Talk:Dhalgren

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Novels
Literature Portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Novels, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to narrative novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit one of the articles mentioned below, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and contribute to the general Project discussion to talk over new ideas and suggestions.
B This article has been rated as B-Class.
Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale.
This article is supported by the Science fiction task force. (with unknown importance)
Assessment comments
LGBT Portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject LGBT studies, which tries to ensure comprehensive and factual coverage of all LGBT related issues on Wikipedia. For more information, or to get involved, visit the project page.
B This article has been rated as B-class on the quality scale.

Contents

[edit] I hate the summary

... and I always have. Can someone help me to construct something better?

"The story can be read as a circular text much like the epic work, Finnegans Wake by James Joyce."

True, but not that important.

"What follows is an extended and increasingly hallucinatory trip through Bellona -- a city divorced from reality and reason."

These words give an impression of the novel that is simply not true. It is not 'hallucinatory' in the standard drug-meaning of the term; the novel is the MOST grounded in actual, physical reality of any I've read. The 'divorced from reality and 'reason' is the worst kind of hyperbole and actually says nothing.

"Cut off from the rest of the country, the city is a place unlike any other."

Not exactly encyclopedia-style.

"Another moon appears in the evening sky, the size of the sun appears to change markedly during a day, street signs and landmarks shift constantly, and time appears to contract and dilate."

True, but the hyperbolic phrasing foregrounds what is LEAST important -- the facts -- and leaves out what is most important and carefully delineated in the novel: the reaction of the characters to these events.

"The few people left in Bellona struggle with survival, boredom, and each other."

Finally, a sentence I can agree with!

"He begins the novel apparently awakening from unconsciousness,"

?? Not true, as far as I can tell.

"He has extremely unusual urges, including necrophilic tendencies (which rise when another character dies). "

Completely wrong! A horrible misreading of a single sentence! Very misleading!

"It is not until the final chapter of Dhalgren that the meaning of the entire experience is laid out, and even then it is elusive."

In no sense is the meaning of the experience laid out in any way, not even an elusive one.

I really want to make this better. Who is in?

Sevenstones 21:47, 24 October 2006 (UTC)


How's this for a revisal of the summary:

The story begins with a well-known passage:

to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind.

What follows is an extended trip through Bellona, a mythical Mid-Western city cut off from the rest of the world by some unknown catastrophe. Whatever has befallen Bellona prevents all but verbal information from entering or leaving the city, and may have created a rift in space-time: Another moon appears in the evening sky, the size of the sun appears to change markedly during a day, street signs and landmarks shift constantly, and time appears to contract and dilate. The few people left in Bellona struggle with survival, boredom, and each other. It is their reactions to (and dealing with) the strange happenings and isolation in Bellona that are the true focus of the novel, rather than the happenings themselves.

The story's narrator is a nameless, left-shoeless drifter nicknamed "Kid" (also referred to as "the Kid", "Kidd", or just "kid"). He appears to be schizophrenic: Not only does the novel begin in what is most likely schizoid babble (which returns at various points in the novel), there are references to memories of a stay in a mental hospital, and his perception of the "changes in reality" is inconsistent with the other characters'. He also seems to have suffered significant memory loss, which also recurs throughout the story. Poet, hero, liar, Kid may be a realization of the very instincts of the city itself.

It is not until the final chapter of Dhalgren that the entire experience is laid out. The rubric running through that final chapter contains the following sentence:

I have come to to wound the autumnal city.

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. Delany himself has written about the novel (both under his own name and under the pseudonym K. Leslie Steiner, the bulk of which is collected in The Straits of Messina (1989), ISBN 0-934933-04-9), and has stated that it is meant to be a circular text with multiple entry points -- those points being the schizoid babble that appears in various sections. Hints along those lines are given in the novel, the most obvious being the point where Kid hears ". . . grendal grendal grendal grendal . . ." going through is mind and suddenly realizes he was listening from the wrong spot: he was actually hearing ". . . Dhalgren Dhalgren Dhalgren . . ." over and over again. Additionally, the doubled "to" created by joining the end of the novel to the beginning is quite intentional. Not only confirmed by the clue found in the rubric of the final chapter, but by Delany: "The 'to to' was very much intended, from the beginning." (In correspondence)

