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| SFReader Forums > SF Fiction and Art > Science Fiction > Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany Help! | Forum Quick Jump
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Jeff Stehman
Sage
      
Date Joined Mar 2005
Total Posts : 1224
| Posted 6/16/2007 9:45 AM (GMT -4) |   | I've never read it, but looking over the Wikipedia entry, it must be a very "interesting" book. 
Wikipedia said...
William Gibson calls Dhalgren "A riddle that was never meant to be solved."
Critical reaction to Dhalgren has ranged from high praise (both inside and outside the science fiction community) to extreme dislike (mostly within the community). Its lack of a linear plot, or even a discernible chronological narrative, its graphically-described homo-, hetero-, and bisexuality, Delany's "modernist" verbal pyrotechnics, and use of stream of consciousness writing has given it a reputation as a difficult novel.
Theodore Sturgeon called Dhalgren "the very best ever to come out of the science fiction field ... a literary landmark." By contrast, fellow writers such as Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison hated the novel. Said the latter: "When Dhalgren came out, I thought it was awful, still do.... I was supposed to review it for the L.A. Times, got 200 pages into it and threw it against a wall."
Doesn't sound like something I'd finish. The entry also warns about the huge number of typos in the earlier (and some later) editions. "Though the 17th Bantam printing (1985) marked a new high in the novel's textual accuracy, the gain became a loss when Bantam let the book go out of print. The 1996 Wesleyan edition constituted an entirely new typesetting, complete with its own unique errors and inconsistencies. Fortunately, Vintage Books was able to license the Wesleyan typesetting for use in its edition, and twice allowed extensive corrections to be made." If you decide to soldier on, at least help yourself out by making sure you have a reasonably clean edition. Good luck.
--Jeff Stehman | | Back to Top | | |
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MichaelEhart
Sage
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 2324
| Posted 6/16/2007 4:39 PM (GMT -4) | | Delaney is difficult at his clearest, and Dhalgren is not his clearest. I don't think it was ever meant to be read just as a novel. I find it alternately brilliant, exasperating, provovative, disgusting, fascinating and impossible, often times within the same few sentances. The old skiffy joke goes "Where are two places no one has ever been? The core of the sun and the middle of Dhalgren."
My first time through took 3 tries, and remember I suffered from chronic insomnia for over 20 years. Like a few other revolutionary works, like Ulysses and The Turn of the Screw it seems to be more fun for the critics to argue over than it is for a reader to enjoy.
"The Scarlet Colored Beast" The Sword Review, September 2007
"Nothing But Our Tears" The Sword Review. August 2007
"Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" The Sword Review, July 2007
"The View From the Shotglass Floor" Ray Gun Revival, coming soon!
"Six Zombies Doing That Mick Jagger Strut" Damned in Dixie, March 2007
"The Death of Number 23" Dark Krypt, Fall 2006
"Servant of the Manthycore" Sword Review, April 2006
"Voice of the Spoiler" Better Fiction, Spring 2006
"Dancing with the Elder Gods"-- Thirteen Magazine, October 2005
"It's a Living" Byzarium---November 2005
"An Exorcism Straight, Hold the Elvis" The Sword Review, October 2005
Host, 2005 Nebula Awards Live Chat, sff.net
http://mehart.blogspot.com/ | | Back to Top | | |
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Frank
Adept
Date Joined Aug 2005
Total Posts : 629
| Posted 6/19/2007 4:57 PM (GMT -4) | | Some people, like Kafka, believed we should only read books that challenge us:
‘Altogether,’ Kafka wrote in 1904 to his friend Oskar Pollak, ‘I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, at a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.’
In a letter to his fiancee ..., Kafka wrote, "I am reminded of a teacher who, on reading [Homer's] Iliad to us, often used to say: 'Too bad one has to read this with the likes of you. You cannot possibly understand it, and even when you think you do, you don't understand a thing. One has to have lived a great deal in order to understand even a tiny snippet.'" Throughout his life, Kafka read with the feeling that he lacked the experience and knowledge necessary to achieve even the beginning of an understanding. [page 89]
(Those two paragraphs are from Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading, one of the most profound experiences contained between two boards that I've ever had. Twice I had the good fortune to meet Manguel and speak at length with him. The man's intellect, and his kindness, were voluminous.)
