Samuel R. Delany’s DHALGREN remains my favorite novel, though I no longer think it’s the best novel I’ve read (it’s still up there, though). I must have read it 10 or 12 times. It came out when I was in seventh grade. I bought it for the cover, the wonderful and misleading jacket copy, and the fact that the book was huge.
The front cover reads:
Stranger in a Strange Land,
Then Dune and now,
The Major Novel of Love
And Terror at the End of Time
Well, sign my ass up! “The major novel of love and terror at the end of time” — I would kill to have a line that good on a cover. And I’m in seventh grade and nuts about postapocalyptic stories (back then we just called them “end of the world books”), and comparing something to Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune was pretty much a guarantee to get me to shell out my $1.95 (Wow! 1975! Wow!)
The back cover reads:
The sun has grown deadly… The world has gone mad, society has perished, savagery rules over all. All that was known is over. All that was familiar is strange and terrible. Today and yesterday collide with tomorrow. In these dying days of earth, a young drifter enters the city…
And the catchpage (first page you see) reads:
In the crippled city
where time has lost its meaning
and violence is swift and sudden,
a nameless young man with no memory appears…
He shares his great strength
in a loving trinity with a young boy
and a haunted, beautiful woman
in that time before the end of time…
Good lord! All of it off the mark but not untrue, exactly, and all of it just gorgeous.
The book begins in midsentence and ends midsentence. There in the bookstore I looked to see if they joined up, and they did: the book looped. (Though now I would offer that there’s a halftwist in the narrative that makes the book a Mobius strip.) At the time I had not read FINNEGAN’S WAKE, so the idea that an author could reach out through a page and make me do that and by implication serve me notice that I was in for a deeper, more involving experience than I might be accustomed to, had me from the first line. It opened up the idea of fiction for me, something like the way 2001: A Space Odyssey opened up the idea of movie when it was released. And the rest of the novel only continued unfolding and subverting the conventions of the novel. This guy was using fiction to write about language. Holy shit.
I’d been writing fiction since I was about five, but I clearly remember the moment I realized I wanted to write for a living. I was in the school cafeteria about to be late to class because I couldn’t stop reading this book. Everyone had picked up their trays and gone to class and I was almost alone in the big room and totally absorbed. And it hit me: I want to do this. I want to write something that does for someone somewhere what this book is doing to me. I’m thirteen years old, and I want to do this for a living.
The only time I have ever been starstruck was when I briefly met Delany in the con suite at some convention. I was too tongue-tied to tell him any of the above. Which maybe he’s heard a thousand times, I dunno, but I can’t imagine getting tired of it. My friends were astonished. Boyett? Tonguetied? Starstruck? Are you freaking kidding me?
I return to DHALGREN every few years and find it a different novel every time. What I bring to it is different, what I glean from it is different. To me this is a hallmark of a book that stands the test of time: it is not the same book always. What it even seems to be about transforms. In seventh grade that spoke to my very marrow. That height was where I set my sights. It speaks to me still.
How about you? Do you have a watershed moment associated with a favorite novel? I hope you do.
Something about Delaney. He’s like a high priest of science fiction that has seen some deeper truth and since gone apostate. I distinctly recall the first time I read Dhalgren, and how I struggled to impose some form of architecture upon its fluid whole, only to eventually surrender and allow myself to be immersed in its complexity. When I think of it now I recall snatches of imagery, like the incandescent Scorpions emerging from the treeline, or the ubiquitous gutted streets covered in ash and littered with abandoned cars, or that throat of an elevator shaft down which that kid fell, or that bar where Bunny danced and whirled as if in a fever dream.
In fact, it all feels like something I read once long ago while suffering from a high fever, with the colors too bright and the edges too sharp and the characters seeming to be enigmatic ciphers of themselves. What a crazy book. And what a chilling lens through which to reflect upon what befell New Orleans.
Wow, what a great last paragraph! That encapsulates the feel of the book beautifully.
