Since 1977, when The Jewel-Hinged Jaw appeared, it has been impossible for anyone writing seriously about the nature and purpose of science fiction to ignore the ideas of Samuel R. Delany. Disagree with them, yes. Take a different approach, certainly. But the ideas first expressed in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and then refined and reiterated and revised in numerous other books (including his novels) are ideas that have so powerfully affected how science fiction has been discussed since 1977 that any analysis that does not at least acknowledge their premises is destined to be both inaccurate and irrelevant.
We could trace the influence of Delany’s ideas earlier than 1977; back, perhaps, to December 27, 1968, when he first gave a presentation to the Modern Language Association—or to October 1969, when that presentation was published as “About 5,175 Words” in Science Fiction Review. Important as it was for changing the discourse around SF, the essay could not do all the work on its own, and it wasn’t until it was collected (revised, with a few hundred more words added) in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw that the development of Delany’s ideas became fully apparent, and the force of them incontrovertible.
Before The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, science fiction criticism was primarily descriptive and taxonomic, focused on delineating and chronicling contents and themes. Delany’s approach was different and revitalizing, bringing linguistic, structuralist, and poststructuralist concepts to bear on the material. He focused on the text. He said that science fiction wasn’t special because of its gadgets and its landscapes. It wasn’t special because of its ideas about technology or progress: instead, it was special because of its language, and the assumptions and techniques readers used to interpret that language, and the ways writers’ knowledge of those assumptions and techniques affected the stories they wrote.
The book that is generally regarded as the first full-length academic study of science fiction is J. O. Bailey’s Pilgrims Through Space and Time: A History and Analysis of Scientific Fiction, first published in 1947 and based on Bailey’s 1934 doctoral dissertation.1 It is a remarkable catalogue of centuries of novels and stories, all summarized and listed by subject matter and theme, and notable because it includes not only the proto–science fiction of such writers as Cyrano de Bergerac, Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne, but also work from such magazines as Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, and Astounding. In the thirty years between Bailey’s book and The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, academic critics became more and more interested in SF, while at the same time criticism by fans and writers became more prevalent, with much of the best evaluative, historical, and bibliographic work being done outside the academy by such people as Sam Moskowitz, Everett F. Bleiler, Damon Knight, James Blish, Reginald Bretnor, and Judith Merril.
The first academic journal devoted to science fiction was Extrapolation, which began in 1959 as The Newsletter of the Conference on Science-Fiction of the MLA under the editorship of Thomas D. Clareson, who in 1970 would become the first chairman of the Science Fiction Research Association, an organization that would not only publish both Extrapolation and (as of 1973) Science Fiction Studies, but also create the Pilgrim Award in 1970 to annually honor one person who had made significant contributions to the study of science fiction. Its first recipient was J. O. Bailey, whose book gave the award its name; fifteen years later, Samuel Delany would be honored with the award himself.
Delany’s interests in science fiction and criticism led him to link the two realms in a way different from many of his predecessors and colleagues, but as The Jewel-Hinged Jaw shows, his ideas didn’t arrive fully formed, and his range of references changed considerably from the earliest essays here to the latest.
As he was writing his first nine SF novels in the 1960s, Delany was also reading a variety of critical texts, including Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis, Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature, E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, Cleanth Brooks’s Well Wrought Urn, W. V. Quine’s Word and Object and The Philosophy of Logic, and even Spengler’s Decline of the West. He had had a brief (though not, by his own testimony, very productive) encounter with the first edition of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, but knew only scattered bits of Barthes and Lévi-Strauss, and he had not yet read Lacan or Derrida. It wasn’t until 1973 that Delany returned seriously to Foucault, Barthes, and Lévi-Strauss. He was living in London, and in addition to his general and eclectic reading, he had a chance encounter with Lucien Goldmann’s Philosophy and the Human Sciences, audited a Malcolm Budd seminar on the mind-body problem in philosophy at London University, and benefited from lectures by or informal conversations with Jerry Fodor and Richard Wolheim.