--Kdring 21:03, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, FWIW, I went ahead and made the changes. I ended up removing the specific mention of "to to" as I felt it did not flow well with the rest of the description. --Kdring 21:23, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Question

"Nevertheless, in a rather stunning exemplar of Murphy's Law, the early submission by Delany of a mistaken correction to the publisher and the publisher's prompt (if promptly forgotten) response led, months later, to the inadvertent introduction of the single worst, most meaning-obliterating multi-paragraph error in the novel's entire convoluted publishing history, an error that Vintage has failed to correct in subsequent printings"

Could someone elaborate, as to what the error is? Or, where one could find some documentation of the error? 217.149.126.59


[edit] Article sequence

Maybe we should move the Publishing History section to the end of the article? Though interesting, its relevance is questionable and its length is daunting for someone (like me) who came here to find out about the novel.

[edit] New Orleans is on the way to become Bellona

Also a moon named George (W. Bush) would fit very well


I took down this spoiler, or what I think was a spoiler anyway. Interested parties can look at the history of this page, I think.

I don't think it was a spoiler, but I do think it was ludicrously wrong. On another subject, I strongly disagree with the claim that in the final chapter the meaning of the entire experience is laid out, even ambiguously. Gibson is right, the riddle is not solved. Would there be cries of anguish if this were removed? Tim Bray 07:21, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I added "kid" as one of the spellings of Kid's name. While it does make the name in its myriad forms look ridiculously complicated, I think that's the point. His apparent youth is an important part of the story. Anyway, I might just be being anal. The lesbian 19:42, 15 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Edit comment inserted in the body of the article?

"Unprejudiced view of byplay between life concepts, aesthetics, ethics, and sexuality set in conditions that are intended by the author to be difficult to generalise accurately."

This looks like either a comment, or like it's missing half a sentence. BTW, re: author's intent: did Delany say this? I thought (and this is NOTHING but IMHO) that one of the novel's central conceits, (which Delany looks at over and over again the the post-Dahlgren Neveryon stories) is the complete subjectivity of experience, i.e., the sheer impossibility of an "unprejudiced view". --Silverlake Bodhisattva 4 July 2005 23:05 (UTC)

[edit] Two "to"s at end and beginning

The last word in the book is "to", as is the book's first word. This gives the phrase: "I have come to to wound the autumnal city". Two "to"s. This repetition is too obvious to be accidental. After all, he could have finished the book with "I have come". Then it would have flowed nicely across the gap. So why didn't he?

The use of this exact wording, complete with the two "to"s, occurs in another place in the book: amongst the later sections where there are additional notes printed down the sides of the pages, as though written in the margin of Kid's own notebook. On page 806 in my Bantam copy (11th printing, 1978), in the note that begins on that page with the line "an intercallory jamb between Wednesday and" - about halfway down, it reads: "Your rosamundus may mathematik him, but it won't move me one mechanical apple corer. I have come to to wound the autumnal city: the other side of the question is a mixed metaphore if I ever heard one."

I think that by leaving the two "to"s in at either end of the book, while also making sure there were two "to"s included in the margin note version of the memorable "autumnal city" phrase (and why use that particular phrase within the notes, unless it was to draw our attention to its very use in that context), I believe Delany is playing a game with us: he's suggesting that the place where the story's end meets its beginning is no longer necessarily part of the main narrative; it could have become, like Kid and the other residents of Bellona, lost in the margin notes of a chaotic, scattered journal. Reinforcing this notion is the enigmatic comment, made early on in the book, by a girl to Kid that he should think himself lucky he doesn't just exist amongst "the notes in the margin of someone else's notebook". (Possibly I've paraphrased a little, but that's the gist.) (And I think now it might be somewhere in The Anathemata rather than near the beginning of the story.)

I'm sorry I don't have the exact quote or page reference for that one right now; it's buried so deep in that dense narrative that it defies a casual browse so I can't find it, but I'll keep looking. In the meantime I'll hope you think this observation is worth including in the revised entry.

Hope this makes some sort of sense.

