. That Jungderived concept is pretty much exactly equipollent to The Dispossessed’s simul-sequentiality, also with respect to its being inscribed in the manner (or protocol) of reading that High Castle demands for its own comprehension. ‘Synchronicity’ also imports something like Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’; but inasmuch as this is also to observe that High Castle’s conception here is also unlike Jung’s (by reason of the fiction’s historicizing of it), Dick does not really part company with Le Guin on this point. Where he does do so, it is a matter of degree: ‘synchronicity’ makes for a fiction that, in its representation of time (and space as well) is more markedly idealist (in Borges’s sense) than Le Guin’s book is.46 Nevertheless, the two cooperate in establishing the theoretical basis for the revisions I have detailed as involving two or more texts. IV. Science Fiction’s Revisionism Revisionism is not unique to science fiction. The poem from which I’ve drawn the title for this book can be taken to indicate as much – informed, as its ‘visions and revisions’ are, by its re-vision, chiefly, of Hamlet. Yet that testimony to the effect that re-vision is no more the singular property of any one genre than revision is strictly depends on Prufrock’s construction as a Browningesque portrait of a diseased psyche, and even as a psycho-

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autobiographical representation of Eliot’s own misogynistic self.47 At the same time, the poem has another, equally legible, intent, which its epigraph from Dante signals: of conveying the ethos of social alienation, and with it the modern sense of meaninglessness. As Prufrock (1917) thereby at once looks ahead to and shares in the epic aspirations of The Waste Land (1922), it points to one conventionally recognized genre disposed toward (a kind of) re-vision: epic poetry. Re-vision is not merely a new name for what, at least from The Aeneid on, is obviously a common feature of epic poems. From a revisionary standpoint, the epic reveals itself to be inherently predisposed as well as historically inclined to evoke predecessors, for the same reason it invokes some inspirational divinity: not to acknowledge the sources of its vision so much as to appropriate their authority. The epic’s re-visions thus tend to be ‘other’-oriented in the way that its motive of authorizing itself dictates: like Prufrock’s vis-à-vis Hamlet,48 they have a citational quality in that they purport to affirm an already-accepted understanding of a given predecessor rather than novelly reconstruing it so as to re-present it as a Borgesian precursor.49 Science fiction is another genre marked by a propensity toward revisionism. Indeed, I would say that it is, in my sense of the term, the revisionist genre par excellence. Nor is its revisionist propensity any more adventitious than the epic’s; but inasmuch as the reasons for it – those which I am coming to – do not include the epic’s authoritarian motive, science fiction does not operate under any constraint in exploring the intrinsic meaningful possibilities of some ‘pre-text.’ An engagement of some other text(s) – sometimes in a fashion now associated with postmodernism – is a pronounced feature of science fiction’s literary history from the start, regardless of where that be located. In fact, virtually every candidate that has been or could be put forward as the seminal work comes with a pre-text that it subjects to some species of revisionism.50 With perhaps the earliest plausible instance, Lucian of Samosata’s True History (2nd century C.E.), the title identifies its chief pretext, Herodotus’ History, whose veracity (coupled with The Odyssey’s) Lucian re-presents satirically in terms of the hyperbolic impossibilities that his own argonauts are witness to in their extraterrestrial travels. Mary Shelley similarly alludes to her pre-text(s) in the subtitle of Frankenstein (1818/31), whose ‘modernization’ of the Prometheus myth fundamentally comes from her textualizing of it with reference to Paradise Lost and a small host of scientific writings inferable from the authorial names she provides. Johann Kepler instead consigns the pre-texts of his Somnium (1634) to its footnotes,51 while Francis Godwin and Cyrano de Bergerac more or less thoroughly incorporate them into The Man in the Moone

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(1638) and L’Autre monde (1657/62), respectively, but in a way that leaves their pre-texts specifiable. These examples, by their diversity as well as their number, suggest that science fiction’s pre-textuality is no more a mere accident of literary history than epic’s is. Yet the fact that so many prototypical instances evince a pretext is hardly enough to account for the species of revisionism that this book of mine puts on exhibit. This insufficiency is even more evident from the cognizance that all literature can be thought of as pre-textual, and not just from the moment, marking the start of its institutionalization, when the word literature gains currency, but from an epoch long antecedent to the material warrant for the term as indicative (by virtue of its etymology) of a divide between oral and written transmission. Literature, that is to say – even at its most innovative – is as much the product of its literary past as it is of an author’s life experiences, its (and their) historical context, and so forth. It cannot not, then, be the informing presence of a pre-text alone that makes science fiction inherently, or inscriptively, revisionist. There must be some predisposing generic motive, equivalent to the epic’s, but just as surely not identical with epic self-authorization – this in view of the fact that every one of the science-fiction prototypes cited above generates more dissonance than consonance with its designated pre-text(s). To determine science fiction’s inherent motive toward re-vision, we must first recognize that even prototypical instances, in imagining an ‘elsewhere elsewhen elsewise,’52 predicate that Otherness, at least tacitly, on some scientific theory. This is science fiction’s chief point of difference with fantasy. Though the two are cognate in respect to their dealing in contra-‘mundane’ states of affairs which, as such, need to be accounted for, they part company when it comes to the species of explanation to which the imaginary Other is referred. Science fiction, as that very designation implies, seriously (though not always solemnly) entertains a scientific explanation of its Other world(s), whereas fantasy (properly speaking) never does (except, occasionally, to expressly disallow such).53 Scientific theorizing, then – or the simulation thereof – is not simply a ploy for overcoming literal-minded resistance to science fiction’s contrafactual alien worlds. It serves to rationalize apparent impossibilities, presenting them as being susceptible of a natural construction, at least in principle. Such theorizing – regardless of whether it be express or a matter of implication – accordingly supplies science fiction with its distinguishing pretext, and not just in the usual understanding of that word, but in a sense consistent with Samuel Delany’s conception of generic ’reading protocols.’54 Scientific thinking, that is, enters into the fiction’s directions as to how it is to be interpreted. This in itself may contribute something to the genre’s revisionist

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tendency, especially in so far as the fiction’s relationship to science be viewed as the ground for whatever affinity may be thought to obtain between science fiction and Critical Theory.55 Yet an at least equally significant impetus toward revisionism comes from an antecedent requirement for science’s being the pretext of the fiction: that science must, again by definition, also be the fiction’s pre-text – i.e., not just a matter of theory, but of already-textualized theory. To be sure, science-fiction stories do not normally manifest their pre-text as such, in the epigraphical manner of Calvino’s Cosmicomiche.56 Indeed, the progress of the genre, especially since it visibly began turning away from the ‘hard’ sciences in the early 1960s, has been toward sublimating its scientific pre-texts, thus making them increasingly difficult to locate, let alone specify. Even so, and as an integral part of its pretextuality, the genre remains inherently – i.e., inscriptively – pre-textual. Having said that, we have still not found the revisionary motive we are looking for. After all, the case against pre-textuality’s supplying such is the same as the one against pretextuality: neither pretext nor pre-text automatically inflects science fiction toward revisionism. What does, however, point it in that direction is this common (which is not to say commonplace) generic fact: that with science fiction, a given pre-text invariably (i.e., again by definition) doubles as a pretext.57 Calvino in effect discovers this to be a generic rule in those cosmicomic stories of his that come ready-furnished with a scientific epigraph. The epigraph as such stands, quite visibly, as a pre-text. But it also instantly (if only for an instant) proves to be the pretext, or rationale, for an imaginary world which, moreover, in one way or another envisions the pre-text in revisionary terms. The doubling of pretext with pre-text tends to endue science fiction with a peculiar, if not unique, intertextual consciousness (as is likewise evident from Calvino’s example). But beyond that, the inevitability of putting the pre-text to a (pretextual) use it was not designed to serve – viz., the rationalizing of a fictifactual Otherness58 – decisively predisposes the genre toward the kinds of revisionism which the foregoing essays illustrate. Tributary to this co-operation of pretext and pre-text in supplying science fiction with its motive-impulse toward revisionism are two other factors, one of them involving the genre’s literary history, the other concerning what might be called its generic vocation. The first has to do with the popularity that science fiction begins attaining long before it comes to be so named – initially in France with Jules Verne; next, and more noticeably, in the England of the 1890s through H. G. Wells’s ‘scientific romances’; and then, perhaps most decisively, in America from the mid-1920s, thanks, initially, to the editorial efforts of Hugo Gernsback in promoting ‘scientifiction’ (inclusive of works by Wells and Verne).59

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Attaching to science fiction by reason of its emergence as a popular genre is the sort of revisionism which all such genres exhibit as ‘formula fiction’60 – the sort consequent upon the tendency of popular writers to borrow from as well as refer to one another. Here science fiction appears as being constructible as fundamentally a ‘pulp’ genre. It accordingly differs from the rest of the multitude which ‘formula fiction’ covers – from, say, the detective story or the Western – only inasmuch as the most common of science fiction’s formulas are a matter of invention rather than of plotting or mise en scène – of Faster-Than-Light (FTL) drives and ‘time warps,’ anti-gravity substances or devices, imaginary super-weapons, and so forth. By the same token, the kind of re-vision to which science fiction’s formulas, like those of any other popular genre, naturally lend themselves tends to be of the most superficial, or trivial, sort: the mere re-use, or recycling, of someone else’s ‘idea.’ But not necessarily so. FTL, as Le Guin re-presents it in The Dispossessed in terms of an ‘ansible,’ figures as having its basis in a simul-sequentialist theory of time which, as that informs and receives substantiation from the very structure of her fiction, profoundly revises the time-travel story. The meaningful revisionism which distances The Dispossessed by at least a light year from even those of its ‘pulp’ predecessors which Le Guin herself authored (i.e., three of the four titles which this book of hers revisionarily reclaims, or repossesses, as her ‘Hainish’ cycle)61 is certainly accountable to an Einsteinian pretext which doubles as The Dispossessed’s Eliotic pre-text. But the revisionary possibility which Le Guin realizes also owes something to a second factor I cryptically referred to earlier in terms of a ‘generic vocation’: viz., science fiction’s inherent tendency to deal in as well as with ideas. Why a preoccupation with ideas should be tributary to science fiction’s revisionism is discoverable by way of Kingsley Amis’s well-known dictum about ‘idea as hero’ in science fiction. This, however, has passed as little more than a slogan, thanks in no small part to Amis himself (134ff.). ‘Idea as hero’ has thereby been almost universally (mis)understood to mean nothing more than that science fiction is ‘a literature of ideas.’ What ‘idea’ actually signifies for him therefore requires comment for his proposition to count as a real generic insight rather than, at best, a critical misdirection. For the most instantly elucidative gloss, perhaps, we can look to the present-day megacorporate-conglomerated film industry: the sort of idea that Amis is referring to is rather more akin to a ‘concept’ in Hollywood parlance than it is to any philosophical usage of either ‘concept’ or ‘idea.’ ‘Idea,’ then, carries a basic import which makes it virtually synonymous with ‘invention’ as Wells employs the word in his ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances’ (1933) to make a point similar to Amis’s. All of this is not to say

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that science-fiction ideas have no commerce whatever with philosophical ones. But I am insisting that the latter come into play only through the indispensable mediation of the science-fiction ‘idea’ – i.e., the literaryimaginative conception – which is their vehicle. This, moreover, is as much a ‘reading protocol’ of science fiction as such as is that attaching to the linguistic peculiarities that Delany concentrates on or their neologistic cognates in Lem. A focal idea of this fictive sort is thence amenable to revision with respect to its ideational content. Such is the case with Blettsworthy and The Croquet Player in their takes on The Time Machine, for instance, or with Hocus Pocus vis-à-vis The Sirens of Titan. The grounds for construing – or constructing – the genre in terms of ‘idea as hero’ are the same as those wherefrom Stapledon, Vonnegut, and Calvino, among others, write science fiction willy-nilly. So, too, those examples may serve as the warrant for my having previously spoken of this second factor in science fiction’s revisionism as a ‘vocation.’ It is, however, also a matter of generic consciousness; and as such it may be looked upon as a more important contributor to science fiction’s revisionary inclination than is the ‘popularity’ factor, which in the absence of any real concern with ideas could make for mere ‘recursivity.’ On the other hand, ‘idea as hero’ cannot rightly supplant the doubling of pre-text as pretext as the primary determinant of science-fictional re-vision because it would admit titles that no one thinks of as science fiction – Our Mutual Friend (1870), for instance. Even so, the Dickensian design of that novel – its totalizing vision of the world of late-nineteenth-century English capitalism as a Dustbin or Garbage Dump – is not as far from the sciencefictional visions I have analyzed as generologists would have us (pre)suppose.62 I shall therefore devote the remainder of my remarks on ‘Science Fiction’s Revisionism,’ not to accounting for a generic propensity for re-vision – a subject on which I have exhausted my thoughts – but to identifying what distinguishes the authorial consciousness of a late Dickens novel, say, from that of just about any of the texts I have examined. By way of looking into the import of ‘idea as hero,’ I mean to suggest, first of all, how and why the (re)constructing of science fiction as the revisionary genre par excellence also licenses it as being the one best suited for negotiating – and putting in critical perspective – the virtual realities of a ‘globalized’ world. Thereafter I shall give this outer-directed understanding an inward turn, in keeping with this book’s overall trajectory. The ideas of a philosophical sort which appear through the mediation of science-fictional ‘ideas’ ultimately have to do with the nature of reality. The reality in question merits a small r, indicative of its not being primarily or immediately metaphysical. The nature of reality figures as science fiction’s central problematic by reason of the genre’s preoccupation with

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time. This is also, necessarily, to acknowledge – or rather, redeem – the truth of the cliché on that subject, a truth (however) totally lost to the clichétranslation, which would stipulate that the genre comprises fictions about the future. Such a proposition would exclude a substantial number of stories set in the present or the past (and not always by merely fictifactual stipulation); but worse, it occludes the genre’s temporal consciousness. That consciousness is locatable in a word: it is Darwinian.63 Nor does this term simply describe science fiction’s temporal scope (in which regard, my Darwinian proposal would be more objectionable than the ‘fiction about the future’ slogan by reason of the number of science-fiction titles it could not take in – e.g., virtually all of C”apek’s and most of Dick’s). Its greatest service, instead, is to call attention to the fact that much science fiction, including (I dare say) every work of any merit, has a temporal consciousness exactly like (indeed, equipollent to) the one which Charles Darwin was chiefly responsible for generating as of 1859. That, of course, was the year in which he finally gave the world (his first version of) The Origin of Species, a book which by the end of the century had effected ‘a [perceived] change in scale in human affairs.’64 From that standpoint, the genre deserves to be compared with the historical novel or romance – this, of course, for purposes of contrast. The difference between the two comes down, I think, to this: that the historical novel or romance, however much it may entertain the prospect of might-have-been, orients itself to the contrary of that, toward the actual, or present, outcome of its depicted past. Science fiction’s temporal horizon, on the other hand, allows for perpetual possibility – in which respect, Calvino’s altrove altravolta altrimenti is precisely descriptive rather than vaguely (and nostalgically) evocative. That so many works of science fiction should also engage themselves in the age-old debate over free will vs. determinism (but rarely in those traditional terms) is therefore no more adventitious than that those novels of Thomas Hardy’s which Darwinism informs should do so. Hardy’s cosmic vision is hardly typical of other novelists’ of his time in its (non-Spencerian) take on Darwinism. But even his last novel, Jude the Obscure (1896), is typically novelistic (according to my theoretical distinction) in centering on individuals as such. In other words, its socio-historical perspective is incommensurate with its temporal consciousness. The same cannot be said of science fiction, thanks largely to a book antedating Jude by about six months: The Time Machine. It in effect makes its temporal consciousness and socio-historical perspective strictly comparable in their Darwinian magnitude, if not synonymous. That, moreover, is precisely what Wells in effect discovers about The Time Machine by way of his subsequent revisionary pairing of his stories of Days to Come and the Stone Age in Tales of Space and Time. It is also what he rediscovers, decades

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later, in The Croquet Player, which revisionarily epitomizes the consciousness at issue as ‘ breaking the Frame of the Present ’ (4:71–72). Earlier on in this section I raised the specter of a seminal generic text. From the candidates I there offered two complementary conclusions could be drawn. On the one hand, the putative prototypes could be set against each other for the sake of demonstrating that the very notion of such a thing as the seminal text (for any genre) is exactly equivalent to the Great Man conception of history (and, perhaps most to the point here, the history of science) – equivalent, that is, in its factitiousness.65 On the other hand, those same examples could be seized upon as not merely presaging science fiction’s generic diversity,66 but also as instancing it centuries before science fiction’s conception as a genre. Let’s instead, however, waive both of those objections for the sake of an academic parlor game. One version of the game would center upon the question of which author is most responsible for a given generic variant. (Here an excellent case could be made, say, for Bishop Godwin as the father of ‘hard’ science fiction – at least, up to the point where that Elizabethan-Jacobean author’s Spanish hero [Domingo Gonsales] arrives in a lunar utopia which intimates the lunacy that Godwin, for sure, afterwards evinced.)67 Another version would have us asking which author is most encompassing of all the generic possibilities that we (now) recognize as science fiction’s. That last question, I believe, allows only one answer, and the answer is not ‘Mary Shelley,’ let alone ‘Hugo Gernsback’ or any science-fiction practitioner of America’s so-called ‘Golden Age.’ Given the stipulations of the game, the only author who fills their bill is H. G. Wells. His role in inventing science fiction’s temporal consciousness would by itself make that choice inescapable. I am aware, however, that this is not a proposition which I can safely assume that proponents of Frankenstein, for instance, will readily grant. I shall therefore attempt to adduce it from my previous argument about the generically revisionary nature of The Dispossessed. That book’s re-vision of what by its time (1974) had long been a ‘pulp’ formula, while it applies in principle to the generality of time-travel stories, does not do so equally. To most of its predecessors (and to many of its successors as well), The Dispossessed brings an understanding which they themselves would not otherwise have. That can hardly be said of the example that the mere mention of time-travel instantly evokes. The Time Machine from its opening chapter evinces a self-consciousness of the premises on which its possibility (as a particular work of fiction) is predicated. Indeed, Wells inscribes these in such a way that not only time travel, but the paradoxical, or contraventional, character of the future thereby arrived at appears as being a logical deduction from them. Furthermore, the awareness which, thus incorporated, makes The Time Machine a

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‘structural model’ for subsequent science fiction extends to its discovery of certain ‘philosophical’ implications of the genre. In this particular envisioning of the future, that is, Wells surely poses, in novel terms, the traditional problem free will vs. determinism, and as one with which science fiction, in its ‘futurological’ aspect (i.e., from the nature of its temporality) will preoccupy itself. But just as surely – especially by reason of an Epilogue which raises the question of historical alterability (and with regard to the past as well as to the future) – The Time Machine frames the problem in science-fictional terms at least approximating those of the genre’s preoccupation with the dilemma as Le Guin articulates it (and also its expressions in Borges’s ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ and Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, to cull from a multitude of candidates two which instantly offer themselves). In all of these respects, moreover, The Time Machine can be viewed as the product of the self-revisionary tendency which its succession of hypotheses about its/the future exhibits; so that it alone is sufficient for proving that Wells invented the kind of generic selfconsciousness which all of the other authors I deal with in this book variously partake of. Put another way, Lem, Calvino, and Dick as well as Zamyatin, C”apek, Stapledon, and Lewis are quite foreseeable just from the Wells of The Time Machine – i.e., without recourse to his many other anticipations of the generic shape of things to come. V. Other Matters This book makes my first essay on science fiction, Into the Unknown (1970), its Borgesian precursor. In my Introduction to the paperback edition (1982/83) of that earlier study, I said: ‘I cannot, in any strict sense that the words will bear, rewrite this book. To do so … would involve my writing a quite different book’ (xiii). At the risk of appearing immodest, I have quoted myself – the self of thirty-odd years ago – on the way to explaining why this is the book I had in mind. The fact that it turned out to be that was (for me) a happy accident, not a plan that was in my consciousness from the moment I began working on or reworking the preceding essaychapters. In view of that declaration, my further remark – that this book is a re-vision of Into the Unknown – should help to clarify what I have already said about re-vision. But it will not likely accomplish that unless I specify the respect in which this book is (to my mind) revisionary. Visions and Re-visions has nothing to do with any past theorizing of mine (or anyone else’s) about the/some sense of ‘myth’ applicable to science fiction. The only expressly offered idea in Into the Unknown that I am here taking up at length is the one informing its chapter on Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. Wells’s final science-fiction volume of the then-closing nineteenth

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century is, by my 1970 account of it, retrospective at once of his own previous work in the genre and of various other authors going back to Johann Kepler (and perhaps Lucian also). In its bibliographical context, that discussion of mine is itself revisionary, albeit implicitly: coming at the end of a survey that begins in 1630s’ England, it re-presents the preceding chapters on ‘the evolution of science fiction’ as tracing the progress toward the generic self-consciousness which finds its apotheosis in Wells. This book continues that story, into the 1970s. Virtually all of the preceding chapters, by any arrangement of them, display the varieties of revisionary consciousness science fiction is capable of; but in their given order, the fourth chapter is pivotal in that it takes account of its predecessors’ case for science fiction as a revisionary genre invented (as such) by Wells and at the same time inaugurates the re-vision of that proposal in §§5–12 by offering Futurological Congress as an instance of the inwardturning of science fiction’s generic consciousness. By the same token, in according High Castle the place in this volume that First Men in the Moon occupied in my previous study, I am suggesting (but not insisting) that Dick is Wells’s successor as the author most comprehensive of science fiction’s generically revisionary possibilities. Despite what ‘story’ (above) might be taken to imply, literary historiography has even less to do with my intention in this book than it did with Into the Unknown’s. This is in part to say that I do not mean to intimate that the authors I am focusing on – barely more than a dozen (most of whom have already received their share of critical attention) – are the only ones deserving of the kind of consideration which I have bestowed on them, let alone that no other writer of science fiction is worth reading. To list notable omissions would probably be an unnecessary and certainly an invidious undertaking. In that regard, it may suffice to endorse W. H. Auden’s aphorism: ‘Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered’ (10). Otherwise, the absence of certain ‘usual suspects’ (and of unusual ones) has to do mostly with my limitations, not theirs: with my not having anything to say about them that strikes me as worth saying or that hasn’t already been said better by someone else than I could have said it, or – as in the case of Dr. Johnson’s original definition of ‘pastern’ – with sheer ignorance on my part. But in addition to that selflimitation, I have been bound by another stemming from the economic realities of present-day book-publishing. In fact, the restrictions they impose on the profitable length of a volume compelled me to excise three chapters which I had revised with a view to their inclusion here. From the same consideration, readers objecting to the absence of this or that author might ask themselves which of the writers I do concentrate on could have been justifiably omitted to accommodate others.

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As that question may itself suggest, no right inference about some ‘hidden agenda’ of mine is to be drawn with regard to the legion of writers whom I have here neglected. This is not true, however, for the ones I have selected; they are meant to serve two polemical purposes. For one, I have chosen authors whom most readers of science fiction, including every ‘fan’ of the genre, would judge to be literary types in order to call into question the long-standing academic prejudice against science fiction as literature. I may appear to have taken the easy way – or, at least, the easiest – of doing that, inasmuch as my token ‘pulp’ science-fiction writer, Philip Dick, is here represented by his most literary work in that genre. But if, instead of High Castle, I had analyzed Ubik as a selfrevisionary text, I would have been liable to the same reproach by reason of a consequence of the fact that the self-consciousness which ‘re-vision’ presupposes is fundamentally writerly: namely, that a reading of the sort I have engaged in would reveal a literariness in any author whose work is amenable to being viewed as realizing science fiction’s revisionary capacity – even, say, the Isaac Asimov of the Foundation series. In that regard, I mean this book to counter not only the traditional contempt for ‘popular’ genres as trash, but also the new academic hostility to literature as such, and with it the tendency to replace absurdly hierarchical generic presumptions about what qualifies as literary with an indiscriminate leveling oblivious of literary values.69 The other polemical purpose that I have designed this book to serve addresses itself to a companion prejudice. Any anglophone reader of this book will instantly notice from its contents that foreign-language authors take up a disproportionate share of these pages by comparison with the vast majority of other American (and English) studies of science fiction. Worse still, only three of my thirteen authors are American. I believe I have just hinted broadly enough at the reason for this anomaly to make additional clarification unnecessary (not to say condescending). Readers still dissatisfied with this book’s rationale can take comfort from what ‘re-vision’ both in itself and in its conjunction with my remarks on genre more or less expressly allows for: other (re)constructions of science fiction, and hence books quite different from this one.

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Notes Notes to Preface 1. In quoting from Delany’s ‘The Semiology of Silence’ (140), I have omitted his credit to Robert Scholes because neither Delany nor Scholes nor I have been able to find the original sentence that Delany somewhat rewords. (This is also to say that I recollect having encountered the sentiment in question somewhere in Scholes’s metacritical writings.) 2. Especially as the author of The Dispossessed (1974), Ursula Le Guin stands out from other English-language writers (and not just of science fiction) in promoting the idea that a revisionary self-consciousness is the sine qua non for communicating with an/the Alien. Her insistence on that possibility finds its rather pessimistic, albeit ambivalent, counterpart in much of the work of Stanislaw Lem, beginning with Solaris (1960). 3. For the essay by Roland Barthes that I am alluding to, see §3’s n. 1, wherein I detail further reasons for finding his position there (logically) objectionable. See also n. 5 of my Afterword. 4. ‘Precursor’ as I use it has its peculiarly Borgesian import, which I extend to cover titles by the same author. Borges himself licenses that extension according to my reading of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ as a text which (pre)constructs its Borgesian successors in a way that makes it their (and its own) precursor in both Borges’s and the usual sense of the word. 5. Whether and to what extent any given writer realizes that generic capacity for re-vision depends not only on her or his degree of writerly self-awareness (which, moreover, can be a matter of literary development) but also on his or her susceptibility to market pressures. Those have become increasingly oppressive of late – militating against the kind of self-consciousness which re-vision requires – thanks to the megacorporate conglomeration of the book-publishing industry and its demands for megasales. Into the bargain, a text’s qualification for being revisionary can be – or, in some schools of critical thought, necessarily is – a matter of readerly perception.

§1. The Language of Utopia 1. Here I quote the Zilboorg translation, 24:127 – but see n. 39 below. 2. ‘Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels’ (1946) in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell – hereafter CEJL – 4:223. As Orwell employs the word, politics applies in its meaning of ‘partisanship’ (he speaks of Swift’s ‘perverse Toryism,’ 4:207), but also in a much broader sense as signifying a ‘view of life,’ ‘a world-view’ (4:223). My own usage of ‘politics’ in this essay is neither as narrow as the first of Orwell’s meanings nor as all-encompassing as the second: it essentially designates ‘a view of social order.’ 3. Of course, other versions of utopia appear locally, as it were, in baroque abundance throughout the Travels. See Robert C. Elliott on ‘Swift’s Utopias,’ in The Shape of Utopia 50–67.

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4. Frye, ‘Varieties of Literary Utopias’ 34, 38. 5. See Burke’s Grammar 710ff. In the context of the present chapter at least, Burke’s ‘dialectical’/‘ultimate’ distinction largely corresponds to Mikhail Bakhtin‘s between the dialogic and the monological. 6. I use a transliteration of the Greek title, not for the sake of sheer pedantry, but rather as a reminder of what I alluded to above – the essential and historical connections in utopian writings between politics and literature – which the familiarity of the usual translation of the title (as The Republic) might cause a reader to overlook. The subtitle of Plato’s dialogue might be rendered: Concerning Political Justice. 7. Cp. Burke’s Grammar 712–13. 8. See Elliott 129–37. On the basis of More’s Utopia, Elliott offers this generalization: ‘Satire and utopia are not really separable, the one a critique of the real world in the name of something better, the other a hopeful construct of what that world might be’ (24). 9. Butler possessed one of the most contrarious minds of any writer in English. See, for example, my discussion of his reaction to Darwinism, in Into the Unknown 110–17. 10. Thus the term ‘model’ as it applies to anti-utopia closely corresponds to what Thomas S. Kuhn calls a scientific ‘paradigm.’ The distinction that I am coming to here is both at odds and compatible with Gary Morson’s. He and I agree that ‘anti-utopia’ and ‘dystopia’ are not (or should not be) interchangeable terms. Taking both to be ‘antigenres’ and hence parodic by the very nature of such, he insists on differentiating the two according to what each purposes to discredit. Initially he calls ‘dystopian’ any work which targets ‘the likely effects of … [utopias’] realization,’ and ‘anti-utopian’ those aiming to ‘discredit the possibility of … [utopias’] realization or expose the folly and inadequacy of their proponents’ assumptions and logic’ (115–16). But the discrimination here is apparently too fine even for Morson, who presently implies instead that dystopias engage historical reality while anti-utopias are intertextually oriented. He is surely right to emphasize the literary-parodic aspect of those fictions which define themselves against the Utopian (for the moment, regardless of whether they be ‘anti-’ or ‘dys-’ topian). But for the reason broached at the outset of this chapter of mine and presiding over it to its end, I regard Morson’s attempt to segregate the literary from the historical to be singularly inappropriate to the generic complex that ‘Utopia,’ ‘AntiUtopia,’ and ‘Dystopia’ collectively would circumscribe. One of his cases in point will serve as a clarificatory example both of his understanding of ‘anti-utopia’ and of my objection. The ‘essay’ on Newspeak for him constitutes at least one anti-utopian moment in Nineteen Eighty-Four – this on the grounds that Orwell is parodying ‘utopian plans for a universal, unambiguous language’ while at the same time ‘allud[ing]’ to ‘anti-utopian parodies’ of those, ‘such as … [Swift’s] projectors’ replacement of words by sacks of things’ (116). This may be said to qualify as an insight; but so long as it leaves out Newspeak’s dystopian – i.e., not purely literary-intertextual – dimension (by Morson’s definition of ‘dystopia’ as well as my own), it risks anachronizing Orwell’s term-concept by amalgamating it with Universal Language Schemes that were barely still alive when Swift satirized them in the 1720s. To be fair, Morson subsequently stipulates (117–18) that ‘an anti-generic work’ of any sort (and perhaps others as well) can be generically constructed in more than one way; and here the only possible difference between his conception of genre and that running through this book of mine is that he seems reluctant to accord any given text anything in excess of two generic possibilities (or so I infer from the short list of examples at the bottom of his p. 117). 11. Wells drops the term ‘stereoscopic quality’ into a March 1894 letter to his friend A. M. Davies. On the grounds for this as a brilliant metaphor, see my edition of Moreau, xlvi (n. 57), and also my note below (47) on Huntington. 12. On the date of We’s composition, see nn. 38 and 62 below.

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13. The distinction between ‘dystopia’ and ‘anti-utopia’ that I am in the process of developing throughout the present chapter (and also in my subsequent consideration of A Story of the Days to Come) has been the subject of contestation for close to a decade. Tom Moylan’s Scraps of the Untainted Sky offers a lucid and illuminating historical account of the terminological debate(s) under the chapter-heading ‘New Maps of Hell,’ esp. 129–45. His own nomenclature, however, is exactly the reverse of mine: i.e., he ascribes to dystopia the characteristics that I call anti-utopian, and vice-versa. In that regard, my usage is consistent with Lyman Tower Sargent’s suggestion: that the dystopia (or ‘negative utopia’) intends to present a society ‘considerably worse’ than the contemporary reader’s, whereas anti-utopia means its societal depiction to be ‘view[ed] as a criticism of utopianism or of some particular eutopia’ (‘Three Faces …’ 9). 14. The words quoted come from the passage in Nicolai Berdyaev’s Un nouveau moyen age (262–63; my translation) which Huxley uses as the epigraph for Brave New World. (In the English version of the Berdyaev as The End of Our Time, they appear on p. 187.) The fact that the ‘New Middle Ages’ of Berdyaev’s polemic is less the product of modern technology than it is of the Bolshevik Revolution (which he unqualifiedly detests, particularly from his standpoint as a convert from ‘Legal Marxism’ to Orthodox Christianity [see E. H. Carr 10]) points to one potent source of dystopianism. Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937, under the pseudonym of ‘Murray Constantine’), even by its title alone, identifies another. (Burdekin there rather fully anticipates Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale [1985], as Robert Crossley points out in ‘Dystopian Nights’ 96–98. See also Carlo Pagetti’s discussion of Swastika, ‘In the Year of Our Lord Hitler.’) 15. I mean ‘disciplinary’ to have a resonance with Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir (1975) in its English translation as Discipline and Punish (1977). 16. Politeia 602C–606E. On the claims being made in Plato’s day for the educative function of poetry, see, for instance, the Politeia 600B–C; on the consequent quarrel between poetry and philosophy, see the Politeia 607B, and also Francis M. Cornford’s introductory remarks to Book Ten, in his edition of The Republic of Plato 321–22. 17. Compare Karl R. Popper 1:159–60, 173–74. 18. ‘The generally accepted view is that portions of the first and third voyages [in Gulliver’s Travels] go back to some version dating from 1714…. It has recently been argued [by Arthur Case], on the other hand, that when Swift began writing in 1721 there was no earlier draft in existence….’: Ricardo Quintana 146. (There are additional and/or other possibilities regarding Swift’s composition of the Travels – among which, however, only the one inferable from n. 24 below is germane to my present argument.) 19. All citations from Swift refer to The Prose Works. 20. For examples of essays of the first-mentioned sort, see those listed on A Soviet Heretic’s contents page(s) under the rubric ‘The Writer’s Craft.’ Probably the most important of the statements of Zamyatin’s which I characterize as ‘untranslatable’ (in this case, apart from its title-conception) is ‘Scythians?’ (1918 – ibid. 21–33), but virtually all the writings that Mirra Ginsburg categorizes as having to do with ‘The State of Russian Literature’ could otherwise serve as instances. 21. All of these words cooperate in rendering the sense of Zamyatin’s term, for which see n. 41 below. 22. ‘Politics vs. Literature,’ CEJL 4:210. The Travels leaves no doubt that the Houyhnhnms are an ideal representation; but the indisputable fact that they are so for Gulliver (and hence for whatever he may be taken to stand for) does not dispose of the question as to whether they are Swift’s ideal of what human beings could and/or should be. 23. Swift defines the dialectical relation between the first two books of the Travels in terms of the ‘Proportion of Twelve to One’ which he has Gulliver insist on (I.3:45) – i.e., Gulliver:Lilliputians::Brobdingnagians:Gulliver::12:1. Whatever ironic doubt may redound on its mathematical exactitude as endorsed by Gulliver, the proportion

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certainly holds for establishing that Gulliver in Book One is, as it were, a Brobdingnagian, and in Book Two a Lilliputian. 24. The paragraphs in GT I.6:59–61 on prelapsarian Lilliput (so to speak) come as a surprise inasmuch as Lilliput has already been well established as satirically resembling extratextual (European) reality rather than presenting an ideal contrast. From this I infer that the discourse about Lilliput’s original institutions marks a revisionary moment – i.e., it stands as a vestige of Swift’s initial conception of Book I, at least, as primarily a visionary Utopia. 25. Esprit in French still retains all the (secular) meanings that ‘spirit’ had for Swift and his contemporaries (but has since largely lost) – including, most notably, ‘wit’ or ‘intelligence.’ For a fuller discussion of Swift’s satiric attack in Book Three on (scientific) theories tending to reduce mind and logos to mechanism, see my Into the Unknown 9–12. 26. Swift’s distinction between the ‘nominal’ and the ‘real’ logically informs his Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (ca. 1708, in Prose Works 2:27ff.): see my analysis in ‘Swift’s “Lost” Answer to Tindal’ 386–88. 27. See my essay on ‘Swift, Gulliver, and “The Thing Which Was Not’’’ 74–77, for a further analysis of Lagado’s projects for reducing words to things and of the ‘Tribnia’ interpolation, which is much to the same point, but from within (written) language. 28. Translation is necessarily involved because the Yahoos are not humans. Gulliver, though he evidently believes otherwise (and would have his readers do the same), identifies the chief perceivable differences in his letter to his Cousin Sympson – viz., that humans ‘use a Sort of Jabber, and do not go naked’ (GT 8). These, moreover, have a connection (via a common understanding of the biblical Fall) with a further difference which, while not equally available to sense perception, is as much a given, or fictifact, as the Yahoos’ ignorance of speech and clothing is: namely, that the Yahoos in their behavior (and even their physical being) embody natural rather than moral evil (le mal physique rather than le mal morale according to the distinction of Swift’s French contemporaries). Gulliver unwittingly says as much when he reports that his Houyhnhnm master ‘no more blamed … [the Yahoos] for their odious qualities, than he did a Gnnayh (a Bird of Prey) for its Cruelty, or a sharp Stone for cutting his Hoof’ (IV.5:248; cf. IV.8:267). 29. This distinction is one that Swift himself makes (in terms of animal rationale and animal rationis capax) in an oft-quoted letter to Alexander Pope dated Sept. 29, 1725. See The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift 3:103. 30. This is the purport of a long – indeed, seemingly overlong and pointless – passage wherein Gulliver’s master endeavors, without success, to classify him properly as a Yahoo or a Houyhnhnm (IV.7:259–60). 31. If ‘Nature’ and ‘Reason’ are not precisely identical among the Houyhnhnms, at least they complement – in fact, entail – one another. This is the logic of: ‘As these noble Houyhnhnms are endowed by Nature with a general Disposition to all Virtues … so their grand Maxim is, to cultivate Reason, and to be wholly governed by it’ (IV.8:267). It is also an implication of the Houyhnhnm truism that ‘Nature and Reason were sufficient Guides for a reasonable Animal’ (IV.5:248) when juxtaposed with ‘Reason alone is sufficient to govern a Rational Creature’ (IV.vii.259 – a rewording wherein ‘Reason’ apparently comprehends ‘Nature’). 32. An Essay on Man (1733–34) I:294; IV:394. 33. The threat to unanimity posed by linguistic change is evident from the instance of the Struldbruggs: The Language of this Country being always upon the Flux, the Struldbruggs of one Age do not understand those of another; neither are they able after two Hundred Years to hold any Conversation (farther than by a few general Words) with their Neighbours the Mortals; and thus they lye under the Disadvantage of living like Foreigners in their own Country. (III.10:213)

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34. In the Politeia 597A–602C, Plato charges poetic imitation, or mimesis, with being three removes from Reality, the realm of Ideas, and therefore from Truth; he then goes on (602C–606E) to accuse tragedians of encouraging the rebellion of passion against reason. 35. The Houyhnhnm contention ‘it was impossible that there could be a Country beyond the Sea’ illustrates the fallibility of Houyhnhnm pronouncements when they are applied literally to the universe beyond the limits of Houyhnhnmland. 36. One of Gulliver’s remarks establishes the ambiguity of the circumlocution: ‘if good Fortune ever restored me to my native Country, to relate my Travels hither, as I resolved to do; every Body would believe that I said the Thing which was not; that I invented the Story out of my own Head’ (GT IV.3:238–39). Gulliver supposes he can follow the example of the Houyhnhnms, to whom lies and fiction are one and the same. In saying that they have provided the model for him to ‘strictly adhere to [literal] Truth’ (IV.12:292), Gulliver is therefore also claiming that his Travels is non-fiction. For the (Puritanical) grounds and consequences of his doing so, see my ‘Swift, Gulliver … ’ 70–75. 37. In the longstanding and ongoing debates as to whether More and Swift themselves endorse the utopian ideal to which they give literary expression, critics on both sides of the question have appealed to evidence outside the texts whose meaning is at issue. This in the case of Gulliver’s Travels is uncalled for (or so I am arguing by the way): the fiction – and especially Book Four – holds the answer, thereby disposing of what must otherwise be (and has been for more than two centuries) a standoff, particularly in view of the fact that Swift’s other writings equally evince both his skepticism about and his attraction to the sort of Rational Ideal that the Houyhnhnms represent. More’s book, on the other hand, offers no such resolution to the argument over its author’s endorsement of a utopia which, attractive as it is in its contrast to political actuality as More depicts it, remains curiously uninformed by the Revealed Truths of Christianity. This point of difference between Utopia and the Travels doesn’t enter into John Traugott’s seminal (and much anthologized) comparison of the two; nor, for that matter, would he likely approve it (countering as it does his belief that Swift stands with the Houyhnhnms). Yet the solid grounds for the connection Traugott makes between the More and Gulliver’s Travels may well have been the source for that difference: i.e., thoroughly conversant as Swift was with Utopia, the hints he took from it possibly included a lesson on how not to proceed. 38. In both ‘I Am Afraid’ (1921) and ‘Fyodor Sologub‘ (1924), ‘Swift’ appears in contexts suggesting that he was more than a name to Zamyatin (see A Soviet Heretic 57, 221; I am grateful to D. J. Richards, 21–22, for the second of these references). And certainly Zamyatin’s command of English was up to his reading the Travels in the original. None the less, the strict sense in which I intend my words about Swift and Zamyatin still holds: We betrays nothing of the influence of Gulliver’s Travels, however great (or negligible) that may actually have been. As for the dating of My (or Muy, an alternative transliteration that better conveys the sound of the Russian word for ‘we’), Alex Shane can, I think, be taken as authoritative with regard to the terminus ad quem of its composition. He reports (38n) that (his friend) Zilboorg was already working in 1922 on the English translation that constituted My’s first published form. Shane’s supposition that Zamyatin’s efforts extended well into 1921 seems to me plausible; and certainly it is consistent, inter alia, with We’s likely debt to Viktor Chernov (for which, see n. 62 below). 39. Unless otherwise indicated, I quote We in Clarence Brown‘s rendition, though occasionally with modifications (of the last two sentences in the present quotation) made with the obliging assistance of Tatiana Bedjanian of McGill University. Neither of the most readily available translations by which We is commonly known to readers of

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English – Gregory Zilboorg’s and Mirra Ginsburg’s – faithfully renders the peculiarities of Zamyatin’s Russian. (B. G. Guerney’s is arguably better than either of those two, but it has long been out of print and is hard to come by.) Meanwhile, B. Cauvet-Duhamel’s Nous autres (the translation that Orwell self-reportedly read) is not quite as good as any English version, mostly because the language of We lends itself even less to French than to English rendering. My/Muy abounds with punctuation marks that look like English dashes – to an extent which finds almost no parallel outside the time of its composition (and even there chiefly in some of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s work). These dashes, moreover, are but the most visible signs of the thoroughly elliptical nature of the verbal expression. Both Zilboorg and Ginsburg as a rule excise these ellipses, figuratively as well as literally. Her translation otherwise tends to adhere more closely to the Russian than his; but Zilboorg’s somewhat more interpretative rendition is sometimes closer than hers to We’s meaning – or rather, is better conveyant of it to an anglophone readership. 40. So, too, the ‘I’/‘he’ distinction reappears toward the end as ‘the real me’ vs. ‘the shaggy me’ (39:217). Meanwhile – roughly midway between that moment and the passage quoted from Record 5 – the reflecting mirror becomes an absorbing mirror (in the course of a doctor’s explanation to D-503 of the acquired disease known as a ‘soul’ – 16:86–88). 41. The Russian word comprises any and all of these meanings. It is not, however, the word Russian uses for translating ‘United States’ (my thanks to Darko Suvin for this lexicographical datum). That resonance in Gregory Zilboorg’s translation of We is none the less not totally malapropos in view of the fact that Taylorism is, after all, an American invention. It is quite likely, I think, that Zamyatin intended his term for We’s (would-be) monolithic socio-political order to resonate with the one which presently made its way (with ‘frequent repetition’: Carr 407) into the Soviet Constitution. The latter’s words for ‘single union state’ are odno Soiuznoe gosudarstvo; We’s, Edinoe Gosudarstvo. It is true that the Constitution in question dates from 1923; but E. H. Carr, whose translation I have just quoted, reports that ‘single union state’ appears in other ‘documents of the period’ (ibid.), presumably going back to 1919/20 at least and possibly containing variant wordings closer to Zamyatin’s. 42. As Patrick McCarthy was the first to note in connection with We, Lenin published three newspaper articles in praise of Taylor in the spring of 1918 (see McCarthy’s ‘Zamyatin … ’ 124, 128n.8, for further details, also of the bibliographical sort). The information I presently retail (in n. 44) makes it conceivable – and perhaps quite likely – that Lenin’s articles were responsible for bringing Taylor to Zamyatin’s attention! 43. A host of commentators have by now rather thoroughly canvassed Zamyatin’s use of F. W. Taylor (though not with regard to those pertinent details about Zamyatin’s Islanders that figure in my next note). But whatever credit priority brings with it should go, I believe, to Caroline Rhodes. 44. In Islanders, a lawyer named O’Kelly jokes about a parliamentary bill to make Englishmen’s ‘noses … [all] the same length’ on the grounds that ‘it’s the only irregularity left, which must of course be eliminated’ (39). This novella also foresees We’s Taylorism (but without any reference to F. W. Taylor) in the person of Rev. Dewley, whose Precepts of Compulsory Salvation proposes the regular timetabling of recurrent human activities, including sex (Islanders 15 et passim). This, moreover, Zamyatin associates with another character’s (Campbell’s) penchant for ‘construct[ing] a syllogism’ to fit each of his life-situations so that ‘[e]verything bec[o]me[s] as simple as a square’ (Islanders 28 – an instance typical of the geometrically metaphoric thinking which makes Campbell D-503’s prototype). For a more extensive discussion of the relationship to We of Islanders and Zamyatin’s other ‘English’ satire (‘A Fisher of Men’), see T. R. N. Edwards 37–44.

