Jag skulle inte påstå att verket, som ännu inte utkommit i svensk översättning (varför dröjer den, Norstedts?) presenterar något radikalt nytt inom litteratur eller riktar sig till finsmakare av något extravagant bokvägen. Men det finns en grej - hittar inget bättre ord - som tar författaren till en högre division.
Delany utvecklar det vi kallar "missed encounter".
Och lyckas bra med den uppgiften faktiskt...
The sense of a “missed encounter” is crucial to Arnold’s history, and is the
best key to his failure to live the life he might have lived. In the book’s last
third, we do see Arnold in the Stonewall, with black, gay male friends and at
least a nascent sense of community; but one that seems to slip away as Arnold
grows older, and more private an circumspect. And the book ends with an
epiphany, which is both aesthetic and erotic in import: it brings Arnold back to
a crucial turning point, from early adulthood, when (an understandable) fear and
an aggravated sense of isolation proved more powerful than desire, setting him
on the path to his later loneliness and frustration. It’s almost a Sartrean
moment of existential choice: and Arnold makes the “wrong” choice, condemning
himself to subsequent ill-at-ease-ness and unfreedom. It’s as if Arnold had been
offered a glimpse of a Delanyesque “pornotopia” — but was too freaked out by it,
in a late-1950s social climate far different from the bohemian one that Delany
himself (as recounted in his memoir The Motion of Light in Water) found just
several years later in the East Village. In any case, Arnold’s aesthetico-erotic
epiphany, with which the book ends, recovers the past in an almost Proustian
sense — but (unlike Proust) without thereby redeeming it. It’s the missed
encounter itself that returns, with its real sense of potentiality and hope, but
also with the mortal awareness that such potentiality and hope have themselves
been squandered.
