#19 = Volume 6, Part 3 = November 1979
Andrzej Zgorzelski
Is Science Fiction a Genre of Fantastic Literature?
The question which has been chosen as the title of this paper is so basic and essential that it may verge on impudence when asked at a time abounding in detailed and conscientious SF studies. The penetrating expositions of Eric S. Rabkin, Robert Scholes, and Darko Suvin which come readily to mind form in themselves a respectable tradition of academic thought in SF research. But, in spite of attempts to systematize SF and fantastic literature, there is still no general agreement as to the nature of these phenomena, which makes it impossible to answer the question in a satisfying way, either in its theoretical or historical aspects (cf. Fredericks, 1978:33-34).1
What is urgently needed in the study of SF and related genres is some theoretical basis that would make possible the analytical and functional use of such terms as "genre," "the fantastic," "science fiction." Nobody can be really satisfied with the existing situation, where some authors affirm that SF and science fantasy are "part of fantasy" (Aldiss, 1973:8; Kagarlitski, 1971; Panshin, 1971:32) while others suggest that at least the majority of SF is "realistic" and in direct opposition to "fantasy" fiction (e.g., Heinlein, 1959:22). Nor is there any common agreement as to the range of SF. For instance, many critics think that utopia is a kind of sub-genre of SF, whereas others suggest that the opposite is true (cf. the reference in Suvin, 1977:14). Even in the most ambitious academic reports and monographs the very concept of genre - surely the most fundamental notion in any systemic approach to literary history - is used in the most diverse ways. It is understood either as a theoretical construct, an essentially stable and extremely limited set of features common to a group of texts (Suvin, 1972; Todorov, 1970), or as a historical phenomenon, a dynamic system of features evolving in its variants (Scholes, 1975), or - quite simply - as a class of works defined more or less arbitrarily according to occasional needs of the observer (Rabkin, 1976). It is precisely this variety of views that appears responsible for the diversity of controversial conclusions concerning the determinants of SF and related genres. Hence, it is perhaps advisable to start our presentation of still another methodological proposition with the notion of genre itself.
1. A genre is understood here as a concept of literary history denoting a diachronic system which underlies a set of texts. The system appears only in a view that generalizes and abstracts from particular synchronic structures (subsets of literary texts written in a given literary epoch) which constitute the successive stages of the systemic evolution. The structures, of course, are characterized by various groups of features depending on the period in which they appear. Their systemic nature becomes evident once contiguous structures are brought into focus - the researcher immediately notices many similarities among large groups of features and can even predict the future changes implicit in the immanent evolutionary tendencies of the system and determined to some extent by the influence of the dominant genres of that epoch.
The feeling of systemic continuity is easily lost in the case of temporally distant structures: they often manifest completely different features and their systemic nature could only be exposed by a study of the whole evolutionary sequence. Such structures are usually called genre variants and it is precisely they that generate the successive genre conventions. This concept of genre is illustrated in the following diagram (Opacki. 1967):
The most serious difficulty with the genre concept comes from the fact that the existence of a particular genre structure (variant) in a given epoch is usually accompanied by literary consciousness of writers, critics, and readers who recognize this structure as different from the synchronic structures of other genres. This intersubjective recognition, depending as it does on the general level of education and culture, on the familiarity of the reading public with traditional and modern literatures, and on the state of criticism of the epoch, is, of course, often arbitrary. It seems that the researcher has to deal here with the two distinct fields of enquiry: with the internal (or textual) genological phenomena, and with their recognition in various intellectual strata of the society. Nevertheless, in actual practice these two fields constantly interact. In fact, a genre cannot appear functional as such roughly at a time of its appearance. In other words, it cannot start to function in the tradition of literature without the contemporary reading public becoming aware of the genre's basic difference from the traditionally accepted conventions. The absence of such awareness in the literary consciousness of the time in case of Gilgamesh, of the Shakespearean drama, and of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- as a symptom that the textual alterations of traditional conventions in them lack genological significance - invalidates the methodological appropriateness of looking for SF determinants in them (cf. Nicholls, 1974; Amis, 196 1; Aldiss, 1973).2
It is following this criterion of the literary consciousness of the age that we can differentiate between the birth of a new genre and the appearance of genre variants. As our diagram indicates, almost every variant is the potential beginning of a new genre; but it is realized as such only when historical continuity is broken by the functional opposition of the variant to its historical roots, both in the alterations of its structure and in the general semantics. When a new genre is born, it is often diametrically opposed not only to its own immediate tradition, but also to the rest of the previously accepted genre hierarchy - or at least to some part of it. The birth of the mock-heroic poem and of the novel, for instance, went hand in hand with the recognition that their meta-genological information was directed respectively against the multifarious tradition of the heroic and against the conventions of the romance. It follows that the introduction of new themes or motifs employed in a set of texts (Bailey, 1947) is in itself not tantamount to the birth of a new genre. If SF as a genre makes its appearance in the history of literature, the fact should be detectable in the broad vistas of historical reproduction and alteration of genological conventions.
