Thursday, February 5, 2009

Week 5: Brunner, DeCerteau

So many diverse readings this week! With so many authors and ideas floating, all I can do this week is to organize the thoughts that struck me most:

1. Does Brunner's "jumpcut" narrative technique produce an effect that works best with "didactic dystopias"?

2. Brunner's technique collapses the readers' experience of time, which ties in nicely with (a) Jameson's discussion of time and (b) my first short paper.

3. DeCerteau makes an interesting analogy by likening walking as a spatial act to talking as a speech act. Does the analogy hold up when we look deeper into the theory of speech acts and codes?

4. Could Garrard's discussion of apocalyptic rhetoric be a helpful perspective for my ethnography of American fundamentalism?

I. BRUNNER'S NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE

For myself, I did not care for Brunner's "jumpcut" technique. During Week 1 we noted Moylan's observation that science fiction and fantasy often work by enlisting readers in a fictive culture and allowing them by stages to figure out the absent paradigm. The rapid jumpcuts and non-linearity in The Sheep Look Up hindered my enlistment in its fictive world and characters.

Yet I could also recognize the effect that Brunner's technique was producing in me. It was a kind of "shock and awe" that, at least for me, will cause me to remember the vividness of the dystopia rather than the vividness of the characters or story.

By contrast, the dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four has stuck with me because I vividly recall the characters (Winston, Julia, O'Brien, Parsons, Charrington), situations (Two Minutes Hate, telescreens, memory holes, Golden Country, Room 101, Chestnut Tree Café, etc), and plot elements (the love affair, Miniluv, etc).

Will I remember the dystopic environmental hell of TSLU as vividly as I remember the people, situations, and story of 1984? Or will Brunner's jumpcut technique end up being like one of those movies that are great on special effects but thin on characterizations and story? You recall some of the images, but in time they fade. But great stories become a part of you.

Anyway, I could see what Brunner was trying to do. And I asked myself: Does his jumpcut technique work best with dystopias (and rather didactic ones, at that)?

Murphy's essay on "John Brunner's Narrative Blending" has a nice discussion of the "polyphonic jumpcut" technique found in TSLU. See especially pages 27-29. He notes how jumpcutting "more nearly reflects reality than traditional narratives," transcends the limits of a single-narrator viewpoint, conveys "the simultaneity of events" and, by "distributing the commentating-observer role among many different characters," undercuts the comforting notion that any heroic figure has "the" authoritative solution.

Somehow, though, I have trouble imagining the technique working with Herland, a classic didactic utopia that follows a linear narrative. The jagged, violent, defamiliarizing technique of Brunner may work for his dystopia. But a utopia such as Herland would seem to require the comfort of a conventional linear storyline in order to persuade readers of its desirability.

II. THE EXPERIENCE OF TIME

Murphy's observation, that the polyphonic jumpcut technique of Brunner conveys "the simultaneity of events," is an apt introduction to a discussion of how readers experience time. TSLU definitely has the effect of collapsing time, while conventional linear narratives can have (in the best stories) the effect of making time seem to slow down.

Jameson's discussion of time (Chapter 1.7) is, like most of his explorations, wide-ranging. Asimov is a favorite of mine, so that I could relate to Nightfall as an illustration of Jameson's points. And I found the typology of SF "eras," found on page 93, to be useful.

But rather than ruminate on Jameson, let me offer some excerpts from my first short paper that bear on the discussion of time. Perhaps these excerpts may help spark some class discussion when we meet next week.

In my paper I look at Ernst Bloch's suggestion that a "Utopian impulse" is rooted in human nature, and then contrast that with ethnographic and linguistic research which suggests that not all cultures are equally oriented (like the United States) to tomorrow. Here are some excerpts:

> If Ernst Bloch correct . . . then any lack of a utopian literature [in non-Western cultures] would owe to economic and political repression . . . Given the same resources as the West, other cultures would produce as rich and varied utopian works of their own. But there is another possible explanation: Utopian works may not speak to all cultures. This proposition would deny Bloch's thesis of a universal Utopian impulse and regard a relative abundance or lack of utopian literature across different societies as culturally situated.

