HEDRICK@RUTGERS.ARPA@sri-unix.UUCP (10/06/83)
From: Charles Hedrick <HEDRICK@RUTGERS.ARPA> Those of you who are interested in critical reaction to SF might find it worth looking at a book of essays by C.S. Lewis: "On Stories and Other Essays on Literature", Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. (edited by Walter Hooper). Lewis has the advantage of being both an author of SF and a literary scholar. This book has discussions of a number of topics that have been raised recently, including critical reaction to SF and writing for children. He also has some interesting discussions on what it means for art to be "good", and whether this is simply a matter of taste. (He believes, and I agree, that it is not.) One of Lewis' theses is that the simple goal of telling a good story has not been admired by the critical establishment. Hooper comments in the preface: "...in 1966... the most vocal of the literary critics were encouraging readers to find in literature almost everything, life's monotony, social injustice, sympathy with the downtrodden poor, drudgery, cynicism, and distaste: everything except *enjoyment*. Step out of line and you were branded an 'escapist'." Lewis comments (in an illuminating conversation with Brian Aldiss and Kingsley Amis): "Matthew Arnold made the horrible prophecy that literature would increasingly replace religion. It has, and it's taken on all the features of bitter persecution, great intolerance, and traffic in relics. All literature becomes a sacred text. A sacred text is always exposed to the most monstrous exegesis; hence we have the spectacle of some wretched scholar taking a pure divertissement written in the 17th century and getting the most profound ambiguities and social criticisms out of it... It's the discovery of the mare's nest by the pursuit of the red herring." Lewis believes, and I agree, that SF is very much oriented towards telling good stories. My overall impression of "high-quality" fiction is that for the last century of so, particularly the last 50 years, it has tended to wallow in the hopelessness of life. SF, on the other hand, tends to leave us with a feeling that the human race has a lot of adventures in store for it. (Sorry if this sounds too much like an ad for Star Trek II.) This is true even if the particular work has a dark tone. I do not claim to be an expert in literature. Maybe someone else on the list can correct this. But what I recall from my days in school is that until recently, the literature that survived tended to be much more like current SF. The early stuff that I remember reading in school includes adventure stores (Beowulf and the early epics, Walter Scott, Kipling) and works with fantastic elements (Dante and other work of that period, and the works in all periods based on the Arthurian legends). Shakespeare seems rather at the level of modern TV documdramas, both in his historical accuracy and in his emphasis on action. It isn't until we get to about the 18th or 19th Century that authors start being controlled by the ideal of representing The Human Condition. It seems to have started about Dickens' time, but even Dickens felt obliged to tell good stories. As we progress(?) from there, "serious" literature seems to become more and more preoccupied with The Human Condition and more and more divorced from anything an average reader would actually read. Books are not the only place where this happened. Those of you who have walked through an art museum recently or who listen to contemporary music (not rock, but the sort of things that are performed by orchestras and studied in music courses) will know that analagous things happened in both art and music. The Christian philosopher Francis Shaeffer has written a book (sorry - I don't remember which of his books) that takes a look at this progession. His theory (as you might guess if you know his theology) is that this change is a result of changes in the value systems prevailing among the intelligentsia. Until recently, most of the West held the view that human life had real, intrinsic value, which it got from God, and that human history was going somewhere worthwhile. Once this idea is abandoned (as it was by a rather large fraction of the people who work in the humanities), life can very quickly start looking like "a tale told by an idiot", and interesting stories like "escape" from the real world in which humans are struggling to find values for themselves in a life where real values are no longer present. I suspect that most people on this list would not accept all of Shaeffer's ideas. But his analysis of the direction in which art has moved does seem to have a lot to it. Fortunately, there does seem to have been movement back in the other direction recently. You will no longer get kicked out of a music school if your music has an identifiable melody. Paintings produced by the chimpanzees in the Cincinnati zoo are no longer showing up in art museums. Who knows, maybe the gap between interesting stories and serious literature will be narrowed also. If so, SF will surely benefit. -------