Determinacion del contenido de humedad inicial y de análisis

We have seen how at a moment of personal and political crisis Woolf felt drawn to the essay-novel form and then how her attempt to write such a novel led to a particular narrative pedagogy in The Years. Like Woolf, Delany has often been drawn to a melding of nonfictional and fictional approaches within his novels even early in his career (e.g. the journal entries that serve as epigraphs in The Einstein Intersection: “while the ‘Author’s Journal’ entries describe real incidents, most were apparently written not on the immediate occasion of the events they recount, but shortly afterward and with their role in the novel already in mind” [In Search of Silence 631 note 364-367]). It was in Trouble on Triton, though, that fictional nonfiction would take a more central role, one that would be replicated in Delany’s work through the 1980s and 1990s.

Completed in July 1974 and published (as Triton) in early 1976, Trouble on Triton includes the first two pieces of “Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus”: the novel Trouble on Triton and the second appendix, “Ashima Slade and the Harbin-Y Lectures”. (Appendix A is titled “From the Triton Journal” and is partly drawn from his essay “Shadows” [Longer Views 253-323], which was written concurrently [Peplow & Bravard 46]. “Shadows” is

then referred to in Appendix B as the name of a lecture given by Ashima Slade, who was born in the year 2051 [Trouble on Triton 301, 297. See also Longer Views xxiv-xxvi].) Delany has explained the “Modular Calculus” as “mostly doubletalk” (Shorter Views 332) and “an algorithm or set of algorithms (a set of fixed operations) that can be applied to any fitting grammar to adjust it into a guiding grammar” and poses the problem “How do we know when we have a model of a situation; and how do we tell what kind of model it is?” The “Informal Remarks” are not the Modular Calculus itself, but rather “a model of a system” (Return 285, 286, 290).

The later pieces of “Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus” appear within the Return to Nevèrÿon series:

The “Informal Remarks” do not include the first five tales in the Nevèrÿon series. The “Appendix” to the first five tales, however, forms Part Three of the “Informal Remarks.” The novel Neveryóna, or: the Tale of Signs and Cities is Part Four of the “Informal Remarks.” From their position in that book it is undecidable whether or not “Appendix A: The Culhar’ Correspondence” or “Appendix B: Acknowledgments” is or is not part of Part Four. The first two tales of volume three are not part of the “Informal Remarks.” The third tale in Flight from Nevèrÿon, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” constitutes Part Five of the “Informal Remarks.” But from their position, it is undecidable whether anything that follows, in volume four (up to and including these notes) is or is not a part. But it would seem that any rich system tends to function through an interchange between what is inside the system and what is outside the system (with what is outside frequently fueling the system proper): and there are always certain elements, such as this appendix,

which are undecidable as to whether they are inside or outside – often, though not always, those parts that encourage definition and revision. (Return 291)

Trouble on Triton’s “Appendix B: Ashima Slade and the Harbin-Y Lectures”, the second of the “Informal Remarks”, includes the dedication/subtitle “A Critical Fiction for Carol Jacobs & Henry Sussman”, and critical fiction is a useful term for so much of Delany’s overall project. It is a phrase he has used in other contexts, as well, for instance the essay “Wagner/Artaud” is subtitled “A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions”, where the term does not refer to any formal element so much as an admission to the reader that this essay, like all essays, is a radical selection and arrangement of material, and that ultimately what it is doing is not conveying some sort of “unprocessed history” (a concept Delany scoffs at in an interview in Silent Interviews [145-146]) and proposing an argument so much as it is asking, “What if…?” (Thus, this critical fiction is a bit like science fiction.) Elsewhere, a “critical fiction” means for Delany an imperfect or even inaccurate concept used strategically, e.g.: “The division of content from form is a necessary (but only provisional) critical fiction. The reason it is only provisional is because, at a certain point in the discussion, form begins to function as content – and content often functions as a sign for the implied form with which that content is conventionally dealt” (Shorter Views 259). If we — perhaps indulging in our own critical fiction — attach some of the properties of this description to the larger critical fiction of the “Informal Remarks” and the Return to Nevèrÿon series generally, we can see a kind of planned obsolence in them: they are highly provisional and self-consciously incomplete (“Some Informal Remarks”), and at a certain point they stop being useful and start blending in with whatever is their supposed opposite. Under such a deconstructive frame, once the critical fiction has done its work of rendering

visible what was previously hidden, then it may be dispensed with, or our analysis may shift toward what the critical fiction itself ignores or hides.54

The fictionality of the critical fictions reaches its limit in the fifth of the “Informal Remarks”, the novel-length story “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals”, where the obviously fictional and the obviously nonfictional compete for the reader’s attention in the text.