Ray Bradbury and the Poetics of Reverie

147 Pages·1984·12.39 MB·English

by  William F. Touponce

William F~ Touponce
UMI Research Press
'" '.\:',. in Speculative Fiction
St~tJies
_Ray Bradbury and the
Poetics of Reverie
~.
Fantasy, Science Fiction, and the Reader
by
"William F. Touponce
"---. (",. .
•
UMI RESEARCH PRESS
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ray Bradbury and the
Poetics of Reverie
Fantasy, Science Fiction, and the Reader
Studies in Speculative Fiction, No.2
Robert Scholes, Series Editor
Alumni! Alumnae Professor of English
Brown University
Other Titles in This Series
No.1 Feminist Futures: Contemporary Women's
Speculative Fiction Natalie M. Rosinsky
No.3 The Scientific World View
in Dystopia Alexandra Aldridge
No.4. Approaches to the Fiction of
Ursula K. Le Guin James W. Bittner
No. 5 Utopia: The Psychology of a
Cultural Fantasy David Bleich
No.6 Biological Themes in Modern
Science Fiction Helen N. Parker
No. 7 Red Stars: Political Aspects oj
Soviet Science Fiction Patrick McGuire
No.8 Scientific Attitudes in Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein Samuel Holmes Vasbinder
No. 9 The Novels oj Philip K. Dick Kim Stanley Robinson
No. 10 The Politics of Fantasy: C.S. Lewis
and J.R.R. Tolkien Lee D. Rossi
No. 11 Literary Criticism in Science
Fiction Frank Sadler
·. "',_.,.'
. r .
Copyright © 1984, 1981
William Ferdinand Touponce
All rights reserved
Produced and distributed by
UMI Research Press
an imprint of
University Microfilms International
A Xerox Information Resources Company
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Touponce, William F.
Ray Bradbury and the poetics of reverie.
(Studies in speculative fiction; no. 2)
Revision of thesis - University of Massachusetts,
1981.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Bradbury, Ray, 1920- -Criticism and interpre-
tation. 2. Fantastic fiction, American-History and
criticism. 3. Science fiction, American-History and
criticism. 4. Reader-response criticism. I. Title.
II. Series.
PS3503.RI67Z88 1984 813'.54 84-2553
ISBN 0-8357-1569-8
For Dorothy
Je suis seul, done nous sommes quatre
Gaston Bachelard
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
1 Wolfgang Iser and the Cognitive Reader 1
2 Gaston Bachelard and the Sublimative Reader 11
3 Reverie and the Marvelous 21
4 Reverie and the Gothic 43
5 Reverie and Science Fiction 55
6 Reverie and the Utopian Novel 79
Notes 111
Bibliography 119
Index 129
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of chapter 5 first appeared in Other Worlds: Fantasy And
Science Fiction Since 1939, edited by John J. Teunissen, with a preface by Ray
Bradbury (MOSAIC, 1980), pp. 203-218.
Quotations from Gaston Bachelard On Poetic Imagination and Reverie,
translated by Colette Gaudin, are reprinted by permission of Bobbs-Merrill Com
pany, copyright © 1971.
Quotations from Gaston Bachelard The Poetics oj Space, translated by
Maria Jolas, copyright © 1958 by Presses Universitaires de France, translation
copyright © 1964 by the Orion Press, and from Gaston Bachelard The Poetics oj
Reverie, translated by Daniel Russell, copyright © 1960 by Presses Universitaires
de France, translation copyright © 1%9 by Grossman Publishers, are reprinted
by permission of Viking Penguin Inc.
Quotations from J. R. R. Tolkien The Tolkien Reader, copyright © 1966 by
J. R. R. Tolkien, are reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Unless otherwise mentioned, all other translations are my own. Full infor
mation concerning all references included in the text will be found in the
bibliography.
Quotations from The Golden Apples oj the Sun, © copyright 1953 by Ray
Bradbury, renewed 1981 by Ray Bradbury, from "Cistern," 1947 by Ray Brad
bury, renewed 1974, and Fahrenheit 451, 1953 by Ray Bradbury, renewed 1981 by.
Ray Bradbury, are reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc.
Quotations from' 'The Sea Shell," are reprinted by permission of Ray Bradbury.
I am grateful to the author for permission to reprint.
I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to reprint.
Introduction
This study attempts to provide a phenomenological account of the reader's
response to fantasy and science-fiction literature written by the American fan
tasist, Ray Bradbury (b. 1920). Why phenomenological? And why Bradbury? For
a nwnber of interrelated reasons.
First of all, because when we respond to the aesthetic experience of fantasy
or science fiction, we are reacting to a concrete vibrant world which we have in
fact helped to create. We do not respond simply to a collection of formalist
devices or a hierarchy oflinguistic structures. Most readers of fantasy and science
fiction seem to recognize intuitively their sub-creative (to borrow a word coined
by 1. R. R. Tolkien) roles. And most readers of Bradbury's fantasy recognize its
potential for oblique social criticism.l Yet in recent theoretical accounts of fantasy
