Asemic Scribbles

Page 22 American Book Review Tucker continued from previous page accomplished intellectual work, namely an analysis of the discursive construction of homosexuality. In “The Rhetoric of Sex, The Discourse of Desire” (1995), Delany describes “discourse” as follows: Men and women do what they do—what they’re comfortable doing. But the constraints on that comfort, on who does what and when, are material, educational, habitual—feel free to call them social. And where all three—material, education, and habit—are stabilized in one form or another by language, we have discourse. Dark Reflections excels at demonstrating how the discourse of homosexuality—the language with which psychology, medicine, mainstream journalism , and “conventional wisdom” (which is often neither)—once spoke about the topic: as a statistically rare “disease” that affects whites exclusively. The impact of such language upon Arnold is the deferral of community and pleasure, as well as the internalization and reproduction of this discourse, so that he collaborates with the forces that deform him, until it is almost too late: When the keystone of a life structure that you have erected turns out to be a falsity falsely fixed, the whole does not necessarily collapse to the concrete in a cloud of steel, masonry, and glass. Too many microstructures have been set in place to support things, so that the initial keystone bears no present condition for any reality it might once have sustained. Arnold’s closet “dissolve(s) around him” at such a gradual pace that by the time he achieves some degree of comfort with his sexuality, he is as out of touch with gay liberation and the world it has made possible as he is with the current state of the publishing industry. The process can be as frustrating for the reader as it is forArnold, but once it is done,Arnold’s realization of what he has lost hits him forcefully, and is rendered with a simple, heartfelt, eloquence: “How cruel, to take us as children and impose such isolating loneliness,”Arnold thinks, “Why, why, why lie to them as I was lied to?” Racial discourse is as significant a topic in the novel as sexual discourse, even if it is addressed somewhat en passant. Delany represents the significance of the shifts from “race records” to “Rhythm and Blues” to “Soul,” and from “Negro” to “black,” the lower-case “b” signifying a sophisticated conception of race as identity but not as biological reality. Arnold’s iconoclasm, his avoidance of conspicuously racial themes in his poetry, makes him somewhat of a “truant” rather than a “dean,” to use Professor Gene Jarrett’s recent formulation, amongst his African American contemporaries. Along with his wonderfully surprising fondness for Country-and-Western music, Arnold’s life chafes against the narrow confines of what is commonly asserted as, or maybe only merely perceived to be, “authentic” black identity. Arnold Hawley bears some similarity to Delany himself; both are elder gayAfricanAmerican writers. The sexual attraction to hands and fingernails of a certain character and quality described in Delany’s autobiography The Motion of Light in Water (1988) is extended into this new book as it is through much of the author’s writing. However, the differences between Arnold and Delany are as prominent as the similarities. Arnold is a poet; Delany writes fiction. Delany writes of real and imagined worlds of sexual liberation and plenitude, whereas Arnold’s desires are generally denied or unsatisfied. Arnold attends Brown and later Boston University; Delany, though an intellectual of astonishing range and intensity, does not have a degree. Arnold’s loving, long-distance relationship with the woman who raised him, the intellectual and supportiveAunt Bea, is one of the novel’s finest features. Delany, of course was nephew to two extraordinaryAfricanAmerican women, Sadie and Bessie Delany, the late authors of Having Our Say (1995). And whereas Arnold savors any crumbs of recognition for his accomplishments that fall from the tables of the publishing industry and the literary world, Delany has won the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in Gay and Lesbian Writing , as well as the Hugo and Nebula Awards, SF’s highest honors; he was even inducted into the SF Hall of Fame...