BOOKS IN REVIEW
Witkiewicz in Translation
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. Insatiability. Translated by Louis
Iribarne. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. xiv + 447 p. $15
In early September, 1939, a few days after the Nazi invasion of Poland, Stanislaw
Ignacy Witkiewicz, like thousands of other refugees, fled from Warsaw towards the east. On
September 17, he learned that the Soviet Union had attacked from the east. Feeling that
his darkest apprehensions about the triumph of totalitarianism were coming true and that
there was no escape, the 54-year-old author committed suicide the next day by slitting his
wrists with a razor.
Painter, playwright, novelist, aesthetician, and philosopher, Witkiewicz -- or Witkacy
as he called himself -- belongs to the writers and thinkers known in Poland as
catastrophists, who sprang up in the period framed by two world wars, the first of which
brought the Polish state back into existence after nearly 150 years of dismemberment, and
the second of which threatened the nation with total annihilation. Poised between
cataclysms, Witkacy forecast an apocalyptic close to Western civilization and wrote with
sardonic humor about the approaching end of the world.
The major theme in all of Witkacy's works is the growing mechanization of life,
understood not as dehumanizing technology, but rather as social and psychic regimentation.
In dozens of plays and two large novels, Witkacy portrays the threatened extinction of a
decadent individualism. The degenerate remnants of a once creative mankind will be
replaced by a new race of invading levelers who will establish the reign of mass
conformity, modeled on the beehive and anthill -- by what Orwell calls
"insect-men."
Thoroughly -- although ironically -- Euro-centric, the author of Insatiability most
often presents the invading forces as coming from the outside, representing a different
culture that will subvert moribund old world values. In his first literary work, the
one-act comedy Cockroaches, which at the age of 7 Witkacy printed on his own
hand-press, a menacing gray object in the sky drawing closer and closer is revealed to be
a cloud of cockroaches from America. Undoubtedly the precocious child, hearing his father
discuss the mechanization of work in the United States according to the assembly line
principles of F. W. Taylor, associated modern mass production with notions of
collectivity, alien and deeply inimical to the individuality so highly prized by the
Witkiewicz family. Brought up in the picturesque mountain resort of Zakopane and educated
entirely at home according to this father's elite system, young Witkacy was nurtured on
contempt for the mob (whatever its class origins) and trained to revere art, although the
boy had doubts about his own vocation and longed to be part of a school world forbidden to
him.
Four years as a tsarist officer in Russia, where he witnessed the last days of St.
Petersburg and lived through the February 1917 Revolution, even being elected political
commissar by his regiment, gave Witkacy an entirely new perspective on the collectivist
threat and caused him to revise drastically his ideas about the supreme importance of art
and artists in the 20th century. In a long series of plays, which the painter-playwright
began immediately after his return to Poland in 1918, Witkacy showed, in vivid but
disintegrating images, the collapse of an ancien régime composed of obsolete
individualists -- decadent artists, demonic women, Nietzschean supermen -- which is
overrun by "the uniform, gray, sticky, stinking, monstrous mass."
Although seen largely from the point of view of the doomed social class of
"pseudo-Hamlets" who have lost faith in their own reason for existence and been
rendered grotesquely impotent, Witkacy's dramas also include in the dramatis personae the
amoral adventurers who take over revolution and exploit it for their own advantage. In
times of violent social upheaval, those who come out on top are not the ideologically pure
but the ruthlessly opportunistic. In They (1920), a prophetic play dealing in
thought control, confession to uncommitted crimes, the destruction of modern art, and
government by informers and secret organizations, Witkacy explores the real, as opposed to
the apparent, sources of power. THEY, ubiquitous and protean, have assumed control of the
institutions of public life and, in the guise of the League of Absolute Automationism,
enforce the tyranny of society over the individual.
