W.D. Clarke’s Reviews > Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing > Status Update

Samuel R. Delaney:

With a Gass or a Nabokov, recognizing the difference between their prose and the ordinary is like recognizing the difference between someone who gets up and walks across the room and someone who leaps up, to grab a trapeze hanging from the ceiling, vaults into the air and spins, balances, and flips.

“But enough of this cursed first person,” it announces at one point in its self-canceling word cascades, “it is really too red a herring.…Bah, any old pronoun will do, provided one sees through it. Matter of habit.” And, later, almost an aside: “I. Who might that be?”

“The [publishing industry's mythical] housewife in Nebraska has, of course, a male counterpart,” [Samuel R.] Delany continues. “In commercial terms, he’s only about a third as important as she is. The basic model for the novel reader has traditionally been female since the time of Richardson. But the male counterpart's good opinion is considered far more prestigious. He’s a high school English teacher in Montana who