"And will you go on with the narration?" -- Socrates, Fifth Century B.C., Phaedrus (263)
"That's all there is." -- Geoff Ryman, 1998 A.D., 253 (5)
I. Parable: Television: 1946
"Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months," Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox at the time, announced to the world in 1946. "People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."
II. Days of Future Passed
The future of narrative, the future of tellings and the structures of those tellings, is behind us. Where else could it possibly lie?The only tomorrow we can ever genuinely know, if we can ever genuinely know any, is the one written day before yesterday-the one manifested, perhaps, in science fiction's metaphorization of a present that through its hardwiring can no longer be our present, if it ever was our present, if it ever could have been.
Or, perhaps, in F. T. Marinetti's 1909 Futurist manifesto that dreams of incendiary speed, jittery technophilic excess, great tail pipes erupting from the trunks of Batmobilish cars, the gangrenous death of museums, professors, moralists, feminists, and other archeologists of what Marinetti felt was antique consciousness-a future that itself, of course, impresses us here, impresses us now, at the cusp of this new time zone we're in the process of entering, as antique, even quaint, uncomfortably comfortable with a certain cypto-fascism and spectral misogyny, a tomorrow that never was, like something imagined for the cover of a thirties' pulp magazine or a Fritz Lang movie set, some Raygun Gothic designed by the same people (as William Gibson suggests in his own attack on the unnervingly tidy blond blandness of yesterday's tomorrow, "The Gernsback Continuum") who designed "pencil sharpeners [that] looked as though they'd been put together in wind tunnels" (25).
Or, perhaps, even "The Waste Land," which in 1922 seemed nothing less than the somber Modernist embodiment of fractured anxiety, but which in 1999 reads more like a kind of playful pla(y)giaristic proto-hypertextual incarnation of the Avant-Pop, fractaling selfhood, unmooring language and authority, and reconfiguring the pageness of the page even as it self-consciously conflates high culture and low through the lens of radically relativized (and, in retrospect, one can't help thinking, MTV-ized) mythology: an anti-aesthetic, perhaps, or perhaps an aesthetics-of-the-ugly -- a limit-situation, in any case, beyond which its future (our present) has been unable to think. (Nabokov permanently altered our reading of it when he nudged his Zemblan scholar's pen into shadowing John Shade's poem with his own mad footnotes in Pale Fire, Donald Barthelme when he pirated and recast Jessie L. Weston's archetectonics of the quest and James George Frazer's of the Fisher King first into The Dead Father, then a decade and a half later into The King, Christiane Paul when she kaleidoscoped criticism into an Eliotic textual web, form mirroring form through a freshly created technology, in Unreal City: A Hypertext Guide to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land".)
We conceive next year by reconceiving last.
Speaking of Kafka's early-twentieth-century influence on Browning's 1876 poem, "Fears and Scruples," Borges comments: "The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future" (201). The same holds true, it almost-but never quite-goes without saying, for every literary critic, the critical act itself amounting to nothing if not ultimately one of self-revelation, self-obsession, another cut of spiritual autobiography.
We conjure our narratological fathers and mothers, who remain locked in one set of historical coordinates forever unable to imagine us, even as we engender our own narratological progeny, who in every history, at every cluster of coordinates, can never actually be born.
III. Parable: Tar & Nicotine: 1963
Ian G. MacDonald, Los Angeles surgeon, quoted in the 18 November, 1963, issue of Newsweek: "For the majority of people, the use of tobacco has a beneficial effect."
IV. On Being a Theoretical Chump
Imagining the future, then, any future, is a sucker's game.We're doomed to failure, doomed even to a sort of intellectual foolishness-and yet imagining the future, any future, is a game we all feel the urge to play, in criticism and out of it.
What shall we do this evening?
What might we believe tomorrow? Where shall we go or what shall we look like or who shall we be like the day after that?
Extrapolation aids us in our pit-bullish quest to generate cosmos out of chaos. It helps us orient ourselves in time and space, invites us to think about what's worth thinking about, what will be worth thinking about in times to come, and, to that extent if in no other, such imaginings function in a fashion analogous to how science fiction functions-or, better, speculative fiction: not as a tool for prophecy, but as a tool for contemplation.
Samuel R. Delany says as much when he reminds us that SF "doesn't tell you what's going to happen tomorrow. It presents alternative possible images of futures, and presents them in a way that allows you to question them" (34).
The present, Robert Frost once observed, is often too present to imagine.
The present changes continuously, continuously teeters on the brink of something other than the present, something beyond the present, and such future imaginings help us to reflect continuously about our current and hereafter choices, our options, our reasons, our desires, and our fears.
