Dhalgren
Encyclopedia
Dhalgren is a science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Samuel R. Delany
Samuel R. Delany
Samuel Ray Delany, Jr., also known as "Chip" is an American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes a number of novels, many in the science fiction genre, as well as memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society.His science fiction novels include Babel-17, The Einstein...

. The story begins with a cryptic passage:

to wound the autumnal city.

So howled out for the world to give him a name.

The in-dark answered with wind.


What follows is an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the American Midwest cut off from the rest of the world by some unknown catastrophe. William Gibson
William Gibson
William Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction author.William Gibson may also refer to:-Association football:*Will Gibson , Scottish footballer...

 has referred to Dhalgren as "A riddle that was never meant to be solved."

Plot overview

An event horizon
Event horizon
In general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. In layman's terms it is defined as "the point of no return" i.e. the point at which the gravitational pull becomes so great as to make escape impossible. The most common case...

, enveloping Bellona, prevents all radio and television signals, even phone messages, from entering or leaving the city. A rift may have been created in space-time. One night the perpetual cloud cover parts to reveal two moons in the darkness. One day a red sun swollen to hundreds of times the size it ordinarily appears rises to terrify the populace, then sets—and the same featureless cloud cover returns, with no hint that it was ever otherwise. Street signs and landmarks shift constantly, while time appears to contract and dilate. Buildings burn for days, but are never consumed, while others burn and later show no signs of damage. Gangs roam the nighttime streets, their members hidden within holographic projections of gigantic insects or mythological creatures. The few people left in Bellona struggle with survival, boredom, and each other. It is their reactions to (and dealings with) the strange happenings and isolation in the city that are the focus of the novel, rather than the happenings themselves.

The novel's protagonist is a drifter who suffers from partial amnesia: he can remember neither his own name nor the names of his parents, though he knows his mother was an American Indian. He wears only one sandal, shoe, or boot. (Characters in two other Delany novels and one short story dress the same way: Mouse in Nova
Nova (novel)
Nova is a science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany. Nominally space opera, it explores the politics and culture of a future where cyborg technology is universal, yet major decisions can involve using tarot cards. It has strong mythological overtones, relating to both the Grail Quest and Jason's...

[1968], Hogg in Hogg
Hogg (novel)
Hogg is a novel by Samuel R. Delany, often described as pornographic. It was written in San Francisco in 1969 and completed just days before the Stonewall Riots in New York City. A further draft was completed in 1973 in London...

[1995], and Roger
Roger Zelazny
Roger Joseph Zelazny was an American writer of fantasy and science fiction short stories and novels, best known for his The Chronicles of Amber series...

 in "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ Move on a Rigorous Line" [1967]). Possibly he is intermittently schizophrenic. Not only does the novel end in schizoid babble (which recurs at various points in the text), but the protagonist has memories of a stay in a mental hospital, and his perception of the "changes in reality" sometimes differs from that of the other characters. Also he suffers from other significant memory loss in the course of the story. As well, he is dysmetric
Dysmetria
Dysmetria refers to a lack of coordination of movement typified by the undershoot or overshoot of intended position with the hand, arm, leg, or eye...

, confusing left and right and often taking wrong turns at street corners and getting lost in the city.

Plot summary

Beginning in a forest somewhere outside the city, the novel recounts the protagonist's meeting with a woman. After they make love, he tells her that he has "lost something"—he cannot remember his name. The woman leads him to a cave and tells him to enter. Inside, he finds long loops of chain fitted with miniature prisms, mirrors, and lenses. He dons the chain and leaves the cave to search for the woman who led him there, only to find her in the middle of a field, turning into a tree. Panicked, he flees. From time to time, he sees other characters in the novel wearing the same sort of “optic chain” (as it is called in the novel), suggesting they have been through a similar initiation, though its specific meaning is never fully explained and may have no real significance at all beyond the personal. Eventually, on a nearby road, a passing truck stops to pick him up. The trucker drops him off at the mouth of a suspension bridge, across the river from Bellona.

As he crosses the bridge in the early morning darkness, the young man meets a group of women leaving the city. They ask him questions about the outside world and give him a weapon: a bladed “orchid,” worn around the wrist with its blades sweeping up in front of the hand.

