While most of us think of science fiction as a genre whose objects of representation are altogether imaginary, Seo-Young Chu argues that science fiction is instead a genre whose objects of representation are real but impossible to describe in a straightforward manner. In Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? (which has been bouncing around the twittersphere as everyone’s favorite title), Chu presents a theory under which all representation is to some degree science-fictional. On the resulting continuum, realism is actually just a low-intensity variety of science fiction, and what most people call science fiction is a high-intensity variety of realism, one that requires exorbitant levels of energy to accomplish its representational work because its referents challenge simple representation. What allows science fiction to render such objects as globalization, cyberspace, and war trauma available for representation, Chu argues, is its dual status as both a narrative and a lyric artform, one that systematically literalizes poetic figures of speech. In the book’s Interlude, presented in full below, Chu draws out her title’s echo of the novel that became Blade Runner, and further reflects on what’s happening when metaphors dream.
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Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?
android: a human-made object that has the form, likeness, or nature of—but is not identical to—a human subject
metaphor: a figure of speech in which a phrase is transferred to an object that has the form, likeness, or nature of—but is not identical to—that to which the phrase is literally applicable
To meditate on the title of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is inevitably to find oneself probing its interrogative form. How should the title be answered? What style of question is being posed? If, for example, the question is hypothetical, then the grammatical mood should be modulated and the question rephrased: “Would androids, were they to exist in real life, dream of electric sheep?” Yet the mood of the title is realis, almost as though the capacity of androids to dream were a matter of knowable fact both inside and outside the novel’s narrative reality. If the question is closed-ended and the answer is either “Yes” or “No,” then the truth of the result cannot be verified on the evidence provided in the novel, whose pages never fully disclose whether Dick’s android characters are capable of dreaming at all. If the title is a rhetorical question to which no instructive answer can be expected, then the question was designed to emphasize a specific point, the absence of which here suggests that the question must somehow be more (or less) than purely rhetorical. If the question is nonsensical, then at least the nonsense is plangently wistful in a manner reminiscent of “Greensleeves,” whose archaic melody—as the science fiction writer Roger Zelazny once noted—eerily translates the title of Dick’s novel into the first line of a futuristic hymn. (Perhaps it is no coincidence that the first sentence of “What Child Is This,” a nineteenth-century hymn set to “Greensleeves,” is likewise interrogative in form: “What child is this who, laid to rest / On Mary’s lap, is sleeping?”) As for the remaining lines of the futuristic hymn, either they have yet to be written or else the opening is all that survives of a relic left incomplete by its mysterious transmission to us from the future.
Do androids dream of electric sheep? The question is haunted by manifold resonances, endlessly oblique, dissonant and harmonic by turns. Let us approach it as a reverberant maze whose invisible exit must be found by echolocation, a riddle whose key is concealed or revealed in the questioning that those six words perpetually elicit. Which sense, for instance, of the verb “dream” is intended? In the lone scene where the title is half- echoed, Deckard (the novel’s human protagonist) wonders idly to himself if androids have “aspirations for something better. Do androids dream?” A different sense of “dream,” however, is much more vividly felt throughout the narrative, which opens with Deckard waking up and closes with Deckard falling asleep. If androids do sleep, is their unconsciousness a figure of speech? Whether they dream consciously or unconsciously, awake or while sleeping, why should androids dream of sheep that are mechanical instead of alive? Must an artificial person dream only of artificial things? It is Deckard who owns an electric sheep, a figure that possesses the form, likeness, and nature of—but is not identical to—a real sheep that he tended before it died of tetanus. Nowhere does the narrative mention the appearance of this sheep-like figure in the dreams of any character, android or otherwise. Do those who are “real” never dream of those that are “virtual”? Toward the end of the novel, Deckard hallucinates that he is turning into an artificial figure, a simulacrum of a human. Should his hallucination come to life, would he dream of what originally he had been? Will virtual humans dream of what eventually they might become, as humanlike figures on a Grecian urn might dream of inhabiting truer realms of truth? A figurative human capable of dreaming the limits to her unconsciousness must also be able to dream of transcending those limits and awaking to her own humanization. What if lyric figures could dream of their own literalization? What if metaphors dreamt of literal sleep—and thus of literal awakening?
This book is an exploration of the dream life of metaphors and other lyric figures, including robots. The questions raised in the preceding paragraphs—their timbres, echoes, tones—are meant to accompany the exploration like ambient music faintly heard. The universe in which the exploration takes place is composed not of stars, black holes, and interstellar matter, but of rhetorical novas, constellations of meaning, and conceptual event horizons. It is a paradoxical universe fraught with paradoxical phenomena such as literalized tropes and nostalgia for the future. It is a narrative universe where poetry is so nearly omnipotent that it need not take the physical shape of verse to make its absent omnipresence potently felt. It is a mind-bending universe where the literal activities of the figurative happen on a continuum with the figurative activities of the literal. Finally, it is a science-fictional universe where all aspects of reality (even extremely obscure referents) can ultimately become available for representation. In this universe, “dimensions” are more often narrative than physical or geometric. “Force” and “energy” are more often lyrical than gravitational or electromagnetic. A riddle such as “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” may find itself rhyming with an answering riddle such as “Do metaphors dream of literal sleep?” Powered by the literalization of lyric personification into narrative event, a humanoid robot may wake up fully sentient and human (only to decide, preferring reverie, to fall asleep again).
(Electronically reproduced from Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? by Seo-Young Chu, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.)
