as fertilization and expansion rather than constraint and failure is closer to what Delany is up to here, for in The American Shore, one solution to (meaningless, undesirable) multiplicity is to bring in the context of science fiction.
Binary/Gravity
Some of the traditional structuralist binaries are present in The American Shore (particularly signifier/signified), but Delany employs and explores many others specific to “Angouleme,” science fiction, and his own interests—s-f/mundane, space/time, the two voices within the narration of “Angouleme” (adult/child), the ocean void/city void noted in the commentary to lexia 210, and (most importantly and meaningfully), all the oppositions created by the gravitic discourse so common to our language and its thoughts.
Delany summarized for a general audience his ideas about gravitic discourse in the introduction to his 1978 graphic novel Empire:
Have you ever thought how much our thinking is controlled by gravity? We get a high score on an English test; our team gets a low score in a volleyball game. Both in anthropology and biology people will speak of organisms or societies as having evolved to lower or higher levels—almost everything is measured on this same, imaginary scale that runs from down to up, from lower to higher.16
Delany goes on to explain that when science fiction brings us beyond the boundaries of a single planet, it helps us imagine our way out of this discourse, because in space up and down are terms that lose their meaning without specific points of reference and gravitational centers. By telling stories that can’t take for granted a fixed meaning of up and down and high and low, science fiction contains an extraordinary power to decenter discourse, to set our imaginations outside of the oppositions that govern so many of our words and thoughts. This power is meaningful for anyone seeking to question or subvert the status quo, to conceive of other ways of speaking, writing, thinking, and living beyond the binaries that bind us.
Delany’s meditations on “Angouleme” show that we do not need to go out into deep space to question or overturn gravitic discourse. Any speculated future that forces us to reflect on the assumptions that fuel our perceptions of normality can have the same effect. The walls of the prison-house of language can be made porous.
Two/Three
Fiction in general, Delany asserts, draws from two discourses: the world within the text (the world of the characters and plot) and the world outside the text (the world of the reader), but it is science fiction that specifically, deliberately, and perhaps unavoidably creates a third discourse: a dialogue between subject and object, between the created world of the story and the lived world of the reader. In other essays before and after The American Shore, Delany shows the process by which a reader constructs the imagined world in her mind and how such construction encourages the reader to reflect on the differences between the imagined world and the world of everyday experience.17 Repeatedly in his meditations on “Angouleme,” Delany returns to the trivalent discourse of science fiction and the specific methods by which that discourse differentiates science fiction from other fictions.
In science fiction, the space of resonance for the mystical is constituted of the richness, resonance, and harmony of the three discourses. No one of the discourses, by itself, can yield up a signifier that will cover either (or both) of the other two as signified. The other two immediately start to jar, rattle, slip from beneath, and begin their own, inexhaustible and autonomous commentaries. This situation is what, finally, makes s-f rich, transcendent, optimistic (it poses a discourse—and creates a dialogue—where mundane fiction can not), and mystical. (Lexia 8)
Few passages in Delany’s published work can compete with the eighth lexia for vehemence in insisting that science fiction possesses unique qualities absent from other types of fiction. (That italicized can not is like a shoe pounding on a desk.)18 Rather than seeing the vehemence and insistence as simply a bit of boosterism for a favorite type of writing, though, we should remember the context in which the words were written, a context where, especially in academia, science fiction was rarely taken seriously as anything more than escapist formula fiction for adolescents and semiliterates. While the choice of “mundane fiction” as a label rather than “literary fiction” might seem to sell the superiority of science fiction, the language is not actually about the superiority or inferiority of anything, because Delany rigorously avoids the gravitic discourse that forces us into relations of higher and lower. The connotations within “mundane fiction” and “science fiction” serve, temporarily, to flip the binary trapped within such discourse, but the more important and lasting project of The American Shore is to open a space in which we can see how structures that are generically different work.
Whether the idea of a trivalent discourse is one that must necessarily and exclusively be applied to science fiction is not a question I will pursue here, because what is valuable to the reader of The American Shore is not so much to debate the validity of the concept as to note the work that the concept does within this text. It opens possibilities for analysis beyond binary oppositions, because not only does it expand beyond duality, but trivalence is combinatory rather than oppositional. By creating a space that cannot be reduced to less than three discourses, and in which those discourses mingle, meld, and produce “inexhaustible and autonomous commentaries,” science fiction (in Delany’s conception) gives us a route away from the limitations of infinite binary series. Mundane fiction gets left behind in the structuralist dust while science fiction finds a way out of the dualistic prison via a poststructuralist escape hatch.
Disch/Delany
The ever-unreliable scholar Charles Kinbote ends the Foreword of Pale Fire with words that Nabokov seems to have meant to be those of a madman:
Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his (being too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work), with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him, has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.19
The idea of the commentator, or anyone, having the last word is perhaps the greatest clue to Kinbote’s madness, but there is delusional grandiosity, too, in his insistence that his commentary provides a human reality to the text. Which is not to deny that there are humans and realities and texts. But as Jorge Luis Borges showed with “Borges and I,” the relationship between those words human, reality, and text is complicated.
Nonetheless, like corporeal signifieds to ink-spewing signifiers, writers dwell somewhere in the penumbra of author-functions, a person behind a byline.
With the possible exception of Hart Crane, Thomas M. Disch (1940–2008) is the writer Samuel R. Delany has devoted the most pages to. Mostly, that’s because of The American Shore, but you will also find two essays specifically about Disch in Starboard Wine and numerous sentences and paragraphs devoted to his work throughout Delany’s other essays and interviews. Additionally, Delany edited a collection of Disch’s work, Fundamental Disch (New York: Bantam, 1980), a book that collects eighteen short stories, three important essays, and the libretto to The Fall of the House of Usher, an opera Disch wrote with composer Gregory Sandow.
For Disch’s biography, the most useful text for the reader of The American Shore is the first Exotext herein, “Auctorial Interfaces,” which gives us not so much the facts of Disch’s life and bibliography as Disch’s life and bibliography through Samuel Delany’s eyes as he was working on The American Shore.
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