A Man of the Enlightenment
Jacques Marx. Tiphaigne de la Roche: Modéles de I'imaginaire au XVIIIe siècle. Brussels:
Editions de l'Université de Bruxelles. 1981. 107p. BFr. 445.00
Tiphaigne de la Roche's classical utopia, Histoire des Galligènes (1765), was
reprinted in 1979 by Slatkine (see my review in SFS No. 23), but his other philosophical
tales have not been republished since the end of the 18th century. De la Roche, a Norman
physician and polygraph, is a typical sample of those minor enthusiasts of the
Enlightenment whose unbridled spirit of "philosophical" conjecture and
speculation provokes alternatively admiration and amazement. Aside from poetry, essays,
and dissertations, he published in 1749 his Amour dévoilé, a physiological
system deemed to account for sexual attraction--this attraction being determined by
exudation of a "sympathetic" fluid, vulgo: perspiration, sweat. Trivial
as this thesis might look, it shows a commendable effort to reject mythological
sillinesses about love and to shape a materialistic concept of attraction and affinities
that leads to Goethe as well as to Charles Fourier. Jacques Marx examines other quite
perspicacious and modern hypotheses formulated by his author: he analyzes several
semi-fictional themes elaborated in the book, such as the automaton or woman-robot, and
rightly suggests that De la Roche should be greeted among the precursors of modern SF. His
second book, Amilec (1753; translated into English the same year), is even more
whimsical and provocative. It is a philosophical dream à la Kepler about the
plurality of inhabited planets (a commonplace of 18th-century speculation) combined with
Swiftian satire of social classes and dystopian pictures. The Bigarrures
philosophiques that follows is a melange of speculative fiction and scientific
hypotheses, as diffuse and peculiar as his previous books.
Giphantie (1760) is an extraordinary voyage combining orientalism and SF
traits. I shan't talk again of the Histoire des Galligènes (see SFS No. 23), his
major utopia which is also his last book. Thanks to Dr. Jacques Marx's erudition and
insight we now have the first excellent survey of Tiphaigne's works, his sources and
intellectual descent. This monograph made out of first hand data is pleasant to read and
informative, it is a significant contribution to the history of utopian fiction and SF.--MA
In Praise of American (Baumian)
Utopianism
Edward Wagenknecht. Utopia Americana. Folcroft, PA: The Folcroft Press,
1977. [reprint of: Seattle, WA: University of Washington Book Store, 1929]. 40p. illus.
$10.00
Edward Wagenknecht's charmingly relaxed speculations on utopia first appeared during
the Great Depression, and then resurfaced after the energetic disillusionment of the 1960s
had wearied itself into complacency. However much had changed between 1929 and 1977, the
publication and the reprinting of Utopia Americana, dreams remained in fashion
and alternative worlds critically in demand. Industrial progress and mechanical ingenuity
had done little to supply these needs, and the profusion of idealist communities, having
reached its zenith in the mid-19th century, had shrunk into parody if not non-existence.
As the need intensified and the commodity vanished, Wagenknecht spoke reassuringly of a
realm in danger of disappearing altogether. The implications of his message are
encouraging. Utopia is no mere dream but a spontaneous by-product of quite ordinary
endeavors. It is expansion, not escape, an appropriate response to a world too constricted
to supply the fantasy demanded by human enterprise. Since such a place is necessitated by
the very business of being alive, it would follow that everyone in his own way is involved
in the building of utopias. The romantics who busy themselves trying to refurbish a fussy
globe, and the realists who would make it less attractive than it is, are not polar
opposites but comprise two separate approaches to tampering with and tempering existence.
Utopia, the great nowhere, appears as everyone's destination, if not milieu.
