They Bellow ‘Til We’re Deaf

Great post, Henry. But I think there’s something to Kunkel’s position if you subtract the unwarranted, since sloppy negativity. (I’ll think about it. But first: sleep.)

OK, the Kunkel essay is silly and bad, but Mieville? — come on, that’s airplane reading.

My favorite example of thoughtful genre fiction with complex characters: The Song of Ice and Fire series by George R R Martin. He himself espouses what he calls the furniture theory of literature, which is that the difference between genre fictions and literary fiction is mainly one of different furniture, the most essential elements–plot, characters, &c.–are mostly independent of the furniture. But most of what I like about the Ice and Fire series just wouldn’t work as well outside of the medieval fantasy genre. Not just the fact that there is magic, but our expectations of a fantasy novel–that it’s going to be about heroic characters, that heroism can save the world, the Regular Guy becoming a hero through the intervention of the extraordinary–are important. Even the annoying tendency of fantasy novels in the last 15 years to go on for 600+ pages, with 5 or more novels in a series, he makes good use of that (going on the 5th book now, I think they’re all 500+ pages).

What Martin does is to relentlessly pick apart heroism. His world is rather gritty, people who aren’t born into the aristocracy usually get screwed, heroic/chivalrous nobles who stand by their principles usually end up doing more harm than good. The story is told from different points of view, and every single one of them is a member of the aristocracy, but not empowered–they are all women, children, cripples. It’s not the conventional fantasy plot of Smaller-than-average/Regular Guy David vs a magical/extraordinary Goliath, but inconveniently crippled, female, or very young characters trying to survive in circumstances that aren’t extraordinary, they are more like the typical intrigues of a pre-modern aristocracy in a time of civil war. And they aren’t saved by magic (in fact they often aren’t saved by anything). All that and he throws in little inside jokes for historians.

I suppose it’s true that, by and large, Martin’s characters in Ice and Fire aren’t all that self-reflective, but he uses the presence of expectations and other intertextualities that are highly specific, if not unique to the fantasy genre, to give us something we can reflect on. Martin’s characters don’t do it for us, and I think that’s a very good thing.

A further grumble: I really, really wish people would try to avoid this kind of casual slippage between “the literary novel” and “literature,” as if they were basically synonymous. In fact, of course, the novel is one particular modern literary medium, with its own idiosyncracies; and without this particular myopia, it becomes pretty obvious that complex characters aren’t as central to literature as Kunkel wants them to be. It would be pretty hard to defend, e.g., Lucretius, or Petrarch, or even Bunyan (who’s almost a novelist) on a pure standard of psychological complexity and realism. (Kunkel’s argument might still have merit, but it’s important to recognize its limited scope.)

It is absolutely too narrow a definition of literature to say it’s about great individual characters. And for more counterexamples of great sci-fi characters, take the short story “I Am Legend” which not only has a non-archetype character, one who reacts realistically to his losses and his unfortunate lot, but is entirely about that character and his decisions.

In case anyone’s interested, I’ve written a rather Holbonically-long response to Kunkel’s piece over on my own site.

I think Kunkel does have a point, tho he phrases it tendentiously.

To the degree that Speculative Fiction is an indentifiable genre separate from literary fiction, it is in the emphasis of environment and contingency on character & plot. The way in which the imagined world of Androids determines the behavior of cops & cyborgs is the foreground of the book, in a way that Elsinore or the NY of Cheever or Roth are not. Perhaps we do need to explore the differences between mainstream works dealing with environmental deyerminism (Joseph Andrews?) and SF.

Environmental determinism, or contingency transcended, is at the heart of SF. Otherwise, why bother to create the environments?

To the degree that Speculative Fiction is an indentifiable genre separate from literary fiction, it is in the emphasis of environment and contingency on character & plot.

Could Last Exit to Brooklyn have been Last Exit to Mogadishu?

I have long resisted tendencies to try to conflate the methods of genre fiction (at its best) with mainstream literary fictions. Of course, they do overlap.

Dark Suvin says the key difference between literary and speculative fiction is cognitive estrangement. I think the imaginary worlds of speculative fictions do act on the reader in ways character & plots do in literary fiction. The world of Androids forces moral work on the reader in the way that Faulkner’s South or the world of Kafka does. Or Lilliput.

Kunkel’s wrong about Dick. One of the constants in Dick’s work is that the imitation human is never the true human, and never become it. Androids don’t dream of electric sheep. Palmer Eldritch left the human race. And so on. Ursula Le Guin brought this to my attention at one of her conversations at Orycon some years back, noting that Blade Runner exactly inverts Dick’s point. She’s right, too – it’s an excellent film, but there’s no room in Dick’s worldview for Deckard or Rachael to be anything but very sophisticated imitations. Whatever the spark of humanity is, they can’t have it.

Bruce, that’s an odd reading of Dick. What about We Can Build You? In which whatever the spark of humanity is, while Lincoln and Stanton may or may not have it, Pris almost certainly doesn’t. The worldview of the characters Dick writes in Androids doesn’t have room for the androids to be anything but imitations, but I think that’s a hard thing to pin on Dick himself.

What I do think is that Dick isn’t particularly interested in the question. Replicants and androids and cyborg space prophets are plot devices that he made up to tell the story. What Dick wants to know is: what is that spark of humanity? Do some (real) people have it while others don’t? Why?

