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and refined in his own fiction over the past two decades or so—particularly in
Dhalgren, Triton
, and that undecidable hybrid of theory and fiction, Return to Nevèrÿon: dialectical framing structures, short textual units numbered in Wittgensteinian fashion, multiply-intersecting stories, and so on. By deploying those tropes here, Delany produces essays which, in their complexity of form and richness of resonance, resemble novels—and postmodernist novels to boot. The result for the reader is an experience which simply cannot be found anywhere else on the current American literary landscape.
    It has often been observed that Delany’s work is deeply concerned with myth. Specifically, as Delany himself has pointed out, it is concerned with myth-
making
—with the social, material, and historical forces that generate cultural myths. 9 The essays to follow share this concern. But they are also equally concerned with myth-
breaking
—with the analytical practices required to discern, interrogate, and dissolve myths. Nothing if not ambitious, these essays tackle the myths of High Art vs. Low, of Sanity vs. Madness, of Theater-As-We-Know-It, of castration as the Freudian and Lacanian model of socialization, of transcendent sexual difference, of biography, of the canon, and indeed of the very concept of “literature.”
    But these essays also interrogate a myth of the essay itself: specifically, the traditional perception of the essay as a “shapeless” form of writing. Critics, reacting to this perceived shapelessness, have for a long time called the essay a “degenerate” and even “impossible” genre, and it has never had a firm foothold in the canon of English literature—a state of affairs which once led the great American essayist E. B. White, only halfjokingly, to call essay-writers second-class citizens. Critics of a more recent generation have tried to recuperate the essay by turning this shapelessness into a plus-value, positing it as the ideal (non-)form with which to critique totalizing systems, or, more radically, as “the moment of writing
before
the genre, before genericness—or as the matrix of all generic possibilities.” 10 But it is the underlying ideas of boththese critical positions—that there can be such a thing as a “shapeless” discourse unfixed by pre-existing rhetorical practices, or that any single rhetorical mode could serve as the “primitive calculus” underlying everything subsequent to it—which Delany has called into question time and time again in his work. 11
    With this collection, Delany continues his critique. As I’ve noted, at certain points along the way he deploys formal tropes which his longtime readers may find familiar. But whether previously acquainted with Delany’s work or not, readers expecting the short, monologic prose discourse that is the currently dominant form of the essay are in for a surprise—for these essays are not like other essays.
    They are huge, sprawling works, encompassing an enormous range of topics and disciplines—from the origins of modern theater to the vagaries of radical feminist scholarship, from mathematical logic to the most marginal of sexual practices, from the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe to the intricacies of literary historical sleuthing, and much, much more—and they combine these topics in interlocking narratives of madmen and burning cities, prodigies and poets, cyborgs, street-hustlers, and the author’s own life, in language that is sometimes light and anecdotal, sometimes vertiginously self-reflexive, but always lucid, luminous and exuberant. “Chrestomathies,” Delany calls some of the pieces to come: collections of textual fragments whose numerous interrelations the reader must actively trace out in order to gather them up into a resonant whole. In their encouragement of active reading, these essays resemble what