Trouble on Triton Read online

  Trouble on Triton

  Books by the Author

  Fiction

  The Jewels of Aptor (1962)

  The Fall of the Towers:

  Out of the Dead City (formerly Captives of the Flame, 1963)

  The Towers of Toron (1964)

  City of a Thousand Suns (1965)

  The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)

  Empire Star (1966)

  Babel-17 (1966)

  The Einstein Intersection (1967)

  Nova (1968)

  Driftglass (1969)

  Equinox (formerly The Tides of Lust, 1973)

  Dhalgren (1975)

  Trouble on Triton (formerly Triton, 1976)

  Return to Nevèrÿon:

  Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

  Neveróon (1982)

  Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

  Return to Nevèrÿon (formerly The Bridge of Lost Desire, 1987)

  Distant Stars (1981)

  Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand (1984)

  Driftglass/Starshards (collected stories: 1993)

  They Fly at Ciron (1993)

  The Mad Man (1994)

  Hogg (1995)

  Atlantis: Three Tales (1995)

  Graphic Novels

  Empire Star (1982)

  Bread & Wine (1999)

  Nonfiction

  The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977)

  The American Shore (1978)

  Heavenly Breakfast (1979)

  Starboard Wine (1984)

  The Motion of Light in Water (1988)

  Wagner/Artaud (1988)

  The Straits of Messina (1990)

  Silent Interviews (1994)

  Longer Views (1996)

  Shorter Views (1999)

  Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  Samuel R. Delany

  TROUBLE

  ON TRITON

  An Ambiguous Heterotopia

  Foreword by Kathy Acker

  for

  Isaac Asimov,

  Jean Marc Gawron,

  and

  Howard, Barbara,

  David, Danny, Jeremy,

  and Juliet Wise

  Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459

  Copyright © 1976 by Samuel R. Delany

  Foreword © 1996 by Kathy Acker

  First published as Triton by Bantam Spectra Books, 1976

  Wesleyan University Press paperback 1996

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America 5 4

  CIP data appear at the end of the book

  This edition originally produced in 1996 by Wesleyan/

  University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755

  The lyrics on pages 145–47 are by Bruce Cockburn,

  from his album Night Vision, and are reprinted by permission.

  The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of the society. There is a continual exchange of meaning between the two kinds of bodily experience so that each reinforces the categories of the other. As a result of this interaction, the body itself is a highly restricted medium of expression . . . To be useful, the structural analysis of symbols has somehow to be related to a hypothesis about role structure. From here, the argument will go in two stages. First, the drive to achieve consonance in all levels of experience produces concordance among other means of expression, so that the use of the body is co-ordinated with other media. Second, controls exerted from the social system place limits on the use of the body as medium.

  MARY DOUGLAS, Natural Symbols

  Contents

  On Delany the Magician: A Foreword, by Kathy Acker

  1. Der Satz

  2. Solvable Games

  3. Avoiding Kangaroos

  4. La Geste d’Helstrom

  5. Idylls in Outer Mongolia

  6. Objective Knowledge

  7. Tiresias Descending

  Appendix A: From The Triton Journal

  Appendix B: Ashima Slade and the Harbin-Y Lectures

  On Delany the Magician

  A Foreword

  by Kathy Acker

  On Naming

  “I feel the science-fictional enterprise is richer than the enterprise of mundane fiction. It is richer through its extended repertoire of sentences, its consequent greater range of possible incident, and through its more varied field of rhetorical and syntagmic organization. I feel it is richer in much the same way atonal music is richer than tonal, or abstract painting is richer than realistic.”

  So speaks a man in the book that you are about to read. The man who is the author of the book. Written in 1976, Trouble on Triton, by use of the name or genre of sci-fi, carved in literary geography a pathway between novel-writing and poetry.

  “I feel the science-fictional enterprise . . .” What is the necessity to name? Why does Delany need to name science-fiction and posit it against other fiction? And isn’t there “other fiction” whose territories and strategies are neither minimal nor restricted by the outdated laws and regulations of bourgeois realism?

  “Naming is always a metonymic process,” Delany writes. That is, a name doesn’t tell you what something is so much as it connects the phenomenon/idea to something else. Certainly to culture. In this sense, language is the accumulation of connections where there were no such connections. And so, to Delany, names such as “science-fiction” form a web:

  All the uses of the words “web,” “weave,” “net,” “matrix,” and more, by this circular “etymology,” become entrance points into a textus, which is ordered from all language functions, and upon which the text itself is embedded.

  Into the Web

  It is this web, a web now named Triton, to which I want to introduce you. If you are Dante, I am Virgil: I am taking you down to the underworld. Into the world under, the worlds of language, words, the world in which there is a secret.

  There must be a secret hidden in this book or else you wouldn’t bother to read it.

  Remember: it all comes down. One must go down to see. Down into language. Once upon a time there was a writer; his name was Orpheus. He was and is the only writer in the world because every author is Orpheus. He was searching for love.

  For his love. For Eurydice.