While this is a bit extreme and characteristically grim of Kafka, I do agree with some of what he's saying here. However, I enjoy both kinds of books: the ones that make us happy, that we read for comfort (like The Wind In The Willows) and I also like challenging books. I haven't read any of Delany's novels yet, but it sounds to me like I need to, and quickly... | | Back to Top | | |
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Frank
Adept
Date Joined Aug 2005
Total Posts : 629
| Posted 6/20/2007 3:00 PM (GMT -4) | | The only Kafka I've read is Metamorphosis and I loved it! I don't know if I'd like his other stuff because I haven't tried any of it yet. Maybe I'd hate it, who knows?
Concerning challenging literature:
I started reading poetry, from Shakespeare and Coleridge to Raymond Carver and Bruce Boston, because I didn't get it. At first I couldn't tell good poetry from bad and I wasn't enjoying it. Now I can tell a good poem from a bad one and I love reading the good ones. I concede that experimental prose can be different matter to deal with compared to poetry, mostly because there are less established guidelines to help you along in your interpretation, and in the end pretentious crap is still pretentious crap no matter how it's delivered. But I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss challenging reading as a useless pursuit. (Of course, god pedlars say the same thing about reading the Bible and I still tell them to go **** themselves, so feel free to tell me the same...) | | Back to Top | | |
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Dave Hardy
Oblast je pri nas ljudska!
Date Joined May 2005
Total Posts : 202
| Posted 6/21/2007 7:04 PM (GMT -4) | | Well, IMHO, there's a difference between challenging literature with serious themes and just plain not connecting with your reader.
I like Kafka, but he is frustrating to read. I'm not sure if he expected his work to ever be published, so he could indulge in nightmares of pointless frustration. I could identify with it, expecially b/c I was living in Prague.
Kafka was a trifle pretentious in his tastes I think. He despised Meyrink, whose work I found delightful.
I've never read any Delany. It doesn't sound like my style.
I like an eperimental narrative style now and again, but not as a rule. Yes, it's important to push the envelope. But there's a reason we have an envelope, and it isn't b/c all us readers are dimwits. Narrative prose tends to fall into traditional forms b/c that's a good way to convey information. If you're gonna experiment, there had better be a damn good payoff.
Dave Hardy
Fire & Sword
Fire & Sword Blog | | Back to Top | | |
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rimworlder
Stablehand
Date Joined Mar 2008
Total Posts : 41
| Posted 3/31/2008 9:11 PM (GMT -4) | | | Its been at least 20 years since I last read Dhalgren.
I remember being totally fascinated by the whole thing, but I was lucky at the time I read it because I was actively attending conventions and there were plenty of people to talk to about it, including Chip himself.
I think one major trick to getting through the whole thing is to RELAX. I'm gonna be pretty outre here and say that reading that book is like anal sex; if you don't relax, its gonna hurt like hell. Given Chip's own inclusion of homosexual themes in the book, I don't believe I'm insulting him by saying that...
The book, at least on first read, is meant to wash over you; stop analyzing and just enjoy the pretty pictures; go for the feel and the raw emotions it engenders rather than looking for boy-meets-boy, girl steals boy from boy styles of plot.
The disaster is never explained; its just a metaphor.
I think though that the thing I find most interesting about Dhalgren is that you can start it anywhere; its both literally and figuratively circular (all good novels are supposed to come back to their beginnings or some such); it doesn't matter where you start and, when you get to the last page of the physical book, go back to the first page and continue from there.
This fact led to the contention that themes and characters in Dhalgren appeared and disappeared with every read, making it truly metaphysical. | | Back to Top | | |
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Nathan Jerpe
Acolyte
Date Joined Nov 2007
Total Posts : 228
| Posted 7/12/2008 10:40 AM (GMT -4) | | | Well I've been reading this, just got through the third part entitled House of the Ax. I've got a long way to go.
Actually as far as the language is considered it is an easy read, I think. There's an occasional twenty-five cent word or two, but there's also lots of dialogue and I feel like my page rate is higher than it is with most books. So those of you who are worried about sludging through difficult prose can rest assured, I think.
What is actually happening is a little bit harder to figure out, though. I think this is due in part to the protagonist having psychotic tendencies. This has actually bothered me on several occasions, made me wonder if Delaney is going down some thought roads that I'd rather not go down...
Still I think that some novels have a key that unlocks them, and Dhalgren just might be one. There's a quote at the beginning:
"You have confused the true and the real." - George Stanley
A simple sentence maybe, but I've puzzled over it for awhile. What does it mean for something to be real, and yet somehow false?
http://roguelikefiction.com | | Back to Top | | |
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