Longer Views

by Samuel R. Delany

  It is interesting: Many native Glotolog speakers, when given transcripts of ancient manuscripts on which the dots have been left out (due to the customs of modern Glotolog printing), can still often place the date of composition from the manner in which sentences like “ ” are used, whether in the indicative (“There are . . .”), the literal (“I see . . .”), or the assumptive (“Somewhere out of sight it is . . .”) voice. Apparently once the metaphoric dot fell out as archaic usage, the indicative and the assumptive were used much more informally.

  Because of the tendency to use English analytic terms in Glotolog, many Glotolog terms are practically identical to their English equivalents (though, as we have seen, the grammar and the logical form of the language are quite different from those of English), so that a native speaker of one has little difficulty getting the sense of many Glotolog pronouncements, especially those having to do with logic and sensation.

  Here is a list of words that are the same in both languages (that is, they are employed in the same situations):

  if

  can be called

  at night

  true

  I feel

  false

  this/that

  though

  on my body

  real

  Also, logical questions are posed in Glotolog by putting the word “is” before, and a question mark after, the clause to be made interrogative. The fact that the semantics and logical form of the language are different from ours only presents problems in particular cases.

  (To summarize those differences: Glotolog has no true predicates [“I feel,” as well as “can be called true,” for example, are the same part of speech as “”]; in fact, Glotolog has no true subjects either. It has only objects, the observer of which is expressed as a description of the object, as is the medium by which the object is perceived; sometimes these descriptions are taken as real; at other times they are taken as virtual. And it should be fairly evident even from this inadequate description of the language—even without exposure to their complex religion, science, poetry, and politics—that this template still gives them a method for modeling the world as powerful as our own equally interesting [and equally arbitrary] subject/predicate template.)

  One of the most famous of such problems is the question put by one of the greatest Glotolog philosophers:

  “If, at night, can be called true, though I feel on my body, is this real?”

  The sense of this, along with the answer, seems self-evident to any English speaker; at the same time, to most of us, it is a mystery why this should be a great philosophical question. The answer lies in the logical form of the language as it has been outlined; but for those of you who do not wish to untangle it further, some of its philosophical significance for the Glotologs can be suggested by mentioning that it has caused among those perspicacious people practically as much philosophical speculation as the equally famous question by the equally famous Bishop Berkeley, about the sound of the unattended tree falling in the deserted forest, and for many of the same reasons—though the good Bishop’s query, perfectly comprehensible as to sense by the native Glotolog speaker thanks to the shared terms, seems patently trivial and obvious to them!

  A final note to this problem: In recent years, three very controversial solutions have been offered to this classical problem in Glotolog philosophy, all from one young philosophy student resident in one of the southern monasteries (it rains much less in the south, which has caused some of the northern sages to suggest this upstart cannot truly comprehend the nature of this essentially northern metaphysical dilemma), all three of which involve the reintroduction of the metaphoric dot, placed not in its traditional position over the or the , or even over the , but rather over the words “real,” “true,” or the question mark—depending on the solution considered.

  More conservative philosophers have simply gone “Humph!” (another utterance common in both Glotolog and English) at these suggestions, claiming that it is simply un-Glotologian to use the metaphoric dot over imported words. The dot is, and it says so in the grammars, reserved for native Glotolog terms. As one of the wittier, older scholars has put it (I translate freely): “In Glotolog, English terms have never had to bear up under this mark; they may, simply, collapse beneath its considerable weight.” The more radical youth of the country, however, have been discussing, with considerable interest, this brilliant young woman’s proposals.

  35. Science fiction interests me as it models, by contextual extension, the ontology suggested among these notes. As it gets away from that ontology, I often find it appalling in the callousness and grossness of what it has to say of the world. (Like Wittgenstein, when I write these notes on science fiction I am “making propaganda for one kind of thinking over another.”) Does that differ any from saying that I like science fiction that suggests to me the world is the way I already think it is? Alas, not much—which is probably why even some of the most appalling, callous, and gross science fiction is, occasionally, as interesting as it is.

  One difference between a philosopher and a fiction writer is that a fiction writer may purposely use a verbal ambiguity to make two (or more) statements using the same words; she may even intend all these statements to be taken as metaphoric models of each other. But she is still unlikely, except by accident, to call them the same statement. A philosopher, on the other hand, may accidentally use a verbal ambiguity, but once he uses it, he is committed to maintaining that all its meanings are one. And, usually, it takes a creative artist to bring home to us, when the philosophy has exhausted us, that everything in the universe is somewhat like everything else, no matter how different any two appear; likewise, everything is somewhat different from everything else, no matter how similar any two appear. And these two glorious analytical redundancies form the ordinate and abscissa of the whole determinately indeterminant schema.