Unlike Capek in R.U.R. and Kaiser in the Gas trilogy, the Polish
playwright was little concerned with the enslavement of man to the machine or the dangers
inherent in advanced industrialization. For Witkacy, modern science and modern art are
allies in the struggle against the anthill; both are subversive of stability and
uniformity and must be rigidly controlled by the new tyrants. Well versed in the theories
of Einstein, Whitehead, Bohr, Mach, Cantor, and Heisenberg, Witkacy recognized that the
conventions of realistic drama are based on mechanistic Newtonian physics. In his own
plays he attempted to create a new dramatic model (which he called Pure Form) derived as
much from the discoveries of the new mathematics as from Picasso's breakthrough in
non-representational painting. In his most farsighted antiutopian play of the 1920's, Gyubal
Wahazar, the automated political realm of the future is portrayed as "a
sixth-dimensional continuum," in which human nature has become something infinitely
malleable and subject to endless transmutation. Subtitled "Along the Cliffs of the
Absurd, a Non-Euclidean Drama in Four Acts," Gyubal Wahazar abandons
old-fashioned psychology and techniques of story-telling in order to portray future
totalitarianism as a world of indeterminacy and relativity; this anticipates by a few
years Evgeny Zamyatin's thesis in "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other
Things," that modern art forms must abandon fixed plane co-ordinates and project
reality onto fast-moving, curved surfaces. Known as "His Onlyness," the insane
dictator Wahazar -- a super-individualist who wishes to liberate mankind from metaphysical
longings and return the human community to the primal harmony of the beehive -- becomes a
martyr to his own cult of the leader, but upon his death, the frightening Dr. Rypmann is
able to fabricate new tyrants by "the fission of the psychic atom," and the
nightmare continues.*
During his lifetime, Witkacy was better known as a novelist than as a playwright, since
his two major works of fiction were brought out by established publishing houses whereas
most of his dramas went unpublished and unperformed. Because of their politically
sensitive character, Farewell to Autumn (1927) and Insatiability
(Nienasycenie, 1930) cannot be reprinted in Poland at the present time, although
there was a limited re-issue of the latter work in 1957, after the "thaw." Louis
Iribarne has performed an important service for English-speaking readers with a dynamic
translation of Insatiability that captures the vigor and grotesque humor of the
original. Of all Witkacy's works the most complex linguistically and stylistically, Insatiability
is a bizarre potpourri of erotic adventures, philosophical speculations, and
predictions of coming disaster; to have rendered this idiosyncratic monster of a novel
into vivid, juicy English is an outstanding accomplishment testifying to Iribarne's
extraordinary skill as a translator. In addition, Iribarne provides an exemplary 40-page
introduction to the life and work of the author as well as an incisive commentary on the
novel.
There are those who argue that Insatiability is the author's masterpiece, and
it is certainly the most Witkacian in the virtuoso narrative digressions and inexhaustible
comic inventions. At the same time this wild, lunatic, and phantasmagoric book has proved
to be one of the most prophetic works of 20th-century fiction, not so much in its
particular predictions (although some of these are quite uncanny) as in its capturing of
the age's sensibility through brief composite portraits of the "psychosocial"
environment. The fractured picture that results is that of an incoherent ersatz world
which resembles our own. In the Witkacian era of insatiability, everything from genius to
revolution, from food to mystical experience, from art to patriotic heroics, is an
inauthentic manifestation of pseudo-culture. Change has accelerated so strongly that
"the distances between generations had diminished to the point of being ridiculous:
people just a few years younger than others were apt to refer to the latter as their
'elders' " (II:288). Throughout all the media there is systematic falsification of
the news, while the government is perceived by all as an organized mafia behind a mafia,
causing such a loss of belief in politics that the state becomes regarded as a sport.
Meanwhile, in the background, the superbly disciplined Chinese communists, after subduing
counter-revolutionary Russia, are poised to take over the blandly bolshevized states of
Western Europe.
In one way a traditional "education novel," Insatiability presents
the initiation into life of the young hero, Genezip Kapen, who, faced with frightening
impulses within his psyche and vast impersonal threats in the society around him, sinks
slowly into mechanized mindlessness, unable to retain his human individuality; at the same
time, Poland is likewise losing her battle to hold back the onrushing Chinese. As
schizophrenic as the bewildered young hero is the divided temporal perspective, situating
the novel at the point "where the opposing forces of past and future intersect"
(II:246). Although the action of Insatiability is situated in the
post-revolutionary world of the 21st century, the new age is seen refracted in an obsolete
pre-revolutionary mirror, Poland -- a limbo and refuge for decadent aristocrats, deranged
artists, posturing titans, and philosophical sensualists.
