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CHAPTER 1

The Semiology of Silence: The Science Fiction Studies Interview

This text began as a recorded conversation in New York City in August 1983 with Sinda Gregory and Larry McCaffery (both of San Diego State University). I produced this written form over the next several weeks, which eventually appeared in Science Fiction Studies, Volume 14 (1987). Another piece based on other parts of the same conversation is included in McCaffery's and Gregory's interview collection, Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s (Illinois University Press, 1987).

Samuel R. Delany: I begin, a sentence lover. I'm forever delighted, then delighted all over, at the things sentences can trip and trick you into saying, into seeing. I'm astonished — just plain tickled! — at the sharp turns and tiny tremors they can whip your thoughts across. I'm entranced at their lollop and flow, their prickles and points. Poetry is made of words, Mallarmé told us a hundred years back. But I write prose.

And prose is made of sentences.

Oh, I've always been a bathroom dictionary browswer. Still — "In the beginning was the word ..."? I suppose poets have to feel that way. But for me, the word's a degenerate sentence, a fragmentary utterance, something incomplete. Mollying along, lonesome Mrs. Masters asks, "Why aren't there any decent words?" Well, no word is decent by itself; and less than a dozen indecent — shit, fuck, and the like working the way they do because when they're blurted by counter women, construction workers, or traffic-bound drivers, they've got a clear capital at one end and an exclamation point at the other, so that the words alone (in the dictionary, say, or askew on the stall wall) are homonymous with the indecent expletive — which is a sentence. Declare "Sputum!" the way we do "Shit!" and we'll have it obscene in a season. It's highly reductive to take the toddler's tentative or passionate utterances, her one- and two- syllable grunts, his burble and blab, merely as practice words; they're questions, exclamations, protests, incantations, and demands. And tangible predicate or not, these are sentence forms. The late Russian critic M. M. Bakhtin (1895-1975) hit on the radical notion of considering the word not a locus of specified meaning but rather an arena in which all possible social values that might be expressed with and through it can engage in contest. But what calls up those differing values? What holds them stable long enough to get their dander up, if not the other words about, along with the punctuation that, here and there, surrounds and, there and here, sunders: in short, the different sentences the word occurs in? Without the sentence, the arena of the word has no walls, no demarcation. No contest takes place. Even historically, I suspect it's more accurate to think of the sentence as preceding the word. "Word" — or "logos" — is better considered a later, critical tool to analyze, understand, and master some of the rich and dazzling things that go on in statements, sentences, utterances, in the énoncés that cascade through life and make up so much of it.

The sentence is certainly the better model for the text. (The word is the model for the Bible, and that really isn't what most writers today want their texts to become.) The word is monolithic. You can't argue with it. At best it's got an etymology — which is to say it comes only from other words that most of us, speaking, don't have immediate access to. And an etymology is only a genealogy, not a real history of material pressures and complex influences. For that, you have to look to a history of rhetorical figures, of ideas (expressed by what ...?), of discourse.

The sentence is more flexible, sinuous, complex — one is always revising it — than the word. It's got style. Yet it holds real danger in its metaphorical compass. The wrong one condemns you to death.

Der Satz, the Germans say, philosophically: the sentence, or the proposition. We've got two terms for their one. They lead to very different areas of utterances about language, too. From the Greek Stoics on, this split strongly suggested that meanings could come apart from words, from the sentences that evoked them. Philosophically speaking, a proposition was thought to be a particular kind of clear and delimitable meaning associated with a particular kind of rigorously simple sentence — or a combination of them in clear and lucid relations, indicated by truth tables and Venn diagrams; and any truly meaningful sentence could be broken down into them. Willard Van Orman Quine is among the more recent philosophers this side of the Herring Pond to suggest that view isn't right. Meanings just aren't hard-edged and delimitable. To use his word (in my sentence): They just can't be "individuated" as easily as that. Meanwhile, on the other side, Jacques Derrida is one of the new thinkers to make it disturbingly clear that the most fixed and irrefutableseeming meaning is finally a more or less overdetermined play of unde- cidables.

"Words mean many things" is the old sentence that tried to illuminate some pivotal point in this complex situation. A comment about words, yes. But it takes a sentence to say it.

What interests me most about sentences is the codes by which we make them — and various combinations and embeddings and tortuosities of them (I was 19 when, in Lectures in America, I first read Gertrude Stein's bright and repeated observation: "The paragraph is the emotional unit of the English language." And you know what makes a paragraph) — make sense. An interest such as mine usually starts from the position: "Well, there are these things called words, sentences, paragraphs, texts. ... And, by a more or less articulatable set of codes, we interpret them to mean certain things."

