With this collection, Delany continues his critique. As I’ve noted, at certain points along the way he deploys formal tropes which his longtime readers may find familiar. But whether previously acquainted with Delany’s work or not, readers expecting the short, monologic prose discourse that is the currently dominant form of the essay are in for a surprise — for these essays are not like other essays.
They are huge, sprawling works, encompassing an enormous range of topics and disciplines — from the origins of modern theater to the vagaries of radical feminist scholarship, from mathematical logic to the most marginal of sexual practices, from the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe to the intricacies of literary historical sleuthing, and much, much more — and they combine these topics in interlocking narratives of madmen and burning cities, prodigies and poets, cyborgs, street-hustlers, and the author’s own life, in language that is sometimes light and anecdotal, sometimes vertiginously self-reflexive, but always lucid, luminous and exuberant. “Chrestomathies,” Delany calls some of the pieces to come: collections of textual fragments whose numerous interrelations the reader must actively trace out in order to gather them up into a resonant whole. In their encouragement of active reading, these essays resemble what Barthes has called the “writerly” text, the text “produced” as much by the reader as by the writer:
This text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach[12]
If any single idea can be said to fuel the fires of all these essays, it is the Foucauldian notion of discourse — the notion of the socially sanctioned systems of perception and practice that hold us all in their thrall, the “structuring and structurating” forces which keep myths alive and preserve the status quo[13]—forces which can only be countered by a “violent rhetorical shift” somewhere in the discursive space (RS 235). And herein lies the relevance, the urgency of these essays. As intellectual entertainments, they make great demands on the reader — and offer unprecedented rewards. But they are more than just entertainments: they are radical rhetorical interventions in the discourse of reading itself. And their radicalism resides precisely in their acknowledgment of the existence of the radical reader: the reader who thinks, who writes, who intervenes.
In the discussion to follow, I shall very briefly review some concepts from Delany’s earlier nonfiction works about the language of science fiction which have a bearing on the analyses Delany carries out here. I will then try to suggest how the formal strategies Delany deploys in these essays both illuminate and are illuminated by the formal strategies of his fiction, as well as how they reflect the theoretical framework which surrounds and informs so much of Delany’s recent fiction and nonfiction. If (to paraphrase Delany) my informal, idiosyncratic, and indeed fragmentary remarks initiate dialogue, so much the better; if they close dialogue off, so much the worse. I hope only to provide a provisional analytical frame to assist the radical reader in her further explorations of the rich and complex universes of discourse which these essays both describe and generate.
II
Science fiction, like the essay, is a form which, in its more popular incarnations, has often tended toward the didactic, in the mode of the aphoristic. Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert, to name two examples, have actually published the “collected sayings” of their best-known fictive protagonists, Lazarus Long and Paul Atreides. Ursula Le Guin’s fiction also leans toward aphorism, her essays doubly so; the list could go on. In his earlier critical work, Delany has discussed in some detail the problem of didacticism in Heinlein and Le Guin specifically and in science fiction and literature in general. (The long interpolated monologues in Return to Nevèrÿon could be read as attempts to suggest some aesthetic solutions to the problem.) Paradoxically, however, Delany has also argued that despite its flirtation with the authoritarian mode, science fiction may still be the privileged genre for writing against what constitutes a significant aspect of today’s status quo.
To understand Delany’s argument we need to recall Barthes’s assertion that conservative discourse tends to de-historicize phenomena which are historically specific. In the rhetoric of this discourse, “things lose the memory that they once were made” (M 142). Both the aphoristic style and the spectacle work to reinforce this confounding of the historical and the natural. In viewing spectacle, “all that is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from” (M 151). Likewise, the aphorism is “no longer directed towards a world to be made; it must overlay one which is already made, bury the traces of this production under a self-evident appearance of eternity” (M 155). Delany argues that the rhetoric of science fiction foregrounds precisely the historical, social, and technological constitution of human landscapes which conservative rhetoric tends to obscure. In this way the rhetoric of sf differs fundamentally from the rhetoric of “literature,” the conventions and tropes of which are organized around an entirely different focus:
Despite the many meaningful differences in the ways of reading that constitute the specifically literary modes, they are all characterized — now, today — by a priority of the subject, i.e., of the self, of human consciousness. To a greater or lesser extent, the subject can be read as the organizational center of all the literary categories’ many, many differing expectations…
Answering its own expectations as a paraliterary mode, science fiction is far more concerned with the organization (and reorganization) of the object, i.e., the world, or the institutions through which we perceive it. It is concerned with the subject, certainly, but concerned with those aspects of it that are closer to the object: How is the subject excited, impinged on, contoured and constituted by the object?[14]
The point is not merely that sf tends to be “about” the object in the sense of taking the object as its main topic of interest; it is, rather, that all of the conventions, tropes, and reading protocols that mark science fiction as science fiction are organized around a revelation of the object and its constituting context. And herein lies the potentially radical force of the genre:
… even the most passing mention by an sf writer of, say, “… the monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni,” begins as a simple way of saying that, while the concept of mines may persist, their object, their organization, their technology, their locations, and their very form can change — and it says it directly and clearly and well before it offers any metaphor for any psychic mystery or psychological state. Not to understand this object-critique, on whatever intuitive level, is to misread the phrase… (SW 188)
By this rhetorical model, we can see that even the most conservatively inclined science fiction, if it is in any way sophisticated as science fiction, must keep a certain margin of imaginative space open for an apprehension of the historicity of objects, landscapes, and social institutions. By this model we can also see that science fiction differs from the essay in at least one of the same ways that it differs from literary fiction: for like literary fiction, the essay is rhetorically oriented toward a revelation of the subject, toward the presentation of a “spectacle of a single consciousness trying to make sense of the chaos.” The problem for both literary fiction and the essay is that the “chaos” of the modern world originates primarily as a chaos of the object, not the subject (SW 158) — which renders these forms, at least vis-à-vis the manifold problems of the object, conservative by default.
13
Delany, “The Rhetoric of Sex, the Discourse of Desire,” from
14
Delany,