Playing at Birth:

Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren

Todd A. Comer

A joycean tour de force of a novel, Dhalgren . . . stake[s] a

better claim than anything else in this country in the last
quarter-century (excepting only Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck
and Nabokov’s Pale Fire) to a permanent place as one of
the enduring monuments of our national literature.—The
Libertarian Review (blurb taken from the recent Vintage
edition.)

This reviewer has missed the point. Or, rather, this reviewer has missed
one point of many in his reduction of Dhalgren to a national monument.
To be fair, this reduction is the essence of the work of a traditional book
review and of much intellectual work. While I do agree that Dhalgren is
an “enduring monument of our national literature,” I question the absence
of scare quotes in the review. In the world of Dhalgren (and some would
say, our world) adjectives—like “permanent” and “enduring”—and
nouns—like “monument” and “nation”—can only be written under era-
sure. There is another reading of Delany’s novel, a reading which inter-
rupts any simple reduction to a patriotic monument, work of art, or tool of
ego creation.
Situating Dhalgren, published in 1975, in the context of the 1960’s and
early 1970’s is difficult to resist. Indeed, Delany has admitted that the

JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 35.2 (Summer 2005): 172–195. Copyright © 2005 by
JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory.
 Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren 173

“ruins and wrecks” of U.S. cities provided him with his essential material
(Edelman). We also know from the same interview that Delany originally
envisioned the novel as a series of five novels in which five dissimilar
governments would be overthrown by a “group of people just exercising
the wonderful world view of the flower children.” For African-Americans,
the 1960’s and 1970’s were a period of extreme poverty and racism, as
well as a period of great change with so many migrating from the rural
south to the industrial north (Zinn 458–459). During this period there were
peaceful civil right marches, militant Black Panther actions, anti-war
protests, prison riots, and assassinations. Exercising little hyperbole,
Howard Zinn describes blacks as “engaging in wild insurrection in a hun-
dred northern cities” in the late 1960’s (450). Dhalgren’s Bellona, named
after the Roman goddess of war, feels like a city torn apart by a race riot,
if not a coup d’état. All of which implies that while Delany’s original con-
ception altered significantly, his critique of extant political structures re-
mains. Readers of Dhalgren in 1975 would have been incapable of under-
standing Bellona as anything other than a near analogue of cities recently
torn asunder by urban riots.
What follows, then, needs to be understood as involving an ethical cri-
tique of concrete political structures and as not simply concerned with the
writing of the text before us because, as I will argue, the city along with
every subjectival creation is a product of myth. Delany’s text interrogates
such monumental myths through a representation of the city (and thereby,
the subject) as wounded and open to certain ethical possibilities. In its
fragmentation Delany’s text represents, internally and externally, subjec-
tivity at its limit, which is to say, a “subjectivity” whose assimilative pow-
ers have been overwhelmed by the experience of the death of the other,
exposing it to community. However, I read Dhalgren first as a way of
thinking about how writing can mitigate against the monumentalism of the
subject and the subject’s myths that obsess after non-relation, eliding that
birth or (communal) relation that comes from the outside and others.
Dhalgren becomes above all a “novel” which plays at birth, at never get-
ting beyond birth, always coming and never arriving at presence, and,
hence, always remaining with others.
Bellona defies description. Indeed, this city seems lost even to percep-
tion, “Very few suspect the existence of the city. It is as if not only the
media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge
174 J N T

and perception to pass it by. Rumor says that there is practically no power
here. Neither television cameras nor on-the-spot broadcasts function: that
such a catastrophe as this should be opaque” (14). There is no law, no so-
cial structure, little work, and little sense of time. Much of the population
has fled and much of this enormous city has been burnt to the ground.
Often the city seems a labyrinth in which streets and landmarks move and
shift according to no discernible law. Sometimes there are two moons and
sometime only one. Sometimes the sun appears so large that it looks like it
is going nova. No one knows why or how Bellona became this way. It
could have been a meteor, a fire, the “rape” of a white girl by a black man,
a bomb, a riot, an ecological disaster, or something else. Like many things
in Dhalgren, this question is never satisfyingly answered. Bellona is a
“vague, vague city” (382).
Dhalgren’s complexity cannot be understated. Fortunately, Delany has
provided a set piece, a microcosm, at the center of his massive novel
which provides the reader with a sense of what is at stake in Bellona.
Against the horror of Bellona, one person, Mary Richards, described as
both bookish and creative, continues to work. According to Mr. Richards:

Mary lives in her world of cooking and cleaning and the

children. I come home. And nothing looks . . . I can’t de-
scribe it. A man’s home is supposed to be—well, a place
where everything is real, solid, and he can grab hold. In our
home, I just don’t know. I come in from that terrible world,
and I’m in some neverland I just don’t believe in. And the
less I believe in it, the more it slips. I think it’s me, some-
times. Mary’s always been a strange woman; she hasn’t
had it that easy. She tries so hard to be . . . well civilized
[. . .] suddenly you begin to feel she’s changing the world
into her own ideas. (173)

An exemplary rational subject, Mary makes a project out of the world,

creating it in her image (Nancy IC 3). Such is her power that Kid and oth-
ers conform to her conversational expectations: “she does more than [keep
a ‘nice house’]. She keeps us too” which is essentially her way of dis-
pelling the confusion of the Bellonan landscape and reinforcing her iden-
tity.
 Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren 175

