**This is part of a series of posts reading Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, chapter by chapter**
We are finally in Bellona. And our protagonist finally gets a name.
Well.. a nickname. After getting into the city, and trying to figure out the state of his body under a lamppost – his hunger, his bare, blistered feet – he checks the streets out, the “fugitive plumbing”.
Noticing him from one of the buildings, our hero gets a guide to his clueless sensibility: A big man named Tak Loufer, which means “Red Wolf or Fire Wolf” according to him, whose “jaw looked like rocks in hay-stubble”.
When the protagonist says he doesn’t know his name, Loufer nicknames him: “I’m going to call you Kid, then. That’ll do you for a name. You can be – The Kid, hey?” And he starts leading the Kid down the streets, as they inquire each other as to why they ended up in the city.
We learn from Loufer a few things about Bellona, that portray it as a post-gentrification, post-apocalyptic kind of city: Once a city of millions, it now has maybe a thousand people. There’s also a gang, the Scorpions, and Loufer and the Kid hide from them at a certain point: They look like giant creatures, like a seven-foot high dragon or a mantis, apparently using holograms they call light-shields: “They’re projected from interference patterns off a very small, very low-powered laser”.
Loufer gives major daddy/flirt vibes. He tells the protagonist multiple times “you’re quite a kid” (even though both of them are supposed to be in their late twenties, and the Kid just has a baby face), enjoys assuming things about him and playing tour-guide. When he assumes that the Kid in not really the working type, “He [the Kid] nodded. It was reassuring to be judged by appearances, when the judge was both accurate and friendly”. Apparently Loufer was in jail for “morals charges” that were later reduced to “public indecency”. And of course, the wolf metaphor, both enamoring and dangerous, and gay.
I found this part especially interesting:
“It’s funny,” Tak said […] “You show me a place where they tell women to stay out at night because of all the nasty, evil men lurking there to do nasty, evil things; and you know what you’ll find?”
“Queers”.
Tak glanced over, pulled his cap visor down. “Yeah”.
I feel like this is Delany speaking to us. In a similar way (albeit different contexts) that he does in his other books, putting in parts of his queer politics into characters mouths. Specifically, and this comes up in a very violent way in his book Hogg, Delany points both to the violence of men and male sociality, but also the opportunity where desire between men can lie.
In a beautiful way, it also subverts the male companionship that is so endemic to sci-fi, but is mostly dessexualized. Here, it’s very apparent to the reader (or at least, to those of us with a certain inclination) – that both the Kid and Tak Loufer are queers in some way or form, and that they assess and acknowledge each other as such.
More than that, Bellona comes off here as a dangerous place of being on the margins, of violence and indifference, but also of identity opportunities. When the Kid asks Loufer why did he stay in Bellona, he says “I think it has to do with – I got a theory now – freedom. You know, here […] you’re free. No laws: to break, or to follow. Do anything you want. Which does funny things to you”.
Ah, those funny things… the Kid contemplates about this in his mind throughout their conversation. He thinks about this new name he is given, the Kid, names it in his mind as a third gift (alongside the other two from the previous chapters: The chain and the orchid). And at the very end, the narration switches to first-person, and he asks: “From this play of night, light, and leather, can I let myself take an identity?”
Night and leather. Let’s see where the wolf takes us next…
by tuliula_