Do you think a city can control the way the people live inside it? (p. 249)
Spoilers abound.
Okay, I think it’s safe to say that I’m in love with this book. Maybe a bit premature, since there are about five or six hundred pages to go, but I’m really enjoying it so far; I saw someone call Delany’s writing ‘prosaic’ in a comment somewhere, and I disagree. Something about the style in Dhalgren is wonderful. Keep in mind that I’m terrible at explaining why I like things, but I think it does what the best writing does: it strikes me as both a completely true rendering of human perception and pleasing to read. It keeps a good flow, rhythm, pace, whatever you want to call it. Some disparate thoughts on Chapter III:
We finally meet George Harrison, populist hero, sex symbol, and alleged rapist. Him and Lanya have an open discussion (observed by Kidd) on the definition of rape; this part makes for fairly dire reading because George essentially claims that June, the girl he raped(?), was actually a willing participant. It’s not exactly Sotos levels of depraved, but it’s nevertheless an extended discourse on sexual violence. I found it interesting as well as harrowing to read (for personal reasons.)
Throughout the chapter, Kidd is helping the Richards family move from an apartment on the seventeenth floor up to nineteenth, ostensibly because an unseen pack of kids have taken to ding-dong ditching the Richards’s apartment. The actuality is that Mrs. Richards is struggling for normalcy and, I suppose, moving apartments is a normal thing that normal people do. In spite of having the most expected reaction to the chaos happening in Bellona (barely disguised terror), Mrs. Richards come across as the most deranged character in the book thus far (aside from George.) She refuses to embrace the chaos as a form of social freedom, and with good reason; throughout the chapter, we’re repeatedly given indications that things in Bellona are far, far worse than seen. Crime is rampant, gangs more or less run the place, and — peep the epigraph — the city might be alive. Something more than just urban design. I expect things to make a turn for the worse pretty soon.
Sidenote: I suspect that George Harrison is a dual parody, at once of the classical male object of desire in romance novels (as a Black American he is both foreign and familiar to Whites, he is simultaneously gentle and kind to women yet sexually violent, he “knows when they want it”, turning sexual violence into ambiguous guilt-free sex) and also as the common White stereotype of a black male; he’s jobless, sexually virile and threatening, effeminate in manner, an absentee father to his children. He’s archetypal. He’s, in that sense, mythological. So is June, the seemingly mutual object of his desire, a “pure” young white woman who lives within a nuclear family. In Mrs. Richard’s monologue to Kidd about her deep, overwhelming fear of what’s going on — the unknown, as no one knows what’s going on in Bellona, not even the people who live there — she mentions that she’s incredibly fearful of “rot” somehow getting into her peaceful family structure. I think the rot she’s talking about is June’s desire for George, not — more obviously, as it happens almost immediately after — Bobby’s death.
We finally get to see Roger Calkins’s house, but Calkins himself is nowhere to be seen… I highly suspect that Delany will keep the gag going and never show Calkins in the flesh. My thoughts as to why: Calkins is representative of a distant upper-class. An entire world in and of itself exists inside of his out of the way, bucolic estate, one that he, it’s worth noting, did not earn but simply began to inhabit once things started to break down. He still isn’t safe from whatever’s happening in Bellona; when Kidd and Lanya visit Newboy, Lanya notes that a garden that was lush only a few weeks seems to have undergone a decade’s worth of decay. An upstairs room is trashed far beyond what out of hand partying can explain. Something is odd is happening.
Chapter IV starts on page 281 — I’m rapidly coming up on the point where Harlan Ellison decided to quit.
A brief excerpt from On Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren that I found online, helping to explain just how this book — ostensibly SF/F but widely derided by that community — sold over a million copies: “I also appreciate the inclusion of a review in a college newspaper by Steven Paley and a review in The New York Times by Gerald Jonas; these demonstrate the interest that college-aged and general audiences had in Dhalgren, and it was these audiences more than genre readers who were responsible for its initial commercial success.” It’s pretty clear why the SF/F community didn’t like Dhalgren, at least initially (posterity seems to have been very kind to it) — it’s a book that values narrative over plot. It’s essentially plotless, in fact, and the narrative (or at least what I think the narrative is, 281 pages in: self-discovery in trying circumstances) isn’t overtly there.
Side-note: a lot of characters wear optic chains and none of them are willing to say why. Kidd, Madame Brown, Bobby, June (although she got rid of hers), Joachim… I’m probably forgetting some. I know at least one of the scorpions has one. Newboy talks about them for an extended monologue but outright admits that he’s just using them as a metaphor for something else. As to what I think they are: beats me. “An indication of past trauma, possibly of a sexual nature” seems too obvious. Truth is, I just dunno.