Keeping these references in mind helps us better understand not only the progress of thought between essays such as “About 5,750 Words” and “To Read The Dispossessed,” but also between such novels as Nova (written between June 1966 and May 1967), Dhalgren (January 1969–September 1973), and Trouble on Triton (November 1973–July 1974), because Delany’s art has never been compartmentalized, and his fiction has been as important a manifestation of his ideas as his essays.
If I risk hyperbole in my assessment of Delany’s influence, I do so because I cannot conceive of science fiction criticism without him. In fact, I have never known science fiction criticism without him, and not just because I was a toddler when The Jewel-Hinged Jaw was published.
When at the age of ten or eleven I discovered that science fiction was something I could enjoy, I looked for it in the local college library. This was the library of a college in rural New Hampshire where my mother worked as a secretary, and the SF collection had mostly been built in the 1960s and early 1970s. Being a slow reader, I liked short stories more than novels: what I read were anthologies of stories that won the Hugo Award, some best-of-the-year anthologies edited by Judith Merril, and, although I don’t remember exactly why I first picked it up, Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw.2
At ten or eleven years old, I did not spend much time with The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. It was (it should come as no surprise) unreadable to me—nonsense. I had no frame of reference with which to bring sense to anything within it. (I found Delany’s fiction similarly incomprehensible; I had tried to read his stories “Aye, and Gomorrah” and “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” in one of the Hugo Winners books, but I couldn’t turn their sentences into images or actions in my head, because I did not know enough about life, sex, language, pain, beauty—anything—to be able to make the words work together.) I wanted to understand Delany, because again and again I came across references to him as an important writer, and something told me there were valuable ideas encoded in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, and I wanted to be able to understand them.
A few years later, I got a copy of Charles Platt’s book of interviews with science fiction writers, Dream Makers, at a used bookstore. Eventually, I read the Delany interview, and even though I had not succeeded in understanding or appreciating anything by Delany that I had yet read, I decided that when I grew up I wanted to be like him, because one paragraph seemed to me to describe the ideal person:
He is not an easy person to interview. His academic habits of analyzing prose and speech make him self-conscious about the act of communication, so that, as he talks, he runs a commentary on himself, and adds digressions and asides, and tentative propositions that are subsequently amended, and footnotes and parenthetic remarks. . . . The skein of words grows longer, and the stream of abstract thought becomes hard to follow, and it is difficult to disentangle the real essence of what is being said; and if you do grasp it, the subject itself often turns out to be a question of semantics—as if, to Delany, the message is the medium.3
Platt then offers what he calls “a portion of the interview in raw, unedited form,” and the string of ideas—hardly any of which I could make much sense of—gave me a greater sense of wonder than just about any SF story I had read till then. It gave me the same feeling I got when I saw superheroes in movies and TV shows: I want to be able to do that.
The description that Platt offers of Delany talking inspired me for various reasons, some of which I can only speculate about now, because it’s been about fifteen years since I first read that interview. Most immediately, I think the extraordinary skill of the act impressed me: to be able to speak with the same complexity that writing allows. To be able to understand thoughts so abstract that an ordinarily intelligent person would have trouble following the expression of them. To create a conversation that includes parentheses. I’m sure I didn’t know what “semantics” meant, and I’m sure I didn’t get the allusion to Marshall McLuhan’s “The medium is the message” (in fact, I’m fairly certain I didn’t know what “medium” meant in that context)—but Platt’s portrait of Delany offered me something I had yearned to know could exist: a superman.
The interview was the first bit of Delany I taught myself to comprehend. I went back again and again to the giant paragraphs of his supposedly unedited talking, and I worked bit by bit through them, wrestling with words, trying to grasp concepts. I wanted to learn how to do this, to speak in this way about these things.
