Narrative Logic, Ideological Domination, and the Range of SF: A Hypothesis

Abstract

A literary text has at least two strange groups of properties pertaining to its extension and to its intension (I am here appropriating terms from logic as metaphoric suggestions only). Extensively, the text can in any sufficiently small period still be thought of as objectifying the central element of a circuit at whose ends are the original sender and the original receiver. However, this objectification — the apparent constancy of the text - lends itself to the creation of other communication circuits, with new receivers and often also new senders: synchronically and (more often) diachronically, a text can have different intensions — that is, result in a number of different messages for different social addressees. As to the latter, it is clear that Marvell’s ode to Cromwell, for example, is read differently by monarchists, Puritans and Levellers, as well as by differing social addressees one, two or three centuries later; this also holds for, say, Dickens’s Hard Times read by a factory owner, a liberal reformer and a socialist, or for Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land read by Charles Manson and by you, gentle critical reader. Perhaps less evident but no less significant is the series of strange metamorphoses undergone by the image of the implied writer, which is the only aspect of authorship relevant in a communication circuit (the ‘everyday’, never mind the ‘true’, personality of the writer is not known even to the original readership).