  36. Omitted pages from an sf novel:

  “You know,” Sam said pensively, “that explanation of mine this evening—about the gravity business?” They stood in the warm semidark of the co-op’s dining room. “If that were translated into some twentieth- century language, it would come out complete gobbledy-gook. Oh, perhaps an sf reader might have understood it. But any scientist of the period would have giggled all the way to the bar.”

  “Sf?” Bron leaned against the bar.

  “‘Scientification?’ ‘Sci-fi?’ ‘Speculative fiction?’ ‘Science fiction?’ ‘Sf?’—that’s the historical progression of terms, though various of them resurfaced from time to time.”

  “Wasn’t there some public-channel coverage about—?”

  “That’s right,” Sam said. “It always fascinated me, that century when humanity first stepped onto the first moon.”

  “It’s not that long ago,” Bron said. “It’s no longer from us to them than from them to when man first stepped onto the American shore.”

  Which left Sam’s heavy-lipped frown so intense Bron felt his temples heat. But Sam suddenly laughed. “Next thing you’ll be telling me is that Columbus discovered America; the bells off San Salvador; the son buried in the Dominican Republic . . .”

  Bron laughed too, at ease and confused.

  “What I mean—” Sam’s hand, large, hot, and moist, landed on Bron’s shoulder—”is that my explanation would have been nonsense two hundred years ago. It isn’t today. The épistèmé has changed so entirely, so completely, the words bear entirely different charges, even though the meanings are more or less what they would have been in—”

  “What’s an épistèmé?” Bron asked.

  “To be sure. You haven’t been watching the proper public-channel coverage.”

  “You know me.” Bron smiled. “Annie shows and ice-operas—always in the intellectual forefront. Never in arrears.”

  “An épistèmé is an easy way to talk about the way to slice through the whole—”

  “Sounds like the secondary hero in some ice-opera. Melony Épistèmé, costarring wi
th Alona Liang.” Bron grabbed his crotch, rubbed, laughed, and realized he was drunker than he’d thought.

  “Ah,” Sam said (was Sam drunk too . . .?), “but the épistèmé was always the secondary hero of the sf novel—in exactly the same way that the landscape was always the primary one. If you’d just been watching the proper public channels, you’d know.” But he had started laughing too.

  37. Everything in a science fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).

  38. Text and textus in science fiction? Text, of course, comes from the Latin textus, which means “web.” In modern printing, the “web” is that great ribbon of paper which, in many presses, takes upwards of an hour to thread from roller to roller throughout the huge machine that embeds ranked rows of inked graphemes upon the “web,” rendering it a text. Thus all the uses of the words “web,” “weave,” “net,” “matrix,” and more, by this circular “etymology” become entrance points into a textus, which is ordered from all language and language-functions, and upon which the text itself is embedded.

  The technological innovations in printing at the beginning of the sixties, which produced the present “paperback revolution,” are probably the single most important factor contouring the modern science- fiction text. But the name “science fiction” in its various avatars—sf, speculative fiction, sci-fi, scientification—goes back to those earlier technological advances in printing that resulted in the proliferation of “pulp magazines” during the twenties.

  Naming is always a metonymic process. Sometimes it is the pure metonymy* of associating an abstract group of letters (or numbers) with a person (or thing), so that it can be recalled (or listed in a metonymic order with other entity names). Frequently, however, it is a more complicated metonymy: old words are drawn from the cultural lexicon to name the new entity (or to rename an old one), as well as to render it (whether old or new) part of the present culture. The relations between entities so named are woven together in patterns far more complicated than any alphabetic or numeric listing can suggest: And the encounter between objects-that-are-words (e.g., the name “science fiction,” a critical text on science fiction, a science-fiction text) and processes-made-manifest-by-words (another science-fiction text, another critical text, another name) is as complex as the constantly dissolving interface between culture and language itself. But we can take a model of the naming process from another image:

  Consider a child, on a streetcorner at night, in one of the earth’s great cities, who hears for the first time the ululating sirens, who sees the red, enameled flanks heave around the far building edge, who watches the chrome-ended, rubber-coated, four-inch “suctions” ranked along those flanks, who sees the street-light glistening on the red pump-housing, and the canvas hose heaped in the rear hopper, who watches the black- helmeted and rubber-coated men clinging to their ladders, boots lodged against the serrated running-board. The child might easily name this entity, as it careers into the night, a Red Squealer.

  Later, the child brings this name to a group of children—who take it up easily and happily for their secret speech. These children grow; younger children join the group; older children leave. The name persists—indeed, for our purposes, the locus of which children use and which children do not use the name is how we read the boundary of the group itself.

