Jeffery Allen Tucker. A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference.

Jeffery Allen Tucker. A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2004. 344 pp. $27.95.

Jeffery A. Tucker has written a provocative work with the hope of rescuing one of the most important science fiction authors of our time. It is not that Tucker states his objective in just that way, but he starts his analysis of the works of Samuel R. Delany by examining his novel Dhalgren as an exercise in linkage to black cultural traditions. Several questions came to mind right away as I began to read Tucker's study. Why should Delany need rescuing? What are the narrative problems, the conceptual concerns, or the thematic issues that have denied him recognition as a major African American writer? Why is it that he is most known among gay science fiction audiences and least known among African Americans? Is this a problem of homophobia, or one of marketing?

Clearly, we are dealing with enormous human and cultural complications in this work because as Tucker full well knows and shows expertly Delany is one of the most gifted word artists living today. Take Dhalgren as a novel, and one sees the immensity of Tucker's task immediately. The key turn in that novel is the mysterious disaster that has struck the midwestern town of Bellona. Everything is disrupted, human beings are devastated, and weird things happen. Tucker explains to the reader that for some characters, "Bellona's apocalypse is a figure for the anxiety of the Times ..." (77). How strange the disruptions appear as parts of Delany's brilliance: he sets us against one another either through competition, guile, politics, or culture, yet never really exposes a racist agenda for the little midwestern town. Can we truly appreciate Delany without appreciating his play with us, his toying with the things that some of us hold dear, close, as essential?

Tucker tries in several passages to bring to a reading of Delany's oeurve a concern with blackness. For example, he writes: "This contiguity between Dhalgren's themes and the struggle for black liberation suggests that the novel should be read not only in a black cultural context, but also in a black historical context" (79). While I admit that Dhalgren uses images from the African American urban environment and provides ways to access US black communities through relevant social and political topics, I cannot get a grasp on Delany's consciousness as a black man. I do find his consciousness as a gay black man, but I do not find in Tucker's reading of Delany a commitment to black liberation. Of course, this is not to say that one could not read into some of his symbolic works the idea of blackness as a trope of liberation and ethic; it is rather a statement that such a reading does not occur freely. Now, on the one hand, one could question whether or not this is a form of racism inasmuch as the black writer, however gifted, as Delany is gifted, cannot state his blackness and cannot state assertively that he is for the eradication of racism and white racial privilege. On the other hand, as Tucker admits and demonstrates this dialectic is not a problem when it comes to Delany's gay consciousness. In other words, Delany is able to articulate his aim skillfully, as he did in Return to Neveryon. Tucker writes that Delany declared that one of his aims was "to articulate for adults the hidden and subterranean (erotic) currents that are forever at play in the largely infantile genre of sword-and-sorcery" (91).

Perhaps another way to look at Tucker's treatment of Delany is in a somewhat Delanyian manner. The people of Neveryon are divided into blacks who rule and whites who are ruled. But this novel is not about race, or is it? What about the fluidity of the essential characteristics of groups and the obliteration of difference? The critical insight that Tucker brings to a rather dense and ever changing corpus by one of the best writers of our age is important. Reading A Sense of Wonder, I thought myself caught up in a Delanyian narration--in the sense that Tucker deftly plows through the many turns and layers of Delany's corn-rowed narratives to ferret out his various passions for sex, science, and a multifaceted present. No one can read Tucker's study without appreciating his great capacity to capture the soul of Delany.

Nevertheless, as an Afrocentrist I am most interested in "locating" Delany in the context of the 500-year struggle for African liberation from the oppressive patterns of white racial privilege, even in the literary realm, but clearly Tucker is much more adept at reading Delany, as Delany would want to be read, as a black gay writer seeking universality. There is nothing wrong with this reading, nor with the study as Tucker conceived it; however, what remains to be done is for an Afrocentric critic to "locate" Delany in the broader context of African agency. Yet, without any doubt, Tucker has written an exciting and penetrating account of Delany's art, showing that he remains an aspiring "universalist" as seen in The Mad Man, The Motion of Light in Water, and other writings.

Molefi Kete Asante 

Temple University