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.To say‘ Dune is a metaphor’ or ‘ Solaris is a metaphor’ is to shrink those texts to a limited field of signification.Suvin addresses this problem by insisting that ‘any metaphor that goes beyond one sentence begins to organize a narrative argument’ and that SF ‘is generally acknowledged to be somewhere in between metaphor and story – the parable’ (Suvin 1988: 199).But a parable, such as the biblical parable of the talents, is similarly reducible to one interpretation; it does not generate the imaginative surplus (the qualia, the density of lived experience) of textual depth because the reading of the parable is always steered towards one interpretation.Metaphor on this level (Suvin calls it ‘model or macro-metaphor’) is surely as limiting as micro-metaphor.Another problem is identified by Patrick Parrinder in his intelligent analysis of Suvin’s work.Most theorists argue that metaphors absolutely permeate all our language and discourse.To base a theory of SF on metaphor blurs distinctions between SF and other forms of literature.After all, some might say that Dickens’ novels are, in their way, just as metaphoric as Cordwainer Smith.Suvin’s model, says Parrinder, quickly leads to a reductio ad absurdum, since most modern linguistic theorists would maintain that metaphor is ubiquitous to and constitutive of language itself … the further we follow Suvin in this, the more inescapable seems his tacit abandonment of the idea of science fiction as a special kind of narrative exhibiting cognitive estrangementconclusion137… In the later writings, in which Suvin considers metaphor as a fundamental aesthetic and cognitive gesture, all aesthetic manifestations in the medium of language seem to entail a cognitive element.Claiming that SF merely exemplifies far more widespread aspects of the process of thinking and making analogies, Suvin’s own analogical mode of thought expands his ‘poetics of SF’ well past breaking point.(Parrinder 2000: 46)The point is that metaphor is everywhere.When we say ‘the sun rises’we employ a metaphor, since we know of course that the sun doesn’t literally rise; if somebody says ‘isn’t it hot today?’ and we reply ‘yes, boiling hot’, we are speaking metaphorically.If I say ‘These shoes are killing me’ or ‘I’m ecstatic’ or ‘he’s a real beast’, I speak metaphorically.Nietzsche noticed this feature of discourse, the way our speech is stitched together from ‘dead metaphors’, in 1873: ‘what then is truth?A mobile army of metaphors … truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensual power’ (Nietzsche (1873): 46–7).French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s classic 1971 essay ‘White Mythologies’ (in Margins of Philosophy) expands Nietzsche’s insight.Karl Simms summarises the essay:Derrida’s claim is that all philosophising is infected with a blindness to the metaphoricity of the language in which it is expressed.Metaphor is more than a special effect within language; it is the very essence of language.Even a philosophy of metaphor is itself inescapably metaphorical, so that metaphor cannot be adequately defined outside its own system.Metaphor thus runs out of control through language and through philosophy, the whole of philosophical discourse being an edifice built entirely upon itself without grounding in reality, and sustaining itself by an active forgetting of this fact.(Simms 2003: 76)From this perspective it may be true that SF is a metaphorical mode, but then so is everything else, so that doesn’t help us very much.Perhaps a way out of the bind is to distinguish between ‘dead metaphors’ and‘vital’ ones, a distinction that is implied in Suvin’s discussion.Talkingconclusion138about ‘the sunrise’ does not make the concept new to us (as Aristotle said metaphor should), but talking of life as a virtual-reality prison perhaps does.But I don’t think this will do: Dickens’ Little Dorrit (1855–7) also imagines life metaphorically as a prison, and yet its tenor and impact are quite different from the Matrix movies.Even ‘vital’ metaphors limit the eloquence of a text to a one-to-one estrangement, and ‘vital’ metaphors are equally ubiquitous in non-SF as in SF.Other critics bring in the notion of ‘metonymy’ (also called ‘synec-doche’) in tandem with metaphor to address this question.Metaphor is talking about something in terms of something else (‘bread is the staff of life’); metonymy is talking about some part of an object as if it represents the whole thing (‘one hundred head of cattle’, ‘a parish of two thousand souls’)
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