60
October 28,1996
sweat glued to my lashes.” The apparition a more focused energy, 1ang.liage that is dren by obliterating their safety net?
assumes the voluptuous shape of an Afri- lean, taut and a&e.You smell the rooms, the
can woman cradling apackage. She appears terrain, the blood, sweat and dread of his and gone, Wideman knows where dream-
to the wanderer in fragments.He can’t stop characters. That his story asks more ques- ing can go wrong.Yet when his book winds
staring at her foot:
A delicate foot, poorly served by rough,
rural paths. An indoor foot, a foot for silk
slippers or soR leather boots with raised
heels and many buttons. A foot weeping
now. Soot-streaked, bloody tears, and I
wished for a basin of cool water in my
sack. I wanted to kneel beside her, bathe
away the misery, listen to her recite the
tale of her misfortune.
A little later, he’s certain the feet are
made of wood. He is also certain that the
bundle she carries is a dead white child she
insists on bathing. He can’t help himself,
He must follow them, offer them charita-
ble’ assuring words that, to his horror, can-
not stop them from being swallowed by a
lake. What is this? One of his apocalyptic
visions, only this one in slow motion? He
remembers seeing the woman once before;
her image is associated with his visits to
a community of black worshipers and to
the home of an older interracial couple,
posing as mistress and slave. The minister
witnesses their slaughter by white mobs
afflicted with the plague-related racist de-
lusion, but not before he hears their stories,
the dreams they use to immunize them-
selves against the visions that trap others.
Ghosts. Ritual sacrifice. Nightmares
of racist retribution. It does appear as if
Wideman is playing with chord changes set
down by Morrison’sBeloved. His narrative
bends and curves in the same willfully el-
liptical manner. You’re pressed to keep up
with the shiftingpoints of view, the morph-
ing of dream and reality, past and present.
Wideman also leaves many questions in
his path, among the biggest being the ex-
act nature of his tale. Is this a story of a
heroic quest? Is it a detective story with
multiple solutions? You’re better off rec-
ognizing that you inhabit a dreamscape
wherebelief itself-in God, in science, even
in imagination-is constantly challenged.
Real-life eighteenth-century luminaries
’
like the British painter George Stubbs,
the American physician Benjamin Thrush
and, most vividly, the African-American
religious leader Richard Allen appear in
the novel, their Enlightenment-forgedcer-
tainties upset by such random insanities as
recreationaldissections of human corpses,
bloodletting and, always, the tyrannical
absurdity of racism itself.,
What keeps this phantasmagoria under
control is Wideman’s style. As always, he
leads with his learning, empathy and ele-
gance. But there’s somethingdifferent here:
The Nation.
Like melancholy Morpheus, now dead
tions than it answers shouldnotbe confbsed back to the contemporary novelist’s head,
with evasiveness or showing off. If any- there is a moment of oblique serendipity
thing, there’s more urgency in Wideman’s that redeems imagination’spower. The con-
questions than there is in anyone else’s an- clusion offers a faint shimmer of hope. Or
swers. And how good are answers anyway is hope itself just another bogus vision,
if they resemble the prophecy that doomed luring us into deep, unruly waters?
the Xhosa’s cattle? Or made Philadelphians By the way, did I mention that there was
strike back at the innocent ‘of color? Or, a child in the last chapter of The Kindly
for that matter, make otherwise rational Ones who may or may not be Morpheus re-
people believe that you can save poor chil- bom? Maybe .
it’s not important.. . m
,Gay; Porno, Cyberpunk.
SCOTT McLEMEE
LONGER VIEWS: Extended Essays. By Samuel R. Delany. Wesleyan. 392 pp. Paper $22.
amuel Delany published his first novel in 1962, at the age of 20, which
sounds like an early start, though not for a prodigy. As a teenager, Delany stud-
ied quantwn’physicsat the Bronx High School of Science.He composed music,
read omnivorously and wrote half a dozen novels. The manuscripts came
back from editors with nice letters worry- system for hours at a time, fighting the
ing that his prose was overly “literary” but urge to throw himself in front of a train.
assuring him he showed promise-the last He was black and gay, and married to the
thing any brilliant kid wants to hear. Then, poet Marilyn Hacker; and they lived “in a
at 19, Delany wrote a short science-fiction Lower East Side tenement where rats leapt
novel, and it was in print, and paid for, noton the sink when you went to brush your
long after his next birthday. So he wrote a teeth in the morning and wild dog packs
second novel, then a third.’Andthese, too, ran on the stairs”; and some of the boy-
friends who driftedthrough their very open
were published in short order.
mdnage were rather scary guys who had
His prose was exceptionally self-
been on the receiving end of violence as
conscious-sometimes in a bad way (there
children, and who now dished it out as well
were passages of deepest purple), and
sometimeswith brilliant effect. From Gide while committing various crimes. It was
he borrowed as a rule of thumb the prin- all very different from the life he knew
ciple that characters ought to manifest growing up as “a Delany’-which is to
three sorts of behavior: purposeful, habit- say, as an aristocrat, the descendant of two
ual and gratuitous. Most S.E novelists spent generations of overachievers, an African-
more time changing typewriter ribbons American Rockefeller of cultural capital.
than worryingabout craft; little wonderthat h d the books he labored over so dili-
Delany was soon, rather conspicuously, gently came out in paperback with covers
one of the most sophisticatedfigures in the that were hideous, or silly, or both. Maybe
genre. The initially gratuitous act of Writ- life in bohemian squalor and deviant free-
ing a science-fiction novel became habitu- dom was bad for him. Perhaps there were
al’ and he published five of them by the other occupations for an aging boy genius
tiqe he was 23-which happens to be the besides writing about life on other planets.
age Milton mentions in that anxious sonnet If, after getting out of the hospital, Delany
about “time, the subtle thief of youth.” had decided just to chalk the whole ad-
It was also during his twenty-third year venture up to experience and then settled
that Samuel Delany spent some time in down to finish college, you could not have
Mount Sinai’s mental health ward, after blamed him.
being drawn into the New York subway Instead, he kept Writing science fiction.
And that is an understatement. His pace ,
Scott McLeinee is the editor of C.L.R. James slowed a little: Over the next decade he
on the <’NegroQuestion” (Mississippi). published only a half-dozen volumes of
’ October 28, 1996 The Nation. 61

S.F. (and wrote two rather baroque porno- point of, say, a bisexual drifter suffering
graphic novels that sat in his desk drawer frommemory loss and blackouts afterbeing
for a while). But Delany’s writing during released from an asylum, as in Dhalgren.
the late sixties and early seventies is some A crucial distinction between poetry and
of the most daring and complex work in sciencefiction is, of cotirse, that a lot more
the history of the field. Genre fiction is people read the latter; and Delany’s work,
a sort of ghetto, with its own powerfully though at times an outrage to the tradition,
conservativerules and traditions; it is rather developed the sort of following invariably
easy to launch an avant-garde by making termed “cult.” But he also won all the prizes
fun of the clich6s. Delany’s work followed given out by the fans and by other writers
a different strategy. in the field, and Dhalgren even sold a mil-
lion copies, which is very strangegiven that
abel-17 (1967), for instance, belongs it resembles JohnAshbery’s versemore than
to one of the hoariest subgenres in sci- Star Wars. He might well have settled into Foreword by Bertram P. Karon,
ence fiction, the “space opera”-Buck steady work as the field’s commercially Ph.D. Author of Psychotherapy of
Rogers-type stuff, involvingintergalac- viable avant-gardist. Schizophrenia.
tic warfare, hyperspace, spies and so on., But sometime around 1972, Delany
But the heroine turns out to be a talented had startedreading Lkvi-Strauss and Lacan Well-researched, yet readable
young poet on the rebound from the break- and Derrida-at the time, an unusual thing personal account suggesting the
up of her “triple” (a long-term sexual re- for anyone outside of New Haven to d o - etiology of schizophrenia is not
lationship among three people) who has and the result was somethinglike a conver- disease but circumstance. ’
to destroy the Invaders’ secret weapon: a sion experience. He responded as if he
language in which there is no first-person had been given a new language of concepts “...an impressive piece of work.”-
pronoun, so that its speakers are enslaved adequate to the experience of marginality. Thomas Szasz, M.D.
by the impossibility of thinking reflexively. Bits and pieces of Foucault made their way
“...demonstrates the physical,
An explanation of the Sapir-Whorftheory into Dhalgren and Triton. But the energy
of linguistic determinismis woven into the he got fromreading French theory was too psychological, and social harm
narrative, along with some careful descrip- powerful for his fiction to contain it. resulting from the label
tions of the emotional nuances of being He wrote The American Shore (1978), schizophrenic and the continuous
in a c‘triple.y’
And one of the central char- for example: a book-length analysis of a need to reexamine the
acters proves to be a violent psychotic short story by Thomas M. Disch, which underpinnings and attitudes of
programmed with the Invaders’language, was modeled on (of all things) S/Z by Ro- psychiatry.”-Booklist.
and so virtually incapable of distinguishing land Barthes. And this began to upset the
“self” from “other.”BuckRogersthis is not. science-fictionpublic. So didDelany’sever- “One of the best things I’ve read
Nowadays, I suppose, the terms “pas: increasing candor about his own libidinal on the subject...I am struck by the
tiche” and “postmodern”do springto mind. explorations.S.F. fans didnot pickup books richness of the ideas and the
But their very inevitability serves to con- expecting to read about signifiers, decon- research and the soundness of the
ceal just how sui generis a transformation struction or weird sex. (They did not pick conclusions.’’-Peter R. Breggin,
of generic raw material Babel-17 really is. up The American Shore at all.) M.D., author of Toxic Psychiatry.
