Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation

Abstract

Science fiction, wrote Darko Suvin in “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” is “the literature of cognitive estrangement”—the genre that arises out of the dialectical encounter between that which is real and that which is imagined, impossible or yet to be.1 The estrangements of science fiction defamiliarize our empirical, everyday reality, motivating through the depiction of radical difference a new and profound rerecognition of our surroundings; cognition acts as estrangement's reality principle, tethering it to what is real, lest it lose all sense and become a mere flight of fancy. Science fiction in this way becomes in Suvin's hands a literature not of anticipation but of analogy; science fiction does not predict the future but rather allegorizes what is already real in the present.This definition—which firmly situates science fiction as a genre of the political left, as both sub- and supragenre of utopia—remains at the center of science fiction studies nearly forty years after its first articulation, with new interventions in the field still typically beginning either with the acceptance of Suvin's terms or else the positing of some alternative approach. In Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?, Seo-Young Chu sets out in precisely this way, provocatively announcing her project as “Suvin's definition turned inside out” (3). For Chu, science fiction is not an antirealist literature of the impossible but rather a mimesis of those alien things that exist despite their strangeness; science fiction describes those literary practices that seek to represent “cognitive estranging objects” that are real but only partially thinkable by the human mind—what Chu calls “objects of wonder” (5). Trauma, cyberspace, and globalization are three such objects, nonimaginary and partially measurable and yet, at the same time, elusive, excessive, and indistinct; each is the focus of a chapter of Chu's book.Chu's startling and ambitious project therefore seeks in the end to turn the existing tradition of science fiction studies on its head, in the process transmogrifying all genres of literature and thought into variations on science fiction. Surrealism becomes the science fictional mimesis of dreams; detective fiction is the science fictional mimesis of “the mystery of ratiocination” (9); supernatural fictions like Harry Potter or the Twilight series are the science fictional mimesis of the fierce, multiple subjectivities of young adulthood. Even the most baseline realist text—something like Balzac or Dickens—becomes, in Chu's terms, “actually a ‘weak’ or low-intensity variety of science fiction, one that requires relatively little energy to accomplish its representational task insofar as its referents … are readily susceptible to representation” (7). All representation, after all, is to some extent or another predicated on the dialectic between cognition/referentiality and estrangement/fictionality; representation without cognition would be quite literally unthinkable, while representation without some level of estrangement would simply be the thing itself. Consequently, everything is science fiction, at least a little bit.The approach to science fictions (and to artistic and literary production more generally) laid out by Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? is in many ways tremendously exciting, especially in the book's positioning of lyricism as the necessary “torque” required to “convert referents ordinarily averse to representation into referents accessible to representation” (67). Whereas most theorists of science fiction focus on the genre's more prosaic characteristics, Chu reimagines science fiction as a long-lost cousin of poetry, with stunning insight. Chu's fascinating epistemological approach likewise makes an important case for the centrality of science fiction for both theories of literature and theories of the world as such. Because “to make something available for representation is to make it knowable” (75) science ficti