Читать книгу The American Shore - Samuel R. Delany - Страница 10

—by Matthew Cheney

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Now/Then

The American Shore is likely the most thorough exploration of a single science fiction text yet published. No matter what we end up thinking of its approach and insights, no reader could deny that it is anything less than an impressive intellectual performance. Around Thomas M. Disch’s short story “Angouleme,” Samuel R. Delany wraps pretexts, contexts, and Exotexts; most impressively, he divides the text into 287 lexias whose accompanying commentaries explore and expound upon Disch’s words and sentences.

Delany provided an introduction to The American Shore when it was first published in 1978, and in it he declares this book is not itself an introduction to the topics of science fiction or structuralism, and that it presupposes at least a basic familiarity with both. This is true. I would further add that this book is not an introduction to Delany’s thought on these subjects. For that, one must turn to Starboard Wine, a collection of essays Delany put together after spending a term as a fellow at the Center for 20th Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where he used The American Shore as a textbook. “Although,” he writes in Starboard Wine, “these essays are not a systematic introduction to The American Shore, needless to say, reading them will ­certainly leave one better prepared to grapple with it.”¹

To pick up this book now—I write these words in the early days of 2013—is to pick it up encumbered by the weight of the years since 1978, when it was first published. The American Shore speaks to us from a world that has not yet experienced the Internet, cyberpunk, New Historicism, queer theory, President Ronald Reagan, or AIDS. Delany finished writing it in April 1977, one month before the release of Star Wars. Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Althusser’s wife, Hélène, were all still alive. As was Thomas M. Disch.

That world is gone. Time has added another text to the many texts herein: a palimpsest made of the past. Our knowledge of the years between now and then may obscure or clarify the words. The effect is unavoidable, inevitable.

Stories like “Angouleme,” set in a future extrapolated from present trends, wear their age a bit differently from other fictions. While some elements of the radical strangeness of the future proposed by “Angouleme” remain, others have become more odd or anachronistic, or even had their power reduced by the changes between the present in which Disch wrote and our own.

Consider a single detail from the story: “Papa, the executive, remarried, a man this time and somewhat more happily.” In lexia 11, when the sentence appears in context, Delany makes no mention of the marriage, but in lexia 66 he compares it with a later passage, saying the marriage signals “a rhetorical tradition of radical utopian reorganization.” Homosexual marriage was, indeed, a utopian concept at a time when sodomy laws were still enforced in some regions of the United States, homosexuals could legally be denied jobs and housing for reasons of sexual orientation, homosexual couples were forbidden from adopting children, and parents whose orientation became known often lost custody of their children in divorces. Forty years after “Angouleme” originally appeared (in the first issue of New Worlds Quarterly), the New York State Senate passed the Marriage Equality Act, legalizing same-sex marriage in New York.² Gay marriage is not itself utopia, of course, but its transformation in cultural status from a radical notion at the time of The American Shore’s writing to a liberal norm in our own is a vivid example of how passing time can affect the meaning of a text.

Science fiction is fundamentally about the present in which it is written, and so its futures are born past their expiration dates. But time complicates the perception of all texts. (We do not read Shakespeare’s sonnets today in the way they were read when they were written, or the way they were read in 1813, or the way they were read in 1953.) Additionally, differences in the production, distribution, and reception of texts between the time of The American Shore’s publication and today may heighten or diminish some of the insights Delany offers, or may hide from us some of the reasons for certain points receiving emphasis, certain terms being chosen, certain theories insisted on. Well-armed with our knowledge of what came next, we may miss some of the details and unique turns of the text before our eyes. On the other hand, we are more fortunate than the original readers of The American Shore in that the distance of years has been accompanied by many more books from Samuel Delany, including essays and interviews that develop, advance, explicate, and complicate the ideas herein. Unlike the original readers, we can look back on this book as one facet of a project.

Our vantage point is one more layer, as valuable as the rest (and, nonetheless, inescapable). It is worth the effort to seek the situation of the world-text when any work was written, but it is pointless to resent the present. From our position as citizens of a realized future, we read as archaeologists and genealogists. Meaning is made by the memory of reading and rereading. Every text is past.

S/Z/etc.

Delany mentions various precursors to The American Shore (in “Part III: The Context”): Bernard Grebanier’s The Heart of Hamlet, Damon Knight’s “An Annotated ‘Masks,’” Vladimir Nabokov’s copious commentary accompanying his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, and Roland Barthes’s S/Z.