Soon, I had discovered an idea that appealed to me immediately: science fiction is another language. It is different from what Delany calls mundane fiction (“the word simply means mundis: world, that fiction which takes place in the world”) because though it uses many of the same words that mundane fiction uses, it uses them differently. To be able to understand science fiction, you must be able to crack its code.
A theory is a story of the way things work. Here’s one: We can trace a progression of ideas from “About 5,750 Words” to “Thickening the Plot” to “Alyx: Joanna Russ” to “To Read The Dispossessed.” It is a story about ways of reading, about how words combine to both state and suggest meanings, about the effects of language, about differences and Derridean différance. The central narrative is about how science fiction is different from other deployments of language, but there are plenty of subplots along the way—about imagery, about definitions, about history, about responsibility.
That theory is fine as far as it goes, but what it leaves out is as interesting as what it includes. For instance, weaving between the essays is a powerful strain of argument about otherness.4 Science fiction itself is other: It is a paraliterature, a working-class literature, a literature with a language different from the language of Literature. It is a language an outsider can wield as a tool of truth-telling, but to do so requires responsibility and care. An ethical argument appears in “Alyx” and culminates in “To Read The Dispossessed,” where the analysis of language is tied to the effects of language in and on the world. “Anyone who would be Archimedes risks being Faust,” Delany writes in the earliest essay here, and that remains the primary message even at the end, because the writer who simply wants to write, without thinking too closely about what is written—the writer who wants to be left alone to think up clever ideas and make pretty word-pictures on the beach—is likely to become the casualty of all she chooses not to see:
Faust dies victim to his own knowledge gone abruptly out of control.
Archimedes dies in its calm pursuit; his fault is a lack of comprehension of the world outside his focus of interest.
Now for another theory: The great contribution of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw is that it offers an early example of engaged postmodern critical thought.
To bring some sort of clarity to this idea, I need to oppose it to someone else’s.
In After the Great Divide, Andreas Huyssen argues that poststructuralism and postmodernism are not terms that can be conflated and that “poststructuralism offers a theory of modernism, not a theory of the postmodern”5 because (despite the highly differing contextual philosophies in which each is embedded) poststructuralism is little more than an extension of the textual practices of the New Criticism (especially as carried out by Americans)—practices that not only are built on a foundation of modernist texts (Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Freud, Brecht, etc.), but that depoliticize the act of interpreting and the interpretations that result by predicating such interpretation on aesthetics while maintaining the modernist dichotomy of high and low culture. Postmodernism “operates in a field of tension between tradition and innovation, conservation and renewal, mass culture and high art, in which the second terms are no longer automatically privileged over the first; a field of tension which can no longer be grasped in categories such as progress vs. reaction, left vs. right, present vs. past, modernism vs. realism, abstraction vs. representation, avantgarde vs. Kitsch.”6
The promise of critical strategies that can grapple with these dichotomies has mostly been unfulfilled by structuralism and poststructuralism, which have not been applied in a postmodern way to postmodern texts. “The point,” Huyssen says, “is not to eliminate the productive tension between the political and the aesthetic, between history and the text, between engagement and the mission of art. The point is to heighten that tension, even to rediscover it and to bring it back into focus in the arts as well as in criticism.”7
Huyssen’s account of structuralism and poststructuralism is useful for highlighting Delany’s uniqueness. From the beginning Delany does not give in to the high art/low art dichotomy, and so there is a postmodern tendency to his readings and a political subtext, a subversion: the reader who begins from an assumption that science fiction is “low” (whether an academic looking at it with scorn or a fan proclaiming its superiority to “that boring Literature stuff”) will be confounded by the presence of interpretive techniques reserved for the “high.” Exploring the idea that SF is a separate language from literature makes good use of various strategies, but the effect of those strategies is to call into question the entire high/low binary, because Delany is not claiming that good SF is the equal of literature. A writer who was trying to make such a claim would need to bring the familiar techniques for interpreting high art to bear on the best works of SF to show that those works are, in fact, literature. But that’s not the point, because for Delany SF and literature are separate phenomena, and the terms should be used for description, not evaluation. (Under such a rubric, neither “bad literature” nor “good SF” would be oxymorons.) Delany brings the techniques of literary analysis to bear on SF texts and on SF as a textual phenomenon to show both that those techniques are valid for interpreting particular works and that SF is different (and not simply less, as a stuffy professor might have it; or more, as a zealous fan might claim). Thus, from his first essays he undermines at least two assumptions: That only high art can profit from certain critical approaches, and that the best SF works in the same way as the best fiction in general.
