MFS Modern Fiction Studies

Laboratories of Culture(s): Pulp Science Fiction, Anthropology, and the American Southwest

When he began the process of composing The Martian Chronicles in 1949, Bradbury stood at a generative intersection of several modernisms.¹ Bradbury’s early writing career was intimately intertwined with the rise of science fiction and fantasy pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. Bradbury himself recalled his childhood discovery of an early edition of Amazing Stories Quarterly, to which he soon added a steady diet of other pulps such as Wonder Stories, Weird Tales, and Argosy Weekly; these stories, alongside Baum’s Oz books, Burroughs’s Tarzan and John Carter of Mars novels, and Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, became major inspirations. By the 1940s, Bradbury was publishing in an array of pulp magazines including Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Detective Tales as well as more prestigious slicks such as Collier’s and Maclean’s.² At the same time, [End Page 312] by the mid-1940s, Bradbury was engaging in what he described as a self-education program in the emerging canon of high modernism, which included Eliot, Faulkner, Wolfe, Hemingway, Lewis, Steinbeck, Anderson, Wharton, and Cather.³

If Bradbury’s career coincided with the rise of pulp science fiction and the emergence of literary modernism, it also coincided with the emergence and popularization of anthropology and the new conceptions of culture and representation that shaped the discipline’s understanding—as Isherwood’s review suggests—of other “inhabitants” (56) (of this world). Led in the US by Franz Boas and his students Sapir, Benedict, Alfred Kroeber, Margaret Mead, and others, anthropology in the interwar period entered what historian of anthropology George W. Stocking, Jr., has called its “classical period” (“Ethnographic” 212), which was marked by crucial shifts in both its professional practices and theoretical paradigms, with new versions of culture as its central concern. Broadly speaking, in contrast to and in complex tension with nineteenth century models of culture as a universal hierarchy of intellectual or technological achievement—Matthew Arnold’s “the best that has been thought and said” (5) or, within the field of ethnology, E. B. Tylor’s evolutionary stages of development—Boas and his students constructed models of culture as relative, plural systems of meaning encompassing all aspects of a group’s life. Each element of a culture needed, they argued, to be understood in the context of the whole culture, and the job of the anthropologist is to see that element within that cultural system. In short, modernist anthropology reimagines singular Culture as plural cultures while also reimagining and replacing the model of the armchair ethnologist—collecting and comparing data sent from missionaries and colonial administrators around the world—with the fieldwork model of the participant-observer studying a single culture.⁴

More broadly, the ideas of cultural pluralism at the heart of what Isherwood might have called the approach of anthropology had become widely disseminated by the 1940s. Boas himself had made the concept of cultural pluralism a part of public debate in the interwar years, deploying his theories to debunk ideas of race and white supremacy as well as xenophobic anti-immigration policies. His stature as a public intellectual grew in the years leading up to World War II as Boas became a leading voice against Nazi racial ideologies and fascism; he was even featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1936. Benedict and Mead were bestselling authors—Mead with her work on gender and sexuality in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935); Benedict with [End Page 313] Patterns of Culture and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword—and were public intellectuals increasingly involved in public policy in the 1940s and 1950s. By 1958, Mead could claim that because of the work of Benedict and others, “today the modern world is on such easy terms with the concept of culture, that the words ‘in our culture’ slip from the lips of educated men and women almost as effortlessly as do the phrases that refer to period and to place” (xi).⁵

Crucially, these anthropologists were intimately involved in the broader intellectual, aesthetic, and political issues that characterized Anglo-American modernism.⁶ In the US, both anthropologists and artists in the interwar years traveled the intellectual circuits of modernist Manhattan—Columbia University and Harlem uptown, Greenwich Village downtown—and regional laboratories for anthropology and modernist art, forming an interdisciplinary conversation out of which new definitions of culture emerged.⁷ As Stocking, Jr., puts it, “the mapping of the ‘geography of culture’ of cultural criticism overlapped that of cultural anthropology to an extent that we may not appreciate today, when the boundaries between academic anthropology and the outside world are more sharply imagined” (“Ethnographic” 220). Among those central “laboratories” were the landscapes and Native American peoples of the Southwest. While modernist anthropologists such as Kroeber, Benedict, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Ruth Bunzel examined the lifeways of the Zuni, the Navajo, the Hopi, and other Native Americans of the Southwest as case studies for new versions of culture, modernist artists such as Lawrence, Huxley, and O’Keeffe gathered at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s artists’ colony in Taos, New Mexico, or nearby Santa Fe, and drew inspiration from the art and rituals of these same Indigenous groups. Many anthropologists were themselves artists. Sapir and Benedict each published poetry, and Parsons published American Indian Life (1922), an anthology of short stories by various anthropologists, each centering around a tribe they had studied, with contributions by Kroeber, Lowie, and Sapir and Boas. Similarly, anthropologist Oliver La Farge drew on field work conducted among the Navajo in the 1920s to compose numerous short stories in the 1930s and 1940s, including his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Laughing Boy (1929). The 1920s and 1930s, then, were a period when “the Indian was in vogue” (Snyder 663) in anthropology, modernist art and literature, and popular culture.

Thus, while histories of the concept of culture often are ruptural—narrating the emergence of an anthropological version of relative, plural cultures in contrast to and replacing universal, hierarchical [End Page 314] humanist Culture—that history is instead one of tension and entanglement. Both within anthropology and in the broader interdisciplinary debates over form and value of which anthropology was one node, the concepts of relativism and pluralism—or difference—were continuously and complexly intertwined and in tension with universal, normative senses of the term that attempted to establish some common criteria—sameness—across which artifacts or whole cultures could be compared. Far from producing a settled version, or even two clear versions, of culture, by the time Bradbury composes The Martian Chronicles in the late 1940s, the social scientific and popular usage of the term had proliferated to the degree that anthropologists Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn concluded it was “time for a stock-taking, for a comparing of notes, for conscious awareness of the range of variation” (7) lest the term, now “one of the key notions of contemporary American thought” (3), become so diffuse as to become meaningless. In short, the relative and the evaluative senses of culture always intertwined, even as the emphasis between these phases shifted—over time, and among critics/anthropologists.

