… a letter can always not arrive at its destination. Its “materiality” and “topology” are due to its divisibility, its always possible partition. It can always be fragmented without return, and the system of the symbolic, of castration, of the signifier, of the truth, of the contract, etc., always attempts to protect the letter from this fragmentation. (PP 187)
Delany redeploys this insight for his own purposes: “Perhaps phallocentric civilization has to construct image after image of castration — such as the cyborg.”[22] This in turn implies a state of affairs which Delany expresses baldly and boldly: “For the record… I do not believe castration as Freud and Lacan have described it even exists.” (RW 105)
We find a hint of what this state of affairs itself implies — for both reader and writer — in “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” from Flight from Nevèrÿon. In that tale, Delany presents us with two more parallel, dialogical texts: one a fantasy unfolding in the world of Nevèrÿon, one a tale of 1983 Manhattan. In the latter, Delany “himself” appears, hard at work drafting the manuscript of the tale we are now reading. At one point, Delany comments:
By now I’m willing to admit that perhaps narrative fiction, in neither its literary nor its paraliterary mode, can propose the radically successful metaphor. At best, what both modes can do is break up, analyze, and dialogize the conservative, the historically sedimented, letting the fragments argue with one another, letting each display its own obsolescence, suggesting (not stating) where still another retains the possibility of vivid, radical development. But responding to those suggestions is, of course, the job of the radical reader. (The ‘radical metaphor’ is, after all, only an interpretation of pre-extant words.) Creators, whatever their politics, only provide raw material — documents, if you will.[23]
Re-reading the above passage, this reader is reminded of the words of the best known avant-pop, feminist cyborg in America, the performance artist Laurie Anderson — who, in her performance pieces and albums (which are usually made up of mutually interilluminating collections of songs, anecdotes, and audiovisual fragments) has repeatedly admonished her audiences: “Hey, sport. You connect the dots. You pick up the pieces.”
In “Aversion/Perversion/Diversion,” as in “Wagner/Artaud,” we are again given a series of stories, this time of some of Delany’s own sexual experiences — stories which both evoke and subvert prevailing sexual myths. The discursive object against which Delany deploys these stories is, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the concept of Gay Identity itself — or rather, the more conservative concept of transcendent sexual difference which lies latent in the use of “Gay Identity” as a catch-all label for a diverse political constituency (another manifestation of the problem of “empirical resolution” explored in “Shadows”). Once again, Delany uses these autobiographical tales as empirical counters to the reductions of discursive myths: they remind us that for every individual, sexual preference and practice are irrefutably idiosyncratic and eccentric, always-already marginal — and that any unified political project set in opposition to the sexual status quo must be founded on an affirmation of the irreducible plurality of sexual experiences and practices.
Delany affirms the truth of these experiences, and the right to speak of them openly, simply by telling them where and when he does: “Aversion/Perversion/Diversion” was originally presented as the Keynote Address at the Fifth Annual Lesbian and Gay Conference on Gay Studies at Rutgers University in 1991. Given that context, we can see how Delany both affirms the liberatory project of Gay Studies, while at the same time placing a critical frame around it. The tales are, after all, cautionary: in their evocation and problematization of all-too-recognizable myths, they remind us that such myths are all-too-recognizable — that even (or especially) those engaged in Gay Studies must be constantly vigilant against the pervasive influence of such myths.
But there is perhaps a more immediate justification for strategies of analytic vigilance and empirical inclusiveness in Gay Studies than the accurate reconstruction of lost histories and the retrieval of suppressed voices. As Delany has said several times in other works and mentions in passing here, the ongoing devastation of the AIDS virus makes “absolutely imperative” such vigilance and inclusiveness.[24] At one point in The Motion of Light in Water, Delany indulges in a utopian fantasy that the “inflated sexual honesty” necessitated by the AIDS crisis will, once the virus is brought under control, bring about “a sexual revolution to make a laughing stock of any social movement that till now has borne the name.”[25] Yet Delany is well aware of the almost fiendish tendency discourses have of “healing themselves across such rhetorical violences” (RS 235) and reifying their own conservative imperatives. The reader is urged to review Delany’s discussion, in “Appendix B” of Flight from Nevèrÿon and in “The Rhetoric of Sex, the Discourse of Desire” (another extended essay, collected in Heterotopia, ed. Tobin Siebers [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995]), of the truly sinister ways in which prevailing sexual discursive codes have sabotaged the effective scientific study of HIV transmission vectors. In the context of such a colossal health crisis, the muddying and mystifying effects of discourse begin to shade over into near-genocidal disinformation.
“Shadow and Ash” takes up many of the images of its “preface” as well as those of the immediately preceding essays and works transformations on them. The logic of these transformations is suggested in “Appendix B” of Triton, in which our fictive scholar notes that, in regard to the relation between Delany’s “Shadows” and Slade’s, “for Slade the concept of landscape is far more political than it was for the author of the older work.” (T 357) Now certainly that “older work” displays a sophisticated political sensibility; one of the chief transformations we experience in reading it is the unfolding of political significance out of such seemingly abstract topics as Quine’s exploration of the “movable predicate” in philosophical logic. But in the present work, we see a whole series of transformations take place according to an algorithm of politicization: over the course of the essay, we trace a shift of attention from subject-oriented autobiography to context-oriented literary biography, from the exclusionary allusiveness of modernism to the inclusive dialogizing of postmodernism, from the “modular calculus” to “theory”—in general (to quote Hal Foster), from formal filiations to social affiliations.[26]
By focusing our attention on individual “thematic” threads running through “Shadow and Ash,” we can begin to discern the micro-effects of the essay’s larger conceptual transformation. For example: scattered throughout the piece we find a series of meditations on aging and mortality — typical concerns of the subject-oriented personal essay. What fascinates about these meditations, however, is how the politicization of subject and landscape wrought by the rest of the essay — by the context — begins to transform the status of death itself, even as Delany takes it up as a topic of personal concern. Delany sets up this transformation in note 8—a consideration of Joanna Russ’ sf novel We Who Are About To… in which, according to Delany’s reading, death serves as an “allegorical stand-in for whatever degree of social-political un-freedom the reader’s society has reached.”[27] Delany then moves elsewhere, exploring the problem of discourse in a number of realms. Midway through, though, Delany returns to the subject of actual physical death with this note:
22
Delany, “Reading at Work, and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority: A Reading of Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs,’” p. 104 of this volume. (Hereafter referred to as RW.)
23
Delany, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” from
24
“Aversion/Perversion/Diversion,” p. 141 of this volume. (Hereafter referred to as APD.)
26
Hal Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” from