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    Longer Views: Extended Essays
    Longer Views: Extended Essays
    Longer Views: Extended Essays
    Ebook633 pages5 hours

    Longer Views: Extended Essays

    By Samuel R. Delany

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    Six essays from the critic and award-winning author exploring topics such as theater, LGBTQ+ scholarship, cyborgs, metaphors, and Star Wars.

    “Reading is a many-layered process—like writing,” observes Samuel R. Delany, a Nebula and Hugo Award–winning author and a major commentator on American literature and culture. In this collection of six extended essays, Delany challenges what he calls “the hard-edged boundaries of meaning” by going beyond the customary limits of the genre in which he’s writing. By radically reworking the essay form, Delany can explore and express the many layers of his thinking about the nature of art, the workings of language, and the injustices and ironies of social, political, and sexual marginalization. Thus, Delany connects, in sometimes unexpected ways, topics as diverse as the origins of modern theater, the context of lesbian and gay scholarship, the theories of cyborgs, how metaphors mean, and the narrative structures in the Star Wars trilogy.

    “Over the course of his career,” Kenneth James writes in his extensive introduction, “Delany has again and again thrown into question the world-models that all too many of us unknowingly live by.” Indeed, Delany challenges an impressive list of world-models here, including High and Low Art, sanity and madness, mathematical logic and the mechanics of mythmaking, the distribution of wealth in our society, and the limitations of our sexual vocabulary. Also included are two essays that illustrate Delany’s unique chrestomathic technique, the grouping of textual fragments whose associative interrelationships a reader must actively trace to read them as a resonant argument. Whether writing about Wagner or Hart Crane, Foucault or Robert Mapplethorpe, Delany combines a fierce and often piercing vision with a powerful honesty that beckons us to share in the perspective of these Longer Views.

    “An intellectually adventurous book. . . . Every page of every essay here rewards a second reading, and a third. Delany has a fearsomely stocked intellect, and a wider range of experience than most writers can even imagine. . . . He is brilliant, driven, prolific.” —The Nation

    “One of science fiction’s grand masters. . . . Delany’s elegant command of language and deep insight into other authors’ works are delightful to behold.” —Booklist

    “Rare personal frankness and stunning erudition. . . . Recommended for readers who enjoy the challenge of being led into remote regions of a gifted mind.” —Library Journal
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMar 15, 2016
    ISBN9780819571946
    Longer Views: Extended Essays
    Author

    Samuel R. Delany

    SAMUEL R. DELANY (Philadelphia, PA) has won four Nebula awards and two Hugo awards. He is the author of more than 40 books, including Dhalgren and Times Square Red / Times Square Blue.

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      Book preview

      Longer Views - Samuel R. Delany

      Longer Views

      Other Books by the Author

      Fiction

      The Jewels of Aptor

      The Fall of the Towers:

      Out of the Dead City

      The Towers of Toron

      City of a Thousand Suns

      The Ballad of Beta-2

      Babel-17

      The Einstein Intersection

      Nova

      Driftglass (stories)

      Equinox (The Tides of Lust)

      Dhalgren

      Trouble on Triton (Triton)

      Distant Stars (stories)

      Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand

      Return to Nevèrÿon:

      Tales of Nevèrÿon

      Neveryóna

      Flight from Nevèrÿon

      Return to Nevèrÿon (The Bridge of Lost Desire)

      Driftglass/Starshards (collected stories)

      They Fly at Çiron

      The Mad Man

      Hogg

      Atlantis: Three Tales

      Nonfiction

      The Jewel-Hinged Jaw

      The American Shore

      Heavenly Breakfast

      Starboard Wine

      The Motion of Light in Water

      Wagner/Artaud

      The Straits of Messina

      Silent Interviews

      Longer Views

      Extended Essays

      Samuel R. Delany

      WITH AN INTRODUCTION

      BY KEN JAMES

      Wesleyan University Press

      Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755

      Copyright © 1996 by Samuel R. Delany

      Introduction copyright © 1996 by Ken James

      All rights reserved

      Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 2 1

      CIP data appear at the end of the book

      Wagner/Artaud was first published by Ansatz Press (New York, 1988). Copyright © 1988 by Samuel R. Delany.

      Aversion/Perversion/Diversion was first published in Negotiating Lesbian and Gay Subjects, ed. Monica Dorenkamp and Richard Henke (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).

      Shadows was published in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, by Samuel R. Delany (New York: Dragon Press, 1977). Copyright © 1977 by Samuel R. Delany.

      For

      Henry Finder and

      Kwame Anthony Appiah

      Contents

      Preface

      Extensions: An Introduction to the Longer Views of Samuel R. Delany

      BY KEN JAMES

      Wagner/Artaud:

      A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions

      Reading at Work, and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority

      A Reading of Donna Haraway’s Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s

      Aversion/Perversion/Diversion

      Shadow and Ash

      Atlantis Rose . . .

      Some Notes on Hart Crane

      Appendix: Shadows

      Index

      Preface

      In a critical epoch that has privileged, for twenty years or more, difference, decantering, discontinuity, diversity, and pluralism over the elder gods of Unity, Totality, and Mastery, so much American nonfiction still finds itself attempting to appease those elder gods and their former conventions. Those of us who read regularly in criticism often find books whose chapters are, it’s clear once we read two, three, or four of them, disconnected occasional essays. Often the Introduction that claims the remainder of the study will not attempt to negotiate its topic with systematic rigor actually introduces a collection of considerations simply of different topics. At the editorial level, forces (usually called commercial—though sometimes even more mystified than that) militate to present collections and chrestomathies as concentrated studies.

      The fiction writer is used to the same forces at work in the contouring of books: Novels sell better than collections of short stories, we are told. It’s a truism of almost any fictive practice—mysteries, westerns, science fiction, or naturalistic fiction.

      Most of my life my own preferred field has been science fiction; and because that field fosters so many series stories sharing characters and backgrounds, publishers and editors for many years took such stories and put them in books they called novels, while renaming the individual stories chapters—largely at the behest of those forces.

      The one form that—in science fiction, at any rate—tends to resist such handling is the long story (or novella). And in the range of literary criticism, it is the long essay—the essay too lengthy to be delivered comfortably as a fifty-minute lecture—that offers similar resistance to such totalizing conventions. What this tends to mean is that the collection of longer essays—or, indeed, science fiction novellas—is treated as the least commercial of all works.

      When publishers are brave enough to undertake such collections, readers, support them both!

      I’m particularly grateful, then, to my editors, Terry Cochran and Suzanna Tamminen, and to my publisher, Wesleyan University Press and their editorial director, Eileen McWilliam, for accepting this book for what it is and for not suggesting I wait till some of the pieces mature (read: till I become tired of seeing them lie unpublished and eventually pad them out to book-length). Various readers have made wonderfully useful suggestions here and there during the composition process of these essays, including Don Eric Levine, Gordon Tapper, James Sallis, Ron Drummond, and all the editors just mentioned.

      This book contains six moderately long essays with five distinct topics.

      The first, Wagner/Artaud: A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions, has been published as a separate monograph by feisty little Ansatz Press (New York, 1988), that wonderful creation of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and Tom Weber. Its topic is precisely its twain eponymous subjects—and the relationship between them as dramaturges and esthetic theoreticians. Three paragraphs have been added or expanded since the ’88 edition; the diligent literary detective should be able to spot at least two of them.

      Reading at Work, and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority—A Reading of Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’—has, in pieces, provided me with various lectures since it was first written in 1985. It tries to give an account of that exciting and influential essay and at the same time tries to examine what the giving of such an account entails and, yes, means. At its center it contains a brief overview of the cyborg as a science fiction image in film, as well as a discussion of metaphor that seems to me necessarily anterior to any discussion of how any metaphor, such as the cyborg, can work in the radical directions Haraway’s manifesto proposes for it.

      On the evening of November 1, 1991, Aversion/Perversion/Diversion was delivered as the Keynote Lecture at the Fifth Annual Lesbian and Gay Conference on Gay Studies, held that year at Rutgers University. It takes an anecdotal tour through some marginal tracks of contemporary (and, at that, largely queer) sexuality, even as its topic is the concept of discourse and its necessity for any sophisticated historical understanding.

      This is also the topic of Shadow and Ash—an intellectual chrestomathy whose fragmentary method is finally its content. For me it is the most important essay here—and the one that needs the least prefatory matter.

      Atlantis Rose . . . is a study of the poetry of Hart Crane, with an emphasis on Crane’s wonderfully rich poetic series, The Bridge. Though I hope this essay can be enjoyed without Crane’s text to hand, I would urge readers to procure a copy of that wonderfully rich poem, and—in fact—to read The Bridge through at least once just before beginning the essay, to pause now and again to reread various sections of it on their first trip through my essay, and to read Crane’s poem once more on finishing my notes here. (Poet James Tate suggests at least one of those readings be out loud.) Though I understand most of us—even most professional critics—don’t have time for such elaborate undertakings, that’s still the ideal reading my study presupposes.

      As an appendix I have included another long essay that first appeared in two installments in Foundation 6 (London, May 1974) and the double issue Foundation 7/8 (London, November 1975), though it was first drafted in 1973 while I lived in England. (I revised it heavily in ’74 for the Foundation publication; then again in ’78 and again in ’79.) I can’t believe anyone, in considering the hard-edged language games around which so much Anglo-American philosophy is constituted, would not find the margins of their thought occasionally troubled by the illusory quality of those edges that recontextualization is constantly and playfully suggesting. Such games are predicated on the idea that certain words have their meanings because certain other meanings are rigorously excluded from ever occupying the same semantic space, e.g., whatever blue means, it can never mean red. But recontextualization always presents, at least as a sort of limit case, possibilities of the following order: Whenever I hold up the placard with the word ‘blue’ on it, I want you to hold up the placard in front of you colored red—rather than the one colored green, blue, yellow, or purple. If we assent to such a request, then—in such a context, however rarely it might arise in life—the word blue there means the color red. One might point out that, in such a context, the word means does not mean precisely what it usually means—to which one can only nod agreement: that’s true. Still, that meaning of means is a recognizable meaning, controlled by the context. But this and many other observations make the hard-edged boundaries of meaning that control the speculations of natural language philosophers and speech act theorists so problematic.

