While we ponder our options, we might want to consider a passage from an essay completely outside this collection (except of course by citing it here I am bringing it part-way in…), in which Delany discusses the post-structuralist project of writing against the discourse of unity and totality:
Under such an analytic program, the beginnings and ends of critical arguments and essays grow particularly difficult. The “natural” sense of commencement and sense of closure the thematic critics consider appropriate to, and imminently allied throughout, the “naturally” bounded topic of his or her concern now is revealed to be largely artificial and overwhelmingly ideological.
Thus the beginnings and endings (as well as the easier middle arguments, once we are aboard) of our criticisms must embody conscientiously creative and political strategies. (NFW 23–4)
In the case of the work at hand, we are given a text with several possible “proper” beginnings, the choice of which involves conscious (as well as conscientiously creative and political) reflection on the reader’s part over where in the discursive space she wants to position herself. Delany has used this strategic deployment of central and marginal texts extensively in Return to Nevèrÿon, each volume of which has its share of “proper” and “supplemental” tales. This strategy made its first overt appearance, however, in Delany’s 1976 novel Triton (written concurrently with “Shadows”), which consists of a main text and two Appendices. (Dhalgren is similarly structured, but there the central/marginal relation is more subtle.)
Let us say, purely for the sake of argument, that we have chosen to read “Shadows” first.
The first thing we notice about “Shadows” is its unusual structure. A description of this structure can be found in “Appendix B” of Triton, in which “Shadows” makes a metafictional cameo appearance as the historical antecedent to the “modular calculus,” an invention of the 22nd-century philosopher Ashima Slade (“Slade,” says the unnamed scholarly “author” of the text of “Appendix B,” “took the title for his first lecture, “Shadows,” from a nonfiction piece written in the twentieth century by a writer of light, popular fictions… ”[18] Here is a description of Slade’s “Shadows”:
A difficulty with “Shadows,” besides its incompleteness, is that Slade chose to present his ideas not as a continuous argument, but rather as a series of separate, numbered notes, each more or less a complete idea — the whole a galaxy of ideas that interrelate and interilluminate each other, not necessarily in linear form. (T 356)
Cross-checking confirms that this is indeed an accurate description of the formal structure of Delany’s “Shadows”—as well as clearly recalling Barthes’s characterization of the “writerly” text as a “galaxy of signifiers.”
However, our scholar also observes that if certain numbered notes in (Slade’s) “Shadows” are considered in isolation from their surrounding text, they seem to resemble nothing more than “a few more or less interesting aphorisms” (T 357). Cross-checking again confirms this aphoristic pattern in Delany’s “Shadows.” Given what we have come to know about aphorisms, their appearance in this essay may seem problematic.
But consider: through their nonlinear relational logic, the sixty numbered notes that make up the body of “Shadows” evoke a complex discursive space with many dimensions. One could say that each of the notes corresponds not just to a different coordinate position in that space, but to a different dimensional axis in it: to read the essay is both to construct that space and trace a vector path through it. To read any given note as though this multidimensional framing context did not exist, then, is essentially to misread it. As Slade himself comments (and, ironically, this is the one statement we are told Slade has “lifted” from Delany’s text): “I distrust separating facts too far from the landscape that produced them” (T 357). This suggests that an aphorism can be as much a product of reading as writing: if we, as readers, omit enough of the descriptive context, we can reduce the potentially rich information-value of a complex statement down to the degenerate information-value of an aphorism.
“Shadows” explores the problematic relation between model and context through personal anecdotes, speculative fictions, strategically placed “aphorisms,” and critical meditations on the works of Wittgenstein, Quine, Chomsky, and other such system-builders. The reader can find in this exploration an early articulation of the problem of “empirical resolution” that provides the epistemological “arc” for the entire Return to Nevèrÿon series (in which what seems to be a revelatory process of mirroring or echoing in the early volumes — a proliferation of metaphorical correspondences between objects, events, and situations — shades over into an oppressive process of mistaken identity and confounding doubling in the later ones). The reader can also find an early articulation of Delany’s concern with the relation of biography to form and context, which he explores in greater detail in the other essays of this collection, as well as in his own autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (which, along with “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” in Flight from Nevèrÿon, and “The Tale of Rumor and Desire” in Return to Nevèrÿon, displays the same chrestomathic organization as “Shadows”).
“Shadows” commences with an announcement that it was written “in lieu of the personal article requested on the development of a science-fiction writer.”[19] After fifty-two notes, we do eventually reach the personal article in question. But by the time we get there, the autobiographical sketch seems to be less “about” its ostensible topic — the teleological development of the self, which the discourse of biography teaches us to expect — and more “about” its own enunciative context, within the greater text, discourse, and world at large. In the absence of a definitive referential center, the act of interpretation then becomes a task of “locating the play in the interpretive space, rather than positing a unitary or hierarchical explanation” (SW 95). It is in this frame of mind that we might want to approach the sixty notes — the sixty axes that make up the referential space — of “Shadows.”
The formal structure of “Wagner/Artaud: A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions” begins to suggest what an argument framed within such a multidimensional space would have to be shaped like — and the sort of reading that would be required to follow such an argument. At first glance, the essay appears to be structured like a conventional literary analysis. But once we begin, we quickly find that the text does not proceed in the linear manner we expect of such an analysis: in place of an unfolding linear argument, we are instead given a series of intersecting stories (and the fictive antecedent to this is once again Return to Nevèrÿon). As the text alights variously on Antonin Artaud’s life, works, and correspondences, Richard Wagner’s memoirs, and Delany’s own autobiographical reminiscences, we are forced again and again to ask, “What is the unifying thread or argument holding these tales together? Why, if there is an argument, is it being presented in this way?” To pull order and pattern out of the essay, we must do a fair amount of mental work in holding these tales together in memory: in this sense, the act of reading “Wagner/Artaud” becomes something of a sustained performance.