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speculative fictions, strategically placed “aphorisms,” and critical meditations on the works of Wittgenstein, Quine, Chomsky, and other such system-builders. The reader can find in this exploration an early articulation of the problem of “empirical resolution” that provides the epistemological “arc” for the entire Return to Nevèrÿon series (in which what seems to be a revelatoryprocess of mirroring or echoing in the early volumes—a proliferation of metaphorical correspondences between objects, events, and situations—shades over into an oppressive process of mistaken identity and confounding doubling in the later ones). The reader can also find an early articulation of Delany’s concern with the relation of biography to form and context, which he explores in greater detail in the other essays of this collection, as well as in his own autobiography,
The Motion of Light in Water
(which, along with “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” in
Flight from Nevèrÿon
, and “The Tale of Rumor and Desire” in
Return to Nevèrÿon
, displays the same chrestomathic organization as “Shadows”).
    â€œShadows” commences with an announcement that it was written “in lieu of the personal article requested on the development of a science-fiction writer.” 19 After fifty-two notes, we do eventually reach the personal article in question. But by the time we get there, the autobiographical sketch seems to be less “about” its ostensible topic—the teleological development of the self, which the discourse of biography teaches us to expect—and more “about” its own enunciative context, within the greater text, discourse, and world at large. In the absence of a definitive referential center, the act of interpretation then becomes a task of “locating the play in the interpretive space, rather than positing a unitary or hierarchical explanation” (SW 95). It is in this frame of mind that we might want to approach the sixty notes—the sixty axes that make up the referential space—of “Shadows.”
    The formal structure of “Wagner/Artaud: A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions” begins to suggest what an argument framed within such a multidimensional space would have to be shaped like—and the sort of reading that would be required to follow such an argument. At first glance, the essay appears to be structured like a conventional literary analysis. But once we begin, we quickly find that the text does not proceed in the linear manner we expect of such an analysis: in place of an unfolding linear argument, we are instead given a series of intersecting stories (and the fictive antecedent to this is once again Return to Nevèrÿon). As the text alights variously on Antonin Artaud’s life, works, and correspondences, Richard Wagner’s memoirs, and Delany’s own autobiographical reminiscences, we are forced again and again to ask, “
What
is the unifying thread or argument holding these tales together?
Why
, if there is an argument, is it being presented in this way?” To pull order and pattern out of the essay, we must do a fair amount of mental work in holding these tales together in memory: in this sense, the act of reading “Wagner/Artaud” becomes something of a sustained performance.
    The essay’s ostensible analytical goal is to read the fragmentary aestheticof Artaud against the discourse of “High Art” as embodied in the theatrical practices institutionalized by Wagner. To carry out this reading, Delany reconstructs events in Wagner’s life which have either been suppressed by Wagner himself or, when brought to the surface and analyzed by others, have been misinterpreted due to the predispositions imposed by subsequent discursive practices. Delany thus takes biographical elements which have proved most susceptible to the colorings