Review! That! Book! DHALGREN by Samuel R. Delaney, Part 2

Still with me? Not done with Dhalgrenyet in the critical sense? Could it be that Dhalgren is not yet done with you? Are you being actively observed? Are you sure that you exist??

Whatever the circumstances, awesome! I knew I wasn’t riding this roller coaster alone. Welcome back, sciencefictionados!

Here’s Part 1 of my DHALGREN review. In case, y’know, you’re new to this epic madness.

Image from New York Magazine

Art

We talked about perception in the last post. Art is one way that people make themselves known in Bellona, so you can look at it as kind of an attempt to shape their own personas and identities, or as a grab at self-preservation as Bellona faces down a rolling existential crisis.

But what happens when people don’t bother to examine that art? I’m mainly talking about the public’s reaction to the Kid’s debut poetry book, BRASS ORCHIDS. Everybody reads this thing, but even the sole critical jerk who the Kid talks to is reading it in search of references to themselves. (The critical jerk is internally comparing it to his own book of poetry, so y’know. Still self-referential.) As we talked about in the last post, everybody in Bellona needs to be seen – possibly, they need to be seen to exist.

But many of them don’t have the ability, confidence, or motivation to make themselves visible through art. Granted, art isn’t the only way you can be visible in Bellona – Madame Brown provides therapy, for example. But one person in particular produces nothing, does nothing, and secludes themselves from most of the rest of Bellona, even by reputation. I’m talking about Mary Richards, whose main accomplishment is the facade of normalcy that she maintains over the Richards family.

Her husband and kids help validate her existence, of course, even as she refuses to validate the existence of Bellona’s transformation by observing it. But she’s really a leech – without her family and her pet artists to observe her, she flirts with meaninglessness, and therefore the void. That’s why she kind of collects intelligent people with whom to surround herself. The gang members, on the other hand, don’t need to make art because they can cultivate notoriety. They’re all awed by a famous person and curious about their own depictions in art, but neither have nor need any sophisticated understanding of the meaning behind the poetry. Why duplicate effort? They’re famous and feared and consistently make it into the paper. Plus, there are enough of them that they can observe one another, no art needed. Their continued existence in Bellona is assured.

From The Warriors, but just imagine it’s Bellona

The Kid doesn’t completely understand his own poetry either, but that does bother him, possibly because he senses that there should be a reason for it. And isn’t his reason the same as everyone’s? We’ll all die someday and the memories about us will disintegrate faster than our hollowed-out bones, but if we do something meaningful, and then write it down, we achieve some kind of immortality. People still talk about Homer. The Kid is grappling with what might be an immediate loss of existence in a place that’s existentially unstable, but that’s really just a short-term metaphor for what will eventually happen anyway.

Frustrated by his own lack of insight, and possibly concerned that anything he does will qualify him as delusional, the Kid tries to glean the quality of his poetry from others, even asking the established poet Ernest Newboy if they’re “good.” Almost nobody gives him any solid answers. Many say that they like the poems, but the only useful critical feedback he receives is brutal and unreliable. And, for what it’s worth, probably accurate. The Kid himself points out that people are partially enamoured of his poetry because they like the idea of a young poet. (Most of the Bellonans seem to think that the Kid is around 17, even though he’s closer to 30.) It would follow that the poetry is stylistically immature to support the misconception.

This begs an important question: how much of the Kid’s art is a lie? Half of BRASS ORCHIDS wasn’t even written by him, and he never finds the author. We may get the most genuine version of the Kid’s artistic expression when the narrative switches to the first-person perspective in the final part. Even there, he edits his version of reality and discusses his relative ability to recall and fabricate conversations with Lanya. This, my dear Watson, is important because gradually we only see Bellona through the Kid’s eyes. It may as well not exist if he’s not telling us about it because he is the storyteller.

He’s controlling Bellona in a whole new way. The Kid levels up creatively in Part 5, even though that advancement is clearly not meant for any eyes but…his own? Lanya’s? The scholars’? Ours? Maybe he means it to be a record for his lucid self in case he loses awareness again. If that’s the case, then Katy bar the door. We know nothing about non-lucid Kid except that lucid Kid is terrified of him. That guy, if he exists, could have an entirely different priority set than the Kid we read about in parts 1 through 4. We don’t know if he experiences continuity with lucid Kid’s actions at all and there’s no telling how truthful his representation of Bellona is.

Got it from Pinterest

That said, the diary references things that have value to lucid Kid. There’s a good chance that the lost time that we discussed earlier was actual lost time in a real sense rather than a memory break. It’s tantalizing to imagine that we might be dealing with an unreal or unreliable version of the Kid in Part 5, (god, so tantalizing) but I consider it a stretch.

Call me blind, but it seems like the Kid doesn’t intend for the diary to ever see publication, even though he does edit his word choice as though the diary is creative writing. (Hell, maybe it is!) It’s also got to be a distinct work from his second book of poetry because that one goes up in flames prior to publication, whereas this one ends up being examined and annotated by scholars.

The Kid’s shift from publishing his poetry to keeping them (and his diary) a secret may indicate his progression from needing others to validate him to being capable of observing himself – developing the ability to navel-gaze. His ultimate progression to the monastery, with its meditative associations, suggests that he’s forming a sturdier sense of self.

Violence

Now we’re getting into the juicy stuff! Blood! Beatings! Gangs! Violence!

From Brown Paper Tickets

Except that violence in this book is kind of an unusual event. When it appears, it’s an artifact of the general chaos, sort of a side effect of being in the city. Sometimes, it’s how people acquire optical chains, as when June kills her brother and takes his. It also tends to appear at moments of transition, but isn’t that true for the outside world as well?

The Kid’s introduction to Bellona includes a random beating by some Scorpions, but afterward, he generally doesn’t encounter trouble unless he goes looking for it. This is true even after he takes over the gang himself. The exception is the book’s conclusion, where he’s chased out of the city by worsening fires. Kid enters, gets beaten. Kid gets beaten, and leaves. HMMM. Maybe Bellona is pushing him out of the nest now that he can fly. Maybe the Kid is running into a new challenge: actual reality, where he’ll probably need to wear shoes on both of his feet.

That’s not to say that the Kid’s presence in the city is unmarked by violence. In fact, he experiences (and causes) his fair share. He hears about even more, often racially motivated or rumored to be so. The people who hole up with guns in the department store are one example, as is the mass shooter. But for all of Captain Kamp’s nervousness about the city, for all of Mary Richards’s terror, for all that the city is known far and wide for its violence, Bellona doesn’t seem to be too much more dangerous than New York in general.

I do think that it’s interesting how everybody in Bellona walks around armed with orchids when firearms and ammo are abundantly available. Any weapon will tie up one of your hands, but the orchid literally cages it. Lanya is fond of slipping her fingers through the blades to reach the Kid’s actual, ugly hand and hold it. Metaphor? If so, it’s oddly clunky for this book. It strikes me as more important that the Kid often finds the orchid on his hand despite his having not consciously donned it. In some cases, it’s impossible for him to have put it on given the circumstances – it just appears there, ready for action. As the novel continues, and the Kid self-actualizes, he walks around with it hanging from his optical chain more and more often. It randomly appears on his hand less and less.

Hey, optical chain! (Kinda.) Some jewelry site

But it’s not even really his orchid, is it? The Kid gets it from someone who’s leaving Bellona when he enters, and when he leaves, he gives it to someone else. Is the orchid power? Influence? Insecurity? It’s a cage, so it could represent the way that the Kid is imprisoned by his own methods, not only of violence, but of generating any influence, notoriety, fear. His desire to save himself from harm, which in Bellona requires him to take off the orchid and take up the pencil.

The Kid’s poetry derives from the wounding of Bellona as a city by the strange disaster that has made it as it is. The poetry that helps to manifest the city and cement its reality is a result of its very instability, and it is the observation of this strange town that may just be keeping it alive. It’s a GODEL, ESCHER, BACH eternal golden braid recursive creativity situation, an Escheresque rendering of reality and its denizens locked in a delicate existential balancing act – and no, I’m not even going to try and review that book. You do it.

Bellona-Specific Stuff

Originally I was going to talk about sex and sexuality here, but I’m preoccupied with my weekend plans and not likely to do a good job with that topic right now. So I’m saving that (and race) for the next part, the part I’ll write after my dear visiting relation is happily on their way back to where they came from. Mmkay? (Also, not to put too fine a point on it, I’m at work right now and I’d prefer that my boss didn’t see what I have to say about George and June.)

