Alien Imaginations

Science Fiction and Tales of Transnationalism

Ulrike Küchler, Silja Maehl, Graeme Stout

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781628921168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

As both an extra-terrestrial and a terrestrial migrant, the alien provides a critical framework to help us understand the interactions between cultures and to explore the transgressive force of travel over geographical, cultural or linguistic borders. Offering a perspective on the alien that connects to scholarship on immigration and globalization, Alien Imaginations brings together canonical and contemporary works in the literature and cinema of science fiction and transnationalism. By examining the role of the alien through the themes of language, anxiety and identity, the essays in this collection engage with authors such as H.G. Wells, Eleanor Arnason, Philip K. Dick and Yoko Tawada as well as directors such as Neill Blomkamp, James Cameron and Michael Winterbottom. Focusing on works that are European and North American in origin, the readings in this volume explore their critical intent and their potential to undermine many of the central notions of Western hegemonic discourses. Alien Imaginations reflects upon contemporary cultural imaginaries as well as the realities of migration, labor and life, suggesting models of resistance, if not utopian horizons.

Part One

Alien Language

1

“Was of the Worlds”

John Mowitt

Leeds University, UK

Linguistricks

By his own count Derrida only ever read four words of Joyce. These words, gathered in two pairs, are “he, war,” and “say, yes.” Doubtless, “read” means something unusual here. Be that as it may, it is the first of these pairs that will concern me here: “he, war.” Although my immediate attention turns to the “war” part of the pair, in the course of my remarks the significance of the masculine pronoun, especially as it factors in the problem of the gendered reproductive dynamics of the family romance put in crisis by alien invasions of all sorts, will also emerge. Derrida reads these words, teases them out of Finnegan’s Wake, in a set of improvised remarks given at the Centre Pompidou in 1982.¹ Although there would be a great deal to say about the entirety of Derrida’s brief intervention, what I want to draw the reader’s attention to is the puzzle that attracts Derrida’s own. Namely, how do we read, that is, secure the sense of, a phrase that, in ceaselessly flickering between English and German makes war (in German) mean, in English, both war (taken as a homonym) and was (when translated)? As Derrida notes in passing he is thinking, among other things, about Freud’s formula: “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (an impossible sentence that I will render as, “where the It was/war, the I will take its place”). But he is also thinking about Joyce’s preoccupation with the Old Testament, about the violence and violation of an “I am” when displaced from the present to the past, and from first person to third. It is partly this violence that Derrida hears (and his improvisation concerns itself repeatedly with hearing) in the war that was. But he is also concerned to develop the theme of violence in relation to the unruly Babel that is figured in the audible but illegible (war/war) flicker between German and English, proposing that translation is impossibly fraught because, no matter how expert, a translation fails in principle to render the multiplicity of language(s) that motivates it. Indeed, beyond suggesting that every war that ever was, was one because those who made it were haunted by some was, some past, Derrida asks us to hear in the trans-lingual homonym that war is always necessarily sparked and fanned by an irreducible alienation of the sort with which translation wrestles. For him, as if all friends were faux amis (in French, deceptive cognates), every utterance is overrun, overturned, by the expressive potential that enables it. Here, our relation to war and was is the same (they say the same thing) without being identical (they say it differently). This is a perplexing thought and in an effort to grapple with its suggestive implications, I want to turn to a reading of H. G. Wells’ oft-reiterated “scientific romance,” The War of the Worlds (1898).²

The particular angle of my reading, however, is captured, in effect crystallized, in the opening sequence of Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black (retronymically now referred to as MIB1 in light of the franchise tentatively brought to completion in the summer of 2011 with MIB3). Tommy Lee Jones, who appears in the scene and stars (along with Will Smith) in the film, has claimed authorship of the segment, characterizing it as a “joke” in the Special Features commentary that accompanies the DVD of the film. Although there is no evidence that Jones is conversant with Freud’s study of Witz, the scene suggests that his unconscious is.

Its opening shot effects a decisive transition between the cinematic and the filmic, that is, it moves us from the title sequence (common to the cinematic mode of production) to the first piece of the diegesis, to the first step in the plot of this film. The shot, massively dependent on CGI effects, tracks an insect as it smashes into a windshield. As Thierry Kuntzel might have insisted (1980: 8–25), we have just seen the entire film: a creature descending from the sky has been reduced to goo on an utterly ordinary avatar of the cinema, a windshield. Be that as it may, this windshield belongs to a truck smuggling Mexicans across the Mexico-US border at night. As if anticipating the current impasses of the debate over immigration reform in the United States, the truck is almost immediately intercepted by the border patrol. As the patrol begins to search the truck, their work is interrupted by the arrival of a second car, this one containing two “men in black,” one of whom is Sonnenfeld in a cameo walk-on. The other is Tommy Lee Jones, who orders the border patrol to back off, which they do, deferring to his authority. In reasonably fluent Spanish, Jones orders the Mexicans huddled into the back of the truck out into a lineup where an interrogation begins. Quickly, he isolates one figure in the lineup—someone revealed by the shibboleth of the Spanish language—then, to the consternation of the border patrol, he instructs the others simply to “váyanse,” to “go” in the imperative.

