Science Fiction Studies

# 6 = Volume 2, Part 2 = July 1975

---

On David Ketterer's New Worlds for Old

NOTE. The following discussion of David Ketterer's New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction and American Literature¹ derives from papers delivered by Mr. Canary, Mr. Fredericks, and Ms. Le Guin at a session chaired by Robert C. Galbreath at the 1974 SFRA Conference at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

ROBERT H. CANARY. NEW WORLDS FOR OLD?

David Ketterer has set himself three goals in New Worlds for Old: first, to convince "more teachers of literature...that science fiction is a viable area of study" by demonstrating that SF novels "can open up to intense critical scrutiny just as Moby Dick can" (p. x); second, "to emphasize the considerable concordance that exists between all science fiction and the characteristics of American literature generally and the American experience" (p. x); third, to make "not only a contribution to the understanding of science fiction and American literature but also a contribution to literary theory" (p. xi). Our evaluation of Ketterer's book presumably depends on how well we think he has met these goals.

It is too early to say whether Ketterer will succeed in convincing our doubtful colleagues that SF is worthy of their respect and attention; New Worlds for Old does provide fuller explications of several SF novels than the reviewing customs of the field have generally allowed, and the works explicated certainly deserve the detailed attention he gives them. His rhetorical strategy of placing such explications side by side with explications of non-SF novels graphically shows that the same critical methods can be applied to both with profit. I believe that we may agree to consider the demonstration a success in itself, and I am sure that all of us hope that it achieves the desired result.

But for our purposes, Ketterer's two remaining goals are equally important. New Worlds for Old offers itself as a possible model for future SF criticism; if we decide that Ketterer has made a significant advance in understanding the nature and history of SF, we may wish to abandon some of our present concepts and terminology in favor of words like "apocalyptic literature." My own impression is less favorable: I do not believe that Ketterer makes a convincing argument for a special relationship between science fiction and American literature, and I believe that his failure to do so is occasioned in part by the deficiencies of his literary theory. In particular, the key concept of "apocalyptic literature" seems to me vague in definition and rather too specific in its connotations; it does not even seem a useful approach to individual works, for it is more closely connected with the weaknesses than the strengths of the individual explications. At the risk of making my general evaluation of the book seem more negative than it is, I want to spend the rest of my time today developing these criticisms.

To begin with, Ketterer's argument for a special congruence between science fiction and American literature seems mostly another rhetorical ploy, designed to encourage critics of American literature to pay more attention to SF. He is well aware that the literary tradition of SF is an international one, and he explicates the works of non-Americans like Aldiss and Lem. It is true that the popular culture marketing of SF—and other pulp genres—has been more highly developed in the United States than in other countries, but this surely has more to do with economics than with literature. More defensible is Ketterer's suggestions that SF is a form of romance and of apocalyptic literature and that both the romance and the apocalyptic imagination have been peculiarly at home in America. But only a comparative study could establish that Americans have in fact written more romances, apocalyptic or not, than other peoples, and New Worlds for Old is not a comparative study.² We do not even have a full enough treatment of American literature to justify an assertion that American literature is especially apocalyptic, and a handful of references to America as a New World do not justify any such generalization about the American experience. Ketterer's procedure is one of suggestive juxtaposition rather than formal argument; works of SF and of American literature are discussed together and both labeled "apocalyptic," and from this the reader is supposed to infer that they are linked by a common sensibility. This procedure might still be persuasive if Ketterer had succeeded in giving "apocalyptic" a more workable definition.

We must give Ketterer credit for recognizing that critical jargon has made the term "apocalypse...a somewhat Delphic critical counter" (p 4) and for admitting that "My sense of the word apocalyptic, as inclusive of Frye's demonic world, implies that all literature is, in an imagistic, archetypal sense, apocalyptic" (p11). He attempts, therefore, to provide a more limited definition. Distinguishing "apocalyptic" literature from "mimetic" or "fantastic" literature, he says, "Apocalyptic literature is concerned with the creation of other worlds which exist, on the literal level, in a credible relationship (whether on the basis of rational extrapolation and analogy or of religious belief) with the 'real' world, thereby causing a metaphorical destruction of that 'real' world in the reader's head" (p13; Ketterer's italics). The criteria for distinguishing this from "fantastic" or "mimetic" literature are not given in any detail; this failure is not surprising, for the definition is vague enough to encompass all literature. All fictional worlds are "other worlds" in a sense, and Ketterer himself allows for "The Present World in Other Terms" (title of Part Three of the book). And a number of critics have held that all art is concerned with breaking down and re-ordering our perceptions of the world—one thinks of Victor Shlovsky's "defamiliarization" or Morse Peckham's "rage for chaos." The only term in this definition which imposes any limits is "credible," and even that is watered down by allowing for "analogy" or "religious belief."

Another problem here is the specifically religious connotations of "apocalyptic" as a term, although these may be part of its attractions, suggesting as they do a profundity of concern and an archetypal appeal. Ketterer does in fact suggest that apocalyptic literature is concerned with

tensions analogous to the four aspects of Revelation, mentioned earlier as bearing particularly on a possible critical usage. The destruction of an old world, generally of mind, is set against the writer's establishment of a new world, again generally of mind. Secondly, satire comes up against a prophetic mysticism to provide a form of "judgment." Thirdly, the creation of purpose and meaning (see Kermode) collides with the possibility of non-meaning and chaos (see Hassan). And fourthly, all the commentators I have cited at least imply that apocalyptic literature involves a certain magnitude of vision which militates against an interest in detailed characterization. (p13)

I do not believe that these "tensions" really limit Ketterer's (later) italicized definition of literature, for as stated they remain vague enough to apply to most works of literature, including those obviously "mimetic" or "fantastic." It is not surprising, then, that Ketterer can discern similar tensions in the biblical Revelation. Such correspondences are not an adequate justification for introducing into critical discourse the irrelevant religious associations of "apocalyptic."³

Science fiction is said to be a "readily identifiable subdivision" (p299) of apocalyptic literature, but the terms which make it identifiable are not spelled out. We are told that Melville is not an SF writer because "his conception of the unknown, symbolized by Moby Dick, is beyond the bounds of scientific inquiry" (p271)—perhaps this is a definition by exclusion. Without specifying particular works, Ketterer says that in those works of "J.G. Ballard and other 'new wave' writers...where the science-fictional landscape has the ontological status of metaphor, I would deny that they belong to the genre of science fiction" (p187), but he later discusses as SF two "new wave" novels by Brian Aldiss which have this metaphorical quality. In general, Ketterer seems to prefer "hard" SF. I do not think that we can say he has contributed to our understanding of SF as a genre, except by placing it within the excessively vague context of "apocalyptic" literature.

