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AN INTERVIEW WITH SAMUEL R. DELANY
Part I
Marcel Cornis-Pope:
Chip, let me start with, hopefully, a question that is both large enough
but also focused enough on what you have been exploring over a good many
years now. I'm very interested in your use of science fiction: first,
how did you get to choose this narrative mode at the very beginning and
then what interesting uses you found along the way. I'm particularly
interested in what political and poetic uses you found in science fiction
because you've obviously pushed the conventions and undermined the sort
of very . . . even the language of traditional science fiction modes,
so why science fiction?
Samuel Delany:
I really don't have an answer for that, it just kind of happened. I never
decided, "Oh, I want to be a science fiction writer." The story,
which I have told many times: my wife, Marilyn Hacker, got a job at Ace
Books as an assistant editor and would come home, usually pretty disgruntled
with the stuff she'd been working on all day. I began writing a novel,
while I was at home, for her. Her particular complaints about the material
she was working with included the tendency of the female characters to
sit around and get rescued constantly without ever doing anything else,
and the corresponding over-maleness of the heroes. So finally I decided
to write a novel where the main character was a poet and the young lady
who got rescued turned out to be pretty feisty in spite of it. After
I got about a third of the way through it, and she was sort of reading
it every night when she came home, and she said, "You know, this
is pretty good, you should submit it," and I said, "Ah, come
on. This is basically just an in joke between you and me," and she
said, "No, really, you should." I finished it. She took it
in and told the editor-in-chief, Don Wollheim, that she'd found it in
the slush pile. We put a pen name on it, Bruno Calabro—where we'd
gotten that name, I sometimes wonder. But he read it and liked it. And
so he bought it. We contracted for it. And after the contracts were drawn
up, Marilyn told him, "Oh, that's my husband, incidentally," and
he said, "Well, I'm awfully glad of that because I hate the name
Bruno Calabro." So I went back to being Samuel Delany, and the
book came out, and because I had sold a novel, I just decided, well,
maybe I should write another novel in the same genre as the one I sold.
And when I got through three-going-on-four science fiction novels, one
day it occurred to me, "Oh, I must be a science fiction writer." But
I never made a decision to be a science fiction writer. That
just happened.
MC-P: Retrospectively,
what are some of the advantages of this mode . . .
SD: There are
no particular advantages to science fiction and there are no particular
disadvantages to science fiction. It is simply a genre like any other.
Genres don't solve problems, they don't create problems. I think all
of us would like them to. You know, you're a marginal writer working
in a marginal genre. Doesn't that mean that the stories you write will
be therefore more sympathetic to marginal people? No. If that's what
you're interested in and you can write things like that, then they will
be, and if you can't, they don't. There are some very, very conservative
science fiction writers: the Heinleins, the Jerry Pournelles, the Orson
Scott Cards. Just because it's a marginal genre doesn't mean that their
ideas are not very straightforward, conservative, political ideas. It's
the same kind of, you know, what Gilbert Ryle called a "category
mistake." When you see a beautiful painting of a sunset and you
think, ah, maybe there is some mystic relation between paint and sunsets.
No, there isn't. Somebody who can paint well will paint a nice sunset,
somebody who can't will paint a not-very-interesting sunset. You have
to be a good practitioner. The genre will not do the work for you.
Nathan Long:
Antonya Nelson talks about, talking about the difference between prose
poetry and the short-short story. And she said, "What doesn't interest
me is the difference between these lines of genre or what they're . .
." What's interesting is that the writers of one genre, what they
have to give up, the poet has to give up in order to write in the sort
of prose poem, what the fiction writer has to give up to write short-short.
When you moved to things like autobiography, did you find yourself having
to give up things? Did you find that there was a struggle?
SD: I wasn't
particularly aware of anything being given up. I think really, for me,
nonfiction is just another mode of fiction where you're just a little
bit more rigorous about creating a parallel with things that happen.
And in fiction you, if you're writing what most readers recognize as
realistic fiction, you have to keep up a parallel between things that
happen or could happen, which on the one hand is a very broad category
but it's not a category . . . it's not a wide-open category.
MC-P: One of
the things that fascinates me in science fiction, particularly more experimental
science fiction, is the encounter with the otherness. Just wondering
to what extent . . . I mean, I know that's a very important concept to
you also. So all these encounters with outsiders—the artist as
an outsider, mythologized others, aliens and so on—do you see a
particular power or enabling position in the position of the outsider
or this position of liminality, or do you see also limitations to this
position?
SD: The outsider
has a particular point of view. And it is limited. As does the insider
have a particular point of view that is equally limited—sometimes
it is even more limited. But every point of view has its limitations.
There is no place you can stand without having half the world be behind
you. And that's the half you don't see. I think the interest in that
comes much more from the kind of life I've led rather than from the genre
I've chosen to write in.
MC-P: What about
the relationship between the politics of theme and the poetics of form.
Do you even consider this kind of dichotomy a useful . . . a lot of debates
in, particularly, more radical forms of fiction—for example, in
feminist fiction—whether post-modern, innovative modes are useful
or not in a sort of effort to defend realism as a mode, as an important
mode. The argument was that if you have a radical theme, a revolutionary
theme, the form will take care of itself.
SD: The form
never takes care of itself.
MC-P: Exactly.
SD: We would
all be much happier if it did.
MC-P: So in that
sense . . . clearly you are not satisfied with that kind of dichotomy
and that sort of split between, oh, you have a revolutionary form and
you can use the traditional modes of fiction. So what is the relationship
between poetics in that sense and politics?
SD: Well, I had
been speaking before in the group that I was talking about before, about
the granularity you have to work, that you have to use in order to work
these things. And most of the poetics, most of the politics, the political
reductions come out of clichés that are not where the corresponding
realities, not looked at with the proper granularity, with a high enough
grain on the grid, so that easy explanations are usually easy explanations,
and what is easy about them is that they are, you know, ordained by God
or nature or they don't need to be questioned. They're not caused, they're
just the way things are. And those are the things that tend to produce
the conservative view.
MC-P: Which compromises,
obviously, whatever revolutionary ideology you may have. If you don't
. . .
SD: Yeah.
MC-P: Finally,
and then I'll let Nathan try a few questions, what has happened the last
decade or so? Why this whole pressure on writers to go back to well-established,
realistic modes? When you look at, for example, the difference between
the Columbia history of the United States [Columbia Literary History
of the United States, published 1988 by Columbia University Press]
and the Columbia history of the novel [Columbia History of the American
Novel, published 1991 by Columbia University Press], it's amazing,
there's three, four years of difference between the two books, and one,
still, is pretty open ended, various voices talk about avant garde, talk
about the post-modern innovation, etc., the other one totally closing
down the avenues, particularly of experimentation at narrative and linguistic
levels. And I remember the Ed Cohen essay, for example, on gay fiction—with
the exceptions of you, and I forget if there's anybody else who has actually
done any work at the level of language—the essay basically promotes
a pretty conservative kind of agenda in terms of narrative. So what is
the pressure? Why is the establishment so afraid of narrative innovation?
SD: The establishment,
I can't speak for. I don't know why they do the strange things that they
do. I don't think, and I never have felt, that normative fiction was
exhausted. I'm also, as a reader, I'm a great lover of experimental fiction
and new forms. I enjoy them. I'm one of the few people who seems to get
a charge out of picking them up, paying money for them, taking them home
and actually reading them.
Myself, I don't see a fundamental difference between
the two. Which is to say, I think all fiction is matter of observation,
representation, and then formal arrangement of these representations.
And in different kinds of fiction, the formal arrangement is different
and the intensity of observation is different. And those are two variables
that you change, and you can make a complete grid where any piece of
fiction, from the most far-out, experimental to the most normative can
be plotted on this grid and something can fall anywhere in between it.
