The work at hand is Fiedler's original article with the original title. This was first printed in Moebius Trip; the quotations in double parentheses are the comments of the editor, Ed Connor, and one of my own.
Fiedler is a dyed-in-the-wool Freudian, but most of his analyses are valid -- from my viewpoint. There is also much that is Jungian and Reichian in my works, and these aspects are neglected in the article. Freudian, Jungian, Reichian, are terms I don't really like to use to apply to literary works. The term Farmerian should be good enough.
Some of my friends, on reading the Times article, commiserated with me. They did not read it aright. I was pretty happy with it. It's by no means a denigration, though not all laudatory, and it's a hell of a lot more insightful than anything most of the specialized science fiction critics have written about me.
I hope there's no deep significance in the fact that Fiedler wrote this on April Fool's Day.
Notes on Philip Jose Farmer
by Leslie A. Fiedler
Philip Jose Farmer seems now to have reached the point of public recognition, and I for one am feeling a little dismayed. I don't suppose that publication in Esquire alone is enough to make an unfashionable writer a chic one, but it is a real, perhaps irrevocable, step in that direction. I liked it much better when a taste for Farmer's fiction could still seem a private, slightly shameful pleasure, or a perverse affectation on the part of a scholar, an eccentric vice. In those days, he belonged chiefly to readers who did not even suspect that the novel is dead -- to an audience which took him off the racks in drugstores or supermarkets or airports to allay boredom -- and with no sense certainly that they were approaching "literature." Beyond them, there were, of course, a few others, some themselves more highly touted writers of Science Fiction, who knew that he was something very special; but they wanted to keep it a secret.
To be sure, Farmer had won a Hugo Award or two, one for his earliest work and another a decade and a half later. And a third, in 1972, for the novel, To Your Scattered Bodies Go. But he was never the object of cult adoration, like Robert Heinlein, for instance, after the appearance of A Stranger in a Strange Land; nor was he regarded, like Kurt Vonnegut, by his group of the faithful, as a hidden "great writer." To tell the truth, Farmer does not behave much like an aspirant to "mainstream" greatness. With all the modesty of a hack, he inclines to throw even his best conceptions away -- writing hastily, sometimes downright sloppily; so that we are likely to be left with the disconcerting sense that his work, especially when it aspires to novel length, runs out rather than properly finishes. ("To preserve the Freudian tone of this article, I would have said 'peters out.' ")
Nonetheless, he has an imagination capable of being kindled by the irredeemable mystery of the universe and of the soul, and in turn able to kindle the imagination of others -- readers who for a couple of generations have been turning to Science Fiction to keep wonder and ecstasy alive in times apparently uncongenial to those deep psychic experiences. That wonder and ecstasy, wherever it is found in Science Fiction, is ultimately rooted in our sexuality; and the best writers of the genre during its period of flowering after World War II, appear to have realized instinctively that to succeed in their enterprise they had somehow to eroticize machines, gadgets, and the scientific enterprise itself -- or at least to exploit the preexistent erotic implications of the paraphernalia of a technological age.
Philip Farmer was, however, during the 50's, the only major writer of Science Fiction to deal explicitly with sex. He constituted, therefore, a singular exception, an eccentric case -- in a genre whose leading authors created protagonists themselves apparently desexed, though they and their adventures implicitly symbolized or projected sexuality; since they constitute, as it were, the communal dreams of a technological, urban civilization. And that civilization knows in its sleep, what it denies waking, that at this point, it must eroticize the Industrial Revolution or perish; just as it thinks it knows waking, what it denies in its sleep, that sex must be reimagined as machine technology or rejected out of hand. The latter is the task of modern pornography, even as the former is that of Science Fiction.
It was inevitable, therefore, from the start that Farmer would, at the climax of his career, produce two works at once fantasy and bald, explicit pornography -- "hardcore pornography," as the cant phrase has it: The Image of the Beast and A Feast Unknown. Both books were published by the same sub-respectable firm and distributed through channels ordinarily unsympathetic to any work not aimed exclusively and directly at simple-minded titillation, "jerk-off literature," in short. Never mind that A Feast Unknown begins with a quotation from May Swenson's poetry and ends with an apologetic Afterword by Theodore Sturgeon, in which he insists that this piece of sado-masochistic porn, whose hero can only have an orgasm over the bleeding body of his victims, represents somehow "the very core of the healthy truth expressed in the slogan, 'Make love, not war.' "
A Feast Unknown is a hilarious parody of the pop literature of super-heroic adventure; but its essential characteristic is a shamelessness beyond all possible apology. To speak of the imagination which informs it and its predecessor (in whose key scene an extraterrestrial girl with sharp iron dentures goes down on an unwary cop) as "healthy" is an inadvertent error or a deliberate lie. They are about as healthy as the works of the "divine" Marquis de Sade himself; which is to say, they may function therapeutically, but only by releasing in us, or exploding out of us, fantasies in themselves sick. And they have, in fact, helped pave the way for a new brand of Science Fiction, which deals frankly with human passion, "sick" and "healthy"; providing us with real phalluses and wombs, against which we can measure their symbolic projections in spaceships and underground cities on unknown planets. The paperback periodical, Quark, for instance, in which Farmer himself has been published, has also printed the work of younger writers, his debtors and descendants -- in the form of candidly-worked-out genital fantasies, often by recently liberated women, eager to excel him in the candor of their language and the brutality of their images. But Farmer was there first.
I remember reading many years ago my first Farmer story, which was called "Mother," and being astonished and gratified (a little condescendingly, perhaps) to discover certain Freudian insights into the nature of family relationships, ingeniously worked out and made flesh, as it were, in the world of inter-galactic travel and an endlessly receding future. My surprise and delight were not only cued by the prejudice which then possessed me utterly -- my conviction that pop fiction was necessarily immune to the insights of depth psychology; but arose also because the mythology of Freud was based on the belief that the neuroses were rooted in the past, and that, therefore, the revelation of sexual secrets depended on retrospection. It needed a writer like Farmer, committed to the anticipation of the future, to turn psychoanalysis in the direction of prophecy. The concerns first explored in "Mother" and the other tales later collected in a volume called Strange Relations have continued to obsess him, reaching their culmination in his Hugo Award winning story, "Riders of the Purple Wage." In that tale -- whose title puns on Zane Grey, of course (as he is always punning on names out of earlier literature, popular or elitist), and whose not- so-secret motto is "the family that blows is the family that grows" -- he has taken advantage of the greater linguistic freedom of the past decade. And he has thus been able to render even more explicitly the vision of a cloying and destructive relationship between Mothers and Sons, with which he began nearly twenty years ago.