Two Books to Get Started Reading Samuel Delany
The wonderful New Yorker profile last week about Delany got me thinking about him again. For many years when people asked me what my favorite book was I said his magnum opus, Dhalgren. I’m not sure I stand behind that statement any longer, not that I don’t think it’s brilliant – I think its better than most books trotted out as post modern classics – but rather that I just don’t have any favorite books anymore.
That said, if you’re interested in Delany, here’s a fiction, and nonfiction, to start with:
Dhalgren
Here is the plot, such as it is – a man walks into post-apocalyptic city in which time is nonlinear and the geography keeps changing. He has weird adventures, meets people living strange lives, has kinky sex, writes obsessively, gets involved in gang wars, journalism, and in small town politics gone bizarro.
Besides it’s plot, the book also features unconventional plot structure (are these the same characters as before? Is time moving forward, backward, randomly?), and formal experiments in style, including unconventional punctuation and grammar and parallel texts on the novels last 100 pages.
It’s a hell of a ride. And all of this may make it seem that Dhalgren is tough sledding, but it’s not. At least it wasn’t for me. I couldn’t put it down. If you’re willing to go along with the flow of the work, take in and appreciate its eccentricities while forgiving its flaws (too long), it can be a hallucinatory ride. (Indeed, I have a friend who claimed whenever he looked up from the book he felt “funny”.)*
I’ve maintained for years that when we look back at the height of post-modernist fiction of the 1970s and 80s, Dahlgren will be viewed as a masterwork of postmodern fiction. Read it and see if you agree.
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Delany’s memoir/ examination of 1970s era Times Square through the lens of late 1990s Times Square gentrification. This is a memoir of a young man exploring his sexuality in the porn theaters and sex shops of Times Square. It is also more than that. It is a clear refutation of the Giuliani idea that these spaces were of no social value. Indeed, for many mostly gay, mostly closeted, men Times Square in the 70s was one of the few places where they could be themselves.
Not that Rudy would have cared.
As always when Delany discusses sex, this book is graphic — really graphic. And like 1984, it is shocking how unsafe his sexual practices were. But this book is about more than sex. It’s about the various relationships he built through that world, some transactional and anonymous, some deeply fulfilling. As a straight man whose first exposure to Times Square was just as the “clean up” began, this book was illuminating and, like much of Delany’s work, challenging.
Does he gloss over the darker aspects of sex work? Perhaps. And is the rampant unsafe sex as the specter of AIDS was rising alarming? Yes. But it’s still a helpful anecdote to the rhetoric of the revitalization of Times Square.
Reading this made me wonder, do we in our progressive present no longer need a place like Times Square? I doubt it. More likely, instead of allowing people to experiment and share with others, we’ve forced sexual discovery to take place online, and alone.
I think that must be some kind of loss.