The final section of Dhalgren is also the most difficult to parse. Not because the action is hard to follow, but because of its presentation. Delany has interleaved marginal notes alongside the main narrative, some of these notes quite lengthy, and at times presenting a parallel narrative that highlights or comments upon the main text. We are given to understand this as direct transcription from Kid’s notebook. By now we have come to accept, though not explicitly told, that the notebook had been his all along. Which offers the suggestion that this is not the first time Kid has been in Bellona. The Ourobouros ending/beginning underlines this idea, because we are here taken back to where we began.
Which makes Bellona ultimately a labyrinth, perhaps the Labyrinth, populated by fabulous monsters who may take turns at center stage with each revolution of the narrative. We can play a game guessing which is what—minotaur, Grendel, the dragon?—but in the end it hardly matters. The cycle is the thing, wherein we may catch the substance of the theme.
Delany salts the text with repeated motifs, one of which is the scratch running up a woman’s calf. Several women exhibit such a scratch, starting (?) with the dryad at the beginning. But I think the more entrenched image is the idea of the Autumnal City. An odd descriptor.
Autumn is the one label of a season that does not have the same descent as the other seasons. There is no proto-Indo-European word for it, but rather a variety of other terms with other roots. The Latin derivation is perhaps related to an Etruscan word by way of the god Vertumnus, an Etruscan deity whose statue in Rome was near the booksellers’ quarter. Vertumnus personified change; apparently he could take on any form he wished. Ovid wrote of his love affair with Pomona, a nymph whose sacred grove was on the road from Rome to Ostia. She was also connected to Picus, an early Latin king, who was also caught up in transformations.
Playing the name game can lead down endless rabbit holes, but we are interested here in the choice of the word Autumn as a description of Bellona. Autumn signifies change, and certainly Bellona is caught up in the kind of change that might suggest final days, heading for a winter.
As this final section begins, Kid has pretty much established his dominance over the Scorpions, albeit an ambivalent one. He continues to seem awkward and unwilling to be responsible for them. Yet he will not divest. And Lanya, who had previously stated her dislike of them, continues to be his paramour. Her relationship to Kid—it’s difficult to call it devotion; she’s taking as much as giving, it is clear she has expectations, and she’s indulging them—is one of the most intense in modern fiction. It is very difficult to see what it is about Kid that keeps her coming back. Until we look at all the other alternatives, none of who present as complete a personality as Kid—with the possible exception of George or Dragon Lady. The others are not to be considered for reasons Lanya makes clear throughout—not her “type.” And George, by way of a fascinating conversation early on, makes it clear he understands—and accepts—that they just wouldn’t work. Despite Kid’s fragmentation, he seems to be the most fully realized personality in Bellona. As fully realized and self-possessed as Lanya, who at times comes across as the more significant of the two. Without Lanya, Kid would have nothing against which to shape himself.
As he leaves Bellona in the very end, his hard-won linguistic skills seem to collapse. He speaks in fragments, gibberish sometimes, vocabulary shattering and dissipating. At the last, he re-accepts the cyclic inevitability of the labyrinth by repeating the beginning.
At this point we have to come to terms with the simple fact that Dhalgren does not resolve. Delany has done this before, most notably in The Einstein Intersection, which is likewise immersed in myth and mythic cycles. Like other hyper-immersive narratives, the resolution, such as there is, is left up to the reader. After several hundred pages of preparation, the tools are left in our hands to finish the work to suit our own tastes. Dhalgren is not a novel to be read for any kind of pay-off, but for the experience of the reading.
What remains is ephemera. Dhalgren began life as a proposed series, in the wake of Nova, of five volumes, with the overall title Mirror, Prism, Lens, for Avon Books. A far future tale of a solar system-wide revolution. The project eventually morphed into Dhalgren, but the work done informed several forthcoming projects over the years (including, apparently, the pornographic novel Hogg). The far-future setting seems absent, but it’s hard to tell with the time-shifting games and the spatial dislocations strewn throughout the novel. It is tempting to see autobiographical aspects, but I would dissuade anyone from going there. Insofar as most writers (especially those of any worth) mine their own histories and emotions for what they produce, the results are always unreliable as biography and biography is beside the point anyway. But the intensity of the interactions of the characters in Dhalgren, the visceral lability of the encounters strike us as well-realized aspects of lived experience.
The oft-shot arrow of mainstream criticism that SF lacks depth of character is here severely taken to task. The result is interesting. Because of the tenuous deployment of science fictional elements through most of the novel, one might argue that this is really a mainstream literary work with some minor glosses that suggest, and only suggest, that it is related to SF. On the other hand, another reading yields the example that these people, in this setting, could not be revealed in these ways in any other but an SF setting. That, in fact, we would not perceive or learn what we do about them in a purely literary novel. The extremes of behavior are the least of those revelations. Motive, inspiration, the overturning of mimetic constraints, the reactions to the world as encountered…and the inverted democratization of all relational hierarchies, which allow people a range of expression they simply would not have “outside” the SF project. Delany pushed all these boundaries to their limits and beyond (in much the same way Joyce pushed the limits of symbolic narrative to, if not past, the breaking point) in order to (perhaps) widen the field for the deployment of already expanded possibilities of narrative choice.
He also, in a very deep and concrete way, tied science fiction to the function of myth is ways previously unrealized.
(I may return to this from time to time with further ruminations. For now, the review is concluded.)
2 Responses
The last chapter is named “Anathemata; A Plague Journal”. According to Google, 1) Anathemata means things set apart or special things, evolving to a more religious meaning of consecrated items or things devoted to God, to the modern meaning of abomination, something so bad that it should be destroyed. 2) “Anathemata” is also an epic poem by David Jones that seems to share elements with “Dhalgren”, like fragmented text and a circular structure. The Plague Journal would seem to refer to the discussion in the book of mental illness being seen as a possible contagion, a literal plague, something to be hidden, set apart, giving the meaning of “Dhalgren” as a journal written by someone suffering from mental illness, and all SF aspects merely delusions and hallucinations.
“Dhalgren” is also a sort of Grail Quest, with the Grail being searching for Kid’s name/identity. It’s also, as pointed out during Kid’s interview with the ever-mysterious Calkin, a search for a “Good Man”, both as a being and a description. Dhalgren was written during what was perhaps the nadir of belief in the traditional hero, coinciding with the height of the Vietnam war and the loss of American optimism. Kids namechecked in the book: Billy the Kid, an outright outlaw. Captain Kidd, started out as an authorized privateer and later became an outlaw; denounced, rightly or wrongly depending on who you ask, as a pirate, though if he was one he didn’t seem to be a particularly competent one, as pirates measure things. And most interestingly, the Cisco Kid, a fictional character who started out as an outlaw with no first name in a short story by O. Henry, and then became a hero in numerous movies, radio shows, comic books, and a TV series.
The book ends in a loop to the beginning, both in the last and first sentences, as well in the structure of someone going into Bellona meeting a group leaving, and a brass orchid being passed along. It has a feel of a ritual, with the same questioning of where have you come from, where are you going, what it’s like outside, and inside, using much of the same language. The group of women leaving that Kid meets at the beginning, significantly contains a pregnant young black woman, and they complain of their home being destroyed, with details that match the women’s home that got destroyed at the apparent “end” of the book. One of them asks if they should tell Kid about June and the scorpions, and another says he will find out about them himself. When Kid leaves, his group meets a young Asian looking woman going in (the woman Kid meets before entering Bellona, the one who turns into a tree, is Asian looking), and one of the group asks if they should tell her about Calkins and the Father. However, there’s no indication in the text that any of the scorpions other than Kid met Calkins or the Father, or that Kid told the scorpions about them. Perhaps this is a hint what the next turn of the cycle will be about?
Delaney ruthlessly smashes any shred of textual reliability in the last chapter. Kid says several times in the notes that he’s condensed and edited conversations, left out boring parts where nothing much happened, and left out other parts where too much happened at once or where after the event happened he didn’t see any need to write it down. There’s one part, just after Kid wrestled the gun away (an echo of the department store run), where the marginalia recounts that event, but switches the attribution of a couple of sentences. Which do we take for the true telling? The most significant takes place about 2/3 of the way through the chapter, page 756 in the Vintage edition I think, where the notes describe waking up in a dark loft, hearing cars outside, and going outside into a clear day with blue sky and fluffy clouds, and seeing normal people walking around. This passage grows increasingly confusing, with someone gesturing him to look at a rainbow, then the narrator seeing a car pull up to a young man, then the passage dissolves into incoherent horror. Does this occur outside of Bellona? Is this a description of what occurred just before The Event in Bellona? Or is this a memory of the narrator seeing some horrific event that sent him into psychosis, causing him to hallucinate the events described in “Dhalgren”?