A piece from my dissertation, I’m briefly discussing representational issues in Kathryn Kramer’s A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space. I’m trying to establish its connection the the slipstream “movement” as Bruce Sterling began defining.
Consider A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space. It takes place in the late 1970s/early 1980s and is the story of family relations, incest and a royal family in exile. Grandparents, parents and children all form a complex pattern of emotional distress, betrayals of trust and distrust. All in all, a quite conventional and classic story, but there are two elements which interrupt an understanding of the text as realist: the potential presence of a war and the symbol of aliens.
To begin with the possible existence of a war, the chapters have titles such as “On All Fronts”, “Unconfirmed Troop Movement” and “The Battle Joins on the New Jersey Turnpike”. Other titles are not distinctly war-like, but hint at war-imagery: “Seeds of Conflict”, “Mutiny” and “Parade”. But what war is actually being discussed here? As the novel takes place when it does, there seems to be only two possible answers: the Vietnam War or the Cold War, yet none of these really fit the bill. The Vietnam War ended in 1975, and the Cold War was never a physical conflict. Also, it seems that no one actually knows where this war is taking place:
No one knew when the war had started, by whom or with what purpose. It had not been declared. Those who tried to join up could not discover where to present themselves. [...] Tradition, people complained, entitled them to more than vague uneasiness - someplace to volunteer their services for the wounded, a slogan or two, a battle hymn. But in this war there was nothing to do except wait around to see what would happen next. Many even refused to believe that there was a war on at all. (Kramer, 1985: 6)
This strange, elusive war thus seems to possibly be a comment on the Cold War, with its lack of direct hostilities and clear direction. Yet there are references to a front line, trench warfare and censorship of civilian letters (Kramer, 1985: 74-75 and 164), something which does not fit with an argument of the war as the Cold War. There seems to be a conflict between the ontological status of the war and the epistemological. The constant references to the war suggests that it does exist, yet no one can know anything about it: “if there really was a war going on, why didn’t the colonel get on the phone to Headquarters and find out who the hell they were supposed to be fighting?” (Kramer, 1985: 117).
The ontological status of the war pushes at the ontological status of the novel; which world are we dealing with, where a war might be going on? It is the ambiguous status of the war which is equally problematic for the characters and us as readers, since we are never sure if we should read the war symbolically or literally. There seems to be two conflicting interpretations activated by the text. The first is a collapse of all meaning into entropy:
The verifiable evidence of the war being scant (troop movements kept top secret, the location of the field of battle unrevealed), no one knew at what moment ordinary life might come to an abrupt halt. The sense that their fate was hidden from them infiltrated every aspect of people’s lives. Even the past was not exempt from suspicion. Had things happened as they were written down, or had the records been falsified? [...] people perceived everywhere conspiracies intended to deceive them personally. They imagined messages, which they alone could not interpret, concealed between the lines of magazine and newspaper articles. The most commonplace phrases of speech seemed mysteriously encoded. (Kramer, 1985: 13-14)
This view of the war seems to be to more symbolic than literal; the war can be seen a concrete statement of the postmodern condition where direct access to knowledge becomes suspect. The conspiratorial view - that something is going which we do not have access to - is also typical of the postmodern condition, as both Fredric Jameson and Brian McHale has noted. The war, thus, is a struggle between meaning versus entropy. Such a reading is interesting in the sense that it inscribes Kramer’s novel the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and others who have dealt extensively with entropy in their works. Most of these authors are canonical within the postmodern tradition, as is the discussion of entropy.
However, it is perhaps even more useful to see Kramer’s novel in the vein of Pamela Zoline’s “Heat Death of the Universe” as there is not only a degree of overlap in the thematics of both texts, but there is also an overlap in the way the texts employ sf devices. Both stories take place mainly in a domestic setting and both revolve around the concept of meaning and reference. In Zoline’s short story, the concept of entropy is used as an analogy of the life of housewife Sarah Boyle, thus the reference to the heat death of the universe. Sarah’s life and her day planning a birthday party for her child tends toward maximum entropy and her world falls to pieces as it reaches complete entropy. In a symbolic sense, her world explodes. The same analogy can be applied to Kramer’s text; the ontologically unstable war becomes an analogy of the crises that the characters experience regarding the world they live in. For all the differences between the two texts, it is interesting to note that Zoline’s short story was first published in New Worlds and thus labelled sf, even if this label has since that time often been discussed. Kramer’s novel thus places itself under both the sf label and the postmodernist label.
However, there is an alternative view of the war as concrete, something which is taking place even if it cannot be located. While no one can find the war:
Symptoms of the war, nevertheless, did not abate. People found it increasingly difficult to just get through the day. They couldn’t remember how they had ever found pleasure in their daily lives. They lost interest in working. They suffered from insomnia and lapses of memory. They became bored with their friends, tired of even their favorite foods. Everything seemed run-of-the-mill, insipid, stale. What had they ever seen, each privately wondered, in the one person they had once professed to love so earnestly? How had they ever fooled themselves into believing they were happy? (Kramer, 1985: 9)
Here the status of the war is different, for it exists even if people cannot find it. The war is thus in an epistemological crisis; no one can find it or know of it, yet it does exist. As such, the war is literal and its effects very real and problematic, both for characters and readers. We are frustrated with never knowing what the war is about, where it takes place or who participates in it. Since this status is continually left ambiguous, we as readers are positioned much like the characters in the novel: with no direct access to whether the war really exists or not. We are thus placed before an ontological hesitation between the war as real and the war as symbolic, yet both readings leave us frustrated. The symbolic reading seems the most obvious, yet the insistence of a war discourse in the chapter titles, the constant reference to soldiers and battles make it impossible for us to view it as fully symbolic.
The same strategy is used in the case of the aliens mentioned in the title of the book, or as they are called, visitors from outer space. The title itself is ambiguous, does it refer to the novel we are about to read, or is said handbook part of the diegetic world we are about to enter? As it turns out, the novel provides few answers although we never hear of any actual aliens. However, one character suggests compiling a handbook for visitors from outer space (Kramer, 1985: 35-37) and generally views the life of these possible aliens as better than life here on Earth: “Maybe in outer space people don’t misunderstand each other, don’t leave each other like they do down here. Maybe in outer space they don’t feel they have to keep secrets.[...] Maybe in outer space they don’t have wars” (Kramer, 1985: 35-36). Outer space and those that live there are idealized by Charles, and a handbook would help them understand Earth, much like “doctors have handbooks to help them diagnose ailments” (37). It is a revealing likening Charles chooses; that the book will be used to diagnose the ailments of the world. Cyrus, the grandchild of Charles and the one responsible for writing the handbook, reflects on how to write it and the need for its existence:
A handbook for visitors from outer space, Charles had ordered him to write. It would EXPLAIN THE ENTIRE WORLD! He remembered thinking how it would suddenly appear everywhere, like Giddeons Bible; visitors from outer space, consulting it, would understand what had happened to the world to make it come to an end. But if you grew up expecting the world to end - even though it might be next to impossible to actually imagine this happening: the whole world just stopping, the war to end all wars (once the First World War had been that) maybe even being started by one crazed person in a vindictive moment - it warped your thinking; you looked at everything with a jaundiced eye; and you could neve relax your vigilance. If you did, and everything blew up while you weren’t looking, it would be your fault. (181, emphasis in original)
This quote gives us an idea of what the handbook is for, but also what the ailment might be that ails society - growing up in a world which might end at any time. This apocalyptic theme was introduced in the afterword/preface of the novel, where we are presented with a world that has stopped and people disappeared. The overarching theme of the novel is thus an apocalyptic vision of Earth where communication is dissolved into secrets, conspiracies and entropy of meaning. As mentioned earlier, entropy has been a guiding concern for many writers, functioning as a metaphor for the world.
