Samuel R. Delany Contends With the Conservatism of Myth
When I did my Master’s in Creative Writing at Temple University, the program administrators wanted me to study Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway. . . all the predictable names. I panicked, terrified I might lose my voice, because I needed the books that made sense for me: Ovid, Lucius Apuleius, C.S. Lewis, Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood.
I ran to the professor in the program who seemed most likely to understand, Samuel R. Delany. “Please,” I said, as soon as he let me into his office. “They’ll drown me in books that they think we’re all supposed to like.” I shoved my list into his hand. “Can I read these and do a tutorial with you instead?”
Delany smiled and stroked his long, messy white beard, which made him look like a Herman Melville with an earring, as he scanned my list for many long, unendurable moments. “Okay,” he finally said. “But I’m drawing the line at Charles de Lint.” Then he sifted through the piles of books on his floor, finally producing an anthology of Joanna Russ and putting it into my hands.
This willingness to break with the oppressive norm has shaped Delany’s life and career. While struggling with dyslexia, he dropped out of City College, and yet, after educating and defining himself, he became more articulate and well-read than most PhDs, a writer who loves Gustave Flaubert and Theodore Sturgeon. By publishing books such as Dhalgren, a circular narrative that resonates with myth and yet has nothing to do with the clichés of science fiction, Delany landed his work in the “literature” section of the bookstore. While helping speculative writing evolve into a more surprising and less formulaic genre, he remains a beloved member of the community; after having won multiple Nebula and Hugo awards, Delany was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002, and more than a decade later SFWA named him their 30th SFWA Grand Master. To learn more about how mythology has influenced Delany’s work, I emailed him the following questions last May.
It’s a paradox that you like mythology, in a way, because myths have traditional and conventional aspects to them that I think probably wouldn’t sit well with you. On the other hand, maybe the myths only seem to hold with conventions of form because people like Joseph Campbell have labeled them that way.
SRD: In 1925 Ernst Cassirer said in Language and Myth that “Myths are necessarily conservative if only because of the committee nature of their composition.” Although this idea is not mine, it’s something that I’ve always felt. Sadly, myths are not the truth. At best, they are the stories a society can bear to tell about itself, but for the truth, we need actual histories.
Some readers think that Dhalgren has mythological elements in it. Did you intend this interpretation? If so, to what extent did you draw from mythology to write the book and how did you do it?
SRD: Not particularly. When, in the first chapter, the woman turns into a tree, at one point the Kid thinks, “No, the Daphne bit would not pass,” and it helps if you know that Daphne turned into a laurel when she was being chased by Apollo; but the Kid wasn’t chasing her. And I’ve never been particularly sympathetic to Campbell’s notion of all adventures being one adventure—or whatever: the single mega-myth, which, to me, seems pretty fascistic. I like the idea of trying to incorporate into my stories bits and pieces of the truth that are not so easy to swallow for many or most people.
How did you get the idea to write Einstein Intersection? To what extent did the movie Black Orpheus and the myth of Orpheus affect your writing process?
SRD: I believe Black Orpheus, which is a film I wanted to like much more than I did, was never in my mind for Einstein Intersection. It was more about taking lots and lots of old stories, some of them new at the time the book was written and some of them thousands of years old, and mixing them up together. It was a matter of letting them comment on one another, which is another strategy for getting to a hidden truth rather than an obvious one.
What books do you recommend for writers who take inspiration from mythology?
SRD: A book I had read that had a lot to do with my sense of mythology was Robert Grave’s The White Goddess, which was incredibly popular with kids at the Bronx High School of Science over the four years I was there and which leaves little bits of its influence all over the work of anybody who’s read it, I think: yew trees are often a symbol for death—and things like that. Another book, of course, that was very popular for a while was Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which, in its uncut version (the 1906–’15 edition) was 12 volumes long, which I always wanted to own and came very close to getting one when, at 19, I worked as a stock clerk at Barnes & Noble in New York.) It’s an exhaustive study of world mythology that makes you realize that the Christ story follows so many mythological patterns from the virgin birth to the dead god hung on a tree (Adonis is simply the Greek word “Adonai,” which means “Lord,” and he is one of those vegetative gods of rebirth, which fill up the Atthis and Osiris volume of the Bough), that it’s very unlikely to be literally historical. Christians don’t realize that the Passion is not something new with them but was already the repetition of a very, very old story about the cleansing of the land and the annual rebirth of Spring.
Any other resources besides mythology that would help people writing fantasy?
Samuel R. Delany as The Hanged Man in The New York Tarot, by Giani Siri
The old-fashioned Tarot cards are basically a book of pictures and symbols, whose pages are not in any particular order, so that they lend themselves to games as well as interpretations of the world-that-is-the-case. I’ve always wanted to do a revision of that set of pictures and have been working on one for the last couple of years after having an idea for it lost in the last century. It will have seven suits rather than four and a new set of Major Arcana.
Can you recommend any contemporary books that draw from older tales?
SRD: Well, almost all novels and stories take some part of their form from older tales, but it’s such a general practice—like a total surround—it’s hard to talk about, so in this sort of context, no, I’m afraid I can’t. There’s an old film called Nightmare Alley (1947) based on the Tarot, as well as Charles William’s books, Taliessin through Logres (1938) and Region of the Summer Stars (1944), which used Tarot cards/images in interesting ways. I tried to do that somewhat in my novel, Nova. Richard Wagner worked with Norse mythology to the same ends in his Ring cycle (1876), as well as his medieval legends, from Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1850) through Parsifal (1882). He was very concerned, especially with the last one, that these not be taken as specifically Christian myths but fallouts from an older Pagan tradition that he hoped would unite all peoples.
What are the advantages of using older tales to inspire your work? Are there any disadvantages that writers should think about?
SRD: They work fine when people recognize their sources, but when people over- historicize them and assume that it is not mythological but historic, using such tales leads to the errors of fundamentalism. The truth is there is no more historical evidence for Christ than there is for Persephone/Proserpine, Cybel/Demeter, and Hades/Pluto.
Why do you think people like books that contain mythological elements?
SRD: I think we just like things that are familiar, and from Edith Hamilton to Pausanius’s two-volume tour of ancient Greece, stopping at all the temples and holy sights to remark on them and tell a lot of stuff that would otherwise have been forgotten, or Robert Graves’s distillation of all those in his two fat volumes of The Greek Myths (1955), it’s fascinating.
—-The End
