Longer Views

I

The term “extended essay,” in its very articulation, seems to presuppose a norm which is somehow being supplemented, exceeded, transgressed. Certainly the long pieces in the remarkable collection to follow do not fit the form of the essay we have been led (by whom? by what? for what purpose?) to expect; nor does the experience of reading them feel like the experience of reading a traditional essay. To better understand what these pieces are up to, then, we might want to consider the form against which they position themselves.

What constitutes a “traditional” essay, and what is the experience of reading one like? Obviously to make generalizations about a form with such a wide range of possible topics (i.e., just about anything) and possible writerly approaches is to construct something of a fiction; nevertheless, generalizations about normative trends — generalizations about what we have come to expect from an essay — are possible. Lydia Fakundiny characterizes the essay in passing as a “short, independent, self-contained prose discourse.”[1] Fair enough. But as has been noted by Fakundiny and many other scholars of the history of the essay, there are other, more specific traits which have characterized the essay since the traditionally posited birth of its modern form in the sixteenth-century writings of Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon. From Montaigne, for example, we inherit (among other things) a focus on the personal, on the authorial subject as the ground and goal of analytical inquiry. Montaigne prefaced his epoch-making Essais with a warning to the reader that, whatever the ostensible subject-matter of the pieces to follow, “I myself am the subject of my book.”[2] Ever since then, essayists have, with varying degrees of intensity, been committed to presenting “the spectacle of a single consciousness making sense of a part of the chaos” of life.[3] From Bacon, we get a writerly stance that tends towards didacticism, in the specifically aphoristic mode. Bacon’s Essays, which appeared 17 years after the publication of the first edition of Montaigne’s collection, are written in a terse, pithy, authoritarian style: they do not so much analyze topics as list epigrams. Here is a well-known example of typical Baconian prose:

Crafty men condemn studies; simple men admire them; and wise men use them… Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention… Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.[4]

In Bacon we find the seeds of what the essay was to become a little over a century later in the hands of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele — a specifically urban mode of writing, offering an authoritarian moral compass for those who would live in the city. (At the same time, a critical tradition was developing from the essay’s classical roots, giving rise to the “impersonal” form which constitutes most academic writing today.)

What often seems to characterize the works of the most popular contemporary essayists is a combination of the didactic tone of Bacon with the self-presentational obsessions of Montaigne — a conflation of the authorial and the authoritarian. Consider the following passage from The Writing Life, in which Annie Dillard compares the experience of essay-writing to a kind of path-finding:

You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you find a box canyon. You hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins.

The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend. In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles. Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work.[5]

Note how Dillard’s use of the second-person pronoun causes the sentences in this passage to waver between description and injunction; note too how the passage gathers rhetorical energy as its sentences approach the aphoristic. I would argue that the personal focus of this passage and its epigrammatic style are typical-unto-defining traits of the contemporary essay. Certainly they are traits which, knowingly or unknowingly, we expect of it.

But as Roland Barthes — one of the great essayists of the twentieth century and possibly the first great theorist of the form — has persuasively argued, spectacle (even the spectacle of self-portraiture) and aphorism are two major rhetorical modes of conservative discourse — the discourse of the status quo. According to Barthes, spectacle discourages critical consideration of “motives” and “consequences”[6] as it treats the spectator to the brief illusion of a “univocal” moral order (M 25). Aphorisms, similarly, derive much of their authoritative force from their implicit affirmation of such an order, such an “unalterable hierarchy of the world” (M 154). Aphorisms serve the purposes of the status quo precisely because their seemingly “pithy” declarations discourage further inquiry into their authorizing context. The root-meaning of the word gives it away: apo-horizein — to delimit, to mark off boundaries, to circumscribe a horizon. Edward Hoagland has commented on the complicity of the essay with the preservation of the status quo:

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]

With this collection, Delany continues his critique. As I’ve noted, at certain points along the way he deploys formal tropes which his longtime readers may find familiar. But whether previously acquainted with Delany’s work or not, readers expecting the short, monologic prose discourse that is the currently dominant form of the essay are in for a surprise — for these essays are not like other essays.

They are huge, sprawling works, encompassing an enormous range of topics and disciplines — from the origins of modern theater to the vagaries of radical feminist scholarship, from mathematical logic to the most marginal of sexual practices, from the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe to the intricacies of literary historical sleuthing, and much, much more — and they combine these topics in interlocking narratives of madmen and burning cities, prodigies and poets, cyborgs, street-hustlers, and the author’s own life, in language that is sometimes light and anecdotal, sometimes vertiginously self-reflexive, but always lucid, luminous and exuberant. “Chrestomathies,” Delany calls some of the pieces to come: collections of textual fragments whose numerous interrelations the reader must actively trace out in order to gather them up into a resonant whole. In their encouragement of active reading, these essays resemble what Barthes has called the “writerly” text, the text “produced” as much by the reader as by the writer:

This text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach[12]

If any single idea can be said to fuel the fires of all these essays, it is the Foucauldian notion of discourse — the notion of the socially sanctioned systems of perception and practice that hold us all in their thrall, the “structuring and structurating” forces which keep myths alive and preserve the status quo[13]—forces which can only be countered by a “violent rhetorical shift” somewhere in the discursive space (RS 235). And herein lies the relevance, the urgency of these essays. As intellectual entertainments, they make great demands on the reader — and offer unprecedented rewards. But they are more than just entertainments: they are radical rhetorical interventions in the discourse of reading itself. And their radicalism resides precisely in their acknowledgment of the existence of the radical reader: the reader who thinks, who writes, who intervenes.

In the discussion to follow, I shall very briefly review some concepts from Delany’s earlier nonfiction works about the language of science fiction which have a bearing on the analyses Delany carries out here. I will then try to suggest how the formal strategies Delany deploys in these essays both illuminate and are illuminated by the formal strategies of his fiction, as well as how they reflect the theoretical framework which surrounds and informs so much of Delany’s recent fiction and nonfiction. If (to paraphrase Delany) my informal, idiosyncratic, and indeed fragmentary remarks initiate dialogue, so much the better; if they close dialogue off, so much the worse. I hope only to provide a provisional analytical frame to assist the radical reader in her further explorations of the rich and complex universes of discourse which these essays both describe and generate.

II

Science fiction, like the essay, is a form which, in its more popular incarnations, has often tended toward the didactic, in the mode of the aphoristic. Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert, to name two examples, have actually published the “collected sayings” of their best-known fictive protagonists, Lazarus Long and Paul Atreides. Ursula Le Guin’s fiction also leans toward aphorism, her essays doubly so; the list could go on. In his earlier critical work, Delany has discussed in some detail the problem of didacticism in Heinlein and Le Guin specifically and in science fiction and literature in general. (The long interpolated monologues in Return to Nevèrÿon could be read as attempts to suggest some aesthetic solutions to the problem.) Paradoxically, however, Delany has also argued that despite its flirtation with the authoritarian mode, science fiction may still be the privileged genre for writing against what constitutes a significant aspect of today’s status quo.

To understand Delany’s argument we need to recall Barthes’s assertion that conservative discourse tends to de-historicize phenomena which are historically specific. In the rhetoric of this discourse, “things lose the memory that they once were made” (M 142). Both the aphoristic style and the spectacle work to reinforce this confounding of the historical and the natural. In viewing spectacle, “all that is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from” (M 151). Likewise, the aphorism is “no longer directed towards a world to be made; it must overlay one which is already made, bury the traces of this production under a self-evident appearance of eternity” (M 155). Delany argues that the rhetoric of science fiction foregrounds precisely the historical, social, and technological constitution of human landscapes which conservative rhetoric tends to obscure. In this way the rhetoric of sf differs fundamentally from the rhetoric of “literature,” the conventions and tropes of which are organized around an entirely different focus:

Despite the many meaningful differences in the ways of reading that constitute the specifically literary modes, they are all characterized — now, today — by a priority of the subject, i.e., of the self, of human consciousness. To a greater or lesser extent, the subject can be read as the organizational center of all the literary categories’ many, many differing expectations…

Answering its own expectations as a paraliterary mode, 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?[14]

The point is not merely that sf tends to be “about” the object in the sense of taking the object as its main topic of interest; it is, rather, that all of the conventions, tropes, and reading protocols that mark science fiction as science fiction are organized around a revelation of the object and its constituting context. And herein lies the potentially radical force of the genre:

… even the most passing mention by an sf writer of, say, “… the monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni,” begins as a simple way of saying that, while the concept of mines may persist, their object, their organization, their technology, their locations, and their very form can change — and it says it directly and clearly and well before it offers any metaphor for any psychic mystery or psychological state. Not to understand this object-critique, on whatever intuitive level, is to misread the phrase… (SW 188)

By this rhetorical model, we can see that even the most conservatively inclined science fiction, if it is in any way sophisticated as science fiction, must keep a certain margin of imaginative space open for an apprehension of the historicity of objects, landscapes, and social institutions. By this model we can also see that science fiction differs from the essay in at least one of the same ways that it differs from literary fiction: for like literary fiction, the essay is rhetorically oriented toward a revelation of the subject, toward the presentation of a “spectacle of a single consciousness trying to make sense of the chaos.” The problem for both literary fiction and the essay is that the “chaos” of the modern world originates primarily as a chaos of the object, not the subject (SW 158) — which renders these forms, at least vis-à-vis the manifold problems of the object, conservative by default.

Bearing in mind the notion of science fiction as object-critique, we can begin to see why a radical practitioner of the genre such as Delany might take an interest in such recondite analytical practices as Marxian critique, deconstructive criticism, and discourse analysis. All offer sophisticated ways of considering the relations of objects, texts, and social practices to their ideological, linguistic, and socio-historical surrounds, and all are in one way or another committed to the exploration of the social constitution of the individual subject, that is, “those aspects of the self that are closer to the object.” All, in sum, are ways of breaking myths — ways of scrutinizing things which may seem eternal, totalized, and systemic, and questioning their totality, interrogating their system-aticity.

