Luckhurst and Alien Abduction Narratives

Roger Luckhurst did say in the beginning of his work Science Fiction, that he'd be discussing Sf in terms of it's origins stemming from our human reaction to technology, and considering that he did state it, I probably shouldn't have been surprised that he included Alien Abduction Narratives in that analysis. I had never considered these stories as narratives to be included in the Sf genre, though, possibly because they're stories that many people believe. They're told that way, celebrated and feared as potential terrifying or wondrous reality, and yet at the same time those stories have been the inspiration for many films, television series' and written fictions.

Even so, I was surprised. And then incredibly intrigued, because Luckhurst doesn't include them in the genre because they involve aliens, or the possible element of fantasy or fiction, but because they reveal another layer of human reaction to technology, and especially because they reveal the inseparable entanglement of technology and our experience and understanding of time.

"Every stage of abduction concerns technology. Where memory stops and the gap begins is marked by the electrical failures of the car, or power surges that scramble TVs, radios, telephones: you reawake to the flashing zeros of your digital clock. The distress of 'missing time' is in fact one predominant motif of contemporaneous discussions of the technologized lifeworlds of the 1990's: technology promises to save time, 'a mastery...through lifting the burden of our existence in linear time.' Missing time as a sign of abduction is a science-fictionalized account of the space-time compression noted by sociologists of postmodernity, and its penetration into intimate spaces - the car, the home, the bedroom -- is frequently discussed in terms of its traumatic effects. Abductees embody the 'implantation' of the machinic into the human world. Literally so: the body is stuffed with tracking devices and microchips by alien masters."

-Roger Luckhurst, 235

 He goes on to say that a major "defining determinant of abduction narrative" are conspiracy theories, and that this is yet another elaboration of a reaction to the rapid changes that modernity brings with it. The trauma and stress of living in a world that changes so quickly  because of near constant technological innovation is translated into the abduction narrative or the abduction conspiracy narrative. He also mentions the link between sexual abuse and 'missing time,' and a few other theories that it might result from if those narratives are to be taken as examples of psychological trauma and not real accounts, which I appreciated, but the link between modernity, technology and the stress of rapid change in relation to the human experience or awareness of time was particularly interesting for me. 

Part of survival involves forgetting certain traumatic events, but we find so many ways of expressing that trauma anyway. The repressed always returns, in some form or another. In this case, it's in the form of an Sf narrative.

I'm still hesitant to discount the possibility that those abductions actually happened. It doesn't seem likely, but who am I to tell anyone what to believe?

Ursula Le Guin, from "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?"

I don't agree with everything she says about art and sterility in this essay, but as a defense of Fantasy as a genre, this is a pretty interesting approach. To give you some sense of context for the passage from The Language of the Night that I'm about to post, she's theorizing that something must happen in childhood that cultivates a rejection of Sf (and in particular, Fantasy) in people.

"So I arrive at my personal defense of the uses of the imagination, especially in fiction, and most especially in fairy tale, legend, fantasy, science fiction, and the rest of the lunatic fringe. I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty, as librarians, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or simply as grownups, to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb. And never, under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They known that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.

So I believe that we should trust our children. Normal children do not confuse reality and fantasy -- they confuse them much less often that we adults do (as a a certain fantasist pointed out in a story called "The Emperor's New Clothes"). Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren't real, but they also know that books about unicorns, ift hey are good books, are true books. All too often, that's more than Mummy and Daddy know; for, in denying their childhood, the adults have denies half their knowledge, and are left with the sad, sterile little fact: "Unicorns aren't real." And that fact is one that never got anybody anywhere (except in the story "The Unicorn in the Garden," by another great fantasist, in which it is shown that a devotion to the unreality of unicorns may get you straight into the loony bin). It is by such statements as, "Once  upon a time there was a dragon," or "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" -- it is by such beautiful non-facts that we fantastic human beings may arrive, in our peculiar fashion, at the truth (44-45)."