“An Annotated ‘Masks’” aimed at giving science fiction readers and aspiring writers an insight into the sorts of specific choices that created a single short story—and, more important, a single science fiction story. Its specificity and, most important, its focus on the meanings that science fiction produces in a text, are replicated by orders of magnitude here.

The Heart of Hamlet and Nabokov’s commentaries on Eugene Onegin are works of literary criticism and philology. Whereas the connection of The American Shore to Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin is straightforward (texts diffused), The Heart of Hamlet has long been out of print and its significance to The American Shore is less obvious, as Grebanier does not carry out a word-by-word or line-by-line reading of the whole of Hamlet. Instead, he attempts to cut through centuries of commentary on Shakespeare’s play and to show that we have lost the actual text beneath the obfuscations of discourse around it. He pays close attention to passages that, he proposes, answer questions critics created from their own assumptions, prejudices, and less than careful readings. While little to no commentary on “Angouleme” had accrued before Delany wrote The American Shore, there were prejudices and assumptions that, indeed, obscured the text: prejudices and assumptions about what science fiction is, should be, and can be.

Pale Fire is a work of fiction disguised as a poem and the commentary about it. Readers’ understanding of the fiction hinges on their interpretation of the relationship between the commentary and the poem. Because of the unreliability of Charles Kinbote, the putative editor of the scholarly edition of John Shade’s poem, Pale Fire’s meanings remain ambiguous and multifaceted. The ambiguity extends across numerous levels of the text, from the poem “Pale Fire” through the critical apparatus and to the relationship between all the words and characters. The universe of the novel flows between its texts.

To anyone familiar with French structuralism in the latter half of the twentieth century, the obvious precursor to The American Shore may seem to be Roland Barthes’s S/Z, ostensibly an exploration of Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine.” It is from Barthes that Delany draws certain techniques, particularly the use of lexias (units of reading) as diffusing tools. What Delany does with the lexias, though, is unique to him. Barthes uses his lexias to locate “five major codes under which all the textual signifiers can be grouped” throughout “Sarrasine,”³ but Delany is not interested in categorizing the language of narration into any limited number of types.

While S/Z is important to some of the form of The American Shore, a great knowledge of Barthes is not a tremendous help with Delany, or vice versa. The influence of S/Z is similar to the influence of the other texts Delany mentions, though influence is too powerful a word, and we should think more in terms of something softer, more associative: a trace, an intimation, a whiff. Ships signaling each other as they pass in the night. Precursors in spirit, but also, sometimes, opponents off of which to bounce and riff.

The key concepts of S/Z are arranged around the five codes that Barthes employs, and he identifies the expression of these codes in each of the lexias. (The hermeneutic code governs mystery and suspense by creating questions and the desire for answers; the semic code indicates connotative signifiers or cultural stereotypes that help readers recognize characters, motivations, and behaviors; the symbolic code guides readers’ understanding of the move from text to symbol; the proairetic code groups actions into sequences and thus creates a recognizable meaning for them; and the referential code indicates a body of cultural knowledge from which the text draws or toward which it gestures.) The codes serve to illustrate an idea Barthes expressed in his most famous essay, “The Death of the Author”: “We know now that a text consists not of a line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but of a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original: the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture.”⁴ (There are echoes here of a statement from Pale Fire: “I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.”)⁵

For Barthes, the codes are also “voices out of which the text is woven,” and he goes on to identify a voice for each code (Voice of Empirics, Voice of the Person, Voice of Science, Voice of Truth, Voice of Symbol).⁶ These codes and voices serve to highlight intertextuality and to undermine the dominant power that notions of authorial intention and individual genius can have over the ways texts are discussed.

The voices that Delany points to within Disch’s text are not the voices of any particular, generalizable code beyond that of the signifier/signified relationship or a chain of signifiers. Delany, too, seeks to open the text out beyond any single meaning. However, he is not systematically showing it to be a “fabric of quotations” from other texts or from culture generally, but rather to be a plane of signification. While such a plane could be endless, its contours suggest certain ways of meaning. Both Barthes and Delany are broadly engaged in a similar project—to show how their chosen texts produce meanings, to open up the possibilities of meaning within those texts, and to draw some insights from the process of identifying the systems of meaning production—but the purposes and goals of their projects are different enough that it is difficult to compare them any more specifically without wrenching them beyond recognition. The American Shore demonstrates a wide range of ways that “Angouleme” means, but its primary task is to show how it means as science fiction. Without the specific way of reading that is science fiction, Delany proposes, “Angouleme” is less meaningful, if it is meaningful at all. It would be inaccurate to label such a position Barthesian.