From sclera-contacts.com

There are a number of items that appear in the book which seem to be unique to Bellona. The orchids are an excellent example. The light shields that the Scorpions use are another one, and of course, the optical chains appear to only exist within and near the city. Bellona also features frightening red eyecaps and a kind of color-changing fabric that Tak turns into a dress for Lanya. We can infer that these are Bellona-specific items by context. When the Kid gets his optical chain, he’s not quite in Bellona yet, but his acquisition is uniquely Bellonan and he later asks Madame Brown what the chains mean. Speculation about that is rampant, but I suspect that they’re indications of trauma.

At no point does the Kid ask “what is this,” even when gifted an orchid or finding the optical chain in a cave. Certain items awe him or freak him out, but he doesn’t really question them in the moment. He never seems to have seen a light shield before, for example, but just accepts that it’s a thing the first time he sees one. From a techie perspective, those little boxes are really interesting. They’d have to be extremely advanced technology even by 21st century standards. Not only do they project a freaking hologram, but they project a freaking unbroken, wraparound hologram from a single point located on the wearer’s chest. Including behind their back! It must be capable of bending light itself. That’s next to miraculous! Even so, these marvels of engineering are light, battery-operated, and turn up all over the place. Considering that nobody in Bellona knows what the exact date is, I think the existence of light shields help make the case that Bellona is actually located in a postapocalyptic future. More on that later.

Make no mistake: the light shields are products. Someone’s manufacturing them. Tak, who might be the only person in the city who actually knows what’s going on, shows the Kid a warehouse full of orchids, optical chain, red eyecaps, color-changing fabric, and – yes – light shields. It’s not clear whether they’re being shipped in or were made in Bellona prior to the disaster, but in many cases, they’re all that the Bellonans actually own. And there is enough stuff in that warehouse to keep many, many more Bellonans stocked with the essentials.

We know that the city, originally meant to hold millions, now houses only thousands, but what a weird assortment of things to sell to an ordinary urban populace! Banks and banks of eccentric handheld bladed weapons? Wearable holograms that obscure your identity? No city in the world would stand for that kind of thing. We’d see it being imported if it was being manufactured outside, despite the “Made In” tags on the optical chains, and since nobody in Bellona has a job, their source is a mystery on a mystery. The orchids and light shields, at least, may be metaphorical for the deceptions and perceptions that limit our engagement with the world. Then again, I might be overthinking it.

Current pinnacle of light shield technology. From AppAdvice.com

The stuff might also represent  Bellona levels. Think video games. The Kid levels up when he gets an optical chain because he sets his intention to go to Bellona, then again when he enters Bellona and acquires an orchid, then again when he takes action with the Scorpions and gets a light shield. Every Bellona object he gets seems to be some kind of reward. But he never finds the eyecaps that Tak wears, and nor does he ever take advantage of Lanya’s color-shifting fabric himself. Does that mean that Tak and Lanya are on different quests? They’re certainly among the most realized characters in DHALGREN, aside from the Kid, and either could populate their own Bellona book with no trouble. (Mr. Delaney, if you’re reading…) It makes me wonder if there are other Bellona-specific things that they’re encountering that the Kid is not. If I could get one thing for Christmas, it would be a DHALGREN video game where I can puzzle out the rules. That, or another Bellona book so I could start to triangulate the references in this one and expand my fan theories. (Mr. Delaney?)

Other than these items, Bellonans treat general consumer goods with utilitarian disrespect or a casual lack thereof. The Scorpions just like to smash things, for example, and the Kid actually urinates on his notebook of poetry at once point. Mary Richards is the exception to this rule. Her non-Bellona consumer goods aren’t just important to her, they’re her tether. I find it significant that her daughter kills her son with one of Mary’s pointless decor objects, a rolled-up rug. Of all the people we meet in Bellona, Mary’s the only one who has a relationship to her stuff that’s not utilitarian or artistic, and that relationship is toxic as all get-out.

In a place where nobody uses money, consumer goods are pointless. In a place where the only objects of value come to you on a meritorious basis, it’s action that’s currency. It makes me want to plunge into the economic aspect of DHALGREN, because of course that’s a thing. (This is the man who wrote Nova.) But I already promised to get into the sexin’ next, and it’s been 2700 words, so here I’ll leave you.

Have a lovely weekend, sciencfictionados!