Bellona’s catastrophe is murky. Among the various elements that are

paraded as causes—the storm, a shooting, the rioting—a major focus is
the violent, consensual, and public sex act that occurs between the young
white June Richards and the older black man George Harrison. This act is
widely publicized in the Bellona Times. Opposed and yet linked to this
public act is a private act, June’s alleged murder of her brother. While
helping June move a rug to a new apartment, Bobby falls down an eleva-
tor shaft. This occurs shortly after he threatens to reveal June’s desire to
their mother, a revelation that would undermine the tenuous state of pro-
priety in the Richards home. To further substantiate reading this family as
a microcosm of Bellona, consider this early conversation between Kid and
Milly on the Bellona catastrophe: “when it happened [. . .] it was terrible,”
she says. Her use of “terrible” reminds Kid of “the way he remembered a
man in a brown suit once say ‘elevator.’ It’s that tone, he thought, remem-
bering when it had denuded Tak’s speech” (30). When told of Bobby’s el-
evator accident, Mr. Richards exhibits a “lack of expression” which can
only re-emphasize how the expressive identity of the solipsistic subject is
undermined by that which it cannot cognize (248). Bobby’s elevator acci-
dent microcosmically grounds this larger catastrophic event and the de-
nuding that is characteristic of Bellona.
In the midst of the work of myth, such moments of horror, leading to
this inexpressiveness, are smoothed-over. Directly before Bobby’s death,
Mrs. Richards describes how the “shrieking“ on the part of her neighbors
made “mak[ing] a home” impossible (original’s emphasis; 227). The move
to another apartment is meant to remedy the noise problem, but instead, as
she feared, “a space, a gap, a crack [appears] in which some terrible thing
might get in and destroy it, us, my home.” This is made less abstract in a
conversation following Bobby’s accident in which Mrs. Richards tells how
a “huge crack” once appeared in June’s ceiling and how it took manage-
ment three months to repair it. She explains that when such things happen
all she can do is continue making a “good home, where nothing can hurt
[her spouse]” (my emphasis; 246). By “nothing,” we may read any thing
that would undermine subjectivity. Briefly, death is that no-thing that con-
cerns her. It follows that one of the most common refrains in the novel is
Kid’s recognition that he is going to die (372). It is such a recognition, such
a crack or wound in the family being, that Mrs. Richards concerns herself
with; she, however, cannot face this fear, but uses others to obscure it.
176 J N T

When Kid argues for her to change and says, “But if everything out-
side has changed—,” she responds, then “I have to be [. . .] stronger in-
side” (original’s emphasis; 227). This means, as a later conversation indi-
cates, that for her the “outside” in a sense is not “real” at all (244–245).
When, for instance, her spouse leaves the building for work, he does not
go “anywhere” because, she explains, there is no place to go. The outside
is simply beyond her comprehension, or a projection of a narcissistic self
(which amounts to the same thing). Just as she feared, a “space” does ap-
pear and this is the spacing of what Jean-Luc Nancy, following Heidegger,
terms being-with, or Mitsein that resists her incessant project. Nancy, in
particular is important here as he addresses so many of the key issues of
Delany’s text: the nature of subjectivity, the subject’s relation to myth and
violence, and, finally, community as that which occurs at the moment of
myth’s interruption.
While this will require further nuancing, the important point to gather
at this juncture is that subjectivity is grounded in the control of alterity.
Richards controls and assimilates the world so that it no longer horrifies
her. In this imminently rational process, she creates an inside and an out-
side, the most basic sort of representation or myth to map the world. How-
ever, as Nancy argues, the experience of the death of an other “irremedia-
bly exceeds the resources of a metaphysics of the subject” (IC 14). As this
is an experience that we can have no knowledge of, the border that sepa-
rates subjectivity from the outside, alterity, is violated. Bobby’s fall
through space and his bloody return in the arms of Kid highlights how
very real the outside is, undermining Mrs. Richard’s solipsistic self. The
move from the 17th to the 19th floor was supposed to be a controlled, up-
ward reorientation that would ultimately better preserve the family. It is
instead much more “cost[ly]” than expected, leading to less a controlled
movement than to an absolute spatial hemorrhaging in which the family
being is torn and exposed to all the difference it hopes to elide. Mrs.
Richards is grief-stricken (246).
The metaphor that most succinctly links the Richards, Bellona, and
writing is that of wounding. Bobby’s fall leaves him viscerally exposed to
the outside—not a subjectival outside, but the outside that the subject’s
bordering of the world hopes to tame. The same is true for the larger fam-
ily being in the aftermath of his death, as it works to create a tidy separa-
tion between the inside and outside and close the crack in the ceiling, if
 Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren 177

you will. Mrs. Richards quickly begins to heal this more immediate
wound. By contrast, it is Kid who retrieves the body, looking just as hor-
rific as Bobby, who cannot easily salve this wound. Like Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake, Dhalgren is circular. It ends and begins with the follow-
ing: “ [. . .] I have come to / to wound the autumnal city.” In Jean Mark
Gawron’s path-breaking article, he describes this “come to” as the “com-
ing to” of consciousness and the repetition of the “to” as a stutter, “a gap
between the text and its subject” (90). While Gawron appears to offer
these as two different readings, I would merge them and argue that what
we see here is a spacing of consciousness. The “self” remains, during the
period of this stutter, exposed, its identity somehow outside of itself and
with others (Nancy IC 15). Certainly the “coming to” of consciousness
and the “wounding” gesture toward the strange logic of exposure: identity
remains, but it is wounded and open to others.
What this analysis reveals is that Bellona is similarly wounded. If the
wound is a stutter, the spacing of consciousness, then Bellona is always al-
ready wounded before Kid arrives. Kid’s subjectivity was exposed before
he even set foot in the city which suggests that it is only Bellona’s exposed
condition that allows him entrance, and, once within, the freedom to be the
singular person that he is, denying any easy assimilation to an urban pro-
ject. Just as the Richards’ home and work are interrupted and spaced out
and into the other, so is the subjectival being that is Bellona. Bellona is un-
worked, profoundly resistant to the salve that would return it to full health.
On the level of writing, Mr. Newboy later describes Kid’s poetry as “that
holy and spectacular wound which bleeds” (258). All of which suggests
that what is at stake in this exposure to the death of the other is the col-
lapse of myth. If myth can be thought of as the seamless work of creating
a home and a consciousness, Bellona is exposed to the outside in the ab-
sence of a work, a myth, or oeuvre.

