Don DeLillo after the Millennium: Currents and Currencies 1498548660, 9781498548663

Table of contents :
Contents
Text Credits
Introduction
“COLLATERAL CRISIS”
Collateral Crisis
The Currency of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
“HERE AND GONE”
‘Here and Gone’: Point Omega’s Extraordinary Rendition
Place as Active Receptacle in Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories
Mourning Becomes Electric
“ONTOLOGICAL CROSSINGS”
Love-Lies-Bleeding
“The Art, the Artist, the Landscape, the Sky”
“TIME, TIME, TIME”
Don DeLillo, the Contemporary Novel, and the End of Secular Time
Cinematic Time, Geologic Time, Narrative Time
“POETICS OF SURVIVAL”
“The Rough Shape of a Cross”
DeLillo’s Poetics of Survival
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

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Don DeLillo after the Millennium

Don DeLillo after the Millennium Currents and Currencies

Edited by Jacqueline A. Zubeck

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zubeck, Jacqueline A., editor. Title: Don DeLillo after the millennium : currents and currencies / [edited by] Jacqueline A. Zubeck. Description: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed. Identifiers: LCCN 2017033331 (print) | LCCN 2017033613 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498548670 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498548663 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: DeLillo, Don—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PS3554.E4425 (ebook) | LCC PS3554.E4425 Z646 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033331 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Text Credits

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Introduction: The Word for Currency  Jacqueline A. Zubeck

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PART I: “COLLATERAL CRISIS”

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1 Collateral Crisis: Don DeLillo’s Critique of Cyber-Capital Matt Kavanagh

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2 The Currency of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis45 Mark Osteen PART II: “HERE AND GONE”

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3 ‘Here and Gone’: Point Omega’s Extraordinary Rendition Jesse Kavadlo 4 Place as Active Receptacle in Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories Elise Martucci

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5 Mourning Becomes Electric: Performance Art in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Falling Man107 Jacqueline A. Zubeck PART III: “ONTOLOGICAL CROSSINGS” 6 Love-Lies-Bleeding: Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Dying Man Graley Herren v

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7 “The Art, the Artist, the Landscape, the Sky”: Ontological Crossings in Love-Lies-Bleeding157 Randy Laist PART IV: “TIME, TIME, TIME” 8 D  on DeLillo, the Contemporary Novel, and the End of Secular Time Scott Dill 9 Cinematic Time, Geologic Time, Narrative Time  Maciej Maslowski

169 171 191

PART V: “POETICS OF SURVIVAL”

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10 “The Rough Shape of a Cross”: Chiastic Events in Don DeLillo’s “Baader-Meinhof” Karim Daanoune

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11 DeLillo’s Poetics of Survival: A Case Study  Jennifer L. Vala

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Index249 About the Contributors

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Text Credits

Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. From: (1) LOVE-LIES-BLEEDING by Don DeLillo. Copyright © 2005 by Don DeLillo. (2) THE BODY ARTIST by Don DeLillo. Copyright © 2001 by Don DeLillo. (3) ZERO K by Don DeLillo. Copyright © 2016 by Don DeLillo. (4) COSMOPOLIS by Don DeLillo. Copyright © 2003 by Don DeLillo. (5) FALLING MAN by Don DeLillo. Copyright © 2007 by Don DeLillo. (6) POINT OMEGA by Don DeLillo. Copyright © 2010 by Don DeLillo. (7) THE ANGEL ESMERALDA by Don DeLillo. Copyright © 2011 by Don DeLillo. Excerpts from Love-Lies-Bleeding by Don DeLillo © Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear. Excerpts from The Body Artist by Don DeLillo © Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear. Chapter 2 based on Osteen, Mark. “The Currency of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55 (3): 291–304. 2014 reprinted with permission.

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Text Credits

Used by permission of the Author and The Wallace Literary Agency. All rights reserved. From: LOVE-LIES-BLEEDING by Don DeLillo. Copyright © 2005 by Don DeLillo. THE BODY ARTIST by Don DeLillo. Copyright© 2001 by Don DeLillo. ZERO K by Don DeLillo. Copyright © 2016 by Don DeLillo.

Introduction The Word for Currency Jacqueline A. Zubeck

Don DeLillo After the Millennium: Currencies & Currents treats the author’s twenty-first-century works from various perspectives: currency and cybercapitalism, space and time studies, and ontology and the cyborg quality of modern life. It considers performance art and ethics, drama and directorial perspectives, and the role of the artist in culture, long a subject of DeLillo’s work. Frequently described as “prescient” in his anticipation of social trends and political impact, DeLillo perspicaciously reads our culture and gives voice to the rhythms of our vernacular and jargon. Nourished by decades of work, DeLillo continues to demonstrate a well-honed talent for gauging the currents of culture and anticipating life in a global environment. Critical works dealing with current fiction often picture 9/11 as the defining moment of the twenty-first century, an event that devastated American selfassurance and conviction, much like that twentieth century back-breaker, the JFK assassination. DeLillo’s twenty-first-century novels—The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, Falling Man, and Point Omega, as well as the play Love-LiesBleeding—might be interpreted vis-à-vis the trauma and loss of confidence that characterize post-9/11 literature in general, and speaks to questions of art and the variables of representation in the twenty-first century.1 Critics cite DeLillo’s shorter, sparer works in the new millennium, which have a more domestic emphasis rather than an encyclopedic breadth. Elegiac, they are punctuated by the silence that renders sound poignant. Utterly serious, they lay the ground for mordant humor. I want to suggest that The Word for Snow works as something of a précis of DeLillo’s twenty-first-century work, a prism that finds reflection in the Millennium essays and looks ahead to Zero K and its evocative musings on the future of death and dying.2 Stories of the last and the lost are intrinsic to ­DeLillo’s twenty-first-century fiction. The work accrues in the wake of suicide (The 1

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Body Artist) and apocalyptic terror (Falling Man and Point Omega) and gives witness to the final days of an artist (Love-Lies-Bleeding) and a currency trader (Cosmopolis). Moreover, the twenty-first-century works are especially “preoccupied with questions of time and deliberately restrict themselves to . . . confined settings” Scott Dill argues, where “an immeasurable time looms ominous.”3 The subject matter is reflected in literary technique, “[t]he abrupt endings of [DeLillo’s] late style—its shortened sentences, shortened paragraphs, shortened novels—[which] focus on the meaning of endings, or rather, on how an end can create the meaning of the present.” The Word for Snow, a dramatic dialogue, exemplifies the author’s twentyfirst–century tendency for the succinct and the oblique, burnished under DeLillo’s sure hand. Published without fanfare in 2014—1,000 copies of twenty-five 8”x11” pages—its print appears as typewriter font, with minor smudges and a clipped “a.” The subject of its drama is global warming. The physical form of the book itself and its limited accessibility as a print edition works to obviate the virtual nature of twenty-first-century expression, and constitutes a publishing venue related pertinently to the subject of global warming. What art form stays afloat when the very ground of reference is washed away in planetary trauma? What happens when war, terror, and disease are diminished as global miseries, in the massive onslaught of oceanic tides? How does one publish when one is threatened with the watery “death wish” swash of our “technology”?4 Don DeLillo brings along his typewriter and writes a dialogue. Premiered by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2007 and published as text in 2014, The Word for Snow is neither a novel nor a play, but a pareddown “reading” staged for the Pilgrim, the Scholar, and the Interpreter. The dialogue opens with the Pilgrim, who has climbed to the mountaintop, and seeks “the bracing sting of clear thought” from the Scholar, an expert in “eschatology” or “last things.”5 The Scholar speaks only “Old Church Slavonic” (except that he doesn’t) and wants questions put to him to be properly “intoned,” voiced, that is, according to his own pompous diction.6 He has little to say about global warming and its concomitant displacement of reference, although the representational inadequacy of language was likely a subject upon which his own career has depended. Instead, he hottails it to an elevation safe from the melting polar ice caps and “[w]hole families swimming after their homes”—the new quotidian world from which he shields himself.7 The Interpreter has the best lines and translates the Scholar’s clichés into some sort of realizable clarity: “People will live in homes that float” or else “[t]hey stand in blazing plazas, groping for shade.”8 Stories of the last and the lost are intrinsic to DeLillo’s twenty-first-century fiction. The work accrues in the wake of suicide (The Body Artist) and apocalyptic terror (Falling Man and Point Omega) and gives witness to the final. In

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The Word for Snow, the ineffectual Scholar, the clever Interpre, and the bewildered Pilgrim symbolize the narrowing potential of the twenty-first-century and the significance of lost possibility that follows in the wake of multinational corporate vampirism and rapacious technological development. Thus the novels’ currents reflect the discourse, possibilities, and probabilities in circulation, relative to a twenty-first-century “chronotope.” Bakhtin’s term “chronotope” refers to “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.”9 The threat of worldwide inundation represents a unique menace to global society, a hazard which forecasts a kind of constriction or narrowing of venues “after the millennium.” DeLillo, of course, has explored the contemporary time-space continuum or chronotope in all his creative work. In fact, his fiction is noted for its authorial perspective in which “time . . . thickens, takes on flesh, [and] becomes artistically visible” and “space becomes charged and responsive to the movement of time, plot, and history.”10 Elise Martucci foregrounds space in her analysis of The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories and bases her discussion on E.V. Walter’s evocative concept of space as “an active receptacle . . . filled with meaning and significance.”11 This perspective squares with DeLillo’s own affirmation about the importance of locale. “New York made me,” he explains, and this impact relates to his approach to character development: an “emphasis on physical place informs his characters’ thoughts and actions.”12 Early in his career, DeLillo explained to Thomas LeClair: “I try to examine psychological states by looking at people in rooms, objects in rooms,” how a character may “see himself in relation to objects. People in rooms have always seemed important to me” so that “the most important thing I can do is set him up in relation to objects, shadows, angles.”13 Martucci notes that this spatial perspective is important: characters’ “ideas of identity are reliant on the places where they stand” and they “often experience a place-based epiphany that makes them question their perceptions and realities.”14 Martucci’s insights about the importance of space in DeLillo’s work provide an avenue for discussion about The Word for Snow. The Pilgrim waxes poetic in his celebration of place, as he stands on a mountaintop, looking for answers. “I remember days at the lake . . . The cry of loons in the stillness.”15 But his statement prompts us to consider the significance of the title. What happens when the word for loon is all that is left of its mournful cry? What is to be our future when we are threatened, literally, with lost ground and thus the foundational resonance of earth and earthiness? What will happen as we approach the condition of “downstreamers” (analogous to Underworld’s “downwinders” who suffered the disfiguring fallout of nuclear testing because they were in the path of prevailing winds)?16 If human culture is no longer

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actually in place, what happens to our notion of time? How do we make sense of this unbelievable development in human and planetary history? We, like the Pilgrim may “believe it at a distance, whatever it is that’s happening,” but “future centuries will experience this. Not us, not now.”17 Other essays in Millennium explore DeLillo’s masterful explication of time and its varied manifestations relative to emotional state, physical condition, or placement. Thus we see how Lauren Hartke’s “plan was to organize time until she could live again” or how New Yorkers measure their everyday lives relative to the period “after the planes,” or the way that postmodern finance makes “[t]he present . . . harder to find” because it is “sucked out of the world to make way for the future.”18 Snow’s focus on global warming or what the Pilgrim refers to as “[t]he tiny final moments in a person’s life, or in the life of the planet” suggests the aptness of Jesse Kavadlo’s analysis of Point Omega (2010), a work which also has last (and lost) things on its mind.19 Kavadlo interprets the term “omega point” not in Pierre Teilhard de Jardin’s sense of an “undying object of ultimate complexity,” but through the sense of an ending, the somber light in which “‘we pass completely out of being’ in the ultimate extraordinary rendition.”20 The omega point, in other words, indicates the edge of a lifetime, the end of an embodied consciousness, a consciousness marked and manifested in the consummation of an ending. Point Omega makes this loss and conclusion particularly poignant by etching it in the unbearable, palpable absence of a man’s child, and captured in Richard Elster’s abiding experience of dearth. Irreplaceable, Jessie Elster is suddenly and irrevocably gone. “In a state of despair,” Jesse Kavadlo writes, “Elster seems to enact the slow-motion rendering of 24 Hour Psycho” and embodies the dragnet pace of the radically slowed film in his own experience of grief and longing.21 Early in the novel, he pontificates on the nature of time and the varieties of temporal experience: the “dimwit time” of cities and the desert time that foresaw “the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter.”22 He philosophizes about the “Pleistocene desert,” where “the rule of extinction” reigns and “time” becomes “slowly older,” the words themselves weighted in impressed linguistic deliberation.23 A matter of casual reckoning for Elster, “extinction” comes vividly to life when his daughter Jessica disappears and her palpable absence launches him immediately into dry and rocky old age. DeLillo’s manipulation of time and space gives way to what Kavadlo calls “the novel’s chief image and plot point . . . presence and absence itself.”24 Kavadlo tackles time in his monograph Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief and discusses the temporal dimension of The Body Artist. He writes: “Taking time and loss together, the novel is about the way in which time passes differently when one loves than when one mourns.”25 In her analysis of performance art and temporal experience in The Body Artist, Jacqueline

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Zubeck takes up Kavadlo’s point and considers the protagonist’s experience of time and space in the aftermath of her husband’s suicide. Zubeck notes that a “widowed spouse feels [her husband’s] absence in sentient consciousness, a phantom limb shadowed forth in the quotidian practice and cadence of the year, an experience that is ‘obscure, slow, difficult and sometimes agonizing.’”26 Hartke’s work as a “body artist” takes place during the unbearable period of reflection brought on by widowhood, doubled in the painful aftermath of her husband’s suicide. Suicide rewrites a whole biography and “makes strange” the loved one who ends his or her life in violent consummation. Hartke bears the marks of this loss in her own body, and in so doing, manages to turn her anguish into performance art. Maciej Maslowski also considers the temporal aspects of grief vis-à-vis Elster’s experience in the “vast meditative time of the desert” as it relates to 24 Hour Psycho, Douglas Gordon’s “scrupulously refined time of the 24-hour videowork.”27 Maslowski conjectures that the “two temporalities” of slowed film and desert “seem to invite . . . careful meditation on the nature of transience and open before the subject’s eyes . . . new levels of experience impossible within the temporal framework of the everyday.” In a dialogue of comparative time frames, Elster notes that “a dim idyll in the summer flatlands” is suddenly marked by the ‘“deep, epochal’ temporality of the desert,” a confluence which “slowly grinds all flesh to sand.”28 The conflation of the chronotopes constitutes tragedy here, because the “weathered bone” of his aestheticized musings become actualized in the disappearance of his daughter, now extinct and unable to be rendered, no matter how many ways her father stretches the etymology.29 Maslowski compares the experience of this disappearance—and its effect on readers—to Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura, a film that also depicts the inexplicable and unresolved disappearance of a woman and the audience’s experience of “enormous” time, “dead time,” and “the whole point of nothing happening.”30 The audience experience that Maslowski discusses in relation to L’avventura and Point Omega is also reflected in Mariela Chapman’s review of Body Time in The Body Artist. “Hartke clearly wanted her audience to feel time go by, viscerally, even painfully . . . causing walkouts among the less committed. / They missed the best stuff.”31 Scott Dill points out that “DeLillo’s reading audience has already undergone a similar experience in the very pace of his prose”; the reader’s subjective experience of time makes it “clear that these novels intend to expand as well as intensify our temporal imagination.”32 A similar experience of embodied slowness occurs in Point Omega, says Maslowski: “Gordon’s piece addresses the viewer as a fully embodied subjectivity that discovers its own temporality through and against the thickness of the body, “the fatigue . . . in [one’s] legs . . . the weight of the body standing.”33 Jesse Kavadlo concurs: “For all its concision, Point Omega is

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a slow and demanding read” and yet “the pace—to use one of DeLillo’s favorite phrases—is the point.”34 Or as Scott Dill adds: “Perhaps DeLillo’s interest in submitting his readers to the experience of slowness indicates that he finds something intrinsically valuable in the act of reading slowly, thoughtfully.”35 Karim Daanoune explores time and finality relative to a sense of mourning that permeates “Baader-Meinhof,” a story from The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. The story is bookended by reference to 18. Oktober 1977, an actual Gerhard Richter exhibit depicting the dead bodies of members of the Red Army Faction (the Baader-Meinhof Gang) in fifteen canvases, a work that DeLillo viewed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.36 When the protagonist of the story ponders the work, she feels as if “she was sitting as a person does in a mortuary chapel, keeping watch over the body of a relative or a friend.”37 Daanoune translates the woman’s process of mourning as Trauerarbeit or “grief work.”38 At the center of the story, a vile and mortifying scene ensues concerning the woman and an unnamed man, a scene both pathetic and despicable. The next day, the woman returns to the museum, where the dead bodies in the Richter paintings exist as figures of her own anguish; these “victims of the State” have become a symbol of the lewd violence that now infects her consciousness and the private space of her apartment. But her mourning “is transferred to the man” at the end of the story, says Daanoune, and the last paragraph depicts him “looking at the last painting in the cycle . . . the one with the coffins and cross, called Funeral.”39 At this point, the paintings call forth a new significance, and speak of the man’s profound regret and shame, bearable only under the possibility of the forgiveness suggested by the cross, a clemency all the more powerful because it is completely undeserved. “Baader-Meinhof” is built, one might say, at the intersection of chronotopes: Germany in the 1970s, pictured in the light of post-9/11 New York. (The story’s setting is implied: two characters are looking for new jobs and visit a museum day after day, to contemplate images related to terrorism and the government reaction to it.) DeLillo’s juxtaposition of Richter’s art in post-9/11 New York makes plain his artistic skill in “temporal literacy” which “involves seeing in apparently static objects or institutions the ‘congealed’ activity of the past and everything that still ‘pulsates’ in the present.”40 In “Baader-Meinhof,” “terrorism” is refracted in intersected realms of space and time, another era’s discourse echoed in the rhythms of the present. A conflation of chronotopes is also recalled in Scott Dill’s analysis of Point Omega. Dill considers Richard Elster’s blithe reference to a “paroxysm” leading to “some worldly convulsion” and “Father Teilhard” who knew of our “gene for self-destruction,” a yen made tangible in “[t]he blur of technology” and impelling us toward the “omega point.”41 Dill introduces a new chronotope into consideration, however, one that also anticipates the subject matter of The

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Word for Snow. Dill writes that Point Omega “[c]onflat[es] the dynamism of Teilhard’s cultural noosphere with extinction” because “we have now entered an Anthropocene that pronounces human culture’s disastrously destructive tendencies” as a “new geological era . . . when humans have reached the point of influencing geological time.”42 Indeed, “the Anthropocene is characterized by manmade extinctions” not only to flora and fauna, but to the very planet itself.43 The Anthropocene, despite the “man” or “person” in its etymology, speaks not of human evolution, but planetary devolution, ironically accruing from scientific, economic, and technological “progress.” Speaking from “an unnamed mountain somewhere in a lost corner of west-central Asia,” both the Scholar and the Interpreter affirm: “Time is a lie” because the death of the planet cannot accommodate either the human temporal experience or the devaluation of the seasons and the rhythms of the earth itself.44 Our present chronotope, therefore, is one of “waiting,” says Dill, “what Christian theology coined as the saeculum,” a “secular timescale,” one in which “the end of the present is entirely indecipherable yet absolutely imminent.”45 In another rendition of time, Mark Osteen considers how Cosmopolis “unveils the peculiar power of postmodern money to produce a new understanding of time, one in which ‘currency’ as a temporal term has been rendered almost meaningless.”46 Packer’s “chief of theory” Vija Kinski explains that “cyber-capital creates the future” in direct proportion to how “the present . . . is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential.”47 The “future,” says Kinski, “becomes insistent” but she realizes that this condition is, by its very nature, impossible to last. “[S]omething will happen soon . . . [t]o correct the acceleration of time. Bring nature back to normal, more or less.”48 DeLillo does indeed bring investment capitalism’s “normal” back to “nature” when Eric glimpses his own death. “At the novel’s conclusion,” says Osteen, Packer’s fancy wristwatch . . . becomes a crystal ball projecting images of his immediate future. As he sits talking to Levin, he observes on his watchscreen the body of a man bleeding on the floor, then lying in an ambulance, and finally dead in a morgue. Ironically, after years of predicting the future, Packer finally glimpses it not as digital impulses, but as a picture of single human body—himself.49

Osteen argues that there is an urge for embodiment in Cosmopolis which runs counter to Eric Packer’s virtual existence in cyber-currency and the trading of “futures.” Consider cyborg Packer in the sight gag that occurs several times: Eric poking his head through the sunroof of the limousine. “It was bracing,” he thinks in the midst of a riot, looking curiously like a member of the “special units . . . all framework and no body.”50 Yet Osteen

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details the process of incarnation by which the “triumph of cyber-capital is delayed by its immersion in the blood and mire of history, and by the body, which carries that history and craves meaningful contact with other bodies.”51 Osteen supports his argument by a perspicacious reading of Zbigniew Herbert’s “Report from the Besieged City,” the source of DeLillo’s epigraph “A RAT BECAME THE UNIT OF CURRENCY.”52 Osteen relates the “rat” to the main character’s hankering for embodiment. “Packer may be dramatizing the desire hidden within postmodern money—a yen to re-anchor itself to the material world.”53 That is, “Herbert’s speaker” considers the rat “adequate” to “expos[e] the vanity of wealth and asser[t] against it the fact of mortality.”54 In its earthy way, “[t]he rat resists [the] reduction of humans to immaterial currency by mutely reminding us of our embodiment and ultimate decay.”55 The impact of cyber-capitalism and the yearning for incarnation, continues Osteen, is demonstrated through Packer’s “double,” Benno Levin, “a human rat who embodies both DeLillo’s challenge to cyber-capital and his recognition that such protests may be driven by a death wish.”56 (Osteen cites the early Dostoevsky story “The Double” in which the “real” character documents the life of his “other” self, a successful doppelgänger who gains social and financial dominance, while the “original” continues to degenerate.) And like the Rat or the Double, “Levin offers a counterfeit currency to reverse the flow toward abstraction.”57 Thus, he “imagines stealing the billionaire’s pocket money, not for its economic value, but for its ‘personal qualities.’” He “wanted its intimacy and touch, his touch, the stain of his personal dirt.’”58 Thus we see that the yearning for embodiment—presence in a particular space—is preferate to the virtual nature of twenty-first-century culture. In his witty summation of financial history and theory, Osteen also considers the moral impact and global consequence of surpassing greed in the twenty-first-century, and in particular, the ability of traders to utterly dismiss the “binding and ancient obligations of kinship or . . . age-old social hierarchies.”59 DeLillo “plumbs the psychology and social role of the traders and financiers who engineered the crisis” and Eric Packer “stands for the unstable, indifferent and shifting world that postmodern money has engendered.”60 Cosmopolis also demonstrates the impact of Packer-type practices in the character of Benno Levin/Richard Sheets. Levin’s squalor and desperation—captured very effectively in the Cronenberg film Cosmopolis—makes incarnate the impact of cyber-capitalism’s violation of responsibility, equity, or loyalty.61 “[Benno] is Packer’s own self-destructive impulse come to squalid life,” writes Osteen, “a twenty-first century Underground Man.”62 A human rat who embodies both DeLillo’s challenge to cyber-capital and his recognition that such protests may be driven by a death wish.” Both Levin and his “double” Packer destroy themselves in order to prove their freedom,

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even if that liberty consists in the self-chosen ability to destroy themselves. In another nod to Dostoevsky, Osteen notes that in Cosmopolis, “the longing to be a god only brings one face to face with one’s naked humanity.”63 Elise Martucci, in her analysis of place in the Esmeralda stories, considers other versions of ethical malfeasance, in particular, how disdain for locale brings with it a scorn for morality or “answerability” relative to a particular time and place.64 “Creation,” first published in 1979, describes how one married couple disregards their vacation island’s actual environment and demonstrates their preference for the eden of their luxury suite, “a private garden of hibiscus, various shrubs and a silk-cotton tree.”65 The narrator is aware of its constructed falsity, “designed to make people feel they’d left civilization behind” but he prefers this “remote-control rapture . . . Naked.”66 Like James Axton in The Names, the character functions with conscientious ignorance in a “march of stupidity” that similarly predisposes him to flout a moral code.67 In “Creation,” says Martucci, “[i]t is no coincidence that it is at the suite that [the unnamed first-person narrator] breaks his marriage vows with no apparent guilt or reservations.” His removal into an exotic environment frees him from scruples and “he appears to have moved himself into a moral vacuum.”68 Ethical alibis are manifest in other DeLillo stories and novels, a moral detachment that reverberates in Snow. The Scholar repeats “we are narrowing the venues” and demonstrates his solipsistic perspective; the earth is about to be inundated but what is important is “[t]he way” his “blood flows” and how his “bowels shake.”69 It is only the Pilgrim who recognizes that the Scholar’s perspective risks “reducing people to faceless multitudes,” with no recourse to our empathy or sense of responsibility.70 Martucci considers “Human Moments in World War III” and the characters who orbit the globe “to gather intelligence.” Vollmer, the “engineering . . . communications and weapons genius” becomes increasingly detached from the earth as a living entity and considers it merely a representation.71 A map, to him, is “more tangible and thus more alluring than the earth itself.”72 But in his aloofness, he is robbed of a human connection. “As he loses his sense of place, he loses his sense of self; he loses his humanity.”73 “The Runner” also suffers from a similar disengagement and concomitant moral hollowness. He reverts to clichés and stereotypes to explain away a threatening truth—that his own local environment can be dangerous, violent, and arbitrary. Significantly, he too “avoid[s] responsibility through [his] detachment from place.”74 Martucci’s linkage of spatial particularity and moral responsibility relates to Jacqueline Zubeck’s reading of The Body Artist and Falling Man. Zubeck discusses the eponymous performance artists with respect to Bakhtin’s sense of “answerability,” an “attitude of consciousness” which is also intrinsically linked to place. “From my own unique place an approach is open to the whole

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world in its uniqueness, and for me it is open only from that place. As disembodied spirit [or ‘theorist’], I lose my compellent, ought-to-be relationship to the world, I lose the actuality of the world.”75 Bakhtin urges us to assume a sense of responsibility for our “unique place in Being” precisely because “[t]hat which can be done by me can never be done by anyone else.”76 Zubeck argues that the performance artists function with this kind of ongoing dedication and work ethic, much like DeLillo himself. In contrast to the eponymous heroes, the foils to the title characters—Rey Robles in The Body Artist and Keith Neudecker and Martin Ridnour in Falling Man—function with a “passive consciousness.”77 Their moral failures accrue from a lack of “faithfulness (being-true-to)” and an unwillingness “to undersign” their actions in “actual fact of acknowledgment, an acknowledgment that is once-occurrent and never-repeatable, emotional-volitional and concretely individual.”78 Rey Robles, Keith Neudecker, and Martin Ridnour avoid answerability and refuse to acknowledge their own particularity and the impact of that presence, a moral deficit which relates to characters in other DeLillo novels as well. Thus, other Millennium authors consider ethical violations, particularly emphasizing intellectuals’ responsibility for their work. In Point Omega, Richard Elster had helped to ready the country for “the blat and stammer of Iraq,” an invasion Elster conceptualizes as a “haiku war” for the ad bellum coterie he is proud to serve.79 Elster was “the intellectual who supported the war, whose writing gave it credence.” He was ‘the outsider, a scholar with an approval rating but no experience in government’” as Scott Dill points out.80 After he plays his part in the war drama, he beats it to his “spiritual retreat” in the desert, a place he assumes is without “conflict.”81 But “Elster’s exile is more mortifying than purifying,” Kavadlo explains.82 Like the Scholar who contemplates his own (lack of a) navel in Snow, Elster is happy to rid himself of “the burden of consciousness” and to “burn away” like Owen Brademas “in the sandstone hills.”83 Elster lives by a casual dismissal of human particularity—as the Scholar says “Every face the same”—until Jessie’s disappearance turns his reveries on “the omega point” into “the point of a knife as it enters a body.”84 Lack of moral responsibility relates to both the “collateral crisis” which informs Cosmopolis and thematically to the intersection of financial and technological devastation: power brokers have failed to register the impact of their lopsided policies and ignored the planetary bill coming due. Matt Kavanagh explains that the “haircut” in Cosmopolis is not, after all, a random plot maneuver as some critics declared early in the game, but a term utterly appropriate to the theme of the novel.85 “A haircut designates the minimum collateral requirement that institutional lenders require of their borrowers to serve as insurance against the risk of default,” a warranty of value that

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sustains a balance between profit and its cost.86 Cosmopolis actually reads the signs and anticipates the violation of economic and moral principles and makes evident “the breakdown of cyber-capital as a cosmopolitical justification, which is to say, as a comprehensive theory of existence that reconciles the order of nature (cosmos) with the order of society (polis).”87 Snow marks the impact of a similar breakdown in the relationship between nature and society, one that sets us back to a concern for primitive survival, indicated by the Scholar who now inhabits a “crude mud hut.”88 In his analysis of the novel, Mark Osteen reads Cosmopolis in terms of the psychology and social role of the traders and financiers” and how the gluttony of a few brought hunger to the many.89 He considers the collateral crisis in terms of the “abandonment of the gold standard in the twentieth century [whereby] money was unmoored from its anchorage to float freely on the tides of exchange.”90 At present, argues Osteen, “money is . . . entirely faithbased” but its artificial liquidity is maintained by the high priests of finance who have gone whoring after strange gods.91 This crooked exchange might also be applied to global warming in that those addicted to luxury, speed, and convenience have failed to register the consequences of their gargantuan energy use, a condition for which there may be no cure. What is balancing the debt for the resources extracted? What currency can balance the manipulation of markets and money? What is the cost of our greed? “Tremendous to think about,” agrees the Pilgrim, yet also suggesting the depths of our denial: “Not us, now now.”92 Rising temperatures due to the degradation of the earth’s interrelated ecological systems speaks to Randy Laist’s analysis of cyborg existence—the interpenetration of nature and technology.93 Laist explores this topic and the science which underlies it in his analysis of DeLillo’s Love-Lies-Bleeding, a play about a dying artist, a man experiencing his own “last times.” Alex is kept alive by various chemical and mechanical devices, so that the line between chemistry and cognizance is indeterminable, or rather, exists as “an interdependent network of associations which make it impossible to define the place where physiology ends and consciousness commences.”94 Laist considers the relationship between electrochemical forces in nature and human identity as entities which tend to “circulate Mobius-style into one another.”95 Laist’s sense of a shared surface or intertwined dependency can be effectively related to the earth and the use of its resources as well. Global warming accrues in our failure to curb the riotous spending of our resources and because we have a “disdain for collateral” that might balance the takings.96 Like “contemporary currency trading,” conspicuous consumption and the production of an underworld of waste constitutes “a[nother] form of high-stakes gambling” in which it is possible to “lose or win vast sums.”97 Yet, we seem to be losing the game because we have failed to adequately account for the fact that human

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beings are inextricably linked to their habitat in “an interdependent network of associations,” an ecological relationship that relates to both “a person’s life” and “the life of the planet.”98 DeLillo’s novels also offer affirmative examples of answerability or moral responsiveness. Scott Dill argues that Point Omega’s “sober affirmation of ethical responsibility” is “assumed in secular time,” that is, in the period of waiting after Jessica disappears from her father’s house.99 Jim Finley, Dill points out, becomes the caretaker of a devastated Elster, who, in the wake of his utter personal tragedy, loses all pomposity and confidence. Jennifer Vala’s discussion of post-traumatic “survival” as a phenomenon of quotidian carefulness and response “in the meantime” pertain here. Vala considers Keith Neudecker, the protagonist in The Ivory Acrobat, and Jeff Lockhart in Zero K, but her terms pertain to Finley as well, who, for example, shaves Elster and gets him to buckle his seat belt. Their interaction at the end of Point Omega prompts Dill to write that “the novel is not a polemical warning against any coming extinction as much as a creative gesture toward the experiences of meaning portrayed in its human relationships.”100 Jacqueline Zubeck also considers ethics and human relationships, specifically in reference to the “art and answerability” of the performance artists in The Body Artist and Falling Man. These characters, articulating what seems to be DeLillo’s own artistic credo, demonstrate “constancy to the artistic task at hand, a deliberate concentration on quotidian existence, and a sense of responsibility for their own time-and-space coordinates in the everyday world.”101 Moreover, both eponymous characters take on the question of art after 9/11. Their response is to “tell the tale by altering their own flesh in order to communicate to small, live audiences the nature of grief and the cellular impact of trauma—by transforming themselves into art.”102 Zubeck argues that their rather “disturbing live art reflects quotidian life in the new millennium” and an art form that suits the aesthetic perimeters of the twentyfirst century.103 What can we conclude about DeLillo’s twenty-first-century writing, looking through the lens of The Word for Snow? Can we not apply Scott Dill’s central point, that “endedness reveals . . . not morbidity” but the very “experience of meaning”?104 Graley Herren’s argument regarding Love-Lies-Bleeding may also pertain.105 In our opening comments, we considered DeLillo’s emphasis on “last things” and the meaning generated by conclusions. LoveLies-Bleeding is a tragic comedy about a dying artist and the family who gathers around to bring him to a so-called good death, that is, to euthanize him. Herren asks a question that refocuses the play into a dimension that has not yet been considered. “What might th[e] ethically provocative and personally wrenching end-of-life decisions . . . look like filtered through the perspective of a dying artist?”106 What if the various scenes of the play relate to a series

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of sketches in the mind of the artist, facing his own omega point? Does Alex imagine the ways in which his family constructs his identity and plight? Are the dialogues in each scene the imaginings of an artist whose perception has been carefully honed and made sharp over the course of a lifetime? Similarly, we might ask if The Word for Snow is DeLillo’s “ethically provocative and wrenching” view of the dying planet, written as a performance piece by the artist who has most perspicaciously and presciently depicted our culture and history and language. The Word for Snow, in its largely unmediated form (type-written 8 × 11 pages), brings us back to the body in a form created to be a live “reading,” at the juncture in time and space when we face the loss of planetary life as a whole. The Scholar’s babble implies the foreshortening of language because we are losing the very ground of referentiality. “You mean children will build a snowman with the word for snow?” asks the Pilgrim.107 This crucial loss of substantiation is signified at the end of Snow when all three characters speak the same unknown language. It’s not Old Church Slavonic, as the Interpreter promised, but some other linguistic construction, an untranslatable version of “speaking in tongues.”108 Jesse Kavadlo considers the linguistic difficulties related to twenty-firstcentury usage and suggests that “[r]eality, like war, like art, resists . . . ­DeLillo’s attempts to shape it using language.”109 The representational difficulty in Snow is implied in the spacing of the title in the actual 8 × 11 text, where a broad blankness exists between “The Word for” and “Snow.” Not recapitulated on the title page, the visual void signifies a hesitation or doubt about referentiality and text. In other words, the word for . . . snow becomes nonsense when actual snow no longer exists. The Interpreter reminds the Pilgrim that people “are babbling. They are making words without meaning,” in part, because “the polar bear” and “the hawksbill sea turtle” will be “gone soon” and the language for these creatures is nostalgic, mere “driveling reminiscence.”110 Reduced to a baseless language, we continue to lose actual referents and proceed with increasingly impoverished connections to quotidian life forms. “Speaking in tongues” in Snow relates to the kind of untranslatable nonsense that terrifies the child Owen “Orville” Brademas in The Names, which is translated by child-author Tap Axton as a “dredful woe of incomprehenshun . . . the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world.”111 Indeed, Tap Axton might have grown up to be the Pilgrim, determined to make sense, somehow, of today’s “fallen” planet. The tension between the longing for embodiment or performance and the striving to recover from the sense that “all judgments are baseless” is manifest in DeLillo’s characteristic fascination with language and its connection to phenomena in the physical world.112 It is no coincidence that Packer, for example, wanders through Cosmopolis thinking about obsolete language, “the anachronistic quality of the word skyscraper” and “office,” and “airport.”113

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The novel, published in 2003, is written in the aftermath of jets flying into office skyscrapers from local airports, an impossible congruence that anticipates the “drowning fish” in Snow or its “floating homes.”114 Yet, DeLillo continues to pursue his perpetual interest in “the physics of language”: “The fat pocketbook pearly mussel . . . . The dusky seaside sparrow.”115 In Snow, this pleasure is particularly poignant because the twenty-first-century has already demonstrated that, in many instances, only the word is available for contemplation. The hesitation described above on the title page of The Word for Snow indicates the absence of the thing itself and the presence or recollection of “snow” in language only. Thus, our present and near-future chronotope has narrowed the possibilities of space and time and troubled our language, disturbing the reach of our diction and syntax. One way to consider the language of Snow and other twenty-first-century DeLillo texts is through the figure of “chiasmus” as Karim Daanoune does regarding the Esmeralda story “Baader-Meinhof.”116 The “chiasmus,” he says, signals “an overarching design of paradoxically amalgamated opposites,” contradictions implied in Gerhardt Richter’s art, the centerpiece of the story.117 “Richter reaches this painterly indeterminacy thanks to the ‘blurring’ technique and his use of gray—two key idiosyncrasies DeLillo fuses in the phrase, ‘ashy blur’—a color Richter defines as representing the ‘absence of opinion, nothing, neither/nor.’”118 Explaining his artistic technique, Richter says that he uses gray to represent a kind of confusion and the “absence of opinion, nothing, neither/nor […] a means of manifesting my own relation with apparent reality.”119 Daanoune argues that DeLillo’s prose “attempts to reproduce as faithfully and factually as possible the recalcitrant ekphrasis of Richter’s series.”120 Yet, the “ashy blur” is not only composed of “contradictory elements,” but “dynamic interacting ones that originate from the mechanism of the chiasmus.” The key to “chiasmus” is its “pattern of circulation and exchange.”121 A similar chiasmic “cross-over” is apparent in Point Omega, in the “unreconciled contraries” and “seemingly innocuous idiomatic contradictions” of the novel, as Jesse Kavadlo explains.122 Specifically, Kavadlo considers the word “rendition” which he explores for its “internal ambiguity,” an oxymoronic configuration which “remind[s] the reader of the perpetual presence and absence of the narrator of ‘Anonymous,’ Finley’s movie, Elster’s targets of extraordinary rendition, and, most disturbingly, of Jessie’s ontological status.”123 After Jessie disappears, she is “[l]ike Schrödinger’s cat . . . both alive and dead at the same time.”124 The men in the story, like the reader, “cannot know the truth, which remains, as Elster hoped yet now must rue, a mere ‘saga of created reality.’”125 His daughter is “here and gone, first in the literal sense of chronology, but worse, in the paradoxical sense of being two contradictory things at once.”126 This unbearable condition of indeterminacy

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in Point Omega indicates that “[t]he novel does not move toward a center of ultimate knowledge, but to a marginal place of pure uncertainty.”127 A similar paradox or chiasmic exchange is felt in The Word for Snow: “Fish are drowning in Great Slave Lake” and yet “the word fish still clings to the bleached earth.”128 The Pilgrim in Snow addresses just such an internal contradiction, now occurring on a global scale: “When things happen that can’t happen, what are we supposed to believe?”129 And yet, despite the conflicts of reference and knowledge, DeLillo clings to the artist’s language of particularity. Even in Snow, the natural world is beautifully wrought, with a love and a fascination that Alex Macklin celebrates—and teaches to his family—in Love-Lies-Bleeding: “Parish larkspur” and “Desert mariposa” and “night-blooming cereus”—names that seem discovered rather than designated.130 Readers will recall Underworld’s Father Paulus, who instructs Nick Shay in the celebration of “everyday things” which “lie hidden. Because we don’t know what they’re called.”131 Father Paulus’s lesson concerns a humble object—the components of a shoe: “the cuff . . . the counter . . . the quarter . . . . The grommet. Learn it, know it and love it.”132 And Nick Shay complies: “I wanted to look up words. I wanted to look up velleity and quotidian and memorize the fuckers for all time, spell them, learn them, pronounce them syllable by syllable—vocalize, phonate, utter the sounds, says the words for all they’re worth/ This is the only way in the world you can escape the things that made you.”133 Paulus—and Shay— articulate the sensibility of the artist and underscore “the physics of language” which so fascinates DeLillo. Like the artist Alex Macklin, Father Paulus is attuned to the nuance and resonance of language, something that the Pilgrim embraces as well. Like Macklin and Shay, she has internalized the names of things, and celebrates the beauty implied in the terms: “The fat pocketbook pearly mussel,” “[t]he dusky seaside sparrow,” “[t]he Guadalupe violet.”134 These natural entities are not only cleverly named and visually stunning, but spoken aloud, they are verbally pleasurable. “Viola guadalupensis.”135 The Pilgrim recalls how she had “memorized the names of trees and birds, different kinds of cactus. It made me feel smart,” she says, “running those names through my head, then reciting aloud.”136 The Pilgrim’s insistence on specificity—again reminiscent of Tap Axton and Nick Shay and Father Paulus—stands in opposition to the dumbed-down language of the Scholar: “All words, one word,” he mumbles.137 “Dead language for lost species.”138 In contrast, the Pilgrim represents the artist, the seeker, the reader, anyone on a quest for “the depth and reach of the commonplace.”139 Zero K, DeLillo’s sixteenth novel, is marked by the intersection between some of the current themes discussed thus far and DeLillo’s astonishing appraisal of the near future in cryonics. Projecting ahead to a “here and now” that is theoretically available and already in elementary practice, Zero K is

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both terrifying and humorous, skeptical and curious.140 It ponders the art and science of the future and listens for the human reaction to cryonic preservation manifest in the first-person narrator, Jeffrey Lockhart. Jeff’s stepmother Artis will undergo “Convergence” and Jeff is there to be a witness, along with his father Ross.141 The character who gives names to unknown people and attempts to define simple entities in order to clarify and make real, Jeff articulates the complex and intriguing questions that emerge regarding cryonic preservation. He wonders if technological resurrection relates to “the controlled future, men and women being subordinated . . . to some form of centralized command” or does this process actually speak of “the mingled astonishments of our lives, here, on earth”?142 Artis and Ross, for their part, represent the genesis of a new era of possibility and consequence, a new Eve and a new Adam, characters who need not designate the names of animals but rather the tenor and significance of animated life in the future. DeLillo’s works in the twenty-first-century are shaped by conclusions, as we have said, the experience of time contoured by the super-consciousness and pinpointed sensibility which comes with grief, loss, and the nearness of death. In some ways, the novels as well as the play Love-Lies-Bleeding demonstrate how endings or death configures biographical stories, forming a wholeness relative to consummation—an “it is finished” sense of both fulfillment and conclusion expressed in the words of Jesus Christ on the Cross.143 But “cryopreservation” rewrites everything.144 Putting off the finality of physical death initiates a “period of waiting” or radical secularity that revolutionizes the way that human beings shape and formulate reality, perception, and morality.145 The desert enclave where Convergence occurs houses a new kind of angelic messenger the “heralds” harkening to the avant-garde work of “medical science . . . social theorists . . . biologists, and futurists, and geneticists, and climatologists, and neuroscientists, and psychologists, and ethicists . . . .”146 Brilliantly, DeLillo demonstrates that such a landmark change will demand a brand new language. “We will approximate the logic and beauty of pure mathematics in everyday speech,” Jeffrey is told. “No similes, metaphors, analogies.”147 DeLillo implies that figurative language is weighted in earthly phenomena marked by ending, transitoriness, and change, of the impending conclusions that frame consciousness and conscience. The new language of Convergence demands a conceptual reworking that “will enable us to express things we can’t express now, see things we can’t see now, see ourselves and others in ways that unite us, broaden every possibility.”148 Thus “when death itself shall be deathless”—St. Augustine’s words in a new context—a new language must be forged.149 That language, without the “like” or “as” of simile nor the analogous renderings of metaphor bring us to “Convergence,” a cyborgian correspondence in merging coincidence, a confluence between

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ice and animation, biology and technology. “We’re living and breathing in a future context, doing it here and now,” says the unnamed woman in tight pants.150 Such intersection suggests that the only hope of expression is through the oxymoronic configurations regarding “suspended animation” and its “unreconciled contraries” and “seemingly innocuous idiomatic contradictions.”151 “Are you legally dead, or illegally so, or neither of these? Do you care? You will have a phantom life within the braincase . . . . A passive sort of mental grasp. Ping ping ping. Like a newborn machine.”152 Here we glimpse the “ashy blur” of chiasmus and its mobius-like “pattern of circulation and exchange.”153 Thus “the world . . . is being lost” to the “transparent networks” of Convergence “that slowly occlude the flow of all those aspects of nature and character that distinguish humans from elevator buttons and doorbells.”154 This watershed in human possibility and conception is so profound that it seems to revise or rethink moral standards relative to death and dying, and the novel ponders the ethical and emotional connotation of euthanasia, murder, and suicide. DeLillo’s glimpse of the future represents a moral upheaval which is by no means unproblematic. Artis Lockhart—her name so close to “artist”—resounds with the emotional fortitude and courage found in Body Artist Lauren Hartke—and represents perhaps the most positive aspect of cryopreservation.155 Artis makes her frightening choice because she is victim to early onslaught something and embodies what we might currently accept as a good reason for cold storage. But DeLillo ups the ante when her husband Ross grows prematurely aged and understandably desolate. Two years after Artis’s “veer” into another reality, he chooses to “g[o] with her” to the never-never land where middle-aged men do not grow old and middle-aged women do not have fatal auto-immune diseases.156 Ross chooses to terminate his current life and projects himself into the future, a herald of the new era. Ross’s son Jeff, who is the witness to both his stepmother’s and father’s chosen demise, is the exemplar of cryonic confusion. He represents current feelings about the cryogenic process and reports faithfully on the “many questions” that it raises in the participants involved, as well as the readers. He sees its absurdity, its potential for humor but also its emotional appeal and profound beauty and artfulness. The questions are never settled but brought to the surface, in part, through DeLillo’s comparison to other forms of selfchosen death as well as the unwanted demise imposed by global warming and natural disaster. The book’s parallel story relates to Stak, the Ukrainian orphan and adopted son of Jeff’s lover Emma, who is ultimately killed trying to defend the homeland from Putin’s (unnamed) coup in that country, an event witnessed by Jeff on one of the many video renderings of life outside Convergence. The novel seems to posit the question: Is the urge to Converge so different from Stak’s nationalistic form of witness or that of the Tibetan

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monks who set themselves ablaze?157 What are the ways to immortality in a radically secular world? How does one maintain a hold on this world and yet project the self into future existence and memory? Leave it to DeLillo to ponder these eternal questions. Don DeLillo’s work continues to question, to inspire, to investigate, to name. Fortunately, the art itself extends far beyond the scope of any critical analysis. Yet it is so rich and inviting, so multi-faceted, that one can jump onto one of its many salient points and from there ascend the mountain and see the world from one more unique angle or vantage point. Let us turn now and take advantage of the view. NOTES 1. Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (New York: Scribner, 2001); Cosmopolis (New York: Scribner, 2003); Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007); Point Omega (New York: Scribner, 2010); Love-Lies-Bleeding (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2007). 2. Don DeLillo, The Word for Snow: a reading (New York: Karma, 2014); Zero K (New York: Scribner, 2016). 3. Scott Dill, “Don DeLillo, the Contemporary Novel, and the End of Secular Time” in Don DeLillo After the Millennium: Currents and Currencies, ed. Jacqueline Zubeck (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, forthcoming), (cited as Millennium) 175. 4. Don DeLillo, Snow, 20. 5. Ibid., 1, 2. 6. Ibid., 7. 7. Ibid., 9. 8. Ibid., 9, 8. 9. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990), 416. 10. Bakhtin, M.M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, 8th edition, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas, 1992), 84. 11. E.V. Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1988), 492; Elise Martucci, “Place as Active Receptacle in Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories,” in Millennium. 12. Don DeLillo, “Exile on Main Street: Don DeLillo’s Undisclosed Underworld.” Interview by David Remnick in Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 138. 13. Don DeLillo, “An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview by Thomas LeClair in Conversations with Don DeLillo, 14. 14. Elise Martucci, “Place,” in Millennium. 15. Don DeLillo, Snow, 7. 16. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 420.