Best wishes,

Bob Kingsley


It makes perfect sense, thanks for bothering to sum this up; I think most of us who read the book more than once noticed these and they're deifinitely worth mentioning.
To "come to" is essentially to return to consciousness. The circular sentences thus goes "I have come to to wound the autumnal city". I don't know whether Delany or anyone else has ever pointed this out in print (thus I would not refer to it in the article, since it cannot be referenced). But I've had it at (only) second hand that Delany has been known to make this point orally. I wish I'd heard him say it myself to have a better context. Metamagician3000 10:17, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Not crazy about the summary

It could stand a serious polish. While I don't buy all of Sevenstones' objections, the summary as it stands contains too much hyperbole and too little explanation. So, beyond the proposed changes, anyone got a cleaner, more complete version worked up?Silverlake Bodhisattva 18:14, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Summary, to to, and the error

I'm in for changing the summary, though I don't know how much help I can be. I do feel the current one misses the mark.

Then there's the "to to" thing. I added to the summary to mention that there's a sentence in the rubric running through Anathemata that reads, "I have come to to wound the autumnal city." In addition to the location in the Bantam version mentioned above, it can be found on page 781 of the Vintage or Wesleyan versions of the book. I asked Chip about this in an email last year, and he said that the doubled "to" was "very much intended, from the beginning." To me, this means the matter bears mentioning.

I believe that the editing/typesetting error is the one regarding the newspaper headline that, when Kid read it correctly, was supposed to read "NEWBOY IN TOWN", but which, when he first read it, looked like it said "NEW BOY IN TOWN". It was early in the novel. Compare the passages that mention the headline in the Bantam and Vintage editions. The Bantam version is correct. Kdring

[edit] Post-apocalyptic?

A category link has been added to Post-apocalyptic novels. While Dhalgren was promoted this way at times, I don't really think it belongs to this category. Thoughts? --Kdring 21:27, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Why not? As I understood, the action set in the city which has gone through (or continues) some catastrophe. Besides, catastrophe affects not only Bellona, it has influence on minds, society and even reality. Thus catastrophe has global and irreversible (apocalyptic) nature. To all attributes it's post-apocalyptic novel. I understand that Delany initially didn't aim to write exactly the apocalyptic novel, but it's just a category for similar fiction. Isn't it? NERV 12:29, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
I see your point, but I don't think an apocalypse really applies when the effects are really only confined to a single, isolated city. It's mentioned in the book that there are no problems outside of Bellona. Maybe it's just me, but when I think of apocalypse, I think worldwide, civilization-ending disaster. I'm not, however, going to push the issue, especially as Dhalgren was indeed marketed as a post-apocalyptic novel.--Kdring 16:53, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
FWIW, I'd say that The Jewels of Aptor is much more a post-apocalyptic story than is Dhalgren. --Kdring 19:19, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Textual accuracy

I don't want to insult anyone by adding {{fact}} to this section, but this section begs for an inline note to document this problem. (Can we honestly trust an account this detailed not to be a clever hoax?) Can someone fill this need, or is adding a tag the only way to fix this? -- llywrch 03:17, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Chip has discussed this matter many times over the years in personal appearances. I'll try to dig up some written info on it. There are certainly several errata sheets out there that Chip hands out to people, and they at least address the errors that abound in the various printings. There's a rather long one contained in Straits of Messina which addresses the errors in the final Bantam edition, but there's no major discussion there of the whole printing thing, as I recall. Chip gave me a comb-bound collection of essays, reviews, and other information regarding Dhalgren, and the errata collection there (for the 3rd, 4th, and 5th printings of the Vintage edition) do mention Ron Drummond's work. But this isn't something that is in print in the normal sense -- it's a correction sheet handed out by the author. He has given me permission to put it into electronic form and put it on the web, but I will then not be able to link to it or mention it in the article in any of the edits I do. It will be "original work" at that point -- I'll be too close to it. And anyway, it's not something I'll be getting to immediately, so it's not something that can soon be referenced. As I said, I'll see what I can dig up. --Kdring 18:26, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
Okay, I did a little research. The publishing history is discussed at length in one of the documents printed at the end of 1984: Selected Letters. It is part of an article that Chip first published in Locus for the tenth anniversary of Dhalgren. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of 1984: Selected Letters, so I have no way to personally verify this. I'll try to get my hands on a copy. Hopefully, though, someone will see this and put a proper reference in. --Kdring 16:30, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Oh, and FWIW, I've started work on putting correction information for Delany's work on my website. Here's the link to the Dhalgren page (note that I'm nowhere near finished re-typing the list I have): Dhalgren corrections page
--Kdring 17:57, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Good news. Chip managed to get his figurative hands on a Word version of the corrections for Dhalgren today, and he forwarded them to me. It's a slightly older revision of the corrections to the one I was working from, but 99% of the information was there. So I have managed to get it converted and uploaded to the link I posted above. Feel free to take a look. I will be updating it soon with further revisions as soon as I can get confirmation from Chip.
--Kdring 00:40, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
It's accurate so far as I know as well -- there's no hoax. The question is how much of this is useful in the article. Maybe we could cut it down. Sevenstones 19:02, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
Good point. While I know Chip would likely want the information regarding the error at 791[rubric]/16/1-3 kept around, I could see the discussion of this matter being moved somewhere else—perhaps even onto the errata page I'm hosting.Kdring 20:37, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

