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Arthur C. Clarke

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/utopianstudies.31.3.0631

2154-9648

Russell Blackford,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Though Arthur C. Clarke was one of the science fiction field's most eminent and influential figures, his work attracts surprisingly little scholarly discussion. In his new study of Clarke's extensive oeuvre, Gary Westfahl points out that few previous books have been devoted entirely to Clarke's fiction, and even those concentrate on what are regarded as a small number of major works. They overlook much of Clarke's short fiction, and most were completed before significant new works appeared in the last thirty or so years of his life. More importantly, Westfahl suggests, Clarke's literary skills are generally underrated by his critics, and his themes and dramatic intentions are widely misunderstood.Westfahl has provided a valuable corrective to all this. Arthur C. Clarke is comprehensive in its coverage, and it's heartening to read solid critical discussions of relatively late novels, such as The Songs of Distant Earth (1986) and The Ghost from the Grand Banks (1990), along with unusually thoughtful and extended readings of Imperial Earth (1975), The Fountains of Paradise (1979), and others that merit more attention. Westfahl provides useful analysis of Clarke's recurrent themes and interests, such as aliens (who usually visit our solar system rather than us visiting theirs), religion, invention and engineering, and the ocean. The book also includes a helpful biographical sketch of Clarke's life, an entertaining and revealing discussion of his juvenilia, an extensive bibliography of his writing (and notable scholarly responses), and an appendix that examines the novels Clarke “co-authored” late in his career.In almost all cases, the latter were written entirely by Clarke's supposed co-authors—among them, Gentry Lee, Mike McQuay, and Stephen Baxter—with minimal involvement from Clarke. Often, as Westfahl explains, these books go against the grain of Clarke's methods, style, and worldview, as revealed in his single-authored fiction and his voluminous body of nonfiction writing. Westfahl treats these collaborations, if that's what they should be called, with a certain disdain that is largely deserved. In particular, as he makes clear, the Rama trilogy-cum-travesty (1989–93), written by Lee, is a melodramatic sequel to Rendezvous with Rama (1973) that inverts much of what makes the original novel unique and attractive.Westfahl sees Clarke's professional career as falling into two phases: the novels and stories of the 1940s and 1950s—and into the 1960s—which showed, in each case, a somewhat unitary thematic focus; and then, from the late 1960s, beginning with the film and book versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a phase of episodic novels with brief chapters and references to several (or more than several) of Clarke's interests. For Westfahl, 2001 “anticipates the episodic structure of later novels” but is not in any way “haphazard” (104) in its structure—here Westfahl disputes George Slusser's harsh assessment of Clarke's achievement. All of this shows significant insight, and I'd only add that we might wonder what drove this change in approach and whether it was always for the better. As to the latter, Westfahl is correct that 2001 contains nothing haphazard, but things seem to be getting that way by 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997), where Clarke appears to be struggling to find a meaningful story.Westfahl is also on the mark when he complains that numerous critics have “dubiously concluded that there were effectively two Arthur C. Clarkes” (4): a practical, hard-nosed version of the author, devoted to plausible depictions of near-future technology, and a more mystical version speculating about mysterious forces underlying our universe. Westfahl insists that there was only one Clarke and that he was always, in his fashion, hard-nosed and practical (as a disclaimer, Westfahl cites some past remarks of my own to the same effect). This theme runs throughout Arthur C. Clarke and is both persuasive and important.As he must, Westfahl acknowledges that Clarke ventures into speculations about the universe millions of years hence, and he concedes that this can create a superficial impression of mysticism. At the same time, he argues, even speculation about the far future can be conducted within a scientific and entirely naturalistic understanding of the universe.Indeed, the closest Clarke gets to anything that could fairly be called mysticism is his occasional portrayal of psi phenomena, but even here he is writing in the same vein as many other writers and editors who first became prominent during science fiction's “Golden Age” (roughly the late 1930s to the late 1940s), who were convinced of the reality of at least some of these phenomena. They expected psi to be explained scientifically. Although the scientific results have since been disappointing, it made sense at the time to speculate that psychic abilities might be the next domain for