* * *

Delany’s text adroitly answers the most obvious questions concerning

this interruption of the work of myth: What does this exposure entail on a
concrete level for knowledge, community, economics, and ethics? It is im-
portant to note that while a concrete description of what this exposure en-
tails is necessary as a bridge to more central questions, it would be dan-
178 J N T

gerous to not discuss each of these issues together. To discuss the theme of
birth without the “being-with” of community, would be to risk falling into
a subjectival reading which clearly is not my aim.
Exposure to the “being-with” of community occurs when the rational
subject faces the death of an other. Bellona, correspondingly, is described
as a graveyard by Kid (386). This is an apt portrayal insofar as no one is
buried or, assumedly, receives the traditional burial rites and rituals. After
being carried out of the elevator shaft, Bobby is left to rot in an empty
apartment. I’m reminded of George Bataille’s comment that “community”
must remain at the “peculiar grandeur” of death, or risk falling into sub-
jectivity (Nancy IC 16). It is such a “being-with” of finite and exposed be-
ings that we see in Bellona. Bellona and its singularities are defined by ter-
ror: “When what terrifies is neither noisy, nor moves quickly, and lasts
hours, then we become very different. I don’t know who she is!” (441).
Since death is unknowable and indistinct, it follows that such an experi-
ence has radical hermeneutic implications, extending even as far as Kid’s
inability to “know” his partner, or his own name, which many too quickly
confuse with insanity. Kid describes his state in the following way:

“Look about . . . being nuts. [. . .] You’re not, and you

never have been. That means what you see, and hear, and
feel, and think . . . you think that is your mind. But the real
mind is invisible: you’re less aware of it, while you think,
than you are of your eye while you see . . . until something
goes wrong with it. Then you become aware of it, with all
its dislocated pieces and its rackety functioning, the same
way you become aware of your eye when you get a cinder
in it. Because it hurts . . . Sure it distorts things. But the
strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to any-
one, except another nut, or, if you’re lucky, a doctor who
has an unusual amount of sense—stranger than the halluci-
nations, or the voices, or the anxiety—is the way you begin
to experience the edges of the mind itself . . . in a way that
other people just can’t.” (original’s emphasis; 48)

In some ways what we have here is similar to the finite objectivity put for-
ward by Donna Haraway in “Situated Knowledges” in which she argues
against a disembodied panoptical objectivity and for an embodied objec-
 Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren 179

tivity. The godlike eye, she insists, “distance(s) the knowing subject from
everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power” (188). She
argues for a mortal, situated knowledge which is ultimately more objec-
tive: “only partial perspective promises objective vision” (190). Such a sit-
uated and embodied objectivity is more responsible because it is there
with others rather than abstracted from the world like an immanent subject
created over and against an object.
The Richards family is implicated in this critique due to their obsession
with moving up in their building to a nineteenth floor apartment with a
balcony. The other god-like eye in Bellona is Roger Calkins, the newspa-
per editor, whose mansion overlooks the city. Against this notion of con-
sciousness (“what you see, and hear, and feel, and think”), Kid points to a
way of seeing founded on the interruption of this panoptical eye and, ulti-
mately, on the death of the other described above and our consequent fini-
tude. His argument here bears a strong resemblance to Heidegger’s analy-
sis of the broken tool (73–73; German page numbers).1 For the latter, the
“I” is not absolute, self-birthed, and non-relational, but essentially with
others in a way that cannot be thought (“invisible”) because thought by its
very nature separates the “subject” from its essence. Its essence is exis-
tence if we understand existence as the constant “self”-interpretation that
occurs prior to rational consciousness and inserts us in the world in a pro-
found referential manner (Dreyfus 12–17). Heidegger describes being-in-
the-world in an imminently practical way, as “a handling, using and taking
care of things which has its own kind of ‘knowledge’” (67).
It is this being-in-the-world that is pointed to in the reference to the
“real mind is invisible.” Delany is not arguing for a higher mind beyond
our own which would ground our world, so much as using a metaphysi-
cally bankrupt vocabulary to suggest that reality may not have a ground at
all; reality may be interpretation all the way down. This “mind,” then, is
not normally noticed, or subject to scrutiny. As Heidegger’s famous analy-
sis of the hammer suggests, it is only when something goes wrong, when
the equipment we need for a project fails, that we see the worldliness of
the world. Once broken, the tool’s relation (“reference”) to its wielder and
the world around it is made conspicuous. The state of being broken forces
us to recognize our relation and dependence on the world around us,
which is to say, that we are in the world and not monadic beings. During
this experience, the reductive, assimilative work of rationality stalls, and
180 J N T

alterity is seen as “dislocated” and “rackety.” While the tool’s “wounded”