V. Y2K as a State of Mind
"What's the big deal about the year 2000?" a colleague asked me recently.We were sitting side by side in the backseat of a car one evening on our way to dinner somewhere along the glittering San Diego waterfront during a conference celebrating Raymond Federman, an author who in Beckett's blackly funny wake began writing the future of narrative more than thirty years ago.
"Why this fixation on the millennium?" my colleague asked, clearly peeved by the whole trendy notion. "January 1, 2000, is going to feel almost exactly the same as December 31, 1999, did. So, tell me, what's the big deal?"
I suppose the start of an answer lies in that almost, which houses within itself an unvoiced but not quite.
And that's a big deal in itself.
The millennial turn as a matter of calendarial business is deeply uninteresting.
As a matter of metaphor, however, as a matter of culturally constructed event, as a kind of social and intellectual marker, it couldn't be more fascinating.
Why?
Because, as Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane offer in their discussion of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century European thought and aesthetics (echoing Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending): "the turning of a century has a strongly chiliastic effect; it helps distill men's [sic] millenarian disposition to think about crisis, to reflect on history as revolution or cycle, to consider, as so many fin-de-siècle and aube-de-siècle minds did consider, the question of endings and beginnings, the going and coming of the world" (51).
And millennium -- just like a fin de siècle, but arguably on a vastly larger, more resonant scale -- encourages us to exercise future vision, which by its very nature gives rise to panoramas of what's passed and passing, and how those constructions narrativize themselves and have become and will become narrativized by others.
VI. :::::Speculative Criticism:::::
Hence the idea of Speculative Criticism, and hence the idea for this issue of Paradoxa.Traditional criticism keeps its eye firmly on the rearview mirror, rediscovering, reevaluating, and renegotiating texts that have cruised the canonical and para-canonical autobahns for years, decades, centuries. At their most adventurous, traditional critical works will sometimes hazard a brief glance out the side windows for a quick deliberation of their immediate if ill-defined surroundings, but then it's back to that rearview mirror once more, and analytic commerce as usual.
The following essays, on the other hand, if "essays" are what we finally choose to call them ("What comprises critical prose?" one subtextual question cycles and recycles throughout these pieces), attempt to turn their attention forward to speculate about what narrative might and could and should look like, feel like, read like in the new millennium. In a sense, no doubt, their approaches -- like Marinetti's, like Gibson's -- amount to little more than further metaphorizations of our own present(s), our own fetishes and frights, but at their most headily audacious and engaging, they also begin to begin to advance a series of central interrogations and, if not exactly tentative answers, then at least more fully articulated interrogations, concerning what's worth thinking about -- and, equally significant, how.
Many, in other words, adopt the form not only of theoretical meditations but also of critifictional performances (several intricately collaborative in their casts), instancing future critical possibilities while subvocally tracing back through such diverse boundary-slurring meta-criti-texts as Derrida's Glas and Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Plato's Republic.
We live nowhere if not in The Age of Uncertainty, The Age of Radical Self-Reflexivity, and so it's unsurprising that at the nucleus of most of these surprising pieces spins the question of how we can construct our futures, themselves defamiliarizations of our present(s), in ways comparable to how we have constructed and continue to construct-and forever reconstruct, revise-our past(s). How, for example, will the continuing postmodern dissolution of edges, perimeters, ambits-separating, say, prose from poetry, "creative" writing from "critical," genre from genre, page from screen, "high" culture from "low," "literature" from "paraliterature," atomic-based formats from digital-affect narrative's trajectory?
How will the advent of such relatively new multimedia as hypertext (both in its local incarnations via the Storyspace program and in its great global one via the World Wide Web), CD-Rom, video games, and eventually even virtual reality contribute to the always mutating shape of tellings and the structures of those tellings? (We might even go so far as to conceptualize this always-altering process as a continuing reconstitution of Realist aesthetics, i.e., the ongoing attempt by the arts to accurately render a contemporary moment, a contemporary phenomenology of the contemporary world.)
What changes can we expect with regard to ideas of authorship, readership, writing and reading strategies, originality, the marketplace, even how and what we think about when we think about the text, about the book-this latter always undergoing its own process of transformation? In a phrase: where in the world might narrative be going, and why?
VII. Prelude:::::Samuel R. Delany:::::Sylvia Kelso
What follows is an undeciphonic polyphony.Eleven forays, that is, by fiction writers, hypertext authors, and critifictionists, as well as young and established theorists, that subset themselves fortuitously into quasi-dialogic pairs (Delany/Kelso, Le Guin/Yoshioka, Jaffe/Halley, Joyce/Jackson, Landon/McCaffery), smaller conversations within a larger party, with an odd-man-out piece (Shaviro) serving as thematic bridge between those that talk primarily of page-centered narratives (Delany/Kelso, Le Guin/Yoshioka, Jaffe/Halley) and those that go elsewhere for their inspiration (Joyce/Jackson, Landon/McCaffery).
