Throughout Dhalgren Delany plays with resonances and echoes that sometimes slip past without conscious impact. One of the repeated devices is the insertion of an authorial voice from time to time, where in the midst of things there is a stopping to comment on—not the plot, at least not usually—the subtext. They can read like Kidd (and in the next hundred pages, he loses a d and becomes “the Kid” or just “Kid”) having an internal dialogue, but gradually we hear a different voice. And then, in the midst of one of the more energetically violent scenes, wherein Kid joins the pack of Scorpions in their raid of an abandoned department store, Kid glimpses someone in a mirror and gives a description that is clearly not Kid. Anyone who had met or knew Delany at that time would have recognized the description. The author comments on his work but here is actually seen by one of his characters.
Twenty or so pages later, Kid reflects on that glimpse.
Mirrors, prisms, lenses—all play a symbolic part in every aspect.
And that raid, what the Scorpions call A Run, opens up the landscape to new possible interpretations, once again bringing us to that question of how this is science fiction.
But lets us back up a bit.
From the start, Kid represents a classic archetype, one seen in literature practically in all ages. The nameless hero who comes to town (village, hamlet, city), disrupts, resolves, settles, defines the landscape, and is accepted as essential by all the other characters. Even as his presence is questioned, he is welcomed in. What initiations there are happen so quickly and acceptance achieved so effortlessly, without question, that we see these types more as a missing piece of a puzzle than as a stranger.
For instance, Kid’s relationship with Lanya. Lanya herself is a transient in Bellona, in the city for undisclosed reasons, for purposes we can surmise but never know. She’s waiting for something. She plays a harmonica from time to time (and plays it rather well, almost a virtuoso) and has been there long enough to have established herself, to have already found and discarded one (at least) relationship, to know most of the major players. She has even lived in Roger Calkin’s mansion for a time with the former lover. When she connects with Kid (Kidd) there is that cinematic inevitability which doubtless vexed many an adolescent male. One or two conversations and they’re lovers, as if an agreement had been reached even before they met. This is important—that it happens this way—as an establishing moment for Kid. He is That Character for whom such things just are. As counterpoint to his own lack of identity, it is more ritual than mimetic.
Which makes their subsequent relationship all the more remarkable because it is Lanya (first but by no means last) who violates the motif and begins to peel him open. She is the opposite of the passive erotic interest. She has her own interests and desires and a history to back them up and therefore eventually demands to be respected and seen. In order for that seeing to be legitimate, Kid has to see himself. He has to stop being an archetype (or stereotype) and be genuinely himself for Lanya to accept him and believe she is accepted as an equal.
(The conversation with George about rape reveals a complex, self-confident person who is, in many ways, more active in life than Kid is.)
Kid, for his part, keeps allowing others to define him. Never for long, sometimes very briefly, and partly because he doesn’t know who he is. Or at least doesn’t know how he is defined or will be defined. He’s bouncing off all the signifiers and markers and each time seems to discover another piece or shape of himself.
When he begins to seriously lose time it forces those around him to confront him.
The Scorpion run is interesting in that from Kid’s perspective the events leading up to it, the event itself, and his return all occur consciously in a day. He is then confronted by multiple persons that he had been gone for five days. He has no memory of the connective tissue between the significant actions of that “day” with each other. What did he do in between the things he vividly remembers. If we look at it cinematically, that missing time simply doesn’t matter. We see the important elements, none of the boring parts, the waiting or wandering around. Intriguingly, Kid sees none of those parts, either. Five days—four of which, by his sense memory, have disappeared—when everyone else has been doing things they apparently remember doing.
In this sense, he is that hero (or anti-hero) from the myths. He has no mundane existence outside those epic moments when he is the primary actor.
But this is a trick of his memory. Isn’t it? Go back to his entry into Bellona and the next few days, where his sense of orientation and space is awry. How long it takes to go from A to B doesn’t quite add up for him. But if we look at it the way fiction is often structured, that space is edited out because it is unimportant.
And those important parts?
One of the most dramatic scenes in the novel is the death of June’s brother, who falls down an elevator shaft while moving a carpet with his sister. Every element of this scene is precise, even the foreshadowing, and Kid’s immediate response to it is heroic. He doesn’t feel that way, but there is no hesitating. He enlists the aid of some squatters, climb down to the mangled body, directs its recovery. The emotional matrix in which this happens is some of the best writing in the book. It is a tragedy, heartfelt and honestly observed.
What then subsequently happens is surreal. The body is placed (for the time being) in the old apartment, the one from which the Richards are moving, until something else can be arranged. And they forget about it. It remains there, rotting. The squatters end up moving out because of the smell.
That which is not important to the main story is unobserved and in this case there is nothing done “off camera” as it were.
The fractured structure Kid experiences is a constant throughout the novel. And one of the most interesting breaks is revealed in the notebook in which Kid is writing his poetry.
We’ll look at that next time.
One Response
Who’s Your Hero?
I had wondered where exactly Delany was going with George, since the hulking black man raping a sweet innocent white girl is such an old racist meme. I thought it likely that it would end up that if the sex had actually occurred it had been consensual, with the claim of rape being used as an excuse since good girls weren’t allowed to want sex, or because the sex was regretted afterwards. But it turned out to be another old trope, the man claiming the woman was actually asking for it, that he could somehow tell when a woman really wanted rough sex. And if he was wrong, oh well, too bad, it happens sometimes that way.
(Another practical aside, there’s someone running around taking bunches of pictures, and a working photolab? And a working print shop with someone who knows how to run the equipment to make all those color posters???)
But more troubling is that George has become a folk hero to the inhabitants of Bellona. Someone who takes what he wants, to take what has historically been forbidden to nonwhite men, who is able to violate with impunity white womanhood, which has been used as an excuse to attack/lynch/execute black men. George has a fan club, collectable posters, and is even mythologized as the 2nd moon. This is nothing new, of course. Transgressors have often become heroes, at least to those who feel a connection with the transgressor. There’s OJ Simpson, who (most likely) got away with murder. There are the people who say they like Trump “because he gets away with things”. In a St. Louis connection there’s the murder that became the basis for “Stagger Lee” in all its variants.
By the 70’s the classic Western with the Code of the Old West / Black Hats vs White Hats had given way to the morally ambiguous Spaghetti Western, influenced by the samurai epics with their non-Western code of honor. The 70s also saw the creation of the Blaxploitation genre, centering Black people as the heroes of their own stories, fighting against a corrupt system, though those Black heroes were often criminals themselves, pimps and drug dealers. These probably informed “Dhalgren”, at least in some small part.
After reading ‘The Stars Are Legion’ by Kameron Hurley for book club back in 2021 I read an early book of hers, ‘God’s War: Bel Dame Apocrypha Volume 1’, and a collection of essays. She states that growing up she loved the 80s action movies, and fantasized being an action hero wandering through a post-apocalyptic landscape. So when she started writing she created protagonists that were female equivalent of those action heroes, hard fighting, hard drinking, tough talking, living in a world of violence where you survived by being a bigger badass than everyone else. It was only later that she realized, as a non-athletic woman dependent on a medication with a short shelf life, that she actually wouldn’t last too long in a post-apocalyptic world, and that those action heroes were actually pretty awful people.
Action movies seemed to have mostly moved beyond the 80s style action hero…into the comic book superhero movie, with even larger than life superheroes fighting even larger than life villains, with even less of a connection to society.
(My 80’s action heroes were Indian Jones and MacGyver)