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A
Space of Her Own: Pamela Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe"
Mary
E. Papke
Pamela Zoline exploded onto the science fiction scene in 1967 with
the publication of "The Heat Death of the Universe" in
New Worlds, a well-known science fiction magazine then under the
editorship of Michael Moorcock. An American living in London, Zoline
was a twenty-six-year-old student interested in radical art and
agit-prop who quickly became a part of Moorcock's Notting Hill artist
circle. Moorcock had just then taken over the financially-strapped
magazine and had rallied a group of distinguished writers and critics
to help him win support from the prestigious Arts Council to help
finance publication. Along with many other artists, Zoline contributed
illustrations for this very new New Worlds, reborn as a
venue for highly experimental extrapolative fiction that decidedly
pushed the envelope on science fiction expectations.
"Heat Death" was the first story Zoline had written since
high school and appeared in the same month that one of her paintings
was exhibited in the Tate Gallery.1
While she would go on to write only a few more new-wave science
fiction stories, published in The New SF, Likely Stories,
and Interzone, all her works are noteworthy for their refusal
of straightforward realistic narratives; and in "Sheep"
(1981) she ingeniously deconstructs particular Western cultural
genres—the pastoral, the spy story, the western, and science
fiction itself—exposing, as it were, the Wizard behind the
curtain putting on a show to keep the audience entranced and docile.
Her works are highly experimental in form and content, intensely
provocative, and deeply felt. Moorcock himself said that upon first
reading "Heat Death" it struck him so forcibly that it
made him cry.2 In the twenty
years following its first appearance, "Heat Death" was
reprinted in at least nine science fiction anthologies.3
However, because of her limited output of fiction, Zoline remains
relatively unknown and underappreciated by both general readers
and literary critics.4
"Heat Death" might not at first reading strike the reader
as science fiction at all. It contains no bug-eyed monsters, interplanetary
flights, postapocalyptic worlds, or technological marvels. It focuses
not on outer space as much as it does inner space—notably
that of a woman—and the geography of the mundane—that
of the home and the supermarket—rather than the fantastic
or extraordinary. Like some of the work Kate Wilhelm, Judith Merril,
Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Anne McCaffrey produced around the same
time,5 Zoline's story explores
relational spaces, those shared by mothers and children, husbands
and wives, domestic economy and the public sphere.
The story does so by extrapolating from the everyday reality of
a middle-class American wife and mother a nightmare vision of endless
meaningless routine, demands, and expectations, focusing intently
on issues of gender, the ethics of care, and the promise of the
future. Within this domestic space, "aliens" appear in
the guise of children, the mother-in-law, high and low cultural
figures such as Shakespeare and Tony the Tiger, and even, in the
most disturbing scenes for the female protagonist, the central character
herself.
The majority of women characters in male-authored science fiction
originally served as receptacles for male valor, scientific expertise,
or, literally, for out-of-this-world sex.6
As the essays in this volume argue, women writers early on broke
from this science fiction expectation in which women characters
were merely instrumental, played upon by superior male protagonists
for the pleasure of the readership, the vast majority of it male.7
For these women writers, women characters are active subjects and
not simply objects of lust or passive helpmates, though the extraordinary
dilemmas they face are not always easily resolved or their worlds
redeemed. While the women characters in these works often fail in
their quests, the works draw attention to the writing of science
fiction as a political act. That is, as we will see in Zoline's
story, while the main character cannot alone succeed in saving the
world, Zoline's writing of her plight foregrounds the absolute necessity
of Zoline's readers doing so.
Written shortly after the publication of Betty Friedan's 1963 The
Feminine Mystique, a book quickly recognized as a groundbreaking
feminist text, and novels such as Sue Kaufmann's 1967 The Diary
of a Mad Housewife, Zoline's story was perhaps influenced by
second-wave feminism. First-wave feminism focused on women's suffrage
at the turn of the twentieth century; this new second wave focused
its attention in turn on the social devaluation of women and the
work they do. The issues of sex, gender, race, and class addressed
by the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s were certainly taken
up in several major science fiction novels of that period—Joanna
Russ's Picnic on Paradise (1968) and The Female Man
(1975), Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976),
and, perhaps most famously, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand
of Darkness (1969), to name a few.
At the same time, Zoline's work shows clear affinities with the
avant-grade and frequently confrontational extrapolative fiction
appearing at the time, of which J.G. Ballard's "The Assassination
of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race"
is the most infamous example. Not surprisingly, in view of her attitude
toward literary genres, Zoline herself considers the strict boundaries
between types and subtypes of fiction as much more fluid than do
most critics, and she suggests that much art and literature is more
productively viewed as "cohort-based"; she says, "in
my case, the fact that I was lucky enough to run with a bad crowd
in London including Tom Disch, John Clute, Mike Moorcock, John Sladek,
Jimmy Ballard, etc. certainly gave a certain neighborhood for my
stories."8 Further,
she happily acknowledges being influenced by and owing debts to
"a very big library of writers, among whom are Nabokov, DeLillo,
Pynchon, Disch, Ed Abbey, Crowley, Clute, Wallace Stegner, Gary
Snyder, E.O. Wilson, John LeCarre, Robert Lowell, Louise Erdrich,"
and the reader can see those multiple influences mirrored in her
venues of publication.9
Pamela
Zoline
Besides "Heat Death," Zoline wrote four other stories
between 1967 and 1985, all available in the collection entitled
The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories published
by McPherson and Company in 1988. The cover illustration is by Zoline
as is that of the 1988 British edition entitled Busy About the
Tree of Life published by The Women's Press. In addition, she
wrote and illustrated a children's book, Annika and the Wolves,
published by Coffee House Press in 1985, a tale that bears striking
commonalities with Angela Carter's reimagined fairy tales.
Zoline lived in the UK for eighteen years, mostly in London; there,
she says, "my work consisted of writing, painting, constructing
some installations, activism and practical politics as part of the
group founding the first Arts Labs, studying art at the Slade School,
studying philosophy, also at University College, London, where its
founder Jeremy Bentham holds court, his body preserved and stuffed
and sitting in a glass cage in the main rotunda."10
Zoline has lived in Telluride, Colorado, for the last three decades
where she continues her work as a social activist/artist, most recently
helping to write scripts for the MuddButt children's theatre and
with others the opera libretti for Harry Houdini and the False
and True Occult and Decreation: An Opera in 3 Parts: The
Forbidden Experiment. She is currently working on a novel "set
one hundred years in the future in the Four Corners region on a
planet much like our own. . . . It will be heavily illustrated with
drawings, photos, charts and maps. Jeremy Bentham is featured, as
are the local rivers and mountains, and there is a focus on opera,
on bees, on fountains, on tribes, and much more."11
Like the artist Joseph Beuys, Zoline believes art to be "a
radicalizing modality" that if "properly deployed"
is "the pivot point for major progressive change."12
"As to my agenda," she writes, "I believe that we
bonny clever humans have outsmarted ourselves into a massive downward
spiral, into the Age of Drastic Simplification as to the loss of
species and of human languages and cultures, and that this means
that we're living in a burning building, and that our works and
actions have to do with how to survive, how to sustain, what to
save, how to start building in the ruins."13
For her, "art as action, huge, subtle, the irresistible seed,"14
remains an enclave wherein or a venue through which one might envision
this world, our home, as something other than a vale of tears."
"Heat Death
of the Universe" and Science Fiction
Zoline's fiction, notably "Heat Death," can be found in
several science fiction anthologies such as Decade The 1960s
alongside pieces by Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss,
Roger Zelazny, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Hers is often the only work
included by a woman writer.15
Her second story, "The Holland of the Mind," after first
publication in a science fiction venue, was reprinted in Strangeness,
sharing space with works by Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, Graham
Greene, Thomas Mann, and Jorge Luis Borges.16
While stories by these authors vary greatly in terms of aesthetic
agendas, they consistently seek to defamiliarize what is accepted
as the real and to make us question the most common assumptions
we have about human affiliations and desires. Attacking "middlebrow
well-made meretricious" high art, "those dreary bedroom/boardroom
dramas," as useless, Zoline insists that "whatever the
corpse of the Great Tradition (sic) is doing to our culturescape,
it's not useful, as the real, messy, whirling world is under closer
analysis and more profound exploration in the best of the Science
Fiction, Speculative, Experimental, Extrapolative etc. etc. fictions."17
Michael Moorcock relates "Heat Death" to the other works
in his Best SF Stories from New Worlds 3 through the common
link of mythology. While some stories in the collection are built
upon the heroic myths of Western culture or the human need for myth-making,
Zoline's work illustrates for him a striking connection between
"the modern myths of science (entropy, etc.) as they are understood
by the layman [sic] with that great myth figure of modern fiction,
the Victimized Domestic Woman."18
The story marries science to fiction, all for the purpose of detailing
one day in the life of Sarah Boyle and her mental disintegration.
It effects this marriage through the inclusion of scientific explanations
but also in its presentation of all information through a series
of axioms, hypotheses, definitions, narrative fragments and summaries
that instantiate the scientific principles inserted into the story.
The story thus literally embodies a new form of science fiction,
one that in both form and content questions relentlessly the truth
of science and the blandishments of fiction.
Not surprisingly, many conservative critics of science fiction dismiss
such new wave writing for what they see as its too facile, manipulative
but inconsequential gestures toward science and, so, bracket it
off as not science fiction. David Ketterer, for instance, in his
New Worlds for Old, insists that like the work of J.G.
Ballard, Zoline's story merely borrows "a science-fictional
conception only for its metaphoric appropriateness." While
her description of one woman's ennui in relation to universal entropy
is perhaps "apocalyptic in a psychedelic or surrealist sense,"
he argues, "because the reality is grounded in a housewife
and her kitchen and because of the lack of plausible scientific
rationale connecting the end of the material universe with her state,
Zoline's piece cannot legitimately be classified as science fiction."19
Ketterer's reading suggests why many women writers have been denied
admission to the science fiction camp: woman's work simply doesn't
merit attention, exactly the sort of devaluation that Friedan, Lisa
Yaszek, Justine Larbalestier and other feminists have argued against
so vociferously. Of particular importance here is Lisa Yaszek's
discussion of Alice Eleanor Jones's "Created He Them"
and the 1940s/1950s development of housewife heroine science fiction.
As Moorcock's remarks above suggest, Zoline's story clearly fits
within this sub-genre and thus extends its life-line into another
decade. Further, as becomes quickly apparent in comparing Jones's
and Zoline's stories, Zoline's work is more overtly committed to
radical political activism, and in that sense underlines the powerful
way an author's times are reflected in her work. One clear connection
between Jones and Zoline is that until very recently housewife heroine
science fiction did not garner much critical respect. As Yaszek
points out in her essay, even some early feminist critics such as
Pamela Sargeant at first seemed to dismiss housewife heroine science
fiction as a negative development in the genre. Sargeant would,
however, include Zoline's story in her 1978 The New Women of
Wonder: Recent Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women,
perhaps privileging its experimental nature over popular fiction
like Jones's story. That the issues housewife heroine science fiction
raised were important can perhaps best be illustrated by the appearance
of Ira Levin's reactionary Stepford Wives in 1972. While
the housewives in all these science fiction works are extremely
limited in agency, they are nevertheless threatening. These stories'
power lies precisely in their threat of disturbing the status quo
of male-female relations and the future of the worlds science fiction
investigates. Indeed, Zoline's story subtly insists through its
meticulous elaboration of the relation between Sarah Boyle's increasing
angst and her reflections on entropy that there is deep social value
in defamiliarizing the "real" world of a woman who seems
to have it made. Not to acknowledge this is to have a very skewed
worldview, for, as Brian Aldiss points out, "the center of
the galaxy lies in Sarah Boyle's kitchen."20
The debate about whether or not Zoline's story is science fiction
is particularly puzzling in that "Heat Death" is imbued
throughout with science fiction thinking. As Brooks Landon defines
this term in his Science Fiction after 1900, science fiction
thinking is not simply genre specific but, instead, is "a set
of attitudes and expectations about the future," including
particular protocols of both writing and reading, that now permeates
and at times determines modern consciousness. "Most broadly,"
he writes, "science fiction thinking is a sense of common enterprise
that underlies the discussion of science fiction, a belief that
better thinking is a desirable goal for humanity."21
Whether we consciously realize it or not, science fiction itself
fosters one type of epistemology or way of knowing; and as Zoline's
story illustrates, it is a most curious mix of rationalism and humanism,
the objective and the subjective, the here and the now and the future.
In "Heat Death," Sarah Boyle's life is presented as if
it were a science experiment focusing on what she knows and what
that knowledge means to her, thus explicitly focusing both on ontology,
or ways of being, and implicitly on epistemology, ways of knowing.
As Brooks Landon points out, "Heat Death" thus "has
one foot in the camp of 'hard' SF with its traditional interest
in physics, astronomy, and chemistry, and the other foot in the
camp of 'soft' SF with its traditional interest in psychology, sociology,
and anthropology."22
More importantly, science fiction itself demands "new ways
of seeing from its readers."23
Readers do not simply extract a moral from a science fiction text
but must work at a constant decoding of each paragraph, phrase,
and even each word to construct and thus come to understand the
text's world and what it might mean to this world. Zoline's experimental
style and subject thus require an experimental way of reading, one
comfortable with observation, hypothesis, indeterminacy, and ethical
adjudication, demands, that is, an ability to speculate not only
about "what has not yet happened" but about what "will
not happen and events that might happen" as well.24
Writing outside the American market and within the radical British
art scene, Zoline extrapolates in her work the dark view of a post-Enlightenment
rejection of the myth of inevitable social and technological progress.
