An Interview with Darko Suvin

Abstract

AL: I would like to locate your ideological position in literary theory. I suppose that you feel close to Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson (even Slavoj Zizek). Moreover, I suppose that you disagree with aesthetic purism (Harold Bloom) or certain relativisms (Stanley Fish and his interpretative communities, poststructuralism and deconstruction). I would like to know your reflections on current literary theory - for instance what about the New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt?DS: I remember a splendid note of Lenin's in his Philosophical Notebooks, where he says that to an intelligent materialist critic an intelligent idealist critic is nearer than a stupid materialist one. So allow me to begin by doubting, not the existence or importance of, but the exclusive nature of ideological kinships. For example, I've followed step by step almost the whole of Jameson's opus, especially since we collaborated in the journal ScienceFiction Studies and other venues, while I have used Eagleton's Theory of Literature as the best introductory survey in my graduate teaching at some point but otherwise not learned too much from him. On the contrary, I've been deeply influenced by and am still writing in the wake of his teacher, my friend Raymond Williams.I loved some of Bloom's early works, say on Romanticism, but when he became an ideologue pure and simple, that stopped. This is the problem with most postmodernists: while declaiming against absolutisms, their supposed relativism is more absolute than that of most modernists. I do make an exception for some so-called deconstructionists such as most Guattari and the later Derrida (after the Marx book). My criterion is simple: what can I learn and build upon from any critic? A little from Greenblatt, almost nothing from Fish, a lot from the materialist feminists, how to charm people by bringing together philosophy and pop culture from Zizek (and of course how to fight against the prohibition against talking about communism).AL: Metamorphoses of Science Fiction is a masterpiece. I think that the first world edition was in 1977. We have lived through a lot of events since then: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Dayton agreement, September 11 attacks, war in Iraq and Afghanistan, financial and economic crises, Wikileaks' revelations, and so on. Also literary theory has changed: the rise of feminism (Nancy Armstrong, Elaine Showalter, etc.), the rise of gay, lesbian and queer theory (Judith Butler), and so forth. What would you change of your book in order to update it? Or perhaps you would prefer not to add or modify anything (I see there is a Croatian version in 2010, maybe that is the answer to my question).DS: It was published in 1979 but written in the preceding ten years. I don't think the book can be updated: it should remain as it is, branded (as Brecht said, like calves on the ranch) by its historical date: the epoch of hopeful High Modernism. What must and therefore can be updated are some of my views - though NOT my values. I dislike renegades. I have done this, as concerns both my epistemological approach and, in particular, some aspects of the Fantasy genre, in numerous articles of the last fifteen years, the longest of which is the Afterword to the Festschrift for me edited by Patrick Parrinder, Learning from Other Worlds (Liverpool University Press 2000). …