Memory’s Guilted Cage:Delany’s Dhalgren and Gibson’s Pattern Recognition Jason Haslam (bio) In 1996, American expatriate William Gibson—the "father" of cyberpunk, living in British Columbia after moving to Canada to evade the Vietnam draft1 —wrote an introduction to the re-release of the novel Dhalgren, originally published in 1974, written by Samuel Delany, often described as a precursor to or inspiration for later authors of cyberpunk.2 In his introduction to Delany's eight-hundred-page opus, Gibson writes that he "place[s] Dhalgren in history," a history he then specifies: No one under thirty-five today can remember the singularity that overtook America in the nineteen-sixties, and the generation that experienced it most directly seems largely to have opted for amnesia and denial. But something did happen: a city came to be, in America. (And I imagine I use America here as shorthand for something else; perhaps for the industrialized nations of the American Century.) The city had no specific locale, and its internal geography was mainly fluid. […] The city was largely invisible to America. If America was about "home" and "work," the city was about neither, and that made the city very difficult for America to see. […] I would not suggest that Dhalgren is any sort of map of that city, intentional [End Page 77] or otherwise, but that they bear some undeniable relationship. (Those who would prefer to forget the city say that it produced no true literature, but that too is denial.) […] When I think of Dhalgren, I remember this: A night in Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C., amid conditions of civil riot, when someone, as the police arrived with their staves and plastic shields, tossed a Molotov cocktail. (xii–xiii) Gibson implies, or intones, that Dhalgren is a novel not just about American civil unrest, but that it is an encapsulation of that unrest, "the unmediated experience of the singularity […], free of all corrosion and nostalgia" (xiii). Gibson thus places Dhalgren at the crux of memory and nation, suggesting that what Toni Morrison has elsewhere called the "national narrative"—the "official story [that] obliterates any narrative that is counter to it" (xvi, xviii)—has either intentionally "forgotten" the civil unrest of the 1960s or rendered it nostalgic, while Dhalgren stands not just as a final testament to, or reflection of, but a nearly magical incarnation of those events. Delany's postmodern, circuitous, self-reflexive, exploration of the fictional city of Bellona represents, for Gibson, the recent radical, if not revolutionary past which has been subsumed by the "long slough" (xiii) of the national narrative which, in turn, is created for and by what is so often referred to as "middle America." Little wonder, then, that Gibson revisits issues of amnesia, denial, and their relations to American national identity (again figured by him as "shorthand for something else; perhaps […] the American Century" of globalization) in his 2003 novel, Pattern [End Page 78] Recognition, possibly the first literary, fictional exploration by an (ostensibly) American author of the position of 9/11 within an American and global history—and future.3 Gibson's and Delany's novels construct a similar tension related to the past and to a largely unspoken sense of a guilt that concerns memories (personal and cultural) of inaction in the face of (cultural and personal) moments of violence. The past becomes a space of both individual neuroses and communal guilt. I argue that both Delany and Gibson use a thematic focus on a past that has gone missing (the protagonist's amnesia in Delany's text, a missing father in Gibson's) to discuss the ways in which the American national narrative, in order to maintain a self-cohesive vision of the nation, needs to repress its very creation of and relation to a silenced other (represented through the inner city by Delany, and the history of global conflict by Gibson). Following the mechanics of ideology, this decontextualization or a-historicizing transforms a given historical moment, with its specificities (of a given system of power relations, for example) into a universalized myth and therefore into a supposedly unassailable truth—in Barthes's terminology a "global sign, the final...
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Dec 18, 2014
Michele Ford + 2
Open Access