The mainstream of American literature would, of course, claim this technique for its own. But its writers were always concerned with generating the greatest number of vibrations from (rather than juxtapositions of) individual objects, individual situations, individual actions, detonated by as much verbal charge as each author, using his individual verbal methods, could muster.

The mainstream American writer must practically invent his own language.

But Chandler’s is the language still handed to the maverick. The idioms and topical phrases change, year to year, decade to decade. Other than that, however, it remains, structurally, practically intact. It is a vastly supple language: it can be glitteringly cold; it can be tender-tough; it can chant; it can yawp; it can sing. More at home in the street, it can still enter any drawing room, business conference, or ambassadorial hall—though seldom without gaining a slightly ironic note. That is was often abused is the inevitable fate of a fine tool tossed away in the corner, but it was been taken up by enough superb artists, working in their maverick fields—Stanley G. Weinbaum, Bester, Sturgeon, the early Zelazny, in science fiction; Hammett, Chandler, and both MacDonalds, in the mystery; Nathaniel West, Darryl Ponicsan [The Last Detail], Robert Kelly [The Scorpions and Cities] in that oddest of American genres, the Art Novel—to have proved itself over and over. I do not mean to imply that each writer does not use this tool in a recognizably different way. Each uses its virtues to make it very much his own.

What sort of language does it become on Delany’s page?

What sort of language is it in Hogg?

It is clear. (I do not think there is one ambiguous sentence, despite colloquial grammar, from beginning to end of the book.) It is supple. It is cold. There is perhaps a slight reliance on the genitive over the prepositional (“… his fist’s black knot …” rather than “the black knot of his fist …”), presumably because, though the diction of the former is cramped and angular, so is the image; and it’s briefer. Verbal economy, Delany has written elsewhere, is the center of style.

The discussion of language is the place to address myself to the question: Is Hogg obscene?