When Samuel R. Delany first started writing science fiction in the early 1960s, he was one of only a tiny handful of blacks active in the field, and he had trouble shaking the erroneous label of "the first black science-fiction author." These days, he's a college professor whose writings include essays, critical reviews, sociological treatises, pornography, graphic novels, and autobiographies, but the "sci-fi author" label still sticks with him, and likely always will; his seminal works are still considered classics of the genre. Vintage Books recently republished Delany's 1974 masterwork Dhalgren, a massive, episodic book that explores urban decay in a near-future setting, as the first in a series of Delany reprints scheduled over the next two years. While touring in support of the Dhalgren re-release, Delany spoke to The Onion A.V. Club about Dhalgren, the nature of privacy, and the purpose of literature.
The Onion: In the introduction to Dhalgren, William Gibson describes the book as a riddle that was never meant to be solved. Do you think that's an apt summary?
Samuel R. Delany: Yes. A number of things in Dhalgren are just meant to function as mysteries. They're mysteries when the book begins, and they're mysteries when the book ends. When it first came out, something that probably made the book confusing, especially to younger readers, was that some readers felt the only reason to have a mystery is if you were going to solve it. The idea that certain things in life—and in the universe—don't yield up their secrets is something that requires a slightly more mature reader to accept.
O: Should readers be trying to solve it?
SRD: No, no. I want people to… What do I want? I don't really want people to do anything. People can read the book any way they want. If they want to look for answers, fine. I have no idea whether they'll find them. I assume they'll find some, and probably won't find others. Dhalgren is the kind of book in which you can look for pretty much anything you want. I tried to put as much into it as I could at the time.
O: And when people come back to you and they've solved it, but their "answers" are off in left field, do you feel you've subconsciously tapped into something, or that they're just wrong? How do you answer them?
SRD: Well, that hasn't happened yet. When people actually take the time to read it, most of the things they come up with are usually things I remember putting in there. In fact, one of the more depressing things about reading your fiction 25 years later, or 10 years later, is you realize the only things going on are things you made go on. Strange and interesting and new and wonderful things don't happen. It's the book you wrote, that's all.
O: Is it true that Dhalgren is based in part on your own experiences growing up in Harlem?
SRD: Right. I think certainly one of the things that came to kind of dominate the book is that in the late '60s and early '70s, almost every major city in the country developed a kind of burned-out inner city. In New York, it was Harlem. It happened in Boston, it happened in Philadelphia, it happened in L.A., Cleveland, Cincinnati. These burned-out inner-city sections usually had been black and Hispanic ghettoes before. I used a lot of the images I had seen—I'd grown up in Harlem, I was born there—so that became the kind of fundamental image gallery for the novel. That's kind of how I put it together.
O: Is the resemblance just geographical, or did you draw social parallels, as well?
SRD: Oh, yeah, I think so. Probably not as much as I should have.
O: It's interesting, then, that there's so little overt racial tension in Dhalgren.
SRD: That's one of the things I had actually noticed, that I think a lot of racial tension, especially in the '60s… a lot of it was more talk than actual tension. One of the things I remember was, I got married fairly young, and my wife, Marilyn Hacker, was a young Jewish girl from the Bronx. I was 19, she was 18. People spent a solid year telling us all the problems we were going to have as an interracial couple. And all the problems we had as an interracial couple were people telling us all the problems we'd have as an interracial couple. We just didn't have any. That became kind of, I guess, the template for the way a lot of that was going.
O: You've been very open about your personal and sexual life through your biographies and in personal books like Bread And Wine. How does that affect the way readers approach you, and relate to you?
SRD: I don't know. I'm very much unaware of changes in the relationship. I taught a class at Bryn Mawr a couple of months ago, and someone in the class brought this up. They had, indeed, read Bread And Wine and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. [The latter of which, in part, describes Delany's sexual encounters in gay porn theaters in Times Square. —ed.] And I said, "What is it that you now know about me that you wouldn't have known about me? That I have sex? How does this make me different from anyone else?" What does it mean to know that so-and-so goes to the bathroom every morning? How do you lose your dignity? The idea is that, if this knowledge becomes public, somehow, a layer of dignity is lost. I think that dignity is something you hold yourself, and I just don't feel any less dignified because somebody knows something about my sexual life.
O: Do you think that loss of dignity is the only potential problem with loss of privacy?
SRD: Oh, no, I think privacy is very important. Nevertheless, I think people often value it for the wrong reasons. The reason for privacy is not so that people will not know you go to the bathroom. It's to allow certain things to go on that you don't want other people to know about, when all is said and done. But the things I don't want other people to know about are not my sex life.
O: In Times Square Red, you argue strongly for the importance of interclass contact. How did you develop the habit of crossing class boundaries?
