Dhalgren: A Book for Our Times

Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren was copyrighted in 1974. A lot has changed since then, but the issues it addresses all ring relevant today, and its treatment of those issues is ahead of even our time. Reading it, I couldn’t help but think that everyone fighting their own little culture wars today would benefit from this book.

Dhalgren is about a city called Bellona where fires still burn from an unidentified catastrophe. A man who has forgotten his name enters the city and there continues life amidst the ruins and survivors. Usually described as science fiction, Dhalgren has precious little in it of what usually gets that label. Instead, it's speculative in the way it addresses social issues related to class, race, religion and sexuality. What would American urban society be like if cut off from the rest of the world and every remaining person were left to fend for her or himself?

 

 

One issue the novel addresses is rape. In a powerful scene, a discussion between an accused rapist named George and a woman named Lanya reads like something you might run across in the comments section under a feminist piece on rape culture. George is that troll who wants to somehow downplay the guilt of the crime, while Lanya is having none of it. Eventually, George gives his account of an incident that happened on the night of the city’s catastrophe, an incident that has made him a notorious rapist:

 

“We was in this alley, and there was this light flashing on and off, on and off; and people would run in, run out, and we just didn’t care! Or maybe that made it better, that there wasn’t nothing they could do, or that they wanted to do . . . And she got hit and she got punched and she got thrown around and she was yelling and screaming, ‘No, no, oh, don’t, oh please don’t.’ so I guess it was rape. Right? But when we finished—“ George nodded—“she was reaching for it. She wanted some more, awful bad.”

And it appears to be true, because the girl he's talking about, June, spends most of the novel looking for him so they can repeat that night. This is troubling. It’s easy to discount George as a sleazeball, but where does June fit into today’s narratives about rape culture? What about women and men, of all sexual orientations, who like it rough? Dhalgren is full of sexual situations--and more than one sexual marathon is described move by move--that push buttons and raise questions.

Author photograph by James Hamilton.

Delany pushes buttons with class, race and religion as well. George is a man of the streets, while June’s family tries desperately to maintain a sequestered middle-class lifestyle. George is described as a hulking and well-hung black man, while June is a timid little white girl--which maybe shouldn’t matter, but the fact is that race does matter in some way to most people. George has become a kind of deity in a new religion propagated by a woman pastor who spreads the faith through posters showing him dressed in nothing but a leather jacket, cap and boots.

At this point, you’re probably wondering, “What the hell kind of book is this?!” And that’s pretty much what I thought the whole time I was reading its nearly 800 pages of Joycean and Pynchonian tumult. Dhalgren raises a lot of issues, makes you uncomfortable, and makes you ponder what is right, but it refuses to moralize, often leaving you lost.

And that’s why it’s ahead of--or perhaps just outside--our time. Moralizing has its place, but too often today everything is sanctimonious--if not on the surface, then in the subtext. Authors, filmmakers and other creators are always presenting the right message and can be sure it will win approval in certain circles. I’m reminded of the Ellen DeGeneres joke at the Academy Awards in 2014:

It’s going to be an exciting night. Anything can happen, so many different possibilities. Possibility number one: 12 Years a Slave wins best picture. Possibility number two: You’re all racists.

I just saw 12 Years a Slave. It’s a great film that tells uncomfortable truths, but it tells them in a way that’s actually comfortable for most--and indeed it won Best Picture. But I can’t imagine anyone that Delaney’s masterpiece wouldn’t challenge. In 12 Years a Slave, right and wrong are clear to see, but Dhalgren is trickier, forcing you to find your own answers. Much of the time, you may not know what is right with regard to the questions raised, but even when you do, it isn’t because that’s what the author said through the book, but because that’s what you said through the book.

Despite its age, Dhalgren remains troubling, and ultimately it’s beyond my grasp. These are but first thoughts upon finishing the novel, and I’m painfully aware of how uninsightful--and possibly just plain wrong--they are. But that’s part of what I want out of The Gleaming Sword--inquiry over right answers, the labyrinth over the exit.

 

 

More posts on sci-fi books:

The Trials of Dune

Riverworld and the Resurrection

A Review of Clockwork Angels 

 

The Ancients' Guide to Love and Sex in the 21st Century

 

"Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come"

--Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI

Plato’s Symposium opens with some Athenian luminaries attending a banquet at the tragic poet Agathon’s place. The gathering begins with everyone agreeing not to drink and ends in drunken revelry. In between, the attendees deliver speeches in praise of love, the finest of them by none other than Socrates himself. I don’t intend to offer my own encomium to love here, but I do have some thoughts on the speeches in the dialogue.