Scientific knowledge is not always a comforter, as Sarah Boyle discovers;
the quest for knowledge of the future, the preeminent subject of
science fiction, can lead as easily to quotidian despair as to extraordinary
triumph. In Zoline's work, Landon asserts, "science and technology
enter SF through the back door, stripped of wonder, submerged in
the details of mundane life, offering neither pleasure nor horror."25
No wonder few science fiction traditionalists, like Ketterer, could
recognize Zoline's way of thinking for what it is—the cutting
edge of a very different apocalyptic vision.
This is not to say that Ketterer's critique hides a simplistic sexist
agenda of exclusion; as Ketterer's extended praise of Ursula LeGuin's
The Left Hand of Darkness intimates, as well as his overall
rejection of virtually all New Wave writers (most of whom were male),
it is the style of writing—how one presents the science fiction
narrative—that may be the major problem. LeGuin's work, however
radical in its intent, is still easily recognizable as science fiction.
That is, there is a clearly sequential story, extraterrestrial worlds
and people, the usual elements brilliantly manipulated to forward
a feminist/humanist message. Zoline's story, on the other hand,
simply refuses to conform to or to satisfy those expectations.
"Heat
Death" and Postmodernism
While women in kitchens were not at first favored in science fiction,
the main reason conservative science fiction aficionados such as
Ketterer find new-wave writing off-putting is its highly experimental
nature. Zoline's story is roughly chronological, interrupted at
times by scientific inserts, the story's action confined to a home
and a supermarket, but the narrative is also fragmented, literally
so on the page, and the "story" is comprised of a puzzling
mixture of scientific discourse, domestic fiction, and direct address
to the reader; in short, it refuses easy interpretation. It is an
early taste of what became known as postmodern writing, the roots
of which, as Ketterer and many others point out, lie in the surreal
assaults of Alfred Jarry and Marcel Duchamp, the modernist mind
journeys of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, the effect of stream-of-consciousness
and magic realism on fiction, as well as the acceleration of world
disasters since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including,
most notably, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and simultaneously,
for many, the end of believing in innocence, in the democratic process,
and in a positive future. At the same time, this period saw the
rise of suburbia and the mega-cities, intense commercialization
touching every aspect of a person's life, and the mass production
of goods and a new mass society taught to want those goods.
Postmodern writing focuses in particular on the failure of grand
narratives, stories the majority in a particular place or time believe
or buy into such as the utopian promise of Marxism or the Christian
originary tale of the Garden of Eden, stories that sustain and console
through their ostensible explanation of why we are here and what
we should do. Even though these stories have failed, postmodernists
argue, many people still crave some sort of consoling fictions,
since post-World War II culture has become both atomized and, in
strange ways, hyper-individualized. That is, the rise of Western
mass culture depends upon a certain conformity of desires with the
products (including the human) of the moment; as people become lost
in the mass, they also become more and more alienated from others
as they move to protect home turfs and to satisfy just those desires
that they are programmed to have.
Postmodern theory also posits that as the cityscapes take over the
natural world and the remaining natural sites become centers of
tourism, people are pressed into the position of voyeurs instead
of actors, passive spectators rather than active agents, unable
to distinguish the simulacra of the real from the real (watch any
episode of "reality" TV to experience vicariously one's
own desires performed by others). And while everyone is engaged
in this endless process of buying and consuming, of attending to
appearances above all else, the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
It is exceedingly strange that traditionalists dismiss experimental
writing as incapable of sustaining or transforming science fiction's
multiple agendas in productive ways, for science fiction's capacity
for embracing the newly imagined and socially relevant is unparalleled.
Feminist and left criticism, in turn, often fault science fiction
for not living up to its own potential, that of critiquing and challenging
the status quo. Zoline's story, however, does precisely that. In
Zoline's work, housewife heroine science fiction is both centered
and then fragmented, instantly recognized and then estranged, radicalized,
politicized, and made deadly serious play. As Brooks Landon argues
of "Heat Death," "despite its ostensibly microcosmic
view of Sarah's life, her thinking tends ever toward the macrocosmic,
particularly as she repeatedly considers her children not in sentimental
terms but in terms of the species implications of their bodies and
manners."26 Zoline,
then, challenges the greatest status quo of all, our belief in our
species superiority and future.
The marriage of postmodernism and science fiction should, then,
be cause for cautious rejoicing. Postmodernism refuses passive voyeurism
and so transgresses against readerly expectations, often relying
on eccentric juxtapositions, the blurring of fact and fiction, the
inclusion of pornography, even, in some works, plagiarism of other
well-known texts to shock the reader awake and to make the reader
work, to engage passionately with the text. While many critics of
all stripes fault postmodernism for its supposedly nihilist stance
or apolitical making of art for art's sake, the most provocative
postmodernist writers, very often women, promote social activism
even in the face of despair. As decades of science fiction writing
illustrates, the future is ours to make—or not. Zoline's story
demonstrates how very hard it is for those living now to imagine
a future at all.
