Longer Views
Extended Essays
by
Samuel R. Delany
With an Introduction
by
Ken James
For
Henry Finder and
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Other Books by the Author
The Jewels of Aptor
The Fall of the Towers:
Out of the Dead City
The Towers of Toron
City of a Thousand Suns
The Ballad of Beta-2
Babel-17
The Einstein Intersection
Nova
Driftglass (stories)
Equinox (The Tides of Lust)
Dhalgren
Trouble on Triton (Triton)
Distant Stars (stories)
Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand
Return to Nevèrÿon:
Tales of Nevèrÿon
Neveryóna
Flight from Nevèrÿon
Return to Nevèrÿon (The Bridge of Lost Desire)
Driftglass/Starshards (collected stories)
They Fly at Çiron
The Mad Man
Hogg
Atlantis: Three Tales
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw
The American Shore
Heavenly Breakfast
Starboard Wine
The Motion of Light in Water
Wagner/Artaud
The Straits of Messina
Silent Interviews
Preface
In a critical epoch that has privileged, for twenty years or more, difference, decantering, discontinuity, diversity, and pluralism over the elder gods of Unity, Totality, and Mastery, so much American nonfiction still finds itself attempting to appease those elder gods and their former conventions. Those of us who read regularly in criticism often find “books” whose “chapters” are, it’s clear once we read two, three, or four of them, disconnected occasional essays. Often the “Introduction” that claims the remainder of the study will not attempt to negotiate its topic with systematic rigor actually introduces a collection of considerations simply of different topics. At the editorial level, forces (usually called “commercial”—though sometimes even more mystified than that) militate to present collections and chrestomathies as concentrated studies.
The fiction writer is used to the same forces at work in the contouring of books: “Novels sell better than collections of short stories,” we are told. “It’s a truism of almost any fictive practice — mysteries, westerns, science fiction, or naturalistic fiction.”
Most of my life my own preferred field has been science fiction; and because that field fosters so many series stories sharing characters and backgrounds, publishers and editors for many years took such stories and put them in books they called “novels,” while renaming the individual stories “chapters”—largely at the behest of those forces.
The one form that — in science fiction, at any rate — tends to resist such handling is the long story (or novella). And in the range of literary criticism, it is the long essay — the essay too lengthy to be delivered comfortably as a fifty-minute lecture — that offers similar resistance to such totalizing conventions. What this tends to mean is that the collection of longer essays — or, indeed, science fiction novellas — is treated as the least commercial of all works.
When publishers are brave enough to undertake such collections, readers, support them both!
I’m particularly grateful, then, to my editors, Terry Cochran and Suzanna Tamminen, and to my publisher, Wesleyan University Press and their editorial director, Eileen McWilliam, for accepting this book for what it is and for not suggesting I “wait till some of the pieces mature” (read: till I become tired of seeing them lie unpublished and eventually pad them out to book-length). Various readers have made wonderfully useful suggestions here and there during the composition process of these essays, including Don Eric Levine, Gordon Tapper, James Sallis, Ron Drummond, and all the editors just mentioned.
This book contains six moderately long essays with five distinct topics.
The first, “Wagner/Artaud: A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions,” has been published as a separate monograph by feisty little Ansatz Press (New York, 1988), that wonderful creation of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and Tom Weber. Its topic is precisely its twain eponymous subjects — and the relationship between them as dramaturges and esthetic theoreticians. Three paragraphs have been added or expanded since the ’88 edition; the diligent literary detective should be able to spot at least two of them.
“Reading at Work, and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority — A Reading of Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’”—has, in pieces, provided me with various lectures since it was first written in 1985. It tries to give an account of that exciting and influential essay and at the same time tries to examine what the giving of such an account entails and, yes, means. At its center it contains a brief overview of the cyborg as a science fiction image in film, as well as a discussion of metaphor that seems to me necessarily anterior to any discussion of how any metaphor, such as the “cyborg,” can work in the radical directions Haraway’s manifesto proposes for it.
On the evening of November 1, 1991, “Aversion/Perversion/Diversion” was delivered as the Keynote Lecture at the Fifth Annual Lesbian and Gay Conference on Gay Studies, held that year at Rutgers University. It takes an anecdotal tour through some marginal tracks of contemporary (and, at that, largely queer) sexuality, even as its topic is the concept of discourse and its necessity for any sophisticated historical understanding.
This is also the topic of “Shadow and Ash”—an intellectual chrestomathy whose fragmentary method is finally its content. For me it is the most important essay here — and the one that needs the least prefatory matter.
“Atlantis Rose…” is a study of the poetry of Hart Crane, with an emphasis on Crane’s wonderfully rich poetic series, The Bridge. Though I hope this essay can be enjoyed without Crane’s text to hand, I would urge readers to procure a copy of that wonderfully rich poem, and — in fact — to read The Bridge through at least once just before beginning the essay, to pause now and again to reread various sections of it on their first trip through my essay, and to read Crane’s poem once more on finishing my notes here. (Poet James Tate suggests at least one of those readings be out loud.) Though I understand most of us — even most professional critics — don’t have time for such elaborate undertakings, that’s still the ideal reading my study presupposes.
As an appendix I have included another long essay that first appeared in two installments in Foundation 6 (London, May 1974) and the double issue Foundation 7/8 (London, November 1975), though it was first drafted in 1973 while I lived in England. (I revised it heavily in ’74 for the Foundation publication; then again in ’78 and again in ’79.) I can’t believe anyone, in considering the hard-edged language games around which so much Anglo-American philosophy is constituted, would not find the margins of their thought occasionally troubled by the illusory quality of those edges that recontextualization is constantly and playfully suggesting. Such games are predicated on the idea that certain words have their meanings because certain other meanings are rigorously excluded from ever occupying the same semantic space, e.g., whatever “blue” means, it can never mean “red.” But recontextualization always presents, at least as a sort of limit case, possibilities of the following order: “Whenever I hold up the placard with the word ‘blue’ on it, I want you to hold up the placard in front of you colored red — rather than the one colored green, blue, yellow, or purple.” If we assent to such a request, then — in such a context, however rarely it might arise in life — the word “blue” there “means” the color red. One might point out that, in such a context, the word “means” does not mean precisely what it usually means — to which one can only nod agreement: that’s true. Still, that meaning of “means” is a recognizable meaning, controlled by the context. But this and many other observations make the hard-edged boundaries of meaning that control the speculations of natural language philosophers and speech act theorists so problematic.