Longer Views (53 page)

Toomer, Jean,
Cane
(first published by Boni & Liveright, 1923), ed. Darwin Turnder, W. W. Norton: New York, 1988.

Unterecker, John,
Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane
, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1969.

———, “The Architecture of
The Bridge,” The Merrill Studies in
The Bridge, ed. David R. Clark, Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company: Columbus, 1970.

Voelcker, Hunce,
The Hart Crane Voyages
, with an “Introduction” by Samuel Loveman, The Brownstone Press: New York, 1967.

Weber, Brom,
Hart Crane: A Biographical and Critical Study
, The Bodley Press: New York, 1948.

Winters, Yvor, “The Significance of
The Bridge
, by Hart Crane, or What Are We to Think of Professor X,”
On Modern Poets
, New Directions: New York, 1943.

Wordsworth, William, “Preface to
Lyrical Ballads,” The Selected Poetry and Prose of Wordsworth
, ed. Geoffrey Hartman, New American Library: New York, 1970.

Yingling, E. Thomas,
Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies
, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1990.

 

*
Herbert A. Leibowitz noted the recall of
Ulysses's
“Floating Flower” in “Voyages II” in
Hart Crane: An Introduction to the Poetry
(Columbia University Press: New York, 1968, p. 100); but I learned of it only after this book was in production.

*
Crane also supplies his range of titles: Tennessee Williams's play
Summer and Smoke
takes its title from Crane's poem “Emblems of Conduct” (indeed from the only three lines in the poem Crane apparently did
not
take from Greenberg); the title for Agnes de Mille's ballet
Appalachian Spring
comes from, appropriately enough, Crane's “The Dance”; Jim Morrison of The Doors took the title of his song “Riders on the Storm" from Crane's “Praise for an Urn”; and Harold Bloom's study of romantic poetry, The Visionary Company, takes its title from Crane's last poem, “The Broken Tower.”

 

Criticism of science fiction cannot possibly look like the criticism we are used to. It will—perforce—employ an aesthetic in which the elegance, rigorousness, and systematic coherence of explicit ideas is of great importance. It will therefore appear to stray into all sorts of extraliterary fields, metaphysics, politics, philosophy, physics, biology, psychology, topology, mathematics, history, and so on. The relation of foreground and background that we are used to after a century and a half of realism will not obtain. Indeed they may be reversed. Science-fiction criticism will discover themes and structures . . . which may seem recondite, extraliterary, or plain ridiculous. Themes we customarily regard as emotionally neutral will be charged with emotion. Traditionally human concerns will be absent; protagonists may be all but unrecognizable as such. What in other fiction would be marvelous will here be merely accurate or plain; what in other fiction would be ordinary or mundane will here be astonishing, complex, wonderful. . . For example, allusions to the death of God will be trivial jokes, while metaphors involving the differences between telephone switchboards and radio stations will be poignantly tragic. Stories ostensibly about persons will really be about topology. Erotics will be intercranial, mechanical (literally), and moving.

—Joanna Russ, “Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction”

1. Today's technology is tomorrow's handicraft.

2. Lines I particularly liked from Knotly's poem in the current
Paris Review:
“for every one must run a race/in the body's own running place” and: “Everything I have has an earwig in it/which will make light of sacred things.”

3. Nothing we look at is ever seen without some shift and flicker—that constant flaking of vision which we take as imperfections of the eye or simply the instability of attention itself; and we ignore this illusory screen for the solid reality behind it. But the solid reality is the illusion; the shift and flicker is all there is. (Where do sf writers get their crazy ideas? From watching all there is
very
carefully.)

4. The preceding notes, this one, and the ones following are picked, somewhat at random, from my last two years' journals (1973–1974), in lieu of the personal article requested on the development of a science-fiction writer.

5. Critical language presents us a problem: The critic “analyzes” a work to “reveal” its “internal form.” Recent structuralist critics are trying to “discover the underlying, mythic structures” of given works or cultures. There is the implication that what the critic comes up with is somehow more
basic
than the thing under study—we are all, of course, too sophisticated to be fooled into thinking what the critic produces is more
important
.

Still, however, we feel the critical find should be more intense, more solid, more foundational than the work. After all, though novels are fiction, the books of criticism about them are not . . .

An obvious visual image for the critical process is a surgeon, carefully dissecting a body, removing the skeleton from it, and presenting the bones to our view—so that we will have a more schematic idea of how the fleshed organism articulates.

All this, however, is the result of a category-mistake of the sort Ryle describes in
The Concept of Mind
(p. 17ff.).

A slightly better image, as a basic model of the critical process, will, perhaps, explode it:

The critic sits at a certain distance from the work, views it from a particular side, and builds a more or less schematic model of the work as it strikes her or him (just as I am making
this
model of what the critic does), emphasizing certain elements, suppressing certain others, attaching little historical notes to his model here and there on where she thinks this or that form in the original work might have come from, adding little ethical notes on what he suspects is its proper usage, all according to the particular critical use the model is intended for. If the critic's model is interesting enough, there is nothing to stop us from considering it a work of art in itself, as we do with Pater or Taine, with Barthes or Derrida, Felman or Johnson. A critic may, indeed, add something to the work. But the critic does not
remove
anything from the work.

Works of literature, painting, and sculpture simply do not
have
informative insides. There
is
no skeleton to be removed. They are all surface-that-endures-through-history. A piece of sculpture has a physical inside, but drilling a hole three inches into the Venus de Milo will give you no aesthetic insight into it. (Note, however: This paragraph does not hold true [at least in the same way] for theatrical works, orchestral music, film, or much electronic art. For an sf story: Postulate a world and a culture which has an art all of which
does
have informative insides—great cloth sculptures, for example, held up from within by hidden pipe- shapes, electronic art run by hidden circuitry. The critic, as criminal, hires herself to other social criminals who wish to understand the art; they break into museums, dismantle the art objects, and remove the insides for inspection. The works are reassembled . . . clumsily. Later, an artist passing by notices something is wrong and cries out to a guard: “Look, look! A
critic
has been at my work! Can't you see . . .?” Theme of the story: If to understand the work is physically to destroy or injure it, are the critics [and the people who wish to understand art] heroes or villains? Are the artists, who make works that can only be understood by dismantling them, charlatans? Consider also, since my view is that this is just how so many people
do
misinterpret criticism today, will my context be understood? Is there any way that I can make clear in the story that what I am presenting is not
how
criticism works; rather, I am poking fun at the general misapprehension? I am not in the least interested in writing a simpleminded, “damning” satire of Modern Criticism. Will have to rethink seriously incidents as first listed if I want the story's point to be the subtle one.
Can
such a point be dramatized in sf story . . .?)

Basically, however, the critic is part of the work's audience. The critic responds to it, selects among those responses and, using them, makes, selectively, a model of the work that may, hopefully, guide, helpfully, the responses of the critic's own audience when they come to the work being modeled.

When a critic, talking about critical work, suggests she is doing more than this, at best she is indulging in metaphor; at worst, he is practicing, whether wittingly or no, more of that pernicious mystification that has brought us to our present impasse.

(Happy with the
idea;
but still uncomfortable with it as a story template—because, as a template, it seems to be saying exactly the
opposite
of what I want to! Is this, perhaps, a problem basic to sf: That you can only use it to reinforce commonly accepted prejudices; and that to use it for a discussion of anything at a more complex resolution simply can't be done at the literary distance sf affords? From Cassirer to Kirk, critics have leveled just this accusation at mythology. If it's true of sf as
well, perhaps sf is, inchoately, an immature form . . .? Well, there: The ugly suggestion has been made.

(Do I agree?

(No, I don't. But I think it is certainly an inherent tendency of the medium. To fight it, and triumph over it, I must specifically: go into the world—the object—I have set up
far
more thoroughly than I have before, and treat it autonomously rather than as
merely
a model of a prejudiciary situation—a purely subject manifestation. I must explore it as an extensive, coherent reality—not as an intensive reflection of the real world where the most conservative ideas will drain all life out of the invention.

(What does my culture look like, for instance, once I leave the museum? Given its basic aesthetic outlook, what would its architecture look like? How would the museum itself look, from the inside? From the outside? What would the building where the artist lived look like? And where the critic lived? What would be their relative social positions? What would be the emblems of those positions? How would such emblems differ from the emblems of social positions in our world? What would it smell like to walk through their streets? Given their art, what of their concept of science? Is it the opposite of their concept of art? Or is it an extension of it? Are the informative insides of the scientific works as mystified as the insides of art works? Or are they made blatantly public? Or are they mystified even
more
than the art? What are the problems that critics of science have in this world? Or critics of politics? Would these critics be the same people?

(As I begin to treat my original conceit as a coherent, antonomous world, instead of just a statement about
our
world, I begin to generate a template complicated enough and rich enough actually to make a statement about our world that is something more than simple- minded. I can now start to ask myself questions like: In this world, what are the psychological traits of someone who would become a critic? An artist? A scientist? Etc. But it is only when the template becomes at least that complex that sf becomes mature.)

6. Moorcocks coming over here for dinner tonight with John Sims: Cream of Leek soup, Roast Beef, Fried Eggplant, Rice (possibly a risotto with almonds? How many stuffed mushrooms are left over from the Landrys yesterday? And will they do, reheated, for starters?); an American Salad (get some Avocado, Bacon, Butter-lettuce, Chicory, Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Carrots, Celery, Mustard, Lemons); to follow: Baked Bananas flamed in brandy. (
Don't
use the mushrooms: John doesn't like them!)

7. For Sturgeon essay: The material of fiction is the texture of experience.

8. Re
Dhalgren
. . . I think Marilyn is depressingly right about the psychiatric session with Madame Brown and the Calkins interview . . . which means more work; and after I've just rewritten the whole last chapter! With Calkins, the historical
must
be made manifest. With Madame Brown, she must realize that the dream is not a dream, otherwise she comes off just
too
stupid. It is so hard to control the outside view of my material, when I am standing on the inside. It's like clutching a balloon to shape from within.

Friday night and to the Moorcocks for dinner with Emma Tennent.

9. Got a letter from R. E. Geis today, asking to reprint my
Letter to a Critic
from
The Little Magazine
in
The Alien Critic
. Am very dubious. First of all, some of the facts, as John Brunner so succinctly pointed out over the phone a fortnight back, are just wrong. More to the point, the section on science-fiction publishing isn't really a description of the current sf publishing scene at all. Rather, it's a memoir of what the publishing situation was like in that odd period between 1967 and 1971. Odd, too, how quickly the bright truths of twenty-six (by which age the bulk of my notoriously unbulky sf oeuvre was already in print) seem, six years later, rather dated. What to do? Get ever so slightly looped and write a polite letter?

Or take a walk up Regents' Canal and go browse in Compendium Book Store? Sounds better.

10. What a tiny part of our lives we use in picturing our pasts. Walked to the Turkish take-away place this evening with John Witton-Doris: consider the
number
of incidents he recalls from our months in Greece together, nine years ago, involving me, that I can barely remember! Biography,
as
it approaches completeness, must
be
the final fiction.

11. Alcohol is the opium of the people.

12. Science fiction through the late sixties seemed to be, scientifically, interested in mathematics segueing into electronics; psychiatry, in all its oversimplified clumsiness, has been an sf mainstay from
The Roads Must Roll
, through
Baby is Three
, to
The Dream Master
.