Kathleen L. Spencer
Vintage Delany
Samuel R. Delany. Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction.
Pleasantville, NY: Dragon Press, 1984. 244pp. $30.00.
The essays collected in Starboard Wine confirm what many of us had already
begun to believe: the most significant contemporary theorist of SF is Samuel Delany. He
brings to this critical endeavor a unique triad of qualifications: a sophisticated
understanding of modern literary theory; 25 years of experience grappling with the
practical problems of writing SF texts; and an insider's knowledge of the history of SF
both as a genre of fiction and as a small intense community of writers, readers, and
editors. All of Delany's criticism demonstrates the value of this combination, but the new
collection (essays originally written between 1977 and 1980) represents an advance over
his earlier work. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, his first collection of essays
on SF language, and The American Shore, his exhaustive examination of Thomas
Disch's "Angouleme," contain numerous inspired observations on the way SF texts
work; but those observations are often couched in language of intimidating technicality
and polysyllabification. The essays in Starboard Wine show no signs of this
fascination with jargon. Over the years, Delany's language has distilled into a lucidity
that, in making his ideas more accessible, also reveals more clearly their value and
power. Second, while he continues to be concerned with the language of SF, with the
semantic and syntactical features that characterize the genre, in this new collection he
consistently addresses larger questions concerning critical approaches to SF and the
relationship of SF to other literary genres. This is not to say the Starboard Wine
is a unified and systematic statement of Delany's theories: it is a collection of essays
written over a number of years for a variety of occasions and audiences, and as such it
contains a certain amount of repetition and fragmentation, in which discussion of a single
idea or closely related ideas may be scattered throughout numerous essays rather than
developed all in one place. But in the absence of Delany's yet-to-be-written systematic
study of SF, Starboard Wine is the most stimulating and clear-minded criticism of
the genre currently available.
Four major themes emerge from the essays: (1) that SF can most productively be
described and taught not as a collection of themes but as a series of reading
protocols, of instructions to readers about how to make sense of the sentences in SF
texts; (2) that where mundane fiction attempts to represent the world, SF's relation to
the world of the present is "one of dialogic, contestatory, agonistic creativity";
that is, the function of SF is to create "a significant distortion of the
present that sets up a rich and complex dialogue with the reader's here and now" (p. 177); (3)
that SF criticism will be of little value unless and until it is informed by the history
of the genre, both of its texts (as exchanges in an ongoing dialogue) and of its social
contexts: market factors, the influence of fandom and its extensive networks of informal
criticism, the central role of magazine editors, and the interactions of the writers with
each other; and--what is perhaps his most important theme--(4) that SF, as a genre of what
he calls "paraliterature," is fundamentally different from literature, has
a different history, different modes of production, different values, and a
different relation to the world of the reader, and for these reasons must be
analyzed in its own terms rather than in those appropriate to "literature."
This final point Delany recognizes as his most controversial, one likely to be rejected
by two different constituencies: academic critics, who, in an attempt to win acceptance
for SF in traditional scholarly circles, have spent years arguing that SF is literature;
and a group of other SF writers who hear in his argument the shrill voices from inside the
ghetto of '30s' and '40s' fandom insisting that SF is the only literature worth
reading, that it is a privileged genre which must be judged only by its own internal
standards. To the latter group (being sensitive to the historical roots of their
reaction), Delany respectfully points out that, unlike those earlier voices, he is neither
anti-intellectual nor contemptuous of literature other than SF; he is merely insisting on
a fundamental difference between the two. To address the concerns of the former group, he
summons a more complex and multifaceted argument, spread throughout many of the essays,
most notably in "Some Presumptuous Approaches to Science Fiction," "Science
Fiction and 'Literature'--or, the Conscience of the King," "Russ," "Disch,"
"Dichtung und Science Fiction," and "Reflections on Historical
Models" (the last of which was originally published in SFS).
His argument rests primarily on two points: first, that the history of SF (in
particular of its mode of production) and its dominant aesthetic values are so utterly
different from the history and values of "literature" that to equate the two leads
inevitably to the judgment that SF is "second-rate literature." Literature (Delany
argues, following Foucault) privileges the concept of the author and of textual unity
(consistency in and between the works of a given author) in style,
theoretical/philosophical position, historical context, and level of achievement, so that
discrepancies on such matters in any work (or part of a work) which cannot be explained
by reference to such principles as evolution, maturation, or influence may lead the work
or section to be rejected as inauthentic. By contrast, SF privileges the concept of the
story over that of the author, and rather than valuing stylistic, conceptual, and
historical unity, prizes plurality in all these matters, not so much within any given text
as over the range of a writer's productions, and particularly in the body of texts that
constitute SF. One of the central concerns of SF as a genre, Delany argues, is precisely
to suggest a wide range of possible futures, in dialogue with each other and with the
given world of the present. Thus to judge SF texts by the traditional literary standards
of unity is not only inevitably to find them wanting, but in fact to miss the very point
they are most concerned with making.
The second crucial difference between SF and literature is that, where the latter (at
least in the last 200 years) focuses its attention upon the subject, the
sensibility of the character or author, the former emphasizes the object, the
exterior world. As a result, we interpret the two sorts of texts according to two very
different sets of assumptions.
Because the world of mundane fiction is fixed, at least in comparison with the multiple
worlds of science fiction, when we read some distortion in the representation of the world
in a piece of mundane fiction we are led to the questions, Why did
the character (the fictive subject) perceive it this way? or Why did the writer (the
auctorial subject) present it this way? (p. 145)
By contrast, because of SF's characteristic focus upon the object world, when
we encounter a detail which differs dramatically from our ordinary present, we
ask instead, "How would the world of the story have to be different from our world in order for
this to occur? " (p. 146)
Science fiction is far more concerned with the organization (and reorganization) of the
object, i.e., the world, or the institutions through which we perceive it. It is concerned
with the subject, certainly, but concerned with those aspects of it that are closer to the
object: How is the subject excited, impinged on, contoured and constituted by the object?
How might beings with a different social organization, environment, brain structure, and
body perceive things? How might humans perceive things after becoming acclimated to an
alien environment? (p. 188)
In an SF story, then, the most passing reference to cultural changes--as in one of
Delany's favorite examples, a line (from a Larry Niven story) about the
"monopole-magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta
Cygni"--functions first as "a simple way of saying that, while the concept of mines
may persist, their objects, their organization, their technology, their locations, and
their very form can change--and it says it distinctly and clearly and well before it
offers any metaphor for any psychic mystery or psychological state" (p. 188).
In and around his discussions of this major contention, Delany calls on his knowledge
of the SF community to make one of his other points--the relevance of genre history to
certain kinds of critical questions, the kinds of questions that academic criticism, in
its general ignorance of this history, tends either not to raise at all or to answer
inaccurately. He ranges knowledgeably over the careers of writers as diverse as Heinlein,
Sturgeon, Bester, Russ, and Disch, placing them in their proper historical
contexts; offers a reinterpretation of the "New Wave/Old Wave" controversy of the '70s; and ends
by criticizing the available historical models of 20th-century SF and proposing an
alternate model of his own, based on his understanding of the genre's developmental
stages in the last 70 years.
Although not a systematic study, then, Starboard Wine, like Delany's earlier
criticism, succeeds splendidly in identifying key issues, making provocative observations,
and outlining promising projects. For myself, I find his distinction between SF and
literature, and his consequent argument that we need to develop a different critical
vocabulary appropriate to SF, as persuasive as it is intriguing. I also am convinced by
his call for good critical histories of the genre, both textual and social. Alas, the
realities of academic life do not promise well for the acceptance of the one project or
the completion of the other. Most academic critics of SF, out of a healthy sense of
self-preservation, are still forced to do their SF scholarship with the left hand, so to
speak--as a hobby, as an eccentric, slightly contemptible but harmless vacation from their
"real" work in Victorian or Medieval or Modern American literature, knowing that
publications in SF will do little to get them jobs or tenure or promotion and may even
work against them. Under such circumstances, it will be hard for any academic to spare the
time for the extensive reading necessary to produce the kind of history Delany proposes;
and even critics who find his argument about SF as paraliterature convincing may feel that
adopting that position publicly would threaten the marginal academic respectability SF
criticism has recently gained.
On the other hand, perhaps a rigorously historical/structural analysis of the genre
along the lines Delany proposes might win at least a grudging respect from some of our
more traditionally-minded colleagues. One can at least hope. And whether the scheme turns
out to be practicable or not, I'm convinced that in Starboard Wine, Delany has
sketched out some highly productive approaches for SF criticism to take.
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