Unity/Plurality

In “Wagner/Artaud” (written from October 1983 to December 1987), Delany offers an efficient summation of his ideas on certain types of artistic unity and their relationship to social and political ideologies—ideas that weave through much of his critical writing, particularly from the mid-1970s and later:

For Hegel, writing in the first, glorious years of the Napoleonic onslaught, history and progress were forces that marched hand in hand. For ­Nietzsche, writing sixty-two years later, history was a nightmare and progress a joke…. But the conceptual screen both Hegel and Nietzsche worked against was one with the concept of unity put forth by Aristotle and [reiterated in the 19th century by] Poe.⁷ This nineteenth-century reductionism, this plea for a unity in which all that is anomalous can be ignored, this appeal to rationalism over empiricism, is behind the whole deadly concept of race; by the end of that century we will see its fallout in the virulent anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair, in what we now speak of as British imperialism, and in Rhodesian and South African racism. Such reductionism when essentialized becomes the philosophical underpinning of this century’s totalitarianisms, whether Hitler’s or Stalin’s or, in its so much milder form, that most social of social constructs—the “human nature” which everyone seems so reluctant to do battle with in the name of pleasure in this country today.⁸

The American Shore stands not only as a testament to and demonstration of a certain kind of literary analysis, but also as a guerrilla attack on the neoclassical concept of Aristotelian unities and Poe’s concept of the single effect in a short story. An especially creative critic might make a plausible case for “Angouleme” as a story that heeds some or most of these unities, but Delany makes the opposite move. The majority of The American Shore not only displays Disch’s text through diffusion, it insists on plurality: this is only one diffusion of the text, and however exhaustive the many pages may seem, we can imag­ine them doubled again with a different diffusion, cut up into a new set of lexias—the refused text diffused and refused again. It is impossible to create or communicate ideas and concepts without unities (the process is itself unifying); it is likely impossible in most cases to account for all anomalies. The error Delany identifies arises from universalizing unities, from dehistoricizing, dematerializing. The American Shore, by binding a text between covers, exists as a unity. It is not a random collage. But neither is it the essence of “Angouleme” or the final statement or the only possibility. It contains multitudes, and multitudes of multitudes could be spun from it, and multitudes of those multitudes are unknown to it, obscured by it, erased by it.

While most of the concerns of The American Shore are textual, the implications reach far beyond “Angouleme” or science fiction or literary theory, and this, for me, is the book’s great value and enduring gift. Delany offers us a model for thinking our way through a particular short story, but the habits we pick up by such practice may weaken or break more malign habits that constrict our perception of the world (and its texts).

The plurality of perspective inheres even in the pronouns. Delany employs a plural viewpoint throughout The American Shore. This may create in some readers’ ears a haughty tone, or perhaps an archaic one, for ours is an age of less formal, more individualized style even in academic prose. With a bit of effort, I soon convinced my mind’s ear to hear the plural pronouns not so much as the voice of a monarch pronouncing from on high, but the voice of someone welcoming me into a discussion, guiding me through the shards, ushering me into the we. In a book of so many diffusions, it became comforting to have that one, plural unity to hold onto.

Blank/Slug

Like much fiction, “Angouleme” uses blank space to indicate changes of scene or perspective, and The American Shore does not let even these blanks go without commentary. Into this silence, this semiotic emptiness, Delany fits musings and extrapolations, letting the empty lines serve as resting points before resuming the hustle and bustle of the broken text.

Delany explains that printers call these blank lines “slugs,” an evocatively unpretentious term. There are eight in “Angouleme.” They fall between lexias 28 and 29, 46 and 47, 75 and 76, 98 and 99, 133 and 134, 173 and 174, 206 and 207, and 242 and 243. They truly sit in between: not lexias of their own, and not exactly belonging to one of the lexias on either side, but rather suspended between them in discontinuity, filling in the blanks, leaking between the lines. They are ghost lexias, a presence within an absence, a haunting of the void.

Slugs disrupt the text from within—they give it order and shape by signaling some unspoken drift, thus taming what would otherwise be a jarring slip, an incoherence, by making it visible. They provide a flexibility within what Delany calls, in the second ghost lexia, “the necessary linearity of fictive time,” but they also render the flexibility readable. The slug is a sign: Mind the gap.

