Note: I’m resuming this column after a multi-year hiatus due to my living circumstances during the pandemic. My work situation stabilized over the past year and now I teach full-time at the University of Kansas (my opinions represent only me, of course, and not those of my employer). I’m catching up and have already written a few articles that will be published monthly. If you’re new to this column, be sure to read the introductory post where I explain what I’ll be including, why, and how.
Today we take a look at Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, often regarded as one of the great American novels and most recently included in esquireList of the 75 best science fiction books of all time. My local SFF book club recently read Dhalgren over a period of two months, and the following discussion owes much to our two meetings. We had to divide the book into two halves because Dhalgren is in my edition just over 800 pages long and set in tiny type; I have seen translated versions where the publisher chose to publish in several volumes.
Dhalgren is set in a mysterious town called Bellona, not Dhalgren, supposedly in the Midwest of the United States. As a Midwesterner, however, it felt more like the East Coast to me. While the rest of the US is going on as usual, Bellona has been hit by some sort of apocalyptic event that has left the town shrouded in perpetual clouds of smoke. The town is also constantly changing shape, with streets being renamed, buildings burning down and then resurfacing the next day unscathed. Most of the people have fled, but there is also a steady stream of new arrivals, curious about what is going on in Bellona, evading the draft, or visiting the town for reasons they themselves may not understand.
The protagonist possibly falls into the latter category. He arrives in Bellona not remembering his name, having lost most of his memory, and is given the name “the Child”. He looks much younger than his age, he is an indigenous half-breed whose race seems ambiguous, and he only ever wears one shoe, leaving the other foot bare. (This is also a recurring motif in some of Delany’s other works, such as in nova.) The boy finds a notebook and decides to write – poetry, memoirs, or something else? He also gets involved with a street gang, the Scorpions (with a lowercase s), who are known for wearing holographic projection necklaces that allow them to create large, shimmering images of various creatures.
The novel concerns the aimless adventures of the boy as he tries to make his way in Bellona, a town where money has lost its value, where television and radio no longer work, and where strange lights appear in the sky. He comes into contact with a wide variety of characters, from a former middle-class family trying to maintain their former life even when it requires considerable self-deception, to a black man accused of rape who becomes an icon of the community and eventually his own planet, to the self-appointed gatekeeper of Bellona, a white queer man and ex-Nazi who tries to have sex with newcomers.
Kid eventually ends up in a romantic and sexual triad with a woman who runs a school and a teenager. People assume that Kid is a teenager himself, but instead of 17, he is actually 27, which leads to several awkward scenes – not just sexually, but in other ways as well. For example, another poet accuses him of being popular because his readers think he is some kind of prodigy, rather than because of the quality of his work. (We never see Kid’s poems, although we do see some of his thought processes.) This leads to some of the most fascinating sections, such as the discussion with this poet and its aftermath; but some of the sections of Dhalgren The most frustrating things I found are also related to this aspect of the text. It is painfully obvious that the age difference between the partners is too great; the characters think about it too. And yet the narrative still assumes this and dwells on it endlessly. Here is a grown man and a grown woman – who runs a school! – having a lot of sex with a teenager. There is a much of sex, even though it’s written almost in a way that doesn’t turn us on – that applies to all the sex in the book, not just the scenes with Kid’s Triad. I thought maybe it was just me as an asexual person (who is otherwise not sex-averse), but people in our book club seemed to agree. Still, that means the reader has to sit through many pages of turn-off sex in a configuration that might be a turn-off in itself, to say the least. The narrative keeps coming back to it. And maybe that’s the goal, but I’m not sure why.
I try to avoid spoilers, but this is more the opposite of a spoiler: something the book does not do, so I’ll put it here. At some point I came up with a theory that one of the revelations would be that Kid is really a teenager, he just can’t remember his own age. However, this has not been confirmed. Kid’s unstable and uncertain perceptions are reinforced over the course of the Dhalgrenbut not in this particular way.
A major theme of the novel is mental illness. Kid is mentally ill and has been in psychiatric hospitals before. He is never sure whether the bizarre phenomena he experiences in Bellona are a product of his own mind, and he repeatedly asks other people if they see and experience the same thing – to which they generally answer in the affirmative: if Bellona exists, it is strange for everyone.
Bellona also has no government and anyone can do whatever they want – naturally this leads to clashes between people about what should be done. The Scorpions go on “runs” where they… yell at people and scare them. Their weapon of choice is the “orchid” (the reference to genitals is intentional, I think), a set of blades that you can strap to your wrist and bend over your fingers. The Scorpions avoid firearms, but the white supremacists holed up in a department store have guns and no qualms about using them. The whole atmosphere has a lot to do with unfettered American libertarianism – my edition includes a recommendation from a libertarian forum, and that seems to hit the mark. Another aspect of social organization that I keep thinking about is mentioned in this review by Kara, who described Bellona as a post-scarcity society, and it is! Although it seems as if the people of Bellona have nothing and live in crushing poverty as scavengers, in reality they need something, then it turns out: Even grocery stores that were previously looted refill their stocks as if by magic.
Dhalgren has a very strong atmosphere and expresses the enforced inactivity, the aimlessness very well. But that is precisely what makes the text difficult to read. It is 800 pages of people hanging around, interrupted by occasional moments of extremely intense experiences, such as having to pull a body out of an elevator shaft. In a way, it is like a soldier, in the sense of “endless boredom punctuated by moments of terror,” as the old saying goes. A soldier of what? And who is the soldier here – the boy or maybe us? Reading this novel definitely requires discipline from the reader. I probably would have given up if I hadn’t been looking forward to our book club discussion – although there are so many gems to be discovered in the text.
Many small details fit together in Dhalgren. Just a handful of examples that don’t give anything away: I kept waiting for the Labry Apartments, the middle-class family’s apartment, to be called The Labrys, and it happened! At one point, the author himself seems to appear in the book, at least in a reflected form. The beginning and end also fit together well. Oddly, different editions of the text also have minor changes, such as different street names – which further illustrates the nebulous, dreamlike spatial organization of Bellona. But some secrets are never revealed, including one that I hoped to find out until the very last page. Maybe I missed something? Even a cursory revisit of earlier sections has proven rewarding. Possibly even more rewarding than the first reading, because being able to make these connections was the most fun I had. I had to get through 800 pages to get there – I think that would Dhalgren a prime example of ergodic literature, and now that I’m looking for it, I see that Hal Duncan made a similar argument. It also reminds of knowledge games like Outer Wilderness where you put the narrative together – or not.
Is it worth the effort? While I generally enjoy engaging with narratives in this way, in the case of Dhalgren I am not sure. I definitely prefer Delany’s other works; when I first read them nova in my early twenties, I felt that it did cyberpunk better and earlier than some of the canonical genre greats. Delany’s short stories have a dazzling intensity that only comes to the surface for moments Dhalgren –although these are memorable moments.
Next time we’ll look at a space opera novel with nonbinary aliens, which is much shorter, but only the first book in a longer series – in the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts on Dhalgrenand what was the longest SFF novel you ever read? I’m not sure Dhalgren is mine, but in terms of length it definitely has to be in the top five…
