Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  —Joanna Russ, “Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction”

  1. Today’s technology is tomorrow’s handicraft.

  2. Lines I particularly liked from Knotly’s poem in the current Paris Review: “for every one must run a race/in the body’s own running place” and: “Everything I have has an earwig in it/which will make light of sacred things.”

  3. Nothing we look at is ever seen without some shift and flicker—that constant flaking of vision which we take as imperfections of the eye or simply the instability of attention itself; and we ignore this illusory screen for the solid reality behind it. But the solid reality is the illusion; the shift and flicker is all there is. (Where do sf writers get their crazy ideas? From watching all there is very carefully.)

  4. The preceding notes, this one, and the ones following are picked, somewhat at random, from my last two years’ journals (1973–1974), in lieu of the personal article requested on the development of a science-fiction writer.

  5. Critical language presents us a problem: The critic “analyzes” a work to “reveal” its “internal form.” Recent structuralist critics are trying to “discover the underlying, mythic structures” of given works or cultures. There is the implication that what the critic comes up with is somehow more basic than the thing under study—we are all, of course, too sophisticated to be fooled into thinking what the critic produces is more important.

  Still, however, we feel the critical find should be more intense, more solid, more foundational than the work. After all, though novels are fiction, the books of criticism about them are not . . .

  An obvious visual image for the critical process is a surgeon, carefully dissecting a body, removing the skeleton from it, and presenting the bones to our view—so that we will have a more schematic idea of how the fleshed organism articulates.

  All this, however, is the result of a category-mistake of the sort Ryle describes in The Concept of Mind (p. 17ff.).

  A slightly better image, as a basic model of the critical process, will, perhaps, explode it:

  The critic sits at a certain distance from the work, views it from a particular side, and builds a more or less schematic model of the work as it strikes her or him (just as I am making this model of what the critic does), emphasizing certain elements, suppressing certain others, attaching little historical notes to his model here and there on where she thinks this or that form in the original work might have come from, adding little ethical notes on what he suspects is its proper usage, all according to the particular critical use the model is intended for. If the critic’s model is interesting enough, there is nothing to stop us from considering it a work of art in itself, as we do with Pater or Taine, with Barthes or Derrida, Felman or Johnson. A critic may, indeed, add something to the work. But the critic does not remove anything from the work.

  Works of literature, painting, and sculpture simply do not have informative insides. There is no skeleton to be removed. They are all surface-that-endures-through-history. A piece of sculpture has a physical inside, but drilling a hole three inches into the Venus de Milo will give you no aesthetic insight into it. (Note, however: This paragraph does not hold true [at least in the same way] for theatrical works, orchestral music, film, or much electronic art. For an sf story: Postulate a world and a culture which has an art all of which does have informative insides—great cloth sculptures, for example, held up from within by hidden pipe- shapes, electronic art run by hidden circuitry. The critic, as criminal, hires herself to other social criminals who wish to understand the art; they break into museums, dismantle the art objects, and remove the insides for inspection. The works are reassembled . . . clumsily. Later, an artist passing by notices something is wrong and cries out to a guard: “Look, look! A critic has been at my work! Can’t you see . . .?” Theme of the story: If to understand the work is physically to destroy or injure it, are the critics [and the people who wish to understand art] heroes or villains? Are the artists, who make works that can only be understood by dismantling them, charlatans? Consider also, since my view is that this is just how so many people do misinterpret criticism today, will my context be understood? Is there any way that I can make clear in the story that what I am presenting is not how criticism works; rather, I am poking fun at the general misapprehension? I am not in the least interested in writing a simpleminded, “damning” satire of Modern Criticism. Will have to rethink seriously incidents as first listed if I want the story’s point to be the subtle one. Can such a point be dramatized in sf story . . .?)

  Basically, however, the critic is part of the work’s audience. The critic responds to it, selects among those responses and, using them, makes, selectively, a model of the work that may, hopefully, guide, helpfully, the responses of the critic’s own audience when they come to the work being modeled.