-Ursula Le Guin, "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" (1974)

Ursula Le Guin and Art as Copulation

I'm nearly finished with Luckhurst (finally), but since it is taking me so long to wade through that text and I want to get more reading accomplished this summer, I've started on Ursula Le Guin's The Language of the Night: Essays On Fantasy and Science Fiction.

This is the book:

I love this woman. Not only because she actually wrote back to me in response to a letter I sent her on her Gifts books series, but because there is something lush and snarky about her writing. It is also a relief to switch gears from Luckhurst who, while lovely, references so many theorists and authors that I spend more time thinking about how much I haven't read yet then about the actual information he's putting forward. It's like having too many people talking to me at one time: not quite incoherent, but close enough to incoherency to be frustrating.

Le Guin is just one voice, speaking sweetly and pleasantly.

Here is a quote from The Language of the Night:

"Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all they have the same mutual enemy, sterility." (Le Guin, 27)

From what I've been reading about Le Guin both in the Luckhurst text and in the introduction to The Language of the Night, she's very much concerned with ethics, balance, sexual identity, and the "necessity of internal exploration...to produce a whole, integrated being" (17).  Which brings me to the quote I cited from her on art and sterility. It's a weighty sentence, so I'll do my best to unpack it as clearly and briefly as possible.

There's a relationship in this quote between art and life -- life in the sense of reproduction, continuity, and self-expression. Art here is an act of creation, a kind of birthing from the interior self rather than the biological self. This birth takes the intangible and renders it tangible, and even communicable by externalizing it into physical form.

Le Guin states that art cannot be carried on "indefinitely solo," the suggestion being that a solitary expression is a part of this process, but that it "cannot" be the only part if it is to truly be meaningful. And meaning, as the warning against sterility implies, lies in reproduction. 

She's obviously not considering cloning or asexuality as a form of reproduction here, so let's take that argument off the table and assume, based on the semantic value in the sentence placed on artistic interaction as something more than solo, that artistic reproduction involves a kind of mental copulation with another individual.

The creative self is externally expressed, and through that externalized expression, capable of being shared. This sharing (or copulation), is where art is truly born. Two minds (or more than two), share an idea of some sort through artistic externalization, and from that communion, new ideas are formed. An essential change occurs in both parties, pleasurable or painful, which always involves inspiration, and that change is transformative. 

The thing to note is that this transformation, according to Le Guin's sentence, at least, cannot occur alone. It can be pleasurable, but unless it's shared, that pleasure amounts to masturbation, and nothing comes of that (in the sense of continued life), except temporary relief. 

As I said, speaking sweetly and pleasantly. 

And apparently impregnating my brain with ideas.

The Power of Necessity and -Earth Abides-

I've been procrastinating over making this post for days.

I finished George R. Stewart's Earth Abides several days ago and have been debating with myself over how to approach talking about it here. I could give little summaries of how the book handles gender, race and spirituality, as there is a lot of material on those issues that are dealt with in surprising ways. This was my original plan: fueled by the powers of scholarly initiative, I was going to bestow upon the internet a gem of literary analysis and then bask in my creation. I would glory in how well I had overcome the procrastination that always overtakes me during my writing projects, and feel that this blog was serving its purpose and that with very little effort, I was well on my way to literary badassery.

Clearly, this didn't happen.

And I have to admit that maybe baby steps are a good idea.

So what I'm going to do instead, after having succumbed to procrastination, is talk about how Stewart addresses that old adage that necessity is the mother of invention (or in this case, the force that prods humanity into creativity and innovation when all we really seem to want to do is exert just enough energy to be comfortable). A little summary is required for this.

Ah, and by the way, keep in mind that the book was originally published in 1949.

