Having reached 500 pages, I would like to make the case for Delany’s main subject.
In this middle section of the novel, we see Kid undergoing changes that, in some cases, are disturbing. Initially, he was depicted as a kind of basic good guy, a mensch, who was struggling with a significant question of identity. He responded to situations, reacted, attempted to find a way to fit into a thoroughly discordant environment. He intentionally came to Bellona, it was a goal (if not the goal) and since arriving he has bounced from one situation to another trying to locate himself within a context which, while appearing to constantly shift and mutate, is actually quite stable in its dishabille. Recognizing that stability gives a clue as to the nature of the narrative and the apparent transformations Kid undergoes.
What is more likely is that aspects of Kid’s personality—his nature, if you will—emerge as he becomes familiar with this new landscape. He seeks to fit in. He takes a job for an hourly wage which he doesn’t need (when he’s cheated of it he becomes insistent on payment, even though he still knows the money is useless in Bellona, although its allure, its “tradition” seems entrenched in the values of people he encounters). He attends a dinner party wherein he cannot find a comfortable way to interact. Later he has to deal with the fact that one of the people at that dinner has to be forcefully disarmed before she shoots him. His relationship with Lanya is fundamentally conservative until he is confronted with his first serious episode of missing time, and after that becomes more and more experimental. Kid attempts to fit in as if the rules of the world he left behind still apply.
After the advent of the second moon and the death of June’s brother, Kid’s disconnection from these more or less traditional strategies increases. Lanya has expressed her disapproval of him running with the Scorpions, yet when she reconnects with him after his lost five days, that’s what he has been doing. He has even acquired a projector, used to create the holographic shells the Scorpions wear. His lacks a battery, but he’s hung it around his neck, over the chain of mirrors, prisms, and lenses he has yet to remove since he found it in the grove outside Bellona. (A projector like the one the Scorpions use would of course depend on a collection of mirrors, prisms, and lenses. In this sense, Kid’s chain binds him into himself, the disconnected elements seeming to—at least symbolically—turn his projections inward. Which may contribute to his missing time. At one point, a link in the chain breaks, the chain dangles, and after that more of the problematic aspects of his personality seem to escape (even after he repairs the chain, which he does badly, and Lanya has to redo the repair for him). It is after that incident that some of his sexual aggression seems to emerge more concretely.
The run through the department store, during which he does things which contribute to his growing reputation, is a transition point for Kid. It lies at the center of both his lost time and the emergence of a more assertive personality. It is during this raid the broken link occurs. Arriving back within the precincts he originally inhabited—the park, the bar, Reverend Amy’s church—the poet Ernest Newboy shows up with the galleys of the book of poems Roger Calkins is publishing. Entitled simply Brass Orchids, with no author (he still has no formal name and it strikes him as absurd to put “by The Kid” on the cover), Kid goes through them in the basement of the church while Newboy waits. Newboy tells him he is going to be leaving Bellona soon.
Several things overlap in this section, including Kid’s return to the bridge, the far end of which is lost in haze. Bellona seems isolated from the rest of the world.
Lanya finds him, tells him how long he has beeb absent, more or less gives him an ultimatum, then sleeps with him again. Kid then tries to get back to the bar and ends up with a young Scorpion named Denny in tow. Denny is enamored of Kid and they end up having sex. Through this section, the various conditions entangling Kid and Lanya and Denny and others seem to center on sex. Everything about it is, on the surface, consensual, but there is a violence to it that suggests choice is a tenuous condition. After Kid has formed a unit, albeit perhaps temporary, with Lanya and Denny, the central revealing image happens.
The perpetual cloud cover dissipates, long enough for the sunrise to be visible. But it is not a normal sunrise. The sun is enormous, easily ten times the size of “our” sun, filling the sky in orange-red awfulness. Like the two moons, this is an irrefutable proof that this is not the world we know. This is terrifying, awe-inspiring, world-shattering.
And yet, within a day or two, things seem to settle back into…not normal, but a kind of ordinary.
This is a clue as to the game Delany is playing. Like any novel of this size and complexity, it is not the only game, but it is central one. Delany has given us a classic science fictional post-catastrophe landscape. Usually, this will be the justification for the various heroic responses of the characters, who will bend all elements of the story to their quest to figure out what has happened and, most importantly for the science fiction endeavor, how to fix it. Either by escaping or by finding the thing that is preventing the world from returning to “normal.” Variations on this template inform a vast body of SF all the way back to its beginnings. The world is wrecked, the hero must restore some vital aspect that allows the resumption of reason. (Unlike fantasy, which usually takes this motif and then drives the narrative to the point where what went before once more pertains, science fiction treats such change as irrevocable and the “new” world must be dealt with on its own terms. But there is still a struggle to establish some kind of order, wherein the pursuits of people can proceed as they did before.) Unlike the standard SF narrative, what Delany has done here is to vacate the landscape of all those classic heroes and taken us through a journey made by people who simply do not respond that way. No one in this novel is trying to reassert what has been lost except in their private sphere. No one is searching for the mechanism of disaster in order to remove it and restore a normal world. No one is rescuing the landscape. Instead, they react, they recover, they resume what they had been doing, and accept the devastated landscape on its own terms. They are not heroes.
Dhalgren in this sense is a novel of inversions. Inversions of tropes, of character types, of expectations. It has been suggested that the title—Dhalgren—is an inversion of Grendel, the monster from Beowulf. That can be argued and Kid may well be the monster. But he’s forgotten who he is. If indeed he is Dhalgren/Grendel, then this is another inversion, and the monster is now living the devastation with no “hero” to confront and defeat. He has to make his own way.
Science fiction is (arguably) about the human reaction to changes wrought by and on the world as understood by science. Technological change, environment change, economic, political, social change as understood as process. How then do people live within these changes? In that sense, Dhalgren is very much a science fiction novel. The difference is, he has populated this landscape with people who are unequipped or uninterested in grappling with those changes the way we usually expect in such a novel.
Questions are being raised, certainly, but there is no mechanism at hand with which to answer them. They’re just people, and not the types of people who might yield a more straightforward SF narrative.
And then we come to a central speech handed out by Reverend Amy. Stayed tuned. Next time.
One Response
Lost Worlds / Lost Boys
My take is that it’s not that they’re Not Heroes, but that they are Lost Boys. I feel that it isn’t that *most* of the people aren’t heroic enough to try to try to restore the world, but that they’re simply not interested because they like it that way. Whatever change happened to Bellona is localized to Bellona, the rest of the world reportedly is unaffected. They can theoretically leave at any time – Ernest Newboy (a symbolic name if ever there was one) comes to Bellona to check out the scene, then leaves – but most choose to remain for whatever reason. Yes, some may be unable to leave because they can’t afford to/have no one or nowhere else to go to. The Richards remain, because they’ve invested in their apartment and lifestyle, and Mary doesn’t want to admit to having failed to her friends and family outside of Bellona. The Blacks in Jackson may choose to remain because they are able to live free from white governmental harassment & violence, if not free from individual white harassment & violence. Lanya says she’s bored in Bellona, that there is nothing equal to the interesting and fulfilling life she had before, but she still chooses to stay there. And most pointedly, to the point of lampshading by Delaney, Nightmare states he’s in Bellona because he WANTS to be. He finds life more thrilling than on the outside, and says when he’s had his fill he’ll go back and start an ordinary life owning a gym like he used to, and if he’s walking down the street and someone calls him Nightmare, he’ll just pretend not to hear. What happens in Bellona stays in Bellona.
Kid & the scorpions have some parallels to Peter Pan & the Lost Boys. While the Scorpions are sexually mature and dangerous, compared to Peter Pan’s group of innocent forever children, the Scorpions evade adult roles and responsibilities, content to live off what they loot, seeming to do little more than drugs and sex, and the occasional “run” to go out and find some things to smash. (Having a “little bit of ultraviolence”? While otherwise quite different, both “Dhalgren” and “A Clockwork Orange” both deal with questions of what is a good person, and what makes a person good). Kid and Peter Pan both experience memory and identify issues. But Kid is also a reflection of Captain Hook, leader of pirates. Kid becomes a gang leader, and significantly, has a hooked weapon that sometimes appears on his hand even when he can’t remember putting it on. The Pirates are merely adult versions of the Lost Boys, innocent play growing into real violence.
Bellona also has some parallels to Fairy Land, a realm set apart from the mortal world, difficult to find and enter, where time runs differently, and once mortals enter many find themselves enchanted and have no desire to leave. While descriptions differ among legends and cultures, a common one is that Fairy Land is overcast or underground with some kind of diffuse light, or that the sun looks different. In some stories Fairy Land has a shifting landscape and mortals can become lost in it.
Lost colony
One sub-genre of SF that isn’t about fixing things is the devolving lost colony, where the colony is cut off from the rest of humanity and can’t maintain their technology, and the colonists have to adjust to their new life. In “Darkover Landfall”, the origin story of the Darkover Series, the climatical action is the ship’s Captain blowing up the crashed colony ship so the colonists don’t come to depend on the ship’s computer for answers, and instead figure out on their own what works on Darkover.