Transformational SF Religions: Philip Jose Farmer's Night of Light and Robert Silverberg's Downward to the Earth
[In the following essay, Dudley analyzes the protagonists' quests for the divine in the respective universes of Night of Light and Downward to the Earth, highlighting the contemporary cultural significance of their search.]
In a 1967 review article, Judith Merril noted that much of the era's science fiction dealt with what she termed “the religious functions of man” (44). These functions quite often found expression in the symbolism of the rocket, which (after losing its status as a phallic symbol with the emergence of the God-is-Dead movement) had come to symbolize to readers not only their own “expanding consciousness” and “the meaning of god, and of man's search for god” (43), but also “a recognition of the subjective ‘reality’ of religious experience to the individual human being” (44).
While contemporary movements such as cyberpunk1 bear witness to how this “subjective reality” has evolved into the present by “removing [the infinite] from its exalted place in the heavens … and squeezing it into the interface between human mind and computer technology” (Voller 20), the books to which Merril refers still communicate much information about how humankind searches for divine elements, both within itself and in the whole of the physical universe. Two works of the period, Philip Jose Farmer's Night of Light (1966) and Robert Silverberg's Downward to the Earth (1970), exemplify this search, signifying a clean break with a view of the universe “governed by an inevitable linear progression onward and upward” in which “[humanity is] assured that a better life on a better world await[s]” (Clareson, “History” 14-15). Also, both of these novels represent a sub-branch of the American New Wave2 (expressed in this country through “a concern with [radical] politics and [alternate] lifestyles” [Scholes and Rabkin 88]), which was itself in turn a development of the postmodern era which began in 1945 with the explosion of the atomic bomb. Thus it characterized itself socially via its “extended deterrence for permanent international alliances” (Kurth 31) and artistically for its recognition that “all relationships are ambiguous, and there is no single ‘story’ and no single ‘meaning’ that can be derived [from it]” (Bank 228).
Farmer’s novel (appearing first as an F&SF novella in 1957, then later gleaning a Nebula nomination when it appeared in novel length) concerns “dualism, the split between immortality and rebirth, the universality of religious truth expressed through the images of [the protagonist's] sin of pride not through humility or degradation, but through the self-aggrandizement of creation” (Brizzi 25). In the same vein, Silverberg's novel (first serialized in Galaxy in 1969) is described as a “several layered work full of symbolism, anti-imperialism, and antiethnocentrism” (De Bolt and Pfeiffer 273) which “employ[s] the motif of contact between human and alien to explore the themes of redemption and transcendence” (Clareson, Silverberg 50). Additionally, given the fact that both works are set on distant worlds with their own peculiar sociopolitical systems and physical laws, each novel answers J. G. Ballard's 1962 call for “more meta-biological and meta-chemical concepts, private time-systems, synthetic psychologies and space-times, [and] more of the remote, sombre half-worlds one glimpses in the paintings of schizophrenics” (Lundwall 232) through the development of plots which intentionally break with relentless “binary systems and their historic connections to the linear thought of modernism, with its causes and effects, direct correspondence with ‘life,’ certainty about what is ‘real,’ and its intellectual, social and artistic investment in ‘truth,’ ‘sources,’ and ‘meaning’” (Bank 228).
As a direct effect of inhabiting universes in which conventional theories of time and space have been abandoned, the characters of both novels are thus left free to focus on the various epistemological doubles which are summarily created and discarded during the religious “quest.” However, in order for these doubles to simultaneously come into and go out of existence, the protagonists (already displaced in physical space by their attempts to locate a higher plane of existence) must personally interact with their surroundings in such a way that both character and environment are ultimately transformed. Therefore, both Farmer's John Carmody and Silverberg's Edmund Gundersen, besides being “concerned with the nature and significance of ‘miracles’ and ‘divine manifestations,’” are also engaged by “the ethical and theological conflicts posed by diverse manifestations in a universe no longer conceived of as uniform in its ‘realities’” (Merril 44). In this respect, each character then represents a fragmented personality existing within a decidedly “Other” (Foucault, Order 326) space which at once demands and facilitates constant transformation. Thus the break with—and total disregard for—the idea of humanity's off-world “manifest destiny” (which appeared in such novels as Louis P. Gratacap's The Certainty of a Future Life on Mars [1903], Mark Wicks's To Mars Via the Moon [1911], and Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men [1930]) highlights a postmodernist vision in which multitudinous levels of discourse may be engendered by a single concept. As Michel Foucault observes, “displacements and transformations … show that the history of a concept is not wholly and entirely that of its progressive refinement, its continuously increasing rationality, its abstraction gradient, but that of its various fields of constitution and validity, that of its successive rules of use, that of the many theoretical contexts in which it developed and matured” (Archaeology 4).
