Review of Samuel Delaney's The Einstein Intersection

               

The Einstein Intersection is a curious work by the award-winning science-fiction author Samuel Delaney. It illustrates once again the enduring legacy of classical Greco-Roman mythology on western culture, making reference to a catalogue of tropes and figures that once again proves endlessly fertile because it has provided the template for those stories that hold meaning in our culture. Classical mythology and the quest underscores our notions of identity and transformation, and it permeates our great works, from Shakespeare to Goethe to Garcia Marquez to Ursula K. Le Guin. It is also a work of ambitious poetic scope, one in which I found myself lingering frequently to savor graceful expressions that resonated endlessly with me. ("Attacked by flowers, a dragon was dying.") Poetry is music, and this enriches our stock of stories, seducing and enchanting us with a potent verbal elixer of words.

This work  is ambitious in other ways as well. It is a work written during the 1960s, the paradigmatic decade in recent memory for quests to find new meaning and to overthrow stifling social, political and cultural norms. The 60s continue to resonate with us vitally because of this evocation of struggle, one in which the Cold War was one of several fronts and new martyrs embodying a revolutionary ethos were created. Samuel Delaney proves sensitive to these struggles, and he is able to makes use of the arsenal of dystopian worlds that has been such a mainstay of science fiction, indeed positing a future in which humans have disappeared but not, startlingly enough, humanity.

In this far future, in a planet that has been contaminated by radioactive waste, in which mutation operates at an accelerated pace and non-functionals (those unable to contribute to the common weal) are humanely (or not so humanely) rounded up and placed in stockades, we have a curious species of sentient being which has settled on Earth. Humans, apparently, have evolved beyond the scope of current understanding, and have ascended to their own mythical Mt. Olympus, seeking their destiny in a different part of the galaxy (or a different dimension, perhaps). In their place we have a form of life that has borrowed human language and vague humanoid shapes, but is transformed in bewildering ways.

In classic terms these would be our misfits, those who are distinctive in utterly unforgettable ways. They would, perhaps, be monstrous in appearance, and the narrator, who goes by the name "Lo Lobey" (the "Lo" is an appellative that indicates not only gender but functionality) describes himself in a way that is meant to underscore how he transgresses between normal boundaries: 

"Ugly and grinning most of the time. That's a whole lot of big nose and gray eyes and wide mouth crammed on a small brown face proper for a fox. That, all scratched around with spun brass for hair. I hack most of it off every two months or so with my machete. Grows back fast. Which is odd, because I'm twenty-three and no beard yet. I have a figure like a bowling pin, thighs, calves, and feet of a man (gorilla?) twice my size (which is about five-nine) and hips to match. here was a rash of hermaphrodites the year I was born, which doctors thought I might be. Somehow I doubt it."

What is he, then? Fox, gorilla, hermaphrodite? He seems to defy notions of grace and comeliness, and is aware of it but, also, finds it utterly acceptable and even comical. And such is the case with the rest of the sentient creatures who inhabit this far future, one in which some are able to produce and contribute, all would seem to have unique talents, and some are even more different in an additional way than one would suspect.

Lo Lobey is an embodiment the classical figure of Orpheus, the musician who made such beautiful music he charmed even death, and he will be involved on a quest to rescue his lover, Friza, who may or may not be female. She has been killed in sudden fashion by some hidden and demonic entity, and in the process of descending and retrieving her from Hades, he will recapitulate the fundamental myths of classical western culture. He will assume the role of Theseus, the clever patron of Athens who slays the Minotaur, and he will be tempted by Mephistopheles, as well as becoming a dragon tamer. 

The essential questions have to do, nonetheless, with notions of difference. By engaging in a quest, the heroic figure (he reluctantly assumes this role, in quintessential fashion described by Joseph Campbell) both upholds as well as questions notions of stability and order. The heroic figure ventures to the boundaries of the known world to combat monsters, a la Hercules and his seven labors, or Orpheus returning from Troy, but he also finds himself transformed, for the modern quest is invested as well in self-questioning. Lo Lobey is a poor country bumpkin, but he is able to tap into the music hidden in the minds of others, and what is music but a way of weaving together meaning in a compelling way? It is a haunting construct, and it is no wonder that naturally represents an intersection in which myth collides with rationality, where science (and Einstein) clash with irrationality and deep and forbidding myths of despair and irrationality.