And I like to read things that fall all over the grid. I think the forms
of normative fiction have the potential of talking about pretty much
anything. And they don't. Again and again, they don't. I think lots of
forms of experimental fiction have the potential of talking about pretty
much anything, and most of it doesn't, either. When it does, I'm a happier
reader than I am when it doesn't. And that again pertains to the normative
and it pertains to the non-normative. That's just a statistical lean
of what people are having more to do with, what people are used to. And,
indeed, certainly in the academy, more and more people are becoming used
to the non-normative. I don't see anything necessarily good or bad about
either of these situations. I think, provisionally, there are things
you can say about all of them—it would be nice to see more of this,
more of that; you'd like to see a larger non-academic readership enjoy
some of the experimental things, and I would like to see the academic
readership get more into some of the normative stuff. Which they don't.
But these are relatively contingent phenomena.
Now, having said this, when I talk to a couple of
my literary friends in the more non-normative areas, they are not terribly
happy with my theoretical approach. I once was having this discussion
with an experimental writer, Richard Kostelanetz. I presented it pretty
much the way I've presented it to you, and I said, "Okay, now what
do you think I've left out?" He said, "Everything of interest
about experimental fiction." And I think he's right. But I'm approaching
it from the point of view of a reader, not the point of view of a practitioner.
And his point, for instance, was that experimental writing is largely
about extremes, so largely about parasitism. And, for him, parasitism
is not a bad word, as intertextuality is not a bad word for people talking
about more normative fiction. But the way I tend to put it all—this
is the influence of Foucault—produces this vast grid on which everything
can be plotted, and once you have plotted the grid, you're not left with
anything with too much articulation or any rents, and what have you,
which may mean that for a certain kind of questioning mind, of the sort
of questions that you're asking, there just aren't any answers. There
aren't any answers that someone from my position can give because it's
all been homogenized onto my grid there.
MC-P: On the
other hand, if you look at how the culture is actually policing this
grid, you have a very different story.
SD: Right. Yes.
But I think it's always false to the individual artist to do something
that escapes the surveillance of the police. I think there's a lot of
correspondences between the criminal and the artist. They're the two
people who force the society to change.
NL: Last night
you talked about the sort of etymology of the term "coming out" and
also its potential possibilities in the future. I'm curious about your
views of Eve Sedgwick's The Epistemology of the Closet, how
that fits into your idea . . .
SD: I basically
think that Eve is one of the good people in the world, you know, and
is doing something good . . . there are places where I—and I just
can't go into them now because it just, it would require three three-hour
seminars—where I do have disagreements with her, and they have
to do largely with the functioning, the nitty gritty functioning of sex.
I don't know, I may be a bit more sympathetic with a more classical pyschoanalytic
approach, perhaps, than she is. And I've certainly never gotten the chance
to argue it face to face with her, and I see her as somebody who's fighting
the good fight and, you know, go out there and do it. The distinctions
between my feelings and her feelings, I think, are probably much more
minor than they . . . they may not even be productive to . . . when all
is said and done, I probably have more problems with Judith Butler [Gender
Trouble] than I do with Eve Sedgwick. Although I have problems with
everybody. There's nobody I agree with one hundred percent. I think that's
the curse of thinking in the contemporary world.
NL: She mentions
similar things about the sort of proliferation of the use of, everybody
is using the closet or coming out of it, things like that.
SD: Although
that, I rather like the way she uses it.
NL: Yesterday
afternoon at Virginia Union [University] you read from a story in which
a character said something like, "I'm originating from everywhere."
SD: Yes.
NL: And many
of your characters, in fact, seem to sort of originate from many sources
and/or transform beyond what we expect a character in a novel to do.
Could you talk a little bit about the origin of that idea in your reading
or your life and, also, is that something that you consciously construct
or is it, like you were saying earlier today, an inevitable outcome of
focusing on something else as you're writing?
SD: Well, the
idea is just a standard theoretical notion which was one of the major
insights, I think, at the beginning of the literary, theoretical tsunami
that washed across the campuses and through the halls of academe in the
late sixties to middle seventies, that the origin is always a political
construct. The notion of a single origin is always a political choice.
Things do not have one cause. Things are caused by an entire multiplicity
of things, and the one you choose—"This is the one I'm going
to say is originary"—that's always a political decision, and
that's always a decision that, that's always a strategic decision. As
such, it's always problematic and always questionable. And Louis, the
character who comes to this decision back in 1923, comes to it as people
back to Spinoza have been coming to it. It's not a, it's not a new idea.
Its most recent articulation has been just at the beginnings of theory,
with Edward Said's Beginnings: Intention and Method was one
of the first books that explored this whole thing. And as he says, you've
got to begin somewhere, you have to pick an origin, but you don't have
to accept the origin that everybody else accepts.
Part II
SD: When I was
at the University of Massachusetts, the head of the comparative literature
department used to say that the only thorough explanation for anything
is a complete explanation of everything else. And I think it's true,
when all is said and done. This is the whole, this is the context argument
that controls a lot of something like Derrida's Limited Inc.,
his whole approach to the Austin performative problem. You can't get
rid of that problem, that whole nineteenth-century notion that you can
cut off everything extraneous and you can find "the essential." By
the time you've cut off enough extraneous things, you've cut off the
thing itself you're examining. This is why all sorts of logical moves
are fundamentally reductive. And Louis has had a—the character
in my stories—had one of those epiphanic realizations of this and
heck, I originate everyplace, man. I'm always, since I am always turning
and going and growing and turning into something else, you know, I read
a book yesterday and I say, hey, that's a really neat idea. That becomes
the origin of who I am today, one of the origins of who I am today. And
why should one privilege my great, great, great, great, great, great
grandfather? Why not his wife? Why not any one of the entire tree? We
all know that there's an entire tree that goes into creating us and not
only is that tree genetic, it is also ideological, it's ideational, it's
affective, it's cultural, social, bio-political, all of these things
go into this, and Louis has just had a momentary blast of realizing the
interconnectedness of everything. And so he's there in the field, he's
expostulating for it.
MC-P: You seem
to treat, in very similar ways, identity. So in some ways, you have no
particular use for it, for the concept. In pragmatic terms, you defend
it.
SD: Yeah.
MC-P: It's very
much like Gayatri Spivak, for example. Are you moving towards some notion
of hybridity or shifting identity or just a kind of cultural notion that
applies, very pragmatic notion that applies to particular local situations?
SD: I think identity
. . . it's a provisional notion. Like race, it doesn't exist. The problem
with identity is simply that there isn't any such thing. Or another way
of saying the same thing, I mean it has no ontological status. It has
a provisional status that allows language to . . . you can't have language
without categories. I think "identity" is a synonym for "category." And
categories are arbitrary. That was one of the great Saussurian realization[s],
that the sign is arbitrary. And not only is the sign arbitrary in what
it can be assigned to, the range of things that you can assign the sign
to. There's nothing to stop me from saying that apples are all these
little red things on the tree and they're also the little green things
and it's a computer. Well, there's nothing, no relationship between Apple
computers and apple trees, but they're all apples. The sign really is
arbitrary. And the categories that we create from the sign are also arbitrary.
And because they're arbitrary, then they serve functions, they allow
language to proceed in an efficient manner. When the categories are not
useful, language snarls and people argue over [it], and then the next
thing you knew, we come up with a new category that's more efficient
and allows less snarling. And it is an entirely provisional process.
Never is it a matter of finding some inner essence of appleness that
both computers and red and green and, you know, crabapples and MacIntoshes
share. And the fact is, if you want to make distinctions, there can be
distinctions made between two MacIntosh apples. You know, why they should
belong in different categories, if that's what you're talking about.
If what you need to talk about is apples that have their full compliment
of sixteen seeds and some that are deficient and only have thirteen or
twelve seeds, and those are the two categories you need, so you come
up with a "blah" and a "bleh." You then use that
to distinguish between them, and that, if you need to make those distinctions,
that becomes an efficient way of talking if the larger context is such
where those distinctions are necessary, operative, and useful to make.
It's nominalism. It's Foucaultian nominalism.
NL: The strategy
that we were talking about, the word "queer" that's often used
now collectively and then these multiply dividing letters in the LGBT.
