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Wednesday, September 06, 2006
False Figuration
The first paragraph from "The Tourist", in Paul Park’s If Lions Could Speak and other stories [amazon]:
Everybody wants to see the future, but of course they can’t. They get turned back at the border. "Go away," the customs people tell them. "You can’t come in. Go home." Often you’ll get people on TV who say they snuck across. Some claim it’s wonderful and some claim it’s a nightmare, so in that way it’s like before there was time travel at all.
Is there a term for this trope? False figuration? Anti-allegory (antigory?) Leading the reader down the primrose path of poetry - extended simile or metaphor - only to dunk them in the pond water of the plain truth?
As a device, it looks to be a bit brittle for the best poetry, mind you, but it’s good for jokes. (Like Buffy belting out "nothing seems to penetrate my heart.") What examples can you come up? Is there some place Shakespeare does it? Donne? Seems like the sort of thing those brainy metaphysical poets might have tried on for size. Melville? He is always willing to push the metaphysics to hyperbolic lengths for a good joke.
I have the feeling there are several SF thought-experiments that riff similarly, but the only example I can come up with, off the top of my head, is the opening to Ted Chiang’s "Hell is the absence of God" - in his wonderful collection, Stories of Your Life and others [amazon]:
This is the story of a man named Neil Fisk, and how he came to love God. The pivotal event in Neil’s life was an occurrence both terrible and ordinary: the death of his wife Sarah. Neil was consumed with grief after she died, a grief that was excruciating not only because of its intrinsic magnitude, but because it also renewed and emphasized the previous pains of his life. Her death forced him to reexamine his relationship with God, and in doing so he began a journey that would change him forever.
Neil was born with a congenital abnormality that caused his left thigh to be externally rotated and several inches shorter than his right; the medical term for it was proximal femoral focus deficiency. Most people he met assumed God was responsible for this, but Neil’s mother hadn’t witnessed any visitations while carrying him; his condition was the result of improper limb development during the sixth week of gestation, nothing more. In fact, as far as Neil’s mother was concerned, blame rested with his absent father, whose income might have made corrective surgery a possibility, although she never expressed this sentiment aloud.
As a child Neil had occasionally wondered if he was being punished by God, but most of the time he blamed his classmates in school for his unhappiness. Their nonchalant cruelty, their instinctive ability to locate the weaknesses in a victim’s emotional armor, the way their own friendships were reinforced by their sadism: he recognized these as examples of human behavior, not divine. And although his classmates often used God’s name in their taunts, Neil knew better than to blame Him for their actions.
But while Neil avoided the pitfall of blaming God, he never made the jump to loving Him; nothing in his upbringing or his personality led him to pray to God for strength or for relief. The assorted trials he faced growing up were accidental or human in origin, and he relied on strictly human resources to counter them. He became an adult who - like so many others - viewed God’s actions in the abstract until they impinged upon his own life. Angelic visitations were events that befell other people, reaching him only via reports on the nightly news. His own life was entirely mundane; he worked as a superintendent for an upscale apartment building, collecting rent and performing repairs, and as far as he was concerned, circumstances were fully capable of unfolding, happily or not, without intervention from above.
This remained his experience until the death of his wife.
It was an unexceptional visitation, smaller in magnitude than most but no different in kind, bringing blessings to some and disaster to others. In this instance the angel was Nathanael, making an appearance in a downtown shopping district. Four miracle cures were effected: the elimination of carcinomas in two individuals, the regeneration of the spinal cord in a paraplegic, and the restoration of sight to a recently blinded person. There were also two miracles that were not cures: a delivery van, whose driver had fainted at the sight of the angel, was halted before it could overrun a busy sidewalk; another man was caught in a shaft of Heaven’s light when the angel departed, erasing his eyes but ensuring his devotion.
Neil’s wife Sarah Fisk had been one of the eight casualties. She was hit by flying glass when the angel’s billowing curtain of flame shattered the storefront window of the café in which she was eating. She bled to death within minutes, and the other customers in the café - none of whom suffered even superficial injuries - could do nothing but listen to her cries of pain and fear, and eventually witness her soul’s ascension toward Heaven.
Nathanael hadn’t delivered any specific message; the angel’s parting words, which had boomed out across the entire visitation site, were the typical Behold the power of the Lord. Of the eight casualties that day, three souls were accepted into Heaven and five were not, a closer ratio than the average for deaths by all causes. Sixty-two people received medical treatment for injuries ranging from slight concussions to ruptured eardrums to burns requiring skin grafts. Total property damage was estimated at $8.1 million, all of it excluded by private insurance companies due to the cause. Scores of people became devout worshipers in the wake of the visitation, either out of gratitude or terror.
Alas, Neil Fisk was not one of them.
You see how this is going to go. When I teach Plato’s Euthyphro, I recommend that my students read the story as an illustration: good old ‘is it good because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is good?’ (Think about it.) The novella develops into a quite scrupulous thought-experiment about reasons. Neil believes in God, since everyone knows He exists. He has a reason to love God, since if he loves God he’ll go to heaven and rejoin his beloved wife. But, in another sense, he doesn’t really have a reason to love God.
