In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Darieck Scott The novella Phallos might be historical or philosophical fiction, an affectionate parody or satire of both kinds of fiction or of the kind of literary geekdom, high and low, that generates crazes for The Name of the Rose at one end of the continuum and The Da Vinci Code on the other. It might be a mystery, an adventure story, or simply what it claims to be, a synopsis of pornography —and certainly we could preface each of these genre descriptions with a meta-. But when I enter its pages, and when I exit them, febrile, the delight of Phallos is that I read it as a fantasy, an imaginatively rich, avowedly homoerotic version of the sword-and-sorcery genre, where lusty and laconic muscle-bound world travelers stride out of the likes of Fritz Leiber’s and Robert E. Howard’s imaginations into the taverns of dusty ancient cities and vine-shuttered temple ruins to cross swords with grotesque monsters and dying gods.1 The genre of fantasy generally serves up elaborate dreams of could-be-but-wasn’t/isn’t/won’t-be/couldn’t-be satisfactions. In Phallos, though the characters’ sandaled feet seem at first only to tread the dust of our “real” world and history, the novella performs a magician’s trick, a literary sleight whereby we shift by degrees into a strange couldn’t-be world: and suddenly here there be gods and monsters (or at least the drugged visions of them). But the surprise, and perhaps the greatest of this parallel world’s delights, is that the novella sprinkles its enchantment by seducing us to dream in the hyperbolic way of the fantasy genre about what might otherwise be dismissed as prosaic or unworthy: Phallos makes us dream about sex; or rather, Sex (explanation of the distinction to follow). i can see atlantis from my house sex, fantasy, and phallos 174 | Darieck Scott Part of the pleasure of the work credited with establishing the genre of modern fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is, as Tolkien puts it, the suggestion of matters “higher or deeper or darker” beyond the adventure plot on the page,2 how reading it produces a frisson of yearning toward what is not fully articulated. These matters feel “high and deep” insofar as their very vagueness (a strange place-name you can’t find even on the map of MiddleEarth . . . ), their presence as only adumbrations, imparts to them the glow of possible existences and histories that tantalize us as wildly different or better than the world we read or the world we know, and which makes them fertile ground for the imagination of “secret wisdom,” as the Umberto Eco epigraph Delany selects to open the novella phrases it. This effect—the summoning up as out-of-reach specters of lost civilizations and supplementary worlds that make us yearn for a repletion we could never experience on the page or in life—is an effect on the reader of Tolkien not unlike the effect of the phallos on the characters in the summary-of-a-novel, who, upon learning that the phallos exists but that it is missing, imagine that the secrets of power or wealth or eternal youth or great knowledge might be theirs if they could recover it. Delany drafts Eco to warn us of the fool’s gold that is this secret wisdom we dream of; but the warning of course cannot escape the standard pink-elephant effect, and thus our appetite is whetted. Phallos is a novella about a novel that does not exist (unless Delany, like Tolkien or like the musician-composer Prince, has been keeping the “real” Phallos locked away from us in a vault, as the priestesses of Bellona or the priests in Hermopolis may or may not have kept the phallos itself under guard and key), and thus a story gone missing about a missing piece. Much is missing, lost,andmysteriousinthenovella,andweseetheseitems—orratherwedonot see them, but take note that they are not there—strewn about the story like so manyglassysand-kernelscatchingsunlightonabeach:youstoopdown,drawn towards the luminosity of what appears to be a jewel, but come up emptyhanded . One of the greatest of Roman emperors meets Neoptolomus disguised as a beggar and, never directly revealing his identity (Hadrian), arrives on the scene having set in motion the murder (but perhaps not fully intended) of one of Neoptolomus’s anonymous lovers, later revealed to be Antinous, and...

Share