Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (6 page)

A representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time make it seem unfamiliar.

Bertolt Brecht

Science fiction is the literature of cognitive estrangement.

Darko Suvin

Is there another way to define SF, not with the vague wave of an all-encompassing hand, not with a finger-pointing to some single corner, not as this Babelesque tower of languages, rising high in an artificed unity of a
bstraction or fallen into the chaos of countless tongues, a conflict of manifestos and movements?

Perhaps a notion of strictured fantasia might serve as a starting-point, if we strip away the redundant
strictured
but leave it to one side for later consideration—and strip away
fantasia
too, this term signifying a closed definition of
fantasy
, one in which the incredible is also the marvellous and/or monstrous, albeit not yet the generic
Fantasy
of elves, orcs and magic swords. If we cannibalise a dictionary definition, maybe we can glean a more neutral label from the notion of the fantastic as: “quaint or strange in form, conception, or appearance…unrestrainedly fanciful…extravagant…bizarre, as in form or appearance; strange…based on or existing only in fantasy; unreal…wonderful or superb; remarkable.”

How else might we label this fiction of the quaint, the fanciful, the extrav
agant, the bizarre, the unreal, the wonderful, the remarkable? How else might we label this strange fiction of the strange?

Now there’s a thought.

[Science fiction is] a new way of reading, a new way of making texts make sense—collectively producing a new set of codes. [SF writers invented the genre] by writing new kinds of sentences and embedding them in contexts in which those sentences were readable.

Samuel R. Delany

Elsewhen, in his essay, “About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words,” Delany outlines a continuous correction process involved in reading a simple sentence:

The red sun was high, the blue low.

Being Delany, he does this at great length and in the most fascinating way. Starting the essay with a proposition that it is meaningless to talk of style in opposition to content—that it is all, in fact, form (or as I like to put it:
words are the only substance
), that meaning is best considered as a thread of memory we follow from word to word through a text—he gives us a reconstruction of the reader’s path through this particular sentence, leading us eventually into a discussion of the role of subjunctivity level in relation to genre.

Suppose a series of words is presented to us as a piece of reportage. A blanket indicative tension informs the whole series: this happened. That is the particular level of subjunctivity at which journalism takes place… The subjunctivity level for a series of words labelled naturalistic fiction is defined by: could have happened… Fantasy takes the subjunctivity of naturalistic fiction and throws it into reverse. At the appearance of elves, witches, or magic in a non-metaphorical position, or at some correction of image too bizarre to be explained by other than the supernatural, the level of subjunctivity becomes: could not have happened.

Samuel R. Delany

So when a strange image, a fanciful, fantastic image, appears in a story or novel, Delany says, we’re kicked out of the naturalistic subjunctivity level—
this could have happened
—and into another—
this could not have happened
. Delany distinguishes this from the subjunctivity level of his SF, speculative fiction:

[W]hen spaceships, ray guns, or more accurately any correction of images that indicates the future appears in a series of words and marks it as s-f, the subjunctivity level is changed once more: These objects, these convolutions of objects into situations and events, are blanketly defined by: have not happened.

Samuel R. Delany

One of the most interesting things about Delany’s essay is that he thereby places both naturalistic and fantastic fiction as subsets of his SF, with the su
bjunctivity levels of events which
have not happened (but could)
or which
have not happened (and could not)
. He says this explicitly about naturalistic fiction in the notes to the essay. He doesn’t actually say the same about fantastic fiction, but this seems to be a ramification of his idea.

There is a slip here though. Until such time as we can stand on a planet in a binary system, if a narrative presents us with two suns in the sky, the level of subjunctivity becomes:
could not have happened, not yet
. As described, Delany’s SF in fact sits as a subset of fantastic fiction; the impossibility we’re presented with in that series of words simply comes with a caveat that at some point it might
become
possible.

Call it the Contingency Slip Fallacy: where a temporal (i.e. technical or hi
storical) impossibility can be viewed as contingent, we can persuade ourselves that it is an actual possibility, hold firmly, even passionately, to a belief that the subjunctivity level has not shifted, that our SF is remaining in the realm of the possible.

But I’m not talking about Delany’s SF here—speculative fiction—but about strange fiction, which is defined not by one or other subjunctivity level but rather by the challenge itself. The subjunctivity of this SF is, in the first i
nstance, undecided, conflicted.

Here’s a sentence, modelled on Delany’s own:

The crescent sun was high, the moon low.

When a strange image appears in a story or novel, we cannot immediately rule out the possibility of an explanation emerging later in the text. There is a moment of subjunctive indefinition here which is crucial to how all strange fiction works.

The crescent sun…

In reading the start of a sentence such as the one above, when we read “The crescent sun” we are faced with an impossibility which requires interrogation. Does the sun only appear to be a crescent, being in partial eclipse perhaps? Is the crescent sun an image r
ather than an actuality, a symbol on a flag perhaps?

The crescent sun was high…

When we read further, from “The crescent sun” to “was high,” the question becomes more pressing. Is the writer using the symbol on the flag to represent the flag itself, or perhaps the ideology represented by the flag? Is this to be read literally, or is it some metaphoric or metonymic figure of speech we should be parsing to its ulterior meaning?

The crescent sun was high, the moon…

When “the moon” appears we might abandon the idea of the flag, our reading corrected by the parallel of sun and moon. We might decide that, yes, this is a description of the sky. Any moment now we’re going to get stars in a darkened sky, the shadow covering the earth, and so on. But we still have a moment of interrogation to go through. “The crescent sun was high, the moon”…was what? Eclipsing it? That would make sense.

The crescent sun was high, the moon low.

With the last word, “low” the sentence resolves into impossibility. We’re asked to accept that the moon is not in fact eclipsing the sun but is in another place entirely. In the sky? In the real world, our world, where this is a physical impossibility?

We might say that, at this point, the subjunctivity level becomes that of fa
ntastic fiction: this could not happen. But what we actually have is subjunctive indefinition, indecision—neither
this could happen
nor
this could not happen
, not a statement but a challenge:
could
this happen? It is this tension of subjunctivities that is the core of SF, the characteristic feature of all strange fiction.

Later in the story or novel in which that sentence appears we might be o
ffered a resolution. The hero removes his VR goggles and we realise this is what Delany calls
speculative fiction
. Or he wakes up in bed and we realise this is what Delany calls
naturalistic fiction
. Or he meets an elf and we realise this is what everyone insists on calling
fantastic fiction
. We realise, that is, how we would classify it as one or other of the above according to our personal taxonomy of the aesthetic forms. But SF is defined, I would argue, more by the moments of indecision than by the moments of decision: all fiction requires the suspension of disbelief; strange fiction is that which actively challenges suspension-of-disbelief, throwing at the reader images, situations, which are dissonant with our knowledge of, as Wallace Stevens puts it, “things as they are.”

The differentiation of strange fiction into science fiction, fantasy and ho
rror? I say this is largely a matter of how we personally respond to those situations. Can we
rationalise
them? Do we
desire
them? Do we
fear
them? In our moments of subjunctive indecision, other questions are fired off by that basic question of
could this happen?
With curiosity we ask ourselves: how, where,
when
could this happen? With fear and desire we ask ourselves: would this, could this, should this happen? would it, could it, should it
not
?

None of these are mutually exclusive. And these are the defining questions of strange fiction, of wish-fulfilment dreams and dread-filled nightmares, plausible or implausible. We have already suspended our disbelief, I should note, so it may be less a matter of whether an event described is possible than where and when it
might
be, what kind of elsewhen we must construct in our imagination, in order to sustain the pretence, as with reading any work of fiction, that these events
are
happening, right now, in simulation. Still, with the challenge to subjunctivity level offered by either Delany’s example or mine, there can only be a sense of strain on the suspension-of-disbelief, a frisson at the conjuring of what surely could not have happened.

With naturalistic fiction there is seldom any question that these events have not ha
ppened but could have—in an elsewhen that is so close to our own it’s virtually indistinguishable. With strange fiction, though, that elsewhen, as we reconstruct it in the reading, is rendered, quite literally, incredible. Add a little desire and/or fear, in our state of suspended disbelief—that the incredible might somehow be made real, and you have the sense-of-wonder or future shock which permeates an SF driven not by plausibility, scientific or otherwise, but by
im
plausibility, by incredulity.