STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, then DUNE and now, the major novel of love and terror at the end of time: DHALGREN, by Samuel Delany, four-time Nebula award winner (ilx book club #Y8554)

xp i wasn't expecting spaceships (since the introduction in my edition said "you'll wait in vain for the spaceships") but was expecting more cryptic writing. Oh, one thing it says in my introduction re: the less than progressive gender politics:

Delany who makes a point of transforming his own life into art, made certain decisions when it came to the final cut, and it seems he chose to present his younger self as he was: unreconstructed, a rebel without a cause [...] The Kid doesn't want to identify himself politically as Gay he just wants to get laid.

Always get confused between Bellona and Belladonna and then think of the Only Ones song "Deadly NIghtshade."

less impenetrable than advertised.

just a lack of clarity and lots of questions left open -- who was the woman? what was her deal at the end of their interaction? why did she send him into the cave? what was the deal with the chains he found? etc. and the questions keep piling up but it's not really posed like a mystery there's no hook to find out what it all really means so i can why ppl would be repelled by all the uncertainty and intentional confusion.

it's not difficult to decipher at all on a syntactical level if that's what u mean by impenetrable it's no finnegan's wake

There are definitely paragraphs that I can't immediately make sense of when they occur in the narrative (they might become clearer later) and which seem to exist mainly for poetic or atmospheric effect - eg this one right at the start of the second section:

Here I am and am no I. This circle in all, this change changing in winterless, a dawn circle with an image of, an autumn change with a change of mist. Mistake two pictures, one and another. No. Only in seasons of short-light, only on dead afternoons. I will not be sick again. I will not. You are here.

That's true but they're not frequent or long enough to be off-putting - that may change. And yes there are those unanswered questions, I suppose at the beginning it's easy to assume that answers will be forthcoming and not worry about it. That too may change.

I appreciate this thread, I think I read this at the right time in my life and have been afraid to re-read (in case it doesn't hold up and I tarnish the memory). But I was thinking about it a lot as a favorable comparison when reading that new Marlon James.

xpost
William Gibson's quote about Dhalgren - "A riddle that was never meant to be solved" - makes me think answers (within the text) might never be forthcoming. And that's OK.

After 6 or 7 readings, I'm most interested in the references to Greco-Roman mythology and theology, despite Delany's caution not to get too hung up on them. I never studied any mythologies in school, so I didn't get any of the references until I found an expansion of the book's Wiki page that provided a partial key. I won't link to it unless asked because SPOILERS. But having that extra textual level available made my most recent reading hella fun.

It’s easy, he thought, to put sounds with either white (maybe the pure tone of an audio generator; and the other, its opposite, that was called white noise), black (large gongs, larger bells), or the primary colors (the variety of the orchestra). Pale grey is silence.

Classic synaesthesia.

"It does not offer me any protection, this mist; rather a refracting grid through which to view the violent machine, explore the technocracy of the eye itself, spelunk the semi-circular canal. "

Maybe the city is his mind, his damaged psyche, which he is exploring to (re) discover his identity. Echoing an earlier passage when he's describing his mental illness to Tak:

But the real mind is invisible: you’re less aware of it, while you think, than you are of your eye while you see … until something goes wrong with it. Then you become aware of it, with all its dislocated pieces and its rackety functioning, the same way you become aware of your eye when you get a cinder in it. Because it hurts …

He's mentioned discovering the source of the smoke that blankets the city, this could be the trauma that cost his memory.

Delany, of course, is The Kid, grown up. So it's his mind, his memories. The notebook just is the novel, simultaneously complete and a work in progress.

Just a thought.

I've been thinking along similar lines, ledge - and also that Delany is not just Kidd, but Bellona too - the author as city, an impossible space of constant, disordered, shifting invention and fancy - architecture of mind and place, etc.

Yes, definitely.

Another minor detail I forgot: so he goes over in fine detail how the orchid was on his hand after leaving Tak's even though he absolutely did not stop to pick it up; later on there's something similar that passes without mention - he is definitely holding the notebook, then a page later Lanya gives it to him.

Happy 77th birthday to SRD today.

Newboy is a bit of a bore.

This is fine, not very avant garde as thomp says above. There are puzzles - what's up with The Kid, what's the deal with the chains, the red eyes - but it doesn't seem as purposefully cryptic as e.g. The Book of The New Sun, where it seemed the real themes only became apparent if you solved the puzzles. Here the themes are pretty obvious.

so I didn't get any of the references until I found an expansion of the book's Wiki page that provided a partial key

Will be interested to see this when I'm done though.

Newboy is a bit of a bore.

Heh, I am in the section with his long monologues just now - can't tell if his boorishness is deliberate, or if he's yet another SRD alter-ego (this time as 'major poet'). The preceding George Harrison monologue about rape and female desire was - surprise - even more problematic, though some of the implicit feminist critique embedded in it feels extremely #metoo relevant, even prescient.

This comment upthread from late great has definitely resonated with me while reading Dhalgren -

i find though that when delany writes about prosaic stuff in triton (like going out to dinner, or playing boardgames, or office politics) he's really great and entertaining

Like, I really enjoyed the long sequence at the Richards' dinner table, where routine domestic chat is undercut by all sorts of familial strife.

Also enjoying the curiously (post-sixties) benign vision of apocalyptic living. Bellona is smouldering, in crisis, but money, employment and status are no longer very important (the Richards clinging to the prestige of a good job and a nice home are clearly delusional/hysterical), and almost everyone that Kid encounters (apart from some of the scorpions, maybe, and even then...) offers to share food, living spaces, bodies, wisdom etc with him. This kind of relaxed communal vibe comes at the expense of fast narrative momentum, but I can live with that - it's a trip, as they say.

The preceding George Harrison monologue about rape and female desire was - surprise - even more problematic, though some of the implicit feminist critique embedded in it feels extremely #metoo relevant, even prescient.

I got that vibe, but there's a danger of course of thinking this is the first time in history when our eyes are truly open to the reality of sexual assault. Either way it definitely swings wildly between 'right on' and 'er, nope...'. (Also, curious name to pick for the guy.)

Also enjoying the curiously (post-sixties) benign vision of apocalyptic living

Yes, I see it as the revolution realised/explored through the lens of post apocalyptic fiction. The traditional power structures (The Man) have disappeared, The Kids have moved into the gap and it's the squares (the Richards) who now seem out of joint with the times. It's not exactly the dawning of the age of aquarius, it's less optimistic/more realistic than that, but they're doing ok.

(Also, curious name to pick for the guy.)

In The Einstein Intersection, The Beatles have become the stuff of myth and legend (Ringo especially!) - fab four definitely one of SRD's obsessions.

Almost exactly halfway through now, and my main question is - what's a Dhalgren?

For one thing, the children run by, calling Grendal Grendal Grendal Grendal

Thanks dow, don't think I've got to that bit yet - but one thing I'm noticing more and more is how Delany's storytelling mirrors the idea of the shifting city, as experienced by someone with memory loss and a history of mental illness; the book is deliberately repetitive, contradictory, opaque, circular, without event, filled with acres and acres of slangy, discursive, abbreviated, random chatter, so the overall effect is of a 'story' where narrative detail/coherence, the order (never mind meaning) of events constantly slip through yr reading mind - if you can even be sure that 'story' is happening at all. Parts of it are very bad just at the level of the sentence - yes, most ruinously in the many sexual encounters in the book - but the overall effect is - something. It really isn't like any other novel I've read, for good and bad, and as you go on there is this very powerful, cumulative feeling that things are happening deep in the book's subtextual undergrowth - and as of page 430 we haven't even gone underground in Bellona yet. I like what Henry James said about reading Proust - “inconceivable boredom associated with the most extreme ecstasy which it is possible to imagine”.

I'm going to have to start marking up my copy with sticky tabs or something -- I looked for a crucial scene that addresses Ward's question last night for 20 minutes but the damn thing is so long I couldn't find it. Kid's haywireness with time is forced onto the reader -- the last time I read the book in full, I was especially keen on getting to a particular scene, which I remembered being about halfway through. Turns out it was in the last 60 pages.

Hah this morning I'd reached page 549 and was feeling p good abt myself for doing so, when I moved from left to right page and found that approx the next 50 pages were simply missing from my copy of this UK paperback edition:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR9-ihoHrdYO6ryjaqkY9sr-Ffp3xF1Mj-cKVmSyUeN3DkGrlEtNQ

At first, without noticing the page numbers, I genuinely thought Delany had just abruptly time-shifted between one segment and another, but no, this was a printing error, an extreme example of the editorial carelessness which seems to attend a lot of these mammoth modernist novels - it's perhaps Dhalgren's strongest link to Ulysses.

For me, reading these huge things is all about momentum - no stopping! - so this evening I bought a replacement copy of the most recent UK edition. It's bigger, and better presented on the page, but I really hate the cover on this one:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51-80RbzT9L._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

The Right Rev. T-Bone Burnett! Looking resentful, as usual. How the Hell did the artist make this connection?

uggghhhh, every single one of those Gollancz SF Masterworks covers is a crime against their author.

imo

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/ac/Dhalgren-bantam-cover.jpg/220px-Dhalgren-bantam-cover.jpg

or gtfo

I'm still surprised at how readable this book is; aside from the odd bad sentence ('bare breasts joggling jingling links' is currently my favourite), and the sex scenes (pretty matter-of-fact but way too long), the prose is very easygoing, and even though it's not exactly narratively compelling there's something pulling me along. And every now and then there'll be something startlingly quotidian and human, even amusing, like the bit i've just read where Lanya visits The Kid's new nest and lightheartedly tells him what a shithole it is, then Bunny turns up and does an amazing camp turn.

It also reminds me of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. Stylistically they're completely different, but both are about someone with a memory problem entering a strange city with dreamlike shifts in space and time, on some kind of quest or mission that's never defined, where they seem to get pulled along by events out of their control.

The Right Rev. T-Bone Burnett! Looking resentful, as usual. How the Hell did the artist make this connection?

