“I don’t know where I fit in in this world. I’ve been wandering for years, finding no place to settle. My memories are incomplete. I can’t even remember my own name. Am I hallucinating? Am I going crazy? I’ve heard about a place somewhere in the Midwest where people like me have found a home. I think I’ll go there and see what happens. And, by the way, who wrote these words anyway? Me?” At some point the central character of Samuel R. Delany’s monumental novel Dhalgren must have thought things like these. But don’t expect any clear answers to his questions. You have to figure the answers out for yourself. But then, how do you even know you’ve come to the right conclusions?
Part of the confusion is that this novel doesn’t necessarily start at the beginning. The beginning may be somewhere in the middle or near the end, but then again, maybe the beginning really is at the beginning. You can never really know. The protagonist can’t remember his own name or who he is, but he goes by the name Kid, Kidd, or sometimes the Kid. This name was given to him by Tak, a gay leather BDSM guy who acts as the local welcome wagon when Kid and others enter the city. Tak is a strangely matriarchal figure, not just because he is a man, but he also brings the nameless main character into the city of Bellona like a midwife bringing an infant into the world and, like a mother, giving him a name: Kid, something we call a child. When they have sex, Tak insists Kid sit on his lap and bite his nipple until he draws blood, an inversion of Christian iconography of the Christ child on the lap of Santa Maria, and a sado-masochistic inversion of breast feeding in which blood stands in for a mother’s milk. Tak introduces Kid to the world and the people of Bellona, sometimes acting as a teacher and sometimes a nurturing matron in leather and spikes, providing food, shelter, and healing when Kid needs it most. Early on in the book, you become aware that Delany has a talent for character building and word building too. There is nothing shallow in the way he writes Kid and Tak into the narrative, and this is true of many others along the way, even those who are of minor importance.
Now here’s a real problem. If I analyze everything, even limiting myself to the most important themes and elements, I will end up with a book review that is twice as long as this 900 page novel and I don’t want to do that.
But the setting is important. Bellona is a post-apocalyptic city where something bad, we’re not sure what, has left it mostly abandoned with a smoke-filled sky even though it appears there are no big fires anywhere. It is completely cut off from the rest of America where life continues on as normal. The remaining inhabitants are four main groups. The two most prominent are African-American people and various remnants of the 1960s counter cultures, namely bikers, hippies, and beneficiaries of the sexual revolution. The counter culturalists and African-Americans interact the most freely. The other two categories of people are a small band of middle class families and a small group of upper class intelligentsia including an order of monks in an isolated monastery. These upper and lower classes mingle less often. All these groups of people are outsiders in some way.
Tak introduces Kid to a hippie commune dedicated to distributing food they lift from abandoned stores. He doesn’t quite fit in with them, but hooks up with another peripheral friend of theirs named Lanya who becomes his girlfriend. She is multi-talented, highly intelligent, free spirited, plays the harmonica, and likes to be naked, a fully realized embodiment of the female hippy who is too individualistic to actually be a part of any one group.
As the story progresses, Kid become the leader of a gang called the scorpions. Their name is never capitalized suggesting that it isn’t actually their name, but rather a subcultural designation like “thugs” or “gangbangers”. These scorpions resemble the Hells Angels only they are interracial, in fact most of them are Black, and they only have one Harley Davidson which they can’t ride because there is no gasoline in Bellona. They squat communally in abandoned houses they call “nests” and spend most of their time eating, getting drunk, and having sex. Sometimes they go out on runs which usually involve nothing more than looting and vandalizing abandoned stores. When Kid joins the scorpions he meets his other lover, a teenage boy named Denny who becomes a third partner in the relationship with Lanya.
Kid is a richly detailed character. He is half Native American Indian and a former inmate of a psychiatric hospital. His two outward emblems of identity are a chain with various jewels, lenses, and stones wrapped around his body and an orchid, a type of weapon he wears strapped to wrist and holding five razor sharp blades which he uses in fights. He acquires these two objects the way a character might come across a magic ring and enchanted sword before setting out on a Grimm’s fairy tale style quest. Aside from recovering his memory and name, Kid’s two main ambitions are becoming the leader of the scorpions and becoming a poet. He accomplishes both. He becomes the gang leader, taking over from a guy named Nightmare, by proving his courage in a run on a department store, but he becomes a poet for a reason he doesn’t choose. The mayor of Bellona is looking for a poet laureate to represent Bellona and Kid is the writer he finds through a scout. Since he is the only writer around, and a charismatic individual who actually writes about Bellona, his poems get published even though they are probably not great writing. This novel, as it touches on the craft of writing, is in part a self-referential work of literary criticism, a use of the novel to philosophize about the writing process.
