SOURCE: “The (Science-Fiction) Reader and the Quantum Paradigm: The Problems in Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand,” in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2, July, 1990, pp. 325-40.

[In the following essay, Bartter interprets the complexity and indeterminacy of Delany's fiction in terms of quantum mechanics, which she argues is a more fitting paradigm for Delany's work than Newtonian physics or Einsteinian relativism. Drawing attention to the controlling metaphors and structural innovations of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Bartter contends that Delany's “quantum” worldview challenges accepted notions of reality and pushes the boundaries of science fiction writing.]

Newton knew. He saw the universe as the function of various forces acting upon a variety of objects. The Newtonian world-view reflects the mechanistic, “billiard-ball” concept of the universe held by scientists who were sure that, given just a little more time and better instrumentation, all knowledge would be available to them and all answers known.¹ This world-view supported the Industrial Revolution; it also supported cause-effect plotting and omniscient narration. The novel reflected the “social and historical norms that applied to a particular environment, and so it established an immediate link with the empirical reality familiar to its readers” (Iser: xi). Though it has been scientifically superseded, Newtonian physics still gives satisfactory results at the level of the scientific macro-universe. Likewise, we still expect cause-and-effect to operate in life, and it still drives the plot of most popular literature.

Our world-view subtly alters as new conceptual patterns, or “paradigms,” become the foundation for scientific, cultural, and artistic comprehension of how the world works (cf. Kuhn). Since the Industrial Revolution, social norms have been represented by scientific paradigms, which are constantly subject to review and revision. Einstein’s theory of relativity created major changes. Relativistically, the position of the observer in space-time genuinely determines what she or he observes. The “forces” described by Newtonian physicists now must be explained as highly complex relationships. (In literary theory, the reader-response paradigm evolved at about the same time [cf. Tompkins: ix].) Non-physicists may equate “relativity” with “relativism,” or, even worse, with “magic”; but as a paradigm, relativity seems quite friendly. Cause and effect still operate, and the theory supports psychoanalytic explanations for a variety of human actions. Still, the changing world-view began to wrench fiction out of its traditional form. If knowledge depends upon the relative position of the observer, the omniscient author disappears. Writers engaging the new paradigm (even if ignorant of the new physics) found themselves using more and more unreliable narrators, existential characters, relativistic plots—the whole panoply we now call “modern fiction.”

Einsteinian physics transcends Newton’s model by accounting for gravitational phenomena in a far more accurate way than the Newtonian “action at a distance” does. It models the very small, the very large, and the very fast; but it does not account for nuclear forces. The foundations for another universe of physics already existed when Einstein first published. In this universe, bodies don’t absorb energy smoothly, but take it in (and emit it) in little packets that Planck termed “quanta.” When an atom takes in a quantum of energy, one or more of its electrons move to a higher orbital; but since they do not pass through intervening space to get there, this involves a “quantum leap.” Physical effects can occur at speeds exceeding the Einsteinian limit. Einstein called quantum phenomena “spooky” and disapproved of the explanations, but quantum mechanics has survived experimental testing.

The predictive, explanatory power of quantum mechanics lies in statistical probability, and gives no information about the “real” behavior of individual particles in action. In quantum mechanics, things connect. Knowledge spreads. Photons “know” when they hit, and their wave-forms disappear from the universe all at once; yet there is no way to measure accurately both of two “conjugate variables.”² But most importantly, the observer becomes part of the system with the observation and the things observed.³ In contrast to the wealth of relativistic metaphors in common use, few metaphors from quantum physics have entered our everyday language. The single exception seems to be the “quantum leap.” This is popularly misunderstood to mean that something has made an immense, unmeasurable, virtually impossible advance, rather than a small but measurable alteration in orbital. This misunderstanding is typical: quantum mechanics delivers radical uncertainty.

Like relativity in the 1920s, quantum mechanics is often referred to but only vaguely understood by the general public.⁴ SF, which depends heavily on concepts from relativistic physics (even though Einstein’s formulae preclude faster-than-light travel by any object having mass), has found quantum mechanics less helpful. Most non-scientists approach quantum mechanics through popularizations like Capra’s The Tao of Physics and Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters. These works, which connect quantum physics with the insights of various Eastern philosophies, emphasize the mystical interconnectedness of all life and the creative quality of human thought.⁵ Seth McEvoy, who claims that Delany’s interests are limited to the fields of “social science, linguistics, archaeology, and psychology” rather than “hard” science or technology, implies that Delany is unable to deal with quantum mechanics on any other level (p. 5). This misrepresents Delany, who attended the Bronx High School of Science (Motion, p. 17) and who casually refers to Weinberg, Feynman, Raup, and Gleick.⁶ It may, however, quite adequately represent the position of a number of Delany’s readers. An alteration in world-view does not depend upon popular understanding.

