Cultural materialism and historicism in the reading of speculative literature

Ever since I was five years old and I taught myself how to read by using my dad's textbooks, historia has always fascinated me.  Even now, when I'm so sickened by my experiences teaching in public school that I find myself at times thinking that I'd rather die than to subject myself to the inanities of the public school system, histories of all stripes fascinate me.  They are, after linguistic semantics, the most important and fascinating ideas and concepts that I'll probably ever come across.  Perhaps to others it might make some sense, but I just cannot fathom separating historia the recollection of the past from historia the invention of stories. 

Rarely does a month go by on the fora that I frequent that I don't encounter some crude attempt at "placing" a particular story, particularly epic fantasies.  I will see earnest people putting forth arguments that basically claim that "dark" and "gritty" fantasies are a relatively new occurrence, arising during the past 10-15 years.  Rarely is there any real understanding presented of the fantasy literature produced any earlier than that person's own childhood it seems; I rarely see discussions of pre-1977 fantasies, especially those of the epic variety.  For those readers, fantasy (particularly epic fantasies, considering the type of fora that I visit most often) seems to be divorced from any sense of history.

This is very strange to me, being not just a historian but also someone who has taught English literature on occasion at the high school level.  Perhaps it's because I was greatly influenced by the Cultural Materialists and the New Historicists during my graduate school years in the mid-1990s, but I find it odd that there is so little curiosity about the antecedents of current literary trends.  Yesterday, while I was composing my review of David Lindsay's 1920 novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, I found myself thinking about some of the similarities that novel shared with Symbolist and late-period Romantic writers.  Although this is reflected with only passing references to three authors (with J.K. Huysmans being the one I thought about most in relation to Lindsay's work), my review is informed with the notion that there is more to a literary work than the words on its pages or how the Author's psycho-sexual tensions may be reflected in it.

Too often I hear of people referring to History as some sort of static, "objective" entity that impartially doles out its judgments.  Rather, I see History as an evolving, "living" record of discourse that encompasses not just what people had to eat everyday during the Turnip Winter or the amount of munitions fired during the Siege of Leningrad, but also how people composed stories and why those stories may have import at one time and not at another.  Historia is not something that should be divided against itself.

In reading speculative literature, especially now that I'm reading dozens of older works for the Gollancz SF and Fantasy Masterworks review projects, I have found more layers of depth and meaning as I began exploring these texts, some of which are more than a century old, as narrative structures that are not to be separated from their historical pasts.  Reading social attitudes as embedded in a story just as William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land and not trying to understand the times in which those stories were written (not to mention trying to understand our own reactions and how these reactions may differ significantly from older generations' views on social mores),  that just seems to be a bit daft to me.  And yet there are quite a few readers who remain so non-curious about the antecedents for say a J.R.R. Tolkien that they see his The Lord of the Rings as a "beginning" of a tradition, rather than as a transitional work that mediates some of the themes and imagery found in Scandinavian, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Finnish sagas and epic poems, finding ways to transform these values and modes of expression into a more "modern" language.  The result of this seems to be a willful lack of understanding of how fantasy and SF narratives are not truly sui generis, but are rather just extensions of older expressions on the various concerns that make up the human condition.

Sure, there will be those who will argue that literature ought to be judged foremost by its own intrinsic qualities.  For the aesthetes, literature is to be analyzed on its inherent genius and not viewed through a historical lens that might take a Shakespeare or Cervantes and have their crowning achievements mixed in with pardoner accounts, Amadis of Gaul, the rise in popularity of teaching the ancient Greek and Latin in schools, and the growing divide between "high" and "popular" culture after the advent of the printing press.  There is something appealing about the notion of approaching Hamlet or Don Quijote as objets d'art rather than as integral parts of the national cultures of their day.  But when a peasant or merchant begins to quote scenes from these works, twisting them about to fit his/her immediate needs, then these works stop being just Art and become something much more amorphous but no less important:  they become cultural markers that are utilized in various way by various social classes over centuries, creating that odd situation, as Borges notes in some of his stories, where "by quoting Shakespeare, one becomes Shakespeare," if albeit only for a moment and with the understanding that multiple applications and interpretations will arise.

All fine and dandy, no doubt, but what about speculative literature?  It is rather disconcerting that the so-called "Sturgeon's Law" about where some high number (usually either 90% or 99%) of something is "crap," is cited so often by spec fic readers.  To me, it seems to be a sort of lazy shortcut, a way to avoid issues of arguing "quality," not to mention examining just how important certain literary works can be outside of formal assessments of their prose, themes, and characterizations.  John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress certainly was not viewed as being a masterpiece when it was published in the late 17th century.  It is inelegant in its construction, with virtually no subtlety in its prose, its wit, or its themes.  And yet for centuries it has been one of the most popular allegorical tales for religion orthodoxy in the English language.  One might be able to dismiss it with a curt "it is crap," but that would be akin to throwing one's self into the Slough of Despond.  Some things, despite their formalistic weaknesses, come to possess a great power with the public, sometimes lasting for decades or even centuries.

And speculative literature?  I believe a better way of assessing it is not to focus solely on its intrinsic qualities, but also to examine what sort of "conversation" it is having with previous works and with our own shared cultural histories.  Understanding the Zeitgeist and the Weltanschauungen surrounding a work's composition can enlighten our understanding of the work at hand immeasurably.  This holds true not just for a "classic" spec fic work published a generation or two ago, but also for those works being published today.  It would behoove us to consider the influences that may be found in a work, since nothing human-made is ever conceived in a vacuum.  Historia is, after all, the greatest, on-going story that we've ever heard or told.