Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

by Duncan, Hal

  Jetse de Vries

  So let’s say we have these two axes of fictional thought—story elements and craft techniques, the former consisting of character, setting and plot (broken down into problem, try/fail cycle, resolution and validation), the latter consisting of things like voice, style, PoV, structure, person/tense, punctuation and paragraphing. Is there a third axis of genre devices, not in the sense of listable concrete MacGuffins (time-travel, spaceships, etc.) which are all ultimately negotiable conventions, but as something more abstract, not tropes but elements or techniques more analogous to the other axes. Jetse de Vries offers an interesting suggestion that the third axis is to do with “deviation from base reality.” Lake meanwhile suggests a rough taxonomy, breaking down types of fiction into four modes of narrative with a fifth, the fantastic narrative, as a fusion of these forms. In this model:

  • Private narrative deals with “things which might have happened or could have happened, but leave the world as it is. Most mainstream novels fall here. Holden Caulfield could have lived or not, the world wouldn’t be noticeably different.”

  • Alternative narrative deals with “things which might have happened or could have happened, but would change the world in noticeable ways. If Jett Rink were real, we would be aware of him as an industrialist and something of a tragic figure, in the manner of Howard Hughes.”

  • Mythic narrative deals with “things which never actually happened, or could have happened in a literal reading, but encapsulate important truths for the tellers of the tale. Gilgamesh was (probably) a real king in Uruk, but the story which was told around him describes the cosmology, aspirations and experience of his people.”

  • Future narrative deals with “things which have not yet happened but might. This ranges from prophetic writings in virtually any literate cultural tradition to cautionary tales such as Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

  Here, we’re entering the same territory as Delany’s essay “About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words,” with Lake’s language of modalities—could have, might have, could not have, have not yet—mapping almost perfectly to Delany’s theory of subjunctivity level as the defining feature of each genre. While there’s a grace to this theory, though, Lake’s reference to events which might have / never actually / have not yet happened requires a step beyond simple subjunctivity.

  The Crescent Sun

  [W]hat distinguishes science fiction from other kinds of fiction is a peculiar compromise between scientific truth and untruth. Samuel Delany has analyzed this compromise in terms of the SF text’s subjunctivity (“About 5,750 Words”). What he means by this term is the degree to which every statement in the fiction describes a hypothetical condition: something that is not happening, has not happened, could not have happened in the past (unlike realistic fiction), but might happen, given the proper changes in society and scientific knowledge. Another word for subjunctivity might be ‘ifness,’ the condition of being contingent.

  What SF is contingent upon is change that does not violate the reader’s understanding of scientifically defined reality, which is not to say that we necessarily accept any statement in the text as scientifically valid. Rather, we accept reference within SF as allusions to science, broadly conceived of as a field of endeavor, a way of mapping the universe, and a way of speaking about the universe and the attempt to comprehend it.

  Brian Attebery

  All fiction requires the suspension-of-disbelief, requires us to read the text as having a subjunctivity level of “this could have happened.” The act of reading a book or watching a movie involves a willingness on the reader’s part to make-believe that these words on the page actually map to events, and so all fiction takes this as its baseline. We’re not generally troubled by the fact that these are lies, fabrications, falsehoods, that the cat did not actually sit on the mat, that there was never a cat to sit, and never a mat for it to sit on. Unless the writer starts dropping hints that the narrator is unreliable, we take the text on face value, pretending to ourselves that the narrator is not in fact breaching Grice’s Maxim of Quality (“Do not say that which you believe to be false or that for which you lack evidence”).

  —The cat sat on the mat, we are told.

  —Fair enough, we say. We’ll go with you on that. We’ve seen cats sit on mats, after all. We know it never happened. But we’ll pretend, for the sake of the story, that it did happen.

  This is not subjunctivity level though. With the modal auxiliary did versus could, we are dealing with an epistemic modality rather than an alethic modality. The latter is equivalent to subjunctivity, but the former is not, a judgement of actuality rather than possibility.

  The difference is a matter of facts versus potentials, so we might look at it in terms of reportage.

  News reports may be false; articles may be inaccurate; history texts may be wrong: all by failure or by intent. As long as these remain within the realm of what’s possible though, they have an alethic modality, a subjunctivity level, of “could have happened.” It’s quite possible for a man to bite a dog. As factual claims, they also have an epistemic modality of “might have happened” though, so we can read sceptically, or we can forsake disbelief and ascribe these factual claims an epistemic modality of “did happen.” We can trust in the veracity of the reportage and project an artificial epistemic modality onto the text.

  Where fiction is seen as naturalistic, realistic, mimetic, the ersatz reality it claims to be rendering is so closely modelled on the world we live in that the events described “could have happened,” such that we can do something similar in play. We don’t forsake disbelief, knowing fine well it’s all made up, but we do suspend it, sustain an artificial epistemic modality.

