Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany

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СКАЧАТЬ both subvert present models and offer alternatives (much as Delany’s own essay does). “But then,” he says, “science fiction has traditionally been at the forefront of the dramatization process by which new models for thinking about the world are disseminated.”

      The two essays on Disch proceed differently from the essay on Russ for a number of reasons. The first essay, which was not included in the original edition of Starboard Wine, is the introduction to Fundamental Disch, a collection Delany edited in 1980. The second essay is a more complex and far-ranging version of the first. “Disch, I” gives us a fine introduction to Disch and to some of what Delany values in his work; “Disch, II” provides an opportunity for Delany to map many of his ideas about science fiction and ways of reading across the varied landscape of one particularly skilled writer’s oeuvre.

      In “Disch, II” Delany presents a sustained argument for his view that science fiction gives priority to the object, in contrast to other types of fiction that give priority to the subject. Only science fiction is different in this way. “How would the world of the story have to be different from our world in order for this to occur? is the question around which the play of differences in the SF text is organized.” This idea goes back to the idea of subjunctivities in “About 5,750 Words” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, where science fiction was differentiated not only from “naturalistic fiction” but also from fantasy. Naturalistic fiction is read with the understanding that the events of the story could have happened, whereas “Fantasy takes the subjunctivity of naturalistic fiction and throws it into reverse … the level of subjunctivity becomes: could not have happened.” SF, though, is different: “These objects, these convocations of objects into situations and events, are blanketly defined by: have not happened.” Delany’s ideas, frames of reference, and terminology changed significantly between 1968, when he wrote “About 5,750 Words,” and 1980, when he wrote “Disch, II,” but the underlying idea remains the same: SF is different from all other types of fiction, and one of its differences is in how the reader must construe the relationship between the world in the story and the world outside the story.

      Disch proves to be useful for such exploration because he has written in the three modes Delany wants to separate—science fiction, fantasy fiction, and mundane fiction—and the discussion allows Delany one of his most nuanced analyses of these ideas, because now he has texts that are multifaceted enough to provide a stronger test of his model than the more conventional fiction of Heinlein and Sturgeon. As the essay shows, the model survives the test intact, and allows Delany to add some caveats to any interpretation of his ideas that would turn them into strangleholds:

      to call a story science fiction, mundane fiction, or fantasy in these pages is simply a shorthand way to indicate that one set of reading conventions (that of science fiction, mundane fiction, or fantasy) is called up so quickly and strongly by the particular story that it would take something of an act of will—for me—to read it by either of the other sets.

      Some stories, he admits, “suggest a fantasy reading here, an SF reading there. But that should be no cause for distress. Simply sit back and enjoy the mental play as you shift back and forth between reading conventions.”

      The analysis of reading conventions, though, only takes up a few pages of the essay; much more space is given to an exploration of differences of subject/object priority, of history, and of the possibilities within different types of texts for cultural critique. The discussion of reading conventions is necessary to an understanding of these ideas, but it is only a piston in the engine that is science fiction.

      Two of the later essays in Starboard Wine, “Dichtung und Science Fiction” and “Reflections on Historical Models,” present first a summing up and synthesis, and then an opening up, an offering of new and different possibilities for SF criticism beyond those explored here.

      The title of “Dichtung und Science Fiction” echoes Goethe, whose autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, is often translated as Poetry and Truth. But along with poetry, dichtung also contains an idea of falsity and imagination, and so in Delany’s title we have various implications within the word as well as implications within the allusion, which makes truth into a shadow.¹⁰

      Many of the ideas we have previously encountered in Delany’s essays are touched upon, reiterated, or given particularly precise enunciation in “Dichtung und Science Fiction.” What is new is a history of pedagogy related to poetry, a history that then becomes a theory of reception and response, of movements and rebellions, continuities and incoherencies. Part of the poetic task is to give us not just meanings, but new meanings: “the release of new meanings in existing words and syntax through the organization of verbal contexts that may be as experimental or as traditional as the poet can tolerate.” Poetry enriches the signified by letting the signifier do more.

      More than once in these essays, Delany has claimed that science fiction is closer to poetry than it is to other sorts of fiction. His description of what poetry does and how it can be read follows along the lines of his description of science fiction, and there is no need in “Dichtung und Science Fiction” for him to connect all the dots, because his point is clear to anyone who has been paying attention. Instead of belaboring the obvious, Delany moves on to explore his ideas of SF’s peculiar history, to challenge originary claims, and to repeat his view that the most useful history is one able to discover actual lines and forces of influence before it sets off to encompass everything. He has already shown how this can work with poetry, and by showing it with science fiction, he suggests even more than he says—most of all, he suggests that by pursuing other sorts of historicizing and theorizing, SF critics have distracted themselves from a universe of significant insights.

      Also new in “Dichtung und Science Fiction” is Delany’s elaboration of the problematic relationship between concepts of style and greatness. Here he uses the example of translation to much effect, showing that the first translators of many of the Russian, German, and French writers, though their translations deeply influenced English-speaking modernists and helped establish some of the ideas of “greatness” enshrined in New Criticism and elsewhere, were not able to be faithful to the excellence of their sources’ style, and so “greatness” must lie outside of style, despite the stylists’ claim.¹¹ While Delany argues that SF is different from mundane fiction, he also argues that the assumptions of some schools of literary evaluation—the same ones advocating a hierarchy where there is literature and there is everything below it—are based on obviously false premises. Such an argument adds support both to his contention that terms such as literature should be used descriptively rather than evaluatively and to his contention that analysis cannot stop with style alone, but must include other elements of aesthetics, as well as history and ethics.

      While “Dichtung und Science Fiction” is at various times concerned with how SF might be taught, described, written, read, evaluated, and contextualized, by the end of the essay, Delany shows that all of these tasks are related, that many of them rely on each other, and that all of them need to be done well so that SF can remain something distinct, different, heterogeneous, and potentially subversive: “We are trying to preserve a certain freedom at a social level where the greatest threat to freedom is not direct forbidding of options but rather the homogenization of all options out of existence in the name of tolerance and acceptance.”

      “Reflections on Historical Models” builds from this idea by asserting that the significant, option-making differences between science fiction and mundane fiction are differences not only of texts, but of histories. The histories are not only matters of what was published when and by whom, but of the forces that created and sustained different types of relationships between writers, editors, publishers, and readers. Once again, Delany links the way texts are read to the contexts in which they are read, saying after a brief overview of his idea of different ways of reading:

      These distinctions in СКАЧАТЬ