Читать книгу The American Shore - Samuel R. Delany - Страница 14

The existence of a series of stories, with its panoply of discontinuities-embedded-in-the-continuous (lacunae in the fictive lives of recognizably continuous characters, settings, situations, as well as the implied gaps between various times of writing, the observable distances between places of publication, yet all of it recognizably of that series), is one pressure (among many) to accept the existence of some greater continuity, with its own coherence, in which each specific textual event lies embedded.

That greater continuity is our object of study.

Conceivably, this greater continuity might be retrieved by a complete study of all the texts in the chain. Critical common sense demands we turn to the other texts to locate endpoints of significant trajectories launched in the present tale, or to see if elements in the present tale are clarified if we construe them as the terminations of trajectories launched in preceding ones. Other than a survey of the rest of the stories in the series, what else critically is there?

But for our purpose, the study of other texts is here precisely what we intend not to do.

From time to time—but rarely—we may glance at one of the other tales in the series Disch has called by the title of the series’ longest novella, 334, but it will be only to note the most cursory verbal occurrences. We are here to examine what constitutes this particular textual event, not another—regardless of what relation to it another textual event may bear.

Such an examination of related texts would doubtless yield up insights. But behind such an enterprise is a critical model of the workings of fictive creation which we feel is simplistic; and to the extent that critics—and particularly critics of science fiction—constantly appeal to it to yield up insights it is simply inadequate to provide, we feel it is pernicious.

So we shall recognize it, we shall outline this model here, in hopes of latterly avoiding its ensnaring oversimplifications:

Fictive creation begins as a set of movements of mind—images, ideas, emotions, all in transition and interplay. The writer, using images of the stabilia of life—people, objects, buildings (and frequently using images of precisely those stabilia which set the mind in motion in the first place)—fixes names (sometimes the real ones, sometimes fictive ones) to the images of these stabilia, and then affixes the images to the various mental motions. The text produced, then, may be read as a map or even a document of the writer’s mental movements in real time against the fictive time of the narrative.

This model, hopefully, will be shown up as wrongheaded from beginning to end. But even before we explode it, we can note a few of its more obvious absurdities as general readers of science fiction, as readers who have just read a science fiction text. Whatever illusory coherence the above model may suggest, it is far greater for mundane fiction than for the glittering, evanescent, and jewel-like field under view. In mundane fiction the measure of the power of the imaginative field (by that model) is the recognizability of the material textures and structures dealt with. (Gogol is the most imaginative of the nineteenth-century Russian novelists because the panoply of his character vignettes is so life-like, so familiar….) But a scalar of familiarity is simply inadequate to measure the imaginative strength of science fiction. If the above model creates a paradox for mundane fiction, for science fiction it yields a sheer preposterousness.

Though some science fiction tales present a world more familiar than others (and “Angouleme” is one), as we view the rather bleak city-scape (with which “Angouleme” makes its point in antiphon), the objects, buildings, people, places, and modes of transportation between them (by which we characterize the bulk of science fiction) simply have nothing to do with our (present, at any rate) stabilia.

If we look at the above model again, we can recognize as one of its kernels the retrieved “Saussurian” concept of S/s—of signifier over signified, word over meaning, icon over interpretation, both terms clearly nameable, clearly locable, clearly separable by that impermeable bar.¹ The psychiatrist Jacques Lacan has argued (and his argument, as the epigraph to this book suggests, is one among many) that this formula, though elegant, is ultimately too simple. The relation between signifier and signified, for Lacan, is an infinite regress of re-evaluation that sends charges in many directions. His witty example, which first gives the “Saussurian” version, and then his own revision, is presented with the following two diagrams. Consider the first, then the second:

Lacan’s implication is that all signifier/signified relations are really of the second type—even, presumably, TREE/; only some such relationships, through acclimation, we entify as completely integrated.² For Lacan, the signified (meaning) is something we always place beneath the signifier at the behest (or through the vector resultant of the various attractions) of the semes around it, which then recontour the relation S/s toward (rather than to) a particular value.

The conventional language of science fiction gives us a number of examples by which we can retrieve the integration process from that moment of psychological exhaustion where the process itself seems to disappear. To choose one: Take the word SHIP, the word SPACE, and the image of a rocket, and order them on the page thus:

Here we can get some feel for the regressive interaction between signifier(s) and signified(s) at perhaps a less lively dislocative charge than MEN/; by turning down the social glare, we make the process more visible.