Delany reconfigures the standardelements
of a rather dopey sort of adventure story y the late seventies-under the double “...a very important contribution to

so that it makes room for some very queer
possibilities indeed. Yet there is nothing
campy, or even ironic, about it at all. In a
number of essays from the late sixties, De-
impact of Stonewall and radical femi-
nism-Delany’s work was running off
in some curious directions. Return to
Nev&jjon (1979-87), his four-volume
the field.”--Theodore Lidz, M.D.,
Yale University.
‘:Before reading the book, I
I

lany sketched the theory that science fic- “Swords and Sorcery” epic, displayed the was largely convinced that
tion was much closer to poetry than to the standard topoi of the genre-ancient civi- schizophrenia was primarily a
classical realist novel, and that made it an lizations, barbarian warriors, dragons-but brain disease. Modrow has forced
ideal medium for challenging a bourgeois reconfigured them along explicitlyhomo- me to take a second look, however,
or consensusview of reality. And while his erotic and sadomasochistic lines. .It bore and reconsider the psychological
next several novels-Nova (1968), Dhal- long epigraphs from Gayatri Spivak and causes of the condition.”-
gren (1974) and Triton (1976)-are as un- Edward Said, to name only the more ac- The Vancouver Sun.
like one another as can be, they share with cessible thinkers. And Stars in My Pocket
Babel-17 an obedience to the Modernist Like Grains ofsand (1984)--the first half “...gives clear proof that there’sreal
command to “make it new,” to defamiliar- of an enormous diptych, the second vol- hope. Truly a remarkablebook!”-
ize both the genre and the,reader’ssense of ume of which Delany has not yet fin- Alan Caruba, Bookview.
the world. ished-is set in a galaxy-wide empire in
Delany’s universe included marginal which the rules of grammar require one to Available from bookstores
people: artists, criminals, unskilled work- refer to a human being as “she,” regardless or call toll free: 1-800-507-2665
ers, insane people, those with few verbal of gender-except when that person is the Most major credit cards accepted.
skills or heterodox sexual preferences. The object of sexual desire, in which case the $14.95 plus $3.50 S/H
novels drew on the standard range of S.F. obligatorypronoun is “he,” also regardless
elements-but presented from the vantage of gender. That sounds, perhaps, like a
 62
rather schematic lesson in feminist lin-
guistics and the social construction of
subjectivity. But after a hundred pages or
so, the effect is cumulative and powerful.
And-like the S&M/S&S of NevGVon-
it can be unnerving. Reading these books,
S.F. devotees started to wonder, “Just ex-
actly what the hell does he think he’s
doing?’ The m o r went out that Delany
had turned his back on the fans and the
genre itself-that he was turning into
(shudder) an academic.
s it turns out, the Nev&-jjonseries did
indeed catch the academic fancy, and
was reissued, not long ago, in a hand-
some edition by Wesleyan University
Press. Delany himself is now professor
of comparative literature at the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst (a pleasing
development to contemplate, since his last
diploma came from Bronx Science). And
. in Longer viaos, he has collected a half-
dozen essays that reflect upon every cul-
tural topic in the world except science fic-
tion: the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk;
Lacanian psychoanalysis; semantics; the
poetry of Robert Browning, Hart Crane
and Ron Silliman; and the lesser-known
byways of erotic deviation, such as sneak-
The Nation.
the early eighties, as Haraway was pub-
lishing her socialist-feminist speculations
on new technologies. After all, Haraway
named Delany as an influence on her think-
ing about “identity and boundaries.. .[in
the] late twentieth century political imagi-
nation.” So it is exasperatingto start “Read-
ing at Work‘, and find it almost completely
incomprehensible.
It seems, in fact, delirious. For the first
three pages, Delany does the literary equiv-
alent of shrieking at the top of his lungs.
After he calms down, things go‘fromthe
hysterical to the merelyayptic, and the
prose nevergets lucid. I put the book down
with a sense of confusionand defeat,think-
ing, “Just exactly what the hell does he
thinkhe’s doing?” Then it hit me. The essay
makes sense if you are reasonably familiar
with Lacanian theory. (Because I dip into
the dcrits only once every decade or so,
my synapses did not fire properly the first
time through.) Readers unable to distin-
guish the Imaginary from the Symbolicare
in Real trouble.