"Heat
Death of the Universe"
Zoline's
story, presented in fifty-four separate entries, begins with a definition
of ontology—"That branch of metaphysics which concerns
itself with the problems of the nature of existence or being"—calling
attention to what constitutes experience and who is privileged enough
to engage in the quest for knowledge. The second entry sets the
scene for the 'experiment' of our observing Sarah Boyle. This experiment
concerns her particular "problems of the nature of existence
or being," its setting an idyllic landscape in which there
is both continual birth and growth (babies' fingernails) and death
and decay (the eroding mountains, rotting fruit, the hair of the
dead). There is still time for both even as time is running out.
The story reads something like a lab report, chronologically linear,
highly descriptive, objective. The ostensible subject is the well-educated,
financially-secure, privileged Sarah Boyle, mother and wife, everywoman
in a mass society. She is troubled: her nose is too large; her appearance
doesn't fit the norm as she perceives it or has been taught to perceive.
The scope then narrows to the particular place and time in which
she exists: California, Alameda, La Florida Street, her house, breakfast
time.
This is her closed system in which she continually expends energy,
at the moment reluctantly serving her children sugary cereal that
will, she believes, rot their teeth, just as mothers across America
do in endless replication. She is called upon to adjudicate which
of her children will own the secret gift inside the cereal box,
who will win the Shakespeare mask on the back. High culture here
meets low culture: Shakespeare and Tony the Tiger are equalized
figures of everyday consumption, both rendered mundane by their
mechanical reproduction. Sarah withholds having to decide until
the box is emptied, and the secret gift in the (Pandora's) box of
cereal remains concealed. The aggressive oversell of the cereal
company's special offers makes Sarah wonder if the contents are
poisonous, if she is being complicit in the slow murder of her children,
but entry nine assures us that she is really a happy and proud mother,
dismissing the concerns of entries four and eight as momentary aberrations
of thought. Entry ten puts Sarah on track again, planning a birthday
party that afternoon, a celebration of birth and growing.
Entry eleven clearly positions the reader as participant in this
experiment; "we" the readers are directly addressed by
the unknown narrator (the primary investigator? a teacher?) and
introduced to the kitchen, the central space of Sarah's closed system.
The narrator up to this point seemed to be simply the omniscient
"know-it-all" voice typical of much fiction, giving us
access to all pertinent facts, even to the protagonist's thoughts.
The narrator in this entry pointedly reflects Zoline's commitment
to agit-prop activism. That is , "we" the readers are
presented not only with a detailed description of a particular situation
but are now positioned within the story itself and then lectured
at by the narrator. We are told by this "professor" that
as yet we all live in a larger closed system—"this shrunk
and communication-ravaged world"—and that there is little
chance for us or Sarah to escape "the metastasis of Western
Culture," the phrase recalling Sarah's fears about the cereal's
carcinogenic potential now transmogrified to the level of overall
social dis-ease caused by a cancer that as it is transmitted throughout
a body or system ravages and kills. The narrator's inclusion of
such analysis (propaganda) is meant to agitate us. We are both invited
to be spectators of Sarah's particular suffering and made to realize
our own suffering, or passive acceptance, of this dying world, our
complicity, then, in this "metastasis of Western Culture."
Zoline thus destabilizes our comfortable position as perhaps sympathetic
but nevertheless distanced readers. As the narrator will continue
to insist through inclusion of readers through the use of "we"
or (the supposedly universal) "one," even as we are privileged
enough to be voyeurs into Sarah's inner space, we are each, just
as she is, also an agent in that world. Fittingly, we now see, the
narrator is an agent provocateur. And, as the story has suggested
from the first, we are far from knowing it all. Our future depends
on our decoding the story's address to us and its message—that
the "aliens" destroying this world are us.
Surrounded by grime and the detritus of the everyday (bobby pins,
a doll's eye, dust, a dog's hair), Sarah cannot be faulted, the
narrator tells us, for imagining that all the world simply replicates
her supposedly ideal setting; everywhere for her is the same, but
it is grotesque. Mother Nature herself has been forcibly and obscenely
transformed into "a land Cunt Pink and Avocado Green, brassiered
and girdled by monstrous complexities of Super Highways." It
is at this point in the experiment that the reader is offered its
guiding principle and Sarah's principal obsession—the theory
of the heat death of the universe.