It seems to me that New Worlds for Old does not present us with a theoretical definition of SF but with a metaphor for SF and other works of literature. Ketterer seems to come close to acknowledging this in a revealing footnote; speaking of the frequent analogy between space travelers and the Pilgrim Fathers, he says, "It appears to me that science fiction is best understood in relationship to various such analogies. The pastoral tradition, metaphysical poetry, Darwin and Darwinistic theory, Brecht's theory of estrangement, surrealism, and phenomenology also work well as analogical models for science fiction" (p26). This is a very mixed set of possible models and it serves to obscure the vital distinction between subjective metaphoric descriptions of literature and rigorously argued literary theory.⁴ I can think of a number of legitimate approaches to the question of genre—Marxist, hermeneutic (Hirsch), and structuralist (Todorov), to name a few. It seems certain to me that any work proposing to contribute to our understanding of science fiction as a genre and to literary theory in general should follow the lead of such theorists. But Ketterer has looked elsewhere.

New Worlds for Old is probably best seen as an application to SF of the symbol-and-image approach of the early American Studies movement. Ketterer has obviously read and been influenced by such later critics as Frye, Hassan, and Kermode, but his ultimate source is the work of R.W.B. Lewis, best known for The American Adam (1951). As Lewis was able to show that Eden and the Fall were played out again and again in American literature, so Ketterer can show that apocalyptic imagery recurs. With the first and last books of the Bible thus covered, the rest of us can devote our time to filling in the rest—Exodus in Grapes of Wrath, Christ figures in Salinger, and so on. But the game is too easy, and works as well with other Western literatures, for the myths of man can always be found in his literature, if we look hard enough. But I believe that most of us have ceased to believe that such investigations tell us anything very unique about American literature.

The search for such patterns can, however, direct the critic to aspects of the work previously ignored, and his resulting explications, although partial, may be illuminating. One can imagine Ketterer's interest in apocalyptic and science-fictional themes improving his explications of individual works even while contributing nothing to our understanding of literature in general. But it seems to me that many of his explications illustrate instead the great critical danger of commitments to over-riding themes—that the critic will become reductive in his approach and distort the work to fit his vision.

For example, Chapter Seven of New Worlds for Old deals with "The Transformed World of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland." Wieland (1798) is, like most of Brown's work, a hasty and ill-contrived fiction, but it is fascinating nevertheless, and it fits easily into Ketterer's "apocalyptic" mode. Ketterer is thus able to weave together effectively a number of recent critical discussions of Wieland; his own contribution is the assertion that Wieland has important science-fictional elements. This seems plausible enough, since the strange events in the novel are partially explained by Brown in terms of the pseudoscience of his time, particularly ventriloquism, which he called bi-loquism and did not choose to understand. Ketterer, however, does understand such matters and so finds the science in the novel unconvincing. He suggests instead that the novel is science-fictional because its events can be explained in terms of telepathy and other phenomena of parapsychology—i.e., the pseudoscience of our time. In effect, he has been driven to re-writing the novel to suit his theories, usually a bad sign.

The reductive character of Ketterer's critical method is illustrated by his feeling that one must choose between rational and supernatural explanations of the events of Wieland, although the work owes most of its power to its ability to keep the reader undecided between alternative explanations.⁵ A similar insistence on resolving what is inherently ambiguous mars Ketterer's discussion of Melville's The Confidence Man (§11) and portions of his treatment of Twain's A Connecticut Yankee.⁶

The pursuit of archetypal patterns also seems to make Ketterer insensitive to characterization at points when it is vital to our understanding of the novel. An example would be Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness. In this novel, Ketterer seems to identify "plot" with the political action, ignoring the equally important relationship between the narrator and Estraven. In the same way, his search for linear patterns of birth-and-rebirth makes him under-rate the permanent dualities of the novel and the crucial differences between Karhide and Orgoreyn, and between the Yomesh cult and the Haddarata. Lacking such clues to the novel's structure, he does not do justice to the interpolated myths and legends, dismissing the important chapter on "The Nineteenth Day" as illustrating only "the rather vague nature" of Handdarata prophecies (p86).

I do not think, therefore, that the theoretical base of Ketterer's work makes it an appropriate model for SF criticism. The notion of "apocalyptic" seems vague at best and misleading at worst, telling us little about science fiction as a genre, about American literature, or about the putative relationship between them; moreover, Ketterer's general ideas sometimes get in the way of his particular analyses. The book's strength, it seems to me, is in its explications of particular works, at precisely those points at which Ketterer forgets about the apocalypse and discusses the sexual imagery of Lem, the weaving imagery of LeGuin, or the spiral imagery of Vonnegut. At such points he is open to "intense critical scrutiny"; I do not intend to adopt the words "apocalyptic literature," but I do expect to require this book of my students and recommend it to my colleagues, in hopes that it will, indeed, convince them that science fiction is "a viable area of study."

 

S.C. FREDERICKS. A UNIQUE CRITICAL METHOD

David Ketterer offers a unique critical method when he reads science fiction narratives by juxtaposing them with mainstream American literature. So, among many examples, Edgar Allen Poe is set beside Ursula K. LeGuin, Edward Bellamy beside Theodore Sturgeon, and Herman Melville beside Kurt Vonnegut. The results of this method are two-fold: not only do we gain a maturer, more aesthetic view of science fiction as capable of undergoing the same kind of close analysis and explication as mainstream literature, but Ketterer succeeds admirably in revealing (if only by analogy) a substantial science fiction element in the very traditions of American literature—in Charles Brockden Brown, Poe, Mark Twain, and Melville.

One overarching emphasis in the book is that American literature in the large sense constitutes a New World literature with its own peculiar emphasis on visionary and prophetic trends of thought so that the religious heritage of America throughout the book acts as a source of analogies for literary narratives. Hence, the Biblical, Prophetic, and Millenial elements in New World thought become as influential for science fiction as the materialistic, pragmatic, empirical, and scientific side of American experience.

