It’s here that the reader is led to understand that with every loop the protagonist switches between male and female. It’s a circular time travel in which the characters can influence the goings-on in Bellona, but this influence, whether they realize it or not, is always in service of maintaining the novel’s loop.ĭhalgren’s looping point occurs on a bridge. Or when we pause to consider Delany’s narrative structure as suggestive of time travel by beginning the novel with the second half of a sentence, and then ending the novel with that sentence’s first half.

Disch, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ-buried within Tak’s library. We’re mostly reminded of the tradition in which we’re reading when we enter the character Tak Loufer’s apartment and find books by Delany’s sci-fi colleagues-Thomas M. In this city without authority, we see Kid’s hip gang member friends gather, party, cruise, fight, and generally flourish while the stubborn hangers-on to the old capitalist infrastructure appear miserable and delusional.Ī number of science fictional events take place without any technological or physical explication we might expect from the genre: a single night of two moons, one long day with an enormous sun, rearranging city streets. To enter into a city ruin and slowly recollect the shards.ĭelany spoke of his 1975 novel as a kind of study and exaggeration of a very American term: the inner-city, “… that burnt out section of your city where the general functions of urban life go on at a very depressed rate.” 1 Delany interviewed in John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History (London: Black Audio Film Collective, 1996), 27:50.

To see that Kid’s memory has shattered, fragmented, and to sense that its linear orientation was always an illusion. Delany’s Dhalgren is to meet Kid, the half-barefoot dyslexic poet-protagonist, on his way into the labyrinthine post-disaster zone of Bellona. To return to the opening pages of Samuel R.

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany