Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Monday, December 01, 2008

 
New Scientist recently carried an article on the future of science fiction, featuring interviews with the likes of Margaret Atwood:

"As well as a mere storytelling device, science fiction often articulates our present-day concerns and anxieties - paradoxically, it is often about the here and now rather than the future. As Stephen Baxter points out, H. G. Wells's ground-breaking 1895 novella The Time Machine - famous for popularising the idea of time travel - was more concerned with where Darwinian natural selection was taking the human race than with the actual nuts and bolts of time travel... Science fiction is the literature of change. It is no coincidence that it emerged as a recognisable genre with writers such as Jules Verne in the late 19th century, an era when, for the first time in history, children could expect to grow up in a world radically different from that of their parents.

The single most useful thing I've learned from science fiction is that every present moment, always, is someone else's past and someone else's future. I got that as a child in the 1950s, reading science fiction written in the 1940s; reading it before I actually knew much of anything about the history of the 1940s or, really, about history at all. I literally had to infer the fact of the second world war, reverse-engineering my first personal iteration of 20th-century history out of 1940s science fiction. I grew up in a monoculture - one I found highly problematic - and science fiction afforded me a degree of lifesaving cultural perspective I'd never have had otherwise... I adopted, as a complete no-brainer, J G Ballard's dictum that Earth is the alien planet... I took it for granted that the present moment is always infinitely stranger and more complex than any "future" I could imagine. My craft would be (for a while, anyway) one of importing steamingly weird fragments of the ever-alien present into "worlds" (as we say in science fiction) that purported to be "the future"."


In a certain sense, science fiction is one of the most realistic genres literature has produced, with novels like We and 1984 speaking to the realities of their time at least as much as Life and Fate or Darkness at Noon. Contrary to the above, Wells was at least as interested in contemporary social divisions as he was excised by natural selection. In an age where technology permeates our everyday lives it hardly seems surprising that many writers have in recent years decided to use the abstraction offered by science fiction as a means of tangentially exploring contemporary reality. Nonetheless, there are perhaps some differences from realist fiction; the essence of much science fiction often rests with the fear and paranoia that is our response to technology as much as with the technology itself, as with The Last Man to Day of the Triffids to The Drowned World (where the notion of events having an especially plausible cause is essentially dispensed with, as much as in The Trial). As Susan Sontag put it "science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster." This piece expands on that theme somewhat:

"In 28 Days Later, an accidentally released supervirus transforms virtually all of Britain into a population of cannibalistic zombies. Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake is a post-apocalyptic bestiary of genetically engineered species; among them, in a world half-drowned by rising seas, lives apparently the last surviving human. Michel Houellebecq’s Possibility of an Island is narrated by a misanthropic contemporary of ours named Daniel, as well as numbers 24 and 25 of the successive clones made from this not-quite individual. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is another clone novel; it concerns genetic supernumeraries raised for purposes of organ harvesting. And cloning likewise furnishes subject matter for David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, where one of five braided narrative strands takes the form of a Q & A between a normally human historian and an imprisoned rebel 'fabricant,' who—unlike Ishiguro’s clones, with their lamblike passivity—has escaped an underground world of slavery into horrified awareness of the genocidal nature of a 'corpocracy' raised on the blood of clones... In Cormac McCarthy’s fantastically grim The Road, all non-human nature has perished beneath the shuttered skies of a nuclear winter, and social organization as such appears to persist only in the form of roving cannibal gangs; the story follows the efforts of a father and his pre-adolescent son to elude these 'bad guys' (as the father-hero matter-of-factly calls them) while scavenging cans of food for themselves. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men mixes dystopian elements with the apocalyptic premise that no human child has been born for seventeen years, leaving civilization to crumble under the accumulated weight of age and despair; once the world’s unique pregnant woman arrives on the scene, the handsome desperado played by Clive Owen takes up the burden of shepherding mother and child to safety... The Road and I Am Legend have a lot in common. Impressively stylish productions, they are also alike in presupposing a collapse of civilization that happens utterly and all at once rather than by degrees—in the movie the trigger is the supervirus, in the book "a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" signaling all-out nuclear war—and both stories set the decency and steadfastness of the solitary hero-father against the sheer evil of a human population otherwise consisting of marauding cannibals...

