Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. John Rieder
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obsession with definite boundaries that once abounded in discussions of genre rested not on a widespread desire for precision in making genre distinctions, but rather on the effects of prestige attached to positions in the contemporary genre system; and this is the source of the recurrent drawing and redrawing of SF’s borders that Luckhurst writes about. The fact that genre boundaries are so frequently described as prescriptive and constricting derives, similarly, not from their really being that way, but rather from the fact that in modern Western artistic practices more prestige accrues to violating these boundaries than to conforming to them. Hence the concept of “literature” as such has repeatedly been formulated as the category where every work constructs its own unique genre (e.g., by Friedrich Schlegel, Benedetto Croce, and Maurice Blanchot; see Frow, Genre, 26–27, and Altman, Film/Genre, 4–7). What this understanding of “literature” puts at stake is much less the prescriptive force of generic boundaries than the play of expectation and surprise in a text’s handling of them, as in the stark opposition in Jauss’s reception theory between innovative strategies and the understanding of genre itself as a set of predictable and eventually worn-out conventions. Yet, although distinctions between high and low modes of narrative can be expected to exist wherever class differences attach themselves to the production and distribution of narratives—which is to say throughout history—the particular way that high and low are connected in contemporary genre practices with innovation versus imitation is a more recent and specific development. The peculiar sense of “literature” as the category whose members defy categorization is an integral part of the history of the sense of “genre” that is one of SF’s conditions of existence. Thus writing the history of SF has to involve, at a minimum, attending to the historical change in genre systems that produced that distinction.
The way generic terms and choices signify in relation to other terms and choices is constantly in flux. Thus, as Fowler says, “It is neither possible nor even desirable to arrive at a very high degree of precision in using generic terms. The overlapping and mutability of genres means that an ‘imprecise’ terminology is more efficient” (130). Such overlapping and mutability also make necessary the practice of retro-labeling in order to trace the lineaments of emerging genre categories (hence, “early science fiction”). Nonetheless, attention to the history of genre systems ought to foreclose the option of transposing the category of SF wholesale onto early modern or classical texts. If Shelley’s Frankenstein was not SF when it was written (see chapter 3), neither, a fortiori, were Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or Lucian’s True History. The important point is that the emergence of SF has to do not with the first appearance of a certain formal type, nor with when the term “science fiction” was first used or by whom, but rather with the appearance of a system of generic identities that articulates the various terms that cluster around SF (scientific fiction, scientific romance, scientifiction; but also horror fiction, detective fiction, the western). Clearly Gernsback did not initiate this system of generic identities when he published the first issue of Amazing Stories in 1926. But just as clearly, the milieu of mass-marketed periodical publications is one of the historical conditions for SF’s emergence as a distinctive genre, and that milieu carries with it its hierarchical opposition to a specific version of the realm of “high” culture.
I propose that understanding the positions and values of SF within past and present economies of genre, or how the history of this shifting and slippery subject, science fiction or SF, fits into the larger context of changes within the system of genres, is the frame in which to put the question, What difference does it make when “we” point to a text and say that it is SF?
The answer to that question from the perspective of genre theory is that attribution of the identity of SF to a text constitutes an active intervention in its distribution and reception. Here we should speak of labeling itself as a rhetorical act. One of the most bustling areas of genre theory in recent years has been that explored by rhetoricians focused on the pedagogy of composition, rather than critics and scholars of literature (Frow, “‘Reproducibles,’” 1626–27). In an important early contribution to the new rhetorical approach to genre, Carolyn Miller wrote in 1984 that a “sound definition of genre must be centred not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish” (151). Miller is primarily concerned with “the ‘de facto’ genres, the types we have names for in everyday language,” because these genres “tell us something theoretically important about discourse” by “tak[ing] seriously the rhetoric in which we are immersed and the situations in which we find ourselves” (155). Although her analysis is therefore more concerned with genres like the letter of recommendation or the inaugural speech than with drawing distinctions between different types of storytelling, Miller’s approach to genre might well lead one to ask why distinctions between types of story are drawn and insisted upon at all. How can one explain this “mutual construing of objects, events, interests, and purposes that not only links them but makes them what they are: an objectified social need” (157)? What action does it accomplish to attribute the label, SF, to a narrative?
Whatever protocols of interpretation or formal and thematic conventions the label refers to, the labeling itself often serves to position the text within the field of choices offered by the contemporary genre system in quite material ways: how it will be printed, where it will be sold, by whom it is most likely to be read. Generic attribution therefore affects the distribution and reception of texts—that is, the ways they are put to use. It is a way of telling someone how to read a text, and even more a kind of promise that the text can be usefully, pleasurably read that way. The attribution does not just classify the text; it promotes its use by a certain group of readers and in certain kinds of ways (e.g., with a high level of seriousness, or a lack of it). When “we” point to a story and say it is SF, therefore, that means not only that it ought to be read using the protocols associated with SF but also that it can and should be read in conversation with other SF texts and readers.
Such acts of labeling, by assigning texts a position and a value within a system of genres, entangle them within both a synchronic web of resemblances and a diachronic history of generic “variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots” (Deleuze and Guattari 21). A history of genre systems attentive to the power that genre attribution exercises upon distribution and reception would not be one structured primarily by the appearance of literary masterpieces, but rather one also punctuated by watersheds in the technology of publication, the distribution of reading material, and the social production and distribution of literacy itself. In the second chapter of this book I will attempt a description of the formation and topography of the mass cultural genre system within which the category of science fiction arose. But first I will turn back to the questions I raised earlier about the collective subject of SF genre formation. Those questions can now take an expanded form that should make their ramifications clearer. If SF is “whatever [in all its historical mutability and rhizomatic irregularity] we are looking for when we are looking for science fiction,” what kind of a collectivity is formed by those who recognize the genre? On what terrain—that is, what system of genres, what regime of the production and distribution of literature and literacy—does the collective endeavor of “looking for science fiction” take place? What in the economy of genres or the dynamics of distribution and reception drives that collectivity to look for SF? And what kind of intervention in that economy is their saying they have found it?
Categorization and Communities of Practice
SF history and criticism afford two drastically different versions of the collective subject of genre formation. The list of “writers, producers, distributors, marketers, readers, fans, critics and other discursive agents” in Bould and Vint’s “fluid and tenuous” construction of SF indicates an anonymous, disparate, and disunified set of people. The use of Knight’s or Kincaid’s pronominal “we” here would constitute a kind of grammatical mirage imputing collective intentionality to a process without a subject—or, to be more precise, a process involving so many and such disconnected subjects that they share only the nominal common ground of their participation in the production, distribution, and reception of SF. This anonymous and scattered sense of a defining collectivity stands in sharp contrast to the practice of referring the construction and definition of SF to a rather tightly knit community,