Hogg
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Hogg
Samuel R. Delany
FOR MICHAEL PERKINS
THE SCORPION GARDEN
Editor’s Note: Hogg, the novel “The Scorpion Garden” prefaces, is Delany’s second experiment in pornography. The first, Equinox, was published by Lancer Books as The Tides of Lust in 1973. Maurice Girodias of The Olympia Press expressed interest in Hogg before he quit publishing; no other publisher, however, has stepped forward to repeat M. Girodias’ offer. At present, there appears little likelihood that Hogg will be published.
—Douglas Barbour
“But how, Mr. Auden,” the interview from Life continued, “do you know if what you are reading is really pornography?”
“That’s simple,” replied the poet. “It gives me an erection.”
Questions of “author’s intentions,” “the leer of the sensualist,” and “lewd and lascivious thoughts” aside, I am content with this as the informal emblem, if not the formal definition, of pornography—with all its contingent ambiguities: What is pornographic for X may not be not be pornographic for Y. What is pornographic for Z at six o’clock may not be pornographic for Z at quarter to seven. What is pornographic for the reader may not have been pornographic for the writer; and vice versa.
Hogg is a work of pornography—that is, it was pornographic for the writer at the time of its writing. Rereading the many-times reworked manuscript, however, it strikes me that, in many places, it accomplishes many things I should like to see in any novel and—you must allow for the writer’s bias towards his latest work—in the rest is preparing to, or recovering from, accomplishing them, with varying skill. Yet, it is only a novel.
Somehow, with such material, or, rather, material from such volatile places in the psyche, one is surprised it is no more.
It does not twitter, bong, flash nor, in general, show any signs of life other than aesthetic. After all that was undergone in its creation—after all, it is pornography—one might expect the manuscript itself to quiver and vibrate beside the typewriter, sending out rays to alter the lives of passersby on the street! But, while it is pornography, it is only a novel. And the pornographic novel is only a novel of a particular type.
Two years ago (well after Hogg’s initial draft, and well before its final) I listened to a member of the Académie Française, at a small New England University, deliver a lecture (I translate the title freely): “Sade, The Compleat Bourgeois.” It was a lecture of great humour, quite a tour de force. To have belabored, during our discussion following, the fact that its main points, well embodied in its title, stood against all historical evidence, as well as the literary and scholarly consensus of the past three hundred years, would have been to attack wit with a jackhammer. But when our discussion gave way to the inevitable sherry party, where the professor received our compliments, someone did remark, now that our avowedly socialist scholar had finished with his dismissal of the Divine Marquis as a mere bourgeois moralist: Granted Sade’s bourgeois morality, perhaps his particular type of it is the only admirable aspect of the bourgeoisie—the aspect which, when one bourgeois recognizes it in a second, the second is immediately clapped into jail or an asylum; for it is that aspect which can ignited the fuel of revolution garnered by the world’s oppressed.