Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (622 page)

Even if dim wining dining me. As me fadder salem,

“
You triumph only wit da whitest.
”

Atop the St. Petersburg Dome

De ebening es mein, starry as himbo
’
s

bubble, de ebening wit stars in grid, starry ya?

Stars ideation in dome, me vocal twills in dome, listen—

HULLO.hullo.hullo..

Vaulted up y up, we reach agley,

We reach agley.no conflict non, no embargo nimbly

Only conflict o duration, yaar, but

no rat-a-tat.but,

Once unrest shatta
’
d desert horizon to ellipses,

Haunted slay de flames feasted de hotels y sommelier,

Feasted de lawn foliage y swim-pool,

y charrum de head chumps to Malaga raisins.

When me comeupon for tippame-turban job,

Greyhound dogs, spectas in de dawn fog,

Traipse de trash-boil mountains for scrap cook pork,

Nut
’
ing left but skrep metal y bitterness.

I de frosh guide maki pennies
‘
cos no one to ooh-aaah.

I guided da misbegodder fool who vacation

In woebegone ruins. Tu, I mean, you tryim.

To flower-arrange words so sand-piss

ash sound like
Melodious plot of

beechen green
, try, nary!.

No money cash flow fo me
‘
cos no foliage, no

Va-va-va-boom sites to show..Me like white fes mime,

gestulatim atta air.a gameshow lass wit

no appliance to show.

So I makeum up gammon, no goodfela am me,

I makeum up.Am I yesman like me fadder y me grandfadder?

Am I hucksta? O Sigh. Me sebum dome skin red-alert from wig rash. Excuse me? Mus
’
exeunt.

* * * *

Copyright © 2006 by Cathy Park Hong.

If lyric is so prevalent in science fiction, then why do so many discussions of SF exclude poetry?

There are three ways of answering this question. 

The first answer:  those who read, write, study, and teach poetry tend not to overlap with those who read, write, study, and teach science fiction.  As I have already mentioned, discussions of poetry are nearly absent from monographs, surveys, anthologies, and collections of essays on SF.  The converse is also true:  discussions of SF are nearly absent from monographs, anthologies, surveys, and collections of essays on lyric poetry.  One aim of
Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?
is to promote dialogue between those who study poetry and those who study science fiction.

The second answer:  protocols/preconceptions surrounding poetry
and protocols/preconceptions surrounding SF have evolved along disparate tracks.  Several generalizations are in order here.  The lyric is considered high art, and lyric poems are treated (rightly so) as worthy of formal appreciation and analysis.  SF, by contrast, is mostly considered sub-aesthetic pop-cultural entertainment.  Rarely are SF novels, stories, and films treated as sophisticated works of compelling art.  More often they are treated as pulp commodities to be consumed rather than appreciated seriously.  These differing attitudes toward poetry and SF can be explained in part by historical circumstances.  The lyric is an immemorially ancient institution and practice.  Accordingly, it inspires reverence, even in those unfamiliar with poetry.  Science fiction, meanwhile, is an institution and a practice whose very name originated (in the 1920s) in the context of lurid magazine publications literally made of pulp.  Accordingly, science fiction tends to inspire less reverence than derision or apathy in those unfamiliar with SF.  The differing attitudes toward poetry and SF can be explained not just by their respective histories but also by formal attributes intrinsic to each discourse.  In The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov articulates a perspective representative of an outlook shared by many when he claims that poetic images are to be read solely “on the level of the verbal chain they constitute, not even on that of their reference.  The poetic image is a combination of words, not of things, and it is pointless, even harmful, to translate this combination into sensory terms” (60).  In Todorov’s view, the necessity of reading poetic images solely as incantatory chains of signifiers (rather than as referential descriptions) renders the protocols for reading poetry incompatible with the protocols for reading fantastic narratives.  Todorov goes so far as to claim that the two sets of protocols are mutually hostile:  “poetic reading constitutes a danger for the fantastic,” Todorov warns.  “If as we read a text we reject all representation” and consider “each sentence as a pure semantic combination”—which is how Todorov idealizes the process of reading poetry—then “the fantastic could not appear:  for the fantastic requires, it will be recalled, a reaction to events as they occur in the world evoked.  For this reason, the fantastic can subsist only within fiction; poetry cannot be fantastic” (60).  By contrast, I prefer to see no reason why readers should be forbidden to read poems as more than incantatory combinations of words.  To be prohibited from reading poems as referential descriptions is to be deprived of revelatory aesthetic experiences.  For example, many of Dickinson’s poems, when approached as more than “pure semantic combinations,” reveal an astonishing science-fiction cosmos where clocks are afflicted with timelessness, mathematical diagrams glow across night skies, and the specter of post-apocalypse haunts every other mindscape.  However, I agree with Todorov’s assertion that the lyric entails certain kinds of reading while precluding other kinds.  Due to its compressed size, the lyric is much more spatial than temporal in its proportions.  In general, spatial forms such as two-dimensional photographs are limited in their representational capacity.  A photograph may suffice as a mimetic account of a simple concrete object, but photography is unfit for the task of representing cognitively estranging phenomena such as cyberspace.  The process through which a cognitively estranging referent becomes available for representation is a massively complicated one that requires ample time and ample space.  Unlike the lyric, the novel is capable of prolongating along axes both temporal and spatial.  This may be one reason why SF writers tend to write novels rather than poems.

