Re: Dhalgren's first and last line

>>>>> "Ray" == Ray Davis <[email protected]> writes:

 Ray> At 10:07 AM 4/11/2006, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
 >> H'mmm. My current model of _Dhalgren_ is almost the opposite of
 >> realism -- I think that the Kidd is precisely contained in and
 >> exactly constrained by the text. This explains, for example, the
 >> kid's odd lapses of memory. When something is skipped over by the
 >> narrator -- as is perfectly normal in a novel -- then he has no
 >> memory of it, because, for him as for us, it never happened.

 Ray> Yes, that's my preferred interpretation as well.

I want to chime in and say that this is also how I've always interpreted
the book.  OK, not always: I think it dawned on me the third or fourth
time I read it.  Another way of putting it is that the Kid isn't *aware*
of being a character in a novel, but rather experiences the *effects* of
being such a character.  (Meanwhile everyone else, like characters in
normal novels, is oblivious to these effects and thinks Kid is
crazy...!)  It's a wonderful (and often very comic) critical laying-bare
of how novelistic worlds differ systematically from real ones.  But then
Delany goes beyond that and has Kid experience effects not just of being
in a novel, but being in a novel in the process of being written, that
is, undergoing revisions and multiple drafts.  I felt that once I had
understood this, suddenly dozens of apparently completely disparate and
inexplicable-seeming things about the book started to make sense,
although I'm sure there's much I have yet to understand.

-- 
Seth Tisue | [email protected]
http://tisue.net | http://www.flickr.com/photos/tisue/


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