Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany
Historical Models,” present first a summing up and synthesis, and then an opening up, an offering of new and different possibilities for SF criticism beyond those explored here.
The title of “Dichtung und Science Fiction” echoes Goethe, whose autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, is often translated as Poetry and Truth. But along with poetry, dichtung also contains an idea of falsity and imagination, and so in Delany’s title we have various implications within the word as well as implications within the allusion, which makes truth into a shadow.10
Many of the ideas we have previously encountered in Delany’s essays are touched upon, reiterated, or given particularly precise enunciation in “Dichtung und Science Fiction.” What is new is a history of pedagogy related to poetry, a history that then becomes a theory of reception and response, of movements and rebellions, continuities and incoherencies. Part of the poetic task is to give us not just meanings, but new meanings: “the release of new meanings in existing words and syntax through the organization of verbal contexts that may be as experimental or as traditional as the poet can tolerate.” Poetry enriches the signified by letting the signifier do more.
More than once in these essays, Delany has claimed that science fiction is closer to poetry than it is to other sorts of fiction. His description of what poetry does and how it can be read follows along the lines of his description of science fiction, and there is no need in “Dichtung und Science Fiction” for him to connect all the dots, because his point is clear to anyone who has been paying attention. Instead of belaboring the obvious, Delany moves on to explore his ideas of SF’s peculiar history, to challenge originary claims, and to repeat his view that the most useful history is one able to discover actual lines and forces of influence before it sets off to encompass everything. He has already shown how this can work with poetry, and by showing it with science fiction, he suggests even more than he says—most of all, he suggests that by pursuing other sorts of historicizing and theorizing, SF critics have distracted themselves from a universe of significant insights.
Also new in “Dichtung und Science Fiction” is Delany’s elaboration of the problematic relationship between concepts of style and greatness. Here he uses the example of translation to much effect, showing that the first translators of many of the Russian, German, and French writers, though their translations deeply influenced English-speaking modernists and helped establish some of the ideas of “greatness” enshrined in New Criticism and elsewhere, were not able to be faithful to the excellence of their sources’ style, and so “greatness” must lie outside of style, despite the stylists’ claim.11 While Delany argues that SF is different from mundane fiction, he also argues that the assumptions of some schools of literary evaluation—the same ones advocating a hierarchy where there is literature and there is everything below it—are based on obviously false premises. Such an argument adds support both to his contention that terms such as literature should be used descriptively rather than evaluatively and to his contention that analysis cannot stop with style alone, but must include other elements of aesthetics, as well as history and ethics.
While “Dichtung und Science Fiction” is at various times concerned with how SF might be taught, described, written, read, evaluated, and contextualized, by the end of the essay, Delany shows that all of these tasks are related, that many of them rely on each other, and that all of them need to be done well so that SF can remain something distinct, different, heterogeneous, and potentially subversive: “We are trying to preserve a certain freedom at a social level where the greatest threat to freedom is not direct forbidding of options but rather the homogenization of all options out of existence in the name of tolerance and acceptance.”
“Reflections on Historical Models” builds from this idea by asserting that the significant, option-making differences between science fiction and mundane fiction are differences not only of texts, but of histories. The histories are not only matters of what was published when and by whom, but of the forces that created and sustained different types of relationships between writers, editors, publishers, and readers. Once again, Delany links the way texts are read to the contexts in which they are read, saying after a brief overview of his idea of different ways of reading:
These distinctions in reading protocols, in their complex summation, are to my mind the measure of the distance between science fiction and literature.
In light of the sociological distinctions, however, the distinction in reading protocols does not seem such a lonely fact.
Delany works to show that homogenization is a danger not only to a history of both literature and science fiction, but to the history of science fiction itself. He demonstrates this at length by insisting that the term “New Wave” is usually used by fans, critics, and historians to lump together—to homogenize—very different tendencies within 1960s SF. By not paying closer attention to those differences, important distinctions (such as those between the goals and achievements of Judith Merril’s reprint anthology England Swings S-F and Harlan Ellison’s original anthology Dangerous Visions; between Michael Moorcock’s editorship of New Worlds and Cele Goldsmith’s of Amazing and Fantastic; between such British writers as J. G. Ballard and M. John Harrison and American [then] expatriates such as Thomas M. Disch and James Sallis) are entirely lost within the history recounted. And if such homogenization can occur with such recent texts and writers, imagine what distinctions have been lost for earlier histories! This idea connects to Delany’s argument against calling texts written before 1926 science fiction, because the argument there is that such texts cannot be differentiated from other discourses of their day, and that no line of influence can be shown between most of them and science fiction. Here, the argument is that careless terminology is eliding lines of influence and causing the loss of important differentiations between discourses.
“Reflections on Historical Models” also builds from the concept of pluralities that was introduced in “Science Fiction and ‘Literature,’” where one of SF’s strengths—indeed, one of the attributes that kept it from ossification—was its plurality (heterogeneity) of styles, theories, and values. Delany notes that the writers associated with John W. Campbell’s editorship of Astounding from 1937 on maintained different theoretical stances that allowed a critique of the philosophy of “science-as-it-was-then-popularly-conceived” within SF. Such theoretical plurality, such critique, prevents SF from having “a simple, uncritical attitude toward science as an explorative philosophy.” Good SF criticism must, then, be able to separate “the philosophy of science (a critique of which science fiction dramatizes by representing a range of sociological situations) from the social uses of science.”
Its pluralities have allowed SF to be an excellent tool for cultural critique, a counterbalance to the popular imagination, and a force for the integration of various ideas and ideologies in a world of growing divisions. For such tendencies to be understood, appreciated, and deconstructed, science fiction’s history must be studied with critical acumen, and the historians and critics must take care with their conceptual models, must be aware of both what they show and what they hide, or else they will unknowingly perpetuate mystification and falsity.
Throughout Starboard Wine, then, Samuel Delany argues with passionate reason for a new kind of criticism, and throughout his arguments he demonstrates some of the ways such a criticism (still rare now, nearly thirty years after the book was first published) can bring insight to the worlds of science fiction and all fiction—the worlds they enlighten, envision, and engender. Our task is to read deeply, to think carefully, to argue fiercely, and to live up to the example set for us.
1. Between The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine sits The American Shore, a booklength study of Thomas M. Disch’s sixteen-page short story “Angouleme,” wherein some of the ideas Delany offers in Starboard Wine about science fiction’s language and history are applied word by word and line by line to Disch’s story. The American Shore is a tour de force of both critical reading and writing, and, as Delany says in his acknowledgments herein, “Although these essays are not a systematic introduction to The American Shore, needless to say, reading them will certainly leave one better prepared to grapple with it.”
2. For those