閱讀筆記：Darko Suvin, “Narrative Logic, Ideological Domination, and the Range of SF: A Hypothesis” (1982)

 

原刊於：Science Fiction Stories Vol. 9 No. 1 (Mar 1982), pp. 1-25

閱讀版本：Darko Suvin, Positions and Presupposition in Science Fiction (Kent, Ohio, The Kent State University Press, 1988), pp. 61-73 

我不敢隨意解讀 Darko Suvin 這種理論大神的論文，所以這一篇原則上只有重點摘錄。

筆記開始：

1.      NARRATIVE LOGIC AND INTERTEXTUALITY

p. 62

… The text is not an independent totality, a closed monad within or atom of social discourse. Rather, it is the frozen notation of a producing of meanings, values and structures of feeling, which results from the writer’s work on given materials within a given socio-historical context. Outside of a context that supplies the conditions of making sense, no text can be even read (as distinguished from spelling out the letters). Only the insertion of a text into a context makes it intelligible; that is why changing social contexts bring different messages out of the same text. Any reading ineluctably invents a more or less precise and pertinent context for the text being read.

p. 64

The presuppositions, the ideological givens, are thus both logically prior and analytically posterior to the text: its emergence as well as its interpretation is impossible without them. They are crucial factors of the context; but they are also among the materials with which the writer has to work, the building bricks which he can manipulate in the text. … Directly to the purpose of studying fiction, ideology is also a lived structure of feeling ‘which simultaneously organize[s] the empirical consciousness of a particular social group and the imaginative world created by the writer.

2.      IDEOLOGICAL DOMINATION VS. THE NOVUM: THE RANGE OF SF

p. 66

… I have argued in MOSF [Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979)，Suvin的科幻定義 cognitive estrangement 與 novum 概念的出處，正如本段下面所述] that SF in general – through its long history in different contexts – can be defined as a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment, and that it is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional ‘novum’ (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic. At the same time, I suggested that the notion of an ineluctably historical novum implies that SF in any particular period will only be understandable by integrating socio-historical into formal knowledge. …

p. 67

If an SF narration hinges on the presence of a novum which is to be cognitively validated within the narration, then this novelty has to be explained in terms of the specific time, place, agents and cosmic-cum-social totality of each narration – i.e., in terms of its ‘possible world’. This means that, in principle, SF has to be judged -- like ‘realistic’ fiction and quite unlike mythological tales, fairy tales, and horror or heroic fantasy – by the richness, consistency and relevance of the relationships presented in any narration. In this chapter I shall focus on consistency, as an already fundamental criterion for analysis.

…

從這裡開始講述科幻的評價方式，不過 Suvin 首先整理 Wells 的說法：

… H. G. Wells’s, ‘Fiction About the Future’, in which he distinguished (to use present-day terms) between the SF story ‘at the lowest level’, a middle range of SF, and its highest form. Wells begins with the necessity of achieving ‘the illusion of reality … the effect of a historical novel … a collaboration [with the reader] in make-believe’. He then focuses on the propensity of the SF writer

p. 68

whose imagination breaks down to ‘pretend that all along he was only making fun’: this is why so much SF ‘degenerates into a rather silly admission of insincerity before the tale is half-way through’. The lowest level of SF, he ironically notes, stops at the superficial or defensive ‘first laugh’ which is implied in the strangeness of ‘every new discovery’:

…

The middle range of SF comes about if the writer carries out his hypothesis ‘to the extent of trying to imagine how such a possibility would really work’ -- … However, ‘the highest and most difficult form’ – and Wells wryly confesses that he has never written one – would be an account of the struggle between opposed opinions, values and social groups that constituted the change in human relations as a consequence of the novum (here, directed parthenogenesis). …

p. 69

… Wells, too – and who better qualified? – is here, clearly, pleading for logical stringency and consistency in developing the implications of the novum.

接下來就是 Suvin 自己的觀點：

To systematize such leads: there is an immanent aesthetics to (at least the novel-size) SF tales, which fuses formal and value criteria. It can be represented as a fan-shaped spread with two limits, the optimal and the pessimal (see Figure 1).

In the optimum, a sufficiently large number of precisely aimed and compatible details draw out a sufficiently full range of logical implications from the central SF novum and thus suggest a coherent universe with overall relationships that are – at least in respect of the thematic and semantic field associated with the novum – significantly different from the relationships assumed as normal by the text’s addressees. …

p. 70

… In such best cases, the balance or shuttling allows the SF estrangement to feed back into the reader’s own presuppositions and cultural invariants, questioning them and giving him/her a possibility of critical examination. In optimal SF, the interaction of the vehicle (relations in the fictional universe) and the tenor (relations in the empirical universe), makes therefore for the reader’s parabolic freedom: this freedom is rehearsed, traced out and inscribed in the very act of reading, before and parallel to forming a conceptual system. …

If there is only one ideal optimum, there are several ways of falling short of it. Here, these worst cases can be divided into the banal, the incoherent, the dogmatic and the invalidated pessimum. In the banal pessimum – probably the most widespread type of SF tale – the narrative details or elements that deal with the novum are too sparse or too circumscribed. They are drowned in the non-SF details and/or plot gimmicks of a banal mundane tale – adventure story, love story, etc. …

In the second pessimum, the narrative details may be too disparate, and then the tale is just not clearly focused. In that case, genological judgments become difficult, relying as they do more on

p.71

the writer’s guessed-at intention than on the incoherent execution.

The third, dogmatic pessimum is (in different ways) the obverse of the first two. In it, the narremes are too explicit or too repetitive, so that the reader’s return to the workaday world does not pass through an imaginary aesthetic paradigm. On the contrary, the environment (which, conversely, severely limits the possible Other in the tale, the kind and radicality of the novum employed). … In significant SF this means that the novum will, as explained above, allow for the reader’s freedom – in literary terms, that the story will be not a project but a parable. Any SF tale that is not a parable but a linear or panoramic inventory correlative to a general conceptual grid – most clearly the static utopias of the nineteenth century – thus to a degree partakes of non-fiction (of political, technological or other kind of blueprint) and loses to that degree the flexibility and advantages of fiction. If in the first pessimum the conceptual blueprint does not allow for interaction with the plot: the plot is here merely so that the reader should traverse the blueprint, and the narration has constant trouble with balancing events and lectures. (It follows from this that all uses of SF as prophecy, futurology, program or anything else claiming ontological factuality for the SF image-clusters, are obscurantist and reactionary at the deepest level – for example, all of Cabet and most of Bellamy, much of Gernsback’s and Campbell editorial policies, von Daniken and Manson, Scientology and Future Shock.

Finally, the invalidated pessimum is akin to the banal one and competes with it for the lead in SF statistics. However, it is more sophisticated: instead of the narrative details being quantitatively insufficient, they are qualitatively unsatisfactory in that they oscillate between a cognitive and a non-cognitive or anti-cognitive validation – in genological terms, between SF and fantasy, fairy tale or kindred metaphysical genres. The details are plentiful indeed, in a way too plentiful: for the strategy here is to induce in the reader an

p. 72

ambiguity concerning the status of the fictive novum inside the story. Is it explainable as a set of logical events on the same level as the story framework, or is it a delusion, dream or irruption of another level with different laws? An unambiguous decision for the second possibility would remove the story from SF and into delusional or horror fantasy, or into similar genres.