University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Graduate Studies Legacy Theses 1999 Discourse, desire, diaphanous skins: reflections and refractions of an SF masculine in two novels by Samuel R. Delany Kelly, Mary Rose Kelly, M. R. (1999). Discourse, desire, diaphanous skins: reflections and refractions of an SF masculine in two novels by Samuel R. Delany (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/12500 http://hdl.handle.net/1880/25111 master thesis University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY Discourse, Desire, Diaphanous Skins: Reflections and Refractions of an SF Masculine in Two Novels by Samuel R. Delany BY Mary Rose Kelly A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQllIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH CALGARY,ALBERTA MAY, 1999 8 Mary Rose Kelly 1999 National library Bibliotheque nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services sewices bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Canada Canada Your fib Vafre refrmce Ow ilk, Norm refdrence The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive pennettant a la National Library of Canada to Bibliotheque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, preter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette these sous paper or electronic formats. la fome de rnicrofiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format electronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriete du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protege cette these. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent dtre imprimes reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. ABSTRACT Writing from the frioges of what was once assumed to be "everyman's" experience, Samuel Delany has long interrogated a discourse anchored by the myth of a universal masculine that has only begun to be questioned in feminist criticism and explored through the informed perspectives of an emerging Queer Theory. This thesis examines how, through the operation of what I call SF Gothic, Delany re-presents a reconceptualised male subject as a Cyborg identity that straddles the borders that defme and prop up the illusion of the universalized subject. Through the inscription of a dynamic arc that describes the reappraisal of bodies and of language systems previously associated with death and degeneration, Delany achieves no less than a recuperation of the abject Other and a new Science Fiction aesthetics that identifies the monstrous, the disordered and the impure as erotic and hopeful. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Approval Page .--------.----------------- --.------ ------ - -...-.- .---------- - -----------.-- - ------------.--.-.---------------- *- ii Abstract.------- *-** ------------- --------- *-* ---.-- ---.----.-.-.---.-----------------.- *----------.-----.-----------------*-* .----*- iii Table of Contents---------------.---------------.--------------------.-.-.--------------.---- - --------------------+--------.- iv CHM'TER ONE: OF NOT THE WORLD BUT IT---* --------- ----.--.*-*- .----- - -- -- ----- -.--*- 1 Notes..__1_.___1_.--1...----------------.--.-------------.------------------------------------------.-----------.-----------.---*. 18 CHAPTER TWO: DANGEROUS BODIES; DIAPHANOUS SKINS..--.---.------------- 22 Cyborg As A Science Fiction Vampire -* .*---..---*------.---- * .-------------22 Toward An SF Gothic.- - --- -..- - - - -.--- - - - - *- - - - .* - - .. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - .* - - -.-- - - a - - - - ------+.----- -.- - .-- - - .- -.-. - - - -24 The Cyborg '4s Science Fiction Monster.*------ -*-a* ----------- * ----.-- .---. --*- *-*.-*-. .---- -.---- *--**-* --34 CYberg Bodies And CYberg Minds .-.----.-- ----------------.* - -----*--- * ** ---.--- -.------.-* *---- **-- .-44 Notes 54 .----.1.-----------__-)----.-----.----------------~~.----.--------------*---~-.----...-----------------------------*-.----------- cxL4PTER THREE:LONGING AND M''T~MOWHOSIS.--.----.-.----.*-----. ------------. 58 Or~heusAgonistes.-- -- --. -.- - - - - - - - - -.- - - - - .- - --.- --. - - -- ---- - - -.- -.- -- - - - - - --.- - - -----.---a. -..- .-. .- -- - -- - - - - ------ --. 61 '&TheTcmlent that chfbsion May Generate".-----.- --...---- ---------. - ---.----.------- -.---- * -.--.-. -67 A "~omanceof ugliness, defodty9 lind mutilation"*----- -- ------* ---*---. ---* ----- - *.-* -"..----- - - 77 Notes 93 -----.1---*---*1.*-----------------.--.--.*..---*----*-.-----.*----------------------*------*---~*..-----*-----.------------* CHAPTER ONE: OF THE WORLD BUT NOT IN IT Criticism of science fiction cannot possibly look like the criticism we are used to. Id will-pei-force-employ an aesthetic in which the elegance, rigorousness, and systematic coherence of explicit ideas is of great importance. 1 will therefore appear to stray into all sorts of extra- 1iterary fieldr, metaphysics, politics, philosophy, physics, biology, psychology, topology, mathematics, history, and so on The relation of foreground and background that we are used to ofier a century and a half of realism will not obtain. Indeed they may be reversed Science-ficlion criticism will discover themes and structures. .. which may seem recondite, extru-l iterary, or plain ridicuio us. Themes we customarily regard as emotionally neurral will be charged with emotion. (Joanna Russ, 1 17-1 18) Science Fiction or, if you will, Speculative Fiction - I will compromise and call it "SF" - comprises a field long disparaged by "serious" critics and mainstream writers and readers as what might be called a "despised genre".' Overstuf5ed with images of rocket jocks, bugeyed monsters, and damsels in distress, the genre would seem at first glance to offer little more than vicarious sensation for escapists and the very young. As such, SF hardly seems to contend for the kind of sober appreciation that we would bring to a discussion of Ulysses, or even Lolita. How, then, and why contemplate directing what presumes to be a serious and relevant theoretical inquiry at SF? In fact, it is the genre's very unreality that makes it only too perfect as the subject- matter at which to direct a series of inquiries. SF is independent of the constraints of Western culture's proprietary rules of novelistic realism that presumptively dictate the structure of experience itsele When a writer of SF abandons the laws of man or of gravity, she is in effect picking up her reader and launching him into the great hypothetical. And that is the crux of the matter. SF does not constrain itself to exploring the variation of human behaviours or social potentials within the parameters of the status quo. SF is about potentialities themselves, and this makes it a perfect medium for theorising about those topics that lie on the other side of what is acceptable or "done." Samuel Delany points out that the purview of "proper" literature has always been a critical exploration of the subject that largely remained wilhlly blind to the excluding boundaries that defmed that same subject (Silent Interviews 31).' However, the prioritization of the subject is a practice that excludes as a matter of course the anomalous identities of whole categories of experience - belonging to men and women of colour, of alternate sexuality - that have been consigned to the margins of articulable experience. Because SF itself developed in the literary margins - as what Delany calls a "paraliteratun$"'- it escapes the prescriptive obligation to represent subjectivity within the parameters of the prioritized subject. "At the level where the distinction between it and paraliterature is meaningll," Delany suggests, literature is a representation of, among other things, a complex codic system by which the codic system we call the "subject" (with which, in any given culture, literature must overlap) can be richly criticized. By virtue of the same distinction, SF is a representation of, among other things, a complex codic system by which the codic system we call the "object" (which, in those cultures that have SF, SF must ditto) can be richly criticized-unto its overlap with the subject. (Interviews, 3 1-32) Consequently, inquiries about gender and identity that remain problematical for the "realist" genres - if only because of the conventions that code them - and remain therefore constrained to abstract speculation and theory, may be indulged in these other worlds, wherein alterity is sought and rewarded. The extremities and alterities of marginalised genres are apt vehicles for the expression of marginalised identities. Despite the stubborn tendency of a public imagination that associates SF with a particular species of philosophically conservative escapism, typified for the layman by pulp magazine covers of the fifties that boasted threatening monsters and robust young women with flared nostrils and conical breasts',