A krater depicting a symposium. I took this photo a few years ago at an exhibit of ancient Mediterranean pottery at San Francisco Airport. From my notes: Symposia were male drinking parties. Wives were excluded, but hetairai (courtesans) were welcome. Music, dancing, games and "erotic activity" were also part of symposia.

PHAEDRUS

What I find most interesting about Phaedrus’ speech is his use of the word lover. Today when we use the word lover, we usually think of one of two in a mutual romantic relationship. A close look at Phaedrus’ speech, however, shows a subtle difference. He uses the word lover to mean one who is in love with another, with reciprocity common but unnecessary. When he makes an example of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, he admits Achilles’ love for Patroclus, but also makes a distinction between lover and beloved:

Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus—his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two.

Perhaps I like this distinction on a rational level because it suggests one of the key points in the dialogue, that love is by the inferior for the superior. I decided to reread the Symposium because of references to it in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein. In the novel, the narrator and titular character love each other as friends, but the narrator goes to great lengths to show that Ravelstein is the superior of the two, and thus the narrator’s devotion.

Or perhaps Phaedrus’ use of lover simply appeals to me because it allows for praise of unrequited lovers, who seek to be more virtuous and thereby win their beloved’s approval. The plight of one who moons over someone one-sidedly--a situation to which I’m no stranger--seems less unseemly when granted classical gravitas.

PAUSANIAS

Pausanias makes a distinction between high and low love:

Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting.

Judging by the jests they trade, Agathon and company have no small amount of appreciation for comely youths, so they would likely understand our modern obsession with sex, but Pausanias makes the commonplace assertion that when truly in love, you find something more in your partner. In wedding speeches and Facebook posts, husbands and wives are always talking about how “kind, caring and sweet” their partners are. This is something like that, but given how much time the great philosophers of ancient Greece spent pondering the “noble disposition,” I think Pausanias has in mind something higher than mere niceness.

But that’s for Socrates to elucidate. First, the playwright Aristophanes--of Lysistrata and Chiraq fame--makes a speech, but only after having overcome a bout of the “hiccough.”

ARISTOPHANES

Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein makes much of the sex myth in Aristophanes’ speech. The idea is that far in humanity’s past, man and woman were one being, but together they were so strong that Zeus found it necessary to weaken them by separating them. Severed from one another and finding themselves incomplete, men and women each yearned desperately for completion. Taking pity on them, Zeus provided a way for them to rejoin through love and sex. However, this was not limited to opposite-sex couples:

…or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.

Certainly there is poetry in this, and I used to view the search for love in this way. A good mate fills a hole inside, completes you, shines light in your darkness. Nowadays, however, I’m more inclined to see the search for “the one” in Lacanian terms. Everyone has a hole inside that is part of their psyche and can never be filled. Two people just means two holes. Thus, Lacan says that sex--seen as the ultimate fulfillment of two individuals each in the other--is impossible (previous post).

But Aristophanes’ myth, usually deployed for its picture of two individuals coming together in perfect harmony, could also be seen as explaining the very separation described by Lacan. And even Lacan didn’t mean to say that all hope was lost. While ultimate satisfaction isn’t possible, we can’t help but search for it, and the search has its own rewards.

SOCRATES

When it’s his turn, Socrates says that love is always of the beautiful, which is the good, and one who gains the good gains happiness. Since the good for Plato is the Form by which all other forms are known, love is nothing less than a vehicle to a higher state of being:

And the true order . . . is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This . . . is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute.

By now we are talking about love of abstracts, of truth. Socrates typifies this latter type of love more than any other figure in the ancient world, while the love he shares with statesman and general Alcibiades--a love characterized by mutual respect and chaste nights cuddling under a blanket--represents a higher type of love between two individuals.

Does anyone experience the higher forms of love anymore? Chaste romantic relationships do exist--just ask Colin Farrell about Elizabeth Taylor--and if all my time on Twitter has taught me anything, it is that the world is full of people passionate about ideas, art and knowledge. But whatever form love takes, Socrates would tell us to do it as best we can so it makes us better people.

Socrates Seeking Alcibiades in the House of Aspasia, Jean-Léon Gérôme.