But since our field is not psychoanalysis, or even linguistics, but science fiction, this briefest recapitulation of one tiny aspect of Lacan’s exhaustive exploration of the relation between the structure of language and the structure of the unconscious can only suggest, but not demonstrate, where we may discover our model.

In general, the poetics of prose lags behind the poetics of poetry proper because there is, through tradition, a greater willingness with poetry than there is with prose to seek what lies about the poetic signifier by shattering the poetic text in ways that render it “just language.” There is, through expediency, a hesitation before the prose text to undertake the greater labor of such a shattering for the frequently much longer work. In terms of possible tasks to hand, most criticism of prose qua prose is not very ambitious—an excuse, perhaps, for the simplistic model, but also that model’s result.

With a poem, say, in which a single word appears several times, we would not be confounded by a critic who claimed to be able to retrieve several possible trajectories (either in terms of the writer’s work or the reader’s) passing through the first occurrence of that word; and then a different set passing through the second occurrence; still others passing through the third; and so on. Nor would we be particularly discommoded if this critic claimed to locate any one of these individual trajectories continuing through any other word(s) in the poem. And certainly we would not be surprised if such a mapping of these varied movements illuminated the poetic totality/plurality. We are sure that anyone who can envision this hypothetical poem-and-commentary (whether as a good, bad, or indifferent reading) must envision it as a detailed reading, and longer than the text of the poem. What this vision of the poem-and-commentary coheres about is a model for the poetic enterprise that, for most modern readers, is substantially richer than the model we have for prose fiction—where the verbal appearance of each character, each object, each setting named can only be read as the cross-section of the locus of a single movement.

Now to read prose as if it were poetry, as we have hinted, is a betrayal. Such a reading can deal neither economically nor sensitively with the purely informative tropes that are the peculiarity of prose, nor with their relation to one another and the world on which so much of the experience of any prose fiction, science or mundane, depends.

To read science fiction as though it were mundane fiction is a similar betrayal. Though there may appear formal congruences between a mundane, and a science fiction, story, at precisely the point in one where we find that life-stabilium—bicycle, sky, airplane—in the other we find some fabular entity that coheres only through an act of imaginative will around some morphological overdetermination—ornithopter, hyperspace, spaceship…. Such nodes of imaginative energy are what charge the structure of the science fiction text and determine the imaginative trajectory of the reader through it; they are a part of the ordering energies that shape our basic object of examination itself: the greater continuity. Only when we take measure of these energy nodes is the “plot similarity” that frequently manifests itself between one s-f story and another mundane tale revealed as illusory. To read s-f as if it were mundane gives us no way adequately to account for the color, the glamour, the exotica with which s-f replaces the worldly stabilia. Since the energy of all these exotica in interplay constitutes the science fictional structure, if we have a model that cannot account for them, how can any map through them, made with such a model as a basic surveying tool, be of more than passing use?

The model we propose, in place of the above, is richer in many, many ways. Specifically, however, it will have the following at its kernel:

Fictive creation begins as the hand, holding the pen above the paper, descends to trace written symbols across the lined or unlined void. (It begins, if oral, as the tongue, for the first time, gathers itself up from the floor of the mouth to chant out the new tale; if it is typewritten, as the fingers begin their rain/reign on the responsive keys.³) All else—­thinking about what one is going to write, mulling over themes, calculating effects, bringing to bear the intellect, the emotions, the spirit, or ideology on these thoughts, even the netting from the speech centers of anticipated phrases that may go, unrectified (having been stored in memory’s foreground for hours, days, weeks, seconds), directly into the composition—is preparation for fictive creation. As such, the preparation is only partially retrievable from an examination of the text; such retrieval may occur only through more or less informed supposition.

Fictive creation is the restructuring of that prepared material by the fixing of a set (or series) of signifiers whose order (and, indeed, whose past order is frequently revised in light of what the restructuring reveals) this restructuring both is and impels.

Elsewhere⁴ we have likened this process to watching a performance and notating the action on the stage in a situation set up so that the notation itself would intrude on and influence the subsequent stage action and decor. This “intrusion and influence” is the creation we shall speak of. It is not the process of “preparing” a meaning, an image, a pure signified (which certainly involves other signifiers—words or other signs, but which we call “signified” here because it is mental and not yet re-presented [i.e., restructured] by utterance), but is rather the process of letting that signified strike up a signifier, which is fixed by tongue or hand, and the fixing of which, as it re-enters the signified, recontours that signified in such a way that the infinite regress (or better, progress) of specifically fictive discourse is begun and continued. What makes our theatrical metaphor too simple is the infinitely complex backstage equipment that would have to exist—a computer vast as the brain—as well as the complexity of preparation (the whole history and texture of the culture) that the theatrical image simply will not encompass.

But what even as unstudied a view as this should tell us, once and for all, is that fictive creation is dense, complex, and irretrievable in any systematic way till more of the psychophysiology of language is known. It should also make perfectly clear that the object we are seeking, and seeking to explore—the greater continuity—simply cannot be identified with the creative process itself.

The Coleridge description, “Prose is words in the best order; poetry is the best words in the best order,” returns to mind, though recontoured in emphasis: the concepts of word and order share the mystery between them, rather than any emblem of good, better, or best. All utterance is creative in the specific sense of fictive creation (though not in the vulgar Chomskian sense of producing an infinite variety of original utterances: anyone who listens to real speech as 99 percent of peasants, politicians, poets, aristocrats, academicians, and prose writers speak it must be stunned into muteness by its sheer, unoriginal repetitiveness); it is creative in that this recontouring process across the arbitrary (by which we mean “arbitrary-as-opposed-to-fixed,” i.e., mobile from case to case, rather than “arbitrary-as-opposed-to-caused,” i.e., random and without explanation for any particular case) Saussurian bar is always operative. This creativity makes for the repetitions, the re-explanations, the developments, and the general recursive texture to the speech of both the most literate and illiterate rhetoric, that constant impulse common to the common speech of all social classes to try to say the same thing more and more accurately because once it is said, “it” is no longer the “same”—a process that may be one, finally, with the process discussed by Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, by which the dream material is not complete until it is re-presented as speech, which representation actually alters the dream material itself, sometimes toward completion, sometimes toward simple emendation, so that (sometimes) the dream must be described and interpreted and described and interpreted and described again, each description/interpretation altering the actual dream residue in the mind/memory/unconscious.

Only the far greater quantity of such repetition and re-explanation and development collapsed about far fewer semes establishes the qualitative difference between fictive art and babel.

The greater continuity we are seeking, then, if it can not be identified with fictive creation, must be specifically identified with what the text can say. The problem here, of course, is that some people will argue that the text can say anything the reader hears; and by extension the text says everything. Our answer is simply: That is not a continuity. That is merely a collection. The text may well say everything, but it also says some things more emphatically than others; it says them in different modes (like affirmation and denial); it says them in a particular order. The order is not only lisibly diachronic (what the text says from beginning to end of itself) but memorially synchronic (what the text has to say connotatively, what it has to say resonantly—at the same time it is speaking denotatively; and the fact that one is specifically a denotation, the other specifically a connotation, and the third specifically a resonance is part of that synchronic ordering). A text orders an infinite set of strong statements, and an infinite set of not so strong statements, about itself, in spectral layers. (If, by extension, it suggests to some a way of ordering the infinitude of all possible statements, this is a matter of their diligence, which may indeed be greater than ours….) Hopefully these fine points will obviate the necessity of asking the absurd question: “What does the text mean?” and absorb what is relevant under that question into the concept of the ordered relation of the plenitude of things the text can reasonably (with clear or cloudy emblems of its reasons, which reasons may extend from chance through playfulness to necessity) speak of. This is the continuity we are searching for.

Anything that we can reasonably suppose about the fictive preparation becomes, as we commit our suppositions to paper, a set of statements, more or less strong, that the text may be said to have ordered up about itself; these statements then—effect the ordering up of others.

That is the process—no less, but no more.

No mode of criticism of the text—biography of the author, syntactic or metric analysis, historical reconstruction of the author’s epoch, parallels (thematic or organizational) with texts written long before or long after the text to hand, computer-assisted analysis of word recurrence—is a priori inappropriate as long as the underlying assumptions of these various modes of critical discourse have been questioned, and we do not make demands on the particular discourse that those assumptions flatly prevent it from ever meeting with anything but mystification. And here we must remind ourselves that the various modes of critical discourse are themselves nodes in a textus: they do not form a hierarchically valued list of methodologies. This is to say: when confronted with a critical text, it is the critical discourse that provides the signifier. At that point the text analyzed is part of the signified, standing, recontoured, beneath it. The understood text is the meaning of the criticism; the criticism is not the meaning of the text.

