Dhalgren Study Guide

Dhalgren and mythology

Dhalgren abounds with references to Greek and Roman mythology. "Bellona" is the Roman war goddess Bellona, the Waster of Cities. The woman encountered by Kid at the beginning of the novel strongly suggests the dryad Daphne—an association that Kid states explicitly, once in the truck that picks him up as he hitches to Bellona.

The "Kid" in Greek mythology mostly likely represents a student of the Greco-Roman gods Pan, Bacchus, or Dionysius. One should note that these three gods predated Greco-Roman theology but were incorporated more fully than other pre-Hellenistic gods. The goat, or "Kid", was long associated with these gods, agents of the human emotions and the wilder, more violent and sexual side of human nature. The protagonist, the Kid himself, suggests the dual nature of Pan and Daphnis. Despite his wild nature, Pan was a teacher and mentor to those he favored. Daphnis was the son of Hermes. He was a poet, a bisexual, and a youth. In addition he was Pan's pupil. Pan taught him to play the pan pipes, or, in Dhalgren , their modern equivalent, the harmonica. When Lanya plays, the harmonica has an intoxicating effect on its audience.

The strange celestial happenings (the double moon and the immense sun) suggest the sun god (Apollo) and the moon goddess (Diana). Apollo is also often associated with the goddess Bellona, and Kid plays Apollo's role in the replaying of the Daphne myth. Apollo is also credited with sending the scorpion Scorpio to kill Orion in some versions of the Orion myth, while the gang Kid eventually leads call themselves Scorpions. The song Lanya composes throughout the story might be interpretable as a paean, and Lanya's harmonica, also known as a blues harp, may represent the lyre or kithara. This song, like the paeans, is played at the celebration for Kid and his book of poetry.

In the chapter "House of the Ax", the Labry Apartments suggest ancient Crete's Labyrinth. "Labrys" is the Greek name for the double-headed ax—the sign beside the doorway into the historical labyrinth. The suggestion here is possibly some form of the following: the complex of rituals which Mrs. Richards goes through to mimic a normalcy that simply can not be maintained in this devastated landscape is so complicated that anyone who onceenters them has little hope of ever getting free of them. The optic chain that circles the body and holds it, coherent, together, suggests the thread of Ariadne, which Theseus used to escape the maze.

George and June may represent Jupiter and Juno: George is sometimes portrayed in scenes with lightning and has many consorts and children. June's similarity to the goddess is most strongly suggested by her name and her association with George, as well as aspects of her personality, especially jealousy. When Kid talks with George about June, he describes George's response, "His eyes will explode like blooming poppies." Poppies are associated with Juno, and—at that point in the novel—with June.

Tak, who meets nearly everyone who enters the city, can be associated with Charon.

Kid can be read as a personification of Orpheus, the son of Calliope, the muse of poetry. Orpheus is, alternatively, the son of Apollo or King Oeagrus of Thrace, depending on the source. Calliope herself was the daughter of Mnemosyne. Mnemosyne is also one of the names of the river dividing the lands of the living and the dead, in which all who cross it forget their earthly lives, especially their names and personalities. Orpheus was also young, bisexual and was mentored by Dionysus, and also by Apollo.

Orpheus eventually fell out of favor with Dionysus for abandoning his worship for the worship of Apollo, and becoming exclusively homosexual. He was then torn apart by the Maenads, Dionysus’s ecstatic band of female worshipers, for denying them his sexual attentions.

Writing in the Libertarian Review , Jeff Riggenbach compared Dhalgren to the work of James Joyce. A quote from his review was included on the inside advertisement page of the fifteenth printing of the Bantam edition. As the critic and novelist William Gass writes of Joyce, "The Homeric parallels in Ulysses are of marginal importance to the reading of the work but are of fundamental importance to the writing of it. . . . Writers have certain ordering compulsions, certain ordering habits, which are part of the book only in the sense that they make the writing possible. This is a widespread phenomenon." Almost certainly this is also the case with Dhalgren : Writing about the novel both as himself and under his pseudonym K. Leslie Steiner, Delany has made similar statements and suggested that it is easy to make too much of the mythological resonances. As he says, they are merely resonances, and not keys to any particular secrets the novel holds.

