Samuel Delany's The Einstein Intersection
Takayuki TATSUMI
Extrapolation 28.3. (1987) Kent State UP.
Michael Peplow and Robert Bravard were absolutely right when they began their bio-bibliography of Samuel Delany with the following sentence: "Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. is actually many men" (1). In fact Delany himself wanted to include in his unwritten autobiography a number of different topics, among other things, his involvement with classic music and painting, avant-garde theatre, the dance, folk music, and popular music. Moreover, in a letter to Peplow and Bravard, Delany even disclosed his willingness to write essays about his sex life, his life as a black American, his experiences with psychotherapy and eventual hospitalization, his critical encounters, and his film production. Delany's life, shining prismatically, can aptly be called "multiplex" if we apply the Delanian term with which strongly impressed me in one of his earlier novels, Empire Star (1966).
A careful glance, however, must take us to the recognition that all topics he referred to above sound minor, although they are very familiar to us. As a writer, he has certainly been concerned with genres of minority literature, for instance, science fiction, science fiction criticism, feminist literature. Delany's biography furthermore depicts a portrait of a young folk-rock musician as well as of a mental patient. Put simply, it is what may be called "multiplex minorities" to which Delany and his life have persistently belonged. Then how can we locate that which seduced Delany into the multiplex minorities? How does it influence one of his early masterpieces, The Einstein Intersection?
To approach the problem of Delany's sense of minority, critics have often tried to find it reflected in his fictional characters. Indeed, his fiction is full of black and other protagonists of color—for instance, Rydra Wong, the Oriental poet, linguist, and starship commander of Babel-17 (1966). Lorq Von Ray, the interstellar mulatto of Nova (1968), Kidd, the native American antihero of Dhalgren (1975), Marq Dyeth, the gay protagonist of Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand (1984), and Lo Lobey, black mutant Orpheus of The Einstein Intersection. But when he wrote Nova, using a black as the main character was too eccentric. Reading its manuscript, John W Campbell, then editor of Analog, rejected it for the serialization, saying in a phone call to Delany's agent, "For Heaven's sakes, he's got a Negro for a protagonist! It's a good book, but our readers aren't going to be able to identify with that" (Peplow and Bravard 32). Since the pulp magazines had rigid requirements, as Seth McEvoy points out, "the heroes of science fiction stories were definitely ultra-white, almost Aryan." Furthermore, "most science fiction writers are white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant" (6). Here we are faced with the greatest scandal of science fiction. Although it started as a minor sub genre of literature, science fiction itself has been trying to disregard many "new and minor" science fiction works, in effect reproducing another minor genre.
Of course, the opinion like Sandra Y. Govan's is not wrong: "Delany parades black characters across the spectrum of his speculative fiction not simply to attest to black survival in the future, but to punctuate his social criticism of our present" (48). Bus she should have recalled that for Delany "social criticism" primarily means the criticism of the science fiction circle, which always functions as a "minority-disseminating minority" in the above sense. Accordingly, whoever is minor in Delany's novel represents not simply the black minority in which society but the minor situation of the author himself even in the science fiction circle.
His bio-bibliographers furthermore tell us that "as a teenager, Delany was introduced to black literature—initially to Paul Laurence Dunbar, and then to Chester Himes, James Baldwin, William Demby, the writers of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance including Jean Toomer, Bruce Nugent, Zora Neal Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Countee Cullen" (10). And it should not be forgotten that his education at Dalton Elementary School gave him an opportunity to recognize the linguistic difference between the white and the black children. This very experience must have provided him with not so much the racial or ideological as the structural sense of language.