Once inside Bellona, an engineer, Tak Loufer, who was living a few miles outside of the city when the initial destruction happened, meets and befriends him. Tak has moved to Bellona and stayed there ever since. Upon learning that he cannot remember his name, Tak gives him a nickname—the Kid. Throughout the novel he is also referred to as "Kid", "Kidd", and often just "kid." Next Tak takes Kid on a short tour of the city. One stop is at a commune in the city park, where Kid sees two women reading a spiral notebook. When Kid looks at it, we see what he reads: The first page contains, word-for-word, the first sentences of Dhalgren. As he reads further, however, the text diverges from the novel's opening.

In Chapter II, "The Ruins of Morning", Kid returns to the commune the next day and receives the notebook from Lanya Colson, one of the two women from the evening before. Shortly they become lovers. Their relationship lasts throughout the book. We meet or learn about several other characters, including George Harrison, a local cult hero and rumoured rapist; Ernest Newboy, a famous poet visiting Bellona by invitation of Roger Calkins, publisher and editor of the local newspaper, The Bellona Times; Madame Brown, a psychotherapist; and, later in the novel, Captain Michael Kamp, an astronaut who, some years before, was in the crew of a successful moon landing.

The notebook Kid receives already has writing throughout, but only on the right hand pages. The left hand pages are blank. Glimpses of the text in the notebook, however, are extremely close to passages in Dhalgren itself, as if the notebook were an alternate draft of the novel. Other passages are verbatim from the final chapter of Dhalgren. It is here in Chapter II that Kid begins using the blank pages of the notebook to compose poems. The novel describes the process of creating the poems—the emotions and the mechanics of the writing itself—at length and several times. We never see the actual poems, however, in their final form. Kid soon corrects any line that appears to a form we do not read—or removes it entirely from the text.

The third and longest chapter, "House of the Ax", involves Kid's interactions with the Richards family: Mr. Arthur Richards, his wife Mary Richards, their daughter June (who had been questionably raped publicly by George Harrison, whom she is now fixated on), and son Bobby. Through Madame Brown they hire Kid to help them move from one apartment to another in the all-but-abandoned building of co-ops, The Labry Apartments, in which they live. All-but-dysfunctional, they are nevertheless "keeping up appearances." Mr. Richards leaves every day to go to work—though no office or facility in the city seems to be in operation—while Mrs. Richards acts as though there's nothing truly disastrous happening in Bellona. By some force of will, she causes almost everyone who comes into contact with her to play along. Kid's interactions with the Richardses culminates in the death of one of the family members.

The third chapter is also where Ernest Newboy, a well-known poet visiting Bellona, befriends Kid. Newboy takes an interest in Kid's poems and mentions them to Roger Calkins. By the end of the chapter, Calkins is about to publish Kid's poems.

As the novel progresses, Kid falls in with the scorpions, a loose-knit gang, three of whom have severely beaten him earlier in the book. Almost accidentally, Kid becomes their leader. Denny, a 15 year old scorpion, becomes Kid's and Lanya's lover, so that the relationship with Lanya turns into a lasting three-way sexual linkage. Kid also begins writing things other than poems in the notebook, keeping a journal of events and his thoughts.

In Chapter VI, "Palimpsest", the novel's penultimate chapter, Calkins throws a party for Kid and his book, Brass Orchids, at Calkins's sprawling estate. At Calkins's suggestion, Kid brings along twenty or thirty friends: the scorpion "nest." While Calkins himself is absent from the gathering, the descriptions of the various interactions between Bellona's high society (or, rather, what is left of it) and what can only be described as a street gang (the scorpions) is a section of the novel that often garners particular attention from reviewers and critics. This is also the part of the novel where Kid is interviewed by William (later passages of the book suggest William's last name is "Dhalgren," but it is never confirmed).

In Chapter VII, "The Anathemeta: a plague journal", the novel's concluding chapter, bits of the whole now and again appear to be laid out. Shifting from the omniscient viewpoint of the first six chapters, this chapter comprises numerous journal entries from the notebook, all of which appear to be by Kid. Several passages from this chapter have, however, already appeared verbatim earlier in the novel when Kid reads what was already in the notebook—written when he received it. In this chapter rubrics run along beside many sections of the main text, mimicking the writing as it appears in the notebook. (In the middle of this chapter, a rubric running contains the following sentence: I have come to to wound the autumnal city.) Recalling Kid's entry into the city, the final section contains a near paragraph-for-paragraph echo of his initial confrontation with the women on the bridge. This time, however, the group leaving is almost all male, and the person entering is a young woman who says almost exactly what Kid did himself at the beginning of his stay in Bellona.

The story ends:

But I still hear them walking in the trees: not speaking.

Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of

the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland into the

hills, I have come to


As with Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...

, the unclosed closing sentence can be read as leading into the unopened opening sentence, turning the novel into an enigmatic circle.

Dhalgren and mythology

Dhalgren abounds with references to Greek
Greek mythology
Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the ancient Greeks, concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. They were a part of religion in ancient Greece...

 and Roman mythology
Roman mythology
Roman mythology is the body of traditional stories pertaining to ancient Rome's legendary origins and religious system, as represented in the literature and visual arts of the Romans...

. "Bellona" is the Roman war goddess Bellona
Bellona (goddess)
Bellona was an Ancient Roman goddess of war, similar to the Ancient Greek Enyo. Bellona's attribute is a sword and she is depicted wearing a helmet and armed with a spear and a torch....

, the Waster of Cities. The woman encountered by Kid at the beginning of the novel strongly suggests the dryad
Dryad
Dryads are tree nymphs in Greek mythology. In Greek drys signifies 'oak,' from an Indo-European root *derew- 'tree' or 'wood'. Thus Dryads are specifically the nymphs of oak trees, though the term has come to be used for all tree nymphs in general...

 Daphne
Daphne
Daphne was a female minor nature deity. Pursued by Apollo, she fled and was chased. Daphne begged the gods for help, who then transformed her into Laurel.-Overview:...

—an association that Kid states explicitly, once in the truck that picks him up as he hitches to Bellona.

The "Kid" in Greek mythology mostly likely represents a student of the Greco-Roman gods Pan
Pan (mythology)
Pan , in Greek religion and mythology, is the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature, of mountain wilds, hunting and rustic music, as well as the companion of the nymphs. His name originates within the Greek language, from the word paein , meaning "to pasture." He has the hindquarters, legs,...

, Bacchus, or Dionysius. One should note that these three gods predated Greco-Roman theology but were incorporated more fully than other pre-Hellenistic gods. The goat, or "Kid", was long associated with these gods, agents of the human emotions and the wilder, more violent and sexual side of human nature. The protagonist, the Kid himself, suggests the dual nature of Pan and Daphnis. Despite his wild nature, Pan was a teacher and mentor to those he favored. Daphnis was the son of Hermes. He was a poet, a bisexual, and a youth. In addition he was Pan's pupil. Pan taught him to play the pan pipes, or, in Dhalgren, their modern equivalent, the harmonica. When Lanya plays, the harmonica has an intoxicating effect on its audience.

The strange celestial happenings (the double moon and the immense sun) suggest the sun god (Apollo) and the moon goddess (Diana
Diana (mythology)
In Roman mythology, Diana was the goddess of the hunt and moon and birthing, being associated with wild animals and woodland, and having the power to talk to and control animals. She was equated with the Greek goddess Artemis, though she had an independent origin in Italy...

). Apollo is also often associated with the goddess Bellona
Bellona (goddess)
Bellona was an Ancient Roman goddess of war, similar to the Ancient Greek Enyo. Bellona's attribute is a sword and she is depicted wearing a helmet and armed with a spear and a torch....

, and Kid plays Apollo's role in the replaying of the Daphne myth. Apollo is also credited with sending the scorpion
Scorpion
Scorpions are predatory arthropod animals of the order Scorpiones within the class Arachnida. They have eight legs and are easily recognized by the pair of grasping claws and the narrow, segmented tail, often carried in a characteristic forward curve over the back, ending with a venomous stinger...

 Scorpio
Scorpio
-Technology:* Scorpio , Roman artillery invented in 50 BC* Scorpio ROV, a class of submersible remotely operated vehicle, including the Scorpio II and Super Scorpio operated by the US and UK navies* Mahindra Scorpio, an Indian SUV...

 to kill Orion
Orion (mythology)
Orion was a giant huntsman in Greek mythology whom Zeus placed among the stars as the constellation of Orion....

 in some versions of the Orion myth, while the gang Kid eventually leads call themselves Scorpions. The song Lanya composes throughout the story might be interpretable as a paean
Paean
A paean is a song or lyric poem expressing triumph or thanksgiving. In classical antiquity, it is usually performed by a chorus, but some examples seem intended for an individual voice...

