Any comparison, including that with the stage magician, isn’t quite exact; the magician doesn’t aim at anything beyond the production of some tricks, whereas the self-imprisonment that is characteristic of science fiction has made it unable to describe real space any more.
To do justice to science fiction, which looks so shabby when compared to the background of cosmology, it is necessary to explain its dilemma further. The sins of individual authors have always been relatively small. The development of the totally false, domesticated universe was a gradual process of self-organization, and therefore all together are responsible for the final deformation — and nobody. Thanks to the first science-fiction invention, all occurrences in space have become easily reversible, but the authors who “just” want to shine with a new version of time travel have forgotten the larger context. It is particularly due to these unnoticed relationships that nature was softened in the cruelty of the irreversible flow of time that is its hallmark. In order that space might not be used as another cruelty to man, it was “short-circuited” by another invention, i.e., annihilated. The fact that a domestication of the cosmos has taken place, a diminution that whisked away those eternally silent abysses of which Pascal spoke with horror, is masked in science fiction by the blood that is so liberally spilled in its pages. But there we already have a humanized cruelty, for it is a cruelty that can be understood by man, and a cruelty that could finally even be judged from the viewpoint of ethics -granted that one could take this blood seriously at all. By looking at it this way, we come to understand what science fiction has done to the cosmos; for it makes no sense at all to look at the universe from the viewpoint of ethics. Therefore, the universe of science fiction is not only minuscule, simplified, and lukewarm, but also has been turned toward its inhabitants, and in this way it can be subjugated by them, losing thereby that indifference which causes man to project continually new enigmas to be solved and secrets to be lifted, in the vain hope to get
3. Why is it impossible to regain the universe that has been lost to science fiction? One could claim that the laws of the market do not permit it — that today no authors and publishers would dare to subject the readers to a cure of giving up that would equal the renunciation of easy solutions to fictitious problems. True, it must be admitted that not everything in science fiction is rotten in the same degree. After all, there was once the cosmogonic fantasy of a Stapledon. But Stapledon, as an isolated writer, was still able to view the universe of cosmology, and not the humanized universe of science fiction. It should be kept in mind here that “humanize” in this context doesn’t mean to “make more humane”; we know that among the animals there are no sexual murderers, and a sexual murderer can hardly be called a humane being.
It must be admitted that the universe presents the “peak of indigestibility” for fiction writing in the whole field of our experience. For what can you do as an author with the central subjects of cosmology — with the singularities? A singularity is a place that exists in the continuum just as a stone exists here; but there our whole physics goes to pieces. The desperate struggles of the theoreticians, going on for several years now, have only the purpose of postponing this end of physics, its collapse, by yet one more theory. In fiction, however, things like that cannot be domesticated. What heroic characters, what plot can there be where no body, however strong or hard, could exist longer than a few fractions of a second? The space surrounding a neutron star cannot be passed closely in a spaceship even at parabolic velocity, because the gravity gradients in the human body increase without a chance that they might be stopped or screened, and human beings explode until only a red puddle is left, just like a heavenly body that is torn apart from tidal forces when passing through the Roche limit. Is there therefore no way out of this fatal dilemma: that one must be either silent about the cosmos or forced to distort it? Cosmology shows us a way out.
Just as one may look at the knowledge of yesterday as a fantastic speculation — as I said about the famous work of Eddington — so one may imagine a cosmogony of tomorrow, dissimilar to the current one, but nevertheless understandable, since cosmic processes are accessible to us to the degree that they can be focused by reason. But nothing is today so much held in contempt in science fiction as reason. In this regard a total harmony unites the authors with the readers. Obscenity is no longer indecent — the intellectual has taken its place in the pillory. Science-fiction fans should be discouraged from perusing
TODOROV’S FANTASTIC THEORY OF LITERATURE
Since structuralism in literary studies is largely of French origin, let this attempt to ruin its reputation have as its motto the words of a Frenchman, Pierre Bertaux:
At one time it was hoped that the beginnings of a formalization of the humanities analogous [to that of the “diagonal” or “formalistic” sciences] could be expected from structuralism. Unfortunately it appears today that precisely the loudest advocates of structuralism have let it degenerate into a mythology —and not even a useful one. This chatter that is now called structuralism has apparently dealt a mortal blow to that rudimentary scientific beginning.[11]
I fully agree with this verdict. However, inasmuch as it is difficult to expose in a single article the barrenness of a whole school of thought — one moreover that has spawned divergent tendencies, since here every author has his own “vision” of the subject — I will limit myself to dissecting Tzvetan Todorov’s book
The history of the degeneration of a conceptual apparatus that originated in mathematical linguistics, after it was mechanically transplanted into the domain of metaliterature, has yet to be written. It will show how defenseless logical concepts become when they are torn out of contexts in which they were operationally justified, how easy it is, by parasitizing on science properly speaking, to bemuse humanists with pretentious claptrap, disguising one’s actual powerlessness in a foreign field beneath a putatively unassailable logical precision. This will be a rather grim, but instructive, history of how unambiguous concepts turn into foggy ones, formal necessity into arbitrariness, syllogisms into paralogisms. It will, in short, deal with a retrograde trend in French critical thought, which, aiming at nothing less than logical infallibility in theory-building, transformed itself into an incorrigible dogmatism.
Structuralism was to be a remedy for the immaturity of the humanities as manifested in their lack of sovereign criteria for deciding the truth or falsehood of theoretical generalizations. The formal structures of linguistics are mathematical in origin, and are, indeed, numerous and diverse, corresponding to branches of both pure and classical mathematics ranging from probability and set theories to the theory of algorithms. The inadequacy of all these leads linguists to employ new models, e.g., from the theory of games, since this furnishes models of conflicts, and language is, at its higher, semantic levels, entangled in irreducible contradictions. These important tidings have, however, not yet reached those literary scholars who have taken over a small fraction of the arsenal of linguistics and endeavor to model literary works using conflict-free deductive structures of an uncommonly primitive type — as we shall demonstrate with the example of the Todorov book.
This author begins by disposing of some objections which arise in connection with constructing a theory of literary genres. Deriding the investigator who would, before proceeding to description of a genre, engage in endless reading of actual works, he asserts — appealing to the authority of Karl Popper — that for the maker of generalizations it suffices to be acquainted with a representative sample from the set of objects to be studied. Popper, wrongly invoked, is in no wise to blame, since representativeness of a sample in the natural sciences and in the arts are two quite different matters. Every normal tiger is representative for that species of cats, but there is no