The Gollancz Masterworks covers for Stapledon's Star Maker are really nice. One exception I've found so far.

Finished!

Dude certainly thinks long and hard about (amongst other things) interpersonal relationships and group dynamics, it almost becomes an essay at certain points.

Anyone else get a strong autobiographical vibe? Saw a comment online that the meeting with Newboy was very like an anecdote of his about a time he crashed a book launch party.

I bookmarked some pages towards the end but I might have forgotten why. I was reading an e-book, not sure if the formatting was up to scratch, the only differences in the different sections at the end were in padding and occasional italics. I'll look for a hard copy if I can find one with a decent cover, I think it's a book worth having even if I never read it again.

it's a puzzle without a solution in the same way as a box full of random jigsaw pieces.

I’m 18% done per my Kindle. As with other Delany I’ve read, yes it’s challenging but he is so great with the evocation of moment to moment consciousness that I’m stuck to the page. This is not hugely more difficult than Triton et al - though maybe I haven’t gotten to the really gnarly bits yet lol.

it can take awhile to get to the grisly nut in the folded vortex, and the soft granular trough behind it. iirc you have to map the folds that fall, wetly out, with your tongue

lol

according to delany:

“I wrote out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sentences at the top of notebook pages,” he remembers. “Then I would work my way down the page, revising the sentence, again and again. When I got to the bottom I’d copy the sentence out to see if I wanted it. Then I’d put them back together again. It was a very long, slow process.”

and after all that we get a grisly nut in a folded vortex :/

I get a strong autobiographical vibe from just about everything of his. I loved Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand enormously and couldn't wait for the sequel. Eventually came to learn that much of the autobiographical part of that book was his relationship with Frank Romeo, which broke up I think in the mid 80s. Delany has written enough about Romeo's problems that I'm not surprised and don't blame him for never wanting to go back to Marq and Rat.

"stars in my pocket ..." is really his masterpiece, isn't it

i read that he didn't want to go back to it because he'd based many characters on real life acquaintances who later died during the AIDS epidemic

is it OOP?

The Wesleyan edition is in print.
https://www.amazon.com/Stars-Pocket-Like-Grains-Sand/dp/0819567140/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=stars+in+my+pockets+like+grains+of+sand&qid=1556038504&s=books&sr=1-1-catcorr

"My life here more and more resembles a book whose opening chapters, whose title even, suggest mysteries to be resolved only at closing. But as one reads along, one becomes more and more suspicious that the author has lost the thread of his argument, that the questions will never be resolved, or more upsetting, that the position of the characters will have so changed by the book's end that the answers to the initial questions will have become trivial." (page 755 of the Burnett edition)

- and finished on this bus this morning.

Making the last section a series of texts that have been recovered long after the fact casts a retrospectively melancholy air over the whole book - a sense of times passed, people long gone, a way of being that can no longer be accessed, or even imagined outside science fiction. I often experience a sense of loss when finishing a very long novel, and this was no exception. The vividness of feeling that Delany has for people and places is clearly autobiographical, which gives the book a lot of its cumulative power, and makes it an affecting memorial for an era that no longer exists, if it ever did.

Something of an ambivalent memorial though, for the culture if not the people. If Bellona is meant to represent the revolution triumphant, it's certainly no utopia. The squares (the Richards) are terrified; the elites (Calkins et al) are comfortable but isolated and also scared; It's not entirely clear what happens to the commune but it's not good; even the scorpions, free to do what they want to do, apparently want to mostly sit around being bored and having petty fights - and ultimately Bellona chews them up and spits them out.

Yes, interesting to compare it to Le Guin's The Dispossessed, published round about the same time and also concerned with an imperfect 'free' society, and what happens after revolution.

I do need to read that again, given that Le Guin is in my all time top 5 authors & it's one of her most famous, but it had little impact on me. I suspect it's a grower.

I found an expansion of the book's Wiki page that provided a partial key. I won't link to it unless asked because SPOILERS.

link plz!

(ppl looking for other things by delany to read shd also consider his non-fiction!)

( yeah, kind of prefer that tbh)

Would def like to read that Wiki link that WmC mentions - and also Delany's own critical essay on Dhalgren, written under the pseudonym 'K. Leslie Steiner'.

Here tis --
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Dhalgren.html

Some of yall's recent responses go much deeper than my dimly recalled take, from the early 80s---one of the specifics in residue is when the clouds part and the citizens, inhabitants, are like oh wow, two moons---my thoughts were: city has moved to Mars/was always on Mars, but they've forgotten that they are descendants of Earth, have no sense of historical time or place, just a foggy notion, habitual expectation, of things as they are, didja see that, so here's this.

But the author and the Kid are walking around and around the declivities of the surface, tour guides and not--hey Virgil, Beatrice, sorry bout that let it all hang in.

Famous long ago

Well I guess the oh wow two moons would be a jolted stump sense of historical etc but it's in that fog of expectations, one of them little breadcrumb kicks for characters and readers (and author, who said he wrote the book intermittently, over a long period of time: was no surprise to read this comment.)