Metafiction and Narrative Worlds in Science Fiction Candidate

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of East Anglia digital repository ‘Prism, Mirror, Lens’: Metafiction and Narrative Worlds in Science Fiction Candidate: Amanda Dillon Submitted for the degree: Doctor of Philosophy University of East Anglia School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing September 2011 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 2 Abstract While invented worlds are one of science fiction‟s most recognisable features, the narrative structure that creates and sustains these fictional worlds is seldom explored in science fiction criticism. This thesis investigates science fiction‟s narratological make-up and explores the narratological similarity between science fiction and the common literary technique of metafiction. To do so, a series of parallels are drawn between models of science fiction and metafiction, as well as text-world theory and modal philosophy. This thesis proposes that science fiction is inherently metafictional because of the way it foregrounds its world; that is, the science fiction world is a form of textual deixis. This thesis examines the multiple ways in which this deixis is accomplished. As such, this thesis progresses from texts that utilise a layering of proposed text worlds to a portrayal of narrative worlds using sophisticated narrative experiments and recursive structures. This thesis also argues that science fiction is particularly well-suited for metafictional exercises, and that its underlying hypothetical structure allows metafiction and science fiction to fuse into „performative metafiction‟; that is, actualised literary theory. This performative metafiction engages with literary theory through the actualisation of textual components like the author, reader, and the text itself, rendering textual boundaries permeable or even erasing them altogether. At it reaches its limits, the metafictional science fiction text takes on a quality of the absurd, or spirals into ever more complex stylistic forms. The texts analysed here probe the limits of both science fiction and fictionality in general. Ultimately, they all question what it means for a text to be „science fiction‟, and in particular, what sciences may be fictionalised. In each case, these texts argue that the remit of this term may be expanded to include science fiction texts about the science of fiction – that is, narratology. 3 Table of Contents List of Figures 4 Acknowledgements 5 Introduction: „Artificial Things‟: Metafiction and Science Fiction 6 Chapter 1: Mirrors: Science Fiction as Literary Experimentalism 28 Chapter 2: Lens 1: Narrative Worlds in Science Fiction 58 Chapter 3: Lens 2: The Unbound Text and Breaking Down Narrative 87 Boundaries Chapter 4: Prism 1: Science Fiction, Temporal Narrative Framing, and 105 Metafiction Chapter 5: Prism 2: Parody as Metafiction in Science Fiction 129 Chapter 6: „Prism, mirror, lens‟: Samuel R. Delany‟s Dhalgren 160 Some Concluding Propositions 196 Bibliography 210 4 List of Figures Figure 1.1: Diagram of narrative worlds involved in the presentation of an 53 internal novel. Figure 2.1: Diagram of the narrative worlds in Rosewater‟s bus journey. 69 Figure 2.2: Narrative Worlds in Breakfast of Champions. 80 Figure 3.1: Extra-Narrative Layers. 89 Figure 6.1: Narrative Worlds in Dhalgren (ontological relativity). 191 Figure 6.2: Dhalgren‟s outer text. 192 Figure 6.3: Dhalgren‟s inner text, including recursion. 193 5 Acknowledgements The following people have been extraordinarily supportive over the years: Allan Lloyd-Smith, Victor Sage, Tim Marshall, Mark Currie, Christine Cornea, Jacob Huntley, Leslie Marrs, Alex Weiss, Scott Christianson, Joanne Asbury, Melissa Cormier, Dan Dombrowsky, Jason Ramboz, my family, and Vincent M. Gaine (owner of the finest of fine-toothed combs). 6 Introduction: ‘Artificial Things’: Metafiction and Science Fiction „It sometimes sounds as if the reading of “popular” fiction involved moral turpitude.‟ – C.S. Lewis, „False Characterisations‟1 „The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things,‟ Karen Joy Fowler‟s 1985 science fiction short story where virtual realities are used as psychotherapy, involves the main character, Miranda, visiting with a man from her past in order to gain a sense of closure about the relationship. Dr Anna Matsui creates new realities from Miranda‟s memories, enabling Miranda to speak to Daniel, her now deceased lover, in order that she should „feel better about him‟.2 Miranda, however, is not content with the therapeutic effect of these virtual worlds her doctor creates. These worlds prove incapable of producing a true catharsis for Miranda: the Daniel in the virtual world is constructed only from her memories of him and therefore unsatisfying. As Miranda complains, „I think I‟m sick of talking to myself. Is that the best you