Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  Perhaps, though, I am only the interpretation of all of them—that I call reality. (Do I write with my pen? Does another daemon hold the pen and write with it?) Am I the sexual surge and ebb that cannot quite be covered by any of the above, but that impinge on all the others and often drown them? What of the bodily apparati in general, as they fall, pleasingly or painfully, into the net of myself? I am always an animal excess to the intellectual system that tries to construct me. I am always a conscious sensibility in excess of the animal construction that is I. And that is why I am another, why my identity is always other than I.

  15. “Things are more like they are today than they have ever been before,” announced American President Dwight D. Eisenhower during one of his ’50s terms of office. And in 1989, on first reaching the Peruvian Altoplano, American artist Gregory William Frux remarked: “Sure is alto. Sure is piano.” Reams have been written explicating the remark of German philosopher Martin Heidegger: “Nothing nothings.” And on more than one occasion I have been known to remind my daughter: “Remember, no matter where you go, there you are.”

  16. Laura Bohannan’s delightful 1966 essay, “Shakespeare in the Bush,” while it makes some interesting cross-cultural points, seems to me to work even better as a kind of sf parable about discourse and rhetoric—specifically what happens when certain rhetorical figures are moved from one discursive field to be read within another.

  The parable dramatizes what happens to the “universal appeal” of Hamlet when its plot is retold in a culture in which the sort of borderline sibling incest Claudius and Gertrude indulge is not only acceptable, but de rigueur, where, though magic is quite real, the concept of a ghost is unknown, and where there is no distinction between a scholar and a witch; where strict moral proscriptions preclude all intergenerational violence—and madness is always the result of witchcraft.

  Even a cursory review of the plot will reveal that Hamlet, retold within such a discursive matrix, is a very different story from the one told in Anglo-European culture. In fact it is arguable that, within such a discursive matrix, the story we know as Hamlet cannot be told at all.

  The question becomes interesting, however, when we start to explore the metalanguage necessary to begin translating one set of discursive assumptions, codes, and expectations into another. Such language is “theory.” And, generally speaking, theory must proceed with extreme care, at great slowness, and must risk being rhetorically, at least at the beginning, even more incomprehensible than the rhetoric it is being used to explain.

  17. . . . Every day I read a little French because it is such a pretty language. Does that make me a rascal? and then I can’t help walking around every day, a bit, in the winter countryside. Does that prove I am indifferent to a great deal of suffering?—Robert Walser, Letter to Hesse, November 15, 1917.

  The sheer bulk of John Addington Symonds’s letters—three eight-hundred-fifty-plus-page volumes—suggests a totality they do not, alas, possess. While it’s true that scarcely a month goes by, between Symonds’s 14th year (1854) and his death from tuberculosis at his home in the Zauberberg country of Devos at age fifty-three (1893), that is not represented by two, three, or more substantial epistles, the totality of his life is still not to be had from these often informative, deeply moving, and frequently brilliant missives—if only because letters do not provide such totality.

  The editors seem to have been taken in by the illusion of that totality as much as anyone. One senses it all through their astute and often revealing commentary. In the “Biographical Introduction” we find them writing, “Gustavus Bosanquet [Symonds’s adolescent playmate] readily saw the humorous and the comic in life, a capacity which in Symonds seems deficient in his published work no matter how often personal accounts in other people’s (like H. G. Dakyns’s and T. E. Brown’s) letters have stressed it” (p. 31) . . . as though a man may not be jolly in person and serious when he writes—even letters.

  Or, again, when pooh-poohing Symonds’s later protestations that he was miserable during his school days at Harrow because “[t]he letters to his family written during this period contain fewer complaints than letters written by most adolescents away from home for the first time,” and thus (they decide) it was only in retrospect that Symonds’s Harrow days seemed miserable to him (p. 32) . . . as though a brilliant, sensitive, gay child must of necessity commit all the details of his misery to the letters he writes to his father and sister at home.

