Microcosmic God (3 page)

To understand why they were so intrigued, however, we have to have some understanding of science fiction as a commercial writing field in the decade after the Second World War. We have to remember that the current respectability of science fiction is less than twenty-five years old. Many writers whose careers extend back before that period—among them many of our best—can still be heard to boast: “Me? No, I never rewrite. It all comes out first draft.” Visitors from
the world of mundane fiction, where the paradigms for fictive labor are the legendary travails of Joyce and Flaubert, tend to frown here. They
believe
these writers (though too frequently the writers who assert these first draft miracles are, to put it politely, overstating things); what bewilders mundane visitors (from a world where a boastful writer is much more likely to talk about how
much
work went into the text) is the underlying assumption to the boast. They miss the subtext that gives the boast its meaning. As one graduate English student once whispered to me a decade ago at a Science Fiction Writers of America party, where a number of our most eminent practitioners were deep in a round of I-work-less-on-my-best-stories-than-thou: “What enterprise do these men [the writers in question were all men] think they are involved in that
not
revising is something to
brag
about?”

The answer is not so difficult, however, as the graduate student might think.

Science Fiction is a highly affective mode of writing. Our audience gasps, applauds, rises stunned from its seats, falls back limp with hanging jaw—so that the writerly stance of the virtuoso is a valid one for us. The SF writer leaps up, momentarily casts a silhouette against the stars, effects a few breathtaking turns and recoveries, then lightly sets down, bows, and saunters off; and the little postperformance gesture—“See, it was nothing”—is, of course, just the final
part
of the performance.

Now there are literary writers—Nabokov, Borges—who are as pyrotechnic in their local effects as, well, Sturgeon—or, to cite another underrated star in our galaxy, Alfred Bester. But although they make our hearts leap as high in our breasts or our breath catch as sharply in our throats, all by a mere dazzle of words, we tend to express our appreciation of those effects by knowing smiles rather than by, as SF readers so often do, falling all over the floor.

We have all seen the SF reader at an SF convention, two o’clock in the morning, run shrieking from a hotel room, paperback waving, to halt, staggering, among the fans around the ice machine, gasping and panting: “
Read
that! Just
read
that paragraph there! I mean, isn’t that
amazing
!” This is a very intense reaction.

For the SF writer to take on the public image of either a Borges (the rare work, produced over a vast period of time under the no doubt exquisitely painful pressure of a doubly distilled aesthetic sensibility and not a little political oppression) or a Nabokov (the rich novel written out on innumerable index cards, each individually and endlessly revised, interminably sorted over and, no doubt, cross-indexed, so that the text is finally the result of an unimaginable and eyestraining amount of sheer
work
) would seem, in light of such intense reader reaction, unseemly. The writer of literary fiction is traditionally the writer ignored or misunderstood. (Borges’s work must wait twenty or twenty-five years for the world recognition we now consider its due; Nabokov becomes famous only through the fluke best-sellerdom of his tenth or so novel, because the public mistakenly considers it obscene.) Somehow it is meet for literary writers (or whoever proselytizes for them) to stress the pain and labor necessary to bring these writers’ valuable works to the world. But that meetness is still proscribed by the career models of Joyce and Flaubert, both writers whose works were tried in court, the one waiting too long for recognition, the other too quickly forgotten.

SF writers and other practitioners of the paraliterary, within their circumscribed world, get all the recognition they can use and then some. And although recognition is not money, within the paraliterary world of SF writers, editors, and convention goers, those writers who do not start to establish reasonable reputations in their twenties are usually those who do not start writing till their thirties. With a background of such volatile appreciation, to downplay the pain and labor that goes into the work is simply a kind of good manners. The readers are quite impressed enough with the texts already. And though they clamor endlessly to ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” (a question I have never heard any SF writer worth her or his salt seriously try to answer), the question, “How do you put these ideas together?” (which, with a little thought and analysis,
is
sometimes answerable) is much rarer. I believe an SF reader asking, “Where do you get your ideas?” is simply the audience asking to be reassured that the hat is really empty and the rabbit really gone. But by and large in science fiction, the readers appreciate the trick enough
to realize just how much (different for each of us) might be lost if the writer were to reveal how it was done. By comparison, the literary writer is continually in the position of having to say to a rather listless audience, “Well, you may not think much of the trick, but if you could only see what its mechanics are you’d appreciate it a lot more.” And whether the mechanics to be explicated are the subtle recomplications of the textual surface itself, or a catalogue of the rigors, triumphs, traditions, or even personal tragedies that underlie the artist’s personal training, the template is the same. Thus, what looks like befuddled vulgarity from the perspective of the literary world appears as a laudable aesthetic reticence from the perspective of the paraliterary landscape—the world of science fiction. But although this is the synchronic situation that contours such behavior from within the field, there is a diachronic (that is, historical) pressure as well from without, working toward the same end.

