Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe Kōbō (review)

Christopher Bolton's Sublime Voices is a comprehensive chronological discussion of the works of Abe Kōbō focusing on the effects of the scientific and technical language the author deploys with such relish and precision. The central thesis of the book is that existing criticism has tended to reduce the meaning of Abe's work to an expression of preexisting biographical, political, or philosophical positions, when in fact the comments on the self, society, and existential meaning are produced by the dialogic interaction of Abe's scientific language with other styles of expression. Bolton argues for the subjective significance of his thesis in terms of Bakhtin's dialogic imagination, and for its significance in the field of knowledge in terms of science studies.

Chapter 1 deals with a series of early stories that describe Kafka-like metamorphoses, and it sets in place the interpretive pattern by noting that in each case the transformation is accompanied by something written. Hence in "Red Cocoon" (1950), it is not some preexisting condition but the application of the label "Dendrocacalia" by a botanist that causes the protagonist to turn into a plant, and in The Crime of S. Karma (1951), it is the separation of the protagonist from his business card that enables his metamorphosis into an endless landscape. In the one case it is the application of a label that brings about the metamorphosis, and in the other it is the removal of a label; thus, we are dealing with correlation rather than causation. Bolton lays out the ambiguities with due care and moves on to cite the employment by each character of different techno-bureaucratic patois as "reward[ing] the reader with this wonderful concert of styles" (p. 39). This emphasis on the disruptive anarchy of style and voice will become the thread that unites his consideration of Abe's corpus.

Chapter 2 provides an interesting recitation of efforts since the Renaissance to distinguish the emerging field of science from older domains of literature and philosophy, including a discussion of Aquinas, Bacon, Locke, Mazzoni, and Wordsworth, and develops the assertion that style of language is the principal point of differentiation between science and literature. This chapter might have made more proximal reference to Sōseki's Bungakuron (Theory of Literature), where Book 3 lays out an argument similar to Wordsworth's. Bolton's thesis is that Abe's work consistently exploited the difficulty of drawing a clear line between a marvelous sense of novelty and a confusing unfamiliarity, a territory he labels "sublime." This thesis includes the interesting insight that there is a "quantitative bias" toward magnitude in the term as developed in Addison and Burke, who link the sublime to science and technology (p. 64).

In a discussion of Inter Ice-Age 4 (1959), Bolton continues to develop the idea that the significance of science in Abe's work lies less in the undeniable thematic accuracy, in this case of biology and computer science, than in the eventual proliferation of scientific sub-dialects and attendant literary effects. Specifically, the novel's discussion of the prediction machine and the Aquans reveals different reasoning strategies in the putatively monolithic sciences—mechanical and biological, mathematical and statistical, hardware and wetware.

Chapter 4 similarly finds that the dizzying subjective effects of The Face of Another (1959) come less from Abe's existential commitments than from the intermixing of styles, in this case a confused and nonsensical reverie slipping quickly into violence, and a voice of scientific detachment. Bolton begins a running commentary on existing English translations, which in adopting a bland literary consistency miss both the precision of Abe's technical and logical presentation and—more importantly for Bolton—precisely the juxtaposition of styles that he finds central to Abe's effects.

Chapter 5 continues both of these themes with a discussion of Woman in the Dunes (1964). Versus a tendency in English-language criticism to see the man's scientific preoccupations...