Search Results for “delany” – Page 2

Phallos

Phallos, which came out last year (2004), is the most recently published novel by Samuel R. Delany. It’s a short work — a mere 95 pages — dense, playful, and delightful. The blurb on the back of the book calls it “a Lacanian riddle to delight,” and that isn’t far wrong.

Delany’s Phallos takes the form of a summary/synopsis/commentary, on the Web of a gay porn novel called Phallos, set in ancient Rome and apparently written in the 1960s, that is out of print and very difficult to find. So I guess it could be called meta-pornography: it’s a pornographic narrative that is only presented indirectly, through all the screens of a somewhat unreliable narrator choosing excerpts, and discussing issues of provenance and textual details about a book that (of course) only exists inside the book we are actually reading. As a result of this strategy, also, the copious sex of the pornographic narrative is not explicitly described on the page in any great detail, but mostly just alluded to. The book is allied, therefore, to Delany’s other sexual narratives (Hogg, Equinox, and The Mad Man) but in a reduced (in size and scope) and considerably more indirect manner.

This indirection is of course the point of the book, which is a book about the phallus of Freudian/Lacanian theory, the signifier of desire, and of erotic (& masculine) potency, but which (as a mere signifier) is always absent, or other than itself. The phallus in Phallos is both the unavailable, and only indirectly narrated, pornographic narrative itself, and also (within that distanced, non-present narrative) the missing male organ of an obscure god (or more precisely, of a statue or idol of an obscure god) whose absence, or quality of being missing, circulates through the narrative, and is the “absent cause” of its repetitions, permutations, and deviations.

Describing Delany’s novel in this way, however accurate, also sells it short, because it makes it sound as if the book were just an allegorization, or an “illustration,” of a philosophical idea: which it is not; because Phallos is not exhausted by its allegorical or ideational nature. This is because it is an affectively powerful work (with an intensity that is both playful and emotionally deep and compelling, if not — for me, at least, as a heterosexual reader — directly arousing). You might say that the novel embodies the absence, the non-identity, the simulacral emptying-out of virility, that is its subject: if embodying something non-present (if not quite a “lack” in orthodox Lacanian terms either) is not too much of an oxymoron.

Actually, the most accurate categorization would probably be to say that Phallos is a philosophical novel (or novella), in precisely the sense that Voltaire’s Candide and Diderot’s Bijoux indiscrets and Jacques le fataliste, together with other 18th century fictional works by Sade and others, are philosophical novels. It’s a work of speculation, and even of wisdom — but one in which the thought is carried by narrative, rather than by theoretical argument. It touches on metaphysical issues, having to do with the nature of selfhood and of desire; but ultimately it is a book about how to live.

The absence that is the phallus/phallos means that desire is never sated by total satisfaction, but always awakened again; that life necessarily implies a certain degree of loss, disappointment, and unfulfillment. The phallus, therefore, always implies change and becoming, without the possibility of attaining a final state of peace: it is “that signification itself by which something else always molds us toward something better — or sometimes, something worse — than what we already are” (77). Desire is never entirely realized — there is no utopia or nirvana — but nonetheless “desire is as endlessly unquenchable as it is repeatable” (62).The novel — or, rather, the novel within the novel, indirectly refracted to is — is filled with orgies and all sorts of sexual extremity; but (as has been the case in some of Delany’s earlier works (and as I have previously noted with regard to his Times Square Red, Times Square Blue) this sex is not presented as transgressive: rather it’s seen as a rather civilized way of negotiating the delights and disappointments, opportunities and limitations, of life. There may be a “lack” at the center of desire; but (sexual) variety is literally the spice of a life of desire, and does not contradict, but supplements a main sexual and partnering relationship that is secure and lasting; as Neoptolomus, the hero of the novel-within-the-novel, reflects at one point (not too far from the end), “with such variety [of sexual experiences and pleasures] it becomes hard to hold on to where that lack lies, since that absent center moves about so: If I have learned anything in this time, is that losing track of it, in such a secure relationship, is surely the closest we can come to filling it” (75). I’m not sure if this difficult pronouncement is sufficiently clear apart from its context in the narrative; but it does express a kind of pragmatic utopianism, if I can dare to use such an oxymoronic phrase, that does not make its point, or achieve its hope, at the price of ignoring change and loss — though it is a perspective that is scarcely intelligible or admissible within contemporary American social, political, religious, and psychological discourse, and in fact serves as a terrible condemnation of the wretchedness of mainstream America’s hopes and fears today.

I’ll stop there, though Phallos, for all its brevity, is so rich and (indeed) inspiring a text that it calls out for a more extended, as well as less muddled, appreciation than I have been able to provide here.

Ellen Gallagher

An exhibit of works by Ellen Gallagher just opened at the Henry Art Gallery. The artist was present to give a talk about her work. I’ll have to go back for a more extended look, but what I saw (and heard) was quite interesting. Gallagher’s work is fascinatingly oblique, giving a kind of formalist take on the history and position of black people in America. Gallagher took advertisements for wigs from old copies of Ebony and other African American magazines (her archive extends from 1939 to the late 1970s). She obsessively reworked these images in various ways, replacing the depicted wigs with plasticine blobs, effacing the faces of the models, organizing the resulting tiny images in huge grid patterns.
Gallagher is tracing a careful path between the Scylla of identity politics, and the Charybdis of universalizing abstraction. She is not representing “black identity” or even black history in any straightforward way; but neither are her abstract patterns – which is what you first notice of her work from a distance – abstracted from history, or from the history of that (contingent, non-essential, but also perfectly concrete and real) “identity.”
Wigs are a prosthetic amplification of the body, even when (or especially when) it is claimed (as is the case in many of the ads Gallagher appropriates) that they are “natural.” (They are also part of the larger history of the cultural meanings of hair – remember Madame C. J. Walker). As dubious fashion accessories. wigs themselves have a history in the years of Gallagher’s archive (witness the differences between the straight ones of the 1940s and the Afros of the late 60s and 70s).
But Gallagher is not just memorializing a history. Neither is she making a critique (as might well be done, for instance, from the point of view of looking at the various ways that African Americans have often sought to make their hair straigher, more like white people’s hair). Rather, she is exploring a tricky middle ground, where identity, an artifice to begin with, becomes blurred by memory, time, and loss, but is never entirely obliterated. Her images of prosthetics of the body are themselves prosthetic images: images which replace, or extend, previous images. This suggests an endless progression of simulacra, perhaps; but it does NOT suggest any sort of Baudrillardian thesis that the “real” has been obliterated. This is because, far from being “hyperreal,” Gallagher’s images are troublingly concrete: indexical presences rather than achieved absences, residues rather than effacements of their dubious “originals.”
In her talk, Gallagher linked these residual presences, uneffaced despite the violence with which she works over her appropriated images, to the themes of Afrofuturist science fiction. That is to say, she sees the Middle Passage as the true and ultimate form of alien abduction: people taken away from their homes and families, brutally dragged by strangers through an unfamiliar, blank space, and enslaved in an utterly alien environment. She suggested that the Middle Passage itself, rather than any fantasy of Mother Africa, is the one “origin” back to which black Americans can refer. And she cited the conceptualizations of Samuel Delany, and the SF mythologizings of George Clinton and especially Drexciya, with their wonderful vision of an underwater Atlantean realm, inhabited by the women and children who perished during the Middle Passage. Gallagher said that she felt close to Drexciya both in terms of this mythology, and in terms of the oblique, abstract way that they present it, in enigmatic techno music without vocals.
Gallagher is a brilliant artist of the in-between, in many different senses.