Longer Views (54 page)

Science fiction from the past few years seems to be interested in mathematics segueing into contemporary linguistics/philosophy (e.g., Watson's
The Embedding
); biology—particularly genetics—has replaced
physics as the science of greatest concern [Cf. the ‘clone' stories over the past few years, from Kate Wilhelm's and Ted Thomas's
The Clone
, through McIntyre's
The Cage
(and Ms. McIntyre is a trained geneticist; where do we get all this about people interested in science not getting into science fiction anymore!?!), to Wolfe's
The Fifth Head of Cerberus];
and anthropology (reflected even in books like Effinger's
What Entropy Means to Me
and Toomey's
A World of Trouble
) seems to be replacing psychiatry as a prime concern.

I think I approve.

13. “You science-fiction writers always criticize each other in print as if the person you were criticizing were reading over your shoulder,” someone said to me at the Bristol Con last week—meaning, I'm afraid, that the majority of criticism that originates within the field has either a “let-me-pat-your-back-so-you-can-pat-mine” air, or, even more frequently, a sort of catty, wheedling tone implying much more is being criticized than the work nominally under discussion.

No, the sf community is not large

Perhaps it's because I've spent just over a decade making my living within it, but I feel
all
criticism should be written as if the author being criticized were—not reading over your shoulder—but written as though you could stand face to face with her and read it out loud, without embarrassment.

I think this should hold whether you are trying to fix the most rarefied of metaphysical imports in some Shakespearean tragedy, or writing a two-hundred word review of the latest thriller. Wheedling or flattery have nothing to do with it.

Among the many informations we try to get from any critical model is the original maker's (the artist's) view of the original work modeled. If the critics do not include, in this model, an overt assessment of it, we construct it from hints, suggestions, and whatever. But
we
are at three removes from the author: and the critic is at two (as the critic is one from the work): In deference to that distance, I feel the critics must make such assessments humbly. They can always be wrong.

But only after they, and we, have made them (wrong or right), can we follow the critics' exploration of the work's method, success, or relevance. The critic can only judge these things by his own responses; in a very real way, the only thing the critic is ever really criticizing—and this must be done humbly if it is to be done at all—is the response of his own critical instrument.

All
criticism is personal.

The best is rigorously so.

14. Yesterday, Joyce Carol Oates sent Marilyn a copy of her new book of poems
Angel Fire
(with a letter apologizing for taking so long to answer Marilyn's last letter etc., and dense with North American weather). This morning, in Compendium, I saw the new Oates book on D. H. Lawrence's poetry,
The Hostile Sun
, picked it up, took it (in its bright yellow covers) home, and have, minutes ago, just finished it.

After going through three novels, a handful of essays, and a few crunches into the Collected Poems (and most recently, the Frank Kermode book on), Lawrence has tended to be for me a clumsy, if impassioned, writer purveying a message I find almost totally heinous. The most generous thing I could say for him till now was, with Kenneth Rexroth, “His enemies are my enemies,” but even here I always found myself wondering, wouldn't he do better on their side than on mine? Lawrence-the-outspoken-sexual-revolutionary has always struck me a bit like those politicians who, in their support of the War in Vietnam, eventually went so far as to use words like “hell” and “damn” in their speeches—then quickly looked at their fellow party members who dared disapprove of their “too strong” language and labeled
them
conservatives. Though Lawrence's novels sometimes refer to sexual mechanics, his overall concept of sex seems institutionally rigid: Everyone must fulfill his or her role, as assigned by Divine Law. The heroes of his novels go about brow-beating everyone who happens to stray from his (usually her) divinely ordained role, back into it. For, after all, it
is
Divine Law. And anyone who still strays, after having been told
that
, must be sick unto damnation. I wonder if Lawrence was aware that his real critics simply found him, in his ideas (rather than in the “strength” of his language, or the “explicitness” of the scenes he used to dramatize his points), an absolute prig?

