Re: Re: Dhalgren's first and last line

Paul, while I like some of your insights here some of your
info has a kind of urbanlegendy quality to it...

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

Seems unlikely; if there is a single text that would be Delany's
tribute to the Wake it would be "Time Considered as a Helix..."
-- in which the character's shifting identities all take the initials
HCE.


>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).

In spiral-bound notebooks, yes, because that's how Delany drafted
a lot of his material in those days. But for the entireity of _Dhalgren_
to have been written in one spial-bound notebook ... let alone on
one side of the pages ... well, either it was one Hell of a huge
spiral-bound notebook, or Delany should take up engraving the Lord's
Prayer on the head of a pin.

>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.

I don't think "throws" is quite the desired verb here -- you don't
throw something with that many blades sticking out to someone
who doesn't know what they're catching. Bad idea.

But, yes, those two scenes very much replay each other, to the
extent that the dialogue between the people entering the city
and the people leaving the city is mirrorred, modulo some
character-specific details. (They're sytagmatically identical, but
paradigmatically othered, if you want to be pedantic about it.)

What's interesting is that the evidence of those two conversations,
plus other bits, indicates that the women the kidd meets leaving
the city as he enters are the same women he meets entering
the city (for the first time) as he leaves; and also that they were
in the city at the same time as Kid ... though I don't _think_ they
ever meet _in_ the city.

>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.

That's a really interesting insight, and I think it fits the text better
than my "spiral" model (which implies a rising consciousness). I'm not
sure they're mutually exclusive, come to think of it -- _Dhalgren_ is
"about many things."

It _would_ be interesting to see the female "version" of the story.


>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.

Yep. And though that one was not entirely new to me, I'm grateful
to -- who was it? Ray perhaps? -- for pointing out that it can also be
read sexually as "I have come, too, to wound the autumnal city."

>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.

Goodness, I can't count how many times I've read _Dhalgren_. Ten
at least. The only other competitors in my world, for the rereading
of really big novels, are _tLotR_ and _tBotNS_, both wonderful in
ways _entirely_ different from _Dhalgren_. (Among other things --
neither Tolkien's nor Wolfe's is a world I would particularly like to
inhabit!)

--Dan'l




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