That seems two separate strategies. One, queer getting to this place
of an umbrella, and the other as the dissection. And it seems like perhaps
there's this third strategy that language or categories or identities
can be used to point back to identitylessness.
SD: Identitylessness
is categorylessness and as soon as something is perceived, it immediately
has its category. If nothing else, it is in the category of that which
has been perceived. Up until that time I haven't perceived it, then it
is in the category of that which I did not perceive before a certain
time. In the same way that there is no genreless text. There is no categoryless
thing. When somebody like Derrida says the world is constituted by language,
that's what he means. That to perceive it is immediately to potentially
linguify it.
MC-P: I'm still
intrigued by this question whether there is a counter-process to this
process of appropriation, the linguistic appropriation by the dominant
culture of various lingoes and concepts coming from subcultures or alternative
cultures. But I'm interested in . . . there is a process, a reclaiming
of some of these concepts and words. I've been thinking, for example,
of Skip Gates's book on the signifying monkey [The Signifying Monkey,
by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., published 1989 by Oxford Press] and how a
subculture can reclaim the terms of the dominant culture. Do you see
anything like that happening in the kinds of cultures you have moved
around?
SD: Okay, well
the problem there for me is the notion of dominant and undominant culture.
I think to talk about a dominant culture is immediately to get yourself
to be complicit in a certain illusory situation. I don't think today
there is any dominant culture. I think there are lots and lots of intersecting
marginal cultures, and one or two of them call themselves dominant. Or
people have taken to calling them dominant. I don't think the straight
white male is any more dominant now at this point than anybody else.
Because the straight white male divides up into too many . . . there
are overweight straight white males and there are underweight straight
white males and there are ones who are too old and too young and too
fat and too thin. Sure, it is useful to put them in a . . . sometimes
it is useful to put them into a category, sometimes it's even politically
useful to put them into a category. But again, if you're going to with
it at any, at a sophisticated level, you're going to have to break things
up into much smaller, into much smaller groups.
Granularity is all, like rightness is all. Sometimes
you can increase the granularity so that, to the point where you can't
see larger patterns, at which point, then, your granularity's getting
in your way. Having said that, I think terms are constantly circulating.
I don't think they're ever static. They're always moving around and shifting,
if nothing else, like Brownian motion. And at certain times there are
certainly roots in which some of that circulation occurs, the media being
a prime example. Those kinds of circulations would be much more promoted
by media of the sort like The Village Voice or The Gay Press or
things like that than The New York Times. Although circulations
occur even in The National Enquirer and The Sun. Whenever
communication is going on, signs are circulated.
Not so long ago I was a part of a symposium, on new
literary history. There were these bunch of questions, eight questions,
about fifty writers all were given, and one of them was, "Is there
any group that you feel that you are politically allied to?" And
my answer was, "Of course!" What are you asking? Are you asking,
am I interested in black people because I'm black? Interested in people
with beards because I have a beard? With people who are overweight because
I'm overweight? Interested in males because I'm male? Or gay people because
I'm gay? Or people who were born Episcopalian and eventually became atheist
because I was a born Episcopalian and became an atheist? The answer to
all of these is, "Yes, and so what?" Everybody is interested
in the groups that they, in the categories that they belong to. How could
you not be? All you're asking is, am I a human being. But what the question
implies—and this is the thing that it's so hard to articulate—the
question implies that there are these groups, and we all know what those
groups are—they are gays, they are women, they are blacks, they
are Jews. And that's it. And that there is this place from which one
can answer that question either "yes" or "no." If
you belong to a certain, unmarked group, then you can say, "No,
I am not interested in all these groups." Well, this is absurd.
Of course you're interested in the groups that you belong to. I assume
white people are interested in white people because they're white. Why
the hell should they not be? It would be absurd not to be. Everybody's
got problems. I may even think my problems are more severe than your
problems. You may think my problems are more severe, but you can do something
about yours where you can't do anything about mine. There's a whole range
of responses to these things, again, that if you start looking at the
thing with a finer granularity, the question begins to dissolve. And
I suppose I'm still one trying to dissolve some of the tensions between
those that set that question in a place that it can be answered "yes" or "no" and
the tension between the yes or no, the opposition between that yes or
no has to be somehow deconstructed.
