Weekly Readings #74 (07/03/23-07/09/23)

national Babel

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week saw the publication of “The Bounding Line,” the latest chapter of my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. There we rejoined the divided soul of artist Marco Cohen as he quarreled with his drawing teacher over the nature and purpose of art and met the model who would become the love of his life. This Wednesday, we return to the burgeoning career of comic-book writer Simon Magnus for the story behind the vicious graphic novel that will establish his career—even as he unknowingly veers toward the collaboration with Marco Cohen that will end the millennium in catastrophe for all. Please subscribe today!

For this week’s post, I share some thoughts on Samuel R. Delany (and related matters) in light of his New Yorker profile. (Regular Substack readers, though, may also want to read my Tumblr commentary, which I believe some considered scintillating, on the David Foster Wallace and Patricia Lockwood contretemps.) Please enjoy!

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Liberation Literature: Delany, Desire, and American Anarchy

Though the talk of the literary world this week was about David Foster Wallace, who doesn’t interest me much, I was glad to see a profile in The New Yorker of a writer who may deserve the attention more: Samuel R. Delany.

The piece by Julian Lucas convincingly condenses the pleasures of the writer’s long and various career while comically and poignantly narrating his latter days.

In the stellar neighborhood of American letters, there have been few minds as generous, transgressive, and polymathically brilliant as Samuel Delany’s. Many know him as the country’s first prominent Black author of science fiction, who transformed the field with richly textured, cerebral novels like “Babel-17” (1966) and “Dhalgren” (1975). Others know the revolutionary chronicler of gay life, whose autobiography, “The Motion of Light in Water” (1988), stands as an essential document of pre-Stonewall New York. Still others know the professor, the pornographer, or the prolific essayist whose purview extends from cyborg feminism to Biblical philology.

[…]

He is a sci-fi child prodigy who never flamed out; a genre best-seller widely recognized as a great literary stylist; a dysgraphic college dropout who once headed the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and an outspokenly promiscuous gay man who survived the AIDS crisis and has found love, three times, in committed, non-monogamous relationships.

Delany’s star seemed to fade a bit during the braided left-right sex-negativisms (#MeToo, #QAnon) of the Trump era. He’s a jovial sex-liberationist, sometimes naive to the point of irresponsibility, as Lucas duly acknowledges—

His tolerance could go alarmingly far. Delany once praised a newsletter published by NAMBLA, the pedophile-advocacy group, for its “sane thinking” about the age of consent. Unlike Allen Ginsberg, he never belonged to the organization. Yet he has refused to retract the comments—in part because of his own sexual experiences with men as an underage boy, which he refuses to characterize as abusive.

—which is why one has heard more about him from anarchically dissident right-wing sources like The Perfume Nationalist podcast in recent years than from mainstream left-liberal venues like The New Yorker.

I have cited Delany as a good example of a writer whose work is an obvious source of “woke” but also a good deal freer, more imaginative, and more beautiful than the bureaucratized and institutionalized identity politics it helped to inspire. Delany knows it; as a genius¹ he has acknowledged that the broad democratization of art and intellect he advocates will likely result in a lowering of the cultural average. For this reason among others, he also celebrates a proliferating diversity of small-scale and experimental social spaces where many forms of life can flourish—a radical politics of the demimonde in keeping with his love of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (it tops his list of “50 Literary Pillars”) as much as with his inspiration by thinkers like Foucault.

From Delany’s essays and published letters, I also first discovered that Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and Plato and Platonism were important if unheralded books, or would at least be important books to me—a discovery that influenced my doctoral dissertation, despite Delany’s absence (as a polymath irrelevant to the specialist) from its bibliography.²

Appreciating his work is not a question of agreeing with his politics. He’s wrong about NAMBLA. I’m ultimately somewhere to his right, since I suspect his overall ethic—that of rationally pursuing your desire to its terminus in the most absolute otherness you can find³—only works for people as brilliant and balanced as he is (I don’t necessarily include myself), and sometimes not even for them.⁴ Most people are therefore better advised to keep their more modest commitments—to take them, even, on faith. The funny and moving sexual adventure that concludes Lucas’s profile, however, radiates a certain nobility, a knight-errantry of the rational desirer’s promiscuous fidelity.⁵

I need to read much more Delany than I have, including the signed copy of Dhalgren I’ve been carrying around for 15 years, but in the meantime let me say that his science-fiction novels and stories of the 1960s—Empire Star, Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, Nova, “Driftglass,” “Aye, and Gomorrah”—are still undersung treasures of the American canon. If you need to read a realist novel instead for your introduction, though, the later Dark Reflections is well worth your time.