Then, to what extent was Delany actually aware of minority language? Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari comment: "A minor literature is not the literature of a minor language but the literature a minority makes in a major language. But the primary characteristics of a minor literature involves all the way in which the language is effected by a strong coefficient of deterritorialization. In short, German in Prague is a deterritorialized tongue suitable for strange, minor uses." Here Deleuze and Guattari compare German in Plague to "what Blacks today can do with the American tongue" (16). Is this true of Samuel Delany? As a writer of a minor literature Delany undoubtedly has an idiosyncratic style. Nevertheless, as for the black influence on his English, he states: "I'm fairly light-skinned, as are both my parents; thanks to their and my educations, I've never had a particularly noticeable black accent; both whites and blacks frequently just assume, at least for the first few minutes . . . that I'm white" (Peplow and Bravard 5-6). Delany regards himself rather as a user of standard English. This statement does make sense if we take into account his English style which has a tint of not so much black dialect but of French symbolism. Delany does not stick to black dialect as the only minor language but probably extends the signification of minorities as multiplex languages: "I write—as a male. as a black male, as a gay male whose work is the writing of paraliterary fictions. . . ."(*note 2)
At this point, what mattes is not whether he was confronted with the difference between standard English and minor English but the fact that "as a young adult, he was discovered to have dyslexia." Here is Delany's own explanation of the condition:
Imagine looking at a page—but the page is on a turn-table, spinning slowly before you. And while it's turning, each word on the page is on its own, small turn-table, turning in different directions. Then, on top of hose one-word turn-tables, each letter in each word is one a separate turn-table. All of them are turning at different speeds, now changing direction, now changing back again, some getting faster, some getting slower.It is this respect that renders Delany distinct from the rest of Afro-American writes. His idiosyncratic style is demanded not by external or social conditions but by internal or psychological ones. And, as far as he was a dyslexic, Delany could have been said to contain within himself the ultimate minority in terms of language.
Now imagine using that contraption to teach a child to read, to teach a child to spell.
But that is what, metaphorically, the ordinary page feels like for the young dyslexic. I still have to focus hard on the figure beside and above it, comparing cross-lines and verticals, to distinguish a "plus sign" from a "time sign." As a child it took me literally months to learn. (Peplow and Bravard 4)
Set on earth in some undetermined future, The Einstein Intersection, Delany's second Nebula award-winning novel, tells the story of young Lo Lobey's journey in search of the murderer of his beloved Friza. Lobey's race has arrived on Earth from some unspecified region in outer space after mankind's departure. His people are trying to take on human shapes and culture, but their mutations as well as their use of human legends, myths, and stories, indicate that they have much trouble doing so, clearly seen in their titling of "purity" and sexual differentiation by applying the prefixes Lo, La, and Le for male, female, and mixed. Lobey himself is a gorilla-like man, who does not seem to have high intelligence, while Friza is, although appearing slim and normal, a kind of nonfunctional who is not given any sexual prefix, because of her muteness. And yet Lobey is one of many in his generation who are born "different" in that, as a fighter and a musician, he owns a machete that is also a flute, making music from other people's thoughts. As the novel unfolds, he is informed that Friza's killer is Kid Death, who symbolizes the power of science, and Lobey is told in the source-cave by a human-made great computer PHAEDRA (Psychic Harmony and Entangled Deranged Response Association) to "exhaust the old mazes before you can move into the new ones" (33). Lobey begins the journey of revenge, getting out of the village to the great city called "Branning-at-sea" together with Spider, the leader of dragon-herders, and Green-eye, a Christlike figure who is totally immune to Kid Death. In the meantime Lobey is encouraged by Spider, the mediator between the past and the present, to kill Kid Death by means of Lobey's own music. Finally Lobey makes up his mind to leave the earth.
This kind of summarization of the plot, however, does not give us the extent to which The Einstein Intersection is developed as a postmodern science fiction or as an Afro-American novel. What comes out of its plot is merely a formula for heroic fantasy, which has been regarded as a minor genre even in the field of science fiction. But, in order to reexamine its fictional structure, we may concentrate on the following three points: first, its place in the history of science fiction; second, its use of rock'n roll as a mode of black music; third, the relationship between "difference" as the main theme and what the very title signifies.
First, how can we explain the significance of The Einstein Intersection as science fiction? Since Sandra Miesel's definition it has widely been accepted that "all Delany's novels are quests" (86). The Einstein Intersection is no exception, but there are also many non-science fiction novels in which we can find quests. In order to specify what quest means in Delany's metaphorics, we should take a glance at the "New Wave" movement in the British science fiction scene, which started with J.G. Ballard's notion that the New World for which we must quest is not the outer space for which existing science fiction has quested but the inner space in terms of the modern or postmodern arts and sciences. Preferring the coinage "speculative fiction" to the conventional "science fiction," most of the New Wave writes were willing to put on the inner space suit, instead of the ordinary space suit. Patrick Parrinder describes this phenomenon as follows:
The much-publicized cultural innovations of the 1960s, from the wave of psychedelic drugs and alternative life-styles to the Tolkien cult and the fantastic, "postmodernist" fictional mode of novelists such as John Barth, Richard Brautigan, and Thomas Pynchon, all contributed to the sense that experience as a whole was becoming "science-fictional"— though, of course, it was becoming rahter more difficult to say what exactly such a statement might mean. . . . The New Wave both reflected (and to some extent anticipated) popular disillusionment with scientific advance, and expressed the anxiety of a group of young writers to take science fiction out of the mode established by Gernsback, Heinlein, and Campbell. (17-18)With this as its background The Einstein Intersection was published. Accordingly, the quest in this novel is undoubtedly the equivalent of the inner space travel. But, neither The Einstein Intersection nor Nova was acceptable to the New Wave. The author recalls: "I always wanted to be a part of the New Wave. I expressed myself in great sympathy with them. . . . But the New Wave themselves . . . let me know quite clearly that I was not a member. How could I possibly have been—when I was writing (in Nova) about rocketships and aliens and interplanetary wars and feuds, all of which were what the New Wave was against! " (Peplow and Bravard 36). This dilemma inevitably forced him to make the revealing statement: "I preferred [the term] 'science fiction,' though I let works of mine be called 'speculative fiction' back when it seemed a viable term" (Peplow and Bravard 37). In other words, the British "major" New Wave undertook to reform science fiction by means of doing away with "gadgets" as local cliches, whereas the American "minor" New Wave did it by means of preserving "gadgets," or to be more correct, displacing the signification of "gadgets." In follows that even a number of heroic fantasy gadgets in The Einstein Intersection should also be reconsidered as "gadgets—deconstruction gadgets." Keenly aware of his own belatedness, closely related with his minority here, Delany delays the preexisting signification of science fiction. For instance, we might as well think of his multiplex mixture of mythologies, that is, Greek myth, Christian myth, even American myth, all of which helped the writer explore his own unconscious. (* note 3)
What might be emphasized most is the Orpheus myth, because Lobey can be primarily considered as Orpheus in terms of his musical genius. His lover Friza is, therefore, Eurydice, whereas her killer, Kid Death, is the Hades or Pluto of the original myths. The author himself talks about this in a metafictional epigraph within the work: "Black outside this morning I wonder what effect Greece will have on TEI. The central subject of the book is myth . . . Drank late with the Greek sailors last night; in bad Italian and worse Greek we talked about myths. Taiki learned the story of Orpheus not from school or reading but from his aunt in Eleusis" (71). And yet, as is the case with the attempt at restructuring myth, Lobey is doomed to become different from Orpheus. Although in the original Orpheus myth, Orpheus is torn apart by the women who serve the god Bacchus, here Lobey escapes to suffer alone, after killing Kid Death. Spider teaches Lobey: "'As we are able to retain more and more of our past, it takes us longer and longer to become old; Lobey, everything changes. The labyrinth today does not follow the same path it did at Knossos fifty thousand years ago. You may be Orpheus; you may be someone else, who dares death and succeeds. . . . The world is not the same. That's what I've been trying to tell you. It's different'" (124).
To differentiate the original myth is to exhaust the original story, as we already knew in PHAEDRA's suggestion. This kind of metafictional strategy cannot but remind us of "Literature of Exhaustion." in the words of John Barth. Teresa L. Ebert says: "The very act of creation of his [Delany's] fictive texts and their relation to the larger questions of language and literary traditions, both science fiction and mainstream, become central aesthetic concerns of his fiction. In writing metatexts, Delany parallels the works of other transfictionists, most notably Barth who constructs elaborate fictions reflecting on the artistic act itself and the ratlin of the work to its aesthetic heritage, particularly, in both Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera" (98). Paying attention to Delany's exhaustion of myth in the above sense of literary convention immediately takes us to his exhaustion of music, because Orpheus is none other than the hero of a myth of music. And as Lobey, a "different alien" with the ability to reach into other people's mind and play the music he finds there, exhausts the myth of the musical and dyslexic ability to "broaden the base of science fiction," exhausts the traditional structure of the genre. As far as Lobey's journey becomes metamythical, Delany's writing becomes meta-science fictional.
