Dhalgren

Dhalgren
Author	Samuel R. Delany
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Bantam Books
Publication date	January 1975
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	879 pp (first edition, paperback)
ISBN	ISBN 0-552-68554-2 (first edition, paperback)
OCLC	16303763

Dhalgren is a science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany. The story begins with a cryptic passage:

to wound the autumnal city.

   So howled out for the world to give him a name.

   The in-dark answered with wind.

What follows is an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the American Midwest cut off from the rest of the world by some unknown catastrophe. William Gibson has referred to Dhalgren as "A riddle that was never meant to be solved."^[1]

Plot overview

The city of Bellona is severely damaged; radio, television, and telephones 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”, a drifter who suffers from 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 is intermittently schizophrenic: 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. Also he suffers from significant memory loss in the course of the story. As well, he is dysmetric, 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.

Plot summary

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 are loath to discuss how they came to do so. 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 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. 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 Calkins's 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

Dhalgren and mythology

Dhalgren abounds with references to Greek and Roman mythology. "Bellona" is the Roman war goddess Bellona, the Waster of Cities. The woman encountered by Kid at the beginning of the novel strongly suggests the dryad Daphne—an association that Kid states explicitly, once in the truck that picks him up as he hitches to Bellona.

The "Kid" in Greek mythology mostly likely represents a student of the Greco-Roman gods Pan, Bacchus, or Dionysius. One should note that these three gods predated Greco-Roman theology but were incorporated more fully than other pre-Hellenistic gods. The goat, or "Kid", was long associated with these gods, agents of the human emotions and the wilder, more violent and sexual side of human nature. The protagonist, the Kid himself, suggests the dual nature of Pan and Daphnis. Despite his wild nature, Pan was a teacher and mentor to those he favored. Daphnis was the son of Hermes. He was a poet, a bisexual, and a youth. In addition he was Pan's pupil. Pan taught him to play the pan pipes, or, in Dhalgren, their modern equivalent, the harmonica. When Lanya plays, the harmonica has an intoxicating effect on its audience.

The strange celestial happenings (the double moon and the immense sun) suggest the sun god (Apollo) and the moon goddess (Diana). Apollo is also often associated with the goddess Bellona, and Kid plays Apollo's role in the replaying of the Daphne myth. Apollo is also credited with sending the scorpion Scorpio to kill Orion in some versions of the Orion myth, while the gang Kid eventually leads call themselves Scorpions. The song Lanya composes throughout the story might be interpretable as a paean, and Lanya's harmonica, also known as a blues harp, may represent the lyre or kithara. This song, like the paeans, is played at the celebration for Kid and his book of poetry.

In the chapter "House of the Ax", the Labry Apartments suggest ancient Crete's Labyrinth. "Labrys" is the Greek name for the double-headed ax—the sign beside the doorway into the historical labyrinth. The suggestion here is possibly some form of the following: the complex of rituals which Mrs. Richards goes through to mimic a normalcy that simply can not be maintained in this devastated landscape is so complicated that anyone who once enters them has little hope of ever getting free of them. The optic chain that circles the body and holds it, coherent, together, suggests the thread of Ariadne, which Theseus used to escape the maze.

George and June may represent Jupiter and Juno: George is sometimes portrayed in scenes with lightning and has many consorts and children. June's similarity to the goddess is most strongly suggested by her name and her association with George, as well as aspects of her personality, especially jealousy. When Kid talks with George about June, he describes George's response, "His eyes will explode like blooming poppies." Poppies are associated with Juno, and—at that point in the novel—with June.

Tak, who meets nearly everyone who enters the city, can be associated with Charon.

Kid can be read as a personification of Orpheus, the son of Calliope, the muse of poetry. Orpheus is, alternatively, the son of Apollo or King Oeagrus of Thrace, depending on the source. Calliope herself was the daughter of Mnemosyne. Mnemosyne is also one of the names of the river dividing the lands of the living and the dead, in which all who cross it forget their earthly lives, especially their names and personalities. Orpheus was also young, bisexual and was mentored by Dionysus, and also by Apollo.

Orpheus eventually fell out of favor with Dionysus for abandoning his worship for the worship of Apollo, and becoming exclusively homosexual. He was then torn apart by the Maenads, Dionysus’s ecstatic band of female worshippers, for denying them his sexual attentions.

Writing in the Libertarian Review, Jeff Riggenbach compared Dhalgren to the work of James Joyce. A quote 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.^[5]

Writing, reflection, and narrative

Writing (not only the act of writing, but writing as narration and writing as reflection), is another major theme. The text of Dhalgren contains many sub-texts—newspapers, poems, journals from the notebook which may or may not become Dhalgren itself. Reflection and narration are central to the novel (and indeed may be the entire purpose of the book), ideas which Delany would go on to delve into deeply in his Return to Nevèrÿon series.

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.^[5][6] 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.^[7] The ability of texts to become circular is something that Delany explores in other works, such as Empire Star.

But the novel is far more complex than a simple circle and compares more closely with a Necker cube. 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. We, the reader, see 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.^[5] 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.^[8] 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 Moebius Strip, and makes a direct connection to Escher's "Moebius Strip".^[9]

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.^[10]

Dhalgren and Delany's personal experience of reality

Samuel R. Delany is profoundly dyslexic and dysmetric. He once spent time in the mental health ward of a hospital. 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 exist. Dhalgren is a literary exposition of all these experiences for the "normal" reader.^[11]

Literary significance and criticism

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).^[12] 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."^[13]

Its lack of a linear plot or even a single consistent chronological narrative, its graphically-described homo-, hetero-, and bisexuality, Delany's "modernist" verbal pyrotechnics, and use of stream of consciousness writing has given it a reputation as a difficult novel. It has been compared to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow—not so much because of the styles in which the two are written, but in terms of the complexity and ambition of the two works.

Some quotes from the back cover of the Vintage Books paperback edition of Dhalgren:

• "a brilliant tour de force." - Raleigh News and Observer
• "I consider Delany not only one of the most important SF writers of the present generation, but a fascinating writer in general who has invented a new style." -Umberto Eco
• "The very best ever to come out of the science fiction field... A literary landmark." -Theodore Sturgeon

The Libertarian Review stated that Dhalgren "seems ... to stake a better claim than anything else published in this country in the last quarter century (excepting only Gass's Omensetter's Luck and Nabokov's Pale Fire) to a permanent place as one of the enduring monuments of our national literature."

The Telluride Times-Journal wrote, "Altogether, Dhalgren is a unique and powerful literary masterpiece."

Darrell Schweitzer, writing in Outworlds, Sixth Anniversary Issue (#27, 1976) stated that "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."

Theodore Sturgeon called Dhalgren "the very best ever to come out of the science fiction field ... a literary landmark." By contrast, fellow writers such as Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison hated the novel. When the book appeared, Ellison in the L. A. Times (Sunday, February 23, 1975, p. 64) wrote: "I must be honest. I gave up after 361 pages. I could not permit myself to be gulled or bored any further." In an interview 27 years later, he said: "When Dhalgren came out, I thought it was awful, still do ... I ... threw it against a wall." Dick called Dhalgren "a terrible book" that "should have been marketed as trash. ... I just started reading it and said this is the worst trash I've ever read. And I threw it away."

Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, a stage adaptation of (or sequel to) Dhalgren, was produced at The Kitchen in New York City in April 2010.^[14]

Textual accuracy and redaction

Dhalgren is a typographically complex novel. Because of logistical delays, Delany had only three days to correct the nearly 900 pages of publisher's proofs prior to the book's first publication. As a consequence, there were hundreds if not thousands of typographical errors in the first edition. Over the years, Delany managed to have corrections made to the text on several occasions, often with the help of dedicated readers and colleagues. Though the 17th Bantam printing (1985) marked a new high in the novel's textual accuracy,^[5] the gain became a loss when Bantam let the book go out of print. The 1996 Wesleyan edition constituted an entirely new typesetting, complete with its own unique errors and inconsistencies. Fortunately, Vintage Books was able to license the Wesleyan typesetting for use in its edition, and twice allowed extensive corrections to be made.

Four times in the twenty years from 1982 to 2002, editor Ron Drummond proofread and redacted the text of Dhalgren, the latter two times at Delany's specific behest. Dozens of Drummond's corrections were incorporated into two late Bantam printings, and hundreds more in the first and third printings of the Vintage Books edition. Because of Drummond's work, the third and later printings of the Vintage edition are considered by the author to be the most accurate rendering of the text. Nevertheless, 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 error in the novel's convoluted publishing history, an error that Vintage has failed to correct in subsequent printings: on page 791, in the left-hand column, paragraph 16 should have a single pair of quotation marks, one at the beginning and one at the end, with none in the middle. What currently reads

Lanya said, "You weren't writing too much at your place, either." She said she thought there were too many people around.

was originally intended and written as a single utterance by Madame Brown as follows:

"Lanya said you weren't writing too much at your place, either. She said she thought there were too many people around."

Even with these errors, the current Vintage edition of Dhalgren remains the most accurate published to date.

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). 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. The Vintage edition is currently (Sept. 2007) in its 7th printing.

• 1975, USA, Bantam Books (ISBN 0-552-68554-2), Pub date ? January 1975, paperback (First edition)
• 1977, USA, Gregg Press (ISBN 0-8398-2396-7), Pub date ? June 1977, hardcover
• 1982, USA, Bantam Books (ISBN 0-553-25391-3), Pub date ? December 1982, paperback
• 1992, UK, Grafton Press (ISBN 0-586-21419-4), Pub date ? ? 1992, paperback
• 1996, USA, Wesleyan University Press (University Press of New England) (ISBN 0-8195-6299-8), Pub date ? ? 1996, paperback and limited edition slip-case hardcover edition of 300 signed and numbered copies.
• 2001, USA, Vintage Books (ISBN ), Pub date 15 May 2001, paperback
• 2002, USA, Vintage Books (ISBN 0-375-70668-2), Pub date 1 February 2002, paperback

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Samuel R. Delany, "About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words" in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Berkeley Books, New York: 1977
• Robert Elliot Fox, “'This You-Shaped Hole of Insight and Fire': Meditations on Delany's 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

External links

• SF Site review of novel
• Bookreporter Review
• An interpretation of the novel
• Classic Sci-Fi's review of novel by Paul Di Filippo
• Errata for Dhalgren, approved by the author

v t e Samuel R. Delany Stand-alone novels The Jewels of Aptor (1962) The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965) Empire Star (1966) Babel-17 (1966) The Einstein Intersection (1967) Nova (1968) Equinox (1973) Dhalgren (1975) Trouble on Triton (1976) Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) They Fly at Çiron (1993) The Mad Man (1994) Hogg (1995) Phallos (2004) Dark Reflections (2007) Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012) The Fall of the Towers Captives of the Flame (1963) The Towers of Toron (1964) City of a Thousand Suns (1965) Return to Nevèrÿon Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979) Neveryóna (1983) Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985) Return to Nevèrÿon (1987) Short stories Stories "Aye, and Gomorrah..." (1967) "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" (1968) Collections Driftglass (1971) Distant Stars (1981) The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction (1983) Driftglass/Starshards (1993) Atlantis: Three Tales (1995) Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories (2003) Nonfiction Heavenly Breakfast (1979) The Motion of Light in Water (1988) Silent Interviews (1995) Longer Views (1996) Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) Shorter Views (2000)