Barbelith Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing

Finished this a couple weeks ago and am still digesting. I like a lot of what's been said here, and I especially like the variety of plausible responses.

Mainly I'm still just caught up in being impressed by the damn thing as a novel playing by the rules of novels (even when it pretends not to). For example:
The way he drops references periodically to tease and jog your memory ("artichokes" being the most obvious example).
The way the eventual reveal of the monastery and interview with Calkins is led up to and forshadowed (esp. the fact that, when it happens, its mechanics and meaning are entirely unexpected but not remotely anti-climactic).
And then there's the George/June thing (what the hell to make of that???) which is such a dangerous bag to open but is handled deftly and with a sense of purpose (even if the purpose itself remains delightfully obscure).

Dhalgren's importance as a modernist (not quite post-modern, I'd say, but then I'm also full of shit) exploration of the uses of meta-narrative and the limits of cause-effect logical structures to elucidate real experience is groovy, but what I found most compelling was the commitment to a subjective viewpoint and to descriptions of events rooted entirely in sensory experience. The only information the reader gets about ANYTHING in Dhalgren is how it FEELS to Kid. Emotions are located in body-response with shocking clarity and the sensory moments (the terrain under Kid's bare foot, or the smell of the air) grounded me completely in the world even though other aspects of the writing were intended to undercut any sense of real comfort or awareness. Of course, in the end, all that Kid knows and experiences still isn't enough to tell "the whole story," which seems more the point to me than anything else (although finding "the point" is also a completely subjective experience).

The sex...I liked it and felt in my gut that it was narratively productive (as opposed to gratuitous) but I can't articulate what progress the various scenes really achieved in terms of story. There were certain key ones (the first encounter with Denny, the Scorpion gangbang) that illuminated the characters, certainly, but I feel like descriptions of non-normative sexual practice is a device that calls such attention to itself by its inclusion that it must be serving a weighty purpose in order to be useful, or even just not-distracting. Again, my feeling is that the sex scenes in Dhalgren were extremely useful, but I can't say why. The Kid/Lanya/Denny relationship, at times, seems to be the only thing keeping Kid from giving in completely to despair, but in the end, of course, it is simply abandoned in the face of physical catastrophe, to which Kid has no choice of response other than to just turn away.

The "it's-about-life-in-a-novel" approach is among my favorites (did I read that here, or in a link from here?) and seems most useful in the consideration of two moments:
when Kid sees Delaney in the mirror (which I didn't realize was Delaney--thanks, Barbelith!) and when Jack wonders why there are no posters of naked women to balance the ubiquity of George's Big Black Cock. The first moment seems to be a gift from Delaney to Kid, to help his poor lost protagonist gain even the slightest clue to anchor his own existence...or maybe it's a vicious prank to send his mind spinning into even vaster and more subjective stratospheres. Somehow, to me that moment hinges on the author-character relationship and the capacity for healing on each end that can be affected by the other (does that make sense?)--but of course author and protagonist teaching and healing one another could just be a preoccupation I brought to the novel. Did anyone else feel this?

I'm having a hard time putting any of my thoughts about this book into coherent structures, as you can no doubt tell.

The why-do-I-have-to-look-at-all-this-dick? conversation...Delaney at his most mercilessly authorial (much like the scene of the monstrous sun), constructing a world of arbitrary and unpleasant dimensions in which the characters suffer without a cause? A cruel joke he plays on a bumpkin Southern racist (you're in MY world now!--but he seems to have too much sympathy for the characters, on the whole, for this to be plausible)? Or does Kid really hit the nail on the head when he posits a female sexual power too vast and unknowable to be iconicized like George's mythical potency?

There's something about the limitations of written language going on that caught my attention as well. In some of Kid's whinier marginal notes in the last chapter it's made obvious, but I dug the way George's speech (and I think that of a couple other characters) is standardized as an admission of the failure of typography to simultaneously represent the sounds and the meanings of his words. It's not a position I necessarily agree with (I think Steinbeck does just fine, for instance) but it's a strong one to take and it's presented well here.

I can't shake the feeling that everything I've said is somehow, in the end, beside the point.

Dhalgren- Samuel R Delany