MUTANTS
&07
literature first conceived the possibility of the future (rather than
an End of Time or an Eternal Return, an Apocalypse or Second
Coming) ; and then furnished that future in joyous or terrified antici–
pation, thus preparing all of us to inhabit
it.
Men have dreamed and
even written down utopias from ancient times; but such utopias were
at
fi~t
typically allegories rather than projections: nonexistent models
against which to measure the real world, exploitations of the impossible
(as the traditional name declares) rather than explorations or antici–
pations or programs of the possible. And, in any event, only recently
have such works occupied a position anywhere near the center of
literature.
Indeed, the movement of futurist literature from the periphery to
the center of culture provides a clue to certain essential meanings
of our times and of the art which best reflects it.
If
we make a
brief excursion from the lofty reaches of High Art to the humbler
levels of Pop Culture-where radical transformations in literature
are reflected in simplified form- the extent and nature of the futurist
revolution will become immediately evident. Certainly, we have seen
in recent years the purveyors of Pop Culture transfer their energies
from the Western and the Dracula-type thriller (last heirs of the
Romantic and Gothic concern with the past) to the Detective Story
especially in its hard-boiled form (final vulgarization of the realists'
dedication to the present) to Science Fiction (a new genre based on
hints in E.
A.
Poe and committed to "extrapolating" the future).
:mis development
is
based in part on the tendency to rapid exhaustion
inherent in popular forms; but in part reflects a growing sense of the
irrelevance of the past and even of the present to 1965. Surely, there
has never been a moment in which the most naive as well as the most
sophisticated have been so acutely aware of how the past threatens
momentarily to disappear from the present, which itself seems on
the verge of disappearing into the future.
And this awareness functions, therefore, on the level of art as
well as entertainment, persuading quite serious writers to emulate
the modes of Science Fiction. The novel
is
most amenable to
this
sort
of adaptation, whose traces we can find in writers as various as
William Golding and Anthony Burgess, William Burroughs and Kurt
Vonnegut, Jr., Harry Matthews and John Barth-to
all
of whom
young readers tend to respond with a sympathy they do not feel even