The twin themes of religious vision and Biblical influences lead to Ketterer's primary term, the "apocalypse." By the apocalyptic mode of literature our author means those fictional narratives which involve a symbolic transformation of our normal, lived reality—or Old Worlds—into visionary New Worlds: "Apocalyptic literature is concerned with the creation of other worlds which exist, on the literal level, in a credible relationship with the 'real' world, thereby causing a metaphorical destruction of that 'real' world in the reader's head" (p13; Ketterer's italics).

At the very outset, then, we are confronted with another analogy drawn from the Bible when Ketterer refers to St. John's Book of Revelations (pp5-8) in order to justify his analysis of the literary apocalypse into two distinct moments: the first encompasses the destruction of the present world and plunges it back into primeval chaos; the second involves the restoration of the world as a New Order of things. The first moment of apocalypse is demonic, the second heavenly; but both are properly visionary, and both can properly lay claim to being apocalyptic. As Tom Clareson has correctly pointed out in his own review, however, Ketterer—no doubt under the influence of contemporary critical theory—leans very heavily in the direction of the negative moment of apocalypse.⁷ On the one hand he has praise for negatively apocalyptic works like Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz and Jack London's The Iron Heel as successful formulations of the destruction of an old reality, but on the other he rejects the positive vision of Bellamy's Looking Backward and argues that all utopian fiction necessarily fails to present a credible alternate reality and must degenerate into fantasy, a non-credible alternate reality, or in the role of devil's advocate suggest itself as, in fact, a dystopia. Ketterer states sweepingly, "while science-fictional dystopias abound, there are no genuinely science-fictional utopias" (p118).

I do not believe that Ketterer's preference for the pessimism of the dystopian vision is authentic criticism but an attempt to acclimatize science fiction narratives to the demands of mainstream literature where the "ironic mode" and the "anti-hero" have prevailed until recently; and to acknowledge an allegiance to mainstream critics like Ihab Hassan and George Steiner, who have variously celebrated a nihilistic vision in modern literature which encompasses the "anti-novel," narrative chaos, non-meaning, and finally even the "literature of silence." In fact, such narrative studies can be applied only to some science fiction. Strictly within the symbolic realm of fictions I see no reason to prefer the destructive moment of the apocalypse to the moment of beatific vision since, after all, both belong equally to the artistically constructed world of the imagination.

I would therefore insist—Ketterer's own views notwithstanding—that New Worlds for Old does not define science fiction as a genre nor in fact deal with genres at all. Ketterer's own penchant for offering analogies between literature and the religious consciousness and between mainstream fiction and science fiction belies that possibility and indicates that he is cutting across genres and extrapolating a transgeneric view of both mainstream and science fictional American literature. There is a much larger issue here, and I would summarize it as follows. In our culture in general the apocalyptic imagination is in full flower. Cultural analogues of the vision of man and his world transformed show up everywhere: in Charles Reich's thirst for a New Consciousness in The Greening of America; in the quest for altered states of consciousness in groups as distinctive as the new Christian Pentecostals and practitioners of Transcendental Meditation; in Von Däniken and his multifarious allies, who want to rewrite human history completely, on the theory that extraterrestrials originated our most ancient "high" cultures; in the current Neo-Gothic rage for preternatural beings like ghosts and devils, a la The Exorcist and Harvest Home. The apocalyptic vision in both its positive and negative sense has never been more prevalent than it is now.

The same is true of contemporary critical theory: in Frye, Hassan, Kermode, R.W.B. Lewis and other authorities cited by Ketterer a rage for apocalyptic criticism has developed recently in proportion to the rest of culture so that I think it fair to say that "apocalyptic imagination" as a theme of criticism recapitulates the prevalent myth. However, as a literary phenomenon, the apocalyptic imagination has been developing for a much longer time, at least from the era of the Gothic Romance at the end of the Eighteenth Century as Ketterer himself recognizes. The conclusion must be that criticism is now catching up and converting this apocalyptic mode into an object of self-conscious awareness. But what is gained in the way of unity of vision, scope, and imaginative power through Ketterer's parameter of apocalypse is, so to speak, lost on the analytical side of the ledger, for here he is very far from being able to delineate the genre or form of science fiction.

At the highest level of generality, then, I'm trying to get away from the notion that Ketterer has presented us with a genre study and to characterize this theory of apocalyptic literature as a participant in a contemporary mythology or Weltanschauung that we all share—literary critics included—more or less unconsciously. What Ketterer has shown us is that science fiction has long been in the vanguard of the development of a new mythology—that is, insofar as we are willing to allow fictions not only to mirror our cultural life but also often to anticipate and create that life. By this view science fiction is the avant-garde literature of the apocalyptic mode and it has long been in advance—in both imaginative richness and intellectual sophistication—of the other cultural manifestations of the apocalyptic imagination. Science fiction has led where the rest of culture now follows.

Over and above Ketterer's attempts at exclusive generic distinctions which violate the inclusive principles at the heart of his method, he also evinces a strange desire for prescriptive and evaluative criticism. In two areas his prescriptions require comment at length.

I have a first major objection to Ketterer's attempt to turn fantasy into the antithesis of science fiction, as when he states flatly that fantasy "involves the creation of escapist worlds that, existing in an incredible relationship to the 'real' world, do not impinge destructively on that world" (p13, my italics; cf the note on p19). This smacks of an a priori value judgment that has little to do with the writers who work effectively in both literatures (Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, and Ursula K. LeGuin come to mind immediately), and there are simply too many hybrid fictions—fantasies with science fiction elements and vice versa—to make any hard-and-fast "generic" distinctions between the two (witness the fictions of Jack Vance, of Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp in tandem, or of Abraham Merritt). A spectrum with fantasy at one end and science fiction at the other would be a more useful critical model because it would allow for gradations in between. It is both unfair and illogical for Ketterer to try to define science fiction by saying it isn't fantasy, nor can I see how difficult fantasy authors like Morris, MacDonald, Cabell, and Lindsay are "escapist" ("escapism" as a critical term is only tautological anyway).

Following up a suggestion from the Preface of Robert Philmus' Into the Unknown (p. vii), I would propose that the difference between science fiction and fantasy is one of epistemology, but not one of literary value or imaginative adequacy. Science fiction "involves the rhetorical strategy of employing a more or less scientific rationale to get the reader to suspend disbelief in a fantastic state of affairs," whereas fantasy literature deliberately and self-consciously relies on non-rational and non-empirical devices as a means of achieving the New World; e.g., dreams, magic, supernatural agency, the blurring of the distinction between life and death.⁸ Because fantasy is concerned with the conceivable, whether or not that means a notion is potential, possible, or likely, I would describe fantasy narratives as taking literally and rendering concrete the "omnipotence of thoughts" (after Freud in Totem and Taboo). The worlds of fantasy are the worlds of mind. Even if those worlds operate under laws that are irrational and abnormal, that does not make the relationship between those worlds and ours incredible, but of another order of human experience which can variously be termed "symbolic" or "non-discursive."⁹ Fantasy posits for us a symbolic, mental world, and we must relate fantasy worlds to our own in terms of the human imagination, which after all can conceive of much more universal ideas and experiences than fall under the rubric "science." Consequently, both fantasy and science fiction mirror the destruction of the so-called "Aristotelian," or "commonsense," or "realistic" interpretation of the world—a project to which all the twentieth century disciplines, sciences and humanities alike, have contributed. "Reality" in our own ear is not some static, objective, pre-existent entity but whatever the creative, yet disciplined, imagination can reveal to itself.¹⁰

I have a second major objection, to Ketterer's animus against the mythological novel. His view is that instead of generating a "new mythology" that is sui generis, too many writers are merely offering a "sterile revamping of the old" (p76), that is, rewriting old myths—Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany being his own cases in point.

First of all, on page 77, Ketterer cites Northrop Frye's formulation that the "mythic basis of any fiction, aside from the occasional reworkings of an O'Neill or a Sartre, should (my italics) exist irrespective of an author's intentions and in a severely displaced relationship to the story line." What Frye really intends here is to defend the critic looking for archetypal patterns in all sorts of fictions, for whether an author says so or not, or even intends it consciously at all, a narrative may still correspond to one of the four archetypal mythoi (which are modelled on analogy with the four seasons) and be open to the critic. But Ketterer takes that word "should" in a prescriptive sense and improperly manipulates it to support his own bias against writers who use myth in a deliberate and self-conscious (hence, "undisplaced") way. In fact Frye never says anything about what writers can or should write, only about what critics can reasonably be expected to find.¹¹

If for a moment I can leave Ketterer's text, I would assert that this entire problem has been cleared up by the principles developed in John White's Mythology in the Modern Novel (1971). The clue is in the subtitle of the book: a study in prefigurative technique. By "prefiguration" White means that a myth sets up a pattern of response in a reader, and in the course of a literary narrative the anticipation aroused by presence of a myth can be fulfilled or betrayed, or transformed in countless ways, depending solely on what the author is trying to tell us. An example that comes to mind is John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy in which one set of responses is based on Joseph Campbell's heroic initiation pattern from The Hero With a Thousand Faces—every iota of Campbell's complex monomythic ritual pattern is fulfilled in Giles, but Barths' final message is that myths in fact do not establish patterns of universal validity for human moral action—the result of Barth's literary application of a mythic pattern is, as it turns out, a completely contemporary theme of an "anti-myth."¹² Or how can anyone think that Delany's Einstein Intersection presents us with a sterile revamping of the old mythologies (the plural is necessary, too) when the author himself over and over again says the new reality will not be the same as in the original myths but different? "Difference" is just as much a key to Einstein as mythical archetypes are.

There's a second principle involved here. Namely that "Prefiguration" signifies the way we are to read and criticize the use of myths in modern fiction: not by reducing the modern work to its mythical basis, above all; that is, we must regard the modern work as primary in all cases whereas the mythical material is a secondary dimension in the work—one that adds enjoyment and stimulation for the subtle reader, to be sure, but the narrative has a perfectly good meaning and interest apart from the use of myths. Zelazny's novels, for instance, may be read quite satisfactorily as superman novels in the tradition of Wells, Weinbaum, and Van Vogt, apart from what we may or may not know of the author's recherché references to Hindu and Egyptian mythlore.

There's never been any problem with writers or readers over the mythological novel, only with inadequate critical theories. White has ended the problem.

To conclude my review, Ketterer has given us a consciousness-expanding essay, valuable for setting up relationships that had never been properly acknowledged before. The value of his book is in its imaginative scope and in its transgressing old critical limits and suggesting new, apocalyptic horizons. If for some reason he needs to step back and worry about defining science fiction as a genre or feels anxious about the object of his study because it is not a scientific enough species, then I feel we must turn him back to his own real Muse which is one of expanding vision. I think the attempt to reintroduce the notion of a genre surreptitiously or the attempt to define the science fiction novel as a literary species is a critical red herring. I applaud Ketterer when he remains inclusive and synthetic, deplore him when he tries to pare down the large class of science fiction narratives in order to establish a canon of authors which will also serve as his "genre."

 

URSULA K. LE GUIN. KETTERER ON THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

If, in his chapter on The Left Hand of Darkness, Mr. Ketterer is saying that the mythic material of the book was not sufficiently brought into consciousness, so that its influence and impetus tends to be obscure and seemingly arbitrary, as in a dream, then he is correct. I was not and still am not in full conscious control of the mythic /symbolic/archetypal material I was dealing with. I know what I was saying at some points, and not at others. The myths—I mean the pseudo-historical Gethenian myths and legends included between narrative chapters—are of course signposts, to myself and others, towards such an understanding. They give the direction. But the words on the signposts have yet to be translated.

But I'm afraid that is not what Mr. Ketterer is talking about, when he speaks of the "rigorous mechanical" control exerted by the "mythic content" over the plot, and so on. If he meant "mechanical" in the sense of "unconscious," as when we speak of "automatic writing," he'd be on the right track; but then he wouldn't say "rigorous," implying that the plot is deliberately forced into the service of a rigid, pre-established, allegorical framework.

I think the confusion—and the whole argument of his essay and indeed of his book—rests on this: that he uses the words myth and symbol to mean intellectual constructs of a known content and a fully known, determined meaning. Myth and symbol are like counters in a game. To use them cleverly, you have to hide them, to "displace" them, so that they appear to be esoteric, except to initiates.

In other words when he says myth he means allegory, and when he says symbol he means sign.

This usage is so totally the reverse of my own that it's little wonder Mr. Ketterer sees as little value in my book as I do in his essay: a sterile circularity of self-definition.

