In an epigraph to one of the late chapters of The Einstein Intersection (they are not numbered), Samuel Delany quotes a bit of conversation recorded in his journal: “What’s a spade writer like you doing all caught up with the Great White Bitch?” Gregory Corso says to him, and then adds an afterthought, “I guess it’s pretty obvious.”¹ Both the content and the tone of these epigraphs, mostly from his journal, suggest that the writing of The Einstein Intersection was for its author a sort of ritual exorcism of old demons. At the head of the next chapter, for instance, Delany remarks, “The images of youth plague me. … By the end of TEI I hope to have excised them. Billy the Kid is the last to go” (p. 118). Like those of all good writers, Delany’s narratives may be read on several levels. The various kinds of myth in the novel have been explored by Stephen Scobie,² and parallels with T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land imagery” have been outlined by H. Jane Gardiner.³ But it is my purpose to suggest here that the American black’s struggle for a cultural identity, a prominent theme of the 1960s when the novel was written, was at least one of the demons that occupied a corner of Delany’s mind.

My inference is based on a series of analogies, applied to images and events that seem transparently sociopolitical. Taken together, these analogies suggest an allegorical message: Blacks in the West must discard the “borrowed” culture of their adopted land, including the Christian religion, which dominates Western myth, before they can achieve a genuine sense of themselves.

Ostensibly, of course, Delany’s protagonists belong to a future race. They are alien beings who have inherited man’s planet after mankind has abandoned it and who have uneasily adopted man’s form (his body) as well as the myths that shaped his “racial memory” (a Jungian concept). But members of this new race find the old forms difficult to maintain, and the rebellious spirits among them chafe against such limitations.

Since the point of view is first person, Delany’s principal alter ego in the narrative is Lo Lobey, a villager whose knowledge of his own world is limited, and who thus undergoes a series of epiphanies that make up the inward plot. The science fictional premise of the novel is implied in its title: an “intersection” of the knowledge based on Einsteinian physics (knowledge that has apparently enabled the old human race to extrapolate itself physically throughout the universe) with a growing knowledge of the irrational principles present (though unproven) within any logical system according to Goedel’s law. Lobey’s world is changing: The irrational (apprehended only pragmatically through experience since it cannot be logically or “scientifically” demonstrated) is beginning to dominate this new race. The various psychic phenomena that make Delany’s principal characters “different” may thus be explained.

The mathematical paradox involved in the intersection, however, is not the main burden of the narrative. The novel is about myth, as Delany tells us in another of the many excerpts from his journal. And its basic metaphor concerns another equation, in which the myths of mankind become the symbols of Western culture, while the alien spirits locked uneasily into foreign bodies represent the black consciousness, alienated and dispossessed by its immersion in Western culture. Essentially, Lobey’s (Delany’s) racial quest is to free himself from the straightjacket of man’s (whitey’s) culture, first by exorcising it through the reenactment of myth, and then by discarding these myths as they are seen to have no relevance to the “new reality” emerging in the consciousness of his race.

Lobey’s epiphany is shared, to some extent, by other principal figures in the novel, all of whom carry the burden of mankind’s myths on their backs. “What do you know about mythology?” Spider asks Lobey.

And I want a Goedelian, not an Einsteinian answer. I don’t want to know what’s inside the myths. … I want their shape, their texture, how they feel when you brush by them on a dark road, when you see them receding into the fog, their weight as they leap your shoulder from behind.

(pp. 126. 130)

Like Jung’s “shadow personalities,” these myths are real and parasitic—they “leap” you “from behind.” Lobey carries on his back Ringo Starr, Orpheus, and Theseus seeking the Minotaur. Spider has Judas Iscariot, Pat Garret, and King Minos to bear, but with a “difference.” Knowing one’s burden gives options to the “beast” thereof. “It’s fixed!” Lobey cries at first, “I’ll fail! La Dire said that Orpheus failed” (p. 131). But it is not fixed. As Spider reminds him, “Everything changes: the labyrinth today does not follow the same path it did at Knossos fifty thousand years ago.”

