13 ways of asking, "Whither Science Fiction?"

[calimac]

A panel of "Bloggers as Public Intellectuals" featured a lot of modest panelist demurrals from the blurb's comparison of bloggers to such great pundits of yore as I.F. Stone and Edmund Wilson. But Chalfin's Law applies: everything is just guys doing stuff. Stone and Wilson were just guys writing, and so are you. Today's bloggers may make mistakes and say dumb things, but so did they. (Anyone remember Wilson's review of The Lord of the Rings, a take so uncomprehending as to raise serious doubt that he actually read the book?) Those writers also did great work for which they are justifiably remembered; but I'd believe it if Cory Doctorow (moderator of this panel) is also someday remembered as a great public intellectual, and the same goes for the others on this panel, including pnh (who described himself as a "blowhard" - yes, but he's a smart blowhard) and Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly. The opportunity to see Drum, whom I've been reading since his Calpundit days years ago, in person was one attraction of this panel. Fortunately I was denied the opportunity to rush up and babble to him how much I enjoy his work. No-one else I know in blogdom can end a post with "What's up with that?" with such authority.

One intriguing topic discussed on this panel was length of blog posts. I like them long, which by blog standards is a few hundred words. A really good writer, like tnh, also present, or a close friend (like many of those on LJ), can go into the low thousands and still keep me reading. Patrick praised the incision of the usually one-line posts of Atrios [not present], but I find Atrios's endless succession of these to be insufficiently interesting to read. Even less appealing to me is RSS, a service that (as I understand it) syndicates just the headlines from reader-chosen blogs. Cory described the process by which he learned that he should lure RSS readers by making the headline tell the whole story as much as the full post does. But in that case, unless the subject is one of special interest to me, why should I bother reading the post at all? Clicking on a link is more perceived effort than glancing down the page from a newspaper headline. I much prefer LJ syndication, by which you get the whole post unless it's behind a cut; and as for most blogs, I read them by just going to the page and seeing what's new. If they're updated rarely, I just visit them rarely.

At the panel on the author-reader contract, Nancy Kress offered the notion that the contract is implied in the opening paragraphs of the story. This tells you what kind of tale you're getting. A fantasy story, she says, will have (or should have) a certain heightening of tone, compared to a non-fantasy story, even if there's no fantasy element yet present. It seems to me that there's truth in this, but that in such genres as fantasies (the ones that begin in ordinary primary-world settings) and mysteries (the ones that begin elsewhere than with the murder or its discovery), the contract is carried by the packaging of the book as much as by the opening paragraphs. By the paragraph standard, The Lord of the Rings breaks the contract, as the tone changes so enormously after a few chapters. Kress excused it on the grounds that the seriousness of the stakes is brought in very early, if not on the first few pages.

The panel had begun with the authors talking about books that had influenced them. Kress turned to Peter Beagle and revealed that her first novel, a fantasy, was an homage to his A Fine and Private Place. "That's interesting," said he, "for I wrote A Fine and Private Place as an homage to one of my favorite stories ..." and as soon as he said that much I knew that the book he was about to mention had to be by Robert Nathan, as indeed he went on to say, though it was a specific novel I'd never read nor heard of (nor can I remember its title now).

I left the "Page 119" panel halfway through because I was falling asleep, which was not the fault of the panelists. It was Sunday morning, I'd gone to bed at 2:30 and woken up at 6, and I just wasn't up to the fine discrimination of prose style required to judge a book by a random page chosen from the middle. I found some personal amusement in putting the chunks to the opening-paragraph contract test, inappropriate as it is for interior chunks. One chunk turned out to be from a vampire romance, but the chunk began with a character's name, Sam, so I found myself thinking of Sam Gamgee, who would have been amusingly risible in this role.

Two nature-of-fantasy lit panels were less interesting than I'd hoped. One titled "Fantasy doesn't have to be about kings and wizards" led the panelists through the "well, duh" stage to list a few books. Another such panel, far more deadly, turned into a "How I Write It" offering from four authors, the two talented veterans being almost drowned out by the voluminous talking of two utterly self-confident tyros. I suppose that "Don't start with exposition, start with a character in a situation" is good advice for beginning authors, and one wouldn't want mediocre fantasy novels to begin with encyclopedia entries about the imaginary land; but instead we get too many mediocre fantasies beginning with "As I know, Bob" interior monologues by characters reviewing their life histories to themselves in the middle of a battle or something. This was an hour of practical advice on how to write mediocre fantasy, and I didn't need that.

A musical demonstration talk was vastly over-populated in a tiny room: a virtuoso on the glass armonica (spinning glass bowls, attached to a rod, that are played by rubbing your wet fingers along the rims). An eerily beautiful but quiet instrument, written for by Mozart and Beethoven. The player performed these pieces, but unfortunately has only recorded his own work, which turned out to be newage sludge.

