ince the publication of his first novel in 1981, James Morrow has amassed one of the
most intriguing and ambitious bodies of work in (or out of) science fiction.
His novels and stories, in the tradition of Voltaire, Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut
Jr., offer a sharp yet compassionate take on the foibles of humanity. Samuel R.
Delany has called Morrow's "Godhead Trilogy," composed of Towing Jehovah (1994),
Blameless in Abaddon (1996) and The Eternal Footman
(1999) "a finely articulated
engagement with some of the major problems of our time," while Brian Stableford
declares the trilogy "one of the finest and most timely literary products of its
day." Morrow has won two Nebula Awards for short fiction (for the novella City
of Truth and the short story "Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge")
and two World Fantasy Awards for Best Novel (for Only Begotten Daughter [1990]
and Towing Jehovah). Morrow lives with his wife, Kathy, in Pennsylvania.
The following is excerpted from an interview that took place on Sept. 30, 2000, in Durham, N.
C., where Morrow was special guest at the Trinoc*con SF convention.
What drew you to the SF community? Your novels have an interesting publishing
history--your first couple of novels, The Wine of Violence and The Continent
of Lies,
weren't really packaged or promoted as science fiction per se, but when your
third novel, This Is the Way the World Ends, appeared, it was picked up by
the Science Fiction Book Club.
Morrow: : It's certainly true that I'm not here through the conventional
avenues, through childhood love of the genre. I can remember a friend in the Boy
Scouts pressing a science fiction novel on me, and I read it, but I didn't read it
to the exclusion of other sorts of literature. My first two novels came out at a
time when it was pretty unusual for an unknown SF writer to get published in hardcover
rather than in mass market paperback. So I think they were perceived almost as
mainstream novels just by virtue of their packaging, although nobody pretended
they were anything other than science fiction. Some people would say that they're
more science fictional than anything else that I've done.
In fact, the Science Fiction Book Club picked up The Wine of Violence.
My agent at the time thought it was a lot like A Canticle for Leibowitz--a
philosophical novel with science fiction trappings-and there was discussion as
to whether my novel would prosper more, perhaps have crossover potential, presented as
a mainstream novel. In recent times, we've seen Mary Doria Russell find a very large
mainstream readership with The Sparrow, a manifestly science
fiction novel, and she
was quite willing to call it that.
But yeah, I kind of backed into the field. I've found it a very convivial place,
though. Especially conventions. I like to use panels at science fiction conventions
to bounce my ideas off of other persons.
In the introduction to your first short story collection, Swatting at the
Cosmos, you wrote of your desire to grapple with the really big ideas. Did you
make a conscious decision to write within a science fiction framework because that
was the best vehicle for grappling with those really big ideas?
Morrow:I don't think I consciously set out to enact my particular
intellectual/philosophical/religious agenda in the form of science fiction
stories. But when one does fall into the field, as I did, one very quickly
discovers its tremendous plasticity. I sometimes even resist calling science fiction
a genre, because it seems to be in many ways an anti-genre, if by genre we mean
a kind of pleasurable literary experience that is predictable. You know what you're
going to get when you sign up for a murder mystery or a western; your expectations
are fulfilled. Science fiction has going for it something like the opposite. You
never know where a given story is going to take a particular trope or premise. ...
To look
at human beings not just as members of a gender or a class or a particular
racial or ethnic heritage, but as a species--I'm stealing this idea from Kurt
Vonnegut--is a remarkable potentiality in science fiction. Science fiction adds a
huge perspective, and in so doing becomes very humanistic.
In an interview with Samuel R. Delany that was published in a special
James Morrow issue of the academic journal Paradoxa, you said,
"The best novels always contradict themselves. They traffic in ambiguity and
doubt. ... The important thing, I feel, is to live one's life in a constant
state of anxiety. It's very human, and you get a lot done." Those are very
wise words, but they also work against what are sometimes the expectations in
science fiction--a desire for resolution and explanation. How does a desire for
ambiguity and anxiety fuel what you're trying to accomplish in your fiction?
Morrow: I suppose a critique I'm prepared to make of science fiction is that
it fails to acknowledge just how
perverse, self-defeating and despairing a species we can be. We talked earlier
about science fiction as the literature that looks at us as a species, that very
humanistically binds us together rather than separating us into special interest
groups. But psychologically, science fiction can be accused, I think fairly, of
being often rather shallow, of not trafficking in ambiguity, in what Thomas Disch
called "a decent sense of despair" and what I would call a sense of tragedy.
