The American Shore. Samuel R. Delany
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whether Hitler’s or Stalin’s or, in its so much milder form, that most social of social constructs—the “human nature” which everyone seems so reluctant to do battle with in the name of pleasure in this country today.8
The American Shore stands not only as a testament to and demonstration of a certain kind of literary analysis, but also as a guerrilla attack on the neoclassical concept of Aristotelian unities and Poe’s concept of the single effect in a short story. An especially creative critic might make a plausible case for “Angouleme” as a story that heeds some or most of these unities, but Delany makes the opposite move. The majority of The American Shore not only displays Disch’s text through diffusion, it insists on plurality: this is only one diffusion of the text, and however exhaustive the many pages may seem, we can imagine them doubled again with a different diffusion, cut up into a new set of lexias—the refused text diffused and refused again. It is impossible to create or communicate ideas and concepts without unities (the process is itself unifying); it is likely impossible in most cases to account for all anomalies. The error Delany identifies arises from universalizing unities, from dehistoricizing, dematerializing. The American Shore, by binding a text between covers, exists as a unity. It is not a random collage. But neither is it the essence of “Angouleme” or the final statement or the only possibility. It contains multitudes, and multitudes of multitudes could be spun from it, and multitudes of those multitudes are unknown to it, obscured by it, erased by it.
While most of the concerns of The American Shore are textual, the implications reach far beyond “Angouleme” or science fiction or literary theory, and this, for me, is the book’s great value and enduring gift. Delany offers us a model for thinking our way through a particular short story, but the habits we pick up by such practice may weaken or break more malign habits that constrict our perception of the world (and its texts).
The plurality of perspective inheres even in the pronouns. Delany employs a plural viewpoint throughout The American Shore. This may create in some readers’ ears a haughty tone, or perhaps an archaic one, for ours is an age of less formal, more individualized style even in academic prose. With a bit of effort, I soon convinced my mind’s ear to hear the plural pronouns not so much as the voice of a monarch pronouncing from on high, but the voice of someone welcoming me into a discussion, guiding me through the shards, ushering me into the we. In a book of so many diffusions, it became comforting to have that one, plural unity to hold onto.
Blank/Slug
Like much fiction, “Angouleme” uses blank space to indicate changes of scene or perspective, and The American Shore does not let even these blanks go without commentary. Into this silence, this semiotic emptiness, Delany fits musings and extrapolations, letting the empty lines serve as resting points before resuming the hustle and bustle of the broken text.
Delany explains that printers call these blank lines “slugs,” an evocatively unpretentious term. There are eight in “Angouleme.” They fall between lexias 28 and 29, 46 and 47, 75 and 76, 98 and 99, 133 and 134, 173 and 174, 206 and 207, and 242 and 243. They truly sit in between: not lexias of their own, and not exactly belonging to one of the lexias on either side, but rather suspended between them in discontinuity, filling in the blanks, leaking between the lines. They are ghost lexias, a presence within an absence, a haunting of the void.
Slugs disrupt the text from within—they give it order and shape by signaling some unspoken drift, thus taming what would otherwise be a jarring slip, an incoherence, by making it visible. They provide a flexibility within what Delany calls, in the second ghost lexia, “the necessary linearity of fictive time,” but they also render the flexibility readable. The slug is a sign: Mind the gap.
The ghost lexias, too, are a kind of sign to us, something different from the ordinary order of things within the text of The American Shore. In their expansiveness, they slow us down, and they encourage us to weave connections between the disparate threads unspooled by the lexias. Many of the ghost lexias offer explicit commentary on the project at hand, moving us a level of perception above the more immediate task of getting in the way of Disch’s text, though the lexias and ghost lexias are united by the common job of, as Delany says at the fifth slug, “circling, searching, thrusting.”
Voice/Text
Something that struck me on my most recent rereading of The American Shore is how strongly certain sentences and phrases within the commentaries give a sense of narration. Obviously, one of the topics they return to is that of the narrative voices of “Angouleme,” and therefore this topic is central to any reading of The American Shore, but I have in the past always read it rather simply and naively as the commentaries being Delany’s Voice, and thus in some way more truthful and less artful than the polysemous voices of fiction. But as countless critics have told us, narrators are constructs, regardless of whether we judge a text to fit somehow in the category of fiction or the category of nonfiction. While certainly Delany’s purpose in writing The American Shore was to convey information and ideas about science fiction, textuality, and “Angouleme,” we should stay alert to the textuality of The American Shore itself.
This is also one of the joys of the book, the pleasures of its text. Delany is, though a rather different sort of writer, at least as fine a prose stylist as Disch, and even in the passages here built from the most abstruse language, the chains of words themselves generate a kind of abstract poetry. Certain statements and turns of phrase deserve to be appreciated on their own (I’m especially fond of a sentence from the commentary on lexia 182: “The mother Sniffles will not call for tomorrow is the man they wish to murder today.”) Don’t neglect the occasional wordplay, too, or the alliterative poetry—for instance, from the commentary on lexia 66: “a simple movement through time, temper, and textual timbre.” We can attend to the textuality of the commentaries themselves, and attune our ears to their timbres, too.
Slash/Virgule
In Richard Miller’s translation of S/Z, the “/” is called a slash. In The American Shore, Delany calls the mark a virgule. It has had other names as well (e.g., solidus, generally for the “/” used in figures and fractions). This polyonymous punctuation points to a central feature of much structuralist and poststructuralist thinking: the exploration and analysis of binaries, dichotomies, dualities, and oppositions. (A completely incomplete list: signifier/signified, langue/parole, writerly/readerly, presence/absence, subject/object, nature/culture, raw/cooked.)
Barthes does not declare what he means by “S/Z” until the forty-seventh of ninety-three mini-essays (“divagations,” in Richard Howard’s term) scattered through the book. Barthes’s meanings have much to do with Balzac’s “Sarrasine” and the French language, but a few clauses from the final sentence of that divagation are worth bearing in mind: “[It] is the slash of censure, the surface of the mirror, the wall of hallucination, the verge of antithesis, the abstraction of limit, the obliquity of the signifier, the index of the paradigm, hence of meaning.”9
Of his virgules, Samuel Delany says, in his introduction, “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.”10 He follows this with a key point about the “gravitic nonsense that constrains so much of our discourse in matters of meaning”—the simple formula of x over y is also a simple hierarchy, the x being in the literally superior position.
Science Fiction/Mundane Fiction
Throughout The American Shore, Delany refers to fiction that is not s-f, and particularly the sort of fiction generally considered “literary,” as mundane. On one level, this is purely descriptive: etymologically, mundane means “of the world.” But Delany is also here very aware of the connotations—my thesaurus lists these synonyms to start: humdrum, dull, boring, tedious, monotonous, tiresome, wearisome, unexciting, uninteresting …
There is a tinge of s-f chauvinism here, but that is not merely or primarily why mundane is a necessary term in this text. The need for that word returns us to the concept