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3 The Context The existence of a series of stories, with its panoply of discontinuitiesembedded -in-the-continuous (lacunae in the fictive lives of recognizably continuous characters, settings, situations, as well as the implied gaps between various times of writing, the observable distances between places of publication, yet all of it recognizably of that series), is one pressure (among many) to accept the existence of some greater continuity , with its own coherence, in which each specific textual event lies embedded. That greater continuity is our object of study. Conceivably, this greater continuity might be retrieved by a complete study of all the texts in the chain. Critical common sense demands we turn to the other texts to locate endpoints of significant trajectories launched in the present tale, or to see if elements in the present tale are clarified if we construe them as the terminations of trajectories launched in preceding ones. other than a survey of the rest of the stories in the series, what else critically is there? But for our purpose, the study of other texts is here precisely what we intend not to do. From time to time—but rarely—we may glance at one of the other tales in the series Disch has called by the title of the series’ longest novella, 334, but it will be only to note the most cursory verbal occurrences . We are here to examine what constitutes this particular textual event, not another—regardless of what relation to it another textual event may bear. Such an examination of related texts would doubtless yield up insights . But behind such an enterprise is a critical model of the workings of fictive creation which we feel is simplistic; and to the extent that critics—and particularly critics of science fiction—constantly appeal to it to yield up insights it is simply inadequate to provide, we feel it is pernicious. 26 the american shore So we shall recognize it, we shall outline this model here, in hopes of latterly avoiding its ensnaring oversimplifications: Fictive creation begins as a set of movements of mind—images, ideas, emotions, all in transition and interplay. The writer, using images of the stabilia of life—people, objects, buildings (and frequently using images of precisely those stabilia which set the mind in motion in the first place)—fixes names (sometimes the real ones, sometimes fictive ones) to the images of these stabilia, and then affixes the images to the various mental motions. The text produced, then, may be read as a map or even a document of the writer’s mental movements in real time against the fictive time of the narrative. This model, hopefully, will be shown up as wrongheaded from beginning to end. But even before we explode it, we can note a few of its more obvious absurdities as general readers of science fiction, as readers who have just read a science fiction text. Whatever illusory coherence the above model may suggest, it is far greater for mundane fiction than for the glittering, evanescent, and jewel-like field under view. in mundane fiction the measure of the power of the imaginative field (by that model) is the recognizability of the material textures and structures dealt with. (Gogol is the most imaginative of the nineteenth-century Russian novelists because the panoply of his character vignettes is so life-like, so familiar. . . . ) But a scalar of familiarity is simply inadequate to measure the imaginative strength of science fiction. if the above model creates a paradox for mundane fiction, for science fiction it yields a sheer preposterousness . Though some science fiction tales present a world more familiar than others (and “Angouleme” is one), as we view the rather bleak city-scape (with which “Angouleme” makes its point in antiphon), the objects, buildings, people, places, and modes of transportation between them (by which we characterize the bulk of science fiction) simply have nothing to do with our (present, at any rate) stabilia. if we look at the above model again, we can recognize as one of its kernels the retrieved “Saussurian” concept of S/s—of signifier over signified , word over meaning, icon over interpretation, both terms clearly nameable, clearly locable, clearly separable by that impermeable bar.1 1. “This approach to the signifier” to quote Jonathan Culler in Structuralist Poetics (ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975) “derives from what Jacques Derrida calls a ‘metaphysics of presence’ which longs for a truth behind every sign: a moment of original plenitude when form...

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