 

Previous posts mentioning Plato:

Have a Holly Jolly (and Consumerist yet Discerning) Christmas

The Philosophy of Zombie Strippers

 

Sex...? Impossible!! (Zizek/Lacan 5)

The following is part of a series in which I apply rudimentary concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis to current events and film. My two principal texts are Lacan, an introductory text by Lionel Bailly, and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture by philosopher Slavoj Zizek. I present these posts in order to deepen my imperfect understanding of the concepts as well as to venture some insights of my own.

A phrase that kept leaping out at me as I read Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry was the “impossibility of sexual relations.” It’s an awkward and counterintuitive phrase, but also a perfect expression for an experience nearly everyone has had.

Consider the classic film noir Double Indemnity (1944). Insurance salesman Walter plots with the hot-as-L.A. Phyllis to kill her rich husband for a massive insurance payout. After the murder, their relationship cools as they each realize the other could go to the police, turn in his or her partner in crime, and make off with the loot. Walter goes to Phyllis’s mansion to kill her, but she gets the drop on him. After she pulls the trigger, you see in her eyes that she truly loves him, but she has realized it a moment too late--a fatal moment. Walter, mortally wounded but still standing, puts a couple bullets in her and stumbles away.

 

This is a perfect, if troubling, illustration of love and sex, for all the gears rarely sync up for both partners at the same time. The relationship works, then doesn’t, then does for one partner but not the other, then for the other but not the other, and so forth. If science is correct, then the euphoria early in a relationship lasts two years if you’re lucky--but the tug-of-war, the soul-searching and the confusion is powerful even then, is it not?

In Lacan, Lionel Bailly describes it this way:

[Lacan] was not saying that sexual relations don’t exist, but that those relations do not have a character of mutual understanding, agreement, or rapports. The individual man and the individual woman in a joint sexual act is each pursuing a form of enjoyment that is distinct from and irrelevant to the other’s.

We think of lovers as counterparts, but in their psyches, any two people are less like a matching bolt and screw than a square peg and a round hole fated to fit imperfectly. This is because the early childhood drama forms each of us differently. According to Jacques Lacan, boys and girls respond differently to castration, the realization that one does not possess the all-powerful Phallus. For the rest of our lives, we seek the Phallus in various objects tailored to our own symbolic economy and shared by no one.

For another example, consider Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), one of my favorite films. During the Japanese occupation of China, Wong Chia-Chi is a member of the Chinese resistance who becomes the mistress of Mr. Yee, a high official in the collaborationist government. Chia-Chi and her comrades devise a plan for Mr. Yee's assassination. When she and her lover go to pick up a diamond ring he has bought for her, resistance thugs will seize the opportunity to assassinate him. However, as they inspect the ring at an Indian jeweler’s, Chia-Chee realizes that Mr. Yee truly loves her and she him. From the book by Eileen Chang:

     He really loves me, she thought. Inside, she felt a raw tremor of shock--then a vague sense of loss.

     The Indian passed the receipt to him. He placed it inside his jacket.

     ‘Run,’ she said softly.

      For a moment he stared, and then understood everything. Springing up, he barged the door open, steadied himself on the frame, then swung down to grab firm hold of the banister and stumbled down the dark, narrow stairs. She heard his footsteps break into a run, taking the stairs two or three at a time, thudding irregularly over the treads.

     Too late. She had realized too late.

This is a perfect scene. You can feel the whole drama from start to finish hinging on this one moment. Will the killers come barging in? Will Mr. Yee notice something is fishy? Will Chia-Chi warn him? It’s a much tighter scene even than the one in Double Indemnity, but it illustrates the same thing: a perfect rapport between lovers is not possible. No matter how close you get, something will always be slightly off.

But, we all know this, don’t we? As good as it gets, it never gets that good. And you don’t need Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek or me to tell you so. Not only will your partner never be perfect, but the perfect partner doesn’t exist. That’s why perhaps the longest standing piece of marriage advice humanity has come up with is accepting your partner with all his or her faults. Love and sex do, after all, provide a measure--but only a measure--of comfort.

 

Previous posts in this series:
Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom
Watching Cinema Through the Eyes of the Past
Don’t Look Away from Mike Brown
Double Fantasy: Total Recall and The Woman in the Window

Deux hommes et une femme et leurs livres (Best of 2014: Books, Part 2)

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn stands as the best book I read this year, because it was every bit the thrill ride it was cracked up to be (previous post), but I had the good fortune of running across a lot of other interesting books this year. By some coincidence, the best of them came in pairs by French authors: Michel Houellebecq, Francoise Sagan and Milan Kundera.


