The American Shore. Samuel R. Delany

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ words themselves generate a kind of abstract poetry. Certain statements and turns of phrase deserve to be appreciated on their own (I’m especially fond of a sentence from the commentary on lexia 182: “The mother Sniffles will not call for tomorrow is the man they wish to murder today.”) Don’t neglect the occasional wordplay, too, or the alliterative poetry—for instance, from the commentary on lexia 66: “a simple movement through time, temper, and textual timbre.” We can attend to the textuality of the commentaries themselves, and attune our ears to their timbres, too.

      Slash/Virgule

      In Richard Miller’s translation of S/Z, the “/” is called a slash. In The American Shore, Delany calls the mark a virgule. It has had other names as well (e.g., solidus, generally for the “/” used in figures and fractions). This polyonymous punctuation points to a central feature of much structuralist and poststructuralist thinking: the exploration and analysis of binaries, dichotomies, dualities, and oppositions. (A completely incomplete list: signifier/signified, langue/parole, writerly/­readerly, presence/absence, subject/object, nature/culture, raw/cooked.)

      Barthes does not declare what he means by “S/Z” until the forty-­seventh of ninety-three mini-essays (“divagations,” in Richard Howard’s term) scattered through the book. Barthes’s meanings have much to do with Balzac’s “Sarrasine” and the French language, but a few clauses from the final sentence of that divagation are worth bearing in mind: “[It] is the slash of censure, the surface of the mirror, the wall of hallucination, the verge of antithesis, the abstraction of limit, the obliquity of the signifier, the index of the paradigm, hence of meaning.”⁹

      Of his virgules, Samuel Delany says, in his introduction, “Such a graphic configuration on the page must call up, both by metaphor and metonymy, that formula so easily attributable to Saussure, S/s, signifier over signified, word over meaning, icon over interpretation.”¹⁰ He follows this with a key point about the “gravitic nonsense that constrains so much of our discourse in matters of meaning”—the simple formula of x over y is also a simple hierarchy, the x being in the literally superior position.

      Science Fiction/Mundane Fiction

      Throughout The American Shore, Delany refers to fiction that is not s-f, and particularly the sort of fiction generally considered “literary,” as mundane. On one level, this is purely descriptive: etymologically, mundane means “of the world.” But Delany is also here very aware of the connotations—my thesaurus lists these synonyms to start: humdrum, dull, boring, tedious, monotonous, tiresome, wearisome, unexciting, uninteresting …

      There is a tinge of s-f chauvinism here, but that is not merely or primarily why mundane is a necessary term in this text. The need for that word returns us to the concept of gravitic discourse and the simple hierarchy of x over y. Delany’s use of the term mundane for not-s-f flips a pernicious, common equation. The term literary fiction is not neutral, but rather comes to us bearing connotations of prestige, complexity, class, and value. While, in an ideal world, the terms literary fiction and science fiction would be descriptors rather than value statements, we do not live in an ideal world. The assumption present in the discourse of Anglo-American bookchat (even more so in 1977, when Delany was writing The American Shore, than now) is that one is inherently superior to the other.¹¹ If the words science fiction cannot be perceived without a valuation, then the words literary fiction need to be replaced with a term that will provide a commutative property to the binary operation. Hence, mundane.

      It is vital to remember, though, that this move is just the first, necessary step in undoing the binary opposition itself.

      Polysemy/Dissemination

      At the heart of much of the linguistic and literary criticism contemporary to The American Shore is the question of how to acknowledge and even celebrate plurality without being lost in infinite, meaningless multiplicity. If all of language sits immanent in the shadow of any single word, and all meanings assume their countermeaning, are we left with no recourse but absolute relativism?

      In S/Z, Barthes proposed the concept of readerly (lisible) and writerly (scriptible) texts, with readerly texts less plural than writerly texts: “ … for the plural text, there cannot be a narrative structure, a grammar, or a logic; thus, if one or another of these are sometimes permitted to come forward, it is in proportion … as we are dealing with incompletely plural texts, texts whose plural is more or less parsimonious.” For Barthes, true plurality was not something to run away from, but rather an ideal of absolute freedom toward which to aim: “a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds.” Sense ultimately and inevitably limits creativity, because the possibilities for any text’s meaning are bounded by language, traditions, and other texts. A readerly text cannot be infinitely polysemous. The readerly text is a product, whereas “the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.” The readerly text is not limited to hackwork. The readerly text is every text that has, through the accumulation (and fossilization) of meaning, lost infinity: “We call any readerly text a classic text.”¹²

      More useful for The American Shore, it seems to me, is Jacques Derrida’s distinction between polysemy and dissemination. The difference between the two terms is a matter of orientation: polysemy generates meaning from within the text and is, at least at its starting point, thus bound by that text’s assumptions and propositions; dissemination generates meanings from beyond or outside the text, invading, infecting, or, to use Derrida’s preferred metaphor, inseminating it: “Even while it keeps the texts it culls alive, this play of insemination—or grafting—destroys their hegemonic center, subverts their authority and their uniqueness.”¹³ Derrida maintained that his distinction between polysemy and dissemination was “very slight,” but I suspect he only saw it as slight because the distinction of inside and outside is not pure and eventually falls apart—in Of Grammatology he famously and vehemently insisted that there is no outside-text.¹⁴ He did not mean, though, like some puritanical New Critic, to limit us only to a text without context. He clarified the importance of context in 1988:

      What is called “objectivity,” scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation), imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, powerfully established, stabilized or rooted in a network of conventions (for instance, those of language) and yet which still remains a context. And the emergence of the value of objectivity (and hence of so many others) also belongs to a context. We can call “context” the entire “real-history-of-the-world,” if you like, in which this value of objectivity and, even more broadly, that of truth (etc.) have taken on meaning and imposed themselves. That does not in the slightest discredit them. In the name of what, of which other “truth,” moreover, would it? One of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be the effort to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to an incessant movement of recontextualization. The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction (“there is nothing outside the text” [il n’y a pas de hors-texte]), means nothing else: there is nothing outside context.¹⁵

      The concept of dissemination as a response to (or replacement of) polysemy opened new perspectives on intertextuality by setting aside the all-or-nothing idealism of binary oppositions for a model of rich impurity, mixing, and fertilization. The impossible ideal of the infinitely polysemous, writerly text does not have to torment us. Dissemination insists on context, for it is context (“the entire ‘real-history-of-the-world,’ if you like”) that can inseminate the text.

      That СКАЧАТЬ