Dynamic Subspace

Author: Jason W. Ellis

  • Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy and Frankenstein

    Y showed me a quote about Frankenstein and Science Fiction in a book on her postcolonial literature comprehensive exam reading list, Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy (1977).  Aidoo is a Ghanaian feminist writer, and she’s currently a visiting professor at Brown University.  I thought it was really interesting the way that Aidoo uses the Western Frankenstein myth or model to talk about the evolutionary derivation of whiteness (Europeans) from blackness (African) following the early-human diaspora from the African continent a couple million years ago.  The speaker aligns Europeans with Frankenstein’s monster, or the “man from the icy caves of the north,” through the exclamation, “But good God, I refuse to think that the man from the icy caves of the north could have been one of our inventions.  Yet sometimes one wonders, considering the ferocity with which he has been attacking us.  As though we were to blame for his feelings of inadequacy.  Both physical and otherwise.  Especially physical” (115).  And then the speaker ties it together with the Frankenstein story and a terrific observation about the nature of SF in general by saying, “It all sounds like science fiction.  Like the story of Frankenstein.  But then, science fiction is only a wild extension of reality, no?”  I’ve included the full quote with some extra material leading up to it below.

                My question is:  who was there when we were saying farewell to our God?  My Darling, we are not responsible for anybody else but ourselves.  We did not create other races.  So we should not let others make us suffer because we are stronger than them or have better skins.

                Sickle cell anaemia.  High blood pressure.  Faster heartbeats in infancy.  One truth maybe.  A whole lot of wishful thinking.  No amount of pseudo-scientific junk is going to make us a weaker race than we are.  And may they come to no good who wish us ill.  After all, what baby doesn’t know that the glistening blackest coal also gives the hottest and the most sustained heat?  Energy.  Motion.  We are all that.  Yes, why not? . . . A curse on those who for money would ruin the Earth and trade in human miseries.

                We have always produced great minds.  But good God, I refuse to think that the man from the icy caves of the north could have been one of our inventions.  Yet sometimes one wonders, considering the ferocity with which he has been attacking us.  As though we were to blame for his feelings of inadequacy.  Both physical and otherwise.  Especially physical.

                It all sounds like science fiction.  Like the story of Frankenstein.  But then, science fiction is only a wild extension of reality, no?  (Aidoo 114-115)

     What’s even more interesting about this quote is the fact that this novel is representative of Ghanaian literature despite its modernist underpinnings and Western intertextualities.  I’m not saying that a Ghanaian novel cannot do or contain those things, but my suspicion is that there are other novels that aren’t considered world literature, and here I’m borrowing from James English’s analysis of Keri Hulme’s the bone people in The Economy of Prestige, because they aren’t readily accessible to a Western audience.  This is because they are more Ghanian (whatever that might mean) and less engaged with post-Enlightenment, Western (or in this case, Northern) ideas and textual networks.

    However, this is the great debate in postcolonialist studies–following the colonial era, you can’t, as the saying goes, return home.  The colonial experience irrevocably changes the colonized’s culture and language.  In Ghana’s case, it was once a colonial holding of the United Kingdom, and it was the first African colony to achieve its independence from the crown.  As a result of the colonizer’s influence, English is the primary language of Ghana, and the UK educational system is more than likely similar to that of other former colonial holdings such as India.  Ghana is implicated with and tied to the West through its past and present, so there really isn’t such a thing as “pure” Ghanaian literature devoid of Western influence, but there is certainly Ghanaian literature that is part of the expansive global networks emanating diachronically from the Enlightenment and the continuing influence of the Western colonizer.

    Find out more about Aidoo on Wikipedia here, or on her Brown University faculty entry here.  The bibliographic entry for her novel is:

    Aidoo, Ama Ata.  Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint.  New York:  Longman, 1977.

  • David Foster Wallace, Philip K. Dick, and Transgressive Parody

    Mack Hassler set with an interesting task this week after the unfortunate death of David Foster Wallace. He asked me to consider two questions:

    1) Is PKD like Wallace in respect to the concept of “transgressive parody,” which Patrick Novotny defines in his chapter to Hassler and Wilcox’s Political Science Fiction (1997) titled, “No Future!  Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration,” as, “Parody in the postmodernist aesthetic is the transgression of aesthetic and representational norms” (100).

    2) How does PKD move beyond parody?

    In response to the first query, Philip K. Dick operates in a similar fashion to David Foster Wallace in terms of transgressive parody.  Both authors use their medium of choice, SF for Dick and the non-fiction essay for Wallace (unfortunately, I have not yet read his fiction including Infinite Jest), as the means for their transgressive parody.  Dick parodies the streamlined and perfect futures of Clarke and Asimov through the introduction of kibble, entropy, and the disintegration of reality–a theme that Novotny elaborates in his study of cyberpunk and postmodernism, and Dick obviously is a predecessor of the cyberpunk authors and enjoyed the potential of postmodern play.  On the other hand, Wallace apes the professional essay format and bends it to his own ends through the use of play (there’s that word again), such as through his hyper-footnoting (the best parts of many of his essays are in the footnotes, and his footnotes have footnotes), and his employment of catechresis, or taking the story or argument from one context and applying it elsewhere–much in the vein of Derrida.  Dick and Wallace parody the norms of the writing that they are doing, but they transgress those norms for their own ends rather than making a comic attack on the parodied norms.  The way to think about it is that they take the postmodern sensibility of “whatever” to heart.  They appropriate the norms of the fields in which they work and reshape them, not to make a direct satire of what’s come before, rather to create something new of their own design for their own creative endeavors.  Dick brings the entropic breakdown of the real world and the inner, psychic world to SF, which had largely ignored that important aspect of reality.  Wallace brings a truly reflective mind and sensibility of open curiosity to apparently mundane and boring writing assignments–he grasps those boring moments as a place to begin thinking about more important matters that are, on the surface, only tangentially connected.