Michel Houellebecq:

Early in the year, I discovered Michel Houellebecq, whose books in the UK editions have covers with a shameless sex-sells aesthetic. Nonetheless, they’re eye-catching, and a good book cover is worth nearly as much as a good book:

 

Atomised (The Elementary Particles in US editions) follows the lives of two brothers. Michel is a molecular biologist with almost no interest in love, while his brother Bruno is a loser obsessed with sex. They are both, as the title expresses, isolated from their fellow human beings by the conditions of modern life, among them market forces dominating everything from economics to sex. Largely set in today’s world, the story reaches beyond into science fiction. Michel discovers a method for cloning humans, thereby separating reproduction from love and sex.

It’s a book of ideas with a lot of explicit sex, which is all well and good, but what hooked me was the author’s blatant misanthropy and pessimism. Let’s face it, more often than not the world is a crock of shit, and Houellebecq isn’t afraid to say so. I’m not as much of a pessimist as I once was, but I can’t deny that in Atomised I encountered passages echoing many of my own dark thoughts. The author’s voice was a familiar one, and as one that doesn’t sugarcoat, I found it a great relief.

Platform is also about a man named Michel, and he too is sex-obsessed. An unrepentant sex tourist, he and his girlfriend embark on a sex tourism business venture, but it doesn’t end well. While Houellebecq’s portrayal of the lonely men who ache for sex with young women is at times compassionate and eloquent, the novel often comes off as propaganda in favor of sex tourism without an honest look at its downsides, such as how awful the lives of many prostitutes must be. Platform, while interesting, was less inspiring than Atomised. Often, I put it down feeling dirty.

 

 

Francoise Sagan:

 

The works of Francoise Sagan are also sordid--but less hard-core. Bonjour Tristesse is about Raymond and his daughter Cecile who spend their summers drinking, partying, lazing about and sleeping around on the French Riviera. Their dissolute lifestyle is scandalous for the times and alienates them from respectable society. When her father makes a bid to marry a proper woman, Cecile will have none of it and hatches a plot that ends in tragedy.

Bonjour Tristesse is fluff, and A Certain Smile--about a young girl’s love affair with an older, married man--is fluffier still. But I enjoyed these books. Their literary heft and insight into the human spirit is debatable, but the voices of the young protagonists are charmingly affectless and carry you along for short, sweet rides. Perhaps it’s just me, but I believe the languorous and free-spirited nature of Sagan’s characters are visible in the eyes of the author herself:

 

 

 

Milan Kundera:

While Milan Kundera’s Immortality and The Unbearable Lightness of Being were both written in Czech, the author is usually described as French-Czech, so he makes it into this post on a technicality. Immortality is a book that reaches in many directions, and while I’ve already posted on it twice, I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface. Check out my earlier posts (4/10/2014, 4/20/2014) or just check out this cover illustration for Immortality because it’s excellent:

 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with an original take on Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence and goes on to relate the changing fortunes of a doctor named Tomas, his wife Tereza, and his lover Sabina against the backdrop of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia. As the years pass, they make decisions that burden or lighten their emotional state, and along the way they have many amorous and erotic encounters.

While Lacanian psychoanalytic theory can be applied to anything, I was surprised to find Kundera intentionally applying it as the framework underpinning his characters, right down to chapters headed “A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words.” Since words like “music” or “fidelity” mean different things to each person, we often fail to understand each other. One of Jacques Lacan’s famous pronouncements is “Communication is a successful misunderstanding.” And so it goes for Tomas, Tereza and Sabina. They inevitably fail to grasp each other, but sometimes they get along well nonetheless.

Not only does Lacan’s theory of signification factor heavily in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but there were also clear references to the Mirror Stage, objet petit a, foreclosure, and other Lacanian concepts without ever mentioning Lacan or using his curious terminology. No doubt others have noticed this in the 30 years since the book was published, but I hope to go into it more in a later post.

None of that was part of the reading I had scheduled for myself this year (I did finish the Dune arc laid out by Frank Herbert and take down a handful of Michael Moorcock’s Elric books as planned), but it was unscheduled reading in French literature that turned up some of the best reading in 2014.