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45. Both Zamyatin’s contempt for Futurism and his grounds for associating it with the One State are clear from the sentence in his reflections on ‘Moscow – Petersburg’ (1933) wherein he characterizes ‘the Futurists’ as ‘compose[rs of] occasional odes glorifying the logical element of reason’ (A Soviet Heretic 147). (It may be worth noting by the way that the One [City-]State is to some extent modeled on Petersburg, or at least on Zamyatin’s residential perception of Petersburg: ‘Petersburg is all straight lines, all geometry and logic’ [‘Gryadushchaya Rossiya,’ 1921 – in A Soviet Heretic 69; cp. Edwards 86].) His brief essay ‘I Am Afraid’ (1921 – see A Soviet Heretic 55) indicates that he was not of a different mind about the Futurists at the time he wrote We. William Hutchings, in a somewhat complementary argument on the subject (which comes with pictorial illustrations), rather sharply differentiates the Italian from the Russian Futurists, making the first Zamyatin’s chief antagonists (Hutchings 89–90, 92– 93). But We in my view draws no such distinction, as Hutchings in effect concedes when he brings in the Constructivists and the Suprematists (94–98), who are at least close relatives of the Futurists – indeed, in some respects are Futurists under another name. Furthermore, Hutchings largely emphasizes Constructivism’s influence on the One State’s architecture (in the most usual meaning of the word) at the expense of the input of Suprematist painting (e.g., of the work of El Lissitsky, Ilia Chasnik, Kasimir Malevich, and Nicolai Suetin – probably in that order – in the late 1910s and the 1920s), not only on the geometricality of Zamyatin’s City-State, but also on We’s palette, so to speak – i.e., its green’s, blue’s, etc. 46. The other particularly salient instance that Ivan Karamazov’s parable informs is, of course, the Benefactor’s interview with D-503 (36:201–03). That is the only scene in We which might give any credence to Orwell’s suggestion that ‘Brave New World must be partly derived from [We]’ (CELJ IV, 72 – otherwise a preemptive strike, as it were, by Orwell; i.e., a proleptic defense of the then barely conceived Nineteen Eighty-Four against the charge of plagiarism). On the other hand, an alternative hypothesis is at least equally probable (is, in fact, certain if one accepts Huxley’s assurance that he hadn’t read We before writing Brave New World – see Christopher Collins 41n1, Shane 140n, and Peter Firchow 121–22): that Bernard Marx’s face-to-face encounter with Mustapha Monde comes directly from Dostoevsky without Zamyatin’s intervention (which is likely also true for the common influence of Days to Come vis-à-vis Zamyatin’s and Huxley’s staging of ‘the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalised, mechanised, painless world’ [Orwell in CELJ 4:72]). Some support for such a counter-hypothesis also comes from the fact that virtually everyone who has written about We – far too many to name – has noticed the influence of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ (with only a slightly lesser number leaving that of Notes from Underground unremarked). This also shows that Zamyatin did not miscalculate in counting on his readers’ familiarity with those two Dostoevsky productions at least. For a fuller account than I have seen reason to give of We’s references and allusions to Dostoevsky (and other Russian writers) – and also for a different view of the importance of Notes from Underground to Zamyatin’s conception of We – see Shane 141– 44, and Edwards 52–60 passim (who deal as well with We’s allusions to additional works by Dostoevsky and also to other Russian writers). I would also refer the reader to Philip Wegener’s extensive analysis (101ff.) of freedom vs. happiness in We. 47. ‘Two-world structure’ is a term-concept that John Huntington (in The Logic of Fantasy 21ff.) applies to many of Wells’s early fictions. Not only does it describe what is the rule with their fictifactual topography; it also epitomizes their (correlative) tendency to traduce generally accepted dichotomies, thereby calling into question the binary thinking which comes with those. 48. The words quoted come from ‘H. G. Wells’ (in A Soviet Heretic 267, 288). That essay of Zamyatin’s appeared at least twice as a separate publication, in 1922 and 1924 (perhaps, respectively, with and without the section headed ‘The Genealogy of H. G.

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Wells,’ or so it has been reported). It also figured as an introduction to a series of Russian versions of Wells titles. Russian was among the first foreign languages into which Wells was translated – and almost as extensively as into French. A multi-volume Russian edition appeared in 1909/10. This, however, was only the first phase of Wells’s ‘Russianization.’ In the years immediately following the October Revolution, the Soviets undertook another project for making Wells available, with Zamyatin as its editorial supervisor. His role, moreover, was not merely titular – at least not on the evidence of the British Library Catalogue, which (presumably on the basis of information from the volumes in question) assigns to him Russian translations of The Time Machine, The Sleeper Awakes, and The War in the Air. It is therefore likely that Zamyatin, if not the sole translator of these titles, at the least verified someone else’s rendition. (Shane says as much in his account [29– 31] of Zamyatin’s role in the World Literature Project that the three translations of Wells were a part of; but he neither gives nor seems to have any evidence for restricting Zamyatin’s input to that of an editorial supervisor. According to Shane’s list [247, entry no. 219], a Russian translation of Wells’s Tales of Space and Time, which would have included Days to Come, appeared in October 1923.) Whether there was any overlap between this project and its 1909/10 predecessor – and with it, more importantly, the question of new or revised Russian renditions of pre1909 Wells – I do not know. Indeed, the introduction that Wells furnished in 1909 – subsequently published in T. P.’s Magazine (Dec. 1911: 339–43) as ‘Mr. Wells Explains Himself’ – suggests that he himself did not precisely know which works of his the original translation project comprised. 49. Neuromancer, of course, is among those relatively few works of science fiction whose literary experimentation is comparable to We‘s. Of the several commentaries remarking that ‘Gibson fits his densely textured world [in Neuromancer] into the proven narrative pattern of the caper story,’ the first in print was Terence Whalen’s (just quoted, 83), and perhaps the subtlest Neil Easterbrook’s (under the rubric ‘Gothic Inconsequence’ 389–90). Prior to either of these, however, Gibson himself had said much the same thing (though without being generically specific): ‘I knew I was so inexperienced that I was going to need some kind of traditional plot armature which had proven its potential for narrative traction… . [S]ince I didn’t have a pre-set notion of where I was going with these things [i.e., with what Zamyatin might have called the revolutionary content of Neuromancer], the plot had to be something I already felt comfortable with, a familiar structure’ (McCaffery [1988] 224–25). Although Whalen cites these words in a note attaching to his supposition that the motive behind Neuromancer’s tried-and-true plot was to ‘ensure [the book’s financial] success’ (83), Gibson instead testifies to having relied on a popular-literary formula because he did not think himself capable of a formal invention suitable to the otherwise experimental nature of his fiction. That is precisely where Neuromancer differs from We. Zamyatin certainly seizes upon a ‘paraliterary’ plot formula; but his fiction can hardly be said to rely on, let alone fall back on, or collapse into, it – in significant part because We ironizes any and every moment at which the formulaic, or conventional, would take over We’s ‘structure of feeling’ (to bring in the term that Suvin borrows from Raymond Williams: see Suvin’s ‘On Gibson …’ 46 et seq.). No doubt the clearest instance of this has to do with D-503’s romantic idea of I-330 – which is also to say, his popular-romance (selfdelusional) construction of her. 50. Perhaps the most cogent of such readings of We as ‘a Stalinist Dystopia’ is M. Keith Booker’s. Booker, however, pays too much attention to the One State’s ‘attempts … [to] control sexual energies’ (32–35) and too little to We as Spy Story. His reading is thus liable to the criticism emanating from many of Zamyatin’s other fictions, and most notably from those set in England, not Russia – viz., Islanders (1917) and ‘The Fisher of Men’ (1918), both of which feature (bourgeois/English) attitudes toward sexuality of

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the sort that Booker characterizes as ‘Stalinist.’ Zamyatin’s first book-length fiction, Na kulichkakh (1913/14 – i.e., ‘At the World’s End’; in the 1988 English translation, A Godforsaken Hole), likewise problematizes the One State’s putative ‘Stalinism’ by reason of the chapter (§12) which Tsarist authorities likely found the most prosecutable – the one headed ‘The Benefactor.’ That label sarcastically applies to the commanding General who blackmails a subordinate officer’s wife into having sex with him (to save her husband from court martial for having accused the general – rightly – of pocketing both public monies intended for horses’ fodder and private roubles supposedly destined for his soldiers). A quite different problem also attaches to any reading of We as foreshadowing Stalin: namely, that Zamyatin thereby appears more obtuse than clairvoyant in ‘foreseeing’ that the One State-as-U.S.S.R. would come out of a civil war of 200 years’ duration and a thousand years later would still be subject to Counter-Revolutionary forces. To the extent that those two elements correspond to Soviet actuality at the time when We was in the making, they might be looked upon, not as predictive, but as instancing Zamyatin’s mordant, or pessimistic, sense of humor. Andrew Barratt’s subtle and sophisticated reading of We, predicated as it is on the generic construction of the book as an ‘adventure story’ (345–47), in effect illustrates (some of) the interpretative possibilities that – to my mind – We as Spy Story offers. According to that last understanding, D-503 appears as being a(nother) double agent (see n. 55 below). 51. Barratt’s interpretation I believe complements mine, also in regard to its connection with We’s/D-503’s use of language. Barratt makes a case for D-503 (and also I-330) as victim of self-deception. (The one point we ostensibly disagree about seems to me to undermine his argument here: he insists that some ambiguous [Russian] words to the Benefactor during their interview indicate D’s prior awareness of I-330’s possible treachery: Barratt 347.) With D-503 at least, the tendency to deceive himself comes from his ‘divided personality’ and finds expression in his ‘two radically different types of discourse,’ the mathematico-scientific and the imagistic (Barratt 357–58). The potentially disjunctive force of ‘radically different’ is contrary to the sense of We’s (point about) language which I am trying to convey. In that regard, and also for the sake of further elucidation, I would appeal to Gary Rosenshield, who (unlike me) has a direct access to Zamyatin’s Russian equal to Barratt’s and posits an all-but-identical linguistic dichotomy. Rosenshield (52–53), however, sees that split as holding only until ‘the rational side begins periodically to alternate and combine with one much more emotional, suggestive, and poetic’ (54). This is entirely to my point, except in its/ Rosenshield’s silence on the dialectical aspect of ‘alternate and combine.’ Similarly consistent with my own argument is Barratt’s truly dilemmatic positioning of D-503 between the Mephi and the One State/Benefactor. To my mind, moreover, Barratt (without saying so) accurately represents the convolutions whereby Zamyatin’s engineer may properly appear as being a surrogate for his author (a problematic matter susceptible of further clarification on the basis of an analogy with Swift vis-à-vis Gulliver). 52. It is worth noting, however, that I-330 is not liquidated in precisely the sense that R-13 is (for having written a poem deemed heretical). She is put under the Glass Bell, a torture device which deprives its victims of oxygen. He, on the other hand, is subjected (by the Benefactor himself) to ‘the Machine,‘ some contraption designed ‘to melt‘ ‘[t]he spread-eagled body‘ into ‘[a] puddle of chemically pure water‘ (9:48). The latter (alone) literalizes what was surely (ca. 1920) a neologistic usage of liquidate (likvidirovat’ in Russian), a word which hitherto had had economic but not political import. (I have not been able to establish a date for the Russian usage or even Russian’s foreign-language source of the word; but for the French equivalent [liquider, from which the Russian possibly derives], the Dictionnaire historique de la langue française [1992] records an instance in 1928.)

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53. Brown’s translation of this passage is far preferable to Zilboorg’s and Ginsburg’s (and even Guerney’s) for not giving the square a greater degree (and different kind) of (self)consciousness than Zamyatin’s text warrants – or so I am informed by the Russophones who kindly allowed me to ply them with queries (in this case, I should admit, with a leading question. Here again I am especially grateful for the help of Ms. Bedjanian, but also for that of Concordia librarian Vladimir Hakien.) Put otherwise, D503’s personified square is, at most, at about the same stage as his ‘namesake’ in Edmund Abbott’s Flatland (1884) when the latter square first realizes that not all worlds are two-dimensional like his. (The resemblance need not be attributable to Zamyatin’s having read Abbott’s little book; it may instead be the result of coincidence – i.e., of mathematical minds thinking alike.) 54. Barratt’s rendering of a pertinent comment in Zamyatin’s essay on ‘Literature, Revolution, Entropy’ conveys in itself a sense of ‘dialectical’ otherwise available only from the full context of Ginsburg’s translation of the words in question: ‘it is the essence of the dialectical process that today’s truths become tomorrow’s errors’ (Barratt 353; cp. A Soviet Heretic 110). Most of my subsequent remarks about We can be regarded as, in effect, a gloss on (what I take to be) Zamyatin’s meaning here. See also Wegener’s observations about ‘the dialectical nature of … [Zamyatin’s] concept of infinite revolution’ (109–10). We’s dialectic is something that Peter Rupert insists upon almost as much as I do. At the outset he characterizes the fiction as having a ‘dialectical structure’ (Reader in a Strange Land 108). It presently becomes apparent that he is thinking of ‘the dialectical oppositions at work in Zamyatin’s novel’ (112), and more particularly of ‘the I/we dialectic’ (113). Beyond this, however, Rupert does not pursue such a dialectic with regard to the pronomial and other linguistic features of We – in part because (as the title of his own book implies) he would have the reader, not the text, be the locus of meaning. Shane, without even using the word, points to certain dialectical elements in We’s ‘names’ (161n). Among these, two are especially noteworthy: (1) that the (Cyrillic) letter component of the Builder of The Integral’s designation may stand for ‘Differential;’ and (2) that the ‘R’ in ‘R-13’ may be intended as ‘the mirror image’ of the/D-503’s Russian pronoun ‘I’ (in Cyrillic a reversed ‘R’). 55. Especially pertinent here is the passage where D-503 supposes, first, that he has become ‘a microbe’ rather than ‘a phagocyte,’ then that he is a microbe ‘pretending to be’ a phagocyte (22:124). This description of double-agency fits in with Robert Russell’s astute analysis (37–39) of R-13. 56. Russian does not strictly require subject-pronouns to nearly the extent that English does; they may instead be left implicit in the verb. The proliferation of I’s in We can therefore be properly be regarded as a belonging to the fiction’s subversive dialectic. 57. Conceivably Zamyatin by his title is also sardonically appropriating a sentence in a letter of Feb. 7, 1870, from Mikhail Bakunin to a French sympathizer: ‘I don’t want to be I, I want to be We’ (the original French reads, ‘Je ne veux pas être Moi, je veux être Nous’: see Arthur Lehning, ed. 272). The immediate context of this aphorism is as curious for an anti-statist like Bakunin as it is apropos for We: Bakunin is calling for anarchists to model themselves on the Jesuits at least with respect to that Order’s ‘absolute effacement of the individual in the will, in the organization, and in collective action’ (ibid.). 58. I found confirmation in Rosenshield for my understanding of D-503’s last words. He points out that the Russian word for ‘must’ which Zamyatin has chosen connotes ‘morally necessary rather than historically inevitable’ (59). 59. For a full discussion of how Orwell came to conceive of Newspeak, see Howard Fink’s essay.

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60. According to ‘Goldstein’s’ The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, ‘The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same’ (2.9:211). 61. With regard to this particular connection between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Gulliver’s Travels, We may (again) stand where this essay-chapter of mine positions it: as intermediary between Swift and Orwell. Robert Russell in effect says as much. On the basis of a close reading of a passage at the end of Record 21 (wherein a ‘horse, … [a wooden] chair, and D-503 himself are mixed up and associated with each other in a syntactical puzzle which defies logic’), Russell concludes that ‘[t]he gulf between the inanimate chair and the animate horse is … unbridgeable in the Single State, for in the language of the Single State there is a direct (‘rational’ would be the word used by its inhabitants) relationship between a word and its referent, rendering ambiguity impossible’ (Russell 44). This point about language, and especially about the One State’s view of language, would not likely have been accessible to Orwell or anyone else reading Zamyatin in translation. Orwell may, however, have arrived at the similarly neo-Houyhnhnmesque conception of language articulated in The Principles of Newspeak from his understanding of a notion which was gaining currency in the 1940s: the ‘Sapir-Whorf’ hypothesis. As put forward by Edward Sapir and refined by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf, the hypothesis maintains that language has determining effects on thought (and rather more as consequence of the thought-directive content of a given language’s ‘grammar,’ or syntax, than of the discriminatory power and limitations of its lexicon). In Whorf’s words: each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar…. (‘Science and Linguistics’ [1940], in Whorf 212) 62. The life-experience which went into it notwithstanding, Koestler’s book is the ideational, or ideological, creature of We as much as Nineteen Eighty-Four is – indeed, perhaps more, because requiring no misprision of the Zamyatin on Koestler’s part. This is, of course, to say that Darkness at Noon’s governing analogy – expressible, for brevity’s sake, as one between the Spanish Inquisition and the Soviet police apparatus which finally became the KGB – is clearly anticipated (as can be seen without Koestler’s assistance) in We’s discourse concerning institutional Christianity (usually, but not always, in a Dostoevskian context, so to speak). We’s thinking on that subject may have been inspired by a Social-Revolutionary leader named Viktor Chernov. In a May 1920 speech to an assembly (mainly of trade unionists) in Moscow, he ‘compared socialism [i.e., of the sort he preached] with primitive Christianity and the degeneracy of the Bolsheviks with that of the mediaeval church’ (Carr 175). Zamyatin’s nearly identical point could, of course, have come from some other source that he and Chernov both knew. But if it did originate with Chernov, then We must have still been far enough from its finished form by mid-1920 to have allowed for such an interpolation. And apart from any question of influence, Chernov in effect testifies to the ‘Koestlerian’ aspect of We as being Social Revolutionist (see Carr 162ff., for the significance of that characterization). 63. This term-concept is Ursula Le Guin’s invention; and as such it informs the fiction which it subtitles, The Dispossessed (in a way that my chapter on Le Guin is meant to clarify). But see also Rupert 121–49, who makes ‘ambiguous utopia’ the name of a (sub)genre – and in the process mentions Zamyatin often enough to lend implicit support to my claim for him as its literary father.

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§2. Generic Configurations of A Story of the Days to Come 1. ‘From Work to Text,’ the essay wherein Roland Barthes first puts forward the correlative term-concepts of œuvre and texte, is something of a performative utterance – i.e., it is ‘work’-like with regard to the distinction it apparently purposes to make, but ‘text’-like in its manner of doing so. That latter quality comes from Barthes’ employment of no fewer than seven different sets of conceptual coordinates, each of which has its own ‘intertextual’ resonance, to ‘differentiate’ texte from œuvre. I should therefore stipulate that in my own use of Barthes’ distinction, I have an eye, especially, to two of his coordinate-criteria (i.e., 4 and 5), and have somewhat delimited even their implicatory range. I thereby mean to exclude not only Barthes’ Saussurean – or (more broadly) his semiotic – frame of reference, but also those respects in which he more or less fully anticipates Jean Baudrillard’s notion of virtuality (albeit mostly via the terms of the Lacanian discrimination of ‘reality’ from the ‘real’: Barthes 74). Furthermore, my use of Barthes runs counter to the direction of his argument. By my definition of what he is saying, œuvre already conceives of texte, so to speak, by reason of the meaning of œuvre that English has primarily adopted: i.e., a body of work, usually by a single ‘author.’ Œuvre in that sense Barthes implicitly opposes to its other chief meaning in French, as a word signifying a single, or individual, work. Œuvre thus becomes self-deconstructive, as it were, in that the first – the collective – meaning specified calls into question the validity of the second’s assumption that a work can be considered without regard, most of all, to the linguistic-cultural materials which are its fabric. This discovery of the Barthesian conception of texte within œuvre entails another: that ‘The Text is read without the father’s signature’ (78) – i.e., irrespective of its author, and hence of his (or her) intentions. The argument I am in the process of presenting, taking Days to Come as the case in point, is that ‘works’ can be (generically) constructed as ‘texts’ in a way, or ways, that preserve(s) their intentionality. In effect, then, I am inflecting Barthes’ texte (back) toward œuvre. I am doing so, however, on the basis of an understanding of intention that differs significantly from his. Whereas he attaches to the word its pre-New Critical baggage (he speaks [only] of ‘the author’s declared intentions’: 78, my emphasis), ‘intention’ in my usage emanates from an œuvre, apart from which ‘authorship’ is a meaningless concept. (This is also to say that the WimsattBeardsley Intentional Fallacy does not serve Barthes’ argument unless that fallacy be misinterpreted – as it usually is – as proscribing intention altogether.) 2. Any reader who is able to distinguish, even vaguely, among the ‘seven types of ambiguity’ which William Empson sets out in the seminal and influential book with that title could easily multiply their number by at least something close to a factor of ten. 3. Admittedly, ‘market pressures’ have by now made all but the most quixotic, or worldly-unwise, of authors more conscious of genre in something like its traditional critical sense than was the case at just about any time prior to the onset (in the 1980s) of the megacorporate conglomeration of book publishing. (For a slightly outdated – and therefore now somewhat optimistic – account of those developments, see Cristina Sedgewick’s essay.) I would argue, however, that even that writerly consciousness of genre is considerably more instantial than abstract, or more Aristotelian than Platonic (in terms of those philosophers’ respective epistemologies) – i.e., that those looking to produce something ‘marketable’ still think in terms of (best-selling) writers and titles rather more than in terms, say, of the rubrics that chain bookstores (now the final arbiters of what gets published) use as shelving-categories. 4. See my discussion of Zamyatin’s We in the chapter on ‘The Language of Utopia.’ 5. ‘A Story of the Days to Come’ was actually the running subtitle of the work published between June and October of 1899 in five monthly Pall Mall Magazine (PMM) installments: (1) ‘The Cure for Love … (Anno Domini 2090),’ PMM 18:186–99; (2) ‘The Vacant Country … (Anno Domini 2090),’ PMM 18:309–23; (3) ‘The Ways of the City …

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(Anno Domini 2090–95),’ PMM 18:491–505; (4) ‘Underneath … (Anno Domini 2098),’ PMM 19:81–94; and (5) ‘The Magnanimity of the Man of Pleasure … (Anno Domini 2097 [sic]),’ PMM 19:222–34. The PMM text thus appeared just after the serial version of When the Sleeper Wakes (in every weekly issue of The Graphic from January 7 to May 6, 1899) and just before Tales of Space and Time, where it was reprinted in slightly revised form as the companion to A Story of the Stone Age. Its relationship to those other stories of Wells’s – which also entails News from Nowhere and Looking Backward – arguably makes for three different generic contexts and with them, three different readings of Days to Come. 6. Quotations from A Story of the Days to Come (SDC) follow the text of Tales of Space and Time (1899) unless otherwise indicated; those from The Time Machine (TTM) cite the Heinemann – the first English – edition (1895); and for When the Sleeper Wakes the 1899 Harper text (which Wells subsequently retitled and otherwise slightly revised as The Sleeper Awakes, 1910). As in the case of all other primary sources cited, the references are to chapter:page(s) – apropos of which it should be noted that Wells conflated The Time Machine’s original 16 chapters to 12 for the ‘Atlantic Edition’ of his works. From its very first installment, the PMM serial anticipates Days to Come’s evocation of William Morris in the form of a Pre-Raphaelite-like frieze (always the same one) set atop the chapter-headings. The actual illustrations, on the other hand, are singularly malapropos: in addition to having almost no discernible connection to the actual narrative, they in themselves suggest that the story is the sort of romance-derivative of Sir Walter Scott that Wells heartily detested. They thus stand in marked contrast to the brilliant work of H. Lanos for The Graphic’s Sleeper – something not at all evident from the book version of Lanos’s futuristic illustrations, thanks partly to cropping but mostly to their stereotypic and reduced reproduction. 7. ‘The Well at the World’s End’ (Saturday Review, 82 [Oct. 17, 1896]: 413–15) is reprinted in (significant) part in HGW’s Lit. Crit. 111–13. 8. News From Nowhere came out first in Morris’s periodical, The Commonweal, in 1890, and then as a book sometime in the following year. 9. Consider, for example: ‘His dress was not like any modern work-a-day clothes I had seen, but would have served very well as a costume for a picture of fourteenthcentury life’ (News from Nowhere [NFN] 2:186). 10. I say ‘no proximate association’ because, as David Hughes pointed out to me, the dogs, ‘while … [their] brutishness and the human response it elicits are “primordial” [2:227] and owe nothing to machinery,’ ‘equally … belong’ ‘to machinery. [I.e.] Dogs, herdsmen, and sheep, separately or together, are chattel of the Food Company. The dogs as such, though “wild,” are employable, just like the ‘gigantic teazels [that] reared their favoured spikes [1:212]’ (pers. comm. of Nov. 6, 2000). 11. Concerning this devolutionary pattern, see my essay ‘The Logic of Prophecy…’ 57–62. 12. On John Thomas Gulick and his idea of ‘Divergent Evolution through … Segregation,’ see EW 85–86n. 13. Huxley himself later characterized Brave New World as presenting a tertium non datur: see his 1946 Foreword to that book. 14. In this regard, it is significant that the ‘wild flower’ which Denton and Elizabeth ‘came upon’ in the countryside (2:218) is reminiscent of Weena’s gift to the Time Traveller: flowers which the narrator of The Time Machine takes as emblematizing hope. I return to this connection in §III. 15. On J.-K. Huysmans, see SDC 5:304–06, and also the review by Wells referred to in HGW’s Lit. Crit. 133n4. The Huysmanism of which Bindon is representative is perhaps related to the import of the ‘stories … by post Victorian authors’ that Sleeper names (7:64–65): Henry James’s ‘The Madonna of the Future’ (1873), Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King (1888), and Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (1900). All three of those can be characterized as being about men with ‘brain-fever’ (James 2.4:49).

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Enhancing the possibility of a connection with Bindon is the fact that The Graphic’s Sleeper (69 [Jan. 28, 1899]: 106) does not mention the James or the Conrad, which may therefore have been additions which Wells made after writing Days to Come. 16. The quotation comes from ‘Morals and Civilization’ (1897), for which see EW 228. 17. In this regard, the precision of chronological information incorporated in the episode-titles of the PMM Days to Come stands in marked contrast to the pronounced (and no doubt equally deliberate) absence of such information in Nowhere. 18. Here it is worth recalling that the ancient Greek word topos is translatable as ‘place.’ Indeed, the entry for topos in Webster’s Dictionary includes the information that ‘common place’ (and hence ‘commonplace’) exactly corresponds to what topos is ‘short for’: koinos topos. 19. See n. 5 above. 20. I have supplied page references to the PMM Days to Come to substantiate its textual correspondence to the Tales of Space and Time version (except as later specified, in n. 40 and the paragraph to which it attaches). With The Graphic’s Sleeper, however, I have only recorded (some of) its deviations from the (first) book edition (for which, see n. 23). 21. ‘A Story of the Years to Come’ appears on the front cover of the 1899 redclothed Sleeper. This, Eric Korn informs me, is the first English edition (discernible as such only from the fact that ‘London’ precedes ‘New York’ on its title-page). The connection which the front-cover ‘subtitle’ makes with Days to Come would, of course, also have been a marketing ploy; but any such intention does not obliterate the significance that I am attaching to it (especially by reason of the difference between this particular ‘advertisement’ and Sleeper’s title-page identification of Wells – in both 1899 versions – as the author of The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds). 22. For the text of ‘Rediscovery of the Unique’ and of Wells’s epitome of the ‘lost’ text of ‘The Universe Rigid,’ see, respectively, EW 22–31 and EW 5–6 and 51–53. A discussion of The Time Machine’s complementary use of their seemingly opposed ideas can be found in EW 4–8 and 50–55. ‘Scepticism of the Instrument,’ a 1903 lecture, originally appeared in print in Mind, n.s. 13 (July 1904): 379–93. The passage most relevant to my present purposes is readily accessible in the ‘Atlantic Edition’ of Wells’s works, 9:345–52. For Stapledon’s similar conceptualizing of all this, see §III of my chapter on his ‘Tragi-Cosmic Vision.’ 23. Wells’s extant correspondence from the late 1890s clearly indicates that he conceived of Sleeper and Days to Come in the same order in which they were published. (This is also true for a work directly related to them, Anticipations [1901].) To be more precise, Sleeper’s composition dates from mid-May of 1897 (with Wells completing at least a near-final draft on March 6, 1898), whereas Days to Come’s is proximate to its actual serialization. See David Y. Hughes’s and my note on ‘Dating H. G. Wells’ for the evidentiary details. To be sure, Sleeper in its book version represents a revision of The Graphic serial, but the changes all count as revisions largely in the usual meaning of the word. Wells totally rewrote the ending (rightly judging the original to be weak: it had Graham dying sentimentally in the arms of a shepherd), and he also, for example, happily eliminated ‘strychnine’ and ‘ergot’ as palliatives or restoratives for the ill-effects of aviation (The Graphic 59:330). 24. On Looking Backward’s Sphinx as a possible inspiration for The Time Machine’s, see my note about ‘Wells’s Sphinx and Edward Bellamy.’ 25. See John Thomas’s account (in his introduction to Looking Backward, ed. cit. 70– 83) of the various problems that stymied Bellamy’s efforts to bring about the sort of Nationalist Party which he had envisioned. 26. The English rendition of the title of Djilas’ 1960 book is faithful to the SerboCroatian original. That Djilas is referring to an elite cadre in the would-be ‘classless society’ of Tito’s Yugoslavia does not, I think, vitiate the point of my connection.

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27. See n. 16 above. 28. This connection to Bellamy is perhaps clearer in Days to Come than it is in Sleeper by reason of what may be regarded as a revision, rather than an inconsistency, somewhat comparable to that concerning the statistic about London’s population in the twenty-second century. Initially, Days to Come leads us to believe that the future is socioeconomically bipartite: ‘The prosperous people lived … in the upper storeys …; the industrial population dwelt beneath’ (2:206); but later on we are told that ‘[t]he new society was divided into three main classes’: ‘[a]t the summit slumbered the property owner’; [b]elow was the enormous multitude of workers employed by the gigantic companies that monopolised control; and between these two the dwindling middle class … whose members led a life of insecure luxury’ (3:232–33). So, too, Denton’s firsthand experience of the Underworld of Labour Company ‘serfs’ engages – in effect, if not consciously – Bellamy’s prediction on the subject: that whereas ‘manual labor [in the nineteenth century] meant association with a rude, coarse, and ignorant class of people’ (LB 21:237), uneducated, uncultured ‘Brutishness is [now] eliminated’ (LB 21:239). 29. The ‘Overman’ idea also appears, fleetingly, in SDC 3:262 as a thought of Denton’s about ‘the things that are to come.’ 30. Graham’s role is expressly figured in Sleeper 18:221 as the Second Coming of a self-sacrificial Christ – a development foreseen in his escape from a ‘flying machine’ by means of a makeshift contraption described as ‘a cross of wood’ (8:91). 31. Perhaps the earliest sign in Days to Come of an intent to engage Bellamy directly (as already implied in n. 28 above) is Wells’s forsaking of Sleeper’s ‘kinematographphonograph’ in favor of a ‘phonograph machine’ of the kind that Looking Backward features. The latter device, both in Bellamy and in Days to Come, unmistakably anticipates the advent of radio, whereas Sleeper’s gismo instead is just as unmistakably a primitive television (which Wells was able to imagine on the basis of the same knowledge of the new technology of movie-making and its products that informs The Time Machine, and particularly its time-traveling sequences). 32. ‘Philosophical element’ is the term by which Wells originally specified what he had in common with Grant Allen; it appears in Wells’s undated reply (quoted in David Hughes’s 1966 essay, 88) to a letter from Allen of June 1895. Cf. my discussion of its significance in ‘Re-visions of The Time Machine,’ §IV. 33. Days to Come may be accounted a romantic comedy with regard to its plot, especially as that involves Bindon as a ‘blocking character’ whose removal enables not only the social rehabilitation of Denton and Elizabeth, but also their reunion after their ‘Underworld’ experiences have, to all intents and purposes, sundered them. 34. The phrase quoted comes from The Croquet Player (1936). Cf. my discussion of its meaning – also in relation to a literary self-conception that Wells had broached in his Experiment in Autobiography (1933) – in §IV of ‘Re-visions of The Time Machine.’ 35. See my remarks on The Time Machine as time machine in §I of the chapter on Lem’s Futurological Congress. 36. Cf. Patrick Parrinder’s hypothesis (Shadows 40–42) about the ‘802,701’ as an entropic number compounded of two different time-scales, one of which (the ‘2,701’ component) represents an interval suitable to the decline and fall of empires (a ‘human’-time dimension that Wells in effect conflates with or collapses into the geological, or ‘cosmic,’ time-scale which the full date suggests). 37. This term is to be found in ‘Zoological Retrogression’ (1891), in EW 159. 38. Wells clearly enunciates this lifelong principle of his in ‘The ‘Cyclic’ Delusion’ (1894). Having argued that there is no such thing as exact recurrence of any kind, he concludes that ‘the main course [‘of the universe’] is … from things that are past and done with for ever to things that are altogether new’ (EW 113). 39. ‘Age of Flint’ is the apt descriptor by reason of the significance that Wells’s ‘The

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Foundation Stone of Civilization’ (1894) imparts to Ugh-lomi’s invention of flint implements. In his brief essay on the subject (EW 234), Wells contends that such tools not only accompanied the demise of savagery, but were ‘the only thing that could engender civilization.’ 40. The additional sentence in full runs as follows: ‘They [the Stone Age ‘men’] had held a precarious foothold among bears and lions and all the monstrous violence of the past’ (5:322). Cp. PMM 19:233. 41. ‘Novels of the Week,’ The Spectator, no. 3725 (Nov. 18, 1899), 754. 42. The Divinity in play is ‘a Being of Life,’ a phrase that Wells substitutes for ‘Him’ (i.e., God) in what is otherwise his direct quotation of Acts 17.28 in SDC 4:293 (as given at the end of the paragraph preceding superscript 42). Cp. ‘Steele’s’ conception of ‘merger-immortality’ in The Anatomy of Frustration (1936), as discussed in my essay on that book of Wells’s 116–17. 43. It is far from evident that the phrase intervening between ‘as little concerned with men’ and ‘as a cyclone’ – ‘save as victims’ – is anything other than a sardonic qualification (given the nature of ‘the machinery of the state’ [4:275]). 44. ‘Human Evolution, an Artificial Process’ (1897), in EW 217. 45. ‘Zoological Retrogression’ (1891), in EW 158. 46. The term-concept ‘symbolic cluster’ comes from Kenneth Burke: see his exemplary discussion of S. T. Coleridge in The Philosophy of Literary Form 22ff. 47. ‘Machine minders’ is the term used at 4:267; the kind of work it epitomizes is described at 3:255–56. 48. Days to Come’s Moreau-like ambivalence toward civilization is detectable (though perhaps chiefly via Moreau) in this passage: ‘He [Denton] had regarded his security from physical violence as … one of the conditions of life…. But … [i]n the Underworld there was no law between man and man; the law and machinery of the state had become for them something that held men down’ (4:275). The last-quoted words, especially, have a Moreauvian double-meaning – i.e., as in Moreau, the Law here is recognized as being both oppressive (with regard to natural desire) and restraining (with regard to instinct brutality). 49. ‘Stone Age’ appears twice more at this point (see 1:195–96) and again at 4:286. 50. In choosing ‘science fiction’ rather than ‘scientific romance,’ I do not mean to dispute Brian Stableford’s thesis that those two terms can serve for differentiating an American from a British tradition of such fiction-writing. The former term, however, is the one most widely used – which may also be taken as an index of the fact that the boundary Stableford would mark is rather more commonly observed in the British Isles than it is anywhere else. 51. See n. 23 above. 52. See §1 of Todorov’s The Fantastic, and also the discussion of that book in my Afterword.

§3. Re-visions of The Time Machine 1. My epigraph comes from the chapter (18) headed ‘Pierre, as a Juvenile Author, Reconsidered.’ 2. The present chapter offers a preview of my theorizing of ‘governing conception’ in the section of my Afterword bearing that head. 3. For a short catalogue of Wells’s rewrites of other authors, see Patrick Parrinder’s ‘Utopia and Meta-Utopia’ 118. To Parrinder’s list might be added The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau as re-visions of William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890/ 91) and Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels (1726/35), respectively. See my chapter on A Story of the Days to Come for a consideration of that as another of Wells’s rewrites of the Morris

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and of When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) as a re-vision of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). 4. For Wells’s Universe Rigid idea, see EW 4–6 and 51–53. The text of The Chronic Argonauts (originally published in three issues of the Science Schools Journal in the spring of 1888) is most readily available in Bergonzi’s The Early H. G. Wells 187–214. 5. The words quoted are from the first volume of the Atlantic Edition, 0:xxi. An essay could be written on the metaphoric substance of Wells’s ‘under the influence’; cp. my edition of Moreau xxiii and xliv, n44. 6. These and the other four installments of the National Observer serial can be found in EW 57–90. 7. For Gulick, see EW 85–86n; and for Lamarck EW 9–11 and 77n. 8. On Sir George Darwin, see EW 89n and 112. 9. I set forth the ‘devolutionary’ pattern of The Time Machine’s vision of the future in my 1969 PMLA article, reprinted in revised form in Bergonzi, ed.; see esp. pp. 57–62 of the latter. In his essay on ‘Zoological Retrogression’ (1891), Wells maintains that ‘the suggestion of advance in biological phenomena’ has ‘an opposite idea’ as ‘its essential complement’: what he calls ‘degeneration’ (perhaps thinking of the Max Nordau book so titled). ‘[T]he real … line of [evolutionary] descent,’ he points out, ‘is … like the course of a busy man moving about a great city’ (EW 158ff.). He thus makes it clear that he understands that ‘devolution’ implies an erroneous view of evolution as teleological. None the less, it is highly arguable that such an understanding is foreign to The Time Machine’s conception of the future-as-Universe Rigid, though it is germane to the ‘opposite idea’ that enters into the fiction’s framing narrative: the idea of ‘the Unique’ (and the free will that goes with it – see EW 48–51, and also my ‘Revisions of the Future’ 24–28). 10. ‘Fictifact’ – or rather, the Polish equivalent – is a term of Stanislaw Lem’s invention. Denoting a fictive given rather than a fact about the ‘real’ world, it is predicated on a distinction between fantasy and reality that Lem subversively plays with throughout Futurological Congress, wherein he ironically defines a fictifact fictifactually: as a ‘dream programmed to order’ (73). Cp. the argument of ‘Futurological Congress as a Metageneric Text.’ 11. Wells’s critical insistence on the ‘logic’ of ‘fantasy’ dates from 1896: ‘[T]he elementary rule of the fantastic … [is] that, granted the fantastic assumption, the most strenuous consistency must be observed in its development’: HGW, ‘The Immature Fantastic’ 500. See also HGW’s Lit. Crit. 223. 12. ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances’ (1933) in HGW’s Lit. Crit. 243. 13. ‘Nebogipfel,’ however, is doubly ‘hillier,’ as it were, since it is compounded from the German word for summit (Gipfel) and the name of the mountain from which Moses viewed the Promised Land. The first one to discover the name of The Time Machine’s narrator was Frank McConnell (98n). It is worth noting by the way that a Hillyer also figures in another book Wells published in 1895, The Wonderful Visit: as the vicar, who resembles his putative namesake in The Time Machine in being sympathetic to an alien perspective, in this case the one that the Angel brings with him from his fourth dimension. 14. Cp. my discussion of The Time Machine as time machine in §I of ‘Futurological Congress as a Metageneric Text.’ Just about every other sense in which The Time Machine validates its name Bruce Sommerville in effect denies in his leap from the premise that the time machine has certain resemblances to a bicycle – an idea which Sommerville perhaps got from Christopher Priest’s ‘recursive’ fiction, The Space Machine (1976 – see esp. 22.3:331) – to the conclusion that Wells intends us to understand time-traveling as a hoax. On the other hand, the case that Nicholas Ruddick makes for The Time Machine’s ‘topicality’ is quite consistent with my point about its temporal self-consciousness. 15 See David Lake 4–6, for a summary of this rechaptering. 16. Henley’s letter (dated April 1, 1895) can be found in Bernard Loing’s book (419).