scientific inquiry and an expansion of human understanding.Westfahl's prose is clear, precise, and enjoyable to read, while his approach to literary criticism is refreshing: it is grounded in his extensive knowledge of the tropes and iconography of science fiction and his deep, scholarly engagement with Clarke's life and work. As a result, Westfahl provides accurate, commonsensical, yet often insightful and surprising readings of Clarke's novels, stories, and other narrative works. In some cases, the surprise comes from his ability to focus on what is actually on the page or the cinema screen, rather than perceiving it through layers of assumptions made on general principles (relating to Clarke or to the science fiction genre) or inherited from previous critics.For example, we might expect that Clarke would depict inventors and engineers as admirable figures bringing humankind the benefits of technological progress. Westfahl, however, demonstrates that it's not so simple: in fact, Clarke tends to present inventors as rather unsavory customers with dubious motivations. Most of them are greedy and/or irresponsible, and their devices very often malfunction spectacularly—sometimes with comic effect. At the same time, Westfahl points out, Clarke is more respectful of technology that has not been invented recently within the world of the narrative but has, rather, been developed over time to a high degree of reliability.As for engineers, Clarke does, indeed, appear to extol the creative greatness of some works of engineering, such as the space elevator of The Fountains of Paradise. Even here, however, its builder, Vannevar Morgan, is far from entirely admirable. Morgan is visionary and hypercompetent. He spends endless efforts—political, legal, and physical—to establish his space elevator on the island of Taprobane (a somewhat fictionalized version of Sri Lanka), and the project eventually succeeds. But as Westfahl brings out, Morgan is something of an egotist, driven by his need for recognition and fame. Westfahl comments judiciously that “the novel suggests that in order to accomplish great things, individuals may have to be unpleasantly ‘hardheaded and unsentimental’ … as Morgan describes himself” (39).Perhaps also surprising—though I think well documented—is Westfahl's conclusion that Clarke usually rejects the idea, common among his generation of science fiction writers, that humanity will colonize the worlds of distant stars and create a galactic empire. For Clarke, rather, human expansion into our own solar system will be an immense project. Clarke usually confines his narratives set in space to the local solar system, and he kept abreast of the latest science relating to it, so that at any given stage in his career his narratives were realistic to that extent.Westfahl is often critical of previous critics, sometimes with sharp humor, as when he comments on an effort by Eric S. Rabkin to discover monoliths throughout Clarke's body of work, in addition to those in 2001 and related narratives. Westfahl observes that Rabkin's examples include a radio tower that appears in Imperial Earth, “presumably because the structure is taller than it is wide” (108). While this is all good fun, Westfahl's own approach occasionally raises general issues about the practice of interpretation and criticism. He is, I think, on weaker ground when he accuses Rabkin of ignoring the “inconvenient fact” (107) that it was Stanley Kubrick, not Clarke, who settled on the shape of the black monoliths. Although that's interesting, how much ice would it cut if it turned out that Clarke's fiction, examined as a whole, really did show a preoccupation with rectangular monoliths? In that case, would a snippet about Clarke's collaboration—known to Westfahl but not to most readers of novels and viewers of films—really be helpful? To express this in another way, should we imagine an ideal reader or viewer as knowing such things and taking them into account?As Westfahl implies throughout, not least through his own no-nonsense style, critics do sometimes overreach when interpreting cultural products such as novels and films. Another example is the suggestion—this time attributed to George Slusser—that there's meaning to be discovered in the transition within the film of 2001 from using the music of Richard Strauss's “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (composed in 1896) to Johann Strauss II's “The Blue Danube Waltz” (composed in 1866). It's true, of course, that there's a compelling emotional contrast between the two compositions, and “The Blue Danube Waltz” comes almost as a relief after the powerful fanfare that opens Richard Strauss's tone poem, used by the filmmakers to accompany a story of primeval violence at the dawn of human evolution. This is genuinely part of any viewer's experience. The soundtrack of 2001, including its contrasts, plays an important part in furthering the film's dramatic intentions. That, however, is not the point that Westfahl criticizes (or, rather, mocks).Instead, Slusser (as described by Westfahl) suggests that a kind of regression is implied by the respective dates of the two musical