A Question of Identity

Cox, Arthur Jean. "A Question of Identity." The Riverside Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 3, 1965, pp. 88–110.

Arthur Jean Cox's "A Question of Identity" (1965) excavates two motif-chains — "large heads" and "faces" — from Harry Bates's sparse solo science fiction bibliography (1931–1953), reconstructing an unsystematized philosophical architecture beneath the pulp surface. Published in Leland Sapiro's Riverside Quarterly, the essay tracks cranial hypertrophy as intellect's somatic pathology and facial obsession as identity's fragile marker. Subsidiary figures — the doppelgänger foremost, shadowed by the grotesque and the forbidden room — thread through both motif-chains. Cox's method — a psychoanalytic close reading that never cites its metapsychological sources — stages its own interpretive "impasse" midway through the analysis, licensing the introduction of "Race" (biological collectivity) as the suppressed third term that displaces the Intellect/Identity dyad.

Dr. Willian Perpetuo Busch reads the impasse as undecidable between genuine methodological breakdown and calculated rhetorical maneuver; the structural effect is identical regardless. Busch's intervention targets Cox's terminological operation on "Race" — the surgical evacuation of the word's political charge to reconstruct it as a purified phylogenetic category. The consequent analytical separation of the grotesque (treated as formal strategy) from the racial-biological determinism it aesthetically encodes draws the same scrutiny. The essay's arc terminates in Bates's resolution — the voluntary dissolution of personal identity into a collective "Psychic Ocean." Intellect's extinction is framed as cosmic reconciliation.

Cox's intervention and the question of method

Arthur Jean Cox's "A Question of Identity" (1965) tracks two interlocking motif-chains across Harry Bates's solo science fiction bibliography — "large heads" (intellect) and "faces" (identity) — reconstructing from them an unsystematized philosophical architecture buried in the pulp.

The essay appeared in Leland Sapiro's Riverside Quarterly, a literary fanzine whose rigor exceeded its institutional standing; Cox treats Bates with a seriousness no peer-reviewed venue had thought to extend to him. Cox's intervention is methodological before it is thematic. He stages a deliberate crisis in his own analytical instrument — confessing an "impasse" when textual-immanent motif-tracking buckles under its own contradictions — then introduces "Race" (biological collectivity) as the suppressed third term that cracks the Intellect/Identity dyad open into cosmological territory.

Dr. Willian Perpetuo Busch reads the essay's self-presentation as a purely textual-immanent exercise — a reading sealed inside the boundaries of Bates's prose — as itself the first object of scrutiny. Cox's method, Busch argues, is more sophisticated than its surface suggests — permeable to external elements in ways the essay's self-presentation actively obscures. Cox imports the vocabulary of castration anxiety and infantile sexual curiosity wholesale. He names retributive punishment as a motor of Bates's plots — yet never once cites the metapsychological tradition from which those terms derive. He uses Bates's editorial history — the racism of the early pulps included — as contextual evidence; the rhetorical gesture of excluding biography masks the operation.

Whether Cox's methodological "impasse" is a genuine breakdown of New Critical formalism or a calculated rhetorical maneuver licensing the introduction of "Race" as an ontological category is, in Busch's reading, undecidable — and the undecidability is itself significant. If the impasse is staged, the essay is a psychoanalytic close reading disguised as a textual-immanent one, the disguise functioning as part of the critical machinery. If genuine, the text itself — Bates's fiction — forced Cox beyond formalist statistics because immanent motif-tracking simply cannot metabolize cosmological or phylogenetic imperatives. Busch holds both readings in suspension: the structural effect is identical regardless. The essay breaks its own frame to admit extratextual content. Reading Cox requires reading through Cox — tracking what the essay does against what it claims to do.

Corpus, exclusion criterion, and bibliographic vulnerability

Harry Bates (Hiram Gilmore Bates III, 1900–1981) edited Astounding Stories from 1930 to 1933. His solo fiction output between 1931 and 1953 is sparse. Cox excludes the early collaborations with D. W. Hall — published under the pseudonyms Anthony Gilmore and H. G. Winter — because "it is impossible to determine precisely which of the ideas in these early stories are his and which are Hall's" (Cox 88). The exclusion is methodologically sound in principle; its execution, less so. "The Return of the Hawk Carse" (Amazing Stories, July 1942), the final Hawk Carse episode, sits inside Cox's analytical corpus despite bibliographically disputed authorship — the Science Fiction Encyclopedia attributes it to Bates alone; the Internet Speculative Fiction Database catalogs it as a Bates/Hall collaboration under the Gilmore pseudonym [citation needed for ISFDB/SFE entries]. Cox does not flag the ambiguity.

