Re: The Mad Man

At 7:31 AM +0000 12/30/05, Guy_Fawkes99 wrote:
>I would disagree with Steve M. that knowing the author's biography
>is rarely of value in fiction.  I think there's a more complex
>relationship going on.

I probably shouldn't have begun with that short declarative sentence. 
But I don't think it's a particularly valuable question to be asking 
when you've barely begun reading a book. It reduces the reading of 
the novel into a search for clues about the writer, ignoring the 
place that she has turned bits of autobigraphy (often interlaced with 
things the writer could never have experienced) to different purposes 
than they could have fulfilled in her life.

I recall noticing that characters in several of Delany's novels have 
sexual fixations about hands and fingernails (especially bitten 
ones). It's most notable in "Stars in My Pocket" and the third 
Neveryon book, but it also shows up in Dhalgren and a couple of the 
other earlier works. When I finally, later read in his autobiography 
that this is one of Delany's own erotic cues, that connection gave me 
a frisson of readerly pleasure ("See: I knew"), but what, really, did 
knowing that add to my understanding of the works? Not much--because 
Delany discusses his own fixation with hands as an irreducible bit of 
psychological gear-meshing, but he turns Marq Dyeth's obsession (for 
example) into a way of exploring the nature of work and interspecies 
relations on his planet, and he uses it to defuse contemporary 
readers' assumptions about the politics surrounding the gay-straight 
divide, by making Dyeth's erotic focus on hands seem even more 
essential to his sexuality than his gender choice in partners. By 
focusing on the connection between writer and character's similarity 
in this regard, a reader is likely to miss much of the importance of 
this detail in revealing much that is important about the character's 
complex interrrelationships with class and race on his worlds, and 
the roles that class and race play there.


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