As his essays become more sophisticated, they continue to undermine modernist assumptions while adding more explicitly political moves to an approach ever more influenced by structuralism/poststructuralism, so that by the time of “To Read The Dispossessed” Delany is employing an unusually wide range of aesthetic and political tools to his reading. By writing about recently produced texts that are part of a paraliterary tradition, he exploits the tension between most of the dichotomies Huyssen delineates; by employing strategies of analysis that are anti-essentialist he aligns himself with feminist and (what would come to be called) queer practices; by insisting that choices about language and representation are ethical choices he avoids the depoliticizing tendencies of aestheticism while maintaining the interpretive strengths aestheticism provides.
One of the pleasures of reading The Jewel-Hinged Jaw is following the progression of Delany’s ideas about feminism, gender, and sexuality—ideas that were always at least dormant in his work, but that came to be as important to it later on as his ideas of science fiction.
First, there is “Alyx,” his essay on the early fiction of Joanna Russ, whose work would remain a touchstone for him.8 He begins with the language, and argues against the idea of transparent prose with a comparison I can’t resist quoting: “The concept of a writer writing a vivid and accurate scene in a language transparent and devoid of decoration so that we see through to the object without writerly distraction suffers the same contradiction as the concept of a painter painting a vivid and accurate scene with pigments transparent and devoid of color—so that the paint will not get between us and the picture.” From a discussion of styles and modes he then moves to the idea of forbidden words and subjects, blasphemies, taboos. Delany will talk often in other essays about such things, but he will not do so in the same way. He is on the verge of formulating ideas here that will sustain many arguments later, but they are still nascent, still entangled.
The ideas about sword-and-sorcery fiction, though, are similar to ones that will fuel what many of us consider to be his greatest achievement, his Return to Nevèrÿon series. (The first story in that series, “The Tale of Gorgik,” was finished less than a year after Delany finished the essay “Alyx.”) The ideas about sword-and-sorcery then lead to ideas about women, because S&S before Russ had often been considered a male idiom, both in terms of its content and who wrote it.9 One of Russ’s important ethical achievements with the Alyx stories, Delany argues, is to bring women’s concerns to the forefront—to show women interacting with women, asking questions of each other, not making husbands the center of their lives—in a way that clears a protofeminist space and makes room for more fully feminist interventions later.
Which brings us to what came before Delany’s essay on Russ: the Khatru Symposium on Women in Science Fiction, an endeavor that included contributions—lively, ferocious, illuminating, even embarrassing, and often brilliant—from (in addition to Delany) Suzee McKee Charnas, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda N. McIntyre, Raylyn Moore, Joanna Russ, Luise White, Kate Wilhelm, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Virginia Kidd, Jeff Smith, and James Tiptree, Jr., whose identity was then (between October 1974 and May 1975) unknown.10 The symposium began with some questions from Smith, editor and publisher of the Khatru fanzine:
Since SF was written by men, for an audience of men, it was generally about men. And when men (Asimov, Heinlein, Panshin) used female protagonists, they were often met by critical cries of “That’s a girl?” What problems are there in presenting an accurate picture of a member of the opposite sex? When you write about men, do you ever wonder if you will be called down for “unrealistic male characters”? (Have you?)11
Delany was brought in for the second round of arguments along with Tiptree as men sympathic to the cause. Delany’s first (and primary) letter immediately caused controversy for its length (“grandstanding!”), for its relentless attack on Jeff Smith’s letter, and even for its sympathy. I’m not sure how much of the energy and tension contained in and unleashed by his contribution still communicates now, without the context of the rest of the symposium, but Delany’s letter still holds much interest on its own, not the least because, though he was generally known to be gay (certainly by the members of the symposium), he does not mention homosexuality anywhere in it—he positions himself as “an owner of a radio and an enjoyer of pop music . . . a stroller in the streets . . . a married male with a daughter” but not as a man sexually attracted to other men.