Connecting it up with the Park passage: if what you assert, metaphorically, were literally true, you wouldn’t necessarily feel about it the way that the metaphor encourages you to feel. You describe the future as a border you can’t cross, because there’s a guard there. But if suddenly the only thing between you and the future were a guard, you would feel very differently about the future than you do now. In Chiang’s story, the game is to draw you up short, making you realize that certain things you register in passing as stock epithets, metaphors, or indices of cultural or ethical attitudes "how he came to love God ... most people he met assumed God was responsible for this ... Neil knew better than the blame Him for their actions" - really have no clear ethical content. The story of how Neil comes to love God - the journey he will take - will be a causal, geographical story; the mistake the people make about him is analogous to the mistake of assuming that someone who has lung cancer must have been a smoker. Neil knowing better is no spiritual achievement but analogous to the cancer victim who knows perfectly well he never smoked. It’s a study in theological disenchantment through false figuration - all the ethics is tied up in the metaphors. When you realize they aren’t metaphors, but literal truths, where does the ethics go?
Anyway, I think it’s sort of interesting.
Comments
Call me dense if you like, but I don’t see that the Paul Park passage is actually “false figuration ... anti-allegory ... antigory.. “ or anything like that. It’s regular figuration, vanilla allegory. There is a border between past and future, like a border between nations. The fact that you can’t cross this border doesn’t make the trope ‘false’; there are plenty of borders you’re not allowed to cross.
Call me dense a second time, in a louder voice (use capital letters to convey this, perhaps), but I don’t see at all where you’re going with the Ted Chiang post. It’s nice, but in what ways does it problematise the trope we call ‘allegory’?
“You describe the future as a border you can’t cross, because there’s a guard there. But if suddenly the only thing between you and the future were a guard, you would feel very differently about the future than you do now.“
Would I? This would depend on the sort of guard you’re talking about, wouldn’t it? If it were the sort of guard you find in, I don’t know, art galleries, aged 75 and armed only with a copy of the rolled up Daily Mail you might think, ‘hey, I can rush past him easy’. But then there are people who think that way about the future (mystics, astrologers etc). Not me. Which is to say, that wouldn’t be a very convincing or eloquent trope as far as I’m concerned. But what if the guard is an East German border guard armed with a machine gun and an attack dog, straining at his leash and eager to sink his fangs into your nethers, and you are a shoeless tramp with frostbite and a gammy hip. You’re not going to think the border is terrible passable in that case.
Catachresis?
I would call it a literal-allegory in the first case, and a literal-metaphor in the second (i.e. the Ted Chiang story).
I would then combine these words to make “litergory”; ‘an allegory played out via its literal meaning rather than its apparent allegorical meaning.’
And a literphor; ‘a metaphor played out via its literal meaning rather than its apparent metaphorical meaning’
There be some pretty ugly words.....
“all the ethics is tied up in the metaphors."
Keep going in this direction and Harry Bloom ends up in Sing Sing! There’s like some Education Code forbidding this anyways: “EC94J.Ii: Any person ( henceforth known as The Philistine) who asserts that literary metaphors (or other figures of speech and tropes, allegories and/or analogies in general) are merely illustrative and evocative shall be denied tenure and made to wear funny hats.”
Lots of haiku involve the denial of metaphor. I believe the Japanese sometimes call this effect Yugen. The poem turns out to have been about a real frog jumping in a real pond at some one time and in some one place. Of course, the expectation of symbolism or allegory is what makes it work, so you never really escape metaphor completely.
Maybe I’m being simplistic here, but surely what we have here is pretty common SF tactic: making the metaphor concrete. Adam’s written about this at length (I’m thinking particularly about an article for the Alien Online), and his thoughts about the relationship of materiality and metaphor in SF have been pretty influential on the way I think about the genre. The misunderstandings that follow I can claim to be my own, though.
But I think it’s interesting, John, as you say, that this materialisation of the metaphor has something in common with comedy-- that sense of artifice collapsing on one level, being fully realised on another. Like a joke I heard recently:
A: Have you heard the one about the Gestapo?
B: No.
A slaps B in the face.
A: YOU LIE!
-- Well, I found it funny.
The best SF-- metaphorically speaking-- acts like this unexpected slap in the face. There’s a switch in understanding, a change in the register in which we are thinking, precisely because of the literature’s insistence that we take the fantastic juxtaposition absolutely seriously. There’s a pleasure in the perverse about this-- and doesn’t comedy just about always delight in this perversity too?
Perhaps the movement is simply dialectical. Fred Jameson muses on the perversity of Zizek’s thought as he reviews ‘The Parallax View’ in the latest edition of the London Review of Books. Unsurprisingly, he declares that Zizek is a dialectical thinker:
“The dialectic is just that inveterate, infuriating perversity whereby a commonsense empiricist view of reality is repudiated and undermined. But it is undermined together with its own its own accompanying interpretations of that reality, which look so much more astute and ingenious than the commonsense empiricist reality itself, until we understand that the interpretations are themselves also precisely part of [the] first impression.”
Isn’t the moniker given to the genre, ‘Science Fiction’, a pointer to the dialectic at the heart of this kind of fiction? Somewhere Jameson says that SF works according to the dialectical logic that the ‘loser wins’. The slap in the face draws us up short, humiliates us in a sense: it reveals a gap between where we thought we were and where we are. So much comedy, it seems to me, works in exactly the same way.
I was holding back from commenting on Griffin’s post, since, you know, he says nice things about me and I don’t want to appear to be tooting my own horn, even by implication: but what he says strikes me as very perceptive and right.
There’s a similar urge to concretize and literalise the metaphorical in religion, I think (God separated the light from the darkness metaphorically? No! It must literally have happened like that! etc). But this only, to my mind, points up the many conceptual similarities between religious and sfnal discourses.
Sfnal? Is that the Norse god of nasal mucous?
Funny, Adam, I was about to write a reading of your book _On_ that does the opposite—argue that it works as a religious allegory hidden under a surface concretization. I guess that the relationship goes in both directions.