What you find going on in science fiction tends to be triumphalist, with happy
endings or, at least, an expectation of satisfying conclusions. But I certainly
stand by what I said about the most satisfying kinds of literary experiences leaving
you a little bit at sea, not quite where you were when you started the journey.
I often liken the process of writing fiction to jumping on a freight train, which
is very different from getting on a passenger train with a ticket. If you jump on
a freight train, you don't know where you're going. I'm often surprised by what
emerges from the premises I set up. So in that sense, that's where the ambiguity
comes from. I had no idea when I wrote Towing Jehovah that implicit
in that idea--the
Corpse of God appearing in the Atlantic Ocean--was a critique of my own worldview,
that atheists would be as upset by this bizarre development as the Catholic Church.
I never thought I would end up giving a begrudging legitimacy to the idea that, if
we were to forget about God or knew there was no theistic, supernatural principle
in the universe, we might in fact lose all moral bearings. I could go on with a
whole list of surprises that occurred in my life when I was writing those books.
I'm constantly amazed that I find myself arguing positions
that I myself find extremely problematic. But I guess that's why God invented fiction.
Fiction is not the same as a pulpit or a lectern. I think that's what makes art art,
that element of ambiguity. If you say I'm a satirist first and a science fiction
writer second, then what's going on in my "Godhead" trilogy is a satirist's impulses
under full sail.
What was it that drove you to your concerns with these
theological issues?
Morrow:That's a large question. ... There was no bad religious
experience for me; there was nothing traumatic that ever happened to me in the
church. I had a rather generic Sunday school instruction in the suburbs of
Philadelphia, where my parents took me to a Presbyterian church. I think they
had an inoculation theory about it: a small dose of religion would inoculate me
against the more extreme forms. So I didn't fall away from the church. In a
sense, I think I fell away from something much larger--my culture, the world of
a white middle-class suburb where God was the norm and the theistic argument was
taken for granted.
But then I found myself in a high school world literature class where we studied
Voltaire, Camus, many writers who dissented from the received wisdom of the day,
particularly the received religious wisdom of the day. That was my inverse road to
Damascus. It wasn't a question of losing beliefs that were dear to my heart. But
ever since then I've found myself at odds with my culture on this level. I just don't
get it--the need for a parallel universe that's invisible, but better. It just has
never struck me as an honest reaction. These authors I read in that class just spoke
to me.
How much have you had to deal with profound misreadings of your work?
Have you have instances where readers had trouble dealing with the irony and
ambiguity, perhaps taking you too literally, or believing that an argument you
proposed was one that you actually embraced?
Morrow: The readers who seek me out, as opposed to the captive audience
professors have in universities, are a self-selected group, so they pretty much
know what they're in for. The books have been recommended to them, or they're a
part of the science fiction community where deuces are wild and they're ready
for anything. Occasionally I'll hear of a professor who used one of my books
in a course, and he or she will say, "Some of my students just couldn't deal with
this. They were very upset and couldn't finish the book." In terms of an individual
instance of a misreading, I don't think I could come up with one. I think that
in Towing Jehovah, the satire of the feminism
is sometimes misread. I regard the
character of Cassie, who voices some of the rhetoric of radical feminism, as
actually being one of the heroes of that book. She does some very heroic
things and, at the end, makes a choice to stick with her convictions rather
than go the easy way. She engages in some admirable self-doubt and grows as
the story goes on. But some people still saw her as a caricature.
In the same interview I mentioned earlier, you said there that "perhaps
the saddest cultural development that I've seen in my lifetime is the rise of
an anti-science credo among folks who ought to know better." Could you comment
on this in general, and also in relation to your new novel? It's my understanding
that The Last Witchfinder begins a conversation on these issues.
Morrow:Yes, indeed. The Last Witchfinder is a novel about the coming
of the Enlightenment and the extraordinary shift, not only in the Zeitgeist, but
also in the sense of the whole universe. A whole new way of constructing reality
arrives fairly quickly in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
The remarkable thing is that the rise of experimental science, then called
"natural philosophy," is concurrent with one of the darkest chapters in the
history of theism, which is the persecution of witches. If we go back to
the 16th century, we have both the very beginnings of modern astronomy
and the absolute height of persecution of supposed Satanists. Witch hunting
is very much a Renaissance phenomenon. We think of it as belonging to the Dark
Ages but, in fact, it's the result of some peculiar theological developments
that are very recent. So, at the same time you have Newton writing the Principia,
you have someone like Robert Boyle--the famous Robert Boyle of Boyle's Law--saying,
yes, witches are probably the case, and it's almost certainly true they can enlist
the aid of Satan.
