Tales of Nevérÿon: Utopia as temporally inaccessible

I’m afraid I missed our class discussion of Trouble on Triton last week, so please forgive me for what might come across as a simplistic or redundant response.

I was particularly interested in the second section in this collection, “The Tale of Old Venn,” both in terms of the Utopian enclave (More/Jameson) and the idea that Utopia is a (pre)historic status to which we can return (Mackey, as one example). Venn reminded me of the narrator in More’s Utopia, and her primary narrative about the Rulvyn–“simple, proud, insular–like an island within our island”–is framed within many utopian terms (Delany 92). Venn disparages the spread of modern systems that developed from more “civilized” Nevérÿon. She feels that money has devalued labor by forcing all goods and services to be equated in the same currency (102). She is concerned about the development of writing as a way to better keep track of and more easily enslave people, and therefore advises that “Since we, here, do not aspire to civilization, it is perhaps best we halt the entire process” of developing a written language (85).

Rather than a positive and progressive force, Venn sees civilization as corrupting. She frames her past life with the Rulvyn as a simpler time free of many of the complications like written communication and money (More’s own symbol of human corruption). Because Rulvyn was “isolated,” it retained a prolonged immunity against the influences of Nevérÿon. Yet, as we discover, the utopian enclave is impermanent as long as the Rulvyn participate in trade. By the time Venn is telling her story, it is clear that the Rulvyn have also been corrupted by money (93). What is established, then, is a utopia that is unreachable not because of its geography, but its temporality. Venn advocates (or longs for) a society free of civilization that can only be set in history now that society has experienced that civilization. And what are we, as readers supposedly thousands of years in the future of Venn, supposed to make of the fact that we are much further removed from Venn’s utopia?

– Heather Nielsen

One thought on “Tales of Nevérÿon: Utopia as temporally inaccessible

  1. The status of writing in the Neveryon series is *very* interesting, and something you might want to explore further, especially this link that Venn makes between writing and enslavement. It seems to me that here the narrative makes an intervention into the slave narrative tradition, which links literacy and writing to liberation and freedom. In this, and other ways (namely, Gorgik’s narrative), Neveryon is a kind of neo-slave narrative.

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