Picnic at Dhalgren Rock

Two books that really don’t want you to have the answers

In my work as a corporate communicator, the goal is invariably a form of articulated explanation. Messages delivered with clarity of purpose are the gold standard, especially when there’s a logistical component that requires an explicit call to action. Every word bends to the goal of delivering the point as succinctly and unambiguously as possible to ensure the smooth workings of a vast machine. 

Of course, underneath these carefully chosen words is usually a deep well of unspoken emotion. The message is being created because there’s a tumult of discontent among employees, or because consumers are leery in the wake of a recent misstep, or because the company’s actions have put it in the crossfire of a political firestorm. But organizations often prefer to talk around the troublesome realities of these feelings to focus on the more concrete sphere of plans and actions. 

It’s been common practice for the past decade or so to couch this under the rubric of storytelling - “what happens next.” But obviously fiction got there several thousand years before the first corporate charter was established. Myth, legend, and pure make-believe have had a longer time to play with the boundaries of what you might call useful information. 

In its most standard template, fiction follows the same principles as the corporate communications I described above: Give us the facts, and allow us to infer the implications. From Homer’s epics to Grimm’s fairy tales, a lot of classical storytelling doesn’t waste much time on the undersides of things. Something happens, which causes something else to happen, and maybe you’ll get some broad strokes of what the characters were feeling, but mostly audiences are left to sort out their inferences on their own. 

I just finished reading two books, both published a bit more than 50 years ago, that turn this formula on its head. They each spend most of their time building impressions of the inner world of their characters, while leaving mysterious many of the concrete details of what exactly has caused those feelings. As someone who spends much of my working life trafficking in explanatory directness, I found them both maddening and thrilling. 

One book provides a famous example of this, particularly through its film adaptation: Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. It is probably a spoiler to tell you going into either version that this is a mystery without a solution. In the year 1900, members of a girls’ boarding school in the Australian bush take a summer outing in the shadow of an ancient geological oddity. Three of the girls and one of the teachers disappear in utterly baffling circumstances, and those who are left behind drive themselves mad trying to figure out what happened. And they never do. 

The details of the disappearances, and the meager clues they leave behind, seem at times like they can only be explained by supernatural means. The story seems to flirt with the Lovecraftian in its implications of eldritch mystery, but where Lovecraft was an intricately detailed explainer, Lindsay denies us any such satisfaction. This was her first novel, published at age 70 - prior to this, she was primarily a painter. She tells the story in daubs, lavishing attention on characters and scenes that she then abandons abruptly, leaving you to flesh out the picture in your mind. 

Unlike Peter Weir’s wonderful film version from 1975, which keeps us suspended very much in the uncomfortable present (it’s the scariest movie I’ve ever seen that takes place almost entirely in sunlight), Lindsay offers frequents jumps in perspective: from the deep mineral past to the futures, imagined or otherwise, of certain characters; from their innermost thoughts to the POV of an ant. And yet she never allows this kaleidoscope to converge on the most urgent question: What happened? The emotions are real, but the message they reflect is denied us. 

I read Picnic at Hanging Rock in a few short days right after finishing a very long novel I’d been nursing for four months: Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren. Perhaps I was poised by their proximity to find parallels between these two books that would seem to have little in common (as was the case with these two films I wrote about last month). But accidents like this seem as good a way of organizing my thoughts as any other. 

Where Picnic is slim, Dhalgren is thick (over 800 pages in my copy). Rather than being built around a single mystery, the mystery in Dhalgren is all-encompassing. The book unfolds in Bellona, a midwestern American city that has fallen prey to an unspecified catastrophe that has driven most of its residents away. Now, under perpetually cloudy skies, a thousand or so citizens - drifters, counterculture types, people (primarily Black) too poor to leave; the curious, the power-hungry, the thrill-seeking, and the deluded - struggle to build a new society in the empty buildings and institutions that remain. 

