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| David Smith, untitled |
I have to admit that while plenty of Damien Walter's
"Weird Things" columns at
The Guardian are interesting, and it's really wonderful to see a major newspaper paying regular attention such stuff, and Walter seems like a passionate and thoughtful person ... the latest one, titled,
"Should science fiction and fantasy do more than entertain?" pretty much made me gag. Mostly it was that headline that caused the coughing and sputtering; the piece itself isn't terrible, is well intentioned, and seems primarily aimed at a general audience. I'm not a general audience for the topic, so in my ways, I'm a terrible reader for what Walter wrote. Thus, I'll refrain from comment on the main text.
But there's a statement he made in response to a commenter that didn't make me cough and sputter, it just made me question something I hadn't really questioned before: the term "formalist" and its relationship to criticism within the field of fantasy and science fiction.
In his
comment, Walter stated, "
The Rhetorics of Fantasy is a formalist approach."
I wonder, though. I haven't read
The Rhetorics of Fantasy, so I don't really want to comment on it too much, since my perception is based on reading a few reviews, what some folks have told me, and glancing at the Google Books preview. So it's entirely possible that my question here has nothing to do with that book. I mention it only because it's the book Walter calls "a formalist approach".
What I wonder is how it's possible to have a formalist approach to fantasy or science fiction that is not also perfectly applicable to other sorts of writing. Is there a specifically formalist approach to SF?
To write criticism about SF is almost always to be stuck in content, not form. (We could, and perhaps should, argue about the soft borders between the two terms, the limits of the terms, the fact that content and form don't really exist outside of the words of the text, what that binary hides, etc. — but at the risk of inaccuracy, let's save such an argument for another time.)
There is nothing I can think of at this moment that
formally differentiates SF from not-SF.
The most formalist approach I know of to SF is something like Delany's
The American Shore, and were I to think of a formalist approach to SF, I'd think of Delany, though I think such a term for his work is pretty reductive. It's formalist, yes, often, but seldom only formalist. How and why depends on what we mean by "formalist" and "formalism".
Of course, "formalism" is not a
term that lacks
history or
context or, quite often, an initial capital. Once we get beyond the most linguistically-based sorts
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (3rd edition) is now in beta-text mode online for free, and even in this obviously incomplete form it's remarkable and fascinating. At Readercon this summer, in answer to the question of what works of SF criticism have been as influential as some of the seminal works of the 1970s and early '80s, I proposed the second edition of The Encyclopedia, a book that was not merely a collection of facts, but an argument about how to categorize the world and our imaginings of it. As such, it reduced even someone as taxonomy-averse as I to awe, and the influence of a lot of its idiosyncratic terms and templates on how people write about SF is undeniable.
I haven't had a chance to read a lot of the new material in the online 3rd edition, and have really only spent time with the Delany entry and the entry on Feminism. The Delany entry is basically the old entry plus some apparently quick updating -- its coverage of material by and about Delany after the early 1990s is vastly incomplete, but there's no reason to assume it will remain so. And it's nice to encounter again my favorite phrase from the older version of the entry: "frank and priapic to the verge of the scabrous" (I think "To the Verge of the Scabrous" would be a marvelous title for something...).
The Feminism entry, originally written by Lisa Tuttle, has been updated by Helen Merrick, a great choice for that task. (The entry on "Women in SF" does not seem to have been updated yet.)
(Tangentially, it seems to me it would be helpful to have the contributors page more prominently available. All the abbreviated names of contributors are annoying enough without hiding the page that tells us what the abbreviations mean. It would be nice in the future if the contributors' initials could provide the full name when hovered over. The people who've done all this work deserve credit.)
Just moving the original encyclopedia, with all its references and cross references, onto the internet is a gigantic task. That the team has worked and continues to work on updating it is even more impressive, since it's not like history and the publishing world are going to stop and wait for them to catch up. Even in its current state, it is easily among the most useful reference sites available anyone with an interest in science fiction. I'm very excited to see where it will go from here...
