The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
David Ian Paddy

Samuel R. Delany. Dhalgren. Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1996. 801 pp. Paper: $17.95.

Nothing would be easier than to declare Delany’s 1975 magnum opus a literary masterpiece that far excels the limitations of the science fiction genre. Nothing would be easier, but then nothing would be more denigrating to Delany’s work and his critical intentions. Delany has always stressed his love for the uniqueness of science fiction, and he has provided some of the most illuminating studies into how the genre requires an audience to read in a different manner. Yet, while Delany has defended the distinctiveness of science fiction, his own works have pushed the genre beyond its usual boundaries. This is especially true for Dhalgren.

Dhalgren is a novel of space exploration that investigates the inner space of time and memory. Like one of Italo Calvino’s invisible cities, Delany’s Bellona is a surreal metropolis where the lines between the imagination and the concrete have been erased. The protagonist wanders this postapocalyptic city and, having forgotten his name, becomes known only as the Kid. He is enmeshed in a realm where the space-time matrix has become unglued, where places move and time becomes random. The Kid is immersed in a psychotropic zone where the city’s remarkable control on personality dramatically affects his writing. Composing in a found journal, the Kid can never quite remember whether the writing in his journal is his own or a previous owner’s. Perhaps the most fascinating feature of Delany’s novel is the Kid’s journal, which serves as the final chapter. Crossed out passages remain. Columns of text emerge in the middle of other passages. Texts written at different times stand next to each other. With this journal the reader witnesses the effect of the spatial and temporal dislocations of the city on the Kid’s consciousness.

Delany’s fiction fascinates us with the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, textuality, and consciousness. Dhalgren is a sexy, sexist, and sexual book that challenges how we read and how we perceive the world and its inhibitants. This hallucinatory book contains elements of what we might usually think of as science fiction—the appearance of two moons, a sun five-hundred-times too large—but the setting is also urban realism. Dhalgren shares with such controversial genre-bending books as J. G. Ballard’s Crash (1973) and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) the quality of challenging the boundaries between the marvelous and the realistic, showing us the greatest of what science fiction can offer. [David Ian Paddy]