verbava все записи автора Thomas M. Disch – On SF

In the quintessentially sophisticated world of Proust's novels there are no moments of embarrassment: his artists are first-rate, his aristocrats know better than to do anything, and everyone else is a provincial. A provincial is any person who would be embarrassing if he were a friend or a member of the same club.

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In youth the most awkward age—the one that gives us the most to blush for—is the one we have just quitted. College students have a horror of being mistaken for high-schoolers; those in their mid-twenties wince at the gaucheries of college years. Thereafter, embarrassment is not so much a matter of maturity as of social class.

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There is nothing that so militates against the sense of one's own vast ignorance as adopting some such Big Idea, and the young, whose ignorance is largest and rawest and most exasperating, have a natural predilection for Big Ideas. Marxists, Ayn Randers, Scientologists, and deconstructionists have one thing in common: they tend to have been recruited young. Once in the fold, they may remain there indefinitely and turn into fossils, but twigs are bent in the teens and twenties.

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If there is one key to prejudging books and consigning them, half-read, to the holocaust, it must be Style, and "Style" is the single word most likely to provoke hack writers and hack readers to postures of defense. Storytelling and yarn-spinning are simple, wholesome crafts, they would aver, to which questions of Style are irrelevant. Style is to be left to stylists, like Hemingway or Faulkner or Joyce, the writers you have to read in school.
Nonsense. Style is simply a way of handling yourself in prose so as to signal to an attentive reader that she is in the presence of someone possessed of honesty, wit, sophistication, irony, compassion, or whatever other attributes one looks for in a person to whom one is about to give over n-many hours of one's mental life. People who insist otherwise usually have mental halitosis.

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These days nothing short of the author's death can keep a commercially successful work of sf from being cloned into sequels as long as the product moves from the shelves.

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The real sociopolitical function of the cold war and the arms race was to guarantee comfortable "demesnes for corporate executives and other officials of the military-industrial establishments." Only as long as there was the menace of an external enemy would a majority of people agree to their own systematic impoverishment.

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Meeting Mormons socially, it is not comme il faut to inquire too closely into their honest opinion of the revelations Joseph Smith received from the Angel Moroni, nor is it considered polite to snicker at the pretensions of those who think there may be something in astrology. The realm of protected idiocies is as large as all illiput—and its boundaries are being continually extended.

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There is also the promise made to Noah. Like Noah, many sf writers and their fans feel they have the inside track on the approaching catastrophe, whatever it may be, and they're counting on being among the happy few who survive it.

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There can be a kind of inverse genius to certain bad writing, so that the reader is always discovering some new godawfulness to cringe at.

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For if the postmodern pigeonhole is a shuck, so is the modernist pigeonhole. James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, and all the rest of the modernist Pantheon have as little in common as the politicians of the same era: i.e., celebrity and contemporaneity. Good artists are remarkable rather for their individuality and/or universality than for their adherence to a set of specs drawn up after the fact. The specs are drawn up for the use of epigones and camp followers.

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In the New York Times of November i, 1997, six scholars were asked what was the Most Overrated Idea of the present day. The philosopher Richard Rorty replied, "The first thing that comes to mind is postmodernism. It's one of those terms that has been used so much that nobody has the foggiest idea what it means. It means one thing in philosophy, another thing in architecture and nothing in literature. It would be nice to get rid of it."

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