ebook img

Ray Bradbury and the Poetics of Reverie PDF

147 Pages·1984·12.39 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview Ray Bradbury and the Poetics of Reverie

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

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.