As entries thirteen and nineteen inform us, the universe is a closed
system subject to the second law of thermodynamics. As the entropy
or disorder of particles (a doll's eye, a dog's hair) increases,
we will approach the end of the universe as we know it as its energy
is used up and time "unwinds." The juxtaposition of these
entries to those describing Sarah's work in her house foregrounds
the similarity between the two closed systems. Sarah's work is never
done, and while she maintains the fiction of the possibility of
homeostasis, of maintaining some sense of constancy, she is overwhelmed
by the ever-increasing chaos of her home space. She attempts to
use language and numbers to control disorder, carefully annotating,
naming, or counting the things that constitute her world, but the
arbitrariness of language's and enumeration's relation to real objects
renders her attempts at ordering futile.
Such ordering is always provisional, as entry fifteen states, an
experiment itself having little relation to lived experience (what
does it mean, after all, to know that you have 819 moveable objects
in your living room?). Indeed, such ordering actions, like encyclopedias
and dictionaries, serve only to give a false sense of control. They
are an unreal "simulacra of a complete listing and ordering."
While Sarah is "transfixed" by ordering texts such as
reference books and children's ABCs, concrete meanings, indisputable
facts, ultimate order always remain beyond her reach (the hand cream
is labeled CAT).
Sarah finds similar reassurance in the Baba, a toy that depends
upon identical reproduction except for matters of size, all the
various dolls fitting one into the other in a neat, harmonious closed
system. Of course, it bears no resemblance to Sarah's own reproduction—she
cannot, for example, remember, or count, how many children she has—and
her system most assuredly does not offer the promise of infinite
reproduction if one just had a large enough Baba or womb to contain
all. Infinite reproduction of the same would, in any case, lead
one to endless self-reflection, what literary theorists call the
mise-en-abyme, a fall into sameness with no possibility of escape
or change; and crawling back into the womb is not an option either.
Sarah is, instead, living on the edge of the abyss, though she hasn't
yet accepted this.
Impotent in her attempts at ordering chaos, Sarah tries to imagine
space as freed from sameness, sometimes to positive and sometimes
to negative effects. She invokes surrealist and dadaist spectacles
of riot and suffocating fecundity: New York will melt like a Dali
watch, her house will go wild, its dust recognized as aesthetic
perfection, and she will be freed of work, of pets, and of children.
However, while these transgressive visions offer her momentary mental
respite, time, as entry two reminded us, is running out (or, perhaps,
is already broken): the sand in the egg timer falls, only some of
the four clocks tick away, her life is measured and calibrated to
the last degree of heat/energy (entry twenty-eight). A wrinkle in
time—imagining an unclosed system—gives way to an all
too real wrinkle on Sarah's face. As she gazes into the mirror at
her own simulacra, her future is foreseeable in her present, and
though she is, entry thirty insists again, a proud and happy wife
and mother, chaos and death are prefigured in the increasing chaos
around/on/in her.
By entry thirty-five, Sarah is being described as fragmenting herself
into mind-body dualities. Already in entry thirty-three, agency
was seeping out of her as she is constructed by language instead
of constructing it ("Sarah muses or is mused"). Something,
she feels, is being done to her by inexplicable unnameable forces,
so she continually acts out in frenzied animation trying to hold
off the state of becoming inanimate (those "terrible glass
eyes"; her dead mother, her Baba in whom she was once safely
enclosed).
The larger landscape serves only to intensify her disquietude. The
sky is bleached of color; the blue of her contact lenses, her tranquilizers,
the swimming pools of California have an acidic and synthetic tint
bearing no relation to anything in nature as it once existed. The
supermarket offers too many choices of the same thing in different
sizes, again recalling the Baba, about which products Sarah cannot
decide and so must buy (into) everything. In entry thirty-eight,
her mother-in-law reinvokes the constant menace of a cancer metastasizing
wildly, chaos vitiating the system, any system. Perhaps Sarah cannot
recall how many children she has since she is obsessed with apocalyptic
visions of world destruction, both natural and man-made; she cannot
bear, that is, to remember how many children she has as they might
be fated to die in a worldwide catastrophe. Art, she imagines, in
entry forty-four, might offer salvation from such cruel absurdities,
but she has no time for it, and nothing, in any case, will last
forever. Even the turtle, symbol of placid longevity, will soon
die.
The birthday party is both a momentary stay against Sarah's obsession
and another scene of increasing chaos. The future promise it celebrates—another
year, a cake in the shape of a rocket, an escape to an unclosed
system—is undermined by the animality and unnaturalness of
the children. One child, refusing to eat the food of the others,
chokes on the cereal's surprise gift, a little green plastic snake,
that once coughed up becomes the prize all the children want. The
child's seemingly individual act of refusal is thus readily transformed
into and coopted back into mass conformity and desire. Further,
the snake—a debased mechanical reproduction of the natural—recalls
Western culture's originary grand narrative, that of the Garden
of Eden and Eve's quest for the knowledge of good and evil. The
promise of experiencing knowledge, reinvoking the need to understand
the reason for one's existence that opens this experiment/story,
is most tempting, most seductive, but as we see throughout, for
Sarah knowledge is also a very dangerous thing.
