Taken as a whole, science-fiction institutions (cons, fanzines, and awards) appear similar to those of the Upper Realm, but dissimilar as regards the function of furthering social values and selections. In the Upper Realm, as time goes by, the worst and the best literary works drift apart from each other; in science fiction however, the forces that are the result of economic laws of the marketplace, an absence of independent criticism, and a lack of cultural assistance are all directed toward the opposite tendency. They put trash next to valuable books; they impede any experiments in literary creation, choke independent, demanding, probing criticism, and they assist publishers in camouflaging as true criticism the advertising that boosts the sales of their products.
Furthermore, the chain of publishers who specialize in science fiction — and the silent majority of mute, passive readers — forms an environment to which even the most gifted science-fiction authors must adapt themselves eventually. The authors are initiated early into the rules of the game, and they must either obey or take immense risks. Suppose an ingenious, even inspired author enters the realm of science fiction. This man must adapt rapidly and without scruples to the simple truth that it is impossible for him to be valued and esteemed according to his extraordinary achievements. The silent majority of the readership will devour his valuable books in just the same way, at best, as they are used to absorbing the worst nonsense of mass production. Taking into account just the economic barometer of the market, the publishers will treat him in the same way as they treat his colleagues — i.e., as authors who willingly allow the titles, lengths, and structures of their books to be changed in advance according to the wishes of their masters. This author will watch helplessly the embarrassing sight of his books submerging in an ocean of trash, for the stigma of science fiction links them irrevocably to this sea. Surely Sturgeon is right in maintaining that ninety-nine percent of all books in every genre are trash, but the fact remains that in the Upper Realm of culture there are forces that never cease furthering positive selection. In the Lower Realm, the best books are placed beside the worst and most stupid, and submerged by them under the pressure of the objective situation.
Thus, science-fiction institutions only seem to be the equal of the institutions of the Upper Realm. In fact, we see before us a superficial mimicry. Science fiction merely apes and simulates the Olympian quality of literature, without reproducing the same performance capability. No famous author from the Upper Realm concerns himself with disqualifying trashy literature or defending himself against the attacks of graphomaniacs. For a while, the Knights and Blishes tried to do this, but in the end their aggressiveness had to give way to a moderated, more passive attitude. To some extent these intelligent men are conscious of their own defeat. They feel that this behavior, typical of science fiction, merely apes grown-up literature. They can see how grotesque such goings-on must look to an outside observer. The unauthenticated (because not earnest) quality of fandom, with its letters, parties, and friendly exchange of opinions, is for the authors only a weak substitute, an asylum where they can play the part of the great writer by confessing in fanzines with circulations of two hundred or less the secret of their creative writing and their deep psychological secrets.
We could consider these phenomena as insignificant and pay no attention to them, because in the end the ways in which the literati compensate their inferiority complexes, their feelings of frustration, and their Wille zur Macht are not necessarily those aspects of literature that flourish in the Upper Realm. However, in the Lower Realm these are symptoms of the chronic illness that impedes so embarrassingly the growth of the science-fiction genre. Thus the only way to better the prevailing situation is to make an outspoken diagnosis. We could support this conclusion with hundreds of examples. In an article by a contemporary science-fiction critic, the names of authors, including Farmer, Joyce, Sturgeon, and Kafka, are listed indiscriminately. But mainstream critics never reciprocate this striving for equal status. In today’s science-fiction anthologies we find, apart from science-fiction authors, such writers as Grass, Calvino, Ionesco, and Michaux, but the Upper Realm does not offer any just return. The inhabitants of the Upper Realm are invited to the Lower; they accept these invitations, but there is no return service. The inhabitants of the Upper Realm treat those of the Lower Realm properly, just as the gentry treat the rabble properly. A lady may enter a honky-tonk, but the “ladies” who reside there permanently are not allowed into a respectable house.
5
We shall now show how the work of a gifted science-fiction writer grows in the science-fiction environment and how it is accepted there. (The fate of the untalented does not concern us — but we will report on it, too, if only marginally, as it turns out in quite a characteristic way in the Lower Realm.)
