Re: Re: Dhalgren's first and last line

On 14 Apr 2006, at 19:17, vpoleganov wrote:

> It's on page 806 in my copy (the old Bantam edition).
> Also (and this is a bit off the topic), there's this sentence several
> lines later on the same page: "Maundy, Tributary, Whitstanly,
> Fibrilation, Factotum, Susquahana, Summer-fine day." When I reread it
> about a month ago, it reminded of Joyce's "All moanday, tearsday,
> wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law."
> This looks more like some allusion to Finnegans Wake and not the
> first/last sentence thing. Or maybe it was not done on purpose.
>
> --- In [email protected], jzitt@... wrote:
>>
>> For what it's worth (and I may have missed a post already mentioning
> this), I
>> believe there's a spot in the text where the line comes up again,
> and it does
>> have the doubled "to" in it. Unfortunately, I'm a few thousand miles
> away from
>> my copies of _Dhalgren_ at the moment, so I can't give an exact
> citation.

I thought it was well known that Dhalgren was Delany's tribute to 
Finnegans Wake.

Anyway, if I remember rightly, the repetition of the enclosing sentence 
occurs more or less in the centre of the book and is part of a 
manuscript hand-written in a spiral bound book that Kidd finds and in 
which he writes his own manuscript on the blank sides of the paper 
(which is, reputedly, how Delany wrote Dhalgren).

Now, when Kidd leaves the city, he encounters a girl entering and 
throws her the brass orchid. When he enters the city, he meets a girl 
leaving who throws him the brass orchid.

To me this has always indicated that there is another story, of the 
girl, written on the other side of the paper but equally that the story 
itself is a moebius strip – it only has one side – which in turns means 
that the story of Kidd is not about a boy/man nor about a girl/woman 
but rather about a person. Gender is irrelevant to the 
character-forming narrative – although not to the specific events 
because Delany is quite clearly saying he can only tell this story from 
the point of view of a boy/man because that is whe he is.

When I read Eric's observation about "come to" I thought to myself, "of 
course that's what it means, I thought that years ago." But on close 
self-re-examination, I find no such understanding and I realise now 
that his insight is so powerful and simply right – it fits all the 
evidence, including Delany's love of multiple meanings – that it is, as 
some famous American once put it, a truth that is self-evident.

Thanks, Eric, for this. I shall have to go back and read it. It's the 
only book of that size that I've read three times, but I haven't read 
it since 1984.

Paul Brazier


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