Rabkin, The Fantastic, Chapters 4-6

Rabkin's definition of Sci fi: "One definition that seems to encompass the diverse works we havem entioned is this: a work belongs in the genre of science fiction if its narrative world is at least somewhat different fromo ur own, and if that difference is apparent against the background of an organized body of knowledge" (119). This definition includes dystopian fiction of all types, then, not just technologic ones--"body of knowledge" here might include social knowledge, religious knowledge, or ecological knowledge (although that, too, borders on the scientific). Rabkin further notes that this definition is dependent upon a sense of "difference" and the audience's perspective. Rabkin even goes so far as to posit a prescription: "A good work of science fiction makes one and only one assumption about its narrative world that violates our knowledge about our own world and then extrapolates the whole narrative world from that difference" (121). For me, the key word here is "extrapolates"--this is what good dystopian fiction does: it extrapolates one element, and leaves the rest untouched, so as to allow for reader identification and recognition.

I have some trouble with Rabkin's "reversal"; at times there is a complete reversal, but many works that are fantastic (i.e. Doctor Who) are serial in nature, and it is hard to imagine continual reversals--after all, once we accept that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, it becomes a normal part of the narrative, a joke that the reader is "in on" and can appreciate the non-shock value when new characters seem surprised. This is not fantastic for anyone but the confused human who keeps running around the edges of the blue box; nor is there anything fantastic about the Stargate, after the first movie. What is reversed in Stargate the series? What is reversed in ;the 200+ episodes of Doctor Who? If I answer nothing, then I'd be saying they aren't fantastic. Unless...this is why there always must be a moment of exposition to new or minor characters, so that we can once more bereminded that htis is a reversal. Where, then, does the identification lie?

Rabkin later (144) distinguishes Utopias (or, "approval") and Dystopias ("disapproval") and divides each into subgenres based on their reliance on either "contemporary perspectives" or "Organized body of knowledge" (one leading, of course, to "fantasy" and one leading to "science fiction"). He further divides each of these into either "extrapolation" or "reversal"--and then gives examples of each. I heartily disagree with his placement of "We" under the "reversal-knowledge" box of dystopian fiction, for I feel there is far more extrapolation at work than reversal, and that that extrapolation is a critique of "contemporary perspectives." It is not so much that OneState is a world where imagination is bad (a reversal) than this ban on imagination is an extrapolation of Stalinist Russia (which is when/where this book was written). If Bellamy's Looking Backward is an extrapolation of Victorian social policies into an ambiguous (at best) utopia where the sick are criminals and criminals are sick, how is We's "illness of imagination" any different?

Rabkin's further chart of circles(147) upon overlapping circles (which place dystopias INSIDE utopias....which i heartily disagree with) only serves to point out that classifying genres by category is a difficult and, in the end, not very helpful cause. Of course, his chart helps me to see why I call some things "true" dystopias--and while there isn't a space for post-apocalyptic fiction, I can imagine another circle for that. It also helps to show the releationship between Sartreian (word?) satire and dystopian fiction--both are "disapprovals" (I'm digging this word)--or in Burke, "stylized, strategic responses"--but are different narratively and aesthetically. More importantly, they are different rhetorically, featuring a different audience, a different purpose (exigence), and very different constraints (publishing-wise).

"In addition to showing new relatinships among works that use the fantastic to similar degrees, inspection of each display alone may well be profitable. For example, works in areas 4 and 7 seem to assume that man will change under the operation of science, while works in areas 6 and 9 seem to assume that society will change under the operation of man. This contrast suggests two hypotheses: 1) science fiction writers feel man is ultimately subject to powers beyond his control, while 2) satirists feelt hat men are always responsible for their actions." (149). Hence the inherent struggle in dystopian fiction for agency over structural determinism. Of course, this is always a question when we begin to speak of change, as Burke notes in P&C. Is it the Scene that makes the Agent, or the Agent who makes the Scene? Dystopian writers tend to feel that man has a choice up to a point--and that point was passed long before the start of their stories.
Of course, Rabkin is the one who set up this chart, and so it is not a "natural" chart like the table of the elements--it shows us Rabkin's assumptions instead of some natural property of the genre. And he begins with the assumption that these three genres (science fiction, utopian fiction, and satire) *are* three seperate genres, and he separates them according to his own understanding of the fantastic. He is asking the "essence" question--is text A essentially science fiction? And if so, what is the essence of scifi? Instead, we should take a more rhetorical approach: in what cases under what conditions does text A count as a member of genre X?

Satire, it seems to me, is a rhetorical mode, not a genre--a way of stylizing an argument, a way of arguing, like "deliberative" or "forensic" and carries with it certain topoi (just as "deliberative" always--according to Aristotle--has some discussion of "the good", satire always carries with it some discussion of benefits and the good of society, but reverses the logical means of arguing.)
After reminding us that the Victorian attitude toward technology informs most texts, and all scifi texts, Rabkin fastforwards to the 20th Century's complex attitude toward science in general, and technology specificially. "In the twentieth century all utopian schemes have included technology, and it is only sicne the emergence of the psychic monolith of The Bomb taht utopias are required to include, as wells did wtih this ruleing elite of humanists, a safeguard against technology gone astray" (155). I'm not sure we can locate The Bomb as the shift from a utopian-in-general attitude to the "dystopian impulse" Booker finds, but it is a good marker, and we can say that by the time of The Bomb, the shift had definitely happened.

"If the fantastic is indeed a basic mode of human knowing, then we should be able to see related and parallel developments in non-narrative materials (190). A way of knowing that is non-scientific draws us into Lyotard's questions of post-modern epistemology. And I must again ask: What do we do with post modern dystopias like "The Dispossessed", which does not clearly reverse anything, but reverses reversals and leaves us disorented. And what to do with the non-programatic medium of American film? What do we do about The Matrix (the place)? The film does not give us an answer but to Wait for The One. Agency is deprived, and we become voyeurs into a horrific landscape, but nothing more. The reversals in The Matrix displace us without allowing us to emerge from the theatre and re-orient. It reverses not the narrative of the film, but the grounds of our own reality, and lets us flounder around this construct as the minor characters we are--but now we are horrifically aware of our own status. This is in opposition to the satirical mode of arguing, to the traditional utopian mode of argument, in that it not only assumes that the Scene determines the act, but that the Scene has been determined by some outside force far greater than ourselves. There *is* no argument beyond a simple revelation (Welcome to the desert of the Real), no equipment for living. It's Stylized, but not strategic.