#AutumnalCity discussion

Discussion of pages 701 and up, and entire book.

So what did everyone think? Reading this right after William Gaddis' JR, there were some similarities and some striking differences.

Both books involved some work on the part of the reader, more work than is usually asked by a modern writer. You're being asked to put burning questions aside, questions that we've been taught to expect immediate answers to. (What the hell happened to this city? What's with the red sun?) and to reconstruct action and relationship from scant textual evidence. Both books turn away from the central story at times to grapple directly with the author's own questions about the nature of text, how to accurately convey ideas using that suddenly blunt-seeming instrument, and how that text is perceived by a society that may or may not value it.

On the other hand, Dhalgren was MUCH less work than JR. The science-fiction setting speeds us along: Something weird and compelling is happening! They might be in outer space! There's something weird about everyone's eyes! People are having enjoyable sex! There's something about a crew of hoodlums and dropouts fucking and drinking and writing poetry and trying to figure out why there's a new moon in the sky in a house with no water in an almost abandoned city that's just more compelling to me than a shouted phone conversation about leveraged buyouts and nativity figurines in a flooded apartment in an almost too-perfectly functioning city. Even if, in some instances, they're talking about the same thing.

I do NOT think that there's a hidden "explanation" for the events in Dhalgren, the way some say you can figure out what really happened in Infinite Jest between the end of the book and the beginning (another book that loops end-to-end, but with a chunk taken out at the seam), or the way John Brunner based the entire structure of The Squares of the City on a famous nineteenth-century chess game.

I think Delany's concerns were much more text and character than science and plot. BUT, I would be thrilled to be proven wrong about this. My own attempts to make sense of things start with the supposition that Bellona is a precursor of the unnamed city in the film Dark City (1998), and that the looping prism/mirror/lens chain is some kind of camera/mind-control device. But that's as far as I got, and for all I know it's far more sense than Delany ever intended anyone to make of the events in the Autumnal City.

Great post, Brian. I agree that there is no hidden explanation. If we couldn't figure out that explanation in 879 pages it will stay hidden. I think the book can be interpreted in any number of ways. To me it was a story about lack of opportunity and the ennui that accompanies it. The concept that art is born out of strife, and that personally knowing the artist alters your perception of the art is up for our consideration. I enjoyed that discussion. I agree that science was less his concern. Fear of the unknown in the form of the scorpions, no one is who they seem to be, and we have the option to disappear within another persona are all ideas I read into the story. Maybe a bit simplistic and I should expand my thought process. :)

I don't read a lot of sci-fi but I might start now. The story essentially went nowhere and I was engrossed for the duration.

All that said, I prefer JR. But I have a newfound admiration for Delany.

Thanks to everyone who kept the discussion going.

I know there are a lot of classical references in Delany that I can sort-of see most of the time, but they don't coalesce into anything more meaningful to me. For instance, the girl turning into a tree is pretty clearly from the Daphne myth, and Labrys Arms apartments uses the name of an ancient axe that's also a modern symbol in lesbian rights. But what does one do with that knowledge? It doesn't recast the story into a new configuration, it doesn't add any "aha!" insights, at least, not without more (that may be there, but I'm not seeing it).

I guess I've been taking my time with this one. I'm just getting into the last chapter. I didn't remember how the previous chapter just ends with George and Kid going in to investigate the fire. It could have ended with them dying there, but fortunately we get notebook passages telling how they rescue kids from the fire instead. I just got to the part where someone who is reading the manuscript is trying to interpret the notations in it. It becomes clear here the whole book is a found manuscript and it also marks where Delany starts to give us a view of his novels from the outside. What I mean is, we're given the opportunity to step outside the novel and look at it from a more scholarly perspective. Delany starts doing this more overtly in subsequent novels like Trouble on Triton and the Neveryon cycle by adding an appendix or two, written structures associated more with a research project than a novel. In this case it serves to pull us out of the action of the novel and reassess what we've been reading. Is it a novel or the found notebook of an unknown writer? It's apparent a second book of poems was published and apparently there was enough interest in Kid for someone to transcribe his whole notebook and for it to subsequently be lost, found, interpreted and published, which essentially is, I guess, what we've been reading. The new perspective also allows us to see, if we didn't already get it, that Kid is an unreliable narrator. At this point we even have to question if the whole thing is fictionalized or a relatively accurate accounting of what happened in Bellona. It's apparent we can't trust the Times or Calkins version of what happens, but maybe we can't trust Kid's version either. I'm amused by the fact Delany gets us asking questions like this about a novel, which is, of course, entirely fictional to begin with. So, I think Delany is examining how we tell stories. What makes a novel a novel? How much can we muck around with that and still have it function as a novel? How untrustworthy can our narrator be and not have the whole thing fall apart? For me, I think this stepping out of the novel and having someone looking at it later, interpreting it, only makes the story more solid and real. We're questioning things here as though it's a real found manuscript and a scholarly reader is examining it and this scholar is a character giving us fresh perspective.

