David Ketterer
Spin-Doctoring the "Testesical" Apocalypse
John Clute. The
Book of End Times: Grappling with the Millennium. HarperPrism
(415-477-4400), 1999. xii + 240 pp. $30.00 cloth.
There is an obvious risk in publishing
in November 1999 a book about the turn of the millennium that will be reviewed
in the present year, 2000. It now appears that the "Y2K bug" was
overhyped, but John Clute (coeditor of those magisterial encyclopedias of sf and
fantasy) could not have known that when he wrote The Book of End Times.
He introduces the threat early—"a lot of computers may blow at the strike
of midnight on 1 January 2000" (9)—and periodically reminds the reader
throughout (162, 167, 178, 224). There is the danger that readers’ overall
confidence in Clute’s argument might be undermined by their knowledge that the
perils of the Y2K bug were very much outweighed by the various, largely
non-computer-generated problems that plagued London’s Millennium Dome and
giant ferris wheel "Eye" by the Thames.
Because The Book of End Times
entwines an argument about the new millennium with an important and no doubt
controversial theory of sf’s development, it is likely to be regarded as Clute’s
summa. And because the main argument is not anticipated but accretes over
the course of the book, it may be helpful to begin this review with a summary.
The year 2000 or 2001 does not mark the arrival of anything like the
capital-M Millennium of the Book of Revelation, but there are senses in
which what happens in the twenty-first century might well be catastrophic.
Waiting to be revealed is some kind of devastation (the seeds of which were
planted in the twentieth century) claiming most or all of life on Earth, or else
some way out—seeds of renewal and survival (also apparent in the twentieth
century). Allied to those considerations is a distinction between "First
SF" and what is not so named but must be called "Second SF" (both
stages exemplified by American sf). First SF, or "Big Story" sf,
peaked in the pre-Sputnik era and had become tired "by about 1975 or
1980" (181), round about when the first edition of The Encyclopedia of
Science Fiction was published (1979). Clute associates First SF—consensus Star
Trek style sf, "sci-fi," and the source of the iconic imagery of
the twenty-first century—with the wrong, one-track, fixed story of
Millennium. He associates wiser Second SF, or "multi-small-story" sf,
with the open-ended cornucopia of story that is the Book of Revelation, the
Apocalypse as most positively understood (perhaps as a typological summation or
microcosm of the Bible). It is in Second SF that may be discerned the seeds of a
positive twenty-first century, or at least a blueprint for survival.
There is, of course, a Big Question to
be asked about all this. To what extent is Clute’s argument, particularly as
it relates to sf, hindered or helped by the application of his generalized
senses of the Christian concepts of Millennium and Apocalypse?
According to Clute, the sf "that
is being written now about the next five to fifty years is sf about surfing"
(182), and he has attempted to provide an analogous experience for the reader of
End Times (as I shall henceforth abbreviate his title). The book is a
handsomely produced coffee-table volume that effectively marries text and
illustration. Clute’s text is regularly interrupted by an anthology of
apposite dire or portentous quotations from such diverse thinkers as Henry
Adams, D.H. Lawrence, Dwight Eisenhower, Leonard Cohen, William Empson, William
Blake, etc. All of the text (whether in regular or emphatic type and layout) is
superimposed on illustrative material, whether computer graphics or appropriate
reproductions. Almost every page of text is paired with an illustration that
does not simply provide a background for the text—reproductions (some familiar
but many not) from such artists as Hieronymus Bosch and Howard Finster, from
such films as Forbidden Planet (1956) and The Name of the Rose
(1986), or from other visual media. Sometimes, this generally very telling
collage presentation makes for strained reading—when, for example, Clute’s
text is interrupted by a quotation that is not clearly signaled. It was not
immediately apparent to me that the concluding quatrain of an unidentified poem
on page 133 (where its layout suggests a complete poem) is to be found on the
following page 135 (where it is identified as Thomas Hardy’s "Channel
Firing" [1914]) against a two-page reproduction of Roger Brown’s Final
Arbiter (1984), a skeleton rider atop a running skeleton horse. This
striking painting does, of course, superbly highlight the power of Hardy’s
final stanza. The use of bubble print for some headings and short quotations, or
the use of varieties of standard print in different colors against variegated
backgrounds, also sometimes presents difficulties. Most such aspects of design
and layout would, of course, have been the publisher’s responsibility, not
Clute’s. And by and large the experimental presentation makes for a stunning
synergy of text and illustration.
