Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany
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Название: Starboard Wine
Автор: Samuel R. Delany
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая фантастика
isbn: 9780819572943
isbn:
5. This is to say they are better regarded as repeated processes numerous subjects can undergo than as repeated patterns given mental entities they can fall out of and then fall into again; in Roland Barthe’s terminology, they are “structuations,” not “structures.”
6. This taxonomy is contemporary and synchronic. For any diachronic understanding of the historical forces that have brought this synchronic array about, we must explore the historical forces that have led to the recent dissolution of the term “genre” in poststructural debate. We must examine the attractions between the sociopsychological world and the locus of an ideally undifferentiated discourse whose historical moment is placed farther and farther back as the revealed vectors clarify the diachronic location of its true differentiations.
7. There are good precedents for this assumption. The Russian critic M. M. Bakhtin was among the first to note (in The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist and translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, University of Texas Press, 1981) that by the end of the nineteenth century, all the literary genres had become “novelized.” This “novelization of literary genres” is what allows me so frequently to take mundane (or bourgeois) fiction as the literary prototype.
8. I, etcetera by Susan Sontag, Vintage Books, 1979; The Persistence of Vision by John Varley (paperback edition), Dell Books, 1978. Even the packages of the two books contour their own sociological discourse. Extraordinary in purely photographic terms, when placed on the Vintage paperback cover (and Vintage has probably become the literary publisher today, perhaps more than any hardcover colophon), enfolding, with the title, the author’s name, Thomas Victor’s photograph of Sontag becomes yet another of the misleading vulgarities by which literature in our time is doomed to propagate itself. (A picture of the writer is the last thing that should appear on a book with this title; and anyone with a sense of literature’s commitment to the impersonality that permits its meticulous exploration of the subject should realize it, including the Vintage art department!) The book’s cover is bearable only because, as Sontag was one of the first to note in her early essays on pornography, science fiction, and camp, the cover Varley’s book bears, in awful taste on a mass market paperback, overloaded with promotional copy in unreadable type, framed and reframed in a perfectly eye-dulling format (“quantum science fiction—the world’s first international science-fiction program—provides worldwide publication of the best new works in the field. Each Quantum selection is approved by our …”—a parody of book-ofthe-month-club advertising that is the quintessence of paraliterary packaging), becomes, by those overwrought conventions of vulgarity that make it vanish into the mass of face-out display SF books, by the same gesture through which Sontag’s cover, inappropriate as it is, leaps from a similar literary display to catch the eye, a kind of aesthetic reticence that precisely a reader with Sontag’s highly trained vision would probably be the first to appreciate. Put more succinctly: By a gesture that at once mocks literature and vulgarizes it (the picture of the “author” blazened across the cover) Sontag’s book appropriates, for economic survival’s sake, a gesture from paraliterature, as Varley’s book, in its paraliterary excess, manages to be undistinguishable from everything else on the SF shelf around it—a camp appropriation of a literary gesture of auctorial dissolution. Thus the conflict that will shortly be reviewed below.
Science Fiction and Difference:
An Introduction to Starboard Wine
—by Matthew Cheney
Starboard Wine offers an extension (and in many ways culmination) of ideas Samuel R. Delany had begun to formulate, revise, and explore in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, which collected essays written between 1968 and 1977 (or, to add a different perspective, between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-five).1 These are ideas about language, about reading, about difference, about history, about criticism, about literature, and about science fiction.
Though subtitled “More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction,” we could also call Starboard Wine “Notes on the Theory and Practice of Science Fiction Criticism,” because more than in any of his previous books, Delany seems here to be calling for SF criticism to move away from certain practices, to aspire to greater rhetorical and historiographic complexity, and to take into account more recent literary theories than those of the Russian formalists or the New Critics. At the same time, he is demonstrating the kind of criticism he advocates.
Starboard Wine’s first essay, “The Necessity of Tomorrow(s),” begins with autobiography—“an attempt to sketch out one lane along one of the many possible highways into the SF world.” This lane leads to a discussion of difference, and the various meanings that word possesses could be used as markers for nearly all of what follows in the book. Difference is what separates a science fiction text from other texts: a difference of representation and reference, a difference of reading strategies (protocols, codes), a difference of history. Science fiction is best described according to its differences, and any meaningful discussion of it will be a discussion of difference. Within such a conception, science fiction becomes a different way of reading and a different way of thinking. What “The Necessity of Tomorrow(s)” suggests, though, is that difference for Delany stretches well beyond the borders of science fiction.
Throughout Starboard Wine, Delany is (mostly silently) applying Derrida’s idea of différance to the texts he encounters and the situations he describes.2 Science fiction is made different from other texts by the play of its references, the techniques of conceiving and writing texts that utilize this play, and the habits of reading required for such texts to yield the most meaning. These differences do not determine quality—they are present in the best and worst science fiction—but in addition to these differences, the most aesthetically accomplished science fiction creates difference by allowing critical inquiries that would not otherwise be possible. It is this latter point that seems to me one of Delany’s great accomplishments, because through it he has linked Lukács’ statement that “the novel is the only art form where the artist’s ethical position is the aesthetic problem” with the particular aesthetics of science fiction in a way that allows—even requires—both close reading and ethical analysis.
“Some Presumptuous Approaches to Science Fiction” offers a view of difference at the level of inspiration by suggesting that the process for coming up with an idea for a science fiction story is different from the process of coming up with an idea for a play, a historical novel, or a poem: “In general, science-fictional ideas generate when a combination of chance and the ordinary suggests some distortion of the current and ordinary that can conceivably be rationalized as a future projection.” Delany insists that “Science fiction is not about the future; it uses the future as a narrative convention to present significant distortions of the present.” The importance of this insight becomes particularly clear when (in “Disch, II”) Delany shows how SF’s prioritizing of the object rather than the subject allows for a different kind of cultural criticism from what is available to the fiction he calls mundane (“of the world”):
[S]cience fiction, because of the object priorities in the way we read it, in the questions we ask of it, in the modes by which we must interpret it simply for it to make sense, is able to critique directly both particular institutions and the larger cultural object in general … The object priority in the reading conventions—which must begin with a consideration of some real institution simply to understand how the science-fictional one works at all—generates the criticism directly in the understanding (cognition) process itself.
“Reading conventions” is an important phrase here, because it signals the transfer of difference between the object-oriented text (imagined via a different process than is used for СКАЧАТЬ