Gary Lim

Prof. D. Kazanjian
17 December 2004
ENGL 80100 Theory Colloquium
Of Delany and Derrida
In Samuel R. Delanys fantasy series, Nevron, 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 heritage that
critical theory has often 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 this heritage of Western philosophy that Derrida, in
Of Grammatology, calls logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence, that exigent,
powerful, systematic and irrepressible desire for such a (the transcendental) signified (49).
In this paper, I will examine some of the forms that this working out takes, in the
second book of the series, Neveryna. By focusing on acts of reading and writing in the
novel, I will suggest that enacting theory through the conventions of speculative fiction offers
an allegory of the possibilities for interpretation made available in a de-constructive reading
practice.

At the same time, by making these concepts allegorical within the narrative,

Delanys text manages to highlight the limits one encounters when reading his text deconstructively.

Reading: Of Collars and Chains

One of the key theoretical enterprises that Neveryna engages with is the particular
mode of reading in Derridas 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 Derridas 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. (35)
Via a similar gesture, Delany explores this binding of binaries in Neveryna. 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 Derridas reading
of Saussure deals with the inside/outside binary as they appear as conceptual terms in
Saussure, Delany locates the slavery/freedom binary in objects: the slaves 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:

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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 Nevron society.
The fact of the mans 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:
Ive sworn that while a man or woman wears the iron collar in Nevron, 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 Gorgiks
particular designation, one of identifying with those that still suffer as slaves, merely reinscribes the singularity of what the collar represents in Nevron: 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 still
shaped 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 Gorgiks 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
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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 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 Pryns imaginative faculties.
More literally, the astrolabe represents an invitation to venture beyond the urban
confines of the city of Nevron. 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 Nevron. Indeed, in contrast to the ordered rituals
of the Court and the political-commercial dealings that characterize Nevron, 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 slaves 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 slaves 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 misrepresents
(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 collar4

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 collarcover 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.

In this instance, the collar as a

representation of slavery is still created by an expectation for a collar to beneath the cover; 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 slaves collar as a sign of slavery can take on a very
complex nature. Even as the cover is meant to hide the collar, hiding it implies its presence
and even if the collar is not actually there, its presence is still assumed. It is the masking
performed by the cover that ironically assures the presence of collar. The sign of the collar
thus occupies a position of ambivalence, simultaneously absent yet present. This presentation
of the collar as a sign, seems to derive in part, by the Derridean attempt to subvert an ultratranscendental 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. (61)
The way a sign hides and obscures itself, like the collar and the cover, is central to the
meaningful function of the sign. 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 this.
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:
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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 slaves collar does not even function properly the locks broken [but t]he hinge is
tight so it holds (488).

Like a collar with a broken lock, the collars 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 slaves neck, the hinge
that holds despite the broken lock, creates an illusion of the collars 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 collars 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 sexual meaning, undermining at another
level, the conventional idea of the collar as being only 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 Gorgiks 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
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over from the collars 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 collars 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 collars 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 unambiguously contained or 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)
Gorgik seems to advocate a mode of reading that characterizes the sign in a ceaseless shifting,
a movement toward, rather than into an absolute position of signification.
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
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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, shed 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.
If this re-making of the sign indicates the liberation of the imagination that the slaves
collar inspires, a re-configuration of the signifier can also undermine the imaginative
possibilities inherent in a signs 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 Grutns 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 can be taken
8

apart and put together through a very specific series of steps (t)hats the part I thought he
wouldnt remember (445) demonstrates a particularity of function that compromises its
mystique as a sign.
decorative.

Further, the patterns on the disks of the astrolabe are not merely

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 key that unlocks imaginative possibilities. In fact, fully
assembled, the astrolabe is not a device that guides individuals to Mad Queen Olins 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 .... Its 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 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 and compromised when Burka and another slave notice the astrolabe
on Pryns 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 sign holds tyrannical sway over 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: Delanys first book
in the series, Tales of Nevron 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 Neveryna 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 in Pryns case, 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
10

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
Pryns 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 Pryn to imagine herself in a position of resistance and power, the
astrolabe has an almost hypnotic effect on Pryn, 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 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.
From another perspective, Pryns final experiences with the slaves collar indicate a
recognition that signs do not merely represent concepts. Instead, Pryns fascination with
the collar that she has taken off the freed slave Burka suggests that the notion of slavery
is an effect of the collar. Pryn, who through her experiences is most exposed to the
various transgressive and liberatory readings of signs, ends up insisting on singular
meanings. She keeps Burkas collar after she frees Burka and her fascination with 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)
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Pryns act demonstrates how the collar functions to asserting itself in a most narrow and
literal way, conditioning her to feel like a slave. In spite of the dramatic readings which
liberated the slaves collar from merely signifying slavery and showing that it could very well
be allied with notions of freedom, the collar still has the power to cause Pryn to experience it
as a technology of bodily control. Now that she is marked as a slave, Pryn joins a group of
slaves and begins to try 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)
Ironically, 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. In fact, thinking that the collar is only a sign causes Pryn to erase its power as the
sign that conditions slavery and to look elsewhere, as if slavery were a pre-existing and
natural notion and would leave other marks on those designated as slaves. In effect, the
liberalization of meaning that has been dramatized through the de-construction of the binary
relationship between opposites does not have the result of Pryn giving up her faith in
logocentric certainties.
In a sense, this reflects Derridas recognition of the danger, even when reading deconstructively, to be lulled by the hope of uncovering essences: The trace is nothing, it is not
an entity, it exceeds the question What is? and contingently makes it possible (75). The
questions What is the collar? or What does the collar mean? are activated by the arbitrary
nature of the sign, and because of these questions, the way to interpretation is opened up. In a
sense, the questions are necessitated by the quest for meaning. Yet to insist on the meanings
that are subsequently produced in the process as final meanings is to merely answer the What
is question and not allow the sign to exceed these meanings.

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Reading then, is necessitated by trying to answer the What is question but is also a
practices which evades the trap of that question, that must try never to be caught or obsessed
with singular answer. Such a reading practice would allowing a space for other readings.
Reading in this manner, one may no longer trust the opposition between fact and principle
(Derrida, 75), suggesting that to insist on the fact of the collar as indicative of the principle of
slavery is to limit the sign to the confines of a metaphysics of presence.
Even though much of the novel questions the basis of the slavery-freedom binary, this
questioning is ultimately limited by Pryn. In the end, Pryn seems anxious to secure (at least
for herself) the meaning of the collar. As she rides with an acting troupe back to Kolhari, she
muses about repairing the broken lock of the collar: Perhaps she could fix the lock (514).
While the intent behind the thought remains ambivalent, for there is no indication what use
she will put the fully functioning collar to, perhaps she thinks that the collar, with a lock (thus
invalidating the possibility of taking it off at will), will more fully represent and fulfill the
functions of slavery.
Writing: Of pryn, Pryn and Pr yn
If the novel has shown that Pryns attempts to reading transgressive meet with limits
that are set in motion by that very manner of reading, might the same be said about acts of
writing in the novel?

Neveryna is a text that constantly foregrounds acts of writing,

consistently demonstrating that the production of text is always already caught up in a

contestation over form, function and meaning. Not presented as purely instrumental, writing
is never mere technique. In this sense, writing has much in common with the transgressive
gestures of reading that take place in the novel. However, because these meditations on
writing are framed, transmitted and explored via the very mode they interrogate, the novel
itself is an act of writing, these moves to question the conventions of writing are
circumscribed by novelistic conventions that seem to lie outside the world of the Nevron.
Seem to lie outside because, as Derrida puts it, [t]he meaning of the outside was always
present within the inside, imprisoned outside the outside [....] (75). The conventions of
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writing are never external to the text as they are imbricated with the very questioning of those
conventions that the allegory enacts.
Throughout Neveryna, Pryns ability to write marks her out. It places her on a social
standing that is above the slaves that she, a runaway child and street urchin, might have very
well become. This is evident when she is employed by Rokar both as a scribe and as tutor to
his nephew (342-343).

But more than serving a function in getting Pryn a job, Pryn

intuitively understands that her ability to write constitutes an integral part of her identity.
When she first meets Gorgik, she immediately indicates this fact as central to who she is:
My name is Pryn I can write it too (61). This fact recurs in her meetings with Madam
Keyne Not only do you know your own name, you know how to write it (132) and the
Earl Jue Grutn Well! Not only do you ride dragons, you can write (359). Constantly
volunteering the fact that she can write, in a world where that skill is highly prized but is not
yet the norm, allows her to construct an identity for herself as a writer. In fact, this identity
becomes a safety crutch for her in moments of insecurity or social awkwardness. When she
attempts to tell a story at the Earls dinner table and finds the effect of alcohol disrupting her
ability to remember the tale, she turns to her ability to write things down:
Im, not a good tale-teller, Pryn apologized. Id much rather write it down,
where I could think about what Im supposed to be saying. She felt unsteady,
unhappy, and out of place. If there werent the pressure of having to tell it, I
could find out the real story, all of it. I could write why it means something
special to me, to, as well as you (470)
To Pryn, the ability to write is not merely the ability to reproduce what is spoken. In fact, it
may be suggested that she privileges writing over speech, claiming that it will enable her to
get at the real story, to even use writing to explain what is not apparent to her or her
audience.
Yet this crutch that Pryn turns to is problematized right from the beginning of the
novel. In an early encounter with Norema, the inventor of the kind of writing that Pryn has
master, no less than three different forms of writing are considered. First, there is the writing
14

