o attempt to synopsize the meticulously patterned action of Samuel R. Delany's masterpiece of speculative fiction, Dhalgren (in this new edition, an impressive 816 pages) is a task both simple and foredoomed. The plot points, such as they are, are transparently presented and innarrable. But in the process of reducing the events and characters of this particular novel to a laundry list, one loses all the book's virtues: the texture, the voices, the sense of mystery, the emotional heft.
Nonetheless:
Dhalgren is divided into seven sections.
"Prism, Mirror, Lens" opens with our temporarily nameless and partially amnesiac protagonist wandering in a wilderness. He meets an enigmatic woman and they make love. She then guides the man to a cave, where he finds a treasure: a long chain featuring the various crystals alluded to in the chapter title. This he twines around himself as a kind of body jewelry. Exiting the cave, he looks for the woman and finds her in the process of morphing into a tree. Frightened by this weird transformation, he stumbles onto a road and hitchhikes to the city of Bellona: an urban discontinuity in the middle of an otherwise fully normal America. Crossing a ruined bridge into the shattered, apocalyptic city, he receives a second gift from a woman: a multibladed weapon known as an orchid.
The first person the wanderer meets is Tak Loufer, who bestows on him the name of "the Kid." Tak shows Kid some of the ropes, including the existence of scorpion gangs: violent posses whose members disguise themselves with individual hologram projectors. Kid learns of a force of order amidst the chaos: whimsical newspaper publisher Roger Calkins. Deposited in an open-air commune established in a park, Kid meets Lanya Colson, who will become his main lover for the rest of the novel.
"The Ruins of Morning" discovers Kid gradually learning more of the city. He finds a lost notebook by an anonymous writer, containing what appears to be at least some of the very text we are reading. Kid uses the blank pages in this book to experiment with his newfound love of poetry. We are introduced to a host of other characters, among whom are: the black rapist named George Harrison; a famous poet, Ernest Newboy, now visiting Bellona; Madame Brown, a kind of go-between. The omnipresent clouds above Bellona part one night surprisingly to reveal two moons rather than one.
"House of the Ax" is the most self-contained portion of the book, almost a novel within a novel. Madame Brown finds Kid a job with the Richards family, moving their furniture from one apartment to another. Utterly dysfunctional, the family consists of Mr. and Mrs. Richards, their daughter June (once famously raped by George Harrison and now fixated on her assailant) and younger son Bobby. (A third adult son nicknamed Tarzan will eventually surface in Kid's life.) Kid's relations with the family members culminates in a death.
"In Time of Plague" finds Kid alternating between high and low cultures. Through the mentoring of Newboy, he eventually has a book of his poems published. But simultaneously, Kid is becoming entangled with a band of scorpions led by a man named Nightmare.
"Creatures of Light and Darkness" reveals Kid casting his lot more firmly with the scorpions. His relationship with Lanya becomes a menage a trois with the addition of a boy named Denny. This chapter ends with Nightmare handing over leadership of the gang to Kid himself.
"Palimpsest" sees a brief union of the two spheres of Kid's life, as the scorpions attend a party at Roger Calkin's labyrinthine mansion. (Calkins himself is mysteriously absent, a "man-in-the-high-tower" figure.) Kid's subsequent running of his scorpions mixes disaster with success.
"The Anathemata: a plague journal" offers a fractured denouement via a descent into Kid's very notebook. The prior chapters, despite infrequent snippets of first-person thought-streams, were all narrated from an omniscient viewpoint. Here we witness as through a glass darkly Kid's final confused days in Bellona, before he departs the tortured city across the same bridge of his entry.
The Fellini's Satyricon of SF
Three decades have treated Dhalgren extremely well. But no novel survives this long without undergoing retroactive reassessments and reevaluations. Delany's verbal artistry and overall vision remain unsurpassed in the SF field. Nothing could alter that achievement. But the valencies of some of the themes and topics of the book have darkened, lightened or jumped orthogonally.
First, the prose. This book might very well be the longest attempt at a "prose-poem" in existence. The concentrated punch of Delany's extensive, phase-shifted vocabulary and syntax remains as potent as ever. Rendering the most quotidian actions and sensory data with minute exactness and supernal acuity, Delany fashions a reality deeper than reality. Just one example: the death of Bobby Richards by falling down an empty elevator shaft, and the subsequent rescue of his body, occupies eight pages of taut action. A lesser or different book would have disposed of this scene in a paragraph or three, to reduced effect.
Dhalgren is at least half conversation, and this plethora of voices is one of the book's unique charms. From the long disquisitions by Ernest Newboy on art to the slangy utterances of the most uneducated scorpion, from the street-level treatise on rape by George Harrison to the blithering of Mrs. Richards, this book is a landscape of the American tongue.
Allied with this are the vivid characterizations (not the least of which is the "character" of the city; Bellona is perhaps the dominant "individual" of the whole book). Autobiographical details, of course, filter into Kid's persona, rendering him particularly deep throughout his transformation from naif to predator. But the range of people he meets is equally entrancing.
On other fronts, this novel is remarkably prescient. The media-free perpetual disaster zone that is Bellona has been replicated in our real world in Lebanon and Serbia, Sierra Leone and Somalia. (Even in such a small detail as the orchid weapon, a cage of razors for the fist, Delany tapped into the kind of pop awareness that would produce Marvel Comic's Wolverine in the very same year of 1974!) Culturally, Dhalgren remains wired to the zeitgeist. The racial, sexual and authoritarian issues it raises and explores are more pressing today than ever before. And its treatment of Kid's bisexuality was certainly in advance of its time.
But in its acceptance and celebration of the "altered consciousness" of the '60s, the novel remains a time-bound artifact. Surprisingly, it's not the minimal drug usage that reads as archaic, but rather the kind of "greening of America" cosmic consciousness that long ago disappeared after its brief flowering. The way everyone in Bellona unquestioningly "does their own thing," the "groovy, man" level of acceptance and willingness to experiment--these attitudes now seem impossibly foreign, after the seismic shifts of the '80s and '90s.
Finally, no longer does Dhalgren seem such a lateral departure for Delany. Bracketed by his later works, the novel strikes us as a logical and predictable transition. Its seeds are clear in such earlier works as "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line" and "Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones." And its shock value and perceived opaqueness have vanished, as our sensibilities and reading tactics have been honed by dozens of books almost as challenging, and as SF itself has matured, thanks in large part to Delany's pioneering work.