Set against this crumbling stronghold of individualists and ready to crush it is the
"mobile Chinese Wall" (1:36), a collective human automaton, drawing closer and
closer. This "flawless, fearless machine," with its countless invisible feet
marching in unison like a huge organism, is Witkacy's ironic version of the old
"yellow peril" cliché and the ultimate embodiment of social mechanization. It
is this sinister drift of Orient to Occident that brings about the Spenglerian decline of
the West in Insatiability. In the second half of the novel, a shadowy and
enigmatic Malay appears in the West, spreading his mystical religion of universal
contentment by means of the "Murti-Bing pill," sold by street vendors, which
relieves the anguish of individual personality. Quickly lulled into ecstatic happiness,
the pill-takers no longer fear the coming extermination of their egos through social
regimentation. Witkacy seems strangely prescient in his identification of drugs and
mysticism as the preferred escape mechanisms of our own age, and his Murti-Bing pill
anticipates the comparable social use of chemistry in two later antiutopian novels: soma
in Huxley's Brave New World and psychem in Lem's Futurological Congress.
Thus, European metaphysical quests -- the essential expression of insatiability -- are
replaced by two instant ideologies, both from the East: mystic Murti-Bingism and
materialistic Chinese communism. Opposed as these two at first may seem, in Witkacy's view
both are designed to eliminate the conscious thinking mind and the inevitable suffering
which it brings. The pill softens up the already demented and debilitated Europeans so
that they can painlessly adjust to the political control which will definitively liberate
them from their own madness and despair and turn them into smoothly functioning members of
the state machinery.
[*Other plays by Witkiewicz which might be considered as at least
borderline SF are Tumor Mozgowicz (Tumor Brainiowicz), about a mathematical
genius who creates a revolutionary new scientific system that threatens the bases of
civilization; and Szewcy (The Shoemakers), "A Scientific Play with
Songs," which presents a series of revolutions culminating in an era beyond ideology
presided over by technocrats.]
-- Daniel Gerould
A Romantic Reassessment -- Unreassessed
Safaa El-Shater. The
Novels of Mary Shelley. Salzburg Studies in English Literature Under the
Direction of Professor A. Stürzl: Romantic Reassessment, ed. James Hogg. Institut für
Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1977. 172p. Distributed in the USA
by Humanities Press. $19.75.
Mounting evidence attests that Mary Shelley's fortunes on the literary stockmarket are
rising. Unlike previous editions, the fourth edition of the Norton Anthology of
English Literature (1979) includes a selection from her works. And thus it is that a
study probably written in the early 1960s (the most recent bibliographical item cited,
dating from 1965, seems to have been a later interpolation) is published -- to judge from
the typos, after inadequate proofreading -- in 1977. Though Safaa El-Shater's book is not
totally worthless, its value, unlike the object of analysis, has diminished with the
passage of time. It is a matter of concern that El-Shater was not required by her
publisher to rewrite her study taking account of the last 15 years of Mary Shelley
scholarship.
Mary Shelley published 6 novels: two of considerable importance to the development of
SF, Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826); two historical
romances, Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830); and two domestic
romances, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). El-Shater takes up the
novels in chronological order devoting a chapter to each of the first five and treating Falkner
in an Epilogue.
Inevitably, given the date of composition, most of what she has to say about Frankenstein
is routine. But which edition of Frankenstein is she using? Her footnoting
technique is often inadequate, even when it dawns on the reader (lacking any footnoted
direction) that such information is to be complemented by the Bibliography. She
characterizes the mixed nature of Frankenstein reasonably enough: "it is at
once a horrific and a social novel with a serious philosophical aim.... It ... anticipates
the science fiction of the present day. In addition, it has some interesting Oriental
[Safie's Story] and travel [five different trips are described] elements" (p.8).
