In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Sword & Sorcery, S/M, and the Economics of Inadequation: The Camera Obscura Interview This text began as a set of written questions posed to me by Camera Obscura editors Constance Penley and Sharon Willis, in 1988. My written response became, finally, too long to include in thejournal: it first appeared as an appendix to theEnglishedition of my autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (Grafton Books, London, 1989), under the title "The Column at the Market's Edge. " I'm grateful to Camera Obscura and its astute editors for allowing me to use thejournal name in the subtitle here. Libidinal Economy/The Marketplace Return to Neveryon (yourseries of talesand novelssetin the imaginary land of prehistoric—or marginally historic—Neveryon) foregrounds a transformation from a barter economy to a money economy, a transformation you've suggested is a common theme of the sword-and-sorcery subgenre. In these tales the marketplace becomes a central topos and a site of exchange between classes, sexes, and peoples (in the ethnic [or prenational ] sense). In representing the marketplace as an intensely eroticized zone, these tales exhibit a certain reciprocal desire across class lines, and a particular fascination with the "lower classes," as well as with marginal or lumpen characters. How are these fascinations connected to the market? What does it mean to explicitly eroticize class relations, as well as economic exchange, in this way? Samuel R. Delany: In Neveryon, of course, everything happens under someone else's critical rubric, so I'll start by placing here, as a kind of motto or epigraph to our discussion, outside our text (yet, as you can 4. 128 Part I see, already within it), the opening statement in a fascinating essay, "The Ring of Gyges," by Marc Shell, from his book The Economy of Literature: In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche argues that "the mind of early man was preoccupied to such an extent with price making . . . that in a certain sense that may be said to have constituted his thinking." A fundamental change in price making constitutes a fundamental change in thinking. The development of money was such a change. In that essay, through a reading of Herodotus and Plato, Shell suggests that coins, tyranny, and philosophy all arose at approximately the same moment for intricately connected reasons, relating to power, visibility, and writing—a type of notion that readers who've sampled my Neveryon tales will be familiar with. Considering Shell (whom I've only recently started reading—alas, he's neither a source nor an influence among the Neveryon tales so far), considering as well your provocative and exciting question, with its numerous possible answers, its numerous satellite suggestions , I'm put in mind of walking into a new and wondrous market, a glorious intellectual mall, in which there are at once beautiful old objects to consider and shiny new ones to handle and examine, the range of them tainted only by the anxiety of exhaustion—will we have time to see and explore them? Will we be able to make a choice of what to commit ourselves to in hard cash or fluid currency? Willwe even be able to hold onto the needs we entered with, now we are faced with such profusion? Before this array, under the sheer compulsion of impulse buying, how many expansions, exchanges, and omissions will distort, or even destroy, the order and specificity of the shopping list we brought in with us before we first took up our cart? (Our motto tells us there is no real inside or outside to this market— or, rather, there are as many goods for sale without as within; and that whatever architectural separation we might fix on, if we only squint we will be able to make out the price tag, even if the ink in which the numbers have been printed is blurred. It is only another item on display .) But let us, for a moment and once again (ifwe have not already done so), return to Neveryon. You've read me as suggesting that sword-andsorcery , such as Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, Joanna Russ's Alyx tales, and Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser adventures, aswell as my more humble Neveryon series, foregrounds an economic transformation from a barter to a money economy. But the status of this observation is of the same order as Robert Graves' observation in The White Goddess that "all true poems are about love, death, or the changing of [3...

Share