Work in Progress

Of Delany and Derrida

In Samuel R. Delany’s fantasy series, Nevèrÿon, there is a constant consideration of structuralist and post-structuralist theory within the frame of the narrative. By incorporating a highly self-conscious application of critical theory to what could easily pass for typical sword and sorcery fantasy writing, Delany manages to enact a working out of theoretical concepts, not by reading a separate text (as is normally the case) but by constructing a text. This has several implications. The notion of critical theory as an act of close reading and re-reading is shifted onto a different modality: it becomes both an act of creative reading and writing. Also, dramatizing critical theory in a fantasy universe re-aligns the philosophical assumptions / heritage that critical theory often has to engage with. Setting his stories in an unidentified time-space “reality” that seems on the brink of civilization, Delany allows for a re-consideration of the critical theory enterprise, which is itself very much a reaction to and product of a very specific philosophical inheritance. It is precisely because Derrida, in Of Grammatology, reacts to this heritage of Western philosophy, what he calls the “logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence”, that “exigent, powerful, systematic and irrepressible desire for such a (the transcendental) signified” (49). Thus, the displacement of the critical reading project into a world that is unburdened of the specific philosophical assumptions creates an interestingly de-stabilizing application of deconstruction.

In this paper, I will examine some of the forms that this working out takes, in the second book of the series, Neveryóna. In the process, I will suggest that enacting theory through the conventions of speculative fiction offers the potential of concretizing .... At the same time, by making these concepts “concrete” within the narrative, the text exposes severe “limits and presuppositions” (Derrida) that plague the deconstructive enterprise.

Of Collars and Chains

One of the key theoretical enterprises that Neveryóna engages with is the particular mode of reading in Derrida’s work that de-stabilizes conventional binary relationships. For example, when reading Saussure, Derrida makes complex the interior/exterior relationship that seems apparent in the distinction between speech and writing. In particular, he shows that by re-considering the assumption that one term is privileged over the other, a presumption rehearsed over and over by the traditions of Western philosophy, not merely subverts that relationship but more profoundly, emphasizes how intertwined the concepts are. In doing so, one of Derrida’s key argumentative moves seems to be to demonstrate how the identity of one term depends inextricably on the other, rather than in the confidence of a “transcendental signified”:

The outside bears with the inside a relationship that is, as usual, anything but simple exteriority. The meaning of the outside is always present within the inside, imprisoned outside the outside and vice versa. (Of Grammatology 35)

Via a similar gesture, Delany explores this binding of binaries in Neveryóna. More specifically, he interrogates the stability of the opposition between slavery and freedom, showing how each term continually derives its meaning from the other, how each term often wanders into the terrain normally associated with its other. However, while Derrida’s reading of Saussure deals with the inside/outside binary as they appear as conceptual terms in Saussure, Delany locates the slavery/freedom binary in symbolic objects: the slave’s collar and an astrolabe. The deconstruction of the binary is enacted through showing the complex manifestation of these objects as signs in the narrative.

The collar ostensibly represents the institution of slavery. This occurs most literally in the fact that individuals that don the collar, or rather have the collar placed upon them, are most assuredly slaves. This fact is demonstrated when Pryn first encounters Gorgik who is wearing “a hinged iron collar” (60). She is immediately consumed by the fear of encountering her first slave up close:

She had seen slaves in the Ellamon market and more recently on the road. But she had never talked to one, nor had she heard of anyone who had. To be standing in a strange city, facing one directly – and such a big one! (61)

Pryn is certain that the man with the collar is indeed a slave, demonstrating not only the ubiquity of institution but also the absolute signification of the collar in Nevèrÿon society. The fact of the man’s slavery quickly overwhelms all other impressions that Pryn may have had of this man and he is objectified as a slave, through the repeated anaphoric reference --“one”. Of course the irony, and hence one de-stabilization of how the notion of slavery is represented, lies in the fact that Gorgik is himself not a slave but “the Liberator”. He wears the collar in solidarity with those who have yet to be set free:

‘I’ve sworn that while a man or woman wears the iron collar in Nevèrÿon, I shall not take the one I wear from my neck.’ (90)

So Gorgik, who fights against the institution of slavery, designates a new public meaning to the collar, one that potentially subverts the received meaning of the collar. Yet Gorgik’s particular designation, one of identifying with those that still suffer as slaves, merely re-inscribes the singularity of what the collar represents in Nevèrÿon: the institution of slavery. Thus, not only does the collar literally represent the institution of slavery, it also represents the tyranny of institutionalized signs suggesting that a reader of such a sign (Pryn) is enslaved to interpreting them narrowly and that the attempt to inscribe new meaning (Gorgik) is contained by the tenacity of conventional readings.

In apparent opposition to the collar, there is the astrolabe. As far as the narrative is concerned, there is only one astrolabe as opposed to the ubiquitous presence of the collar on the necks of slaves whenever they appear. Further, if the collar is a highly public sign whose meaning is immediately and obviously accessible, what the Astrolabe is and represents, remains a mystery for most of the book. In fact, when Pryn notices it on Gorgik’s neck, just several moments after she notices the collar, it is left unnamed, unidentified:

On the copper chain hung a bronze disk the size of her palm – really it was several disks, bolted one on top of the other, with much cut away from the forward one, so that there were little shapes all over it with holes at their points; and some kind of etching on the disk beneath ... Around the rim were markings in some abstract design. (63)

But it is precisely this object that is yet without a name that represents imaginative possibility. The astrolabe is not dismissed as an unidentifiable object. Rather, Pryn is visually attracted by the complexity and artistry of this multi-layered object. She notices the decorative details that await interpretation, the “shapes”, “etching” and “markings” seem to be pregnant with meaning, waiting to be read. Unlike the “hinged iron collar” (60) which is immediately identified in a terse phrase, the astrolabe seduces Pryn’s imaginative faculties.


More literally, the astrolabe represents an invitation to venture beyond the urban confines of the city of Nevèrÿon. Gorgik, when conferring the object onto Pryn, suggests that the “astrolabe is, in its way, a map of just that southern-most peninsula” (257) that lies beyond the control of the Imperial High Court of Nevèrÿon. Indeed, in contrast to the ordered rituals of the Court and the political-commercial dealings that characterize Nevèrÿon, the south is “monstrous and mysterious” (256), a geographical space that is yet untamed by the centers of political and economic power found in the northern port city of Kolhari. In fact, when Pryn receives the astrolabe from Gorgik, she is given the injunction to “Take my gift ... into the south” (259). Not only is the astrolabe freely given (unlike the slave’s collar), it comes with a blessing of sorts, for Pryn to venture into lands unknown. The astrolabe thus comes to represent the freedom of physical as well as imaginative movement.

Yet even as the binary relationship between the slave’s collar and the astrolabe is constructed, its stability is consistently questioned and undermined. The collar, for instance, is never a clear representation of slavery. As was earlier mentioned, the collar mis-represents (at least to Pryn) the fact that Gorgik is not a slave but is in fact the Liberator of slaves. This theme, that the institutionalized sign never unambiguously signifies what it is meant to, is taken up at various points in the text:

A tall woman at the corner newel was fastening a white damasked collar, sewn with metallic threads and set with jewels. It was one of the decorative collar-covers house slaves in wealthier families sometimes used to hide the ugly iron band all slaves wore by law. Having trouble with the clasp, however, the woman removed the cloth to shake it out. Her long neck was bare. She raised the collar-cover again. (57)

The collar is expected, assumed to be present beneath the decorative cover but its presence does not need to be assured for it to have its effect. This description is not an effacement of the collar as slavery is still denoted by a collar, or at least the original expectation for it to be on the woman’s neck; is gestured at by a masking of the physical reality (its ugliness) of the collar. What this moment demonstrates is that the functioning of the slave’s collar as a sign of slavery can take on a very complex nature. A fair amount of toying about with coherent and clear meanings takes place in this moment of signification: the absence of the collar is masked by the cover that is meant to both signal its presence yet hide its materiality. The complex manner in which the sign makes meaning here seems to derive in part, by the Derridean attempt to subvert an “ultra-transcendental” origins of writing through the contradictory notion of the “arche-trace”:

(T)he value of the transcendental arche must make its necessity felt before letting itself be erased. The concept of the arche-trace must comply with both that necessity and that erasure. ... (O)ne must indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace. Yet we know that concept always destroys its name .... (Of Grammatology 61)

The contradiction of being felt and yet erased, again characterizes the symbolic value of the collar when Gorgik describes a “freed retainer” of the “Baron Inige”: “Notice how she holds her bristly chin high, which means her neck once wore an iron collar – wore it for many years” (78-79). In this case, the collar has left its mark as a symbol of slavery and its very absence indicates

Perhaps the most fitting demonstration that the collar is at best an ambiguous evocation of slavery occurs near the end of the novel when Pryn helps to rescue an old woman, Burka, from slavery. After cutting the ropes that bind Burka, Pryn is taken aback when Burka seems to take apart the iron collar at will:

The old slave grimaced, slipping two fingers of each hand beneath the iron collar at each side. She pulled.... The lock separated and the collar came open on its hinge. (488)

This slave’s collar does not even function properly – “the lock’s broken ... (but t)he hinge is tight so it holds” (488). Like a collar with a broken lock, the collar’s integrity as an unambiguous signifier of slavery can only function with the willing co-operation of reader of signs. Once the reader of the collar decides to appropriate the collar for other meanings, even meanings that are conventionally held in opposition to the notion of slavery, the collar gives. In fact, the mechanism that enables the collar to be closed around a slave’s neck, the hinge that holds despite the broken lock, creates an illusion of the collar’s integrity. It is this very mechanism that has allowed Burka to take it off at every night because the collar “chokes” her (488). Similarly, it is the very fact that the collar is a sign of slavery, at one remove from the notions of slavery itself, that enables it to retain the semblance of an unambiguous signification slavery while subversive meanings are continually attached to it.

One of these subversive meanings takes the form of the personal erotic attachment to the collar that Gorgik expresses: “The itself may be a sign of all social oppression – yet its wearing can also be an adjunct of pleasure” (249). Not only is the collar’s secure relationship with the notion of slavery undermined when it assumes the status as a fetish for Gorgik, this transformation of the object gives it an intensely private meaning, undermining at another level, the institutionalized, and hence public nature of the collar as a sign of slavery. Another subversive use that the collar is in the way that Gorgik and his lover Small Sarg use it in their modus operandi to free other slaves. The collar enables them to infiltrate the slavers’ camps and attack the slavers from within. In this sense, the collar symbolizes a kind of political empowerment.

This is not to say that Gorgik’s particular attachment of meaning to the collar remains uncontested. In fact, his lover, Small Sarg, argues that “its oppressive meaning debased love” (249). Thus, at the same time that Gorgik is involved in a radical reading of the collar by associating it with sexual pleasure, the reading is irremediably tinged with meanings carried over from the collar’s more conventional meanings. One might argue that perhaps it is precisely these trace associations with slavery that allow Gorgik to find sexual pleasure in the collar. Such a reading effaces the collar’s potency as a sign and merely replaces it with the notion “slavery” and re-instates slavery as the absolute meaning of the collar. This is the mode of reading that Small Sarg advances. After insisting that the collar’s primary significance corrupts love, he later maintains that Gorgik cannot wear the collar and play the part of the slave because Gorgik is “contaminated by the secret productions of lust” (251). Sarg may allow for the collar to assume different meanings but he insists that the effect of the collar is entirely conditioned by an unambiguous transference of essential meanings into other contexts: “(f)or Sarg, the collar was social oppression, as well as all asocial freedom” (255).

In contrast, I believe that the narrative gestures towards the fact that the tension between the sexual, political and institutional significance of the collar cannot so easily resolved by an explanation where meanings are transferred via the sign. In fact, to insist on one primary meaning for the collar, even if it is a subversive one, oversimplifies the complex process of signification that the text assiduously develops. As Gorgik puts it:

If a sign can shift so easily from oppression to desire, it can shift in other ways – toward power, perhaps, and aggression, toward the bitterness of misjudged freedoms by one who must work outside the civil structure. (255)

The is a mode of reading that characterizes the sign in a ceaseless shifting, a movement “toward”, rather than into an absolute position of signification. To a large extent, this is notion reflects Derrida’s recognition of the danger of insisting on positivistic descriptions: “The trace is nothing, it is not an entity, it exceeds the question What is? and contingently makes it possible” (Of Grammatology 75). Hence, the question, “What is the collar?” is never given a simple answer.

In another sense, the collar subverts its position as an institutional tool with a fixed meaning, by itself being a symbol that inspires contested narratives within the text. It is through explaining the significance of the collar that Gorgik manages to recount the adventures that he had with Small Sarg, indeed, manages to contest an earlier narrative where Small Sarg accuses Gorgik of selling him to slavers. In this way, the collar is a plot device that encourages the telling of stories precisely because of its ambiguous status as a symbol. In fact, the imaginative possibilities associated with the collar fascinate Pryn. Leaving the house of her employer, Old Rokar on the eve of her visit to the Earl Jue-Grutn, Pryn faces the anxiety of not knowing why she has been summoned to the Earl. She turns, in a dream-like moment to the collar:

Pryn felt a moment of disorientation which imagination answered with an image, not of the Liberator, but of Pryn herself wearing the iron collar. She was astonished to feel before the image a relief as intense as the previous anxiety, an intensity as strong as any desire, sexual or other, she’d ever known. (377)

The imaginative relief that Pryn finds in the collar underscores its value as a sign that moves toward multiple meanings. Further, Pryn allows the collar to organize her fantasies of political resistance. She imagines a sequence of confrontations with Rokar, where wearing the collar is calculated to shock Rokar and protest against his own use of slaves:

Sometimes she would arrive for the encounter already wearing the shocking iron – that she would get a smith to forge for her from the growing collection of small coins under her straw pallet with which Rokar was paying her. (377)

In this imaginative manifestation of the collar Pryn does not merely wear the symbol of slavery in order to subvert social categories of “slave” and “free”. Instead, she re-constructs the collar with the very markers that undermine the notion of slavery, paid labor. Hence, the disruptive practice that Pryn imagines involves re-configuring the signifier itself and not merely its signification, perhaps alluding to the fact that the very signifier of slavery can indeed be constituted by the notion of freedom. possibly D 73 – both faces of the sign

If this re-making of the sign indicates the liberation of the imagination that the slave’s collar inspires, re-configuration of the signifier can also undermine the imaginative possibilities inherent in a sign’s apparent complexity. The astrolabe, a mysterious object for most of the narrative, is shown to contain very specific, if discrete meanings. Indeed, it loses its status as an object of imaginative possibility when the Earl Jue Grutn’s son, Ardra, dismantles it and sets it up to show how it “works” (442). While the Earl uses the idea of the astrolabe performing a function rather ironically, for its workings show that it really does not function as an instrument that accomplishes a task, the fact that the astrolabe has to be taken apart and put together through a very specific series of steps – “(t)hat’s the part I thought he wouldn’t remember” (445) – demonstrates a particularity of function that compromises its mystique as a symbol. Further, the patterns on the disks of the astrolabe are not merely decorative. In fact, one of the disks traces the outline of “Gauine”, the non-existent constellation of the dragon (446) and the markings on the rim of another disk merely constitute “a circle of numbers counting nothing” (447). So while there are very specific meanings produced by the astrolabe, these meanings do not transform the astrolabe into a powerful instrument nor amount to a broader theme / principle / key that unleashes imaginative possibilities. In fact, fully assembled, the astrolabe is not a device that guides individuals to Mad Queen Olin’s fabled treasure. Instead, it denies the imaginative impulse for adventure any satiation.

Indeed, summarized, the astrolabe is a negation of secret meanings in particular and more generally embodies a kind of reading practice that is always aware of textual spaces where the desire for absolute meanings can never be fully satisfied:

(I)t is not a key to open a lock; it is not a map to guide you to the treasure; it is not a coded message to be deciphered .... It’s an artfully constructed engine that, by the maneuvering of meanings, holds open a space from which certain meanings are forever excluded, are always absent. (448)

Thus the astrolabe comes to represent a sign that is constantly arranges meanings in a manner that never offers closure. There will always be “excluded” meanings, a kind of possibility for the imagination perhaps, but not in the way that Pryn has thus far understood it, as the capacity for a positivistic experience that is directed toward a goal or imaginative closure. Rather, this opening of a space is in tune with the resistance of “a metaphysics whose entire history was compelled to strive towards the reduction of the trace”(Derrida, 71).

More literally, the liberation of the imagination and action first associated with the astrolabe is complicated / compromised when Burka and another slave notice the astrolabe on Pryn’s neck and relate to her the taboo that Pryn is breaking by bringing the astrolabe south:

To bring that back into the Garth is to is to unleash on us the madness of Olin herself.... You should have never set foot in the Garth Peninsula... When the Vygernangx Monastery thrust even the tip of one tower over the tree tops within the circle of your vision, you should have turned yourself around to ride, run, crawl away as fast as you could go.... (362)

For the slaves, the astrolabe represents not freedom and possibility but a destructive curse. Also, the terror it evokes in the slaves hints at the way the symbol controls the imagination. Their horrified reference to the myth of the Mad Queen Olin (first encountered in the text when Norema tells Pryn the story then later reprised near the end when Pryn imagines herself within the myth) indicates that the astrolabe invokes a myth that has congealed into a cliche. The formulaic phrases – “when the Vygernangx Monastery thrust even the tip of one tower” and “ride, run, crawl away” – of their warning sound like an incantation received in childhood, and reinforced by the telling and re-telling of the myth. In a very real sense, the astrolabe represents the enslavement of the imagination to narrative and myth.

Indeed, the phrases are a formulaic incantation in another sense: Delany’s first book in the series, Tales of Nevèrÿon offers the exact same lines when Gorgik is allowed by his patroness, the Vizerine Myrgot, to leave her service. He is told “never to set foot on the Garth peninsula” (Tales 44) with the exact same injunction that he should abide by the same taboo. It is also then that the Vizerine gives Gorgik the astrolabe though the injunction to never transgress into the Garth is not stated as a condition for owning the astrolabe. Does the transformation of the astrolabe in Neveryóna into an object that embodies the taboo then signal our penchant for fixing myths, for insisting that narratives to take a particular form or shape, for subjugating ourselves to cliched stories that enslave the capacity to imagine?

This is at least true for Pryn, who is disappointed and disconcerted that the astrolabe does not represent an actualization of the myth of the Mad Queen. In response, she re-creates the lost city of Neveryon and the gigantic dragon, Gauine, in a hallucinatory sequence. Trapped by the need for narrative to manifest itself in her own experience, she seems to have come under the power that the slaves attribute to the astrolabe. The re-creation of the scenes earlier narrated to her by Norema and the insertion of herself in the role of Queen Olin are not merely evidence of wish-fulfillment taking place but demonstrate how Pryn’s imagination, fixated on what the astrolabe should mean, enslaves her mentally. In a dramatic gesture, Pryn offers the astrolabe up to the dragon:

“Oh great Gauine, I have come to give my treasure ... !”
... Pryn hurled the astrolabe as high and hard as she could.
Gauine roared.
Gauine beat her wings.
The sea and the winds leapt to answer.
And Pryn ran. (476-477)

Thus if the collar enables to Prynn to imagine herself in a position of resistance and power, the astrolabe has an almost hypnotic effect on Prynn, enslaving her imagination to a narrative from an earlier part of her adventures that she vaguely remembers. This in effect, demonstrates how intertwined the collar and the chain are even though they appear to represent polar opposites. Through this complex investigation of the signs of slavery and freedom, the narrative undermines the straightforward distinction between the two terms by showing that the very signs that evoke either slavery or freedom could very well be constituted by the opposing concept. This twinning of opposites is succinctly summarized in moment before her visit to the Earl Jue Grutn, where she imagines how she might act when she meets him:

She envisioned herself removing the chain from her neck and tossing it to him – or presenting it graciously to him as a gift – in either case, the same sort of amusingly arrogant gesture as taking on the collar. And probably as unnecessary. (379)

While I have demonstrated that Neveryóna constantly presents acts of de-constructive reading, I now wish to propose that these acts of de-construction are necessarily circumscribed by the very elements that de-stabilize meaning in the first place.

The process by which the de-stabilization of binary oppositions takes place depends very much on the meanings that the slave’s collar and astrolabe take on throughout the narrative. While the fact that they are at one remove from the concepts of slavery and freedom, which they constantly undermine, affords a certain mobility of signification, this gap between the conceptual and the material circumscribes the de-constructive movements of the text. In order for the collar and the chain to remain effective as representations of the tendency in reading to cause slippages of meaning, they can never be fully occupied or substituted by the concepts that they represent – their status as material objects has to persist within the narrative. However, their material presence as objects in a world of things becomes a problematic fact that limits the de-constructive impulses of the text.

Firstly, there is the lingering presence – both actual and implied – of these objects throughout the narrative. As has been pointed out, the various manifestations the signs of the collar and the astrolabe have taken in the novel go a long way in disrupting the notion of the transcendental signified. Yet the very fact that they continually make an appearance, precisely because so much attention is given to them as privileged objects within the world of the novel, the penchant for a metaphysics of presence draws a limit on the deconstructive movements of the text. Pryn, the character that comes closest to the character that is most exposed to the various transgressive and libratory readings of signs, ends up still under the sway of the presence that she might find in these objects. Near the end of the novel, Pryn keeps Burka’s collar after she frees Burka and her fascination the collar leads her to put it on:

(She) pulled the iron collar from her sash and raised it to her neck. She pushed the iron semi-circles closed – a small click.... She felt a tingling over her entire body. No one seemed to be watching. It struck her for the first time as she dropped her chin almost to hide it now she wore it, that the collar was not particularly comfortable. (503)

Pryn’s act demonstrates the difficulty a reader of signs encounters in effacing the prominence of the very objects that became so because they were consistently re-iterated as points of contested meaning. Because the collar as a sign still retains its material presence as a collar, and has to in order to be read as a slippery sign, there is the possibility of the object re-asserting itself in a most narrow and literal way. In spite of the dramatic readings which liberated the slave’s collar from merely signifying slavery and showing that it could very well be allied with notions of freedom, Pryn still experiences the collar as a technology of bodily control. And it does not end with the physical. Pryn joins a group of slaves and tries to locate the difference that marks slaves out as slaves apart from the collar:

Certainly there must be something that marked them as different, marked them as belonging to the collar – which, now she had become part of its meaning, was, after all, only a sign. (504)

Her recognition that the collar is “only a sign” does not come with the attendant realization that there is nothing inherent or natural in the disposition of slaves that makes them slaves. She does not realize that even if she finds a distinguishing feature, that too will merely be a sign of slavery, indeed, only “marking” them as different. In effect, the liberalization of meaning that has been dramatized through the de-construction of the binary relationship between symbolic objects is never set free from a lingering notion of transcendental signification lodged in the objects themselves. These readings still “belong to the collar”.

Secondly, despite the radical destabilization of meanings associated with reading the collar and the astrolabe, the objects seem to exist on the exterior of the transgressive discourse, seem to become figures for the notion of “trangressive discourse”. This emerges when one considers the fact that the majority of the acts of transgressive reading begin as attempts to understand the significance of these objects or to re-interpret them. In a very literal sense, these readings take place in the light of these objects. The long discourses by Gorgik on the slave’s collar and by the Earl on the astrolabe take place because the objects are indeed placed at the center of discussion. However, by the end of novel, the accumulative effect of these varied and temporally fragmented moments of discourse, accumulative because of the plot moves Pryn through these moments of discourse, is one that posits the slave’s collar and the astrolabe as existing in order to allow those discursive explorations. This perhaps is the difficulty of working out critical concepts through a fictional world: the objects of that world quickly become subordinated as secondary to the principles of reading and writing that seem to be more internal to the message of the text.