status—in this case, the cinder in the eye—may cause some discomfort,
forcing the “subject” to be exposed to the world, to anxiety, hurt, and to
mortality, this discomfort allows for a more accurate experience (or
“knowledge”) of the world by allowing the “subject” to “experience the
edges of the mind itself.” Delany underlines this a bit more concretely di-
rectly after this speech. Kid, who never wears more than one shoe, puts his
bare foot on the floor and the omniscient narrator remarks, “He was far
more conscious of the texture of the floorboards with the foot that had
been bare” (48). Kid, like his shoes, both present and absent, has a more
direct, bodily understanding of the world.
We’ve already seen to some degree how Mrs. Richards creates a
monadic shell around her family, cutting her off from community. The text
indicates this more directly when her daughter, June, visits her brother at
the scorpion commune. Delany writes, “She circles [. . .] in. Yet she’s so
far away! It’s not even that [. . .] she’s a pretty girl, but rather that there are
over two dozen people living in here and the isolation she demands about
her destroys our concept of human space” (563). June is god-like and
“heroic,” if only because of her persistence in trying to mend her family.
She is visiting in order to convince her brother Eddy to return to the fam-
ily which she says has “fallen apart . . . it’s like . . . the plug was pulled out
and everything ran out. All of it” (567). June is the very model of the
monad insofar as she is intent on control, on a restricted economy that is
intent on conserving identity, keeping it all inside (Derrida WD 251–277).
Her greatest worry is precisely what we see once again in this final quota-
tion: the horror of an inside exposed to the outside.
By contrast, for those who are exposed to one another, “Bellona is ter-
ribly hospitable. You can have your fantasy and [. . .] feel just a bit less
like you’re depriving anyone else of theirs” (373). While Bellona is full of
wealth, little real looting occurs which is “a comment on the limits of the
particular mind the city encourages. Who wants to be as lonely as the ac-
quisition of all those objects would make them?” Rationality, in its
essence, always gathers to its self, assimilating alterity. Its interruption
amounts to a radical dispersal. At a party thrown in honor of Kid’s re-
cently published book, Kid notes how Calkin’s mansion “can soak up a lot
of people,” before the conversation turns to the city:
 Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren 181

“How odd,” Lanya said. “All the limits go, and you
can’t believe there’s really any more to it. We’re used to
objects like icebergs or old wells where you know most of
it is under ground or water. But something like a city at
night, with great stretches of it blotted or obscured, that’s
very different—“
“You guys,” Denny interrupted [. . .] you two can talk
about things that, you know, are just so far beyond me [. . .]
when I don’t understand—even when I do, I just wanna
fuckin’ cry, you know?” [. . .]
Lanya nodded. “I do.”
Denny breathed out and looked.
They stood apart and felt very close. (615)

Calkins, June, and Mrs. Richards are each examples of the rational subject
gathering in difference, making it work, creating a profit, and forming a
narcissistic shell around the self. This shell amounts to the drawing of lim-
its, a delineation of inside and outside, which allows identity to be seen. In
Bellona, the death of the other has turned Bellona’s urban consciousness,
these limits, inside out. The city’s condition exposes most people to their
essential finitude and the impossibility of immanence. With the limits
(borders, edges) of their minds turned inside out, the work of assimilation
stalls and with it the capitalist impulse. Kid, by contrast to Calkins or
Richards, does not depend on clear limits. Calkins is able to assimilate
many people (“can soak up a lot of people”) because he possesses a sense
of interiority and an interior always requires an exterior with the borders
in between. Exposed to death, Kid, Lanya, and Denny as subjects are in-
terrupted and spaced out and into one another: they can stand spatially dis-
tant from one another, yet, due to this rational interruption (“so far beyond
me [rationally]”), find themselves in the most intimate of situations.
This notion of intimacy is a radical revision of that seen in Delany’s
book-length essay, Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love.
The essay concerns itself with the author’s experience living in a New
York commune in 1967 and 1968. While Robert Elliot Fox argues that
Dhalgren describes the “cold underside” of his communal experience
rather than any “hoped-for state of bliss,” I would insist that both of these
texts are very much concerned with the possibility of a communal, utopian
182 J N T

ethics (106). In Heavenly Breakfast, space remains a concern. In a com-

mune the quarters are so close, Delany tells us, that every action on the
part of an “I” is immediately felt by others and vice versa: “the square of
the distance intervening between us must be a diminishing factor in how
much information and energy crosses from me to you and back” (103).
Since there is such an immediate connection between people, it becomes
impossible “to avoid responsibility” or force the other person to work
harder than he or she can bear. All of this is communicated less through
rationality (“telepathy”) than “touch and smell.” While Delany even at this
early moment is skeptical of rationality, he does not emphasize its inter-
ruption, so much as the way that touch and smell appear to overwhelm the
rational information that might bolster an “I.” In Dhalgren, by contrast, he
begins with an experience, the death of the other, that interrupts rational-
ity.

* * *

Nancy describes how prior to myth humans existed as singularities, not

linked by anything other than being-with. In an interview, he describes the
concept as “proximity without recovering [assimilating] one through the
other. If the pen is hidden behind the glass, you can’t say they are ‘with.’
[. . .] So, ‘with’ implies proximity and distance, precisely the distance of
the impossibility to come together in a common being [a subject]” (“Love
and Community”). The “with” points toward the absolute impossibility of
an absolute, of a subject who can be non-relational, shutting out alterity. It
was only when a speaker, a poet, stood up and began telling a story that
these separate singularities began to recognize each other and cohere and
move toward immanence. As the scene of myth, it is also the scene of a
subject’s (re)presentation of itself: “Myth is of and from the origin, it re-
lates back to a mythic foundation, and through this relation it founds itself
(a consciousness, a people, a narrative)” (IC 43–45). Once the poet/hero
begins speaking, “it is no longer the language of the [singular] exchanges,
but of their reunion—the sacred language of a foundation and an oath.”
The “unknown” and unnamed become known during this telling. The
group of disparate singularities knows itself and the world through this
representation. Consciousness, immanence, and subjectivity are all formed
through the telling of myth.
 Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren 183

