A Time of Plague: Allegory, Seriality, and Historicity in Samuel R. Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon

Abstract

Among the most prolific and consequential US writers, Samuel R. Delany has published novels and short stories, a magnificent autobiography, various memoirs of social commentary, extraordinary essays of literary theory and criticism, and numerous (written) interviews. However, it is his Nevèrÿon sword and sorcery series (1979-87) that he describes as his most ambitious narrative “experiment.” Occupying Delany for nearly a decade, Nevèrÿon’s singularity as a narrative experiment is not solely achieved in terms of its complex unfolding as a series, with each tale accumulating over four volumes into an astonishing ensemble of stories, images, and worlds. Beyond its unfolding and enfolding of tales and beyond its “play” at the “game” of sword and sorcery central to its fictional experiment is its commitment to the “paraliterary” construction of his text. Refusing the distinctions marked out by “literary” and “non-literary,” Delany uses a serial narrative platform to braid together philosophical discourses and genre elements into a theoretically complex textual ensemble that comes to include both the rupture of AIDS and of an AIDS-like epidemic into the ninth tale of the series, the novella The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals (1985). Referring to it as his “novel of crisis,” Delany weaves New York City and the fictional world of Kolhari into what he calls “a document of our times,” opening sword and sorcery to a baroque discursive and rhetorical flux historiographically aware of itself both as a marginal cultural form and as a document of lives at the margins of a world-historic plague.