TALES OF NEVÈRŸON
Samuel R. Delany
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Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Return … a preface by K. Leslie Steiner
Tales of Nevèrÿon
The Tale of Gorgik
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
The Tale of Old Venn
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
The Tale of Small Sarg
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
The Tale of Potters and Dragons
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Appendix
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Website
Also By Samuel R Delany
Dedication
Author Bio
Copyright
Return … a preface
by K. Leslie Steiner
Humankind still lives in prehistory everywhere, indeed everything awaits the creation of the world as a genuine one. The real genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it only begins when society and existence become radical, that is grasp themselves at the root. The root of history, however, is the human being, working, producing, reforming and surpassing the givens around him or her. If human beings have grasped themselves, and what is theirs, without depersonalization and alienation, founded in real democracy, then something comes into being in the world that shines into everyone’s childhood and where no one has yet been – home.
– Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung
Come to a far when, a distant once, a land beyond the river – but a river running no-one-knows-where. That’s the invitation the following fantasy series here holds out. But where does its landscape lie? Some have suggested it’s Mediterranean. Others have thought it Mesopotamian. Yet arguments can be made for placing it in either Asia or Africa. And its weather and immediate geography (sun, fog, rain, but no snow, in a city on the sea surrounded by mountains) makes it sound like nothing so much as prehistoric Piraeus – or San Francisco, in both of which modern cities, in the years before he began this series (if we are to trust the several books on him by over-eager commentators), Delany lived.
What’s certain, however, is that it was a long time ago.
But four thousand years? Six thousand? Eight thousand?
The most accurate placement is, after all, a happy accident of the advertising copy on the back of one of the paperbacks in which some of the tales were first published, putting it at ‘the borderland of history’. For before this ancient nation there is only the unrectored chaos out of which grew (and we watch them grow page on page) the techne that make history recognizable: money, architecture, weaving, writing, capital … Yet a whiff of magic blows through it all, now as the flying dragons corraled in the Faltha mountains, now as a huge and hideous monster, part god, part beast, turning back would-be defectors as it patrols the ill-marked border.
Re-readers of these tales may be curious why I, who am after all only a fictive character in some of the pieces to come, have taken this preface on. Yes, it’s an odd feeling – but finally one I like. The publisher wanted me to jot something on the stories’ cryptographical origins. (You may have already encountered a note on their archeological ends.) I agreed, under condition I might include this extended historical disclaimer. But something about these stories defers origins (not to say endings) in favor of fictions. Still, for those readers, old or new, who do not recall, I will (again) explain:
Picture me (if it will help) as your average black American female academic, working in the largely white preserves of a sprawling midwestern university, unable, as a seventies graduate student, to make up her mind between mathematics and German literature. (The politics required eventually to secure a joint line in our Math and Comp. Lit. departments are too rococo to recount.) Category theory was all the rage when I emerged from my first meaningful degree. But there was an intriguing spin-off of it called naming, listing, and counting theory, which perhaps seventy-five people in the world knew anything at all about and another twelve could actually do anything with. There, on these rare and stilly heights, I decided to dig in my heels – while, during summers, I ran around the world reading as much as possible in the oldest and most outré languages I could find.
Well.
Sometime in the mid-seventies, my mathematical work led me to apply a few of naming, listing, and counting theory’s more arcane corollaries to the translation of an archaic narrative text of some nine hundred or so words (depending on the ancient language in which you found it), sometimes called the Culhar’ Fragment and, more recently, the Missolonghi Codex. That fragment has come down to us in several translations in several ancient scripts.
The occasion for my own translation was the discovery, in a basement storage room of the Istanbul Archeological Museum, of a new version of the Culhar’ in a script that was, by any educated guess, certainly older than most previously dated. Appended to it was a note in an early version of Greek (Linear B) to the effect that this text had been considered (at least by the author of the note) to be humanity’s first writing.
And Linear B has not been written for a very, very long time.
But since the Culhar’ only exists in its various partial and, sometimes, contradictory translations, we do not know for certain which script it was initially supposed to have been written in; nor can we be sure of its presumed initial geography.
The origins of writing are just as obscure and problematic as the origin of languages in general. Some of those problems are discussed, in the appendix to Delany’s first published volume of Nevèrÿon stories, by my friend and sometime colleague S. L. Kermit. Yes, that appendix was written at my request. For, thou
gh I have (still) never met him, Delany, after he had written his first five tales, sent me at my university a warm and appreciative letter about what my work had meant to him. (Till then, bits had been scattered only in the most recondite journals; though soon – praise the gods of tenure – they were to coalesce into the precious, precious book.) He also asked if I, or someone I knew, might write a piece about my cryptographic successes that would serve as an appendix to his collection. On his behalf, then (regardless of what my old and dear friend claims – though I’ll admit the circumstances were confused, the time period rushed, and the weather just frightful), I asked Professor Kermit to lend the entertainment his limpid expository manner.
But anyone interested in the details may consult the appendix to this first volume and pursue the matter through the first appendix to the second.
I have worked with that ancient, fragmented, and incomplete narrative, with its barbarians, dragons, sunken cities, reeds and memory marks, twin-bladed warrior women, child ruler, one-eyed dreamer and mysterious rubber balls, for many, many months, spread out over what has become many years; and I’m delighted that the pressure of my own attentions drew Delany to pose (with the help of my commentary) his own land of Nevèrÿon.
Professor Kermit’s generous essay, which concludes this volume, is rich in suggestions as to ways the Culhar’ may have prompted Delany to elaborate elements in his fantasy. But to say too much more about that, especially before you have read the stories themselves, is to suggest there is a closer juncture between post-modern tales and ancient Ur text than there is. For the relation between the Culhar’ and these stories is one of suggestion, invention, and play – rather than one of scholarly investigation or even scholarly speculation. If anything, Delany’s stories are, among other things, a set of elaborate and ingenuous deconstructions of the Culhar’ – a word I take to mean ‘an analysis of possible (as opposed to impossible) meanings that subvert any illusions we have of becoming true masters over a given text,’ a word which I have, like so many in the last decade, become rather fond of; and one which Professor Kermit abhors.
Still, I am as happy to fulfill the publisher’s request for a general introduction to the series as I was first pleased by the fact my translation called Delany’s attention to the Culhar’ in the first place.
But there, really, you have it.
This recompilation of Delany’s immense and marvelous fantasy will mark a return to the series for thousands on thousands of readers, some of whom may even recall when the first piece, ‘The Tale of Gorgik,’ appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine for Spring of 1979. That story was nominated for a Hugo Award; and the collection of the first five tales (with Kermit’s intriguing appendix) in a paperback volume that same year became an American Book Award nominee. And, lo, the opening tale is now longer.
Taken all together, Delany’s mega-fantasy is a fascinating fiction of ideas, a narrative hall of mirrors, an intricate argument about power, sexuality, and narration itself. In the second piece, ‘The Tale of Old Venn,’ we can watch sophisticated intellection and primitive passion play off one another. By the third, ‘The Tale of Small Sarg,’ sadomasochism has reared its endlessly fascinating head; while the ninth, ‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,’ explores the impact of AIDS on a major American city.
Where did the fantasy go …?
But that is precisely the fascination of the series.
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 ap
art 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 Nevèrÿon1 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.’