More importantly, the letter demonstrates how much passion Delany felt for feminist ideas, and gives some context to the essays in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw that would most immediately spring from the passions in the letter: his essay on Russ and, even more directly, “To Read The Dispossessed.”
To better understand the latter essay, we should look at how Le Guin ended her contribution to the symposium. Her last letter contains what she called “Final Deliberately Irritating Statements arrived at by Le Guin after reading Russ’s The Female Man, reading part of Delany’s Dhalgren, and rereading this whole symposium so far.” She wrote:
The identification of feminism with free love (1910), promiscuity (1965) or fucking (1975) is a blind alley. The issue is free choice, not Sex as the Magic Cure-All.
I think that the identification of the women’s movement or feminism with lesbianism is equally stultifying. Feminism, lesbianism, and male gay lib are naturally related in that they are all liberty-seeking; feminism and lesbianism are further related in that they originate with women; that’s a lot, but that’s all. The end, and means, of feminism are immensely larger than those of lesbianism. In so far as lesbian rhetoric is separatist and anti-male/anti-straight, it is in conflict with and obstructive to feminism. . . .
The Confessional form is no longer useful to the movement. It was at first. It is now mere dog-returning-to-vomit. It’s time we stop whining about what awful things I have done to women and what awful things men have done to me, and then compensating by daydreamining about retaliation and the Perfectly Guiltless Society; it’s time we try to start intelligently and passionately and compassionately considering, proposing, inventing, and acting out alternatives. If even people in science fiction can’t do that, can’t look forward instead of back, it’s bad news for the women’s movement, and everybody else.12
Le Guin would come to find these statements “appalling” and the rant of “a scared woman striking out,”13 but the effect they had at the time was significant, as they were clearly at least in the back of Delany’s mind when, in 1976, he wrote his extraordinary study of her 1974 novel.
The title of “To Read The Dispossessed” echoes Louis Althusser’s Lire le Capital, a collection of five book-length essays by Althusser and his one-time students Pierre Macherey, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Ranciere, and Roger Establet, two of which—Althusser’s and Balibar’s contributions—were translated by Ben Brewster as Reading Capital, but which Delany prefers to translate as “To Read Das Kapital.” His own summary of Althusser’s contribution is useful, not only for readers unfamiliar with Althusser’s arguments, but to give an idea of how Delany construes them:
Althusser argued that Marx developed a new level of analytical reading: According to Althusser, earlier economists and political theorists read each other only in terms of what each said. Each then proposed his own ideas against that reading. But Marx’s writings on earlier theorists presented a “double reading,” Althusser maintains, in which Marx reads what the other economist said, then proceeds to read what he left out, his tacit presuppositions, the historical pressures on him, the stabilizing institutions he was involved with, the aspects he repressed or was blind to, thus allowing Marx to go on to show the contradictions within the “restored” text, and to speculate on the significance of the two texts of the way one comments on the other . . .14
The technique Althusser claims for Marx is one that is not only similar to what came to be called deconstruction, but is also part of what Delany does to The Dispossessed. Many of his most significant ideas about the language of science fiction are utilized in the essay, and to them are added ideas about politics, gender, and sexuality that vividly demonstrate the ethics underlying the aesthetic analysis.
The essay contains some of the most specific and effective close reading Delany has done outside the context of The American Shore, his book-length study of Thomas M. Disch’s sixteen-page short story “Angouleme.”15 It is valuable not only because it makes his reading process clear, but because it focuses our attention on how the words work. It slows our own reading down, forcing us to pay attention to the words in a way that is serious, deliberate, and instructive. (The first paragraph of the second section of “To Read The Dispossessed” could teach a beginning writer more than an entire shelf of how-to books.)
The third section, in which Delany details what he thinks works well in The Dispossessed, could get forgotten in the intense deconstruction that follows, but the insights there are important and worth remembering. This is not a book that Delany loathes, despite his careful assault on many of its premises and practices. It is, instead, a book in which he sees skill and accomplishment, and more than that, potential. It is, in fact, the missed potential that seems to frustrate him the most.
“[T]o treat a referential enterprise as if it were only a musical structure is to betray it—especially an enterprise as clearly concerned with ideas as The Dispossessed.” With this statement, Delany in the fourth section moves beyond aesthetics and toward an ethical consideration of the book and of its silences and absences, its double text. This section also hints at a response to Le Guin’s final volley in the “Women in Science Fiction” symposium, because it is here that Delany begins an analysis of the assumptions about gender and sexuality in the novel.
The analysis Delany offers is one that utilizes personal experiences to undermine Le Guin’s assumptions. He separates “the erotic, the exotic, the sensual, and the sexual” into different categories and asserts that “All of them must be learned, and learned differently in different cultures.” This is an important point that the essay will reiterate, and Delany will repeatedly counter the stated and implied ideas about sex in The Dispossessed with an anti-essentialist doctrine of cultural pluralism and social construction.
One of the strengths of Delany’s analysis is that it is not linear, but recursive. He makes an assertion, provides evidence for it, makes another assertion, offers more evidence, then relates the second assertion to the first. And so on. Thus, he connects his analysis of how Le Guin writes about sex to his ideas about the differences between literature and science fiction, showing that science fiction, by its different relationship to the referential world, has different requirements for its prose than does literature. And that includes SF and how its writers write about sex.
The vision of sexualities that Delany offers is not just a critique of Le Guin’s representation of erotic, exotic, sensual, and sexual life in The Dispossessed, but a critique of her statements at the end of the “Women in Science Fiction” symposium about homosexualities and feminism. It also shows the limits of Le Guin’s own offering of alternatives and supplements her call for SF writers to think more broadly and radically by demonstrating how conservative and culturally bound was her perspective.
“Mundane fiction,” Delany says, “can get by with a clear and accurate portrayal of behavior that occurs merely because it occurs. Science fiction cannot.” SF has a speculative responsibility that is different from the responsibilities of other types of fiction, and it is that responsibility Delany sees The Dispossessed evading.
The seventh (“purely theoretical”) section is a discussion of structuralism and science fiction, and it is valuable as an early iteration of ideas and connections Delany would continue to make through The American Shore, Starboard Wine, and his later essays. It is at its heart, once again, a call for recognition of science fiction’s particular and different qualities. The eighth section provides an analysis of how some of the characters are used for didactic purposes, particularly the lone homosexual Bedap. Here Delany does what he did not do in the symposium: he outs himself, and uses his own experience as a gay man (and father) within his argument. (Confessional writing? Perhaps so, and perhaps, in that, another response to Le Guin.)
In the ninth section, even Le Guin’s portrayal of women’s sexuality is shown to be thin—in fact, thinner than her presentation of male homosexuality: “In the portrayal of the book’s major heterosexual relation, all aspects of Takver’s personality or intellect that might cause conflict and thus promote intellectual change and growth in either her or Shevek have been relegated to the same mysterious space as Anarresti contraception methods. The heterosexual relation is merely supportive—and supportive, when all is said and done, of some of Shevek’s least attractive characteristics.” Delany then ends the section with a discussion of difference, an idea (or set of ideas) that is important to these essays and even more important to the ones that will follow in later books.
