September 27, 2024

The title of this newsletter, Expanding Eyes, is a visual and spatial metaphor.  But the imagination expands in time as well as space, dilates into the past and future.  From this, questions arise.  How do we see into past and future, and, more importantly, why.  Why are we not content to live in the present, like the animals?  But we are are not: we are restless in the here and now.  Indeed, it is a characteristic of human identity: we could be defined as the species uniquely obsessed with the nature of time.  It is the riddle whose answer is what we are, as Oedipus discovered when the Sphinx asked him what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening.  He answered the riddle of himself:  the human being crawls on all fours in the morning, walks upright at noon, and hobbles in old age with a cane into that good night.  The reference to Oedipus indicates that obsession with time is by no means just a characteristic of the “modern,” some product of the increasing self-consciousness of our age.  Indeed, mythology could be conceived as the attempt to give a shape and therefore a meaning to time: to imagine the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega, from Creation myth to apocalypse, whether that apocalypse is final or merely the beginning of a new cycle. 

Mircea Eliade contended that what is “modern” is not time-consciousness itself but rather the birth of a new conception of historical time in the Biblical religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as opposed to a mythical or sacred time that is not really time at all but the shape of an endlessly-renewing eternity.   The difference between linear and progressive historical time and cyclical mythical time is a central insight, but we do have to be cautious about idealizing earlier ages.  No societies have lived in mythical time since the original ancestors.  That would mean that its members lived in an unfallen state, not time as we know it but an eternal perfection, heaven on earth.  There has always been a fall or decline from the sacred, and all societies dwell largely in the non-sacred state that Eliade calls the “profane.”  Their rituals may attempt to renew the connection with the original mythical state, but success is only partial.  The difference between such traditional societies and modern historical ones is one of direction.  Traditional societies are nostalgic:  they look backwards towards a lost ideal, and are therefore conservative, trying to recover a lost past.  Modern historical societies look forward towards an ideal that is hoped to come into being in the future, and are therefore inherently revolutionary, abandoning the past for what is yet to be. 

Some of us are more predisposed than others to imagine past and future.  The goal of social conditioning is to root us firmly in the present, in what is called the “real world,” in order to focus on the project at hand, which is survival.  To dream of other times and places is neurotic, an attempt to escape from the challenges of living rather than confronting and resolving them.  As a lifelong dreamer, I will admit with a rueful laugh that it is a good thing to be grounded in the real world. There are many times I wish I were.  The fun that is made of us dreamers is—up to a point—deserved.  But only up to a point, beyond which there are certain things to be said in the other direction.  The first is that “realism” and its commonsense attitude, to the extent that it is unaware of or in denial of its limitations, is itself a kind of evasion, a kind of escapism in the other direction.  Realism of the hardnosed type protests too much.  It insists so fiercely on keeping its horizons narrow and contracted that we suspect it is afraid of what might lie beyond its seemingly safe, familiar world of “facts.”  It masquerades as strength, but may in actuality be a form of insecurity, unable to deal with anything that can’t be nailed down, categorized, turned to practical use, and thereby controlled.    

In its fear of the unfamiliar and strange, it may cultivate a willful ignorance, asserting that “everybody knows” that certain things are normal and right, grounded in real distinctions.  “Everybody knows” that God and nature have decreed that there are two sexes, and that heterosexual union leading to reproduction is “obviously” in accord with both reality and morality.  Anything else is sick fantasy, born of a diseased imagination.  The need to condemn the polymorphous variations of desire that the imagination can improvise upon the ground bass of certain biological facts arises from the need for social cohesion.  Most societies, most of the time, try to achieve cohesion by collectivizing their members, subordinating individuals to the mass by means of supressing individuality and making everyone more or less alike.  Dreamers are capable of imagining other modes of being and other ways of life, and that is a threat to a stable social order, and is perceived as a kind of metastasizing psychic cancer.     

