The American Shore. Samuel R. Delany
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and dark, alive, yet covered with an impenetrable bark of language enclosing some inner semantic density, shedding its dry, brittle, and finally dead exfoliations of meaning at our feet. Nor must we think of the text as a creature displaced by its own, sudden self-consciousness when, clothes a-gape and privates dangling, it squats revealed at some necessary, natural, yet nevertheless embarrassing function once the door of insight is smartly and smugly yanked back. On the other hand, if we do think of the text, finally, as piloting us, sleek and gleaming, at speeds approaching that of light anywhere in the known universe and possibly beyond, we must do so with a clear apprehension (if not a healthy apprehensiveness) of the vast complexities to the machinery that make such a journey possible, the constant testing and retesting of each of its components, the overriding importance of ground control, the immense number of discrete data that must dovetail at every instant on voyages whose very scope and range are signs of a monumental constitutive precision—lest we plunge into some mystical sun only to be conflagrated by its nether mists a million miles from its unreachable heart, crash on some implacable rock to shatter on impact with its airless, icy despair, break open in the absurd and ignorant vacuum of space itself because one small, hard meteor of fact accidentally scraped some unforeseen structural flaw in our armature so that we are exposed to, absorbed by, and lost in, the vast, factless silence which is ultimately what most of the known universe after all is—or that we simply do not erupt in pathetic, shocking flames while still on the launching pad, the very countdown remaining incomplete.
The best way to preserve the text from our own abuses upon it is to make clear the only view that can justify the present undertaking: the view which holds that criticism (assuming it is done with passion and precision) has an autonomous value in itself.5 It is not a poor relation, bearing the same name but living in the town, of that half-mad monster Literature dwelling in the castle on the hill—a threadbare soul now cajoling coins from the townspeople with exaggerated tales of the elegance of the table settings and the atrociousness of the table manners up the slope or, upon rare visits to the castle itself, extorting candlesticks and pillowcases from the demented scions with threats to expose their decadent goings-on to the good citizens below; then the return to the public square next morning, linen and pewter waving, as proof of an association for a populace too dazzled by the pedigree to do more than Oooh and Aaah at any chicanery.
We must begin this study with the conviction that criticism has its autonomous value, just as we must begin with the conviction that science fiction has its autonomous value—and is not merely the idiot cousin of fiction.
In summary then:
We shall try to keep our model rich.
(As to its precision, we can not profess it; we can only demonstrate.)
And we shall try to use the pressure of other texts (within the series or no) not to limit ourselves or our modes of inquiry, but as reminders of the reality of the continuity to be retrieved—a continuity of what the text can say. And we shall try to avoid, in every way, using that pressure as a reassurance of, or a judgment on, the success of our access to our object.
1. “This approach to the signifier” to quote Jonathan Culler in Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975) “derives from what Jacques Derrida calls a ‘metaphysics of presence’ which longs for a truth behind every sign: a moment of original plenitude when form and meaning were simultaneously present to consciousness and not to be distinguished. Though dissociation is a fact of our post-lapsarian state, it is assumed that we should still try to pass through the signifier to the meaning that is the truth and origin of the sign and of which the signifier is but the visible mark, the outer shell” (p. 19).
2. Diagrams and example are, of course, from The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious (1957) by Jacques Lacan, included in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, 1970).
3. To make the distinction between oral and chaironic creation at the beginning is to say that the two processes that begin here continue along notably different trajectories: see “On Pure Story-Telling,” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw by Samuel R. Delany (Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press, 1977). More recently that essay is contained in About Writing: Five Essays, Four Letters, and Six Interviews (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005).
4. In “Thickening the Plot” by S. R. Delany, contained in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, a text which dramatizes, if not clarifies, many of the assumptions underlying the paragraph above.
5. In our epoch the journey toward a sensitive and incisive criticism begins, of course, with the assumption that the critical purpose is to return the reader to the criticized text with greater understanding and increased responsiveness. But such a purpose, as it is achieved, deconstructs into the assumption above. For if the critical text is to turn the reader to anything, whether in action or contemplation, it must do so by the strength of its own garnered and organized charge. It cannot borrow that charge from any other text: reference is not receipt. In such light all criticism is, finally, occasional. And the critic most likely to succeed is the one who sees it as an occasion to be risen to—rather than a level to be descended to or, even more common in our day, an enterprise to be descended upon: vertical value-models (i.e., gravitic), as we shall soon see (see commentary for lexias 214 to 218), are one of the prime targets of science fiction.
4
The Diffused Text
In the structural consideration of a given work what must be structured is, of course, the consideration—the work under consideration presumably having its structure and whatever potential to convey it. We only hope the structure of our endeavor will provide an extensive enough scaffolding from which we may model1 those aspects of the work beneath that will illuminate our object. The form chosen for the consideration, then, must be determined by our intuitive apprehension of the work itself; for rich and efficient modeling there must be some initial intuited congruence. The form we have chosen, therefore, inspired by the text, is polysemous,2 detailed, and mutable.
1) ANGOULEME / Once sunk in its euphony, what the general American reader is most likely to take from the encounter with this first lexia is its mystery. Indeed, the most likely place for that general reader to have encountered the name before is the Duchesse d’Angoulême,3 of whom, by 1816, de Rollebon was the sole confidant—de Rollebon, the biographical subject of Antoine Roquentin, protagonist of Sartre’s La Nausée: the name, for an American, signals erudition as we proceed out from it in any direction. It sits at the head of the text, titling it and, for the general reader, entitling it to the mystery of that erudition. But the destruction of that mystery is one of the topical tasks of the text. During our first reading it revealed itself as a forgotten name for the American shore (as Crysopolis is the ancient name for Usküdar, the Asian shore of Istanbul), recondite, historical, a forgotten fact at a monument’s base. Here at our first lexia we recall that the revelation did not occur till our 42nd. But what of our 287th how long ago now completed? We have turned back to the title, as if reclaiming the word above the text (reclaiming the signifier from above the signified) were the only way to apprehend for certain what, indeed, it was the title of. “Angouleme”-the-story is a faulty algorithm4 for murder, a program for death that didn’t work—like a computer program for figuring out a problem that is ultimately memorable because of the mistakes it contains. “Angouleme”-the-title is the name of that program, as another might be named Pay Scale Differentiation 2-A, or Buster Brown Account, or Harry–B-7–December. By a simple semantic substitution and transformation we may read it, then: “The Forgotten name for America is a faulty algorithm for death”—if we believe in the fiction of semantics. This is—obviously—not what the title means. But it is one of the things (by that transformation) the title can say. Whether or not it says it strongly or weakly is a matter of whether or not we can apprehend, twice sieved through the tale’s double futurity (see commentary to lexia 2), enough of the texture and structure of the American society which the story orders up and organizes on and of our individual imaginative fields to argue for agreement—and of course whether or not one holds with this title transformation as a true statement about the