One of the most famous nominative predicates of the last quarter of this century is Frederic Jameson's: "History is what hurts. It is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis." This nominative predicate is justly famous, for it speaks not only to the student of history, but to all who are determined (or desperate) to change the reality of the world they live in, or even their own individual lives. And it speaks above all to the science fiction writer, whose broadest concern is the realm of human possibility.
Political art, Jameson writes, needs to "convey the sense of a
hermeneutic relationship to the past which is able to grasp its
own present as history only on condition it manages to keep the
idea of the future, and of radical and utopian transformation,
alive." I find this to be the hardest task of writing: managing
to see sharply and clearly enough to know what must be critiqued
and blasted, while at the same time, by means of that critique,
creating the space in which a vision of hope and possiblity can
bloom. In other words, to write strong fiction, one must say
No, not this and Yes, something like that in the same breath.
One must admit the limitations of the human being and believe
there is always hope. No wonder "happy endings" tend to trivialize
a powerful vision. A happy ending usually pays deference to What
Is, saying
Margaret Atwood insisted that "pessimism" in art is not antithetical
to "hope" when she commented in a 1986 interview with Geoff Hancock:
I find that in almost every piece of science fiction I write,
no matter the setting and character, "what it means to be human"
is necessarily at issue. Nothing can be less obvious, or more
open to dispute. How one answers the question will indicate how
one conceptualizes identity issues, history, individual and collective
potential, and one's own version of "common sense" (namely, all
those cliché assumptions one takes for granted without realizing
they are assumptions, and ideological ones at
that (*). When I
don't call bits of "common sense" into question, I am tacitly
either valorizing or declaring it a hopeless "fact" of ineluctable
human existence. An editor once asked me to provide a "moral,"
"happy" ending to my story "Ms. Peach Makes a Run for Coffee,"
on the assumption that there was only one "correct" thing for
the protagonist to do. That "correct" action would have negated
the character's own values-- but would have comforted some readers
by suggesting that the double-bind the character was caught in
could simply be wished away through sturdy rational thought, thereby
erasing the very implications of capitalist middle-class values
the story was addressing. The pressure of the character's double-bind
makes it clear that some degradations, in a captialist system
of values, namely those that preserve a minimally bearable class
status, are likely be preferrable to other degradations when they
are undertaken to preserve one's (class-determined) respectability.
A "happy ending" would insist that there is no problem or contradiction
that a sufficiently strong individual can't overcome. A "happy
ending" would subscribe to the notion that humans are not social
creatures, mutually dependent in every way imaginable, but monads
living separate existences in which everyone always has the choice
of doing the Right Thing. (And that of course there always is
a "right" thing to be done.)
In the early and mid-1980s I hiked and camped several times, in
Spring, in the Anza-Borrego desert in California. What a heady,
powerful experience! Never have I encountered such a profuse
variety of wildflowers (no, not even on the subalpine slopes of
the Cascades in July!). As I trudged through sand, I sought in
vain to place my steps where they wouldn't crush the amazing,
often tiny flowers carpeting every surface in sight. I gloried
in the fiery fountains made by the tall, arching branches of ocotillos,
the garishly blossoming barrel cacti (on which I always seemed
to be impaling myself), the constantly shifting striations of
light tinting the mountain ridges surrounding us. At night I
grew breathless with pleasure at the glitter of pyrite sprinkling
the sand in the moonlight. And in the morning I was sexually
aroused by watching humming birds dipping their long, sharp beaks
into the lush, mauve trumpets of the flowering willows that graced
our campsite.
Before I tasted the wonders of the desert, I thought the very
word implied scarcity, lack, aridity, sterility. Certainly I've
never even considered trying to camp in the desert in August.
And even hiking in the spring, one would be a fool not to carry
in a lot of water. But it is precisely the starkness and harshness
of the desert that makes a spectacular proliferation of life possible
after a single, good rain. And so it is for me, seeking the bloom
of hope in creative work. The beauty and power of life and hope
don't come easy. I never find them in the slick, easy endings
that slide down like the cola that leaves my mouth cloyed and
thirsty afterward. Hope cannot be found by shutting one's eyes
to what hurts, by pretending that history simply doesn't matter.
For without the courage of acknowledging what we can't (and shouldn't
have to) bear, "hope" is but a mirage of an oasis without substance.
________________________________
When I finish a book I really like, no matter what the subject
matter, or see a play or film, like Kurosawa's Ran, which is swimming
in blood and totally pessimistic, but so well done, I feel very
good. I do feel hope... If you see something done very, very
well, something that is true to itself, you can feel for two or
three minutes that the clouds have parted and you've had a vision
of something of what music or art or writing can do, at its best.
A revelation of the full range of our human response to the world--
that is, what it means to be human, on earth. That seems to be
what "hope" is about in relation to art. Nothing so simple as
"happy endings."
February, 1998
(*) "Clichés, especially sexual clichés, are always signs of power
or political relationships."
---Kathy Acker