Joe De Bolt and John R. Pfeiffer have criticized the far-future alien world of Night of Light for societal structures appearing “unrealistically too similar to the present” (200). However, Roger C. Schlobin notes that the novel is characterized “by the mixture of the real and the unreal, the mystical and the mundane” (259), and Farmer specialist Mary T. Brizzi observes that the planet Kareen “is the perfect setting for a novel [concerning] the reality of dreams,” a place where “[m]en and women turn into statues, trees, satyrs, and other mythological monsters” (30). Indeed, Kareen (known colloquially as Dante's Joy) is a world well acquainted with bizarre physical and mental displacements due to a periodic solar aberration. For example, as the Night of Light approaches, protagonist John Carmody chases after the skin of his dead wife's face when it appears in the air and is borne away on the wind (Farmer 1). Later he is drenched in blood as it erupts from a mirror in Mrs. Kri's boarding house (Farmer 22), an incident which, perhaps intentionally, recalls the final moments of Antonin Artaud's surrealist drama, The Spurt of Blood.
Clareson notes of Silverberg's Downward to the Earth that it is “a story concerned with ‘inner space’ as much as ‘outer space’” (Downward 592), a quality which becomes immediately apparent when the reader learns protagonist Edmund Gundersen has lost the “prime decade of his life” to Belzagor (known to Earthmen as Holman's World) while learning there “things about himself that he had not really wanted to know” (Silverberg 7). The mystery which has drawn him back eight years after Earth's relinquishment of the planet is ostensibly the relationship between the elephantine nildoror and the baboon-like sulidoror. To understand this relationship, Gundersen admits to a nildor “many-born” that his soul has been “captured” by the planet and asks permission to travel into the sulidor mist country, where nildoror go to experience the rite of rebirth (Silverberg 42).
With the exceptions of Schlobin and Brizzi, what the critics cited above fail to acknowledge is that the settings of the novels—the planets Kareen and Belzagor—are not merely one-dimensional backgrounds for the machinations of the characters but rather fully realized, four-dimensional locales (possessing, if we invoke Einstein, three dimensions of space and one of time) in which reside “a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another” (Foucault “Other Spaces” 23). Yet, that these two “synthetic space-times” (the doubling and transforming natures of which are hinted at by the fact that both possess alternate names) are at once the locus of vital theological beliefs and radical religious activities is a factor which imbues each with heterotopic power to make the imagined real by “juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (25). Significantly for both novels, the surroundings which then claw and gnaw at Carmody and Gundersen are
neither substanceless void[s] to be filled by cognitive intuition nor repositor[ies] of physical forms to be phenomenologically described in all [their] resplendent variability. [They represent] another [kind of] space … [an] actually lived and socially created spatiality, concrete and abstract at the same time, the habitus of social practices. [As heterotopias, they are spaces] rarely seen [in their most true and complete form,] for [they have, by general consensus,] been obscured by a bifocal vision that traditionally views space as either a mental construct or a physical form. (Soja 17-18)
That Gundersen, at the beginning of Silverberg's novel, is returning to a space previously vacated signals not only that he has undergone some form of uncompleted transformation here, but that it was indeed radical enough to make life without its completion impossible to endure. Early on, a peculiarly spatial aspect of this transformation is revealed: during his tenure as sector chief, Gundersen once drank raw serpent venom (a sacred element in the rebirth ceremony [Silverberg 111]) with fellow officers and a few delinquent nildoror, in effect performing a blasphemous parody of the parent ritual. The hallucinogenic venom caused Gundersen's body to transform for a short time into that of one of the elephantine aliens, an experience which displaced him in the spaces he sought to occupy—Holman's World in general, more specifically the Serpent Station. Furthermore, this displacement and its accompanying psychological effects were attested to by the fact that three days later Gundersen applied for and received a transfer to another part of the planet, never returning to that particular post again (Silverberg 34-36).