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17. Don DeLillo, Snow, 24. 18. Don DeLillo, The Body Artist, 39; Falling Man, 34, 170; Cosmopolis, 79. 19. Don DeLillo, Snow, 2. 20. Jesse Kavadlo, “Here and Gone: Point Omega’s Extraordinary Rendition,” in Millennium, 71. 21. Jesse Kavadlo, “Here and Gone,” Millennium ; Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho, 1993. Douglas Gordon makes a version of Alfred Hitchcock’s film slowed to a full day’s viewing and seen from either direction on a translucent screen, without a soundtrack. 22. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 45, 50. 23. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 72. 24. Jesse Kavadlo, “Here and Gone,” in Millennium. 25. Jesse Kavadlo, Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 149. 26. Jacqueline Zubeck, “Mourning Becomes Electric: The Body Artist and Falling Man,” in Millennium; Don DeLillo, Body Artist, 111. 27. Maciej Maslowski, “Cinematic Time, Geologic Time, Narrative Time” in Millennium; Don DeLillo, “A Conversation with Thomas DePietro.” The Barnes and Noble Review, accessed February 1, 2010. http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/ Interview/Don-DeLillo/ba-p/2144. 28. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 72; Maslowski, “Cinematic Time,” in Millennium, 196. 29. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 72. 30. L’avventura, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (Cino del Duca, Produzioni Cinematografiche Europee (P.C.E.), Societé Cinématographique Lyre, 1960); Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 44, 36, 47. 31. Don DeLillo, Body Artist, 106. 32. Scott Dill, “Don DeLillo, the Contemporary Novel, and the End of Secular Time,” in Millennium 174. 33. Maciej Maslowski, “Cinematic Time,” in Millennium, 195. 34. Jesse Kavadlo, “Here and Gone,” in Millennium, 76. 35. Scott Dill, “Secular Time,” in Millennium, 172. 36. Gerhardt Richter, 18. Oktober 1977, 1988. 37. Don DeLillo, “The Angel Esmeralda,” in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (New York: Scribner, 2011), 105. 38. Karim Daanoune, “The Rough Shape of a Cross:” Chiastic Events in Don DeLillo’s “Baader-Meinhof,” in Millennium, 215. 39. Ibid., Don DeLillo, Esmeralda, 118. 40. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Prosaics, 416. 41. Ibid., Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 72, 52. 42. Scott Dill, “Secular Time,” in Millennium, 183. 43. Ibid. 44. Don DeLillo, Snow, 1, 3. 45. Scott Dill, “Secular Time,” in Millennium 174. 46. Mark Osteen, “The Currency of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis,” in Millennium 47. 47. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 79.

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48. Ibid. 49. Mark Osteen, “Currency,” in Millennium, 55. 50. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 96, 97. 51. Mark Osteen, “Currency,” in Millennium, 55. 52. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 96. 53. Mark Osteen, “Currency,” in Millennium, 53. 54. Ibid., 52. 55. Ibid., 53. 56. Ibid., 54. 57. Ibid., 55. 58. Ibid., Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 58. 59. Mark Osteen, “Currency,” in Millennium, 46. 60. Ibid., 47. 61. Cosmopolis, directed by David Cronenberg (Alfana Films, 2012). 62. Mark Osteen, “Currency,” in Millennium. Like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—a version of the Underground Man—Benno steals electricity (Cosmopolis, 57). 63. Mark Osteen, “Currency,” in Millennium, 55. 64. Bakhtin’s ethics, to which he devoted two books, is rooted in his weighted sense of the “architectonic of being-as-Event,” that is, in a continual effort and willingness to answer for one’s actions, words, and even thoughts and to answer to specific others, in a particular here and now. Answerability (otvetstvennost’) implies an “incarnate” participation and willingness to “undersign” one’s acts and ideas, just as one would a work of art. “[F]rom my unique place in Being . . . I assume answerability for my own uniqueness” as I demonstrate “my non-alibi-in-Being,” Bakhtin writes, in typical first-person narration. See M.M. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist, trans. by Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 11, 51, 49; M.M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov, supplement trans. Kenneth Brostrom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). 65. Don DeLillo, “Creation,” in Esmeralda, 8. 66. Ibid., 8, 9. 67. Don DeLillo, The Names (New York: Knopf, 1982), 43. 68. Elise Martucci, “Place,” in Millennium, 86. 69. Don DeLillo, Snow, 17. 70. Ibid., 15. 71. Don DeLillo, “Human Moments in World War III,” in Esmeralda, 25. 72. Elise Martucci, “Place,” in Millennium, 88. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 90. 75. M.M. Bakhtin, Act, 47, emphasis mine. 76. Ibid., 40. 77. Ibid., 38. 78. Ibid., 38, 39. 79. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 21, 29.

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80. Scott Dill, “Secular Time,” in Millennium, 176; The Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 19. 81. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 23. 82. Jesse Kavadlo, “Here and Gone,” in Millennium, 68. 83. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 50; Names 296. 84. Don DeLillo, Snow, 13; Point Omega 98. 85. Matt Kavanagh, “Collateral Crisis: Don DeLillo’s Critique of Cyber-Capital,” in Millennium, 28–29. 86. Ibid., 40. 87. Ibid., 30. 88. Don DeLillo, Snow, 1. 89. Mark Osteen, “Currency,” in Millennium, 47. 90. Ibid., 46. 91. Ibid. 92. Don DeLillo, Snow, 24. 93. Randy Laist, “‘The art, the artist, the landscape, the sky’: Ontological Crossings in Love-Lies-Bleeding, in Millennium, 166; Don DeLillo, Love-Lies-Bleeding (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2007). 94. Randy Laist, “Ontological,” in Millennium, 160. 95. Ibid. 96. Matt Kavanagh, “Collateral,” in Millennium, 36. 97. Mark Osteen, “Currency,” in Millennium, 49. 98. Randy Laist, “Ontological,” in Millennium, 160; Don DeLillo, Snow, 2. 99. Scott Dill, “Secular Time,” in Millennium, 183–184. 100. Ibid., 184. 101. Jacqueline Zubeck, “Mourning Becomes Electric: Performance Art in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Falling Man, in Millennium, 107. 102. Ibid., 109. 103. Ibid. 104. Scott Dill, “Secular Time,” in Millennium, 181. 105. Graley Herren, Love-Lies-Bleeding: Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Dying Man,” in Millennium, 138. 106. Ibid. 107. The word for snow, 13. 108. Ibid., 23. 109. Jesse Kavadlo, “Here and Gone,” in Millennium, 78. 110. Don DeLillo, Snow, 4, 23, 10. 111. Don DeLillo, Names, 338, 339. 112. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 85. 113. Ibid., 9, 15, 22. 114. Don DeLillo, Snow, 14, 9. 115. Don DeLillo, Underworld 542, Snow 18. 116. Karim Daanoune, “‘The Rough Shape of a Cross:’ Chiastic Events in Don DeLillo’s ‘Baader-Meinhof,’” in Millennium, 211–230. 117. Ibid, 217.

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118. Karim Daanoune, “Cross,” in Millennium, 214; Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” in Esmeralda, 108; Hans Ulrich Obrist, ed. Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962–1993, trans. David Britt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 175. 119. Obrist, ed., 175. 120. Karim Daanoune, “Cross,” in Millennium, 213. 121. Ibid, 217. 122. Jesse Kavadlo, “Here and Gone,” in Millennium, 76. 123. Ibid., 69, 76. 124. Ibid., 76. 125. Ibid., Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 28. 126. Jesse Kavadlo, “Here and Gone, “in Millennium, 76. 127. Ibid., 78. 128. Don DeLillo, Snow, 14, underlined in original text. 129. Ibid., 12. 130. “Where did the names come from? . . . He thought there was something inevitable in these names. They don’t seem made up.” Don DeLillo, Love-Lies-­ ­ Bleeding, 17. 131. Don DeLillo, Underworld, 541, 540. 132. Ibid., 541, 542. 133. Ibid., 543. 134. Don DeLillo, Snow, 18. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid., 17. 137. Ibid., 6. 138. Ibid., 19. 139. Don DeLillo, Underworld, 542. 140. Don DeLillo, Zero K, 239. The phrase is repeated throughout the novel. 141. Ibid., 9. 142. Ibid., 146. 143. Artis explains: “Since coming here I’ve found myself concentrating on small things, then smaller. My mind is unwinding, unspooling. I think of details buried for years. I see moments that I missed before or thought too trivial to recall . . . . It’s a sense of closing down, coming to an end” (Zero K, 17). 144. Don DeLillo, Zero K, 141. 145. Scott Dill, “Secular Time,” in Millennium. 146. Don DeLillo, Zero K, 141, 33. 147. Ibid., 130. 148. Ibid., 33. 149. Ibid., 240. The Word for Snow posits more and more people “speaking in tongues,” not in the translated languages of Pentecost, but according to the confusions of Babel (another attempt to reach godhead through technological means). Zero K also picks up the themes of Snow, depicted in the video feeds that Jeffrey witnesses, many of them demonstrating the inexpressible onslaughts of global warming and widespread flooding. 150. Don DeLillo, Zero K, 239.

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151. Don DeLillo, Zero K, 15; Jesse Kavadlo, “Here and Gone,” in Millennium., 69 152. Don DeLillo, Zero K, 238. 153. Karim Daanoune, “Cross,” in Millennium, 214, 217. 154. Don DeLillo, Zero K, 239. 155. Artis reminds this reader of DeLillo’s fond depictions of artists, particularly women artists, in his later novels. 156. Don DeLillo, Zero K, 139, 239. 157. Ibid., 85.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Antonioni, Michelangelo, Dir. L’avventura. Cino del Duca, Produzioni Cinematografiche Europee (P.C.E.), Societé Cinématographique Lyre, 1960. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination, 8th edition. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Bakhtin, M.M. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Edited by. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. DeLillo, Don. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. New York: Scribner, 2011. ———. The Body Artist. New York: Scribner, 2001. ———. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003. ———. “Exile on Main Street: Don DeLillo’s Undisclosed Underworld.” Interview by David Remnick in Conversations with Don DeLillo. Edited by Thomas DePietro. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 131–144. ———. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007. ———. “An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview by Thomas LeClair in Conversations with Don DeLillo. Edited by Thomas DePietro. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 3–15. ———. Point Omega. New York: Scribner, 2010. ———. Love-Lies-Bleeding: A Play. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2007. ———. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. ———. The Word for Snow: a Reading. New York: Karma, 2014. ———. Zero K. New York: Scribner, 2016. Kavadlo, Jesse. Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990. Obrist, Hans Ulrich, Ed. Gerhardt Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962–1993. Translated by David Britt. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995. Walter, E.V. Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Part I

“COLLATERAL CRISIS”

Chapter 1

Collateral Crisis Don DeLillo’s Critique of Cyber-Capital Matt Kavanagh

In Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel Cosmopolis, billionaire financier Eric Packer bets disastrously on the yen. His position is so large that it causes “storms of disorder” in the market; he is so leveraged that the prospective implosion of Packer Capital threatens the stability of the entire banking system.1 Against this backdrop of global financial turmoil, set in a day in April 2000 and clearly evocative of the dot-com meltdown that brought an end to the go-go 1990s (and seemingly clairvoyant of the 2008 crash), Eric decides to get a haircut. Reviewers largely ridiculed what was to follow, prompting a wave of scorn that has made Cosmopolis one of DeLillo’s worst-received novels. Intent on traveling across the city to his childhood barber, Eric settles into his customized limousine for an eleven-block journey fated to take all day. His limo is a hive of activity. It is less a conveyance than a command center, a rolling trading floor outfitted with the latest technology. Here he holds court with his various advisers, including his currency analyst, personal physician, and various chiefs (of security, technology, finance, and—amusingly— theory). Along the way, his progress is impeded by a presidential motorcade, an anti-globalization protest, various sexual assignations, and the massive funeral procession of his favorite rapper. There are also security concerns— his “complex” has received a threat on his life on a day when two other titans of finance will be assassinated. Eager to avoid this folly, his chief of security warns him: “You will hit traffic that speaks in quarter inches.”2 While driven, literally, by the seemingly banal goal of getting a haircut, Eric’s attention is fixed on the currency markets. Not even the violent street protest of anti-capitalist demonstrators rocking his limo in Times Square deters his focus. Quite the opposite. Far from being chastened by a mob in fullthroated roar, Eric exults when he realizes that the organizers—prominently 27

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displaying Zbignew Herbert’s line “a rat became a unit of currency” on a hacked electronic ticker—have been reading the same poetry as he has.3 The common text attests to the underlying identity shared between them and thus validates a claim made by Vija Kinski, his chief of theory, that protest doesn’t so much challenge capitalism as confirm its omnipotence: “The market culture is total,” she says. “It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system that they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are market-driven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system.”4 Reassured by the ability of the market to absorb dissent, Eric is further emboldened by a recurring temporal twitch in the narrative, whereby his state-of-the-art technology provides him with glimpses of the future. “Genius alters the terms of its habitat,” Kinski says, marveling.5 Savoring his triumph over the protestors and time itself, Eric leverages his considerable resources and doubles down on his initial bet: “He borrowed yen in dumbfounding amounts. He wanted all the yen there was.”6 Almost immediately, though, Eric’s victory turns to ashes. Just after executing his order, Eric is transfixed by the spectacle of a lone protestor, “a man sat on the sidewalk with legs crossed, trembling in a length of braided flame.”7 Though Kinski is quick to dismiss the burning man’s actions as derivative, an appropriation of the self-immolation of Vietnamese monks protesting an unjust war, Eric isn’t so sure: “The market was not total. It could not claim this man or assimilate his act. Not such starkness and horror. This was a thing outside its reach.”8 From this point forward, his spectacular progress comes crashing to a halt as Eric suffers from, for lack of a better term, a crisis of confidence. The man aflame serves as both corollary and confirmation of his art dealer (and lover) Didi Fancher’s earlier suggestion that an element of doubt has entered his life. Eric dismissed her suggestion at the time—There is no doubt. Nobody doubts anymore—but the burning man incinerates at least one of the assumptions guiding his strategy: his sense of the market as an all-encompassing totality, one that admits to no outside.9 In short order, as the yen continues to strengthen against his expectations, he learns that the security situation has been upgraded to “credible red. Highest order of urgency.” Facing a mortal threat and financial ruination, Eric remains resolute: “But we still want what we want,” he tells Torval, his chief of security. “We want a haircut.”10 Eric’s dogged insistence on getting his hair trimmed is one of the more perplexing elements in Cosmopolis. In contrast to the novel’s fascination with financial metaphysics, Eric’s fixation on personal grooming seems both arbitrary and mundane. For many of the novel’s first readers and reviewers, the haircut deliberately and somewhat perversely diminished the narrative by rendering Eric’s actions as impossibly self-aggrandizing and his motives absurd.



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Perhaps this helps to explain the novel’s remarkably hostile reception when it was first published in 2003; indeed, critics were initially so ferocious that a second wave of commentary about the poor reviews soon followed. In recent years, however, the discussion around the novel has shifted considerably.11 Critics have come to realize that the sharp sense of disappointment evident in the initial response was a product of misguided expectations. (Cornel Bonca’s 2012 reappraisal of Cosmopolis for the L. A. Review of Books is typical in this regard.) As DeLillo’s first novel published in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, which he also wrote about in a trenchant essay for Harper’s, Cosmopolis was widely anticipated to be the author’s latest meditation on what was both a career-long concern and the most pressing issue of the day: terrorism. That novel, or something close to it, would eventually be written (2007’s Falling Man, which is a searching examination of how we mourn and the consolations we seek in the face of tragedy) but Cosmopolis wasn’t it.12 Instead, it offered a seemingly ill-timed attempt to dramatize the structuring antagonism at the heart of global market mechanism in the slow-moving yet inevitable collision of financier Eric Packer with an expendable and embittered ex-employee. But what was read as crude caricature of economic inequality in 2003 took on an entirely different resonance after the global financial meltdown of 2008 and its various aftershocks, such as the emergence of the Occupy movement. For one thing, the stark division between the plutocracy and the precariat in Cosmopolis seems less polemical to today’s audience given that most observers acknowledge the winner-takeall economy characteristic of neoliberalism leads to increasingly unequal outcomes. But beyond that, the critical agenda itself has been reshaped across a range of disciplines as the shock of 2008 has underlined the fact that finance is increasingly central to everyday life. In literary terms, this has led to renewed interest in exploring economic metaphors and theorizing finance as the symbolic machinery of capital. This, in turn, has led to a renewed appreciation of DeLillo’s accomplishment in Cosmopolis, particularly his critique of cyber-capital.13 THE COSMOLOGY OF CYBER-CAPITAL Cosmopolis completes a process of triangulation begun in the epilogue to DeLillo’s masterpiece Underworld (1997) and continued in his meditation on the 9/11 attacks, published in Harper’s as “In the Ruins of the Future” (2001).14 In all three pieces, DeLillo sets himself to the task of anatomizing cyber-capital, his term for the potent convergence of information technology and financial speculation that defined the so-called “New Economy” of the 1990s. Cosmopolis, DeLillo tells John Barron, is set on “the last day of [that]

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era. It’s that interval between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the current [period] of terror. It’s essentially the 1990s.”15 In it, DeLillo traces the breakdown of cyber-capital as a cosmopolitical justification, which is to say, as a comprehensive theory of existence that reconciles the order of nature (cosmos) with the order of society (polis). During the 1990s, the market penetrated the far corners of the world and the intimate spaces of everyday life. In englobing the world, it appeared less as a human institution than a natural process. At the same time, however, the doctrine of neoliberalism held that it was the highest expression of human freedom (“choice”). The idea of the market offered a unified solution to the distinction between the “mechanical causality” of natural phenomena and the “logical rationality” of human action.16 The invisible hand smoothed over the gap between nature and society, holding both cosmos and polis within its grasp. One of the clearest expositions of the market as a cosmopolitical justification appears in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. He argues that the defeat of state communism and implosion of the Soviet system led to the unquestioned hegemony of global capitalism and liberal democracy. This was not simply a political victory. The triumph of liberal democratic capitalism effectively transcends politics since according to Fukuyama: “all of the really big questions had been settled.”17 The future that he envisions is one absent of ideological conflict fueled by competing historical narratives. Politicians give way to experts as ideology is superseded by technology. Development will henceforth unfold according to the instrumental logic of modern natural science (“rationalization”), which itself is cumulative and directional. The combination of free market economics and liberal democracy is quite literally a force of nature, albeit one that “makes possible the limitless accumulation of wealth, and thus the satisfaction of an ever-expanding set of human desires.”18 Fukuyama’s description of “a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism” was first published in 1989 and it set the stage for the decade to follow.19 The advent of the Internet was only the most visible of a series of transformations that have come to be known as the “New Economy.” Perhaps the most far-reaching of these was psychological. Because economic expansion and technological innovation were so entwined as to be indistinguishable from one another, people were rather quickly seduced to the notion that since technology is unidirectional (i.e., it doesn’t move backward) the economy must be, too. If so, the business cycle of boom and bust no longer applies. What was “new” about the New Economy, then, was this sense that it was unprecedented, that the boom would go on and on. DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld appeared at the height of this frenzy and offers an electric account of the promise of the New Economy. Ranging from the 1950s to the 1990s, Underworld strikes a tone that is both elegiac and cautiously optimistic



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by suggesting how long-standing Cold War antagonisms could be suspended or even dissolved in the new world order. DeLillo’s solution in the novel— in the sense of both an answer and a medium to contain these tensions—is cyberspace. “There is no space or time out here, or in here … . There are only connections. Everything is connected,” he writes.20 Underworld is clearly taken with the redemptive possibilities of a networked world. Its narrative qualities—saturation and immersion—are those of a cosmopolis made flesh, an ideal materialized. At a moment when you can “imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world” all states are possible and no boundaries are left to cross.21 Cyber-capital, “untouched money” as DeLillo calls it, is the engine that brings this realm into being. “[The] force of converging markets produces an instantaneous capital that shoots across horizons at the speed of light, making for a certain furtive sameness, a planning away of particulars,” he writes in Underworld.22 As the circulation of capital speeds up, it increasingly abolishes distance as a constraint on its reproduction, resulting in a uniform spatiality where we are all equidistant to one another (this is the promise of globalization). It generates a purely notional space, an artificial environment exemplified by the omnipresent yet insubstantial financial markets, which are everywhere and nowhere, all at once, all the time. Temporally speaking, cyber-capital accelerates to the point where its circulation is experienced as being more or less instantaneous. “The present is harder to find,” says Eric’s chief of theory, Vija Kinski. “It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential.”23 Eric, though, wants to go faster. As a disgruntled former worker describes him, Eric “wanted to be one civilization ahead of this one.”24 After a fashion, he succeeds. Through the speculation in derivatives like futures, cyber-capital renders the unpredictable quality of the future into a predictable quantity (i.e., “volatility”), one whose risks can be inferred, calculated and ultimately hedged out. “Computer power eliminates doubt. All doubt rises from past experience. But the past is disappearing,” Eric’s chief of theory tells him, “it’s cyber-capital that creates the future.”25 In Cosmopolis, what DeLillo calls “the future” designates the indeterminate state produced through what David Harvey calls the discounting of time-future into time-present.26 It resembles nothing so much as an endless present since it is predicated on the persistence of sameness. As a result, Eric realizes, “there’s no more danger in the new.”27 Eric aspires to this fully rationalized and abstracted state. Indeed, in a partial and yet very suggestive way, there are moments in Cosmopolis when he appears to directly inhabit it. One of the oddities of the narrative is Eric’s spycam, the closed-circuit video in his limo used for teleconferencing. It routinely shows things that

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haven’t quite happened to him yet—for example, he sees himself recoil on a screen, before he hears the blast of a bomb set off at the financial exchange.28 Vija Kinski, his aforementioned chief of theory, is philosophical about this seeming impossibility. “There are rare minds operating, a few, here and there, the polymath, the true futurist. A consciousness such as yours, hyper­ maniacal, may have contact points beyond the general perception.”29 Scattered mainly throughout the first part of the novel, these uncanny intrusions of the future into the present serve as a powerful testament to the idea that the velocity of Eric’s speculation has somehow outpaced reality itself.30 Indeed, they suggest that through the ingenious exercise of logical rationality he is somehow on the verge of transcending the physical world of mechanical causality altogether—even and especially the body itself: “the structure he wanted to dismiss in theory even when he was shaping it under the measured effect of barbells and weights. He wanted to judge it redundant and transferable. It was convertible to wave arrays of information.”31 It’s a fantasy, of course, if a particularly seductive one. By the end of the novel, broke and bereft, Eric ultimately acknowledges his folly. “The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data,” he realizes, “the hang of his cock, untransferable, and his strangely achy knee, the click in his knee when he bends it, all him, and so much else that’s not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-withoutend.”32 The question of course is what makes this fantasy of convertibility so compelling in the first place? The novel opens on a tipping point as the fine balance charted by his models—revealing “a common surface, an affinity between market movements and the natural world”—is threatened by Eric’s actions regarding the yen. Convinced of “an order at some deep level … a pattern that wants to be seen,” that has yet to be noticed by his models, Eric peers beyond this “common surface” in the attempt to see what lies on the other side.33 Breaking through the surface tension, Eric effectively suggests that the market is not like nature, but nature itself (and vice versa), investing his forecasting models with the same inevitability as natural processes. Not to put too fine point on it, Eric’s gamble on the direction of the yen is not based on the further refinement of his system, but on a leap of faith that the models, having attained a certain level of sophistication and complexity, are indistinguishable from the reality they are supposed to represent. Eric’s hubris and eventual downfall is the stuff of Greek tragedy, but we need not look so far into the past for useful analogues. In fact, I’d like to make a detour through DeLillo’s archive housed at the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin) to demonstrate how Packer Capital’s spectacular meltdown has a more recent antecedent, one which reveals that DeLillo’s critique of cyber-capital is informed by a more-than-passing interest in what passes for economic orthodoxy underpinning global financial markets. The



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five boxes of material on Cosmopolis are a remarkably rich trove and provide a great deal of insight into DeLillo’s research strategies and the actual process of composition. (They also include reviews and other secondary material.) It’s fascinating to see how the narrative evolves from scattered notes on everything from the yen carry trade to lists of potential titles (early readers knew this text as Compulsion) to a flaneur’s journal of 47th Street to clippings on everything from the excesses of conspicuous consumption (a piece by the now-notorious fabulist Jayson Blair), New York cabbies, antiglobalization protestors and even a Sotheby’s catalogue featuring a work by Mark Rothko. (“You’ve always wanted a really important Rothko,” DeLillo scrawled on the page, a stray moment of inspiration which later features in an exchange between Eric and his art dealer.)34 In addition to consulting works by contemporary thinkers like John Gray (False Dawn), Mark Dery (Escape Velocity), Paul Virilio (Open Sky) and James Gleick (Chaos), DeLillo also took copious notes on Tony Plummer’s Psychology of Technical Analysis and Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed, a study of the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) debacle of 1998.35 Plummer’s book provides some background for Eric’s genius. It details the practice of “charting” or technical analysis—determining the proper price for a stock through the careful examination of a moving average of its price. In this way, technical analysts use past movement in prices in building models that allow them to forecast future fluctuations, paying relatively little regard to the underlying state of the company (as can be determined by consulting financial statements, which is the province of fundamentals analysis). Charting is the basis for Eric’s intellectual mastery of the market. He is both technically adept—his sophisticated models are so microtimed, Benno Levin notes, no one else can keep up with him—and intuitive.36 The sections in Cosmopolis where Eric celebrates the harmony of the market and nature are inspired by examples from Plummer’s work: He studied the figural diagrams that brought organic patterns into play, birdwing and chambered shell. It was shallow thinking to maintain that number and charts were the cold compression of human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets. In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process.37

Lowenstein, in contrast, tells the story of a wildly successful hedge fund that overreached and sparked a global crisis through aggressive leveraging. It isn’t the only tale of hubris and financial disaster that DeLillo has in mind (he also collected clippings about the 1995 collapse of Barings Bank due to the actions of rogue trader Nick Leeson), but it is particularly useful for what it reveals about the ideology of cyber-capital and the surprisingly crucial role of haircuts.

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Long-Term borrowed funds using investor capital as collateral, and then borrowed some more, using the initial round of loans as collateral for the next round, and on and on. Leveraging is a common-enough practice in the financial world, but what set LTCM apart was its determination to take this process to its logical conclusion, described by Nicholas Dunbar as a vision of “zero capital and infinite leverage.”38 Within a few short years, Long-Term was so highly leveraged that it was implicated in a series of side deals with a host of counterparties totaling over a trillion dollars’ worth of both direct and indirect exposure. Its brain trust, which counted former Nobel Prize–winning economists and former central bankers among their company, had such faith in their ability to hedge out any possible risks to their various positions, they effectively believed that their trades would become self-sustaining, profits carried onward and upward by virtue of their own momentum. John Meriwether, the founder of LTCM, envisioned a perfectly engineered structure, a series of “money machines” each tasked with identifying an inefficiency in the market, smoothing it out by extracting excess liquidity, and from these profits providing the collateral for the next generation of machines.39 With each turn of the financial innovation spiral, the entire structure moved further and further away from its original capital base; the money machines were in effect self-perpetuating. “As the technology of risk management continued to improve, the tiny sliver of equity underneath the inverted pyramid would vanish completely.”40 Their ultimate strategy was to dispense with collateral altogether because anything held “outside” of the market exerted drag on what was otherwise potentially unlimited growth. Collateral was no longer seen in terms as insurance, part of the cost of doing business, but as friction, a stubborn pebble of resistance eventually to be dissolved by the liquidity of the global financial markets. LTCM’s investment strategy depended on several assumptions about the nature of the market, assumptions that were part of the then-reigning economic orthodoxy. None was more important than a theory known as the efficient market hypothesis (EMH). An efficient market is one where prices reflect all available and up-to-date information; it is one where there are no mispriced assets. Efficiency, in other words, functions as a regulative ideal. The mechanism by which efficiency is enforced is what economists call the law of one price: assuming accurate information, identical products will sell for the same price across different markets when expressed in the same currency. The law of one price and the assumption of convergence are part of an understanding of the market as a general equilibrium system, one where risks and returns balance out and the speed of information entering the market correlates to the spread in prices. The dynamic nature of the market, though, ensures that the ideal of equilibrium can never be realized, only approximated.