Writers cannot not reflect their world-view, consciously or unconsciously; this does not depend upon their “understanding.” The Newtonian writer knows what is going on and informs the reader directly; the Relativistic writer perceives cause-and-effect and expects the reader to work out the interlocking actions (given the unreliability of point of view, position, etc.); but the Quantum writer literally constructs the meaning of the text by constructing the text itself, expecting readers to repeat the process for themselves. The counter-intuitive physical phenomena described by quantum mechanics thus underlie post-modernist literature, where any term can stand as a metafiction, referring not to “reality” but to another kind of fiction depending on “the essentially unstable nature of signification. The sign is not so much a unit with two sides, as a momentary ‘fix’ between two moving layers” (Selden: 73). Like post-modern fiction, quantum mechanics argues that “cause” may be an irrelevant concept; readers—and writers—may be asking all the wrong questions.⁷ As scholar and critic as well as writer, Delany cannot not include contemporary literary theories in his world-view; nor can he not include contemporary scientific theories as well.

George Slusser calls Delany a “structuralist” writer: “Instead of reflecting some objective ‘reality,’ the fictional work is seen primarily as a word-construct, a self-contained system whose relation to our familiar world is homologous, but in no way necessary or determined by it” (p. 3). McEvoy notes that in works like Dhalgren, “facts are missing from the narrative that are usually part of a standard prose text. It is up to the reader to supply these facts. This method of co-creation (where the reader must supply the missing parts of the story, sort of a literary partnership) appears in every book by Delany to a certain extent” (p. 3). McEvoy attributes this to Delany’s dyslexia, but it also describes the post-structural paradigm.

There is no question that the contemporary world-view supports deconstruction theory, reader-response criticism, and the radical uncertainty of quantum mechanics. Possibly dyslexia provides for Delany a privileged deconstructionist outlook. He has deconstructed the concept of “theme” as representing a literary urge rejected by post-structuralists as “distorting, biasing, untrustworthy, ideologically loaded, and finally blinding” (“Neither the Beginning. …” p. 1). However (as deconstruction continually reminds us), no writer really knows everything he or she puts into the work. Moreover, although a writer may attempt to put such an apparently “obvious” aspect of literature as “theme” “under erasure,” the reader is apt to reinstate it. As readers, we need to raise our consciousness, becoming aware not only of the writer’s strategies, but also of our own accustomed reading strategies. We must continually test whether these elucidate, or misinterpret and confuse, our understanding of the text.

All we, the readers, know about the subject in the story comes from (1) what the author tells us, and (2) how the author tells us. We match the text against what we already “know,” based upon our world-view, and see how well it fits. The better the fit, the better we “understand” the story, and the more apt we are to enjoy it. Readers who rejected Dhalgren (1975) as essentially “implottable” may find Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1985) much more attractive. Still, we encounter problems. One comes from the book’s division into three parts: the Prologue, “A World Apart”; the body of the text, labelled Monologues, “Visible and Invisible Persons Distributed in Space,” consisting of 13 “chapters” that certainly distribute in space (space-time?) and that concern a number of invisibilities, but do not read like monologues; and the Epilogue, “Morning,” Prologue and Epilogue respond to careful reading. The Monologues resist it; and as its title indicates, the connection between Prologue and the following text seems obscure at best. What do we do with a story like Stars that fascinates us, almost matches our understanding of textuality, yet resolutely refuses closure?⁸

If we assume that Delany has left most of the resolution to the promised second volume of the diptych, The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities (forthcoming), we reject the promise Delany makes to his readers: “Each of the two books will stand on its own, but each can be read in reference to the other” (McEvoy: 127). It does not seem likely, as some argue, that Delany has forgotten how to construct a plot or that his interest in critical theory has irretrievably poisoned his writing ability.⁹ On the assumption that he is making reasonable (but complex and unfamiliar) demands on his readers, I will look at just two parts of the novelistic structure in Delany’s Stars in My Pocket: plot and interlocking metaphor.

1.

The plot seems at first quite straightforward. An omniscient narrator introduces us to Rhyonon, a complex, vividly described world, and to Korga, the apparent protagonist. Korga is a victim, both of his genetic heritage and of the socio-economic-technical complex in which he finds himself. He is a misfit. He seeks relief through Radical Anxiety Termination (RAT), an operation reminiscent of prefrontal lobotomy. Although RAT techniques could make Korga normal—he hopes to become able to “understand things and numbers and reading and stuff!” (1:4)—he is tricked into agreeing to a treatment that merely removes his self-destructive anger … and gives the RAT Institute license to sell him as a slave. He becomes more passive, but nothing else seems to change for him; he is no smarter, happier, or better adjusted. This life continues, with some interesting digressions, for a number of years. Then his world destroys itself or is destroyed.

We have been led to entertain certain assumptions about texts like this. We do not expect a novelist to create a character with such care and trace his history over such a long period simply to throw him away, except perhaps to point up the horror of the holocaust; yet the holocaust itself gets thrown away in a single sentence (I:62). Our expectations are frustrated. The omniscient narrator disappears. The Prologue is over, Korga has vanished, and we find Marq Dyeth of Velm, Industrial Diplomat, elegantly introducing us to the complexities of his life. He seems to be explaining something important, but we are not sure what or to whom.

As readers accustomed to relativistic textual structure, we expect Korga to reappear promptly, thus providing the contrasting point in space-time from which to view the disaster of Rhyonon. This does not occur. Marq tells his story fascinatingly, relentlessly, relativistically—but the relativity lies in his own inability to acquire knowledge. Especially, he fails to understand the Thants, those aggravating, politically sophisticated visitors to his world. This tactic reassures us; perhaps this is a political novel. We have had enough evidence for thinking so in the conflict of the Yellows vs. the Grays on Rhyonon; the Family vs. the Sygn in the worlds under the Web (which may be political; it seems sufficiently mysterious otherwise); the diplomatic emergencies that create Marq’s job, problems that apparently may throw worlds into the holocaust of Cultural Fugue (CF).

No: such assumptions are equally frustrated. We know that Marq and his world(s) face a multitude of problems, but have little evidence of the details or the possible solutions. We do see that the co-existence of human and the truly alien evelm in the “nurture stream” that is Dyethshome is vulnerable, under attack from human and evelm alike, and that Marq seems unable to comprehend what is going on, even though he can usually get data at any time simply by thinking a question at General Information, popularly called GI (II:3.7:140-41).¹⁰ We meet Japril, a Web official (perhaps the more visible and more opaque of those “Visible and Invisible Persons Distributed in Space”), who may have answers; but if she does, Marq fails to obtain or understand them.

Again, this should not surprise us. One of the major contributions a relativistic world-view has made to literature is the underinformed, unreliable narrator. But while such a narrator is usually unaware of being unreliable. Marq Dyeth is agonizingly aware. Indeed, he reminds us repeatedly of the impossibility of reliability. This does not fit our readerly expectations either.

But wait. Perhaps we have a plot after all! Korga reappears; he has been resurrected (almost literally) from the wreckage of Rhyonon by the mysterious action of the Web. Japril suddenly contacts Marq to tell him that this survivor concerns him. The power of their mutual attraction is made clear in several ways: metaphorically, by the rings once worn by Vondramach Okk, which connect Korga to General Information (since Radical Anxiety Termination prevents him from tapping in directly, neuron to network); physically, by his move to Dyethshome; emotionally, by proving to be the “perfect erotic object” of Marq’s homosexual passion (II:6:179). He is also endowed with some magnetic attraction that makes him (or them; perhaps this force depends on Korga’s proximity to Marq? on Marq’s passion for Korga?) the anxious, angry focus of virtually every human on Velm. After several forceful but inexplicable crowd scenes, Korga is abruptly shipped off Velm. The XIv have arrived, and Velm is now in danger of Cultural Fugue. In the Epilogue, Marq, off on yet another diplomatic mission, takes this philosophically: “Still I knew that morning, whatever it was, was over. When I awoke again, it would be day” (III:375). The end.

That’s a plot? Look at what we don’t know: What happened to Rhyonon? Who or what are the Xlv? What is Cultural Fugue? What happens to Velm? What role does the Web play in all this? What are the Thants really up to? What’s going on with Marq, and what has happened to Korga? We expect a novel to connect actions and meanings, or at least actions and purpose. We have seen Marq and Korga together: enjoying sex, “dragon hunting,” putting on a highly unsuccessful party for the Thants, raising Marq’s seven-times great-grandmother’s revenant, fending off the madding crowd—all interesting as actions, as the people are interesting as people; but the actions do not combine to “explain” the text.

2.

If the plot seems intractable, perhaps a study of some important metaphors will open the work to us. There are plenty to choose from; I will look at three that interlock: home, history, and information. As Marq muses:

… history is what is outside, in both time and space, the current moment of home. And without history, there is no home. … When you go to a new, all you can take of your home is its history. And … your choice is to take it knowingly and be its (and your new home’s) silent friend, or to take it unknowingly and be its (and your new home’s) loud slave.

(II:3.2:104)

“Home” is a major metaphor in Delany’s novel. The protagonist of the first section, “Rat” Korga, seems never to have a home. Once he undergoes Radical Anxiety Termination, he is sent as a slave to various unpleasant stations, without choice or even the ability to be concerned about his situation. At one point he gains access to a library and to the ability to read. This should be a liberating experience; one would expect it to make a difference to him. It doesn’t. He is recaptured, re-enslaved, and his life goes on as before. But Korga demonstrates the real meaning of homelessness when his entire world destroys itself, apparently the result of Cultural Fugue.

Marq Dyeth, the protagonist of the second part of the novel, has a very different problem. He is a sophisticated interstellar traveller, frequently away from home. Every planet he visits seems obsessed by the danger of Cultural Fugue, that ultimate threat to security. On Velm, even the physical fabric of the residence he occupies appears unreal. No one knows all the ramifications of Dyethshome, which, furnished as much by hologram projections as by tangible artifacts, seems somehow to exceed the space allotted to it. Moreover, it is the home not of a family as we know it (as sexuality is not represented as we know it, either), but of a “stream” (II:8.5:219-20), a non-genetic admixture of human and evelm that lives and works in and out of Dyethshome (pronounced Death’s Home [II:3.5:115]). This seems like an unusual arrangement, and one that the (human) Thants find frighteningly repellent; but its importance is left unstated.

History, for Marq Dyeth, is Dyethshome, which was made possible by the largesse of the dictator Vondramach Okk many “ripples of the stream” ago. It still contains as an active participant the first builder, his “seven-times great-grandmother,” Gylda Dyeth, now “a simulated synapse casting,” looking like crystal column (II:3.5:115). History is also people, or rather Marq’s knowledge and understanding of people. As an Industrial Diplomat, he is schooled in people and their ways, in exchanging information, in various forms of knowledge. Yet what he most wants to know, he cannot even find the proper questions to ask about.

Marq’s tale, Gylda’s, and that of Vondramach Okk intertwine like snakes on a caduceus. It is Okk’s poetry that Marq reads; her rings that Rat Korga wears; her savage persistence that pulled history into its present shape, while driving four planets into Cultural Fugue; her addictions that forced medicine to create the technology that revives Korga; her generosity that built Dyethshome. To know this tale is to know how Dyethshome came into being, for Dyethshome is history as well as home. Marq’s job is Dyethshome docent; and as Marq and Korga meet, students roam the grounds, studying it. Even so, we learn little enough about either the place or the people who live in it.

History relies on memory, which acts in ways only now being explained in the physical universe by “the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is a two-way contract between the future and the past” (Cramer: 96). Memory both recalls the past and changes it, even as we use it to come to terms with the present. A two-way contract would allow us to “remember ahead” as well. If so, Cultural Fugue may be the time-reversed, quantum memory of the end of history, the destruction of the universe.

But what in this text corresponds to “quanta,” those tiny yet measurable, essential packets of energy? When we look at Delany’s multi-world universe, one in which many thousands of planets support many billions of sentient life-forms (we notice that Marq Dyeth is never able to determine exactly how many “people” are alive in the universe, although he does ask), the smallest unit seems to be one sentient living being. When we read Stars in My Pocket, we see particles—Rat Korga and Marq Dyeth—and may wonder in whose pocket, and on what scale, these stars may fit. If we see the humans as particles, then the quantized energy they respond to must be information.

In the Prologue, Korga is put in touch with General Information and “jumped up” or energized, like an electron jumping orbitals. He takes in vast amounts of literature literally in seconds, any reader’s dream. yet when he is disconnected from GI, he jumps back; nothing seems to have changed. He is “the same” Korga, a slave, a Rat, treated the same, behaving the same. His “knowledge,” which he does not forget (our usual test for effective “knowing”), makes no difference to him or to his world. Yet something destroys that world. Is it Cultural Fugue? The mysterious Xlv? Or has Korga’s energy state something to do with it? To which (or both, or neither) should we connect the later appearance of pre-CF symptoms on Velm?