compositions—1896, then 1866—just as the film switches from events in prehistory to events in what was (in 1968) the imagined future. But is even an ideal viewer of 2001 really supposed to be aware of not only the music's original sources but also such minutiae as specific dates of composition? Perhaps these dates are well known among aficionados of classical music, but should they really play a part in audience responses to Kubrick's film? How far could this approach be taken? Here, Westfahl's incredulity seems warranted.But Westfahl also takes Slusser to task for interpreting 2001 as a retelling of the Odysseus story, complete with a cycle of departure and return. While this interpretation does, indeed, seem strained, it's less obviously so. It's at least true that David Bowman returns, in the form of the Star Child, from his “odyssey” in space—and he immediately employs his powers for good (at least in the more comprehensible ending of the novel, as opposed to the enigmatic film). Be that as it may, Westfahl complains that Slusser ignores “the fact that the title 2001: A Space Odyssey was chosen only after its basic story was finalized” (107). Fine—but the title is nonetheless available to the novel's reader and the film's viewer as they respond to these works and interpret them, and an ideal reader or viewer should surely be attributed some conception of a foundational text of Western civilization such as the Odyssey. By contrast, I'm skeptical that such a reader or viewer ought to be attributed knowledge that a film or novel's title was chosen at a particular point in the creative process.It would be tedious to list every such issue arising from Westfahl's approach to interpretation and his disputes with previous critics. As a final example, then, consider Childhood's End (1953), the first part of which was originally published (in slightly different form) under the title of “Guardian Angel” (1950) in the magazine Famous Fantastic Mysteries. Here, Westfahl complains about critics who attempt to find religious themes in Clarke's novel, especially when they allegorize the alien Overlords, who physically resemble medieval images of the devil, as somehow Satanic. This does seem like a misreading. As Westfahl points out, Childhood's End does not portray the Overlords as devils. Rather, “dimly perceived as inimical images from the future, they were misinterpreted by past humans as devils” (91).This much can be gleaned from careful attention to the text. What such attention won't reveal is that the physical appearance of the Overlords was a touch introduced by James Blish when, at the request of Clarke's agent, he edited “Guardian Angel” before it was submitted for publication. Westfahl brings this up to further debunk the idea of any intended religious allegory, yet Clarke retained the detail in Childhood's End, so it is an element for a reader to come to terms with. Conversely, is knowledge of Blish's involvement really something that a reader should bring to the text?Perhaps Westfahl is best understood as revealing historical particulars that indicate why certain lines of critical inquiry are unlikely to be fruitful. In itself, this is a reasonable application of scholarship, and such information might be suggestive. It could warn against probable dead ends and prompt alternative lines of inquiry. At times, however, Westfahl seems to offer these details as clinching points, almost as if they were available within the works under discussion and should control our responses.In conclusion, I must emphasize Westfahl's insight into Clarke's typical characters and his approach to characterization. Although it's risky to generalize, Clarke's characters are often rather isolated, stoic professionals, primarily motivated by commitment to their jobs—though sometimes, as with Vannevar Morgan, also by egotism or vanity. These characters usually work far from their loved ones, if any, and maintain communications with other human beings more through technology than face-to-face contact. To a large extent, they live asocial lives.To some observers, this might show a weakness in Clarke's characterization and his range as an author. And yet, it's enlightening to compare his characters, such as the disciplined, quietly professional space explorers of Rendezvous with Rama, with the self-obsessed and histrionic personalities devised by Gentry Lee for his trilogy of sequels. Lee's characters are closer to those in many best-selling novels written in supposedly realist modes, but they actually appear less believable than Clarke's equivalents. Westfahl puts forward a persuasive case for the solidity of Clarke's characterization and even suggests that he was ahead of his time in presenting such characters as more the rule than the exception. That is, Clarke's fiction presages the direction of life in industrially advanced societies of the early twenty-first century.This seems plausible, and if it's true, it shows insight on the part of both Clarke and Westfahl. These and many other points made by Westfahl are worth contemplation, and I recommend Arthur C. Clarke to science fiction scholars and students of contemporary culture.