2. As examples illustrating these processes I am selecting here two of the most ancient genres connected with the later birth of SF: the utopia and the Gothic novel. Both of them were born in opposition to some groups of genres and their variants; the utopia in opposition to the Platonic dialogue, the travel narrative, the treatise, the sermon, and others; the Gothic novel mainly in opposition to the picaresque works of Tobias Smollett, to the so-called "realistic" novel of Henry Fielding, and to the kind of equally "realistic" writing best exemplified perhaps by the works of Daniel Defoe. The main factor in establishing the opposition at hand was, of course, the introduction of "the fantastic."
An interpretation of this theoretical concept - another one from among the most basic notions in our field - has been proposed in my paper "Understanding Fantasy" (1972), which dealt with the definition of the fantastic as an intratextual literary phenomenon. I advanced the view that the fantastic consists in the breaching of the internal laws which are initially assumed in the text to govern the fictional world. The establishment of these laws always constitutes meta-textual information about the genre convention that is to be employed in the given text: each of the traditional genres has its own device for opening the text and for suggesting the basic laws of the fictional world. This information rarely acquires the shape of one or two stock phrases, as in the case of the fairy tale's "Once upon a time . . ."; but it is always suggested in the initial pages of the text (cf. the examples in Heinlein, 1959:37). When these initially established laws are breached in the course of the story, this is discerned first of all by the characters, the narrator or the addressee of the narration - who from the very beginning are all fully aware of the laws of their world. The breaching of the laws causes their astonishment, surprise, fear, awe, disbelief. Owing to the expression of these feelings, the fact of the breaching might be easily documented in the text itself. But at the same time the change of the world laws becomes a breach of the previously established genre features. In this way the introduction of the fantastic constitutes meta-textual information about the opposition of a given text to the traditional genre or even to the accepted genre spectrum.
This is evident in the birth of the utopia and the Gothic novel. They both suggested, in the beginning of the texts, the construction of a fictional world in accordance with the laws governing the objective reality. In other words, they established the primary laws of their worlds as a mimetic model (MWM). As has been already suggested, the fantastic entering this system in the course of the story was a breach of that model and changed it into a different world - the novum (NWM), to use here Suvin's term. Hence, while the opposed genres presented a unified shape of the fictional world, the utopia and the Gothic novel (and not only these two, but also some variants of other genres, e.g. the fantastic novel of adventure) build their fictional world as a textual confrontation of two models of reality. We illustrate this in the following formula:
I. Primary conventions = mimetic genres = MWM
II. Secondary conventions = fantastic genres = MWM ? NWM
A full characterization of these secondary genre conventions would require considerable space. I have to confine myself to the most important features only. The fantastic genres, as has been said, are marked by the existence of two models of reality in the text. These are usually confronted by means of a number of popular motifs which change with particular genres: e.g., a mad scientist, an extraordinary voyage, Bug-Eyed Monsters, vampires and ghosts, a wonderful invention or discovery. All of them aim at provoking the reader's feeling of Wonder, of the Unexpected and the Unknown. either by itself, or combined with didactic purposes.
Historically, these secondary conventions have a growing tendency to diminish the extent and the functions of that part of the text which presents the mimetic model of reality. Its complete disappearance in a number of texts exerts an immediate influence on their genological function. The fictional world becomes once more unified - no breach of the initially established laws is observed and, as a result, the fantastic element vanishes. The writer directs his efforts not towards making this world probable, but towards making it ordinary; not towards justifying the appearance of improbable events, characters or elements of the setting, but rather towards making it appear normal, everyday-like within the suggested laws of the given reality. The mood is that of rationalization; even if the reader observes an apparent change in the laws of the world - both the protagonist and the reader know that it is not a breach of the laws themselves, but the acquisition of a better knowledge about them. The mystery of the new world has vanished: a scientist is no longer a magician but one of us, an expert, a specialist; an imaginary voyage is not an extraordinary happening but a common event. The text no longer presents a confrontation of two models of reality (although such a confrontation may be undertaken by the reader); from the very beginning it tries to build a model of a non-mimetic reality not with a view to evoking the feelings of Wonder and of the Unknown, but rather as an aim in itself or simply as a model of the world per se. The dominant literary ambition, inscribed in such texts, is no longer to reflect the existing world, to reconstruct the past one, to issue a pseudo-prophecy or a warning - the centre of interest is the creation of a new reality.
