Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary.

Samuel R. Delany. Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1999. 464 pp. $50.00 cloth/$22.00 paper.

Samuel Delany is a writer of great intellectual and imaginative depth whose works often are challenging and controversial. His fiction and his essays--which sometimes cohabit to form intriguing hybrids--are among those vanguard texts of our time which trouble our more conventional notions of identity, discourse, and desire, all of which are rigorously interrogated, commingled, and "multiplexed" in Delany's work. Part of his significance lies in his willingness to push, if not transgress, limits, although in doing so he has created works that many readers undoubtedly would find repulsive (his pornographic novels Equinox, Hogg, and The Mad Man, for instance); but the bottomline with Delany is that he never has written anything that is not at least interesting and skillfully done. This makes him the sort of author one feels compelled to read, if only for the delight and edification that derive from following a first-rate mind in its peregrinations.

I reviewed Delany's 1996 book Longer Views: Extended Essays for African American Review (Spring 1999), and while I definitely admire it for its weighty combination of scholarship and (perhaps idiosyncratic) connoisseurship, I think Shorter Views may be a better book. It is far easier to draw a "cognitive map" of Shorter Views than of Longer Views, not because of any incoherence in the latter (although the coherence that is there requires a good deal of mind-work to grasp), but because the organization of Shorter Views is clearer. It is divided into three parts, the first of which concerns what Delany calls "queer thoughts" (meditations on gay experience). The discourse here frequently and inevitably turns to the subject of AIDS. Part two deals with the politics of paraliterary criticism. Paraliterature includes science fiction and comic books, genres that are "lowly" from a highbrow perspective but which are taken quite seriously by Delany, who, indeed, refers to much mainstream writing as "mundane" literatur e. And part three is a consideration of some disparate writers and writings (among them, Othello, A. S. Byatt, and Susan Sontag). The book concludes with an appendix that brings the book full circle, so to speak, by focusing on creative writing, which also is the subject of the author's preface.

With regard to science fiction, the field in which he first achieved prominence, Delany asks himself, "Why is SF still so overwhelmingly white? I wish I knew. There're lots of African-American SF readers....Why haven't the writers followed?" And when an interviewer reminds Delany that the "color-blind society" in Robert A. Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers was "one of the things that influenced you to embrace science fiction," and asks him if he believes such a society "is still obtainable," Delany replies that "we actually seem to have achieved not Heinlein's 'color-blind' world by any means, but something distressingly close to it: a world that's color-deaf. By that I mean a world where, with very few exceptions..., there's little or no talk of racial matters at all." (This might be surprising to some readers, since it seems we're surrounded with talk of one sort or another about race, but it's talk to little purpose if few of us are willing or able to listen.)

One of the things I find most valuable about Delany, apart from his incredibly wide-ranging mind, his thoroughgoing grasp of so many different subjects, is his independence of thought, his terribly honest self-scrutiny, his relentless interrogation of the myths we tend to live by--both the myths that facilitate oppression and the countermyths that purport to liberate us (myths of "race," gender, culture, etc.). In an early science fiction novel, Empire Star (1966), Delany laid out three stages of understanding: simplex, complex, and multiplex. Too many writers today tend to give us simplex views of (for example) identity couched in sometimes complex language. Delany always aims for the multiplex view. He can be difficult; he can be disturbing--but these are signs of his significance. He walks the same territory as many contemporary cultural critics, but he always traces his own road, always follows his own insights. This may be due in part to the fact that, although he has taught in a number of universities, he does not hold any university degree. (Delany formerly was a member of the comparative literature department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and is now a professor in the English department at SUNY-Buffalo.) Being a self-made intellectual has given him real autonomy and a large measure of originality.

Delany's ability to take the street and the academy, the "raw" and the "cooked," as it were, and interweave them, is explicitly illustrated in a piece from part one called "On the Unspeakable," which documents the activities in a Times Square porno theater (a subject Delany deals with at greater length in his book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue [1999]) and which unfolds simultaneously as pornography and theory. The text, running in two parallel columns, is structured like a moebius strip (and is thus continuous, like a porno loop), but the graphic sexual descriptions and the theoretical commentary jump back and forth between these two columns, thus enacting on the page Delany's assertion (on a right-hand column) that "the unspeakable is, of course, not a boundary dividing a positive area of allowability from a complete and totalized negativity ..." and his (left-hand-column) contention that "the unspeakable is always in the column you are not reading."

That there are, perhaps predictably, many more shorter views by Delany than longer views doesn't necessarily mean something for everybody but very likely does mean more of interest for a wider potential audience. A book like Longer Views will appeal primarily to people interested in the possibilities of the essay and in literary/cultural criticism in general, whereas Shorter Views will attract the attention of people interested in the above, as well as those who are interested in creative writing, science fiction, critical theory, and issues of gay identity.

Now, Chip, where is the follow up to Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand that you have been promising us for so long?