In the case of Bellona, tremendous forces immediately begin to re-

work the mythic fabric whose shredding has exposed the city to being-
with. Once again, Mrs. Richards can serve as an example. After Bobby’s
death, she discovers Kid writing a poem and wonders if it is an elegy for
Bobby. Kid denies this and immediately decides that “Elegy” will be the
title (242). Mrs. Richards exudes a “nervousness” that makes others con-
form to her wishes (173). In this case, she uses Kid’s poetry to heal her ex-
posure to Bobby’s death. On the level of the polis, Calkins stands in for
Mrs. Richards. Just as Mrs. Richards tries to use Kid and his writing as a
means of healing the rift created by Bobby’s death, so Calkins twists real-
ity and makes Kid a mythic hero, filling in or caulking the breach in Bel-
lona’s psyche (654, 712–713). Kid says, “I’m not a poet. I’m not a hero.
But sometimes I think these people will distort reality in any way to make
me one—but that’s insanity, isn’t it?”
Calkins identifies with the city (“my City”) and uses Kid, “the sort of
poet Bellona needs,” as a means to build up a level of “acclaim” for Bel-
lona (658; 740–742). Calkins publishes Kid’s Brass Orchids without even
reading it or meeting with the poet. Society requires art, well-written or
not. Calkins describes his interest in Kid as a matter of the “mechanics of
power.” However, he is just as interested in Kid as a hero than as a poet. If
we ignore, for the moment, Dhalgren’s surreal and fragmented prose and
focus on the actual events of the narrative, the novel could be understood
as a heroic epic, the outfitting of the hero being one of the most obvious
conventions of the heroic myth. The partially amnesiac narrator enters the
city and almost immediately is outfitted with “three gifts [. . .] armor,
weapon, title” (18, 7). He is armed with an “orchid” which resembles Ed-
ward Scissorhand’s famous blades. For armor, he has a three-yard long
chain of prisms tightly wrapped around his torso. And, lastly, he is dubbed
“the Kid,” “Kidd” or “Kid.” Along with these themes, we have the epic
length of Dhalgren itself, the repeated mention of Kid as “hero,” and the
way that the novel ostentatiously thematizes myth (249). On the most bla-
tant level, the Bellona Times continually misrepresents Kid, so that he and
the scorpions look more dangerous, if not heroic. When he follows George
into a burning house to rescue three children, he retains all the credit while
George is dropped from the news story. When he and the scorpions go on
a “run” through the city, a series of dull pranks is blown into a violent
rampage.2
184 J N T

This heroic thematization is perhaps nowhere more evident than in an

image that appears to Kid as he engages in a consensual gangbang with
fellow scorpions:

This time, it was an image of myself, holding hands with

someone (Lanya? Risa? Denny?) and running among leaf-
less trees laced with moonlight while the person behind me
kept repeating: ‘ . . . Grendal, Grendal, Grendal . . .’ which,
while I rocked my face in her hot neck and the stinging in
my thighs, chest, and belly went on, seemed very funny.
(Specific and primitive?) I raised my face out of the moon-
bright branches into a room lathered with the smell of
smoke and scorpions. And grinning, man, like a tiger. (678)

Kid is haunted by a simultaneous call to the closely coupled vocations of

hero and poet. This repetition is either the call to kill the monster Grendel,
or to write the story, a contemporary Beowulf, that would recapitulate the
death of Grendel—the monster in this case being a metaphor for the un-
working of Bellona. As his handholding and flight indicate, heroism en-
dangers his relation with others. This theme of myth’s immanence and ex-
clusion is underlined by the final reference to “grinning [. . .] like a tiger.”
Ostentatiously an allusion to the grinning and tiger-like protagonist of Al-
fred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, it also links up with what may be
the most repetitive trope for immanence in the novel: lions. Statues, or
monuments, of lions are strewn throughout the text. We see them linked to
Mrs. Richards, Calkins, and the park commune. In each instance they are
linked to work, to the assimilative actions of the rational subject.
Matters do not remain so simple. Afterwards, Kid realizes that it was
not Gren-dal, but Dhal-gren that he heard. While not stated explicitly, it
seems fairly clear that Bill, the man who interviews Kid for the Bellona
Times is, in fact, William Dhalgren (783). “Kid” does not know his name
and wonders whether he, himself, might be William Dhalgren, whose link
with the newspaper—a transmitter of myth—can only magnify the logo-
centric implications of the proper name. The latter would seem to be an
immediate means of identifying a person through language, an identifica-
tion that would not have to first traverse the outside, a relation to the other
(Bennington 105). In Glas, Derrida writes that “the work of mourning
 Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren 185

[. . .] is always for/of the proper name,” an observation that is supported

very well by Mrs. Richards, among others (86). The proper name as with
any other “proper” thing—property, propriety—can only be what it is
through exclusion of that which is other, exclusion of that which under-
mines the illusion of pure immanence. Since death or a recognition of fini-
tude leads to a radical interruption of subjectivity, subjectivity can be
thought of as essentially founded on a work of mourning in which death is
kept at arms length through the polite observance of funeral rites: myth, in
a word. But this is impossible. When Kid once again remembers his
proper name (described later in this piece), he is already “with” others in
the sense I have been describing. The proper name cannot be removed
from what Derrida calls the “system of differences.”
The essential tension in the novel is between whether to be a
hero/poet/proper name, or to be exposed to the being-with of relation. Kid
waffles on this question. At the moment he realizes that he had heard
“Dhalgren” and not “Grendal,” he wipes himself with a copy of the Times.
At this Joycean juncture, Kid does not recognize the connection between
the Times and William Dhalgren, but the implicit criticism remains (679).
At other moments, he is enthralled by the fantasy of the Author. Consider
his ambivalent attraction to Newboy’s books: “A field, cast by the name of
a man, who, without my ever having read a complete work of his, the hid-
den machinery of my consciousness at some point decided was an artist.
How comical, sad, exhausting. Why am I a victim of this magic?” (763).
And yet he wonders whether he will also cast such a spell on those who
have not read him.
What is at stake in this question of having a poet/hero for the city? If
we ignore Delany’s explicit interest in the question of community, Dhal-
gren could be read as an 800 page gloss on Michel Foucault’s ”What is an
Author?” In Foucault as well, it is death that provides impetus for the cre-
ation of narrative (890). Narrative substantiates the hero’s death and post-
pones, in the exemplary case of Scheherazade, the moment at which the
poet faces death. The poet, hero, and narrative are all bound to the move-
ment of what Foucault terms individualization which he also sees in terms
of space. When the author dies, he writes, “we must locate the space left
empty [. . .] follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the
openings that this disappearance uncovers” (892). It is less this emphasis
on space that interests me, as Nancy has certainly theorized spatiality in
186 J N T

