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protect the letter from this fragmentation. (PP 187)
    Delany redeploys this insight for his own purposes: “Perhaps phallocentric civilization
has
to construct image after image of castration—such as the cyborg.” 22 This in turn implies a state of affairs which Delany expresses baldly and boldly: “For the record . . . I do not believe castration as Freud and Lacan have described it even exists.” (RW 105)
    We find a hint of what this state of affairs itself implies—for both reader and writer—in “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” from
Flight from Nevèrÿon
. In that tale, Delany presents us with two more parallel, dialogical texts: one a fantasy unfolding in the world of Nevèrÿon, one a tale of 1983 Manhattan. In the latter, Delany “himself” appears, hard at work drafting the manuscript of the tale we are now reading. At one point, Delany comments:
    By now I’m willing to admit that perhaps narrative fiction, in neither its literary nor its paraliterary mode, can propose the
radically
successful metaphor. At best, what both modes can do is break up, analyze, and dialogize the conservative, the historically sedimented, letting the fragments argue with one another, letting each display its own obsolescence, suggesting (not stating) where still another retains the possibility of vivid, radical development. But responding to those suggestions is, of course, the job of the radical reader. (The ‘radical metaphor’ is, after all, only an interpretation of pre-extant words.) Creators, whatever their politics, only provide raw material—documents, if you will. 23
    Re-reading the above passage, this reader is reminded of the words of the best known avant-pop, feminist cyborg in America, the performance artist Laurie Anderson—who, in her performance pieces and albums (which are usually made up of mutually interilluminating collections of songs, anecdotes, and audiovisual fragments) has repeatedly admonished her audiences: “Hey, sport.
You
connect the dots.
You
pick up the pieces.”
    In “Aversion/Perversion/Diversion,” as in “Wagner/Artaud,” we are again given a series of stories, this time of some of Delany’s own sexual experiences—stories which both evoke and subvert prevailing sexual myths. The discursive object against which Delany deploys these stories is, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the concept of Gay Identity itself—or rather, the more conservative concept of transcendent sexual difference which lies latent in the use of “Gay Identity” as a catch-all label for a diverse political constituency (another manifestation of the problem of “empirical resolution” explored in “Shadows”). Once again, Delany uses these autobiographical tales as empirical counters to the reductions of discursive myths: they remind us that for every individual, sexual preference and practice are irrefutably idiosyncratic and eccentric,always-already marginal—and that any unified political project set in opposition to the sexual status quo must be founded on an affirmation of the irreducible plurality of sexual experiences and practices.
    Delany affirms the truth of these experiences, and the right to speak of them openly, simply by telling them where and when he does: “Aversion/Perversion/Diversion” was originally presented as the Keynote Address at the Fifth Annual Lesbian and Gay Conference on Gay Studies at Rutgers University in 1991. Given that context, we can see how Delany both affirms the liberatory project of Gay Studies, while at the same time placing a critical frame around it. The tales are, after all, cautionary: in their evocation and problematization of all-too-recognizable myths, they remind us that such myths
are
all-too-recognizable—that even (or especially) those engaged in Gay Studies must be constantly vigilant against the pervasive influence of such myths.
    But