Disputing the Deluge

Collected 21st-Century Writings on Utopia, Narration, and Survival

Darko Suvin, Hugh C. O'Connell, Hugh C. O'Connell

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501384783
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction

Featured on the 2021 Locus Recommended Reading List For over 50 years, Darko Suvin has set the agenda for science fiction studies through his innovative linking of scifi to utopian studies, formalist and leftist critical theory, and his broader engagement with what he terms "political epistemology." Disputing the Deluge joins a rapidly growing renewal of critical interest in Suvin's work on scifi and utopianism by bringing together in a single volume 24 of Suvin's most significant interventions in the field from the 21st century, with an Introduction by editor Hugh O'Connell and a new preface by the author. Beginning with writings from the early 2000s that investigate the function of literary genres and reconsider the relationship between science fiction and fantasy, the essays collected here--each a brilliant example of engaged thought--highlight the value of scifi for grappling with the key events and transformations of recent years. Suvin's interrogations show how speculative fiction has responded to 9/11, the global war on terror, the 2008 economic collapse, and the rise of conservative populism, along with contemporary critical utopian analyses of the Capitalocene, the climate crisis, COVID-19, and the decline of democracy. By bringing together Suvin's essays all in one place, this collection allows new generations of students and scholars to engage directly with his work and its continuing importance and timeliness.

1

Kick-Off: An Introduction to Narrative Genres, with a View to SF (2007, 2020)

In memory of the writer and critic Stanisław Lem

Note 2020: This text was prepared as an Italian lecture for the doctoral studies at University of Roma II – Tor Vergata in early 2007, for which my thanks go to Andrea Gareffi and my long-time friend Daniela Guardamagna. Its function was to introduce the approach to SF as a literary genre taken from MOSF, which had arisen within a rich discussion on the status and importance of literary genres in the five main European languages, beginning with Lukács, Russian Formalism, and Propp. To my mind this culminated in works by Fredric Jameson, particularly in his Political Unconscious, but I was also very aware of the work and national context of, say, Eco and Vosskamp, and had oral discussions with all three colleagues; and I followed the raging French debates around Barthes and a plethora of other names at the time. Without this context, my position on SF lacks the necessary presuppositions for today’s readers unfamiliar with my earlier work, even if I reuse in this book the opposition between the lay and mythical narration. I have now freely retranslated this back from the Italian, expanding the beginning.

1.0. On Epistemic Regimes

1.01. An epistemic regime within an artistic and/or scholarly discipline indicates the preconditions and framework of what understanding (knowledge, cognition) that discipline conveys how, and at least implicitly also what for and to whom; it always comes about within a more or less strict institutional framework. The epistemic practices in such disciplines follow norms for methods and procedures that are to be recognised as valid both for the practitioners and the users of the discipline.

To choose our path here, it is indispensable to reject the monoalethists (see my Introduction) who hold they have the Absolute Truth, even when it is the belief that relativism is absolute. A useful horizon and way beyond this bind would be an operative epistemological realism recognizing there are still some logical ways at least of defining untruth (Goodman & Elgin 136). All opinions are constructed and up to a point wrong or limited, but even so some are valid within given limits: this needs a sense of relevance or pertinence, impossible to detach from the situation and interests of the knowing collective subject (cf. Prieto). Some beliefs and orientations are much more wrong than others, and a belief in the absolute right is absolutely wrong.^1/