  As a child, I went to a summer camp where all outgoing letters were read by the camp director and all incoming letters were read to the campers by this same tyrannical woman—which simply made it impossible to communicate to parents about either the emotional or the material horrors of the place; and I can recall as an adult in my thirties writing a letter to a very good friend, while a somewhat deranged lover of mine wandered about the apartment wrapped in a sheet and threatening suicide—I had to stop writing to argue a knife out of his hand. But, when, a day later, I resumed the letter, the incident did not go into it, because the letter had begun—and therefore, even though I was writing to a very good friend, was obliged to end—concerned with other things. The incident of the sheet and the knife never made it into my most personal journal, either—because the same lover had a habit of browsing through those notebooks and, if he found any reference to himself, became furiously angry.

  The incident has never ended up, through any transformation, in my fiction—because the man dreaded both the publicity and the distortion such a transformation represented as much as he dreaded anything else in the world, and he repeatedly drew promises from me that I would never use anything in his unhappy life in a fictive rendering.

  But the conversations we had that day shook me to the bottom of my being; and they informed me about depths of human misery I have never been able to forget; and that meant that I who finished that letter was not I who had begun it. But though it was a most personal letter, I doubt any of what I learned in the midst of writing it showed in its text—although what I learned of personal despair and fear that day still informs the whole of my life, more than a decade on.

  This is as close as the incident has gotten—or will ever get—to becoming a text . . . far closer than it ever got to any text written at the time.

  The larger point is, however, that letters—especially the letters of someone who writes a great many of them—only play in one section of the personal spectrum (different, of course, for each of us).

  But when they play there as deftly and articulately as Symonds’s letters play, perhaps the editors can be forgiven for feeling they have been privy to the range, harmonies, and scale of the “whole” man, and that all claims that he was other than the letters present him (even at the very hour of their writing) must be taken as errors—rather than as additions or expansions.

  As letters play in one range, journals and diaries play in another; and the material of fiction plays in another still. It is hard to explain to any researcher—whose relation to writing is often very different from the titanic relations to the written held by the researched subject—that precisely in the real and obsessive writer, none of these ranges is privileged.

  To be sure, overlaps between ranges occur.

  But even that does not mean the whole scale is ever completely—is ever any more than partially—filled in.

  For even with the most assiduous practitioner of all the intra- and extra-literary genres (letters, journals, memoirs), he or she still experiences the vast majority of her or his life outside language written to friends, spoken to friends, to the self, or to the public. Thus the researcher must never forget that the researcher’s purpose, no matter how much material present itself, must always lean toward an understanding of something in excess of the material.

  Should we call it discourse . . .?

  18. Yesterday, to make sense of a Sherlock Holmes story, my daughter had to look up the word “beeswing” in the OED, and discovered it meant the film forming on wine after
it’s stood out a goodly while.

  19. Essex Hemphill notes (in Ceremonies, p. 39) that when viewing Mapplethorpe’s “Man in Polyester Suit,” it is impossible “to avoid confronting issues of exploitation and objectification.” That body without a head, in which the hands alone tell us the body is black, with its big, flaccid cock loose from its fly, masked in a suit that, through the title, carries the connotations of white working class tackiness, if it cannot call up such questions, is just not doing its job. The disingenuously cool, racially neutral title works to that end: You bring up the racial questions, it all but instructs the viewer. Some thoughts, however, after reading Kobena Mercer on Mapplethorpe in Transition 51: what Mercer misses (or doesn’t quite hold on to) is that Mapplethorpe’s photos, especially in The Black Book, sit on a particularly troublesome border. They are art photographs. But they are saturated with the visual rhetoric—smooth studio backgrounds, high contrast lighting, and compositional fragmentation—of advertising photographs. Much of the disturbing quality of these erotic images comes from their generic ambiguity.

  The advertising photograph always makes a coherent statement: “I’ve got it. You want it,” it says. But the rhetorical configuration by which it says it renders such a message completely different from, say, the message of Walker Evans’s and Dorothea Lange’s photographs of rural Depression men and women.

  The art photograph says merely: “Look at this carefully—for its esthetic aspects.” And, so, Mapplethorpe . . .?

  To place the erotic into the frame of art is a standard Western move that goes back to the very beginnings of representational art, if not before. Precisely to the extent we are familiar with the tradition, Mapplethorpe’s photographs, both in The Black Book and in his other homoerotic collections, shift between these twin, insistent statements, to all their viewers, male, female, gay, straight, black, and white. The problem is: What does such an interplay of messages mean, when the speaker of the messages is a white southern gay photographer, dead of AIDS, and the objects advertised/presented are a series of beautiful and intensely phallocised black male bodies?

  The picture is ironic, outrageous—shocking? It is that last alone that renders it banal. It is only there that, as a black viewer (and a black gay viewer at that), I am back at the realization that white artists constantly use blacks to represent the extremes they refuse to picture about themselves, i.e., to invent their own normalcy. Whether it is black singer Jennifer Holliday’s over-the-top performance of “And I Am Telling You” under white director Michael Bennett in Dreamgirls, or the jaw-dropping violence of the forced separation scene of the two black sisters in white director Spielberg’s Color Purple; whether it is the black female nudity that the white producers of Les Ballets Africains wanted to (but were not allowed to) put on Broadway in the fifties, or indeed “Man in Polyester Suit”: all suggest the oddly childish scenario of the white kid urging the black kid to go a little further, to violate expectations, to break accepted boundaries just a bit more than any comparable white singer/actor/ model has done till now. Is it collaboration? Is it exploitation? The effects are indisputably powerful for both white and black audiences. At the same time one notes that it is not what black directors Isaac Julian or Spike Lee are doing with their white actors—pushing them to outrageous, electric, audience-paralyzing depictions of whatever.

  At some point, through the same mechanism by which the picture initiates its dialogue on objectification (whether one takes it as a picture of a biological lie, a statistical leaning, or a visual truth), someone has to ask: What would the picture be saying if the body in polyester was white and male—or a white female body with the fly a-gape around some hefty labia? Or a black female body? Or with a small dick, small cunt, etc.?

  They would all be shocking. But what would the different trajectories of that shock be? Only such questions can sketch out the nature of what the picture-as-is is doing.

  Without its schlong a-dangle, “Man in Polyester Suit” could be a sales photo for a late ’70s issue of GQ Magazine. It is, after all, a funny picture. (It’s the visual inverse of a joke people, black and white, have been telling for years: What’s ten inches long, three inches around, and white? The white answer, straight and gay, male and female, is: “Nothin’!” The straight black male answer just removes the exclamation point. And the black gay answer is: “Not a thing, honey!”) Its laughter is directed, however tastelessly, at straight white males—but desire (would you like to suck or fuck one? Would you like to have one?) implicates all persuasions in its dialogic thrust. Hemphill, Mercer, and Julian all ask sensibly: “What do [Mapplethorpe’s images] say to our wants and desires as black, gay men?” As a black gay man, I’d suggest—sensibly—the answer starts with what one feels about big black cocks, and only point out that that answer is not necessarily conditioned one way or the other by being black alone. The larger question is, however, how predictable does the picture appear to presume the answer to be?

  Just how old is the joke? And how new does dressing it up in polyester make it?

  To engage these questions at all is to risk becoming the butt (as it were) of the joke. But clearly that goes for Mapplethorpe as well.

  A suggestive historical note to close with: Within six weeks of the October 1839 date Louis Daguerre took out his patent on the Daguerreotype, the first man was arrested on the steps of the Louvre for selling pornographic photographs: naked women against backgrounds and in poses suggesting the most famous nudes on the museum walls within—putting high art, pornography, and photography into a contestatory wrangle that has not silenced since.

  20. “Novelists ought not to be deaf,” write Disch and Naylor on page 59 of their wondrous historical reconstruction Neighboring Lives. But, for better or no, I am losing my hearing.

  21. The Twin Cities: One is made of polished sewer grills, violet neon tubes, and twelve-foot mosaic panes reflecting other mosaics.

  The other is made of words: “tenebrose,” “ineluctable,” and “abrogation”—but not “sybaritic,” “nilotic,” or “alpine.” (They cleave to other geographies, urban, agric, or mountainous, all together.) The second, like the first, has a history. The first, unlike the second, has only associations.

  The first is populated by tall women in translucent plastic raincoats, short, muscular men in tanktops and loose camouflage fatigue pants, one out of thirteen of whom has a walrus moustache and is hung like a buffalo. The Japanese population is on the rise; and Native Americans have, recently, been migrating here from the west.

  The second has a free public transportation system of pneumatic capsules, is cut by a river of No. 3 watch oil, and crouches in the shadow of the first. There are more animals in it than people—most of them with silver fur, ebon scales, or scarlet feathers. What human inhabitants stroll its streets tend to have hair the hue and crispness of rusted Brillo. They speak in gnomic phrases, punctuated by silences during which they examine their pocket calculators, the bolts on their roller blades, their antique calipers and circular slide rules.

  The cities share, however, a dump.

  And when the garbagemen from one poke pitch forks into the black sacks deposited there from the other, they step back, breathe in sharply—one or two brave ones scream—while still another stands there, eyes closed, the green canvas of his right pantsleg trembling.

  22. Title for a Lacanian paper on heterosexuality: “A Lass and a Lack.”

  23. The Palace and the Sea: Late that night in the palace of Alcinous, the Traveler regaled the king and his courtiers with tales of the storm-bound, sun-shot sea. As the fire burned in the walk-in fireplace and serving women moved among the guests, refilling goblets with wine, he told of mast-high waves, rafts of ice, ropes of white fire that netted the winter waters, and the slow metamorphosis of the periplus, from split cliffs a-glitter in dawn sun to the black lace of forests under indigo evening; and of how his ship had sailed through mayhem and magic to the gate of hell.

  But the little princess, whom a
lmost everyone had forgotten by now, thought to herself as she heard him: Where is this fabulous sea? Isn’t it all in the wash and wonder of his words, brought here, safe within the palace stones, made tame as a summer’s pool beside which one picnics with the other girls, off in the forest . . .?

  For outside she could hear the rhetoric of the ocean, as it crashed at the foot of her home, yowling and growling around the rocks, leaping and hissing as high as her father’s anciently laid foundations.

  In the roaring fireplace a moist log at last took flame and—cracked, spouting sparks toward blackened chimney stones, sifting more ash onto the hearth and, for a moment, interrupting the flow and weave of the Traveler’s cunning discourse on (his understanding of) the sea.

  As if having heard his daughter’s thought, King Alcinous now asked: “Say, once again, Traveler, where is that sea . . .?”

  23. “To Newton and to Newton’s dog Diamond,” Carlyle reminds us in the second chapter of The French Revolution, “what a different pair of universes . . .”

  24. “Man,” says Dennis in the half-dark, “I’ll fuck you up the ass so much the cum’ll be runnin’ out your nose—you won’t need any moustache wax!” Odd how affection manifests itself in various ages and epochs, in various social niches.

  25. If rhetoric is ash, discourse is fire . . .

  26. The desire to be conscious of the process of losing consciousness, of having no consciousness at all—this paradox is source and kernel of the anxiety over dying and death.

  27. I am awed, and just a bit terrified, at the mystery of my own existence. That something so rich and wonder-filled as fifty years or more of living should be given to someone as fallible and unimportant in the universe’s larger scheme and just plain ordinary as I is astonishing.