  The group persists—persists weeks, months, years after the child who first gave it its secret term has outgrown both the group and its language. But one day a younger child asks an older (well after the name, within the group, has been hallowed by use): “But why is it a Red Squealer?” Let us assume the older child (who is of an analytical turn of mind) answers: “Well, Red Squealers must get to where they are going quickly; for this reason sirens are put on them which squeal loudly, so that people can hear them coming a long way off and pull their cars to the side. They are painted with that bright enamel color for much the same reason—so that people can see them coming and move out of their way. Also, by now, the red paint is traditional; it serves to identify that it is, indeed, a Red Squealer one sees through the interstices of traffic and not just any old truck.”

  Satisfying as this explanation is, it is still something of a fiction. We were there, that evening, on the corner. We know the first child called it a Red Squealer out of pure, metonymic apprehension: there were, that evening, among many perceived aspects, “redness” and “squealing,” which, via a sort of morphological path-of-least-resistance, hooked up in an easily sayable/thinkable phrase. We know, from our privileged position before this text, that there is nothing explicit in our story to stop the child from having named it a Squealing Red, a Wah-Wah, a Blink-a-blink, or a Susan-Anne McDuffy—had certain nonspecified circumstances been other than the simplest reading of our fiction suggests. The adolescent explanation, as to why a Red Squealer is a Red Squealer, is as satisfying as it is because it takes the two metonyms that form the name and embeds them in a web of functional description—satisfying because of the functional nature of the adult épistèmé,* which both generates the functional discourse and of which, once the discourse is uttered, the explanation (as it is absorbed into the memory, of both querent and explicator, which is where the textus lies embedded) becomes a part.

  Science Fiction was named in like manner to the Red Squealer; in like manner the metonyms which are its name can be functionally related:

  Science fiction is science fiction because various bits of technological discourse (real, speculative, or pseudo)—that is to say the “science”—are used to redeem various other sentences from the merely metaphorical, or even the meaningless, for denotative description/presentation of incident. Sometimes, as with the sentence “The door dilated,” from Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, the technological discourse that redeems it—in this case, discourse on the engineering of large-size iris apertures, and the sociological discourse on what such a technology would suggest about the entire culture—is not explicit in the text. Is it, then, implicit in the textus? All we can say for certain is that, embedded in the textus of anyone who can read the sentence properly, are those emblems by which they could recognize such discourse were it manifested to them in some explicit text.

  In other cases, such as these sentences from Bester’s The Stars My Destination, “The cold was the taste of lemons, and the vacuum was the rake of talons on his skin . . . Hot stone smelled like velvet caressing his skin. Smoke and ash were harsh tweeds rasping his skin, almost the feel of wet canvas. Molton metal smelled like water trickling through his fingers,” the technological discourse that redeems them for the denotative description/presentation of incident is explicit in the text: “Sensation came to him, but filtered through a nervous system twisted and shortcircuited by the PryE explosion. He was suffering from Synaesthesia, that rare condition in which perception receives messages from the objective world and relays these messages to the brain, but there in the brain the sensory perceptions are confused with one another.”

  In science fiction, “science”—i.e., sentences displaying rhetorical emblems of scientific discourse—is used to literalize the meanings of other sentences for use in the construction of the fictional foreground. Such sentences as “His world exploded,” or “She turned on her left side,” as they subsume the proper technological discourse (of economics and cosmology in one; of switching circuitry and prosthetic surgery in the other), leave the banality of the emotionally muzzy metaphor, abandon the triviality of insomniac tossings, and, through the labyrinth of technical possibility, become possible images of the impossible. They join the repertoire of sentences which may propel textus into text.

  This is the functional relation of the metonyms “science” and “fiction” that were chosen by Hugo Gernsback to name his new pulp genre. He (and we) perceived that, in these genre texts, there existed an aspect of “science” and an aspect of “fiction,” and because of the science something about the fiction was different. I have located this difference specifically in
a set of sentences which, with the particular way they are rendered denotatively meaningful by the existence of other sentences not necessarily unique to science fiction, are themselves by and large unique to texts of the sf genre.

  The obvious point must be made here: this explanation of the relation of the two onomastic metonyms Science/Fiction no more defines (or exhausts) the science-fictional enterprise than our adolescent explanation of the relation of the two onomastic metonyms Red/Squealer defines (or exhausts) the enterprise of the fire engine. Our functional explanation of the Red Squealer, for example, because of the metonyms from which the explanation started, never quite gets around to mentioning the Red Squealer’s primary function: to put out fires.

  As the “function” of science fiction is of such a far more complex mode than that of the Red Squealer, one might hesitate to use such metonyms—”function” and “primary”—to name it in the first place. Whatever one chooses to name it, it cannot be expressed, as the Red Squealer’s can, by a colon followed by a single infinitive-with-noun—no more than one could thus express the “primary function” of the poetic enterprise, the mundane-fictional, the cinematic, the musical, or the critical. Nor would anyone seriously demand such an expression for any of these other genres. For some concept of what, primarily, science fiction does, as with other genres, we must rely on further, complex, functional description: