Dust

A naive argument.  Ordinary or mainstream novels walk with an unavoidable limp; ordinary or mainstream novels are hobbled by their associations with dullness. – Is that fair?  Ordinary fiction merely confirms what experience teaches.  For that is where its sense begins.  A mainstream novel succeeds by finding novel ways of teaching us what we already know.   It does not tell us anything new it merely dresses in new clothes the already familiar, the familiar beyond recall – the familiar to the point of oblivion.  But so does this hobbling acquire a power; we originate in the ‘ordinary world’ for example but this revisiting of it, this act of looking again at it, at the past or the present, can be de-familiarising. Our ordinary lives are revisited in a light quite different to anything ‘ordinary’; facts that usage and habit have all but made invisible suddenly appear visible again.  Through its presentation of what works as immediate experience, through verisimilitude, the ’ordinary’ novel is able to convey the non-ordinariness of the ordinary.  What happens when this engagement is abandoned?  So that the concept of reality is presented hyperbolically?  Just as for example with an advert.  It does not give us the story of reality but an hyperbolised purified revision of it, instrumentally designed – seemingly akin to reality and yet not so but reduced down: an above body temperature truth.  Thus a science fiction novel does not give us reality but a sort of high temperature simulacrum.  Everything is bland, draft-free, room shaped, smiley, even fire and ice.  Death and destruction.  Or is that true? 

Tags: Science Fiction, The Novel