Busch identifies that silence as non-trivial, but concedes the charge requires qualification. The ISFDB and SFE are 21st-century instruments; Cox, writing in 1965 for a literary fanzine, operated under conditions of bibliographic uncertainty that were simply the state of pulp scholarship. No cross-referenced digital archive existed to flag the Hawk Carse ambiguity. Busch does not claim Cox was negligent — the material limitations of mid-century pulp bibliography made comprehensive authorial attribution aspirational at best. What Busch identifies is a structural vulnerability in the exclusion criterion itself: the principle of isolating a single authorial unconscious was always exposed to archival instabilities that no critic working within the fanzine ecology of the 1960s could have fully mapped. The essay's foundational move — filtering out co-authorship to excavate a "pure" Bates — rests, as Busch notes, on a boundary the archive had not yet settled, and whose settlement would require infrastructures Cox could not have anticipated.

The solo corpus spans ten stories: "Slave Ship from Space" (1931, as A. R. Holmes); "A Matter of Size" (1934); "Alas, All Thinking!" (1935); "The Experiment of Dr. Sarconi" (1940); "Farewell to the Master" (1940); "A Matter of Speed" (1941); "The Mystery of the Blue God" (1942); "The Return of the Hawk Carse" (1942); "Death of a Sensitive" (1953); "The Triggered Dimension" (1953).

Psychoanalytic apparatus without theoretical citation

Cox's method is a close reading saturated in psychoanalytic vocabulary whose theoretical provenance he never acknowledges. Freud and Jung: no metapsychological authority receives citation. The apparatus is unmistakable all the same. Cox names "the castrative element" directly (Cox 90). Behind the intrusion motif he locates "a fragment of some unassimilated incident of infantile sexual curiosity" (Cox 100). The dangerousness of intellect in Bates he pins to "the desire for the threat of retributive sexual punishment" (Cox 100). A framework operationalized without being theorized — the posture grants Cox interpretive leverage and shields him from defending the epistemological premises he imports wholesale.

Large heads: intellect as somatic pathology

Disproportionately large heads recur across Bates's fiction with the insistence of a diagnostic symptom. "Alas, All Thinking!" terminates humanity's evolutionary trajectory in a massive cranium devoid of a body. Characters in "A Matter of Size" shrink to oversized skulls; "The Triggered Dimension" literalizes the figure — disembodied heads drifting through the air. Cox refuses the pulp-sensationalist reading. The large head is a hieroglyph: intellect made monstrous flesh. "It is not heads that Bates associates with rationality (or, more accurately, great intellect, knowledge), but large heads" (Cox 93). Cranial hypertrophy signifies rationality's pathological overgrowth at the expense of biological wholeness — mind consuming body.

Bates's anti-intellectualism runs through a double bind: "he not only regards intellect as dangerous when possessed by others, but also as not being conducive to happiness when possessed by oneself" (Cox 90). Sterile by nature, intellect severs the individual from vitality. Cox excavates a psychoanalytic substrate beneath the somatic imagery — heads shrunk and severed, wrenched free of their bodies — carrying what he calls, with clinical bluntness, "a castrative element (to name it as such)" that is "quite obvious" (Cox 90). Intellectual curiosity warrants retributive punishment; the thinker's anatomical reduction to disembodied cranium enacts, at the level of figuration, a forfeiture of corporeal wholeness that doubles as the sentence itself.

The Gnut anomaly

The anomaly is Gnut. The robot in "Farewell to the Master" possesses the same somatic marker — a "large head" — that Bates everywhere deploys for hypertrophied intellect, yet the narrative extends to Gnut an unmistakable "affection," portraying its artificial intelligence as "dignified, kind and gentle" (Cox 109). Cox identifies the paradox without resolving it. Gnut is non-biological, devoid of the organic "Race" and instinct that Bates elsewhere exalts as the stabilizing force of the cosmos; by the internal logic of Bates's own system, the robot should be monstrous. The affective warmth fractures the Intellect/Instinct binary from within. Busch reads the fracture as structural.

Gnut is, in Busch's assessment, the point where Bates's fiction resists the schema Cox constructs around it — the text produces an object the interpretive framework cannot metabolize. Cox registers the fissure without suturing it (to his credit as a reader), but the unresolved anomaly, Busch argues, retroactively destabilizes the entire Intellect/Instinct architecture. If the purest embodiment of non-biological intellect in Bates's corpus elicits tenderness rather than horror, the anti-intellectual thesis is not a thesis at all. It is a tendency — one that the author himself could override when a given narrative demanded it.

Faces, identity, and the doppelgänger

Faces work on a different axis. Where large heads encode intellect-as-pathology, faces encode identity. "Bates invests nearly all the qualities of his characters in their heads and faces" (Cox 96); a character's face is the character. The synecdoche "Two new faces joined us" — dropped into a story about literal floating heads — collapses part and whole (Cox 96). Cox's argument reaches its most compressed formulation at this juncture: "His purpose in reducing his characters to heads alone is to present them as pure identities. He wishes to isolate their identities and show them floating free, uninvolved with the material world" (Cox 96).