For a suggestion of his early science fiction’s quality, see my essay on Babel-17. I pointedly begin with a citation of Delany’s under-discussed and devastating ideology critique of The Bluest Eye. He construes Morrison’s almost universally celebrated first novel as racially purist, sexually panicked, anti-intellectual, and generally fascistic.⁶ Why punish Pecola, he wants to know, for her fantasy of difference? Seeing science fiction as the heir to the 19th-century realist novel he reveres in frankly Marxist terms, he would have preferred a narrative where a heroine who wants to modify her body into accord with her interior sense of self could acquire the material means to do so. (For Delany, this acquisition of the means to flourish is the central issue of the bildungsroman as a genre.) I’m not so sure that Delany would demure from following the logic of transgenderism—which he obviously upholds—to a more controversial domain like transracialism. I admire thinkers who think their thoughts to the end.

Delany has a non-Marxist side to his sensibility, too, philosophically poststructuralist but aesthetically modernist—necessarily idealist. This Delany sees language as perhaps our truest and deepest being, constitutive of self and society. He believes, therefore, that fiction must not only be socially conspective and radical but also beautiful—a concept for him that includes the unsettling of oppressive norms linguistically sedimented as clichés. Thus the importance to him of Pater and Barnes alongside Austen and George Eliot—and of linguistically daring science fiction, even when written by right-wingers like Robert A. Heinlein, whom Delany has also startlingly praised, and in so doing (see his preface to Heinlein’s Glory Road) compared himself to the Marx who admired Balzac.

To emphasize Marxism and poststructuralism in his career may, however, be misleading. I once chanced upon a remarkably prescient essay originally published in The Libertarian Review in 1980: “The National Letters” by Jeff Riggenbach. There, Riggenbach lamented the hegemony of novelistic realism, derogated Bellow, Updike, Roth, et al. when it was not yet fashionable to do so, and admired instead what was not yet called the genre fiction and the autofiction of writers like Didion, Babitz, Le Guin, Nin, and others—he praised Delany in particular at length. Riggenbach’s judgment was too absolute. Bellow and Updike were and remain superb at their best; their style of novel just didn’t deserve the unquestioned, unthinking hegemony over the form it once enjoyed. But he also foresaw the coming expansion of critical taste indexed by Delany’s reception, meager then and burgeoning more recently.

Riggenbach’s foresight is explained by the remainder of the essay. He argues that what makes American literature distinct from other national traditions is an absolute individualism driving writers to work in genres that, unlike novelistic realism or essayistic objectivity, stress self-expression and the autonomous imagination. Such genres, invented in his telling by Thoreau and Poe in the 19th century, include the confessional essay, the symbolic novel, science fiction, and detective fiction, all of them evincing American anarchy.⁷

Detective fiction, science fiction, symbolism and the confessional essay—these are the main currents in America’s national literature. All distinctively American fiction writers derive from Poe. All distinctively American essayists derive from Poe and from Thoreau. And all distinctively American writers have, from the time of their first appearance nearly a hundred and fifty years ago down to this very day, met with incomprehension and neglect at the hands of native critics and professors of literature; for these latter have always been convinced that Europe maintained a kind of monopoly on excellence in the literary arts, and have always judged all American writing by European standards.

His linkage of this persistent American libertarian literary tradition to America’s persistent libertarian cultural politics, while controversial, accords with my own reading of Delany, who, for all his self-advertised Marxist politics and poststructural linguistics, is an individualist at heart—or, more accurately, a thinker using the insights of European theory to augment an American individualism that perhaps can’t, in purely voluntaristic practice, bootstrap itself to the stars.

