Return to Nevèrÿon (series)

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Return to Nevèrÿon book covers
Return to Nevèrÿon book covers

Return to Nevèrÿon is a series of eleven “sword and sorcery” stories by Samuel R. Delany, originally published in four volumes during the years 1979-1987. Those volumes are:

The eleven tales are discussed in the articles devoted to the individual volumes mentioned above. The rest of this article is dedicated to the series as a whole.

Contents

[edit] Overview

The eleven tales that make up Return to Nevèrÿon are set before the dawn of history, in a location that might be Africa or Asia but is finally not locatable in any clear and absolute way. The men and women of the reigning civilization have brown to black skin. Barbarian tribes live to the south: a people with pale skin, yellow hair, and light eyes. By the time the stories start, clearly some amount of racial mixing has occurred. But the barbarians were for many years the slaves of the dominant brown-skinned culture, especially for mining and agriculture (as we learn in both “The Tale of Gorgik” and Neveryóna)—and in many places still are.

Many of the stories have different protagonists and, indeed, different sets of foreground characters. But all take a greater or lesser part in recounting an overall story running through the whole series, the history of a man called Gorgik the Liberator.

Currently the eleven stories are collected in four volumes, put out by Wesleyan University Press. At the end of the fourth book, Return to Nevèrÿon (1996), the first tale is reprinted, to emphasize the cyclic nature of the series. The tales themselves are discussed in the articles devoted to each individual volume.

[edit] Structure and Genre

A number of the Nevèrÿon stories are novella (or short-novel) length, including the seventh tale, “The Tale of Fog and Granite” (1984), the ninth tale and the first novel-length treatment of AIDS from a major U.S. publisher, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” (1984), the tenth tale, “The Game of Time and Pain” (1985), and the eleventh, “The Tale of Rumor and Desire” (1987). The sixth story, Neveryóna, or: The Tale of Signs and Cities (1981), is a full-length 380 page novel. As well, a set of appendices and an over-all introduction are fixed to the project, all of which have elements that make them part of the fiction. The introduction to the first volume of stories, Tales of Nevèrÿon, is presumably written by a young black woman academic, “K. Leslie Steiner,” for example, who turns out to be a character in the ninth tale, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals.” The first appendix to the novel Neveryóna is an exchange of letters between a fictive character, S. L. Kermit (who also appears in “Plagues and Carnivals” and is the "author" of the appendix to the first volume, Tales of Nevèrÿon) and one Charles Hoequist, Jr., who, unlike the fictitious Steiner and Kermit, is an actual person—an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University during the early eighties when Delany was first writing the stories.

Science fiction and its poor relation “sword and sorcery” (the term was coined by science fiction writer Fritz Leiber, author of the sword-and-sorcery series, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser) both have a history of “series” stories—sets of tales with continuing characters and/or continuing locations. In his “Introduction” to Joanna Russ’s series, The Adventures of Alyx, first written for the Gregg Press Science Fiction Library series publication of the single volume collection of Russ’s stories in 1977, Delany makes several statements that throw light on his own sword-and-sorcery series, which he began the following year. In that Introduction he wrote:

“For sword and sorcery to be at its best, one needs a landscape that is ‘on the brink of civilization’ in an almost scientifically ideal way. It is only here that one can truly play the game.” (The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, p. 197, Berkeley Books, New York: 1977.)

As well, in discussing the relation between sword and sorcery and science fiction, Delany notes: “sword and sorcery represents what can still be imagined about the transition between a barter economy and a money economy,” while “science fiction represents what can be most safely imagined about the transition from a money economy to a credit economy” (The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, p. 197-8). He goes on to redescribe this relationship in terms of a mathematical theory, put forward by G. Spencer-Brown, having to do with content, image, and reflection (Laws of Form, “Chapter 8,” G. Spencer-Brown), which basically holds that when one moves from a content to an image to a reflection, one reverses the form of the content. This is a complicated idea, but it is also a central trope of the series and is dramatized and redramatized throughout the Nevèrÿon tales in many different forms, perhaps most clearly in the second story in the first volume of tales, “The Tale of Old Venn.” (For a discussion of this particular aspect of the stories, see Kenneth R. James’s essay “Subverted Equations” in Ash of Stars; On the Writings of Samuel R. Delany, edited by James Sallis, University of Mississippi Press, Jackson: 1996) Hardly a tale in the cycle of eleven fails to appeal to this concept in some form.

When he was actually in the midst of writing the series, in a discussion of the formal way the stories in a series differ from the chapters in a novel, in a later interview Delany wrote, that in the series: "Put simply, the first story poses a problem and finally offers some solution. But in the next story what was the solution of the first story is now the problem. In general the solution for story N becomes the problem of story N + 1. This allows the writer to go back and critique his own ideas as they develop over time. Often of course the progression isn’t all that linear. Sometimes a whole new problem will insert itself into the writer’s concern—another kind of critique of past concerns. Sometimes you’ll rethink things in stories more than one back. But the basic factor is the idea of a continuous, open-ended, self-critical dialogue." Delany goes on to say: "The series is very flexible. Here’s a short story. Next’s a bulky novel. That can be followed by a novella, or another novel, or another short story . . . (One good form of criticism comes from asking the question, ‘What, historically, might have caused people to act in a particular way that, when I wrote the last story, I just assumed was unquestioned human nature?’)" ("The Semiology of Silence," p. 48, Silent Interviews, Wesleyan University Press: Hanover and London: 1994). The above is a remarkably good description of the entire Return to Nevèrÿon series. Delany wanted something that was coherent but supple and self-critical. In the same interview he says that the story series is, in many ways, closer to the continuous modernist “longpoem,” such Ezra Pound’s Cantos or Robert Duncan’s “Structure of Ryme” or “Passages,” Anne Waldman’s Jovis, or Rachel Blau Du Plessis’s Drafts.

More and more readers and critics (Kenneth James, Carl Freedman, Kathleen Spenser) have come to the conclusion that, even more so than Dhalgren, Return to Nevèrÿon is finally the major Delany work from between the nineteen-seventies and the nineteen-nineties. It is the longest, certainly. It may well be the richest.

[edit] Themes

[edit] Content, Image, Reflection

When looked at as a whole, the most pervasive theme throughout the Nevèrÿon tales can be expressed in a question: What is the effect of narrativity itself? What happens to a story when we tell it—to others, to the culture it moves out into, to ourselves and our sense of ourselves?

[edit] The Tale of Old Venn

The question of reflection has already been mentioned and cited as the series’ central trope. The most dramatic instance of this occurs in “The Tale of Old Venn” (Tales of Nevèrÿon). Venn is a wise woman, a kind of primitive genius, who lives in the Ulvayn Islands, where she functions as a teacher for the local children. (At one point, we know, Venn visited Kolhari and, indeed, traveled around Nevèrÿon. Her genius was quite celebrated. We will later find out [in both Neveryóna and “The Tale of Rumor and Desire”], however, that in this trip she befriended another primitive genius, a barbarian inventor named Belham, and that she was responsible for a number of architectural marvels, including a stone bridge and its support, "Venn’s Bridge" and "Venn’s Rock" [even though no one in the town of Enoch remembers why it is called that], and a set of stone steps that lead up beside a waterfall in a gorge at Narnis, "Venn’s Stair.") Occasionally important people who know of her genius come to visit Venn, briefly, on the island in her old age. But in the tale that bears her name, we see her attempt to explain an “idea” to a young—but particularly bright—girl on the island, named Norema.

