Session 8: Science Fiction, Literature and Gender

by

Prof. Amie Elizabeth Parry

Professor, Department of English,

National Central University, Taiwan

Prof. Amie Parry began her lecture with a telling quote from Samuel Delany who said at one point that the only hope for literature is for it to be read as science fiction. Literature and science fiction as literature was originally thought about as a question about taking a method of looking at the world, and putting that into literature as different from the canon … referring to the work of Darko Suvin, who speaks of estrangement and cognition, coming out of literary theory, is developed in science fiction, where you have something that takes you out of the set of norms and assumptions through which you usually look at the world. Estrangement is here the exercise of defamiliarisation. Cognition is part of the same process, which involves a focusing back of this defamiliarisation onto reality. Most theorists of science fiction would say however it does not reflect back on the world but simply offers an escape from it.  Suvin would see the estrangement, or the creativity, as also constitutive of science. Postmodern critics of science fiction (like Broderick) take this a bit further, to say that there is a difference in method of representing reality in science fiction and literature – it is not a subjective perspective, or a stream of consciousness narrative, what it does is objectify things in the world so that it can ask critical questions of it. Amie went on to talk about the film Matrix, as also a place where one can begin to play with gender stereotypes, as also a quest for a better perception of the world.

Delany, as different from other critics who might call some science fiction great literature, calls science fiction and literature as two different discourses, two different categories of knowledge opposed to one another. The placing of science fiction under literature obscures a whole material culture that produces it. Science fiction, for one, is 90% of the time about the future, and therefore first, simply, steps out of the ‘author function’. Moreover, publishing demands, the market, and so on, sometimes create multiple voices for the same author. What, then, is science fiction, if not literature? Amie illustrates this with examples of spoken or written sentences that would mean very different referents in these two forms of knowledge. She went on to illustrate, through a clip from Matrix, the same point about referents. In response to a question about science fiction not being subtle enough, Amie suggested that perhaps it might be the apparent lack of subtlety in a simple sentence that might be significant for reading. Delany states that literature is starting to be a lot more like science fiction, in terms of offering a different mode of reading. Science fiction, then, is inserted by Delany in the larger shift in literature from the author function to more constructionist ways of reading. Amie went on to talk about feminist critiques of science fiction, as challenging stereotypical representations of women, or of gender as fixed definitions, making possible gender as a way of becoming, rather. In response to questions about ‘how to read’ then science fiction, and to skepticisms about the productive ambiguity that it may provide for critical readings of reality, Amie suggested that for one, the reading will have to be open ended, open to interpretations. Another interesting point that came up in discussion was about whether changing representations afforded empowerments that could be good material for feminism. An interesting thought might be that a different representation affords empowerment in a limited sense, with immediate respect to an earlier situation, and only with respect to such a situation. Also, since experience is necessarily mediated, it will be as influenced by the hegemonic as an act of resistance. As such, such a ‘different’ representation might offer resistance, not necessarily an overturning of the dialectic. All this is also what still keeps the definitions of science fiction and literature open. If the attachment is to form rather than to content, the distinction is better made in terms of methodology than content. As to feminism, is it possible for feminism to offer allegiance to fantasy as a genre that works against reality, or to science fiction on account of its own attachments to transformation?

In the second half of the session, Amie went on to speak at some length on the text of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, about reading it in a science fiction. She began by putting out some ideas about Frankenstein as an originary text of sf, as opposed to what Suvin says about sf being opposed to myths – of humanist scientific endeavour, of imperialism, of mastery. Other ways of thinking about Frankenstein included studying it as the process of scientific method, or calling it speculative fiction and therefore sf since it is about time. It has also been suggested that Shelley uses the difficulty of representing female characters in the story to talk about the difficulty of representation itself, and of representing the marginal in particular, as also as a text that exposes the myths of authorship as a self-reproducing, narcissistic exercise, as also of good parenting. By implication, the myth of family and universal good nature is also brought out in the novel. Spivak’s interpretation of the text of Frankenstein offers a whole series of options of reading, calling it interesting for feminism through its failure to produce a high feminist text according to the expectations of feminist individualism, nor does it produce the axioms of imperialism.

The session offered, then, a series of questions about representation and its attachment to definition [is it a full mirror of reality or is it an act of interpretation], therefore about genres being interpretatively different rather than definitively so. Are concepts/ definitions fixed or in flux, fixed and individually discovered each time, as a particular theory of knowledge would suggest, or are they up for negotiation among a community of knowers, with all their “ontological heterogeneities” providing greater empirical adequacy, as Longino’s feminist contextual empiricism would suggest? We started with the question of whether sf and literature are different in content, whether sf is a sub-stream of literature, or whether they offer different modes of reading, with sf undeniably offering more interesting modes that have also now permeated the literary canon.