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17. The history of The Island of Doctor Moreau offers a possible parallel here. Sometime between that book’s original appearance and 1900 – perhaps ‘somewhen about 1898 or 1899’ (Atlantic Edition, I:0:xxii) – Wells made some fairly radical revisions (mostly retrenchments) for its French translation, and reportedly told the translator that future English editions of the book would incorporate those changes. But that didn’t happen, because Wells either forgot about them or changed his mind, again. See my edition of Moreau Appendix 4. 18. The metaphor here is curiously mixed: the relationship that the ants Wells alludes to have with the other insects they cultivate is symbiotic; but by way of his analogy with ‘fatted cattle,’ he instead represents it as predatory. 19. See John Huntington’s Logic 21–27. His application of the concept to The Time Machine (41–53) makes it clear that there, at least, ‘two-world structure’ names a series of such. 20. For Wells’s ideas on human evolution as ‘an artificial process,’ see Appendixes 5 and 6 of my edition of Moreau. 21. The phrase quoted is from ‘Human Evolution, an Artificial Process’ (1896); see my Moreau 193. It is worth noting, however, that when Blettsworthy himself first evinces this duality (in self-reflecting about his physical assault on the woman who has betrayed him with his friend), he speaks of it in terms evocative of The Time Machine: ‘It was as if I, a young savage, sat and brooded in silence while an old gentleman discoursed of Space and Time and Predestination and Free Will’ (Blettsworthy 1.5:49). 22. William Scheick (54) lists Candide first among the works by other authors that he finds ‘echoes from and revisions of’ in Blettsworthy – appropriately enough, given that Wells dedicates the book to Candide’s ’Immortal Memory.’ Voltaire’s priority can also be substantiated with reference, for example, to this comment of Blettsworthy’s: ‘I had started out life with the completest confidence in myself, mankind and nature, and all that confidence was gone’ (2.5:88). 23. The ‘Philosophical Investigator’ in effect holds ‘sanitary science’ responsible for the future in the fourth installment of the National Observer Time Machine: see EW 72–73. The idea makes a brief (but unmistakable) reappearance in Blettsworthy, via the remark that Lyduph Graves ‘seemed incapable of doubting that all the Megatheria in the world could not only be killed, but disposed of in an entirely sanitary manner’ (4.12:267). 24. Thus quoted, The Time Machine may seem perfectly in line with Spencer’s laissezfaire thinking, which would justify an economic struggle for existence as leading to the triumph of the fittest individuals. But in its continuation – ‘conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men’ (TTM 6:52) – The Time Machine goes on to repudiate the paramount Spencerian virtue of individualism in favor of human cooperation, an ethic, Wells has already argued, that biology sanctions far more than it does a neo-Hobbesian war of each against each (see ‘Ancient Experiments in CoOperation’ [1892] in EW 187–93). 25. Much could be said about Weena’s invocation of Sir Walter. Whatever admiration Wells had for him, he saw Scott’s contemporary influence as unqualifiedly pernicious – as is evident, for example, from his verdict that The Weir of Hermiston is ‘another brilliant testimony to the mastery of Scott, with gleams here and there of humour, of subtlety, of a whimsical stoicism curiously delightful, of all that Stevenson might have been had not the Scott tradition laid hold of him’ (‘The Lost Stevenson’ [1896], in HGW’s Lit. Crit. 101). 26. This is the second of two reversals of what Weena’s flowers signify. Much earlier on, the flowers that Arnold had bought for Olive Slaughter serve as a reminder of her – and his best friend’s, Lydulph Graves’s – betrayal of him (see Blettsworthy 1.5:50, 52): that is, they acquire a meaning diametrically opposed to that of the flowers Weena gives the Time Traveller, which Hillyer takes as ‘witness to … gratitude and mutual tenderness’ (Epilogue to TTM 152). For Borges’s interpretation of these flowers, see n. 28 of my chapter on him.

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27. Blettsworthy’s last clause here becomes (even more) ironic in so far as it brings to mind the Angel of Wells’s fantasy The Wonderful Visit (1895). 28. See TTM 3:20, 3:21, 3:22, 10:99, 10:104, and 15:144. Casey Fredericks, taking his cue solely from 802,701’s Sphinx, proposes that in The Time Machine ‘“man” is … the … riddle,’ ‘not the answer to her question’ (71). Brad Buchanan has some highly suggestive remarks about Oedipus’s connection to ‘hybridity.’ He styles the latter ‘a central fact of existence’ at a time when ‘extinction, degeneration or mutation’ were seen as distinct possibilities for humankind (Buchanan 35 – who doesn’t mention that Wells dealt separately with all three). Buchanan sees ‘[t]he Sphinx [as] recall[ing] [T. H.] Huxley’s threat of class war’ (45). 29. On The Time Machine’s claustrophobia, see Robert Weeks. 30. The Sphinx in Greek mythology is, of course, part lion as well as having the head of a woman; and this offers the basis for connecting The Time Machine’s Sphinx with Moreau’s puma. 31. The phrase in quotation marks is V. S. Pritchett’s (35). 32. See Scheick on ‘the splintering frame,’ but also his source, Experiment in Autobiography 7.5:415: The Novel in English was produced in an atmosphere of security for the entertainment of secure people…. Its standards were established within that apparently permanent frame and the criticism of it began to be irritated and perplexed when, through a new instability, the splintering frame began to get into the picture. I suppose for a time I was the outstanding instance among writers of fiction in English of the frame getting into the picture. It is, I think, worth noting that much of the first paragraph just quoted can be taken as an interpretation of The Time Machine. 33. The Croquet Player first invites comparison with the Eloi in saying, ‘We are the cream of humanity’ (1:6). 34. See Scheick’s analysis (80–87) of Star-Begotten. 35. The word ghost (or ghostly) occurs at least half a dozen times. In most cases it simply conveys the evanescence of whatever it attaches to: the miniature time machine (2:13), a ‘downpour’ (4:35), the Time Traveller as such (16:150). On the two occasions applying to the Morlocks (8:75, 80), however, it certainly connotes something more than that, consistent with the emotion-charged comparison of them to spiders (8:78) and rats (12:124); and that connotation carries over to the descriptor ‘ape-like’ (8:75, 77), especially by reason of the Morlocks’ being likened to ‘whitened Lemurs’ (9:87; my emphasis) but also via Wells’s reference to Grant Allen (8:75–76). Mention of Allen ties in, too, with the ‘Christmas’ ‘ghost’ that the Medical Man alludes to in 2:16 – this on the grounds that both raise the specter of the ghost story, for which see §IV’s ending. 36. See Parrinder’s 1976 essay as well as Mark Rose’s account of defining generic space, 19ff. 37. From an undated reply by Wells to a letter from Allen of June 1895 – quoted in Hughes’s 1966 essay (88). 38. See Hughes’s ‘A Queer Notion of Grant Allen’s’ (the title comes from TTM 8:75). It is quite likely that the express praise Wells got from the author of The Turn of the Screw (1898) came from Henry James’s cognizance of The Time Machine’s original treatment of ghost story elements along with his appreciation for its management of multiple viewpoints. See James’s letter to Wells of Jan. 29, 1900, in Edel and Ray 63. 39. The phrases quoted are from p. 29 of Darko Suvin’s Introduction to the volume edited by him and me; see also, in the same volume, his essay on ‘The Time Machine as a Structural Model for Science Fiction.’ 40. On The Time Machine’s connection with Dickens and Morris, see Parrinder’s 1976 essay. Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) is perhaps worth singling out from a legion of ghost stories that Wells seems to have had generally in mind, though the

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White Sphinx’s similarity to Collins’s ghost is tenuous. For Wells’s view of Lang, see HGW’s Lit. Crit. 83–87. Sanction for connecting The Time Machine with fairy tales comes, especially, from repeated reference to the Eloi as ‘the little people’ (7:65 and 10:96). 41. The 1921 and 1933 prefaces are reprinted in HGW’s Lit. Crit. 238–45; see also the editorial introduction to their section (§6). 42. See §7 of Wells’s autobiography and also the introduction to the section on Wells and James in HGW’s Lit. Crit. (179–88) and the first chapter of Robert Bloom’s book, esp. 22–23. 43. See my essay on Wells’s Anatomy, ‘Revisions of his Past.’ Wells’s self-definition as ‘a journalist’ appears in his letter to James of July 8, 1915 (reproduced in Edel and Ray 264). What Wells was thinking of is in all likelihood consistent with his assertion in the General Introduction to the Atlantic Edition of his works that ‘[a]ll art, all science, and still more certainly all writing are experiments in statement’ (xviii).

§4. Futurological Congress as a Metageneric Text 1. My reason for dropping the definite article from an English rendering of Kongress futurologiczny has to do with what I perceive as Lem’s exploitation of an ambiguity inherent in Polish grammar, which calls for no article whatever in this case (wherefore the English addition of ‘A’ would be as proper – or unjustified – as ‘The’ is). I have also deviated from the text English readers will be familiar with in regard to the name of the (imaginary) country in which the events of Futurological Congress transpire. Recognizing that there is something to be said for ‘Costa Rica’ (which encourages the illusion of a situation in the real world), I have nevertheless gone back to Lem’s text (mainly on the grounds that ‘Costa Ricana’ indicates the imaginary status of the setting even as it also points us toward a real place). Apart from those two exceptions, I have followed Michael Kandel’s translation, in its latest bibliographic incarnation, which – be it noted – differs in its pagination (but little else) from the 1976 Avon Paperback. 2. Here I particularly have in mind Mark Rose’s persuasive metageneric reading (82–95) of Solaris. 3. Cp. my discussion of The Time Machine in the foregoing chapter on Wells’s ‘Revisions …’ As there, my citations here refer to the chapter:page(s) of TTM’s first English edition, published by Heinemann in 1895. 4. The other principal external laws operative in the course of The Time Machine’s vision of the future – the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Theory of Tidal Evolution propounded by ‘the younger [i.e., G. H.] Darwin’ (TTM 8:76) – prove subservient to Charles Darwin’s. Cp. nn. 7–8 of my preceding chapter. 5. The Wellsian meaning of ‘invention’ is close to what Kingsley Amis intends ‘idea’ to signify. See Wells’s ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances’ (in HGW’s Lit. Crit. 241ff.) and Amis’ New Maps of Hell 118–19. 6. I am bringing together, in a way which gives a slightly different meaning to both, Darko Suvin’s argument in ‘A Grammar of Form and a Criticism of Fact’ and Patrick Parrinder’s in ‘News from Nowhere, The Time Machine, and the Break-Up of Classical Realism.’ 7. Here again I have inserted a phrase of Suvin’s (this time taken from his Introduction to H. G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction 29) in a context which alters its meaning: he emphasizes the point that The Time Machine stands as an ideological paradigm for the science fiction subsequent to it, whereas I am drawing attention to its influence as a generically self-conscious text. 8. Borges, by his seemingly paradoxical statement that ‘each writer creates his precursors,’ is calling attention to the fact that authors contemporary with us influence, and alter, our understanding of those in the past. Presumably the Argentine would also

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acknowledge the influence to be bilateral; see his ‘Kafka and his Precursors,’ in Other Inquisitions 111–13, and my discussion of the relevant passage in §II of the chapter on Borges. 9. Lem indicates his misgivings, in the ‘P.S.’ to his interview with Istvan CsicseryRonay, in these terms: ‘Futurological Congress is a depressing tale, but told funnily – i.e., with black humor’: ‘the mass starvations of the Third World’ ‘will only intensify,’ ‘because no local relief action will overturn the general trend. It is this type of implication that is hidden below the humorous surface of … Futurological Congress, which now reads rather strangely for me, for it feels much less fantastic (and thus, less entertaining) than when I wrote it’ (255, 257). 10. Here and elsewhere (most notably in The Investigation) Lem allows us to accept either Freud’s or the behavioral psychologist’s view of what count as dream stimuIi – perhaps not surprisingly, since their respective etiologies are not in this area wholly incompatible. 11. These episodes, perhaps needless to say, are not as discrete as such a scheme represents them as being; and the line of demarcation between (4) and (5) in particular can only be approximate. 12. Tichy’s question upon seeing ‘himself’ reflected in a mirror as a ‘little black woman’ – ‘Who was I then?’ (51) – articulates an identity crisis which subsequently finds expression in collective terms: see his diary entry for August 8, 2039, with its passage about ‘humanity … torn by the contradiction between the old cerebralness … and the new’ (67). This aspect of Futurological Congress’s meaning (which I touch upon again later on) signals a recurrent thematic preoccupation of Lem’s, figuring perhaps most prominently in Tichy’s ‘21st Voyage’ but never far from the center of significance in Lem’s other fictions. On this point both in itself and in its relation to language as a medium of (self)discovery, see my essay on ‘The Cybernetic Paradigms of Stanislaw Lem.’ 13. This ‘Voyage’ of Tichy’s can be found in English translation in The Star Diaries 194–256. This parable of Lem’s, which he refers to as ‘one of my most “teleologically” serious works, one that I personally attach great importance to’ (interview with Csicsery-Ronay 256), ties in with the significance of 2039’s ‘body shops’ and, even more, with Tichy’s report of the ‘most interesting discussion’ he has with ‘Father Modulus, a monk of the Nonbiologican order,’ regarding that order’s missionary activities among intelligent machines (FC 94–95). That passage, like much else about the Utopia of Plenty, evinces a concern with the ethical implications of ‘auto-evolution’ that Futurological Congress shares with Tichy’s ‘21st Voyage’ (which focuses on the subject); the two texts also are thereby related to the hypothetical example of the second type of science fiction that Lem outlines in ‘Metafantasia’ (54–55). 14. In regard to its self-generative principle, Futurological Congress bears a strong resemblance to the ‘Tale of the Three Story-Telling Machines of King Genius’ (for which, see The Cyberiad 144–200). The connection between that principle and Futurological Congress’s assault on the distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘dream’ is pointed to in the following passage from ‘The Sanatorium of Dr Vliperdius’: … it would seem that reality, or actuality, exists, and also dream. But [‘in keeping with Ockham’s razor’] the hypothesis of reality is unneeded. So, then, dream [alone] exists. But … the postulation of someone dreaming is – again – an unnecessary hypothesis, for it sometimes happens that in a dream another dream is dreamed. Thus everything is a dream dreamt by a succeeding dream, and so on to infinity. Now because … each succeeding dream is less real than the one preceding (a dream borders directly on reality, while a dream dreamed within a dream borders on it indirectly, through that same intermediate dream, and the third through two dreams, and so on)[,] the upper bound of this series equals zero. (Mortal Engines 135)

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This ‘proof’ of the validity of ‘neantics’ also, of course, bears on the meaning of Tichy’s dreams as they usurp the place of his ‘reality.’ 15. In accordance with a distinction I draw toward the outset of ‘The Language of Utopia,’ the dialectical involvement of the world of Scarcity with that of Plenty dictates that the former be styled anti-utopian rather than (what it is on its own) dystopian. 16. In this regard, it is significant that the ‘up’n’at’em,’ which poisons Tichy’s vision of Utopia, smells like ‘bitter almonds’ (1l4) – i.e., cyanide: cp. Katar (1976 – in English, The Chain of Chance). 17. On the decline of Utopia, see, for example, R. C. Elliott 84–101; on its ambiguous resurrection, see Fredric Jameson’s ‘Progress Versus Utopia,’ and also my chapter on The Dispossessed. Taking the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic as his chief example, Jameson argues that ‘what is indeed authentic about [science fiction] … is not at all its capacity to keep the future alive, even in imagination. On the contrary, its deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity … [for] imagin[ing] the future, to body forth … the atrophy in our time of what [Herbert] Marcuse has called the utopian imagination, the imagination of otherness and radical difference.’ This would account for the tenuousness of the future which Futurological Congress at once envisions and repudiates – i.e., a future which is ‘fictifact.’ Indeed, as ‘an auto-referential discourse, whose content is a perpetual interrogation of its own conditions of possibility,’ Futurological Congress illustrates the following remark of Jameson’s better than the text he is actually referring to does (Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven): ‘in the very process of exploring the contradictions of … [the] production [of a Utopian future], the narrative gets written, and “Utopia” is “produced” in the very movement by which we are shown that an “achieved” Utopia – a full representation – is a contradiction in terms.’ (My quotations come from ‘Progress Versus Utopia’ 153, 156, and 157, respectively.) 18. See FC 93, 99, 104, 106, 137, and 143 for passages in which Tichy’s sewer reappears as a kind of return of the repressed. The fact that ‘reality’-as-sewer gradually obtrudes itself as such into the anti-utopian world of 2039 serves only to involve it all the more with Tichy’s cloacal fantasy and hence advances the actualytic process. In other words (those of Peter Swirski, who restates this point of mine, inter alia, while suggesting some radical divergence in our respective readings of Futurological Congress): ‘The sewer, far from playing a role of a reliable touchstone to “reality,” serves as a reminder of the collapse and interpenetration of the ontological dialectic of ‘reality’ and “fiction’’’ (38). 19. Of course, the basis of this calculation becomes dubitable the moment we read that the ‘real’ date of Tichy’s last two visions is not 2039, but 2098, when the human population of Earth has reached about 95 billion rather than 29.5 (see 67, 147). In this way, Futurological Congress finally removes even its own ‘fictifacts’ as a reference point for locating (its) ‘reality.’ 20. See the comments of Lem’s quoted in n. 9 above. 21. By the same token, the fact that the ‘interferent’ who assaults Tichy ‘look[s] half like an oak’ (75) indicates that the connection between Tichy’s past and present hallucinatory episodes is bilateral. 22. For more on this matter, see my essay on ‘The Cybernetic Paradigms of Stanislaw Lem’ 206–07. 23. This common ground of science fiction and futurology is what Lem in effect maps out in ‘Metafantasia’ (q.v.). 24. Lem himself encourages us to doubt that he conceived of Futurological Congress in neologistic terms ab origine. In his interview with Csicsery-Ronay, he generalizes: ‘Neologisms happen to come up only when they become absolutely indispensable to me during the course of writing’ (247; my emphasis). On the other hand, it is not absolutely clear that that remark applies specifically to Futurological Congress. Nor does my interpretation hinge on its not doing so: it is sufficient for my purposes that Lem in

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effect works ‘not only but largely in neologisms’ (to quote his own words, from the same interview: ibid.) It is also worth mentioning that the neologistic theory of science fiction inextricably involved in Futurological Congress’s (manner of) meaning complements the critical ideas about science fiction’s linguistic basis that others have arrived at independent of Lem – Kathleen L. Spencer (in her 1983 article), for example, through the influence of Samuel R. Delany. 25. Such a qualification is implicit throughout Lem’s critical writings on science fiction, as it is in the opening sentence of his ‘Metafantasia.’ 26. That Ubik is unquestionably the book of Dick’s which Lem values most highly can be inferred from his devoting to it the better part of his essay ‘Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans.’ Evidently, too, Ubik must have been very fresh in Lem’s mind when he was writing Futurological Congress – given, approximately, the mere two-year interval between the dates of publication of those respective fictions of theirs. For more on Dick’s epistemology of paranoia, especially as he works it out in Ubik, see Carl Freedman’s essay. 27. The difference that I am getting at between Lem and Dick is perhaps clearly inferable from the argument of Lem’s essay ‘On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction’: ‘Literary games can never have so great a degree of semantic vacuum [as games in the strict sense of the word], for they are played with “natural language,” which always has meanings oriented toward the world of real objects’ (26–27). This statement hints at a counter-current in Lem’s science fiction: as his fictions ‘actualytically’ subvert our conceptions of ‘reality,’ they at the same time create an alien world suggestive of what extra-human reality may be like; and this they do by means of the very neologistic processes which make them – and with them, their human self-discoveries – possible. Much of what I say in my essay on Lem’s ‘Cybernetic Paradigms’ is to that effect.

§5. Karel C””apek’s Can(n)on of Negation 1. Sc. 2:293. This play alternates between prose and verse. 2. Viz., The Luminous Depths (Zárivé hlubiny, 1916), Wayside Crosses (Bozí muka, 1917), and possibly The Garden of Krakonos (Krakonosova zahrada, 1918). (Whether this last appeared before the Armistice took effect on November 11, 1918, I do not know; but in any event the stories in that volume had already seen periodical publication in the years 1908–12.) 3. The Munich Pact was negotiated in late September. By November Germany was occupying the Sudetenland; and on March 15, 1939 the Wehrmacht entered Prague. C”apek spared the Nazis the trouble of exterminating him by dying of pneumonia on Christmas Day, 1938. 4. C”apek went ‘over to Lidové noviny [i]n March, 1921,’ and ‘remained on … [its] staff for the rest of his life’: William Harkins 10–11. 5. The names by which C”apek’s works are (best) known in English as often as not follow the principle of enticement rather than strict faithfulness to the Czech. The Absolute at Large is a case in point: the original title is equivalent to ‘Factory for the Absolute’ (though C”apek himself Englished Továrna na absolutno as ‘[The] Manufacturing of the Absolutum’ – this in a letter to Montgomery Evans dated April 18, 1925 and now in the care of the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University [ref. no. VFM603]). On the ve“c in Ve“c Makropulos, see below; and for Krakatit see n. 29. 6. Hordubal’s original scheme involves the betrothal of his eleven-year-old daughter to his wife’s lover. This is a notable departure from the real-life story from which Hordubal took its genesis: there it is Hordubal’s (or rather, Hardubej’s) wife who

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arranges the marriage ‘[t]o conceal her [adulterous] guilt’ (Harkins 130 – q.v.). (C”apek, it should be added, might – reasonably – have expected some of his readers to recognize his alteration from having seen the real-life story where he got it: in the pages of Lidové noviny – see n. 4 above.) 7. I’ve appropriated John Keats’s definition of the mind(set) which gives up on ‘Negative Capability’ in favor of imposing some preestablished/preconceived idea on whatever one has been trying to understand. The phrase quoted is from Keats’s December 1817 letter to his brothers. 8. The name comes from the Czech word for ‘ashes’ (as in ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’), and is therefore something of the equivalent of ‘Adam’ in the latter’s root-meaning and as synonymous with Everyman (with mortality as Adam’s–Popel’s common denominator). 9. The following passage (and the thinking behind it) in particular calls for a/the differentiation of ‘self’ from ‘life’: whatever of those lives I lived or whichever of those figures I was, it was always myself, and that self was always the same, and never changed from beginning to end…. For the self is something that is ABOVE those figures and their lives, something higher, single, and unifying – is it perhaps what we call a soul? But surely that self had no content of ITS own … (An Ordinary Life 31:445) As these same words also make evident, the distinction C”apek has in mind he could have made in terms self and soul. Perhaps the – or one – reason he didn’t do so was to preserve the double-meaning of ‘life’ (i.e., not just as what the opening words in the above-quoted passage suggest, something ‘lived,’ but also as a species of writing, as biography. The Czech word, z“ivot, has both of those meanings of English’s ‘life.’) 10. Quotations from An Ordinary Life preserve the use of ‘small caps’ for emphasis. 11. C”apek also offers alternative wording of what is essentially the same point about Hordubal: ‘A story originally simple breaks up into a series of insoluble and conflicting uncertainties as soon as it is fitted into various systems and subjected to various explanations’ (Epilogue: 466). 12. See the opening paragraph of my chapter on Stapledon for the source and sense of Amis’s notion. 13. This particular Hapsburg Emperor (1576–1612) is not a name that C”apek pulled out of a hat. Rudolph II was himself a practicing alchemist, especially interested in concocting the Elixir of Life (whether that pursuit led to his madness, or merely expressed it, or both is something of an open question). He also chose Prague as the capital of his empire. 14. This term of (self-)deprecation comes from Wells’s ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances’; see HGW’s Lit. Crit. 242. 15. Sometime after writing these words, I noticed that C”apek says much the same thing about R.U.R.: ‘To create a Homonculus [sic] is a mediaeval idea; to bring it in line with the present century, this creation must be undertaken on the principle of massproduction’ (‘The Meaning of “R.U.R.’’’). 16. See §I of my chapter on Lewis, which expatiates on the present argument concerning him. 17. This somewhat oversimplified schema for War with the Newts I revise in my subsequent discussion of that title. 18. For the benefit of anyone who (still) has difficulty comprehending the Hegelian distinction between variety and difference, I pass along the clarificatory example which Herbert Marcuse once offered me (as an auditor of his seminar on Hegel): ‘Take breakfast cereals. There’s variety, but there’s no difference.’ 19. This also appears to have been the view of Leos Janác“ek, the fellow-countryman of C”apek who presently seized on Makropulos as material for an opera (as well he might, considering that a play dominated by a prima donna inherently lends itself to

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such treatment). In his role as librettist (as well as music composer) for this twentiethcentury opera masterpiece (1926), Janác“ek excised the passages wherein Vitek and Prus articulate their utopian dreams for the elixir, whereas otherwise he pretty much maintains a verbatim faithfulness to the C”apek. (In saying this, I am assuming that the Epic-label recording I am going by – billed as including the ‘complete libretto’ – is indeed an uncut version of Janác“ek’s opera.) The hypothesis that Janác“ek had authorization for his changes to Makropulos gets support from two different sources: (1) Paul Selver’s testimony (in a note subjoined to his translation of C”apek’s Preface to the play) that his Macropulos Secret (which, like Janác“ek’s, deviates most from the Czech original in the third and final act) is based on an authorial revision; and (2) C”apek’s own proposal (in a letter of July 24, 1923 – see Korespondence No. 391, Spisy 22:201) that a would-be French translator freely adapt Makropulos for a French audience. 20. The words quoted come from three different speeches of Elina’s on the subject: III.ii.174-75. 21. The translation that I cite (Selver’s) retitles the play Power and Glory, but otherwise does not strike me as being faithless to the original. 22. It may be worth noting by the way that the same paradox applies to another ‘immortal’ singer: the nightingale of Keats’s famous ode. 23. D-503 does say that ‘Love is the function of death’ in the Zilboorg translation of We (24:127; in Brown’s rendition [130], as in the original, the proposition is put in mathematical form [‘L = f(D]’], the decipherment of which remains elliptical [‘i.e., love and death … ’]). 24. See III.ii.167. In this regard it is significant that the court’s verdict, though advertised as being imminent from the start of Makropulos (I.114–15; also I.112), is never divulged. 25. The just-quoted line on which this (express) parallel between war and pestilence depends does not appear in the first – or any other – edition of Bílá. But if it be Selver’s responsibility, it is arguably warrantable by reason of an interpretative astuteness that likewise applies to Selver’s designation of the last act of R.U.R. as an ‘Epilogue’ (see n. 41). This is also to say that Bílá’s opening scene authorizes it. 26. The resemblance between Galen and the Marshal is something that C”apek himself underscores in his Preface to Bílá: ‘The person who represents the will to power [the Marshal] will not be stopped by compassion for human pain and terror, while the other person [Galen], who fights against him in the name of humanity and life, refuses to help the suffering because he himself, fatally, adopts the inexorable morality of the struggle’ (3; my emphasis). 27. See paragraphs 5–6 of Swift’s Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (ca. 1708). 28. The fact that the chapter detailing ‘The Last Battle’ is flanked on both sides by chapters set in Seven Cottages establishes the connection metonymically. 29. While citing this fiction of C”apek’s by the title it goes under in English, I have otherwise rendered Prokop’s imaginary explosive as ‘Krakatite’ on the grounds that the name is modeled on ‘dynamite’ (dynamit in Czech; the OED credits Alfred Nobel with the invention of the term for his notorious chemical compound). This is also to say that ‘krakatit’ in the English translation is a misrendering of its Czech look-alike. ‘Karburator,’ on the other hand, captures The Absolute’s neologistic sense (as ‘carburetor’ would not). 30. The film Dr. Strangelove (1963), scripted by its director, Stanley Kubrick, in collaboration with Terry Southern and Peter George, originated with ‘Peter Bryant’s’ (George’s) Two Hours to Doom (or Red Alert in the U.S. – 1958). But the latter bears little resemblance to the book issued in George’s own name in 1963 as Doctor Strangelove – presumably to capitalize on the (anticipated) success of Kubrick’s film. The most noteworthy difference vis-à-vis Krakatit has to do with Strangelove’s Gen. Jack D. Ripper. He fulfills the same plot-function as Two Hours’/Red Alert’s Brigadier General Quinten;

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but otherwise the latter is unrecognizable as Ripper’s prototype – as the difference in names indicates. Quinten carries none of the Freudian baggage of Ripper’s homicidal impotence-frustration; instead, he is a Herman Kahnesque (or Henry Kissinger-like?) proponent of a ‘preemptive’ nuclear first-strike against the Soviet Union. See Merritt Abrash’s account, 130–32, for further details. 31. ‘[A]tomic bombs’ are first referred to by that name in The World Set Free [2.3:97] shortly after three of them are dropped. C”apek was likely as familiar with the Wells as were many of the scientists engaged in the Manhattan Project. For an account of Cromie’s (far less well known) fiction, see my Into the Unknown 80-82. 32. By the standards of 1920s’ mainstream literature, most of Krakatit’s love scenes are as pornographic as any in Molly Bloom’s monologue. 33. The third is a young anarchist groupie whose sexual advances (in the back seat of a moving car that Daimon is driving) Prokop repulses. The fact that she is kept nameless (purportedly, for the sake of her father, a famous author – 49:374) relates her to Prokop’s anonymous visitor (albeit he and we are finally given that woman’s name); but Prokop himself, after reducing her to tears, sees her as another Anni (51:388 has a paragraph indicating the two parallels). Both of these connections are oxymoronic, as it were: the first because the sexual anarchist holds no attraction for Prokop; the second (more curiously), because the virginal Anni would seem to be the polar antithesis of the once sexually abused and now promiscuous anarchist. 34. Krakatit’s misogyny, for example, is too blatant, too aggressive, for C”apek to have been oblivious of it; but to what extent (if any) he is aware of its virgin–whore polarity is entirely open to speculation. This same sort of consideration applies generally to his Freudian awareness, or insight – which is not to suggest that he could have been ignorant of Freud. 35. Krakatoa’s volcano in 1883 produced the most notorious such eruption since the last days of Pompeii and Herculaneum. In addition to the meaning which ‘krakatite’ thus gets from its fictifactually given source (see 1:8), C”apek’s verbal invention possibly carries another from a recollection of the Greek word enkrateia. Denoting in ancient Greek a certain kind of self-discipline, or self-control, this term was later applied in ‘-ism’ form (i.e., Encratism) to those early Christians who subscribed to an ascetic denial of bodily desires (‘including abstention from marriage’: OED). (I am indebted to Dr. Pamela Bright, Professor of Theology at Concordia University, for much of this information.) As a university-educated European, C”apek is likely to have been familiar with the word (probably in all of its denotations). In which case, he has inscribed in the neologism much of the psychological profile of Krakatite’s fictive creator – i.e., Prokop’s refusal of (sexual) desire as well as his susceptibility to ‘volcanic’ emotional impulses. The observation that ‘Prokop’ is a derivative of ‘prokopati’ I’ve taken from Harkins (107), who renders the Czech as ‘to tunnel through’ (whereas I am giving ‘to tunnel into’ the greater emphasis). Alexander Matus“ka, in effect making Prokop the forebear of ‘Case X’ in Meteor, puts in evidence words drawn from a passage wherein the Clairvoyant divines that ‘X’ ‘dreams of those imaginary [chemical] compounds [of his] and their possible properties. They are drugs, rainbow colours, unknown scents, explosives, materials with which the face of the world might be changed’ (15:214). But to strengthen the connection with Prokop, Matus“ka quotes only the last dozen words, refashioning their meaning in the process (at least in the English translation of his critical study) by altering the text to read: ‘explosive materials.’ 36. Prokop’s nameless female visitor remains an insubstantial presence at least up to the point (near the very end) when he learns that she’s called Ludmila (see n. 38). 37. Stanislaw Lem attests to his teenage knowledge of C”apek in an interview with Istvan Csicsery-Ronay. Though Lem there mentions only War with the Newts and The Absolute at Large (‘Twenty-Two Answers … ,’ 248), a reader of my essay on Lem’s

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‘Cybernetic Paradigms’ will remark a profound resemblance (and affinity) between the two writers – at least by my subsequent account of R.U.R. (another work of C”apek’s which Lem is surely familiar with). 38. Harkins reports that Ludmila is ‘a name … connot[ing] love of [hu]mankind, and… often used in this sense in poems by the Czech Baroque poets’ (107). This information has the effect of refiguring Krakatit as a moral quest on Prokop’s part rather than a quasi-Freudian exploration of his unconscious mind; but perhaps C”apek didn’t regard those as mutually exclusive undertakings. 39. See Harkins 94. While C”apek’s unhappiness is perhaps to be taken at face value, it may also bespeak an irritation over being identified with R.U.R. at the expense of his subsequent work – the flip side of ‘What have you done lately?’ 40. Bohuslava Bradbrook (44) to my mind plausibly dramatizes ‘robot’ as Josef C”apek’s offhand suggestion. R.U.R. is textually self-conscious of its neologistic origin in ‘robot.’ Radius, in response to Helena’s asking why he hates humans, epitomizes his contempt in saying, ‘You make unnecessary words.’ Kamila Kinyon, whose translation (382) I have just quoted, points out (387 n. 6) that the Czech sounds as odd as any accurate English rendition does. That strangeness in turn suggests that R.U.R., as a drama about the ‘Robot’ (the term-concept as well as the ‘thing’), is designed to answer Radius’s challenge, at the same time educing a meaning from his words that is surely not his. (Radius either is declaring that human beings say more than the occasion requires or is deprecating words altogether in favor of deeds. R.U.R.’s answer is to demonstrate that ‘Robot,’ the word designating him among others, is indispensable for understanding its – which is also his – world.) 41. In my act-scene citations of R.U.R. (in the Novack-Jones translation unless otherwise specified), I have given Roman numerals I–IV to the play’s divisions, thereby waiving ‘Prologue’ and ‘Epilogue.’ If the latter designation indeed be the doing of Paul Selver (R.U.R.’s first English translator), it shows a fair amount of critical acumen. Contrary to received opinion, however, it may be the case that Selver’s supposed departures from the Czech were not made on his own initiative (except, perhaps, for those which count as bowdlerizations in the strict sense of the word and also for the production-minded conflating of Damon with Radius). Some evidentiary confirmation of that hypothesis appears from the two instances that I subsequently specify (in nn. 43 and 44), wherein Selver’s translation corresponds to the first edition of R.U.R. (1920) and Novack-Jones’s to C”apek’s 1921 revision. For a lengthy consideration of the (many) factors entering into Selver’s translation as published (and also of the differences between the American and English versions of that), see my ‘Matters of Translation’ 13–20. 42. Further encouragement for this understanding comes from the fact that R.U.R. is a rewrite of ‘The System’ (1908), wherein an American capitalist details his ‘scheme for keeping his workers in line by insulating them from every kind of spiritual and esthetic influence.’ The fullest summary of that early short story of C”apek’s (which has yet to be Englished) is Harkins’s, most readily available toward the start of his (justquoted) introduction to the Hyperion reprint of The Absolute at Large (as listed in my Works Cited). 43. The last pronouncement is Busman’s; but Alquist, not he, underscores the shareholders’ part in R.U.R.’s tragedy. Gall forestalls both of them in a passage not to be found in C”apek’s 1921 revision (and therefore absent from Novack-Jones). After telling Helena that ‘[n]othing can be done’ to ‘restrict the manufacture of Robots’ despite the evidence that ‘[hu]mankind will become extinct’ unless that happens, Gall goes on to explain that ‘the R.U.R. shareholders … won’t hear of it. All the governments in the world are even clamouring for an advance in production, to raise the manpower of their armies. All the manufacturers in the world are ordering Robots like mad’ (Selver’s R.U.R. II.48–49). This is a reasonably exact translation of Gall’s corresponding speech in the 1920 Czech edition (48).

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44. This resemblance of the Robots to The Absolute’s Karburators is less easy to overlook in the 1920 (and Selver’s) R.U.R. than it is in the 1921 revision (and hence in Novack-Jones’s version). In the Selver, a Fourth Robot tells Alquist: ‘We have striven with all our might. We have obtained a million million [sic] tons of coal from the earth. Nine million spindles are running by day and night. There is no more room to store what we have made’ (IV:93). The corresponding passage in the 1921 text as NovackJones renders it consists of a Third Robot’s two short sentences: ‘We have increased productivity. There is nowhere to put all we have produced’ (IV.98). 45. Also confounding the differentiation of actual Robots and actual humans is Busman’s robotic correction of Domin’s statistic as to the number of Robots currently warehoused on the island (I.48). 46. On the difference between Radius and Damon, for example – almost invisible in English translation – see Kinyon, 381–87 and 389–93, who also makes a persuasive case for those two Robots’ serving a critique, respectively, of Hegel’s notion of Mastery and Kant’s Ethical Imperative. 47. Admittedly, however, R.U.R.’s influence has been as a technophobic vision of the robot, with Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) standing (at least in part) as the exception to that rule. Dragan Klaic; in effect proposes Elmer Rice’s play The Adding Machine (1923) as a product (in all likelihood, the earliest) of the C”apek’s putative technophobia – this in the course of Klaic;’s modifying such an understanding so as to make R.U.R.’s ‘menacing prediction’ consequent upon ‘human attitudes’ rather than upon ‘technology as such’ (80–84). 48. While Gall shares with Helena culpability for the consequences of altering the design of Robots, she alone has destroyed Rossum’s manuscript and with it any hope of the humans negotiating their way out of R.U.R.’s Last Man scenario. The misogynistic implications of this are, however, somewhat attenuated by R.U.R.’s point of connection here with Makropulos, wherein Krista’s burning of Hieronomo’s secret formula is apparently a good thing not just in the eyes of Elina. 49. In this regard, it is worth noting that the exchange among Helena Glory, Sulla, and Domin (or Marius in Selver) parallels that of Alquist, Primus, and the Robot Helena at the end of the play: cp. I.43–44 and IV.106–08. 50. This interpretation is consistent with C”apek’s own claim: ‘as the author I was much more interested in men than in Robots’ (‘The Meaning of “R.U.R.’’’). 51. The second of these citations is from the Robot Manifesto, which I am supposing is Radius’s work, at least to all intents and purposes. Certainly in Domin’s paraphrase – ‘They … assert that they are higher than man on the evolutionary scale. That they are stronger and more intelligent,’ etc. – the thought is similar to that informing Radius’s previous hints as to why he should be Master. 52. Kinyon’s acute analysis (390–92) of the words that C”apek gives Damon suggests that the Robot is becoming humanized in part through Alquist’s linguistic (and more precisely, pronomial) cues. 53. There are at least two other reasons for seeing Primus as a ‘new’ Domin. For one, Primus’s relation to Helena the Robot implies – indeed, dictates – such a correspondence. For another, Alquist’s referral of Primus to Adam, while pointing to their commonality as signifying ‘the First Man,’ also resonates with one of Domin’s phrasings of his utopian vision. Describing the latter as ‘recreat[ing] the world from Adam,’ Domin reiterates the name: ‘O Adam, Adam! no longer will you have to earn your bread by the sweat of your brow; you will return to Paradise … [Y]ou will have no other task, no other work, no other cares than to perfect your being. You will be the master [or: Lord] of creation’ (I.52). 54. Here as in the chapter on Stapledon, I use the French word because it has a meaning additional to its English look-alike’s – viz., consciousness. 55. This is consistent with the position that C”apek takes in ‘Why I Am Not a

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Communist’ (1924). There he sides with those ‘who are being crushed between the two millstones of capitalism and class-conscious proletariat.’ He cannot endorse the latter partly because ‘I do not believe in the value of the masses,’ but more because communism ‘is out to rule, not to rescue; its great watchword is power, not help’ (quoted, without any attribution of translational source, by Montrose Moses 280–81: see my Works Cited entry for Adam the Creator). 56. ‘Misfit’ is Cathryn Alan’s translation (re: Matus“ka 367). 57. C”apek makes it clear that the difference between the sea captain and the ‘captain of industry’ is centrally an issue of literary style as well as style of governance. After Capt. van Toch’s demise, Bondy tells an ‘extraordinary general meeting’ (1.12:97) of Pacific Export Co. directors: ‘So long as my good friend Captain van Toch was alive there could be no question of giving our enterprise a character different from what I would call Captain van Toch’s style.’ (Why not?) ‘Because, sir, I have too much taste to mix different styles. Captain van Toch’s style was, let us say, the style of an adventure novel. It was the style of Jack London, of Joseph Conrad and others. The old, exotic, colonial, almost heroic style…. [A]fter Captain van Toch’s death we have no right to continue such adventurous or juvenile epics. What lies ahead of us, gentlemen, is not a new chapter but a whole new concept, a task for a new and substantially different imagination.’ (1.12:101) A few pages later Bondy says much the same thing in brief, at the same time belatedly characterizing his own style: ‘This [enterprise] will no longer be the style of Captain van Toch; we shall replace the adventure story of pearls by the hymnic paean of labour’ (12:105). In this connection, Elizabeth Maslen’s commentary on the ‘crucial importance in War’ of ‘the whole question of language’ (83ff.) is illuminating. Especially instructive are her remarks on War’s exhibition of its author’s masterly capacity to ‘imitate or parody any verbal register,’ but also her suggestion that C”apek, through van Toch, is perpetrating a satiric joke on Conrad for writing in a language not native to him. 58. See Wells’s essay on ‘Human Evolution, an Artificial Process’ (1896), in EW 211–19. 59. As a graduate student of philosophy in Paris in his early twenties, C”apek was attracted to Pragmatism – to the extent of making all three major versions (Charles Peirce’s, William James’s, and John Dewey’s) the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Subsequently, however, Pragmatism did not prove to be entirely invulnerable to his Cannon of Negation, especially in his fiction-writing – as Matus“ka, for one, hints (49–53). 60. In characterizing this tertium datur as a paradigmatic absence, I mean to identify it as a special case of ‘absent paradigm.’ That concept as Marc Angenot elucidates it extends the Saussurean meaning of ‘paradigm’ to cover the recognition that any science-fictional or other (e)strange(d) world calls for definition not in its own terms per se, but in their relation to the opponents which those terms imply (and which are otherwise ‘absent’). This semiotic understanding applies not just to isolatable verbal details (as Angenot may seem to be suggesting), but to entire worlds (as Kathleen Spencer [44–45] demonstrates, in a way that connects Angenot’s ‘absent paradigm’ to Samuel R. Delany’s generic ‘reading protocols’). 61. From about 1930, the rumor began spreading that Hitler’s father, Alois (or Aloys), had been born with the name Schickelgruber but changed it (years before Adolf’s birth) as part of an elaborate scheme to conceal his illegitimacy. The Schickelgruber connection may also imply Jewish ancestry. Hence the fictifact that Andreas Schultze is not himself a Salamander ties in with his initials in suggesting that C”apek knew all of this. 62. This, for example, is the case with the Newt ‘faith’ ‘different’ from the one proposed by George Sequenz (George Santayana?): instead of ‘belief in the Great

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Salamander’ as its ‘highest article,’ ‘the Newts themselves came to accept’ one ‘involv[ing] adoration of Moloch, whom they visualised as a giant Newt with a human head’ (2.2:156–57). 63. Darko Suvin in effect confirms this point in his sympathetic rendition (Metamorphoses 276–77) of what Book I of War is variously about – which is especially telling by reason of his being a proponent of the view that the fiction is entirely an anti-fascist satire. 64. The possible impact of the great Austrian satirist on C”apek is a matter of some disagreement. Jindr“ich Toman concedes that ‘C”apek may have known about Karl Kraus’ from sometime in the 1910s, but doubts that Kraus’s ‘influence was fundamental’ (96). Harkins meanwhile, as a fellow-participant in the same 1989 Symposium on C”apek, lists Kraus as one of three notable influences on the Czech’s early work (see p. 44 of the volume listed under Toman’s name). There is no dispute, however, about C”apek’s conversance with Kraus by 1934 (see Toman, 97), at which time War with the Newts had yet to be written. 65. This does not, however, obviate the unwitting (?) racism of identifying Bondy (1.3:30) as a ‘pimply little Jew’ or the Amsterdam controllers of the pearl trade as Jews (1.4.39) – even though those characterizations are Van Toch’s. 66. C”apek’s words here, from a 1914 essay of his on modern art originally published in the magazine Pr“ehled, I am quoting from Matus“ka, 319 (but with my emphasis on ‘formal’).