SRD: Mainly, it was what my city gave me, what living in New York meant I had to do. It was something the city promoted, just by being a city. My family trained me to be polite to people I had just met, and that included strangers. You speak when you're spoken to. You look people in the eye when they address you and when you address them back. You don't walk around with your mouth open. When you eat, you only put as much food in your mouth as you can comfortably chew with your mouth closed. You help people in need of help; that includes strangers, and
especially older people. Smile and say "good day" to people on the street, especially once you've established that they're people you'll see with any regularity, even if you don't know their name. This was a code of behavior that was imparted to the children in my Harlem neighborhood and, equally, to the Park Avenue kids with whom I went to elementary school. It was what being a civilized city-dweller entailed. It was a code of behavior that affected our relationships with strangers and all new individuals. Today, many people are brought up with a very different code. Quite possibly you've known someone who was raised with a very different set of expectations. People who do not follow such a code can be very difficult for the people like me who do.
O: You also argued in Times Square Red that people actively need outlets for casual, and public, sexual contact.
SRD: Yes, I did.
O: Why is that necessary? You say in the book that a sexually functioning city is a happy city, but why is casual or public sex necessary for a happy sexual life?
SRD: Well, it's certainly made my life happier. And the people I know who indulge in it, it tends to make their lives happier. It tends to be egotonic rather than ego-dystonic. It makes them feel better. Even in the face of a good many attempts to demonize it, to somehow say that… The basic form of the argument is that, because it doesn't lead to marriage, it must somehow be immature. Which is silly. It takes a while to get over that, even oneself, but it's worth getting over, because people do enjoy it and keep pursuing it.
O: Have you been back to Times Square since the renovations?
SRD: Yes. Because I teach in Philadelphia, I come in at Port Authority pretty much once a week and end up walking through it.
O: How does the experience compare?
SRD: It's a lot more homogenized now. It is harder to make contact with people, to start conversations with people on the street. Which is too bad. On the other hand, I think there were lots of things about it that do defend it. It does draw people, and I think that's good. I wish there was a little more variety in what was offered, but that may change. That may come once the social ecology that people tried to set in place shifts, and the social ecology that the place actually supports comes, finally rises, and adjusts to what's actually going on there. I think it'll be quite interesting to see.
O: Do you think people's fear of interclass contact comes primarily from the media, from social pressures, or from somewhere else?
SRD: I think the media certainly helps. And I think we tend to forget that the media is a huge business. As such, it functions in the larger society as big businesses do. It promotes the ideas that are useful to big businesses, and by extension, are deleterious to small businesses. "Bigger is better." It's very hard for the media not to say that, even when it's trying to. And I think a lot of those ideas do come from the media. Within the circle of the media, I don't think there's any way to get around that.
O: So, the re-education that would get people talking between classes again would have to take place on a small-scale, grassroots level?
SRD: Grassroots, or through smaller… I have some faith in the web to do it, although the web gets larger and larger, and is so dominated by commercial forces, that one wonders how that's going to work. Can one see the social messages through the banner ads?
O: Is entertaining your audience a primary goal, or are you more interested in teaching or enlightening?
SRD: Well, I know Horace said that the purpose of art was to delight and instruct, somewhere back in the second or first century B.C. But I've never seen it as either one. I think the fundamental enterprise is different from both. I'm trying to make a pattern, to erect a verbal experience that has many elements of repetition and pattern resonant from one part to another that I want my reader to go through, and then associate those patterns with any similar patterns in his or her life. And if, by making those associations, he or she can draw something useful out of it, fine. If they see something beautiful in the repetition of those patterns, fine. But that's what I'm about. I'm not about either entertaining or instructing. The entertaining and instructing are secondary fallout from the fundamental thing, which is basically to create an aesthetic object.
O: Do you think there's a difference in the way people read your novels at the beginning of your career, when you'd only published fiction, and the way people read you now?
SRD: Probably a few more folks are willing to give my work a try, though I think the critical works function like all those odd jobs they used to stick under the author's photo on the back cover of the book. You know, "Mr. Authur A. Scrumbler has worked as a pheasant-foot measurer in a Canadian aviary, and has panned for iridium nuggets on the south coast of New Zealand. The adoptive father of 13 Thai children from a coastal fishing village destroyed in 1976 by Philippine soldiers, he lives, together with his children, with his wife, a practicing priestess of Zend Avesta, in a small and recently remodeled Cambodian slaughterhouse for goats." It's just to make the author sound like a more interesting fellow. I'm not only an SF writer: Like Joanna Russ, and Jack Williamson, and James Gunn, and Brian Stableford, and Joe Haldeman, I'm also an English professor. The critical work just makes me sound like enough of an oddball that people are willing to cut me a few inches more slack.