The American Shore. Samuel R. Delany
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written, or the way they were read in 1813, or the way they were read in 1953.) Additionally, differences in the production, distribution, and reception of texts between the time of The American Shore’s publication and today may heighten or diminish some of the insights Delany offers, or may hide from us some of the reasons for certain points receiving emphasis, certain terms being chosen, certain theories insisted on. Well-armed with our knowledge of what came next, we may miss some of the details and unique turns of the text before our eyes. On the other hand, we are more fortunate than the original readers of The American Shore in that the distance of years has been accompanied by many more books from Samuel Delany, including essays and interviews that develop, advance, explicate, and complicate the ideas herein. Unlike the original readers, we can look back on this book as one facet of a project.
Our vantage point is one more layer, as valuable as the rest (and, nonetheless, inescapable). It is worth the effort to seek the situation of the world-text when any work was written, but it is pointless to resent the present. From our position as citizens of a realized future, we read as archaeologists and genealogists. Meaning is made by the memory of reading and rereading. Every text is past.
S/Z/etc.
Delany mentions various precursors to The American Shore (in “Part III: The Context”): Bernard Grebanier’s The Heart of Hamlet, Damon Knight’s “An Annotated ‘Masks,’” Vladimir Nabokov’s copious commentary accompanying his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, and Roland Barthes’s S/Z.
“An Annotated ‘Masks’” aimed at giving science fiction readers and aspiring writers an insight into the sorts of specific choices that created a single short story—and, more important, a single science fiction story. Its specificity and, most important, its focus on the meanings that science fiction produces in a text, are replicated by orders of magnitude here.
The Heart of Hamlet and Nabokov’s commentaries on Eugene Onegin are works of literary criticism and philology. Whereas the connection of The American Shore to Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin is straightforward (texts diffused), The Heart of Hamlet has long been out of print and its significance to The American Shore is less obvious, as Grebanier does not carry out a word-by-word or line-by-line reading of the whole of Hamlet. Instead, he attempts to cut through centuries of commentary on Shakespeare’s play and to show that we have lost the actual text beneath the obfuscations of discourse around it. He pays close attention to passages that, he proposes, answer questions critics created from their own assumptions, prejudices, and less than careful readings. While little to no commentary on “Angouleme” had accrued before Delany wrote The American Shore, there were prejudices and assumptions that, indeed, obscured the text: prejudices and assumptions about what science fiction is, should be, and can be.
Pale Fire is a work of fiction disguised as a poem and the commentary about it. Readers’ understanding of the fiction hinges on their interpretation of the relationship between the commentary and the poem. Because of the unreliability of Charles Kinbote, the putative editor of the scholarly edition of John Shade’s poem, Pale Fire’s meanings remain ambiguous and multifaceted. The ambiguity extends across numerous levels of the text, from the poem “Pale Fire” through the critical apparatus and to the relationship between all the words and characters. The universe of the novel flows between its texts.
To anyone familiar with French structuralism in the latter half of the twentieth century, the obvious precursor to The American Shore may seem to be Roland Barthes’s S/Z, ostensibly an exploration of Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine.” It is from Barthes that Delany draws certain techniques, particularly the use of lexias (units of reading) as diffusing tools. What Delany does with the lexias, though, is unique to him. Barthes uses his lexias to locate “five major codes under which all the textual signifiers can be grouped” throughout “Sarrasine,”3 but Delany is not interested in categorizing the language of narration into any limited number of types.
While S/Z is important to some of the form of The American Shore, a great knowledge of Barthes is not a tremendous help with Delany, or vice versa. The influence of S/Z is similar to the influence of the other texts Delany mentions, though influence is too powerful a word, and we should think more in terms of something softer, more associative: a trace, an intimation, a whiff. Ships signaling each other as they pass in the night. Precursors in spirit, but also, sometimes, opponents off of which to bounce and riff.
The key concepts of S/Z are arranged around the five codes that Barthes employs, and he identifies the expression of these codes in each of the lexias. (The hermeneutic code governs mystery and suspense by creating questions and the desire for answers; the semic code indicates connotative signifiers or cultural stereotypes that help readers recognize characters, motivations, and behaviors; the symbolic code guides readers’ understanding of the move from text to symbol; the proairetic code groups actions into sequences and thus creates a recognizable meaning for them; and the referential code indicates a body of cultural knowledge from which the text draws or toward which it gestures.) The codes serve to illustrate an idea Barthes expressed in his most famous essay, “The Death of the Author”: “We know now that a text consists not of a line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but of a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original: the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture.”4 (There are echoes here of a statement from Pale Fire: “I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.”)5
For Barthes, the codes are also “voices out of which the text is woven,” and he goes on to identify a voice for each code (Voice of Empirics, Voice of the Person, Voice of Science, Voice of Truth, Voice of Symbol).6 These codes and voices serve to highlight intertextuality and to undermine the dominant power that notions of authorial intention and individual genius can have over the ways texts are discussed.
The voices that Delany points to within Disch’s text are not the voices of any particular, generalizable code beyond that of the signifier/signified relationship or a chain of signifiers. Delany, too, seeks to open the text out beyond any single meaning. However, he is not systematically showing it to be a “fabric of quotations” from other texts or from culture generally, but rather to be a plane of signification. While such a plane could be endless, its contours suggest certain ways of meaning. Both Barthes and Delany are broadly engaged in a similar project—to show how their chosen texts produce meanings, to open up the possibilities of meaning within those texts, and to draw some insights from the process of identifying the systems of meaning production—but the purposes and goals of their projects are different enough that it is difficult to compare them any more specifically without wrenching them beyond recognition. The American Shore demonstrates a wide range of ways that “Angouleme” means, but its primary task is to show how it means as science fiction. Without the specific way of reading that is science fiction, Delany proposes, “Angouleme” is less meaningful, if it is meaningful at all. It would be inaccurate to label such a position Barthesian.
Unity/Plurality
In “Wagner/Artaud” (written from October 1983 to December 1987), Delany offers an efficient summation of his ideas on certain types of artistic unity and their relationship to social and political ideologies—ideas that weave through much of his critical writing, particularly from the mid-1970s and later:
For Hegel, writing in the first, glorious years of the Napoleonic onslaught, history and progress were forces that marched hand in hand. For Nietzsche, writing sixty-two years later, history was a nightmare and progress a joke…. But the conceptual screen both Hegel and Nietzsche worked against was one with the concept of unity put forth by Aristotle and [reiterated in the 19th century by] Poe.7 This nineteenth-century reductionism, this plea for a unity in which all that is anomalous can be ignored, this appeal to rationalism over empiricism, is behind the whole deadly concept of race; by the end of that century we will see its fallout in the virulent anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair, in what we now speak of as British imperialism, and in Rhodesian