These two phenomena—the shifts in conceptions of culture and the emergence of twentieth-century science fiction in pulp magazines—are intertwined. As David Cheng has argued, the popularity of science fiction was rooted in the immense prestige of science itself in the interwar years, both as a technology and mode of knowledge promising to bring order and understanding to the rapid changes in modern life. Anthropology likewise offered itself as a science through which one might understand the meaningful organization of human societies at the very moment when those societies seemed incomprehensible in their flux. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for example, gripped the public imagination.⁸ If that fascination expressed itself through science fiction stories of time travel, it could also be said to lie behind anthropological relativism as a technique for exploring different perspectives or meanings given to the same phenomena.⁹ Philip Wegner suggests that this dual perspective, toggling between the real and the estranged, defines science fiction as a specifically modernist genre. Grounded in realist epistemology, Wegner argues, science fiction narratives simultaneously deploy a “critical, distancing eye” (11) that produces “estrangement” or “modernism” (13): he thus recasts Darko Suvin’s now canonical formulation of science fiction as “realist (cognitive) modernism (estrangement).” This same movement—between the familiar and the strange, the participant and the observer—is central to the theories and methodologies of new versions of anthropology that arose in precisely the same moment. [End Page 315] Thus, both science fiction and anthropology/ethnography in the interwar period (and beyond) emerged as technologies to negotiate, represent, and thereby understand, difference.¹⁰

Imagining Indigenous Aliens, Part I: Culture and/as Form on Martian Mesas

Bradbury was well situated within this network of art, anthropology, and the desert Southwest. He was enchanted with Southwest desert landscapes in part from living for two brief periods in Tucson, Arizona, as a child. As Jonathan Eller has shown, Bradbury underwent several formative experiences in his brief time in Tucson: it was there that he typed out his first stories, inspired by Burrough’s John Carter tales, which similarly envisioned Mars as a desert. Most importantly, he encountered the desert landscape, the open spaces and wilderness of which conveyed a sense of newness and rebirth—much as it did for modernist artists and anthropologists who encountered similar landscapes in Arizona and New Mexico. Bradbury also turned, in contrast, to the desert for “metaphors for the decline and fragmentation of art and imagination in the modern world” (Eller, “Miracles” 19). Thus, for Bradbury, as for other modernist anthropologists and artists, the Southwest desert was a space for envisioning alternatives to modern life.

Bradbury in turn was connected to anthropologists such as La Farge who linked their fieldwork and fiction. Bradbury’s stories would later appear alongside La Farge’s—some of which blended elements of the fantastic with ethnographically informed plots—in publications such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; Bradbury included one of La Farge’s stories, “The Resting Place,” in his edited volume, The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories (1956). That anthology also included a story by Loren Eiseley, another anthropologist whose fiction Bradbury had encountered and admired in the late 1940s.

Bradbury was thus firmly engaged in the circuits of debates over culture and value that arose most forcefully within anthropology and were often generated around images of Native American lifeways in the desert Southwest. This engagement is particularly evident in “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright.” First published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1948, the story narrates the arrival of an Earth expedition to Mars; there, they find the Martians extinct, having left behind empty cities of beautifully delicate architecture and art. Spender, the expedition’s archeologist/anthropologist, laments the coming destruction of these ruins and the Martian landscape at the [End Page 316] hands of the impending waves of settlers, when humans will “throw condensed-milk cans in the proud Martian canals” (49) and leave “banana peels and picnic papers in the fluted, delicate ruins of the old Martian valley towns.” Spender deserts the crew, escaping to the hills where he lives in the Martian ruins, learning their language, art, and philosophy. He returns to the crew, in effect, “a Martian” (60), and kills several crew members; the remaining crew members and the captain give chase to capture or kill Spender.

At the climax of the story, Spender and the captain—who sympathizes with Spender’s affinity for the Martian civilization—meet in a temporary truce. Spender offers his account of Martian culture, which, I suggest, is an account of culture as such. Martian culture, Spender argues, was one where art, science, and religion were “blended”: unlike American culture, the Martians “knew how to blend art into their living. It’s always been a thing apart for Americans. Art was something you kept in the crazy son’s room upstairs. Art was something you took in Sunday doses, mixed with religion perhaps. Well, these Martians have art and religion and everything” (64), and they “knew how to combine science and religion so the two worked side by side, neither denying the other, each enriching the other . . . they blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle. They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful” (67). As a result, their “cities were good” (64). After “learning to read the ancient books and looking at their art forms” (60), Spender adopts a Martian identity: he is “glad to call [the Martians his] ancestors” (64) and simultaneously feels freed from his fellow astronauts’ “so-called culture . . . free of their ethics and customs. I’m out of their frame of reference” (64–65).

As critics have often noted, Bradbury’s Martians and their encounter with colonizing humans echo Native Americans’ experiences of settler colonialism. This analogy is underscored through Spender’s attempt to recruit a Native American astronaut named “Cheroke” to his cause; Cheroke initially professes some sympathy for the surviving Martians, referring to his own grandfather’s experiences on the Trail of Tears, but ultimately refuses to join Spender. In The Martian Chronicles version of the story, the analogy is made even stronger when Bradbury incorporates a narrative explanation for the Martian extinction: by the time this fourth expedition arrives, the Martians have been wiped out by a deadly epidemic of chickenpox that had been introduced by the previous astronauts. This, of course, alludes to the decimation of Native American populations by smallpox and [End Page 317] other diseases brought by European colonists from the seventeenth century onward.

But Bradbury’s construction of Martian culture as specifically whole, constituting a fundamentally different “frame of reference” (65) than American systems of value, draws as well on the distinctly modernist anthropological ideas of culture as plural, relative wholes, located for anthropologists and others in traditional Native American lifeways. This conception of culture found one of its most influential articulations in Sapir’s “Culture, Genuine and Spurious.” Sapir had himself performed fieldwork among a variety of Native American peoples. As scholars such as Richard Handler have shown, Sapir was also intensely engaged in the broader artistic and intellectual circuits of 1920s New York, publishing essays, poetry, and criticism in a variety of journals of art and opinion that were central in forming the parameters of modernism, including Freeman, Poetry, The Dial, The Nation, and The New Republic.