MC-P: Your assumption,
again, is the sort of Foucaultian assumption that we are, sort of, equal,
on a grid that allows all these options . . .
SD: Yes.
MC-P: . . . in
that sense, for me, for example, the concept of hegemony still applies,
to some extent . . .
SD: Okay.
MC-P: . . . so,
I'm still thinking that the culture still has certain dominant patterns
. . .
SD: Absolutely.
Absolutely.
MC-P: . . . and
that there is, if not the kind of polarization we had during the Cold
War with culture and counter-culture, there is still . . .
SD: Absolutely.
MC-P: . . . some
kind of tension there between them. So from that perspective, I think
that the question in some ways is legitimate because wherever we are,
in whatever group we are continually re-appropriated by some larger concept.
SD: The problem
is, is hegemony an element of one's political ontogeny, or is it a political
effect? And I think it's a political effect, not an ontological absolute.
NL: You mentioned The
National Enquirer, so I thought I'd ask a tabloidesque question.
SD: Sure, please
do.
NL: I think more
than anyone I know, your private life, and, more specifically, your sexual
life is accessible to the public.
SD: Something
of an illusion, which is to say, a vast amount of my private life that
really is private.
NL: And this
is not only out there, like Bill Clinton's private life, but a choice,
to some degree. And I'm curious whether there has been unimagined consequences
or unanticipated consequences to this and whether it's actually shaped
your identity by having that.
SD: By and large
there haven't been, and that's why I've been comfortable doing it. I
was talking a couple years ago, I was talking to a class at Bryn Mawr
and they had just read Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.
And they'd also read Bread and Wine, the graphic novel I wrote
about my current partner, partner of fourteen years. One of the young
women in the class said, "Well, how can you write things like that
about yourself?" And I said, "Well, you know, how is my dignity
compromised in any way by saying in a public place that I do things that
everybody else does?" That I go to the bathroom. That I have sex.
And that I have sex in a particular way. I don't see what this has anything
to do with my dignity, in one way. My dignity is inviolate. Catch me
out in certain lies, some of which I've probably told, had to tell, and
I might get a little red in the face. But I'm not going to get red in
the face because, "Oh, my God, he's got a penis!" So how does
that make different from anybody else, either at the table or anyplace
else? There's something highly artificial about claiming a sense of dignity
because we don't mention things that are relatively universal. That's
kind of the way I justify it. And I think because they're relatively
universal and because people feel that they would look rather stupid
saying, "0h, my God, but you said you've got a penis, so therefore,
you know, something's really wrong with you," That begins to just
crumble as soon as it's articulated.
NL: But what
is unique is the willingness to risk that . . .
SD: I think,
when all is said and done, it's a non-risk. And in terms of practical
response, I'm really trying to think of someplace where it has had some
repercussions that are even notable, much less interesting. I can't think
of too many.
NL: do you want
to plug your new books? Your various new books?
SD: Actually,
well, actually I don't like plugging new books on tape, but I will tell
you about them anyway because I'm sure my publicist would prefer that
I did. In the spring, Vintage Books is bringing back into print The
Fall of the Towers, an early trilogy of novels, all in one volume.
And they've been doing a nice job releasing some of the early science
fiction as well. A new novella, a short novel, is coming out from Bamberger
Books called Phallos. Then there is a collection of essays,
writings, coming out from Wesleyan University Press—seven essays,
four letters, and three interviews about writing. About Writing is
the title of the book, and the other is the subtitle, but the subtitle
comes before the title, which I thought was just kind of fun. And then
the University of Minnesota Press is bringing back into print my autobiography, The
Motion of Light and Water, and they're all coming out sometime between
the spring and the summer.
NL: Thank you
very much.
MC-P: Thank you.
SD: Thank you. ![](../../images/bug_print.gif)
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