The "Prologue," which states
Clute’s premise "that millennium fever is nonsense, but ... apocalypse is
not" (1) and defines the terms "hysteria,"
"apocalypse," "apocalypticism," "millennium," and
"millennialism," is preceded by a quote from an unpublished 1999
speech of William Gibson’s that expresses Clute’s general point: "I do
not usually deal in the capital-A Apocalypse. What I’ve said so far has
to do with the ongoing, the daily, the little-a apocalypse, and I believe
that each of us today is aware, to some degree, of some convulsive quality in
contemporary existence which may actually be new in the experience of the
species" (xii). Clute and Gibson’s little-a apocalypse does not
mean the literal end of the world. They are concerned with the possibility that
the turn of the millennium coincides with a reality paradigm shift—a
"philosophical apocalypse." To varying degrees a "philosophical
apocalypse" is also a "metaphorical" or "rhetorical
apocalypse." Too much metaphor and too much rhetoric and it is not a true
philosophical apocalypse at all. There is no question but that a new
twenty-first-century reality is in the process of being "constructed."
Only with another century’s hindsight, however, will we know whether or not
that reality first coalesced around, say, 1980 or, say, 2020. One can predict
with some assurance that it will not be dated from 2000 or 2001.
The first of the book’s four parts is
entitled "A Story Called Millennium." It provides an overview of
"the hysteria-ridden world of 1999 ... and of how we fail to describe it to
ourselves" (7). As evidence, Clute examines the fall 1997 issue of Life magazine
on the closing millennium and a 1998 article from the British newspaper The
Observer. The issue of Life includes a list of the most significant
events since the year 1000. It is, Clute underlines, a winner’s list
determined by the story of progress, the Whig interpretation of Western history—"what
is real is what leads to us." The celebration of "rise" blocks
out the cyclical story of "renewal" (25). The most important
scientific event of the first millennium, according to Richard Powers in a
similar special issue of The New York Times for April 18, 1999, is not in
Life’s list:
This event—the demonstration by Ibn
al-Haythan, or Alhazen, that light traveled to (not from) the eye—was of vital
importance, not only because it solved a centuries-old dispute, but because
Alhazen proved his case not through abstract argument but through observation.
He asked observers to stare at the sun. If their eyes began to burn, it meant
that light was entering them. Their eyes began to burn. Case proved. (25)
Clute mentions some of the events that are
in Life’s list but not always with a clear sense of chronology:
"The 1500s and the 1600s are chock-full, with twenty-one big ones. Some of
them, such as the Industrial Revolution [?] and Luther’s invention of
Protestantism, rank very high...." (26). Life’s last major event
is homo sapiens on the moon: "Nothing since 1969 is worth
noting" (28). But, Clute argues, the moon landing was a climax that points
backwards, not forwards. President Nixon’s "practical" 1972 decision
that NASA focus on the development of the space shuttle rather than space
exploration was the more forward-looking event; thereby Nixon betrayed the
American myth of Manifest Destiny, "smashed the ladder of history"
(32), generated "a sense that we have entered the end time," and so
"created a climate for apocalyptic thought" (33). History lost
momentum and "retro sf" ("sci fi") came to the fore. This
phenomenon is typified by the success of Star Wars in 1977.
The refusal to face what is really
happening—the claim, à la the 1975 film Jaws (and as a chapter
title has it) that "There is No Shark" (51)—is epitomized for Clute
by an essay in the British Sunday newspaper The Observer for February 15,
1998. The essay reports that an American geologist, Dr. Roger Hooke, calculates
that "the earth moved by humans exceeded that moved by rivers 25 years
ago" (56), but rather than confront the dangerous environmental
implications, the reader’s attention is directed to a Flintstones
cartoon joke that trivializes the story and creates "a frame of comic
irony" (59).
Part Two, "What to Do in Dreamland
Till We’re Dead," finds its clue in the 1998 craze for the interactive
Tamagotchi toy. This compulsively distractive device, which resembles a worry
stone rather than a prayer bead promising transcendence, offers the illusion of
meaningfulness—and hence what Clute, who has a knack for naming social and
fictional phenomena, dubs "the Tamagotchi gesture" (72). A list of
nineteen "phenomena that mimic or manifest the Tamagotchi gesture"
includes "manned space flight as it exists in 1999,"
"frequent-flyer programs," "modern computer games," and
"the fin de millénium itself" (76-78).
Clute finds further guidance in Elaine
Showalter’s Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture
(Columbia UP, 1997). Clute has already defined "hysteria" in his
"Prologue": "From hysterion, which is Greek for ‘womb.’
