pouring gas on the choir

[eub]

Sven Birkerts on Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake

I am going to stick my neck out and just say it: science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ''L,'' and this is because it inevitably proceeds from premise rather than character. It sacrifices moral and psychological nuance in favor of more conceptual matters, and elevates scenario over sensibility.

Whether or not you agree with this critique of SF, you have to admire Birkerts's boldness in laying it out straight, and in the NYT Books section. Has to be a career-limiting move around those parts.

Anyway. Actually, I'm sure I catch the tone, but I don't even understand what he's saying. "Proceeds from premise"? Does he mean that in the writing of an SF story, premise is chronologically first in the author's mind? That premise determines character? Conversely, that an author of Literature first conceives of character in a void, and then casts about for a premise to support it?

Somewhere in here is the fact that SF exists which cares about premise and not about character. But the idea that they're opposed is bizarre. If I do start by choosing a premise, how does that meaningfully constrain what I do with character, unless my premise is something like "A Sweeping Epic of the Unthinking Depths!"? People, or something like, are always with us.

SF can be written in other ways, too. I don't know, but I would not be surprised if Bone Dance proceeded more from Sparrow than from the world around. Or "premise" and "character" can both emerge far downstream of whatever else generates the structure of the work.

The best I can rejigger this critique is to say that we have a hard time writing the (non)human experience of a situation alien to us. (One might then be reassured that so much SF is so basically non-alien.) On the other hand, we have no easy time stepping back to write about what's familiar.

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In the "Ten Pounds of Sheesh in a Five-Pound Sentence" department:

Ed Regis on Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything:

Bryson might go on for too long about such (to my mind) anesthetizing subjects as trilobites, mosses, lichens, continental drift, plate tectonics, taxonomy and cladistics (don't ask) [...]

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Birkerts is presumptuous in assuming that sf is written the way he suggests, and probably wrong about characters being the be-all and end-all, but he is not expressing an unpopular view. That's why Atwood herself has gone to such trouble to reassure us that she is not writing that rocket-ships-and-robots science fiction stuff.

[eub.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I imagine she was nodding along until she got tagged. Must distance harder next book.

[r-transpose-p.livejournal.com]

Anyway. Actually, I'm sure I catch the tone, but I don't even understand what he's saying. "Proceeds from premise"? Does he mean that in the writing of an SF story, premise is chronologically first in the author's mind? That premise determines character? Conversely, that an author of Literature first conceives of character in a void, and then casts about for a premise to support it?


I was going to counter-critique the reviewer, but then i realized that "premise before character" very neatly describes Stanislaw Lem's major works, which are only superior because the premises are better then most sci-fi, and the characters flow well from the premises.

OTOH, I would have to argue that classic literary analysis is hardly a measure of whether a book is good, and instead is intellectual baggage from a long western tradition of forcibly interpreting the bible to desired ends. I would bring up books like "The Scarlet Letter" as evidence that traditional literary critiquability can in fact be anti-correlated with how good or stimulating a book is. Further evidence is my off-the-wall claim that modern-day hip-hop (which dodges literary criticism by masquerading as music) is far better poetry then most current book-poetry.

[r-transpose-p.livejournal.com]

"Proceeds from premise"?

Speaking of religious baggage in the western intellectual tradition, this quasi-nonsense actually reminds me of the philoque and the schismatic debate over whether the holy spirit proceeded "from the father and the son" or "from the father through the son"

Yeah, I know, off-topic free association.

[platypuslord.livejournal.com]

Proceeds from premise: I've thought this about Larry Niven for some time. His stories are about ideas, about things, about technologies... When the new gadgets run dry, and he falls back on characterization and drama, his books get much worse.

Since he's a fairly successful science fiction writer (isn't he?), this would seem to imply that science fiction is judged by some metric other than pure characterization. I think I'm okay with that.

[eub.livejournal.com]

Good Old SF as a genre does deemphasize characterization, so basically I guess Birkerts is looking over the divide from the High Lit genre, which swings the other way. For me, characterless can work at short length but poops out at novel length, and Niven is an example.

[drakemonger.livejournal.com]

The thing that always gets me about this kind of pronouncement is the failure to see the Background. Insofar as SF proceeds from permise, *all* Literature also proceeds from premise. That premise is, "these characters live in the Real World." (No, I don't know what to make of magical realism. Maybe Birkerts will decide that is also not literature.) That constrains their actions in ways that seem entirely natural to us, but the constraints are still there.

If Birkerts wanted to make a more sublte critique - say, that the alienness of SF premises forces the author to exaggerate the effects of the world on the characters' actions, thus detracting from a sense of character - I'd be more inclined to agree, or at least not dismiss the argument so quickly.

Just to be snarky, I'll add that the written work which proceeds most strongly from character seems to be Romance, not Literature. :P

It almost seems like people believe in an Iron Triangle of Writing: character, setting, plot - the more you emphasize one, the less you can emphasize the other two. There's something to that, actually, but when you start to look at it that way, trying to define "Literature" and "Not Literature" by their relative positions on this triangle seems like a ridiculous game, doomed to failure.

[eub.livejournal.com]

Let me put it this way: if you drew a UML collaboration diagram of Character, Setting, and Plot, it would not be symmetric.