Models, or, Learning from Science Fiction

Brian McHale

Abstract: One of the most powerful and valuable products of the literary system is models of real-

ity. But the present paper argues that literature can conduct thought-experiments the purpose of

which is to produce notjustmodels ofreality(recognizable models)butmodels forreality(fresh,

novel cognitions). The case investigated here is thatof science fiction,still a somewhatdisreputa-

ble literary genre, but one that foregrounds world-building, proceeding from certain“what if?”

premises and extrapolating its alternative worlds more or less rationally and systematically from

those premises. One example is Alfred Bester’s science-fiction novel The Stars My Destination

(1956), which projects an alternative to the polarized, Cold War reality of the mid-Fifties, ex-

trapolating a“globalized”(in effect,“Americanized”)world. In other words, science fictions

such as Bester’s novel conduct thought-experiments. One can learn from the example of science

fiction howto be thinking about even canonical classics such as Jane Austen’s novels or Cervan-

tes’ Don Quixote as thought-experiments capable of producing fresh cognitions.

Key words: model　thought-experiment　world-building　science fiction　globalization

Author: Brian McHale is Distinguished Humanities Professor of English at the Ohio State Uni-

versity. In 2007 he was appointed Guest Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University for a three-

year term. For many years co-editor of the international journal Poetics Today, he is a founding

member of Project Narrative at OSU, and vice-president of the newly-formed Association for the

Study of the Arts of the Present(ASAP). He is also author of books on postmodernist fiction and

poetry(Postmodernist Fiction, 1987; Constructing Postmodernism, 1992; The Obligation toward

the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems,2004)and of articles on modernist and postmod-

ernist fiction and poetry, narrative theory, and science fiction. Email: mchale.11@ osu.edu

标题:模式?还是科幻小说的启示?

内容提要:文学系统一个最强大最有价值的产品是它反映了现实的模式,然而本文却认为,

文学能够引发思维实验,而其目的是不仅反映现实的模式(即能被认识的模式),而且为现

实创造模式(即全新的认知)。本文以科幻小说为个案进行了研究。科幻小说作为一种文

学样式,虽然仍然不为人们普遍看好,却凸显出对世界的构建。科幻小说构建世界首先基于

某种“如果… …又怎样”的前提,而后在此基础上进行不同程度的系统的理性的推断。例

如,阿尔弗雷德 贝斯特的科幻小说《星辰我的终点》(1956年)为20世纪50年代中期两极

分化的冷战现实构思了一个替代版,推演出一个“全球化”(实际上是“美国化”)的世界。

换言之,像贝斯特小说这类科幻小说就引发了思维实验,人们可以从中学会一点,即如何把

DOI:10.19915/j .cnki .fls.2009.02.002奥斯丁的小说或者塞万提斯的《堂吉诃德》这类经典化的名著作为能够引发全新认知的思

维实验来理解。

关键词:模式　思维实验　世界建构　科幻小说　全球化

作者简介:布赖恩 麦克黑尔,美国俄亥俄州立大学英语系教授,中国上海交通大学客座教

授(2007 -2010年)。多年来他一直与人合编国际期刊《今日诗学》,是俄亥俄州立大学叙

事文学课题组创办人之一和新近成立的学术组织当代艺术研究协会副会长。出版有关后现

代小说和诗歌研究的著作多部(如《后现代小说》,1987年;《建构后现代主义》,1992年;《对

艰难的整体承担义务:后现代长诗》,2004年),发表关于后现代小说和诗歌、叙事理论、科幻

小说的众多论文。

　

1. Models

　 Why study literature? Among the most compelling answers I know of is the one that derives

from the work of one of my mentors, the Israeli cultural theorist, Itamar Even-Zohar. In Even-

Zohar’s view, the most valuable product of the literary system is not texts as such but the cultural

models from which texts are constructed, and which they in turn help to maintain and circulate.

“The mostconsequential socio-semiotic productof literature,” Even-Zohar writes,“lies… on the

level of images, moods, interpretation of‘reality,’ and options of action. The products on this

level are items of cultural repertoire: models of organizing, viewing, and interpreting life.” If we

adopt this viewof literature’s cultural function, its cultural work, then one reason to study litera-

ture is thatitprovides extraordinary access to a culture’s models of reality. Itallows us to glimpse

howa culture organizes itself and the world around it; and this applies not only to historically or

geographically distant cultures, whose models of reality might be alien to us, but also to our own

contemporary culture, whose models might pass unnoticed, taken-for-granted, pitched below the

threshold of our attention, without the salience(or foregrounding)that literature imparts to them.

