8/16/2019 Fredric Jameson - Generic Discontinuities in SF Brian Aldiss Starship http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/fredric-jameson-generic-discontinuities-in-sf-brian-aldiss-starship 1/23 Science Fiction Studies #2 = Volume 1, Part 2 = Fall 1973 Fredric Jameson Generic Discontinuities in SF: Brian Aldiss' Starship The theme or narrative convention of the lost-spaceship-as-universe offers a particularly striking occasion to observe the differences between the so called old and new waves in SF, since Aldiss' Starship (1958) was preceded by a fine treatment of the same material by Robert A. Heinlein in Orphans of the Sky (serialized 1941 as "Universe" and "Common Sense").1 Taken together, the versions of the two writers give us a synoptic view of the basic narrative line that describes the experiences of the hero as he ventures beyond the claustrophobic limits of his home territory into other compartments of a world peopled by strangers and mutants. He comes at length to understand that the space through which he moves is not the universe but simply a gigantic ship in transit through the galaxy; and this discovery--which may be said to have in such a context all the momentous scientific consequences that the discoveries of Copernicus and Einstein had in our own--takes the twin form of text and secret chamber. On the one hand, the hero learns to read the enigmatic "Manual of Electric Circuits of Starship," a manual of his own cosmos, supplemented by the ship's log with its record of the ancient catastrophe--mutiny and natural disaster as Genesis and Fall--which broke the link between future generations of the ship's inhabitants and all knowledge of their origins. And
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8/16/2019 Fredric Jameson - Generic Discontinuities in SF Brian Aldiss Starship
structure which they share. Their differences begin to emerge when we
observe the way in which each deals with the principal strategic problem of
such a narrative, namely the degree to which the reader is to be held, along
with the hero, in ignorance of the basic facts about the lost ship. Now it
will be said that both books give their secret away at the very outset--Aldiss
with his title, and Heinlein with the initial but retrospective "historical"
motto which recounts the disappearance of the ship in outer space.
Apparently, therefore, we have to do in both cases with an adventure-story
in which the hero discovers something we know already, rather than with a
cognitive or puzzle-solving form in which we ourselves come to learn
something new. Yet the closing episodes of the two books are different
enough to suggest some significant structural distinctions between them. InHeinlein's story, indeed, the lost ship ultimately lands, and the identity of
the destination is not so important as the finality of the landing itself,
which has the effect of satisfying our aesthetic expectations with a full stop.
Of course, the book could have ended in any one of a number of other
ways: the ship might have crashed, the hero might have been killed by his
enemies, the inhabitants might all have died and sailed on, embalmed, into
intergalactic space like the characters in Martinson's poem and Blomdahl'sopera Aniara. The point is that such alternate endings do not in themselves
call into question the basic category of an ending or plot-resolution; rather,
they reconfirm the convention of the linear narrative with its beginning (in
medias res or navigationis), middle, and end.
The twist ending of Aldiss' novel, on the other hand, turns the whole
concept of such a plot inside out like a glove. It shows us that there was a
mystery or puzzle to be solved after all, but not where we thought it was; as
it were a second-degree puzzle, a mystery to the second power,
transcending the question of the world as ship which we as readers had
taken for granted from the outset. The twist ending, therefore, returns
8/16/2019 Fredric Jameson - Generic Discontinuities in SF Brian Aldiss Starship
structural function of unifying the work from without. Whatever the
heterogeneity of its materials, the unity of the "realistic" work is thus
assured a priori by the unity of its referent. It follows then that when, as in
SF, such a referent is abandoned, the fundamental formal problem posed
by plot construction will be that of finding some new principle of unity. Of
course, one way in which this can be achieved is by taking over some
ready-made formal unity existing in the tradition itself, and this seems to be
the path taken by so-called mythical SF, which finds a spurious comfort in
the predetermined unity of the myth or legend which serves it as an
organizational device. (This procedure goes back, of course, to Joyce's
Ulysses, but I am tempted to claim that the incomparable greatness of this
literary predecessor comes from its incomplete use of myth: Joyce lets ussee that the "myth" is nothing but an organizational device, and his subject
is not some fictive unity of experience which the myth is supposed to
guarantee, but rather that fragmentation of life in the modern world which
called for reunification in the first place.)
Where the mythological solution is eschewed, there remains available to SFanother organizational procedure which I will call collage: the bringing into
precarious coexistence of elements drawn from very different sources and
contexts, elements which derive for the most part from older literary
models and which amount to broken fragments of the outworn older
genres or of the newer productions of the media (e.g., comic strips). At its
worst, collage results in a kind of desperate pasting together of whatever
lies to hand; at its best, however, it operates a kind of foregrounding of the
older generic models themselves, a kind of estrangement-effect practiced
on our own generic receptivity. Something like this is what we have sought
to describe in our reading of Starship.