that Pryn knows before meeting Norema, a representation that is without capitalization. In
fact, the novel adopts Pryns conception of writing in its own description of her: Her name
was pryn -- because she knew something of writing but not of capital letters (13). Then in
the meeting with Norema, Pryn learns about capitalization, how that non-auditory aspect of
writing has the power to help one mean them differently (23). It is at this point that pryn
becomes Pryn. The reader gets an inkling of how these shifts are fundamental to the
concerns of the novel for up to this point, the text has represented its protagonist as pryn but
from this moment on, registers the shift to Pryn. Yet a third kind of writing that Norema
actually introduces at the same time that she explains capitalization to Pryn, are marks that
distinguish a word as a name and another mark that shows that the sounds need to be put
together. Thus, while it is never adopted by the text, Noremas writing of Pryns name would
perhaps look like Pr yn.
The rationale Norema offers for her markings is a version of phonologism (Derrida
10): That line there means you squish the two sounds together into one. Otherwise you have
people mispronouncing it every which way [....] These days you have to indicate everything,
or nobody understands (22-23). Thus the text reminds the reader that the conventions of
writing that are taken for granted are highly contingent ones. In showing various types of
writing revolving around a single word, the text suggests an irreducible contestation and
tension inherent in the act of writing, even at the level of the word. Even as the varying
representations of the same sound and concept demonstrate that writing is never merely a
figuration of speech given that there are multiple figurations presented and therefore infinite
figurations possible if indeed writing was meant to merely represent speech, this moment also
demonstrates that each choice with regard to writing necessarily and powerfully shapes that
act of production because alternatives are constantly displaced or erased.
The sense of displacement in the written is also explored in terms of the elusive
origins of writing. While Neveryna is ostensibly set in a world that is much closer to the
origins of civilization than ours is, the text by no means uses this fact to enunciate a
theoretically coherent account of the emergence of writing. In fact, in an extended discourse
on the subject, the Earl Jue Grutn demonstrates to Pryn that contestation over a notion of
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origins is a reality that will perpetuate as long as people cease to speak [...] before the
wonder, the mystery, the confusing, enciphered presence of a written text (416). Referring to
three different parchments, the Earl explains three different theories of text: writing as purely
functional (for commercial transactions), writing as art (for transcribing the beauty of the realworld) and writing as violence (a branding on the skin as punishment). He then suggests that
despite a certainty about the nature of these texts, it is impossible to determine which of the
three came first (414). This is by no means a question for mere intellectual amusement, for
as the Earl points out, the terroristic origin would haunt [...] any claim to either responsible
beauty or responsible disinterest and on the other hand, originary disinterest, however
polluted by [...] later visions, [will] somehow redeem them (415). The conflicting accounts
of an origin of writing however, do not efface a notion of origins, which writing requires for
the production of meaning. While the notion is not of origins as pure, unitary or stable, it is a
notion that enables meaning. As Derrida puts it:
(T)he appearing and function of difference presupposes an originary synthesis not
preceded by any absolute simplicity. Such would be the originary trace [....]
(W)ithout the trace retaining the other as other in the same, no diffference would
do its work and no meaning would appear. (62)
Hence, it is precisely because the conflicting accounts of the origins of writing evade and
efface a simple point of origins that they manage to energize the notion of writing with
motives and implications that are other from themselves, thus opening the act of writing to
possibility. The Earl Jue Grutn summarizes the case for valuing this undecidability:
And I forsee a trilogue, now with one voice silenced, now with another
overweeningly shrill, now with the three in harmony, now with all in cacophony
[....] (416)
The lack of a clear account of the origins of writing is not to be taken as crippling but as
resulting in an on-going interplay of forces that afford the notion of writing a sense of
engagement and immediacy, as existing in ever-evolving now.

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At the end of the novel, Pryn is shown to be at another beginning with regards to
writing. Speaking to a musician who drives the cart as she re-enters Kolhari, she learns from
him that no one has yet figure(d) a way to write down music so that musicians can
remember their tunes (514).

Immediately making the connection between music and

language, Pryn volunteers:

If you can write down words [...] I dont see why you cant find a way to write
down [...] Ill work on it! (514)
Will Pryn be the originator of this new system of writing? And even if she did succeed, might
it not be a re-discovery of a system that has already been developed but has been forgotten?
Regardless of the imagined answers to these questions, the reader is left with the promise of
origins at the end of the novel but origins that are already contested and ambivalent. In this
moment, Pryn dramatizes the fact that the contested origins of writing energize language not
because they offer an explanation of the past but because that very contestation illustrates an
unfinished, incomplete aspect to language that feeds and drives interpretation.
If the conventions that anchor notions of writing are interrogated thoughout the novel,
the same process also takes place with regard to narrative conventions. Neveryna seems to
challenge a central convention of fantasy the dragon by questioning its status as a
powerful, magical creature of myth. Dragons are omni-present in the novel everywhere yet
hardly prominent or the developed as the magical creatures of fantasy.

In fact, the

proliferation of dragons in different guises acts to undermine this narrative convention. There
is the immediately recognizable dragon of myth and legend, the Worm of the Sea that
Queen Olin invokes to guard her treasure. This is a gigantic beast that lies asleep beneath the
waves and needs to be summoned:
To the extent she had seen it at all, shed thought it was a toppled carving, as
sculpted demons head, big as a house and fallen in its chin. A gold and black eye
opened; and opened; and opened, wider than the wide moon .... A head, still wet,
rose on its thick neck, clearing near roofs, rising over the towers, spiring between
the wings. (33)
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While this depiction of the classic fantasy dragon is immediately recognizable, its status is
problematized because it forms part of a tale told within the novel. Indeed, as Norema tells
the legend of the Mad Queen Olin, she alludes to the narrative conventions that have shaped
the contours of the legend: Again Olin cried out, loud enough to hurt her throat: Oh great
Gauine for that was the dragons name though I dont know where she learned it (33).
Norema steps out of her narrative for a moment, offering a rationalist explanation for the
sudden intrusion of an unexplained reference to the name of the dragon but in the same
moment opening up her narrative to the question where did Norema herself learn the name
Gauine? This thus becomes a moment where the nature of inheritance that marks how
folklore and legend are shaped becomes exposed as having tenuous links to an originary
moment of telling and hearing. In fact, this dragon of myth never appears in the real world
of Neveryna but makes a re-appearance only when Pryns hallucination dramatizes the same
tale and inserts herself in the role of Olin.
At the same time, there are the real mountain dragons that inhabit Nevron. Pryn
rides one into the pages of the novel. But these creatures are worlds apart from the dragons of
myth, for they are fitted with reins, kept in corrals and can only fly if they take off from a
ledge. Next to Gauine, these dragons are rather uninspiring:
The dragon swung her head, opened her beak and hissed over stained near
useless teeth, tiny in mottled gum. (18)
These are the real dragons of Nevron and the their representation as pathetic creatures, in
contrast to Gauine demonstrates the undermining of genre conventions that the novel
undertakes. Yet the persistence of legend and its application to political ends is by no means
stymied by this reality. The fact is that these mountain dragons have been put under Imperial
protection (353), and according to one of the more interesting fables of Nevron (35), it
was Queen Olin that instituted this practice. While never clearly explicated in the novel, the
dragon also seems to represent the political affiliations of a faction of the nobility that traces
its ancestry to Queen Olin, that lives in the south and that is currently out of favor with the
court of the Child Empress, the Court of High Eagles. The dragon is thus to the political
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interests of Nevron a marker of factions, an embodiment of the political memory that is

empowered and legitimized through myth.
Then there is the other dragon Gauine, that is the imaginary constellation drawn out
when the astrolabe is put together, already discussed at length in an earlier section of this
paper. The layered references that emerge from this dragon the legend of Queen Olin, the
dispossessed southern nobility and the complex space where singular, instrumental meanings
are problematized demonstrate that Delanys dragons do not merely overturn genre
conventions but operate as powerful points where meaning is compacted at the same time that
interpretative space is opened up.
One effect of this de-stabilization of mythic meaning is the displacement of narrative
and genre conventions that exist prior or external to the novel. Even when these are invoked,
meaning is not communicated in a straightforward manner. A case in point would be the way
Norema uses a recognizable mythic trope to explain how Queen Olin wins over the wealth of
her captors:
A few days later a third servant came with four gold pieces and a great rock to
smash in the queens head. After that a fourth came with eight gold pieces and a
draught of corrosive poison. The fifth had sixteen gold pieces. The sixth had
thirty-two coins. The next (26)
Pryn immediately indicates her recognition But Ive heard this story before! Or one just
like it only it was about grains of sand piled on the squares of a gaming board (26-27)
and the familiarity with the idea of exponential increment that strikes the reader as well. But
are Delany and Norema merely acknowledging that myth is made by re-constituting older
myths in new configurations? Norema defends the originality of her story by claiming that
there are some new parts too (27). Further, Delanys use of the trope of exponential
increment is even more ambivalent. It appears when the markings on the rim of one of the
astrolabes disks are explained by the Earl as representing precisely this exponential number
system Belhams signs for numbers [...] a circle of numbers counting nothing (447). The
Earl claims that the markings are only the numbers, without special meaning or significance.
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But given the associations that have already been made both in Noremas tale and our own
recognition of the trope, the numbers cannot be without meaning unless that band of
meaningless numbers itself signifies a position of theoretical resistance to specified meanings.
Thus mythic tropes inserted into the moment of writing are never either entirely devoid of
prior meaning or absolute carriers of that meaning.
Instead, the patchwork effect of this assemblage of myth signals the limits that
Neveryna faces as a narrative that tries to harness de-constructive interpretive practices as a
mode of production. I have already pointed out how Norema, the story teller, exhibits
moments of meta-textual consciousness, where her comments highlight the fact that she is
telling a story, in an attempt to excuse implausible elements of a tale. But this meta-textuality
is also employed to enhance the telling of a story:
The uncle took her (Queen Olin) to his family home, there is the south, and that
evening he went with her up into a tall tower at least thats how one version of
the story goes. In another version, he took her up on a high rocky slope
Shouldnt you choose one or the other for the sake of the telling? Pryn asked.
For the sake of the story, Norema answered, I tell both and let my hearer make
her choices. (28)
Noremas insistence that she offers choice to the listener (f)or the sake of the story is an
interesting one. Her assertion demonstrates a faith that the meta-textual commentary will not
distract the efficacy of the illusion created by the story-world but conversely enhance it.
Norema may be getting at the fact that listeners hear in a text their own experiences and
realities. Her invitation to consider different versions is an invitation to identify or at least
begin to uncover points of contact between the world that appears external to the fiction and
the fictive itself.
Delany himself employs this meta-textual commentary to delineate the nature of his
narrative enterprise. Before Pryn finally makes it to the Garth peninsula in the South, where
the climax of sorts takes place, she meets two young men and several barbarians, and spends
some time with them. The narrative clearly points out that these encounters could have
launched the narrative on a very different trajectory: Were this an entirely different story, it
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would no doubt go on to tell how [...](330). Two pages later, the text summarizes what that
other story might have looked like:
In brief, the story we might have written had things been only a little
different would have told of bravery, wonder, fun, laughter, love, anger, fear,
tears, reconciliation, a certain wisdom, a turn of chance, and a certain resignation
the stuff of many fine tales over the ages. But in the weeks Pryn did not once
think of dragons.
Thus we review them briefly. (333)
If Noremas meta-textual comments have the effect of draw the listener into her story,
Delanys direct the readers attention to the allegory of theory that the novel is. It is almost as
if he is concerned that the reader will be lulled into reading the narrative as merely a fantasy
novel by the writing itself, and sees the value of supplementing the narrative with these
comments. At the same time, it is a comment about the direction he might have taken as a
writer. His reason for making these remarks, the fact that Pryn did not once think of
dragons, suggests that he envisions the narrative as constantly probing and theorizing the
meaning making process. This involves, as I have argued, the radical problematization of
both reading and writing. Further, his use of we is ambiguous. Perhaps he is suggesting
that in order for a radical de-stabilizing of the conventional quest narrative to take place, there
has to be a certain complicity between the writer and reader.
Yet at this point, the text traces the limits of working out such a problematization
within the conventional framework of a narrative.

Even as questioning the traditional

frameworks of symbol, textual production and genre enables the critique of those processes to
take place, the possibility of what is effaced in that questioning the story we might have
written, the story that does not leave the threads of its unraveling exposed always lurks
close by.
Thus, Delany recognizes that in order to produce a text that allegorizes a deconstructive enterprise, an inhabiting of those very structures (Derrida 24) of genre that
constitute the basis of the conventions that he wishes to de-stabilize, must take place. At the
same time, he seduces the reader to inhabit the world of Neveryna, and in the process
21

witness how that world falls prey to its own work (Derrida 24). Yet in that seduction, there
is the ever present danger that the reader falls prey, as Pryn does, to the conventions of the
fantasy narrative, and forget the fact that Nevron was always already vanishing from the
moment of its inception.
References
Delany, Samuel R. Nevrona, or, the Tale of Signs and Cities : Some Informal Remarks
Towards the Modular Calculus Part Four. London: Voyager, 1996.
---. Tales of Nevron. New York: Bantam Books, 1979.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corrected ed.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

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