  When a critic, talking about critical work, suggests she is doing more than this, at best she is indulging in metaphor; at worst, he is practicing, whether wittingly or no, more of that pernicious mystification that has brought us to our present impasse.

  (Happy with the idea; but still uncomfortable with it as a story template—because, as a template, it seems to be saying exactly the opposite of what I want to! Is this, perhaps, a problem basic to sf: That you can only use it to reinforce commonly accepted prejudices; and that to use it for a discussion of anything at a more complex resolution simply can’t be done at the literary distance sf affords? From Cassirer to Kirk, critics have leveled just this accusation at mythology. If it’s true of sf as well, perhaps sf is, inchoately, an immature form . . .? Well, there: The ugly suggestion has been made.

  (Do I agree?

  (No, I don’t. But I think it is certainly an inherent tendency of the medium. To fight it, and triumph over it, I must specifically: go into the world—the object—I have set up far more thoroughly than I have before, and treat it autonomously rather than as merely a model of a prejudiciary situation—a purely subject manifestation. I must explore it as an extensive, coherent reality—not as an intensive reflection of the real world where the most conservative ideas will drain all life out of the invention.

  (What does my culture look like, for instance, once I leave the museum? Given its basic aesthetic outlook, what would its architecture look like? How would the museum itself look, from the inside? From the outside? What would the building where the artist lived look like? And where the critic lived? What would be their relative social positions? What would be the emblems of those positions? How would such emblems differ from the emblems of social positions in our world? What would it smell like to walk through their streets? Given their art, what of their concept of science? Is it the opposite of their concept of art? Or is it an extension of it? Are the informative insides of the scientific works as mystified as the insides of art works? Or are they made blatantly public? Or are they mystified even more than the art? What are the problems that critics of science have in this world? Or critics of politics? Would these critics be the same people?

  (As I begin to treat my original conceit as a coherent, antonomous world, instead of just a statement about our world, I begin to generate a template complicated enough and rich enough actually to make a statement about our world that is something more than simple- minded. I can now start to ask myself questions like: In this world, what are the psychological traits of someone who would become a critic? An artist? A scientist? Etc. But it is only when the template becomes at least that complex that sf becomes mature.)

  6. Moorcocks coming over here for dinner tonight with John Sims: Cream of Leek soup, Roast Beef, Fried Eggplant, Rice (possibly a risotto with almonds? How many stuffed mushrooms are left over from the Landrys yesterday? And will they do, reheated, for starters?); an American Salad (get some Avocado, Bacon, Butter-lettuce, Chicory, Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Carrots, Celery, Mustard, Lemons); to follow: Baked Bananas flamed in brandy. (Don’t use the mushrooms: John doesn’t like them!)

  7. For Sturgeon essay: The material of fictio
n is the texture of experience.

  8. Re Dhalgren . . . I think Marilyn is depressingly right about the psychiatric session with Madame Brown and the Calkins interview . . . which means more work; and after I’ve just rewritten the whole last chapter! With Calkins, the historical must be made manifest. With Madame Brown, she must realize that the dream is not a dream, otherwise she comes off just too stupid. It is so hard to control the outside view of my material, when I am standing on the inside. It’s like clutching a balloon to shape from within.

  Friday night and to the Moorcocks for dinner with Emma Tennent.

  9. Got a letter from R. E. Geis today, asking to reprint my Letter to a Critic from The Little Magazine in The Alien Critic. Am very dubious. First of all, some of the facts, as John Brunner so succinctly pointed out over the phone a fortnight back, are just wrong. More to the point, the section on science-fiction publishing isn’t really a description of the current sf publishing scene at all. Rather, it’s a memoir of what the publishing situation was like in that odd period between 1967 and 1971. Odd, too, how quickly the bright truths of twenty-six (by which age the bulk of my notoriously unbulky sf oeuvre was already in print) seem, six years later, rather dated. What to do? Get ever so slightly looped and write a polite letter?