      The work of continental philosophers like Derrida has not explained away such problems. But it has demonstrated why such problems are not some marginal impediment to a more mathematically solid model of language but are rather inescapable and fundamental to what language is and how it functions, i.e., that a word is never out of a specific context limiting its meaning, even when it is isolated by a line of white paper above and below it, or when it is beside its definition on the dictionary page, or when it is cited as a general instance of meaning in a philosophy paper (i.e., that the absolute and unlimited Word-with-its-meaning—the transcendental Logos—is an illusion).

      Shadows, then, represents what I hope some readers will find an interesting piece of transitional thinking between the two traditions. And it prefigures much of the later work. If Shadow and Ash is the most important essay here, then Shadows is its lengthy, chrestomathic preface.

      The excuse for such a collection is not to provide a good read but—indeed—to provide several, some sequential, others simultaneous. For reading is a many-layered process—like writing. The different forms, such as the long essay vis-à-vis the short, all have their separate excellences and pleasures. I hope this collection presents a rich field in which to look for—if not to find—them.

      —New York

      21 October 1993

      Extensions

      An Introduction to the Longer Views of Samuel R. Delany

      BY KEN JAMES

      There is here a problem of framing, of bordering and delimitation, whose analysis must be very finely detailed if it wishes to ascertain the effects of fiction.

      —Jacques Derrida

      I

      The term extended essay, in its very articulation, seems to presuppose a norm which is somehow being supplemented, exceeded, transgressed. Certainly the long pieces in the remarkable collection to follow do not fit the form of the essay we have been led (by whom? by what? for what purpose?) to expect; nor does the experience of reading them feel like the experience of reading a traditional essay. To better understand what these pieces are up to, then, we might want to consider the form against which they position themselves.

      What constitutes a traditional essay, and what is the experience of reading one like? Obviously to make generalizations about a form with such a wide range of possible topics (i.e., just about anything) and possible writerly approaches is to construct something of a fiction; nevertheless, generalizations about normative trends—generalizations about what we have come to expect from an essay—are possible. Lydia Fakundiny characterizes the essay in passing as a short, independent, self-contained prose discourse.¹ Fair enough. But as has been noted by Fakundiny and many other scholars of the history of the essay, there are other, more specific traits which have characterized the essay since the traditionally posited birth of its modern form in the sixteenth-century writings of Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon. From Montaigne, for example, we inherit (among other things) a focus on the personal, on the authorial subject as the ground and goal of analytical inquiry. Montaigne prefaced his epoch-making Essais with a warning to the reader that, whatever the ostensible subject-matter of the pieces to follow, I myself am the subject of my book.² Ever since then, essayists have, with varying degrees of intensity, been committed to presenting the spectacle of a single consciousness making sense of a part of the chaos of life.³ From Bacon, we get a writerly stance that tends towards didacticism, in the specifically aphoristic mode. Bacon’s Essays, which appeared 17 years after the publication of the first edition of Montaigne’s collection, are written in a terse, pithy, authoritarian style: they do not so much analyze topics as list epigrams. Here is a well-known example of typical Baconian prose:

      Crafty men condemn studies; simple men admire them; and wise men use them . . . Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention . . . Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.⁴

      In Bacon we find the seeds of what the essay was to become a little over a century later in the hands of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele—a specifically urban mode of writing, offering an authoritarian moral compass for those who would live in the city. (At the same time, a critical tradition was developing from the essay’s classical roots, giving rise to the impersonal form which constitutes most academic writing today.)

      What often seems to characterize the works of the most popular contemporary essayists is a combination of the didactic tone of Bacon with the self-presentational obsessions of Montaigne—a conflation of the authorial and the authoritarian. Consider the following passage from The Writing Life, in which Annie Dillard compares the experience of essay-writing to a kind of path-finding:

      You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you find a box canyon. You hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins.

      The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend. In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles. Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work.⁵

      Note how Dillard’s use of the second-person pronoun causes the sentences in this passage to waver between description and injunction; note too how the passage gathers rhetorical energy as its sentences approach the aphoristic. I would argue that the personal focus of this passage and its epigrammatic style are typical-unto-defining traits of the contemporary essay. Certainly they are traits which, knowingly or unknowingly, we expect of it.

      But as Roland Barthes—one of the great essayists of the twentieth century and possibly the first great theorist of the form—has persuasively argued, spectacle (even the spectacle of self-portraiture) and aphorism are two major rhetorical modes of conservative discourse—the discourse of the status quo. According to Barthes, spectacle discourages critical consideration of motives and consequences⁶ as it treats the spectator to the brief illusion of a univocal moral order (M 25). Aphorisms, similarly, derive much of their authoritative force from their implicit affirmation of such an order, such an unalterable hierarchy of the world (M 154). Aphorisms serve the purposes of the status quo precisely because their seemingly pithy declarations discourage further inquiry into their authorizing context. The root-meaning of the word gives it away: apo-horizein—to delimit, to mark off boundaries, to circumscribe a horizon. Edward Hoagland has commented on the complicity of the essay with the preservation of the status quo:

      The essay is a vulnerable form. Rooted in middle-class civility, it presupposes not only that the essayist himself be demonstrably sane, but that his readers also operate upon a set of widely held assumptions. Fiction can be hallucinatory if it wishes, and journalism impassive, and so each continues through thick and thin, but essays presuppose a certain standard of education in the reader, a world ruled by some sort of order—where government is constitutional, or at least monarchical, perhaps where sex hasn’t wandered too far from its home base . . .⁷

      Clearly, the essay is ripe for a radical rhetorical intervention.