In the face of this practical-minded suspicion and hostility, we should insist on the practicality of a liberal education that enables you to see beyond your own nose. Liberal education insists on trying to imagine the past, not merely as escape but as a quest for insight.  We all know that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.  There are plenty of people at present who do not want students to learn history precisely because it may cause them to question certain values and practices, such as slavery or homophobia, and maybe even oppose them—plenty of people who want us to repeat history.  As for the future, it is increasingly recognized that the human race is responsible from this point for its own evolution.  Natural selection has brought us here, sentient and capable.  But from this point forward, we must imagine the future—or futures—we want, but also imagine those we don’t want, and learn from those nightmares what to avoid.  It is a fatal flaw of capitalism that its vision is short-term gain.  Its goal is to get in, make a profit, and get back out fast, letting other people suffer from the outcome.  Or it can fall into magical thinking, refusing to imagine that there could be consequences, and, if there were, that there is always a way to escape them for those who are rich enough and smart enough.  Such magical thinking gave us the economic meltdown of 2008—and, for that matter, the career of Donald Trump as a businessman.  Capitalism does not want to imagine the future, for that kind of thinking gets in the way of returns for investors.  Refusing to imagine the future has led to catastrophe time and time again, but capitalists never learn, because it is not in what they conceive as their best interests to learn. 

Increasingly we are becoming aware that the same is true of technologists.  Mary Shelley tried to warn us about this over two centuries ago in Frankenstein, but the contemporary scene burgeons with mad inventors who are either incapable of imagining the negative ramifications of their inventions—or who do realize and don’t care, because they are really capitalists greedy for money and power.  This was true of the inventors of social media—oh, what harm could ever come of connecting the world into a true global village?  And it seems true now of the inventors of AI and cryptocurrency. 

Clearly, we need imagination’s capacity to imagine both past and future precisely in order to cope with the challenges of the “real” world.  Greek mythology embodies these capacities in the twin figures of Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus, whose names mean forethought and hindsight.  Epimetheus is treated as something of a fool—he is the one who is duped by Pandora, who turns out to be Zeus’s method of revenge on Prometheus and the human race.  But that is perhaps a deliberate undercutting in order to cast his brother in a better light.  They are, at any rate, the twin spirits of the temporal imagination. 

Thus, the educated imagination lives in a world of wider horizons and greater possibilities, and such a widened perspective is a great asset in both personal and professional life, despite the cynicism of those who would like to abolish liberal studies, especially humanities majors, in favor of some “practical” training that would inevitably turn out to be a mode of capitalist exploitation. But liberal education can go further in its defense of imagination and its vehicles, the creative arts.  Yes, it can be a useful instrument for helping people navigate the ordinary world.  But eventually the imagination pushes up against the boundaries of the ordinary world—and calls them into question.  Eventually it becomes clear that the “reality principle” is a constricted view, and ultimately an illusion.  Beyond its confines is a realm of wonder, which wears the twin aspects of beauty and terror, desire and nightmare.  So long as we are perceiving as the ordinary ego, these realms of wonder are merely fictions.  But modern thought—in psychology, in literary theory and cultural studies, in philosophy—has become inescapably aware that it is the ego which is a construct.  To experience the wider realms of wonder that traditional mythology projects as heavens, hells, and Otherworlds we have to perceive as another kind of self.  What we call imagination is what we sense of that mysterious other self, which may be, for all its strangeness, a deeper and truer identity than our ego-self.  This puts our perception and understanding through what Blake called a Vortex, turning us inside out:  from an ego that sits in the center of a universe from which it is distanced and alienated into a Self that is a circumference that holds the universe within itself, a cosmic being who cannot be pointed to, like a god or God, because it is not an object within the environment but rather the environment itself.  This is a paradoxical boundary concept, but it would appear that the ultimate truth is paradoxical. 