The "interview" with Samuel R. Delany, which serves as a kind of prelude to the subsequent pieces, quickly morphs into some narratologically amphibious Other: not quite interview, surely, but surely not quite customary essay either. Delany characteristically employs the questions of the Q&A less as gateways to circumscribed answers than as generative mechanisms for an extended, cubistic, and often impishly polymathic rumination, here about the nature and history of alternative American fiction in the second half of the twentieth century-and, at the end of the day (though often by implication rather than by declaration, and despite his protestations), Delany's place within it as powerful creator and contemplator of SF, fantasy, and experimentally transgressive texts.
If Delany's subject is speculative fiction in the widest possible theoretical sense, then Sylvia Kelso's is the pragmatic relationship between more conventional science fiction and fantasy in tomorrow's marketplace. Her gently metafictional inquiry commences by teasing out the definitional questions that revolve around the nucleus of this issue of Paradoxa, along the way eliding the high theory of narrativity with examples from multiple centers of pop culture, before it sets forth to argue provocatively, among other things, that millennial society has begun to privilege fantasy's deep-structure nostalgia for a more stable preindustrial past over science fiction's (read: cyberpunk's) glitz and future-thinking impulse.
VIII. Ursula K. Le Guin:::::Kumiko Yoshioka
Next appears a kind of postmodern call and response.Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the most highly regarded figures in speculative fiction, subtly troubles the easy generic fiction/nonfiction binary in a graceful offering that arrives at an unanticipated conclusion, while in a complex rhetorical flourish Kumiko Yoshioka examines Le Guin's under-examined poststructuralist Always Coming Home long after it has been virtually forgotten by the publishing industry in the country that first brought it out -- and long after it has undergone a catena of translations, linguistic and otherwise.
IX. Harold Jaffe:::::Catherine Halley
To one degree or another, Delany's, Kelso's, and Yoshioka's contributions to this issue are affably ludic in nature, Le Guin's affably literary.Not so the following pair.
Harold Jaffe, one of the most wrongfully overlooked innovative writers on the American scene, tenders a critifiction that functions within the rhetorical tradition of fin-de-siècle manifestoes, phosphorescing as it does with angry passion, its radical camera lucida focused upon the relatively recent commodification of the arts and call to, in Bataille's phrase, "the immoral subversion of the existing order."
In many ways Catherine Halley seems to take up that call by positing a subversive and revelatory reading of feminist discourse and of one of the father's of poststructuralism -- Roland Barthes -- through a sadistic/lesbian optic.
The very presence of Jaffe's and Halley's textual practices advocate an infusion of extreme subjective fervor and political engagement into a usually staid genre and discourse that until only a short time ago cheerlessly devalued both.
X. Interlude:::::Steven Shaviro
Steven Shaviro's essay, which spans those pieces that talk primarily of page-centered narratives and those that go elsewhere for their inspiration, is less critical analysis of than meticulous meditation on Lost Highway, one of David Lynch's most unnerving and arresting films. Instead of an aerial overview of texts and genres within a clearly defined theoretical framework, Shaviro performs something akin to a phenomenological strafing run over (and around, and around) a particular aesthetic object in order to finesse out a plurality of readings from it (at last falling on a Kantian/Wittgensteinian one) that through a string of suggestive indirections lead to the doorstep of an illuminating distinction between modern and postmodern consciousness -- all the while toying with readerly expectations in a way distantly analogous to how Lynch's film toys with expectations of the viewer.
XI. Michael Joyce:::::Shelley Jackson
We live nowhere if not in The Age of Virtual Light, The Age of the Illuminated Manuscript, the geography of the flickering image, the country where bits have scintillated into bytes, hypertext has come to inform the very structure of postmodern perception.The next pairing enters this terrain first through a critifiction by one of the inventors of hypertext writing and then through a critifiction by one of the premier hypertext authors of the succeeding generation. Michael Joyce, whose Afternoon: A Story stands as a landmark in the development of the digital genre, provides something closer to theoretical poetry than to traditional criticism here about the fluidity and hybridity of all future narratives. Shelley Jackson, whose Patchwork Girl forms a postfeminist rewriting of that other Shelley's Frankenstein, explores an elaborate confluence of ideas-the body, selfhood, and the "feminine" networked text-in a conformation that enacts the future of narrative.
Both pieces go about their pursuits by approximating on the printed page the nonlinear reading experience of the electronic genre in which their authors excel.