Such universality and hope supply the comforting tenor of the work, but like its
subject, the book (really an essay bound in a single volume) has no position on any map
and therefore no specific direction. As if in stylistic harmony with its subject, this
brief study is as confused as it is clear. The author taps any number of tantalizing
topics, provides brief compelling biographies of Robert Louis Stevenson and L. Frank Baum,
makes some tenuous connections between utopia and fairy-tales and then hastens to lament
the lack of native American fairy stories. If the realms of fairy and of the idealist
wanderer are similar (and there is more to suggest discrepancy than similitude), then it
would appear logical that the US, with its more than 140 utopian settlements in the 19th
century, should have had no pressing need of fantasy, for there were Shaker colonies along
with those of Zoar, Harmony, Oneida, Icaria, Amana, and sundry quasi- Fourierist
efforts--all in practical operation and ready to serve the perfectionist and imaginative
leanings of a populace, whether they chose to join, to gaze with awed curiosity, or simply
to derive assurance from the existence of these idealist ventures. Whatever the American
stance, there was always some relationship with utopia. Although Wagenknecht does not make
the connection, the fact that he offers Oz as a reply to the void of utopianism points up
a peculiarity of the American response. The Emerald City, dazzling as it is, cannot
displace gray Kansas in the affections. Dust storms, cyclones, and spirit-bending labor
fail to quash the vision of something better transpiring right here in this perennially
parched pasture.
According to Wagenknecht, Baum and his conscious efforts to supply young America with
native fantasies opened the way for the New World to populate itself with legendary
figures. Baum's contribution should not be minimized, but he was hardly breaking new
ground. If anything Americans were busy with Oz almost from the outset of colonizing,
laboring humorously throughout the westward push like Uncle Henry and Aunt Em to convert a
howling wilderness into a verdant Eden. Pioneers of the Great Plains and their descendants
in defiance of geographic certainties treated this climatically fickle region as if it
were divisible into tidy, agriculturally predictable New England homesteads. They lived
utopian dreams by stubbornly refusing to leave off thinking them possible. And these
dreams were not over the rainbow but in the gullies.
In 1900, the same year that the immortal Wonderful Wizard of Oz made its
appearance, Baum published a book with the prosaic title The Art of Decorating Dry
Goods Store Windows. The connection between the fantastic and the prosaic work is in
fact closer than between fairy-tales and utopia. Like Oz, the display window was the
mundane made marvelous through manipulation of light and appealing arrangement of
materials. One day Baum, eyeing a random piece of stove pipe, worked it into the decor of
his display, and at the same moment the Tin Woodsman emerged. Merchandizing and Oz,
Puritan ingenuity and the proliferation of the arts--the two inclinations merged in the
profile of the American. An American ideal is the charlatan like P.T. Barnum or the
irrepressible wizard who keeps everyone in benign wonderment. Whatever the cost, whatever
the deceit, he proves a bargain in consideration for what he provides for the affections
and the imagination.
Wagenknecht's pursuit of the components of American utopia are deceptive in their
presumed successes, but his confusions and hedgings are forgiveable, maybe even
applaudable. Such genteel, semi-sagely dabblings are sorely required. If he fails to
define utopia, Wagenknecht shows that it remains viable and necessary. The man Baum
responding to the call of his youthful readership to keep on producing sequels long after
his desire to do so had given out is an image of the wizard as a spontaneous product of
the land. The impossible conditions of the Plains generate wizards, and the American
dreamer toils onward finding sophistry in scarecrows and enchantment through green tinted
glasses. It's all the happy marriage of dullness and our dreams, of a dilemma transformed
into a dazzling delight.
--Leonard Mendelsohn
The Merits of Samuel R. Delany
Douglas Barbour. Worlds Out of Words: The SF Novels of Samuel R. Delany.
Frome, Somerset: Bran's Head Books, 1979. 171p. 4.50
Despite the considerable number of doctoral dissertations and heavy-duty critical
essays being devoted to the works of still-practicing SF writers, the fact remains that
few such writers have produced bodies of work of sufficient size or complexity to sustain
such attention. Perhaps one reason that so many of us SF critics seem fond of global
theorizing about the genre is that we seek to provide a kind of theoretical scaffolding or
superstructure upon which to place works which, by themselves, would quickly collapse
under the weight of too much scrutiny.
These thoughts are prompted by Douglas Barbour's 1979 volume on Delany not because
Barbour is guilty of such practices, but because he presents a convincing case that Delany
is one SF author who warrants, and perhaps even demands, such attention. Much of Barbour's
book, in fact, began as part of his doctoral dissertation, in which he discussed Delany's
novels to 1972. He has modified this material, added chapters on Dhalgren and Triton,
and appended a brief conclusion and a lengthy primary bibliography. Despite a
distracting number of typographical errors and a visible break in the structure of the
book between the chapters dealing with the early novels and the chapters dealing with Dhalgren
and Triton, the result is probably the most intelligent study of Delany we
are likely to see for some time.
