Pretentious, Verbose, and Dull -- A Lament on Samuel R. Delany

My blog post title gives me a vague feeling of guilt. I know, I know -- we're supposed to like Delany. He's a prominent black author when at a time when SFF desperate needed the diversity, and even more importantly, he's probably the most theory-orientated major writer of SFF out there. Thus there's just oodles of material in his writings that causes literary theorists to salivate.

Still, my intense dislike for Delany's fiction is hard to express -- only slightly alleviated, I must admit, by Delany owning one of the all-time great beards. ààà

Case in point.

I recently forced myself to digest the first two books in his S&S fantasy series, Return to Nevèrÿon. I entered into these books with mixed hopes. On one hand, it's virtually the only S&S -- thanks to Delany's Marxist, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist leanings -- to get serious academic respect.

On the other , I have encountered Delany before. Several years ago, I read Triton (1976), a long-winded and (in my view) intellectually suspect work, and The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, a book of criticism that vastly disappointed me. My issues with that book are perhaps indicative of my dislike of Delany in general. There, he displayed an impressive range of knowledge about high-theory concepts, but lacked any sustained analytical rigor. The "notes" from the title perhaps should have indicated this, but I could find no discussion of any concept that was not more clearly (and more rigorously) available in books by real philosophers or academics. It was like reading the literature review of a dissertation. Why read second-hand interpretations when the original works are more clearly expressed? Perhaps calling Delany a dilettante of critical theory is unfair, but there it is.

Anyway, back to Nevèrÿon. My main objections are all found in my blog title, so let's just list them out here.

1. Verbose. Good gawd, Delany is long-winded. There is one section in Tales of Nevèrÿon where a character re-tells the creation story from Genesis from a feminist perspective . . . for six pages. Sorry, but thanks: I got the main gist after the first paragraph. But this verbosity seems like a general feature of Delany's writing. Close reading his books is nearly impossible for me. Skim-reading was my norm. Alongside that, there are several scenes where Delany virtually halts the narrative in some unimportant setting, cites his characters as performing some narratively pointless thing (like setting up camp or cooking), and just allows his mouthpiece characters to dully express the ideas Delany wishes to express
2. Boring. Granted, boredom can be subjective, but there's a number of concrete items here.

First, obviously, the verbosity -- when a reader feels that every other word is unnecessary, that's going to start the yawns.

Extended monologues; lack of action. Despite being S&S, the plot -- such as it is -- is a thinly disguised vehicle for various long monologues. There are entire chapters where Character X expounds lengthily on some pet topic. For example, Gorgik in Neveryóna discourses not-so-eloquently on the city Kolhari, and Madame Keyne, whose name is meant to remind us of John Maynard Keynes, discourses not-so-eloquently on capitalism. Occasionally, their interlocutor, Pryn, interjects an occasional remark, but nothing substantive. . . some enough to prompt additional monologue from the mouthpiece character.

Actually, Delany's literary form seems more like lecturing to me than fiction. His characters are too often mere authorial mouthpieces for complex ideas better expressed in a different format. Other characters, like Pryn, are passive listeners only. Delany's attempts to give depth or nuance to them all fail drastically. In fact, Delany frequently reminds me of the extended monologue by Dr. Matthew O'Connor to Nora Flood in Nightwood (Djuna Barnes, 1936). An no, I couldn't read that closely either.

(3) Missing Suspense. Oddly enough, Delany seems to ignore the possibility for narrative suspense, which seems like genre fiction's biggest selling point. I'm not talking about ending books with big booms or battles, either. The culmination of a character arc can be important as a suspense point, too. Yet, as  mentioned, there don't seem to be any characters in Delany -- just conveyers of authorial ideas through lecture-like dialogue, and who happen to have odd personal names.

(4) Pretentious. I've hit upon this before when discussing The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. Delany is basically writing "philosophical" novels that partake of the worst of both worlds -- on the philosophical side, a lack of sustained analysis and rigor, and on the literary side, a deep failure of narrative engagement.

In particular, I'm thinking of "The Tale of Old Venn" from Tales from Neveryón, another case of character X lecturing characters Y and Z for dozens and dozens of pages. Anyway, Venn** talks about the emergence of a money economy among the barter-economy Rulvyn, and all the implications for alienation that a second-order semiotic system like "money" implies. All Venn's ideas might have been -- and are -- more concisely and engagingly presented by academic works. Encyclopedia entries or introductions to theory, even. Read as fiction, it's just murder

Also, speaking of pretentious . . . opening every chapter with a dense epigraph from some academic or critical theorist is NOT a good way to show readers just how smart you are.

All told, reading the first two books in Return to Nevèrÿon, there was simply nothing that I found admirable. For all Delany's unquestioned originality -- for example, using BDSM to reflect class relations is a stroke of inspiration, no matter how turgid its execution -- I have rarely encountered an author with so little emotional depth to their work.

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** By the way, also if you haven't noticed, Venn = Venn diagram, since she's the overlap-point between multiple cultures and ways of life. Oh, Delany, you scamp.