(cover art unavailable, plus you have to love the beard - Ed)
Starboard Wine
by Samuel R Delany
Hardback, 224 pages, Dragon Press, Out of Print
*
reviewed by Karen Burnham
Samuel Delany is quickly becoming my favorite critic of sf/f literature. While the field, small as it is, is filled with some amazing talent, Delany brings something to the table that I haven't found elsewhere. I admire Gary Wolfe for his breadth of knowledge and prose style, Farah Mendlesohn for her penetrating analysis, John Clute for his <ahem> *unique* perspectives on whatever he's looking at, and James Blish writing as William Atheling, Jr. for his nuts-and-bolts craft-level story critiques. However, when reading Delany I consistently have moments where I say: "Aha! Yes, I know *exactly* what he's talking about, and I can use that to improve my own thinking and writing *right now*. While the broadly applicable About Writing remains the only other book I've read, I would recommend Starboard Wine for any and all critics working in the sf field right now (who haven't read it yet, of course).
I had previously encountered Delany's "reading protocols" argument: that one has to approach sf reading differently, or else it will be imcomprehensible. He mentions that one can read "Her world exploded" only metaphorically in a work of literature, but in sf you have to be open to reading it to say that a planet, belonging to a woman, blew up. What I had not understood before, was that the 'protocols' are only a minor part of a broader argument about the difference between genre works (he uses the term 'paraliterature' throughout the book) and 'literature' as it is commonly understood by academe.
His argument begins from the point that paraliterature is fundamentally different from literature and must be read and understood as such. We should not approach sf apologetically and try to claim its worth as measured by literature's own rubric. Paraliterature has its own unique history and aims and must be evaluated as such. As part of this argument he notes that standards of literary criticism derive from the medieval exercise of trying to determine which writings attributed to various saints were truly divine. This demanded that literature exhibit, amongst other things, thematic unity (if four of five writings deal with the sin of pride and the other one meditates on farming, perhaps the odd one out isn't actually by your saint), temporal unity (no referring to things that happened after the putative saint was already dead), and stylistic unity (if four of your five texts are full of flowery prose and biblical references and the other one is cast as an Aesop's fable, perhaps this isn't the scroll you're looking for). These continue to be the standards used to discuss the 'worth' of literary writers today (see, for example, the recent eulogies of John Updike, especially for stylistic and thematic unity).
When you judge sf/f by these standards, you run into trouble. Stylistic unity? Even apart from the pulp writers who were writing under 10 different house names and had to adopt a different voice for each, look at someone like Gene Wolfe. What exactly does The Evil Guest have in common, stylistically, with the Book of the New Sun novels? Or compare Snow Crash with Anathem. If you ripped off the cover would anyone assume they were by the same author? Similarly for thematic unity: Robert Silverberg has hit more thematic points in more types of stories than you can count. He doesn't have a single area of thematic concern. And temporal unity? The whole *point* of sf/f is to write about things that haven't happened yet--something that clearly makes people approaching it as literature uncomfortable.
Already, this is a fascinating and clearly laid-out analysis that was completely new to me. But Delany doesn't stop there! Having examined how sf/f is *looked at*, he then considers what sf/f *does* that is different from literature. In his schema, literature deals with the subject, by which he means a person's subjective experience, where sf/f focuses more on the object, i.e. the objective world. Thus in literature the object—the current day, the world as we know it—is so taken for granted that the character tends not to think about it, and focuses inward instead. My own expansion of Delany's thought here is that this explains why I tend to dislike so much contemporary literature for being passive: look at Middlemarch. The main romance, between Dorothy and what's-his-name, can only be resolved when Dorothy reveals that she is independently wealthy. What they cannot do is attempt to change the world in such a way to make the romance acceptable even without the money. Or look at Catcher in the Rye. It is completely about one character's subjective experience of the world; however there is little or nothing he can do (or at least, nothing he does) to change the world in which he lives. The characters in 'literature' can only change themselves--leave a spouse, pay more attention to their children, quit or gain a job or a romance--they fundamentally cannot challenge their world. I believe it is this passivity that frustrates so many readers who come from the genre--we ask ourselves, why don't they *do* something? (Delany does note that this distinction really became firm at the end of the 19th century. Obviously in something like Les Miserables the characters do try to take action to change the world, and it is still considered to be literature. And some folks still sneak through. Under this rubric, Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis is finally revealed to be sf, because the protagonist takes action to change the world with his vaccine.) This likewise may explain some of the frustration that literary readers experience when reading 'paraliterature.' Being used to focusing exclusively on the subject, they don't understand why they should need to mentally construct the world around that subject. And inasmuch as the focus is removed from the subjects, the field opens itself to critiques of 'insufficient characterization' (charges that I have at times leveled myself).