I cannot survey here the shoreless ocean of narratology as a means of organising human time and meaning/s, on a par with metaphor (trope). Fredric Jameson, who has wrestled with narrative and brilliantly illuminated it throughout his opus, remarked discussing Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, that narrative is “a primary instance of the human mind,” and that it powerfully intervenes into the human understanding of temporality (Jameson, Valences 486). I agree, even though we should beware of overweening linguistic imperialism – the embodied human imagination has a variety of means to apprehend meaning and time. Furthermore, narrative is inextricably bound up with the constitution of any kind of subject: an excellent proof by contraries being Althusser’s definition of scientific discourse as obviously bereft of any explicit signifier designating subject (Humanist 49, cf. Jameson, Allegory XII, and Suvin “Horizons”). In the study of narrative and performance such methods and procedures are called poetics, with a nod to its first Euro-Mediterranean practitioner to exert an immense influence, Aristotle (for whom the term seems to have meant both how to create and how to understand a verbal work). Much expanding on the old Hellenic source, all matters of narration, visualisation, and theatricalisation can by now be taken to fall under poetics: and it is difficult to say what does not at least partly fall under it, since human lives are shot through and imaginatively oriented by narratives through which all of us, and especially those with power over mass communication, account for our and others’ everyday lives (cf. Bowlby). As Kenneth Burke phrased it, “Literature [is] equipment for living” (293).

1.02. One ought philosophically to start with a general inquiry into forms, probably omnipresent in our lives but foregrounded and clearly analysable in the arts. The useful book by Caroline Levine focusses on the subdivisions of “Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network,” but I would say that a first ineluctable articulation of value-bearing shapes would be into the syntagmatics and the paradigmatics, as pioneered in post-Saussurean linguistics. Paradigmatics is a synoptic view of the whole as based on articulating co-occurring entities, its model is “X and Y and Z”; while syntagmatics is about how the paradigm is gradually built up and manifested in a temporal flow actualising mutually exclusive choices, its model is “X or Y or Z”. The relationship of paradigmatics to syntagmatics is spiral and passes through the narration’s plot, itself reposing on the interaction of chronotopes (spacetimes) and agential systems changing in time. The central device of form seems to me a boundary, exemplified by the “empty” spaces that constitute words or by analogous beginnings and ends of, say, a line of poetry or a narrative text. A boundary determines what can be considered in its discussion or not, with the attendant train of borders, liminality, cross-overs, purity, and contamination. My identification of any form as bearing a (positive or negative) value, meaning or quality is axiomatic: humans organise their horizons and orientations around values of physical and psychic survival and enrichment. Since in any society more complex than a tribe there will be a number of competing values for different pursuits of different groups of people, a hierarchical organisation of values (as to which is more or less basic, central or supreme) is also unavoidable.

Within a formal boundary, there is always a reproducible arrangement of elements (existents and relationships), an organised – often institutionalised – ordering or patterning in paradigmatic ideal space and syntagmatic flowing time (cf. Levine 3 and passim). Chaos may sometimes be a bitter herb necessary to counteract ossification, but only if it issues in a new and more useful pattern, as a star is born from coalescing lumps of matter. Since all that we call politics is an ordering of power in human communities to achieve certain values as ends, no hierarchical inclusion/exclusion is bereft of politics. As I put it in a paper: form is always involved in epistemological politics; or, more or less but always, “forms constrain” (Levine 4) . Last not least, form in literature (including its genres) is the only way allowing you to get at the meaning.

What is then not form? I would point to most situations in empirical life and very many in the lower reaches of arts that are chaotic, not fully fleshed out, in contention between dimly understood forces. Our lives are often poorly articulate, from hand to mouth, rife with Baconian idols.

Here I wish to approach a poetics of literary – or in fact of all narrative – genres.

1.1. Narrative Genres as Superindividual Entities

Traditionally, literary studies that want to liberate themselves from the initially necessary but insufficient fixation on The Text opt for the communicational trinity of Writer (or Author) –> Text (or Work) –> Reader (or User). Even if one is interested mainly or quite centrally in The Text, as a student of literature should be, Writer and – less clearly but powerfully – Reader contribute not only to its existence but also to its most intimate forms.

My first axiom is therefore that cultural texts are sometimes individual but always also superindividual. The concept of originality in the sense of being novel or newfound, even unique, arose as a critical term in Romanticism: it did not exist between Homer and Victor Hugo. It has been degenerating from the 20^th Century on – on the one hand the age of massification, of world wars, and of movies, all hostile to individualism and autonomy, and on the other hand wedded to copyright and especially patent law, which is intimately bound up with the pulsating heart of capital, and slops over into art with the claim that only what is original can be interesting. Originality did not exist, for example, for Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare or Milton, all of whom worked recombining the existing literary topoi and forms (such as genres). All of them followed the general maxim non nova sed nove (not new matter but in new ways). Historically clearest is perhaps the tradition of the epic poem in verse, from Homer through Virgil by way of Dante and Milton, and then on to Fielding – who transformed it, as he wrote semi-ironically in his preface to Joseph Andrews, into “a comic epic in prose” and to Byron’s Childe Harold.

The most fertile way to talk about the superindividual or collective (group) aspects of texts seems to me to approach them inside genres – though when we talk of an individual text or smaller grouping of texts, it is indispensable to consider also its particular characteristics. I adopt here Jameson’s approach to genres as mediations between the formal analysis of texts and their history in social life: “Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact.” (Political 106). Therefore, before being explicated as classificatory devices used by literary critics to orient themselves, literary genres are spontaneously and necessarily generated inside fiction as an implied contract with the reader. Ursula Le Guin put it with luminous precision: “If fiction is how it says what it says, then useful criticism is what shows you how fiction says what it says” (23).

I am forced to swat a noxious Summer fly here: the Post-Modern a priori refusal of genre, very fashionable in the 1970s–90s (cf. the able critique of Derrida and early Culler by Bolongaro 302–03). If genres are institutionalized and convention-bound vehicles of communication so that the necessary process of cognition could take place (ibidem 304–05), then literature is, as Guillén named it, a “system of genres,” changing with and within the concrete historical hegemony of the period. This leads to two clarifications: first, to a welcome relativising of what I shall continue to develop here in view of the overriding usefulness of genre in many (not all) cases. Genre “is not a law, a rigid taxonomic landscape”; as Dimock concludes, genre is “a provisional set, that will always be bent and pulled and stretched by its many subsets,” in brief a more or less quickly changing “family” (73–74) – with Wittgensteinian family resemblances, eccentrics, black sheep, and pillars of righteousness (I discussed a case at length in an essay unwillingly split into “Against” and “Synchrony”).

Second, it leads to the motor and evidence of both stability and change, societal history. Genre was first discussed in the European tradition by Plato and Aristotle, revived in the Renaissance. At times of political absolutism subject to rigid laws, as in Baroque, the official genre system could and did degenerate to “a clearly delineated model in which not only an obligatory complex of subject-matters, motifs, and agents, not only an obligatory diction and technique, but also a prescribed world-image and a prescribed thought-content fit together so that none of these components was displaceable or replaceable” (Alewyn 22). Predictably, oppression and monotony were rife, finally leading to a breakdown and to the equally stultifying theoretical reaction in the notion of individual “genius.” However, this process also gave rise to a technical critical problem: in much more complex societies that ensued with the rise of the bourgeoisie and capitalism, describing such a system proved very onerous for a single critic because it could only be based on a large range of texts subjected to induction. Thus despite very valiant critical pioneers, say Lukács for the novel in general and the historical novel in particular (maybe also for the 19^th-Century realistic novel), and then Propp and the Russian Formalists on various generic morphologies and aspects beginning with the folktale, arguing about all-encompassing systems became practically prohibitive. Most 20^th-Century attempts were either programmatically ahistorical, such as much French work, or confined themselves to either a useful but vague general sketch and/or (more often) a focus on one or a small group of cognate genres – certainly mine too have done so, with the dichotomy between estranged and naturalistic genres plus focus on a few estranged ones around the center of Science Fiction. What the current I learned most from concluded was that a genre had no transhistorical essence, much less a template in some (human) organic body of which it would be a constitutive member; it...