The ghost lexias, too, are a kind of sign to us, something different from the ordinary order of things within the text of The American Shore. In their expansiveness, they slow us down, and they encourage us to weave connections between the disparate threads unspooled by the lexias. Many of the ghost lexias offer explicit commentary on the project at hand, moving us a level of perception above the more immediate task of getting in the way of Disch’s text, though the lexias and ghost lexias are united by the common job of, as Delany says at the fifth slug, “circling, searching, thrusting.”

Voice/Text

Something that struck me on my most recent rereading of The American Shore is how strongly certain sentences and phrases within the commentaries give a sense of narration. Obviously, one of the topics they return to is that of the narrative voices of “Angouleme,” and therefore this topic is central to any reading of The American Shore, but I have in the past always read it rather simply and naively as the commentaries being Delany’s Voice, and thus in some way more truthful and less artful than the polysemous voices of fiction. But as countless critics have told us, narrators are constructs, regardless of whether we judge a text to fit somehow in the category of fiction or the category of nonfiction. While certainly Delany’s purpose in writing The American Shore was to convey information and ideas about science fiction, textuality, and “Angouleme,” we should stay alert to the textuality of The American Shore itself.

This is also one of the joys of the book, the pleasures of its text. Delany is, though a rather different sort of writer, at least as fine a prose stylist as Disch, and even in the passages here built from the most abstruse language, the chains of words themselves generate a kind of abstract poetry. Certain statements and turns of phrase deserve to be appreciated on their own (I’m especially fond of a sentence from the commentary on lexia 182: “The mother Sniffles will not call for tomorrow is the man they wish to murder today.”) Don’t neglect the occasional wordplay, too, or the alliterative poetry—for instance, from the commentary on lexia 66: “a simple movement through time, temper, and textual timbre.” We can attend to the textuality of the commentaries themselves, and attune our ears to their timbres, too.

Slash/Virgule

In Richard Miller’s translation of S/Z, the “/” is called a slash. In The American Shore, Delany calls the mark a virgule. It has had other names as well (e.g., solidus, generally for the “/” used in figures and fractions). This polyonymous punctuation points to a central feature of much structuralist and poststructuralist thinking: the exploration and analysis of binaries, dichotomies, dualities, and oppositions. (A completely incomplete list: signifier/signified, langue/parole, writerly/­readerly, presence/absence, subject/object, nature/culture, raw/cooked.)

Barthes does not declare what he means by “S/Z” until the forty-­seventh of ninety-three mini-essays (“divagations,” in Richard Howard’s term) scattered through the book. Barthes’s meanings have much to do with Balzac’s “Sarrasine” and the French language, but a few clauses from the final sentence of that divagation are worth bearing in mind: “[It] is the slash of censure, the surface of the mirror, the wall of hallucination, the verge of antithesis, the abstraction of limit, the obliquity of the signifier, the index of the paradigm, hence of meaning.”⁹

Of his virgules, Samuel Delany says, in his introduction, “Such a graphic configuration on the page must call up, both by metaphor and metonymy, that formula so easily attributable to Saussure, S/s, signifier over signified, word over meaning, icon over interpretation.”¹⁰ He follows this with a key point about the “gravitic nonsense that constrains so much of our discourse in matters of meaning”—the simple formula of x over y is also a simple hierarchy, the x being in the literally superior position.

Science Fiction/Mundane Fiction

Throughout The American Shore, Delany refers to fiction that is not s-f, and particularly the sort of fiction generally considered “literary,” as mundane. On one level, this is purely descriptive: etymologically, mundane means “of the world.” But Delany is also here very aware of the connotations—my thesaurus lists these synonyms to start: humdrum, dull, boring, tedious, monotonous, tiresome, wearisome, unexciting, uninteresting …

There is a tinge of s-f chauvinism here, but that is not merely or primarily why mundane is a necessary term in this text. The need for that word returns us to the concept of gravitic discourse and the simple hierarchy of x over y. Delany’s use of the term mundane for not-s-f flips a pernicious, common equation. The term literary fiction is not neutral, but rather comes to us bearing connotations of prestige, complexity, class, and value. While, in an ideal world, the terms literary fiction and science fiction would be descriptors rather than value statements, we do not live in an ideal world. The assumption present in the discourse of Anglo-American bookchat (even more so in 1977, when Delany was writing The American Shore, than now) is that one is inherently superior to the other.¹¹ If the words science fiction cannot be perceived without a valuation, then the words literary fiction need to be replaced with a term that will provide a commutative property to the binary operation. Hence, mundane.

It is vital to remember, though, that this move is just the first, necessary step in undoing the binary opposition itself.

