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e N vO I Hospitality and Alice Sheldon In the end, all books are written for your friends. Gabriel García Márquez We can’t take leave without noting, for our English colleagues and for their students, that socially and culturally the way authors manage both to safeguard their authorings and to relinquish them to the apparatuses of the world is through hospitality. We mean hospitality in the old sense, the welcome and befriending of strangers, the cultural and religious codes that used to be (and sometimes still are) exercised on the byroads and backstreets, providing travelers with rest, food, and lodging. Rules governing the traditional relations between guest and host included swapping of information, unspoken assumption of social equality, unspoken assumption of the equal validity of differing customs, and a respect for privacy. The host would never ask the guest’s name, but rather wait until it was freely given. In Chapter 1, it may be remembered, hospitality was listed as one of the phenomenological traits of authoring, the feeling of working authors that their future readers must be given a stranger’s welcome. In the end—although Agamben would say the gesture does not end— authoring is a hospitable extending of the hand to unknown others. When most people write, they assume that the results of the act somewhere will be invited in, or conversely that their work in words will serve as a friendly, if temporary, abode for reader-strangers. As Virginia Woolf put it, writers must find “some means of bridging the gulf between the hostess and her unknown guest on one hand, the writer and his unknown reader on the other” (1950, 110). In this book’s terms, to the degree that authoring is a praxis happening within a social and cultural surround, that context always takes the shape of hospitality conventions, which embrace the singularity and the potentiality of both host and guest. Hospitality is the pragmatic or social means by which authors broadcast to the world. Envoi 261 All the scenes exploring the neglect of authoring in the previous chapter show hospitality present, pending, or missing. The Peruvian consulate might have invited the traveler into his country with more grace and less deceit. One manifestation of Derrida’s “secret” is the password or shibboleth that tests the entrant and bars the unwelcome . Agamben’s “gesture” is the decision of authors to chance their work at unknown doors. The readers of Victoria’s and Kevin’s essays might have better respected the individual differences of those authorstrangers . English teachers might better respect the differing reading habits of the students who enter the gates of their academy. And aboard the no-man’s-land of a cruise ship, Jan realized that there is a basic hospitality that should be exercised in the most erudite and exotic lodgings of scholarship. The act of hospitality, with all its social rules governing host-guest relations, inheres in the sociability of writer-reader relations. In her works and in her life, hospitality haunted author Alice Sheldon like a half-remembered dream. The ancient host-guest codes underlie many of her tales. Often disregard or breach of the codes leads to tragic clashes between humans and between humans and aliens. In Houston, Houston, Do You Read Me? three male astronauts are rescued from their disabled craft and taken aboard another run entirely by women from a future female-only Earth—women who appear friendly (“their reception couldn’t be more courteous”), but eventually put the men to death after learning of their gender-dominating sex drives by surreptitiously administering truth-telling narcotics to them. In “A Momentary Taste of Being” humans test life-forms on a newly encountered planet to see if it is livable and discover that humans are spermatozoa and the aliens are ova of a greater being—a discovery that envisions all of them as trapped in the essential inhospitality of mere biologic life, “hostile or smiling, suffering each in his separate flawed reality.” But in “With Delicate Mad Hands” genuine hospitality occurs when the dying female narrator meets a welcoming alien on his planet and for the first time in her life finds an unoppressive relationship— an encounter celebrated by the other natives and retold as expressive of “the love of all that is alien.” And in “Come Live with Me” human explorers acquire alien symbiotes, and together both learn to reject acts of manipulative hospitality and to perform acts of generous hospitality in order...

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