[edit] Telling and retelling

To do so, Venn tells a story from her own adventures when a girl. Once she took a boat out on the water, and was attacked by a giant sea monster—easily it could have been a giant squid. The beast breaks her boat rail. It coils a tentacle around her leg, which she hacks free with a knife. Finally, she manages to repel it and escape, with some damage to her craft. When finally she returns to the island, in the tavern excitedly she tells her adventure. In the course of narrating it (and in thinking about her telling, afterward, when she is getting ready to go to sleep), she realizes that, between the reality of the incident, and the image of that incident in spoken language, the “value” of the whole occurrence has completely reversed: “‘While for me, the value of the experience was that, for its duration, I had not known from moment till moment if I would live or die, for them [her auditors] the value of the telling was that, indeed, I had lived through it, that I had survived, that I was here, safe, and alive, confirmed as much by my solid presence as by my stuttering voice and half incoherent account, running on and on about an experience during which I just happened not to have known the outcome.’” That evening, while she goes over in memory what she had said to the folks in the inn, when she examines her account far more carefully and also the reactions of her hearers, she puts together a clearer, cleaner account, taking into consideration the parts they had understood easily and the parts that had mystified them, and which she now works to make clearer in her own retelling. Because all the Uhs, Ums, stutters, and repetitions are gone from the tale, the next day, when she tells the story again, she does a much better job and, if anything, her audience finds it even more fascinating and exciting than they did, and has a much better understanding of what occurred. Indeed, she has made it into a good, accurate, and honest story. (“Truth” is not what is at stake here; but the value of a truth.) Venn explains, “. . . I was now much happier with the reaction of my listeners, for now that it was a story, the telling grew and directed their responses with a certain precision that at least followed the same form as my own experiences on that two-day-previous terrifying night.” If anything, the edited version would seem to be even truer to the event. But finally Venn concludes about the sea monster that had been the center of the experience: “For all her fleshy scales and eyes and slime, for all I use the same words to tell you of her, ordered and recalled in calmness, that I first used to babble of her in fear, she is an entirely different monster.”

[edit] Two other examples

Before and after this account, Venn gives two other examples of this notion of content, image, and the reflection that creates a different content, even if it would seem to have the same shape and form. The first involves actual mirrors. The second is another story, this time of what happened when money was introduced into an even more primitive polygamous culture that, at one time, she went to live among and even married into and had a child. The way money draws to material wealth and abandons material poverty creates a reflection of the culture that makes the culture reverse many of its initial values.

The single husband with many wives is her prime example.

When the culture was based on the barter of material goods, whoever did the work was the one who controlled the wealth. Thus a marriage group, in socio economic terms, was a cooperative of working women with a certain amount of power, who shared a prestigious hunter among themselves, sexually and culturally, a figure of pride and social standing for them all. Since the meat he provided as food was, however prestigious, no more valuable than the grain, vegetables, pots, and tools they made and worked with, he was in no real way wealthier than the women—on the contrary.

But then, with the arrival of folks from Nevèrÿon, money began to enter the tribe.

Money was a custom imported from outside the tribe, and it began as a prestige object, and so it went to the prestige bearer, the husband. But as money replaced barter in the culture, now women would have to go to someone with money—the husband—and exchange their goods for it, and then go and purchase what they wanted. Whoever had the money had the power—rather than whoever had the material wealth having the power. The result was that the emotional and power deployment of the society was soon reversed, especially as to gender. Suddenly the wives were workers for their husbands (in the form of employer and laborers), rather than cooperative laborers with a fancy sexual object to show off to the other groups. Now the husband was showing off the number of his wives he could afford—and who worked for him now—to the other men . . .

[edit] Language, Reflection

The major way that this pattern of content, image, and reflection rings through the series, however, is in the concept of language itself. We have experiences. We tell our friends about them. (We mirror them in speech.) Then, in an attempt to critique what we say—to say it more carefully, more accurately, more permanently, more truthfully—we write it out. (We reflect on what we have already reflected.) One of the most interesting examples of this, rather than the general situation of the written text itself that we encounter whenever we open the stories, occurs between “The Tale of Fog and Granite,” and, two stories later, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” (both found in Flight From Nevèrÿon). The first is about the adventures of a young smuggler whose name we never learn.

