A hundred or so pages on we begin to see how Dhalgren is science fiction as opposed to a form of magic realism (sans magic). The extraordinary advent of two moons in the briefly cleared sky above Bellona. And not just two moons, but the puzzle of how one can be near full and the other a crescent. Delany says nothing about their relative size other than the fact that both are obviously globes. (This is important because it shatters the easy surmise that this is somehow Mars—Phobos and Deimos would not be so large, nor would their relative positions lend explanation to the difference in phases. Of course, the idea that this might be Mars has already been precluded by no one, ever, observing that gravity is different in Bellona than on Earth.)
What this does is signal that on crossing the bridge into Bellona, Kidd left “our” world—the world he catalogued in the first page by the list of all the things he knows that we know—and entered a world which has become isolated and disconnected. Kidd’s inconsistency in remembering where things are can be seen as a cognitive problem or as an aspect of a shifting landscape.
But a more telling and dramatically interesting sign is the increasing estrangement of people within Bellona from what might be termed Ordinary Life. As Kidd moves from group to group, place to place, the structure of life appears to be adhering to what he has always known—the world outside. People are trying to maintain. But some of their efforts become strained and even absurd. When he meets the Richards family, being offered a job by them to help clean out an apartment on a higher floor than the one they have been living so they can move into it, he comes face to face with a desperate attempt on their part to maintain the kind of life they had before—
Well, before whatever calamity befell Bellona. The Richards are offered up as a template of a white middle class family with reliable survival skills and coping mechanisms for a world they no longer inhabit.
Right around page 75 and for a few pages after that (in this, the Wesleyan edition) Kidd is making a sojourn from the park to a tonier part of town in search of the editor/publisher of the Belloina Times, Roger Calkins. The landscape through which he passes shows all the signs of massive trauma. He cannot determine what caused it, only sees the improbable rupture of streets and buildings. Streets are overturned, debris is scattered over shattered pavement. Considering the idea that some terrible physical anomaly severed Bellona from its original landscape, much of the damage makes sense. Kidd, however, sees and registers the damage but cannot explain it.
It is here, in the midst of evidence for the calamity that he begins to write in the notebook he found, with a pen he salvaged. Seeing torn up streets and ruin, he writes: it is our despair at the textural inadequacies of language that drives us to heighten the structural ones toward
And stops, blocked by the very inadequacies he is setting out to describe.
The social fabric is as broken as the physical, but the attempt by many of the people Kidd meets to maintain a semblance of normality obscures just how broken. Upon meeting the Richards he experiences the chasm. There is something unhealthy in their family unit and as time passes it becomes more apparent. They were likely broken before the calamity, but we infer that in a “normal” setting they might have torn themselves apart in an ugly divorce, but now they hold tightly to clearly unworkable forms.
The daughter, June, becomes a focus for Kidd’s growing perception of the damage. There is a man in Bellona, George Harrison, a physically imposing black man who is “famous” for a rape of a young white girl. There are photographs, there were stories published in the Times. There is no mechanism in place to hold him accountable. Rather he has become a local legend. Not a hero, no, Delany is careful not to inaccurately position George as anyone “heroic,” but someone who has done something shocking and is now famous for it. June is the girl. She is now obsessed with George Harrison. She approaches Kidd to act as some kind of bridge for her. She wants a poster of Harrison that is popular in some quarters—a poster distributed by a local minister. But she is confused about the entire thing.
In one of the more uncomfortable passages of the novel, there is a conversation between Kidd’s lover, Lanya, and George about what he did. There is no approval within the dialogue, just analysis, and George is, at best, a sociopath. But in his willingness to discuss it—and Lanya’s open interest and, in fact, fearlessness in approaching him about it—we continue to see the widening gap between our world and Bellona.
By this stage it is evident that Delany’s intent—one of them, anyway—is to distort the social landscape and realign what passes as social contracts within that distortion to show us the personal effects of living in what can be considered a science fictional ground state. Kidd’s response as he tries to adapt—one of his responses—is to write. It seems to come out as poetry, but he is writing this down in a notebook that already contains a text, written by someone who may or may not be William Dhalgren, clearly addressing—in prose—reactions to whatever happened to Bellona.
A palimpsest of sorts (though not exactly) which is logical given Delany’s critical work about SF that suggests all science fiction, in part at least, indulges a conscious act of overwriting on a given template to achieve its effective distortions.
We’re about a quarter of the way in now. Delany is also indulging a pace of cognitive displacement that, for most SF works, is glacially slow and deeply thorough. But instead of a deep insertion of landscape, as in most science fiction, he is doing this on the psyche and with the social fabric. This is very much about the changes wrought through landscape on the human experience, by means of significant changes in the given world, changes which we recognize as “natural” and presumably amenable to scientific examination and explication.
Onward.
One Response
Criticisms of society.
Kidd is finding it hard to adjust to a moneyless society, and gets angry that he’s not being paid the full amount he was promised to move the Richards, even though that money is actually worthless since he’s found (so far) no place in Bellona that takes it. That sounds wonderful, but it only works because the food, clothes, and whatever else, are items that have already been produced that they’ve looted from stores and houses. Once those are gone, the inhabitants will have to produce more with their own labor, if they’re able to. What happens then? Money developed as a means of exchange in place of bartering, so you wouldn’t have to lug around physical goods, and try to find someone who had what you wanted and wanted what you had. The real problem is not money, but the hoarding of it. And the hoarding of wealth, of food, of material goods and of the labor that produced them, is far older the capitalism, or even the creation of money.
“The Actual Star” featured a post-scarcity gift economy, BUT everyone had what was functionally a magic cornucopia that would produce whatever basic food, clothing, and medical supplies were needed.
Nalo Hopkinson’s “Blackheart Man”, a Caribbean based fantasy, features a more realistic gift economy, but it’s set in a pre-industrial island where if everyone doesn’t know everyone else, they at least know someone who knows someone, and if someone is a slacker and just takes, word gets around. Gossip provides accountability. But the downside of gossip controlled small communities is that it’s easy to get on the bad side of a clique. And going further is the scapegoating of a community outsider, a widow, someone developmentally disabled or neuro-atypical, and then taken to the extreme the labeling as a witch or sorcerer, and possible banishment or death.
The Richards are an obvious criticism and symbol of white middle class America, clinging to their old lifestyle as the world changes around them, insisting that things must stay the same, that thing CAN stay the same if only they just will it hard enough. Arthur pretends to go to work, either to keep up appearances for his wife’s sake, or because he would rather not deal with his family. And the entire family caters to Mary’s delusions of normalcy. A question that has current examples, why do people become so intense about propping up an obviously unwell person’s delusions to their own detriment?
Canned soup and peaches are the stereotypical symbol and criticism of the mid-century middle-class lifestyle. But without those canned items, the population of Bellona would be starving. Canned items allow people cheap shelf-stable access to out-of-season fruits and vegetables, which historically had been unaffordable to poor and even middle-class people. A better criticism is the marketing behind those items. The marketing that created that mid-century middle-class ideal to begin with. Once people told their own stories, the folk tales, fairy tales, wonder tales, the myths, that defined who they were, what was important, what their values were, good or bad. Now as a society we’ve primarily turned storytelling over to Madison Avenue & Hollywood, and letting them define who we are.