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CONTENTS
写真：特別講演 “Pilgrims... Or Just Commuters? American Heroes On the Road”
序文：英米研究のロード・ナラティヴ Road Narrative on the Road
巽孝之
講演再録：“Pilgrims... Or Just Commuters? American Heroes (and Anti-Heroes) On the Road”
Carol Mcguirk
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写真：特別講演 “Pilgrims... Or Just Commuters? American Heroes On the Road”
5月 6日(木) 14:45-16:15
三田キャンパス南校舎456-A教室
講師：キャロル・マグワーク教授（フロリダ・アトランティック大学）
司会：巽孝之
Carol McGuirk（キャロル・マグワーク）
フロリダ・アトランティック大学英文科教授。1970年ベニントン大学卒、1977年コロンビア大学にて英文学・比較文学Ph.D取得。1990年より現職。
序文：英米研究のロード・ナラティヴ Road Narrative on the Road
巽孝之
18世紀を代表するスコットランド詩人ロバート・バーンズといったら、いまでは何よりもかのＪ・D・サリンジャーの青春小説『ライ麦畑でつかまえて』の主人公ホールデンが間違ったかたちで覚えている詩の作者として、広く知られる。物語の後半、第 22章で、妹フィービに「いったい何かひとつでも好きなものがあるの、そもそも将来なりたいものがあるの？」と詰め寄られたホールデンが、苦しまぎれにバーンズの詩を再解釈し「ライ麦畑で崖から転がり落ちそうになる子どもたちの捕まえ役になりたい」と表明する。ところが、そもそもバーンズの原詩のほうは「ライ麦畑でつかまえたら」“If a body catch a body coming through the rye” どころか「ライ麦畑で出会ったら」“If a body meet a body coming through the rye” が正しいのだ、とフィービが訂正する（原詩 “Coming Through the Rye”では“Gin a body meet a body / Coming thro' the rye” ）。
本作品の文学史的祖型とされるマーク・トウェインの『ハックルベリー・フィンの冒険』の詐欺師たちがシェイクスピアを徹底改竄したように、ホールデンはバーンズの誤読ならぬ超読を行ったというところが、同書のキモであろう。だがアメリカ文学を専攻する立場で、まさかそのバーンズ自身の研究家に出くわすとは、まったく予想もしていなかった。
ペンギン版バーンズ詩集の編纂者で 18世紀スコットランド協会副会長まで務めた経歴をもつフロリダ・アトランティック大学英文科教授キャロル・マグワークとの初対面は、そう昔のことではない。2002年暮れは 12月 27日のニューヨークにおける近現代語学文学協会（MLA）の年次大会初日の晩、作家サミュエル・ディレイニーの出るヒルトン・ホテルのパネル「災厄の想像力」“The Imagination of Disaster” へ足を運んだら、うしろの席から肩を叩く人物がいる。それが彼女だった。以前に面識があったわけではないが、じつはマグワーク教授とはきわめてヴァーチャルな空間においては、すでに一緒に仕事をしていたのである。彼女は北米を代表するSF学術誌＜SFスタディーズ＞ Science-Fiction Studies の編集委員であったため、わたしがイシュトヴァーン・チチェリイ＝ローナイとクリストファー・ボルトンとともに企画を担当した第29巻第3 号の「日本 SF特集号」(通算 88号= 2002 年 11月号) でも大奮闘してくれた（ http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/）。それもそのはず、バーンズとともに『源氏物語』を愛する彼女は、大の日本贔屓だったのである。
したがって、去る 2004年 4月末のこと、研究室のメール・アドレスに突然、マグワーク教授から連絡が入り「4月末から 5月半ばにかけて日本へ遊びに行きパレスホテルに泊まる」と聞いた時、わたしは一も二もなく、ゼミで講演してもらおうと思い立つ。彼女のほうも「二年前にジョアン・ゴードンがあなたのゼミがとても楽しかったと言っていた」と快諾。もっともあくまでアメリカ文学専攻なので、その点もたしかめてみると「それならば環大西洋的な英米文学論をやりましょう」ということで、さっそく話がまとまる。このあたりの臨機応変、かつ即応性と多様性にみちた芸域こそは、アメリカの文学研究者のいちばんおもしろいところではないかと、わたしはかねがね感心している。
履歴をたどってみると、彼女は 1970年にベニントン大学を卒業した時には文学と絵画の二重専攻だが、1977にコロンビア大学で文学博士号を取得する時には英文学と比較文学専攻、研究の中核は18世紀スコットランド文学でゆらぐことはない。前掲のバーンズ詩集のほかにも、バーンズ研究、バーンズ論集など、専門的業績は数多い(http://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/250-5789652-7905031)。ところが、前掲＜SFスタディーズ＞の編集主幹格のチチェリイ＝ローナイと長年の友人であったため、1993年より、彼女は同誌の編集部に迎えられることになる。

それほどにレパートリーの広いマグワーク教授であるから、さていったいどんな講演になるのか期待がふくらんでいたのだが、果たして 2004年 5月 6日 4限、ゼミの時間を割り当てた英米文学専攻講演会は果たして “Pilgrims? Or Just Commuters? American ‘Heroes’ on the Road” なるタイトルのもとで、何と 17世紀イギリス作家ジョン・バニヤンの『天路歴程』を 19世紀アメリカ作家ナサニエル・ホーソーンの「天国行き鉄道」と徹底比較検討し、そこで培われたロード・ナラティヴの伝統がいかにライマン・フランク・ボームやエドガー・ライス・バローズ、ロバート・A・ハインラインからコードウェイナー・スミスにまで継承されていくかを探るという、英米文学研究の発想としても方法論としても大いに啓発的なものとなった。懇切丁寧に作成されたハンドアウトには、19世紀における南フロリダで実際に建造された「天国行き鉄道」の写真やスミスの「アルファ・ラルファ大通り」の映像資料も盛り込まれて、視覚芸術と文学の相互交渉を重視するマグワーク教授のディシプリンに感嘆したものである。講演後にはゼミ員たちと研究室棟ラウンジからおなじみの喫茶店 “Lounge U” に場所を移していつ果てるともない懇談が続き、一同楽しいひとときを過ごす。
マグワーク教授は今回の来日で京都と東京を存分に堪能、東京観光のさいには現役ゼミ代が大活躍した。数年後の再来日を約して彼女が帰国したのは、5月半ばの晴れた日だった。
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Carol Mcguirk
Le Corbusier’s “contemporary city” is yet another settlement along a highway. ──Walter Benjamin, “Dream House, Museum, Spa,” The Arcades Project (1927-40)
Indeed, such are the charms of the place [the town of Vanity Fair] that people often affirm it to be the true and only heaven; stoutly contending that there is no other, that those who seek further are mere dreamers.──Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Celestial Railroad” (1846)
Introduction
If the city is literature’s habitual trope of “settlement,” the lonesome highway leading out of town is, as suggested by Walter Benjamin in my epigraph, a contrary image suggesting the modern subject’s counter-hegemonic journey away from consensus and (if the journey is lucky) into self-knowledge. Such imagery is not peculiar to American culture, of course, but is embedded with a particular force in the U.S. imagination──probably a legacy of America’s own early history, in which largely European “settlers” seized and developed the large tracts of land over which Native Americans had roved as hunter-gatherers.
