On Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren ed. by Bill Wood

Abstract

Reviewed by: On Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgrened. by Bill Wood A.J. Rocca Delany's Autumnal Anthology. Bill Wood, ed. On Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren. Fantastic Books, 2021. 271 pp. $31.35 hc, $21.99 pbk. [End Page 195] On Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgrenis an eclectic collection of reviews, essays, interviews, and one poem all relating to Delany's most famous novel, published in 1975. This anthology began its existence as a set of Xeroxed documents relating to Dhalgrenin Samuel Delany's personal possession and stayed that way for years before it was published. The book we have now exists thanks to Bill Wood, Delany's personal assistant, who helped to make some last-minute additions to the anthology and prepared it for publication with Fantastic Books. On Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgrenis arranged into six sections, covering everything from some contemporary reviews of Dhalgrento its relationship to various other texts, including John Ashbery's "The Instruction Manual" (1956) and Delany's own Hogg(1995). These unusual additions make this a unique collection that opens up a number of forgotten or otherwise unexplored avenues into the world of Dhalgrenscholarship. One of the most useful aspects of On Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgrenis that it presents a fairly comprehensive timeline of Dhalgren's reception history through the twentieth century. The opening section is titled "Contemporary Reviews, 1975-1976," and in only seven reviews it does a good job of demonstrating the variety of responses Dhalgrenreceived when it was first published. Dhalgrenhas long been established as an sf classic, and it can be easy to forget what a controversy it kicked up in the sf community when it first appeared. Wood's anthology presents the range of that controversy nicely, bookended in my mind by the reviews of two sf sf greats: Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison. Sturgeon called Dhalgren"the very best ever to come out of the science fiction field" (23), while Ellison with signature Waldorf-and-Statlerian flare called it "an unrelenting bore of a literary exercise afflicted with elephantiasis, anemia of ideas and malnutrition of plot and character development. It is a master talent run amuck, suiciding endlessly for chapter after chapter of turgid, impenetrable prose" (21). I also appreciate the inclusion of a review in a college newspaper by Steven Paley and a review in The New York Timesby Gerald Jonas; these demonstrate the interest that college-aged and general audiences had in Dhalgren, and it was these audiences more than genre readers who were responsible for its initial commercial success. Following the contemporary reviews is a short section of reviews for Dhalgren's 1996 Wesleyan UP reprint. This documents how Dhalgrenover time was eventually canonized as an sf classic and also picked up the imprimatur of serious academic literature. Wood's anthology also includes a small selection of "Critical Reactions" from the scholarly literature on Dhalgren, with an emphasis on its narrative structure and use of language. Delany's own critical writings on Dhalgren, included in the anthology under the section "Delany on Dhalgren," also put a predominant focus on structure, sign, and myth. Additionally, this section documents Delany's peculiar history of oblique Dhalgrencriticism. Delany has proven that he has quite a lot to say about the novel, but he always does so through the proxy of either penname or metacommentary. [End Page 196] Beyond just documenting Dhalgren's own reception history, the collection also invites comparison with three intriguing sources that are not much talked about in Dhalgrenscholarship: John Ashbery's "The Instruction Manual," G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form(1969), and Delany's Hogg. "The Instruction Manual" is reproduced in full under a section titled "Sources," and the collection explains its inclusion by stating that Delany's encounter with it in the early 1970s "resulted in a major restructuring of Dhalgren's material" (139). In the "Critical Reactions" section there is an essay by Kenneth James called "Subverted Equations," in which James discusses Delany's connection to G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form, an obscure mathematical-philosophical work, and attempts to demonstrate the influence of...