Re: Reading Phallos

On 6/16/06, David Carlton <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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.

Curious. My reaction was almost exactly opposite -- I wished the novel
had remained more lost or mysterious or cryptic. The quoting of long
excerpts, entertaining as some of the excerpts were, deflated a bit of
the mythos. But maybe my expectations were too Borghesian.

(I have also assumed that somewhere, as prep for the meta-text of
_Phallos_, SRD had in fact written the bulk of, or perhaps the
entirety of Phallos -- but that text is only important for SRD as a
stage prop to the published book.)  I imagine other sections of
Phallos that didn't appear in _Phallos_ may perhaps crop up someday in
future books, perhaps as sections entitled "Notes Toward a Modular
Calculus, Part XXVII (or whatever)"?  :)

> 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.

We only get gestures at the outermost layers, like the prefatory page.

> 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.

It might be lighter in page count, but I think some of the conceptual
and philosophical underpinnings of _Phallos_ made it a more difficult
fiction to create than some of his higher page-count works.

-- 
Ron Henry | [email protected]


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