Longer Views
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These accolades have not come without controversy. Examples: in 1974, Delany published an 879-page novel, Dhalgren, which—with its story of a bisexual amnesiac’s rise to fame in a mysteriously burned-out midwestern city, its frank depictions of marginal sexual practices and the social forces surrounding and pervading them, and its notoriously complex formal structure—inspired a heated discussion within the sf community about, among many other things, the very nature of science fiction, which continues in various circles to this day; and in 1979, Delany published the first of what would become four volumes of interlocking narratives collectively known as Return to Nevèrÿon, an experiment in paraliterary form which—with its unlikely combination of the hoary formulas of sword-and-sorcery fantasy with the sophisticated rhetoric of structuralist and post-structuralist theory, as well as its exploration of marginal sexuality—inaugurated a spirited debate over the question of what sort of rhetoric is “proper” to the paraliterary fields of science fiction and academic criticism. Over the course of these ongoing genre-bending interventions, Delany has had a huge influence over a whole generation of writers and thinkers: he is regularly cited as arguably the major sf influence, in both style and subject matter, on the cyberpunk movement, and is cited with equal regularity as a major force behind the current academic recognition of science fiction as one of the most vital and innovative fields of contemporary American writing.
In his previous critical work—collected in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Starboard Wine, and The Straits of Messina—Delany has more or less restricted himself to the expository form of the “standard” critical essay. (Exceptions to this restriction are “Shadows” from The Jewel-Hinged Jaw—included as an Appendix to this collection—and The American Shore, a book-length, microscopically detailed “meditation” on the sf short story “Angouleme” by Thomas M. Disch.) In the present collection, Delany turns his considerable creative and analytical energies toward a radical reworking of the essay form. He does this in part by combining, at various strategic points, the “impersonal” rhetoric of literary analysis with the “personal” voice of the Montaignean essay—a mixing of rhetorical modes which has attracted increasing interest over the years, in light of the critiques of the Western discourse of the sign and the subject put forward variously by post-structuralist, feminist, and Frankfurt School critics, among others. Delany also deploys formal tropes which he has developed and refined in his own fiction over the past two decades or so—particularly in Dhalgren, Triton, and that undecidable hybrid of theory and fiction, Return to Nevèrÿon: dialectical framing structures, short textual units numbered in Wittgensteinian fashion, multiply-intersecting stories, and so on. By deploying those tropes here, Delany produces essays which, in their complexity of form and richness of resonance, resemble novels—and postmodernist novels to boot. The result for the reader is an experience which simply cannot be found anywhere else on the current American literary landscape.
It has often been observed that Delany’s work is deeply concerned with myth. Specifically, as Delany himself has pointed out, it is concerned with myth-making—with the social, material, and historical forces that generate cultural myths.9 The essays to follow share this concern. But they are also equally concerned with myth-breaking—with the analytical practices required to discern, interrogate, and dissolve myths. Nothing if not ambitious, these essays tackle the myths of High Art vs. Low, of Sanity vs. Madness, of Theater-As-We-Know-It, of castration as the Freudian and Lacanian model of socialization, of transcendent sexual difference, of biography, of the canon, and indeed of the very concept of “literature.”
But these essays also interrogate a myth of the essay itself: specifically, the traditional perception of the essay as a “shapeless” form of writing. Critics, reacting to this perceived shapelessness, have for a long time called the essay a “degenerate” and even “impossible” genre, and it has never had a firm foothold in the canon of English literature—a state of affairs which once led the great American essayist E. B. White, only halfjokingly, to call essay-writers second-class citizens. Critics of a more recent generation have tried to recuperate the essay by turning this shapelessness into a plus-value, positing it as the ideal (non-)form with which to critique totalizing systems, or, more radically, as “the moment of writing before the genre, before genericness—or as the matrix of all generic possibilities.”10 But it is the underlying ideas of both these critical positions—that there can be such a thing as a “shapeless” discourse unfixed by pre-existing rhetorical practices, or that any single rhetorical mode could serve as the “primitive calculus” underlying everything subsequent to it—which Delany has called into question time and time again in his work.11
With this collection, Delany continues his critique. As I’ve noted, at certain points along the way he deploys formal tropes which his longtime readers may find familiar. But whether previously acquainted with Delany’s work or not, readers expecting the short, monologic prose discourse that is the currently dominant form of the essay are in for a surprise—for these essays are not like other essays.