Each of the more dystopian novels sketched above involves human cloning. It should also be clear that in the current political context the clone novel can hardly fail to suggest a nightmare of perfected neoliberalism. In the clone novel, class society—in what may be a lurid reflection of our distinction between citizens with full legal rights and 'illegal' foreign workers without them—hardens into a strict demarcation of castes... The possibility of love requires the existence of at least two irreplaceable individuals, a condition that can’t quite be met in any of the clone novels. The anxiety dominating each of these books is that a human being might prove perfectly fungible in an emotional and sexual as well as an economic sense, a fear most coherently and angrily expressed by Houllebecq, who may be the living writer best at suggesting the dystopian element in contemporary society. For him the problem lies not only in the liberalized private sector, with its ready disposal of people according to their economic value, but also in sexually liberalized 'private life'...

The diversity of apocalyptic triggers hardly conceals the basic sameness, from work to work, of the apocalypse itself. In almost every case... large-scale social organization, including the state, has disappeared; the cumulative technological capability of century upon century has collapsed to the point that only agricultural know-how, if that, is retained; and the global society we know has shattered into small tribal groups, separate families or couples, and helpless solitary individuals. In such anarchic conditions, without governments to enforce contracts, stable currencies in circulation, or any industrial or transportation infrastructure, capitalism likewise becomes a thing of the past—and yet the contemporary apocalypse, as painted in our collection of movies and novels, illustrates in the most literal fashion possible Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum that there is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families. The corollary view holds that 'society' is merely the excuse used by tyrannical regimes like the Soviet one to justify the trampling of individual rights—and contemporary apocalyptic works are all but united in stigmatizing any group larger than the family as oppressive and evil. Frequently, collectives are simply occasions for organized cannibalism, as in 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, and The Road. Or bands of survivors are fascists at heart: again, 28 Days Later...

In the neoliberal dystopia a totally commodified world transforms would-be lovers into commodities themselves and in this way destroys the possibility of love. In the neoliberal apocalypse, on the other hand, the wreck of civilization reveals the inherent depravity of mankind (excepting one’s loved ones) and ratifies the truth that the family is a haven in a heartless world. Both the neoliberal dystopia and the neoliberal apocalypse defend love and individuality against the forces threatening to crush them; the difference is that the clone novel sticks up for humanity from the standpoint of an implied or explicit critique of neoliberalism, while the apocalypse narrative (whether in prose or on film) tends to reflect the default creed of neoliberalism, according to which kindness may flourish in private life but the outside world remains now and forever a scene of vicious but inevitable competition... The rub, of course, is that such sci-fi humanism is quickly overcome with another irony, this one unintentional, since it is the hallmark of genre fiction to treat characters instrumentally, putting them through the paces of the plot according to their function as the embodiment of some general psychological or social category and failing or refusing to endow them with the individuality to be found among the livelier inhabitants of the traditional realist novel and, for that matter, the real world.

This is the highly compromised 'individualism' promoted by our collection of futuristic novels: individuality here means escape from the bad collective (cannibals, the corporate state) but does not entail real individuation. Our literary sci-fi novels are bereft of strongly individual characters—the apocalyptic ones even more depopulated than they know, the clone narratives at least bespeaking the anxiety that their characters are redundant—and the ongoing merger of genre fiction (where the reader is accustomed to finding no complex characters) with literature (which no one would think to accuse of being indifferent to individuality) has allowed the liquidation of character to pass virtually unnoticed. "


It's an interesting critique though I'm not sure that I'm fully persuaded; realist fiction embedded in the thisness of contemporary society lacks the ability to consider other political possibilities. In that sense, it represents a curtailed set of assumptions about what constitutes human nature and human society. The elimination of character in a JG Ballard novel represents a statement that human nature is neither fixed nor stable but is instead a set of drives fuelled by our genes and our environment. It is in short, not that far of the sort of conception of human nature that predated the advent of the realist novel (if we substitute Hobbesian notions of the passions for Locke's tabula rasa, for example) and the reason why characters in early novels so often acts inconsistently, with events proceeding from episode to episode rather than in a linear plot sequence.

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posted by Richard 10:13 pm