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Didn't find that, but I did find a Heinlein USENET group discussion of another Disch critique, namely:
I have been attempting to read most of the critical responses to sf
ever published, in preparation for writing a history of the American sf
short story, as well as hunting for Heinlein materials.
I ran across this essay by Thomas Disch, which was originally published
in Peter Nicholls' "Science Fiction in Dimension," and now available as
the first entry in Disch's latest collection, "On SF." The piece is
titled "The Embarrassments of Science Fiction." Before you folks begin
distressing over the title, Disch actually has some very interesting
takes on the idea of embarrassment, as well as looking at SF as in some
ways similar to childrens' fiction (a genre he has written for, as did
Heinlein in the juveniles, and a genre I admire).
The piece takes a left turn into a discussion of Heinlein's "Starship
Troopers" -- which (again) gets labeled as fascist, and a source for
Norman Spinrad's "The Iron Dream" (a brilliantly unsettling book, in
which Hitler comes to America and becomes an sf writer...).
But the whole fascist charge isn't what I want to kick around here. I
am getting to the point where I think I need to go find all those
arguments which are in print, and go through and try to understand why
perfectly rational and intelligent people keep making that charge,
rather than simply dismissing them as idiots -- which, in general, they
aren't, as much as I know they're wrong.
I'm actually looking for some rational discourse on the loopy statement
which follows these concerns: 1) leaving aside his interpretations, are
Disch's statements of plot correct? 2) to the degree to which his
statements of plot are correct, to what degree are his interpretations
correct? I'd rather not dismiss them out of hand, simply because I
want to be able to respond effectively to this argument. If we can
keep the category of "the guy's an idiot" out of the conversation, I'd
appreciate it. Disch, by the way, has a number of complimentary
responses to Heinlein scattered throughout the books he's written, so
this is not somebody who's simply bashing Heinlein.
Here's what Disch says about "Starship Troopers":
"What is embarrassing to me about this book is not its politics as such
but rather its naivete, its seeming unawareness of what it is really
about. Leaving politics aside and turning to that great gushing source
of our richest embarrassments, sex, I find 'Starship Troopers' to be,
in this respect as well, a veritable treasury of unconscious
revelations. The hero is a homosexual of a very identifiable breed.
By his own self-caressing descriptions one recognizes the swaggering
leather boy in his most flamboyant form. There is even a
skull-and-crossbones earring in his left ear. On four separate
occasions, when it is hinted in the book that women have sexual
attractions, the only such instances in the book, each time within a
single page the hero picks a gratuitous fistfight with the other
servicemen -- and he always insists what a lark it is. The association
is reflexive and invariable. Sexual arousal leads to fighting. At the
end of the book the hero has become a captain and his father is a
sergeant serving under him. This is possible because his mother died
in the bombing of Buenos Aires by the Bugs, who are the spiritual
doppelgangers of the human warriors. In an earlier captain-sergeant
relation there is a scene intended to be heartwarming, in which two men
make a date to have a boxing match. Twice the hero makes much of the
benefits to be derived from seeing or suffering a lashing. Now all of
this taken together is so transparent as to challenge the possibility
of its being an unconscious revelation. Yet I'm sure that it was, and
that moreover any admirer of the book would insist that it's just my
dirty mind that has sullied a fine and patriotic paean to the military
life.
"So why bring it up at all? For two reasons. The first is that
such sexual confusions make the politics of the book more dangerous by
infusing them with the energies of repressed sexual desires. It may
be that what turns you on is not the life of an infantryman, but his
uniform. A friend of mine has assured me he knows of several
enlistments directly inspired by a reading of 'Starship Troopers.' How
much simpler it would have been for those lads just to go and have
their ears pierced. The second related reason is that it is a central
purpose of art, in conjunction with criticism, to expand the realm of
conscious choice and enlarge the domain of the ego. It does this by
making manifest what was latent, a process that can be resisted, but
not easily reversed. And so even those who dislike what I have had to
say may yet find it useful as a warning of how things appear to other
eyes, and be spared, in consequence, needless embarrassment."
link: http://www.archivum.info/alt.fan.heinlein/2005-10/msg00876.html
I approach Heinlein with the same unease that I get from a lot of Sci-Fi/Pulp writers, ie, so much of his stuff smacks so obviously to me of juvenile wish-fulfillment. It's been hashed over before, but I simply can't get into any book that was written so clearly so that its author could create a world where everybody who held all his opinions were the most valiant, clever, righteous, successful and oversexed people in it. It's the same reason I couldn't get into V for Vendetta; sure, V and [whichever crotchety Heinlein patriarch you like] are incredibly clever and entertaining individuals, but when that's all they are -- a romanticised and facile justification of the author, by fiat -- then they're not going to do much for me.
As for any potential homosexual undertones in his work, I have no comment -- save that it would be a lot more interesting than all this running around, slapping each other's asses and murdering aliens. |
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