The Uncanny and Monstrosity: Still More on the Tropology of SF

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<strong>and</strong> on certain other tropes of thought, such as the “sf synecdoche,” which Anthony Easthope defines as text “in which a single feature or group of features empirically plausible in our present world becomes extrapolated to occupy the whole space of an imagined future” (54). It’s probably obvious that my thinking about tropes is part of a much larger project on literature <strong>and</strong> rhetoric, a good portion of which will be directly, perhaps even exclusively, about SF. At ICFA in 2009, I pontificated about the tropes of narrative time, ending up saying something like within fiction, all temporal structures are examples of achrony (anachronism), <strong>and</strong> then tried to provide something of a catalog of the types. For instance, in distinguishing between analepsis <strong>and</strong> prolepsis, projecting backward or projecting forward, I followed the book About Time, where Mark Currie argues there are three forms of prolepsis—narratological prolepsis (the flash-forward within a particular plot); structural prolepsis (the temporal difference between narrator <strong>and</strong> narratee); <strong>and</strong> rhetorical prolepsis (“the anticipation of an objection to an argument” [29]). If I tell you that my paper now will conclude with a reference to the philosopher Avital Ronell, you have an example for the first, narratological prolepsis; if I speculate that right now you are muttering sotto voce, just what the hell does this have to do with anything?, then you have an example of the third, rhetorical prolepsis. But it’s structural prolepsis that aligns most clearly with the distinctive quality of the literary, <strong>and</strong> especially so with sf. <strong>The</strong> difference between the text’s time <strong>and</strong> the reader’s time is always proleptic, since even if today yr reading China Miéville’s <strong>The</strong> City & the City, there’s a temporal difference between when the book was written <strong>and</strong> the now of your reading. Structural prolepsis is thematic in SF: use Greg Bear’s City at the End of Time, <strong>and</strong> its retrocausal sum-runners as a paradigmatic instance. My general interest is that all of these textual features have tropological structures. But I’m still very much at that cataloging phase, <strong>and</strong> if I fail here to give a thrilling inferential claim I hope you’ll forgive me. (Please note: that was just an example of rhetorical prolepsis.) Since I’ve found that many critics <strong>and</strong> scholars use various terms interchangeably, that that will cause considerable equivocation. So let’s have a little semiological hygiene. I want, as the classical rhetoricians did, to make rigorous distinctions between tropes <strong>and</strong> topoi, <strong>and</strong> I think conflating these two terms causes much confusion in literary study, especially when we are trying to characterize <strong>and</strong> define genres. Most of the time when people like us use the word trope, we probably should use topos. Topos is a Greek noun that can mean place or topic; for Aristotle, it was topic, <strong>and</strong> part of the first canon of rhetoric, inventio. This sort of topos concerns the types of approach in argument. But the other kind of topos that came to be important in literary study is the “common place” (koinos topos): these are the common place objects, events, settings, or stock characters; as regards SF, here’s one of each: spaceships, conceptual breakthrough, a laboratory, the mad scientist. As one instance of our typical equivocation, take Gwyneth Jones, in <strong>The</strong> Cambridge Companion to SF, who calls these the “icons” of SF—that’s a very different idea. That her essay is otherwise excellent doesn’t change the overdetermination of the terms. 1600 years after Aristotle, another kind of topos became important (you’ll find this in Aristotle too, both in <strong>The</strong> Rhetoric <strong>and</strong> <strong>The</strong> Topics, but the meaning has shifted radically): This is the eidos topos (literally “idea topic”), which Ernst Robert Curtius, in
his great book European Literature <strong>and</strong> the Latin Middle Ages translates as “intellectual theme.” Here’s an SF example: the mad scientist, because of his misanthropic ardor <strong>and</strong> immodest hubris, will be clobbered by Nemesis. Being precise here with the terminology has tremendous practical value to us, because maybe the most common way to define a genre is simply to count topoi <strong>and</strong> then check a generic box. That’s certainly how I make decision about what movie to see or what TV channel to watch. Test case: Star Wars. Darko Suvin <strong>and</strong> Samuel Delany would say no way!, but most of us say: hey, here’s a critical mass of the topoi, so check the box. Amass enough submarines <strong>and</strong> enough cavorite <strong>and</strong> enough BEMs <strong>and</strong> enough light sabers, <strong>and</strong> check the box. QED. Topoi are either present or not, <strong>and</strong> they are drawn from the catalog of previous usage, as Victor Frankenstein is drawn from the Faust figure, who is a medieval version of Prometheus. But topoi are to tropes, at least analogically, what constative language is to performative language: constative language, the topoi, declare states of affairs; performative language, the tropes, actually change the discourse, tho here the analogy breaks down, because a trope requires an audience as an active participant to produce the twist or the turn in the discourse. Actually, that’s basically what the Greek word means, a turn or twist. Sometimes you’ll see tropes defined as a “swerve” from common usage, revealing the general western prejudice in favor of topoi <strong>and</strong> against tropes. For tropes belong to a completely different linguistic order than do topoi: a topos is an instance of literal language, a trope is an example of figural language. So what’s figural language when it’s at home? Here cognitive linguistics gives perhaps the best description. In a metaphor, say Carl S<strong>and</strong>berg’s the fog crept in on little cat feet, the audience maps a source domain, the insidious behavior of cats, natural ninjas if there ever were such, onto a target domain, fogs. This mapping is a superimposition of one set of qualities <strong>and</strong> characteristics for the audience to produce a comparison, a new thought, so it’s typically called “cognitive mapping.” Something new is produced—this is the crucial bit—in metaphor, the comparison is produced by audiences, not found. <strong>The</strong> comparison is not already present. In a topos, it is: Victor is a Faust figure. Topoi say what they mean <strong>and</strong> mean what they say, but tropes are allophonic, they say one thing <strong>and</strong> mean something else. This is especially crucial since literature is made up of entirely tropological language. Just as there are two kinds of topoi, there are two kinds of tropes, tropes of speech (sometimes simply called rhetorical figures) <strong>and</strong> tropes of thought. Tropes of speech twist the discourse of limited phrases; tropes of thought reconfigure an entire discourse. Think, for example, of the difference between America as a melting pot or as a spicy gumbo. Me, I don’t want to live in a fondue, but that’s one trope of the American mythos. Henry Louis Gates Jr writes that, in America, race is a trope: it does not designate a thing or essence, so the biologists tell us, but instead a rhetorical transfiguration of our thought. But in lived experience, these figures are monsters, as real as can be. Uncanniness <strong>and</strong> belatedness are examples of such tropes of thought. Freud's often-cited but infrequently-read essay on this subject, "<strong>The</strong> <strong>Uncanny</strong>," proves pivotal for underst<strong>and</strong>ing the semiotic structure of SF. My touchstone example is Lem’s Solaris, with the Phi-creatures appearance(s) <strong>and</strong> the dread they engender through repetition.
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The Uncanny and Monstrosity: Still More on the Tropology of SF

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