Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future

, and: Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays

, and: Science Fiction: History Science Vision
, and: The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
, and: The Fantastic in Literature (review)

Susan R. Gannon

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer

1979, pp. 9-11 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.0.1400

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/250332

Access provided by Purdue University (24 Feb 2017 17:29 GMT)

Robert Scholes. Structural Fabulation:
An Essay on Fiction of the Future. South
Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1975.
Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical
Essays, ed. Mark Rose. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976.
Robert Scholes and Eric Rabkin. Science
Fiction: History Science -- Vision.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Tzvetan Todorov. The Fantastic: /\
Structural Approach to a^ Literary Genre.
Ithaca, New York: Cornell University
Press, 1975. (Cornell Paperbacks)
Eric Rabkin. The Fantastic in Literature.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1976.
Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fic-
tion of the Future is a revised version of
four lectures Professor Scholes gave at
Notre Dame in 1974, lectures intended as
prolegomena to the serious reading of
science fiction. The first piece is a
commentary on the contemporary situation
of fiction (and literary criticism of it)
which makes a case for "fiction of the
future." In the second of his essays
Scholes discusses "The Roots of Science
Fiction," and offers a set of useful
critical definitions. He sees fabulation
as "fiction that offers us a world clearly
and radically discontinuous from the one
we know, yet returns to confront that
known world in some cognitive way."
Structural fabulation is "simply a new
mutation in the tradition of speculative
fiction" which is "modified by an aware-
ness of the nature of the universe as a
system of systems, a structure of structures,"
and in which "the insights of the past
century of science are accepted as fictional
points of departure." In his third essay
Scholes illustrates the range and quality
of work to be found among modern structural
fabulists, and his last piece is a close
look at the achievement of one of these:
Ursula K. LeGuin. Scholes devotes a good
part of his essay, "The Good Witch of the
West," to a discussion of the Earthsea
Trilogy, which he admires very much. He
reflects on a passage from A Wizard of Earth-
sea this way:
Is this magic? Religion?
Science? The great gift of Ursula LeGuin
is to offer us a perspective in which all
these merge, in which realism and fantasy
are not opposed, because the supernatural
is naturalizednot merely postulated but
regulated, systematized, made part of the
Great Equilibrium itself. And of course,
this is also art, in which the sounds of
individual sentences are as cunningly
balanced as the whole design, in which a
great allegory of the destructive power
of science unleashed, and a little
allegory of an individual seeking to
conquer his own chaotic impulses, come
together as neatly as the parts of a dove's
tail. (p. 86)
Not all readers would agree with his com-
parative estimate of CS. Lewis and LeGuin,
but Scholes makes an interesting case for
his position: LeGuin is the better writer,
and her world-view is a deeper one. He also
has some useful observations on what makes
juvenile fiction juvenile, in his com-
parison of LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy with
her work for more mature audiences.
Structural Fabulation is a short book.
As Scholes says, it is "an essay, not a
treatise, a series of lectures on a single
topic, not an exhaustive investigation of
that topic." But the book rests solidly on
the theoretical foundations of his
studies in The_ Nature of Narrative and
Structuralism in Literature, and should be
of great interest to anyone involved in
the serious reading of science fiction.
Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical
Essays, edited by Mark Rose, is a recent
addition to Prentice-Hall's useful series
of Twentieth Century Views. The history
of science fiction is surveyed by Kingsley
Amis, and Robert Conquest presents a
thoughtful discussion of the critical and
popular attitudes toward the genre. The
editor has wisely chosen to include the
essay from his recent book in which Robert
Scholes develops his theory of science
fiction as "structural fabulation." A
section devoted to theory contains some of
the best pieces in the book, including
Darko Suvin's fine essay "On the Poetics
