The American Shore. Samuel R. Delany
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qualities making one general type of story superior to another, and (as Delany asserted in “Wagner/Artaud”) able to set up a hierarchy of humans based on the concept of race, to see human nature as unbounded by time or society, immutable. The practice of diffusion, the refusal of the unified, is not a practice that should be limited to reading texts. Our concepts go to work in our worlds. Delany’s practices and examples exhort us to keep working on our concepts lest those concepts work against us.
And therein lies the value of The American Shore. It may, on a quick glance, appear to be a book about a short story. On further examination, it may appear to be a book about how science fiction works, or a contribution to the literary and cultural theory of its day. It is those things, but not only those things. Like so much of Delany’s writing, its strategies and concerns nudge our view wider. Much as the best science fiction’s trivalent discourse easily lures us into considering the meaning produced by the intersections of world and text, and thus provides a powerful space for reflection on both, so Delany’s dive over and between the lines of “Angouleme” stands as a model for and instigator of various levels of thought about all the signs and languages that produce and obscure our lives. No great text ever ends if there are still readers to read it and reread it, to diffuse it and re-fuse it, reveling in the possibilities of polysemy and dissemination. Even the briefest moment of meaning can be, itself, a meaning machine. Signifiers and signifieds want to dance till the end of time.
The American Shore employs systems and terminologies that Delany would not take up as thoroughly again, if at all (the concept of Inward and Outward Signifiers, the play of voices in science fiction, and other ideas more specific to “Angouleme,” such as the difference between the children’s and adults’ voices). His decision to keep some of the concepts and vocabulary of The American Shore within its pages only was a choice that further marks the text as more Derridean than Barthesian: Delany had no desire for the terminology to congeal around it the suggestion of a privileged method. Any end must encourage more beginning.
The final paragraph of The American Shore, which returns us to “Angouleme,” brings to my mind the final scene of a film that offers some of the clearest and most affecting cinematic treatments of basic structuralist ideas of language: François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child, 1970). The last words there are fitting ones for any endeavor of literary or social analysis, any engagement with multiplicities: “Tomorrow we’ll resume our lessons.”
Notes
1. Samuel Delany, “Acknowledgments,” in Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction [1984] (rev. ed., Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012).
2. If we take the dates in 334 as a guide—setting the stories around the third decade of the twenty-first century—and assume that men have had the option to marry each other for at least a year or two (since it is not marked in the text as a significant cultural change, it must have existed long enough to be normalized), then Disch was stunningly prescient in this prediction.
3. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 19.
4. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 19.
5. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire [1962] (New York: Vintage International, 1989), p. 289.
6. S/Z, p. 21.
7. Delany’s point is that the idea has become all but universal in Western criticism over the intervening two thousand–odd years between the two.
8. Samuel Delany, “Wagner/Artaud,” in Longer Views (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), p. 40.
9. S/Z, p. 107. The preface by Richard Howard, “A Note on S/Z” provides the term divagation.
10. Here the shadow of Jacques Lacan lurks. In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan says the figure of S over s “should be attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure” (in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink [W. W. Norton, 2006], p. 415), but as Steven Ungar has written, it “was more [Lacan’s] own creation, [and] differed from the diagram in [Saussure’s] Course in important ways.” Indeed, as Ungar notes, Lacan’s algorithm is, to start with, an inversion of Saussure’s original, though Lacan also de-emphasizes the interdependence and complementary exchange within Saussure’s conception. For much more detailed discussion, see “Saussure, Barthes, and Structuralism” by Steven Ungar, in The Cambridge Companion to Saussure, edited by Carol Sanders (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 157–73. This detail is essentially irrelevant to The American Shore, and Delany and I discussed both Saussure and Lacan at length after I sent him an earlier draft of this introduction—he’s as familiar with the Course as with Lacan. I raise the point not out of a desire to “correct” that which doesn’t need correction (I expect Lacan knew exactly what he was doing, and I know Delany did), but merely because it, to my eyes, demonstrates the power of some of Lacan’s formulations on Delany’s thinking at the time. For anyone interested in the development of Delany’s thought, it might be a useful datum, though one that should be considered alongside Delany’s updated thoughts on Lacan in “The Kenneth James Interview,” in Silent Interviews (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), p. 242.
11. See the discussion of gravitic discourse below for why the language so commonly used to express the assumption is itself problematic.
12. S/Z, pp. 4–6.
13. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination [1972], trans. Barbara Johnson (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 378.
14. An idea that Barthes, too, accepted, saying in S/Z, that “as nothing exists outside the text, there is never a whole of the text” (p. 6), but for Barthes the limitations imposed on the readerly text by its necessary intertextuality created a kind of wholeness (further evidence, for him, of the inferiority of the readerly text).
15. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 136.
16. Samuel Delany, Empire: A Visual Novel, illust. Howard V. Chaykin (New York: Byron Preiss Visual Publications, 1978).
17. See, for instance, “To Read The Dispossessed,” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw; and “Some Presumptuous Approaches to Science Fiction,” in Starboard Wine, for a start.
18. I can’t resist quoting a comment from Delany on this point: “Even the banging of the shoe on the desk that you cite is to point out a fundamentally generic difference between them, not a difference in value. It’s like saying that a line of poetry is more onomatopoetic than the same words used as prose because—generically—poetry makes you pay more attention to the sound of words than prose does—and not because the words sound any different in either medium.”
19. Nabokov, Pale Fire, pp. 28–29.
20. S/Z, p. 10.
21. “Disch, Thomas M.” Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 3rd ed. (online). Accessed November 27, 2012. Gollancz/SFE Ltd. Accessed December 12, 2012.
22. Douglas Martin, “Thomas Disch, Novelist, Dies at 68,” New York Times, July 8, 2008.
1
The Pretext
Concatenated texts—romans fleuves, interrelated series of novels and stories, stories and plays—appear from time to time in mundane fiction. Sometimes the connecting link is so tenuous as to constitute the merest ornamentation, a grace note to the text (as when the imprisoned Mersault, in Camus’s novel L’Etranger, comes upon a newspaper article that incidentally summarizes Camus’s play Le Malentendu); sometimes the links are forged of the unmalleable ore of naturalistic fiction: recurrent characters, settings, themes (as with the Forsytes, the Compsons/Snopeses/Sartorises, Leatherstocking, Tarzan, or the Thibaults).
If subjective time laid down through real history is the road on which mundane fiction travels, holding