The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction

Sixth Beauty The Science-Fictional Grotesque

Sixth Beauty The Science-Fictional Grotesque ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ The SF Grotesque. Most works of sf develop under the canopy of a vast new idea of the order and possibilities of the material universe — a sublime novum. But the idea is made real, impinging, and intimate by the protagonists’ and audiences’ encounters with concrete phenomena that disrupt their sense of familiar existence. The sublime has to do with the mind reflecting on its power, or lack of it, to understand the totality of the world, which of course includes the mind itself. The grotesque has to do with the struggle to accommodate mutable, unstable objects and beings in the world. These objects may include the mind’s own mentifacts, its thoughts externalized with respect to their thinker. The intellectual order of science is a system for regulating things. New speculations about overarching principles cannot by themselves change science; they require ideas about the way things behave. When something does not conduct itself as scientific rationality asserts/predicts it must, it creates a clash between the concept of an ordered world and concrete, experiential evidence to the contrary. When its disorienting anomalousness also disorients the routines of human lives and institutions, the novum is grotesque. SF cultivates the grotesque for its popular appeal, which, as Bakhtin showed in Rabelais and His World (1968), has a long history in European culture. But the impetus for grotesque imagery and language is not only its entertainment value. The grotesque brings the sublime to earth, making it material and on our level, forcing attention back to the body. It traps the sublime in the body, partly to subvert it, but also because sf’s fictive ontology requires this duality, manifest as oxymoron at the level of ideas, metamorphosis at the level of bodies , and surprising incongruities in storytelling. Bakhtin conceived of the grotesque as a challenge to “cosmic terror,” the religious mask of the sublime: 182 The cosmic terror is not mystic in the strict sense of the word; rather it is the fear of that which is materially huge and cannot be overcome by force. It is used by all religious systems to oppress man and his consciousness . Even the most ancient images of folklore express the struggle against fear, against the memories of the past, and the apprehension of future calamities, but folk images relating to this struggle helped develop true human fearlessness. The struggle against cosmic terror in all its forms and manifestations did not rely on abstract hope or on the eternal spirit, but on the material principle in man himself. Man assimilated the cosmic elements: earth, water, air and fire; he discovered them and became vividly conscious of them in his own body. He became aware of the cosmos within himself.1 Bakhtin actually has little to say about the sublime. He does not use the term; he merely implies it in setting up a Manichaean opposition between aristocratic/hieratic ideology and the earthy materialism of the populus. In the domain of language and imagery, the relationship between the two corresponds to the antinomy between oppressors and oppressed, official and popular culture. Historical progress is marked in literature by the rise of the grotesque sensibility to dominance over official aesthetic norms, a process Bakhtin links in metaphor to the rise of scientific materialism as the “popular conquest of the world”: The familiar conquest of the world . . . also prepared a new, scientific knowledge of this world, which was not susceptible of free, experimental , and materialistic knowledge as long as it was alienated from man by fear and piousness and penetrated by the hierarchic principle. The popular conquest of the world . . . destroyed and suspended all alienation; it drew the world closer to man, to his body, permitted him to touch and test every object, examine it from all sides, enter into it, turn it inside out, compare it to every phenomenon, however exalted and holy, analyze, weigh, measure, try it on. And all this could be done on the one plane of material sensual experience. (380–381) Bakhtin’s grotesque is a matter of pleasure in corporeal existence, the rich and funky gaiety that sees life processes intimately flowing into one another, rejecting the abstract divisions and intellectual puritanism of the elites, and consequently threatening and shocking only to them. Once scientific materialism established that the essence of the world and human existence is physical, the spiritual terror of the religious sublime was overthrown. Bakhtin did not pursue the critical investigation of the...