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 in
terface 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 na
tural 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).