Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  The objection to Freud, however, remains. I do not, of course, mean the problem of ‘vulgar Freudianism,’ where metonymies are interpreted as metaphors for their originary terms and situations. The valid Freudian enterprise is rather to discern the several social and psychological systems (clearly distinguishing which is which) by which metonymies exfoliate. And Freud’s discovery of the force of sex as it worked among the psychological systems was a great one. The problem was, however, not that Freud paid too much attention to sex, but that—paradoxically—he paid too little attention to it. The nature of his inattention manifested itself as a series of metaphors that exhausted sex by purely social analogues. In the Oedipus Complex, for example, infantile sexuality becomes wholly entailed with the emotions of jealousy, aggression, and fear, which, after puberty, sexual feelings can, indeed, sometimes evoke when frustrated—though by no means necessarily so. Since sex is not an emotion, but an appetite, this entailment wreaks untold confusions in a theory that is supposed to be dealing with ‘drives’: in short, Freud does not deal with sex as an autonomous function that may (or may not) have its own working rules apart from the shifting emotional calculus in which it is embedded: and he deals with a negative irritant that can only be satisfied (however pleasurably) by a counter irritant as if it were a positive energy. At some point in any detailed analysis that goes on long enough, this must cause errors.

  The objection to Lacan—a paradox that mirrors our objection to Freud—is that he does not pay enough attention to language. I am not talking of Lacan’s famously recomplicated and allusive style. Rather, in the range of his theoretical elaboration there is little to suggest that, for all his brilliant speculation on the way language works [in] the mind, he entertains any grasp of the primary function of language, not only in the function and field of psychoanalysis, but in the general cultural scheme of things.

  Language is first and foremost a stabilizer of behavior, thought, and feeling, of human responses and reactions—both for groups and for individuals. Its aid in intellectual analysis and communication are (one) secondary and (two) wholly entailed with its function as a stabilizing system. (It is precisely by its ability to stabilize reactions at the level of the signified that language creates—or ‘introduces the subject into’—the Symbolic.) Language by itself can call up sexual responses in the absence of a sexual object—and, sometimes, repress sexual responses in the presence of one. Given the tasks we humans find, fixate on, and imagine, again and again our responses must achieve a variety, complexity, and accuracy surpassing those of other species by enormous factors. If there were not an extensive stabilizing system, that variety, complexity, and accuracy could never be achieved.

  The masculinist bias in the language of patriarchal society and culture in general, and in psychoanalytic terminology in particular, from ‘phallus,’ ‘castration,’ and ‘There is only one libido, and it is male,’ to ‘absent father’ and the exemplary ‘he,’ is not the producer of the problem. But it most definitely stabilizes responses and patterns of response to the problem—responses now of individuals, now of groups.

  A European study of the 1970s has shown that Italian mothers who breast-feed their infants wean their girl children 40 percent earlier, on the average, than they wean their sons. An American study of the same decade has shown that the average white-collar American father physically handles his under-a-year-old infant of either sex less than five seconds a day. Male children under five receive on the average more than five times the amount of physical contact, both from their parents and other adults of both sexes, than do female children of the same age. Infants handled primarily by one adult for their first eighteen months tend to be frightened of strangers and less secure as children than infants handled consistently by two or more adults for their first eighteen months. These and a host of like facts may just be among the strongest empirical causes for ‘patriarchal culture.’ As one collects more and more of them, one begins to read from them a relative brutalization of the female body and the female psyche in infancy and early childhood that manifests itself in any general collection of male and female adults in terms of adult physicality, attitude, and behavior; and they may directly or indirectly control both the Imaginary and the Symbolic orders well before the infant grows into her or his stade du miroir—that is, before the phallus (as opposed to the female genitalia or the male genitalia) is perceived as a signifier or anything else.

  Language is a stabilizer among our responses to the world and to our problems in it. When the stabilizing system is so powerful and important as to make our responses as we recognize them, for all practical purposes (whether they are good responses or bad ones), possible, it is tempting to view the stabilizing system itself as causative of the responses if the responses are judged good, and causative of the problems themselves if the responses are judged bad (i.e. if the responses exacerbate the problems or just allow them to continue). But with the concept of stabilization of response, we can accept the overlap in both these cases while still avoiding its seductive confusions.

  To make real changes in patriarchal society and culture will require complex, intricate, and accurate behavior. And things can be done about the empirical problems if our responses are stabilized by language.

  Our earliest and originary Judeo-Christian myth tells us that Adam alone had the right to name—that is, he had the triple right, first, to divide up the world into the semantic units most useful for him, second, to organize those units into the fictions that would stabilize what was most useful to him to have stable, and, third, to exclude from language whatever was most convenient for him to leave unspoken. If we want a world where not only freedom of speech, but freedom of social determination exists for both sexes, women must seize this triple right to name, seize it violently and hold to it tenaciously; and they must use it for something more than simply retelling his old tales. For those tales were what stabilized patriarchal society in the first place. But only if they seize and use this right will they be able to stabilize reactions in both men and women at a fine enough precision to bring about the desired revolution in patriarchal society and culture. If women commit this seizure, that revolution, however painful, may still be a comparatively peaceful one.

  If they do not, it will be a bloody one. For, once again, language is not the problem—only a tool to help with solutions.

  But at this point the historical battle to name the law and to effect its constitution within an always-to-be-created society and culture—already a whit less patriarchal for sustaining the conflict even the length of time it takes to name it—has always-already begun. And certainly nothing I, a man, have written, write here, or could possibly write represents or expresses its origins.

  7. If, as it turns to examine the interplay between the healthy and the pathological, psychoanalysis would untangle specific failures of the stabilizing system, or would examine ways in which the stabilizing system itself is unstable or, indeed, would explore response patterns stabilized in undesirable ways, all well and good. But it must be prepared to find destabilizing systems, counter-stabilizing systems, and reactions and responses simply too great to be stabilized by the systems available (reactions both social and psychological), many if not most of them nonlinguistic. But only with its object so clarified can psychoanalysis proceed on any front with any lasting efficacy.

  8. The excerpt from Ryan’s preface that introduces volume three ends with a footnote commending the reader to a number of articles by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (from whose introduction to her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology I took the motto for the first volume of these tales), among them: ‘Il faut en s’en prenant à elles,’ in Les fins de l’homme (Paris, 1981); ‘Revolutions that as Yet Have No Model: Derrida’s “Limited Inc.”’ Diacritics 10, no. 4 (Winter 1980); ‘Finding Feminist Readings: Dante and Yeats,’ Social Texts 3 (Fall 1980); ‘Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse,’ in Women and Language in Literature and Society (New York, 1980); ‘Three Femi
nist Readings: McCullers, Drabble, Habermas,’ Union Seminary Quarterly Review 35, nos. 1 and 2 (Fall-Winter 1979-80); ‘Explanation and Culture: Marginalia,’ Humanities in Society 2, no. 3 (Summer 1979); ‘Displacement and the Discourse of Women,’ in Displacement: Derrida and After, edited by Mark Krupnick, Indiana University Press (1983); ‘Sex and History in The Prelude (1805): Books 9-13,’ in Texas Studies in Language and Literature; ‘Reading the World: Literary Studies in the 80s,’ in College English; and ‘French Feminism in an International Frame,’ Yale French Studies.

  Let me iterate Ryan’s commendation.

  In a sense, modern philosophy is a series of introductions to introductions to introductions, the movement between them controlled by the protective play of forces about desire.

  9. Early on, it occurred to me that the relationship of the Nevèrÿon series to semiotics/semiology might be, for better or for worse, much like that of Van Vogt’s Null-A series to General Semantics.

  I have tried to leave the odd sign of this in the text.

  10. Davenport plumbs Pausanias (Volume II, Penguin edition, pp.355-364?) for souvenirs of Elis and its resident Skeptic; Mabbott (or Julian Symons? That’s where I found it) for young Poe’s bogus Russian romp; perhaps Maurois for Hugo’s visit, from his exile in Jersey, to Guernsey. But that’s very different from the historical enterprise of Nevèrÿon; different from the way I comb Braudel, or, for that matter, the Native’s D’Eramo.

  11. But origins are always constructs, always contouring ideological agendas.

  What other kinds of origins, then, am I drawn to discuss?

  What other kinds of origins am I drawn to exclude?

  12. Childhood readings of Robert E. Howard, descriptions by various friends over the years of Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Moore’s Jeryl, Moorcock’s Elric? Finally, I suppose, Russ’s Alyx series and the introduction for its initial volume assemblage: but those are public precursors for any reader to infer.

  I can remember others.

  The first Nevèrÿon story, for example, was never finished, never titled; its two fragments, as far as I know, were lost.

  In London in 1973, while I was completing the first draft of Triton and ‘Shadows,’ waiting for my daughter to get born, this image struck:

  To a sequestered corral, somewhere near the mountain hold of fabled Ellamon, delinquent girls were sent for incarceration from all over the prehistoric land. There they were put to work as grooms and riders for a breed of flying dragon, local to the mountains, which, for some generations now, had been under Imperial protection.

  I made two written starts into this imaginary visitation, both of which I thought might become one tale.

  One ran to perhaps a dozen typewritten pages:

  In a wagon caravan also carrying goods and stores for the mountain hold, a girl of fifteen was being transported from a primitive city, where she’d been convicted of stealing some coins, to the mountain reformatory. Her overseer was a foreign, Amazon-like woman named Raven, who wore a black rag mask across her eyes and who was to work as a guard at the prison once she had delivered her charge.

  In the midst of the caravan journey through the forested slopes, bandits attacked the wagons, and, with bow and arrow, Raven killed their chief. (She was a crack shot.) During the attack, she gave the girl some orders, but, more hypnotized than frightened by the violence, the girl did not respond. She was so unused to taking orders, especially from another woman, that it didn’t occur to her to obey—even to save her life and the lives of the others around her. Raven was not so much angered or bewildered by the girl’s paralysis as amused. She speculated that a time in the reformatory with other young women criminals might do the girl good. The bandits were driven off, but, as the caravan resumed its journey, the girl, who’d always thought of herself as an adventurous, dangerous, and independent sort, was both fascinated and repelled by this foreign woman who killed men for rational reasons.

  The other, six-page fragment, written perhaps three weeks earlier, detailed an incident that occurred some weeks later, with the girl now having become an inmate at the dragon corral and Raven having taken up her job among the guards:

  The corral had something of a reputation throughout that primitive land, and from time to time men tried to break into it in hope of the sex to be had there from the young criminals. Led by an older inmate, a young woman possibly psychotic, a group of girls (including the newcomer) had captured such an interloper that morning. Binding his hands behind him, they hung him from a wooden rack (was it built for the purpose …?) by one leg.

  Over a day and night, the delinquents tortured, maimed, and—finally—killed him.

  Was there some question as to whether the man was a willing victim, who’d let himself be captured and bound, under the impression that the delinquent girls, after they had ‘enjoyed’ him, would set him free …?

  Raven learned from the other guards that such male invasions happened two or three times a year—and always with the same end. When men penetrated the mountain reformatory, the more experienced women who guarded the youngsters looked the other way and let them do as they would. At first, when Raven (like the young man) thought the girls would ‘enjoy’ him and let him go, she’d even allowed some of the girls to sneak off to take part. Later, when she accidentally came upon the actual torture, however, she was deeply troubled—particularly by the participation of the girl she’d brought to the compound. While Raven could conceive of killing men (or women) for reasons of self-defense, this Dionysiac slaughter was, to her, deranged—though, unsettlingly, on discovering it, she could not bring herself to step in and stop it, almost as if she suffered from the same paralysis as had her young charge earlier.

  That evening Raven decided she would not remain there as a guard but would leave the dragon corral the next morning and go elsewhere …

  A third, unwritten scene was probably why the fragments never joined in a single tale. For the strongest of my initial visions was that, at the story’s end, the newly imprisoned girl would ride gloriously through the air on the back of a flying dragon—

  I begin, a sentence lover, an SF writer; which means I am stuck, willy-nilly, with a certain grammar, a certain logic. It seemed important that my young prisoner not escape (or die!) at the (potential) story’s end. (‘Escape’ was something only Raven, by her decision, was free to do.) But the notion of all these young criminals, grooming and riding their own means to freedom but never actually using them, no matter what limitations they’d internalized through whatever social pressures, no matter how terrible the jungle or rock or desert they might have to struggle in when their dragons landed, seemed an oddity that, finally, meant there was no story.

  Similarly, Raven’s inability to bring herself to stop the slaughter of the young man seemed as unbelievable as the girl’s inability to do anything to help when the caravan was attacked.

  Both finally lacked what T. S. Eliot’s generation called ‘objective correlatives,’ and mine, ‘psychological veracity.’

  These two moments of feminine paralysis on which everything hinged were literature’ in its most degraded sense. Neither reflected in any interesting way anything I’d known of women or men in any real situation of material pressure, and both reflected all too much the psychological clichés for heroines of fifties’ action-adventure movies.

  I felt, and still feel, that it is important for fantasy to have a grasp of the complexity of fact, if not of factual content.

  So the tale was put aside.

  In December 1974, just before Christmas, after a stay of almost two years to the day, I returned from London to New York. When various papers were sent after me, the fragments were not among them.

  I haven’t seen them since.

  The Hanged Man from the FitzGerald Tarot, drawn over ’67 and ’68; copyright ’69

  In some parallel world that tale may have been written, with all its excesses, unbelievabilities, and contradictions—the distortions that would mak
e it ‘work’ committed largely on the personality of the foreign guard, on her young charges.

  It’s not my world.

  Nevertheless, it remains in memory as one lost origin of Nevèrÿon: those two fragments, with the unwritten third, were the logical and grammatical violences against the real, torn apart, recast, recon-toured, critiqued, reformed, elaborated in all their various atomika, and their atomika rejoined as this set of intricate lies that have tethered me to this odd structure, the Nevèrÿon series (built for what purpose …?), a decade now.

  13. ‘The history of thought is the history of its models,’ Fredric Jameson writes in the opening of his preface to The Prison House of Language.

  14. The problem as some feminists have articulated it (most recently and brilliantly, Teresa de Lauretis, in Alice Doesn’t—Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema Indiana University Press, 1984), is the exclusion of woman as ‘historical subject’ from an overwhelmingly male discourse. This exclusion has been effected by yet another logical contradiction of man: historically, woman has been projected again and again as the subject side of man (i.e., as nature, mystery, the unknown, the site of absence of the social constraints on which all society is grounded, the site of uncontrolled desire) and at once the object of man (sign of male social position, a source of cheap or unpaid labor, the desired object, and the unitary exchange commodity that at once binds, coheres, and generates patriarchal society-as-a-collection-of-bodies).

  I would suggest that, theoretically, this ‘exclusion of woman as historical subject’ is a false problem (i.e., a misreading); I would further suggest that, within patriarchal society, the notion of ‘historical subjects’ itself stabilizes the contradiction and thus encourages the exclusion. The real problem, as I see it, is not the apparent contradiction between woman as subject and woman as object and the exclusion it seems to achieve. It is rather the obvious complicity between the denial, first, of woman as historical object and the denial, second, of woman as transhistorical subject: these twin denials, which have nothing contradictory about them, are the real mechanism for the exclusion of women from a cultural discourse, which, by that exclusion, stabilizes their social, psychological, and sexual exploitation—an exploitation largely carried out in overwhelmingly economic terms. I truly believe that, restated in this wise, the theoretical side of the problem is solved much the way the goose is gotten out of the bottle in the famous Zen koan. What is left for theory in practical terms, after this theoretical revision, is the specific assertion of women as historical object (research, history, speculation on where women have been and what they have done) and the assertion of the historical constitution of women as transhistorical subject (how has it been brought about). Lacan and Foucault both would seem to agree that this is identical with the constitution of ‘man’ as transhistorical subject. Certainly there must be an overlap: men and women are less than a chromosome apart. But the very existence of a feminist critique, totally aside from any rightness or wrongness of any of its elements, means that identity does not cover the case.