Longer Views: Extended Essays

Preface

Preface In a critical epoch that has privileged, for twentyyears or more, difference , decantering, discontinuity, diversity,and pluralism over the elder gods of Unity, Totality,and Mastery,so much American nonfiction still finds itself attempting to appease those elder gods and their former conventions. Those of us who read regularly in criticism often find "books" whose "chapters" are, it's clear once we read two, three, or four of them, disconnected occasional essays. Often the "Introduction" that claims the remainder of the studywill not attempt to negotiate its topic with systematic rigor actually introduces a collection of considerations simply of different topics. At the editorial level, forces (usually called "commercial"—though sometimes even more mystified than that) militate to present collections and chrestomathies as concentrated studies. The fiction writer is used to the same forces at work in the contouring of books: "Novels sell better than collections of short stories," we are told. "It's a truism of almost any fictive practice—mysteries,westerns, science fiction, or naturalistic fiction." Most of my life my own preferred field has been science fiction; and because that field fosters so many series stories sharing characters and backgrounds, publishers and editors for many years took such stories and put them in books they called "novels," while renaming the individual stories "chapters"—largely at the behest of those forces. The one form that—in science fiction, at any rate—tends to resist such handling is the long story (or novella). And in the range of literary criticism, it is the long essay—the essay too lengthy to be delivered comfortably as a fifty-minute lecture—that offers similar resistance to such totalizing conventions. What this tends to mean is that the collection of longer essays—or, indeed, science fiction novellas—is treated as the least commercial of allworks. When publishers are brave enough to undertake such collections, readers, support them both! x Preface I'm particularly grateful, then, to my editors, Terry Cochran and Suzanna Tamminen, and to my publisher, Wesleyan University Press and their editorial director, Eileen McWilliam,for accepting this book for what it is and for not suggesting I "wait till some of the pieces mature " (read: till I become tired of seeing them lie unpublished and eventually pad them out to book-length). Various readers have made wonderfully useful suggestions here and there during the composition process of these essays, including Don Eric Levine, Gordon Tapper, James Sallis, Ron Drummond, and all the editorsjust mentioned. This book contains sixmoderately long essays with five distinct topics. The first, "Wagner/Artaud: A Play of igth and 2oth Century Critical Fictions," has been published as a separate monograph by feisty little Ansatz Press (New York, 1988), that wonderful creation of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and Tom Weber. Its topic is precisely its twain eponymous subjects—and the relationship between them as dramaturges and esthetic theoreticians. Three paragraphs have been added or expanded since the '88 edition; the diligent literary detective should be able to spot at least two of them. "Reading at Work, and Other ActivitiesFrowned on byAuthority—A Reading of Donna Haraway's'Manifesto for Cyborgs:Science, Technology , and Socialist Feminism in the igSos'"—has, in pieces, provided me with various lectures since it was first written in 1985. It tries to give an account of that exciting and influential essay and at the same time tries to examine what the giving of such an account entails and, yes, means. At its center it contains a brief overviewof the cyborg as a science fiction image in film, as well as a discussion of metaphor that seems to me necessarily anterior to any discussion of how any metaphor , such as the "cyborg," can work in the radical directions Haraway 's manifesto proposes for it. On the evening of November i, 1991, "Aversion/Perversion/Diversion " was delivered as the Keynote Lecture at the Fifth Annual Lesbian and GayConference on GayStudies, held that year at Rutgers University . It takes an anecdotal tour through some marginal tracks of contemporary (and, at that, largely queer) sexuality,even as its topic is the concept of discourse and its necessity for any sophisticated historical understanding. This is also the topic of "Shadow and Ash"—an intellectual chrestomathy whose fragmentary method is finally its content. For me it is the most important essay here—and the one that needs the least prefatory matter. "Atlantis Rose . . ." is a study of the poetry of Hart Crane, with an emphasis on Crane...