Imagine a world – call it Mundavia – in which the dominant genre of literature is one in which plots, dialogue, and setting can be freely invented, but all the characters have to be real people. You can have Napoléon Bonaparte and Lady Gaga rappelling down the side of a Martian volcano while being shot at by Archimedes with a rocket launcher, and all will be well – but invent a nonexistent valet for Napoléon and you will at once be regarded as having abandoned mainstream literature for a specialised genre: call the latter genre Pseudoprosoponic Fiction, or Pseu-Fi.
In Mundavia, the choice to write (or to read) Pseu-Fi is regarded as just that – a choice. People ask why, e.g., Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad write Pseu-Fi, and speculate as to whether they will ever do justice to their obvious talents by switching to the mainstream. Those who write Mundavian Mainstream fiction, by contrast, are never asked why they chose that genre, because it’s not even regarded as a genre; it’s the default, by contrast with which everything else is defined as a genre.
Our world is a lot like Mundavia, with the exception that instead of licensing invented settings while forbidding invented characters, the mainstream fiction of our world licenses invented characters while forbidding invented settings. People your story with imaginary characters, and your work will still be accepted as mainstream; but place your story in an imaginary world (as I just did in inventing Mundavia), and you will be regarded as having chosen a specialised genre – either science fiction or fantasy, depending on the details.
My point is that mainstream fiction is just as much a genre, just as much a choice, as science fiction or fantasy, and that there are no grounds for treating invented-characters-in-real-settings as any more of a natural “default” than invented-characters-in-invented-settings or real-characters-in-invented-settings or what have you. They’re just different ways of telling stories. And to those who say that stories with invented settings cannot be relevant to real life, I ask how that can be so, given that no one doubts that stories with invented characters can be relevant to real life. What counts as “mainstream” is conventional and culture-relative. (In ancient Greece, convention dictated that comedies be set in the contemporary present and tragedies in the legendary past. This rule may strike us as odd, but I’m sure it seemed utterly natural to Greek audiences. Of course there were plays that violated this rule – e.g. Aeschylus’s Persians, a tragedy that dealt with real events in living memory – but those were, y’know, a choice.)
(For more on the invention of worlds in fantastic literature, see of course Tolkien’s classic essay “On Fairy-Stories.”)
One common canard I hear from people who aren’t such fans of sci-fi is that it’s “far-fetched” or “will never happen” when nothing has more preposterous plots and characters than soap operas.
Actually a lot of soap operas do end up veering into science fiction and/or fantasy. For example, among the adventures of the character of Marlena on Days of Our Lives have been “being used as a surrogate for genetically engineered babies … during a four year coma,” “being mind-controlled to believe she was a serial killer,” and “possession by the devil”; and the Dynasty spinoff The Colbys ended with one of the main characters being abducted by extraterrestrials.
In any case, why is “that would never happen” any better an objection than “these people don’t really exist”?
I think the argument for “mainstream” fiction can be made stronger by not forbidding imaginary characters like Aslan and Sauron, but imaginary types of characters, i.e. non-humans (including Paul Atreides for example since super powers make you non-human for our purpose). Then the general argument is, the farther a story departs from human experience the more difficult it is to relate to it. When Tolkien talks about Sauron being disembodied for thousands of years or talking rats show up with tiny swords, you start to wonder just what these characters are about, what their past is like, how they reason and feel. With human characters, even ones of the past centuries, we can relate to their experiences, but animals, elves, and gods are a little harder to do that with.
Comparing “War and Peace” or “The Count of Monte Cristo” to LOTR or Narnia, there is definitely a feeling of over-simplification in the latter, the feeling that you just kind of have to accept orcs and elves and talking rats because either they don’t have a rich characterization and backstory, or if they do it’s difficult to grasp and outlandish sounding (“As a young rat I could not see at first, but my tail was strong and my squeaking was merry. When the first rays of light broached my covered eyes, I knew I was destined to explore, to seek, to uncover the mysteries of my environment. Today, I shall explore the Utter East!”).
But that’s not going to rule out sf and fantasy per se, since lots of it has only humans (or folks indistinguishable from humans).
But that just by itself can’t be the argument, since obviously lots of people do relate to it. And in any case, why should difficulty of relating to it be considered a flaw rather than a challenge?
Most fantasy posits things remote from the human experience like elves or humans with super powers. That’s one reason I like “Game of Thrones” so much, most of the characters are ordinary humans and most of the settings are like the ones on earth, but there’s just enough magic to add a little spice. Even the Greek myths are about supposed gods that act more like humans than like Yahweh.
But that just by itself can’t be the argument, since obviously lots of people do relate to it. And in any case, why should difficulty of relating to it be considered a flaw rather than a challenge?
Well it’s the argument my literature professor gave when I discussed this with him, so I guess it is, of which the double-standard you cite is just a special case. Have you ever asked someone in the Auburn writing dept about this?
And a lot of people think they relate to it, but that doesn’t make it so. Would you really hold Reepacheep up beside Edmund Dantes or put Arwen in the same class as Anna Karenina?
And in any case, why should difficulty of relating to it be considered a flaw rather than a challenge?
I just thought it was obvious. Can you explain why making characters opaque or difficult to grasp is a good thing? If you look at all the really successful fantasy stories, they get around this problem by having ordinary humans that we can relate to traveling in a fantasy world (both Narnia and LOTR fit into this model). On “Star Trek” the captains and leaders are all humans (and the episodes centering around Klingon and Ferengi culture were usually pretty bad).
No, but Reepicheep and Arwen are minor characters about whom we learn very little, so they’re an odd choice for a contrast case.
Well, serious literature is not typically expected to be highly accessible. Why isn’t the challenge of trying to grasp a new and different way of thinking, to try to see from a different perspective, a good thing?
True, they were badly done. Basing an entire culture on a single value or trait, as Star Trek repeatedly did, is pretty silly. If they had existed in real life, neither the Klingons nor the Ferengi would ever have developed space travel or even a decent astronomy.
I think one possible objection is that with a fantastic setting, it’s extremely difficult to ever know if you’ve achieved any insight or grasped a new and different way of thinking. If I read a story about a coal miner and think I’ve really grasped what it would mean to live such a life, I can actually find a coal miner and ask if my changed perspective has any real correspondence to his or her life. Not possible to check in with the local Kwisatz Haderach on whether looking in the place that is terrifying to women is as cool as it sounds on paper.
I’m not sure why it would have to correspond to some real coal miner to count. If you manage to think of something in a new way, then you have managed it. Your new insight is into what you’re thinking about, not necessarily into some previous thinker thereof.
It may be more difficult, or it may not, but if you want to see an example of sci-fi that does achieve great insight, check out Solaris by Stanislaw Lem.
Actually Nathan’s example of the coal miner is pretty good, the point is that at least with a coal miner there is some connection to reality. When we depart too far from “the human experience” as my prof called it you have the possibility that what you are reading and thinking doesn’t really correspond to reality in any way (i.e. would be insanity or nonsense). It reminds me of one of the strengths of science which is that by referencing empirical tests you ensure that you don’t get too far from the dock, so to speak.
I think Roderick’s objection about imaginary settings is valid. But most of what is in fiction is, by definition, imaginary. What I think critics of speculative fiction (i.e. fantasy and scifi) are really objecting to are the supernatural, superhuman elements. Indeed, I pick three books at random from the Hugo Award for Best Novel list and all of them are written from the perspective of ordinary humans. None are written from the perspective of talking badgers, fallen gods, or omni-dimensional beings. And the more I think about it, the more it makes sense that the more remote from human experience the novel is, the more difficult it is to take seriously.
I’m not saying spec fiction is bad, since I read a lot of it myself. But I read comic books too, that doesn’t mean I expect Superman stories to be placed on the same level as “The Count of Monte Cristo” or say any of Chekhov’s short stories.
Well, Superman isn’t one of the more subtle comics. What do you think of Gaiman’s Sandman, or Alan Moore’sWatchmen, or Moore’s run on Swamp Thing — all three of which include rather alien-minded folks among their viewpoint characters?
If insight is taken to be purely internal rather than as it is also used, to gain insight into something else outside of one’s experience, then that’s fine. No one can judge your own internal insights. But generally critics of speculative fiction are not meaning ‘insight’ or ‘new way of thinking’ in that way. (At least, that’s my impression.)
I wasn’t meaning it that way either. I’m not sure what a “purely internal insight” is; but if it’s so internal that “no one can judge” it, then (as a Wittgensteinian) I don’t believe there are such things. Are you assuming that coming to a new perspective on X must involve either a) understanding some previous person who had that perspective on X, or b) understanding some purely internal X? Why can’t X be something external?
It certainly can, as in my example of coal mining. As I said, perhaps poorly, a common objection of those who don’t value science fiction very highly is that the X in question is not capable of being experienced or understood as a part of real human experience. (As in, World War 2 was real but non-existent in the present but is remembered by a few living persons, while unicorns or Asimovian robots are not real either now or in the past and no one has any real memory or experience with them.) I’m not defending their position as my own, just pointing out that they place a priority on those things and that this makes a lot of intuitive sense to a lot of people. Saying that it’s an arbitrary preference won’t be very convincing to them. (But that may not be your goal anyway.)
I think we’re talking past each other somehow. I wasn’t suggesting that the external X might be unicorns or Asimovian robots!!! My point was that unicorns or Asimovian robots might be helpful in getting new perspectives on real, external Xs in ordinary human experience.
There’s a great Gene Wolfe quote that goes something like We all write speculative fiction, some of us are just more honest about it. Really my biggest issue with sci-fi and fantasy is just how much of it sucks. And somewhat worse than mainstream fiction as the didacticism of most sci-fi writers bleeds the air out of the stories.
Well, Sturgeon’s (second) Law applies.
I have no strong feelings for any side in this debate, though I do like some fantasy and science fiction ( Horror is my favourite) but, when it comes to the claim that such stories are not taken seriously because of the inability of humans to relate to imaginary characters, I have to chuckle a bit. In my experience, the way most people think is as alien to me as the thinking of imaginary elves or dwarves, and I found that this has only increased as I have gotten older.
And of course lots of “mainstream” literature features characters with alien ways of thinking.
What about “The Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov? It is considered one of the great novels of the twentieth century and it features a talking cat, the devil, witches, and all sorts of great fun.
Speculative literature, at its best, seems to me to achieve what was, to my mind, most interesting and valuable in the project of high modernism. One of the big differences between literary high modernism and what largely came before it was the following. Before modernism set in, many or most authors thought of insight as something an author achieves through mimesis – through the accurate portrayal of the real: actual kinds of human predicament, actual kinds of human beings, events, and so on. Of course, we’re dealing with fiction here, so exactly what we mean by “mimesis” is a tricky matter to make clear. But the goal, at any rate, was clear: the task of the author was precisely to reveal, through the construction of imitative fictions, what the real, actual world is like. Literature was to put up a mirror to the world.
The modernists showed up an offered up a completely different model. For them, art was precisely about disorientation and alienation: shaking us out of our complacency, our unreflective comfort with the ordinary. They tried to achieve this in lots of ways. Two major approaches stand out for consideration. First, there is the approach of daring formal experimentation, – that is, finding strange new modes and styles writing: as we for example find in Joyce or Pound or Stein. The second approach was the representation of strange scenarios – very often, using a no-nonsense prose style: as we find, for example, in many of the surrealists and in the theater of the absurd.
Bertold Brecht has a name for this strategy: “ostranenie” – the ‘alienation affect.’ Arguably, it’s the central unifying technique that defined high modernist literature.
What’s little acknowledged (except by good critics like Darko Suvin) is that speculative literature is fully modernist in this sense. Most obviously – as is clear from Roderick’s original post – in many of the best works of speculative fiction we find especially good examples of the second approach: the representation of bizarre, otherworldly scenarios. But great speculative fiction very often works with the first approach: one of the singular pleasures of great sci-fi and fantasy is catching on to alien modes of thinking and the strange vocabularies used to articulate them. I tend to think of this first-approach virtue of great speculative literature as one of the biggest contributions of the New Wave.
Why can effects of alienation and disorientation be virtues in a piece of literature? I don’t think it’s that hard to understand: as in life, in literature alienation and disorientation can be occasions for insight precisely because one very often must experience these feelings of dislocation in order to find a new and better orientation in the world. Sometimes it takes an existential crisis in which I lose my grip on who I am for me to be capable of reflecting on what kind of person I should be. Sometimes a new set of results must throw a science into confusion in order that the most deeply-ingrained scientific accounts might be revised for the better.
And, sometimes in literature it takes disorientation and alienation in order to achieve aesthetic insight – for example, into the human condition. You only have to read great unacknowledged masters of science fiction like Samuel Beckett and Witold Gombrowicz (I mean this in total seriousness) to catch on to what I mean – alongside, of course, the acknowledged masters of science fiction like Ursual LeGuin, Samuel Delany or M. John Harrison. If you think there is some great principled divide between what’s aesthetically valuable in each group of writers, I think you’re just blinded by genre categories…
By the way, Roderick, I noticed in your post an idea that I’ve been coming across more and more among interesting writing about genre fiction: treating ‘literary fiction’ as just another genre – albeit (as the Vandermeers put it in the Steampunk II anthology) one which arrogantly thinks of itself as ‘beyond genre,’ as literature full stop, in contrast to ‘all that (nose turned up) genre fiction.’
I rather like this way of thinking. I’m also cautious of it, since defensive apologies for sci-fi and fantasy are so bloody common these days and so often ignored by the literary world at large that I worry that we’re just preaching to the choir at this point.
Of course, there’s still an obvious need for these polemics. Literary fiction is so complacent right now. You only need to read the banal, tedious fiction to be found in the pages of “The New Yorker” to see this. The spirit of bold innovation that made high modernism and postmodernism interesting has evaporated, and literary fiction seems to be stuck re-hashing models from 19th century realism. Not uniformly of course, but by and large the hip literati seem to have given up thinking hard about what literature could be.
Fortunately, the slack has been taken up by the ‘fringe’ genres and media: sci-fi, fantasy, comics, and so on. But just as the literary establishment turned up its nose to avant-garde literature in the early 20th century, so it turns up its nose to the fringe genres now. Maybe the right thing to do is to ignore them the way that the high modernists more or less ignored the stuffy critics of their day. It worked out for the high modernists: after a generation or so of complete neglect, the New Critics came along and the literary establishment finally caught up with them and canonized them. Here’s to hoping that the same thing will happen for all the bold creativity coming out of the fringe genres today…