The American Shore. Samuel R. Delany
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only through an act of imaginative will around some morphological overdetermination—ornithopter, hyperspace, spaceship…. Such nodes of imaginative energy are what charge the structure of the science fiction text and determine the imaginative trajectory of the reader through it; they are a part of the ordering energies that shape our basic object of examination itself: the greater continuity. Only when we take measure of these energy nodes is the “plot similarity” that frequently manifests itself between one s-f story and another mundane tale revealed as illusory. To read s-f as if it were mundane gives us no way adequately to account for the color, the glamour, the exotica with which s-f replaces the worldly stabilia. Since the energy of all these exotica in interplay constitutes the science fictional structure, if we have a model that cannot account for them, how can any map through them, made with such a model as a basic surveying tool, be of more than passing use?
The model we propose, in place of the above, is richer in many, many ways. Specifically, however, it will have the following at its kernel:
Fictive creation begins as the hand, holding the pen above the paper, descends to trace written symbols across the lined or unlined void. (It begins, if oral, as the tongue, for the first time, gathers itself up from the floor of the mouth to chant out the new tale; if it is typewritten, as the fingers begin their rain/reign on the responsive keys.3) All else—thinking about what one is going to write, mulling over themes, calculating effects, bringing to bear the intellect, the emotions, the spirit, or ideology on these thoughts, even the netting from the speech centers of anticipated phrases that may go, unrectified (having been stored in memory’s foreground for hours, days, weeks, seconds), directly into the composition—is preparation for fictive creation. As such, the preparation is only partially retrievable from an examination of the text; such retrieval may occur only through more or less informed supposition.
Fictive creation is the restructuring of that prepared material by the fixing of a set (or series) of signifiers whose order (and, indeed, whose past order is frequently revised in light of what the restructuring reveals) this restructuring both is and impels.
Elsewhere4 we have likened this process to watching a performance and notating the action on the stage in a situation set up so that the notation itself would intrude on and influence the subsequent stage action and decor. This “intrusion and influence” is the creation we shall speak of. It is not the process of “preparing” a meaning, an image, a pure signified (which certainly involves other signifiers—words or other signs, but which we call “signified” here because it is mental and not yet re-presented [i.e., restructured] by utterance), but is rather the process of letting that signified strike up a signifier, which is fixed by tongue or hand, and the fixing of which, as it re-enters the signified, recontours that signified in such a way that the infinite regress (or better, progress) of specifically fictive discourse is begun and continued. What makes our theatrical metaphor too simple is the infinitely complex backstage equipment that would have to exist—a computer vast as the brain—as well as the complexity of preparation (the whole history and texture of the culture) that the theatrical image simply will not encompass.
But what even as unstudied a view as this should tell us, once and for all, is that fictive creation is dense, complex, and irretrievable in any systematic way till more of the psychophysiology of language is known. It should also make perfectly clear that the object we are seeking, and seeking to explore—the greater continuity—simply cannot be identified with the creative process itself.
The Coleridge description, “Prose is words in the best order; poetry is the best words in the best order,” returns to mind, though recontoured in emphasis: the concepts of word and order share the mystery between them, rather than any emblem of good, better, or best. All utterance is creative in the specific sense of fictive creation (though not in the vulgar Chomskian sense of producing an infinite variety of original utterances: anyone who listens to real speech as 99 percent of peasants, politicians, poets, aristocrats, academicians, and prose writers speak it must be stunned into muteness by its sheer, unoriginal repetitiveness); it is creative in that this recontouring process across the arbitrary (by which we mean “arbitrary-as-opposed-to-fixed,” i.e., mobile from case to case, rather than “arbitrary-as-opposed-to-caused,” i.e., random and without explanation for any particular case) Saussurian bar is always operative. This creativity makes for the repetitions, the re-explanations, the developments, and the general recursive texture to the speech of both the most literate and illiterate rhetoric, that constant impulse common to the common speech of all social classes to try to say the same thing more and more accurately because once it is said, “it” is no longer the “same”—a process that may be one, finally, with the process discussed by Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, by which the dream material is not complete until it is re-presented as speech, which representation actually alters the dream material itself, sometimes toward completion, sometimes toward simple emendation, so that (sometimes) the dream must be described and interpreted and described and interpreted and described again, each description/interpretation altering the actual dream residue in the mind/memory/unconscious.
Only the far greater quantity of such repetition and re-explanation and development collapsed about far fewer semes establishes the qualitative difference between fictive art and babel.
The greater continuity we are seeking, then, if it can not be identified with fictive creation, must be specifically identified with what the text can say. The problem here, of course, is that some people will argue that the text can say anything the reader hears; and by extension the text says everything. Our answer is simply: That is not a continuity. That is merely a collection. The text may well say everything, but it also says some things more emphatically than others; it says them in different modes (like affirmation and denial); it says them in a particular order. The order is not only lisibly diachronic (what the text says from beginning to end of itself) but memorially synchronic (what the text has to say connotatively, what it has to say resonantly—at the same time it is speaking denotatively; and the fact that one is specifically a denotation, the other specifically a connotation, and the third specifically a resonance is part of that synchronic ordering). A text orders an infinite set of strong statements, and an infinite set of not so strong statements, about itself, in spectral layers. (If, by extension, it suggests to some a way of ordering the infinitude of all possible statements, this is a matter of their diligence, which may indeed be greater than ours….) Hopefully these fine points will obviate the necessity of asking the absurd question: “What does the text mean?” and absorb what is relevant under that question into the concept of the ordered relation of the plenitude of things the text can reasonably (with clear or cloudy emblems of its reasons, which reasons may extend from chance through playfulness to necessity) speak of. This is the continuity we are searching for.
Anything that we can reasonably suppose about the fictive preparation becomes, as we commit our suppositions to paper, a set of statements, more or less strong, that the text may be said to have ordered up about itself; these statements then—effect the ordering up of others.
That is the process—no less, but no more.
No mode of criticism of the text—biography of the author, syntactic or metric analysis, historical reconstruction of the author’s epoch, parallels (thematic or organizational) with texts written long before or long after the text to hand, computer-assisted analysis of word recurrence—is a priori inappropriate as long as the underlying assumptions of these various modes of critical discourse have been questioned, and we do not make demands on the particular discourse that those assumptions flatly prevent it from ever meeting with anything but mystification. And here we must remind ourselves that the various modes of critical discourse are themselves nodes in a textus: they do not form a hierarchically valued list of methodologies. This is to say: when confronted with a critical text, it is the critical discourse that provides the signifier. At that point the text analyzed is part of the signified, standing, recontoured, beneath it. The understood text is the meaning of the criticism; the criticism is not the meaning of the text.
In such an undertaking as this, amidst such mutilations as we shall perform, it is of course necessary to preserve the text under discussion from certain imaginative abuses.