Something has happened in Bellona. We don't know what it is--maybe nobody does--but it has turned the Midwestern city into a place isolated from the rest of the country, without government or utilities, cut off from commerce, largely abandoned. Gangs of "scorpions," petty thugs hidden in giant hologram animals, roam the street. Geography shifts; streets and neighborhoods change places. A second moon appears in the sky; a new sun absorbs the sky and threatens to set everything on fire. A man makes his way into this city wearing only one shoe and unable to remember his name. Called "The Kid," he takes up with a commune living in the park, then with a nest of scorpions, who make him their leader. He gets a girlfriend, and then also a boyfriend, and he writes a book of poetry, which becomes--well, not a bestseller, because money in Bellona is no good, but whatever the equivalent is.
What is Dhalgren? It's science fiction, maybe. The scorpions, the second moon, the claw-like "orchid" he wears for protection, all seem like images taken from old pulps. Stylistically, Dhalgren lies somewhere between those pulps and Beat writing, with a dash of the exploitation movies of the 1970s. Bellona is post-apocalyptic in its way, though I'm not sure I've ever seen a self-contained dystopia, one that crumbles while the rest of the world trucks on as usual.
What is Dhalgren? Well, it's long for one--my copy is exactly 800 pages. It's very metatexual: the notebook that the Kid discovers, and scribbles his poems in, seems to be a copy of the book itself. After the successful publication of "Brass Orchids," a critic who's seen this notebook--we're never allowed to see any of the Kid's poems ourselves--remarks that he thinks they've been cribbed right from the notebook, which means that the character is somehow a collaborator in the work itself, which is also therefore circular, feeding on itself. Like Finnegans Wake, the final sentence wraps around to the beginning. The last section is, ostensibly, a facsimile of the notebook itself, written in the first person and crowded with disordered fragments. What is text and what is commentary, exactly? And how does the fragmented writing capture the fragmented self of the Kid, who does not know his identity and who frequently "loses" hours and days in time?
I want to make a suggestion: Dhalgren is about, among other things, the city of the 1970s. Bellona is less the Thunderdome than Cleveland or Detroit, emptied out by years of white flight and suburbanization, and with the coffers so empty that the normal course of life threatens to break down. The scorpions that Kid hangs out with--who have evocative names like Copperhead, Filament, Tarzan, Glass, Dragon Lady, Lady of Spain--are undoubtedly violent, going on "runs" for food and supplies that make little distinction between homes that are occupied and those that aren't, but they also provide community for each other, in the manner of an urban underclass who have been shunted aside. Bellona's disintegration is a catastrophe, but also an opportunity: it allows the family unit to be reimagined. The scorpions follow a kind of free-love philosophy that allows Kid to have his throuple with Lanya and Denny. (Much of the book's second half is taken up with scenes of tedious, queasy sex. Let's pass over the fact that Denny is fifteen.)
Not everyone can embrace the change. The best parts of Dhalgren, in my opinion, come when the Kid, new to the city, is given a job moving furniture from one floor of an apartment building to another for a middle-class family. The mother stays inside, clinging to a version of normalcy. Her husband pretends to go to work each day, because there is no work. (For that matter, there is no good reason for Kid to have a "job," when their money--which they plan to stiff him anyway--is good nowhere in Bellona.) But their daughter June is obsessed with George, a charismatic character from Bellona's Black neighborhood, and whose immense penis, for reasons that were never clear to me, is plastered on posters all over town. When her kid brother discovers the poster, June may or may not push him down an empty elevator shaft with a rolled up carpet. This is the novel's most shocking act of violence, far worse than anything the scorpions cook up, and it seems to suggest the futility of the family's attempt to keep the city locked outside, or escape it by moving two floors up.
Kid, however, comes to embrace the possibilities of Bellona, and for this he's made king of the scorpions. The final chapter, the notebook, troubles this somewhat: in its fragmented form, the violence and dissolution seem more frightening, as if they are also part of the Kid's unraveling. But more than anything I think Dhalgren, science fiction or not, captures the pulp era's dizzy sense of possibility, and applies it to the American metropolis. Here anything is possible. "I come to wound the autumnal city," the first--and last--sentence goes: a city in decline, but which perhaps can be reconstituted, made into something new. When the end is reached, there's the beginning.
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