Dhalgren

Last updated
Dhalgren
Dhalgren-bantam-cover.jpg
Author Samuel R. Delany
Cover artistDean Ellis
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre Science fiction
Publisher Bantam Books
Publication date
January 1975
Media typePrint (Paperback)
Pages879 (first edition, paperback)
ISBN 0-552-68554-2 (first edition, paperback)
OCLC 16303763

Dhalgren is a 1975 science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. It features an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the American Midwest cut off from the rest of the world by an unknown catastrophe. It is number 33 on the 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction list.

Contents

Plot overview

The city of Bellona is severely damaged; radio, television, and telephone signals do not reach it. People enter and leave by crossing a bridge on foot.

Inexplicable events punctuate the novel: One night the perpetual cloud cover parts to reveal two moons in the sky. One day a red sun swollen to hundreds of times its normal size rises to terrify the populace, then retreats across the sky to set on the same horizon. Street signs and landmarks shift constantly, while time appears to contract and dilate. Buildings burn for days, but are never consumed, while others burn and later show no signs of damage. Gangs roam the nighttime streets, their members hidden within holographic projections of gigantic insects or mythological creatures. The few people left in Bellona struggle with survival, boredom, and each other.

The novel's protagonist is "the Kid" (sometimes "Kidd"), a drifter who has partial amnesia: he can't remember either his own name or those of his parents, though he knows his mother was an American Indian. He wears only one sandal, shoe, or boot, as do characters in two other Delany novels and one short story: Mouse in Nova (1968), Hogg in Hogg (1995), and Roger in "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ Move on a Rigorous Line" (1967). Possibly he has schizophrenia: the novel's narrative is intermittently incoherent (particularly at its end), the protagonist has memories of a stay in a mental hospital, and his perception of reality and the passages of time sometimes differ from those of other characters. Over the course of the story he also experiences significant memory loss. In addition, he is dyslexic, confusing left and right and often taking wrong turns at street corners and getting lost in the city. It is therefore unclear to what extent the events in the story are the product of an unreliable narrator.

Delany has stated that "Kid's sanity remains in question ... for the same reason the disaster of the city is unexplained: such explanations would become a fixed signified straiting the play and interplay of the signifier - the city of signs - that flexes and reflexes above it." [1]

Synopsis

In a forest somewhere outside the city, the protagonist meets a woman and they have sex. After, he tells her that he has "lost something"—he cannot remember his name. She leads him to a cave and tells him to enter. Inside, he finds long loops of chain fitted with miniature prisms, mirrors, and lenses. He dons the chain and leaves the cave, only to find the woman in the middle of a field, turning into a tree. Panicked, he flees. Many characters in the novel wear the same sort of "optic chain" (all will be uncomfortable discussing how they came to have it). On a nearby road, a passing truck stops to pick him up. The trucker, hauling artichokes, drops him off at the end of a suspension bridge leading across the river to Bellona.

As he crosses the bridge in the early morning darkness, the young man meets a group of women leaving the city. They ask him questions about the outside world and give him a weapon: a bladed "orchid," worn around the wrist with its blades sweeping up in front of the hand.

Once inside Bellona, an engineer, Tak Loufer, who was living a few miles outside of the city when the initial destruction happened, meets and befriends him. Tak has moved to Bellona and stayed there ever since. Upon learning that he cannot remember his name, Tak gives him a nickname—the Kid. Throughout the novel he is also referred to as "Kid", "Kidd", and often just "kid." Next Tak takes Kid on a short tour of the city. One stop is at a commune in the city park, where Kid sees two women reading a spiral notebook. When Kid looks at it, we see what he reads: The first page contains, word-for-word, the first sentences of Dhalgren. As he reads further, however, the text diverges from the novel's opening.

In Chapter II, "The Ruins of Morning", Kid returns to the commune the next day and receives the notebook from Lanya Colson, one of the two women from the evening before. Shortly they become lovers. Their relationship lasts throughout the book. We meet or learn about several other characters, including George Harrison, a local cult hero and rumoured rapist; Ernest Newboy, a famous poet visiting Bellona by invitation of Roger Calkins, publisher and editor of the local newspaper, The Bellona Times; Madame Brown, a psychotherapist; and, later in the novel, Captain Michael Kamp, an astronaut who, some years before, was in the crew of a successful Moon landing.

The notebook Kid receives already has writing throughout, but only on the right hand pages. The left hand pages are blank. Glimpses of the text in the notebook, however, are extremely close to passages in Dhalgren itself, as if the notebook were an alternate draft of the novel. Other passages are verbatim from the final chapter of Dhalgren. It is here in Chapter II that Kid begins using the blank pages of the notebook to compose poems. The novel describes the process of creating the poems—the emotions and the mechanics of the writing itself—at length and several times. We never see the actual poems, however, in their final form. Kid soon revises or removes any line that does appear in the text.

The third and longest chapter, "House of the Ax", involves Kid's interactions with the Richards family: Mr. Arthur Richards, his wife Mary Richards, their daughter June (who may or may not have been raped publicly by George Harrison, whom she is now fixated on), and son Bobby. Through Madame Brown they hire Kid to help them move from one apartment to another in the mostly-abandoned Labry Apartments. Led by Mary Richards, they are "keeping up appearances." Mr. Richards leaves every day to go to work—though no office or facility in the city seems to be in operation—while Mrs. Richards acts as though there's nothing truly disastrous happening in Bellona. By some force of will, she causes almost everyone who comes into contact with her to play along. While carrying a carpet to the elevator, June backs Bobby into an open elevator shaft, where he falls to his death. There is reason to believe that June did this intentionally after Bobby threatened to reveal her relationship with George Harrison to the family.

The third chapter is also where successful poet Ernest Newboy befriends Kid. Newboy takes an interest in Kid's poems and mentions them to Roger Calkins. By the end of the chapter, Calkins is preparing to print a book of Kid's poems.

As the novel progresses, Kid falls in with the Scorpions, a loose-knit gang, three of whom have severely beaten him earlier in the book. Almost accidentally, Kid becomes their leader. (Much of this suggests the American "mythical folk hero," Billy the Kid, whom Delany used in his earlier, Nebula Award-winning novel, The Einstein Intersection [1967].) Denny, a 15-year-old Scorpion, becomes Kid's and Lanya's lover, so that the relationship with Lanya turns into a lasting three-way sexual linkage. Kid also begins writing things other than poems in the notebook, keeping a journal of events and his thoughts.

In Chapter VI, "Palimpsest", Calkins throws a party for Kid and his book, Brass Orchids, at his sprawling estate. At Calkins's suggestion, Kid brings along twenty or thirty friends: the Scorpion "nest." While Calkins himself is absent from the gathering, there are extended descriptions of the interactions between what is left of Bellona's high society and, in effect, a street gang. At the party, Kid is interviewed by William (later passages of the book suggest William's last name is "Dhalgren," but this is never confirmed).

In the concluding Chapter VII, "The Anathemata: a plague journal", bits of the whole now and again appear to be laid out. Shifting from the omniscient viewpoint of the first six chapters, this chapter comprises numerous journal entries from the notebook, all of which appear to be by Kid. Several passages from this chapter have, however, already appeared verbatim earlier in the novel when Kid reads what was already in the notebook—written when he received it. In this chapter rubrics run along beside many sections of the main text, mimicking the writing as it appears in the notebook. (In the middle of this chapter, a rubric running contains the following sentence: I have come to to wound the autumnal city.) Recalling Kid's entry into the city, the final section contains a near paragraph-for-paragraph echo of his initial confrontation with the women on the bridge. This time, however, the group leaving is almost all male, and the person entering is a young woman who says almost exactly what Kid did himself at the beginning of his stay in Bellona.

The story ends:

But I still hear them walking in the trees: not speaking.
Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of
the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland into the
hills, I have come to

As with Finnegans Wake , the unclosed closing sentence can be read as leading into the unopened opening sentence, turning the novel into an enigmatic circle. [2] [3]

Major themes

Mythology

Writing in the Libertarian Review , Jeff Riggenbach compared Dhalgren to the work of James Joyce. A quotation from his review was included on the inside advertisement page of the fifteenth printing of the Bantam edition. As the critic and novelist William Gass writes of Joyce, "The Homeric parallels in Ulysses are of marginal importance to the reading of the work but are of fundamental importance to the writing of it...Writers have certain ordering compulsions, certain ordering habits, which are part of the book only in the sense that they make the writing possible. This is a widespread phenomenon." [4] Almost certainly this is also the case with Dhalgren: Writing about the novel both as himself and under his pseudonym K. Leslie Steiner, Delany has made similar statements and suggested that it is easy to make too much of the mythological resonances. As he says, they are merely resonances, and not keys to any particular secrets the novel holds. [1]

Circular text, multistable perception, echoes, and repeated imagery

Delany has pointed out that Dhalgren is a circular text with multiple entry points. Those points include the schizoid babble that appears in various sections of the story. [1] [5] Hints along those lines are given in the novel. Besides the Chapter VII rubric mentioned above (containing the sentence "I have come to to wound the autumnal city"—the exact sentence that would be created by joining the novel's unclosed closing sentence to the unopened opening) the most obvious is the point where Kid hears "grendal grendal grendal grendal" going through his mind and suddenly realizes he was listening from the wrong spot: he was actually hearing "Dhalgren Dhalgren Dhalgren" over and over again. [6] The ability of texts to become circular is something that Delany explores in other works, such as Empire Star .

Delany conceived and executed Dhalgren as a literary multistable perception—the observer (reader) may choose to shift his perception back and forth. Central to this construction is the notebook itself: Kidd receives the notebook shortly after entering Bellona. In the first several chapters of the novel we see, on several occasions, exactly what Kid reads when he looks at the open notebook. The notebook appears to take over as the main text of the novel starting at Chapter VII, coming almost seamlessly after Chapter VI. However, though Chapter VII reads as though it is written by Kid, many of the passages shown in earlier chapters appear verbatim in Chapter VII. Yet for Kid to have read those passages earlier, the passages must have been written before he received the notebook. In fact, the last few pages of the novel show Kid leaving Bellona. The last sentence of that departure sequence is the incomplete one that conceivably loops back to the beginning of the book. However, earlier in the novel the notebook falls to the ground and Kid reads the last page. The reader sees exactly what Kid reads: the last four sentences of the novel, word for word. This happens well before a point in the novel where Kid specifically states that he only wrote the poems, and "all that other stuff" was already in there when he received the notebook. However, those four sentences are part of a longer section at the end of the novel which, when read, was obviously written by Kid. This means he left Bellona—taking the notebook with him, for how else would he be able to write about his departure—prior to that notebook being found inside Bellona and given to him. Delany has specifically stated that it is not a matter of settling or deciding which text is authoritative. It is more a matter of allowing the reader to experience perceptual shifts in the same way that a Necker cube can be viewed. [1] Akin to the hints regarding its circular nature, Dhalgren also contains at least one hint towards the perceptual shifts: Denny's book of M. C. Escher prints. [7] Additionally, Jeffrey Allen Tucker has written that Delany's unpublished notes regarding the writing of Dhalgren contain direct references to the novel itself working as a Möbius Strip, and makes a direct connection to Escher's "Möbius Strip". [8]

Within the looping text that comprises Dhalgren, many other textual plays on perception can be found. Imagery and conversations, some hundreds of pages apart, closely echo each other. One case in point: The scenes on the bridge mentioned in the "Plot Summary" above. In another, light sliding across the face of a trucker driving at night is echoed in the description of light sliding across the face of a building. The repeated motif of a scratch down the lower leg of several female characters at different points in the novel is yet another example. [9]

Delany's personal experience of reality

Samuel R. Delany has dyslexia and dysmetria. [10] He once spent time in the mental health ward of a hospital. [11] and he has repeatedly spoken and written of seeing burned-out sections of great American cities that most people didn't see, or even know existed. Dhalgren is a literary exposition of all these experiences for the "normal" reader. [12]

Influences

Dhalgren is often compared to James Joyce's Ulysses . Delany has cited poets W. H. Auden, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Valéry as influences on the book, as well as John Ashbery's poem "The Instruction Manual". [1] Elsewhere he cites Michel Foucault, Frank Kermode, and Jack Spicer. [5] Kenneth R. James has elaborated subtextual ties to mathematician G. Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form . [13]

Literary significance and criticism

Cover of Vintage edition. Dhalgren vintage.jpg
Cover of Vintage edition.

With over a million sales, Dhalgren is by far Delany's most popular book—and also his most controversial. Critical reaction to Dhalgren has ranged from high praise (both inside and outside the science fiction community) to extreme dislike (mostly within the community). [14] However, Dhalgren was a commercial success, selling a half million copies in the first two years, and over a million copies worldwide since then, with "its appeal reaching beyond the usual SF readership." [14]

William Gibson has referred to Dhalgren as "a riddle that was never meant to be solved." [15]

Darrell Schweitzer expressed the opinion, "Dhalgren is, I think, the most disappointing thing to happen to science fiction since Robert Heinlein made a complete fool of himself with I Will Fear No Evil ." [16]

In 2015, Elizabeth Hand characterized the novel as "a dense, transgressive, hallucinatory, Joycean tour-de-force". [17] Theodore Sturgeon called it "the very best ever to come out of the science fiction field". [18] By contrast, Harlan Ellison hated the novel. When the book appeared, Ellison wrote: "I must be honest. I gave up after 361 pages. I could not permit myself to be gulled or bored any further." [19]

Delany has speculated that "a good number of Dhalgren's more incensed readers, the ones bewildered or angered by the book, simply cannot read the proper distinction between sex and society and the nature and direction of the causal arrows between them, a vision of which lies just below the novel's surface." [5]

Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, a stage adaptation of (or sequel to) Dhalgren, was produced at The Kitchen in New York City in April 2010. [20]

In 3 Body Problem (TV series) S1 E7 at 20:52, the man following Ye Wenjie is seen reading Dhalgren while waiting in the airport.

