Thoughts About Thoughts to Think About Before Reading FEELING VERY STRANGE
update: I guess I should have provided some linkages that prompted some of this discussion about Feeling Very Strange! Check out this and this. See here we go.
1. I think where a lot of my unease about the slipstream label comes from is that the affect (”feeling very strange”) comes about from signifier-level techniques, rather than trying to use fiction as a tool to get at the heart of that which is signified. That is to say: A slipstream story is only one half of the equation for the emotion produced (overtly indicated in the title). The reader has to meet the story halfway. A story isn’t made of emotions; it’s made of words. So what else creates that affect? And is it even a valuable way of looking at fiction? Are the emotions elicited or created by a story? To say nothing of the way other conscious/ non-conscious efforts come into play–thoughts, ideas, intellectual rationalizations, grammar, etc. These are the questions that come out for me about any discussion of a story’s “effectiveness.”
2. As a kind of corollary to that (and this might be paradoxical)–we shouldn’t overestimate the power of fiction. But it’s in its powerlessness that it gains its strength. Stories, on a basic level, can’t make anyone feel anything. They’re only linguistic intermediaries, membranes.
3. “All the same, nothing is more damaging to theoretical knowledge of modern art than its reduction to what it has in common with older periods. What is specific to it slips through the methodological net of “nothing new under the sun”; it is reduced to the undialectical, gapless continuum of tranquil development that it in fact explodes. There is no denying the fatality that cultural phenomena cannot be interpreted without some translation of the new into the old, yet this implies an element of betrayal. Second reflection would have the responsibility of correcting this. In the relation of modern artworks to older ones that are similiar, it is their differences that should be elicited.[my emphasis] Immersion in the historical dimension should reveal what previously remained unsolved; in no other way can a relation between the present and the past be established. In comparison, the aim of the current history of ideas is virtually to demonstrate that the new does not exist.” –Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
OK, so this isn’t a thought to think about, but rather a quotation. More later?
(Update): Later:
4. What I think is tricky about pinning down an affect-based literature is the attempt to define the undefinable. It’s trying to pin down a void. And what is that void anyway? It’s a void that more than one art besides literature has had to grapple with.
That “clicking” sound you hear inside your mind when you read a story that really messes with your head (IS it a clicking sound? It’s like a planetary alignment in the head. There’s no other way to approach wacky reader responses except through wacky metaphors) is that “it.” Perhaps it’s not our place to understand that. I’m not sure. We’re all grasping at straws.
Last night when we were coming home late at night from Diversicon, Kristin was letting our puppy out and the dog burst free. Kristin told me about how, when the dog gets loose like that (and by loose I mean loose), the trick to getting the dog to follow you back is to immediately run in the opposite direction that the dog is running. Which is, at first, terrifying: I’d chased the dog all over the neighborhood once, and it was like trying to catch greased air. But running in the opposite direction did work, the dog came right back, etc.
5. Stories gain “excess value” from being perceived to transcend limitations. And, incidentally, SF/F (accidentally or no) has gained significant cogency and power through these flirtations with transcendentalism (little t) in terms of subject matter. In a way, it’s one of the most substantive (or transubstantive) conceits of the entire genre. But with transcendence comes perceptual dissonance: evidence of this runs through a swath of SF/F tropes, from personality upload to the interference of gods in human affairs (”What are those gods thinking!?!?). This dissonance is what haunts the entire corpus of fantastic literature.
6. So go back to the Adorno quote–what is different than dissonance? Oddly, if we accept cognitive dissonance as the baseline, then maybe we’re left with the void, the “it” mentioned above. And maybe that can’t ever be named. Maybe that’s the crux of the issue: how speculative and fantastic literature is inherently about “cognitive dissonance”. We don’t have to go far from home to find this dissonance in the earliest examples of the genre. Maybe the codification of “slipstream,” ironically, is actually a consolidatory effort for the genre’s own benefit.
7. Calling George Saunders’s “Sea Oak” slipstream is like calling Moby Dick “whale-y.”
What I think is tricky about pinning down an affect-based literature is the attempt to define the undefinable.
Do you consider horror an affect-based literature? I think I do, and I think it’s possible to recognise something as horror without necessarily being personally horrified by it. We can recognise the way it works. Same with slipstream, perhaps.
Maybe that’s the crux of the issue: how speculative and fantastic literature is inherently about “cognitive dissonance”.
Or indeed cognitive estrangement, per Suvin. Which I think is one of the problems with Kessel and Kelly’s intro; one of the holes it doesn’t plug.
I can’t wait to read this book. I saw it in a local bookstore lately. Not that I can afford it for another year or so. I’m saving up for the single beer I’m going to drink at quizzo tonight.
However I got a book on China’s short stories which should be fun.
I thought that this whole slipstream thing was great b/c many people said that wow, this just means that Sterling discovered pomo. I’m wondering what’s the difference? Of course, artists will always try to break out of their pigeonholes so we’ll see. I’d like to see a book that’s part slipstream part pomo. I can see that this is probably missing the point which is the point.
Fred
It comes to mind that trying to say what a story is, in the absence of a reader, is like trying to say what a word means in the absence of a hearer. Just because you can build whole academic departments around it doesn’t mean you’re talking about something that actually exists.
On which note, I think pomo is more about reading than writing….
Niall> Right–Greg Egan can make a reader feel very, very strange. It would be interesting to take this even further and find how “cognitive dissonance” bleeds into the age-old “sense of wonder.”
David> I think you point to something important there. Mapping a reader-response might be easier in a relatively stable reading community (like SF/F), but with a project that is supposed to be trans-genre or even non-genre, the affect mapping becomes much more problematic as a way to talk about what brings a certain set of weird stories together.