In “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” Sapir defines “genuine culture” (410) as above all characterized by unity and wholeness: culture, he suggests, is “not of necessity either high or low; it is merely inherently harmonious, balanced, self-satisfactory. It is the expression of a richly varied and yet somehow unified and consistent attitude toward life, an attitude which sees the significance of any one element of civilization in its relation to all others. It is, ideally speaking, a culture in which nothing is spiritually meaningless.” Instead of this “harmonious synthesis,” “spurious” culture is a “spiritual hybrid of contradictory patches, of water-tight compartments of consciousness” that separate different aspects of life, such as economics from religion, values from action. By this standard, modern industrial society offers only “spurious” culture—a critique echoed in Bradbury’s description of American society as holding art, science, and religion as “things apart” (64).

Moreover, the “significance” (Sapir, “Culture” 410) of genuine culture does not refer to any particular content but rather the formal structure that creates meaning: in short, Sapir is interested not in what a particular element means but rather how it means in its relation “to all others.” The structuralism of Sapir’s genuine culture links “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” to his influential work in linguistic anthropology, where he argues that any language is structured by a set of phonetic patterns that form a “complete system of reference” (“Grammarian” 153), a “formal completeness” (emphasis added) that lies beneath the specific content of whatever one might say in that language. That formal unity is what Bradbury in turn embodies [End Page 318] in Martian culture. We learn little about the content of Martian language or religion or art; we just know that the different elements of science, religion, and art “blend” (Martian Chronicles 64) to create Sapir’s formal completeness.

For Sapir, the Native American is the exemplar of this genuine culture: “The American Indian,” he writes,

who solves the economic problem with salmon-spear and rabbit-snare operates on a relatively low level of civilization, but he represents an incomparably higher solution than our telephone girl of the questions that culture has to ask of economics. . . . The Indian’s salmon-spearing is a culturally higher type of activity than that of the telephone girl or mill hand simply because there is normally no sense of spiritual frustration during its prosecution . . . because it works in naturally with all the rest of the Indian’s activities instead of standing out as a desert patch of merely economic effort in the whole of life.

(“Culture” 411–12)

Native American culture is genuine here precisely because of “the firmness with which every part of that life—economic, social, religious, and aesthetic—is bound together into a significant whole” (414).

Sapir’s association of a whole culture with “the Indian” (411) was in turn attached, through the work of fellow anthropologists and artists, specifically to the Indigenous cultures of the Pueblo Southwest. Modernist artists such as Mary Austin, archeologists such as Edgar L. Hewett, and even head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs John Collier extolled, through the 1920s and 1930s, what they perceived as the unique unity and harmony of Pueblo lifeways.¹¹ This image was popularized perhaps most influentially through Benedict’s Patterns of Culture. In it, Benedict articulates both the Boasian ideals of “the relativity of cultural habits” (11), and the “integrity” of each culture. The “form” (46) cultures make varies through the text: at times, Benedict likens culture to “an individual,” with a psychology made up of “a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action”; at other moments, however, a culture is itself a work of art, which, like all “great art-styles” (48) takes disparate behaviors and beliefs and, through selection, adaptation, and modification, makes them “over into consistent patterns.” Crucially, Benedict’s prime example is the Zuni Pueblo culture, which “has not disintegrated like that of all the Indian communities outside of Arizona and New Mexico” (57; emphasis added). The pattern of Zuni culture, it turns out, revolves around form itself: valuing moderation and tradition in all things, unified [End Page 319] around prescribed forms, Zuni culture is “an organic whole” (231).¹² The image of Southwestern Pueblos as the embodiment of whole cultures continued to be promoted by anthropologists through the 1930s and 1940s, such that anthropologist John W. Bennett, for example, could identify by 1946 a consensus view among anthropologists that “Pueblo culture and society are integrated to an unusual degree, all sectors being bound together by a consistent, harmonious set of values, which pervade and homogenize the categories of worldview, ritual, art, social organization, economic activity, and social control” (362–63).

It is important to note that, while Benedict’s particular version of relative cultural “patterns” was widely disseminated by the 1940s, Bradbury’s model of culture has more in common with Sapir’s articulation from the 1920s. Benedict’s description of the Zuni, Dobu, and Kwakiutl lifeways emphasizes the relativity of cultures: while the Zuni emerge as the most integrated of the cultures, each culture has a “pattern” and is “a culture.” Even modern life in the US—which Benedict acknowledges is less “integrated” (48) than the geographically bound cultures of the Zuni or the Dobu and which is the target of the critical self-examination she hopes to provoke—is still a culture. For Sapir, while many different lifeways might be “harmonious” and “unified,” and therefore “genuine cultures,” the fragmentation of modern life in the US only offers “spurious” culture. Sapir’s articulation of “culture” is thus one where some lifeways count as “a culture” and others do not, with the measure of value being no longer “high” or “low” but “whole” versus “fragmented.” This division between genuine and spurious culture makes Sapir—as Susan Hegeman has noted—the “most Arnoldian thinker among [his] peers” (67), replacing Arnold’s division between “Culture” and “anarchy” with “genuine” and “spurious” cultures. The resonance between Sapir and Bradbury points, as I suggest below, to the shifting debates over cultural pluralism and universalism between the 1920s, 1930s, and the postwar 1940s.

While there is no evidence that Bradbury read Sapir (or Benedict), he certainly was influenced by modernist writers who themselves participated in the debates over culture of which Sapir was a key part. Most notably, Cather likewise articulates Sapir’s spatial conception of culture as a structured, integrated whole in her description of the vanished Cliff Dweller culture of the Southwest in her novel The Professor’s House. Bradbury, in fact, frequently cited Cather as one of his most significant literary influences.¹³ Thus, Cather’s 1925 novel forms an important intertext mediating between his vision of a vanished [End Page 320] Martian culture and Sapir’s construction of vanishing Native American culture. Close comparison of these two works reveals both Bradbury’s deployment of, and variations from, Sapir’s model of culture, pluralism, and identity.

The parallels to Cather’s novel, and more specifically to “Tom Outland’s Story” that forms the center of the novel’s tripartite structure, are striking. In “Tom Outland’s Story,” the cowboy Tom Outland stumbles upon the deserted “Cliff City” (modeled on Mesa Verde) whose Native American inhabitants have died off, leaving behind the monuments of their culture “preserved like a fly in amber” (180). Cliff City, then, is suspended in time much like the “fluted, delicate ruins” (Martian Chronicles 49) of the Martian cities, “left flawlessly intact” (55) despite having been “empty for thousands of years” (50). In both stories, the spatial form of Indigenous architecture embodies the unity of the way of life practiced within it. Most importantly, Cather describes Cliff City, and the unity of art, religion, and science that was practiced there, in ways similar to Spender’s account of Martian culture. Outland describes Cliff City’s central “tower” (180)—simultaneously a watchtower, an astronomical observatory and a religious site—as the “fine thing” that “held the jumble of houses together and made them mean something.” In these terms, Sapir’s argument for culture finds its parallel in (first) Cather and (later) Bradbury.

Significantly, Cather and Bradbury also construct culture as both an artistic process and an identity. The Cliff Dwellers were a “provident, rather thoughtful people” (197) who “rose gradually from the condition of savagery” (198); with “patience and deliberation” (190), they had “work[ed] out their destiny, making their mesa more and more worthy to be a home for man” (198) until they were “probably wiped out, utterly exterminated, by some roving Indian tribe without culture or domestic virtue.” Spender’s Captain Wilder in turn imagines the Martians were a “graceful, beautiful, philosophical people” (55) whose “civilization” “builds itself for a million years, refines itself, erects cities like those out there, does everything it can to give itself respect and beauty, and then it dies” (51). In this analogy, however, Spender’s fellow astronauts are Cather’s “roving Indian tribe without culture” (198) whose germs wipe out the Martians before they could do the job themselves. In both cases, culture is envisioned as both an object and an identity, something one can inherit or take possession of. After spending months among Cliff City artifacts, Outland imagines them “belong[ing] to my poor grandmothers a thousand years ago” (219; emphasis added); now he—like Spender—imagines the former inhabitants as his “ancestors.” [End Page 321]

In this light, the oft-noted parallel between Martians and Native Americans in The Martian Chronicles takes on new significance. Critics such as Gary Wolfe and others have long argued that the text plays with and against the mythology of Manifest Destiny and frontier expansion in the American West, with “the [American] Indian becom[ing] Martians” (Wolfe 33). On one level, Bradbury revises the myth of “progress” from “savagery” to “civilization,” replacing it with a Romantic narrative nostalgically lamenting the destruction wrought by the pioneers—a Romantic narrative that itself has long been part of the discourse of American empire. On another level, the discourse of Boasian anthropology deployed by Bradbury revises—even as it repeats—that Romantic narrative of the “vanishing Indian.” Rather than Romantic “noble savages” whose natural virtues are tragically supplanted by artificial civilization, in the emerging discourse of modernist anthropology transposed by Bradbury, Native Americans/Martians are exemplars of culture rather than nature. Their displacement by American “civilization” is the fragmentation of a “whole” culture (or more precisely, “culture as whole”) by a “spurious” one.

Sapir, Cather, and Bradbury’s emphases on culture as whole in turn reveal the utility of cultural wholes for modernist anthropologists and the corresponding utility of the aesthetic whole for the modernist artist—be they artists creating literary representations of whole regional cultures, science fiction authors representing whole alien cultures, or, in this case, both. Conceiving culture as a discrete, spatial whole makes it uniquely available to the anthropologist/artist for study and makes it quite literally an object of analysis—and in this case, an object for aesthetic contemplation and critical comparison. Culture thus also becomes an object available for possession by the (colonial) observer. Within anthropology, this is reflected in the proprietary “My People” (Stocking, “Delimiting” 317) trope, the anthropologist “incarcerat[ing]” (Appaduri 37) the people they study within the bounded and synchronic culture composed around them. For Cather’s Tom Outland and Bradbury’s Spender, the simultaneous possession of and belonging to the object of analysis—a culture—is made literal by the fantasies of identity they enact. The colonial context and power dynamics that undergird the development of both modernist anthropology and mid-century science fiction remain, even as anthropology more broadly and Bradbury’s narrative specifically define themselves in opposition to the framework of cultural evolution that characterized earlier versions of colonial ideology.¹⁴

As I have argued elsewhere, Cather and Sapir’s theory of culture as a whole system of meaning, conceived as a spatial, aesthetic object, provides a link between the anthropological representation of that [End Page 322] culture in writing—the ethnography—and what would become the New Critical conception of the literary text as itself a structure of internally-generated meanings, by the late 1930s and 1940s. To the interdisciplinary conversation between anthropologists, artists, and literary critics over culture and form that shaped both anthropology and literary studies in the 1930s and 1940s, we can now add science fiction authors such as Bradbury, who serve as a transition toward what will become known as “social science fiction” from the 1960s onward. For social science fiction authors, the narrative strategies deployed by anthropologists to represent whole cultures in ethnographies shape the narrative strategies they adopted to render the whole cultures they imagine. As David Samuels has pointed out, both science fiction and ethnography rely on textual strategies of translation to convey both the otherness and the coherence of the alien culture being narrated. But both these narrative strategies rest on an underlying assumption shared by both the reader and the text—that cultures (and texts) do have meaning and are unified systems of signs that, with time and patience (and the aid of the guiding anthropologist/narrator), will make sense. That shared guiding assumption, undergirding modern ethnography, New Critical theories of literary form, and much science fiction, is made visible through Bradbury’s contemplation of culture-as-genuine-whole and the contrast between that formal wholeness and formless spurious modern culture.