      Samuel R. Delany was born in 1942 and raised in New York City’s Harlem. Something of a prodigy, he published his first novel at age 20, and has made radical interventions in various literary and paraliterary practices for over thirty years now. In the science fiction field, he is a renowned novelist and critic, having garnered four Nebula Awards and a Hugo Award for his fiction, as well as the nonfiction Hugo for his autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water. His numerous studies of the history and rhetoric of science fiction have moved his colleague Ursula K. Le Guin to call him our best in-house critic.⁸ Delany has also written for comic books, and has produced a remarkable trio of pornographic novels (or anti-pornographies, as his critical alter-ego, K. Leslie Steiner, calls them): Equinox, Hogg, and The Mad Man. And he has recently made a foray into historical fiction with the short novel Atlantis: Model 1924, which details a meeting between characters modeled after Delany’s own father as a young man and the poet Hart Crane, on the Brooklyn Bridge one bright afternoon in, yes, 1924. Over the course of his career, Delany has again and again thrown into question the world-models that all too many of us unknowingly live by—particularly, but certainly not restricted to, those models which relate to sexual identity and practice. For this aspect of his work, in 1993 he was given the fifth William Whitehead Memorial Award for Lifetime Contribution to Gay and Lesbian Literature, an honor he shares with Edmund White, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and James Purdy.

      These accolades have not come without controversy. Examples: in 1974, Delany published an 879-page novel, Dhalgren, which—with its story of a bisexual amnesiac’s rise to fame in a mysteriously burned-out midwestern city, its frank depictions of marginal sexual practices and the social forces surrounding and pervading them, and its notoriously complex formal structure—inspired a heated discussion within the sf community about, among many other things, the very nature of science fiction, which continues in various circles to this day; and in 1979, Delany published the first of what would become four volumes of interlocking narratives collectively known as Return to Nevèrÿon, an experiment in paraliterary form which—with its unlikely combination of the hoary formulas of sword-and-sorcery fantasy with the sophisticated rhetoric of structuralist and post-structuralist theory, as well as its exploration of marginal sexuality—inaugurated a spirited debate over the question of what sort of rhetoric is proper to the paraliterary fields of science fiction and academic criticism. Over the course of these ongoing genre-bending interventions, Delany has had a huge influence over a whole generation of writers and thinkers: he is regularly cited as arguably the major sf influence, in both style and subject matter, on the cyberpunk movement, and is cited with equal regularity as a major force behind the current academic recognition of science fiction as one of the most vital and innovative fields of contemporary American writing.

      In his previous critical work—collected in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Starboard Wine, and The Straits of Messina—Delany has more or less restricted himself to the expository form of the standard critical essay. (Exceptions to this restriction are Shadows from The Jewel-Hinged Jaw—included as an Appendix to this collection—and The American Shore, a book-length, microscopically detailed meditation on the sf short story Angouleme by Thomas M. Disch.) In the present collection, Delany turns his considerable creative and analytical energies toward a radical reworking of the essay form. He does this in part by combining, at various strategic points, the impersonal rhetoric of literary analysis with the personal voice of the Montaignean essay—a mixing of rhetorical modes which has attracted increasing interest over the years, in light of the critiques of the Western discourse of the sign and the subject put forward variously by post-structuralist, feminist, and Frankfurt School critics, among others. Delany also deploys formal tropes which he has developed and refined in his own fiction over the past two decades or so—particularly in Dhalgren, Triton, and that undecidable hybrid of theory and fiction, Return to Nevèrÿon: dialectical framing structures, short textual units numbered in Wittgensteinian fashion, multiply-intersecting stories, and so on. By deploying those tropes here, Delany produces essays which, in their complexity of form and richness of resonance, resemble novels—and postmodernist novels to boot. The result for the reader is an experience which simply cannot be found anywhere else on the current American literary landscape.

      It has often been observed that Delany’s work is deeply concerned with myth. Specifically, as Delany himself has pointed out, it is concerned with myth-making—with the social, material, and historical forces that generate cultural myths.⁹ The essays to follow share this concern. But they are also equally concerned with myth-breaking—with the analytical practices required to discern, interrogate, and dissolve myths. Nothing if not ambitious, these essays tackle the myths of High Art vs. Low, of Sanity vs. Madness, of Theater-As-We-Know-It, of castration as the Freudian and Lacanian model of socialization, of transcendent sexual difference, of biography, of the canon, and indeed of the very concept of literature.