  Eurydice is secret, a secret. This is how Eurydice became secret: she was walking down by the river, always by water, and a man named Aristaeus tried to rape her. She escaped from him before he got to do anything, but in the process, she stepped on a snake. It bit her; she died.

  So Orpheus couldn’t see her anymore. Dead, she became secreted, secret. He wouldn’t accept her death, death. Every poet is revolutionary. Orpheus started searching for Eurydice, for his secret. For all that was now unknown and, perhaps, unknowable. He journeyed, for he had no choice, into the land of death.

  For the poet, the world is word. Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each other.

  Delany is Orpheus searching for Eurydice by means of words. By going down into words. Into the book. As you read this, you will become Delany/Orpheus.

  The book’s protagonist, Bron Helstrom, looks for his Eurydice—who is totally unknown to him. Unknowable? Therein lies the narrative of Trouble on Triton: the trajectory from “unknown” to “unknowable.” Here, also, is the mystery of the Orpheus myth.

  Delany is going to take you to Triton. To a society to which you are a stranger. To all that is other, to the other-world or underworld. Bron Helstrom is also a stranger in this society: you and he will share problems. The book is not named Triton, but Trouble on Triton.

  Every book, remember, is dead until a reader ac
tivates it by reading. Every time that you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies. Aeneas did. Odysseus did. Listen to Delany, a prophet.

  You are about to enter a story or a land in which there is a mystery, a secret, a prophecy about you.

  Bron, another appearance of Orpheus, is in the land that is strange to him, in Triton; he’s searching for someone to love. Since that means that he’s also searching for how to love, he’s trying to find himself. Every search for the other, for Eurydice, is also the search for the self. Who, Bron will ask, do I desire? Who can I desire? What does my desire look like? Strange even to himself, Bron learns that he cannot find himself and so he begins to look more widely, more profoundly, and, as you see through his eyes, for he is your guide, you will begin to look. For Eurydice; for yourself. As soon as you find Eurydice, who lies in the center of this masterpiece by Delany, because she is the one who does not lie, as soon as you see Eurydice’s face, you will know everything.

  You shall see desire.

  Delany has seen Eurydice’s face, for he is also the constructor of Triton, he is the magician. Look at his language. Call it “poetic language.” But “poetry” doesn’t mean much anymore. This, his, is magic language. It is, as Delany says, not the language of the web so much as the language that makes webs. Delany the author entered into language until language made his desires/questions into a world. The last part of this creation process is you entering the same language by reading until the language shows you you. Delany, a magician.

  Eurydice? Where is she? As another woman, Luce Irigaray, has asked: are there women anywhere?

  In the utopia/distopia of Triton, women can become men and men, women. In 1976 Delany, magician, was prophesying or creating the San Francisco of 1996. But . . . what of Eurydice by herself?

  According to Robert Graves in The Greek Myths, Eurydice, whose name means “wide justice,” is the serpent-grasping ruler of the underworld. (Remember: she died because a snake bit her as she was running away from Aristaeus.) There in the underworld, she is offered humans who have been sacrificed by injecting them with snake venom.

  Eurydice, then, whom Bron/Orpheus cannot find in Triton, in the underworld, becomes Eurydice whom Bron/Orpheus cannot bear to see. She becomes doubly unable-to-be-seen.

  Bron, you will learn as you try to see him, is looking for a lover. He has already decided that he isn’t homosexual. To find a female lover, he will have to find women, to see them, to understand them, their real sexualities. Increasingly desperate to find and to see love, he will become what he cannot see.

  As if it’s possible to become what one cannot be/see. For it is possible to change form, to become another form, for Bron to become female with regard to form, but it is not possible to have another history. To really become a woman, Bron must understand patriarchy and sexism, history that he has not experienced.

  Orpheus cannot bear to see Eurydice.

  As Bron/Orpheus’s quest fails, turns on itself, it changes form. It becomes something other than quest, than story. It becomes Bron/Delany/Orpheus’s meditation on gender, desire, and identity. Delany’s story refuses to find an ending, to end. Rather it turns on itself like one of the snakes Eurydice handles when she’s ruler of the underworld; it becomes a conversation. A conversation, not only about identity, desire, and gender, but also about democracy, liberalism, and otherness. And, perhaps more than anything, a conversation about societies that presume the possibilities of absolute knowledge and those societies whose ways of knowing are those of continuous unending searching and questioning . . .

  Enter now into Trouble on Triton: enter into a conversation between you and Samuel Delany about the possibilities of being human. By choosing the novel as an arena for conversation, Delany is revealing himself as a great humanist.

  —San Francisco, 1996

  Trouble on Triton

  Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus,

  Part One

  1. Der Satz

  No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.

  WILLARD VAN ORMAN QUINE, Word and Object

  He had been living at the men’s co-op (Serpent’s House) six months now. This one had been working out well. So, at four o’clock, as he strolled from the hegemony lobby onto the crowded Plaza of Light (thirty-seventh day of the fifteenth paramonth of the second yearN, announced the lights around the Plaza—on Earth and Mars both they’d be calling it some day or other in Spring, 2112, as would a good number of official documents even out here, whatever the political nonsense said or read), he decided to walk home.

