Straits of Messina

Samuel R. Delany

Preface To read writers writing about their own work is to watch often intelligent and graceful men and women stumble between the pompous and the pitiful. The spectacle is so disquieting I’ve sometimes suspected the benighted folk requesting these displays must do so in happy anticipation of the too-frequent clown show that results. A simple “No” to such requests, it might then seem, should staunch the idiocy. And for many writers constrained by a larger sense of decorum, it does. For many years it did for me. Why then, knowing better, does a writer from time to time to such a request say, “Yes”? There probably are some overwhelmingly popular writers who receive so many demands for self- explication that they are simply worn down by the onslaught. But that is not most of us. I can think of two other reasons, however, that cover much. One is, oddly, the “fascination of what’s difficult.” Having watched so many other writers fail to negotiate the waters between the Scylla of overweening self-importance and the Charybdis of childish self-deprecation, the prose writer is drawn to take up the challenge in much the same way as the poet is sometimes tempted to wrestle something interesting into some particularly complex form—canzone, rondeau, or chant royal—which seems, by the very intricacy of its structure, restricted to the trivial. The pieces in this book signed by me grow largely from that fascination— although what made the task of self- criticism difficult was often more difficult than I suspected; thus, on that count, they fail more often than they succeed. Still, save their occasional headnotes, I don’t believe they need further explanation. The second reason, however (to which the second set of pieces cleaves), is that desperate human failing, wishful thinking: “Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone say all the fine and brilliant things about my work I so desperately would like to hear ...?” Out of such wishfulness the “author” of five of the pieces, K. Leslie Steiner, was born. Ms. Steiner is a product of pure excess desire. Her specific point of genesis was London, in the winter of 1973, when I was finishing up a late draft of a pornographic novel, Hogg. The book had already produced a writer’s preface, signed by me, “The Scorpion Garden.” But at that time there was still rampant a tradition that the only recently legalized erotic text carry as much apparatus as possible, in the form of scholarly exegeses, medical disclaimers, and apologiae—many of them, of course, bogus. So “K. Leslie Steiner” sprang full-formed from the writer’s head with her initial critical offering, “‘The Scorpion Garden’ Revisited: The Anti- Pornography of Samuel R. Delany.” Her ruminations are what it would have been utterly wonderful to have discovered someone else had written about my recent effort. No, I wouldn’t have agreed with Steiner’s assessment or analysis, even at the time. (My real opinions are still to be found in my own piece on the novel, which opens this book.) Yes, it would have been nice. But Steiner’s piece—as do all her offerings—gives not so much an insight into the text it purports to consider, in this case Hogg itself (still, at this writing, unpublished), as it gives a view into the dreams a writer must dream in order to write at all. If there is anything instructive in them, I suspect it is what troubles in them rather than what reassures. Back in New York City in 1975, after a term teaching at SUNY Buffalo, I was seeing a long and somewhat controversial SF novel through its first half year of publication, when an invitation arrived from Tesseraci, the SF Society of the University of New Hampshire, to address them on the book and take part in a discussion of it. The critic within rose up to respond with the letter/essay, “Of Sex, Objects, Signs, Systems, Sales, SF, and Other Things.” But I was halfway through the dozen notes about which my dis-tractionary essay on the semiology of cities centered when more notes began to collect on other pages of the same notebook. Wouldn’t it be grimly satisfying if someone did say about the book ...... and Ms. Steiner, unthought of more than a year, rose, shaking her hair and eyes, from the slough of desire, with “Some Remarks toward a Reading of Dhalgren.” For at least another year I didn’t show the piece to anyone. I must have mentioned it, however, because at one point someone busily writing an article on me asked to see it. With trepidation, I consented—and discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that Steiner was “alive” enough for me to put the opening pages through the typewriter again, updating the various facts about sales, etc. And careful readers will realize that Ms. Steiner has taken the opportunity of this publication to update her first footnote on textual matters right to the present day. At about the same time as I was first writing “Sex/Objects” and “Remarks,” I was also seeing through publication another novel I’d completed just before my return from England during the Christmas season of 1974. The book had been conceived, written, and sold under the title Trouble on Triton. I thought of it as a far-future comedy of manners, and I was fond of its name. A friend had looked it up in the Day SF Index for me, and I’d learned that there had been two insignificant short stories with the same title in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Also, it recalled Simak’s The Trouble with Tycho as well as a Henry Kuttner tale, “Trouble on Titan”—all of which were resonances I was pleased with, since one of the protagonist’s problems is that he lives his life by certain cliches he has not developed the ability to question or deal with historically. But even more strongly, at least to me, Trouble on Triton whispered of Leonard Bernstein’s 1952 opera, Trouble in Tahiti. Bernstein’s seven-scene opera takes place largely in a generalized suburban America. In the course of it, a trio of radio voices from time to time connects the audience and the characters to the escapist world of art, represented by the technicolor musical movie, Trouble in Tahiti, showing a little ways down the road—an alternative world of romance, adventure, and fulfilled desire. I was much drawn to the irony. In one sense, the Triton of my novel is to Earth very much as the Tahitian never-never land of Bernstein’s opera is to U.S. suburbia— at least in terms of general (American) associations: both Tahiti and Triton are imagined as places of comparative sexual and spiritual freedom vis-à-vis the repressions and constraints of Earth in general and suburban America in particular. Looked at in terms of the opera’s structure, at the end of the novel the trouble on Earth plays an ironically contrasting role in the lives of my Tritonians similar to the role the distanced Tahitian movie construct plays in the lives of Bernstein’s despair- ridden suburbanites—all of which is to say that, in terms of what I took to be its ironies and associations, I liked my title. “Try and think of another one, Chip,” editor Fred Pohl said to me one afternoon when we were returning to the Bantam offices after lunch. “Whatever for?” I wanted to know. First, Bantam had recently published a blockbuster bestseller called Jaws, and the current theory reigning in the Bantam offices was that one— word titles were a priori a Good Thing (i.e., commercial). Second, as Fred put it so succinctly, “It sounds too much like too many other SF stories. People will think they’ve read it before.” I said: “But—” “No ‘buts,’” said Fred. So much for ironies and associations. But while I was making the painful transition in my mind between Trouble on Triton and the final, published, one- word (ho-hum ...) Triton, something happened within me: desire asserted itself again, excrutiatingly, insistently, uncontrollably. In this case, it was the desire to read a positive, intelligent review, perhaps in a better fanzine, of a book called Trouble on Triton—my book called Trouble on Triton. And Ms. Steiner was once again at work. Steiner ‘s briefest and penultimate offering emerged several years later, when, from the West Coast, a fanzine called Venom appeared. More accurately, Venom was a “killer review- zine.” Indeed, it shouldn’t be called a “fanzine”: despite its mimeographed fanzine format, it was published by professional SF writers and its contributors were limited to people like Marta Randall, Robert Silverberg, Ursula Le Guin, and Vonda Mclntyre. Venom encouraged SF writers to produce scathing reviews of their colleagues’ books, publishing them under pseudonyms. The price of admission, however, was a pseudonymous review of one of your own books—equally scathing—that appeared in the same issue. It was great fun since there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that the writer of any book reviewed was also a contributor. From there on, the game was to try and spot which reviews were mock self-put- downs and which were, however tongue in cheek, the product of long-held critical grudges. Before I reached the end of the first Venom, Steiner’s ectoplasmic emanations had begun to re-cohere. This seemed Steiner’s perfect vehicle. Here were people actually asking for a pseudonymous review of Delany by Delany. But could Steiner, up till now such a fervent Delany partisan, turn tail and attack ...? I feel that in her review of Tales of Nevèryon she has done a dangerously fine job. The problem came, however, when, having penned the admission piece for Venom, she turned to the work of another writer, where the true fun was supposed to start ... and I realized: though Steiner could praise or damn Delany to a faretheewell, she could criticize no one else! By now, of course, there were other, practical problems. In the appendices of the first two books of my Nevèryon series, Steiner had taken on the larger life of a fictive character. She had begun merely as a voice, writing down wonderful things in the nebular dark where wishes are whispered The Scorpion Garden Editor’s Note: Hogg, the novel “The Scorpion Garden” prefaces, is Delany’s second experiment in pornography. The first, Equinox, was published by Lancer Books as The Tides of Lust in 1973. Maurice Girodias of The Olympia Press expressed interest in Hogg before he quit publishing ; no other publisher, however, has stepped forward to repeat M. Girodias offer. At present, there appears little likelihood that Hogg will be published. —Douglas Barbour “But how, Mr. Auden,” the interviewer from Life continued, “do you know if what you are reading is really pornography?” “That’s simple,” replied the poet. “It gives me an erection.” Questions of “author’s intentions,” “the leer of the sensualist,” and “lewd and lascivious thoughts” aside, I am content with this as the informal emblem, if not the formal definition, of pornography—with all its contingent ambiguities: What is pornographic for X may not be pornographic for Y. What is pornographic for Z at six o’clock may not be pornographic for Z at quarter to seven. What is pornographic for the reader may not have been pornographic for the writer; and vice versa. Hogg is a work of pornography—that is, it was pornographic for the writer at the time of its writing. Rereading the many-times reworked manuscript, however, it strikes me that, in many places, it accomplishes many things I should like to see in any novel and—you must allow for the writer’s bias towards his latest work—in the rest is preparing to, or recovering from, accomplishing them, with varying skill. Yet, it is only a novel. Somehow, with such material, or, rather, material from such volatile places in the psyche, one is surprised it is no more. It does not twitter, bong, flash nor, in general, show any signs of life other than aesthetic. After all that was undergone in its creation—after all, it is pornography—one might expect the manuscript itself to quiver and vibrate beside the typewriter, sending out rays to alter the lives of passersby on the street! But, while it is pornography, it is only a novel. And the pornographic novel is only a novel of a particular type. Two years ago (well after Hogg’s initial draft, and well before its final) I listened to a member of the Académie Francaise, at a small New England University, deliver a lecture (I translate the title freely): “Sade: The Com-pleat Bourgeois.” It was a lecture of great humor, quite a tour deforce. To have belabored, during our discussion following, the fact that its main points, well embodied in its title, stood against all historical evidence, as well as the literary and scholarly consensus of the past three hundred years, would have been to attack wit with a jackhammer. But when our discussion gave way to the inevitable sherry party, where the professor received our compliments, someone did remark, now that our avowedly socialist scholar had finished with his dismissal of the Divine Marquis as a mere bourgeois moralist: Granted Sade’s bourgeois morality, perhaps his particular type of it is the only admirable aspect of the bourgeoisie—the aspect which, when one bourgeois recognizes it in a second, the second is immediately clapped into jail or an asylum; for it is that aspect which can ignite the fuel of revolution garnered by the world’s oppressed. To define any of this more rigorously, we must, of course, throw out the initial premise and start again seriously—Sade was an aristocrat. But that leads me from, not to, my point. Pornography is didactic. That is one of its intrinsic qualities—a quality that has more to do with the type of attention we pay to it than the mten-tion of the writer. Better, then, a pornographer like Sade who at least tries, however clumsily, to take advantage of this quality and, more importantly, takes responsibility for what he preaches. This is certainly preferable to the bulk of modern pornographer s who, convinced they are writing healthy, liberating, sexually un-hung-up entertainments, are actually espousing, when their work is examined, the most conservative and reactionary Weltanschauung, one that no Victorian patriarch would have argued with. The didactic purpose of Sade’s major work, that diptych of novels the first of which has been ubiquitously available in one form or another since I learned to read, and the second of which has been nearly unobtainable since its composition (only paragraphs of it had been translated into English as late as 1968), was “to bring to birth the New Woman.” And what strange sister volumes are Justine and Juliettel For almost three centuries, people have taken the former as the virtual synonym for pornography. For much of the same period, people could never quite agree whether or not the latter was even extant. Justine, or the Miseries of Virtue, for three hundred-odd pages, depicts a young woman who believes passionately that the myths of Womanly Virtue and Female Honor are sacred to God; she suffers every conceivable abuse and indignity at the hands of society in the impossible attempt to live up to these ideals till, moments after she finishes recounting the pathetic comedy of her life story to her sister, Juliette, she is struck down by lightning—by the God she was so sure would bring her at least one breath of peace before her death, in reward for her belief. That, anyway, would be Justine’s interpretation. But, Sade assures us, there is no such God. Her death came, as all of ours must, from chance; for the rest, she is the victim of stupidity, ignorance, and truly pernicious values. Juliette, or the Riches of Vice, the sister volume (but what a sister!—over a thousand pages to Justine’s three hundred!) gives us the story of Justine’s long-lost sibling: Juliette quickly learned in childhood, she narrates, that womanly virtue and female honor—any trait society deigns to call “virtuous,” but the “womanly” ones in particular— are a sham and are only invoked at the expense of the “virtuous” person to the profit of those in the position to apply the label, even if they are applying it to themselves. Hiding behind the facade of “the virtuous,” unscrupulous men and women have exploited her as a child, body, soul, and fortune. Therefore, by the age of twelve, Juliette decides to commit any and every crime and violence to better herself, or simply for amusement: she indulges in theft, blackmail, a panoply of sexual pleasures and atrocities; she commits innumerable murders, some for gain, some for passion, and an amazing number from sheer caprice. Some are clever and sly; many are overt, violent, and gory. As a result of all this, she gains wealth, social prestige, personal happiness with her final husband and her remaining lovers, male and female—and lives to a ripe, joyous old age. Shocking? Far more than Justine. But, as Sade says in his Preface to Juliette, “... the New Woman will only emerge when she learns to commit every horror and violence that till now society has denied her as foreign to her temperament.” In short, though he talks of a personal revolution, it is still a real and corporeal one—as real as the one he lived through. Why should such a revolution be necessary? For a moment ignoring the overwhelming evidence of life, let us simply look at what literature makes so evidently manifest. This is the moral stance that controls, totalitarianly, the modern novel in all its genres, high or low: “It is the novelist’s duty to attack society, for its false complacency, for its repressive rigidity, and for its self- righteous insensitivity. Society is women. Therefore, the novelist must attack and punish women in his works.” At first glance, this must look very similar to the moral template of Justine. It is, with this difference: Sade goes to great pains to show that the idea that women are the upholders of the values of society and civilization is an illusion fostered on them purely to get the better of them—so they may be raped, enslaved, and all money and economic power they may be fortunate enough to have inherited or actually to have earned by their own work can be stripped from them the more easily. And the larger point, of course, is that Justine is only a fraction of the dialogue, the fraction that sets out this stance in order, at so much greater length, to demolish it by positive example. And it is this denial—Juliette, not Justine—that is Sade’s truly “banned” novel.1 Understandably, the most successful novelists are not the ones who have espoused the novel’s moral stance intellectually, but the ones whose basic psycho-sexual mechanism holds them to it despite their more cerebral beliefs. Reading the modern novel, one realizes all its energy, its bravura, its whole aesthetic life springs from this stance; both its art and its intelligence are straited by it, whatever its ostensible topic. Without it, novels would miss the very drive that propels them from incident to incident; and the novel as a form would deliquesce. These are the novels of Fielding and Tolstoy, of Flaubert and Hawthorne, of Lawrence and Joyce, of Hemingway and Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald, of Mailer and Gaddis and Baldwin and Bellow, of Gide and Collette, of Kesey and Brautigan and Berger. Even Beckett, as his novels stray near plot, catches in the same gaping groove. These, to take the most random and easily replaceable of examples, are spectacularly the novels of Thomas Pynchon: Where is Oedipa Maas’s treasured collection of pre- thirties Coca-Cola bottles? What happened to her passion for discovering new junked car-yards? The major punishment is that novelists deny the very calculus of invention second nature in their creation of the male character to any and every female character. They cannot place her in a structural position in that completely artificial construct called “the story” so that, in her purposes, in her actions, and in her reactions, she resonates as a whole and autonomous creation. Whereas the male characters are automatically conceived as a matrix of purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous actions, the female characters, if they are “bad,” are all purpose, or, if they are “good,” are all gratuitous. It is not that the female characters in the modern novel are characterizations of bad or limited people—although, incidentally, they almost always are— but that they are badly drawn, because the writers flatly refuse to apply the same complex of literary artifice in their character realizations to both males and females—out of habits that begin as a response to some terror that human individuation would make the female characters equal to the males. In a political field where men have declared women must be kept inferior, especially at the level of language, actually to show a woman as equal threatens the whole field with overthrow because it implies the possibility of superiority, which is so socially anathema that no one (except certain Radical Lesbian groups and Radical Effeminists) will even consider it. The proscribed limits on what is allowed women characters in novels are stricter than any Hayes Code or Lord Chamberlain’s Office. They define the novel. If the novel is dying, this above all (as Fiedler hinted at, but could never quite come out and say, in Love and Death in the American Novel) is what is killing it. And if no novelist, from Barthelme to Oates, from Didion to Gass, can break these strictures, then better it die! For it is always understood —it is worked into the texture of the language with which the novelists cover their pages—that the men in these books, no matter how formal a structure binds them, be it the Czarist Army arrayed against Napoleon’s troops or the intrigues of Left Bank Bohemia, are free; it is only the betrayal of this freedom that decides if they are bad men or good men; no matter how grudgingly, they are a fraternity of free beings. But they are not society, even when they have power over it. Often they are society’s victim. Through stupidity or malice, they may be society’s dupes. But society itself—no man in a novel is ever shown thus. Those occasional all—(or almost all- ) male extravaganzas, from Melville’s Moby Dick to Dickey’s Deliverance, ask to be considered, to the extent they are womanless, as complex prose poems whose significance is in their exploration of the sui generis existential embattlements of the free, male spirit, allegorically dramatized in landscape or decor. Kate Millett to the contrary, this is true even of Genet. But these books are never to be taken as social commentary, unless, like Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest, they contain one Awful Woman and/or, like Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, a herd of faceless, immoral ones. Should we mistakenly examine what we can of the author’s social ideas from his depiction of actual life on a nineteenth-century whaling voyage, or a twentieth-century canoeing trip, the picture seems oddly fascistic. And that certainly could not have been the authors ‘ intention .... The fictions of writers like Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, or Ronald Firbank at first appear as a much needed respite from this standard stance. Is it that their casts are all—(or almost all-) female? Perhaps their characters simply tend to have what is so easily labelled a “female sensibility,” i.e., they seldom act or particularly think of themselves as apart from society and consequently seldom act or particularly think of themselves as “free.” Yet the socially marginal and the insane are important characters for all these writers. Take a second look: These are the “Uncle Remus” tales of a slave culture. “Society is women” is still their unquestioned supposition. They simply choose to ignore the attack that is the “novelist’s duty.” But either in whole or in part, the moral stance of the novel is as absurd and self-perpetuating a lie as the one given by those Southern critics of American Slavery who claimed that the only flaw in the society of the American South was the appallingly weak character, lack of honor, laziness and scheming of its nigger chattel—who, according to them, had been given too much power and responsibility at every level already. This is ridiculous. In our society, men have all the real social power: men are society. Women, at best, are men’s viceroys in its administration. If some women think of this as freedom, few men will trouble to dispute them. Man has created the institution of womanhood, all to his own profit. And any woman who would move even slightly beyond the allowable margins of that institution is likely to become man’s hunted and hounded victim, economically threatened and jeopardized at every turn, jeered toward any slough of guilt and madness she can be shoved into: Man will commit any indignity upon those human beings he has set aside into that minimal social area he has reserved for women. On observing the newborn infant, he notes the minutest physical distinction and sets all who bear it apart linguistically: They are “shes,” “daughters,” “girls,” “nieces,” who will grow into “ladies,” “women,” “females,” “aunts,” “mothers,” and “grandmothers,” forever cut from the linguistic collective of mankind. (Whoever claims the word “mankind” includes women is simply ignorant of the language’s history: “... she knew too much of the obstinacy of mankind to oppose any of their ridiculous humours,” writes Fielding in Tom Jones, Chapter 5, paragraph 2; it is only since 1920, i.e., the year women forced men to cede them the vote, that, as an appeasing gesture, anyone even suggested the obviously masculine word might, on occasion, be interpreted with such generous inclusiveness.) I recall a theater audience, a few years ago, gasping when a sensa- tionalistic documentary showed some ten—and twelve-year-old African boys who, from the ages of two and three, had been kept in tiny cages, molds, and mangles their whole lives to stunt and deform their limbs so that their owners could put them to beg on the highways where their deformities might excite sympathy. But half the population on any street in any civilized western city is victim of an equally vicious process of physical deformation. Man imposes on any one female— and on females alone—from infancy on, an aesthetic standard that equates the fragile, the weak, and the powerless with the Good and the Beautiful. Consider: an uncritical infant, you are encouraged by the giving and withholding of affection to be dainty; should you be fleshy ... well, some men find that attractive. But you must not be muscular! Perhaps in your legs, if you are a dancer, for even that can attract men. But you must never have muscles in your arms and hands. In you, muscular strength is the definition of grotesquery; it is unthinkable; it is more obscene than any toilet graffiti; it must never be depicted, even in jest. (Because, of course, its possibility is much too serious for jest.) But the mental deformation has been proceeding apace: The only toys we will give you with full approval are first-level reproductions of the domestic surround. Do not play with anything that might move your imagination beyond the home. Play with nothing that must be built, constructed, created, or figured out; with nothing that might stretch the mind or, even worse, encourage competition in the physical sports or the fantasies of the moving, adult world. Once in school, you can be as intellectually advanced as possible; and (because at home the imaginative and fantasizing facilities, as well as displays of physical energy, have been continually discouraged) how customary it is in those early years for girls to excel in those purely imitative exercises by which the intellect of the young is first judged. And at first the praise you receive for your accomplishments seems lavish. But soon you notice a discrepancy: While your efforts are praised, any tangible results are subtly devalued. And the scale against which the devaluation occurs is the efforts and achievements oí ... him. If you write a poem, it is nice. If he writes a poem, it is an evidence that his is a creative personality. If you organize some social event, that too is nice. If he organizes some social event, it is because he has organizational ability that may lead him on to greater things. Everything he does seems to have both a history and a future. Everything you do seems to register on only the most immediate attention matrix. With the most outrageous thing he does, even the condemnation of it, again and again, reiterates that he and his outrage exist. Any outrage of yours is glossed over, inarticulately excused and, as soon as possible, forgotten. Do you question the why of this? “It is because you are a girl and are to partake in the mysteries of ‘womanhood.’ You will go on till some man find you. You will serve him and bear him children. That alone will make you happy. Should experience ever seem to say other than this, know that you have strayed from the true path: all true happiness, for you, lies upon it. Look: You have written poems, organized events, committed outrages; and you have gotten less satisfaction from it than he has. That is because you are a woman and it is your place to be less happy. (Not because I, who praise and condemn, regard you differently and have praised and condemned you less.) Believe this till you die. If you do not, you will be mocked by the world, damned by God, and will get no love.” The reward of love given and the punishment of love withheld have been the instruments with which these very real deformities have been inflicted till now. The temptation to acquiesce again, no matter the pain, is great. And if mothers collude with fathers ... well, educated slaves worked as clerks and accountants in the slave markets of the ante-bellum South. Brutalizing, psychological systems can hold the personality to shape as surely as a bamboo splint, bound with thongs about the leg of a child and left for years, will produce the desired crippled limb. A gallery of laws once existed to ensure there was no appeal from this situation. I know a woman, up this morning, as I write, at six, to make bread for her family, who was forty years old when women finally took the right to vote. If the legal system has altered, it is only because men are convinced that the damages inflicted in childhood are much too serious to be—seriously—affected by anything so abstract as a law. And it hasn’t altered much. “If the crippled creature really wants to limp about the edges of the playing field during the game—well, let it!” is the tone in which men have passed most sexually equalizing laws, after the incredible work of the women who formulated and fought for them. And having been so magnanimous by day, at night men turn to view your atrophied limbs, at last undraped, your attenuated body they have pared away with the acid of their dreams, your breasts praised if they are immature, dismissed as repellent if they are long and mature, your vulva above the fleshy thighs where the pelvic blades still jut in the parchment skin, and above it all your reticent smile which says: “I have no history, no memory of injustice. You are safe. I am not even capable of rage toward something so awesome as youl”—and their cocks rise .... And perhaps next day, the same men sit and fondly remember when they last put some feisty old biddy in her place; when they last shocked some tightassed virgin; when they last got the best of some castrating bitch; and they smile and they think: “I am helping to liberate society ...”—while war and environmental pollution and economic exploitation make miserable and destroy, by frightening design, among all, all the earth’s peoples! A very healthy sound: the rage a-broil behind that reticent smile. No person can deny another’s history; history comes into being as humans endure because all humans remember, and women’s history is remembered and broadcast by the mothers and the daughters who have lived it. “But the very suffering that is God’s law women endure ...” someone cries. Well, man is very quick to label his most brutal whim “God’s law.” (All those “deaths in childbirth” that plagued the nineteenth century and infected the whole idea of motherhood well into the twentieth were not deaths from childbirth itself; the overwhelming majority were from puerperal fever, a complication that resulted because male doctors were too squeamish [or ignorant] to curette away the afterbirth that did not come out naturally—a complication that became prevalent, incidentally, only when midwives were replaced by male attending physicians.) The same voice again: “But you learn by your oppressions—” No. Oppression teaches us nothing. It weakens us and demoralizes us, makes us shallow and coarse. Under it, we may be forced to learn the limits of the survival of the human in us. But it is the human that does the teaching, not the oppression. And the learning justifies the oppression not one bit. And the novelist? The lie that society has conditioned into the fictional practitioner is inchoate, sexual in genesis and political in effect —and practically opaque to intellectual analysis. Society, and the novels of others, constantly reiterate that the novelist’s is the normal sexual syndrome. It is condoned on every side. Bluntly, one who does not suffer from it —whether male or female, heterosexual or homosexual—in our society is not likely to become a novelist. The great women writers of the nineteenth century came as close as anyone to escaping the syndrome. Yet Emma Woodhouse must be humiliated. (And if Jane Austen came the closest of all, what a price she pays!) Maggie Tulliver must drown. So must the heroine of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, perhaps the most pathetic, because it is the suicide of a person who has everything to live for. The novelistic lie seems inchoate to the medium of fiction. If one can enumerate its effects on the art’s great practitioners, one could fill encyclopedias with examples of how it has defaced the works of the unskilled and the clumsy, whose fifty-thousand- word-plus endeavors fall, by want of another name, under the heading, novel. It affects me. I am distressed when, writing a novel in which I am consciously struggling to deploy men and women characters among the incidents of my tale in some way that violates this moral template, I discover the development of what I first thought some innocent piece of stage business or decor suddenly demands the situation resolve completely faithful to this sexual determinism. When I think I have conquered even this—for one small section of my story—then to step back from it and discover I have set loose elements in my narrative which, in league with the basic structure of the narrative itself, conspire backwards and forwards through the plot to support this moral lie by the overall structure more firmly than before, I am frightened. Some of this, the honest critic must admit, is the attitude we bring, as readers, to the fictional gesture—so different from our attitude toward the same gesture in life —so that one action, performed by Joseph, gets a completely different interpretation when performed by Judith; though we change only the proper noun, a phrase of description previously neutral is at once pejorative; another, before purely praising, now takes on an ironic tone of censure. But much more frequently, it is simply the insidious workings of the writers’ own prejudices. Having constructed a scene in a book where a man and a woman must have a physical fight and the woman win, rereading it three days later I notice that I have written the whole six pages without a single declarative sentence beginning with the pronoun She followed by an active predicate! (Needless to say, there are many such sentences that begin with He.) All through the scene, although he occasionally reels from her blow or the like, she never actually hits him. Another scene, another story: a discussion between a man and a woman. I want the woman to make an epigrammatic point that happens to be one I particularly believe in. Reading my tale later, I notice that somehow my woman is completely unanchored to the world of my story. No profession is mentioned for her, or any other source of income. How does she live? Where does she come from? Where will she go when the story is over? She is there only to make the point, and because she is, as a result of my failure, an insubstantial character, the point, as made in the discussion—in fact the whole discussion —is fairly insubstantial too. Yet I know that had I given the point to an equally minor male character, without even a second thought I would have constructed a whole series of past experiences, as well as a present situation, for him that would define a personality from which such a point might naturally flow. I know that ideas must be connected to character in fiction; it is one of the major aesthetic canons of my personal approach to writing. Yet time and again these methods of character consti net ion, inchoate to the way in which I write male characters, have simply blanked out while I tried to create a female character in first draft after first draft. When I have been lucky, in second, third, or fourth, I have been able to correct some of this by conscientious contrivance. Ten years ago, the result of this was that a number of readers (women) took it upon themselves to let me know they understood and appreciated what I was doing, and, in various letters, praised me for it—well before the phrase Women’s Liberation had received any of its much- needed currency. But language is a delicate medium; often it reflects the thought of the practitioner despite what he thinks he is thinking. A more recent and more informed reaction has been to note that, while there is the (rare enough) attempt to fill out my women characters, the attempts are contrived. I cannot argue; I know my method. If it is annoying to watch methods creak, clank, and falter, it is shattering to watch intentions carom off the track to smithereen against the grandstand of cultural determinism: I conceive a story around a form: “A set of couples, each member a distinct personality type, undergoes a series of situations in which, alternately singly and in pairs, each person must have an encounter with every other.” That is the note I wrote to myself at the head of my first work-page. After this comes much labor to construct a set of situations that will propel my characters from one encounter to the next; six weeks of five-hour-a-day labor later, I have finished a reasonable second draft. Picking it up from the kitchen table where I do most of my work, a day or so later, I notice—and for the first time!—that while each man has his encounter with every other man, and while each man has an encounter with every woman, somehow I have neglected, in express opposition to my stated form, to have any encounters among any of the women characters at all! Anyone with a sense of symmetry can feel the tale drastically list; and yet through two drafts the idea of fixing a situation so that two women might have to talk to one another never even occurred to me! Indeed, as I look again, I realize that there is one very definite non-encounter between two of the women: one refuses to speak to another because of mistaken jealousy over one of the men. At this point, the only way to return to the form is to wrench apart all the elements of the story—plot, themes, motivations—and build these missing encounters back in. On more than one occasion I have wrenched, and, at least in terms of my own satisfaction, found it well worth it. The more distressing point is that I do not think I was any less aware of this problem twelve years ago when I started writing than I am today. My twentieth and twenty-first year were dominated by hundreds of discussions with women writers, housewives, women psychologists, and the men around them, on the position of women in society and literature. These are the points that were made then: why can neither male nor female writers show women in the psychological richness that they show men (or with the psychological generosity they show to their male characters); why can they not show the social and economic realities that hold their women to the world of their fictions; and why can they not show women’s relations with one another, involved and fruitful. And these are the places I still find my own fictions failing at age thirty-one. The mark of the failure is usually some blatant violation of a perfectly obvious aesthetic symmetry—thankfully! I have become so numbed by the world I live in, were it not for this over-determined relation between aesthetics and ethics, I sometimes think I would not even be able to recognize these inequities at all, even critically, much less have a hope of recognizing them from the more complicated position inside the creative, story-making process. But when I speak of the inequity of literary artifice, the above examples only define the pernicious category. Again and again, over twelve years of writing, when my intentions have been the most conscientiously egalitarian, my initial results have been sabotaged by them. Looking at it objectively, it seems to have all the earmarks of a compulsive neurosis; and it is not in the least heartening that this particular neurosis seems endemic to almost all novelists in the West. What we are dealing with, here, are those fine elements of language and sensibility which the novelist uses to amass the life of the book. To see them so insidiously outside control as soon as the material wants to veer from the well- worn groove is terrifying. All writers who have confronted this problem must have felt the pressure on the vein, the tightening around the throat, the heart itself crushed, their lives as novelists in danger. But, somehow, during the uncritical years of reading, when the novel was weaving its initial enchantment around us, it also managed to scribe out on the base materia of recognition memory the pattern which the most energetic or considered efforts seem unable to erase and still leave a narrative recognizable to us, who have been so seduced, as fiction. It is sexual. I suffer from it. Which brings me to the pornographic novel. Each genre has its particular attractions, some of which appeal to the most serious writers, others to the most cynical. The attraction that the pornographic novel holds for the serious writer is a chance to organize a structure with which to explore his own, inchoate fantasies; the temptation to the cynical writer is that he can make minimal moneys while indulging his. And it is a bold writer who can claim he or she has a clear and certain view of the illusive line, especially here, between indulgence and exploration. Nevertheless, this is the sexual syndrome—the truth behind the novel’s standard, moral stance—that I have chosen to explore: Power in our society is overwhelmingly allotted to men; no matter how socially marginal a man is, the power situation is maintained in all ways when it is at the expense of women. Women are almost always society’s victims, when society deigns to consider them at all—which is rarely. That is the didactic template under Hogg. It is not Sade’s. Still, do not mistake it for the standard lie .... Though if any woman wishes to construct a proof that I have, indeed, fallen victim to it, at any level, subtle or overt, I bow to her argument sight unseen. It is all too possible. It is all too probable. I can only say: “Produce some fiction that contradicts it. That is the novel I wait for more eagerly than any other.” In 1963, Marilyn and I, returning at dawn to our apartment on East Fifth Street, found a young woman asleep on a schoolyard bench on West Fourth. She had been the manager of a coffee house where I occasionally played guitar and sang for what Greenwich Village tourists would leave in the wicker basket—it was “seeded” with a dollar bill, but we were happy if there were quarters. We took her back to our second-floor apartment at the end of our dead-end street, and a complicated and harrowing story followed to explain why she was sleeping on a schoolyard bench in the first place: the only detail I remember was that, among other sordidnesses, someone had hired three men to rape the woman friend she had been staying with; and, indeed, such hirings, in certain circles, were common. Once, I spent a boozy evening at a Clancy’s on Twenty-third Street, listening to a man regale me till closing with a tale, verging on psychotic incoherence, of the years he had spent as a “rape artist,” when he had been paid to sexually molest women—usually strangers to him. His account was punctuated by unfathomable statements like: “But I never killed none of ’em. Not one—at least not on purpose ...”—a sort of line frequently used to lend ironic poignance to certain romantic fictions but, when encountered in life, somehow says more about fiction than about the incidents under discussion. These, among other things, are the basal subject matter for Hogg. It is perhaps time to say that Hogg is certainly not pornography for-women, despite my concern—no, I can be more honest: despite my honest guilt. Having said that, it is only fair to say: neither is it pornography for most men. Though the majority of the goings-on inside depict sex between males, I would be astounded if even a plurality of male homosexuals found these goings-on particularly to their tastes. And I suspect it will be the rare lesbian who enjoys contemplating the ensuing scenes. But it is the most rigorous and honest fictional exploration I can render of what crawls and wriggles and grubs among the roots in my own scorpion garden. That is its only excuse. The Scorpion Garden is a dangerous place. I have worked and reworked my map carefully over the last four years. It will take you, certainly, past a few of the more interesting growths. Followed carefully, it will even lead you out again —but a warning: These gardens are far larger than they appear. Are they pretty? I would not dare suggest it. But when you have browsed on the excrescent foliage; when you have observed the wet, sloughed bark, whose odor of decay is its most savory feature; when you have glimpsed the dark things glittering beneath the shadowy overhang, perhaps you will find something to make you look harder .... Listen! The hinges are grating to behind us. How long have we been within? —London September 1973 1Justine (1791) and Juliette (1797) are, of course, as much manuals by a man for women’s behavior as were Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) fifty years before. Indeed, Justine and Juliette may be read as parodies of their English forebears in much the same way that Gulliver’s Travels (1726) can be read as a parody of the phenomenally successful Robinson Crusoe (1720) that had appeared six years before it. But while Sade’s and Richardson’s works share the same respective physical proportions, the pornographic (i.e., fantasy) element in Sade allows a margin of interpretive play Richardson sorely misses. A note on the titles of the two novels is appropriate here: In 1787 while in prison for his revolutionary activities, Sade wrote a novel he entitled Les Infortunes de la vertue [The Misfortunes of Virtue]. Several times Justine has been translated into English under the title Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, which is a good approximation of this early title. In 1791 under the title Justine, ou les malheurs de vertu [Justine, or the Miseries of Virtue], an expanded version of the novel was finally printed in Paris, chez Girouard on the rue du Bout-du-Monde in two octavo volumes, with a frontispiece depicting Virtue between Licentiousness and Irreligión. At the place on the title page generally reserved for the publisher’s imprint there appeared the vague description: In Holland, At Associated Booksellers. The novel sold quite briskly in Paris until 1797, when an immense book appeared, in ten volumes, entitled Lö nouvelle Justine— which the 18th century French reader would have read as: A New [version of, or edition of] “Justine” The full bibliographic citation is of interest: La nouvelle Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu. Ouvrage orné d’unfron- tispice et de quarante graves avec soin. En Hollande [Paris], 7797. Four volumes, 18mo. These four volumes comprise the first part of the definitive edition of this work, of which the second part, in six volumes, bears the title: La nouvelle Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, suivie de Vhistoire de Juliette, sa soeur [ou les prospérités du vice]. Ouvrage orné d’un frontispice et de cent sujet graves avec soin. En Hollande [Paris]. Assuming the final six volumes of this 4,000 page epic carry Sade’s final thoughts as to title, etc., then we are justified in calling the separate novels, Justine, ou les malheurs de vertu and Juliette, ou les prospérités du vice. The most respectable English translation, that of Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (Grove Press, New York: 1965), still chooses, nevertheless, to call the first volume Justine, or Good Conduct Well-Chastised, which is, I’m afraid, an importation of Victorian smuttiness that simply has no bearing on this 18th Century revolutionary document. La nouvelle Justine sold more or less without hindrance for a year. Then searches and seizures began. On March 6,1801, Sade and his publisher, Masse, were arrested. Sade vigorously denied being the author of either work (there was no author given in the original published version), but was again incarcerated, first in St.-Pélagie, and, two years later, in Charenton Asylum, where he remained until his death. “The Scorpion Garden” Revisited: A Note on the Anti-Pornography of Samuel R. Delany by K. Leslie Steiner In his preface, “The Scorpion Garden,” holding up a witty exchange between W. H. Auden and a Life Magazine interviewer, Delany introduces his novel Hogg as pornography. I acknowledge the writer’s opinion—and maintain, by the same emblem he cites, the ability to produce erection (and, one presumes, vaginal dilation and lubrication ...?), he has erred. Though the material of Hogg (and his previous “pornographic” novel Equinox [published as The Tides of Lust, New York: Lancer Books, 1973]) is the constantly perverse aspect of sexual mechanics (does a page go by without intense exploration of their textures, their smells, their tastes?) and remains insistently so and at a density greater than numerous more exploitative and cynical works, I think I can say that while there may be places here and there which stimulate the average male (or female) reader, frankly, there aren’t many! What he has written I would call anti- pornography—in the sense, say, Samuel Beckett’s novels have been called anti- novels. Let me explain. The novel is traditionally rich, in description and design, in incident and action, in social reflection and psychological density. In contrast, the anti-novel is traditionally thin, a minimal presentation of a minimal consciousness at a minimal level of activity. Conversely, traditional pornography has always been thin—even 18 Sade, even Apollinaire. (Many anti- novels, less successful than Beckett’s, read like pornography with the sex excised.) In the bulk of pornographic films and novels, the situations in which the sex occurs are only sketched. Even in Sade, though he allows great length to the didactic passages, the sex has an oddly emblematic quality. In most traditional pornographic movies, the bulk of the extreme close-up footage could be of any couple having sex, and the majority of scenes in most modern pornographic fiction seem to be written from a glossary of some hundred, a hundred fifty phrases denoting stock positions, stock passions, and stock physiological/ emotional responses—to allow, quite understandably, the imagination to do the work necessary if the pornography is to be, by Delany’s informal emblem, successful. Delany’s pornography, however, is rich. One reason why it bypasses eroticism is that, even should a particular act described happen to be Your Thing, he is always telling you too much about it for you to lapse into the fantasy state necessary for excitement. There is too much information about what is going on, how it is being done, who is doing it, and whom it is being done to, so that the reader has as much chance for real, extended arousal as a Masters-and-Johnson researcher busy with lights, photometers, cameras, and measuring tapes. This is why I call Delany’s work anti-pornography. Of course, the anti-novel is a sub- genre of the novel; in the same way, anti- pornography is a sub-genre of pornography—not, as the morphology of the terms suggests, a distinct and opposite form; it is rather a smaller, apposite area in which some of the genre’s overt traditions have been reversed for particular purposes. My own reaction on reaching, for the first time, the final line of this dark and bizarre concoction—Hogg—was a sudden rush of resonant horror, as all the images of the novel came back to sweep around me, much like my first reaction to the finale of Moby Dick, where the author calls up all the major images of his book in a verbal recreation of the whirlpool he is describing. It is interesting that other Delany works have been compared with Melville. As august a publication as Time said, a bit extravagantly, of his fine science fiction novel Nova “... it reads like Moby Dick at a strobe-light show.” But both Melville and Delany are concerned with an intensely American experience, though both often abandon the terra firma of America per se to explore it, Melville in a boat, Delany in a space ship. But this (as Delany also says in his preface) leads me from, not to, my point. Susan Sontag, in a charmingly naive essay, has pointed out some of the structural similarities between pornography and science fiction. In the past decade a number of writers, with varying aesthetic success, have moved back and forth from one to the other (e.g., Philip José Farmer, Theodore Sturgeon, Glen Cook, Andrew Offutt, and Richard Geis). Delany’s primary dramatic purpose, sounded in the novel’s opening line, is to give a significant portrait, and ultimately a sympathetic one, of a monster—a laudable science fiction theme if there ever was one, dating from Frankenstein. But Delany has transferred his theme to pornography: his monster is a sexual human. We are romantically conditioned to extend—while we can remain at a safe distance—much sympathy to the human creature who errs into the monstrous. But once we have decided that the man or woman walking on two legs, with two hands, a brain and a mouth, really is a monster, we become monstrously cruel. Delany’s characters are monsters; they are not merely deluded or mistaken in their actions. They are psychotic, they are depraved, they are selfish and vicious, but they are not deluded: Even though the worst of Harkner’s crimes are committed in a psychotic half-trance, he can say, when the trance is past: “I don’t want anybody to feel sorry for me ... I’d kill a mother-fucker for that.” Future crimes, as heinous as the ones already done, are by no means out of the question. And the reader must close the book aware of it. The job of sympathetic portraiture here is a huge one. An interesting side-note: The finest science fiction writer in the American language, Theodore Sturgeon, once stepped across his genre’s boundaries to deal with the same theme as Delany, a dozen or more years ago, in an exquisite (if the rather saccharine opening pages are excepted) short novel, Some of Your Blood. Sturgeon’s temporary field for this work was the Psychological Mystery. His very effective character study (of another human “monster”) is presented as a palimpsest of portraits of a young army recruit (a perfect model for e.e. cummings’s “i sing of Olaf) whom we learn, in about the third portrait down, has a sexual fetish for human blood. As effective and moving as Sturgeon’s tour de force is, it is finally marred by the happy resolution using a technicality involving menstrual blood and cunni-lingus (all implied with pyrotechnical discreetness). It is believable for the length of the story only because the actual psycho/sexual mechanics are kept pretty much in the background. Examined closely, however, the technicality seems rather flimsy, i.e., very few people whose sexual fetish is human blood would be completely satisfied with, let us say, an occasional polystyrene container from the local blood bank. Comic vampires aside, such fetishists do exist, they have been somewhat studied, and the method of acquisition is usually part of their fetish and involves some violence, no matter how ritualized. Sturgeon’s “solution” avoids this. Delany’s method for handling this theme is to explore, and keep on exploring, the psycho/sexual relations of his monster with a host of other monsters, a more ambitious undertaking than Sturgeon’s and, as much as I admire the earlier tale, I feel a richer one. To explore this richness, I am going to discuss the language of the book, the structure of the book, the political template that underlies it, and, finally, the book’s significance. II It is the novelistic effects of Hogg, most readers will agree, that give it its power. A reason for this, I suspect, is that the serious approach to Hogg’s type of material in the past has been very different. We are more used to the violence, the sordidness, the degradation, the brutality that fill, that clutter Hogg’s pages, presented in the hysterical, sparsely punctuated prose of a Hubert Selby, Jr. or a William Burroughs. Such things must be shouted about, must excite some harangue, some dithyramb, or other Dionysian mode of rhetoric ... After two, single sentence paragraphs, stating the major and minor themes of the book, Delany confronts us with the blatant mechanics of his relationships, but in the calmest, most off-hand manner possible. He commences his description—and suddenly our heads are locked, fixed inches from the appalling parts; and, with the exception of a page or two here and there, our gaze is never let deviate; we are not allowed to draw back an instant, even to take breath. The story is not shouted; it is sighed, sotto voce, in the quietest diction. But, quiet as the diction is, its substance is raw, painful, tortured. There is no way to keep the rawness from distracting us from the formal organization and orchestration going on within each section, each scene, each incident—so that when the novelistic effects do occur, they hit like hammers! The first monster Delany introduces us to is his narrator, a nameless eleven year old boy in whom practically anything resembling human sensibilities has been numbed or extracted—the first chapter gives us with insidious coolness some of the extraction process—and in whom, by little else than chance conditioning it would seem, a whole set of brutalized and degraded responses has been substituted. Hogg is presented to us through the ironical distancing of this childish and alien mind in a vocabulary that, like Beckett’s, seldom exceeds a slightly colloquial Basic English. The book begins practically in a whisper. But by the time we have finished the first six numberless and nameless chapters, climaxing with Harkner’s self-mutilation, the effect is of one constant shriek—though the diction of any sentence, even here, is the same as in the opening pages: measured, impartial, precise. But to go back, even from here, and reread the opening pages (as I did my second time through the novel) is to hear that shriek from the very beginning. It is our ear that Delany has been tuning, from his very first sentence. The excuse for the language in which Hogg is written (its directness, its simplicity, its clarity) is that it is the language of a child. Anyone with an ear for the nuances in the development of American prose, however, will hear that it is an artful variation of the language of Chandler—whom no less a figure than André Gide called the finest stylist in America. Granted the tendency of the French to go overboard for things American, there is something real to consider here. America has no classic diction—at least not in the mainstream of its literature. Its “Great Styles”—the gothic paragraphs of Faulkner, or the experiments to capture the cadences of “real speech” of Stein and Hemingway (significantly, both had to leave America before the experiments became successful, and Hemingway’s return to this country seems to have thrown his method into self-parody), the balanced play-at-refinement of Fitzgerald, or even the earlier, self-conscious Britishisms of Henry James (James’s British, like his Britain once he moved there, was very much a British of the mind) are all artificial, individually architected, and essentially romantic dictions. They are the opposite of classic. They are all brilliantly suited for the presentation of a region, geographic, psychological, or social; at the same time, none of them could be the language of a people. Even the naturalists who tried to capture the language the people spoke—Farrell, Dos Passos, the Dahlberg of Bottom Dog—were bent on an innately personal task. What Chandler did, even more than Hammett, was to take the language the people read and refine it—purify it, bring it to pitch, crystallize it. Chandler, and writers like him, took the language of journalism and the pulps as their basic material and honed from it a verbal tool that was as close as American could come to a classic diction. What were its hallmarks? It was easy; it was graceful; it did relate, and relate closely, to the language people spoke—not in a slavish imitation of individual quirks and angularities, but in the sane and measured way speech and writing must relate if both are to remain alive. It could absorb immense colloquialism without strain. There was nothing in the real world of things and actions it could not describe. But Chandler’s letters are written in the same language: in them, you will find the most fine and subtle critical concepts put as clearly as any of Philip Marlowe’s descriptions of Southern California manners and mores. By the use of idiom (essentially a product of speech—as distinct from cliché, primarily a manifestation of writing), it could be witty, concise, or cutting. (And using idioms is a very different process from accurately recording them to lend color and verisimilitude to a reproduction of regional speech.) Above all, it had the classic virtue of clarity. Unlike Faulkner’s, James’s, or Stein’s (and even Hemingway’s), you never had to ask of Chandler’s prose: “But what does this sentence mearil” While the grammar was often that of informal speech, the substance was never ambiguous on first hearing to a native American speaker. You never had to track back through even one of his sentences or paragraphs to untangle the antecedent of a lost pronoun, or to discover what some dangling, baroque clause was actually modifying. This meant the aesthetic effects in fictions built of such language had to be achieved by formal means. It was certainly a visual language, but visual with a clear, sharp light, rather than a murky, glossalized glimmer. The fictive effects arose from the resonances set off in the mind of the reader between objects, situations, emotions, and actions, clearly limned and significantly placed. The mainstream of American literature would, of course, claim this technique for its own. But its writers were always concerned with generating the greatest number of vibrations from (rather than juxtapositions of) individual objects, individual situations, individual actions, detonated by as much verbal charge as each author, using his individual verbal methods, could muster. The mainstream American writer must practically invent his own language. But Chandler’s is the language still handed to the maverick. The idioms and topical phrases change, year to year, decade to decade. Other than that, however, it remains, structurally, practically intact. It is a vastly supple language: it can be glitteringly cold; it can be tender-tough; it can chant; it can yawp; it can sing. More at home in the street, it can still enter any drawing room, business conference, or ambassadorial hall—though seldom without gaining a slightly ironic note. That it was often abused is the inevitable fate of a fine tool tossed away in the corner, but it has been taken up by enough superb artists, working in their maverick fields—Stanley G. Wein- baum, Bester, Sturgeon, the early Zelazny, in science fiction; Hammett, Chandler, and both MacDonalds, in the mystery; Nathanael West, Darryl Ponicsan [The Last Detail], Robert Kelly [The Scorpions and Cities] in that oddest of American genres, the Art Novel—to have proved itself over and over. I do not mean to imply that each writer does not use this tool in a recognizably different way. Each uses its virtues to make it very much his own. What sort of language does it become on Delany’s page? What sort of language is it in Hogg? It is clear. (I do not think there is one ambiguous sentence, despite colloquial grammar, from beginning to end of the book.) It is supple. It is cold. There is perhaps a slight reliance on the genitive over the prepositional (“... his fist’s black knot ...” rather than “the black knot of his fist ...”), presumably because, though the diction of the former is cramped and angular, so is the image; and it’s briefer. Verbal economy, Delany has written elsewhere, is the center of style. The discussion of language is the place to address myself to the question: Is Hogg obscene? In a classic language, while there is blasphemy—the conscious and articulate insulting of the gods—there are no “dirty words.” Words, the words of the people, are used for what they fit. The idea that there are things in themselves not fit to be said is a romantic notion; the classic ideal is that anything, put well into the classic language—even the blasphemous —may be heard by all. Greek drama, of course, gave us the word “obscene”; but it is perhaps well to go back to its classical meaning: Ob-skene, Off-stage, i.e., “not-shown.” In the classic Greek drama, there were many things not shown; but there was nothing that could not be talked about. And the ob-skene actions, on which the plots of the tragedies turn, were described to the audience in exhaustive detail by that ubiquitous Messenger, just arrived from the blood-soaked bed-chamber, the corpse-strewn bath. From a first reading of Hogg we get a first impression that the author has held nothing back. But a second look shows there is a whole complicated matrix of ob-skene events, far more horrendous than the on-stage ones, that are only talked about, or reported—by radio, by Monty and Bill, or by Rufus. Everything that revolves around Mr. Jonas, for example, is merely speculation. And Mr. Jonas’s death, certainly the most gratuitously violent in the novel, takes place in the break between chapters. Violent as what appears on stage in Hogg is, the reader should note that, as with the Greeks, there is a point of violence—not of sex—that, as incidents approach it, determines whether they are to be shown or reported. As with the Greeks, this is not for moral reasons, but aesthetic ones. As Aristotle pointed out, once things go beyond this point, placed ob-skene they are simply more effective. But we are already into the form of the novel. III Hogg is a version of pastoral. Most genre fiction (or “category fiction” as publishers now call it) is. In Hogg, however, there is the difference that the Antiseptic Tenet of the pastoral is thrown, gear-grindingly, into reverse. From Sade, through Cleland, to Apollinaire, and on, how many pornographic writers have religiously provided us with the moment in which, after the sweat—(and worse-) drenched orgies are over, the participants leap up to wash? There is only one time anything near this happens in Hogg, and its use, effectively enough, is not for any symbolic (and, with those other authors, how hollow that symbol always feels!) purification, but rather to strip the character even further, to leave him more naked, with even the protection of his own dirt—the filth, the blood, the excreta—gone. Harkner, naked in the truck, newly scrubbed and still dripping, listening to another radio report, must be one of the most pathetic creatures in American fiction. Hogg is pastoral, but with its focus fixed on the sordid goings-on in Caliban’s cave—what Delany calls, in his preface, the Scorpion Garden. For the writer of Hogg, Caliban’s cave, it would seem, forms most of the world. And from it, the Prósperos of the universe—the Mr. Jonases (and the Martin Sells!)—are a terrifying bunch. Even the Ariels—Monty, Bill, Whitey, Officer Pelham, and Inspector Haley— are mean and tarnished. Caliban is still rutting after various Mirandas, with Prospero’s blessing. Ferdinand, by shipwreck or any other means (look at what lives on the broken-down boats along Crawhole!) has not arrived on this shore! From the author’s preface, one suspects he is not about to. And the dramatic structure of the book is Shakespearean in another way: there is a typically Shakespearean penultimate act in which the main characters retire from the stage to rest up for a final, bravura entrance and the climactic sword fight. One of the most impressive formal devices occurs in this hiatus, with the use of the aforementioned radio-casts. A horrendous catalogue of mass-murders is coming to us in a series of parodistic news bulletins that punctuate the chapter’s foreground action. They have all the hysterical piety of the small-town media faced with a shattering horror, effective enough as set pieces (and the only example of a really contrasting diction); but Delany turns them to far more complicated ends. The crimes are bringing one of our monsters closer and closer to the Crawhole docks (where the narrator has been sold[!] as a waterfront catamite). The last crime is committed on a barge just the other side of the bushes where (and while) the narrator is being buggered by the two scow owners and one of the dockside police. Minutes after the shots and screams, when we burst from the bushes ready to face the reality of the horrors that have been tantalizing us till now with their approach, we find ourselves, instead, face to face with the radio crew and their mobile van, embarking on their own On-The-Spot coverage, so that this crime is given us as a bizarre fugue, both live and (after a thirty second delay) on the police car radio speaker. This would be an impressive enough cadenza, but Delany goes a step further. He manages to give us the whole anti-world of the novel in miniature with the director, the announcer, and the various assistants. Among them, indeed, you will find Delany’s most subtly drawn, ob-skene monster, the absent program producer Martin Sells, who is apparently the guiding force behind the station policy of poshlust and sensational, kitschy sentimentality. Sells’ characterization is completed a chapter later in one cutting stroke (in the scene mentioned with Harkner, naked, in the truck), when, in the last radio report, we are told that Sells has been “on the phone long distance” with the officers of the Womack County Correctional Institute for Boys “... to find out for you ...” what sort of a boy Harkner “... really is.” The other extremely effective thing that comes out of the brief appearance of the radio crew is the moving encounter between the young black girl, Honey- Pie, and the radio director, which supplies us with the reading for the final exchange between the narrator and Hogg —the reading that, more than anything else, is responsible for the significant horror that I spoke of before, and that creates the book’s final, overwhelming effect. But there are many other formal excellences in the book: The way in which the opening section first seems a completely unrelated prologue, but turns out to supply so much, both in characters and theme; or Hawk’s bizar-rely comic monologue on “his thing” beside the flaming car; or any of the numerous dovetailing ironies of which only the narrator and the reader are aware. (Hogg, for example, never learns that Mr. Jonas is dead; and isn’t this used, in just the tiniest way, to gain sympathy for Mr. Jonas’s unsavory ex-employee?) Then there is the book’s formal hierarchy of monsters: the major monsters, Hogg, Denny, Nigg, Dago, and the narrator, are buttressed by a gallery of minor ones—Pedro, Mr. Alvarez, the Townley brothers, Big Sambo, Rat, Chico, and Hawk—who are highlighted in turn by a Gogolian collection of mini- monsters, some, like Martin Sells, who do not even appear, or others, like Monty, Bill, and Whitey, who merely drift through with only an indication of the horror that might accrue to them. IV At this point, having examined both the texture and the structure of the book, we can ask the simplistic question “What, then, is Hogg about?” with hope of a non-simplistic answer. Delany has prefaced his book with an essay which, though it begins by discussing pornography, is primarily about sexism in the novel. It is in turn witty, elegant, and impassioned. My own reaction, when I first read it, was a frank suspicion that the novel could not live up to it. And indeed, one can make a case that it would be hard to conceive of a more sexist novel than Hogg; but if it is sexist, it is not misogynistic; the range of women characters and their fates, for example, is far greater than, say, in Hitchcock’s somewhat similar Frenzy. And there is an honesty to the sexism that, if not redeeming, is, at least, hopeful. Delany does not commit the particular sexist flaws he describes in his opening essay; and, in a book composed of material such as Hogg, that is an achievement. But sexism and the treatment of women is the political template Delany asks us to view his novel against. Given the vocation of his main character, and the avocations of most of his minor ones —professional and amateur rape—it is a template that it is hard to let slip too far out of mind. One of the things Delany warns us of, by indirection, in his preface, is that all the monsters in his book will be male. If his view of the world, particularly in the relation of men and women that the preface presents, is correct, then it follows (I am assuming this is his logic) there simply is no room for female monsters in fiction. It seems he has decided this in the same way that a generation of American writers in the thirties and forties decided that there was no longer room in fiction for the black monster—such a mainstay of both American and European light fiction for the previous seventy-five years (and whose avatars can still be seen in films like Griffith’s Birth of a Nation). It is not, I think Delany would concur, that there are no female monsters in life. It is rather that there are no female monsters as usually presented in literature; and that the famous ones, such as Kesey’s Big Nurse, or Arthur Kopit’s Mom (from Oh, Dad, Poor Dad) are a trivializing political lie. I gather, from book and preface, that Delany feels the presentation of any female monstrousness without a firm, fictional appeal to the sociological, economic, and psychological indignities women are forced to endure (as a political class) on every front from men, is, at this point in history, merely a politically egregious cliché. I suspect he feels, further, that since the monstrousness with which men treat women, in all walks, so outweighs those times when women are brutalized into behaving monstrously in return, that to harp on a particular monstrousness from a woman before the monstrous-ness of men is fully explored and revealed for what it is, is to render the fiction, at this particular moment, somewhat irrelevant. This is a liberal (not a revolutionary) position; it is a sympathetic one; but it is one whose flaws have been shown before. And it is ultimately what opens Hogg to the charge of Feminist-Uncle- Tomism—that, indeed, Delany invites toward his preface’s close. All the women in Hogg are martyrs, saints, or heroes. We have seen that Delany is concerned with the political statement the book makes. But I cannot help thinking what a different, and possibly more effective, statement it would have made if it had been, say, Maria, rather than Harkner, whose horrendous and outraged slaughterings we were forced to listen to in report after report. On multiple readings, I find myself questioning whether Delany’s making the crippled girl the only young woman with any rebelliousness in the face of direct fire is a bit of the same, unconscious, political maneuvering he decries so in the preface. Delany talks about the failure of women to encounter in fiction. There are only two such encounters in Hogg: In one all that is exchanged is an inarticulate roar. In the other, the abortive encounter of the director and Honey-Pie, one of the participants utters only a single word. But the book does go beyond this— not in spite of the author’s political concerns, but because of them; it is a mark of his political intelligence that, feeling as he does, he has not tried to write a book about women; the author is, we know, a man (and a black man), as Mrs. Stowe was white. Unlike Mrs. Stowe he did not try to write a book about “life among the lowly.” The book is about life among the monsters. And, where women do come into it, he has done better than most. At this particular moment, that may be all a man can do. Delany has shown men in their most psychotic relations, with each other, and with women. Women’s rage at what in this situation affects them, as well as their reactions to and their actions against it, are subjects a woman might be able to handle with more authority, if not passion. I think this is the book Delany, in his preface, says he is waiting for. So am I. In his preface, Delany claims that his book, in personal terms, is as honest as he can make it. There is a similar claim in the dedication to his first anti- pornographic work, The Tides of lust. “This is an artificial, extravagant and pretentious book ...” he claims of the earlier novel, in a cunningly accurate assessment: “... But it is honest before its artifice ....” Honesty is, apparently, important to him in erotica. The first book was a cluster of bright fragments, here a Jamesian pastiche on necrophilia, there a surrealistic nightmare of copulating chimera, now some elegant essays on the significance of the erotic interspersed with monologues of transcriptive doggedness by illiterate sociopaths about their sexual disasters, all strung, catch as catch can, on a modern Faust story set on the Texas coast. It is flamboyant, it is dazzling, an anthology of brilliant verbal show pieces that, ultimately, aims at a serious point. In Hogg, however, the extravagance and the pretension have been set by. And the artifice is so rich it has become art. Hogg is a novel, a novel that, in the face of monumentally unpalatable material, can move us, can touch us. I feel it is the more important book; and the more significant. But if a political template helps us trace our way in it, points out some of the intelligence as well as some of the failures in it, that template is not the significance itself. Art that is exhausted by the politics around, above, and beneath it tends to be transient and, ultimately, lifeless. We are closer to the significance of Hogg with such bald statements as: It presents the horrible in the world. What it has to say about it is even more horrible. But it is said with such intelligence and persuasiveness that, if we refuse to listen, it is we who are condemned. V So far, in our textural, structural, and political discussion, we have been fairly, strictly formal. But if a book is ultimately to be taken seriously, other things than its formal excellences must be considered. And this is the point where the serious critic is tempted to say: “Now I shall leave you, the serious reader, to consider them.” One of the problems with saying more, of course, is ihatHogg is a new novel. It does not have the advantage of having been around for sixty years, or even six months (as I write this), to garner the benefit of discussion consensus on What It Is Trying To Do. It is a book I was sent in manuscript and asked to see if I might say something favorable about it. It is a book that, between manuscript and galleys, I have now read » through three times end to end; and have read sections of it over many more. It is a book I write about far more from compulsion than I do merely to provide a legitimizing afterword. I think it has something dark and dangerous to say about the world, and about all our relations with it. Though for exactly what to be defined, other voices than mine will have to enter the dialogue. I can only marvel. Hogg is not a novel to be interpreted. It is a novel to be experienced. All a critic can really do is to warn the prospective reader that to experience it fully, he must undergo much terror and must bridle his disgust; or, with the reader who has just emerged from the novel, the critic can discuss some of that terror’s quality. I began with a mention of some of the classic overtones in Delany’s work. Let me return to them as I move toward summation. As Hogg throws some of the traditional conventions of pornography into reverse, it also reverses some of the values of classical tragedy. The characters and situations in Hogg are terrible and they are pathetic. But where tragedy begins with characters who are terrible in their height, rendered piteous by their fall, the monsters in Hogg begin as pathetic.Then their pathos is stripped away, only to show them as even more pathetic; then the process is repeated. Then repeated. And repeated— insistently, inexorably, and without surcease, till somehow, in full denial of the romantic claim that the pathetic can only elicit low emotions, the characters pass into the terrible: by the book’s end, Hogg and Denny, if not the narrator, are larger than life, casting shadows far longer than our first encounters with them could have possibly indicated. Without losing an iota of their texture, their smell, or any physical presence, they are becoming archetypes. Much (if not most) of the criticism around Delany’s work to date has concerned itself with the relation of his work to myth. Most of this that I have seen, well intentioned as it is, is trivial. Those critics with adequate scholarly equipment for the task get caught in a labyrinthine search for more and more tenuous plot parallels to more and more obscure myths; those with inadequate equipment (the majority) usually founder on the simple problem that, having no clear picture themselves of the way myth works, they have no clear position from which to examine Delany’s. Intermittently, Delany’s works have contained mythical ornaments (at least that’s how I have always seen them), which encourage this type of criticism— e.g., the Faust-foam swirling on The Tides of Lust. But what is centrally mythic in his work is the quality, as in Hogg, I have just mentioned. The first critic to note this quality in print, seven years ago, Judith Merrill, actually caught the distinction which subsequent critics have tended to ignore: The work is mythopoeic (to borrow her terms) rather than mythopoetic: It makes myth, rather than merely utilizes and refers to it. Though the treatment of Harkner suggests Delany has a great understanding of how modern myths are generated (by administering some shock to a media-solution super-saturated with cant and cynicism, searching among situations well beyond morals and hopelessly into the pathological for something to moralize over), while Harkner perhaps becomes a myth figure for the world of the fiction (Frontwater, Crawhole, Ellenville, Fairhaven and the adjoining towns), Hogg himself is the myth figure who emerges from the novel into our world —horrible as Frankenstein’s monster, vicious as Dracula, and stolid as Babbitt. “HOGG!” proclaims the blurb: “An eleven year old boy stumbles upon an act of brutal rape—but this is only prologue to a weekend of sexual mayhem, destruction and mass murder.” What a suggestive blurb it is! But it also, I suspect, will help begin a popular mythology around the book that will confuse Hogg with the mass murderer, as Frankenstein is confused with his monster, or as Faust is confused with Mephistopheles—phenomena Delany himself has commented on in Tides. But the situation of Hogg is far more complex than the blurb suggests: Hogg, a murderer and a monster himself, is morally and psychologically responsible for precipitating Harkner over the edge into his far more monstrous death- rampage—and is then responsible for bringing him (however temporarily) back! It takes some mature considering to figure out what, ethically, is going on here. It is not a simple book. An extremely perceptive female reader once remarked in my hearing, “Literature survives by fertile ambiguity.” And an equally perceptive male poet once committed to a letter, reprinted many times, “All criticism comes down to a more or less happy misunderstanding.” These two statements can be used to define (or better, in Delany’s term, emblemize) the positive and negative poles of the romantic axis, the main axis of American literature and letters. But there is a classic axis that cuts across it. Its tenets are not so easily defined: classic literature is harder and, finally, more complex; and in America, as I have said, the classic is maverick rather than central to established literary concerns —whether it appear in the avant garde of the little magazine or the commercial works of mystery, science fiction, or in the most recently rejuvenated and perhaps liveliest genre, pornography. The substance of classic work (and Delany’s is) is all in what is told. (And the classics are notorious for telling all —which is why they so upset those super-romantics, the Victorians.) Its significance is in what it suggests. Its technique is the organization of what it tells into the most suggestive form. But even if the coordinates of concern continue the rotation begun with the turning of attention of “serious” critics to “popular” culture, I still doubt if Delany-the-pornographer will ever be an accepted writer. His message is too dark. I have mentioned my first response to Hogg. My second was to search, almost hysterically, for some romantic synopsis. I fell on the frequently quoted lines of Yeats: But love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement. For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent. As quickly, I had to turn away. Moving as they are, these lines—we must insistently remember if we are to understand the seriousness of the book— define exactly the attitude the book is not concerned with. The word “love” does not appear once in the novel. At one point, the narrator misses Hogg to a point where he is about to cry. At another, Hogg goes to a fair amount of effort to repossess the narrator who has been spirited off by Nigg and Hawk. But to call the relationship of the narrator and Hogg “love” at any time during the book, or to assume it partakes of anything but the structure of the most sado-masochistic infatuation, does not dignify it in the least; it merely imposes a romantic distortion. Delany is concerned with something vaster and icier. The Human Condition (as much a romantic cliche as “love”) comes closer to naming that concern. But it is a cliché, and therefore not accurate enough. While the author’s disclaimer that Hogg is not pornography for heterosexual women, for heterosexual men, for male homosexuals, or for Lesbians is accurate (But, if it isn’t, who is it for? Another reason to call it “anti- pornography”), what I can say, finally, is that Hogg is a book for anyone who finds the novel itself fascinating; for anyone who wants to see the effects that occur when this most un-novelistic of material is subjected to an intricate, re- complicated (I borrow this useful term from Knight’s early criticism of Harness and Bester; it refers to a formal, self- critical narrative device, such as the Burning Man in The Stars My Destination or, indeed, the fugai broadcast in Hogg) form. I predict the book will be discussed. If I am wrong and it falls from our attention, my prediction, as it appears here with it, will vanish too. —K. Leslie Steiner Ann Arbor, 1973 [London, 1973] Of Sex, Objects, Signs, Systems, Sales, Sf, And Other Things Note: Tesseract was the name of the science fiction society of the University of New Hampshire. In August or September 1975, their then president, Frank Brunner, extended an informal invitation to me through Bernard Kay to come and discuss my science fiction novel Dhalgren, which had been published eight or nine months before in January 1975. I sent them the following open letter, which, I was later told, would appear in the Tesser act- sponsored ‘zine, S-Forum. At the end of that year, however, Brunner graduated from the university, and S-Forum suspended publication before the piece could appear there. A dozen years later, it appeared in Australian Science Fiction Review. Dear Frank—Thanks muchly for your letter. (Bernie Kay read it to me over the phone; so I haven’t, as it were, been exposed to the actual text.) Thanks also for the invitation to sit in on Tesseract’s Dhalgren meeting. I’m afraid, however, I have to decline. A couple of years back I would have replied to such an invitation, quite imperiously, “I never discuss my work in public,” and let it go. But I’ve mellowed. I dislike discussing my own work for a host of reasons, some highly admirable I’m sure, others no doubt suspect, lowdown, and neurotic. Nevertheless, that’s me. The discourse of personal criticism is useful as it treats of the writer as a fictional Other. For A to ask Β what Β thinks writer Y was trying to do (and for Β to return an answer either the same as or different from A’s) is a useful, even a rich enterprise. For A or Β to turn to writer Y and ask such a question (and for Y to come back with an answer) defeats the whole enterprise of fiction. (As you can see, I love to theorize about language/writing and will do it at the drop of a postcard; the fact that I enjoy it so much is one of the [possibly neurotic] reasons I like to stay away from such discussions of my own work.) Such discussions, for me as a writer at any rate, are essentially fictions —as much as any story or novel. The relation between two fictions is a complex business to map out, especially when it must be done by the creation of a third. Julia Kristeva, Carol Jacobs, and Jacques Lacan (among others) have been exploring, from their respective positions, the complexities that lurk behind that most complex of fictions: commentary. Fictive discourse aims at producing a range of reactions, a field of multiple responses, responses not as in a scatter-pattern of buckshot, but as interrelated and ordered as lightwaves in a spectrum. Critical discourse between two readers, both by its disagreements and by its angles of agreement, no matter how linear, preserves that plurality in emblem and embryo. The same discourse between reader and writer rotates the lines of communication ninety degrees away from the currents that pass between equals so that now it lies directly across those currents, stalled in that ill-charged space auc-tority (authority) creates, that plurality abolished. I work hard on my science fiction. Much of that work is theoretical (though the theorizing done when entangled in the text of fiction has a very different feel to it from the theorizing whose end is a theoretical, rather than a fictive, text); but the work is to read, and reread, reform, and respond to (making sure they proliferate properly) the resonances of whatever is being put down on paper. In a live question-and-answer situation, the spontaneity alone—on my part at any rate—would defeat all accuracy in linearly verbalizing what was (as is so much of writing) such a many-layered and finally non-verbal process. I am perfectly happy to write about what’s outside the text. You asked about sales, for example. Last time Bantam communicated with me anent the subject, there were 273,000 copies of Dhalgren in print, with more to come. Actual sales are hard to judge after only six months, but the general Bantam policy is not to order a new printing until at least 80% of the previous one has sold out; the sixth printing is currently on the book racks. The seventh is on order. Yes, it’s a minor record for an SF novel in the first half of 1975, but in only a few weeks The Mote in Gods Eye will raise its braying yawp in paperback and go galumphing off, I’m sure, with all the medals.1 Because I love the SF field, in some respects I’m downright gleeful to discuss what’s outside the text! In a giant field like the Post-Modern Novel, with thousands upon thousands of examples high and low produced each year, it would be terribly presumptuous for any single author, even a postmodern Proust or Mann, to hope that a single work, or even a series of works, might restructure to whatever extent the concept of the form. In a field like SF, with not quite 325 original SF novels produced this year from substantially less than that number of writers—and most of these novels in a commercially fixed form the writers themselves would be the first to admit was dead from the outset—it is not so preposterous for a writer to hope that a single work, fermenting in the acknowledged live area of the field, might loosen and recontour the web of possibilities, charging that web at each repositioned intersection of possible word and possible word. I think, in exactly that slow and inevitable way that causes shrieks both of rage and delight, Dhalgren is doing that. And I like it. What I don’t mean here is that I want to see more novels that resemble Dhalgren either in texture, form, or subject matter. (What writer would!) But I would like to see the range—the space of possibilities —that the textures and organization in Dhalgren imply explored by other SF writers. Of course the line between what is inside the text and what is outside the text is frequently foggy—especially for the writer. And it is at least as permeable as Lacan’s version of the Saussurian bar between signifier and signified2. Another reason I hesitate to attend a live discussion is because in live discussions that line may be too easily transgressed, by auctorial accident or enthusiasm—with disastrous results. I prefer the reflection afforded by ballpoint and notebook. As an SF writer I frequently see myself as trying to reach the boundary, the edge, the limit of fiction, a journey that can only be made on paper. Similarly, I am tempted to come as close to the line as possible from the critical side—one wants to live not just dangerously, but dangerously and intelligently. Is this, for example, outside or in? I’ve always wanted to write books that I wished to read but could not find on any library shelf or bookstore rack. A kind of book I’ve always liked is one that is witty, intelligent, formal, colorful, written with life and brio. But there’s another that, from time to time, I hunt out as well: Oddly enough, you will find it described in occasional contemporary introductions to various novels by Eliot and Stendhal. It is a long book, covering exhaustively the social workings of some heretofore unexplored sector of society, orienting it within the greater social context—but it does this almost off-handedly, as if in a passing nod to Arnold’s observation that the life of fiction lies in the exactitude with which it can evoke the surfaces of life. But much more than that, it is a complex metaphysical construct: to understand it requires considered and deep response, measured and multiple readings. We note, at this point, the novels described in these introductions are novels-of-the-mind. They are seldom the novels of Eliot or Stendhal that follow. I do not mean that Eliot’s and Stendhal’s are not rich works, or that they do not benefit from close attention or careful rereading. But the entire critical stance these introductions assume is, in historical terms, a back- reading. A critical gaze that has no existence before the commentary garnered from the specific aesthetic undertakings of, first, Flaubert and, second, Joyce, can only meet with its true object as long as it gazes forward. It has been known as long as narratives have been recognized for what they are that stories are made more coherent, vivid, exciting, and energetic by resonances leap-frogging from one section over another to relate to yet another; a multiplicity of such resonances binds the living and lively construct together. (What else is “plot” other than something at the end of the tale relating clearly and strongly to something at the beginning? And if “plot” is “dead,” it is only because in most people’s minds the only relations they will respond to have become far too limited, formalized, and restricted to a ridiculously narrow repertoire of revelatory actions.) But for a writer to expend such Flaubertian labors to make a complex web of responses the experience of the fiction is a specifically post-Joycean enterprise. And it is worth reminding ourselves that Joyce, to do this, had to shatter, more and more as Ulysses progressed, the novel’s fictive foreground (though he allowed one to retrieve a foreground structure by means of the referent myth); in Finnegans Wake, he shattered not only the fictive foreground but all foreground mythical reference as well, so that all could be used, infragmentia, to form the infrastructure to which the recomplicated resonantial textus was moored. Yes, Stendhal and Eliot used such resonances to bind their work together; but they did not use them in the same way as Joyce, to the same extent, or with the same intentional charge: this charge is fixed on so many other things in their work that it makes the kind of modern criticism that frequently introduces them court distortion of them each time it is evoked. Nor does such criticism fit, say, with Proust, Mann, or Kafka. These are all very nineteenth- century-oriented artists. If they add an obsessional concern with one sensibility or another, reflected in “excessive” (with Proust and Kafka, at any rate) labor over the text itself3, this still only winds up the decadent ends of the nineteenth century. We still have not approached the parameters of Stein, Charles Olson, and Frank O’Hara around which the vital art of the second half of this century organizes itself. (And if Olson and O’Hara respected Pound and Williams, it was as much for their negative as for their positive examples —the only truly rich examples one generation of artists can bequeath another.) Fictive discourse contains within it (as one of its most powerful fictions) the possibility of exhaustiveness. Critical discourse, as Foucault showed in The Order of Things, is inexhaustive by virtue of the very épistémé in which it generated back with its birth in medieval commentary. (The basic reaction of most readers of Barthes’ S/Z has to be, when all is said and done, how much more could have been said! The margins of my own copy crawl with commentary upon his.) Which brings me, abruptly, back to Dhalgren. Was it written for the critics, as various of them have megalomaniacally suggested? Well, it was definitely written to appease a certain richly critical response in myself —a response which, in myself, I associate with something mature and measured. I wanted to read a book— solid, sedate, sexual, and complex—full of mysteries that proliferate in orderly fashion by the very fact of their solution, a book I could sink my mental teeth into after they had been sharpened by what I’d found valid in the art and aesthetic discourse of the past century-and-a- quarter. But if it was written “for critics,” it was not written for any fancied reward to be gleaned from any critical commentary. The largest influences on the book that I am aware of, at any rate, were Michel Foucault (primarily Madness and Civilization, secondarily The Order of Things), John Ashbery’s poems The Instruction Manual (and the Richard Howard essay on Ashbery in Alone with America) and These Lacustrine Cities, G. Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form (given me as a birthday present, months after its publication, by a young Harvard student when I lived in San Francisco), Frank Kermode’s Sense of an Ending (bits and pieces of Dhalgren were worked on in Kermode’s old office at Wesley an University’s Center for the Humanities, where I was a guest for a couple of weeks in 1971), and, of course, the works of Jack Spicer, whose memory and whose poems haunted San Francisco the years I lived there, where much of Dhalgren’s first draft was written, as Cavafy’s hovered over Durrell’s Alexandria. Anyone who thinks the elucidation of my science fiction novel worth the trouble might pursue these works with hope of at least a small reward over and above the great interest of the works themselves4. But certainly anyone who had read the Foucault thoroughly would know I could not expect much commentary: We can separate fiction into foreground and récit: récit is the written commentary that occurs within fictive discourse. Foreground is the referential presentation of “what was there” and “what happened to it.” Foucault demonstrates clearly that it is commentary which breeds commentary —and very little else. By a simple extension, only those novels proportionately rich in récit (James, Proust, Joyce, Stendhal, Kafka, or Faulkner, for examples) are likely to be much commented on at length. Novels proportionately rich in foreground (Chandler—whom no less than Gide called the finest stylist in America and of whose works no less than Auden said, “... they are darkly powerful works of art ...”—R.L. Stevenson or D. Merezhkovsky, for examples) are experienced as more or less richly detailed slabs of experience itself; if this presentation is done with a rich web of language (to do it in a conscientiously impoverished language, e.g., Robbe- Grillet, to whom we shall return, reduces foreground to the status of récit; thus the commentary), the effect is of a double text of structured reality highlighted by a complex superstructure of attentional nodes. Mapping the relation between the two illusory texts (the “referent” [or even “meaning”] of the text and the nodal highlights of the text) is an infinite job because the separation between them—only the old warhorse “content vs. style” in another guise—is illusory and vanishes into an ungraduated unity wherever we fix our attention on it. Possibilities of commentary in such cases are so endless (they will generate wherever we decide to fix gradations) that the sane critic must eschew them. The only thing that, as a reasonable endeavor, we can comment on in such works is what they have to say about certain subjects. But heaven protect us once we get lost in the primary critical task of discovering and recovering what such works, phenomenologically, are. That is best left to the solitary dialogue between sovereign reader and playful page; those are the only participants in the dialogue that I, or the novel I wrote, are concerned with. Dhalgren is (as is most SF) practically all foreground—at any rate, the proportion of foreground to récit is high enough to assure a paucity of serious (written) analysis. Here, standing on the line, it would be most presumptuous for me to suggest that the language within the text was rich, complex, or worked. It may well (and from my own, most unprivileged position, despite what anyone says, I shall never know) be simply flabby, opaque, and confusing. What I can hazard—not as my own response to any of the words on paper but merely as a projected observation that someone who visited me at any of the places I lived while I was writing it would have had to make—is that the language was worked on. (And what a Lacanian plenitude of readings that little preposition offers up to that most Calvinis-tic of verbs!) Where one goes with Dhalgren after that is entirely a matter of personal temperament. The reasons I wrote it are precisely those which prevent me from urging anyone else to read it. I can far more easily think of reasons to encourage people to avoid it. My most vituperative critic (not Lester del Rey, but Harlan Ellison, in his review in the Los Angeles Times), abandoned the book at page 361, remarking that Dhalgren was not a novel but a “career.” I wonder if it doesn’t mean something when the most violent detractor hits the point precisely. Certainly the greatest single fiction among the many that weave together to make up the text are subsumed by the two dates which, nominally, enclose its creation—the last writing of mine one reads in the novel. One person who has read Dhalgren a number of times writes me she found it easier to hear the voice of the writing if she actually paused, when reading to herself, between sentences. Many hundreds of sentences in the book were written down on index cards and/or separate notebook pages, worked over and revised as autonomous verbal objects to assure they did their particular micro-jobs as economically as possible before they were mortared back in edificial place. (Many of the sentences I am least satisfied with are ones I did not give this kind of attention to and which only underwent their various buffings on their half dozen trips through the typewriter.) Is there any relation between this reader’s discovery of a way to respond to the text and my way of composition? I don’t know. But her method and mine are ultimately outside the text and of merely anecdotal interest. But let me see how closely I can approach the dangerous city-limit from a different direction. A few months ago someone doing an article on “Sex in the Future” called me, along with a number of other SF writers, for a quote. I sent him: There’s a prevalent theory that society, in some mysterious way, is and will always be a mirror of some mysteriously eternal sex act, i.e., standard missionary position. This theory, of course, is nonsense. Every sex act, from the most “normal” to the most “perverse,” is an internalization of one or another set of social parameters. Once internalized, however, they are sexual and no longer social—save in their social effect as sexual behavior. Though an easy and uncritical passage from the social to the sexual is, therefore, always suspect, I would hazard that sex in the future will be no better or worse than society in the future. If future society is vigorous, open, and varied, then so will future sex. If future society is repressive, authoritarian and monotonous, you won’t be able to hope for too much better in bed. Somewhere in the text of the last chapter of Dhalgren, readers have noted some sentences that they feel express more or less the same thoughts as the first four sentences of the above. It would ill behoove me to argue. Without commenting on what is in Dhalgren, I will say that the first four sentences of my quote (we can ignore the last three speculative ones) are about psycho/social facts-in-the-world. One might quibble with terms—perhaps it is not a “theory” so much as a largely unexamined model that explains much ill-considered action, many glib statements, and vast numbers of movies, novels, and plays; one could argue over how and in what way and when and exactly which social parameters are internalized to give specific forms to the varieties of human sexual responses. But that is arguing over whether the earth is a sphere, an oval, or a pear—not whether it is flat or round. Dhalgren certainly isn’t about this psycho/social fact—nor the conflict between those who are aware of it and those who are its unknowing victims and/or exploiters— any more than Shakespeare’s Tempest is about the fact that the Earth is round, a fact which the discovery of Bermuda had brought to the general attention of the British public only a few years before the play was written. Nevertheless, to know about the discovery of Bermuda and the new status of both magic and science that had resulted from it is certainly to make the Tempest more comprehensible. More to the point, contemporary playgoers who did not “believe” in the roundness of the earth, nor in the existence of outlying tropical islands, and had no feeling for the new distinctions between fantasy/magic/reality/science that were then being etched on the modern English- speaking consciousness, though they might recognize the form of the Masque, would, with all else in the play, be totally at sea. They simply would not be able to make the storm-tossed landing on that tropical island, nor read properly the emblems of what is real and what is not and the dialogue between them which are the structure, significance, and charm of the play. It is not that they would miss the surface plot: they would miss the subtext which gives the surface plot its reason for being what it is. I think a good number of Dhalgreris more incensed readers, the ones bewildered or angered by the book, simply cannot read the proper distinction between sex and society and the nature and direction of the causal arrows between them, a vision of which lies just below the novel’s surface and which gives the book its logical coherence. Though these readers are perfectly willing to respond to a “sympathetic portrayal of the social problems of those who deviate sexually from the statistical norm,” they are at first confused by and ultimately angered with a presentation that completely subverts the entire subtext that informs a discourse of “social problems/ sympathetic/sexual deviate/normal” in the first place. They still see “real” society as a projection of an “idealized” sex act (which somehow involves vast amounts of male aggression inchoately coupled with total female passivity), and read all fictional accounts of sex-and/or-society as accurate, relevant, and charged with value as they constitute themselves under the shadow of this model. Such a mistake is understandable. Precisely this model charges with sense the fiction of writers as diverse as Lawrence, Mailer, Malzberg, Oates, Ellison, Barth, Roth, Bellow, and Thomas Berger. To read Dhalgren against this model, however— that is, to use this model as a template against which to discern the sense and weight of various scenes OF SEX, OBJECTS, SIGNS, SYSTEMS, SALES, SF ... 41 and sentences—is to render the book a non-sense far greater than any which might come under the rubric of “unorthodox plot,” “sexual explicitness,” or “reality vs. fantasy.” It renders a very long book a mere mass of unordered, quotidian psycho/social detail. I think this model—a platonically ideal sex act after which all social relations must be formed in order to partake of the good—is pure literary excrescence. (To call it “literary invention” implies that someone, sometime, somewhere invented it with malice aforethought: and I do not think this is the case.) I would like to see it dispelled. It distorts the true polarities of the human universe, mystifying the known and the knowable, subverting and diffusing human energies away from where they might help real women and real men: because it makes human problems accessible to analysis appear adamantine, monolithic. Sex is sex, pleasure is pleasure, anger is anger, sadness is sadness, joy is joy, and fear is fear: all are intricately and intimately related, and the sudden paths from one to the other are endlessly surprising. All of them, and all the paths between, are affected by the material universe we live in. All affect our picture of that universe. Also, each of us experiences the complex of them differently, first because we are in different positions vis-a-vis the ordered external universe and moving through that order at different trajectories, and second because we are different individuals at our respective positions and the internal factors—capacities for pleasure, anger, joy, sex, etc.—are constituted vis-a-vis themselves differently in each of us. Mapping all of this, either with the fictive device of “character” or “narrator,” or employing such a map to move with words the “character” of the reader through such a territory, is one of the writer’s possible tasks. Confusion in the map (or generalizing too quickly between one element and another) is an aesthetic flaw. To use the sex-produces-society model as a mapping tool (rather than society-contours-sex) in any sort of narrative fictions (science or otherwise) foredooms us to losing our way, both practically and ethically, once we turn back to the world—and it does so without any implication that any particular set of morals need be reflected in the fictions themselves. Here follows a random galaxy of notes, most of them no doubt familiar to anyone who has read at all in the last decade-and-a-half ‘s work in semiotics and structuralism, which, from their disorder, will hopefully force at least some coherence between what has gone before and what will come after them. (1) Our actions influence the material world. The material world (not just the modes of production!) influences (among many other things) our emotions and our general psychology. Frequently we are unaware of it—often we are only partially aware of it. (2) Our landscape, entirely true for any urban environment (and, today, almost entirely true for any rural environment in Europe, the United States, and Canada), is made up totally of emblems of former human actions. From the sky (overcast because of the industrial effect or the greenhouse phenomenon), to each tree or grass blade in the city parks (the trees are there because someone put them there, or because someone left them there when clearing away others), the landscape is a dense, interlocked web of the detritus of haphazard human action and/or intentional human undertaking. One way to look at it is as a vastly recomplicated code of human signs (or semes). As we walk down any street, we read (or sometimes misread), consciously or unconsciously, this code. What it says affects us. It is the real world influencing (among many other things) our emotions and general psychology. (3) I call it a code; but this code has many aspects of a true language. For one thing, syntax is all important. A new building encountered in a section of the city where all the buildings around it are new has one meaning; a new building encountered in a section of the city where all the buildings around it are decrepit slums and tenements has another. As well, these signs, semes, or codons affect one another in purely autonomous ways that change their meanings so that those meanings cannot be traced back to any intention on the part of the initial human actors: soot in the air (one seme) defaces a new building (another seme) creating a new seme—a grimy building—with a new meaning for the city itself. An unused sewer main beneath the street (one seme) collapses and causes a tenement (another seme) to drop a wall and collapse at one corner. The abandoned, half-ruined building where people have been injured and have fled from it is a different seme (with a different meaning) from either an over-crowded tenement or an abandoned sewer main. (4) Fiction as we know it today begins as a response to an industrial phenomenon, to which the social analysis of Marx was equally a response. To quote Sartre quoting Marx: “The means of production affect the political, spiritual, and economic life of the people.” Responding to the same phenomenon that Marx’s words were attempting to model, various nineteenth- century novelists (in France, they included Balzac, Stendhal, the Goncourts, and Zola; in England, they included Thackeray, Charlotte Bronté, George Eliot, and Dickens) realized, more or less articulately, that to describe the products of production, to evoke their textures and suggest their syntagmatic relation to one another in various settings, in the novel’s foreground social space, not only fleshed out the representation of material life, but was also a way of implying— through their relation with the means of production—a commentary, in the novel’s background social space, on the values, aspirations, and ethics (political, economic, and spiritual) of everyone involved in the described object’s production, distribution, and purchase. Thus to describe an object was to generate a web of commentary, just beyond direct apprehension yet nevertheless strongly felt as one reads the texts to hand, on the politics, economics, and religion of both the material and the fictive world, charging the whole work with significance and a sense of coherent worldly knowledge. This is what all those descriptions of furniture, fashion, fabrics, and carriages are doing in the novels of Balzac. More or less under control, this is (more or less) what they have been doing in the novels of all fictioneers since—and this includes science fictioneers. (5) Consider: Our clothes are a sign system. So are our hairstyles; and whether or not we wear makeup, whether or not we shave; natural pigment in our skins is a direct sign (or an indirect reminder) of others’ actions. The pigment acquired by exposure to sunlight is a sign of our own recent histories. Again, syntactic relation is all: deeply tanned skin on a well-dressed young man carrying an attache case means one thing. Deeply tanned skin on a ragged old woman carrying a bulging, frayed shopping bag speaks something else entirely. The entire visible surface of every urban landscape we walk or ride through, as well as ninety-nine percent of the visible surface of every human being in it, is constituted of signs of specifically human actions, human reactions, class and individual histories, ordered in informative, syntactic relations. (At a previous point in history, it might have been useful to distinguish between human signs and natural signs. Today the distinction is meaningless. The reading of “purely natural signs” generates the whole discourse we know as science; but with its humanly organized “controlled experiments” we have devised to verify our readings, the natural signs at this point have been absorbed by that discourse—at least for the West. Nature, or the study of nature, as soon as we turn to a book to help us pursue it, is absorbed in the implied discourse of human technology.) The autonomous inter-effects of these signs on one another and one another’s meanings suggest the volatility of a living language—rather than the lexical extensionality of a simple code or cipher. We may, for a moment, locate two areas in this language of human signs: the signs constituted under the rubrics of nature, architecture, furniture, cooking, craft and science form one area; and in general they are far more ambiguous, resonantial, and connotative than the signs in the other area we can locate, i.e., those signs constituted under the rubrics of bodies (gestures, deformations, and wounds), fashions, faces (expressions), texts, and voices, which, by comparison, are straightforward, clear, and denotative. (6) Marx still provides the basic transformation by which the rare, simple declarative statement in the nonstop din of this language of human-made, human- charged, and human-structured signs may be translated into its political, economic and spiritual equivalent: “Who made it? How much were they paid? Who profited, and by how much, from its sale? Who profits most from its having been put specifically there—in that specific syntag-matic order with the world around it?” Though they may use the answers differently, both the poet and the politician will find these good questions to ask of the objects they encounter on their trek and trajectory. But “simple declarative utterances” in the total surround of the sign language we live in today are rare. (7) We tend to forget that Shakespeare’s art was precisely an art of bodies, fashions, faces, texts, and voices—with a little music thrown in on the side: lavishly costumed, full of poetry, and from report brilliantly acted. But how many thousands of post- Elizabethan performances have obscured the fact that the plays were performed without scenery and with an astonishingly meager prop-box: letters, handkerchiefs, swords (which are really part of fashion), jewel boxes (ditto), cups, chairs, and a few musical instruments practically exhaust the lot. Precisely what there was of the sixteenth century language of objects, so connotative and resonantial, Shakespeare, on his bare boards, collapsed with the language of the actors. Another thing we tend to overlook is that, thanks to the fleshing out provided by the imagination of modern theatrical and film directors, for all the rich gallery of character types, covering such a goodly span of Elizabethan society, high and middle (if not low), it would be next to impossible, from the corpus of thirty-six, to construct a rich vision of the material life of any of those types: details of architecture and shelter, food and food preparation, textile weaving and sartorial technology are just not terribly forthcoming from his texts. And these are the same details that the novels of the Goncourts and Zola— following from examples begun in Balzac—threaten to collapse under. The list of foods, clothing, and shelter mentioned in Shakespeare is thin and generalized: wine, roast meat, bread, fruit, “sweets” and “sweet meats,” doublet, hose, cloak, hat, bonnet, gown, armor, sword, shield (encore ditto), castle, courtyard, dungeon. And an unbiased translator would confirm for us that there were not many more things on this list than could be found, say, mentioned in the Iliad, written twenty- five hundred years before (we except the descriptions of war articles—we are talking of the texture of material life). The language of artifacted objects did not become the relative treasure of connotative riches it now represents for literature until it had been recom- plicated by industrial development, as well as given a clear reading by that development’s political consequences. But the social developments that made the language of objects literar-ily decipherable did not halt; those developments that made this language both rich and clear (by providing an industrial, or sometimes an industrial vs. cottage, reading) continued to lay complexity atop complexity in that language so that its resonances, by the end of the First World War, if not well before, were too complex for the orthodox rhetoric of nineteenth-century fiction to represent clearly and precisely. (8) Some months ago, I happened to encounter, by one of those chains of coincidences which are fiction, six Sony eight-inch portable color television sets: The first was in the office of the chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Buffalo where I was teaching. The chairman was keeping it, on top of his filing cabinet, he explained, for a woman professor who was picking it up from him later that afternoon. The same model set, a few days later, was brought around to the bachelor digs of one of my older students (who worked as a carpenter when not in class, and who had bought the house with three other young men some two years ago, though now its kitchen was filled with dirty dishes, its carpet worn through, its bathroom always in the midst of home repair, and its porch steps in need of new boards), by a rather scroungy, bearded seventeen-year-old, who wanted to sell it. My student didn’t want to buy, and it was carried away across a wet, leaf-plastered Buffalo street. Several weeks later, in New York City, I encountered the same set on the large, teakwood desk of a successful homosexual novelist in his largish, plant-filled, one-room studio apartment in Soho. That same evening I found it on the cigarette-burned table top in the room of my next-door neighbor in the residence hotel where I’d been staying: he was a twenty-two-year-old black, a year out of North Carolina and ten months into a job as a security guard for an uptown building. He was sharing the room with (and I suspect supporting as well) a friend who was a not very effectual grass-dealer and their two girlfriends, who were always in to borrow my iron. I’d already resolved to write down this chain encounter, so it was something of a humorous footnote to my proposed text when, almost two months later (and no writing actually done), I noticed the same model set under the elbow of a fortyish salesman in a green banlon shirt in a Fourteenth Street appliance store where I had gone to buy a digital clock radio. What finally impelled pen to paper, however, was encountering a 46 half-mad old woman who used to wander, mumbling, around Union Square and who later turned out to live on welfare in the basement of a building on Avenue D where a friend of mine lived on the third floor. In her basement room, where she beckoned us in to see, were piles and stacks of old TV chasses, broken sets and discarded pieces found all over the streets. I did not see the Sony. But there was a plastic Sony colophon in a large paper bag full of knobs and electronic parts, leaning against the leg of a rickety table—all of which, considering what had gone before, brought up quite clearly a Sony- of-the-mind. Now the point of all this: the Sony eight-inch color portable speaks in far more muted tones than, say, the Aubusson tapestry on the wall of a Proustian drawing room—a simple cipher of money and taste, a simple symbol of time, if not history, passed in sight of an emblem of both. The sociological syntagmatic accompaniments to solid state circuitry, both synchronically and diachronically, are too complex for us to read from these half dozen situations a simple, industrial message. We live in a world where the language of signs has grown too complicated for money, morals, aesthetics, philosophy, and technology to collapse, as in the case of Proust’s Aubusson, under a single symbol. This does not mean that the objects of modern technology—by virtue of their likelihood to appear in such varied social syntagms—have gone lit-erarily mute. Rather, we simply must listen much more carefully if we are to hear what such a TV set truly has to say. Certainly it fulfills its task in generating a Marxist commentary, trailing the image of myriad Japanese women technicians (like a sexually inverted Hamlet’s ghost viewed through the eye of a fly) as well as implications about wealth, supply, demand, production and production values, international tariffs, and the like. But in complex harmony with these, it signs a whole web of social values and social values denied, of communication —between classes, sexes, ages—and communication subverted. Even to say, “Several weeks later, in New York City, I encountered the same set ...” generates a discourse almost totally congruent with one of those tedious aesthetic texts that begins, “Can we locate the single object under consideration in, say, six copies of Ulysses ...?”—a problem that does not raise its head with the individually fashioned wall hanging. The Sony, if only through the greater multiplicity of its possible environments, sings a far more complicated, if quieter, song. One must constantly invoke the clanking music-box of nineteenth-century nov- elistic rhetoric just to make clear that these jigs and brass cadenzas are not what we are listening for: that we are attempting to hear a much subtler and more complicated interweave of melodies. (9) The best-known attempt to present fictively the language of objects in all its modern complexity is, of course, the novels of Robbe— Grillet. By suppressing all traditional novelistic rhetoric, he hoped that the complex interrelation of object and object (or object perception and object perception), would speak forth loudly and state itself with its own, inchoate voice. The flaw in his strategy, a shy quarter of a century after the appearance of the first of the novels that made Robbe-Grillet a scandal and then an institution, is today too apparent: Objects in the world speak the language of objects in the world: material life. Words on paper speak the language of words on paper: writing. The other thing one must remember is that a good deal of that suppressed nineteenth-century novelistic rhetoric grew up precisely to represent in words the growing complexity in the language of objects that industrialism had rendered so aesthetically rich. Much of that rhetoric, frankly, was successful. (There is also the fact that the language of human signs in the seventies is substantially more complex than it was at the appearance of Les Gommes in 1953.) The solution to the problem of the fictive representation of signs is more complicated than Robbe-Grillet’s solution—indeed, it is not likely to be found in any specifically unilateral method. Like any other artist, the contemporary novelist must take from the past what seems to remain useful, discard what is irrelevant or what specifically distorts, and invent an artistic structure or set of structures adequate for what she or he feels has not been dealt with before. For the novelist, this means devising a set of fictive tropes, rhetorical devices, etc., complex enough to present/represent what one wants. If Robbe-Grillet’s novels are powerful works and remain viable, it is rather in the way Seurat’s paintings remain forceful nodes of aesthetic tension/attention, i.e., not because of the method but because of the artists’ faithfulness to it. That, as artists, they needed their particular methods psychologically as well as intellectually (what a strange vision of the mind, where these aspects are so sundered!) only circles our point. One must remember that if what Seurat in particular and the impressionists in general wrote about their methods were to be taken literally, then their canvasses, when viewed from more than ten feet off, should suddenly look like Andrew Wyeth’s! Similarly, the problems spelled out in Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel (1965), while they are certainly real problems, are not the ones his novels triumph over. Since the literal interpretation of neither of these artists’ written theories appears, after an encounter with their works, as a literal description of their aesthetic undertakings, we are in the somewhat tricky position of asserting— in a work that is essentially a written theory of our own—that artists writing about their own theories are constructing not a description of their work, but a metaphor to take with one into the orderly chaos of that work as a tool for making one’s own, personal map. As Seurat’s paintings create their stunning impression of stylized light and life by the power of paint placed so systematically on canvas, so Robbe- Grillet’s novels gain their hypnotic quality through the strength of systematically disciplined words. (10) The sexual/social myth that the good society takes its form from the most socially condoned sexual act is a result of two factors that, here, need only be mentioned, as elsewhere others have exhaustively described them. First, there is a mental template that was worked into the very form of fiction (among social entities) by the same industrial forces that contoured so much of the rest of the rhetoric of the nineteenth-century novel—forces that compelled all people, to the extent of their identification with, or even their contiguity to, the white male, middle- class nodes of power, to see the working class in general, racial and religious strangers in particular (as they represented, in large amounts, possible additions to the labor market), and the unstable (do they work or don’t they? are they property or aren’t they?) status of women in a radically revalued patriarchal society, as perennial threats to the order of things. The second factor —the twentieth century’s addition—was to lay over this basic template a muzzy misreading of Freud, that saw “... sex as the source of all things.” (What Freud said, of course, was that, in a society which represses and/or sublimates it, sex is still very strongly at work, even in places where the repression and/or sublimation appears successful—which is another thing entirely. And though the mechanics of the workings are different, the same can be said of anger, pleasure, sadness, fear, grief, joy, pain, and intelligence.) Lay over this the general aesthetic laziness of most modern novelists before the admittedly immense task of untangling the significance of the dense surround of human signs that is our life in the modern world, and you have the limits on the “impoverishment” of modern fiction. One of the failures of Robbe-Grillet’s method, for example, is that when he embeds all these objects in such textureless discourse (or, at least, discourse of such limited texture), rather than our reading the true message that flashes out from their syntactical- interaction-as-objects, it is too easy for us to read the style itself as saying, “None of these objects means anything other than the amassed, inarticulate presence it achieves through the repetition of names, attributes, dimensions—the stuff of terror and despair.” The cumulative force of a Robbe-Grillet novel is, essentially, a negative one: the reaction of the reader to the text is best taken as a metaphor for despair before the task of ever untangling meaning from a complexity of objects—which is why his books that work best are the books that are about, in the most nineteenth-century way, “characters” for whom such despair is an appropriate reaction: a psychotic murderer, an obsessively jealous husband. And one cannot divorce the aesthetic success of these novels from the failure inherent in fictive discourse itself, which failure is emblemized by the “fact” that the “victim” in both the “successful” books is that terror and time-bomb which, in nineteenth-century fiction, must be gotten rid of, either by death or marriage, at any cost: the Female. (In a sense, Lolita [1956] can be seen as a novel struggling, both in its textures and its plot/structure, with precisely what defeats Robbe-Grillet in Le Voyeur [1955].) What one is looking for is a novelist who can make sense out of the plethora of semiotic associations our world yields throughout every arc- second of its field, whether or not her or his “plot” dramatizes the “success” or “defeat” of a “char-acter” before the same task. (11) To return to the end of the nineteenth century: The general despair of novelists at negotiating the recomplicated language of signs produced a fiction that responded, in historical terms, by becoming highly subjective and/or psychological. Between the seventeenth century and the end of the nineteenth century, the convention was established that a certain proportion of sentences in serious fiction must be devoted to récit—commentary on the subjective world of the characters or the sociological significance of the situation. To conform to this proportion was a way of meta-fictively signaling that the fiction was, indeed, serious. It is just after the turn of the century that the myth of the sexual source of everything becomes an articulate force in modern fiction. It allowed the modern novelist (most specifically and successfully, D.H. Lawrence) to recharge these récit sentences, hitherto devoted to psychological analysis, with a certain energy that comes as much from the repetitions of real speech as it does from real speakers’ ever-present topical interest in the passions. Before Lawrence, those récit sentences had to stand or fall on pure wit and socio/psychological insight. These sentences were not so much to “present character” (though this was how their task was referred to) as to present what the novelist knew of the workings of human psychology in interface with society—the task of the light essayist. (Yes, they knew this was not the “character” itself: in the nineties Wilde had quipped: “The more one analyzes one’s characters, the more they come to sound like everyone else.” Yet the whole history of the novel had shown the form committed to presenting the distinctions between human beings within the coherent matrix of society. The modern task of the novel, to show that all human beings are essentially the same while at the mercy of the flaws and contradictions of an incoherent society [a Durkheimian entity which, as Saussure’s langue claims for itself an ontological status apart from parole, claims for itself an onto-logical status apart from the social behavior of any given individual], does not emerge until later.) But, at the same time, psychology itself, at the hands of Freud and others, was becoming a science. Lawrence’s sentences of repressed sexual rhapsody implied, in the background social space of the novel, just as strongly as Balzac’s descriptions of furniture et al. had accomplished an implication of economic commentary before, the entire discourse of that science. How could this implied discourse of a branch of medical science fail to triumph over those merely clever observations by amateurs who stated in their texts that psychology was a matter of verbal paradox, mental contradiction, step and misstep through the social dance, knowledge and ignorance of What Is Expected? At this point in the development of the novel, insightful and/or witty analysis of social and psychological situation was replaced by subjective rhapsody. Subjective rhapsody implied the entire discourse of a science—psychoanalysis—just behind it; novelistic psychological analysis suggested a competition with that same science that the novelist, as amateur, could not possibly hope to win in the face of the new erotics. Looking slightly askance at this development, one also notes that such rhapsodies are certainly easier to read, if not write, than the rhetoric it replaces. I have written elsewhere (as have a number of others) that science fictional discourse redistributes the fictive attention between character and landscape (i.e., between subject and object) in a manner different from mundane fiction. Science fiction makes the attention on the landscape much higher. To work within this reorganized fictive frame gives us, first of all, a basically better matrix in which to deal with the recomplications of modern “sign” language. And I can think of no better place than science fiction in which to avoid “certain conventions of fiction” that make so much fiction such a political disaster. I am attracted to those areas that most fiction handles with both textual and structural clichés—blacks, women, the mentally ill, the socially marginal, the relationship between society and sex— because I have had firsthand experience with many of the situations they imply: I am black, I have spent time in a mental hospital, and much of my adult life, for both sexual and social reasons, has been passed on society’s margins. My attraction to them as subject matter for fiction, however, is not so much the desire to write autobiography, but the far more parochial desire to set matters straight where, if only one takes the evidence of the written word, all would seem confusion. One of the most pernicious things about the myths—for that is all one can call them—shadowing these areas is that they preclude any possibility of envisioning a different social order whose members, in response to it, might grow up reasonably to seek and expect, for example, quantitatively more sexual encounters and/or who might foster a more reasonable and re— laxed attitude about those sexual encounters they do have. The view of sexual encounters as affected and affective processes is abolished from possible consideration by the kernel of illogic at those pernicious myths’ core: sexuality is a substance, and what is more, some individuals possess more of it than others, in measures entirely proportional to their distance from certain centers of bourgeois power. To deny this whole set of prejudices, kernel and superstructure, is to affirm that, from the inside, all people experience their own surface behavior, sexual and otherwise, as a negotiable dialogue of response, reaction5, desire, and control: not to experience the generation of one’s own behavioral signs in this manner is the subjective experience of madness. (12) So we will always recognize it, let us have this model one last time in all its raw absurdity: All peoples who are not by heredity and/or active bonds of control fixed to the centers of bourgeois power are seething masses of dull, inarticulate sexuality. The man’s is completely identified with jealousy and aggression, the woman’s with jealousy and acquisitiveness. Take, as an example, the bulk of men (one could as easily take their wives, sisters, and daughters with very little translation in the ensuing description) that statistically form the plurality of unskilled and semi- skilled labor in this country— traditionally referred to once as “The Working Class Male” and now as “The Lower Classes” (this social group is not to be confused in any way with any revisionary or other Marxist view of “the proletariat”), the “Under Class,” or most recently by ironic European sociologists as “The Fourth World.” In him, sex and aggression are one. The appalling and inhuman conditions under which he lives barely keeps this sexuality/ hostility under control. Conceivably, if he could ever lower his persistent and dull anger enough, he might be able to employ enough intelligence to exert some beneficial influence over his own life as an individual or over the lives of his fellow men. (The obliteration of women and their labor, within the home and without, from this model is pivotal to its working efficacy.) But since this dull and disfocusing rage is fed by that inexhaustible and ever-brimming pit of sexuality (with which it is one), this lowering is not very likely—except now and then, when a particular lower-class male is able to exert great self-control, repress all primitive urges (which, for him, will be a nearly killing effort and cannot help but cause some great psychological crippling) for the rest of his days. And should he ever fail to repress, and that sexuality/anger should break free, he will destroy himself and all he lias achieved in a single sweep, probably taking the odd bourgeois-born woman with him. On the one hand (the myth continues), it is mildly sad that the conditions under which the majority of such men live are so oppressive; and it is sighed over that things don’t get better for them—so that the lower class male could blossom forth, while sticking to his place. But any logical assessment of the situation makes it perfectly clear (declares the myth) that if the restraints of inhuman labor and/or inhuman conditions over inhuman hours were removed for more than one or two days a week, the sexuality/ hostility would erupt and run berserk, and lower class males would destroy everything, more than likely including themselves6. One can find this myth in all its quintessential absurdity in the portrait of Carlton Walpole, the migrant fruit picker, at the beginning of Joyce Carol Oates’s 1967 novel, A Garden of Earthly Delights. It contours the portrait of all the prole-origined soldiers in Norman Mailer’s 1948 novel, The Naked and the Dead. One tries to give these novels liberal readings—of a sort any contemporary social worker or psychologist might be expected to bring to the situations the novels portray: ‘The hostilitity here is a response to the inhuman conditions. If these men cannot seem to get it together to do anything about the conditions, the best explanation is what behavioral psychologists call ‘psychological generalization,’ an inescapable process that is a response to emotional overload —a process that occurs on all social levels; as well, the pressures to be dealt with, from inside the situation, are more complicated than they could possibly appear from outside, since they include the conditioning of these men and our conditioned view of the situation.” But one can no more find emblems for this reading in the fictions than one can find emblems of the knowledge of the existence of the moons of Jupiter in Don Quixote. The existence of the moons of Jupiter was simply not part of the aristocratic and upper-middle-class Spanish fifteenth-century épistémé. What makes the situation of the modern novel so appalling is that the liberal reading was, more than likely, very much part of the épistémé of twenty-five-year-old Mailer in 1948 and certainly part of the épistémé of twenty- eight-year-old Oates in 1967. But it is not part of the épistémé that generated the nineteenth-century fictive discourses they write. And to write nineteenth- century fictive discourse, precisely to the extent that given examples of such discourse are recognizable as fiction, is to doom onself to projecting the nineteenth-century épistémé of which such appalling myths as the one above are part and parcel. Fictive discourse’s treatment of women, blacks, Jews, homosexuals, etc., takes off from the same point as the myth we have outlined and moves along similar trajectories—with women’s fictive treatment having a couple of particularly frustrating contradictions, which, to understand, we must begin with the understanding that women are not, as even my list might suggest, a category among four, but rather marginally more than half of the other three, and are just as exploitable within the work force (as that phrase is traditionally read) as they are “outside the work force” (i.e., at work in home for a father or husband), and that the two modes of exploitation are intimately connected and endlessly and mutually supportive. What all these fictions do is, first, take only a novelistically valorized set of visible elements (never an individualized totality: everything done by one woman, one working man, one Jew), and, second, suggest causal arrows between these elements in absurd directions. What makes modern fiction so uninteresting is that the causality and analysis implied by the fiction is demonstrably not the matrix of causality and analysis that the writers themselves could possibly believe in. We are at a point in history where the basic models proposed by the objective discourse of sociology and psychology—even in their most vulgarized, cocktail party versions —are more accurate and interesting than the basic models that underlie most “serious” novels. Let the above galaxy of twelve be the readings which anchor all our subsequent statements to this text as we put our toe over the brim into the oceanic text of Dhalgren. Here, on the edge, we note that some of the most disappointed readers were those who tried to read the “city” as a “projection” of the protagonist’s (or, heaven forbid, the author’s) “fantasies.” I suspect these are the people who see the récit/foreground (subjective/objective) proportion of sentences as a fixed sign evoking an interpretive judgment that—for the SF reader, at any rate—such a proportion simply doesn’t call up. The logic runs: If there are too many subjective-sounding sentences, this is a sign that some objective mystery exists to be solved; it is a sign that there is some objective correlative which will clear up the mystery and make “sense” of all this confused “subjectivity.” (One recalls the more naive critics of books like Finne- gans Wake demanding to know what it was “really” about, or those even more naively claiming to have “discovered” its “plot.”) Such readers simply assume that every book must have a clear and linear reading that “explains” the “story”; for them the sign of its existence is the distortion of that proportion of sentences away from the objective. By the same token, too many objective sentences, again violating that proportion, for these readers is a sign to take all this objectivity as a projection of some traumatic, inner, subjective state-of-character: dream, guilt, psychosis ...(One recalls the equally naive readers of Le Voyeur at this point.) Dhalgren is almost all foreground—as I have mentioned. One can only speculate that these readers took this as a sign for some great and inner subjective distortion (above and beyond the description and analysis of psychological distress the text supplies) which would “explain” it all. They were, understandably, disappointed when the text did not supply one7. And I suspect these were readers who, on the deepest level where it counts, simply could not read the book as science fiction—a practice of writing which has familiarized its readers with another proportion weighted toward the objective. I would like to make the following suggestion humbly, but perhaps I have already crossed a limit, a line, into a landscape where humility has no existence. I may well be already in the city of the unacceptable: Anyone who finds it helpful may approach Dhalgren, without fear of misreading the text because of the approach (though there is, alas, no way to insure a “proper” reading: it may have none) as (and in) an attempt to explore and respond to a small sector of the grammar of the language of human signs. It tries to focus on the grammar of that language by a science fictional reorganization of these signs’ textual production/reproduction. Kid’s sanity remains in question (and hopefully is never fixed to the circumscribed area of meaning that respectively overshadows the officially “sane” or the officially “insane”) for the same reason the disaster of the city is unexplained: such explanations would become a fixed signified straiting the play and interplay of the signifier—the city of signs—that flexes and reflexes above it. To “clear up” either question (that of the Kid’s “sanity” or that of “what happened to the city”) would prevent us from apprehending Dhalgren’s real/true(?) topic: the organizing and reorganizing transformations we are free to view and experience once these restraining models are tossed aside. —New York September 1975 !A dozen years later (November 1987), Dhalgren’s sales have settled at about a million. It is still in print and sells a few more thousand each year. While more popular with the hardcore SF readership, The Mote in God’s Eye never did catch up. 2Lacan, Jacques, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” included in Structuralism, edited by Jacques Ehrmann, A Doubleday Anchor Book, New York, 1970. 3Roland Barthes has quipped in Writing Degree Zero that Flaubert made writing acceptable to the bourgeoisie by welding the idea of “labor” to the creation of the text. 4Readers who detected the pastiche of Caliban to the Audience in Newboy’s second monologue might wonder if Auden shouldn’t be included. Let me say, Auden is a writer who concerns me and delights me—rather than who influences me. 5I intend these first two categories to cover habitual reactions that may run counter to more recently manifested desires. 6In a depressingly real sense, the Marxist glorification of work for its own sake, coupled with the naive assumption that as long as everybody is working hard, all sexual “problems” will disappear, i.e., reduce to a pastoral (and suspiciously bourgeois) vision of respectful, shy, young working men getting up the nerve to propose to respectful, shy, young working women, who must get up the nerve to respond, quiveringly, “Yes” (both, finally, taking courage from the fact that they are serving the state—the Marxist equivalent of “doing it for Old Glory”?), is historically, if not archetypally, one with the nineteenth-century industrial mythos: “Keep the proles working hard enough and they’ll be too tired to break out into the orgies of lust, rapine, and [incidentally] economic devastation [the absent text supplies for this term, “looting”] we know seethes just below the surface of every prole soul. Under industrial containment [read: exploitation/exhaustion] their sex [read: aggression] can be limited to the most conventional and tepid expressions.” The entire template, Marxist and Capitalist, is a pre-Freudian disaster area which Freud’s own inability to distinguish between sensuality, sexuality, biological gender, and sex role socialization has done as much to perpetuate in the West as his basic discovery of the unconscious, sexual repression, transference, and infantile sexuality have prepared the groundwork to alleviate. 7A11 possible readings of a book, naive or otherwise, are of course in dialogue with one another—but in different modes and at different intensities! Some Remarks Toward A Reading Of Dhaloreh by K. Leslie Steiner Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany, belongs to that scant handful of science fiction novels with obvious aesthetic range and clear seriousness. At our most cynical, if we cannot state that a full appreciation of that range and seriousness is the reason for the book’s near three-quarters of a million sales to date (among paperback original science fiction where a hundred thousand is considered notably successful), we can reasonably maintain that such sales are due in large part to a curiosity over what such range and seriousness look like in a science fiction novel. Sex will not account for it. Thirty-five odd of Dhalgren’s near nine hundred pages do deal with copulatory mechanics, but this is simply not a high enough percentage— especially with the real and near-real pornography seldom more than a bookrack away. Also the “sex” in Dhalgren is too psychologically portrayed for real arousal. From the beginning to the end of it the characters never stop thinking. It isn’t publisher promotion. Besides a somewhat more elegantly designed cover than is usual for paperback original science fiction, there’s been none. Also, three quarters of a million sales in any field outside science fiction is just not that spectacular—especially from the publisher of Jaws and Day of the Jackal. What has made Dhalgren a phenomenon at Bantam Books is not the sales so much as that those sales have come without one advertisement in prozine, fanzine, or general readership newspaper—a distinction neither The Dispossessed on the one hand nor The Mote in God’s Eye on the other (both books which have sold less well by respective factors of three and four) can claim. Sales in the multiple millions helped on by hundred thousand dollar ad campaigns are not uncommon at Bantam. Sales of over half a million with only the standard seventy-five review copies are. Dhalgren is a novel that has achieved its readership entirely on garnered reputation. To the extent that reviewer response contributes to such reputation, we must note that not one such response we have seen, whether the praiseful New York Times Book Review piece by Gerald Jonas or the hyperbolically glowing appreciation by Theodore Sturgeon in Galaxy, whether the vitriolic reaction of Ellison in The Los Angeles Times or the outrage of Del Rey in Analog, has even suggested that the book was traditionally “entertaining” or a “good read.” In fact it has probably been the most appreciative reviewers, like Barbour and Lupoff, who have been the first to warn the general reader that the book, besides long, is involuted, obscure, and difficult—if not downright tedious. Yet today, just over a year and a half after these first critical reactions, the tremors of one sympathetic reviewer concerned with whether or not Delany could continue to find publishers for such obviously uncommercial work, or the philistine remarks that, for a few months, littered both prozines and fanzines on the stupidity of the publishers for taking on such an obvious bomb, today seem like natterings from a parallel universe quite out of touch with our own. Dhalgren has found its audience. It is not the runaway audience of the manufactured bestseller. It is not the all too swayable and, finally, all too naive audience of hardcore science fiction readers. Because it is neither of these, we may speculate that it might well be the basis for that most important of audiences, the vertical audience of concerned and alert readers interested in the progress of American fiction. For it is our sincere belief that only this audience could find such a novel truly absorbing. Among Dhalgren’s array of poets and priests, astronauts and engineers, lay analysts and leather queens, outlaws and oligarchs, all interlocked in a daymare plot sired by Borges out of Genet, each in intracranial trajectory across the deliquescent and quintessentially American cityscape of Bellona—a ‘scape duplicated in how many photos of burned-out central Harlem, depopulated Buffalo, dying Detroit and half a dozen other towns for which the book presents the fantastic calculus that, despite (or even because of) its avoidance of specific economic and political explanation, nevertheless demonstrates with exhaustive accuracy the workings of such images within the meaning codes that form and inform our epoch—we can only touch, in an essay of this scope, on the novel’s most formal and framing structures. As formal and framing as our exploration will be, we feel it is justified: Dhalgren does not yield up its center easily on first reading—at least not to this its first wave of readers. Our own attempt to illuminate that center, in all its dislocated play, is formed by highlighting elements on the borders of its vast tapestry: the center itself, which is not so much a location as a set of optical strategies to refract their glimmer, this essay must largely leave out; for that is something only a careful reading of the text itself can supply. The simple key to Dhalgren is an old and familiar one to serious novel readers: Dhalgreris central character, the Kid, has great charm. Unless one is prepared, however, to find a meticulous and exhaustive portrait of a somewhat shy and dubiously honest (if well- intentioned) ex-mental patient charming, Dhalgren cannot be a pleasure to read. But one must find doughty old men charming to enjoy Don Quixote. And one must find high spirited if somewhat naive young women charming to enjoy Emma. Indeed, if one does not find high spirited if somewhat naive young women charming, all Austen’s extensive art, inexhaustible wit, and moral fervor will seem pretty cold fare. Similarly for Cervantes’. And one must find Delany’s wandering madman charming; if one does not, the great net of verbal resonances Delany sets up around him, the glimmer of evanescent experience half comprehended in the burning city, the metaphoric superstructure of language and logic as well as the precision and energy with which Delany propels the Kid through them will seem pretty rarefied stuff. The Kid, of course, is much more than a charming wastrel. He is deeply sensitive, sharply observant; he is very brave and sincerely—almost agonizingly —modest. But our approach to these qualities must be through a sense of his charm. If it is not, these other qualities will seem quite disembodied, and the structural complexities of the novel which support Kid’s tragedies— tragedies which are the tragedies of our epoch underlined and highlighted by an extraordinary fictive surround—will seem mere cleverness or less. Over a wide field of reading we can locate two categories of successful character. Characters of one category, on our first exposure, wrench at our sympathies, frequently overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds, to push us toward laughter or tears. One thinks of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, of Osborne’s Jimmy Porter. Characters of the second category are presented usually at much greater length and always with greater analysis —frequently too much analysis for even a diligent reader to absorb at a single reading. Though the author, by this analysis, compels us to think about the character more, our initial emotional responses are much cooler. If we must watch such a character suffer or despair, we watch as we would a real person suffer in the street: it is sad, yes; but we do not get involved. One thinks of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, of Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke. The characters in the first category, on repeated reading, pall. Their play on our emotions begins to appear too calculated, too strident. At worst, they dissolve, on fifth or sixth reading, into the various rhetorical postures out of which their authors cobbled them together but which adhere, finally, to no rich organization of psychological veracity. At the same time that we must now make an effort of will to experience these collections of verbal tropes as human beings, much less respond to them humanely, we realize that the intensity of our initial response was basically due to safety: we could cry and laugh so easily because, finally, we were not crying or laughing about anything very much. Characters of the second category, if we are lucky enough to indulge multiple readings of the works in which they occur, we find gaining an intense presence. Though we still may not cry at their suffering, frequently we are deeply moved by it, if not truly frightened. We begin to know in our bones why their insoluble problems are, for them, insoluble. Against this, their triumphs, however minor or momentary, present for us all we can know of our own human possibility, or the possibility of humanity for humanity. As their significance becomes for us more and more universal, our picture of them becomes more specific, more individual, unique. Without further denigrating the pleasure or importance of characters in category one, those in category two are the indisputable triumphs of the writing art. In the eighteen months since its publication, we have read Dhalgren cover to cover six times. Though this suggests an enthusiasm of a sort usually associated with works containing category one characters, our own experience of the Kid is far closer to what we have known of category two. But if the simple key to Dhalgren is character, the complexities it unlocks, like Austen’s complexities, are structural. And it is finally an aspect of structure that we shall here explore. In the second half of Don Quixote, the errant Don encounters men and women who have read of his adventures in the first half—which, in concert with the Don’s literarily mediated ideals of chivalry from the first half, justifies the interpretation current among a number of critics that the Quixote is, among other things, an allegory of the progress of the text. In the first chapter of Dhalgren, the Kid encounters a notebook which, though he only recognizes it in dim flashes, could only have been written by himself. The text of this notebook sweeps up the text of the novel proper and, in the last chapter, comes to replace it. We do not need to be critics, then, to assert that Dhalgren, in its foreground, deals with a theme others have found buried in allegory in Cervantes. What it does perhaps require a critic for is to trace out the organization of the numerous variations on this theme. For this organization recalls, in its complexity, one of Austen’s minuets of affection and self- deception, if indeed it does not go beyond that complexity into a new mode altogether. Let us leave Austen and Cervantes and explore the play and progress of texts in the text of Dhalgren. Dhalgren makes constant reference to, and/or quotes extensively from, three inner texts: the poems written by Kidd (his earlier onoma) which eventually form the booklet Brass Orchids (as well as the mysterious “second collection”); the newspaper published and edited by Roger Calkins, The Be liona Times; and the journal which appears in fragments throughout the novel and which, with Chapter VII, becomes one with it. The most traditionally privileged of these texts is, of course, the poems—i.e., literarily privileged. The sign of their privilege, in the novel Dhalgren, is that they are not anywhere quoted in the text —at least not in final draft. We see (and experience) Kidd write them, revise them, correct them; we watch others read them, recopy them, and miscopy them. But whenever we are given any phrase from their text, almost immediately we are informed that the phrase is to be deleted or rewritten. And the once Denny reads a line aloud from the printed version (p. 568)\ and we think we have at last heard a true fragment of these most privileged utterances, we learn two sentences on that he has misread the line. The astute reader will recognize that misreading as a combination of two rejected versions of the same poem (p. 271), which perhaps explains Kid’s extreme anxiety at Denny’s mistake: for a moment Kid must believe he did not make the corrections he remembered making, which corrections make the text of the poem authentic for him—and inaccessible to us. But if we stand back from all three inner texts—poems, newspaper, and journal—and the text of the novel in which they are embedded, we notice what a substantial amount of the machinery of this very long book (far more than is devoted to the too often mentioned “sex”) is given to debunking the traditional authority on which their various textual privileges are founded. Thus, the newspaper’s traditional authority of accurate public pronouncement is thrown into question by its shifting dates, its absurd headlines, and even its highly affected style. There is the suggestion that many of the articles assumed to be written by Calkins are really written by Bill. The Bellona Times has dealt in scandal, muckraking, and libel. It announces the publication of the “second collection” without Kid’s agreeing to it, exaggerates the number and nature of the scorpions and their runs, and we catch it in at least one specific error of fact that is typical: We would much prefer to give our opinions on Lower Cumberland Park [... where apparently all power has gone out with the breaking of the water main on my last Thursday ...]. But another writer (page one, continued page seven) has already rehearsed his eyewitness, first- hand account. And, anyway, in his words, “... chances are, no one lives there any more.” (p. 547) It is in Lower Cumberland Park that Dragon Lady has her nest and that George Harrison lives with his populous entourage of blacks. The traditional authority of poetry is its claim to aesthetic integrity. This is thrown into question at the party given for Kid by the publisher Calkins—with Thelma pro and Frank con: and before the party ends, the poems’ very authorship is put in doubt. During the party, the specifically social de- privileging of art and the art-text, for which the poems are a symbol, becomes explicit in the novel: Lanya sighed. “I guess that’s why I’m glad I’m not an Artist ...1 mean Artist in the way this party presupposes ...1 don’t just think you can be that kind of artist any more. Lots of people do things lots better than lots of others; but, today, so many people do so many things very well, and so many people are seriously interested in so many different things people do for their own different reasons, you can’t call any thing the best for every person, or even every serious person ... This party—it’s ritual attention, the sort you give a social hero. I guess that can be an artist if there’re few enough of them around—” “—like in Bellona?” “Bellona is a very small part of the universe. And this party is a very good place to bear that in mind ...” She glanced down under her brows. “Maybe that’s what Mr. Newboy was trying to tell you?” (pp. 692-693) The journal, which is found in the novel’s first chapter and quoted in fragments throughout Dhalgren (and was therefore written, at least in part, “before” the novel’s action begins) is given in substantial portion as the last chapter. We reread a number of the same quotes we have read before, only this time in context. (This identifies what we are reading as the “same” journal.) Nevertheless, the journal seems to continue the story of the characters and events “forward” through time from where it takes up at the end of Chapter VI. Also, Kid claims never to have seen the journal before Lanya finds it in the park (p. 37), and yet when we are finally presented with the journal text, it certainly appears to be narrated by Kid —all of which undermines the traditional authority we grant a journal: that of a real recounting of real happenings written by a real person in real time. Even the variorum apparatus with which the opening section of the journal chapter is encumbered seems to be there essentially to point out its own inconsistencies, flaws, and generally to deflate itself (p. 723 & pp. 735-736). As we stand back, however, we must also notice something else: the multiplicity of places these texts-within- texts connect with one another; and that the connections are most unlinear. We hope to show that these texts connect in such a way that their various privileges/deprivilegements form an interlocking and interdependent structure. A section of this structure, which we feel is indispensible for the true appreciation of the novel and a key to much that is in it, is what, in this essay, we shall explore. We have already used once in this essay that most privileged of critical terms: symbol. The sin of privilege is that it allows what we grant it to pass without closer examination. But we shall not, I hope, indulge such a sin here. Modern Active symbolization is semantic and plurally metonymic— rather than allegorical and globally metaphoric. If, for example, one character robs another in an alley, and we read at the incident’s conclusion, “The buildings stared down with blind, accusing windows,” the way to retrieve the symbolism of this (admittedly hackneyed) sentence is by imaginative metonymic extension and semantic substitution: by metonymic extension, the “buildings” and the “windows” symbolize the landscape in which the crime occurs. By semantic substitution, then, the landscape in which the crime occurs is “blind” and “accusing.” The windows are blind because presumably (by metonymic extension) no one is looking out of them. The windows are accusing because (by metonymic extension and semantic substitution) //people were looking out the windows, they might proffer an accusation. In another mood then (i.e., conditional subjunctive) the inhabitants of the landscape are symbolized by the sentence. We may also say (continuing the semantic substitution that allowed us the previous statement) that the symbol sentence symbolizes the material of the landscape and the inhabitants of the landscape in different moods. The double pair “buildings/windows” and “blind/accusing” symbolizes (again by semantic substitution) alternation in properties of the landscape, i.e., opacity and transparency, efficacy and ethics. We can say, by semantic substitution, that the alternation symbolizes the complexity of the landscape. We can then go on to discuss these various complexities of landscape, remembering that they are organized around a crime, and organized in relation to one another by the symbol sentence. We might return to other parts of the text to retrieve the trajectory at which we enter this symbolic structure (i.e., the web of signifiers that is our only expression of this symbol’s signified): Was the crime recounted from the criminal’s or the victim’s point of view ...? This will ultimately play a part in organizing our symbolic elements and their referents2. But the way not to untangle the symbolism of such a fictive sentence is to say: “The buildings, with their blind, accusing windows, are an allegory for the forces of society and justice.” The metonymic leap here is too great and the semantic collapse too complete to be useful. The first method explodes (as with a microscope) the elements of our awareness as we experience the symbol sentence itself, retaining those elements in their various moods and in their various structural relationships. The second merely takes one symbolic structure and replaces it with another, which, despite any accuracy of intuition, puts too little analytic energy to the task. We have already said, rather conservatively, that the poems in Dhalgren symbolize the art-text and, by extension, art. We also say that the situation of Kid, his poems, and Bellona, symbolizes the situation of the modern artist, his art, and his landscape. But though we note that one situation might be considered an allegory (or metaphor) for the other, still we reiterate that we have arrived at the various symbolic correspondences not by intuitive leap, but by an extensive semantic/metonymic matrix which orders the symbol in the way it is experienced while reading the text. It may be assumed that such a matrix is constructible behind any subsequent use of the word “symbol” in the text at hand. We have gone on at such length about our method here because it is precisely such a method that will most aid a reader in retrieving what, symbolically, is occurring around those sections of fictive discourse that so many have found nearly impenetrable, and which Dhalgren presents us with again and again—for example the following from Kid’s musings as he approaches the city of Bellona: This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain. Very few suspect the existence of this city. It is as if not only the media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it by. Rumor says there is practically no power here. Neither television cameras nor on-the-spot broadcasts function: that such a catastrophe as this should be opaque, and therefore dull, to the electric nation! It is a city of inner discordances and retinal distortions, (pp. 15-16) We shall return to this passage to show how it is symbolically related (i.e., lies a mere step away in the symbol matrix) to another passage further on. That connection will strongly suggest one aspect necessary to the theme cited—i.e., the progress of the text. But we cannot leave the general problem of symbology without touching, in Delany’s work, on its sister problem, the problem of mythology. Our approach to the mythological allusions in Dhalgren is this: While there are mythical fragments scattered throughout the novel, we suspect that their symbolic significance (by semantic substitution) is precisely that they are fragments and not wholes. To locate a single myth with the same “plot” as Dhalgren and say that one symbolizes the other would be to commit, on a grand scale, the allegorical error that, on a small scale, we have analyzed above. At least one of Dhalgren’s explicit themes is the fragmentation of modern social myths (p. 278ff); the fragmentary nature of the mythic allusions merely dramatizes in privileged literary terms what the foreground of the novel dramatizes in action. The novel begins with a clear recall of the myth of Daphne3. But when, in the next scene, Kid, about to discuss the incident with the truck-driver who has given him a lift, thinks, “No, the Daphne bit would not pass—” (p. 11), we suspect Delany is also telling us that we cannot discuss this novel as though it were a contemporary Ulysses, i.e, a novel with a coherent referent myth in place of a traditional foreground structure or plot. It won’t pass. The Daphne encounter takes place outside the city of Bellona. The myth fragments are encountered after we cross the bridge into Bellona proper. We think the symbolism here is: clear, recognizable myths—not only literary, but (by metonymic extension) social ones as well—are to be found outside Bellona. Inside the city all myths/fictions/signs—literary and social —are shattered, revalued, and recombined. We have spoken of connections between texts in Dhalgren. Let us examine one such connection—between the text of Brass Orchids and the text of the novel proper. In Chapter II, Kid is walking up Brisbain Avenue, looking for Calkins’ mansion. He is carrying the notebook; recently he has broken into a house for something to eat. When he is on the street again, continuing his search, we come across the following description: Charcoal, like the bodies of beetles, heaped below the glittering wall on the far corner. The sharpness of incinerated upholstery cut the street’s gritty stink. Through a cellar window, broken, a grey eel of smoke slithered the sidewalk to vaporize in the gutter. Through another, intact, flickerings ... The singular burning among the dozens of whole buildings was the most uncanny thing he’d seen. He crossed quickly to the next block, (p. 86) Kid continues up the avenue, writes his first poem (“Brisbain”) on the blank verso of a notebook page, finds the Calkins mansion and, while he is trying to look over the wall, is set upon by three scorpions (who will be revealed later as Copperhead, Glass, and Spitt); he is revived by Newboy the poet and Fenster the black liberal, but is not allowed within the mansion gates. He starts back down Brisbain Avenue; and, after he sees some people down the block who might be more scorpions, he responds to his terror by sitting down against a lamp-post to write again: His heart pounded. His armpits grew slippery. Breathing hard, he sat with his back to the post’s base. He took the pen from his pocket ....”Charcoal,” he wrote down, in small letters, “like the bodies of burnt beetles, heaped below the glittering black wall of the house on the far corner.” He bit at his lip, and wrote on: “The wet sharpness of incinerated upholstery cut the general gritty stink of the street. From the rayed hole in the cellar window a grey eel of smoke wound across the sidewalk, dispersed before” at which point he crossed out the last two words and substituted, “vaporized at the gutter. Through another window,” and crossed out window, “still intact, something flickered. This single burning building in the midst of dozens of other whole buildings was,” stopped and began to write all over again: “Charcoal, like the bodies of beetles, heaped below the glittering wall. The sharpness of incinerated upholstery cut the street’s gritty stink.” Then he went back and crossed out “the bodies of” and went on: “From a broken cellar window, a grey eel wound the sidewalk to vaporize at the gutter. Through another, intact, something flickered. This burning building,” crossed that out to substitute, “The singular burning in the midst of dozens of whole buildings,” and without breaking the motion of his hand suddenly tore the whole page from the notebook. Pen and crumpled paper in his hand; he was breathing hard. After a moment, he straightened out the paper and, on a fresh page, began to copy again: “Charcoal, like beetles heaped under the glittering wall ...” He folded the torn paper in four and put it back in the notebook when he had finished the next revision, (pp. 93-94) What Delany has done here is construct a purely verbal perspective that begins, broadly, below the baseline of the novel’s text, then rises through it until it converges somewhere above at the vanishing point—at the “next revision” we never see—that is, presumably, the poem. The history of poetics gives us the reading for those perspective lines. They progress from the direction of prose and in the direction of poetry. From Coleridge’s “Prose is words in the best order; poetry is the best words in the best order,” through Flaubert’s rhetorical inquiry of George Sand in a letter of 3 April 1876, “Why is there a necessary connection between the right word and the musical word? Why does one always end by writing a line of poetry when one condenses one’s thoughts too much?” to Marianne Moore’s “In poetry, the instantaneous solution to almost any problem is to delete,” the history of poetics is littered with topoi that leave the reading clear. And these perspective lines establish a clear connection between the text of the novel and the text of Kid’s poem—though in such a way that we cannot say for sure that any word in the novel text, including “charcoal” or “beetles,” survives into that final draft. Here we refer the reader back to the paragraph quoted on page 64 of this essay, and particularly the sentence: “It is as if not only the media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it by.” It, of course, is Bellona. The first clear appeal to perspective we encounter in the novel is in this purely verbal illusion of perspective. At this point we should also recall that historically the “laws of perspective” arose as an essentially ironic two-dimensional commentary on a ponderous, three-dimensional real: lines that met were suddenly signs for lines that no less than Euclid had claimed would never touch; one angle was a sign for another; ellipses were signs for circles; in short, systematic distortion was a sign for the organically undistorted. And what facilitated the codification of these laws in the west? A specifically ponderous architecture! Japan, despite a solid tradition of highly representational painting, never developed these “laws,” and there are numerous examples of Japanese, till the beginning of the twentieth century, reporting that Western painting was “curiously distorted.”4 All this metonymic interplay between perspective, perception, distortion and architecture, as well as Dhalgren’s precise rendition of the first of these (and its overwhelming rendition of the last) as language, is the first clear, symbolic suggestion that Bellona is a city of words, on a far deeper level than we might have suspected—indeed, on a level that recalls nothing so much as that astonishing Chapter II in Book V of Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, “This Will Kill That,” where Dom Claud outlines, in a way that, to the modern ear, casts forward to McLuhan far more than it recalls anything medieval, how the birth of printed language signals the death of architecture. But there are other junctures between text-and-text within Dhalgren which, when we begin to trace out their pattern, reveal even more interesting symbolic structural exfoliations. The Necker cube is a visual illusion with which we are all familiar. As we regard the two dimensional projection of the three dimensional object, spontaneously what was the back face leaps forward to become the front, and what was the front face drops away to become the back. Planes seen from above are suddenly seen from below; outsides are now insides and insides outsides: To some extent, once we know how the illusion is supposed to affect us, we can control the switching back and forth —the alternation of “readings” for its interlocking junctures. Dhalgren is a novel that is frequently described as circular—because the last non-sentence in the book (“Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to”) can be read as the first part of a sentence completed by the book’s opening non-sentence (“to wound the autumnal city.”). But we must point out that a circle is not the only closed figure possible to inscribe on a plain sheet of paper. A careful reading of Dhalgren shows that the connecting nodes of various textual modes of discourse give rise to a figure more closely resembling a Necker cube than a simple circle. The resultant shifts in authority of the various fictive planes, leaping back and forth as we observe them, are, we feel, crucial to the appreciation of Dhalgren. We take the trouble to describe these shifts in the hope that, once the reader can bring them more or less under control, she or he will appreciate the structural beauty and complexity of the novel Delany has architected. The first movement of Dhalgren’s Chapter I begins with subjective rhapsody: to wound the autumnal city. So howled out for the world to give him a name. The in-dark answered with wind. All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student riots; know that dark women in bodegas shook their heads last week because in six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee tastes after you’ve held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute, (p.l) The second movement of Chapter I begins: It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now. In the long country, cut with rain, somehow there is nowhere to begin .... (p. 11)

In the fourth movement of Chapter I, the harmonica player (who will later be identified as Lanya) brings a notebook up to the park commune’s campsite. And when Kid reads this notebook, it begins on its own page one: In Palmer-perfect script, an interrupted sentence took up on the top line: to wound the autumnal city. So howled out for the world to give him a name. That made goose bumps on his flanks ... The in-dark answered with wind. All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student (p. 36) But here, apparently, the text alters. For when Kid picks up the notebook again to show Lanya the mention of student riots: He reached for the book (she pulled back sharply from the orchid), spread his free hand on the page (she came forward again, her shoulder brushing his arm. He could see her breast inside her unbuttoned shirt. Yeah) and read aloud: ‘“... thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student happenings with spaghetti filled Volkswagens, dawn in Seattle, automated evening in LA.”‘ He looked up, confused, (p. 37) And the next day when Kid is looking for Calkins’ mansion, he discovers (shortly before the writing scene with which we examined our—but not the novel’s—first textual juncture) the following passage in the notebook: It is not that I have no future. Rather it continually fragments on the insubstantial and indistinct ephemera of now. In the summer country, stitched with lightning, somehow there is no way to conclude ... (p. 85) Whatever the significance of the correspondences between the text of the narrative and the text of the enclosed (and enclosing) journal, in terms of “plot” or “symbolism,” what we can say unequivocally is that such correspondences do exist and that they exist between texts of differing modes— modes that differ even though some of the words shared by these differently moded texts are identical. The correspondences are furthered in more generalized, semantic ways as well: in the scene at the commune, from which we have already quoted, the two young women, Milly and Lanya, discuss the notebook’s contents: Milly had taken the book, turned to a later page. The green-eyed girl leaned over her shoulder: “Read that part near the end, about the lightning and the explosions and the riot and all. Do you think he was writing about what happened here—to Bellona, I mean?” “Read that part at the beginning, about the scorpions and the trapped children. What do you suppose he was writing about there!” They bent together in firelight, (p. 37) Chapter VII, which is the text of the notebook itself, indeed begins with some entries concerning the scorpions and the five children who had been trapped in the burning house (and rescued by George and the Kid); and, indeed, it ends with a description of catastrophe in the city, involving lightning, riot, and explosions. The notebook, which will begin in the middle of a line, will not, however, begin with “to wound the autumnal city.” But there is internal justification for this. We shall read among the journal entries: I’ve read some pages so many times they’ve pulled loose from the wire spiral. Some of these I’ve caught before they ripped completely free, folded them up and put them inside the front cover. Carrying the book around, though, I must have let them slip out. The first pages— poems and journal notes—are all gone, as well as pages here and there through the rest. (pp. 759-760) We have seen how Delany has connected the text of the novel proper with the poetic text: a section of text is condensed until it is one with the novel’s, then that text is condensed and recondensed until it disappears into the poem, via the verbal perspective lent by poetic tradition. What is the nature of the correspondence between the novel text and the journal text? From an examination of the above examples, we see that sometimes the texts are identical and sometimes they are substitutive variants, one for the other5. What do these correspondences accomplish within the novel’s foreground space? Besides unequivocally connecting two modes of discourse, they hint, whenever, as in his stopover en route to Calkins’ mansion, Kid becomes aware of one, that “he pay attention to part of his mind he could not even locate” (p. 85). We might let this phrase pass without comment were it not for another passage earlier in the book, in which Kid, referring to his stay in a mental hospital, tells Tak what it’s like to be insane: “Look, about ... being nuts.” He felt self-righteous and shy, looked at the doubled fist of flesh, hair, horn and callous pressed into his groin; it suddenly seemed weighted with the bones in it. “You’re not, and you never have been. That means what you see, and hear, and feel, and think ... you think that is your mind. But the real mind is invisible: you’re less aware of it, while you think, than you are of your eye while you see ... until something goes wrong with it. Then you become aware of it, with all its dislocated pieces and its rackety functioning, the same way you become aware of your eye when you get a cinder in it. Because it hurts ... Sure, it distorts things. But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you’re lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense—stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety—is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself ... in a way other people just can’t.” (pp. 53-54) Though Kid cannot “locate” the “part” of the mind where these correspondences are significant, he is at least aware that its “edges” exist, because he has had some firsthand experience of them, thanks to his bout with mental illness. I suspect that these places in the mind, “dislocated” and functioning in a “rackety” way during mental distress, are nothing less than the unconscious itself—though they are not the “Freudian” unconscious (i.e., the popular misconception of Freud’s discovery), filled with lurking monsters, repressed terrors, and archetypes. Rather, it is a very specifically Lacanian unconscious (i.e., the concept of the unconscious Lacan has retrieved from a close examination of Freud’s original work), an unconscious composed of the infrastructure of language itself, where such syntactic substitutions may be made, and where the reality-model is stored “as a language.”6 The circularity that so many elements of Dhalgren suggest is, symbolically, not so much a circularity through time as it is a circularity through the great, unconscious storehouse of language itself, where modes of discourse are stacked, helter- skelter, up against one another—as in the great MSE Warehouse, in which are stored all the inventions in (and the inventions of) the novel. Here is the prokaryotic magma of speech itself, which erupts the words actually composing the novel7, as well as, presumably, those words that make up the journal, the newspaper, and even the final, unuttered utterances of Brass Orchids. We may reasonably assume Delany is aware of the differing weights of varying modes of discourse—reportage, fiction, fantasy, etc. On the final page of Dhalgren, we read that work on its immense text was begun in January 1969 (p. 879). Just a week or so before, on 27 December 1968, Delany delivered a talk at the MLA Seminar on Science Fiction that grew into the paper “About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words,”8 which deals with the various levels of subjunctivity that inform various types of discourse—reportage, fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. It is therefore reasonable to assume that in the novel he began work on between four days and four weeks later he may well have been interested in exploring the fictive possibilities resulting from juxtaposing one discourse with another, embedding one in another, transforming one into another. (If the paper cited— which begins with an appeal to an extremely close reading of fictive sentences, literally word by word—does not precisely announce the theme of the novel [and a reasonable argument can be made that it does], it is nevertheless closely related to it.) As we have seen, Dhalgren is lush with such juxtapositions, embeddings, and transformations. If we read across the book’s final circularity, we see one of these transformations accomplished: as we reach the final pages of the last journal entry, in which the diarist has been describing his exit from Bellona, suddenly the entry loses narrative coherence and becomes—for the third time in the journal—schiz-talk. The schiz-talk joins with the subjective rhapsody which begins the book, out of which, phoenix-like, emerges the jeweled and polished prose of the novel’s text, describing the initial encounter between the Kid and the strange tree-woman, just before Kid’s entry into the city. But let us look a little more closely at what is going on around the juncture of these modes. At the beginning of the book, Kid (then nameless) encounters an Oriental woman (with a Midwestern Standard accent) in the woods. They make love. He asks her to tell him his name; instead of answering, she shows him where to get a strange chain of prisms, mirrors, and lenses. While he is taking it from the cave, she runs away. He follows, to find her in the middle of a field, whereupon she turns into a tree. He runs away. Going only so far into the novel, we note that there are two possible modes in which this opening incident can be read: either it is one with the base-line reality of the novel, i.e., we are to take it as something that really happened and assume there is some implicit or explicit fantastic/science-fictional explanation for it, an explanation that goes along, as it were, with the mode; or it happens against the base-line reality of the novel, i.e., we are to take it as a dream, a hallucination, or a fantasy (in whole or in part) of the character, a mental fiction that Kid reads, as it were, in the wrong mode. These are the two modes of fictive authority that such fictive discourses— especially that discourse labeled science fiction—present us with. Kid runs away from the meadow and, on the highway, is given a lift by a trucker: The driver, tall, blond, and acned, looking blank, released the clutch. He was going to say thanks, but coughed. Maybe the driver wanted somebody to rap at? Why else stop for someone just walking the road. He didn’t feel like rapping. But you have to say something: “What you loading?” “Artichokes.” Approaching lights spilled pit to pit down the driver’s face. They shook on down the highway. He could think of nothing more, except: I was just making love to this woman, see, and you’ll never guess ... (p. 11) This is their only exchange. Later, when the ride is over, most of the actual ride—so various sentences in the ensuing text would indicate—slips from Kid’s mind; the only thing that remains with him is the word “artichokes” (that plant of many leaves and many layers, its own exfoliation of its most sumptuous heart), which rings here and there in his mind throughout the novel, an absurd emblem from the gap in the Kid’s memory9—a gap that the text of the novel has traversed and retrieved for the reader. For the character, it is an emblem of ignorance and absence; for the reader it is both an emblem and a reminder of privileged knowledge, of the sort only third person narrative fiction can supply. Kid, at any rate, is let off by a river and starts across a bridge into the bizarre and shifting city. At this point, however, the conversation with the women he meets while crossing the bridge must be reviewed in full. Rather than quote three entire pages, however, we urge our readers to open their own texts of Dhalgren at this point and re- read pages 12 through 15 before continuing. Other parts of the novel supply us with more information about these “characters.” It is very easy to identify the small, pregnant black woman with the black, pregnant fifteen year old Gladdis, whom we meet in the scorpion nest during the journal chapter. As well, the woman who has the fever could easily be the nameless girl who is referred to as “Denny’s girlfriend.” Also, we will hear that at the woman’s commune there is a Eurasian woman sculptor who made a lion out of scrap metal and old car parts. Let us now skip to the closing entry in the final journal chapter—but we must note that our first encounter with this section of text is not in the closing pages of Chapter VII, but rather in Chapter III, when Kid is visiting Newboy at Calkins’ mansion. At one point, the notebook falls from Newboy’s knee while the elder poet is reading the poems: The poet bent, but Kidd snatched it up first. Its back cover had fallen open. Kidd frowned at the final block of handwriting that ran off the page bottom: ... The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to ... Kidd’s hand fell on the page. He looked up slowly, (pp. 291-292) Again, this suggests strongly that this entry—which in Chapter VII we get in full and to which the above lines indeed form the abrupt conclusion—was written before the action of the novel proper, i.e., before the action recounted in the first six chapters begins. At this point, we must look closely at what happens in this final entry: it begins with a description of a strange catastrophe, from which Kid, along with a handful of scorpions, flees to the bridge. As the little bunch are crossing the bridge, they encounter an Oriental woman coming into the city. At this point we again urge our readers to open the novel and review the exchange that begins on page 875, and continues on to the “end.” Our general tendency to exercise fictive coherence makes it very easy to read the Oriental woman who enters over the bridge as none other than our lion-sculptor, coming into the city to begin her stint at re-education within the city of revalued signs. (It is equally easy to identify her with the tree-woman Kid first makes love to. We note in passing: if the woman is, as Lanya elsewhere describes her, Eurasian, that means she is half Oriental and half Caucasian. Kid is half American Indian: the American Indians are traditionally considered a Mongoloid race.) As Kid was given the orchid by her on her departure and his entrance, now he gives the orchid to her at his departure and her entrance—and it is precisely at this point in the cyclic completion that the journal’s narrative coherence breaks down and becomes babble. Coming out of the journal text (and the novel) at this particular trajectory, we note that there are two possible modes in which the closing incident may be read—as there are two possible modes in which any first person account, found in a notebook, may be taken: either it is real; or it is invention. One recalls Cecily’s diary of her non-existent romances in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: “These are merely the innermost thoughts of a young girl and consequently meant for publication.” What presses a diarist to fictionalize, however, need not be so cynical. More to the point, one recalls the occasional chimerical or fantastic occurrences that appear in Kafka’s, Rilke’s, or Nijinsky’s diaries, without comment, among the more quotidian concerns, and the occasional account of what could only have been a dream, notated exactly like some diurnal happening. We have already pointed out that the opening of the novel avails us two possible modes of interpretation— reality or hallucination—just as the closing journal entry avails us two possible modes—reality or invention. We maintain, in this essay, that the amazingly close correspondences between both dialogue and description in the two texts—novel and journal— strongly suggest that one or the other of the two passages must be read in a non-reality mode: Two real events are just not likely to occur with such extended similarities. How one reads the temporal relation of the journal to the novel determines which passage we take as real and which passage we take as hallucination/fiction. If the journal does precede the novel and does recount an actual exit (of Kid’s) from Bellona, then the novel’s opening, i.e., everything that happens outside the city—the tree woman, possibly the driver, and definitely the women on the bridge—are most likely some sort of hallucination; moreover, the hallucination of the women on the bridge is probably based on the real encounter recounted at the journal’s close. If the novel precedes the journal, however, and the meeting with the women on the bridge did occur when Kid first entered the city, then the closing account in the journal must be a fiction, extruded no doubt under some neurotic pressure, but based on the real experience of the encounter which occurred when Kid entered Bellona. (“Real” here means, of course, one with the novel’s base-line reality.) It is under the pressure of this anxiety—the character’s anxiety at producing such Ά fiction—that the narrative discourse breaks down into the babel that ends the book10, and out of which, as we swing round to the beginning, the true Active discourse of the book arises. Need we make it explicit? These two readings are not to be chosen between. They are to be experienced as shifts back and forth between possible textual authorities, like the shift between foreground and background of the vertical planes in the Necker cube. The shift symbolizes the paradoxical frame of the novel itself: If Kid really entered the city, then he never truly left it. If Kid really left the city, then he never truly entered it11. We have described two faces of Delany’s Necker cube, flickering between background and foreground by the interplay of modes of fictive authority. We reiterate: to ask which of these two readings is “correct” is as pointless as asking which is the proper interpretation of an optical illusion that has been so carefully drawn to allow our interpretation to fall back and forth between them. What the illusion does, of course, is maintain both readings while deprivileging the authority of each—and as such is in keeping with the theme of deprivileging certain textual authorities that runs through so much of D hal gre η. In light of this fictive paradox, we turn to another which we shall only explore briefly: the death of June’s brother—Did he fall or was he pushed? Some readers have felt the book leaves the situation unresolved. But when Kid outlines both possible interpretations of the situation to George, in Chapter V, what George tells Kid in effect (p. 534) is that the asocial nature of George’s sexuality deprivileges the traditional social value—June’s innocence or guilt of the crime—that traditionally accrues to either reading of June’s actions. We have already mentioned the theme of deprivileging the art text; it is carried through the book by a host of ironic and symbolic machinery: the poems are written on the verso sides of totally impossible journal pages, or in the margins of a completely bogus newspaper. Such aesthetic deprivileging has been one of the major problems of art for the last eighty years (if not the major problem since Romanticism)—at least since Gertrude Stein first began to write in Paris12. There would seem to be two major sets of reasons for this. The first set are internal to the fiction itself: they are the reasons Delany discusses so lucidly in his letter/article “Of Sex, Objects, Signs, Systems, Sales, SF, and Other Things,”13 i.e., the great tendency of fiction to be staunchly conservative even in the face of its writer’s own liberal, if not radical, political sympathies. The second set of reasons are external, and Delany has discussed them in part in his essay “Popular Culture, High Art, and the SF Landscape,”14 i.e., the various types of mystification that accrue to the art object and the artistic enterprise through the granting of social privileges by a critical public that, itself, will lose much of its social privilege should the mystification ever be dispelled. Delany treats the social emblems of the privileged art text with much irony in Dhalgren: the publisher has not read the poems, but publishes them purely on the mention (not even the recommendation!) of an establishment poet, who refuses to say if he thinks the poems good or bad; the publisher gives an elaborate party on the book’s publication, at which he does not bother to show up because he is having a religious crisis. This is rare irony indeed! One reason the social emblems of artistic privilege are a problem is because there is no way today that they can possibly be doled out according to merit. As Lanya says, there are too many good artists around, and too varied a range of serious, public tastes. At best these emblems are a distraction and at worst they are a prison—a gilded prison the desire for which helps promulgate literature’s internal conservatism. The traditional aesthetic response to this problem, beginning with writers like Stein, has been to write purposefully impoverished texts (frequently under the banner of social and psychological honesty; but as frequently with a sense of aesthetic purity), and to create works too bare to be considered political. But, as Lacan has demonstrated15, a signifier (such as a work of art) always takes some of its meaning from the signified (such as the social response) that accrues to it. And since such works do indeed answer the aesthetic problems of the times, the establishment world of better informed aesthetic opinion-makers frequently responds by turning all its traditional privilege-cum-mystification powers on these conscientiously impoverished works, granting Beckett a Nobel Prize, or devoting an official museum show to found-object art. What Delany has done is construct not an impoverished, but a rich text, that deals specifically with the break-up of social signs (and, I think most readers will agree, treats of this break-up as a good thing), and in which the various social privileges of the text (in its various modes) simply cannot be held onto, because each is laid against a fictive foreground plane that, as we perceive it, vanishes into the background and is swallowed up in a concert of possible deconstructions. We have outlined one of the most important of these shifts. As we began by discussing a textual mode that was not vital to this particular shift, so we shall close by discussing another: The journal/Chapter VII/novel closes with an entry we have already discussed in part, which deals with Kid’s actual- or-invented exit from the city. Marginal to it, however, beginning (p. 864) immediately after the last, textual lacuna, is an entry which has Kid still in the city, still writing his poems, still living with Denny and Lanya. How are the marginal entries of the journal connected to the major entries? The editorial apparatus, as well as internal evidence, suggest a clear and coherent answer: ... The rubrics running pages left or right, which we print in slightly smaller type, are marginal (sometimes rather wide) entries made along the sides of our typescript at somewhat narrower spacing; most probably they represent “entries in quarter-sized, near illegible scrawl all over the margins”—that is, entries of a later date than the one beside them we print in ordinary sized typeface. (Note also that the rubric which breaks off marginally to the last entry in the notebook continues as the major entry just two previous to this.) (p.735 [Italics mine.]) We wonder how many readers who have been baffled by “what happens in Dhalgren” have stopped to make use of this extremely important note on ordering the events of the text. The first implication of this note is certainly, at any rate, that the last marginal entry concerning Kid’s, Lanya’s, and Denny’s stay at Madame Brown’s (and Kid’s finally getting to work on his new poems), is written after the entry about trying to leave the city. The marginal entry concludes: Woke up loggy but clutching for my pen. Took some blue paper to the back steps, put the pine plank across my knees and wrote and wrote and wrote. Went back into the kitchen for some water. Lanya and Denny were there. “Hi.” “Oh, hi.” Went back to the porch and wrote some more. Finally it was (p. 869) And the entry continues, a hundred thirty-eight pages previously, on page 731: too dark to see. So got up, stretched, put down my plank, went inside—and was suddenly bellowing and yelling and laughing .... Running marginally to the second half of this entry (which, now, is the major entry) is one of the entries concerning the rescued children—which suggests that the whole incident of the fire, rescue, and its aftermath happened even after Kid began to write again, which happened after the catastrophe with the lightning and explosions (during which Kid may or may not have actually tried to leave Bellona). If all this chronology is to be trusted, then the “second collection” that gets destroyed before being published would actually have been written before Brass Orchids, making the actual text of Brass Orchids his third collection .... We shall cease here. But the point can be made that critics are simply not prepared to discuss Dhalgren until they have wrestled that last chapter into some sort of chronological order—or, more accurately, retrieved some of its possible chronological orders, for there are more than one and all are in dialogue. Delany has allowed several possible interpretations to the chronology of events. These alternate chronologies play as alternate signifieds beneath the fixed signifier of the musically satisfying order of the fragments as presented in the text. (The American reviewers who shout, with high-flung vitriol, “Joyce” or “tenth-rate Joyce pastiche”—most recently Barry Malzberg in a near-schizophrenic article in the September ‘76 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—are simply revealing that sad, abysmal, but typical ignorance of their country’s literary production. If there is a source to be located for this technique, it is the opening movement of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. But Delany presents such a rational and effective development on this technique, bringing it into such a clearly autonomous mode, that no one could really make the accusation—as one can with the Brunner of Stand on Zanzibar vis-a-vis Dos Passos—of simple imitation. At any rate, the technique has no parallel in either the Portrait, Ulysses, or the Wake16. And if Dhalgren does borrow the technique of pastiche itself from Ulysses’”Oxen of the Sun” episode—for Dhalgren does contain pastiches, of Auden, Rilke, and Valéry, as well as an amusingly covert allusion to John Ashbery’s early poem “The Instruction Manual” (p. 164)—it does so in such an idiosyncratic way as to put the whole concept of “borrowing the technique of borrowing” into its necessarily dubious light.) Some have argued that nothing in Dhalgren is resolved. We maintain the specific contrary: practically everything in the book is furnished with at least two possible resolutions, one of which is in the foreground and one of which is in the background, the two always ready to change places at an eye’s blink, depending on which way we choose to read Delany’s complex Necker cube. “Most of the time,” writes Flaubert in another letter, “conclusions seem to me acts of stupidity.” One can only go back to the frequently quoted line from Delany’s Einstein Intersection11: “... Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.” But inconclusive does not mean unstructured. And the ending(s) of Dhalgren are organized into the most dazzling of fictive structures, to preserve even more purely that so necessary inconclusiveness. The careful reader will note, on second or third reading of Dhalgren, that the book contains not two or three of these optical illusions, but dozens. Indeed, to trace out all their interconnections is to realize the novel is constructed of practically nothing else. Dhalgren accomplishes the Herculean task of presenting us with a totally coherent foreground which, by the fictive geodesies it establishes throughout the contours of its fictive field, allows not one plane of meaning to hold to any one single level. The task of treating the major problem of modern aesthetics in such a rich and recomphcated mode in the already deprivileged field of science fiction is certainly an impressive undertaking. Symbolically what the concert of Dhalgreris illusions says is that we cannot trust too deeply in any socially privileged certain knowledge18. All we may trust are our own readings of the paradoxes of the world, until we encounter evidence that things are not as we have thought, and our reading drops into the background and a new reading springs to the fore. In our quotidian rounds, all but philosophers (and certain types of madmen) tend to forget what a flimsy mental construct “certainty” is. As Wittgenstein says in the beginning of On Certainty, “If you can prove to me that ‘Here is one hand,’” referring to a line in G.E. Moore’s A Defence of Common Sense (a line Delany plays with in Chapter VI of his most recent novel Triton, Bantam Books, New York, 1976, p. 268), “I will give you the rest.” Knowledge, even knowledge of the laws of logic or the facts of science, is a mode of belief. Belief is always a matter of faith. Faith is a mystical occurrence, whether it be in the existence of God or the existence of the external world. What is mystical is not that we have more evidence for one or the other, but that we are able to constitute whatever evidence we have— for either one—into belief in the first place. Human knowledge has only been able to grow to the staggering proportions it has reached in this century of technological advance because our belief in reality, as Delany’s book symbolically suggests, must be like our belief in one reading or the other of the Necker cube: the earth may appear flat, or the scatter pattern through a pinhole may suggest light is made up of particles, but there is evidence waiting just over the horizon, or in the diffraction pattern through a fine mesh grid, for another reading of both phenomena. This symbolic evocation alone, we feel, is enough to judge Dhalgren science fiction. (It is certainly epistemological fiction!) And the skill, art, richness and complexity with which the work accomplishes its theme and themes, within its highly articulated structure, renders it science fiction of the highest order. —Ann Arbor, 1975 [New York, 1975] 1 All page numbers in parentheses, e.g. (p. 568), refer to Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany, Bantam Books, New York, 1975,6th printing & ff, as emended by the author’s correction sheet Correct line-readings for DHALGREN, 6th printing & ff, circulated by the author September 1975. In February 1985 on the occasion of the 17th printing of Dhalgren, which marked the book’s first decade in print, in Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field (edited by Charles Brown: Oakland, 1985), Delany published an article on the textual history of his novel since its publication in January 1975. According to his article, some sixty-odd typographical corrections were made in the 6th printing in 1975. A further set of c.150 were incorporated in the 16th seven years later in 1982, with a dozen more incorporated into the 17th, at the end of 1984. That printing also included what appeared to be an error on the copyright page: a list mid-page citing the month and year of each of the sixteen previous printings fails to include the present, 17th, printing. But a row of descending numbers at the page’s bottom, beginning at 25 and ending at 17, gives the printing’s proper designation. This designation method holds true for Dhalgren’s 18th and 19th printings as well—printings which are textually identical to the 17th. As this essay goes to press, the 19th was Dhalgrerfs last printing. For the first time since it reached print almost fifteen years ago, the book is now out of print—and has been for more than a year. Though now and again a great deal has been made of them, everyone who has actually taken the trouble to examine the corrections has judged them of a minor, if clarifying, nature. Some months afterwards, Delany circulated a short list of further corrections still remaining to be made. They are, indeed, typical of the others. The most major of these is the removal of Madame Brown’s name from a scene in which obviously she does not appear (304/9/1). The name endured, Delany states, through a late, hasty retyping of a former version in which she was present. As this terminal list is brief, with Delany’s permission I reproduce it in full. The numbers indicate page/paragraph/line-of-paragraph, follwed by the correct line reading and/or a typographical instruction in square brackets. This list, used on the 17th printing and beyond, Delany says, will produce an all but error-free text. CORRECTIONS REMAINING TO BE MADE IN DHALGREN 17th printing & ff 16/1/1: ception to pass it by. Rumor says there is practically no 36/9/3: tresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight 61/5/3: Where was Dad now? In one of three cities, in one of two 85/2/4: country, stitched with lightning, somehow there 94/2/2-3: ing hard. After a moment, he straightened out the paper and, on a fresh page, began to copy again: 100/2/1: (“Muriel! Now, Muriel, be quiet!” 131/9/1: [Typesetter: This should be reset as two lines, both of them centered:] MYSTERIOUS RUMORS! MYSTERIOUS LIGHTS! 132/8/2: We are sure something happened in the sky last night. 304/9/1: “What is that?” the man on Mr Richard’s left 339/3/21: since he was in the area, why didn’t he stay there. So the 367/2/4: [Typesetter: Note this is in a different font from the main text. Observe the spacing:] Τ Ε G TA Y 389/7/1: It fell open in Kid’s hands: 384-412: [Typesetter: In these pages, change the spelling of “Tayler” to “Taylor” throughout.] 414/3/3: international spies—I mean, maybe the whole city here 643/1/2: the blowout George gave for the Reverend Taylor in Jack— 693/6/4: Pure Reason, The Phenomenology of Mind, and Being 729/2: [Typesetter: Retaining its present placement on the page, reset this paragraph so that there is no widow at the end and the last line ends flush right with “actual —”] 749/5/6: chin toward Glass and Risa. “That nigger can fuck!” 767/4/2-3: the pussy. Despite George, and a city consecrated by twin moons, I know there must be some greater, female deity 785/2/21: the Emboriky for 795rubric/l/l-2: The active ones (of whichever sex) are denser and crueler. The passive ones (of whichever 805/14/7: funny things about me, and what had happened on the roof 820/5/3: the train-tracks, boy. Apocalypse has come and gone. We’re 835rubric/10/l: She: “Madame Brown took me to the 838/6/1: Mrs. Arthur Richards For these corrections, I am particularly grateful to Ron Drummond, Robert Morales, and Paul Blackwell, whose names I happily add to the list of readers (Douglas Barbour, Camilla Decarnin) who, over the last decade, have pointed out other errors that have been corrected in previous editions, i.e., the 6th, 16th, and 17th. —SRD, 1986 2Three further points may be of interest in our discussion of our symbolic model: One) Imaginative metonymic extension and semantic substitution may of course proceed out from the symbol sentence in several “directions.” The further they move from the initial symbol sentence, the more likely any two extensions are to diverge—though there is always a possibility of later intersection. Two) Some ideas (and the words expressing them) are more strongly associated than others. (Here we see the power of the Saussurian concept of sound-image over word.) There will frequently be, therefore, a stronger disposition to begin the journey out from the symbol sentence in one direction rather than another. Our point One) accounts for the richness and multiplicity of symbolic retrievals, while still keeping what is retrieved in some sort of order. Point Two) accounts for the fact that while two individual retrievals may be arrived at by the same number of steps, one may still be a more “obvious” retrieval than the other. Three) is an answer to a possible question our model for symbolic retrieval may elicit at this point: Do we then say that in fiction something is always a symbol for whatever it is an example of! Briefly, yes. But examining our example should make it clear that not all symbolic retrievals may be accomplished merely by asking what various images in the text are examples of. Consider the mode in which “The buildings stared down with blind, accusing windows” symbolizes the landscape’s inhabitants, or the complexity of the landscape, or the relation between opacity and transparency. We could not say our symbol sentence was an (or contained any) example of these without indulging catachresis in its most pejorative sense. 3There is an intriguing paragraph on page 4 of Ernst Cassirer’s Language and Myth, translated by Susanne K. Langer, Dover Publications, 1946, reissued 1953, which connects the mythical name Daphne, through the Sanskrit, with the word “sunrise”— intriguing in terms of Delany’s setting his Daphne scene in the moonlight, and the subsequent rising of the giant sun that apparently bears some ineffable female name (p. 767). Delany is obviously something of a Langer admirer (see Nova, p. 25, Bantam Books, New York, 1969, also Triton, p. 352, Bantam Books, New York, 1976, both by Samuel R. Delany); so it is not so farfetched to suspect he is familiar with the Cassirer. For the import of those myths that connect human beings with vegetation in general and trees in particular there is of course all The Golden Bough (Frazer) to browse over. And it is not forcing the basic plot structure of D hal gre η to describe it in terms of one of the most elemental myth plots: The hero, after an encounter with the Goddess, is struck with madness and poetry. But as we have said above, to specify any more than this is to violate the book. 4For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Art and Illusion, by Ernst Gombrich, Princeton University Press, 1960, a book which Delany discusses briefly in his article “Shadows,” page 63, in The Jewel- Hinged Jaw, Berkley Windhover, New York, 1978. Delany’s use of “perspective” to project these never- uttered utterances is, we feel, also ultimately ironic. 5One of the most interesting correspondences between novel and journal text is found between the scene in Chapter IV where Kid is searching for Lanya at the mysteriously abandoned commune site (p. 353) and the end of that mysterious journal section (that begins p. 832) in which Lanya, again in her glittering dress, exhorts Kid over Fenster’s murder and the burning of the “second collection”—and there is the hint of a tree beginning to turn back into ... something! This entry, after Lanya disappears and Kid, hiding from the marauders, sleeps in the park, finally degenerates (as he returns to the commune site) into a page of schitz-talk —the first of three such in the journal. The novel section we would consider (p. 353) begins: “Lanya?” He turned, waiting, for her answer, uncomfortable at any noise in this ringed, misty clearing. Even at the height of the project period, there were ... etc. The corresponding journal section (p. 837) begins: “Lanya?” They squatted to the furnace, simulatable in every break on those fenestrated, rusty fill-ins. Only for a distance in civet furrow, here hid ... etc. With the exception of the participle “waiting,” the article “the” (before “height”), and the possessive adjective “his,” the one is an almost perfect morphological rhyme of the other: pronoun/pronoun, verb/verb, participle/ —, preposition/ preposition, adjective/article, noun/noun, adjective/adjective, preposition/preposition ... etc. The correspondence, with perhaps half a dozen exceptions, is perfect/or one hundred eighty words. To discuss the significance of this correspondence in detail would require an essay almost as long as this one. But for those searching out “plot” in Dhalgren, we suggest that here is a clue to some of what transpired during Kid’s missing five days. The vanished time obviously must have started somewhere around Lanya’s (and the commune’s) disappearance. This suggests that the fight in the park with the man from the Emboriky, recounted in the journal (p. 785), might have occurred some time within the “forgotten time,” as Jommy claims it was the people from the Emboriky who’d already “run them from one side of the damn park to the other” (p. 785); which may also, given the correspondence, be the explanation of why the commune was abandoned in Chapter IV. There is internal evidence in the journal not only that it was written before the novel and after the novel, but during the novel as well. 6See “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever,” by Jacques Lacan, in The Structuralist Controversy, edited by Macksey and Donato, The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1972, and particularly Lacan’s comment in the discussion afterwards on how reality is stored in the mind, page 198: “I said like language, French, English, etc.” See also The Language of the Self, by Jacques Lacan, translated by Anthony Wilden, Delacorte Press, Delta Books, New York, 1975. 7See “Thickening the Plot” by Samuel R. Delany, in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, op. cit., pp. 147-154. Compare Delany’s description of the continual inter-effect of words and mental images with Lacan’s description of the inter- effect (or “intrusion”) of the signifier into the signified in “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” by Jacques Lacan, included in Structuralism, edited by Jacques Ehrmann, Doubleday, Anchor Books, New York, 1970. included in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, op. cit. See note on page 37. 9In connection with memory-gaps, so significant in the action of Dhalgren, we quote the following text-plus-text- within-text from The Prison-House of Language, by Fredric Jameson, Princeton, 1972, page 51: Shklovsky’s famous definition of art as a defamiliarization, a making strange (os-tranie) of objects, a renewal of perception, takes the form of a psychological law with profound ethical implications. The passage of Tolstoy’s journals which Shklovsky quotes in illustration is as close as he ever comes to taking an actual metaphysical or ethical position: I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn’t remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember—so that if I had dusted it and forgotten—that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or looking on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had not been lived. Art is in this context a way of restoring conscious experience, of breaking through deadening and mechanical habits of conduct ... and allowing us to be reborn to the world in its existential freshness and horror. Three points are to be made here in terms oí Dhalgren. First, we note that art, forgetfulness, and strangeness have a venerable tradition of intellectual juxtaposition, which is not begun, but only developed, in Dhalgren. Some familiarity with that tradition, however, will make us more appreciative of the intensity and originality of Delany’s development. Second, we note that Tolstoy’s “couldn’t remember whether or not I had dusted it” is a signifier which has collapsed a much more complicated process beneath it than first appears. Taken literally, the phrase contains a nonsensical double negative. (How much of this is translation, of course, we do not know.) One cannot “remember not doing something.” One can only remember deciding not to do something. In his preoccupied meanderings around the room, obviously Tolstoy came upon evidence that the divan had been dusted, i.e., it was probably free of dust. Also Tolstoy had no memory of dusting it. Yet there was probably other evidence to suggest that the duster had been, indeed, himself, e.g., perhaps he had a dust rag in his hand; perhaps he had memories, only seconds old, of dusting other pieces of furniture in the room; possibly he also knew no one else was in the house; possibly he also had memories of being preoccupied; or perhaps he realized his mind had not been on much of anything because what memories he did have of dusting some of the objects in the room were so hazy. Presumably, however, if his wife or a servant had run into the room just then and explained that only minutes before Tolstoy had come in to dust, she had been in and dusted only the divan, Tolstoy would probably have been quite happy with the explanation. In other words, it is the apprehension of evidence that things have gone other than one remembers them that sparks a certain sort of personality to “be reborn to the world in its existential freshness and horror.” The strange thing encountered is both the stimulus to be reborn as well as part of the freshness and horror one is reborn to. (This rich strangeness, I suspect, is the be-all and end-all of that so elusive “difference” that is such a central concept in Delany’s The Einstein Intersection.) But it is not some impossible memory-of-something- not-remembered. Certainly the Kid’s world is composed of practically nothing but such evidence of things gone differently. But what is, by implication, analytically muzzy in the Tolstoy passage is, by the same implication, analytically clear in Delany. The progression from one to the other presents a true diachronic development, however minor; and it is not insignificant (if the reader will forgive us our single litotes for this paper) that such analytical clarity should be manifested in a modern science fiction novel. Our third point is this: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, and Jameson would no doubt all agree that it is the habitual which dredges out the inland seas of forgetfulness, beneath which occur the slippages in the faults of the real that leave their evidence on the beach of perceived reality. Kid forgets, at least for a while, his last hitchhiking lift. Is he then a habitual hitchhiker? We quote: I recall and want this: Swinging up into the cab of a truck, miles north of Florida, and the driver asking how long you’ve been hitching, and the sunlight fills his lime-splattered lap and your rank jeans and he lets the radio play pop music for a while, for a while country; then twists the dial; your forearm burns on the door, your hair snaps and your cheek freezes, and the motion is spindled on the rush of music. So you sit, just breathing, to hear and to move through the red and green country, with the sun in the tree-tops a stutter of bright explosions. The City suffers from the lack of it. But most of us have come here by way of it. (p. 734) It is easy to read Dhalgren as a response to the horror of the world. But we must remember that it also contains some marvelous and lyrical responses to the freshness. 10At the end of Delany’s more recent novel Triton, op. cit., the protagonist, on being proposed to by another character, breaks down under the accumulated pressure of his/her life-lies to produce another such neurotic fiction, thence to retreat, under pressure of accrued guilt, into a near-psychotic mode. But in Triton, unlike Dhalgren, the retreat is not sudden but is, rather, mapped out step by painful step over the novel’s concluding seven pages. 11 See the discussion of the antinomies in “Shadows,” by Samuel R. Delany, in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, op. cit., pp. 38-118. 12For an extended discussion of this problem, see Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero, Cape Editions, London, 1967. Delany cites Barthes in passing in a number of places, notably in his essay “Of Sex, Objects, Signs, Systems, Sales, SF, and Other Things,” pp. 33-55 supra, and in his essay on Ursula K. Le Guin, “To Read The Dispossessed,” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, op. cit., pp. 218- 283. 13Pages 33-55 supra. 14In The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, op. cit., pp. 3-18. 15See “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” by Jacques Lacan, in Structuralism, op. cit.; see also note 7. 16To pursue beyond the development of a Faulknerian technique the literary precursors of Dhalgren, we note that the general template of the novel (a young man comes into a strange and isolated place where time seems to have lost all meaning and where a group of eccentric retirees from the real world put him through a series of educational and frequently disillusioning experiences) sits only a hair’s breadth away from the general template of Mann’s The Magic Mountain (that other seven-hundred- plus-page text also divided into seven further subdivided chapters). It is easy to see Kid as a sort of counter-culture Hans Castorp. In the two novels’ use of psychotherapists and psychotherapy, in the general makeup of their respective social microcosms, indeed, there are too many parallels even to enumerate in a note that already threatens to be overlong. Nevertheless, one can reasonably argure that, for Delany, Dhalgren bears a relation to Mann’s work similar to the relation that, for Bester, The Stars My Destination bears to Joyce’s. To retrieve the former relation, then, let us outline the latter: During the ‘teens of the century, Joyce noted that the single, classic plot- structure he was assuming for Ulysses actually covered a number of tales. As Hugh Kenner puts it in The Pound Era (University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1971, p. 147): “In Zürich James Joyce was drawing the 18 hours of Leopold Bloom through a patterned integrity defined by Homer: a tough self-interfering pattern through which, he discerned, Shakespeare had already drawn the skein called Hamlet (Telemachus, Stephen), and Mozart his Don Giovanni (Anti-nous, Boylan) and even the elder Dumas his Monte Cristo, returned avenger (Odysseus at Ithaca, the stone guest at the banquet, the ghost at Elsinore). Time, place and personnel alter; the pattern remains.” “In 1941,” Paul Williams continues the tale for us in his introduction to the Gregg Press edition of Bester’s The Stars My Destination (G.K. Hall & Co., Boston, 1975, p. vi), “Mort Weisinger and Jack Schiff, the editors who had purchased Bester’s first story and with whom he had held running discussions of James Joyce’s Ulysses for several years, invited him to write scenarios for them at Superman Comics, their new employer.” (Delany, in the early 70’s, briefly scripted Wonder Woman for Superman Comics’ corporate descendant, National Comics.) “For some time,” Williams goes on to quote Bester directly from his article “My Affair with Science Fiction” (written in 1972 and published in Hell’s Cartographers, edited by Brian Aldiss, Harper and Row, New York, 1975), “I’d been toying with the notion of using the Count of Monte Cristo pattern for a story. The reason is simple: I’d always preferred the anti-hero and I’d always found high drama in compulsive types,” {op. cit., p. ix). When Bester got to the actual writing of his novel (begun in England, rewritten in Rome during 1955), he signaled his position vis-a-vis Joyce by paraphrasing on page 14 of his own text (the first page of Chapter One, after the prologue) the poem that Fleming had written on the flyleaf of Stephen’s geography text (on page 16 of Joyce’s) opposite Stephen’s attempt (in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) to record “himself, his name and where he was. Stephen Dedalus Class of Elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe The World The Universe” Fleming had rendered this: “Stephen Dedalus is my name, Ireland is my nation. Clongowes is my dwellingplace And heaven my expectation.” Bester’s Gulliver Foyle, the wrong choice of an oxygen bottle away from death, in the midst of his struggles, prayers, and blasphemies, suddenly remembers “a nursery jingle: Gully Foyle is my name And Terra is my nation. Deep space is my dwelling place And death’s my destination.” To recognize the Joycean source under Bester’s jingle (as a piece of demotic folk doggerel alive in the Midwest it provided a title for Thornton Wilder’s novel Heaven’s My Destination) is to realize that Bester has flung down his version (with existential obliteration—“death”—replacing fundamentalist salvation—“Heaven”) as a challenge that is merely intensified by the choice of the Monte Cristo version of the pattern that Joyce (and, presumably, Bester both—as Joyce states it in the text of Ulysses) knew was finally one with The Odyssey. For as Joyce’s Portrait and its peripatetic sequel are, in our time, the novels of the privileged aesthetic sensibility, so Bester’s book is the most resonant, intense, and reintensified image/metaphor/ exploration of the “common man,” the man who lacks precisely this aesthetic sensibility, the man “too easy for trouble, too slow for fun, too empty for friendship, too lazy for love,” (The Stars My Destination, p. 14), the man with EDUCATION: NONE SKILLS: NONE MERITS: NONE RECOMMENDATIONS: NONE (p. 15) the opposite of the privileged Joycean artist if ever there was one. And this is the man who becomes, not the fatherly supporter, drinking companion and somewhat bewildered admirer of the artist, but rather the vibrant, demonic, and implacable savior of humanity itself—in Bester’s novel. In the twenty years since its publication, no one in the science fiction community (with the possible exception of Delany himself; c.f., “About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words,” cited in note 8) seems to have noticed this illuminating Joycean parallel in what has come to be regarded as the greatest of far-future SF novels. Let us not allow such a time to elapse before noting the Mannian parallel in what is no doubt the most ambitious S F novel to date, of futures near or far. As Bester’s novel of 1956 challenges the Joycean precept of privileged aestheti-cism, so Delany’s novel of 1975 challenges the Mannian precept of decadent bourgeois centrality. (Mann’s comment on the artist’s knowledge of the value of his own work—“I cannot know and you cannot tell me.”—is quoted by Newboy in Dhalgren; and the Mannian passion for “the exhaustive” which was, Mann felt, the only thing that could be “truly interesting,” is reflected in Dhalgren by the whole, massive and intricate text itself.) Mann’s hero, the young engineer Hans Castorp, is a socially central naif. Delany’s basic precept is that today there is no social center; and Delany’s hero is a socially marginal naif, in a world where there are only margins. (Compare Delany’s “young engineer,” the oddly “Germanic” Tak Loufer—the first person to befriend the Kid when he enters the city—with Mann’s: the contrasts between the two are a bouquet of exfoliating ironies.) Society for Delany is merely an interweave of social margins, with various economic privileges—magically invalidated by the novel, but nevertheless leaving their mythic detritus —but none with true social primacy. (Henry Hatfield, in his Thomas Mann, New Directions, New York, 1951 revised 1961, p. 40, recounts Trotsky’s remark “that the German workers would not seize a railway station unless they had bought tickets first,” in relation to Mann’s comic description of the ill-fated German-liberal revolt of 1848 in Buddenbrooks. Delany’s scorpions are far closer to the energized Gully than to Mann’s bumbling workers.) At intriguingly corresponding points in their respective novels, Proust’s Mme Verdurin and Delany’s Mrs Richards express the conviction that the much more sophisticated Guermantes, in the one case, and the much more sophisticated Calkins, in the other, no doubt actually pay people to attend their parties. But if Mrs Richards is a Mme Verdurin, think of how much more drastically, tragically, pathetically she is displaced in her particular illusions of social centrality. Delany’s Kid is a socially marginal naif, but he is streetwise; and his literary education is—as are all educations today, in light of what there is to be known—eccentric. He speaks Portuguese and has read Mailarme in that language. He is a long-time reader of Poetry (Chicago) but has never read The New Yorker, and he has never heard of iambic pentameter before, and the suggestion is made that trying to write in it may have hopelessly perverted his natural, Olsonian breath- line. Hans Castorp, after his epiphany in the snow, moves on to disillusion and flight from the illusions of Devos. In Delany’s book, as we have tried to show in the discussion above, it is both the flight and the disillusion that are posited in themselves as “optically illusory.” For the same structure that so playfully challenges the Kermode theory of fictive resolution (q.v. note 17 below) throws down the gauntlet before Mann’s privileged bourgeois centrality as Bester threw down his own before Joyce’s privileged aestheticism. We end this note with two comments: first, science fiction has always been ambitious, and if we are not put off by its constant taking on of the problem of Humanity in the Universe, we cannot be too surprised by its taking on en passant the ethical (if not the aesthetic) challenges of a Joyce or a Mann— though even this suggests a self- confidence that would leave most modern mundane fictioneers quaking in their boots lest they be found out. That Bester and Delany have signaled their ambition so off-handedly without rippling the surface of their works (by, essentially, a rewritten quatrain and a plot choice in one case and by a mere chapter schema—but not a table of contents—and a line or so of quotation on the other), in what have proved to be two very popular novels, and with signs only readers likely to care are, finally, likely to notice, is itself a sign of the reticence, sensitivity, and intelligence of the field, as well as a sign of the aesthetic self-confidence of the respective writers. Our second point is simply that if those reviewers so miffed by Dhalgreris popularity, such as Malzberg and Ellison, would cease to bandy about “Joyce” as a literary catch- all (that should have been the cry twenty years ago with Bester) and turn their attentions to Mann—whether to praise, denigrate, or merely explain Delany— they would quit the merely rhetorical and approach what is at least documentable. 17See The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany, Ace Books, New York, 1967, reprinted 1973 (4th printing), page 137. In regard to this point, we note that Delany, in his article “Of Sex, Objects, Signs, Systems, Sales, SF, and Other Things” (q.v. notes 12 & 13), cites as an influence on Dhalgren Frank Kermode’s excellent study in the theory of fiction The Sense of an Ending, Oxford University Press, New York, 1967. (One of Newboy’s books of essays is called Λ Sense of Commencement.) In connection with this, let us simply juxtapose a passage from Kermode’s study with a passage from Dhalgren. Kermode writes, on page 45, “The clock’s tick-tock I take to be a model of what we call ‘plot,’ an organisation that humanizes time by giving it form .... Tick is a humble genesis, tock a feeble apocalypse.” In his journal (p. 784) the Kid observes: “People probably do hear watches go tic-tok. But I’m sure my childhood clock went tic-tic-tic-tic-tic- tic-tic .... Why do I recall this in a city without time?” We may answer the Kid’s rhetorical question with Kermode’s terminology: Kid recalls this because Bellona is a city (as Dhalgren is a novel) of perpetual humble genesis. And Dhalgren’s “plot,” which substitutes a continuous movement toward rebirth for the sense of closing finality that Kermode cites as one of the basic forms of literary expression, reflects this. Most modern clocks do not go tick-tock. And in Kid’s sensibility, or the sensibility projected by the novel, tock is therefore unnecessary. For, as Calkins says, in Bellona “Apocalypse has come and gone ... That simply isn’t our problem any more.” (p. 820). 18The title “Dhalgren”—which so many readers have found baffling—is a symbol for the uncertainty of certain knowledge. It is a symbol for this in no more complicated a way than “A Streetcar Named Desire” is a symbol for human movement toward emotional catastrophe, or than “The Iceman Cometh” is a symbol for the inevitable arrival of death, in the respective works that bear those titles. Upon remembering his own first and middle names (and the first initial of his last one), Kid suddenly experiences certain knowledge of the last name of the newspaper reporter Bill, prompted by the double metonymy, no doubt, that Bill is the nickname associated with William and that William Dhalgren was a name on the list of names that pulled free from the notebook (pp. 859-861). Yet Kid has no logical reason to think he knows. The point is: the name is not mentioned anywhere in the scene. Yet the reader is just as certain in his or her knowledge of what the name in Kid’s mind is as the Kid is certain to whom that name belongs—though there is as little logical reason for the reader to know as there is for the Kid. This is another of Delany’s most striking optical illusions. What Delany is saying, symbolically, is that “certain knowledge” is really founded on the interaction of random encounter (the list of names, pp. 70, 590, etc.), accidental correspondence of phonemes (the name of the Oregon workman, p. 696), mythical resonances (Grendel/Grendal/Grendhal, p. 753), psychological propinquity (the one name he remembers from the list once it pulls free of the notebook and is lost, p. 853), and aesthetically prejudiced expectation (the novel’s title). Delany is saying— symbolically—that even this evidence is hugely scattered and only rarely encountered. For this is how we encounter the evidence—whether we choose to draw our conclusions from it merely by intuition, or we try to reconstitute it into the form of a scientific experiment complete with controls—scattered through life as widely as it is through the vast, paradoxical tapestry of Dhalgren. Trouble On Triton by K. Leslie Steiner Samuel R. Delany must have an amazing love-hate relation with science fiction. From time to time, I really feel he is trying to do in the field. To get it out of the way at the beginning: Delany’s new novel Trouble on Triton (the most recent Frederik Pohl selection) is the best science fiction novel I’ve read in half a dozen years. It is a better read than The Mote in God’s Eye. It has more to say about the condition of man (and woman) than The Dispossessed. And it is a more profound book, to my mind, than Delany’s own Dhalgren—that is, Delany’s last frontal attack on the field. Dhalgren was a science fiction novel that (What? Yes, it is science fiction: the hero enters over a bridge into a parallel world—see, silly!—into an alter- version of an American city where “... the ordinary laws of time and space,” as they used to say, “no longer apply.” I mean, really!) attacked the field by being a great book (though it makes the ascent to greatness, as someone once remarked of George Eliot, with laboring breath) in just those ways most science fiction is not even good: by density of psychological construction and depth of social insight, as well as by the richness of its metaphysical superstructure. To say that Dhalgren was not good in the ways that, frequently, science fiction can be dazzling—brio, endless color, surface excitement, recomplication of surface and surface invention—is simply to miss the point. Dhalgren was not even interested in exploiting these. That is why, for all its ponderous greatness, it can be read as an attack on traditional science fiction. Trouble on Triton is an attack too. Only it is highly readable, brilliantly colored, and the speculation in at least three areas of science (physics, linguistics, and biology) should be enough to keep even the hardest of hard-science fans happy. The sociological extrapolation—government erected “ego-booster booths” where, with a coin in the slot, you can get a peep at the secret government files on yourself; unlicensed sectors in the cities, where no laws are binding and which become, in interface with the rest of the city, the safest place in town; government grants to “micro-theater” troupes, which perform elaborate, surreal productions that only last a minute, for an audience of one, literally dragged off the street and drugged for the performance; and that’s just a sampling from the first chapter—is in the great tradition of Pohl’s and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants. But Delany has taken this classic SF approach and used it to write a deeply tragic tale—or at least a very moving one. Yet the controlling mode of the book is irony; and it is the many-edged irony of the great novelists, a Thackeray or a Dickens—though the book never sinks to Dickensian caricature. The title, straight from some barely remembered Startling Stories with an opening illo by Frank R. Paul, announces that irony on the cover. But never fear: in the last pages, the title is lifted from its intentionally nostalgic banality into another sphere altogether. What’s in between? What’s the book about? Well: Two hundred or so years from now (the novel posits), there will be extensive human population on both Mars and on the various satellites of the gas giants, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. The cities of Mars and the satellites are kept going by “plasma fields” that hold down an Earth-normal atmosphere with the help of artificial gravity, about which Delany does some of his fanciest hard-science extrapolation—eat your heart out, Larry Niven! But the stringencies of life under glass—or under plasma—have made it necessary to restructure the whole concept of human society. Such a city simply cannot tolerate either a runaway population growth or a vast, unskilled labor supply that can do very little efficiently except breed. The way the satellites have restructured their society to accomplish this is radical.To begin with, there is universal birth control for both women and men. Anyone can have children who wants to. Pills that temporarily counteract the birth control system (established with a single injection at puberty) are freely available. All that has to happen is for two people (man and woman) to agree to take the pills at the same time and have a child. But this changes the procreation process from what systems analysts call a normal-on system to a normal-off one: conscious effort must be coordinated between two parties to have a child. Laziness, absent-mindedness, accident, or just general inability to get it together, in satellite society, mitigates against reproduction, instead of for it, as is the case on Earth. But this is only one point in Delany’s many-valenced restructuring. Except in the unlicensed sectors, where anything goes, marriage is illegal, and for the same reason that prostitution is: under satellite law, no contract may specify either a sexual or a religious condition. Both of these, in satellite society, must always be dealt with by gentleman’s (and gentlewoman’s) agreement. Does it have its bad points? You bet it does! But Delany (as Babel—17, Nova, and Dhalgren have shown) is the master of coherent future societies. And Trouble gives glimpses of everything, from the new family life to the new welfare system. But as his presentation of the society is (one of) the delight(s) of the novel, I won’t spoil it by too much prologuing of its endlessly fascinating features. To get on with the plot: After a few generations of this, you can see how all sorts of cultural friction might arise between this system and the current Earth society. The Outer Satellites’ economy is also quite different from Earth’s (and presumably inextricably intertwined with it). The result is that a cold war has grown up of such proportions that its damages, by the end of the book, dwarf that of most hot ones we’ve seen to date. (One can’t help but compare it to the “military conflict” in Mote, with its good-guy Imperial Navy making war on the fractious rebels to avoid fractious rebellions that might turn into war ... isn’t there some circular thinking in that somewhere? Delany’s war is so much more believable! And so much more scary!) Between Earth and the Outer Satellites sits Mars. Though we never visit it, we hear a lot about it. Not only physically, but culturally and politically as well, Mars lies halfway between Earth and the Satellites: the same encapsulated cities, but it’s easier to ship natural resources around on it than it is among the satellites; the same birth control system, but marriage and the nuclear family persist there. And Mars has sided with Earth in the conflict. Only a few years before the hostilities reached their present boil, there was fairly free emigration between all three societies. It was back then that our hero, Bron Helstrom, as a young man, left Mars’s capital city Bellona (named after what ...?) where he was born, to come first to Callisto Port, then to Lux on Iapetus, and finally to Tethys on Triton, the largest city on the larger moon of Neptune. Helstrom is a misfit in the Outer Satellite community. His “mis- fittedness” does not consist of the comic mistakes of the newly arrived immigrant trying to learn the new manners and mores. For him, those mistakes are fifteen years in the past. His is the deep, cultural unhappiness that so frequently comes to people years after they have made all the surface adjustments. On Mars, as a teenager, Helstrom was a male prostitute, a sort of paid, heterosexual super-stud. (Male prostitution is legal on Mars, as female prostitution is legal on Earth.) He was also something of a drifter and a sociopath. At nineteen, he was brutally raped by a Martian women’s street-gang, and came close to losing his hearing for life from the injuries. Now, on Triton, at thirty-seven, after government education programs and what-have-you, he has a good job as a designer of “custom styled metalogics,” a branch of computer mathematics. {He feels it’s a step up ...) Helstrom lives in a co-op specifically set up for men like himself who have trouble adjusting. He has even developed some friends there: a seventy-five-year-old homosexual from Earth’s South Africa, Lawrence; a seventeen-year-old hopelessly neurotic boy from another moon, Alfred; and Sam —who turns out to be not at all the happy-go-lucky, back-slapping, good- natured black man he first appears. The plot is launched when Helstrom encounters a fascinating woman from the city’s unlicensed sector who creates the magical micro-theater pieces. They have an affair, the progress of which, counterpointed with (and at times influenced directly by) the war, is the book’s substance. In the course of the relation, we learn just what the real, deep, and hopeless nature of Helstrom’s “unfitness” for satellite society is. There is no way, for instance, he could be happy on conservative Earth. At one point in the tale, with a bit of novelistic sleight-of-hand that should leave anyone fascinated with pure SF storytelling technique gasping and applauding with delight, Delany transfers the whole cast to Earth (symbolically enough, to the site of an archeological dig: the one thing the new society cannot have is an ancient history of artifacts), and we see why Helstrom could not live here. The only thing resembling compassion he finds on Earth is from another ex-Martian, now an Earth government guard, and even that, here, can do him no good. The twists, turns, and final resolution of the whole business are nov-elistically rich, aesthetically satisfying, tragic in human terms, and are of the sort only science fiction can provide; and they are disturbing at just the level one wants to be disturbed by a science fiction novel: intellectually. What Delany has given us is a richly detailed treatment of the problem of the liberal, in a society that has radically implemented what began as liberal pipedreams for a better world. At first he finds himself happy with the benefits; then he finds he cannot deal with the contingent responsibilities; he tries to retreat to the conservative, but he cannot tolerate the imprisoning strictures there; and purely personal solutions leave him a life too thin and stripped of human texture to bear for long without establishing oneself so far down the beach of eccentricity that the tides of madness begin to suck at one’s toes, ankles, knees .... Delany has written elsewhere: “The only message that the mundane novel can have, whether the hero succeeds or fails, is that the values of society—whether you or the author likes them or not— will, eventually, triumph.” In Trouble on Triton he has given us a portrait of a new society: I will not reveal (nor, believe it or not, have I already) whether the hero wins or loses. But society’s values do follow Delany’s dictum. Whether or not this society is better than ours is moot. (One of Delany’s subtitles, an ambiguous heterotopia, puts the book in direct and fascinating dialogue with Le Guin’s ambiguous utopia, The Dispossessed—a venerable tradition which runs through the Utopian fiction of the Victorians, including a number of Wells’s scientific romances, through Gordon R. Dickson’s Traitor to the Stars, an answer to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.) What Delany does manage to convince you of, by the book’s end, is that 1) this society’s values are different from ours, and 2), better or not, they are certainly no worse. That is an achievement. But I said that Trouble on Triton is an attack on science fiction. In the face of all the foregoing praise, I’d better elucidate. Science fiction is usually conservative—especially the kind of science fiction traditionally rich in the strengths that Trouble on Triton bulges with: color, invention, sociological extrapolation, what-happens-next readability. Sometimes science fiction with these strengths poses itself as liberal, but always with the liberal’s inevitable, conservative roots at base— which, inevitably, cause the liberality to self-destruct as soon as you get one step beyond the surface good intentions. So hopelessly do SF’s imaginative strengths and its political conservatism correlate that many SF readers, of a more radical turn, have about decided that the two— strengths and failings—are inextricable aspects of an unshatterable entity: If you love science fiction for its intellectual stimulation and life, you have to put up with its political pig-headedness. We readers love it; and we put up with it. Delany’s book shows that linkage is not inextricable; and that a colorful science fiction novel can take off intelligently and subtly from a radical position. (The average reader may be halfway through the book before realizing how gently, but expertly, he or she has been brought to the edge of the politically acceptable, then just as gently, but quite firmly, pushed over and sent smilingly on her or his way—or how cleverly the values appealed to in the first chapter have been, by the end of the fourth, quietly but systematically— and with malice aforethought— reversed.) The reason I say Delany may be “doing in” the field is because from now on it is going to be just a little harder for us to read the kind of science fiction we love and still be so easy on those aspects we have had to put up with till now. Those unpleasantnesses will be just a little harder to ignore, a little harder to make excuses for. The reason is that Delany’s book —both in the new terms established by science fiction such as Malzberg’s, Russ’s, Disch’s, and Delany’s own Dhalgren, as well as the old terms set up by Heinlein’s, Bester’s, and Clement’s—is just better. Trouble on Triton will definitely make some science fiction (some that I love a lot, too) harder to read sympathetically. If his attack succeeds in making those aspects that mar the kind of science fiction I love a little harder for science fiction writers to let slip by, in (and into) the future, I for one will be a very happy science fiction reviewer. —Ann Arbor, 1976 [New York, 1975] Ruins/Foundations or: The Fall of the Towers Twenty Years After Demolition for the Village View Apartments hadn’t quite finished: on a July dawn you could wander the small streets (shortly to be replaced by concrete paths between scrubby lawns and red-brick buildings) and, among the devastated acres, catch sight, in the muggy morning, of fires here and there beside one or another still standing tenement wall. Off beyond the Jacob Riis Houses and the park’s green sliver, the East River’s sluggish oils nudged the city’s granite embankments or bumped the pilings beneath the Williamsburg Bridge: girder, cable, and concrete rose from among the delis and cuchifrito stands, the furniture and fabric stores, the movie marquees of Delancey Street to span the night waters—where cars and subways and after-dark cruisers took their delicate amble above the blue- black current banked with lights—before striking deep into Brooklyn’s glittering flank, above the Navy Yard. In summer of 1961 no one had yet named it the East Village: it was still the Lower East Side. Behind the public school, the five- story tenement toward the dead-end of East Fifth Street was the house into which the balding landlord, who owned a goodly number of buildings in the neighborhood, just happened to put all the interracial couples who came to his dim, storefront office out on Avenue B, looking for apartments. On the top (fifth) floor, there was Terry (eighteen, plump, and Italian, from up-state New York) and Billy (thirty-five, black, and vaguely related to me by marriage). They and their one, then two, kids lived in a living room crowded with a fold-out couch and a kitchen very full of a newly purchased washing machine. Shortly after we moved in, Bill and Terry took over the management of a tiny Greenwich Village coffee shop on 3rd Street, the Café Elysée, where, with my guitar, I would go to sing in the evenings and pass the basket, along with the likes of Bob Dylan, Tim Hardin, Karen Dalton, Dick Glass, Lisa Kindred, Fred Neil, my long-time friend Ana Perez, a friendly and talented youngster, Vic Smith, from whom I learned endless guitar riffs, and an extraordinary blind Puerto Rican guitarist, José Feliciano, who slept on our living room daybed for a couple of weeks before taking an apartment upstairs in the same building with his girlfriend (and later wife), Hilda, Ana’s sister. Alex, who was a very lanky, very black, very stoned folk-singer, and his wife, Carol, who was a very blonde, also very stoned, dancer, lived on the fourth floor. I was nineteen. Marilyn, my new wife, was eighteen. We’d rented the four small rooms on the second floor in July of ‘Sixty-one. Filthy when we moved in, the gray floorboards were littered with news- papers, orange rinds, an apple core, tunafish cans, torn paper bags; the sink counter was strewn with matches, candle stubs, twisted spoons; and a hypodermic needle lay among the floor splinters by the sink—detritus of the junkies who’d had the place before us and who, according to the other tenants, had spent their three-month stay without ever having the lights turned on. (As it was, we were still diagonally across the tiled hallway from a local “shooting gallery”—an apartment where neighborhood heroin addicts dropped in to shoot up.) Primitive drawings sprawled the dirty, lead-white walls, and in the front room foot-high green, blue, and red crayoned letters proclaimed: HEY, HEY! WE FOUND SOMETHING THAT PLEASES THE CAT! Over several visits we cleaned it out, got the electricity working, then, with a loan from Sharon Ruskin, a high-school friend and wife of Mickey (in a few years to be owner of Max’s Kansas City), went off to Detroit by Greyhound to get married. While waiting out the three-day period of “residency,” we sat for hours in coffee shop booths, writing the opening chapters of a novel about a dead horse, a little girl named Messalina Schmidlap, and a lady taxidermist called Octavia Declivity (“One day, on the outskirts of Detroit, in a field of blowing grain, a horse died ...”); or we took six hour walks through the city or crossed into Windsor; and slept the night in separate Y’s. The wedding took place in City Hall, at eleven o’clock, August 24th, 1961. We were under-age, of different races, different religions, and without parental approval on either side; and— in most states of the union, besides Michigan—without legal support. In the small bare Judge’s office beside the empty, echoing court, while the pedestrian ceremony took place, Marilyn broke out in barely suppressed giggles. As we were leaving through the beige paneled courtroom, I asked: “What on earth was that about?” She whispered, holding my hand tightly: “I kept on imagining that, when we came out, we’d find a dead horse in front of the judge’s bench!” Returning by bus to New York at August’s end, the first thing we did, on leaving the Greyhound Bus Station, was see Gone With the Wind, which had just been revived at 42nd Street’s Harris Theater: in Part Two, where Vivien Leigh, Butterfly McQueen, and Olivia de Havilland make their way by wagon away from the flames of Atlanta, suddenly their horse keels over, clearly defunct, and Butterfly McQueen cries out in her childish soprano, “Miss Scarlet! Miss Scarlet! The horse is dead ...!” We howled for ten minutes, while, around us in the audience, black women or Puerto Rican men tried now and again to quiet us. That first night back in the city we spent at my childhood Harlem home up at 2250 Seventh Avenue, where my cousin (named Brother) sometimes lived above my father’s old funeral establishment—I remember I cried that night to see the furniture of the house in which I’d lived till I was fifteen practically unmoved since we’d gone, the same drapes still at the window, uncleaned for four years. We left before five in the morning. Back in the Lower East Side just after dawn, we threw ourselves into more cleaning, straightening, and fixing, sleeping on the floor over the next few nights till some friends, Randy and Donya, who lived up near Columbia University, loaned us a day-bed. A musician friend, Dave Litwin, gave us a combination house-warming and rent party, during which we collected some twenty-eight dollars in a zinc pail tied to the livingroom light cord toward the exorbitant $58.00 a month rent. A trip to the New York City Rent Commission brought up a building inspector who brought down the rent to $52.00, on account of the sub-standard pipes—and earned us the landlord’s undying detestation and, a few weeks later, an invasion of plumbers and carpenters, who tore holes in our kitchen and bathroom floor, through which we could see into the apartment below, and holes in our kitchen wall, through to the bathroom pipes. The obligatory rapprochement visits to our families? On my first trip home, while Mom dithered a bit, wondering why on earth we’d done it, my grandmother asked to see the marriage license and, after reading it over with her glasses held away from her nose, announced: “Well, then, you’re married. And you have an apartment. All right, what kind of things do you need?” My uncle, Judge Paige, invited us up to his summer home in Greenwood Lake, where we spent the Labor Day afternoon at another uncle’s home (Judge Delany), down by the lake itself, in a bevy of relatives and old friends of my family, while my cousin inveighed us to go water skiing. And our friends, Dick and Alice Entin, living then in the Van Rensselaer Hotel, besides taking us out to innumerable restaurants over those early months (now to Chumley’s, now to Fedora’s; I sometimes wonder if we would have survived without them), carried us off to a post-wedding celebration at Palisades Amusement Park, where we all rode ferris wheels and roller coasters to calliope music, there above the waters at Jersey’s edge. In a Grand Concourse apartment, set about with flowered chairs and sofas under transparent plastic covers, there were odd, Friday night dinners with my shrill, brilliant, bewildered mother-in- law, who, for those first months, seemed so tragically surprised when, after dinner, Marilyn would get ready to return with me to the Lower East Side. Usually, those nights, we walked down through the Bronx, across the Hundred-Forty-Ninth Street Bridge, along Seventh Avenue, then by Central Park West, finally to cross Forty-Second and Sixth Avenue, all the way to Eighth Street and across town, through Tompkins Square Park, on down Avenue Β by the RKO Theater facing the public school—the ancient movie palace already slated for destruction. To return to Fifth Street, at least from the west, you walked east on Fourth Street a third of the way along the block beyond Avenue B, then turned up an alleyway between the back of the schoolyard’s handball court and the red brick of the window-frame factory. D.T.K.L. A.M.F. was the only graffito scrawled in black paint over the handball court’s wall in those days. An extraordinarily handsome fifteen-year- old Puerto Rican boy named Rusty, whose mother ran the aforementioned shooting gallery, explained to us that the D.L.A.M.F. part meant “Down like a mother-fucker.” The T. and the K., however, were mysteries. Then, there was another party, this one a wedding celebration for my tall cousin, Nanny, who, a scant month after we wed, married a small, intense musician/karate instructor/black radical, with a gentle smile and a sense of humor that could smart like finest emery cloth. It was a quiet, Buddhist ceremony at a small, mid-town temple, and my elderly maiden aunts, whom everyone feared would be shocked, sat primly on the floor with everyone else. Those two slim black ladies, one a dentist (I remember a photograph of Dr. Bessie in a college schoolroom at the blackboard with a pointer, before the conjugation of πάνω, παν€ΐς, Travel ...), one a home- economics teacher (who, as she got older and older, became more and more like Dr. Bessie’s less aggressive twin), had, forty-five years before, stormed the theater at the premiere oí Birth of a Nation and, with the pickets and protests outside, torn down the screen and started a riot. Fifteen years later, they would take up the serious study of yoga. Then the younger guests repaired to East Fifth, where I had cooked pounds and pounds of yellow rice and paella, vaguely perturbed as to whether anyone would think to ask if the lobster tails had been, indeed, imported from South Africa, a fact I’d only discovered on the bottom of one label after I’d gotten the dozen of them home from the supermarket and out of their red, white, and clear plastic wrappers. 1961’s was a hot September. Outside, among the domino games in progress on sagging bridge tables at the sidewalk’s edge, grubby kids in shorts and sneakers opened both ends of empty beer cans (this was pre-pop-top; this was when some women carried a “church-key” [a pocket can opener] to rip the necks of muggers or sexual assailants) and used them to deflect bright arcs from the spuming hydrants up through the harsh purple illumination of the mercury vapour street lights newly installed that year, high enough to splatter our second story windows, while I crouched on the daybed in the living room, working in my notebook in red ballpoint on a one- act play, The Night Alone, inspired by James Ramsey Ullman’s novel, The Day on Fire, which, though it contained the best, if fragmentary, translations of Rimbaud’s prose poems yet to appear in English, seemed (to me) to show no understanding of the young writer’s inner psychology. My play dealt with the shooting of Rimbaud by a Verlaine urged on—in my version—by his young wife, Mathilde, from her frustration over having been kept a Victorian prisoner, first by her parents, then by her twenty- eight-year-old husband—Mathilde herself only a few months older than the eighteen-year-old vagabond poet. There was no lock on the front door of our building—indeed, there was no front door. Day and night, especially in colder weather, from the hall we would hear the claws of two, three—sometimes half a dozen—ownerless dogs, running on our stairs; daily we found their turds on the landing. Across from us was a factory where they made aluminum window frames. A doctor’s office was on the ground floor of the building directly opposite. Along the block were various bodegas, botánicas de fe, garages, other apartment houses—most of them tenements as squalid as our own; one, next door, called The Mildred, was in miraculously decent condition at the head of the row of slums. Weeks before we’d rented our apartment, the Daily News had carried, 104 on one day, a story of a rat that had gnawed the head off a baby in a house just down from ours and, on the next, the tale of some juvenile delinquents who’d murdered a neighborhood cop by hauling a concrete paving block up to the roof of an apartment house across the street from ours. One of the kids blew a police whistle in the hall. When the cop ran up to the doorway, they dropped the concrete on him over the roof’s edge. And in the first months I lived there I went with some acquaintances to clear out (read: loot) an apartment a block or so away that had belonged to a twenty- five-year-old male dancer who’d died of hepatitis in a city hospital, though the only thing I could bring myself to take away was a bathtub stopper. I recall looking at an immense pair of tennis sneakers lying on the invaded bathroom’s tile, wondering just how tall the dead dancer had been. At home, now and again, the apartment rat would jump up on the back of the kitchen sink, while one or the other of us was brushing our teeth— shocked paralysis holding a moment between human and rodent, before one of us shrieked and the other fled; or it skittered out from under the tub to dash toward the toilet and leap to the rim for a drink—halting only because I was sitting there! (The next day, when Marilyn was leaving the apartment, in the hall she met the middle-aged Polish woman from the apartment next door. “I hear you have rats,” the woman said. Marilyn was surprised. “Eh ... yes,” she answered. “But how did you know?” The woman laughed: “I heard your husband shout out last night!”) In a grimly comic gesture, we named him Gregor, after Kafka’s giant waterbug. Our first months of marriage were a time of emotional turmoil. Pregnant by me when we wedded, Marilyn miscarried in October. Someone had thrown out an old appointment calendar in the alley, and for days the large, broken paving squares were strewn with white rectangles marked with large black numbers signifying days in the waning year, each day a few of them blowing nearer and nearer the Fourth Street curb. Toward the beginning of the month, in that unusually chill autumn, Marilyn had written of life in our second-floor slum: These nights old madwomen chant in the streets wailing their deaths to the October dusk. Precocious cold sullies our gelid sheets. Our hands turn yellow, and a sticky crust devils our eyelids wakening ... The rats wax bold without enough to eat. A few days later, when the temperature had crept back up into the sixties and she was coming home through the alley, a few calendar pages still strewn about, Marilyn realized she was hemorrhaging. In the apartment, perhaps an hour later, she miscarried. I came home maybe an hour after that. It was a day of fear, endless frustration, and finally futile rage: at that time it was just assumed that any eighteen-year-old mother who miscarried, married or unmarried, must be in the aftermath of an illegal abortion (then, the only kind there were), and was treated by hospitals and their staffs as a criminal. The doctor Marilyn was seeing during her pregnancy, when she tried to gain admission to the hospital and he was called by the admittance staff, claimed he had never heard of her, and, with Marilyn still hemorrhaging and in great pain, we were just sent away. When, half a day later, Marilyn finally managed to obtain the necessary D&C, we stayed at my mother’s a few days, emotionally drained and Marilyn physically exhausted by a complex of tragedy, inhumanity, and general fiasco that had assumed Kafkaesque proportions before it finally resolved. Back on East Fifth, alone one afternoon in the apartment, I looked out of the narrow back window of our living room, which opened onto the foul roof of a small out-building between the airshaft walls. The platform was thick with defenestrated refuse from the floors above. On it lay a rat’s corpse, which made me wonder—as I had seen still another dead rat in the gutter up the street only a day before—if, at least for the neighborhood, we weren’t due for an outbreak of plague. With such thoughts, I turned to lie down on the daybed in the shadowed living room, to sink, tingling with hyperawareness (once again), into the luminous evening waterfront of a primitive city, to climb, dripping, from the river into the ruined streets of an abandoned futuristic metropolis, to toil through glimmering jungles alive with violet sunsets and red-bugs and ghouls, above which soared ivory and onyx vampires and in whose rivers dwelt a slimy aquatic race, jungles where I watched a man turn into a wolf while I tramped past moss-grown temples to the foot of a volcano abroil on the night, and where great violence was done to a four-armed child, which woke me (again), sharply and shockingly, in the dim tenement— The dreams (nightmares, I’ve called them since, though they clung to memory, lurid, fascinating, as pleasurable as they were unsettling) had returned for the sixth or seventh time in four or five days, and I resolved: yes, I would try to catch their hyper-vividness in language. I would weave some science-fantasy novel through those light-shot locations, one that might even appease Marilyn’s complaints about the books she was now editing. In 106 the shadowy second floor living room, I sat on the edge of the bed, palms and bare feet tingling, between writing and sleep, while outside, a rainy weekend in November rendered the remains of the calendar gray mulch. My tenure as a book clerk at Barnes and Noble had fallen to part-time at the end of that year’s textbook rush; but Marilyn had just gotten a job at Ace Books as an editorial assistant, where she’d lied about her age to secure the position. Once the youngest on the TV “Quiz Kid” show, she had gone to college at fifteen and all but graduated by eighteen—when she’d decided to marry me. She had told them at work she was twenty. That November I got involved in my first (major) gay infidelity—with another book clerk from Barnes and Noble, the shy, handsome son of a Chicago minister, who, in the course of the whole thing, one night burst into our apartment and actually declared, “We can’t go on like this!” (On an immobilely chill evening that month, within the alleys adjacent to the Village View construction, through a window, Marilyn glimpsed two or four or six naked people—multiplied or confused, in a moment of astonished attention, by some mirror on the back wall, as the window itself added a prismatic effect to the bodies inside, gilded by candlelight or some mustard bulb— before they moved behind a jamb, or she walked beyond the line of sight, the image suggesting proliferations of possibilities, of tales about those possibilities, of images in harmony, antiphon, or wondrous com- plimentarity.) It was a time of strained discussions in our tenement living room, in the midst of which a bit of plaster from the newly painted ceiling would suddenly fall to shatter over the arm of the red easy chair Marilyn’s mother had given us. This was life in our new neighborhood. Without him many of us would have never happened ... Karl Shapiro/”Auden” W.H. Auden lived at 77 St. Marks Place, practically on the other side of Tompkins Square Park, with his lover, the poet Chester Kallman. One of our earliest plans after getting married had been to show some of Marilyn’s poems to Auden. That October, Marilyn had taken some manuscripts over to his apartment. Auden had generously asked her to come back in November to discuss them. And five weeks after the new year, the two older poets graciously accepted an invitation to dinner. I’ve always wanted to write a full account of that evening in 1962, when Auden and Kallman came to eat at our grubby second-floor apartment (2-B) at 629 East 5th Street, if only to provide a possible footnote for some future edition of Osborne or Carpenter; or to supplement Charles Miller’s charming An American Friendship. According to the Mendelson chronology of Auden’s poems, Auden wrote no (or at most two) poems between September 1961 and July 1962, a fairly long period —for him—to go without producing even a few ephemeral pieces, a period all but unmentioned in the recent biographies. Carpenter notes an anecdote told about Auden’s 1962 birthday party, held at St. Marks Place (a few weeks after he and Kallman visited us), in which Auden became upset when an unidentified “Jewish girl” inadvertently opened the door to his bedroom. But from “A Change of Air” (the poem he wrote toward the completion of his and Elizabeth Meyer’s translation of Goethe’s Italian Journey, in 1961) to Thanksgiving for a Habitat (begun in the summer of ‘62), there is practically nothing. My account only locates the poet for one freezing night in February, 1962. But for that, if not the night’s effect on me, or on Marilyn (or on her poem, “Prism and Lens,” or on my novels), I give it here. A school friend of mine, Johnny Kronenberger, had come to our rent party-cum-house warming. Johnny’s father, Louis Kronenberger, had collaborated with Auden on The Oxford Book of Aphorisms. Along with accounts of Kallman’s imitations of Diana Trilling at Johnny’s parents’ last Christmas fete, Johnny had given us Auden’s address and assured us the poet was a genial and accessible man, with a sincere interest in young writers. I’d first gone to 77 St. Marks Place at the tail-end of August, 1961 (the basement bar on one side of the steps up to the entrance, the printer’s shop on the other), days after our return, to introduce myself to Auden and mention that my wife of a week was a poet who’d already won a number of writing awards and scholarships—but I learned from the golden summer sublets, who, when I pressed the bell button, came down to answer the door, that Auden and Kallman would not be back from Austria till September. Sometime later, toward October’s end, Marilyn took some poems over to their house, where she was received by Kallman, who, at the head of the first floor landing, in a blue kimono, asked her what she wanted and somewhat grumpily took her poems in to Auden. In November, Auden phoned Marilyn at our apartment to come to St. Marks Place for tea and a talk about her poems. One of the poems she had given him was “The Song of Liadan,” whose source in Graves’s The White Goddess, at their November meeting, Auden recognized. After they’d spoken about some of the other poems, he asked her if she thought Marianne Moore had a tin ear—a few years before, he’d dropped the “... week/... physique” quatrain from the famous Yeats elegy, because he found his own rhyme tinny. Auden mentioned his boyhood interest in engineering, which, Marilyn later told me, she recalled having read about before in some text- book blurb in one of our old high school poetry anthologies. When she came home from her critique session, Marilyn wrote a nine— 108 line fragment and a sonnet about the visit (“In the chill outer rooms of strangers’ houses ...” and “We sit in a cold room. A. pours the tea ...”1 as well as some doggerel bits on the encounter); also, at my urging, she wrote a note to Auden thanking him for his time and asking whether he and Kail-man might come to dinner. Auden returned a friendly note saying they would indeed come, but that they were busy all through the Christmas season and, really, through January as well. They would not be free till after the first week in February. Marilyn responded with a note giving them their choice of Monday, February the eighth, or Friday, February the twelfth. Auden phoned to accept for the eighth. At that time what I knew of Auden’s work was largely his half dozen over- anthologized warhorses. A few years before, I’d seen him read on the Sunday morning television show, Camera Three (and become an admirer, through ttíat reading, of his poem “The Shield of Achilles”). And I’d watched the NBC Opera production, on Channel Four, of The Magic Flute, with the young Leontyne Price as the Queen of the Night, more or less unaware that Auden and Kallman had translated (and rearranged) the Schikaneder libretto. Years before that, while working at a summer job as a page at the St. Agnes branch of the New York Public Library when I was fifteen, I’d spent an hour or so in the basement with the score of The Rake’s Progress, where I’d traced out, between Stravinsky’s staves of neoclassic melody, Auden’s and Kallman’s verbal inventions for Tom, Shadow, Ann, and the bearded Baba-the- Turk. And only months ago, in the Barnes and Noble basement, where I’d gotten that first post-marital job, I’d stolen several hours over several days and, back in the stacks, perched on the top of a ladder, my head among the asbestos-covered pipes with purple rounds of light falling on the page from the dirty glass tiles in the sidewalk above, now and again blocked by overhead pedestrian feet, I’d read Auden’s Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being. I felt, as I suspect many of its Forties’ and Fifties’ readers did, it was a more ambitious, focused, and finally better poem than The Waste Land, some of whose themes it shared. The fact that Auden’s poem had been written twenty years after Eliot’s had not really registered. To me, at nineteen, both Auden’s and Eliot’s efforts were simply “modernist works.” After all, the two names had always appeared in the same sentence in the introductions to the various high school poetry anthologies where I’d first met them. At the prospect of the dinner visit, Marilyn and I had taken out of the Tompkins Square Library (named after Vice President Tompkins, buried over in the churchyard at St. Marks in the Bowery), Nones, Homage to Clio, and The Shield of Achilles (and looked in vain for Kallman’s Storm at Castlefranco), read them over quickly (dwelling on “Primes,” on “In Praise of Limestone,” on “Shorts”), and returned them a few days before the poets arrived—so as not to have them ostentatiously lying about. Yet if you’d asked me just before that evening, I’d have said I was far more familiar with any number of other poets—Eliot, Pound, Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane, e.e. cummings, George Starbuck (“Oscar Williams fills a need, but a Monkey Ward Catalogue is softer, and gives you something to read ...”