Improbable Communities: Post-precarity and the Politics of Sex in Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

Samuel R. Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand appeared in 1984, the same year as William Gibson's Neuromancer. While more people have likely read Gibson's novel, Delany gives readers a different account of cyberspace. Stars in My Pocket first shows readers how a vast information network called "the We" allows for crosscultural (and intergalactic) communication. Yet, Stars in My Pocket also hints at the eventual capture and quantification of information. The Web calculates Rat Korga as Marq Dyeth's near-perfect erotic object after Korga's planet is destroyed by an event known as Cultural Fugue. As the sole survivor of this apocalyptic event, the Web sends the former slave to Velm, where Korga meets Marq. When Korga proves potentially catastrophic to Marq's own planet, the Web separates the two. For Robert Reid-Pharr, the Web must "clean" Korga so that he might become a known (or, more importantly, quantifiable) subject to the multiplanetary cultures in the novel. Pharr concludes that the Web ultimately removes Korga because "they understand that they have failed in their civilizing mission."1 (The Web is "they.") The web-like logistics of General Information in Stars in My Pocket constrict Korga and Marq's desire to its coordinates.    

For Reid-Pharr, frustration with Stars in My Pocket emerges from the novel's failure to "produce a fantastic treatment of (gay male) sexual permissiveness that thumbs its nose at the many uptight, anti-sex pseudointellectuals" who limit queer sociality to "sentimentalized fantasies of sexual monogamy."2 Pharr finds that the queer slave Korga comes to represent "post-AIDS" gay male identity, where "neoliberal socialization, or subjectification, functions by extinguishing the wild, 'prehistoric' subject and then replacing her with a properly socialized avatar."3 Readers, however, do not know what happens to Korga or Marq after the Web ends their brief relationship, as the planned sequel to Stars in My Pocket remains unpublished. It is here, at this archival and theoretical gap, that I want to read Delany's 2012 SF pornographic novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders as one possible spiritual sequel to Stars in My Pocket. Much like his 1984 cosmic SF, Through the Valley concerns the relationship between two people: Eric Jeffers and Morgan "Shit" Haskell. But unlike Marq and Korga, Eric and Shit stay together for the entirety of their long lives. And, perhaps more importantly, Delany does not constrict their relationship to the "cleaned-up" portrait of monogamy.    

While Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders was published three years before the Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) decision, same-sex marriage is legal in Delany's projected future. Eric tells Shit their local gay bar, The Slide, closed the same "year they passed all the laws all over the country that [said] gay marriages were okay." The bar closed once officials "began diggin' up those old hygiene standards for gay bars and places like that." Eric notes there was no way to get The Slide, which had places for those into drinking piss, "past half of 'em," by which he means past the resuscitated hygiene standards and their enforcers.4 The future politics of sex in the novel line up with Christopher Chitty's conclusions about homosexuality as a bourgeois category in Sexual Hegemony. Chitty finds that "what was counterhegemonic about homosexuality [such as] its appropriation of urban spaces for public sex . . . may no longer be so for a postbourgeois cultural dominant." Chitty concludes that any future politicization of sex will be "part of a wider social movement responding to worsening conditions of life," and will need to consider how "the precarity of some bodies link up with that of others."5 Delany does just this in Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. The novel begins in 2007-2008, but we do not hear much about the 2008 financial crisis. Readers instead encounter a post-precarious future, where those most neglected or marginalized can live a relatively good life.   

In their notes on Through the Valley, Keguro Macharia calls the novel curious because it "asks what it means to imagine that the Black gay homeless and poor are worth saving."6 Robert Kyle III, a gay Black millionaire in the novel, provides material support to the (mostly) Black gay men who live in the rural community called The Dump. With "the Kyle Foundation" Eric recalls how "everything was arranged, from salary to security. It did a good job of taking care of us — and we thought that was good." And yet, he wonders if that is enough. People like Robert Kyle are someone you can tell a story about, whereas Shit, Eric, Dynamite, Jay, Mex, and the others are elements in his narrative. "They have stories . . . I just have a life."7 Kyle might provide the financial support for the Dump, but he only briefly makes appearances in the novel.8 Delany instead seems invested in the stories of lives that are rarely the subjects of literature. As Lavelle Porter writes in an early review of the novel, the book "is chock full of all the wrong kind of queers: poor, uneducated, disabled, old, fat, ugly, and promiscuous."9 Delany does not see these as wrongs that need correction. In Shoat Rumblin, another of Delany's late pornographic works, the title character tells his story with the help of his partner Adrian Rome. And while Adrian makes a few editorial interventions, he puts "down all the words right like [Shoat] say[s] them" because it is Shoat's story to tell.     

When Eric tells Shit how important he and Dynamite are to their community, he notes that no one would miss the mayor if he suddenly disappeared. Eric "can't even remember who's mayor!" But, he adds, "suppose all the garbage men [like Shit or Dynamite] upped and disappeared . . . you couldn't have no city here. Pretty soon people wouldn't be able to negotiate the place."10 Delany, then, is more interested in telling the stories of garbage men and those who live in and around the Dump. They are what make a community possible to live in.   