　 This is not a mimetic theory of literature,I hasten to emphasize,but a thoroughly semiotic one.

Literature gives us access not to raw,unmediated reality(whatever that might be),but to prefab-

ricated reality, ready-made reality, reality filtered through a culture’s grid of categories and

structured according to its system of relations. By this account, literature mirrors, not the world,

but world-models, the world as mediated by a culture’s modeling systems, beginning with the

fundamental modeling system of language itself.

　 My allusion here to the notion of modeling systems is meant to suggest the kinship between

Even-Zohar’s approach and that of the Tartu-Moscow semioticians, especially Jurij Lotman. E-

ven-Zohar readily acknowledges his indebtedness to the work of Lotman and his circle,and also to

that of Pierre Bourdieu, whose notion of habitus is a near relative of Even-Zohar’s concepts of

repertoire and model. Compatible,too,are the notions of frame, script and schema in cognitive po-

etics, though the cognitivist approach tends to emphasize the passive side of modeling— models as

tools of understanding— while Even-Zohar’s approach, in common with Lotman’s, also accom-

modates active modeling— models as programs for operating in actual life. Even-Zohar also recog-

nizes certain affinities between his approach and that of new historicists like Stephen Greenblatt,

though he is generally wary of the impulse toward ideological critique thatis a feature of much new

historicist work. For the same reason, he is anxious to distance himself from critique-oriented va-

10外国文学研究　2009年第2期rieties of cultural studies, with which his own cultural research otherwise has much in common.

　 Cultural models of reality, and consequently their literary reflections, vary widely in kind and

scale, ranging from micrological details of language and behavior right up to worldviews and cos-

mologies. For example,somewhere in the middle of this range falls our everyday,working models

of linguistic variety, what David Crystal once called our“linguistic stereotypes,” as distinct from

the expert knowledge of actual linguistic reality painstakingly acquired by professional linguists

and dialectologists. If you examine(as I once did)the representation of children’s language in

modernist novels(my test-case was the fiction of John Dos Passos; see McHale 1994), you will

find that novelists reflect not children’s actual, real-world speech behavior, but rather a conven-

tionalized linguistic stereotype of children’s language: not child-language, but baby-talk, the

special variety of language that adults use when talking to children(and sometimes to pets and

lovers, too). The baby-talk model stands for, and stands in for, children’s language in fiction;

baby-talk models child-language for writers and readers alike, indeed for everyone except child-

language specialists, who have a different, professional apprehension of children’ s speech.

Here, then, is one small-scale example of why we might study literature: in order to catch a

glimpse of cultural models, such as the baby-talk model of child-language, that might otherwise

escape our notice. It serves to illustrate why I find Even-Zohar’s approach so compelling.

　 Compelling, but in the end, not entirely satisfying. For if literature’s function is to reflect,

maintain and recycle its culture’s models, it’s hard to see how, if at all, it could get beyond

those models— howit could exceed them. Literature can give us valuable insight the given of

culture,butcan itproduce the new?Itis notclear to me thatany of the related approaches I men-

tioned a moment ago— not Even-Zohar’s or Lotman’s,and certainly not the cognitive or newhis-

toricist or cultural-studies approaches— are particularly well-equipped to give a theoretical account

of the possibility of literary innovation; and this seems to me a drawback. The various theories of

literature as modeling system all treat literature’s cultural work as essentially homeostatic: they

account well for howliterature helps conserve a culture, but not howit could help renewone.

　 This,I think,is the point of Terry Cochran’s contribution to a recent special issue of NewLit-

erary History(38.1, Winter2007)that posed the question,“What Is Literature Now?” Cochran

chooses to respond indirectly, by calling question the monopoly that historical understanding

holds over the study of literature now. When we historicize a text— and this includes texts of our

own historical moment— we operate on the assumption that the text can knowonly as much as its

historical moment knows, and no more; if we assumed otherwise, we would be opening the door

to anachronism, to untimeliness, and this is prohibited by our historicist preconceptions. Cochran

objects that, under the institutional regime of historicism,“literature... has been stripped of its

powers to evoke the unknown, the unknowable, the unforeseen, or even the unthinkable.” Now,

the theory of literature as modeling systemis a historicisttheory— I have already noted its compati-


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