Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (20 page)

For that matter, the complaint is unfair if it is anachronistic. When I was young, science fiction was written for boys, published in paperback, meant as cheap mass-market entertainment to be read once and forgotten, and spoke to such deep and lasting question of the human condition as were addressed by the average episode of
The Twilight Zone
or the average superhero comic book—by which I do not mean they lacked all depth, merely that they touched on deep issues only in a glancing way, meant to produce a startled or jarring moment of awe or irony or wonder, not to provoke lingering meditation on sublime truths.

This has changed in my lifetime. Science fiction is now so much part of the mainstream that opinion-makers, pundits, political leaders and others who speak on serious topics make references to
Star Wars
or
The Lord Of The Rings
without hesitation or blush or, (more significantly), without any fear of being misunderstood.

Part of this is demographics: the youth in the 1950′s did not surrender their comic books and paperback space operas upon reaching old age in the 2000′s. Pundits make passing reference to popular stories, not because they are great stories, (they may or may not be), but because they are popular.

Part of this is the result of the evolution, (whether unintentional or as a byproduct of editorial crusades), within the genre itself: science fiction stories routinely tackle deeper issues in a deeper way than were seen in the early days. In other words, the watchdogs are less likely to scorn science fiction, first, because they grew up with it, and, second, because science fiction in the main is no longer as crude and juvenile as once it was.

I am assuming that any reader who is in sympathy with modern ideas, or, rather, postmodern anti-ideas reads the opening dozen paragraphs above with a growing sense of vague discomfort, or a stalking suspicion that he has strayed into a moral atmosphere alien to his particular mental outlook. ‘Who in the world…’ (our hypothetical postmodernist may well ask) ‘…dares talk about good taste these days, or truth, or beauty, or believes that art has an innate and natural role determined by objective rules of moral reasoning which impose an obligation on the artist to serve some greater good? Truth? What is truth?’

Good question, Pontius! Well, for one, I talk about truth because that is what honest men talk about. What good is served in talking lies?

To believe that truth is true is not due to daring, but due to humility: the honest man does not think he gets a veto over reality. A humble man says you don’t vote on laws of nature, you cannot create reality, and you did not father yourself out of nothing.

A postmodern man says truth is fluid and subjective. This both makes man less than an animal, for it says his brain is not suited for survival in reality because his brain does not give him true information about reality; and more than a god, for it says that, like a god, each man creates his own universe; and more than god, for not even a god can create himself of himself from himself. Pagan gods, who are not eternal, like Zeus, have to be born from Saturn or Uranus or Chaos, and so cannot be his own maker. The God of Abraham, who is eternal, cannot from his position of primal perfection evolve into something more perfect, because to perfect perfection is a paradox. But the self-made reality-creating modern man somehow does what both pagan and Christian divinities cannot.

That this stance involves intolerable logical self-contradiction does not shame the postmodernist into rethinking the bumper sticker slogans of his position. As befits creatures both above gods and below beasts, they have no shame. Shame is a human characteristic, befitting humble men.

But let us return from this digression to the question at hand: what is entertainment? What is it for? (And, let us not forget to return to the larger question of why we honor those who successfully entertain us, rather than just pay them.)

The humble man of whom I just spoke will be shocked to learn that entertainment, at least as far as fiction is concerned, is untrue. Even from the beginning it was so. The events in
The Iliad
did not happen literally as described, and even if there was such a war, Ares and Aphrodite were not wounded in it, nor did the heroes of Achaia utter their oratories, vaunts, and defiance in such perfect dactylic hexameters. Fiction by definition is untrue, but none save the most literal fool is fooled by this untruth, for it is not meant to fool.

What is it meant for? That answer is known to everyone who asks: Fiction is untruth that serves truth. Or, in other words, art is the magic by which the muses express truths that cannot be expressed as truthfully by mere literal words, nor as memorably, adroitly, or trenchantly.

In all this there is a divine irony, a heavenly cunning, for the muses use lies, which are the instruments of hell, against the hellish goal of magnifying ugliness and deadening our lives, instead use those lies to tell truths larger than literal words can carry, granting us richer life and deeper.

At this point, both any hypothetical honest man and the postmodern man reading these words must be blinking in puzzlement at that last sentence.

Perhaps their eyes drift from this essay to their nearby bookshelf, where they see a science fiction book about, for example, an immortal amnesiac with a double-brain using his superhuman mind-powers to teleport galaxies into collision or destroy and recreate timespace; or another book starring a half-clad yet fully buxom princess from the fourth dimension who is abducted by a lascivious sea-monster; or a book about a giant spaceship made of gold; or a book about a Texas gunslinger trying to fight off an invasion of space monsters.

Whereupon the honest man and the postmodern man no doubt, (when done laughing), must say in unison: “No, sir, you go too far! Entertainment is not about some profound and cosmic truth of human nature. It is about beguiling an idle afternoon with adventure stories. Entertainment is the amusement of the imagination. Entertainment is diversion, divertissement, and distraction.”

Well said. But, O hypothetical honest man and dishonest postmodern man, from what do the readers of such tales seek diversion? From what must they be distracted?

