{"id":143967,"date":"2020-03-30T11:00:15","date_gmt":"2020-03-30T15:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=143967"},"modified":"2020-03-30T12:07:54","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T16:07:54","slug":"quarantine-reads-dhalgren","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/03\/30\/quarantine-reads-dhalgren\/","title":{"rendered":"Quarantine Reads: Dhalgren"},"content":{"rendered":"

In our new series Quarantine Reads, writers present the books they\u2019re finally making time for and consider what it\u2019s like to read them in this strange moment.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I started reading Samuel Delany\u2019s Dhalgren<\/em>, a prismatic, nightmarish work of speculative fiction, in New York City a couple weeks ago, when the coronavirus had just begun to spread into the West. Italy had fallen and the threat in the United States was imminent, but the real panic and anxiety still hadn\u2019t sunk in. Stubbornly, and against better judgment, I decided to go through with my plans to take a three-week trip to Japan. I continued reading Dhalgren<\/em> on my way to Tokyo on March 14. As I was reading on the nearly empty plane, I kept looking down at my hands, getting up, washing them, until they were dry and cracked and my knuckles started bleeding, and by the time I disembarked it looked like I\u2019d been in a fistfight. Dhalgren<\/em> has been my only real traveling companion this week: gently purring in my hands with the landscape tilting outside the window of the Shinkansen; in the coffee shops of Ginza and Shinjuku, wiped with sanitizer each time, carefully, front and back; and in my lap on a park bench overlooking a river, across which stands the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, the battered dome of a ruined building.<\/p>\n

The German-language writer Elias Canetti\u2014most famous for his book Crowds and Power<\/em>\u2014deeply admired Dr. Michihiko Hachiya\u2019s Hiroshima Diary<\/em>, a powerful and lucid account of the days and weeks following the Hiroshima atomic bombing. In a short essay from 1971, Canetti wrote of Dr. Hachiya\u2019s profoundly vivid hellscape, of the uncertainty each new day brought to the doctor\u2019s treatment of victims (while trying to understand what was happening to his own body), and of the doctor\u2019s narration of the ever-shifting new realities of something completely unknown. As Canetti writes, \u201cIn the hardship of his own condition, among dead or injured people, the author tries to piece the facts together; with increasing knowledge, his conjectures change, they turn into theories requiring experiment.\u201d<\/p>\n

It had been years since I\u2019d first read Canetti\u2019s essay, but the notion that I should reread it popped into my head while I was distractedly strolling through the crowded Hondori shopping district of Hiroshima. It\u2019s difficult, of course, not to jam the coronavirus into every thought, and I couldn\u2019t help but draw connections to the bombing of Hiroshima\u2014and to a fleeting question that Canetti poses in this essay: \u201cIs misfortune the thing that people have most in common?\u201d Walking around Hiroshima today, with the scars of its past barely concealed to anyone looking for them, I noted the surreal and incongruous way the city still functions normally despite the threat of the virus. The city\u2019s past\u2014even the name, Hiroshima, evokes carnage and loss\u2014seemed to offer a brief moment of perspective: bacteria, an invisible terror, feels somehow less threatening when reminded of this human atrocity, of our capacity to inflict destruction upon ourselves.<\/p>\n

One of the things that Canetti found most captivating\u2014and horrifying\u2014in Hiroshima Diary<\/em> was that it was written in real time, as the events unfolded. This sense of narrating and revising the shifting facts resonated with me, not only because of the strange state of the world, but also in thinking about Dhalgren<\/em>, which, though I\u2019ve been reading every day for the past couple weeks (but don\u2019t these weeks feel like years?), has felt at times impenetrable, surreal, frustrating, unpredictable. Dhalgren<\/em> eludes me at every turn\u2014I have a notebook now nearly full of scribblings and half-baked ideas about themes I\u2019d wanted pick apart (about hygiene, the uncanny, mythology, race, migration, disaster, et cetera). I keep trying to wave the book in the air to see if the coronavirus waves back.<\/p>\n

Dhalgren<\/em> takes place in the fictional city of Bellona, a city that once had a population of two million but because of a strange disaster (a series of fires? a race riot?), there are only about a thousand inhabitants left there. In general, Bellona is a pretty dangerous place to find yourself: people die unexpectedly; acts of violence or debauchery occur randomly and often; and a gang of thugs, called the Scorpions, run the streets by night. To stay safe, it\u2019s best to wear an orchid, a bladed weapon that I imagine looks like the Wolverine\u2019s fist, if you have one.<\/p>\n