Writing, reflection, and narrative

Writing (not only the act of writing, but writing as narration and writing as reflection), is another major theme. The text of Dhalgren contains many sub-texts—newspapers, poems, journals from the notebook which may or may not become Dhalgren itself. Reflection and narration are central to the novel (and indeed may be the entire purpose of the book), ideas which Delany would go on to delve into deeply in his Return to Nevèrÿon series.

Circular text, multistable perception, echoes, and repeated imagery

Delany has pointed out that Dhalgren is a circular text with multiple entry points. Those points include the schizoid babble that appears in various sections of the story. Hints along those lines are given in the novel. Besides the Chapter VII rubric mentioned above (containing the sentence "I have come to to wound the autumnal city"—the exact sentence that would be created by joining the novel's unclosed closing sentence to the unopened opening) the most obvious is the point where Kid hears ". . . grendal grendal grendal grendal . . ." going through his mind and suddenly realizes he was listening from the wrong spot: he wasactually hearing ". . . Dhalgren Dhalgren Dhalgren . . ." over and over again. The ability of texts to become circular is something that Delany explores in other works, such as Empire Star .

But the novel is far more complex than a simple circle and compares more closely with a Necker cube. Delany conceived and executed Dhalgren as a literary Multistable perception—the observer (reader) may choose to shift his perception back and forth. Central to this construction is the notebook itself: Kidd receives the notebook shortly after entering Bellona. In the first several chapters of the novel we see, on several occasions, exactly what Kid reads when he looks atthe open notebook. The notebook appears to take over as the main text of the novel starting at Chapter VII, coming almost seamlessly after Chapter VI. However, though Chapter VII reads as though it is written by Kid, many of the passages shown in earlier chapters appear verbatim in Chapter VII. Yetfor Kid to have read those passages earlier, the passages must have been written before he received the notebook. In fact, the last few pages of the novel show Kid leaving Bellona. The last sentence of that departure sequence is the incomplete one that conceivably loops back to the beginning of the book. However, earlier in the novel the notebook falls to the ground and Kid reads the last page. We, the reader, see exactly what Kid reads: the last four sentences of the novel, word for word. This happens well before a point in the novel where Kid specifically states that he only wrote the poems, and "all that other stuff" was already in there when he received the notebook. However, those four sentences are part of a longer section at the end of the novel which, when read, was obviously written by Kid. This means he left Bellona—taking the notebook with him, for how else would he be able to write about his departure—prior to that notebook being found inside Bellona and given to him. Delany has specifically stated that it is not a matter of settling or deciding which text is authoritative. It is more a matter of allowing the reader to experience perceptual shifts in the same way that a Necker cube can be viewed. Akin to the hints regarding its circular nature, Dhalgren also contains at least one hint towards the perceptual shifts: Denny's book of M. C. Escher prints. Additionally, Jeffrey Allen Tucker has written that Delany's unpublished notes regarding the writing of Dhalgren contain direct references to the novel itself working as a Moebius Strip, and makes a direct connection to Escher's "Moebius Strip".

Within the looping text that comprises Dhalgren , many other textual plays on perception can be found. Imagery and conversations, some hundreds of pages apart, closely echo each other. One case in point: The scenes on the bridge mentioned in the "Plot Summary" above. In another, light sliding across the face of a trucker driving at night is echoed in the description of light sliding across the face of a building. The repeated motif of a scratch down the lower leg of several female characters at different points in the novel is yet another example.

Dhalgren and Delany's personal experience of reality

Samuel R. Delany is profoundly dyslexic and dysmetric. He once spent time in the mental health ward of a hospital. And he has repeatedly spoken and written of seeing burned-out sections of great American cities that most people didn't see, or even know exist. Dhalgren is a literary exposition of all these experiences for the "normal" reader.