  Or take a walk up Regents’ Canal and go browse in Compendium Book Store? Sounds better.

  10. What a tiny part of our lives we use in picturing our pasts. Walked to the Turkish take-away place this evening with John Witton-Doris: consider the number of incidents he recalls from our months in Greece together, nine years ago, involving me, that I can barely remember! Biography, as it approaches completeness, must be the final fiction.

  11. Alcohol is the opium of the people.

  12. Science fiction through the late sixties seemed to be, scientifically, interested in mathematics segueing into electronics; psychiatry, in all its oversimplified clumsiness, has been an sf mainstay from The Roads Must Roll, through Baby is Three, to The Dream Master.

  Science fiction from the past few years seems to be interested in mathematics segueing into contemporary linguistics/philosophy (e.g., Watson’s The Embedding); biology—particularly genetics—has replaced physics as the science of greatest concern [Cf. the ‘clone’ stories over the past few years, from Kate Wilhelm’s and Ted Thomas’s The Clone, through McIntyre’s The Cage (and Ms. McIntyre is a trained geneticist; where do we get all this about people interested in science not getting into science fiction anymore!?!), to Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus]; and anthropology (reflected even in books like Effinger’s What Entropy Means to Me and Toomey’s A World of Trouble) seems to be replacing psychiatry as a prime concern.

  I think I approve.

  13. “You science-fiction writers always criticize each other in print as if the person you were criticizing were reading over your shoulder,” someone said to me at the Bristol Con last week—meaning, I’m afraid, that the majority of criticism that originates within the field has either a “let-me-pat-your-back-so-you-can-pat-mine” air, or, even more frequently, a sort of catty, wheedling tone implying much more is being criticized than the work nominally under discussion.

  No, the sf community is not large

  Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent just over a decade making my living within it, but I feel all criticism should be written as if the author being criticized were—not reading over your shoulder—but written as though you could stand face to face with her and read it out loud, without embarrassment.

  I think this should hold whether you are trying to fix the most rarefied of metaphysical imports in some Shakespearean tragedy, or writing a two-hundred word review of the latest thriller. Wheedling or flattery have nothing to do with it.

  Among the many informations we try to get from any critical model is the original maker’s (the artist’s) view of the original work modeled. If the critics do not include, in this model, an overt assessment of it, we construct it from hints, suggestions, and whatever. But we are at three removes from the author: and the critic is at two (as the critic is one from the work): In deference to that distance, I feel the critics must make such assessments humbly. They can always be wrong.

  But only after they, and we, have made them (wrong or right), can we follow the critics’ exploration of the work’s method, success, or relevance. The critic can only judge these things by his own responses; in a very real way, the only thing the critic is ever really criticizing—and this must be done humbly if it is to be done at all—is the response of his own critical instrument.

  All criticism is personal.

  The best is rigorously so.

  14. Yesterday, Joyce Carol Oates sent Marilyn a copy of her new book of poems Angel Fire (with a letter apologizing for taking so long to answer Marilyn’s last letter etc., and dense with North American weather). This morning, in Compendium, I saw the new Oates book on D. H. Lawrence’s poetry, The Hostile Sun, picked it up, took it (in its bright yellow covers) home, and have, minutes ago, just finished it.