This version of anthropology and science fiction as cultural critique also reveals a transformation of what Rieder calls the “anachronistic structure of anthropological difference” (6) shared by early science fiction and ethnology. Working within the paradigm of evolutionary theory, both fin-de-siècle ethnology and early science fiction, Rieder argues, produce narratives through which the Western encounter with a spatially distant Other is read as an encounter with the evolutionary past. Rather than an earlier temporal moment on a linear evolutionary scale, Sapir’s “genuine culture” and Bradbury’s “Martian culture” represent a unity that is past, but is just as importantly a potential utopian future. Sapir, for example, looks back to ancient Greece and Elizabethan England as genuine cultures and refers to contemporary regional movements within the US as hopeful alternatives to the homogenized, spurious culture encouraged by the nation-state, which “may in the dim future be trusted to melt away” (“Culture” 428). Similarly, Bradbury blurs the past and the future throughout The Martian Chronicles. On the one hand, Bradbury is notoriously nostalgic, often invoking as his idyll an image of small-town America that existed in the 1920s Midwest; on the other hand, in [End Page 323] crucial moments of the story cycle, the wholeness of Martian culture might be humanity’s future. For example, the story “Night Meeting” centers on a human/Martian encounter where it is impossible to tell which character represents the past and which the future; in the final story, “Million Year Picnic,” the last human families, who have fled to Mars to escape nuclear apocalypse on Earth, form a potential remnant from which a genuine culture might be rebuilt. Thus, in both Bradbury’s science fiction and Sapir’s (and other Boasians’) anthropology, the genuine cultures that might exist in the past also represent possible utopian futures. As Bradbury put it, “a man cannot possibly speak futures, unless he has a strong sense of the past” (“Portrait” 22).

Bradbury’s construction of culture, then, resonates particularly strongly with Sapir’s and Cather’s, despite the twenty years separating their respective texts. The resonances, as well as the differences—particularly with respect to the tension between the normative, universal and the relative, pluralist sense of the term—are revealing, both of Bradbury in particular and of science fiction and late US modernism more broadly. Critics have often noted Bradbury’s nostalgic depiction of small-town American life, drawn from his childhood memories of Waukegan, Illinois. This nostalgia, of course, is evident—albeit in complex ways—throughout The Martian Chronicles, most explicitly in “The Third Expedition” where rocket men land in what seems to be a version of “heaven” (Rabkin 94), a replica of Green Town, IL, circa 1926. In addition, while Bradbury composed many of the stories in The Martian Chronicles in the 1940s, he was immersing himself in a number of modernist texts from the 1920s and 1930s, including Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio—the text whose “story cycle” (Eller, Becoming 204) form became the inspiration for the form of The Martian Chronicles. Bradbury’s understanding of what Eller calls the “Modernist crisis-of-values” (4) was also shaped by texts from the 1920s and 1930s such as Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Modern Temper (1929). That Bradbury’s engagement in the late 1940s with debates over culture would be framed in terms that echo key articulations of the 1920s, then, could in some ways be attributed to Bradbury’s particular reading.

But this resonance between the constructions of culture-as-formal-whole characteristic of the 1920s and 1930s on the one hand, and Bradbury’s science fiction of the late 1940s on the other, also illuminates the relationship between science fiction and “modernisms.” As part of his argument for science fiction as “realist modernism,” Wegner proposes a more specific periodization of science fiction [End Page 324] as a “narrative technolog[y]” (1), formed through the Jamesonian dialectic of realist, modernist, and postmodernist phases. “Realism,” Wegner suggests, should be seen not as a specific narrative form but rather as the phase of any “collective project” (19) that “helps establish the cultural space for a set of practices”; in this sense, modernism in turn “experiments upon the institution of a practice itself.”

Wegner thus argues that a specifically American form of science fiction undergoes its realist phase in the late 1920s with the emergence and dominance of popular pulp magazine science fiction, in which Gernsback and the pulp science fiction editors and authors that followed demanded closer attention to scientific principles within narratives; an overall optimistic faith in science, rationality, and technology; and clear lines between good and evil offered within melodramatic space operas while keeping formal experimentation to a minimum.¹⁵ This realist phase within US science fiction in turn gave way to a second modernist phase in the postwar and early Cold War years as science fiction authors began to emphasize formal experimentation, along with a broader skepticism about science and technology borne out of the early Cold War context. One of the first masterpieces of this new modernist phase of science fiction, Wegner suggests, is The Martian Chronicles.

Wegner’s model suggests how modernist postwar US science fiction could be seen as taking up some of the problematics that characterized the literary and anthropological modernisms of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in their skepticism about science and modernity itself as well as their interest in formal innovations. At the same point on the dialectic of realism-modernism-postmodernism, but out of phase with one another historically, these varying but connected modernisms—literary, anthropological, and science fictional—are captured in Bradbury’s deployment of terms and categories that echo most strongly authors such as Sapir and Cather.

Imagining Indigenous Aliens, Part II: Pluralism, Universalism and (American) Identity on Bradbury’s Mars

These resonances—as well dissonances—between Bradbury’s text and those of Sapir and Cather also speak to the way specific tensions over culture’s multiple, emergent meanings in the 1920s continue to shift in postwar late modernism, and how these shifts in turn are reflected in the shifting image of “the American Indian” deployed within these debates. One lens through which to track these continuities and shifts is the relationships between culture and identity constructed in [End Page 325] these texts. Both Outland in The Professor’s House and Spender in The Martian Chronicles figure their possession of bounded, whole (Cliff Dweller/Martian) cultures as an ancestral inheritance. But if both Cather’s and Bradbury’s central characters, along with anthropologists such as Sapir and Benedict, are—as Philip Deloria argues—in a long tradition of white Americans “playing Indian,” the precise fantasies of identity they play out are different: within the complexly braided senses of culture both authors deploy, Cather emphasizes the pluralist threads, in the specific form of a nativist fantasy of national identity; in contrast, Bradbury foregrounds a national fantasy of universal human(ism). These shifts in turn reflect changes in the postwar discourse of culture both within anthropology and beyond.

As Walter Benn Michaels has argued, Cather’s construction of culture in The Professor’s House is part of a broader nativist argument about race, cultural pluralism, and national identity in 1920s American modernism. In Tom Outland’s relation to Cliff Dweller artifacts, Cather constructs an argument for an American identity in which Outland imaginatively inherits, along with their whole culture, the Native Americans’ status as native Americans—a status newly attested to by the Native American Citizenship Act of 1924. Outland’s specific national identity is reinforced by his memorizing The Aeneid while on the mesa—a text that also narrates the founding of an (imperial) nation and played an important role in the period’s nativist rhetoric. This nativist, antiassimilationist logic is a crucially pluralist logic in which, among different cultures, your culture is not determined by what you actually do, but who you are; that prior identity, Michaels argues, is a racial identity.¹⁶ In this logic, Native Americans emerge as cultural heroes for refusing to assimilate; dying without biological descendants, the Cliff Dwellers leave their artifacts and status as native “Americans” (Michaels, Our America 44) free for “stray[s]” (Cather 165) such as Outland to “inherit” (219). It is crucial that Tom Outland plays Indian, but never is one genealogically, and is thus free from the threat of miscegenation.

Bradbury’s narrative diverges from Cather’s in crucial ways that reflect a shift in the broader conversation around culture and pluralism between the 1920s and the 1940s. Like Cather and Sapir, Bradbury intertwines pluralism and universalism: The Martian Chronicles is pluralist in its indifference to the content of culture while universalist in its emphasis on the form of culture as above all whole. But the whole potential culture represented by Spender is constructed as a universal culture rather than an exclusively national one. Or, more precisely, Spender’s specifically American identity is also constructed as universal. [End Page 326] Throughout The Martian Chronicles, humanity is represented exclusively by Americans: “the rockets were American and it stayed that way, while Europe and Asia and South American and Australia and the islands watched Roman candles leave them behind . . . buried in war or thoughts of war” (87). As noted, the imagery of settlers arriving on Mars is drawn from images of US westward expansion and pioneering. But in contrast to Outland’s recitation of an epic of nation-building, Spender recites lyric Romantic poetry in the form of Byron’s “So We’ll Go No More a Roving” (from which the story’s title is taken), a poem that narrates fading strength and desire. While the poem could be read as a comment on the cyclic “course of empire” (Spender’s captain calls the Martian’s peaceful “[acceptance of] what came to them” [55], an “object lesson in civilizations”), the poem has no particular national content but rather makes universal claims about imagination, desire, creativity, and culture. Spender himself, in his ability to recognize Martian culture as culture, is marked not as an American, but as an exceptional individual—a true Arnoldian “alien” (73) who is able to become an actual alien (species), recognizing the universal structure of Martian culture as whole, beyond its irreducibly different content.¹⁷

The universalism of Spender’s (American) identity is matched throughout The Martian Chronicles by what emerges as the fundamental interchangeability of humans and Martians: rather than—following the logic of pluralism—being ontologically different, humans and Martians share a sameness that allows one to shift into the other, raising the persistent question through the text of who is the alien. From the earliest expeditions, humans and Martians share a telepathic bond, allowing Martians to speak snatches of English. In a number of tales, Martians shapeshift to embody the most nostalgic memories of the humans they encounter—to weaponize that nostalgia in “The Third Expedition” or to assimilate to and survive within human society in “The Martian.” In “The Night Meeting,” the human Tomas encounters the Martian Muh Ca on a lonely highway in the Martian mountains. While they can communicate telepathically, each appears as a ghostly image to the other, and each sees a different scene overlaid on the landscape around them: Muh Ca, a thriving, festive Martian town; Tomas, a ruin, as opposed to the new human town to which he is headed. Each insists that they are alive and the other is a ghost. Crucially, the story is structured such that it begs the question, as Muh Ca puts it, “how can you prove who is from the Past, and who from the Future?” (85). Is Muh Ca a Martian ghost from a past long fallen to ruin, and is Tomas the human present and future of Mars? [End Page 327] Or is Muh Ca in fact a glimpse into Mars’s future, the environment to which humans have assimilated, becoming something new?

This possibility, of course, is explored more fully in several other of Bradbury’s Mars stories that did not end up in The Martian Chronicles, most notably “The Naming of Names,” published just before the first edition of The Martian Chronicles appeared in print. In that story, humans slowly morph, physically and mentally, into Martians, speaking their ancient language and abandoning their imported human towns for the ancient cities, despite their efforts to, as Spender predicts, “rip it up, rip the skin off and change [Mars] to fit ourselves” (54) by (as Tomas describes) creating their “Green City” (84) off of the “Illinois Highway” built with “a million board feet of Oregon lumber.” These are narratives of assimilation, with humans as the assimilating immigrants.¹⁸

By the The Martian Chronicles’s final story, “The Million Year Picnic,” Spender’s imagined Martian genealogy is made literal, as the members of the last human family, having fled to Mars to escape nuclear war on Earth, become Martians. In the concluding lines, the father, who has promised his sons that they will “see Martians” (182) brings them to the edge of a canal:

“There they are,” said Dad, and he shifted Michael on his shoulder and pointed straight down.

The Martians were there . . .

The Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad.

The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water.

The inheritors of Martian status are, notably, the archetypal 1950s American family—a white, heterosexual couple with 3.5 kids, the classic nuclear family surviving the nuclear apocalypse who are met by another nuclear family (with girls to pair with their boys) to become humanity’s future. As with Spender, the family is American, but their American-ness is marked as universal. When the father burns documents from his work (as a “former state governor” [180]), he describes himself as “burning a way of life,” but that “way of life” is not specifically American, but “of Earth”: “‘that way of life is being burned clean of Earth right now.’ And then all the papers were gone except one. All the laws and beliefs of Earth were burnt into small hot ashes which soon would be carried off in the wind. Timothy looked at the last thing that Dad tossed in the fire. It was a map of the world” (181; emphasis added). American culture, then, is framed [End Page 328] as universal human culture, and as Americans, they stand in for humanity itself. By linking culture, nation, and race, the conclusion of Bradbury’s novel might be said to reflect a particular midcentury (white) American self-understanding in the emerging Cold War era as both exceptional and universal: exceptional in its embodiment of values of democracy, equality, and liberty, and universal in imagining those values as everyone’s values.

