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Article Excerpt
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy has been lauded as a signal achievement in science fiction. Its three parts describe the colonization and terraforming of Mars over the course of more than two centuries, forming a cohesive storyline focused on the "First Hundred," the earliest colonists who, granted extended longevity by virtue of medical technologies, become central to the revolutionary utopian scientific and political project whose unfolding is the heart of the series. The first part, Red Mars, won the Nebula Award, and both of its sequels, Green Mars and Blue Mars, received Hugo Awards. Reviewing Red Mars for the New York Times, Gerald Jonas called it "an absorbing novel of ideas, notable for the opportunity it provides to watch a scientifically informed imagination of rare ambition at work" (25). Scholars have taken note of the series' rich allusiveness, its awareness of its own textuality (Foote; Franko "Density"), while readers have marveled at its scientific virtuosity and compelling humanistic vision (Amazon.com).
Of course, some of those same readers have expressed dismay at the complexity of the writing and the storyline, a feature that scholars acknowledge as well. Bud Foote, for example, in an appreciative note on the first novel, clearly relishes the prospect that untenured assistant professors and graduate students will be digging out its references for decades to come (66). William Dynes, on the other hand, in discussing his own students' experiences, says that upon finishing Red Mars, "even after five hundred pages and at least seven distinct shifts in narrator, the reader cannot feel that he or she has been given a reasonably complete understanding of the events of the novel" because of the contradictions and conflicts between the viewpoints used to develop the story (154). This essay, in seeking to make sense of the novel's structure, is an effort to grapple with the complexity of the Mars books and provide the basis for a more complete understanding of its events.
In order to do so, this essay takes as its starting point the strange musings of Robinson's psychiatrist character Michel Duval in an early section of Red Mars as he suffers through homesick alienation from the rest of the Martian colonists he has been sent along to watch over. Following a hint that the "structuralist alchemy" (as Robinson calls it) in which Michel engages is meant to suggest a way of reading the meanings implicated in the novel itself, this essay makes use of the work of the French semiotician from whom Robinson borrows his alchemical procedures, turning them recursively upon the novel itself in order to bring to light the thematic discursive structures that underpin the narrative. It then turns to a narrative analysis that explores the "actantial" dimension of Red Mars; that is, how characters come to embody or instantiate those discursive structures. It does so by examining the story of John Boone, a charismatic leader of the Martian colony, in structural terms. It then contextualizes that "mythic" (uninflected) narrative analysis in light of the "counter-narrative" afforded by the story of Frank Chalmers, Boone's romantic and political rival, suggesting that an effect of that contrast is both to valorize and problematize Boone's intertwined political and spiritual mission. Finally, the essay concludes by suggesting that it is the tension between the mythic and the ironic that gives the novel much of its resonance, "exploding" (that is, expanding) the myth/irony dualism in order to do so.
The Semantic Rectangle Appears on Mars
Among the "First Hundred" colonists who arrive on Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, Michel Duval occupies a singular place. The rest of the settlers are scientists, engineers, and technicians, charged with exploring and building a new world; he is the psychiatrist sent to observe, evaluate, and when necessary counsel the others. Whereas they endured a rigorous winnowing process to join the First Hundred, eager to be among the first to colonize the planet, Michel was included by the selection committee largely at his own insistence to ameliorate the potential social and psychological dysfunctions created through the selection process. But Michel Duval is a reluctant colonist at best, and his alienation is the key issue in the section of Red Mars in which he is the viewpoint character (Part 4, "Homesick"). He is withdrawn and melancholy, mechanically going through the motions of his work in a forlorn fugue until "rescued" by Hiroko Ai, the mystagogical leader of the bioscience-oriented "farm team" that splinters off from the colony at the end of Part 4 to pursue in secret their own vision of Mars.
Furthermore, in contrast to the technical and geographical prose that characterizes the "hard science" of earlier and later sections, in "Homesick" there is a description of Michel's use of a "Greimas semantic rectangle" (Red Mars 217) to categorize members of the First Hundred, labeling them according to a scheme derived from the ancient theory of the four humours, so that the affable and easy-going astronaut John Boone is "sanguine" while the glowering political operator Frank Chalmers is "choleric," and so forth. The semantic rectangle he uses is a "combinatoire" involving paired contradictions of personality (introvert vs. extrovert) and emotional volatility (stabile vs. labile). Robinson describes how Michel combines different pairs of the four terms to identify "temperaments" as contingencies of those combinations (see Figure 1).
The "Greimas" to whom Michel Duval attributes the semantic rectangle is Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917-1992), a French semiotician whose work was heavily influential upon the structuralist "Paris school" of the 1970s and 1980s; his 1966 Semantique structurale "stood out like a culmination and pinnacle of all previous attempts to produce a systematic theory of meaning" (Budniakiewicz 3). The semantic rectangle (and the "semiotic square" that forms its core set of contrasting terms; see Schleifer 25) is an attempt to grasp the "entanglement" of opposites (Schleifer 30). In other words, Greimassian semiotics recognizes the inadequacy of simple opposed binary pairs (e.g., black/white) and attempts to account for the missing or excluded semantic terms (e.g., both black and white, equivalent to "grey" or "striped" or "colored (in)," depending on context, and neither black nor white, equivalent to "colorless").
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Duval's arcane musings have not attracted much comment in the reviews and criticisms of Robinson's trilogy, perhaps because they seem part and parcel with the rest of his psychological "science," which attracts critical derision from other characters whenever it appears: Michel's defense of the personality test used to assess the candidates for the expedition generates a "methodological inquisition" (63), and his off-hand reference to Abraham Maslow's notion of "peak experience" after John Boone's visionary speech on Olympus Mons elicits a groan from one of his friends (381). Michel himself is self-deprecatingly amused when he recognizes the irony of using "a century's [worth of] psychological thinking, and some of the latest laboratory research in psychophysiology, not to mention a complicated apparatus from structuralist alchemy, all in order to reinvent the ancient system of the humours" (219).
Read Mars: A Semantic Rectangular Recursion
Despite this, there is some evidence that Robinson intends for the close reader to take the semantic rectangle seriously at least as a device for illuminating some of the thematic underpinnings of the Mars trilogy. This being the case, it is thus possible that Greimassian semiotics can be employed recursively to decode or at least unpack meanings available in the text. Robinson's academic mentor Fredric Jameson, whose influence Robinson acknowledges in Red Mars and whom he cites extensively in his own dissertation on the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, himself analyzes one of Dick's novels using a semantic rectangle ("After Armageddon") and suggests in his foreword to a translated volume of Greimas's essays that that newcomers to Greimas should feel free to engage in bricolage or, more plainly, "simply ... steal the pieces that interest or fascinate us, and ... carry off our fragmentary booty to our intellectual caves" (Greimas viii). Robinson's dissertation, later published as a book (The Novels of Philip K. Dick), reveals him to be intensely interested in the structural relationships among characters, at least as a literary scholar, which experience Robinson says he regards as part of his education as a writer (Foote and Robinson).
Besides these contextual cues, the semantic rectangle reappears at least in passing several times in the novels, most notably as sense-making device during the "Dorsa Brevia conference" in Green Mars, when many of the factions involved in the underground Martian independence movement meet to hash out a political program:
One night Michel Duval joined [three other characters] for a drink, and as Nadia described the problem he got out his AI and began to make diagrams based on what he called the "semantic...
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