Being in the Writers in Florence program hasn’t necessarily been especially conducive to working on The Alien Theory Quartet in a direct way, but the techniques I’ve been sharpening and experiences I’ve been exposed to during this time have been useful. Much of what I’ve been experimenting with here has been surrounding ideas of life, death, and genre fiction. How can genre fiction specifically reflect the life-death divide in a way that is affectively unique and effective? Further, at what point does SciFi serve the same purpose as allegory or the dream sequence? Rather, at what point is SciFi overtly saying “this is a symbol for actual life”? And how useful is that as a fictional/literary device?
This leads me to think of my longstanding fascination with mythology, namely Jean-Luc Nancy’s thoughts on social mythologies in The Inoperative Community. Much of this was also especially relevant in my studies of the void over the course of the previous semester. Great SciFi writer, Ursula K. Le Guin debunks the myth of the myth, so to speak, in her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” which turns the idea of fiction on its head. For Le Guin, fiction is not the story of one hero going on a journey to find himself; rather, fiction is the work of collecting realities, gathering them up and placing them into a bag. The story is this bag, this vessel for holding multiple ways of knowing/seeing the universe. How can both my art piece itself and my understanding of the American SciFi novel tradition reflect this? Is the mythology always this hero who we must cast off? Or are there other, fuller versions of mythology that allow the alien in, that allow them space to float about, unarticulated, in a reality of their own entirely?
One of the Writers in Florence trips took us to Palazzo Strozzi, a museum space that’s currently hosting an exhibition called “Reaching for the Stars.” This exhibition of contemporary art combines artists from Italy and many international artists, all of whom showcase work that aligns with a handful of very broad artistic themes. I found myself particularly struck by the room titled “Mythologies.” The room’s description included a question from artist Adrián Villar Rojas: “What if we could see and think ourselves – humanity – from an alien perspective: detached, unprejudiced, even amoral? What if we could see and think of ourselves from the border of our own completed path?” The exhibit itself relied heavily on the divisions between human and non-human, something that the question of aliens has been leading me to repeatedly. Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism has been uniquely helpful on this front, and attending the exhibition has reinforced the importance of this divide between life and non-life for my research.
