Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren

A joycean tour de force of a novel, Dhalgren . . . stake[s] a better claim than anything else in this country in the last quarter-century (excepting only Gass's Omensetter's Luck and Nabokov's Pale Fire) to a permanent place as one of the enduring monuments of our national literature.—The Libertarian Review

(blurb taken from the recent Vintage edition.)

This reviewer has missed the point. Or, rather, this reviewer has missed one point of many in his reduction of Dhalgren to a national monument. To be fair, this reduction is the essence of the work of a traditional book review and of much intellectual work. While I do agree that Dhalgren is an "enduring monument of our national literature," I question the absence of scare quotes in the review. In the world of Dhalgren (and some would say, our world) adjectives—like "permanent" and "enduring"—and nouns—like "monument" and "nation"—can only be written under erasure. There is another reading of Delany's novel, a reading which interrupts any simple reduction to a patriotic monument, work of art, or tool of ego creation.

Situating Dhalgren, published in 1975, in the context of the 1960's and early 1970's is difficult to resist. Indeed, Delany has admitted that the "ruins and wrecks" of U.S. cities provided him with his essential material (Edelman). We also know from the same interview that Delany originally envisioned the novel as a series of five novels in which five dissimilar governments would be overthrown by a "group of people just exercising the wonderful world view of the flower children." For African-Americans, the 1960's and 1970's were a period of extreme poverty and racism, as well as a period of great change with so many migrating from the rural south to the industrial north (Zinn 458–459). During this period there were peaceful civil right marches, militant Black Panther actions, anti-war protests, prison riots, and assassinations. Exercising little hyperbole, Howard Zinn describes blacks as "engaging in wild insurrection in a hundred northern cities" in the late 1960's (450). Dhalgren's Bellona, named after the Roman goddess of war, feels like a city torn apart by a race riot, if not a coup d'état. All of which implies that while Delany's original conception altered significantly, his critique of extant political structures remains. Readers of Dhalgren in 1975 would have been incapable of understanding Bellona as anything other than a near analogue of cities recently torn asunder by urban riots.

What follows, then, needs to be understood as involving an ethical critique of concrete political structures and as not simply concerned with the writing of the text before us because, as I will argue, the city along with every subjectival creation is a product of myth. Delany's text interrogates such monumental myths through a representation of the city (and thereby, the subject) as wounded and open to certain ethical possibilities. In its fragmentation Delany's text represents, internally and externally, subjectivity at its limit, which is to say, a "subjectivity" whose assimilative powers have been overwhelmed by the experience of the death of the other, exposing it to community. However, I read Dhalgren first as a way of thinking about how writing can mitigate against the monumentalism of the subject and the subject's myths that obsess after non-relation, eliding that birth or (communal) relation that comes from the outside and others. Dhalgren becomes above all a "novel" which plays at birth, at never getting beyond birth, always coming and never arriving at presence, and, hence, always remaining with others.

Bellona defies description. Indeed, this city seems lost even to perception, "Very few suspect the existence of the city. It is as if not only the media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it by. Rumor says...