A thought about SF&F and Academe

[sraun]

There was a panel at Minicon some years ago - IIRC, the title was
something like "Science Fiction and Fantasy: Instantiating the
Metaphor". Someone (maybe one of the panelists?) raised an interesting
point - a number of things that are exclusively metaphorical in
mainstream fiction can easily be literal truths in SF&F. (For example,
my wife described a character as a silk-dressed cobra - the first
question asked about the passage was 'is she a snake or a human?')

Since there is that problem, the metaphors, similes, and similar
constructs in SF&F are either absent, or much larger or more
subtle. From what I can tell, this drives the academic nuts - part of
their world-view is that they provide the explanation of what the
author was saying by pointing out all these constructs, and explaining
what they mean. And in SF&F it's (mostly) just not there! The
whole story (or big blocks of it) may have meaning or illumination
outside the story proper, but it's not there at the nit-picky detail
level that academics love.

Comments

[sethb.livejournal.com]

The canonical example of meaning differences is "He turned on his left side."

[jiawen]

I often get frustrated with Iain Banks' use of metaphor. He frequently describes things in that kind of ambiguous way, where you're not sure whether he means it literally or figuratively. And he usually says something in the next paragraph that assumes you know which way he meant it.

A lot of academics are doing things with Phil Dick's stuff, though, and a lot of the time, he was very, very literal. Even when the metaphor is literal, the meaning may not be.

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

I think you may have an out of date view of what academics are looking for in literature--or else I was extremely lucky in my college career, another valid possibility. Analyzing simile, metaphor, and, god help us, Freudian symbolism in literature is...pointless? A mechanistic approach to literature? The realm of bad high school English classes? at least according to most of my professors.

More important, and more interesting, is looking at the message that the author is, consciously or un-, conveying in the novel. If you run a critical eye over David Weber's Honor Harrington books, for instance, you can (easily!) see the author's extreme libertarian views, and how he manipulates the plot to ensure that all "liberal" and "social conservative" characters--everyone who doesn't agree with Honor and thus David Weber--turn out to be incompetent, corrupt, cowardly, or some combination of the above. (Well, a couple of characters experience a "road to Damascus" style conversion, becoming disciples of Honor, but that's really more of the same.) (I enjoy the Honor Harrington books, or at least all but the last, but I'm not blind.)

Using Weber as an example is shooting fish in a barrel, of course, but even in more subtle authors you have messages that the authors themselves may not realize they're writing. How often, for instance, do you see any variation from the "true love" message? I can only think of one author, Steven Brust, who has written the divorce or separation of a couple without one or both of them becoming a monster (that's metaphorically, not literally, at least in most cases *grin*). Lois McMaster Bujold is one of the few authors who continue a character's plot past the point of their marriage. Marriage, in fiction, is the goal of life, permanent, and the end of one's interest. This message is hardly new or exclusive to SF, of course, but it's interesting to see how little SF challenges it. For speculative fiction, science fiction is remarkably conservative.

These are two random observations, but it's the kind of analysis that I was taught in university-level English classes. It's also great practice for seeing through propaganda. *grin*

[brashley46.livejournal.com]

Hah. Point 'em at Chip Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw if you can find a copy. Chip does just that sort of analysis of the first sentence in Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon. You can just see the typical academic following Dr Delaney through the first two paragraphs of the deconstruction (I'm paraphrasing, mind, it's been twenty years since I've seen a copy):

"The" ... okay, definite article indicating that it is this object in front of us rather than some other object elsewhere, mumble, mumble ...

"The door" ... Right, obviously this is an object of the class door, since it's the subject of the sentence we're going to see it open or perhaps shut in some manner, mumble, mumble, this will be on the test, I'm so sure ...

"The door dilated." WTF???

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Heh; Doc Smith never had a character's story end with marriage. The Seatons got married in the first book (of 4), and Dorothy doesn't seem less important in later books (she's not that important in ANY of the books). And of course Children of the Lens is about Kim and Clarissa's children when they're grown up (and their parents are still very active, in fact Clarissa is more important in that book than any of the others).

But then he somehow seems to avoid most criticisms leveled at SF, except for the one of being sneered at by the literary elite.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Hm, while it's an interesting point, I don't agree with the premise as to why academics don't do their wanky exercise in delving for hidden meaning in most SF. I think it's because they simply don't care. SF (mainly) isn't marketed as "literary" (with perhaps the exception of your Atwoods - and I don't think she's a great SF writer), so academics don't think it's worth their time.

If quality SF was subjected to an in-depth analysis, I'm sure that there would be enough metaphor and whatever to keep even the wankiest academic happy. I would say, however, that SF is a little light on allusion. I think world-building can remove some of the reliance on direct cultural resonance in "literary" fiction. But I think that world-building could be worthy of academic study in its own right.

Finally, SF can be very functional in its prose - and that's nothing to do with the settings or anything like that. It's to do with mass-market authors chunking out as much as possible in the shortest amount of time. I do wish there were more SF authors with, say, Ursula Le Guin's command of language. But then again, fine prose isn't necessarily a requirement for "literary" works. Does anyone honestly believe that Wuthering Heights has fantastic writing?

Regarding how a piece of fiction is marketed and how that influences its perceived artistic merit, I think it's very similar to how visual art is marketed. If someone has a "name (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Hirst)", or went to the right art college, or had the right mentors, and they can write pseudo-intellectual wank about the "relevance" of their work, it will sell, and be appraised by the important critics. Much more beautiful (of course, that's relative), well-crafted and interesting works will be disregarded because the creator doesn't play the right games. So too with "literary" and genre fiction, IMO.

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

The presence or absence of a particular message in a fictional work doesn't make it better or worse than any other. The "marriage is the reward at the end of the story" message is the classic definition of a "comedy"--in the Greek sense of "not a tragedy," not the modern sense of "funny." Male or female, marriage was the reward and the story was over afterwards. Doc Smith, from what I've read of him (Lensman series only), moved the marriage forward, which is different, but kept it as the reward, which is the same. It's not a good thing or a bad thing: it's just a thing. Being able to recognize what the thing is and whether it's there is useful, in my opinion, but not as an indicator of quality.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

If you mean message isn't integral to literary value, sure, that's true.

Smith certainly treats marriage between two people who want to be married as a good thing. But in this particular case, as much a duty as a reward (Mentor even tells them that their marriage is *necessary*).

And, as I said but you ignored, it happens in the first book of the Skylark series. And as I didn't mention but could have, in the first chapter or two of Subspace Explorers and fairly early in Spacehounds of IPC, and not at all in The Galaxy Primes.

Sure, avoiding one characteristic flaw doesn't elevate a book significantly. I happen to know all this Smith trivia in such detail because *I* like the books, but the trivia is not why they are good, really, no. Although avoiding most characteristic failings of SF all at once *is* part of why I like the books.

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

You're missing the point, I'm afraid. Marriage as the final act isn't a "characteristic flaw" of anything, it's just plain a characteristic of at least 99% of the non-tragic fiction written in the last four thousand years, including most of what is considered "classic literature." I used it as an example of a theme or message that can be found if you look for it (or not found, as the case may be), not as a flaw to pick at.

I probably shouldn't have used the phrase "critical eye" in my original comment--blame the time of night I posted it. I meant an analytical eye, not a fault-finding one. Pity "critic" has picked up such a negative meaning.

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

The volume of academic journal articles and scholarly books published about Harry Potter would be sufficient to crush Voldemort if collected in one spot. There is a respected professor (or was twenty years ago) at Michigan State University who specialized entirely on comic books. I attended a panel at a national academic conference that was covering monsters in science fiction, including Alien and Star Trek DS-9. I personally know at least three English professors who publish scholarly articles on SF/F, and one is the former dean of a major state university's English department. So what on or off earth makes you think academics aren't interested in science fiction?

Sure, science fiction is a specialty area, but so is Shakespeare. You don't make a name for yourself in academic circles without publishing, and there is very little new to say about Shakespeare, but a lot new to say about science fiction, film, mysteries, and even romance. What literary academics write about has nothing at all to do with what high school English teachers teach, any more than research physicists write papers about incline planes, Newton's Three Laws, and other basics from high school physics class.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Looks to me like you're not reading the same books I'm reading. Marriage as any kind of finale is rare in SF, rare in mystery, moderately rare in historical and spy fiction. I believe it's common in...romance. Strangely enough. :-) But nowhere else.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that all academics aren't interested in SF, or its their fault that it's not being taught more. I personally know a few who are myself! I should probably say that mainstream Academe doesn't appear to be. I also think that many academics who would probably be interested in further work in those areas would not be particularly encouraged in it by the Powers That Be. Publishing papers, fine; teaching, not so much, from what I can tell. I do hope that will change - after all, universities aren't just about reading Latin and Greek (with a bit of Hebrew) texts these days either.

As for Shakespeare being a "speciality" area, uh? Sure it is, at its more rarefied level. However, is there such a thing as an English 100 course that doesn't cover Shakespeare? There certainly isn't a university that doesn't offer at least one course in SS, where courses on SF and genre fiction of all kinds are comparatively rare. Or perhaps this is different in the US.

I don't know what point you were making about high school English teachers - as far as I'm aware, we weren't talking about them.

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

There are, sad to say, a number of stodgy professors who think that literature ended a hundred years ago, but the number is, I hope, diminishing.

I don't know how prevalent science fiction classes are in U.S. universities in general (or non-U.S. for that matter), but most of the universities I have personal experience with have an SF class--if only one. I can't speak for anyone else, but I managed to get a B.A. in English without ever taking Shakespeare.