Delany’s utopia was partly written in adversarial dialogue with LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. His utopia is rooted in its emancipated people and culture, their lived experience foregrounded, with politics as the stage; utopia as praxis.
Triton’s citizens live in communes and co-ops delineated along lines of gender and sexuality (easily altered with medical procedures). The narrative is anchored by their quotidian social interactions, bursting with sex, games, music, theatre, and fashion; worldbuilding by accretion of experiential interactions. Delany loves his wild costumes, body modifications, and nakedness, creating a visceral sense of the future much as we define our past ages by fashion. It reminded me of the sartorial craziness of Ubik.
Surprisingly, Delany’s protagonist, Bron is an unhappy apolitical anti-hero. Dropped into a voluntaristic egalitarian society where economic and sexual repression have been eliminated, Bron doesn’t know what he wants. Triton is the story of Bron’s futile search for happiness. Futile because Bron can’t shed his dystopian cultural conditioning; he’s a solipsistic, misogynistic, status-obsessed, jealous, narcissist. Delany’s utopia is defined by Bron’s negative space, putting him centre stage so that we can understand utopia not by what it adds, but by what it makes anachronistic.
Triton is a utopian experience rather than a treatise. A post-revolutionary, post-activist utopia that Moylan describes in ‘Demand the Impossible’ as:
less focused on the struggle toward utopia, more focused on the struggle to preserve it and live in it once it “arrives.” (p174)
As Bron demonstrates, achieving utopia doesn’t make us utopians. Political liberation creates the conditions for freedom, but not the ability to live with it. It’s fascinating reading this after Delany’s critique of The Dispossessed. You can really see how Triton responds to it; the complementary focus on the intimate human interactions and cultural details of life in an anarchist society. It’s an important utopian novel that embraces its transgressive difficulties and unlikeable protagonist.