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There will always be inefficiencies (unbalanced prices), but for savvy traders, a profit can always be made from exploiting inefficiencies through arbitrage. In identifying these spreads, arbitrageurs both profit from them and in the process rationalize the market since the very act of profit taking ensures prices will converge. By individually profiting from inefficiencies, arbitrageurs make the market as a whole more efficient. For EMH advocates, arbitrage is the mechanism by which their theory becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, “in which the use of a model makes it more ‘true.’”41 Ironically, though, as the more glaring inefficiencies are targeted for arbitrage and ironed out of the market, profit margins shrink. “The only way to continue making the same profit would be to pour even more money into the trade—thus hastening its demise.”42 Arbitrageurs had to either find new opportunities (hence the mania in the mid-1990s for emerging markets like post-Soviet Russia and the Asian “Tiger” economies) or devise new ways to wring profit from even the slightest inefficiencies. As they were chasing after smaller and smaller inefficiencies to exploit, traders had to conversely make larger and larger deals in order to realize a profit, instituting the widespread leveraging that became LTCM’s stock in trade. At the same time, however, all of this leveraging prompted a widespread collateral crisis and far-reaching financial panic. After several years of massive, market-leading returns, the unthinkable happened. The global financial instability that spawned the “Asian flu” hit Long-Term with unprecedented speed and force, taking it to the brink in a few short months. The problem was that their competitors began to imitate their strategy: Donald MacKenzie cites the formation of a new fund that raised $700 million in initial capital solely from unhappy investors who were unable to put their money in LTCM (which was closed to new investment). While the fund’s leverage meant that it had an outsize presence, the real problem was that the smart money in the industry—and all its associated leverage—was mirroring their activity. This meant that LTCM’s careful strategy of hedging out risk by diversifying its investments in different sectors was tripped up by an unanticipated correlation. Because so many other entities were making a similar play, they in effect created correlations where none previously existed.43 And when some of the riskier players stumbled in the face of an outlier (Russia’s default of its ruble debt in 1998), liquidity—the availability of which was a key assumption in LTCM’s models—fled to safe investments like the U.S. Treasuries, causing the fund’s vaunted money machines to seize up. As it began losing money, its highly leveraged equity base began to disappear, which in turn triggered its automated risk management system to start selling off the more exposed positions. In order to meet its mounting obligations the fund had to sell more and more of its holdings which, caught in a downdraft, were worth less and

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less. What’s more, because LTCM was extremely secretive in its dealings (since arbitrage profits in particular depend on exploiting a spread before anyone else jumps in), its counterparties had no idea about the true extent of its exposure. Fearing the worst, they exerted enormous pressure on the fund, anticipating that unknown number of others would be lining up to do the same. LTCM’s famously high tolerance for risk, eager leveraging and disdain for collateral spawned a perfect storm, one that threatened the global economy. Its collapse, moreover, implicated the major players on Wall Street because LTCM had, in effect, passed its own collateral crisis onto them. Banking on its unprecedented size and influence, Long-Term demanded (and received) privileged treatment from its creditors from the day it opened up shop. In particular, the partners insisted that banks waive their usual borrowing requirements. “Now, normally when you borrow a bond from, say, Merrill Lynch, you have to post a little bit of extra collateral—maybe a total of $1,010 on a $1,000 Treasury and more on a riskier bond,” explains Roger Lowenstein. That $10 initial margin, equivalent to 1 percent of the bond’s value, is called a haircut. It’s Merrill Lynch’s way of protecting itself in case the price of the bond rises. The haircut normally acts as a check on how much you can trade. But if you could avoid the haircut, well, the sky would be the limit. It would be like driving a car that didn’t burn gas: you could drive as far as you wished. What’s more, the rate of return would be substantially higher—if you didn’t have that extra margin tied up at Merrill Lynch.44

Avoiding the haircut was a crucial part of LTCM’s strategy (“zero capital and infinite leverage”). They made deals with no money up front, using them as collateral for yet more deals. At the time of its collapse, LongTerm had booked about $250 billion worth of liabilities against $4 billion in equity. On top of that, it held positions worth $1.25 trillion in derivative trades (unregulated investments that didn’t show up on the official balance sheet).45 As Peter Gowan points out, “the safety of the entire American credit system was apparently threatened by the behaviour of a single, speculative hedge fund.”46 Fearing “systemic risk,” the U.S. Federal Reserve was forced to step in, orchestrating a bail out paid for by many of Long-Term’s counterparties who were otherwise imperiled by the defunct fund’s unsecured debts, both actual and potential. In a vast irony, these included Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and other investment banks which were subsequently wiped out in an amplified version of this crisis a decade later.



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PRISONERS OF THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE Cyber-capital proponents like the guiding lights behind LTCM proclaimed that with the advent of globalization, capital had effectively conquered its outside; the world is remade by (and in the image of) technology. As such, the critic Fredric Jameson suggests that globalization itself is nothing other than “a kind of cyberspace in which money capital reached its ultimate dematerialization as messages which pass instantaneously from one nodal point to another across the former globe, the former material world.”47 Cyber-capital, in other words, is no longer subjected to physical determination. Business at the speed of thought, to borrow the title of Bill Gates’s treatise on the subject (1999), takes place in a smooth or frictionless world. Liberated from material constraints, the only curbs on economic growth are wholly internal to the process itself. The utopian promise of both finance capital and cyberspace (hence “cyber-capital”) is to “live on its own internal metabolism and circulate without any reference to an older type of content.”48 “Money has taken a turn. All wealth has become wealth for its own sake. There’s no other kind of enormous wealth,” Eric Packer’s chief of theory marvels.49 I’d like to take this opportunity to build on an observation made by Slavoj Žižek, who notes that cyber-capital resembles nothing so much as a universalized pleasure principle.50 I am referring here to the keystone of what Freud called his economic model of the mind. At its most basic level, Freud suggests, “the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant.”51 While a comprehensive treatment of Freud’s metapsychological account about what precedes and underpins the ego is beyond the scope of my discussion here, I would like to draw a parallel between his speculative model of the libidinal economy and the financial orthodoxy of what is known as the efficient market hypothesis: both psyche and market are conceived as self-regulating systems that tend toward equilibrium. In fact, when economists refer to the efficiency of the market, they rely on a concept that is strikingly reminiscent of Freud’s principle of constancy. Information spreads through global financial markets in much the same way as libidinal energy flows through the unconscious realm of the primary process. The pleasure principle is only one of what Freud insisted were two principles of mental functioning. The second principle modifies the first, subordinating the desire for pleasure (which is to say, the tendency toward equilibrium) to the demand for self-preservation. The pleasure principle, in other words, is inhibited by the reality principle, which requires the “postponement of satisfaction … and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a

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step on the long indirect road to pleasure,” Freud writes. The reality principle introduces a minimal degree of self-reflexivity into what would otherwise be a closed circuit of self-satisfaction, since it presupposes the awareness of one’s surroundings. The frustrating experience of the external world as constraining is the origin of consciousness, “the beginnings of thought.”52 Accordingly, the goal of our waking activity is to cultivate our environment so that it no longer poses an obstacle to the pursuit of pleasure (i.e., equilibrium). Technology designates the cumulative process of mastering external reality in the service of the pleasure principle. “Technology has an enormous will to realize in three dimensions whatever becomes theoretically possible,” DeLillo tells an interviewer. “Every limit must be reached. That’s my sense of the psychic drive it exerts upon us.”53 The advent of cyber-capital, to return to our subject, marks an epochal shift as the logic of development overtakes the reality principle. “Technology is perceived as something that can produce more reality than nature itself.”54 It has progressed beyond the point where it enables us to control our environment, which is to say, to rearrange and reconstitute nature in accordance with the pleasure principle. Today, cyber-capital is theoretically capable of producing a new environment—this virtual reality or second nature, moreover, is congruent with the pleasure principle from the outset. Cyber-capital, suggests Antonio Di Ciaccia, unleashes “a hermeneutic utopia in the field of economics,” one where models overtake reality.55 To the degree that we can no longer imagine any external constraint, obstacle or limit to the realization of a world market, we are prisoners of the pleasure principle, trapped in a hermeneutic utopia of our own devising. “We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over,” Vija tells Eric in Cosmopolis. “The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It’s simply how we live.”56 A globalized world—which is to say a world rationalized by cyber-capital—is a world upended, one where the pleasure principle (i.e., the market) supplants the reality principle as the determinate basis of everyday life. The pleasure principle in effect absorbs the reality principle when its abstract logic is directly realized not just in the world, but as the world, what Eric rhapsodizes as “the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole.”57 The question, then, is that if cyber-capital is capable of molding reality in its image, then what is to keep it from taking the “natural next step,” as Eric puts it, and directly realizing itself in the world?58 Put another way, how does one explain the persistence of unpleasure in a world fully rationalized by the pleasure principle? The reality principle historically accounted for the existence of unpleasure, but only at the cost of externalizing it as nature. Its recent eclipse confronts us with the realization



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that freedom from physical determination is not the same thing as freedom from any sort of determination whatsoever; unpleasure is inherent to the pleasure principle (“enjoyment”). Jacques Lacan was among the first to recognize this. He writes: “As soon as we try to articulate the reality principle so as to make it depend on the physical world to which Freud’s purpose seems to require us to relate it, it is clear that it functions, in fact, to isolate the subject from reality.”59 Here, we come to the crux of the issue. Even as we shape reality in our own image through technology, we suffer a debilitating loss of reality. As Mark Taylor observes apropos of the wave of global financial turmoil generated by real-world analogues to Packer Capital in the late 1990s, “far from the referent disappearing, the conflict between models and reality brought the global economy to the brink of collapse.”60 As Eric’s overconfidence in his ability to chart the yen demonstrates, the breakdown of cyber-capital as a cosmopolitical ideal is both cause and consequence of a “collateral crisis”—which is to say, a crisis in the concept of collateral, in reality itself. Eric turns the speculative game of bets made on bets into a truly existential gamble, one where the last vestige of nature in a thoroughly postmodernized world and only seemingly inalienable form of collateral—the body, that “older type of content”—is put into play. Leveraging is transformed here from an investing strategy to an act of metaphysical bootstrapping. The ultimate barrier that Eric seeks to surpass is neither market nor man but mortality itself. There is, however, something holding him back. “Perhaps the most important thing at the outset of the book,” explains DeLillo, “is that [Eric] is feeling a certain intimation of mortality.”61 During one of his daily (!) physicals, Eric learns he has an asymmetrical prostate, a fact that causes him unreasoning anxiety.62 The doctor’s pronouncement, however, is offered less in the spirit of sober diagnosis than as a casual aside since this particular abnormality is a fairly common condition; in short, nothing to worry about. It is a meaningless peculiarity of Eric’s biology and yet it nonetheless fills him with dread. It was intriguing in the world outside the body, a counterforce to balance and calm, the riddling little twist, subatomic, that made creation happen. There was the serpentine word itself, slightly off kilter, with the single additional letter that changes everything. But when he removed the word from its cosmological register and applied it to the body of the male mammal, he began to feel pale and spooked. He felt a certain perverse reverence toward it. A fear of, a distance from.63

In terms of “the world outside the body” asymmetry exists only to be rationalized, “balanced and calmed” through the rigorous application of his sophisticated models. In his exquisitely ordered and, as one character

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remarks, “sadistically precise” world, there are no meaningless peculiarities because the very act of identifying them brings them under the sway of a relentlessly categorizing intelligence that through naming homogenizes difference.64 Asymmetry, Alison Shonkwiler reminds us, is “a force of creation. Profit is generated in the discontinuities of capital’s circulation (which drive Packer’s currency arbitrage) and the disjunctions of time (which create debt instruments such as derivatives).”65 Eric’s prostate, unlike his portfolio, cannot be rationalized. It remains a nagging reminder that not everything can be subsumed under the logic of abstraction; the equation never quite balances. The ideology of cyber-capital finds its fullest expression in these moments of “collateral crisis,” whether provoked by Eric’s desire to transcend his body or even his seemingly bizarre desire for a haircut, which brings us full circle. Critics like Jerry Varsava and Alison Shonkwiler have identified Eric’s trip to the barber with the Wall Street colloquialism whereby getting a haircut means taking a loss in one’s investments. Given that Eric stakes his vast fortune on an unhedged (i.e., one-way) bet in the currency markets and manages to lose everything even before he arrives for his standing appointment with the barber, the implication seems clear enough: Eric’s investments have been trimmed (if not to say shorn) and he himself will be clipped by the end of the night, murdered by a disgruntled former employee responsible for the aforementioned threat on his life. The haircut, then, broadly signifies loss, but it also functions in a narrower technical sense, one which DeLillo would have been familiar from the Lowenstein book: collateral. A haircut designates the minimum collateral requirement that institutional lenders require of their borrowers to serve as insurance against the risk of default. As a little piece of capital that has to be held in reserve, it also serves as a brake on the whirl of speculation itself, or Mark Taylor puts it, “everything dissolves into perpetual circulation.”66 In psychoanalytic discourse, one might say that the haircut functions as a reality principle articulated to the symbolic machinery of capital rather than empirical reality. With this in mind, DeLillo’s decision to structure Cosmopolis around Eric’s quest for, of all things, a haircut makes a great deal of sense. It establishes a metaphoric connection between the physical (“body”) and the financial (“collateral”). It also slows down speculation—the haircut, an embodied metaphor if there ever was one, keeps the financial market from realizing the theoretical possibility of what one critic describes as the “dream of zero capital and infinite leverage.”67 NOTES 1. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (New York: Scribner, 2003), 116. 2. Ibid., 11.



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3. Ibid., 97. 4. Ibid., 90. 5. Ibid., 95. 6. Ibid., 97. 7. Ibid., 87. 8. Ibid., 99–100. 9. Ibid., 31. 10. Ibid., 101–102. 11. For a sample of the initial negative reviews, see Cook, Greif, Kakutani, Begley, Kirn and Woods. See Philip for a relatively lonely encomium. 12. Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007). 13. Scholarly interest in Cosmopolis initially coalesced around a number of studies that explored its complicated relationship to 9/11: see Boxall, Brooker, Chandler, Conte, Cowart, Giamo, Laist and Thurschwell. More recently, attempts to theorize the economics of Cosmopolis include Heffernan and Shonkwiler. 14. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997); “In the ruins of the future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001. 15. Don DeLillo, “DeLillo Bashful? Not This Time,” Interview by John Barron, Chicago Sun-Times, March 23, 2003, Web, accessed December 16, 2005. 16. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 163. 17. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon, 1992), xii. 18. Ibid., xiv. 19. Ibid., xv. 20. Don DeLillo, Underworld, 825. 21. Ibid., 827. 22. Ibid., 786. 23. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 79. 24. Ibid., 152. 25. Ibid., 86, 79. 26. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 161. 27. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 8. 28. Ibid., 93–94. 29. Ibid., 95. 30. Ibid., 22, 52, 93, 204–07. 31. Ibid., 48. 32. Ibid., 207–208. 33. Ibid., 86. 34. Ibid., 27. 35. DeLillo’s reading notes on Plummer and Lowenstein can be found in a red spiral-bound notebook (Box 9, Folder 7). See Tony Plummer, Psychology of Technical Analysis: Profiting from Crowd Behavior and the Dynamics of Price (New York:

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McGraw-Hill, 1993); Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York: Random House, 2000). 36. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 191. 37. Ibid., 24. 38. Nicholas Dunbar, Inventing Money: The Story of Long-Term Capital Management and the Legends Behind It (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001), 190. 39. Ibid., 114. 40. Ibid., 190. 41. Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006) 19. 42. Nicholas Dunbar, Inventing Money, 61. 43. Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, 226. 44. Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed, 65. 45. Nicholas Dunbar, Inventing Money, 191. 46. Peter Gowan, The Globalisation Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance (London: Verso, 1999), 120. 47. Frederic Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (New York: Verso, 1998), 154. 48. Ibid., 161. 49. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 77. 50. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006), 310. 51. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (New York: Penguin, 1991), 277. 52. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (Karnac Books, 1988), 380. 53. “Is DeLillo Bashful?” Barron Interview. 54. Renta Salecl, (Per)Versions of Love and Hate (New York: Verso, 1998), 96. 55. Antonio Di Ciaccia, “Ethics in the Era of Globalization,” trans. Julia Richards in Lacanian Compass 1.3 (February 15, 2005), 6. 56. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 85. 57. Ibid., 24. 58. Ibid., 207. 59. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959–1960. 1986., ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1997) 46. 60. Mark Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago University Press, 2004), 241. 61. “Is DeLillo Bashful?” Barron Interview. 62. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 8, 52–54. 63. Ibid., 52. 64. Ibid., 200. 65. Alison Shonkwiler, “Don DeLillo’s Financial Sublime,” Contemporary Literature 51.2 (2010), 267. 66. Mark Taylor, Confidence Games, 169. 67. Nicholas Dunbar, Inventing Money, 190.