Not the least useful part of the book is the Introduction, which consists largely of
quotations from Delany's own critical works. While it would be misleading to take
statements made as early as 1970 as providing any sort of basis for Delany's later work,
this chapter nevertheless provides the valuable dual function of establishing Delany s
dedication to his craft and of providing a brief overview of an important body of SF
critical theory which some have claimed to find impenetrable.
The chapters that follow treat Delany's novels up to and including Nova as a
group, exploring the aspects of quest, allusion, world-making, and style and structure.
While Barbour does not deny the preciosity of such early novels as The Fall of the
Towers, he regularly invokes such "mainstream" theorists as William Gass,
Richard Poirier, Hugh Kenner, and Susanne Langer to connect Delany's works with
broad-based contemporary cultural theories. In some cases this works better than in
others. Poirier's notion of "performance," for example, seems unusually apt not
only for Delany but for SF writers in general, with the peculiarly complex relationships
they have with both the popular audience and with critics. Langer is appropriate to Delany
because of her acknowledged influence on his work. Gass is an insightful novelist and
essayist, some of whose essays lead in the direction of semiotic theory, which seems
especially applicable to Delany. But Barbour fails to follow this lead, and seems unaware
of or uninterested in European semiotic theory, with the exception of Foucault, whom he
discusses in connection with Triton. He does invoke briefly the old Whorf-Sapir
hypothesis, which has been a bone for many SF writers to gnaw on for years, but as he
himself suggests, Delany's fiction seems to move beyond that concept rather quickly. Nor
does Barbour seem especially interested in connecting Delany's work to earlier works of
SF; perhaps he has to some extent fallen prey to the temptation to "legitimize"
his subject by the invocation of only the loftiest antecedents. But isn't it possible that
Heinlein has as much to do with The Fall of the Towers as does Robert Graves?
These are relatively minor complaints in a book as rich in insights as this one is,
though they tempt me to the conclusion that the book is more for students of Delany in
particular than for students of SF in general. Barbour's account of Delany's growing
mastery over such techniques as synaesthesia and "multiplexity," his argument
that Dhalgren is more indebted to Thomas Mann than to James Joyce, his
explanation of the growing recursiveness of Delany's later fiction, are only a few of the
things I learned from this study. The complexity of the subject matter and the occasional
stiffness of Barbour's style may prevent this from becoming a popular critical text among
fans, but it is clearly a book which deserves wider attention than it has received on this
side of the Atlantic. Far from being an example of critical overkill, Worlds Out of
Words leaves one with the conviction--which Barbour wisely acknowledges--that there
is more to explore in Delany's fiction than as been treated in this volume. And that alone
comes as something of a relief.
--Gary Wolfe
Delany and Zelazny from G.K. Hall
Michael W. Peplow and Robert S. Bravard. Samuel R. Delany: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography,
1962-1979. xiv+178p
Joseph L. Sanders. Roger Zelazny: A Primary and Secondary
Bibliography. xxx+154p. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980. S15.00 ea.
These two volumes in G.K. Hall's continuing series of author bibliographies, Masters of
Science Fiction and Fantasy (edited by L.W. Currey with Marshall B. Tymn as Advisory
Acquisitions Editor), follow the same basic format that Gary K. Wolfe described in his
earlier review of the first four titles published (SFS, 8 [1981]:224-26): introduction,
primary bibliographies, secondary bibliography with selected annotations' various
appendices, and two indices to primary works by title and secondary works by author and
title. Unfortunately, these two volumes, unlike their predecessors, are not typeset; they
are reproduced from typed, camera-ready copy. This change probably reflects G.K. Hall's
concern with the cost of smaller press runs and with the reduction in length that
typesetting would cause. The only problem that this creates is that the increased length
means that readers must often flip back eight to ten pages to discover the publication
year of a given item since dates are only listed at the beginning of the listings for a
given year. It's strange that running heads were not used as a simple solution to this
problem.
Before continuing with the few, peripheral difficulties of these two books, it should
be noted first that they both do their primary jobs with skill and excellence. Following
contemporary SF and fantasy writers through the quagmire of early published letters,
high-school literary magazines, and often rare issues of amateur magazines to the readily
available products of major publishers is a time-consuming and often frustrating task.
