The American Shore. Samuel R. Delany

term mundane for not-s-f flips a pernicious, common equation. The term literary fiction is not neutral, but rather comes to us bearing connotations of prestige, complexity, class, and value. While, in an ideal world, the terms literary fiction and science fiction would be descriptors rather than value statements, we do not live in an ideal world. The assumption present in the discourse of Anglo-American bookchat (even more so in 1977, when Delany was writing The American Shore, than now) is that one is inherently superior to the other.¹¹ If the words science fiction cannot be perceived without a valuation, then the words literary fiction need to be replaced with a term that will provide a commutative property to the binary operation. Hence, mundane.

      It is vital to remember, though, that this move is just the first, necessary step in undoing the binary opposition itself.

      Polysemy/Dissemination

      At the heart of much of the linguistic and literary criticism contemporary to The American Shore is the question of how to acknowledge and even celebrate plurality without being lost in infinite, meaningless multiplicity. If all of language sits immanent in the shadow of any single word, and all meanings assume their countermeaning, are we left with no recourse but absolute relativism?

      In S/Z, Barthes proposed the concept of readerly (lisible) and writerly (scriptible) texts, with readerly texts less plural than writerly texts: “ … for the plural text, there cannot be a narrative structure, a grammar, or a logic; thus, if one or another of these are sometimes permitted to come forward, it is in proportion … as we are dealing with incompletely plural texts, texts whose plural is more or less parsimonious.” For Barthes, true plurality was not something to run away from, but rather an ideal of absolute freedom toward which to aim: “a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds.” Sense ultimately and inevitably limits creativity, because the possibilities for any text’s meaning are bounded by language, traditions, and other texts. A readerly text cannot be infinitely polysemous. The readerly text is a product, whereas “the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.” The readerly text is not limited to hackwork. The readerly text is every text that has, through the accumulation (and fossilization) of meaning, lost infinity: “We call any readerly text a classic text.”¹²

      More useful for The American Shore, it seems to me, is Jacques Derrida’s distinction between polysemy and dissemination. The difference between the two terms is a matter of orientation: polysemy generates meaning from within the text and is, at least at its starting point, thus bound by that text’s assumptions and propositions; dissemination generates meanings from beyond or outside the text, invading, infecting, or, to use Derrida’s preferred metaphor, inseminating it: “Even while it keeps the texts it culls alive, this play of insemination—or grafting—destroys their hegemonic center, subverts their authority and their uniqueness.”¹³ Derrida maintained that his distinction between polysemy and dissemination was “very slight,” but I suspect he only saw it as slight because the distinction of inside and outside is not pure and eventually falls apart—in Of Grammatology he famously and vehemently insisted that there is no outside-text.¹⁴ He did not mean, though, like some puritanical New Critic, to limit us only to a text without context. He clarified the importance of context in 1988:

      What is called “objectivity,” scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation), imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, powerfully established, stabilized or rooted in a network of conventions (for instance, those of language) and yet which still remains a context. And the emergence of the value of objectivity (and hence of so many others) also belongs to a context. We can call “context” the entire “real-history-of-the-world,” if you like, in which this value of objectivity and, even more broadly, that of truth (etc.) have taken on meaning and imposed themselves. That does not in the slightest discredit them. In the name of what, of which other “truth,” moreover, would it? One of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be the effort to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to an incessant movement of recontextualization. The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction (“there is nothing outside the text” [il n’y a pas de hors-texte]), means nothing else: there is nothing outside context.¹⁵

      The concept of dissemination as a response to (or replacement of) polysemy opened new perspectives on intertextuality by setting aside the all-or-nothing idealism of binary oppositions for a model of rich impurity, mixing, and fertilization. The impossible ideal of the infinitely polysemous, writerly text does not have to torment us. Dissemination insists on context, for it is context (“the entire ‘real-history-of-the-world,’ if you like”) that can inseminate the text.

      That vision of intertextuality 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.