In Dan Simmons’ Endymion (1996), during a pregnant pause in a scene set on the remote outpost world of Hyperion, plutocratic duck hunters stalk exotically transplanted mallards with expensive energy rifles while their guide, Raul Endymion, takes a breather to notice that a thing of beauty is a joy forever.
“I felt the usual thrill I always encounter in such moments: my throat tightens and my heart pounds, seems to me to stop for a moment, and then palpably aches” (Simmons 10).
Beyond subtle echoes of famous Keatsian diction (e.g., “I hate poetry that has a palpable design on me” or the opener to “Ode to a Nightingale”, “my heart aches”), there is the typical Keatsian sentiment in this scene, that is, a preternatural receptivity to the aesthetically pleasing elevated to a paramount value. The literary critic R.F Thomas might consider this type of allusion “casual” since it “recalls a specific antecedent but only in a general sense.”
Perhaps casual, though, is too glib since the rich allusiveness of this entirely typical passage from the Simmons’ monumental quartet of space opera, dubbed the Hyperion Cantos, evokes what Gérard Genette has classified as an “architext”, i.e., a palimpsest or skein of references that is “everywhere — above, beneath, around the text, which spins its webs by hooking it here and there onto that network” which underpins the dense tissue of allusion. According to this idea, the myriad allusions to John Keats that permeate Simmons’ space operas function as a kind of partially shaken Etch A Sketch in which the contours of previous drawing are still visible over the new one.
Such a pervasive, implicit architext would be in striking contrast to the many singular and explicit allusions of which there are numerous littered throughout the series. In the same book, during another transient lull in the action, for instance, Aenea, the messianic twelve-year-old daughter of a John Keats “cybrid” (i.e., a clone implanted with a mind upload of the dead poet), explicates the hymn to pan from Endymion, the original poem by Keats:
“by that [‘fellowship with essence’] Father meant an imaginative and sensuous response to nature…just the sort of feeling were describing earlier…Father included poetry and music and art as a response to nature…it’s a fallible but human way of resonating to the universe — nature creates that energy of creation in us. For father imagination and truth were the same thing. He once wrote: ‘the Human may be compared to Adam’s dream — he awoke and found it truth.”
(Simmons 281)
The direct call out and commentary here — even including the paratext of Keats’ letters to the editor of Endymion, John Taylor, and its voice-of-god authorial gloss on Endymion’s Book I speech on the gradations of human happiness as a “pleasure thermometer” —serve as a knowing intertextual touchstone. However, the overarching architext of Keatsian allusion in the series, a veritable echo chamber of complex referentiality, not only informs the Romantic sensibility of the series but also haunts the reinvention of the canonical literary figure in the commercial subgenre of contemporary space opera.
In other words, onto the pulpy corpus of traditional space opera, Simmons grafts this literary notion of the sublime imagination, specifically the distinction of what Keats described as the “indescribable feud” between the brooding, cerebral imagination of the natural and empirical world and the warm dynamic affections and pathetic fallacy of the human agent. This imagination is both psychological and scientific since, as Christopher Ricks in Keats and Embarrassment explains, Keats’ truth of the imagination “is not simply located within us, but is a consequence of our knowing — and our being truly able to imagine, intermittently or partially — that we are located elsewhere than we are” (Ricks 118).
Indeed during many moments in this teemingly dense quartet of novels, the allusions border on postmodern travesty or burlesque in their irreverent parody and pastiche of John Keats as canonical British poet of the Romantic period, especially in the profane outbursts of Martin Silenus, and the delicious speculation that if Keats had lived long enough he might have devolved into a cranky vulgarian. Nevertheless, ringing such slapstick and lowbrow changes on high culture is not simply in the service of comic flippancy.
The Ultimate faction of the Techno-Core, after all, is that omnipresent SF trope of the sadistic artificial intelligence bent on destroying humanity, but the crucial postmodern twist here is that the runaway AIs update the terror of the Romantic sublime. The digital storage of mind-state copies of people like John Keats, referred to as “personality retrievals”, by these renegade AIs, reconfigures for the era of Big Data, machine learning, and the explosive acceleration of automation, the classic Keatsian dilemma of the frozen tableau of immortality over against the “weariness, the fever, and the fret” in which our tragic knowledge of time’s passage lays waste to our frail grasp on eternal beauty.
Likewise, the gothic menace of the mechanized, time-travelling Shrike, and true to its avian namesake, its grotesque impaling of victims on the razor-bladed thorns of the tree of pain, not to mention the masochistic cult of suffering-worshippers the Shrike inspires, all remake for our time the achingly lovely somberness of Keats’s poetry, its bittersweet voice of anguished joy. In an astonishing exhibition of raw writing virtuosity, Simmons helped to renovate the ghettoized playground of space opera for serious adult readers, retrofitting all its hackneyed tropes of galactic empires and faster-than-light starships, with a nuanced, densely allusive literary sensibility.