Fantastic Metropolis

Formal innovation in both The Female Man and Dhalgren is essential for enabling the presentation of the story each tells. Russ makes the explicit point that her formally innovative novel has a political agenda by ending with an apostrophe to the book itself, telling it that when its story has become “quaint and old-fashioned,” it should “Rejoice, little book! For on that day, we will be free.” The story told in The Two of Them, however, while stretching at least one of its narrative conventions to the breaking point, does not require an entirely new form for its telling. Most readers will be familiar with the Steed and Peel (or, variously, Gale) Avengers duo; Russ’s highly politicized reading of that duo and the feminist consciousness of the female partner in her version of the duo, results in murder which in turn seriously sabotages the conventional form she has used to tell the story. One might say that while The Female Man created a new formal structure (which is not likely to be adopted by another writer), The Two of Them shone a bright and revealing light on a familiar narrative convention, rendering all future use of it tricky, at best.

Triton, too, uses a conventional narrative form to call commonplace assumptions into question. Its protagonist, Bron Helstrom, is a heterosexual white male who would have been nicely comfortable (and likely satisfied) living in suburban North America in the 1970s. Traditionally, characters like Bron represent the universal—rather than the “particular”—human experience. Delany, however, inserts this protagonist who holds the dominant values of the world in which Delany was living at the time he wrote the novel into a world in which not only white men but also white women and people of color thrive. Readers who identify strongly with Bron tend to be deeply disconcerted by what the novel reveals to them about themselves—and about the particularity of values and experience that they are likely to consider “universal.” Although Triton’s narrative strategy may be described as dialogical, the formal structures of the novel are not intrinsically innovative. Rather than sabotaging a familiar narrative convention as Russ does in The Two of Them, in Triton Delany forges a new one (which has lately been adopted by John Kessel in “Men’s Stories” and Kim Stanley Robinson in “Sexual Dimorphism”) out of the familiar one and in the process reveals that the presumed “universal” point of view is in fact highly particular.

All four of these books, regardless of how formally innovative they may or may not be, consciously address ideological issues. So I could argue about other such dichotomous pairs I could list: for instance Pamela Zoline’s formally innovative “Heat Death of the Universe” vs. Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Conqueror’s Child; Shelley Jackson’s formally innovative Patchwork Girl vs. Carol Emshwiller’s The Mount; and Ursula K. Le Guin’s formally innovative Always Coming Home vs. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” Could I name which, of each pair, I consider more significant? Even if I chose to do so, not everyone would agree with my choices. Nor could I judge one work in each pair as more “revolutionary” than another and expect everyone to agree with me.

I would note that although all of Wittig’s novels are formally innovative, at least three of them sharply revolt “against the material conditions of [her] world.” But, as I have argued is the case for both The Female Man and Dhalgren, I would assert that Wittig’s novels are formally innovative only to the extent that they need to be in order to tell the stories the author wanted to tell. Is it meaningful, I wonder, to sort works according to their degree of formal innovation? Or, to ask a slightly different question: would a reader convinced that men and women are essentially different and fixed species have the ability to read Les Guérillères without reducing the work to a single, ideological element (its contention against the very existence of gendered categories), which is the fate Wittig sees attached both to “minority” and “committed” literature? And are the innovative elements of a work intrinsically more significant than the functions they serve within the work as a whole?