§6. Olaf Stapledon’s Tragi-Cosmic Vision 1. Spinoza’s Second Axiom under the rubric ‘Of God’ (p. 42). From the quantity and kind of attention that Philosophy and Living gives him, it is evident that Spinoza is one of Stapledon’s favorite philosophers – which is also to say, someone with whose thinking Stapledon feels that his own has affinities. 2. Eiseley 24. That the ‘other than human’ ‘eye’ Eiseley is referring to is a dog’s (and, more precisely still, that of Odysseus’s dog, Argus) may appear to be an uncanny coincidence, given the applicability of Eiseley’s remark to Sirius; but possibly instead this congruence is a result of his reading of that and/or other works by Stapledon. 3. Amis 134ff.; Wells’s ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances,’ in HGW’s Lit. Crit. 241–42. 4. Stapledon was reportedly familiar with only three or four works of science fiction up to the time he finished writing Last and First Men: the two Wells titles I presently name, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and probably another book by Jules Verne which in (one) English translation goes by the name of Voyage to the Moon. (See Robert Crossley’s 1994 book, 61, 155, 197; John Kinnaird 30; and Patrick McCarthy’s Olaf Stapledon 28–29.) Crossley, who knows as much about Stapledon’s life as anyone is now ever likely to know, opines (pers. comm. of Jan. 6, 1995) that Stapledon was not aware, e.g., of Fowler Wright’s science fiction, even though Wright was his friend and mentor. At the least, then, there is no hard evidence that Stapledon in 1930 was familiar with any work of fiction that could have served as a model for Last and First Men et seq. – unless, of course, Wells’s Outline of History be accounted fictional in its tracing of the evolution of (the human) mind. It should be added, however, that Stapledon’s 1937 talk on ‘Science and Literature’ reveals a greater conversance with science fiction than he professed to have when writing Last and First Men – see Crossley’s 1986 essay, 25–29. 5. On Haldane’s influence on Last and First Men, see McCarthy, Olaf Stapledon 32–33, and Crossley, Olaf Stapledon 190–91, as well as §II of my chapter on C. S. Lewis. Stapledon mentions Wells’s Outline of History by name in Sirius (6:73), among other places. 6. ‘Myth’ is Stapledon’s preferred term, from Last and First Men through The Flames

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(1947), as instanced in my quotations. A phrase from Star Maker, ‘the actual vision my myth represented’ (14:233), may give some further idea of what he has in mind. Charles Elkins, after surveying some of the pertinent occurrences, criticizes myth as a term-concept for concealing an ahistorical premise antagonistic to science fiction (cp. n. 33 below). ‘Fantasy’ figures, inter alia, in the (sub)titles of Sirius and The Flames. ‘Philosophical fiction’ is in keeping with the tenor of Stapledon’s ‘Thoughts on the Modern Spirit’ (printed for the first time in Crossley’s Stapledon Reader 148–63). Probably dating from the late 1920s, this essay deals with literary men (as it does with philosophers) in terms of their philosophical ideas. Cp. McCarthy’s Olaf Stapledon 28. Stapledon uses ‘scientific romance’ in his 1931 letter to Wells (quoted in full in Crossley’s Olaf Stapledon 197–98), but refrains from applying it to Last and First Men. This is both curious and significant by reason of the overall purport which makes the letter in question strictly comparable to the one that Wells had sent to Grant Allen almost forty years earlier (see my §3’s n. 37) – i.e., by reason of the fact that Stapledon is likening his project to Wells’s. By the same token, Brian Stableford’s distinction between ‘scientific romance’ and ‘science fiction’ as nomenclators, respectively, of a British and an American tradition no more impugns my argument about Stapledon’s generic vocation malgré lui than does the fact that the term science fiction didn’t become current until the late 1930s. 7. I mean my parenthetical qualification of ‘cognitive estrangement’ to give a Stapledonian inflection to a phrase of Darko Suvin’s epitomizing his view of science fiction – and thence to imply that any such view is conducive to a re-vision of (the) genre as a Borgesian Garden of Forking Paths. The works by Stapledon which I analyze may serve to illustrate that possibility with reference to what I have said thus far. From one perspective, they merely articulate a generic vocation for ideas which is as much a reality of science fiction as heliocentricity is of the planetary system to which Earth belongs. But the rephrasing of that proposition in terms of Stapledon’s ‘confirming’ an inherent generic affinity for ideas by writing science fiction without knowing it brings with it the understanding that reality – the ‘same’ reality – is also an ideal, a human, invention. This in part means that our sense of science fiction or the astronomical universe owes at least as much, respectively, to Stapledon and Copernicus – in both cases, et alii – as it does to the Ding an sich. At the same time, the notion of influence thereby imported brings with it a recognition that the ‘reality’ in question not only could have been, but has been – and no doubt will be – otherwise. Here again the Copernican Revolution can, for brevity’s sake, stand in for science fiction – with reference, for example, to the fact that in its Newtonian phase, that thought-revolution momentarily foreclosed a previously opened prospect of an infinite universe. 8. Kinnaird 34. The same kind of criticism that Kinnaird’s proposition is open to by reason of his speaking of ‘man’s,’ rather than ‘humanity’s,’ ‘origins …’ can also be leveled against ‘time-transcendent,’ even though the latter is an accurate as well as a sympathetic translation of a good part of the Stapledonian import of ‘mythic.’ (Because of, rather than despite, what would now be regardable as its implicit sexism, ‘man’s,’ too, is well-attuned to the Stapledon who employs the masculine pronoun to refer to the Star Maker – a practice which I, perforce, must follow inasmuch as that is one of Star Maker’s fictifacts.) 9. The phrase ‘Excelsior biology’ is Wells’s, not Stapledon’s. See ‘Zoological Retrogression’ (1891), in EW 159. 10. Stapledon describes ‘personality-in-community’ as ‘the ideal’ which ‘conscious beings’ must come to as they ‘advance in mental growth’ to the point of realizing that the self-awareness on which self-fulfillment depends requires that they ‘embrace not merely their own kin and neighbours, not only their tribe or nation, not only the whole race or species, but all conscious beings whatever, no matter how foreign’ (P&L 403).

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11. ‘Thinking-feeling-striving’ is another term-concept to be met with in Philosophy and Living, where it is fairly closely associated with ‘personality-in-community’ (see my previous note). 12. ‘Conscience’ is italicized here because the French word is intended, for having a meaning additional to that of its English look-alike (viz., consciousness). 13. In this respect, Star Maker is comparable to The Dispossessed (see my chapter on Le Guin). 14. ‘Pascal’s Sphere’ can be found in Borges’s Other Inquisitions 5–8. 15. Stapledon develops that parallel in Saints and Revolutionaries (1939). 16. The last string of words quoted (‘produce … selves’) is a (p)restatement of what Stapledon means by ‘personality-in-community’ (see n. 10 above). 17. The contrast sketched here between these paired fictions is compatible with Louis Tremaine’s: that Last and First Men and Star Maker serve up ‘spiritual vision,’ whereas Odd John and Sirius deliver ‘spiritual experience’ (68; Tremaine’s emphasis). 18. One influence on Odd John (and therein acknowledged as such by Stapledon), John Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder (1915), hardly even attempts any such tour de force – despite (or is it because of?) the fact, now widely known, that Beresford had a real-life model for his Wunderkind: H. G. Wells. See also Crossley’s Olaf Stapledon 225. 19. This doubtless factors into the verdict that Sirius’s message is the same as Odd John’s but is conveyed more engagingly (as Barbara Bengels, in essence, argues). On the other hand, Sirius’s fictionalizing of elements from Stapledon’s (psycho)autobiography ‘indicates how radical a recasting of Odd John … Sirius … is’ (as I observe in my review of Crossley [‘Kindred Spirits’ 108–09], wherein I attempt to identify some of those elements). 20. Stapledon’s pun is especially evident in the Dover edition of Sirius (and Odd John), wherein the first syllable of ‘legible’ appears, hyphenated, at the end of a line (on p. 183). Other jeux de mots of this sort include the characterizing of Sirius’s attempt to conquer ‘music’ as a goal he pursues with ‘his usual doggedness’ (3:36); the remark that on an occasion when he ‘was more tired than he had ever been before, “dogtired,” as we say, … he was still able to summon a fundamental doggedness …’ (5:57– 58); and Robert’s ‘I could see my handiness galled him’ (15:170). It will be noticed that the last instance is an exception to the rule: that these jokes at Sirius’s expense appear early on, and mostly in §§3–5. 21. For Coleridge on the ‘suspension of disbelief,’ see his Biographia Literaria II:6; and also Walpole’s preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto 7–8: ‘Desirous of leaving the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention, … [the author] wished to conduct the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability; in short, to make them think, speak and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do in extraordinary positions.’ 22. It may be worth adding that the distinction between the psychological and the metapsychological finally breaks down, correlative to the deconstruction of the self vs. other dichotomy – and in both cases largely in consequence of the fact that Sirius’s many moments of introspection, which epitomize his psychological make-up, are themselves mostly metapsychological in nature. 23. This (self)irony in the title Stapledon chooses is overdetermined through his subtitle (A Fantasy of Love and Discord), which reproduces the tension of the pun on Sirius, and not so much in the subtitle’s ‘Love and Discord’ component as in the opposition between the ‘serious’ theme thus designated and what is normally expected from ‘fantasy.’ If there be any doubt that the ‘Sirius’/‘serious’ pun is Stapledon’s (i.e., by conscious intention), one or another of the following should suffice to dispel it: our being told (1) that Plaxy was ‘suffering from a serious conflict over Sirius’ (4:51); (2) that Sirius has ‘a mind which seemed to oscillate between a heavy, self-pitying seriousness and a

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humorous detachment and self-criticism’ (7:99); and (3) that ‘we [Robert and Plaxy] would talk, sometimes seriously …’ (in Sirius’s absence – 15:169). 24. ‘Non-sequitur’ because his assertion of a common identity of himself and Thomas comes an instant after Sirius has posited the difference between the human and the canine. 25. Eric Rabkin, for one, cites the pertinent passage in the key interview between Sirius and Thomas (Sirius 6:78) as alluding to – paralleling (no doubt consciously) – the exchange wherein the Monster accusatorily confronts Frankenstein and asks his Creator why he made him a social misfit. To Rabkin’s commentary (238–39 et passim) it is worth adding that Stapledon in his rewrite elicits from Frankenstein a meaning which Mary Shelley herself was probably not conscious of, and one which no (other) interpreter of her book remarked until sometime in the late 1970s, when feminist critics began making Frankenstein one of their canonical texts (and hence a canonical text, period). The resemblance to Frankenstein also extends to Sirius as psychoautobiography, in a loosely Freudian understanding of that term as it applies to Stapledon – i.e., one neither totally congruent nor wholly at odds with Robert’s simplistic Freudianizing at 14:162 (a passage again marking the difference between Stapledon and Shelley in point of their [self]consciousness of what their respective fictions mean). 26. I mean to echo a once well-known remark (recorded in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations) that Bartolomeo Vanzetti made about his alleged co-conspirator in his closing speech to the Massachusetts court whose judge had just sentenced Nicolo Sacco and him to death: ‘Sacco’s name will live in the hearts of the people when your name, your laws, institutions and false gods are but a dim rememoring [sic] of a cursèd past in which man was wolf to … man.’ (Whether Sacco was intentionally echoing Thomas Hobbes’s ‘Homo homini lupus’ I do not know.) 27. This is the punch line of the Pogo comic strip that appeared on Earth Day 1971, reproduced in Phi Beta Pogo, ed. Mrs. Walt Kelly and Bill Crouch, Jr. 21. 28. The same view is detectable in a claim of Robert Shelton’s: that A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929) ‘can be seen in large measure as a source book for understanding the philosophy conveyed by all the works that follow, including Stapledon’s science fiction’ (7). McCarthy takes Stapledon’s point of origin further back still, to his first book (of poems), Latter-Day Psalms (1914), ‘several’ of whose ‘themes and attitudes … Stapledon was to develop in a more sophisticated fashion in his fictional and philosophical writings’ (Olaf Stapledon 18). I, for one, would not strenuously contest taking the 1929 title over the next year’s Last and First Men as Stapledon’s intellectual starting point. 29. Whether Cass is the victim of suicide, homicide, or accident remains somewhat unresolvable. The Flames does, however, blur the distinction between the first two possibilities, thanks to Cass’s repeated emphasis on the Flames’ evil influence. Not only does he believe that the Flames have, indirectly, driven his wife to suicide; he also understands one Flame-representative to insinuate that if Cass doesn’t resume cooperating with them, they could similarly bring about the human mass-suicide that is nuclear war. Whereupon Cass kills the Flame, and then convinces himself that the ‘remorse and shame and compassion’ he feels is ‘not my feeling’ but one ‘forced on me by the outraged race of flames’ (64). Cass’s conviction about ‘the diabolical psychic power of the flames’ (67) can, of course, be labeled ‘paranoid’; but, as the well-known joke on the subject has it, the Flames may ‘really’ be out to destroy him. And in any case, his paranoia is very much a fictifact of Cass’s vision (in a way that the advisory quotation marks surrounding really are meant to signal; in other words, Cass’s fantasy is a/his reality); and as such it stands as the basis for reading The Flames as selfdestructively critical of its author’s own vision of the Spirit – Stapledon’s as well as Cass’s. 30. As The Flames’ Introductory Note (unpaginated) points out.

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31. ‘I decided that I would publish his original statement intact, in spite of his wish to withdraw it’ (Flames 84). 32. As the following extract makes evident, Death Into Life draws also on Star Maker and on the ambivalencing of the latter in Darkness and the Light. The spirit of Man could not but yearn towards a divinity beyond himself, towards the universal Spirit that was his own essence, yet infinitely more than himself. But also with painful perplexity he recognized in himself an obscure yearning toward something beyond even the universal and lucid Spirit of intelligence, love and creative action; a yearning toward some alien Other, inscrutable, terrible, yet in some strange dread way most beautiful…. Nor … could it be said for certain that the dark Other was identical with the Spirit, … which … might perhaps in the Other be transcended. (4:91–92). Though I have not chosen it for being blatantly self-parodic, this passage exhibits an abstractness of expression which tends to evacuate its Stapledonian term-concepts of any living, or spiritual, force (in his sense of those words), so that they become empty verbal gestures toward – and oversimplifications of – his ‘philosophy’ of ‘thinkingfeeling-striving.’ This same tendency is traceable to Darkness and the Light in its working out of its analysis of the Star Maker’s duality into the two separate components which the 1942 title names. 33. Stapledon’s project of instilling an Other-consciousness has a by no means superficial resemblance to Bertholt Brecht’s contemporaneous theory and practice (from the mid-1930s on) of the Verfremdung-Effekt. To be sure, Brecht would not have said precisely what Stapledon does in his March 1937 Preface to Star Maker: Those who are in the thick of the struggle inevitably tend to become, though in a great and just cause, partisan. They nobly forgo something of that detachment, that power of cold assessment, which is, after all, among the most valuable human capacities…. But some who have the cause at heart must serve by striving to maintain, along with human loyalty, a more dispassionate spirit. And perhaps the attempt to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all, increase not lessen, the significance of the present human crisis. (SM 0:8) This passage may be taken as indicating that whatever affinity there be between Brechtian Alienation and Stapledon’s efforts to give his readership ‘a view of humanity from outside humanity’ (Sirius 10:126–27) is neither merely coincidental nor the outcome of the literary influence of one of them on the other, but instead is the product of a shared view of ‘the present human crisis.’ In that regard, too, both Stapledon’s and Brecht’s thoughts on Otherness, or Alienation, situate them between entre-guerre intellectual quietism and the Existentialist engagement which was an outcome of the ascendancy of fascism (especially of the Hitlerian variety) in Europe (as the example of Jean-Paul Sartre amply demonstrates). On the other hand, Brecht’s theory emphasizes historicity as Stapledon’s does not. ‘The A[lienation]-effect [V-effekt in the original] is a social measure’ (Brecht 104) by reason of Brecht’s programmatic conception of Epic Theatre as historicizing, or denaturalizing, what it represents (so as to enable the ‘judging [of] a particular social system from another social system’s point of view’ [103]); whereas, by comparison at least, Stapledon appears to be doing the opposite: setting ‘our turbulent world against a background of stars,’ he tends to universalize – i.e., to mythologize – it (cp. n. 6 above). Thus their greatest rapprochement may lie with the fact that Brecht, in perhaps his fullest statement on the subject, The Messingkauf Dialogues (begun in the late ’30s), gives over exposition of the ‘A-effect’ to a dramatis persona designated The Philosopher – a self-ironic Stapledonian touch.

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VISIONS AND RE-VISIONS §7. C. S. Lewis and the Fictions of ‘Scientism’

1. Lewis uses the term, with a capital T, in the Preface to That Hideous Strength (viii). 2. Mortimer Proctor’s book on ‘the University Novel’ offers no strictly comparable example; nor, in fact, does it mention Lewis – which is all the more surprising given Proctor’s determination to trace fictions of this sort back to Tom Jones’s Man of the Hill. At least one other reader of That Hideous Strength has, however, noticed by the way that it is in (significant) part ‘a satire on academic life’: Richard Purtill (102). 3. The dispute is rendered elliptically: of the ‘views’ of Canon Jewel and the other ‘Die-hards’ opposed to Belbury’s plan, Lewis says only that they ‘were manoeuvred into the position of appearing as the party who passionately desired to see Bragdon surrounded with barbed wire’ (THS 1.4:19–20). 4. A letter of Dec. 20, 1943 to Arthur Greeves suggests, at the least, that Lewis was working on That Hideous Strength by then, if not concurrently with The Abolition of Man (see Walter Hooper, ed. 499–500). Furthermore, THS’s Preface is dated ‘Christmas Eve 1943.’ 5. In the posthumously published (and unfinished) ‘Reply to Professor Haldane,’ Lewis remarks: ‘Out of the Silent Planet … certainly is an attack, if not on scientists, yet on something which might be called “scientism” – a certain outlook on the world which is causally connected with the popularization of the sciences, though it is much less common among real scientists than among their readers’ (Of Other Worlds 76). 6. I am using the term as Wells does: Ransom’s account of life on Malacandra (Mars) is a species of fiction similar to Cavor’s ‘Natural History of the Selenites’ (one of the chapter-titles of The First Men in the Moon). 7. The Faust connection is one that Lewis himself licenses with reference to a source of the legend, Paracelsus, and to Marlowe’s and Goethe’s treatments of it (see Abolition 38–39). For a supplementary account of the myth of the modern Faust, see §4 of my Into the Unknown. 8. In this context the reader might refer to Robert Plank’s discussion (30–33) of Ransom’s reply to Merlin’s ‘Who is Sulva?’ (THS 13:321). 9. Blake uses the term ‘Eternal Death’ throughout his Major Prophecies to signify a state of mind correlative to the world-view of Newtonian mechanics. The notion central to Blake’s thinking, that human beings become what they behold, that the way someone perceives the universe is what he or she is, resembles Lewis’s own ideas, as can be seen both in my next quotation from The Abolition of Man (35–36) and in his concept of the Un-man in Perelandra. T. S. Eliot’s ‘Time and the bell have buried the day,’ the opening line of section IV of Burnt Norton (1940), may be responsible for the name Belbury, which in any event, as an amalgam of ‘bell’ and ‘bury,’ doubly evokes death. 10. See my Into the Unknown 146–47, for some observations about Wells’s depiction of ‘the otherness of nature, nature in its defiantly unanthropomorphic aspect, opposed to all that man is and prides himself in being.’ 11. See n. 5 above. 12. Lewis does, however, compare Ransom to Cavor: ‘He did not want to tell … [the hrossa] too much of our human wars and industrialisms. He remembered how H. G. Wells’s Cavor had met his end on the Moon … ‘ (OSP 11:70). 13. The admiration strongly inflected with antipathy was reciprocal. Stapledon deemed Out of the Silent Planet ‘a delightful though in some ways perverse fantasy.’ Robert Crossley, quoting this excerpt from one of Stapledon’s unpublished letters of late 1939 or early 1940 in his 1994 biography of that writer, conjectures that his subject may have ‘resented the parody of Stapledonian agnosticism in the character of Professor Weston’ (Olaf Stapledon 264). Possibly, however, no such personal factor entered into Stapledon’s judgment.

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14. Wells self-ironically refers to ‘The Man of the Year Million’ in the second chapter of Book II of The War of the Worlds (1898). Originally published in the Pall Mall Gazette (1893), and reprinted, inter alia, in Wells’s Certain Personal Matters (1897) as ‘Of a Book Unwritten,’ this speculative essay anticipates his Martians in envisioning humans of the future as consisting primarily of head/brain and hands. 15. Bernal broaches the idea by saying, ‘He [‘Man’] will … be forced to decide whether to abandon his body or his life. After all, it is the brain that counts, and to have a brain suffused by … blood is to be alive – to think’ (34). Subsequently, he envisions humansas-brains wiring themselves together, so to speak, into ‘complex minds’ (42–44). 16. ‘Seed’ here of course has one or more of its biblical senses (perhaps including that of Jesus’s parable of the seeds, in Mark 4.13–20). But the sardonic emphasis Lewis puts on the term suggests that he may – again – have an eye to Stapledon. Last and First Men’s Epilogue, in particular, gives the word a certain prominence, comparable to Silent Planet’s (see LFM 16.3:322 and 325; the latter reads: ‘the Scattering of the Seed has come to be for every one of us the supreme religious duty’). 17. Hence Lord Feverstone (formerly Devine) says to Studdock: ‘Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of other men’ (THS 2:37). ‘What we call Man’s power over Nature,’ writes Lewis, ‘turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument’ (Abolition 28). 18. No doubt Lewis would have had in mind the biblical prophecy, ‘The crooked shall be made straight’ (Luke 3.5, in a passage replete with echoes of Isaiah – in this case, of Isaiah 42.16 and 45.2). 19. C. N. Manlove makes a somewhat comparable point about this dream, but confines its foreshadowing to Out of the Silent Planet. I concur with his reservation that ‘[n]ot all details [of the dream] fit with this long view’ (29). 20. When Merlin protests that heavenly interference abrogates God’s ‘Seventh Law’ (‘that He will not send down the Powers to mend or mar in this Earth until the end of all things’), Ransom replies: ‘if men by enginry and natural philosophy learn to fly into the Heavens, and come, in the flesh, among the heavenly powers and trouble them, He has not forbidden the Powers to react’ (THS 13:342). In that regard, That Hideous Strength’s apocalyptically dark view of the contest between Good and Evil is barely foreseeable in Ransom’s dream, wherein Weston and Devine’s foolish ignorance of the door in the wall they scale makes for a gag-routine straight out of post-World War I silent comedy. 21. One of the members of Belbury equates the two by saying, ‘This Institute … is for the conquest of death: or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer’ (THS 8:202). 22. Thus, for example, Joe R. Christopher finds it ‘likely’ that Ransom’s belief (in OSP) that the Sun’s ‘brightness ends … [at] the edge of the solar system’ ‘is intended to … recreate some of the effect of the medieval view’ (92).

§8. Kurt Vonnegut, Historiographer of the Absurd 1. Wampeters 258. This self-characterization appears toward the end of Vonnegut’s remarks about ‘black humorists’ (like himself; see Wampeters 257). He there refers to Freud’s conception of jokes, a comparison which Ellen Cronan Rose takes up in her essay on Sirens. 2. Donald Lawler, in characterizing Sirens as ‘a shaggy-dog story,’ probably has in mind the same thing I mean ‘extended joke’ to cover. But the entry in Webster’s Dictionary, among others, does not countenance the synonymy: a shaggy-dog story is everything that Sirens is not – unnecessarily drawn-out, boring, and pointless. 3. According to Sirens, Salo’s ‘S.O.S.’ travels at the same speed as his space ship does, the speed of light, and thus requires 150,000 (Earth) years to reach its destination; but

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another fictifact has it that his cohorts on Tralfamadore are able to respond thrice as fast. Hence the computation of 200,000 years, not counting another 3,000 or so between the first response (Stonehenge) and the last (the League of Nations). 4. Salo’s commission from his fellow mechanoids presumably comes sometime after they annihilate the non-robots who created them. The original Tralfamadorians and their civilization, then, must have perished over 350,000 years before Malachi, Beatrice, and Chrono rendezvous with Salo (by a calculation which my previous note details). 5. The accidental aspect of Constant’s reassembly of Salo has mainly to do with an awareness sometime after the fact that his attempts have been successful. See Epilogue: 303–04, 313. 6. The first title in the Hitchhiker series, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, came out twenty years after Sirens, to be followed by The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe and Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984), Young Zaphod Plays It Safe (1986), and Mostly Harmless (1992). Carl R. Kropf (67) contends for ‘important differences between Vonnegut’s and Adams’ works’ in point of ‘scope’ and ‘closure,’ but these are arguably differences in degree rather than in kind. Moreover, Adams’s own summation in Restaurant of the seminal book in his series, A Hitchhiker’s Guide, has a striking similarity to my account of Sirens to this point (and not through any influence of Adams on my interpretation of Vonnegut, which to this point is relatively rudimentary). According to Adams’s epitome, after the computer Deep Thought ‘announce[s] that the answer’ is ‘Forty-two,’ another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was…. [T]his computer … was called Earth’ (Restaurant 1:149; my emphasis). 7. For an almost completely different representation of what Sirens has to say about time, see Joseph Sigman’s essay. Whatever one may think of his case for ‘the influence of modern physics on Vonnegut’s imagination’ (25), its high seriousness does not comport with the tone of the fiction he is applying it to. Otherwise, however, I perceive no obvious discrepancy between his account of this particular topic and mine. Indeed, the point he makes about Sir Arthur Eddington’s ‘use of Carroll’s work’ (37–38) complements what I subsequently say about Sirens as science fiction. 8. The significance of this image – and of the moment it occupies in Sirens – invites comparison with the Borges of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (as discussed in my chapter on Borges). 9. Cp. David Ketterer’s analysis of Sirens’ plot in terms of ‘wheels within wheels,’ in New Worlds for Old, 308ff. 10. ‘If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue’ (which, however, may be ‘the best part of … [one’s] life’ – Deadeye Dick 26:208, 210). In view of that parenthetical qualification, Malachi’s, Beatrice’s, and Chrono’s modus vivendi on a post-Tralfamadorian Titan can be regarded as instancing ‘the true quest for the meaning in life,’ which Sirens ‘juxtapose[s]’ to and differentiates from ‘the false quest for the meaning of life’ (Donald Morse 55). 11. Though conceivably Boaz in part owes his name to the Book of Ruth, he is certainly so called with parodic-affectionate reference to Franz Boas – and by reason of Boaz’s relationship with the harmoniums. That famous anthropologist was teaching at the University of Chicago at the time when Vonnegut briefly forayed into his field of study as a master’s candidate (in 1945–47). James Whitlark, in ‘Vonnegut’s Anthropology Thesis,’ unfortunately says nothing about this, though he does offer a plausible hypothetical reconstruction of Vonnegut’s rejected M.A. proposal. The term harmonium may come from – or rather, via – the title of Wallace Stevens’s first book of poems (as Tony Tanner has opined, 184); but certainly in Vonnegut as in Stevens, it is (to be) connected with the meaning which any English-language dictionary ascribes to the word.

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12. This tag-phrase is among Vonnegut’s recurring favorites. In Timequake, for example, he has his imaginary science-fiction writer (the ubiquitous Kilgore Trout) apologize thus for an insouciance about characterization (which Vonnegut, apart from – the non-science-fictional – Bluebeard [1987] shares): ‘If I’d wasted my time creating characters, … I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter: irresistible forces in nature, and cruel inventions, and cockamamie ideals and governments and economies that make heroes and heroines alike feel like something the cat drug in’ (Timequake 18:63). 13. The connection is one that Donald Lawler touches upon when he suggests that Sirens’ plot is like a ‘metaphysical Rube Goldberg’ machine, ‘a device for doing something simple by an extravagantly indirect method’ (78). Vonnegut, too, has something to say on the subject which bears on Sirens (albeit he does not expressly refer to that or any other work of his): ‘Religions were exhibited and studied [in the anthropology courses he took at the University of Chicago] as the Rube Goldberg inventions I’d always thought they were’ (‘Self-Interview,’ in Palm Sunday 101). 14. ‘Harrison Bergeron’ made its first appearance in the October 1961 issue of The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy (5–10). How far it spins off from Sirens may be measurable from the fact that William F. Buckley reprinted it (in 1965) in his National Review, an unlikely venue for just about anything (else) of Vonnegut’s, and certainly not a publication whose readers would welcome Sirens’ satire of Fundamentalist thinking. 15. The episode referred to appears in §3 of Book IV of Tom Jones, and its fictive import is expressly divulged in §5. On the providential design of that novel, see Martin Battestin’s ‘Tom Jones: The Argument of Design.’ 16. See EW 4–6, 50–55. 17. This aspect of Vonnegut’s meaning has frequently been discussed, but always in terms which obstruct an understanding of what he is saying. Properly speaking, those should be, not determinism and free will, but accident and purpose. As a (further) textual basis for that contention, I would put in evidence the following passage from Galápagos: [T]he soldier [Private Geraldo Delgado] who shot them [Zenji Hiroguchi and Andrew MacIntosh, a Japanese computer whiz and an American entrepreneur] is another person who should be credited with having done a little something whose effects are still visible after a million years…. I [Leon Trout] am talking about his breaking into the back door of a shuttered souvenir shop which faced the El Dorado [hotel]. If he had not burglarized that shop, there would almost certainly be no human beings on the face of the earth today…. Delgado, facing starvation like so many other people in Guayaquil, thought his big problem was enemies with little radios [‘envious of his dancing ability … (and) attempting to destroy his brains’]. And when he broke through the back door of what was plainly a defunct souvenir shop, it wasn’t a souvenir shop to him. To him it was the headquarters of the Ecuadorian Ballet Folklórico, and he was now going to get his chance to prove that he really was the greatest dancer in the world. (27:148–49) The concepts of accident and purpose, along with the confounding of their opposition, certainly inform this passage; but that is clearer still from its context in the overall plot. Mistaking Mandarax, a microcomputer, for a little radio, Delgado assassinates its possessor, Hiroguchi, and MacIntosh along with him. But in consequence of carrying out that dictate of psychotic intention, he accidentally opens a ‘breach’ for six Kankabono girls (‘predominantly Indian,’ but with ‘Negro ancestors,’ 27:153) to get to the hotel – and thence to the island of Santa Rosalia, where they will (d)evolve into the seal-like creatures which are the sole survival of the human species. 18. Ex-astronaut Bud Williams, played by Bob Elliot. The PBS telecast also drew

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upon the talents of the other member of this innovative comic twosome: Ray Goulding took the role of TV anchorman Walter Gesundheit. 19. Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters features a brain implant very like Vonnegut’s Martians’; but since that title came out in the same year as Sirens, it is improbable that Vonnegut took the device from Heinlein (or vice-versa). A comparable mind control is to be met with in pulp science fiction at the beginning of the decade, in John D. MacDonald’s ‘The Hand from the Void’ (Super Science Stories, January 1951). But while this early manifestation of the trope, too, probably owes something to the wordconcept of brainwashing (a translation from the Chinese used in print in October of 1950, according to an OED citation), even The Puppet Masters does not connect it with the Red Menace nearly to the extent that The Manchurian Candidate does, in either Richard Condon’s novel (1959) or John Frankenheimer’s now cult-classic film version of Condon’s book (1962). 20. Vonnegut names Alice in Wonderland (1865) twice in connection with the Rumfoords’ door (1:15 and 10:234); he alludes to Carroll’s Cheshire Cat at 1:39. 21. See §§8-9 of Moby-Dick (1851). There is no room for doubting Vonnegut’s conversance with Melville, and especially with Moby-Dick. Its opening line is consciously echoed at the start of Cat’s Cradle; Vonnegut refers to Melville’s masterpiece in Bluebeard (32:258); he stipulates that Malachi’s father is ‘a native of New Bedford’ (Sirens 3:71); and in a 1982 interview he indicates some familiarity with Melville’s earlier works, which he co-credits with Darwin’s writings as an inspiration for Galápagos (see Reed and Leeds, eds. 13). As for Vonnegut’s knowledge of The Scarlet Letter (1850), see Timequake, 17:61. 22. This conception of generic space owes much to the opening chapter of Mark Rose’s book on science fiction. 23. Directed by George Roy Hill, the film version of Slaughterhouse had its release in 1972. The film’s success in visually rendering the book’s neurasthenic quality may well have been the chief reason for Vonnegut’s enthusiasm for the treatment. 24. This idea receives succinct imagistic exposition in Slaughterhouse, where a Tralfamadorian tells Billy: ‘I … see all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations’ (4:85–86). 25. In its root meaning, ‘holocaust’ is synonymous with ‘conflagration.’ To this particular horror Vonnegut does not accord the prominence he gives to other nightmares of history. This, there is little room to doubt, has in part to do with the same impulse that prompts him to challenge any stock response (e.g., to his own work). But he bestows no special and prolonged attention on the Holocaust also because, to his mind, it isn’t a singular event. Accordingly, it appears as something of an allusion in Bluebeard, for instance, which foregrounds instead one of the numerous episodes in the genocide of Armenians. And it is likewise at least implicit in Timequake, though not at the moment when Vonnegut in effect explains why he seizes upon Nagasaki rather than Hiroshima: ‘I had to respect the opinion of William Styron that the Hiroshima bomb saved his life’; but ‘I had to add … that I knew a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense…. The word was Nagasaki’ (Timequake, 51:169). 26. Surely that is the point of the otherwise largely pointless expository passage wherein Horatio, at the play’s outset, retails past hostilities between Hamlet Sr. and Fortinbras Sr., the Norwegian king whose son (also named Fortinbras) accedes to Denmark’s throne – with Prince Hamlet’s benediction – at the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy. 27. Vonnegut says something to the same point in a 1983 interview with Reed and Leeds. Referring to Timequake, Leeds observes: ‘It’s interesting that you’re … [g]oing

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back to February 13[;] in the past it has a biographical explanation as the firebombing of Dresden and in … fiction as Billy Pilgrim’s death date.’ To which Vonnegut responds: ‘It does, but that’s just trivia. It’s not all that important. I had to pick some date’ (Reed and Leeds, eds. 39). Meanwhile, however, his 1977 ‘Self-Interview’ (reprinted in Palm Sunday 89–94) is somewhat ambivalent, revealing as it does that Vonnegut saw, close up and personally, rather more of the consequences of the Dresden firebombing than Slaughterhouse (or any other work of his – e.g., Bluebeard, especially in its final tableau) discloses. This supports Bruce Franklin’s reading (‘Strange Scenarios’ 120–23) of Slaughterhouse as the imaginative product of Dresden (and analogous horrors which the U.S. war against Vietnam supplied). What I am arguing, however, is that while Dresden and comparable atrocities inspire(d) Vonnegut’s moral outrage, they are also the cause of moral despair – of the skepticism which Sirens evinces about solutions. Moreover, the suspicion of nihilism is prevalent enough for many of Vonnegut’s commentators to have felt called upon to defend him against it. 28. If any argument be necessary for confirming Vonnegut’s antipathy for this and any other symptom of the bureaucratic mind, it can come from Sirens’ explanatory aside as to why the controllers on Mars discontinued the practice of ‘cleaning out a few memories [of army recruits]’ completely: because ‘the only thing anybody could think to do with … [those ‘poor people’ with totally wiped memories] was to housebreak them, teach them a basic vocabulary of a thousand words, and give them jobs in military or industrial public relations’ (5:127; italics removed). (One can also infer from this obiter dictum how much Vonnegut enjoyed the two years or so during which he worked in G.E.’s public relations department.) 29. This line of argument is resumed in the final section, below. 30. Conceivably, Moore’s film Roger and Me (1989) had an impact on the writing of Hocus Pocus (though their dates make this somewhat doubtful). It is equally conceivable that the influence has been reciprocal. Vonnegut, in a letter to me dated May 8, 2001, says that he is ‘an admirer of … Moore’s work, and may indeed have been influenced by it,’ but adds: ‘Until you mentioned the possibility of a substantial link between our oeuvres, … I never suspected that there might be one.’ 31. Ronald Reagan is named twice (32:236, 36:272), and so is Nancy (30:222, 31:231), figuring in Hocus Pocus (as in reality) as something of a surrogate for her husband (or vice-versa). The only other President cited – or even for certain alluded to – is Lincoln, whose appearance is as incidental to Vonnegut’s vision of post-Vietnam America as the chronology would suggest. It is possible, however, that, given the Vietnam War’s prominence in Hocus Pocus, the President of Tarkington usually referred to as ‘Tex’ Johnson – the man who, in imitation of Charles Whitman, goes up to the Tarkington College belfry to snipe at black escapees from the Athena prison – is to be taken as a caricature of Lyndon Johnson. 32. Not part of this constellation, but otherwise surely a self-deprecating touch, is the Vonnegut Memorial Fountain at the center of the campus. Almost as surely, it is there to recall the Rumfoords’ fountain as well as to connect with Hocus Pocus’s later tribute to firemen (39:293). As for our being led to believe (28:211) that Iran is irrelevant to Hocus Pocus’s Pahlavi(s), that surely counts as what the CIA terms disinformation. 33. Hocus Pocus reads: ‘had a higher percentage … than any other country except for Haiti and South Africa’; but with the fall of ‘Baby’ Doc and the apartheid regime, that information was probably out of date at the time of the book’s release. 34. A further decision of the Court, this one vitiating the Freedom of Information Act [36:272], is likewise, mercifully, futuristic. So far. 35. The number in question putatively appears on Hocus Pocus’s (Vonnegut-designed)

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endpapers in the form of a scattering of stylized pawn-like cutouts representing interchangeable human beings. By my count, however, the quantity of such figures on the front endpaper differs from that at the back, and in neither case does it precisely correspond to what one comes up by following Hartke’s concluding instructions (40:321). 36. See Wampeters 239–40, 243. 37. Extending this characterization of Hartke’s activities in promoting the war to Vonnegut himself as an employee of G.E. is completely consistent with the contextual import of the phrase in question. (For G.E.’s place in Vonnegut’s private mythology, see below.) 38. See the opening of §II of my chapter on Borges. 39. The inference that this aspect of Sirens is autobiographical is consistent with what Vonnegut says in his ‘Self-Interview’ about his military training (Palm Sunday 85– 86), and especially with his attitude toward officers (ibid. 89; cp. Wampeters 265). 40. This sentiment ties in with the fictifact that ‘[o]n Mars, the word [father] was emotionally meaningless’ (6:146) as that is brought to bear on Malachi/‘Unk,’ whose ‘own strange childhood had been spent in daydreams of at last seeing and loving a father who did not want to see him, who did not want to be loved by him’ (6:147). But the statement of Boaz’s resolution of his problem of being parentless bespeaks, to some degree, both narcissism and incest. And this in turn may have some relevance to one otherwise totally tangential detail: that Beatrice Rumfoord for a time passes under an alias (the laundress Florence White, 10:241) which is very close to the name of Malachi’s mother (the chambermaid Florence Whitehill, 3:75). Whether or not this suggests that narcissism may be related to incestuous impulses, it may certainly serve to signal the convoluted workings of the psychoautobiographical imagination – something which Vonnegut otherwise requires us to do by representing parental indifference and desertion throughout Sirens in the person of a father who surely in (t)his case is a surrogate for his suicide mother. (Edith Leiber Vonnegut overdosed on sleeping pills in May of 1944 – not a good year for Vonnegut: by the end of it, the Battle of the Bulge had left him a POW.) Presumably Vonnegut himself would not totally disapprove of this sort of literarypsychoanalytic reading. In response to the Playboy interviewer’s question-cum-statement, ‘So your books have been therapy for yourself,’ Vonnegut replied: ‘Sure. That’s well known. Writers get a nice break in one way, at least: They can treat their mental illness every day’ (Wampeters 283). 41. Perhaps from the same considerations motivating his denial of Dresden’s personal traumatic impact, Vonnegut elsewhere offers a formula of his own making which demands comparison with his pediatrician son’s by reason of its echo: ‘We are here on Earth to fart around’ (Timequake 57:191). At the least, the verbal resemblances between these two statements of human purpose should make us hesitant about ascribing to Vonnegut a facile and un(self)critical sentimentality – a hesitation which possibly entered Vonnegut’s mind as a proleptic intent dictating ‘to fart around,’ but in any case one which bears on Malachi’s, Boaz’s, and Beatrice’s dicta in favor of mutual assistance as a/the summum bonum. 42 See the penultimate paragraph of §I above. See also the moving and insightful sermon that Vonnegut delivered at St. Clement’s Episcopal Church on Palm Sunday 1980 (in Palm Sunday 325–30), and especially his introductory comment: ‘Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far’ (i.e., anywhere from anyone).