The doppelgänger motif pushes the identity crisis from figuration into plot mechanics. Cox distinguishes Bates's doubles from the standard literary tradition: "In most such stories, the duplicate persons represent antagonistic motives or embody contradictory attitudes: One of the identical twins is Good, the other is Evil" (Cox 94). Bates's duplicates refuse that distribution. His doubles "usually have the same motives. In fact, they are the same person, not two different persons who look alike" (Cox 95). "You split me!" — the anguished cry of a duplicated character — registers no conflict between competing values; what it registers is the sheer ontological horror of identity's divisibility (Cox 95). Machines are the instruments of that splitting. Dr. Sarconi's duplication device fractures the body. From a mechanical voice recording, Gnut's flesh-synthesizing apparatus reconstitutes it. The time-travel mechanisms in "A Matter of Speed" and "Death of a Sensitive" force characters to confront their own temporal doubles — the self split across its own chronology. Cox does not frame the point in these terms.

Busch proposes a stronger formulation: technology in Bates is an ontological vector. The machines have nothing to do with speculative-fictional hardware extrapolated for narrative convenience. Each one, in Busch's reading, exists to catalyze the splitting of the self; its technological plausibility is irrelevant to its narrative work. None of the machines is explored as technology. All are deployed as instruments of dissociation — the material form intellect's fracturing power assumes when it enters the plot. Bates writes "science fiction" in which the science, as Busch understands it, is a delivery mechanism for ontological damage.

A subsidiary motif — the forbidden room — threads through the bibliography. Characters breach laboratories and force entry into private studies; they trespass through hospital wards and museums. The act of intrusion carries the charge of "curiosity ... charged with awe and anxiety and countered somewhat by a contemptuous distaste for those who pry and disturb" (Cox 100). Curiosity is "the intellectual passion" (Cox 100). The spaces violated are invariably sites of intellectual labor. Cox reads the intrusion motif through the psychoanalytic lens already established: the forbidden room recapitulates infantile sexual curiosity; knowledge gained through trespass brings retributive punishment down on the trespasser.

The grotesque and its biopolitical substrate

The grotesque is Bates's rhetorical armament against rationality itself. Radical disproportion — anatomical elements wrenched from their natural contexts — is a calculated assault on logical coherence, whatever the pulp packaging suggests. "Bates uses grotesque conceptions to give new perspectives on things: to show them in a radically different light, or to discredit them by rendering them grimly ludicrous" (Cox 104).

Absurdity subverts rationality from the inside; the grotesque is anti-rationality weaponized at the level of narrative form, a battering ram aimed at the fortress intellect built. Cox treats this weaponization as a purely formal strategy — an aesthetic operation independent of the sociopolitical content he has already made visible and will shortly bracket.

Busch identifies the separation as the essay's deepest analytical omission. The grotesque in Bates — bodies made monstrous through anatomical distortion — disproportion calculated to overwhelm — does not operate in a political vacuum. If the anti-rational aesthetic is intrinsically linked to the racial essentialism and authoritarian impulses Cox himself acknowledges in Bates's editorial milieu, then the grotesque enacts a biopolitical vision where "Race" (the phylogenetic collective) annihilates individual consciousness — anti-rationality harnessed to a political program. Cox's surgical separation of the grotesque (treated as formal strategy) from "Race" (treated as purified ontological category) obscures the possibility — one Busch considers near-certain — that Bates's aesthetic and his ideology are the same thing operating at different levels of the text.

The disproportion Cox reads as anti-rational armament is — Busch contends — the aesthetic signature of the racial-biological determinism he will later identify and bracket. Busch argues that the grotesque, integrated into the ontological critique of "Race," exposes Bates's political prejudices at work in narrative form itself — the formal and the ideological, in this author, cannot be analytically separated without cost.

The staged impasse and the terminological operation on "Race"

The essay's structural coup is the moment Cox stages his own interpretive failure. The motif-tracking method — "statistical analyses pointing to the repetition of faces, the use of doubles, and so on" — proved "too narrow" to reconcile the contradictions between Intellect and Identity (Cox 97). Elements resistant to assimilation into the textual-immanent framework precipitate "from another dimension, that is, from outside the natural boundaries of the story" (Cox 97). Methodological insufficiency — whether genuinely suffered or rhetorically performed, a question Busch leaves deliberately open — licenses the introduction of a concept absent from the surface of Bates's prose — "Race."