The recognition of difference brings us to the second point, the use of rock'n roll in terms of black music. Science fiction has often been compared to rock'n roll, as is seen in the following comment made by Michael Moorcock, who was editor of the New Worlds (1964-1971 and 1978), at "Science fiction was attractive because it was overlooked by the critics and it could be written unselfconsciously, just as, in the early days, it was possible to do interesting work in popular music as a rock and roll performer" (16). This passage is all the more persuasive because Moorcock himself is a rock musician. On this point Moorcock's career and Delany's are parallel.
How do science fiction and rock'n roll, then converge? Mike Brake's definition might be useful: "Rock is body music, simple and yet highly aggressive; death is ever present on the bike, and this threat is central to control, control over the machine, one's life, oner's body, one's identity—oner's manhood" (77). We might immediately be reminded of the relationship between Kid Death's power (science and death) and Lobey's music (art and control), on which the rock'n roll of the novel must have been based. But, at the same time, it occurs to me that for Delany the literary text itself is just like a machine, if not the bike, as he comments in his own literary criticism. "Words in a narrative generate tones of voice, syntactic expectations, memories of other words and pictures. But rather than a fixed chronological relation, they sit in numerous inter- and over-weaving relations (The Jewel-Hinged Jaw 36). For example, early in The Einstein Intersection, La Dire, a wise woman of Lobey's village, speaks as follows:
Let's talk about mythology, Lobey. . . . You remember the legend of the Beatles? YOu remember the Beatle Ringo left this Maureen love even though she treated him tender. He was the one Beatle who did not sing, so the earliest forms of the legend go. After a hard day's night he and the rest of the Beatles were torn apart by screaming girls, and he and the other Beatles returned, finally at one, with the great rock and the great roll. . . . Well, that myth is a version of a much older story that is not so well known. . . . In the older story Ringo was called Orpheus. He too was torn apart by screaming girl. But details are different. He lost his love—in this version Eurydice—and she went straight to the great rock and the great roll, where Orpheus had to go to get her back. He went singing, for in this version Orpheus was the greatest singer, instead of the silent one. In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the nest (12-13, my emphasis added)What the superimposition of Beatles myth on Orpheus myth now reveals is that the meaning of the expression "torn apart" is differentiated, and "the great rock and the great roll," another name of rock'n roll, comes to signify "all death and all life" (13). What is more, close reading will reveal that in this postmodern Waste Land, the protagonist "prefers to sit on the flat rock" (3), sometimes creeping "up a slope of rock" (59), and that if asked by someone to play music, Lobey puts the blade to his mouth, "rolled over on his back, and licked the sounds" (13):
"Lobey, when you were a boy, you used to beat the rock with your feet, making a rhythm, a dance, a drum. Drum, Lobey!"Moreover, when Whitey, Lo Easy's brother, was dead, to bury him Lobey "rolled the stone out" (45), and after that, making up his mind to "take a trip . . . to destroy what killed Friza" (46), he "crossed the stream and started up the rocks, mad as all Elvis" (48). As is understood from my emphasis added to this passage and those preceding it, the author disfigures the difference between "rock" and "roll" and "rock'n roll." What most impresses me is the scene in which Kid Death, who has the power to resurrect whatever he has killed, conjures up Friza in front of Lobey:
I let the melody speed, then flailed it up an octave so I could handle it. That means only fingers.
"Drum!"
. . . The music laughed. . . . I, immobile above the waist, flung my hips, beating cross rhythms with toes and heels, blade up prick the sun, new sweat trickling behind my ears, rolling the crevices of my corded neck (14).
She fell, throwing the brach away from her in one instant; clutching at the stone as she fell, snatched at the length of leather dangling from my neck, then let it go . . . .Delany's insistent description of rocky landscape and the act of rolling always keep us conscious of rock'n roll. At this point we are forced to move—or, roll our own rock—from mythology to linguistics. What is presented here is less the landscape of postnuclear Waste Land in a mimetic sense than a linguistic landscape always already rock'n rolling. (* note 4) What Houston Baker says of blues music might be helpful, if we consider rock'n roll as one of the most proper descendants of Blues: "Afro-American culture is a complex, reflexive enterprise which finds its proper figuration in blues conceived as a matrix. A matrix is a womb, a network, a fossil-bearing rock, a rocky trace of gemstone's removal, a principal metal in an alloy, a mat or plate for reproducing print or phonograph records" (3).