1. I don’t only mean a literary genius, which one can be without having an especially high IQ. In fact, genius-level IQ often seems to degrade the emotional and social literacy on which the novelist relies; I suspect most literary geniuses, at least among the novelists, are hovering around 130 score-wise. An exception like the reclusive Pynchon just proves the rule. Delany, by contrast, understands mathematics, linguistics, philosophy, and the sciences from the inside out, but also has an extraordinary command of emotional and social life—and not only in his work, since, as Lucas acknowledges, he’s extroverted and charismatic. A pretty rare personality in my experience. (I’m not a great believer in IQ, by the way, and have never myself taken an official test—the internet suggests that I am, as you might have guessed, hovering around 130—but I use it here as shorthand.)

2. I may have slightly overstated the case for the novel Marius the Epicurean in the dissertation, but we still haven’t caught up to the treatise on Plato and Platonism yet. Pater’s exposition of the path from Platonism to medieval Christianity may help to explain how something like Delany’s liberationist politics and aesthetics can make the journey I’ve labeled “from counterculture to hegemony.” If you’ll permit me to quote myself:

Plato and Platonism thus gives us Pater’s career in miniature, from its early defense of historical contingency and materialist explanation to a late preference for the ordered forms of the Christian faith—what Pater’s younger contemporary G. K. Chesterton was to label in his popular Catholic apologetics “the romance of orthodoxy,” by which he meant the adventurous retention of balance between reason and emotion, desire and restraint, mercy and justice, through believing in and striving toward the transcendent ground of being—whether the Platonic Forms or the Thomist God. The aesthetic preference for order or orthodoxy may lead to a dangerous temptation: the aesthete may attempt to reverse-engineer a society from his preferred artistic forms. Adapting a famous Adornian phrase about mass culture’s desublimating properties, we might say that Pater anticipates modern totalitarianism and understands it as “Aestheticism in reverse.” If Aestheticism, particularly in The Renaissance, is a liberatory force, producing the social unity-through-diversity that results from each person following his or her individual (but nevertheless common-to-all) natural desire, then Aestheticism in Plato and Platonism becomes the source of all political coercion, as the Aesthete insists that the entire polis be subject to his poiesis in its color and shape, as well as in the very dispositions of its inhabitants.

3. In his introduction to Bread & Wine, Delany’s graphic memoir with Mia Wolff discussed in the New Yorker profile, Alan Moore puts it in prose as ripe as Pater’s:

Bread & Wine affirms the central truths of all Delany’s writings with conviction that is absolute, a light unscattered by the necessary mirror-surfaces of fiction: that love will transfigure and redeem. That the profane can only be the sacred. That the scum of all the earth and salt of all the earth are of the same coin. This is wisdom. This is necessary radiance to drive the shadows from the underpass, the ghosts from needle park, to blow the fogs away from culture’s edge, its coastline, and reveal the widening ocean of the dispossessed beyond as objects not of fear, but of desire, of love.

4. As an old professor of mine once wrote, and I will let you look up the reference since I don’t like to plaster non-famous people’s names all over the internet,

Identification as readerly strategy belongs to the New Old Right, which is why we don't have to throw out Adorno because he rejects, for example, Jazz: it is only the uncritical desire to seek a Master, thus to be a Slave, that would demand of a great thinker that his taste always be correct.

5. Regular readers of this newsletter will also be amused or perhaps bemused by this detail in Lucas’s profile, which deserves expansion:

Gayatri Spivak, the deconstructionist scholar, was so impressed with Delany’s work that she asked him to sire her baby. Ever obliging, Delany left her a deposit at a sperm bank, and would have gone through with the arrangement, he told me, if she hadn’t insisted on his accepting legal paternity.