Thus the first historical convention of SF is that of a genre devoid of the fantastic, of a genre that is functionally opposed to the primary genre conventions of the mimetic tradition and to the secondary genre conventions of "fantastic" literature. The opposition becomes evident once we complete our formula:
I. Primary conventions = mimetic genres = MWM
II. Secondary conventions = "fantastic" genres = MWM ? NWM
III.Tertiary convention = SF genre = NWM
3. As has been suggested, the interpretation of "genre" proposed here differs from other views of genre mainly in that it stresses the historical continuity of genological phenomena and the literary consciousness co-existing with them. It may seem that our identification of the first historical convention of SF is based solely on the shape of its world: the unified non-mimetic model of reality, the feature that SF evidently shares with some other genres including the fairy tale and the so-called "heroic fantasy." But the non-mimetic model of reality is here important only in so far as it is a product of a certain historical process, as a product which feeds on the immediately preceding tradition of the "fantastic" genres and stands in opposition to them. In other words, it is decisive that the SF convention appears to be a tertiary genre convention, while the fairy tale, for instance, is evidently at the other end of the whole spectrum of primary conventions that we spoke of, namely: the primary convention of the anti-mimetic order.
Moreover, the SF texts themselves seem to "remember" their own roots in the tradition of the utopia, the Gothic novel, and the fantastic novel of adventure; and this is due to other reasons than the mere use of many themes and motifs found in both kinds of literature. Although the system of the fantastic has been eliminated from the SF conventions, the texts more often than not resort to equivalents of that system. Placing the time of action ahead of "the author's empirical environment" (a phrase used by Suvin, 1972:373) - the extrapolative device - constitutes such an equivalent, as it links up to the system of measuring time peculiar to a mimetic reality. In SF the extrapolative device functions as a sign of the mimetic model, while the system to which the sign belongs - the model itself - does not exist in the text any longer. A similar function is fulfilled by the polarization of the language into a scientific jargon with its neologisms and into the language closely modeled upon the everyday speech of the author's times; the latter pole becomes a sign, an equivalent of the mimetic reality. In other words, in its use of equivalents the structure of the works themselves induces the reader to view SF as an inheritor of the fantastic genres - but an inheritor which is marked by the disappearance of the fantastic.
I am acutely aware that all these propositions are "most vulnerable to the charge of being overly speculative," full of "unnecessary jargon" (such as "tertiary conventions," "genre hierarchy," "meta-" and "intra-textual," "equivalents," etc.); that they betray "an a priori interest in creating a system"; that the diagrams and formulas are hardly "anything more than perhaps useful intuitions" (cf. Fredericks' review of Rabkin, 1978:34). Furthermore, no analysis of an actual text has been offered here to support and illustrate these methodological considerations. It seems to me, nevertheless, that many points in the proposition seem to be in line with the current understanding of our topics. Thus, my interpretation of the fantastic as a breach of intratextual genre laws, although it antedates Rabkin's "reversal of narrative ground rules" by four years, is almost identical with his definition. The only difference lies in my understanding of "genre," which I would share - at least to some extent - with Scholes (1975:31) rather than with Rabkin or Todorov. Similarly, I would agree with Suvin that SF "is distinguished by the narrative dominance of a fictional novelty" and that it is differentiated from the fantastic genres by "the presence of scientific cognition as the sign or correlative of a method ... identical to that of a modern philosophy of science" (Suvin, 1978:45). I would suggest, however, that both the "dominance" and the "presence" that Suvin speaks of should be determined by some clearly defined intratextual phenomena (such as, e.g., the unified and non-unified models of reality) and viewed as primarily the result of genre evolution and not necessarily as the effect of some non-historical constant of narrative logic" (Suvin, 1978:47).
In other words, what I have attempted to do here is to suggest that no "structural" view of SF is fully possible without taking into consideration both the historical notion of genre continuity and the existence of the literary awareness of genres. Hence, E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) -- although presenting a unified non-mimetic model of the world -- should be viewed as a successive variant of a utopian story -- not SF! -- because there was as yet no SF genre convention to be continued at the time: all the existing genres of which the text could be the continuation were significantly characterized by the use of the fantastic. Of course, the non-existence of the name itself (SF) is relatively unimportant; the relevant fact was the literary historical situation in which the work could be recognized only as a text continuing the tradition of an extant genre. Although it also opposed the conventions of utopia, as a single text it could at best suggest the birth of the variant of utopian tradition -- as in fact it did. It is true, naturally, that this variant of the genre will later create one of the basic impulses for the appearance of the S-F convention.