Literary fiction rises out of (or, more accurately, has since the early 19th century successfully appropriated) what Professor Stanley E. Fish calls “The Aesthetic of the Good Physician”: literary fiction is good for you; its goal is a greater understanding of the world and of the passions, which understanding will make you a better person. If you are educated well enough, or lucky enough already to possess the proper temperament, the whole process may even give pleasure … although more serious readers are chary of holding out even this much enticement. And with reason. Satisfaction, yes—but
pleasure
… ? In the last few years at least two perfectly intelligent persons have told me, with a polemical glitter in their eye, “I never read for pleasure.” One was an Oxford graduate specializing in Italian literature of the Resorgiamento. The other was the chairman of the comparative literature department for an upstate New York university. On the one hand, I can say that this sentence, as it concerns these two readers and as most SF readers would interpret it, is simply untrue. I have seen the first of these folk laugh aloud over one 17th-century lyric and be struck to wet-eyed muteness by another; the second, twenty-five minutes after he made the statement, was (as we shared the comparative privacy of Buffalo’s Albright-Knox cafeteria) in tongue-tied rapture over an ironic trope in the third chapter
of
Bouvard et Pécuchet
. On the other hand, their point on not reading
for
pleasure
is
polemical. I understand it, and I agree with its polemical intent. To have read and responded to the written word at a depth great enough to experience satisfaction/pleasure/rapture is
to have worked
. And if you are a writer, teacher, or critic, that work had best be done with a certain degree of conscientiousness, if not self-consciousness. Pleasure in reading is
not
innate. It is a learned response, as reading itself (i.e., all the conventions that contour pleasure in a text, from the meanings of individual words to the significance of larger fictive figures) is learned.

Fans—whether they are science fiction fans or opera fans—are people who, through education or exposure, have simply been able to establish the good working habits without really trying necessary to respond to the work. But unless fans keep up that work by fairly rigorous application, their enthusiasm falls away. They are able to enjoy less and less varied kinds of writing within their desired precincts; and finally none at all. And this atrophy of response is what the reader who reads “only for pleasure”—the reader who says, “I will make no conscious effort over any work aside from what my temperament and my education to date have rendered spontaneous”—always risks, always falls victim to. In this sense a reader must read
for
the work rather than for the pleasure, if pleasure is to be a rich and continuing experience in reading. The reader is rather like a dancer: s/he must be as committed to the practice session as s/he is to the performance to produce specular delights in either—a delight that even so laborious a reader as the author of
S/Z
, Roland Barthes, finally consents to call
The Pleasure of the Text
.

Now, as we have said, science fiction fans risk the same falling away if they do not work at their reading as do any other fans. But, because of the social matrix around science fiction (of which its extensive fandom, myriad fanzines, and hundred-odd yearly SF conventions are only the most conspicuous emblems), there is a much greater social pressure on SF fans to
do
the work than there is on most readers of literary fiction. (Outside the university,
where
is the pressure …?) From science fiction’s initial self-presentation as an “intellectual” entertainment, to the various fictive conventions that
must be learned for the reader to make any headway with the texts, to organized fandom, and finally to the rather flamboyant image most readers have of the delights to be achieved, everything allows us to take it on faith that in science fiction the work, to a surprising extent, is
done
by a large number of science fiction readers. Thus, in discussions of the field set within its borders, we are not so constrained to polemicize for that work by decrying the pleasure as are either our reader of 17th-century Italian or our Comp. Lit. chairman.

The larger point of all this is, of course, that science fiction does not grow out of “The Aesthetic of the Good Physician.” It grows out of quite a different aesthetic, an aesthetic we could easily call Faustian—or even that of the Evil Charlatan.

It grows out of the dime novel, the pulp tradition, the borderline pornography of violence and romance. It grows out of a tradition that, for most of its history, was not only considered to be Not Good for You, but for much of its existence was considered to be downright deleterious. The Platonic ideal was—and still is—the dominant model by which art is judged, especially art for the young: Art is supposed to supply models for correct behavior. Thus, by definition, anything with too great an element of fantasy, anything that distorts the world, any text with any sort of larger-than-life romanticism, tends to be considered dangerous. This was especially true during the hardship years of the Great Depression, when brilliant men like Sturgeon’s stepfather, William Dicky Sturgeon (whom Sturgeon and his older brother Peter called Argyll), master of half a dozen languages and a crack mathematician, were working well below their capacity at various elementary and high school teaching jobs, simply to hold a family together. It was a time when the good child was the silent child, the scared child, the child wholly intimidated by authority—the child who would do what he was told and could not possibly get into any sort of trouble. Sturgeon learned about this aesthetic at the hands of his stepfather, brutally and painfully. He describes the event in an autobiographical essay he wrote for a therapist, Jim Hayes, in 1965.

At the same time, Argyll was reading to his stepson from such volumes as “The
Cloister and the Hearth, The White Company, Anthony Adverse, Vanity Fair, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
, Homer, Aristophanes, Byron
(Childe Harold), The Hound of Heaven, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Dead Souls
, God knows what all” (
Argyll
, 29). And young Sturgeon “got most of it.”

But Sturgeon also continued to read the forbidden pulp stories. He sought for a way to collect the magazines, and he expended a good deal of ingenuity figuring out a way to read them—in his desk drawer, while he was doing his homework, the sides waxed with a candle to keep them from squeaking—and to store them: Finding a trap door in the roof of his closet, young Sturgeon (he describes himself then as “twelve or fourteen”) placed his magazines, two deep, between the attic beams—starting five beams away. He even went so far as to replace the dust on the beams after he had crawled across them, and did everything else to cover up the traces.

Two weeks later, however: