The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction

By Samuel R. Delany

From the four-time Nebula Award–winning author, an indispensable work of science fiction criticism, revised and expanded.

Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw appeared originally in 1977, and is now long out of print and hard to find. The impact of its demonstration that science fiction was a special language, rather than just gadgets and green-skinned aliens, began reverberations still felt in science fiction criticism. This edition includes two new essays, one written at the time and one written about those times, as well as an introduction by writer and teacher Matthew Cheney, placing Delany’s work in historical context. Close textual analyses of Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ read as brilliantly today as when they first appeared. Essays such as “About 5,750 Words” and “To Read The Dispossessed” first made the book a classic; they assure it will remain one.

“Delany’s first work of non-fiction, The Jewel Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, remains a benchmark of sf criticism thirty-three years after its initial publication in 1977. . . . Extensively revised and reissued in 2009, JHJ has become even stronger, containing twelve essays in ten chapters and two appendixes.” —Isiah Lavender, Science Fiction Studies

“I re-read The Jewel-Hinged Jaw every year as a source of guidance, as a measure of what all criticism and literature should aspire to be, and as a challenge for those of us who want to write.” —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“What a joy it is to have The Jewel-Hinged Jaw back in print! These essays glitter with insights into writing, reading, society, and the multiple relationships of the three.” —Reginald Shepherd, author of Orpheus in the Bronx

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9780819572462

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany published his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, at the age of twenty. Throughout his storied career, he has received four Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards, and in 2008 his novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. He was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002, named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2014, and in 2016 was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. Delany’s works also extend into memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society. After many years as a professor of English and creative writing and director of the graduate creative writing program at Temple University, he retired from teaching in 2015. He lives in Philadelphia with his partner, Dennis Rickett.  

Book preview

The Jewel-Hinged Jaw

Also by Samuel R. Delany

FICTION

The Jewels of Aptor (1962)

The Fall of the Towers

Out of the Dead City (1963)

The Towers of Toron (1964)

City of a Thousand Suns (1965)

The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)

Babel-17 (1966)

Empire Star (1966)

The Einstein Intersection (1967)

Nova (1968)

Driftglass (1969)

Equinox (1973)

Dhalgren (1975)

Trouble on Triton (1976)

Return to Nevèrÿon

Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

Neveryóna (1982)

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

Return to Nevèrÿon (1987)

Distant Stars (1981)

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984)

Driftglass/Starshards (collected stories, 1993)

They Fly at Çiron (1993)

The Mad Man (1994)

Hogg (1995)

Atlantis: Three Tales (1995)

Aye, and Gomorrah (and other stories, 2004)

Phallos (2004)

Dark Reflections (2007)

GRAPHIC NOVELS

Empire (artist, Howard Chaynkin, 1980)

Bread & Wine (artist, Mia Wolff, 1999)

NONFICTION

The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977; revised, 2009)

The American Shore (1978)

Heavenly Breakfast (1979)

Starboard Wine (1978; revised, 2009)

The Motion of Light in Water (1988)

Wagner/Artaud (1988)

The Straits of Messina (1990)

Silent Interviews (1994)

Longer Views (1996)

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

Shorter Views (1999)

1984: Selected Letters (2000)

About Writing (2005)

THE JEWEL-HINGED JAW

REVISED EDITION

Notes on the Language of Science Fiction

Samuel R. Delany

Published by Wesleyan University Press,

Middletown, CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

Wesleyan edition copyright © 2009 by Samuel R. Delany,

original edition copyright © 1978 by Samuel R. Delany.

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Delany, Samuel R.

The jewel-hinged jaw : notes on the language of science fiction /

Samuel R. Delany. — Rev. ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-8195-6883-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Delany, Samuel R. 2. Science fiction—History and criticism.

3. Science fiction—Technique. I. Title.

PS3554.E437J4   2009

814′.54—dc22      2008054082

Of course for

those without

whom:

et in memoriam

Algis J. Budrys,

Judith Merril,

P. Schuyler Miller,

Damon Knight,

and James Blish.

Contents

Prefaces and Acknowledgments

Ethical Aesthetics, An Introduction by Matthew Cheney

1. About 5,750 Words

2. Critical Methods / Speculative Fiction

3. Quarks

4. Thickening the Plot

5. Faust and Archimedes

6. Alyx

7. Prisoners’ Sleep

8. Letter to the Symposium on Women In Science Fiction

9. To Read The Dispossessed

10. A Fictional Architecture That Manages Only with Great Difficulty Not Once to Mention Harlan Ellison

APPENDIXES

A. Midcentury

B. Letter to a Critic

Index

Prefaces and Acknowledgments to the First, Second, and Revised Editions

Preface to the First (Dragon Press) Edition

The following essays circle about, hover over, and occasionally home in on science fiction. Four—and only four—examine individual science-fiction writers’ works; the last three of these presuppose recent if not repeated intimacy with the texts. This book is not an introduction to its subject.

The fourteen pieces here were written from 1966 to 1976. They are not a unified project, and there is terminological inconsistency from one to the other—the more confusing, I’m afraid, because I have not presented them in that strictly chronological order which would allow a reader to follow the terminological development. But I have chosen to group them (somewhat) according to topic because that arrangement seems to afford them and the reader the greatest service in other ways. Some minor inconsistencies I have been able to bring into line—along with the excision of some minor infelicities of style and analysis. The major inconstant terms, however, science fiction, speculative fiction, and SF, I could not integrate without major surgery—plastic rather than radical, I suspect, but still beyond my current energies if not skills. I must therefore assume those interested enough to read these pages most probably bring their own ideas on how the terms’ thrusts differ, as well as where their loci overlap.

For science fiction, here we must make do with Damon Knight’s ostensive definition: Science fiction is what I point at when I say ‘science fiction’—with the rider that after we have said a great deal more and, besides pointing, have handled and examined and taken some apart, even if no strict definitions are forthcoming, we shall still know a great deal more about what we are pointing at than we did before.

Speculative fiction, roughly between 1964 and 1972, was an active term among a number of science fiction writers (borrowed, in some cases unknowingly, from Heinlein a decade and a half earlier) in their talk with one another about what they and a number of other writers felt they were doing. Since then, it has by and large passed out of the talk of these same writers, except as a historical reference.

SF, happily or unhappily, is the initials of both.

For our purposes, this explanation for when each term appears and when it does not, however inadequate, must suffice.

The recent passage from mainstream to mundane as a term to designate that fiction which is neither science nor speculative strikes me as a happy gathering of generic self-confidence. (I first came across mundane fiction in a 1975 Galaxy essay by Roger Zelazny.) Yet the insecurity it remedies is part of our genre’s history. Though a comparison with the original of some of these pieces might suggest that I have shamelessly rewritten it other places, here at least I have avoided the temptation to revise that insecurity out and let mainstream stand in the older essays—only noting that we have all been unhappy with the term as far back as I can remember.

Rereading the pieces for this edition, I am pleased with a consistency in their movement toward a language model that all of them, for all their different levels, their different methods of approach—intuitive, thematic, textural, or structural—ascribe to. And that model is, after all, their object.

Intensive criticism of science fiction is a comparatively new phenomenon. Its most effective organizing principles have not been established. Also, I emerge into such criticism from a most subjective position: a practicing science fiction writer. The center provides a fine view of certain aspects of our object of consideration and a very poor one of others. Among the poorest it provides is a view of that object’s edges. In the SF world of readers and writers, we are all used to the phrase, Fandom is a way of life. Being an SF writer is a way of life too: it is a way of life which courts all the traditional problems of the artist as well as those problems unique to an artist socially devalued in a particularly systematic way—a way that has nothing to do with the family’s disapproval of John for enrolling at the Art Students’ League, or with the neighbors’ suspicions that the Colton girl has not only been writing poems again but sending them to magazines that actually publish them. The Rimbaldian intensity with which our writers are forever abandoning the SF field is, I suspect, emblematic of the process by which SF writers, along with losing sight of the edges of their object, tend to lose, by the same process, sight of their own edges as well. And if money is a reason frequently cited for these defections, well, money is our society’s most powerful symbol: it exists at points of social and material vacuum; its trajectory has seemingly infinite potential; its strength is measured by all that moves in to displace it: food, sex, more money, shelter, art, or anxiety.

There are places in these pages where I have exceeded my object’s edges (for my own are no more intact than any of my colleagues’), notably in Shadows and the closing Autobiographical Postscript. What, my reader may ask, "does Quine’s hesitation to quantify across predicates or the play of light on Mykonos in winter have to do with science fiction? My answer is simply: I don’t know. Yet the ontology suggested by much in the Quinian position as I understand (or possibly misunderstand) it seems an ontology that much of what I value in science fiction strives to reinforce; and the particular analytic flight the light on that most lovely of Greek islands called from me in the winter of ’65/’66 seems a fine topos for a kind of thinking that goes into the richest science fiction. Thus the inclusion of these and similarly unrelated" bits of speculation and/or autobiography.

In a sense, then, this is the most subjective of books on science fiction—by someone who spends much of his subjective energies analysing the SF phenomenon. But the discourse of analysis must not be confused with some discourse of privileged objectivity. Such privileges in our epoch have less and less place.

Here I must thank the people who first requested that some of these essays be written, oversaw their publication as editors, or to whom they were written in response: Terry Carr, Thomas Clareson, Leslie Fiedler, David Hartwell, Peter Nichols, and Robin Scott Wilson.

Finally I must thank the students of my two extremely astute classes at SUNY Buffalo during the winter ’75 term (particularly Jane Nutter, Mayda Alsace, and Charles Thomas, III); and also Randson Boykin, Eugenio Donato, Marc Gawron, Carol Jacobs, Judith Kerman, Maureen O’Merra, Paul David Novitsky, Judy Ratner, Robert Scholes, Janet Small, Eric Steis, and Henry Sussman for everything from stimulating converse over these and related subjects to detailed response (in person, letter, or fanzine) to various of the pages here, the results of which are evident in minor revisions of the older works and hopefully inform the newer. Needless to say, errors and eccentricities are all my own.

MARCH 1977

Preface to the Second (Berkeley Windhover) Edition

For this Berkeley Windhover edition I must also thank—for myriad microimprovements—Camilla Decarnin of San Francisco, Florine Dorfmann of New York City, and Professor Teresa de Lauretis, Assistant Director of the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee’s Center for Twentieth Century Studies, where I was so happily a Fellow in 1977.

MARCH 1978

Preface to the Revised (Wesleyan University Press) Edition

The revision here is extensive. Pieces have been dropped (the longest essay in the original book, Shadows, and three of the essays, Teaching S F, Characters, and On Pure Story-telling, are now available in other volumes, Longer Views [1996] and About Writing [2005]); pieces have been moved (Letter to a Critic, initially the book’s Introduction, is now a second appendix); and pieces have been added Letter to the Symposium on ‘Women in Science Fiction’ is my first contribution to that extraordinary document; and a first appendix, Midcentury: An Essay in Contextualization, which, under the title Velocities of Change initially appeared in briefer form in Josh Lukin’s and my Fifties Fiction [Paradoxa #18, 2003], almost making up for the length of the omitted Shadows). Here, something should be said, clearly and directly. Save for what is more promise than practice in the first piece, About 5,750 Words, the first eight and the last three pieces are more or less passionately thematic. Only the ninth, "To Read The Dispossessed," openly abjures thematics to focus on textual analysis. And, as I have written elsewhere, thematic does not, in any way, shape, or form, vanish under such a regime. It only changes some of its aspects, some of its discursive positioning.

About 5,750 Words grew out of a talk presented at the Modern Language Association Meeting in New York, December 27, 1968, and was published in SF: The Other Side of Realism, Thomas D. Clareson, ed., Bowling Green University Popular Press, Bowling Green, Ohio, 1971.

Critical Methods/Speculative Fiction and Quarks appeared respectively in Quark/1 and as editorial notes in Quark/1, Quark/4, and Quark/3, Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker, eds., Paperback Library, New York, 1971.

Thickening the Plot first appeared in Those Who Can: An SF Reader, Robin Scott Wilson, ed., Mentor Books, New American Library, New York, 1973.

Faust and Archimedes appeared in The Science Fiction Writers of America Forum, Terry Carr, ed., New York, 1966.

Alyx first appeared as an introductory essay by Samuel R. Delany in Alyx, by Joanna Russ, Gregg Press, Boston, 1976.

Prisoners’ Sleep was first delivered as a lecture at the State University of New York at Buffalo, April, 1975, and appeared in the first edition of this book.

Letter to the Symposium on ‘Women in Science Fiction’ appeared in Symposium: Women in Science Fiction, a special issue of Khatru, 1975, edited by Jeffry Smith.

"To Read The Dispossessed" appeared in the first edition of this book.

A Fictional Architecture That Only Manages with Great Difficulty Not Once to Mention Harlan Ellison first appeared in Lighthouse, Terry Carr, ed., vol. 3, no. 1, New York, 1967.

Midcentury: An Essay in Contextualization first appeared as Velocities of Change in Paradoxa #18, Fifties Fictions, edited by Samuel R. Delany and Josh Lukin, 2003, and was initially conceived as an introduction to the paired reissue of the revised editions of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine until the pressure of occasion turned it into something quite other.

Initially written to critic Leslie Fielder after his talk to the SFWA in 1972, Letter to a Critic first appeared, somewhat revised even then, in The Little Magazine, David Hartwell, ed., vol. 6, no. 4, New York, 1973.

All pieces here have been somewhat revised with each edition.

—Samuel R. Delany

JUNE 2007

Ethical Aesthetics

An Introduction to The Jewel-Hinged Jaw

—by Matthew Cheney

§1

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.

§2

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.

§3

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 postmodern⁵ 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.

§4

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