Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form by Matthew Cheney;

Author:Matthew Cheney;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

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Improper Arts: The Mad Man

The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

— James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

In the third update to his “Tales of Plagues and Carnivals” postscript, written in July 1988 (for the Grafton edition of Flight from Nevèrÿon in the UK), Delany addressed the effect of AIDS on his own life: “In spring of ’84 I could write that personally I knew no one with the disease. Today it is the single largest slayer among my friends and acquaintances” ([1985] 1994: 364). As the crisis deepened, as knowledge of the disease’s etiology and vectors developed, as AIDS came to be seen not as a local problem but an international health emergency, as political activism grew more and more sophisticated in its quest to increase public awareness and influence medical and political institutions, Delany’s writing strategies shifted.

Whenever asked, Delany denied being an AIDS activist, saying, for instance, in a 1996 interview, “Outside of writing and writing-related activities (lecturing to and talking with various groups, usually in colleges around the country), I’ve done very little. I am not a member of any organization” (1999: 125). Jeffrey Tucker has written that “in his numerous works of fiction and nonfiction essays that address AIDS […] Delany effects his own brand of AIDS activism” (2004: 233), which, whether we agree with the idea of writing-as-activism or not, does identify an impulse within many of Delany’s writings from 1983 through the 1990s, and helps explain some of the shifts in his writing career during that time: an impulse to address (and perhaps shape) the discourse of AIDS in a way that would not reify homophobic and heteronormative assumptions.

In 1987, Paula Treichler wrote that the “homophobic meanings associated with AIDS continue to be layered into existing discourse” because the “text constructed around the gay male body—the epidemic of signification so evident in the conceptions cited above and elsewhere in this essay—is driven in part by the need for constant flight from sites of potential identity and thus the successive construction of new oppositions that will barricade self from not-self” (285). Those barricades were in need of storming: “The question is how to disrupt and renegotiate the powerful cultural narratives surrounding AIDS. Homophobia is inscribed within other discourses at a high level, and it is at a high level that they must be interrupted and challenged” (285–286). In many ways, Delany’s work had sought at least since Equinox, Hogg, and Dhalgren to interrupt and challenge homophobic discourses, but from “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” onward, it would add an energetic, radical intervention into the “powerful cultural narratives surrounding AIDS” that Treichler identifies.

The writer in crisis

After Return

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