Similarly, for the reasons explained above, Bulwer-Lytton's A Strange Story should be regarded as a fantastic story of the Gothic type, whereas Wells's The Invisible Man (also a story confronting two models of reality) is better treated as a fantastic story of adventure, belonging - if a closer denomination is required -- to the genological variant of the "scientific romance."
The meta-literary interest awakened in the 20th century seems to have stimulated the literary awareness into voicing this interest by the creation of critical and theoretical terms which foreshadowed the appearance of literary phenomena in the writers' practice. At the beginning of the century this interest was given an outlet in the recognition of such genological variants as "scientific romances" and "scientifiction." So far as the text structures of these variants are concerned, they introduced some new motifs and narration methods; but, as a rule, they also followed the tradition of utopia, the Gothic novel, the fantastic story of adventure, etc.; the changes were not effective enough to produce the functional opposition of those texts to the accepted genre hierarchy and to give birth to a new genre. Similarly, although the coinage of the term "science fiction" in 1929 heralded the first S-F convention, it happened nearly a decade in advance of its actual birth.
It seems extremely significant that in the history of magazines which are avowedly called "science-fiction magazines" in the critical literature, 1926 marks the appearance of Amazing Stories and 1930 that of Astounding Stories of Super-Science. The titles suggest best the kind of stories that appeared there: "Astounding was unabashedly an action adventure magazine," says one of its readers (Rogers, 1964:4). Harry Bates, the editor of the Astounding Stories of Super-Science, tells us about his troubles with the title for the magazine:
My preference [for the title] was 'Science Fiction', which was generic and like the other ['Tomorrow'] had dignity, but I killed this one with arguments that as a phrase hardly anyone had ever seen or heard it...and that as a name it would promise only mild and orthodox stories concerned with today's science.... The magazine could easily die of lack of readers...(Rogers, 1964:xi).
It was not until 1938 that the term "science fiction" appeared in the title of Astounding Science Fiction and only as late as 1939 and the early forties that the recognition of the convention was confirmed by such titles as Science Fiction, Future Combined with Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Quarterly (Rogers, 1964:64-65).
The proposition I have tried to present may provoke many other doubts besides those anticipated in the third part of this paper. So it is perhaps advisable to stress here once more that there are two decisive factors in the appearance of a new genre convention. The first is the new structural changes within the texts themselves (the text being the main object of our study) that establish the opposition of a new structure to the accepted genre conventions. The other is the readers' recognition of both the changes and the "antithetical relationship" of them to the tradition. This awareness of the reading public, as the resultant of the changes, is often one of the most important historical directives for the researcher in establishing the period in which the changes begin to function as an element of the literary tradition, in which they begin to work as a literary system.
If the late thirties and early forties were to witness the appearance of the first historical S-F convention, this might perhaps be regarded as an attempt to deprive the genre of its ancient nobility and of its most famous authors, Verne and Wells among them. But it is not the aim of genological research to provide apologetic evaluations or dogmatic panegyrics of particular genres; it is primarily directed towards doing justice to the historical evolution of literature by offering a description of its many aspects. It seems extremely important to view the constructional principles and the modes of narration of a particular text in the perspectives of literary history so as to bridge the gap between the theoretical and historical approaches to fiction. I have tried here to avoid thinking about the historical process in literature in static terms; and constructing a system of finite, more or less arbitrarily chosen, thematic features as a pattern which - malleable to a degree within the possibilities of such a set - would suggest an unhistorical pseudo-similarity of the works.
Instead we have striven to view the texts in the systemic perspectives of both their internal construction and its function within the text-reader historical relationship. It appeared possible to see these functions as distinguishable in the signals within the text (unified and non-unified models; equivalents). Such a procedure for dealing with works of art seemed to be a reliable one for both theoretical and historical reasons.
NOTES
1. Complete bibliographical references are to be found below. In my text, they are cited by name, year of first publication, and page number.
Brian Aldiss: 1973. Billion Year Spree (London, 1975).
Kingsley Amis: 1961. New Maps of Hell. A Survey of Science Fiction (London, 1961).