I can remember this tension between settlement and heroic wandering in my own earliest experiences of reading. In my primary school, the “pre-reader” taught basic skills through one-syllable words and short sentences (“See Dick Run. Run, Dick, Run!”). This primer, titled Fun With Dick and Jane, confined itself to incidents between three children (Dick, Jane, and Sally──no surname), their pets (Spot and Puff), and their parents. Real vocabulary-building, however, was reserved for the second volume, titled Friends and Neighbors, which moved beyond the family circle to introduce benevolent policemen and kindly store-owners in a small town setting. As early as 3rd grade, however, the final grade in American primary school, the reaction to all this cheerful community spirit had set in. Three years into reading, students encountered the final primary text, Streets and Roads, which moved out of contexts of family affection and neighborly suburbia into such new themes as getting lost in the city, not having change to make a telephone call from a pay phone, solo journeys by bus, and other mild introductions to the anxious epistemology of growing up. If I remember correctly, Streets and Roads ended with a section on the legends and myths of other countries.
In the most recent issue of PMLA, Professor Takayuki Tatsumi argues that American literary history itself may be read a “global road narrative” (94). From the earliest days of the colonies, he argues, writers in the U.S. allude to and are influenced by events and value-systems from around the world. Some American authors have always pursued the streets and roads that connect with other cultures. As Professor Tatsumi puts it, all journeys in American myth ultimately “look for a world elsewhere.” Whether this aspiration beyond the material, local, and collective into a far world, a better place, is hard-wired into people (as what might be called a “spiritual” instinct, however formulated or expressed), or whether it is entirely a product of cultural influences, is a fascinating topic, but one on which I do not feel qualified to speak. I will instead analyze a smaller matter today: the legacy of an imprisoned seventeenth-century English Baptist preacher, John Bunyan, to American writers both popular and “canonical.”
On your handouts is the frontispiece of the first edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress (first published in 1678), an allegory that traces the passage of its hero from his worldly life in the City of Destruction to his adventures on the road to the Heavenly City. In Bunyan’s tale, the hero, “Christian,” ultimately vanquishes not only Apollyon (the monster who rules the material world) but also his even more dangerous inner demons of self-loathing and self-doubt. Because Bunyan’s vivid parable was often the only Sunday or Sabbath reading permitted to children in devout Christian families during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, his images and characters entered the imaginations of many Americans who grew up to become writers themselves, from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott (whose story for girls, Little Women [1868], parallels Bunyan’s) to L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert A. Heinlein, and “Cordwainer Smith.”
Because Smith is a less well-known figure today, he may require further introduction. “Cordwainer Smith” was the science-fiction pseudonym used by Paul M.A. Linebarger, a Johns Hopkins professor who received his PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins at the precocious age of 22 and who in 1948 wrote the first textbook on propaganda──it was titled Psychological Warfare, a term he popularized and perhaps invented. He served during the Cold War era (he died in 1966) as a speech-writer for President Eisenhower, a consultant on Asian affairs to President Kennedy (advising against intervention in Vietnam), and a spy for the CIA and Army Military Intelligence in China, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. I have argued in a recent article that through the writing of science fiction, Linebarger sought recovery from (or, more precisely, a visionary counterpart to) the tensions of a particularly painful pre- and post-war life: Linebarger was also probably the model for “Kirk Allen,” the war-stressed sf writer whose case history is retold in Dr. Robert Lindner’s The 50-Minute Hour, a psychiatric memoir that was a U.S. bestseller in 1954.
I will conclude today’s talk with a contrast between “road” stories by Robert A. Heinlein and Cordwainer Smith. I will begin, however, with L. Frank Baum’s and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s popular adaptations of John Bunyan’s motifs. In the middle section of the talk, I will historically backtrack (to use a metaphor from railroading) to the mid-nineteenth century and Nathaniel Hawthone, discussing two of his stories, “The Celestial Railroad,” a sardonic updating of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and “P’s Correspondence.”
One might divide the writers I will be discussing into the pragmatists (optimists about “progress”) and the idealists, who are more skeptical, ambiguous, ironic. Bunyan’s hero, pursuing a vision he has had, forsakes the world of domestic comforts for a solitary and often terrifying journey, though there is a heavenly reward waiting for him at the end of his troubles. L. Frank Baum’s retelling of Bunyan’s story──The Pilgrim’s Progress seems to have inspired and to some degree structured Baum’s first novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)──is understandably (his is a tale for children) much more optimistic, although even gentle Baum cannot quite dispense with the associative link between departure and Departure──between journeying and dying. For Dorothy’s arrival in Oz causes (however unintentionally) the death of the Witch who has ruled over the Munchkins. But Death has no sting whatever──no force in the plot──either in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first Mars novels (1913-1916), whose hero is immortal, or in Robert A. Heinlein’s pragmatic early story, “The Roads Must Roll” (1940). Heinlein, who often paid tribute to Baum and Burroughs, is nearly as optimistic as they.
The idealists see the road and the journey in more complicated ways. Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad” (1846) and Cordwainer Smith’s “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” (1961) both echo Bunyan’s repudiation of material prosperity, though neither is as certain as Bunyan about the purpose and meaning of their journey. Yet for both writers, as for Bunyan, the road out of town, especially when traversed at a human pace (on foot), is the only enlightened way to seek answers to the big ontological questions. The community simply offers distractions. Hawthorne and Smith both employ allegory, as Bunyan did. But whereas Bunyan satirizes worldliness, they both satirize contemporary cults of prosperity and technological “progress.”
In addition to exploring the intersection between myths of the individual hero and the central metaphor of “streets and roads,” my talk will also, I hope, suggest the very different ways in which the literary influence of a single author may be expressed.
John Bunyan, L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs
As I teach both 17th century British literature and contemporary American literature, it is probably an accident of my teaching assignment that I have been so struck by the persistence of Bunyan’s images in the U.S. cultural imaginary. Indeed, I have come to think that Bunyan helped to nourish a “dreaming” strain in modern popular fiction; ironically enough, this fundamentalist Baptist exerted a particularly strong influence on the notably secular genre of science fiction. For one thing, like Bunyan, writers of sf reject the mundane present to focus on the future, or as Bunyan puts it in his title, the “world which is to come.” Paul K. Alkon has argued the “radical incompatibility” of authentic speculative or “futuristic fiction” and religious prophecy as “practiced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.... [T]he two forms tend toward opposite ends of the spectrum” (60-61). While agreeing about a basic disparity between the speculative and “allegorical” impulses (Alkon 61), my premise is that Bunyan’s focus on dreaming allows him, and writers who revise him, to access both ends of this narrative spectrum at once, producing characters and plots that are simultaneously emblematic and idiosyncratic. (The protagonists in these popular stories are, like Bunyan’s heroes Christian and Christiana, a blend of realistic and symbolic qualities. Burroughs’s John Carter, for instance, first-person narrator, is a veteran of the Civil War, a native of Virginia, a proponent of nudism, a prospector──a specific person of the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century. Yet he is also something of an abstract emblem and superhero, and not only in his resurrection after apparent death. In introducing himself in the first novel, for instance, he discloses a strange detail: “I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man of about thirty” [PM] 1.)
Part 1 of The Pilgrim’s Progress, describing the journey of Christian, appeared in 1678; it was followed six years later by Part 2, in which Christian’s widow Christiana travels the same road. Bunyan’s tale was, as mentioned, echoed two centuries later both by L. Frank Baum in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and Edgar Rice Burroughs in his first BARSOOM [Mars] trilogy (1912-1914). From the first of his BARSOOM tales, Burroughs seems intent on setting the groundwork for an extended Oz-like saga, though marketed to young adults rather than children. His echoes of Bunyan are most likely secondary, through his close study and revision of elements in Baum’s super-successful series.
The Bunyanesque elements brought into the popular American imagination by the immensely popular Baum and Burroughs go beyond adaptations of specific episodes to broader elements of plot and characterization. For like Bunyan’s Christian and Christiana, Baum’s Dorothy Gale of Kansas and Burroughs’s Captain John Carter of Virginia traverse an exotic dreamscape whose successive challenges demonstrate their “progress” into the heroism to which they are called──however differently “heroism” and “calling” might be defined by each author.
Bunyan dwells on ontological rather than epistemological matters, on being and believing as opposed to knowing. As Barbara Johnson has said, “Bunyan’s metaphors do not deflect us toward a concept but rather embody an experiential truth” (124). My purpose in considering his legacy to popular sf is to consider an often overlooked element in the genre’s complex heritage──a focus on consciousness that, if not rigorously logical, can be analytic and speculative in its way. One small instance of Bunyan’s interest in character analysis may be seen in his extended account of the misadventures of neurotic but plucky Mr. Fearing: “He had, I think, a Slough of Despond in his mind, a slough that he carried everywhere with him, or else he could never have been as he was” (222). Mr. Fearing may have inspired Baum’s Cowardly Lion; he certainly shows how well a linear adventure plot can serve a writer interested in the workings of his characters’ minds. In emulating Bunyan, in fact, adventure fiction took on psychodramatic elements, prompting such later writers as Cordwainer Smith (who as a teenager wrote an imitation-Burroughs “Mars” story [Hellekson 7]) to show that for heroes, the way out can also be the way in.
Bunyan’s own battle to defend a singular consciousness was hard fought. He was jailed in Bedford in 1660 at age 32 for refusing to worship in the established religion and he remained in jail for twelve years. In 1676, jailed again for praying and preaching as the spirit, not the state, directed, he completed Part 1 of The Pilgrim’s Progress, his twenty-fourth published work. It was wildly popular, selling over 100,000 copies before 1688, the year of his death. Bunyan recounts in his autobiography, Grace Abounding (1666), his rejection of that masterpiece of consensus, The Book of Common Prayer, which prescribes rituals and forms of devotion for the English church. In Bunyan’s view, even the “Our Father,” though taken directly from scripture, lost its force when recited out of context (Grace 112-14). For Bunyan, prayer was an outpouring of the spirit──a gift to be received, not a lesson to be learned by rote. There could be no common prayer because there could be no common experience of “the Spirit,” a position Bunyan argued vigorously but unsuccessfully before the Bedford magistrates. Bunyan’s radical Protestant belief in the singular status of every human soul is conveyed in The Pilgrim’s Progress by an emphasis on dreams that is plain even in the printing of the word in extra-large type on the title page of the first edition: “The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World to That Which is to Come; Delivered Under the Similitude of a DREAM” [see handouts]. No two people can have the same dream, as in Bunyan’s view no two people can pray the same prayer. Dreams know nothing of consensus, though in Freud’s analysis they perform crucial work for the psyche.
Part 1 describes Christian’s journey. Though told to stay on the straight and narrow path prescribed by the Bible, he twice strikes out on his own with disastrous consequences: Mount Sinai almost falls on his head when he attempts an early detour to the town of Morality (21) and he is imprisoned in Doubting Castle by Giant Despair (and almost commits suicide) when he is talked into trying a short-cut (101). Christian travels with a single companion: after Faithful’s execution at Vanity Fair, he walks with Hopeful.
In Part 2, Christiana, widow of Christian, is called in a dream to travel the same road, but her experience is entirely different. At first she walks with her four sons and her friend Mercy, but (like Baum’s Dorothy Gale two centuries later) she acquires an ever-increasing entourage of other pilgrims, most of them, like Dorothy’s friends, disabled in some way. This band of pilgrims support and encourage each other, but it is Christiana, a serene matron very unlike self-doubting Christian, who sets the steady tone of Part Two. Even though they meet the same people and stop at the same places, Christian and Christiana enact stories as different as their personalities.
It may be precisely this hospitality to contradiction in Bunyan, this dream-possibility of seeing the same road from two contrary perspectives, that his successors have found so useful. Freud wrote that a major attribute of dreams is that in them the whole category of “contraries and contradictions” is “simply disregarded”: situations that in real life would be mutually exclusive must in interpreting a dream be given equal weight, added up as supplements rather than logically reconciled:
“No” seems not to exist as far as dreams are concerned. They show a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing. (929)Indeed, Bunyan’s portrayal of dreaming is in itself dreamlike in its contradiction. For the narrative so enticingly offered to readers as two compelling dreams repeatedly warns readers (in passages later recalled by Baum) of the dangers risked by pilgrims who fall asleep on Enchanted Ground.