I slammed my face against the shale. "Friza!" . . .
Her music crashed out with her brains on the rocks of the canyon floor a hundred feet below.
Rock. Stone. I tried to become the rock I hung against. I tried to be stone. Less blasted by her double death I would have dropped. . . . My heart rocked. My heart rolled. (92-93)
It is clear that Delany has been obsessed with mineralogy, as is apparent from such titles as The Jewels of Aptor (1962), "Driftglass" (first published as a short story in 1967, later included in a collection of short stories also titled Driftglass), "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" (1969), "Prismatica" and The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. An example follows which illustrates his analogic concern with mineralogy and music.
Jasper, this month, is the Word.Later in this short story, which won a Nebula and Hugo in 1969 and 1970 respectively, we are confronted with a dazzling masquerade of rolling semiprecious stones, which ranges from agate, malachite, tourmaline, beryl, porphyry, sapphire, cinnabar, turquoise, tiger's eye, garnet, topaz, taafite down to pyrite. It is the semi-precious stone as signifier that controls human lives as signified. For Delany, whether it is rock or stone or the pebbles Friza loved to play with, the image of mineral represents the linguistic multi-plexity of difference itself. As his playing with minerals naturally signifies his playing with language, so his rolling minerals means his rolling signifiers. Thus, Delany succeeds in creating musical languages like jewels and describing precious stones like words. (* note 5) Now let us call this intermetaphorical act of rolling minerals as the "rock'n roll effect." And it is this effect of rolling rocks that helps Delany realize multiplex textuality, which prolongs the duration of meaning. Delany delays always.
Jasper is the pass code warning that the singers of the cities . . . relay by word of mouth for that loose and roguish fraternity with which I have been involved (in various guises) these nine years. It goes out new every thirty days; and within hours every brothers knows it, throughout six worlds and worldlets. ("Time as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones" in Driftglass, Signet, 226)
This kind of recognition encourages us to clarify the third point, the relationship between the title and the theme of the novel. At first glance, this title, The Einstein Intersection, must have confused its readers, all the more because the title and the (Bantam) cover illustration seem to have no relation; the book of this title sounds like hardcore science fiction, whereas the cover illustration looks like a scene from a heroic fantasy. According to the author himself, this titling is, as noted earlier, attributed to the editor's suggestion. Nevertheless, in view of the very theme of the book, the superficial contradiction between the title and the cover illustration begins to seem most appropriate; however, the real secret of this strange title is unveiled late in the novel. Let me introduce the conversation between Lobey and Spider:
"Do you understand difference, Lobey?"Whoever is unfamiliar with science fiction cannot help feeling uncomfortable with this kind of passage. Yet this is typical of science fiction style, as Delany himself has often discussed it, sometimes providing us an example like "She gave her heart willingly." If "she" is the heroine of a Harlequin romance, we cannot imagine her to "voluntarily open her chest cavity, wrench her heart from within, and present it to her beloved on a silver platter. On the other hand, if she is a science fiction heroine, this literal reading would gain high authenticity." (* note 6) And, as black dialect is contrasted with standard English, so science fiction dialect is contrasted with "literary" language. What should not be ignored here is that now Delany provides us with another strong difference between science as humanity's language in the Einsteinian sense and art as alien's language in the Godelian sense. (* note 7) Each language might be a dialect to each other, in other words, mute to each other. At this point , the significance of Friza's muteness cannot be overemphasized: "She was beautiful. And silent. When she was a baby, she was put in the kage with the other nonfunctional because she didn't move. . . . But she never spoke. So at age eight, when it was obvious that the beautiful orphan was mute, away went he La" (5). La is, of course, one of his coined particles mentioned earlier. Friza is, then, a dialect itself unknown to the villagers. We might compare her muteness with what Ralph Ellison allegorize as "invisibility" in Invisible Man (1947). What Lobey quested for in Friza turns out to be minority as the effect of linguistic differentiation. To try to encounter Friza means to try to intersect with a language unknown yet fascinating. By "intersection" Delany means the possibility of intertextual dynamics, which in turn refers back to the differences and encounters between standard English and black dialect, and between "literary" language and science fiction language, and, moreover, the conventional science fiction language and the New Wave speculative fiction language.
