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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 come
across always seems to
come across like Italio Calvino,
clever-words-on-the-page. Umberto Ecco...
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,
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
And Delany in scenarios you
particular has had can believe in
some problems with if you really
unreliability of need one to
senses and memory believe in.
(which you might 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
on the level of history,
philosophy...
"Triton"
"Stars in my Pocket"
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
level, I had to be
handed some clues by An example I might
other people first. hold up as a Someone else's
defense of the reading of a work
Still, for me, value of literary can inform your
Dhalgren, was criticism. own, without
immediately denying the
accessible, if validity of your own...
only on on the
small scale, in Though actually, the
the close-focus. first, short section is
a bit of a pretentious,
It probably didn't confusing slog.
hurt that it was
about cool hipster It could be that many
kids hanging around of Dhalgren's
having sex with detractors never made
each other. it through the first
dozen pages.
I think this accounts for a
lot of it's strong sales But after that, I found it a
figures. Carefully written, fast trip downhill, I was just
stylish prose about aimless totally sucked in. I resented
wandering and kinky sex, having to put it down to go off
with hints of some heavy to school.
philosophical ideas in the
background -- this is a I was reading a I suppose it
killer formula with the lot of Kerouac might say
teenage/college market. around then, too. something
about me:
I think people schooled in
whose backgrounds the SF
lie primarily tradition,
outside the SF Strong sales figures: but not
field perceive 750,000 after 18 months put off by
this book 875,000 after 10 years something
completely stepping
differently from Over 3 times "The outside of
the SF audience. Mote in God's Eye" that.
or "The Dispossessed".
For them -- as with my
teenage self -- the low More
level coherence of the recently,
writing dominates, and Dhalgren haters I've heard
the intentional, continually need sales of
teasing, imprecision and to be reminded "over a
ambiguities in the that this book million"
higher level conceptual was commercially cited.
structures (history, successful.
technology) are much
less disturbing, perhaps Verily, this point is
not even noticed. harder for them to
grasp than the absence
of an Iraq-Al Qaida
connection for
Bush Jr. supporters.
The trouble with Dhalgren
is not that it can only be
appreciated by an elite
that it was written for.
The trouble is that it was specifically
targeted at the SF readership, but not
in the usual way.
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