I think you’re right that there’s a sense that “Delany has Gone On,” somehow moved beyond the pale. There are aspects to his fiction that were invisible to me years ago but which bother me now. There’s not an ounce of love in them, for one thing, beyond love for the language itself. And a certain preciousness, a kind of overly deliberate control. You have to be really good for that to be a flaw, frankly. And Delany flawed is a higher bar than most writers can achieve.
Yeah, Delany zonked out on meds and writing on a bathroom stall wall is probably better than what most writers can achieve, but I definitely hear you on your criticisms (which really hit the nail on the head). I mostly read him when I was younger, and didn’t notice the crystalline, almost brittle edge to some of his SF fiction, where everything was so exact and precise and perfectly expressed that it felt as if the characters were being squeezed out of the narrative by the vast impersonal forces Delany handled so well.
Unless, of course, you turn to some of his none SF works like Hogg, and then man does it become all about the characters, and what they like to do to each other, and them some. Also, have you read any of his autobiographical stuff? Fascinating depiction of 1960’s NYC, and his experiences growing up as a bewilderingly talented writer. His wife had Auden over for dinner one night, and when Auden asked him what he did, Delany responded self-deprecatingly that he ‘scribbled SF stories’ or something along those lines. Auden just looked at him, and then turned to his partner, and Delany felt a sudden and intense sense of shame for not standing up for his own writings. Fascinating!
I read TIDES OF LUST, which I have yet to read anyone noticing is a version of FAUST (if I recall correctly; it’s been a long time). Mostly I thought it was hilariously over the top. There’s a scene that is simultaneously homosexual, incestuous, necrophilic, and cannibalistic.
I’ve read a lot of Delany’s memoir / critical stuff (even SILENT INTERVIEWS, good lord). THE JEWEL-HINGED JAW and HEAVENLY BREAKFAST are by far the best. I’m afraid I just don’t relate to his last several years’ worth of stuff.
Delany is like licorice: you either like that or you don’t, there’s not much middle ground there. I love him but now have some caveats. (Hell, I even read all the Neveryone books. Good lord redux.)
You know, I think you are the first person I’ve met who’s read more as much Delany as I have (if not more, good lord). I actually know exactly which scene you’re referring to in TIDES OF LUST, and it’s one I’ve forced my friends to read simply to watch horror dawn on their unsuspecting faces. I’ve not read THE JEWEL-HINGED JAW, but I’ve had it on my Amazon Wish List (and what a long list that is) since what feels like forever. And… I just double checked and saw that it was released this July, so it’s probably going to be my next purchase.
And I agree with the licorice comparison! I took a short story class in college (shocking revelation, that), and everybody there was intent on bashing SF. So I, in all my misguided enthusiasm and desire to hit them over the head with the best I could find, photocopied about 50 pages of STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND (the part where the ‘hero’ has his intelligence augmented, and spends some twenty pages reading the greatest literary works of the galaxy) and convinced the teacher to make it mandatory reading for the next class.
You can guess how well that went. Suffice to say that in retrospect I might have chosen a different text to serve as ambassador to such a politely dismissive crowd.
JHJ is one of the better books about the process of writing, and of writing SF, that I’ve encountered (not that I’ve read many, to be honest).
I wouldn’t really try to proselytize Delany. On my forum I warned everyone that just because I’d waxed poetic about him didn’t mean they wouldn’t hate him. I’d have offered them DHALGREN, though. When it was released it was quite reviled in the genre, but quite appreciated outside it. Partially it’s because it so clearly takes place in a very recontextualized Manhattan, and apparently people all over NYC could be seen reading it when it came out.
Still. I wouldn’t try to talk anyone into liking licorice, either. 🙂
For memoir-based Delany, I also highly recommend ATLANTIS: THREE TALES. I kind of gave up on Delany around STARS IN MY POCKET, but I also think Delany kind of gave up on SF around then, too.
Thanks for the recommendation, and the stimulating conversation thread. I think you’ve said the final word on the subject of Delany, so I’m going to fade back into the mists of the net and await the next opportunity to pop back in with a comment to contribute 😉