#50 = Volume 17, Part 1 = March 1990
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Off Base
Cecil D. Eby. The
Road to Armageddon. The Martial Spirit in English Popular Literature, 1870-1914.
Durham and London: Duke UP, 1987. 280pp. $27.50
To begin with, I must enter a strong protest on behalf of all the Scottish, Welsh,
Irish, and Cornish inhabitants of the UK against Cecil Eby's constant use of
"England"
and "the English" throughout his Road to Armageddon. His book, I would also
add, should carry a warning that much of the core material comes from other writers, and
that it draws many of its facts and conclusions from British historians--Brian Bond's War
and Society in Europe (1983), John Gooch's The Prospect of War (1981), my
own Voices Prophesying War (1966), and so on over a substantial range of books to
Corelli Barnett on The Collapse of British Power (1972).
Nevertheless, the discussion of the massive growth of imaginary wars of the future
during the period 1878-1914 goes on in a partial vacuum. There is little reference to the
real context of European antagonisms and alliances that once gave form and meaning to all
these admonitory projections of victory or defeat. This weakness shows from the start. For
instance, the second chapter, on "Paper Invasions," opens with a verse which has to do
with the agitation of the late 19th century against a Channel Tunnel. Eby refers it to the
"Music Hall Song, c. 1910," whereas in fact the passage in question belongs to a song
that went around music halls in 1882, at the height of opposition to plans for such a
tunnel. Again--and this is far more serious--the author of the The Battle of Dorking can
in no way be dismissed as "an obscure army officer in the Royal Indian Civil Engineering
College at Staines" (p. 13). Five minutes with the DNB, that repository of the
great and eminent, would have revealed that Sir George Tomkyns Chesney was a major
achiever in his time: selected from the elite corps of the Bengal Engineers to found the
Calcutta Engineering College --an important development--he later on established and
served as the first president of the even more prestigious Royal Indian Civil Engineering
College, from which came the men who built the roads, bridges, and railways of the old
Raj. This was hardly the career of an obscure officer.
As one reads on, the suspicion grows that these gaps between the facts and their
interpretation are the consequence of an original decision which has shaped Eby's entire
book. The last paragraph of his introduction presents what are presumably the guiding
assumptions of his research program: "This book examines some selected areas of popular
literature in Great Britain between 1870 and 1914 in order to isolate and interpret the
tides of militarism and xenophobia which prepared the public for the Great War of
1914-18" (p. 9). As the author pursues his argument, he becomes so selective that he
cannot see the wood for the trees. For instance, he turns to the various future-war
stories by H.G. Wells in order to demonstrate his thesis of "militarism," and he traces
their origins to what is his own view, that "Wells found the invasion genre
irresistible" (p. 39). That, however, was not the way Wells's contemporaries saw The
War of the Worlds, the first and the best of them. The reviewers placed him where he
truly belongs--in the new literature of science, far away from the admirals and generals
but not so far from Jules Verne, and speculating with great originality and ingenuity on
the myriad possibilities revealed by the new biological sciences.
The reviewers were right. From the beginnings of Wells's SF--in the logical and
imaginative projection of acquired characteristics in The Time Machine--that most
inventive of writers made it a highly profitable business to push a hypothesis to a highly
dramatic final disaster. Thus, the Time Traveler makes his fearful discovery of the
Morlocks and the evolutionary conflict they represent and then hurtles onwards to the last
days of Old Earth. That marvelous account of divergent evolution--not the invasion
stories--was the seed idea for The War of the Worlds, as Anthony West shows very
clearly in his biographical reminiscences about his father. In like manner, the sole
failure among Wells's pre-World War I war stories, The World Set Free, found its
starting point far away from the military, in the scientific writings of Frederick Soddy.
Soddy had worked with Rutherford at McGill University on radioactivity, and his subsequent
account of the atom and his conjectures about possible applications of atomic power gave
Wells the information that gave the world his--and the--first use of the term atomic bomb
in 1914.
Eby's failure to place individuals and events in their true historical context has at
times the effect of obscuring the causes and links which are central to a full
understanding of the works that he deals with. He opens a major discussion of future-war
fiction, for example, by pointing to the time when "France forged her alliance with
Russia in 1894" (1893?), and he sees that alliance quite rightly as a major factor in
promoting a new wave of imaginary war stories. "It is hardly coincidence," he says,
"that in 1893 there appeared The Great War of 189-: A Forecast, an ambitious
attempt by Whitehall to show how England [sic!] would fare in the event of a world war in
the future" (p. 22). Unfortunately, though, Eby has confused the two states of the story
in question, thereby missing an important point. The origins of The Great War of 1892,
as the first serial was called, go back to the beginnings of the Franco-Russian
rapprochement of 1889, and especially to the entente cordiale which the two
countries signed in August 1891, after the historic visit of the French fleet to Kronstadt
in July. That was an unmistakable signal of potential dangers for the British, and it was
a clear opportunity for the editor of the new illustrated magazine Black and White,
who was then casting about for means of increasing his sales. What better than "a tale of
the next great war"? He accordingly commissioned his team of established and expert
writers--soldiers, sailors, diplomatic correspondents--and in January of 1892 he presented
the new serial to his readers in the language of the day: "The Editor of Black and
White, considering that a forecast of the probable course of such a gigantic struggle
will be of the highest interest, has sought the aid of the chief living authorities in
international politics, in strategy, and in war; and in the present number appears the
first installment of a suppositious record of this future war." (The story, by the way,
proved to be most successful in boosting the sales of Black and White, and it
also did well when it came out in 1893 as an illustrated book under the revised title by
which alone Eby cites it.)
If Eby's reference to "an ambitious attempt by Whitehall" means that The Great
War was inspired by the British government--that it emanated from sources in the War
Office or the Admiralty--then it would be most interesting to see the evidence for that
claim. Everything about the story--the topic, the journalistic enterprise, the well-known
contributors--were the unmistakable characteristics of the many war projections that
flourished everywhere in the excitable, jingoistic European press from the 1890s onwards.
Nor was the style of "the Great War" the invention of Admiral Colomb, one of the
contributors, as Eby surmises. It is to be found well before the 1890s; indeed, it was
used to characterize the multi-power struggle against Bonaparte.
As Eby moves on from his account of the imaginary wars, he widens his range to include
those aspects of British life which he believes will demonstrate his thesis of militarism
and xenophobia--the Boy Scouts, Public Schools, Peter Pan, Georgian Poetry, Rudyard
Kipling, and so on. But all this piling up of instances, it seems to me, represents the
victory of searching over researching. Like the Mechanical Hound for ever on the quest in
the Ray Bradbury story, Eby homes in on everything that triggers his sensing system. There
is, for example, the case of Baden-Powell and the Boy Scout movement. Taking his
information from the somewhat biased account of Thomas Pakenham (not Packenham, as he is
called on p. 259), Eby presents an ignoble, self-seeking Baden-Powell during the siege of
Mafeking. There are other, and very different views of the man; but it seems that the
worst is good enough for Eby. From this, the narrative goes on to the foundation of the
Boy Scouts, an event of some significance in the social history of the 20th century; and
here Eby draws attention to Baden-Powell's alleged eagerness to provide thousands of the
young "with protomartial habits of discipline and organization" (p. 70). But the fact is
that Baden-Powell resolutely opposed all who sought to turn the scouts into a feeder
supply for the armed forces. He insisted that the object of his movement was "to develop
among boys a power of sympathising with others, a spirit of self-sacrifice and patriotism,
and generally to prepare them to become good citizens." The world endorsed that
objective, and the Scouts spread across the globe. As Calvin Coolidge saw the matter in
1926, the Boy Scouts were able to bring together in a single generation the different
foreign elements that made up the United States--a process that would otherwise have taken
three generations of education and legislation. Does that count as militarism?
In the last analysis, The Road to Armageddon is, I think, a tendentious and
unbalanced book, superficial and partial in its views and without any sensible
orientation. Take the question of militarism, for instance. Eby could never have presented
so uniform a thesis had he considered the highly effective work of the journalist W.T.
Stead in spreading the views of Ivan Bloch on the dangers of a future war. Again, had he
looked into the widespread reception of Norman Angell's The Great Illusion (1912),
he would have found general discussion of the most unmilitaristic sentiments. (Perhaps
that is why Angell was given the Nobel Peace Prize?) Finally, had Eby done the obvious and
looked outside his chosen British context, he would have discovered that the Europeans
were all engaged in anticipating predicting and describing la guerre qui vient,
or der nachste Krieg. In those far-off days before August of 1914, war seemed to
be a fact of nature, an affair of alliances, something that could never interfere greatly
with the normal round of civilized life. In the usual way of human beings, the Europeans
of the pre-1914 period failed to foresee how their precious technologies would transform
the conduct of warfare. In our own epoch of "evil empires," do we know any better?
--I.F. Clarke Milton-under-Wychwood, Oxon
Secrets of the Pulp Canon
John Huntington. Rationalizing Genius: Ideological Strategies in the Classic
American Science Fiction Short Story. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP,
1989. 216pp. $37.00 (cloth), $15.00 (paper)
The stated goal of John Huntington's new book is to "interpret a thirty-year period of
SF by careful and prolonged analysis of a few important texts" (p. 9). The first task he
sets himself is to locate a sample small enough for intense study, adequately insulated
from his own criteria of selection (that might otherwise predetermine the outcome of his
analysis), and broadly representative of American SF from 1934 through 1963. He believes
that he has discovered such a critic's equivalent of the La Brea pits in Volume I of the Science
Fiction Hall of Fame (SFHF), the 1970 anthology of stories chosen by the Science
Fiction Writers of America.
