David Ketterer
The Machine in the Garden -- Take Two
Sharona Ben-Tov. The Artificial Paradise: Science Fiction and American Reality. Studies
in Literature and Science Series. Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 1995. 202 pp. $29.95.
Leo Marx makes no mention of sf in his compelling 1964 study The Machine in the
Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. His particular concern is the
intrusion into the natural world of such technological marvels as the locomotive and the
steamship in such classic nineteenth-century texts as Walden and Huckleberry
Finn. The impact of the juxtaposition that Marx describes does, of course, provide an
explanation for the fact that sf has become both a predominantly American genre and mode
of experiencing the world. And Sharona Ben-Tov's book (derived, the 1994 MLA
International Bibliography informs me, from her 1991 Stanford University dissertation
"Science Fiction and the Earthly Paradise: American Construction of Nature")
provides a real service in positioning American sf within Marx's matrix. Thus placed, the
bulk of American sf, Ben-Tov asserts, is "a mass dream" "about nature and
the control of nature" (2) by "science and technology" (6) whereby
"the realism of Star Wars becomes the realizability of SDI [Strategic
Defense Initiative]" (3).
Like Marx, Ben-Tov is a mythographer. Consequently, in her lengthiest endnote she takes
Darko Suvin to task for his "blindness to science fiction's mythic structure"
specifying "science fiction's powerful version of the myth of alchemy...as well as
its connection to the pastoral via the myth of the Earthly Paradise" (185 nl5 to the
Introduction). Ben-Tov's reference to the pastoral here is potentially confusing and not
just because Suvin does, in fact, stress the links between the genre of pastoral and sf.
To the extent that The Artificial Paradise revises The Machine in the Garden,
Ben-Tov's allusion to pastoral invites comparison with the "pastoral ideal" of
Marx's subtitle. Marx's pastoral ideal is a "middle landscape" that seeks to
reconcile (as surely does some sf, American and otherwise) technology with raw nature. For
the most part, Ben-Tov sees only oppositions. What might appear to be reconciliatory
gestures are actually illusions. The pastoral ideal should be totally aligned with
technology; it is one version of the "artificial paradise" of Ben-Tov's title,
sf's attempt to recover an enchanted nature, the Earthly Paradise, by simulating
it.
Ben-Tov writes the kind of engaged criticism that depends upon the layering of
binaries, and it is by relating the binaries of gender theory to the nature/ technology
dualism that she deconstructs as literally synthetic transcendent mystifications--rabbits
out of magical hats--any suggestions that that dualism has been surmounted. In less
sophisticated hands (I am tempted to say the hands of a less agile conjurer) this can tend
towards painting-by-numbers criticism, but Ben-Tov plays the game with finesse and humor.
Dipping into what she calls "our dualism box" (162), the binaries she works with
align themselves as follows:
The Enchanted
Garden The Paradise Machine
Nature
Technology
Female
Male
Object
Subject
Body
Mind
Emotion
Reason
Time/Life/Death
Transcendence/Eternity
She sums up the left-hand terms as being mythically concerned with "generative
nature" and those on the right with alchemy and "inventing life" (131).
This kind of criticism can lead to very different interpretations depending (1) on how
one gauges the slippages between these aligned binaries, and (2) the matter of
hierarchical ordering, i.e., which binary sets, are assumed to be the governing ones. I,
for example, would privilege the last binary above-- Time/Life/Death and
Transcendence/Eternity--as being particularly relevant to the analysis of sf largely
because sf is essentially a romance genre mixing reality and fantasy. The substantial
slippage between the last binary above and the first one-- The Enchanted Garden and The
Paradise Machine-- is obscured by those that intervene and especially by the elided
dichotomy between The Enchanted Garden and fallen Nature. In fact a reversal has taken
place; Transcendence/Eternity should be aligned with The Enchanted Garden and
Time/Life/Death with The Paradise Machine. If one believes that Ben-Tov has privileged the
wrong binary, one might conclude that her entire thesis is based upon a false assumption,
and/or that the sleight-of-hand she attributes to the dream of American sf is, to a
greater or lesser extent, her own.