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§9. Borges and the Labyrinths of Time 1. In Other Inquisitions (hereafter OI) 114. The dates given for Borges titles are those of their original appearance in a literary magazine (usually Sur) – unless asterisked, in which case the date is that of the work’s first inclusion in a Borges anthology. 2. Obras = Obras Completas. All citations from this source (by volume: page) are in my own translation from the Spanish. (Note, by the way, that despite its title’s promise, this edition, by his own choice, does not include the complete works of Borges; see n. 5 below.) 3. This second edition of Evaristo Carriego expands upon the first (1930). 4. I say ‘inhabits’ rather than ‘inhabited’ because the Borges I am referring to is not the Argentinian who died in 1983, but the writer who continues to live in his writings – and in the way that (other) great authors do: viz., by communicating his mental presence through them. 5. This last phrase of mine is intended to take cognizance of Borges’s repudiation (at least in effect) of those early works of his that would qualify as specifically Argentinian – those deliberately left out of Obras Completas. The element of (auto)biographical self-creation in Evaristo Carriego’s Prologue becomes evident with reference to the opening paragraph of Borges’s ‘Note on Carriego,’ in OI 31. 6. The fact that Borges quotes Alexander Pope in his essay’s epigraph points to that English poet as the one who put Borges onto this particular Chinese emperor. Pope mentions the two projects of ‘Chi Ho-am-ti’ (his spelling) in a footnote to The Dunciad; but in the body of that mock epic, he simply represents him as one more enemy of learning (whom the Goddess of Dullness praises in III.75–78 of the 1743 version of Pope’s satiric masterpiece). Shih Huang Ti founded the (relatively short-lived) Ch’in Dynasty in the late 3rd century B.C.E. His project for a Great Wall, however, assumed the form and proportions we currently know more than a millennium after his death (sometime during the Ming Dynasty). In addition to the Wall and the book-burning (along with a pogrom against the intelligentsia), Shih inaugurated centralized government and regularized the writing system. 7. I have something more to say about this idea regarding the names of things in my chapter on ‘The Language of Utopia’ and also in my 1971 essay on Gulliver’s Travels. 8. Cp. ‘Forms of a Legend’ (1952*), in OI 149–53. 9. John Sturrock points out that the ‘Pên’ component of this name doubly inscribes its bearer’s writerly vocation: by reason both of the English word it resembles and of a ‘colloquial Chinese term for one of the stitched “gatherings” of which books are made’ (44). 10. Another of Borges’s speculations in ‘The Wall and the Books’ is that Shih Huang Ti undertook the building of the wall so that a future emperor would ‘destroy the wall, as I have destroyed the books, and he will erase my memory and will be my shadow and my mirror and will not know it’ (OI 4). Shih Huang Ti himself, in burning the books, would, according to this baroque notion, be just such a shadow and a mirror of ‘that legendary Huang Ti, the emperor who invented writing’ (ibid.). Similarly, Yu Tsun is the negation (shadow) and inversion (mirror) of his ancestor Ts’ui Pên, of whom Yu Tsun says, ‘The hand of a stranger murdered him’ (Labyrinths 23). 11. My emphasis on ‘spatial’ is meant to anticipate my subsequent reformulation (in §IV) of what Borges is doing with space and time. The same caveat applies, mutatis mutandis, to ‘ostensibly’ two paragraphs on. 12. Américo Castro (236, 662) connects some of these features of Las Meninas with those observable in Spanish literature of the Golden Age, especially in the Quixote. See also Wylie Sypher 171–72. The significance that I inferentially attach to the probable dimensions of the canvas-within-the-canvas is something which I thought to be

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indisputable when I originally drafted my essay on Borges; but I have since found out that this was a matter of heated disagreement among art historians for a time (a debate by now resolved in favor of what I took for granted). And this may also serve to give some indication of how oblivious my remarks here about Velásquez’s masterpiece are both to the voluminous commentary that it has attracted and to the many pages that Las Meninas deserves and requires. (In a book-in-progress on Jonathan Swift, I devote the better part of a dozen pages to analyzing the Velásquez, which I conclude is a painting about [its own] perspective, an interpretation which fits in with a report that Sir Kenneth Clark made numerous visits to the Prado in an attempt to determine the angle from which Velásquez painted Las Meninas – an exercise in futility, I would say, because there can be no such single standpoint.) 13. In ‘La perpetua carrera de Aquiles y la tortuga’ and ‘Avataras de la tortuga’ (in Discusión [1932] – with the second essay also in OI), ‘Kafka and his Precursors’ (in OI), and ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ (in Ficciones). There is also an allusion to Zeno in ‘The Lottery of Babylon’ (Labyrinths 34). 14. The only thing which Borges has not invented in his version of The Biathanatos is that title itself, which heads an argument (published in 1628) whereby Donne, implicitly, rationalizes suicide. 15. Borges himself makes this point in his notes to The Aleph and Other Stories 269: ‘The Killer and the slain, whose minds work the same way, may be the same man. Lönnrot is not an unbelievable fool walking into his own death trap but, in a symbolic way, a man committing suicide. This is hinted at by the similarity of … names. The end syllable of Lönnrot means red in German, and Red Scharlach is also translatable, in[to] German, as Red Scarlet.’ 16. The Borgesian notion of universal history as the history of all men and of one man is implicit in many of his writings, particularly in ‘The God’s Script,’ ‘The Immortal,’ and ‘Pascal’s Sphere’ (1951). The last begins: ‘Perhaps universal history is the history of a few metaphors’ (OI 6). A corollary of this notion can be found in ‘The Wall and the Books,’ where Borges defines ‘sacred books’ as those ‘that teach what the whole universe or each man’s conscience teaches’ (OI 5). Here and in the discussion above of Borges’s baroque qualities, I have made no attempt to exhaust the possible examples. 17. Along with his grandmother’s books, Borges seems to have inherited her idiosyncratic taste in literature. In ‘An Autobiographical Essay’ (Aleph … 206) he recalls: ‘When she was over eighty, people used to say, in order to be nice to her, that nowadays there were no writers who could vie with Dickens and Thackeray. My grandmother would answer, ‘On the whole, I rather prefer Arnold Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells.’ 18. Ronald J. Christ maintains that the ‘authors who really influence [Borges’s] work, the reflection of whose writing can be seen in his fiction, are Chesterton, Wells, and Kipling’ (43). Of the three, Christ focuses mainly on Wells (e.g., on pp. 144–45, 164–65); he also makes a convincing case for an affinity between Borges and De Quincey (pp. 148–210). 19. Or the Donne Borges creates via his version of The Biathanatos, for that matter – see n. 14 above. 20. Preface to The Island of Doctor Moreau in the Atlantic Edition of the Works, 2:ix. 21. Epilogue to El Aleph 198. 22. This phrase, quoted from ‘The First Wells’ (OI 88), originally occurs in a review Borges reprints in Discusión, where he speaks of Wells as the ‘ancient [in the sense of ageless] narrator of atrocious miracles: that of the voyager who brings back from the future a wilted flower; of the Beast Men who gabble a servile creed in the night; of a traitor who flees from the moon’ (Obras 6:164–65). 23. Wells’s Works 1:434. The same story contains this hellish speculation: ‘It may be… that, when our life has closed, when evil or good is no longer a choice for us, we

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may still have to witness the working out of the train of consequences we have laid’ (1:445). 24. Wells uses this term in his essay ‘Zoological Retrogression’ (1891); see EW 158. 25. This and other matters concerning the construction of genre I discuss at some length in §II of this book’s Afterword. Meanwhile, the claim I make for Wells as Borges’s chief ‘collaborator’ gets tacit endorsement from R. Christ (see n. 18 above). 26. ‘Zoological Retrogression,’ in EW 168. 27. Compare Yu Tsun’s precept: ‘The executor of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past’ (Labyrinths 22). 28. ‘The Flower of Coleridge’ goes on to give a brief account of Henry James’s Sense of the Past, where ‘The cause follows the effect, the reason for his [Pendrel’s] journey is one of the consequences of the journey.’ Borges finds this ‘an incomparable regressus in infinitum’ (OI 12) – that is, the future determines the past, which determines the future, and so on. Could he be hinting, by his juxtaposition, that he perceives this regress in embryo in The Time Machine (see OI 12n. 2), where, as it were, the present identity of the Traveller is dependent on the future? 29. TTM 1:5. For a further analysis, see my essay ‘The Time Machine: or, The Fourth Dimension as Prophecy.’ 30. ‘New Refutation… ,’ OI 177: ‘I admire his [Heraclitus’] dialectic skill, because the facility with which we accept the first meaning (‘The river is different’) clandestinely imposes the second one (‘I am different’).’ Borges’s citation and commentary provide the basis for a connection between writings of his as I interpret them here and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. See n. 19 of my chapter on Le Guin and the body of my discussion attaching thereto. 31. Compare this sentence from ‘The Man on the Threshold’: ‘The exact geography of the facts I am going to report is of very little importance’ (Obras 7:143). The abstractness of space in Borges’s fictions undoubtedly has something to do with his congenitally bad eyesight. Cp. T. S. Eliot’s discussion of Milton’s ‘auditory imagination’ in his first essay on that poet, 157ff. I speak of Borges’s mature concern for the geometry of space because in his early work, ‘in books now happily forgotten, I tried to copy down the flavor, the essence of the outlying suburbs of Buenos Aires’ (‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition,’ Labyrinths 181). 32. Borges’s footnote at this point in the text says, ‘There is an erasure in the manuscript; perhaps the name of the port has been removed’ (Labyrinths 116). 33. Compare L. A. Murillo 237–38. 34. See ‘New Refutation… ,’ OI 176–77. 35. On the question of when Borges may have written what, see my next note. On the bibliographical history of ‘Tlön,’ see Martin Stabb 104. 36. It will be noted that virtually all of the Borgesian self-allusions I enlist in my subsequent argument that much of Borges’s œuvre constitutes the definitive encyclopedia of Tlön are to ficciones which initially appeared between one and seven years after ‘Tlön’ came out in Sur. But along with being consistent with the ruse of the postdated Postscript, the seeming anachronism is explicable in non-Tlönian terms, and in either of two ways: that Borges already had in mind (perhaps even had already drafted) in 1940 the writings in question (e.g., ‘The Immortal’ [1947]) or – perhaps more plausibly – that those other fictions, in so far as he self-allusively connects them with ‘Tlön,’ are designed to make good on the latter’s concluding promise (‘The world will be Tlön’). In that regard, it is significant that many of the fiction’s ‘futuristic’ self- and cross-references occur in the spuriously dated Postscript. (I might add that John Sturrock, at least in effect, is offering a reading of ‘Tlön’ similar to mine [see pp. 118–22 of his book].) 37. Sturrock (118–19) in effect demonstrates a parallel or analogy at work in ‘Tlön’: that the relationship among the fiction’s three encyclopedias (the Britannica, The Anglo-

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American Cyclopædia, and The First Encyclopædia of Tlön) reproduces that obtaining among the ‘real’ world, Uqbar, and Tlön. 38. The philosopher Chuang Tzu, or Chuang-tse (4th century B.C.E.), was a follower of Lao-tze, the legendary founder of Taoism. 39. ‘Today, one of the churches of Tlön platonically maintains that … [a]ll men, in a vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare’ (Labyrinths 12n). Taking a hint from Michel Foucault (The Order of Things 47), Jaime Alazraki would have it that ‘whereas Don Quixote reads the world to validate [demostrar] books, Tlön is the reading of books to validate the world’ (288). But neatly aphoristic though this formula be, its distinction is ultimately fallacious – mainly for a reason traceable to Foucault’s not clarifying that his remark about Don Quixote does not hold true for Don Quixote. This is also to say that the sort of hermeneutic circle – often referred to as ‘the prisonhouse of language’ – which ‘Tlön’ describes (i.e., linguistically performs) exists in Cervantes as well, though admittedly Borges’s rendition is closer to the significance of ‘word-golf’ in the Appendix to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1969) than the Quixote is. 40. On ‘generology,’ see my remarks about Aristotle and Todorov toward the start of §II of my Afterword. 41. Jameson in his 1973 essay (p. 60) acknowledges his debt to Gaston Bachelard’s treatment of ‘the poetics of space.’ 42. ‘Irreality’ is a neologism deriving from the Spanish word (for ‘unreality’) that Ana María Barrenechea disseminated in her study of Borges (La expressión de la irrealidad …, 1957). See her discussion (133–43) of how ‘unreality [is] reflected in [Borges’s] vocabulary and syntax,’ which includes the following aperçu: Quite often … [Borges’s] syntax of interpolated elements seems to allude to the imprecision and manifest treachery of language. It appears as if he were demonstrating a way of writing which allows itself to be influenced by the approximate only [or: in order] to correct or define it…. [H]e prefers to leave intact the route of the discovery … (142; my translation and emphasis) Just one of her examples will serve for clarification: ‘For one of those Gnostics the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism.’ 43. I am using Lem’s neologism in the same sense he does in Futurological Congress: to signify the breaking down, or corrosion, of actuality, or reality. 44. This is the burden of John Balderston’s reading of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths,’ to which he entirely devotes his third chapter. He there supplies a hint that Borges may have (consciously) contributed to the thoughtless supposition that Hart is an invention by giving an erroneous page reference to Hart’s History of the European War (1931). (Alazraki [390–91] reports that the 1956 edition of Ficciones is wildly off on this detail, giving the Hart page number as 22 instead of 252; but conceivably that is a compositorial error rather than a Borgesian misdirection. See also Balderston 151n5.) Although whatever information I have about that fiction’s historical references and allusions I owe almost entirely to Balderston, the conclusion that I presently reach on their basis about Borges’s concealment strategy I take to be almost diametrically opposed to Balderston’s. Risking the imputation of ingratitude (or worse), I would also contend that he is reading ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ ‘against the grain’ (40) in a sense of that phrase which he doesn’t intend. 45. I mean this instance of ‘encryptment’ to be generalizable, and hence consistent with the proposition which Lawrence Schehr offers in his ‘unreading’ of Borges: that ‘texts are generated’ ‘[t]o cover death’ (184). 46. This Romantic idea of poetic, or imaginative, Genius receives perhaps its first (unmistakable) expression in William Blake’s ‘All Religions Are One’ (1787). 47. Marina Kaplan sees ‘Tlön’ as a ‘traducción quevediana’ of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial (1658 – mentioned at the end of Borges’s Postscript). By traducción she

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means both rewrite and parodic betrayal, both of these having to do with Borges’s replacement of Browne’s Christian faith with Modern skepticism (Kaplan 332–33 et passim). The justice as well as the sense of her adjective Quevedian is apparent from Borges’s own essay on Francisco de Quevedo, whose ‘art … was [not] distinguished by … sentimental excesses’ – indeed, au contraire (‘Quevedo,’ in OI 36). 48. Borges’s affinity for this particular poem is evident from ‘The Nightingale of Keats’ (OI 121–24). The conclusion of that essay hints at the point attaching to my n. 45. 49. This is Kaplan’s observation, 336. 50. It also requires that we overlook the irony in Borges’s declaration at the end of ‘New Refutation of Time.’ ‘The world, alas, is real’ there shares that reality with ‘I, alas, am Borges,’ and thus loses it (for a reason deriving from the truth as well as the factitiousness of differentiating ‘Borges’ from ‘I’ in ‘Borges and I’). The quotations in both the sentence to which superscript 46 attaches and that preceding it are from Kaplan (pp. 337 and 341, respectively – in my translation), though ‘epistemological metaphor’ comes, by way of Alazraki (275–77), from Umberto Eco. Oddly enough, in arguing that ‘Tlön’ finally has a profound connection with Urn Burial in that both have to do with reality (viz., the reality of death – but see Borges on Browne’s Religio Medici, in OI 120), Kaplan cites Borges’s characterization of that reality as ‘atroce o banal’ no fewer than three times. It is also telling, perhaps, that she rarely descends to examining any sort of textual detail in the course of her lengthy article.

§10. Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomic Tales 1. Because the English translations of Calvino are not consistently accurate enough for my purposes, I have offered my own renderings (made in consultation with my wife, who holds the Italian equivalent of a PhD in literature). Accordingly, the first number following that of the chapter cited refers to the page(s) of the Italian edition specified in my Works Cited. To the right of the slash is the corresponding page in the Archibald Colquhoun or William Weaver rendition (again with reference to the texts scheduled in Works Cited). 2. Calvino’s critical writings occupy two posthumously published tomes (Saggi) which between them take up 2700pp. The three volumes Calvino intended for publication – Una pietra sopra, Collezione di sabbia, and Lezioni americane (the last a series of lectures he was to have delivered at Harvard had death not prematurely intervened) – take up little more than a quarter of that total. Of the remainder, those in Part II of Saggi alone would easily fill another three volumes (even if confined to literary matters – i.e., excluding Calvino’s essays on films, politics, and culture, interviews with him, etc.). 3. On my translation of this title, see n. 12 below. 4. Ann Charters (11) quotes this line (in italics), without giving its source (which presumably is Fields’s written tribute to Williams). 5. D. S. Carne-Ross in effect says as much in his critique of Weaver’s translations. Martin McLaughlin goes so far as to apply prosodic/metrical analysis and the like to Calvino’s prose. 6. Calvino in his Preface to the first edition of I nostri antenati (1960, ed. cit.) testifies that he initially conceived of each of its three components in terms of an image. With Visconte he early on imagined ‘a man cut lengthwise in two’ (xi); Barone began with the image of ‘a boy who climbs up a tree’ (xiv); and Cavaliere with ‘a suit of armor that walks about and is empty inside’ (xvi). This is not the only way in which a poet may think; but it does differentiate the mind of the poet from that of the novelist, say (as any number of novelists have attested in recording how a character came to life in their head and gave rise to this or that fiction). Calvino’s account of how Gurdulù came to him suggests that the creative thought-

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process of the science-fiction writer as well as of the poet came into play, at least with Cavaliere. In conceiving of that figure, he reports, he proceeded by ‘logical contrast’ (to Agilulfo), starting with ‘the idea to arrive at the image, and not vice-versa as I usually do’ (xvii). This, it may not be needless to add, is consistent with my Afterword’s claim that science-fictionists as such are primarily working with (science-fiction) story-ideas, not philosophical concepts. 7. This phrase is Ursula Le Guin’s. See n. 1 of the following chapter. 8. See ‘Jorge Luis Borges’ in Saggi 1292–1300. It is telling that in these remarks (originally delivered to introduce a reading by Borges), Calvino largely makes the Argentine writer over in his own image. He emphasizes ‘the stylistic miracle’ of Borges’s writing, for example – ‘the variety of rhythms, of the syntactic movements, of the always unexpected and surprising adjectives’ (1294) – and speaks of the Borgesian ‘text as a tissue of words and images and meanings’ composing a ‘musical space in which a theme develops its variations’ (1296). 9. ‘Fantasmi’ (as Creagh’s translation suggests) is the Italian word for ‘ghosts.’ (Calvino uses it in ‘Livelli della realtà’ [Pietra sopra 311/Uses of Literature 102], for instance, as the term for Hamlet Senior.) But inasmuch as Calvino in ‘Cibernetici e fantasmi’ is alluding to and combatively engaging ‘the ghost in the machine’ (in the sense of that phrase which the philosopher Gilbert Ryle is responsible for), ‘ghostly presences’ may serve to obviate the irrelevant superstitious import of ‘fantasmi.’ 10. I am translating from the text of ‘Cibernetici …’ in Pietra sopra 174. Patrick Creagh’s version of the passage I quote can be found in The Uses of Literature 18. But his rendering of Calvino is somewhat less satisfactory than Colquhoun’s or Weaver’s: not just on grounds of (in)accuracy (especially when he comes to ‘I livelli della realtà in letteratura’ (‘Levels of Reality in Literature,’ 1978), but also because Creagh habitually resorts to paraphrase. 11. By reason of its dating from the moment that Barone, Cavaliere, and Visconte made their bibliographical début as a trilogy (i.e., under the name I nostri antenati), Calvino’s most telling statement is perhaps that found in ‘Tre correnti del romanzo italiano d’oggi’ (‘Three Currents in Today’s Italian Novel’). There he speaks of ‘neorealism’ as his own ‘point of departure’ (Pietra 47). 12. In this regard, it is significant that Calvino first arranges the three in a single volume (viz., the 1960 edition of I nostri antenati)) in the order their internal, or fictifactual, chronology dictates (whereas the corresponding one-volume English translation follows the order of their original publication dates, which is also that of their composition). The names that Colquhoun bestows on the three have the virtue of poeticality as well as of marketability. But ‘The Cloven Viscount’ has a diabolical insinuation that is not entirely apropos; ‘Nonexistent’ may suggest Calvino’s Knight’s peculiarity slightly less than ‘Inexistent’ does; and ‘The Baron in the Trees’ conveys nothing of the ambiguity of ‘rampante’ (which in Italian has the same double-meaning as the English ‘rampant’ – i.e., it is also a heraldic term). 13. Without naming its ‘inventor,’ Calvino uses the exact Italian equivalent of Eliot’s term-concept ‘the impersonality of literature’ in his remarks on Borges (Saggi 1299), and in a context which evokes an Eliotic understanding of how literature produces literature. 14. This ‘ancestral’ revelation appears in Calvino’s Preface to Nostri antenati (xiii), and at the point where Calvino is talking about Visconte’s Huguenots. 15. Given that any number of Italianists have already dealt with Ariosto’s ‘ancestral’ relationship to Calvino more competently than I could (as is also true for Calvino’s use of Italian folk- and fairy-tale materials), I have concentrated instead on foreign, mostly English, influences (especially Tristram Shandy’s) – this on the grounds I indicate in n. 17 below. To what little I have said about Ariosto, I might add, however, that Patricia Parker’s reading of Orlando furioso as a metageneric text does in effect offer it as a model for what Calvino is about not only in Il cavaliere but also in Il barone. Of particular

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application (mutatis mutandis) to Calvino is this remark of hers: ‘a careful study of the context of [Orlando’s] echoes of … the Aeneid … suggests that the ‘Ferrarese Virgil’ [i.e., Ariosto] was not failing in his imitation of the model but rather marking his own departure from it’ (40). 16. I.e., this sort of meaning can be seen in the Don Quixote–Sancho Panza opposition without Calvino’s help. For the Borgesian sense of ‘precursor,’ see the start of §II of my chapter on Borges and also the closing paragraphs of §III of my Afterword. 17. Lest it seem implausible that Calvino would be familiar with Wordsworth and Sterne, we should recall that he held the Italian equivalent of a PhD in English literature, having written his dissertation on Joseph Conrad. 18. McLaughlin (§3) is especially insistent on the ‘symmetry’ of Nostri antenati – in point of structure as well as of the characterological relationships. Here (and elsewhere), he is taking his cue from Calvino (in this case, from what Calvino says about Visconte and Cavaliere in his 1960 Preface). 19. Calvino in his 1960 Preface to Nostri antenati (xi) expressly compares Visconte to Jekyll and Hyde (and also to Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae). 20. ‘Dimidiamento’ is the word Calvino uses as the noun-equivalent of ‘dimezzato’ (1960 Preface, xiii). The word cannot be said to be entirely Calvino’s invention (unlike Lem, he rarely neologizes; ‘cosmicomiche’ is the one obvious exception). Still ‘dimidiamento,’ as a term that Calvino derives from the Latin adjective dimidiatus, has a distinctly recherché aura (which is in keeping with the spirit of this trilogy). 21. As Calvino applies the adjective schematico to Visconte (1960 Preface xiii), it is clearly a synonym for what McLaughlin calls ‘symmetry’ (cp. n. 18 above). The 1960 Preface to Nostri antenati is the major deviation from my rule about Calvino the critic. So far as I’m aware, however, he never reprinted it among his critical writings (though Oriana Palusci informs me that the rumor that he suppressed it altogether after 1960 is false). 22. Sofronia is still virgo intacta the second time Agilulfo rescues her; but he does his disappearing act on the auditory evidence of Torrismondo’s word that she is his mother (whereafter she’s revealed to be Torrismondo’s sister). 23. See my foregoing analysis of Futurological Congress. 24. Colquhoun, in effect if not by intention, ambiguates ‘Zaira’ by Englishing ‘il paese di Zaira’ as ‘the country of Zaira’ rather than as ‘Zaira’s country’ (the latter conveying the Italian’s univocality). This confusion of the female object of Carrega’s desire with a place is not, however, entirely an unhappy – or unCalvinoesque – mistake. 25. Ti con zero’s apparent asymmetry is twofold: not only is it ostensibly one narrative short of corresponding to Cosmicomiche; it also owes that deficit to a central trilogy, ‘Priscilla,’ which deviates from Ti con zero’s pattern (in Parts One and Three) of collecting its narratives in fours. This anomaly, however, can also be seen as offering confirmation for my subsequent reading of ‘Priscilla’ as a narrative sequence whose three components by their meaningful interaction(s) imply a fourth, synthetic or macro, narrative. 26. McLaughlin 17. 27. See §V below. I use ‘new’ and ‘old’ advisedly because I, for one, suspect that some of Calvino’s later cosmicomical additions were stories he already had in hand by, say, 1966, but had left in a drawer because they didn’t fit (in with) his original conception of Cosmicomiche and Ti con zero (either as independent volumes or with respect to their logical interconnection). McLaughlin (91) documents the ‘prepublication’ (my word) of five of the eight stories ‘new’ to La memoria del mondo. 28. James Boswell (731) records this remark of Dr. Johnson’s among the entries for April 5, 1776. Boswell editorializes that this is a ‘strange opinion’ ‘refute[d] by ‘[n]umerous instances … in the history of literature.’ 29. By the same token, ‘self-betrayal’ is something of an overstatement for emphasis. We shall eventually find that Calvino’s re-collections do qualify as revisionary for a

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reason inscribed in the title La memoria del mondo. 30. Given the epigraph’s status as a literary convention, it is significant that three of the seven epigraphs to ‘Priscilla’ come from non-scientific texts (e.g., J.-P. Sartre’s Les mots). (Weaver’s replacement of the scientific epigraph from T. H. Morgan’s Embryology and Genetics with an extract from the Encyclopædia Britannica entry for ‘Gene,’ while allegedly approved by Calvino, is not entirely felicitous.) 31. ‘Seemingly’ is meant as a forewarning against the misimpression that language is somehow – any how – epiphenomenal for Calvino. Robert Rushing, too, sees the incongruities in Calvino’s cosmicomics as being fundamentally linguistic, the outcome of juxtaposing a quotidian lexicon with ‘sectorial’ (i.e., specialized) language (‘linguaggio settoriale,’ 409). 32. As with Nostri antenati, the page reference to the left of the slash is to the Italian original, and the other to the English translation – in each case with respect to the editions recorded in my Works Cited. Weaver’s renditions, Cosmicomics and T Zero, have received much praise. This he might well have deserved had he revised them before committing them to publication. Unfortunately, however, he didn’t do that – with deplorable consequences. All too often his renderings are such as to suggest that it never entered his head that he is dealing with a linguistically exact and exacting author. Not only is Weaver generally careless as to what Calvino may mean; he as well takes the liberty of deleting phrases which he evidently regards as insignificant repetitions (most egregiously when he comes to Calvino’s ‘altrove altravolta altrimenti’; but see also n. 35 below). 33. With regard to the oddity of the definite article (further evinced vis-à-vis the Weaver rendition, ‘At Daybreak’), I refer the reader to my subsequent analysis of this cosmicomic story’s title. 34. What can be seen as a cosmicomic antagonism between science and fiction also appears on occasion within the scientific realm by itself: in discrepancies between scientific theories epigraphically invoked. Most of the cosmicomics, for example, epigraphically endorse the Expanding Universe Theory with its Big Bang; but ‘Giochi senza fine’ is a predicate of the Steady State Universe (whose most famous proponent is the sometime science-fiction writer Fred Hoyle). Calvino’s interest is not, I think, in the possibilities for incongruity which such scientific contradictions offer. In that regard, his arranging for ‘La Luna come un fungo’ (‘The Moon as a Mushroom’) to intervene between ‘La Distanza della Luna’ and ‘La molle Luna’ in La memoria is telling. The first and last of those three narratives are diametrically opposed: ‘La Distanza,’ as we have seen, invokes George Darwin on Tidal Evolution as the basis for the moon’s distantiation; ‘La molle’ appeals to recent astronomers to justify the moon’s rapprochement. In the epigraph to ‘La Luna,’ the reappearance of ‘the younger Darwin’ may bring to mind the fact that he, too, could have been cited in support of the scientific premise of ‘La molle’ (because, as Wells emphasizes, Tidal Evolution provides for ‘the planets[’]’ – and with them, Earth’s moon – ‘ultimately fall[ing] back one by one into the parent body’ [The Time Machine 8:76]). 35. Calvino’s insistence on ‘invece’ (‘instead’) in the latter pages of ‘Distanza’ is not nearly as available in Weaver, who deletes several of invece’s repetitions (no doubt from the mistaken belief that that’s all they are). 36. Cp. Claudio Milanini: ‘the representation of amorous impulses and contrasts sets itself up as reiterated metaphor for the conflictual relationship between the subject and the opaque objectivity of the universe’ (116, in my translation). 37. The phrase I have quoted from Tommasina Gabriele (78) I take to be the gist of her argument on the subject of Calvino’s cosmicomic portrayal of women. 38. Xenophobia constitutes one of the incongruous elements in ‘Tutto’ inasmuch as the story’s Punctiform Universe offers ‘neither a before nor an after nor an elsewhere to emigrate from’ (Cosmicomiche 56–57/44).

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39. Indeed, I would say that this story implicitly encourages an ‘allegorical’ reading that would analogically extend its central debate to black-and-white vs. color movies. That we are told at the outset of ‘Senza colori’ that the world so designated does not know ‘truly [proprio] black black’or ‘white white’ (64/51) – offering instead contrasting shades of gray – does not rule out a cinematic connection. After all, the same is true of ‘black-and-white’ films, none of which has any moment exactly equivalent, say, to Tristram Shandy’s black or white/blank pages. (The one near-exception I can think of, Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud [1964], stands out precisely because of its perpetual whitening effects.) 40. My point here is to elicit the inherent paradox of a title which finally characterizes the New World of Color as being ‘senza colore,’ or (figuratively) colorless. The fact that the text itself offers ‘incolore’ twice (64, 65) and ‘senza colore’ not at all does not preclude the engagement by ‘senza colori’ of its near-homophone ‘senza colore’ – in part because the choice of ‘incolore’ is an inevitable dictate of its antithetical term, ‘multicolore’ (71). At the same time, ‘senza colore’ inherently possesses a negative connotation, whereas ‘senza colori’ is merely descriptive. The story therefore licenses the former as a substitute for its given title only at the end, when Qfwfq poignantly refers to the now-lost world of grays as ‘Ayl’s perfect world’ (il mondo perfetto di Ayl) and contrasts it with the new reality of greens, reds, yellows, and blues (73/59–60), a reality which he finds ‘banal’ and hence, in effect, ‘senza colore.’ (The paradox of a figuratively colorless world of colors has its counterpart in Qfwfq’s declaration that he ‘no longer even knows how to imagine’ Ayl’s world [74/60].) A complementary warrant for (re)naming ‘Senza colori’ as ‘Senza Ayl’ is supplied by Roberto Deidier. He groups the story in question with two others: ‘Sul far del giorno’ and ‘Il cielo di pietra’ (‘The Sky of Stone,’ first collected in La memoria). He observes (98) that the three have a common ‘mythological matrix,’ the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. To Deidier’s list we should add a fourth cosmicomic: ‘La tempesta solare’ (‘The Solar Tempest,’ also ‘new’ with La memoria). While the latter is more suggestive of the Persephone myth than it is of Eurydice’s, it by the same token serves to indicate the interpretative use of any such grouping as the one Deidier proposes: to reveal the way(s) in which the cosmicomic narratives are variations on one another. 41. This gender differentiation is anticipated, appropriately enough, a moment after ‘I’ vs. ‘you’ makes its appearance – i.e., when Qfwfq, noticing that his remark to that effect has upset Ayl, uses a (female)gendered participle (‘contrariata’) to express his perception of her. The fact that gendered personal pronouns make their appearance in the Weaver translation at least half a page before they do in the original should not be counted among his many translatorial transgressions. Italian is peculiar, perhaps unique, in allowing for Calvino’s linguisitic practice in ‘Senza colori,’ which could no more be duplicated in French, say, than it can be in English (at least not without coming across as unacceptably odd, which the Italian is not). 42. For the only grounds for thinking otherwise (which, however, are ‘posthumous’), see n. 34 above. 43. I mean this as a facetious suggestion – even if Calvino had some conversance with Welsh (which is more than I know). 44. Milanini makes a complementary point: that ‘Qfwfq’ is a ‘perfectly bifrontal’ palindrome, ‘constructed in a mirror, consonant with the narcissistic character of a personage who has reality [consistenza] solely in that he narrates and narrates himself’ (121, in my translation). 45. Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London’ provides an instance cognate to ‘Sul fare.’ Appropriating a passage from D. H. Lawrence, Thomas reworks ‘daybreak’ as a term-concept by speaking/writing of ‘the last light breaking’ (a phrase whose contextual ambiguity arises from the fact that ‘breaking’ is both participial and half of a compound noun).

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46. Colquhoun translates this title as The Path to the Nest of Spiders. 47. I mean ‘literally,’ first of all, in what I take to be its root sense (in the Latin word for an alphabetic letter). The basis for the point I am making lies with Qfwfq and Kgwgk as sequences of letters. It gets reinforcement from something that an English reader (as such) would not be aware of: that ‘k’ is as foreign to Italian as ‘w‘ is (wherefore Kgwgk is even stranger than Qfwfq for having two foreign components rather than one). 48. Given the ensuing narrative, the original is quite ambiguous (in the Empsonian sense). ‘[F]eci un segno’ (41), that is, permits Weaver’s rendering, ‘drew a sign’ (31), as much as it does mine. In this case, however, ‘made a mark’ is warranted afterwards, at least by my understanding of what Calvino is up to. That is to say, we must first take the ‘segno’ to be any kind of mark – for instance, scratchings akin to the Stone Age petroglyphs I presently allude to. The subsequent reconstruction (by ‘Un segno’ itself, as it were) of the ‘segno’ as a pictorial representation – of what is never specified – and (then) as a kind of verbal icon in effect recapitulates ‘Un segno’s’ discovery of the sign as the discovery of time. 49. Lem’s ‘Rien du tout’ can be found in A Perfect Vacuum 69–79. I analyze it in §IX of my essay on ‘The Cybernetic Paradigms of Stanislaw Lem.’ 50. Even if Derrida does not actually provide for the totally extralinguistic origin of language (which is what I take Calvino to be doing), his entire chapter on ‘La voix qui garde le silence’ (‘The Voice Which Preserves Silence’) may otherwise be read as a gloss on ‘Un segno nello spazio.’ The text of Derrida’s I refer to appears as §6 of his La voix et le phénomène (‘Voice and Phenomenon’), wherein Edmund Husserl on language (as sign and sense) offers Derrida the basis for his own theorizations (including those concerning language’s – here chiefly voix’/voice’s – relation to time). Calvino’s and Derrida’s meeting of minds may have something to do with the common influence on them of Raymond Queneau and his Parisian intellectual circle, Oulipo. On Calvino and Queneau, see McLaughlin (esp. 101), and for a broader survey of Calvino’s ‘French Connection,’ Beno Weiss (88–95). 51. Qfwfq discovers – and tells us – as much when, ‘having come back to the point of [his original] segno’ and finding ‘in its place … an ugly shapeless scratch, an irregular and bruised abrasion [un’abrasione … slabbrata e pesta] of space’, he says: ‘I’d lost everything: the sign, the point, what made me – being the one of that sign at that point – to be me’ (45/35). 52. The disparition of the epigraph has its parallel in that of Qfwfq. In Part One of Ti con zero his ‘name’-designation (or sign) is as prominent as it is in Cosmicomiche (in accordance with the later volume’s contents-page promise that its first four narratives will be ‘Other Qfwfq’s’ [‘Altri Qfwfq’]); in ‘Priscilla’ somewhat less so (though the ‘signified’ is still recognizable as Qfwfq); and in the final section (whose rubric is ‘Ti con zero’) barely at all. The initial narrative in Part Three, ‘Ti con zero,’ provides itself with a cipher-entity signified as ‘Q’; ‘L’inseguimento’ (‘The Chase’ or ‘The Pursuit’) replaces him with a pronomial ‘I’; and ‘Il guidatore’ with an ‘X.’ Finally, of course, we are given a human-like entity with a human name – except that the Edmond Dantès of ‘Montecristo’ bears no ostensible resemblance to (any) Qfwfq. On the other hand – and as the word I’ve just stressed may imply – Dantès is to be understood as a re-vision of Qfwfq, all of whose narratives in Ti con zero, at least, are reconstructible as Dantèsque projects for imag(in)ing the perfect prison so as to effect an escape from it. On that understanding, what I initially characterized as parallel disappearances are also analogous. 53. Cp. the discussion of Derrida’s essay ‘Before the Law’ in my Afterword (291–92). 54. Again it should be emphasized that this pre-text, like any other in Ti con zero, ‘T con zero’ internalizes as its pretext, wherefore it is inscribed as indissociable from Qfwfq’s particular – and seemingly futile – project of defining to (which is a, but not the, beginning, in view of Qfwfq’s allowance for t-1, t-2, etc.). 55. I should add that the lack of commas in the Italian is somewhat less peculiar

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than it would be in English – this because Italian is less inflexible in such matters of punctuation. 56. A Tale of a Tub, in my view, is a thoroughly deconstructive project virtually from its outset (whether that be its Apology or, prior to the 1710 edition, its Dedicatory Epistle). But for two local cases in point, I would particularly refer to what Swift is doing with interiors vs. exteriors in §II’s ‘digression’ on Tailorism, and with surface vs. depth in ‘A Digression on Madness.’ 57. Rapporti’s sexual connotations are stronger than even those which Bill Clinton contrived to impart to its English counterpart (‘relations’). 58. Here the context of this Shandean dictum is singularly apropos. Eugenius, Tristram’s sometime companion, is confronted with a choice between a certain word’s (crevice’s) ‘two senses,’ which Tristram likens to ‘two roads’ and dichotomizes as ‘a dirty and a clean one.’ Asked which to take, Eugenius says, ‘The clean, – by all means.’ It is at this point that Tristram, ‘laying my hand upon his breast,’ pronounces his ominous sentence on Eugenius’ decision: ‘to define – is to distrust’ (Tristram Shandy III§31; see 1:258 of the Florida Edition of TS). 59. ‘Vuoto’ (‘empty’ or ‘emptiness’ – Italian allows for either rendering) is as prominent in the closing pages of ‘Meiosi’ as its antithesis, pieno/pienezza, is at the beginning of ‘Mitosi.’ 60. For the (Hegelian) distinction between variety and difference, see §5, n. 18. 61. This is a highly simplified epitome of ‘Montecristo.’ It therefore needs supplementation from Francis Cromphout’s analysis (172–73, 175–77), for one. (I pick him because, as translator, I had some input into the English version of his French essay.) 62. The ‘Château d’If’ is, to be sure, the elder Dumas’ term for the place where Dantès is held prisoner for fourteen years. That fact, however, does not automatically rule out Calvino’s use of that name as importing possibility (and this regardless of whether the same can be said for the Dumas). To think otherwise would entail binding Calvino as well in his appropriation of Dumas’ Dantès/‘Dantès’ and Faria/‘Faria,’ conducing to the foolish conclusion that Calvino’s ‘Montecristo’ is nothing but a (partial) rehash of Dumas’ Monte-Cristo. On the same understanding, however, ‘Montecristo’s’ devious conversance with Monte-Cristo probably extends to one datum in the latter that the Calvino version apparently does not even allude to: that Dantès, after being a prisoner for fourteen years, finally contrives to escape from If by feigning death. 63. From my analysis of ‘Priscilla,’ it should be evident (and no news to Calvino) that he couldn’t very well have included only one member of that trilogy – or rather, that it would have been worse if he had. 64. The phrase quoted comes from ‘Il niente e il poco’ (‘Nothing and Little’), which is one of the two stories ‘new’ to Cosmicomiche vecchie, not to Memoria. In changing the original’s ‘nostalgica’ into a noun by dropping the ‘c,’ I have in no way altered its contextual meaning (see Cosmicomiche vecchie 213): the adjective both applies to and substantively stands in for Nugkta, Qfwfq’s female antagonist in this narrative, who longs for the Old World of Nothing by comparison with the New Order of Little. 65. McLaughlin (101–02) surveys the two chief schematic (or, one might say, genomic) accounts of Le città. Francesca Bernardini makes a similar point about Il castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of the Crossed Destinies, 1969; rev. ed. 1973): that in it, ‘the theoretic hints of Cosmicomiche and T con zero are elaborated into a theory of literature founded on the combinatory game in which a Barthesian influence is notable’ (95). This remark has as its context an overall view of Calvino’s cosmicomic project (inclusive of La Memoria) as constituting a ‘macro-text’ (a term-concept for which Bernardini credits Maria Corti – see Bernardini 60). In the case she makes for that conception, too, Bernardini’s argument complements mine. By the same token, however, our respective views are at odds inasmuch as she pursues a macrotextual comprehension of the cosmicomics

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solely on the level of theme and subject-matter (i.e., without regard for what Calvino is doing with language). 66. Palomar (published as a book in 1983, but serialized from 1975–76 on) is, however, also amenable to a reading which would make it a quite foreseeable outcome of Ti con zero. JoAnn Cannon, for instance, sees Palomar as ‘a focalisateur whose perceptions of the world are recorded by an invisible narrator’ (95) – and hence, in effect, as an extension of the disappearing Qfwfq detailed in n. 52 above. Cannon, then, provides additional grounds for holding, with Kathryn Hume (4), that ‘the cosmicomical stories’ are central to Calvino’s opus – though not, methinks, for (Hume’s) purposes of ‘metaphysical clarification.’

§11. Ursula K. Le Guin and Time’s Dispossession 1. The phrase quoted comes from the concluding lines of Burnt Norton. Since (as far as I am aware) no edition of Eliot’s Four Quartets exists with enumerated lines, I identify quotations from it by section and line(s) within that section. My implicit point, as my epigraph is meant to indicate preliminarily, is that The Dispossessed constitutes a reworking, or re-vision, of the argument of Four Quartets, whose Eliotic meaning Le Guin secularizes and gives a decidedly political application to (in the broadest sense of ‘political’). This, she has privately communicated to me, is neither the result of conscious intention on her part nor an accident (i.e., an arbitrary connection of mine). Her further reponse (in the form of an annotation on what I’ve just said) is that I make it sound as if she ‘‘‘reworked” what he [Eliot] thought/said,’ whereas ‘Eliot & I were/are working at the same place’ (her emphasis). But this is to some extent compatible with the case I am trying to make about The Dispossessed’s relationship to the Four Quartets: that she is re-vising – and also, at least in effect, appropriating – Eliot in a way that makes him something of a Borgesian ‘precursor’ (for which see my Afterword and the chapter on Borges). 2. By ‘semantic opposition’ I mean to suggest not only that Anarres at first defines itself as the paradigmatic negation of Urras, but also that its name is to be thought of as the phonemic negative of ‘Urras’ – i.e., as Un-Urras. This notion is consistent with other proposals about the derivation of the name of Shevek’s home planet, at least if the candidates in question be regarded as negational forms (of ‘archy’ and ‘res,’ or object). It should be stressed, however, that any such understanding of ‘Anarres’ must give way to another by the time Shevek returns: that the name finally takes on a positive meaning all its own correlative to that of ‘dispossessed’ in the sense he redeems. By that transvaluation, moreover, the paradigmatic dependency of ‘Anarres’ and ‘Urras’ reverses: ‘Anarres’ appears as the primary signifier, with ‘Urras’ the Ur-form that according to Odonian (but not Shevek’s) history it has been all along. 3. Thinking of Urras as a compound of U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. becomes more plausible when we remember that the French initials for the latter are U.R.S.S. (see my next note). On the other hand, the presence of Terra in The Dispossessed serves to point to some of the respects in which Urras is not (simply identifiable as) Earth. 4. Recalling that Le Guin at Radcliffe was a student of Romance languages specializing in French and Italian literature, we can take the ‘Io’ of A-Io as the Italian firstperson singular pronoun and ‘Thu,’ pronounced ‘tu,’ as the familiar form of ‘you’ in French (but also the French term for the [Martin] Buberian ‘Thou’). In this connection, see the passage in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) in which Genly Ai and Estraven between them establish the ‘duality’ of ‘I and Thou’ as ‘essential’ (LHD 16:222); and consider also Donald Theall’s gloss on that passage: ‘This duality of ‘myself and the other’ or ‘I and Thou’ is naturally at the heart of human communication’ (260). It should be added that the ‘Thu’ which we sound as (if it were) the Vietnamese-

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French name which it looks like points to the fact that The Dispossessed is as much a product of the American War in Indochina as is The Word for World is Forest (1972). (The difference between them is that the latter is situated in a fictional equivalent of Vietnam, so to speak, while The Dispossessed – as becomes evident from events toward the end of Shevek’s stay on Urras – emanates from the United States of the era of antiwar protest and its promise, as it seemed at the time, that radical change in the direction of realizing America’s foundational ideals might be possible.) In this connection, ‘A-Io’ can also be deciphered as ‘A-One-o,’ a sardonic acknowledgment of America’s pretensions to world hegemony. 5. Whether by authorial intention or not, the episode concerning the Dust proleptically militates against the widely-held view that Anarres is a privative utopia, a place where ‘the valued social … interdependence of the propertyless’ is ‘environmentally coerced’ (John Fekete 133); this same assumption governs Raymond Williams’s account of The Dispossessed, 213-14; and it underlies Nadia Khouri’s contention that ‘the economic entropy of Anarres becomes the necessary condition for [its] virtuous … superiority … over Urras’ (52). ‘Mutual aid’ is a recurrent phrase bringing to mind P. A. Kropotkin and his bestknown treatise on anarchism. For a compelling discussion of his and other anarchist thinkers’ influence on the conception of Anarres, see Victor Urbanowicz’s essay. 6. ‘What,’ Shevek rhetorically asks Chifoilisk, ‘is idealistic about social cooperation, mutual aid, when it is the only means of staying alive?’ (5:109). Carl Freedman makes my point about Anarres’ scarcity in somewhat different terms: ‘material privation not only sets quantitative limits to the achievements of socialism; it may qualitatively deform socialist values at their very core’ (Critical Theory 122). 7. According to the distinction I have in mind, ‘anti-utopian’ fiction is immanently and continually (if not continuously) engaged in a dialogue with ‘utopian’ fiction, whereas the ‘dystopian’ occupies the already-evacuated space formerly held by utopian ideas/ideals, which figure (if at all) only as a vacancy. On this understanding of the three terms, ‘utopian’ and ‘dystopian’ fictions are more or less monological. Compare John Huntington’s discussion in §7 of The Logic of Fantasy, and see also my foregoing chapter on ‘The Language of Utopia.’ 8. For reasons that I come to in §III of this chapter, the meaning of The Dispossessed is predicated on the truth that the text, through our reading of it, is as much a matter of our experience as is what we usually think of as the empirical world. 9. This point is borne out by the following passage, which (moreover) indicates that the estrangement between Shevek and Takver has been mutual: He had withdrawn from Takver since the winter, since the decision about the book [i.e., Sabul’s decision not to publish Shevek’s Principles of Simultaneity]. She had been increasingly quiet, passive, patient. He understood that passivity now: it was a preparation for her death. It was she who had withdrawn from him, and he had not tried to follow her. He had looked only at his own bitterness of heart, and never at her fear, or courage. He had let her alone because he wanted to be let alone, and so she had gone on, gone far, too far, would go on alone, forever. (8:195) That this last thought of his proves not to be the case is largely owing to the process of reflection in which it is situated. (‘Looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives’ [10:269; my emphasis].) In my present account of the Takver-Shevek relationship, I have conflated the temporal fictifacts to emphasize the sense that their marriage is in jeopardy by the time Shevek departs, alone, for Urras. In retrospect, however – and in keeping with the reality of Causative Reversibility – this past, like every other as The Dispossessed represents it, is (already) amenable to alteration (i.e., to being perceived differently,

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and thereby changed). Thus, for example, Takver’s unwavering moral support for Shevek and her stated conviction that ‘you will come back’ (12:305) promise that their separation will not be permanent. 10. Against the possibility that Urras will repeat the self-desolation of Terra stands the fictive given that A-Io ‘had led the world for centuries … in ecological control and the husbanding of natural resources’ (3:66). In the face of universal instability and the ‘profiteering’ impulse, however, there is no guarantee that this will always be the case. 11. For Orwell’s expression of dismay ‘that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world,’ see ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War,’ in Orwell’s The Collected Essays … 2:258-59. This same idea figures as an absence in Nineteen Eighty-Four. 12. See E. E. Nunan and David Homer (311-12, 324-26) for a consideration of The Dispossessed’s bearing on the debate between ‘the traditional “internalist” view of science as a totally self-regulated activity and their “externalist” opponents, who emphasize outside forces as determining the rate, direction, and form of knowledge production’ (311). Their essay, however, hardly exhausts what the fiction has to tell us about such matters as the impact of socio-politics and ideology on scientific undertakings. 13. See §II for my itemization of these setbacks. As the present paragraph and its successor are intended to imply, the question of responsibility – and that of selfjustification attaching to it – is central not only in Shevek’s mind but also to The Dispossessed’s moral (and moralistic) meaning (or what Freedman characterizes as its ‘ethical-political emphasis’ [Critical Theory xvii]). 14. One version of Zeno’s paradoxical reductio ad absurdum of Sequentist time (cum space) appears (unattributed to him) at 1:23. Cp. Borges’s ‘Avatars of the Tortoise,’ in Other Inquisitions 109–15. 15. Our common supposition that Sequence is a feature of the external world and Presence merely a fact of human psychology is directly inverted in Shevek’s remark (to Dearri): ‘Within the strict terms of Simultaneity Theory, succession is not considered as a physically objective phenomenon, but as a subjective one’ (7:178). Cp. the congenital idealism of Borges’s Tlönians, who ‘do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of [the] association of ideas’ (Labyrinths 9). 16. Cp. Victoria Myers’ analysis of The Left Hand of Darkness in terms of the ‘speechact.’ 17. Einstein (28) in effect explains the meaning of this favorite saying of his in his 1941 additions to ‘Science and Religion,’ where he writes: ‘The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature.’ By reason of his political concerns as well as his professional stature, Einstein clearly stands as one real-life model for Shevek. Le Guin, however, noted on a draft of this chapter of mine that she was thinking of other scientists as well, Robert Oppenheimer in particular. 18. It is worth recalling that Stapledon speaks of his Star Maker’s creativity as having two ‘aspects,‘ one temporal, the other eternal. These correspond almost exactly to sequency and simultaneity in The Dispossessed’s understanding of those term-concepts. 19. Heraclitus’ apothegm is quoted (but not attributed to him) at 2:44. J. L. Borges’s gloss is pertinent to Le Guin’s meaning here: ‘I admire … [Heraclitus’] dialectic skill, because the facility with which we accept the first meaning (‘The river is different’) clandestinely imposes the second one (‘I am different’)’ – ‘New Refutation of Time,’ in Other Inquisitions 177. 20. Shevek in fact doubly breaks those Terms of Closure, which would prohibit not only his return, but also his bringing with him the Hainishman Ketho.

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21. According to my reading, the burden of The Dispossessed’s argument about time entails a valorizing of Shevek as the bearer of socio-political change, whose very possibility inheres in his capacity for self-alteration through temporal self-discovery. Khouri, when she implicitly objects to the elitism of the book, in effect ignores the point of Le Guin’s demonstration, which validates the Shevekian ‘I’ as the paradigmatic premise of societal transformation, not as its unique sine qua non. 22. It can also be said that the wall is the Way, given that this realization of Shevek’s, by its union of (contextual) opposites, epitomizes the Taoist influence on this book of Le Guin’s (among others). 23. This and previous quotations from ‘There is NO Natural Religion’ (Second Series) follow the 1965 Erdman edition of Blake. 24 That is one sense of Shevek’s remark to Atro, ‘You know that the means are the end, to us Odonians’ (5:116). Cf. the apparently cryptic connection between ‘the problem of ends and means’ and ‘Causative Reversibility’ (2:37). 25. ‘Occupations of Uninhabited Space’ is evidently Takver’s term for all the mobiles she creates (see 6:148). I’ve corrected the name for the mobile designed for Pilun on the basis of the hard-cover edition of The Dispossessed (321); the paperback’s ‘Inhabition’ is a compositorial error. 26. This image is potentially positive, but not immediately so: at first it figures an unattainable object of desire – as is also the case in Burnt Norton, and for the reason implicit in my next paragraph. 27. The only problem about adding The Word for World is Forest to this list is that its focus is on conflict with the Alien (and a conflict of genocidal proportions at that). Still, in its depiction of cultural Difference and in its narrative point of view toward it, Word, too, mediates oppositions in the way that The Dispossessed and Le Guin’s other Hainish stories do. M. Teresa Tovorima (55) makes a similar point about the ansible’s connection with Le Guin’s other Hainish fictions. 28. The complementary character of this project is inscribed in the Taoist yin-yanglike global maps which punctuate the text. Such diagrammatic representations are particularly telling in this regard when they appear side by side, as they do atop the opening and closing chapters of The Dispossessed. The juxtaposition, that is to say, facilitates our imagining that the dark areas (or oceans) of Anarres more or less exactly correspond to the light regions (or land masses) of Urras, and vice-versa.

§12. Time Out of Joint: Philip K. Dick 1. Eye, like many other PKD titles, is an earlier work than its date of publication (1957) might suggest; it was written in 1955. My information of this sort comes from Douglas Mackey’s book, collated with (and sometimes corrected by) Lawrence Sutin’s PKD biography whenever the latter retails such facts. All but one of Dick’s dozen book-length forays into ‘mainstream’ or ‘mundane’ fiction appeared posthumously (see n. 9 below). 2. The hyphen marking the divergence between ‘artful’ and ‘art-full’ also signals their common ground: the realm of High Art. Citations of the latter alone enter into a reckoning of any PKD text’s art-fullness. By my count, High Castle offers four such: the two Japanese poems (MHC 3:45, 9:128) sourced in Dick’s Acknowledgments, a stanza from Goethe’s ‘Der Erl König’ (10:155), and an epitome of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (7:107–08). (The first two fictifactually owe their presence in the book to the appropriate cultural emissaries, a Japanese associate of Tagomi’s and Wegener, respectively; but the last of them comes from Paul Kasoura, with Childan, the representative American in High Castle, ‘assisting’ solely in a French meaning of the word – in this case, as an auditor.)

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The most art-full of Dick’s books is a leading candidate for being his least artful: The Simulacra (written in 1964). Replete with Artsy references – most of them courtesy of its Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy counterpart (Nicole Thibodeaux), and all of them equivalent to name-dropping – the fiction reads like a conglomeration of outtakes from other books, going back to High Castle, that Dick was working on in Simulacra’s chronological vicinity. If, moreover, we also take into consideration, say, Galactic PotHealer (1969), we arrive at this rule: that with Dick artfulness and art-fullness are inversely proportional to one another – or in other words, inscriptive references to (various kinds of) works of art are normally signs that his ordering imagination is failing him. 3. In an unpublished essay on Dick, F. Jameson proposes, as a matter of principle, that ‘all the works of a given [PKD] cycle’ be treated ‘as though they were variants of one single work.’ Jameson is hardly alone in promoting that ‘synoptic’ approach (his Gospel-derived term), which is all the more attractive in view of the perspicacity of many of its practitioners (most of whom see Dick as some kind of Marxist) as well as by dint of the resistance of just about any Dickian text to close analysis. On the other hand, even if the question-begging aspect of ‘cycle’ be ignored, it remains arguable that a synopsis of some number of Dick’s fictions runs the same risk as does taking that tack with the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – viz., of minimizing or negating their differences. 4. But see n. 33 below. 5. By reason of its length, the most emphatic of PKD’s persistent retailings of Grasshopper’s putative ‘Inner Truth’ as if it were High Castle’s is to be found in his would-be lecture, ‘If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others’ (1977). There he not only echoes the statement-cum-rhetorical question that Juliana wrings from Abendsen; in keeping with his 1977 mad ramblings, Dick also claims ‘that my own supposed imaginative work The Man in the High Castle is not fiction – or rather, is fiction only now, thank God’ (Sutin, ed. 245). 6. Dick’s almost verbatim reiteration of Juliana’s epitome of Grasshopper is so patently reductive of High Castle that we may imagine he meant for his utterance to give the reader of High Castle true direction. (High Castle’s own authorial figure lends support to this possibility: ‘If,’ says Hawthorne Abendsen, ‘I ask [the I Ching, the ‘oracle’] why it wrote Grasshopper, I’ll wind up turning my share [of the royalties] over to it. The question implies I did nothing but the typing, and that’s neither true nor decent’ [15:266].) In that case, PKD’s pronouncement can be viewed as not only illustrating but validating the intentional fallacy: by revealing that his comments (like any other author’s) on the meaning of a given book of his are rightly to be construed only on the basis of that book’s independent construction. 7. How and why this is true we are on the verge of exploring, keeping in mind that ‘The Book of Changes’ is the I Ching’s alias. 8. Here, as at the start of my essay-chapter on Stapledon, the difference I am proposing between science fiction and novel is, in writerly practice, a relative one or a matter of degree. Having said that, I think it worth noting that on at least one occasion when PKD singled out Tagomi (implying by the way that he is the hero of High Castle), Dick spoke of him in exactly the fashion that ‘psychological’ novelists repeatedly speak about their imaginary personages. ‘Tagomi … has left me; we are cut off from each other. To read the novel does not restore Mr. Tagomi, place him once again where I can hear him talk’ (‘Notes Made Late at Night by a Weary SF Writer’ [1968], in Sutin, ed. 19; I have quoted but a part of the germane passage). Regardless of whether this be taken as supporting my distinction in the abstract, it certainly favors my current proposal that High Castle be first of all read novelistically rather than as alternativehistory science fiction. 9. The twelve books I am alluding to all date from 1952–60, and seven of them were drafted between 1958 and the moment (in March of 1960) when Dick started writing

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High Castle. All twelve are usually categorized as ‘mainstream’ novels, but they can properly be so styled only in so far as they collectively bespeak Dick’s original ambition to do work having some connection with the literary mainstream. Otherwise, they were – and perhaps many of them still are – far enough away from that stream to ensure that Dick’s agent (Scott Meredith), for all his persistence, could find a publisher for only one of them (Confessions of a Crap Artist, 1975), and only after Paul Williams published a limited run at his own expense. 10. What I am getting at becomes immediately apparent from a juxtaposition of the Edfrank pin (or the I Ching, for that matter) as Tagomi experiences it and the litigious doors which Joe Chip tries to negotiate (with) in Ubik (to take the most familiar of the many examples of ‘animate objects’ that Dickian science fiction affords). 11. The same cannot quite be said of Ubik inasmuch as the conveyer of its meaning is an entropy which makes the plot seem increasingly aimless following the lunar explosion of its initial world (in §6). 12. Childan can be seen as importing into High Castle a distinction between morality and business ethics. But while we are certainly given to understand that he means to leave Ed McCarthy no practicable choice except to consign the Edfrank jewelry, ‘consignment’ is not a universal euphemism for ‘theft.’ It is conceivable, of course, that Dick himself thought otherwise: at least one letter of his, from late in the game, appears to indicate his naïveté about the economic relationship between a literary agent and a publisher (see PKD to Philip José Farmer [Apr. 15, 1974] in Selected Letters 3:52). On the point where business ethics and the moralist’s totally agree, however, High Castle allows no room for judging Childan to be a crook: with respect to his dealing in forgeries, Dick implies (proleptically – see MHC 4:55) that Childan is exactly like the art, coin or stamp dealer who doesn’t know a fake from the genuine article (indeed, he doesn’t even think to make that a question until Frink presents it to him – see 4:56ff.). Childan’s business practices, in short, serve to make the abstract meaning of ‘moral ambiguity’ tangible. 13. Admittedly, the pinocs (i.e., American collaborators) whom we do hear in High Castle don’t emulate, say, Tagomi’s way of speaking English. My (mis)use of the word as metaphoric shorthand for the latter is none the less justifiable, I think, inasmuch as it is responsive to any reservations which Political Correctness may bring to bear on this stylistic feature of High Castle. Those, after all, should not – and, I would hope, cannot – impair our cognizance that what I am calling pinoc English constitutes the book’s most obvious literary tour de force (especially with regard to Childan, as I am in the process of explaining, above). As such, it is also the most visible (and audible) signal of High Castle’s literariness. 14. Sutin’s characterization of Childan as a man ‘who clings to Nazi dreams of white supremacy’ (Divine Invasions 114) is directly to my point here. But while such a view is salutary for restoring balance to the perception of Childan-as-hero, ‘balance’ in this case must be comprehended as a synonym for ‘moral ambiguity’ (in High Castle’s sense). It is therefore essential to recognize that a verdict against Childan as a racist – like every other such judgment which High Castle holds or can support – is not free from impediment, and not just in consequence of the ‘heroism’ of Childan’s act of repudiation itself, but also by reason of a factor in all three of the book’s main ‘heroic acts’ which I shall hereafter identify. 15. It should be noted that this moral computation, while surely attributable to Tagomi, is not textually, or expressly, attributed to him. As I shall later demonstrate, much of High Castle’s ultimate reality (so to speak) emanates from that difference. 16. As if to emphasize this point, an episode of Frank’s life intervenes between Wegener’s briefing of Tadeki and Tagomi’s shooting of the SD contract-killers. The further ambiguating factor, just touched upon, is that Tagomi’s victims aren’t card-carrying Nazis, so to speak, but a couple of free-lance assassins whom the local SD chief has

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engaged for this particular purpose (a transparent imposture to conceal Berlin’s responsibility). (The fact that the two are at once Americans and – presumptively racist – Nazi collaborators introduces another, subsidiary, moral ambiguity.) 17. On any such understanding, High Castle’s meaning would be reducible to a moral very like the one which a secondhand account of Grasshopper elicits from Wyndham-Matson: that (world) war inevitably entails spiritual and ethical ruination (5:67; see n. 54 below and the text attaching thereto). That is what Patricia Warrick, for instance, gets out of her analysis of the book: ‘On a moral level,’ ‘the winner of any war’ ‘has already been destroyed because of the horrendous acts he committed to win’ (Mind in Motion 57; simplistic though it be, such a reading is all-too-apropos of the George W. Bush administration’s ‘War on Terrorism’). Warrick thereby in effect testifies to the power of what I have styled High Castle’s inscriptive misdirection. Any reader coming (back) to her analysis (ibid. 40–57) from mine will see that she, too, approaches High Castle novelistically, and therefrom constructs a novel which differs from what I have so far offered only in her insistence that there are ‘four narratives, each with its own set of characters’ (41; my emphasis). It will also be observed that the ‘themes’ she so derives are, to say the least, impoverished by her above-quoted moral/conclusion – that there is virtually a disconnect between it and her ‘Taoist’ analysis. This non-sequitur is not entirely attributable to Warrick’s preconception about High Castle’s ‘alternate history’ labeling. She also presupposes that the I Ching holds the fiction’s (‘Taoist’) meaning rather than its manner of meaning. Accordingly, she instantly privileges Juliana’s narrative as ‘the inner level,’ ‘the inner meaning of’ the PSA story-lines (41), and thereby arrives at the idea that Juliana ‘is the only one who understands the meaning of Abendsen’s [and hence PKD’s] book’ (56). This, as we shall see, is completely untenable. Juliana, as John Rieder broadly hints (214 et passim), does not even comprehend what type of ‘Inner Truth’ the I Ching itself is referring to, let alone how it applies. Warrick’s reading, in short, offers itself as a compendious cautionary example of the mistakes that High Castle invites us to fall into – one or the other or both of which every reader of the book (myself included) must find irresistible unless and until its fundamentally novelistic construction be recognized (indeed, momentarily privileged). (On the other hand, Warrick’s – alas, belated – insistence that High Castle’s fifteen chapters are divisible into three groups of five will be amply verified by my analysis of the many other ways in which the fiction operates triadically, wherefore it may also, rightly, be said to work ‘trigramatically’ [to use her I Chingderived term – see Mind in Motion 52].) 18. Satori (3:34, 14:219) is the Japanese-Buddhist word for the Buddhist concept which English usually names Enlightenment (but perhaps is better rendered as Intuitive Insight). As such, it contributes to High Castle’s mélange of cultural value-systems (cf. n. 44 below). 19. The Chronicle seems to have been PKD’s newspaper of choice, at least in the 1960s (see Selected Letters 1:30, 107, 112, and 209). The Embarcadero Freeway Project was a front-page controversy when Dick was writing High Castle – not so much on account of cost overruns, but because many Bay Area residents thought the original plan (to encircle San Francisco) would ruin the city. The upshot was that this highway from Oakland (‘Gakville’ to Dick-its-resident) was abruptly brought to an end at San Francisco’s city limits. As most readers have noticed, the irruption of this reality of our world into Tagomi’s finds its homologue in Juliana’s news about the Second World War’s reality. This connection is mutually ambiguating. 20. Erwache was also a Nazi watchword (as Dick in all probability knew). 21. That Dick makes a woman its agent will hardly be surprising to those who have read even a few of his books. In this case, however, it is hard to imagine how he could

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have done otherwise – without, that is, introducing a homosexual relationship (which science-fiction publishers at the time would never have let pass). I.e., it is necessary that Juliana be seduced, not coerced (e.g., at gunpoint), into being the (unwitting) accomplice of Abendsen’s would-be assassin – this for reasons having to do with Juliana’s role in what I subsequently style High Castle’s Borgesian Garden of Forking Paths. 22. A fuller and more precise ‘history’ of this pin carries the suggestion that it is a kind of objective correlative for High Castle’s obliquity in reaching a meaningful destination, or for the indirection by which it finds direction out. The pin, after all, passes from its maker to Childan via Ed McCarthy; Childan then ‘grafts’ it to Paul Kasoura; and it winds up in Tagomi’s hands by way of Childan again, in consequence of Paul’s delayed rejection of it. The pin is thus endowed with a circuitousness which would be quite otiose were High Castle’s diagetic relationships exactly correspondent to those which causality dictates (see nn. 25 and 72 below). The pin, then, can be taken as the ‘symbolic’ embodiment of the fiction’s inherent principle of connection, to the Western mind a matter of psychological association, to the Sino-Japanese a property of wu. The inherent principle at issue is the very same whereby the Edfrank pin is (rightly) connectable to Juliana’s. Thus David Ketterer’s notion (echoing Abendsen’s, 15:234) that the latter ‘holds the entire novel together’ (New Worlds for Old 245) is not at all the foolishness which Dick himself declared it to be. Indeed, for reasons I am coming to, it is highly appropriate to think of High Castle as deriving coherence from an object whose moral value is fundamentally æsthetic. 23. The Rocky Mountain States serve as a buffer (zone) between the Japanesecontroled-and-administrated Pacific States of America and the Nazi-occupied territory east of the Mississippi River. High Castle thus reconstructs the perdurable North vs. South dichotomy in U.S. politics as an East–West division. In doing so, Dick probably means to acknowledge his debt to Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee while at the same time registering his criticism of Moore. (See PKD’s Selected Letters 1:24–27; his commentary, dated Oct. 29, 1952, was based on a shorter version of Moore’s fiction that had just come out in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, whose co-editor, J. Francis McComas, Dick is addressing.) 24. High Castle, after all, doesn’t end when Juliana’a interview with/of Abendsen terminates. It subsequently dismisses her into the yin–yang world of ‘patches of light’ and ‘shadows’ (15:239). As with Ubik, this final moment images the start of an understanding of High Castle, one based on the ‘Inner Truth’ that the reader – not the Juliana-type but the ideal reader – is supposed to have gleaned from the fiction’s authorial word about its (manner of) meaning. 25. ‘Synchronicity’ (MHC 4:52) is a term-concept which Dick gets from Carl Jung – to be precise, from Jung’s Foreword to the translation of the I Ching that Dick quotes in MHC. Its Jungian import, however, is mostly relevant to the tangential implication of High Castle which I broach in n. 72 below. Otherwise, it vaguely covers the third and last of High Castle’s (self)constructions, the ‘Inner Truth’ that the penultimate section of this chapter of mine concerns itself with. Dick says as much in ‘Schizophrenia & The Book of Changes’ (1965). A couple of pages after introducing synchronicity as a Jungian concept, he offers up the I Ching as a ‘method by which synchronicity can be coped with’ (Sutin, ed. 179). What exactly this means for High Castle is evident from those instances where two or more of the fiction’s principals cast the same Hexagram. The mutual entailment of synchronicity and the I Ching can be taken as the crux of High Castle as ‘alternate history.’ The sense of this, however – or at least a clear inkling thereof – we already have from our novelistic understanding of the book: i.e., from the perception that all three ‘heroic acts’ are variants of one another. When so viewed, their differential temporal (or historical) coordinates are entirely immaterial, and even their given sequence is ultimately dispensable (once it has served its Absurdist purpose). On that understanding, Jung’s characterization of synchronicity becomes

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applicable (but not strictly necessary): ‘Just as causality describes the sequence of events, so synchronicity [‘diametrically opposed to causality’] … deals with the coincidence of events’ (Jung’s Foreword xxiv). 26. In calling into question (as I am now on the verge of doing) these values in High Castle, I am aware of contradicting the sense – or rather, the preconceptive belief – of most readers about them: that they are to be taken at face value. But while my argument will prove to be pretty much diametrically opposed to George Slusser’s, say, I am not alone in my suspicions about High Castle’s ‘authenticity,’ ‘historicity,’ etc. John Huntington (157–58) and Mark Rose (120, 122) have already expressed considerable skepticism, though without offering any textually global grounds for it. While I trust I shall have proved before long that skepticism is fully warranted, it belongs to the High Castle presently under construction. Otherwise, ‘authenticity’ and ‘historicity’ are redeemable values, but only by way of the operation of the book’s alternativity principle, especially as that conduces to its Inner Truth. How they are redeemed the reader who grasps the fiction’s Inner Truth can fairly easily infer from the hints in nn. 31–33 below. 27. Indeed, the assassination attempt provides the historical context for all the information which Wyndham-Matson imports into High Castle at this point (5:65–67). Where PKD gets his information about Zangara from is a question worth asking, especially as the answer does not lie with any of the sources he acknowledges. Intuition told me that he got it from the TV series The Untouchables (1959–63). The relevant episode – the only Untouchables’ two-parter (possibly a Don Siegel production; he was a sometime director of the series) – was called ‘The Unhired Assassin.’ It dramatized the/ FDR’s close call as Weird. Robert Stack (as Eliot Ness) and his FBI cohorts discover an Al Capone plot to dispose of Cermak on a permanent basis. (This, by the way, is not a wholly groundless invention. Some reporters – Harrison Salisbury among them – had wind that such a thing might ‘go down’ in Miami and betook themselves there for the ‘scoop,’ for the sake of which they neglected to notify the police of the rumor. The only truly dubitable ‘information’ purveyed in the TV episode has to do with the motive for the ‘hit’: the reality of Chicago politics favors the possibility that Capone wanted Cermak out of the way not because he was ‘reformist,’ but for being in the pocket of Capone’s chief gangland rival, Frank Nitti.) At the end of the second and last installment the viewer learns that the Untouchables have followed a couple of Capone’s hitmen to Miami, where (again the viewer is told, not shown, this, or so I recall) Zangara, firing before they can, none the less accomplishes their mission – as chance or the I Ching would have it. ‘The Unhired Assassin’ aired on Feb. 25 and Mar. 3, 1960, exactly when Dick reportedly began writing High Castle. Anne R. Dick, PKD’s wife at the time and the source of that last bit of information, also tells me that he was a more or less regular viewer of The Untouchables. 28. ‘Those who believe that personalities make no difference to history might well ponder whether the world would have been the same … had Giuseppe Zangara’s bullet killed Roosevelt at Miami in 1933 and had Mario Contasini’s car killed Winston Churchill on Fifth Avenue in 1931’: Arthur M. Schlesinger 466. (The Churchill nearmiss involved him as a pedestrian in New York.) 29. It was because of the close call with FDR that the date for the Presidential swearing-in ceremony was thereafter moved up to January 20th. Put another way, my point about High Castle’s misdating is that for its ‘alternate history’ purposes (as those are usually apprehended), Dick could have killed FDR off before he officially assumed the office of President. In that event, of course, High Castle’s Americans – notably Childan (see MHC 9:120) – wouldn’t even be able to vaguely ‘remember’ what could have been. That suggests – what will indeed prove correct – that more is going on here than imposture (and hence that the High Castle currently under construction is not the

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only one). The ‘more,’ however, does not nullify the Absurdist impact of High Castle’s fakery on its vaunted ‘authenticity’; instead it marks the book’s (novelistic) difference with Grasshopper by reason of the similarity between them which my next note covers. 30. Such a comparison, however, must chiefly accentuate the difference between Grasshopper and High Castle. For one thing, the former’s pivotal, or crucial, event – the Nazis’ defeat at Stalingrad (see MHC 5:67) – has no Zippo lighter, so to speak: i.e., it is not pinpointable to a particular day and hour (unlike the Zangara incident). Furthermore, those impostures in Grasshopper which for some readers may not be transparent – most notably, British military assistance in lifting the Stalingrad siege – are (again unlike the FDR assassination) as historically inconsequential there as they would have been in our world if we accepted that fiction’s word as a statement of fact (i.e., with or without Britain’s [fictive] participation, Stalingrad names the turning point of the war against Nazi Germany). (As if to signify this inconsequentiality, Grasshopper, for all we know of it, does not distort the actual sequence of real-life historical events – e.g., Montgomery had indeed bested Rommel in North Africa before the German attack on Stalingrad even got under way.) In that sense, at least, Grasshopper’s ‘Truth’ isn’t ‘Inner’ at all; it is an outer – in effect a literal – truth, summed up in the proposition that ‘Germany and Japan lost the war.’ 31. In other words, all of the real-life Nazis in the book are, in their historical – here opposed to their moral – representation, just as ‘fake’ as the Colt .44 (or Wegener or Cinnadella) is; and by the same comparison, their fakeness, unlike the Colt’s or the purely fictive Nazi-impostors’, is unredeemed and irremediable inasmuch as Goebbels, Göring and Co. do not figure in any of High Castle’s three ‘heroic acts.’ Why an ‘intent to deceive’ should be an aggravating circumstance is inferable from the latter part of n. 12 above with reference to MHC 4:46ff. 32. It is true that Wegener immediately contradicts this pessimistic thought: ‘At this moment we work against Operation Dandelion. Later on, … we work to defeat the police. But we cannot do it all at once,’ etc. It is equally evident, however, that a logical disconnect is operative here (virtually declaring itself in: ‘On some other world, possibly it is different. Better’ – 15:227; emphasis added). The fact that Wegener’s utopianism appears as being a non-sequitur is unpromising for being fully compatible with High Castle’s Absurdity. On the other hand, this new idea’s very disjunction from Wegener’s previous train of thought will finally validate it as a dictate of the Inner Truth of High Castle’s alternativity principle. 33. This Absurdist construction is but one of (at least) three which Juliana’s ‘oracular’ affirmation demands. The second, which my ‘chasm’ (above) notices by the way, has to do (via Tagomi’s Embarcadero experience) with the multiple ‘realities’ of High Castle as ‘alternate history.’ The third, at once separate from and encompassing the other two, follows from an awareness of ‘Juliana’s replies … [as] a revelation that she and everyone else in the novel are merely fictions’ (M. Rose 121) – i.e., that she (with Hawthorne Abendsen’s reluctant collaboration) is delivering a truth about High Castle itself; indeed, an ‘oracular’ truth, one which she (especially she, the least conscious of High Castle’s ‘heroes’) cannot otherwise be given to know. This third interpretation, then, has to do with the I Ching’s ‘authorship’ of High Castle. What that exactly means we have yet to discover; but for the moment, we should note that we have just glimpsed it: in allowing a pronouncement about the fiction’s ‘Inner Truth’ three distinct constructions which (moreover) mutually interact to generate a Book of Changes High Castle. 34. The comparison could provide, quite by the way, an occasion for inquiring into PKD’s ‘German identity.’ In lieu of a monograph on that subject, I shall merely observe that all currently known biographical evidence suggests that this is purely a Dickian self-construction – in contrast to the case with Vonnegut and his German ancestry or even with Calvino and his putatively Huguenot forebears. 35. A letter of June 6, 1957 to Tony Boucher makes clear that Dick knew and

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admired Vonnegut’s first book (Player Piano, 1952 – a likely influence on Vulcan’s Hammer [1960], an early draft of which dates from 1954); and a later mention of Vonnegut (in an August 17, 1970 letter to John Brunner) indicates that Dick read at least some of Vonnegut’s subsequent works (see Selected Letters 1:37 and 277). 36. The best example of High Castle’s Dickian sense of humor – also because it exhibits the subtlety Dick is capable of in this department – appears at the outset of what may well be the book’s seemingly most solemn moment: when Tagomi is trying to access the wu properties of the Edfrank pin. Having instructed himself to ‘[e]xhaust by logical analysis every possible entree’ (this is the joke’s set-up), he next proceeds to hold the pin to his ear, then finger it with his eyes shut, then smell it, and finally taste it (14:193)! Dick may have learned a thing or two about subtle comedy from N. West (cf. n. 2 above) and also from Samuel Beckett (see Selected Letters 1:80). On the basis of this example, many of Dick’s science fictions in their entirety (but not High Castle) reveal themselves as being Absurd or sick jokes. Unlike Vonnegut’s Sirens, however, their meaning does not reside in their construction as such. 37. Katherine Hayles (65–66) gives a fairly complete list of Grasshopper’s grossest historical misrepresentations. 38. By the end of this chapter’s penultimate section, it will be apparent that (and how) High Castle is designed – and in that sense, destined – to deconstruct the chance– intention antithesis. 39. What I am claiming to be a ‘brilliant dénouement’ is usually regarded as High Castle’s major flaw. The only specification of the latter verdict that I have come upon is Kim Stanley Robinson’s. ‘[T]he final scene,’ he opines, ‘is superfluous. It points to the mirror we are already well aware of, and repeats in a weaker, more self-conscious form the point already made so brilliantly by Tagomi’s [visionary] experience’ (Robinson 48; my italics). The word of Robinson’s that I have emphasized will (further) serve to indicate how far this evaluation is from mine. Any vote on the issue should, however, await the outcome of my analysis of what is at stake in the Juliana–Abendsen confrontation (for a preview of which, see n. 33 above). 40. The same unmistakable information that the SD chief in San Francisco wants Abendsen dead chronologically precludes Cinnadella’s being his SD agent at least (Juliana’s thought to the contrary notwithstanding – see 13:194-95). We need not infer, however, that Cinnadella is working for Heydrich: see n. 42. 41. Even here, however, Cinnadella’s contempt for ‘Nazi thuggery’ (his term, MHC 10:151) again makes him cognate to Wegener. Focused on those two, the point I am in the process of making (above) thus digresses into another, which is lost in an evaluation of Wegener and Cinnadella as, respectively, a Good Nazi and The Bad Guy: that (instead) they are both – and, by reason of their pairing (particularly as impostors), pretty much equally – morally inscrutable, all the more so in contrast to the Japanese (with [here ironic] reference, of course, to the Western stereotype that ‘inscrutable’ instantly evokes: cf. MHC 11:168). 42. But this is not inevitably a point of difference between Wegener and Cinnadella, who may be operating on self-commission (a possibility which High Castle allows on grounds that will be evident from my n. 40 above). 43. High Castle’s game-playing invitation makes for an experience very like the one a viewer may have in watching Der Wannseekonferenz (1984), Heinz Schirk’s docudramatic recreation (in real time, no less; the film is about 90 minutes long!) of the meeting (at Wannsee, just outside Berlin, on Jan. 20, 1942) at which certain Nazi higher-ips debated, and agreed upon, the Final Solution to ‘The Jewish Problem.’ 44. From High Castle’s characterization of the I Ching as the ‘Book of Confucian wisdom, the Taoist oracle’ (2:21), we can be sure that Dick was either oblivious of or insouciant about the difference between a Taoist and a Confucian understanding of that book’s reality. The same can be said for Buddhism, which enters into this mélange

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of Eastern value-systems via Tagomi. On the other hand, the distinctions at issue are not, I think, applicable to High Castle’s I Ching – for reasons which, I trust, will be evident by the time we’ve completed (re)constructing the fiction’s Inner Truth. 45. In other words, the horrific projects Dick has imagined contribute mightily to absolute evil’s palpable presence in High Castle to the extent that they seem plausibly Nazistic. The draining of the Mediterranean would certainly qualify on the basis of Dick’s claim to having come upon archival evidence for that plan (see Selected Letters 1:227). On the other hand, the distinct possibility that Martian concentration camps are Frank’s sick joke (at the expense of the Nazis’ ‘glorious’ enterprise of planetary colonization – cp. MHC 1:16 vs. 3:38, e.g., with its mention of ‘colonizing rocket ships’ [my emphasis]) is not entirely to Dick’s purpose by reason of his invention’s potential spillover effect – of making the Holocaust into a joke. (The fact that High Castle gives the joke to a Jew and has him conceive it in German evinces Dick’s awareness of its untoward implications, but at the same time brings it to bear on what is disturbing about Dick’s German self-fabrication, for which see n. 34 above). 46. Hayles presents this as a metaphysical contradiction. Furthermore, ‘Dick’s failure to resolve the conflict he sets up between two contradictory metaphysical systems’ (53) presumably constitutes the flaw that she is ‘conceding at the outset’ (55) of an analysis which exhibits High Castle’s ‘shift to metafiction’ (54) as a ‘changing of the rules halfway through the game’ (53) – an evasion of the problem (cp. nn. 47, 52–53, and 70 below). It should be evident by the end of this chapter of mine (if it isn’t already) that Hayles has misconstrued her own insight (and hence High Castle). That so perceptive a reader could do so is testimony to the power of High Castle’s Dickian misdirection. But it is also partly attributable to our commonly assuming that something which doesn’t fit our (pre)conception of a given text’s meaning is an authorial/textual ‘failing’ – a methodological mistake even with Dick, an author who hardly encourages our faith that there is coherence lurking beneath the chaotic surface of his fictions. 47. Nor (except momentarily) is the resolution to be found in any other book of Dick’s where the problem of evil comes up – which covers, at least, everything he wrote after High Castle. Even Valis, which features this problem (and, by the way, makes free will contingent on its disposition), self-acknowledgedly resolves it only provisionally (in its oscillations between Christian and Zoroastrian Gnosticism, which remove and reinstate it, respectively). Hayles (54, 62–63) singles out The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) for its spotlighting of the problem; but perhaps the most telling example of how pervasive and profound a problem this is for Dick comes from The Divine Invasion (1980/82). There he contrives – for the only time in his science fiction, I think – to make the problem go away. To do so, however, he must forget about the unholy (and precarious) alliance of the Christian Islamic Church and the Scientific Legate (this book’s version of what Dick – in Counter-Clock World (1967), e.g. – means by ‘relpol’). Which, of course, is exactly what Invasion does, at the expense of qualifying as PKD’s most æsthetically unacceptable work (especially by reason of the book’s dropping of these fictifacts after setting in motion a conspiracy of mutual usurpation). 48. Peter Fitting’s seminal account of this Dickian discovery continues to be not only the most comprehensive, but also the basis for any further understanding of the subject. 49. My ‘virtually’ is meant to cover a (bare) possibility which the literary influences on this book of Dick’s (above all the rest by him, ‘mainstream’ included) point to: that High Castle could have been written as entirely mainstream, as a variant of (rather than a deviant from) the historical novel à la John Dos Passos for certain, probably Thackeray (Vanity Fair), and perhaps Joyce (Ulysses). (I have limited my influential examples to authors and works that Dick says he was familiar with. See Sutin, ed. 14, 65; his Divine Invasions 3, 79; and PKD’s Selected Letters 3:160; the first volume of his

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letters, covering those from 1938 to 1970, indicate that he was rather well read in ‘classic’ as well as contemporary literature). I think it quite improbable, however, that Dick could have written such a novel, mostly because he had no real experience of any world outside California – indeed, until he moved to Orange County in the mid-1970s, of any place outside Northern California (see his confession to that effect in his Sept. 4, 1973 letter to Stanislaw Lem, Selected Letters 2:297–98). 50. The phrase quoted here comes from Huntington (‘Philip K. Dick …’ 153), who would allow it, at least in principle, to apply universally with Dick. Cp. n. 76 below. 51. PKD to Cathy Meyers, Jan. 12, 1979, in Selected Letters 5:199. 52. This will ultimately turn out to be another version of our earlier question: as to why High Castle’s three ‘heroic acts’ can properly be deemed morally responsible – why, in other words, the quotation marks advisory of the ‘moral ambiguity’ of these acts (at least with regard to their apparent unconsciousness) can, in the final analysis, be removed. 53. This is Valis’s recurrent metaphor (1:10, 1:17, 3:40, 3:45, 8:133, 11:188). There, however, the hermeneutic-moral-metaphysical problem (the one posed by VALIS) worsens the more one resists it only for readers who follow Horselover Fat’s example (as ‘Philip K. Dick’ and Fat’s cohorts do) of engaging to explain away all that VALIS imports (rather than dismissing it outright). With High Castle, on the other hand, the problem resides outside as well as inside the book – which is also to say that readers in this case are not being asked to accept, as given, something exactly like Valis’s (and Dick the man’s) ‘pink beam’ experience of extraterrestrial enlightenment, as it were. (In that regard, I think it significant that Valis in the first instance isn’t at all clear or exact as to what its practical-joker device imports in the fiction itself, but nevertheless subsequently always speaks of ‘another finger trap,’ or ‘fingertrap,’ as if a precise understanding were indeed an already-given.) 54. Wyndham-Matson offers this pronouncement about ‘[e]very country on the Allied side’ as his reason for deeming the defeat of Japan incredible, and hence as a sentence against Grasshopper. But a fact that he overlooks or suppresses – that World War I’s ‘Allies’ included Japan – makes his statement self-contradictory unless, despite his intent, it be taken as Grasshopper’s ‘moral.’ 55. Tadeki and Wegener are both sympathetic attendants on Tagomi at this moment of his psychological collapse – see MHC 12:186–87. In that connection, it is perhaps pertinent to note that the Japanese general, too, goes by an alias (Shinjiro Yatabe). 56. Dick’s ‘Anglo-Saxon philosopher’ is presumably Ben Franklin. Witnessing the ascent of a hot-air balloon in Paris in August of 1783 and hearing a fellow-spectator questioning aloud the value of the thing, Franklin (according to Baron von Grimm) retorted: ‘Eh, à quoi bon l’enfant qui vient de naître?’ See Carl Van Doren 700. 57. See n. 69 below for the pertinent quotation. 58. See n. 44 above. 59. Charles Sanders Peirce, Principles of Philosophy §191, in Collected Papers 1:79. Put in traditional terms, Peirce is saying that our ideas of truth ultimately rest on those of the beautiful, with conceptions of the good as their mediator. (That translation allows ready access to the import that Tagomi perhaps finds in contemplating the Edfrank pin. But this is not to say that Dick then or in High Castle as a whole is out to demonstrate the validity of Peirce’s insight, which I have brought up only because it may clarify what the I Ching imports in[to] the fiction.) 60. The full and exact meaning of this proposition will, I hope, be evident by the end of my analysis. Meanwhile, however, I should remark that I am making allowance for the fact that all of the objects holding High Castle together – the Edfrank pin and Grasshopper as well as the I Ching and the Colt .44 – have a basis in historical reality (in the first-named case, not only public, vis-à-vis its Mexican cognate, but also personal, with the reference to Anne Dick’s jewelry creations).