In the course of the story, the smuggler takes his provision cart across the bridge, to where people hail the carts leaving the city for various outlying towns to buy rides from the drivers. On the bridge, at three or four in the morning, the smuggler sees at first a crazy young man. Then he encounters some young white barbarians who have been out all night long and are basically harassing some black middle class folk of the city, who are coming to find rides; but the harassment is not carried out in any serious way, nor do the people take it seriously. Finally, the smuggler observes some of the folks in the waiting area, and a man who comes to clean it. At the end, he has a conversation with a student he gives a ride to in his wagon for part of the way.

Two stories later, in “Plagues and Carnivals” (by far the most complex story in the series), Delany himself, in one of the present day sections of the tale, stops to give us a journal entry from his own notebook. It tells of a bus trip he took at three or four o’clock in the morning from Port Authority at New York’s 42nd Street, down to Philadelphia to attend an academic conference (Post Barthes, Post Bhaktin) at Temple University in 1981. In his journal entry, he describes coming down to the Port Authority bus terminal, where at first he sees a crazy young man; then he has an encounter with some young black kids who have been out all night long and are basically harassing some white middle class folk of New York, who are coming to catch their buses; but the harassment is not carried out in any serious way, nor do the people take it seriously. Finally, he observes some of the folks in the waiting area, and a man who comes to clean it. At the end, he has a conversation with a student, who is taking the same bus and rides with him for part of the way.

Many sentences in the accounts are identical. Many others differ only by a word or two. The two passages suggest an “original” experienced content, a journalistic “image” of that experience, and a fictive “reflection” of the journal. The question, then, as it was in the case of Venn’s tale, is: What happens to the ‘truth values’ of the various modes, as we consider each in the light of the other?

[edit] Mirroring Gorgik

Another level at which this “reflective” theme is carried out is dramatized in the number of people who attempt to imitate (or “mirror”) the Liberator Gorgik in the course of the tales, and the endless problems this produces for everyone, from the government to primitive scholars who want to construct a history of the rebellion. Those like Cloden counterfeit him for evil gains. Those such as the one-eyed Noyeed do it to aid the Liberator and distract others away from him, so that Gorgik will be “the freer . . . to move more fully, further, faster” (16). Even the “little man” in “The Tale of Fog and Granite,” whom most readers, working their way through the whole series in order, assume is Noyeed, are surprised to find out at the end that he is someone else entirely, pretending to be the Liberator’s one-eyed lieutenant, who sometimes passes himself off as the Liberator himself. (Finally, of course, there is the question: What happens to the content of the idea of reflection itself when one example is reflected by another, which is again reflected by still another . . .) The results of all these reflections of reflections (imitations of imitations) is perhaps best summarized in the chronologically final story, “The Game of Time and Pain,” (from Return to Nevèrÿon) when Gorgik, rehearsing his adventures to the young Udrog, explains: “I had looked into a mirror, recognized that mirror for what it was, and seized the image within it for my use. Now, at a sudden turn of chance, in need of an image to seize, I’d glimpsed that what I'd thought were mirrors and images and an 'I' looking into and at them were really displaced, synthetic, formed of intersecting images in still other mirrors I had not noticed before—mirrors whose angle, tactility, and location, because there were so many of them, because they were visible only through what was reflected of them in other mirrors, I couldn’t hope to determine (much less determine a coherent pattern in which to place them), much less determine which were real and which were merely intersections in others.” Not only does this disorientation mirror the content of the character’s life experience, finally it’s the rather heady aesthetic experience of the reader of Delany’s text itself.

[edit] Dragons

Dragons and their eggs (and the “dragonfruit” which can be mistaken for dragon eggs—another case of doubling by counterfeit) are also a thematic element that weave through Delany’s Nevèrÿon stories. Dragons are introduced in the first five tales, where they function as an image of freedom, flight, and hope—though we learn that, in evolutionary or ecological terms, the dragons are an endangered species and on the way to extinction. In Neveryóna the dragons are specifically identified with the ability to write—and the intellectual freedom which this gives, through allowing us to engage in a dialogue with the past. In “Plagues and Carnivals,” again dragons would seem to have something to do with language, where they provide the extraordinary image of flight that concludes this tale of translation between incommensurate tongues. And, in “Rumor and Desire,” again Delany generalizes them into an image for barely attainable desires.