Polysemy/Dissemination

At the heart of much of the linguistic and literary criticism contemporary to The American Shore is the question of how to acknowledge and even celebrate plurality without being lost in infinite, meaningless multiplicity. If all of language sits immanent in the shadow of any single word, and all meanings assume their countermeaning, are we left with no recourse but absolute relativism?

In S/Z, Barthes proposed the concept of readerly (lisible) and writerly (scriptible) texts, with readerly texts less plural than writerly texts: “ … for the plural text, there cannot be a narrative structure, a grammar, or a logic; thus, if one or another of these are sometimes permitted to come forward, it is in proportion … as we are dealing with incompletely plural texts, texts whose plural is more or less parsimonious.” For Barthes, true plurality was not something to run away from, but rather an ideal of absolute freedom toward which to aim: “a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds.” Sense ultimately and inevitably limits creativity, because the possibilities for any text’s meaning are bounded by language, traditions, and other texts. A readerly text cannot be infinitely polysemous. The readerly text is a product, whereas “the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.” The readerly text is not limited to hackwork. The readerly text is every text that has, through the accumulation (and fossilization) of meaning, lost infinity: “We call any readerly text a classic text.”¹²

More useful for The American Shore, it seems to me, is Jacques Derrida’s distinction between polysemy and dissemination. The difference between the two terms is a matter of orientation: polysemy generates meaning from within the text and is, at least at its starting point, thus bound by that text’s assumptions and propositions; dissemination generates meanings from beyond or outside the text, invading, infecting, or, to use Derrida’s preferred metaphor, inseminating it: “Even while it keeps the texts it culls alive, this play of insemination—or grafting—destroys their hegemonic center, subverts their authority and their uniqueness.”¹³ Derrida maintained that his distinction between polysemy and dissemination was “very slight,” but I suspect he only saw it as slight because the distinction of inside and outside is not pure and eventually falls apart—in Of Grammatology he famously and vehemently insisted that there is no outside-text.¹⁴ He did not mean, though, like some puritanical New Critic, to limit us only to a text without context. He clarified the importance of context in 1988:

What is called “objectivity,” scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation), imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, powerfully established, stabilized or rooted in a network of conventions (for instance, those of language) and yet which still remains a context. And the emergence of the value of objectivity (and hence of so many others) also belongs to a context. We can call “context” the entire “real-history-of-the-world,” if you like, in which this value of objectivity and, even more broadly, that of truth (etc.) have taken on meaning and imposed themselves. That does not in the slightest discredit them. In the name of what, of which other “truth,” moreover, would it? One of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be the effort to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to an incessant movement of recontextualization. The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction (“there is nothing outside the text” [il n’y a pas de hors-texte]), means nothing else: there is nothing outside context.¹⁵

The concept of dissemination as a response to (or replacement of) polysemy opened new perspectives on intertextuality by setting aside the all-or-nothing idealism of binary oppositions for a model of rich impurity, mixing, and fertilization. The impossible ideal of the infinitely polysemous, writerly text does not have to torment us. Dissemination insists on context, for it is context (“the entire ‘real-history-of-the-world,’ if you like”) that can inseminate the text.

That vision of intertextuality as fertilization and expansion rather than constraint and failure is closer to what Delany is up to here, for in The American Shore, one solution to (meaningless, undesirable) multiplicity is to bring in the context of science fiction.

Binary/Gravity

Some of the traditional structuralist binaries are present in The American Shore (particularly signifier/signified), but Delany employs and explores many others specific to “Angouleme,” science fiction, and his own interests—s-f/mundane, space/time, the two voices within the narration of “Angouleme” (adult/child), the ocean void/city void noted in the commentary to lexia 210, and (most importantly and meaningfully), all the oppositions created by the gravitic discourse so common to our language and its thoughts.

Delany summarized for a general audience his ideas about gravitic discourse in the introduction to his 1978 graphic novel Empire:

Have you ever thought how much our thinking is controlled by gravity? We get a high score on an English test; our team gets a low score in a volleyball game. Both in anthropology and biology people will speak of organisms or societies as having evolved to lower or higher levels—almost every­thing is measured on this same, imaginary scale that runs from down to up, from lower to higher.¹⁶

Delany goes on to explain that when science fiction brings us beyond the boundaries of a single planet, it helps us imagine our way out of this discourse, because in space up and down are terms that lose their meaning without specific points of reference and gravitational centers. By telling stories that can’t take for granted a fixed meaning of up and down and high and low, science fiction contains an extraordinary power to decenter discourse, to set our imaginations outside of the oppositions that govern so many of our words and thoughts. This power is meaningful for anyone seeking to question or subvert the status quo, to conceive of other ways of speaking, writing, thinking, and living beyond the binaries that bind us.