All of Delany’s other work resonates with the essays in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. For instance, “To Read The Dispossessed” should be read alongside Trouble on Triton (written before it) and Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand (written just after). “Alyx” gives us the first iterations of ideas about sword-and-sorcery that would lead to the Return to Nevèrÿon series. The essays on Disch could be seen as warm-ups for The American Shore. The discussions of imagery, signs, and reference are all illuminating for Dhalgren.
And a multitude of other combinations and implications, echoes and shadows, prisms, mirrors, lenses.
There are more contexts I should tell you about, but I will, instead, only hint.
You might want to know something, for instance, about Quark, the four paperback anthology-journals that Delany edited with Marilyn Hacker, published between November 1970 and August 1971. Therein appeared the short editorials here called “Quarks,” as well as “Critical Methods/Speculative Fiction.” They were published alongside stories and essays and poems by Joanna Russ, Thomas M. Disch, A. E. van Vogt, Ursula K. Le Guin, M. John Harrison, Carol Emshwiller, Christopher Priest, Larry Niven, Michael Moorcock, and others.
Or you might wonder why “Shadows,” which was originally placed between “About 5,750 Words” and “Critical Methods/Speculative Fiction,” is now gone. One reason is because it is readily available in Longer Views, where Delany calls it a “piece of transitional thinking” that “prefigures much of the later work.”16 It is similar in content to some of what is here, but it is notably different in form (fragmentary, chrestomathic) and less continuously devoted to SF. By its absence, we lose the transition, but the transition is apparent anyway, and now we can give “To Read The Dispossessed” the weight it might otherwise have lost in the gravitational pull of the dense asteroid field that is “Shadows.” (This edition of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw also allows a looking back, via the second appendix, which reprints “Letter to a Critic” from the original edition. The ideas in the letter remain interesting, even if the publishing situation has changed so radically as to make much of what is said in the letter more useful to historians than anyone else, which explains the current placement.)
In the original preface to The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Delany said, “The following essays circle about, hover over, and occasionally home in on science fiction.” He warned: “This book is not an introduction to its subject.”
I have shown how I first came to encounter these essays and their subject(s), and I have laid out the contexts under which I came to certain understandings of what Delany was writing over a period of many years. If I were to step into a time machine and go back to design a context for myself to understand the book, I couldn’t do too much better than I have, but I could have been more efficient. A basic collection of SF texts that any reader of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw should be familiar with is mostly obvious from the essays, but for the sake of (someone’s) efficiency, let me lay out here one potential canon:
The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
The Stars My Destination (Tiger, Tiger!) by Alfred Bester
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
Camp Concentration and various short stories by Thomas M. Disch
The Past Through Tomorrow by Robert A. Heinlein
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Swords and Deviltry by Fritz Leiber
Jirel of Joiry (Black God’s Shadow) by C. L. Moore
Alyx, And Chaos Died, and The Female Man by Joanna Russ
Short stories by Cordwainer Smith
More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
This Immortal, Lord of Light, The Dream Master, and various short stories by Roger Zelazny
The Disch, Le Guin, Russ, and Zelazny are obvious, since there are essays devoted to them. The Bester is cited repeatedly in multiple essays. The Asimov, Clarke, and Smith are useful for various points made about language, technology, history, and mysticism. The Leiber and Moore are useful for a context to understand the sword-and-sorcery tradition discussed in “Alyx.” The Heinlein is a collection of stories and short novels that gives as good a sense as any single book can of his particular strengths and tendencies, and a familiarity with those strengths and tendencies is presupposed in some of the essays. The Sturgeon is cited in passing and is an excellent example of his prose, which is discussed more than once, and is marvelous.
Let us go back to Charles Platt’s description: “His academic habits of analyzing prose and speech make him self-conscious about the act of communication, so that, as he talks, he runs a commentary on himself, and adds digressions and asides, and tentative propositions that are subsequently amended, and footnotes and parenthetic remarks. . . .”