—Starbuck’s scathing acrostic was the intellectual secret of every bright fifteen-year-old with literary leanings in the latter half of the Fifties), X. J. Kennedy, Allen Ginsberg, John Crowe Ransom, or Gregory Corso. The morning of the eighth, I worked for a few hours on my SF novel, now called The Jewels ofAptor, stopping when the landlord’s carpenters arrived to start work on our bathroom, built into the kitchen’s corner, to go out to the open-front fishstore around on Avenue C. Tramping about in the sawdust among the larger, cigar-smoking, rough- languaged men working there, Johnny, the red-headed near-midget fishmonger, measured me out a pound and a half of shrimp. A young man probably no older than I, in a bloody white apron, orange work shoes, thick grey sweater out at the elbows with a rolled down shawl collar, his small, heavily veined hands sported frantically bitten nails, his fingers translucent from fillets and ice. Back home, with rice, canned tomatoes, some wine, onions, and curry powder, I got started on dinner as the winter windows darkened to blue, then black. Just before six, Marilyn came home from work. I slipped out of my jeans and flannel shirt to dress. In my dark brown suit and bright red tie, I was, by my own choice, to be merely the cook and the maker of conversational filler. Though I was certainly as excited as she, it was, of course, Marilyn’s evening. Her two and a half feet of bronze hair were up in a bun; she wore a green wool winter dress, a bronze deco pin on her shoulder from which hung a brazen fringe. Charging in and out of our tiny bathroom off the kitchen, we were about as flustered as an eighteen—and nineteen- year-old couple could be, anticipating such guests, and kept making anxious quips to each other to the effect that we hoped they would be fashionably late, to give us time to get organized. In rather a frenzy, we passed from arguments on how to do this or that to hysterical laughter, then back, minute by minute. The night of the eighth was freezing. The apartment was swelteringly overheated. Steam from the saffron rice I was preparing licked up under the blue kitchen cabinets, with their painted-over broken panes. From time to time I glanced at the eye-level hole in the kitchen’s blue, blistered wall, within which sweated new copper piping. About ten minutes before the eight o’clock dinner hour, someone twisted the key outside on our ancient door bell. And I turned to answer it. Unbuttoning overcoats over grey herringbone suits and somber ties, first Kallman, then Auden, stepped in. After I greeted them in our cramped kitchen, with Marilyn somewhat nonplussed behind me (I don’t think she really believed they were coming), I told them: “If we had a schedule, which we don’t, we’d be about twenty minutes behind it.” “Then perhaps,” Kallman said (as Marilyn finally got out her “Hello,” her smile, her hand ...), taking a paper bag from under his arm, “we should all have some of this—” and broke out a small bottle of gin (not vodka, that night) —“unless you’re serving something else ...?” There was also a small bottle of Noilly Prat in the bag. When I shook Auden’s hand, I noticed he was a serious nail-biter and, I think, fell in love with him a little. I took their coats and put them in the back bedroom. Left over from the house- warming (and we only had two real glasses), paper cups did for the martinis. Auden and Kallman were both big men, and our apartment was suddenly very small. Beneath the somewhat long, greying hair, Auden’s face had already begun to split into those astonishing crevices from the Touraine-Solent-Golé syndrome he suffered with—though they were not yet so deep as later photographs show them, nor was his increasing fleshiness yet so pronounced. For now, indeed, he was a handsome fifty-four—days away from his fifty-fifth birthday, though we didn’t know it. Through the opening conversation both men were as complimentary as possible about our apartment. They wanted to know how much we paid for it and told us they paid, I believe, $148.00 a month for their own St. Marks Place flat—which whispered to us of the luxurious life truly successful writers might lead. From somewhere or other Marilyn and I had acquired a copy of the 1949 translation, put out in Paris by Edition Morihen, of Genet’s Notre Dame des fleurs, called, rather rakishly, in English, Gutter in the Sky. The black hardcover had an oddly illustrated double-spread title page, which included a drawing of a 17th Century French wig in a little circle on the upper right of the recto. In the actual text, each new male character was introduced with a parenthetical aside, e.g., “(Peruque, nine-and-a-quarter inches.)” or “(Peruque, seven-and-a- half inches.)”: peruque means “wig” in French and is also argot for “cock.” (Apparently Genet omitted these bits from the 1952 Gallimard edition from which Frechtman did the current translation that appeared in 1963— unless they were extra-auctorial interpolations to begin with, inserted to spice up a text that, while lurid as to its depicted social milieu, was, in texture, all but non-erotic.) In the living room the book was lying on the bridge table my mother had given us, and on which we were to eat. Either Auden or Kallman picked it up; one or the other of them hadn’t actually seen the translation before, but I don’t remember which. The peruques were duly chuckled over. As I recall, Genet didn’t linger in the conversation. They approved of and cuddled our black kitten, Tammuz. “He’s a marvelous cat,” Marilyn told them, “except at four o’clock in the morning when he decides to do his imitation of six dray horses pulling a beer wagon over the living room floor.” “Dray horses!” Auden declared, laughing. And to Chester, “This cat can imitate a dray horse!” Auden told a story about a cat of theirs in Ischia, who walked over his typewriter and sat on his papers, and whom I was sure I recognized, from his poems, as “Lucina,/Blue-eyed Queen of white cats ...” Her initials, “L.K.-A.,” Marilyn and I had identified only a few days before as “Lucina Kallman- Auden.” After a bit Kallman suggested we three men remove our jackets in the overheated living room. We did—and opened some windows as well. Dinner was a very mild shrimp curry —and I note that the martinis were probably a good idea, as Marilyn and I, still teenaged hosts, had only thought to provide (for four!) a single fifth of red wine. The conversation ranged from the preparation of escargots with Chester (“Really, the best thing to do in this country is to get them canned; the shells come separately, and you can always reuse them ...”) to the proper reading of a line from King Lear with Auden.2 Some years before, out of Pound’s ABC of Reading, I’d memorized two poemlets, by, respectively, Walter Savage Landor and Arthur Hugh Clough. One was: DIRCE Stand close around, ye Stygian set, While Dirce on one barque conveyed, Or Charon, seeing, may forget That he is old and she a shade. The other was: ON SEEING A LOCK OF LUCREZIA BORGIA’S HAIR Borgia, all that remains to thee these plates enfold: Calm hair meandering in pellucid gold. Today, without looking them up, I couldn’t tell you which poem was by which poet. But I recall, that evening, I broke out one of them and asked Auden: “How do you pronounce ‘Clough’—‘Arthur Hugh Clough’? I mean, is it ‘Clow’ or ‘Cluff’?” Myself, I’d opted for ‘Cluff.’ With the surprise of an adult realizing, faced with children, that history is running out, Auden answered: “It’s ‘Clow.’ Oh, it’s very definitely ‘Clow.’ Not ‘Cluff.’Arthur Hugh Clough.” Carpenter and Osborne both tell of an Auden who, by the Sixties, pontificated rather than conversed. Had he been inclined to pontificate that evening, he would have had a willing audience in Marilyn and me. That night, however, both he and Kallman were convivial. Auden sat forward on our daybed, which doubled as a couch, alert and asking questions about everything. Kallman sat most of the time, more relaxed, his back against the beige wall. Where had we gone to school? they wanted to know. They asked about the Bronx High School of Science, where Marilyn and I had attended high school. (In those days everybody did.) Most of the talk was aimed at Marilyn, Auden conversing with her, while Kallman talked—about cooking, largely—to me. At one point, however, when Kallman returned from the bathroom and sat down on the daybed beside Marilyn, leaving Auden between us, Auden turned to me and asked: “And what do you do?” “Oh,” I said. “I scribble science fiction to survive.” Immediately I grew embarrassed. The science fantasy novel I had been contemplating back in October had grown, by now, to a handful of chapters. After a couple of weeks’ hesitation, I’d shown what I’d done to Marilyn, who’d suggested, as I’d hoped she might, that I submit it to the publisher she worked for, when it was finished. But as yet no one besides her at Ace Books had even heard of it, much less seen it; survival, i.e., money, was not even a question. At this point Kallman looked over. “What was that?” “He scribbles science fiction,” Auden said, “to survive.” “Oh,” said Kallman, not unkindly at all. But hearing my words come back at me like that, they sounded awful! What I’d intended, of course, was to maintain an appropriate modesty about an enterprise I took as seriously as anything I’d ever done. But what I’d actually managed to blurt was an untrue boast, laced—I could hear it when Auden repeated the words to Kallman—with the most ingenuous self-contempt. The conversation went on, while, red to the cheeks, I swore to be more circumspect about what I said in the future concerning my SF writing. It’s only small consolation, though I didn’t discover it until years later, but Auden himself had already noted, somewhere in The Age of Anxiety, that human beings are creatures who can never become anything without pretending to be it first—such as a publishing science fiction writer. I had managed to get in my moment of pretense; then I sweated for it the rest of the night. Before the evening was through, there was a fire in the paper garbage bag in the kitchen, from one of Auden’s several times emptied and refilled cigarette dishes (we had no proper ashtray). We learned of it through our elderly upstairs Filipino neighbors, who smelled smoke before we did: it had trickled from the garbage bag, to be sucked into that hole in the wall, where it was drawn by the draft beside the new copper pipes and into their rooms above. When I opened the kitchen door to their insistent ringing, they blurted: “You have fire! You have fire!” “Oh, I don’t think so,” Kallman said, stepping up behind me. “There’s no fire here.” “Oh, yes! Yes! You have fire!” the wizened couple persisted, while Auden and Marilyn joined us, looking at one another. Then Marilyn or Auden noticed the smoke threading up from the rolled down rim of the paper garbage sack against the wall by the sink ... When it was out, the couple had gone, and we’d been sitting again for perhaps twenty minutes, the doorbell key was twisted once more. Once more I went to open it, and found myself staring at an old high school friend in a black leather jacket, who, as soon as he was brought awkwardly in and introduced (“Cary, this is Chester Kallman and Wystan Auden ...”) said hello, wide-eyed, and, recognizing the visitors on whom he had intruded, fled—as did our auspicious guests, a polite ten minutes later. Marilyn and I were left wondering whether, despite the night’s adventures, the dinner had been a success or not. But we were pretty pleased with ourselves. There is a process politicians know well: a hand shaken is a vote secured. The reason is simply that once the hand has been touched, all subsequent information about the politician’s policies takes on the character of gossip about a person briefly known; and to the extent there’s any intelligence behind those policies at all, the attention one pays to gossip is more likely to ferret it out than the attention most of us (Americans, at least) pay to politics per se. There is an analogous process in literature, by which the great writer, once met, however fleetingly, ceases to be a passing, passive interest and becomes an active object of study. Shortly after that dinner, a copy of the old Random House Collected Poems of W.H. Auden found its way into our apartment, to be digested practically poem by poem. Then the Faber editions of the Auden/Isherwood plays began to arrive on our shelves. At one point I even had a xerox of Auden’s bit of rhymed pornography about a gay tryst between the narrator and a mechanic. In later years I always tended to be at the edge of a social circle that knew Auden, though I never spoke to him again after that night. A librarian friend in San Francisco claimed to have been picked up by him in Washington Square during the Fifties. And in the spring of 1966 in Athens, in a moment of sun-shot and beer-soaked Gemütlichkeit, outside a Plaka cafeneon, Gregory Corso invited me to lunch at Alan Ansen’s elegant Kolonaiki home, with its gray walls and original Cocteau drawings. That afternoon Gregory cooked a bizarre casserole with many too many hot peppers, which Ansen and I sweated over but ate anyway. (Gregory said we didn’t have to, and didn’t eat any himself beyond the first bite.) But from that afternoon’s conversation, about the book I was then working on, A Fabulous, Formless Darkness, Gregory, still a bit irritable over his culinary failure, made a comment that I lifted for an epigraph to one of the chapters. Nine years later, while visiting Ansen in that same house, some fifteen months after Auden’s death, Chester Kallman died. And in 1982 I found myself in the center of the confusion over the location of some forty pages of Auden letters, found at 77 St. Marks, by a friend of a friend when, after Auden’s and Kallman’s death, the apartment was left open almost a year. Today Auden is certainly the modernist poet whose work I know best. Time tends to shift our allegiances to encountered gods. I suppose this all brings up the obvious, if pompous- sounding, question: What influence has Auden had on my own writing? Well, a few pages in one SF novel are a direct pastiche of “Caliban to the Audience,” and another SF short story goes to some troubles to reflect/refract The Sea and the Mirror, but these are more in the nature of allusion than of influence. Auden has certainly given me great pleasure as a reader on many fronts. But, as to writing, I don’t think influence per se is there. The reason simply is that, very soon, I knew his work too well. Writers who influence us, at least when we’re young (pace Harold Bloom), are not usually the ones we read thoroughly and confront with our complete attention, but rather the ill—and partially-read ones we start in on, often in troubled awe, only to close the book after pages or chapters, when our own imagination works up beyond the point where we can continue to submit our fancies to theirs.3 I think it’s reasonable to suppose that, as poets, Kallman and Auden were broadly and generously interested in what younger writers might be doing. That’s why they accepted Marilyn’s invitation. But parental transference working as it does, the visit was more important for us than for them, however it might have assuaged their curiosity: under the older writers’ gaze the youngsters’ self-critical faculties turn up another anxious notch. No matter how dispassionate or non-judgemental the elder actually is, the youngster can only read it as the awful gaze of History. This is not a bad thing. Some days after the visit, work on The Jewels of Aptor was halted again, as the heat in our apartment gave out entirely. At the same time, I developed an ingrown hair on my jaw which became badly infected. After a week of sitting about all day huddled with Marilyn under blankets, the spot on the left of my face had swollen to the size of an emperor grape. A trip to Bellevue’s emergency ward one cold grey afternoon only got me seen by a rather nervous intern who suggested that the swelling might be an abscessed tooth and, before they did anything, I should come back to their dental clinic—just to make sure. That was on Friday. The dental clinic was not open till the following Wednesday. Sunday, I was stricken with chills and fever. The swelling had gone from the size of a grape to the size of a plum. Monday night, in my old army jacket, with a towel around my neck for a scarf, I walked, fevered and shivering, to the drugstore on the corner of Fourth Street and Avenue B: an impossibly crowded counter, a small tiled floor, and three wooden phone-booths along one side, where we’d often gone to make phonecalls when we’d first moved in. The druggist was a large, round-faced, balding man who ran the store with his small, white-haired father. In such an impoverished neighborhood, he served as a kind of first level doctor, within the limits of the law. That night he talked to me for a minute, heard my chattering teeth, saw my hunched shoulders and ballooning jaw, and phoned a small clinic just below Houston Street. Yes, I should go there right away. There was a doctor on duty till nine o’clock. The clinic was on the second floor above a storefront. I remember fluorescent lights, blue walls, white enamelled pots on a table, a white glass- faced cabinet, and a very tall, white- haired doctor in shirtsleeves, who, when I said something about the Bellevue intern’s suggestion of a possible impacted tooth, muttered: “... idiots!” and anesthetized and lanced open the swelling, to drain a good half-cup of bloody pus from my cheek. Then he packed the wound with gauze and bandaged it. My fever broke in the office. Soaked and cold, I walked back through the blowy February night, my teeth chattering, the street lights incredibly sharp on the black, now and again doubled in reflection on my glasses. I climbed upstairs in the dark (the hall light had been smashed again) and crawled into bed with Marilyn in the cold apartment. This is more characteristic of our time on Fifth Street than dinners with famous poets. But Auden? Two years after that, with our friends Dick and Alice Entin, Marilyn and I attended a reading he gave at the New School for Social Research. Though he could occasionally do inspired readings of his own poems, Auden was sometimes a worse reader of his own verse than even Delmore Schwartz—who was pathologically shy and had some small speech defect that you immediately overlooked in person, when you met him, wandering through Washington Square with Dick, but which became glaring from the podium of the Columbia University Auditorium, where we’d gone one evening to hear him. At that night’s New School reading, Auden was not inspired. Afterwards, however, Marilyn went up among the others who’d gathered around him to offer him her good wishes and congratulations. When she returned to us through the crush, Dick asked: “Did he remember you?” Marilyn laughed. “Of course not!” The four of us walked back across Fourteenth Street toward the Lower East Side. If those first months of marriage were not the most emotionally satisfying time, they still produced a flurry of writing. I mentioned the play, finished in days; there was also, finished days later, a fairy tale, “Prismática”—published twenty years afterwards. I also wrote a hundred or so pages on what I then considered my major project: a vast novel about poets, criminals, and folksingers loose in the streets of New York City, Voyage, Orestes! Today only fragments of it survive; but in it, a young poet, named Geo, had written a booklength poem called The Fall of the Towers, which I’d envisioned as something between The Waste Land and The Bridge. And, despite my February pretense, The Jewels ofAptor had sold in May, to Ace. In the last two days of February, I’d finished and dated a draft of the final chapter. Then, for the next three weeks, I did what major rewriting struck me as still necessary—so that it might be more accurate to say that the book wasn’t really completed until late March, four or five days before my twentieth birthday. (I’ve always let the February date stand, though.) I got through the retyping by mid-April. Marilyn was still working as an editorial assistant at Ace Books (where Carl Solomon, of Howl fame, was “Idea Man”; and where William Burroughs’ first novel Junkie had been published as a paperback original; and where the second-in-line senior editor had the distinction of having been the reader who’d rejected Nabokov’s Lolita from Scribner’s, an accomplishment about which he still boasted—“I just don’t think it’s a good book”—making him seem, at least to Marilyn and myself, a fool); she had taken my manuscript into the office. It carried the pen-name “Bruno Callabro” (lifted from a melancholy character in an adolescent novel I’d written some years before, Those Spared by Fire); Donald Wollheim had read it, had liked it, had contracted for it at the tail end of May—at which point Marilyn mentioned that “Bruno Callabro” was her husband, Chip. “Good,” said Wollheim. “Then he can just go back to his own name. I hate the name Bruno Callabro.” Samuel R. Delany signed and returned the contracts on his first book in the opening days of June. Throughout one night, a few days later, kneeling on the living room daybed with its threadbare spread the color of dirty Pepto-Bismol, I cut the manuscript by 740 lines (at Wollheim’s firm suggestion. “But why?” I’d asked, back in the office. “Was there some place you thought it needed tightening?” “Oh, no,” said Don. “But it has to fit into a hundred-forty-six pages. And it casts off at 740 lines too long. I’ll cut it for you if you want me to ...” “Oh, no!” I said. “That’s all right! I’ll do it.”). It was the most painful self- mutilation I can conceive of performing. Once or twice, when there seemed nothing more that might reasonably go, in a sour-mouthed daze, I simply pulled out a random page, tossed it on the blackened, bare wood floor, and wrote the ends of the sentences on the page before and after together. Still, for all the pain, the possibility of selling fiction was fascinating. And I had already begun a second science fantasy—a set of five short stories of various lengths that I assumed could be published together as a novel. With titles like “They Fly at £iron,” “Ad Steshobovne,” and “In the Ruins,” only two were even vaguely readable—and their relation was tenuous. As far as making a coherent book, they were only cobbled together. Still, that September, I was surprised when Wollheim rejected them. But it brought home a lesson every young writer must learn: just because one book or one story or one poem has placed, this still doesn’t mean one is “in”— indeed, the condition of “in-ness” itself is only an illusion of people who are out. (Back in February, hadn’t Auden himself mentioned in passing some poem of his that had recently been rejected?) But the same day he gave me my second manuscript back, Don also gave me the galleys for the Jewels to correct. Four or five days later I turned the corrected galleys in. Publication was scheduled for the coming December. The work of correcting, along with the rejection, pushed me to come up with an SF project of density and seriousness. Various fragments had been gathering in my head for a few days now. I ‘d made a few notes in the spiral notebook I always carried with me. It was sometime the previous June ... Ambling down the Bowery to the narrow stone steps under the lower stanchion that led up to the bridge’s central wooden walkway, Marilyn and I had been discussing the limits of the American “buddy novel” as a template for adventure fiction since we’d left the house. (Writing was something we could always talk about; often we took refuge in it when our more emotional problems threatened to swamp us. In the midst of high ire or deep depression, “Tell me about literature,” from either of us was always a sign for truce; and the other would usually try to take up the topic.) As the late afternoon’s first violet understained the clouds over the sounds beyond the intersections of slant and vertical cables, we started across the Brooklyn Bridge, talking about the problems of making the “social chronicle novel” as exciting as the “adventure novel” and worrying whether or not this could be done in science fiction. Among the conclusions we reached that evening, as we strolled or paused at the rail with the cars sweeping by below us, or walked once more, fingers interlocked, cables wheeling above us, was that for a novel, SF or otherwise, to show any aesthetic originality in the range of extant American fiction, it must portray, among many other sorts of relationships, at least one strong friendship between two women characters. Also, the major heterosexual relationship would have to involve a woman as active as the man. (Leslie Fiedler was shortly to announce that the proper subject for the novel was “mature heterosexual relations”; and we were too young to realize the phrase itself might just be—in our culture—a contradiction in terms.) Both characters must be developed as human beings, we decided, before they hooked up. Once, in the first weeks of our marriage, Marilyn had come back to our Fifth Street apartment with an armful of groceries, shouldering through the kitchen door, sopping wet from a surprise downpour. “Here,” I said, taking the bag from her and putting it on the sink counter while, with over- pearled glasses and hair stringing down her forehead, she muttered above the puddle forming about her on the kitchen floor-boards. “Let me go get you some dry clothes.” A minute later I was back with a pair of my own jeans—we both wore the same size back then, twenty- eight, twenty-eight—and she shrugged out of her blouse, peeled off her wet trousers, and slipped a leg into the dry pair I’d brought. As she finished zipping them up, absently she slid her hands into the pockets. The strangest look came over her face. I paused, handing her the paper towel to wipe off her glasses. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “The pockets!” she declared. “What about them?” “They’re so big!” Then she showed me the pockets in the pair of girls’ jeans she’d bought a few weeks back; and the pockets in her overcoat. And in her skirts. They were too small to hold a pack of cigarettes unless it stuck out the top. (Remember, this was 1961: pre- Kennedy assassination; pre-Beatles; pre- wrap-around skirts; and nobody admitted they liked either rock’n’roll or American movies.) The idea that pockets in men’s clothes were fundamentally functional had never occurred to her. The idea that pockets in women’s clothing were basically decorative had never occurred to me. I already knew that Marilyn, at Ace, was making twenty dollars a week less than a young man of the same experience, education, and basic age as she—simply because it was customary to start women at lower salaries. But that afternoon in 1961 we started a discussion that was to go on, almost non-stop, over many years, analyzing the ways women and men, even within the same house, simply lived in two different cultures. For months before that June evening we had discussed what was necessary in fiction to portray characters of both sexes accurately: both male and female characters needed to be presented by purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous actions. With both men and women, the character’s economic anchors to the world of the tale had to be clearly shown. And I had already found out in one novel, how hard, starting with these principles, it was to apply them egalitarianly. It was tepid stuff in the face of the analysis that, some six years later, the women’s movement was to provide in a clearly articulated critique. But by 1962 it occupied a good deal of our thought and talk—about 80% of it, as I recall. The experience of cutting The Jewels of Aptor to fit Ace Books’ 60-thousand- word/ 146-page paperback original format still smarted. I knew that SF series were often popular. We were talking about a sizable work. The idea of making this a trilogy of SF novels came up before we reached the first stanchion. (We joked about Oscar Wilde.) But how to make it art? Formally, parallels and contrast among the three volumes would provide the major aesthetic resonances. The first chapter of Book One would cut across all the social classes the remainder of the story would deal with. The final chapter of Book Three would survey the same locations but in reverse order. (The notion of having each volume turn on a different slogan didn’t come until I began writing the second book.) The theme would be freedom. The story would begin with the main character’s escape from prison—no, better: just after his escape. The escape itself would be recounted in each volume, but each time from a different point of view. The prison escape in the first book would be an “objective” narrative; the second book would retell the escape from the point of view of a prison guard, which would deepen its meaning. The full meaning would not come clear, however, until in the final book it was recounted by one of the prisoners remaining behind. As we walked the bridge that evening, before a city skyline not yet dominated by the World Trade Center, the U. S. was already in the first years of the immoral and grueling Viet Nam War. Glorifying war as a viable field for personal growth, Heinlein’s S tar ship Troopers had recently won a Hugo award for best SF novel of its year. At the insistence of Ana Perez, who frequently nudged SF books my way, I had read it a little over a year before while at my parents’ home, and my response had been complex. Much in the book had fascinated me. But much in it had appalled. I wanted to make my work an answer to what I felt (and still feel) was specious in Heinlein’s argument. We talked about War and Peace that evening on the bridge (both of us had read it several years before), in terms of the proportion of the story to be devoted to civilian life. I very much wanted to write a tale that would deal with the real effects of war on what, some years later in his fine SF novel Camp Concentration, Thomas Disch would call “the fabric of the everyday.” If direct portraiture of military action took up more than a certain percentage of the whole, then by definition that portrait would be distorted—at least if its aim were social completeness. I would use the alternate chapters of the middle volume alone, I decided, to tell a military tale that would critique the soldiers’ relation to what was happening in the greater society. A night or two before that evening’s stroll across to Brooklyn Heights, I’d had another intensely vivid dream that was to become the assassination of Prime Minister Chargill at the dawn ball, which begins Book Two, The Towers of Town. And there had been still another dream, of soldiers in a foggy landscape cupping hallucinatory sea- shells and flaming women in their dirty palms—an image I’ve since traced to an illustration by Don P. Crane in a child’s life of Goethe I’d read as a boy. That image would appear in the military novella that weaves through the second volume. That particular evening on the bridge, however, while I knew both dreams would eventually produce scenes for the books, I had no idea where or how. What else had I been reading? James Baldwin’s Another Country had come out that year; I thought of it as a dauntingly negative example. It seemed a modern tale trying to grapple with something approaching the social scope I wanted for my own story, but its lack of formal organization had undercut its every novelistic effect, and I wanted to avoid such disfiguring chaos. I had recently reread that favorite novel of Sigmund Freud’s, Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s marvelous and magical fictional biography of the renaissance painter, Giovanni Beltraffio, called after Beltraffio’s teacher, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci. It seemed, and still seems, an almost perfect historical narrative, marred only by an egregious burst of historical teleology (the Greater Mission of Mother Russia ...) in its closing fifty or so pages. Its dazzling orchestration of ideas and action was what I would strive after. (I’ve been striving after it ever since.) I’ve already mentioned my reading of Auden, both before and after his and Kallman’s winter visit. As we mounted the steps of the stanchion to walk under the arched and cabled stone, I knew that I wanted my books to convey the same air of compassionate analysis and abstract topicality as Auden’s longer poems. I even considered calling the project And at the Present Time for a few minutes—a homage to Auden’s oratorio. But soon The Fall of the Towers, the original title around which the ideas had come, returned as first choice. For me, at twenty, fiction itself was the series of overwhelming effects from works I’d read in adolescence: the torture scene in Heinlein’s “Gulf”; the scene in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath where, after endless and exhausting trials, the Joad family comes upon the peace, cleanliness, and community of the government migrant labor camp; Dr. O’Connor’s “Watchman, What of the Night?” monologue in Barnes’ Nightwood. That evening on the bridge I decided, about as cold- bloodedly as any twenty-year-old could, who’d suddenly realized that, through a largely preposterous ñuke, part of his meager livelihood might now come from making novels, that, in my SF, I would try for science fictional effects comparable to those that, in my other reading, had so struck me. The Queen Mother’s interrogation of Alter in Book One was my essay in reproducing the Heinlein. John’s and Alter’s arrival at the City of a Thousand Suns in Book Three was my attempt to duplicate the Steinbeck. And Vol Nonek’s terminal monologue was my try at recreating the Barnes. What else had I been reading? Beside Gutter in the Sky, I’d also been very much enjoying Beckett’s trilogy, as each volume appeared in the early Grove Press trade paperbacks. For four or five years now, I had been following each new work by Camus to come out in Vintage Paperback. Two years before I had been in the second night audience of Alan Kaprow’s Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts (to which I’d dragged my older cousin, Boyd Savoy, in that week from medical school4), and my friend Judy Ratner had taken me to see the revival of James Waring’s Dances Before the Wall at the Henry Street Playhouse, where she led me backstage afterwards and introduced me to dancers Fred Hurko and Vincent Warren. I had followed John Rechy’s stories, eventually brought together in City of Night, through their initial publication in The Evergreen Review, reading the “Winnie” section and “The Wedding of Miss Destiny” aloud to my high school friend, Chuck Abramson, at all hours. In the second issue of Evergreen, I’d first read Duncan, Olson, and Ginsberg. Alexander Trocchi’s Cains Book was my personal nomination for the most successful novel of 1960. But it wasn’t till some years later that I began to recall these in a search for new aesthetic models. For now, the gut effect of Heinlein and Steinbeck seemed more trustworthy. Gut effect, I thought, was what I’d best try for—compassionate analysis notwithstanding. By the bridge’s second stanchion, we’d made it from Tolstoy to Balzac: the novel, modern or classic, always seemed at its most lively when a character was learning to negotiate a social position somewhere up or down the scale from the one that he (or she) was used to. Take a lesson, then, we decided: make sure the plot pushed the various characters out of the social strata in which they began. Did that work for the science fiction novel too? It certainly seemed to provide the frame to support all the energy in Bester’s The Demolished Man and, even more so, The Stars My Destination. If it worked for Balzac and Bester, then it could work for me. The fragmentary and episodic method Sturgeon had used in The Cosmic Rape to depict the carrying out of complex plots and schemes had always struck me as an effective, suggestive, and economical way to put over general plot hugger-mugger, of which I was sure my books would have a fair amount. Very well, then, I would appropriate Sturgeon’s method for myself. What else had gone into the preparation? My high school senior English teacher had been a marvelous woman, Dr. Isobel Gordon, and a great fan of Conrad Richter’s trilogy, The Trees, The Fields, and The Town. One incident from her description of Richter’s novels always stayed with me: the kidnapping of the heroine’s younger sister by Indians in the first volume. “But then,” Dr. Gordon had explained enthusiastically to our Advance-Level English Class, “she returns as an adult, who’s been raised by the Indians, in a later volume ...!” When Richter’s trilogy appeared in paperback, I bought all three volumes and plunged into the first. But after forty pages, I’m afraid I found it unreadably mucky. (Was it an influence? Undoubtedly. I could never read more than twenty pages at a sitting!) I’d even tried a brief parody, where the heroine, Seyward Luckett, became Swayback Lunkhead. But still, I thought, someone ought to have written a trilogy with such an exciting effect—thus the abduction of Prince Let to the forest in Book One and his return to the throne in Book Two. Shortly after my seventeenth birthday, I’d first read Moby Dick. From the “Afterword” to the gilt-covered Mentor paperback, I’d gleaned the notion—or at any rate first seen it articulated—that greatness in a novel was a matter of form: the richness to the pattern of emotional contrasts between the various sections, the pacing and placing of those lines or metaphors that recall for the reader whole scenes or sections located earlier in the text—in short, the entire range of intratextual mechanics by which a novel sets up resonances and echoes within itself. Struggling even then with juvenile attempts at novels of my own, I’d logged Moby Dick’s thirty-five “non- fiction” chapters and noted where they came in the narrative proper, as well as where Melville had chosen to place his rhapsodic “silent monologues”5 or the several playlets that punctuated his book. One of the Pequod’s crew had been a Gayheader. During my seventeenth summer, my family had spent a few weeks on Martha’s Vineyard in the black section of Oakbluffs. While there, we took a trip to the multichrome clay cliffs at Gayhead. During our car ride across the island, it rained; by evening the air was thick with yellow fog. When I got out of the car and went to look down the rocks, all I could see in the sunset was a single spot of ocean burning orange-white down at the sand’s edge, like a splatter of glass and silver in the mist, fifty yards below. It might as well have been a lake as the sea ... It might as well have been a foggy dawn as evening ... 1960’s summer I’d spent waiting table at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. Along with my memory of the spot of water below the Gayhead cliffs, the experience produced a novella I’d called The Flames of the Warthog, after a line from a poem by John Ciardi (then Breadloaf’s director), about a young waiter in a summer resort who suddenly stops speaking, leaves his job, and goes to live in the woods, where he is taken in by a kindly, woods-wise hermit. With the hermit’s help, the young man returns to language. The central section of Warthog, with about a third of its pages rewritten, became Prince Let’s sojourn in the forest with the forest guard, Quorl—Chapter Eight of Out of the Dead City. And in the first practice session for my high school’s short-lived freshman gymnastics team, I’d learned my first three stunts at the hands of our coach just the way Tel learns his at the hands of Alter in Chapter Five. During my high school years, the acknowledged star of our school’s creative writing program (which included the future journalists Tod Gitlin, Sheldon Novik, Stewart Byron, and Michael Goodwin; poets Lewis Warsh and, of course, Marilyn Hacker; and SF fantasy writers Peter Beagle and Norman Spinrad) was a bright, gaunt youngster named Cary. (Yes, you’ve seen him, in his black leather jacket, at the end of the Auden/Kallman dinner.) Cary was a Marxist and had been two years ahead of me at Science. His dark hair was very thin. He usually spoke softly, intensely, and he could be very funny when he wanted to. For half a dozen years, starting in my first year at high school, his moody lyric prose, now in letters, now in short stories or personal essays, often passed around in more and more dog-eared manuscript among the awed students, was the exemplum of art—at least as far as I was concerned. Cary also drew. In his junior or senior year he’d done a set of perhaps seven drawings he’d called The Fall of the Towers. They were multiple portrait studies, three to five heads on a sheet: a variety of children and old people, men and women, boys and girls, some clearly middle class, some explicitly working class, reacted to a catastrophic incident, outside the frame and never shown—this one with a look of curiosity, that one with an expression of distrust, another with an excited gaze, but most with a stupefied fascination hardly distinguishable from indifference. He’d first shown them to me on a Bronx street corner one breezy November afternoon. To me they had all the forceful commitment of Käthe Kollwitz (an artist we all admired hugely) combined with the delicacy of Virgil Finlay (who only those of us familiar with science fiction magazines knew of). And like everything else Cary wrote or did or even said, to me they were Art! Today I suspect that, as figurative drawings go, they were pretty good. But I was overwhelmed by them—at least by what I took to be the concept behind them. We are speaking of the Fifties now, a decade in which our parents, reacting to the Great Depression’s hardships and the war years’ disorientation—first World War II, with the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, then the Korean War— along with the McCarthy period’s blow to leftist and liberal thought, made “security” our nation’s watchword. People who lived in Greenwich Village, or people, like Cary, who spent time there sitting in coffee shops, talking or reading, people who were members of YPSL (the Young People’s Socialist League) or YSA (the Young Socialists’ Alliance), as almost all my teenage friends were, people who moved away from home early to live on their own (and during one of my teen-aged attempts to get away, I’d slept on the floor of Cary’s roach-infested, East Fourteenth Street furnished room for a week, and gone to meetings and parties with him at the St. Marks Place offices of The Militant, New York’s Communist Party newspaper, where I’d folded circulars and stuffed envelopes for mailings and where I was bought a fair number of meals by the sympathetic older volunteer workers), people who played go and chess at Liz’s coffeeshop above The Gaslight on McDougal Street, waiting to score a nickel bag of pot from a black dealer named Ronny Mau-Mau: such people were still “Bohemians.” And even those odd folk who were actually “beatniks” did not yet have long hair. A few weeks after our Detroit marriage in late August ‘61, Cary had dropped over to our East Fifth Street apartment in his black jeans and black sweater. What had happened to The Fall of the Towers, I’d asked. Myself, I’d been convinced that the fullness of time would bring them to some museum wall between the Modigliani portraits and the smaller nude studies of Géricault. Cary explained that, in one of her periodic attempts to shake this “art” nonsense out of his head and make sure he did something with some “security” to it, his mother had destroyed as much of his writing as she could find, along with as many of his notebooks and letters and drawings as she could manage to cram down the incinerator. The Fall of the Towers had gone up in smoke in a basement furnace somewhere in the Bronx. Had I visited the Museum of Modern Art and found that Picasso’s Guernica or Tchelichev’s Hide and Seek had been destroyed, I couldn’t have been more devastated. There had to be a way to make some gesture to the fact that the drawings had existed, had delighted, had awed. And while I wondered how, wandering with Marilyn through the cable shadows slanting the planked walkway, looking back at Manhattan’s towers, looking ahead at Brooklyn’s, Í decided that must be my trilogy’s overall title. But not all things I felt on that bridge walk were so admirable. Among the other things I wanted that evening— simply and baldly and with absolute envy—was to write a novel at twenty that would be more ambitious and better wrought than Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, which I’d read a few years before and knew he’d written by the same age. I wanted to write a novel better than Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which she’d finished at twenty-three. The five hundred dollars I’d received after I signed the contract for my first SF novel (with the promise of another five hundred on publication, six whole hopeless and uncountable months away) along with the equally real warning from the rejection of my second, had convinced me that fiction was—and, yes, science fiction—serious business. Today the only thing I can look back on with complete sympathy from that evening (and even that sympathy makes me smile) is the seriousness with which I jumped from “Gulf” to War and Peace to Star ship Troopers to The Grapes of Wrath to The Cosmic Rape to Pére Goriot to The Stars My Destination to Nighrwood to ... well, to whatever had struck me as effective, to whatever had seemed instructive. Provencal poetry has its tradition of the dompna soiseubuda, or “borrowed lady”—that ideal woman with the eyes of Judith, the complexion of Susan, the voice of Linda, the breasts of Roxanne .... Whatever its ambition, The Fall of the Towers was the most “borrowed” of SF works. Perhaps all that can be said for it is that, given the age and experience of the writer, it couldn’t have been much else. As I strolled through summer’s opening with Marilyn, between two island shores, trying not to look down at green glitter between the wooden walkway slats, two hundred feet below (I am a hopeless acrophobe), the sky went yellow then blue behind the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Watchtower offices. We paused to speculate, as usual, on whether any of the windows we could see might be the one through which Hart Crane and his lover, the nameless ship’s printer, had gazed out on the bridge in winter, listening to “... the long, tired sounds—fog-insulated noises: / Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails, / far strum of fog horns ... signals dispersed in veils. // And then a truck will lumber past the wharves / As winch engines begin throbbing on some deck; / Or a drunken stevedore’s howl and thud below / comes echoing alley upward ....” We continued through the June warmth into Brooklyn Heights, to join Dick and Alice for dinner, where they now lived in a small brownstone. I don’t believe I’ve said: Dick was a playwright. Sometime later Alice was to become a psychotherapist. The talk that evening was mostly over the play Dick was writing, The Tyrant, about a revolution in an imaginary Central American country. Mostly we argued over the presentation of its single woman character, although from time to time the conversation drifted to Stendahl, Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, Auden, or Provencal poetry .... Next day, back on East Fifth Street, I sat down at the manual portable typewriter I’d borrowed from a wonderful woman named Rosemary; I ran a piece of paper around the narrow black platen and typed: THE FALL OF THE TOWERS Then I rolled the paper down, moved it to the left and typed: a trilogy of novels: 1) Out of the Dead City 2) The Towers of Toron 3) City of a Thousand Suns I rolled the paper down further and moved it right: by Samuel R. Delany 629 East 5th Street New York 9, New York (Yes, this was before zip codes.) I took the page from the typewriter, slipped it into my notebook where I’d already begun to make notes on the organization of Book One’s first chapter and the last chapter of Book Three, and went on with what I’d begun in longhand of Chapter One. What I’ve described so far is the context, the preparation, and the ambition behind The Fall of the Towers. What my reader has in hand today is the uneven, faltering work of a very young man. I was twenty when that first title page went into the typewriter—and only weeks away from twenty-two when I wrote out the last of the epilogue in my notebook and turned back to retype Book Three’s finale. Today, I am appalled at how thin it all is. And the “borrowed” effects, for all the analysis of Heinlein and Tolstoy, Bester and Barnes, Sturgeon and Steinbeck, Baldwin and Balzac, are among the thinnest. Although I can still enjoy the seriousness with which it was all planned, the results still contain a large helping of the ludicrous. As early as Chapter Two of Book One, for example, I became mired in some nonsense about human transparency. I certainly never thought it scientifically possible. Still, over those summer months when I wrote it, I felt it was beautiful and poetic and mysterious. All that bothered me was a suspicion it had nothing to do with the book I was writing. Today it reads like nonsense —because it has nothing to do with the book I was writing. And though from time to time some gift of the muse let me wring a vaguely interesting image from it in the subsequent two books, I still wish it wasn’t there. The “gosh-wow” exposition from beginning to end will always be an embarrassment. (“Hey, now that must be because ...”) In creative writing classes since, I’ve been railing against such barbarousness for years. Here, my beleaguered students can see why it shouldn’t be done: each of these unspeakable clutches creates the occasion for the next. They breed in the creaking awkwardnesses of plot. They lie across the substance of fiction, science or mundane, like rotten tenement timbers. More than any other