XII. Postlude:::::Brooks Landon/Larry McCaffery:::::Coda
The last two contributions operate as a postlude to this issue by continuing to theorize into the first decades of the new century while concomitantly concentrating more obviously on the future of the critical act itself.Brooks Landon reflects on what criticism is or will be at the same time he wonders about the advent of virtual reality, "worries" about the relationship between critical theory and fiction, and welcomes the reintroduction of conventional semblance -- or at least a certain mode of conventional semblance -- into literature.
Along the way he offers a typically sharp critique of the so-called "Avant-Pop," a term in good part heralded and publicized by Larry McCaffery, who in the wide-ranging interview that comes next discusses the term's origins, defends it against a number of recent attacks, and touches upon a vast quantity of diverse texts and authors from Apuleuis to Bruce Springsteen and beyond in order to contextualize and investigate the advent of what he christens Avant-Crit (perhaps a self-reflexive commentary on what this issue has really been about all along) -- in a shape (arrived at through massive critical collaboration) that performs innovation even as it investigates it through a series of cut-ups, graphics, pla(y)giarisms, and typographical excesses that speculate back through Federman to Apollinaire's calligrammes and before and ahead into a multi-dimensional space of critifictional possibility.
Finally, in a contemplative coda, Brian Evenson reviews McCaffery's collection of interviews with experimental writers, Some Other Frequencies, and Cam Tatham reviews McCaffery's, Thomas Hartl's, and Doug Rice's wild Avant-Crit compilation and celebration, Federman: A to X-X-X-X: A Recyclopedic Narrative, about that author who in Beckett's blackly funny wake began writing the future of narrative more than thirty years ago.
XIII. Subtext: Gratitude: 1999
By way of brisk conclusion, let me simply point out that the subtext of my own telling, here and now, runs thus: I feel privileged to have been invited to this party.The guest list is nothing short of astonishing, and the people who need to be thanked for working in myriad ways to make it happen is full and varied: David Willingham, for approaching me in the first place and supporting this project with his editorial savvy, creativity, and cheerful, level-headed sense of collaboration; each writer who finds a place in the following pages for working so long and hard on these pieces before and during the editorial process; Michael Arnzen, F. Brett Cox, Veronica Hollinger, Sylvia Kelso, and Cam Tatham for their good-spirited, thoughtful, invigorating, and prompt readings and rereadings of the submissions; the English department at the University of Idaho for its reduction of my teaching load to enable me to pursue such projects as this; and, it almost-but never quite-goes without saying, my wife, Andi Olsen, who writes the future of our private micro-narrative in multifarious and magical ways every day of the week.
After oral recitation, music, and cave paintings, of course, writing constitutes one of the earliest virtual reality machines.
As you slip into this imagined and imaginative print engine, let me take this opportunity to thank you, too, for joining in and wish you an engaging ride: the future of narrative, the future of tellings and the structure of those tellings, is all around us.
Where else could it possibly lie?
Works Cited Barthelme, Donald. The Dead Father. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975.
--. The King. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.
Borges, Jorge Luis. "Kafka and His Precursors." In Labyrinths. Tr. James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964: 199-201.
Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane. "The Name and Nature of Modernism." In Modernism: 1890-1930. New York: Penguin, 1976: 19-55.
Delany, Samuel R. Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Pleasantville, NY: Dragon Press, 1984.
Derrida, Jacques. Glas. Paris: Galileé, 1974.
Eliot, T. S. "The Waste Land." In The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1952: 37-55.
Gibson, William. "The Gernsback Continuum." In Burning Chrome. New York: Arbor House, 1986: 23-35.
Jackson, Shelley.Patchwork Girl. Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995.
Joyce, Michael. Afternoon: A Story. Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1987.
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966.
Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
Marinetti, F. T. "The Joy of Mechanical Force." In The Modern Tradition. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, eds. New York: Oxford UP, 1980: 431-435.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1962.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." In The Portable Nietzsche. Tr. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin: 1954.
Paul, Christiane. Unreal City: A Hypertext Guide to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, Inc., 1997.
Plato. "Phaedrus." Tr. Jowett. In The Works of Plato. New York: Modern Library, 1956.
--. "The Republic." Tr. Jowett. In The Works of Plato. New York: Modern Library, 1956.
Ryman, Geoff. 253. New York: St. Martin's, 1998.
Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
Lance Olsen, professor of English at the University of Idaho, is author of numerous books about and of postmodern fiction, including studies of William Gibson, Vladimir Nabokov, fantasy, and comedy, and the novels Tonguing the Zeitgeist and Time Famine. He has edited collections on Donald Barthelme, postmodern fantasy, and the future of American fiction. His third book of short stories, Sewing Shut My Eyes, will be published by FC2/Black Ice Books in the spring of 2000. His electronic avatar resides at <www.uidaho.edu/~lolsen>.