This begins the second segment of the sequence where the figure isolated is soon revealed to be Mikey, an extraterrestrial, hidden beneath the sartorial markers of “Mexicanness.” Jones violently slits through the costume exposing, as he puts it when later recounting the “joke,” the illegal alien inside the illegal alien. Predictably, it is at this moment that the patience of the border patrol thins to breaking point. One of them approaches from the rear, Mikey sees him and rushes to destroy him. After some plot enabling fumbling, Jones draws a weapon and reduces Mikey to goo, saving the border patrol officer while simultaneously motivating the use of a “neurolyzer,” a device that wipes the memories of those exposed to it without the characteristic sunglasses of the “men in black.” In the dialogue, the neurolyzer is significantly presented as an explanatory device and a memory bomb. If Freud’s formula cited above can also be rendered as “consciousness rises instead of a memory-trace” (Freud 2001: 25), then the neurolyzer is also an instance of the war/war overlap that interested him.

While the scene achieves many effects (for example, reminding us that borders are policed as much by knowledge as by patrols or fences) and commits many blunders (for example, accepting the characterization of undocumented Mexican workers as illegal aliens), it is its haunting presentation of the overlap between immigrants and extraterrestrials that holds our attention and invites elaboration. My interest here is not in the mere linguistic fact that alien functions as a heteronym in English, but in the social fantasy that allows immigrants to provide extraterrestrials with ubiquity, and extraterrestrials to provide immigrants with menace.³

Alienations

Doubtless, one is hard-pressed to say much if anything new about a text as well-combed as The War of the Worlds.⁴ It has been attached to Wells’ biography, the British Fabians, the Copernican revolution effected by Darwin, the British empire in the late nineteenth century, the discovery of aluminum, and on and on. Surprisingly, in David Lodge’s novel effort to rethink Wells’ sexuality—see A Man of Parts (2011)—he has little if anything to say about the figure of the wife that haunts this text, and this despite the fact that he discusses Wells’ wives and mistresses in relation to the corpus with a deliciously scandalized abandon. Although stressing this may suggest that my reading will center on the wife, my point will be different. Instead, I want simply to acknowledge the insurmountable challenge of saying something new, and insist upon the value of restating the familiar, differently. So in addition to the wife, I want to dwell on the figure of the Jew, and the figure of the Tasmanian in relation to “the Martians,” especially as these, or more specifically their impossibly sudden arrival, figure as an instance of scriptura interruptus.

The figure of the Jew appears in the chapter titled “Exodus from London” (note the particular Biblical reference made). The caricature is unmistakable (“bearded,” “eagle-faced”) as are the behaviors (flinging himself on his “heap of coins”). In Bryan Cheyette’s comprehensive Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society (1995), he underscores the many anti-Semitic clichés at work in this passage and Leon Stover, the editor of the critical edition of the text published by McFarland (Wells 2001), draws emphatic attention to the importance and apparent originality of Cheyette’s reading. I will confess that this last strikes me as a bit odd, because this scene is painstakingly re-created (if updated and relocated) in the 1953 film by Byron Haskin and George Pal. Clearly somebody recognized the scene for what it was, indeed it stands out even more starkly in a plot that zooms in on Cold War Christianity for the finale. Of course, one might argue that this particular plot twist is present in the original (God in “his” wisdom did, after all, place bacteria on the Earth), but in the end too much emphasis on this dimension of the text’s anti-Semitism misses something more fundamental. This has to do with the articulation of immigrants and extraterrestrials, or more particularly with Jews and Martians.

Among the many touchstones in Cheyette’s study is the Alien Act of 1905. In summarizing the impact of what was also referred to as simply the “Immigration Act,” Cheyette writes: “The Immigration Act both incorporated elements of the urban working class into a racial-Imperial ‘Englishness,’ and, at the same time, excluded ‘undesirable’ Jewish ‘aliens’ from the shores of Britain and, thereby, severely narrowed the liberal ‘idea of the Nation’” (1995: 159).

I will return to the theme of empire, but here it suffices to draw attention to the notion that the tensions of class, race, and ethnicity were active and in play during the decade prior to the parliamentary decision that took shape in the Alien Act, that is, during the gestation of The War of the Worlds. And, because it bears stating emphatically, the English word “alien” is here deployed by a sovereign state as a synonym for an immigrant community: the Jews.

The importance of this period has been spelled out in considerable detail by Bernard Gainer in The Alien Invasion (1972) where, among other things, he draws attention to the emigration of Russian Jews to England as a result of Czarist housing policies, policies obliging Jews to live outside the Pale of Settlement on the Polish border. Beyond the pale, indeed. This emphasis on the Russian provenance of Jews emigrating to England—they were not, in effect, English speakers—is coupled in Gainer’s analysis with an attentive reading of the formation of the British Brothers League and the popular press in which the public reception in Britain of this immigrant community is recorded. Here, I will suggest, we can tease out not so much the figure of the Jew in Wells, but the trace of anti-Semitism in the menace of his monsters.

Noting that the League’s excited motto was: “Britain should not become the dumping ground for the scum of Europe” (1972: 50), Gainer goes on to demonstrate that the organization insisted upon the foreignness of Jews. They were said to raise rents while also being willing to accept and occupy substandard housing. Self-serving paradox personified. Gainer also combs the newspapers, drawing attention to stories about the filth, the smell, and the noise of the Jewish neighborhoods in East London. In particular, “all night ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword Dame Gillian Beer, King Edward VII Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge, UK
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Ulrike Küchler, Silja Maehl, and Graeme Stout
• Part 1 Alien Language
• Part 2 Alien Anxieties
• Part 3 Alien Identities
• Index
• Copyright