Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (46 page)

A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world. The outcome of his thought, ceasing to be r
enunciatory, flowers in images. It frolics—in myths, to be sure, but myths with no other depth than that of human suffering and like it inexhaustible. Not the divine fable that amuses and blinds, but the terrestrial face, gesture, and drama in which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral passion.

Albert Camus,
The Myth of Sisyphus

SF has always had a love/hate relationship with Romanticism, happy to utilise its aesthetic of the sublime, but uneasy with the suspension of critical nous such rapture entails. Sense-of-wonder is a sense of incredulity tinged positive, created in the breach of possibility—the technical or historical, physical or logical alethic quirk—so to appreciate the incredible in SF is paradoxically to fancy reason capable of that which it is not—not yet. Where even critics claim for SF an alethic modality of “could have happened,” untrue because this would require technical possibility, the rapture is revealed: we fancy the fancy practicable. The denial is endemic. Our (in)credulity always already a betrayal of a wholly rationalist aesthetic—pretending the practicality of a quirk—it seems the less easy we are with the game of suspended disbelief as a game, the more we must gloss the impossible as possible, the implausible as plausible.

The rigour required to cleave to what’s
actually
plausible is the province of a rare few, not the core of the genre. An SF that eschews all mumbo-jumbo—a truly scientific fiction working only on the novum, with no place in it for errata, chimerae or suturae—this is a fantasia of the genre’s future, a
Hard SF
or
Mundane SF
ideal, not an accurate model of our roots. This is not to criticise it
as
an ideal, simply to say it’s not the picture as it stands, as it has ever stood. The wildest technical impossibilities are seldom adequate, let alone the tamer ones which have real plausibility.

Instead, freely employing the Paradigm Shift Caveat to excuse all manner of imposs
ibilities, SF blithely accepts into its canon works which breach not just known science but the laws of nature, works where the conceit is ultimately metaphysical. If a wormhole or FTL drive or an ability to jaunte is not glossed as magic, it remains a chimera, no more possible—or even plausible—than a teleportation spell. It requires a spurious physics in place of the established one. The difference in the text, like that between a mentalist and a magician, is only the shtick that sells the trick. The difference in the reading may be an actual plausibility we afford the chimera sold as novum, faith furtively sneaking in the back door as we swallow the pseudoscientific spiel of the illusionist. It’s a fun twist on the game, to suspend the disbelief that would remind us we are suspending disbelief, but where it is afforded more weight, a fancy of hyperspace is more credulous than that of an astral plane; this is a tautology.

An SF that applies the Paradigm Shift Caveat or some other flimflam to l
egitimise those wilder quirks, but scorns them when (but only when) rendered as magic, is a fantasia of the genre’s present, glossing the illusion as a feasible marvel because it pulls the bouquet of blue flowers from the sleeve of a lab coat rather than a robe. It is a divine fable, and the higher the snoot is cocked at the frolics of those who don’t buy the shtick, projecting one’s own doubly-suspended disbelief into their gameplay, the more it reveals itself as grandiose conceit, its imagined tether of possibility mere credulity. The deeper the scorn of a magic carpet as against an
Analog
story of teleporting sun whales, say, the more we must arch a Spocklike eyebrow at the judgement lending such credence to the latter whimsy, so requiring it that it damns the former for not accommodating this doubly-suspended disbelief.

The more a straight man identifies as homophobic, experiments show, the more likely he’s aroused by gay porn, as if that hate is a song of fierce denial roared to drown out dread desire. I can’t help wondering what scorn of magic carpets comes from a similar doublethink of denial, angst at the echoes of faith that scorn reveals when not directed at teleporting whales of the sun, whether that doubly-suspended disbelief simply isn’t a game for some, but rather an actual belief, shorn of all doubt so as to disacknowledge that it is b
elief—not truth—that all those marvels now impossible are nonetheless more fundamentally possible, made so by the power of unknown science, even breaches of the laws of nature admissible, so limitless that capacity is in this credo.

We do not always reconstruct elsewhens from these quirks. Narratives cha
racterised by such quirks do not always invite us to parse them as indexes of a coherent worldscape. The alethic quirk, incredible because it is a motif misplaced (a man in space, jaunting) or a recombination of forms (a crescent and a sun fused), may invite no such rational interpretation. Thrown into a mimetic narrative without any sense of coherent structuring, they might suggest to us only that what we’re reading is an oneiric narrative, with no worldscape to reconstruct—only a dreamscape. This is the only fictive setting offered by the movie
The Science of Sleep
. In its mimetic detail it points to a story taking place in the real world, but the environment it offers us is a dreamscape in which the day’s events are recombined with fancy and unreason. The instability of these types of narrative is often alienating precisely because of its illogic, regarded as “experimental” (i.e. an experiment that failed.)

In narratives better classed as ludic than oneiric, we begin to see, in the rel
ationships of those quirks, the arbitrary rules of play, the logic of a game. So Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland
offers us logic-puzzles and syllogisms made flesh; but if there is more order here than in a dreamscape there’s still no coherent worldscape. The same is true of most allegory, where the rules applied are those of analogy (e.g.
Pilgrim’s Progress
). Here the quirks function as vehicles of metaphor (often crude, blatant), their behaviour bound by the proposition they exist to act out in vehicle-form in order that it can be translated into tenor-form by the reader, parsed into a moral. In parable, where the quirks are played down or removed so that the text can also be read as straight mimesis (a prodigal son rather than a Vanity Fair), or in fable, where the imagery is more directly rooted in mundane reality (a talking fox, say, rather than a Slough of Despond), we start to see the beginnings of worldscape. Still, there is little of the elsewhen here, our suspension-of-disbelief requiring an acceptance of whimsical make-believe or of worthy figurative sermonising. It is not entirely surprising that allegory is not the most popular mode of contemporary narrative.

Satiric narrative takes the strategies of fable a step further though. As it a
ttaches its moral message to a specific real-world target rather than offering it as a general axiom of righteousness, it becomes an act of mimesis in its own right, a representation of the target of its derision. The Cloud Cuckoo Lands of satire may still be rendered incoherent and fanciful by their comic exaggerations, their absurdities, but the more accurate their representation of the target underneath that absurdity, the more acute the critique they offer. It is still largely the rules of analogy around which the fictive environments of satire cohere, but as the motifs and milieus are fleshed-out as fabricated forms, the edifices of absurdity begin to slip free. Somewhere between Swift’s Lilliput and Kafka’s Castle, perhaps, satire becomes story.

Where satire lets the story take over, where the rules of analogy are replaced by the rules of narrative logic, a change takes place. Here in the diegetic narr
ative—the story as a told-tale, an autotelic artefact—the behaviours of the quirks and their environment must be integrated into the story as a whole. They must be coherently and comprehensively understandable as elements of the unfolding dynamics, even if this means unmooring them from the rules of direct analogy. Diegetic narrative, it should be made clear, does not necessarily involve quirks. (Not all fiction is strange.) Its motifs may be purely mundane even if they carry the symbolic meaning of theme. Where they
are
strange however, story’s demand for suspension of disbelief drives writer and reader toward the creation of worldscape. The strange must be excused as within a conventional framework (worldscape as mythos in its contemporary sense) or explicated as an original creation—or better still both. So we may even find, to borrow a phrase from film theory in a bad pun, the “extra”-diegetic elements of infodump and backstory.

Other strategies are evident in this fiction which some might call fantasy, others fa
ntastika or phantasia, but which I’m referring to as rhapsody, and it’s largely these other strategies that are my reason for this naming. From the earliest tellings of tales in written history, long before the metafiction of the (post)modernists, the stitching-of-stories has been a strategy for maintaining suspension-of-disbelief by drawing the reader into the story. As Gilgamesh sits listening to Atrahasis’s embedded story of the Deluge, the reader sits at his side. As Lucius, transformed into an ass, listens to the tale of Cupid and Psyche, only one of many strung through his own story like beads on a bracelet, our awareness of the artifice of story is focused on that inner tale; we are for that moment in an exactly corresponding situation with the protagonist because we, like him, are listening to this embedded tale. These metafictional structurings—like the epistolic form of
Dracula
or the found-text claim of
Manuscript Found in Saragossa
—are not designed to distance us but rather to immerse us, to offer us sleight-of-hand subterfuges by which we might just continue to imagine this story real. As the character—Gilgamesh, Lucius, Miranda or Frodo—sits listening to a story within their story, or watching a play within their play, we are being offered a subtle mimesis: their worldscape as one which is
like ours
because stories are told in it, a worldscape which is, we are being told, more real because of that.

This is the fiction that I’m referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic represe
ntation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative. And it is in this fiction that, as those quirks become unmoored from direct relationships of meaning, the diegesis, or the layering of diegesis, becomes a syntax in which these symbols articulate new meanings. Story becomes a language with the sort of narrative grammars that John Clute discusses in his “Fantastika in the World Storm” essay, and with these quirks as motifs, semes coined in the process of narrative, we end up with a fiction that is not just mimetic, oneiric, ludic, allegoric, satiric or diegetic, but
semiotic
. It bears a remarkable resemblance to (post)modernism in some respects, but this may only be because if the project of Modernism was to fuse Romanticism and Rationalism, the end of that project may mean, in the end, a return to the freedom of form that existed before the ideological schisming of that original Great Debate.