But there are some fine discussions of
poetry here too, including a stydy of Hart
Crane that attends to both the poet’s life
and his art with sensitivity and care. It’s
even better if you’ve read “Atlantis: Model
October 28,1996
Tales, by Wes1eyan)-a stunning novella
in which Delany imagines his own father
arriving in New York and meeting Crane.
And in.a long, heavily anecdotal lecture,
ccAversion/Perversion/Diversion,’’ Delany
quotes a “straightmale friend of mine” who
told him:“If you can explainthe fascination
with licking sneakers so that I can under-
stand it, you can probably explain a n m g
to anybody!”That sums up Delany’s virtues
as well as anythng could.
Every page of every essay here rewards
a second reading, and a third. Delany has
a fearsomely well-stocked intellect, and a
wider range of experience than most writ-
ers can even imagine. The man’s books
have sold by the hundreds of thousands;
he is the author of texts rich and dense
enough to keep a graduate seminar buzz-
ing for weeks; and his work has trans-
formed a quintessentiallyAmerican literary .
genre. Yet people who are otherwise well-
read often have no idea who he is. This is
perplexing. But at a time when the most
dangerous place to stand in American cul-
ture is between a “public intellectual” and
a camera, there is much honor in Samuel
Delany’s will-to-complexity. He is brilliant,
driven, prolific. And this past spring, he
turned 54, which does seem ridiculously ~

,er fetishism. There are scattered remarks 1924”(publishedlast year indtluntis:27tree young, all things considered.
on S.F., but more pages are devoted to
the anguished rantings of Artaud. Readers
who, first encountered Delany in cheap
paperbacks will probably want to take their
pleasure elsewhere.
Independence Day
That is understandable, but unfortunate, VALERIE MINER
for Longer viavs is an intellectually ad- ~~~~ ~

venturousbook. And like some of Delany’s
other nonfiction-especially The Motion
oflight in Wuter(1987),probablythe finest
account of youthful genius since the Auto-
’
biography~ofJohn Stuart Mill-it is a
complex supplement to the novels. For in-
stance: Swords and Sorcery fiction, in all
its wretched excess, has an unmistakable
quality of bastardizedWagner. So Delany’s
“Wagner/Artaud”--with its idiosyncratic
reading of the possible autobiographical
dimensions of the operas-offers a new
point of entry into the Nev2rj;on stories.
And by linking the composer with Artaud
(both of them creators of visions of the
Total Theater) the essay makes subterra-
nean links between Delany’s fiction and
the non-S.F. avant-garde.
Still, Longer Yiews can be maddening.
It is at times oblique and willfully difficult.
The prospect of an essay on Donna Har-
away’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” is in-
viting. Delany’s work is often considered
a forerunner of cyberpunk-which, not
coincidentally, arrived on the scene in
WE WERE THE MBLVANEYS. By Joyce Carol Oates. Dutton. 454 pp. $24.95.
To be without afamily in America is to be deprived notjust of thatfamily, but of an entire
arsenal of allusive material as cohesive as algae covering apond.
e Were the Mulvuneys: If they were tion, adaptation or self-creation?
the Mulvaneys, who are they now? Audacious speculation is nothing new
What happened? How did it happen? for Oates, one of our best contemporary
Examining systems and shifts within novelists, who combines a nineteenth-
an upwardly/downwardly mobile white century political and moral range with a
American family between 1955 and 1993, twentieth-century psychoanalytic sensi-
Joyce Carol Oates has written an uncharac- bility. Perhapsthis talent for thinking is one .
teristically cathartic book with a provoca- reason Oates writes better novels than short
tively happy ending. fiction. While her’stories often seem raw,
Oates’s twenty-sixth novel questions the extended enterprise of a novel affords
instinct and survival. She employs social her adequate space to filter emotional di-*
theory, theology and scienceto ask wheth- lemmas through action and consequence.
er changes within the family are emblem- Oates is under-appreciated in a culture
atic of evolutionwithin the species. Is the suspiciousof artist as intellectual and artist
Mulvaney story a tale of predetermina- as productive worker. Her fiction consis-
tently raises philosophicalissues within an
Yalerie Minerk novel Winter’s Edge will be examination of American violence. Some
re-issued by The Feminist Press in January. critics have an almost prudish response to
She is professor ofEnglish at the Universityof her prolific (promiscuous) output. Even
Minnesota. those who appreciateher seem to read each