1. Today’s technology is tomorrow’s handicraft.
2. Lines I particularly liked from Knotly’s poem in the current Paris Review: “for every one must run a race/in the body’s own running place” and: “Everything I have has an earwig in it/which will make light of sacred things.”
3. Nothing we look at is ever seen without some shift and flicker — that constant flaking of vision which we take as imperfections of the eye or simply the instability of attention itself; and we ignore this illusory screen for the solid reality behind it. But the solid reality is the illusion; the shift and flicker is all there is. (Where do sf writers get their crazy ideas? From watching all there is very carefully.)
4. The preceding notes, this one, and the ones following are picked, somewhat at random, from my last two years’ journals (1973–1974), in lieu of the personal article requested on the development of a science-fiction writer.
5. Critical language presents us a problem: The critic “analyzes” a work to “reveal” its “internal form.” Recent structuralist critics are trying to “discover the underlying, mythic structures” of given works or cultures. There is the implication that what the critic comes up with is somehow more basic than the thing under study — we are all, of course, too sophisticated to be fooled into thinking what the critic produces is more important.
Still, however, we feel the critical find should be more intense, more solid, more foundational than the work. After all, though novels are fiction, the books of criticism about them are not…
An obvious visual image for the critical process is a surgeon, carefully dissecting a body, removing the skeleton from it, and presenting the bones to our view — so that we will have a more schematic idea of how the fleshed organism articulates.
All this, however, is the result of a category-mistake of the sort Ryle describes in The Concept of Mind (p. 17ff.).
A slightly better image, as a basic model of the critical process, will, perhaps, explode it:
The critic sits at a certain distance from the work, views it from a particular side, and builds a more or less schematic model of the work as it strikes her or him (just as I am making this model of what the critic does), emphasizing certain elements, suppressing certain others, attaching little historical notes to his model here and there on where she thinks this or that form in the original work might have come from, adding little ethical notes on what he suspects is its proper usage, all according to the particular critical use the model is intended for. If the critic’s model is interesting enough, there is nothing to stop us from considering it a work of art in itself, as we do with Pater or Taine, with Barthes or Derrida, Felman or Johnson. A critic may, indeed, add something to the work. But the critic does not remove anything from the work.
Works of literature, painting, and sculpture simply do not have informative insides. There is no skeleton to be removed. They are all surface-that-endures-through-history. A piece of sculpture has a physical inside, but drilling a hole three inches into the Venus de Milo will give you no aesthetic insight into it. (Note, however: This paragraph does not hold true [at least in the same way] for theatrical works, orchestral music, film, or much electronic art. For an sf story: Postulate a world and a culture which has an art all of which does have informative insides — great cloth sculptures, for example, held up from within by hidden pipe- shapes, electronic art run by hidden circuitry. The critic, as criminal, hires herself to other social criminals who wish to understand the art; they break into museums, dismantle the art objects, and remove the insides for inspection. The works are reassembled… clumsily. Later, an artist passing by notices something is wrong and cries out to a guard: “Look, look! A critic has been at my work! Can’t you see…?” Theme of the story: If to understand the work is physically to destroy or injure it, are the critics [and the people who wish to understand art] heroes or villains? Are the artists, who make works that can only be understood by dismantling them, charlatans? Consider also, since my view is that this is just how so many people do misinterpret criticism today, will my context be understood? Is there any way that I can make clear in the story that what I am presenting is not how criticism works; rather, I am poking fun at the general misapprehension? I am not in the least interested in writing a simpleminded, “damning” satire of Modern Criticism. Will have to rethink seriously incidents as first listed if I want the story’s point to be the subtle one. Can such a point be dramatized in sf story…?)
Basically, however, the critic is part of the work’s audience. The critic responds to it, selects among those responses and, using them, makes, selectively, a model of the work that may, hopefully, guide, helpfully, the responses of the critic’s own audience when they come to the work being modeled.
When a critic, talking about critical work, suggests she is doing more than this, at best she is indulging in metaphor; at worst, he is practicing, whether wittingly or no, more of that pernicious mystification that has brought us to our present impasse.
(Happy with the idea; but still uncomfortable with it as a story template — because, as a template, it seems to be saying exactly the opposite of what I want to! Is this, perhaps, a problem basic to sf: That you can only use it to reinforce commonly accepted prejudices; and that to use it for a discussion of anything at a more complex resolution simply can’t be done at the literary distance sf affords? From Cassirer to Kirk, critics have leveled just this accusation at mythology. If it’s true of sf as well, perhaps sf is, inchoately, an immature form…? Well, there: The ugly suggestion has been made.
(Do I agree?
(No, I don’t. But I think it is certainly an inherent tendency of the medium. To fight it, and triumph over it, I must specifically: go into the world — the object — I have set up far more thoroughly than I have before, and treat it autonomously rather than as merely a model of a prejudiciary situation — a purely subject manifestation. I must explore it as an extensive, coherent reality — not as an intensive reflection of the real world where the most conservative ideas will drain all life out of the invention.
(What does my culture look like, for instance, once I leave the museum? Given its basic aesthetic outlook, what would its architecture look like? How would the museum itself look, from the inside? From the outside? What would the building where the artist lived look like? And where the critic lived? What would be their relative social positions? What would be the emblems of those positions? How would such emblems differ from the emblems of social positions in our world? What would it smell like to walk through their streets? Given their art, what of their concept of science? Is it the opposite of their concept of art? Or is it an extension of it? Are the informative insides of the scientific works as mystified as the insides of art works? Or are they made blatantly public? Or are they mystified even more than the art? What are the problems that critics of science have in this world? Or critics of politics? Would these critics be the same people?
(As I begin to treat my original conceit as a coherent, antonomous world, instead of just a statement about our world, I begin to generate a template complicated enough and rich enough actually to make a statement about our world that is something more than simple- minded. I can now start to ask myself questions like: In this world, what are the psychological traits of someone who would become a critic? An artist? A scientist? Etc. But it is only when the template becomes at least that complex that sf becomes mature.)