Longer Views

by Samuel R. Delany

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

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

  Discourse says, “You are.”

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

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

  III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  In the second passage near the essay’s close, Delany considers Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” of the work of art. Arguing (contra Benjamin) that the aura is precisely what is preserved in the mechanical reproduction of art, rather than what is lost, Delany shows how a biographical account of a direct encounter with a work of art—such as his own with Picasso’s Guernica—can serve as an empirical counter to the mythic “aura” that Wagnerian discourse places around reproductions (W/A 78). This conception of biography as empirical counter provides a second reading for the backstage passage: what stands out now is less the all-engulfing quality of the space than its intense material specificity. Backstage at the Met now looks less like an image of all-encompassing Wagnerism and more like an inadvertent manifestation of Artaud’s insistently corporeal Theater of Cruelty. The guiding metaphor—theater as discourse—has, by its own signifying excess, overturned and revealed its subversive underside.

  The deployment of a self-deconstructing framing structure here recalls the beginnings-and-endings of several of Delany’s novels, most notably Dhalgren and Neveryóna. Like the framing structures of those earlier works, the theater-metaphor framing “Wagner/Artaud” yields up two equally viable yet mutually subversive readings, neither of which can crystallize out into “the” definitive interpretation. Moreover, the closer we look at these two readings individually, the richer and more complex they seem to become within themselves. This self-complexifying quality suggests an explanation for the intriguing pile-up of ironies and subversions in the essay’s closing pages: the simple thematic opposition of Wagner as the Elder God of the discourse of “High Art” to Artaud as the deranged Trickster God of postmodernism has begun to crumble under the weight of the analytical pressure Delany has applied to it. In its form, then, “Wagner/Artaud” is a classic deconstruction—an analysis which “dissolves the borders that allow us to recognize [a theme] in the first place” (NFW 8).

  The notion of reading a metaphor or theme into its own radicalness is given its most explicit consideration in “Reading at Work, and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority: A Reading of Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs.’” As in “Wagner/Artaud,” the privileged critical method is the argument from empirical evidence—and as in “Wagner/Artaud,” the steady accumulation of evidence leads to an overturning or inversion of the guiding theme: through an extended consideration of Haraway’s notion of cyborg-as-metaphor, Delany arrives at the notion of metaphor-as-cyborg. A significant distinction between the two essays is that in “Wagner/Artaud,” Delany supplies the guiding metaphor, whereas in “Reading at Work,” the guiding metaphor in question is Haraway’s, which Delany proceeds to re-frame. This process of re-framing continues on many levels throughout the essay: over its course, we are given a reading of Haraway’s essay, and a reading of that reading; we are given a Lacanian reading of castration imagery in pop culture, and a reading of Lacanian readings in general; we are given an explication of the notion of radical metaphor, even as the form of the explication is revealed to follow from the conclusion it itself yields up. In terms of sheer economy of means, the number of simultaneous readings Delany manages to orchestrate in this 32-page essay is a bit dizzying. And as with “Wagner/Artaud,” the vertiginousness of our experience is in direct proportion to the rigor of our own reading—a reading which reveals, once again, the cohering and dissolution of a rhetorical object (in this case, the traditional conception of metaphor itself) within a posited discursive space.

  But beyond the textual transformations going on inside “Reading at Work,” there are texts outside the essay with which it is clearly engaged as well. Readers familiar with contemporary theory will recognize in the discussion of castration and the images of theft
and reciprocity clear references to the “Purloined Letter” debate, inaugurated by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s analysis of Poe’s short story. Although it is in no way necessary to be familiar with this debate to follow Delany’s argument, we might nevertheless want to consider the relation between them. In Lacan’s conception, the paralysis that seems to fall upon each character in “The Purloined Letter” after he or she gains knowledge of possession of the letter is an image of the “truth of castration,” a metaphor for the subject’s entry into the Symbolic realm. “The letter,” says Lacan, “always arrives at its destination”: castration is inevitable.21 Jacques Derrida counters that this image of inevitability is an artifact of the phallocentrism underlying psychoanalytic thought—an artifact conjured up by the surrounding discourse in order to ensure its own stability. Against this image Derrida posits the notion of the material contingency of society, which the image of castration exists specifically to conceal and contain. By this conception, the “truth of castration” is not that “the letter always arrives at its destination,” but rather that

  . . . a letter can always not arrive at its destination. Its “materiality” and “topology” are due to its divisibility, its always possible partition. It can always be fragmented without return, and the system of the symbolic, of castration, of the signifier, of the truth, of the contract, etc., always attempts to protect the letter from this fragmentation. (PP 187)

  Delany redeploys this insight for his own purposes: “Perhaps phallocentric civilization has to construct image after image of castration—such as the cyborg.”22 This in turn implies a state of affairs which Delany expresses baldly and boldly: “For the record . . . I do not believe castration as Freud and Lacan have described it even exists.” (RW 105)

  We find a hint of what this state of affairs itself implies—for both reader and writer—in “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” from Flight from Nevèrÿon. In that tale, Delany presents us with two more parallel, dialogical texts: one a fantasy unfolding in the world of Nevèrÿon, one a tale of 1983 Manhattan. In the latter, Delany “himself” appears, hard at work drafting the manuscript of the tale we are now reading. At one point, Delany comments: