The Hard Questions

The new issue of the SFRA Review arrived in my mailbox this week. This is the annual SFRA awards issue, and it has the text of Brian Attebery's acceptance speech for the 2009 Pilgrim Award, presented in June at the 2009 SFRA Awards ceremony, which was held this year in Atlanta. I'm happy to see that in his speech he identifies critics as writers and notes that writing is a significant part of his craft. Indeed, much of the speech is about the discoveries he's made about writing over the course of his career. The third of the discoveries he lists interests me most. So I'll quote a few chunks of that portion of his speech here:

My third discovery about writing is that it only works when I force myself to ask the hard questions. That's especially true when writing about something I care deeply about-- passion has to be tempered and tested by critical thought. Otherwise it does become a mere exercise in political or aesthetic orthodoxy (and I think aesthetic correctness is more harmful than the political variety). When I look back at my early papers...the problem is not that they're badly written or that they misread the material. It is that they don't probe deeply enough into their own--which is to say, my own--assumptions and reading practices. I didn't ask hard enough questions.


But what exactly is a hard question?


Well, that one is.


I believe that when we study literature, we are never studying just the literary work itself. Instead, we're examining our own interaction with the text. That is difficult because it means bringing to consciousness the very structure of consciousness, which is the business of theory. Psychological theory, political theory, feminist theory, semiotic theory: these all have to do with making the invisible patterns of thought and culture more visible, so that they can be challenged.


Sometimes I will be in the middle of writing about a story, when the Theory Fairy peeks over my shoulder and asks something like, "But what exactly is a character?" "What does fantasy reveal about the basic fabric of storytelling?" "If a concept like androgyny changes depending on the direction one looks from, what is its meaning?" These are "Whew!" questions. They're the sort of questions that make you question pretty much everything you've learned about literature and society and your own sense of self. They're big questions: you know you're not going to answer them fully even in a book-length project.


Here are two quick ways to recognize a hard question. First, if you ever hear yourself saying, "Somebody ought to explain this or that," you have probably just posed a hard question, especially if you look around and can't find anyone else stepping forward to be that somebody. You read a study, for instance, of the way fiction depicts consciousness, and you think to yourself, "But what about shared consciousness or telepathy? How does that relate to narrated thought? I wish somebody would write about that." Bingo You've just asked a hard question.


Second, a hard question is one that makes you take up a whole new field of study....[he gives specific examples of doing this]


I have had to reeducate many times to meet the demands of this or that hard question....Not so much fun is confronting myself. The hardest part of hard questions is that they turn back on the questioner: they're double-edged blades. I think writers of fiction all know this: that if you are going to write a story about, say, violence, you are going to end up confronting all your own memories and fears and denials of violent impulses and behaviors. The same is true of good scholarship. You can't write about gender without examining your own desires and experiences and constructed gender identity. You can't write about fantasy and myth without questioning your own mythic beliefs. At some point, the hard question is going to be, "Who are you to write about this?" and if you can't come up with a good answer, you probably won't finish the project. If you are lucky, that last hard question morphs into something more productive: "Who are you when you write about this?" In other words, what does the question tell you about yourself? What I often find, when I probe, is that myself-- my writing self-- is not any one thing, but an amalgam of many voices and many interactions.

"...a particular, awkward kind of SF feminism"

The new issue of the SFRA Review arrived in my mailbox today, and it has the text of Gwyneth Jones's acceptance speech for the 2008 Pilgrim Award, which was read at the SFRA's awards ceremony in her absence. It's fairly long, so I'll quote only a couple of chunks. It opens:

First, let me say how sorry I am that I can't be with you in the home of the Apocalypse (as Mark Bould reminded me, temptingly), and that I'm missing my only chance-- on the return trip-- to use one of my favourite iconic sayings in its original context. I'm not in Kansas, and it's a real shame, but I've given up flying, until further notice-- and it'd be a sad thing, after my rash, intransigent pilgrimage through SF criticism, if I dumped a rash, quixotic vow to come and collect the Pilgrim award.

