The American Shore. Samuel R. Delany
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is constituted of the richness, resonance, and harmony of the three discourses. No one of the discourses, by itself, can yield up a signifier that will cover either (or both) of the other two as signified. The other two immediately start to jar, rattle, slip from beneath, and begin their own, inexhaustible and autonomous commentaries. This situation is what, finally, makes s-f rich, transcendent, optimistic (it poses a discourse—and creates a dialogue—where mundane fiction can not), and mystical. (Lexia 8)
Few passages in Delany’s published work can compete with the eighth lexia for vehemence in insisting that science fiction possesses unique qualities absent from other types of fiction. (That italicized can not is like a shoe pounding on a desk.)18 Rather than seeing the vehemence and insistence as simply a bit of boosterism for a favorite type of writing, though, we should remember the context in which the words were written, a context where, especially in academia, science fiction was rarely taken seriously as anything more than escapist formula fiction for adolescents and semiliterates. While the choice of “mundane fiction” as a label rather than “literary fiction” might seem to sell the superiority of science fiction, the language is not actually about the superiority or inferiority of anything, because Delany rigorously avoids the gravitic discourse that forces us into relations of higher and lower. The connotations within “mundane fiction” and “science fiction” serve, temporarily, to flip the binary trapped within such discourse, but the more important and lasting project of The American Shore is to open a space in which we can see how structures that are generically different work.
Whether the idea of a trivalent discourse is one that must necessarily and exclusively be applied to science fiction is not a question I will pursue here, because what is valuable to the reader of The American Shore is not so much to debate the validity of the concept as to note the work that the concept does within this text. It opens possibilities for analysis beyond binary oppositions, because not only does it expand beyond duality, but trivalence is combinatory rather than oppositional. By creating a space that cannot be reduced to less than three discourses, and in which those discourses mingle, meld, and produce “inexhaustible and autonomous commentaries,” science fiction (in Delany’s conception) gives us a route away from the limitations of infinite binary series. Mundane fiction gets left behind in the structuralist dust while science fiction finds a way out of the dualistic prison via a poststructuralist escape hatch.
Disch/Delany
The ever-unreliable scholar Charles Kinbote ends the Foreword of Pale Fire with words that Nabokov seems to have meant to be those of a madman:
Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his (being too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work), with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him, has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.19
The idea of the commentator, or anyone, having the last word is perhaps the greatest clue to Kinbote’s madness, but there is delusional grandiosity, too, in his insistence that his commentary provides a human reality to the text. Which is not to deny that there are humans and realities and texts. But as Jorge Luis Borges showed with “Borges and I,” the relationship between those words human, reality, and text is complicated.
Nonetheless, like corporeal signifieds to ink-spewing signifiers, writers dwell somewhere in the penumbra of author-functions, a person behind a byline.
With the possible exception of Hart Crane, Thomas M. Disch (1940–2008) is the writer Samuel R. Delany has devoted the most pages to. Mostly, that’s because of The American Shore, but you will also find two essays specifically about Disch in Starboard Wine and numerous sentences and paragraphs devoted to his work throughout Delany’s other essays and interviews. Additionally, Delany edited a collection of Disch’s work, Fundamental Disch (New York: Bantam, 1980), a book that collects eighteen short stories, three important essays, and the libretto to The Fall of the House of Usher, an opera Disch wrote with composer Gregory Sandow.
For Disch’s biography, the most useful text for the reader of The American Shore is the first Exotext herein, “Auctorial Interfaces,” which gives us not so much the facts of Disch’s life and bibliography as Disch’s life and bibliography through Samuel Delany’s eyes as he was working on The American Shore.
We might (for our own purposes of reminder, of warning) put two statements together, one from Barthes in S/Z, and one from Delany’s Exotext:
Barthes: “This ‘I’ which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost).”20
Delany: “Thus we weave together the fictions that are the signifiers of our friends’ biographies, the biographies of distant authors, and—who knows—the biographies of ourselves.”
Thomas M. Disch lived and wrote for thirty-one more years after Delany finished writing The American Shore in April 1977. Disch developed a strong reputation as a poet, he wrote numerous book and theater reviews, created the text for an innovative computer game in 1986, Amnesia, and his children’s books—The Brave Little Toaster and The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars—were adapted as popular animated movies. He published five more novels of great craft, irony, and power: On Wings of Song (which won the John W. Campbell Award and was listed by Harold Bloom in The Western Canon) and then four novels in what came to be called the Supernatural Minnesota series: The Businessman, The M.D., The Priest, and The Sub. His play The Cardinal Detoxes was denounced by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, which tried to have performances shut down. His final novel, The Word of God, was released days before his death, and his final short story collection, The Wall of America, appeared a few months later. Of the works published after The American Shore and Fundamental Disch, Delany considers the masterpieces to be On Wings of Song; the story collection The Man Who Had No Idea; a short novel serialized in Amazing Stories in 1992, A Troll of Surewould Forest. Additionally, Delany cites an uncompleted novel, The Pressure of Time, as among Disch’s best works (significant pieces of that novel were published as separate short stories in the 1970s).
Disch’s idiosyncratic (and often scathing) 1998 study of science fiction, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, won him his only Hugo Award, the most prestigious award bestowed by science fiction fans, an award for which he had only three other nominations—as opposed to nine nominations (but no wins) for the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute wrote that “Disch went relatively unhonoured by a sub-culture awash in awards for the bestowing.”21 The general readership of science fiction and its organized fandom never quite knew what to make of him, and his work proved ultimately too complex and caustic for mass popularity ever to be its fate.
The last years of Disch’s life were marked by enormous difficulties and tragedies. His life-partner of more than thirty years, Charles Naylor, had died of malignant melanoma (without health insurance). Diabetes, arthritis, and other ailments had made Disch’s own health precarious. A severe fire had destroyed the considerable library in his and Naylor’s Manhattan apartment, and burst pipes rendered their country house unlivable and destroyed even more books and papers. Because Disch had spent most of the last year of Naylor’s life at the country house, the landlord of their rent-controlled Manhattan apartment was seeking his eviction, since a provision of New York rent-control policies requires the apartment to be a primary residence.
Over the July 4 weekend in 2008, Thomas M. Disch shot himself. “He was,” the novelist Norman Rush said, “simply ground down by the sequence of catastrophes.”22
End/Beginning
We never come to the end. To claim our interpretation—our diffusion, our united set of lexias—as definitive is to join