The American Shore. Samuel R. Delany
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Studies (Michel Benamou, director) where I was a fellow in 1977, provided a number of astute and helpful readers during the final birth-pangs of this text, including Professor Teresa de Lauretis, then assistant director of the Center, and Assistant Professor Mary Kenny Badami of the Department of Communications. Finally, I must thank Thomas M. Disch. There is so much for which to thank him that partial enumeration, which is all this note affords, would merely misrepresent my gratitude. Let me end, then, by offering this simplest, this richest, this most endless of metonymies: I thank him for “Angouleme.”
1977
For his generous support and help for this 2013 Wesleyan University Press edition, from beginning to end, Matthew Cheney and I would both like to thank Gregory Feeley, executor of the literary estate of the late Thomas M. Disch. I am very grateful as well to Alex Luzopone for redrawing (and much improving upon) the illustrations that appeared in the first (Dragon Press) edition of this book.
Samuel R. Delany December 2013
The American Shore, Author’s Introduction
A reader who feels acutely the need for an introduction to the serious reading of science fiction, or for an introduction to those science fiction writers—Russ, Disch, and Zelazny paramount among them—whose work, appearing first in the early Sixties, contoured and codified a canon which could tolerate and profit by such a reading, or for an introduction to the s-f tradition out of which these writers arise and without which their work cannot be richly understood, that reader should find another book.
Having given that warning, we can easily conceive of a reader in a field like science fiction who needs reassurance rather than instruction. Such a reader might do well to turn immediately to the Exotexts and read sections 1, 3, and 4. (Sections 2 and 5 hinge on, if they do not exactly follow from, what will have gone before.) If, having read them, a reader still feels uncomfortable with the discourse (or simply offended by the rhetoric), my initial warning should most likely be heeded: read elsewhere.
This study presupposes a minimal familiarity with, if not a similar sympathy for, structuralist thought* of the past few decades. If it would be impracticable to introduce the science fictional topics above, it would be absurd to try to introduce here what is finally a disjunctive category including history, philosophy, anthropology, psychiatry, and literary criticism among many others. What we can do—again for the reader who needs reassurance—is describe very briefly what interests us about some of the intellectual endeavors that have been brought from time to time, and sometimes with vehement protest, under the structuralist heading.
First is the general concept that meaning is not contained in the sign but is extrinsic to it—that is, that the ontological location of meaning, more or less acknowledged with Saussure’s appropriation of the Stoic division of the sign (Greek σήμeιоν) into a signifier and a signified (“the perceptible signans and the intelligible signatum,” writes Jakobson in Main Trends in the Science of Language [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974], p. 19), lies in the signifier’s relation to other signifiers, and that the signified is therefore always a web of signifiers, malleable in four and possibly five dimensions, the gathering into signification of any part of which invariably further excites that malleability (and that the relational field in which all this finally registers as meaning is the neural web of the sentient body).* It is what we can say of the gross organization, synchronic and diachronic, of that web which we see as the reward to be gained from the study of any given sign, any set of signs, or any signifying figures. Even in those finally rather arbitrary physical situations where we might say, “The meaning of the atom is contained within the molecule,” or, “The meaning of the book is contained between its covers” (in both cases the term “meaning” is simply a metonymy for the expected signs themselves) we accede to this general concept of an extrinsic signified.
The second aspect of this thought that interests us is a highly rhetorical vocabulary—and finally a rather small one—which has arisen to handle those situations which the above outlined concept accounts for so much more elegantly (in the mathematical sense) than the concept of meaning contained in the sign, of meaning ontologically present in the materia of real signs, whether that meaning is considered material, mystical,** or relational. What intrigues us about this vocabulary is that, in an age of mutually incomprehensible specialist jargons, this particular jargon is at work in fields as diverse as the history of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contemporary poetics, topological critiques of art and information theory, Proustian criticism, and Marxist theoretics. This vocabulary gives a reasonably intelligent reader who is prepared to go slowly reasonable access to major work in these fields and many more. The inevitable distortions of popularization may be avoided; and because popularizations can be written in the same vocabulary, those popularizations that do occur distort less than the rather folksy ones usually inflicted. Though we entertain no illusions about some ideal universal language (for this jargon is no less elitist than any other, including literacy itself), nevertheless the possibility of interdisciplinary access strikes us as a good thing. We have found this rhetorical vocabulary useful.
This is perhaps the place to mention that from the beginning of whatever we may call structuralism there have been texts that employed this vocabulary but which, either by intention or oversight, lost sight of the initial concept. Given the makeup of Western languages in general—not to mention the general organization of Western culture—to lose sight of that concept is tantamount to assuming its reverse. When this reversal is intentional, the sign it most easily presents itself by is semantics—both term and concept.
The most useful description of semantics we know is the informal one given by Jerry A. Fodor: “Semantics is when you replace one set of words by another because they mean more or less the same thing.” The problematic phrase is “more or less.” What it subsumes is the resolution at which we regard this very important substitution without which discourse can not proceed. The informality of the description, however, acknowledges that there are always other resolutions at which different sets of words, however substitutable in a given situation, mean more or less different things; that different sets of words always maintain a rhetorical autonomy; and that when the only change in a given situation is the resolution at which we consider it, neither order of resolution (save possibly in the realms of Heisenberg; or in the neurological circuitry itself, which we have not begun to untangle) is privileged. In short, what we describe is the opposite of solipsism.
Semantics, then, as we use it throughout this study is a convenient way of referring to an effect of substitution: it does not indicate any linguistically privileged content that impels or allows such substitution. (As the author of that pinnacle among science fiction novels, The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester, once wrote: “For me there are no synonyms.”) To the extent that the following study relies on the initial concept and uses the aforementioned vocabulary, it may be (semantically) comprehensible to call it a structuralist or semiotic study.
On the other hand, Julia Kristeva has written, quite succinctly: “Rather than a discourse, contemporary semiotics takes as its object several semiotic practices which it considers translinguistic; that is, they operate through and across language, while remaining irreducible to its categories” (The Bounded Text, from Σημeιωτική, by Julia Kristeva [Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979]), whereas our object in this study is nothing less than the discourse of science fiction itself, its discursive organization, its rhetorical specificity, its specific difference. To facilitate our exploration we have employed certain semiotic practices, to be sure. But as our object remains what it is, this may be another reason not to classify this discursive analysis under the semiotic rubric.
With that as prologue, we may now introduce the investigation at hand. The concepts that make up the rest of this introduction can all be retrieved from the body of the study subsequent to their representation here. But an initial encounter with them—here—, ordered thus and given this emphasis, may provide another sort of reassurance:
On most of the following pages the reader will encounter brief passages (ranging from a word or two to several sentences) from the science fiction story “Angouleme” by Thomas M. Disch, numbered,