THE SCIENCE FICTION OF OLAF STAPLEDON
Robert Branham
Stapledon's "Agnostic Mysticism"
Abstract .--The works of Olaf Stapledon offer a chronicle of personal
struggle with revelation and expression. His non-fictional works describe both the
importance of spiritual vision for personal and social development and the utter
impossibility of adequately conceptualizing or expressing the substance of these
perceptions. Stapledon's fictions feature a staggering array of visionary experiences,
including a confrontation with the Star Maker, a cosmic view of human history over a span
of two billion years, and an exploration of spirit and mind among a cast of characters
that includes stars, nebulae dogs, flames, and the cosmos itself.
The uniqueness of Stapledon's fiction lies not simply in the grandeur of his visions,
but also in his development of a literary style that enforces a certain attitude toward
these insights. Stapledon's simultaneously held beliefs regarding the importance of
spiritual discovery and the complete unreliability of attempts to describe its nature or
meaning led him to adopt an outlook he termed "agnostic mysticism." This
twinning of vision and skepticism also characterizes the rhetorical stance of his fiction,
mythic constructions that are heavily qualified and are masterpieces of indirection.
Through his fiction Stapledon sought to refine his personal vision, communicate some
aspect of it to others, and yet maintain the sense of mystery that inspired and sustained
his spiritual quest.
Robert Casillo
Olaf Stapledon and John Ruskin
Abstract .--In assessing Stapledon's social criticism one is struck by
its great debt to Ruskin. Indeed, in many ways it is unoriginal, being a restatement of
ideas which Ruskin (and numerous others) had first presented and which had become more or
less intellectual commonplaces in the early decades of this century, particularly within
the broad tradition which Ruskin had inaugurated. And even when Stapledon is hostile or
negative towards Ruskin's thinking, his objections seem either commonsensical, as in his
defense of the machine, or else derivative of well-known Marxist doctrine, as in his
critique of nostalgic medieval paternalism and capitalist exploitation. Nor does Stapledon
on the whole exhibit anything comparable to the texture of Ruskin's prose, its varied
rhythms, troubled imagery, bold and problematical metaphors, abrupt transitions, sometimes
uncontrollable emotion, above all its rich and fully dramatized tension of conflicting
attitudes and ideas--features which have barely even been suggested in this essay.
Generally speaking, Stapledon is by contrast an abstract and schematic writer; his
characters too often seem like text-book illustrations, embodiments of Stapledon's ideas.
So too, Stapledon, a daring adventurer into man's future history, was generally carried on
the wings of a sober, conventional, and essentially Victorian style, a style most suitable
to the expository essay. And yet in spite of these limitations, one cannot fail to be
struck by the scope of Stapledon's works, not just his imaginative leaps into the future
but his liberalism, tolerance, and compassion, qualities in which, even if he sometimes
manifests them a little too easily, he exceeds his Victorian master. These make Stapledon
an admirable figure in his own right and a writer of continuing interest.
Robert Crossley
Politics and the Artist: The Aesthetic of Darkness
and the Light
Abstract .--Although Star Maker has sometimes been perceived
as a Miltonic book, Stapledon's affinity with Milton may be even clearer in Darkness
and the Light, for it contains, along with a large measure of Miltonic didacticism, a
vision of personality-in-community that Milton would have instinctively grasped, powerful
images of paradise betrayed and paradise attained, and not least of all a summons to what
Michael calls "one Faith unanimous" (Milton, XII.603). Perhaps no other English
writer since Milton has been more determined than Stapledon to make spiritual politics the
foundation of an aesthetic which is at once propagandistic, psychologically liberating,
and committed to the creative envisioning of an integrated cosmos.
John Huntington
Remembrance of Things to Come: Narrative Technique in Last
and First Men
Abstract.-- Last and First Men has not received the
attention it deserves as a work of art. Behind much of the praise of Stapledon's novel
lies the somewhat naive idea that the novel works by the brilliance of its ideas and the
enormous reach of its imaginative scope. These dimensions exist, of course, but without
the art of Stapledon's narration they would be much less impressive. In this article, I
suggest some principles of Stapledon's narrative technique that I think account for Last
and First Men's effect. My terminology comes from Gérard Genette's Narrative
Discourse, itself a study of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.