6. He might have seen Morrison’s clumsy and tendentious pen-portrait of the novel’s villain Soaphead Church as a demagogically distorted caricature of his own social type: light-skinned, mixed-race, and descended from white nobility; a latent homosexual, an impotent celibate, and a pedophile who preys on little girls (as if to Morrison all “perversion” were one); and an intellectual with a heightened preference for order and abstraction masking his nostalgie de la boue.

He could have been an active homosexual but lacked the courage. Bestiality did not occur to him, and sodomy was quite out of the question, for he did not experience sustained erections and could not endure the thought of somebody else’s. And besides, the one thing that disgusted him more than entering and caressing a woman was caressing and being caressed by a man. In any case, his cravings, although intense, never relished physical contact. He abhorred flesh on flesh. Body odor, breath odor, overwhelmed him. The sight of dried matter in the corner of the eye, decayed or missing teeth, ear wax, blackheads, moles, blisters, skin crusts—all the natural excretions and protections the body was capable of—disquieted him. His attentions therefore gradually settled on those humans whose bodies were least offensive—children. And since he was too diffident to confront homosexuality, and since little boys were insulting, scary, and stubborn, he further limited his interests to little girls. They were usually manageable and frequently seductive.

[…]

A cinnamon-eyed West Indian with lightly browned skin.

[…]

He read greedily but understood selectively, choosing the bits and pieces of other men’s ideas that supported whatever predilection he had at the moment. Thus he chose to remember Hamlet’s abuse of Ophelia, but not Christ’s love of Mary Magdalene; Hamlet’s frivolous politics, but not Christ’s serious anarchy. He noticed Gibbon’s acidity, but not his tolerance, Othello’s love for the fair Desdemona, but not Iago’s perverted love of Othello. The works he admired most were Dante’s; those he despised most were Dostoyevsky’s. For all his exposure to the best minds of the Western world, he allowed only the narrowest interpretation to touch him. He responded to his father’s controlled violence by developing hard habits and a soft imagination. A hatred of, and fascination with, any hint of disorder or decay.

Soaphead Church reminds me of Loerke from Lawrence’s Women in Love, especially the odd conflation of adult homosexual with heterosexual pedophile in a fussy aesthete; the politics of Lawrence’s pre-World-War-II caricature are more obvious, however, since Lawrence suggests that Loerke is also Jewish. Morrison, while retaining her interest in Christ’s or Dostoevsky’s “serious anarchy,” will later drift away from this more censorious vision of what she elsewhere called metaphysical blackness. I imagine that her late masterpiece Paradise is still too religious for the materialist Delany, but its explicitly gnostic celebration of social difference is an effective palinode for all that abrades in the overrated first novel.

7. If Riggenbach is right, where does my work fit in? My fiction basically answers to his description of the symbolic novel in his discussion of Twain as crypto-aesthete—

And his great contribution to the development of American fiction lay in having proved, with Huck Finn, that a symbolic fantasy as sensuous and strange and individual as anything by Poe himself could be made to look on its surface like a straightforward realistic novel. Twain showed that the supernatural—or even the atmosphere of the supernatural—was no more essential to the symbolist writer than was an elaborately ornate and “literary” prose style.

—while, considering his argument that Americans founded “European” Aesthetcism, he would no doubt see my criticism as displaced confession, per Wilde’s “criticism is the only civilized form of autobiography.” Riggenbach is too severe in his judgment, however, against the influence from Europe and particularly Russia brought to midcentury American literature by the New York Intellectuals.

This distaste also drove the young Jewish literary men and women of Howe’s generation to embrace another national literature as their own. “The dominant outlook of the immigrant Jewish culture” Howe writes, “was probably a shy, idealistic, ethicized, ‘Russian’ romanticism directed more toward social justice than personal fulfillment.” The literary heroes of the young Irving Howe and his friends were not Poe, Thoreau and Twain, but rather “Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov.”

Even Lawrence, who shares Riggenbach’s apparent suspicion of “Jewish intellectuals,” saw the kinship between Russian and American letters, God-haunted and apocalyptic. But then Riggenbach also misses Lawrence’s own honorary Americanness. We do contain multitudes.