Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany
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Ficker, Wittgenstein made the same claim for philosophy, referring to his Tractatus: “My work consists of two parts: the present one here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.” And writing of poetry in an essay on La Fontaine’s Adonis, Valéry put it this way: “Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.” Indeed, the nonexistent or imaginary object,3 of art in general and writing in particular, becomes problematic only within a Western tradition of realistic painting on the one hand and bourgeois fiction on the other, where a great deal of aesthetic energy is expended urging the audience to believe that something essential in the artwork did exist, could have existed, or should exist. When looked at as a virtuoso performance that lends an interesting harmony to a melody mostly silent, reference and representation are all very well. But when reference and representation are all that are seen and heard by untutored eyes and ears,4 then the rigor becomes necessary that alone can release the unsayable into that form where (beside the utterable) it can most clearly be perceived, by saying what can be uttered with a great deal more care and clarity than is usual.
What are these unsayable things? They are mental constructs, contoured certainly by what is said. They are not so much imaginary as symbolic—symbolic in the Lacanian sense that they contour our entire symbol-producing and symbol-consuming process, direct our entire negotiation of the universe of signs. They are the very models by which all thought—about both the most real and the most abstract problems—propagates itself. These mental constructs are often complex, often recursive,5 and can be shared in remarkably stable form by an astonishingly diverse population.
A given construct may promote one kind of thought and discourage another. A given construct often lends itself to one kind of abuse through the same gesture with which it fends off another. The organization of language (as opposed to any specific collection or collation of utterances that organization produces) is one such construct. The French call it langue. This particular one is transmitted largely by exposure to an all but random sequence of linguistic utterances (parole), only a trivial portion of which refer directly to the organization itself. And those utterances that do refer to the organization (grammar) can be understood only after the structure itself has been pretty firmly communicated.
Now is the time to name the discourses.
These discourses, or formal categories of writing—among them poetry, prose reportage (criticism, journalism), bourgeois fiction (mundane fiction), drama, philosophy, pornography, and, I maintain, science fiction—each represent a different symbolic construct, constructs without which the texts themselves would be unreadable. These constructs are probably transmitted in much the same way as language itself.
Among these discourses, at least two groups can be distinguished: on the one hand there is literature (which includes among other categories poetry, mundane fiction, drama, and—today—philosophy), and on the other there is paraliterature (which includes among other categories pornography, comic books, possibly certain kinds of parody, and, of course, science fiction). Although it is largely considered paraliterature, journalism has a firm foot in the literary camp, through its subgenre, “criticism,” both literary and social. 6
Science fiction is the writing category—the complex of reading protocols, the discourse—that interests me most in these essays, although for purposes of identification and distinction I will frequently need to contrast it to other formal writing categories or to the category collection, literature, of which I take contemporary bourgeois fiction (mundane fiction) to be, today, the representative example.7
One useful aspect of the mental construct unsayable behind and before the range of specific SF texts is its encouragement of a clear view of the figure/ground antagonism in all narrative matters. In science fiction this encouragement is carried on indirectly, yet extremely efficiently because of its indirection, by the continual (and, from specific SF text to specific SF text, the continually varied) ground/ground antagonism science fiction provides, where one ground is the fictive ground of the story and the other is the ground of the reader’s given world.
As the categories it comprises become more aware of their imaginative sources and resourcefulness, as they take more cognizance of the problematic relation between “fiction” and “reality,” as they become more aware of the impossibility of any exhaustive fictive representation of reality, literature encourages the reading of an extentional relation between figure and ground, between fictive subject (invented character or narrative voice) and fictive object (the fictive or biographical decor, the setting, the landscape, the institutions whose representations evoke the fictive or biographical world).
Take two of the finest collections of short stories published in 1978: Susan Sontag’s I, etcetera is literature; John Varley’s The Persistence of Vision is science fiction. But from their titles onward, through their texts, both books declare their allegiances from first page to last.8
Starting with its title, I, etcetera announces literature’s commitment to the subject and literature’s equal commitment to the subordination of the ground, rendering ground an expression of subject, of personality, of sensibility. The most overtly referential politics and the most a-referential surrealism in Sontag’s stories register as projections of that sensibility—or as total determinants of that sensibility, which amounts to the same thing when the gestalt experience of self-and-self-surround is projected on a flat surface where all distinctions are a matter of reading, of codes.
Entitling a collection of SF stories, with all it speaks of afterimages, The Persistence of Vision inscribes itself within the ubiquitous antagonism of, the continual mutual impingement between, and the originary conceptual severance that finally determines subject and object: for vision to persist, some one must perceive; some thing must be perceived. And there are experimental hints of this distinction within minutes of birth; contrary to Freud it may well not be learned by violences to the nurturing alterity of food, sleep, and elimination in a variable field of warmth. As the SF reader knows (and the literary reader often becomes uncomfortably aware within the first few paragraphs of any SF text), science fiction does not try to represent the world. It conscientiously misrepresents the world in an endless series of lucidly readable ways—and this amounts to something very different from literature’s exhaustion (which, perhaps naively, I take to mean nothing more than “intense fatigue”) before representation’s admittedly daunting problematics.
The separate mental constructs involved in science fiction and literature both have their separate uses, both grounded in a view of response and responsibility, which make both, finally, human fields for art. Both are needed. But science fiction—the mental, shared, recursive construct science fiction encourages us to use—is in a particularly interesting historical position.
Science fiction is among the youngest of the West’s formal writing categories. In the particular form that propagates the mental construct that interests me, science fiction can be said to have existed only from the early ’30s (possibly middle ’20s) on. Since the early ’50s, its social propagation across the United States, Europe, and the Soviet bloc has been huge. (Approximately 15 percent of all fiction published in the United States today [1980] bears the SF label.) And where the SF construct encounters the literary construct, there is always conflict, whether acknowledged or hidden.The symptomatology of the encounter between science fiction and literature, whether the intention of the speaker or writer is to support the side of science fiction or to support the side of literature, is fairly clear. (All the overt attackers of literature—and a good number of the overt attackers of science fiction—have realized by this time that there is something risky about any directly negative strategy.) The argument always starts with the declaration that science fiction should absorb the values of literature and be transformed by them; labels should be rescinded; boundaries should be erased—these are some of the ways the conflict announces itself. After this warm and friendly invitation, however, the argument goes on to assert that, even if this amalgamation does occur, science fiction will nevertheless always take a back seat to literature: science fiction’s basic nonrepresentational