Delany’s meditations on “Angouleme” show that we do not need to go out into deep space to question or overturn gravitic discourse. Any speculated future that forces us to reflect on the assumptions that fuel our perceptions of normality can have the same effect. The walls of the prison-house of language can be made porous.

Two/Three

Fiction in general, Delany asserts, draws from two discourses: the world within the text (the world of the characters and plot) and the world outside the text (the world of the reader), but it is science fiction that specifically, deliberately, and perhaps unavoidably creates a third discourse: a dialogue between subject and object, between the created world of the story and the lived world of the reader. In other essays before and after The American Shore, Delany shows the process by which a reader constructs the imagined world in her mind and how such construction encourages the reader to reflect on the differences between the imagined world and the world of everyday experience.¹⁷ Repeatedly in his meditations on “Angouleme,” Delany returns to the trivalent discourse of science fiction and the specific methods by which that discourse differentiates science fiction from other fictions.

In science fiction, the space of resonance for the mystical is constituted of the richness, resonance, and harmony of the three discourses. No one of the discourses, by itself, can yield up a signifier that will cover either (or both) of the other two as signified. The other two immediately start to jar, rattle, slip from beneath, and begin their own, inexhaustible and autonomous commentaries. This situation is what, finally, makes s-f rich, transcendent, optimistic (it poses a discourse—and creates a dialogue—where mundane fiction can not), and mystical. (Lexia 8)

Few passages in Delany’s published work can compete with the eighth lexia for vehemence in insisting that science fiction possesses unique qualities absent from other types of fiction. (That italicized can not is like a shoe pounding on a desk.)¹⁸ Rather than seeing the vehemence and insistence as simply a bit of boosterism for a favorite type of writing, though, we should remember the context in which the words were written, a context where, especially in academia, science fiction was rarely taken seriously as anything more than escapist formula fiction for adolescents and semiliterates. While the choice of “mundane fiction” as a label rather than “literary fiction” might seem to sell the superiority of science fiction, the language is not actually about the superiority or inferiority of anything, because Delany rigorously avoids the gravitic discourse that forces us into relations of higher and lower. The connotations within “mundane fiction” and “science fiction” serve, temporarily, to flip the binary trapped within such discourse, but the more important and lasting project of The American Shore is to open a space in which we can see how structures that are generically different work.

Whether the idea of a trivalent discourse is one that must necessarily and exclusively be applied to science fiction is not a question I will pursue here, because what is valuable to the reader of The American Shore is not so much to debate the validity of the concept as to note the work that the concept does within this text. It opens possibilities for analysis beyond binary oppositions, because not only does it expand beyond duality, but trivalence is combinatory rather than oppositional. By creating a space that cannot be reduced to less than three discourses, and in which those discourses mingle, meld, and produce “inexhaustible and autonomous commentaries,” science fiction (in Delany’s conception) gives us a route away from the limitations of infinite binary series. Mundane fiction gets left behind in the structuralist dust while science fiction finds a way out of the dualistic prison via a poststructuralist escape hatch.

Disch/Delany

The ever-unreliable scholar Charles Kinbote ends the Foreword of Pale Fire with words that Nabokov seems to have meant to be those of a madman:

Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his (being too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work), with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him, has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.¹⁹

The idea of the commentator, or anyone, having the last word is perhaps the greatest clue to Kinbote’s madness, but there is delusional grandiosity, too, in his insistence that his commentary provides a human reality to the text. Which is not to deny that there are humans and realities and texts. But as Jorge Luis Borges showed with “Borges and I,” the relationship between those words human, reality, and text is complicated.

Nonetheless, like corporeal signifieds to ink-spewing signifiers, writers dwell somewhere in the penumbra of author-functions, a person behind a byline.

With the possible exception of Hart Crane, Thomas M. Disch (1940–2008) is the writer Samuel R. Delany has devoted the most pages to. Mostly, that’s because of The American Shore, but you will also find two essays specifically about Disch in Starboard Wine and numerous sentences and paragraphs devoted to his work throughout Delany’s other essays and interviews. Additionally, Delany edited a collection of Disch’s work, Fundamental Disch (New York: Bantam, 1980), a book that collects eighteen short stories, three important essays, and the libretto to The Fall of the House of Usher, an opera Disch wrote with composer Gregory Sandow.

