The American Shore. Samuel R. Delany
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of “Angouleme” text preceding it) printed in roman type. Such a graphic configuration on the page must call up, both by metaphor and metonymy, that formula so easily attributable to Saussure, S/s, signifier over signified, word over meaning, icon over interpretation. But this reading, this evocation, is entirely contoured by gravity: the weighty signified below, the airy signifier above … the signified holding the signifier down by the same gesture with which it holds it up … the signified from which pure signification (the valued, weightless essence contained in any signified) diffuses upward through the bar rendered permeable by the corrosive action of the desiccated signifier weighing on it, so that this pure signification, having aspired, now holds the signifier aloft, straining against the heavy signified under it, but without whose signification that signifier would collapse into meaninglessness, lacking all support … all of which is to trace out the locus of gravitic nonsense that constrains so much of our discourse in matters of meaning.
Science fiction, as we shall shortly discuss (see commentary to lexia 218), constitutes the prime demotic attack on gravitic value systems —those value systems (of thought, speech, and written analysis) that organize not only the schema above but which organize as well almost all our rhetoric about society (with its lower and upper classes), intelligence (of the higher and lower sort), and social evolution (that has reached a higher or lower level)—in brief, any discourse where the image lower signs the presence “of lesser value” and the image higher signs the presence “of greater value,” however oblique, however critical the expression. And it holds equally for their converse systems, where the basic is of the greatest value and the superficial or the superfluous is of the least.
This is a text on science fiction: contouring it at every point is that gravitically neutral space (free-fall) where imagination streaks between worlds, between stars. Any reader who cannot get free of the gravitic orientation, who cannot allow the lexias and commentary to rotate freely about that most arbitrary bar, who cannot read the commentary as signifier and the criticized text as signified (the text fragment namely a metonymic entrance to the plurality of the signified) as easily as a more conventional discourse coerces from us the more conventional reading, that reader had best take our initial warning: find another book. Indeed, if an initial interest has prompted a reader to come this far who must now turn away, perhaps the book to seek is 334 by Thomas M. Disch,* in which the text of “Angouleme” also occurs, surrounded and intruded on by a set of fictions different from those we indulge here—a set we can claim unreservedly is at least as elegant as—if not notably more so than—our own.
New York, 1977
(revised 1982)
*Here we are taking an unfair, if not an illiterate, American privilege by calling a (till recently) primarily European dialogue, whose successive movements are designated by the participants “structuralist,” “poststructuralist,” “deconstructionist,” “semiological,” etc., with what for many, if not most, of these men and women is the hopelessly contaminated term.
*With Saussure’s conviction that only the signifier could be rigorously, scientifically studied, we commence what a generalized structuralist critique has variously termed, first, the privilege of the signifier and, finally, the tyranny of the signifier. Though our own enterprise begins within that tradition—beneath that tyranny as it were—with the most careful attention paid to the signifier, signed by fraying the signifier twice and at two different densities across the pages of our own text, we have tried to subvert that tyranny by a critical response to the signified rendered, by fictive creation (see the Context, p. 36), a hopefully luminous cotextus of signifiers.
**Today (June 2013), I would write “transcendental” rather than “mystical.” As with the use of “mundane,” some readers may consider that too extreme a swipe at those whom I took for my polemical adversaries at the time of writing—or, indeed, may consider it not clear enough.
*Thomas M. Disch, 334 (New York: Avon Books, 1974; Vintage Books, 2014).
A Road along the Shore
An Introduction to The American Shore
—by Matthew Cheney
If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Now/Then
The American Shore is likely the most thorough exploration of a single science fiction text yet published. No matter what we end up thinking of its approach and insights, no reader could deny that it is anything less than an impressive intellectual performance. Around Thomas M. Disch’s short story “Angouleme,” Samuel R. Delany wraps pretexts, contexts, and Exotexts; most impressively, he divides the text into 287 lexias whose accompanying commentaries explore and expound upon Disch’s words and sentences.
Delany provided an introduction to The American Shore when it was first published in 1978, and in it he declares this book is not itself an introduction to the topics of science fiction or structuralism, and that it presupposes at least a basic familiarity with both. This is true. I would further add that this book is not an introduction to Delany’s thought on these subjects. For that, one must turn to Starboard Wine, a collection of essays Delany put together after spending a term as a fellow at the Center for 20th Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where he used The American Shore as a textbook. “Although,” he writes in Starboard Wine, “these essays are not a systematic introduction to The American Shore, needless to say, reading them will certainly leave one better prepared to grapple with it.”1
To pick up this book now—I write these words in the early days of 2013—is to pick it up encumbered by the weight of the years since 1978, when it was first published. The American Shore speaks to us from a world that has not yet experienced the Internet, cyberpunk, New Historicism, queer theory, President Ronald Reagan, or AIDS. Delany finished writing it in April 1977, one month before the release of Star Wars. Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Althusser’s wife, Hélène, were all still alive. As was Thomas M. Disch.
That world is gone. Time has added another text to the many texts herein: a palimpsest made of the past. Our knowledge of the years between now and then may obscure or clarify the words. The effect is unavoidable, inevitable.
Stories like “Angouleme,” set in a future extrapolated from present trends, wear their age a bit differently from other fictions. While some elements of the radical strangeness of the future proposed by “Angouleme” remain, others have become more odd or anachronistic, or even had their power reduced by the changes between the present in which Disch wrote and our own.
Consider a single detail from the story: “Papa, the executive, remarried, a man this time and somewhat more happily.” In lexia 11, when the sentence appears in context, Delany makes no mention of the marriage, but in lexia 66 he compares it with a later passage, saying the marriage signals “a rhetorical tradition of radical utopian reorganization.” Homosexual marriage was, indeed, a utopian concept at a time when sodomy laws were still enforced in some regions of the United States, homosexuals could legally be denied jobs and housing for reasons of sexual orientation, homosexual couples were forbidden from adopting children, and parents whose orientation became known often lost custody of their children in divorces. Forty years after “Angouleme” originally appeared (in the first issue of New Worlds Quarterly), the New York State Senate passed the Marriage Equality Act, legalizing same-sex marriage in New York.2 Gay marriage is not itself utopia, of course, but its transformation in cultural status from a radical notion at the time of The American Shore’s writing to a liberal norm in our own is a vivid example of how passing time can affect the meaning of a text.
Science fiction is fundamentally about the present in which it is written, and so its futures are born past their expiration dates. But time