Return to Nevèrÿon by Samuel R. Delany (Book 4 of 4)

This is the fourth and final book in Samuel R Delany’s “sword and sorcery” series (the overall series shares a title with this final volume), and it contains two further tales, a book-ending reprint of the first tale from the first book (Tales of Nevèrÿon), and then the obligatory 50 pages of appendices that both contextualise and inform the intended readings of the tales themselves…

With the third volume of stories (Flight from Nevèrÿon) featuring a really breathtaking piece of writing that re– (or de-) contextualises and collapses the entire series into a non-fictional exploration of the (then in-process) AIDS crisis of 1980s New York City, a further volume felt almost unnecessary to me… However, Delany uses an appendix to make clear his case for writing more about Nevèrÿon, going so far as to describe that final piece from the third volume (‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals’) as the least experimental of the tales within the series… Metatextuality isn’t complicated, but what Delany is seeking to do is…

He reasserts in this analytical appendix (very different from the fictional world-building appendices of the earlier volumes) the importance of his writing’s reliance on post-structuralist theory, and the ways in which Freudian and cultural critical practices both fail and succeed at explaining the narrative and theoretical ideas he’s exploring in these texts…

This appendix/essay, titled ‘Closures and Openings’, is basically a manifesto for the series… Delany writes about how, for him, it is the meanings and the ideological elements that are most significant, and most worthy of attention… The narratives and the characters and the world building were, to him, entirely secondary to his epistemological project.

He even suggests that he has written with a “yearning for a world in which all these stories might be merely beautiful” (p. 386), a statement which seems to express a desire for a literate society that has reached sufficient intellectual heights to see these discussions as easy – a dumbing down because more is understood and known, with complex texts not needing time or effort to have their themes explicated and explored. Or not.

I suppose that for a general reader (which is me (big dumb dumb here)), explorations of Lacanian and Foucauldian semiological study aren’t necessarily what we open a “sword and sorcery” novel hoping to find… However, as the intellectual practices that Delany is employing here to structure and centre his fiction do permit him to create evocative narratives and character studies, then I don’t find my simple mind floundering…

I suppose what Delany is doing with this series is the thing that all teenage students of English literature doubt ever happens – he is packing his text with meaning purely for the purpose of eliciting complex responses from close textual analysis…

I remember first doing those close analyses, led by high school teachers reciting the government-set curriculum, and wondering whether the words being underlined and highlighted and the meanings being extrapolated and annotated were actually things that the author intended to be present…

It remains difficult to know, because one can easily be dismissive and say that, ugh, before, like, modernism and, err, psychoanalysis, no one was thinking about how people think and what they’re choosing to not say, but that’s absolute bullshit and, like, Shakespeare’s oeuvre is full of important weight given to dual meanings of words, and he frequently created neologisms in order to better express ideas… He absolutely was creating texts that were suitable for structural analysis, and not by mere coincidence…

Delany, too, is building a text here with the principles of semiotics and structuralism and post-structuralism as foundations. He isn’t applying theories to something that he’s already written to analyse or falsely complicate it, he has created an analysable novelistic practice from the off…

These far-from-simple, yet far-from-realist tales are suitable for complex theoretical engagement, not just because they are literary texts and any text can be analysed within any critical framework, but because they have been written with these analyses in mind, with the expectation that these stories are best enjoyed by someone who is able to recognise and understand the conversations around semiotics and cultural theory they contain…

The presumed reader, here, is a theorist, not a “general reader”, yet Delany has constructed the texts in such a way that they are enjoyable for someone like me… Though, yes, I do have two degrees in English literature, but they’re both mediocre degrees and my theoretical interests have always been far more rooted in the biographical than any sort of structural critical theory… But it does mean that I know some of these words and ideas and thinkers, even if I don’t necessarily understand them very well. (Or at all…)

I suppose it is appropriate, then, for this commentary on this final book to ignore the narratives of the tales within it, but I will note that there is a satisfying conclusion to the narrative of Gorgik the Liberator, and engaging narratives around other characters too. There are tales within the tales, but this time there’s no collapsing of fact into the fiction, which was something I really really really enjoyed…

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Return to Nevèrÿon (the series) can be read purely as enjoyable, evocative and exciting [slightly] intellectual genre fiction, with the intellectual rigour with which Delany approached its composition justified by the clear results. The intellectual ideas baked into the structures and themes don’t overcomplicate or weaken the tales for a non-intellectual reader, and though I clearly don’t have the critical knowledge and framework to appreciate these works as intended, my understanding gestures towards it being an incredibly rewarding read for anybody who does. Then again, I could be wrong, and intellectuals may find these books shit and boring!

I didn’t, though, I thought they were really good.

Exciting, playful and (for me!) the repetition of the first tale at the end of the series was a cheeky decision that really does pay off, as revisiting all of the narrative and world-building details at that point demonstrates how rich and complex the world Delany was creating with that initial story was, and therefore why he was able to dedicate about a decade of his creative practice to expanding this series of narratives…

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If you are an intellectual, do give these a go, as I would love to find out from someone who does understand the critical frameworks whether they work as intended! If you’re an intellectual who’s already done this, please do let me know in the comments as to whether or not all the critical baggage adds anything!

Maybe the four books that form Return to Nevèrÿon are best enjoyed as literary, well-regarded, genre texts, rather than as exercises in critical theory. I don’t know!

That’s it with this series for me, then!

I’ll return to some more Delany in a few weeks as I have a few more of his books I’ve keen to dive into, including his career-defining massive novel, Dhalgren…

See ya soon, Chip!