Structural Fabulation; An Essay on Fiction of the Future by Robert Scholes (review)

Abstract

Scholes is the most persuasive contemporary American critic in the field of narrative theory. I use the slightly catachretic "persuasive" because narrative theory has never been as important in the American academy as it is in Europe and Latin America, and readers and scholars still often need to be convinced that our social and cultural approaches to fiction can profitably be supplemented by structuralist and semiological models that Scholes presented so well in his 1 974 Structuralism andLiterature (the title is too general, as fiction is the point of reference). Structural Fabulation performs in the area ofnarrative theory what Kinsley Amis's 1960 New Maps ofHell did for narrative content analysis: provide a reasoned defense of the importance of science fiction. Admittedly Schole's task is easier: while some scholars may continue to disdain SF (and that other pariah; detective fiction), as subliterature, the serious critic of fiction in recent decades must give centrality to how concepts like good vs. bad literature, serious vs. popular writing, fiction vs. non-fiction, crafted vs. sloppy structure have been irreparably shattered bymajor innovators. Science fiction can only by the greatest haughtiness be dismissed as trivial. Scholes supports his case by a felicitous combination of the description of the structural principles of SF narrâtology and the discussion of concrete works, organized around the central, intriguing proposition that "... the most appropriate kind of fiction that can be written in the present and the immediate future is fiction that takes places in future time" (p. 17). DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER*