Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics—A Collection of Written Interviews

2. Toto, We're Back!The Cottonwood Review Interview

Toto, We're Back! The Cottonwood Review Interview This text began as a set of written questionsfrom Lloyd Hemingway andjohan Heye (both then at the University of Kansas, at Lawrence) in October 1986. I responded in writing. About a third of that response was published in a special "contemporary black writers " issue of The Cottonwood Review (5^/39, Summer/Fall 1986), edited by Gerard Early. Samuel R. Delany: Let me begin with a theoretical precept that will probably color any answer I give, even to your simplest questions: There are some today who would argue that there isno such thing as "experience"—lived experience, as it is sometimes called—save as it is reducible to language and desire. But it seems to me that the gesture abolishing at least what happens as an irreducible ontological order makes language and desire immediate, contiguous (in the sense that nothing mediates between them; that one is wholly flush with, wholly adequate to, the other), and has the same function as the metaphysical and mystificational gesture that makes language immediately and transparently adequate to the Real, or that makes experience the immediate cause and resolution of desire—and thus begins the myth of positivity that our precept here critiques: Say rather (as another interim strategy): The mutual inadequations of language and desire constitute what happens; the mutual inadequations of desire and what happens constitute language; the mutual inadequations of what happens and language constitute desire. Then, to preserve ourselves from experiential or linguistic or sexual idealism (for what we are preparing is, after all, the theoretical aspect of a materialist practice), we must remember that the whole tripartite process is forever responding to a Real (I borrow the register from Lacan) that, if we "know" anything at all (and never forget that we may not!), we know is there (all else is belief), but that, other than as this tripartite process of 2. 6o Part I discrepancy and inadequation encounters it, responds to it, shapes it when it can (forming genres, genders, semantic categories, and social classes) and is necessarilyshaped by it (our constantly repeated realization of the inadequacy of all such categories, through the slightest shift in some response to the Real, apprehended through the same inadequations by which, a historical moment ago, the categories were formed), is inaccessible. Desire . . . Language. . . What happens . . . The point is that, because the inadequacy of any one to any other produces the field in which the third constitutes itself and registers, none of the three is a ground that can stabilize either of the other two. To negotiate their interrelations we must hold onto the fact that none is ultimately a privileged register or term. We only know any one of the three because of the gap between the other two. None operates as the ground against which eventsin the areas indicated by the other two are shadowed, highlighted, modeled in some way that is, itself, the privileged representation. Rather, each is a web, a net, a rhyzome—a revisable text, if you will—whose rhyzomatic aspects, whose gaps, whose flexibilities and rigidities, howevertemporary, are forever constituted by the coextensive failures, discrepancies, and gaps between the other areas we were precisely then not considering. Lloyd Hemingway: Let mebegin with a simple question. I'll be interested to seejust how that precept contours your answer: When did you first discover science fiction, and what was that experience like? SRD: Well! Your question suggests a moment of discontinuity before which—for the young and eager reader—there wasno science fiction, but after which the genre, with its panoply of luminous and vividworlds, lay there in all its potential to explore. This may be the point to remind ourselves that the rhetoric of revelation, the suggestion of a transcendent vision carried by even so innocent a phrase as "the discoveryof science fiction," is basically part of the inflationary process by which genres survive, endure, propagate, and, in response to the material world, speciate. But though it's sometimes fun to talk about them as if, indeed, that's the waythey hit us, genres don't really come to us like that. As curious and embattled children, busily absorbing the culture of childhood, first we hear a little bit about them. Then, perhaps, we see a book cover or an illustration—in the paraliterarygenres, the visual is Toto, We're Back! 61 intimately involved with that inflationaryrhetoric, through its...