Thread: Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany

I've embarked on a re-read of this lengthy and somewhat difficult book. Anyone else read it? The edition I have has an intro by William Gibson in which he confesses that he doesn't understand the book, either.
I find it readable and somewhat entertaining, but the lack of conclusion, the extended epilogue, and the lack of information about the cataclysm that caused the city of Bellona to become virtually deserted makes it hard at times to plow through.
Delany's insistence on alternative sexual roles and sometimes graphic depiction of same can be offputting also, though not as odd as Triton, another of his "big" novels, which involves the mc going through a sex change.
Some of the parts don't fit...I almost put it down the first time I read it because I didn't believe that the main character couldn't remember his name.

This book BLEW MY MIND in college (25 years ago). It was one of the last "science fiction" books I read and one of the few I still have on my bookshelf to this day. (I put "science fiction" in quotes because this book doesn't fit neatly into that genre IMO. I spent most of my adolescence reading science fiction but my interest fizzled out during undergrad.)

I should probably pick it up again soon...I wonder if it's on the "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" list?

T'isn't...that list is so slanted toward litfic that I don't trust it anyway.
Dhalgren isn't science fiction at all to my mind. It has that vaguely postapocalyptic setting and various unexplained celestial events take place therein, but that's about it as far as the scientific content. I re-read it every ten years or so-this has been the fourth reading. Delany deals mostly in parables, and that tendency is pronounced in this volume, as it is in his more fantasy-oriented books like the Fall of the Towers series. Much more explicitly moralistic than Babel-17 or the Einstein Intersection, which are superior if only for their brevity.

I got 2/3 of the way through it and put it down. Dhalgren clearly was not given time to edit the book into a coherent format. (This has been documented) Portions of what I read were absolute genius, but large portions needed less of a blue pencil and more of a razor blade. I think it is far too over-hyped by a clique of wanna be Joycian sci-fi fans.

I'm interested in learning more about Delany not having enough time to edit Dhalgren into a coherent format. I agree that it is overvalued by the highbrow set of sf readers but I didn't know that there was any deadline pressure involved in a book that took four years to write.

This is from Wikipedia, so take it with that grain of salt. I've read somewhere that the editing problems were even worse than described here:

"Dhalgren is a typographically complex novel. Because of logistical delays beyond anyone's control, Delany had only three days to correct the nearly 900 pages of publisher's proofs prior to the book's first publication. As a consequence, there were hundreds if not thousands of typographical errors in the first edition. Over the years, Delany managed to have corrections made to the text on several occasions, often with the help of dedicated readers and colleagues. Though the 17th Bantam printing (1985) marked a new high in the novel's textual accuracy[5], 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.
Four times in the twenty years from 1982 to 2002, editor Ron Drummond proofread and redacted the text of Dhalgren, the latter two times at Delany's specific behest. Dozens of Drummond's corrections were incorporated into two late Bantam printings, and hundreds more in the first and third printings of the Vintage Books edition. Because of Drummond's work, the third and later printings of the Vintage edition are considered by the author to be the most accurate rendering of the text. Nevertheless, the early submission by Delany of a mistaken correction to the publisher and the publisher's prompt (if promptly forgotten) response led, months later, to the inadvertent introduction of the single worst, most meaning-obliterating multi-paragraph error in the novel's convoluted publishing history, an error that Vintage has failed to correct in subsequent printings. On page 791, in the left-hand column, paragraph 16 should have a single pair of quotation marks, one at the beginning and one at the end, with none in the middle: The whole paragraph—"Lanya said you weren't writing too much. She said she thought there were too many people around."—was initially intended as a single utterance by Madame Brown. Even with that error, the current Vintage edition of Dhalgren remains the most accurate published to date."

Thank you...as it happens, I have both the original Bantam edition and the newest Vintage edition. Delany did a really long interview in Locus that might be what you're referring to-that rang memory's chimes with me a little but I can't find it. Samuel Delany himself believes that the novel isn't scifi...but rather speculative fiction. There are a lot of good interviews available online though. Here's a good one, wide-ranging and interesting:depauw 1
and another:depauw two
Delany@scifi.com on Dhalgren