Unlike Gundersen, Farmer's John Carmody is shown early in the novel to be the agent of others' transformations. He is both a criminal and a murderer, having violated previously occupied spaces by stealing the treasured Staronif of the planet Tulgey (Farmer 95) and then killing his wife because she was pregnant with another man's child (Farmer 31)—an act which has caused his own displacement in space, as he is in hiding on the planet and cannot hope to safely leave it. However, from within the space he now occupies, Carmody witnesses transformations which he has not initiated, but which have come about due to the solar aberration causing the Night of Light. Thus he sees a satyr (who before the Night began was a Catholic monk) having sex with the simulacrum of his deceased wife (Farmer 35) and a Catholic priest who believes he is atoning for others' sins by letting himself be consumed in hellfire (Farmer 38). Later, Carmody is himself trapped by a “spatial” manifestation of the Night when the gaping mouth of a bronze statue closes around his finger (Farmer 55).
But it is Carmody's murder of the god Yess which affirms his self-appointed role as agent of transformation within the quasi-religious festival of the Night:
Carmody squeezed the trigger. Yess and the chair on which he sat slid backward from the impact of the stream of exploding bullets. Flesh and blood rose in little spurts, collected into tiny balls, drifted around him, and fell down in a shower on him. His head flew apart. His arms rose upward and over, and his legs kicked up. The motion carried him over backward, and he fell with a crash. …
[Carmody's] heart was beating savagely; his hands shook. This was the culmination of his career, his masterpiece. He liked to think of himself as an artist, a great artist in crime, if not the greatest. … No one could surpass him now. Who else had murdered a god? (Farmer 51-52)
Carmody's sociopathic act, which Brizzi observes is designed “to aggrandize himself, [while] at the same time finding redemption for himself” (28), serves to identify him as a god-figure in a doubled capacity. First, through his demonstration of machismo he has shown himself to be powerful enough to indeed destroy a god; second (and more importantly), now that the god's seat of power is empty, Carmody, having already demonstrated his god-like ability, is the logical choice to fill it.
However, he is soon displaced from this role when he is given the opportunity of becoming one of the seven Lovers of the planet's mythical goddess Boonta, thereby becoming one of the corporate Fathers of either her Dark son Algul or a new incarnation of the recently murdered Son of Light, Yess (Farmer 58, 60). His choice to become a Father of Yess indicates the multiple levels on which his character is now operating: through his decision, he becomes the ultimate “artist,” a supra-agent of transformation who is able to direct the course of an entire planet's morality (as evidenced by the death of the would-be Fathers of Algul when he rejects them [Farmer 63]). Paradoxically, he is at the same time losing this very ability, becoming less an agent and more an object of transformation when he cuts off his own finger to free himself from the statue (Farmer 62). His new status as a transformed “object” is further reflected in his concern for the simulacrum of his wife when it accompanies him and the other Fathers of Yess as they approach the temple (Farmer 64).
Gundersen is also witness to multiple transformations, the most striking of which have happened to Earthmen, who, like himself, have been “captured” by the mystery of Belzagor. Inside an abandoned Company station, he finds an emaciated couple who have become hosts for the spores of a parasitic jungle plant (Silverberg 87). At Shangri-la Falls he meets a past lover, Seena, who has not only learned to survive on but also to love the strange planet, surrounding herself with its exotic plant and animal life and even “wearing” an amoeba-like creature which survives by metabolizing her perspiration (Silverberg 96). Seena tells him of a mutual acquaintance, Gio' Salamone, who fell prey to a crystalline parasite and became “all cubes and prisms” with “outcroppings of the most beautiful iridescent minerals breaking through his skin” (Silverberg 99).