  Even strange fiction contains naturalism in that sense, the mimesis of sentences that carry an alethic modality of possibility and to which we ascribe this (artificial, projected) epistemic modality. There are bound to be cats sitting on mats somewhere in the text. What makes some fiction strange is that it also involves a shift of alethic modality from “could have happened” to “could not have happened,” as the narrative performs a sentence that is harder to read as simply mimetic. Delany’s example, “The red sun was high, the blue low,” would serve as example of a rupture in the mimetic weft, introducing an alethic modality (subjunctivity level) of “could not have happened,” but for ease I’ll stick with my alternative:

  The crescent sun was high, the moon low.

  The above sentence representing something impossible—a “crescent sun”—these sort of word-combos that fuck with the reader’s suspension-of-disbelief are, of course, what I’ve been talking about as quirks of impossibility. My example is a chimera, Delany’s a novum; mine breaches the laws of nature, his known science—a technical impossibility because we can’t yet stand on a planet in a binary system. It’s a comparable impossibility to that of the novum’s closer bedfellow, the quirk that plays with known history as the novum plays with known science: the erratum. Where the novum is a conjuring of what could not be, not yet, the erratum is a conjuring of what could not be, not now, an historical impossibility because we have already passed the point where events might have hypothetically played out otherwise to produce it.

  How do we swallow these alethic quirks? There are people who don’t read fiction at all because they cannot suspend disbelief even in the most mimetic narrative. They cannot entertain (or cannot see the point in entertaining) an artificial epistemic modality. They read a story and know it has the epistemic modality of “this never happened,” and if it never happened, why should they care? This may be significant when it comes to those who can’t suspend disbelief in strange fiction, and when it comes to those who can: that some clearly can’t see the point in entertaining texts with an alethic modality of “could not happen” suggests that those who can, insofar as they do, are playing a comparable game of make-believe—i.e. sustaining an artificial alethic modality.

  Contrary to Delany, I’d argue that th
e continued engagement with the text, the continued suspension-of-disbelief requires that in some way the “could have happened” alethic modality persists. Which is to say, rather than a quirk causing our reading to flip from one alethic modality (“could have happened”) to another (“could not have happened”) in an act of correction, it is an act of addition that takes place, with the secondary alethic modality introduced and entering into a state of tension with the primary or base level. To illustrate this with an example:

  The man stood on the balcony, gazing at the clear sky. The crescent sun was high, the moon low. He smiled.

  In the first sentence, a baseline alethic modality is introduced with a bit of simple mimesis: could have happened. In the second, in Delany’s model, the introduction of the “crescent sun” causes an act of correction on the part of the reader, alethic modality flipped: could not have happened. But given that the third sentence is entirely as plausible as the first, has nothing strange about it at all, in and of itself, what alethic modality do we read into it? Should we not simply perform another act of correction and flip back to “could have happened”? Would we really deem that shift in the second sentence irreversible, reading the narrative as fantastic (to hold with Delany’s term for now) from there on in if no other quirk was introduced into the text to reinforce our reading? Or would we, at some point, decide that the “crescent sun” was just some metaphor, metonym or even misprint that has thrown us, that the text never actually deviated from the basic alethic modality of “could have happened”?

  We must, I suggest, entertain multiple subjunctivities simultaneously during the reading experience. Even when reading a purely fantastic work, where we’re asked to swallow, for the sake of the story, a complete impossibility such as a crescent sun, some part of us is still playing along with the game of make-believe, continuing to work on the principle that “this could have happened.” For the epistemic modality to persist, that alethic modality upon which the suspension-of-disbelief is founded must persist as a baseline, even as the strange sentences dealing with crescent suns interject themselves among the otherwise mundane paragraphs dealing with men standing on balconies, gazing at skies, and smiling.

  The text becomes, then, a pattern of tensions formed by playing these two conflicting subjunctivity levels off against each other, by disrupting the equilibrium of suspension-of-disbelief with the incredulity that attaches to the quirk. It becomes a rhythm: could; could not; could; could; could not; could; could, could not; could not; could; could. It becomes the accumulating medley as each voice of a sentence joins the chorus, pitched baritone low or soprano high, singing theme or counterpoint. It becomes the soundscape of those strange sentences sustaining, the note of impossibility from one fading out as the next comes in, or enduring to be built on with even bolder and more brazen strangeness.

  A Lesser Impossibility

  The red sun was high, the blue low.

  Samuel R. Delany

  In Delany’s model of subjunctivity level and genre, any such physical impossibilities theoretically render a work no longer s-f, as Delany refers to it—speculative-fiction, decapitalised and hyphenated. This is a fairly orthodox view. With all the talk of plausibility and possibility, science and magic, there are many who would argue that the alethic modality of “could not have happened” breaches the rigours of the genre, that SF only ever deals with things that “could not have happened yet,” things that therefore “never happened (but could).”

