OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (8)
By:
April 29, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Seventies (1974–83) sci-fi novels and comics! Series edited by Josh Glenn.
DHALGREN | SAMUEL R. DELANY | 1975
The thing with Dhalgren is that you feel compelled to cast about for comparisons — post-apocalyptic amnesiac Ulysses, or maybe contextless picaresque The Sound and the Fury, or Candide if it occurred in white-flight Cleveland, The Wasteland mixed with Parable of the Sower — but they all miss the point. Why do we do it? It’s a sprawling and difficult novel, so our inclination is to try to whack off some pieces and make sense of it. Surely the miasma of unknowing that hangs over the novel is meant to be pierced? All those languorously ephemeral scenes of sex and drugs, all those bodies in motion, bodies at rest, all the wandering through other people’s stories without really having a story to hang onto?
But this is not a novel you can break into pieces, and it’s definitely not a novel that you can make sense of as a whole. It’s a third thing, an evocation, a void that appeared at the center of American culture in the 1970s — after the civil rights movement, free love, Stonewall, Vietnam, and Nixon. The thing that poured into that void was Delany’s Dhalgren. The good and the bad commingled, indistinguishable, or irrelevant, all that is left over when all the sense has been made, all the i’s dotted, everything socialized, colonized, commoditized, and the fecund pure stuff of truth and life left over — the whey, the dross, the dregs — and this whole weird novel poured into that abandoned space, filling it up, washing over the top and sloshing around.
Which is why it still speaks to me, why it stays so alive, because here we are, staring into another Great American void. This contextless and hollow world that the unnamed main character (“The Kid”) lives in, it seems to me, is one that this country generates over and over again. The Kid is often scratching his belly or feeling his organs shift around, a hollowness in his bowels, creases in his stomach. He is stuck in the real because the unreal — memories, aims, plans — have been taken away, his interior life zeroed out. Or not quite: Something propels him forward towards the next thing, keeps him fucking, eating, shitting, and wandering through the autumnal city. What drives these recapitulations? Where does the energy come from to push that great pile of meaninglessness ahead of ourselves towards the next thing?
I guess we will see.
OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on RIDDLEY WALKER | Carlo Rotella on THE FACE | Sara Ryan on DREAMSNAKE | Matthew Battles on THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST | Ramona Lyons on HIGH-RISE | Adam McGovern on SHADRACH IN THE FURNACE | Deb Chachra on THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY | Tom Nealon on DHALGREN | Michael Grasso on FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID | Stephanie Burt on BRIGHTNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR | Nikhil Singh on SABRE | Gordon Dahlquist on VALIS | Miranda Mellis on THE DISPOSSESSED | Marc Weidenbaum on SOFTWARE | Peggy Nelson on THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER | Josh Glenn on ENGINE SUMMER | Mimi Lipson on A SCANNER DARKLY | Douglas Wolk on THRILLER | David Hirmes on ARZACH | Anthony Miller on SHOCKWAVE RIDER | Annie Nocenti on JIMBO | Seth on MR. MACHINE | Alex Brook Lynn on JUDGE DREDD | Joe Alterio on THE INCAL | Jason Grote on JOSIE AND THE ELEVATOR.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!