Of course, this is also the point in the novel where it starts to deconstruct itself and become less solid in other ways. It's where we have to start to question everything. If we are reading the notebook, did the other 6 chapters, at one time, look like this seventh? Who transcribed the notebook? Was it Lanya and did Kid correct all the sequencing, cross outs, etc. in the first six chapters? Or did Calkins or his assistant transcribe it? Why was it left unfinished? Who is the Kid? Is he William Dhalgren? Did he write the rest of the notebook before he lost his memory? Is that possible? We have to question even the sequence of events from the previous chapters. Were they sequenced by someone other than the original writer? Is that why it starts in the middle of the sentence it ends with? Where did the story really begin? Who or what is the main character? Is it the Kid? Is it the city, Bellona? Is it the notebook itself?

This is a novel about a city and a society that has deconstructed and is falling apart and it is also a novel that is doing the same thing about a character who is also doing the same, having lost his memory.

Thanks for those posts, I found them very helpful!

As for William Dhalgren...it's just a name. If he is or is not Dhalgren, we are no nearer finding anything about him,except that his name was in the notebook.

The 'editor' is quite fun with his pedantic questioning of marks in the text (been a couple of months now and I haven't got the book to hand). I wonder if Delany had anyone in mind?

And I'm still taking my time. I've got less than 100 pages left now. I'm realizing just how much my first 1 1/2 years at college really were like being in Bellona. Within my first semester at college I had 3 nicknames with 3 different fraternities. I was a member of none of them. I went to their parties and had no intention of ever joining one. And then there were the derivations of the nicknames that caught on with my friends, RA, hall mates, etc. I was reminded of this as I read the handshaking scene when the Scorpions meet Kamp. Looking back, I realize my personality (or my identity) was deconstructing and reforming during those years, not unlike what happens to Kid in losing his memory. I didn't quite fit anywhere, but I didn't quite not fit anywhere either, so I pretty much went where I wanted to, without realizing I had that freedom. It felt more like I didn't belong anywhere. In actuality, at that point, I probably could have belonged anywhere I wanted to just like Kid.

I'm coming to the conclusion that perhaps the notebook belonged to Kid before he lost his memory too. No way to ever know for sure, but it's curious no one ever came looking for it.

I'd forgotten there was a place in the book where the sentence that's split and makes this a circular novel actually appears intact. I suppose there had to be to make it obvious it is a circular novel. One might never come to this conclusion without it. But it appears in a passage so nonsensical it doesn't bring any more meaning to it. In fact it does quite the opposite. But it made me start to think about the idea of going with the flow of the circularity and not stopping at the "end" and just going back to the "beginning" and continuing reading. I'm really curious how that would feel and what new insights it might bring. The length of this novel really gets in the way of doing that, though. You really feel as though you've been running a marathon when you finally reach the "end." I've been reading a lot of comic books as I've been reading Dhalgren, which is why it has been taking a while, so I'd really like to get on to another novel, maybe something shorter, not sure what yet. One of the things I've been reading is old Wonder Woman comics, which is rather appropriate because Delany wrote a few issues back around the time he was writing Dhalgren. I started collecting WW a couple of years ago after buying a lot on EBay containing Delany's issues.

