What I've Been Reading – 2010, Part 4

Dhalgren by Samuel Delany

Last month I read Samuel R. Delany's novel Dhalgren, which is a very strange and yet fascinating work. Science Fiction – The Illustrated Encyclopedia characterized it as "perhaps the most difficult SF novel that has still sold in large numbers". While I have read a few other SF novels that I recall taking a similar amount of extra effort, such as J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World and Stanislaw Lem's Solaris (the latter in particular being well worth the effort), it’s certainly true that Dhalgren is not an easy read – not to mention the fact that it is considerably longer than most other novels, science fiction or not. It begins with a bizarre, dream-like sequence (indeed, later in the novel it's made clear that the protagonist half believes it to have been a dream), followed by the protagonist's entry into Bellona, the weird city that serves as the setting for the rest of the novel. Bellona has suffered an unexplained disaster that has caused most of its population to abandon it and prevents any radio or television signals from getting in or out. Most of the rest of the country has forgotten it, but it has attracted a number of free spirits, army deserters, and social misfits, who live there along with the remaining original inhabitants. But as eventually becomes clear, there is much more to the city's oddness than simply being half empty and inhabited by strange characters. Weird, impossible phenomena occur, like two moons appearing in the sky – and in different phases. Space and time themselves seem to be distorted, though to what degree is not always clear, due in part to the issues the protagonist from whose perspective we see things has.

The protagonist of the story is almost as strange as the city it takes place in. Though he remembers quite a bit of his past, he doesn't remember his name, or the names of his parents. After arriving in Bellona he gets the nickname Kid (or Kidd or the Kid), which is what he is known by through most of the novel. He wears only one sandal (later a boot), and his other foot is always bare. He has spent time in a mental institution and still seems to have some mental problems. At times he seems to hallucinate, and at other times he blacks out on the passage of time (to him it seems only a day has passed, while others tell him it's been several days). However, though he himself often questions his sanity, it is not always clear whether some of these problems really are in his own mind, or are caused by the city itself. For instance, early in the novel there are several instances where a door he remembers being on one side of a street seems to shift to the other side the next time he encounters it. It seems that this perception on Kid's part might be a hallucination, but later his friend Tak, who for the most part is one of the most clearheaded people in the city (despite his penchant for taking men who have just come to Bellona home and seducing them), tells Kid that he often finds that things in the city seem to have shifted around. Even Kid's problems regarding the passage of time may not be entirely in his head, as I'll explain below.

Soon after arriving in the city, Kid obtains a battered notebook which someone has filled with slightly disjointed observations. He starts using the blank left hand pages to write poems, which he is continually polishing and rewriting. He meets a girl named Lanya with whom he starts a relationship, and he spends a period of time working for a dysfunctional middle class family, with tragic results. He meets a famous visiting poet, and through him ends up having his poems published in a book, which becomes the most widely read book in town (in part because it's the only book to be published in the town, though also because many feel the poems capture the feel of Bellona). The book of poems is published by a man named Calkins who has a large house up in the better part of town. The somewhat mysterious Calkins (who we never actually see) is the publisher of the town’s newspaper, which he dates idiosyncratically (one day may be dated Tuesday, February 12, 1995, and the next might be Saturday, April 1, 1919).

Eventually Kid falls in with the scorpions, who are gangs of young people that wear a type of chain that, when turned on, create a light image of a creature like a scorpion, dragon, or spider that envelops the wearer. Though they have a rather dangerous reputation among the other residents, the scorpions are not quite as fearsome as they seem, for the most part living peacefully and communally in abandoned houses – though they do occasionally engage in violence. Kid forms a relationship with a young scorpion named Denny, with the two of them and Lanya forming a ménage à trios. As a side note, there is a lot of sex in this book. Though I've read one or two books that might have as much, I don't think I've read any that had quite so much variety, often described fairly graphically (Delany himself is supposedly bisexual, which I can well believe).

