by John Updike
Speculative leaps, the spectacle of the never-seen: these are what attract and dazzle and in the end weary us in science fiction. Aristotle placed spectacle last in his list of the components of poetic representation, saying, “The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry.” What we tend to remember of science fiction is its amazing, astounding scenery. Slowly sinking into Jupiter, the heroes of “The Way to Amalteia” cannot but marvel at what they see:
They saw broad motionless zigzags of lightning, running from the darkness above to the pink abyss below, and heard the lilac discharges pulsing with an iron thunder. They saw some sort of fluttering films that flew close by with a high-pitched whistle
and
Enormous rainbow spheres rose up out of the yellow-pink abyss. They resembled soap bubbles and shone green, blue, red.
On Arthur C. Clarke’s pre-Voyager Jupiter, envisioned in 1972, giant living forms adorn the vaporous vastness—mile-wide floating medusas and herds of arrowhead-shaped cattle browse upon “the cloud pastures … the dark, red-brown streaks that ran like dried-up river beds down the flanks of the floating cliffs.” In Gérard Klein’s “The Valley of Echoes,” a smaller, harder planet is evoked: “The Martian sky was always like itself, very pure, a very dark blue with an occasional hint of gray, and with admirable pink efflorescences at sunrise and sunset.” Horizons seem “short, curtailed,” as tractors traverse the monotonous “gray sand and scattered lichens.” Then: “Suddenly, we saw surge up and grow on the horizon translucent needles of rock, so thin and so high, with such sharp contours, that we did not believe our eyes.” The human scenery, too, in science fiction strains optical belief; in “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” prostitutes of the future parade
in costumes that displayed their rouged breasts in enclosures of twisted wire like birdcages, or gave them the appearance of great height (dissolved only when someone stood very close to them), or gowns whose skirts reflected their wearers’ faces and busts as still water does the trees standing near it, so that they appeared, in the intermittent colored flashes, like the queens of strange suits in a tarot deck.
And when we come to extraterrestrial life-forms, the sky is the limit. Near to Homo sapiens, only a mutation away, is a comely female in Brian Aldiss’s “A Kind of Artistry”: “She was a velure, born of the dense y-cluster worlds in Vermilion Outer, and her skin was richly covered with the brown fur of her kind.” In the middle distance, picturable in cartoon fashion, are Josef Nesvadba’s macro-microscopic truth-seekers: “One was almost the size of a whale and looked something like a swollen ciliaphore; another was covered with flagella, while another featured eight feet. They were all transparent, and he could see a strange liquid pulsating through their bodies.” At an extreme of strangeness, so strange that sheer proximity mutually gives man and creature a killing psychic pain, is the giant alien of Damon Knight’s “Stranger Station,” visible only in televised glimpses:
a tangle of nameless limbs, whiplike filaments, claws, wings … the great clustered eyes were staring directly into the camera; the coiled limbs threshed in pain: the eyes were staring, asking, pleading.… The thick stems were like antennae, the leaves thoraxes, the buds like blind insect-eyes. The whole picture moved slightly, endlessly, in a slow waiting rhythm.
The seriousness of such conjurations rests upon the possibility that they are not impossible—that they might, somewhere, sometime, exist. But our improved knowledge of the solar system and beyond offers no confirmation; we seem to be stunningly alone. Science fiction finesses the paradoxical gap between the infinity and the vacuity of extraterrestrial space. Feasible travel to all but the nearest stars, even granting spaceships a speed near that of light, would consume human lifetimes. Robot exploration of the solar system has discovered no life, not even on Mars, with its polar frosts and ancient traces of a watery atmosphere. The astronomical facts, since the days of H. G. Wells’s marvellously populated planetary fantasies, add up to chemical bleakness. Yet fantasy fiction wishes to provide escape into plenitude, wherein the dreadful thinness of space is magically enriched. Nathalie-Charles Henneberg, in “The Blind Pilot,” unveils, in the visions of a hero bewitched by a manateelike alien, “the star spirals and the harmonies … oceans of rubies, furnaces of emeralds, dark stars, constellations coiled like luminous dragons. Meteorites were a rain of motionless streaks. Novas came to meet him; they exploded and shattered in sidereal tornadoes, the giants and dwarfs fell again in incandescent cascades. Space-time was nothing but a flaming chalice.” Alas, the chalice appears empty, except for what we put into it. Stanislaw Lem, in his fairy tale “How Erg the Self-Inducting Slew a Paleface,” parodies the universe as adventure site; his hero is lying when he tells of
lands unknown to anyone, such as that of the Periscones, who build hot sluices of corruption; of the planet of the Epoxy-eyed—these merged before him into rows of black billows, for that is what they do in time of war, but he hewed them in two, laying bare the limestone that was their bone, and when he overcame their slaughterfalls he found himself face to face with one that took up half the sky, and he fell upon it, to demand the way, but beneath the blade of his firesword its skin split open and exposed white, writhing forests of nerves. And he spoke of the transparent iceplanet Aberrabia, which like a diamond lens holds the image of the entire Universe within itself; there he copied down the way to palefaceland. He told of a region of eternal silence, Alumnium Cryotrica, where he saw only the reflections of the stars in the surfaces of hanging glaciers; and of the kingdom of the molten Marmaloids, who fashion boiling baubles out of lava, and of the Electropneumaticists, who in mists of methane, in ozone, chlorine and the smoke of volcanos are able to kindle the spark of intelligence, and who continually wrestle with the problem of how to put into a gas the quality of genius.