But as you articulate those codes more and more, you soon find, if you're honest with yourself, you're at a much more dangerous and uncertain place. You notice, for example, the convention of white spaces between groups of letters that separate out words is, itself, just a code. Knowing the simplest meaning of a word is a matter of knowing a code. Knowing printed letters — written characters — stand for language and are there to convey it is, itself, only a certain codic convention. "Word" (or, indeed, "sentence" or "paragraph") is only the codic term for the complex of codic conventions by which we recognize, respond to, understand, and act on whatever causes us to recognize, respond, understand, and act in such a way that, among those recognitions and responses and understandings, is the possible response: "word" (or, indeed, "sentence" or "paragraph").

But turn around now, and what we called "the real world" seems to be nothing but codes, codic systems and complexes, and the codic terms used to designate one part of one system, complex, or another. In the larger neural net, the colors we see and the sounds we hear are only codic markers for greater or lesser numbers of vibrations per second in electromagnetic fields or clouds of gas. Shapes among colors are markers coded to larger or smaller aggregates of atoms and molecules that reflect those vibrations. None of this can be perceived directly; and it's only by maneuvering and cross-comparing certain codic responses to certain others according to still other codes that we can theorize the universe's external existence in our own internal codic system — a system that, in practical terms, while it expands and develops on that theory at every turn, seems hardly set up to question it except under extremely speculative conditions.

The sentential, codic — or semiotic — view is dangerous because questions that, at least initially, seem inimical to the system do get asked. And inimical-seeming answers are arrived at. The comparatively stable objects posited by the limited codic system of the senses do not correlate well with the greater codic complexes that entail our memory of objects, our recognition of them, and our knowledge of their history and their related situations, which, finally, are what allow us to negotiate, maneuver, and control them. Sense-bound distinctions such as inside and outside become hugely questionable. Value-bound metaphors such as higher and lower stand revealed as arbitrary. And the physically inspired quality of identity becomes a highly rigid mentalistic ascription in a system that can clearly accommodate more flexibility.

"Solipsism" is what it's called — to call it with a sentence. And it feels very lonely.

The way out, however, is simply to remember that the code system isn't simple. It's terribly complex, recursive, self-critical, and self- revising; and redundancy, sometimes called overdetermination, is its hallmark at every perceivable point. The overdetermination of the codic system is the most forceful suggestion that the universe, from which the system is made and to which (we assume) it is a response, is itself overdetermined — which is to say: It operates by laws. (It is sentenced, if you will, to operate in certain ways and not in others.)

What does that overdetermination mean to the human codic system?

It means frequently you can knock out the most obvious appearance and still come up with pretty much the same understanding or one that feels even finer.

What could be more important than the spaces between for distinguishing individual words? Yet you can drop the word spaces in almost any English sentence and still readit well enough. Words seem to individuate more easily than meanings. The early Greeks used to write with all capital letters and no punctuation or spaces between words at all. There are a number of writing systems that have no way — or only a very impoverished way — of indicating vowel sounds. They still produce perfectly readable sentences. Nd y cn drp th vwls n Nglsh nd stll mk prtty gd gss t wht th txt sys. You can cut the bottom half of the print off an English sentence with no irretrievable loss of meaning.

That's all overdetermination.

What you can't do is drop the word spaces and the vowels and the bottom half of the print all at once. That over-determines chaos. Suddenly all meaningful pattern becomes massively underdetermined — far more so than the overdetermined current through all language that governs its flexibility and facilitates its deconstruction, though this chaos of the letter may well be the origin of that always inescapable current.

But the fact is, almost any codic convention we can talk of in language matters is likely to be overdetermined. Where there's communication, there's redundancy — starting with the one between what's in your mind and what's in mine, which allows words to call up similar meanings for both of us. Indeed, if there's a codic rule of thumb governing the vast complex of codes which makes up life in the world, it would seem to be: The more obvious, important, and indispensable a codic convention, the more redundant it is — including this one. That results from all the other little rules, often very hard to ferret out because the obvious hides them, that obliquely replicate parts of it, that manage to reinforce much of it, that give it its appearance — in short, that make it "obvious," "important," and "indispensable" in the first place.

