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The Mad Man, by Samuel Delany
Jan. 19th, 2021 11:21 am[Very belated what-I'm-reading post! I'd half-written this when I moved house a month ago and it got swept away in busyness.]
When I took this off the bookstore shelf (Aha! Unusual Delany!) I didn't know it was a porn novel. But by the end of the proem I did, because it quite deliberately wraps up all the sex the book's going to feature into one symbol and says, “If you don't want to read extended treatments of everything mentioned in these two pages – as to race kink, level of realism, species, and range of fluids – here's your warning.”
It isn't quite true that I read the book despite its being porn rather than because of it, because it was really interesting to read so many sex scenes which couldn't have been less erotic to me if they'd been specifically trying. That will no longer be a selling point if I go on to read a second of Delaney's porn novels. My trajectory started with working out what triggers my gag reflex versus what's just interesting (piss-drinking was in the second category and... I don't want to give examples from the first, but there were many). From there it slowly slid into boredom. The sex scenes are talking backward and forward to each other and being engagingly observed human moments, but they also do rely for pages at a time on the assumption that readers are interested in the sex for its own sake, which after the eighth variation on the specific kinks of the protagonist, was wearing on me. (The first-person narrator never describes his own pleasure or desire, although sometimes quotes himself saying things like, “That feels good.” Which might work to create a natural immersion if the bridge between the sex he's having and his implied feelings about it was intuitive to me; since it wasn't, I felt distanced instead).
The other bit of 'because porn, not despite,' is that I don't often see bodies and sexuality described this much, this well – so, as someone who has both, it was affirming to read, in a 'training a telescope on that branch over there makes me more aware of the branch I'm standing on' kind of way.
If one were reading The Mad Man entirely despite its being porn – well, parts of it would just be dull right from the get go, but there'd still be plenty to find: it's as serious about being a novel as it is about being porn, as well as vice versa. As much as Delany's science fiction, the book rotates the concept of 'normal' until it looks just as strange as everything it claims to exclude. The sex is braided with and mirrored by the protagonist's academic researches into the life of a shooting-star young philosopher, and the extent to which who knows what about the philosopher's sex life, and how comfortable they are with it, has shaped what information about him is available. The protagonist has a lot of sex with homeless men on the streets of New York, just like the philosopher he's researching did; much of it is unprotected, after the arrival of AIDS, and that's a sea change between them.
I like how Delaney puts novels together; the way the meaning of the title modulates as the book goes on, the way the names of the book's sections, seen in the contents page, set up expectations in advance which he can then play on. I knew nothing about the book going in, and one reason I'm not saying more about what happens in it is that it was really fun knowing almost nothing and slowly discovering what the book was; and it's long enough and dense enough that it can be multiple braided things.
A point of discomfort: there are women in and important to this book, but what there isn't, really, is the place of sexism in the systems of the world. It's mostly a book about cis gay sexuality, but sometimes the edges feel uncomfortable, as when a homeless man mentions flashing his penis at a woman on the street as a neutral example of one of his turnons – leaving aside the likelihood that his behavior might read as threatening, let alone that, in context, the reading might be accurate. There are things which make the protagonist say “Hey, stop that,” and things he notes the dubiousness of in passing, but this floats by him like he doesn't notice it, and seems to float by the book, too. (The book's rightly interested in not stating that homeless men are primarily dangerous, or society's primary dangers; the discussion of this particular point is one I can perfectly well have with the little Delany I'm constructing in my head, but I think the book would have been strengthened by putting it on the actual page. I mention it because I've heard, or been alerted to, notes of sexism sounding here and there in several other Delany books, making this one seem louder).
…
The Mad Man was a good match for recent Film Society films – after Only Lovers Left Alive I wandered around the CBD's rain-mirrored backstreets, gave money to a homeless man (who I'm seventy percent sure wouldn't have seemed to be offering me sex if I hadn't been reading The Mad Man – whatever his vague offer meant, I declined), and sat in a bar with a glass of beer and a rugby game in an overhead corner, reading about men pissing on each other while drinking beer in a bar in New York. I'd been experimenting with reading speed; just then my mood combined with the alcohol to let my eyes track once across the page for each beat of the music, which is perhaps ten times faster than my usual, and it made the scene more rather than less vivid. (And makes the section of another Delany novel where a man reads novels in seconds, each at the touch of a hand, more imaginable, since now I have a trajectory to extend in its direction).
And then, because Film Society had been programming love stories, The Mad Man was a good book to have been reading at the beginning of God's Own Country. I don't think I'd otherwise have parsed the naked back of a man vomiting into a toilet as a genre-tag for romance. (Not that the film share kinks with the Delaney, but it does share the matter-of-fact bodiliness common to lovers and sheep farmers: it's a beautiful gay love story which I thoroughly recommend, and, for all the harshness of its landscape, its characters, their failures and losses, it's deeply kind).