Huntington is an exceptionally sensitive and adroit reader who focuses a fine moral
consciousness. So whether or not one accepts the large claims he makes for this book, his
explication of particular texts alone makes it a useful work. For example, his expose of
"The Cold Equations"--that purported paragon of disinterested rationalism--as a
misogynist fantasy should be required reading for anyone interested in the subliminal
appeal of "hard" SF. Indeed, he elucidates brilliantly the subtle and insidious
contradictions inherent in the "technophilia" running through many of these favorite
stories of the "Golden Age." Huntington offers splendid insights into various fictive
encounters with aliens and women, probing deep into the ideological, psychological, and
cultural content of the iconography of "genius."
Yet attempting to analyze American SF from the mid-Depression through the first stages
of the Vietnam War by exploring the stories and novellas in one anthology obviously
presents some formidable perils. To be sure, the collection chosen for study is undeniably
a fine choice. Not only were the stories selected by vote of several hundred authors of
SF, but this volume has been quite influential on the subsequent study of the genre,
evidently having been adopted in more courses than any other SF anthology. Nevertheless,
it does not adequately represent the range of American SF during the three decades of
Huntington's analysis. Certain facts about the anthology, not discussed by Huntington,
depreciate its significance as a representative work.
According to my count, half the stories in SFHF were either published in Astounding
Science-Fiction under the editorship of John W. Campbell or (in one case)
written by Campbell himself. Huntington accurately records Campbell's extreme "technophilia" (p.
181), but does not take account of the fact that he rigidly enforced his own ideological
perspective on stories appearing in the magazine or that he nurtured and developed his own
coterie of authors, quite a few of whom were among the voters who selected the tales to be
included in the anthology. Thus SFHF's first volume tends to represent that part
of American SF most possessed by technology and most directly aimed at an audience equally
absorbed in its cult. Between the Civil War and the Depression, and after World War II, SF
had a much wider readership (being frequently published in slick magazines and by regular
trade presses) and far more complicated ideology than one might infer from SFHF.
And by virtually ignoring not only SF movies but also novels--not to mention much previous
scholarship and criticism in the field--Huntington ends up vastly overstating the
significance of that anthology within the genre and American culture.
The problem is compounded by Huntington's inattention to both the shifting historical
context and the lives of the authors, leading to a kind of New Critical obsession with
"the text" while at the same time suggesting that much broader cultural implications can
be derived from the explications. This all tends to undermine even Huntington's adroit
readings of particular texts. For example, by divorcing Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God"
from its own subgenre (extending back at least as far as Fitz-James O'Brien's "The
Diamond Lens" [1858]) and from the author's other fiction, Huntington understates the
story's critique of the cult of the lone scientific genius. The usefulness of his fine
reading of Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" is limited by a failure to contrast it to a
far more influential--and quite contradictory--vision: Pohl and Kornbluth's satiric
masterpiece, The Space Merchants. Since he insists on resolving "the story's
riddles on the basis of the text alone" (p. 103) together with reader responses from his
students and himself, Huntington finds Judith Merril's "That Only a Mother" thoroughly
"ambiguous in its actions and its political conclusions" (p. 104), failing to recognize
that this 1948 story, together with Merril's 1950 novel, Shadow on the Hearth, in
fact forms part of a coherent anti-nuclear-bomb movement in the life of its activist
author and in post-war American culture. (From that perspective, the husband--who designs
atomic bombs for a living and who may be about to strangle his own baby--can hardly be
seen as an embodiment of "rationality" [p. 104].)
Rationalizing Genius makes no claim to be original research, and although
theory is invoked in the preliminary chapters discussing the basis of its own methodology,
it makes no theoretical breakthrough. The book's achievements come essentially from
Huntington's qualities as a reader. Still it is worth repeating that these are impressive.
Reading with exceptional alertness, precision, and ethical sensibility, he revitalizes the
dynamic contradictions in the stories he explicates while deftly sketching the main
ideological superstructure of SFHF. Whether or not that anthology is as revealing
as a La Brea pit, Huntington has certainly dissected some of the more characteristic
features of the beasts from SF's so-called Golden Age preserved within its pages.
--H. Bruce Franklin Rutgers University, Newark
Dancing Gracefully But Cautiously:
Ursula Le Guin's Criticism
Ursula K. Le Guin. Dancing
At the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. NY: Grove
Press, 1989. 306pp. $19.95
Ursula Le Guin's second collection of non-fiction is, to use her image, a carrier bag
of critical essays, reviews, and poetry. With reviews in a separate section, the work is
organized chronologically. Oddly, the pieces are keyed according to content: feminism,
social responsibility, literature, and travel. This system is meant to further the goal Le
Guin announces in her introduction: "to subvert as much as possible without hurting
anybody's feelings" (p. vii).