The habits described here, the ones that so captivated me at such an early age and made me think of Delany as something more than an ordinary person, are not merely academic. They should not live only in a classroom or the pages of an esoteric journal. We should all be “self-conscious about the act of communication,” because to be anything else—to be complacent—is to relinquish power and opportunity and to give in to the ocean of expression that threatens ever and again to drown us. The running commentary, the digressions, the asides, the tentative propositions, the amendations, the footnotes, the parenthetical remarks are breakwaters, and there is an honesty to them that is absent from the slicker, less thoughtful, more propagandistic waves of words that we encounter every day.
The search for the best way to say something is an exhilaratingly impossible search, because, as Delany has said from his earliest essays, how the thoughts get expressed is not a simple question of finding the right words for an idea; the words are the idea, and a change of words is also a change of ideas—not always a significant or destabilizing one, but enough to create an infinite cycle of revision. Hence the constant need for comment, for amendment. (There is no Platonic realm where the perfect forms of ideas wait around in the sun for us to harvest them, but every writer must pretend there is, or else be reduced to silence.)
There are inconsistencies between the essays of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, and that, too, is part of the book’s value. Critics who have nothing but consistent and accurate insights are less valuable than critics who are willing to risk inconsistency and inaccuracy, critics who struggle with their ideas and make the struggle part of their endeavor. Such critics are not predictable, and their ideas become spurs to our own—they help our minds grow, they reveal ways of seeing what we might be blind to, they teach us about what we most value by making us defend or celebrate what we cherish and enjoy. Such a critic is Samuel R. Delany.
1. There were other studies of works that could be considered SF before Bailey, such as Philip Babcock Gove’s The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction (1941) and Clyde F. Beck’s Hammer and Tongs (1937); but Gove wrote only about eighteenth-century works, and without arguing for an SF tradition; and Beck’s book collected nonacademic essays from a fanzine.
2. Yes, improbable as it is, though this library did not have a very broad SF collection at the time, they did have the original hardcover edition of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. In fact, the library had as many, if not more, books by Delany as by any other SF writer.
3. From Charles Platt, Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction (Berkeley Books, New York, 1980), p. 70. Ellipsis in the original.
4. There is no need to forget the situation of Delany at the time many of these essays were written. To choose just a few descriptors: A black gay science fiction writer married to a National Book Award–winning poet with whom he was raising a young daughter. Add something else that belongs in the theory: The Motion of Light in Water.
5. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 214.
6. Ibid., 216–217.
7. Ibid., 221.
8. Russ’s later fiction is discussed at length in an essay in his next collection, Starboard Wine.
9. C[atherine].L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry stories, which began in 1934 with “The Black God’s Kiss,” offered the first female protagonist for a sword-and-sorcery series, though as Delany notes in his essay, they fit comfortably into the “fighting women” tradition of S&S.
10. See Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006).
11. Khatru Issues 3&4 (Symposium: Women in Science Fiction), edited by Jeffrey D. Smith (originally published in 1975; reprinted with additional material edited by Jeanne Gomoll in 1993 by Obsessive Press and the Corflu 10 Convention Committee), 11.
12. Ibid., 99–100.
13. In the 1993 material, Ursula Le Guin said she found her final statement “appalling to me now. It rants about things that never happened in the Symposium (such as the identification of lesbianism and feminism); it ignores most of what had really been going on in the Symposium, and misinterprets the rest . . . I only wish Joanna’s kind-hearted reading of it as devil’s advocacy had been correct. It wasn’t. It was just a scared woman striking out” (115).
14. “Neither the First Word nor the Last on Deconstruction, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Semiotics for SF Readers,” in Shorter Views (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, 1999) 157.
15. Delany began The American Shore in December 1975 and finished it in April 1977. “To Read The Dispossessed” is dated as April 1976.
16. Longer Views (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996) p. xii.