The obstacle to such analysis, on the one hand, is the pervasive influence of the discursive surround, the interpretive context “by which we register a text well-formed or ill-formed” (RS 235). Only vigilant analytical attention can tease out the myths that discourse has embedded in any given text, precisely because discourse determines the attentional norm:

For what discourse does above all things is to assign import. Discourse, remember, is what allows us to make sense of what we see, and hear, and experience… Discourse is what tells us what is central and what is peripheral — what is a mistake, an anomaly, an accident, a joke. It tells us what to pay attention to and what to ignore. It tells us what sort of attention to pay. (RS 239)

The possibility of such analysis, on the other hand, resides in language’s tendency towards “unlimited semiosis”—the tendency of linguistic signs and sign-arrangements to carry connotations in excess of the normative meanings to which the discourse is perpetually working to restrict them. Deconstruction and discourse analysis exploit this inherent richness of language by evoking those meanings which the given discourse has systematically relegated to the margins of consideration, thus problematizing the meanings which would at first seem unproblematically and eternally lodged in the discourse’s rhetorical center. Characterized in this way, theory begins to look like more than just a range of analytical methodologies to be applied to a science fiction text, or a set of rhetorical tools to apply within a science fiction text, but rather like a case of convergent evolution with science fiction in general. If we view them both as ways of reading and writing the silences of objects, texts, and discursive landscapes, then theory and science fiction begin to look like two very closely related modes of inquiry.

The term “unlimited semiosis” comes from the American philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce, but the idea as Delany deploys it comes from the post-structuralist critique of the Western discourse of the sign. In that discourse, the relation between linguistic signifier and nonlinguistic (“objective”) signified is presumed to be clear, direct, and unproblematic; by extension, texts are presumed to have clearly delineated, finite, and masterable meanings derivable from their concatenation of signs. In post-structuralist discourse, on the other hand, linguistic signifiers do not point towards a transparently clear objective reality (what Derrida calls the “transcendental signified”), but rather towards one another in a dynamic interrelational process occurring within a larger linguistic/discursive system (“The signified,” explains Delany, “is therefore always a web of signifiers”[15]).

By this argument, a “theme”—conceived in traditional discourse as an object-like “thing” which one “finds” in a given text — is actually an artifact of a readerly predisposition to order textual signs in a certain way. It marks a preconception, an effect of discourse; it has, in Delany’s words, “the same political structure as a prejudice.”[16] In order to get around such prejudicial reading, Delany argues, we have to stop seeing the text as a linguistic construct with object-like, synchronic referents or themes hovering “behind” it, to be systematically uncovered in a hermeneutical reading process, and start seeing the text as “a space of discourse — the space in which, at various points and along various loci, discourses (of whatever rhetorical expressions the reader is led to make) may be organized in relation to one another” (AS 174). That is, we must see the text as a contestatory site where various discursive relations are transformed by the reader in an ongoing, diachronic process of reconceptualization and revision.

(It should be noted here that Delany, like certain post-structuralists, has observed in Barthes a tendency to discuss texts in thematic terms: “Even the plural text of Barthes is a synchronic plurality” (SW 205). Delany’s answer to Barthes can be found in The American Shore, which formally resembles Barthes’s S/Z but differs from it theoretically in many significant respects. More on this ambiguity in Barthes’s work later.)

The diachronic, discourse-space model of writing and reading has the obvious virtue of being empirically more compelling than the synchronic-thematic model: it describes a situation that feels more like what we do when we read and write. It also has the more subtle virtue of reminding us that discourses are not monolithic structures, despite their pervasive and seemingly systemic influence; it shows, rather, that they arise from and are subject to the rhetorical interventions of the conscientious writer and the sensitive reader. In other words, it reminds us (to paraphrase ethnographer Stephen Tyler) that discourse can always be relativized to rhetoric.[17]

For a gay black man such as Delany — or for anyone of whatever social position committed to a critique of or intervention in a status quo which seems to derive much of its strength from a whole series of discursive and coercive exclusions and oppressions — the recognition of the relativization of discourse to rhetoric is a tremendously empowering political truth. It is empowering in one sense because it reminds us that the pretense to universal authority which Barthes has shown to be the hallmark of the rhetoric of the status quo is just that, a pretense: every utterance, no matter how much it evokes a transcendental system of authority to legitimate itself, can always be traced back to an individual or group with a historically, socially, and materially specific position. It is empowering in another sense because it places the power to revise a discourse back into our hands, with whatever personal or collective energy we can bring to our revisionary project:

Discourse says, “You are.”

Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, “I am not.” (AS 172)

Delany’s own creative output can be read as a rigorous analysis of the implications of this freedom, as well as an exercising — through the production of radical paraliterary works — of this same freedom. It remains for us to look at the fallout of this prior creative work in the essays to follow.

III

The moment we turn to consider the essays in this collection, we are faced with a choice: the choice of where to begin. In his Preface, Delany informs us that the essay in the Appendix to this collection, “Shadows,” was actually the first essay to be published, and is itself a preface to “Shadow and Ash,” one of the essays in the collection “proper.” Do we prioritize chronology of publication, then, and read “Shadows” before the rest? (But then we would also want to read “Reading at Work” before “Wagner/Artaud”…) Do we wait until we are about to commence “Shadow and Ash,” and then read “Shadows” as a preface to that essay only? Or do we hold to the reading protocol that says an Appendix is only a marginal supplement to a main text — and defer reading “Shadows” until the very end, if we read it at all?