The third and least obvious answer: lyric qualities are so prevalent in science fiction, so thoroughly characteristic of SF, that their collective presence need not take the physical form of verse in order to make itself felt to the reader of SF narratives.  By “lyric qualities,” I have in mind not just musicality, soliloquylikeness, lyric time, etc., but also—more broadly—the lyric
“turn”
that subsumes as its subcategories lyric time, soliloquylikeness, descriptive intensity, musicality, and eccentric/heightened perception.  As Northrop Frye has remarked, “the lyric
turns away,
not merely from ordinary space and time, but from the kind of language we use in coping with ordinary experience” (“Approaching the Lyric” 34, emphasis added), and it is equally true that science fiction
turns away
from ordinary space and time and from the kind of language we use in coping with ordinary experience.  The existing canon of SF may consist mostly of prose, but the straightforwardness of prose (“prose” derives etymologically from “prosum,” Latin for straightforward) is absent from science fiction.  Just as verse constitutes a turn away from prose (“verse,” as noted earlier, comes from the Latin verb “vertere,” to turn), and just as poetic tropes constitute a turn from literal to figurative meaning (“trope” comes from “tropos,” Greek for “turn”), science fiction constitutes a
turn away
from familiar reality.  The organism
turned
by mutation into something else; the wormhole twisting and
turning
through universes; the mind-turning realization that “reality” is actually a computer-generated simulation; the moment when an inanimate robot turns into a living person:  each of these science fictions is literally a trope, a verse, a deviation in narrative space-time and consciousness.  The “turn” that defines verse is so deeply implanted in SF that science-fiction verse nearly amounts to a redundancy.  Paradoxically, then, the omnipresence of lyric poetry in SF narrative is an absent presence.  This paradox explains why SF authors tend to write novels and stories as opposed to poems, and it explains why the study of SF in lyric terms remains largely unexplored territory—one that I hope to open up to investigation.

