Dan’l Danehy-Oakes: Dhalgren at 40

When Dhalgren came out, I was about seventeen. I had lived essentially all my life in very very veryveryvery very white, middle-class suburban towns. Homogeneous to the max—in fact, homogenous like milk (as Anna Russell put it). And science fiction was pretty much like that, too: the heroes were (essentially) all white Americans, if not literally, then in their attitudes and concerns.

I’m pretty sure I’d read one or two of Delany’s other books—definitely Babel-17, possibly The Fall of the Towers. I’d certainly read “Aye, and Gomorrah” in Dangerous Visions—and hadn’t quite gotten it. And I’d read “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious Stones” in something. So anyway, Dhalgren came out. I saw it in Kepler’s bookstore in January of 1975; I remember that clearly. It said the publication date was the following month, so I thought I was getting something vaguely illicit.... It looked interesting. I bought it.

I read it three times in the next six months, three more in the following year. I must have read it—the whole, monstrous 800+ pages of it—another ten or so times in the forty years since it came out. I wore out copies and finally spent the big bucks for a Gregg Press library-quality hardcover edition with acid-free paper and all that because it would be cheaper in the long run.

It wasn’t the mystery or the literary playfulness that captured me though those certainly appealed to me: it was the characters. Dhalgren introduced me to all kinds of people I’d never met before, and I wanted to meet them in real life.

For example, I had been vaguely aware that there were such things as gay people, and my response up to that point to the concept had basically been: ew. (I was a white middle-class heterosexual, neurotypical, Protestant [at the time] male....) I had heard of “gay liberation” and even Stonewall, but didn’t know or care much about them.

Delany showed me a whole world of gays, bisexuals, and all kind of other orientations—as well as people who were different from me for all sorts of other reasons—and they were all so damned interesting and vibrant and alive! What’s more, they lived in an environment where all these different people kind of mixed and interacted—I hadn’t run across the term “subculture” before, but that’s what we had here, a mélange of subcultures—and one where the white middle class (as represented by the Richards family) was just another, nonprivileged subculture and indeed one that was pretty much irrelevant to the real life of the city in which they lived.

I mean ... wow. Talk about opening of the eyes.

I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t already read Dhalgren when I met (for example) my first gay, S/M biker skinhead. I think I would have freaked; instead, I got to know the guy and we were friends for a while. (He’s dead now, sadly.) You might say that the book and its author helped make life in the larger world possible for me.

So.

At this remove, what can an aging, self-confessed Delany fanboy say about Dhalgren?

Dhalgren is, as Delany says in his dedication, about a lot of things. The dominant metaphor—if there is one!—is the optical chain: prism, mirror, lens, different ways of viewing things, breaking them apart, combining them, reversing them, making them bigger or smaller. Dhalgren treats its various concerns by viewing them through prisms, mirrors, lenses. The social order in particular is distorted, reversed, parts of it magnified and minified.

(As a side note, Delany has claimed elsewhere that this is the basic method of social criticism in sf: to look at the “real” world through a significant distortion—that is, a distortion that signifies.)

Things that seem obvious aren’t. What look like street gangs are the closest thing to a police force the city has and also its strongest force for cohesion. (A harmonica makes a disharmonious jangle that you can’t make on a harmonica ... or does it?) The many weird things in the book have ... mostly have ... their explanations—though there are those odd and massive celestial events—but those explanations are separated from the weirdnesses by great textual distances and often seem unsatisfying. Sometimes they aren’t even explanations. (Lanya doesn’t make the recordings with the harmonica till later—if you can trust the timeline—and anyway doesn’t have her recording studio with her when we hear that jangle....)

One thing it’s about is the process of reading and constructing a “reality” from the words we read. Everything we see and hear in Dhalgren is tightly controlled from the point of view of the main character, the nameless Kid.

The thing is, the Kidd is the protagonist of a novel.

No, wait: that’s obvious, but what I mean is that the kidd’s actual experience is conditioned by his being the protagonist of the novel, Dhalgren, which we are reading—so that when Delany uses a standard narrative technique, the kidd is aware of it, though he isn’t aware that this is what’s going on.

For example, at one point we leave the kid at the end of one chapter and pick up three days later. That’s standard stuff in a novel, right? Except that when he meets other people, they want to know where he’s been for the last three days, and he doesn’t know because for him (as for us) they never happened; he only experiences what Delany writes. He finds this very disorienting!

