Tales of Nevèrÿon

by Samuel R. Delany

  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 Alyx3, 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.

  Such deciphering work as mine (to return to our initial topic) is, of course, highly speculative. And the part that inspired Delany’s series was done over a decade back. The interpretive successes of those of us who work today with the most enduring, if not eternal, of human productions often seem, in our own eyes, spectacularly ephemeral. And though, on occasion, some of them that ignite the general imagination receive a modicum of acclaim, most developments – not to say triumphs – in the decipherment of unknown scripts don’t, today, garner much fanfare. Still, I would hope that, even among those readers ‘returning’ here for the first time, a few might remember a bit about them.

  These tales are a marvelous reminder.

  Thus, on Delany’s behalf, I’m delighted to introduce to you the stories my labors engendered.

  Return, then, to Nevèrÿon …

  – Ann Arbor

  Summer 1986

  NOTES

  1. Samuel R. Delany’s fantasy series, Return to Nevèrÿon, consists of four volumes of stories and novels. The first, a collection of five stories, is Tales of Nevèrÿon (Bantam Books; New York: 1979); the second is the novel Neveryóna, or the Tale of Signs and Cities (Bantam Books; New York: 1983); the third is the triptych of novellas, Flight from Nevèrÿon (Bantam Books; New York: 1985); the fourth and most recent is Return to Nevèrÿon – American title The Bridge of Lost Desire (Arbor House; New York: 1987).

  2. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, by Samuel R. Delany (Bantam Books; New York: 1984) paperback, p.100. (Grafton Books: 1986, p. 129.)

  3. Alyx by Joanna Russ, with an introduction by Samuel R. Delany, was originally published by Gregg Press (Boston: 1976). Under the title The Adventures of Alyx, it has appeared in paperback from Timescape Books (1983) and Baen Books (1986) without the Delany introduction. That introduction can be found in Delany’s trade paperback
essay collection, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (Berkley-Windhover Books; New York: 1978).

  4. ‘Alyx,’ in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, by Samuel R. Delany, p.197.

  5. ‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,’ in Flight from Nevèrÿon by Samuel R. Delany, p. 237.

  Tales of Nevèrÿon

  And if the assumption of responsibility for one’s own discourse leads to the conclusion that all conclusions are genuinely provisional and therefore inconclusive, that all origins are similarly unoriginal, that responsibility itself must cohabit with frivolity, this need not be a cause for gloom … Derrida, then, is asking us to change certain habits of mind: the authority of the text is provisional, the origin is a trace, contradicting logic, we must learn to use and erase our language at the same time … If one is always bound by one’s perspective, one can at least deliberately reverse perspectives as often as possible, in the process undoing opposed perspectives, showing that the two terms of an opposition are merely accomplices of each other … : the notion that the setting up of unitary opposites is an instrument and a consequence of ‘making equal,’ and the dissolving of opposites is the philosopher’s gesture against that will to power which would mystify her very self.

  – Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

  Translator’s Introduction

  Of Grammatology

  The Tale of Gorgik

  Because we must deal with the unknown, whose nature is by definition speculative and outside the flowing chain of language, whatever we make of it will be no more than probability and no less than error. The awareness of possible error in speculation and of a continued speculation regardless of error is an event in the history of modern rationalism whose importance, I think, cannot be overemphasized … Nevertheless, the subject of how and when we become certain that what we are doing is quite possibly wrong but at least a beginning has to be studied in its full historical and intellectual richness.

  – Edward Said

  Beginnings, Intention and Method

  1

  His mother from time to time claimed eastern connections with one of the great families of fisherwomen in the Ulvayn Islands: she had the eyes, but not the hair. His father was a sailor who, after a hip injury at sea, had fixed himself to the port of Kolhari, where he worked as a waterfront dispatcher for a wealthier importer. So Gorgik grew up in the greatest of Nevèrÿon ports, his youth along the docks substantially rougher than his parents would have liked and peppered with more trouble than they thought they could bear – though not so rough or troubled as some of his friends’: he was neither killed by accidental deviltry nor arrested.

  Childhood in Kolhari? Somehow, soldiers and sailors from the breadth of Nevèrÿon ambled and shouted all through it, up and down the Old Pavē; merchants and merchants’ wives strolled on Black Avenue, so called for its topping that, on hot days, softened under the sandals; travelers and tradesmen met to chat in front of dockside inns – the Sump, the Kraken, the Dive; and among them all slipped the male and female slaves, those of aristocratic masters dressed more elegantly than many merchants, while others were so ragged and dirty their sex was indistinguishable, yet all with the hinged iron collars above fine or frayed shirt necks or bony shoulders, loose or tight around stringy or fleshy necks, and sometimes even hidden under jeweled pieces of damasked cloth set with beryls and tourmalines. Frequently this double memory returned to Gorgik: leaving a room where a lot of coins, some stacked, some scattered, lay on sheets of written-over parchment, to enter the storage room at the back of the warehouse his father worked in – but instead of bolts of hide and bales of hemp, he saw some two dozen, cross-legged on the gritty flooring, a few leaning against the earthen wall, three asleep in the corner, and one making water astraddle the trough that grooved the room’s center. All were sullen, silent, naked – save the iron at their throats. As he walked through, none even looked at him. An hour, or two hours, or four hours later, he walked into that storage room again: empty. About the floor lay two dozen collars hinged open. From each a chain coiled the pitted grit to hang from a plank set in the wall to which the last, oversized links were pegged. The air was cool and fetid. In another room coins clinked. Had he been six? Or seven? Or five …? On the street behind the dockside warehouses women made jewelry and men made baskets; for coppers boys sold baked potatoes that in winter were crunchy and cold on the outside with just a trace of warmth in the center and, in summer, hot on the first bite but with a hard wet knot in the middle; and mothers harangued their girls from raffia-curtained windows. ‘Get in the house, get in the house, get in the house this instant! There’s work to do!’

  With spring came the red and unmentionable ships from the south. And the balls. (Most things dubbed unmentionable have usually been mentioned quite fully in certain back alleys, at certain low dives, beside certain cisterns, by low men – and women – who do not shun low language. There have always been some phenomena, however, which are so baffling that neither high language nor low seems able to deal with them. The primitive response to such phenomena is terror and the sophisticated one, ignoral. These ships produced their share of both, sold their cargo, and were not talked of.) The balls were small enough for a big man to hide one in his fist and made of some barely pliable blackish matter that juvenile dissection revealed hid a knuckle-sized bubble. With the balls came the rhyme that you bounced to on the stone flags around the neighborhood cistern:

  I went out to Babàra’s Pit

  At the crescent moon’s first dawning.

  But the Thanes of Garth had covered it,

  And no one found a place to sit,

  And Belham’s key no longer fit,

  And all the soldiers fought a bit,

  And neither general cared a whit

  If any man of his was hit …

  The rhyme went on as long as you could keep the little ball going, usually with a few repetitions, as many improvisations; and when you wanted to stop, you concluded:

  … And the eagle sighed and the serpent cried

  For all my lady’s warning!

  On warning! you slammed the ball hard as you could into the cistern’s salt-stained wall. The black ball soared in sunlight. The boys and girls ran, pranced, squinted … Whoever caught it got next bounce.

  Sometimes it was ‘… for all the Mad witch’s warning …’ which didn’t fit the rhythm; sometimes it was ‘… for all Mad Olin’s warning …’ which did, but no one was sure what that meant. And anyone with an amphibrachic name was always in for ribbing. For one thing was certain: whoever’d done the warning had meant no good by it.

  A number of balls went into cisterns. A number simply went wherever lost toys go. By autumn all were gone. (He was sad for that, too, because by many days’ practice on the abandoned cistern down at the alley end behind the grain warehouse, he’d gotten so he could bounce the ball higher than any but the children half again his age.) The rhyme lingered in the heaped-over corners of memory’s store, turned up, at longer and longer intervals, perhaps a moment before sleep on a winter evening, in a run along the walled bank of the Big Khora on some next-summer’s afternoon.

  A run in the streets of Kolhari? Those streets were loud with the profanity of a dozen languages. At the edges of the Spur, Gorgik learned that voldreg meant ‘excrement-caked privates of a female camel,’ which seemed to be the most common epithet in the glottal-rich speech of the dark-robed northern men, but if you used the word ini which meant ‘a white gilley-flower,’ with these same men, you could get a smack for it. In the Alley of Gulls, inhabited mostly by southern folk, he heard the women, as they lugged their daubed baskets of water, dripping over the green-gray flags, talk of nivu this and nivu that, in their sibilant, lisping way, usually with a laugh. But when he asked Miese, the southern barbarian girl who carried vegetables and fish to the back door of the Kraken, what it meant, she told him, laughing, that it was not a word a man would want to know.

  ‘Then it must have something to do with what happens to women every month, yes?’ he’
d asked with all the city-bred candor and sophistication of his (by now) fourteen years.

  Miese tugged her basket higher on her hip: ‘I should think a man would want to know about that!’ She stepped up the stairs to shoulder through the leather curtain that, when the boards were removed for the day, became the Kraken’s back door. ‘No, it has nothing to do with a woman’s monthly blood. You city people have the strangest ideas.’ And she was gone inside.

  He never did learn the meaning.

  The lower end of New Pavē (so called somewhere between ten and ten thousand years) was one with the dockside. Along the upper end, where the road dipped down again to cross the Bridge of Lost Desire, male and female prostitutes loitered or drank in the streets or solicited along the bridge’s walkways, many come from exotic places and many spawned by old Kolhari herself, most of them brown by birth and darkened more by summer, like the fine, respectable folk of the city (indeed, like himself), though here were a few with yellow hair, pale skin, gray eyes, and their own lisping language (like Meise) bespeaking barbaric origins.

  And weren’t there more of them up this year than last?

  Some stood about all but naked, squinting in the sun, while some wore elaborate skirts and belts and necklaces, most of the women and half the men with dark wings of paint laid about their eyes, some sleepy and slow-moving, some with quick smiles and inquisitive comments to every passerby, with sudden laughter and as-sudden anger (when the words for women’s genitals, men’s excreta, and cooking implements, all combined in truly novel ways, would howl across the bridge: the curses of the day). Yet all of them had, once they began to talk to you, astonishingly similar stories, as if one tale of pain, impoverishment, and privation (or a single, dull, if over-violent, life) had been passed from one to the other, belonging really to none of them, but only held by each the length of time it took to tell it, the only variation, as this one or that one recounted it, in the name of this small town or that abusive relative, or perhaps the particular betrayal, theft, or outrage that meant they could not go home.