days of 2013—is to pick it up encumbered by the weight of the years since 1978, when it was first published. The American Shore speaks to us from a world that has not yet experienced the Internet, cyberpunk, New Historicism, queer theory, President Ronald Reagan, or AIDS. Delany finished writing it in April 1977, one month before the release of Star Wars. Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Althusser’s wife, Hélène, were all still alive. As was Thomas M. Disch.
That world is gone. Time has added another text to the many texts herein: a palimpsest made of the past. Our knowledge of the years between now and then may obscure or clarify the words. The effect is unavoidable, inevitable.
Stories like “Angouleme,” set in a future extrapolated from present trends, wear their age a bit differently from other fictions. While some elements of the radical strangeness of the future proposed by “Angouleme” remain, others have become more odd or anachronistic, or even had their power reduced by the changes between the present in which Disch wrote and our own.
Consider a single detail from the story: “Papa, the executive, remarried, a man this time and somewhat more happily.” In lexia 11, when the sentence appears in context, Delany makes no mention of the marriage, but in lexia 66 he compares it with a later passage, saying the marriage signals “a rhetorical tradition of radical utopian reorganization.” Homosexual marriage was, indeed, a utopian concept at a time when sodomy laws were still enforced in some regions of the United States, homosexuals could legally be denied jobs and housing for reasons of sexual orientation, homosexual couples were forbidden from adopting children, and parents whose orientation became known often lost custody of their children in divorces. Forty years after “Angouleme” originally appeared (in the first issue of New Worlds Quarterly), the New York State Senate passed the Marriage Equality Act, legalizing same-sex marriage in New York.2 Gay marriage is not itself utopia, of course, but its transformation in cultural status from a radical notion at the time of The American Shore’s writing to a liberal norm in our own is a vivid example of how passing time can affect the meaning of a text.
Science fiction is fundamentally about the present in which it is written, and so its futures are born past their expiration dates. But time complicates the perception of all texts. (We do not read Shakespeare’s sonnets today in the way they were read when they were written, or the way they were read in 1813, or the way they were read in 1953.) Additionally, differences in the production, distribution, and reception of texts between the time of The American Shore’s publication and today may heighten or diminish some of the insights Delany offers, or may hide from us some of the reasons for certain points receiving emphasis, certain terms being chosen, certain theories insisted on. Well-armed with our knowledge of what came next, we may miss some of the details and unique turns of the text before our eyes. On the other hand, we are more fortunate than the original readers of The American Shore in that the distance of years has been accompanied by many more books from Samuel Delany, including essays and interviews that develop, advance, explicate, and complicate the ideas herein. Unlike the original readers, we can look back on this book as one facet of a project.
Our vantage point is one more layer, as valuable as the rest (and, nonetheless, inescapable). It is worth the effort to seek the situation of the world-text when any work was written, but it is pointless to resent the present. From our position as citizens of a realized future, we read as archaeologists and genealogists. Meaning is made by the memory of reading and rereading. Every text is past.
S/Z/etc.
Delany mentions various precursors to The American Shore (in “Part III: The Context”): Bernard Grebanier’s The Heart of Hamlet, Damon Knight’s “An Annotated ‘Masks,’” Vladimir Nabokov’s copious commentary accompanying his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, and Roland Barthes’s S/Z.
“An Annotated ‘Masks’” aimed at giving science fiction readers and aspiring writers an insight into the sorts of specific choices that created a single short story—and, more important, a single science fiction story. Its specificity and, most important, its focus on the meanings that science fiction produces in a text, are replicated by orders of magnitude here.
The Heart of Hamlet and Nabokov’s commentaries on Eugene Onegin are works of literary criticism and philology. Whereas the connection of The American Shore to Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin is straightforward (texts diffused), The Heart of Hamlet has long been out of print and its significance to The American Shore is less obvious, as Grebanier does not carry out a word-by-word or line-by-line reading of the whole of Hamlet. Instead, he attempts to cut through centuries of commentary on Shakespeare’s play and to show that we have lost the actual text beneath the obfuscations of discourse around it. He pays close attention to passages that, he proposes, answer questions critics created from their own assumptions, prejudices, and less than careful readings. While little to no commentary on “Angouleme” had accrued before Delany wrote The American Shore, there were prejudices and assumptions that, indeed, obscured the text: prejudices and assumptions about what science fiction is, should be, and can be.
Pale Fire is a work of fiction disguised as a poem and the commentary about it. Readers’ understanding of the fiction hinges on their interpretation of the relationship between the commentary and the poem. Because of the unreliability of Charles Kinbote, the putative editor of the scholarly edition of John Shade’s poem, Pale Fire’s meanings remain ambiguous and multifaceted. The ambiguity extends across numerous levels of the text, from the poem “Pale Fire” through the critical apparatus and to the relationship between all the words and characters. The universe of the novel flows between its texts.
To anyone familiar with French structuralism in the latter half of the twentieth century, the obvious precursor to The American Shore may seem to be Roland Barthes’s S/Z, ostensibly an exploration of Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine.” It is from Barthes that Delany draws certain techniques, particularly the use of lexias (units of reading) as diffusing tools. What Delany does with the lexias, though, is unique to him. Barthes uses his lexias to locate “five major codes under which all the textual signifiers can be grouped” throughout “Sarrasine,”3 but Delany is not interested in categorizing the language of narration into any limited number of types.
While S/Z is important to some of the form of The American Shore, a great knowledge of Barthes is not a tremendous help with Delany, or vice versa. The influence of S/Z is similar to the influence of the other texts Delany mentions, though influence is too powerful a word, and we should think more in terms of something softer, more associative: a trace, an intimation, a whiff. Ships signaling each other as they pass in the night. Precursors in spirit, but also, sometimes, opponents off of which to bounce and riff.
The key concepts of S/Z are arranged around the five codes that Barthes employs, and he identifies the expression of these codes in each of the lexias. (The hermeneutic code governs mystery and suspense by creating questions and the desire for answers; the semic code indicates connotative signifiers or cultural stereotypes that help readers recognize characters, motivations, and behaviors; the symbolic code guides readers’ understanding of the move from text to symbol; the proairetic code groups actions into sequences and thus creates a recognizable meaning for them; and the referential code indicates a body of cultural knowledge from which the text draws or toward which it gestures.) The codes serve to illustrate an idea Barthes expressed in his most famous essay, “The Death of the Author”: “We know now that a text consists not of a line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but of a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original: the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture.”4 (There are echoes here of a statement from Pale Fire: “I wish you to gasp not only