Sarah knows from the outset that home life, like the birthday party,
is only a temporary stay against confusion and chaos and in fact
breeds even more chaos and fragmentation. Tellingly, Zoline's own
illustration for the first appearance in print of the story emphasizes
this: it was a montage consisting of pieces of Duchamp's Mona Lisa,
an ad for a bathroom cleaner, and maps of California.27
Every momentary attempt at order is undone by visions of profound
dis-ease. She bathes and puts to bed her children; she also imagines
eating them. She dreams of cleaning and ordering the entire universe
but breaks down when she finds the turtle's dead body, a pathetic
reminder that death will come, that no amount of cleaning will wash
away that eventuality. She has cried before, as entry fifty-three
informs us; she will cry again and again and again. And there is
no one to respond to her cry for "Help, help, help, help, help."
Her husband is strangely absent, her mother is dead, her mother-in-law
a surreal intrusion into her space, her children "debauched
midgets." Although grievously fatigued, in a last surge of
energy before entropy is reached, she destroys the kitchen, hurling
her eggs (and the promise of future life) into space only to watch
them fall. An end to reproduction, an end to sameness, the sands
have run out. She comes full circle, then, madly burdened with the
problems of the nature of existence and being.
What, finally, does the experiment of "Heat Death" achieve?
To mimic Zoline's countdown or piling-up of facts:
1. Her story is not simply a decadent exercise in despair or madness
but has meaning beyond the personal world of Sarah Boyle, the object
of observation;
2. It suggests that perhaps this world is not, despite all the material
evidence available, a closed system or, at least, that there might
exist enclaves where life might be experienced without repeated
surrender to despair;
3. Art, even a science fiction short story, may be a means of salvation,
although language is always tricky, easily ignored or misread, far
from transparent;
4. The revolt against entropy must begin in the smallest of closed
systems—your own body, the home, your family, must be an opening
out of that closed system;
5. Women, slandered in Western culture's originary grand narrative
of Eden, have always been set up for a fall, fortunate or otherwise,
and know only too well what is good and what is evil;
6. Perhaps a woman will lead humanity (again) into a new world and
new narratives, not necessarily grand but nevertheless life-sustaining
ones. Zoline does so in this and her other short stories, particularly
in her 1985 "Instructions for Exiting this Building in Case
of Fire," in which the Mothers of a later time than Sarah Boyle's
act in shockingly outrageous ways in their attempt to save this
world from man-made destruction. Even the very depressing conclusion
of Sarah Boyle's story rejects annihilation: the eggs fall, but
they do not break; that closure is denied or, at least, postponed.
As Brian Aldiss writes, "the fatal error of much science fiction
has been to subscribe to an optimism based on the idea that revolution,
or a new gimmick, or a bunch of strong men, or an invasion of aliens,
or the conquest of other planets, or the annihilation of half the
world—in short, pretty nearly anything but the facing up to
the integral and irredeemable nature of mankind—can bring
about utopian situations. It is the old error of the externalization
of evil." He continues by stating decisively that "'Heat
Death makes no such error."28
Zoline's story is, in her own words, "an attempt to 'make sense'
of things, of general data, by organizing the private to the public,
the public to the private, by making the analogies between entropy
and personal chaos, the end of the universe and our own ageing and
death." She captures the unreal real world as she experiences
it; the experimental form of her story, what she describes "as
an arrow, an energy flow,"29
challenges readers to be more than passive consumers of yet another
useless fiction. We have to put the pieces together, to study the
data, and, unlike Sarah, to make careful ethical adjudications about
what matters, what stories to create and consume.
Rose Flores Harris writes of Zoline's stories that "the alienation
of Zoline's characters seems to be offset by their intelligence
and desire to survive in a world not of their creation, which they
do not understand yet struggle to cope with. This common dilemma
of human beings of all eras and the tenacious frailty of the author's
heroes unite the reader sympathetically with them and with their
creator."30 Thomas
M. Disch, in turn, extols "Heat Death" as "the most
technically accomplished and humane mosaic fiction produced by the
New Wave." It is, he says, most importantly a piece written
not simply for personal fame and glory but "for an Other,"31
for you, for me, for another mode of being with each other.