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BIBLIOGRAPHY Begley, Adam. “Stuck in the Slow Lane,” review of Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. The Times (London, UK). May 7, 2003. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/ article2457051.ece. Bonca, Cornell. “Contact with the Real: On Cosmopolis.” Los Angeles Review of Books. September 12, 2012. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/contact-with-thereal-on-cosmopolis/. Boxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2006. Brooker, Peter. “Terrorism and Counternarratives: Don DeLillo and the New York Imaginary.” New Formations 57 (December 1, 2005): 10–25. Chandler, Aaron. “An Unsettling, Alternative Self”: Benno Levin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.” Critique 50.3 (Spring 2009): 241–260. Conte, Joseph M. “Writing Amidst the Ruins: 9/11 and Cosmopolis.” in The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, edited by John M. Duvall. New York: Cambridge UP, 2008, 179–192. Cook, Brian. “Loving to Hate Don DeLillo,” review of Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. InThese Times. April 28, 2003. http://inthesetimes.com/article/69/ loving_to_hate_don_delillo. Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Revised Edition. Athens, GA: Georgia UP, 2003. DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003. ———. “DeLillo Bashful? Not This Time.” Interview by John Barron. Chicago SunTimes. March 23, 2003. ———. “In the ruins of the future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September.” Harper’s. (December 2001): 33–40. ———. The Body Artist. New York: Scribner, 2001. ———. Underworld. New York: Scriber’s 1997. ———. Mao II. New York: Penguin, 1991. ———. Players. 1977. New York: Vintage, 1989. Dewey, Joseph. Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. Di Ciaccia, Antonio. “Ethics in the Era of Globalization,” translated by Julia Richards. Lacanian Compass 1.3 (February 15, 2005): 3–7. Dunbar, Nicholas. Inventing Money: The Story of Long-Term Capital Management and the Legends Behind it. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001. Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, translated by James Strachey. edited by Angela Richards. New York: Penguin, 1991, 271–338. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon, 1992. Giamo, Paul. Appreciating Don DeLillo: The Moral Force of a Writer’s Work. Denver, Colorado: Praeger, 2011. Gowan, Peter. The Globalisation Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance. London: Verso, 1999.

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Grief, Mark. “Bonfire of the Verities,” review of Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. American Prospect Online. April 1, 2003. http://prospect.org/article/bonfire-verities. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990. Heffernan, Nick. “ ‘Money is Talking to Itself’: Finance Capitalism in the Fiction of Don DeLillo from Players to Cosmopolis.” Critical Engagements 1.2 (September 2007): 53–78. Jameson, Fredric. “Culture and Finance Capital” in. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. New York: Verso, 1998, 136–61. Kakutani, Michiko. “Headed Towards a Crash, of Sorts, in a Stretch Limo.” Review of Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. New York Times. March 24, 2003. Accessed July 1, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/24/books/books-of-the-timesheaded-toward-a-crash-of-sorts-in-a-stretch-limo.html. Kirn, Walter. “Long Day’s Journey into Haircut,” review of Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. New York Times. April 13, 2003. Accessed July 12, 2016. http://www. nytimes.com/2003/04/13/books/long-day-s-journey-into-haircut.html. Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959–1960, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1997. Laist, Randy. “The Concept of Disappearance in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.” Critique 51.3 (2010): 257–75. Laplanche, Jean and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books, 1988. Lowenstein, Roger. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management. New York: Random House, 2000. MacKenzie, Donald. An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Phillip, Sven. “Words and Syllables,” review of Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. Electronic Book Review. 29 May 2003. Accessed July 9, 2015. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/technocapitalist Salecl, Renta. (Per)Versions of Love and Hate. New York: Verso, 1998. Shonkwiler, Alison. “Don DeLillo’s Financial Sublime.” Contemporary Literature 51.2 (2010): 246–82. Taylor, Mark. Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption. Chicago University Press, 2004. Thurschwell, Adam. “Writing and Terror: Don DeLillo on the Task of Literature After 9/11.” Law and Literature 19.2 (2007): 277–302. Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Varsava, Jerry. “The ‘Saturated Self’: Don DeLillo and the Problem of Rogue Capitalism.” Contemporary Literature 46.1 (Spring 2005): 78–107. Woods, James. “Traffic,” review of Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. The New Republic 14 (April 2003): 30–33. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006.

Chapter 2

The Currency of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis Mark Osteen

Numberless sages have tried to define money. Some writers have linked it with the human imagination and emotions. Thus Wallace Stevens writes that “money is a kind of poetry.”1 Similarly, for Schopenhauer money signifies “human happiness in the abstract,” while for literary scholar Frederick Turner it represents “practical quantified objective love,” and for financial historian James Buchan it is “incarnate desire.”2 Other writers view money as an embodiment of the modern self. Fyodor Dostoevsky, for example, describes money as “coined liberty,” and the narrator of Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “The Zahir,” muses that money betokens “man’s free will,” and represents a “repertory of possible futures.”3 More practical definitions issue from Marshall McLuhan, for whom money is “a storehouse of communally achieved work, skill and experience,”4 and from John Stuart Mill, who defines it, in typical fashion, as “a machine for doing quickly and commodiously, what would be done, though less quickly and commodiously, without it.”5 Perhaps my favorite definition, however, is a more straightforward, not to say cynical, rendering: according to this sage, a banknote is “just a little piece of paper / Coated with chlorophyll.”6 As sung by Ray Charles, these lines surely justify his nickname—“The Genius.” More seriously, Jean-Joseph Goux reminds us that money incorporates three aspects: it serves as a measure of value (an “archetypal” or “imaginary” function), operates as medium of exchange and circulation (a symbolic or token function), and constitutes a physical store and means of payment (a real function). The term “currency” usually refers to money in its second phase—as a medium of exchange.7 A quick trip through the history of money may help to flesh out this sketch. In the early modern period most financial theorists subscribed to a bullionist belief that value somehow inhered in the physical material of gold or silver. Economic faith was founded on the weighty metals which, they perceived, 45

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anchored money’s archetypal and symbolic aspects in its real function. Remember Donald Duck’s uncle, Scrooge McDuck? He owned a huge vault filled with bills, jewels and bags of coins, and spent many merry hours plunging into and swimming through these lakes of money. Bullionism, we might say, is the Scrooge McDuck theory of money. Gold’s sacred aura dimmed when Spanish conquests in the new world made it more readily available in Europe and produced inflation.8 Consequently, during the seventeenth century, mercantilism and the explosion of global trade gave birth to a culture of debt, and by the 1680s, goldsmiths’ notes were used in Europe to pay debts and to establish character and credit. In Goux’s terms, the real function of money was gradually superseded by its token and archetypal functions. These developments initiated a monumental shift in monetary theory, because these new forms of currency proved that financial value derived not from matter but from something intangible.9 With the final abandonment of the gold standard in the twentieth century, money was unmoored from its anchorage to float freely on the tides of exchange.10 Thus, as Georg Simmel emphasizes in his magisterial (and still underappreciated) work, The Philosophy of Money, modern money is little more than an expression of a “supra-theoretical” belief in the economic system and in the governments that guarantee its value.11 Scrooge McDuck has given way to Alan Greenspan: money is now entirely faith-based. In other words, twenty-first-century money is “fiat-currency”: intrinsically worthless, unbacked by any commodity, and almost costless to produce. You couldn’t exchange it for gold or silver even if you wanted to.12 Money’s value is guaranteed by the words inscribed upon it that certify its legitimacy. This condition enables one of the founding insights of the subdiscipline of economic literary criticism, as formulated by Marc Shell: “credit, or belief, involves the very ground of aesthetic experience, and the same medium that seems to confer belief in fiduciary money (bank notes) and in scriptural money (created by the process of bookkeeping) also seems to confer it in literature. That medium is writing.”13 This condition also encouraged the proliferation of counterfeit money and undermined notions of transcendent value, because it meant that anything accepted as money is money. These conceptual changes carried profound psychological and social ramifications. As Simmel brilliantly reveals, money is part and parcel of the modern concept of selfhood, in that it permits individuals to interact without being subjected to the binding and ancient obligations of kinship or to age-old social hierarchies. Because of its “unconditional interchangeability,” modern money expresses relationships between objects (and people) without itself entering into them.14 It thus represents “the absolute freedom from everything personal”; as Buchan puts it, “liberty as a modern idea is represented by money.”15 Of course, this freedom carries costs: because social life mirrors



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its medium of exchange, human relationships now seem as “fluid, temporary, indifferent, unstable” as currency itself.16 Many economic literary critics (for example, Goux and Hawkes) deplore this reign of symbolic money, arguing that it exemplifies the dominance of machines over humans and heralds the total depersonalization of social life. I.  no one knew / his face / tightly locked / in an inaccessible place / called debir / in the very heart of the treasury . . . 17 —“Mr. Cogito–Notes from the House of the Dead.”

Let us now turn to a fictional text that dramatizes the reign and repercussions of postmodern money: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. Taking place on a single day in April 2000, and published in May of 2003, it restricts itself rigorously to the contemporary scene, and employs postmodern currency symbolically—even allegorically—to represent the psychic and social conditions of the early twenty-first-century. Cosmopolis may be even more timely now than it was in 2003, for the novel anticipates in many ways the world financial crisis that began in 2008, not so much in its details (the novel barely gestures at collateralized debt obligations and tranches) as in the way it plumbs the psychology and social role of the traders and financiers who engineered the crisis. It also unveils the peculiar power of postmodern money to produce a new understanding of time, one in which “currency” as a temporal term has been rendered almost meaningless. All these qualities are embodied by twenty-eight-year-old multibillionaire and currency speculator Eric Packer, who crosses New York City—a space crammed with people from all over the globe and besieged by massive traffic jams—in his allegedly impenetrable corklined limo, ostensibly to get a haircut. As he circulates like a blood cell through the city’s arteries, the walls he has carefully erected between himself and the cosmos of real bodies and emotions gradually crumble. By the end of his trip he has been dispossessed of his limo, of his bodyguard (whom Packer himself shoots), of his dignity (he is hit by a pie), of his shoes, of his wife, of his vast fortune and, finally, of his life. Packer has been married for twenty-two days to Elise Shifrin, the heiress of an old banking fortune, but he barely knows her. The marriage is a synecdoche for his relationships with money and with other humans; if anything, Packer’s other social and sexual encounters are even more fleeting and impersonal than his marriage. He stands for the unstable, indifferent, and shifting world that postmodern money has engendered. As befits a man made of money, he relates to objects solely through ownership. For example, when Didi Fancher, one of his female sex partners (he has sex with four different women during the day), tells him he “needs a Rothko” to complete his art collection, he proposes instead to buy the entire Rothko Chapel. When she

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insists that “the Rothko Chapel belongs to the world,” he replies, “It’s mine if I buy it.”18 Didi staunchly defends cultural value against economic value, maintaining that great art allows you to “feel a radiance wash through you.” 19 But Packer already possesses a source of radiance: the “glow of cybercapital” that illuminates his every activity. For him money is more than wealth, more even than love, poetry, or happiness: it is a mode of transcendence.20 Watching rates of exchange fluctuate second by second on the computer screen in his car, he comes to believe that “data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, . . . the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions.”21 Of course, the money in which Packer deals is not “realized” at all: rather, in Goux’s terms, it is de-realized. In eschewing materiality, electronic money constitutes a form of the sublime—a condition that DeLillo renders in many of his novels by the word “aura,” which, Shell reminds us, derives from the Latin word for “gold” and “coin.”22 After another of Packer’s experts emerges from the Church of St. Mary the Virgin to discuss with him the nature of money, Packer experiences a religious epiphany: watching the tickers of the Times Tower, he feels that “we are not witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable. The small monitors of the office, home, and car become a kind of idolatry here.”23 In some respects, then, Packer is less magnate than mystic, the priest of a pagan sect whose seeds were planted by usurers four hundred years ago. Packer makes money multiply as if by magic. His “chief of theory,” Vija Kinski, reminds him that such operations enact “Chrimatistikós,” the reproduction of money from money that Aristotle famously condemns as unnatural.24 But no matter, she assures him: “we have to adapt it to the current situation. Because money . . . has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself today.”25 Postmodern money, that is, no longer depends even upon the brief tale of origins that paper currency bears: twenty-first-century currency is free even from textuality and, Packer and Kinski declare, from history. It is true that today’s currencies are not merely untethered to gold or silver; since the 1970s, they are not even permanently “pegged” to any other currency. Money has become “pure sign” in a “realm of complete nonconvertibility” governed by what Goux calls “nominalism.”26 Currency circulates without an anchor that would ensure “the consistency of a system of conventional signifying marks and prevent [ ] them from drifting or floating in relation to the valences they are meant to signify.”27 That’s why experts describe the currency market as a “floating battlefield,” a rough sea upon which exchange rates rise and fall wildly, as if buffeted by tempests with every passing second.28



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Kinski announces that cyber-capital “creates the future . . . . Because time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system”; meanwhile, the present is being “sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential” (79). She agrees with the narrator of Borges’s “The Zahir,” who says that “money is the future tense.”29 Packer, too, believes he has passed beyond “geography and touchable money and the people who stack and count it” (36). For him, as Alison Shonkwiler observes, dematerialized money signifies “an ever-expanding process of abstraction across time and space.”30 Yet, ironically, Packer’s journey through New York actually proves his embeddedness within the history of money, for the city is, as Shonkwiler remarks, “inscribed” with that history.31 The reference to Aristotle invokes one early moment in that history. A later period surfaces as Packer crosses the diamond district, where he contemplates jewels as an “obsolete” form of money, “hard, shiny, faceted,” and “three-dimensional,” representing “everything he’d left behind” (64). Here Packer is awash in the sounds and smells of the Old World, of “the souk, the shtetl . . . hagglers and talebearers, the scrapmongers, the dealers in stray talk. The street was an offense to the future” (65). Old money bears within it the narratives and human interactions that postmodern money has abandoned. That money was digital in the original sense, having been passed from person to person by human fingers. Representing a slightly later financial regime, Elise’s wealth issues from the banking practices of the past, generated via liaisons between individuals and groups and passed down by “the right of blood” (15). That is, her riches were forged from deals transacted by humans in close proximity and transmitted to later generations via inheritance. In short, her currency was produced, like blood, from connections among bodies. Packer even attests to Elise in Part Two of the novel that “I married you for your money, in a way, the history of it, piling up over generations” (120). His marriage implicitly recognizes his imbrication in economic history. Moreover, in wedding himself to her family, he tacitly expresses a yearning for the old-fashioned human trading and intimate exchanges represented by obsolete currencies. II.  and already / he is / alone / in the treasure-house / of all misfortunes —Herbert, “Mr. Cogito–The Return.” (15)

Packer’s own profession, as I have noted, deals entirely in dematerialized money. Contemporary currency trading is essentially a form of high-stakes gambling: traders bet that a given currency will rise or fall—taking with it the prices of goods, stocks, securities, labor, and so forth, paid in that currency— and lose or win vast sums through those predictions. Although Packer seems to believe that his wealth is grounded in an extra-sensory perception that

