The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction

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The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction

by Samuel R. Delany, Matthew Cheney (Introduction)

4.28 of 5 stars 4.28 · rating details · 99 ratings · 11 reviews

Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw appeared originally in 1977, and is now long out of print and hard to find. The impact of its demonstration that science fiction was a special language, rather than just gadgets and green-skinned aliens, began reverberations still felt in science fiction criticism. This edition includes two new essays, one written at the time and one...more

Paperback, 254 pages

Published July 30th 2009 by Wesleyan University Press (first published June 1st 1977)

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Feb 02, 2010 Valerie added it · review of another edition

I've never read any of Delaney's fiction, but I found much of his critical work absorbing and interesting. There were discussions on such divers topics as the grammar of ASL and the question of (numerically) equal representation of the sexes in stories.

I'm told LeGuin denies ever having read Delaney's critique on The Dispossed; I gather this is because she feared she'd become hypersensitized, as Oliver Sacks once complained that he'd become overconscious of his gestures after being accused of i...more

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Apr 26, 2011 David rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A must read for any serious SF writer. Sam Delany is brilliant, one of the smartest people living. That said he's also ridiculously pretentious and this collection of essays indulges itself in the worst excesses of Derrida and the like (the 60 page analysis of Ursula K. Leguin's "the Dispossessed" is unreadable), but it's still worth it for Delany's insights into SF (he gives a brilliant and simple description of the differences between SF, Fantasy, and Literary fiction with the simple phrase "A...more

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Dec 18, 2012 Gabriel C. rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, scifi, 2012

I wish I had read all of the stuff he's talking about, and read it immediately before reading him. I'm so in awe. I imagine getting a job at Temple and being near him. Is he still active? I'd have to work really hard to get there. Maybe it's not quite in my line but I wish it were. It could be. I don't know. I feel like things are falling apart in this review right now. I'm just sitting hear overhearing and tired and can't give this book justice right now. I wish I could. I can say right now, th...more

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Jun 03, 2013 Larou added it · review of another edition

This book, and in particular the essay opening the collection, “About 5,750 Words” is famous (I wouldn’t know whether justly or not) for being the first attempt to define Science Fiction not by way of its content (“It takes place in the future”, “It has robots and starships”) but by way of its literary form. In all honesty, I’m not at all sure there actually is any formal element that would allow to identify a given work as being distinctly Science Fiction, but Delany’s attempt at identifying it...more This book, and in particular the essay opening the collection, “About 5,750 Words” is famous (I wouldn’t know whether justly or not) for being the first attempt to define Science Fiction not by way of its content (“It takes place in the future”, “It has robots and starships”) but by way of its literary form. In all honesty, I’m not at all sure there actually is any formal element that would allow to identify a given work as being distinctly Science Fiction, but Delany’s attempt at identifying it is both heroic and fascinating.

He does so by way of “reading protocols”, i.e. a certain (mostly implicit) set of rules and skills that is required to actually make sense of SFnal sentences. A phrase like (to quote one of his examples) “the door dilated”, used quite casually by Heinlein in one of his novels, just does not make any sense in a frame of reference that is not Science Fiction and that is not familiar with the concept of iris doors. Of course, one has to ask where this frame of reference comes from, as it needs to exist in some kind of contest; and when Delany finally describes Science Fiction as “What is possible” (as opposed to “what is” of realistic and “what is impossible” of fantastic fiction), he has moved away from strictly formal criteria back towards defining Sciene Fiction as a specific content again, as there is just no way to determine possibility without recourse to some kind of external, non-literary reality that would be independent of any specific form.

But then it is very doubtful whether Delany is interested in the merely formal anyway, for the essays collected in this volume also show him as someone with a keen interest not just in literary theory but also in politics, the politics of literature and even the politics of literary forms. This is at its most pronounced and its most detailed in his long essay on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which is in many ways the most remarkable and most important essay in this volume but also the one I had the most issues with. Most important because his examination of Le Guin’s work led Delany eventually to write his own novel Triton, most remarkable because it is such a close and fascinating reading, admiring even where it criticizes and raising many excellent points. But also the most problematic for the particular ad hominem argumentation of much of the criticism Delany levels against The Dispossessed – the homo in this case not being Le Guin but Delany himself, in so far as much of his argument consists simply of claiming that he has experienced things differently than Le Guin describes them and that therefore he must be right and the novel must be wrong.

Now, I agree that a depersonalized, absolutely objective point of view is at best an illusion, at worst an ideology that masks the most impoverished form of subjectivity, that the writing subject is always inextricably involved and engaged in any kind of debate and that therefore it is not automatically illegitimate to appeal to that subject’s experience. However, the simple referral to a subjective, individual experience does not constitute an argument - if it is not in some way mediated or refined through some degree of objectivity or generality, it remains a mere statement of opinion. And this is unfortunately where a large part of Delany’s essay on The Dispossessed remains stuck, a part that contrasts rather strangely with those bits where Delany’s criticism is solidly founded on a close reading of the novel’s text. The whole essay thus remains a somewhat uneven affair, but it is well worth reading – both for its insights on The Dispossessed and the snippets of Delany’s autobiography, as badly integrated as the two may be in this instance. I can’t help but suspect that Delany felt somewhat similarly, and that because of this, the essay might very well have been the starting point not just for Triton but for two of my favourite essays in this volume that explore precisely different ways of melding subjective experience with objective insight, the individual with the general.

The first one is the last piece in the collection, “A Fictional Architecture That Manages Only with Great Difficulty Not Once to Mention Harlan Ellison” - not really an essay, but a series of autobiographical sketches, a kaleidoscopic jumble of scenes where Science Fiction intersected with Delany’s life (or the other way round). As much as I enjoyed getting to Delany as a critic through the course of this volume, this final piece reminded that and why I like him most as a writer – it is dense, almost lyrical and dazzlingly brilliant and as far as I’m concerned, the high point of this collection. Also, you just have to love the title.

The second one is part of the appendix, the essay “Midcentury” which has as its subtitle “An Essay in Contextualization.” It undertakes an examination of the 1950s in the US by way of a parallel reading of some experiences from Delany’s youth and pictures from a contemporary exhibition, The Family of Man, showing both how young Delany’s preconceptions shaped his perceptions of the pictures, and how those in turn led to a certain shift in those very same preconceptions, and inscribing both into the context of their time. It is a brilliant and enlightening piece of work and I am a bit surprised that it was relegated to the appendix (which might have to do with the volume’s publishing history rather than with any perceived slightness of this and the other essay making up the appendix).

While The Jewel-Hinged Jaw is not Delany’s final word on Science Fiction and he apparently revised some of his views in later works, this still remains not only a groundbreaking collection, but also one that continues to excite and stimulate, with many thought-provoking essays not just on the theory of Science Fiction in general but also on individual authors (like Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, Roger Zelazny) and works, as well as several particularly astringent observations on gender and race in the genre which sadly are almost as valid today as back in the seventies.(less)

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Nov 08, 2009 Sessily added it · review of another edition

(I read the old edition, the new edition is structured slightly different and includes at least one new essay.)

Jewel Hinged Jaw is a collection of essays all centered around a discussion of science fiction. The collection was first published in the 70s and has aged quite well, despite including a few now-dated facts. The book is broken into two sections: the first centering around general theory, the second including a series of book reviews that Delany presents as examples of him applying his t...more

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Jul 08, 2009 Larry-bob Roberts added it · review of another edition

Took me a while to make it through this collection of essays about science fiction as literature. I started on it because I'd finally read Ursula Leguin's The Dispossessed which is the subject of one of the longer essays. Delany offers a lot of critiques of the book, including that the only gay supporting character last appears thinking that he needs to change something in his life, and since the three things we know about him are that his political beliefs are in line with those of the main cha...more

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Oct 21, 2007 Nicholas Whyte added it · review of another edition

http://nhw.livejournal.com/521590.html[return][return]This is a collection of a dozen pieces about sf, written between 1966 and 1976. They vary greatly in both length and quality; the longest, an article called "Shadows", is 80 pages, split into 60 sections which really appear just thrown together at random. I found some of this book stimulating but other bits overblown - for instance, Delany's apparently serious argument that there is no difference in average height between men and women, it's...more

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Aug 28, 2012 Tamahome is currently reading it · review of another edition

I read the first page, and I'm already turned off. He seems really full of himself at that time, and not really interested in communicating.

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Nov 15, 2009 Shauna rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: literary criticism

Beautifully written, but dense, literary criticism of science fiction.

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Jul 25, 2007 Ross Lockhart rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

While some of these essays are repeated in Delany’s About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews, herein the anecdotal tone is more pronounced, reproducing journal entries and critical essays alongside a master author’s indispensable advice. Well worth seeking out.

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May 26, 2007 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sf-fantasy-horror, contemporary_fiction, craft_and_criticism, read-more-than-once

One of the best books ever on writing and science fiction.

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Recommended to pjreads ♫ by: GR <Language of the Night

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About Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7t...more Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis: Model 1924 in his book of largely autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.

Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.

Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.

Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.

In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.(less)

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“In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.” — 9 people liked it

“The concept of a writer writing a vivid and accurate scene in a language transparent and devoid of decoration so that we see through to the object without writerly distraction suffers the same contradiction as the concept of a painter painting a vivid and accurate scene with pigments transparent and devoid of color, including white and black—so that the paint will not get between us and the picture.” — 3 people liked it

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