"I lige in a different world, where many have it and many do not. I just discovered it in myself weeks ago. I know the world moves towards it with every pulse of the great rock and the great roll. But I don't understand it."
Through the eagerness on this drawn face Spider smiled.
"Wars and chaoses and paradoxes ago, two mathematicians between them ended an age and began another for our hosts, our ghosts called Man. One was Einstein, who with his Theory of Relativity defined the limits of man's perception by expressing mathematically just how far the condition of the observer influences the thing he perceives. . . . The other was Godel, a contemporary of Einstein, who was the first to bring back a mathematically precise statement about the vaster realm beyond the limits Einstein had defined. . . . The visible effects of Einstein's theory leaped up on a convex curve, its productions huge in the first century after its discovery, then leveling odd. The productions of Godel's law crept up on a concave curve, microscopic at first, then leaping to equal the Einsteinian curve, cross it, outstrip it. At the point of intersection, humanity was able to reach the limits of the known universe with ships and projection forces that are still available to anyone who wants to use them—. "(119-21)
As for the image of intersection in terms of black music, Baker gives a stimulating interpretation: "To suggest a trope for the blues as a forceful matrix in cultural understanding is to summon an image of the black blues singer at the railway junction lustily transforming experiences of a durative (unceasingly oppressive) landscape into the energies of rhythmic song. . . . The singer and his production are always at this intersection, this crossing, codifying force, providing resonance for experience's multiplicities" (7). The Einsteinian convex curve, then, signifies one railroad, which must be filled with stones, as suggested by the name of Ein-Stein, meaning "One Stone" in German. It is also noteworthy that the figure of this curve itself looks like a rock as well as the source-cave in which human products are preserved. However, rock has to be rolling and aliens "have to live out the human" if they "are to move on to" their "own future" (78). And this is the reason why this Einsteinian convex curve is to be interested by the Godelian concave curve. It is at this intersection that Lobey is, just like a black blues singer, plating his one rock'n roll, whose alchemic effect is capable of transforming one rock into never-enfing rock'n roll music and / or ever-rolling rock music int a multiplex jewel.
In his last scene Lobey confesses to Spider his desire to leave the earth for the other planets. Spider, who has already experienced this kind of journey, does not make it clear it "it's going to be different" (147) or not, as was already suggested in one of the author's own epigraphs: "Endings to be useful must be inconclusive." Rock'n roll is, just like blues, a musical form that has no conclution but improvisation, which is nothing but the art of differentiation. it only keeps rolling, just as for the dyslexic Delany language keeps rolling on a turntable. To read Delany is to repeat his dyslexia. Therefore, this ending itself would be another opening of another rock'n roll, which might be performed between the human and the alien on a cosmic scale.
Notes
- My interview with Delany at York, Pennsylvania, Nov. 2, 1985 (to be published in Diacritics in 1987). *Takayuki Tatsumi, "Interview: Samuel R. Delany." Diacritics 16. 3 (Fall 1986): 27-45.
- From one of his latest lectures (unpublished), "Reading at Work and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority: A Reading of Dona Haraway's Manifesto for Cyborgs" (at Cornell University, Nov. 10, 1986).
- According to Douglas Barbour's lucid explanation, "Spider is Minos, Iscariot, Pat Garrett: Green-Eye is Christ, and possibly Odin; Kid Death, Hades, Satan, Billy the Kid; and The Dove, the hermaphrodite temptress who 'becomes the thing you love,' is Helen of Troy, Jean Harlow, Star Anthim, Mario Montez." Worlds out of Words: The SF Novels of Samuel R. Delany (London: Bran's Head, 1979), p. 30.
- Here the words "rock" and "roll" reveal their catachrestic moment. As for the theory of disfiguration, see Cynthia Chase, Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Reading in the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore: John Hopkins Uni. Press, 1986), p. 13-31.
- Delany's first grade teacher wrote: "Sam has a wonderful feeling for the sounds and rhythms of language." Peplow and Bravard, 7.
- Cf. Delany's keynote address given at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, March, 1982. Quoted in Marleen Barr in Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren in Patterns of the Fantastic, Donald M. Hassler ed., (Mercer Island: Starmont HOuse, 1983), p. 57.
- Cf. Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Brain (New York: Basic, 1979).
CPA編集部注
巽先生によるディレニーへのインタビューは Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics : A Collection of Written Interviews
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