THE BODIES AND MINDS of homosexual men have historically been subject to both real and psychological prisons. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish and A History of Sexuality, examines regimes of incarceration, played out on specific, arrested bodies but resonant with generalized experience. While reading Foucault’s work, the word incarceration is evocative, palpable, you can smell it: the fleshy confinement, the ripeness. In the relationship between pleasure and power for Foucault, the homosexual body is a bruised and weary fetish, due to the wringer it has been put through. This much-abused body has a mind which is neither a single nor a separate entity but shares its fears with others who are equally persecuted for their sexuality. Juridical and social homophobia, physical arrests and confinements, find their parallel in psychological structures. Even when the mind revolts from the body’s abuses, it does not escape them. For the mind, the very attempt at transcendence makes its own prison: exile.
Samuel Delany’s 1974 novel Dhalgren is described as “psychogeographic.” The novel has a distinct, urban location—Bellona—but it is ultimately impossible to decide whether this peripatetic novel takes place in a dystopian U.S. city or in an incarcerated person’s mind. The answer is: both. Like the symbolic ghettoization of Manhattan, as the whole island is turned into a federal prison in the 1981 movie Escape from New York, Bellona is a social state of mind: “Very few suspect the existence of this city. It is as if not only the media but also the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it by. … It is a city of inner discordances and retinal distortions.”
Dhalgren is set in a landscape of marginalization. Kid, the novel’s bisexual protagonist, is a classic existential hero, an outsider wandering through the streets of a science fictional or real dystopia, trying to come to terms with this world. For queer people, physical incarceration and social rejection have psychological repercussions. Even when the body is not incarcerated, the mind is exiled, cast out from society, until both mind and body find their freedom and return. This may not be peculiarly a homosexual condition, but forms and themes of the interplay of imprisonment, seeing the bars of the prison, and being an outsider on the inside resonate through gay and queer literature from Oscar Wilde to Jean Genet, from Michael Arditti to Uzodinma Iweala.
Delany’s novel spectacularizes the cityscape and mindscape of the disenfranchised in 1970s America in the midst of race riots and financial collapse.
Delany, of course, identifies as both Black and gay. To be gay, Black, and/or working-class, especially in the America of Delany’s youth (he was born in 1942), was to be forced to cruise in the dark, in the off-grid locations of the homeless and in the dark places of the metropolis not provided with streetlamps. For each of these identities, arrest and imprisonment have historically beckoned in disproportionate numbers. In this double bind, societal structures of homophobia and racism are internalized. The self is equally exiled internally, simultaneously disembodied and incarcerated in a mirror of its social alienation. The social and architectural city colonizes the mind. Those who have no place literally have no place. The unprivileged are foundationally imprisoned in the dual prisons of exile, where disenfranchisement is both material and psychological. This outlaw perspective drives Dhalgren’s continuing and interactive reflexivity. It is a novel that does what it describes, thematically and formally: the book’s own structure, its social and architectural layout, chapter by chapter, is a burning struggle constituting our internal relations as we read. For the novel’s bisexual hero, the outside and the inside of Bellona resonate with each other:
Look, about being nuts. … You’re not and you never have been. That means what you see, and hear, and feel, and think … you think that is your mind. But the real mind is invisible: you’re less aware of it while you think, than you are of your eye while you see … until something goes wrong with it. Then you become aware of it, with all its dislocated pieces and rackety functioning, the same way you become aware of your eye when you get a cinder in it. Because it hurts.
In the sexual realm, it is only those who run up against the barriers of social norms who notice their containment, their incarceration, and, in rebelling against these norms, who are classified as mad or ill. Who appears mad and who appears sane depends on where you are. The classes and cityscape of Bellona are vertically and horizontally structured in a spatial psychogeography—the layout of the novel. Each area is a cell with its own language. Delany deploys distinct voices to create situated, socially ranked characters and their speech. Access to, and interaction between, these strata of society is facilitated through a particular historical nexus—a queer bar called Teddy’s. Kid’s bisexuality gets him around. As ever with Delany, the sex is part of the message and never offstage. The novel explores sexuality just as it does the physicality of our burning cities and the unequal living standards of the rich and poor. When law and order are gone, a mutually moderating anarchy opens as a space in which to be whoever we desire in a queer society of communal living, in which we achieve our liberation by being allowed to reach others.
The streets are the avenues of our freedom, yet they define where we can and cannot go in advance. They are a social and architectural map to our psyches and the limits of our experience. Stepping beyond the walls of ghettoization is difficult because the walls have become embedded within you. The physical bridge out of the city of Bellona keeps shifting and becoming invisible in the smoke; it seems to have moved from where it was. Inhabitants rewrite the street names and change the signs. Kid has one shoe on and one shoe off, literally. Dhalgren is a literally descriptive novel in which everything is a metaphor. Neuronal fires burn on the streets. Bellona’s blocks of poetry lay down the inescapability of its contained psychogeography; time and streets warp and loop back upon themselves. Some tracts burn, some remain untouched. This is our mind. Kid finds himself a poet; writing catalyzes his struggle to get back into a life denied, even after age-old barriers have been broken down. Anarchy tries to form new structures of attachment in the rubble of the old architecture, and Kid finds love in communes. Writing is part of this struggle, and language is its medium, though it too needs reconfiguring.
The psychogeography of Dhalgren is not that of the bourgeois flâneur, the amiable, detached, self-funding wanderer discovering the psychological dramas of an external city, as exemplified by the works of Will Self and Edmund White. Here there is no such privileged decoupling; in Bellona, the architectures of personality and the urban are integral and mutually determinative. This dystopia is the prison of long marginalization that our battered psyches have to escape. Mediating between external and internal locations, as always in Delany, is the ever-present, two-way conduit and consolation of sexually embodied experience. Finding others like yourself in the city provides freedom and sustenance. But the cybernetic mechanics and social structures of the city both guide the hero in his encounters (as much as the piers and warehouses of the West Side did in Delany’s autobiographical account of sex and sexuality in 1950s New York, The Motion of Light in Water) and mold to his flesh in the form of a flowering, bladed weapon that straps around the wrist and hand: a “brass orchid.” Indeed Brass Orchids becomes the title of the book of poems that the protagonist etches out of his odyssey, invoking Les Fleurs du Mal and Guy DeBord’s christening of Baudelaire as the original psychogeographer. As Bellona and his mind reconfigure, Kid hangs on to his notebook, gradually filling it with poetry whose authorship remains ambiguous.
Central to Kid’s new Bellona is its disruptive, discursive iconography. George Harrison, an African-American buck in blue- blackest ebony, is a new moon. His Negro image bursts through the shackles of sexual objectification and replaces Jesus in a church that’s been taken over by a prim, white woman minister. She now dispenses his posters:
Beside the desk were portfolio-sized cardboard boxes. Reverend Taylor pulled one open. “Is this what you want?”
Naked and half erect, one hand cupping his testicles, Harrison leaned against some thick tree. The lowest branches were heavy with leaves. Behind him, a black dog sat in the dead leaves, lolling an out of focus tongue. Sunset flung bronzes down through the browns and greens. “It was done with a backdrop, right down in the church basement,” she said. “But I think it’s rather good. Is that the one you want?”
People who live in the city of Bellona project images of themselves and maintain fantasy images of others. These images are projected through lenses and prisms that sometimes distort and sometimes clarify. Delany materializes these lenses as battery-powered, holographic crystal chains that the citizens of Bellona wrap around themselves and use to recognize each other. Looping chains of lenses and prisms beam cocooning images of lizards, scorpions, and peacocks as their wearers roam the glowering streets. These appearances are both literal and figurative in the hierarchies of the place:
“I’ll get it for him, Pepper. You may not be a gentleman, but I am a lady.” Bunny plucked the jar from Kid’s hands and went to fill it and another cup. “Just an old fashioned girl, too shy to dive into the rushing river of worldly fame, too late for the mouse-drawn pumpkin to take me to the ball, too old for Gay Lib—not to mention Radical Effeminism!” Bunny couldn’t have been more than thirty-five, Kid thought. “Not in body, not in mind. Just in spirit. Ah, well … I have the consolations of philosophy, or whatever you call it.”
Kid sat on the couch beside Pepper.
Bunny returned with the brimming jelly glass. “When you let your little light shine, what great and luminous beast do you become?”
As in Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, characters make themselves, and they make themselves larger than life. They are free to choose their own names, but in doing so can only work with the detritus of what has gone before, attempting to kick it up to a level of beauty and grandeur that will satisfy their needs and sense of themselves.
Within the ever-burning, ever-reconfiguring streets, Kid struggles to find some shape, even his name, in the numinous smoke, the post-catastrophe period, without being able to pin down exactly what the catastrophe was that sent this part of America careening through murky space. He tries to rejoin the broken links of the prismatic chain that he is looped with, folding them back together with a manual laborer’s fingers. (Such hands are a running trope in Delany’s work and perhaps hark back to Hart Crane’s Episode of Hands.) The novel materializes philosophy on property, poetry and identity—the making and ownership of each—in the fractured psychogeography of Bellona.
“My soul is black,” Tak reiterated. “You know what black soul is?”
“Yeah, I know what black soul is. And like hell you do.”
“I do not want to be black.”
“—what gives you a black soul?”
“Alienation, the whole gay thing, for one.”
“That’s a passport to a whole area of culture and the arts you fall into just by falling into bed,” Fenster countered. “Being black is an automatic cut-off from the same area unless you do some fairly fancy toe-in-the-door work.” Fenster sucked his teeth. “Being a faggot does not make you black.”
Identity conversations in Delany’s work are prescient in their investigation of the intersections of race, class, and sexuality, prefiguring more elaborated contemporary works such as Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019), which is constructed from the voices of a dozen Black, lesbian, straight, and trans women as they locate themselves historically in contemporary Britain and the African diaspora. In Dhalgren, Kid walks within the falling structures of Bellona’s institutionally heterosexual and monogamous architecture. Delany melds his own saturation in realist sci-fi tropes with the magic realism of a psychological novel. And he does all this while simultaneously bound in the politics of the civil rights era, its urban riots and struggles for freedom from the past. Old buildings collapse and all doors are flung open. Pansexual communes form in newly defined spaces, but even in these groupings, old power relations linger.
The health of the lawless city is defined by the mental and physical health of its population. Elements of both science fiction and modernism—with slippages of time and shifts of perspective and perception—make for a ballooning sense of things going psychologically awry. In this contemporary, immense, historic, and non-canonical novel, Delany has written what is simultaneously popular sci-fi and monumental American modernism. This is the American dream as an American nightmare, written from the other side, from the disenfranchised and underprivileged escarpment, from the margins of society, by an outsider in its midst: the builder, the worker, the exploited, the overlooked, the Black, the female, the gay, the fully present individual who queers the whole structure by looking for communion instead of division.
Incarceration is a mental state reflecting real juridical, architectural, and geographic structures. Coming out is an escape from prisons both psychological and literal. When the prison walls fall, the trauma of psychic imprisonment can be deconstructed also. Our new queer generations, at least in the West, are already inheriting a different experience with regard to physical imprisonment and psychological embodiment. Already LGBT novels move in more integrated structures of personality and the society we inhabit. Nevertheless, as Foucault may have wryly pointed out, our inherited buildings and institutions remain heterosexually designed in their floorplans even if we now have more freedom to move within their containments and definitions. Coming out of yesterday is only one end of the prison. New imprisonments and new freedoms await us like further mountains to climb. All these processes are limned in Samuel Delany’s premonitory novel of transformation.
Russell B. Christie, a doctoral researcher in autobiographical methods at Brunel U. in London, is the author of the 2015 novel The Queer Diary of Mordred Vienna.
