From Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren:

My life here more and more resembles a book whose opening chapters, whose title even, suggest mysteries to be resolved only at closing. But as one reads along, one becomes more and more suspicious that the author has lost the thread of his argument, that the questions will never be resolved, or more upsetting, that the position of the characters will have so changed by the book’s end that the answers to the initial questions will have become trivial (755-756).

This edition of the book is 801 pages long, and those words on pp. 755-756 do indeed reflect a reader’s feelings as he moves through the last fifty pages of the work. The question is whether the self-reflective paragraph enhances a reader’s experience of the text or deflates it. Before the question can be answered, however, there must be a concise paragraph summarizing this difficult work.

In his foreword to the Vintage book edition, William Gibson writes:

Samuel Delaney’s Dhalgren is a prose-city, a labyrinth, a vast construct the reader learns to enter by any one of a multiplicity of doors…I have never understood it…This has never caused me the least discomfort…I believe its ‘riddle’ was never meant to be solved…To enter Dhalgren is to be progressively stripped of various certainties, many of these having to do with unspoken, often unrecognized, aspects of the reader’s cultural contract with the author. There is a transgressive element at work here, a deliberate refusal to deliver certain ‘rewards’ the reader may consider to be a reader’s right (xi).

That is no summary, but it does reveal some of the reasons why Dhalgren is so difficult to summarize. Any ‘question’ opened at the beginning of the book is forgotten by the middle of the book and recombined with later questions to suggest the impossibility of any answer at anytime anyway.

A man with a forgotten name arrives in a post-apocalyptic city with a forgotten past, where he:

• meets up with a diverse assortment of pan-sexual polymaths;
• finds a journal of poems, in the blank pages and margins of which he begins constructing his own poems;
• loses time to the point where weeks pass and he has no recollection of events in which he (apparently) engaged;
• unwittingly becomes the leader of a street gang and one of the principal players in the underground politics of the city;
• has his poems published anonymously;
• is concerned with the possibility of his own plagiarism;
• falls in love with a boy and a woman and enters into a three-way amorous relationship with the two;
• has several discussions on the nature of art, politics, and religion;
• witnesses a second moon and an impossible sunrise;
• is caught in some kind of massive destruction;
• and exits the city, entering, in a circular final sentence, an alternate beginning of the book.

All of that, however, is up for grabs, seeing as the main character, who seems the prima facie narrator on most pages, is an avowed schizophrenic, a victim of his own imagination and false recollections.

Summary is impossible—or if not impossible, then harmful and disrespectful to Dhalgen’s rigorous communication of uncertainty:

I am limited, finite, and fixed. I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on. I commend myself up to what is greater than I, and try to be good. That is wrestling with what I have been given. Do I rage at what I have not? (Is infinity some illusion generated by the way in which time is perceived?). I try to end this pride and rage and commend myself to what is there, instead of illusion. But the veil is the juncture of the perceived and the perception. And what in life can rip that? Is the only prayer, then, to live steadily and dully, doing and doubting what the mind demands? I am limited, finite, and fixed. I rage for reasons, cry for pity. Do with me what way you will (583).

So much, so much. In that paragraph alone. How to create a narrative arc—nay, how to see, find, discover a narrative arc, a rainbow of meaning—when one can do nought but look through the ground-level gaze of a mortal human man, one whose beginning are lost in fog and whose ending can only lead back to the fiery bridge where one began?

“Rage for reasons” all you will, but you are no god, and reasons are not yours to have. You are limited, finite, fixed in the ignorance that fixes us at birth, the ignorance of the here and now, and only the faintest contrails of yesterday’s passage give us any clue as to the arrival time of tomorrow. “Cry for pity.” Do what you will.

For a reader who takes so much pleasure in the ambiguity that powers Dhalgren from one page to the next, the paragraph that opens this annotation, where the sensation of ambiguity in the body of the reader is, if not excused, then recognized and revered as the right way to feel — such a paragraph deflates the very experience of ambiguity and fixes a notion of the proper in the experience of the text. It’s as if Kandinsky were to affix a paragraph of instructions to the side of his art. It gives a work whose words and structure seem to argue against causation and purpose a teleological foundation that lets the reader “off the hook.”

The self-referential paragraph at the top of this annotation (which is just one of dozens in the book) is what makes reading Delaney so maddening. It is the experience of watching a writer come so close to greatness, only to fail for not trusting his reader to let him be great.