In regards to the writing process, Delany presents us with a puzzle in the form of a notebook which Kid finds when he is with Lanya. It is a ragged spiral bound notebook which has writing only on the right side pages (for bibliophilic nerds who actually know anatomical terms concerning books, the right hand side of the page is called the “recto”). The author of these writings is never revealed, but we do know they contain extensive commentaries on literary criticism and, by a possible interpretation, they are also pages from the novel Dhalgren itself. Something else in these pages written by the unknown author is a list of names, some of which bear close but not exact resemblance to the names of other characters in the book. One of these names is Dhalgren, which may or may not be the name of a journalist that Kid meets at a party given in his honor. Are the contents of this notebook the writings of Kid, being part of the memories that he lost? There are clues that suggest Kid’s real last name is Dhalgren and that the journalist is actually himself and the author of the entire novel. Does that make Kid a literary persona of Samuel R. Delany? But wait a minute, aren’t all the characters personae of Delany? Is that true of all authors? Can an author write characters that are actually not a part of their own mind? Before I expand on this meta-meta narrative framework, let me just point out that the blank pages on the left hand sides (called the “verso” in book nerd language) are where Kid writes the poems that will later be published by the mayor.
One key to understanding this book might be the chain that Kid wears wrapped around his body. Several characters wear these chains and Kid learns early on that it is considered impolite to ask anybody what they mean. These people are all symbolically connected through these chains. What the lenses, stones, and beads attached to them actually do is distort visual imagery when looked through, refracting light, fracturing appearances, and redirecting eyesight during the act of looking. If these objects are different occurrences strung together in the narrative of the novel, then it is an indication that what we read is a distorted and fractured view of what actually happenes. We use language and memory to interpret the world and neither can be entirely accurate since they approximate and distort the world the way the stones distort visual imagery. This distortion can be seen in several ways, one of which is the shifting of narrative voices. In the earlier chapters, there are points where the narrative changes without warning from third person singular to first person with the first person being the voice of Kid. The final chapter of the book switches over entirely to first person narration which tells us that Kid is the author of Dhalgren, especially because the last section is made of fragments relating back to other parts of the story complete with meta-critical commentaries, reworkings of passages, corrections of spelling errors and typos, and other editorial notations, all of which are presumably written by Kid. This suggests that the final section contains contents from the right side pages of the notebook he writes his poetry in. This narrative chaos forces the reader to think in terms of narrative distortion, shifting planes of reference, and redirecting of attention which can be compared to the way the objects on the necklace distort visual perception when held in front of the eye. This alteration of narrative lines also indicates another theme in the novel: the questioning of Kid’s sanity.
As Kid wanders through the novel, he constantly frets about whether he is insane or not. We know that he was once diagnosed with a mental illness and forgetting your own name isn’t exactly healthy or normal. If that isn’t insanity, it certainly indicated an identity crisis at the very least. Kid’s mind also appears to play tricks on him. Streets and buildings seem to move to different locations when he isn’t looking, for example, and then there are a series of fortean anomalies. A woman he has sex with turns into a tree, two moons appear at the same time, one day passes for him whereas one week passes for everyone else, and then the smoke in the sky clears as a giant red sun appears over Bellona then goes away. These can’t be simply attributed to insanity and hallucination because, at least with the moons and the sun, everybody else in Bellona sees them too.
My contention is that these anomalies are merely literary devices, especially because they occur at major turning points in the development of Kid as a character. For instance, one morning Kid and Lanya go off on their own. Kid takes a bus to a department store where the scorpions are preparing for a run that involves breaking into the skyscraper which is guarded like a fortress from the top floors by members of the middle class. Kid joins the scorpions and, through his actions, sets himself apart from the others in terms of courage, intelligence, and fighting ability. During the span of this day, Lanya is out searching for Kid, but for her this span of one day lasts an entire week that ends when they meet up in the evening. Previous to this time warping, the two had spent most of their days together having sex. This shift in time perspective happens when they reach a crossroads in their relationship and go their separate ways for a bit which is further enhanced by the fact that Lanya is against the idea of joining the scorpions. The time distortion represents a major turning point in how Kid and Lanya see each other,
The most memorable anomaly is the appearance of the giant red sun, the most mind altering, entrancing, and emotionally intense passage of the novel. My interpretation here is that this event symbolizes another major turning point in the story of Kid’s life. As the sun begins to rise, Kid leads the scorpions to the balcony of a house so they can watch. The sun is so intense that it scares everybody, some to the point of dread and tears, and yet Kid, feeling fear the same as the other, remains calm simply knowing that if it is an indication of impending doom, there is nothing he can do about it. But what really happens is that this coincides with Kid’s ascension to the leadership of the scorpions, taking over the mantle from Nightmare. The sun appears when he reaches his goals of becoming a famous poet and becoming the leader of his gang. At the same time as the sun’s appearance, one scorpion also kills somebody and a sniper begins firing from a rooftop at African American people on the street.
