[PREV - NEWBIE] [TOP]
DHALGREN
January 19, 2005
From material originally written:
January 31, 1992
April 28, 1993 About time
July 9, 1994 I put it all
DELANY April 5, 1997 together, eh?
June 19, 2003
With this book, Delany attacks
the genre conventions of the
field that he grew out of...
Though it was published as
Turning his back "science fiction", and is
on Romanticism? by an author who had an
established track record
As the Toadkeeper put it: of writing works that are
"Dhalgren is a device for (or at least can function
frustrating the expectations as) science fiction
of a science fiction reader." adventure stories,
Dhalgren isn't really a
It's written really well, science fiction novel.
capturing the texture of
experience with amazing
fidelity, despite the fact It's in essence
that on any kind of macro meta-fiction about
level the existence science fiction, written
described makes little with the audience of
sense. science fiction readers
in mind.
In a conventional SF novel,
the mysterious events lead You might say it was
up to the revelation of a designed as a
conceptual framework that consciousness
"explains" them. In raising experience.
Dhalgren, there is no such
framework, there are only Or you might say
hints that such a framework it was designed
exists; faint promises that to piss 'em off.
it's all going to be
explained... promises which
are ultimately broken.
Thus, the basic structure of
the SF story is violated. The fundamental premise
Similarly, the basic problem- of the SF story is that
solving/conflict-resolution the world can be
plot structure of the comprehended, that
conventional story is ignored. uncertainties are
bounded and minimal,
that the universe is
orderly and --
So, in essence this is a crystalline
work of meta-fiction, but
what's amazing is that
it's meta-fiction that
also works as fiction.
Most of the meta-fiction
I've seen just comes Italio Calvino,
across like clever-words-on- Umberto Ecco...
the-page.
Caveat: I haven't
read Nabokov
Dhalgren in contrast has
some really well-realized Resorting to meta-fiction
characters moving through often seems like a cheap, STAGGERING
a brilliantly rendered clever gimmick...
landscape.
AVENGING_RAND
Was Delany holding this
realism up against the
simplified, reassuring nature
of the typical SF story?
Possibly he was presenting
a thesis about the nature of reality,
suggesting that it's naive to
think that the world is composed of
phenomena with neat "explanations".
In the real world,
you *don't* always
get a solid
explanation for
every weird Though there's
phenomena you usually no
encounter. shortage of
plausible
scenarios you
And Delany in particular has had can believe
some problems with unreliability of if you really
senses and memory (which you might need one.
call "insanity"), though I gather
his difficulties weren't often as
bad as that of the amnesiac Kid.
This is characteristic of
Delany's later SF:
Macro-scale ambiguity, up
on the level of history,
philosophy...
"Triton"
"Stars in my Pocket"
TRITON
So I can easily go
on about the Great (A merger of
Significance of realism and (An assault
Dhalgren... post-modern on the tropes
metafiction!) of genre
But that fiction!)
would be
deceptive.
The first time I read
Dhalgren I was fifteen
years old, and I
certainly didn't
follow it on that An example I might
level, I had to be hold up as a
handed some clues by defense of the Someone else's reading
other people first. value of literary of a work can inform
criticism. your own, without
Still, for me, denying the validity
Dhalgren, was of your own.
immediately
accessible, if
only on on the
small scale, in
the close-focus. Though actually, the
first, short section is
It probably didn't a bit of a pretentious,
hurt that it was confusing slog.
about cool hipster
kids hanging around It could be that many
having sex with of Dhalgren's
each other. detractors never made
it through the first
I think this accounts for a lot of dozen pages.
it's strong sales figures. Carefully
written, stylish prose about aimless But after that, I found it a
wandering and kinky sex, with hints fast trip downhill, I was just
of some heavy philosophical ideas in totally sucked in. I resented
the background -- this is a killer having to put it down to go off
formula with the teenage/college to school.
market.
I think people I was reading a
whose backgrounds lot of Kerouac (So, I was schooled in
lie primarily around then, too. the SF tradition, but
outside the SF not limited to it?)
field perceive
this book
completely Strong sales figures:
differently from 750,000 after 18 months
the SF audience. 875,000 after 10 years
For them -- as with my Over 3 times "The
teenage self -- the low Mote in God's Eye" More
level coherence of the or "The Dispossessed". recently,
writing dominates, and I've heard
the intentional, Dhalgren-haters sales of
teasing, imprecision and continually need "over a
ambiguities in the to be reminded million"
higher level conceptual that this book cited.
structures (history, was commercially
technology) are much successful.
less disturbing, perhaps
not even noticed. Verily, this point is
harder for them to
grasp than the absence
The trouble with Dhalgren of an Iraq-Al Qaida
is not that it can only be connection for
appreciated by an elite Bush Jr. supporters.
that it was written for.
The trouble is that it was specifically
targeted at the SF readership, but not
in the usual way.
--------
[NEXT - ORCHID_PETALS]