When Joanna Russ was given the Pilgrim Award by the Science Fiction Research
Association in 1988, there was great indignation among the (male) membership of SFRA over
the blatant politicism of the award committee's decision. When Le Guin won the same award
in 1989, the award committee's decision met with universal approval. Isn't Le Guin as
politically committed a feminist as Joanna Russ? Yes; but as her concern with hurt
feelings shows, she is not so aggressive a feminist. When Russ received the award, she
wrote no acceptance speech; when Le Guin received it, she wrote hers in the persona of the
organization's "Mad Great-Aunt Ursula in Oregon." By taking on the role she describes in
"The Space Crone" (collected in this book of essays), Le Guin makes herself
simultaneously independent of men and seemingly harmless to them. This stance illustrates
both the strength and weakness of her criticism.
Let me look at the independence first. In such superbly insightful and useful essays as
"Is Gender Necessary? Redux" (a revised version of an essay from her first critical
volume, The Language of the Night [1978]), "Some Thoughts on
Narrative," "A
Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be," and "The Carrier Bag Theory of
Fiction," Le Guin lets us see SF in new ways. In "A Non-Euclidean View," for instance,
she asks us to rethink Utopia. "It seems," she says, "that the utopian imagination is
trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future
consisting only of growth" (p. 85). She suggests that we "go backward. Turn and return"
(p. 85) instead, find a "non-European, non-euclidean, non-masculinist" utopia
(p. 90). Where Utopia has been traditionally yang, she says, let us imagine an
inward, "yinward,"
ideal: "dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical,
peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold" (p. 90). This 1982 essay
anticipates, as we would expect, her own Always Coming Home, as well as forming
an exegesis for feminist utopian works from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915)
to Joan Slonczewski's A Door Into Ocean (1986).
Le Guin continues yinward in her "Carrier Bag Theory" (1986): "if...one avoids the
linear, progressive...mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as
primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination,...science fiction can be
seen as a far less rigid, narrow field" (p. 170). Here she has us re-evaluate both
heroism and the novel. Why must the hero be aggressive, combative, and conquering and the
novel defined by action and conflict? "I differ with all of this," she says. "The
natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds
words. Words hold things," and "the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a
stage" (p. 169). To imagine the novel as a vessel and its plot and characters suitably
contained within that vessel is to imagine a kind of SF far from the SF of great men,
great deeds, cataclysm, and war, where actions are right or wrong, people good or evil.
Her rejection of binary, either/or, thinking frees Le Guin's criticism from predictability
while offering us new and convincing ways to see the potentiality of SF. Just as modern
historians examine the quotidian past, Le Guin offers the quotidian future.
Le Guin's harmless persona at first seems another strength of her writing. It is her
kind reasonableness, after all, that allows her to regret, in her revision of "Is Gender
Necessary?," the decision to use the masculine pronoun in Left Hand of Darkness:
"if I had realized how the pronouns I used shaped, directed, controlled my thinking, I
might have been 'cleverer'" (p. 15). Her gentleness suits the "peaceful, nurturant" yin
of her literary theory. And it is her benign aura that allows the male bastions of SF to
admit not only her but her feminist principles as well.
Feminists in SF, however--and this includes men who believe they are sympathetic with
the movement--need to remember the difference between the reaction to Le Guin's Pilgrim
Award and Russ's. Russ is certainly as perceptive a critic as Le Guin, with as great a
body of criticism, but she doesn't pretend that her ideas are harmless. The subversion of
Western notions of progress, heroism, either/or thinking, conflict, and conquest threatens
the Western world's status quo: it is far from harmless. Infiltration rather than conquest
may be the preferred non-Euclidean mode for change but it deserves the same respect for
power as the Euclidian mode does. Gandhi and Thoreau didn't belittle the strength of their
commitment. In adopting the role of our "mad Great-Aunt," Le Guin may weaken her case
through self-deprecation. While Le Guin's harmless, charming persona better enables her
ideas to infiltrate the consciousness of many, it may also make her easier to dismiss. In
Le Guin's case, the SFRA could congratulate itself on its commitment to feminism; in
Russ's, they showed how tenuous that commitment is.
Dancing At the Edge of the World contains beautiful, wise, moving, criticism
which teaches both lay readers and scholars new ways to understand SF. But it does so
cautiously. Le Guin does not dance as near the edge as she might; in skirting the danger
of disapproval, she might sacrifice her grace, but she might gain power. Hurting feelings
is not always a bad thing, and our great aunt might consider being a bit more stern with
her nieces and nephews in SF.
--Joan Gordon Nassau Community College
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