Notes
1. There is very little material available on
Zoline. I have gleaned biographical facts from the following sources:
Brian W. Aldiss' "Foreword" to "The Heat Death of
the Universe" in The Mirror of Infinity: A Critics' Anthology
of Science Fiction, ed. by Robert Silverberg New York: Harper
& Row, 1973, 267-273; "P. A. Zoline . . ." in England
Swings SF, ed. by Judith Merril Garden City, NY: Doubleday
& Company, Inc., 1968, 329-330; and "Michael Moorcock"
in the same volume, 343-349. The last source also gives an interesting
account of Moorcock's takeover of New Worlds and Zoline's
involvement with the magazine. I have also been in correspondence
with Zoline.
2. See Michael Moorcock's "Introduction"
in his Best SF Stories from New Worlds 3 New York: Berkley
Publishing Corporation, 1968, 7.
3. "The Heat Death of the Universe"
was reprinted in England Swings SF (1968), ed. by Judith
Merril; Best SF Stories from New Worlds 3 (1968), ed. by
Michael Moorcock; Decade The 1960s (1976), ed. by Brian
W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison; The Mirror of Infinity (1970),
ed. by Robert Silverberg; Voyages: Scenarios for a Ship Called
Earth (1971), ed. by Rob Sauer; The New Women of Wonder
(1978), ed. by Pamela Sargeant; The Road to Science Fiction
#4 (1982), ed. by James E. Gunn; New Worlds: An Anthology
(1983), ed. by Michael Moorcock; and The Heat Death of the Universe
and Other Stories (1988). The best source for print bibliography
information on Zoline's stories is <http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/p1.cgi?Pamela_Zoline>.
See also <http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pw.cgi?528853> for
"Heat Death" in particular, as well as <http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/zoline
>and Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections
by William Contento Boston: G.K. Hall, 1978, 257.
4. Besides the works cited in this essay, see
also my "What Do Women Want?" Context: A Forum for
Literary Arts and Culture 11 (Fall 2002): 12-13.
5. See, for instance, Merril's "That Only
a Mother" (1948), Zimmer Bradley's "The Wind People"
(1958) and McCaffrey's "The Ship Who Sang" (1961).
6. See Eric S. Rabkin's "Science Fiction
Women Before Liberation" and Scott Sanders' "Woman As
Nature in Science Fiction" in Marleen S. Barr's Future
Females: A Critical Anthology Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling
Green State University Popular Press, 1981, 9-25 and 42-59 for examples
of vacuous women characters in early science fiction.
7. See Lisa Yaszek's essay on Alice Eleanor Jones's
story in this volume for an overview of housewife heroine science
fiction as well as Justine Larbalestier's The Battle of the
Sexes in Science Fiction Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan
University Press, 2002 for a detailed account of "the evolving
relationship between men and women in sf" (1).
8. Email correspondence with Pamela Zoline, 24
March 2004.
9. Email correspondence with Pamela Zoline, 24
March 2004.
10. Email correspondence with Pamela Zoline,
24 March 2004.
11. Email correspondence with Pamela Zoline,
24 March 2004.
12. See the website at <http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/zoline/
zoline_bio.html>.
13. Email correspondence with Pamela Zoline,
24 March 2004.
14. See the website at <http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classic_archive/zoline/zoline_bio.html>.
15. See, for example, Brian W. Aldiss and Harry
Harrison, eds., Decade The 1960s London: Macmillan London
Limited, 1977; Robert Silverberg, ed., The Mirror of Infinity:
A Critics' Anthology of Science Fiction, cited above; and Michael
Moorcock, ed., Best SF Stories from New Worlds 3, cited
above.
16. Strangeness: A Collection of Curious
Tales, ed. by Thomas M. Disch and Charles Naylor New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977.
17. Email correspondence with Pamela Zoline,
24 March 2004.
18. "Introduction" to Michael Moorcock,
ed., Best SF Stories from New Worlds 3, cited above.
19. New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination,
Science Fiction, and American Literature Garden City, NY: Anchor
Press, 1974, 187.
20. "Foreword" to "the Heat Death
of the Universe" in Robert Silverberg, ed., The Mirror of Infinity,
cited above, 270.
21. Brooks Landon, Science Fiction after
1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars New York: Twayne Publishers,
1997, 4, 7.
22. Landon, 27.
23. Landon, 7.
24. Landon, 8-9.
25. Landon, 27.
26. Landon, 29.
27. The illustration is described by Brian W.
Aldiss in his "Foreword" to "The Heat Death of the
Universe," cited above, 269.
28. "Foreword," cited above, 267-268.
29. Ibid., 268.
30. "Zoline, Pamela A." in Twentieth-Century
Science-Fiction Writers, ed. by Curtis C. Smith New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1981, 610.
31. "The Astonishing Pamela Zoline,"
in The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories Kingston,
NY: McPherson & Company, 1988, 8.
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