Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary

8 The Thomas L. Long Interview

The Thomas L. Long Interview At the time of this interview, Thomas L. Long was a graduate student working at the University of Virginia on questions of AIDS and American apocalyptic imagery. THOMAS LONG: What work does your writing perform in regard to HIV/AIDS? Would I be on track by thinking that §11.4 in The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals represents a summary of your self-understanding of all your writing? SAMUEL R. DELANY: In general, what I hope at least part of my work performs—or helps to perform—is a necessary deformation of an older, pre-AIDS discourse, which privileged sexual reticence, into a discourse that foregrounds detailed sexual honesty, imagination, and articulation. AIDS makes such a discursive adjustment imperative. (Today, anything else is murder.) But such a deformation also has other benefits, in terms of the liberation of a range of subjects frequently marginalized under the rubric of "the perverse." As an artist I (I want to add, "of course") resist the idea of my work containing any summary of itself. As I understand it, such a summary would make—or at least take steps toward making—the rest of the work superfluous. But especially I resist the notion of summary in terms of§11.4! That, yes, is the climax of my 1984 novel about AIDS, The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals. As such, it's a piece of writing that would be meaningless without all that has gone before in the novel—and that can only finish its reverberations as the reader reads the sections that come after it. Alone, it is particularly flat and dead. Byitself, it is almost incoherent. Taken out of context, rather than summarize anything, it would strike most readers unacquainted with the rest of the book, I suspect, as lunatic babble. It's a piece of writing specifically crafted to be without any of the 8 124 Shorter Views explanatory excess that, at least to my understanding, such a summary section would demand. If I were going to choose a summary section from that novel, I would choose any and every section before I would choose that one! Particularly, I would choose— as a summary—section §9.82 and the other sections circling around the Master's attempt at a biography of Belham. At least those sections dramatize what I see as the problem of the subject-for-another-subject—and do so in general summary terms. Their constituent microdramas allegorize the problems we have apprehending any other subject, whether that subject be the socially acclaimed great man, the most ordinary person on the street, or the particularly marginalized and oppressed: someone whom society urges us at every turn to see as oscillatingbetween the state of "dangerous" and the state of "victim"—someone who is, say,HIVpositive. Thus they generalize the overall problems of fiction writing as I see them, whether about AIDS or about anything else involving human beings. The faltering and all but impossible attempts of the "author" to describe a specific moment in the life of the ill "Pheron" in section §11.4 constitute a specific, non-summary example of the general problems that the Master has describing the life of Belham throughout section§9.82 (and has, equally, trying to find a recognizable reflection of his own life in §9.83). I would hope it's clear that §9.82 and §9.83 dramatize the general case while §11.4 is a specific case (a specific narrative case effective as it recalls and evokes the generality,certainly)—but notthe other way around! The general is the resonance to the specific. This is the "law" controlling the rhetoric of Proust and James. And, for better or for worse, it controls my fictive rhetoric as well. Indeed, my apprehension of the text—more than a dozen years after writing it, true—is so far from yours, at least in terms of this point, I suspect we may simplyhave different notions of the meanings of such terms as "summary,""understanding," and even (or especially) "writing." TL: What can you tell me about your role as both writer-educator and writer-advocate (i.e., your inclusion of specific biomedical discourse on HIV infection and your persistent message that adequate research into vectors of transmission have not been undertaken)? SRD: The message is persistent—and, yes,it still is—because the situation is persistent. Thomas L. Long...