      But these essays also interrogate a myth of the essay itself: specifically, the traditional perception of the essay as a shapeless form of writing. Critics, reacting to this perceived shapelessness, have for a long time called the essay a degenerate and even impossible genre, and it has never had a firm foothold in the canon of English literature—a state of affairs which once led the great American essayist E. B. White, only halfjokingly, to call essay-writers second-class citizens. Critics of a more recent generation have tried to recuperate the essay by turning this shapelessness into a plus-value, positing it as the ideal (non-)form with which to critique totalizing systems, or, more radically, as "the moment of writing before the genre, before genericness—or as the matrix of all generic possibilities."¹⁰ But it is the underlying ideas of both these critical positions—that there can be such a thing as a shapeless discourse unfixed by pre-existing rhetorical practices, or that any single rhetorical mode could serve as the primitive calculus underlying everything subsequent to it—which Delany has called into question time and time again in his work.¹¹

      With this collection, Delany continues his critique. As I’ve noted, at certain points along the way he deploys formal tropes which his longtime readers may find familiar. But whether previously acquainted with Delany’s work or not, readers expecting the short, monologic prose discourse that is the currently dominant form of the essay are in for a surprise—for these essays are not like other essays.

      They are huge, sprawling works, encompassing an enormous range of topics and disciplines—from the origins of modern theater to the vagaries of radical feminist scholarship, from mathematical logic to the most marginal of sexual practices, from the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe to the intricacies of literary historical sleuthing, and much, much more—and they combine these topics in interlocking narratives of madmen and burning cities, prodigies and poets, cyborgs, street-hustlers, and the author’s own life, in language that is sometimes light and anecdotal, sometimes vertiginously self-reflexive, but always lucid, luminous and exuberant. Chrestomathies, Delany calls some of the pieces to come: collections of textual fragments whose numerous interrelations the reader must actively trace out in order to gather them up into a resonant whole. In their encouragement of active reading, these essays resemble what Barthes has called the writerly text, the text produced as much by the reader as by the writer:

      This text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach¹²

      If any single idea can be said to fuel the fires of all these essays, it is the Foucauldian notion of discourse—the notion of the socially sanctioned systems of perception and practice that hold us all in their thrall, the structuring and structurating forces which keep myths alive and preserve the status quo¹³—forces which can only be countered by a violent rhetorical shift somewhere in the discursive space (RS 235). And herein lies the relevance, the urgency of these essays. As intellectual entertainments, they make great demands on the reader—and offer unprecedented rewards. But they are more than just entertainments: they are radical rhetorical interventions in the discourse of reading itself. And their radicalism resides precisely in their acknowledgment of the existence of the radical reader: the reader who thinks, who writes, who intervenes.

      In the discussion to follow, I shall very briefly review some concepts from Delany’s earlier nonfiction works about the language of science fiction which have a bearing on the analyses Delany carries out here. I will then try to suggest how the formal strategies Delany deploys in these essays both illuminate and are illuminated by the formal strategies of his fiction, as well as how they reflect the theoretical framework which surrounds and informs so much of Delany’s recent fiction and nonfiction. If (to paraphrase Delany) my informal, idiosyncratic, and indeed fragmentary remarks initiate dialogue, so much the better; if they close dialogue off, so much the worse. I hope only to provide a provisional analytical frame to assist the radical reader in her further explorations of the rich and complex universes of discourse which these essays both describe and generate.

      II

      Science fiction, like the essay, is a form which, in its more popular incarnations, has often tended toward the didactic, in the mode of the aphoristic. Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert, to name two examples, have actually published the collected sayings of their best-known fictive protagonists, Lazarus Long and Paul Atreides. Ursula Le Guin’s fiction also leans toward aphorism, her essays doubly so; the list could go on. In his earlier critical work, Delany has discussed in some detail the problem of didacticism in Heinlein and Le Guin specifically and in science fiction and literature in general. (The long interpolated monologues in Return to Nevèrÿon could be read as attempts to suggest some aesthetic solutions to the problem.) Paradoxically, however, Delany has also argued that despite its flirtation with the authoritarian mode, science fiction may still be the privileged genre for writing against what constitutes a significant aspect of today’s status quo.

      To understand Delany’s argument we need to recall Barthes’s assertion that conservative discourse tends to de-historicize phenomena which are historically specific. In the rhetoric of this discourse, things lose the memory that they once were made (M 142). Both the aphoristic style and the spectacle work to reinforce this confounding of the historical and the natural. In viewing spectacle, all that is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from (M 151). Likewise, the aphorism is no longer directed towards a world to be made; it must overlay one which is already made, bury the traces of this production under a self-evident appearance of eternity (M 155). Delany argues that the rhetoric of science fiction foregrounds precisely the historical, social, and technological constitution of human landscapes which conservative rhetoric tends to obscure. In this way the rhetoric of sf differs fundamentally from the rhetoric of literature, the conventions and tropes of which are organized around an entirely different focus:

      Despite the many meaningful differences in the ways of reading that constitute the specifically literary modes, they are all characterized—now, today—by a priority of the subject, i.e., of the self, of human consciousness. To a greater or lesser extent, the subject can be read as the organizational center of all the literary categories’ many, many differing expectations . . .

