In class on Tuesday much of our discussion of Le Guin, Gunn, and Suvin centered on estrangement from the world that we live in and how it affects our involvement in fictional stories. The story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula Le Guinn seemed to me very much as an exercise in how the writer or author must struggle to involve the reader in the story at hand. When writing a story it is very important to convince your reader to actually invest some part of them in your story; convince the reader to actually care, to put it bluntly. In Omelas, Le Guinn is explicitly struggling with how to go about describing the city, village, or town (whatever Omelas is) in a way that will do just that. When she writes, “ Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?” and “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing…” she is calling us to pay attention to and reflect upon this very important aspect of writing. Famous writer, Italo Calvino, took a very similar approach in his works of Invisible Cities.
When I try to think about this subject, I often think of it in terms of suspension of disbelief. If you want to invest some kind of feeling in a story and be moved by it, you need to “entertain” the events of the story as being real, or at least, real in theory so that you can by extension experience it in some way or another for yourself. What a feat, right? I often find that when I am reading a story and a character’s personality doesn’t match their actions (good examples come from the fiction workshops in classes taught here at WWU) I can’t engage myself in the story itself and, as a result, it’s hard to read through a story that I don’t feel anything for. Creating a convincing reflection in writing of our own world allows for a story that readers can easily relate to and engage in, therefore, suspending the reader’s disbelief to experience the tale you want to tell.
Suvin, in his essay Estrangement and Cognition, leads us through an analysis of these issues but in very different terms that familiarize us with Science Fiction and Fantasy. The way they relate to one another in regards to how they mirror our world and are different from our world (estrangement) and how that affects the reader (cognition). Suvin essentially says just this when he quotes Bertolt Brecht in his Short Organon for the Theatre, “A representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but that the same time makes it unfamiliar.” This particular passage makes me think instantly of Freud’s The Uncanny which illustrates perfectly why science fiction fixates and draws our attention to it, invites hard questions, and begs us to analyze what it is saying about our world. It takes what is, for the most part, ‘our world’ and changes it in a way that makes it “uncanny” to us. Like the naked body of a woman in her sexual prime with the head of a vulture, it draws our eyes (I guess I might not be able to speak for everyone, but quite a few, I’m sure) and repulses or confuses us at the same time. Conflicted feelings work great for maintaining attention. Attention, suspended disbelief for further judgment, mission accomplished in terms of entertainment.
Well, those are my thoughts for now! I’d love to hear feedback if anybody had some thoughts while reading it.