rhetorical figure they are what give “plot” its bad name. And if plot can only be brought off by such horrors, then those who say plot is dead are right. I suppose my story did, however clumsily, move my characters between social strata. But once I got them to this level or that, I would sit dumbly with my notebook and no idea how, once there, a person from one stratum, now at a new one, might act. I had no sense of the hesitation and play of their gestures or the care and turns of their speech: and that is tantamount to saying that I had no talent for fiction. The details that would make them read right and recognizable were simply not there. At a loss to generate any rich and human-scale behavior, I would drag in another wooden bit of exposition for another piece of unbelievable “action” no reader could have possibly cared about. (‘Action” is what the unskilled writer substitutes—often in despair—for observation.) My first SF novel The Jewels of Apto f s official publication date was December first, 1962. But when I was a handful of chapters into the Tower’s Book One, in November the first copies of The Jewels of Apt or arrived at Ace Books (in a double volume with James White’s novella Second Ending on the other side), recently moved up to new offices on Sixth Avenue and 48th Street. The cover, by artist Jack Gaughan, a deep and layered blue, depicted bony vampire creatures staring after floating pearls, within which glimmered skulls. My only real memory of the day is, after buying the special Sturgeon issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction at the Sheridan Square newsstand, walking, after dark, with Marilyn along West Fourth Street, somewhere near Gerdes Folk City (then two blocks east of Washington Square). Suddenly I hurled the clutch of paperbacks into the air with a whoop of joy, then ran along by the manhole cover in the cobbled street to swipe one from where it had landed, spraddled open, cover up, while Marilyn stood behind me, laughing. The next day at the Fifth Street apartment I was back at work on the Tower’s first volume, but with a strangely distanced feeling. Why didn’t the real pleasure of my first book’s publication (a copy lay on the green metal wing of the typewriter table, as I typed up the current chapter from my notebook) do more to impel me on with the writing of this one? But it didn’t. And it seemed grossly unfair—since I knew by now that worry over what was happening to an earlier book could trouble work on a new one. Still, a few months later, when Out of the Dead City was finished, I felt it was rich and accomplished and infinitely superior to Jewels. I was particularly proud of the climax, a chase through the universe in Chapter Eleven (that I planned to repeat in miniature in Chapter Five of Book Two), whose episodes had been generated according to a complex pattern of the four classical elements (fire, water, earth, air) overlaid on the modern states of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma) deployed between the epic spheres (underworld, real world, heavens). “Yes, we’re going to publish it,” Don said, when, after what seemed years of waiting for him to read it, at last he called me into the Ace office to talk about it. “It’s not as strong as your first book, Chip. But that often happens with second novels. Still, it’s got some interesting stuff.” On the subway back down to the Lower East Side, I found myself thinking that, though they might add a feeling of range to the episodes, probably no reader would experience the elements behind the chase as a pattern, even though they made one. A few days later, I took out my notebooks and looked over the notes on my June dream, then launched into the assassination scene that begins The Towers of Town. In memory, that second volume remains the most difficult book I’ve ever written. Though certain sections gave me much satisfaction (the long-planned-for friendship between Alter and Clea, some of the sections in the military chapters), in general everything around them seemed thick to write, thin to read, and sunk in an endless personal dullness. That winter I was going weekly to Queens to tutor poet Marie Ponsot’s ten- year-old son, Antoine, in arithmetic. (Two years before, when I was eighteen, it was Marie who had given me my first copy of Barnes’ Nightwood.) Three chapters into the second volume, and I had to give up the weekly tutoring sessions. “Well,” Antoine told his mother, “I guess Chip is writing another novel.” I was; but it was going very slowly. The summer of that June walk, Marilyn went to Mexico with her mother for a month and a half. Upstairs, Terry laid a place for me at dinner for ten dollars a week, somewhat over my protests. An Italian girl from upstate New York, she could not be convinced that, in our house, I did the overwhelming majority of the cooking. But her and Billy’s company was pleasant. Months before, a painter named Simon had told me about the trucks parked under the highway out by the docks at the river end of Christopher Street as a place to go at night for almost instant sex. (That Simon was also gay came as a jarring surprise after I’d known him almost a month. His vivid and precise canvases seemed more luminous to me than any art since Cary’s.) I went once, stood across the street under the light, watching the trucks almost twenty minutes—and saw nothing of the mass orgies Simon had described. Now and then, a lone man in jeans wandered across the street to disappear among the parked vehicles—some driver checking his van. That was all. “No,” Simon told me the next afternoon, “you have to cross over and walk around between them. And you still probably won’t see very much.” “Isn’t that kind of scary?” I asked. “You got it,” Simon said. And a few nights later, I went back. And crossed over. And discovered that, from about nine o’clock in the evening on, between thirty-five and a hundred- fifty (on weekends) men were slipping through and between and in and out of the trailers, some to watch, but most to participate in numberless, silent, sexual acts, till morning began to wipe night from above the Hudson, to blue the oily waters. I stayed there for perhaps five or six hours, had sex seven or eight times, and finally left exhausted. Once, coming home one rainy dawn from the Christopher Street docks that summer, I picked up a two-hundred- forty-pound, thirty-year-old Canadian ex-convict, hanging out at the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, named Sonny. He ended up staying with me for a couple of weeks while Marilyn was away, his illegal activities bringing down on me only one invasion of the police. Another time that summer I brought home with me a very intelligent and incisive acting teacher, named Claud (a friend of the aging and infirm Carson McCullers, it turned out). As he came into the apartment and saw the clutter I’d allowed to gather over those hot days, he declared: “My god, is this what you think of yourself?” I was surprised. But we remained friends for years. Besides these distractions, by now the sheer bulk of the trilogy was beginning to tell. Once, I decided to abandon it and began another science fiction novel, The Ballad ofBeta-2. Planned to be much shorter, it could be finished in some reasonable number of weeks, I was sure. But when I was sixty or seventy pages along in the manuscript, it too hit a point beyond which I could not go. Finally I gave the manuscript to an older friend of mine, Bernie Kay. “Yow finish it,” I told him. “Here’s the outline. There’re only two chapters to go. If you complete it, I’ll split whatever it sells for with you, fifty-fifty.” And again I took up the abandoned Towers of Town, pausing now and again to work on Voyage, Orestes!, the only thing I seemed actually able to write. As July gave way to August, the trip across to the Village and along Christopher Street to the docks became a nightly journey, till I came down first with gonorrhea, then (once that was cured) pneumonia; and I disappeared into my apartment for four days so that, on the evening of her return, Marilyn had to take me to the hospital with a hundred-four fever, where I stayed, first at Bellevue, then at Sydenham, for two weeks. With its title changed by editorial mandate from Out of the Dead City to the more commercial Captives of the Flame, Book One appeared while we were still living on East Fifth Street. Shortly afterwards, in December ‘63 (a year after the publication of The Jewels of Aptor) another ex-B&N clerk, this one a tall, bespectacled, black-haired graduate student in English at Columbia, Susan, appeared one day at our door, destitute, to stay with us for an unspecified number of weeks. “Literature survives by fertile ambiguity ...” she told me, handing over her copy of Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man. I was having my first bout with ulcers that month but I tried to be appreciative. Some years before I had read D.B. Wyndham Lewis’s study, Frangois Villon. Now I discovered that this Lewis was not the same person at all: the pointed and polemical critiques of Joyce, Woolf, and Proust, interlarded with near-impenetrable bouts of metaphysics, were the very opposite of the arch, learned, gossipy, and finally somewhat suspect recreations of Twelfth Century life and thought. But through ulcers, through semi- permanent house guests (through Time and Western Manl), I worked away on the second volume. One nagging problem with the book was simply that when the civilian chapters of the Towers’ Book Two had finally developed a plan, I realized that, if I wanted to end it in anything other than chaos, changes would have to be made as far back as Chapter One of Book One—which was now in wire paperback bookracks across the country. My solution—a most clumsy one, I felt, even at the time—was to drag on some robots who would explode at the end of Book Two and destroy, along with themselves, a few loose ends lingering from the earlier volume. But that was nothing against the sheer difficulty in getting the pages written. Though Wollheim was not pressing for completion, the weeks when I could not write a word of science fiction were upsetting. The deadline I’d set myself was long past. When I was some three- quarters of the way through The Towers of Town, I spent a night talking to an artist named Al in his East Village studio. (He had a sprawling purple birth mark over his eye and cheek, very like my character Rara.) Near tears the night long, I went on till after sun-up, explaining and explaining and explaining again, as the sky lightened behind the bars of the fire escape outside the windows in his grey loft walls, that I had no idea what was happening any more in the book I was writing. I honestly did not believe I could finish it. Indeed, starting such a grandiose project—much less expecting it to pay my rent and feed me—was the biggest mistake I’d ever made! Too many of its pages were simply written in a daze by a befuddled youngster clambering to reach the end. And when, somehow, the second volume was finished and submitted to Wollheim, and, over lunch at the old Blue Ribbon restaurant on 48th Street, Don commented, ‘Oh, we’ll definitely publish it. Readers like series books. But it’s not quite as strong as your last one,” I wasn’t surprised. From the first two volumes, it was clear that I was not producing a better work than McCullers’ or Capote’s. Aside from mine’s sheer limpness, Capote’s and McCullers’ books were astutely observed psychological novels; and just as the social chronicle represents an advance on the picaresque, so the psychological novel, when well wrought, is an advance on the social chronicle. I hadn’t even noticed the particular problems of rendering psychological movement among the specific SF parameters, nor had I even thought about orchestrating such effects in concert and counterpoint within a richly envisioned, coherent, alternate world. But I had noticed by now that even the SF conceit behind my whole enterprise had been chosen rather thoughtlessly, governed more by my zeal to “say something meaningful” than to say something coherent. A small, isolated empire still managing to maintain a developing technology and culture (so very like our own!) for five hundred years ...? In my anxiety to say something important, what I was doing was babbling! It was a painful lesson in the split between theory and practice. It would have been a wonderfully simple one if I’d been able to say, honestly, my mistake was merely that I’d done too much planning. But it was also clear that the only thing that made the first two books of the trilogy minimally publishable was, indeed, what planning there had been. If anything, they’d needed a lot more: without it, there were simply too many stretches where I was flailing at my notebook with my ball- point instead of writing. And it was only the plan that had kept the results, however far they strayed from anyone’s notion of “good writing,” within the comprehensible. And I’d already begun the third volume .... As far as I can see, at the start of City of a Thousand Suns something happens to the writing. Every time I’ve read over the galleys for the trilogy’s dozen various editions during the past twenty years, the change has struck me. As much as I can tell from my all-too-subjective position, the energy increases. An artist’s evaluation of his or her own work is probably the least trustworthy judgement possible in the range of human judgements. Still, the move between the end of Book Two and the beginning of Book Three is, at least for me, the change between the wholly unbearable and the barely acceptable. This is not to say that the third book avoids the mawkish, the moralistic (“Alter turned to face the sword ...” Cringe!), or the mucky. Yet it does not cause me quite as much aesthetic pain as the previous two. What intrigues me about this change —if it is actually there—is that I can’t point to anything in my life that might have caused it. I finished the handwritten version of The Towers of Town’s Chapter Thirteen and immediately— within minutes? hours? certainly after no more than a day—skipped a page in my notebook to begin writing out “Chapter One” of Book Three. In fact, I finished the hand-written version of Book Three’s “Chapter One” before I turned back to re-type the last few chapters of Book Two (in the midst of which I was suddenly struck by a method to make the vowel progression in the successive mentions of the “flip-flop” creature appear as random as possible: actually a very simple formula, it took me a day- and-a-half of work to carry it out. But the effect of uniform variety that is the way art conveys the random always requires organization, if only to avoid the aesthetically distracting clumps and repetitions that the truly random always displays and around which meaning forms), to hand it in to Don, once Marilyn had checked it for spelling, a few weeks after my twenty-first birthday that April. I remember, right afterwards, showing the first chapter of Book Three to both Terry upstairs (an avid SF reader) and Marilyn. Do I fool myself by remembering both women seemed to think it substantially more vivid and immediate than what had gone before? In the first months of ‘64, while I was in the middle of writing City of a Thousand Suns’ Chapter Two, we moved to another apartment that had belonged to yet another ex-Barnes and Noble clerk—Rose Marion—at 739 East 6th Street (4-D), a block north and a block east, where that final typing of Book Two was completed and where, over the next two months, Book Three came as easily as Book Two had come haltingly. But the change had already occurred. I recall some subjective differences in what writing felt like before and after the break between those last two volumes. Until I began City of a Thousand Suns, what pressed me to actual writing were images, ideas, a kind of ill-seen “movie in the mind” (what current narratologists call the diagesis), which, in order to clarify, I would sit down and describe on paper. There were occasional words and phrases involved in that initial inner imaging, but not many. And those that were there usually went into the text pretty much unchanged. (The Towers’”beetlewings/carbuncle/silver fire” motif is an example.) From its first pages, however, once the expository opening was finished and the first scene in Toron begun, City of a Thousand Suns came to me with just as many ideas and images, but now what pressed me to put words on paper—what made me take up my notebook and pen—were comparatively large, if vague, blocks of language that came as well. It was as if the whole writing process had finally secreted another, verbal layer on top of what had been going on till then. These “language blocks” were not, certainly, lengths of finished prose, all words in place. But now, as well as the vague images and ideas that formed the pre-written story, I would also hear equally vague sentences or paragraphs, sometimes as much as a page and a half of them—which was the point at which I knew it was time to write. In these vaguely imagined blocks, there would be one to ten clear words and/or clear phrases, as well as a sense of the lengths of language between them —even a sense of that language’s intervening rhythm. The actual writing, of course, would revise all this greatly. (If anything, the rhythm gave the most cliché, common, and least energetic way to say what I wanted, so that its loose, lazy, and lax periods became a base meter against which to write hard prose: but that soft and lilting underrhythm would let me know what the line must be hard in relation to. Till then, simply because I had never consciously or conscentiously heard it—or listened for it—before, it had been the rhythm that, too often, my writing followed rather than fought.) Pre-set phrases would change. The vaguer material would shrink or expand as words made it real. And, as always, images would clarify and complete themselves in the writing. But the language part, at least to this extent, just hadn’t happened before. I was probably sixteen when I first read George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Along with Pound’s ABC of Reading (which I’d found at about the same time), very little else is teachable about writing. Getting rid of superfluous adjectives and extra words, the advantage of the active voice, the breaking of overcomplex sentences into smaller ones—these were all things I’d learned before I’d begun my first SF novel, back in ‘61. Had I not known them, no doubt that first book would never have placed. But what I’m talking of now is a certain psychological relation to the work. Before the change, I would have been very open to the pernicious mythology of professionalism that, save when it serves as a polemical counter against a kind of romantic self- indulgence (that, certainly, no romantic we still read today could have indulged), does so much to pollute contemporary paraliterary art. Before the change, I thought of myself as a writer who could write everything. I probably could have—all equally badly. After, I began to realize that I was profoundly limited in what I could write —at least if I wanted to write with the best language my inner tongue could offer up for conscious working and reworking. Once this change, invisible in its actual occurrence, was complete, I knew I wasn’t a poet or a playwright or a journalist or a writer of naturalistic short stories or of historical novels. I was a science fiction writer. I suspect I am describing here the largely psychological experience others have written of as “finding” one’s own “voice”—though it is given, not found (the poets Yeats and Spicer spoke of it as “dictation”), and has not so much to do with voice or writing as with language itself, somewhere in the very reading and listening centers of the brain, a new level of stabilization in the discursive mechanism that precedes and informs all rhetoric, to the most revolutionary. I write of “a new level of language,” “new confidence,” “voice,” “energy,” “dictation.” And even before City of a Thousand Suns had appeared, I’d gone and retrieved the incomplete manuscript of The Ballad of Beta-2 from Bernie. He’d only written a page or so, before other tasks had distracted him. I discarded his additions, and within weeks I wrote the last two chapters, then retyped/re-wrote the whole: once the change arrived, the smaller book was no problem. “My own voice,” “dictation,” or however you characterize it, it came, however, with a price. The acrophobia I mentioned parenthetically during our June walk across the bridge in ‘62 had grown more and more intense in the first months of 1964, so that by the time I finished the Towers, I could not have taken that walk again. Even to be in a room with windows more than one or two stories above ground level was almost physically painful. The longhand version of the City of a Thousand Suns was finished in late February; but retyping and rewriting continued for another six weeks or so. The Ballad of Beta-2 was handed in and sold at the end of June. But by that time, the acrophobia had slid over into another fear that I would, first, fall under a subway train and, shortly after that, that something inside me was compelling me to throw myself under an on-rushing subway. But general anxiety was rising all through my life. Two or three times that spring I woke at three or four in the morning, to leap from the bed and stand, shaking, naked, in the middle of the room, unable to breathe, my heart pounding, a red film over everything that, as my breath came back, would swirl clear in patches. Shivering, I would lie back down, unable to explain to Marilyn what had occurred, who now tried harder and harder to ignore my stranger and stranger behavior. Over the summer months I got well on the way to becoming one of the common, garden-variety madmen you see wandering about New York City: filthy clothes, all unbuttoned, going nowhere, mumbling to 136 themselves. By October of ‘64,1 was making daily, circuitous, ambling trips to the Second Avenue subway on Houston Street, where, finally, inside the turnstile, I would sit at the top of the stairs leading down from the underground concourse to the track level, clutching the bannister rails, feeling myself drawn to the tracks, while some unlocable force impelled me down, pushed me to throw myself under the next incoming train. When, below, I saw the subway rush roaring up beside the platform, I’d hug my chest and face to the bars and hold my breath till I broke into a sweat. (Did I want to kill myself? No, there was nothing in my life I was dissatisfied with, which made the compulsion the more unnerving!) I only realized how much I needed help one evening when a young policeman came up and pried me loose from the bars I was clutching with his billy club and shooed me out of the station with the logical question that, in my obsession, had somehow never occurred to me: “If you’re afraid of the subways, why do I see you come and sit here every day?” In November Dick Entin arranged an appointment for me with a psychiatrist he was seeing. The meeting was about five minutes long; I doubt the doctor made his diagnosis on what I said so much as on the way I looked and my general affect: the next morning, on a chilly autumn day, I was admitted into Mt. Sinai Mental Hospital, where I stayed for the next few weeks. City of a Thousand Suns appeared while I was still at the hospital’s “Day/Night Center.” But I wrote no more science fiction (nor could I have written any) from June, when Beta-2 was finished, till sometime after Christmas and I was out of the hospital—when, tentatively, I began another novel, Babel-17. The pressures of writing were only one cause of the breakdown. Still, in three years I had written and sold five SF books—with another unsold. (Not to mention the thousand pages of Voyage, Orestes!6) That pressure was certainly one of the factors. Science fiction has always been attractive to young writers. It offers a possibility of writing for a living rather more quickly than certain other practices of writing, literary or paraliterary. But to the extent young writers take their work seriously, it opens them to a great deal of internal strife for very meager rewards. And it’s arguable that the nil-reward situation that greets most young literary writers is finally healthier because it does not hold out the initial illusion of economic stability, which becomes hopelessly muddled with the thrill of seeing your work in print—in devastatingly embarrassing packages! Today The Fall of the Towers’ three volumes strike me as very naked. They show—not necessarily in the best light, either—all the preoccupations to be expected of a young man whose family two years before had merited a paragraph in a popular non-fiction bestseller, High Society in the United States (in a chapter on “Negro High Society”), who now lived in a Lower East Side tenement where rats leapt on the sink when you went to brush your teeth in the morning and wild dog packs roamed the stairwells. To say that the homicides, suicides, and madmen who come to dominate the final volume reflect the pressures that were building within me is probably too dramatic. Nevertheless, they are there to be read however one should read them. The relationship between Jon and his sister, Clea, is very much the one I would have liked to have had with my own sister, Peggy—and which I did not begin to develop until some years later, when she came to my rescue during a bout of illness while I was languishing in a seedy residence hotel. (The ulcers had acted up again ....) The rapprochement between Jon and his father (that I meant to be the emotional climax of all three books; only it’s in the wrong place ...) is very much the rapprochement my own father’s death, three years before, had prevented me from having. I wept when I wrote the scene—aware, as I wrote, as I cried, that tears were no assurance it would be more than melodrama. It may come as a surprise after all this Sturm und Drang that, as a writer, I like my own work. Somewhat glibly, I’ve advised many creative writing students, who, under whatever misapprehensions, have ended up in the various writing workshops various universities have coerced me into teaching over twenty years (“We’ll let you teach the theory class if you’ll just do a writing class for us too ...”), that they’d best choose topics interesting enough to maintain their enthusiasm—at least through the time it takes to finish what they’re writing. Otherwise, they’ll be very unhappy. The Towers is where I learned that first hand. I hadn’t known it would take most of two years ...! And at twenty and twenty-one, two years is a long time. Yes, I like my own work. That means I find, even today, aspects of the Towers that retain charm and interest for me. But I am more and more surprised when they can charm or interest anyone else. In 1966, when I was on my way back from six months in Europe to the U.S. via London, Michael Moorcock, editor of New Worlds, held out the first possibility of a British edition. Weeks later, that May, again in New York and back on Sixth Street, I did the thirty-odd pages of retyping necessary to make Book One and Book Two coherent with each other and conform to a modicum of common sense. (I cannot tell you the pleasure it gave me finally to strike the few paragraphs devoted to those robots!) The new pages were typed for me by a friend I’d met in Europe, who’d come back to the U.S. at about the same time I had, Ed Maxey, a former secretary to Ay η Rand and who now worked for a translation bureau that Bernie ran, up on 42nd Street. Those revisions are described in a note to the one-volume American edition that first appeared in 1970. When I was preparing that volume (a month before I was to leave for San Francisco on New Year’s Eve, 1968), the artist Russell FitzGerald, who’d already done the stunning cover paintings for the British Sphere Books three-volume edition, told me one October afternoon that he feared “preparing” might mean drastic cutting. We sat in his East Third Street fourth- floor apartment, sipping white wine, while a winter breeze chattered in the bare trees and naked brush about the graveyard outside, below his back window. “Have some respect for the little boy you were when you wrote them,” Russell said. ‘After all, Chip, he’s largely responsible for anything you’ve done since.” Sobering advice. But I’ve tried to follow it. In the one-volume edition, the books are all there. Either as three volumes or as one, The Fall of the Towers has been in print practically without break since its initial publication twenty years ago. (And in 1968, an edition of The Jewels of Aptor was issued by Ace, reset from the carbon of the original typescript, with the excised 740 lines returned to the text. “Expanded and Revised,” said the book’s jacket copy, though it’s only the novel as originally written.) The Towers’ initial reception was three generous and supportive reviews by the late R Schuyler Miller (may his criticism be collected and canonized!)—although I didn’t see the third and most generous of them till long after it had been published, when SF editor Terry Carr, to whom I’d made the mistake of complaining that the trilogy had never been reviewed as a whole in the United States, ferreted out the last and most glowing of the pieces that Miller had written, for Analog Magazine’s “Reference Library.” It had appeared the winter I was stuck on an island in the Aegean, with one boat a week from the mainland—and only the memory of Orion straddling wintery West Fourth Street as I made my way back from the Greenwich Village coffee shops, lugging my guitar case past the all-night vegetable stand on Avenue B, at two or three o’clock in the morning, where I’d stop to look long and hard at the kale, tomatoes, or zucchini under the unfrosted electric bulbs under the awning, largely because the seventeen- year-old kid on the night-shift, sitting on the vegetable crate beside the electric heater in his ragged sweater and dilapidated sneakers (happy enough for a winter’s night’s chat), was another nail-biter. The three books had also elicited a favorable review in England from New Worlds reviewer James Cawthorne, which I had seen on that first trip to London in the spring of ‘66. It appeared in one of the last digest format is sues before New Worlds went on to tabloid size and notoriety with those writers who would soon be called the “New Wave.” Out of the Dead City had drawn a single fan letter—from a teenage reader who decided “Samuel R. Delany” must be a penname for A.E. van Vogt because (one) my plot was as complex as any of Van Vogt’s and because (two) he had never heard of an SF writer named “Delany” before and because (three) letters could be taken from parts of my name to spell “Slan,” the name of Van Vogt’s best-known novel; therefore (Q.E.D.) Van Vogt I must be. City of a Thousand Suns brought half a dozen notes from readers—one, a warm, appreciative, and wholly unexpected letter from SF writer John Brunner in London. I think that letter was half the reason I decided to include London on my European itinerary; and, when the book was reprinted, why I re- dedicated it to him and his wife Marjorie for their great kindnesses to me on that first London trip. The most pleasing response the books elicited, however, was one I discovered perhaps three months after City of a Thousand Suns appeared and I was still living on the Lower East Side. It may be the greatest single satisfaction I’ve ever gotten in return for writing. I’d picked up a mimeographed avant- garde poetry magazine, The World, at a bookstore on St. Marks Place. Kneeling on the bed, now at East Sixth, I was browsing through the legal-sized pages when I came across a poem by a poet I’d never heard of before, Tom Veitch— pretty usual in such a magazine. The title of Veitch’s poem, however, was: “SAM’S FICTION MACHINE DELIVERS THE GOODS” As I read it, I realized that much of it was made of phrases taken from the last chapter of the Towers’ Book Three. I hooted with delight! The way I read the poem at the time was that, somehow, another person somewhere had been moved to write by what I’d written as strongly as I had been moved by any of the texts that had ever moved me. I don’t think I would read it that way now. From twenty years’ perspective, a more reasonable explanation is simply that Veitch was also young. (I met him later, and our birthdays were indeed within weeks of one another’s.) My age had been mentioned here and there in the biographical squibs appended to my (by then) four published SF novels. Probably Veitch identified with me as a young writer as much as, or even more than, he responded to any merits of the texts—the same way I instantly became a fan of any writer I heard about who was under twenty-five, from Canada’s Marie- Claire Blais to England’s Shana Alexander, an urge that always preserved a historical spot of fondness in me for writers like Raymond Radiguet and Natalia Crane and Samuel Greenberg (from whom I had lifted an image for that last chapter, which Veitch had lifted in turn for his poem) and Chatterton (some of whose Rowley forgeries I had, as a teenager, rendered into modern English) and Rimbaud (whose Le bateau ivre I had translated when I was eighteen) and Keats .... Ace Books published something like six science fiction books a month in those days. To say The Fall of the Towers was better than four-fifths of them is not to say much. That so many of those books, however, mine among them, are still in print after twenty years speaks well of the vigor of the SF field as a whole at that time. But presented with the blunt question, “Why should anyone read your books today, much less your reminiscences about them?” I would have to answer, after the polite attempt to wriggle out of the whole embarrassing topic, that if the texts are looked at with enough of a squint to blur the egregious awkwardness of their surfaces, a bit of the ambition may be discernible here and there. And in certain moods some readers can find ambition pleasurable for itself. An extraordinary amount of thinking went into The Fall of the Towers. That the books are no better than they are merely confirms the truism that talent and thought do not necessarily run neck and neck. (Auden writes somewhere: “When a successful writer analyzes the reasons for his success, he generally underestimates the talent he was born with and overestimates his skill in employing it.”) But the happiest reader of the books will, I suspect, be the one who can, on whatever level, look for the thought and can more or less ignore the myriad stupidities, in the name of whatever personal or political indulgence. (Somewhere Goethe writes: “One is not necessarily wiser at fifty than at twenty. One simply knows different things.”) Ambition—even thoughtful ambition—is not, however, accomplishment. And though popularity always involves the blur in vision that can be counted on over any statistical range of readers, art demands an individual reader’s clear and responsive gaze. Any clear gaze at these texts will meet with cascades of thinness, interrupted by clumsiness, giving way to pure clutter. If, after that, there is still some aesthetic response, then I am simply and humbly grateful. Valéry has reminded us that the work of art, good or bad, is always a disproportionate act. The reader does at least 50% of the work—while the writer, if only in typing time, does at least another 725%. And that’s not even mentioning any work that may actually make the text praiseworthy. The writer’s sense of disproportion (and the reader’s or critic’s identification with it) is the largest factor promoting the nostalgia for the artistic preparation associated with a given text—those ideas and images, those memories and enthusiasms, those experiences and influences that were developed, enriched, impoverished, forgotten, or transformed (but never left unchanged) by the writerly encounter with the page that is Active creation, a process by which that preparation is modulated into something both more stable and more playful: a specific discursive genre, a particular literary or paraliterary text. We speak of critical researches into such preparation as “instructive.” Yet most of us know we are only indulging in the curiosity of the gossip: “I wonder what that odd person was actually doing when she wrote ...? What did he think he was doing ...?”—a question that can be asked precisely because the creative process, even when the aesthetic intention is strictest autobiography, is always as great a violence to the preparation as it is. The modernist aesthetic claims the art work must “stand on its own.” Most of us generally believe this. And even when the rumblings of ego make me temporarily wish otherwise, as a young writer I accepted this in principle once and for all when I signed the contract for my first SF novel. In an age of mass printing to be distributed to an audience larger than any the writer might ever meet in person, anything else would be silly. And what else could one think when one lived across the park from the modernist poet who wrote: “Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books .... Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition. A suffering, a weakness, that cannot be expressed as an aphorism should not be mentioned.” I don’t know how many writers who have “found their voice” cracked up over the next few months. But until those who have write about it, we can’t know how typical the occurrence is or isn’t. And a more sophisticated post- modernist aesthetic tells us that historical context is all important for any true understanding of the text—that, indeed, the illusion that is “the text” is, itself, only the interpenetration of various historical economies at various levels of language, of genre, of social code, and of real and imagined experience, their play only somewhat restricted by a set of socially agreed- upon signs (the letters the writer, convulsed by whatever inter-economic traumas, fixes on the page); and that there are other economic stations between individual experience and “the human condition”—group, neighborhood, class, race, gender. Writing about it is the only way to locate a given personal experience within the political context that the most radical social critique says the personal always is. In the face of nostalgia the determining line between historical context and personal history sometimes blurs, however, beyond our ability to hold onto it. One reason I’ve risked so much nostalgia here (and nostalgia, like mythology, is always conservative) is that while most people have a sense of the historical context that shapes the lives of artists in the literary practices of writing, many of the same people have no sense at all of the context that shapes the lives of artists in the paraliterary fields—science fiction, westerns, mysteries, pornography, comic books, song writing, film scripts, contemporary journalism, advertising copy, and, yes, even scholarly criticism. Because of historical context, the forms of these writers’ lives are very different from the forms of lives lived within the literary precincts. Also there is far more paraliterary art than literary art; there are far more paraliterary artists than literary artists. The majority of texts we encounter daily (song lyrics, advertising, TV, film, journalism,...) is from the paraliterary. Understanding the paraliterary condition is necessary, whatever its sordidnesses, whatever its glories, if we would understand our world. But neither the romantic myth of the nineteenth century artist oblivious to all save the sublime nor the corresponding myth of the crassly commercial contemporary creator insistently oblivious to every cultural reality save money can organize the real information available about the lives and processes of the creators of the vast majority of texts most of us are exposed to on any given day, whatever their difference from literature, whatever their overlap. Too often someone comfortable with the impassioned underlinings a Keats might make in his copy of Shakespeare is quite surprised to learn that the twenty-two-year-old renegade art student, hired by Marvel Comics last week to draw Teen Romances for six months before going on to ink The Fantastic Four or The X-Men, can likely be found on his time-off roaming the Met or the Whitney or a Soho gallery or the Society of Illustrators, ransacking the paintings of Rembrandt or Léger, Hockney or Rauschenberg, along with the giants of the comic medium itself (Kirby, Adams, Novičk, or Kubert; Moebius, Wilson, Crumb, Corben, or Hernandez ...) with the same appetitive passion for the usable as, on that June evening in ‘62,1 ransacked my memories of Tolstoy and Heinlein and Balzac and Bester and Sturgeon and Baldwin and Barnes and, yes, even if only to reject them momentarily, Waring and Kaprow. I am not passing a judgement. I am locating a process—indeed, locating several processes—that are necessary if judgement is to be intelligent and analytical. I have known many comic artists, many SF writers. Such passionate intertextual appetitiveness is the seriousness loaned to the paraliterary condition by economic reward, and even more by the statistical reality of the audience. In their desire to locate the use-value of art, a desire they share with many post-modern literary artists, many post- modern paraliterary artists—and not a few post-modern experimentalists— have been too quick to think they have solved the problem by assuming “entertainment value” is the useful presence to be located in the text rather than “aesthetic value.” Joined with the notion of “political value,” these three concepts (“aesthetic value,” “entertainment value,” “political value”), seen as presences in the text, operate in almost the same manner, and are what assure that art, literary or paraliterary, will ultimately function only as exchange value— tending toward the most inflated rates possible, with a kind of aesthetic Parkinson’s Law (“Bad art drives out good.”) reducing the whole cultural landscape to the crumbled brick and broken glass we are all so familiar with. (The politics of presence, identity, and transcendence are too familiar and, alas, too complex to rehearse here.) If my own texts have any use whatsoever, whatsoever political, aesthetic, or entertainment concerns I had (or, pace, still have) when I wrote them (or write this), that value is not to be found in any of the three—art, entertainment, or politics—interpreted as values the texts contain in some essential form and can therefore somehow project, promote, or translate into the world in any direct way. The texts’ use is only that they were able, more or less, to stabilize, however briefly, certain images, patterns of images, images of pattern into which, indeed, other images might go—images and patterns the reader is free to use or not use in political or entertaining or literary processes/interpretations. That is the situation of any text, of every text. The Fall of the Towers was written in an historical context: it’s the writing of a young, privileged, gay, black male who’d recently entered into an actively heterosexual, interracial marriage, living in an impoverished neighborhood of a great city, while his country created a hideous and immoral war—a context that provided a certain urgency to the writing: the urge to dramatize what I saw as the vast méconnaissance in the whole concept of war as presented by SF writers like Heinlein in books like Star ship Troopers. But while the context informs the meanings that play through— that are—the text, those meanings are not the text’s use. They are rather what we and the text, always within historical restraints but always, also, with a marginal range of historical freedoms, use to create and construe our selves and the world. —New York Winter’81/Autumn ‘85 2The two verse paragraphs currently appear as Part III of “Prism and Lens” (in Separations, by Marilyn Hacker, Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 1976, pp.70-71). That long poem was assembled from a number of disparate pieces, whose occasions more or less occurred between September of ‘61 and spring of ‘62. The exception is, of course, the monologue that comprises Part II (“My mother got me awfully overdressed ....”), which was written at (and refers to) an earlier time, at least a year before. I had told Marilyn about my homosexuality before our marriage. She had been my confidante during the whole previous three years, when I had been exploring the gay side of New York (as I had been hers through her various heterosexual affairs, which, at the time, to me seemed far more adventurous, if substantially less numerous, than mine). Our own sexual play together always seemed to be an anomaly in that life, more her idea than mine, though—about a third the time—pleasant enough physically, if troubling emotionally. Standing on the subway platform at 125th Street in the summer of ‘61, where she told me that, from the second (or third?) time we’d actually gone to bed with one another, she was pregnant and we finally decided marriage would be best, she had explained that it would not bother her, as train after train rolled by. But we were both very young. Neither of us really knew what it would mean. Working out our lives around the fact of my sexuality was one of the problems, negotiated with astonishing success, now that I think back on it, we faced. Reflecting her pregnancy and miscarriage, “Eternal pressure shrinks the finite earth./The waxing body swells with seeds of death./The mind demands a measure to its breath ...” (Separations, p. 23), was written just after that October, as, a little later, was “Catherine” (Separations, p. 22), a name borrowed for its euphony from a redheaded cousin of the composer and musician, David Litwin, though the feelings were Marilyn’s. “Eternal pressure ...” was finally excluded from “Prism and Lens” for formal reasons: Marilyn felt that the triple off-rhymes would call attention to themselves in ways that the several other sonnets in “Prism and Lens” would not. Likewise, “Catherine” was omitted through narrative considerations: the voice of the longer poem, excluding the opening verse paragraph and a four-line narration in section II, was an “L” Marilyn felt a third person incursion, which also gave the voice a Active name, would not suit the poem. By ‘63, when “Prism and Lens” had all but achieved its final form, the two excluded fragments, now entitled “Catherine” and “Catherine Pregnant” (Separations, pp. 22-23) were interspersed with two new poems inspired by incidents in the lives of sculptor David Logan and his French- born wife, Claudi. In terms of biography, however, poems one and three of the “Catherine” cycle date from Autumn/Winter ‘61 and reflect Marilyn’s own feelings then, while the remaining two are observed fictions from ‘63. (The Logans’ newly born daughter, also named [wholly coincidentally] Catherine, became the inspiration, fifteen years later, for “The Hang- Glider’s Daughter” [Taking Notice, by Marilyn Hacker, Alfred A. Knopf; 1980], during Marilyn’s 1979 visit with the Logans in Tourette, France.) Marilyn’s first poetic response to her initial visit at 77 St. Marks Place, when Kallman intercepted her on the landing to take her poems in and give them to Auden without effecting an introduction, was a bit of doggerel composed the same afternoon: “Critic, do not beat your breast/Though Chester Kallman is a pest/He must have done strange things to broaden/The attitudes of Wystan Auden.” This, however, was eventually put by—though I suspect it was recited at least once before our dinner guests arrived. At about the same time as her visit to Auden, Marilyn wrote another doggerel bit, when one or another of us were joking about Joyce Kilmer: “A tree can grow from any clod,/But only Jews could make a God.” Either she or I copied it in ballpoint pen on the flaking blue hall wall around the corner from our apartment door, where I (I confess) expected it to stay till the ages rolled by. If this essay fixed on Marilyn’s esthetic development during that very important time, I’d have to reiterate “change” as her then theme, concern, and obsession. Discussions of it were intense and intricate; and she led them to all their insights and through most of their elaborations. (The reflection of the theme in The Jewels ofAp-tor, say, was secondary and very much my borrowing.) I should mention two of her poems, which, more than “Prism and Lens,” were focuses. The first was written days before (or just after) her birthday, November ‘61. Here is the background. With the marriage, Marilyn immediately felt a decrease in her creative energy and output. It worried her; and, together, we worried over it in our late-night discussions—the same discussions where she finally confirmed something she’d long suspected: the famous “vaginal orgasm” of fifties fame, whose praises had been sung by male writers from D.H. Lawrence to Norman Mailer, was a physiological myth—and, at best, a psychological anomaly. In 1960, Marilyn had invented a ten- line stanza for a poem called “The Terrible Children”: two quatrains and a couplet, as serviceable and as solid as a sonnet, but which lent itself to a strong narrative. As she worried about her failing output, I suggested she explore her ten-line form further. She debated it, now enthusiastic over possibilities, now listless with the suspicion that finally she’d write nothing anyway. November was emotionally difficult—for her, for me—because of my affair with stockclerk John. These discussions came as respite from it all. Shortly, alone, Marilyn took a walk one afternoon among the wintery paths of the East River Park. A little later she showed me a poem in an intricately complex and symmetrical nine-line form. I took it as a happy reaction against our discussion of the simple, straightforward ten-line stanza. For a while, I believe, the poem bore the title “Birthday Poem”: Growing older I descend November. The asymptotic cycle of the year plummets to now. In crystal reveries I pass beneath a fixed white line of trees where dry leaves lie for footsteps to dismember. They crackle with a muted sound like fear. That and the wind is all that I can hear. I ask cold air, “What is the word that frees?” The wind says, “Change,” and the white sun, “Remember.” The story of the second poem is this. Dick Entin had loaned us a copy of the young suicide Klaus Mann’s (son of Thomas, brother of Erika) biography of Andre Gide. Marilyn and I had read a fair amount of Gide already. And Marilyn had pointed out to me, in Les Faux- Monnayeurs, the unfairness of Gide’s judgment on Lillian, who, because she saves her own life in the lifeboat, is judged a blunt and coarse sensibility. I’d often told Marilyn about my own first, traumatic awareness of death at five or six, when I’d sat on the steps of my father’s embalming room, watching my father’s chief embalmer, Freddy, work on the naked corpse of a woman who’d died of diabetes. A few days after the first, in the same intricate nine-line form, Marilyn wrote another poem, “Gide.” It began: Action was evil. Death and his grey mother cornered him early in a moral trap. One yawned before. The other gaped behind. The choices locked to stasis in his mind: to give up lying, atrophy, and smother—or plunge headlong into the appalling gap. And it ended: He called out, crying, “I’m not like the others!” She’d begun the poem, intending it to describe some conflation between Gide and me. But, like Gide, Marilyn had been brought up to think of herself as different from the people around her— and special ... a notion that only began to die its necessary deaths, beaten out on the shingle of her New York University experiences. (I’d always been raised to believe everyone was different from everybody else, so that, for me, uniqueness itself had never seemed unique.) Within the hour of her showing me the second poem, however, we were discussing how much it spoke of her own situation—with her mother, her own sense of self. For by now, she’d been struck with—and distressed at—the extent to which, as a girl, she’d internalized values that said to be passive was to be good; values that hinted any action at all would lead to pain, immorality, and evil; values which, by now, she could no longer intellectually—or practically—tolerate. Within a month, she’d written half a dozen more poems in the same iambic, nine-line strophe, all telling bits of the Elektra story. The parallels between Elektra, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, and Orestes and Marilyn, her mother, her late father, and me were minute and fascinating. Just about simultaneously, both Marilyn and I realized the first two nine-line poems were part of the series. Now she rewrote “Gide,” “she” replacing “he,” as the second stanza of the larger series: Elektra. The series became a psychological/intellectual (the sort so often called “spiritual”) autobiography. At least five times between 1962 and 1970,1 typed the entirety of it out—the whole of what had been written finally ran to more than thirty pages, with villa- nelles, a prose fragment, and pentameter monologues added to it—preparatory to various attempts from Marilyn to bring it to a conclusion. The poem grew. But it would not end. Though it was never published in its entirety and, today, remains incomplete (November 1987), it was still one Marilyn was adding stanzas to, in the same nine-line form, in San Francisco as late as 1969 and ‘70. If / had any major revelation in the early months of ‘62 on Fifth Street, it came from my life—and largely went back into it—particularly from my homosexual adventurings. (If it affected my writing, others must tease that out.) But, as winter gave to spring in our dead-end alley, I can call back my sitting in the red armchair, explaining to Marilyn, on the daybed, head to one side, intense and attentive: “You know, it struck me last night. If you define intelligent people as the ones who know all the same facts you do, who think all the same things and like all the same things, then whenever you meet someone new you spend a lot of time testing them out, asking them leading questions, and checking over whether they’ve given the right answers or not—only to discover most of them don’t measure up too well. But if you define intelligent people as the ones who know something different from what you do, whom you can learn something from if you’ll only ask the right questions and listen carefully enough, it’s strange: suddenly there aren t any more stupid people!” A few times after I’d said it to her, when we were talking to some of our intellectual friends, I heard Marilyn say much the same. At about that point (Spring ‘62), Marilyn brought back news of a poetry contest. One of its judges was Robert Lowell, for whose work she had great respect. She put together a submission. (I wrote a few pieces using her ten-line “Terrible Children” stanza form, which I submitted.) It was a national contest and widely publicized. Doubtless there were several thousand entries. When the winners were announced, neither of us had placed. Never having considered myself a poet, I was not greatly bothered. But Marilyn was depressed over it for several days—leaning toward a week. Once, when we were talking about it and I was trying to lift her spirits, she pointed out it was the first contest she’d ever entered of any sort where she hadn’t gotten first or second place. It was the first test she’d ever taken where she hadn’t been among the top two or three performers. It seemed to contribute even more to the drawing in of her creative energies and output. But the building on East Fifth Street housed skeins and snarls of memory and change. About 1967, however, long after we’d moved, 629 was gutted, the roof taken off, and pre-fabricated apartments lowered in. Finally, a new fagade was erected over the ground floor, with a new entrance, eight feet higher than the old, at the head of raised metal stairs. By 1980, with its “new” unrecognizable face now half-ruined, it (and the Mildred) stood alone behind the school, the rest of the buildings on both sides of the street reduced to shattered brick around them. And the alley to Fifth Street was no longer an alley, but only a handball wall beside a stretch of broken paving running by desolate acres. 