Stewart's apocalypse is very tidy. Humanity is almost completely wiped out by a mysterious disease in about a week and a half. Civilization handles it well, or at least, America does, keeping order and quickly burying bodies up until the point when there is no one left alive to do the burying. The result of this approach is that the survivors have all the benefits of civilization at their disposal without having to wade through mountains of corpses: They have access to canned food, clothing, weaponry, cars, gasoline, an endless landscape of homes to choose from, and even electricity and running water for a good while. Stewart spends a lot of time describing the decay of the monuments of civilization, including the return of natural wildlife and the eventual deaths of kept animals who have been bred to require human care for their survival. His narrator, Isherwood Williams, is a graduate student who is twenty when the disease wipes out most of the human race. The novel follows Isherwood's life from that point until his death as an old man.

What makes all of this interesting is that Isherwood is alone in his need to keep alive the knowledge and ideologies of America before the disease. He attempts repeatedly to impart the knowledge and values of his civilization onto the younger generations born to him and the other adult survivors, with little to no success. Eventually Stewart writes Isherwood as accepting of the fact that the future generations are not going to bring the world back to what it was, that the world is going to change, that the people in it are going to change, and that ensuring their survival after the supplies left behind by the "Old Timers" runs out, is all that he can really give them.

Necessity and its relation to human creativity plays an enormous role in Isherwood's failure to re-animate the pre-disease world. Part of this has to do with the way Stewart writes this apocalypse. That an almost infinite number of supplies are still undisturbed in all the department and grocery stores in the 1950's America Stewart describes, means that regular hunting and even gardening is unnecessary for survival. Canned food and the occasional hunting of a cow provide the survivors of Isherwood's small community with all the sustenance they need, and all other supplies are available in abundance in the myriad of abandoned stores. Electricity and running water are shown to be mere conveniences whose absence can be easily adapted to, and with or without them, children are born and new generations flourish completely disassociated from the way of life Isherwood grew up with.

The children growing up with this disconnect from Old World knowledge and lifestyles play a pivotal role in the eventual loss of that knowledge and those lifestyles, but the perpetrators of the initial loss of information are the adult survivors of the disease. They, as parents, adults, and as people who remember what life was like pre-apocalypse are the only ones in a position to make the world they came from seem relevant to the new generation. The reality for Isherwood's community, however, is that the ideologies and knowledge of the 'time before' are no longer relevant for the adult survivors, and part of the reason they have become irrelevant is because that knowledge is no longer necessary for their survival.

The link between creativity, innovation and survival revealed here is what really interests me. It comes with a heavy suggestion in Earth Abides that the mechanism that truly binds 'civilization' together is not some inherent rightness, or even religious predestination, but the fact that, while living in such a pervasive system, human survival within it depends on the maintenance of that system through tacit agreement with its laws and many organizations. It is also held in place by the sheer quantity of people who live within it, and once the majority of those people are gone, the system itself is no longer relevant because it can only operate at its previous scale. Stewart presents this irrelevancy partially through the size of Isherwood's community. At its largest, the group is not more than forty people, and those people are all eventually intermarried, so that they become more of a family group than a collaboration of strangers bound together by law. The complexity of government is not necessary in such a small group when the resources needed for survival and comfort are so readily available, and so, with the exception of Isherwood, the other adults are content to live off of the remnants of the past. Without their participation, the knowledge is lost, and the human world changes accordingly.

Civilization, then, and specifically in the context of Earth Abides, American Civilization, is not a sacred permanence. It is an object of utility whose function changes or becomes irrelevant once it outlives its usefulness in relation to the human beings who give its very existence meaning. Stewart reveals that what dictates the endurance of a civilization and all the ideologies and knowledge that comes with that civilization, is how effective it is at maintaining the lives and relative comfort of the people who form it. If there is another way of ensuring that comfort and survival, the old ideologies disintegrate, and the human experience of social life changes.

And I seem to have gone off on a tangent about civilization rather than talking about the relationship between creativity and comfort in a post-apocalyptic world. I keep getting more ideas the longer I work on this and it is preventing me from posting! So I think I will end this post for now, and live to blog more about Earth Abides another day.