[edit] Style

As Delany writes in his “Introduction” to Russ’s sword and sorcery series The Adventures of Alyx (clearly one of his major inspirations and influences), “Traditionally, sword-and-sorcery is written with a verbal palette knife—an adjective heavy, exclamatory diction that mingles myriad archaisms with other syntactical distortions meant to signal the antique: the essence of the pulps” (JHJ p 194). Delany’s first move in revaluing the “content” of sword-and-sorcery is to employ a style that is as far as away from that of the pulp magazines as possible. While the style of the Nevèrÿon tales is rich and colorful (as well as precise), it is also heavily weighted with psychological analysis, till it is almost Jamesian or even Proustian in its effect.

The style, or rather styles, employed in these stories cover an extraordinary range of rhetorical approaches, moving from the dense analytic monologues of Gorgik, Madame Keyne, and the Earl Jeu Grutn in Neveryóna, to the lyric lushness of the closing section of “Plagues and Carnivals,” when a character who may or may not be the one-eyed Noyeed (or who may or may not be a one-eyed homeless derelict camping out by a fire in Riverside Park) abandons broken English for his “own” language in which to recount his final “flight from Nevèrÿon.” Delany can switch and switch back (especially in “Plagues and Carnivals”) from giving a narrative to giving the way a narrative is written. Delany’s style is precise enough to allow us to watch the fundamentally purely verbal way the elements that ground our desires are recombined by language to cleave to the form of the real man or woman who happens to be the object of desire, and shows how obsession with one part or another can lead us again and again beyond borders that we were unaware we had crossed. Indeed, the whole Return to Nevèrÿon series is a rhetorical feast of all-but-inexhaustible richness.

[edit] Other Influences

The invention of "sword and sorcery" is generally credited to Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936), a young pulp writer from Cross Planes, Texas, who committed suicide at age thirty. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories and his King Kull tales fixed the major tropes of the genre from 1925 on, when the first Conan story, "Spear and Fang," appeared. Delany twists and plays with these conventions in his Nevèrÿon stories, to create his critical effects. Fritz Leiber (1910—1992), who coined the term "sword and sorcery" and whose Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales appeared from the nineteen thirties through the nineteen seventies, introduced the possibilities of self-satire and humor into Howard's vision of blood, guts, and primitive glory. Joanna Russ’s Alyx series—certainly the greatest direct influence on Delany—and G. Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form (specifically “Chapter 8”) have already been mentioned as important sources. Others almost as important are the work of the French Psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (discussed in part of the appendix, “Closures and Openings,” in the final volume, Return to Nevèrÿon), as well as critical theory in general. Each of the stories begins with an epigraph from a theoretical thinker. Many graduate students over the last quarter of a century have reported that Delany’s tales were their first exposure to the exciting dialogues that give significance to some of these thinkers. Two brief Delany non-fiction works the readers may find helpful are "The Ken James Interview" in Silent Interviews [1992] and “Neither the First Word nor the Last on Deconstruction, Structuralism, and Poststructuralsism,” his survey of literary theory up through 1988, including a brief but insightful discussion of Lacan’s concept of the phallus, in Shorter Views [2000].

Other literary sources that Delany himself has cited are the tales of the English language Danish writer, Isak Dinesen, and the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar.

[edit] “Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus”

Through the course of Return to Nevèrÿon, Delany connects it to a larger project, “Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus.” The first part of this work is his science fiction novel Trouble on Triton (1976)—which functions as a prologue to the Nevèrÿon tales. The second part of “The Informal Remarks” is the second appendix to that novel, “Ashima Slade and the Harbin-Y Lectures.” Apparently the first five stories of Return to Nevèrÿon, the fiction proper in Tales of Nevèrÿon, manages to slip outside the overall project. Part Three of the “Informal Remarks” is the first appendix to that volume, by “S. L. Kermit.” This is the discussion of the supposed source of all the Nevèrÿon tales in an ancient manuscript known as the “Kolhar Fragment” or the “Missolongi Codex,” an ancient text of some nine hundred words, which exists in “numerous” translations in many ancient languages. It is presumed to be humanity’s first attempt at writing. But because of all the translations, no one is really sure which was actually the first. Kermit’s discussion even takes in a theory by an actual archaeologist who did her work in the early eighties, Denise Shmandt-Besserat, which proposes an earlier “token” writing using sculpted beads for words and ideas; according to Shmandt-Besserat, the earliest cuneiform writing that we have today is a matter of these "tokens" first pressed into clay to leave and imprint, and later the same marks drawn on soft clay with a sharp stick. Apparently, accordingly to the essay, a fragment of the “Kulhar’ Fragment” even exists in a “token writing” version.

Part Four of “Some Informal Remarks” is the novel Neveryóna, and Part Five is the AIDS novella, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals.” If one can pull out a pattern from this, starting with Trouble of Triton, the “Informal Remarks” are constituted by the sections that have most to do in which the doubling (discussed earlier in this article) that has most to do with writing. In “Closures and Openings” (in Return to Nevèrÿon), section 15 discusses the Modular Calculus directly, for those who need a helping hand or who have not carefully pursued the notion for themselves through all the “Informal Remarks.” As Delany puts it in another interview, “The Second Science Fiction Studies Interview” (in Shorter Views [2000], p 319), he quotes from “The Informal Remarks, Part II” (the second appendix to Trouble on Triton), “How can one relational system model another? . . . What must pass from system-A to System-B for us (system-C) to be able to say that system-B now contains some model of system-A? . . . Granted the proper passage, what must be the internal structure of system-B for us (or it) to say it contains any model of system-A?” (Triton, “Appendix B,” p. 356 [of the 1976 Bantam edition / p. 302 of the Wesleyan UP edition of Trouble on Triton].). In the interview Delany goes on to answer his own question: “The question encompasses the semiotic situation, since the answer to the second part of the question (“What must pass from system-A to System-B . . .”) is some form of the answer ‘signs’; and the answer to the third part (“. . . what must be the internal structure of system-B for us (or it) to say it contains any model of system-A?”) is: "Clearly it must be of an internal structure that allows it to interpret signs—i.e., its internal structure must be one that allows it to perform some sort of semiosis.” To the extent that Return to Nevèrÿon deals with narrativity and writing, this would explain one of Delany’s most often quoted comments about this major project, that Return to Nevèrÿon was conceived as “a child’s garden of semiotics."

[edit] References

  • Kathleen Spencer, "Nevèrÿon Deconstructed: Samuel R. Delany's Tales of Nevèrÿon and the 'Modular Calculus'" in Ash of Stars; On the Writings of Samuel R. Delany, edited by James Sallis, University of Mississippi Press, Jackson: 1996 ISBN-13: 978-0878058525
  • Kenneth R. James, “Subverted Equations: G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form and Samuel R. Delany's Analytics of Attention” in Ash of Stars; On the Writings of Samuel R. Delany, edited by James Sallis, University of Mississippi Press, Jackson: 1996 ISBN-13: 978-0878058525
  • Jeffrey Allen Tucker, A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference, Wesleyan University Press: 2004 ISBN-13: 978-0819566898
  • Samuel R. Delany, "Alyx" (an introduction to Joanna Russ' The Adventures of Alyx) in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Berkeley Books, New York: 1977
  • Samuel R. Delany, "The Semiology of Silence," in Silent Interviews, Wesleyan University Press: Hanover and London: 1994 ISBN 0-8195-6280-7
  • Samuel R. Delany, The Straits of Messina, Serconia Press, Seattle: 1989 ISBN 0-934933-04-9
  • Samuel R. Delany, “Neither the First Word nor the Last on Deconstruction, Structuralism, and Poststructuralsism,” in Shorter Views, Wesleyan University Press: 2000 ISBN 0-8195-6369-2
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