Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany
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clears, however, as soon as one asks such questions as: which is the most important “fiction”—Paradise Lost, Bleak House, or The Voyage of the Beagle? Which is the most representational? And of what? Should the labels be taken off “poetry,” “fiction,” or “philosophy”? Which of these categories has representational priority?
What is going on, of course, is a game of subordination and appropriation, a game which SF writers themselves have been playing just as freely from their side. And when both sides are trying to subordinate and appropriate the other, it is naïve, if not mystificational, to call such a relation other than conflict, no matter how refined or friendly it seems.
To conjoin science fiction with literature is about as silly as trying to conjoin poetry and prose fiction, or drama and prose reportage. (In the United States in the ’30s, among the violences of the Depression, both were tried: e.g., Boni & Liveright’s slim volumes of poetic/prose effusions; and the WPA’s “living newspaper,” which toured the nation’s backroads out of New York, Chicago, and L.A. Both were finally abandoned.) Some of the specific reasons for this, having to do with science fiction’s status as a formal writing category, as a complex of reading protocols, as a discourse, will occupy the essays to come.
Because the different constructs that different writing categories generate are mental and do not “exist,” sometimes it is hard to keep a clear view of just what use such insubstantial, symbolic, intersubjective objects can possibly have. In our attempts to talk about (in the sense of around) these silent constructs, often we find ourselves slipping back into a rhetoric that deals with only the use and application of the enunciated portion of any given text, while we all but deny that any other aspects of it can manifest.
But about three months ago I took a Greyhound bus down from New York to Baltimore; and after a night in a seedy hotel, in the basement of which a very loud “New Wave” rock concert was in progress, I taxied in the morning to the Dundalk Marine Terminal to catch the Polish freighter Mieczyslaw Kalinowski, on which I was booked, with some dozen other passengers, to Antwerp, there having been a dock strike in Rotterdam, the boat’s initial destination.
The Atlantic is a lonely shield of water.
At sea you are continually struck, on those days when no other object is visible, by the fact that, this close to the Earth’s surface, you will never see more of a single substance. But, as happens even on the lonely Atlantic, one evening at sundown for perhaps half an hour, here and there about the horizon’s aluminum, above that gunmetal shield, five other ships were in view at one time.
Two showed a red light.
Three showed a green.
And I gained some admiring remarks by explaining to my fellow passengers with me that evening on deck which ships were showing us their starboard flank and which were showing their port side; and consequently we were able to tell which direction each ship was moving in relation to us—although I am, incidentally, severely dyslexic, which doesn’t mean I can’t read, only that I have no natural sense of left and right.
But I would tell you this:
During the entire evening and explanation, the oversweet taste and dead-blood color of port never entered my mind. What facilitated the explanation for me, that evening on the deck, was a purely mental construct, the memory of a liquor conceived years before, first put together in silence that night on the ferry with my friend, from an entirely different fermentation process, a distillate the hue of a beacon the color of a spring leaf paled by fog; and, although it has never been decanted and does not, certainly, exist, it is of a different bouquet, of a different vintnerage, and of an entirely different draft.
NEW YORK, 1980
1. Joseph F. Cox (1943–2002).
2. “About 5,750 Words,” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, by Samuel R. Delany, Berkley Wind hover, New York, 1978. [Revised edition, Wesleyan University Press, 2008.]
3. Have we all suffered those various “unicorns,” “current Kings of France,” and “Hitler’s daughters,” which are Anglo-American philosophy’s recent emblems for the present “absent object”? Poststructuralism has reiterated the lesson that “the origin is always a construct.” The historical archaeologies of Foucault and the psychoanalytic researches of Lacan have shown that the same is true of the subject. We have yet to learn, however, that the object is a construct as well—at least we have yet to learn the profound significance of its con-structural aspect for language. Indeed, it is only that the object is a construct—whether it “exists” or not—that allows it so easily to come apart. It is a much subtler construct that is usually supposed by our neorationalists, from Lévi-Strauss to Chomsky, in their search for cultural universals. The object is not made up of meanings (or “facts,” as the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus once asserted). It is made up rather of the elements of which meanings are also made, e.g., various routed-wave phenomena. If the sei in sich is made up of more than, or other than, routed-wave phenomena, I think we can safely say that unless there is an empirical revolution to shatter beyond recognition both the Newtonian and Einsteinian objects (the two stereoptic views that currently give modern thinkers a sense of cosmic depth), though we may speculate endlessly, we shall not know it.
4. In most cases, I suspect, however, that untutored tongues have a vocabulary to discuss only reference and representation—even when the mind has responded to a great deal more.
5. This is to say they are better regarded as repeated processes numerous subjects can undergo than as repeated patterns given mental entities they can fall out of and then fall into again; in Roland Barthe’s terminology, they are “structuations,” not “structures.”
6. This taxonomy is contemporary and synchronic. For any diachronic understanding of the historical forces that have brought this synchronic array about, we must explore the historical forces that have led to the recent dissolution of the term “genre” in poststructural debate. We must examine the attractions between the sociopsychological world and the locus of an ideally undifferentiated discourse whose historical moment is placed farther and farther back as the revealed vectors clarify the diachronic location of its true differentiations.
7. There are good precedents for this assumption. The Russian critic M. M. Bakhtin was among the first to note (in The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist and translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, University of Texas Press, 1981) that by the end of the nineteenth century, all the literary genres had become “novelized.” This “novelization of literary genres” is what allows me so frequently to take mundane (or bourgeois) fiction as the literary prototype.
8. I, etcetera by Susan Sontag, Vintage Books, 1979; The Persistence of Vision by John Varley (paperback edition), Dell Books, 1978. Even the packages of the two books contour their own sociological discourse. Extraordinary in purely photographic terms, when placed on the Vintage paperback cover (and Vintage has probably become the literary publisher today, perhaps more than any hardcover colophon), enfolding, with the title, the author’s name, Thomas Victor’s photograph of Sontag becomes yet another of the misleading vulgarities by which literature in our time is doomed to propagate itself. (A picture of the writer is the last thing that should appear on a book with this title; and anyone with a sense of literature’s commitment to the impersonality that permits its meticulous exploration of the subject should realize it, including the Vintage art department!) The book’s cover is bearable only because, as Sontag was one of the first to note in her early essays on pornography, science fiction, and camp, the cover Varley’s book bears, in awful taste on a mass market paperback, overloaded with promotional copy in unreadable type, framed and reframed in a perfectly eye-dulling format (“quantum science fiction—the world’s first international science-fiction program—provides worldwide publication of the best new works in the field. Each Quantum selection is approved by our …”—a parody of book-ofthe-month-club advertising that is the quintessence of paraliterary packaging), becomes, by those overwrought conventions of vulgarity that make it vanish into the mass of face-out display SF books, by the same gesture through which Sontag’s cover, inappropriate as it is, leaps from a similar