of the Science Fiction Genre," which defines
science fiction as a literature of cognitive
estrangement requiring a relatively high
degree of knowledge and social imagination
from teacher, critic, author, and reader.
(It would be interesting to see what Suvin
would make of the necessary changes in the
relationship between implied author and
reader when that author is speaking to a
juvenile reader of science fiction.)Among the
more familiar titles rounding out this
convenient and inexpensive collection are
Susan Sontag's now classic essay on science
fiction films, "The Imagination of Disaster,
and CS. Lewis's reflections "On Science
Fiction" from Of Other Worlds.
Science Fiction: History -- Science --
Vision is an introductory handbook which
should prove useful to teachers and
students of science fiction. Scholes and
Rabkin are serious literary critics with
particular interest in literary theory and,
clearly, they love science fiction. The
book is far more than a casual compilation.
It is a well written and critically astute
account of the development of science
fiction from Mary Shelley to Kurt Vonnegut.
For those whose knowledge of physics and
astronomy, computers and thermo-dynamics is
sketchy, a chapter on the sciences of
science fiction is a pleasant bonus. Myth,
fantasy and Utopian themes in science
fiction are treated in a separate chapter,
and a final section deals with ten
representative novels, treated in con-
siderable detail. These range from
Frankenstein (1818) and 20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea ( 1870) to The_ Left Hand of
Darkness (1969) and The Shockwave Rider
(1976). (In his consideration of the work
of Ursula LeGuin, Scholes reprints his
critical estimate of the Earthsea trilogy
which originally appeared in Structural
Fabulation.
Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A
Structural Approach to_ a^ Literary Genre is
a bold and original study of generic theory
as well as a particular literary genre.
He begins with a shrewd critique of North-
rop Frye's theory of genres and goes on to
discuss some of the basic difficulties in-
volved in generic criticism. He proposes
his own definition of fantasy and offers
a fascinating though admittedly quite
speculative account of the structure of
fantastic narrative.
For Todorov, the fantastic text is one
which obliges the reader to consider the
world of the characters as a world of liv-
ing persons and to hesitate between a
natural and a supernatural explanation of
the events described. Moreover, the text
must ensure that the reader will reject
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allegorical as well as poetic solutions of
the puzzle. The fantastic, then, exists
on the borderline of the uncanny (the
wonderful which can be explained away) and
the marvelous (which would require new laws
of nature to explain what has happened.)
Clearly, this is a narrowly conceived
definition which is strictly applicable to
relatively few texts, but Todorov's
general approach has relevance also to
texts which present some elements of the
fantastic.
Todorov distinguishes three aspects of
the literary work: the verbal, the syntac-
tical, and the semantic. His observations
on some of the verbal aspects of fantasy
include a discussion of the way the super-
natural often appears in fantasy when the
reader is being encouraged to take a
rhetorical figure literally. Most of
Todorov's examples come from French lit-
erature, but it is easy to see the relevance
of his remarks to the work of Lewis Carroll
and Hans Andersen.
In his discussion of the semantic or
thematic aspect of fantasy, Todorov, despite
his expressed concern for scientific
rigor in critical discussion, chooses not
to engage in the sort of wide-ranging sur-
vey of fantastic works which might lend
weight to his conclusions. Instead, he
applies his (considerable) critical in-
tuition to two texts, a novel and a fairy
tale, which serve as convenient illustrations
of his theory that the themes of fantasy
fall into two categories: the "themes of
the self" which concern man and his world
and deal principally with "the perception-
consciousness system," and "themes of the
other" which concern "the relation of man
with his desireand thereby with his un-
conscious."
Critics of children's fantasy will find
much that is interesting in Todorv's book.
It is hard to resist arguing with him, but
it is also hard to resist the temptation
to apply some of his ideas to works in our
own area of interest. Perhaps, for example,
it might be possible to approach the
thematic differences between the two books
by saying that while Todorov's "themes of
the other" are more prominent in Alice in
Wonderland, his "themes of the self" with