J. O. Bailey: 1947. Pilgrims Through Space and Time. Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction (NY, 1947).
S. C. Fredericks: 1978. "Problems of Fantasy," SFS 14 (1978):33-34.
Ryszard Handke: 1969. Polska prozafantasiyczno-naukowa. Problemy poetyki (Wrociaw, Krakow, 1969).
Robert A. Heinlein: 1959. "Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults and Virtues," in The Science Fiction Novel. Imagination and Social Criticism (Chicago, 1969, 3rd edition), pp. 14-18.
Julius Kagarlitski: 1971. "Realism and Fantasy," in T.D. Clareson, ed., SF: The Other Side of Realism (Bowling Green, 1971), pp. 29-52.
Peter Nicholls: 1975. "Science Fiction and the Mainstream, Part 2: The Great Tradition of Proto Science Fiction," Foundation, 5 (1974):9-43.
Ireneusz Opacki: 1967. "Krzyzowanie sie postaci gatunkowych jako whyznacznik ewolucji poezji," in Problemy teorii literatury (Wroctaw, Warszawa, Krakow, 1967), pp. 165-206.
Alexei Panshin: 1971. "Science Fiction in Dimension," in T.D. Clareson, ed., SF: The Other Side of Realism (Bowling Green, 1971), pp. 326-33.
Eric S. Rabkin: 1976. "Genre Criticism: Science Fiction and the Fantastic," in M. Rose ed., Science Fiction. A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1976), pp. 89- 101.
Alva Rogers: 1964. A Requiem for Astounding (Chicago, 1964).
Robert Scholes: 1975. Structural Fabulation. An Essay on Fiction of the Future (Notre Dame and London, 1975).
Darko Suvin: 1972. "On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre," College English, 34 (1972):372-82.
1977. "SF Theory. Internal and External Delimitation and Utopia (Summary)," Extrapolation, 19 (1977):13-15.
1978. "On What Is and Is Not a SF Narration: With a List of 101 Victorian Books That Should Be Excluded from SF Bibliographies," SFS, 14 (1978):45-47.
Tzvetan Todorov: 1970. Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris, 1970).
Andrzej Zgorzelski: 1972. "Understanding Fantasy," Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, 14 (1972):103-110.
1973. "Pojecie ekwiwalentu w badaniach prozy narracyjnej,"Folia Societatis Scientiarum Lublinensis, 15 (1973):75-82.
2. Looking for SF determinants in some ancient, Renaissance, or Romantic texts seems to me dangerously close to the illicit procedure of sentencing a man by applying a law that was not extant at the time of the supposed criminal deed. (This is not tantamount to saying that writing SF is a criminal activity!) But it would do some critics good to remember that it is Christopher Colombus who functions in history as the discoverer of America, though he was not the first European to reach the new land. At least so far as the historical perspectives count, it is not only the fact itself that makes something what it is, but also the human awareness of it. Historically speaking, the wolf (or jackal?) ceased to be a wild animal at a time when humans became aware of the significant changes in its nature--consciously aware enough to call it a "dog."
ABSTRACT
What is urgently needed in the study of SF and related genres is some theoretical basis that would make possible the analytical and functional use of such terms as "genre," "the fantastic," and "science fiction." Nobody can be really satisfied with the existing situation, where some authors affirm that SF and science fantasy are "part of fantasy" (Aldiss, Panshin) while others suggest that at least the majority of SF is "realistic" and in direct opposition to "fantasy" (Heinlein). Nor is there any common agreement as to the range of SF. For instance, many critics think that utopia is a kind of sub-genre of sf (Suvin), whereas others suggest that the opposite is true. Even in the most ambitious academic reports and monographs the very concept of genre--surely the most fundamental notion in any systemic approach to literary history--is used in the most diverse ways. It is understood either as a theoretical construct, an essentially stable and extremely limited set of features common to a group of texts (Suvin, Todorov), as a historical phenomenon and a dynamic system of features evolving in its variants (Scholes), or--quite simply--as a class of works defined more or less arbitrarily according to occasional needs of the observer (Rabkin).
It is precisely this variety of views that appears responsible for the diversity of controversial conclusions concerning the determinants of SF and related genres. This essay offers a tentative theoretical outline for an analytical and functional definition of terms such as "genre," "the fantastic," and "science fiction." It will strive to view such texts in the systemic perspectives of both their internal construction and their function within the text-reader historical relationship. It is important to the view the constructional principles and the modes of narration of such texts in the context of literary history so as to bridge the gap between the theoretical and historical approaches to such fictional forms.
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