Dhalgren

IdleRich

IdleRich
Right, I just read this behemoth this week and I'd be interested in the thoughts of anyone else who has read it. It's a bizarre, possibly circular, novel where the single-shoed main character - known as the kid - cannot remember his own name and suffers from dyschronic episodes as a result of which he appears to lose chunks of time - he also seems to have difficulty distinguishing between dreams and waking. As well as this it is often implied that going by his birth date he ought to be much older than his stated twenty-seven years and yet he in fact appears much younger.
The novel is set in a fictional American city that has suffered an unspecified event leaving it covered permanently by cloud; without radio links and forgotten by the rest of the country Bellona is filled with characters who (mainly) inexplicably choose to remain or even enter the city. No records of dates are kept in the city and people take the day of the week from the Bellona Times which is printed with random dates by an eccentric semi-recluse who lives in a gated house with the upper crust types who have hung stayed behind. On top of this there is the fact that the city seems to change so that things are in different places and there are fires that never go out and supplies of tinned goods seem to be inexhaustible.
The kid constantly fills a found notebook with poetry reading from time to time from the notes which are already in the book and which often turn out to describe (roughly) events which occur later on. For the last chapter the viewpoint appears to switch so you are being narrated to from the notebook - it is not totally clear whether what happens now is consistent with the events have already being described. Also the kid has a seemingly magic weapon always finds its way onto his arm when he needs it despite him having no memory of attaching it. Oh yes, and he keeps seeing people's eyes become totally red, an event which, although never really explained (or is it?), always terrifies him. Plus another moon appears in the sky and one day there is a huge sun which scares the shit out of everyone.
The book is very long and rather low key so that despite the amount of stuff that happens there is lots more time when nothing much is going on. I think that this is rather effective and it's only at the end when you realise quite how much strangeness has passed. The main feeling you are left with is how much of the book has described the main character and his friends sitting down, talking bollocks and engaging in unnecessarily long and boring sex scenes.
Despite enjoying most of the book a lot I basically don't feel that I understood it that well and I'd be grateful to anyone who could help me at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhalgren
 

STN

sou'wester
I've read it, and it just annoyed me senseless. I was really hyped about it, but it was utterly boring and uninvolving and just felt like the crap bits of Edward Dorn's gunslinger. The Kid, indeed! I mean, honestly...

I guess I just didn't 'get' it either, but it left me totally cold.

That bloke with his funny newspapers was sort of cool...
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I liked the way the newspaper gave the date too. I can see that bits of it were boring but I kind of thought that they worked well to hide how mad everything was until you started thinking about it properly. I might be being a bit too kind there though.
 

STN

sou'wester
well i mean it is acclaimed rich, so you're obviously not the only person that liked it. maybe i'm just being a bitch. It just wasn't the hallucinatory, paranoid nightmare I wanted it to be. It was drab and self-consciously weird, weighty and 'earthy'.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Well, looking it up, it seems that as many people utterly hated it as liked it. I honestly didn't know what to expect, just that it was a sci-fi thing that didn't sound very sci-fi. I should say I really like the way he wrote when he was interjecting Kidd's musings - actually rather poetic and enjoyable I thought although I'm not often one for poetry.
 

STN

sou'wester
See, I just couldn't go for those interjections. I'll try to dig up an example that I thought was really bad.

I think there's an early scene (maybe when he finds that weapon thing) that I thought was really, really beautifully written, but beyond that ... i didn't think the writing was bad, but I don't think it was good enough to carry the novel.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Fair enough. What was interesting to me was that it was mostly written in this rather mannered and prosaic style which was every now and then dropped for a few beautifully written lines in a completely different style, almost as if to show that he could do it when he wanted to. I didn't find this annoying though because I liked the dropped in bits so much - although I'm not clear what exactly they were meant to be as they were never attributed, I assumed that they represented the Kid's unconscious thoughts or something but that could be totally wrong.
 

STN

sou'wester
That's an intersting point Rich. I guess the way you're looking at it is similar to Nostromo, in which the first fifty or so pages are rather baffling, to replicate the narrator's confusion and uncertainty. The prose imposes the narrator's state of mind on the reader.

I think, in the book's favour, the reader is meant to be uncertain on the poetic bits - the world bleeds into The Kid's thoughts, and his thoughts shape his/the external world.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"That's an intersting point Rich. I guess the way you're looking at it is similar to Nostromo, in which the first fifty or so pages are rather baffling, to replicate the narrator's confusion and uncertainty. The prose imposes the narrator's state of mind on the reader."
Yeah, something like that I think. It seems (to me) that Kid has two distinct voices, the "high level" stuff when it's clearly laid out "He thought x, y or z" and the bits which just appear without any link to anything else which I assumed to be low-level subconscious stuff - although alternatively they could just be some musings from a wanky (if gifted) narrator stuffed into the book willy-nilly to make it more confusing.

"the world bleeds into The Kid's thoughts, and his thoughts shape his/the external world."
I'm sure that's right. An obvious (and effective I thought) example of this is the bit near the end when he describes events which the reader has previously taken to be real as a dream he once had.
 

STN

sou'wester
I think the bit I liked wasn't when he finds the weapon; it was when he needlessly prods that woman on a cliff or something.

I sort of felt it was a very dated idea of a future. I know 'the future' wasn't the point of the novel but it seemed quite tied to the early 70s.
 
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