An extremely perceptive female reader once remarked in my hearing, “Literature survives by fertile ambiguity.” And an equally perceptive male poet once committed to a letter, reprinted many times, “All criticism comes down to a more or less happy misunderstanding.” These two statements can be used to define (or better, in Delany’s term, emblemize) the positive and negative poles of the romantic axis, the main axis of American literature and letters. But there is a classic axis that cuts across it. Its tenets are not so easily defined: classic literature is harder and, finally, more complex; and in America, as I have said, the classic is maverick rather than central to established literary concerns—whether it appears in the avant garde of the little magazine or the commercial works of mystery, science fiction, or in the most recently rejuvenated and perhaps liveliest genre, pornography. The substance of classic work (and Delany’s is) is all in what is told. (And the classics are notorious for telling all—which is why they so upset those super-romantics, the Victorians.) Its significance is in what is suggests.

Its technique is the organization of what it tells into the most suggestive form.

But even if the coordinates of concern continue the rotation begun with the turning of attention of “serious” critics to “popular” culture, I still doubt if Delany-the-pornographer will ever be an accepted writer. His message is too dark.

I have mentioned my first response to Hogg.

My second was to search, almost hysterically, for some romantic synopsis.

I fell on the frequently quoted lines of Yeats:

But love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement.

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.

As quickly, I had to turn away. Moving as they are, these lines—we must insistently remember if we are to understand the seriousness of the book—define exactly the attitude the book is not concerned with. The word “love” does not appear once in the novel. At one point, the narrator misses Hogg to a point where he is about to cry. At another, Hogg goes to a fair amount of effort to repossess the narrator who has been spirited off by Nigg and Hawk. But to call the relationship of the narrator and Hogg “love” at any time during the book, or to assume it partakes of anything but the structure of the most sado-masochistic infatuation, does not dignify it in the least; it merely imposes a romantic distortion. Delany is concerned with something vaster and icier. The Human Condition (as much a romantic cliché as “love”) comes closer to naming that concern. But it is a cliché, and therefore not accurate enough.