  After going through three novels, a handful of essays, and a few crunches into the Collected Poems (and most recently, the Frank Kermode book on), Lawrence has tended to be for me a clumsy, if impassioned, writer purveying a message I find almost totally heinous. The most generous thing I could say for him till now was, with Kenneth Rexroth, “His enemies are my enemies,” but even here I always found myself wondering, wouldn’t he do better on their side than on mine? Lawrence-the-outspoken-sexual-revolutionary has always struck me a bit like those politicians who, in their support of the War in Vietnam, eventually went so far as to use words like “hell” and “damn” in their speeches—then quickly looked at their fellow party members who dared disapprove of their “too strong” language and labeled them conservatives. Though Lawrence’s novels sometimes refer to sexual mechanics, his overall concept of sex seems institutionally rigid: Everyone must fulfill his or her role, as assigned by Divine Law. The heroes of his novels go about brow-beating everyone who happens to stray from his (usually her) divinely ordained role, back into it. For, after all, it is Divine Law. And anyone who still strays, after having been told that, must be sick unto damnation. I wonder if Lawrence was aware that his real critics simply found him, in his ideas (rather than in the “strength” of his language, or the “explicitness” of the scenes he used to dramatize his points), an absolute prig?

  At any rate, The Hostile Sun offers me a guide to the Collected Poems (the volume Joyce gave Marilyn as a going-away present; she must have been working on the essay then) that may just get me into them in a way that I can get something out. The book makes the idea of Lawrence-the-Poet interesting to me and offers me some way of divorcing it from Lawrence-the-Prophet—whom I find a pernicious bore. Oates points out his strengths in the poems (the overall intensity of vision; his aesthetic of unrectified feeling) and warns what not to look for (the single, well-crafted poem; a certain type of aesthetic intelligence). Since there are half a dozen poets whom I enjoy in just this way, from James Thomson and Walt Whitman to Paul Blackburn and Philip Whalen, I suspect I will go back to Lawrence’s poems better prepared.

  It is nice to be reminded that criticism, well done, can open up areas previously closed.

  15. Confessions of a science-fiction writer: I have never read one H. G. Wells “romance of the future” from cover to cover. I once read three quarters of Food of the Gods, and I have read the first fifty/one hundred pages of perhaps half a dozen more.

  When I was thirteen, somebody gave me Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a book that “you’ll simply love.” At page two hundred I balked. I never have finished it! I did a little better with From the Earth to the Moon, but I still didn’t reach the end.

  By the time I was fifteen, however, in my own personal hierarchy, Wells and Verne were synonymous with the crashingly dull. Also, I had gotten their names mixed up with something called Victorian Literature (which, when I was fifteen, somehow included Jane Austen!), and I decided th
at it was probably all equally boring.

  I was eighteen before I began to correct this impression (with, of all things, Eliot’s Adam Bede); fortunately somebody had already forced me—marvelous experience that it was—into Jane Austen by assuring me that her first three books were written before Victoria was even a sparkle in the Duke of Kent’s eye. Then the hordes: Thackeray, the Brontës, Dickens, Hardy. But I have never quite forgiven Wells and Verne for, even so briefly, prejudicing me against the “serious” literature written by their contemporaries and precursors who just happened to have overlapped, to whatever extent, the reign of that same, diminutive monarch.

  16. When I was a child, I used to play the violin. At fourteen I developed a not wholly innocent passion for a boy of fifteen who was something of a violin prodigy: He had already been soloist with several small but professional orchestras, and he was talked about muchly in my several circles of friends. I wrote a violin concerto for him—it took me four months. Its three movements ran about half an hour. I supplied (I thought then) a marvelous cadenza. The themes, if I recall, were all serial, but their development was tonal. I orchestrated it for a full, seventy-five piece orchestra—but by the time I had finished, he had moved to upstate New York.

  And I had been afraid to tell him what I was doing until it was completed.

  Months later, I ran into him in the Museum of Modern Art (he was in the city visiting an aunt) and, excitedly, I told him about my piece, over cokes and English muffins in a coffee shop a few blocks away. He was a little overwhelmed, if not bewildered, but said, “Thanks,” and “Gosh!” and “Wow!” a lot. We talked about getting together again. He was first chair violinist with the All State Youth Orchestra that year and a favorite with the conductor. We talked about a possible performance or, at least, getting some of his adult friends to look at it. Then he had to catch a train.