Baum and Burroughs revisit episodes in Bunyan’s plot, but more importantly they adapt Bunyan’s contradictory portrayal of characters who are at once realistic (speaking a racy contemporary English) and didactic/symbolic. Broadly enough conceived to work as archetypes──the little girl, the man of action──Dorothy Gale and John Carter at the same time exhibit, as do Christiana and Christian, distinct personalities and a nimble mother-wit.
Let me offer a few examples of shared motifs. Though I had been taking notes on these before encountering his essay, I should say that L. Karl Franson’s work on Bunyan and Baum covers some of the same motifs, though drawing different conclusions.
The Calling. All three stories open with a great change. Graceless, a man clothed in rags, flees the City of Destruction to seek the gate that Evangelist has told him opens onto a road leading straight to the Celestial City; he becomes a pilgrim and assumes a new name, Christian. As The Wonderful Wizard of Oz opens, Dorothy Gale’s introduction is preceded by a famous description of a desiccated landscape:
The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass.... Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, nd now the house was as dull and gray as everything else. When Aunt Em came to live there she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled, now. (8)The cyclone intervenes, transporting Dorothy from this blank and futile space──this Prairie of Destruction──to Oz, a child-sized, child-centered, colorful place that seems, like a dream or a toy, designed just for her interaction.
Burroughs’s first chapter also begins with a departure. John Carter, a former Confederate officer who is prospecting in Arizona, is chased by a band of Apaches into a cave. Felled by a misty vapor that induces sleepiness, Carter loses consciousness, only to recover as a spirit looking down on his own apparently dead body. In a magnificent dream-move reminiscent of the non-transitions in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the newly deceased Carter’s immediate reaction is to step outside for a breath of fresh air. Surveying the splendid view, he sees Mars in the night sky:
As I gazed upon it I felt a spell of overpowering fascination──it was Mars, the god of war, and for me, the fighting man, it had always held the power of irresistible enchantment. As I gazed on it that fargone night it seemed to call across the unthinkable void.... I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space. (PM 9)Like Christian, John Carter is born again at the beginning of his story; the next chapter is appropriately titled “My Advent on Mars.” Carter, seen by the Martians alternately as “arch-blasphemer” (WM 69) and Jeddak of Jeddaks (Prince of Princes), bears the same initials──JC──as another controversial messiah. He pursues his vocation as hero across a dreamlike “planet of paradoxes” (PM 46) that is the very place to perfect through trial his skills as a “fighting man” (PM 9). And like Christian and Dorothy, Carter is in a closing scene “promoted” after many mishaps, receiving the title “Warlord of Barsoom” as he stands on the “Pedestal of Truth” in the “Temple of Reward” and faces what he calls the “Throne of Righteousness” (WM 157).
The Mark. The calling of the hero is visible as a shining mark. In Bunyan, the character named Interpreter marks Christiana and Mercy: “he set his mark upon them that they might be known in the places whither they were yet to go.... This seal greatly added to their beauty” (185). Dorothy’s mark is bestowed by the witch (not named Glinda in the novel) who tells her about the yellow brick road and the Emerald City: “‘[N]o one will dare injure a person who has been kissed by the Witch of the North.’...Where her lips touched the girl, they left a round, shining mark” (17). The Guardian of the Gates at the Emerald City admits Dorothy to the city because of this mark, which is also the reason that the Wizard grants Dorothy and her friends an audience. The shining mark protects Dorothy, just as it does Christiana and Mercy. The Wicked Witch of the West tells the Winged Monkeys to kill Dorothy, but when they see the shining mark, they bring her back to the Witch, who instead of killing the child (she too fears to harm the bearer of this mark), sets her to work in the scullery, leading to a memorable later scene involving dishwater. (The power of water is actually stressed in all three writers; it seems very American somehow, though it probably derives from Bunyan’s reverence for the sacrament of Baptism. Christiana, Mercy, and the boys are instructed to bathe at Interpreter’s house: “and [when] they came out of that Bath ... they looked fairer a deal” [184]. In Oz, Dorothy explains her need to bathe (as well as to eat, sleep, and drink) to her new friend the Scarecrow, who remarks that “It must be inconvenient to be made of flesh” [29]. In Warlord of Mars, John Carter notes approvingly that the public house at which he is lodging requires that all guests “bathe daily or depart from the hotel” [98].)
Though not as central in Burroughs’s first Mars trilogy, there is a small crisis in Warlord of Mars that remembers Bunyan’s shining mark. When John Carter is disguised as a red Martian, a spy washes some of the red paint from his forehead while he sleeps, exposing him when he next enters the court, for the telltale circle of white is a “fatal sign ... upon my brow” that leads to his exposure and capture (68). Throughout the 1920s, Burroughs unsuccessfully pitched to publishers the idea of an “Autobiography of Cain” that presumably would have explored further this idea of the “marking” of protagonists.
Enchanted Ground. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, the Enchanted Ground is a pleasure-ground near the earthly paradise, Beulah; it has been cursed by a witch named Madame Bubble. Bunyan’s message: the seductions of worldliness lull pilgrims, inviting them to a spiritual sleep. Part 2 explains its properties:
By this time they were got to the Enchanted Ground, where the air naturally tended to make one drowsy .... [H]ere and there ... was an enchanted arbour, upon which ... if a man sleeps, ‘tis a question, say some, whether ever they shall rise or wake again in this world. (264)
Two characters who doze off there are Mr. Heedless and Mr. Too-bold (265). As tough-minded Mr. Standfast replies to Christiana’s anxious query about them: “Ay, ay, I saw Heedless and Too-bold there. And for aught I know, there they will lie till they rot” (268). As Karl Franson has also noted (104), this dangerous ground near the end of the pilgrims’ journey may have inspired the field of deadly poppies near the Emerald City that in Baum’s novel endangers Dorothy: “Now it is well known that [the poppies’] ... odor is so powerful that anyone who breathes it falls asleep, and if the sleeper is not carried away ... he sleeps on and on forever” (50). When Dorothy and the Lion do fall asleep in the poppy field, Baum echoes Standfast’s writing off of Heedless and Too-Bold. The Scarecrow and Woodsman move Dorothy, but sadly agree that they “can do nothing for [the Lion] ... for he is much too heavy to lift. We must leave him here to sleep on forever, and perhaps he will dream that he has found courage at last” (51). Finally, John Carter’s adventures are made possible by the sleep brought on by an enchanted vapor in a magical cave, which induces the same deathlike trance: “a sense of delicious dreaminess overcame me” (6). For Carter, profound sleep on enchanted ground in Arizona is the prelude to adventures on Mars.