The most radical transformation which Gundersen witnesses, however, is that of ex-Company officer Jeff Kurtz, who—feeling remorse for his actions during Earth's imperialistic rule of the planet—has attempted redemption by undergoing the rebirth ceremony: “It was as if everything had been heated in a crucible and allowed to melt and run. Kurtz's fine high-bridged nose was now a rubbery smear, so snoutlike that Gundersen was jolted by its resemblance to a sulidor's. His wide mouth now had slack, pendulous lips that drooped open, revealing toothless gums. His chin sloped backward in pithecanthropoid style. Kurtz's cheekbones were flat and broad, wholly altering the planes of his face” (Silverberg 114). Once the officer who led the diabolical rituals at the serpent station, Kurtz can now only echo Conrad's Heart of Darkness as he witnesses visions of a personal “horror” (Silverberg 115). Gundersen, however, by observing Kurtz in his monstrously reborn condition, is now able to completely relinquish Seena and to verbalize the reason for his own quest: to experience for himself the mysteries of rebirth (Silverberg 112) and thus complete the transformation initiated when he drank the venom Kurtz offered and ate malidar meat with the sulidoror (Silverberg 46).
Although De Bolt and Pfeiffer see the two-part structure of Night of Light as “[t]wo John Carmody stories. … unartfully tacked together” (200),3 it is notable that Carmody's most significant transformation occurs within the gap which these critics identify. At the end of the first part Carmody has not completely relinquished either the role of “a great artist in crime” or his prisoner status on Kareen. As the second part opens twenty-seven years later on Earth, he has now (Apostle Paul-like) been “[scattered] through time and [pinioned] at the [very] centre and duration of things” (Foucault Order 331), having aspired to the religious order of his home planet (itself having experienced transformation) and thus appearing now as a Catholic priest, husband, and expectant father (Farmer 87-89). Further evidence of Carmody's agent-to-object transformation follows immediately: Carmody's superior, Cardinal Faskins, orders him to return to Kareen to dissuade his “god-son” Yess from keeping the entire population awake during the Night, thereby creating a unified community of followers to proselytize off-planet (Farmer 92). Before Carmody departs, his wife and unborn child are brutally murdered by a survivor of his criminal past, Mrs. Fratt, who seeks revenge for the death of her son and the loss of her own sight (Farmer 80). Once on Kareen, Carmody is continually threatened, both by Mrs. Fratt (Farmer 110) and by the Algulist sect seeking to depose Yess (Farmer 141).
But even though Carmody is now a transformed Other, it is his prior “spatial” condition as agent of transformations on Kareen which continues to transform the alien world and ultimately threaten the displacement of his own religion. Yess, now Other himself in terms of his familial relationship to Carmody, explains how this state of affairs has come about when the two meet in the temple: “As you can see Father … I am half-terrestrial, truly your son. And that, by the way, is one of our arguments about the universality of Boontism. Once restricted to the planet, Boontism is destined to spread throughout the universe. Its destiny became manifest the moment I was conceived by an extra-Kareenan mother and Father” (Farmer 131).
However, the existence of a “half-Terrestrial” god on Kareen has caused radical transformation to the religion itself, the nature of which even Yess is unaware. Until this point in Kareenan history, only one of the twin gods has existed in human form during a cycle, with the possibility of a power shift occurring only during the Night of Light (Farmer 20). Now, even though Carmody, Yess, and the other Fathers survive the siege on the temple, the potentialities inherent in Yess' plans for an extra-Kareenan mission also serve as an impetus to the seven wicked Fathers; during the Night an infant Algul has been born (Farmer 150). Thus the novel ends with plans for the spread of Boontism temporarily displaced and the cultural history of the planet violently shattered and forcefully reconfigured. With the (re)birth of the (br)other—and the freedom from marginalization which this birth affords Algul's followers—Kareen is thrust into an ideological war between Good and Evil, the Algulists appearing to have the upper hand as Yess is driven from the temple (Farmer 151).
In Silverberg's novel, Gundersen's experience of rebirth transforms him into “a transparent man through whom the light of the great sun at the core of the universe passes without resistance” (168), while in the process revealing the answer to his original question: that “nildor and sulidor are not two separate species but merely forms of the same creature, no more different than caterpillar and butterfly” (171). Gundersen's transformation, unlike the one which ends Farmer's novel, reveals the nature of an environment which has remained relatively constant (its displacement having occurred before the novel begins) through a complete transformation of the protagonist. Like Carmody in the second part of Night of Light, Gundersen is now Other; Otherness in this work, however, represents a state of totally realized potential freed from the natural foibles of the human condition. Thus Gundersen is able to assume the role of savior as he returns to Shangri-la Falls to lead Kurtz through a new rebirth, while simultaneously giving the remaining human population of the planet a commandment to “love one another” (Silverberg 178) as a first step toward living in harmony with the alien world they've chosen to call home.