therapists can manage? I think I‟ll stay home and talk to the mirrors‟.3 The use of mirrors in particular underlines Miranda‟s plight, as revisiting memories, which by their very nature must reflect Miranda‟s own personality and problems, is no better than self-talk. The self- referential nature of these virtual realities makes them implicitly problematic as a form of psychotherapy, at least for Miranda, as she can only face her internalised version of Daniel. At the climax of the story, the reality Dr Matsui creates intrudes upon the real world almost as a vision. Though this story speaks specifically about those left behind by soldiers who have died in wartime,4 and in particular to a wish to change history, it also exhibits a particular concern with concepts of reality. The story‟s title, taken from Wallace Stevens‟ poem „Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction‟ (1942), serves as a framing device for understanding the story as having a deep-seated interest in realities. These „artificial things‟ may, at first glance, seem to refer to the technology that Dr Matsui uses to create these alternate realities for Miranda, but 1 Lewis, C.S., ‟False Characterisations‟, in An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 5-13, p. 5. 2 Fowler, Karen Joy, „The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things‟, in Artificial Things (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1986),pp. 1-15, p. 5. 3 Ibid., p. 9. 4 Ibid., p. 13. 7 they can also be read as the constructed realities themselves. Dr Matsui explains to Miranda, „In these sessions we try to show you what might have happened if the elements you couldn‟t control were changed‟:5 the realities presented in these therapy sessions are distinct from the real world, are altered somewhat from what actually happened, and can therefore be seen as fictional. If, as Lubomír Doležel argues, all fiction implicitly suggests a break with the reader‟s world in some manner,6 this understanding of the created realities as fictional can be pushed further, allowing the fictional world containing Dr Matsui and Miranda to be read as artificial. The title may refer, therefore, to the proposed „storyworld‟7 of Dr Matsui and Miranda as well. In this case, a series of parallels can be established between the world where Miranda interacts with Daniel and the world of Dr Matsui and Miranda, as well as both of these worlds and the generic „fictional world‟ of which Doležel speaks. This is a fairly straightforward set of parallels: Miranda‟s comments about the virtual world she visits can be read as comments about fictionality in general. Her suggestion that she is really only talking with herself in these therapy sessions and may as well go home and „talk to the mirrors‟8 suggests a level of explicit self-referentiality in the story, emphasised in particular by her mention of mirrors. This understanding is complicated, however, when the story‟s status as science fiction is considered. Fowler‟s use of a non-existent form of technology, what Darko Suvin would label a „novum‟,9 suggests this story‟s reality is somehow separate from the reality of the known world. The specific emphasis on the worlds created through memory and imagination suggests an implicit knowledge on the part of the text that it, too, is as fictional as the memories 5 Ibid., p. 9. 6 Doležel, Lubomír, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 16. Robert Scholes makes a similar argument in his book Fabulation and Metafiction: „Our fictions are real enough in themselves, but, as signs pointing to any world outside the fiction or the dream, they have no factual status. All thought, being fiction, tends toward this situation‟ (Scholes, Robert, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 7). 7 Herman, David, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), p. 14. 8 Fowler, Karen Joy, p. 9. 9 Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 63. 8 Miranda attempts to recreate. This implicit self-reflexivity denotes an underlying metafictionality in the text. In this thesis, I argue that the self-reflexive, or metafictional, undertone exemplified in „The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things‟ is a microcosm of a larger stylistic and specifically metafictional trend in American and British science fiction. In particular, I argue that this trend capitalises upon the implicit ontological layering of the real world and the fictional world that is found in all fiction. This layering is a part of science fiction‟s „deep structure‟ that enables it to perform literary theory in a science fiction context. Furthermore, I argue that the narratological make-up of the science fiction text creates a fertile ground for this kind of literary experimentalism, and in essence produces a fiction about the „science‟ of fiction – narratology.

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