Arcseed, if you read Dick’s essays and speeches you’ll find this theme of real and fake humanity running all through it, from almost the beginning of his career right up to his death. Lawrence Sutin’s The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick has a bunch on this. From Dick’s 1975 essay “Man, Androids, and Machine”:

These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior. In my science fiction I write about about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do not know they are androids. Like Rachel Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack something; or, like Pris in We Can Build You, they can be absolutely born of a human womb and even design androids – the Abraham Lincoln one in that book – and themselves be without warmth; they then fall within the clinical entity “schizoid,” which means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word “thing.” A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne’s theorem that “No man is an island,” but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.

So, I’m not sure I understand Kunkel’s piece entirely. Is he arguing that somehow genre fiction, in this case, a couple of sub-classes of sci-fi, is apparently mostly (for the last 20 something years) barren of good characterization, because of some limitation of the genre itself, or perhaps the writers attracted to it? Or something? As opposed to “literature” which is gloriously full of it? Or, to put it a bit more causticly, to indicate my level of skepticism, novels written by New England adulterers for New England adulterers about New Englanders committing, ahem, adultery (and occasionally, fornication) somehow lend themselves more readily than genre fiction to illuminate moral and political problems, and love as well? Really? I’ve got to be missing something.

As concerns PKD, I’ll allow that Dick had his problems writing fully individualized characters, and that indeed most of his protagonists are uniformly, almost interchangeably bland. I’d also say, to his credit, that Dick often turned this bug into a feature, and that in the case of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the questions “What does it mean to be human?” and “Why is it so hard?” make up the central goddamn themes of the fricking book — and not just this book either, such being a common theme to his later works, even ones that have much better, more interesting and individualized characters.

To put this another way, does Kunkel think that writing fully individualized characters is easy? Hmmm.

I’m probably being too harsh. I do find his dystopian from gothic, apocalyptic from quest derivation interesting, even useful.

It does seem odd that he didn’t discuss Minority Report. I mean, Cruise and Spielberg? Come on, is it anything other than A-List? It even dealt with politics, federal vs. state vs. individual. Or does Kunkel mean something else by “politics”? Morality and love, too, if I recall correctly, with a fair amount of subtlety. Fuck the outliers, I guess.

“The literary novel illuminates moral problems (including sometimes those that are also political problems) at the expense of sentimental consolation, while genre fiction typically offers consolation at the expense of illumination.”

I wonder if he only sees illumination of personal moral problems as worthy of attention. It would be odd, as some literary novels do a good job of illuminating societal or social moral problems, but most of them are largely personal. Science fiction, and other forms of fiction, illuminate social moral problems by examining the society itslef, which sometimes cause their focus to be on the society more than the inner workings of the characters. And though many modern science fiction novels adopt the 1st person narrative which is very common in literary novels (and which lends itself to the perception of rounding of characters because we can see their thoughts) many do not, which I would argue artificially creates a sense of distance to a reader who has become used to the comprehensive interiority of the literary novel.

Now I suppose that the literary novelist might respond that all this is best handled by developing deeply rounded interior characters. But part of it is a function of time and space in books. For a realist novel, set in a modern setting, with fairly stock literary novel New England characters, you can jump straight into the interiority of the character because you don’t really have to do anything else to set the stage. For most such novels, the general societal/social/political stage is already set. For a good science fiction novel, none of that is taken for granted. You must set the stage, because the stage is not assumed.

Now bad science fiction novels just draw from the stock scenery associated with science fiction. But literary novels do that too, Kunkel just doesn’t see to realize it because for the most part they don’t even have to mention it directly in the book. It is assumed that the WASPish literary novel reader alreadyknows most of it. Bad science fiction novels have to be explicit about the stock social contexts they draw from because otherwise you wouldn’t know. The typical literary novel doesn’t because it assumes it all implicitly. But for my two cents, a good science fiction novel is often better at examining society because it already has to examine it to set the stage. Good literary novels often get caught looking awkward when they try to tackle such things because they are forced to either deal with them in very limited ways, or they are forced to set the stage in ways that aren’t normal for the genre.

Now I assume he is talking about the good examples of both genres. But there is a lot of drek in both.

There’s so many issues here, from the failed assumptions of universality in a lot of literary novels, to the reality that 2% of literary novels achieve what Kunkel claims.

However, to keep it short. Have to highlight Sebastian and others who point out that the “literary novels” are in fact a genre, with a set of conventions and shorthand archetypes, including ones about the psychological state, emotions and moral sentiments of the characters.

BUT! The most important question is… if the literary novel is such a great developer of introspection and the moral imagination, why are the devotees (authors and readers) generally so shallow, non-introspective and lacking in moral imagination when it comes to actual conversation, as opposed to communing with pieces of paper?

What actually seems to drive Kunkel’s article is not questions of humanity, but the answer. At least some SF answers the question, “What does it mean to be human?” with “Not a lot.”

Where does this leave the project of politically-engaged realism then? Nowhere but the past, as a comforting bu inaccurate alternative answer. (“What does it mean to be human?” “Oh, everything! Everything! Especially if you’re a white middle-class human from the developed West!”)

Kunkel took a few peeks into the future, didn’t see himself, and freaked. It is what folks from his sliver of the centrist left do.