In such an undertaking as this, amidst such mutilations as we shall perform, it is of course necessary to preserve the text under discussion from certain imaginative abuses. On the one hand, we must not think of the text as wooden, stolid, gnarled and dark, alive, yet covered with an impenetrable bark of language enclosing some inner semantic density, shedding its dry, brittle, and finally dead exfoliations of meaning at our feet. Nor must we think of the text as a creature displaced by its own, sudden self-consciousness when, clothes a-gape and privates dangling, it squats revealed at some necessary, natural, yet nevertheless embarrassing function once the door of insight is smartly and smugly yanked back. On the other hand, if we do think of the text, finally, as piloting us, sleek and gleaming, at speeds approaching that of light anywhere in the known universe and possibly beyond, we must do so with a clear apprehension (if not a healthy apprehensiveness) of the vast complexities to the machinery that make such a journey possible, the constant testing and retesting of each of its components, the overriding importance of ground control, the immense number of discrete data that must dovetail at every instant on voyages whose very scope and range are signs of a monumental constitutive precision—lest we plunge into some mystical sun only to be conflagrated by its nether mists a million miles from its unreachable heart, crash on some implacable rock to shatter on impact with its airless, icy despair, break open in the absurd and ignorant vacuum of space itself because one small, hard meteor of fact accidentally scraped some unforeseen structural flaw in our armature so that we are exposed to, absorbed by, and lost in, the vast, factless silence which is ultimately what most of the known universe after all is—or that we simply do not erupt in pathetic, shocking flames while still on the launching pad, the very countdown remaining incomplete.

The best way to preserve the text from our own abuses upon it is to make clear the only view that can justify the present undertaking: the view which holds that criticism (assuming it is done with passion and precision) has an autonomous value in itself.⁵ It is not a poor relation, bearing the same name but living in the town, of that half-mad monster Literature dwelling in the castle on the hill—a threadbare soul now cajoling coins from the townspeople with exaggerated tales of the elegance of the table settings and the atrociousness of the table manners up the slope or, upon rare visits to the castle itself, extorting candlesticks and pillowcases from the demented scions with threats to expose their decadent goings-on to the good citizens below; then the return to the public square next morning, linen and pewter waving, as proof of an association for a populace too dazzled by the pedigree to do more than Oooh and Aaah at any chicanery.

We must begin this study with the conviction that criticism has its autonomous value, just as we must begin with the conviction that science fiction has its autonomous value—and is not merely the idiot cousin of fiction.

In summary then:

We shall try to keep our model rich.

(As to its precision, we can not profess it; we can only demonstrate.)

And we shall try to use the pressure of other texts (within the series or no) not to limit ourselves or our modes of inquiry, but as reminders of the reality of the continuity to be retrieved—a continuity of what the text can say. And we shall try to avoid, in every way, using that pressure as a reassurance of, or a judgment on, the success of our access to our object.

1. “This approach to the signifier” to quote Jonathan Culler in Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975) “derives from what Jacques Derrida calls a ‘metaphysics of presence’ which longs for a truth behind every sign: a moment of original plenitude when form and meaning were simultaneously present to consciousness and not to be distinguished. Though dissociation is a fact of our post-lapsarian state, it is assumed that we should still try to pass through the signifier to the meaning that is the truth and origin of the sign and of which the signifier is but the visible mark, the outer shell” (p. 19).

2. Diagrams and example are, of course, from The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious (1957) by Jacques Lacan, included in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, 1970).

3. To make the distinction between oral and chaironic creation at the beginning is to say that the two processes that begin here continue along notably different trajectories: see “On Pure Story-Telling,” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw by Samuel R. Delany (Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press, 1977). More recently that essay is contained in About Writing: Five Essays, Four Letters, and Six Interviews (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005).

4. In “Thickening the Plot” by S. R. Delany, contained in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, a text which dramatizes, if not clarifies, many of the assumptions underlying the paragraph above.

5. In our epoch the journey toward a sensitive and incisive criticism begins, of course, with the assumption that the critical purpose is to return the reader to the criticized text with greater understanding and increased responsiveness. But such a purpose, as it is achieved, deconstructs into the assumption above. For if the critical text is to turn the reader to anything, whether in action or contemplation, it must do so by the strength of its own garnered and organized charge. It cannot borrow that charge from any other text: reference is not receipt. In such light all criticism is, finally, occasional. And the critic most likely to succeed is the one who sees it as an occasion to be risen to—rather than a level to be descended to or, even more common in our day, an enterprise to be descended upon: vertical value-models (i.e., gravitic), as we shall soon see (see commentary for lexias 214 to 218), are one of the prime targets of science fiction.