At the center of the novel is a character named Kid - or the Kid, or Kidd - whose past yields as little exposition as Bellona itself. He doesn’t remember his name or his history, rendering his slate as clean as that of the city where he settles. He disappears from his own narrative for days or weeks at a time, forced to learn about his actions from those around him. To articulate his understanding of this fragmented world, he turns to writing poetry in a discarded notebook, which has surprising effects on the social dynamics around him. 

What makes Dhalgren such an indelibly weird - and often frustrating - experience is that these lacunae are surrounded by incredibly dense accumulations of everyday detail. Delaney will vividly describe an interior without giving much information about the house or neighborhood it’s a part of. A gang of hologram-augmented ruffians known as Scorpions will go on minutely rendered “runs” to cause havoc in various settings, without ever making it clear why they’ve decided this or what they hope to accomplish. Most bizarrely, Delaney will dip into 10-page, play-by-play, anatomically precise sex scenes, which might make you thump your fist against the table and demand to know why we’re focused on this when there are literally thousands of other things you’re burning to find out. Even the word “Dhalgren” itself is only referenced obliquely within the book, and in contexts that don’t give you any hint as to why it’s been granted the title role. 

Delaney is primarily known as a sci-fi author. I’d only read one of his books before - Triton - which is a good example of his interest in using speculative structures to explore the vagaries of human thought and culture. But we tend to expect a certain prescriptive quality from science fiction, particularly of the vintage variety - the author generally wants to show off how their imaginative flights are grounded in reality. Dhalgren subverts these expectations both by the setting of the book - which takes place in the “now” of early ‘70s America - and by his tantalizing yet intentionally unsatisfying introduction of genre tropes. The holographic gang members are one example - another is the succession of cosmic phenomena that occur without warning and then disappear as abruptly, keeping you just as off balance as the characters who are forced to reckon with it and then go on with their grimy, mundane lives. 

I’ve encountered plenty of indirection and circumspection in literature, of course, but rarely in such a maximalist vein. You’re more likely to find it in miniature, in works from authors like Diane Williams and Lydia Davis. I was recently reminded of a short story by Davis, a genius of minimal implication, that consists entirely of the following: 

An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.

No characters, no pronouns - no verbs, even - and yet so much for the imagination to reconstruct. But even then, some mysteries remain ineffable: What was being discussed? Who hurt whom, and why? Even when we think we’ve figured something out, there’s so much we don’t know right beneath that surface. 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these works were all written by authors from marginalized communities. Women like Lindsay and Davis, and minorities like Delaney - who is one of the few celebrated Black sci-fi authors of his generation - have traditionally been forced to tiptoe around what they truly want to say in deference to the powerful figures of white, male authority. Those in power and their surrogates have a stake in direct explanation, bludgeoning readers and listeners with blunt, unadorned declarations to guarantee unquestioned consensus. In contrast, the authors under discussion use their evasiveness like an emotional knife, cutting through perception with what isn’t said - their subversion, perhaps, all the more effective by running in hidden channels. 

Even as works like these implicitly question authority, they also reflect the fact that this very questioning has taken us into uncharted territory. Both of the books discussed above were written at a time when the consensus reality of the previous decades had begun to atrophy (Picnic was published in 1967, Dhalgren in 1975). They both do an eerily good job of foreshadowing the world we live in today, where we have too much information about bullshit and not nearly as many answers as we need. When forced into such open-ended circumstances, some of us willfully impose order on the chaos in the form of conspiracy and paranoia (thanks, QAnon); others simply turn our backs on the uncertainty and focus on the simplified narratives that we grew up with. Very few of us possess the strength of a Lindsay, a Delaney, or a Davis to not only accept the ambiguity, but to revel in it, to build with it. 

Even as we speak, I’m fighting the urge to bring this little essay in for a glib close, making an overt tie between their oblique storytelling approaches and the institutional certainties I get paid to peddle. I fight that battle every day as both an artist who wants to interpret the world in all its strangeness and a professional who crafts narrow narratives to accomplish specific goals. I’m losing that battle by writing this paragraph in the first place, but habits die hard - balancing crystal clarity with understated absence may not be my own special skill, but we’re all the richer for encountering it in the work of others.