A disease—often now called ‘conversion disorder’—where some scarring but
inadmissible stress, which may be physical in origin but is usually psychic,
surfaces as a symptom or symptoms seemingly unrelated to that original
stress" (1). Enlarging on that definition, Clute claims that not women but
"Men are the hysterics of the race. Hysteria might better be called testesia"
(82-83). It follows that our construction of the millennium’s end might well
be characterized as "testesical." And so Mark Kingwell’s
interpretation in Dreams of Millennium: Report from a Culture on the Brink
(Viking, 1996) of the famous 1956 film Forbidden Planet (misdated 1966
and later [146] mistitled Fantastic Planet) as a case of "hysterical
displacement" is spot on: "We have the power to destroy ourselves,
this film suggests, only when our own unconscious wishes and fears are sent into
the world. When, indeed, they become the world—a tissue of irrational
fears, a screen onto which we project our various phobias and desires"
(90). It is a pity that the facing-page still from Forbidden Planet is of
the benign robot, Robby, and not of the "monster from the id." Perhaps
Walt Disney’s fee, as creator of the monster, was too high.
The phenomenon of chronic fatigue
syndrome may also be a manifestation of hysteria/testesia. The Roswell
"conspiracy" and the popularity of The X Files feed more
proactive reactions: "Increasingly ... [i]t is the feeling, on the part of
many of us, that not only was the world made up in the first place, probably by
God, but something or someone has betrayed what was intended. That we are
not simply victims of the way of the world: that we are, in fact,
persecuted" (123). And so some "bitch about the government," some
"await the Rapture," and some "are abducted by aliens. At least they
care" (123-24). Clute’s sometimes scattershot approach leads to
occasional careless repetition in this section. Within three pages, we are twice
told that Chris Carter created The X Files (123, 125). I was uncertain as
to whether or not the repetition of a quotation from Michael André Bernstein’s
1992 Princeton UP book Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero
(on page 126 and, with some preceding sentences, on page 141) was an accidental
slip or aimed at incremental impact.
Part Three, "There Is a Wasteland
and It Is Us," focuses on false prophets and "toggle points."
Peddlers of the millennium, itself "a contraption of architecture and
hype," are Hermes figures "in trickster motley" (131), like
Nostradamus (1503-66) and Joanna Southcott (1750-1814). Clute’s freewheeling
style of argument and speculation is, by turns, persuasive and over-the-top. Is
T.S. Eliot’s line, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins,"
most fruitfully understood as "a slogan for [body] piercers" (142)?
But Clute’s account of the ways in which the postwar boomer generation has
shaped the millennium’s turn is instructive: "the world historical shock
of a mass conversion of boomers to millennial anxieties could in itself create
the formal requirements for the realization of those anxieties. The millennium
is a midlife crisis for boomers" (146). Following an appropriate quote from
Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888)—"Living as we do in the
closing year of the twentieth century..." (148) (which I misread, as
craftily intended perhaps, as Clute’s factual statement rather than Bellamy’s
fictional one)—Clute notes "an apocalyptic undertext" (151) in late
twentieth-century nonfiction and turns to a monitory listing of
"toggles," decisive moments of change, here late-twentieth-century
negative changes.
Clute’s source for the useful concept
of "toggle" points seems to be the same 1999 unpublished speech in
which William Gibson spoke of little-a apocalypses: "(This perpetual
toggling between nothing being new under the sun, and everything having very
recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension in my
work.)" (51). The definition first given beneath this quote is repeated on
page 156: "Toggle: A switch between before and after in the world,
when a difference in degree turns visibly into a difference in kind. A toggle
occurs when things not only change but are seen to change." Clute
instances fifteen toggles. His toggle 11 is representatively malign: "The
point at which, by standards of nutrition universally recognized, the number of
starving people exceeds the number of those who are obese" (157).
In Part Four, "How Are
Tricks?", Clute suggests some alternatives to millennialism as strategies
for dealing with the apocalyptic temper of our times—the little-a
apocalypses all around us. It is here, I believe, that Clute stretches, or
spin-doctors, the terms "millennialism" and "apocalypse" in
ways that seriously muddy their core theological meanings.
"Millennialism" comes to mean simply a single-minded, fixed story
while its opposite—multiple, fluid, open-ended stories—is to be understood
as exemplified by the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation. All of which bears on
Clute’s provocative theory of two stages in the history of sf, the first
covered in the first edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
(Granada, 1979) and the second adumbrated in the second edition (St. Martin’s,
1993). The fragile, "single-minded future" of First SF (with
significant exceptions I assume) bears "a humiliatingly close relationship
to millennial thought in general" (174). Millennial thought is anxious and
hysterical and can only deal with binaries—heaven or hell, eutopia or dystopia.