Due to its popularity, this demo had a hard time breaking up before the next item in the room, a panel on Fan Projects which I moderated. A quiet talk with Len Moffatt and John Trimble about fan funds and fan directories and how cons got started, that sort of thing, with a gratifying few folks in the audience.

The panel on awards, which I shared with sandial and jerrykaufman, had a very tiny audience, composed entirely of award administrators of one sort or another, as qualified as we to discuss the topic. I explained why, as Hugo administrator, I'd announced that the film Apollo 13 was eligible, and offered a theoretical distinction between awards that seek only excellence within a fairly rigidly defined category, and those which seek both excellence and centrality to the theme of a fuzzy set. (The first kind includes the Hugos, the second kind the Tiptrees and Mythopoeics.)

The other panel I moderated was on Tolkien's short fiction. With Lisa Goldstein (our token fiction writer), Diana Glyer, and a woman authentically named Lorien Gray (her parents were Tolkien fans too), we discussed whether "Leaf by Niggle" is an allegory (some said yes; I said no, the symbolism is too multi-level to fit what Tolkien called allegorical) and whether we found "Smith of Wootton Major" effective (Lisa and I did; Diana and Lorien didn't; and then we split up and regrouped on "Farmer Giles of Ham"). We also talked about the posthumous short fiction, of which there's a surprising amount. I cited the Book of Lost Tales battle in which indestructable machines disgorge hordes of Orcs. Tolkien, just back from WW1, had extrapolated from primitive tanks to the armored personnel carrier. That makes him a science fiction writer.

Let me know if you'd like the Word document listing a sampling of the range of Tolkien's short fiction (with word counts, date of composition, history of publication) that I distributed on this panel.

Comments

[mithriltabby]

RSS feeds depend on how they’re set up. Some of them will just give you headlines, some of them will give you the first paragraph or so, and some will give you the entire text of the article.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

I hadn't previously heard of Chalfin's Law. Good one.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Chalfin = Greg Chalfin, former LA fan, now gafiated in the Bay Area. Not sure if it's ever been dubbed "Chalfin's Law" before, but it was a favorite observation of his.

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

I love it. There ought to be a wikipedia entry for it.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Somehow, I imagine there will be soon...

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

I used to see Greg at LASFS every week, back in the 1970s. At a guess, I don't think I've seen him once since ConFrancisco.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

If you limit yourself to Tolkien's very limited definition of allegory then, no, "Leaf" isn't an allegory. But that was a definition by someone who disliked allegory, rather like accepting a definition of SF as "that crap about rockets and aliens" by someone who knows literature very well and doesn't like SF.

By any reasonable and sympathetic definition of allegory (one that wouldn't exclude, say, The Pilgrim's Progress, as Tolkien's -- or at least your redaction of it here -- pretty well would), however, "Leaf by Niggle" is very much an allegory.

And so is Narnia. But not tLotR or the "Space Trilogy."

So there.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No, I believe Tolkien's definition of allegory did include books like Pilgrim's Progress and Animal Farm, and "Leaf by Niggle" does not entirely decode to single-level allegory as those books do. There's one level of straight decoded symbolism in "Leaf", the one where the journey = death and the workhouse = Purgatory. So far it is allegory. But so much else in the story does not require that kind of decoding. Nothing about Niggle's art resolves that way, where it makes no sense unless the symbolism is penetrated. The Tree, as described on the opening pages, is remarkably parallel to Tolkien's own work. But you don't have to know that, and you're missing nothing essential to understand the story if you don't. That's not allegory as Tolkien defined it, a definition which would include Bunyan and Orwell, whose stories are straight, thorough symbolic allegory.

For the full argument, see Richard Purtill's GoH speech from the 1977 San Diego Mythcon, reprinted in his book J.R.R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality & Religion.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

I see a problem here.

Neither The Pilgrim's Progress nor Animal Farm "requires" decoding. Both can be read as engaging stories by someone who does not know the symbolism: I did this with the Orwell as a young person, and know people who have read and enjoyed Bunyan in pretty complete ignorance of Christian moral theology.

However: both have a clear layer of symbolic meaning, intended by their author, in which every significant person, action, and object takes part, paralleling something in the intended layer of meaning.

But in what way is that not true of "Leaf?" Or what in addition is true of them that is not true of "Leaf" that makes them "true allegories?"

And why (I repeat) does the definition of a genre offered by someone admittedly hostile to that genre have any bearing on any useful discussion of that genre?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Everything in Progress or Animal Farm may be decoded in terms of the prime allegorical level. That is not true of "Leaf". Niggle's goals as an artist, the question of the artist's duties to society and vice versa, and even more so the broader question of Niggle's duties as a man to society and its duties to him, are all on different levels from one another, and none of them are part of the death/purgatory/paradise symbolic allegory.