Gods, Wizards, and Humbugs. This is a point of major difference. Baum and Burroughs focus on false calling and deluded pilgrimage. Unlike Bunyan’s Christian and Christiana, the Scarecrow, Lion, and Tin Woodsman already possess the special talents that they are on pilgrimage to find. And the Emerald City is no transcendent final destination, especially if the mandatory green spectacles that make it look a certain way are removed. (In Baum’s original, it isn’t an Emerald City at all: everyone is just required to wear green glasses.) Though Dorothy liberates Oz, she doesn’t want to live there: “Send me back to Kansas ... I don’t like your country, although it is so beautiful” (66). Oz is revealed as a false Heaven around the same narrative moment that its presiding spirit, the Wizard, reveals that he is a false god:
“I have been making believe.”
“Making believe!” cried Dorothy. “Are you not a great Wizard?”
“.... Not a bit of it, my dear. I’m just a common man.”
“You’re more than that,” said the Scarecrow in a grieved tone; “you’re a humbug.” (97)
Later, the Wizard says to himself, “How can I help being a humbug, when all these people make me do things that everybody knows can’t be done?” (105).
Burroughs’s portrait of the “gods” of Mars goes beyond Baum’s gentle derision to flamboyant hostility. Carter reports that Martians never die of old age, though they often perish in battles, assassinations, and sporting accidents. It is the custom of those who survive many battles, however, at “about the age of one thousand years” to “go voluntarily upon their last strange pilgrimage down the river Iss, which leads no living Martian knows whither and from whose bosom no Martian has ever returned” (PM 16-17). In the second novel, The Gods of Mars, Carter discovers that the entire Martian religious system is a sham: the priest class, the so-called “Holy Therns,” eat the faithful immediately upon on arrival at the far shore, sparing just a few for use as slaves and sex partners. “This, John Carter, is Heaven,” says his green friend Tars Tarkas bitterly, after he is rescued from the Plant Men who drain the blood from arriving pilgrims in order to sanctify their flesh for consumption by the Holy Therns (31). Carter resolves to escape this fiendish false Heaven in order to bring the blessings of his own agnosticism to the deluded Martian masses: “Only thus may we carry the truth ... though the likelihood of our narrative being given credence is, I grant you, remote, so wedded are mortals to their stupid infatuation for impossible superstitions” (GM 45).
Ontologies of “Progress.” In Warlord of Mars, while imprisoned in the Pit of Plenty in the city of Kadabra, Carter is sent a message that is not as symbolically weighty as Christian’s instructions to keep on the straight and narrow path or even the witch’s directions to Dorothy to follow the road of yellow brick. Carter’s instruction sheet reads only: “Follow the rope.” Using the rope provided to climb out of the Pit, he follows its path through a labyrinth of Kadabran subterranean passages. But the rope ends just before the junction of five branching tunnels. So much for following orders; Carter must make his own decision about where to go next. The breaking of the rope is not even the result of some enemy’s evil intent: “It must have been cut by someone,” decides Carter, “in need of a piece of rope” (123).
Bunyan’s unifying vision of a single road and a single human soul traversing wonder and peril is recast for children in some detail by Baum, though he reserves for his conclusion a thorough debunking of Bunyan’s emphasis on unswerving faith. But the road, like the rope, plays out in Burroughs, leaving the hero in a maze of unmarked paths. Burroughs’s decision to jettison this effective unifying trope──following the road──might be simply a lapse of artistry, but it could also be read as a fitting enough emblem for 1914. In the year that Warlord of Mars was published, what lay ahead for the world was as hopeless a puzzle as the branching tunnels that confront John Carter in Kadabra. Even when Bunyan’s adapters change the story, they obliquely evoke, as Bunyan did and as dreams do, the historical world out of which the hero’s dream is projected.
In the poem that precedes Part 1 of The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan justifies his departure from theology into allegorical fiction with a defensive implied comparison of himself to Plato: “I find that men as high as trees will write/Dialogue-wise, yet no man doth them slight/For writing so” (7). Bunyan seems to have envied the intellectual prestige enjoyed by speculative philosophers, even though he disagreed with their commitment to reforming rather than fleeing the City of Destruction. In any event, his work enriches (through Baum and Burroughs) an ontological/psychological current──a recurrent emphasis on consciousness and states of being──in the popular sf tradition. Like many a later sf hero, Bunyan’s Christian begins to make “progress” only after, intent on a private errand, he frees himself from the gravitational pull of the human City (i.e., the mundane world). The energy with which Christian rejects the material world provides a distant historical model for some later heroes of popular sf, who also depart this world in order to traverse a dreamlike space.
Baum dreamed up Oz when he was forty-four: though born into wealth, he had failed in a long series of business ventures. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first John Carter of Mars story was his first publication. Burroughs was thirty-five and had begun the manuscript of what is now known as A Princess of Mars on the backs of unused letterhead stationery from his own string of failed enterprises. Baum evidently derived from Bunyan (and Burroughs from Baum) the emphasis on a linear journey that dramatizes the calling of the hero, the main action of travel to a City, and a stylized symbolism that progresses in Baum to a color-coded Oz and in Burroughs to contrasting (and often warring) Green, Red, White, Black, and Yellow Martian societies. Yet both American writers transfer Bunyan’s motifs to a distinctly secular and democratic vision. Christian is intent on saving himself, but Dorothy Gale and John Carter are wholesale emancipators of oppressed peoples, from the Munchkins and Winkies of Oz to the various factions and religious sects of Barsoom. Both U.S. writers exhibit a pragmatic value for action over Word that is antithetical to Bunyan’s own beliefs. Yet both were, like Bunyan in his den of a prison cell, outsiders who dreamed into print wildly popular stories of contemporary characters whose adventurous road takes them out of this world, across a fantastic dreamscape, and into their own heroism.
