The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Longer Views and Atlantis: Three Tales by Samuel R. Delany
James Sallis

Samuel R. Delany. Longer Views. Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1996. 342 pp. $50.00; Paper: $22.00. Atlantis: Three Tales. Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1997. 212 pp. $24.95.

We witness a strange period in which it seems that, at the same time the canon of approved, proper literature narrows, we have ever greater access (through translations, small-press publications, courageous university presses) to the fullest range of literary possibility: Delany, for instance.
Author of thirty or so books, a cornerstone of contemporary science fiction with novels such as Dhalgren and Triton, praised by the likes of Umberto Eco for the innovation and imaginative force of his fantasy quartet Return to Nevèrÿon, Delany is a national treasure unknown to the majority of readers. He is also, as earlier books such as Silent Interviews and The Straits of Messina suggest and as Longer Views affirms once and for all, a formidable, engaging critic.
Opening with a graceful introduction from Ken James, Longer Views goes on to reprise Delany’s brilliant, evocative investigation of modernity, “Wagner/Artaud”; a reading of Donna Haraway’s feminist “Manifesto for Cyborgs”; a self-interrogation into the nature of personal and social sexual experience (“Aversion/Perversion/Diversion”); the collagelike, darting, glancing “Shadow and Ash”; and a marvelous essay on Hart Crane written simultaneously with composition of Delany’s short novel “Atlantis: Model 1924.” An earlier essay, “Shadow,” is included as appendix.
Ken James points out that in previous critical work Delany largely restricted himself to standard essay forms, while here, importing techniques from his later fiction—framing structures, multiple-intersection stories, conflation of personal, social, and historical voices—he comes onto something new in the world, “an experience which simply cannot be found anywhere else in the current American literary landscape.”
Atlantis: Three Tales brings into paperback Delany’s most recent medium-length writing. “Atlantis: Model 1924” supposes a meeting of Delany’s father, newly arrived in New York, with Hart Crane; it’s as densely allusive, as written-over and frought with cultural cargo as anything of Joyce’s, truly a major work. In a sort of inversion of intent, “Citre et Trans” fictionalizes, or reimagines, actual episodes of Delany’s travels in Greece. The model here is Paul Blackburn, stories that seem all fictive stuff, not at all arranged. “Eric, Gwen, and D. H. Lawerence’s Esthetic of Unrectified Feeling” seems at first a memoir on the model of Delany’s earlier Heavenly Breakfast or The Motion of Light in Water. Probing at his early fascination with science fiction, his simultaneous awakening to art and to his own homosexuality, quickly the “essay” takes on the texture and heft of fiction, those “neat and headlong narratives.”
Wesleyan University Press, meanwhile, is to be roundly commended both for its publication of new Delany, such as Longer Views and Atlantis, and for its reissues of classic Delany fiction: Dhalgren, Triton, the Return to Nevèrÿon quartet. [James Sallis]