Well, here I sit, in the middle of all these playful, sensuous sentences and codes, writing my SF, my sword-and-sorcery, more or less happily, more or less content. But I suspect there's little to say about writing, mine or anyone else's, that doesn't fall out of its sentences, or the codes which recognize and read them, the codes which the sentences are — and the sentences which are the only expressions, at least in verbal terms, we can have of the codes.

Larry McCaffery: Unlike Kurt Vonnegut, you have openly and proudly proclaimed your writing to be "science fiction." Indeed, in your critical writings, you have suggested that SF is a genre in its own right and not merely a subgenre of mainstream (or "mundane") fiction or of the romance or whatever. And you have resisted the notion that recent SF is "re-entering" the realms of serious fiction. Could you talk about these controversial notions, explain how you arrived at them, and why you feel they're important?

SRD: The easiest place to enter your question is at the idea of SF's "reentering" the realm of serious fiction. To be "reentering" anything, SF has to have been there once before (presumably in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries' "feigned histories" and "utopias," from Kepler and Cyrano to More and Bellamy); then it has to have left (no doubt when SF stories began to appear in the adventure and pulp magazines of the early part of this century); and now, according to some people, it's coming back — while, according to me, it isn't.

Well, that whole model of the "history of SF" is, I think, ahistorical. More, Kepler, Cyrano, and even Bellamy would be absolutely at sea with the codic conventions by which we make sense of the sentences in a contemporary SF text. Indeed, they would be at sea with most modern and postmodern writing. It's just pedagogic snobbery (or insecurity), constructing these preposterous and historically insensitive genealogies, with Mary Shelley for our grandmother or Lucian of Samosata as our great-great grandfather. There's no reason to run SF too much back before 1926, when Hugo Gernsback coined the ugly and ponderous term, "scientifiction," which, in the letter columns written by the readers of his magazines, became over the next year or so "science fiction" and finally "SF." Ten years before or 30 years before is all right, I suppose, if you need an Ur-period. It depends on what aspect of it you're studying, of course. But 50 years is the absolute outside, and that's only to guess at the faintest rhetorical traces of the vaguest discursive practices. And in practical terms, most people who extend SF too much before 1910 are waffling.

Look. Currently our most historically sensitive literary critics are busily explaining to us that "literature" as we know it, read it, study it, and interpret it today hasn't existed more than 100 years. Yet somehow there is supposed to be a stable object, SF, that's endured since the 16th century (or 1818, when Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, an equally silly date) — though it only got named in 1929 ...?

That's preposterous.

Now, there've been serious writers of SF ever since SF developed its own publishing outlets among the paraliterary texts that trickled out on their own toward the end of the 19th century and that, thanks to technical developments in printing methods, became a flood by the end of World War I and today are an ocean. Some of those SF writers, like Stanley G. Weinbaum (19001935), were extraordinarily fine. Some of them, like Captain S. P. Meek (1894-1972), were unbelievably bad. And others, like Edward E. Smith (1890-1965), while bad, still had something going. But what they were all doing, both the bad ones and the good ones, was developing a new way of reading, a new way of making texts make sense — collectively producing a new set of codes. And they did it, in their good, bad, and indifferent ways, by writing new kinds of sentences, and embedding them in contexts in which those sentences were readable. And whether their intentions were serious or not, a new way of reading is serious business.

Between the beginning of the century and the decade after the Second World War — by the end of which we clearly have the set of codes we recognize today as SF — there are things of real historical interest to study in the developing interpretative codes and the texts that both exploited them and revised them in the pulp SF magazines and, later, in the SF book market, hardcover and paperback. But most academic critiques that equate 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century didactic fables with 20th-century pulp texts just mystify history and suppress those historical developments, both in terms of what was seriously intended and what was simply interesting, however flip.

I've never proclaimed my work SF, proudly or humbly. I assume most of my published fiction is SF — and I assume most of my readers feel it is, too. But that's like a poet assuming she writes poems, or a playwright assuming he writes plays.

All I've ever "proclaimed" in my critical books, The American Shore (1978) or Starboard Wine (1984), is that, today, at this particular point in the intellectual history of various practices of writing, in the development of the greater complex of interpretative codes that we apply to the range of writing practices, "science fiction" is a useful designation and marks a useful distinction from literature. And I've even gone so far as to propose that when we bypass some of the most obvious appearances associated with the distinction and explore the ways in which the underlying codes and conventions overdetermine them, interesting things come to light.

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Excerpted from "Silent Interviews"
by .
Copyright © 1994 Samuel R. Delany.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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