Fantastic Metropolis

Two additional pieces of literary history, addressing the subject of the writer’s position rather than reading communities, especially struck me. Elizabeth W. Harries’ “’Out in Left Field’: Charlotte Smith’s Prefaces, Bourdieu’s Categories, and the Public Sphere” (Modern Language Quarterly 58:4; December 1997) begins by examining how the cultural field of eighteenth-century fiction had “its own rules for the woman who writes for publication, rules that differ sharply from those that govern male writers” and the “propitiatory dance that publication required of” (471) novelist Charlotte Smith (because she was female), and then observes how Smith transformed private experiences and opinions into a public form. Harries quotes Sartre to describe the result: “Words wreak havoc when they find a name for what had up to then been lived namelessly.” (472) Marilyn Butler’s “The Purple Turban and the Flowering Aloe Tree: Signs of Distinction in the Early-Nineteenth-Century Novel” (Modern Language Quarterly 58:4; December 1997) delivers a decisive reminder that definitions of literature that insist that it is “centrally about character” necessarily exclude most literature written before the nineteenth century. Butler notes that the novel as it was emerging around 1800 was extremely close to the travel narrative. (Often the same people wrote in both genres.) What the two, overlapping genres shared in common was “the attentive documented study of human beings within their social and physical environment or their habitus.” One of the century’s most celebrated writers, Daniel Defoe, for instance, wrote works now classified as novels—including Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders—as a paid spy, “not merely to simulate factual truth (verisimilitude) but to reproduce it.” (480) Butler’s article is full of fascinating surprises; I recommend it as a fun read to anyone interested in the development of the Anglophone novel.

The fragmentation and breakdown of political discourse in the United States continued apace in 2004; living in that country as I do, I could not help but be drawn into somber reflection and concern about the relationship between political discourse on the one hand and civil liberties and democratic processes on the other. Gore Vidal’s mannered essay on the framing of the US Constitution, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson (Yale University Press, 2003), gave me some help in my thinking. Vidal treats George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton critically but respectfully. His skill is such that he renders them not as icons, nor as caricatures, but as three-dimensional persons—even as he focuses primarily on their political moves and how and why the Constitution came to be designed at all. (Vidal bluntly reminds us that the Constitutional Convention was convened following Shay’s Rebellion because men of property decided they needed an instrument of law to protect their interests from those who owned no property.)

Another book-length essay, Steven Shaviro’s Connected: or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), also gave me a lot to think about. Shaviro meditates paragraph by paragraph, with impressive specificity, on both science fiction and current social and technological realities to their mutual illumination. In addition to his insightful discussions of numerous sf texts, plain-language explication of theory, and riffs on copyright law, privacy, flexible accumulation, the fall of the rate of profit (and much, much more), Shaviro spices his prose with gossipy tidbits. He cites an April 2000 New York Times Magazine piece by Andrew Sullivan, for instance, in which Sullivan “rhapsodizes” about the wonderful effects of shooting up biweekly with testosterone but admits that he missed the deadline for his article because it fell three days after one such injection, such that he “couldn’t bring [him]self to sit still long enough” to work on it. Shaviro reports that Sullivan apparently finds this a negligible price to pay, holding as he does that “the Big T” brings out his true manhood, making him able “to feel things no woman will ever feel to the degree that I feel them, to experience the world in a way no woman ever has.” (200). When at the end of Connections Shaviro takes the stance that “science fiction does not claim to be reportage,” he proposes that “science fiction is about the shadow that the future casts upon the present. It shows us how profoundly we are haunted by the ghosts of what has not yet happened.” (250)

In Anecdotal Theory (Duke University Press, 2002), Jane Gallop, a literary theorist, brings explicit personal experience, often emotionally fraught, into her painstaking examinations of how narratives (particularly anecdotes, which are rooted in reality) not only provide examples for illustrating theoretical arguments, but also “knot theory to the here and now.” (5) Gallop hopes, she says, to “find the seductive fissures in theory,” to “make theorizing more aware of is moment, more responsible to its erotics, and at the same time, if paradoxically, both more literary and more real.” (11) Although in the front and back matter she places emphasis on how the anecdotal serves theory, I found her essays interesting for their insights into how narrative structures shape even the most abstract discourse.