26. The desire to be conscious of the process of losing consciousness, of having no consciousness at all — this paradox is source and kernel of the anxiety over dying and death. (SA 157)
But by this point in the essay, we are well aware of the degree to which discourse analysis is itself “about” our relation to the things we are least conscious of — the things we are blind or “dead” to. As we read on, death and aging seem less and less problems to be solved at the individual existential level, and more problems which are intimately tied to politics and constituencies. Here is note 9 in its entirety:
9. “What shall I do with this body I’ve been given?” asks Mandelstam. When, one wonders, was the last time he asked it? In his cramped Petersberg apartment? or in the death camp where, near mad, the elements and ideology killed him…? (SA 149)
Delany seems to be suggesting a radical interpretation of the motto, “the personal is the political”—an interpretation which implodes “the political” directly into the material ground of “the personal” with the corporeal body at their interface (this in turn recalls and revalues the notion of the “absolute and indisseverable interface” of object and process explored in “Shadows”). On a human landscape defined in these terms, discourse and death become “problems of consciousness” of similar (or identical) ontological orders. For Delany, to recognize their interface is to gain both insight into the grounds for meaningful political action, and access, perhaps, to a very real personal solace.
Notice that our own recognition of the above transformations arises not from any overt argument on Delany’s part but rather from the organization of the discursive space of the essay as a whole. Each numbered fragment, because it functions as a different coordinate axis within that space, can be said to frame, and be framed by, all the others. The complex mutuality of these framing-relations allows Delany to effect conceptual transformations without resorting to outright assertion within any single fragment. This dynamic, in which what is outside a given text-unit strongly determines what is perceived to be inside it, resembles what Derrida calls a transgressive rhetoric, in which “by means of the work done on one side and the other of the limit the field inside is modified, and a transgression is produced that consequently is nowhere present as a fait accompli.”[28] By evoking such a rhetoric through the deployment of an intricate arrangement of frames — and this formal strategy is at the heart of just about everything he has written from Dhalgren on — Delany is able to effectively sidestep spectacle. Because the essay is organized around a play of absences, because it is fundamentally reticent at the moment of revelation, “Shadow and Ash,” like all the works in this collection, discourages the passivity engendered by spectacle in favor of the active tracing out of discursive parameters and possibilities — the reading of the un-said, whose shadowy presence on the offstage margins renders the said intelligible.
The topic of literary biography — alluded to in the closing argument in “Aversion/Perversion/Diversion” and expanded upon in one of the marginal arguments in “Shadow and Ash”—takes up the whole of “Atlantis Rose…” Here we are given a close reading of Hart Crane’s 1930 poem The Bridge, in which, with almost microscopic meticulousness, Delany weaves together the textual artifacts surrounding the poem’s composition into a hybrid form of multiple biography, close textual analysis, and even — in a fascinating reconstruction of an evening between Crane and his friend Samuel Loveman — speculative literary history. Along the way — as in “Shadow and Ash”—we are given an image of literary practice as a fundamentally social and dialogical activity, in which canons are made and unmade, and discourses reified and subverted, by the rhetorical interventions of individual writers. We see, for example, numerous instances of discursive “normalization” as poetry editors and critics analyze and actually revise the works of various poets according to then-prevailing discursive imperatives.
Against the rhetorical interventions of their editors Delany positions the writing protocols of the poets themselves — protocols which are also shown to both arise from and inform (depending on the case) the protocols of “homosexual genres.” These genres — which use conventionalized patterns of ambiguous language to indicate, by indirection, homosexual content — call for reading protocols which privilege form and context over content. A poem deploying such conventions would thus be subject to a double reading:
… while a heterosexual reading may find the poem just as beautiful and just as lyrical (that’s, after all, what the poet wanted), it will not find the poem anywhere near as poignant as the homosexual reading does — because the heterosexual reading specifically erases all reference to the silence surrounding homosexuality for which the heterosexual reading’s existence, within the homosexual reading, is the positive sign.[29]
Such protocols allow communication to pass across discursively and coercively enforced silence by exploiting the possibilities of excess signification immanent in the sign — by side-stepping direct reference to socially proscribed content and making language itself speak. But this notion — of speaking across the gap, of communicating across time, space, and death — is, of course, at the heart of The Bridge. Delany recalls reading Crane at an early age, and perceiving in his a-referential lyricism an evocation of a utopian discursive space, “a world where meaning and mystery were one, indisseverable, and ubiquitous, but at the same time a world where everything spoke (or sang or whispered or shouted) to everything else…” (AR 197). But of this evocation there are two readings, one indicating a presumably universal yearning for communion, the other indicating a historically and contextually specific silence all around.
For Delany, the resolution to such oppressions resides in the actions of those who elect to participate in the ongoing evolution of the discourse. Delany’s call, near the essay’s end, for literary anthologies edited with greater attention to compositional context can be read as an attempt to foster and encourage such participation. According to Delany, most collections are edited under the general assumption that “there exists a Common Reader of poetry who comes from no place — and is going nowhere” (AR 240). But as Delany says in “Shadow and Ash”—specifically in response to the critical work of Language Poet Ron Silliman — there need be “nothing passive” about such a reader (SA 171). Silliman himself has put it this way:
Here the question is not whether a poet will be read in five or fifty or five hundred years, but whether that poet can and will be read by individuals able and willing to act on their increased understanding of the world as a result of the communication.[30]
“Atlantis Rose…” ends with an intriguing coda. The whole essay, we learn, was written at least partly in parallel with Delany’s historical novel Atlantis: Model 1924—their composition dates overlap. In Atlantis: Model 1924, as I mentioned earlier, we are shown a fictive — though possible — meeting between Hart Crane and Delany’s own father on Brooklyn Bridge in 1924. Yet what transpires in this meeting between a young heterosexual black man and a slightly older homosexual white man is only a brief and fragmentary communion, ending in comic miscommunication and misinterpretation. What is revealed is the discursive form of the two characters’ mutual misunderstanding, the structure of their inability truly to meet. True, we do get a vision from the fictive Crane of that utopian space where complete communication can occur. But what we are left with, finally, is a vision of two men who communicate only imperfectly and incompletely, who quickly retreat to opposite sides of the bridge — all on an achingly beautiful day charged with subversive possibilities, but pervaded by the tragicomic order of discourse.
28
Jacques Derrida,