Upon reading this I was immediately able to call up examples from my own recent reading and re-evaluate them in light of this new approach. Baxter's Flood : I had rather damned it for that same poor characterization, and I still think it could have been better if the character motivations had been clearer. But now I understand the arguments that it is fundamentally not *about* the people, and doesn't need to be. Going the other way, I recently read a novella titled The Enigma of Departure It is a book that has a character meditate upon art and death. It is fundamentally about the subject, hence it is literature. I was approaching it as paraliterature (it is published by PS Publishing, after all), and to me the occasional intrusions of the fantastic into the subject's consciousness (he finds Venice to be physically difficult to navigate, and he occasionally sees his dead father in people around him) weren't at all enough to make it satisfying. Now, going back and examining it as literature I still find it somewhat unsatisfying, but on different grounds (the change in character is unclear, the art-as-metaphor is insufficiently explained for the non-art-aficionado, and the prose style lacks a bit).
Now, I'll want to make sure to read more of Delany's criticism since then. In Starboard Wine (which is a collection of essays developed mostly in the late 70s) he mentions that his thinking had already changed vis-a-vis things he wrote in the 60s and early 70s. I'm looking forward to seeing how well he found this approach to hold up, and to see what other revelations he has in store for me. As to Starboard Wine as a piece of writing itself: it is mostly extraordinarily readable, although the introduction seemed a bit tortured. It also has a tendency to repeat itself. The articles contained herein were written for a variety of different purposes at different times, and you can see him hitting some of the same notes repeatedly as he spirals into the complete argument that becomes the closing essay. Still, following that thought process makes it easier to follow his argument, actually lending clarity instead of bogging down. And I haven’t even touched upon his in-depth chapters on Heinlein, Sturgeon and Russ; all excellent, filled with personal reminiscences and thorough analyses. There aren't many works of literary criticism extant that are so well written, nor so well-thought out and illuminating.
Karen Burnham has a blog; Spiral Galaxy Reviews. More respectably, she is a scholar with the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts and an Editorial Assistant and Reviewer at Strange Horizons. She is a good engineer for a literary critic and a good literary critic for an engineer.
I had previously encountered Delany's "reading protocols" argument: that one has to approach sf reading differently, or else it will be imcomprehensible. He mentions that one can read "Her world exploded" only metaphorically in a work of literature, but in sf you have to be open to reading it to say that a planet, belonging to a woman, blew up. What I had not understood before, was that the 'protocols' are only a minor part of a broader argument about the difference between genre works (he uses the term 'paraliterature' throughout the book) and 'literature' as it is commonly understood by academe.
His argument begins from the point that paraliterature is fundamentally different from literature and must be read and understood as such. We should not approach sf apologetically and try to claim its worth as measured by literature's own rubric. Paraliterature has its own unique history and aims and must be evaluated as such. As part of this argument he notes that standards of literary criticism derive from the medieval exercise of trying to determine which writings attributed to various saints were truly divine. This demanded that literature exhibit, amongst other things, thematic unity (if four of five writings deal with the sin of pride and the other one meditates on farming, perhaps the odd one out isn't actually by your saint), temporal unity (no referring to things that happened after the putative saint was already dead), and stylistic unity (if four of your five texts are full of flowery prose and biblical references and the other one is cast as an Aesop's fable, perhaps this isn't the scroll you're looking for). These continue to be the standards used to discuss the 'worth' of literary writers today (see, for example, the recent eulogies of John Updike, especially for stylistic and thematic unity).
When you judge sf/f by these standards, you run into trouble. Stylistic unity? Even apart from the pulp writers who were writing under 10 different house names and had to adopt a different voice for each, look at someone like Gene Wolfe. What exactly does The Evil Guest have in common, stylistically, with the Book of the New Sun novels? Or compare Snow Crash with Anathem. If you ripped off the cover would anyone assume they were by the same author? Similarly for thematic unity: Robert Silverberg has hit more thematic points in more types of stories than you can count. He doesn't have a single area of thematic concern. And temporal unity? The whole *point* of sf/f is to write about things that haven't happened yet--something that clearly makes people approaching it as literature uncomfortable.