“Information” keeps showing up in this novel, yet it rarely comes as “knowledge.” Knowledge, the sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or inferred, includes both empirical material and that derived by inference and interpretation. Information is usually construed as narrower in scope and implies a random collection of material rather than orderly synthesis. For instance, GI simply puts answers into the heads of those who question. These answers may or may not be useful; people often ignore them, as a sort of background noise, because they frequently cannot use the data adequately. Not only is there too much to know, there are too few connections for what one does know. Marq explains:

If only because there is so much to know in our human universe, the working assumption you can go on is: You may assume, about absolutely any fact (how many transuranic elements are there? why does cold water remove human blood stains faster than hot?) that nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand do not know it—which goes for the working assumption too.

(II:3.7:141)

Moreover, in order to obtain information, one must know how to ask an answerable question, something that Marq Dyeth rarely manages to do when it really matters.

Given this information about “information,” how do we find something we can call “knowledge”? Does Korga achieve “knowledge” when he reads, retains—and apparently understands and enjoys—poetry, or does he merely acquire information? What kind of knowledge does Marq deal with when he “knows” how little the information he acquires—say, about the alien Xlv—actually covers? Would knowledge (as opposed to information) produce a plot?

Marq passes up the opportunity to obtain a “vaurine recording” of the prolonged interview with Japril that recounts the Web’s resurrection of Korga. He later regrets his “idiocy” (II:6:182), but what he wants most is information about Cultural Fugue. What he receives is yet another restriction; already forbidden to ask about Rhyonon, he is now forbidden to ask about the Xlv as well, and his query about Cultural Fugue is neatly diverted. This prohibition may imply that Marq’s acquisition of such information would be intrinsically dangerous, perhaps even precipitating Cultural Fugue; or it may merely reflect a pragmatic refusal to engage in an impossible task, organizing information about CF into the knowledge that Marq seeks. In either case, we can read CF as a metaphorical example of radical uncertainty.

Nothing in the text, either physical or metaphorical, seems sufficient to account for Cultural Fugue. Every society that Marq visits fears it; the Web is supposed to prevent it. Delany has suggested many possible causes of CF on Rhyonon: political conflict between the Yellows and the Grays, reflecting the larger conflict between Family and Sygn; the socio-economic system, obviously failing (as evinced by the creation and treatment of Rats and the rationalizations that permit this); the tectonic instability of the planet. Later we are told of the alien Xlv—yet another mysterious possible “cause” of CF. Or are they a result? We don’t know, and we aren’t told. Like photons, they disappear completely, unknowably, as the planet Rhyonon flames with biocidal energy. Their sudden appearance near Velm, at the end of the book, “causes” the Web to remove Korga as unexpectedly as they sent him there.

Cultural Fugue, part of humanity’s long history, is the ultimate home-wrecker. The very name Xlv engages this metaphor in our nuclear memory. If we read it as a date—(19)45, the year in which America initiated nuclear war, opening the “nuclear age” with violence—then it engages not only our memory, but our paranoia. We may indeed be the Xlv: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” If any issue connects Stars in My Pocket with today’s world, it is Cultural Fugue.

We have identified knowledge on three paradigmatic levels here. The lowest is the mechanistic, in which one can really know what is going on. This is represented by the “dragon hunt,” that fascinating and enigmatic pastime engaged in by both evelmi and humans on Velm, where the hunter literally becomes his target for a limited time. Marq introduces Korga to this game, apparently for the sheer fascination of seeing him “connect” fully with another species. In this passage Delany deliberately plays the “omniscient author,” a role impossible in modern (let alone post-modern) fiction. Then uncertainty reasserts itself: their successful hunt makes no difference to the plot.

The second level of knowledge is relativistic, represented best by the complicated, abortive relationship between the Dyeths and the Thants. Some members of the Thant family seem to offer friendship, others jealous enmity. Invited to a party in their honor, the Thants arrange to insult their hosts. Marq the diplomat seems baffled and dismayed as George Thant accuses him of diplomatic trickery and brags of the way her family has outmaneuvered him. She drives her point home by disrupting the holographic projection that creates Marq’s room, a blatant display of power. Her point of view differs completely from Marq’s, though her objectives remain unclear. Here Delany emphasizes Marq’s relativistic role of unavoidably unreliable (and baffled) narrator.

