Quote:
Originally Posted by Timoleon
I remember receiving Dhalgren as a Christmas present  many years ago from my little brother. I think that with the cover art on the paperback book he thought it was just another scifi book. I started reading it on Christmas Day, and if I recall rightly there was a scene early on in the book graphically describing a homo-erotic oral sex encounter that the hero of the book was engaging in. Since my tastes didn't veer in that direction (sixteen year old horny hetero teenager), I quickly put the book down and never picked it up again. Of course, to my brother's embarrassment and my parent's horror, I read out loud to everybody hanging out in the living room one particularly juicy passage that Christmas morning...  |
Well, Chip is gay, so the homo-erotic episode isn't a big surprise.
I'll have to re-read Dhalgren one of these days. In retrospect, I see it as an exploration of what happens when the usual constraints of civilization are removed. We never find out exactly what happened to the city of Bellona, but it's obvious that most have left, and those who remain are different from what they used to be.
Civilization is a shared construct, and the restraints we think of as normal are consensual and imposed partly from within, and partly from social pressure. (There are things we don't do because we think we shouldn't, and others we don't do because those around us would object. Different societies draw those boundaries in different places and whether the control is internal or external may vary, but the control will be there.)
What happens when external controls are removed? You can make a case that Delany was working the same territory as William Golding in _Lord of the Flies_.
And Chip dropped some hints that the protagonist was not a reliable narrator, and might not be what we think of as sane.
______
Dennis