These elements of universalism, within the broader complex tension between relativist pluralism and hierarchical universalism articulated in Bradbury’s concept of culture, reflect similar shifts in the deployment of culture in postwar discourse within anthropology as well as more broadly. During the 1930s, ideas of cultural pluralism undergirded artists’ and intellectuals’ exploration and representation of a variety of regional, ethnic, and folk cultures that made up the US; as Warren I. Susman has put it, the “idea of culture [was] domesticated” (157) in the period, and the emphasis on difference was framed as democratic, antitotalitarian, and antifascist. At the same time, anthropologists such as Benedict deployed cultural relativism to simultaneously argue for respecting whole cultures different from that of the US while also using their alternative examples to spur a critical self-examination of American norms. In the years surrounding World War II, however, and particularly in the postwar years, Boasian anthropologists, along with other social scientists, intellectuals, and artists, began to retreat from that emphasis on cultural pluralism and relativism. With the imminence of the Nazi threat, and then all-out war with German and Japan, the idea that the US was potentially a divided nation (let alone divided along ethnic and racial lines, in a way uncomfortably close to Nazi racial ideology) became politically sensitive, while the idea that Nazi Germany and imperial Japan represented cultures that needed to be respected was even less palatable for wartime Americans.¹⁹

As part of this shift, anthropologists such as Mead, Benedict, and others moved toward a theory of culture “beyond relativity” (Benedict, “Ideologies” 383) that would allow them to lend their particular expertise to the war effort, and—working with the US government through a variety of government-funded think tanks and institutions—to analyze the cultural patterns of various wartime allied and adversarial nations.²⁰ Benedict’s influential study of Japanese culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, emerged from her wartime work for the Office of War Information (OWI), and she continued to analyze the cultural patterns of various nation-states into the early Cold War period through her Office of Naval Research-funded Research on [End Page 329] Contemporary Cultures project based at Columbia University. Mead founded the Council on Intercultural Relations in 1941 (renamed the Institute for Intercultural Studies in 1944) and joined the Food Habits Committee at the US Department of Agriculture—an avenue that gave her and her colleagues entrée to government departments and policymakers. Along with her analyses of various national cultures, she also produced her influential study of American cultural patterns, Keep Your Powder Dry (1942), in which she constructed a consensual, transhistorical American culture unified precisely around the idea of democracy itself. In short Benedict, Mead, and others deployed a version of cultural pluralism—that is, each nation is a culture and has a “national character” (Hegeman 166)—in the name of universalism, specifically, the superior moral value and universal desirability of US-style liberal democracy, a model that would make “the world safe for difference” (Benedict, Chrysanthemum 15).

This blurring of boundaries between what, in the 1930s, had been constructed as multiple, bounded (regional/ethnic) cultures to imagine in the postwar years a unified American culture, in turn reshaped how Native Americans were represented, both in the popular imagination and in actual policy. Deloria, for example, argues that white Americans’ relationship with Native Americans—as individuals and as a culture—shifted in this period, as reflected in the shifting dynamics of “playing Indian” performed by “Indian hobbyists” (235) who sought to learn and perform “traditional” Native American arts and crafts. Interwar hobbyists, he suggests, emphasized Native American difference, and saw them as racially distinct and temporally separate from modernity; authenticity thus resided not in actual, living Native Americans but in traditional artifacts. In contrast, in the wake of communal experience of World War II and the ideological emphasis on democracy and freedom—coupled with postwar disillusion over the contradictions in American life surrounding precisely these issues—there was among white Americans a “widespread reworking of notions of color and culture” (132) around “how those boundaries could (or could not) be bridged, and . . . what it meant to make some part of somebody else—music, speech, authenticity—some part of you” (132–33). This new form of what Deloria calls “people hobbyists” (140) thus saw “authenticity . . . not in the archaic object, but in the contemporary Indian person dancing and singing at the powwow.” Native Americans could thus be seen as “assimilating . . . equal participants in American society and economy,” while still maintaining authentic traditions. Conversely, if “being Indian was most of all a matter of behavior” (141) in the present, then “individual [End Page 330] non-Indians could also learn it” and cross what was now perceived as a blurred boundary to “grasp hold of the authentic.”

This emphasis on a universal American identity shared by white people was also reflected, for example, in shifting Hollywood images of Native Americans. The image of the Hollywood American Indian, which in the 1920s and 1930s emphasized difference—either as foreign enemies of white America’s Manifest Destiny, or victims of white oppression who struggled nobly to maintain their cultural distinctiveness (or vanished trying)—shifted in the years leading up to World War II to emphasize “Indians as allies” in a united America. In 1942, the OWI—while employing anthropologists such as Benedict for the war effort—issued the “Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry” with instructions admonishing Hollywood studios to depict “dark skinned people” (Aleiss 76), including Native Americans, as part of an American melting pot united in the fight for democracy. This trend was epitomized in films such as Broken Arrow (released the same year as The Martian Chronicles): while the filmmakers consulted anthropological sources to portray elements of Apache life with ethnographic accuracy, the film also dissolved linguistic and ideological differences (Apache characters speak in eloquent English) with the friendship between white Army officer Thomas Jeffords (Jimmy Stewart) and Apache leader Cochise (Jeff Chandler) doubled by the permanent peace established between the Apache Nation and the US government. As Angela Aleiss argues, the film suggests that “peaceful coexistence between Indians and whites was achieved only through the loss of Indian identity” (90).

This shift toward universalism and assimilation in popular culture also characterized actual policy toward Native Americans in this period. As part of the emphasis on cultural pluralism articulated by American anthropologists such as Sapir, Benedict, La Farge, and others, in the 1930s the US Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), under the leadership of John Collier, shifted from the policies of forced assimilation that had characterized the previous decades to a policy emphasizing cultural pluralism and tribal sovereignty. By the postwar years, however, the BIA had again shifted back to the “termination” of federal responsibility for upholding treaty agreements and tribal sovereignty and again encouraged assimilation. By 1950 even La Farge—whose Laughing Boy popularized a pluralist version of Indigenous American cultures in the 1930s, and who worked as President of the Association of American Indian Affairs through the 1930s and 1940s—stated that “our basic over-all theory or policy is that Indians must become absorbed to the general population. In being thus [End Page 331] absorbed, they may or may not be able to retain enriching elements of their own culture. . . . Our problem is so to guide and protect the process of amalgamation that it will be carried through with benefit to both groups, with justice, and with humanity” (qtd. in Hasse 114).²¹

The tension in Bradbury’s construction between a version of cultural pluralism and a universalism that allows the blurring of boundaries between separate (American) cultural identities, as well as between an American identity and a universal human identity, participates in the postwar debate over culture that included anthropologists, artists, and government policymakers. This universalism—blurring the boundaries between (for anthropologists and in American popular culture) white and Native Americans and between (for Bradbury) human and Martian—is, as several Indigenous critics have suggested, a double-edged sword. On the one hand, downplaying Native American cultures as distinct wholes makes them available for easier appropriation for white Americans playing Indian and for policymakers seeking more rapid assimilation of Native Americans into American culture and life. Certainly, one might see the Martian’s struggle, in the story “The Martian,” to fit the variety of fantasies imposed on him by the humans with whom he seeks to live, as a reflection of white Americans’ demands that Native Americans be all things to all people. (That struggle kills the Martian, thus fitting into, once again, the same “vanishing Indian” trope that has supported such neglect and abuse even as it supposedly laments its tragedy).