Now take a step back for a second and look at this from another angle: if Kid is the writer of this novel, than these anomalies and the people who say them might be creations of his imagination. Or maybe these things really did happen. But if he is the writer, editor, and narrator of his own story should we take these anomalies at face value as hallucinations, or did the writer write the witnessing of these events into the story to prove that other people saw them in order to ward off accusations of insanity, a possible defense mechanism protecting his own ego from dissolution. By forcing us to think on different levels about the possible reality, hallucination, or symbolism of these anomalies, Delany draws our attention to the fact that we edit our own personal narratives, adding details and leaving out others, in a way that a writer makes choices when writing a novel. It is human nature to embellish stories so where is the dividing line between truth and fiction? Is the line between sanity and insanity really all that clear? The shifting narrative planes make you see the story from Kid’s point of view in a way that make you think like a person who might be insane while wondering if this is really insanity or just human nature. Or just a bunch of literary devices. Anyways, the reason I think these anomalies are nothing more than literary stylization is because of the chain that Kid wears wrapped around his body.
As said before, the chains with their ornaments are worn by many people in Bellona and it is considered impolite to talk about them. Kid believes the people who wear them are special in some unexplained way. This gets reinforced when the psychiatrist Madame Brown offers him a job moving furniture for her friends, the Richards family. She tells him she is doing him a favor because he wears his chain. She later reveals that that is not the truth; she only told him that to conceal the real reason she offered him the job. She tells him that the chains actually mean nothing. This is also reinforced when Tak brings Kid to a warehouse where massive amounts of these chains are being stored. Anyone who knows where this warehouse is can get an ornamented chain to wear. They are nothing but cheap trinkets. It is possible the reason no one who wears them wants to talk about them is that there isn’t anything special about them and they just don’t want to admit that. So if the chains are a metaphor for the novel itself and the objects attached to it have no value other than the purpose of distorting the viewer’s vision, then we can conclude that the anomalies and some other details in this novel have no intrinsic meaning other than ornamentation. The anomalies dazzle the mind, but if the reader looks too deeply into their meaning, they get sidetracked from the more important elements in the story.
This brings us to the passage where the two moons appear in the night sky. There is a backstory and a subplot related to this. During a riot in the African American neighborhoods, a Black man named George Harrison gets photographed having sex with a white teenage girl named June Richards in an alley. The photograph is printed in Bellona’s newspaper which describes it as a rape. But the situation is complicated because it may not have been a rape considering that June wanted to have sex with George Harrison. His name is interesting considering he has nothing to do with the now deceased guitarist for The Beatles. Maybe the author chose that name as an element of distraction, a symbolic dead end. There is one night when George Harrison is hanging out in a bar and June is outside because she is stalking him for the purpose of having another sexual encounter, negating the accusation that she was raped. When Lanya confronts George Harrison about this, the Black man himself, who has the status of a celebrity in the community partly because nude posters of him are being circulated by the female minister of a church, explains that the controversy isn’t that he raped her. The controversy is that American society has anxieties and fears regarding Black sexuality and, just as much, there are fears and anxieties surrounding women’s sexuality. So when a Black man and a white woman are exposed for having consensual interracial sex, the society reacts with accusations of rape. So what happens when June comes close to catching up with George Harrison at the bar is that two moons appear, one a nearly full with a sliver of shadow over its left side, the other gibbous with its two horns pointing right. This is an anomaly because the Earth’s shadow would project onto the same sides of the two moons but they don’t. This is because June and George Harrison are going off in two different directions without meeting even though they are in close proximity to each other. The people in Bellona immediately assign the name “George Harrison” to the new moon to emphasize this point. The symbolism is so obvious that you have to second guess your interpretation to check if it makes sense or not.
The character of June Richards links into another of the novel’s many subplots. June lives with with her parents and her brother in an apartment building. Kid gets hired to move their furniture from their apartment into another one because the people downstairs make too much noise. The people downstairs are actually a nest of scorpions. While helping to move a sofa, the son falls down an empty elevator shaft and dies. After the scorpions help Kid pull the corpse out of the shaft, he begins to get closer to them. And we find out that all is not right with the Richards. The scorpions say they hear strange noises coming from their apartment, suggesting the possibility of domestic violence or incest. Mrs. Richards is a nervous woman who talks endlessly but cautiously when Kid comes to work for her. Her goal in life is to be a great housewife and a socialite who entertains friends at dinner parties. She is also agoraphobic and never leaves the apartment. Mr. Richards leaves every day to go to work, but he lives in Bellona where there is no work and probably does nothing more than wander around alone, a perfect portrait of a middle aged man who feels lost in the world and tired of his life. They also have an older son named Eddie who he kicked out of the house. We later find out that Eddie joined the scorpions. The Richards are a perfect portrait of a middle class American family. They hold together by never talking about their problems and never directly confronting reality. Beneath the surface, they seem like people who are about to explode. When their son dies, they cope by leaving his body to rot in another apartment and pretending he never existed. Strangely, their friend Madame Brown insists that they are a perfectly well-adjusted family.
Madame Brown is a minor character, but by the end you begin to realize she is not a reliable source of information. That is why you might not believe her when she tells Kid that he is mentally ill because her own judgments and perceptions are always lacking.
The Richards are a middle-of-the-road American nuclear family and Kid realizes they are not his people. Mrs. Richards serves spam on wonderbread for dinner, acting as though they are elegant despite the moldy corners she has to cut off to make them edible. The way she cuts off the mold is like the way the family acts willfully ignorant in order to maintain the illusion that they are happy. They may be typical of Americans outside Bellona, but inside Bellona they are outsiders because the city is populated with outcasts. The Richards represent what the counter cultures of the 1960s were rebelling against and Bellona is an enclave of the refugees from those counter cultures.
Bellona’s post-apocalyotic atmosphere demarcates it as cut off from the mainstream outside world where everything functions as normal. Yet all is not bad there and it seems to hover between utopia and dystopia as a kind of purgatory. The 60s counter cultures valued individual freedom yet also valued communal relations. They believed in free love and the right to have non-traditional sexual relations. Some dreamed of a society without money or police. They wanted to party and do drugs without having to work at meaningless jobs. All of these are aspects of Bellona. But then when murders or riots happen, there is nothing that can be done about it. Material possessions have no value because everything is free. Nothing gets accomplished because society has no purpose. Scorpions commit acts of violence and vandalism simply because they have nothing better to do. Illnesses and injuries can not be properly treated because there are no doctors or medicine. Bellona represents what a society would look like if the counter cultures finally had their way. It is up to you to decide if Bellona is a success or not.
Delany’s prose is entrancing. It is the type of writing that glides along smoothly with alliteration used to give it a subtle rhythmic continuum of language. It moves along steadily and slowly and once you get into its groove you never really get out of it until the end. It reminds me of what Stanley Kubrick said about the slow pacing in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon; they move at the pace of life. If Delany had written this with a faster pace, I fear all the complex layering of meaning, themes, details, and interconnections would end up being nothing but a jumbled mess. There are a small number of passages that suffer in their execution though. Mostly these are the passages with excessive descriptions of sex. The first night that Kid and Lanya spend together is long, but it isn’t that bad. This is partly because Lanya is totally hot and I’d be chasing her tail myself if it wasn’t for two factors, one being that I am happily married and wouldn’t cheat on my wife, the other being that Lanya is a fictional character in a novel which renders the first factor null and void anyhow. The other sex scenes, and one where Lanya and Denny throw pieces of a board game at each other, just go on for too damn long.
Dhalgren is a deep and difficult novel for a lot of people. I would argue that following what is happening is not what makes it difficult, but interpreting it is what makes it daunting for some. It is maximalist in its contents. It is full of ambiguity and symbols that may not symbolize anything at all. The beginning and end overlap in a way that I haven’t even touched on here. It forces you to question your own sanity as you see Bellona from the point of view of a man who might be insane even though he oten makes sense. You might go insane yourself if you try to interpret every lead this novel offers so you have to decide what themes to pursue. Delany doesn’t offer any final answers and its open-endedness may be one of its greatest strengths. If somebody were to ask what this whole novel is about, I would answer that it isn’t about one thing; it is about a whole lot of things and you have to choose what it means to you. This might bother a lot of readers who want definite answers from what they read, but that is better for the small number of us who get deeply absored in it while pursuing a unique literary experience. Dhalgren isn’t for everybody. It’s only for a few.
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