Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
Samuel
R. Delany’s new novel, Through
the Valley of the Nest of Spiders,
is over 800 pages, which makes it the longest book he has ever
written (even longer than Dhalgren).
It is also one of the best novels by anyone that I have read in quite
a long time. Indeed, I would go so far as to say (as I already put it
on Twitter) that it is the best English-language novel that I know
of, of the 21st century so far.
Through
the Valley of the Nest of Spiders tells
the story of Eric Jeffers and his life partner Morgan “Shit”
Haskell. Eric is white, though he has been brought up mostly by his
black stepfather; Shit is black, though he has been brought up mostly
by his white father. We meet Eric and Shit when they first meet, as
teenagers; and we follow them for seventy years, until extreme old
age. The location is a kind of backwater, a (fictional) small town on
the Georgia coast, with little going on economically except for the
summer tourist trade. The novel starts more or less in the present,
in 2007 when Eric is just a few days shy of his 17th birthday; and it
ends in the 2080s, when Eric is in his nineties. To a degree, the
novel is science-fictional; we hear of future cultural ferment (the
2030s sound a lot like a freer and more advanced 1960s), of changes
in social mores (though homophobia hasn’t disappeared, same-sex
marriages are legal everywhere, and pretty much taken for granted);
of terrorist nuclear attacks, of colonies on the Moon and Mars, of
gas-free automobiles, of new telepresence and virtual reality
technologies, and so on. But all of this happens in the background,
and only affects the main characters at second hand (as they live
their lives in a backwater, and are largely unconcerned with
contemporary media). The emphasis remains firmly on the uneventful
happenings of everyday life.
There’s
an enormous amount of sex in the book — on a level that at least
equals that of The
Mad Man,
and that is only matched within Delany’s oeuvre by his early
“pornographic” novels, Hogg andEquinox.
The book is therefore very much of a hybrid — between what might be
called mainstream literary ambitions, and those of the two
“paraliterary” genres (as Delany has called them in his critical
writing) pronography and science fiction. It remains to be seen how
this will affect the book’s overall reception. Its ambitions, and
its achievements, are immense in ways that recall, and equal, the
great novels of the 19th and 20th centuries; but it differs from
these because, most notably, its pages are filled with so much gay
sex.
Delany’s
writing of sex is itself one of the most noteworthy, powerful, and
original things about the novel. There is a stylistics to it that
already appeared in The
Mad Man,
but that is brought to a pitch of perfection here. I don’t know how
to explain it except to say that Delany is the
most materialist fiction
writer I have ever encountered. His evocation of sex is very much of
a piece with his evocation of other sorts of sensuous details of life
and experience. Delany’s autobiography is called The
Motion of Light in Water,
and descriptions of shimmerings and shadings, of delicate preceptual
differentiations, and indeed specifically of sunlight reflecting off
the waves at the seashore, are quite prevalent in Through
the Valley of the Nest of Spiders,
as in many of Delany’s texts. And these are not so different from
his descriptions of bodily/sexual sensations. In the present book,
Delany gives us an intensely vivid, sensual and materially
thick description of “bodies and pleasures” (to use a phrase from
Foucault). A wide range of sexual acts among men are described: from
sucking and penetration to snot-eating and piss-drinking, to
masturbation and nail-biting (something that comes up in many of
Delany’s novels), to various sorts of voyeuristic arousal, to the
enjoyment of funky body odors, to just plain cuddling. The only thing
uniting them is that they are all exclusively among males, and that
they are all consensual.
Although
the explicitness of the sexual descriptions in Through
the Valley of the Nest of Spiders certainly
qualifies as “pornographic”, the ethos of
Delany’s sex-writing is vastly different from what is commonly
understood either about “pornography” or about its more
respectable upscale cousin “erotica.” Some readers will find
parts of Delany’s descriptions arousing, and others will not —
there is no way to assume just who the “reader” is, after all;
but in either case the point is much more to describe the arousal of
the characters undergoing these acts, than it is to produce arousal
in the (ideal or actual) reader. Another way to put this is to say
that — even if the sheer plethora of available sexual acts in the
world of the novel is something of a fantasy (or better, a fairy
tale) — the orientation of
the sex-writing is towards desire-fulfilled-as-bodily-pleasure,
rather than towards the fantasy of desire-projected-beyond, or
desire-that-exceeds-any-possibility-of-fulfillment. It’s desire as
concrete production of affects, as in Spinoza, rather than desire as
“lack” (as in Hegel and Lacan). We have multiple, concretely- and
bodily-rooted arousals and satisfactions, rather than some furious
drive towards some infinitude (whether of repletion or of
self-annihilation). The characters often speak of doing “nasty”
stuff, but there is no sense of (say) Bataille’s transgression or
Genet’s willed abjection. I myself regard Bataille and Genet as
among the greatest writers of the old past century; but I think it’s
important to see that Delany is doing something new and different
here, something that is as far from such 20th century art pornography
as it is from more commercial (straight or gay) pornography.
