..."The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound - a fact the linguistic positivists take no interest in. A sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music : its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect).
All fiction is a metaphor. Science fiction is a metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life – science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relatavistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
A metaphor for what?
If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination."
--Ursula K. LeGuin, introduction to 'The Left Hand of Darkness'.
There's more to it, if you're interested. I actually typed the whole thing out, because my paperback copy doesn't have the intro, which I really liked.
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Date: 2009-10-22 12:03 (UTC)From:..."The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound - a fact the linguistic positivists take no interest in. A sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music : its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect).
All fiction is a metaphor. Science fiction is a metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life – science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relatavistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
A metaphor for what?
If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination."
--Ursula K. LeGuin, introduction to 'The Left Hand of Darkness'.
There's more to it, if you're interested. I actually typed the whole thing out, because my paperback copy doesn't have the intro, which I really liked.