Dhalgren (1974) - by Samuel R. Delany
Figure this took more or less the same amount of time to read as my first go-round.
Overall, it feels Unlocked. I get where Delany was coming from, and what the materials were, and how he mixed them. Cruising was a huge turn of the key-- once I realized that this story of metamorphosis opened with cruising, it told me not only who the narrator was, but where the hunting grounds were.
Obviously one part of that Big Answer was The 1970s. The readership for this book, as I imagine it, was in two discrete parts-- the Delany fans, who were championing youth, intersectionality, and an adventurous imagination; and the closeted readership, who were not (I am fairly sure) exclusively cisgender nor inexperienced.
We queers had kind of emerged, in the wake of sexual liberation, but we weren't entirely accepted or understood by our communities, and so a great many of us were D.L.-dormant or selectively closeted. A lot of us were eager to be seen, but the realities on the ground were... not dissimilar to today, really. Bisexuals and non-denominational freaks were (and to a greater or lesser extent still are) The Queers to the "strictly" hetero- and homosexual spheres. There's a lot of gatekeeping in the gay & lesbian communities-- a degree of it is necessary, to screen out sketchy creeps & users --but there's also a component of that mentality that is inherited, or adopted, from the straightlaced. Because when everyone is telling you what your spirit & body are ALREADY telling you ("Sex is sacred! Sex is vital! Sex is integral!") only they're using borrowed & purloined ideologies & terminologies, well, those Good Intentions are actually chaff, being thrown into your affairs, just to fuck with your radar.
I don't believe anybody is 100% anything besides themselves. Everyone travels their own road, and arrives at their own conclusions. That is not a comfortable conclusion for the majority of us, particularly those of us who would like to believe the best of our fellows. We don't want to believe there are Users and Bad Actors among us, stealth agents for the christo-fascist agenda, weirdos who harbor genuine concern over caucasian birth rates. Perhaps we do not want to believe this because-- whither utopia? Perhaps because we crave the notion of a people unified by charity & largesse of spirit. If humanity is, as we queers so wish to see it, a calculus-- a process, not merely Of Change but Of Being Changed by process --then the terms being definite (or not) are part of the equation.
Perhaps the unchangeable, the normies, the straights, the idol-worshipping dotards, are always going to be with us. Perhaps America-- the Mythic america, the Idea of america, the Sales Brochure cannily folded between the bars of our cribs, the america of potentially incalculable virtue & barely choate utopian instinct --is the greater problem. Because it isn't just religion, or capitalism, that's the bug in our program. It's the fundamental bullshit that blinds us, literally. It's the fundamentalist tendency. The one that's addicted to false binaries.
America is THE land of false binaries. Two parties, two genders, two polarities. Rich & poor, blessed & accursed, high & low culture. We carry these notions of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil everywhere with us and (intentionally or not) slather these assumptions all over.
We particularly treasure being able to use these assumptions-- whether it's Rebel Forces versus Tyrannical Empire, or Invisibles versus Myrimidons --to construct alternate Americas within the greater geographical confines of this thing we recognize as society, on this continent. Consequently there are as many Americas as there are sub-genres of science fiction. There is america for the law-abiding, and america for the criminal underclass; america for the wise, and america for the deplorable. America the beautiful, and america blackpilled. American pastoral, and america-built-on-bones.
But, to return to Science Fiction... America perhaps most resembles that. America most definitely is a fiction, and its nature, as an evolv(-ed/-ing) nation-state, is absolutely indebted to science. America is wedded to a certain idea of process, and believes that process-- let's call it capitalism --to be synonymous with Progress. America is vast, and in its vastness there is a foolhardy tendency to believe its resources inexhaustible. Science fiction was one of the major social indicators, over the 50s, 60s, and 70s, that ingenuity, adaptibility, & a knack for invention were proof that we Knew What We Were Doing. No science fiction, no space race, right? And space was the place we were going. We were going to take our successes, as one nation under god, indivisible, straight the fuck over that final frontier. Fer shure.
