# 17 = Volume 6, Part 1 = March 1979
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An Unnecessary Reprint
Hans Girsberger. Der utopische Sozialismus des 18. Jahrhunderts in Frankreich.
Wiesbaden: Focus-Verlag, 1973. XXVII+271 p.26 DM.
This photo-offset edition of the original 1924 book on utopian thought in 18th-Century
France, occasioned by the growing post-1968 interest in the history of utopianism and SF,
confirms Dale Mullen's complaints (in SFS 15:192) about unnecessary reprinting;
indeed it extends them, since he was speaking about post-1945 fiction, and this is an
example of pre-1945 secondary literature. The first 107 pp. of Girsberger's book are an
introduction discussing the philosophical, ideological, and material "bases"
of 18th-century utopianism, with a brief review of the utopian tradition from Plato to the
Renaissance and of the "socialist" extra-literary models for that tradition in
Antiquity, the Jesuit state in Paraguay, and the French rural cooperative as remnants of
the early "agrarian communism." Self-confessedly a second-hand digest, based
mostly on the French and German secondary literature of the 50 years preceding Girsberger's book, this first part is today completely superseded by intervening studies
on utopianism (for the general ones of Beer, Berneri, Biesterfeld, Bloch, Cioranescu,
Gove, Negley-Patrick, Schwonke, and Seeber see SFS 10:245-46; also Atkinson,
Baczko, Chérel, Coe, Coste, Courbin, Krauss, Le Flamanc, Manuel, Mühll, Patrick, Pons,
Poster, Trousson, Tuzet, Venturi, Volgin, and Wijngaarden, to mention only the main
studies dealing with 18th-century authors). However, the investigation of the texts of
"utopian socialism" proper which follows on pp. 108-235 is not much more useful
either. First, it is based on what I have elsewhere (see chapter 3 of my book Metamorphoses
of Science Fiction, US 1979) called the "antediluvian" approach in utopian
studies, i.e. the isolation of a fully perfect and ideal "essence" of utopia
which is by definition identical in "poetically intuitive" and
"philosophically dialectical" (in other words, fictional and non-fictional)
"forms"; this essence is for Girsberger "the universal image of the State as a
whole... and the cultural-cum-social life in its totality" (p. 1). Therefore he
proceeds to discuss the "social nucleus" of each utopian text without regard to
the "adventurous garb" (p. 1 11) when it happens to be a fictional tale. Such a
Kantian distinction of form and content, coupled with a total disregard of the former,
leads to a willful blindness toward the narrative effect of all utopian texts (even the
non-fictional ones). To take only one example, Girsberger has to dismiss the differences
between Morelly's two widely differing utopian works -- one fictional and
"romantic" and one non-fictional and "rational" -- with the observation
that they represent "the two sides of utopian socialism, the fantastically unbound
and the mathematically rational one" (p. 130): an observation which, assuming it were
correct, would then raise the question how come he discusses only the rational side in his
book, merely muttering feebly something about Shaftesburian pre-romanticism when
encountering such clearly non-mathematical texts as Morelly's Basiliade (not to
mention Restif, whose main work he confesses not to have found and blithely discusses from
paraphrases in secondary literature). Second, Girsberger divides his texts into three
groups using the basic yardstick of how they relate to "modern socialism" or
"the pure socialist form" (p. 110 -- whatever that meant in 1924: German
social-democratic or Russian bolshevik programs?); thus, e.g., Fontenelle's Ajaoiens is impure because it depicts merely an "agrarian communism." This yardstick
is then supplemented with a double grid based on the categories consistent vs. confused,
and purely vs. impurely collectivist. The final result is: 1) the radical or consistently
collectivist works (with common property of means of production, to spell out what he
coyly does not) which include Vairasse, Meslier, Morelly, Mably, Restif, Foigny, and
Fénelon (?!); 2) the reformist works with individual or mixed Property of the means of
production, which include Ramsay, Péchméya (?!), Mercia, Fontenelle (?!), the anonymous Féliciens,
Volney, and Boissel; 3) the "confused" works which are uncategorizable but
unimportant, probably because Girsberger confesses not to have read them (Guilbert,
Gueudeville, Tyssot, Berington, Tiphaigne, etc.). Not to raise queries of a basic nature,
such as how far are some of them utopian, or why are a number of 17th-Century or
non-French works included and a number of works excluded, my parenthetic
question-cum-exclamation marks indicate evidently nonsensical categorizations to which
Girsberger's non-method has led. Thirdly and perhaps crowningly, the actual texture of his
discussion is composed of ideological paraphrase of each work plus ideological commentary
within the described categories (together with hints about a few other categories, e.g.