Eric S. Rabkin
The Composite Fiction of Olaf Stapledon
Abstract .--More explicitly than anyone writing before him, Stapledon
saw SF as a tool for philosophic inquiry and as an agency for moral growth. In prosecuting
this ultimately serious aim, Stapledon gathered into his writing some of the key threads
of English SF, English religious literature, and English science. From these he wove a
dense and continuous fabric of fiction, a set of novels which may be best seen as chapters
all of the same spiritual novel, each work a thing of power, the whole cycle a composite
fiction of staggering scope.
Amelia A. Rutledge
Star Maker: The Agnostic Quest
Abstract .--The SF writings of Olaf Stapledon, taken with his social
philosophy. represent a complex intellectual quest after an adequate philosophical
grounding for the concept of community. " The quest is complicated by Stapledon's
allegiance to the concept of "spirit." This term--always difficult to define in
his works-- at times seems congruent with its traditional religious meanings, but at other
times it seems to be an idealized abstraction of human moral qualities. Stapledon was
always cautious never to exceed what he assessed to be the boundaries of human perception
and knowledge; and to him religion--at least as popularly promulgated--was a snare and a
delusion. On the other hand, the merely human seemed at times inadequate as a basis for
argument or as the philosophical ground for a cherished ideal. Between skepticism and
strongly felt desire he maintains a tension in all of his works; but he also struggles, by
way of rational argument and fictive stratagems, to bring reason and desire into some
congruence. In his approach to the problems presented by the concepts of spirit and
community, there is great consistency; and although his later expositions, such as can be
found in Saints and Revolutionaries (1939), New Hope for Britain (1939),
and Beyond the "Isms" (1942), are clearer and more refined, the
structure and content of his best work of fiction, Star Maker (1937), are a
lapidary instance of his own struggle with rigorous agnosticism and his urgent need of a
praiseworthy object that would validate "true community." In short, the
dream-quest of his protagonist in Star Maker mirrors his own quest.
Curtis C. Smith
The Manuscript of Last and First Men: Towards a
Variorum
Abstract .--This article examines in detail the original manuscript of
Stapledon's Last and First Men, housed in the archives of the University of
Liverpool. A large number of the author's changes, additions, and deletions to the
original draft are analyzed. A commonplace of Stapledon criticism since the first reviews
of the 1930s has it that Stapledon is a philosopher but not a novelist, his style being
haphazard and crude. The care with which Stapledon handles his manuscript revisions
contradicts this view, and demonstrates a strong concern for nuances of style, including
diction, tone, and organization.
Roy Arthur Swanson
The Spiritual Factor in Odd John and Sirius
Abstract .--It seems logical that spirituality, as the human
experience of the divine, should decrease in proportion to the achievement of
superhumanity. Demigods may be less spiritual than humans, and gods may not be spiritual
at all. Spiritual beings are usually humble before their gods, and humility may not be a
trait of the gods. The hypothesis is pessimistic because it posits the limitation of
spirituality and implies that arrogance and indifference are attributes of the divine. The
limitation of spirituality must hold that to be spiritual is to be human, and to be human
is to be spiritual: these corollaries appear in works as remote from each other as John
Scotus Erigena's De Divisione naturae (9th century) and Vercors' Les Animaux
dénaturés (1952), and they inform Olaf Stapledon's dyed of disaster, Odd John (1935)
and Sirius (1944). In Stapledon's companion-pieces, Sirius, a dog coming into
human status, achieves and welcomes spirituality, and John, a human coming into superhuman
status, reluctantly and even tearfully sloughs spirituality. The superman, John
Wainwright, and the superdog, Sirius, appear to warrant our admiration because each has
transcended his species; but Stapledon directs our concern to the dangers of transcendence
and shows us how easy it is to applaud our own imminent destruction as a species.
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