    PKD moves beyond parody by using his works as a means of exploration of issues of self, identity, and subjectivity in an increasingly complex world.  On the surface, many of his works parody the cornerstones of the post-pulp era of SF.  For example, Ubik parodies aspects of SF such as space opera, but it does so only on the surface.  This isn’t Dick’s real target.  Instead, he uses the novel as a means to critique the nature of reality and the forces of entropy–two issues largely disregarded in SF until the New Wave.  Another example would be Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  In that novel, Dick parts ways with Asimov and gives his androids a real soul and a sense of self-preservation.  However, he isn’t parodying Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw, but instead, he’s appropriating an element of the SF mega-text for his own purposes, which is to work through his own questions about reality, soul, and memory.  

  • Paul Newman’s Contact With Science Fiction Criticism

    I just read on the New York Times that Paul Newman passed away.  He was one of my favorite actors, most notably as Butch Cassidy in George Roy Hill’s 1969, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and as Reg Dunlop in the best Hockey movie ever, released the year that I was born, Slap Shot (1977).  Of course, Newman’s accomplishments as an actor go far beyond those two memorable roles, and one role in particular stands out in my mind, because it was the one that, in a way, served as my point of entry into Science Fiction discourse.

    At Georgia Tech, I chose the Senior Thesis option to complete my B.S. in Science, Technology, and Culture, instead of the Senior Seminar.  The thesis option was better for me, because I wanted my work to serve as my graduate school writing sample.  Professor, and Chair of the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, Kenneth Knoespel, Professor Lisa Yaszek, and Professor Doug Davis (at Gordon College) guided me in my research.  The paper that I produced, “Networks of Science, Technology, and Science Fiction During the American Cold War,” went a long way on my initial steps on the SF studies path (that sounds very Tao).  Elements of my thesis made appearances at Georgia Tech’s Monstrous Bodies Symposium, and my first SFRA conference in White Plains, New York.  So, what does that have to do with Paul Newman?  The epigraph that I chose for that paper was delivered by Paul Newman, portraying General Leslie R. Groves in the film about the first two atomic bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy.  In the film, he said to J. Robert Oppenheimer (Dwight Schultz), “Sometimes, just standing here, I keep wondering–Are we working on them, or are they working on us?  Give them dignity doctor, then we can start talking about who can do what and what they mean.”  What better way to begin a paper on the interaction between technology and culture during the Cold War?  Those lines represent the central question to which my thesis was responding.  

    I’m not familiar with Paul Newman acting in any SF films, but he certainly had many connections to SF through his fellow actors, as evidenced above by working with Dwight Schultz of Star Trek:  The Next Generation fame.  However, the Guardian says that he began working in television on Tales of Tomorrow in 1952.  It would have been interesting to see Newman in a Science Fiction film, and who knows, I might even draft him in a story that’s yet to be written.

  • Blogging, Philip K. Dick, Percy Shelley, and Belief Systems

    This is the third and final post of a three part series that explores some issues and ideas proposed to me by Mack Hassler as part of the independent study that he’s conducting for me on the works of Philip K. Dick.

    What would Philip K. Dick do with a blog? How might he have revolutionized the way we engage and think about belief and our perception of reality had he had a less restrictive method of communicating with fans and passers-by alike?

    I use my blog as a means of connecting with people personally as well as professionally. Originally intended as a personal blog about my travels abroad in the UK, it changed over time along with my own professional transformation into a PhD student and active participant in professional organizations. It allowed me to hone my writing ability through additional practice, and it facilitated feedback from those persons who happened to by blog by the almighty digital deity, Google. Also, it is a self-promotion of sorts, not unlike those by SF authors such as Cory Doctorow or John Scalzi, but it represents my life and work as a professional academic who critically thinks about the relationship between science, technology, and culture. It’s more than a calling card–it’s a bulletin board that I organize and run that facilitates a communal response to my observations and thoughts.

    Philip K. Dick would undoubtedly have had a different kind of blog than Doctorow, Scalzi, or I. In his work, he questions the nature of reality and the human mind’s ability to perceive and react to the external world. He realized, like Percy Bysshe Shelley, that our relationship to the external world is made possible by our senses and the interpretation of that sensory data by our mind. Thus, the supposed external world is actually a simulation that is ever present in our mind. Dick questions, problematizes, and critiques our relationship to the external world in his myriad works, but it’s the latter works that specifically deal with perception and the questions of belief that Shelley raised in the early 18th century.

    Shelley argued that the only ways in which one may believe in a Deity is directly through our senses, reason, and the experience of others. He quickly dispenses with the last two as being unequivocally insufficient for proof in God. However, the first, direct sensory perception is the only sure way to prove that God exists, for the individual. It is here that Dick steps into the picture one and three-quarter centuries later.

    In his last works exploratory works, VALIS and the Exegesis, Dick describes his own direct sensory perception of a Deity, or more accurately, a Gnostic revelatory experience. In these works, which would have been the pinnacle of blog writing had he had a digital outlet for communicating his experiences, he describes on the page what he remembers of the experiences of 2-4-74 as well as his reasoning through those experiences. Dick follows what Shelley described two centuries before as the mind actively clarifying the sensory perception. And as a reflective person, Dick offered many interpretations and counter-interpretations for his sensory experience in order to find his own way of understanding the experience. From the extended process of reasoning, Dick arrived at his own set of beliefs surrounding the experience, but he conceded that they were his experiences, and despite sharing them, one must arrive at that kind of belief on their own. Additionally, he envisioned a future with less organized religion and more personal belief based on individualized experiences. In this sense, Dick is taking Shelley to task by establishing his own beliefs in a Deity.

    I wonder what Dick would have concluded had he explored these ideas online through blogging. According to Sutin’s biography of Dick, Divine Invasions, Dick corresponded with friends and colleagues, but “he was blue because it seemed there was no one to talk with about the ideas that mattered to him” (273). Those ideas were those that he recorded as his verbose self-dialog in the Exegesis. However, interpersonal communication with friends is a somewhat different dynamic than the largely anonymous online communication (hence the recent flame war initiated by the new SFRA troll). Would an online community foster or impede Dick’s personal exploration of his unique sensory experiences? In addition to the voluminous writing that he was doing at that time regarding his experience, an online forum would necessitate a certain level of response and tailoring subsequent material to his readership. Perhaps this would have enhanced or altered his reasoning based on the suggestions and theories of others. However, as Shelley pointed out, we cannot wholly trust the reports of others in our own interpretation of sensory experiences. I’m confident that Dick would have been aware of this, but it would certainly have had some influence, however insignificant but subtle, on his own thinking.

    There are certainly issues today with online communication and the dissemination of ideologies and systems of belief. I have heard anecdotally that online systems of communication assist individuals in finding or establishing smaller groups that share similar beliefs. Hence, Republicans find other Republicans, and Science Fiction fans find other Science Fiction fans. However, there’s certainly a cross pollination where, for example, Republicans find their way to the Science Fiction fan enclaves and either comment positively or negatively on something a SF fan has said, and vice versa. It’s these interactions between borders that I find interesting, because a synthesis at best or a culture war at worst is taking place at these imaginary or invisible dividing lines. Shelley and Dick would probably have found themselves on the same side, looking across the border at the unreflective infidels, and they would most assuredly have “guest blogged” on each other’s site.

    One final thought–what would Shelley have done with a blog?  In his day, he used his wealth to print phamplets and he distributed them himself in London.  Was this an early form of blogging?  Perhaps the analogy might be that he was pushing an antiquated RSS feed to the masses (at least to the literate bourgeoise).  It’s interesting to consider the ways in which technology facilitated the ideas of Shelley and Dick, as well as to conjecture the ways in which our contemporary technology might have played a part in the further development or alteration to their ideas.

  • Notes on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Refutation of Deism: In a Dialog

    This is part two of a three part post series that explores some issues and ideas proposed to me by Mack Hassler as part of the independent study that he’s conducting for me on the works of Philip K. Dick.

    Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Extract from A Refutation of Deism: In a Dialog.” Romantic Period Writings 1798-1832: An Anthology. Eds. Zachary Leader and Ian Haywood. New York: Routledge, 1998. 80-81.

    You may find an expanded version of this extract online here.

    In this extract, Shelley is questioning the prevailing social order, maintained by the monarchy and church, and its requirement for what he calls a “supernatural intelligence” (80). Also, he considers the conflict between order and disorder in that system, and the supposed requirement for a “power” that supports order, and another, malignant, that supports disorder (80).

    In a thought experiment, he questions if order might have a penchant for evil, and disorder a hint at good. Why do these divisions necessarily remain diametrically opposed? He answers that order and disorder are constructions that we map onto our understanding of the world and our relationship to it (80). Therefore, what is good for us is heavenly ordained and that which is ill for us is the work of Satan.

    He points out that order and disorder cannot be universal, because the criteria for those things are as varied and colored as the different people whose “opinions and feelings” create those criteria (80).

    The most powerful passage in this extract is when he establishes that good and evil are relative, not only in effect, but more importantly in the relationship between people and their perception of the external world. It is human attribution of good or evil to objects and events external to the perceiver rather than an extrinsic or universal attribution of those descriptions.

    And, connecting this extract to the previous, he concludes that one cannot reason the existence of a Deity, because what is believed to have divine motivation in the external world are really judgments and opinions of people mapped onto the events observed.