I believe its "riddle" was never meant to be "solved". I do not believe that this has to do with any failure of coherence on the part of either the author or the text. I find both to be exceptionally coherent. Author and text are determinedly self-aware, in ways that less exploratory authors and their tales never are. Dhalgren is quite literally an experimental novel, and exploration of the cultural envelope of fiction. Delany, equipped with the accumulated tool-kit of literary modernism, heads straight for the edges and borders and unacknowledged treaties of the consensual act of fiction. And, most remarkably — almost uniquely, in my experience — he succeeds; the text becomes something else, something unprecedented.

To enter Dhalgren is to be progressively stripped of various certainties, many of these having to do with unspoken, often unrecognized, aspects of the reader's cultural contract with the author. There is a transgressive element at work here, a deliberate refusal to deliver certain "rewards" the reader may consider to be a reader's right. If this is a quest, the reader protests, then we must at least learn the object of that quest. If this is a mystery, we must at least be told the nature of the puzzle. And Dhalgren does not answer. But what of this recombinant city, the reader asks, this metamorphic Middle American streetscape, transfigured by some unspecified thing or process, where nothing remains quite as it was, and the sky itself is alight with primal signs of Tarotic portent?

And Dhalgren does not answer, but goes on.

Revolving. A sigil of brass and crystal, concrete and flesh.

I place Dhalgren in this history:

No one under age thirty-five today can remember the singularity that overtook America in the nineteen-sixties, and the generation that experienced it most directly seems largely to have opted for amnesia and denial.