made a noticeable bulge but not the kind of bulge one would ordinarily associate with a pistol.
“Sorry,” he said coolly. “I’m broke.”268
“Did I ask?”
“You were going to.”269
The old man made as if to return in the other direction, so he had to speak quickly, something that would hold him here.
“I saw you speaking with Miss Kraus.”270
He was held.
“Congratulations—you broke through the ice!”271
The old man half-smiled, half-frowned. “You know her?”272
“Mm. You could say that we’re aware of her.”273 The “we” had been a deliberate risk, an hors d’oeuvre. Touching a finger to each side of the strings by which the heavy bag hung from his belt, he urged on it a lazy pendular motion.274 “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
There was nothing indulgent now in the man’s face. “I probably do.”275
His smile had lost the hard edge of calculation. It was the same smile he’d have smiled for Papa, for Amparo, for Miss Couplard, for anyone he liked.276 “Where do you come from? I mean, what country?”
“That’s none of your business, is it?”
“Well, I just wanted … to know.”
The old man (he had ceased, somehow, to be Alyona Ivanovna)277 turned away and walked directly toward the squat stone cylinder of the old fortress.278
He remembered how the plaque at the entrance—the same that had cited the 7.7 million—had said that Jenny Lind had sung there and it had been a great success.279
The old man unzipped his fly and, lifting out his cock, began pissing on the wall.280
Little Mister Kissy Lips fumbled with the strings of the bag. It was remarkable how long the old man stood there pissing because despite every effort of the stupid knot to stay tied he had the pistol out before the final sprinkle had been shaken out.281
He laid the fulminate cap on the exposed nipple, drew the hammer back two clicks, past the safety, and aimed.282
The man made no haste zipping up. Only then did he glance in Little Mister Kissy Lips’ direction. He saw the pistol aimed at him. They stood not twenty feet apart,283 so he must have seen it.284
He said, “Ha!”285 And even this, rather than being addressed to the boy with the gun, was only a parenthesis from the faintly-aggrieved monologue he resumed each day at the edge of the water.286 He turned away and a moment later he was back on the job, hand out, asking some fellow for a quarter.287
—New York,
April, 1970
As our Pretext was a pretext in at least two ways, so we shall “refuse” the text of “Angouleme” in at least two ways. Having now read it, ponderingly, straightforwardly, we shall refuse that ponderous reading in favor of a subsequent, diffused one, interlarded and interlaced with meditations and mediations, heuristical diversions, and hermeneutical divagations. The carets point to the places where we shall shortly perforate the text with our own discourse, which will treat of the words between as discrete lexias, each lexia to be followed by one of a number of modes of commentary.
Currently the best known example of this approach to criticism of prose fiction is Roland Barthes’s S/Z (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), an essay on the Balzac novella “Sarrasine.” But it is hard to contemplate S/Z without thinking of its fictive predecessor, Nabokov’s Pale Fire (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962), if not his Eugene Onegin (4 vols., Bollingen Series LXXII, Princeton University Press, 1964). And both Barthes and Nabokov are adumbrated by a work in like form leading to highly different ends. I mean Bernard Grebanier’s illuminating and insightful The Heart of Hamlet (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1960). But readers familiar with the range of science fiction criticism will detect, in the tenor, in the timbre, in the final informality of our text, in the trajectory at which our search after wonder initiates itself, if not in its ultimate angle of impact, the pervasive influence of Damon Knight’s The Annotated “Masks” (in Those Who Can: A Science Fiction Reader, Robin Scott Wilson, ed. New York: Mentor Books, New American Library, 1972): if we appropriate an extra-generic formality, what asks for the appropriation has its originary problematics bound up with and entwined throughout the s-f genre itself: as has been many times noted, science fiction establishes a critical historiography, in which are implicit certain critical questions (that the knowledgeable reader will hear echoing throughout our text), with the first use of the term1 (1929) in our century by Hugo Gernsback.
Here we must mention that the French have a problem with this sort of detailed analysis that in general the American avoids: that problem is the existence, in the French lycée and gymnasium, of the pedagogical technique explication de texte, a traditional student exercise in which a paragraph or so of prose (or a short passage of poetry) is analyzed exhaustively in terms of the way the sounds of the words, their rhythms and specific ordering, choice of tense and diction, as well as other stylistic elements, modulate the sense, lend emphasis here, irony there, or create a particular emotional tone. Such an exercise produces readers very sensitive to the nuances of French style. But such an exercise also constitutes a tradition where the extended analysis of prose is equated with a particularly undergraduate sort of tediousness. French critics who attempt such a detail-oriented analysis must reassure the reader that they are not simply hawking a high school paper gone to seed. And they usually avoid all mention of those elements—euphony, rhythm, word order—that might so earmark the essay.
American high schools and colleges have no such tradition. And though we wish to avoid any easy or rigidly mechanical approach that, with extended application, might render our study tediously puerile, we do not feel the same constraint as the French to avoid, in the course of our discussion, all mention of the (traditionally so-called) poetic elements a writer such as Disch uses to contour his text.2 But we shall remain aware that we are analyzing prose, prose fiction, and prose science fiction at that—not a poem.
After having encountered the “Diffused Text,” we shall presume (after the pentilogue of pauses and distractions supplied by the “Exotexts”) a readerly return to the text above, to re-read and to re-fuse the diffused elements. Hopefully this coming reading will serve as well to defuse any claim to an explosive authority the diffused text may have inadvertently appropriated. If our undertaking is successful, that success can be measured precisely from the degree of necessary (and sufficient) superfluity our own co-text bears to the text of “Angouleme.”
1. Gernsback’s initial term, scientifiction, became, by a more or less natural process, today’s “science fiction” or “SF.” The first known use, however, of “Science-Fiction” follows a discussion of R. N. Horne’s novel The Poor Artist in William Wilson’s A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject, London: Darton and Co., 1851: “We hope it will not be long before we have other works of Science-Fiction, as we believe such works likely to fulfil a good purpose, and create an interest, where, unhappily, science alone might fail.” There follows a long account of “the poetry of science.” Though the use of the two terms forms an illuminating, diachronic coincidence, there is no evidence for direct influence from Wilson to Gernsback.
2. Disch is the author of an extremely impressive volume of poems, The Right Way to Figure Plumbing (Fredonia, NY: Basilisk Press, 1971). His poems have appeared widely, in Poetry (Chicago), The Little Magazine, The Paris Review, The American Review, and The Transatlantic Review, among many others.
3
The Context
The