But is not Clute himself here indulging in binary thinking: dark ages, Big
Story, wrong story sf permeated by millennial "scenario" thinking
versus enlightened contemporary sf? Is not Clute here offering us a simplified,
overstated, and possibly wrong Big Story? And is he not writing a Whig history
of sf, the kind of winner’s history that he criticizes Life for
applying to its list of important first millennium events?
Clute makes a number of sweeping
generalizations in distinguishing First from Second SF. Most controversial is
the claim that "conceptual breakthrough," which described "First
SF to a nicety," does not "describe the kind of sf now being written
by live talents." Clute records that Peter Nicholls "devised the term
‘conceptual breakthrough’—that moment at which a new paradigm of
perception or knowledge replaces, usually convulsively, the old—to describe
the central movement of sf" (181). My own preferred analogous term is
"philosophical apocalypse." Clute claims that "conceptual
breakthrough" works only with Big Story (wrong story) SF, which "is a
thing of the past" (178). Second SF is "about surfing"
(182), not conceptual breakthrough. I would argue that Second SF is about
both surfing and conceptual breakthrough.
First SF may largely be defined by its
commitment to a positivist philosophy. The moment of conceptual breakthrough
involved the replacement of error by truth. The weakening of the relationship
between positivism and sf, which does seem to have occurred around the
period 1975-80, went hand-in-hand with a strengthening of the relationships
among sf, some forms of fantasy, and postmodernism in general. Unfortunately,
Clute does not address these crucial developments. Conceptual breakthroughs or
philosophical apocalypses take different forms in the context of post-positivist
sf, but they remain central to understanding the genre. Conceptual breakthrough
now involves the replacement of error by the understanding that there is no
clear truth, certainly no single truth. (At the same time, the burning eyes
lesson taught by Alhazen should not be forgotten.) When Gibson talks about his
concern with mini-apocalypses, small-a apocalypses, apocalypses toggling
between the radically new and the forever-the-same, he is talking about the
experience of flickering, perhaps subliminal, conceptual breakthrough in
Second SF. And certainly Gibson continues to at least hint at conceptual
breakthroughs in the three ways possible and already familiar in First SF (and
all at the same time): he speculates about new definitions of reality (and
the inability to distinguish between reality and computer-generated virtual
realities); new definitions of the human being or the end of being human (in
terms of DNA coding, information, and digital identity); and unsuspected outside
manipulators (shadowy multinational corporations and cyberspace entities).
Clute plumps for Bruce Sterling’s
novel Distraction (1998), set in "2040 or so," as his optimal
example of surfing sf—"sf about the kind of people it will take to cope
with a hundred futures rather than one" (182). Presumably the
textual/visual collage that makes up End Times was designed to encourage
the surfing talents of its readers. Oscar, the protagonist of Distraction,
exemplifies the positive possibilities of being a spin doctor—a useful
trickster. Clute sees himself in a similar role. He is the spin doctor Hermes
giving us the little messages, the vignettes that just might add up to a renewed
and decidedly Big Picture. It is unfortunate that the real-life scenarios he
describes amount only to a binary choice—roller-blading, plugged-in youth in
Camden Town, London (where Clute lives) versus golfing retirees in reactionary
Maine, USA. It may be, however, that this too-simple opposition (which
apparently values that ultimate Tamagotchi gesture—most mobile phone calls) is
redeemed by Clute’s closing thoughts.
Just as for Clute the true history of
sf is American, so it is not to a version of Blake’s visionary London that
Clute finally looks in hope but to America. "The past [like First SF?]
drags you under" (194). America (the future?) "is the true land of the
trickster" (200)—the confidence-man. It is there that Clute’s hope for
positive, philosophical/conceptual/rhetorical apocalypses resides. The
Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, will help, because it may be regarded as
"a cauldron of story" (223) from which a new, preferable mappemonde,
a map of the world (or should that be maps plural?), may be created. This
description of the Book of Revelation is, of course, pure spin-doctoring—it is
rather End Times itself that seeks (with some success) to provide a
cauldron of invention. The relationship between sf and the turn of the
millennium is an important and necessary topic that deserves further study. End
times can, as the cliché has it, be beginning times. Certainly End Times
effectively begins the exploration of the second millennium’s end, as filtered
through, and constructed by, the apocalyptic imagination of sf.
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