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.

The essay’s ostensible analytical goal is to read the fragmentary aesthetic of Artaud against the discourse of “High Art” as embodied in the theatrical practices institutionalized by Wagner. To carry out this reading, Delany reconstructs events in Wagner’s life which have either been suppressed by Wagner himself or, when brought to the surface and analyzed by others, have been misinterpreted due to the predispositions imposed by subsequent discursive practices. Delany thus takes biographical elements which have proved most susceptible to the colorings of discourse — to mythopoesis — and renders them vivid, concrete, and contextually specific. As we’ve noted earlier, this is a key move in discourse analysis. In place of a pervasive set of artistic practices which are usually accepted without question or even notice, Delany substitutes a life, its socioeconomic context, and the materially specific foundations of those artistic practices — which can be noticed and questioned.

The strategic placement of the two autobiographical passages near the beginning and end of “Wagner/Artaud” creates a conceptual frame within which the transformation of the myth of Wagnerian discourse can be observed. In the first passage, we are given a vivid account of the chaotic goings-on backstage during a Wagner performance at the newly opened Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center:

The proscenium is not before you to frame what you see: costumed chorus members in their intense make-up mingle with workmen in their greens and blues and technicians in sweaters and jeans, with metal scaffolding all around (invisible from the seats), lights hung every which where, and music always playing through the lights and motion and general hubbub, so that the effect is more like watching a circus rehearsal scattered about the floor of some vast hangar than an artistic performance.[20]

We are then immediately given a metaphorical reading of this episode:

… one reason it is sometimes so hard to evaluate Wagner’s influence is because we are always within it. We can never get outside it, never see it as an organized stage picture. There is no vantage from which we can slip into the audience and look at it objectively. (W/A 21)

By this reading, the all-engulfing backstage experience becomes an image of the ubiquity of Wagnerian aesthetic practices — in ironic contrast to the spectacle of transcendence which those practices strive to generate onstage. Yet there seems to be more to this anecdote than a metaphor for pervasiveness — the images are too vivid, too concrete. There is an excess of signification.

In the second passage near the essay’s close, Delany considers Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” of the work of art. Arguing (contra Benjamin) that the aura is precisely what is preserved in the mechanical reproduction of art, rather than what is lost, Delany shows how a biographical account of a direct encounter with a work of art — such as his own with Picasso’s Guernica — can serve as an empirical counter to the mythic “aura” that Wagnerian discourse places around reproductions (W/A 78). This conception of biography as empirical counter provides a second reading for the backstage passage: what stands out now is less the all-engulfing quality of the space than its intense material specificity. Backstage at the Met now looks less like an image of all-encompassing Wagnerism and more like an inadvertent manifestation of Artaud’s insistently corporeal Theater of Cruelty. The guiding metaphor — theater as discourse — has, by its own signifying excess, overturned and revealed its subversive underside.

The deployment of a self-deconstructing framing structure here recalls the beginnings-and-endings of several of Delany’s novels, most notably Dhalgren and Neveryóna. Like the framing structures of those earlier works, the theater-metaphor framing “Wagner/Artaud” yields up two equally viable yet mutually subversive readings, neither of which can crystallize out into “the” definitive interpretation. Moreover, the closer we look at these two readings individually, the richer and more complex they seem to become within themselves. This self-complexifying quality suggests an explanation for the intriguing pile-up of ironies and subversions in the essay’s closing pages: the simple thematic opposition of Wagner as the Elder God of the discourse of “High Art” to Artaud as the deranged Trickster God of postmodernism has begun to crumble under the weight of the analytical pressure Delany has applied to it. In its form, then, “Wagner/Artaud” is a classic deconstruction — an analysis which “dissolves the borders that allow us to recognize [a theme] in the first place” (NFW 8).

The notion of reading a metaphor or theme into its own radicalness is given its most explicit consideration in “Reading at Work, and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority: A Reading of Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs.’” As in “Wagner/Artaud,” the privileged critical method is the argument from empirical evidence — and as in “Wagner/Artaud,” the steady accumulation of evidence leads to an overturning or inversion of the guiding theme: through an extended consideration of Haraway’s notion of cyborg-as-metaphor, Delany arrives at the notion of metaphor-as-cyborg. A significant distinction between the two essays is that in “Wagner/Artaud,” Delany supplies the guiding metaphor, whereas in “Reading at Work,” the guiding metaphor in question is Haraway’s, which Delany proceeds to re-frame. This process of re-framing continues on many levels throughout the essay: over its course, we are given a reading of Haraway’s essay, and a reading of that reading; we are given a Lacanian reading of castration imagery in pop culture, and a reading of Lacanian readings in general; we are given an explication of the notion of radical metaphor, even as the form of the explication is revealed to follow from the conclusion it itself yields up. In terms of sheer economy of means, the number of simultaneous readings Delany manages to orchestrate in this 32-page essay is a bit dizzying. And as with “Wagner/Artaud,” the vertiginousness of our experience is in direct proportion to the rigor of our own reading — a reading which reveals, once again, the cohering and dissolution of a rhetorical object (in this case, the traditional conception of metaphor itself) within a posited discursive space.

But beyond the textual transformations going on inside “Reading at Work,” there are texts outside the essay with which it is clearly engaged as well. Readers familiar with contemporary theory will recognize in the discussion of castration and the images of theft and reciprocity clear references to the “Purloined Letter” debate, inaugurated by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s analysis of Poe’s short story. Although it is in no way necessary to be familiar with this debate to follow Delany’s argument, we might nevertheless want to consider the relation between them. In Lacan’s conception, the paralysis that seems to fall upon each character in “The Purloined Letter” after he or she gains knowledge of possession of the letter is an image of the “truth of castration,” a metaphor for the subject’s entry into the Symbolic realm. “The letter,” says Lacan, “always arrives at its destination”: castration is inevitable.[21] Jacques Derrida counters that this image of inevitability is an artifact of the phallocentrism underlying psychoanalytic thought — an artifact conjured up by the surrounding discourse in order to ensure its own stability. Against this image Derrida posits the notion of the material contingency of society, which the image of castration exists specifically to conceal and contain. By this conception, the “truth of castration” is not that “the letter always arrives at its destination,” but rather that

… a letter can always not arrive at its destination. Its “materiality” and “topology” are due to its divisibility, its always possible partition. It can always be fragmented without return, and the system of the symbolic, of castration, of the signifier, of the truth, of the contract, etc., always attempts to protect the letter from this fragmentation. (PP 187)

Delany redeploys this insight for his own purposes: “Perhaps phallocentric civilization has to construct image after image of castration — such as the cyborg.”[22] This in turn implies a state of affairs which Delany expresses baldly and boldly: “For the record… I do not believe castration as Freud and Lacan have described it even exists.” (RW 105)

We find a hint of what this state of affairs itself implies — for both reader and writer — in “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” from Flight from Nevèrÿon. In that tale, Delany presents us with two more parallel, dialogical texts: one a fantasy unfolding in the world of Nevèrÿon, one a tale of 1983 Manhattan. In the latter, Delany “himself” appears, hard at work drafting the manuscript of the tale we are now reading. At one point, Delany comments:

By now I’m willing to admit that perhaps narrative fiction, in neither its literary nor its paraliterary mode, can propose the radically successful metaphor. At best, what both modes can do is break up, analyze, and dialogize the conservative, the historically sedimented, letting the fragments argue with one another, letting each display its own obsolescence, suggesting (not stating) where still another retains the possibility of vivid, radical development. But responding to those suggestions is, of course, the job of the radical reader. (The ‘radical metaphor’ is, after all, only an interpretation of pre-extant words.) Creators, whatever their politics, only provide raw material — documents, if you will.[23]

Re-reading the above passage, this reader is reminded of the words of the best known avant-pop, feminist cyborg in America, the performance artist Laurie Anderson — who, in her performance pieces and albums (which are usually made up of mutually interilluminating collections of songs, anecdotes, and audiovisual fragments) has repeatedly admonished her audiences: “Hey, sport. You connect the dots. You pick up the pieces.”

In “Aversion/Perversion/Diversion,” as in “Wagner/Artaud,” we are again given a series of stories, this time of some of Delany’s own sexual experiences — stories which both evoke and subvert prevailing sexual myths. The discursive object against which Delany deploys these stories is, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the concept of Gay Identity itself — or rather, the more conservative concept of transcendent sexual difference which lies latent in the use of “Gay Identity” as a catch-all label for a diverse political constituency (another manifestation of the problem of “empirical resolution” explored in “Shadows”). Once again, Delany uses these autobiographical tales as empirical counters to the reductions of discursive myths: they remind us that for every individual, sexual preference and practice are irrefutably idiosyncratic and eccentric, always-already marginal — and that any unified political project set in opposition to the sexual status quo must be founded on an affirmation of the irreducible plurality of sexual experiences and practices.

Delany affirms the truth of these experiences, and the right to speak of them openly, simply by telling them where and when he does: “Aversion/Perversion/Diversion” was originally presented as the Keynote Address at the Fifth Annual Lesbian and Gay Conference on Gay Studies at Rutgers University in 1991. Given that context, we can see how Delany both affirms the liberatory project of Gay Studies, while at the same time placing a critical frame around it. The tales are, after all, cautionary: in their evocation and problematization of all-too-recognizable myths, they remind us that such myths are all-too-recognizable — that even (or especially) those engaged in Gay Studies must be constantly vigilant against the pervasive influence of such myths.