Cox performs a deliberate terminological operation on the word. He acknowledges "an outspoken consciousness of race, in the popular sense of the word" in Bates's early work and editorial practice — a racism that "showed itself in an ugly way" (Cox 107). Busch reads what follows as a decision rather than a discovery. Cox needs "Race" to function as the phylogenetic imperative — instinct incarnated at the species level, the "Collective Man" who acts through individuals sharing identical organic constitutions — so he evacuates the word of its political charge.

The sociopolitical content is acknowledged, then surgically removed; "Race" is reconstructed as a biological-ontological category purified of the racism Cox himself has just made visible. The operation is analytically productive (it generates the essay's most powerful structural insight), but Busch insists it is an operation — a terminological intervention whose costs should be legible. The ugly racism of the early pulps does not vanish because the critic has redesignated the word; it is bracketed, held in suspension. The bracket itself — Busch argues — is a critical choice with consequences for what the reading can and cannot see.

Among those consequences: Cox's formalist treatment of the grotesque as a purely aesthetic strategy, which Busch has already flagged, becomes untenable once "Race" enters the analysis. The anti-rational aesthetic and the racial-biological determinism share a common root; the bracketing operation severs what Bates's texts fuse. "We conclude that the most basic elements in his fiction are not Intellect and Identity, but Race and Identity" (Cox 107). The dyad governing the essay's first half — Intellect/Identity — is displaced. Race signifies the biological collective; Identity, the fragile individual ego.

Personal identity vs. racial identity: dissolution into the Psychic Ocean

The dichotomy is the basis for the master thesis. Personal identity, yoked by Bates to the egoistic intellect, is weak — a construct that isolates its bearer and collapses under existential pressure, without possibility of recovery. Racial identity is inexorable. "There is a striving to maintain the personal in implied contrast to racial identity, but Intellect, the chief power of the individual self, is disesteemed, while Instinct, the function of race, is respected" (Cox 109). Entomological determinism governs Bates's fictional universe; the choice of an entomologist as protagonist in "A Matter of Speed" is no accident. Cox calls it the "phylogenetic ingredient" — the mechanism by which an individual will subordinate itself to species imperative.

The bibliographic arc moves from paralyzed horror before intellect's dominion toward mystical reconciliation with collective consciousness — a reconciliation that, depending on one's tolerance for annihilation, reads as transcendence or obliteration. "Death of a Sensitive" and "The Triggered Dimension" resolve the hyper-conscious protagonist's burden when the boundaries of the individual ego collapse entirely.

The protagonist of "Death of a Sensitive" opens a vein, soliloquizing about sinking "back into the great Ocean which is the origin and goal of all life" (Cox 96); the floating heads of "The Triggered Dimension" drift across the countryside and sink below the surface of a lake. Cox reads the parallel as structural — both narratives enact the voluntary dissolution of personal identity into a universal psychic substrate. "What Bates has done in 'this very human and moving story' ... has been to take his earlier, more abstract notions of the oneness of all life and of the Psychic Ocean and translate them into rustic-boyhood images: the girl, the boy and the horse, the farm, the woodland and the lake" (Cox 96).

Bates's fiction achieves its peculiar "peace" — if that word can survive its own scare quotes — through the total surrender of cognitive isolation. The frail construct intellect labors to maintain ceases resistance; personal identity merges into the biological-cosmic matrix. Cox's reading positions Bates's entire bibliography as one extended argument whose resolution demands the extinction of the very faculty that enabled its articulation.

Works Cited

• Cox, Arthur Jean. "A Question of Identity." The Riverside Quarterly [[[Saskatoon]]], vol. 1, no. 3, 1965, pp. 88–110.
• Bates, Harry. "Alas, All Thinking!" Astounding Stories, June 1935.
• Bates, Harry. "A Matter of Size." Astounding Stories, Apr. 1934.
• Bates, Harry. "A Matter of Speed." Astounding Stories, June 1941.
• Bates, Harry. "Death of a Sensitive." Science Fiction Plus, vol. 1, no. 3, May 1953.
• Bates, Harry. "Farewell to the Master." Astounding Science-Fiction, Oct. 1940.
• Bates, Harry [as A. R. Holmes]. "Slave Ship from Space." Astounding Stories, July 1931.
• Bates, Harry. "The Experiment of Dr. Sarconi." Thrilling Wonder Stories, July 1940.
• Bates, Harry. "The Mystery of the Blue God." Amazing Stories, Jan. 1942.
• Bates, Harry [as Anthony Gilmore]. "The Return of the Hawk Carse." Amazing Stories, July 1942.
• Bates, Harry. "The Triggered Dimension." Science Fiction Plus, Dec. 1953.

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This entry is contributed by Willian Perpetuo Busch to the Clockworks 2 wiki.

How to cite this article: Busch, Willian Perpetuo. "A Question of Identity." Clockworks 2, 11 Mar. 2026. Web.