Longer Views by Samuel R. Delany Read Free Book Online

this note:
    26. The desire to be conscious of the process of losing consciousness, of having no consciousness at all—this paradox is source and kernel of the anxiety over dying and death. (SA 157)
    But by this point in the essay, we are well aware of the degree to which discourse analysis is itself “about” our relation to the things we are least conscious of—the things we are blind or “dead” to. As we read on, death and aging seem less and less problems to be solved at the individual existential level, and more problems which are intimately tied to politics and constituencies. Here is note 9 in its entirety:
    9. “What shall I do with this body I’ve been given?” asks Mandelstam. When, one wonders, was the last time he asked it? In his cramped Petersberg apartment? or in the death camp where, near mad, the elements and ideology killed him . . .? (SA 149)
    Delany seems to be suggesting a radical interpretation of the motto, “the personal is the political”—an interpretation which implodes “the political” directly into the material ground of “the personal” with the corporeal body at their interface (this in turn recalls and revalues the notion of the “absolute and indisseverable interface” of object and process explored in “Shadows”). On a human landscape defined in these terms, discourse and death become “problems of consciousness” of similar (or identical) ontological orders. For Delany, to recognize
their
interface is to gain both insight into the grounds for meaningful political action, and access, perhaps, to a very real personal solace.
    Notice that our own recognition of the above transformations arises not from any overt argument on Delany’s part but rather from the organization of the discursive space of the essay as a whole. Each numbered fragment, because it functions as a different coordinate axis within that space, can be said to frame, and be framed by, all the others. The complex mutuality of these framing-relations allows Delany to effect conceptual transformations without resorting to outright assertion within any single fragment. This dynamic, in which what is outside a given text-unit strongly determines what is perceived to be inside it, resembles what Derrida calls a transgressive rhetoric, in which “by means of the work done on one side and the other of the limit the field inside is modified, and a transgression is produced that consequently is nowhere present as a
fait accompli
.” 28 By evoking such a rhetoric through the deployment of an intricate arrangement of frames—and this formal strategy is at the heart of just about everything he has written from
Dhalgren
on—Delany is able to effectively sidestep spectacle. Because the essay is organized around a play of absences, because it is fundamentally
reticent
at the moment of revelation, “Shadow and Ash,” like all the works in this collection, discourages the passivity engendered by spectacle in favor of the active tracing out of discursive parameters and possibilities—the reading of the
un
-said, whose shadowy presence on the offstage margins renders the
said
intelligible.
    The topic of literary biography—alluded to in the closing argument in “Aversion/Perversion/Diversion” and expanded upon in one of the marginal arguments in “Shadow and Ash”—takes up the whole of “Atlantis Rose . . .” Here we are given a close reading of Hart Crane’s 1930 poem
The Bridge
, in which, with almost microscopic meticulousness, Delany weaves together the textual artifacts surrounding the poem’s composition into a hybrid form of multiple biography, close textual analysis, and even—in a fascinating reconstruction of an evening between Crane and his friend Samuel Loveman—speculative literary history. Along the way—as in “Shadow and Ash”—we are given an