The Gap Between Worlds in Samuel Delany’s Babel-17: Customs, Transport, and Cosmetic Mythic Method

Abstract In Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction novel Babel-17, lower-class humans often cosmetically alter their appearance. Brass the pilot appears as a ten-foot-tall saber-toothed tiger; Ron, one of the navigators, has a rose protruding from his arm; and even the customs official Danil D. Appleby attaches a small dragon to his body. The alterations these characters undergo typically have no impact on their job performance. Rather, the cosmetisurgery (as it is called in the novel) of these characters is purely volitional and, as such, an expression of their identities. In Babel-17, cosmetic alteration is a form of stabilization for the most vulnerable human beings in Delany’s science fiction world. Typically, characters graft mythic images onto their bodies, from mythic animals to memorable symbols. This article argues that cosmetic alteration in Delany’s novel functions much like T. S. Eliot’s “mythic method” first outlined in his review of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Through cosmetics and myth, Transport humans write stability onto their bodies. They forge distinctive identities that set them apart from their mechanistic existence in the margins of an earth-centered world.