'Any review of Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg must prepare the reader for the explicitness of the content; an explicitness marked even before you begin to read the book by the keyword indicators in the peritext.
'"1. Rapists – Fiction. 2. Sex crimes – Fiction. 3. Pedophilia – Fiction. 4. Victims of violent crimes – Fiction. 5. Children – Crimes against – Fiction."
'Hogg is explicitly and violently pornographic. Delany takes his readers to the limit of readability – but as long as you keep reading, you repeatedly face up to some of the darkest and most carefully hidden parts of your own desire. Presented in a similar format to the conquests of Walter in My Secret Life by Frank Harris (1890) and the narratives of de Sade, Hogg follows the encounters of the boy-narrator-protagonist in a catalogue of sexual and violent acts which he witnesses, or more often participates in, particularly in relation to the dirt-encrusted trucker come hit-man Hogg.
'Delany forces his reader through page after page of violence and abuse. As a reader I found myself varying between arousal and disgust (and occasionally disgust at my arousal), between groping my throbbing erection and plunging my hand into my crotch the way nervous children do, trying to find my shrivelled cock, which had withdrawn in horror at the narrative. Reading Hogg makes you viscerally complicit. ...
'Written in San Francisco in 1969 and revised over the next four years, Delany did not find a publisher for Hogg for over twenty years after its completion, despite a backlist of popular successes as a writer of fiction, science fiction and non-fiction. Even the editor at Olympia Press, who first published Lolita, said that Hogg was the only novel he’d ‘ever rejected solely because of its sexual content.’ When it was issued by Black Ice Books and FC2 in 1995 it was published in an edition of just five-hundred. The current reprint by FC2 is the first time Hogg has been issued to a wider readership.
'Although Hogg is not autobiographical, the unnamed child protagonist and narrator would appear, in part, to be Delany. The racial ambiguity of the narrator-protagonist (he slips between a black/white identification) could very easily be Delany himself, who has described elsewhere his ability to ‘pass’ as white. Hogg is an autobiography of the pornographic imagination. Related works by Delany include the memoir The Motion of Light in Water (1988), the novel The Mad Man (1994), and the graphic novel Bread and Wine (1999). Even where there is no ‘resemblance’ to be found, the extreme nature of the content brings us back to the life of the author; we inevitably ask: what kind of guy would write this stuff? ...
'Unlike sex itself, Hogg is not more-ish. I was relieved to get to the end. But the relief was not that of dutifully completing a novel I got no pleasure from, rather it was the relief of a challenge accepted and fulfilled, an exhausting journey that made me want to consider what I had discovered along the way.'-- Joshua Sofaer
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Further
Samuel Delany Info Page
Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210
Samuel Delany Autobiography (written under a pseudonym)
Errata for all of Delany's novels
"Racism and Science Fiction" by Samuel R. Delany
Samuel Delany @ Facebook
'A Conversation With Samuel R. Delany'
'Alone as a queer, young, black sci-fi nerd: then I discovered Samuel Delany'
'The Samuel Delany / NAMBLA Conversation'
'The Motion of Light: Celebrating Samuel R. Delany'
Samuel Delany's review of Kubrick's '2001'
Film: 'The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman'
'Studying the Works of Samuel R. Delany'
'A Celebration of Samuel R Delany: Aye, and Gomorrah'
'Samuel R. Delany: Another Roundtable'
'Samuel R. Delany: The Grammar of Narrative'
'When Gloria Steinem and Samuel Delany clashed over Wonder Woman'
'Sage of the Apocalypse'
'About Samuel Delany'
'Samuel R. Delany on Why Science Fiction and Literature Are and Should Be Different'
'Space Cowboy: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany'
'Opposing Forces and Ethical Judgments'
'10 Reasons Why Everyone Should Read Samuel R. Delany'
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Additionally
Pratt Lecture Series: Samuel R. Delany
Samuel R. Delany reads from 'Through The Valley of the Nest of Spiders'
Robert Reid-Pharr interviews Samuel R Delany at University of Maryland
JNT Dialogue 2013: José Muñoz and Samuel Delany
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Interview
TERRY ENRIGHT: One of the few things that’s comforting about the book is that there seems to be a real acceptance of human beings—the narrator accepts them young or old, fat or skinny, hung or not. And not just every kind of human but everything that comes out of them. In addition, no one seems ever to get jealous—Hogg never tries to claim the boy solely for himself or anything. Since this attitude prevails in The Mad Man and from what I know of your autobiography, it strikes me that you might be endorsing this as a utopic vision of love and sex. Would that be accurate?