Delany’s
descriptions/evocations of multiple bodily arousals and pleasures
also shade into descriptions or evocations of interpersonal
relations, or of what is sometimes called “community” (a word I
resist, because it has censorious implications in many contexts; but
I cannot find a better word here). The sexual acts that Delany
describes also involve, and create, forms of affiliationbetween
people. These affiliations are grounded in bodily pleasures, in the
pleasures of sharing, and in the multiple ways that people can find
mutually enabling forms of contact. It’s a vision of both bodily
desire, and human sympathy or being-together, that seems to me in an
odd way more reminiscent of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier
than it is of Freud. Each person’s particular twists of desire
are what enlivens him or her, without having to be “accounted
for,” or matched to any norms—so that they are entirely
singular and autonomous to but also with the open,
outward-looking potentiality of creating affinities with other people
who have similar and/or complementary desires (someone who likes to
drink piss meets someone who likes to piss in other people’s
mouths; and in turn they meet someone else who likes to watch
this . . .). With all these singularities of desire, nobody is
ever drearily “the same” as anybody else; but also, with the
widening circles of these singularities, everyone is likely to
find at least some other people with whom to share at
least something that
moves, excites, or arouses them. It is in the midst of such continual
fluctuating action that Eric and Shit, and also some of the other
couples or threesomes (or more-than-threesomes) that we meet in the
course of the novel must negotiate, both their primary emotional
relationships with one another, and their
sexual-emotional engagements, of various longer or shorter durations,
with other people as well.
With
all this, I don’t mean to imply that the novel is only about
sex. It is about sex overwhelmingly, but it is also about lots of
other things. The key point is that sex is part of
the everydayness of
Eric’s and Shit’s lives, and of the world they share. What really
makes the novel so powerful is the sheer accumulation of incidents
and everyday habits in Eric’s and Shit’s lives, over some 800
pages, or over the 70 years that they live together. There is lots of
repetition, but also all sorts of subtle modulations of perception,
habit, interest, and desire. As the characters get older, the sex
diminishes, and also our sense of time gets changed — so that
longer periods of time seem to pass more quickly. Reading the novel,
we come to live and feel along with Eric and Shit, just because
so much of their lives are given to us in the course of those
800 pages — we get the motifs and endless variations which are at
the heart of what it means, for anyone, to “have a life.”
It’s amazing to have this sort of feeling in a long book where, in
a sense, “nothing happens” — there are no great deeds, no
striving against mighty dangers, no special adventures — just the
adventure which is the stuff of living itself, no matter how quietly
and uneventfully. Eric and Shit are not important players in the
history of the world, and they know that they are not. They spend
twenty years as garbagemen, then thirteen years as managers of a
porno movie theater, and finally forty-odd years as handymen on an
island off the coast that has found semi-prosperity as a lesbian
artists’ colony.
In
all these settings, Eric and Shit do their work; they find both
sexual (with other men) and simply social (with women) ways to
associate with others and feel some sense of community; they have
lots of fun (or sexual/sensual enjoyment); and also they strive to
help other people when necessary, and to be kind to
others, as much as possible. As Spinoza might put it, they work
toward ever-greater compositions of positive affects. Indeed, Spinoza
is something like the tutelary spirit of the novel. Around the middle
of the book (or around the middle of Eric’s life), an older gay man
gives Eric a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics;
and for the rest of his life (or the rest of the novel), Eric reads
this text over and over again. He originally finds it
incomprehensible; but gradually he comes to make sense of it. We
aren’t directly given Eric’s thoughts about Spinoza; but
gradually we discern that the whole impulse and organization of
Eric’s life, with his cultivation of positive affects, of
widespread generosity, and of ever-widening affiliations with others,
is very much a Spinozistic one.