There is nothing whatsoever in science—and this should be shouted from the rooftops of every scientific institution—that makes it immune from such abuses… Some scientists will dispute this, claiming that the values of open, objective enquiry, m
utual criticism and protection of learning in the accumulated wisdom of science amount to an ethical system which, if applied to the world, would make it a better place, potentially protected from future horrors. This is not wrong, just fantastically utopian. Such values are not exclusive to science; they preceded it. Science sprang from philosophy, theology and even magic. The reason it became science at all was because of the direction these disciplines took in the course of the Renaissance.

New Scientist

It should be clear where I stand on the belief that reality cannot be ultimat
ely amenable to reason simply because Old Nobodaddy in the sky slipped the ineffable into his crock pot of creation—dude, I am not innarested in your condition—but as the article on scientism in the special fundamentalism issue of
New Scientist
quoted above makes clear, the belief that the world is “accessible to and ultimately controllable by human reason” is also “a profoundly unscientific idea…neither provable nor refutable.” Likewise the notion of science as a universal panacea for all human folly. The author points to Hitler’s use of the biology of Ernst Haeckel, the roots of Stalinism in Marx’s conviction that a science of history had been discovered, to illustrate the dangers of this scientism, this fiction of science as hero. It would be bully to believe that everything is and must be explicable and that explication will and must lead to ethical improvement—it’s certainly a good operating assumption, I’d say, tried and tested—but to take that stance as a conviction is an act of faith.

My scepticism calls shenanigans then at the zeal of loyalists like Benford, at the ove
rturned tables of the SF Café, the volleys of blanks fired at brothers-in-arms, accusations of intellectual cowardice, cultural treason. Where a writer takes umbrage at the Hugo win for Harry Potter as fandom’s betrayal of science in favour of superstition, I see Rationalism that has ceased to be rational, goaded to pious outrage at the folly of the faithless. A fantasist writes of a blue flower’s petals stewed to a tea that, with one sip, transports the drinker to another world, a nightmarish détournement of biological determinist pulp, say, and they are the enemy because this unmoored metaphor of estrangement is not…a sun whale using paradigm-shifted science…in a story that casts religion as the source of ethics, science as a straw man of relativism that—quick, push the button!—excuses rape?

My scepticism asks whether SF is engaging with the rapture of unreason here or su
rrendering to it. Is it analysing the semiotics of reactionary agitprop to defuse it, dissecting the madness of societies, or retreating into the secure self-certainties of ghetto guttersniping? Is it applying Kohlberg’s studies of the stages of moral development in children to critique the conventional worldview as not historically but psychologically immature, or being raptured in a fancy of holding the fort against the savage hordes, of the infrastructure of fandom infiltrated by a treacherous Fifth Column of fantasists—which we must imagine uttered with the emphasis of a sibilant hiss?

Anders and Gibson offer conciliatory perspectives—the former focusing on “narrative complexity and whether the speculative material you read (whether SF or F) serves to turn your brain on or turn it off,” the latter refraining from imposing a definition on fantasy which, “like sf and every other form of liter
ature, is a tool to be used in whichever way a particular author chooses to use it”—but moderates seldom set the tone in the Great Debate. The rapture of unreason won’t stand for such nuanced opinions.

Instead, characterisation collapses into caricature: the hawk-eyed, square-jawed, inte
llectual brilliance of
Science Fiction
in the red corner; the slack-jawed, blinkered, credulous nonsense of
Fantasy
in the blue corner. Science versus Superstition. Or vice versa—the noble poet versus the dreary pedant, the artistic versus the autistic. Dynamism versus mechanism. To close the definitions of science fiction and fantasy to a Rationalist
Science Fiction
on the one hand, a Romantic
Fantasy
on the other is tiresome whichever corner is claimed. But those who would do so will seldom be swayed, caught up in their self-heroising narrative.

One expects such from the Romantic, such refusal to countenance the co
ntrary, but reason is discursive or it is not reason. Where that conviction of the limitless efficacy of science turns to condemn the absence of conviction—refusing as inadequate commitment belief held as an operating assumption, as if only absolute conviction were truly conviction—this is not Rationalism but a romance with Reason, blinded by love. Where it collapses the complex discourse to the faithless and the faithful, eliding in one all possibility of truth, eliding in the other all possibility of error, it is not just unsound in principle but in practice, calls us to question the functionality of its dysfunction.