To me a myth is a living element, a symbolic constellation, in Jung's terms, within my own psyche; and my job as an artist is to create a way, a thoroughfare, to and from it, by means of my art, so that both the image and some sense of its meaning can come up into consciousness and be communicated to other consciousnesses. I fully accept Jung's definition: "The symbol differs essentially from sign or symptom, and should be understood as the expression of an intuitive perception which can as yet neither be apprehended better, nor expressed differently."

To Mr. Ketterer, the "winter journey" and the "mythos of winter" would seem to be a set of intellectually recognizable signs or counters which one has learned about from Mr. Northrop Frye. To me, the winter journey and the mythos of winter are part of the ground of my being. In the effort to express it, and so to achieve community with other beings, my intellect is certainly involved, intensely involved, along with my capacities for sensation, feeling, and intuition. But the thing itself, the myth or symbol, is primarily and ultimately a supra-rational given, a datum, which it is not my job to disguise cleverly, but to express vividly and to communicate. I am not a priest. I am a witness.

I will say that I think I did my job pretty well with the myth of winter, although I must admit that I still haven't read Northrop Frye. With the other ruling myth of the book, the archetypal figure of the Androgyne, I did much less well. That is why the plot, as both Mr. Ketterer and Stanislaw Lem have remarked, does not reflect the androgynity of the main character, can be summarized without mentioning it, and so—by the way—can hardly be said to be "ruled" or "controlled" by the myth at all. What I was dealing with was and is so obscure to me, and so powerful, that I could do very little more than bring the image itself up to consciousness: the Androgyne: and let it stand there, visible, at least, if not explicable. I rather doubt if anybody now is capable of explaining the archetype of the Androgyne, but I do feel that it is one of the archetypes/potentialities of the human psyche which is of real importance now, which is alive now and full of creative-destructive energy; and so it is urgent that it be brought into consciousness. The Androgyne theme in my book is surely related to such phenomena as the women's movement, and gay lib, and unisex clothes, and many other portents. When one of the great myths moves, it is only by a movement of the whole person, intellect, feeling, sensation, intuition, that we can follow it. And we don't know where it will lead us. That's why it's important to try and find out.

But the Apocalypse theme is the only one Mr. Ketterer discusses and it is neither expressed nor contained in my book.

If Mr. Ketterer has to have that myth and no other, he might have looked in my novel The Lathe of Heaven. That book is just bubbling with apocalypses. Of course, they're fake ones. I am afraid that all apocalypses are fake, to me. The ones in Lathe, like the one Mr. Ketterer finally digs up in Left Hand, are all dreams, or even pseudo-dreams—fake dreams.

Surely a critic might have found some significance in that? And mightn't the significance be that I, by temperament, or as an unconsistent Taoist and a consistent un-Christian, just don't buy the Apocalypse? Anybody who goes after the Christian mythos in my work, all the nice familiar signs and symptoms, crucifixion, redemption, judgment, apocalypse, etc., is going to be looking for pearls in a pigpen. And I fear he'll end up with about as much illumination as Mr. Ketterer, despite all his critical skill and intelligence and patience, ends up with: the news that this book is a book about a book—and that I spent two years in the Ice Age with a lot of androgynous aliens in order to make a neat little remark about "the theoretical definition of science fiction."

 

DAVID KETTERER. IN RESPONSE

In response I propose to take up the issues raised by my critics in the context of a restatement of what New Worlds for Old is all about—at least as I see it. This will involve some interweaving of the three critiques although, in beginning with the more fundamental objections and descending to matters of detail, I shall be answering for the most part, first Professor Canary, secondly Professor Fredericks, and finally Ursula K. Le Guin. On the taped version of this response I complained of an element of shadow-boxing. This was particularly the case because so many of the criticisms appear to me to be directed at misunderstandings of my book. Hence my restatement strategy, while partially for the sake of coherence, is also intended to establish a "reality principle."

First of all the concept of apocalyptic literature: my intention in New Worlds for Old was to define an imaginative structure existing between the structures of realism and fantasy, a structure characteristic not only of science fiction but also of a range of critically established literature best typified perhaps by the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. I delineate a tripartite division of fantastic literature, apocalyptic literature and mimetic literature, a division dependent upon differing relationships between the fictional "world" and the real world. In order to talk about the nature of science fiction it is essential to have some conception of the totality of literature of which science fiction is a part. My tripartite division is simply a logical carving of the literary cake given a particular parameter, and as such is surely beyond argument. There are works which attempt imitations of the "real world," there are works which claim to present different worlds which on a literal level are intended as concordant with the "real" world and therefore believable, there are works which claim to present different worlds which, on a literal level, are intended as discordant with the "real" world and which therefore do not inspire a literalistic believability. There are obviously works which fall between these three structures—there are grey bordering areas—but given my particular parameter, these three structures exhaust the logical possibilities.

Now I believe that I am as aware as anybody of the difficulty, if not ultimate impossibility, of defining one kind of verbal structure by another kind, of understanding language by means of language. Literary criticism, even the most apparently rigorous kind, works within a necessary margin of vagueness. For a majority of literary terms and concepts, poised as they are upon a philosophical crux, we have no final agreed definitions. Language being what it is, words like tragedy, romance and realism remain and will continue to remain somewhat fuzzy at the edges. Precision is of course always to be aimed at but I should be happy if my tripartite division makes a reasonable kind of sense. Professor Canary appears to wilfully misunderstand me when he asserts that my definition of apocalyptic literature is "vague enough to encompass all literature" because all fictional worlds are, according to a critical convention, "other worlds." Thus the mimetic worlds of War and Peace or Studs Lonigan are other than the real world because they lack historical existence in the real world. But my sense of the word "other" in the definition and elsewhere in the book implies the phrase "significantly different." The world of War and Peace is other than the historical world but it is not significantly different from it. Certainly, some of the tensions which I claim characterize apocalyptic literature may be found in examples of mimetic or fantastic literature but I cannot understand Professor Canary's implication that the totality of tensions which I describe, especially the peculiar relationship between the historical world and the fictional world, is common to all literature. Similarly, the literal form of "defamiliarization" provided by apocalyptic literature is a thing apart.

