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Literature is not furniture. The End.

Temporary Rhetoric and Speculative Fiction

I am never 100% sure I understand any of these theorists. I have colleagues who are patiently and weekly tutored through everything they read by three different faculty members, and of my five-person committee, my chair is in the middle of three major projects, one is on maternity leave, one is on sabbatical, one isn't even in my department (it's a requirement) and the fifth is being loaned out this semester for a chair somewhere in the midwest. I'm reading these totally alone.

So. . . De Man. I did need to supplement this essay with another lecture or two, but if I had to dangerously reduce the idea into a summary I would say that he's comparing allegory (in a general sense, after conflating or redefining other forms of symbolic narrative into it) to irony around the function of linear time. In the case of allegory, I would say that it is irreconcilable through time. It is inevitably separated the story from its antecedent. In the case of irony, De Man argues that the subjectivity is irreconcilable (a mystified subject is being viewed by the same subject from some aware, but still mystified distance), but the chronology is conflated - both subjectivities must exist simultaneously, while never reconciling. They are simultaneous and perpetual.

So, fascinated by this description of irony. . . I had already decided that "allegory" was the perfect category for speculative fiction, although De Man seems to think the novel the perfect form of irony - fiction aware that it is fiction, in the way that history is mystified, and unaware of its fictiveness. In this way, Spec Fic seems to be another layer of mystification on top of the irony: Fiction aware that it is fiction, but also simultaneously fully and irreconcilably convinced that fiction is the only reality.

Lacan and Spec Fic

After reading Lacan's "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud," watching this lecture, and reading three or four summaries, I have come to several conclusions, not all of which are co-extant.

Firstly, I conclude that it is rhetorically impossible for a summarist to make Lacan comprehensible for the simple reasons that to do so would both betray Lacan's original style, and lose the rhetor credibility (capital). It is my experience that summaries and discussions of Lacan are no more helpful than Lacan himself, who is undeniably not. They are (I believe ironically AND metaphorically) a deferral of desire by acting as signifier for the unachievable signified. And not in a good way. It's like Kafka's bloody apparatus (the association being inescapable after my undergraduate theory course).

If, as Lacan proposes in "The Mirror Stage," we continually build our self-image by seeing ourselves reflected from other people, and perpetually striving for the no-longer-available ideal-I, I have allowed Lacan to show me myself as a victim of his obtuseness, obfuscation, and general antagonism for any agency external to his collective and indistinct self. I might need counseling from someone a little more practical to recover.

Despite this, I think Lacan (via Jakobsen) might be essential for an understanding of how speculative fiction functions in culture. What if culture functions exactly like the unconscious, either metaphorically or consequently (okay, maybe not)? It is not unified or guided by a central consciousness, but is divided and sub-divided into factions continually in conflict. Tumblr is pure signification, nothing material. What if speculative fiction is that metaphor/metonymy that Lacan found a connecting point that can be so valuable in indicating desire, and demonstrating the mechanism of deferral? If speculative fiction provides metaphors for race relations, gender relations, etc. then they must be, on some level, available to analysis, though whether as symptomatic of culture, or of an individual pathology, can we ever decide?

This is becoming an individual/culture, chicken/egg problem, although Lacan seems to have weighed in on one of those pretty one-sidedly, which might have at least, again, metaphorical significance. Stupid weighted words. Lacan has stolen my ice cream.

Honestly - what more essentially rejoices in the unattainable than the fantastic? And who is more baffled by the success of Twilight?

I'm almost definitely oversimplifying, but I think there's something. . .

Lukacs and Spec Fic

It is one of the most frustrating experiences in my academic life to stumble upon a colleague or superior who refuses to accept the value of speculative fiction, and the first time it happened I was absolutely stunned. It had never occurred to me that anyone would simply reject an entire genre which had already produced some of the twentieth century's most breathtaking prose. I did not, and still do not entirely understand why the presence of the unreal in a modern/late-modern text should very thoroughly disqualify a novel from serious study. 

Then I read "Realism in the Balance," Georg Lukacs's argument against various aesthetic movements in modern culture. Academics are still highly influenced by the Frankfurt School. 

That's a profound understatement. 

Academia and Marxism are professors' OTP. They will go down with this ship, avataring the whole way. 

The Frankfurt School were influenced by (among others) Lukacs, and Lukacs proponed realism as the only way to achieve true revolution. Even Magic Realism can't claim to be any kind of realism of which Lukacs would approve, although I'm totally willing to make that argument on its behalf. Magic is not exactly expressionism, but it is likely seen by Marxists as having a similar effect - and there are two paths here to the same dreaded end.

Lukacs speaks well of popular novels, but only as they are realistic. Elements of distortion or subjectivity offer an individualistic view of the world which is unhelpful in constructing a useful image of holistic, objective reality. We can't change the world because we have glimpsed inside one person's head. Only their perspective on a deeper, naturalistic reality could offer us that grip on the actual which would lead to necessary revolution.

The other path to complacency is the idea that popular culture in any form is essentially a political soporific. I don't know who says so, but I'm sure I'll run across him soon. That argument is/was inevitable.

So when my professor who is personally and professionally interested in racism screws up her face at me when I suggest that I want to write a paper on race in speculative fiction, I understand that it's because she has been ideologically programmed to reject the imaginative as relevant to social change. And yet she has no problem urging us to boycott racially unequal science fiction films. It's very inconsistent.

And yet here is my defense: many of us, steeped in capitalistic popular culture, experience speculative fiction as an actuality. I do not mean that we "live" our novels the way Pinterest would suggest, but rather that the relationships we observe between characters, while not necessarily derived from actual relationships, still constitute a level of experience which inevitably colors our daily interactions in the same way that anything fictional would. Just because the embedded racism is between dwarves and elves, it does not mean that every reader will not understand the metaphor, and the reason for using it. Other magical functions can become metaphors, or indicate areas of interest for other actual social concerns. Race is just the most obvious, and most written on by those who brave censure to analyze genre fiction.

Yes, the metaphors are implicated in such an analysis for "softening" the language of a harsh reality. We're not morons. We just like magic and space battles.

The OTHER argument which professors politically avoid is much more relevant to my area of study: the accusation that the imaginative is immature. THAT's a horse of a different color, and one that hasn't yet been stabled.