      Answering its own expectations as a paraliterary mode, science fiction is far more concerned with the organization (and reorganization) of the object, i.e., the world, or the institutions through which we perceive it. It is concerned with the subject, certainly, but concerned with those aspects of it that are closer to the object: How is the subject excited, impinged on, contoured and constituted by the object?¹⁴

      The point is not merely that sf tends to be about the object in the sense of taking the object as its main topic of interest; it is, rather, that all of the conventions, tropes, and reading protocols that mark science fiction as science fiction are organized around a revelation of the object and its constituting context. And herein lies the potentially radical force of the genre:

      . . . even the most passing mention by an sf writer of, say, . . . the monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni, begins as a simple way of saying that, while the concept of mines may persist, their object, their organization, their technology, their locations, and their very form can change—and it says it directly and clearly and well before it offers any metaphor for any psychic mystery or psychological state. Not to understand this object-critique, on whatever intuitive level, is to misread the phrase . . . (SW 188)

      By this rhetorical model, we can see that even the most conservatively inclined science fiction, if it is in any way sophisticated as science fiction, must keep a certain margin of imaginative space open for an apprehension of the historicity of objects, landscapes, and social institutions. By this model we can also see that science fiction differs from the essay in at least one of the same ways that it differs from literary fiction: for like literary fiction, the essay is rhetorically oriented toward a revelation of the subject, toward the presentation of a spectacle of a single consciousness trying to make sense of the chaos. The problem for both literary fiction and the essay is that the chaos of the modern world originates primarily as a chaos of the object, not the subject (SW 158)—which renders these forms, at least vis-à-vis the manifold problems of the object, conservative by default.

      Bearing in mind the notion of science fiction as object-critique, we can begin to see why a radical practitioner of the genre such as Delany might take an interest in such recondite analytical practices as Marxian critique, deconstructive criticism, and discourse analysis. All offer sophisticated ways of considering the relations of objects, texts, and social practices to their ideological, linguistic, and socio-historical surrounds, and all are in one way or another committed to the exploration of the social constitution of the individual subject, that is, those aspects of the self that are closer to the object. All, in sum, are ways of breaking myths—ways of scrutinizing things which may seem eternal, totalized, and systemic, and questioning their totality, interrogating their system-aticity.

      The obstacle to such analysis, on the one hand, is the pervasive influence of the discursive surround, the interpretive context by which we register a text well-formed or ill-formed (RS 235). Only vigilant analytical attention can tease out the myths that discourse has embedded in any given text, precisely because discourse determines the attentional norm:

      For what discourse does above all things is to assign import. Discourse, remember, is what allows us to make sense of what we see, and hear, and experience . . . Discourse is what tells us what is central and what is peripheral—what is a mistake, an anomaly, an accident, a joke. It tells us what to pay attention to and what to ignore. It tells us what sort of attention to pay. (RS 239)

      The possibility of such analysis, on the other hand, resides in language’s tendency towards unlimited semiosis—the tendency of linguistic signs and sign-arrangements to carry connotations in excess of the normative meanings to which the discourse is perpetually working to restrict them. Deconstruction and discourse analysis exploit this inherent richness of language by evoking those meanings which the given discourse has systematically relegated to the margins of consideration, thus problematizing the meanings which would at first seem unproblematically and eternally lodged in the discourse’s rhetorical center. Characterized in this way, theory begins to look like more than just a range of analytical methodologies to be applied to a science fiction text, or a set of rhetorical tools to apply within a science fiction text, but rather like a case of convergent evolution with science fiction in general. If we view them both as ways of reading and writing the silences of objects, texts, and discursive landscapes, then theory and science fiction begin to look like two very closely related modes of inquiry.

      The term unlimited semiosis comes from the American philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce, but the idea as Delany deploys it comes from the post-structuralist critique of the Western discourse of the sign. In that discourse, the relation between linguistic signifier and nonlinguistic (objective) signified is presumed to be clear, direct, and unproblematic; by extension, texts are presumed to have clearly delineated, finite, and masterable meanings derivable from their concatenation of signs. In post-structuralist discourse, on the other hand, linguistic signifiers do not point towards a transparently clear objective reality (what Derrida calls the transcendental signified), but rather towards one another in a dynamic interrelational process occurring within a larger linguistic/discursive system (The signified, explains Delany, is therefore always a web of signifiers¹⁵).

      By this argument, a theme—conceived in traditional discourse as an object-like thing which one finds in a given text—is actually an artifact of a readerly predisposition to order textual signs in a certain way. It marks a preconception, an effect of discourse; it has, in Delany’s words, the same political structure as a prejudice.¹⁶ In order to get around such prejudicial reading, Delany argues, we have to stop seeing the text as a linguistic construct with object-like, synchronic referents or themes hovering behind it, to be systematically uncovered in a hermeneutical reading process, and start seeing the text as a space of discourse—the space in which, at various points and along various loci, discourses (of whatever rhetorical expressions the reader is led to make) may be organized in relation to one another (AS 174). That is, we must see the text as a contestatory site where various discursive relations are transformed by the reader in an ongoing, diachronic process of reconceptualization and revision.

      (It should be noted here that Delany, like certain post-structuralists, has observed in Barthes a tendency to discuss texts in thematic terms: Even the plural text of Barthes is a synchronic plurality (SW 205). Delany’s answer to Barthes can be found in The American Shore, which formally resembles Barthes’s S/Z but differs from it theoretically in many significant respects. More on this ambiguity in Barthes’s work later.)