that these are all anthropological and not cosmological utopias, which is obviously untrue
at least for Restif and to my mind for a number of other texts too). Even his title,
claiming all of these texts for "utopian socialism," is never substantiated -
certainly not by the confused discussion on socialism vs. collectivism on pp. 18-19, which
is concluded by denying the sense of such discussions! Nonetheless, on p. 213 he remarks
in an offhand note that all of these utopias can be imagined as a pyramid, in which the
broad basis is socialist, a smaller middle step is kind of mixed, a still smaller third
step is reformist, and a very small apex is liberal: if this is true, the whole thesis of
the book is untenable.
Thus, while there are a few interesting hints in the book, including its conclusion
(pp. 236-53), the well-intentioned leftist Focus-Verlag -- publisher also of several books
on SF to be reviewed soon in SFS -- would have been better advised to translate one of the
works I listed above, or even to go back to good old André Lichtenberger (Le
Socialisme au XVIIIe siècle, Paris 1895, rpt. 1970), from whom much of Girsberger's
data is anyway taken. The new preface by B. Heymann on bourgeois ideologies of the time is
of dubious relevance, while the appended bibliographic update, I think, fully proves my
point.
--Darko Suvin
The CEA Critic [Special Issue]: Fantasy, 40,
No. 2 (Jan 1978): 1-42.
$3.00.
Guest editor Donald E. Morse assembles three articles on teaching fantasy, four pieces
dealing with a specific author or theme (Horatio Alger, Sleeping Beauty, Isaac Bashevis
Singer, and Tolkien), and two bibliographies: Roger C. Schlobin's "Annotated
Bibliography of Fantasy Fiction," and Marshall Tymn's "An Annotated Bibliography
of Critical Studies and Reference Works on Fantasy." Except for purposes of
comparison, most of this material is of only passing interest to SF readers. However, one
is struck by the variety of works included under the rubric of "fantasy" (e.g.
Wells' The Time Machine, Haggard's She, Vance's The Dying Earth, and
Horatio Alger's fiction), which indicates the need for some general introduction to at
least raise the issue of genre - especially of the relationship between fantasy and SF.
The two bibliographies are useful to readers new to the field. Tymn's bibliography can be
supplemented with his Recent Critical Studies on Fantasy Literature: An Annotated
Checklist, Exchange Bibliography No. 1522 (May 1978), 21pp ($2.00) and his A Basic
Reference Shelf for Science Fiction Teachers, Exchange Bibliography No. 1523 (May
1978), l2pp ($1.50); both are published by the Council of Planning Librarians, General
Editor Mary Vance, P.O. Box 229, Monticello, Il. 61856. The SF bibliography is aimed to
"serve the needs of the beginning SF teacher." It brings up to date Ms. Susan
Keller's more complete and useful (and free!) "Science Fiction: The Sources of
Information" (1974 unpubl. ms) given out at the 1974 SFRA meeting in Milwaukee. Both
are supplemented by Tymn's and Schlobin's A Research Guide to Science Fiction Studies (reviewed
in SFS No.14).
--Charles Elkins
Campbell, Campbell Everywhere, and Not a Drop
To Drink
Leon E. Stover, La
Science-fiction américaine: Essai d'anthropologie culturelle. Paris:
Aubier Montaigne, 1972, 187 p., price ?.
This French translation of Leon Stover's "anthropological" study of American
SF has unaccountably not become available in the original, and is therefore being reviewed
here after waiting for the English version in vain. It is divided in two parts, "Form
and Function" and "Content." SF is, Stover affirms in his first sentence
(in flagrant contradiction with the Introduction by Professor Jacques Goimard), an
American paraliterary genre which has evolved out of the dime novels and pulps of the
early 20th century. Firmly rejecting the view that SF has a long history which can be
traced back to the Greeks (which is possibly why he ascribes The Golden Ass to
Lucian, p. 23), Stover describes the crucial roles of Gernsback and Campbell in early
American SF. In answer to the question "What is SF for?" - the title of his
second chapter - he defines what SF became under the guidance of John Campbell and what it
potentially still remains today: "a means of criticizing and questioning science, of
protecting man from a technology which has become too eager for results while ignoring the
consequences of those results" (p. 39). The growth of SF and its special relationship
to science stem, according to Professor Stover, from two factors: the rise and importance
of scientific research and development in the US; and the snobbish anti-scientific bias of
the American literary intellectuals which has caused engineers and scientists to develop
another means -- outside the Eastern, "leftist" literary establishment -- for
the exposition and criticism of their ideas. And in terms of such an explanation, the
ideal is of course John Campbell: "For the agnostics that we are," admits
Stover, speaking for American SF writers, "John Campbell represented the closest
thing to a God we had ever known" (p. 27).
The author's very open admission of his biases continues with a description of the methodo- logical format of his study:
All literature is, finally, a kind of anthropological criticism, a means for moralising
about human conduct. The realistic novel judges the individual's qualities: man as a
creature provided with (or deprived of), a certain ethical formation; and it often implies
a personal reform: can I improve myself?
In SF, the purpose of the moral judgement is man insofar as he shares customs and
practices - culture, in the sociological and anthropological meaning of the word .... My
analysis of the content of American SF in the second part of this volume will follow the
ten universal and basic principles of human culture .... Communication has led to
exchange which in turn has permitted the formation of Society, whose principle
end is to assure the subsistence of the individual through Work and the reproduction of
the population through Sexuality. These activities are oriented in Space and
Time. In every culture the end of these activities is preservation;
these activities are felt profoundly and are consequently less subject to rational forces
than the remaining four principles which constitute deliberate means employed by
every culture which, by their nature, have an innovative force. Play, for instance, is but
experimental comportment without which there could be no modification in the Acquisition
of Knowledge. Taken as a whole, culture is the human way of adapting to the
world and includes the means of Defence and the use of Tools (pp. 43-44).
In the following thematic chapters Professor Stover deals very narrowly, from a vulgar
or pseudo-sociological perspective, with certain problems which fall into each category.
He sets out to examine how SF has dealt with these ten "basic principles of human
culture," but in each case the "principle" is reduced to a single theme as
it is presented in ten or twelve stories and novels. Thus the fictions referred to under
the first heading, "Communication," revolve around what the author calls
"the American concept of sincerity" as seen in the theme of telepathy and in the
many stories in which communication is established despite the language barrier . . . .
Under Society, he examines the theme of return to primitive society centered
around the family and the underlying notion of innocence . . . . The principle of Work
leads to a discussion of ecology and the author again pays tribute to the memory of
John Campbell whose disappearance, he fears, marks the death of SF insofar as Campbell was
the only one capable of reconciling two hostile poles: engineers and scientists on the one
hand, the "anti-conformist enemies of science and rationalism" on the other (p.
82). The level of Professor Stover's critical judgements may be seen in his comment on Dune:
"If only we were taught in school to understand the world in a look as Herbert
does his imaginary world, we would probably be able to understand the political economy of
our planet and its workings as a whole" (p. 82)! Sexuality provokes a
different response from the author who attacks the "modern," explicit treatment
of sex (as exemplified by Heinlein's "disgusting" I Will Fear no Evil), while
praising that SF which criticizes the subjugation of sex to technique and technology; a
position which, he admits, coincides strangely with "traditional religious
opinions" and which suggests to him that there must be some kind of arrangement
possible between religion and scientific knowledge.
By limiting himself to a Campbellian definition of SF -- it is "a response to
modern research and the rapid material progress which has resulted from it" (p. 45)
-- the author restricts himself too severely, excluding, for instance, Jules Verne on the
(incorrect) grounds that he was "never concerned with the social consequences of his
actions" (p. 34). This methodological confusion is amplified not only by his personal
prejudices and biases (objectionable only insofar as they are presented as fact rather
than opinion), but by the interjection of "literary" criteria -- in rejecting as
worthless, for instance, most SF from the magazines of the 1930's (p. 22) -- into what he
describes as his "anthropological" approach. However, a "scientific"
description of a given corpus - in this case US SF would seem to be invalidated by any
prior, non-scientific delimitation of that corpus. Yet he uses "literary"
criteria, and admits as well that he has stressed stories from Astounding because
he has a complete collection of that magazine! Moreover, there is no explanation nor
documentation of his "ten universal and basic principles of human culture," a
declaration which I am very reluctant to admit as either anthropologically valid or as
useful in terms of SF criticism.
--Peter Fitting
Gérard Klein. Malaise dans la science-fiction. Metz:
l'Aube enclavée, 1978. 78p.