8/16/2019 Fredric Jameson - Generic Discontinuities in SF Brian Aldiss Starship
a future in which politics has once again become ethics. This issue turns
essentially on the right of advanced civilizations or cultures to intervene
into the lower forms of social life with which they come into contact. (The
qualifications of higher and lower, or advanced and underdeveloped, are
here clearly to be understood in a historical rather than a purely qualitative
sense.) This problem has of course been a thematic concern of SF since its
inception: witness H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, patently a guilt fantasy
on the part of Victorian man who wonders whether the brutality with
which he has used the colonial peoples may not be visited on him by some
more advanced race intent, in its turn, on his destruction. In our time,
however, such a theme tends to be reformulated in positive terms that lend
it a new originality. That the destruction of less advanced societies is wrongand inhuman is no longer, surely, a matter for intelligent debate. What is at
issue is the degree to which even benign and well-intentioned intervention
of higher into lower cultures may not be ultimately destructive in its results.
Although the conventions of SF may dramatize this issue in terms of
galactic encounters, the concern clearly has a very terrestrial source in the
relations between industrialized and so-called underdeveloped societies of
our own planet.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, a safe liberal anti-colonialism, analogous
to the U.S. condemnation of the decaying British and French colonial
empires, seems to have been quite fashionable in American SF. In one
whole wing of it, interstellar law prohibiting the establishment of colonies
on planets already inhabited by an intelligent species became an accepted
convention. However, the full implications of this theme, with a few
exceptions such as Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969),
were explored only in the SF written within socialist horizons, in particular
in the works of Stanislaw Lem and in the Strugatsky Brothers' It's Hard to
be a God (1964).7 In Western SF, this theme is present mainly as a cliché
8/16/2019 Fredric Jameson - Generic Discontinuities in SF Brian Aldiss Starship
country; in sum, the general relationship between indigenous culture and
industrialization--are historical and political in character. For our literature
to be able to raise them, it would be necessary to ask ourselves a good
many more probing and difficult questions about our own system than we
are presently willing to do. I should add that this comparison between the
formal capacities of Western and Soviet SF is not intended to imply that
the Soviet Union has in any sense solved the above problems, but merely
that for the Soviet Union such problems have arisen in an explicit and fully
conscious, indeed agonizing fashion, and that it is from the experience of
such dilemmas and contradictions that its best literature is being fashioned.
The thematic interest of Starship lies precisely in the approach of such a
dilemma to the threshold of consciousness, in the way in which the theme
of intercultural influence or manipulation is raised almost to explicit
thematization. In this sense, it makes little difference whether the reader
chooses to take Mr. Aldiss' own rather reactionary political interjections at
face value, or to substitute for them the historical interpretation suggested
above; the crucial fact remains that the political reemerges in the closingpages of the book. The structural inability of such material to stay buried,
its irrepressible tendency to reveal itself in its most fundamental historical
being, generically transforms the novel into that political fable which was
latent in it all along, without our knowing it. So it is that en route to space
and to galactic escapism, we find ourselves locked in the force field of very
earthly political realities.
NOTES
1The British (and original) title of Starship is Non-Stop; the book Orphans
8/16/2019 Fredric Jameson - Generic Discontinuities in SF Brian Aldiss Starship
6I have discussed this phenomenon from a different point of view in
"Seriality in Modern Literature," Bucknell Review, Spring 1970.
7This is a working hypothesis only, since the basic thematic spadework--as
in so many other aspects of SF--has not yet been done. A bibliography of
such writings should be compiled as a first step toward further
investigation.
ABSTRACT
The narrative convention of the lost-spaceship-as-universe offers a
particularly striking occasion to observe the differences between theso-called old and new waves in SF, since Aldiss’s Starship (1958) was
preceded by a fine treatment of the same material by Robert A. Heinlein in
Orphans of the Sky (serialized in 1941 as "Universe" and "Common
Sense"). The two writers give a synoptic view of the basic plot: the hero
ventures beyond his home territory into other compartments of a world
peopled by strangers and mutants. He comes at length to understand that
the space through which he moves is not the universe but simply a giganticship in transit through the galaxy. The narrative terminates with the arrival
of the ship — against all expectation — at its immemorial and long-forgotten
destination; with the end of what might be called the "prehistory" of the
ship’s inhabitants. But this is only the horizontal dimension of the plot line.
A kind of vertical structure is evident as well — an account of the customs
8/16/2019 Fredric Jameson - Generic Discontinuities in SF Brian Aldiss Starship