I'm honoured, I'm astonished, I'm very proud to be a recipient of the Pilgrim Award. Despite Adam's kind protestations (I think I initially responded to his phone call by saying, are you sure this isn't a joke?) I still feel bemused. What did I do to deserve this? Caused a little trouble, maybe, occasionally, once upon a time (which seems, according to previous Pilgrims' accounts of themselves, to be something of a trend...) But I'm both glad, and sorry, to feel that this is an honour for a particular, awkward kind of SF feminism. Not the "girls get to be guys" type of feminism. Nor the equally anodyne "women are morally superior" variety-- but the deeply offensive contention that our whole global culture (and specifically, the future of our culture) could stand to be a little less masculine. Could stand a strong infusion of the values designated as "weak," and "feminine"--negotiation above conflict, empathy above self-interest, and all the rest of that repertoire. So, I'm glad I'm getting this award as a feminist, and I'm sorry-- because I'd much rather that my ideas and opinions were *individual* but mainstream, and didn't merit a special label.

*

I'm not sure exactly when I got started in SF critical venues. I wrote a book called Divine Endurance. As soon as it was publisehd I was hailed, by a community which I hadn't known existed (I'd read a lot of SF, but never been to a convention, never been a "fan" in the technical sense of the term). Someone must have sent me one of those alluring free gifts, and off I went, reviewing for Vector, for Foundation, having a troubled, on-and-off relationship with Interzone-- and later, maybe most significantly, writing regularly for David Hartwell's New York Review of Science Fiction. Things became a little heated, from time to time. There was a correspondence with Brian Stableford, in Foundation, on the subject of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale... I remember contacting the then editor, Edward James, and asking him, is this Stableford chap okay in a scrap? He understands about play-fighting? I won't make him cry or anything? Edward duly assured me that I ened have no fear. Mr. Stableford was bulletproof.

What I chiefly recall about those gunslinging years is that I never, or very rarely, chose the books that I reviewed. (The exceptions that spring to mind our Colin Greenland's Take Back Plenty and Rachel Pollack's Unquenchable Fire.) I would tell the reviews editor, don't worry, just send me whatever you like. I'm not primarily interested in giving people tips on what to buy, and I don't want to have advance guidance on what I'm supposed to think. It doesn't matter to me if the novel is obscure. I want to see what's happening in science ficiton, I want to take books apart, find out how they work. How they relate to popular culture, sexual politics, global politics. How SF writers are using the constructive or destructive interferences between technology, science, human life... I didn't realise, way back then, that I had crossed the line: I was no longer reviewing books, I'd become a critic. I didn't even realise how different, in practice and in purpose, those two activities are-- and this blissful ignorance could get me into trouble. I remember the look of hurt astonishment in the eyes of a certain illustrious cyberpunk, when he'd read my review of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash in the New York Review of Science Fiction. But Bruce (no, I didn't say this, but I thought it)-- surely you noticed that this book positively licks the boots of mindless violence? You're a decent human being, surely you were repelled by Hiro Protagonist's smug, shallow, machismo...?

Those were the days. I wouldn't dream of behaving in the same way now. For one thing, thanks to the internet explosion, it's become almost impossible not to know what the community thinks you should think, about any given SF novel... For another, I'm older and a little wiser. I no longer think it's such a great idea to stand alone, and shoot the bad guy full of holes in the middle of Main Street...

The issue also has a lengthy review by Ritch Calvin of Stretto. I'll quote its last paragraph:

From the very beginning of the series, Duchamp makes it clear that one of her interests in the series is to examine how revolutions take place. Too often, the narrative conceit is that a revolution had already taken place in the past and a new society has emerged. For Duchamp, the interest is in the very messy process of working through the changes, the personalities, the conflicts, the contradictions. Too often a novel will show individuals and scoeities that are united, at times over generations, by a single cause-- terraforming a planet, for example. However, the case of 9/11 demonstrates clearly that such unanimity and momentum are impossible to create and sustain. Duchamp and the Marq'ssan series demonstrate this beautifully. Perhaps it does not create the sort of narrative arc to which we are accustomed; perhaps it does not create the sort of resolution and closure we would like to see, but just as she resists the marketing strategies, she resists such easy narrative devices.
Practically speaking, the books and the series would be difficult to teach, at least in most classroom settings. However, they do raise interesting and important thematic issues as they challenge contemporary conventions of narrative and plotting.