They are huge, sprawling works, encompassing an enormous range of topics and disciplines—from the origins of modern theater to the vagaries of radical feminist scholarship, from mathematical logic to the most marginal of sexual practices, from the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe to the intricacies of literary historical sleuthing, and much, much more—and they combine these topics in interlocking narratives of madmen and burning cities, prodigies and poets, cyborgs, street-hustlers, and the author’s own life, in language that is sometimes light and anecdotal, sometimes vertiginously self-reflexive, but always lucid, luminous and exuberant. “Chrestomathies,” Delany calls some of the pieces to come: collections of textual fragments whose numerous interrelations the reader must actively trace out in order to gather them up into a resonant whole. In their encouragement of active reading, these essays resemble what Barthes has called the “writerly” text, the text “produced” as much by the reader as by the writer:
This text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach12
If any single idea can be said to fuel the fires of all these essays, it is the Foucauldian notion of discourse—the notion of the socially sanctioned systems of perception and practice that hold us all in their thrall, the “structuring and structurating” forces which keep myths alive and preserve the status quo13—forces which can only be countered by a “violent rhetorical shift” somewhere in the discursive space (RS 235). And herein lies the relevance, the urgency of these essays. As intellectual entertainments, they make great demands on the reader—and offer unprecedented rewards. But they are more than just entertainments: they are radical rhetorical interventions in the discourse of reading itself. And their radicalism resides precisely in their acknowledgment of the existence of the radical reader: the reader who thinks, who writes, who intervenes.
In the discussion to follow, I shall very briefly review some concepts from Delany’s earlier nonfiction works about the language of science fiction which have a bearing on the analyses Delany carries out here. I will then try to suggest how the formal strategies Delany deploys in these essays both illuminate and are illuminated by the formal strategies of his fiction, as well as how they reflect the theoretical framework which surrounds and informs so much of Delany’s recent fiction and nonfiction. If (to paraphrase Delany) my informal, idiosyncratic, and indeed fragmentary remarks initiate dialogue, so much the better; if they close dialogue off, so much the worse. I hope only to provide a provisional analytical frame to assist the radical reader in her further explorations of the rich and complex universes of discourse which these essays both describe and generate.
II
Science fiction, like the essay, is a form which, in its more popular incarnations, has often tended tow
ard the didactic, in the mode of the aphoristic. Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert, to name two examples, have actually published the “collected sayings” of their best-known fictive protagonists, Lazarus Long and Paul Atreides. Ursula Le Guin’s fiction also leans toward aphorism, her essays doubly so; the list could go on. In his earlier critical work, Delany has discussed in some detail the problem of didacticism in Heinlein and Le Guin specifically and in science fiction and literature in general. (The long interpolated monologues in Return to Nevèrÿon could be read as attempts to suggest some aesthetic solutions to the problem.) Paradoxically, however, Delany has also argued that despite its flirtation with the authoritarian mode, science fiction may still be the privileged genre for writing against what constitutes a significant aspect of today’s status quo.
To understand Delany’s argument we need to recall Barthes’s assertion that conservative discourse tends to de-historicize phenomena which are historically specific. In the rhetoric of this discourse, “things lose the memory that they once were made” (M 142). Both the aphoristic style and the spectacle work to reinforce this confounding of the historical and the natural. In viewing spectacle, “all that is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from” (M 151). Likewise, the aphorism is “no longer directed towards a world to be made; it must overlay one which is already made, bury the traces of this production under a self-evident appearance of eternity” (M 155). Delany argues that the rhetoric of science fiction foregrounds precisely the historical, social, and technological constitution of human landscapes which conservative rhetoric tends to obscure. In this way the rhetoric of sf differs fundamentally from the rhetoric of “literature,” the conventions and tropes of which are organized around an entirely different focus:
Despite the many meaningful differences in the ways of reading that constitute the specifically literary modes, they are all characterized—now, today—by a priority of the subject, i.e., of the self, of human consciousness. To a greater or lesser extent, the subject can be read as the organizational center of all the literary categories’ many, many differing expectations . . .
Answering its own expectations as a paraliterary mode, science fiction is far more concerned with the organization (and reorganization) of the object, i.e., the world, or the institutions through which we perceive it. It is concerned with the subject, certainly, but concerned with those aspects of it that are closer to the object: How is the subject excited, impinged on, contoured and constituted by the object?14
The point is not merely that sf tends to be “about” the object in the sense of taking the object as its main topic of interest; it is, rather, that all of the conventions, tropes, and reading protocols that mark science fiction as science fiction are organized around a revelation of the object and its constituting context. And herein lies the potentially radical force of the genre:
. . . even the most passing mention by an sf writer of, say, “. . . the monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni,” begins as a simple way of saying that, while the concept of mines may persist, their object, their organization, their technology, their locations, and their very form can change—and it says it directly and clearly and well before it offers any metaphor for any psychic mystery or psychological state. Not to understand this object-critique, on whatever intuitive level, is to misread the phrase . . . (SW 188)
By this rhetorical model, we can see that even the most conservatively inclined science fiction, if it is in any way sophisticated as science fiction, must keep a certain margin of imaginative space open for an apprehension of the historicity of objects, landscapes, and social institutions. By this model we can also see that science fiction differs from the essay in at least one of the same ways that it differs from literary fiction: for like literary fiction, the essay is rhetorically oriented toward a revelation of the subject, toward the presentation of a “spectacle of a single consciousness trying to make sense of the chaos.” The problem for both literary fiction and the essay is that the “chaos” of the modern world originates primarily as a chaos of the object, not the subject (SW 158)—which renders these forms, at least vis-à-vis the manifold problems of the object, conservative by default.
