Conversely, traditional pornography has always been thin—even Sade, even Apollinaire. (Many anti-novels, less successful than Beckett’s, read like pornography with the sex excised.) In the bulk of pornographic films and novels, the situations in which the sex occurs are only sketched. Even in Sade, though he allows great length to the didactic passages, the sex has an oddly emblematic quality. In most traditional pornographic movies, the bulk of the extreme close-up footage could be of any couple having sex, and the majority of scenes in most modern pornographic fiction seem to be written from a glossary of some hundred, a hundred fifty phrases denoting stock positions, stock passions, and stock psychological/emotional responses—to allow, quite understandably, the imagination to do the work necessary if the pornography is to be, by Delany’s informal emblem, successful.

Delany’s pornography, however, is rich. One reason why is bypasses eroticism is that, even should a particular act described happen to be Your Thing, he is always telling you too much about it for you to lapse into the fantasy state necessary for excitement. There is too much information about what is going on, how it is being done, who is doing it, and whom it is being done to, so that the reader has as much chance for real, extended arousal as a Masters-and-Johnson researcher busy with lights, photometers, cameras, and measuring tapes. This is why I call Delany’s work anti-pornography.

Of course, the anti-novel is a sub-genre of the novel; in the same way, anti-pornography is a sub-genre of pornography—not, as the morphology of the terms suggests, a distinct and opposite form; it is rather a smaller, apposite area in which some of the genre’s overt traditions have been reserved for particular purposes.

My own reactions on reaching, for the first time, the final line of this dark and bizarre concoction—Hogg—was a sudden rush of resonant horror, as all the images of the novel came back to sweep around me, much like my first reaction to the finale of Moby Dick, where the author calls up all the major images of his book in a verbal recreation of the whirlpool he is describing. It is interesting that other Delany works have been compared with Melville. As august a publication as Time said, a bit extravagantly, of his fine science fiction novel Nova “… it reads like Moby Dick at a strobe-light show.” But both Melville and Delany are concerned with an intensely American experience, though both often abandon the terra firma of America per se to explore it, Melville in a boat, Delany in a space ship. But this (as Delany also says in his preface) leads me from, not to, my point.