The two essays by Gérard Klein recently published in SFS -- "Discontent in
American Science-Fiction," No. 11 (1977) and "Le Guin's 'Aberrant' Opus:
Escaping the Trap of Discontent," No. 13 (1977) -- were, as we had told our readers,
only excerpts from a much larger work which is now available in its entirety in French.
The reader will find here a close-textured synthesis of the general ideological tendencies
and aesthetic choices of American SF from the early 60's on. Klein's approach is founded
upon a very original fusion of the Marxist sociology of Lucien Goldmann and Freudian
hermeneutics. Despite the title which suggests a wide range of material, the book deals
exclusively with American SF of which, one must add, Klein remains probably the most
probing connoisseur in continental Europe.
--Nadia Khouri
Luigi Russo, ed. Ventanni di fantaseienza in Italia: 1952-1972.
Palermo: La Nuova Presenza Editrice, 1978. 77 p. Lire 2,500. -
In the frame of the International Conference held in Palermo in October 1978 (see Nadia
Khouri's report in our section "Notes & Correspondence"), Luigi Russo had
organized an exhibition of which this book is the catalogue. But it is also more than that
since it provides a number of bibliographies and surveys of Italian SF, and includes
several short notes by prominent Italian writers and critics about the present state of SF
in Italy.
--Marc Angenot
Michael B. Goodman. William S. Burroughs: An Annotated Bibliography of
His Works and Criticism. Bibliography of
His Works and Criticism. New York & London: Garland Publishing,
1975. 96p. $13.00.
How much in Burroughs' writing, and consequently in Goodman's bibliography, is directly
related to SF is a matter of geneological interpretation. However, the influence of SF in
Naked
Lunch, Nova Express, and, perhaps, The Wild Boys seems evident enough to
justify drawing the attention of SFS readers and contributors to him by this review.
As Jack Ludwig points out in the introduction to Professor Goodman's bibliography, the
compiler "uses old-fashioned apparatus on a writer not very old fashioned," a
fact that all Burroughs (W.S. not E.R.!) scholars and users of this valuable tool should
appreciate. What Goodman sets out to do is to apply much common sense to a highly volatile
body of bibliographic information on Burroughs, sometimes contained in obscure or
inaccessible sources, and to present "in an organized format what major primary and
secondary sources exist, what is in them, and which ones are easily secured." Over
400 bibliographic entries are divided into seven sections: books by Burroughs; articles,
essays, and stories; interviews and biographic material; critical articles on Burroughs;
original letters owned by Columbia University; the Burroughs material from the Grove Press
Collection, kept by Syracuse University; and finally the bibliographic material on
Burroughs. Of these, sections V and VI are of particular interest to Burroughs scholars
because of their descriptive account of the contents of newly available manuscript
material, including unpublished letters to Kerouac, publishers' proofs, legal
correspondence surrounding the obscenity trials of Naked Lunch, and other
documents of critical and biographical interest, are accompanied by citations to ca 135
reviews, grouped under the most available edition of each work. Articles, essays, and
short stories are also arranged by title and include important information on reprints.
Some of the most substantial reviews have been treated as critical material by the
compiler, and can be found in the appropriate section. There is a similar overlap between
the section covering biographical material and the section of criticism; the latter
supplies references to close to a hundred articles that appeared in the American and
British press. A brief itemization of the principal bibliographical sources on
Burroughs brings the total to 425 citations. An author/title /topic index provides ready
reference to the individual entries.
If there is one thing to regret about Professor Goodman's bibliography, it is the
exclusion of translations of Burroughs' works and the deliberate non-attention to the
critical and biographical material in other languages. Lynda Rushing's bibliography of
Burroughs (Bulletin of Bibliography, July 1972) includes representative
translations into French, Italian, German, Japanese, and the Scandinavian languages. It is
reasonable to assume that their number has grown in recent years. The appearance of
Le Mitro Blanc (Paris: Seuil, 1976) and of L'oeuvre croisée (with Brion Gysin,
Paris: Flammarion, 1976) as well as of Philippe Mikriammos' book, William S. Burroughs (Paris: Seghers, 1975) is a good indication that the continuing foreign interest in
Burroughs' writing is sufficient to warrant bibliographic coverage in a guide of this
scope.
Nonetheless Professor Goodman's work will provide, as he intended it, "a solid
foundation for any study of [Burroughs's] work." That he accomplished this far from
easy task through an "old-fashioned" format is much to the users' advantage. No
bibliographer could have done so by following Burroughs' own "cut-up" style.
--Irena Žantovská-Murray
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