Bearing in mind the notion of science fiction as object-critique, we can begin to see why a radical practitioner of the genre such as Delany might take an interest in such recondite analytical practices as Marxian critique, deconstructive criticism, and discourse analysis. All offer sophisticated ways of considering the relations of objects, texts, and social practices to their ideological, linguistic, and socio-historical surrounds, and all are in one way or another committed to the exploration of the social constitution of the individual subject, that is, “those aspects of the self that are closer to the object.” All, in sum, are ways of breaking myths—ways of scrutinizing things which may seem eternal, totalized, and systemic, and questioning their totality, interrogating their system-aticity.
The obstacle to such analysis, on the one hand, is the pervasive influence of the discursive surround, the interpretive context “by which we register a text well-formed or ill-formed” (RS 235). Only vigilant analytical attention can tease out the myths that discourse has embedded in any given text, precisely because discourse determines the attentional norm:
For what discourse does above all things is to assign import. Discourse, remember, is what allows us to make sense of what we see, and hear, and experience . . . Discourse is what tells us what is central and what is peripheral—what is a mistake, an anomaly, an accident, a joke. It tells us what to pay attention to and what to ignore. It tells us what sort of attention to pay. (RS 239)
The possibility of such analysis, on the other hand, resides in language’s tendency towards “unlimited semiosis”—the tendency of linguistic signs and sign-arrangements to carry connotations in excess of the normative meanings to which the discourse is perpetually working to restrict them. Deconstruction and discourse analysis exploit this inherent richness of language by evoking those meanings which the given discourse has systematically relegated to the margins of consideration, thus problematizing the meanings which would at first seem unproblematically and eternally lodged in the discourse’s rhetorical center. Characterized in this way, theory begins to look like more than just a range of analytical methodologies to be applied to a science fiction text, or a set of rhetorical tools to apply within a science fiction text, but rather like a case of convergent evolution with science fiction in general. If we view them both as ways of reading and writing the silences of objects, texts, and discursive landscapes, then theory and science fiction begin to look like two very closely related modes of inquiry.
The term “unlimited semiosis” comes from the American philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce, but the idea as Delany deploys it comes from the post-structuralist critique of the Western discourse of the sign. In that discourse, the relation between linguistic signifier and nonlinguistic (“objective”) signified is presumed to be clear, direct, and unproblematic; by extension, texts are presumed to have clearly delineated, finite, and masterable meanings derivable from their concatenation of signs. In post-structuralist discourse, on the other hand, linguistic signifiers do not point towards a transparently clear objective reality (what Derrida calls the “transcendental signified”), but rather towards one another in a dynamic interrelational process occurring within a larger linguistic/discursive system (“The signified,” explains Delany, “is therefore always a web of signifiers”15).
By this argument, a “theme”—conceived in traditional discourse as an object-like “thing” which one “finds” in a given text—is actually an artifact of a readerly predisposition to order textual signs in a certain way. It marks a preconception, an effect of discourse; it has, in Delany’s words, “the same political structure as a prejudice.”16 In order to get around such prejudicial reading, Delany argues, we have to stop seeing the text as a linguistic construct with o
bject-like, synchronic referents or themes hovering “behind” it, to be systematically uncovered in a hermeneutical reading process, and start seeing the text as “a space of discourse—the space in which, at various points and along various loci, discourses (of whatever rhetorical expressions the reader is led to make) may be organized in relation to one another” (AS 174). That is, we must see the text as a contestatory site where various discursive relations are transformed by the reader in an ongoing, diachronic process of reconceptualization and revision.
(It should be noted here that Delany, like certain post-structuralists, has observed in Barthes a tendency to discuss texts in thematic terms: “Even the plural text of Barthes is a synchronic plurality” (SW 205). Delany’s answer to Barthes can be found in The American Shore, which formally resembles Barthes’s S/Z but differs from it theoretically in many significant respects. More on this ambiguity in Barthes’s work later.)