Samuel Delany’s masterwork is a deconstructed odyssey of unsettled streets and fluid identity.
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William Gibson called Dhalgren the “secret masterpiece”, and when I first stumbled on a copy in one of Toronto’s aging and congested used bookstores, that’s exactly how it felt. Suddenly, it was like I’d been let in on a secret. As an undergraduate in the university’s English department I’d been subjected to the canon for 4 long years, and I was hungry for something, anything, new. I didn’t know how much I needed a novel like Dhalgren until I found it.
“… to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind.”
Opening the book and reading those lines was like walking into an unformed conversation, or an unexpected and oddly personal insult; this was a novel? There was no preamble, no entryway. The prose was as slippery and overwrought as poetry. I grew aware that I was inhabiting the thoughts (or perhaps the externalized consciousness) of an anonymous and amnesiac man. None of this would ever stand up to my professor’s dusty scrutiny. I was in awe.
William S. Burroughs was attracted to the phrase “nothing is true, everything is permitted” and Dhalgren is one of the 20th century’s strongest realizations of that ideal. An empty page accepts all marks, and Delany uses that freedom to subvert everything from gender to narrative structure, geography to genre. Early on, a cache of near-future tech (a chain of linked prisms, mirrors, and lenses) is discovered, and the book’s intentions are apparent: a prism refracts and contorts; a mirror reflects and represents; a lens magnifies and sharpens. A novel may do all three.
This is Delany’s purpose, as he sets his nameless protagonist moving through Bellona, a post-apocalyptic city that acts as a simulacrum of 20th century America. Over the course of the novel, this man will collect a series of interlocking names (Kid, the Kid, Kidd) along with a web of tangential identities: well-meaning labourer, prolific (and terrifically insecure) poet, leader of a gang of hologram-clad outlaws.
When the novel takes place, and over the course of how much time, is explicitly nebulous. The dates on the newspapers appear at random. The sun rises and sets at odd intervals. The plot flits like a ghost in the spaces between vignettes, some hundreds of pages long, scenes of violence, searing eroticism, and humour. An astronaut arrives in town to wax philosophical about his trip to the moon; a polyamorous romance is cut in sharp relief; a dinner party is held above the ruins of the smouldering metropolis. The novel is incredibly expansive, but there is a lived-in quality to the settings and a precision to the movements of the characters that produces a nearly hallucinatory specificity:
“A web of shadows swept on a floor he first thought was gold-shot blue marble. His bare foot told him it was plastic. It looked like stone… One elevator door was half-open on an empty shaft, from which drifted hissing wind. The door was coated to look like wood, but a dent at knee level showed it was black metal. While he squatted, fingering the edge of the depression, something clicked: a second elevator door beside him rolled open.”
The novel’s frequent (and unsparing) depictions of sex are equally precise:
“Lanya opened her eyes and, through her catching and catching breath, frowned. She worked one hand free, and licked and licked her fingers. Then she reached around Denny’s back. First just the side of her thumb touched his cock. Then his movement in her fist’s tunnel made the thing that was not a muscle tighten (and whole webs above and around his pubis that were, relax). His penis filled through her grip.”
Alongside the physical environment, the geography of the body is mapped in clear (and at times breathtaking) detail. In its focus on queer sexual pleasure and attention to racial and economic realities, Alexis Lothian argues that Dhalgren goes beyond world building to engage in a process of world making. Delany creates queer worlds of theory and practice, not only for his characters, but within his readers as well:
“On the one hand, [the novel] suggested an “us” out there neither straight nor contented with sexual orientations and their meanings in the world; on the other, it offered a new view on ways in which my surroundings already failed to live up to the straight rendering of what “a better world” might be. Disappointments transfigured to electric possibilities.”
Dhalgren’s unfettered narrative produces a palimpsest of the self: identity as changing, shifting, constantly in flux. Here is selfhood that lies open to digestion and revision; an eternal writing and rewriting of the possible. Ultimately, Bellona, like the novel itself, functions as a metabolising agent:
“Where is this city’s center? he wondered, and walked, left leg a little stiff, while buildings rose, again, to receive him.”
More than 40 years since its initial publication, Dhalgren has lost none of its power to inspire, amaze, and confound. The canon will never be the same.
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Follow CG Inglis on Twitter @viscereal and on Instagram @viscerealism
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