However, without much in the way of demonstration, its corresponding "conglomerate
patchwork of narrative techniques" is judged negatively, the prefatory Walton section
is viewed as extraneous, and "the epistolary form" is declared "inadequate
and almost pointless" (p.28). Some of El-Shater's contextual material is of interest,
particularly the emphasis on the influence of Rousseau's Les Rêveries du Promeneur
Solitaire. Other contextual statements are misleading. Whatever mysterious experiment
by Erasmus Darwin Mary Shelley may be referring to in her 1831 Introduction, there is no
evidence that he attempted "to turn a piece of vermicelli into a worm" (p.9).
Elsewhere there seems to be some confusion between the concepts of "biological
reproduction," "[H]omonculi" (sic), "robots and
automatons," and the nature of the monster (p. 17).
El-Shater quotes on p.35 the letter to Maria Gisborne about Valperga, in which
Mary Shelley observes that, "It has indeed been a child of mighty growth, since I
first thought of it in our library at Marlow. I then wanted the body in which I might
embody my spirit. The materials for this I found at Naples.... It has indeed been a work
of some labour since I have read and consulted many books." This image of a book as a
living being seems to be a carry-over from Frankenstein, "my hideous
progeny" (1965 Signet edition, p.xii). Like Frankenstein, Valperga is very
much a composite work, "racked out of fifty old books" in Percy Shelley's words
(quoted p.63). El-Shater speculates that he contributed some of the wordage to Valperga
and agrees with Claire Clairmont that one of the novel's characters is "Shelley
in female attire" (p.50). Correspondingly, Shelley had a hand in the writing of Frankenstein
and may be discerned in the characterization of the protagonist. Another common
element, that of the doppelganger, may be deduced -- again the point is not made -- from
El-Shater's summary of Valperga: one of the main characters experiences a
disturbing dream concerning a shadowy double. (El-Shater does suggest a number of
interesting parallels with another book, George Eliot's Romola, which she sees Valperga
as anticipating.) The detailed summaries provided for each of the novels might well
be considered the most valuable aspects of this study since, aside from Frankenstein, Mary's
works remain pretty much unread. El-Shater follows each plot summary with a mechanical
balancing of virtues and defects. Among its defects, Valperga is judged to be
overlong. The same criticism might be leveled at many of the quotations which pad out this
commentary.
The chapter on The Last Man is much the most successful. Although the Last Man
theme was popular at the time and may be understood as "a variation in the legend of
the Wandering Jew" (p.93), El-Shater rightly stresses that Mary's interest in the
topic had much to do with the fact that, after the deaths of Shelley and others, she felt
herself to be in the position of the last woman. The roman
à clef nature of the
novel is fully described and its various weaknesses convincingly identified. In spite of
the novel's title, "it is hard to decide which is its central character" (p.
84). The character of Lionel (Mary's surrogate) is judged to be unsuccessful largely
because of the diversity of the novel's three parts: the centre of interest shifts from
the domestic sphere to the political to the catastrophic (and metaphoric) plague.
Furthermore, the futuristic illusion is unconvincing. The central theme of the novel,
"Mary's belief that whatever man's achievement on earth, he is bound to be destroyed
by the gods," El-Shater sees as "another aspect of" the Frankenstein theme
which is "concerned with the tragic results of man's scientific progress"
(p.92). Mary's "notion of God," it is usefully emphasized, "was not that of
Christianity. It was a belief in Necessity" (p.93). Equally, we are reminded, her
notions about republicanism and human nature were not Percy's.
The last three novels are distinctly inferior to the first three. However, Lodore and
Falkner contain interesting evidence of some of Mary's basic beliefs. Mary
Shelley was not Mary Wollstonecraft: she "believed that woman's ultimate aim should
be to provide solace and comfort for man" (p. 146). In an 1835 letter to Maria
Gisborne, she even asserts "that the sex of our material mechanism makes us quite
different creatures -- better though weaker but wanting in the higher grades of
intellect" (quoted p. 146). Nevertheless, because the loneliness she experienced
after Percy's death had much to do with her own dependent character, Mary did come to
realize that "A degree of independence is ... necessary for woman" (p. 148).