From these far reaches, where our lives touch upon mystery, we may come down to earth and ask what happens when the imagination imagines the past.  In the opening of Shakespeare’s Tempest, Prospero speaks to his daughter Miranda of the “dark backward and abysm of time” in his attempt to reconstruct for her their personal past that led to their 12-year exile on a desert island.  Both words have their significance.  We normally think of a horizontal timeline on which we move forward—but, as Northrop Frye liked to say, we travel into the future like a passenger on a train or subway, facing backward towards a past that forever recedes from us.  That is at least our experience of fallen time, time in the realm of Eliade’s “profane.”  Profane time is the time of physics.  Because of its origins in 17^th century Newtonian mechanics, we tend to think of physics as a science of the movement of bodies in space.  But it might be more accurate to think of physics as the science of time, time measured by the decay of energy, or entropy, as expressed in the second law of thermodynamics.  The late 19^th and early 20^th centuries seem to have been traumatized by the discovery that, because entropy, the decay of order and return to chaos that ensues from a loss of energy, is always increasing, the universe is slowly dying.  This idea of “the heat death of the universe” induced a mood of melancholy in some quarters, despite the fact that it is many trillions of years away and is unlikely to disrupt anyone’s retirement plans.  It is irrational to feel pessimistic about such a distant prospect, but I think the ideas of entropy and heat death emerged at time when people were beginning to feel pessimistic about “the decline of the West.”  Behind it was really the mythological idea that profane time decays to such a point that “things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” in Yeats’s famous phrase, and the world reverts to original chaos again. 

This bleakness about living in an end-time pervades the whole Modernist era of the early 20^th century, and the mythological motif found scientific ideas of the decay of systems a convenient metaphor.  Thomas Pynchon’s first published story in 1959 was called “Entropy.”  His early work, influenced by Henry Adams, a 19^th century prophet of modern decline, was paralleled by some science fiction in the 1960’s in the movement known as the New Wave, one of whose members, Pamela Zoline, published a celebrated story called “The Heat Death of the Universe.”  In the work of J.G. Ballard, characters wander aimlessly across strange, surreal landscapes of decay, and behind the British faction of the New Wave is the dark future foreseen by H.G. Wells’s imagination even as his ideological writing insisted on progress and utopia.  Olaf Stapledon, in Last and First Men and Star Maker, seemingly inspired by the end of Wells’s The Time Machine, expanded the idea of universal decline to the scale of the whole cosmos of modern science, writing a “future history” of the universe in which cycle after cycle of alien races through billions of years rise, aspire, reach a zenith, and decline, to no avail.  In the end, it is all a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.  Like others of the Modernist period, Stapledon tried to cheer himself up by adopting a Nietzschean rhetoric about how the strong person is one who can stare into the meaningless of life and affirm it anyway, but the result, to me anyway, is a kind of poetic nihilism, for all the extraordinary inventiveness of his portrayal of alien races, all of them eventually doomed.  

Thus, the profane view of life is one in which we helplessly watch the past recede further and further from us, not only lost but more and more lost the older we grow.  “It is as if we were never alive,” says Wallace Stevens in a poem of old age, “The Rock.”  We move towards a future in which all things, as Prospero says in The Tempest, the cloud-capped towers and even the great globe itself, will vanish and leave not a wrack behind.  This is the experience of time of the alienated ego, with the imagination largely dormant.  It is important in understanding The Tempest, however, to keep in mind that Prospero’s famous speech is not the play’s final word.  There is much else going on in that play that moves in the opposite direction, towards renewal and the birth of a new order out of the sea. 

Prospero’s other word is “abysm,” which implies a different direction from “backward,” vertical instead of horizontal.  Outwardly, time recedes from us, moving ever backward into nonexistence.  But to find the lost past, it may be that we need to change direction and explore inward, to embark on a descent journey into an internal realm.  We think the past is gone, and then discover it is “here” but buried.  It is under our feet, and we walk upon it, unknowing.  People have always been haunted by ruins, survivals of the past that are still around us, visible.  But it is significant that those explorations of the buried and invisible, the sciences of archeology and paleontology, grew up in the later 19^th and 20^th centuries, after the inward turn that we call Romanticism.  Archeology was more or less born with Schliemann’s excavation of Troy in 1871, and what Schliemann found was the remains of a city of many levels, each built on top of the previous one, the lower levels descending ever deeper into the past.  Jung once had an extraordinary dream of a house whose levels descended in much the same manner:

I was in a house I did not know, which had two stories.  It was “my house.” I found myself in the upper story, where ther was a kind of salon furnished with fine old pieces in rococo style.  On the walls hung a number of precious old paintings.  I wondered that this should be my house, and thought, “Not bad.” But then it occurred to me that I did not know what the lower floor looked like.  Descending the stairs, I reached the ground floor.  There everything was much older, and I realized that this part of the house must date from about the fifteenth or sixteenth century.  The furnishings were medieval; the floors were of red brick.  Everywhere it was rather dark.  I went from one room to another, thinking, “Now I really must explore the whole house.”  I came upon a heavy door, and opened it.  Beyond it, I discovered a stone stairway that led down into the cellar.  Descending again, I found myself in a beautifully vaulted room which looked exceedingly ancient.  Examining the walls, I discovered layers of brick among the ordinary stone blocks, and chips of brick in the mortar.  As soon as I saw this I knew that the walls dated from Roman times.  My interest by now was intense.  I looked more closely at the floor.  It was of stone slabs, and in one of these I discovered a ring.  When I pulled it, the stone slab lifted, and again I saw a stairway of narrow stone steps leading down into the depths.  These, too, I descended, and entered a low cave cut into the rock.  Thick dust lay on the floor, and in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primtive culture.  I discovered two human skulls, obviously very old and half disintegrated.  Then I awoke.    (158-59)

Jung found the past inside himself, through the unconscious, and not just his personal past, for our personal lives are grounded in the collective life of past humanity.  A bit later, Jung puts it, “The deeper I went, the more alien and the darker the scene became.  In the cave, I discovered remains of a primitive culture, that is, the world of the primitive man within myself—a world which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness”  (160).  Significantly, Jung says, “The dream of the house had a curious effect upon me:  it revived my old interest in archeology” (162).  Another of my favorite writers, Loren Eiseley, actually became a paleontologist or, as he usually said, a “bone hunter,” searching in actual caves because of his fascination with the past that lies buried in what the title of one of his essays calls “The Places Below.”  In an essay titled “Paw Marks and Buried Towns,” he says,

A man who has once looked with the archeological eye will never see quite normally.  He will be wounded by what other men call trifles.  It is possible to refine the sense of time until an old shoe in the bunch grass or a pile of nineteenth-century beer bottles in an abandoned mining town tolls in one’s head like a hall clock.  That is the price one pays for learning to read time from surfaces other than an illuminated dial.  It is the melancholy secret of the artifact, the humanly touched thing.  (81)

The personal past and the collective past are one.  We are part of something larger than ourselves.  Eiseley’s essay, written around the time of the early space program, says that “while the public’s eye has been forced upward it has also, in the same act, been cast downward toward the earth” (81)  But astronomers too are archeologists of a sort.  They are seeking a past far earlier than that of the paleolithic caves, trying to close in on the very beginning, the Origin, the Big Bang.  They do so by scientific means, but their theories are in fact modern Creation myths.  The difference is that in their Creation story there are no gods or God.  But that may not be a crucial difference.  Maybe God is not a being, an artificer, a demiurge.  Despite the Biblical version, demiurges in some mythologies are regarded as mere pseudo-creators.  In Gnosticism, the demiurge is named Ialdabaoth, and the world he makes, although he is ignorantly, arrogantly proud of it, is in fact the fallen world—in other words, the Creation and the Fall are the same event, a catastrophe that should not have been.  However he knew of it, Blake borrowed this idea of a Creation-Fall: his demiurge is named Urizen, which suggests “horizon,” and Urizen’s idea of Creation is to bind life within limits—to bury it alive. 

A true God would create as artists create, spinning the world like a spider out of his—or her, or their—own internal being.  The word I borrowed for this in The Productions of Time was “emanation.”  All things are emanations of a creative spirit, including us, who are what Joseph Campbell calls “the masks of God.”  Such a view is closer to some Eastern ideas, though it has typically been condemned in the West as “pantheism,” which is supposed to be very bad.  But heretical or no, the notion certainly solves some problems, such as why we don’t see God.  All that we do see is in fact God, especially that which is alive—but then, all things are alive, even the dead rocks of Newtonian mechanics if we but knew how to see.  Romanticism often took the form of a vitalism which imaged the universally indwelling energy as wind—exactly as the Bible does, for that matter, for the words for spirit in the Biblical tradition are the words for wind:  Greek pneuma, Latin spiritus, Hebrew ruach.  It bloweth where it listeth. 