And
this leads me to the one major aspect of the novel that could be
called “utopian,” or a “fantasy,” in the sense that (even
more than wide general acceptance of the sexual acts portrayed
throughout the book) it is something that, unfortunately, is scarcely
imaginable in America today. Eric and Shit and their friends are able
to lead the sorts of lives they do because they receive the discreet
backing of the Kyle Foundation, an organization set up by a
black gay millionaire, in order to give support to the lives of gay
men of color. Because of the Foundation’s backing, Eric and Shit
and their entire community have access, even when they are most
poor and deprived, to living space and food and good medical care.
Also, they encounter & suffer from far less homophobia
and racism (though it of course remains present, and comes up at
several points in the course of the novel) than would be the
case in the “real” world as we know it today. In this way I
think the novel suggests that the possibility of a humane life
for all really depends upon at least this minimum of protection from
the vagaries, not just of bigotry, but of “the market” as well.
In effect, this makes the novel into an argument for socialism, as
well as for the humane pleasures of nonprocreative sex. And this has
something to do, in turn, with the kindness or generosity which is so
big a feature of Eric’s life and actions, and is the ethos of
the book as a whole.
By
the end of Through
the Valley of the Nest of Spiders,
I found my reading experience to be pretty much overwhelming. Over
the course of the book, we get to know Eric and Shit as intimately,
and as well, as we have ever gotten to know any of the great
characters in the history of modern Western literature. I mean this
less in the sense of “depth” than in that of breadth. (“Depth
psychology” I think is overrated — and it is far rarer a thing to
encounter, whether in “real life” or in novelistic and cinematic
narratives, than we often suppose. Neither Hamlet, nor Raskolnikov,
nor Leopold Bloom, nor Proust’s narrator have anything to do with
depth psychology. They are all defined as rich characters by the
range of the discourses and affiliations associated with them, as
well as by the absence of any master key to who they are. This is
what makes them so, well, lifelike). As we read Through
the Valley of the Nest of Spiders,
we gradually accumulate, around Eric and Shit, a wealth of
perceptions and sensory impressions and likes and dislikes; of habits
and wishes and preferences and physical inclinations; and also of
affiliations and alliances, and points of both contact and distance —
and it’s often hard (and not really relevant) to discern which of
these are internal and which external, which are private, which are
shared by the two of them, and which are shared more widely. And with
this wealth of connections, with this broad web of feelings and
meanings, particular new facts or meetings or happenings or
encounters often take on a weight that they could not have just by
themselves. Memories surprisingly return in full intensity; but they
also weaken, wear away, become general instead of specific, fade or
get confused. The latter parts of the novel are rich because of how
they follow from, and draw upon, everything that has come before. But
they also register a powerful poignancy that comes from people dying,
from changes that cannot be reversed, and finally from the very
experience of aging, with the gradual lessening of physical
vigor and of sexual excitement; the novel goes into great detail on
the facts of how getting old changes our relationship to the
past, and even to what we most vividly remember.
I
don’t know how to conclude this brief account except by reiterating
how rich the
novel is, and also how generous —
in the sheer profusion of what it offers us as readers, and allows us
to share. Conservative critics (I mean this both politically and
aesthetically) often like to go on about universal values that great
works of art are supposed to inculcate. But Delany confirms what
Proust and Deleuze already knew: that the only “universality”
worthy of the name is one that rejects bland generalities, and
instead affirms and passes through the most singular of
passions.Through
the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is
not a book about capital-L Love, but rather one about two boys who
fall in love with one another at least in part because they both so
greatly enjoy chewing on their own, and each other’s, snot.
Something like that might seem disconcerting for those of us (myself
included) who are not snot-eaters — or simply for those of us who
are not accustomed to talk about such things. But such are the
details, or the singular affects, that are composed
together to
make up an actual life, as well as the fictional depiction of such a
life. And it is this sense of actual life — not of something
special or heroic or earthshattering, but just of a
life —
that Delany’s novel brings us.
Review By
Steven Shaviro http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/
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