Read Longer Views for Free Online Page B

there is perhaps a more immediate justification for strategies of analytic vigilance and empirical inclusiveness in Gay Studies than the accurate reconstruction of lost histories and the retrieval of suppressed voices. As Delany has said several times in other works and mentions in passing here, the ongoing devastation of the AIDS virus makes “absolutely imperative” such vigilance and inclusiveness. 24 At one point in
The Motion of Light in Water
, Delany indulges in a utopian fantasy that the “inflated sexual honesty” necessitated by the AIDS crisis will, once the virus is brought under control, bring about “a sexual revolution to make a laughing stock of any social movement that till now has borne the name.” 25 Yet Delany is well aware of the almost fiendish tendency discourses have of “healing themselves across such rhetorical violences” (RS 235) and reifying their own conservative imperatives. The reader is urged to review Delany’s discussion, in “Appendix B” of
Flight from Nevèrÿon
and in “The Rhetoric of Sex, the Discourse of Desire” (another extended essay, collected in
Heterotopia
, ed. Tobin Siebers [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995]), of the truly sinister ways in which prevailing sexual discursive codes have sabotaged the effective scientific study of HIV transmission vectors. In the context of such a colossal health crisis, the muddying and mystifying effects of discourse begin to shade over into near-genocidal disinformation.
    â€œShadow and Ash” takes up many of the images of its “preface” as well as those of the immediately preceding essays and works transformations on them. The logic of these transformations is suggested in “Appendix B” of
Triton
, in which our fictive scholar notes that, in regard to the relation between Delany’s “Shadows” and Slade’s, “for Slade the concept of landscape is far more political than it was for the author of the older work.” (T 357) Now certainly that “older work” displays a sophisticated political sensibility; one of the chief transformations weexperience in reading it is the unfolding of political significance out of such seemingly abstract topics as Quine’s exploration of the “movable predicate” in philosophical logic. But in the present work, we see a whole series of transformations take place according to an algorithm of politicization: over the course of the essay, we trace a shift of attention from subject-oriented autobiography to context-oriented literary biography, from the exclusionary allusiveness of modernism to the inclusive dialogizing of postmodernism, from the “modular calculus” to “theory”—in general (to quote Hal Foster), from formal filiations to social affiliations. 26
    By focusing our attention on individual “thematic” threads running through “Shadow and Ash,” we can begin to discern the micro-effects of the essay’s larger conceptual transformation. For example: scattered throughout the piece we find a series of meditations on aging and mortality—typical concerns of the subject-oriented personal essay. What fascinates about these meditations, however, is how the politicization of subject and landscape wrought by the
rest
of the essay—by the context—begins to transform the status of death itself, even as Delany takes it up as a topic of personal concern. Delany sets up this transformation in note 8—a consideration of Joanna Russ’ sf novel
We Who Are About To
. . . in which, according to Delany’s reading, death serves as an “allegorical stand-in for whatever degree of social-political un-freedom the reader’s society has reached.” 27 Delany then moves elsewhere, exploring the problem of discourse in a number of realms. Midway through, though, Delany returns to the subject of actual physical death with