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61. I have in mind an interview that appeared in the February 1974 issue of Vertex. See Warrick’s ‘The Encounter of Taoism …’ 174. 62. Indeed, as I later found out, Dick clearly implied as much in both his 1974 and his 1976 version of ‘the I Ching wrote it’: ‘Without any notes I had no preconception of how the book would develop, and I used the I Ching to plot the book’ (quoted from Sutin’s Divine Invasions 112, q.v. also for Frank as a Dick-surrograte as jewelry-maker). Be that as it may, the basic and indubitable truth about Dick’s conscious use of the I Ching in the writing of High Castle is covered in his Dec. 5, 1968 response to a query on the subject: ‘Every hexagram in the novel is the actual one which I obtained by throwing coins and asking the Oracle the character’s question’ (Selected Letters 1:240). That Dick (as indicated at the start of this note) was still giving positive credit to the I Ching in 1976 makes for a curious contrast with another idea he was entertaining at the time, in the very interview just cited (one published in the Science Fiction Review): that the I Ching is – or was – a ‘malicious spirit’ for having botched High Castle’s ending (see Sutin’s Divine Invasions 116). Peter Fitting tells me he instead recalls Dick saying to him something like: ‘The I Ching took over my mind.’ This is a rather different proposition from any that Sutin offers, one which gives Dick’s original thought a decidedly paranoid twist – more exactly, a ‘pink light’ inflection. Fitting himself is uncertain of his remembrance; it may have come from his reading of Sutin’s biography. My own sense, however, is that it is not a kind of false memory on Fitting’s part, especially because the earliest date for the conversation wherein it could have come up – also, to my mind, its likeliest date – would place it just after Dick’s house was broken into and ransacked (in November 1971). The latter, I believe, is the event which (thanks, in part, to the chief investigating officer’s insinuation that PKD himself was the culprit) made Dick-the-man vulnerable to his ‘pink beam’ experience, thereby precipitating his logorrhetic (not to say, deranged) efforts to come to terms with that. 63. In quoting Paul Kasoura’s jaundiced verdict about Frank’s pin, I mean to bring prominence to what a Westerner would regard as an implicit opposition of chance and intention, or design. At the moment I am ruling out the one (i.e., chance) in favor of the other, but only for the sake of intelligibly reinstating them later on as being mutually inclusive. The fact (already noticed above) that both the Edfrank pin and Grasshopper have virtually identical functions in holding High Castle together, forewarns of this change of mind (on the part of Dick’s Book of Changes, not just of its readers). 64. Dick in effect admits as much, in a letter to Terry Carr dated Nov. 20, 1964: ‘I simply do not understanding [sic] the meaning of the ending of MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE’ (Selected Letters 1:128). This construction of a completely nescient PKD, however, like just about any other of the man and/or the author, requires balancing from its bipolar opposite – in this instance, from the PKD who is privy to the (actual) import of his fictions. The prime exhibit in a case for the PKD who does know what he is up to is his analysis of Ubik in a 1975 letter to Malcolm Edwards (for which, see Selected Letters 4:40). 65. Two early instances cover most of the territory: Frank’s practical inquiry (4:51– 52) about the business decision facing him, and Tagomi’s (2:24–25) for ‘picturing … the situation’ (1:18). Frank’s yields ‘success’ and ‘humiliation,’ Tagomi’s ‘No blame. No praise,’ a response whose (moral) ambiguity is hardly canceled by another I Ching stanza wherein ‘No blame’ alone appears (2:24). The only answers which don’t fit one or the other of these patterns are of the sort Frank gets from his initial consultation: univocal advice not to do what is already history (specifically, a warning not to have married Juliana: MHC 1:18). Dick in propria persona lends support to what all this might suggest. He says flatly that the I Ching ‘is not a fortunetelling device, despite what’s been believed about it for centuries’ (‘Schizophrenia …,’ in Sutin, ed. 179); and a decade later declares it to be ‘a liar’ for ‘speak[ing] with forked tongue’ (from a 1976 interview, quoted in Sutin’s Divine Invasions 116). See also Dick’s late-1964 parody of the I Ching in Selected Letters 1:137.

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66. The difference between Juliana’s and Abendsen’s understandings suggests that Dick had some awareness of what the James Legge rendition of the I Ching implies about Chung Fu (the name of Hexagram 61): that it can be Englished by ‘Inmost Sincerity’ as well as by ‘Inner Truth.’ Possibly Dick found this out by comparing the Baynes translation with Legge’s (which gives priority to ‘Sincerity’ and consigns ‘Truth’ to a footnote; see Selected Letters 1:139 for PKD’s familiarity with Legge’s I Ching). But Dick could have reached the conclusion that sincerity as well as truth is at issue from the sentence (the third in ‘the Text’ on Chung Fu) explicating the structural meaning of Hexagram 61 (‘open at its center’) as ‘indicat[ing] a heart free of prejudices and therefore open to truth’ (Böllingen ed. 235). This intrinsic ambiguity of the term Chung Fu (or so I take it to be) would seem to be fully cooperative with High Castle’s finding that the I Ching in its use always yields ambiguous ‘answers.’ Juliana’s encounter with Abendsen, however, does not inevitably countenance the notion that (once again) the I Ching is the victim of a Dickian satiric insinuation. On the contrary, my very reason for thinking that Dick recognized the I Ching’s inherent ambiguity is that High Castle in effect exploits it, largely for complex ironic purposes. In the antagonism between Juliana and Abendsen, his refusal of her sincerely intended propositions is readily mistakable for a sign of his insincerity; and at the same time, her would-be truth is just as readily prejudicial (i.e., well-meaning but wrong-headed) unless his skeptical corrections be seriously taken into account. 67. Comparison of this passage from High Castle (4:51) with the Böllingen I Ching (51–52, 445) will serve to confirm that Dick is indeed quoting verbatim. 68. Childan in effect both vehiculates this idea and (in the same breath) undermines it: in thinking that the Japanese have ‘forced down our throats’ a book they’ve ‘[b]orrowed from way back when’ (7:106). The latter fact, of course, implicitly takes in the Japanese ‘grafting’ of American things (and values) onto themselves (as it were). Moreover, Dick himself says that the (putatively American) fortunetelling use of the I Ching has Chinese precedent. 69. King Wên (ca. twelfth century B.C.E.) is creditable with initiating the systematizing of the I Ching as we now have it. The point I am using him to make is apparently one that Dick himself was conscious of, and probably at the time he was writing High Castle. ‘[W]e can’t live by the damn book,’ he declares in his 1965 essay on ‘Schizophrenia and The Book of Changes,’ ‘because to try to would be to surrender ourselves to static time – as King Wen was forced to do’ (Sutin, ed. 180). My ‘King Wên, say’ is intended to signal that his date(s) should not be taken to impugn High Castle’s characterization of the I Ching as ‘a book begun in the thirtieth century B.C. [and] … created by the Chinese sages over a period of five thousand years, … that superb cosmology – and science – codified before Europe had even learned to do long division’ (MHC 1:18). Dick here is in agreement with the scholarly consensus as the Böllingen presents it (which is no wonder, since that’s where he gets virtually all of his information about the I Ching). It is worth noting, however, that just as PKD elides the differences among Confucians, Taoists, and Buddhists (see n. 44 above), so he is here representing the I Ching to be a unitary work. But, then again, even the two most respectable English editions of the I Ching – the Cary F. Baynes translation and James Legge’s (both, be it noted, renditions by way of German rather than from the Chinese original) – give any user curious about its textual history only a vague idea as to how this Book of Changes changed over the course of millennia. That we are left to imagine by extrapolating from Old and New Testament models (with allowance for the fact that even the oldest of those two collections is more than a thousand years younger than the I Ching). Otherwise see the Böllingen I Ching’s introductory materials, esp. lviii-lxi. 70. At least from High Castle on, none of PKD’s fictions would have been possible had he not been (often at one and the same time) skeptical and skeptical of his skepticism. Ubik instantly offers itself as proof; but so, for a different reason, does Valis (which

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without Dick’s ‘philosophical’ shilly-shallying would have been, at most, a 20-page obscurantist tract). Indeed, Dick’s epitaph could very well have been: Here lies a man whose ‘[f]aith [was] shaken by the discovery that the entity believed in actually existed’ (Valis 10:161–62). 71. High Castle makes this point otherwise as well, and perhaps more obviously: by reason of its retailing Grasshopper in fragments. 72. It is almost de rigueur to notice that High Castle at least implies, if it does not induce, a rapprochement between the I Ching and post-Newtonian scientific thinking. Often the name of Fritjof Capra is dropped into such a consideration (e.g., by Warrick in ‘Encounter …’ 177). But Capra’s The Tao of Physics appeared in 1975. Hence the effect of that particular connection must be either to cast doubt on the presence of such a meaning in High Castle or to credit Dick himself with Capra’s insight (supposing it to be that). As it happens, however, neither is the case: Dick could have known – indeed, surely did know – Capra’s idea because it is fully forestalled, quite visibly, in a single paragraph of Jung’s Foreword (1960) to the I Ching (Böllingen ed. xxii). (Hayles [56– 57] makes the same point, but rather more diplomatically than I.) 73. This is also to say that the I Ching’s ‘authorship’ of High Castle is ‘occult’ in exactly the sense (and manner) that Shevek’s temporal synthesis is. Each, that is, appears to be unintelligibly obscurantist unless and until it be recognized as a textually self-regarding proposition of the import immanent not only in the book’s entire (authorial) construction, but also in the reading which the book inscriptively dictates by virtue of the way in which it is put together. (Cf. the concluding section of my chapter on Le Guin.) That near-total coincidence of High Castle and The Dispossessed is, Le Guin tells me, a matter of chance in its Dickian sense. (‘Man in the High Castle was not in my consciousness when I was writing Dispossessed’: letter of Mar. 3, 2001.) Carl Freedman’s characterization of The Dispossessed as having an ‘ethical-political’ ‘emphasis’ (Critical Theory xvii) is worth citing here for underscoring a primary point of resemblance to High Castle which my account leaves largely implicit. 74. This, of course, is consequent upon a connection which High Castle itself inscriptively directs us to make by reason of the fact that Tagomi and Juliana each cast the same hexagram (‘Inner Truth’) concerning their experiences of ‘reality’ (he afterwards, 14:223; she in the midst of her interview with Abendsen, 15:237). 75. The fiction virtually figures as much, not just in having its Nazis, Wegener included, be oblivious of the I Ching – this in marked contrast to their awareness of High Castle’s other book-antagonist of Nazism, Grasshopper – but also vis-à-vis Childan. The one featured character whom we are asked to view as the embodiment of Americanism stands apart from High Castle’s other principals in that his consultation of the I Ching appears as something of an inference rather than being explicitly given (see MHC 7:101). 76. On van Vogt’s rule of changing the subject, so to speak, every 800 words, see Huntington’s ‘Philip K. Dick.’ Huntington by the way hints at my point in observing that the I Ching in High Castle resembles the van Vogt rule in ‘enforc[ing] randomness’ (155). I should add that this essay of Huntington’s, so far as I am aware, constitutes the only in-depth exploration to date of PKD as a ‘pulp’ science-fiction writer. But see also Thomas Disch’s remarks (19–23) on PKD and the pulp tradition. 77. ‘Tricky Dick’ here designates PKD, not Richard Milhous Nixon (and, moreover, PKD the self-trickster, not the perpetrator of fictionally inscribed interpretative misdirections). In the present context, however, there is a basis for eliding PKD and Nixon in point of ‘trickiness.’ Dick’s letters to Nixon reproduce in petto the schizophrenic self-contradictions that, on a rather larger scale, Dick gets himself into in trying to fathom his own science-fiction books (Ubik above all). Both of his 1974 letters to the about-to-be-impeached President (see Selected Letters 3:64–65 and 78) wildly oscillate between commiseration and antipathy; but perhaps the maddest of the two is the first of these missives (dated April 20, 1974). Its overall tenor – of beatifying Nixon as

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Abraham Lincoln redivivus – is strikingly at odds with Dick’s underlying point, that Nixon’s ‘ordeal’ is divine retribution. (This last idea conduces to one of Valis’s momentary conclusions about Nixon: that he is the Antichrist, as Valis [9:155] insinuates by merging him with a fictifactual President whose initials are decipherable as the Book of Revelation’s Mark of the Beast.) 78. Both Warrick (in Mind in Motion) and Robinson repeatedly insist on this. 79. The Stevens of my epigraph may also be read as commenting on the project that Melville and Whitman inaugurate with Moby-Dick (1851) and Leaves of Grass (1855), and hence as pointing to Dick’s similar ambition in High Castle – viz., of conveying (or reproducing) the manifold diversity of the American experience which the melting pot conception of American reality occludes. In that regard, the I Ching serves High Castle’s omnivorous aspirations. 80. This can be taken as a re-vision of the supposedly wacky understanding of High Castle’s PKD-endorsed proposition about the I Ching’s authorship of the fiction (cp. n. 62 above). 81. The only other candidate, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), is High Castle’s competitor solely in that respect; otherwise it’s an ideological mess, a prime exhibit – at least among the most highly respected PKD titles – of chaos’s triumph over order. 82. ‘Metafiction’ is Hayles’s term; see n. 46 above. 83. Ubik came out in the spring of 1969. When Dick wrote it seems to be an open question. Paul Williams (183) reports that the Scott Meredith agency received the ms. in December of 1966, but Dick himself says ‘circa 1968’ (Selected Letters 3:261). Either of those years would place it at roughly the midpoint of his career, which with Ubik also proved to be a turning point in his science fiction. Yet despite what that last remark of mine and chonology would suggest, PKD remained mindful of High Castle through the mid-1970s (when he was still contemplating a sequel – see Williams 75–77). 84. A demonstration of the validity of this term of distinction would require a fairly long close analysis of Ubik. In lieu of that, I offer two quite different witnesses favoring my fundamental point: that any true comprehension of Ubik begins with the realization that it is about how Dickian science fiction works. The first is Sutin, who (while apparently having no such idea in mind) illustrates it with reference to Eye and Solar Lottery (1955) to support his claim that Ubik contains ‘[p]lot devices ransacked from Phil’s fifties [sic] SF’ (Divine Invasions 153). My other witness is Lem as author of Futurological Congress. Lem’s book (as we have seen in §4) is surely, in part, a re-vision of Ubik, their most profound resemblance residing with their shared meta-science-fictionality. But it is even more evident to any reader of the two that Futurological Congress is not Ubik. Their specific grounds of difference are covered by what ‘meta-Dickian’ imports. 85. Instead of an essay on this subject, too, I will refer any incredulous reader not only to the two early chapters of mine featuring Wells, but also to §IV of my Afterword as well as to my discussion of The Time Machine toward the start of my analysis of Futurological Congress. 86. The (to my mind menacing) truth about Valis as the End of science fiction is discernible as being also Robinson’s (intuitive more than reasoned) conclusion to a monograph whose final chapter bears the title ‘The Science Fiction End, the Realist End.’ This, I think, is all the more telling inasmuch as Robinson, like everyone else who has written about Dick at book-length, is highly sympathetic to PKD. The fact that Valis inscribes (and often footnote-references) so much of PKD’s previous science fiction strongly implies that he, too, regarded Valis as the outcome of just about everything else he had written.

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Afterword 1. I am quoting this characteristically Bohrian sentiment from Werner Heisenberg’s memoirs, 102. Bohr himself writes something to exactly the same effect toward the end of his ‘Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics’ (1949); and this in turn finds its echo in a memoir by his son (Hans) in S. Rozental, ed. 328. 2. See my Acknowledgments for a schedule of those changes to previously published essays (§§1–4, 7, 9, and 11) which are readily specifiable. 3. In replacing the expected New Critical ‘said’ with ‘constructed,’ I mean to exploit the double meaning of the latter – this in anticipation of my subsequent remarks (in §II below) on genre as an intertextual matter. That ambiguity, however, should come with a caveat educible from Laurence Sterne’s ironic concession to ‘halve the matter [of textual meaning] amicably’ with the reader (on which, see Sigurd Burckhardt’s ‘Tristram Shandy’s Law of Gravity’ 86; cp. n. 32 below). 4. My wording is intended to carry much the same meaning as ‘leading question.’ 5. ‘Text’ and ‘textus’ have their Barthesian equivalents in œuvre and texte, respectively. By investing the latter with its etymological meaning (of seamless, hence boundless, fabric), Barthes invokes the Romantic idea – first clearly discernible, so far as I know, in Blake’s ‘All Religions Are One’ (1787) – that all literary creations are fragments of a textus notionally attributable to ‘an universal Poetic Genius’ (to quote Blake). The fact that Barthes, though having some such idea in mind, uses the French word for text to signify textus, makes for a certain amount of confusion vis-à-vis my sense of text. But, for reasons that I presently make clear, that is precisely why I want to reacquire text in the New Critical understanding of the word, rather than substituting ‘work,’ the English counterpart of ‘œuvre’ (also in that those two are equally slippery in the direction of texte – i.e., both ‘work’ and ‘œuvre’ can signify a body of texts). Barthes’ overall point of distinction, by my understanding of it (for which, see also my §2, n. 1), is restatable with reference to a term-concept of Christine Brooke-Rose’s invention, mega-text, but only as Damien Broderick redefines it – viz., as ‘a selfstructuring web of … interpenetrating semantic and tropic givens or vectors’ which texts constitute by ‘imbricat[ing]’ one another (Reading by Starlight 59; cp. Brooke-Rose 243–45). Broderick as I have selectively quoted him thus establishes the import of my rephrasing of Barthes’ proposition about texte/textus as asserting that any œuvre/work is a fragment of a/the megatext. 6. The exceptions immediately coming to my mind are Leo Spitzer, Sigurd Burckhardt (a student of his), and Earl Wasserman. 7. ‘Presuppositions’ is a term that Darko Suvin takes from Oswald Ducrot to cover all of the (diverse) socially contextual ‘ideological givens’ on which textual communication, from the standpoint of both its ‘senders’ and its ‘addressees,’ necessarily depends. See Suvin’s Positions and Presuppositions 61–64. 8. This phrase from Wells’s The Anatomy of Frustration can better serve the point I am seeking to make by it in the context of a lengthier quotation of the passage that it climaxes: ‘We cannot discuss money without a general theory of property, … we cannot discuss property without a general theory of economic organization, … we cannot discuss economic organization without a general political and social ideal and … we cannot have a general political and social ideal without a comprehensive conception of human ecology’ (AF 9:63). 9. Northrop Frye uses the same oppositional terms (Anatomy of Criticism 73), but for the purpose of discrediting any ‘centrifugal‘ approach. 10. ‘Discursive’ here applies to Discourse Theory, with its understanding that certain words and phrases, from their common usage at a given historical moment, assume an ideological charge that they do not otherwise bear (as is the case with ‘struggle for existence’ in the late nineteenth century, for example).

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Robert Scholes in effect expatiates on the overall point of my sentence in ‘Deconstruction and Communication,’ a critique of Jacques Derrida. 11. In accordance with syllogistic logic’s distinction, the claim I am making for the validity of my analyses leaves their truth for the reader to decide. 12. Here I am alluding to the interpretative principle or method that Alexander Pope, in his final version of The Dunciad (1743), defines largely by its paradigmatic opposition to ‘[t]he critic Eye, that microscope of Wit,’ which ‘examines [a text] bit by bit’ without any thought to ‘[h]ow Parts relate to Parts, or they to Whole’ (IV:233–35). 13. It is true that the zigzags and spiralings of Malachi’s actual life-voyage, for one, ironically compromise any such linear trajectory (whose literal destination point ironizes it as well); but as Sirens thereby takes on a seemingly willful freight of satiric digressions, it is likewise true that its cohesiveness contextually depends on the Tralfamadore plot (in two meanings of that phrase). 14. My quotations here come from the end of the opening section of T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, which I have argued (in §11) is The Dispossessed’s revisionary pre-text. 15. This statement can be taken as both endorsing and modifying Carl Freedman’s idea (Critical Theory 20–21) that any given work exhibits one ‘dominant generic tendency’ among the many such it incorporates – an idea premised on genre’s being a ‘tendency’ rather than a ‘category.’ 16. Sophocles’ very title for this play can be seen as ironic. It implicitly makes a distinction which is lost to both ‘King’ and the high-sounding but absurdly macaronic/ anachronistic ‘Rex’: between one who enjoys rulership by hereditary right (basileus) and one who owes it to his heroic exploits (tyrannos). As Laïus’s son, Oedipus could, in other circumstances, have claimed the kingship of Thebes on both counts – a tragic irony that surely does not escape Sophocles’ notice. 17. Anagnoresis and peripetia, though not commonly operative in comedy before Menander (i.e., after Aristotle’s death), also apply to The Odyssey, for example. 18. Reams of pedantic commentary have pretty much buried under them what Aristotle is probably referring to as catharsis: tragedy’s end-effect of persuading the spectator of the ‘rightness’ of the universe which (none the less) dictates the tragic hero’s demise. The word I have quoted is from some remarks by Stapledon (for which see p. 123 above) that can serve as a gloss on what I (as well as Stapledon, methinks) take Aristotle to be getting at. (As Stapledon’s remarks make clear, especially in their connection to Star Maker, this understanding overrides the sterile debate among classicists as to whether the catharsis of ‘pity’ and ‘fear’ resides within the play as a matter of ‘purification’ or instead is synonymous with the ‘purgation’ of those emotions in the audience.) 19. Aristotle’s account of the historical emergence and development of comedy and tragedy implicitly allows for new literary species (see Poetics 1448b34–49a25). But his earlier division of poetic mimesis into narrative, dramatic, and mixed modes is at least equally germane vis-à-vis Gerald Else’s contention (100) that ‘Aristotle’s scheme … provides for varieties that were not actually exemplified’ at the time. If Else has correctly interpreted the passage in question (and D .W. Lucas’s gloss [59] on Poetics 47a28–b2 suggests that he has), Aristotle is not only logically deriving as-yet-unheardof generic possibilities, but is doing so with reference to the verbal aspects of mimesis – i.e., the re-presentation of speech-acts (in drama at least). 20. In other words, Todorov gives a neologistic meaning to a French word which otherwise is as plastic in its usage as ‘fantasy’ is in English. 21. The century from which Todorov draws most of his examples of the fantastique – the nineteenth – affords many literary instances of the sort I am alluding to, thanks to the host of phenomena (electricity, mesmerism, and spontaneous combustion, for example) that were thought to be both natural and supernatural even by the scientifically informed. For more on this subject, see my essay-critique of Todorov.

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22. Thomas Beebee, in his rehearsal (278–79) of Derrida’s opening argument, concentrates solely on Derrida’s alternative (‘constative’ vs. ‘illocutionary’) interpretations of ‘Genres aren’t mixed’ (the closest English equivalent to ‘Ne pas mêler les genres’). Derrida, however, immediately goes on to suggest a third possibility: that the repetitive or citational nature of the just-quoted phrase engenders the temptation ‘to opt for … one and the other of these two [foregoing interpretative] decisions’ (see ‘The Law of Genre,’ in Acts of Literature 226–27). 23. This literal rendering I believe conveys the sense that Derrida means to impart to what is otherwise his idiomatic usage of saurait/savoir. See ‘La loi du genre’ 185. 24. ‘The law of the law of genre’ is a phrase that Derrida ostensibly applies to the demand for generic ‘purity.’ But he presently elicits from that a ‘counter[-]law that constitutes this very law’ (‘The Law of Genre,’ in Acts of Literature 225–26) – which I take to be ‘the law of the law of genre’ as I am glossing it. 25. In this regard, Derrida plays with a distinction more readily available in French than it is in German or in English: between spatial and temporal beforeness as denoted, respectively, by devant and avant. Thus, while his essay takes its title from the French rendition of Vor which recognizes the spatiality of Kafka’s story, Derrida is also mindful of the fiction’s paradoxically temporal priority to the law of genre which it obeys. See ‘Before the Law,’ in Acts of Literature 200 and 216. 26. Indeed, Derrida himself generically constructs ‘Before the Law’ in two intertextual ways: first with reference to Kant and Freud (regardless of Kafka’s conversance with the latter), and then by considering it in the bibliographical context of Der Prozess, which in supplying the fiction with a talmudic commentary, re-presents it. (Strangely enough, however, Derrida says nothing about any significance accruing to ‘Before the Law’ from its placement, by Max Brod, toward the end of The Trial rather than at the beginning, as in Orson Welles’s film version [1962].) 27. So, too, the norm of generic autonomy points to its negation, generic automatism, as being the consequence of a writer’s predisposition to pervert a literary idea by importing or omitting materials merely for the sake of fashioning a marketable product. Thomas Kent derives a comparable term-concept from the Prague School’s understanding of ‘automatization’ (for which, see Kent 48). But whereas he seems inclined to regard ‘automatized texts’ as the product of ‘an automatized genre’ (78 – e.g., the ‘dime novel’), I would insist that they are the consequence of authorial perfidiousness (not to say cupidity). Our possible disagreement, in other words, is over the question of whether any conventional or namable genre comes pre-automatized, as it were. For reasons which should be evident by the end of this Afterword, I am claiming that even characterizably formulaic genres are not necessarily that. (What my concept of genre as an intertextual matter would allow for is a grouping of works whose [only] common denominator is their automatization – which, however, would make for a rather odd assortment of ‘popular’ and ‘mainstream’ fictions.) 28. Here I am putting the point in the terms that Mark Rose (19–23) suggests. Also see my review-article on his book, ‘Science Fiction and Alienation’ 89–91. 29. See §2 of HGW’s Lit. Crit. and also my essay on ‘H. G. Wells as Literary Critic for the Saturday Review’ 170–73. 30. It may be worth noting by the way that this conception of genre effects a revision of intertextuality. According to theorists of the latter, ‘intertextuality [is] the very condition of textuality’ (to quote Linda Hutcheon’s admirably succinct statement of the case [8] in her survey of the subject). The present book can be taken as proposing that that relationship is reversible. 31. This idea is perhaps creditable to E. D. Hirsch, whose statement of it I am quoting (78). But while recognizing (‘intrinsic’) genre to be a matter of construction, he repeatedly speaks of genre as something to be ‘guessed.’ 32. In attributing consciousness primarily to a text rather than to its author, I am

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educing a logically inevitable consequence of the intentional fallacy (properly understood: see William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s essay on the subject). At the same time, I am making conceptual space for re-vision as an author’s more or less conscious realization of a hitherto unperceived meaningful textual possibility – a perception, I might add, that some interpreter of a given text could find in it without its (or another) author’s revisionary help, so to speak. In which case, however, the interpreter would do well to keep in mind this admonitory aphorism of W. H. Auden’s: ‘We often derive much profit from reading a book in a different way from that which its author intended but only (once childhood is over) if we know that we are doing so’ (The Dyer’s Hand 4). (The intention Auden surely has in mind is textually inscriptive rather than being some authorial instruction outside the precincts of the work in question.) 33. But see n. 84 of my chapter on High Castle. 34. David Ketterer, who by now is the leading authority on Wyndham’s life and works, has given me three different reasons for objecting to my characterization of Wyndham as a literary parasite of Wells rather than a true revisionist: (1) that Wyndham didn’t draw exclusively on Wells (‘Ward Moore’s Greener Than You Think [1947] is an important source for The Day of the Triffids’ [1951]); (2) that he ‘moved from “evolution” to “genetics,’’’ and hence away from Wells’s position; and (3) that he makes his Wellsian borrowings his own through the permeation of ‘estranged autobiograph[ical]’ elements. 35. Aldiss is familiar with Dick’s ‘Maledictory Web’; I am here citing Aldiss’s perspicacious metaphor as that figures in the title of his foreword to the 1976 reissue of Dick’s Martian Time-Slip (1963/64). 36. I take his (book’s) statement that ‘Frankenstein was no Faust’ (Unbound 2.6:54, but contradicted two paragraphs later) to be responsive to my contrary argument in §4 of Into the Unknown (1970). Aldiss tells me (pers. comm. of October 22, 2000) that he may have ‘inadvertently seize[d] on one or two of [my] ideas’ (among others’), and also that ‘the impulse behind F[rankenstein] U[nbound] was, at least in part exegetical.’ 37. I.e., by reason of his knowing things she isn’t privy to – e.g., she self-professedly isn’t aware that ‘there is a real Frankenstein’ (Unbound 2.10:90), even though he’s virtually her neighbor. It is perhaps needless to say that ‘fictifact’ in my usage designates a datum of a fiction. I defend this understanding of (the English counterpart of) Lem’s neologism in §3’s n. 10; but my full answer to the objection that I have misappropriated it resides with my §4’s analysis of Futurological Congress, the work wherein the neologism first appears. 38. Bloom 141. I have left out the sentence’s continuation – ‘and even (necessarily) to be lessened by [his] greater splendor’ – on the grounds that even Aldiss would not make such a claim for his book. 39. It is true that Bloom does mention one woman poet, Emily Dickinson; but she figures in Anxiety as little more than a name. The masculinist bias of Bloomian revisionism has hardly escaped the notice of feminist theorists, at least some of whom are nevertheless willing to approve it for the revelatory power it has. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, for example, say that ‘Bloom’s historical construct is useful not only because it helps identify and define the patriarchal context in which so much Western literature was authored, but also because it can help us distinguish the anxieties and achievements of female writers from those of male writers’ (48). I would add, however, that the second of those two uses makes for a project which is diametrically contrary to as well as different from Bloom’s in its valorizing of cooperation or collaboration over competition or aggression. I presently associate that anti-Bloomian understanding of literary history with Adrienne Rich (by way of further defining what ‘re-vision’ means in this book), but it is also implicit in Gilbert and Gubar’s subsequent remarks on Bloomian revisionism’s applicability to ‘the anxieties … of female writers’ (49–52).

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40. Rich’s essay as an MLA paper dates from 1971. I am grateful to Linda Duchamp for having called my attention to it in her comments on an earlier draft of my Afterword – until which time, I was unaware of having been forestalled in my use of revision as a term-concept. 41. ‘[R]evisionism … follows received doctrine along to a certain point, and then deviates, insisting that a wrong direction was taken at just that point’: Bloom 29. In other words, poetic misprision is predicated on ‘prision.’ It may be worth noting by the way that Bloom’s theory would have at least some poets misprising themselves. William Blake offers himself as the most poignant instance (in view of his large theoretical presence in Anxiety) inasmuch as the words of Bloom’s I just quoted are applicable to Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem in their relation not only to Milton’s epics, but also to a previous (abandoned) work by Blake himself: Vala, or The Four Zoas. 42. I cite Borges’s statement in full at the start of §II of my chapter on him. 43. I am quoting (sans italics) a marginal comment of Le Guin’s in the copy of my essay-chapter on The Dispossessed that she obligingly scrutinized. 44. In connection with the main point of this entire paragraph, I should belatedly introduce a caveat about ‘revisionism’ (applicable to ‘revisionary’ as well). Despite the absence of a hyphen, that word in these pages takes its meaning entirely from ‘revision.’ ‘Historical revisionism,’ then, is in its usual practice the antithesis of my intended sense as Le Guin clarifies it – this because most so-called revisionist historiographers impose their (mostly right-wing) ideological preconceptions on the past, and in the process either willfully ignore or outright distort whatever evidence does not suit them. 45. Into the bargain, the textual self-construction which realizes what can properly be called High Castle’s ‘alternate history’ is itself threefold (as I demonstrate in §12). The remainder of the paragraph to which the present note attaches reflects upon the findings of §12 without attempting to repeat or even summarize what I say there about High Castle’s three (self)constructions. For my present argument it will suffice to know or grant that there are (at least) three and that each is distinct from the others. 46. I am referring, of course, to Borges’s Berkeleyan Idealism as discussed in §9. Perhaps in consequence of its own epistemological idealism, High Castle is less morally idealistic (not to say optimistic) than The Dispossessed. 47. As will, I hope, be evident by the end of this paragraph, any generic construction of Prufrock other than an epic one will do here. 48. While Hamlet figures as just one of three real or fictive personages whom Prufrock compares and contrasts himself with (or four, if one includes Dante’s Count Montefeltro), he is easily the most significant of the lot by reason of the fact that Eliot’s poem has its center in a couplet which takes its inspiration from Hamlet’s likening of Polonius to a crab. This in turn connects with what every reader of this poem of Eliot’s gets from it: that Prufrock represents a re-vision of Hamlet as dilatory intellectual – i.e., Prufrock monologically dramatizes a view of Shakespeare’s play which the Romantics (initially the Germans, then the English) made traditional. In what I’ve just observed about Prufrock, I am again illustrating the main point of my previous discourse on revisionism as fundamentally entailing an insight about the latent meaning of a precursor rather than a recasting of generic conventions (though that can be a by-product of re-vision). 49. Orlando furioso, on Patricia Parker’s reading of it (§1), is an exception precisely to the point of my rule. Ariosto refers to previous epics (above all, Virgil’s) to criticize them rather than for purposes of epic self-authorization; but he does so as part of Orlando’s project of inflecting epic in the direction of – or deflecting it toward – romance. 50. Any survey of literary histories of science fiction must discover that credit (or blame) for the notion of one generically seminal text goes to Brian Aldiss as the author of Billion-Year Spree (1973). Aldiss, I believe, chose the earliest candidate most congenial

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to his own Gothic writing practice; but his selection of Frankenstein also proved timely, coming as it did at a moment of resurgent feminism. From the latter consideration (only), I myself regard the choice as salutary (despite what the near-total absence from this volume of women science-fiction writers might, quite wrongly, suggest). But I also perceive the proposition that there is such a thing as a single seminal work as being both disputable (for the reasons I shall presently come to in fashioning an academic parlor game of it) and objectionable (on grounds of its inherent dogmatism). 51. I owe this idea to my reading of Arthur B. Evans on Kepler, 165–66. (Evans there takes the Somnium’s footnotes to be the earliest instance of science-fiction criticism.) 52. This phrase comes from Calvino’s ‘Mitosi,’ wherein it appears three times (see Ti con zero 71, 74 – more than that if one counts the occasions when only one or two of the trio invoke the others). In quoting it again below, I substitute the original Italian. 53. The C. S. Lewis trilogy that I deal with in §7 makes the transition from science fiction to (supernatural) fantasy with Perelandra. It thereby allows theoretical space for what Carl Malmgren terms science fantasy (174). Proposing that ‘extrapolative SF’ ‘tends to emphasize the science’ and ‘speculative SF’ the fiction in science fiction, Malmgren sees science fantasy as gravitating toward the ‘speculative’ pole. 54. See Delany’s Starboard Wine 50–53, 88–90, and 219–20; and also his ‘The Semiology of Silence,’ 139ff. 55. The best case for the connection of science fiction and Critical Theory is to be found in Freedman’s book on the subject. 56. See §§III–IV of my chapter on Calvino, whose cosmicomic tales I analyze in part vis-à-vis their dialectic of pre-text and pretext. 57. The reverse, however, is only sometimes true, and solely by dint of homology. 58. My Into the Unknown (109) makes this point with reference to Hans Vaihinger’s ‘Philosophy of “As If.”’ 59. The chief exponent of Gernsback is Gary Westfahl. He contends that Gernsback ‘offered a complete theory of the genre’s nature, purposes, and origins,’ thereby making science fiction ‘a recognized literary form’ (1; see also Westfahl’s pp. 38–39 for the essence of what this means). 60. Gary Wolfe in effect reinforces my argument about the formulaic nature of science fiction at least with respect to those ‘icons’ he identifies which are peculiar to the genre (e.g., the robot and the space ship). 61. See the two concluding paragraphs of my §11. 62. An otherwise comparable Dickensian instance, Bleak House (1852–53), is rather more poignant in this connection for offering an incident susceptible of science-fictional construction: the one concerning the sudden and mysterious demise of Mr. Krook. This is certainly to be understood as an apocalyptic – that is, supernatural – event. The unwitnessed incineration of the man popularly styled ‘the Lord Chancellor’ (5:50) is a judgment of the sort Miss Flite ‘expect[s] … [o]n the Day of Judgment’ (3:34). ‘Men of science and philosophy’ nevertheless account (for) his death as a natural occurrence (33:413). Furthermore, Dickens devoted the latter half of his preface to Bleak House to justifying the scientific possibility of Krook’s ‘Spontaneous Combustion’ – mainly as a corrective to what had been an overbalance of readers favoring a supernatural explanation. Implicitly, he is arguing that the supernatural event is consistent with the natural order of things: Krook is reduced to a small heap of ashes through the cooperation of scientific and moral laws. That ‘the world of Bleak House … has physical laws which are almost exact analogues to moral laws’ is a point that Ann Y. Wilkinson demonstrates with considerable insight in an essay suggestively named ‘From Faraday to Judgment Day.’ 63. Paul Alkon’s study of ‘futuristic fiction’ in effect proves as much (as he himself would no doubt willingly concede): i.e., the pre-Darwinian texts he focuses on, while conducive to science fiction by virtue of their futuristic setting, do not themselves qualify as such.

