Samuel R. Delany: disability and 'Dhalgren'

Al Filreis

Samuel R. Delany at the Kelly Writers House, February 2016

Here is an excerpt from an seventy-minute interview/conversation with Samuel. R. Delany. Delany was a Kelly Writers House Fellow in 2016. The discussion took place on February 16 that year. Regina Salmons has done the work of transcription. A video recording of the entire conversation can be viewed here.

Al FILREIS (begins by quoting Delany’s novel Dhalgren)

“As I walked home, I thought about the hospital again” — this is described earlier in the “It was so easy to tell your story and not mention you were homosexual.” I assume he means to tell your story in the clinic. [Continues quoting Delany.] “It was so simple to write about yourself, and just not to say you were black. You could put together a whole book full of anecdotes about yourself without ever revealing you were dyslexic. And how many people whom I’d just met and who’d ask me ‘what do you do?,’ did I answer disingenuously, ‘Oh I type manuscripts for people.’”

So my question, really is about the dyslexia, but there’s a lot going on there and I just wondered if you could comment on why it was so easy in the psychiatric hospital to tell your story without including these fundamental things about you.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

It’s because of the way that language itself works. Language … is this … we live in a — three-, four-, possibly five-dimensional world. Which is to say, it’s got dimensionality and depth and what have you. And it’s got a future and it’s got a past and it’s got possibilities of things that didn’t happen that might happen. And that’s five dimensions that you — and that’s kind of where we live, every moment that we live through is a combination of all of that.

The language by which we talk about it and we remember it, is a one-dimensional tool that is trying to model that. We can’t possibly do all of that. And so, so it’s always, you can always, “Well I just won’t mention that I have a third ear growing out of my — out of the front of my forehead,” I can’t see it, so I don't know whether if other people are responding to it or not. And so that’s how I think this works and it’s fairly easy to do that.

FILREIS

This [passage] is not a criticism of psychotherapy in a psychiatric hospital, because you were clearly telling stories about yourself, I would assume somewhat urgently, without identifying yourself for instance as dyslexic. Which is a major feature of your life and your career as a writer.

DELANY

The word didn’t even exist. I didn’t even know the word until I was twenty-one years old. You know I had grown up as a dyslexic, with all these bizarre things that happened. And they were always causing certain things to happen. It was considered, for when, I was a kid in elementary school, what was pretty clearly because of my dyslexia, was attention-getting behavior.

And so extreme attention-getting behavior because I had this IQ that tested out on one scale a hundred and sixty eight or something. And on another one, it said I was illiterate. So therefore, they didn’t jive, and because they didn’t jive, all sorts of explanations were offered. And some of them were correct and some of them were not. And then eventually, someone noticed that there were a lot of people running around exhibiting the same symptoms. And then there had been all throughout history, like William Butler Yeats and Flaubert and Virginia Woolf —

FILREIS

Were they as severely dyslexic and had related issues as you, do you think?

DELANY

Yeah, I think they did. I think they did. There are probably many kinds of dyslexia. There’s not just one kind of dyslexia, there’s dysgraphia, there’s dyslexia where you can’t read, there’s dyslexia where you can’t write. And I have dysgraphia more than dyslexia. I can read fairly well, I do make slips. Probably more slips than people reading, but I usually catch them.

FILREIS

Is it true also, Chip, that you don’t easily tell left from right?

DELANY

Yeah, it’s always a case of “Which left?,” you know?

FILREIS

What does that mean?

DELANY

Go to the left, go to the left? Which left?

FILREIS

I’ve been driving you around the fucking suburbs, and I know my left from my right but not in Wynnwood.

[Audience laughter]

And you don’t know your left from right, so: seriously challenged situations.

DELANY

Yeah, mhm-mm.

FILREIS

Let me just ask again about this issue of dyslexia. Most people who are deeply dysgraphic don’t write — how many novels, books have you written? Thirty? Forty?

DELANY

Mhm-hmm. And then many, many of them do.

FILREIS

Flaubert, obviously did.

DELANY

Flaubert and Yeats —

FILREIS

We’ll argue about Yeats. But you wrote this book [Dhalgren], it’s eight hundred pages in which the main character is very — well, he’s got intellectual disabilities as we would now call them.

DELANY

Mhm-hmm. Yup!

FILREIS

And he also doesn't know his left from his right which is crucial in his book, because nobody knows where they are going in this city. And eight hundred pages, Chip! You've really worked the quirk pretty well, I would say.

DELANY

Well, it was very easy to do.

FILREIS

It was easy to do, that’s the thing!

DELANY

All I had to do was write the way, you know things … Not every dyslexic is the same. Kid [the protagonist] is not me. Kid, there are no … Kid is very, very different from me.

FILREIS

You didn’t choose your dyslexia, you didn’t choose your sexual identity. You didn’t choose your race. And in your very early story about the Frelks and the Spacer, “Aye, and Gomorrah,” one of the Frelks, one of the main Frelks we meet, says “I didn’t choose to be a Frelk, I simply am a Frelk.” And [another character] says, and I’m paraphrasing: “It’s rather beautiful.” Is the dyslexia a “beautiful thing” in the end? Does it produce beauty? And the other identifications as well?

DELANY

I think there is a tendency in our society in general, to try to excuse the way we treat people who have something wrong. As well, “really it’s beautiful,” “really there’s something …” No. Dyslexia is a pain in the ass!

FILREIS

So this Frelk is just blowing off steam?

DELANY

Yeah, and I think, a disability has to be acknowledged. It’s better to acknowledge a disability as a disability first, then if you can get something out of it.

June 6, 2019

TAGS:

< previous post next post >

RSS feed | subscribe by email

DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.