Tales of Neveryon (2 page)

Some critics have found within the stories, as well as the individual tales’ arguments with one another, critiques,
parodies, and dialogues with and of writings as diverse as Freud’s
Three Essays on the Theory of Sex
, G. Spencer Brown’s
The Laws of Form
, Marx’s
Critique of Political Economy
, Popper’s two-volume study,
The Open Society and Its Enemies
, Derrida’s essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ – and even
The Wizard of Oz
. To others, however, it was all ponderous and pointless beyond bearing. For certain critics, the ten years Delany devoted to this most massive yet marginal project in an already marginal sub-genre seemed manic willfulness.

But we do not have to be alert to
every
nuance of the fantasy’s sometimes dauntingly allusive play to enjoy this epic of the rise to political power of an ex-mine slave in a world of dragons, barbarians, Amazons, prehistoric splendor, perverse passions, and primitive precocity. If we did, the series never would have gained the audience it has – which, thanks to its initial three-volume paperback appearance (with a fourth in hardcover), already numbers in the hundreds of thousands. And it is equally a fact: few of us are such provincial readers that we won’t
catch
some.

This heroic saga has been characterized many ways. Delany himself has written of it as ‘a child’s garden of semiotics.’ Once, at a department party, I overheard someone who asked what to expect of Delany’s fantasy sequence receive the suggestion that he would find it closer to
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
than
Die Frau ohne Schatten
. My favorite description was given, however, by SF writer Elizabeth Lynn. Within my hearing, out on some screened-in Westchester porch, Lizzy was speaking to someone who’d asked her about the first volume, just published. (At this remove I don’t remember if they realized I was listening.) She said:

‘Imagine going to a wonderful gallery exhibit with an intelligent, well-spoken, and deeply cultured friend, an
expert in the period, richly informed on the customs and economics of the times, familiar with the lives of the artists and of their models, as well as the subsequent critical reception of all of the paintings over each ensuing artistic period, a friend who you only wished, as the two of you walked from painting to painting, would shut up …’

What a recommendation for a heroic fantasy!

But consider. That benevolent, oppressive, insistent voice, droning on before those glimmering, luminous images – the voice of the master – always and forever conveys two messages. One is true; ‘History,’ it tells us, ‘is intellectually negotiable. It can be untangled, understood, and the miseries of our entrapment in it can be explained. And because history is never finished, those miseries can be interrogated, alleviated, and the situations that comprise and promote them can be changed. All men and women have the right to essay such mastery over their own lives.’ The second message, inextricably bound up with the first, is as much a lie: ‘History,’ it tells us, ‘has already been negotiated, so that beyond a certain point any attempt to know more is at best error and at worst sedition. That we have
any
of the tools of historical analysis means that, on some level, history is finished. Things as they are are as they ought to be and must not be questioned or changed. Our agonies and our pleasures, whether physical or intellectual, are fixed by a Greater Power, call it God or history itself: thus no woman nor any man may challenge the institutions through which you endure yours or I indulge mine.’

Because it always bears this double message, that voice has only value in a dialectical, if not dialogic, process. (Statements tolerable at the beginning of arguments are not acceptable as ends.) But if we cannot silence the lie completely – for it is too intimately bound up with
experience, language, and desire – at least the writer can worry over how to articulate the truth of that voice; and can try to write up the lie for what it is.

The recourse here is always to form.

There is a traditional Marxist argument that when Daniel Defoe takes on the voice of the prostitute Moll Flanders, or Paul T. Rogers the voice of the hustler Sinbad, we still have the voice of the master, only now involved in an extended quotation, still all for the profit of his own class; and it is by untangling the recomplications of narrative form that the Marxist reveals the voice’s true class origins, despite its appropriations from whatever ostensibly proletarian subject.

But consider the problems our traditional Marxist might have, say, reading the intricately framed monologue, the eighth part of Delany’s series, ‘The Mummers’s Tale’ (along with its chilling postscript, section 9.6 of ‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals’), in which the master takes on the voice of an actor informing the voice of a hustler, to tease apart just those problems of appropriation, while, at the margin of the tale itself, almost wholly congruent with the position of the reader, sits
the
Master, silent through the recitation, in a growing indignation and outrage that, we learn in the postscript, at last takes on, however unconsciously, by means of a similar appropriation, murderous proportions.

Who is quoting whom? What has been written and what has been spoken? And how does the truth slide between them?

And though to learn that ‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,’ §9.6, takes resonances from Popper’s readings of Plato (with a passing gander at Ryle’s) may please those who need reassurance that a writer knows a little of what he or she is about, that is not knowledge we need to
follow the development of Delany’s argument for free political dialogue and against political closure. That argument is there, however clear, however cloudy, for anyone to read, concerned Marxist or committed capitalist, or even those of us unsure of our position in this worldwide debate.

Return to Nevèrÿon
¹
is Delany’s overall name for his fantasy series – though the publisher, without forbidding me to mention it, has urged me not to stress it, as foreign-sounding words and diacritical marks are thought to be off-putting to that most embarrassing of statistical fictions, the commercial reader (not you, of course; not me), who presumably consumes texts only for story, is assumed to stand deaf to style, and is thought to applaud only the endlessly repeated pornographies of action and passion that, for all their violences, still manage to pander to an astonishingly untroubled acceptance of the personal and political status quo.

(Where, one wonders, and in what form, does narrative elimination take place?)

The ancient land called Nevèrÿon is pronounced (I’ve been told by the editor, who presumably at least
once
lunched with Delany himself) Ne-VER-y-on: four syllables with the accent on the antepenult. The phrase ‘Flight from Nevèrÿon’ more or less rhymes with the word ‘octogenerian.’ and Neveryóna, the old aristocratic neighbourhood of the capital port, Kolhari, which briefly lent its name to the entire town, is pronounced Ne-ver-y-O-na: five syllables with the primary accent on the penult, and a secondary one on the second syllable: the word rhymes – roughly – with ‘Defer Pomona.’

There. Now doesn’t that allay just a
little
of the anxiety?

Oh, and ‘The Tale of Rumour and Desire,’ the editor told me (at our own lunch), was one Delany wrote when
a two-volume collection of all the shorter Nevèrÿon stories and novellas had been planned. That last written story was crafted to make a transition between ‘The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers’ and ‘The Tale of Fog and Granite’ for readers who would not be able to make the journey through the full-length novel,
Neveryóna, or the Tale of Signs and Cities
, which, while it naturally falls out as tale number six, was simply too long to include in that bipartite omnibus – alas, since scuttled. That terminal tale’s major events occur just after the end of
Neveryóna
. Read it there if you must. But I can assure you that – there – it will make no thematic sense whatsoever. And its particular play of discontinuities will – there – only disorient you the more as you broach the considerable mists of volume three.

But surely Delany intends his ‘return’ not only for readers who are actual re-readers of his sword-and-sorcery series. Recalling the passage from German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s three-volume
Principle of Hope
I’ve set at the head of this preface, Delany writes at the beginning of Chapter Three of his SF novel
Stars in my Pockets Like Grains of Sand
(written concurrently with the first Nevèrÿon stories):

Home?

It’s the place you can never visit for the first time, because by the time it’s become home, you’ve already been there. You can only return. (You can never go home, only go home again.)
²

There is a suggestion of Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ in these tales Delany asks us to return to. In the strict sense that one can never initially ‘go’ home, Nevèrÿon is not a place one initially visits; it can only be revisited – in much the way Delany revisits (and revalues) a certain romantic stance connected with the Thomas Wolfe title he lightly
mocks in the parenthesis above. And in his essay on Joanna Russ’s beautiful and meticulous science fiction cum sword-and-sorcery sequence,
The Adventures of Alyx
³
, in a section dealing with the puzzling but persistent relation between sword-and-sorcery and science fiction, we find:

As one can speak of the simple calculus implicit behind the set of algebras called Boolean, the comparatively limited landscape of sword and sorcery may be the simple fantasy behind the extremely varied set of future landscapes we call science fiction … More precisely, I suspect, sword-and-sorcery represents what can, most safely, still be imagined about the transition from a barter economy to a money economy … By the same light, science fiction represents what can most safely be imagined about the transition from a money economy to a credit economy.
⁴

The suggestion is that in such fictions the place we are returning
to
is deeply and historically implicated in the place we are returning
from
.

The nostalgic fictive recreation of a primitive past is always constructed from the contemporary cultural materials around us – precisely to the extent the primitive is seen to be one with the mystical, the unknown, and the unknowable. Even as they speculate on the workings of history, such creations are insistently ahistorical – or are, at any rate, historical only as they are products of our own historical moment.

The panorama of material life Delany evokes in his fantasy epic has little or nothing to do with any specific society or culture of some long-ago epochal period, some distant geographical site. These stories do not move toward research into lost time. And it takes only the smallest critical leap – which we are encouraged toward with the epigraph of each new tale – to realize all we are really learning about is our own age’s conception of
historical possibility. For the gesture with which we reach yearningly after the exotic turns out to be only a digging down into our own pockets for whatever is caught in the seams. As Delany writes in ‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,’ the antepenultimate (or penultimate) tale (depending, alas, on where you place ‘Rumor and Desire’), for anyone managing to miss the point till then:

… The Nevèrÿon series is, from first tale to last, a document of our times, thank you very much. And a carefully prepared one, too.’
⁵

The series is a document of its times – our times, today. It is a lush and colorful fantasy adventure. With all its sections taken together, it forms a dark
unheimlich
comedy about the intricate relations of sex, narrative, and power. What it is
not
, in any way, is a portrait of some imagined historical culture.

I should know. The original historical research – if one can speak of such – was mine.

Some of Delany’s readers will be renegotiating (once again) this interplay of image and idea, of intellectual grit and imaginative grandeur, of moonshot fog and micaflecked granite, of controversy and conversation. Others will be encountering it for the first time. ‘Fantasy,’ I have called the series. Delany marks it with Fritz Leiber’s term ‘sword-and-sorcery’ and calls it ‘paraliterature.’ Still, rereading it strongly invokes the often quoted comment by the German novelist Hermann Broch: ‘Literature is always an impatience on the part of knowledge.’ So I am tempted to call it literature, as it inscribes itself where historical knowledge is at its most incomplete and we are likely to become our most impatient with it. (‘Speculative fiction,’
we could have labeled it, had it been written in the sixties when that term was used to refer to an amalgam of the literarily experimental and the science fictional or fantastic.) But, for all its historical thrust, there is something about it rigorously of its own decades, the twentieth century’s terminal quarter.

Our return begins (and ends) by plundering present-day culture for all its source material, even when that means present-day cultural images of the past. What it presents us, even as it seems to lure us away to another age and clime, is our own home reviewed through the distorting (or, better, organizing) lens of a set of paraliterary conventions. We begin by preparing for a spin out in the extremes; but we are only going home … again – another way of saying one never
goes
home at all. So if the saga seems luminous and familiar, remember: even before we open the first page of the first tale, we know the material from which it has been elaborated wondrously well.

Orphans that we are, it is ours.