But there is perhaps a more immediate justification for strategies of analytic vigilance and empirical inclusiveness in Gay Studies than the accurate reconstruction of lost histories and the retrieval of suppressed voices. As Delany has said several times in other works and mentions in passing here, the ongoing devastation of the AIDS virus makes “absolutely imperative” such vigilance and inclusiveness.[24] At one point in The Motion of Light in Water, Delany indulges in a utopian fantasy that the “inflated sexual honesty” necessitated by the AIDS crisis will, once the virus is brought under control, bring about “a sexual revolution to make a laughing stock of any social movement that till now has borne the name.”[25] Yet Delany is well aware of the almost fiendish tendency discourses have of “healing themselves across such rhetorical violences” (RS 235) and reifying their own conservative imperatives. The reader is urged to review Delany’s discussion, in “Appendix B” of Flight from Nevèrÿon and in “The Rhetoric of Sex, the Discourse of Desire” (another extended essay, collected in Heterotopia, ed. Tobin Siebers [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995]), of the truly sinister ways in which prevailing sexual discursive codes have sabotaged the effective scientific study of HIV transmission vectors. In the context of such a colossal health crisis, the muddying and mystifying effects of discourse begin to shade over into near-genocidal disinformation.

“Shadow and Ash” takes up many of the images of its “preface” as well as those of the immediately preceding essays and works transformations on them. The logic of these transformations is suggested in “Appendix B” of Triton, in which our fictive scholar notes that, in regard to the relation between Delany’s “Shadows” and Slade’s, “for Slade the concept of landscape is far more political than it was for the author of the older work.” (T 357) Now certainly that “older work” displays a sophisticated political sensibility; one of the chief transformations we experience in reading it is the unfolding of political significance out of such seemingly abstract topics as Quine’s exploration of the “movable predicate” in philosophical logic. But in the present work, we see a whole series of transformations take place according to an algorithm of politicization: over the course of the essay, we trace a shift of attention from subject-oriented autobiography to context-oriented literary biography, from the exclusionary allusiveness of modernism to the inclusive dialogizing of postmodernism, from the “modular calculus” to “theory”—in general (to quote Hal Foster), from formal filiations to social affiliations.[26]

By focusing our attention on individual “thematic” threads running through “Shadow and Ash,” we can begin to discern the micro-effects of the essay’s larger conceptual transformation. For example: scattered throughout the piece we find a series of meditations on aging and mortality — typical concerns of the subject-oriented personal essay. What fascinates about these meditations, however, is how the politicization of subject and landscape wrought by the rest of the essay — by the context — begins to transform the status of death itself, even as Delany takes it up as a topic of personal concern. Delany sets up this transformation in note 8—a consideration of Joanna Russ’ sf novel We Who Are About To… in which, according to Delany’s reading, death serves as an “allegorical stand-in for whatever degree of social-political un-freedom the reader’s society has reached.”[27] Delany then moves elsewhere, exploring the problem of discourse in a number of realms. Midway through, though, Delany returns to the subject of actual physical death with this note:

26. The desire to be conscious of the process of losing consciousness, of having no consciousness at all — this paradox is source and kernel of the anxiety over dying and death. (SA 157)

But by this point in the essay, we are well aware of the degree to which discourse analysis is itself “about” our relation to the things we are least conscious of — the things we are blind or “dead” to. As we read on, death and aging seem less and less problems to be solved at the individual existential level, and more problems which are intimately tied to politics and constituencies. Here is note 9 in its entirety:

9. “What shall I do with this body I’ve been given?” asks Mandelstam. When, one wonders, was the last time he asked it? In his cramped Petersberg apartment? or in the death camp where, near mad, the elements and ideology killed him…? (SA 149)

Delany seems to be suggesting a radical interpretation of the motto, “the personal is the political”—an interpretation which implodes “the political” directly into the material ground of “the personal” with the corporeal body at their interface (this in turn recalls and revalues the notion of the “absolute and indisseverable interface” of object and process explored in “Shadows”). On a human landscape defined in these terms, discourse and death become “problems of consciousness” of similar (or identical) ontological orders. For Delany, to recognize their interface is to gain both insight into the grounds for meaningful political action, and access, perhaps, to a very real personal solace.

Notice that our own recognition of the above transformations arises not from any overt argument on Delany’s part but rather from the organization of the discursive space of the essay as a whole. Each numbered fragment, because it functions as a different coordinate axis within that space, can be said to frame, and be framed by, all the others. The complex mutuality of these framing-relations allows Delany to effect conceptual transformations without resorting to outright assertion within any single fragment. This dynamic, in which what is outside a given text-unit strongly determines what is perceived to be inside it, resembles what Derrida calls a transgressive rhetoric, in which “by means of the work done on one side and the other of the limit the field inside is modified, and a transgression is produced that consequently is nowhere present as a fait accompli.”[28] By evoking such a rhetoric through the deployment of an intricate arrangement of frames — and this formal strategy is at the heart of just about everything he has written from Dhalgren on — Delany is able to effectively sidestep spectacle. Because the essay is organized around a play of absences, because it is fundamentally reticent at the moment of revelation, “Shadow and Ash,” like all the works in this collection, discourages the passivity engendered by spectacle in favor of the active tracing out of discursive parameters and possibilities — the reading of the un-said, whose shadowy presence on the offstage margins renders the said intelligible.

