Reading LII
Samuel R. Delany, Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979/1988)
I bought the first volume of Delany's Return to Nevèrÿon series on 13 April 1989, from Sherratt and Hughes, under the council house of Nottingham. I suspect I demolished it in a couple of days, lying on my childhood bed at my parent's home during the Easter vacation, but the wonder is what I made of it. English Lit being a very different beast in those days I would have had the barest inkling of who Lacan and Derrida were, although their names were scattered through this book. Is it later volumes retrospectively changing things or is there less sex than I remember - Gorgik in his preslave days is attracted to the collar, but his sex slave status is with a woman. Only in the later shirt stories do we see him as homosexual - and again perhaps the fetishism means the sex of of the sexual object is irrelevant. Anyway - a may spare blushes here.
An introduction, which I'd like to hope I was already sceptical of, refers to the Culhar' fragment, an ancient manuscript which acts as a source from Delany's what? speculative translatin? Four volumes from 900 characters. The five tales are "The Tale of Gorgik", "The Tale of Old Venn", "The Tale of Small Sarg", "The Tale of Potters and Dragons", and "The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers", so in effect we have two sets of characters who come together in the fifth story - Gorgik and his "slave" Sarg, and Norema and her companion Raven. We have a series of largely preliterate societies on the edge of change - Normea is taught about the powers of writing, and how it can lead to ownership and slavery, whilst the Gorgik thread explores slavery from the inside. Gorgik is a precursor of Gladiator - a freeborn man who is captured and then freed, then leads a rebellion against the system. His name, we learn in the second story, is close to a child's coinage for genitalia, which ought to lead us to think about phalluses and power. Meanwhile the power of the phallus is undercut, both by the valorising of the neckring and the reversals of the story of the Fall narrated here, in which it is the male who causes the fall, and 'man is degraded woman.
It's a book curiously short of action and full of conversation - and explication of psychanalytic theory.
Another commentary here
I bought the first volume of Delany's Return to Nevèrÿon series on 13 April 1989, from Sherratt and Hughes, under the council house of Nottingham. I suspect I demolished it in a couple of days, lying on my childhood bed at my parent's home during the Easter vacation, but the wonder is what I made of it. English Lit being a very different beast in those days I would have had the barest inkling of who Lacan and Derrida were, although their names were scattered through this book. Is it later volumes retrospectively changing things or is there less sex than I remember - Gorgik in his preslave days is attracted to the collar, but his sex slave status is with a woman. Only in the later shirt stories do we see him as homosexual - and again perhaps the fetishism means the sex of of the sexual object is irrelevant. Anyway - a may spare blushes here.
An introduction, which I'd like to hope I was already sceptical of, refers to the Culhar' fragment, an ancient manuscript which acts as a source from Delany's what? speculative translatin? Four volumes from 900 characters. The five tales are "The Tale of Gorgik", "The Tale of Old Venn", "The Tale of Small Sarg", "The Tale of Potters and Dragons", and "The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers", so in effect we have two sets of characters who come together in the fifth story - Gorgik and his "slave" Sarg, and Norema and her companion Raven. We have a series of largely preliterate societies on the edge of change - Normea is taught about the powers of writing, and how it can lead to ownership and slavery, whilst the Gorgik thread explores slavery from the inside. Gorgik is a precursor of Gladiator - a freeborn man who is captured and then freed, then leads a rebellion against the system. His name, we learn in the second story, is close to a child's coinage for genitalia, which ought to lead us to think about phalluses and power. Meanwhile the power of the phallus is undercut, both by the valorising of the neckring and the reversals of the story of the Fall narrated here, in which it is the male who causes the fall, and 'man is degraded woman.
It's a book curiously short of action and full of conversation - and explication of psychanalytic theory.
Another commentary here