Dhalgren
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Dhalgren is an 800+ page science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany.
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Publishing history
Dhalgren was originally published in 1974 as a paperback original (a Frederik Pohl selection) by Bantam Books.
The Bantam edition of Dhalgren went through 17 printings, selling close to a million copies. Subsequently, Dhalgren was republished by Gregg Press (1977), Grafton (1992), University Press of New England (Wesleyan) (1996) and by Vintage, an imprint of Random House (2001), the latter two with an introduction by William Gibson.
Critical reaction
Critical reaction to Dhalgren has ranged from high praise (both inside and outside the science fiction community) to extreme dislike (mostly within the science fiction community). Its lack of a linear plot, or even a discernable chronological narrative, its graphically-described homo- and heterosexuality, Delany's "modernist" verbal pyrotechnics, and use of stream of consciousness writing has given it a reputation as a difficult novel. It has often been compared to Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon because of the surreal style in which it is written.
Theodore Sturgeon called Dhalgren "The very best ever to come out of the science fiction field ... a literary landmark." By contrast, Harlan Ellison hated the novel: "When Dhalgren came out, I thought it was awful, still do ... [...] I was supposed to review it for the L.A. Times, got 200 pages into it and threw it against a wall."
Unprejudiced view of byplay between life concepts, aesthetics, ethics, and sexuality set in conditions that are intended by the author to be difficult to generalise accurately. The story can be read as a circular text like the epic work, Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.
Description
It begins with a famous passage:
to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind.
What follows is an extended and increasingly hallucinatory trip through Bellona -- a city divorced from reality and reason. Some catastrophe has befallen Bellona. Cut off from the rest of the country, the city is a place unlike any other. Another moon appears in the evening sky, during the day the sun may grow exponentially large, and street signs and landmarks shift constantly. The few people left in Bellona struggle with survival, boredom, and each other.
The story's narrator is a nameless, left-shoeless drifter nicknamed (the) (K/k)id(d). He begins the novel apparently awakening from unconsciousness, and seems to have suffered significant memory loss, which recurs throughout the story; he also may be schizophrenic. Poet, hero, liar, Kid is a fascinating realization of the very instincts of the city itself.
It is not until the final chapter of Dhalgren that the meaning of the entire experience is laid out, and even then it is elusive.
The story ends:
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
Much like Finnegans Wake, the unclosed closing sentence may be the beginning of the unopened opening sentence, turning the novel into an enigmatic circle.
Quotes
William Gibson calls Dhalgren "A riddle that was never meant to be solved."