, and Lanya's harmonica
Harmonica
The harmonica, also called harp, French harp, blues harp, and mouth organ, is a free reed wind instrument used primarily in blues and American folk music, jazz, country, and rock and roll. It is played by blowing air into it or drawing air out by placing lips over individual holes or multiple holes...

, also known as a blues harp, may represent the lyre or kithara. This song, like the paeans, is played at the celebration for Kid and his book of poetry.

In the chapter "House of the Ax", the Labry Apartments suggest ancient Crete
Ancient Crete
The term Ancient Crete refers to the civilization that existed on the island of Crete, just south of Greece, in the Mediterranean Sea. From around 3000–1100 B.C., inhabitants known as Minoans controlled the island of Crete and ruled the island autonomously...

's Labyrinth. "Labrys" is the Greek name for the double-headed ax—the sign beside the doorway into the historical labyrinth. The suggestion here is possibly some form of the following: the complex of rituals which Mrs. Richards goes through to mimic a normalcy that simply can not be obtained in this devastated landscape is so complicated that anyone who once enters them has little hope of ever getting free of them. The optic chain that circles the body and holds it, coherent, together, suggests the thread of Ariadne, which Theseus used to escape the maze.

George and June may represent Jupiter and Juno
Juno (mythology)
Juno is an ancient Roman goddess, the protector and special counselor of the state. She is a daughter of Saturn and sister of the chief god Jupiter and the mother of Mars and Vulcan. Juno also looked after the women of Rome. Her Greek equivalent is Hera...

: George is sometimes portrayed in scenes with lightning
Lightning
Lightning is an atmospheric electrostatic discharge accompanied by thunder, which typically occurs during thunderstorms, and sometimes during volcanic eruptions or dust storms...

 and has many consorts and children. June's similarity to the goddess is most strongly suggested by her name and her association with George, as well as aspects of her personality, especially jealousy. When Kid talks with George about June, he describes George's response, "His eyes will explode like blooming poppies." Poppies
Poppy
A poppy is one of a group of a flowering plants in the poppy family, many of which are grown in gardens for their colorful flowers. Poppies are sometimes used for symbolic reasons, such as in remembrance of soldiers who have died during wartime....

 are associated with Juno
Juno (mythology)
Juno is an ancient Roman goddess, the protector and special counselor of the state. She is a daughter of Saturn and sister of the chief god Jupiter and the mother of Mars and Vulcan. Juno also looked after the women of Rome. Her Greek equivalent is Hera...

, and—at that point in the novel—with June.

Tak, who meets nearly everyone who enters the city, can be associated with Charon
Charon (mythology)
In Greek mythology, Charon or Kharon is the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. A coin to pay Charon for passage, usually an obolus or danake, was sometimes placed in or on...

.

Kid can be read as a personification of Orpheus, the son of Calliope, the muse of poetry. Orpheus is, alternatively, the son of Apollo or King Oeagrus of Thrace, depending on the source. Calliope herself was the daughter of Mnemosyne. Mnemosyne is also one of the names of the river dividing the lands of the living and the dead, in which all who cross it forget their earthly lives, especially their names and personalities. Orpheus was also young, bisexual and was mentored by Dionysus, and also by Apollo.

Orpheus eventually fell out of favor with Dionysus for abandoning his worship for the worship of Apollo, and becoming exclusively homosexual. He was then torn apart by the Maenads, Dionysus’s ecstatic band of female worshippers, for denying them his sexual attentions.

Writing in the Libertarian Review
Libertarian Review
Libertarian Review was a libertarian magazine published until 1981. It had been established by Robert Kephart in 1972 as a book-review magazine, initially titled SIL Book Review , then Books for Libertarians, and was renamed with the October, 1974 issue...

, Jeff Riggenbach compared Dhalgren to the work of James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

. A quote from his review was included on the inside advertisement page of the fifteenth printing of the Bantam edition. As the critic and novelist William Gass writes of Joyce, "The Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...

ic parallels in Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...

are of marginal importance to the reading of the work but are of fundamental importance to the writing of it. . . . Writers have certain ordering compulsions, certain ordering habits, which are part of the book only in the sense that they make the writing possible. This is a widespread phenomenon." Almost certainly this is also the case with Dhalgren: Writing about the novel both as himself and under his pseudonym K. Leslie Steiner, Delany has made similar statements and suggested that it is easy to make too much of the mythological resonances. As he says, they are merely resonances, and not keys to any particular secrets the novel holds.

Writing, reflection, and narrative

Writing (not only the act of writing, but writing as narration and writing as reflection), is another major theme. The text of Dhalgren contains many sub-texts—newspapers, poems, journals from the notebook which may or may not become Dhalgren itself. Reflection and narration are central to the novel (and indeed may be the entire purpose of the book), ideas which Delany would go on to delve into deeply in his Return to Nevèrÿon
Return to Nevèrÿon (series)
Return to Nevèrÿon is a series of eleven “sword and sorcery” stories by Samuel R. Delany, originally published in four volumes during the years 1979-1987...

 series.

Circular text, multistable perception, and echoes

Delany has pointed out that Dhalgren is a circular text with multiple entry points. Those points include the schizoid babble that appears in various sections of the story. Hints along those lines are given in the novel. Besides the Chapter VII rubric mentioned above (containing the sentence "I have come to to wound the autumnal city"—the exact sentence that would be created by joining the novel's unclosed closing sentence to the unopened opening) the most obvious is the point where Kid hears ". . . grendal grendal grendal grendal . . ." going through his mind and suddenly realizes he was listening from the wrong spot: he was actually hearing ". . . Dhalgren Dhalgren Dhalgren . . ." over and over again. The ability of texts to become circular is something that Delany explores in other works, such as Empire Star
Empire Star
Empire Star is a 1966 science fiction novella by Samuel R. Delany. It is often published together with another book, most frequently with The Ballad of Beta-2. Delany hoped to have it first published as part of an Ace Double with Babel-17, but instead it was published with Tree Lord of Imeten by...

.

But the novel is far more complex than a simple circle and compares more closely with a Necker cube
Necker cube
The Necker Cube is an optical illusion first published as a rhomboid in 1832 by Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker.-Ambiguity:The Necker Cube is an ambiguous line drawing....

. Delany conceived and executed Dhalgren as a literary Multistable perception
Multistable perception
Multistable perceptual phenomena are a form of perceptual phenomena in which there are unpredictable sequences of spontaneous subjective changes...

—the observer (reader) may choose to shift his perception back and forth. Central to this construction is the notebook itself: Kidd receives the notebook shortly after entering Bellona. In the first several chapters of the novel we see, on several occasions, exactly what Kid reads when he looks at the open notebook. The notebook appears to take over as the main text of the novel starting at Chapter VII, coming almost seamlessly after Chapter VI. However, though Chapter VII reads as though it is written by Kid, many of the passages shown in earlier chapters appear verbatim in Chapter VII. Yet for Kid to have read those passages earlier, the passages must have been written before he received the notebook. In fact, the last few pages of the novel show Kid leaving Bellona. The last sentence of that departure sequence is the incomplete one that conceivably loops back to the beginning of the book. However, earlier in the novel the notebook falls to the ground and Kid reads the last page. We, the reader, see exactly what Kid reads: the last four sentences of the novel, word for word. This happens well before a point in the novel where Kid specifically states that he only wrote the poems, and "all that other stuff" was already in there when he received the notebook. However, those four sentences are part of a longer section at the end of the novel which, when read, was obviously written by Kid. This means he left Bellona—taking the notebook with him, for how else would he be able to write about his departure—prior to that notebook being found inside Bellona and given to him. Delany has specifically stated that it is not a matter of settling or deciding which text is authoritative. It is more a matter of allowing the reader to experience perceptual shifts in the same way that a Necker cube can be viewed. Akin to the hints regarding its circular nature, Dhalgren also contains at least one hint towards the perceptual shifts: Denny's book of M. C. Escher
M. C. Escher
Maurits Cornelis Escher , usually referred to as M. C. Escher , was a Dutch graphic artist. He is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints...

 prints. Additionally, Jeffrey Allen Tucker has written that Delany's unpublished notes regarding the writing of Dhalgren contain direct references to the novel itself working as a Moebius Strip, and makes a direct connection to Escher's "Moebius Strip".