Regarding the rise of an anti-science credo, well, there's always been a critique
of science. To a degree, I think that's very helpful. But I do think there's
something so precious about science, this totally unexpected development in human
intellectual history that tells us we could, at least provisionally, step outside
of the revealed truths about nature, investigate in a completely different way and
look in a completely different direction. I think that's astonishing. And so it
makes me very sad when I see in some postmodern academics a certain kind of romantic
critique that in some ways dismisses the special status of science, that does not
admire it, that sees science as just another story, just another narrative, and
does not privilege it.
I think I will go to my grave saying science is privileged.
Not universally privileged, not privileged at the expense of other ways of
understanding reality--I wouldn't be writing fiction if I didn't think it was
terribly important to come at reality from lots of different directions. But
I am distressed by a certain kind of mindless dismissal, one that certainly
doesn't begin with postmodern academia, a kind of resentment that science tells
us lots of things that we would prefer not to be the case: we're not special,
we're not the center of the universe, there doesn't seem to be much evidence
that we are the special creation of a divinity. Those are extremely annoying
messages, and annoyance with them is part of what I believe is behind a certain
intellectual spin that arrives with Heidigger and Wittgenstein and Derrida: the
notion that science is just another belief system, that it's every bit as
ideological and metaphysical as an organized church. For my money, that's
kind of nonsensical. But the anger in my soul that's being fanned by that
discourse keeps me writing this novel. It'll be my longest and most ambitious
work, I think.
Is it the first in another trilogy, or is it a stand-alone work?
When can we expect to see it?
Morrow: It's very much a stand-alone, other than the fact that James Morrow's
obsessive themes are going to be there throughout. I'd love to just live with this
book for about two more years, but I think it'll be out in about a year and a half.
I've got most of it written.
The novel is certainly an example of writing as just an endless series of
surprises. It almost feels like a book that was asking to be written. That's
sounds almost mystical, I know. But it was an amazing period in history, and
I don't think the science of the time has ever been written about in a novel. You have
something like John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, which is about the sociology
of that time. But I discovered I could have Benjamin Franklin and Isaac Newton
in the same scene, because they were briefly contemporaries and almost met. So
I had them meet. Here you have men not only of two different generations and two
different continents, but two different universes. Newton was very much the
Renaissance man, very devout in his own way, manifestly theistic in his outlook.
Then you have Benjamin Franklin, the Enlightenment figure par excellence.
In terms of this discussion, I can't help thinking of Isaac Asimov, who was in a
way a true Enlightenment figure himself. Benjamin Franklin was one of his heroes, and
he had such a strong investment in the privileged nature of science and trying to
approach the world in a rational way. Did
you ever have any contact with Asimov?
Morrow: I had tremendous respect
for Asimov's worldview. Not so much for his fiction, but his essays were marvelous.
He had such integrity. Here was a man who lived what he believed. I did have
occasion to supervise the obituaries and eulogies for Asimov when I was the editor
of that year's Nebula volume. I would be at the same convention with him on occasion,
but I never got to sit down and talk with him. So I saw him near the end of his life.
There's so much facetious discourse that goes on at science fiction conventions
concurrently with wrestling with God and trying to say something coherent about
the big issues, and I never got to see him hold forth publicly. But the fact
that he left behind a little self-obituary saying, well, I can't buy into that
dream of a great beyond, of an afterlife, I just won't do it, sorry, that would
be a betrayal of what I stand for--to me, that's real heroism. The whole New Age
Zeitgeist that Isaac Asimov stood in glorious opposition to, I also find vapid
and just not consonant with the best in human beings.
A final question: What do you want people to take away from your work?
Morrow: I guess I want people to take away from my work
a kind of benign anxiety, a sense that the conversation the Enlightenment got going
should never stop. Many people, including some of my friends and colleagues in the
academy, can't stand the Enlightenment conversation. They just want it to go away.
And I think that science fiction, being a fiction about science, keeps the Enlightenment
conversation going. So I thank you all for reading it.