  But this is where the problem lies when we consider the jaunting of Bester’s The Stars My Destination. In Delany’s model, jaunting would have to manifest an epistemic/alethic modality of “never happened (but could)” in order for the work to qualify as SF. But it’s wishful thinking to imagine it does; it’s the Contingency Slip Fallacy, the Paradigm Shift Caveat. In fact, what we have is the “could not have happened” alethic modality that Delany ascribes to fantasy, manifest in an act which clearly breaches what we know of the laws of nature. It’s a magic, a metaphysical causation which requires no power, involves manipulating matter in a jaw-dropping way, and which is instigated by mere will, placing it in the same category, ultimately, as Dracula transforming into a bat. Even allowing for a level of uncertainty, a degree of implausibility, this is surely at odds with the exclusion of impossibility required to map the “could have happened” alethic modality directly to SF.

  What we can do, though, is expand on Delany’s idea. Stepping through my example sentence as Delany steps through his, you’d reach the end, having corrected your reading a number of times, (having gone through various possibilities such as the crescent sun being an image on a flag, or a metaphor for an Islamic culture) and settle on an alethic modality of “could not have happened,” having realised that it’s intended to be read literally.

  —Ah, you’d say, this is a fantasy story.

  Follow Delany’s theory, and if jaunting reads more like a crescent sun than a binary system, then the alethic modality of the jaunting sequences in The Stars My Destination would similarly place the book in fantasy rather than SF. If we don’t assume a single subjunctivity level though, then no such instant taxonomic judgement need be made. If the process of reading is one of continual correction we can suspend our ultimate decision, read the text with the multiple alethic modalities it has, taking one sentence as SF the next as fantasy, either switching back and forth in one’s attitude to the text or just being in two minds about it, so to speak.

  Stealing that famous SF sentence of Heinlein’s and splicing it together with my own, suppose you kick off a story with this paragraph:

  The door dilated. The man stepped out onto the balcony, gazed up at the clear sky. The crescent sun was high, the moon low. He smiled.

  The dilating door is a quirk just as the crescent sun is, but it is a different kind of quirk; like Delany’s twinned suns, it is only a technical impossibility rather than a metaphysical impossibility, a breach of known science rather than the laws of nature, a novum rather than a chimera. Still, it is a quirk.

  So is this going to be an SF story or is it going to be fantasy? If the story goes on to work almost entirely in the mimetic “could have happened” mode or limits itself to hypothetical nova, we’d probably suspend our decision, waiting for some revelation which explains the crescent sun and places the story firmly in the realm of SF. (Oh crap, it’s a VR story!) If it goes on with the metaphysical chimerae mounting, we might expect a revelation which throws away our reality altogether and places it in the realm of fantasy. (Oh crap, the hero’s dead!) Or indeed, we might happily sustain it as SF. (Oh cool, it’s a PKD story!)

  Or, indeed, the story might well never actually resolve into one or the other, instead utilising the tension between conflicting subjunctivities of “could have happened” and “could not have happened” (in which case we probably hum and haw and mutter something about “slipstream” when we reach the end).

  In Bester’s novel the metaphysical impossibility of the quirk of jaunting is obscured by its context within a whole worldscape of quirks that are only nova rather than chimera. SF novels like The Stars My Destination demonstrate that we’re a lot more lenient as readers than the definitions we impose, that there’s a lot more of “could not have happened” than we claim. There is always the Paradigm Shift Caveat, of which “the next stage in human evolution” as used by Bester is a blatant example. (Because, yes…the next stage in human evolution is going to give us the power to twitch our noses, click our heels three times, say, “There’s no place like the asteroids,” and teleport ourselves away from impending death. For sure.) And if a flagrant metaphysical impossibility is not quite so outrageous as a crescent sun, if the chimera is on its own rather than being in a huge heap of such impossibilities, or if it’s simply such a cool idea we want it to be feasible, we can quite often just shunt the “could not have happened” alethic modality to the back of our minds and read the work as SF regardless. There’s the “one impossible thing per story” rule too
, a First Offence Caveat which along with the Paradigm Shift Caveat renders all sorts of spurious pseudo-science acceptable.

  So, not only is the quirk of a crescent sun operationally identical to the quirk of jaunting in disrupting the suspension-of-disbelief with a metaphysical impossibility; it is or can be functionally identical to the quirk of a dilating door in the effect of such a disruption, regardless of the type of impossibility. It is only the addition of that “yet” to the “could not have happened” alethic modality which distinguishes the two, and this SF rationalisation has its complement in fantasy.

  But we’ll get to that.

  For now, if we add in a requirement to not breach epistemic modality with events that would necessarily, because of their scale of impact, be on the historical record as fact, we have an effective definition of Lake’s private narrative as that which cleaves to a “could have happened” alethic modality, versus the strange narrative, as that which introduces a “could not have happened” alethic modality. We have a fundamental difference between private narratives that exclude quirks in favour of the mundane and those strange narratives that introduce them as notes of dissonance in the mimetic weft, whatever the flavour of quirk, and whether they rationalise them or not.

  A Personal Perspective, Frontal, Lateral, Residual

  To put a personal perspective on this, in Vellum and Ink there are two big-ass conceits that, for many people I’m sure, render them fantasy rather than science fiction. In the SF Café I’ve been asked enough times what category I’d place them in to know that it’s a matter of doubt for some.