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beginnings and endings (as well as the easier middle arguments, once we are aboard) of our criticisms must embody conscientiously creative and political strategies. (NFW 23–4)
    In the case of the work at hand, we are given a text with several possible “proper” beginnings, the choice of which involves conscious (as well as conscientiously creative and political) reflection on the reader’s part over where in the discursive space she wants to position herself. Delany has used this strategic deployment of central and marginal texts extensively in Return to Nevèrÿon, each volume of which has its share of “proper” and “supplemental” tales. This strategy made its first overt appearance, however, in Delany’s 1976 novel
Triton
(written concurrently with “Shadows”), which consists of a main text and two Appendices. (
Dhalgren
is similarly structured, but there the central/marginal relation is more subtle.)
    Let us say, purely for the sake of argument, that we have chosen to read “Shadows” first.
    The first thing we notice about “Shadows” is its unusual structure. A description of this structure can be found in “Appendix B” of
Triton
, in which “Shadows” makes a metafictional cameo appearance as the historical antecedent to the “modular calculus,” an invention of the 22nd-century philosopher Ashima Slade (“Slade,” says the unnamed scholarly “author” of the text of “Appendix B,” “took the title for hisfirst lecture, “Shadows,” from a nonfiction piece written in the twentieth century by a writer of light, popular fictions. . . .” 18 Here is a description of Slade’s “Shadows”:
    A difficulty with “Shadows,” besides its incompleteness, is that Slade chose to present his ideas not as a continuous argument, but rather as a series of separate, numbered notes, each more or less a complete idea—the whole a galaxy of ideas that interrelate and interilluminate each other, not necessarily in linear form. (T 356)
    Cross-checking confirms that this is indeed an accurate description of the formal structure of Delany’s “Shadows”—as well as clearly recalling Barthes’s characterization of the “writerly” text as a “galaxy of signifiers.”
    However, our scholar also observes that if certain numbered notes in (Slade’s) “Shadows” are considered in isolation from their surrounding text, they seem to resemble nothing more than “a few more or less interesting aphorisms” (T 357). Cross-checking again confirms this aphoristic pattern in Delany’s “Shadows.” Given what we have come to know about aphorisms, their appearance in this essay may seem problematic.
    But consider: through their nonlinear relational logic, the sixty numbered notes that make up the body of “Shadows” evoke a complex discursive space with many dimensions. One could say that each of the notes corresponds not just to a different coordinate position in that space, but to a different dimensional axis in it: to read the essay is both to construct that space and trace a vector path through it. To read any given note as though this multidimensional framing context did not exist, then, is essentially to misread it. As Slade himself comments (and, ironically, this is the one statement we are told Slade has “lifted” from Delany’s text): “I distrust separating facts too far from the landscape that produced them” (T 357). This suggests that an aphorism can be as much a product of reading as writing: if we, as readers, omit enough of the descriptive context, we can reduce the potentially rich information-value of a complex statement down to the degenerate information-value of an aphorism.
    â€œShadows” explores the problematic relation between model and context through personal anecdotes,