Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany

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СКАЧАТЬ afterimages, The Persistence of Vision inscribes itself within the ubiquitous antagonism of, the continual mutual impingement between, and the originary conceptual severance that finally determines subject and object: for vision to persist, some one must perceive; some thing must be perceived. And there are experimental hints of this distinction within minutes of birth; contrary to Freud it may well not be learned by violences to the nurturing alterity of food, sleep, and elimination in a variable field of warmth. As the SF reader knows (and the literary reader often becomes uncomfortably aware within the first few paragraphs of any SF text), science fiction does not try to represent the world. It conscientiously misrepresents the world in an endless series of lucidly readable ways—and this amounts to something very different from literature’s exhaustion (which, perhaps naively, I take to mean nothing more than “intense fatigue”) before representation’s admittedly daunting problematics.

      The separate mental constructs involved in science fiction and literature both have their separate uses, both grounded in a view of response and responsibility, which make both, finally, human fields for art. Both are needed. But science fiction—the mental, shared, recursive construct science fiction encourages us to use—is in a particularly interesting historical position.

      Science fiction is among the youngest of the West’s formal writing categories. In the particular form that propagates the mental construct that interests me, science fiction can be said to have existed only from the early ’30s (possibly middle ’20s) on. Since the early ’50s, its social propagation across the United States, Europe, and the Soviet bloc has been huge. (Approximately 15 percent of all fiction published in the United States today [1980] bears the SF label.) And where the SF construct encounters the literary construct, there is always conflict, whether acknowledged or hidden.The symptomatology of the encounter between science fiction and literature, whether the intention of the speaker or writer is to support the side of science fiction or to support the side of literature, is fairly clear. (All the overt attackers of literature—and a good number of the overt attackers of science fiction—have realized by this time that there is something risky about any directly negative strategy.) The argument always starts with the declaration that science fiction should absorb the values of literature and be transformed by them; labels should be rescinded; boundaries should be erased—these are some of the ways the conflict announces itself. After this warm and friendly invitation, however, the argument goes on to assert that, even if this amalgamation does occur, science fiction will nevertheless always take a back seat to literature: science fiction’s basic nonrepresentational aspect dooms it to a position as second-rate fiction.

      What is being done in such an invitation clears, however, as soon as one asks such questions as: which is the most important “fiction”—Paradise Lost, Bleak House, or The Voyage of the Beagle? Which is the most representational? And of what? Should the labels be taken off “poetry,” “fiction,” or “philosophy”? Which of these categories has representational priority?

      What is going on, of course, is a game of subordination and appropriation, a game which SF writers themselves have been playing just as freely from their side. And when both sides are trying to subordinate and appropriate the other, it is naïve, if not mystificational, to call such a relation other than conflict, no matter how refined or friendly it seems.

      To conjoin science fiction with literature is about as silly as trying to conjoin poetry and prose fiction, or drama and prose reportage. (In the United States in the ’30s, among the violences of the Depression, both were tried: e.g., Boni & Liveright’s slim volumes of poetic/prose effusions; and the WPA’s “living newspaper,” which toured the nation’s backroads out of New York, Chicago, and L.A. Both were finally abandoned.) Some of the specific reasons for this, having to do with science fiction’s status as a formal writing category, as a complex of reading protocols, as a discourse, will occupy the essays to come.

      Because the different constructs that different writing categories generate are mental and do not “exist,” sometimes it is hard to keep a clear view of just what use such insubstantial, symbolic, intersubjective objects can possibly have. In our attempts to talk about (in the sense of around) these silent constructs, often we find ourselves slipping back into a rhetoric that deals with only the use and application of the enunciated portion of any given text, while we all but deny that any other aspects of it can manifest.

      But about three months ago I took a Greyhound bus down from New York to Baltimore; and after a night in a seedy hotel, in the basement of which a very loud “New Wave” rock concert was in progress, I taxied in the morning to the Dundalk Marine Terminal to catch the Polish freighter Mieczyslaw Kalinowski, on which I was booked, with some dozen other passengers, to Antwerp, there having been a dock strike in Rotterdam, the boat’s initial destination.

      The Atlantic is a lonely shield of water.

      At sea you are continually struck, on those days when no other object is visible, by the fact that, this close to the Earth’s surface, you will never see more of a single substance. But, as happens even on the lonely Atlantic, one evening at sundown for perhaps half an hour, here and there about the horizon’s aluminum, above that gunmetal shield, five other ships were in view at one time.

      Two showed a red light.

      Three showed a green.

      And I gained some admiring remarks by explaining to my fellow passengers with me that evening on deck which ships were showing us their starboard flank and which were showing their port side; and consequently we were able to tell which direction each ship was moving in relation to us—although I am, incidentally, severely dyslexic, which doesn’t mean I can’t read, only that I have no natural sense of left and right.

      But I would tell you this:

      During the entire evening and explanation, the oversweet taste and dead-blood color of port never entered my mind. What facilitated the explanation for me, that evening on the deck, was a purely mental construct, the memory of a liquor conceived years before, first put together in silence that night on the ferry with my friend, from an entirely different fermentation process, a distillate the hue of a beacon the color of a spring leaf paled by fog; and, although it has never been decanted and does not, certainly, exist, it is of a different bouquet, of a different vintnerage, and of an entirely different draft.

      NEW YORK, 1980

      1. Joseph F. Cox (1943–2002).

      2. “About 5,750 Words,” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, by Samuel R. Delany, Berkley Wind hover, New York, 1978. [Revised edition, Wesleyan University Press, 2008.]

      3. Have we all suffered those various “unicorns,” “current Kings of France,” and “Hitler’s daughters,” which are Anglo-American philosophy’s recent emblems for the present “absent object”? Poststructuralism has reiterated the lesson that “the origin is always a construct.” The historical archaeologies of Foucault and the psychoanalytic researches of Lacan have shown that the same is true of the subject. We have yet to learn, however, that the object is a construct as well—at least we have yet to learn the profound significance of its con-structural aspect for language. Indeed, it is only that the object is a construct—whether it “exists” or not—that allows it so easily to come apart. It is a much subtler construct that is usually supposed by our neorationalists, from Lévi-Strauss to Chomsky, in their search for cultural universals. The object is not made up of meanings (or “facts,” as the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus once asserted). It is made up rather of the elements of which meanings are also made, e.g., various routed-wave phenomena. If the sei in sich is made up of more than, or other than, routed-wave phenomena, I think we can safely say that unless there is an empirical revolution to shatter beyond recognition both the Newtonian and Einsteinian objects (the two stereoptic views that currently give modern thinkers СКАЧАТЬ