2Marilyn and I had recently sat in on an evening Shakespeare course given at the New School. Our instructor, Professor Lewis, was a theatrical and enthusiastic man with a reputation for making “dead topics” come to life—for this term, As You Like It, Coriolanus, The Tempest, and King Lear. Infected with Lewis’s charisma after taking the first half of the course, a red-headed Barnes and Noble stock clerk, Rose Marion, had insisted we take the second half. During his first class on Lear, in his explication of the Scene i altercation between Lear and Kent just before Lear curses Cordelia, as Lewis read the text to us, paraphrasing along, I realized he had interpreted Lear’s line 144 (“The bow is bent and drawn. Make from the shaft.”), which interrupts Kent’s petition, as: “You’ve spoken too long. Get to your point,” i.e., “Your bow is bent and drawn, Kent. Let your arrow fly.”—as if the line were a metaphorical version of Gertrude’s exhortation to Polonius in Hamlet, “More matter with less art.” In the discussion that followed, I took what I thought was the mildest exception and suggested the line was better interpreted: “My anger is ready to become action. If you do not move away from it, it will strike you too,” i.e., “My bow is bent and drawn. Move away from the arrow.” I pointed out that he’d conflated the meanings of “bow” and “shaft” (i.e., “bow” and “arrow”). Lewis declared, however, that here shaft just meant a piece of wood (like staff) and that the word was, indeed, synonymous with bow. My reading was, he declared, obviously and patently wrong. The argument became rather heated, with Marilyn and I the chief spokespersons for my reading, with most of the class on Lewis’s side. (At one point, he actually took a vote!) Poor Rose Marion was, I’m afraid, the most upset of all. In the course of the evening’s dinner with Auden and Kallman, the Shakespeare course came up. Auden mentioned he’d also taught Shakespeare at the New School, some years before, as well as at Swarthmore. When we outlined the controversy to him, he exclaimed that “of course” my reading was right and that Lewis’s was “ridiculous.” Several weeks later, this was reconfirmed for me by Auden’s long- time friend, Louis Kronenberger, whom I met one day walking in the street and whom I strolled with for several blocks. I’d known Mr. Kronenberger as the father of my element-ary schoolmate, Johnny. Years before, he had taken Johnny and me to see Michael Redgrave in The Night My Number Came Up— while Johnny had explained to me in whispers that for his father (then Drama Critic for Time magazine) to condescend to go to a mere movie was a monumental rarity. Johnny had come to visit us several times in the first weeks after our August marriage and, indeed, unbidden, had first given us Auden’s address. The confirmation of the line reading was repeated, eventually, in the textual apparatus in the various paperback Shakespeares, such as Signet and Folger’s, that began to appear widely a year or so later. That February, however, I was in the midst of writing the concluding chapters of The Jewels ofAptor. I’d been working on it the morning of Auden and Kallman’s visit. The next day I went back in the text and memorialized what now I began to think of as the Lewis/Auden debate in anagram in The Jewels’ Chapter Six, when Iimmi and Geo discuss their feuding teachers at the university of “Olese Olwn” (New School). The incident was, however, among the first times I was led to question the status of various textual readings and the various authorities that propound them. In my science fiction criticism of recent decades, I’ve tried to validate a demotic reading of science fiction, a reading no less complex than that which any other true language can support, a reading through which, in the very meaning of sentences, the object is privileged over the subject, a reading, certainly, in which the subject is, however disseminated, not absent, a reading that can be as recomplicated as any that literary hermeneutics can devise, a reading that SF texts, since the late Thirties at least, have all been written in expectation of—a reading, finally, in the midst of which the traditional literary expectations of the priority of the subject can generate semantic disasters as palpably wrong- headed as Professor Lewis’s reading of Lear. But the complexities of exactly which reader (and how that reader) becomes a privileged reader of the text I first felt as a palpable reality that night in February, 1962. 3Gaddis’s The Recognitions was an influence: I dawdled over one copy or another, reading a few pages or a few hundred pages, from the first hardcover I saw in 1956 at the Greenwich Village home of a boyfriend of my cousin Barbara’s, through various trade paperback editions in the Sixties, till the Avon mass market paperback appeared in 1975. Again and again during these partial readings, some snippet of Gaddis’s text would propel me from the page into various reveries and reflections on what the whole of such a novel might be doing, which notions would become hopelessly mixed up with what I wanted my own novels to do. Finally, cooped up in a Buffalo motel room in ‘75,1 read the entire book end to end. The next week I lectured on it to my creative writing class at SUNY. But though I greatly respect the book and have reread it with both admiration and delight, it hasn’t been an influence since! 4For a number of historians the year I entered high school, 1956, marks the transition from America’s “Industrial” to its “Post-Industrial” period: it was the year the country’s white collar workers exceeded in number its combined blue collar and agricultural workers. As a transition, it’s somewhat arbitrary. Whatever effects might be ascribed to the shift in work deployment, they’d long since occurred in the country’s major urban areas where that redeployment had been the case for decades: three years before, the New York Subway fare, which had remained a nickel since World War One, had doubled—to the outrage, consternation, and bewilderment of the whole urban populace. And the price of milk, which for many years had been more or less stable, between 21 and 24 cents a quart, had recently moved up to 25, to 27 cents, and, in very little time, to 35 cents a quart, introducing cities to the constant and inexorable inflation that has since become the national condition—a condition very different in feel, cause, and form from the irregular upward jerks in pricing the U.S had lived with since the depression. Four years later in the late summer of 1960, only a few years after this post- industrial point, an artist named Alan Kaprow first presented a new work, Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts. It was repeated for several evenings in a Second Avenue studio apartment; it was the first time the word “happening” had been used in such a performance context; and, though the initial work itself in this form did not achieve overwhelming popularity, over the next dozen years, through Kaprow’s later “happening” works and from its appropriation by many other artists, the word passed into the general U.S. vocabulary. Several times now I’ve seen Kaprow’s initial piece (today we would call it “performance art”) cited by several art historians as the (equally arbitrary) transition between the modern and the post-modern. But I don’t believe I’ve yet read a first-hand account of it by any of its original audience. I jot down here what I remember, then, twenty-five years after the fact, for much the same reasons as I have reconstructed the evening with Auden. Walking somewhere along Eighth Street, in 1960, on the side of an army- green mail collector I saw a black and white mimeographed poster stuck up with masking tape announcing: “Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, by Alan Kaprow,” giving the weekend dates (“Friday, Saturday, and Sunday”), time (7:30 P.M.), and price (Contributions, $3.00), and location. Such posters were fairly common in the Village area at that time, advertising the newly burgeoning galleries on Ninth and Tenth Streets, or telling of a poetry reading at one or another coffee shop on the periphery of the tourist area. From the same period, another such poster had put me in touch with a group called Chamber Theater, run by an energetic and visionary woman, Risa Kurzen, an undertaking which occupied me for a summer. Another introduced me to the New York Repertory Company, which had rented the St. Marks Theater for a summer season, where I performed for several months, at the site of what is now a vintage clothing store, between the Valencia Hotel and the St. Marks Baths. In this case, it was the word “Happening” that intrigued me. A notion was abroad—and it had saturated the air so that even a bright eighteen-year-old might respond to its modernist currency, if not its Wagnerian roots—that art must somehow get up off the printed page, must come down from the gallery wall. And the word “happening”—with its lack of fanfare on the poster—spoke of just such a movement of art stepping from its current frame into a larger and more theatrical concept and context. I wrote down the dates, time, and place in my notebook. And I spent a lot of time mulling over what “Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts” might, indeed, comprise—quite sure, however, that I would find them exciting, whatever they were. The weekend of the “Eighteen Happenings,” my cousin, Boyd Savoy, five years older than I, was in from medical school. Why didn’t he come along with me? Boyd was a lover of Fielding’s Tom Jones and a figurative artist of some talent, as well as a medical student. I think he was intrigued—if not by the artistic prospects, then by the notion of “the Village” with its romantic glimmer; as well, he had some curiosity as to what his younger cousin, who’d already established a reputation in the family for intellectual eccentricity, might be into. And so we got on the subway (with the small, new, copper tokens, brighter than clean pennies, just up from the size of dimes, whose price had just risen from fifteen to eighteen cents), and wound our way down to the Village, wandered across town by Cooper Union, in plenty of time for the performance. Below the bell in the apartment building’s narrow, white vestibule the same poster I’d seen on the mail-holder was taped up. Upstairs, when we walked in, most of the space was taken up by temporarily erected polyethylene walls on unpainted wooden frames. These walls divided the performance area into what I assume, at this distance, was six square chambers, each about eight feet by eight, each enterable from a doorwide space on the outside, but separate from one another, and through whose translucent, wavering planes, you could just make out what was going on in the chambers beside or across from yours. Possibly because Boyd and I were early, no one seemed set up to take our contributions. Two or three young women were walking around in black leotards, apparently part of the proceedings. There was at least one male assistant in jeans and t-shirt, all shoulders and cheek bones and deep-set eyes, who had something to do with the small, harsh overhead lights. A gangling man in his late twenties or early thirties, in khaki slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, with a short haircut that nevertheless peaked in front—the fifties prototype for any number of today’s more conservative punk coiffures—was Kaprow himself. The rest of the audience (somewhere between twenty and thirty-five of us) wandered in over the next half hour. Someone eventually took our money, looking rather surprised that we were actually paying. Clearly most of the audience had been invited. In each of the polyethylene walled-off chambers, there were half a dozen or so blondwood folding chairs. It became clear that we were to be deployed between the six rooms—I don’t remember whether or not there was some lottery arrangement to divide us up. But at one point I suggested to Boyd: “Why don’t you sit in another room so we can see as much of it as possible and compare notes afterwards?” “That’s all right,” Boyd whispered to me. “I’ll stay in here with you.” Were there four people in our particular room? Were there six? The only truly clear memory I have of the performance proper was that I wasn’t very sure when, exactly, it started. One of the assistants came in and set a small mechanical wind-up toy to chatter and click about the floor—which ran down faster than it was expected to; and so had to be wound up and set going again, numerous times, throughout the twenty or so minutes of the work’s duration. I also recall a dish of water sitting on the floor, and a ball of string on a small table—but they may well have been in other rooms than ours, whose entrances Boyd and I had looked into while we were walking around, waiting for the work to begin. During the duration, while we sat in our room, now and again from one of the other spaces we could hear the sound of a single drum or tambourine beat—or, at one point, intriguing laughter from one of the isolated groups when something in another room went (presumably) not quite according to plan. And just above floor-level, through the greyish plastic wall to our right, a wobbling glow came through from a candle that had been set up as, or as part of, a happening in an adjacent chamber. There was general silence, general attention: there was much concentration on what was occurring in our own sequestered part; and there was much palpable and uneasy curiosity about what was happening in the other spaces, walled off by the translucent sheets, with only a bit of sound, a bit of light or shadow, coming through to speak of the work’s unseen totality. At one point another assistant carried another child’s toy—this one a blue-tin noisemaker with two little balls, which, when twisted back and forth, make a childish racket—silently into our room; but two steps in, she realized she had the wrong space, and ducked out. After a while, a leotarded young woman with a big smile came in and said: “That’s it.” For a moment, we were unsure if that were part of the work or the signal that it was over. But then Kaprow walked by the door and said, “Okay, it’s over now,” and we got up and stepped out of our plastic walled cubicles. “Did you understand that?” Boyd asked softly as we waited our turn among the crowd at the apartment doorway to go downstairs. “I mean, could you explain to me what that was supposed to be about?” “I don’t think it’s about anything in the way you’re asking,” I said in my best tone of aesthetic neutrality. “You’re just supposed to experience it.” A woman was standing next to us, wearing some voluminous kaftan in a green print. “That was kind of fun,” I said to her, to get out from under what I took to be the embarrassment prompting my cousin’s question. “Oh,” she said. “Did you think so? How did you come here?” “I saw it advertised on a poster taped up on the side of a mailbox. It sounded interesting. So we just came by.” “You did?” she asked, a bit incredulously. I’d already noted that Boyd and I were probably the only two black people in the audience. Today I also suspect we were two of the very few there that evening unknown to the others, at least by sight. “You liked it?” And she smiled. “How unusual.” This was, remember, 1960. Then we were going down the stairs. Boyd continued to question me on the “meaning” of what we had just seen, all the way up town. And I continued to resist explaining. But he had obviously been tickled by it all. And clearly it had meant something, though I was only willing to clarify it for myself once Boyd’s somewhat amused attentions were diverted from me, and he could boast to the rest of the family about this strange artistic gathering Sam had taken him to in the Village. Figuring it out for myself, I began by reviewing my expectations from the title: Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts. I’d assumed that the work, regardless of its content, would be rich, Dionysian, and colorful; Fd thought that the happenings themselves would be far more complex, denser, and probably verbally boundable: someone might come in and put on or take off a costume; someone might come in and destroy a baby carriage. Someone else might come in blowing bubbles under colored lights. Fd also thought the eighteen happenings, despite their partition, would crowd in on one another, would tumble into my perception one after the other, that they would form a rich, interconnected tapestry of occurrences and associations. In short, while I had not assumed they would have the singular, totalized meaning Boyd was asking for, Fd nevertheless thought that they would be rich in meanings and meaning fragments, full of resonances and overlapping associations, that they would be thick with ready-made suggestions, playful, sentimental, and reassuring—like a super e.e. cummings poem; indeed, Fd assumed from the title they would be much like what many “happenings,” as other artists appropriated the term, were actually to be over the next decades. The work F d actually experienced had been, however, spare, difficult, minimal, constituted largely by absence, isolation, and even distraction. For all its immense framing in wood and polyethylene, the actual work was even difficult to locate as to its beginning, content, and ending. (Other than the chattering toy, Boyd and I were very unsure which were “our” actual happenings and which were things that merely facilitated them.) An hour later at home, however, I was already reflecting to myself that a little arithmetic might have disabused me of some of my expectations of meaningful richness: eighteen happenings in six parts generally suggests about three happenings per part, which, in turn, suggests concentration, sparsity, and analysis—not Dionysian plenitude. But what exactly had been our three happenings? Or had we only had one happening in our room, while four or five happenings took place in one of the others? Or perhaps the title had simply lied about the work: either by accident or design, there could have been a few, or many, more than, or less than, eighteen happenings deployed among the chambers. In our isolate groups there was simply no way to know. Had there, indeed, been six chambers? I, of course, had expected the “six parts” to be chronologically successive, like acts in a play or parts in a novel— not spatially deployed, separate, and simultaneous. Fd expected a unified theatrical audience before some unified theatrical whole. And it was precisely in this subversion of expectations about the “proper” aesthetic employment of time, space, presence, absence, as well as the general locability of “what happens,” that made Kaprow’s work signify: his happenings—clicking toys, burning candles, pounded drums, or whatever else comprised them—were organized in that initial work very much like real events in history. No two groups had seen the same ones. No group was even sure what the other groups were seeing. No one in the audience—nor, possibly, the artist nor any of his assistants—could have more than an inkling (at best a theory) of the relation of a textured and specific experiential fragment to any totalized whole. Nor could the audience be sure any authoritative statement about it, from the artist’s title to the assistant’s announcement of the work’s conclusion, was the truth. The unity of the audience had been shattered as much as any other aspect. And of course there still remained the question for me over the next few days: how, in our heightened state of attention, could we distinguish what a single happening was? What constituted the singularity that allowed the eighteen to be even countable? Had the performance of our wind-up toy been one happening? Or was the winding up one happening, its walking about a second, and its running down still a third? And how were we to distinguish facilitation from content—that is, how were we to distinguish “information” from “noise”? Certainly noise could figure in the interpretation or the meaning of a particular performance. (Earlier that spring I’d played and played a record of George Antheil’s Ballet mecanique to a frazzle.) But that presupposes the noise can be identified as such. But was that mistaken assistant’s momentary ingress one of the eighteen happenings or not? The impressive three-dimensional frame, which not only contained the work but the audience as well, and that divided the work and the audience as well as contained them, truly shattered the space of attention and, therefore, threw as many, or more, such distinctions into question than I was ready to deal with. And in a work whose title, organization, and accidents seemed set up to question precisely such distinctions, how was one to fit their sudden problematization into an interpretation? It would be disingenuous to say that the interested eighteen-year-old, just back from the Βreadloaf Writers’ Conference earlier that summer, who was me that year, went through this entire analysis in the hours and days after Kaprow’s piece. Exactly how much of it I went through then, I can’t, at this distance, say. “Subject,” “problematization,” and “interpretation” were not then part of my aesthetic vocabulary; but “man,” “question,” and “meaning” were. And they were adequate to much of it. Certainly I had no particular difficulty accepting it as art or believing that, along the lines I’ve just sketched out, the piece was decipherable. Nor was I caught up in the search for narrative singularity—at whatever level of allegory—that, I suspect, Boyd wanted. Still, I confess now (in a way I was unwilling to admit to Boyd at the time), I’d been disappointed in it: Boyd wanted his singular narrative meaning. And I still wanted my meaningful plenitude. But I can also say, at this distance, that mine was the disappointment of that late romantic sensibility we call modernism presented with the post-modern condition. And the work I saw was far more interesting, strenuous, and aesthetically energetic than the riot of sound, color, and light centered about actorly subjects in control of an endless profusion of fragmentary meanings that I’d been looking forward to. Also it was far more important: as a replication and analysis of the situation of the subject in history, I don’t think Kaprow’s work could have been improved on. And, in that sense, Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts was about as characteristic a work as one might choose in which to experience the clash that begins our reading of the hugely arbitrary post- modern. 5”Silent monologue” was Stuart Gilbert’s term for Joyce’s “stream of consciousness” technique that, today, more usually goes by the French term, monologue interiere. Gilbert used it in his Study of “Ulysses,” which I read at about the same time as, if not before, I read Moby Dick. 6Voyage, Orestes! was begun in a notebook when, at eighteen, I spent the summer of 1960 working as a waiter, on scholarship, at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. After writing ten or fifteen pages toward a forty page “Prologue,” I put it aside a few weeks later—until my marriage, whereupon I started in on it again and worked pretty consistently at it, till, nearly an even thousand pages later, I completed it near midnight on November 21, 1963, its hero and heroine strolling along the wintery beach at Coney Island, looking for a new world and their future. The next afternoon, as I lugged the MS up to an editor at a mid-town publisher who had expressed interest in it from reading earlier sections, I heard, from a portable radio on the counter of the newspaper kiosk in the Astor Place Subway station, news of President John F. Kennedy’s death from an assassin’s bullet, fired minutes before, during the Dallas motorcade, an event that for many of us marked the beginning of a new age and of the Sixties proper. The last complete copy of the MS was lost by my agent, in a move between offices, in 1968. In 1982, when my friend of many years, Bernie Kay, died, some two- hundred-fifty-odd pages of the manuscript surfaced among his papers. They are on store at the Mugar Memorial Library at the University of Boston. The Early Delany Response to a panel, The Early Delany, given at Madison, Wisconsin, 318181, after presentations by Mary Kenney Badami, Catherine McClenahan, Thomas Moylan, and Janice Bogstad. Most writers do not have a chance to see their work parsed and parceled out into periods, early, middle, or late, with appropriate bridges and transition phases. And we begin—all of us—to respond to any such effort as an orderly compliment. And for the compliment— the compliment of orderly attention—I am grateful. There is too little of it in the world, of any sort. Yet, if one happens to be the writer in question, it is hard not to be aware of a certain violence, a certain displacement, a certain reorganization ocurring, will- ye, nill-ye, before the greater concerns that shape all critical discourse. Lurking behind such organization, “The Early X,” “The Middle Productions of Y,” or— horror of horrors—“The Last Thing Ζ Ever Wrote,” are a set of assumptions on development, growth, and, yes, regression that reads all textual signs as constituents of orderly processes, progresses, continuities, in short as part of a unity for which the differences between texts as much as the images repeated from text to text are the constitutive signs of its unquestioned coherence. The writer watching this continuity, these progressions and regressions spun out of critical rhetoric, remembers, however, a much more dangerous game. Did the writer want to develop? Always. To develop for the writer, however, was not a process of continuity but rather one of radical disruption: How to become a person who can never write a sentence like that again? What experiential violences must one endure never to conceive of a man or a woman again in such shallow, stilted terms? What kind of gaze must be turned on the world to assure one will never again see it through such simplistic, schematic prejudices? What can I build with this wondrous, volatile, associational malleability called language which will hold contour clear enough and clean enough to be read! Does the writer want to regress? Never. What then are the exhaustions, distractions, responsibilities, or experiential shocks that make the writer no longer know what was known? What strikes the writer at the heart of the sentence so that, at last, when the words lie limp on the page, clarity and contour, energy and precision are gone? Even the repeated images and themes, seized on by the critic as the most lucid emblem of the existence, the location, and the structure of that continuity the critic tries to create, come to the writer like the insistent repetitions of some initial plosive in the mouth of a stutterer who is only as aware (or unaware) of his defect as any speaker might be in his rush to be understood, repetitions whose meanings, whose very constitution is that of an occurrence for which iteration, as in the stuttered vocable, is the sign, not of a closed and conscientious structuration, but of an open and radical incompleteness. Repetition is desire, said Freud. No, suggests the critic, it is merely organization. From where the writer stands, let me state: Freud’s is the assertion thai feels right. In short it would seem that the writer is playing the more dangerously ... till we turn to look at “The Early Criticism,” “The Middle Period Criticism,” and “The Late (and Supremely Difficult!) Criticism” of a given critic. After all, our critics are writers too. They are subject to the same violences as any other writer. They know these violences first hand—and that is why one wants to see them more willing to admit such violences into the compass of the critical gaze. But one must indulge the fictions of both order and violence if one is to make sense of the world, if one is to understand the world’s codes and readerly operations by which we make its texts make sense. The “early Delany” begins with a fiction by a nineteen-year-old who, while he loved science fiction, was certainly not (at least when he began it) planning to write it for more than one book. It ends with another by a twenty- five-year-old who, having written eight more of the things, had more or less decided he didn’t want to write any more fiction of any sort—and didn’t, for about a year. Here at the verge of forty, I still have a great deal of fondness for that befuddled, confused, if somewhat engaging youngster. I knew him fairly well. I have some pleasant memories of our time together, as well as my share of scandalous, scabrous, and simply embarrassing anecdotes, which, in less guarded moments, I am likely to break out, and which may cause the odd eyebrow to raise: “Did he really?” “Oh, no, he couldn’t have!” There are even one or two, “No, I was there; and it just wasn’t like that!” And, more and more as my beard turns whiter and whiter, I hear, from people who have only read what he wrote but were never in his company: “Oh, no, that really doesn’t sound like him at all!” I am often astonished, when I look at the calendar, by how long it’s been since I’ve seen him. Yet he is, possibly more than anyone else, why I am here today. For that I have not him to thank so much as you. All I can really say, then, is thank you —and exhort you to be as violent and as adventurous as you can in all your criticisms, not only of him but of our whole SF field. From what I remember of him, however suspect, I’m sure he would have appreciated it. Again, on his behalf, I thank you. Tales Of Ñevéryon by Κ. Leslie Steiner Once we get beyond the bright and active Bantam cover, on which a Conan- style barbarian draws a mighty bow against a dragon to save two lovely ladies, very little happens in these five interconnected sword-and-sorcery stories. In the first, the main character (presumably the cover lad) ages—from about fifteen to about thirty-five. In the process the only thing he actually does— somewhere about the midpoint—is throw up. At the beginning of the second, an island hag, alleged to be a bit of a brain, explains to a bunch of children that she has an idea: “But I can’t tell you what it is,” she says to them. Seventy pages later, after she has gone on, and on, and on, died, and been all but forgotten by everybody in the story, we realize in the tale’s concluding pages she was right. At the end of the third tale, a young mountain girl tells the tale’s main character, a barbarian boy who has been dragged into the country as a slave, “You’re a fool, barbarian!” She too, it turns out, is right. In tale four, a number of moderately engaging characters, including a rather stocky potter’s apprentice, a traveling secretary, and a masked woman warrior, go to a lot of trouble over nothing—a whole castle full, it turns out. Since one of them winds up dead and the other two are afraid to go home, this seems, somehow, a little too “Much Ado ....” In the final story, the hero (the one who threw up, remember?) and his little friend (the one we said wasn’t very smart ...?) liberate the slaves in castle after castle after castle after castle after castle .... The general theme all the stories share, as far as I can make out, is that children do like to bounce rubber balls —or did I miss something? The whole closes with what I suspect is a fannish joke, about a nonexistent Necronomicon-style “ancient text,” though it is written in a half-eccentric (but not, alas, eccentric enough to be interesting), half-scholarly (but not, alas, ditto) diction that will leave precisely the fans who might get a chuckle from it ho-ing and hum-ing. I hear there really is a contemporary archeologist named Denise Schmandt-Besserat, who, for reasons too baroque to speculate over, Delany cites in his mock-scholarly hodge-podge. I wonder what she thinks of all this? Finally your reviewer is left with the observation that Proust’s opening twenty-thousand-word analysis of the bedtime preparations of a chronic invalid is hard-boiled action-adventure compared to any of these soporific, if not somnolent, narratives. And I hear there’s to be a sequel ...! —New York 1982 Return ... A Preface by K. Leslie Steiner Humankind still lives in prehistory everywhere, indeed everything awaits the creation of the world as a genuine one. The real genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it only begins when society and existence become radical, that is grasp themselves at the root. The root of history, however, is the human being, working, producing, reforming and surpassing the givens around him or her. If human beings have grasped themselves, and what is theirs, without depersonalization and alienation, founded in real democracy, then something comes into being in the world that shines into everyone’s childhood and where no one has yet been—home. —Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung Come to a far when, a distant once, a land beyond the river—but a river running no-one-knows-where. That’s the invitation the following fantasy series here holds out. But where does its landscape lie? Some have suggested it’s Mediterranean. Others have thought it Mesopotamian. Yet arguments can be made for placing it in either Asia or Africa. And its weather and immediate geography (sun, fog, rain, but no snow, in a city on the sea BUI rounded by mountains) make it sound like nothing so much as prehistoi V Piraeus—or San Francisco, in both of which modem cities, in the h before he began this series (if we are to trust the several books on him b overeager commentators), Delany lived. What’s certain, however, is thai it was fl long tim< ago But four thousand years? Si\ thousand ‘ l tghl thou land ‘ The most accurate placement is, afltei all, Β happ) ao Id ill ol th 1 advertising copy on the back of one of the paperbacks in which some of the tales were first published, putting it at “the borderland of history.” For before this ancient nation there is only the unrectored chaos out of which grew (and we watch them grow page on page) the techné that make history recognizable: money, architecture, weaving, writing, capital ... Yet a whiff of magic blows through it all, now as the flying dragons corralled in the Faltha mountains, now as a huge and hideous monster, part god, part beast, turning back would-be defectors as it patrols the ill-marked border. Re-readers of these tales may be curious why I, who am after all only a Active character in some of the pieces to come, have taken this preface on. Yes, it is an odd feeling—but finally one I like. The publisher wanted me to jot something on the stories’ cryptographical origins. (You may have already encountered a note on their archeological ends.) I agreed, under condition I might include this extended historical disclaimer. But something about these stories defers origins (not to say endings) in favor of fictions. Still, for those readers, old or new, who do not recall, I will (again) explain: Picture me, if it will help, as your average black American female academic, working in the largely white preserves of a sprawling midwestern university, unable, as a Seventies graduate student, to make up her mind between mathematics and German literature. (The politics required eventually to secure a joint line in our Math and Comp. Lit. departments are too rococo to recount.) Category theory was all the rage when I emerged from my first meaningful degree. But there was an intriguing spin-off of it called naming, listing, and counting theory, which perhaps seventy-five people in the world knew anything at all about and which another twelve could actually do anything with. There, on those rare and stilly heights, I decided to dig in my heels—while, during summers, I ran around the world reading as much as possible in the oldest and most outre languages I could find. Well. Sometime in the mid-Seventies, my mathematical work led me to apply a few of naming, listing, and counting theory’s more arcane corollaries to the translation of an archaic narrative text of some nine hundred or so words (depending on the ancient language in which you found it), sometimes called the Culhar’ Fragment and, more recently, the Missolonghi Codex. That fragment has come down to us in several translations in several ancient scripts. The occasion for my own translation was the discovery, in a basement storage room of the Istanbul Archeological Museum, of a new version of the Culhar’ in a script that was, by any educated guess, certainly older than most previously dated. Appended to it was a note in an early version of Greek (Linear B) to the effect that this text had been considered, at least by the author of the note, to be humanity’s first writing. And Linear Β has not been written for a very, very long time. But since the Culhar’ only exists in its various partial and, sometimes, contradictory translations, we do not know for certain which script it was initially supposed to have been written in; nor can we be sure of its presumed initial geography. The origins of writing are just as obscure and problematic as the origin of languages in general. Some of those problems are discussed, in the appendix to Delany’s first published volume of Ne very on stories, by my friend and sometime colleague S. L. Kermit. Yes, that appendix was written at my request. For, though I have (still) never met him, Delany, after he had written his first five tales, sent me at my university a warm and appreciative letter about what my work had meant to him. (Till then, bits had been scattered only in the most recondite journals; though soon—praise the gods of tenure—they were to coalesce into the precious, precious book.) He also asked if I, or someone I knew, might write a piece about my cryptographic successes that would serve as an appendix to his collection. On his behalf, then (regardless of what my old and dear friend claims—though I’ll admit the circumstances were confused, the time period rushed, and the weather just frightful), I asked Professor Kermit to lend the entertainment his limpid expository manner. But anyone interested in the details may consult the appendix to the first volume and pursue the matter through the first appendix to the second. I have worked with that ancient, fragmented, and incomplete narrative, with its barbarians, dragons, sunken cities, reeds and memory marks, twin- bladed warrior women, child ruler, one- eyed dreamer, and mysterious rubber balls, for many, many months, spread out over what has become many years; and I’m delighted that the pressure of my own attentions drew Delany to pose (with the help of my commentary) his own land of Nevéryon. Professor Kermit’s generous essay, which concludes the first volume, is rich in suggestions as to ways the Culhar’ may have prompted Delany to elaborate elements in his fantasy. But to say too much more about that, especially before you have read the stories themselves, is to suggest there is a closer juncture between post-modern tales and ancient Ur text than there is. For the relation between the Culhar’ and these stories is one of suggestion, invention, and play— rather than one of scholarly investigation or even scholarly speculation. If anything, Delany’s stories are, among other things, a set of elaborate and ingenuous deconstructions of the Culhar’—a word I take to mean “an analysis of possible (as opposed to impossible) meanings that subvert any illusions we have of becoming true masters over a given text,” a word which I have, like so many in the last decade, become rather fond of; and one which Professor Kermit abhors. Still, I am happy to fulfill the publisher’s request for a general introduction to the series as I was first pleased by the fact my translation called Delany’s attention to the Culhar’ in the first place. But there, really, you have it. This recompilation of Delany’s immense and marvelous fantasy will mark a return to the series for thousands on thousands of readers, some of whom may even recall when the first piece, “The Tale of Gorgik,” appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Adventure Magazine for Spring of 1979. That story was nominated for a Nebula Award; and the collection of the first five tales (with Kermi’s intriguing appendix) in a paperback volume that same year became an American Book Award nominee. And, lo, the opening tale is now longer. Taken all together, Delany’s mega- fantasy is a fascinating fiction of ideas, a narrative hall of mirrors, an intricate argument about power, sexuality, and narration itself. In the second piece, “The Tale of Old Venn,” we can watch sophisticated intellection and primitive passion play off one another. By the third, “The Tale of Small Sarg,” sadomasochism has reared its endlessly fascinating head; while the ninth, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” explores the impact of AIDS on a major American city. Where did the fantasy go ...? But that is precisely the fascination of the series. Some critics have found within the stories, as well as the individual tales’ arguments with one another, critiques, parodies, and dialogues with and of writings as diverse as Freud’s Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, G. Spencer Brown’s The Laws of Form, Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, Popper’s two-volume study, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Derrida’s essay “Plato’s Pharmacy”—and even The Wizard ofOz. To others, however, it was all ponderous and pointless beyond bearing. For certain critics, the ten years Delany devoted to this most massive yet marginal project in an already marginal sub-genre seemed manic willfulness. But we do not have to be alert to every nuance of the fantasy’s sometimes dauntingly allusive play to enjoy this epic of the rise to political power of an ex-mine slave in a world of dragons, barbarians, Amazons, prehistoric splendor, perverse passions, and primitive precocity. If we did, the series never would have gained the audience it has—which, thanks to its initial three- volume paperback appearance (with a fourth in hardcover), already numbers in the hundreds of thousands. And it is equally a fact: few of us are such provincial readers that we won’t catch some. This heroic saga has been characterized many ways. Delany himself has written of it as “a child’s garden of semiotics.” Once, at a department party, I overheard someone who asked what to expect of Delany’s fantasy sequence receive the suggestion that he would find it closer to Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften than Die Frau ohne Schatten. My favorite description was given, however, by SF writer Elizabeth Lynn. Within my hearing, out on some screened-in Westchester porch, Lizzy was speaking to someone who’d asked her about the first volume, just published. (At this remove I don’t remember if they realized I was listening.) She said: “Imagine going into a wonderful gallery exhibit with an intelligent, well- spoken, and deeply cultured friend, an expert in the period, richly informed on the customs and economics of the times, familiar with the lives of the artists and of their models, as well as the subsequent critical reception of each of the paintings over each ensuing artistic period, a friend who you only wished, as the two of you walked from painting to painting, would shut up ...” What a recommendation for a heroic fantasy! But consider. That benevolent, oppressive, insistent voice, droning on before those glimmering, luminous images—the voice of the master— always and forever conveys two messages. One is true: “History,” it tells us, “is intellectually negotiable. It can be untangled, understood, and the miseries of our entrapment in it can be explained. And because history is never finished, those miseries can be interrogated, alleviated, and the situations that comprise and promote them can be changed. All men and women have the right to essay such mastery over their own lives.” The second message, inextricably bound up with the first, is as much a lie: “History,” it tells us, “has already been negotiated, so that beyond a certain point any attempt to know more is at best error and at worst sedition. That we have any of the tools of historical analysis means that, on some level, history is finished. Things as they are are as they ought to be and must not be questioned or changed. Our agonies and our pleasures, whether physical or intellectual, are fixed by a Greater Power, call it God or history itself: thus no woman nor any man may challenge the institutions through which you endure yours or I indulge mine.” Because it always bears this double message, that voice has only value in a dialectical, if not dialogic, process. (Statements tolerable at the beginnings of arguments are not acceptable as ends.) But if we cannot silence the lie completely—for it is too intimately bound up with experience, language, and desire—at least the writer can worry over how to articulate the truth of that voice; and can try to write up the lie for what it is. The recourse here is always to form. There is a traditional Marxist argument that when Daniel Defoe takes on the voice of the prostitute Moll Flanders, or Paul T. Rogers the voice of the hustler Sinbad, we still have the voice of the master, only now involved in an extended quotation, still all for the profit of his own class; and it is by untangling the recomplications of narrative form that the Marxist reveals the voice’s true class origins, despite its appropriations from whatever ostensibly proletarian subject. But consider the problems our traditional Marxist might have, say, reading the intricately framed monologue, the eighth part of Delany’s series, “The Mummer’s Tale” (along with its chilling postscript, section 9.6 of “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals”), in which the master takes on the voice of an actor informing the voice of a hustler, to tease apart just those problems of appropriation, while, at the margin of the tale itself, almost wholly congruent with the position of the reader, sits the Master, silent through the recitation, in a growing indignation and outrage that, we learn in the postscript, at last takes on, however unconsciously, by means of a similar appropriation, murderous proportions. Who is quoting whom? What has been written and what has been spoken? And how does the truth slide between them? And though to learn that “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” §9.6, takes resonances from Popper’s readings of Plato (with a passing gander at Ryle’s) may please those who need reassurance that a writer knows a little of what he or she is about, that is not knowledge we need to follow the development of Delany’s argument for free political dialogue and against political closure. That argument is there, however clear, however cloudy, for anyone to read, concerned Marxist or committed capitalist, or even those of us unsure of our position in this worldwide debate. Return to Nevéryon1 is Delany’s overall name for his fantasy series— though the publisher, without forbidding me to mention it, has urged me not to stress it, as foreign-sounding words and diacritical marks are thought to be off- putting to that most embarrassing of statistical fictions, the commercial reader (not you, of course; not me), who presumably consumes texts only for story, is assumed to stand deaf to style, and is thought to applaud only the endlessly repeated pornographies of action and passion that, for all their violences, still manage to pander to an astonishingly untroubled acceptance of the personal and political status quo. (Where, one wonders, and in what form, does narrative elimination take place?) The ancient land called Nevéryon is pronounced (I’ve been told by the editor, who presumably at least once lunched with Delany himself) Ne-VER-y-on: four syllables with the accent on the antepenult. The phrase “Flight from Nevéryon” more or less rhymes with the word “octogenarian.” And Neveryóna, the old aristocratic neighborhood of the capital port, Kolhari, which briefly lent its name to the entire town, is pronounced Ne-ver-y- O-na: five syllables with the primary accent on the penult, and a secondary one on the second syllable: the word rhymes—roughly—with “Defer Pomona.” There. Now doesn’t that allay just a little of the anxiety? Oh, and “The Tale of Rumor and Desire,” the editor told me (at our own lunch), was one Delany wrote when a two-volume collection of all the shorter Nevéryon stories and novellas had been planned. That most recently written story was crafted to make a transition between “The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers” and “The Tale of Fog and Granite” for readers who would not be able to make the journey through the full-length novel, Neveryóna, or the Tale of Signs and Cities, which, while it naturally falls out as tale number six, was simply too long to include in that bipartite omnibus— alas, since scuttled. That terminal tale’s major events occur just after the end of Neveryóna. Read it there if you must. But I can assure you that—there—it will make no thematic sense whatsoever. And its particular play of discontinuities will —there—only disorient you the more as you broach the considerable mists of volume three. But surely Delany intends his “return” not only for readers who are actual re- readers of his sword-and-sorcery series. Recalling the passage from German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s three-volume Principle of Hope I’ve set at the head of this preface, Delany writes at the beginning of Chapter Three of his SF novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (written concurrently with the first Nevéryon stories): Home? It’s the place you can never visit for the first time, because by the time it’s become “home,” you’ve already been there. You can only return. (You can never go home, only go home again.)2 There is a suggestion of Nietzsche’s “eternal return” in these tales Delany asks us to return to. In the strict sense that one can never initially “go” home, Nevéryon is not a place one initially visits; it can only be revisited—in much the way Delany revisits (and revalues) a certain romantic stance connected with the Thomas Wolfe title he lightly mocks in the parenthesis above. And in his essay on Joanna Russ’s beautiful and meticulous science fiction cum sword- and-sorcery sequence, The Adventures ofAlyx3, in a section dealing with the puzzling but persistent relation between sword-and-sorcery and science fiction, we find: As one can speak of the simple calculus ... implicit behind the set of algebras called Boolean, the comparatively limited landscape of sword-and-sorcery may be the simple fantasy behind the extremely varied set of future landscapes we call science fiction .... More precisely, I suspect, sword-and-sorcery represents what can, most safely, still be imagined about the transition from a barter economy to a money economy .... By the same light, science fiction represents what can most safely be imagined about the transition from a money economy to a credit economy.4 The suggestion is that in such fictions the place we are returning to is deeply and historically implicated in the place we are returning from. The nostalgic fictive recreation of a primitive past is always constructed from the contemporary cultural materials around us—precisely to the extent that the primitive is seen to be one with the mystical, the unknown, and the unknowable. Even as they speculate on the workings of history, such creations are insistently ahistorical—or are, at any rate, historical only as they are products of our own historical moment. The panorama of material life Delany evokes in his fantasy epic has little or nothing to do with any specific society or culture of some long-ago epochal period, some distant geographical site. These stories do not move toward research into lost time. And it takes only the smallest critical leap—which we are encouraged toward with the epigraph of each new story—to realize all we are really learning about is our own age’s conception of historical possibility. For the gesture with which we reach yearningly after the exotic turns out to be only a digging down into our own pockets for whatever is caught in the seams. As Delany writes in “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” the penultimate (or antepenultimate) Nevéryon tale (depending on where you place “Rumor and Desire”), for anyone managing to miss the point till then: ... The Nevéryon series is, from first tale to last, a document of our times, thank you very much. And a carefully prepared one, too.5 The series is a document of its times —our times, today. It is a lush and colorful fantasy adventure. With all its sections taken together, it forms a dark unheimlich comedy about the intricate relations of sex, narrative, and power. What it is not, in any way, is a portrait of some imagined historical culture. I should know. The original historical research—if one can speak of such— was mine. Some of Delany’s readers will be renegotiating (once again) this interplay of image and idea, of intellectual grit and imaginative grandeur, of moonshot fog and mica-flecked granite, of controversy and convention. Others will be encountering it for the first time. “Fantasy,” I have called the series. Delany marks it with Fritz Leiber ‘s term “ s word-and—sorcery” and calls it “paraliterature.” Still, re-reading it strongly invokes the often quoted comment by the German novelist Hermann Broch: “Literature is always an impatience on the part of knowledge.” So I am tempted to call it literature, as it inscribes itself where historical knowledge is at its most incomplete and we are likely to become our most impatient with it. (“Speculative fiction,” we could have labeled it, had it been written in the Sixties when that term was used to refer to an amalgam of the literarily experimental and the science fictional or fantastic.) But, for all its historical thrust, there is something about it rigorously of its own decades, the twentieth century’s terminal quarter. Our return begins (and ends) by plundering present-day culture for all its source material, even when that means present-day cultural images of the past. What it presents us, even as it seems to lure us away to another age and clime, is our own home reviewed through the distorting (or, better, organizing) lens of a set of paraliterary conventions. We begin by preparing for a spin out in the extremes; but we are only going home ... again—another way of saying one never goes home at all. So if the saga seems luminous and familiar, remember: even before we open the first page of the first tale, we know the material from which it has been elaborated wondrously well. Orphans that we are, it is ours. Such deciphering work as mine (to return to our initial topic) is, of course, highly speculative. And the part that inspired Delany’s series was done over a decade back. The interpretive successes of those of us who work today with the most enduring, if not eternal, of human productions often seem, in our own eyes, spectacularly ephemeral. And though, on occasion, some of them that ignite the general imagination receive a modicum of acclaim, most developments —not to say triumphs—in the decipherment of unknown scripts don’t, today, garner much fanfare. Still, I would hope that, even among those readers “returning” here for the first time, a few might remember a bit about them. These tales are a marvelous reminder. Thus, on Delany’s behalf, I’m delighted to introduce to you the stories my labors engendered. Return, then, to Nevéryon .... —Ann Arbor Summer 1986