The topic of literary biography — alluded to in the closing argument in “Aversion/Perversion/Diversion” and expanded upon in one of the marginal arguments in “Shadow and Ash”—takes up the whole of “Atlantis Rose…” Here we are given a close reading of Hart Crane’s 1930 poem The Bridge, in which, with almost microscopic meticulousness, Delany weaves together the textual artifacts surrounding the poem’s composition into a hybrid form of multiple biography, close textual analysis, and even — in a fascinating reconstruction of an evening between Crane and his friend Samuel Loveman — speculative literary history. Along the way — as in “Shadow and Ash”—we are given an image of literary practice as a fundamentally social and dialogical activity, in which canons are made and unmade, and discourses reified and subverted, by the rhetorical interventions of individual writers. We see, for example, numerous instances of discursive “normalization” as poetry editors and critics analyze and actually revise the works of various poets according to then-prevailing discursive imperatives.

Against the rhetorical interventions of their editors Delany positions the writing protocols of the poets themselves — protocols which are also shown to both arise from and inform (depending on the case) the protocols of “homosexual genres.” These genres — which use conventionalized patterns of ambiguous language to indicate, by indirection, homosexual content — call for reading protocols which privilege form and context over content. A poem deploying such conventions would thus be subject to a double reading:

… while a heterosexual reading may find the poem just as beautiful and just as lyrical (that’s, after all, what the poet wanted), it will not find the poem anywhere near as poignant as the homosexual reading does — because the heterosexual reading specifically erases all reference to the silence surrounding homosexuality for which the heterosexual reading’s existence, within the homosexual reading, is the positive sign.[29]

Such protocols allow communication to pass across discursively and coercively enforced silence by exploiting the possibilities of excess signification immanent in the sign — by side-stepping direct reference to socially proscribed content and making language itself speak. But this notion — of speaking across the gap, of communicating across time, space, and death — is, of course, at the heart of The Bridge. Delany recalls reading Crane at an early age, and perceiving in his a-referential lyricism an evocation of a utopian discursive space, “a world where meaning and mystery were one, indisseverable, and ubiquitous, but at the same time a world where everything spoke (or sang or whispered or shouted) to everything else…” (AR 197). But of this evocation there are two readings, one indicating a presumably universal yearning for communion, the other indicating a historically and contextually specific silence all around.

For Delany, the resolution to such oppressions resides in the actions of those who elect to participate in the ongoing evolution of the discourse. Delany’s call, near the essay’s end, for literary anthologies edited with greater attention to compositional context can be read as an attempt to foster and encourage such participation. According to Delany, most collections are edited under the general assumption that “there exists a Common Reader of poetry who comes from no place — and is going nowhere” (AR 240). But as Delany says in “Shadow and Ash”—specifically in response to the critical work of Language Poet Ron Silliman — there need be “nothing passive” about such a reader (SA 171). Silliman himself has put it this way:

Here the question is not whether a poet will be read in five or fifty or five hundred years, but whether that poet can and will be read by individuals able and willing to act on their increased understanding of the world as a result of the communication.[30]

“Atlantis Rose…” ends with an intriguing coda. The whole essay, we learn, was written at least partly in parallel with Delany’s historical novel Atlantis: Model 1924—their composition dates overlap. In Atlantis: Model 1924, as I mentioned earlier, we are shown a fictive — though possible — meeting between Hart Crane and Delany’s own father on Brooklyn Bridge in 1924. Yet what transpires in this meeting between a young heterosexual black man and a slightly older homosexual white man is only a brief and fragmentary communion, ending in comic miscommunication and misinterpretation. What is revealed is the discursive form of the two characters’ mutual misunderstanding, the structure of their inability truly to meet. True, we do get a vision from the fictive Crane of that utopian space where complete communication can occur. But what we are left with, finally, is a vision of two men who communicate only imperfectly and incompletely, who quickly retreat to opposite sides of the bridge — all on an achingly beautiful day charged with subversive possibilities, but pervaded by the tragicomic order of discourse.

IV

For the reader positioned comfortably within the traditional discourse of the modern essay, the origins of which I began this Introduction by positing, it may come as a surprise to learn that the earliest essay Montaigne wrote which would eventually appear in the Essais was, in fact, an extended essay, entitled “An Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Sebond had written a Natural Theology whose principal thesis is that the natural landscape is one gigantic text — literally a second book of God, which Man in his post-lapsarian state has lost the ability to read. Montaigne attempted to defend Sebond’s thesis by doing an extended close reading of both Sebond’s text and those of its detractors. Over the course of that extended reading, however, Montaigne manages to argue himself into a state of near-total skepticism: by the end of the “Apology,” Montaigne has arrived at an image of a landscape-text that is opaque to analysis and in constant flux.[31]

After that first, long work, Montaigne’s remaining essays generally restrict their focus to the concerns of the subject. We no longer see extended analytical attention paid to texts. We no longer see the topics under consideration dissolve into indeterminacy and undecidability. Instead we see meditations in which the sovereign self is the authoritative ground for analytical inquiry. Does this shift in focus trace the inevitable course toward the subject which any work aspiring toward “universality” must take? Or is this shift to be read as a restricting of horizons — a retreat from the vagaries of a mysterious reality, a mysterious play of language, towards seemingly more stable certainties?