their obsessive concern with "the percep-
tion-consciousness system" dominate Through
the Looking Glass. At any rate, while few
readers will agree with everything Todorov
says, anyone interested in fantasy or in
fictional poetics should find The Fantastic
indispensable reading.
Eric Rabkin, in The Fantastic in
Literature, defines the fantastic not as
Tzvetan Todorov does in terms of a
hesitation effect in the reader but
rather as a "quality of astonishment that
we feel when the ground rules of a narrative
world are suddenly made to turn about 180."
Such a reversal is signaled "in the reactions
of characters, the statements of narrators,
and the implications of structure, all
playing on and against our whole experience
as people and readers." Rabkin sees the
fantastic as an element in a wide range of
narratives. "At the far end of this range,"
he suggests, "we find Fantasy, the genre
whose center and concern, whose primary
enterprise, is to present and consider the
fantastic."
Rabkin deals with the fantastic element
in such varied forms as fairy tales, science
fiction, detective stories, and Utopian
literature. He believes that "if we know
the world to which a reader escapes. . .
we know the world from which he comes."
This idea Rabkin develops at length, con-
tending that we can understand a writer's
world view, his preoccupations and his
perspectives, much better if we understand
what he takes to be operative oppositions.
Rabkin's formulation of what happens in
fantastic writing is most useful when
applied to works he would classify as pure
fantasy, work which focus thematically on
logical reversals. When dealing with other
kinds of fantastic fiction, he is persuasive
more because what he says about a particular
piece rings true than because his formula
for reading fantastic fiction is completely
convincing.
According to Rabkin's theory, micro-
contextual clues should be present to guide
the critic in determining what opposition
and reversals help to structure a work, but
in his own practice it does seem helpful
that he as a critic knows enough about the
life, thought, and background of each of
the authors he treats to make some pretty
good guesses about their perspectives.
Rabkin has chosen to concentrate much of
his critical attention on the structure of
fantasy in some of the later Victorians.
Inevitably, he deals with the rich vein of
fantasy in Victorian literature for child-
ren, seeing it as a means of understanding
both the Victorian conception of child-
hood and the yearnings of normal
Victorian adults. Many of Rabkin's
incidental observations are per-
suasive. For example, he notes the way
in which many works of fantasy "seem
to distill their constellation of
perspectives into a single metaphor,
often the title character." The example
he offers is Peter Pan, but innumerable
others from children's literature come to
mind.
Rabkin gives a great deal of attention
to the way George MacDonald "used the
strength of the Victorian perspective on
children to justify the escape from the
Victorian perspective on religion." He
sees MacDonald as using the allowed fanta-
sies of childhood to offer consolation for
all ages from the rigors of contemporary
religious doctrines. The book includes an
extended treatment of At the_ Back of the
North Wind, and as one might expect, there
is considerable discussion of the work of
Lewis Carroll. Rabkin also seems in-
terested in much modern children's fantasy.
He mentions P.L. Travers and Norton Juster
as readily as Orwell or Robbe-Grillet.
Here is one distinguished critic who appears
well-equipped to help those of us in-
terested in children's literature to in-
quire into the way in which the fantastic
operates to serve the human needs of both
reader and writer. It would be most
satisfying to hear more from him on this
subject.
Susan R. Gannon
Associate Professor of
Literature and Communications
Pace University
Irwin, W[ i 11 i am] R[obert]. The Game of the
Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy. Urbana,
111. University of Illinois Press, 1976.
Professor Irwin's study covers only
"long prose fiction fantasy" from 1880 to
about 1960: since 1957, he considers, the
stream of fantasy "has all but run dry."
It will be seen from this remark that
Prof. Irwin is not particularly attentive
to contemporary fantasy for children or
adolescents. William Mayne, Alan Garner,
Ursula Le Guin, Peter Dickinson and others
whose work was in print when this book was
written are never mentioned. The roster
of critics cited is also uneven: Northrup
Frye, Rosemary Haughton, Elizabeth Cook,
Andre Favat, and virtually all of the myth-
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