I can imagine someone reading Progress who knows nothing else of Christian moral theology. (I pretty much don't.) But I find it harder to imagine anyone, at least today, reading all the way through that book who doesn't even know that it's a Christian moral theological alleogry, and who is not at least somewhat edified on the subject by reading it. Is that what you mean? If so, I'd request further details on how this came to occur.

I can imagine a child reading Animal Farm without knowing anything about the encoding of Russian history. But, man, are you ever missing the point of the book if you do. Similarly, you are missing the point of Narnia if the "Aslan as Christ" encoding doesn't occur to you. And you are missing the point of the journey and the Workhouse in "Leaf" if you don't grasp that symbolism. All these encodings were obviously consciously intended by the author, and are essential to a basic understanding of the story, and are therefore allegorical. But the "encoding" (if it was a conscious encoding) of Tolkien's own creative work in Niggle's painting is not essential to understanding the story. It's an enrichment, an applicability as Tolkien called it.

Lewis, by the way, denied that Aslan was an allegorical encoding of Christ. Aslan is Christ, yes, but they have a different relationship: Aslan is an imagined alternate incarnation of the Second Person, not an allegory of Christ in our world, he said. And I say that Narnia as a whole is no more an allegory than "Leaf" is. There is too much in the story that doesn't encode to a reading of the Gospels the way that every character in Animal Farm encodes to a reading of Russian history. But you said Narnia is an allegory: surely you will not attribute to Lewis, author of what is still today one of the definitive scholarly studies of medieval allegory, a misunderstanding of what allegory is?

You do misunderstand Tolkien's position on allegory if you attribute to him some kind of seething hatred of the whole mode. He openly used allegory to make pedagogical points (see the Beowulf essay). What he disliked was allegory as a substitute for history: an attitude on the author's part of hiding an all-encompassing, all-explaining meaning in a story and trying to force the reader to be decoding that meaning all the time. He disliked it because it put readers in the habit of trying to thus decode stories not meant to be decoded that way, like LOTR. The more open the author's allegorical intent, the less he was annoyed by it.

Lewis once said, don't ask a person hostile to a genre to evaluate the success of books within that genre. And I wouldn't ask Tolkien for an evaluative critical review of Animal Farm. But that doesn't mean their definitions of that genre can't be useful: if not definitive, the line between what they like and dislike may be a useful line for critical purposes. And Tolkien's line, which is the line between all-encompassing allegories, and stories with allegorical elements in them, strikes me as a very useful line indeed. And if it is not the only possible line to define "allegory", it may be used if we define it as Tolkien's line, which I did do.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Niggle's goals as an artist, the question of the artist's duties to society and vice versa, and even more so the broader question of Niggle's duties as a man to society and its duties to him, are all on different levels from one another, and none of them are part of the death/purgatory/paradise symbolic allegory.

That's because you've limited the allegory to death/purgatory/paradise. I read "Leaf" as an allegory on the subject of an artist's conflicting responsibilities to his art and to his fellow-humans/society. The d/p/p part of the allegory is Tolkien's judgement on Niggle's (read Tolkien's own) attempt to deal with the conflict.

Yes, I agree, it would be hard for anyone raised in Western society to read Progress and not at least glerk that it was about Christian moral theo, and pick up something about same. However, the person I'm thinking of wasn't particularly "raised" yet: he was raised in a household with no religion, and read it before his tenth birthday.. Of course he figured out for himself that it was "about" Christianity -- the name of the Pilgrim is sufficient clue -- but didn't have a clue what a lot of the "stuff" was. Vanity Fair, for example; the modern meaning of the word didn't really help here. And what on earth, he wondered, was Despond? Etc. The moral intent of the story came through, all right, but he wouldn't have been able to tell you that there was a one-to-one correspondence to anything.

I'm not sure that you "entirely miss the point" of Animal Farm if you don't get the parallels to Russian history: it remains an effective fable about power and its abuse without that "layer" -- in fact, for me, at least, it's more effective without playing the "Snowball = Trotski, Napoleon somehow = both Lenin and Stalin," etc., game, which I find more distracting than enlightening.

As for Lewis -- I didn't say "Aslan" was an allegory. I said that Narnia was. Rather, though, I should have said that it embeds a series of allegorical situations and sequences of events, though it is not itself one sweeping allegory. (And what Lewis said about Aslan strikes me as one of those differences that makes very little difference; the Lion takes the symbolic role of Christ in situation after situation.)

