Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany
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exactly the same as différence, but the ending ance, which is used to produce verbal nouns, makes it a new form meaning ‘difference-differing-deferring.’ Différance thus designates both a ‘passive’ difference already in place as the condition of signification and an act of differing which produces differences” (On Deconstruction, Cornell University Press, 1982), 97.
3. Delany’s use of the word terrorist a few times in Starboard Wine may now, in an era when the term has gained as much connotative weight as any word can bear, seem even more hyperbolic than it did when the book first appeared. It echoes Barthes’s (or his translator, Annette Lavers’s) use of the word in “Blind and Dumb Criticism” (Mythologies, Hill & Wang, 1957/1972): “In fact, any reservation about culture means a terrorist position. To be a critic by profession and to proclaim that one understands nothing about existentialism or Marxism … is to elevate one’s blindness or dumbness to a universal rule of perception, and to reject from the world Marxism and existentialism: ‘I don’t understand, therefore you are idiots’” (35).
4. I dislike the term mundane fiction, but discussing Delany’s ideas of textuality and difference without using it becomes frustratingly awkward, and so, unable to offer an alternative, I resort to it throughout this introduction.
5. Positions by Jacques Derrida, translated by Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1981), 27.
6. The American Shore (Dragon Press, 1978), 233, 236.
7. “The Semiology of Silence” in Silent Interviews (Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 26.
8. In “Heinlein,” Delany uses Beyond This Horizon for a brief mention of the difference between science fiction and 19th-century utopian stories—though it’s only a passing remark in the essay, it is one worth noting, because it will be relevant to other essays.
9. While reading Delany’s account of SF writers bragging about how little they revised, and how this differs from the attitude of other sorts of writers, I thought of Ben Jonson stating that Shakespeare’s fellow actors “have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line.” Jonson (a rather different sort of writer) scoffed that, “My answer hath been, ‘Would he had blotted a thousand’ … but he redeemed his vices with his virtues.” (The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations, edited by Peter Kemp, Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 272.
10. The title may also call up for the informed reader memories of the immensely detailed descriptions of nature and the world within Goethe’s text. Or we may think of Goethe’s pose of objectivity, his writing of himself in the third person, which is just the sort of thing a critic with a bent towards poststructuralism could enjoy unpacking.
When he wrote “Dichtung und Science Fiction,” Delany had been reading, in addition to Goethe, the American poet Charles Olson’s Beloit Poetry lectures, Poetry and Truth (presented at Beloit College in Wisconsin, March 25, 1968, and reprinted in Muthologos, Vol II, by Charles Olson and edited by George Butterick [Four Seasons Foundation: Bolinas, 1979]). Olson’s critical work was important for Delany and he quotes from it a number of times, e.g., at the opening of his afterword to his novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.
11. Tangential to Delany’s point, but nonetheless worth considering, is whether the stylistic differences imposed on, for instance, Dostoyevsky and Kafka by their translators helped ease acceptance of those writers by “taming” their styles enough to make them feel more familiar than they would have had they been more accurately translated.
Starboard Wine
1
The Necessity of Tomorrow(s)
Anyone who spends any time at all in the community of SF writers, SF editors and publishers, interested academics, or among the highly enthusiastic SF readers who put on and attend the more than 70 annual SF conventions or publish the more than 300 SF fanzines that appear in the United States each year must from time to time ask: “What am I doing here?” But this is just to say we have all come here from somewhere else. An attempt to sketch out one lane along one of the many possible highways into the SF world, the following was first delivered as a talk at the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York City in November, 1978, a few streets from the three-story, red-brick building whose ground floor was once my father’s place of business and whose upper stories were my home till I was 15.
At the south corner of the block was Mrs. Dade’s funeral parlor. Centered in the block north was Mr. Sterrit’s. Between was Levy and Delany’s, my father’s funeral home. (Undertaker was a word he detested; he considered himself a funeral director.) When I was seven my father had the face of the building covered in red brick. Aluminum letters that stood out from the facade on little posts went up to replace the old sign—green neon letters in their tin shadow masks, the whole metal housing almost as big as I was. The workmen on their scaffold lowered it down over the door, first the L end, then the Y. Levy had died before I was born. Growing up with Levy and Delany, however, it was years before I thought to question why my father had kept the name of his former partner, whom he had later bought out. Originally friends, they had only briefly been in business together. (Years later my mother told me, laughingly: “Your father said he always owed Mr. Levy a great debt: he showed your father every way possible not to run a successful funeral business.”) Still, I wonder, with my father dead twenty years now, whether the two of them found an irony in the suggestion of the Jew and the Irishman running what, by the middle of the ’40s, was considered a rather swell Harlem funeral establishment. At any rate, the irony was misleading. Both were black men. Both owed their ethnic patronymics to the whites who had owned their parents, their great-grandparents.
On our left was Mr. and Mrs. Onley’s grocery store, which the Onleys ran with their grown son Robbie. In summer, green wooden stands sat out under the awning, full of cabbages, carrots, green and red peppers—although what I remember far more clearly is the exotic autumn produce: bananas, kale, pomegranates, coconuts, sugar cane, mangoes. My childhood seems to have been continually punctuated with the refrain, “Would you run down to the store, Sam, and get me …” from my mother. After the few inevitable episodes of change accidentally dropped while lugging the brown paper bag back up the side steps to the kitchen, for several months, as Mrs. Onley stood implacably calm behind the counter in her alternating white, blue, or green smocks, my entreaty was an embarrassed and insistent: “Mrs. Onley, please don’t give the change to me. You just put it in the paper bag. That way I don’t have to even touch it so that upstairs they’ll get it all!”
“No,” she would say, smiling. “You just take it in your hand and be careful.”
On our right was Mr. Lockley’s Hosiary and Housepaint Store. Mr. Lockley was a thin man, slightly darker than wrapping paper, with white hair, a withered face, and a game leg I always used to wonder whether or not was hinged and wooden, like my cousin Jimmy’s. Jimmy had lost his in the Second World War and played a pretty good game of chess. As the years went on, running the store was taken over more and more by Mr. Lockley’s balding son, Albert, and his red-headed daughter-in-law, Minnie. In memory that space, always dim, seems to extend for blocks and blocks under the stamped tin ceiling and the first fluorescent lights in the neighborhood. Beside the narrow aisle, the square counter trays—the front ones of glass, those farther back in the store of wood—held rolls of black electrician’s tape, piles of orange and yellow yo-yos, boxes of carpet tacks, rings of cardboard with walnut-size rubber balls in each central hole, starred about with ten multichrome jacks; mousetraps (we had two under our kitchen sink), the larger versions of which, in my innocence, I had thought must be to catch cats; nails, screws, buttons, stacks of cheap plates so dusty I wondered who would eat from them; hammers, screwdrivers with clear yellow handles, pressboards full of thumbtacks, boxes of staples, Scotchtape rolls, the rrrurring key-copying machine; and small religious pictures in purple plastic frames, dusty as the plates.
Every evening Albert or Minnie would drag across the store window—full of bride dolls with chocolate brown