      The diachronic, discourse-space model of writing and reading has the obvious virtue of being empirically more compelling than the synchronic-thematic model: it describes a situation that feels more like what we do when we read and write. It also has the more subtle virtue of reminding us that discourses are not monolithic structures, despite their pervasive and seemingly systemic influence; it shows, rather, that they arise from and are subject to the rhetorical interventions of the conscientious writer and the sensitive reader. In other words, it reminds us (to paraphrase ethnographer Stephen Tyler) that discourse can always be relativized to rhetoric.¹⁷

      For a gay black man such as Delany—or for anyone of whatever social position committed to a critique of or intervention in a status quo which seems to derive much of its strength from a whole series of discursive and coercive exclusions and oppressions—the recognition of the relativization of discourse to rhetoric is a tremendously empowering political truth. It is empowering in one sense because it reminds us that the pretense to universal authority which Barthes has shown to be the hallmark of the rhetoric of the status quo is just that, a pretense: every utterance, no matter how much it evokes a transcendental system of authority to legitimate itself, can always be traced back to an individual or group with a historically, socially, and materially specific position. It is empowering in another sense because it places the power to revise a discourse back into our hands, with whatever personal or collective energy we can bring to our revisionary project:

      Discourse says, You are.

      Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, I am not. (AS 172)

      Delany’s own creative output can be read as a rigorous analysis of the implications of this freedom, as well as an exercising—through the production of radical paraliterary works—of this same freedom. It remains for us to look at the fallout of this prior creative work in the essays to follow.

      III

      The moment we turn to consider the essays in this collection, we are faced with a choice: the choice of where to begin. In his Preface, Delany informs us that the essay in the Appendix to this collection, Shadows, was actually the first essay to be published, and is itself a preface to Shadow and Ash, one of the essays in the collection proper. Do we prioritize chronology of publication, then, and read Shadows before the rest? (But then we would also want to read Reading at Work before Wagner/Artaud . . .) Do we wait until we are about to commence Shadow and Ash, and then read Shadows as a preface to that essay only? Or do we hold to the reading protocol that says an Appendix is only a marginal supplement to a main text—and defer reading Shadows until the very end, if we read it at all?

      While we ponder our options, we might want to consider a passage from an essay completely outside this collection (except of course by citing it here I am bringing it part-way in . . .), in which Delany discusses the post-structuralist project of writing against the discourse of unity and totality:

      Under such an analytic program, the beginnings and ends of critical arguments and essays grow particularly difficult. The natural sense of commencement and sense of closure the thematic critics consider appropriate to, and imminently allied throughout, the naturally bounded topic of his or her concern now is revealed to be largely artificial and overwhelmingly ideological.

      Thus the beginnings and endings (as well as the easier middle arguments, once we are aboard) of our criticisms must embody conscientiously creative and political strategies. (NFW 23–4)

      In the case of the work at hand, we are given a text with several possible proper beginnings, the choice of which involves conscious (as well as conscientiously creative and political) reflection on the reader’s part over where in the discursive space she wants to position herself. Delany has used this strategic deployment of central and marginal texts extensively in Return to Nevèrÿon, each volume of which has its share of proper and supplemental tales. This strategy made its first overt appearance, however, in Delany’s 1976 novel Triton (written concurrently with Shadows), which consists of a main text and two Appendices. (Dhalgren is similarly structured, but there the central/marginal relation is more subtle.)

      Let us say, purely for the sake of argument, that we have chosen to read Shadows first.

      The first thing we notice about Shadows is its unusual structure. A description of this structure can be found in Appendix B of Triton, in which Shadows makes a metafictional cameo appearance as the historical antecedent to the modular calculus, an invention of the 22nd-century philosopher Ashima Slade (Slade, says the unnamed scholarly author of the text of Appendix B, took the title for his first lecture, Shadows, from a nonfiction piece written in the twentieth century by a writer of light, popular fictions. . . .¹⁸ Here is a description of Slade’s Shadows:

      A difficulty with Shadows, besides its incompleteness, is that Slade chose to present his ideas not as a continuous argument, but rather as a series of separate, numbered notes, each more or less a complete idea—the whole a galaxy of ideas that interrelate and interilluminate each other, not necessarily in linear form. (T 356)

      Cross-checking confirms that this is indeed an accurate description of the formal structure of Delany’s Shadows—as well as clearly recalling Barthes’s characterization of the writerly text as a galaxy of signifiers.

      However, our scholar also observes that if certain numbered notes in (Slade’s) Shadows are considered in isolation from their surrounding text, they seem to resemble nothing more than a few more or less interesting aphorisms (T 357). Cross-checking again confirms this aphoristic pattern in Delany’s Shadows. Given what we have come to know about aphorisms, their appearance in this essay may seem problematic.

      But consider: through their nonlinear relational logic, the sixty numbered notes that make up the body of Shadows evoke a complex discursive space with many dimensions. One could say that each of the notes corresponds not just to a different coordinate position in that space, but to a different dimensional axis in it: to read the essay is both to construct that space and trace a vector path through it. To read any given note as though this multidimensional framing context did not exist, then, is essentially to misread it. As Slade himself comments (and, ironically, this is the one statement we are told Slade has lifted from Delany’s text): I distrust separating facts too far from the landscape that produced them (T 357). This suggests that an aphorism can be as much a product of reading as writing: if we, as readers, omit enough of the descriptive context, we can reduce the potentially rich information-value of a complex statement down to the degenerate information-value of an aphorism.

