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.
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 cannot 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."Samuel R. Delany (writing as K. Leslie Steiner), "Some Remarks toward a Reading of Dhalgren" in The Straits of Messina, Serconia Press, Seattle: 1989
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 .) 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:
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.Paul Di Filippo, "Dhalgren", on-line review from Sci Fi Weekly (11 June 2001)
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."Conversations with William Gass, edited by Theadore G. Ammon, pp. 32-33, University of Mississippi Press, Jackson, 1996. 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.
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.Samuel R. Delany, "Of Sex, Objects, Signs, Systems, Sales, SF, and Other Things" in The Straits of Messina, Serconia Press, Seattle: 1989 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.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 The ability of texts to become circular is something that Delany explores in other works, such as Empire Star.