What is it about?
The article begins by discussing Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel in relation to Fredric Jameson's argument that Science Fiction emerges at the end of the nineteenth century to register a sense of the future in the space in which the historical novel had previously registered a sense of the past. It continues by arguing that SF and modernism are closely-linked parallel products of the collapse of the historical novel. This theory is related to William Empson's concept of pastoral and discussed through readings of the Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic, Kafka's The Castle, Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's analysis of Kafka, these texts are all identified as versions of the 'fool's errand', which is theorised via Žižek and Freud as an alternative to the death drive. Final readings of Orwell's Coming Up for Air and Kafka's 'The Truth about Sancho Panza' relate the 'fool's errand' to a restoration of agency in an anti-fascist context. The article concludes by noting that 'twentieth-century versions of the fool's errand may yet prefigure a general alteration of consciousness'.
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Why is it important?
Because it links modernism to science fiction and anticipates a field which is beginning to emerge. My current book project is concerned with making a much wider and more sustained case for this linkage.
Perspectives
Every time I dare look at this piece again I wonder what the hell I was on at the time. Yet it pretty much predicts the subsequent directions of my research. It. itself, seems to be an example of a 'secondary distortion of an allegedly "original" narrative', as the article puts it.
Dr Nick Hubble
Brunel University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Historical Psychology, Utopian Dreams and Other Fool's Errands, Modernist Cultures, May 2008, Edinburgh University Press,
DOI: 10.3366/e2041102209000410.
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