This belief is reinforced because Delany had characters in different books have similar insights. (It creates a re-presentation, in a different form, of the reader’s world.) In short, writing creates not a representation of the writer’s world but a model of the writer’s purport.
Rather it creates an experience that is entirely the reader’s, forged and fashioned wholly from her or his knowledge, of her or his memories, by her or his ideology and sensibility, and demonstrably different for each-but which (according to the writer’s skill) is merely as meaningful (though not necessarily meaningful in the same way) as the writer’s, merely as vivid. Theodore Sturgeon’s fine insight is perhaps germane here: the best writing does not reproduce-or represent-the writer’s experience at all.
That age-old philosophical chestnut, the Problem of Representation (in its twin forms, the Problem of Verification and the Problem of Exhaustiveness) makes mastery as such a non-problem, with no need of haute théorie. Here’s what he says in Motion:īut no simple, sensory narrative can master what it purports-whether it be a hitchhiking trip to Texas or the memories that remain from such a trip twenty-five years later. Connell and I have always believed Delany was giving us insight into his real-life experiences coded into fiction.
So we have both the fictionalized and nonfiction account of Delaney’s experiences. Delany just published In Search of Silence: The Journals of Samuel R. In 1988 Delany published The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village a memoir about his life during the years he wrote his early science fiction. However, we felt his stories conveyed genuine emotional experiences that we could learn from. Is that possible? We didn’t even know at the time that Delany was African-American and gay. We feel Chip Delany wrote about important life-altering events in the 1960s he experienced in his mid-twenties that we translated and understood in our mid-teens. This was especially true for Empire Star/Babel-17, and “ The Star Pit” (found in the collection Aye, and Gomorrah). It’s why I considered Delany the most creative science fiction writer at the time.ĭelany was a decade older than Connell and me, so we used his books as guides to experiences that were out of our league. Delany was probably in the most exciting place on Earth (NYC) in his early twenties, and that was reflected in his 1960s science fiction. Delany was hanging around Greenwich Village when Bob Dylan showed up. Delany was a child prodigy, and his early books reflect his experiences of exploring a larger, more exciting adult world filled with other prodigies, some more dazzling than he. Is this an illusion? Can fiction be a Rosetta stone for feelings?Ĭonnell and I continually refer to one book we both read fifty years ago, Empire Star by Samuel R. How often have you felt that a novel transmitted a deep emotional insight about life? We often talk about books and movies in terms of emotional responses. And, here’s my hypothesis: novels should be able to describe feelings in such a way that we can relate them to our own experiences and feelings. On the other hand, I think it’s obvious that books can convey information we learn from our experiences. I concur with Connell that books can’t recreate the feeling of an experience. My conclusion is experiencing comes in two kinds – what we feel and what we think about those feelings. I probably am but I want to believe books can convey a degree of actual experience. Since I’ve never traveled out of the country but often read books by people that do, I argued that we should be able to gain some sense of traveling from reading. Connell said traveling to another country changes people in ways that are impossible to know without actually going. We were talking about another friend Janis moving to Mexico, and I wondered if I would like living in Mexico. experience came up recently in an argument with my old friend Connell. Can we ever learn about living from reading fictionalized experiences?īook v. Can reading substitute for experience? Is there ever a time when book knowledge beats knowledge gained through living? Because it’s impossible to do everything in life, most of us live vicariously through reading.