Re: Reading Phallos

On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 13:29:07 -0000, "Pete Lenz" <[email protected]> said:

> So, anyone whose read Phallos, sound off! 

I read it a little more than a year ago; this is what I posted here at
the time:

I finished _Phallos_ a couple of days ago.  On the one hand, I quite
enjoyed it.  On the other hand, I'm rather disappointed by it, as
well.

I first read part of it in a chapbook that came with, I think, _1984_.
From that, I got the idea that the book was about somebody searching
for a copy of a book called Phallos.  There was some summarizing and
excerpting of the fictional Phallos (I'll write _Phallos_ when
referring to Delany's book, and just Phallos for the book referred to
within _Phallos_), but I assumed that the chapbook largely consisted
of that just because that was the easiest way to get a coherent
extract of the full novel.

Unfortunately (as is fairly clear from the page count of the final
novel), that summarizing and excerpting is pretty much all you get.
It's actually quite a lot of fun; I like the plot he's made up for
Phallos, I like the characters, and there's typical Delany playfulness
(intellectual and otherwise).  But my first reaction upon finishing
the book was "that was all well and good, but I wish he'd tried to
write Phallos instead of a summary of it".  That would have been a
book well worth reading.  (Though I'm not sure he could have brought it
off in the alleged 500-ish pages that Phallos is supposed to have
taken up: just making the dirty bits explicit would probably have
bumped up the page count most of the way to that level.)

Another possibility, suggested by my reading of the chapbook, would
have been to add more of the outer story of the person searching for
Phallos, as I'd initially assumed would have been the case.  These
days, my reading tastes don't lean to quite that much layering, but
I'm sure Delany would have done a great job with it.

Incidentally, as hinted at above, the explicit dirty bits have been
almost entirely removed; there's description of the dirty bits, but I
wouldn't call _Phallos_ pornography at all.  (Certainly not in
comparison to _Hogg_ or _The Mad Man_ or _Equinox_.)

I probably would have had a different reaction if this had come out a
year after _The Mad Man_.  But we've been waiting a decade for another
piece of Delany fiction; I expected something a little more
substantial than this.

I'm pretty curious where he's planning to go next, fiction-wise.  And
I'm glad that _On Writing_ is almost done.  Though, these days, I find
the idea of anything by Delany being in its "last edits" almost
risible...

David Carlton
[email protected]


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