“Mr. Bunyan’s Road-Book”: Hawthorne’s “P’s Correspondence” and “The Celestial Railroad”
Bunyan’s image of the journey of the human soul is greatly tempered by Baum, who was personally progressive and optimistic in his beliefs──very fond of his mother-in-law (a pioneering radical feminist), an admirer of Buddhism (at least as transmitted through the Theosophy movement of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky [1831-1891]), and a writer who devoted much thought to eliminating violence from fiction written for children. But now that I have devoted some time to allowing Baum’s gentle influence to infiltrate our sense of the American hero’s road-trip, I want to turn to a more restless spirit, an author who wrote darkly equivocal fables for adults and who acknowledged in his own family’s heritage──his ancestor Justice John Hathorne had been one of the judges in the notorious Witch-Court of Salem──the violence (both to nature and the psyche) that typically accompanies the American cult of “getting ahead.” “The Celestial Railway” was published by Hawthorne in 1846. (It is one of the stories in Mosses from an Old Manse──there is a picture of the “Old Manse” itself on your handouts. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandfather had lived there, and Emerson’s grandmother had witnessed from her living room window the battle between the British and the Americans at Concord, which more or less took place in her back yard. Hawthorne rented the house from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and wrote many of his stories there.). “The Celestial Railroad” both parodies The Pilgrim’s Progress and concurs with its fundamental critique of materialism.
But let me first briefly glance at another story from the same collection, which more generally introduces Hawthorne’s view of literary influence from England. Hawthorne is friendlier to folkish Bunyan in “The Celestial Railway” than he is, in “P’s Correspondence,” to the canonized poets of the English 19th century. “P’s Correspondence” opens with the narrator’s establishment of the mental illness of a friend, known only as “P,” who sends him letters that focus on his delusion that British Romantic poets such as Keats, Shelley, and Burns are still alive:
My unfortunate friend P. has lost the thread of his life by the interposition of long intervals of partially disordered reason. The past and present are jumbled together in his mind in a manner often productive of curious results, and which will be better understood after the perusal of the following letter than from any description that I could give. The poor fellow, without once stirring from the little whitewashed, iron-grated room to which he alludes in his first paragraph, is nevertheless a great traveller, and meets in his wanderings a variety of personages who have long ceased to be visible to any eye save his own. In my opinion, all this is not so much a delusion as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of the imagination, to which his disease has imparted such morbid energy that he beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no less distinctness than a play upon the stage, and with somewhat more of illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession, some based upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of correspondence, which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend from what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise myself a pious pleasure in editing for the public eye. P. had always a hankering after literary reputation, and has made more than one unsuccessful effort to achieve it. It would not be a little odd, if, after missing his object while seeking it by the light of reason, he should prove to have stumbled upon it in his misty excursions beyond the limits of sanity.
P’s delusion is here imagined as a kind of departure──an “excursion” beyond the city-limit signs of neighborly consensus. In the jumbling together of “past and present” within P’s letters, Hawthorne offers a prescient deconstruction of English influence on the American consciousness. For “P” (though confined for madness) is convinced he is visiting London──a crazy alternative London in which Lord Byron, grown conservative and enormously fat by the 1840s, is engaged mainly in expurgation of his own best early poems. Robert Burns, spry as a cricket but senile at 87, is visiting London for a reading at the British Museum. John Keats is a ghostlike wraith, still afflicted with tuberculosis; and ten years after a stroke, Sir Walter Scott lingers on at Abbotsford, paralyzed and semi‑conscious. Two promising young English writers, on the other hand──William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens──have, in “P”’s deranged account, died prematurely, Dickens after completing only the first numbers of The Pickwick Papers.
His insanity, we are told, has been caused by his failure as a poet, a failure “P” projects onto popular American poets of the 1840s, whom he imagines as dead before their time:
Most of our writers have come to untimely ends. . . . Bryant has gone to
his last sleep, with the Thanatopsis gleaming over him, like a
sculptured marble sepulchre by moonlight. . . .Somewhat later there was
Whittier, a fiery Quaker youth, to whom the muse had perversely assigned a battle-trumpet, and who got himself lynched, ten years agone, in South
Carolina. I remember, too, a lad just from college, Longfellow by name,
who scattered some delicate verses to the winds, and went to Germany,
and perished, I think, of intense application, at the University of
Gottingen.
Hawthorne, with his search─and─destroy instinct for the United States’ nascent myths, poses two questions: what if Bryant, Whittier and Longfellow had been fated to die young, before their essential mediocrity could be detected by the reading public? (Incidentally, though Hawthorne could not have known this in 1845, the American poets did live out “P”’s contrast to the full, his Bowdoin College classmate Longfellow surviving well into his seventies and Whittier and Bryant into their eighties.) And what if the canonized figures of British Romanticism had long outlived their talent, instead of dying while still at the height of their powers? The British authors named in “P’s Correspondence” were the very writers who most impressed and intimidated nineteenth-century literary Americans, including the young Hawthorne. Indeed, the three poets in his college novel Fanshawe (1828)──Fanshawe, Walcott, and Crombie──likewise constitute, as Patricia Crain has recently argued, a meditation on the literary careers of Keats, Wordsworth and Burns, respectively.
“P’s” ambiguous tale of transcultural and transatlantic “correspondence” is darkly comic, dramatizing the extent to which, in Hawthorne's view, American literary culture during the 1840s remained colonized by Great Britain. As Walt Whitman wrote rather mournfully in “Poetry Today in America” (1881): "Long, long are the processes of the development of a nationality." “P” could stand equally well for “Poet” or for “Patient”: his narrative asks readers to consider whether American “P” will ever emerge from its sickroom, or its paralyzing dream of British literary preeminence. Amused but also alarmed at the disease in contemporary U. S. writing, Hawthorne mocks his compatriots’ sick longing for a British literary culture no longer native or natural.
In adapting more the more popular (and populist) English writer Bunyan, Hawthorne seems more sympathetic to a British precursor. In “The Celestial Railway,” the narrator is relieved to discover that his own journey from the City of Destruction to the Heavenly City will be eased by a newly constructed railway line. Bunyan’s hero Christian carries an enormous burden of guilt on his back for much of his journey. (Although this is an allegory of sin as a weight on the soul, there is a real-life basis for Bunyan’s imagery as well. He was by trade a tinker──a repairman of pots and metal objects──and carried a 40-pound anvil on his back in the course of his daily labor.) By contrast, Hawthorne’s pilgrims experience the “great convenience” of stowing their spiritual baggage “snugly... in the baggage car,” though he slyly adds that every piece will be “delivered to their respective owners at journey’s end.” Instead of looking up to Evangelist and Interpreter as his guides, Hawthorne’s narrator is accompanied by fast-talking “Mr Smooth-it-away.” Bunyan’s monster Apollyon, thought to be no longer dangerous, is the engine driver; and most pilgrims make lengthy stays at “Vanity Fair,” the materialist’s paradise that (in Bunyan’s story) executes “Faithful” for reprimanding them and scorning their laws. The pace of technological “progress” has quickened between the 17th and 19th centuries, and so, therefore, has the pace of pilgrimage. Bunyan’s Hill of Difficulty, for instance, which almost defeated Christian, has been conquered by the railroad company, who have blown up part of it in order to construct a tunnel. The exquisite parchment scroll given to Christian and other pilgrims has been replaced by a pasteboard ticket in Hawthorne’s story. A few pilgrims still take the road on foot and are jeered by the railway passengers and by Apollyon, who contrives to drench them in steam and smoke as the carriage rushes by.