SAMUEL R. DELANY: I feel a little odd talking about a novel as “endorsing” anything. Always, I’ve felt that novels were fundamentally records—and necessarily distorted records—of things observed in the world. It would be disingenuous not to admit that some things I observe I like and some I don’t like, but the basic enterprise is to portray them—with all the distortions—in some sort of esthetic pattern. My like or dislike of them should be of secondary, or even tertiary importance.
Because, with jealousy, you feel majorly disrespected, jealousy is different from the simple sadness of not getting what you want. With jealousy, you feel you should have what you lack—as a man, as a woman, as a wife, as a husband, as a worker overlooked for a promotion, as a child who has not received a present some other sibling has gotten, as a friend who hasn’t gotten a phone call thanking you for a gift you gave or a dinner check you picked up at a restaurant.
Fundamentally, jealousy is a social emotion. People are jealous because they are brought up to feel that they have a right to certain treatment—to other people’s attention, to other people’s work, to other people’s sexual fidelity. When they don’t get it, they feel diminished, insulted, and cheated out of something they believe society marked out as their due. Jealousy is not particularly “natural”—or, for that matter, “unnatural.” Nor do I think it’s necessarily “healthy,” or “unhealthy.” I think it’s learned. When it’s extreme, often it’s a pain in the butt, both for the person feeling the jealousy and for the person who is the object of that jealousy, as well as the world around both persons. Once we learn what it is, however, in some cases—if we live certain kinds of lives—we can unlearn how to be jealous.
The vast majority of us live in our superegos, rather than in our ids or even our egos. It’s much easer to do something we think is right (even momentarily) than it is to do something only because it’s pleasurable (and, even trying, we cannot think of an ethical justification). Indeed, it takes a highly civilized person with a highly cultivated aesthetic sensibility to do something just because it’s pleasurable. And most of the time, the necessary prior cultivation has been the setting in place of a discourse that says a certain amount or type of pleasure is itself good, moral, right, and beneficial to the individual and promotes the greater good.
Only the strongest egos can occasionally break through this mental stricture—at the behest of sex, say—and even that usually leads to a restructuring of an ethical discourse. The vast majority of the “evil” perpetrated in the world is perpetrated in the name of the superego, through which, as Freud showed us, the ego and the id try blindly to live.
In your question up there, basically you’re right as far as my own feelings are concerned. I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly jealous person. But because I’m a gay man who’s lived a relatively active sexual life, in many places the idea of sexual jealousy is so self-contradictory that I simply couldn’t tolerate it in myself. So I’ve worked—not terribly hard, when all is said and done—to eradicate those feelings. I’m glad I did. Yet once in a while a surge of it flares up and surprises me. Today, rarely do I feel jealousy for sexual reasons. Social attention from a friend—or its lack when I’m expecting it—is far more likely to set me off and leave me feeling the painful, angering deprivation that’s what jealousy is. Frankly, today even that’s pretty rare for me.
Still, I work on it.
A few people—often ones who have never thought of themselves as particularly deserving of anything in the first place—are astonishingly “non-jealous.” Certainly this is the case with the narrator of Hogg as well as Hogg himself. But, yes, such a lack of jealousy is one of the things a sexually active life may actually be able teach you.
It was Blake who said the Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom. I always suspected this was one of the things he had in mind.
Fundamentally, I don’t think there’s anything necessarily healthier about monogamy than there is about promiscuity, either. Or vice versa, for that matter. But, yes, if you lead a promiscuous life, putting some curbs on your tendency toward jealousy is the only reasonable way to do it. Only extremely powerful—and dictatorial—people can afford to be both promiscuous and jealous.
TERRY ENRIGHT: The most disturbing element of the book—aside from particular scenes of especially gruesome depravity—is the utter passivity towards the pain of others (when that pain isn’t being actively inflicted). Even the characters who ostensibly provide contrast to Hogg and his crew exhibit a stunning unwillingness to intervene in the suffering of others. Red, Rufus, Mona and Harry all at least suspect Big Sambo of abusing and raping his daughter, but none of them does anything about it. Then there’s the narrator who seems almost completely indifferent to the suffering of the women—he seems aware of what they’re enduring and, at the urging of others, helps assault them. Is he supposed to be too young to be able to think these things out for himself? One reviewer was under the impression he licks a girl to ease the pain of the rape—but to my eye that’s a misreading of a pretty straightforward text. He prepares to lick her and as he does so, it occurs to him it might ease her pain—but they weren’t cause and effect.
SAMUEL R. DELANY: I think you’re perfectly right in that particular reading. But just as I believe jealousy, even sexual jealousy, is a fundamentally social emotion, I also believe identification with other people’s suffering is almost entirely an aesthetic emotion. When we watch real suffering occur, out on the street, perhaps, the fact is, most people don’t feel very much. The offers of help may be real. The shows of concern tend to be a variety of emotional miming. Sometimes people feel fear—and sometimes that fear can even linger. But that’s about all. To watch real suffering causes our emotions—unless we’ve had a particular kind of education—immediately to clamp down.
Think of the young people in Pride and Prejudice, girls and boys of 18, 19, and 20, who come in, laughing and chattering, from a pleasant afternoon watching a sailor publicly flogged—a sailor who, as happened in three out of five such floggings at the time, probably died over the next couple of days.
We learn compassion for others through works of art. It’s one of the ways art civilizes—it’s something narrative art really can teach. The major thrust of Aristotle’s argument on tragedy—pity, terror, and catharsis aside (they’re only the machinery through which it happens)—is that tragedy promotes compassion in the public audience for that public’s leaders, leaders who often, however inadvertently, make terrible mistakes. This compassion in the people is politically advantageous to the greater society, Aristotle argues. If they feel this compassion, they are more easily governed. (The fact that Hogg starts to make people feel some compassion for people both like Hogg and the narrator is, I suspect, what readers find most unsettling.) Aristotle also argues, in effect, that to have such compassion for ordinary men and women—the working classes, say—would be silly and socially counterproductive. There’s far too much suffering in the world and no practical way to relieve it. It would only gum up the social workings—and, for 4th Century BCE Greece, he was probably right.
But the fact that my characters don’t feel much compassion for each other—people who are being really hurt—only means that they haven’t spent a lot of time at the movies or watching TV.
That’s all.
Even by the end of the 18th Century, there was probably less compassion for the working classes among the bourgeoisie and aristocracy than there is today for the run-of-the-mill child molester. While people were proud of their own country’s soldiers killed in the line of duty, nobody felt sorry for them—unless a casualty happened to be a personal friend. Even the working classes themselves, while often they felt severe family loyalties, had little compassion for one another, as individuals or as a class. The general wisdom—which the working class itself shared—was that 95% of them were thieves and layabouts, when they weren’t retarded. Unless they were under strict supervision from overseers or army officers, they would probably rob you blind and, with half a chance, rape your daughter. (Think of all those scheming peasants in all those Balzac novels!) This was the life Hobbes described as “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short,” and thus a relief for everyone else when you were finished with it—and nobody gave much thought at all what losing it might mean to you.