> Bloch (1885-1977) saw past, present, and future in dialectical tension so that the latencies and tendencies of the past inform the present and can influence the future. "Bloch's understanding of time as possibility reconfigures the word itself," notes McManus (2003). "Knowledge of the world can no longer be fallaciously conceived via . . . the 'given,' and becomes, instead, a creative epistemology of the possible . . . [that] is both utopian and deconstructive" (p. 2).

> Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck proposed that all cultures must answer the basic question: What is the orientation toward time? . . . "Past-oriented cultures believe strongly . . . that the past should be the guide for making decisions and determining truth," while "present-oriented cultures hold that the moment has the most significance" and "future-oriented cultures . . . emphasize the future and expect it to be grander than the present."

> Then finally, there is Whorf's (1940) question, "Are our own concepts of 'time,' 'space,' and 'matter' given in substantially the same form by experience to all men, or are they in part conditioned by the structure of particular languages?" (p. 138). In their seminal Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) noted how English-speakers, at least, cognize time by metaphorizing it as a commodity (e.g., time is money) or an object in motion (e.g., time flies). . . . [Yet] English speakers might talk of the future lying ahead, Mandarin speakers below, and Aymara speakers behind.

> Casasanto (2008) concludes: "In summary, people who talk differently about time also think about it differently, in ways that correspond to the preferred metaphors in their native languages. Language not only reflects the structure of our temporal representations, but it can also shape those representations. Beyond influencing how people think when they are required to speak or understand language, language can also shape our basic, nonlinguistic perceptuomotor representations of time. It may be universal that people conceptualize time according to spatial metaphors, but because these metaphors vary across languages, members of different language communities develop distinctive conceptual repertoires (p. 75)."

III. SPEECH ACTS AND "SPATIAL ACTS"

DeCerteau (pp. 97-102) makes the interesting assertion that, in the same way that talking constitutes a speech act, walking constitutes what I'll call a "spatial act." That's because:

> The walker appropriates topography just as the talker appropriates language

> The walker spatially enacts topography just as the talker acoustically enacts language

> The walker relates to the topography just as the talker relates to his/her interlocutor(s)

Thus the walker (or cyclist? or driver?) engages via spatial acts in a relationship with topography/place just as the talker engages via speech acts in a relationship with other discursants. This is a neat comparison. But like most analogies, is it imperfect and breaks down when carried too far?

Speech act theory treats speech as action, so that speech act theorists focus on how language functions (does an utterance give a command? negotiate rights and obligations? provide explanations and justifications?) rather than the cultural codes or linguistic structures of the speech. Analysts look at speech to discern its embedded motives and try to explain how the effectiveness of a speech act is determined by the rules and conditions for speaking in a given situation.

To carry on the analogy, a theory of "spatial acts" would treat walking as an action, look at what functions a given act of walking performs, analyze the underlying motives of the walker which are embedded in his/her spatial act, and discern how a given walk is (or is not) successful under the prevailing rules and conditions that govern the propriety and effectiveness of the spatial act in question.

Does DeCerteau's analogy hold this far? What do you think?

On the other hand, if we compared "spatial codes" (as Lefebvre suggested) to "speech codes," then we would ask how an act of walking (or interaction with a space) embodies taken-for-granted cultural assumptions about (a) the respective natures of people and space, (b) how people and space should be linked, and (c) the role of spatial action.

IV. APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC

Garrard's discussion of tragic versus comic apocalypse was new to me and seemed a typology I could usefully apply to my ethnography of American fundamentalist culture.

Not surprisingly, Garrard's description of Fundamentalist/Evangelical eschatology lacks nuance. There is, in fact, an enormous division in the ranks between premillenialism (that the world won't be set right until Christ returns) and postmillenialism (that believers, by setting the world right, will prepare the way for Christ to return).

This division helps explain the different rhetorics of, say, the Left Behind book series (which promote a premillenial eschatology) and Pat Robertson and his Christian Coalition (which promote a postmillenial eschatology).

Left Behind urges believers to live godly and convert the lost while time remains before God decides at any moment to inaugurate the millenium. Robertson urges believers to perfect the world and thus proactively help to usher in the millenium.

My ethnography pays the most attention to the speech codes and rhetoric of Fundamentalist culture, specificaly of the premillenial persuasion. Garrard's typology might be useful is seeing how the underlying communal assumptions of the two competing eschatologies--premillenial and postmillenial--are embedded in the speech codes and rhetoric of each faction.

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