My Thoughts On Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

by M Cody McPhail

The city of Bellona is a strange place. It is somewhere in the middle of the United States. There's only one bridge that goes in and out of it. There aren't any stars in the sky. Sometimes there are two moons. Electrical storms break out of nowhere, lighting everything on fire. Time doesn't work the way it's supposed to. Electronic mechanisms don't work at all. One day, a giant sun rises and sets, scaring the shit out of the Bellona residents. This city's attributes are not just strange, they're completely insane.

The occupants of Bellona take it all in stride. There aren't many of them. They all know one another. A lot of them want to work to make Bellona a better place to live. There are no real jobs. Everyone has a lot of time on their hands. Even though no one ever knows what time it is.

A large percentage of the population are in a gang called the Scorpions. They are violent, hypersexual. They are thieves. Sometimes they provide security. They go on runs where they roam the streets looking for anything worth taking. They all adorn chains, utilize unique weaponry, and wear a strange tech that projects light around the wearer in the shape of an animal. They illicit fear amongst the residents of Bellona but at the same time work to build the community as well.

There is no law in Bellona. You can pretty much do whatever you want. It is a haven of anarchy and creativity. Here mob justice can be enacted at any time but for the most part, anything goes.

Our main character is a 27 year old amnesiac. He aimlessly wanders into Bellona. He can't remember his name but can remember aspects of his life.

This novel is an account of a lost human trying to regain an identity he's not sure he misses. His new identity within the confines of Bellona overshadows anything he was able to accomplish up until this point. He becomes the most interesting person in a town that is constantly shifting, changing, watching.

What you soon realize after getting a ways into Dhalgren is that Bellona is the true main character of this story. It is in every scene. Every aspect. Always effecting everything.

The tertiary info I gleaned from reviewers and other sources led me to believe Dhalgren would be a fairly impenetrable work. The science fiction equivalent of Naked Lunch. Maybe I psyched myself up enough to where I was ready to take it on? Maybe I've read enough "difficult" works to make this surprisingly breezy? Who knows but it all made sense to me without much fuss.

Dhalgren at its best is an amazing work of prose poetry mixed with high drama. A lot of drama. It reads almost like a stage play at times. Long bits of dialogue musing on life and why it’s worth living.

There are strange elements in the story that make it dreamlike. Just weird enough. You're in a version of reality mutated by gamma rays and an unknown apocalypse.

Then there's the sex. So much sex. Never sexy and mostly unsettling. At many times problematic. In a town where rules are forgotten, most of the sexual encounters tend toward the deviant side. Throughout most of the novel the main character is in a throuple with a 15 year old boy and a harmonica wielding hippie in her 20s. Their relationship is written with a seriousness that never feels like any of the three lovers are exploiting one another. There is fetishizing and experimentation between them. It's all fun and games until you realize you're reading about a 15 year old with two people in their 20s. Definitely one of the more disturbing aspects in the book.

The amount of racist rhetoric throughout is traumatizing. I've never read a book with this much derogatory language. Most of the Scorpions would rather use slurs to refer to each other than actual names. I feel like Delany might have been attempting to disarm these words through excessive use but that never made it less impactful or less offensive to my delicate white male viewpoint. It became like sandpaper to my mind after a while. I wonder how this aspect of the novel affects different readers. Delany is a black man so his use of a certain word in excess can be justified but for those that don’t know he is black, this book could be unreadable.

This is a book of excesses. Violence, sex, drugs, racism, but also beauty. Some of the passages and descriptions are utterly jaw droppingly gorgeous. Any iniquities that the book throws at us is counter balanced by some of the most brilliant prose ever written.

The main character is a burgeoning poet. He finds a notebook early on in the novel partially filled with someone else's writings. He decides to continue the work of this unknown writer and create his own poetry based on his experiences in Bellona. This is the fuel of the story. You want the main character to realize his full potential and become the great writer he wants to be. His work sprinkled throughout is proof that his talent is substantial. It is amazing to experience.

There are so many characters. So many threads. Each have stories within the main story. Layers upon layers. The ending section becomes very meta in that the main character is examining the notebook and making notes on the book itself in the margins of the story we're reading. It can be a bit jumbled at times. Most of the time it gives a depth we otherwise would've never known was there. A hidden aspect that Delany magically pulls out of the void and revealing to us new ways of storytelling.

Dhalgren reads like a vision of a world Delany would thrive in. A world where nothing is perfect and everything is a bit chaotic. The perfect breeding ground for creative people to find out who they really are. To be able to make the art they were always meant to create.