Longer Views: Extended Essays Read online

  Longer Views

  Other Books by the Author

  Fiction

  The Jewels of Aptor

  The Fall of the Towers:

  Out of the Dead City

  The Towers of Toron

  City of a Thousand Suns

  The Ballad of Beta-2

  Babel-17

  The Einstein Intersection

  Nova

  Driftglass (stories)

  Equinox (The Tides of Lust)

  Dhalgren

  Trouble on Triton (Triton)

  Distant Stars (stories)

  Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand

  Return to Nevèrÿon:

  Tales of Nevèrÿon

  Neveryóna

  Flight from Nevèrÿon

  Return to Nevèrÿon (The Bridge of Lost Desire)

  Driftglass/Starshards (collected stories)

  They Fly at Çiron

  The Mad Man

  Hogg

  Atlantis: Three Tales

  Nonfiction

  The Jewel-Hinged Jaw

  The American Shore

  Heavenly Breakfast

  Starboard Wine

  The Motion of Light in Water

  Wagner/Artaud

  The Straits of Messina

  Silent Interviews

  Longer Views

  Extended Essays

  Samuel R. Delany

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION

  BY KEN JAMES

  Wesleyan University Press

  Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755

  Copyright © 1996 by Samuel R. Delany

  Introduction copyright © 1996 by Ken James

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 2 1

  CIP data appear at the end of the book

  “Wagner/Artaud” was first published by Ansatz Press (New York, 1988). Copyright © 1988 by Samuel R. Delany.

  “Aversion/Perversion/Diversion” was first published in Negotiating Lesbian and Gay Subjects, ed. Monica Dorenkamp and Richard Henke (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).

  “Shadows” was published in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, by Samuel R. Delany (New York: Dragon Press, 1977). Copyright © 1977 by Samuel R. Delany.

  For

  Henry Finder and

  Kwame Anthony Appiah

  Contents

  Preface

  Extensions: An Introduction to the Longer Views of Samuel R. Delany

  BY KEN JAMES

  Wagner/Artaud:

  A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions

  Reading at Work, and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority

  A Reading of Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”

  Aversion/Perversion/Diversion

  Shadow and Ash

  Atlantis Rose . . .

  Some Notes on Hart Crane

  Appendix: Shadows

  Index

  Preface

  In a critical epoch that has privileged, for twenty years or more, difference, decantering, discontinuity, diversity, and pluralism over the elder gods of Unity, Totality, and Mastery, so much American nonfiction still finds itself attempting to appease those elder gods and their former conventions. Those of us who read regularly in criticism often find “books” whose “chapters” are, it’s clear once we read two, three, or four of them, disconnected occasional essays. Often the “Introduction” that claims the remainder of the study will not attempt to negotiate its topic with systematic rigor actually introduces a collection of considerations simply of different topics. At the editorial level, forces (usually called “commercial”—though sometimes even more mystified than that) militate to present collections and chrestomathies as concentrated studies.

  The fiction writer is used to the same forces at work in the contouring of books: “Novels sell better than collections of short stories,” we are told. “It’s a truism of almost any fictive practice—mysteries, westerns, science fiction, or naturalistic fiction.”

  Most of my life my own preferred field has been science fiction; and because that field fosters so many series stories sharing characters and backgrounds, publishers and editors for many years took such stories and put them in books they called “novels,” while renaming the individual stories “chapters”—largely at the behest of those forces.

  The one form that—in science fiction, at any rate—tends to resist such handling is the long story (or novella). And in the range of literary criticism, it is the long essay—the essay too lengthy to be delivered comfortably as a fifty-minute lecture—that offers similar resistance to such totalizing conventions. What this tends to mean is that the collection of longer essays—or, indeed, science fiction novellas—is treated as the least commercial of all works.

  When publishers are brave enough to undertake such collections, readers, support them both!

  I’m particularly grateful, then, to my editors, Terry Cochran and Suzanna Tamminen, and to my publisher, Wesleyan University Press and their editorial director, Eileen McWilliam, for accepting this book for what it is and for not suggesting I “wait till some of the pieces mature” (read: till I become tired of seeing them lie unpublished and eventually pad them out to book-length). Various readers have made wonderfully useful suggestions here and there during the composition process of these essays, including Don Eric Levine, Gordon Tapper, James Sallis, Ron Drummond, and all the editors just mentioned.

  This book contains six moderately long essays with five distinct topics.

  The first, “Wagner/Artaud: A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions,” has been published as a separate monograph by feisty little Ansatz Press (New York, 1988), that wonderful creation of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and Tom Weber. Its topic is precisely its twain eponymous subjects—and the relationship between them as dramaturges and esthetic theoreticians. Three paragraphs have been added or expanded since the ’88 edition; the diligent literary detective should be able to spot at least two of them.

  “Reading at Work, and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority—A Reading of Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’”—has, in pieces, provided me with various lectures since it was first written in 1985. It tries to give an account of that exciting and influential essay and at the same time tries to examine what the giving of such an account entails and, yes, means. At its center it contains a brief overview of the cyborg as a science fiction image in film, as well as a discussion of metaphor that seems to me necessarily anterior to any discussion of how any metaphor, such as the “cyborg,” can work in the radical directions Haraway’s manifesto proposes for it.

  On the evening of November 1, 1991, “Aversion/Perversion/Diversion” was delivered as the Keynote Lecture at the Fifth Annual Lesbian and Gay Conference on Gay Studies, held that year at Rutgers University. It takes an anecdotal tour through some marginal tracks of contemporary (and, at that, largely queer) sexuality, even as its topic is the concept of discourse and its necessity for any sophisticated historical understanding.

  This is also the topic of “Shadow and Ash”—an intellectual chrestomathy whose fragmentary method is finally its content. For me it is the most important essay here—and the one that needs the least prefatory matter.

  “Atlantis Rose . . .” is a study of the poetry of Hart Crane, with an emphasis on Crane’s wonderfully rich poetic series, The Bridge. Though I hope this essay can be enjoyed without Crane’s text to hand, I would urge readers to procure a copy of that wonderfully rich poem, and—in fact—to read The Bridge through at least once just before beginnin
g the essay, to pause now and again to reread various sections of it on their first trip through my essay, and to read Crane’s poem once more on finishing my notes here. (Poet James Tate suggests at least one of those readings be out loud.) Though I understand most of us—even most professional critics—don’t have time for such elaborate undertakings, that’s still the ideal reading my study presupposes.

  As an appendix I have included another long essay that first appeared in two installments in Foundation 6 (London, May 1974) and the double issue Foundation 7/8 (London, November 1975), though it was first drafted in 1973 while I lived in England. (I revised it heavily in ’74 for the Foundation publication; then again in ’78 and again in ’79.) I can’t believe anyone, in considering the hard-edged language games around which so much Anglo-American philosophy is constituted, would not find the margins of their thought occasionally troubled by the illusory quality of those edges that recontextualization is constantly and playfully suggesting. Such games are predicated on the idea that certain words have their meanings because certain other meanings are rigorously excluded from ever occupying the same semantic space, e.g., whatever “blue” means, it can never mean “red.” But recontextualization always presents, at least as a sort of limit case, possibilities of the following order: “Whenever I hold up the placard with the word ‘blue’ on it, I want you to hold up the placard in front of you colored red—rather than the one colored green, blue, yellow, or purple.” If we assent to such a request, then—in such a context, however rarely it might arise in life—the word “blue” there “means” the color red. One might point out that, in such a context, the word “means” does not mean precisely what it usually means—to which one can only nod agreement: that’s true. Still, that meaning of “means” is a recognizable meaning, controlled by the context. But this and many other observations make the hard-edged boundaries of meaning that control the speculations of natural language philosophers and speech act theorists so problematic.

  The work of continental philosophers like Derrida has not explained away such problems. But it has demonstrated why such problems are not some marginal impediment to a more mathematically solid model of language but are rather inescapable and fundamental to what language is and how it functions, i.e., that a word is never out of a specific context limiting its meaning, even when it is isolated by a line of white paper above and below it, or when it is beside its definition on the dictionary page, or when it is cited as a general instance of meaning in a philosophy paper (i.e., that the absolute and unlimited Word-with-its-meaning—the transcendental Logos—is an illusion).

  “Shadows,” then, represents what I hope some readers will find an interesting piece of transitional thinking between the two traditions. And it prefigures much of the later work. If “Shadow and Ash” is the most important essay here, then “Shadows” is its lengthy, chrestomathic preface.

  The excuse for such a collection is not to provide “a good read” but—indeed—to provide several, some sequential, others simultaneous. For reading is a many-layered process—like writing. The different forms, such as the long essay vis-à-vis the short, all have their separate excellences and pleasures. I hope this collection presents a rich field in which to look for—if not to find—them.

  —New York

  21 October 1993

  Extensions

  An Introduction to the Longer Views of Samuel R. Delany

  BY KEN JAMES

  There is here a problem of framing, of bordering and delimitation, whose analysis must be very finely detailed if it wishes to ascertain the effects of fiction.

  —Jacques Derrida

  I

  The term “extended essay,” in its very articulation, seems to presuppose a norm which is somehow being supplemented, exceeded, transgressed. Certainly the long pieces in the remarkable collection to follow do not fit the form of the essay we have been led (by whom? by what? for what purpose?) to expect; nor does the experience of reading them feel like the experience of reading a traditional essay. To better understand what these pieces are up to, then, we might want to consider the form against which they position themselves.