Lobey’s proof of the possibility of change is most strikingly demonstrated not in the search for the lost Friza (his Eurydice), which he ultimately abandons, or in his confrontation with Kid Death (Billy the Kid, Pluto, Satan), but in his ambivalent rejection of the Christ figure (Green-eye), which has dominated Western culture for the last two thousand years.

Green-eye’s parallel with Christ is complete, even to the “virgin birth” (parthenogenesis) that sets him apart from his peers. As Spider describes him, he has the ability not only to change matter (shared by Kid Death) but to create it out of nothing (a power attributed in the Bible only to God the Creator and his only begotten son). Lobey’s association with Green-eye reveals the pattern that a contemporary observer would recognize in witnessing the gospel story. In a parody of the famous Christian temptation scene, in which Satan taunts Christ in the desert, tempting him with riches, power, and pleasures, Lobey watches Kid Death fail in a parallel attempt to corrupt Green-eye. He sees the mob then come to usher “Christ into Jerusalem” (Green-eye into Branning-at-Sea). Betrayed by the illusory appearance of Friza conjured by the Great White Bitch (“Le Dove,” Jean Harlow, Helen of Troy), he gets a glimpse of hell (“the Kage” beneath the floors of The Pearl) and finally a glimpse of the crucifixion (Green-eye hanging from a tree in the square).

Phaedra (the computerized “kage-keeper,” but also in myth the wife of Theseus) gives Lobey the word on his Orpheus quest:

It’s still the wrong maze, baby. You can find another illusion down there [in hell]. She’ll follow you all the way to the door, but when you turn around to make sure she’s there, you’ll see through it all again, and you’ll leave alone. Why even bother to go through with it? … You’re a bunch of psychic manifestations, multi-sexed and incorporeal, and you—you’re all trying to put on the limiting mask of humanity. Turn again, Lobey. Seek somewhere outside the frame of the mirror.

(p. 148)

“Have you begged at the tree?” she asks, sending him to his final confrontation with the central image of Christian myth. Lobey prays, but Green-eye, like the Christian god, is unresponsive. Beginning humbly, Lobey’s prayer ends in outrage. He grabs his knife—flute (called an “ax,” punning on the musician’s word for his musical instrument), symbol of the ordering principle in his psyche, and plunges it into the crucified Green-eye’s thigh.

The blow proves to be the mortal one. As Spider says, “You killed him. It was that last stroke of your [ax]” (p. 154). But by this time, having witnessed the demise of Kid Death at Spider’s hand (Lobey, by mesmerizing the Kid with his “ax,” is an accomplice), Lobey has discovered that he, too, has the power to bring back those he has killed.

Lobey has thus discovered that gods and mythic heroes are under the power of their believers, who shape them, make them, destroy them. Will he, then, revive Christ, fulfilling the resurrection myth central to Western culture? “Not now,” he says, in answer to Spider’s urgings. Rejection of the Christ figure (now metaphorically dependent on the will of the alien hero for its existence) implies a rejection of the martyr—hero archetype as the exemplum of black racial consciousness. The figure of passive resistance and suffering, applicable to Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is symbolically thrust into limbo.

“Green-eye will … wait, I suppose,” Spider responds (p. 155), more caught up in his role of Judas than Lobey is in the Orpheus routine. Meanwhile, Lobey turns away from the cultural imperatives of Western myth, abandons his Eurydice and his Christ, and begins a new voyage of self-discovery, following the “darkness … [as it falls] away at the far side of the beach.” As a representative of black consciousness, Delany’s alter ego is still in search of himself, but freed at last of the need to follow alien archetypes.

Notes

1. Samuel R. Delany, The Einstein Intersection (New York: Ace, 1967), 107. Further references appear in the text.

2. Stephen Scobie, “Different Mazes: Mythology in Samuel R. Delany’s The Einstein Intersection,” Riverside Quarterly 5 (1971): 12–18.

3. H. Jane Gardiner, “Images of The Waste Land in The Einstein Intersection,” Extrapolation 8 (1977): 116–23.