Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2006; Ł75 hb; 154pp

reviewed in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 2007

John Clute has suggested on numerous occasions that there are three key dates for any work of science fiction: the date of publication, the date on which it is ostensibly set, and the date that it is actually about. Most of Philip K. Dick’s novels, for example, although set in the future, are actually about California in the 1950s. Although Clute might demur at such a description, this perception is clearly allied to new historicism, that branch of critical theory which examines work in terms of its historical, cultural and social context. As is J.G. Ballard’s oft-repeated claim that science fiction is the only way of writing about the present.

            Given how these highly regarded commentators on the genre argue so strongly for looking at what science fiction is emerging from and what it is trying to tell us about that milieu, it is perhaps surprising how little the new historicist approach has been used as a tool to examine the genre. We are far more likely to read a Marxist or a post-modern analysis than we are a new historical critique.

            These thoughts are generated by the book under review which, although it considers science fiction not at all and the fantastic only tangentially, might still suggest fruitful avenues for future genre scholarship. It has to be said from the start that this is not a book for the general reader. Indeed it is one of those narrowly focussed academic works where one occasionally wonders if the author doesn’t already know personally all his intended audience. Certainly Pieters makes broad assumptions about which few of the many jargon terms he uses need any sort of a gloss; and while he presents passages from German, Greek and Latin in English, and provides parallel translations of passages in Dutch, he also assumes that his audience will be happy to encounter long and significant passages in French. In other words, this slim volume still demands a great deal of work and attention from its readers.

            Pieters takes as his text one casual phrase used by Stephen Greenblatt at the start of his Shakespearean Negotiations (1988): ‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead.’ This book is devoted to examining what that might mean, or rather, what it has meant through history. Pieters ranges back in time (rather haphazardly, the book is arranged on a curiously ahistorical pattern) as far as Aeneas and Odysseus descending into the underworld to literally speak with their dead. By the renaissance, however, letters from Petrarch and Machiavelli, among others, demonstrate that reading was already being characterised as conversing with the dead. Although this seems a simple metaphor for the process of reading, like many things it becomes more complex the closer it is analysed. It is, of course, not a conversation in the normal way of things. We don’t hear the dead, and any voice we do hear, as Pieters makes clear, can only be our own. And if we argue back, not only will the author not hear but the contentious proposition will not have changed one jot the next time we return to it in that same book. Yet it is undeniable that those of us who enjoy the company of books, who might in our unguarded moments describe them as our truest friends, can regard the immersion in a book as a conversation. And as Pieters traces the story it would seem to be the same conversation from Sidney through Flaubert to Roland Barthes.

            One of the more wide-ranging effects of the new historicist approach is that historians have more and more taken to using contemporary fiction as a way to bring the period to life. This is a relatively recent phenomenon: just fifty years ago the eminent Tudor historian G.R. Elton could describe More’s Utopia as ‘carefree playing with ideas’ [England Under the Tudors, 1955], while now most historians of the period use the book assiduously as a guide to the Henrican court. It is here, examining the interface between fiction and history that the vivacity implied by a conversation with the dead raises, that this book is at its most interesting. In a discussion of the ideas of the cultural historian Johan Huizinga, for example, Pieters argues that ‘the historical sensation can be expected to function as an experience of strangeness or alterity, embodying as it does a feeling that forces us to question our habitual frame of reference’ (61). This sense of alterity is heightened when he goes on to say ‘The conversation with the dead broadens our lives and deepens our souls … it turns us into someone we were not before – someone of whose existence we may have had no idea at all’ (61). This, surely, is the ‘other’ of science fiction, that alienation engendered by engagement with the text which forces us to see outside ourselves, to recognise in ourselves someone we might not have known before. That Pieters sees the same effect in the ‘historical sensation’ raises a prospect of examining the science fiction text not for its futurism but for its contemporaneity.

            This whole issue comes up again in a discussion of the sense of wonder evoked by great art – there is a long digression in which Pieters discusses the way paintings speak to us, which also involves using Rubens’ painting of the head of Medusa as the starting point for a considerable analysis of realism in art. Here Pieters asserts that ‘[t]he feeling is one of alienation, one could say, in the aesthetic sense of the word as well as in the psychoanalytical one; there is the sense that we see things anew, the way they really are, and this feeling confronts us with the limits of both our perception and our “natural” identity’ (73). This in turn leads to a discussion of the sublime (Pieters leans more to Boileau than to Burke) which is usefully categorised as ‘that which we are better off to know only in the shape of a representation’ (74). Increasingly, it seems, a discussion of the effect of literature, how it imaginatively revivifies other times by allowing us to engage in this dialogue with the dead, turns upon issues, concepts and questions which are central to our understanding and appreciation of science fiction. Whether, by extension, this opens up fruitful avenues for future consideration of the genre is another matter, but it might be worth a look.

            A hesitant one, though, for this a far from straightforward work and it is as prone to excite doubts and quibbles as it is to convince. On a superficial level, for instance, there is the question of translation. In discussing Aristotle’s Poetics Pieters notes that when the text first became known in Europe the idea of mimesis was termed ‘imitatio’, but imitation then meant something very different than it does now. Do we , therefore, need an historical light thrown upon the text before we can properly discern the light the text throws on history? On a more substantial level, Greenblatt’s idea of speaking with the dead also involves something he calls ‘social energy’ which, at least in so far as Pieters glosses this term, is a sort of cultural cement which allows certain texts to continue to appeal to us. The worry is that this ‘social energy’ is precisely what allows us to continually reinterpret texts in the light of our own cultural context. When we engage with a Shakespeare play, are we truly engaging with the play Shakespeare wrote? Or is the voice we hear in our heads being led by our own dreams, and putting us into a place that is neither Shakespeare’s nor our own? Listening for echoes in a text can open up vivid new dimensions in a work, but it is also prone to mishearing.

            In my conversation with Jurgen Pieters, therefore, my interlocutor said not one word about genre and probably would not have comprehended how I could constantly reinterpret his words in the light of science fiction. Was I mishearing all along? Very likely, this is a short, dense but complex book with no clear pattern. But such misinterpretations can be creatively productive; though you might well have a more productive and more stimulating conversation with a totally different book.