“Dasein possesses a logos, not to be understood in the usual way as reason or language, but as an ability to collect and remeber the manifestations of Being, which constitute the World…Dasein is thus a collecting-point where beings come out of conealment and make themselves present. These two notions, of coming out of concealment and being present are key to Heidegger’s metaphyics.” The History of Philosophy, A.C. Grayling
“We are looking for the answer to the question of the meaning of being in general, and above all the possibility of radically developing this basic question of all ontology. But freeing the horizon in which something like being in general becomes intelligible amounts to clarifying the possibility of the understanding of being in general, an understanding which itself belongs to the constitution of that being which we call Da-sein…One thing has become unmistakable. Our existential analytic of the Da-sein up to now cannot lay claim to primordiality. Its fore-having never included more than the inauthentic being of Da-sein as fragmentary…Thus the task arises of placing Da-sein as a whole in our fore-having…that means that we must first unpack the question of this being’s potentiality-for-being-a-whole. As long as Da-sein is, something is always still outstanding.” Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
With the advent of Reverend Amy’s sermon (pg 469, Wesleyan edition) we come face to page with the philosophical endeavor at the core of Dhalgren. Because, if science fiction is at base a philosophical exercise, then along with the other concerns Delany explores, there must be one of philosophy. If, at it base, philosophy is the intellectual mediation between our Self and the universe, then the disconnects, dissonances, and distances encountered in SF all center on a search for how to be against an ever-shifting reality.
It should be no surprise, then, to find Heidegger, if not the center of the novel’s epistemology, as a fulcrum to help explain what universe and which beings are thrown together. “Time,” Reverend Amy Taylor exclaims, “is the hero! Time is the villain! Where is this city? Struck out of time! Where is it builded? On the brink of truths and lies.”
Kid’s entire quest, consciously or otherwise, is to define himself. Thus the roles he slips in and out of. And part of his problem, his difficulty in this task, is that there is no other Being against which to struggle. Lanya, primarily among many others, is a gauge, a kind of passive Virgil to check him on his journey. He keeps returning to her throughout. It is, in its peculiarity, a remarkably stable relationship. As depicted, it is a primal kind of connection. Kid at least seems to be closer to himself when they’re together, either talking or copulating (but then, after all, isn’t sex an aspect of conversation?), but when he is apart from her he experiences the wildest of personality changes. He is centered within her acceptance.
But all the characters around Kid aid in his self-assessment. Their regard, their defining of him, all go toward allowing him to emerge as…
I said before that this is a novel of inversions. Science fiction offers numerous stories of isolated communities. Classics such as Earth Abides and Alas, Babylon and A Canticle For Liebowitz. One thing connects them all thematically, which is that the community has survived a catastrophe that has enveloped the world. The collapse is Out There, external. Here, though, this is reversed. The world at large seems to be fine. The collapse has engulfed Bellona.
(Delany’s exegesis here is used later, in his very next novel, in fact, Trouble On Triton, in which we see enclaves built around specific group identities, set amidst a post-scarcity civilization. Some of the interpersonal dynamics are reflected, even reified, from Dhalgren. And Bellona is specifically referenced, a city on Mars.)
As an inverted setting, Bellona functions as a kind of Plato’s cave, the outside world reflected in distorted ways in the customs, habits, and residual assumptions about how a community should work. After the initial calamity, of which we remain vague, there seems to be a remarkably low incidence of violence. People find their balance, roughly sometimes, but even among the Scorpions, violence is more ritual than real, and death a wound to the group. (Perhaps this is an inversion as well?) If we read the clues in the traditional way of science fiction, we have a city that has been ripped out of its “natural” setting, adrift. There is no federal assistance, no FEMA, no national guard. It is in a very real sense dislocated. Its connection to the outside apparently remains in place—people come and go—but the exact route is unclear, and we have no idea what kind of continuity exists. The astronaut Kamp, who has been to the moon, is the rationalist trying to make sense of the physical reality. At one point he is in the park setting up a telescope in the hope that a break in the cloud cover will allow him to locate stars and planets to see where Bellona might be in relation to the universe. This is a tacit admission that whatever happened in Bellona, there is a nearly cosmological aspect.
But at the heart is Kid, who is trying to determine his Being. He is the monster in search of the hero (another inversion?), Enkidu cut off from his Gilgamesh. The facsimiles he adopts serve temporarily, but do not in the end constitute being-as-a-whole.
Time is severed. Being is unresolved. It appears that his best hope of coming to terms with himself would be to return to some place where people knew him from before. But the new appreciations he has developed, the new connections (Lanya, Denny, Tak, the Scorpions) would be subsumed in recovered memory, and that would just be another loss. Combining the two worlds might be ideal, but since his continual Here is isolated from his historic When, that reconciliation can only result in a further distortion he might be unable to sustain…or survive.
2 Responses
The symbol that resonates most with me is Lanya’s song created from her layering multiple loops of music, a reversal from a prism separating a beam of light into its component colors. Perhaps Kid has been fractured into different components? When Kid loses time, or when someone claims Kid has spent longer somewhere than he remembers, has he been playing a different part in another loop, or has someone else been playing his part for a while? There are multiple events that reoccur in a similar manner, like Kid wrestling a gun away from someone. There is the threesome Kid sees before he and George rescue the kids from the fire, the blind-mute, the blond Mexican, and red-haired Black woman, perhaps another reoccurrence of himself, Denny, and Lanya in a different cycle?
Roger Calkins is another character who seems quite happy with the way things are, being the local bigwig, publishing the paper as he sees fit, hosting parties, etc. I would say he’s the unelected de facto mayor of Bellona, except that he seems to be only interested in the fun parts, not doing any of the real work of being a mayor. Or at least nothing that appears “on screen”, no talk of surveying the inhabitants for anyone with medical training to set up a clinic, no scouring stores to secure and ration medical supplies and food, no creation of a communal kitchen, no getting people with mechanical or engineering training to check out the infrastructure. We have a bunch of isolated communities doing their own things
Roger Calkins and Tak Loufer seem to be a set of poles in Bellona. Roger is the epitome of upper-class professional respectability, of the status quo, of aspirational traditional American life, the sort that would appear in a Mid-Century magazine. Tak is the countercultural leather wearing transgressive who also acts as a gatekeeper to Bellona, welcoming newcomers, and providing them with a “baptism” of sex to their new life in Bellona. He also perhaps is the only person who knows the way to that mysterious warehouse chock full of things like the optical chains, projectors, red eye caps, and the control device for Lanya’s dress, some of which are far beyond 1970s tech. A different book might have Tak (and perhaps Calkin as a co-conspirator or opponent) be from the future or an alternate reality or an alien in disguise, running some sort of experiment on Bellona and its inhabitants. The optical chains have tags saying “Made in [Country]” in various languages, one of which Delaney directly calls out as being bad Portuguese, which according to Google Translate it is, in both Portuguese and Brazilian forms. Another lampshade is Kid thinking the “eye caps” might be the cause of the red eyes characters occasionally have, but then wondering why he never sees anyone putting them in or taking them out, and where they store them.
I would not say there’s little violence in Bellona, it’s just that the majority of violence occurs “off screen”, like the riots after the “Event” that left a lot of damage, and the mysterious damage that occurred at Roger Calkin’s house after Lanya’s stay there, and the shooting from the tower. There is a lot of implicit violence, however, simply in the wearing of the brass orchids, and a lot of simmering tension that’s ready to flare into violence with the right trigger.