The American Shore. Samuel R. Delany
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(lacunae in the fictive lives of recognizably continuous characters, settings, situations, as well as the implied gaps between various times of writing, the observable distances between places of publication, yet all of it recognizably of that series), is one pressure (among many) to accept the existence of some greater continuity, with its own coherence, in which each specific textual event lies embedded.
That greater continuity is our object of study.
Conceivably, this greater continuity might be retrieved by a complete study of all the texts in the chain. Critical common sense demands we turn to the other texts to locate endpoints of significant trajectories launched in the present tale, or to see if elements in the present tale are clarified if we construe them as the terminations of trajectories launched in preceding ones. Other than a survey of the rest of the stories in the series, what else critically is there?
But for our purpose, the study of other texts is here precisely what we intend not to do.
From time to time—but rarely—we may glance at one of the other tales in the series Disch has called by the title of the series’ longest novella, 334, but it will be only to note the most cursory verbal occurrences. We are here to examine what constitutes this particular textual event, not another—regardless of what relation to it another textual event may bear.
Such an examination of related texts would doubtless yield up insights. But behind such an enterprise is a critical model of the workings of fictive creation which we feel is simplistic; and to the extent that critics—and particularly critics of science fiction—constantly appeal to it to yield up insights it is simply inadequate to provide, we feel it is pernicious.
So we shall recognize it, we shall outline this model here, in hopes of latterly avoiding its ensnaring oversimplifications:
Fictive creation begins as a set of movements of mind—images, ideas, emotions, all in transition and interplay. The writer, using images of the stabilia of life—people, objects, buildings (and frequently using images of precisely those stabilia which set the mind in motion in the first place)—fixes names (sometimes the real ones, sometimes fictive ones) to the images of these stabilia, and then affixes the images to the various mental motions. The text produced, then, may be read as a map or even a document of the writer’s mental movements in real time against the fictive time of the narrative.
This model, hopefully, will be shown up as wrongheaded from beginning to end. But even before we explode it, we can note a few of its more obvious absurdities as general readers of science fiction, as readers who have just read a science fiction text. Whatever illusory coherence the above model may suggest, it is far greater for mundane fiction than for the glittering, evanescent, and jewel-like field under view. In mundane fiction the measure of the power of the imaginative field (by that model) is the recognizability of the material textures and structures dealt with. (Gogol is the most imaginative of the nineteenth-century Russian novelists because the panoply of his character vignettes is so life-like, so familiar….) But a scalar of familiarity is simply inadequate to measure the imaginative strength of science fiction. If the above model creates a paradox for mundane fiction, for science fiction it yields a sheer preposterousness.
Though some science fiction tales present a world more familiar than others (and “Angouleme” is one), as we view the rather bleak city-scape (with which “Angouleme” makes its point in antiphon), the objects, buildings, people, places, and modes of transportation between them (by which we characterize the bulk of science fiction) simply have nothing to do with our (present, at any rate) stabilia.
If we look at the above model again, we can recognize as one of its kernels the retrieved “Saussurian” concept of S/s—of signifier over signified, word over meaning, icon over interpretation, both terms clearly nameable, clearly locable, clearly separable by that impermeable bar.1 The psychiatrist Jacques Lacan has argued (and his argument, as the epigraph to this book suggests, is one among many) that this formula, though elegant, is ultimately too simple. The relation between signifier and signified, for Lacan, is an infinite regress of re-evaluation that sends charges in many directions. His witty example, which first gives the “Saussurian” version, and then his own revision, is presented with the following two diagrams. Consider the first, then the second:
Lacan’s implication is that all signifier/signified relations are really of the second type—even, presumably, TREE/
The conventional language of science fiction gives us a number of examples by which we can retrieve the integration process from that moment of psychological exhaustion where the process itself seems to disappear. To choose one: Take the word SHIP, the word SPACE, and the image of a rocket, and order them on the page thus:
Here we can get some feel for the regressive interaction between signifier(s) and signified(s) at perhaps a less lively dislocative charge than MEN/
But since our field is not psychoanalysis, or even linguistics, but science fiction, this briefest recapitulation of one tiny aspect of Lacan’s exhaustive exploration of the relation between the structure of language and the structure of the unconscious can only suggest, but not demonstrate, where we may discover our model.
In general, the poetics of prose lags behind the poetics of poetry proper because there is, through tradition, a greater willingness with poetry than there is with prose to seek what lies about the poetic signifier by shattering the poetic text in ways that render it “just language.” There is, through expediency, a hesitation before the prose text to undertake the greater labor of such a shattering for the frequently much longer work. In terms of possible tasks to hand, most criticism of prose qua prose is not very ambitious—an excuse, perhaps, for the simplistic model, but also that model’s result.
With a poem, say, in which a single word appears several times, we would not be confounded by a critic who claimed to be able to retrieve several possible trajectories (either in terms of the writer’s work or the reader’s) passing through the first occurrence of that word; and then a different set passing through the second occurrence; still others passing through the third; and so on. Nor would we be particularly discommoded if this critic claimed to locate any one of these individual trajectories continuing through any other word(s) in the poem. And certainly we would not be surprised if such a mapping of these varied movements illuminated the poetic totality/plurality. We are sure that anyone who can envision this hypothetical poem-and-commentary (whether as a good, bad, or indifferent reading) must envision it as a detailed reading, and longer than the text of the poem. What this vision of the poem-and-commentary coheres about is a model for the poetic enterprise that, for most modern readers, is substantially richer than the model we have for prose fiction—where the verbal appearance of each character, each object, each setting named can only be read as the cross-section of the locus of a single movement.
Now to read prose as if it were poetry, as we have hinted, is a betrayal. Such a reading can deal neither economically nor sensitively with the purely informative tropes that are the peculiarity of prose, nor with their relation to one another and the world on which so much of the experience of any prose fiction, science or mundane, depends.
To read science fiction as though it were mundane fiction is a similar betrayal. Though there may appear formal congruences between a mundane, and a science fiction, story, at precisely the point in one where we find that life-stabilium—bicycle,