Repeatedly in this series of often superficial if generally even-handed critiques,
El-Shater fails to draw out the more significant implications of the material she
presents. This is nowhere more apparent than in her failure to note the presence of
submerged quasi-incest patterns in Lodore and Falkner. Yet their role in
Frankenstein and especially in the 1819 novelette Mathilda (which
El-Shater does not deal with) suggests that here we have a matter touching on the central
wellspring of Mary Shelley's creative imagination. Unfortunately, a full exploration of
this topic -- and others -- must await the publication of another and better study.
-- David Ketterer
Hawthorne
Taylor Stoehr. Hawthorne's
Mad Scientists: Pseudoscience and Social Science in Nineteenth Century Life and Letters.
Hamden, CT Archon Books, 1978. 313 p. $19.50
This is a frustrating book for the Hawthorne scholar. The title is promising, but
misleading; it is the subtitle that really characterizes this work. Stoehr seems far more
familiar with and interested in 19th-century pseudo-sciences and social sciences than in
Hawthorne's mad scientists. Devoting a chapter to each, he provides detailed examinations
of mesmerism, physiognomy and phrenology, homoeopathy, associationism, spiritualism,
feminism, and prison reform. He discusses the history of each of these
"sciences," its basic tenets, its most famous practitioners, and finally its
influence on Hawthorne.
It is not difficult to prove that Hawthorne was familiar with most of these ideas, and
it is clear that he exploits some of them in his fiction. Stoehr, however, makes excessive
claims. For example, in discussing physiognomy, Stoehr quotes a number of passages from The
House of the Seven Gables -- passages in which Hawthorne assesses a character's
spiritual qualities (or lack thereof) by examining his/her face and facial expressions.
Stoehr uses these passages to support the assertion that Hawthorne was greatly influenced
by the theories of the physiognomists. It is true, of course, that physiognomists put
great stock in the reading of faces; it is also true, however, that fiction writers
(especially writers of third person narratives) have always looked to the face as a kind
of objective correlative for character. I doubt that Faulkner could be called a
physiognomist just because he describes Flem Snopes as a man "with a broad face ...
eyes the color of stagnant water, and projecting from among the other features ... a tiny
predatory nose like the beak of a small hawk" (The Hamlet [New York, 1940],
p. 52). It is clear from the biographical data that Hawthorne was quite familiar with the
theories of the homeopathists, and Stoehr may be right when he argues that Roger
Chillingsworth is a homoeopathic physician. But Stoehr does not really explain why this
fact is important and how it might heighten our understanding of the character or the
story.
Stoehr's linking of pseudo-science and social science is a bit disconcerting, and it is
not fully justified until the book's final chapter, where Stoehr maintains that
Hawthorne's mad scientists derive from both utopian and gothic literary traditions.
However, Stoehr does seem to be on reasonably firm ground in discussing the influence of
the social sciences on Hawthorne, since Hawthorne's involvement with Brook Farm forced him
to confront many of the contemporary "isms" and Blithedale is clearly modeled on
Brook Farm. Yet, even in this section Stoehr tends to force the question of literary
influence, as when he insists that Zenobia is really a characterization of Margaret
Fuller. Zenobia may very well be a characterization of Fuller, but Stoehr does
not explain why this is important (or even interesting). A complete discussion of the
history of penal reform in New England seems an excessive preamble to a discussion of
Hollingsworth, the penal reformer at Blithedale.
In assessing the influence of 19th-century sciences and pseudosciences on Hawthorne's
fiction, Stoehr tends to focus on plot and characterization and overlooks or trivializes
thematic concerns. He does, however, link mesmerism to Hawthorne's "unpardonable
sin" and in doing so generates an intriguing proposition. He suggests that for
Hawthorne the writer is himself a sort of mesmerist: "the unpardonable sin is to be a
kind of artist .... the temptation of the mesmerist is to behave like the story teller
whose fancies immediately take shape as realities. [Hawthorne] used mesmerism as a
metaphor for the writer's art, and explored the question of his own guilt or innocence in
it." This is a marvelous notion and I wish that Stoehr had gone further with it. I
wish, too, that Stoehr had provided his readers with more such provocative ideas.
