The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction

Fifth Beauty The Science-Fictional Sublime

Fifth Beauty The Science-Fictional Sublime ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ The sense of wonder: sublime/grotesque. The cognitive beauties we have been exploring would be merely formal schemes if they did not have strong emotional attractions. SF artists work in many styles and moods, but behind all the variations is a charged background against which they come into relief. This is the so-called sense of wonder, a powerful expansion of quotidian awareness to the insight that the physical universe involves far more than anyone can imagine. The sense of wonder does not lend itself to critical analysis. SF is certainly a literature of ideas,1 as it’s often said to be, but it also resists them. A sense is not a concept. Wonder, even less so. Readers of sf expect it to provide an intense experience of being translated from the mundane to imaginary worlds and ideas that exceed the familiar and the habitual. They expect to feel as if they are witnessing phenomena beyond normal limits of perception and thought that people have not been able to witness before, or perhaps even to imagine. This sense of liberation from the mundane has an established pedigree in art, in two related ways of feeling and expression: the sublime and the grotesque. The sublime is a response to a shock of imaginative expansion, a complex recoil and recuperation of self-consciousness coping with phenomena suddenly perceived to be too great to be comprehended. The grotesque is a response to another sort of imaginative shock, the realization that objects that appear to be familiar and under control are actually undergoing surprising transformations, conflating disparate elements not observed elsewhere in the world. The recoil and recuperation of the sublime responds to things that are overpowering and dominating; of the grotesque, to things that are near and intimate, yet that prove to be strange. With the sublime, consciousness tries to expand inward to encompass in the imagination the limits to its outward expansion of apprehension. With the grotesque, consciousness tries to project its fascinated repulsion/attraction out into objects that it cannot accommo146 date, because they disturb its sense of rational, natural, and desirable order. In both, the perceiver enjoys a sudden dislocation from habitual perception. Both attitudes have been deeply connected to sf from the start, because both are concerned with the states of mind that science and art have in common: acute responsiveness to the objects of the world, the testing of the categories conventionally used to interpret the world, and the desire to articulate what consciousness finds inarticulable. It is not always easy to distinguish the two modes, as they are dynamically, dialectically related. A phenomenon that to one mind appears to be grotesque may appear sublime to another, if the principles behind it are seen not as violations of reason, but its primal processes. The platypus has been a grotesque freak of nature, as well as a sublime demonstration of evolutionary principles. Quantum physics appeared grotesque to those who did not accept the irreducibility of indeterminacy; it is viewed as sublime by those who do. Both modes involve affects that are represented in distinct rhetorical and poetic effects. Such effects are particularly valued in film and graphic art, where the visual spectacle is expected to convey most of the information. Accordingly , in these chapters sf film will play a more prominent role than it has in previous ones. The genre of sf film has evolved into an apparatus for rendering affects through special-effects technology, a process that can be traced to the earliest examples of cinematic art.2 Capturing, reproducing, and foregrounding the violence of sublime and grotesque shocks has become one of the main purposes of f/x technology and sf film in general. ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ The novum in Suvin’s formulation is principally a cognitive event; it changes the way the world is understood. But it is before this a narrative event, changing the conditions for protagonists and audiences to navigate fictive worlds. By changing these conditions, the sf novum also alters the way imaginary worlds can be inhabited and witnessed by feeling bodies, who gain access to new experiences. Just as each work of sf, no matter how derivative, is expected to introduce a novum in a way that has not been depicted before, it must also deliver experiences that have not been represented before (such is true, of course, of fantastic art in general). SF’s imaginary new experiences are distinctive because they are...