The third level, the most mysterious, is the one on which both Korga and Marq take in information, jump activity levels, and fall back. All power in this book is based on knowledge: the Web, which seems to control so many actions, operates strictly from knowledge; GI, the information system, is itself a means to political power. This is made clear on Rhyonon, which forbids its general use, fearing perhaps that too many people jumping energy shells (as Korga does) could disrupt the entire system. On this level, Marq and Korga are mere data points in a system of probability.

We certainly see the love relationship between Korga and Marq as driving the action, focussing a universe of energy. The energy of their combined mutual attraction may translate into mass sufficient to pull all Velm—and even the Xlv—into their vicinity. The presence of the Xlv signals that Velm is in imminent danger of Cultural Fugue. If (as we have speculated) this energy can as easily move forward in time as backward, it may earlier have unleashed CF on Rhyonon. At some point it may even become controlled (or controllable), productive. As Japril tells Marq when he protests the abduction of Korga, “We can’t have the two of you there. … We can’t have the two of you together yet” (III:367; my emphasis).

Identifying issues like these should clarify the text, if it were Newtonian or relativistic. That doing so still leaves several layers of uncertainty should convince us that it is based on a quantum paradigm. Let us look at one of the “interpretational ideas” of quantum mechanics, “Heisenberg’s Knowledge Interpretation: the notion that the wave function is neither a physical wave travelling through space nor a direct description of a physical system, but rather is a mathematically encoded description of the knowledge of an observer who is making a measurement on the system” (Cramer: 94). If the wave-form is metaphorically represented by General Information, and we are observers along with Marq and Korga, then our knowledge is precisely the point: our knowledge of the measurement (the reading) we make of the system-as-a-whole-at-a-date.¹¹ In other words, the text consists of our reading, our comprehension of the text.

The three metaphors—home, history, information—intertwine, neatly and inextricably. They form a set of “conjugate variables,” necessary for measurement of the story, yet resistant to individual measurement. The more we examine one of the set, the less we can fix the other two. What knowledge leads Marq to live his history? What history has established his home? And what home has he, given his history and his knowledge? As a single particle in his universe, Marq can—must—construct “explanations” for himself as he takes in quanta of experience/information. For instance, when he is led through the (unfamiliar) North Hall to avoid the sudden crowds about Dyethshome, he is reminded by a student that the rings Korga wears once belonged to a woman who “murdered someone in this room!” Suddenly, for Marq, the “student’s word, as it displaced me from my own image of its history, by the same movement, replaced this abandoned hall in some eccentric centrality that only struck me as we left it” (II:12.3:305). This process of repeated realignment produces Marq’s tale, the “Monologues” and “Epilogue.” But it does not account for the Prologue. Each section creates a consistent pattern; yet no apparent pattern reconciles all the sections.

Why does Delany structure his novel this way? If we assume that he is artistically competent—not incapacitated by dyslexia, overdosed on literary theory, or deliberately alienating readers—we must find another explanation for our problems. Let us assume that he presents readers with this kind of text because his sense of the contemporary paradigm precludes his following the familiar pattern. Our problem with Stars in My Pocket, I contend, is therefore less the result of Delany’s theoretical convictions than of his writing from a world-view organized around the metaphors of quantum physics while most of us are still reading from relativity. He is making a new set of demands on himself, as creator of a “monologue” of many voices, and on his readers, as inevitable co-contributors to the text. The “field” of 20th-century literature now includes mechanistic, relativistic, and quantum-theoretic paradigms; writers may choose among them for artistic purposes, but even if they do not awarely choose, they cannot avoid finding this climate of opinion “the underlying force guiding intellectual inquiry” (Hayles: 22).¹²

As Robert A. Heinlein has a character say in The Door Into Summer, “you railroad only when it comes time to railroad” (12:186). Heinlein here uses “railroad” as a synonym for “technological advance.” (The protagonist of The Door Into Summer is an inventor and engineer who sees a changed world-view as the function of new technologies.) The term serves equally well to distinguish a new paradigm. Perhaps it is now time to railroad, and Delany is on the new track. And perhaps, once we assimilate quantum metaphors, we will find it impossible to read any other way. If our world is now structured on radical uncertainty, cause and effect must be seen as processes rather than as reality. This is the history that creates our new home. Shall we “take it knowingly, and be its (and [our] new home’s) silent friend, or … take it unknowingly and be its (and [our] new home’s) loud slave”? The question is not trivial.

3.