An intriguing epiphenomenon of the paradoxically absent omnipresence of lyric in narrative science fiction is the prevalence of lyric intertexts and paratexts in SF novels and short stories.  Paratexts and intertexts are themselves paradoxical spaces:  a book’s title, for instance, is at once central to the book and overtly peripheral; an intertextual allusion is neither fully here nor exclusively there yet definitely present in both texts simultaneously.  Such paradoxical textual spaces are frequently the same places where the absent presence of lyric manifests itself most explicitly in narrative SF.  Titles of SF narratives, for example, often allude intertextually to specific poems. To cite a few cases:  the title of Philip José Farmer’s 1971 novel
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
echoes a line from one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets; the title of Iain M. Banks’s 1987 novel
Consider Phlebas
echoes a line from
The Waste Land
; the title of Simmons’s Hyperion tetralogy echoes the title of Keats’s unfinished epic; the title of Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” echoes Sara Teasdale’s poem of the same name.  Moments of verse also erupt intertextually within many SF narratives. In David Brin’s novel Startide Rising, sentient dolphins, biologically uplifted by humans, communicate in haiku-shaped thoughts.  In Cunningham’s Specimen Days, soulful androids compulsively recite lines by Whitman and Dickinson.  This latter poet, it is worth noting, appears intertextually as a science-fiction protagonist in a growing sub-sub-set of narrative SF.  In Yolen’s 1996 story “Sister Emily’s Lightship,” set in nineteenth-century Amherst, a fictional Dickinson has a mystifying nocturnal encounter with an extraterrestrial lifeform that leaves Dickinson forever mind-altered and launches decades of otherworldly creativity.  In Joyce Carol Oates’s 2006 story “EDickinsonRepliLuxe,” a childless suburban couple purchases a robot designed to simulate Dickinson’s personality—with heartbreaking results.  In a 1997 short-story-disguised-as-a-scholarly-article by Connie Willis entitled “‘The Soul Selects Her Own Society’: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: A Wellsian Perspective,” the narrator fancifully speculates that Martians invading Earth around the turn of the century inadvertently disturbed Dickinson (d. 1886) from her slumber in the grave, thereby angering the dead poet and provoking her to relay admonitions in verse to the Martian invaders.  Severely injured by Dickinson’s weapons of slant-rhyme, the Martians (Willis conjectures) hastily retreated from Earth before suffering further casualties.  What exactly makes Dickinson an attractive figure to writers of SF?  My guess is that there is something enticingly science-fictional about Dickinson’s idiosyncratic sensibilities.  Dickinson’s poems are so hyperbolically lyrical, so acute in their lyricism, that they virtually self-literalize into recognizable science fiction.

The absent omnipresence of lyric in SF narrative is precisely what accounts for the representational work that SF is capable of performing.  Only a narrative discourse powered through and through by lyricism possesses enough
torque
—enough
twisting force
, enough
verse
—to
convert
referents ordinarily
averse
to representation into referents accessible to representation.  Just as the “turn” that defines poetry is so deeply implanted in SF that “science-fiction verse” approaches redundancy, lyric figures and devices (apostrophe, synesthesia, the simple present, etc.) are so thoroughly and systematically literalized as features of SF narrative worlds that SF cannot be understood as
narrative
without concurrently being understood as
lyric
.  Hence the moment when a humanoid robot comes alive is not only a narrative event but also a spatio-temporal
trope
—a
twist
, a
turn
, in space-time—charged with the lyric energies of personification.  Within the narrative universe of SF, the literal and the metaphoric share ontological status.  As a figurative discourse whose grammatical mood is indicative, SF can provide a representational home for referents that are themselves neither purely literal nor purely figurative in nature.

* * * *

WORKS CITED

Banks, Iain M. 1987.
Consider Phlebas.
New York: Orbit, 2008.

Brin, David. 1983.
Startide Rising.
New York: Bantam, 1995.

Cunningham, Michael. 2005.
Specimen Days.
New York: Picador.

Farmer, Philip José. 1971.
To Your Scattered Bodies Go.
New York: Berkeley, 1983.

Frye, Northrop. 1985. “Approaching the Lyric.” Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism. Ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Oates, Joyce Carol. 2006. “EDickinsonRepliLuxe.”
Wild Nights! Stories about the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway.
New York: Ecco, 2008. 37–73.

Simmons, Dan. 1989.
Hyperion.
New York: Bantam, 1995.

Todorov, Tzvetan. 1970.
The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.
Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.

Willis, Connie. 2005. “‘The Soul Selects Her Own Society’: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: A Wellsian Perspective.” The War of the Worlds: Fresh Perspectives on the H.ºG. Wells Classic. Ed. Glenn Yeffeth. Dallas: BenBella. 285–292.

Yolen, Jane. 1996. “Sister Emily’s Lightship.”
Sister Emily’s Lightship and Other Stories.
New York: Tor, 2001. 267–283.

* * * *

Seo-Young Chu
is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. She is the author of
Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation
.

* * * *

Reprinted by permission of the publisher from DO METAPHORS DREAM OF LITERAL SLEEP? A SCIENCE-FICTIONAL THEORY OF REPRESENTATION by Seo-Young Chu, pp. 63–67, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.