On Reading Dhalgren, Part One

Possibly in a moment of insanity, my reading group chose to do Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren this year. This is one of those touchstones in one’s reading life that challenges, daunts, requires. I possess a first edition…I think. A Bantam paperback original, a Frederik Pohl Selection from 1975. 879 pages.

I’m currently reading it for the second time. Like other novels of such storied complexity, it’s an achievement to get through once. Other such novels include James Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravitys Rainbow. I might throw in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions and possibly Don DeLillo’s Underworld. It’s not just that they’re long—I’ve read a number of James Michener bricks and none of them posed the same sort of challenge, as well as other famously long novels, like Forever Amber and Gone With The Wind and From Here To Eternity—but that they are dense. Meaning that there are layers of subtext, metafictional excursions, discursive passages that actively demand more from the reader in order to experience the full substance of what is on offer. One cannot just skim, one has to do a kind of archaeology.

The problem with such density, while it can be rewarding, is that it defies easy encapsulation. Why should you read Ulysses? Hard if not impossible to say. Why should you go to the Grand Canyon (rather than be satisfied with a post card)? A description of plot rarely gives an indication of what reading the book provides.

But then, you have to do some kind of summarizing to yourself at the end in order to assess in any concrete way. And the whole point of such works is that they actively resist the attempt.

I read Dhalgren when I was about 27 (the same age as the protagonist claims to be) and I can honestly say that I understood very little of it in any codifiable way. I was having an experience with the reading. I was into it and going along and having reactions. Usually, all that compiles into an arguably useful descriptive summation at the end. But not in this case. I was mentally taxed throughout and a bit exhausted at the end. I’m glad I read it, but I couldn’t tell you why.

Time for a revisit.

I have the Wesleyen Press edition this time. A little easier on the aging eyes. I sat down with it yesterday and started. I’m 70 pages in and…

I intend to pause from time to time and write something about it. It may add up to something useful, We’ll see.

A curious thing I have noticed right off is that my experience of time within the text is different now. I remember everything taking longer to get to that first time. A function of youth? Inexperience? It’s just that I seem to recall more space between Kid’s crossing the bridge into Bellona and his sexual encounter with Tak. Other details seem closer together. Or maybe I’m reading it more efficiently.

The opening scene is purely mythic hallucination. Kid is an Orpheus figure, being directed to go into a cave to find something (the chain with the mirrors, prisms, and lenses) which he had no idea he was looking for. There is that odd disconnect in which, once he finds it, he seems to know exactly what to do with it. Which is? He wraps it around himself, an action that requires him to strip into order to accomplish. He seems utterly unreflective about it. He just does it. This after he makes love to a woman who turns out to be a dryad. No names are exchanged (is she Daphne? Does that make him Apollo, since she transforms shortly after their liaison?) and Kid is frightened off by her change. He staggers onto a highway and a truck stops to take him on.

There are other references from mythology at hand. Kid has only one sandal. Jason? Is he then on his way to Bellona (Iolcus?) to reclaim his throne? (Delany has played with this image in other works.) But Jason’s father, the king, was murdered by his brother. Kid’s parents (as far as he knows) are still alive. The aphasia Kid suffers (not being able to remember his name) lends him a chameleonic utility for Delany to play with. He could be anyone.

There is a shift in the language from those first pages. There is an almost forced elegance to the way Delany writes that beginning scene, a kind of high art approach, which, while it never disappears in the next pages, becomes more embedded in the descriptions as Kid reaches the bridge and crosses over to the city. The dreamlike quality of the opening scene gives way to a harsher substance as Kid encounters other people and then finds himself in the labyrinth of Bellona.

And a labyrinth is how Kid experiences it. There are a number of instances in which Kid is baffled by the topography of the city. It has been suggested that Kid is severely dyslexic, so much so that he experiences it geographically. Perhaps. But he has navigated the world (by his own admission) and found his way here by himself. (He has been isolated from other people long enough that he hasn’t had to give his name to anyone and therefore has forgotten it through disuse.) His navigation skills desert him only in this, his first night in Bellona.

By page 70, where left off last night, the prose have settled down to a more utilitarian deployment (though still elegant, the descriptions rich and very centered in Kid’s P.O.V.) and we have met a number of characters who will play a role in Kid’s sojourn in this ruined city.

As to Bellona itself…like most things in Delany’s work, Bellona is several things all at once. A calamity happened here. No one thus far has described it, but it has cut Bellona off from the rest of the country. It is isolated, having achieved the curious status of “ancient ruin” even while still contemporary with the culture that built it. For the time being, may I suggest that it resembles nothing so much as Troy. It resides by a river which does not always seem to be there (the Meander?)

The conditional is the only useful way to approach Dhalgren, the constant question of what something might be. In this sense it most resembles Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, where everything has multiple instantiations and even the people are not always what they are. But we really should not fall into a habit of comparing it to other contemporary texts. If memory serves, Dhalgren is a unique experience.