Barthes, the codes are also “voices out of which the text is woven,” and he goes on to identify a voice for each code (Voice of Empirics, Voice of the Person, Voice of Science, Voice of Truth, Voice of Symbol).6 These codes and voices serve to highlight intertextuality and to undermine the dominant power that notions of authorial intention and individual genius can have over the ways texts are discussed.
The voices that Delany points to within Disch’s text are not the voices of any particular, generalizable code beyond that of the signifier/signified relationship or a chain of signifiers. Delany, too, seeks to open the text out beyond any single meaning. However, he is not systematically showing it to be a “fabric of quotations” from other texts or from culture generally, but rather to be a plane of signification. While such a plane could be endless, its contours suggest certain ways of meaning. Both Barthes and Delany are broadly engaged in a similar project—to show how their chosen texts produce meanings, to open up the possibilities of meaning within those texts, and to draw some insights from the process of identifying the systems of meaning production—but the purposes and goals of their projects are different enough that it is difficult to compare them any more specifically without wrenching them beyond recognition. The American Shore demonstrates a wide range of ways that “Angouleme” means, but its primary task is to show how it means as science fiction. Without the specific way of reading that is science fiction, Delany proposes, “Angouleme” is less meaningful, if it is meaningful at all. It would be inaccurate to label such a position Barthesian.
Unity/Plurality
In “Wagner/Artaud” (written from October 1983 to December 1987), Delany offers an efficient summation of his ideas on certain types of artistic unity and their relationship to social and political ideologies—ideas that weave through much of his critical writing, particularly from the mid-1970s and later:
For Hegel, writing in the first, glorious years of the Napoleonic onslaught, history and progress were forces that marched hand in hand. For Nietzsche, writing sixty-two years later, history was a nightmare and progress a joke…. But the conceptual screen both Hegel and Nietzsche worked against was one with the concept of unity put forth by Aristotle and [reiterated in the 19th century by] Poe.7 This nineteenth-century reductionism, this plea for a unity in which all that is anomalous can be ignored, this appeal to rationalism over empiricism, is behind the whole deadly concept of race; by the end of that century we will see its fallout in the virulent anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair, in what we now speak of as British imperialism, and in Rhodesian and South African racism. Such reductionism when essentialized becomes the philosophical underpinning of this century’s totalitarianisms, whether Hitler’s or Stalin’s or, in its so much milder form, that most social of social constructs—the “human nature” which everyone seems so reluctant to do battle with in the name of pleasure in this country today.8
The American Shore stands not only as a testament to and demonstration of a certain kind of literary analysis, but also as a guerrilla attack on the neoclassical concept of Aristotelian unities and Poe’s concept of the single effect in a short story. An especially creative critic might make a plausible case for “Angouleme” as a story that heeds some or most of these unities, but Delany makes the opposite move. The majority of The American Shore not only displays Disch’s text through diffusion, it insists on plurality: this is only one diffusion of the text, and however exhaustive the many pages may seem, we can imagine them doubled again with a different diffusion, cut up into a new set of lexias—the refused text diffused and refused again. It is impossible to create or communicate ideas and concepts without unities (the process is itself unifying); it is likely impossible in most cases to account for all anomalies. The error Delany identifies arises from universalizing unities, from dehistoricizing, dematerializing. The American Shore, by binding a text between covers, exists as a unity. It is not a random collage. But neither is it the essence of “Angouleme” or the final statement or the only possibility. It contains multitudes, and multitudes of multitudes could be spun from it, and multitudes of those multitudes are unknown to it, obscured by it, erased by it.
While most of the concerns of The American Shore are textual, the implications reach far beyond “Angouleme” or science fiction or literary theory, and this, for me, is the book’s great value and enduring gift. Delany offers us a model for thinking our way through a particular short story, but the habits we pick up by such practice may weaken or break more malign habits that constrict our perception of the world (and its texts).
The plurality of perspective inheres even in the pronouns. Delany employs a plural viewpoint throughout The American Shore. This may create in some readers’ ears a haughty tone, or perhaps an archaic one, for ours is an age of less formal, more individualized style even in academic prose. With a bit of effort, I soon convinced my mind’s ear to hear the plural pronouns not so much as the voice of a monarch pronouncing from on high, but the voice of someone welcoming me into a discussion, guiding me through the shards, ushering me into the we. In a book of so many diffusions, it became comforting to have that one, plural unity to hold onto.
Blank/Slug
Like much fiction, “Angouleme” uses blank space to indicate changes of scene or perspective, and The American Shore does not let even these blanks go without commentary. Into this silence, this semiotic emptiness, Delany fits musings and extrapolations, letting the empty lines serve as resting points before resuming the hustle and bustle of the broken text.
Delany explains that printers call these blank lines “slugs,” an evocatively unpretentious term. There are eight in “Angouleme.” They fall between lexias 28 and 29, 46 and 47, 75 and 76, 98 and 99, 133 and 134, 173 and 174, 206 and 207, and 242 and 243. They truly sit in between: not lexias of their own, and not exactly belonging to one of the lexias on either side, but rather suspended between them in discontinuity, filling in the blanks, leaking between the lines. They are ghost lexias, a presence within an absence, a haunting of the void.
Slugs disrupt the text from within—they give it order and shape by signaling some unspoken drift, thus taming what would otherwise be a jarring slip, an incoherence, by making it visible. They provide a flexibility within what Delany calls, in the second ghost lexia, “the necessary linearity of fictive time,” but they also render the flexibility readable. The slug is a sign: Mind the gap.
The ghost lexias, too, are a kind of sign to us, something different from the ordinary order of things within the text of The American Shore. In their expansiveness, they slow us down, and they encourage us to weave connections between the disparate threads unspooled by the lexias. Many of the ghost lexias offer explicit commentary on the project at hand, moving us a level of perception above the more immediate task of getting in the way of Disch’s text, though the lexias and ghost lexias are united by the common job of, as Delany says at the fifth slug, “circling, searching, thrusting.”
Voice/Text
Something that struck me on my most recent rereading of The American Shore is how strongly certain sentences and phrases within the commentaries give a sense of narration. Obviously, one of the topics they return to is that of the narrative voices of “Angouleme,” and therefore this topic is central to any reading of The American Shore, but I have in the past always read it rather simply and naively as the commentaries being Delany’s Voice, and thus in some way more truthful and less artful than the polysemous voices of fiction. But as countless critics have told us, narrators are constructs, regardless of whether we judge a text to fit somehow in the category of fiction or the category of nonfiction. While certainly Delany’s purpose in writing The American Shore was to convey information and ideas about science fiction, textuality, and “Angouleme,” we should stay alert to the textuality of The American Shore itself.
This is also one of the joys of the book, the pleasures of its text. Delany is, though a rather different
