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Starboard Wine, An Author’s Introduction

These baker’s dozen disparate pieces discuss the past and the future of science fiction, those violences committed on our reading of science fiction texts by memory (and remembering) and desire (and although we have no English word re-desiring, desire itself is so closely allied to repetition that Freud could identify the two). Despite their thrusts forward and backward, some of these meditations on practice and potential take off, especially in the last third of the book, from a present position of uncharacteristic rigor—that is to say, a theoretical rigor uncharacteristic of most contemporary SF criticism, fannish or academic, formal or informal. At the same time, especially in the first half, autobiography is rampant.

There is some reason to believe that in other areas of our universe certain constants, such as the speed of light or the direction of time, may be quite different from what they are likely to be throughout our local galaxy. Because facts result from the encounter of consciousness with landscape, a fact too far removed from the landscape that produced it often becomes problematic, if not downright suspect. The social landscape is far more variable and volatile than the physical one; and science fiction, like all aesthetic productions, is a social phenomenon: the autobiography is here to ground the rigor, not to relieve it.

With that as prologue, let me tell a tale.

One late autumn afternoon some years ago, as I was coming down the stone steps outside my apartment building, I glanced up 82nd Street toward Columbus Avenue. In Central Park, two blocks away, the sun had found some leaves to snag on. It was cool, but not cold enough to button my jacket.

And walking toward me (I didn’t stop; I didn’t frown; I kept walking toward him, a bigger and bigger grin catching up my face) was a friend I hadn’t seen for six years.¹

Living in Connecticut now, he’d gotten my address from a mutual San Francisco friend; and on this, his third trip into the city, he’d come to look me up.

As I was free for the day, and as it was the first time my friend had been in New York with someone who actually lived here, the afternoon turned into a round of Upper West Side, then Village, bars; then dinner in a downtown Indian restaurant with a pale gold Pakistani beer; at last a night trip across upper New York Bay on the Staten Island Ferry.

At the deck rail, looking over the wrinkling waters at the heap of lights mounding the Staten Island shore, my friend pointed to some other lights out in the haze, within which, on the dark, one could imagine the turning tugboat that owned them. “You know what those lights mean?”

“The ones on the mast? Yes,” I said. “Two lights on the mast and it’s a tug with one barge; three lights mean it’s a tug with two barges. Four, and it’s got three —”

“No, I didn’t mean those lights,” he said. (When I’d last seen him, he’d worked as a salad assistant in the galley of a Matson Line steamship on another coast.) “I mean the other lights. Down there.”

“Down where?” I asked.

“There. Below the mast. Look: on each side of the boat there’s a beacon. The red light means it’s the port side. And a green light would mean you were seeing the starboard side. When I worked on the boats out of San Francisco, they gave us two ways to remember which was which. Red is on the left side of the ship, the port side, and red stands for the heart—on the left side of the body. They other way is just to remember that red stands for port, and port wine is red.”

Out on the night water, the tug, with her single mast-light, completed her turn and started off through the fog, her red light occluded, her starboard beacon revealed now, growing a dimmer and dimmer green.

He repeated: “Port wine is red …”

Over the next minutes we watched the green light drift into invisibility while our boat pulled toward the bright windows and chained ramps of the Staten Island terminal.

As friendships will, this one went on to some new highs, then hit some lows; I haven’t seen my friend now in over a year. The memory, then, suffices.

But what I have been doing a lot since then is writing about science fiction. This book contains some of the more recent pieces.

Years ago in San Francisco—indeed, in the months when my friend and I first met—I had written, “Science fiction is about events that have not happened,”² and somehow this admission that science fiction concerned things that do not exist stirred a very specialized academic circle in a very small but distinct way. In matters written, this nonexistent absent aspect is not a particularly new discovery. In a letter to Ludwig Ficker, Wittgenstein made the same claim for philosophy, referring to his Tractatus: “My work consists of two parts: the present one here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.” And writing of poetry in an essay on La Fontaine’s Adonis, Valéry put it this way: “Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.” Indeed, the nonexistent or imaginary object,³ of art in general and writing in particular, becomes problematic only within a Western tradition of realistic painting on the one hand and bourgeois fiction on the other, where a great deal of aesthetic energy is expended urging the audience to believe that something essential in the artwork did exist, could have existed, or should exist. When looked at as a virtuoso performance that lends an interesting harmony to a melody mostly silent, reference and representation are all very well. But when reference and representation are all that are seen and heard by untutored eyes and ears,⁴ then the rigor becomes necessary that alone can release the unsayable into that form where (beside the utterable) it can most clearly be perceived, by saying what can be uttered with a great deal more care and clarity than is usual.

What are these unsayable things? They are mental constructs, contoured certainly by what is said. They are not so much imaginary as symbolic—symbolic in the Lacanian sense that they contour our entire symbol-producing and symbol-consuming process, direct our entire negotiation of the universe of signs. They are the very models by which all thought—about both the most real and the most abstract problems—propagates itself. These mental constructs are often complex, often recursive,⁵ and can be shared in remarkably stable form by an astonishingly diverse population.

A given construct may promote one kind of thought and discourage another. A given construct often lends itself to one kind of abuse through the same gesture with which it fends off another. The organization of language (as opposed to any specific collection or collation of utterances that organization produces) is one such construct. The French call it langue. This particular one is transmitted largely by exposure to an all but random sequence of linguistic utterances (parole), only a trivial portion of which refer directly to the organization itself. And those utterances that do refer to the organization (grammar) can be understood only after the structure itself has been pretty firmly communicated.

Now is the time to name the discourses.

These discourses, or formal categories of writing—among them poetry, prose reportage (criticism, journalism), bourgeois fiction (mundane fiction), drama, philosophy, pornography, and, I maintain, science fiction—each represent a different symbolic construct, constructs without which the texts themselves would be unreadable. These constructs are probably transmitted in much the same way as language itself.

Among these discourses, at least two groups can be distinguished: on the one hand there is literature (which includes among other categories poetry, mundane fiction, drama, and—today—philosophy), and on the other there is paraliterature (which includes among other categories pornography, comic books, possibly certain kinds of parody, and, of course, science fiction). Although it is largely considered paraliterature, journalism has a firm foot in the literary camp, through its subgenre, “criticism,” both literary and social. ⁶

Science fiction is the writing category—the complex of reading protocols, the discourse—that interests me most in these essays, although for purposes of identification and distinction I will frequently need to contrast it to other formal writing categories or to the category collection, literature, of which I take contemporary bourgeois fiction (mundane fiction) to be, today, the representative example.⁷

One useful aspect of the mental construct unsayable behind and before the range of specific SF texts is its encouragement of a clear view of the figure/ground antagonism in all narrative matters. In science fiction this encouragement is carried on indirectly, yet extremely efficiently because of its indirection, by the continual (and, from specific SF text to specific SF text, the continually varied) ground/ground antagonism science fiction provides, where one ground is the fictive ground of the story and the other is the ground of the reader’s given world.

As the categories it comprises become more aware of their imaginative sources and resourcefulness, as they take more cognizance of the problematic relation between “fiction” and “reality,” as they become more aware of the impossibility of any exhaustive fictive representation of reality, literature encourages the reading of an extentional relation between figure and ground, between fictive subject (invented character or narrative voice) and fictive object (the fictive or biographical decor, the setting, the landscape, the institutions whose representations evoke the fictive or biographical world).

Take two of the finest collections of short stories published in 1978: Susan Sontag’s I, etcetera is literature; John Varley’s The Persistence of Vision is science fiction. But from their titles onward, through their texts, both books declare their allegiances from first page to last.⁸

Starting with its title, I, etcetera announces literature’s commitment to the subject and literature’s equal commitment to the subordination of the ground, rendering ground an expression of subject, of personality, of sensibility. The most overtly referential politics and the most a-referential surrealism in Sontag’s stories register as projections of that sensibility—or as total determinants of that sensibility, which amounts to the same thing when the gestalt experience of self-and-self-surround is projected on a flat surface where all distinctions are a matter of reading, of codes.

Entitling a collection of SF stories, with all it speaks of afterimages, The Persistence of Vision inscribes itself within the ubiquitous antagonism of, the continual mutual impingement between, and the originary conceptual severance that finally determines subject and object: for vision to persist, some one must perceive; some thing must be perceived. And there are experimental hints of this distinction within minutes of birth; contrary to Freud it may well not be learned by violences to the nurturing alterity of food, sleep, and elimination in a variable field of warmth. As the SF reader knows (and the literary reader often becomes uncomfortably aware within the first few paragraphs of any SF text), science fiction does not try to represent the world. It conscientiously misrepresents the world in an endless series of lucidly readable ways—and this amounts to something very different from literature’s exhaustion (which, perhaps naively, I take to mean nothing more than “intense fatigue”) before representation’s admittedly daunting problematics.

The separate mental constructs involved in science fiction and literature both have their separate uses, both grounded in a view of response and responsibility, which make both, finally, human fields for art. Both are needed. But science fiction—the mental, shared, recursive construct science fiction encourages us to use—is in a particularly interesting historical position.

Science fiction is among the youngest of the West’s formal writing categories. In the particular form that propagates the mental construct that interests me, science fiction can be said to have existed only from the early ’30s (possibly middle ’20s) on. Since the early ’50s, its social propagation across the United States, Europe, and the Soviet bloc has been huge. (Approximately 15 percent of all fiction published in the United States today [1980] bears the SF label.) And where the SF construct encounters the literary construct, there is always conflict, whether acknowledged or hidden.The symptomatology of the encounter between science fiction and literature, whether the intention of the speaker or writer is to support the side of science fiction or to support the side of literature, is fairly clear. (All the overt attackers of literature—and a good number of the overt attackers of science fiction—have realized by this time that there is something risky about any directly negative strategy.) The argument always starts with the declaration that science fiction should absorb the values of literature and be transformed by them; labels should be rescinded; boundaries should be erased—these are some of the ways the conflict announces itself. After this warm and friendly invitation, however, the argument goes on to assert that, even if this amalgamation does occur, science fiction will nevertheless always take a back seat to literature: science fiction’s basic nonrepresentational aspect dooms it to a position as second-rate fiction.

What is being done in such an invitation clears, however, as soon as one asks such questions as: which is the most important “fiction”—Paradise Lost, Bleak House, or The Voyage of the Beagle? Which is the most representational? And of what? Should the labels be taken off “poetry,” “fiction,” or “philosophy”? Which of these categories has representational priority?

What is going on, of course, is a game of subordination and appropriation, a game which SF writers themselves have been playing just as freely from their side. And when both sides are trying to subordinate and appropriate the other, it is naïve, if not mystificational, to call such a relation other than conflict, no matter how refined or friendly it seems.

To conjoin science fiction with literature is about as silly as trying to conjoin poetry and prose fiction, or drama and prose reportage. (In the United States in the ’30s, among the violences of the Depression, both were tried: e.g., Boni & Liveright’s slim volumes of poetic/prose effusions; and the WPA’s “living newspaper,” which toured the nation’s backroads out of New York, Chicago, and L.A. Both were finally abandoned.) Some of the specific reasons for this, having to do with science fiction’s status as a formal writing category, as a complex of reading protocols, as a discourse, will occupy the essays to come.

Because the different constructs that different writing categories generate are mental and do not “exist,” sometimes it is hard to keep a clear view of just what use such insubstantial, symbolic, intersubjective objects can possibly have. In our attempts to talk about (in the sense of around) these silent constructs, often we find ourselves slipping back into a rhetoric that deals with only the use and application of the enunciated portion of any given text, while we all but deny that any other aspects of it can manifest.

But about three months ago I took a Greyhound bus down from New York to Baltimore; and after a night in a seedy hotel, in the basement of which a very loud “New Wave” rock concert was in progress, I taxied in the morning to the Dundalk Marine Terminal to catch the Polish freighter Mieczyslaw Kalinowski, on which I was booked, with some dozen other passengers, to Antwerp, there having been a dock strike in Rotterdam, the boat’s initial destination.

The Atlantic is a lonely shield of water.

At sea you are continually struck, on those days when no other object is visible, by the fact that, this close to the Earth’s surface, you will never see more of a single substance. But, as happens even on the lonely Atlantic, one evening at sundown for perhaps half an hour, here and there about the horizon’s aluminum, above that gunmetal shield, five other ships were in view at one time.

Two showed a red light.

Three showed a green.

And I gained some admiring remarks by explaining to my fellow passengers with me that evening on deck which ships were showing us their starboard flank and which were showing their port side; and consequently we were able to tell which direction each ship was moving in relation to us—although I am, incidentally, severely dyslexic, which doesn’t mean I can’t read, only that I have no natural sense of left and right.

But I would tell you this:

During the entire evening and explanation, the oversweet taste and dead-blood color of port never entered my mind. What facilitated the explanation for me, that evening on the deck, was a purely mental construct, the memory of a liquor conceived years before, first put together in silence that night on the ferry with my friend, from an entirely different fermentation process, a distillate the hue of a beacon the color of a spring leaf paled by fog; and, although it has never been decanted and does not, certainly, exist, it is of a different bouquet, of a different vintnerage, and of an entirely different draft.