Which is not to say that this world is irrational. It has fantasy elements, but one must take them to be metaphors for the differences which otherwise would not easily be described in commonsensical terms. He is pained by loss, by Friza's and then Dorik's disappearance, and by the bewildering appearance of an antagonist who is imbued with immense powers of his own, Kid Death. How can we view this antagonist? At first appearance, he would seem to be perverse, a wizard able to weave illusions, one who is able to kill at whim, and yet, one who is lonely, unable to escape the thumb of his father until he has someone else kill this figure. And, in the rush towards this confrontation that awaits them, we have the encounter with a crew of other motley figures, with the herder of dragons, Spider, who would seem to be a stand in for the auteur. "Spider who herds dragons; Spider who writes; Spider who has the multiplicated music of Kodaly in his head--good man to receive a compliment from" (p. 68). And the figure of Green-eye.

This last figure is a noble being from ostensibly aristocratic stock who becomes in a short time a good friend to Lo Lobey. He comes from the giant city of Banning-at-sea, a sort of crossroads that one could certainly take for Jerusalem, if one were to view Green-eye as a sacrificial figure. He is also said to have had no father, in the sense that he wasn't sired from the sperm of any man. As Spider says, "The fact that he's different and immune to Kid Death, from a respected family, and rather chary of ritual observances makes him quite controversial. Everybody blames the business on his parthenogenetic birth." (p. 77) Having no father is not the same as killing one's father. To kill one's father is to hark back to essentially Edipal notions, of knowledge and the killing of mystery on the way to assuming power. But to have no father is to strike out completely on your own, to deny the power of heritage.

These are notions that are communicated in poetic fashion in this exploration of what is means to question notions of difference, of how power is entwined with violence and regularization, and of how authority depends in a fundamental fashion on the fashioning of boundaries. It is no accident that these boundaries are elaborated in metaphors not only of monstrous bodies (but they are also beautiful in their own way), but also in landscapes, in the mountaintops and cliffs where Lo Lobey herds sheep (or what pass for sheep in this future), in deserts such as that where Kid Death was confined to a stockade and in the air and where dragons are herded. It is evident in the notion of genetic mixing as a pervasive and compelling process fraught with suspense and mystery, but one necessary, where even gender is questioned as we are led to believe when the characters speculate about Friza's orientation, who we are led to believe is a hermaphrodite. 

Green-eye, he who returns in innocence to the city to be sacrificed, may be a Norse god Odin who hang from the tree Yggdrasil and rots, and Lobey (he drops the "Lo" title once he arrives at the city) may be Orpheus doomed to fail, who wails in despair at the odd against his ever recovering Friza and being able to defeat Kid Death, but whose gesture of striving and resistance is still uniquely symbolic and redolent with meaning and power in our cultures, for it constitutes a form of rebirth. As Spider tells Lobey: "The labyrinth today does not follow the same path it did at Knossos fifty thousand years ago." (p. 114).

This intersection, then, on the part of an African-American writer who is engaged on his own quest, is one that resonates with all of us who have undertaken these same explorations. We search for meaning, but we do so appealing to the language we have inherited, to the culture that has formed us, to the myths that continue to occupy such a fundamental place in our imagination. We are all Oedipus, venturing out with the assurance of rationality (and Einstein's notions of science and the "God that does not play dice") but also tripping over hidden emotional and moral landmines. We are Oedipus, wanting what we have lost, and we are Faust, consumed by the notions of power, but not appreciative of the moral sacrifices and the inescapable hold that mortality and consequences hold on us all. 

Music, as a stand in for art, provides hope for refashioning this world and creating the myths we need to sustain us. Kid Death, the malevolent and jeering figure, had no enduring hold on us. Spider, the auteur who is the apparent stand-in for the writer and for all of us who assume creative power, overcome Kid Death in the only way he can, through art and the help of Lobey. The "Dance" is eternal, the Eleusinian mysteries from the cult of ancient Greece, and in the end it is fitting that what should await Lobey is not an end to the quest, but a continuation to the stars.