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Michael Salewski makes my point in a different way. He sees The Time Machine as marking ‘a great moment in the history of SF – and of historiography’ because with it science fiction (SF) ‘once and for all immediately appropriates history as the object of its undertakings. SF is henceforth no longer mere future history, but can also deal with the history of the past; it concerns itself not only with naturalistic but also with historical phenomena. Science fiction as [the] expression of historical self-understanding [thereby] discovered History itself’ (Zeitgeist 125–26; my translation). My discussion in §2 of Wells’s pairing of A Story of the Days to Come with A Story of the Stone Age has a comparable bearing on the subject of a generic temporal consciousness. 64. ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances,’ in HGW’s Lit. Crit. 243. Wells is referring in particular to The Food of the Gods (1904), in which connection Mark Chilton’s allegorical/ roman à clef reading is highly illuminating . 65. See Bruce Franklin’s remarks (‘Strange Scenarios’ 119ff.) on what he sardonically styles ‘the lone genius’ theory of scientific endeavor. A similar critique implicitly informs Franklin’s War Stars (attaching to the last word of his jeu-de-mots title). 66. We might note by the way that this diversity cooperates with – even promotes – what might be called generic seepage, the science-fictionalization not only of ‘mainstream’ writing, but also of cultural discourse. On the latter subject, see Istvan CsisceryRonay’s ‘The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Harraway’; on the former, see Brian McHale’s book. 67. See my ‘Murder Most Fowl’ 264. 68. While taking this phrase from the title of the essay wherein Darko Suvin argues exclusively for The Time Machine as such a model, I have not only emphasized ‘structural,’ but also somewhat altered his sense of it, mostly by enlarging its scope. 69. In observing the bias of practitioners of non-literary, or multidisciplinary, treatments of texts – and especially of the current fashion for Cultural Studies – I do not mean to reciprocate their animosity to literary approaches such as mine. On the contrary, I readily acknowledge that such studies can be quite illuminating.

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VISIONS AND RE-VISIONS

——. A Story of the Stone Age. In Tales of S&T, 61–163. ——. Tales of Space and Time. [Tales of S&T.] NY: Doubleday & McClure, 1899. ——. The Time Machine. London: Heinemann, 1895. ——. The War of the Worlds. London: Heinemann, 1898. ——. When the Sleeper Wakes. NY & London: Harper & Bros., 1899. ——. The Works of … [The ‘Atlantic’ Edition]. 28 vols. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924–27. ——. The World Set Free. London: Macmillan, 1914. See HGW’s Lit. Crit. and EW for all of the other cited writings by Wells. Westfahl, Gary. The Mechanics of Wonder. The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1998. Whalen, Terence. ‘The Future of a Commodity: Notes Toward a Critique of Cyberpunk and the Information Age.’ SFS 19 (1992): 75–88. Whitlark, James S. ‘Vonnegut’s Anthropology Thesis.’ In Literature and Anthropology, ed. Philip A. Dennis & Wendell Aycock. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 1989. 77–86. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of … Ed. John B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of M. I. T., 1956. Wilkinson, Ann Y. ‘Bleak House: From Farraday to Judgment Day.’ ELH 34 (1967): 225–47. Williams, Paul. Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick. NY: Arbor House, 1986. Williams, Raymond. ‘Utopia and Science Fiction.’ SFS 5 [1978]: 203–14. Wimsatt, W[illiam] K., Jr. & Monroe Beardsley. ‘The Intentional Fallacy.’ In Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon. [Lexington]: U of Kentucky P, 1954. 3–18. Wolfe, Gary K. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1979. Zamyatin, Evgeny. A Godforsaken Hole (Na kulichkakh = “At the World’s End,” 1913–14). Tr. Walker Foard. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1988. ——. ‘Islanders’ and ‘The Fisher of Men.’ Tr. Sophie Fuller & Julian Sacchi. Edinburgh: Salamander P, 1984. ——. My/Muy. NY: Chekhov Publishing House, 1952. [Reportedly this is the first Russian edition of We.] ——. Nous Autres. Tr. B. Cauvet-Duhamel. 1929; rpt. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. ——. A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Ed. & tr. Mirra Ginsburg. Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1970. [The Russian basis of this volume appeared from Chelsea House in 1955 under a title transliteratable as Litsa.] ——. We. Tr. Clarence Brown. NY: Penguin, 1993. ——. We. Tr. Mirra Ginsburg. NY: Bantam, 1972. ——. We. Tr. Bernard Guilbert Guerney. In An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Period from Gorki to Pasternak, ed. Guerney. NY: Random House, 1960. 168–353. ——. We. Tr. Gregory Zilboorg. 1924. rev. ed. NY: E. P. Dutton, 1952. [This is the first published version of My/Muy—see the above listing for that title.]

LUP_Philmus_15_WorksCited

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Index

Abbott, Edmund (Flatland) 321n53 Abrash, Merritt 337n30 Adams, Douglas 153–54, 348n6 Alazraki, Jaime 356nn39, 44, 357n50 Aldiss, Brian 186, 295–98, 300, 384nn35–36, 38, 385–86n50 Frankenstein Unbound 297–98, 301, 384nn36–37 Moreau’s Other Island 297 Starship 186 Alkon, Paul 386n63 Allen, Grant 64, 326n32, 330nn35, 37–38, 342n6 The British Barbarians 64 Amis, Kingsley 114, 305, 331n5, 335n12, 341n3 Angenot, Marc 340n60 Arendt, Hannah 188 Ariosto, Ludovico 195, 358–59n15, 385n49 Aristotle 29, 123, 288, 289, 382nn17– 19 Asimov, Isaac 311, 339n47 I, Robot 339n47 Atwood, Margaret (The Handmaid’s Tale) 314n14 Auden, W. H. 310, 384n32 Bachelard, Gaston 187, 356n41 Bakhtin, Mikail 313n5 Bakunin, Mikail 321n57 Balderston, Daniel 356n44 Barratt, Andrew 320nn50–51, 321n54 Barrenechea, Ana María 356n42

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401

Barthes, Roland 28, 323n1, 363n65, 381n5 Battestin, Martin 349n15 Baudrillard, Jean 296, 323n1 Beardsley, Monroe. See W. K. Wimsatt Beebee, Thomas O. 383n22 Bellamy, Edward 29, 37–41, 44, 325nn24–25, 326nn28, 31, 328n3 Looking Backward 29, 37–41, 324n5, 325nn24–25, 326n28, 328n3 Bellow, Saul 243 Bengels, Barbara 343n19 Berdyaev, Nicolai 314n14 Beresford, John (The Hampdenshire Wonder) 343n18 Bergonzi, Bernard 328nn4, 9 Berkeley, George 176, 183, 187, 189 Bernal, J. D. 135, 142, 347n15 Bernardini Napoletano, Francesca 363n65 Blake, William 20–21, 138, 148, 198, 243, 346n9, 356n46, 367n23, 381n5, 385n41 Blanchot, Maurice 290–91 Bohr, Niels 284, 381n1 Bloom, Harold 298–99, 384nn38–39, 385n41 Bloom, Robert 331n42 Booker, M. Keith 319–20n50 Borges, Jorge Luis 121, 133, 173–89, 191, 256, 263–64, 282, 287, 299–300, 301, 309, 329n26, 331–32n8, 342n7, 348n8,

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402

VISIONS AND RE-VISIONS

353nn1–2, 4–6, 11, 354nn14– 18, 22, 355nn25, 28, 30–32, 35– 36, 356nn42, 44–45, 357nn47– 48, 50, 358n8, 359n16, 366n19 ‘Chess‘ (poem) 176 Evaristo Carriego 173, 353nn3, 5 Essays and Parables: ‘About Oscar Wilde’ 178; ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’ 355n31; ‘An Autobiographical Essay’ 354n17; ‘Avatars of the Tortoise’ 173, 366n14; ‘The Biathanatos’ 176– 77, 354n14; ‘Borges and I’ 175, 357n50; ‘The First Wells’ 178– 79, 185, 354n22; ‘The Flower of Coleridge’ 179, 355n28; ‘A History of Eternity’ 176; ‘Kafka and His Precursors’ 177, 332n8; ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne’ 177–78; ‘New Refutation of Time’ 176, 177, 181, 355nn30, 34, 357n50, 366n19; ‘On Chesterton’ 178; ‘Partial Enchantments of the Quixote’ 176; ‘Pascal’s Sphere’ 121, 343n14, 354n16; ‘The Penultimate Version of Reality’ 180–81; ‘La perpetua carrera de Aquiles y la tortuga’ (‘The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise’) 354n13; ‘Quevedo’ 354n47; ‘The Wall and the Books’ 173– 74, 353nn6, 10, 354n16 Ficciones: ‘The Aleph’ 179; ‘The Circular Ruins’ 176; ‘Death and the Compass’ 177, 181, 189, 354n15; ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ 174–75, 183, 185, 187–89, 264, 309, 348n8, 353nn9–10, 355n27, 356n44; ‘The God’s Script’ 354n16; ‘The House of Asterion’ 184; ‘The Immortal’ 181, 184, 354n16, 355nn32, 36; ‘The Library of Babel’ 173, 184, 185; ‘The Lottery of Babylon’ 354n13; ‘The Man on the Threshold’ 355n31; ‘Three Versions of Judas’ 176; ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ 180–85, 186–87, 189,

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354n13, 355nn35–37, 356nn39, 47, 357n50, 366n15; ‘The Zahir’ 179 Boswell, James 359n28 Bradbrook, Bohuslava R. 338n40 Brecht, Bertholt 345n33 Broderick, Damon 381n5 Brooke-Rose, Christine 381n5 Brown, Clarence 316n39, 321n53, 336n23 Browne, Thomas 356–57n47, 357n50 Buchanan, Brad 330n28 Burckhardt, Sigurd 381nn3, 6 Bulwer Lytton, Edward (The Coming Race) 3 Burdekin, Katherine (Swastika Night) 314n14 Burke, Kenneth 1, 313nn5, 7, 327n46 Butler, Samuel 2, 125, 313n9 Erewhon 2 Calvino, Italo 46, 190–223, 282, 292, 304, 306, 309, 357nn1–2, 5–6, 358nn8–15, 359nn16–21, 27, 29, 360nn31–32, 34–35, 37, 361nn41, 43, 362nn48, 50, 363nn62–63, 65, 364nn65–66, 373n34, 386n56 Il castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of the Crossed Destinies) 363n65 Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities) 191, 222, 223, 363n65 Collezione di sabbia (Collection of Sand) 193, 282 Le Cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics) 193, 199–212, 213, 221, 304, 359nn25, 27, 360n32, 362n52: ‘I dinosauri’ (‘The Dinosaurs’) 208; ‘La distanza della Luna’ (‘The Moon’s Distance’) 201–04, 205–06, 207, 221, 360nn34–35; ‘Giochi senza fine’ (‘Games Without End’) 220, 360n34; ‘Senza Colori’ (‘Without Colors’) 206–07, 361nn39–41; ‘Un segno nello spazio’ (‘A Sign in Space’) 209–12, 362nn47–48, 51; ‘La

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INDEX spirale’ (‘The Spiral’) 205, 208; ‘Sul fare del giorno’ (‘At the Daybreak’) 202–03, 208–09, 360n33, 361nn40, 45; ‘Tutto in un punto’ (‘All at/in a Point’) 204–05, 208, 360n38; ‘Lo zio acquatico’ (‘The Aquatic Uncle’) 208 Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove (‘Cosmicomics Old and New’) 199, 200, 221, 363n64 Essays: ‘Cibernetici e fantasmi’ (‘Cybernetics and Ghostly Presences’) 191–92, 358n9; ‘Jorge Luis Borges’ 358n8, ‘Livelli della realtà’ 358n9 La memoria del mondo (‘The Memory of the World’) 199, 200, 221–22, 359n27, 360nn29, 34, 363nn64– 65: ‘Il cielo de pietra’ (‘The Stone Sky’) 361n40; ‘La Luna come un fungo’ (‘The Moon as a Mushroom’) 360n34; ‘La tempesta solare’ (‘The Solar Storm’) 361n40 I nostri antenati (Our Ancestors) 193– 99, 223, 357n6, 358nn12, 14, 359nn19, 21: Il barone rampante (‘The Baron Rampant’) 190, 194, 195–96, 198–99, 207, 357n6, 359n24; Il cavaliere inesistente (‘The Inexistent Knight’) 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 357–58n6, 359n22; Il Visconte dimezzato (‘The Splitin-Half Viscount’) 194–95, 196– 97, 357n6, 359nn20–21 Palomar 223, 364n66 Una pietra sopra (‘A Stone Above’) 193, 357n2, 358nn9–10 Il sentiero dei nidi (‘The Path of the Nests’) 209, 211, 362n46 Ti con zero (T Zero) 192, 199, 200, 201, 203, 209, 212–21, 359n25, 360n32, 362n52, 364n66: ‘Le conchiglie e il tempo’ (‘Shells and Time’) 193; ‘Il conte di Montecristo’ (‘The Count of Montecristo’) 192, 211, 212–13, 220–21, 362n52, 363nn61–62; ‘Il guidatore notturno’ (‘The Night

LUP_Philmus_16_IndexNew

403

403

Driver’) 220; ‘L’inseguimento’ (‘The Pursuit’) 362n52; ‘La molle Luna’ (‘The Soft Moon’) 207, 360n34; ‘L‘origine degli uccelli’ (‘The Origin of the Birds’) 213–14, 219; The Priscilla Trilogy (‘Mitosi,’ ‘Meiosi,’ and ‘La morte’; ‘Mitosis,’ ‘Meiosis,’ and ‘Death’) 201–02, 214–19, 220, 359n25, 360n30, 362n52, 363nn59, 63, 382n52; ‘Ti con zero’ 362nn52, 54, 363n59 Camus, Albert 92 Cannon, JoAnn 364n66 C”apek, Josef 79, 88, 338n40; also see Karel C”apek C”apek, Karel 79–113, 282, 287, 295, 307, 309, 334nn3–5, 335nn6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 19, 336nn26, 29, 337nn31, 34–35, 37, 338nn39– 43, 339nn47, 50, 52, 55, 340nn57, 59, 61, 341nn64–66 The Absolute at Large 79, 84, 87, 95– 98, 99, 101, 102, 109, 112, 334n5, 336nn28–29, 338n42, 339n44 Adam the Creator (with Josef C”apek) 79, 86, 87, 107, 108–09, 111, 340nn55–56 Hordubal 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 87, 112, 334n6, 335n11 Krakatit 84, 98–102, 334n5, 336n29, 337nn32–36, 338n38 The Macropulos Secret 79, 83, 84, 86, 87–92, 93, 95, 99, 334n5, 335– 36n19, 336nn20, 24, 339n48 ‘The Meaning of “R.U.R.”’ 85–86, 104, 335n15 Meteor 79, 80–81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 112, 337n15 An Ordinary Life 79, 80, 82–83, 84, 86, 87, 112, 335nn9–10 R.U.R. 79, 84–86, 87, 97, 102–07, 109, 110–11, 112, 282, 295, 335n15, 337n37, 338nn39–43, 339nn44–53 ‘The System’ 338n42 War with the Newts 84, 87, 107, 109– 12, 335n17, 337n37, 340n57

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404

VISIONS AND RE-VISIONS

The White Plague 84, 87, 91–94, 95, 99, 336nn21, 25–26 Capra, Fritjof 379n72 Carne-Ross, D. S. 357n5 Carr, Edward Hallett 314n14, 317n41, 322n62 Carroll, Lewis 161, 348n7, 350n20 Casares, Bioy 182–83 Castro, Américo 353n12 Cauvet-Duhamel, B. 317n39 Caudwell, Christopher 53 Cervantes, Miguel de 176, 185, 195, 293, 353n12, 356n39, 359n16 Chernov, Viktor 316n38, 322n62 Chesterton, G. K. 178, 354n18 Chilton, Mark 387n64 Christ, Ronald J. 354n18, 355n25 Christopher, Joe R. 347n22 Chuang Tzu 184, 188, 356n38 Clarke, Arthur C. 166 Coghill, Nevill 135 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 127, 327n46, 343n21 Collins, Christopher 318n46 Collins, Wilkie 330n40 Colquhon, Archibald 357n1, 358nn10, 12, 359n24, 362n46 Condon, Richard 350n19 Cornford, Francis M. 314n16 Conrad, Joseph 81, 324n15, 340n57, 359n17 Creagh, Patrick 358nn9–10 Cromie, Robert (The Crack of Doom) 99, 337n31 Cromphout, Francis 363n61 Crossley, Robert 314n14, 341nn4–5, 342n6, 343nn18–19, 346n13 Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. 332nn9, 13, 333n24, 337n37 Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien (L’Autre monde) 302–03 Dante Alighieri 302 Darwin, Charles 50, 117–18, 307, 331n4, 350n21 Darwin, George 51, 202, 328n8, 331n4, 360n34 Defoe, Daniel 65, 92

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404

Deidier, Roberto 361n40 Delany, Samuel 303, 306, 334n24, 340n60, 386n54 Derrida, Jacques 173, 210, 211, 290– 92, 362nn50, 53, 382n10, 383nn22–26 DeSica, Vittoria 193 Dick, Anne 372n27, 376n60 Dick, Philip K. 77, 250–83, 292, 296, 297, 307, 309, 310, 311, 334nn26–27, 367nn1–2, 368nn3, 5–6, 8–9, 369n12, 370nn19–21, 371nn22–23, 25, 372nn27, 29, 373nn34–35, 374nn36, 44, 375nn45–49, 376nn50, 53, 59, 377nn62–65, 378nn66–70, 379nn72, 76–77, 380nn83, 86, 384n35 Confessions of a Crap Artist 368–69n9 Counter-Clock World 375n47 The Divine Invasion 375n47 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 380n81 Essays: ‘How to Build a Universe …’ 250; ‘If You Find This World Bad …’ 368n5; ‘Notes Made Late at Night …’ 368n8; ‘Schizophrenia and The Book of Changes’ 371n25, 377n64, 378n69 Eye in the Sky 250, 279, 367n1 Galactic Pot-Healer 368n2 The Man in the High Castle 250–83, 292, 299, 301, 311, 367–68nn2, 5–6, 8–9, 369nn12–16, 370nn17–19, 371nn21–25, 372nn26–27, 29, 373nn30–33, 374nn36–44, 375nn45–47, 49, 376nn52–56, 59–60, 377nn62– 65, 378nn66–70, 379nn71–76, 380nn79–81, 385n45 The Simulacra 368n2 Solar Lottery 380n84 The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch 375n47 Time Out of Joint 279 Ubik 77–78, 275, 282–83, 296, 311, 334n26, 369nn10–11, 371n24, 378n70, 379n77, 380nn83–84

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INDEX Valis 283, 375n47, 376n53, 379n70, 380n86 Vulcan’s Hammer 374n35 Dickens, Charles 64, 68, 88, 187, 287, 306, 330n40, 354n17, 386n62 Diderot, Denis 195 Disch, Thomas 379n76 Djilas, Milovan 40, 325n26 Donne, John 176–77, 354nn14, 19 Dostoevsky, Feodor 4, 17–18, 33, 12, 318n46 Dryden, John 7 Dumas, Alexandre, the Elder 191, 192, 196, 363n62 Easterbrook, Neil 319n49 Edel, Leon 330n38, 331n43 Edwards, T. N. R. 317n44, 318nn45– 46 Einstein, Albert 238, 305, 366n17 Eiseley, Loren 114, 341n2 Eisenhower, Dwight 156 Eliot, T. S. 154, 192, 194, 201, 224, 235, 240, 241, 242, 246, 247, 283, 295, 301–02, 305, 346n9, 355n31, 358n13, 364n1, 367n26, 382n14, 385nn47–48 Elkins, Charles 342n6 Elliott, Robert C. 312n3, 313n8, 333n17 Else, Gerald F. 382n19 Empson, William 323n2 Evans, Arthur B. 386n51 Fekete, John 365n5 Fielding, Henry 159–60, 195, 293, 346n2, 349n15 Fink, Howard 321n59 Firchow, Peter Edgerly 318n46 Fitting, Peter 375n48, 377n62 Flaubert, Gustave 49 Ford, Henry 16, 169, 262 Foucault, Michel 314n15, 356n39 Frankenheimer, John 350n19 Franklin, Ben 376n56 Franklin, H. Bruce 351n27, 387n65 Fredericks, Casey 330n28 Freedman, Carl 334n26, 365n6,

LUP_Philmus_16_IndexNew

405

405

366n13, 379n73, 382n15, 386n55 Freud, Sigmund 59, 81, 280, 332n10, 337n34, 338n38, 344n25, 347n1, 383n26 Frye, Northrop 1, 313n4, 381n9 Fuller, Buckminster 159 Gabriele, Tommasina 360n37 George, Peter (Two Hours to Doom/Red Alert) 336n30 Gernsback, Hugo 304, 308, 386n59 Gibson, William (Neuromancer) 18, 319n49 Gilbert, Sandra M. 384n39 Ginsburg, Mirra 22, 314n20, 317n39, 321nn53–54 Godwin, Francis (The Man in the Moone) 302–03, 305 Goethe, Wolfgang von 20, 101–02, 346n7, 367n2 Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm 104 Gubar, Susan. See Sandra Gilbert Guerney, Bernard 317n39, 321n53 Gulick, Thomas 32, 51, 324n12, 328n7 Haldane, J. B. S. 115, 141, 142, 341n5, 346n5 Hardy, Thomas 294, 307 Harkins, William E. 334n4, 335n6, 337n35, 338nn38–39, 42, 341n64 Hart, Liddell 187, 356n44 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 50, 161, 177– 78, 350n21 Hayles, N. Katherine 374n37, 375nn46–47, 379n72, 380n82 Hegel, Georg Friedrich 83, 335n18, 339n46 Heinlein, Robert 186, 350n19 Orphans of the Sky 186 The Puppet Masters 350n19 Heisenberg, Werner 381n1 Heraclitus 180, 355n30, 366n19 Herbert, Frank (Dune) 226 Hill, George Roy 350n23 Hirsch, E. D. 383n31 Hitchcock, Alfred 58

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406

VISIONS AND RE-VISIONS

Hitler, Adolf 79, 94, 111, 340n61 Homer 185, 294 Homer, David. See E. E. Nunan Hooper, Walter 346n4 Hoyle, Fred 360n34 Hudson, W. H. (A Crystal Age) 41 Hughes, David 64, 324n10, 325n23, 326n32, 330nn37–38 Hume, Kathryn 364n66 Huntington, John 318n47, 329n19, 365n7, 372n26, 376n50, 379n76 Hutcheon, Linda 383n30 Hutchings, William 318n45 Huxley, Aldous (Brave New World) 3–4, 16, 25, 33, 314n14, 318n46, 324n13 Huysmans, J.-K. 34, 324n15 James, Henry 65, 287, 324n15, 330n38, 331nn42–43, 355n28 Jameson, Fredric 185–86, 187, 333n17, 356n41, 368n3 Johnson, Samuel 200, 310, 359n28 Joyce, James 112, 150, 153, 337n32, 375n49 Jung, Carl 301, 371–72n25, 379n72 Kafka, Franz 177, 291, 383nn25–26 Kandel, Michael 331n1 Kaplan, Marina 356–57nn47, 49–50 Keats, John 188–89, 210, 335n7, 336n22, 357n48 Kelvin, William Thompson 51 Kent, Thomas 383n27 Kepler, Johann (Somnium) 302, 309, 386n51 Ketterer, David 58, 348n9, 371n22, 384n34 Khouri, Nadia 365n5, 367n21 Kinnaird, John 341n4, 342n8 Kinyon, Kamila 338n40, 339nn46, 52 Kipling, Rudyard 178, 324n15, 354n18 Klaic;, Dragan 339n47 Koestler, Arthur (Darkness at Noon) 27, 322n62 Kraus, Karl 112, 341n64 Kropf, Carl R. 348n6 Kropotkin, P. A. 365n5

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406

Kubrick, Stanley (Dr. Strangelove) 99, 100, 336n30 Kuhn, Thomas S. 313n10 Lake, David 328n15 Lamarck, Pierre 32, 50, 328n7 Lang, Andrew 43, 331n40 Lawler, Donald L. 347n2, 349n13 Le Carre, John 288 Leeds, Marc. See Peter Reed Le Guin, Ursula 27, 72, 193, 224–49, 258, 281, 282, 283, 286, 295, 299–300, 301, 305, 309, 322n63, 333n17, 355n30, 358n7, 364nn1, 4, 366nn17, 19, 367nn21–22, 27, 379n73, 385nn43–44 City of Illusions 248 The Dispossessed 27, 72, 193, 224–49, 258, 282, 286, 287–88, 295, 299–300, 301, 305, 308, 322n63, 333n17, 343n13, 355n30, 364nn1–3, 365nn4–6, 8–9, 366nn10, 12–13, 15, 18–20, 367nn21–22, 24–28, 379n73, 382n14, 385n46 The Lathe of Heaven 333n7 The Left Hand of Darkness 248–49, 364n4, 366n16 Planet of Exile 248 Rocannon‘s World 248 The Word for World Is Forest 365n4, 367n27 Lem, Stanislaw 66–78, 96, 101, 191, 192–93, 287, 296, 306, 309, 328n10, 331n1, 332nn9–10, 12– 13, 333nn23–24, 334nn25–27, 337–38m37, 356n43, 359n20, 376n49, 384n37 The Chain of Chance 333n16 The Cyberiad 332n14 Fiasco 150 Futurological Congress 66, 68–78, 96, 101, 193, 197, 282, 292, 296, 310, 328n10, 331n1, 332nn9, 11–14, 333nn15, 17–19, 21, 24, 356n43, 380n84 Highcastle 66

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INDEX The Investigation 66, 332n10 Master’s Voice 66 ‘Metafantasia: The Possibilities of Science Fiction’ 193, 332n13, 333n23, 334n25 Mortal Engines 332n14 ‘On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction’ 334n27 A Perfect Vacuum 210, 362n49 ‘Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans’ 334n26 Solaris 66, 83, 193, 282, 287, 331n2 The Star Diaries 71, 332nn12–13 Lenin, Nicolai 16, 317n42 Le Sage, Alain-René 195 Lewis, C. S. 84–85, 135–49, 295, 297, 309, 346nn1, 3–5, 7, 9, 12, 347nn16–18, 386n53 The Abolition of Man 84, 136–39, 144, 149, 346nn4, 7, 347n17 The Discarded Image 149 Of Other Worlds 346n5 Out of the Silent Planet 84, 135, 137, 139–49, 282, 295, 346nn5, 13, 347nn16, 19, 22 Perelandra 84, 135, 145, 147, 148, 346n9, 386n53 That Hideous Strength 84, 85, 135, 136–37, 141, 145, 149, 346nn1– 4, 347nn17, 20–21 Loing, Bernard 328n16 Lucas, D. L. 382n19 Lucian of Samosata (A True History) 302, 309 MacDonald, John (‘The Hand from the Void’) 350n19 Mackey, Douglas A. 367n1 Malmgren, Carl 386n53 Manlove, C. N. 347n19 Marcuse, Herbert 333n17, 335n18 Maslen, Elizabeth 340n57 Matus“ka, Alexander 337n35, 340nn56, 59, 341n64 McCaffery, Larry 319n49 McCarthy, Patrick A. 317n42, 341nn4–5, 342n6, 344n27

407

McConnell, Frank D. 328n13 McHale, Brian 387n66 McIntyre, Vonda (The Exile Waiting) 185, 186 McLaughlin, Martin 357n5, 359nn18, 21, 27, 362n50, 363n65 Melville, Herman 49, 161, 350n21, 380n79 Milanini, Claudio 360n36 Milton, John 21, 302, 392, 355n31, 385n41 Moore, Michael 165, 351n30 Moore, Ward (Bring the Jubilee) 371n23 More, Thomas 4, 313n8, 316n37, 324n5 Utopia 2, 313n8, 316n37 Morris, William 3, 29, 30–31, 34–35, 41, 44, 64, 324nn6, 8, 327n3, 330n40 News from Nowhere 29, 30–31, 34– 35, 324n8, 327n3 The Well at the World’s End 30 Morse, Donald E. 348n10 Morson, Gary Saul 313n10 Moylan, Tom 314n13 Murillo, L. A. 355n33 Myers, Victoria 366n16 Nietzsche, Friedrich 126 Nunan, E. E. 366n12 Oppenheimer, Robert 366n17 Orwell, George 1, 3, 6, 7, 19, 22–26, 27, 232, 293, 312n2, 313n10, 317n39, 318n46, 321n59, 322n61, 366n11 Homage to Catalonia 232 Nineteen Eighty-Four 3, 5, 7, 19, 22– 26, 27, 72, 293, 294, 313n10, 318n46, 321–22nn59–62, 366n11 ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ 366n11 ‘Politics and the English Language’ 5, 6, 23 ‘Politics vs. Literature’ 312n1, 314n22 Pagetti, Carlo 314n14

LUP_Philmus_16_IndexNew

407

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408

VISIONS AND RE-VISIONS

Parker, Patricia A. 358–59n15, 385n49 Parrinder, Patrick 326n36, 327n3, 330nn36, 40, 331n6 Peirce, Charles Sanders 340n59, 376n59 Piercy, Marge (Woman on the Edge of Time) 27 Plank, Robert 346n8 Plato (The Republic/Politeia) 1, 4–5, 13, 313n6, 314n16, 316n34 Poe, Edgar Allan 105, 178 Pope, Alexander 19, 181, 184, 315n29, 353n6, 382n12 Popper, Karl R. 314n17 Pound, Ezra 298 Priest, Christopher (The Space Machine) 328n14 Pritchett, V. S. 330n31 Proctor, Mortimer R. 346n2 Proust, Marcel 189 Quintana, Ricardo 314n18 Rabkin, Eric 344n25 Reed, Peter J. 350–51n27 Rhodes, Caroline H. 317n43 Rice, Elmer (The Adding Machine) 339n41 Rich, Adrienne 298–99, 384n39, 385n40 Richards, D. J. 316n38 Richardson, Samuel 195 Rieder, John 370n17 Robida, Albert (Le vingtième siècle) 3 Robinson, Kim Stanley 374n39, 380n78, 380n86 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 259–60, 372nn27–29, 373n30 Rose, Ellen Cronan 347n1 Rose, Mark 330n36, 331n2, 350n22, 372n26, 373n33, 383n28 Rosenshield, Gary 320n51, 321n58 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 195 Ruddick, Nicolas 328n14 Rudolph II, Emperor 84, 335n13 Rupert, Peter 321n54, 322n63 Rushing, Robert 360n31 Russell, Robert 321n55, 322n61

Sargent, Lyman Tower 314n13 Sartre, Jean Paul 219, 288, 345n33, 360n30 Saussure, Ferdinand de 210, 323n1, 340n60 Schehr, Lawrence R. 356n45 Scheick, William J. 329n22, 330nn32, 34 Schirk, Heinz 374n43 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. 372n28 Scholes, Robert 382n10 Scott, Walter 57, 64, 294, 324n6, 329n25 Sedgewick, Cristina 323n3 Selver, Paul 336nn19, 21, 25, 338n41, 339nn44, 49 Shakespeare, William 122, 163, 176, 208, 301, 350n26, 356n39, 385n48 Shane, Alex M. 316n38, 318n46, 319n48, 321n54 Shelley, Mary 129, 297–98, 300, 302, 308, 344n25 Frankenstein 129, 295, 297, 302, 308, 344n25, 386n50 Shelley, Percy 297 Shelton, Robert 344n28 Shih Huang Ti 173, 353nn6, 10 Sigman, Joseph 348n7 Skinner, B. F. (Walden Two) 4 Slusser, George 372n26 Sommerville, Bruce David 328n14 Sophocles 289, 382n16 Southern, Terry 336n30 Spencer, Herbert 56, 118, 180–81, 329n24 Spencer, Kathleen 334n24, 340n60 Spengler, Oswald 117 Spinoza, Baruch 114, 180, 341n1 Stabb, Martin S. 355n35 Stableford, Brian 327n50, 342n6 Stapledon, Olaf 36, 114–34, 141–43, 149, 200, 282, 292, 295, 299, 300, 306, 309, 325n22, 335n12, 339n54, 341nn1, 4–6, 342nn6– 8, 10, 343nn15–16, 18–20, 23, 344nn25, 28–29, 346n13, 347n16, 366n18, 382n18 Darkness and the Light 345n32

Salewski, Michael 387n63

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INDEX Death Into Life 133, 345n32 ‘Escapism in Literature’ 115 The Flames 132–33, 342n6, 344nn29–30, 345n31 Last and First Men 114, 115, 116–20, 123, 124–25, 132, 133, 142–43, 200, 252, 295, 341nn4–6, 344n28, 347n16 Last Men in London 119 Latter-Day Psalms 344n28 A Man Divided 115, 130, 132 A Modern Theory of Ethics 114, 118, 121, 344n28 Odd John 114, 124–26, 127, 200, 343nn17–18 Old Man in New World 133 Philosophy and Living 123, 124, 341n1, 343n11 Saints and Revolutionaries 343n15 Sirius 114, 124–31, 132, 133, 134, 200, 292, 299, 341n2, 342n6, 343nn17, 19–20, 22–23, 344nn25, 28–29, 345n33 Star Maker 36, 114, 116, 118, 119– 23, 124–25, 129, 200, 299, 342nn6, 8, 343nn13, 17, 345nn32–33, 366n18, 382n18 ‘What Are “Spiritual” Values?’ 118 Stendhal 195 Sterne, Laurence 19, 195–96, 215, 218, 223, 358n15, 359n17, 361n39, 363n58, 381n3 Stevens, Wallace 250, 281, 348n11, 380n79 Stevenson, Robert Louis 178, 196–97, 329n25, 359n19 The Master of Ballantrae 359n19 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 178, 196–97, 359n19 The Weir of Hermiston 329n5 Strugatsky, Boris and Arkady (Roadside Picnic) 27, 72, 333n17 Sturrock, John 353n9, 355–56nn36– 37 Sutin, Lawrence 282, 367n1, 369n14, 377n62, 380n84 Suvin, Darko 46, 317n41, 319n49, 330n39, 331nn6–7, 341n63,

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342n7, 381n7, 387n68 Swift, Jonathan 1, 5, 6, 7–14, 96–97, 147, 158, 215, 223, 293, 312n2, 313n10, 314nn18, 22, 315nn24– 28, 316n38, 321n51, 322n61, 327n3, 336n27, 354n12, 363n59 An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity 96–97, 315n26, 338n27 Gulliver’s Travels 1, 5, 7–14, 15, 22, 24, 26, 147, 293, 312n3, 314n18, 314–15nn23, 315nn24, 28–31, 33, 316nn35–37, 322n61 A Proposal for Correcting … the English Tongue 5 A Tale of a Tub 363n56 Swirski, Peter 333n18 Sypher, Wylie 353n12 Tanner, Tony 348n11 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 16–17, 317nn41–44 Theall, Donald 364n4 Thomas, Dylan 361n45 Thomas, John 325n25 Thompson, Francis 128 Todorov, Tzvetan 29, 48, 288–90, 292, 293, 327n52, 382nn20–21 Tolstoy, Leo 195 Toman, Jindr“ich 341n64 Tovorima, M. Teresa 367n27 Traugott, John 316n37 Tremaine, Louis 343n17 Urbanowicz, Victor 365n5 Van Doren, Carl 376n56 Velásquez, Diego de 175–76, 353– 54n12 Verne, Jules 304, 341n4 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de 65, 329n22 Vonnegut, Kurt 150–72, 262, 287, 292, 306, 309, 347n1, 348nn6–7, 11, 349nn12–14, 17, 350nn19–21, 351nn27–28, 30–32, 35, 352nn37, 39–42, 373n34, 374n35 Between Time and Timbuktu or

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410

VISIONS AND RE-VISIONS

Prometheus-5 161, 349n18 Bluebeard 171–72, 349n12, 351n27 Cat’s Cradle 150, 350n21 Deadeye Dick 348n10 Galápagos 150, 163, 349n17 ‘Harrison Bergeron’ 159, 349n14 Hocus Pocus 164–70, 306, 351nn30– 35, 352n37 Palm Sunday 349n13, 351n27, 352nn39, 42 Player Piano 171, 374n35 The Sirens of Titan 150–61, 170–72, 262, 287, 306, 309, 347nn2–3, 348nn4–5, 7–11, 351nn27–28, 352nn39–40, 374n36, 382n13 Slaughterhouse-Five 5, 158, 162–63, 350nn23–24, 351n27 Timequake 150, 158, 171, 349n12, 350nn21, 25, 27, 352n41 Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons 164, 172, 347n1, 352nn36, 39–40 Walpole, Horace 343n21 Warrick, Patricia 370n17, 379n72, 380n78 Weaver, William 357nn1, 5, 358n10, 360nn30, 32–33, 35, 361n41, 362n48 Weeks, Robert P. 330n29 Wegener, Phillip E. 318n46 Weiss, Beno 362n50 Wells, H. G. 2, 18, 27, 28–65, 66, 78, 85, 95, 101, 102–03, 110, 114, 115, 133–34, 140, 141, 142, 149, 160, 164, 178–80, 186, 189, 222, 282, 283, 286, 287, 294, 297, 304, 305, 307, 308, 309, 310, 313n11, 318–19nn47–48, 329nn17–20, 337n31, 341nn3–5, 342nn6, 9, 343n18, 346nn6, 12, 347n14, 354nn18, 22–23, 360n34 The Anatomy of Frustration 65, 222, 287, 327n42, 331n43, 381n8 Anticipations 46, 325n23 The Chronic Argonauts 50, 51, 328n4 The Croquet Player 49, 53, 60–64, 65, 200, 295, 306, 308, 326n34 Essays and Reviews: ‘The “Cyclic” Delusion‘ 326n38; ‘The

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Foundation Stone of Civilization’ 326–27n39; ‘Human Evolution, an Artificial Process’ 327n44; ‘The Immature Fantastic’ 328n11; ‘The Lost Stevenson’ 329n25; ‘The Man of the Year Million’ 142, 347n14; ‘Morals and Civilization’ 325n16; ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances’ 305, 328n12, 335n14, 341n3, 387n64; ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique’ 36, 38, 325n22; ‘Skepticism of the Instrument’ 36; ‘The Universe Rigid’ 36, 325n22, 328n4; ‘The Well at the World’s End’ 324n7’ ‘Zoological Retrogression’ 328n9, 342n9, 355nn24, 26 Experiment in Autobiography 65, 164, 326n34, 330n32, 331n42 The First Men in the Moon 141, 142, 179, 309–10, 346nn6, 12 The Food of the Gods 387n64 The History of Mr. Polly 101 The Invisible Man 178, 325n20 The Island of Doctor Moreau 45, 52, 54–55, 62, 102–03, 178, 295, 313n11, 327n48, 327n3, 329nn17, 20, 21, 354n20 Love and Mr. Lewisham 49 Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island 49, 53, 54–61, 62, 64, 65, 200, 295, 306, 329nn21–23, 330n27 The Outline of History 115 Short Stories: ‘The Apple’ 179; ‘The Country of the Blind’ 179; ‘The Crystal Egg’ 179; ‘The Lord of the Dynamos’ 179; ‘The Plattner Story’ 179; ‘The Star’ 44, 115; ‘The Strange Orchid’ 179; ‘The Story of Davidson’s Eyes’ 179 Star Begotten 330n34 A Story of the Days to Come 3, 18, 27, 29–48, 200, 294, 307, 314n13, 323–24nn5–6, 324n10, 325nn20–21, 23, 326nn28–29, 31, 33, 327nn48–49 A Story of the Stone Age 29, 43–45,

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INDEX 46–47, 307, 324n5 The Time Machine 3, 31, 32, 42–43, 45, 47, 49, 50–54, 55–60, 62–64, 65, 66–68, 73, 78, 95, 160, 179– 80, 189, 200, 202, 287, 292, 295, 306, 307, 308–09, 319n48, 324nn (5, 11, 13), 325nn (22, 24), 326nn34–36, 327n3, 328nn9, 13–14, 329nn18–19, 21, 23–26, 330nn28–30, 32, 35, 38–40, 331n40, 355nn28–29, 360n34, 387nn63, 68 The War in the Air 319n48 The War of the Worlds 63, 115, 141, 142, 295, 325n20, 347n14 When the Sleeper Wakes (The Sleeper Awakes) 28, 29, 35–42, 46, 65, 319n48, 324n5, 325nn15, 20– 21, 23, 326nn28, 30–31, 328n3 The Wonderful Visit 328n13, 330n27 The World Set Free 99, 337n31 West, Nathaniel 367n2, 374n36 Westfahl, Gary 386n59 Whalen, Terrence 319n49 Whitlark, James S. 348n11 Whitman, Walt 79, 380n79 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 322n61 Wilkinson, Ann Y. 386n62

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Williams, Paul 369n9, 380n83 Williams, Raymond 365n5 Wimsatt, W. K. 323n1, 384n32 Wolfe, Gary K. 386n60 Wordsworth, William 195–96, 221, 359n17 Wright, Fowler 341n4 Wyndham, John 296–97, 384n34 Zamyatin, Evgeny 3, 4, 6, 14–22, 23, 29, 33, 40, 91, 293, 309, 314n20, 316–18nn38–47, 319– 20nn49–51, 321nn54, 57, 323n4 The Fisher of Men 317n44 A Godforsaken Hole 320n50 Islanders 17, 317n44, 319n50 A Soviet Heretic 6, 314n20, 316n38, 318nn45, 48, 321n54 We 3, 4, 7 14, 15–22, 23, 29, 33, 40, 91, 313n12, 316–18nn38–46, 319nn49–58, 323n4, 336n23 Zangara, Giuseppe 260, 372nn27–28, 373n30 Zeno the Eleatic 176, 177, 186, 213, 234, 354n13, 366n14 Zilboorg, Gregory 21, 316n48, 317nn39, 41, 321n53, 336n23

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