      Shadows explores the problematic relation between model and context through personal anecdotes, speculative fictions, strategically placed aphorisms, and critical meditations on the works of Wittgenstein, Quine, Chomsky, and other such system-builders. The reader can find in this exploration an early articulation of the problem of empirical resolution that provides the epistemological arc for the entire Return to Nevèrÿon series (in which what seems to be a revelatory process of mirroring or echoing in the early volumes—a proliferation of metaphorical correspondences between objects, events, and situations—shades over into an oppressive process of mistaken identity and confounding doubling in the later ones). The reader can also find an early articulation of Delany’s concern with the relation of biography to form and context, which he explores in greater detail in the other essays of this collection, as well as in his own autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (which, along with The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals in Flight from Nevèrÿon, and The Tale of Rumor and Desire in Return to Nevèrÿon, displays the same chrestomathic organization as Shadows).

      Shadows commences with an announcement that it was written in lieu of the personal article requested on the development of a science-fiction writer.¹⁹ After fifty-two notes, we do eventually reach the personal article in question. But by the time we get there, the autobiographical sketch seems to be less about its ostensible topic—the teleological development of the self, which the discourse of biography teaches us to expect—and more about its own enunciative context, within the greater text, discourse, and world at large. In the absence of a definitive referential center, the act of interpretation then becomes a task of locating the play in the interpretive space, rather than positing a unitary or hierarchical explanation (SW 95). It is in this frame of mind that we might want to approach the sixty notes—the sixty axes that make up the referential space—of Shadows.

      The formal structure of Wagner/Artaud: A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions begins to suggest what an argument framed within such a multidimensional space would have to be shaped like—and the sort of reading that would be required to follow such an argument. At first glance, the essay appears to be structured like a conventional literary analysis. But once we begin, we quickly find that the text does not proceed in the linear manner we expect of such an analysis: in place of an unfolding linear argument, we are instead given a series of intersecting stories (and the fictive antecedent to this is once again Return to Nevèrÿon). As the text alights variously on Antonin Artaud’s life, works, and correspondences, Richard Wagner’s memoirs, and Delany’s own autobiographical reminiscences, we are forced again and again to ask, "What is the unifying thread or argument holding these tales together? Why, if there is an argument, is it being presented in this way? To pull order and pattern out of the essay, we must do a fair amount of mental work in holding these tales together in memory: in this sense, the act of reading Wagner/Artaud" becomes something of a sustained performance.

      The essay’s ostensible analytical goal is to read the fragmentary aesthetic of Artaud against the discourse of High Art as embodied in the theatrical practices institutionalized by Wagner. To carry out this reading, Delany reconstructs events in Wagner’s life which have either been suppressed by Wagner himself or, when brought to the surface and analyzed by others, have been misinterpreted due to the predispositions imposed by subsequent discursive practices. Delany thus takes biographical elements which have proved most susceptible to the colorings of discourse—to mythopoesis—and renders them vivid, concrete, and contextually specific. As we’ve noted earlier, this is a key move in discourse analysis. In place of a pervasive set of artistic practices which are usually accepted without question or even notice, Delany substitutes a life, its socioeconomic context, and the materially specific foundations of those artistic practices—which can be noticed and questioned.

      The strategic placement of the two autobiographical passages near the beginning and end of Wagner/Artaud creates a conceptual frame within which the transformation of the myth of Wagnerian discourse can be observed. In the first passage, we are given a vivid account of the chaotic goings-on backstage during a Wagner performance at the newly opened Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center:

      The proscenium is not before you to frame what you see: costumed chorus members in their intense make-up mingle with workmen in their greens and blues and technicians in sweaters and jeans, with metal scaffolding all around (invisible from the seats), lights hung every which where, and music always playing through the lights and motion and general hubbub, so that the effect is more like watching a circus rehearsal scattered about the floor of some vast hangar than an artistic performance.²⁰

      We are then immediately given a metaphorical reading of this episode:

      . . . one reason it is sometimes so hard to evaluate Wagner’s influence is because we are always within it. We can never get outside it, never see it as an organized stage picture. There is no vantage from which we can slip into the audience and look at it objectively. (W/A 21)

      By this reading, the all-engulfing backstage experience becomes an image of the ubiquity of Wagnerian aesthetic practices—in ironic contrast to the spectacle of transcendence which those practices strive to generate onstage. Yet there seems to be more to this anecdote than a metaphor for pervasiveness—the images are too vivid, too concrete. There is an excess of signification.

      In the second passage near the essay’s close, Delany considers Walter Benjamin’s notion of the aura of the work of art. Arguing (contra Benjamin) that the aura is precisely what is preserved in the mechanical reproduction of art, rather than what is lost, Delany shows how a biographical account of a direct encounter with a work of art—such as his own with Picasso’s Guernica—can serve as an empirical counter to the mythic aura that Wagnerian discourse places around reproductions (W/A 78). This conception of biography as empirical counter provides a second reading for the backstage passage: what stands out now is less the all-engulfing quality of the space than its intense material specificity. Backstage at the Met now looks less like

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