For Disch’s biography, the most useful text for the reader of The American Shore is the first Exotext herein, “Auctorial Interfaces,” which gives us not so much the facts of Disch’s life and bibliography as Disch’s life and bibliography through Samuel Delany’s eyes as he was working on The American Shore.

We might (for our own purposes of reminder, of warning) put two statements together, one from Barthes in S/Z, and one from Delany’s Exotext:

Barthes: “This ‘I’ which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost).”²⁰

Delany: “Thus we weave together the fictions that are the signifiers of our friends’ biographies, the biographies of distant authors, and—who knows—the biographies of ourselves.”

Thomas M. Disch lived and wrote for thirty-one more years after Delany finished writing The American Shore in April 1977. Disch developed a strong reputation as a poet, he wrote numerous book and theater reviews, created the text for an innovative computer game in 1986, Amnesia, and his children’s books—The Brave Little Toaster and The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars—were adapted as popular animated movies. He published five more novels of great craft, irony, and power: On Wings of Song (which won the John W. Campbell Award and was listed by Harold Bloom in The Western Canon) and then four novels in what came to be called the Supernatural Minnesota series: The Businessman, The M.D., The Priest, and The Sub. His play The Cardinal Detoxes was denounced by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, which tried to have performances shut down. His final novel, The Word of God, was released days before his death, and his final short story collection, The Wall of America, appeared a few months later. Of the works published after The American Shore and Fundamental Disch, Delany considers the masterpieces to be On Wings of Song; the story collection The Man Who Had No Idea; a short novel serialized in Amazing Stories in 1992, A Troll of Surewould Forest. Additionally, Delany cites an uncompleted novel, The Pressure of Time, as among Disch’s best works (significant pieces of that novel were published as separate short stories in the 1970s).

Disch’s idiosyncratic (and often scathing) 1998 study of science fiction, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, won him his only Hugo Award, the most prestigious award bestowed by science fiction fans, an award for which he had only three other nominations—as opposed to nine nominations (but no wins) for the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute wrote that “Disch went relatively unhonoured by a sub-culture awash in awards for the bestowing.”²¹ The general readership of science fiction and its organized fandom never quite knew what to make of him, and his work proved ultimately too complex and caustic for mass popularity ever to be its fate.

The last years of Disch’s life were marked by enormous difficulties and tragedies. His life-partner of more than thirty years, Charles Naylor, had died of malignant melanoma (without health insurance). Diabetes, arthritis, and other ailments had made Disch’s own health precarious. A severe fire had destroyed the considerable library in his and Naylor’s Manhattan apartment, and burst pipes rendered their country house unlivable and destroyed even more books and papers. Because Disch had spent most of the last year of Naylor’s life at the country house, the landlord of their rent-controlled Manhattan apartment was seeking his eviction, since a provision of New York rent-control policies requires the apartment to be a primary residence.

Over the July 4 weekend in 2008, Thomas M. Disch shot himself. “He was,” the novelist Norman Rush said, “simply ground down by the sequence of catastrophes.”²²

End/Beginning

We never come to the end. To claim our interpretation—our diffusion, our united set of lexias—as definitive is to join the line of errors that includes the claim of being able to define science fiction and locate its exact origin, able to quantify and universalize the specific qualities making one general type of story superior to another, and (as Delany asserted in “Wagner/Artaud”) able to set up a hierarchy of humans based on the concept of race, to see human nature as unbounded by time or society, immutable. The practice of diffusion, the refusal of the unified, is not a practice that should be limited to reading texts. Our concepts go to work in our worlds. Delany’s practices and examples exhort us to keep working on our concepts lest those concepts work against us.

And therein lies the value of The American Shore. It may, on a quick glance, appear to be a book about a short story. On further examination, it may appear to be a book about how science fiction works, or a contribution to the literary and cultural theory of its day. It is those things, but not only those things. Like so much of Delany’s writing, its strategies and concerns nudge our view wider. Much as the best science fiction’s trivalent discourse easily lures us into considering the meaning produced by the intersections of world and text, and thus provides a powerful space for reflection on both, so Delany’s dive over and between the lines of “Angouleme” stands as a model for and instigator of various levels of thought about all the signs and languages that produce and obscure our lives. No great text ever ends if there are still readers to read it and reread it, to diffuse it and re-fuse it, reveling in the possibilities of polysemy and dissemination. Even the briefest moment of meaning can be, itself, a meaning machine. Signifiers and signifieds want to dance till the end of time.