At any rate,
The Hostile Sun
offers me a guide to the Collected Poems (the volume Joyce gave Marilyn as a going-away present; she must have been working on the essay then) that may just get me into them in a way that I can get something out. The book makes the idea of Lawrence-the-Poet interesting to me and offers me some way of divorcing it from Lawrence-the-Prophet—whom I find a pernicious bore. Oates points out his strengths in the poems (the overall intensity of vision; his aesthetic of unrectified feeling) and warns what not to look for (the single, well-crafted poem; a certain type of aesthetic intelligence). Since there are half a dozen poets whom I enjoy in just this way, from James Thomson and Walt Whitman to Paul Blackburn and Philip Whalen, I suspect I will go back to Lawrence's poems better prepared.

It
is
nice to be reminded that criticism, well done, can open up areas previously closed.

15. Confessions of a science-fiction writer: I have never read one H. G. Wells “romance of the future” from cover to cover. I once read three quarters of
Food of the Gods
, and I have read the first fifty/one hundred pages of perhaps half a dozen more.

When I was thirteen, somebody gave me Verne's
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
as a book that “you'll simply love.” At page two hundred I balked. I never
have
finished it! I did a little better with
From the Earth to the Moon
, but I still didn't reach the end.

By the time I was fifteen, however, in my own personal hierarchy, Wells and Verne were synonymous with the crashingly dull. Also, I had gotten their names mixed up with something called Victorian Literature (which, when I was fifteen, somehow included Jane Austen!), and I decided that it was probably all equally boring.

I was eighteen before I began to correct this impression (with, of all things, Eliot's
Adam Bede
); fortunately somebody had already forced me—marvelous experience that it was—into Jane Austen by assuring me that her first three books were written before Victoria was even a sparkle in the Duke of Kent's eye. Then the hordes: Thackeray, the Brontës, Dickens, Hardy. But I have never quite forgiven Wells and Verne for, even so briefly, prejudicing me against the “serious” literature written by their contemporaries and precursors who just happened to have overlapped, to whatever extent, the reign of that same, diminutive monarch.

16. When I was a child, I used to play the violin. At fourteen I developed a not wholly innocent passion for a boy of fifteen who was something of a violin prodigy: He had already been soloist with several small but professional orchestras, and he was talked about muchly in my several circles of friends. I wrote a violin concerto for him—it took me four months. Its three movements ran about half an hour. I supplied (I thought then) a marvelous cadenza. The themes, if I recall, were all serial, but their development was tonal. I orchestrated it for a full, seventy-five piece orchestra—but by the time I had finished, he had moved to upstate New York.

And I had been afraid to tell him what I was doing until it was completed.

Months later, I ran into him in the Museum of Modern Art (he was in the city visiting an aunt) and, excitedly, I told him about my piece, over cokes and English muffins in a coffee shop a few blocks away. He was a little overwhelmed, if not bewildered, but said, “Thanks,” and “Gosh!” and “Wow!” a lot. We talked about getting together again. He was first chair violinist with the All State Youth Orchestra that year and
a favorite with the conductor. We talked about a possible performance or, at least, getting some of his adult friends to look at it. Then he had to catch a train.

I never saw him again.

He never saw the concerto.

At fifteen I gave up the violin—and have had a slight distrust of the passions ever since.

I notice that I often tend to talk (and think) about my childhood just as though music had no part in it—whereas, in reality, I must have spent more hours at it from eight to twice eight than at anything else. And between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two, I probably made as much money as a basket musician in Greenwich Village coffee houses as I did from my first four sf novels, written over the same time. (And how interesting that the ages from nineteen to twenty-two are suddenly part of my childhood!)

17. A dozen poets whose work I have enormously enjoyed in the last couple of years: Michael Dennis Browne, Alice Knotly, Robert Allen, John Oliver Simon, Philip Levine, Robert Peterson, Judith Johnson Sherwin, Ted Berrigan, Robert Morgan, Ann Waldman, Richard Howard, and J. H. Pryne.

(I am leaving out Marilyn Hacker and Tom Disch; I know them and their work too well!)