NEW YORK, 1980

1. Joseph F. Cox (1943–2002).

2. “About 5,750 Words,” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, by Samuel R. Delany, Berkley Wind hover, New York, 1978. [Revised edition, Wesleyan University Press, 2008.]

3. Have we all suffered those various “unicorns,” “current Kings of France,” and “Hitler’s daughters,” which are Anglo-American philosophy’s recent emblems for the present “absent object”? Poststructuralism has reiterated the lesson that “the origin is always a construct.” The historical archaeologies of Foucault and the psychoanalytic researches of Lacan have shown that the same is true of the subject. We have yet to learn, however, that the object is a construct as well—at least we have yet to learn the profound significance of its con-structural aspect for language. Indeed, it is only that the object is a construct—whether it “exists” or not—that allows it so easily to come apart. It is a much subtler construct that is usually supposed by our neorationalists, from Lévi-Strauss to Chomsky, in their search for cultural universals. The object is not made up of meanings (or “facts,” as the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus once asserted). It is made up rather of the elements of which meanings are also made, e.g., various routed-wave phenomena. If the sei in sich is made up of more than, or other than, routed-wave phenomena, I think we can safely say that unless there is an empirical revolution to shatter beyond recognition both the Newtonian and Einsteinian objects (the two stereoptic views that currently give modern thinkers a sense of cosmic depth), though we may speculate endlessly, we shall not know it.

4. In most cases, I suspect, however, that untutored tongues have a vocabulary to discuss only reference and representation—even when the mind has responded to a great deal more.

5. This is to say they are better regarded as repeated processes numerous subjects can undergo than as repeated patterns given mental entities they can fall out of and then fall into again; in Roland Barthe’s terminology, they are “structuations,” not “structures.”

6. This taxonomy is contemporary and synchronic. For any diachronic understanding of the historical forces that have brought this synchronic array about, we must explore the historical forces that have led to the recent dissolution of the term “genre” in poststructural debate. We must examine the attractions between the sociopsychological world and the locus of an ideally undifferentiated discourse whose historical moment is placed farther and farther back as the revealed vectors clarify the diachronic location of its true differentiations.

7. There are good precedents for this assumption. The Russian critic M. M. Bakhtin was among the first to note (in The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist and translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, University of Texas Press, 1981) that by the end of the nineteenth century, all the literary genres had become “novelized.” This “novelization of literary genres” is what allows me so frequently to take mundane (or bourgeois) fiction as the literary prototype.

8. I, etcetera by Susan Sontag, Vintage Books, 1979; The Persistence of Vision by John Varley (paperback edition), Dell Books, 1978. Even the packages of the two books contour their own sociological discourse. Extraordinary in purely photographic terms, when placed on the Vintage paperback cover (and Vintage has probably become the literary publisher today, perhaps more than any hardcover colophon), enfolding, with the title, the author’s name, Thomas Victor’s photograph of Sontag becomes yet another of the misleading vulgarities by which literature in our time is doomed to propagate itself. (A picture of the writer is the last thing that should appear on a book with this title; and anyone with a sense of literature’s commitment to the impersonality that permits its meticulous exploration of the subject should realize it, including the Vintage art department!) The book’s cover is bearable only because, as Sontag was one of the first to note in her early essays on pornography, science fiction, and camp, the cover Varley’s book bears, in awful taste on a mass market paperback, overloaded with promotional copy in unreadable type, framed and reframed in a perfectly eye-dulling format (“quantum science fiction—the world’s first international science-fiction program—provides worldwide publication of the best new works in the field. Each Quantum selection is approved by our …”—a parody of book-ofthe-month-club advertising that is the quintessence of paraliterary packaging), becomes, by those overwrought conventions of vulgarity that make it vanish into the mass of face-out display SF books, by the same gesture through which Sontag’s cover, inappropriate as it is, leaps from a similar literary display to catch the eye, a kind of aesthetic reticence that precisely a reader with Sontag’s highly trained vision would probably be the first to appreciate. Put more succinctly: By a gesture that at once mocks literature and vulgarizes it (the picture of the “author” blazened across the cover) Sontag’s book appropriates, for economic survival’s sake, a gesture from paraliterature, as Varley’s book, in its paraliterary excess, manages to be undistinguishable from everything else on the SF shelf around it—a camp appropriation of a literary gesture of auctorial dissolution. Thus the conflict that will shortly be reviewed below.