Yet when Montaigne occasionally contemplates the effectiveness of using his own self as an anchor for his meditations, he finds that it, too, begins to dissolve under extended scrutiny: “I am unable to stabilize my subject: it staggers confusedly along with a natural drunkenness… I am not portraying being but becoming… If my soul could only find a footing I would not be assaying myself but resolving myself” (CE 907–8).

Even at the origin we have posited for it, then, the essay is a contestatory site, a turbulent confluence of — at the very least — the medieval Book of Nature and the more-recently-emerged Renaissance Book of the Self.

With this point in mind, let us return to Barthes for a moment.

In her Introduction to the essay collection A Barthes Reader, Susan Sontag notes that a major feature of Barthes’s prose is its “irrepressibly aphoristic” quality.[32] She goes on to say: “It is in the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making” (BR xii). Yet doesn’t this characterization of the aphoristic style — not far, after all, from Barthes’s own characterization, or indeed from the root meaning of the word — suggest that Barthes’s style is at odds with his message?

It would seem to depend on where we posit the metaphysical ground of our argument. For Sontag, looking specifically at his later, more autobiographical work, “Barthes is the latest major participant in the great national literary project, inaugurated by Montaigne: the self as vocation, life as a reading of the self” (BR xxxiii). If we posit the self as the metaphysical ground — and this places us squarely within the discourse of the transcendental subject — then we must agree with Sontag that Barthes was not fundamentally a political writer, that he merely “put on the armor of postwar debate about the responsibility of literature,” only to take it off again later; that he was “the opposite of an activist… one of the great modern refusers of history” (BR xix, xxii); that in his later work he systematically “divested himself of theories,” presumably to leave the unadorned, central, transcendent self open for all to view (BR xxxv). From this interpretation of Barthes arises “the awareness that confers upon his large, chronically mutating body of writing, as on all major work, its retroactive completeness” (BR ii).

A compelling reading. And, in its striving for closure, for centrality, for the transcendence of the historical, an all-too-familiar one — as Barthes himself has shown us so convincingly. Such “retroactive completeness” is surely the retroactive imposition of precisely the discursive imperatives that so much of Barthes’s work was clearly positioned against. No, Barthes’s life and work did not end with the neat, closed parenthesis of the final revelation of his transhistorical self: he was, after all, struck down by a laundry van — a sign of the object-world of our industrial culture if there ever was one.

Yet Sontag is indubitably right about Barthes’s style — it is irrepressibly aphoristic. Moreover, Barthes’s privileging of thematic/synchronic readings, which we noted earlier, would seem to be an emblem of the very discursive imperatives which so many other components of his work were contrived to contest. How are we to view Barthes, then? What are we to do with him? Are we to bracket all that was radical in him and place him on the altar of the sovereign self? Or does another, longer view suggest itself — and another course of action?

Here we might do well to recall Delany’s words near the end of “Reading at Work”:

As I conclude this minimal bit of work — of interpretive vigilance, of hermeneutic violence, of pleasure, of aggression — my eye lifts from the text and again strays, glances about, snags a moment at a horizon, a boundary that does not so much contain a self, an identity, a unity, a center and origin which gazes out and defines that horizon as the horizon is defined by it; rather that horizon suggests a plurality of possible positions within it, positions which allow a number of events to transpire, move near, pass through, impinge on each other, take off from one another, some of which events are that an eye looks, a voice speaks, a hand writes. (RW 117)

In this ontology of the open horizon — which relativizes discourse to rhetoric, refuses closure and the transcendence of history, places the subject back into its object-context, and privileges the active, social self over the passive sovereign self — surely the proper response to Barthes would be to carry Barthes’s project forward. But that project is not the “national literary project, inaugurated by Montaigne” of making self-consolidation into public spectacle. It is, rather, Montaigne’s other project, marginalized by subsequent discursive practices but in fact preceding the rest of Montaigne’s work: the project of reading texts into their own radicalism, of writing the extended essay. It is that project, abandoned by Montaigne, which Barthes and the post-structuralists have begun to take up again — and which Delany carries significantly forward here.

By ordinary standards — by ordinary readerly expectations — these essays, with their intricate formal strategies, their remarkable erudition, and their sheer length, may seem daunting, intimidating, “forbidding.” Yet far more so than the seemingly more “accessible,” monologic works which currently dominate the literary landscape, these essays are, fundamentally, invitations. As we begin them — and indeed as we finish them — we must hold in our minds one of the closing comments of “Reading at Work,” which suggests our place within the discursive space Delany is exploring:

Clearly, there is no survival here unless the reader turn to Haraway’s manifesto, to do her or his own work, which alone can restructure mine. (RW 118)

The universe of discourse these essays begin to map out is not monolithic, eternal, always-already complete. It is evolving, historical, subject to dialogue and revision. We can revise it ourselves, with our own creative and critical work. All we need to do is enter it — with all the analytic vigilance (and sense of play) we can muster.

The universe of discourse is an open universe. With these essays, Delany invites us in.