I've reached the point where some of the passages start in the middle of sentences. It really serves to unhinge the book and makes you realize we really don't know the true sequence of events. There's even a point where it talks about that. We don't really know the order of the events. The only points of reference are when a passage references a previous event. We learn we can't trust the sequence that's been presented to us in the previous 6 chapters. I was thinking this is really how we learn about someone new we've met. In the context of conversation within a group, people relate stories about themselves, not in a coherent sequence, but at random, depending on how they relate to the conversation, their mood, and how what their memory calls up in the context of conversation. Even when one on one, we relate events from our past out of context to someone new. The recipient of the information, in their mind, probably tries to organize the information on some sort of timeline as they get to know the new person, but the info probably falls together more like we see in chapter 7, with lots of holes, unfinished stories. So, in a sense, we get to know Kid, in much the way we might get to know someone in real life, or I guess more accurately, how we'd get to know someone if we found his diary, journal or notebook, if the pages had come loose and gotten out of order.

I'm still at it. Today I came to a new interpretation of the novel. There's a passage where Kid is visiting Calkins at the monastery . In it, Kid asks Calkins whether the man who runs it is a good man. He repeats the question two more times. The first three times I read this book, that would have been meaningless to me because I hadn't read the Bible yet. This time it read hauntingly like the passage in the Bible when Jesus asks Peter, "do you love me?" 3 times. It made me wonder if it was Delany's intention for us to equate Kid with Jesus or if this is just a red herring. It seems too obvious to me now for me to assume it was unintentional. Since it comes so late in the book, I don't imagine I'm supposed to go back and reassess the whole thing, but maybe I am. It does make me curious to go back and read it again with this in mind, but it isn't going to happen right away, that's for sure. Certainly everyone starts following Kid, so I don't think this is necessarily a far stretch.

I thought that section was odd ... I had also thought of the scene in the Bible where Peter denies Jesus three times, but I think your connection is closer to Delany's intent.

Here's my question (with all of Delany's allusions) ... what does it mean? Does it say something that we haven't already intuited from the surface of Delany's story or from the antecedent of his reference (in this case, the story of Peter)? I'm still just enough of a scientist to want some synergistic and concrete meaning from such connections, beyond a simple Rorschach test referral to the reader: "What does it mean to YOU?" I'm reading this to find out what it meant to the author. In many cases that's not clear to me.

Another odd scene is Kid's therapy session with Madame (Dr.) Brown. I think this scene more than any other (except perhaps the passage where he critiques another passage by saying he didn't attribute what was said to the correct people) brings home the fact our protagonist is not mentally stable. He's been institutionalized previously, possibly he even escaped from an institution just before coming to Bellona, which would explain his amnesia.

Another interesting scene is the one where he remembers his first and middle names, Michael Henry. But is he right? He's excited enough about it, but we've come to find we can't trust his memory at all by now. And then he re-meets the man who interviewed him, whose name is Bill or William (perhaps Dhalgren?) Is that why Kid get's so excited-- he's the man whose name is the only one Kid remembers from the list? And I went back and checked, there are no Michael Henry's in that list, so, if Kid is right, the list gives us no clue to his last name, as we might have hoped.

I finally finished my fourth reading of Dhalgren. I decided to turn back to the first page and continue with the sentence. It was rather disconcerting going from the first person fragmented notebook back to third person narration. It brings you from the very personal, inside Kid's head, apocalyptic "ending" to the outside looking in viewpoint of the "beginning" of the book. All in all, the book has held up well for me, no matter when I go back to it. I'm thinking I'll finish reading the into from the Gregg Press edition. I just bought the book, "Ash of Stars" and discovered it reprints that intro. It will be much easier reading it there rather than the humongous Gregg Press book.

So, given the number of entries here besides my own, I'm getting the sense not too many in the group got through it. I'm curious what others though of the book, why they may have stopped or refrained from commenting at all. It can definitely be an overwhelming book.

I'd love to hear more. I actually finished a couple of months ago and feel as if I've moved on, but this is a book I will definitely keep coming back to. It's a book where you are living alongside the characters, you can feel and taste Bellona as you read, utterly immersive.

I've enjoyed reading your comments, David and Brian, and I'm sure others have too - no one else has anything to contribute?