It is but one more step to say that, if such an immanent spirit is ubiquitous spatially, it must also be ubiquitous in time.  The immanent God is a process, and evolves.  Darwinism in the 19^th century prompted various versions of creative evolution and a Life Force, such as those of Bergson in philosophy, Shaw in literature, and Teilhard de Chardin in theology.  Related to these is the most ambitious of them all, Hegel’s Absolute Spirit whose development, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, is history seen not as entropic but as progressive, moving towards the goal of its own birth.  Marx claimed to have turned Hegel’s Idealism on its head, but his dialectical materialism is also a process of history evolving through progressive conflict towards a goal that is, though later Marxism tried not to admit it, a religious goal:  the withering of the state, the end of history, and communal harmony.  This idea of a diachronic quest for a spiritual goal seems at first to be in conflict with the more traditional idea that the purpose of religion is to help us climb upward on the vertical axis mundi, from this middle earth to the heavens where the angels move the spheres.  Actually, Christianity does have a diachronic or horizontal aspect, merely one that was de-emphasized by a Church interested in maintaining a vertical status quo.  In fact, original Christianity was powerfully diachronic:  the kingdom of God was seen as evolving, so to speak, through the stages of past history, from Adam and Eve, to the patriarchs, to Moses and the Exodus, to the coming of Christ, and early Christians waited with intense eagerness for the final coming of a kingdom that they thought might well be in their lifetimes. 

These two movements, detachment and otherworldly ascent out of the world of time towards a transcendent eternal goal and a participation in a spiritual drama moving towards a climax in time, are in fact both true.  They are necessary Contraries, as Blake would have called them, two aspects of one thing—though of course that means we are back to paradoxes again.  Here too there are Eastern analogies.  There are two types of Buddhism, the original Hinayana Buddhism whose goal was detachment and escape from this world of illusion into enlightenment, and the later Mahayana Buddism, including Zen, that declared that enlightenment is here and now—that, to quote a Gnostic saying of Jesus, the kingdom is here on this earth and people do not see it.  Cleave a piece of wood and I am there.  I think this is what Frye was trying to express in the title of his last book, The Double Vision.  In the Nativity Ode, Milton shows the descent of God in the Incarnation down the vertical axis mundi, and shows the movement of all life on earth, both natural and human, leaping upward in response, momentarily transfigured.  If such a process continued, the poem says, time would go back and fetch the Age of Gold.  But that must wait for a fulfilment in time.  The message of the poem is “Now, but not yet.”  But that is always true, not just on the original Nativity.  We live our lives participating in a process that, seen with with imagination’s expanding eyes, is a historical process of making a better world by creating, not just better technology, but better institutions, deeper communications between people, and a return to a harmony with nature.  But a linear, progressive view turns neurotic when it postpones everything and focuses only on a distant end.  That is the problem with most secular myths of progress, including Hegel’s and Marx’s, and it often leads to the attitude that the end justifies the means.  At any moment, not later but now, there is the possibility of a hierophany, and we see the world in a grain of sand and experience eternity in an hour.  Now, but not yet—and yet now. 

Literal time travel is impossible, yet science fiction is full of stories about time travel, for a reason beyond mere escapism.  The imagination is a non-literal time machine.  It travels to pasts and futures by creating them.  Such pasts and futures are fictions, yet not “mere” fictions.  The only way we can know the past at all is via the fictions of the imagination.  The past is constructed, and so is the future.  So is the present, really—as Blake said, all reality is mentally created, which is not to say created by the ego—but we do not need to have that argument today.  Let us stick with the imaginative construction of past and future. 

