DEFINITIONS

Speculative fiction

Kathryn Hume (1984) defined fantasy in opposition to mimesis; the term ‘speculative fiction’ may do the job of the first a tad better. This is the label for a mode that is currently held to encompass fantasy, science-fiction and horror,
but also their derivatives, hybrids, and cognate genres like the gothic, dystopia, weird fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, ghost stories, superhero tales, alternate history, steampunk, slipstream, magic realism, fractured fairy tales, and more (Oziewicz 2017).
Note that all of the genres listed by Oziewicz are modern. When he writes ‘ghost stories,’ does he mean literary texts, or folktales about ghosts? Why only ‘fractured fairy tales’ but not ‘fairy tales’ tout court? By the side of ‘superhero tales,’ why not ‘hero tales’ covering epic and knight-errant romance? In fact, it is not clear whether the term ‘speculative fiction’ is meant to apply at all to fiction before the eighteenth century. If it is not, the field it does cover must yet have forerunners, precursors, harbingers. There must be a history to it. And where there is history, there is pre-history.
The pre-history of this mode would be a broad array of works that ply the trade without claiming the label because they are busy with other things. Isn’t Homer’s Odyssey speculative when it has its hero descend into the nether world in search of a dead prophet whose advice he needs to return home? Are Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or Milton’s Paradise Lost mimetic fictions? How about the biblical story of Joshua, who commanded the sun to halt and was obeyed? And what of a film such as George Pal’s Destination Moon, which painstakingly and realistically dwelt in 1950 on the practical problems astronauts might face in the very near future? Never mind that some of these texts may be wrapped up in religion, believable science or fantasy—they are plain fiction to our twenty-first-century eyes; and downright speculative at that. But history demands compartmentalisation; so, if we are agreed that there is no speculative fiction as such before, shall we say, the eighteenth century, let us look at Milton and Homer as its forerunners or roots. Our project considers Beowulf one such, among other reasons because it lies right behind one of our most canonical fantasy texts, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. And it considers the biblical and medieval conception of Paradise speculative fiction, if only because it underlies so many fantasy narratives of utopian, dystopian or heterotopian tales.
The threshold chronotope, under a myriad varieties, is here hypothesised to be the cornerstone of all speculative fiction; and this, simply, because—unlike mimetic fiction, which aspires to dwell on one single, if infinitely complex, reality—it contemplates two radically different dimensions: ordinary reality, and another reality-beyond, manifested in fantasy as a domain of wonder; in SF, as the future or other planets; in the Beowulf epic, as a realm of ogres and dragons; in horror fiction, as a dimension of ghosts; in religious discourse, as Paradise, a spacetime apart from the human world; in alternate histories, as a parallel reality; and so on. Between the two realities it is convenient to postulate a threshold, and all Speculative Fiction genres unfailingly propose a negotiation on the boundary—whether physical or figurative—between the two domains. But this boundary is equivocal because it itself constitutes a four-dimensional domain. If it were a mere line, we would never be able to fit into it the space and time that all definitions—beginning with Bakhtin’s own—seem to concede to it; the boundary is therefore a veritable threshold chronotope; or it is itself and the ‘territory’ beyond itself, so that crossing the threshold is entering the threshold, with all the ambiguities and possibilities this gives rise to.

• Mode vs genre

We borrow from Brian Attebery a refinement on Hume’s position, and take speculative fiction to be a mode that encompasses a multiplicity of genres. By genre we understand a discourse governed by convention and bound to some historical period and culture. A mode, on the other hand, permeates the literary field and does not belong to any particular period of history; it is loosely thematic, extremely flexible, and obeys no conventions (Attebery 1992:3). Speculative fiction is a mode of writing that contrasts with the mimetic mode; it manifests in many kinds of text, and coalesces into genres and sub-genres. Fantasy, science-fiction, horror and so forth are genres arisen from the speculative mode.

• The threshold chronotope

Front hall, staircase, corridor, street and public square exemplified the chronotope of the threshold for Bakhtin (1981: 248). That these are all spatial sites tallies with the fact that discussions of liminality inescapably handle terms—‘entry,’ ‘traversal,’ ‘process,’ ‘sojourn,’ ‘exit,’ ‘time passing,’ ‘time flow’—which presuppose physical or figurative extent and duration, spatial and temporal coordinates. The concept is thus most promising for liminalist research. But the scholar adds that these are ‘places where crisis events occur,’ and where ‘time is essentially instantaneous, it is as if it has no duration and falls out of the normal course of biographical time’ (1981: 248). Now, these observations are fraught with difficulties. We enumerate a few:

• Is the threshold chronotope to be defined solely as befitting ‘crisis time’? Do the expressions ‘the threshold of the new year,’ ‘an auditory threshold’ or ‘the threshold of consciousness’ necessarily imply a crisis?

• Once we have defined a staircase as a threshold—a line—how can we present it as a three-dimensional space, or as a length of time?
• Is time in the threshold truly ‘instantaneous’? How does this harmonise with ‘crisis’? Can a crisis not last years?
• Might Bakhtin’s description fit other sites? Must we distinguish between sites that are thresholds and sites that may operate as thresholds?
• Can an ordinary space acquire a liminal quality? Does the contrary hold—can liminal space become ordinary space? (ditto for time).
• Bakhtin claims that ‘it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions’ (1937-38: 85), meaning that each novelistic genre is governed by its own specific chronotope. Which genre does the chronotope of the threshold shape?
• What is the difference, if any, between the threshold and the chronotope of the threshold?

Assuming that ‘the chronotope of the threshold’ designates the dynamic configuration of space and time that is characteristic of liminal sites, we will argue that this chronotope must be defined in accordance with the traits it displays and the roles it performs, rather than in terms of a typology of sites (corridor, staircase, etc.) and of one overriding office (hosting a crisis); in other words, that the threshold chronotope is not a category but a function; that it is not genre-bound but transversal, in that it cuts across genres; and that it is Dominant in speculative fiction, in the sense that it lies at its core in ways which cannot be predicated of mimetic fiction. This minimalist definition will be expanded and revised as work proceeds. Suitably developed, it should provide answers to at least some of our questions.

• Speculative fiction and the threshold chronotope

If, as Bakhtin contends, a chronotope constitutes the core of each narrative genre, the narrative mode labelled ‘Speculative Fiction’ and the various genres it covers merit a chronotopic approach. We assume that they gravitate around a chronotope of the threshold, that is to say, around a liminal configuration of space and time. Identifying this configuration should allow us to obtain a wholistic view of the mode.
Under the general label of ‘Speculative Fiction,’ the project will tackle the following genres: Gothic and horror fiction, science-fiction, fantasy, epic, as well as medieval Paradise narratives. Such other genres and media as board-, video- and tabletop games fall within the purview of this umbrella mode in more rarefied ways, but the project will initially not tackle them. The project will conduct a number of case studies in these areas in order to analyse the structure and dynamics of various chronotopes of the threshold in the light of Bakhtin’s insight as well as in the light of our prior research into liminality (see 8. PREVIOUS WORK). Six research areas are contemplated at present, each focusing on one or more of the desiderata listed above under GOALS: 1) a comparative and interdisciplinary scope; 2) a reassessment of Bakhtin’s concept in the light of Turner’s; 3) a flexible approach to generic classification; 4) non-normative instantiation; 5) corpus-based models; 6) historicity. These six research issues lead to as many sub-projects (turn .