Longer Views by Samuel R. Delany Read Free Book Online Page A

imageof literary practice as a fundamentally social and dialogical activity, in which canons are made and unmade, and discourses reified and subverted, by the rhetorical interventions of individual writers. We see, for example, numerous instances of discursive “normalization” as poetry editors and critics analyze and actually revise the works of various poets according to then-prevailing discursive imperatives.
    Against the rhetorical interventions of their editors Delany positions the writing protocols of the poets themselves—protocols which are also shown to both arise from and inform (depending on the case) the protocols of “homosexual genres.” These genres—which use conventionalized patterns of ambiguous language to indicate, by indirection, homosexual content—call for reading protocols which privilege form and context over content. A poem deploying such conventions would thus be subject to a double reading:
    . . . while a heterosexual reading may find the poem just as beautiful and just as lyrical (that’s, after all, what the poet wanted), it will not find the poem anywhere near as poignant as the homosexual reading does—because the heterosexual reading specifically erases all reference to the silence surrounding homosexuality for which the heterosexual reading’s existence, within the homosexual reading, is the positive sign. 29
    Such protocols allow communication to pass across discursively and coercively enforced silence by exploiting the possibilities of excess signification immanent in the sign—by side-stepping direct reference to socially proscribed content and making language itself speak. But this notion—of speaking across the gap, of communicating across time, space, and death—is, of course, at the heart of
The Bridge
. Delany recalls reading Crane at an early age, and perceiving in his a-referential lyricism an evocation of a utopian discursive space, “a world where meaning and mystery were one, indisseverable, and ubiquitous, but at the same time a world where everything spoke (or sang or whispered or shouted) to everything else . . .” (AR 197). But of this evocation there are two readings, one indicating a presumably universal yearning for communion, the other indicating a historically and contextually specific silence all around.
    For Delany, the resolution to such oppressions resides in the actions of those who elect to participate in the ongoing evolution of the discourse. Delany’s call, near the essay’s end, for literary anthologies edited with greater attention to compositional context can be read as an attempt to foster and encourage such participation. According to Delany, most collections are edited under the general assumption that “there existsa Common Reader of poetry who comes from no place—and is going nowhere” (AR 240). But as Delany says in “Shadow and Ash”—specifically in response to the critical work of Language Poet Ron Silliman—there need be “nothing passive” about such a reader (SA 171). Silliman himself has put it this way:
    Here the question is not whether a poet will be read in five or fifty or five hundred years, but whether that poet can and will be read by individuals
able and willing to act
on their increased understanding of the world as a result of the communication. 30
    â€œAtlantis Rose . . .” ends with an intriguing coda. The whole essay, we learn, was written at least partly in parallel with Delany’s historical novel
Atlantis: Model 1924
—their composition dates overlap. In
Atlantis: Model
1924, as I mentioned earlier, we are shown a fictive—though possible—meeting between Hart Crane and Delany’s own father on Brooklyn Bridge in 1924. Yet what transpires in this meeting between a young heterosexual black man and a slightly older homosexual white man is only a brief and fragmentary communion, ending in comic