The book in question is Delany's collection of critical essays and reviews called The Jewel-Hinged Jaw; Notes of the Language of Science Fiction…. [Grammatical,] stylistic and factual howlers [abound]…. But when one actually experiences the clotted precocity of his prose,… [with] its uneasy condescension and agglutinative gumminess, then the multitude of typos and other errors does seem more forgiveable, because translatorese is always hard to get a grip on; the Rube Goldberg unworkableness of much of the writing in this book, especially in the earlier and middle essays collected, does in fact make the task of winkling out paraphrasable content almost impossible…. Ultimately I failed…. I could not even patch together an adequate sense of what I had failed to understand; after all, as Delany does say in a clear moment, style and content are intersecting models of one another. I'm paraphrasing him. At the heart of this failure of mine—beyond the word-deaf gaucheries of the style, beyond the intrusive self-congratulatory garish foregrounding of the auctorial voice with all its morose cheeriness and duckpond aggro—lay a sense that when I did think I understood the terms and assumptions shaping a paragraph, by the dint of a lot of deconstruction work, what I was left with was a kind of shambles strewn with disqualified data and beheaded arguments, a spastic Guernica. (pp. 45-6)
Bits of the arguments about the nature of sf as opposed to "mundane" literature, though tendentious and embarrassing in their attempts to restrict the imaginative scope theoretically realizable within a "mundane" text, are at least arousing. And the late long essay on Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974) is a brilliant demolition job. Delany is at his best when he's forced to stick close to a given text…. (pp. 48-9)
John Clute, "Books: 'The Jewel-Hinged Jaw; Notes of the Language of Science Fiction'," in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (© 1978 by Mercury Press, Inc.; reprinted from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), Vol. 56, No. 1, January, 1979, pp. 45-9.
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