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I'm not a great expert on critical terminology, but I think I recall Adam Roberts using "structuralist" rather than "formalist" for Rhetorics.
Still, as you say, that's not relevant to your lovely idea.
As Cheryl suggests above, I've seen/heard Rhetorics of Fantasy called a structuralist approach more often than a formalist one, but honestly I've always questioned the distinction between formalism and structuralism. Structure (and Delany illustrates this beautifully in his essay for "intermediate and advanced creative writing students") is one of the defining characteristics of form. As such, Rhetorics does an amazing analysis of the structures utilized in fantasy, and I think it could easily be dubbed a "formalist" look at fantasy even without getting into the syntactical constructions thereof.
That being said, I think both "pure" formalist approaches which abandon content, and "pure" content-oriented approaches risk missing the forest for the trees. Content is what gets expressed through the form, and the two have a recursive relationship. Consider Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: can something meaningful be said about it by wholly separating form from content?
To apply either approach to the exclusion of any other forces us to miss fine-detailed nuance and/or broad macro-level implications: it's the equivalent of a critic of SF never reading outside the genre, or a "mainstream" critic never reading within it. Either is ultimately hobbling.
Who, though, other than Delany, is trying to show that SF is distinguished from non-SF primarily through its language?
I still haven't got round to The American Shore, for shame, but I've been arguing for a while that Delany's application of subjunctivity level can be (and needs) modified and extended: firstly, modified to rearticulate the false distinction between s-f as what "could happen" and fantasy as what "could not happen," since the former also changes subjunctivity level to what "could not happen" -- just in terms of *temporal* rather than metaphysical possibility -- as indeed there's an even more extreme breach of *logical* possibility (Delany's own Dhalgren being a prime example of the use thereof); secondly, extended by recasting subjunctivity as alethic modality, allowing us to view a larger context of other possible modalities -- epistemic, boulomaic, deontic -- think, what "may have happened," what "should have happened," what "must not happen".
Basically, I see the sentences of fiction as having a baseline modality of "could have happened" -- even a pretended modality of "did happen" in suspension-of-disbelief -- which isn't changed so much as *disrupted* by additional modalities that enter into tension with that conceit. That which changes the subjunctivity / alethic modality of a sentence (e.g. the second sun in Delany's "About 5750 Words" example,) to "could not happen" can be considered a "quirk," as I call it, specifically an alethic quirk (technical novum, historical erratum, metaphysical chimera or logical sutura depending on possibility level.) I'm not sure whether one would call this approach formalist or structuralist, but it's certainly about looking for technical linguistic features.
It is an approach that, yes, practically speaking, obliterates the boundaries between fiction in general and the various traditional strange-fictional genres, in decomposing genre to low-level linguistic elements which don't define a text as essentially this genre or that any more than my use of alliteration and rhyme in certain sections of INK suddenly renders the whole thing a poem rather than a novel. So this text throws nova in with chimerae, errata and even suturae, and suddenly there's argument over whether it's SF or Fantasy. So this text has a single novum or chimera used in a non-traditional way and suddenly there's argument over whether it's spec-fic or not. That taxonomic bickering is utterly tangential to my aim of analysing the dynamics of the modalities. In fact, while I refer broadly to works which utilise quirks as "strange fiction," when it comes down to it, tragedy is as parseable in terms of boulomiac & deontic quirks as horror is.
Anyway, enough blather from me. There's a more detailed attempt to thrash out the general idea(s) here: http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/notes-toward-theory-of-narrative.html
Hal, would you mind translating your comment into a language I speak? I'm lost!
What? Does no-one know their alethic modality from their boulomaic these days? We're talking formalist criticism of science fiction and you baulk at the linguistics terminology? Have we lived and fought in vain?!
Sorry, just kidding. This glossary of modality has the technical jargon if you want: http://dinamico2.unibg.it/anglistica/slin/modgloss.htm And the post linked above should be a bit less "WTF?!" TBH, I just didn't want to hit and run with a link to me, me, me, or to expound My Pet Theory at length on Matt's blog either. Hence the comment is condensed to a rather abstruse gloss, I freely admit.