The substance that fills the entire milieu of science fiction, and upon which the work of its authors feeds, is kitsch. It is the last, degenerate form of myths. From them it inherited a rigid structure. In myth the story of Ulysses is the prestabilized structure of fate: in kitsch it becomes a cliché. Superman is a spoiled Hercules, the robot a golem, even as kitsch itself is the simplified, threadbare, prostituted, but original constellation of values central to a given culture. In our culture, kitsch is what was once holy and/or coveted, awe-inspiring, or horrible, but now prepared for instant use. Kitsch is the former temple that has been so thoroughly defiled by infidels for so long that even the memory of its ancient untouchability has been lost. When hitherto untouchable idols get the status of mass products, through mechanical reproduction, and become obtainable as everybody’s objects of enjoyment, we observe how the originally sublime is degradingly transubstantiated into kitsch. The venerable paradigm is reworked in order to make it easily consumed and as simple as possible. And — quite important — kitsch does not present itself as such to its consumers; it believes in its own perfection and wants to be taken seriously. Even the psychic process that originally kept the mass of the uninitiated at a distance from the object of worship, because it was an obstacle that had to be overcome, comes wrapped up with the goods as an appetizer. Kitsch, free from all difficulties of consumption, is a product that has been prechewed for the consumer. In literature, kitsch results when all the complexity, multi-sidedness, and ambiguity of the authentic product is eliminated from the final product.
However, the people concerned (both authors and customers) have a splendid feeling of well-being if this final product retains the air of being an objet d’art, in full bloom, without restrictions. Kitsch is composed exclusively of ersatz products: of heroism, of need, misfortune, love, etc. In science fiction, kitsch is made from ersatz science and literature. From reading “inner circle” critiques and considering what science-fiction prospectuses have to offer, you would hardly believe that the authors who are reviewed display an abundant ignorance of the grammar, syntax, and style of their mother tongue; it is as if one suddenly hears that a team of athletes preparing for the Olympic Games cannot yet get up and stand.
In a stabilized culture, the sphere that kitsch might inhabit is quite small. In mass culture, it tends to overflow into neighboring genres; it has an aggressive and explosive pressure; it is a tumor that grows exuberantly, devouring that part of the body which is still intact. It is quite hard to justify morally a defense against its attacks, because the dilemma always arises as to which is the lesser evil: the trashy deformation of an art object, or its total absence from the circuit of a mass culture that cannot assimilate the real thing. Science fiction is a clinical case of a region occupied exclusively by trash, because in kitsch, the culturally and historically highest, most difficult, and most important objects are produced on the assembly line, in the most primitive forms, to be sold to the public at bargain prices.
Knowing no discretion and no reverence for things inconceivable by the human mind, piling universes upon universes without batting an eyelash, mixing up physics, metaphysics, and trite trash from misinterpreted philosophical systems without e
nd, science fiction is the true embodiment of kitsch, because of the cheekiness of its total ignorance, which even denies the existence of a higher knowledge, toward which it finds no path, and denies it triumphantly and obstinately.
Even if there are subjects about which philosophers dare not even think, topics about which world-famous scholars can say scarcely anything at all, they can be bought for 75¢ to $1.25 at every newsstand for immediate inspection. Science fiction provides a pleasant substitute for the study of the handbooks of the greatest thinkers, cosmologists, astrophysicists, and philosophers who have ever lived — yes, it can even report on what scientists born a thousand years from now will know. I am not ridiculing this maximum offer; I can only repeat what you read in the science-fiction advertisements. If somebody ridicules somebody else, you could not tell from the earnestness of these statements; it is just another case when you can’t take a single word seriously, for this is advertising, which is used to talk only about the best possible and previously nonexistent products. If all this is not meant to be taken seriously, then what is the real content of all their cipher language?