  What constitutes a “traditional” essay, and what is the experience of reading one like? Obviously to make generalizations about a form with such a wide range of possible topics (i.e., just about anything) and possible writerly approaches is to construct something of a fiction; nevertheless, generalizations about normative trends—generalizations about what we have come to expect from an essay—are possible. Lydia Fakundiny characterizes the essay in passing as a “short, independent, self-contained prose discourse.”1 Fair enough. But as has been noted by Fakundiny and many other scholars of the history of the essay, there are other, more specific traits which have characterized the essay since the traditionally posited birth of its modern form in the sixteenth-century writings of Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon. From Montaigne, for example, we inherit (among other things) a focus on the personal, on the authorial subject as the ground and goal of analytical inquiry. Montaigne prefaced his epoch-making Essais with a warning to the reader that, whatever the ostensible subject-matter of the pieces to follow, “I myself am the subject of my book.”2 Ever since then, essayists have, with varying degrees of intensity, been committed to presenting “the spectacle of a single consciousness making sense of a part of the chaos” of life.3 From Bacon, we get a writerly stance that tends towards didacticism, in the specifically aphoristic mode. Bacon’s Essays, which appeared 17 years after the publication of the first edition of Montaigne’s collection, are written in a terse, pithy, authoritarian style: they do not so much analyze topics as list epigrams. Here is a well-known example of typical Baconian prose:

  Crafty men condemn studies; simple men admire them; and wise men use them . . . Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention . . . Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.4

  In Bacon we find the seeds of what the essay was to become a little over a century later in the hands of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele—a specifically urban mode of writing, offering an authoritarian moral compass for those who would live in the city. (At the same time, a critical tradition was developing from the essay’s classical roots, giving rise to the “impersonal” form which constitutes most academic writing today.)

  What often seems to characterize the works of the most popular contemporary essayists is a combination of the didactic tone of Bacon with the self-presentational obsessions of Montaigne—a conflation of the authorial and the authoritarian. Consider the following passage from The Writing Life, in which Annie Dillard compares the experience of essay-writing to a kind of path-finding:

  You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you find a box canyon. You hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins.

  The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend. In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles. Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work.5

  Note how Dillard’s use of the second-person pronoun causes the sentences in this passage to waver between description and injunction; note too how the passage gathers rhetorical energy as its sentences approach the aphoristic. I would argue that the personal focus of this passage and its epigrammatic style are typical-unto-defining traits of the contemporary essay. Certainly they are traits which, knowingly or unknowingly, we expect of it.

  But as Roland Barthes—one of the great essayists of the twentieth century and possibly the first great theorist of the form—has persuasively argued, spectacle (even the spectacle of self-portraiture)
and aphorism are two major rhetorical modes of conservative discourse—the discourse of the status quo. According to Barthes, spectacle discourages critical consideration of “motives” and “consequences”6 as it treats the spectator to the brief illusion of a “univocal” moral order (M 25). Aphorisms, similarly, derive much of their authoritative force from their implicit affirmation of such an order, such an “unalterable hierarchy of the world” (M 154). Aphorisms serve the purposes of the status quo precisely because their seemingly “pithy” declarations discourage further inquiry into their authorizing context. The root-meaning of the word gives it away: apo-horizein—to delimit, to mark off boundaries, to circumscribe a horizon. Edward Hoagland has commented on the complicity of the essay with the preservation of the status quo:

  The essay is a vulnerable form. Rooted in middle-class civility, it presupposes not only that the essayist himself be demonstrably sane, but that his readers also operate upon a set of widely held assumptions. Fiction can be hallucinatory if it wishes, and journalism impassive, and so each continues through thick and thin, but essays presuppose a certain standard of education in the reader, a world ruled by some sort of order—where government is constitutional, or at least monarchical, perhaps where sex hasn’t wandered too far from its home base . . .7

  Clearly, the essay is ripe for a radical rhetorical intervention.

  Samuel R. Delany was born in 1942 and raised in New York City’s Harlem. Something of a prodigy, he published his first novel at age 20, and has made radical interventions in various literary and paraliterary practices for over thirty years now. In the science fiction field, he is a renowned novelist and critic, having garnered four Nebula Awards and a Hugo Award for his fiction, as well as the nonfiction Hugo for his autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water. His numerous studies of the history and rhetoric of science fiction have moved his colleague Ursula K. Le Guin to call him “our best in-house critic.”8 Delany has also written for comic books, and has produced a remarkable trio of pornographic novels (or “anti-pornographies,” as his critical alter-ego, K. Leslie Steiner, calls them): Equinox, Hogg, and The Mad Man. And he has recently made a foray into historical fiction with the short novel Atlantis: Model 1924, which details a meeting between characters modeled after Delany’s own father as a young man and the poet Hart Crane, on the Brooklyn Bridge one bright afternoon in, yes, 1924. Over the course of his career, Delany has again and again thrown into question the world-models that all too many of us unknowingly live by—particularly, but certainly not restricted to, those models which relate to sexual identity and practice. For this aspect of his work, in 1993 he was given the fifth William Whitehead Memorial Award for Lifetime Contribution to Gay and Lesbian Literature, an honor he shares with Edmund White, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and James Purdy.