When I took this off the bookstore shelf (Aha! Unusual Delany!) I didn't know it was a porn novel. But by the end of the proem I did, because it quite deliberately wraps up all the sex the book's going to feature into one symbol and says, “If you don't want to read extended treatments of everything mentioned in these two pages – as to race kink, level of realism, species, and range of fluids – here's your warning.”
It isn't quite true that I read the book despite its being porn rather than because of it, because it was really interesting to read so many sex scenes which couldn't have been less erotic to me if they'd been specifically trying. That will no longer be a selling point if I go on to read a second of Delaney's porn novels. My trajectory started with working out what triggers my gag reflex versus what's just interesting (piss-drinking was in the second category and... I don't want to give examples from the first, but there were many). From there it slowly slid into boredom. The sex scenes are talking backward and forward to each other and being engagingly observed human moments, but they also do rely for pages at a time on the assumption that readers are interested in the sex for its own sake, which after the eighth variation on the specific kinks of the protagonist, was wearing on me. (The first-person narrator never describes his own pleasure or desire, although sometimes quotes himself saying things like, “That feels good.” Which might work to create a natural immersion if the bridge between the sex he's having and his implied feelings about it was intuitive to me; since it wasn't, I felt distanced instead).
The other bit of 'because porn, not despite,' is that I don't often see bodies and sexuality described this much, this well – so, as someone who has both, it was affirming to read, in a 'training a telescope on that branch over there makes me more aware of the branch I'm standing on' kind of way.
If one were reading The Mad Man entirely despite its being porn – well, parts of it would just be dull right from the get go, but there'd still be plenty to find: it's as serious about being a novel as it is about being porn, as well as vice versa. As much as Delany's science fiction, the book rotates the concept of 'normal' until it looks just as strange as everything it claims to exclude. The sex is braided with and mirrored by the protagonist's academic researches into the life of a shooting-star young philosopher, and the extent to which who knows what about the philosopher's sex life, and how comfortable they are with it, has shaped what information about him is available. The protagonist has a lot of sex with homeless men on the streets of New York, just like the philosopher he's researching did; much of it is unprotected, after the arrival of AIDS, and that's a sea change between them.
I like how Delaney puts novels together; the way the meaning of the title modulates as the book goes on, the way the names of the book's sections, seen in the contents page, set up expectations in advance which he can then play on. I knew nothing about the book going in, and one reason I'm not saying more about what happens in it is that it was really fun knowing almost nothing and slowly discovering what the book was; and it's long enough and dense enough that it can be multiple braided things.
A point of discomfort: there are women in and important to this book, but what there isn't, really, is the place of sexism in the systems of the world. It's mostly a book about cis gay sexuality, but sometimes the edges feel uncomfortable, as when a homeless man mentions flashing his penis at a woman on the street as a neutral example of one of his turnons – leaving aside the likelihood that his behavior might read as threatening, let alone that, in context, the reading might be accurate. There are things which make the protagonist say “Hey, stop that,” and things he notes the dubiousness of in passing, but this floats by him like he doesn't notice it, and seems to float by the book, too. (The book's rightly interested in not stating that homeless men are primarily dangerous, or society's primary dangers; the discussion of this particular point is one I can perfectly well have with the little Delany I'm constructing in my head, but I think the book would have been strengthened by putting it on the actual page. I mention it because I've heard, or been alerted to, notes of sexism sounding here and there in several other Delany books, making this one seem louder).
…
The Mad Man was a good match for recent Film Society films – after Only Lovers Left Alive I wandered around the CBD's rain-mirrored backstreets, gave money to a homeless man (who I'm seventy percent sure wouldn't have seemed to be offering me sex if I hadn't been reading The Mad Man – whatever his vague offer meant, I declined), and sat in a bar with a glass of beer and a rugby game in an overhead corner, reading about men pissing on each other while drinking beer in a bar in New York. I'd been experimenting with reading speed; just then my mood combined with the alcohol to let my eyes track once across the page for each beat of the music, which is perhaps ten times faster than my usual, and it made the scene more rather than less vivid. (And makes the section of another Delany novel where a man reads novels in seconds, each at the touch of a hand, more imaginable, since now I have a trajectory to extend in its direction).
And then, because Film Society had been programming love stories, The Mad Man was a good book to have been reading at the beginning of God's Own Country. I don't think I'd otherwise have parsed the naked back of a man vomiting into a toilet as a genre-tag for romance. (Not that the film share kinks with the Delaney, but it does share the matter-of-fact bodiliness common to lovers and sheep farmers: it's a beautiful gay love story which I thoroughly recommend, and, for all the harshness of its landscape, its characters, their failures and losses, it's deeply kind).