Structurally this book presents no major problems. Its overall outline is clear. There
are three major sections (pseudoscience, social science, and the mad scientists) and each
chapter within the first two sections explores a particular science. (I must admit that I
do not understand why spiritualism is in the social science section.) Despite the clarity
of outline, this book is disorganized in small ways. Possibly because the author has
difficulty abandoning an idea or jettisoning any of his research, the book is full of
repetitions and digressions. The chapter on spiritualism is a partial rehash of the
chapter on mesmerism. In the chapter on feminism, Stoehr provides a detailed plot summary
of an anti-philanthropic novel entitled Spiritual Vampirism: The History of Etherial
Softdown and Her Friends of the New Light. While the story is entertaining, it sheds
no light whatsoever on the subject at hand -- Hawthorne's uses of feminism in Blithedale,
and Stoehr himself points out that Spiritual Vampirism "appeared after
Blithedale so there is no question of influence." In the chapter on spiritualism
there is a detailed discussion of Melville which Stoehr lamely justifies by pointing out
that Hawthorne and Melville are both interested in "problems of narrative
illusion."
I fear that Hawthorne's Mad Scientists is really two books -- one on
Hawthorne's mad scientists, the other on pseudo-science and social science in 19th-century
life and letters. The second book dominates the first. Hawthorne's Mad Scientists will
do little to heighten its readers' understanding of Hawthorne's mad scientists. It does,
however, provide a great deal of information about the pseudo-sciences and social sciences
named above. It is, in the final analysis, a far more valuable tool for the student of
19th-century American popular culture than for the student of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
-- Lynn Berk
Sheckley's Victim
Robert Sheckley, The Tenth Victim (reprint of the 1965
Ballantine Books paperback, with a new introduction by Richard Gid Powers). Boston: Gregg
Press, 1978. 158p. + 8p. introduction + 8p. movie stills. $9.00.
Richard Gid Powers seems to understand as little as I do why this hasty novelization of
a fifth-rate movie should have been reprinted in hard covers. Most of his short
introduction discusses anything but the novel, concluding with the recommendation that the
reader try something else of Sheckley's instead. One is tempted to say "anything
else," but Sheckley has done worse, if not by much.
Powers' suggestion that Sheckley's "real subject is boredom" may be true not
only of this novel but also of most of his fiction of the last few years; at least that is
its effect. He no longer has any patience with characters, plot, premise or
rationalization in his latest novel, Crompton Divided (NY: Holt, Rinehart,
Winston, 1978), a self-indulgent farrago of bad puns and pointless jokes without even a
semblance of reality to make fun of.
In his contribution to Peter Nicholls' symposium, Science Fiction at Large (London:
Gollancz, 1976; NY: Harper and Row, 1977), Sheckley, in so far as he says anything at all,
admits to being a fantasist and at most a wry commentator on a world whose science and
technology have passed him by. Although much of his work, some of which Ace is now
reprinting in paperback, consists of exercises in silliness, he did write a number of
amusing take-offs on SF themes and "ideas" in the 'fifties, a few of which are
worth a second glance.
One of those is "The Seventh Victim," first published in Galaxy (April,
1953) and included in his first collection, Untouched by Human Hands (Ballantine,
1954; Ace 1979). It postulates a "future" with an amoral equivalent of war, the
licensing of people to alternate -- if they survive, -- as hunter and quarry in a
free-form but highly commercialized kind of dueling. The reader is asked to identify with
a man on the hunt, anxious for catharsis, who falls in love with his target, giving her
perfect opportunity to kill him instead and chalk up her tenth victim, stopping
him before he reaches seven.
