“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 And isn’t there “other fiction” whose territories and strategies are neither minimal nor restricted by the outdated laws and regulations of bourgeois realism?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.
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 activates 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