How many of the dozen named have I actually met? Six. Interesting that one, whom I've never met at all, felt it necessary to tell a complete stranger, who only accidentally met me six months later, that he was quite a good friend of mine when I lived in San Francisco!
^*

18. Down to give a lecture on sf at the University of Kent. In the discussion period after my talk, someone brought up Theodore Sturgeon. I asked the assembly what they particularly liked about his work. From one side of the room, someone shouted, “His aliens!” and from the other side, simultaneously someone else: “His people!” Everyone laughed. Consider this incident for the Sturgeon essay.

19. Marilyn, from the other room (where she is reading the Jonathan Raban book
The Sociology of the Poem
and, apparently, has just come to another horrendous misreading [where he goes on about Pickard's poem “Rape” (he doesn't apparently remember the title and refers only to a few lines of it) as expressing good will (!) and fellowship (!!) between the young men in the pub and the old woman (whom he, not Pickard, calls a prostitute)]: “Poetry should be as well written as prose—and at
least
as carefully read!”

20. In the context of 1948—a vacuum tube technology where most adding machines were mechanical—Gilbert Ryle was probably right in denying the existence of mental occurrences as material events with the nature of mechanical entities, separable from the brain. In the context of 1973—where we have a solid-state technology and electronic computers—we have to rethink: the empirical evidence of neurology, electronics, and cybernetics all point to a revitalization of the concept of mental occurrences as brain processes. A perfectly serious argument seems to be occurring today in philosophy over whether mental occurrences are nonmaterial events that just happen to happen simultaneously with certain brain processes (or are even set off by the brain processes, but are different from the processes themselves), or whether the brain processes are, indeed, the mental occurrences themselves.

Two things make such an argument seem ridiculous to me—one empirical, the other logical.

First, it seems as silly to say that the brain contains
no
model of what the eye sees (which arguers on one side of this argument maintain) as it is to say that the circuitry in a TV camera (that has been turned on) contains no model of what is in front of the image orthicon tube at its proper focal distance. The point is: Anyone who has tried to design a television (or even a radio) circuit from scratch has some idea of just how great the complexity of that model must be: It is practically
all
process, composed of a series of precisely ordered wave fronts that peak in precise patterns, hundreds-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-times per second, all shunted around, amplified, distorted, and superimposed on one another, in a precise pattern, at close to the speed of light. The philosophers who hold this view, I'm afraid, are simply revealing their inability to conceive even this complexity, empirically demonstrable for processes far simpler than the simplest brain process.

To take another side of the argument (and it has many more than two) is to get lost in one of the numerous logical contradictions of ordinary speech, which allows us to call “a process” a
thing
and “an object” a
thing
too. The internal logical structure of one is distinct from the internal logical structure of the other.
All
processes are nonmaterial, whether they be brain-processes or the process of raising my hand off the table. At the same time, all processes need material to define them. (If I raise a glass off the table, aren't I doing the same “thing” as raising my hand off the table . . .? O course I'm not. Which is to say, I
am
doing the same “thing” [i.e., indulging the same process] only in so far as I am
observing
the two events at the same degree of empirical resolution. If I want to, I can observe the raising of two more or less identical glasses from the same spot on the table [or even the same glass] at different times, at such a high degree of empirical resolution that their processes can be uniquely differentiated, having to do with drying times of films of water, molecular change and interchange between the table and the glass, etc. And that, alas, exhausts the tale.) Similarly, all material can be defined by process, the most basic of which, for a static object, is simply the process of duration; as it changes (or as I observe it at a higher degree of empirical resolution, so that I become
aware
of changes in it) we can bring in other processes as well. In this way, all material can be defined by the process (infinitely analyzable into smaller processes) it is undergoing. But the basic terms that are thrown around in this argument—“material event” and “nonmaterial event”—both have an element of self-contradiction (i.e., if “a brain process” can be called “a material event,” then, as the brain is the material, the event must be the process, which implies something like a “material process” . . . which is nonsense of the same order as “a green smell”) that, it would seem to me, renders them
both
useless for any serious, logical discussion.