The imagination creates a past out of three elements, out of (1) empirical data, (2) ideological commitments, and (3) universal human desires.  The criterion of empirical data, objective evidence, is what makes history scientific in a humanistic rather than positivistic sense.  But historians are by now aware that there is no purely empirical history, because there are no purely indisputable facts.  Facts are always to some extent interpretations, never fully objective, the first interpretation being to judge what counts as a fact.  History is inescapably an interpretive discipline, though its interpretations are checked and limited by the resistance of certain data.  Murder is an interpretation, but it is made empirical if someone brings in the smoking gun.  Of course, no fact is beyond interpretation, or at least attempts at interpretation, like Monty Python’s dead parrot:  “He ain’t dead, he’s sleeping.”  But the integrity of history, and of other truth-telling disciplines like journalism, depends on how seriously its practitioners take the criticism of conclusions by data.  All interpretations, however, have an ideological aspect: there is no such thing as a completely unbiased interpretation.  Political parties are embodiments of rival ideologies.  The temptation of ideology to abandon the inconvenience of facts and critical analysis leads to the current prevalance of “alternative facts” and magical thinking.  This is usually justified by the rationalization that the end justifies the means—but such an such an attitude is a deal with the devil, and the devil collects by possessing your soul.  That does not mean taking away some ethereal essence after you die.  It means possessing you right now, in the sense of demonic possession.  Nearly half the electorate are presently possessed right now.  Once halfway decent people, something nasty has taken them over, a spirit of fear and hate, and all they are capable of hearing are that malicious spirit’s ideological lies.  This is what Iago did to Othello, with the same result:  turning a good man into a paranoid, malicious, gullible, and in the end violent fool.  Mind you, there used to be those on the left who also threw out facts and said that only ideology existed.  Still, any version of history will be ideologically inflected, will be progressive, moderate, or conservative to varying degrees according to the values of the historian.  Democracy depends on a dialectic, a debate or contest among those conflicting visions, from which may come insight and social change. 

The historical novel, said to have been invented by Sir Walter Scott in his Waverley novels, came into being when modern democracy did, at the turn of the 19^th century.  Historical novels differ according to the degree of importance they grant to empirical veracity, ideology, or imaginative vision.  Some historical novels are dominated by the desire to recreate a historical period, an event, or a historical personage in as much verifiable detail as possible.  Nicola Griffith’s Hild (2023) about the life and times of the woman who became St. Hilda and founded the Abbey of Whitby, is very slow-moving because it is so dense with facts: facts not just about historical characters and politics but about material day-to-day life.  It is a magnificent achievement, but I would warn readers that you have to read it for the texture, not the plot.  By contrast, Scott’s Waverley (1815), the paradigm of the whole historical novel genre, is about the uprising of the Scottish Highlanders that culminated in the disastrous Battle of Culloden in 1745.  It is factually informed, but it is a thesis novel, arguing a moderate point of view against revolution—Scott, after all, was a lawyer.  That does not mean it is right or wrong, only that it is committed.  The Brutus who assassinated Julius Caesar is regarded as an ultimate traitor by Dante in the Inferno but as an idealistic but naïve advocate of freedom by Shakespeare in Julius Caesar.  Such historical narratives provide models for the purpose of clarifying our thinking.  But Scott also wrote historical novels that are not really novels but romances, tales of wonder.  Guy Mannering is a comic romance that alludes frequently to Shakespeare’s final romances; The Bride of Lammermoor is a Gothic tragedy.  These tales have historical trappings, but what they really do is turn history into an Otherworld in which strange and beautiful and terrible things happen.  Historians may complain about such works that they falsify history.  One would not know from many novels set in a colorful, exotic version of the Middle Ages that the average lifespan was about 35 years and most of life was not at all heroic.  Such works are really historical romances, and live next door to works of fantasy that may have kings, knights, and castles but are really not historical at all.  Romance may also create an imagined world that has its own internally-consistent history, like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Historical novels are an important element in education, because they can fire young readers with “the magic of history,” bring to life the dry names and dates that students profess to hate so much in their history classes.  And not just young readers.  When we moved to North Royalton, Ohio, 18 years ago, I singlehandedly landscaped the front yard, which had been left a dug-up mess by the installation of a new septic system.  In the process, I turned up dozens of fossils, because this area is where the glacier stopped at the end of the Pleistocene.  I own a wonderful poster by Cinncinnati artist Kyle Hartshorn that reconstructs what this area would have looked like 20,000 years ago.  In it, the retreating glacier can be seen in the distance, but the foreground is crowded with the animals, birds, insects, and plants who are shown along a stream that could the creek that runs by the driveway.  That scene could be here, my front yard.  The poster is part of a whole series showing the same area through the various prehistoric ages.  For more information, consult his website or the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.  This to me is time travel.  To me this is magic.

It's funny to think that Americans have a huge gap in their historical mythology.  We have to jump from the Pleistocene directly to the European settlers of the 17^th century.  We have no history that corresponds to the Classical, medieval, and Renaissance periods in Europe.  Unless we are Indigenous, we jump directly from the prehistoric to modern times.  This has acted somewhat as a deficiency disease.  Many of our greatest works of fiction are historical—but not historical novels: rather, historical romances, even the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, the “American Scott.” In the American Renaissance we have Moby Dick, which is very definitely not a history of American whaling, and the romances of Hawthorne.  Hawthorne’s novels The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables are genuinely historical novels, grounded in Puritan history, but his tales are romances, such as “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”  Our relationship with the past is not even tenuous—past a point it is non-existent.  In a way, that is how we wanted it: we defined ourselves our break with, our freedom from, the bad old history of Europe.  But in another way we are always haunted by an absence.  That is probably why America took to science fiction so strongly, out of a sense that our history is a history yet to be made in the future. 

Science fiction, as the genre that imagines the future, falls roughly into the same three categories described above.  The empirical impulse in science fiction takes the form of extrapolation, the attempt to imagine a near or middle-range world of the future with as much scientific veracity as possible.  Robert Heinlein was the main originator of the “future history,” a sequence of stories based on a timeline running from the present into a future usually a few centuries down the line.  There is also ideological science fiction, much of it either utopian or dystopian. But then there is also much science fiction that is not extrapolative but a form of romance, using the future and its alien worlds and technological innovations as the means to telling a tale of wonders.  Such works may be called by terms such as “science fantasy” or “scientific romance.”  The difference between Star Trek and Star Wars is the difference between an attempt to extrapolate a possible real future and a romance that takes place long, long ago, in a galaxy far away.  Science fiction criticism has sometimes fallen into factions, fracturing along these lines.  Those who like “hard” science fiction with serious extrapolative content may regard something like Star Wars as commercial pablum.  Marxist and other cultural critics may despise any science fiction that is not ideological critique—which means they despise the greater part of the field.  Those who want a playground in a galaxy far away may make anti-intellectual comments about critical elitists.  But the categories are not mutually exclusive.  Some of the greatest works of science fiction, Samuel R. Delany’s Nova, for example, may exemplify all three tendencies at once, though admittedly at the price of being something of a tour de force. 

Our three criteria are really the component parts, so to speak, of the imagination in any context.  Wallace Stevens often spoke in his poetry of a conflict between the imagination and reality, which he saw as what Blake called Contraries, opposites in creative tension.  Of our three criteria, the empirical or realistic and the ideological belong on the side of “reality.”  The imagination also subdivides, making a fourfold distinction.  We have mostly spoken of the form of romance, the tale of wonder.  But at its far reaches, the imagination reaches the boundaries of mystery, expressing itself, as we have seen, in a series of paradoxes, going beyond myth and symbol into the inconceivable and inexpressible.  The medieval system of interpretation called this level of meaning the “anagogic” or mystical.  And in fact, what we now have is a modern version of the fourfold system of polysemous   meaning used to interpret Scripture, but which Dante said also applied to his commedia.  The empirical/realistic, ideological, mythical/archetypal, and anagogic are the terms in which we tend to think when we interpret literature.  And again there are schools of criticism which “privilege” one of these and denigrate the others.  But to the truly educated imagination, all texts, in varying degrees, have elements of all four levels of meaning.  And, more importantly, so does life.  Life is “all of the above.”  And below. 

References

Eiseley, Loren.  The Night Country.  University of Nebraska Press, 1971.

Jung, C. G.  Memories, Dreams, Reflections.  Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston.  Revised edition.  Vintage, 1965.