Soon after arriving in Bellona, Kidd (or Kid, or the kid\u2014he\u2019s not even sure of his own name) meets Tak Loufer, who, in these first pages, serves as a guide to the ravaged city. Laufer explains, \u201cYou know, here\u2026 you\u2019re free. No laws, to break or to follow. Do anything you want. Which does funny things to you. Very quickly, surprisingly quickly, you become\u2026 exactly who you are.\u201d Kidd, is, as he soon discovers, a poet. But he is also a nomad, a flaneur, an adventurer, an eyewitness.<\/p>\n

The reader explores the city of Bellona through Kidd\u2019s fragmentary perceptions: time unfolds in loopy swirls because, for the most part, Kidd is figuring things out as he goes and he has a very tenuous relationship not only with his own consciousness but also with his past. Some conversations or events happen multiple times\u2014seen from different angles, in different lights\u2014while other, seemingly important details are withheld indefinitely. Ideas and images are introduced, partially developed, refracted, cut down. Reading Dhalgren<\/em> is a bit like being held upside down from your ankles and dangled off the back of a speeding truck.<\/p>\n

My own reality this week has rivaled the novel\u2019s uncertainty. I\u2019ve changed my return flight four times so far, committing to the irresponsible delusion that I might be able to outwit the spread of disease. To travel under these conditions you need to be delusional, selfish, a little stupid, always ready to embrace the unknown. In Japan, where I speak the language with the proficiency of a toddler, I\u2019m never quite sure what\u2019s happening around me, what the real situation is here. Am I in danger? What awaits me back home? Am I invisible enough\u2014keeping enough distance, using enough sanitizer, wearing a mask enough, am I in safe spaces? The trains, bars, restaurants, and department stores are still, as of today, full of people. But this could change at any moment. One Japanese friend said that things are much worse than they appear but the government has been downplaying the crisis\u2014there was a similar response, and mistrust of Japanese public statements, after Fukushima. Another person I spoke to, a friend from high school (who used to be a reasonable person, maybe a little too gullible back then), said that he\u2019d heard the coronavirus was an act of bioterrorism, somehow perpetuated worldwide, but sparing Japan, by a group of Jewish Zionists living on the small island of Awaji in Japan\u2019s Inland Sea. I couldn\u2019t make sense of this bizarre notion, which seems to be the conflation of several different wild conspiracy theories. One rare certainty this week: I will not fear of the Awaji Jews.<\/p>\n

In Tokyo, everyone wears a face mask. Not everyone, but nearly. Talismans, shields, work most efficiently against the ineffable. I\u2019ve seen thousands of faces but very few smiles. A few days ago, I saw a well-dressed businessman on his lunch break at a ramen restaurant, wearing a face mask, who daintily pulled the mask above his upper lip before he slurped each bite of noodles, and then chewed with the mask lowered. It must\u2019ve taken him much longer to eat this way. I feel a kinship with the absurdity of this ramen eater, who, rather than dining safely at home, would sacrifice his dignity in order to enjoy a meal. But this was an anomaly. Most people seem to move about as they normally would. \u201cIf a bomb had fallen, we\u2019d be dead. This is something perfectly natural. And we have to make do, don\u2019t we, until the situation is rectified?\u201d the almost unflappable Mrs. Richards explains to Kidd. He\u2019s come over to help her family move apartments\u2014another largely symbolic gesture of normalcy in the face of crisis.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve been reading Dhalgren<\/em>, I keep seeing strange parallels to the proliferating unknowns of traveling (or even staying put) during the coronavirus. The novel demands qualities of its reader\u2014patience, flexibility in most things, stubbornness in others, paranoia\u2014that are also helpful now. One of my favorite characters in the book, the perfectly pretentious, rambling poet from New Zealand, Ernest Newboy, states midway through the novel: \u201cThere\u2019s no reason why all art should appeal to all people.\u201d Dhalgren<\/em> isn\u2019t for everyone. Delany\u2019s formal and linguistic experimentations are a bumpy road to follow. It\u2019s not a very comforting book, and, of course, it\u2019s not a comforting time to be traveling either. In hindsight, Dhalgren<\/em> probably isn\u2019t the book I should be reading during the plague, but it might be the book that I deserve.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read more in our Quarantine Reads series here<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Tynan Kogane is an editor at New Directions.<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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