• DOI:10.1093/ALH/AJS045
• Corpus ID: 145175953

Delany's Divinities

@article{Scott2012DelanysD,
  title={Delany's Divinities},
  author={Darieck Scott},
  journal={American Literary History},
  year={2012},
  volume={24},
  pages={702 - 722}
}

• Darieck Scott
• Published 25 November 2012
• Philosophy
• American Literary History

“If a god has no name, what sort of god can he be?” So queries a befuddled sophisticate in the Egyptian city of Hermopolis in the year 130 when asked by Neoptolomus, protagonist of Samuel R. Delany’s novella, Phallos (2004), about the location of the temple of “the nameless god” (14). The man’s question about the object of Neoptolomus’s search is perhaps more argumentative than nonplussed; it’s fairly easy to imagine his response enunciated in a barbed tone, at least when we read it from a temporal location that flips the Hermopolite’s assumptions, in a modern world gripped by fervid monotheisms, where the god who has a name is likely to be viewed as a relic of “myth,” a human-sized efflorescence of primitive imagination limited in the domain of his (in any case, mistakenly attributed) powers, while the deity that is “real” is implicitly understood to be, is implicitly spoken as, immanent and omnipotent, qualities communicated by the vagueness of its generally being addressed by a title rather than through the diminution of a proper name. For the reader of Phallos, as for Neoptolomus whose quest we follow in the novella, the hidden name of the nameless god is just one of a series of mostly unsolved riddles and mysteries within the pornographicphilosophical adventure story. And by the lights of a familiar framework for taking account of that god’s presence in the text—a framework taught to us by the three Mesopotamian traditions