Genre is another one of those words which present difficulty. Professor Fredericks to the contrary, I would claim that my book is a genre study or, more specifically, a study of the way in which a particular and historically determined genre operates within a universal structure or mode. And Professor Canary is wrong to suppose that my formal sense of the apocalyptic imagination be understood as simply "a metaphor for SF and other works of literature." The American experience, Darwinistic theory and some of the other analogies referred to in the "revealing footnote" may, it is true, be regarded as metaphors. And it is of course true, as Professor Fredericks points out, that an apocalyptic consciousness is very much in the air these days.

Of most difficulty is that old chestnut, the distinction between fantasy and science fiction or, in my terms, between apocalyptic and fantastic literature. The issue constantly arises in discussions of science fiction never, it appears, to be settled. Professor Fredericks pulls me up on my definition of fantasy literature as involving the "creation of escapist worlds that, existing [on the literal level] in an incredible relationship to the 'real' world, do not impinge destructively on that world" (p13). I regret my use of the word "escapist"—it carries a value judgment which I did not intend. While I personally don't like most fantasy I realize that the preference for science fiction over fantasy is a matter of taste. I would prefer to talk about the independent worlds of fantasy rather than the escapist worlds. It is impossible, I believe, to make the distinction on the basis of content and in my book I have attempted to argue against a tendency to characterize all stories involving the supernatural or mystical as fantasies. Professor Fredericks' claim that literary fantasies are almost fantasies in the clinical sense, that "the worlds of fantasy are worlds of mind," does, I would agree, account for an important portion if not all of fantastic literature, but to see such works in this way is to view them as projective allegories—thus, on a literal level, they do not relate to the external historical world—in this sense, the relationship is incredible. I recognize, however, that my suggestion that a certain kind of overt allegory is important to the distinction between fantasy and science fiction calls for further elaboration.

Professor Canary refers to Todorov's book The Fantastic and offers Wieland as an example of this category because it keeps "the reader undecided between alternative explanations," i.e. rational and supernatural explanations. This particular ambiguity is crucial to Todorov's structural model of the fantastic. I can only say that such an ambiguity strikes me as more characteristic of life itself rather than fantasy. In addition, I'm afraid that Stanislaw Lem's attack on Todorov's book has further shaken my faith in his concept of the fantastic.¹³ I incline towards the notion suggested by H. Bruce Franklin and elaborated by Samuel R. Delany and more recently by Joanna Russ, that the difference between fantasy, science fiction, realism, reportage and other literary forms depends ultimately upon the "level of subjunctivity."¹⁴ Unfortunately, this subjunctivity—the consistency of the glue between the words—is not something that one can readily put one's finger on. It must be decided in terms of an author's intentions, and that itself is a vexed critical issue.

If you will grant me that the imaginative structure which I have called apocalyptic literature is not a figment of my own imagination—that I have described (hopefully, with no more than a necessary vagueness) an aspect of the literary landscape^-the question remains, is "apocalyptic" the most appropriate term to describe that structure? Professor Canary speaks of the "irrelevant religious associations of 'apocalyptic.'" On the contrary, I argue in the book for the value of the religious associations. For example, I am inclined to emphasize the visionary quality of science fiction over the satiric. My approach is an alternative to the, I believe, currently more usual critical approach to science fiction which primarily values the worlds of science fiction as extrapolated or estranged critiques of the societal situations to which the authors belong. I agree with C.S. Lewis who claims that "to construct plausible and moving 'other worlds,' you must draw on the only real 'other world' that we know, that of spirit" and with Samuel R. Delany who claims that "to move into an unreal world demands a brush with mysticism" (quoted in NWFO, pp 92, 18). Or, put another way, the concern of science fiction with extending the frontiers of knowledge, controlling and hence, in a real sense, rendering the universe into dead matter, into a machine, calls into vital and necessary being the theme of transcendence.

The centrality of world destruction and transformation, whether literal, metaphorical or philosophical, in the works analyzed, seem to me to make the Apocalypse an appropriate structural model—which is all it is—it is not intended as a base-line of descent. I was interested in fictions which give rise to climactic sentences such as those which I quote on the page facing the Contents page and typified by this line from Brian Aldiss' Barefoot in the Head: "All the known noon world loses its old staples and everything drops apart." I would want to argue strongly against Professor Canary's assertion that I am using the Apocalypse in much the same way that R.W.B. Lewis uses Genesis in The American Adam as a base-line source for imagistic structures and biblical typologies in American literature. The Judeo-Christian mythology is one among many and all are to be understood as manifestations of the apocalyptic imagination. Apocalyptic literature is not to be read in terms of the biblical Apocalypse; rather the biblical Apocalypse is to be read as a notable "Western" product of the apocalyptic imagination.

As Professor Canary observes, there is a grey area where works of science fiction leave off and other manifestations of the apocalyptic imagination, such as Moby-Dick, begin. This was deliberate. There are many different kinds of science fiction now being written and I simply didn't want to draw a line. Many of the different kinds have already been satisfactorily defined. I have become tired of that kind of mystification which despairs of achieving such definitions. It would seem to me to be critically more useful to examine science fiction in terms of the distinctions indicated by what I believe to be its wider formal context. Furthermore, there is an area where the issue of what is and what is not science fiction has become steadily more complicated. How, for example, should we describe the growing number of works which are not strictly science fiction but which couldn't exist but for the prior existence of science fiction? And I do think that those projective world-of-mind works where the science-fictional landscape and machinery has the ontological status of metaphor should be distinguished from science fiction. My instancing of aspects of Ballard's work here is, I accept, arguable. The two Aldiss novels which I discuss may have something of this metaphorical quality but only in a primary context involving the genuine interaction of mind and reality, whether in physical or philosophical terms. It does not follow that I prefer "hard" science fiction. I prefer good science fiction, whatever its consistency.

