Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany

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СКАЧАТЬ one could imagine the turning tugboat that owned them. “You know what those lights mean?”

      “The ones on the mast? Yes,” I said. “Two lights on the mast and it’s a tug with one barge; three lights mean it’s a tug with two barges. Four, and it’s got three —”

      “No, I didn’t mean those lights,” he said. (When I’d last seen him, he’d worked as a salad assistant in the galley of a Matson Line steamship on another coast.) “I mean the other lights. Down there.”

      “Down where?” I asked.

      “There. Below the mast. Look: on each side of the boat there’s a beacon. The red light means it’s the port side. And a green light would mean you were seeing the starboard side. When I worked on the boats out of San Francisco, they gave us two ways to remember which was which. Red is on the left side of the ship, the port side, and red stands for the heart—on the left side of the body. They other way is just to remember that red stands for port, and port wine is red.”

      Out on the night water, the tug, with her single mast-light, completed her turn and started off through the fog, her red light occluded, her starboard beacon revealed now, growing a dimmer and dimmer green.

      He repeated: “Port wine is red …”

      Over the next minutes we watched the green light drift into invisibility while our boat pulled toward the bright windows and chained ramps of the Staten Island terminal.

      As friendships will, this one went on to some new highs, then hit some lows; I haven’t seen my friend now in over a year. The memory, then, suffices.

      But what I have been doing a lot since then is writing about science fiction. This book contains some of the more recent pieces.

      Years ago in San Francisco—indeed, in the months when my friend and I first met—I had written, “Science fiction is about events that have not happened,”² and somehow this admission that science fiction concerned things that do not exist stirred a very specialized academic circle in a very small but distinct way. In matters written, this nonexistent absent aspect is not a particularly new discovery. In a letter to Ludwig Ficker, Wittgenstein made the same claim for philosophy, referring to his Tractatus: “My work consists of two parts: the present one here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.” And writing of poetry in an essay on La Fontaine’s Adonis, Valéry put it this way: “Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.” Indeed, the nonexistent or imaginary object,³ of art in general and writing in particular, becomes problematic only within a Western tradition of realistic painting on the one hand and bourgeois fiction on the other, where a great deal of aesthetic energy is expended urging the audience to believe that something essential in the artwork did exist, could have existed, or should exist. When looked at as a virtuoso performance that lends an interesting harmony to a melody mostly silent, reference and representation are all very well. But when reference and representation are all that are seen and heard by untutored eyes and ears,⁴ then the rigor becomes necessary that alone can release the unsayable into that form where (beside the utterable) it can most clearly be perceived, by saying what can be uttered with a great deal more care and clarity than is usual.

      What are these unsayable things? They are mental constructs, contoured certainly by what is said. They are not so much imaginary as symbolic—symbolic in the Lacanian sense that they contour our entire symbol-producing and symbol-consuming process, direct our entire negotiation of the universe of signs. They are the very models by which all thought—about both the most real and the most abstract problems—propagates itself. These mental constructs are often complex, often recursive,⁵ and can be shared in remarkably stable form by an astonishingly diverse population.

      A given construct may promote one kind of thought and discourage another. A given construct often lends itself to one kind of abuse through the same gesture with which it fends off another. The organization of language (as opposed to any specific collection or collation of utterances that organization produces) is one such construct. The French call it langue. This particular one is transmitted largely by exposure to an all but random sequence of linguistic utterances (parole), only a trivial portion of which refer directly to the organization itself. And those utterances that do refer to the organization (grammar) can be understood only after the structure itself has been pretty firmly communicated.

      Now is the time to name the discourses.

      These discourses, or formal categories of writing—among them poetry, prose reportage (criticism, journalism), bourgeois fiction (mundane fiction), drama, philosophy, pornography, and, I maintain, science fiction—each represent a different symbolic construct, constructs without which the texts themselves would be unreadable. These constructs are probably transmitted in much the same way as language itself.

      Among these discourses, at least two groups can be distinguished: on the one hand there is literature (which includes among other categories poetry, mundane fiction, drama, and—today—philosophy), and on the other there is paraliterature (which includes among other categories pornography, comic books, possibly certain kinds of parody, and, of course, science fiction). Although it is largely considered paraliterature, journalism has a firm foot in the literary camp, through its subgenre, “criticism,” both literary and social. ⁶

      Science fiction is the writing category—the complex of reading protocols, the discourse—that interests me most in these essays, although for purposes of identification and distinction I will frequently need to contrast it to other formal writing categories or to the category collection, literature, of which I take contemporary bourgeois fiction (mundane fiction) to be, today, the representative example.⁷

      One useful aspect of the mental construct unsayable behind and before the range of specific SF texts is its encouragement of a clear view of the figure/ground antagonism in all narrative matters. In science fiction this encouragement is carried on indirectly, yet extremely efficiently because of its indirection, by the continual (and, from specific SF text to specific SF text, the continually varied) ground/ground antagonism science fiction provides, where one ground is the fictive ground of the story and the other is the ground of the reader’s given world.

      As the categories it comprises become more aware of their imaginative sources and resourcefulness, as they take more cognizance of the problematic relation between “fiction” and “reality,” as they become more aware of the impossibility of any exhaustive fictive representation of reality, literature encourages the reading of an extentional relation between figure and ground, between fictive subject (invented character or narrative voice) and fictive object (the fictive or biographical decor, the setting, the landscape, the institutions whose representations evoke the fictive or biographical world).

      Take two of the finest collections of short stories published in 1978: Susan Sontag’s I, etcetera is literature; John Varley’s The Persistence of Vision is science fiction. But from their titles onward, through their texts, both books declare their allegiances from first page to last.⁸

      Starting with its title, I, etcetera announces literature’s commitment to the subject and literature’s equal commitment to the subordination of the ground, rendering ground an expression of subject, of personality, of sensibility. The most overtly referential politics and the most a-referential surrealism in Sontag’s stories register as projections of that sensibility—or as total determinants of that sensibility, which amounts to the same thing when the gestalt experience of self-and-self-surround is projected on a flat surface where all distinctions are a matter of reading, of codes.

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