literature (I will deal with science fiction separately below) this complex ex
perience of the reader tends to lose its relationship to historical content. The
reader has been reduced to a mere passive adjunct of genre theory.
Two examples of this tendency immediately come to mind. Tzvetan
Todorov's The Fantastic (1970) transforms language into the content of the fan
tastic. The fantastic in this study, which is largely confined to the nineteenth cen
tury, is a kind of rhetorical discourse, and the reader's role consists in following
the nwnerous indications given by the process of utterance (enonciation) as they
are presented within the text itself. 2 Apart from identifying with a character, all.
this linguistic reader is required to do is to doubt or hesitate about the nature of a
supernatural event, which in the last analysis is reduced to language anyway: "If
the fantastic constantly makes use of rhetorical figures, it is because it originates
in them. The supernatural is born oflanguage, it is both its consequence and its
proof ... language alone enables us to conceive what is always absent: the
supernatural."3
. The second example is Eric S. Rabkin's The Fantastic in Literature (1976), a
study which transforms content into form by arguing that the more a text lays
bare its devices, the more fantastic it is (and Rabkin's example of pure fantasy is
Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland). In the chapter on the fantastic and literary
history, for instance, Rabkin argues that "if one cannot exaggerate content, then
xii Introduction
one must exaggerate form. After World War II, driven to more fantastic writing,
the detective tale became more self-reflexive, more concerned with its own on
tologyas fiction:'4 Apparently, it was only the wearing out of conventions within
the genre which "drove" writers to make these changes, for no direct linkages
between literature and society are specified by Rabkin. In any case, the reader's
role is reduced in this formalist study almost as starkly as it is in Todorov's struc
turalist study. It consists in interpreting certain stylistic signals indicating the
presence of the fantastic with reference to narrative ground rules, and mainly in
the effect of astonishment when these rules are suddenly subverted.
A crucial concept missing in both these studies, although it is indeed often
nominally present, is that of world. In this study I plan to show that only a
phenomenological account is capable of treating adequately the irreducible
nature of fantastic worlds by describing precisely how such worlds are built up in
the reading process. Since phenomenology is the philosophy of life-worlds, it is
ideally suited to such a task. Its very techniques and methods are designed not to
be reductive, but rather to uncover the network of hidden intentional processes by
which we inhabit the horizons of the world. Furthermore, as early as 1931, with
the publication in German of Roman Ingarden's The Literary Work of Art,
phenomenological aestheticians were investigating the ways in which the text
holds in readiness a world for the reader. According to the strata-theory of In
garden, in the work of art itself objects are only given schematically, fragmentari
ly, in perspectives chosen by the author. It is up to the reader to make them com
plete in the form of a concretization. This study employs a contemporary variant
of Ingarden's theory, the implied reader of Wolfgang Iser, which investigates this
need for turning the sketch into a complete form in the concrete with the help of
imagined experience and much else besides, as world-experiencing life. In !ser's
view it is the unformulated aspects of the text that allow us to formulate a
response to the aesthetic object, that we come to feel as the life of a fantastic
world, its ideas, values, and specific intangible glamour. Thus it is not simply an
array of linguistic structures or formalist devices to which we respond, though
they are part of it to be sure. We respond to a world.
As a corollary to the formal imagination, there is a second reason for a
phenomenological study. Since fantasy and science fiction are narrative arts, the
tendency among theorists has been, understandably, to be primarily concerned
with the various forms that plots may take in these genres. But as far as the
reading process itself is concerned, narrative and the resources of form only
satisfy one particular cluster of related desires. They silhouette the material of the
fantasy world with a certain degree of clarity and thereby aid in the communica
tion and perception of expressive content.
There is, however, another cluster of desires in reading, long recognized by
phenomenological aestheticians and termed the material imagination. They seek
satisfaction in the richness and sensuous exuberance of the imagined world. Of