This marvellous spoof (marvellously translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel) goes on and on, a bejewelled memorial to our romantic expectations of space.
The future, too, feels deromanticized: more pollution, more population, more poverty on this pooped planet. It is touching, in Mr. Hartwell’s world treasury, to discover that some of the futuristic tales now happen in the past; Alfred Bester’s “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed,” with its omniscient government and Professorships of Applied Compulsion, occurs in 1980, having been published in 1958. Now we know 1980 wasn’t quite like that, nor was 1984. Fritz Leiber’s parody of L. Ron Hubbard’s scientism, “Poor Superman,” locates its post-atomic-war wastelands and glitzy governmental towers in an “America approaching the end of the twentieth century,” which in 1951 must have seemed fantastically remote. Are we, as the fabled twenty-first century approaches, still innocent enough to dream of escape into either the future or the realms of other stars? Or has the future come too close to escape to, and are the stars revealed as, in all their splendor, forever out of reach?
Ecolalia
TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY, by Umberto Eco, translated from the Italian by William Weaver and others. 307 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.
One way to ensure loving attention from your publisher is to write a big best-seller the first time out. In the churning wake of The Name of the Rose (1983), by the previously obscure Italian professor of semiotics Umberto Eco, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich has brought out Eco’s amusingly brief and scholarly Postscript to The Name of the Rose (1984) and now a collection of Eco’s essays, entitled Travels in Hyperreality. Eco, it should be said, has two American publishers: the Indiana University Press has issued, from his more academic self, A Theory of Semiotics (1976), The Role of the Reader (1979), and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984). The general essays of Travels in Hyperreality verge, some of them, on the linguistically technical, and some on the fadingly topical, but the best of them recall the jeux d’esprit of the late Roland Barthes in his journalistic, foreword-writing mode. Eco does not quite convince us, however, as did Bar
thes, that he is in possession of a wholly new tool of perception, a cerebral instrument that by a quick process of reduction and reassembly gives familiar and commonplace matters a bright, freshly faceted aspect. Barthes had something of the puckish perverse, the smirk of the true provocateur, whereas Eco is relatively benign and earnest—he is the plump, cigarette-puffing tutor who sits across from us at his littered desk and gently conveys the rueful truth that our honors thesis would be much better if he could only write it himself. Barthes’s agility was all mental; enthroned in Paris, the capital of intellection, he had no need of research or legwork, though he might strangely find himself, as if by a blink of thought, in Japan. Eco actually travels, visiting voodoo rites in the outskirts of São Paulo, sightseeing in the intellectual hinterlands of North America, and delving into some rarefied neighborhoods of history.
As an essayist Eco has two strengths, two areas where he is unusually knowledgeable and therefore especially interesting: the Middle Ages, upon which The Name of the Rose was an animated disquisition, and the New World, where he is a well-acclimated tourist. The title essay, the longest in this collection, ranges across the United States in search of instances of the native appetite for “the real thing” (to quote the Coca-Cola commercial) and (to quote many another) “more.” Realer than real are Disneyland, Forest Lawn, the Movieland Wax Museum, Old Beth-page Village on Long Island (where changes in sheep produced by breeders flaw the otherwise perfect reconstruction of an early-nineteenth-century farm), and three-dimensional wax versions of Leonardo’s Last Supper—Eco visited seven between Los Angeles and San Francisco, all of them claiming evident superiority to the fading, flaking original in Milan. In the Palace of Living Arts in Buena Park, for five dollars the dumbfounded tourist could (until 1982, when the Palace closed) view colored wax reproductions of famous marble statues like Michelangelo’s David and the Venus de Milo (her arms considerately restored) and 3-D travesties of such celebrity paintings as the Mona Lisa, Ingres’s Grande Odalisque, and Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie, complete with a concealed fan stirring her silk dress. This bold, if not commercially successful, attempt to bring closer to the American citizenry the wonders of European culture—“the fetishization of art as a sequence of famous objects”—is brother, Eco suggests, to such massive conglomerate appropriations as Hearst’s San Simeon and the Ringlings’ Venetian palazzo Ca’ d’Zan in Sarasota; thence to the Getty Museum, with its authentic masterworks in a re-created Roman villa, is a short, if tastefully trodden, step. Eco is not insensitive to the pathos of our vulgar homages, the “something disarming about this search for glory via an unrequited love for the European past,” nor quite unmindful of Old World wax museums and reliquaries that also strive for what he calls hyperreality. He takes a dainty philosophical delight in the paradoxes of such marriages of the synthetic and the actual as ecologically minded zoos and marine parks where “Nature has almost been regained, and yet it is erased by artifice precisely so that it can be presented as uncontaminated nature,” and artificial Old West towns whose fake shops sell actual goods for real money. In the entertainment industry, he tells us, “when there is a sign it seems there isn’t one, and when there isn’t one we believe that there is. The condition of pleasure is that something be faked.” He leaves few semiotic nuances of our recreational fakery unravelled, and rises to an insight into popular American theology:
If you follow the Sunday morning religious programs on TV you come to understand that God can be experienced only as nature, flesh, energy, tangible image. And since no preacher dares show us God in the form of a bearded dummy, or as a Disneyland robot, God can be found in the form of natural force, joy, healing, youth, health, economic increment (which, let Max Weber teach us, is at once the essence of the Protestant ethic and of the spirit of capitalism).
