Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany

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СКАЧАТЬ suspect that if an average science fiction reader knows of Delany’s critical theories, they know of the idea of “reading protocols”—a term Delany used interchangeably with a few others, and seems mostly to have abandoned since Starboard Wine, but which has held on within the discourse of the science fiction fan community. (At every SF convention I’ve attended, I’ve heard the term used more than once.) The other concept in Starboard Wine that is likely to be familiar to many SF fans is an idea stated in “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’”: that any sentence from a non-SF story could conceivably appear in an SF story, but “there are many, many sentences in science fiction that would be hard or impossible to work into a text of mundane fiction.” I have seldom been comfortable with the way fans use these ideas, because often what they say seems close to what Delany’s imagined critic complains about in “Dichtung und Science Fiction”: “Underneath your critical terminology we hear the echoes of those illiterate, anti-intellectual, terrorist³ ravings: science fiction is not literature; science fiction is a privileged form of writing to be judged only by its own laws, against which the rest of world literature will be found lacking.” The problem is that most discussions of these concepts get stuck on the ideas themselves rather than what is far more important: how Delany uses them.

      Though there are occasional moments of SF-chauvinism in Delany’s essays, they are usually expressed with at least a touch of irony, and in any case they are rare. Delany uses his ideas of SF’s différance not to create a hierarchy of texts—difference does not imply superiority or inferiority—but rather to explore and describe the particular qualities various texts possess and the ways those texts may most profitably be read. He repeatedly chastises critics who assume that the label of “science fiction” can also be an evaluation of the aesthetic or social values for any text receiving the label. In “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’” he says that “Having adjudged a text science fiction, we have made no unitary statement, however vague or at whatever level of suggestion or implication, about its value.” SF is not an evaluative term, but other terms used in distinction from it (e.g. “literature”) are also not evaluative terms (though “mundane fiction”, despite its Latin heritage, does possess some negative connotations, a fact that may explain SF readers’ fondness for it, as it levels the playing field when the term “science fiction” has negative connotations in many contexts).⁴ Science fiction is neither better nor worse; it is different.

      While Delany’s basic idea of reading protocols has achieved general acceptance with many science fiction critics and fans, he differs significantly from them in his insistence that SF can be described but not defined, and in his approach to SF historiography. These ideas, though, rely on and extend from the more commonly accepted ones, and deserve more careful consideration than they have generally received.

      A definition of science fiction is impossible for many reasons (as Delany explains in various essays), but one of the most important is that a definition would require SF to be a fixed and constant item. In an interview with Julia Kristeva, Derrida said, “The activity or productivity connoted by the a of différance refers to the generative movement in the play of differences. The latter are neither fallen from the sky nor inscribed once and for all in a closed system, a static structure that a synchronic and taxonomic operation could exhaust.”⁵ Because SF relies on différance, it cannot be stuck in a static structure such as a comprehensive definition. That does not mean, though, that the play of differences that create SF cannot be described. A mature criticism will seek to do just that, and will not bother with the futile pursuit of definitions.

      Also futile is the pursuit of an origin, though not entirely for the same reasons (although if SF is, as Delany posits, a “field phenomenon” then locating any single origin is impossible). In the fourth “Exotext” of The American Shore, Delany offers a quick survey of many of the 17th- and 18th-century works various critics have claimed to be science fiction, and he rejects them as SF because they do not possess enough difference from the discourses of their day: “In brief, what we have throughout this whole period is a comparatively undifferentiated tradition of Prose Commentary, in which science and fiction are both struggling to separate themselves out, to establish themselves as separate modes, with separate criteria for judgment.” The nineteenth century’s voyages imaginaires and utopian novels “are works that simply try to resort to an undifferentiated discourse for instructive purposes, an endeavor which still locates itself in commentary rather than in fiction.”⁶ In Starboard Wine, Delany expands on these ideas, saying in “Dichtung und Science Fiction,” “For an originary assertion to mean something for a contemporary text, one must establish a chain of reading and preferably a chain of discussion as well.” In the “Letter from Rome” to Science Fiction Studies, he writes that “before any historical inquiry occurs a fundamental process takes place, a process so fundamental we are apt to lose sight of it.”

      He describes this process through an extended metaphor of automobiles and transportation that is marvelous and resonant, but may not immediately make the point clear. The fundamental process is to determine what unites “the dullest Analog putt-putt tale” with such SF masterpieces as Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, and what differentiates those two items from other (non-SF) texts. This is not only a process of identifying aspects within the texts themselves (“the engine” in Delany’s metaphor), but it is also a process of identifying the forces and systems (“the assembly-line development, the oil refineries, and the highway systems”) outside the texts that help constitute and support them in ways different from the forces and systems constituting and supporting other texts.

      We know that for Delany it is SF’s language—how it is conceived and received—that differentiates SF from other types of writing, and in the essays about specific writers and, particularly, “Reflections on Historical Models” he locates at least some of the extratextual differences at play: the relationships between writers, editors, and fans; the discourse of fanzines and best-of-the-year anthologies; the exigencies of publishing during particular eras in particular cultural and economic environments. In an interview in Science Fiction Studies in 1987, he said, “There’s no reason to run SF too much back before 1926, when Hugo Gernsback coined the ugly and ponderous term ‘scientifiction’ which, in the letter columns written by the readers of his magazines, became over the next year or so ‘science fiction’ and finally ‘SF’.”⁷ To Delany, 1926 (or so) is a reasonable starting point for SF because that is the point at which it becomes a differentiated discourse, with texts that require their own ways of reading, and with systems of production and consumption for those texts that are not the same as for others. “To say that a phenomenon does have a significant history is to say that its history is different from the history of something else: that’s what makes it significant” (“Science Fiction and ‘Literature’”).

      We need to consider Delany’s ideas about science fiction together as a group because they rely on each other. If we accept that SF is not a static system, but is instead an overdetermined phenomenon, then there is no point in searching for an originary text for SF, because overdetermined phenomena can have no single origin. If we accept that SF is an overdetermined phenomenon, then we know that it cannot be defined; however, it can be described. To describe something, we must be able to differentiate it from other things, and any history of the phenomenon must first be a history of difference. This is where the idea of reading protocols (ways of reading, codic strategies) is most useful, because it offers a theory that allows us to describe SF’s differences at a level where we can include works of widely varying qualities. But the concept of reading protocols is only a starting point for analysis, and a critic who considers it an end in and of itself risks creating an analysis that is flat, obvious, or irrelevant.

      The path Delany maps is not the only one possible or valuable (he would, I expect, be uncomfortable claiming any One True Way for SF criticism), but it deserves more attention. We can begin to see the value in such attention by looking more closely at how some of the essays in Starboard Wine work together.

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