Within the looping text that comprises Dhalgren, many other textual plays on perception can be found. Imagery and conversations, some hundreds of pages apart, closely echo each other. One case in point: The scenes on the bridge mentioned in the "Plot Summary" above. In another, light sliding across the face of a trucker driving at night is echoed in the description of light sliding across the face of a building.

Literary significance and criticism


Cover of Vintage edition.


With over a million sales, Dhalgren is by far Delany's most popular book—and also his most controversial. Critical reaction to Dhalgren has ranged from high praise (both inside and outside the science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 community) to extreme dislike (mostly within the community). Its lack of a linear plot or even a single consistent chronological narrative, its graphically-described homo-, hetero-, and bisexuality, Delany's "modernist" verbal pyrotechnics, and use of stream of consciousness writing has given it a reputation as a difficult novel. It has been compared to Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...

's Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern novel written by Thomas Pynchon and first published on February 28, 1973.The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest...

—not so much because of the styles in which the two are written, but in terms of the complexity and ambition of the two works.

Some quotes from the back cover of the Vintage Books paperback edition of Dhalgren:
  • "a brilliant tour de force." - Raleigh News and Observer
  • "I consider Delany not only one of the most important SF writers of the present generation, but a fascinating writer in general who has invented a new style." -Umberto Eco
    Umberto Eco
    Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...

  • "The very best ever to come out of the science fiction field... A literary landmark." -Theodore Sturgeon
    Theodore Sturgeon
    Theodore Sturgeon was an American science fiction author.His most famous novel is More Than Human .-Biography:...



The Libertarian Review
Libertarian Review
Libertarian Review was a libertarian magazine published until 1981. It had been established by Robert Kephart in 1972 as a book-review magazine, initially titled SIL Book Review , then Books for Libertarians, and was renamed with the October, 1974 issue...

stated that Dhalgren "seems ... to stake a better claim than anything else published in this country in the last quarter century (excepting only Gass
William H. Gass
William Howard Gass is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and former philosophy professor. He has written two novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which have won National Book Critics Circle Award...

's Omensetter's Luck
Omensetter's Luck
Omensetter's Luck is a novel by William H. Gass, published in 1966. In his Salon article naming five overlooked American novels written after 1960, novelist David Foster Wallace called Omensetter's Luck Gass's "least avant-gardeish, and his best." And Susan Sontag wrote, "William Gass has written...

and Nabokov's Pale Fire
Pale Fire
Pale Fire is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional John Shade, with a foreword and lengthy commentary by a neighbor and academic colleague of the poet. Together these elements form a narrative in which both authors are...

) to a permanent place as one of the enduring monuments of our national literature."

The Telluride Times-Journal wrote, "Altogether, Dhalgren is a unique and powerful literary masterpiece."

Darrell Schweitzer, writing in Outworlds, Sixth Anniversary Issue (#27, 1976) stated that "Dhalgren is, I think, the most disappointing thing to happen to science fiction since Robert Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of...

 made a complete fool of himself with I Will Fear No Evil
I Will Fear No Evil
I Will Fear No Evil is a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein, originally serialised in Galaxy and published in hardcover in 1970...

."

Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon was an American science fiction author.His most famous novel is More Than Human .-Biography:...

 called Dhalgren "the very best ever to come out of the science fiction field ... a literary landmark." By contrast, fellow writers such as Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick
Philip Kindred Dick was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments and altered...

 and Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison
Harlan Jay Ellison is an American writer. His principal genre is speculative fiction.His published works include over 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, essays, a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media...

 hated the novel. When the book appeared, Ellison in the L. A. Times (Sunday, February 23, 1975, p. 64) wrote: "I must be honest. I gave up after 361 pages. I could not permit myself to be gulled or bored any further." In an interview 27 years later, he said: "When Dhalgren came out, I thought it was awful, still do ... I ... threw it against a wall." Dick called Dhalgren "a terrible book" that "should have been marketed as trash. ... I just started reading it and said this is the worst trash I've ever read. And I threw it away."

Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, a stage adaptation of (or sequel to) Dhalgren, was produced at The Kitchen
The Kitchen
The Kitchen is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary art and performance space located at at 512 West 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City...

 in New York City in April 2010.

