The essay is a vulnerable form. Rooted in middle-class civility, it presupposes not only that the essayist himself be demonstrably sane, but that his readers also operate upon a set of widely held assumptions. Fiction can be hallucinatory if it wishes, and journalism impassive, and so each continues through thick and thin, but essays presuppose a certain standard of education in the reader, a world ruled by some sort of order — where government is constitutional, or at least monarchical, perhaps where sex hasn’t wandered too far from its home base…[7]
Clearly, the essay is ripe for a radical rhetorical intervention.
Samuel R. Delany was born in 1942 and raised in New York City’s Harlem. Something of a prodigy, he published his first novel at age 20, and has made radical interventions in various literary and paraliterary practices for over thirty years now. In the science fiction field, he is a renowned novelist and critic, having garnered four Nebula Awards and a Hugo Award for his fiction, as well as the nonfiction Hugo for his autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water. His numerous studies of the history and rhetoric of science fiction have moved his colleague Ursula K. Le Guin to call him “our best in-house critic.”[8] Delany has also written for comic books, and has produced a remarkable trio of pornographic novels (or “anti-pornographies,” as his critical alter-ego, K. Leslie Steiner, calls them): Equinox, Hogg, and The Mad Man. And he has recently made a foray into historical fiction with the short novel Atlantis: Model 1924, which details a meeting between characters modeled after Delany’s own father as a young man and the poet Hart Crane, on the Brooklyn Bridge one bright afternoon in, yes, 1924. Over the course of his career, Delany has again and again thrown into question the world-models that all too many of us unknowingly live by — particularly, but certainly not restricted to, those models which relate to sexual identity and practice. For this aspect of his work, in 1993 he was given the fifth William Whitehead Memorial Award for Lifetime Contribution to Gay and Lesbian Literature, an honor he shares with Edmund White, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and James Purdy.
These accolades have not come without controversy. Examples: in 1974, Delany published an 879-page novel, Dhalgren, which — with its story of a bisexual amnesiac’s rise to fame in a mysteriously burned-out midwestern city, its frank depictions of marginal sexual practices and the social forces surrounding and pervading them, and its notoriously complex formal structure — inspired a heated discussion within the sf community about, among many other things, the very nature of science fiction, which continues in various circles to this day; and in 1979, Delany published the first of what would become four volumes of interlocking narratives collectively known as Return to Nevèrÿon, an experiment in paraliterary form which — with its unlikely combination of the hoary formulas of sword-and-sorcery fantasy with the sophisticated rhetoric of structuralist and post-structuralist theory, as well as its exploration of marginal sexuality — inaugurated a spirited debate over the question of what sort of rhetoric is “proper” to the paraliterary fields of science fiction and academic criticism. Over the course of these ongoing genre-bending interventions, Delany has had a huge influence over a whole generation of writers and thinkers: he is regularly cited as arguably the major sf influence, in both style and subject matter, on the cyberpunk movement, and is cited with equal regularity as a major force behind the current academic recognition of science fiction as one of the most vital and innovative fields of contemporary American writing.
In his previous critical work — collected in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Starboard Wine, and The Straits of Messina — Delany has more or less restricted himself to the expository form of the “standard” critical essay. (Exceptions to this restriction are “Shadows” from The Jewel-Hinged Jaw — included as an Appendix to this collection — and The American Shore, a book-length, microscopically detailed “meditation” on the sf short story “Angouleme” by Thomas M. Disch.) In the present collection, Delany turns his considerable creative and analytical energies toward a radical reworking of the essay form. He does this in part by combining, at various strategic points, the “impersonal” rhetoric of literary analysis with the “personal” voice of the Montaignean essay — a mixing of rhetorical modes which has attracted increasing interest over the years, in light of the critiques of the Western discourse of the sign and the subject put forward variously by post-structuralist, feminist, and Frankfurt School critics, among others. Delany also deploys formal tropes which he has developed and refined in his own fiction over the past two decades or so — particularly in Dhalgren, Triton, and that undecidable hybrid of theory and fiction, Return to Nevèrÿon: dialectical framing structures, short textual units numbered in Wittgensteinian fashion, multiply-intersecting stories, and so on. By deploying those tropes here, Delany produces essays which, in their complexity of form and richness of resonance, resemble novels — and postmodernist novels to boot. The result for the reader is an experience which simply cannot be found anywhere else on the current American literary landscape.
It has often been observed that Delany’s work is deeply concerned with myth. Specifically, as Delany himself has pointed out, it is concerned with myth-making — with the social, material, and historical forces that generate cultural myths.[9] The essays to follow share this concern. But they are also equally concerned with myth-breaking — with the analytical practices required to discern, interrogate, and dissolve myths. Nothing if not ambitious, these essays tackle the myths of High Art vs. Low, of Sanity vs. Madness, of Theater-As-We-Know-It, of castration as the Freudian and Lacanian model of socialization, of transcendent sexual difference, of biography, of the canon, and indeed of the very concept of “literature.”
But these essays also interrogate a myth of the essay itself: specifically, the traditional perception of the essay as a “shapeless” form of writing. Critics, reacting to this perceived shapelessness, have for a long time called the essay a “degenerate” and even “impossible” genre, and it has never had a firm foothold in the canon of English literature — a state of affairs which once led the great American essayist E. B. White, only halfjokingly, to call essay-writers second-class citizens. Critics of a more recent generation have tried to recuperate the essay by turning this shapelessness into a plus-value, positing it as the ideal (non-)form with which to critique totalizing systems, or, more radically, as “the moment of writing before the genre, before genericness — or as the matrix of all generic possibilities.”[10] But it is the underlying ideas of both these critical positions — that there can be such a thing as a “shapeless” discourse unfixed by pre-existing rhetorical practices, or that any single rhetorical mode could serve as the “primitive calculus” underlying everything subsequent to it — which Delany has called into question time and time again in his work.[11]
7
Edward Hoagland, “That Gorgeous Great Novelist,” from
8
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Introduction,” from
9
Samuel R. Delany, “‘The Scorpion Garden’ Revisited,” from
10
Bensmaia, Reda,
11
See my own “Subverted Equations: G. Spencer Brown’s