more extensive ways, than the question of how the author-function oper-
ates in Dhalgren.
Clearly, in the “author” we confront the problematic of the proper
name, myth, and heroism. Foucault’s theorization of the author function
dovetails with the above on several interrelated levels: the author acts as a
limiting agent, “marking off the edges of a text” (893); the author is a
“principle of thrift [read, restricted economy] in the proliferation of mean-
ing” (899); and, the author is a “principle of unity” (895). Just as Kid is
controlled by Newboy’s books, so Kid operates for Bellona. Looking at
Newboy’s books, Kid asks, “What is it around these objects that vibrates
so much the objects themselves vanish?” (763). Kid, as concrete, singular
book, is also lost when the author function controls him which explains
how this “hidden machinery” is also able to look past Kid as a singular en-
tity and create him as Author. The importance of this appropriation cannot
be underestimated. In a limit-less city, a city without an economy and
without unity, Kid as Author represents a crucial limiting figure. Kid as
Author lends himself to the city as Subject; otherwise, the city or commu-
nity of Bellona, remains un-worked, a non-exclusionary being-with.

* * *

“You have received that holy and spectacular wound which

bleeds . . . well, poetry [. . .] But have you hunkered down
close to it, sighted through the lips of it the juncture of your
own humanity with that of the race? [. . .] Whether love or
rage,” Mr Newboy went on, not looking up, “or detach-
ment impels the sighting, no matter. If you don’t do it, all
your blood is spilled pointlessly . . .” (258)

We have a sense of what this “holy and spectacular wound” entails

epistemologically, relationally, and economically for singularity (as op-
posed to subjectivity). We have also touched on the question of myth and
its web of influence. In this final section, I focus on the question of writing
more directly, asking how Dhalgren mitigates against a mythic, monu-
mental state. We have a sense of what a city or knowledge might look like
in light of the experience of the wound, but what about a work of art? If
consciousness, subjectival or urban, is a matter of seamless myths, how
 Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren 187

can writing remain exposed, un-worked and thereby retain the ethical,
epistemological, economic benefits detailed above? How can an author
write without becoming subject to “Authority” and to the consequent as-
similation of difference?
I have already mentioned the circularity of Dhalgren’s narrative and al-
luded to some of the apocalyptic themes that are never fully narrated: the
origin of Bellona’s wounding, and the “plague” alluded to in two section
headings (“In Time of Plagues” and “The Anathemata: a plague journal”).
Dhalgren owes its horror to its absolute abandonment of these flagrantly
important themes. Apart from one young woman lying sick in a bed, we
are left pondering whether the plague is a real illness or existential, along
the lines I have been depicting. In addition, the ontological nature of Dhal-
gren is confused on several levels. Dhalgren appears to be a novel con-
cerned with Kid’s experiences in Bellona in which a clear division be-
tween author and subject is cultivated. Then we begin to notice that the
notebook—already full of notes and observations when given to Kid early
in the text—begins to repeat the opening of the novel. Is Kid writing the
“novel” before us, or has he discovered the author’s discarded notebook
and decided to inscribe his own thoughts alongside the author’s words?
The opposition between author, character, and reader are all radically dis-
placed in this way.
Along with this stylistic intermingling of self (author) and other (his
object, characters), the novel shifts point of view frequently. Most of the
text remains in third person omniscient while infrequent paragraphs in the
first person detail Kid’s observation of the world around him. Dhalgren’s
most ostentatious feature is the way in which the text is riven by multiple
narratives. This is particularly true of the final section, the plague journal,
in which a third person narrative might take up the left portion of the page
and Kid’s own point of view the remaining white space. Kid’s interjec-
tions often criticize the inaccuracy of the other passage, implying that he,
once again, is the Author and denying any simple totalization of meaning.
The text in this final section appears unfinished; words are crossed out, or
sentences end in midstream. At least two editorial notations appear here
by, it would seem, two different editors. We are given a profound sense of
a project that has not been finished, but simply abandoned.
I want to turn to a lengthy passage in which we find Kid writing. Be-
fore turning to his notebook, Kid has been walking through the city, horri-
188 J N T

fied by the inexplicable destruction he sees around him in which the “de-
marcation [again, limit or border] between lawn and street vanished be-
neath junk” (77):

He sat down on the curb, opened to the notebook’s first

page.

to wound the autumnal city

he read once more. Hastily he turned the page over to the

clear side. He looked down the four streets, looked at the
corner houses. He sucked a breath through closed teeth,
clicked the point out and began to write.
In the middle of the third line, without taking pen off
paper, he swept back to cross it all out. Then, carefully, he
recopied two words on the next line. The second was “I.”
Very carefully now, word followed word. He crossed out
two more lines [. . .]
Between lines, while he punched his pen point, his eye
strayed to the writing beside his:

It is our despair at the textural inadequacies of lan-

guage that drives us to heighten the structural ones toward

“Annn!’ out loud. There was not a pretty word in the

bunch. Roughly he turned the notebook back around the
paper to avoid distraction.
Holding the last two lines in his head, he looked about at
the buildings again. (Why not live dangerously?) He wrote
the last lines hurriedly, notating them before they dis-
persed.
He printed at the top: “Brisbain”
[ . . .] closed the book, puzzled at what he had done.
Then he stood.
Struck with dizziness, he staggered off the curb. He
shook his head and finally managed to get the world under
him at the right angle. The back of his legs were cramped:
he’d been in a near-fetal squat practically half an hour.
(original’s emphasis; 78–79)
 Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren 189

Fredric Jameson’s main thesis in Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of

Late Capitalism is “that the latest mutation in space—postmodern hyper-
space—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individ-
ual human body to locate itself, to organize its surroundings perceptually,
and cognitively map its position in a mappable external world” (44).
Needless to say, for Jameson agency depends on the ability to cognitively
map postmodern space whose confusion he links to “late capitalism.” Bel-
lona’s spatial confusion cannot be overstated. We must not only recall
Kid’s sense that the city changes daily—he even sees one person swap-
ping road signs—but the essential mystery of what led to this confusion
remains unanswered. The passage moves from a horror of postmodern
urban space to a sense of positioning seen most simply in Kid’s mapping
of self (“I” above) against the other. Soon after writing the poem, Kid’s
dizziness dissipates and with it his horror of the street. He notices that
Brisbain North has given way to Brisbain South, bringing Kid (on the next
page) to Calkin’s mansion. Clearly, this transformation is a product of
writing; writing, urban spatial mapping, and consciousness are knotted to-
gether here. All of this fittingly occurs while Kid is on his way to
Calkins’s mansion. In writing this poem (“Brisbain”), he has already
begun to fulfill his role as mythmaker. By contrast to Jameson, however, it
is the capitalist, Calkins, who pushes for this new mapping.
The passage begins with Kid glancing at the opening page of the note-
book which “begins” as Dhalgren does (“to wound the autumnal city”).
Kid “hastily” turns the page. When he glances to the writing adjacent to
his own—an incomplete sentence which details the inadequacy of lan-
guage (the impossibility of myth’s desire to resolve the chasm between
idea and reality)—he screams. This strange scream (“Annn!”) also occurs
in a flashback of his boyhood derangement. Again, he turns the notebook
so he will not be “distract[ed].” We have already seen how this passage
describes the creation of subjectivity as mythic mapping. Identity, as we
have discussed, is a matter of non-relation, immanence. What we see here
is the birth of immanence which is always formed first through relation to
the other (the glance to the writing on the side) only to then hastily elide
that same movement. This is a glance, a relation, that the resultant subject
cannot comprehend because its birth via relation is beyond the subject: “to
the degree that it occurs, birth effaces itself, and brings itself indefinitely
back. Birth is this slipping away of presence through which everything
190 J N T

comes to presence” (Nancy Birth 4). In this case, this birth is that of a
poem, “Brisbain,” which appears to have been fully completed while Kid
sat in a “near-fetal squat.” Kid’s forgetfulness, however, reaches beyond
the elision of the other in writing to the point at which his own terror dis-
sipates, demonstrating the concomitant connection between myth and con-
sciousness. A completed writing—unlike the fragment mentioned
above—protects the subject from the horror of relation, rebuilding the lim-
its of consciousness along with the limits of the city street.
When Kid finally remembers his name, a similar situation is played
out. The scorpions and various other Bellonan people dance en masse
around a fire. It is riotous. People are naked, clapping, floundering back
and forth, and stumbling into one another. With the emphasis on a central
point, the fire, and Kid’s recollection of his name (Michael Henry Fl—)
and Dhalgren’s, this appears to be a celebration of immanence. Yet the
center in this case is a fire, a figure for the Bellonan catastrophe, and there
is a profound sense of transience in this passage. Derrida writes of cinders
as “at once the best name for the absence of a truly proper name”
(Lukacher 1). The fire, like ashes or cinders, signals both identity’s pres-
ence and its absence—its presence in others, its relation. Paul Fenster, a
civil rights worker and non-dancer, tries to keep Kid and Lanya from
falling but Lanya tells him that “It’s all right if we fall” (779). Protecting
the self (or Calkins’s mansion) is not part of this dance. This is not a re-
stricted economy. Instead, it is a dance grounded in the movement of
Being (in which, it is worth noting, both conservative (Calkins) and liberal
politics (Fenster) are critiqued):

I sat and panted and smiled [. . .] with contentment over the

absolute fact of his [William Dhalgren’s] revealed identity,
till even that, as all absolutes must, began to dissolve. [. . .]
“What—?” Denny moved his hand on my leg.
Lanya glanced at me, shifted her shoulder against mine.
But I sat back again, silent, marveling at the dissolve’s
completion, both elated and numbed by the jarring claps
that measured and metronomed each differential in the
change—till I had no more certainty of Bill’s last name
than I had of my own. With only the memory of knowl-
edge, and bewilderment at whatever mechanic had, for
 Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren 191

minutes, made that knowledge as certain to me as my own

existence, I sat, trying to sort that mechanism’s failure,
which had let it slip away. (784)