One of the most incredible secrets of science fiction (although one not too closely guarded) is the fact that ninety-nine percent of its authors do not know even the titles and authors of today’s learned works, but still they want to top these scholars with their knowledge of the year 6000. If an author understands schoolteacher’s physics, he is praised by Knight, quite in earnest, and presented as a model to authors who seem to have been forced to drop out of school after three years because of general mental weakness. The public does not seem to wait to find out about these interesting facts, probably because such news would annoy them. It is quite embarrassing to find out that for the least amount of money and mental effort, one has been convinced that one was initiated into the vastest secrets of the universe and existence.
6
The exception mentioned in the title of this essay is the work of Philip K. Dick. Because of the lack of a selection process to struggle against trash and promote real value, the works of Dick are sometimes compared with those of A. E. van Vogt.
The novels of both authors share the common characteristics that (1) they are composed of trashy parts and (2) they are full of contradictory elements. The contradictions include those of an external nature (as when the world depicted in a book runs counter to empirical scientific knowledge) and of an internal nature (as when during the course of a novel the action becomes self-denying — i.e., contradicts itself).
Such a diagnosis does not automatically invoke a subsequent condemnation. It is true that literary judgment is undemocratic, but nevertheless in the course of each critical trial it is also just. Yet it must be ascertained why the case under scrutiny allows a sacrifice of values. These works contain local nonsense and a local destruction of values (sense is always to be preferred to nonsense), but this local inroad might aid the construction of a higher sense of the totality. This point is connected with the general relativity of all values: even a murder may be justified in a civilization where it is considered a link in a chain of connections in which, according to prevailing belief, the lesser value, a man’s life, is sacrificed to the greater, the godhead.
Judged prima facie, there are no relevant differences between the two cases under review. Both authors disregard empirical knowledge, logic, and causality, categories upon which our knowledge is founded. They seem to sacrifice these basic values to the momentary stage effect; therefore, they destroy the greater values in order to create a lesser one — something always culturally taboo.
However, our authors are writers of quite different ranks, when read thoughtfully. As Knight and Blish have proved, the phantasmagoric acrobatics of van Vogt do not add up to a meaningful whole. He does not solve the riddles posed, he does not draw conclusions from the things depicted early in his books, and he sketches only ephemeral ideas, piling them chaotically on one another. With all that, he does not hypnotize the wary reader, but only lulls him to sleep; this sleep comes from increasing boredom, not fascinating magnetism. The only problem posed by van Vogt’s prose is its financial success, at the same time irritating and annoying an intelligent reader like Knight. Why is it possible that work the stupidity of which was amply and unequivocally demonstrated by Knight still enjoys such great popularity?
But no deep secret awaits discovery. The van Vogt fans do not care a jot about the Knight line of deduction. Most probably they do not know of it and do not want to, either. From van Vogt they get the whole cosmos, with its inhabitants, wars, and empires, excellently served up, because the plot can be seen without thinking at all, and they close their eyes to the knowledge that they are being fed with stupid lies. We will say no more on this topic.
Philip K. Dick seems to write in a vein similar to van Vogt’s, although he does not, like van Vogt, violate grammar and syntax as well as physics. Dick, too, works with trash. Yet his novels are structured with more logic. He is accustomed to let action issue from a clearly and precisely built situation, and only later in the course of a novel does decay, perplexing the reader, begin to undermine initial order so that the end of the novel becomes a single knot of fantasies. Dreaming and waking are mixed, reality becomes indistinguishable from hallucination, and the intangible center of Dick’s world dissolves into a series of quivering, mocking monstrosities so that in the end each novel of Dick’s mainstream (for Dick has also written second-rate, insignificant works) destroys the order of things that he erected at the beginning. Even if Dick’s worlds owe their explosion to a technology or a disease (or madness) of the space-time manifold, in ever-increasing speed they multiply their “pseudo-realities” so that (as in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch) the levels of hallucination and reality, which initially were separate from one another, become a space-time labyrinth. But Dick always moves among the typical trash of science fiction in the realm of androids, of the usual prophets (“precogs”), “psi,” “esp” fields, brain transplants, and hundreds of other similarly scurrilous products and phenomena.