The first six sections of the book, covering the first 620 pages, are told in third person narration from Kid's point of view, and while certain passages, especially those reflecting Kid's notebook, are similar to stream of consciousness, for the most part the narrative is reasonably straightforward. The events occur and are described in an apparently linear fashion, though the events themselves are often strange and as mentioned there are occasional disjointed passages. The seventh and last section, covering the remaining 150 pages, is purportedly a typescript someone made from Kid's journal. It takes up more or less where the previous section left off, but as many of the pages in the notebook had come loose and the typescript was seemingly made from a bunch of pages that were somewhat out of sequence, with some missing, the episodes described are no longer in their proper order. As Kid used the margins of the notebook to add extra thoughts, this section is full of marginalia, usually but not always connected with the main text it appears beside. As the writing on the original pages often continued onto subsequent pages that were missing when the typescript was made, many passages are cut off in the middle of a line. Descriptions of some events are missing entirely, though we know they took place because of references elsewhere. In a few places Kid lapses into gibberish.

Finally, in this section it becomes clear that not only are the descriptions of events not in order, but time itself is out of joint. There are contradictory indications of the sequence of certain events, and ultimately the novel is circular. This is made obvious by events at the very end of the book. Without going into precise detail, I will describe one event which gave this away to me (though there had been other clues that I noticed when I looked back). When Kid enters the city at the beginning of the book, he encounters a group of girls leaving and talks to them briefly (though in the dark he doesn't see them clearly). One gives him a bizarre weapon called an orchid (made of seven blades curving forward from a wrist band) that he carries throughout much of the story. At the end of the story, a group of people, mostly male, leave the city and meet a girl going in. They have a conversation almost identical to that between Kid and the girls at the beginning. In flipping back to the latter to check this, I realized that the group of girls Kid meets going in are a group that are described as disappearing from the city in the last section of the book.

What's more, many of the passages that Kid reads out of the notebook that he gets at the beginning – passages that were already in the notebook when he first got it – appear word for word in the last section of the book. In other words, it seems as if Kid himself wrote the original passages in the notebook. The book begins in the middle of a sentence; "…to wound the autumnal city". It ends with "…I have come to…", and in one passage of gibberish in the last section of the novel the entire sentence ("I have come to to [sic] wound the 'autumnal city") appears. So the novel ends as it begins (as supposedly James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, which I haven't read, does), making a loop. Indeed, one critic has said it acts as a Moebius Strip.

Unsurprisingly, Dhalgren (which ultimately sold in the neighborhood of a million copies) elicited a wide range of opinions. Many critics both inside and outside the science fiction praised it highly, and it has received far more critical attention from people attempting to explain various aspects of it than the average science fiction book gets (comparable instead to the attention given to some of Ursula Le Guin's work, or the novels of Kurt Vonnegut). Others hated it, among them prominent writers like Philip K. Dick. Even its fans often admit to not understanding it; William Gibson wrote a forward to one edition in which he said: "I have never understood it. I have sometimes felt that I partially understood it, or that I was nearing the verge of understanding it... Dhalgren is not there to be finally understood. I believe its 'riddle' was never meant to be 'solved.'"

So would I recommend it? It depends entirely on the taste of the individual reader. Certainly those who dislike anything other than a straightforward tale, expect to have all mysteries (or even most of them) explained or have a problem with sex that is not heterosexual or monogamous would do well to steer clear. I personally found the book very intriguing and somewhat frustrating (I do generally prefer to have all the mysteries cleared up at the end of a book). I'm glad I read it, and I may read it again someday, but I wouldn’t want to read a lot books like it, certainly not on a regular basis. There's no doubt, however, that it's an unusual reading experience.


Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The next novel I read was a well-known classic, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. This novel superficially has very little in common with Dhalgren, but there are a few points in common. The most obvious is that they were both controversial, and sex was a primary reason for this. There are no graphic sex scenes in Madame Bovary, but she commits adultery, which was something of a taboo topic. What’s more, there is confusion, if only in the mind of Madame Bovary herself, between spiritual and physical ecstasy, resulting in accusations of blasphemy. In fact, Flaubert was prosecuted for "immorality" and "irreligion", though he was ultimately acquitted.

Madame Bovary is far from an admirable figure, and in fact there are no truly admirable characters in the novel, at least among the main characters. Madame Bovary is shallow and self-centered, and is unable to separate fantasy (as represented by the romantic novels she reads) from the reality of mundane everyday life. She believes she cannot be happy unless she is swept off her feet and carried off to exotic lands, and as a consequence she is almost constantly unhappy, except early in her affairs when she is able to convince herself that what is happening is like the stories she has read. In fact, as I read the novel, she made me think of Don Quixote, and later when reading the critical supplement at the end of the book I learned that several critics have made the same comparison. She is not delusional to the point of obvious mental illness like Don Quixote, but the result is nearly the same. She despises her husband because of his ordinariness and lack of competence, and while not unintelligent, she has no self-control, spending extravagantly to gratify her various impulses. She doesn't even truly care for her lovers, just for the way they can satisfy her desires.

Madame Bovary is not a cheerful book; it's full of not very lovable people, and the end is not a happy one, at least for most of the characters. But Flaubert's skill as a writer is what makes the book a classic, and while I can't claim to be able to fully appreciate his stylistic ability, especially in translation (that's not a criticism of the translator, just recognition of the inevitability of something being lost in translation, particularly in the case of a writer like Flaubert), there were many standout passages, making it obvious why many admire the book. Flaubert himself once wrote that "there is no such thing as a beautiful idea without beautiful form, and vice versa." He was said to constantly write and rewrite passages, searching for the perfect combination of words (in this, if nothing else, he is like Kid in Dhalgren). Despite this, he was cynical about the ability of words to really convey anything properly; in one passage in Madame Bovary explaining the inability of her lover to truly understand her, he says: "…no one can every express the exact measure of his needs, his conceptions or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars." From the descriptions of him in the critical supplement, including ones by people who knew him personally like Emile Zola, Flaubert was a somewhat obsessive and occasionally contradictory character, but nonetheless widely admired, and Madame Bovary was the main foundation for much of that admiration.

Leiber, Cherryh and Moorcock

After reading two relatively "heavy" books in a row, I wanted some relatively light reading for a time. Accordingly I decided to return to Fritz Leiber's tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by reading The Swords of Lankhmar, the first book included in the omnibus The Second Book of Lankhmar. As I have discussed Leiber's tales previously, I will just make a few observations here. One is that The Swords of Lankhmar is unusual in that it is a full novel rather than a collection of stories gathered in chronological order (internal chronology, that is). Also, though he is writing fantasy, Leiber makes a commendable effort to provide scientific explanations for fantastic things. When the Gray Mouser shrinks due to a magic potion, he leaves a puddle of slimy pink liquid on the ground, bordered by a gray powder, corresponding to the matter that he has lost from his flesh, clothing and weapons. Likewise, Fafhrd quite intelligently asks a female Ghoul (a human-like creature with flesh and organs that are entirely transparent, making them look like living skeletons) he meets and becomes romantically involved with how she can see, given that light passes straight through her eyes. Whether her explanation, or Leiber's explanation for the geology of the Sinking Land, is completely sound scientifically I couldn't say, but at least he makes the effort. The episode with Fafhrd and his Ghoul lover is also notable for Leiber's aside that the sight of them together was "one to touch the hearts of imaginative lovers and enemies of racial discrimination in all the many universes". And once again his heroes stand in contrast to characters like Conan in that they are less superhuman (though the way they are able to fight off a crowd of people out for their blood at the beginning of the novel is almost Conan-like); they are occasionally foolish, usually lustful and greedy, somewhat sexist (though unlike nearly all of Conan's lovers, their lovers are often a match for them, mentally and in the case of Fafhrd's Ghoul lover, even physically) and yet prone to generous impulses. All in all, they make a pleasant if not always politically correct diversion.

I followed this with C. J. Cherryh's novel Merchanter's Luck, a story set, like the other books of hers that I’ve read, in her Alliance-Union universe. This is a far future where humans have expanded into far into space, settling in space stations and eventually habitable worlds strung out among the stars, with their ties to Earth eventually loosening to the point that contact is minimal. The routes between the stars are traveled by merchant spacers who carry goods from station to station. Cherryh has written many books in this series, but the only ones I've read previously are the much longer Downbelow Station and Cyteen, plus the more distantly connected Chanur trilogy. Downbelow Station is an action-packed adventure tale featuring complicated political maneuvering, ending by creating the balance of power that serves as the background for many of the later tales. Cyteen takes place on the eponymous central planet of the somewhat fascistic Union, and is an interesting account of an attempt to replicate a genius, not only by creating a genetic clone, but also by recreating the environment and events of her childhood. The Chanur trilogy takes place in a more distant area of the galaxy inhabited by intelligent alien races. It centers on a ship which ends up taking on a refugee alien of a hitherto unknown race that calls itself “human”. This series is notable not only for creating believable alien races, but for making them the focus of the story (we only learn what the human thinks from the little he is able to convey as he slowly learns their language). Merchanter's Luck, which takes place soon after Downbelow Station and includes appearances by some of the characters of that novel, is less of an epic tale than any of the above, but is gripping nonetheless. It also has some psychological elements, as one of the two protagonists is a young man whose family were massacred when he was a boy, except for two others who died subsequently, leaving him the sole owner of a starship, often flying it completely alone when he is unable to find temporary crew, accompanied only by his ghosts and the voice of his cousin, programmed into the ship's computer. When he has the opportunity to take on a more trustworthy crew, his solitary habits and deep-seated distrust of others creates problems. The story is fairly short (around 200 pages) but fast-paced. Basically, it's an entertaining way to spend a few hours.

Next I read The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Michael Moorcock, which is the second book (by internal chronology) of the Elric series. Elric is the rightful emperor of Melnibone, a land inhabited by race of beings similar to humans, but more powerful and almost completely lacking in human emotions like regret and compassion (they quite casually inflict very barbaric tortures, and rarely show any concern for others, even of their own race). Elric is exceptional in that he does feel such emotions to some degree. He is also an albino, and physically weak without special drugs. Despite this, he is a powerful sorcerer and a skilled swordsman. What's more, he wields an extremely powerful sword called Stormbringer. This black blade is semi-sentient and often seems to murmur to itself. It sucks the souls out of those it strikes, consuming them and transferring energy from their souls to Elric. However, it sometimes gets out of Elric's control, striking those he does not wish to strike, with tragic results.

In this novel, Elric has recently left Melnibone to travel in the human kingdoms, as he believes that understanding the up and coming human powers is necessary if the decadent, decaying realm of Melnibone is to have any chance of surviving, and also because his unusual (for a Melnibonean) ability to feel human emotions made him restless at home. When feeling hostile humans, he meets a mysterious ship that sails between worlds, on which he meets several individuals who, like he himself, are incarnations of a being known as the Eternal Champion. It seems that virtually all the heroes featured in Moorcock's fiction are incarnations of the Eternal Champion, despite superficial differences. In this book, Elric meets Erekose, Hawkmoon, and Corum, all of whom feature in other Moorcock novels (though other than Elric, the only one I’ve read any stories of is Corum, when someone lent them to me in high school – my impression at the time, accurate or not, was that they were grim and depressing). After facing a pair of beings that threaten all the worlds that they come from, Elric parts company with the others, and has further adventures in attempting to return to his own world, the last ending in misfortune.

As might be guessed with his sinister sword, his unpleasant antecedents, and his ill-starred life, Elric is a much grimmer hero than Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or Conan. There is no question he is a very memorable character, but his adventures are much bleaker and so not as much fun to read about. Also, while Moorcock's scope is broader than many other fantasy writers in that his tales of many different worlds are all in a sense tied together, his individual worlds don’t seem to be quite as detailed as those of Leiber and Howard, not to mention Tolkien (though to be fair, I haven’t read as many of his books – even in the case of the Elric stories, I’ve only read the first three books, all of which are on the short side). However, despite these downsides, anyone interested in fantasy should read at least some of the Elric stories, as they are sure to make an impression.