into the ruins of the morning

Current Music: Sin- Nine Inch Nails
Current Mood: Accomplished

Because I'm ruddy suicidal, I also decided to review Dhalgren.

to wound the autumnal city.

So howled out for the world to give him a name.

The in-dark answered with wind

These lines are as haunting as they are iconic, legendary. They are beginning of something remarkable- and odds are, if you do not recognize them, you will not know of the book. It is major science fiction author Samuel R. Delaney’s greatest work, and perhaps one of the more controversial stories ever written in the science fiction genre, despite myself not being not that much of a follower of it. It is the masterpiece known as Dhalgren.

Any attempt to summarize Dhalgren is, to put it frankly, futile. The plot dodges and weaves and plays hide-and-seek with itself, twisting and darting back and forth, decorated with a good ammount of sprinkles of schizoid babble. Trying to explain it all in order reduces the story from everything it is- it’s haunting prose, the tone, the texture, the mystery, the journey, the confusion and the immersion in a world that shifts and breathes in a constant flux. And that is, of course, what makes the story incredible.

Nontheless, we must try.

Dhalgren is about a man who stumbles upon a city, without his memories- no knowledge of himself or his name, who is given a bracelet of mirrors and prisms- an Orchid- to wear around his wrist, a weapon of sorts. The apocalyptic city of Bellona, all conventions of modern life have been discarded, rewritten, and then discarded again- there is a strong not-so-undercurrent of rampant violence and sexuality, and everything from homosexuality to bisexuality is commonplace within Bellona, even at times with underage parties. Violence and crime is common, accepted, death and murder is everyday. This is Bellona.

Our nameless protagonist- the only thing we know about him is that he is a drifter, and likely schizoprenic, and that he wears only one sandal (rather like many of Delany’s characters). He has seizures, he confuses directions- because of his apparent innocence and youthful appearance, he gains the name of Kid- then Kidd- and then Kid again, as though gaining and losing his naivete.

Throughout the story, Kid takes many roles- from servant to gang leader to a man struggling for normalcy in a post-apocalyptic near-dystopia, all along with a notebook at his side in which he constantly scribbles- but only on the right-side pages. He is a poet, and his poems feature largely in his notebooks- and when we do see his scribbles, they are eerily similar to the book itself, almost as if it was an alternate copy, an early draft. As Kidd he is an innocent passer-by to this strange world, trying to make his way- as Kid he is darkly manipulative and sometimes almost cruel, and presumably they are the same person.

You can never be sure, as you can never be sure with anything in Dhalgren.

Dhalgren takes place across seven parts- chapters, if you will- Prism, Mirror, Lens, then The Ruings of the Morning, The House of Ax, In Time of Plague, Creatures of Light and Darkness, Palimpsest and The Anathemata: a plague journal. The final chapter is perhaps my favourite, of all- it offers a denouement of sorts to a puzzles story by showing us Kid’s notebook itself. We see, through his scribbles and ramblings, his final days in Bellona before he wanders from the city across the same bridge on which he came.

Dhalgren is a prose-poem, and beautifully written- most of it is dialoug,e and wonderful dialogue. It’s characters are alive and breathingn and tortured, even Bellona itself is the most prominent member of the cast, a tortured once-great city that echoes what it once was. The book has been an inspiration to many others, from William Gibson to Elizabeth Hand, and it is clear why when it is read.

Dhalgren is about many things- relations between races and cliques and the sexes, the unfathomable nature of everyday reality, the nature of civilization and the rules we have constructed for our behavior, rampant sexuality and exploitation- to such a point of ennui that it becomes nothing more than a hobby, a past time- there is too much the novel is about, and much more.

Gibson said once before, that Dhalgren is not there to be understood- he puts it beautifully, that Dhalgren is “a riddle that was never meant to be solved”.

The famous start-and-end lines of Dhalgren show us that the plot is a circle, that the final words link to the first, the end to the beginning- but Dhalgren is far more than a simple cycle. It’s almost a necker cube of plot and and prose- even those cryptic lines themselves reappear more than once in the story, scribbled in the sides of Kid’s own book.

It is not just a story, it is an experience, and one of which I understand nothing but perhaps a small shard of it’s true nature. But that shard alone glimmers with a brilliance that I can’t quite describe.

But I still hear them walking in the trees: not speaking.
Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of

the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland into the
hills, I have come to