As detailed as the Textual Accuracy section is, the copy of Dhalgren I'm holding in my hands (Vintage, 2001) does not in fact contain the "most meaning-obliterating multi-paragraph error" - the paragraph has one set of quotation marks and makes sense as printed. Superadvancepet (talk) 20:23, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Which printing do you have? The error is not in the first two printings.Kdring (talk) 21:06, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
Just to confirm, I pulled out one of my Vintage 1st printings and my Vintage 3rd printing and compared them. The paragraph in question is correct in the 1st printing, and is not correct in the 3rd printing. Kdring (talk) 19:11, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Harrison

There's a topic I think would be a good addition to the article. Something about the fact that George Harrison is going to remind a lot of new readers of _George Harrison_. It's trite, but encyclopedia articles are a good place to find straightforward answers to FAQ-fodder, right? I have always adored the way in which, no, it's utterly nothing to do with the UK dude, the Bellona Harrison is called that because it's just a common name. Since the article talks about resonances with mythology, it might be nice/appropriate to have something about a way in which Delany is not a compulsive alluder, and has the restraint to skip referentiality and use the flat, banal rhythm of real life TOO. It's something we all experience in real life - we don't look for parallels in cause & effect between our co-worker Michael Jackson and the pop star, because, we just don't. But it's a subtle (and wonderful IMO) thing to have in science fiction. Anyhow, I am not writing this myself because... I don't have anything to cite. If I find something, I'll add it, but I hope someone may want to add this in the meantime. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.122.192.59 (talk) 08:17, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Then again, The Einstein Intersection was all about mythology and used The Beatles as a major mythological reference. I would guess that, in fact, the name was used with a very specific knowledge of how George's characteristics (as depicted in Dhalgren) would reflect and resonate against the well-known name. I can't imagine the name was simply used to show that there are other people out there with famous names. With everything else in Dhalgren being so meticulously planned and working on so many levels, I can't imagine that George's name was not selected without a very specific thought towards the mental dissonance it would create. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kdring (talk • contribs) 04:20, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Hi Kevin - well, I'm more baffled, in that case. I didn't know about "The Einstein Intersection." I have yet to read it. I can see evidence for both possibilities. ... I don't think, if the purpose of the GH name was for "just" the flat rhythm of no particular connection, that that would mean he was haphazard, or that it's incompatible with a tight attention to detail on Delany's part. He could be very carefully designing a world that feels a certain way- it feels like the reader's own blah world in some ways, which makes the contrast sharper and more exhilarating when you reach something in the story that doesn't. On the other hand, maybe there is a supposed to be a specific reference, a la Einstein Intersection. If so, I'd like to know what the heck it is about. Could it be a red herring, like "the walrus is Paul," to drive people up the wall with curiosity? That would be sort of ironic/funny, if Delany was having a laugh at the expense of obsessives, using an allusion to a band that also inspired endless speculation about what the pieces of the puzzle meant.

At this rate, I may add something short about this subject, without any quotations, and just see if it survives editing. Thanks Kevin 68.122.74.149 03:53, 19 October 2007 (UTC)another Kevin

Well, I'm trying to do my best to get this article up to high Wikipedia standards. It would be best if anything new in the article actually had some sort of reference to back it up. If someone can bring up a reference here on the talk page that actually supports either theory, I'm all for it going up in the article. But until that happens, it really should stay here. Kdring 16:14, 19 October 2007 (UTC)