So are you saying that when Tolkien wrote that he "cordially disliked" allegory, he was, shall we say, exaggerating?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I read "Leaf" as an allegory on the subject of an artist's conflicting responsibilities to his art and to his fellow-humans/society.

Oh, that's there all right (I mentioned it in my previous), but it's
1) a different level of meaning than the d/p/p allegory and thus not part of it, the way that all the elements in Progress and Animal Farm are unified;
2) not in fact an allegory at all, since Niggle is an artist with conflicting responsibilities. He doesn't stand for an artist with conflicting responsibilities, which would be an allegory.

Animal Farm ... remains an effective fable about power and its abuse without that "layer"

True, which is what makes it so effective. Nevertheless, if you don't get the encoding, you're missing the point. The publishers who indignantly rejected the book sure got the point.

I didn't say "Aslan" was an allegory. I said that Narnia was.

If Narnia is an allegory, than the important things in it must be allegorical. But then you go on to say:

it embeds a series of allegorical situations and sequences of events, though it is not itself one sweeping allegory.

which is fair enough: it's close to what I'd say about "Leaf".

And what Lewis said about Aslan strikes me as one of those differences that makes very little difference; the Lion takes the symbolic role of Christ in situation after situation.

I tend to agree. Lewis didn't, though.

On the same line, Lewis and Lewis apologists draw a tremendous distinction between Lewis having sat down intending to write a Christian story (which he didn't do) and deliberately encoding Christianity into it after he'd decided to write it (which he did do). I don't see how it makes any difference.

So are you saying that when Tolkien wrote that he "cordially disliked" allegory, he was, shall we say, exaggerating?

No. Why should I be?

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

H'mmm. I guess we have a fundamental disagreement here: to me, the social and religious meanings in "Leaf" are not "different levels of meaning" at all. I can see the argument that Niggle-as-artist isn't allegorical, but I think that glosses over the rather obvious point that he's an allegorical stand-in for JRRT himself. As I said, for Niggle, read Tolkien himself: what "Leaf" seems to me to be, more than anything else, is JRRT's attempt to come to terms with his odd manner of working, his annoyance at not being free to do it, and his perceived duties as a member of society, along with the judgment his Catholic faith required him to make of them, of how he answered each of these calls on his time. Niggle doesn't stop being Tolkien when he "makes his journey;" his "journey" is Tolkien's approach to judging his life as he believes (hopes?) God will judge it.

Similarly, yes: the important things in Narnia are, one and all, allegorical -- the only exception I'd make is the human PoV characters*, who of course are the reader's vicarious witnesses to the allegorical persons, things and events.

----------
Specifically: the seven Friends of Narnia, Caspian, Tirian, Shasta, and Aravis.
----------

But, as I said, it isn't a single, sweeping allegory, if only because it's seven separate stories, not planned as a whole. "Leaf" is a single story, and I submit that its meaning-structure is quite unified.

By the way, I agree with you against the Lewis apologists on that matter. Whatever he originally set down to write, a story with blatant Christian content is what he chose to publish. I try not to judge an artist's intentions; I prefer to judge their work. Artists may lie, demur, or simply misunderstand or misremember their intentions, and those intentions are invisible anyway; but the work is honest, it is there, and we can perceive it and judge it.

Why I thought you were saying Tolkien exaggerated: in your previous post, you seemed to be saying that it wasn't allegory itself that JRRT disliked, but readers' attempts to read an allegory where none is intended.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Niggle as a stand-in for JRRT is yet another level of meaning than Niggle as Every-Artist. "Stand-in for JRRT", though allegorical, is not an allegory the reader was intended to get, and thus "allegory" is perhaps not even the right word for it. It's closer to an in-joke, something Tolkien had a fondness for.

"Niggle doesn't stop being Tolkien when he makes his journey," no, but at that point another level of meaning comes in, the purely allegorical one of the journey = death.

"Leaf" is unified in the sense that the story hangs together. But it's not unified in having a single level of symbolism. Instead, it's quite complex and varied for such a short story.

"I prefer to judge their work" is a good principle as long as you're an intelligent and thoughtful judge. OTOH we've had people insisting that LOTR is an allegory for this or that, over Tolkien's vehement objections, and even proofs that it could not have been.

"Readers' attempts to read an allegory where none is intended" is part of the reason Tolkien disliked allegory. He also disliked the whole idea of encoding in a story. But none of this is the equivalent of calling SF "crap".

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I should have replied to the first paragraph of this immediately. Tolkien never said anything as hostile or ignorant about allegory as to be the equivalent of someone calling SF "that crap about rockets and aliens." All he said was that he disliked having allegorical meanings covertly forced on him by the author.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

No; he said he disliked allegory, period.

Cue "The Earth isn't round, it's an oblate spheroid!"

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

*sigh* That's what he said he disliked about allegory. *sigh*