At the same time, some Indigenous critics have read The Martian Chronicles as an embrace of an antiessentialism (cultural or racial) that makes room for hybrid identities and temporalities. Grace Dillon, for example, finds antiessentialist “mixedblood messages and survivance stories” (66) in Bradbury’s dramatization of the fluid boundaries between human and Martian, the persistence with which The Martian Chronicles and Bradbury’s other Mars stories problematize the question of who is the alien, and in particular the way these tales foreground the process of “becoming” (56) Martian. As Dillon puts is, “those Bradbury stories where distinctions between Earthmen and Martians blur, where Martians Nanabozho nâssa ijinagwad, morph themselves into othered selves, bejig kéma gaié nabané, to placate Earthmen, where Earthmen become Martians, where Martians may have been Earthmen all along” (59), these tales, she argues, narratively “eras[e] white supremacy and ameliorat[e] Manifest Destiny by imagining racialized becoming in place of racialized othering. There really are no Martians. There is only us” (65). “This message of unity,” Dillon suggests, “might strike us, even today, as wishful thinking at best and [End Page 332] as hallucinatory in practice” while nonetheless offering a glimpse of an alternative construction of culture and identity.

These alternative constructions of culture and identity in turn generate alternative temporalities that rework those commonly associated with both modernist anthropology and early science fiction. As critics of both anthropology and science fiction have noted, both fields have often relied on Rieder’s aforementioned “anachronistic structure of anthropological difference” (6), or what Johannes Fabian has called “allochronism” (32). Fabian argues that modern(ist) anthropology, with its emphasis on culture as a bounded, synchronic system of meaning, most often embodied in so-called primitive groups, likewise relegates its Other to a time frame separate from the anthropological observer and from modernity. At the same time, critics such as Mark Rifkin, addressing specifically representations of Native Americans, have argued that attempts to overcome this allochrony with a “coevalness” (viii) that asserts “a shared modernity or presentness of Natives and non-natives” are themselves problematic. While inserting Native Americans into a narrative of shared “modernity” might counter images of them as trapped in the past, these narratives also “tend to bracket the ways that the idea of a shared present is not a neutral designation but is, instead, defined by settler institutions, interests and imperatives.” Thus, Rifkin says, “dominant nonnative geographies, intellectual and political categories, periodizations, and conceptions of causality”—including “history”—are treated “as given” into which Native American experiences are inserted.

If, as Dillon argues, Bradbury’s particular braiding of pluralism and universalism blurs rigid categories of human and Martian to make possible alternative identities, it also creates temporalities alternative to settler time. Bradbury’s text, as the title indicates, is centrally concerned with time and history: from its use of dates set in the future, to its repetition of and variation on the frontier mythology of the US past in a space-travel future, to the particular brand of nostalgia deployed in the text as noted previously, Bradbury plays with concepts of past, present, and future and blurs the boundaries between these categories as much as he does the boundaries between human and alien, self and Other. This interplay of past, present, and future is most evident in “Night Meeting.” Placed strategically in the middle of the Chronicles, balanced equally between the past and the future, pointing equally in either direction, the story hinges on the characters’—and the reader’s—inability to determine which character is the other’s past and who is their future—or indeed if they exist on the same timeline at all. The result is a temporality that [End Page 333] is both universal and relativist: universal in that they might occupy the same timeline and relativist in that it is impossible to privilege any one position. Or to put it another way, the temporality is both allochronous and coeval, with the tension between them expressed spatially in the characters’ occupation of the same space, but not at the same time. A distinct Martian temporality is thus given equal status to “settler time” (Rifkin viii).

Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, then, engages—in multiple, complex ways—with debates over new versions of culture developed in the interwar years. These debates, which are a part of an interdisciplinary conversation including anthropologists, artists, and critics, include—as Bradbury’s text makes evident—the new forms of science fiction that arose in pulp magazines and novels. Bradbury’s text, in particular his central story “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright,” reflects and participates in the generative tension that characterizes these debates, between traditions of Culture as a universal, normative standard of comparative value, and new versions of cultures as plural, relative ways of life that constitute bounded, coherent, whole systems of meaning. Through its multiple interlocking stories, the composite novel echoes an earlier phase of this debate, constructing a version of genuine cultures as plural meaningful wholes that themselves constitute aesthetic structures. At the same time, Bradbury’s text reflects shifts in these conceptions in the years surrounding World War II and the early Cold War as both anthropologists and artists begin to emphasize a more universal conception of culture “beyond relativity” (Benedict, “Ideologies” 32). Playing out these debates through his construction of Martian culture and identity, Bradbury draws on and makes visible the multiple ways anthropological and popular discourses in the interwar and early Cold War period took Native American lifeways as paradigmatic examples of these theories. Bradbury’s dramatization in turn reflects both the problematic ways anthropology and popular culture have “incarcerated” (Appaduri 37) Native Americans in competing visions of difference and assimilation as well as some of the potentially liberatory ways that the speculative element of science fiction enabled alternative visions of culture and identity to emerge.

In some ways, Bradbury’s fiction—and science fiction more broadly—constitutes a site that maintains the interdisciplinary ferment that characterizes discussions of culture in the interwar years. That wider interdisciplinary conversation around culture, I would suggest, became increasingly foreclosed with the rise of the disciplined and departmentalized postwar university where, for example, literary [End Page 334] studies came to see itself as more rigorously separate from the social sciences, and from which emerged what C. P. Snow would label the “two cultures” (2) of the humanities and the sciences just a few years later. This fissuring of cultures was doubled by the related emergence of narratives, within intellectual circles, of the great divide that separates high culture and aesthetic modernism from popular or mass culture. Bradbury’s science fiction, riding the tension between these multiple versions of culture, maintains that interdisciplinary ferment and points to the way science fiction as a field continued to engage in debates over culture and identity—alongside and in dialogue with anthropology—throughout the twentieth century.