In Sentimental Education (1858) Flaubert’s portrait of Dussardier is a mid-19th century analytical attempts to bring a member of the urban working class into the circle of middle-class compassion, through the aesthetic strategy of revealing what happens when that compassion is withheld, dissembled about, faked, and the bourgeois characters continue on in what at the time was their traditional manner. Dussardier’s death on the blade of Sénécal (the coldly calculating politico, Frédéric’s truly terrifying “bad conscousness”—and by implication what would be left of Frédéric were all his wishy-washy romanticism stripped away) is the moral and intellectual climax of the novel. Frédéric likes Dussardier, certainly. But he accuses him falsely of thefts to justify Frédéric himself borrowing large amounts of money (ineffectually to run after his pipe dream of an affair with Madame Arnoux), and generally abuses him shamelessly. The twin things Frédéric lacks for Dussardier are respect and compassion, and the result is that Dussardier is the character for whom the reader feels the most compassion—at least, by the calculus of 19th century melodrama that was alone available to even such an innovator as Flaubert, however flat it falls for readers today. (How could one person, for the coldest and most inhuman political reasons, Sénécal run through with a sword someone who once so good heartedly invited him to a party he gave in which he went out of his way to impoverish himself so that Sénécal might have a bottle of decent beer—that’s the question the novel asks in effect, as though writer and readers were all cousins of Nick Carraway, the narrator of Gatsby. The argument is finally one about the value of pleasure, as are finally all arguments about compassion—its poetry, its unbiquity.)
For thousands of years, people have been saying war is a terrible thing. There have still been wars. What there hasn’t been, however, is “war movies.” Starting with Battleship Potemkin, Napoleon and Intolerance, up through The Grand Illusion, Paths of Glory, The Battle of Algiers, Apocalypse Now, The Big Red One, Saving Private Ryan, and The Pianist, those are what, in not quite a century, have helped stabilized the idea that war is terrible in a world economic order where it is far more profitable to take over a country’s functioning industrial system already in place rather than to first smash its infrastructure with bombs and troops beyond the point where it can function. Wars are relatively reasonable for conflicts between agricultural countries. Replanting a battlefield is not particularly difficult. For conflicts between industrial nations, it’s extraordinarily wasteful. I hope this awareness keeps growing.
In France the working classes weren’t even expected to marry with full church ceremonies until 1875, four years after the Paris Commune—when the first laws facilitating church weddings for the working classes came in!
In John Gay’s The Beggars Opera (1765), from 110 years before the Commune, in England, when the first possibilities for working class marriage are being considered, the bone of contention is that Polly Peachum wants to marry Macheath. Polly’s parents are not married. And while Mr. Peachum thinks it would be a fine idea because then his grandchildren would not be bastards the way his daughter, Polly, is, and many of the better off artisans are trying out the new socio-legal arrangement, Polly’s mother thinks it’s a terrible idea, because then all a legal wife’s assets are entailed to her husband. That is just not a good plan in a social milieu where women are regularly abandoned and betrayed—especially by shiftless hustlers such as Macheath.
Finally, why is life pleasant enough so that most people really do want to live it for a long time? What is the basis of pleasure which is the positive measure (after the negative measure of freedom from pain, hunger, ill health, and discomfort) for general compassion—that is to say, the yearning to relieve the suffering of others. Shockingly enough, I suspect masturbation is the one truly self-administered and self-regulated pleasure central to well over half the world’s positive pleasure—along with its attendant fantasies. (Since masturbation is such a large part of people’s lives—and has been since primates’ arms reached their current length—I really believe that the reason it has been all but repressed from political and even most public discourse is that the moment it is politicized as a positive pleasure men and women have a right to, it redefines the relationship of individual to the group from the bottom up in a way we might never recover from; today, we might not even recognize what some of those new discursive definitions of humanity could look like.) Then comes sex with other people. The pleasure of sociality, work, accomplishment, and others talking and socializing with people probably comes next. Finally the pleasures of nature fall in there—which range over those of children, small animals, greenery, good food, fine weather, beautiful landscapes, and flowers. Somewhere in there is, I’m sure, art itself—music, dancing, singing, painting, sculpture, literature, architecture, as well as history and philosophy (even though the last, as Benjamin points out, has no muse). The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful—though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering. But certainly I feel privileged to have had thirty years of them with my daughter and fourteen with my current partner, as well as a briefer stint, now and again, with various friends, with some of whom I had sexual relationships and with some of whom I never even considered it. How these pleasures finally map out in terms of which are more or less important to us, is, I’m sure, different for each individual. But most of us will recognize the basic areas. In short, pleasures are everything the poet celebrates, directly or indirectly.
As to the characters’ leave-it-alone attitude toward Big Sambo’s relationship with children, Hogg is a historical novel after all. Specifically, it’s pre-Stonewall. As is still largely the case—and it was even more so thirty-five years back, when Hogg was written—you don’t interfere with how people raise their children. Honey-Pie is a deeply depressive and wounded kid. I’m almost certain she doesn’t attend school. I doubt she has any friends her own age. Add to it that her out-of-work father uses her as a sexual plaything, and I think that’s a truly bleak existence. There’s nothing there I’m endorsing. But the fact is, at the time, the Rufuses and Reds of the world had to protect the Sambos from the otherwise well-intentioned eyes of the Harrys and the Monas in order to protect their own practices.
Today, Rufus and Red would probably have a support group with monthly meetings and trips to play with other S&M groups in near-by cities, with whom they kept in regular on-line contact—at least I’d like to think so. They might even put out some considerable effort to get both Big Sambo and Honey-Pie some serious counseling. Failing that, they might well call the police. Certainly I wouldn’t fault them if they did, even as I would prefer them to start with the former before resorting to the latter—for the child’s sake.
As far back as the middle 1950s, I first heard, on television, a noted child psychiatrist, a Dr. Schimmel, explain to the public that, in his considerable experience, in the vast majority of actual cases, however harmful sexual relations were with children, the way the police and other social institutions brought those relations to an end was far more painful and emotionally scarring to the child than the relations themselves. There was no way for the child to read his or her subsequent removal from home and other family members, the subsequent incarceration in an institution, the new lack of freedom of motion and general harshness of how, from then on, he or she was dealt with, as anything other than punishment for what she or he had done, no matter how little he or she was actually to blame. Despite the sentimentalities of post-primetime TV (when the controversial programs are aired), rarely can you prevent a child from eventually saying: “I would have been better off if I’d kept my mouth shut or at least if I’d managed to get away and no-one had ever known.” You can dismiss this as “silly childishness” if you like, but that contravenes the entire subjective set of measures by which one acts to bring the situation to an end in the first place. One of the terrible things about our society, even today, is that, in five out of six cases, the molester who threatens the child, “If you tell anyone what we’re doing, they will do awful things to you!” is usually, in the long run if not in the short, right. And that was far more the case a quarter of a century ago.
To repeat, in no way does citing such a contradiction mean that I approve of such child/adult relationships themselves. But counseling and gentler intervention is the direction that the world is going in—it just hadn’t arrived there, yet (as in only a few cases has it today), when I wrote the novel.
In the scenes on the docks, the narrator sees (with just a little nachtraglicheit) that the garbage men’s protection of Sambo is also fundamentally self-protective. Because of it, it also facilitates what he himself desires, so Rufus and Red get points in his book for it.
The novel presents the thinnest cross-section of everyone’s experience. The real test of the extremely delicate moral structure the book is trying to set up would be for the reader to come back to Crawhole after three weeks, after two months, or after a year, then see how things are going with them all.
Do you think the narrator will still be there, with Rufus and Red? Or will he have grown tired of their S&M shenanigans and run off once more?
There is just the possibility—and I think the narrator, to the extent his fantasies ever run in this direction, probably would like it in theory—that Red and Rufus will provide him with exactly what he wants as well as whatever he needs that he himself has little way of knowing in any detail. (He is eleven!)
And, who knows, they might.
But if you, as reader, tell me that you feel it’s highly unlikely, I, as writer, am certainly not going to argue with you. I know what the world is like. I think it’s pretty unlikely too.
(cont.)
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Book
Fiction Collective 2
'Acclaimed winner of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime's contribution to gay and lesbian literature, Samuel R. Delany wrote Hogg three decades ago. Since then it has been one of America's most famous 'unpublishable' novels. The subject matter of Hogg is our culture of sexual violence and degeneration. Delany explores his disturbing protagonist Hogg on his own turf--rape, pederasty, sexual excess--exposing an area of violence and sexual abuse from the inside. As such, it is a brave book.'-- FC2
Excerpts
When I was eleven, I used to suck off a kid named Pedro behind the bottom landing of the stairs that went to the basement.