Hawthorne’s narrator does experience, as Christian did, the torment of viewing his own deficiencies as the train passes through the Valley of the Shadow of Death: “grim faces, that bore the aspect and expression of individual sins, or evil passions, seemed to thrust themselves through the veil of light, glaring upon us, and stretching forth a great dusky hand, as if to impede our progress. I almost thought that they were my own sins that appalled me there.” But he soon is able to use modern medical terminology to rationalize his experience: “The mephitic gases of that region intoxicate the brain.”
Hawthorne’s retelling of Bunyan suggests his view that the headlong speed of modern life makes it all the more difficult to find (and to keep) the right road. One of the footsore true pilgrims in the story, speaking of the railroad, tells the narrator that “the whole concern is a bubble. You may travel on it all your lifetime, were you to live thousands of years, and yet never get beyond the limits of Vanity Fair.” The story ends as the waters of death begin to close over the narrator, but “with a shiver and a heartquake I awoke. Thank Heaven it was a Dream!”
Hawthorne dissents from 19th century American progressivism, just as in the 17th century Bunyan had dissented from the consensus about forms of worship. Progress does not ease the individual subject’s (the “hero’s”) journey merely by accelerating its pace; if insight is the goal of life, the pursuit of ever higher standards of prosperity (at ever increasing velocities) is indeed simply “a bubble.” The inhabitants of Vanity Fair, the narrator says, have a tendency simply to disappear with no warning: “nothing was more common than for a person──whether at feast, theatre, or church, or trafficking for wealth and honors, or whatever he might be doing, to vanish like a soap bubble, and be never more seen by his fellows.” Advances in technology, the comforts of material prosperity, to Hawthorne do not really address the human dilemma of locating values that give meaning to life’s journey. Technology and cults of improvement do not, in Hawthorne’s view, take into account (and therefore can provide little enlightenment about) the basic fact that all individual human journeys end in death.
A curious (and more cheerful) side-note to Hawthorne’s story is preserved in the history of nineteenth-century South Florida, where I live. Inspired by Hawthorne’s story (though evidently missing its darker undertones), the local citizens of Palm Beach County──it was called “Mosquito County” in the 19th century, which was more a accurate if less appealing name──called their own narrow-gauge rail line “The Celestial Railroad.” Constructed some 40 years after Hawthorne published his tale, the line took in the towns of Jupiter and Juno (which still exist──I sometimes teach in Jupiter, as our university has a branch campus there) and the now non-existent towns of Mars and Venus (the latter’s total population even during the 1880s and 1890s, when the railroad ran, was recorded as consisting of one man and two cats). Hawthorne worked against the grain of American optimism in his stories, but American optimism in Jupiter, Florida utterly ignored his satire while adopting the evocative name he had given his hell-bound train. North Palm Beach’s version of a “Celestial Railroad” was not, to be sure, especially infernal or even headlong in its speed. Two trips a day were scheduled, but the little train “had a reputation for being late. It was said that the train would stop for anyone waving from the bushes.” Most sources agree on “two minor points of lore. Engineer Blus Rice (or Reis) could play Dixie on the single-toned steam whistle while his passengers sang along. He also was accompanied by a hunting dog that he would “rent out” to passengers. He would drop off people to hunt and pick them up on a return trip” (Jupiter, Florida website). There is a picture of Blus Rice and his hunting dog on your handouts.
Cordwainer Smith and Robert Heinlein
Let us conclude with a brief contrasting view of one final optimist, Robert A. Heinlein, and one final pessimistic visionary, Cordwainer Smith. I have argued in a recent essay that “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” is actually a critique of Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll” (written 21 years earlier). In Heinlein’s tale, the roads themselves move at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour: the commuters just stand there. The imagery suggests an overarching technology that wholly carries the human burden. Nobody even has to think about where they are going; the road and its workers do it for them. Smith’s rejoinder is reminiscent of Hawthorne in suggesting that any such emphasis on technology, in and of itself, to “bring people home” is a falsification, even a betrayal, of the intractable anxieties of human experience.
In Smith’s tale, the road leading out of town bears the strange name “Alpha Ralpha.” The boulevard begins as a conventional highway but then leaves the ground behind, soaring miles into the sky above a place very near where I now live: the far-future city that Smith called “Meeya Meefla,” a future incarnation of Miami, Florida. In “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” the portion of the highway’s “northern side” that incorporates a moving roadway (392) directly refers to how the roads work in Heinlein’s early classic. The central symbolic icon in both stories is a highway, then; but the very fact that Smith’s is elevated conveys visionary interests at odds with Heinlein’s more “down to earth” view of roadways and the people who build and use them.
In “The Roads Must Roll,” when renegade labor-union activists disrupt service on a road used by long-distance commuters on the U.S. West Coast, the conflict is resolved not by arbitration but by the development of an “infallible” psychological test, which will in future ensure that the rolling road employs only “reliable” workers. In “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” the moving roadway has also stopped functioning, for it has fallen into disrepair. And yet Smith’s pilgrims Paul and Virginia (the names are taken from an 18th century French novel by a disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bernadin de St Pierre) manage their journey on foot.
