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From: Hoffman.ES@Xerox.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Ellison on Dhalgren
Message-ID: <3524@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Wed, 4-Sep-85 11:21:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.3524
Posted: Wed Sep  4 11:21:00 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 5-Sep-85 20:26:35 EDT
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Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
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From: Hoffman.ES@Xerox.ARPA

I knew I had saved this, but, since I've just moved, it took me a while
to find it.  From the Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1975 (yes '75):

	BREAKDOWN OF A BREAKTHROUGH NOVEL
	By Harlan Ellison
	
	"Dhalgren" by Samuel R. Delany (Bantam Books: $1.95)
   
   The millenium is at hand and, to quote Gulley Jimson in "The Horse's
Mouth," "It's not the vision I had."  Speculative fiction has been
banging down the barriers of the ghetto for 20 years and apologists of
the idiom have been saying, "Just wait till the important novels of
human conflict are written utilizing the tools of science fiction.  Just
wait!  Then you'll see some dynamite literature."  Well, I was one of
the prime shouters, and some of those novels have been published in the
last few months, and frankly I feel as if my mouth ought to be washed
out with a copy of "The Charterhouse of Parma."
   
   Probably the most anxiously awaited of these promised "big" novels
intended to merge SF with the mainstream, written not by academic
dabblers or best-seller-list poseurs but by Our Crowd, was "Dhalgren" by
Delany.  Of all the post-New Wave writers, young Delany had the most
stuff going for him: consummate storyteller, poet, four-time Nebula
award winner, au courant, flashy stylist; hell, he'd even been published
in New American Review.
   
   Rumors of its length, the depth of its perception, the range of its
subject matter have circulated in the world of the fantasy writers for a
fistful of years:  it's huge, more than 300,000 workds; it synthesizes
everything Chip Delany was going for in "The Einstein Intersection" and
"Nova"; it's sexually explicit in a way the genre's never been.  Then
came delays, and the book was always coming, coming, coming.  The rumors
grew more interesting.  Chip refuses to sell it to any publisher who
won't guarantee it'll be released uncut; Chip won't let anyone edit a
word of it; Chip's had to change the title from "Brodecky" to
"Dhalgren"; Chip's book has been turned down by all the hardcover
houses.
   
   Now "Dhalgren" is with us, all 879 pages of it, and the questions are
answered.  Who could have known that all the answers would be
unsatisfying?
   
   For "Dhalgren" is a tragic failure.  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.
   
   I must be honest:  I gave up after 361 pages.  I could not permit
myself to be gulled or bored any further.  Realizing from the git-go
that the opening lines of the novel would tie into the closing lines,
forming one of Laocoonian Moebius gimmicks considered too hoary for use
30 years ago, the travels of the nameless hero with one sandal did not
seem sufficiently enriching to permit my engaging in the reading of the
book as a career.  Others who leaped on the first available copies of
the novel, as I did, who began reading it avidly, as I did, who began
breathing raggedly and faltered in the sprint, as I did, have assured me
the book goes nowhere, does nothing, says nothing, and is sunk to its
binding in mythological symbolism that is both flagrant and
embarrassing.  Three hundred and sixty-one pages had delivered me of the
same conclusions.
   
   It is possible the trendy and the impressionable who conceive of
"great" books as being those that are sententious and muddled may take
to "Dhalgren" in cult as did the poor saps who think "Stranger In a
Strange Land" is a hot item.
   
   But for those of us who have read Delany's previous work, who have
admired it and who have rooted for him, hoping "Dhalgren" would be the
breakthrough novel that won for him and for science fiction all the
legitimacy for which both have been crying . . . this sorry compendium
of pointless ramblings is a dry hole over which we will weep and wail
for years to come.
   
- - - - 

[ellipsis in the original]

I had saved this all these years because it captured my own sense of
disappointment at the time, though I did read the entire book, and I got
a handful of tidbits worth savoring.  Even disappointed, I could not
give up so quickly on a writer whose earlier work had touched me and
taught me so much, and I'm glad I didn't.  I continue to be a strong fan
of Delany's writing, both fiction and criticism.  I still "leap on the
first available copy" of his every new work and I've enjoyed much of it.
And, yes, I still await the "breakthrough novel" I think he can produce.

-Rodney Hoffman