Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. John Rieder
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and broadcast media, I call it the mass cultural genre system.
For the most influential members of the first generation of scholars of SF,1 legitimizing the study of the genre entailed separating the best, most literary examples of SF from the more familiar, popular, and supposedly inferior versions of it that predominated in mass culture. Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System is written on the premise that not only has this strategy of academic legitimization long ago run its course, but that the mass cultural genre system and the contemporary academic-classical genre system are best understood in relation to one another, so that twenty-first-century literary history needs to recognize and study both. The overriding thesis is that the field of literary production and the project of literary studies cannot be adequately conceptualized without taking into account the tensions between these two genre systems (or we should say, at least these two) that arise from the different modes of publicity—that is, the interwoven and codependent practices of production, distribution, and reception that are the “ground” or environments for those different systems.
This book is an exercise in literary history based on the implications of taking a historical, rather than formalist, position on genre theory. Although the careful reading of individual texts forms an important part of its methodology, the fundamental challenge presented to the literary historian is here conceived as understanding systemic change rather than locating and appreciating individual innovation. Perhaps the best approximation in contemporary scholarship to narrating a transformational episode in the history of genre systems within such a framework are the various accounts of the rise of the European novel in conjunction with revolutions in the technology of print and the emergence of the middle class. Early theories of the novel that sought to understand it as modernity’s version of the epic contrast sharply with those more recent ones that instead track its emergence out of a dense eighteenth-century milieu of genres including travel writing, biography, memoir, the conduct manual, and others. It is this confusion and repurposing of genres that characterize the transformation of the genre system itself so as to allow the new form, the novel, to emerge into recognizability. A similar situation attends the emergence of science fiction, as it is gradually constructed out of different permutations of the marvelous voyage, the utopia, lost-race adventures, stories of time travel, and the future war.
As Michael McKeon remarks in the introduction to The Origins of the English Novel, the novel as a generic designation is an abstraction that came to be formulated only when the process of its emergence was complete: “‘The novel’ must be understood as what Marx calls a ‘simple abstraction,’ a deceptively monolithic category that encloses a complex historical process” (20). Its “deceptively monolithic” character indicates something of its force as an intervention in the reception of those fictional works that came to be identified with it as definitive examples. Furthermore, the tendency, already evident in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, to make the novel into the descendant or heir of the epic traded upon the prestige classical literature enjoyed because of its central place in the educational curriculum. In the twentieth century, as the modern national literatures took the place of classical literature in the schools, construction of the “great tradition” of realist fiction—that is, of the realist novel—no longer needed to refer to the novel’s affinity with the epic.2 But even before this the novel’s cultural prestige was being redefined by its difference from the commercially ascendant periodical and serial publications that ushered in mass distribution and mass culture.
The emergence of SF, like the rise of the novel that precedes it and is one of its preconditions, also needs to be understood in the context of a large-scale transformation of the system of genres. Too often the history of genres, and SF is no exception, has been overly fascinated with the appearance of master texts that encapsulate moments of influential innovation. A history of genre systems attentive to the power that generic attribution exercises upon distribution and reception is one just as emphatically punctuated by watersheds in the technology of publication, the distribution of reading material, and the social production and distribution of literacy itself. Thus the influence of the great innovators like Shelley, Verne, and Wells takes place within the context of “cultural and historical fluctuations in the composition of generic systems,” and close attention to the reception of any of the three (as I demonstrate in chapter 3 with respect to Shelley’s Frankenstein) will show that “the same texts may be subject to different generic classifications in different social and historical contexts” (Bennett 101).
This variability is not simply a matter of applying different sets of terminology to the same story, but rather of using entirely different sets of criteria to identify genres. There is certainly a good argument to be made, for instance, for reading Sophocles’s Oedipus the King as a detective story, as some eminent critics have done (e.g., Bloch). The main character is a famous solver of puzzles. He learns of a horrible crime and is tasked with solving it. He collects evidence and interrogates witnesses. Gradually he unravels the truth, and he exposes and punishes the criminal. But here is the catch: none of this has any bearing on whether or not the play is a tragedy. One could just as easily imagine a play featuring a famous solver of puzzles, the unraveling of a crime, and the punishment of the wrongdoer that would be a comedy, or a satire. Oedipus the King is, of course, Aristotle’s prime example of the genre of tragedy in the Poetics. But the features that distinguish it as a tragedy, rather than a comedy or a satire, have nothing to do with the features that distinguish it as a detective story, rather than, for instance, a piece of science fiction or a western (and it very clearly does not resemble either of those genres).
These semiotic variations in what counts as significant to genre identification point to more profound differences in the social uses of narrative. More than merely sets of interrelated genre designations, the systems are composed of the values, not always explicit or simple, that direct competent users to recognize genres, perform them, and enforce or resist their boundaries. If genre categories do not come to us in isolation but always in some sort of relational matrix, then we need to ask, what sort of relations form these matrices? What are the social underpinnings of the mass cultural genre system, and what are those that keep the classical-academic system in place? For the classical-academic and mass cultural genre systems each have a history that has entered into the production, distribution, and reception of texts, and that often forms substantial connections between the systems themselves and the history and significance of a given text. Thus, while it is certainly possible to read the Oedipus as detective fiction, its historical relationship to the genre of tragedy, and to the system of genres and literary values elaborated in relation to classical tragedy, is a good deal more consequential. By the same token, texts that are usually considered SF could be read simply as examples of satire, romance, comedy, tragedy, and so on—and the assimilation of SF to satire, in particular, has been a practice employed by some of those who have wanted to argue for taking such texts seriously in an academic context—but this strategy of canonization by assimilation to the classical genre system strips them of an important aspect of their historicity. What I hope to do here is to respect the literary values and historical substance embedded in both systems, not by giving them equal time, but by trying to understand how the tensions between the two have become part of the structure of the contemporary field of cultural production.
Those tensions are all too evidently the basis for the major flaws in Darko Suvin’s influential theorization of SF as “the literature of cognitive estrangement” (see Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, chapter 1, and “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre”). The enduring strength and usefulness of Suvin’s conceptualization of the SF “novum” and the critical power of its estrangement of cultural norms have been convincingly argued recently by Rhys Williams, who urges that “the radically ethical and utopian demands that shape the true core of the Suvinian paradigm should not be diluted but instead renewed, retooled, and readied to once again join battle” (618). I entirely agree, and I applaud the way those “ethical and utopian demands” continue to be energetically forwarded in a work like Philip E. Wegner’s Shockwaves of Possibility (2014). However, the limitations of Suvin’s paradigm have to do with some basic issues of genre theory that this study hopes to address.
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