Longer Views (2 page)

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