Now let's retrench to Delany, and Dhalgren. Because the science fiction in this book is a fiction about sciences, social & practical. Sex undergirds ALL that-- point of fact, Delany seems to be saying rather explicitly that sexuality IS the science whereby we may understand ourselves. Sexual chemistry is the engine of growth in the artificial heart of urbanism. If you can't get along with your fellows, you can't co-exist, let alone propagate. And since the advent of psychology as a science with a little 's', it's become axiomatic that sexual identity is a fundamental component of the human psyche. There are more sexually aware, and active, people in major urban centres than anywhere else in the country. It's not just a numbers game: it's how things Actually Work.
But of course cities train humans to exist within them, therefore American cities teach their inhabitants to be schizoid about their desires. Our educational system is not, contrary to the pledge of allegiance, indivisible, nor under god. Liberty & justice are at best tertiary concerns to the fact that this shit is Too Big To Fail. And that's what urbanism was finally starting to do, with the advent of the 70s: caucasians were realizing their racial caste was imaginary, but they weren't necessarily waking up to it, whereas non-caucasians were wider awake than had ever been permitted; women were realizing their power need not be limited to interactions with men, and the realization was starting to make the greater masses of men shit scared; and the queers, darling, were realizing themselves.
I know, blah, blah, blah. I do this every time. I talk about a book by not talking about the book.
(At least this time, not by talking at bible length about myself. Much?)
The big concept of Dhalgren, to me, is that Delany realized american urbanism was a science-fictional state, and that living in a science-fictional state, in a major metropolitan city, stresses & reshapes the sexual individual. Cities force change. The modern american city, at the time of Dhalgren's publication, was in crisis, with infrastructure breaking down, racially-charged rioting, and scarcity being accelerated by (purposefully gamed,) asymmetrical systems of commerce.
How do you find unity within that?
Why, you find it by looking for it. Maybe you find it by asking your neighbors. Maybe you find it by accepting a name, or rôle, or position. Maybe it was already there, waiting for you to seek it.
Dhalgren is, after all, a quest novel. But perhaps a unique quest novel, in that it asks whether the quest necessitates a hero. If the quest is just going out and getting laid...
Yeah, folks, I'm not getting to a Final Point with any of this maundering. Dhalgren is a fascinating little thing. It can be infuriating, even. The text is unstable to the point of disintegration, and interminable if you're short on patience (or just not fond of logic puzzles), but it's brimming with self-awareness and a real zest for asking Why, Goddammit, Do You Think It Has To Be This Way.
I don't believe in the great american novel. I think the great american novel is a rosy bucket of balls. But Dhalgren is definitely one of the great lowercase-'a'-merican novels. It does so by breaking the definition of science fiction as being stolidly Science-y, it restores sexual honesty to the generally muddied and messy state of city (& communal) living, and it asks, over & over again: "Do the categories matter?" Do the classifications apply to you? Are "you" who You think you are? And what is that, exactly?
Dhalgren is exactly nothing. It does not contain every possible variation of every possible formula for what can be; in fact, it doubly refuses the Joycean dead-end of Ulyssess, with its white male hero(es) in their eternal peregrinations in a city whose imaginal limits are determined by colonialism & cultural "wisdom", because it neither requires nor accepts ANY SINGULAR INTERPRETATION as a genre work. Dhalgren is not utopian, dystopian, or even queertopian. Dhalgren is, exactly, no-thing.
Dhalgren is Bellona. And Bellona-- goddess of war, leveler of cities --is the greatest american city that never was, viewed from within the event horizon of its author's experiences in Great American Cities, viewed from as many angles as may be found within its borders. These are plainly marked, if one may see through the fug of words to perceive them. There are multiple points of view, and multiple bolt-holes through which to See, what Dhalgren is about. And... ultimately?
It's problematic. Its problems are america's problems. They are not American Problems, exclusively. But they are the terms by which Delany's equation may be read.
Which solves the puzzle well enough for me.
What's it about? It's about 801 pages.
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