Cordwainer Smith and Robert Heinlein

　　　　　 Let us conclude with a brief contrasting view of one final optimist, Robert A. Heinlein, and one final pessimistic visionary, Cordwainer Smith. I have argued in a recent essay that “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” is actually a critique of Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll” (written 21 years earlier). In Heinlein’s tale, the roads themselves move at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour: the commuters just stand there. The imagery suggests an overarching technology that wholly carries the human burden. Nobody even has to think about where they are going; the road and its workers do it for them. Smith’s rejoinder is reminiscent of Hawthorne in suggesting that any such emphasis on technology, in and of itself, to “bring people home” is a falsification, even a betrayal, of the intractable anxieties of human experience.

　　　　　 In Smith’s tale, the road leading out of town bears the strange name “Alpha Ralpha.” The boulevard begins as a conventional highway but then leaves the ground behind, soaring miles into the sky above a place very near where I now live: the far-future city that Smith called “Meeya Meefla,” a future incarnation of Miami, Florida. In “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” the portion of the highway’s “northern side” that incorporates a moving roadway (392) directly refers to how the roads work in Heinlein’s early classic. The central symbolic icon in both stories is a highway, then; but the very fact that Smith’s is elevated conveys visionary interests at odds with Heinlein’s more “down to earth” view of roadways and the people who build and use them.

　　　　　 In “The Roads Must Roll,” when renegade labor-union activists disrupt service on a road used by long-distance commuters on the U.S. West Coast, the conflict is resolved not by arbitration but by the development of an “infallible” psychological test, which will in future ensure that the rolling road employs only “reliable” workers. In “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” the moving roadway has also stopped functioning, for it has fallen into disrepair. And yet Smith’s pilgrims Paul and Virginia (the names are taken from an 18^th century French novel by a disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bernadin de St Pierre) manage their journey on foot.

　　　　　 Smith’s story is set in a far-future eutopia that he reads as a dystopia. Technology and medical advances have made life’s journey longer but less meaningful. Life-extension is possible for spans up to 1000 years, but people have little to do. The average person is allotted 400 years by the “Instrumentality,” the secret group that governs human beings but denies rights to the “Underpeople,” genetically-altered animals who do all the work while human beings pursue a life of material comfort and pleasure. Alarmed at a precipitous drop in the birthrate and a general sense of malaise in their far-future world, the Instrumentality (in secret consultation with the oppressed but wise Underpeople, although that is clear only from another story) embarks on a project that is not a “dystopia” so much as an “anti-utopia.” The premise of the story is sketched in its fine opening paragraphs:

We were drunk with happiness in those early years. Everybody was, especially the young people. These were the first years of the Rediscovery of Man, when the Instrumentality dug deep in the treasury, reconstructing the old cultures, the old languages, and even the old troubles. The nightmare of perfection had taken our forefathers to the edge of suicide. Now, under the leadership of the Lord Jestocost and the Lady Alice More, the ancient civilizations were rising like great land masses out of the sea of the past. I myself was the first man to put a postage stamp on a letter, after sixteen thousand years. I took Virginia to hear the first piano recital. We watched at the eye-machine when cholera was released in Tasmania, and we saw the Tasmanians dancing in the streets because they did not have to be protected anymore. Everywhere, things became exciting. Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world.

Nationalism, religious contention, infectious diseases──all “the old troubles” are revived. This project is nothing less than “The Rediscovery of Man,” for (as in Hawthorne’s story) Smith’s parable suggests that the “truth” of human experience resides somewhere far outside neighborly consensus and the machinations of the State. The rediscovery of “man” surveyed in the story is really grounded in the two-way pilgrimage of one man to the higher reaches of Alpha Ralpha Boulevard──out and back. The man in question is the story’s narrator, Paul. (This was not only the author’s real first name, but a name used only in this story, which was the only story published during Smith’s lifetime told from the first-person point of view.) Paul must shed his social programming──stop believing what he has always been told──and set out on the road to individual insight. And in this story, the State hovers almost more oppressively over individuals than the fact of mortality, though that, too, threatens the characters. Like Dorothy, Paul is accompanied on his journey; unlike Dorothy, he loses his companions: a hurricane causes them both to fall from the road. (This recreates a scene in “The Roads Must Roll” where some of the commuters are jolted off the road and fall to their deaths.) Yet the highway in “The Roads Must Roll” is just a large-scale conveyor belt for commuters, lined with fast-food restaurants. Heinlein’s road (like Hawthorne’s hell-bound railroad) looks very much like America having a normal day. Smith’s visionary highway (your handouts depict artist Corby Waste’s rendition of Alpha Ralpha Boulevard) is described, by contrast, as a barely visible sky-borne “vapor trail,” inaccessible to all but the boldest of “true men.” The differences in the two writers’ conception of “the road” recall a difference noted by Walter Benjamin between the modern word “street” and the more mystical connotations of the “older term ‘way.’ The way brings with it the terrors of wandering....The person

　　　　　 In his early sf especially, Heinlein offers a straightforward pathway that moves his readers along to a point of resolution. The problem driving the plot of “The Roads Must Roll”──a deputy has sown discontent among the workers entrusted with the maintenance of the moving highway──is decisively solved, as briefly mentioned, by its hero’s decision to monitor more closely in future the “temperament classification test” (109). “[T]here had never been a failure” (108) of that test, though Van Kleek, the troublemaker, has been “falsifying” the results and promoting other “bad apples” (109): “The real failure had been in men. Well, the psychological classification tests must be improved to ensure that the roads employed only conscientious, reliable men” (108). In Heinlein, a test administered by a scientist can infallibly determine good or bad character, while in Smith’s fiction, people are tested at unpredictable moments of crisis and confusion. Their behavior under stress reveals their true nature──including, in “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” the anti-hero Macht’s instinct for cruelty──he is a destroyer of animals──Virginia’s unlovely contempt for Underpeople, and hesitant Paul’s sole (but saving) grace of kindness. Life, not a trained psychologist, administers the test of character in Smith.

