[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.In this case, the statement 2 + 2 = 4 has a range of symbolic meanings, to do with individual freedom and resistance.To talk of symbols rather than metaphors is, perhaps, a more fruitful way of apprehending the ‘point of difference’ that defines SF.It aligns SF with poetry, which is where it surely belongs, rather than science, and it expresses the complex of interpretive relations between ‘poetry’and ‘speculative thought’.First, the poetry.One of the arguments I make in this book is that SF, as a symbolist discourse, is akin to poetry.I could go further here and suggest that the key moments in the SF of the last half century are in essence poetic moments; the resonance and mystery as well as the beauty of a poetic image is what makes luminous (as it might be) the ape throwing its bone into the sky to metamorphose into a spacecraft; or the star-drenched sky of the final paragraph of Nightfall; or Wyndham’s unsettling Midwich children; or Carrie-Anne Moss suspended in mid-air kung-fu as the camera sweeps all the way around her; or the eerie silences of the first two books of Robinson’s Years of Rice and Salt.There are many hundreds of examples from the best SF, and they all work precisely as poetic images work.Second, the aspect of speculative thought.It is this, I suppose, that most readers of SF come to the genre for.Extrapolation, the imaginative inhabitation of new possibilities, gives SF vigour and power.But, reading via Ricoeur, these two aspects, poetry and speculative thought, are precisely the two dialectical arms of living metaphor.On the one hand, poetry, in itself and by itself, sketches a ‘tensional’conception of truth for thought.Here are summed up all the forms of‘tensions’ brought to light by semantics: tension between subject and predicate, between literal interpretation and metaphorical interpretation, between identity and difference … they come to completion, finally, in the paradox of the copula, where being-as signifies being and not being …Speculative thought, on the other hand, bases its work upon the dynamism of metaphorical utterance, which it construes according to its own sphere of meaning.Speculative discourse can respond in this way only because the distanciation, which constitutes the criticalconclusion146moment, is contemporaneous with the experience of belonging that is opened or recovered by poetic discourse, and because poetic discourse … prefigures the distanciation that speculative thought carries to its highest point of reflection.(Ricoeur 2003: 370)For our purposes, we can take Ricoeur’s ‘distanciation’ as the imaginative space that opens up between the lives we live in London or Chicago (or wherever we happen to live) and the lives we live in Lord of the Rings or Dune.1 It is because SF is both poetic and speculative that it is proper to think of it as metaphoric, in this strong, Ricoeurian way.In other words, SF is metaphorical, but in the strong sense of living metaphor that Ricoeur outlines, not the weak Aristotelian sense that lies behind so many critics’ usages.This, I think, is what is wrong with Suvin’s detailed analysis; what is missing from his notion of SF as metaphoric is not ‘coherence and richness’ (two qualities that are necessities for any great art, surely) but a properly poetic-speculative dialectic, a Ricoeurian sense of metaphor as alive.RELIGIONThe fact that Ricoeur was a committed Christian, and much of his philosophy explores ‘the relationship between philosophy and biblical faith’(Simms 2003: 3), is also crucial, I think.A great deal of SF is fascinated with religion (see Farah Mendlesohn’s excellent article ‘Religion and Science Fiction’ for a more detailed discussion – James and Mendlesohn 2003: 264–75), even some SF written by atheists.This might be because religion is so similar to SF; in some respects religious belief depends upon an apprehension of the world in which we actually live, and in some respects it posits a world utterly different from this world.In other words, we might think of ‘religion’ as a metaphore vive for SF.Religion is a speculation about the nature of the cosmos that operates symbolically rather than literally.It can never (whatever funda-mentalists say) be straightforwardly and literally true, but it may inhabit Ricoeur’s ‘tensional conception of truth’.What this means, as far as I can see, is that one way of thinking about SF is as a specifically non-religious religion, an atheistical theism: SF plays with the waysconclusion147the world is not in order to reveal truths about the way the world is [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]