I am not sure how a postmodern man would answer. A modern man from the previous generation might say that the artist and the audience were slightly at odds, for the audience wanted to be diverted from the boredom which comes from a bourgeoisie existence of oppressive racist wife-beating hypocrisy (or whatever), and the artist, as a loyal servant of the cause of ushering in socialist femmtopia (or whatever) had the task of subverting the tastes and hence the loyalties and political sentiments of the audience, and winning their hearts over to the revolution. Other modernists were rebels without so clear cut a cause, or none at all, but wanted to express dissatisfaction with the world as it was, and draw attention to social problems that needed fixing; but their approach and basic psychology was the same as the revolutionaries, they were merely not so consistent and fixed in purpose.

But postmodernists are famed for their lack of belief in any socialist or Christian or spiritualist or utopian “narrative” which they regard, one and all, as malign attempts to seduce or subvert the natural loyalties of man. (And in their criticism of what I have here called the modernist man, they are exactly right: what writers of the modernist school wrote was propaganda, not true art). Logically, this means the postmodernist is estopped from seducing or subverting the reader’s loyalties to a new scheme of life, (if I may use a useful but obscure legal term—I mean they have lost the right to do that which they condemn in others).

Now, I am not going to disagree with the modernists, but will say instead they are not bold enough to tell the whole truth. Writing stories about beggars and orphans so as to raise public indignation as part of a program of social reform is diversion from the dangerous self-satisfaction that arises from living a too-comfortable life, but there is clearly something here beyond mere diversion. The artist is attempting to call forward the better angels of their nature in the readers.

But I draw your attention to the fact, which you may look into your own heart and confirm for yourself, that even allegedly shallow adventure stories, or romances, are more than mere diversion. I know a man who, as a boy, read
A Princess Of Mars
—of which a less realistic and more boyish adventure yarn cannot be imagined, nor one having less to do with conditions on Earth — but the lesson he took from it was to treat women chivalrously and with honor, to be objects of love more akin to worship than to the sordid mutual exploitation or animal attraction which modernists denigrate love to be. Again, I know a man who, as a boy, so loved
Star Wars
, that he decided to live his life as should a Jedi Knight, putting right and truth above all things, even if he lacked the mind-powers and buzzing glow-swords. Chivalry and righteousness are not unimportant things. They are not the most important things, of course, but they are more important than life, and ergo worth dying for.

So what do simple tales of adventure and romance, such as those penned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and deeper tales that provoke the conscience, such as those penned by Charles Dickens, have in common? What is the diversion?

I suggest that if we look at the very greatest of literature we will see the answer.
The Odyssey
of Homer has enough monsters and derring-do to satisfy even the most demanding of childish tastes, but it is a poem that even millennia of study have not exhausted. The war in heaven occupying the middle books of Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, or the battle scenes in Tolstoy’s
War And Peace
also do not exhaust the examination of those works and the profound points the authors address. The same is true for the love story between Odysseus and Penelope, Adam and Eve, Natasha and Pierre. Nor is the pity felt for Oliver Twist or Little Nell and their troubles any less than is felt for Odysseus or Andrei or Adam, because the act of waking the conscience to support, say, compassion for the poor, is not different than, except that it is smaller in scope, waking the conscience to the issues of loss and love and war and peace and justifying the ways of God to man.

If we divide books into the lowbrow, the middlebrow, and the highbrow, running from shallow and popular books concerned with parochial things, to sober books concerned with deeper things, to books that earn eternal fame and plumb the deepest, we will see that a common current runs through all the branches of the great river called literature, the shallow currents as well as the deep. They all run to an ocean.

The great books are great because they are better than the good books and much better than the crappy guilty-pleasure books in the one regard of how well they treat with the great ideas of Western literature.

For those of you unfamiliar with these great ideas, Mortimer Adler was kind enough to compile them into a handy list: Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy, Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom and Convention, Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Element, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, Love, Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny and Despotism, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, and World.

What makes a simple adventure yarn or love story simple is that it treats with these profound matters in a simplistic, unoriginal, and unexceptional way. John Carter dies and comes to life again on Mars and then cuts and carves his way across the face of the bloody planet of the wargod to win the hand of his true love, the princess Dejah Thoris. The book does deal with issues of life and death and love and honor. But it does so in an utterly unexceptional way — I say this as an avid fan and partisan of the book — because it does not say anything about life and death and love and honor a schoolboy does not already know, nor does it correct any false ideas a schoolboy might have. John Carter neither pauses to wonder about the widows and orphans of the men he’s killed, nor is the romance between man and Martian shown to be an act of will, a divine grace, something to sustain the couple through everything from domestic squabbles to disease and death. What Dickens or Milton has to say about death and love is deeper and therefore, at least to mature tastes, more interesting, but it is still on the same topic.

At this point we can answer an earlier question adroitly. Why are we science fiction buffs offended if the watchdogs of public taste treat us lightly? We are not, (I hope), offended because someone says
Synthetic Men Of Mars
is inferior to
The Brothers Karamazov
. In such a case we have no claim, and any feeling of offense would be mere partisan emotion or fannish loyalty. But we are, (I hope), deeply offended because someone says Tolkien’s
The Lord Of The Rings
is inferior to Sartre’s
No Exit
on the grounds that Tolkien’s work involves fairy-tale creatures like Sauron, Gandalf and Saruman, angelic powers, (fallen and unfallen), who walked the earth, who do not really exist, whereas Sartre’s masterpiece of existentialist drama concerns Garcin, Inès, and Estelle, three ghosts in hell, (all fallen), who do exist.

An honest observer will note that there is no great idea addressed by
No Exit
, or, for that matter,
The Odyssey
, which is not equal in scope to the great ideas addressed in
The Lord Of The Rings
.