Re: Re: Dhalgren's first and last line

> >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.



I often wonder, given the shifting gender modelling that
Delany often plays with, is that the woman Kidd meets
entering the city is "himself" leaving the city. This would,
to me, fit with the spiral nature of the book (is it an
inward or outward gyre?) and also bookend the novel in terms
of Kidd's shifting sense of identity and "lost" time.  For
us, we read and it comes together coherently, but when other
characters ask Kidd where he was, and treat him with
caution, that shows us there is something unsaid, a boulder
beneath the river of text.

Much of Dhalgren reads to me as a hallucination.  There are
flashes of "reality" as the ruined city gives way to a more
ordinary New York City.  I remember one moment when the sun
glints off the glass on a tower and thinking, did I just see
the actual city, or are we still in the ruin?  Could it be
that Kidd hallucinated the gender of the "woman" leaving the
city, or saw, somehow, as a reflection of himself
entering/leaving/penetrating/wounding . . .

?


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