abrasions through which blood slowly wept. Days or years, seconds or months: the gouges did not go away. Oozing and clotting and cracking again, when tended the wounds would not heal; neglected, they only persisted, a permanent fixture, the mark of an imagined victory.
I read the whole of Dhalgren recently. The book is long, dull, indulgent, incoherent, sometimes as much as self-contradictory (at least I think) and totally inconclusive from its premise to its themes and characters. And those are its good points.
Assured that this sounds scathingly negative, I could happily leave the review there just to confound readers with the numeric scores below. After all, Dhalgren never explains itself -- and that’s half of its charm -- so why should I? But well, it wouldn’t be an accurate picture of my thoughts on the book.
And so here are my thoughts: every interpretation of this book that I’ve read so far feels like a reach. Why? Because every serious question that’s asked in this book lacks a clear answer in the text. And the book is long and detailed enough, and loops around to the same themes so many times, that you can flip to a random chapter and pretend something in there is the answer. And you wouldn’t be wrong. Because to me, that’s what it seems Delaney was writing: a criticism exercise where you can never be entirely wrong or entirely right. In his unquestionable success at that goal, Delaney manages one of the most profound messages in literature: that the same is true for all criticism, and all acts of interpretation, as both creator and audience. You can choose to speculate wildly or deeply analyze the text, and the result is the same, like throwing wild haymakers or precise combinations at a peak Muhammad Ali. You miss either way, and only give Dhalgren the chance to rack up more points. After all, the book soaks up negative criticism and loses no prestige for all those one-star thrashings.
The fact that Dhalgren is still making you talk nearly fifty years later, in praise or in condemnation, is monument enough to its worth.
Of course, the book wouldn’t work very well if it were always incoherent, or if it didn’t have the setting or characters to compel you to find a temporary anchor in its world. And it does: the characters in Dhalgren are indelibly human. And the grit and ash of the world can be smelt and tasted on every page. You may turn the leaf ten or fifteen times, sure of the sudden momentum of the story, and begin to really want to see where things are going. And then the narrative turns left, sidestepping the conclusion to the plot thread you were so interested in and leaving you adrift in a story whose very premise seems to have shifted. You may, eventually, find two-thirds of an answer, which is just enough to realize that the book was never trying to provide one to begin with. And so time meanders, nonlinear in ways that make you question whether it was coherent all along and... perhaps you’ve just misremembered a passage here or there?
He went on throwing punches, passersby unconvinced that he was aiming for anything at all. A man mad in the streets, the pavement his only enemy. All you or I know, he didn’t. In delusional victory, he finally departed having never closed distance to the no one with whom he’d fought. As he turned away, he inspected both hands to find
Content warning: sexual, physical and emotional violences of all sorts; pages and pages of pornography; ill-defined mental illnesses, in wide variety; domestic abuse; strong language.
Plot: 0
Characters: 10
Themes: 8
Prose: 10
Overall score: two moons and an oversized sun.
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