The American Shore employs systems and terminologies that Delany would not take up as thoroughly again, if at all (the concept of Inward and Outward Signifiers, the play of voices in science fiction, and other ideas more specific to “Angouleme,” such as the difference between the children’s and adults’ voices). His decision to keep some of the concepts and vocabulary of The American Shore within its pages only was a choice that further marks the text as more Derridean than Barthesian: Delany had no desire for the terminology to congeal around it the suggestion of a privileged method. Any end must encourage more beginning.

The final paragraph of The American Shore, which returns us to “Angouleme,” brings to my mind the final scene of a film that offers some of the clearest and most affecting cinematic treatments of basic structuralist ideas of language: François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child, 1970). The last words there are fitting ones for any endeavor of literary or social analysis, any engagement with multiplicities: “Tomorrow we’ll resume our lessons.”

Notes

1. Samuel Delany, “Acknowledgments,” in Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction [1984] (rev. ed., Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012).

2. If we take the dates in 334 as a guide—setting the stories around the third decade of the twenty-first century—and assume that men have had the option to marry each other for at least a year or two (since it is not marked in the text as a significant cultural change, it must have existed long enough to be normalized), then Disch was stunningly prescient in this prediction.

3. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 19.

4. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 19.

5. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire [1962] (New York: Vintage International, 1989), p. 289.

6. S/Z, p. 21.

7. Delany’s point is that the idea has become all but universal in Western criticism over the intervening two thousand–odd years between the two.

8. Samuel Delany, “Wagner/Artaud,” in Longer Views (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), p. 40.

9. S/Z, p. 107. The preface by Richard Howard, “A Note on S/Z” provides the term divagation.

10. Here the shadow of Jacques Lacan lurks. In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan says the figure of S over s “should be attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure” (in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink [W. W. Norton, 2006], p. 415), but as Steven Ungar has written, it “was more [Lacan’s] own creation, [and] differed from the diagram in [Saussure’s] Course in important ways.” Indeed, as Ungar notes, Lacan’s algorithm is, to start with, an inversion of Saussure’s original, though Lacan also de-emphasizes the interdependence and complementary exchange within Saussure’s conception. For much more detailed discussion, see “Saussure, Barthes, and Structuralism” by Steven Ungar, in The Cambridge Companion to Saussure, edited by Carol Sanders (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 157–73. This detail is essentially irrelevant to The American Shore, and Delany and I discussed both Saussure and Lacan at length after I sent him an earlier draft of this ­introduction—he’s as familiar with the Course as with Lacan. I raise the point not out of a desire to “correct” that which doesn’t need correction (I expect Lacan knew exactly what he was doing, and I know Delany did), but merely because it, to my eyes, demonstrates the power of some of Lacan’s formulations on Delany’s thinking at the time. For anyone interested in the development of Delany’s thought, it might be a useful datum, though one that should be considered alongside Delany’s updated thoughts on Lacan in “The Kenneth James Interview,” in Silent Interviews (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), p. 242.

11. See the discussion of gravitic discourse below for why the language so commonly used to express the assumption is itself problematic.

12. S/Z, pp. 4–6.

13. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination [1972], trans. Barbara Johnson (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 378.

14. An idea that Barthes, too, accepted, saying in S/Z, that “as nothing exists outside the text, there is never a whole of the text” (p. 6), but for Barthes the limitations imposed on the readerly text by its necessary intertextuality created a kind of wholeness (further evidence, for him, of the inferiority of the readerly text).

15. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 136.

16. Samuel Delany, Empire: A Visual Novel, illust. Howard V. Chaykin (New York: Byron Preiss Visual Publications, 1978).

17. See, for instance, “To Read The Dispossessed,” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw; and “Some Presumptuous Approaches to Science Fiction,” in Starboard Wine, for a start.

18. I can’t resist quoting a comment from Delany on this point: “Even the banging of the shoe on the desk that you cite is to point out a fundamentally generic difference between them, not a difference in value. It’s like saying that a line of poetry is more onomatopoetic than the same words used as prose because—generically—poetry makes you pay more attention to the sound of words than prose does—and not because the words sound any different in either medium.”

19. Nabokov, Pale Fire, pp. 28–29.

20. S/Z, p. 10.

21. “Disch, Thomas M.” Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 3rd ed. (online). Accessed November 27, 2012. Gollancz/SFE Ltd. Accessed December 12, 2012.

22. Douglas Martin, “Thomas Disch, Novelist, Dies at 68,” New York Times, July 8, 2008.