Ramblings
Greg - Boomtime, 48 Bureaucracy 3169 @ 12:08 AM
Every few years I revisit Bellona. It's one of those rare instances where my spotty memory is a gift; I recall the shape and something of the flow of the story, and many scattered details - not unlike Kid's recollection of his own past - but some parts are always essentially new.
Spoilers follow, if Dhalgren can be spoiled, so please read no further if you haven't read the book. Just take my word for it, the book is worth reading - maybe. Depending on who you are and what you want out of a novel. I, for one, like a story that poses more questions than it answers.
As I reread this time around, I'll be checking a new theory (new to me anyway; it may already be obvious to everyone else). The theory is that the circularity of the story runs deeper than I had realized and actually explains Kid's lack of name and memory, as well as the chaotic last few passages.
The idea is that Kid can only exist as a character in relation to the city; he's not an escaped mental patient nor an amnesiac. He coalesces at the beginning of the book and dissolves at the end. He's not so much a person as a phase in the cycle symbolized by the passing of the orchid - and so the women he meets at the beginning and end ARE him.
Just poking around before I dig in and read from cover to cover (that takes me a couple of days, and I prefer as few interruptions as possible, so I'm waiting for a good time) a few things stand out in support of this idea:
1) The almost word-for-word repetition of the conversation as the orchid is passed. Many details vary, but all the major points are identical or nearly so. The other voices in the parallel group suggest that Kid and the woman fell in with very similar groups of people.
2) The woman who gives Kid the orchid was a sculptor; later we see the unfinished lion, and maybe a few other clues as to how she spent her time in Bellona. Their experiences were clearly parallel, but different on some points... She probably didn't join up with the scorpions, but probably did have very similar experience with Calkins.
3) The mention of leaves, twigs and shadows as the second-to-last paragraph becomes disjointed seems very suggestive of the scene where the other major symbol of Kid's destiny - the optical chain - is passed to him.
4) Kid's memory is a hodgepodge, but most things seem to be recalled in detail; his identity is the only major gap. I'm thinking now that that's because he doesn't have one - he is newly created, with a collage of (false? borrowed? invented?) memories but nothing to hold them together.
I guess it could be Delaney's statement about the ephemeral nature of fictional characters; they spring into being at the beginning of the story, with their existence backdated arbitrarily into the past and then, other than the reader's impression of their future, disappear at the end. Perhaps the reiterative nature of the orchid passing from one similar character to another, almost ritually, is a statement on how the same story can be told differently with just a little change in perspective.