Textual accuracy and redaction

Dhalgren is a typographically complex novel. Because of logistical delays, Delany had only three days to correct the nearly 900 pages of publisher's proofs prior to the book's first publication. As a consequence, there were hundreds if not thousands of typographical errors in the first edition. Over the years, Delany managed to have corrections made to the text on several occasions, often with the help of dedicated readers and colleagues. Though the 17th Bantam printing (1985) marked a new high in the novel's textual accuracy, the gain became a loss when Bantam let the book go out of print. The 1996 Wesleyan edition constituted an entirely new typesetting, complete with its own unique errors and inconsistencies. Fortunately, Vintage Books was able to license the Wesleyan typesetting for use in its edition, and twice allowed extensive corrections to be made.

Four times in the twenty years from 1982 to 2002, editor Ron Drummond
Ron Drummond
Ronald Norman Drummond is an American writer, editor, and independent scholar, currently living in Troy, New York.-Writer:...

 proofread and redacted the text of Dhalgren, the latter two times at Delany's specific behest. Dozens of Drummond's corrections were incorporated into two late Bantam printings, and hundreds more in the first and third printings of the Vintage Books edition. Because of Drummond's work, the third and later printings of the Vintage edition are considered by the author to be the most accurate rendering of the text. Nevertheless, the early submission by Delany of a mistaken correction to the publisher and the publisher's prompt (if promptly forgotten) response led, months later, to the inadvertent introduction of the single worst, most meaning-obliterating multi-paragraph error in the novel's convoluted pulishing history, an error that Vintage has failed to correct in subsequent printings. For example, on page 791, in the left-hand column, paragraph 16 should have a single pair of quotation marks, one at the beginning and one at the end, with none in the middle: What currently reads
Lanya said, "You weren't writing too much at your place, either." She said she thought there were too many people around.


was initially intended as a single utterance by Madame Brown as follows:
"Lanya said you weren't writing too much at your place, either. She said she thought there were too many people around."


Even with these errors, the current Vintage edition of Dhalgren remains the most accurate published to date.

Publishing history

Dhalgren was officially published in January, 1975 (with copies available on bookshelves as early as the first week in December, 1974), as a paperback original (a Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl
Frederik George Pohl, Jr. is an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning over seventy years — from his first published work, "Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna" , to his most recent novel, All the Lives He Led .He won the National Book Award in 1980 for his novel Jem...

 selection) by Bantam Books. The Bantam edition went through 19 printings, selling slightly more than a million copies.

A hardcover edition was published by Gregg Press
Gregg Press
Gregg Press was founded about 1965 by Charles Gregg in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey to distribute in the United States the antiquarian reprints published in the UK by Gregg Press International....

 (1977). After the Bantam edition went out of print the book was republished by Grafton
Grafton (publisher)
Grafton was a British paperback imprint established circa 1981 by Granada Publishing Ltd, a subsidiary of media company Granada Group Ltd. It was named after the publishing company's then address, 8 Grafton Street, in central London...

 (1992), Wesleyan University Press / University Press of New England
University Press of New England
The University Press of New England , located in Lebanon, New Hampshire and founded in 1970, is a university press consortium including Brandeis University, Dartmouth College , the University of New Hampshire, and Northeastern University...

 (1996), and Vintage Books, an imprint of Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...

 (2001), the latter two with an introduction by William Gibson
William Gibson
William Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction author.William Gibson may also refer to:-Association football:*Will Gibson , Scottish footballer...

. The Vintage edition is currently (Sept. 2007) in its 7th printing.
  • 1975, USA, Bantam Books (ISBN 0-552-68554-2), Pub date ? January 1975, paperback (First edition)
  • 1977, USA, Gregg Press (ISBN 0-8398-2396-7), Pub date ? June 1977, hardcover
  • 1982, USA, Bantam Books (ISBN 0-553-25391-3), Pub date ? December 1982, paperback
  • 1992, UK, Grafton Press (ISBN 0-586-21419-4), Pub date ? ? 1992, paperback
  • 1996, USA, Wesleyan University Press (University Press of New England) (ISBN 0-8195-6299-8), Pub date ? ? 1996, paperback and limited edition slip-case hardcover edition of 300 signed and numbered copies.
  • 2001, USA, Vintage Books (ISBN ), Pub date 15 May 2001, paperback
  • 2002, USA, Vintage Books (ISBN 0-375-70668-2), Pub date 1 February 2002, paperback

External links

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