Smith’s story is set in a far-future eutopia that he reads as a dystopia. Technology and medical advances have made life’s journey longer but less meaningful. Life-extension is possible for spans up to 1000 years, but people have little to do. The average person is allotted 400 years by the “Instrumentality,” the secret group that governs human beings but denies rights to the “Underpeople,” genetically-altered animals who do all the work while human beings pursue a life of material comfort and pleasure. Alarmed at a precipitous drop in the birthrate and a general sense of malaise in their far-future world, the Instrumentality (in secret consultation with the oppressed but wise Underpeople, although that is clear only from another story) embarks on a project that is not a “dystopia” so much as an “anti-utopia.” The premise of the story is sketched in its fine opening paragraphs:
We were drunk with happiness in those early years. Everybody was, especially the young people. These were the first years of the Rediscovery of Man, when the Instrumentality dug deep in the treasury, reconstructing the old cultures, the old languages, and even the old troubles. The nightmare of perfection had taken our forefathers to the edge of suicide. Now, under the leadership of the Lord Jestocost and the Lady Alice More, the ancient civilizations were rising like great land masses out of the sea of the past. I myself was the first man to put a postage stamp on a letter, after sixteen thousand years. I took Virginia to hear the first piano recital. We watched at the eye-machine when cholera was released in Tasmania, and we saw the Tasmanians dancing in the streets because they did not have to be protected anymore. Everywhere, things became exciting. Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world.
Nationalism, religious contention, infectious diseases──all “the old troubles” are revived. This project is nothing less than “The Rediscovery of Man,” for (as in Hawthorne’s story) Smith’s parable suggests that the “truth” of human experience resides somewhere far outside neighborly consensus and the machinations of the State. The rediscovery of “man” surveyed in the story is really grounded in the two-way pilgrimage of one man to the higher reaches of Alpha Ralpha Boulevard──out and back. The man in question is the story’s narrator, Paul. (This was not only the author’s real first name, but a name used only in this story, which was the only story published during Smith’s lifetime told from the first-person point of view.) Paul must shed his social programming──stop believing what he has always been told──and set out on the road to individual insight. And in this story, the State hovers almost more oppressively over individuals than the fact of mortality, though that, too, threatens the characters. Like Dorothy, Paul is accompanied on his journey; unlike Dorothy, he loses his companions: a hurricane causes them both to fall from the road. (This recreates a scene in “The Roads Must Roll” where some of the commuters are jolted off the road and fall to their deaths.) Yet the highway in “The Roads Must Roll” is just a large-scale conveyor belt for commuters, lined with fast-food restaurants. Heinlein’s road (like Hawthorne’s hell-bound railroad) looks very much like America having a normal day. Smith’s visionary highway (your handouts depict artist Corby Waste’s rendition of Alpha Ralpha Boulevard) is described, by contrast, as a barely visible sky-borne “vapor trail,” inaccessible to all but the boldest of “true men.” The differences in the two writers’ conception of “the road” recall a difference noted by Walter Benjamin between the modern word “street” and the more mystical connotations of the “older term ‘way.’ The way brings with it the terrors of wandering....The person
In his early sf especially, Heinlein offers a straightforward pathway that moves his readers along to a point of resolution. The problem driving the plot of “The Roads Must Roll”──a deputy has sown discontent among the workers entrusted with the maintenance of the moving highway──is decisively solved, as briefly mentioned, by its hero’s decision to monitor more closely in future the “temperament classification test” (109). “[T]here had never been a failure” (108) of that test, though Van Kleek, the troublemaker, has been “falsifying” the results and promoting other “bad apples” (109): “The real failure had been in men. Well, the psychological classification tests must be improved to ensure that the roads employed only conscientious, reliable men” (108). In Heinlein, a test administered by a scientist can infallibly determine good or bad character, while in Smith’s fiction, people are tested at unpredictable moments of crisis and confusion. Their behavior under stress reveals their true nature──including, in “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” the anti-hero Macht’s instinct for cruelty──he is a destroyer of animals──Virginia’s unlovely contempt for Underpeople, and hesitant Paul’s sole (but saving) grace of kindness. Life, not a trained psychologist, administers the test of character in Smith.
His heroes cannot, like Heinlein’s commuters (or Tom Godwin’s pilot in “The Cold Equations” [1954]), ensure that they will arrive safely at their planned destination merely by re-instituting standard protocols after some temporary disruption. They do not travel a street laid down for the sole purpose of taking them home, but thoughtfully, tentatively, pursue an upward “way.” Gaston Bachelard explains the phenomenology of such journeys as Smith’s:
The voyage into distant worlds of the imaginary ... takes the shape of a voyage into the land of the infinite. In the realm of imagination, every immanence takes on a transcendence. The very law of poetic expression is to go beyond thought....The infinite is the realm in which imagination is affirmed as pure imagination....There the images take flight and are lost....We understand figures by their transfiguration. The word is a prophecy. The imagination is thus a psychological world beyond. (23)
Smith’s fictions lead toward “a psychological world beyond.” He dramatizes, as do many sf writers of his day, conflicts of intellect and desire──a matter that John Huntington has addressed at length in Rationalizing Genius, the best book to date on the classic sf short story. But Smith differs from his peers in using fundamentally equivocal symbolic representations that depart from popular tradition in aspiring to a realm that is “beyond thought” in being beyond conventional extrapolative logic.
In contrast to Bunyan, Smith implies that there is no reward for insightful travel, except for the insight itself. Like Hawthorne in “The Celestial Railroad,” he suggests that the problem with the American cults of prosperity and velocity is simply that they neither prevent death nor explain life. In “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” Paul does not at first recognize as bones and skulls the detritus surrounding the oracle (a forbidden weather-computer called the Abba Dingo) that he and Virginia consult in the climax of the story. So self-deluding and self-estranging has been his prior life of State provided comforts that he sees only “a walkway littered with white objects──knobs and rods and imperfectly formed balls about the size of my head” (393).
As an image, the soaring expanse of Alpha Ralpha Boulevard invites what Gaston Bachelard, following Rousseau, calls “reverie” or philosophic daydream:
For one who knows written reverie, who knows how to live, to live fully, as the pen flows, reality is so far away! What one meant to say is so quickly supplanted by what one finds oneself writing, that we realize written language creates its own universe. A universe of sentences arranges itself on the blank page, in an organization of images which follow different laws, but which always observe the great laws of the imaginary....A literary image sometimes suffices to transport us from one universe to another....Language evolves through its images much more than its semantic effort. (26-27)
Bachelard suggests that “image” (more than “semantic effort” or a literal pursuit of meaning) is the crucial element in fostering reverie, a term for which a reader versed in sf might wish to substitute the word “speculation.” For if John Bunyan’s allegory aims at instilling faith, Smith’s images invite speculation, holding out a promise of a higher order of consciousness. Travelers seek out Alpha Ralpha Boulevard for where it can take them: fallen into disrepair and broken through at its higher reaches, it is in itself no ideal or goal. But rightly traveled, it offers a possible route to insight.
On this note, and with this final contrast between Heinlein and Smith, our own journey concludes today. Thank you so much for your kind attention.
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