Publishing history

Dhalgren was officially published in January, 1975 (with copies available on bookshelves as early as the first week in December, 1974), as a paperback original (a Frederik Pohl selection) by Bantam Books. The Bantam edition went through 19 printings, selling slightly more than a million copies.

A hardcover edition was published by Gregg Press (1977), based on the Bantam paperback edition with many errors corrected, and with an introduction by Jean Mark Gawron. After the Bantam edition went out of print the book was republished by Grafton (1992); Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England (1996); and Vintage Books, an imprint of Random House (2001), the latter two with an introduction by William Gibson. In 2010 Gollancz brought out an edition as part of its SF Masterworks series, and in 2014 an ebook edition of the novel appeared.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joanna Russ</span> American writer

Joanna Russ was an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny. She is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire, and the story "When It Changed".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-reference</span> Sentence, idea or formula that refers to itself

Self-reference is a concept that involves referring to oneself or one's own attributes, characteristics, or actions. It can occur in language, logic, mathematics, philosophy, and other fields.

Bellona may refer to:

Alexei Panshin was an American writer and science fiction critic. He wrote several critical works and several novels, including the 1968 Nebula Award–winning novel Rite of Passage and, with his wife Cory Panshin, the 1990 Hugo Award–winning study of science fiction The World Beyond the Hill.

<i>Always Coming Home</i> 1985 novel by Ursula K. Le Guin

Always Coming Home is a 1985 science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. It is in parts narrative, pseudo-textbook and pseudo-anthropologist's record. It describes the life and society of the Kesh people, a cultural group who live in the distant future long after modern society has collapsed. It is presented by Pandora, who seems to be an anthropologist or ethnographer from the readers' contemporary culture, or a culture very close to it. Pandora describes the book as a protest against contemporary civilization, which the Kesh call "the Sickness of Man".

<i>Triton</i> (novel) 1976 novel by Samuel R. Delany

Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976) is a science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. It was nominated for the 1976 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and was shortlisted for a retrospective James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 1995. It was originally published under the shorter title Triton.

<i>Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand</i> 1984 novel by Samuel R. Delany

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) is a science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany. It is part of what would have been a "diptych", in Delany's description, of which the second half, The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities, remains unfinished.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Gaughan</span> American science fiction artist (1930–1985)

John Brian Francis "Jack" Gaughan, pronounced like 'gone', was an American science fiction artist and illustrator and multiple winner of the Hugo Award in the category of Best Professional Artist.

<i>Nova</i> (novel) 1968 science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany

Nоva is a science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany and published in 1968. The plot concerns the spaceship captain Lorq Von Ray's search for a supernova, which will produce the essential power source Illyrion, and his vendetta with the Red family, who seek to kill him. Nominally space opera, it explores the politics and culture of a future where cyborg technology is universal, yet making major decisions can involve using tarot cards. It has strong mythological overtones, relating to both the Grail Quest and Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece.

<i>The Mad Man</i> 1994–2015 novel by Samuel R. Delany

The Mad Man is a literary novel by Samuel R. Delany, first published in 1994 by Richard Kasak. In a disclaimer that appears at the beginning of the book, Delany describes it as a "pornotopic fantasy". It was originally published in 1994, republished and slightly revised in 1996, and republished again with significant changes in 2002 and again in an e-book version with further corrections in 2015. Delany considers the 2015 version the definitive edition.

Ronald N. Drummond is a writer, editor, and independent scholar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Return to Nevèrÿon (series)</span> Book series by Samuel Delany

Return to Nevèrÿon is a series of eleven sword and sorcery stories by Samuel R. Delany, originally published in four volumes during the years 1979–1987. Those volumes are:

<i>The Ballad of Beta-2</i> 1965 novel by Samuel R. Delany

The Ballad of Beta-2 is a 1965 science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. The book was originally published as Ace Double, together with Alpha Yes, Terra No! by Emil Petaja.

<i>Equinox</i> (novel) 1973 novel by Samuel R. Delany

Equinox is a 1973 novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. His first published foray into explicitly sexual material, it tells of a series of erotic and violent encounters in a small American seaport following the arrival of an African-American sea captain. It is a non-science fiction work, though with fantastic elements.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samuel R. Delany</span> American author, critic, and academic (born 1942)

Samuel R. "Chip" Delany is an American writer and literary critic. His work includes fiction, memoir, criticism, and essays on science fiction, literature, sexuality, and society. His fiction includes Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection ; Hogg, Nova, Dhalgren, the Return to Nevèrÿon series, and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. His nonfiction includes Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, About Writing, and eight books of essays. He has won four Nebula awards and two Hugo Awards, and he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002.

Michael Perkins is an American poet.

Flowers of Asphalt is an unfinished novel attributed to American writer Stephen Crane. The novel, said to have been started in 1894, was to be about a male prostitute. No trace of the manuscript has ever been found.

<i>Empire</i> (graphic novel)

Empire is a 1978 graphic novel written by Samuel R. Delany and illustrated by Howard Chaykin.

<i>Nebula Award Stories 5</i> 1970 anthology edited by James Blish

Nebula Award Stories 5 is an anthology of award-winning science fiction short works edited by James Blish. It was first published in the United Kingdom in hardcover by Gollancz in November 1970. The first American edition was published by Doubleday in December of the same year. Paperback editions followed from Pocket Books in the U.S. in January 1972, and Panther in the U.K. in December 1972. The American editions bore the variant title Nebula Award Stories Five. The book has also been published in German.

<i>The Straits of Messina</i> 1989 essay collection by Samuel R Delany

The Straits of Messina is a 1989 non-fiction collection of essays, in which author and critic Samuel R. Delany discusses his own novels. The essays are published under his own name, and under the pen name K. Leslie Steiner.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Samuel R. Delany (writing as K. Leslie Steiner), "Some Remarks toward a Reading of Dhalgren" in The Straits of Messina , Serconia Press, Seattle: 1989 ISBN   0-934933-04-9
  2. Delany, Samuel R. (2001). Dhalgren. Vintage. ISBN   0-375-70668-2.
  3. Paul Di Filippo, "Dhalgren", on-line review from Sci Fi Weekly (11 June 2001) Archived 2007-11-14 at the Wayback Machine
  4. Conversations with William Gass, edited by Theadore G. Ammon, pp. 32-33, University of Mississippi Press, Jackson, 1996.
  5. 1 2 3 Samuel R. Delany, "Of Sex, Objects, Signs, Systems, Sales, SF, and Other Things" in The Straits of Messina , Serconia Press, Seattle: 1989 ISBN   0-934933-04-9
  6. Jean Mark Gawron, "On Dhalgren" in Ash of Stars; On the Writings of Samuel R. Delany, edited by James Sallis, University of Mississippi Press, Jackson: 1996 ISBN   978-0-87805-852-5
  7. Mary Kay Bray, "Rites of Reversal: Double Consciousness in Delany's Dhalgren" first appearing in Black American Literature Forum (Vol. 18, Number 2, Summer 1984)
  8. Jeffrey Allen Tucker, A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference, Wesleyan University Press: 2004 ISBN   978-0-8195-6689-8
  9. Samuel R. Delany, "Of Doubts and Dreams" in Distant Stars, Bantam Books, New York: 1981 ISBN   0-553-01336-X
  10. Robert Minto, "Samuel R. Delany's Life of Contradictions." The New Republic, May 18, 2017.
  11. Joseph Beam, "Samuel R. Delany: The Possibility of Possibilities." In Conversations with Samuel R. Delany. Literary Conversations Series, ed. by Carl Freedman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009,
  12. The Motion of Light in Water, by Samuel R. Delany, Arbor House, 1988
  13. James, Kenneth (2021). "Subverted Equations: G. Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form and Samuel R. Delany's Analytics of Attention". On Dhalgren: 85.
  14. 1 2 A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference by Jeffrey Allen Tucker, Wesleyan University Press, 2004, page 57. The relevant quote states that of the nearly 100 reviews of Dhalgren in SF magazines and fanzines at the time, "most of them were hostile or negative."
  15. David Soyka, "Dhalgren", on-line review (2002) SFSite
  16. Outworlds, Sixth Anniversary Issue (#27, 1976)
  17. "Books", F&SF , November–December 2015
  18. Sturgeon, Theodore (March 1975). "Galaxy Bookshelf". Galaxy Magazine.
  19. Los Angeles Times. Sunday, February 23, 1975, p. 64
  20. Anderson, Sam (28 March 2010). "Sage of the Apocalypse". New York Magazine. Retrieved 2010-04-01.

Sources