The background and rationale are fed in a little obtrusively, the message is somewhat
repetitive, and the satire on gender roles seems a bit obvious today, but the story is
still coherent, effective, and entertaining. None of that can be said for the novel, based
on the 1965 movie, a rambling vehicle for a languid Marcello Mastroianni and a
characterless Ursula Andress. Lacking the visual stimulus of their presence and numerous
location shots in Rome (not compensated for by the presence of twelve still photographs),
the book offers a nonsensical and incoherent story which Sheckley apparently lacked the
interest either to rationalize or to make fun of.
This time the "hero" is a bumbling incompetent, his opponent seemingly
invincible, neither particularly interested, let alone seeking either catharsis or a star
rating. Most of the action is irrelevant or incomprehensible, including his participation
in a sun-worshipping cult and a conclusion which deprives the story of any point, their
anticlimactic marriage. Sheckley's style is flat and insipid, which does justice to the
actors and filmmakers by capturing the vapidity of their project, but does no credit at
all to him or to SF.
Gregg Press must really be scraping the bottom of the barrel if they can't find
anything better to reprint for collectors and libraries.
-- David N. Samuelson
Silverberg's Best
The Best of Robert Silverberg,
Vol. 1, with an Introduction by Barry Malzberg. Boston: Gregg Press, 1978. xiv - 258p.,
$13; The Best of Robert Silverberg,
Vol. 2, with an Introduction by Thomas D. Clareson. Boston: Gregg Press, 1978. xxi+ 323p.,
$15.
These volumes are useful and desirable not because the stories are otherwise
unobtainable (all have appeared in hard-cover anthologies or collections -- though a few
are a bit obscure), but for the opportunity to see what Silverberg considers the best of
his shorter work and to read his introductory comments on the background and genesis of
each story. Volume I is a reprint of the Pocket Books Best edition of 1976, while
volume 2 is a new selection assembled by Silverberg especially for the Gregg series.
The books cover 19 years of Silverberg's career, from 1954's "Road to
Nightfall" to 1973's "Trips," "Born with the Dead," and
"Schwartz between the Galaxies." Coverage overlaps, with Volume 2 offering more
detail on the latter five years of Silverberg's work. The principle of selection is, as
the titles have it, to identify the best rather than, say, the statistically
representative -- just as well, since that would make Volume 1, especially the 1954-62
section, not much more interesting than any other retrospective of interchangeable
magazine SF; instead, Silverberg has picked out of those years of massive production just
three stories that represent his ambitions rather than what he and undemanding magazine
editors would settle for: "Road to Nightfall," "Warm Man," and
"To See the Invisible Man." On the other hand, for the rest of Volume 1 and all
of Volume 2, the best is representative of his later work, and 3 outstanding
seventies collections -- Unfamiliar Territory (1973), The Feast of St.
Dionysus (1975), and Capricorn Games (1976) -- contribute 9 stories out of
17.
Many of these stories are touchstones for understanding Silverberg in matters of theme
and form -- "To See the Invisible Man," "Passengers,"
"Nightwings," "Sundance," "In Entropy's Jaws,"
"Breckenridge and the Continuum" -- and Thomas Clareson's introduction to Volume
2 shows the importance of irony and parody, alienation, and absurdism not only in these
late stories but in earlier work as well. Here, as in his longer essay, "The Fictions
of Robert Silverberg" (in Voices for the Future, vol. 2), Clareson insists
on the continuity of Silverberg's career and denies the convenient old Silverberg/new
Silverberg picture that Silverberg himself has contributed to in his autobiographical
writing. This view does not ignore the mass of pulp work that Silverberg cranked out in
the 'fifties, but does insist that the urge toward serious and innovative SF is present
from the beginning and that those remarkable stories that started appearing in Frederik
Pohl's Galaxy in the 'sixties are not the result of some miraculous conversion
but only the full emergence of the writer who was always there.
--Russell Letson
Pedagogies of Imagination
Georges Jean. Pour
une pédagogie de l'imaginaire. Paris: Casterman (coll.
"Orientations/E3"), 1976 (second edn: 1978). 170 p. Price: Can. $16.25.
Back to Home