We perhaps don’t need the reference to Weber’s well-worn teaching, and an American native, becoming the object of so lively and amused an anthropology, grows, like anthropologically considered natives the world over, rather restive with possible objections, such as that most of the hyperreal sites Eco surveyed are to a great extent aimed at the entertainment and edification of children. More than once, for light on our essence, he draws upon comic strips, with which he shows an encyclopedic acquaintance. Lyndon Johnson’s enormous monument to himself in Austin is likened to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, and the market for kitschy hyperreality is “the America of Linus, for whom happiness must assume the form of a warm puppy or a security blanket, the America of Schroeder, who brings Beethoven to life not so much through a simplified score played on a toy piano as through the realistic bust in marble (or rubber). Where Good, Art, Fairytale, and History, unable to become flesh, must at least become Plastic.” That hurts. Next we’ll be told that Beethoven is plastic Beethoven if played on an American piano. Eco’s tour begins with an exhilarating prospectus—“There is … an America of furious hyperreality, which is not that of Pop Art, of Mickey Mouse, or of Hollywood movies. There is another, more secret America (or rather, just as public, but snubbed by the European visitor and also by the American intellectual).… It has to be discovered”—but ends on a sour, somewhat Marxist note: “The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.… Thus, on entering his cathedrals of iconic reassurance, the visitor will remain uncertain whether his final destiny is hell or heaven, and so will consume new promises.”
Semiology, the study of signification born from the semantic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, is limited, as a tool of cultural analysis, by its necessary focus on propaganda—that is, the loading of discourse, visual or auditory, with messages of salesmanship and social reassurance. In Barthes’s deft and beguiling essays, the “mythologies” of the French petite bourgeoisie are caught and held to analysis as they flicker past, all but subliminally, in the Paris press; he practiced an updated and more urbane version of Flaubert’s satire of Bouvard and Pécuchet’s conventional wisdom. Eco, as he reads the Italian newspapers of the Seventies and Eighties, finds grimmer matter—the death of Aldo Moro, the barbarities of the Red Brigades. In “Striking at the Heart of the System,” Eco concludes that the terrorists’ mythology, which he couches in rather recondite comic-strip terms—“their Disney-like mythology, in which on one side there was a wicked individual capitalist named Uncle Scrooge and on the other the Beagle Boys, a cheating rabble, true, but with a certain charge of crazy amiability because they stole, to the tunes of proletarian confiscation, from the stingy, egotistical capitalist”—has become obsolete, because Uncle Scrooge has gone multinational, and “the system” is now “headless and heartless.” As such, it displays “an incredible capacity for healing and stabilizing,” and “manages things in such a way that, except for the inevitable outsiders, everybody has something to lose in a situation of generalized terrorism.” Eco, reading the signs, takes comfort in the conclusion that power has become unlocatably diffused. A photograph in Corriere d’Informazione shows a ski-masked terrorist brandishing his pistol alone on the street: “The collective element was missing,” Eco’s interpretation of this sign runs. “This image suggested other worlds, other figurative, narrative traditions that had nothing to do with the proletarian tradition, with the idea of popular revolt, of mass struggle.” In “Language, Power, Force,” citing Barthes, Georges Duby, and Michel Foucault, Eco proposes that power in today’s world is, like language, subject to many small adjustments but never to revolution; change expresses itself as “progressive adjustment through slow, marginal shifts, in a centerless universe where all is margin and there is no longer any ‘heart’ of anything.”
Our world, Eco believes, resembles the medieval world, with its intricate and shifting alliances between clergy and nobility, clergy and populace, national monarchies and monastic orders. The barons of multinational capitalism are observed “to medievalize their t
erritory, with fortified castles and great residential complexes with private guards and photoelectric cells.” Fantasy fiction and movies are riding a “neomedieval wave,” and this nostalgia, the essay “Living in the New Middle Ages” explains, is really a search for self-understanding, as we traverse our post-imperial landscape of personal insecurity, wandering thieves and mystics, plagues and massacres, monasterylike university campuses, and a gaudy artistic culture pasted together from the flotsam of the past.