Robert Scholes - As The Walls Crumble

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ROBERT SCHOLES

As the Wall Crumbles

Robert Scholes is a professor of English at Brown University. Born in

Brooklyn, New York, in 1929, he received his B.A. from Yale in 1950, his Ph.D.

from Cornell in 1959. He has written many books and essays on literary theory

and on modern fiction. His most recent works are Structuralism in Literature

(Yale, paperbound, 1975) and a study of science fiction entitled Structural

Fabulation (Notre Dame, 1975).

For some time in literary circles-or circles with literary pretensions it has

been possible to acquire virtue automatically by uttering hostile noises at

the mention of science fiction, with the vehemence of the noises in direct

proportion to the noisemaker's ignorance of the subject. I regret to report,

however, that this particular path to meritorious eminence is becoming beset

with pitfalls for the unwary. There are people around who have read the stuff

and are just militant enough about it to challenge such casual remarks.

Something is going on here, of which this change in behavior is a symptom. The

wall between sf and mainstream, between fans and critics, is coming down. It

is not coming down all at once, like the walls of Jericho in that old sf tale

about the sun standing still. Oh, no. It is being dismantled brick by brick,

and the whole job may never be completed. But holes are appearing here and

there, and communications are being sent back and forth. From my point of

view, as an "academic critic" (a man who likes to talk about books and accepts

money from universities for doing so) the great benefit of all this is that

the literary riches inside the wall are becoming more accessible. And a lot of

what's in there is too good and too important to be left to the "fans." The

rest of the world needs it too.

When people ask me, more or less politely, "What's so hot about science

fiction, huh? "-and they do ask, more and more, all the time I answer, more or

less politely, "Literary quality

and ideas that we need to hear." That's the short version of my= reply. The

long version might fill a book-and as a matter of fact it has. Another

version, of intermediate length, will occupy these few pages in the tenth

volume of Nebula Award Stories. Most readers of this volume, of course, don't

need to be told that sf is interesting. Their interest is no doubt the thing

that has brought them to the volume in the first place. But even for the

initiate I may be able to put this interest into a broader perspective, as an

aspect of the whole literary situation at the present: time, which is itself

an aspect of the entire system of literature.

If we think of all fiction as a kind of separate territory within the domain

of literature as a whole, we can see that this territory. is subdivided into

smaller sections, sort of like pieces of real estate. The divisions are

fictional (like real-estate divisions) and: subject to revision, though some

of the major boundaries, like that between realism and fantasy, seem based on

natural features. First of all, the boundaries are continually shifting, and

no two surveys ever coincide exactly, though there may be some agreement from

one to another. Also, the value of different" tracts is subject to change from

time to time. What we have learned to call science fiction was a neglected

comer of the' territory of fantasy until the past century, a kind of swamp or

bog,,,, that defied productive use. But after Wells and Stapledon and a--. few

others blazed some trails through it, people went to work: draining, clearing,

building, mining. It will never look like Kansas (as Dorothy observed to

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Robert Scholes - As The Walls Crumble

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