That a garbage man like Shit gets to have "a long, vibrant, and happy life" is part of what makes the novel so "miraculous" for Macharia, especially since Shit refuses to learn how to read. Timothy Griffiths notes how we read "the illiteracy of a character like Shit depends on our social norms and assumptions about literacy and background."11 His refusal to prove that he can improve goes against a so-called progressive contract, where we are asked to (im)prove our human capital or else face a precarious future. Shit's way of living in the world, then, "is a critique from within the hegemony of the Dump that embraces the abjection that utopianism seeks to hide or erase."12 The tech-utopias dreamed up by venture capitalists were a blueprint for emerging control societies. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney find, "logistical capitalism" depends on "the continuous improvement of the production line that never finishes" and "seeks total access to [our] language."13 Here we might turn our eyes again to the stars. Unlike Shit in Through the Valley, in Stars in My Pocket Rat Korga is able to read when connected to General Information (GI). As an "information diplomat" Marq notes that General Information gives him "ways of categorizing whole geosectors: this one or the other one on this world or that." Marq, however, finds that "besides the coordinates the Web lays out for us, he has his own map of the universe."14 Just beyond these known spaces exist "information with an appetite" that might "confound the Web and not be found in any of its informative archives."15 In Delany's cosmic future(s), General Information is an advanced tech that regulates communication to fit the logistical coordinates of the Web, but the technologies we expect to read in most hard-SF do not interest anyone in the Dump. Shit, we are told, "is a near Luddite."16 Webs, however, do appear in Through the Valley (as might be suggested by the full title, in which the valley is "of the Spiders"). The Robert Kyle Foundation held "almost everything in the county together . . . like a web whose strands reached-glittering-over the landscape."17 Those who live in and around the Dump maintain a queer sociality that frequently involves group sex and intimacy in public spaces.   

Much of the fucking, cock-sucking, piss-drinking, and snot-eating in Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders happen amongst groups of people in gas stations, porn theaters, or underneath the stars. We might ask why these places still contain a radical possibility for Delany, especially when Chitty notes how the queer appropriation of public space "flipped in the opposite direction as homosexual institutions were increasingly commercialized and the plebeian basis of queer counterpublics was liquidated."18 But the histories of Times Square's porn theaters, for Delany in particular, are important for a politics of sex that addresses the "worsening conditions of life" under increased austerity and precarity. Delany writes about these histories in a future tense so that those too dirty, "dangerous," or abject for liberal sensibilities are seen living — or more importantly living well — in public. As Delany writes in Times Square Red Times Square Blue, the porn theaters on 42nd street "fulfill needs that most of our society does not yet know how to acknowledge."19 After Eric and Shit retire as garbage workers, they take up a position at the Opera, a porn theater owned by the Kyle Foundation that also serves as a shelter for the homeless. Later in the novel the Opera is designated a historical site, and Eric reminds a young graduate student that "there's a lot of history . . . in a place like this." And yet, he adds, "the trouble is, you can't see it a lot of times. 'Cause everything gets cleaned up and rebuilt and polished over, and there it all goes.'"20 City officials and politicians, of course, talk about ways to improve their cities, which always mean freeing up more space for developers and policing those that end up on the other side of private property.   

With the increasing disappearance of the commons, there now are fewer chances for contact between people and more opportunities to network. Delany makes a distinction between contact and networking in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. A networking situation concerns those with like interests meeting together, whereas contact can begin with a conversation in a grocery checkout line or with "two men watching each other masturbating together in adjacent urinals of a public john."21 Most importantly, contact, unlike networking, "regularly crosses class lines." Delany recalls meeting "playwrights, carpenters, opera singers, telephone repair men, stockbrokers, guys on welfare, guys with trust funds" in Times Square's porn theaters.22 Delany's science fiction and non-fiction reveal ways of (re)assembling in public that still have the potential to realize a collective future. In his essential book on queer futurity, José Esteban Muñoz notes that while "the state understands the need to keep us from knowing ourselves [in] our masses," it also realizes, like Delany, "the power of our masses, a power that can be realized only by surpassing the solitary pervert model and accessing group identity."23 Jordy Rosenberg likewise finds, "there are no fantasies of self-possession [in Delany], but quite a few dreams of speculative, collective reproduction."24

When Korga attends a formal dinner at the end of Stars in My Pocket, he tells Marq that he "knows the names of some'' of the food but "not what they taste like." Marq explains that this is typical of the Web: it will "tell you the names of famous local concoctions, show you pictures, give you some insight into how they're made . . . only they don't bother to let you taste, which after all is what food is all about."25 In contrast, Through the Valley gives us people with appetites. Eric and Shit hold an annual chili cookout in honor of their late partner (and Shit's father). When someone asks Eric if it's for women or just the gay men who frequent the Opera, he responds:  

When someone asks him if he truly means everyone, Eric amends his generous offer:   

In this moment, we might see the limit of Delany's improbable community, where concrete habits of mutual aid appear to end at the Dump, since not everyone can appear.  As Eric reminded Shit "they were making a world, a county, a city together, and that it was wonderful."27 And yet, just because "the sexual landscape" of the Dump "is not articulated in certain orders of language [...] does not mean it doesn't exist." We might imagine the "you and you and you and you and you and you" continuing until Eric invites the entire world.  If we do not see Eric and Shit's world, the descriptive "sexcess" (see Y Howard's essay in this cluster) in Delany's pornography makes it easier. The Dump's web — glittering with piss — refracts outward.   

---

Blake Stricklin (@blakestricklin.bsky.social) is a Lecturer of English Literature at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is the author of American Paraliterature and Other Theories to Hijack Communication (Anthem Press, 2021), and has published work in the Journal of Modern Literature, Symplokē, Burroughs Unbound: William S. Burroughs and the Performance of Writing, and the American Book Review.

---

References