As these two novels demonstrate, science fiction in the late sixties and early seventies was in a unique position to reexamine man's age-old “religious functions” with eyes opened to “a new importance, a new incisiveness and perhaps most of all, a new element of compassion [and] depth” (Merril 44). In reflecting back on the period, it is appropriate that these elements should appear in the genre, for the New Wave branch of SF was itself in the midst of transformations as turbulent as the postmodern society which produced it (witness, for example, the experimentalism of the British SF magazine New Worlds under the editorship of Michael Moorcock and the American SF community's concern with sex roles and alternate realities alongside such events as the war in Vietnam and the Kent State shootings).
That current SF criticism should turn once more to consideration of these works is both appropriate and desirable, for—in an age when some physicists believe the “fabric” of space-time itself to consist of an interlinking series of “quantum loops” (Bartusiak 66, 67)—each work becomes a spatially located “archaeological site” wherein we may discern not only the value systems which lay at the heart of the works themselves, but indeed the truth of the value systems upon which we as readers and critics currently operate. This is so because, in addition to becoming “archaeological sites,” the works serve as self-reflexive epistemological “mirrors” which allow us to not only be here and there, but indeed to be at both points simultaneously. Furthermore, through this convergence of past with present the mirror is shattered—and our gaze fractured—allowing us to perceive at once the unity and duplicity of mind and body, self and other, eros and thanatos, and indeed even time and space.
Thus we can, by collecting together these fragments of past and present (reflected in SF as well as in the more pervasive sociological and critical atmospheres in which it developed and continues to develop), forecast a future wherein the shattered epistemological mirror—and our fractured gaze—may once again become whole; thus we are empowered to reconstruct the deconstructed promise of science fiction for a new age. Indeed, in the sphere of social philosophy Foucault has already foreseen this event, for he observed as early as 1971 that the “knowledge of [humanity], unlike the sciences of nature, is always linked, even in its vaguest form, to ethics or politics; more fundamentally, [however,] modern thought is advancing towards that region where man's Other must become the Same as himself” (Order 328). And lest we forget the less-than-marginal roles which women play in Farmer's and Silverberg's universes (i.e. the goddess Boonta and the toughened survivor Seena)—and as gender critic Alice A. Jardine suggests (86)—herself as well.
Notes
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Although SF scholars are in general agreement that first wave cyberpunk (initiated by William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer) is for all intents over, the 1992 publication of Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi indicates that the second wave may now be preparing to once more reexamine the “religious functions” of humanity and its off-world search for transcendence.
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The British New Wave during this period was mainly composed of a group of writers “who had lost faith in the future” and who believed they were living “in a world growing [ever] more irrational, more absurd” (Clareson, “History” 14); as a reflection of this belief their writing, á la J. G. Ballard's The Crystal World (1966), consistently reflected “a general sense of defeat [and] a wish to turn away from … hard realities” (Lundwall 233).
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De Bolt and Pfeiffer refer to Farmer's series of John Carmody stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which, besides the novella version of “The Night of Light” (1957), include “Attitudes” (1953), “Father” (1955), “A Few Miles” (1960), and “Prometheus” (1961). These stories were subsequently collected by Jim Baen and published by Tor Books in 1981 under the title Father to the Stars.
Works Cited
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———. Robert Silverberg. Starmont Reader's Guide 18. Mercer Island: Starmont, 1983.
———. “Toward a History of Science Fiction.” In Tymn 3-18.
De Bolt, Joe and John R. Pfeiffer. “The Modern Period: 1938–1980.” Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction. Ed. Neil Barron, 2nd ed. New York: Bowker, 1981.
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Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22-27.
———. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon-Random House, 1972.
———. The Order of Things. World of Man Series, 1971. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1973.
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Kurth, James. “The Post-Modern State: Is America a Nation?” Current 348 (December 1992): 26-33.
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Merril, Judith. “Books.” Fantasy & Science Fiction, 32 (May 1967): 43-48.
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Voller, Jack G. “Neuromanticism: Cyperspace and the Sublime.” Extrapolation 34 (Spring 1993): 18-29.
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