I have been trying to get the ball rolling on a research project I'm committed to. I'll be investigating representation of literacy in science fiction in the archives of the university where I live. Last Saturday I managed to squeeze in an hour before they closed up to talk to the Science Fiction archive librarian, a friend who has helped me a lot with knowing where to start looking! This Saturday, having taken his hints and gotten in my request of things for them to pull ahead of time, I still only managed to squeeze in a little while before they closed, but even so, I managed to look at a few things and read one short story. This truly is archival research, as some of the stories are not available in anthologies--ANY anthologies. Pretty exciting. If there was not already a glut of super-specialized Science Fiction anthologies, both in and out of print, that serve only about 5 science fiction readers and researchers each, I might have dreams of a "literacy in SF" anthology. Oh well. I'll stick to my dreams of a fantasy anthology that would actually work for the class I teach.
This weekend's story is "The Bookshop" by Nelson Boyd (1946), republished in Avon Fantasy Reader in 1951. The interesting thing about these early SF/F short stories is that they are very reminiscent of early Twilight Zone episodes. Maybe because they often became Twilight Zone episodes. Or Star Trek.
"The Bookshop" has that familiar feel about it. The narrator begins the tale trying to complete a novel--his best, he believes--but he is stuck, and feeling the heat. He gradually realizes he is sick--actually physically ill. In his illness, he comes to fixate on a bookshop where a poet friend of his stops suddenly during a bus ride--a bookshop our narrator has never noticed before--very shortly before the poet friend dies suddenly of a heart attack. The narrator is drawn to visit the place when he recovers, and finds a familiar-looking proprietor presiding over a very dark shop containing volumes upon volumes by many of the usual names--Shakespeare and Twain among them--but unusual titles: Shakespeare's Agamemnon, for example. He sees among the books, the work his poet friend told him he was writing before his death--supposedly, his masterpiece. The bookshop, then, contains the works that authors were unable to finish (or even begin) in their lifetimes, including the novel of our narrator, in all of its perfection.
The bookshop, then, is an allegory for heaven, suggesting a comparison to E. M. Forster's "The Celestial Omnibus," in which "heaven" is a literary creation--filled with the characters from literature as early as Homer and continuing through the 19th century with Dickens's Mrs. Gamp and Fielding's Tom Jones. The idea, I argue, is that literary enjoyment (as opposed to dispassionate "appreciation" of literary texts) transports one to heaven--though in retrospect, Forster's allegory suggests a disbelief in an actual Heaven in a way that "The Bookshop" does not. In "The Bookshop," one can not return from "heaven" where one's works exist in their perfection (much like Plato's realm of Forms). In "The Celestial Omnibus," one is transported back and forth between "heaven" and "the real world" by the authors themselves, who pilot the omnibuses. (Dante is one of the drivers, and his horses are black, grey, and white--the grey being the finest.) The idea of perfection isn't important for Forster, who seems to focus more on how the literary works act upon or are received by the reader rather than the writer's quest for perfection (which is largely irrelevant to the reader once the work has been published).
Some of the important ideas in "The Bookshop" from the perspective of literacy theory are some tidbits about the permanence of writing, curiously undermined by the ephemeral nature of the unwritten masterpiece. There is a kind of lonely near-despair that permeates the story, which clearly takes the solitary vision of the "writer writing in isolation" to heart. The idea of "the Story" as it could be or should be rather than the story that "IS" situates the perspective of "The Bookshop" as far removed from the theoretical reader, who doesn't really matter to the writer-as-artist. However much we might wish to read Shakespeare's Agamemnon (a singularly unlikely title), we realize, being left in the cold by the voice of Sarumon, that it (like Hamlet or Macbeth) was clearly not written for us.