  He thought: I am a reasonably happy man.

  The sensory shield (he looked up:—Big as the city) swirled pink, orange, gold. Cut round, as if by a giant cookie-cutter, a preposterously turquoise Neptune was rising. Pleasant? Very. He ambled in the bolstered gravity, among ten thousand fellows. Tethys? (No, not Saturn’s tiny moon—a research station now these hundred twenty-five years—but after which, yes, the city had been named.) Not a big one, when you thought about places that were; and he had lived in a couple.

  He wondered suddenly: Is it just that I am, happily, reasonable?

  And smiled, pushing through the crowd.

  And wondered how different that made him from those around.

  I can’t (he stepped from the curb) look at every one to check.

  Five then? There: that woman, a handsome sixty—or older if she’d had regeneration treatments—walking with one blue, high-heeled boot in the street; she’s got blue lips, blue bangles on her breasts.

  A young (fourteen? sixteen?) man pushed up beside her, seized her blue-nailed hand in his blue-nailed hand, grinned (bluely) at her.

  Blinking blue lids in recognition, she smiled.

  Really, breast-bangles on a man? (Even a very young man.) Just aesthetically: weren’t breast-bangles more or less predicated on breasts that, a) protruded and, b) bobbed . . .? But then hers didn’t.

  And she had both blue heels on the sidewalk. The young man walked with both his in the street. They pushed into parti-colored crowd.

  And he had looked at two when he’d only meant to look at one.

  There: By the transport-station kiosk, a tall man, in maroon coveralls, with a sort of cage over his head, shouldered out between several women. Apparent too as he neared were cages around his hands: through the wire you could see paint speckles; paint lined his nails; his knuckles were rough. Some powerful administrative executive, probably, with spare time and credit enough to indulge some menial hobby, like plumbing or carpentry.

  Carpentry?

  He humphed and stepped aside. A waste of wood and time.

  Who else was there to look at in this crowd—

  With tiny steps, on filthy feet, ten, fifteen—some two dozen— mumblers shuffled toward him. People moved back. It isn’t, he thought, the dirt and the rags I mind; but the sores . . . Seven years ago, he’d actually attended meetings of the Poor Children of the Avestal Light and Changing Secret Name; over three instruction sessions he’d learned the first of the Ninety-Seven Sayable mantras/mumbles: Mimimomomizolalilamialomuelamironoriminos . . . After all this time he wasn’t that sure of the thirteenth and the seventeenth syllables. But he almost remembered. And whenever the Poor Children passed, he found himself rehearsing it, listening for it in the dim thunder of labials and vowels. Among a dozen-plus mumblers, all mumbling different syllable chains (some took over an hour to recite through), you couldn’t hope to pick out one. And what mumbler worth his salt would be using the most elementary sayable mumble in a public place anyway? (You had to know something like seventeen before they let you attend Supervised Unison Chanting at the Academy.) Still, he listened.

  Mumblers with flickering lips and tight-closed lids swung grubby plastic begging-bowls—too fast, really, to drop anything in. As they passed, he noted a set of ancient keys in one, in another a Protyyn bar (wrapper torn), and
a five-franq token. (“Use this till I report it stolen, or the bill gets too big,” had been someone’s mocking exhortation.) In the group’s middle, some had soiled rags tied over their faces. Frayed ends flapped at an ill-shaved jaw. A woman to the side, with a cracked yellow bowl (she was almost pretty, but her hair was stringy enough to see through to her flaking scalp), stumbled, opened her eyes, and looked straight at him.

  He smiled.

  Eyes clamped again, she ducked her head and nudged someone beside her, who took up her bowl and her begging position, shuffling on with tight-clenched lids: she (yes, she was his fourth person) sidled and pushed among them, was absorbed by them—

  Ahead, people laughed.

  He looked.

  That executive, standing free of the crowd, was waving his caged hands and calling good-naturedly: “Can’t you see?” His voice was loud and boisterous. “Can’t you see? Just look! I couldn’t give you anything if I wanted to! I couldn’t get my hands into my purse to get anything out. Just take a look!”

  The executive was hoping to be mistaken for a member of some still severer, if rarer, sect that maimed both body and mind—till some mumbler opened eyes and learned the dupe was fashion, not faith. A mumbler who blinked (only newer members wore blindfolds, which barred them from the coveted, outside position of Divine Guide) had to give up the bowl and, as the woman had done, retire within. The man harangued; the Poor Children shuffled, mumbled.

  Mumblers aimed to ignore such slights; they courted them, gloried in them: so he’d been instructed at the meetings seven years ago.

  Still, he found the joke sour.

  The mumblers, however laughable, were serious. (He had been serious, seven years ago. But he had also been lazy—which was why, he supposed, he was not a mumbler today but a designer of custom-styled, computer metalogics.) The man was probably not an executive, anyway; more likely some eccentric craftsman—someone who worked for those executives who did not have quite the spare time, or credit, to indulge a menial hobby. Executives didn’t—no matter how good-naturedly—go around haranguing religious orders in the street.