begun to untangle) is privileged. In short, what we describe is the opposite of solipsism.
Semantics, then, as we use it throughout this study is a convenient way of referring to an effect of substitution: it does not indicate any linguistically privileged content that impels or allows such substitution. (As the author of that pinnacle among science fiction novels, The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester, once wrote: “For me there are no synonyms.”) To the extent that the following study relies on the initial concept and uses the aforementioned vocabulary, it may be (semantically) comprehensible to call it a structuralist or semiotic study.
On the other hand, Julia Kristeva has written, quite succinctly: “Rather than a discourse, contemporary semiotics takes as its object several semiotic practices which it considers translinguistic; that is, they operate through and across language, while remaining irreducible to its categories” (The Bounded Text, from Σημeιωτική, by Julia Kristeva [Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979]), whereas our object in this study is nothing less than the discourse of science fiction itself, its discursive organization, its rhetorical specificity, its specific difference. To facilitate our exploration we have employed certain semiotic practices, to be sure. But as our object remains what it is, this may be another reason not to classify this discursive analysis under the semiotic rubric.
With that as prologue, we may now introduce the investigation at hand. The concepts that make up the rest of this introduction can all be retrieved from the body of the study subsequent to their representation here. But an initial encounter with them—here—, ordered thus and given this emphasis, may provide another sort of reassurance:
On most of the following pages the reader will encounter brief passages (ranging from a word or two to several sentences) from the science fiction story “Angouleme” by Thomas M. Disch, numbered, printed in italics, followed by a virgule (/), that slash followed by a commentary (generally longer than the fragment of “Angouleme” text preceding it) printed in roman type. 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. But this reading, this evocation, is entirely contoured by gravity: the weighty signified below, the airy signifier above … the signified holding the signifier down by the same gesture with which it holds it up … the signified from which pure signification (the valued, weightless essence contained in any signified) diffuses upward through the bar rendered permeable by the corrosive action of the desiccated signifier weighing on it, so that this pure signification, having aspired, now holds the signifier aloft, straining against the heavy signified under it, but without whose signification that signifier would collapse into meaninglessness, lacking all support … all of which is to trace out the locus of gravitic nonsense that constrains so much of our discourse in matters of meaning.
Science fiction, as we shall shortly discuss (see commentary to lexia 218), constitutes the prime demotic attack on gravitic value systems —those value systems (of thought, speech, and written analysis) that organize not only the schema above but which organize as well almost all our rhetoric about society (with its lower and upper classes), intelligence (of the higher and lower sort), and social evolution (that has reached a higher or lower level)—in brief, any discourse where the image lower signs the presence “of lesser value” and the image higher signs the presence “of greater value,” however oblique, however critical the expression. And it holds equally for their converse systems, where the basic is of the greatest value and the superficial or the superfluous is of the least.
This is a text on science fiction: contouring it at every point is that gravitically neutral space (free-fall) where imagination streaks between worlds, between stars. Any reader who cannot get free of the gravitic orientation, who cannot allow the lexias and commentary to rotate freely about that most arbitrary bar, who cannot read the commentary as signifier and the criticized text as signified (the text fragment namely a metonymic entrance to the plurality of the signified) as easily as a more conventional discourse coerces from us the more conventional reading, that reader had best take our initial warning: find another book. Indeed, if an initial interest has prompted a reader to come this far who must now turn away, perhaps the book to seek is 334 by Thomas M. Disch,* in which the text of “Angouleme” also occurs, surrounded and intruded on by a set of fictions different from those we indulge here—a set we can claim unreservedly is at least as elegant as—if not notably more so than—our own.
New York, 1977
(revised 1982)
*Here we are taking an unfair, if not an illiterate, American privilege by calling a (till recently) primarily European dialogue, whose successive movements are designated by the participants “structuralist,” “poststructuralist,” “deconstructionist,” “semiological,” etc., with what for many, if not most, of these men and women is the hopelessly contaminated term.
*With Saussure’s conviction that only the signifier could be rigorously, scientifically studied, we commence what a generalized structuralist critique has variously termed, first, the privilege of the signifier and, finally, the tyranny of the signifier. Though our own enterprise begins within that tradition—beneath that tyranny as it were—with the most careful attention paid to the signifier, signed by fraying the signifier twice and at two different densities across the pages of our own text, we have tried to subvert that tyranny by a critical response to the signified rendered, by fictive creation (see the Context, p. 36), a hopefully luminous cotextus of signifiers.
**Today (June 2013), I would write “transcendental” rather than “mystical.” As with the use of “mundane,” some readers may consider that too extreme a swipe at those whom I took for my polemical adversaries at the time of writing—or, indeed, may consider it not clear enough.
*Thomas M. Disch, 334 (New York: Avon Books, 1974; Vintage Books, 2014).
A Road along the Shore
An Introduction to The American Shore
—by Matthew Cheney
If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Now/Then
The American Shore is likely the most thorough exploration of a single science fiction text yet published. No matter what we end up thinking of its approach and insights, no reader could deny that it is anything less than an impressive intellectual performance. Around Thomas M. Disch’s short story “Angouleme,” Samuel R. Delany wraps pretexts, contexts, and Exotexts; most impressively, he divides the text into 287 lexias whose accompanying commentaries explore and expound upon Disch’s words and sentences.
Delany provided an introduction to The American Shore when it was first published in 1978, and in it he declares this book is not itself an introduction to the topics of science fiction or structuralism, and that it presupposes at least a basic familiarity with both. This is true. I would further add that this book is not an introduction to Delany’s thought on these subjects. For that, one must turn to Starboard Wine, a collection of essays Delany put together after spending a term as a fellow at the Center for 20th Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where he used The American Shore as a textbook. “Although,” he writes in Starboard Wine, “these essays are not a systematic introduction to The American Shore, needless to say, reading them will certainly leave one better prepared to grapple with it.”1