Trash is present everywhere in Dick’s books; from time to time, though, in some of his novels, he succeeds in executing a master stroke. I am convinced that he made this discovery unconsciously and unintentionally. He has invented an extremely refined tactic: he uses elements of trash (that is, those degenerate molecules that once had a sacramental, metaphysical value) so that he leads to a gradual resurrection of the long-extinct, metaphysical-exotic values. In a way, he makes trash battle against trash. He does not deny it, he does not throw it away, but he builds from it a ladder that leads straight into that horrible heaven, which, during this operation, ceases to be an “orthodox” heaven, but does not become an “orthodox” hell. The accumulating, mutually negating spheres of existence enforce the resurrection of a power that has been buried for eons. In short, Dick succeeds in changing a circus tent into a temple, and during this process the reader may experience catharsis. It is extremely difficult to grasp analytically the means that make it possible for him to do so.
On the contrary, it is easy to say that this catharsis justifies the sacrifice of values that shocks the reader at the beginning. I cannot devote this essay to the Dick Transubstantiation Method; therefore, I will make only a few remarks on his tour d’adresse.
The promise of “almightiness” is implicit in science fiction. This omnipotence has a bipolar nature — the omnipotence of the bad (as in the dystopia) and of the good (the Utopia). In the course of its evolution science fiction has renounced the positive omnipotence, and for a long time it has occupied the opposite pole — that of maximum despair. Gradually it has made this pole its playground. Because the end of the world, the atomic Last Judgment, the epidemic provoked by technology, the freezing, drying up, crystallization, burning, sinking, the automation of the world, and so on no longer have any meaning in science fiction today. They lost their meaning because they underwent the typical inflation that changes eschatological horror into the plea
sant creeps. Every self-respecting fan owns a science-fiction library of the agonies of mankind that equals the book collection of a chess amateur, since the end of the world should be as formally elegant as a well-thought-out gambit. I believe it is a very sad phenomenon to witness the indifferent workmanship with which such novels are produced. There are specialists who have slaughtered mankind in thirty different ways, but still search diligently and calmly for further methods of murder. Structurally this (end-of-the-world) science fiction has put itself on the same level as the crime novel, and culturally it acts out a nihilism that liquidates horror, according to the law of diminishing returns. A space occupied by trash is a vacuum in which lead and feathers fall at the same speed. It is indeed a great venture to coerce the resurrection of dead metaphysical values from such a novel.
* This point of view may prompt some fans to ask the question why science-fiction writers should not be allowed to make an intellectual game out of the topic of mankind’s doom, and why the science-fiction field should be forbidden that which is done with complete justification in the field of the crime novel? My answer is: Surely nothing in heaven or on earth prohibits us from doing so; in the same way as there are no “absolute” prohibitions to hinder us from playing with corpses or the genitalia of our fathers or from concentrating our whole love life on the goal of sleeping as fast as possible with as many women as possible in order to establish a record. We could do all these things as a matter of course, but surely nobody praises such programs as something to further social values: neither can we deny that these actions promise certain new liberties only annulling forever taboos that have stayed intact until today. As the English put it: you cannot have it both ways; you cannot respect a life, a topic, a feeling, and prostitute it at the same time. At the utmost you can falsify the real appearance and real meaning of a situation brought about by your own actions deliberately or unconsciously; but hiding one’s head in the sand is fraught with well-known dangers. According to the whole historical tradition of our culture, truth has inherent value, whether pleasant or depressing. If crime novels follow their own schemata to falsify reality, it does not matter, since nobody looks into these novels for the highest revelations and initiations into the abysses of human nature. If science fiction adapts itself to the crime novel, it must stop claiming to be considered as something better than the crime novel. Its peculiar state of continual oscillation between the Upper and the Lower Realms of literature is a symptom of its repetitive attempts to have it both ways. But this is impossible without self-deception.
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