Already, this is a fascinating and clearly laid-out analysis that was completely new to me. But Delany doesn't stop there! Having examined how sf/f is *looked at*, he then considers what sf/f *does* that is different from literature. In his schema, literature deals with the subject, by which he means a person's subjective experience, where sf/f focuses more on the object, i.e. the objective world. Thus in literature the object—the current day, the world as we know it—is so taken for granted that the character tends not to think about it, and focuses inward instead. My own expansion of Delany's thought here is that this explains why I tend to dislike so much contemporary literature for being passive: look at Middlemarch. The main romance, between Dorothy and what's-his-name, can only be resolved when Dorothy reveals that she is independently wealthy. What they cannot do is attempt to change the world in such a way to make the romance acceptable even without the money. Or look at Catcher in the Rye. It is completely about one character's subjective experience of the world; however there is little or nothing he can do (or at least, nothing he does) to change the world in which he lives. The characters in 'literature' can only change themselves--leave a spouse, pay more attention to their children, quit or gain a job or a romance--they fundamentally cannot challenge their world. I believe it is this passivity that frustrates so many readers who come from the genre--we ask ourselves, why don't they *do* something? (Delany does note that this distinction really became firm at the end of the 19th century. Obviously in something like Les Miserables the characters do try to take action to change the world, and it is still considered to be literature. And some folks still sneak through. Under this rubric, Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis is finally revealed to be sf, because the protagonist takes action to change the world with his vaccine.) This likewise may explain some of the frustration that literary readers experience when reading 'paraliterature.' Being used to focusing exclusively on the subject, they don't understand why they should need to mentally construct the world around that subject. And inasmuch as the focus is removed from the subjects, the field opens itself to critiques of 'insufficient characterization' (charges that I have at times leveled myself).
Upon reading this I was immediately able to call up examples from my own recent reading and re-evaluate them in light of this new approach. Baxter's Flood : I had rather damned it for that same poor characterization, and I still think it could have been better if the character motivations had been clearer. But now I understand the arguments that it is fundamentally not *about* the people, and doesn't need to be. Going the other way, I recently read a novella titled The Enigma of Departure It is a book that has a character meditate upon art and death. It is fundamentally about the subject, hence it is literature. I was approaching it as paraliterature (it is published by PS Publishing, after all), and to me the occasional intrusions of the fantastic into the subject's consciousness (he finds Venice to be physically difficult to navigate, and he occasionally sees his dead father in people around him) weren't at all enough to make it satisfying. Now, going back and examining it as literature I still find it somewhat unsatisfying, but on different grounds (the change in character is unclear, the art-as-metaphor is insufficiently explained for the non-art-aficionado, and the prose style lacks a bit).
Now, I'll want to make sure to read more of Delany's criticism since then. In Starboard Wine (which is a collection of essays developed mostly in the late 70s) he mentions that his thinking had already changed vis-a-vis things he wrote in the 60s and early 70s. I'm looking forward to seeing how well he found this approach to hold up, and to see what other revelations he has in store for me. As to Starboard Wine as a piece of writing itself: it is mostly extraordinarily readable, although the introduction seemed a bit tortured. It also has a tendency to repeat itself. The articles contained herein were written for a variety of different purposes at different times, and you can see him hitting some of the same notes repeatedly as he spirals into the complete argument that becomes the closing essay. Still, following that thought process makes it easier to follow his argument, actually lending clarity instead of bogging down. And I haven’t even touched upon his in-depth chapters on Heinlein, Sturgeon and Russ; all excellent, filled with personal reminiscences and thorough analyses. There aren't many works of literary criticism extant that are so well written, nor so well-thought out and illuminating.
____________________
Karen Burnham has a blog; Spiral Galaxy Reviews. More respectably, she is a scholar with the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts and an Editorial Assistant and Reviewer at Strange Horizons. She is a good engineer for a literary critic and a good literary critic for an engineer.
Where did you FIND this? I've been looking for it for years.
Posted by: Paul Camp | August 07, 2009 at 05:30 AM