This is sneaky, and it’s never made explicit—though there is one moment when someone who may be Delany (or may not) appears in a mirror where the Kidd’s reflection should be, and near the end in the journal section, the kidd addresses him directly (not by name but as “you”—though this could as easily be addressed to the reader, come to think of it).

Another thing it’s about is the things we don’t see that are always there.

Delany, walking around New York and other great American cities, noticed that it wasn’t quite the way it’s portrayed. There were sections—blocks, even whole neighborhoods—of these cities that were practically empty, abandoned, burnt-out, ruinous.

Then too, we all live in our own subcultures. Some of us are better at mixing in others, but for each of us, for all of us, there are whole subsets of our larger culture that we just never see.

Delany reverses, magnifies, splits, and recombines (mirror, lens, prism ...) these to create a situation where there is no privileged subculture, and if there is any underclass, it is the one that considers itself the “dominant” culture in “ordinary” society; similarly, the topogeography of the city itself is reversed, magnified, split, and recombined so that the burnt-out areas nobody notices are the main feature of the city, and only certain small areas (which don’t seem stable) are “normal.”

A third thing Dhalgren seems to be about: dyslexia.

Samuel R. Delany is profoundly dyslexic. His editor once pointed out that he had spelled “want” as “whan’t.” For those who don’t know, dyslexia isn’t “being a bad speller,” it’s a neuro-perceptual condition that (depending on how severe it is) can make reading, spelling, and other tasks that come fairly easily to neurotypical persons extremely difficult. (It is also, interestingly, believed to be fairly common in “great” writers, though not usually as severe as in Delany’s case, probably because these persons have to pay attention to the written word in a way that neurotypicals don’t.)

At any rate, some of what goes on in Dhalgren is simply a literal presentation, and some is a significantly distorted examination (through the prism, mirror, lens ...) of how Delany actually perceives the world. He has written of how, on the New York subway, he’ll come to a stop he’s come to for years on the same track and be surprised at which side of the train the platform is on—wasn’t it on the other side just yesterday? Well, maybe: to you and me, the platform stays put; in Delany’s perception, it shifts.

Of course Dhalgren is “about” many other things: relationships of desire and friendship (Delany seems to distrust “love” as a concept), the changing social strata of the ’60s and ’70s, the nature of art and poetry, how one becomes a writer (not the technique but what happens to one’s personality), cultural heroes, presence and absence, violence and boredom, sex and death, mythology and its cousin fame, sanity and insanity, typography, and much more.

Dhalgren was and is something of a cult book, but it has/had a very large cult. Reasonably reliable sources inform me that over a million copies have been sold. To this day, when I meet someone who knows Dhalgren, we have something in common that bonds us immediately (if not closely). Goodreads lists it as #163 on its list of best science fiction books—and #51 on its list of most difficult novels. Go figure.

The unusual (well, for the time) sexual content is probably a part of what made it a cult book. People could read this and say, “I guess I’m not that weird after all....” or at least, “There are others like me.” The most transgressive scene of all, of course, takes place outside the pages of the book, the rape (but is it rape? She wants it ... but isn’t that what all rapists say ...?) of June Richards by George Harrison, a young white girl by a big black man, which happens either before or after the action of the novel.

The typographical complexity of the last section appealed to a certain type of intellectual, ones who wanted to either figure out the “right” sequence or prove that there wasn’t one. There isn’t other than the sequence in which it is presented. Delany didn’t do this by accident or at random. Delany is more in love with text for itself than any other writer I know.

In many ways, the novel’s impact was greater outside the sf community than in it, where it was lauded (by Theodore Sturgeon, among others), dismissed (by Harlan Ellison, among others), laughed at, and finally treated as something of a mysterious monolith (if not a monomyth). I gather it was a Big Book ON Campus—I don’t know about that; when I was on campus a few years later the Big Books were Gödel, Escher, Bach and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

It captured the feel of the ’60s counterculture for me in a way that no other book has. Not that there are hippies or yippies, but it has that Baby Boomer feeling that anything is possible if we just want it hard enough.

It is—need I say it?—a very big book. And it is a difficult book, but it’s one that (in my experience) rewards one in direct proportion to the work one applies to it.

My life is much better for having found it.

Dan’l Danehy-Oakes lives in Alameda, California.