But it is said with such intelligence and persuasiveness that, if we refuse to listen, it is we who are condemned.

V

So far, in our textural, structural, and political discussion, we have been fairly, strictly formal. But if a book is ultimately to be taken seriously, other things than its formal excellences must be considered.

And this is the point where the serious critic is tempted to say: “Now I shall leave you, the serious reader, to consider them.”

One of the problems with saying more, of course, is that Hogg is a new novel. It does not have the advantage of having been around for sixty years, or even six months (as I write this), to garner the benefit of discussion consensus on What It Is Trying To Do. It is a book I was sent in manuscript and asked to see if I might say something favorable about it.

It is a book that, between manuscript and galleys, I have now read through three times end to end; and have read sections of it over many more. It is a book I write about far more from compulsion than I do merely to provide a legitimizing afterword. I think it has something dark and dangerous to say about the world, and about all our relations with it. Though for exactly what to be defined, other voices than mine will have to enter the dialogue.

I can only marvel.

Hogg is not a novel to be interpreted. It is a novel to be experienced. All a critic can really do is to warn the prospective reader that to experience it fully, he must undergo much terror and must bridle his disgust; or, with the reader who has just emerged from the novel, the critic can discuss some of that terror’s quality.

I began with a mention of some of the classic overtones in Delany’s work. Let me return to them as I move toward summation.

As Hogg throws some of the traditional conventions of pornography into reverse, it also reverses some of the values of classical tragedy. The characters and situations in Hogg are terrible and they are pathetic. But where tragedy begins with characters who are terrible in their height, rendered piteous by their fall, the monsters in Hogg begin as pathetic. Then their pathos is stripped away, only to show them as even more pathetic; then the process is repeated. Then repeated. And repeated—insistently, inexorably, and without surcease, till somehow, in full denial of the romantic claim that the pathetic can only elicit low emotions, the characters pass into the terrible: by the book’s end, Hogg and Denny, if not the narrator, are larger than life, casting shadows far longer than our first encounters with them could have possibly indicated. Without losing an iota of their texture, their smell, or any physical presence, they are becoming archetypes.