*
‘I heard him grunt. He smelled like a stopped toilet-stall, where somebody had left six months of dirty socks, in the back of a butcher shop with the refrigeration unit on the blink, on fire. The tube under his dick filled, retreated, filled again; and spilled enough spunk for three guys. “Pissin’ in you now boy….” Not like Pedro’s or his pop’s shotglass leakage. I swallowed five times (he was still pumping into my face), and I couldn’t hold no more. Piss spurted all over his fly – I could see pee between the zipper teeth. Piss ran down my chin. He got my head – like I saw this really big-handed nigger hold a basketball, once, and turn it upside down without dropping it – and with his other hand wiped hard around his chin and face, smearing piss. He rubbed his balls with wet fingers, pulled at them, while I leaked piss out of my lower lip. “Yeah… I’m gonna drown you, cocksucker!”’
*
‘His cock, hanging wet from his fly, was wormy with veins. So were his big, big hands. His broad nails were bitten so far up they were three times side-to-side as from thickened, dirt-lined cuticle to bulging, grease-rimmed nub – which, on his thumb at least, went on another horny half inch. His fingers were immense and chiselled, the upper joints clouded in yellow. He was a big man, with the start of a gut. Yellow hair tufted between the missing buttons at the bottom of his shirt, and all up around a neck thick as a scrub pail. Watching him, I got the thought that maybe a month ago he’d been on his back under a car and hadn’t bothered to wash since. His hands and forearms, under the gold fur that burned in the four o’clock sun striking up the alley, were grease-gray. His face was like sunburned brick, smeared and streaked over.’
*
He smiled. “You cut me, lady…” He licked his bloody palm. “You cut me, lady, and I’m going to cut you now.” His other hand brought the knife out of his pocket. “I’m going to cut a hole in your belly and f*** it, lady. I’m going to cut your leg up like a Virginia ham and fry the slices for lunch. I’m gonna hack out a piece of your gut, poke out the shit, and wear it for a ring…”
*
She tried to push the nigger away, gasping and crying out and biting off the gasps. She had a lot of black hair on her cunt. The nigger yanked up one leg; you could see the raw pussy hanging through like skirt steak. The wop grabbed her other leg--and even though he still had the knife, she struggled pretty hard. The nigger, his mouth wide, squatted, grabbed her over the other leg, and pushed his face into her. I saw the muscles tighten along the back of his jaw.
She screamed, loud, and flung her head back and then down, and beat his head, clawed his ears, her head flopping, around, back, and forth, her mouth still wide and all the breath running out. She roared in more air, and screamed again, beating his back with her heel.
Hogg's dirty fist turned on the head of his dick. Urine welled over his knuckles and dripped. Some ran down his testicles, making a dark, shiny tongue along his right pants leg.
*
“You know what I think, Ray-?” That was Hogg again. Him and the bartender were ambling around the crowding bikers. “I think I ain’t never met a normal, I mean normal, man who wasn’t crazy! Loon crazy, takem ‘em off and put ‘em away crazy, which is what they would do if there wasn’t so many of them. Every normal man-I mean sexually normal, now-man I ever met figures the whole thing runs between two points: What he wants, and what he thinks should be. Every thought in his head is directed to fixing a rule-straight line between them, and he calls that line What Is.” ….
“I mean it, now: I think about things like that. And thinkin’ about it, I think I got it figured out. That’s what a normal man thinks is reality. On the other hand, every faggot or panty-sucker, or whip jockey, or SM freak, or baby-fu*ker, or even a motherfuc*er like me, we know-“ and his hands came down like he was pushing something away: “We know, man, that there is what we want, there is what should be, and there is what is: and don’t none of them got anything to do with each other unless-“…”unless we make it,” Hogg went on…
*
p.s. Hey. So, like I said yesterday, I'm moving to my new apartment this morning and for the rest of today. I'll have to catch up with you guys tomorrow. For now, please think about Samuel Delany's 'Hogg' for the duration, won't you? See you tomorrow morning (my time).