As Eric Zencey points out, entropy has often been used in its vague, connotative sense rather than its strictly scientific sense, and so used to indicate disorder, pessimism and generally as “a convenient shorthand for articulating a sense that things are running downhill, falling apart, getting worse” (Zencey, 1991: 51). Kramer’s text thus falls within familiar territory, and the metaphor of entropy should thus not be taken too literally as belonging to a scientific discourse, but rather a broader, less clear-cut, use of the concept as vehicle for something else. Kramer’s use is this typical, but the way that her text is structured is less so. Her two main disruptions - the war and the aliens - are never literal in the novel, but instead used to destabilize what otherwise often reads as a realist novel. They create an ontological flickering and hesitation between the real world and the fictional.
The fictional world is constantly bordering on apocalypse due to a war we cannot locate and so can never prevent. Its omnipresence, however, makes us insecure and uncomfortable creating a pervasive mood of things falling apart, since people are still being affected by this war. We get the sense that time is running out, moving towards the entropic state which we encountered with the afterword/preface which - due to its doublenaming - is both starting point and end point. To some extent, time is thus suspended as if the apocalypse had already happened, since we all know - or at least expect - what is going to happen.
The settings that we are introduced to are similarly incoherent and separate from each other. Arborville, the town which represents a kind of “Main Street USA”, has decided to ignore the outside world and the presence of war:
Little by little, anxiety increased around the country, but the people of Arborville remained content. They thought all this talk of approaching war was so much hooey. They heard of people stocking food in their basements, building special shelters for protection during air raids, and they slapped their thighs and roared. “They’re out of their minds. Who would dream of attacking us?” (26-27)
We learn that Arborville is the place “where bronzed men on tractors enjoyed the atavistic companionship of their forefathers as they guided the plow in the furrow” (28) and that there, as Arborvillians say, “couldn’t be a better place in the universe to bring up kids [...] Let the Martians look down and drool. It’s safe; the schools are good; the air is fresh, the morals untarnished” (28). Arborville is presented as a utopian place, perfect ion its small-town idyll, even to the extent that no one goes on vacation since anywhere else is perceived to be worse. Of course, this idyll conceals larger problems that are simply ignored, but the point here is again that the place Arborville is presented as separate from the rest of the world. There is even a parking lot “marked VISITORS - under which some smart kid had added ‘From Outer Space’” (87).
While this brief comment is clearly ironic, it is also a very apt description of how Arborville is presented and an example of how the symbolic intrusions of the war and the aliens are constantly invoked. Seen isolated, the above parking lot holds no special significance - it is simply a joke by a kid - but taking together with all the other references to aliens, a growing significance is attached to these instances. Typically, one would argue that such superfluous, irrelevant detail corresponds to what Barthes refers to as the “reality effect” (Barthes REF XX). Yet in their insistence and continued presence, these references begin to create a kind of “unreality effect” in the way that they constantly pick away at the status of the fictional world.
Most of the settings we encounter in the text are similarly disconnected from each other; the military school Cyrus attends, the nursing home Charles ends up in, and the Cottage - the home of the exiled royal family, which is actually a castle in medieval European style placed in the American heartland. Even the people driving the New Jersey Turnpike are said to come from everywhere
They came east on Interstate 80 from Dover, Two Bridges, and Patterson [...] They came west on 287 from White Plains, Scarsdale, and beyond. [...] Before that, they had come from England and France and the Netherlands, from all over Europe, from Africa and India and China. And before that they came from somewhere else too: from Babylon or Carthage, from Atlantis or the Garden of Eden. Once they had all been homesick, but now they were home… (299)
Here, the New Jersey Turnpike takes on mythic proportions as a highway that everyone has travelled towards no matter when in history. The interesting thing about the above mentioned quote (although shortened) is the slipping which occurs from a factual reference of the Interstate sections with the Turnpike, to the historical and mythic intersections of people migrating to the US just to find this grand highway. Once again, the narrative undermines a stable world as it moves from fact to myth.
What is even more significant is that the cities mentioned (Babylon, Carthage, Atlantis, and even the Garden of Eden, though hardly a city) are all best-known for their destruction, thus reenforcing the apocalyptic theme, as well as disconnecting the various places in the novel and instead creating a kind of alternate or parallel world. We see here how both time and in particular space has fragmented from a stable unity (ie. as in corresponding to our factual world) and instead takes on the attributes of the textual zones mentioned earlier.