　　　　　 His heroes cannot, like Heinlein’s commuters (or Tom Godwin’s pilot in “The Cold Equations” [1954]), ensure that they will arrive safely at their planned destination merely by re-instituting standard protocols after some temporary disruption. They do not travel a street laid down for the sole purpose of taking them home, but thoughtfully, tentatively, pursue an upward “way.” Gaston Bachelard explains the phenomenology of such journeys as Smith’s:

　　　 The voyage into distant worlds of the imaginary ... takes the shape of a voyage into the land of the infinite. In the realm of imagination, every immanence takes on a transcendence. The very law of poetic expression is to go beyond thought....The infinite is the realm in which imagination is affirmed as pure imagination....There the images take flight and are lost....We understand figures by their transfiguration. The word is a prophecy. The imagination is thus a psychological world beyond. (23)

　

Smith’s fictions lead toward “a psychological world beyond.” He dramatizes, as do many sf writers of his day, conflicts of intellect and desire──a matter that John Huntington has addressed at length in Rationalizing Genius, the best book to date on the classic sf short story. But Smith differs from his peers in using fundamentally equivocal symbolic representations that depart from popular tradition in aspiring to a realm that is “beyond thought” in being beyond conventional extrapolative logic.

　　　　　 In contrast to Bunyan, Smith implies that there is no reward for insightful travel, except for the insight itself. Like Hawthorne in “The Celestial Railroad,” he suggests that the problem with the American cults of prosperity and velocity is simply that they neither prevent death nor explain life. In “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” Paul does not at first recognize as bones and skulls the detritus surrounding the oracle (a forbidden weather-computer called the Abba Dingo) that he and Virginia consult in the climax of the story. So self-deluding and self-estranging has been his prior life of State provided comforts that he sees only “a walkway littered with white objects──knobs and rods and imperfectly formed balls about the size of my head” (393).

　　　　　 As an image, the soaring expanse of Alpha Ralpha Boulevard invites what Gaston Bachelard, following Rousseau, calls “reverie” or philosophic daydream:

For one who knows written reverie, who knows how to live, to live fully, as the pen flows, reality is so far away! What one meant to say is so quickly supplanted by what one finds oneself writing, that we realize written language creates its own universe. A universe of sentences arranges itself on the blank page, in an organization of images which follow different laws, but which always observe the great laws of the imaginary....A literary image sometimes suffices to transport us from one universe to another....Language evolves through its images much more than its semantic effort. (26-27)

　

Bachelard suggests that “image” (more than “semantic effort” or a literal pursuit of meaning) is the crucial element in fostering reverie, a term for which a reader versed in sf might wish to substitute the word “speculation.” For if John Bunyan’s allegory aims at instilling faith, Smith’s images invite speculation, holding out a promise of a higher order of consciousness. Travelers seek out Alpha Ralpha Boulevard for where it can take them: fallen into disrepair and broken through at its higher reaches, it is in itself no ideal or goal. But rightly traveled, it offers a possible route to insight.

　

　　　　　 On this note, and with this final contrast between Heinlein and Smith, our own journey concludes today. Thank you so much for your kind attention.

　

WORKS CITED

Alkon, Paul K. Origins of Futuristic Fiction. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1987.

Baum, L. Frank. The Wizard of Oz. CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES. Ed. Michael Patrick Hearn. New York: Schocken, 1983.

Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding and The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. London: Dent (Everyman), 1956.

──. The Pilgrim’s Progress. Ed. Roger Sharrock. 1965. London: Penguin, 1987.

Burroughs, Edgar Rice. The Gods of Mars. 1913. New York: Del Rey, 1979.

──. A Princess of Mars. 1912 (as Under the Moon of Mars). New York, Del Rey, 1979.

──. The Warlord of Mars. 1913-14. New York: Del Rey, 1979.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Dream-Work.” The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent Leitch. New York: Norton, 2000. 919-99.

Franson, J. Karl. “From Vanity Fair to Emerald City: Baum’s Debt to Bunyan.” Children's Literature: Annual of The Modern Language Association Division on Children's Literature and The Children's Literature Association 23 (1995): 91-114.

Heinlein, Robert A. “The Roads Must Roll.” 1940. Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Ed. Robert Silverberg. Vol. 1. New York: Avon, 1971. 74-114.

Hellekson, Karen. The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith. Jefferson, NC: McFarlane, 2001.

Johnson, Barbara A. “Falling into Allegory: The ‘Apology’ to The Pilgrim’s Progress and Bunyan’s Scriptural Methodology.” Bunyan in Our Time. Ed. Robert G. Collmer. Kent: Kent State UP, 1989. 113-137.

Linebarger, Paul M.A. [as Cordwainer Smith]. “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard.” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. June 1961: 5-30.

Tatsumi, Takayuki. “Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic Crossings and Transpacific Crossovers.” PMLA 119.1 (January 2004): 92-102.

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