I do not prefer the negative vision of science fiction to the positive, as Professor Fredericks suggests when he refers to Professor Clareson's view that I lean "very heavily in the direction of the negative moment of apocalypse." The basis of this misinterpretation is my assertion that there "are no genuinely science-fictional utopias" (p118). In my chapter on utopian fantasy I am using the concept of utopia in the strict sense intended by Thomas More and demonstrating the nature of language will simply not allow for the realistic presentation of a perfect, ideal, therefore static human society. More embodied the element of linguistic indirection by coining a term which is itself etymologically ambiguous and paradoxical. I am not denying the science-fictional possibility of kinetic utopias (a contradiction in terms) or of societies which are variously more perfect than those in which authors find themselves. The problem of course is the term utopia, which has been used to cover everything from Plato's Republic to any vision of an alternative society. One should distinguish between societies which are simply different or heterotopias, more perfect societies or plutopias, perfect societies or utopias, bad societies planned as utopias or dystopias or anti-utopias, and societies which just present a generally bad scene apart from any utopian plan, i.e., maltopias. The direction of the overall "plot" of science fiction is, as I repeatedly stress, optimistic, culminating in a quasi-mystical "utopian" or beatific vision of an interstellar New Jerusalem. In other words, in the plot of science fiction, as with the apocalyptic imagination itself, the negative charge is outweighed by the positive.

Let me turn now to the relationship between science fiction and American literature. My approach here was not, as Professor Canary suggests, "mostly another rhetorical ploy designed to encourage critics of American literature to pay more attention to science fiction." My interest in science fiction predated by a good many years my interest in American literature. More recently, I have come to appreciate that the sensibility or imaginative structure which attracted me to science fiction drew me also to much American literature. I argue that the romance form and the shape of the American experience account in large measure for the area of congruence between science fiction and American literature—and I remain convinced. I recognize that the now commonplace assertion that the romance form is characteristic of much American literature is undergoing some revision (some of it misguided) and that the term "romance" has not been adequately defined, but I still believe that it makes more sense to call a good many major American books, including The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick, romances rather than novels. I would accept Professor Canary's statement that my procedure here is one of suggestive juxtaposition rather than formal argument but would plead that, believing in the truth of this literary congruency, lacking the space to insert monologue length material on the romance, and lacking statistical evidence concerning the incidence of romances, I have made a defensible case.

Certainly both Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were compelled to speculate about the role and future of America, while earlier works—important to the history of science fiction and apocalyptic literature—More's Utopia, Bacon's New Atlantis and Shakespeare's The Tempest all owe something to a consciousness of the new American world. Of course, there is a wider subject, not described in detail but which my book repeatedly infers, the relationship between science fiction and the many fine apocalyptic works of world literature which do not happen to figure in the American tradition. It is with this in mind that I have recently completed a coda article entitled "Science Fiction and Allied Literature." Christopher Small's study, Ariel Like a Harpy (1972; US title, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Tracing the Myth), of the relationship between Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound, the one exemplifying the negative, the other the positive pole of the apocalyptic imagination, points the way here. M.H. Abrams' Natural Supernaturalism (1971) provides one context.

I come finally to particular interpretations. Ursula Le Guin's own reactions to what I have to say about her novel are, of course, of special interest. Unfortunately there is so little congruence between her version of what I am trying to say and what I believed myself to be saying that I became suspicious as to how much of my book she had actually read. I do not understand how, if she had read my introductory section, she was unable to address herself to my conception of the apocalyptic imagination. Instead she refers to the biblical Apocalypse, describes herself as "an unconsistent Taoist and a consistent unChristian" and indicates that "Anybody who goes after the Christian mythos in my work...is going to be looking for pearls in a pigpen." This may very well be true, although I would not describe her work as a "pigpen." The point is such a quest is essentially irrelevant to my approach.

In my terms The Left Hand of Darkness may be described as a product of the apocalyptic imagination most obviously in two senses. The basic thrust of the book appears to me to be visionary as one might expect of even an "unconsistent Taoist." Like the English Romantics and the American Transcendentalists, Ms. Le Guin is after the evocation of a unified realm beyond space and time. Secondly, her androgynous beings—if taken literally—constitute a radically new idea of man and thus might be said to effect a philosophical apocalypse. Our conception of what it is to be human would be drastically revised were a Gethenian or any intelligent alien suddenly to appear in our midst. In fact, like much of the best science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness is visionary, philosophical and satirical at the same time and might have fitted, to a greater or lesser degree, into all of my categories of the apocalyptic imagination. It figures where it does solely on the basis of what I understand to be its primary emphasis. What makes The Lathe of Heaven apocalyptic in my terms is not so much the reality changes in themselves—the fake apocalypses with which the "book is just bubbling"—but the revolutionary philosophical concept that an individual's dreams may literally bring about instantaneously a new human, world, or universal "reality."

I am, however, happy to see that Ms. Le Guin does accept the observation which is at the back of my entire analysis of her novel, namely that, in her words, "the plot ...does not reflect the androgynity" of the Gethenians. It may be true, as Professor Canary complains, that in my summary of the plot I have overemphasized the political action and downplayed characterization and, what is very much self-evident, the importance of the relationship between Ai and Estraven. But to say that the novel comes to focus primarily on Ai's understanding of the truly alien nature of Estraven does not answer the action/androgynity disjunction—it in no way necessitates that ambisexuality be at the root of what is alien about Estraven. Estraven might have qualified as an alien in any number of other ways.

What Ms. Le Guin does not seem to appreciate, however, is that my whole argument amounted to an attempt to heal this breach. Surely of significance among the mysteries and meanings symbolized or otherwise conveyed by the androgyne is the business of duality and unity. The theme of duality and unity, balance and wholeness runs through Ms. Le Guin's entire opus. It was so evident in The Left Hand of Darkness that I assumed its expression, whether direct or indirect, to be deliberate. Ms. Le Guin's interest in Gethenian sexuality appeared to me the first time that I read the book and appears to me now after a third reading, to be severely secondary to the possibility of using the androgyne as a means of expressing the issue of duality and unity. Although one can speak of telling understatement, that is perhaps why the implications of a sexual relationship between Ai and Estraven are evaded. In fact a reader's sense of the reality of the Gethenians as androgynes is lost from the moment when Ai as narrator elects to use Masculine pronouns to refer to them.

What I now know and what I didn't know when I wrote my interpretation of The Left Hand of Darkness is that Le Guin is a Taoist. I only became aware of this fact after reading Douglas Barbour's dissertation on contemporary science fiction, Worlds out of Words. Taoist thinking is very much dependent upon the concepts of duality, unity, balance and wholeness. In the light of Ms. Le Guin's comments, it would appear that what I speak of as a directing mythic structure of unity and duality in the book, reflected in terms of plot development and the androgyne, got there not consciously but unconsciously. My implication that "the plot is deliberately forced into the service of a rigid, pre-established, allegorical framework" remains. I would only wish to add now that this framework reflects the Taoist structure of Ms. Le Guin's unconscious. Her Taoist convictions must inform her fictional choices in ways that she does not always consciously recognize.

