I'll be honest, I don't understand this book. William Gibson writes in its introduction that he never felt it a book to be completely understood. This might be so, but it was, particularly at the beginning, difficult for me to keep going.
The language is jumbling through itself, interruptings are common, there's no logical sense it seems, so you have to trust your feelings.
Is it one big metaphor? For a writer? For life? For despair?
Bellona, a strange dystopian city is nowhere. It is abandoned, yet there is still food in cans and liquor stores to be plundered. People live there, people even travel there, in that autumnal city.
The end of life?
I have finished it without reading reviews but will definitely look for them in order to understand it better.
From my notes:
- time running backwards? sideways?
Yeah, time plays an important part. Bellona seems to stand alone in everything, space and time. - People look up to the Kid for writing his poems. Is it the power of written word? There are explanations why it is so important (only understandable when you have lived there, it could only have been written by someone who has lived there)
- "I have logic and laughter, but can trust neither my eyes nor my hands"
- "I am lonely, he thought, and the rest is bearable. And wondered why loneliness in him was almost always a sexual feeling.
From sites:
- Dislocations, discontinuties, and ontological entanglements are clearly central to Samuel R. Delany‘s design. The novel’s setting (and, arguably, main character) is a bombed-out Midwestern metropolis called Bellona – a spatial, temporal, and psychosexual labyrinth in which our Theseus, an amnesiac poet-adventurer known as Kid, will or won’t find himself. And as it embodies the instabilities of institutions, identities, and power relations, Bellona may be the metaphor par excellence for the 1960s.
[...]
Dhalgren generates a fair amount of suspense out of questions of “what really happened.” That answering those questions would compromise the book may not excuse the omission – at least, in the eyes of my friends who never finished. For those Dhalgrenites in the cafes and subways, however, the novel’s radical open-endedness seems to have been a virtue.
http://www.themillions.com/2010/06/difficult-books-dhalgren-by-samuel-r-delany.html - It was in many ways the culmination of science fiction's New Wave: where writers such as Aldiss, Ballard, Disch, Zelazny, and Delany himself had pushed the envelope, Dhalgren finally ripped it up and scattered the pieces. Mainstream critics, caught flat-footed, came up with the term "magical realism" in an attempt to link it to "respectable" if somewhat outré writers such as Borges and Garcia Marquez.
[...]
It is dense, with events, revelations, intuitions, insights, and a sensuality that is rare in fiction -- not merely sexual imagery, but a full range of sight, taste, smell, sound, a density of sensation that is sometimes almost overpowering.
[...]
In many ways I see it as a forerunner, perhaps even ancestor, of contemporary renegade "genres" such as slipstream. (There are many other possible antecedents, of course, going back to Philip K. Dick, Delany, J. G. Ballard and beyond.) Mostly, and it's ironic considering the thematic thrust of the novel toward searching for answers, it's because Delany, while rejecting consensus reality, or even the idea of consensus reality, doesn't explain anything of the context, which I've found to be characteristic of those writers generally considered "slipstream," such as Jonathan Lethem or Carol Emshwiller or Karen Joy Fowler. It's a phildickian worldview (sorry, but I've been dying to use that word ever since I discovered it), mordant, dark-edged, treading the edges of sanity, and it's just there and we have to deal with it, somehow.
http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book_delany_dhalgren.html - Dhalgren the book, the story, blurs the familiar territory-boundaries between author and book (here in the real world) and the fictional world created by that author and book, and the characters within that fiction, and their power over it. Early in the book Kid finds a used journal that someone has written in - on just one side of the pages - and he uses the blank pages to write down his own poetry and experiences in the city. But by the end you and he realize that he himself may have written those previous passages, or someone like him going through the same events. In fact, some passages appear to tell his story before it even happened.
By the last chapter of Dhalgren, it's clear that what you have in your hands is supposed to be that journal, after Kid has added to it (and maybe added to it again at a later/different time - or else someone like him going through a similar story?). You begin to wonder if the story relives or retells itself with a slightly different cast each time, as if the strange city is remixing the people (characters) and events over and over. You also begin to doubt which passages in the book are a truthful recounting of events (within the fiction), or where the characters may have written untruths or half-truths (maybe simply because they experienced events differently, noticed different details, paraphrased conversations later with more or less accuracy).
[...]
You can't trust what you have in your hand (Kid's journal, Delany's Dhalgren), and that messes with your expectations as a reader. It breaks a sort of implicit contract we have with authors, in a way that expands what literature can do. The story here affects the book, writes the book, which in turn presents the story. The characters are authored by the author, yet within the story they author the story, which is apparently authored before they are around, but not by Delany but someone within his fiction-city. It's a strange loop, a playful tangled hierarchy of ontology that turns an otherwise unnecessarily long and dense book into a fun, exciting, experimental read.
[...]
So maybe rather than seeing Dhalgren - and the notebook it represents - as showing a story relived over and over in slightly different remixes by the city, you can see it as one story that is transcribed and passed along in a somewhat jumbled, misremembered, imperfect state, and so we end up with these mysterious isomorphisms (the beginning and the end being the same events, but not quite the same) and these mixing of details across characters (the leg scratches and naming of characters).