Their dance celebrates the stutter, the gap or relation to the other, through
which entities begin their presencing. Kid strips and says, ”I want to . . . to
dance” (782). This is not a celebration of destruction either, because that
would very quickly fall into immanence. It is instead the coming and
going, the birth that leads to presence. Kid is both “elated and numbed,”
feelings that go in divergent directions. Opposed to the deadening effect of
signification, of the proper name, of myth, is the freeing movement of
existence—the only “knowledge” Kid can attest to. Kid’s interest in
“Dhalgren” parallels the reader’s. We also want to have this mystery un-
veiled yet, following Kid, it is not the signified that becomes privileged
here, but the architecture of meaning that allows signification to appear. To
privilege this coming is to privilege existence. To ex-ist is to be in relation,
exposed to the outside. Signification, myth, subjectivity are what erase ex-
istence as they resolve the gap between reality and the subject’s idea of
what reality should be, creating the illusion of non-relation to others
(Nancy Gravity 22–23; “Of Being” 1). Existence, then, is irrevocably
communal or relational.
Nancy writes that “Death is the absolute signified, the sealing off of
sense. It is the name, but ‘to be born’ is the verb” (original’s emphasis; 3
Birth). Dhalgren concerns itself with birth as that which is foregrounded
when myth is interrupted. “Kid” is continually being born: Kid, Kidd, the
Kid, Michael Henry Fl—. Not only the instability of his name, but “Kid”
signifies immaturity, if not birth. Each of the recently quoted passages are
concerned with the nature of birth. In the first we saw how relation was
elided in the process of writing “Brisbain.” The second passage makes
clear that birth, here, is not birth as signification, or the work of mourning,
or heroes. Birth in the second passage is approximate with the sideways
look, that relation that is quickly rejected in the writing of “Brisbain.”
What would a work that included this relation look like? It would look
un-worked, rather like Dhalgren whose incompleteness, abandonment, os-
tentatious erasures, and editorial intrusions force the reader to recognize
the relation to the other that was eliminated during the writing of the
poem. Dhalgren is the gap, or stutter, that which disturbs the easy assimi-
192 J N T

lation of alterity to a tidy inside. There is no tidy inside here. The work of
myth has been exposed, leaving the reader without a unified sign, hanging,
exposed to the outside—but not without meaning. We are meaning, as
Nancy likes to say. Meaning, he writes, “takes place between us and not
between signifier, signified and referent [. . .] before all produced or dis-
closed meaning, and before all exchanges of meaning, our existence pre-
sents itself to us as meaning” (original’s emphasis; Gravity 58, 62). Mean-
ing is an “infinite hollowing out of presence” of the subject and the
subject’s myths: the city, the proper name, and so on (64). All that remains
is that we follow Kid’s lead and sit back and enjoy its coming and its
going.
Perhaps here we can begin to understand the relentless sex in Dhalgren
and its link to this exposed community (sex requires more than one). Un-
like the traditional heterosexual coupling which the Catholic Church and
others have linked to societal welfare, a threesome is not productive. After
the West and its obsession with signification, it is just such an unproduc-
tive coupling that beckons to us. This new “subject comes, does nothing
but come, and for him, presence in its entirety is coming: which means,
not ‘having come’ (past participle), but a coming (the action of a coming,
arriving). Presence is what is born, and does not cease being born” (Nancy
Birth 2). In this way, Delany represents those strife-torn American cities of
the 1960’s and 1970’s in a profoundly different light. If Bellona stands in
for one of these cities, it does not represent a simple tragedy—a monu-
ment—that a liberal or conservative politics could then be founded upon.
Instead, Delany peels away these exclusionary structures and represents
what cannot be mentally represented: our birth which always takes place
with others, a birth both horrifying and wonderful.
Jean-Francois Lyotard describes the Paris riots of 1968 in a similar
fashion by showing how politics grounds itself in forgetting. Polemos ex-
ists between conservatives and liberals as a way to forget this birth that
“has no relation to the mind” but gives birth to the mind (44). Conserva-
tive and liberal politics are equivalent insofar as each tries to assimilate
the “unmanageable” (birth, death), that which cannot be used as a basis for
a conventional community. He describes the student protestors as lacking
a “contract” (a political agenda), and, as such, dwelling within that child-
hood, or state of dependency that the adult mind—obsessed with imma-
nence—cannot bear. Such a “politics” confronts traditional authorities
 Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren 193

with their essential relation to others. Dhalgren, in this way, has much to
say about the nature of black, gay and even feminist politics of the late
1960’s and the early 1970’s.
Monuments—to return to our introductory theme—are also born. In
Dhalgren’s strange opening pages, Kid meets a woman outside of Bellona,
makes love, asks if she knows his name (she says, “You’ve come from
somewhere. You’re going somewhere” as if that is all the identity one
needs), and then chases her until she transforms into a tree (4, 2). Again,
the proper name, the name that would be a monument, is juxtaposed with
birth, the dryadic transformation. However, it is not until much later that
we learn that this “Eurasian” had built a “life-size lion wedged together
out of scrap car-parts and junked iron” (785). She is a bricoleur, as op-
posed to an engineer. An engineer, like Mr. Richards, is one who would
“supposedly be the absolute origin of his own discourse and supposedly
would construct it ‘out of nothing’” (Derrida WD 285). An engineer
would create a lion without seams, non-relational, like the lions found in
Mrs. Richard’s apartment or guarding Calkins’s mansion. A bricoleur
does not dabble in theology, but takes her concepts from a “heritage which
is more or less coherent or ruined.” Ruined, heterogeneous, abandoned—
it is just such a monument that Dhalgren plays at being.

Notes
The author thanks Maureen Lauder, Dawn Comer, and JNT’s anonymous reader for their
many incisive comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

1. If it were not for the centrality of mourning in the novel and this resemblance to a pas-
sage in Heidegger’s Being and Time, I might have led with the following. Ken James
writes, “Delany argues that the rhetoric of science fiction foregrounds precisely the
historical, social, and technological constitution of human landscapes which conserva-
tive rhetoric tends to obscure” (James xix–xx). Rather than being naturalized or dehis-
toricized and thereby elided, the objective world (of space, landscape, culture, and
technology) are foregrounded as questions in sf.

2. Both Gawron and Mary Kay Bray have produced intriguing takes on Delany’s use of
myth. Bray writes, “By means of its ironies, Dhalgren brings readers to a simultaneous
awareness both of traditional American myths and preoccupations and of their failure
to be viable, at least for some [. . .] ironies in Dhalgren emanate from the pattern of
194 J N T

quest and initiation suggested above, from a variety of plays upon the concept of
American individualism, and from a thirst for moral absolutes set against an intensely
relative background” (58).

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