With responsible indications of what has been omitted or undiscovered, Sanders and Peplow
and Bravard succeed in accurately citing large numbers of primary and secondary works that
will delight and enlighten even the most devout and conscientious of Delany and Zelazny
followers. At times the arrangement of the volume is awkward and convoluted--as when
Sanders provides full bibliographic information for some of Zelazny's novels, such as The
Dream Master and This Immortal, only under their seed stories and doesn't
repeat the information when the novels are listed later (they are, however,
cross-referenced)--but with rare exceptions, both volumes supply full and correct
citations to first and subsequent appearances. Their successes in this vital area of
accuracy prove that the volumes are well done and well worth acquisition.
Where there are problems with the two volumes, they are in the areas outside of the
bibliographic citations. Both introductions supply biographies and career histories, but
while Peplow and Bravard's is strong, providing valuable information on the personal and
creative relationship between Delany and Marilyn Hacker (among other things), Sanders'
survey of Zelazny's life and career is painfully brief. On the other hand, Sanders'
examination of Zelazny's fiction is far more energetic and insightful than Peplow and
Bravard's. For example, the Delany introduction contains little discussion of his themes
and his literary criticism, both major concerns. Both volumes selectively annotate the
secondary studies. Peplow and Bravard consistently draw on the studies themselves for the
annotations by using quotations, a debatable, though not incorrect, practice, while
Sanders prefers to use his own prose. Perhaps more significantly, neither volume evaluates
the secondary studies, staying for large part with descriptive statements. While it is
acceptable to leave such value judgments to the researcher, such tags as
"valuable," "superficial," "trivial," and
"important" would be of help to anyone pursuing further understanding of either
author. Also, the secondary section of the Delany bibliography lists a very odd group of
items as "not seen." While such publications as The Alien Critic, LUNA
Quarterly, and Riverside Quarterly might be difficult to find, certainly The
CEA Critic, Locus, Foundation, and Extrapolation (the last three available
in microfilm from Greenwood Press and in reprint from G.K. Hall/Gregg) are readily
available. The strangest example of this is that a review in the December, 1974, issue of Extrapolation
(D110) is listed as not seen, and two items later (D112), an article in the same
issue that immediately precedes the review (pp. 81-85 vs. p. 88) is both seen and
annotated. In addition, Peplow and Bravard irregularly list the pages for Delany
references in larger studies, leaving the reader to wonder, for example, how extensive the
discussion is and where it is in Brian Aldiss' Billion Year Spree. In short, the
secondary section of the Delany volume, despite its valuable inclusions, is uneven and not
as strong as the one in the Zelazny volume.
Both volumes include valuable appendices. The Delany has ones on juvenilia,
unpublished speeches, and non-fiction, and Delany collections; the Zelazny, on
nominations, awards, and honors; foreign-language editions; and Zelazny collections. Not
included in the appendices are series and genre listings. These would have been very
helpful additions, especially to the Zelazny volume. For example, if readers do not
discover the entry for the Science Fiction Book Club's omnibus set of the five novels in
the Amber series, where they are listed, there is no way that anyone would know they are
related. There is nothing at all to indicate that Zelazny has a group of short stories
featuring a sword-and-sorcery protagonist, Dilvish the Damned, which has recently
generated the first novel in a trilogy (The Changing Land, 1981). In addition,
the works of two authors like Delany and Zelazny, who write in a variety of genres and
media, would be clarified by appendices that list these distinctions.
With numerous volumes forthcoming in this valuable series, it is time for the
contributors and editors to reflect on the successes and failures of the previous seven
volumes--Norton, Simak, Sturgeon, Williamson, and Verne (all published
in 1980) in addition to the two under discussion here--and further strengthen the
important contributions these bibliographies have already made. Certainly, as the Masters
of Science Fiction and Fantasy series continues into 1982 with volumes on three women
authors (Anne McCaffrey, Leigh Brackett, and Marion Zimmer Bradley), Robert Silverberg,
J.G. Ballard, Gordon R. Dickson, and Ursula K. Le Guin, it is a must for any library that
takes its SF and fantasy collections seriously, and the individual volumes should be
necessary acquisitions for any person seriously interested in any of the authors.
--Roger C. Schlobin
An Index of SF Criticism and Book
Reviews
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