Readers in earlier periods enjoyed a tacit compact with writers, an agreement about the way the world worked; but writers like Delany seem to transcend that compact. They engage a new paradigm, one that provides more explanatory power, a better fit with observed “reality” than the old. In it, author, text, and reader form a whole which cannot be divided. Our ability to read the text (and our world) depends not only upon author and text, but also upon what we bring to the reading. It seems that we must now bring our understanding, limited as it may be, of quantum mechanics to this (and many other) texts or leave large sections unread and unreadable.

Where we stand when we pose questions affects the questions we ask as much as does our understanding of the range of possible answers. Standing in a relativistic universe, writers could ask questions that related one observer’s information to another’s; could question the validity of history and the universality of knowledge; but could still subject the relativistic universe to cause-effect analysis. The idea that the quantum particle not only cannot be located in space-time until it ceases to exist as a particle, but that its possible “future” does not bear a one-to-one relation to its “past” opened the door to fiction consciously created as metafictional construct, not to mirror a reality but to create “realities.”

If knowledge itself consists of nothing more substantial than a collection of possibilities created by the statements that compose it, and if the observer doesn’t merely alter the observation by the act of observing it, but also creates the observation itself and (possibly) the results as well, then readers, who see only the “tracks” left by the photons (data) as (after) they “hit,” must also engage with the field (or a fair proportion of it) that the photons “covered” before they “hit.” They must work out as text (not as “real”) something analogous to their own understandable experience, recognizably (or potentially) human. In other words, readers must construct for themselves an experience of reading they find valid, if not “true.”

One thing we can be sure of: once we experience a paradigm shift (and we do so by exposing ourselves to this kind of literature), we can’t unexperience it. We not only can’t feel the way we did before, we can’t even recall how it felt to feel that way (cf. Kuhn: 20–23). We can’t unread a book, either. Having experienced Stars in My Pocket—having seen (in some sense) where the photons turned into visible light (and where they did not)—must change the way we look at the beginning of the book, at the relationships it explores, at ourselves. The world-view inevitably alters the work, even as the work alters the world-view.

As SF readers, we may now find ourselves in a cross-paradigm communications gap. We have familiarized ourselves with the SF “code,” a way of languaging fiction to reflect the relativistic, changing, technological world we perceive about us. We have defended this code from persistent denigration by the “establishment.” If we now insist on maintaining this code unaltered, claiming that any challenge represents merely another assault by academe, we may find ourselves shut out by the shift in scientific paradigms, as “mundane” readers have allowed themselves to be shut out of SF. Like the “new wave” which offended many SF readers but opened the literature to new possibilities, the quantum paradigm offers a closer “fit” with observed phenomena, a better way of representing the way the world “really” works. Readers who fail to make the paradigm shift may find themselves left with little of the newest and most interesting literature still available to them. On the other hand, writers like Delany who push at the boundaries of fiction need to keep their readers in mind.¹³ We can expect writers to leave at the very least a trail of white pebbles in the paradigmatic forest.

As a relatively accessible quantum text, Stars in My Pocket may leave just such a trail. Stars (which, more clearly than Dhalgren, is a thoroughly “textual” text) can produce/induce/introduce in/for the reader the paradigm shift that makes these ideas not only accessible but relevant: a shift in being as well as seeing, which, we may assume, represents the tacit aim of most serious artists. Stars doesn’t have to be deconstructed; it can be read. Fortunately, as contemporary literary theory demonstrates, we cannot avoid constructing the text as we read, whether we like it or not. The demands made on the reader by quantum literature are difficult but not impossible. They include the active awareness that we live in radical uncertainty; that reading is co-creation; and that we therefore cannot, in the quantum universe, reread the (same) text, since in the first reading the first text has disappeared, along with the first reader. But literature organized on a quantum paradigm requires (at least) two readings: not a “rereading” (which implies doing “the same thing” again), but a new reading to reconstruct for ourselves the system that produced the quantum event constructed by the novel. To read the new paradigm we must bring to it our new past, through which memory may construct a new textual “home.”

Notes

1. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories are excellent examples of the power of this popular assumption, while simultaneously parodying it.

2. “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: the idea that pairs of ‘conjugate variables’ (such as position and momentum or energy and time) cannot simultaneously be measured to ‘perfect’ accuracy, nor can they have well-defined values at the same time” (Cramer, p. 94).

3. “Bohr’s Complementarity Principle: the idea that the uncertainty principle is an intrinsic property of nature (not just a measurement problem) and that the observer, his measuring apparatus, and the measured system form a ‘whole’ which cannot be divided” (Cramer, p. 94).

4. In the '20s and '30s, SF writers fairly boasted that they were experimenting in fiction with ideas that only a few top scientists understood in fact. More recently, many physicists, Richard Feynman among them, admit that although they routinely and successfully use quantum physics, they do not find it intuitively obvious.

5. Cf. Crease and Mann, pp. 52–54. They cogently argue that this mysticism serves neither popular nor scientific understanding of quantum mechanics, and that it significantly distorts “eastern mysticism as well as physics. Zen Buddhists believe that individual perception is inherently fragmentary and provisional not because … the observer creates reality but because he creates illusions … that he cannot help but construe as reality” (p. 57).

6. See Delany’s “Neither the Beginning …,” p. 9. Delany also notes his early interest in and study of biological science in “Shadows” (Jewel-Hinged Jaw, pp. 48–50).

7. Oddly enough, an identifiable literary locus for quantum mechanics outside of modern fiction can be found in composition theory, where writers are advised to consider their ideas as particles, as waves, and as fields in the course of pre-writing. See, for instance, Young, Becker and Pike, pp. 126–30.

8. When I have tried to discuss my readings of Stars in My Pocket with knowledgeable SF readers, the most frequent response I have encountered has been: “I tried to read it, but gave up at the point where it stopped making sense to me.” That usually means at the end of the “Prologue.” (The next most frequent response was: “I gave up on Delany after Dhalgren.”)

9. See, for example, Darrel Schweitzer’s claim that “aside from an autobiography, Delany’s last decent book was Driftglass. … He is certainly the worst example in our field of the damage over-attention to critical theory can do” (p. 30).

10. Like many other terms in this book, GI carries with it a number of associations, including the Freudian implications of “gastrointestinal” and all the socio-political connotations of “Government Issue.”

11. Compare Delany’s comments above on why he subscribes a date to his manuscripts (“so that … I have some idea where I was, when”: p. 320)—RMP.

12. The Introduction and chapter 1 of N. Katherine Hayles’ The Cosmic Web provide an elegant elucidation of the relationship of physics to literature.

13. Articles like his “Neither the Beginning …” prove Delany’s desire to remain in contact with SF readers. He notes that the “first version of this article was requested in place of a Guest of Honor Speech at the Readercon science fiction convention in Lowell, Massachusetts, where, as far as I could tell, the interest in these topics [e.g., literary theory] was both high and sincere” (“Neither …,” p. 9). Schweitzer, however, who calls the speech “puzzling,” notes that Delany warned that it was “going to be rough” and that he found it so; that Delany soon lost most of his audience; and that of those who stuck it out, there were only “about five people present who spoke fluent Delanyspeak” (p. 29).

    Guest of Honor speeches at fan conventions often deal with topical problems in the SF world, which may include critical issues; but they usually do so in an accessible and humorous way. This talk of Delany's must have been neither accessible nor humorous. Nor is the article easy reading—though, unlike the speech, seeing Delany's remarks in print gives the reader the opportunity to reflect, return, and try again.

Works Cited

Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. NY, 1976.

Cramer, John G. “The Quantum Handshake,” Analog, Nov. 1986, pp. 93–97.

Crease, Robert P. & Charles C. Mann. “Physics for Mystics,” The Sciences, July/Aug. 1987, pp. 50–57.

Delany, Samuel R. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. NY: Berkley, 1977.

———. The Motion of Light in Water. NY: New American Library, 1988.

———. “Neither the Beginning nor the End of Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Semiotics, or Deconstruction for SF Readers: An Introduction,” The New York Review of Science Fiction, No.6 (Feb. 1989), pp. 1, 8–12; No. 7 (Mar. 1989), pp. 14–18: No. 8 (Apr. 1989), pp. 9–11.

———. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. NY: Bantam Spectra, 1985.

Hayles, N. Katherine. The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca, NY: 1984.

Heinlein, Robert A. The Door Into Summer. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction From Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore, 1974.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. Chicago, 1970.

McEvoy, Seth. Samuel R. Delany. NY, 1984.

Schweitzer, Darrell. “Critical Theories,” Aboriginal Science Fiction, Mar-Apr. 1990, pp. 28–32.

Selden, Raman. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Lexington, KY: 1985.

Slusser, George Edgar. The Delany Intersection. [Milford Series, Vol. 10.] San Bernardino, CA: 1977.

Tompkins, Jane P., ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore, 1980.

Young, Richard E. & Alton L. Becker & Kenneth L. Pike. Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. NY, 1970.

Zukav, Gary. The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics. NY, 1979.