The Mad Man - Allusions/references To Other Works

Allusions/references To Other Works

Delany said that the novel was inspired by his outrage at an article on AIDS by Harold Brodkey that appeared in The New Yorker in the June 21, 1993 issue. (Brodkey's series of articles about dying of AIDS was reprinted in revised form as a book, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (Henry Holt and Company, 1996)). The article entitled "To My Readers" begins, "I have AIDS. I am surprised that I do. I have not been exposed since the nineteen-seventies, which is to say that my experiences, my adventures with homosexuality took place largely in the nineteen-sixties, and back then I relied on time and abstinence to indicate my degree of freedom from infection and to protect others and myself." Once past its "Proem," Delany's novel opens with similar statements, but placed in the negative: "I do not have AIDS. I'm surprised that I don't . . ." As critic Reed Woodhouse (in Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945—1995, University of Massachusetts Press, 1998),wrote, "What one hears in Delany's sentence is the sound of the gauntlet being thrown down, for he wants to completely reverse the story Brodkey tells: the story, that is, of an 'innocent victim' who may have played around a little but very long ago and certainly not doing those things. John Marr, by contrast, is presented as a 'guilty victor', so to speak, in that he has done all those things (though not, it is true, unprotected anal intercourse) and has yet survived."

The character of Timothy Hasler dies in a knife fight in a bar at age 29, an incident that is very similar to the death of English playwright Christopher Marlowe.

Delany discusses some of the background behind the novel in "The Phil Leggiere Interview: Reading The Mad Man", which appears in his essay collection Shorter Views.