When I say myth, by the way, I mean myth, not allegory, and when I say symbol I mean symbol and not sign. I would admit, however, that I failed to distinguish clearly between mythic content, which some writers choose to rework, and mythic structure which, a la Northrop Frye, may be found in all fictions. Few would deny, I think, that in reusing a mythic content there is some danger that the writer of science fiction may produce something like the generally deplorable kind of "space opera" previously associated with the transposed "western." My citing of Delany and Zelazny in this context is perhaps unfortunate. Maybe Lord of Light and The Einstein Intersection are creative reworkings of mythic material comparable to works by O'Neill and Sartre and thus perfectly justifiable. I do think that generally speaking, the science-fictional reworking of myth has shown itself to be a dead end. But in my analysis of The Left Hand of Darkness I am concerned with what seemed to me to be an overly deterministic use of a mythic structure.

I did not intend, as Professor Fredericks believes, an adverse value judgement concerning all writers who use myth in a deliberate and self-conscious way. In attacking my version of Frye, that "the mythic basis of any fiction, aside from the occasional reworkings of an O'Neill or a Sartre, should exist irrespective of an author's intention and in a severely displaced relationship to the story line" (p77), Professor Fredericks leans very heavily on my "should" and omits to give my preceding qualification its intended emphasis. Perhaps I should have simply said "exists" and dropped the "should."

As for my comparison with Frye's mythos of winter, Professor Fredericks' complaint of artificiality is justified. It crept in there because of my incidental attempt, and no part of the author's intention as Ms. Le Guin testifies, to treat The Left Hand of Darkness as a kind of model for the science fiction genre. This was a rhetorical convenience given that this book is the first example of science fiction which I submit to detailed analysis. Whatever low opinion Ms. Le Guin may have of my chapter, I still admire her book while standing by my argument that it is radically flawed. Indeed had I not admired her book it would not have taken up so much space in mine.

I recognize that, regarding many of the criticisms raised, I am simply not in the best position to respond. For example, Professor Canary finds that a number of my interpretations are reductive and insufficiently sensitive to the presence of ambiguity. I hope this isn't so and would refer him to my description of The Confidence Man as a work about which "a critic can say everything and nothing with confidence" (p272). I do not believe that one must choose between rational and supernatural explanations in Wieland. Is Professor Canary correct, by the way, to refer to ventriloquism as the pseudo-science of Brown's time or to "telepathy and other phenomena of parapsychology" as "the pseudo-science of our time"?

By way of conclusion I would like to thank Professor Canary, Professor Fredericks and Ursula K. Le Guin for their critiques. And I am grateful for this opportunity to answer objections and clarify what appear to me to be misunderstandings. Certainly my book is not without its weaknesses. Some of them I am already aware of and, no doubt, with the passage of time, I shall become aware of more. I can only hope that there are at least as many corresponding strengths which will remain.

NOTES

¹Published in 1974 by Doubleday Anchor in paperback and by Indiana University Press in hardback with the same pagination; page-references to these editions are made in the text of the various papers. RDM.

²The notion of SF as "romance" is not an important part of Ketterer's argument, although I find it reasonable. The documentation of romance as central in American fiction is a simple appeal to authority—"the romance, which, thanks largely to Richard Chase, we now recognize as the basic form of the American novel" (p22). I am bothered by this because Chase's book, although interesting, displays the theoretical inadequacy of most American criticism of the 1950s. —RHC.

³I am prepared to argue that these tensions can be found in works of "mimetic" realism such as War and Peace and in works of "mimetic" naturalism like Studs Lanigan. Any such argument could, of course, be answered by claiming that the works in question were (in fact? therefore?) "apocalyptic." Vague arguments are hard to refute. —RHC.

⁴The reference to "Brecht's theory of estrangement" is presumably meant as a friendly gesture toward the work of Darko Suvin, but it seems to me that Suvin's work displays a kind of intellectual rigor quite different in kind from the projective commentary of Ketterer. —RHC.

⁵The reader will note that I place Wieland within the realm of "the fantastic" as defined by Tzvetan Todorov, whose work on The Fantastic (trans. Richard Howard, 1973) seems to be an excellent model of the way studies of a genre should be done. —RHC.

⁶AIthough it seems unnecessarily reductive to me, I enjoyed Ketterer's reading of The Confidence Man as an anti-Christian novel, missing only a reference to Lawrence Thompson's Melville's Quarrel With God (1952). It did not seem to me, however, that the notion of "apocalyptic literature" was integral to the reading. —RHC.

⁷Clareson's review appeared in Extrapolation 15(1974):156-57. My own review in SFS 1(1974):217-19 was more favorable to Ketterer. I hope that the reservations I announce in this paper will not be taken in a negative sense as a revision of my earlier judgment so much as a positive speculation on an important new critical theory of the science-fiction narrative. —SCF.

⁸See the recent article by Jane Mobley, "Toward a Definition of Fantasy Fiction," Extrapolation 15(1974):117-28, who would also suggest a revisionist view of fantasy like the one I offer here. I believe, however, that the author over-rates "magic," regarding it as she does as essential to fantasy fiction. "Non-empiricism" is not a synonym for "magic." See Ernest Cassier's Language and Myth (English trans. 1946). —SCF.

⁹I borrow the latter term from Suzanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key 3rd edn (1947). —SCF.

¹⁰There are many major works of scholarship which confirm my views. I would single out Langer (Note 9), Ernst Cassirer's An Essay on Man (1944), Gaston Bachelard's The Philosophy of No (English trans. 1968), and Jean Piaget's Psychology and Epistemology (English trans. 1971). Recently, Sharon Spencer in Space, Time, and Structure in the Modern Novel (1971) has shown the same process—an attempt to transcend naive realism—at work in 20th-century mainstream fiction. —SCF.

¹¹I notice, too, that Ketterer provides only a vague "passim" footnote reference to Frye, not a specific page reference, and indeed I am certain that Frye would not accept this prescription of Ketterer's against the mythological novel as an implication of his own theory. I am even more certain that Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness bears not the slightest relationship to Frye's mythos of winter. Ketterer's analogy is completely artificial, apart from his prejudice against Left Hand. —SCF.