To judge from the abstract in the 1992 Dissertation Abstracts International
(52[91]: 3276A), the first four chapters of The Artificial Paradise approximate
the four chapters that constitute the entirety of Ben-Tov's dissertation. Chapter 1,
"Man-made wonder," traces the development of the Earthly Paradise myth in
relation to our changing conceptions of nature. The Scientific Revolution replaced the
romance notion of a divine, or semi-divine, Mother Nature (a numinous nature that provided
our basis for transcendent experience) with the mechanistic idea of a purely material
nature subject to human control, an idea reflected in the technological utopia (initiated
by Francis Bacon's New Atlantis in 1627 and distinguished, like other utopias,
from sf as game-like and apart from history) and in sf. The man-made technological utopia
"appropriated the abundance and social harmony of the garden and replaced Mother
Nature as their source" (20). Sf, which "inherits the structure and [rational]
ideology of utopia" goes one stage further: it attempts "to appropriate the
Earthly Paradise's magic, the numinous quality of feminine nature. To re-enchant the
heterocosm [the alternative man-made world] without the enchantress. To manufacture
wonder" (23). The mechanized world of Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano is shown
to be such an attempt. If, and only if, a numinous nature provides our only basis
for numinous experience, then sf, supposedly structurally committed to banishing a
numinous feminine nature, "denies the possibility of otherness" (36;
Ben-Tov's emphasis). Consequently, the only thing that can inspire wonder in sf, a generic
requirement, "is the appropriated magic of the Earthly Paradise" (37).
The argumentation here is patently circular. To equate the numinous with what seems to
be essentially the natural picturesque is to ignore the much more important source of
numinous wonder in sf: the sublime. Although the sublime has been the subject of much
deconstructive and materialist theorizing, the case can certainly be made that the
experience remains recognizable and that many of its categories --particularly impressive
forms of non-picturesque nature, the cosmological, and the technological-- account quite
satisfactorily for sf's sense of wonder. One should allow also for the survival of a
religious or spiritual sensibility--and some sf--that attests to an experience of the
numinous that, by definition, has nothing to do with nature. Ben-Tov's argument,
then, like so much stimulating theory and criticism, is not so much wrong as dramatically
overstated.
Granted Ben-Tov's initial much too narrow assumption, the philosophical (and later
psychological) ramifications of her argument make reasonable sense. Because, by and large,
sf holds to the subject/object split at the heart of Descartes' philosophy, "One of
the most frightening moments in any science fiction tale is when the boundary of the
Cartesian subject becomes blurred when the human I and the inhuman It begin to merge"
(40). Such anxieties are located in Asimov's "Misbegotten Missionary," in the
movies Alien and Aliens, and in George R.R. Martin's
"Sandkings." All these works display the ambivalence that, it is claimed, is
structurally fundamental to sf: "Although Earthly Paradise nature is alienated and
monstrous, it still exerts numinous authority, in contrast to humanity's merely technical
transcendence" (46). It is argued that even a writer like Ursula K. Le Guin,
concerned with expressing a sense of empathy with the Other in a story like "Vaster
than Empires and More Slow," succumbs to the same ambivalence.
Chapter 2, "Wonder: Made in USA," explains that the Americanness of the sf
genre is attributable to the fact that "America was supposed to be the Earthly
Paradise" (53). American heterocosms, like Disneyland and shopping malls, are
products of "the American paradise machine" (55) the belief that fallen nature
merely requires a technological fix to be redeemed. The contest between this technological
utopianism and the Earthly Paradise, which is expressed in sf generally, is analyzed in
Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court. It is in relation to Slaughterhouse-Five that Ben-Tov first
elaborates on the psychological dimension of her theory of sf, the differentiation
syndrome described by Jessica Benjamin: "the son remains incompletely differentiated
from the mother [and Mother Nature], relying on her as a projection of himself while
repudiating and objectifying her" (67). Hence the ambivalent relationship between
Vonnegut's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim (his American Adam) and maternal nature. (The fan in
Robert Silverberg's "Hall of Fame" has a similar problem.)
In the case of A Connecticut Yankee, because Hank Morgan's technology is
finally defeated by the witch-like (therefore feminine) Merlin's magic, synecdochic of
nature's magic, that novel cannot finally be classified as sf: "the laws of the
science fiction heterocosm preclude unrationalized phenomena" (80). Once more the
problem is overstatement. While some sf (the only true sf Ben-Tov would be forced to
respond) does preclude unrationalized phenomena, a good deal of it does encompass
metaphysical matters which, by definition, are beyond rational analysis. Here as
elsewhere, little or no time is spent engaging with what might be construed as
counter-evidence. There is, for example, no mention of, let alone attention to, Clifford
Simak, the most obvious representative of a pastoral American sf which apparently
envisages a harmonious relationship between nature (whether in not invested with wonder)
and technology (whether or not appropriating that wonder). And what, one might wonder,
about the numinous influence of American transcendentalism and the Oversoul (rather than,
or in addition to, the Earthly Paradise myth) on American sf?
Chapter 3, "Myths of the Final Frontier," discusses the category of sf that
deals with the exploration of the final American frontier "space fiction." This
chapter, the strongest in the book, is of particular interest because of its account of
the relevance of myths of alchemy to sf in addition to the Earthly Paradise myth. In the
context of its "quest for personal immortality, or exemption from natural time,"
alchemy "furnishes science fiction with two myths of maternal nature, the Rock and
the Abyss." By transmuting the base metals derived from stone, the maternal Rock,
into gold, "the alchemist is helping nature reach the final and perfect form to which
she ultimately aspires" (93). As the most perfect metal, gold is figurative of a
perfected nature which transcends time. But first the alchemist "must undergo the
ritual dismemberment of his body, returning symbolically to the state of primordial matter
in the maternal Abyss, or cosmic womb, out of which all material forms emerge" (94).
The equivalent of the maternal Abyss in sf is uncharted space or hyperspace. Stories about
the technological creation of life and the technological avoidance of death share the same
alchemical goal the transcendence of natural process. The way in which alchemy has
imprinted itself on sf is, of course, most apparent in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Although Victor Frankenstein supposedly abandons his early alchemical studies in favor of
modern science, his ambitions, and the metaphoric import of his procedures, remain
alchemical.
But Ben-Tov's primary examples are two works about desert planets: C.J. Cherryh's The
Faded Sun trilogy and Frank Herbert's Dune. Both are provocatively analyzed
at length. The Faded Sun comes to focus on a science that, like alchemy, seeks
"control over time and over the generative process" (101), on "an ideal
human nature that can be forged" (111), and on making "the space program seem
like an alternative to the Garden" (112). Dune is categorized as a retelling
of an ancient religious myth: "the battle of the transcendent sky-god against the
witches of nature." It is an "example of the worship of transcendence, in the
guise of secular entertainment" (113). Indeed, I would argue that it is the
displacement of religious concerns in sf generally, at least as much as a pathological
technology, which negates nature. I would relate the transcendental aspirations of sf to
what might be understood as the encoding of the author's death in a work of sf, given that
the future, the routine temporal domain of the genre, is also the inevitable locale of the
author's death. But Ben-Tov is not interested in alternative explanations. Dune's
"sandworms are avatars of the maternal rock and produce its elixir of
immortality" (117). The witches of Dune, the Bene Gesserit, are
"alienated nature figures" (114) who are eventually superseded much as maternal
nature is replaced by "a masculine mode of reproduction" (115) which is actually
the power to destroy life: "War creates a god-king whose transcendental power,
manifested as destruction, rivals nature's awesome power of creation" (120). Paul
Atreides, the protagonist of Dune, is an American superhero, a frontiersman, a
Captain Ahab who rapes the maternal Abyss of nature "in order to become a god"
(126). This "golden genesis" is what the dazzling sands of Dune
ultimately signify: "Deathless truth. Stability. Immortality" (128).
One might suppose that the alienated nature of traditional sf would not be found in
feminist sf. But it is argued in Chapter 4, "Cyborgs and Daughters: Feminist Myth in
the Man-made World," that "as long as science fiction's cardinal rule, Leave
Nothing Unrationalized, is observed" (137), alienated nature is a constant. Joanna
Russ is cited as the only author who breaks this rule. And, as one might expect, the
currently fashionable theoretical cyborg utopia--a form of technological
transcendence--espoused by Donna J. Haraway in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The
Reinvention of Nature (1986) derives from a strict adherence to the rule. Ben-Tov's
attack here is necessary and overdue. Just how liberating is it for women (or men) to
aspire to be cyborgs? Haraway fails to appreciate that there are significant areas of life
which cannot be technicized: "You cannot have a technological heterocosm without
solid barriers between the manmade world and nature, masculine and feminine, mind and
body, subject and object, and the rest of the familiar lineup" (144).
Joan Vinge's The Snow Queen is analyzed in terms of the psychology of
differentiation as it relates to the mother-daughter relationship. "Feminist science
fiction portrays versions of women and of alienated nature that derive from women's
ambivalent differentiation" (154). The Snow Queen is representative; the
protagonist Moon owes her rise to power to a computer, the sybil machine, not to her
biological mother. Likewise, "the images of technology" in Vonda N. McIntyre's Superluminal
"maintain a classic dualistic division between the technological subject and animate,
feminine nature, the nature of the origin myth" (160). But Russ's The Female Man
points to an " embodied female imagination" (166), "a new philosophy"
which might "free women from the false role of the Other, nature, the non-human"
(165). New technologies based on old philosophies will not work.
According to the DAI abstract, Ben-Tov's dissertation ends at this point. But
what about cyberpunk? And how exactly are American sf writers to get out of the
nature/technology binary? Whoever asked these questions--perhaps Ben-Tov herself--the
result is a final chapter entitled "Paradises Lost and Regained" and
"Cyberpunk: An Afterword about an Afterlife." Since cyberpunk turns out not to
be the solution, and these two sections thus reverse the logical order, I shall briefly
describe the afterword on cyberpunk first. Cyberpunk is about transcendence; cyberspace is
an Edenic technological afterlife opposed to the fallen "meat" life. Like space
travel, cyberspace (and the romantically heightened desk-job world it disguises) promises
immortality and masculine self-reproduction. William Gibson's Neuromancer is the
inevitable representative text: "As in Dune, the climax of the novel is a
showdown between nature's witches and technology's transcendent god. At stake...is
generative power" (180). This power is the province of an alienated nature embodied
in protagonist Case's horrific memory of a wasps' nest (a figure for the matriarchal
Tessier-Ashpool clan) and in the Word, "the dance of biz, information interacting, data
made flesh in the mazes of the black market" (quoted 180; Ben-Tov's emphasis).
The demystification of cyberpunk here is as pithily effective as Ben-Tov's earlier
demolition job on the cyborg ideal.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the trite synthesis outlined in the brief Chapter 5 (much the
same length as the afterword) represents a dramatic fall from the previous level of
argument. The essential problem is restated as follows: "As long as we can only
realize our selfhood in opposition to the nonhuman Other, whom we have to transcend and
dominate, we will be tyrannized by our own fears of Otherness" (172). It is proposed
that James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis (the Earth is a live harmonious system) and an
empathic quantum mechanics offer hope. Has Mother Nature returned as Gaia and are we now,
as ever, "living in the enchanted garden" (168)? The quasi-mystical ideas of
quantum mechanics raise "doubts about the subject-object dualism" and about
"the idea that matter is passive, inanimate stuff" (169).
But is the numinous wonder/enchantment associated with the Gaia hypothesis really the
same as that associated with quantum mechanics? I would suggest that quantum mechanics
exercises a sublime enchantment which is of a different order from the human-oriented
enchantment of the picturesque garden. That is to say--to repeat my essential criticism of
what is nevertheless an important, insightful, engagingly written, and provocative
study--I believe that Ben-Tov is seriously mistaken in her key assumption that all of (or
even most of) the wonder that American sf attempts to inspire is appropriated from the
myth of a lost Earthly Paradise and linked to the socially and humanly desirable. Via the
fairytale term "enchantment," Ben-Tov misunderstands the numinous as invariably
tokenistic of benevolence and the improvement of life on Earth. Indeed her assumption that
a numinous science and technology (the utopia of cyberspace excepted?) is the answer to
what ails us is surely deconstructible as yet one more expression of a nostalgic longing
for transcendence; rather more mundane historical grounds must be found for critiquing and
reforming the present system.
We do indeed live in an imperfect world and some of the minor imperfections of The
Artificial Paradise should also be noted. Chapter 1 endnotes 28 and 29 (187) are
presumably to David Noble's America by Design and not, as the "Ibid"s
would have it, to Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. The running head
here--"Notes to Pages 30-47" (187)-- is off; the notes 27 to 47 which figure on
page 187 apply to page 25 through to the top half of page 37. Presumably at least some of
the other running heads to the "Notes" are also off. There are problems with
Chapter 1 notes 42 and 44 (187), Chapter 3 note 27 (191), and Chapter 4 notes 18 (193) and
28 (194). The "(emphasis added)" (123), following a quote from Susan Griffin,
has not in fact been added. Sharona Ben-Tov clearly did not receive from The University of
Michigan Press the kind of editorial attention that her book required and deserved.
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