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the rise and fall of currencies taps into natural rhythms—“the heave of the biosphere,” where our “bodies and oceans” are “knowable and whole” (24)— Kinski is correct that his speculations almost perfectly exemplify Aristotle’s chrimatistike, a mode of unnatural reproduction (akin to incest) whose most pernicious form was usury, which “makes barren metal breed” (the Greek word for “interest”—tokos—is also the word for “offspring”).32 Thus, on the day Cosmopolis takes place, Packer wagers that the value of the Japanese yen will rise no higher, and leverages his fortune against its seemingly inevitable fall. Borrowing yen at extremely low interest rates, he uses it to take on more debt. “But the stronger the yen became, the more money he needed to pay back the loan”: the yen are worth more, in relation to dollars, than they were when he bought them (84). If the yen continues to rise, he will lose enormous sums. He bets that the yen will fall; but it does not fall. Instead, Packer does, despite the advice of three specialists who warn him that he “may be leveraged too rashly” and urges him to back down (21, 53). In the language of currency trading, Packer has not adequately “hedged”—protected himself against mistakes through other investments or currency trades. Currency traders call this condition “exposure,” and when one is not “hedged” against losses, one is said to be fully exposed, or “naked.” As the novel proceeds, Packer is stripped naked in more ways than one. One reason for this condition is that his experts, like actual economists, offer conflicting advice, sometimes urging him to cut his losses and at other times insisting that to do so would not be “authentic,” because it would be to yield to the idea that, Kinski explains, “there are foreseeable trends and forces. When in fact it’s all random phenomena . . . . Hysteria at high speeds . . . . We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final control over” (85). Instead, Packer stakes his fortune on chance. And why not? As Brian Cooper and Margueritte Murphy have argued, economic discourse has never adequately explained “the underlying ‘psychology’ of currency speculation, panics and crises, and even the normal functioning of financial markets.”33 Jerry A. Varsava further points out that currency markets are even less regulated than others, and individual investors or cabals can either make billions or wreak havoc very quickly.34 Contravening the allegedly rational and self-interested actors of neoclassical economic theory, traders are subject to what Greenspan famously termed “irrational exuberance”—an unpredictable penchant for inflating or deflating values. Indeed, as its name indicates, the yen in Cosmopolis is not just a national currency: it is “incarnate desire,” a yearning for power or intimacy, order, or destruction, a part of that “longing on a large scale” that, according to DeLillo’s narrator in Underworld, constitutes history itself.35 Packer believes that there must be a way to “explain the yen” (Cosmopolis 63), but he can’t even explain his own yen. Rather, he clings to a belief that



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the currency market follows a rational or predictable “pattern that wants to be seen” (86), a pattern drawn from nature. To back down now would signify a “loss of faith” in the very idea of money (46). Because Packer is so fully involved in global capitalism, his loss of faith would quickly infect other speculators, thereby creating a worldwide financial panic. This is indeed what happens. By the novel’s halfway mark, “there were currencies tumbling everywhere. Bank failures were spreading . . . . His actions regarding the yen were causing storms of disorder. He was so leveraged, his firm’s portfolio . . . linked crucially to the affairs of so many key institutions, all reciprocally vulnerable, that the whole system was in danger” (116). Likewise, as we learned from the recent real-life financial crisis, a collapse in mortgage payments may threaten the entire global banking system. The currency of Cosmopolis, then, does not lie merely in its money; it also resides in its analysis of money as an expression of human psychology and social life. If, as Cooper and Murphy suggest, such economic crises reveal the “duplicity of signs in the use of currency, including the duplicity of time,” then it would seem that money itself betrays Packer.36 Once it does, Packer betrays it in return by trying to lose more and more of it, not only his own, but also his wife’s. Hacking into her accounts, he moves all of her money into his own collapsing portfolio. Although he reasons that doing so ensures that “he could not accept her offer of financial help,” it may also be his final nose-thumbing to the earlier forms of wealth she represents. “Let it all come down” he thinks (123). Thus does Eric Packer lose his faith. III.  empty storehouses a rat became the unit of currency —Herbert, “Report from the Besieged City.” (76)

What will replace that faith? Money glows for Packer because it is free from the grit and muck of the material world: his money has no body. When he admires the patterns of “numbers pumping up and down” on his computer screen, he fancies that he is gazing at his own cyborgian heartbeat (63). Packer has replaced nature with numbers, blood with currency, and the solid world with spectral capital. Throughout the novel, DeLillo rings changes on this neo-Cartesian dichotomy between electronic money and the roil and blurt of a city packed with bodies.37 But if Packer’s economic crisis exposes what Cooper and Murphy call “the fiction of the social body” (236), it also clears the way for a reattachment to his physical self.38 He is first reminded of the unpredictability of his body during a comically exaggerated scene in which a doctor palpates his prostate while Packer engages in a long conversation—first economic, then erotic—with Jane Melman, another of his experts. When the exam reveals that his prostate is asymmetrical, Packer muses that “there was something about the idea of asymmetry. It was . . . a counterforce

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to balance and calm, the riddling little twist . . . that made creation happen” (52). Glandular asymmetry, DeLillo half-seriously implies, offers an antidote to global cybercurrency. However, the greatest shocks to Packer’s system occur by way of a series of protests he witnesses in which young men and women, costumed as rats, rock and spray-paint his car, unleash a score of live rats into city cafés, and then hack into the tickers on Times Square, altering its messages to read: “A SPECTER IS HAUNTING THE WORLD—THE SPECTER OF CAPITALISM” (96). Though they recognize this revision of the famous line from The Communist Manifesto, Packer and Kinski employ Marx’s analysis of how capitalism incorporates its own opposition to reassure each other that this protest “against the future” is merely a “fantasy generated by the market,” a “form of system hygiene, purging and lubricating” (91). It only verifies, they explain, “the market’s innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorb everything around it” (90, 99). But these consolations erode when the protesters bomb an investment bank, and explode for good when Packer watches a man, driven only by “lucid conviction” (97), set himself on fire. “Trembling in a length of braided flame” (97), this man lies beyond the market’s reach. The suffering of human bodies alone eludes commodification. Such bodies create a countercurrency. The protesters reinforce this truth through a message that reiterates the novel’s epigraph—a half line from Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s “Report from the Besieged City” that strikes Packer like the “arced charge of current”: “A RAT BECAME THE UNIT OF CURRENCY” (Cosmopolis, 96; Herbert, 76). In Herbert’s war-besieged cosmopolis as in DeLillo’s, “everyone . . . suffers from a loss of the sense of time”; hence, his speaker tries to harness his emotions and write only about facts, for only they are “appreciated in foreign markets” (Herbert, 76). Herbert’s speaker, surveying the history of foreign invasion and occupation, seeks a universal language adequate to these atrocities. He finds it in the rat, which exposes the vanity of wealth and asserts against it the fact of mortality. In DeLillo’s novel, Packer’s discovery of this counterforce inspires his plunge into self-destruction. Packer indeed resembles a persona featured in several of Herbert’s poems—Mr. Cogito, a figure who repeatedly confronts the ineluctable circulation between mind and body as he ruminates on subjects such as blood and precision. In “Mr. Cogito on the Need for Precision,” for example, he meditates on “the specter of indefiniteness,” which hides the truth of the numberless throngs lost to war and political killings and thereby “undermines the reality of the world,” thrusting us into the “devilish net of dialectics / proclaiming there is no difference / between the substance and the specter” (Herbert, 67–8). One such specter—that of capitalism camouflaged as auratic mathematics—has snared Packer. As Kinski, echoing



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Herbert, admonishes Packer, the flaw in pure rationality is that it “pretends not to see the horror and death at the end of the schemes it builds” (DeLillo, Cosmopolis 91). The rat resists this reduction of humans to immaterial currency by mutely reminding us of our embodiment and ultimate decay. As Aaron Chandler observes, the rat is “the other at the shadowy margins of our global system of production and consumption but also the final product of that system.” Moreover, as he astutely adds, Packer is himself “a pack rat”— a collector of objects—and so “the parasitic resonance is doubled: Packer feeds on money, which feeds on humanity” (249). The rat, then, is a kind of counterfeit money—a species that, as the word’s etymology indicates, is “made against” the prevailing form. Yet counterfeit and genuine money depend upon each other. Counterfeit money is evidently parasitic upon genuine money, but the converse is also true: the existence of counterfeits ratifies the value of genuine cash. As currency, then, the rat both sustains and eats away the ratiocination of the world’s Eric Packers. IV.  we lay in a row / in the depths of the temple of the absurd —Herbert, “Mr. Cogito–Notes from the House of the Dead.” (71)

The second half of Cosmopolis relates the triumph of the rat and the emergence of other countercurrencies. As he loses his money, Packer begins to feel “purified in nameless ways” (106), and as he watches the funeral cortege of Brutha Fez, a Sufi rapper whom he admires, he feels that his delight in going broke has been “blessed and authenticated” (136). He almost welcomes the attack by Andre Petrescu, a “pastry assassin,” who stalks corporate directors and slams them with pies (“fresh-baked only,” of course: 141–2). Packer’s odyssey acquires a more personal dimension when he returns to Hell’s Kitchen, the rundown neighborhood where he was reared. Here Packer visits his father’s friend Anthony, who feeds Eric, and, clucking over his “ratty” hair, commences that long-awaited trim (160). In this domain of sensation and “solid objects” (166), Packer believes he is feeling “what his father would feel” (159). It is possible that, in searching for his father, Packer is enacting Goux’s thesis that monetary forms are homologous with certain psychic formations.39 That is, Goux proposes that, in the psychic register, the father is the equivalent of gold: both are transcendental signifiers.40 If so, Packer may be dramatizing the desire hidden within postmodern money— a yen to re-anchor itself to the material world. Ensconced in his father’s domain of layered pastry, barber chairs, and unsilvered mirrors, Eric “feels safe” (166) and grounded. But before his haircut is finished, he rises from the chair and goes off to meet his death. He does not know why. In the words of St. Augustine that his killer later quotes to him, Packer has become an enigma to himself (189).

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On the way to this lethal rendezvous, Packer encounters a group of movie extras sprawling naked on the pavement (as in a Spencer Tunick installation) and places himself among them. Supine in this “city of stunned flesh,” he finds the prospect of “so many bodies unprotected” “hard to credit” (172): human flesh recoils from the immateriality of “credit,” engendering instead its own form of bodily belief. For a moment Packer becomes “all-body,” anonymous amidst the “tattooed, the hairy-assed, those who stank” (176). His financial nakedness now become physical, Packer’s rite of purgation— the ritual preceding his culminating sacrifice—is nearly finished. But it’s not just his ritual: the “expression” (“let it express itself” is a running phrase in the novel) of his yen for loss and self-destruction has already “gone viral,” the global economy already crumbling because of it. One of the faceless figures near Packer thus informs him that the movie’s funding has suddenly “collapsed. Happened in seconds, apparently. Money all gone” (175). Ironically, Packer’s self-destructive plunge has also drowned a possible means of resuscitation for him. V.  To the end he will defend / the magnificent sensation of pain —Herbert, “Eschatological Forebodings of Mr. Cogito.” (31)

One piece of business remains for Packer: to encounter his killer. This man, who calls himself Benno Levin, narrates the two first-person sections that interrupt the close third-person narration of the rest of the novel. As if to demonstrate how contemporary currency has reversed or halted the flow of time, Levin’s sections are narrated achronologically: the first “confession” occurs after he has already shot Packer but before the main narrative depicts their meeting; the second interpolation occurs before the first. A former employee who had worked on the baht, Levin seeks revenge because, in a phrase that perfectly captures the monetization of identity, he was “demoted . . . to lesser currencies” (60, 151). Levin has been stalking Packer, who now, rather implausibly (though appropriately for DeLillo’s quasi-allegorical design) is driven past a series of “ratty” storefronts (179) and drifts into the rat-infested building where Benno squats (182–3). Lacking cash or credit card, Levin (real name Richard Sheets) is a twenty-first-century Underground Man, a human rat who embodies both DeLillo’s challenge to cyber-capital and his recognition that such protests may be driven by a death wish. He is Packer’s own self-destructive impulse come to squalid life.41 Yet even after Levin shoots Packer, he imagines stealing the billionaire’s pocket money, not for its economic value, but for its “personal qualities . . . . I wanted its intimacy and touch, his touch, the stain of his personal dirt” (58). Perhaps, then, Levin shoots Eric less for revenge than from a yen for physical intimacy—the transfer of bodily molecules (along with money) that characterized ancient



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trading. Like the rat, Levin offers a counterfeit currency to reverse the flow toward abstraction. Near the end of the novel, as the two confront each other, each one holding a gun, Packer tries to bully Benno, then to reason with him, reminding him that “nobody’s against the rich. Everybody’s ten seconds from being rich. Or so everybody thought” (196; recall that April 2000, was the moment when the dot-com stock bubble first began to deflate). Levin resists so staunchly that, after accidentally shooting himself in the hand, Eric is reduced to whining, “my prostate is asymmetrical.” Levin replies, “So is mine . . . . It means nothing . . . . It’s harmless” (199). But it is symbolically significant. As Levin tells Packer, in making currency analysis “sadistically precise,” Eric forgot something: “the importance of the lopsided, the thing that’s skewed a little . . . . That’s where the answer was, in your body” (200).42 At the novel’s conclusion, Packer’s fancy wristwatch, on whose screen he has been viewing himself and his money throughout his trip, becomes a crystal ball projecting images of his immediate future. As he sits talking to Levin, he observes on his watchscreen the body of a man bleeding on the floor, then lying in an ambulance and finally dead in a morgue. Ironically, after years of predicting the future, Packer finally glimpses it not as digital impulses, but as a picture of single human body—himself. Yet even as he waits, suspended between the image of his future and its bodily reality, he imagines the final evolutionary advance of cyber-capital, extending “the human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment,” and envisions living “outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in a whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void” (207, 206). But alas, “his pain interfered with his immortality” (207). And so the rat prevails. Or, to put it another way, the triumph of cyber-capital is delayed by its immersion in the blood and mire of history, and by the body, which carries that history and craves meaningful contact with other bodies. Dangling between life and death, between physical reality and its mediation, Packer is suspended. In Cosmopolis, as in many of DeLillo’s other novels, the longing to be a god only brings one face to face with one’s naked humanity. VI.  Mr. Cogito’s soul / acts differently / during his life she leaves the body / without a word of farewell / for months for years she lives / on different continents / beyond the frontiers / of Mr. Cogito —Herbert, “Mr. Cogito’s Soul” (6)

The inversion of chronology in Levin’s seemingly misplaced narratives provides a clue to a way out of Packer’s limbo. In Ratner’s Star, DeLillo uses the history of mathematics to reveal the origins of human consciousness, in so doing unveiling (and re-enacting) a monumental historical reversal in which

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“things go the other way.”43 Likewise, in Cosmopolis he points a way out of Packer’s cave by evoking the pre-history of economics. Near the end of the novel, Levin scoffs at Packer’s belated attempt at penance and purgation: “you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others. In the old tribes a chief who destroyed more of his property than the other chiefs was the most powerful” (193–4). In other words, Levin reads Packer’s serial dispossessions as a form of potlatch, that ritual of property destruction in Native American and Pacific cultures so influentially analyzed by Marcel Mauss. As Mauss and others have shown, those orgies of destruction were motivated not by altruism but by the desire to reinforce power by generating unpayable obligations. Potlatch “gifts” weren’t meant to be reciprocated but rather to make reciprocation impossible.44 Mauss insists that such ceremonies—total prestations, in his terms—signify in all registers: they are simultaneously economic, social, religious, juridical, familial, and tribal. They prove that economics and culture are ineluctably interwoven and that, paradoxically, loss may also be gain. Other readings of these rites, however, see them as motivated by a genuine desire to lose. According to such interpretations, Packer, by stripping himself financially naked, may instead be seeking to embrace and embody what Georges Bataille famously terms “the accursed share”: the unproductive expenditure in a “general economy.” According to Bataille, even if potlatch inevitably becomes a source of symbolic capital or prestige, it is nevertheless “determined by a squandering of resources that in theory could have been acquired.”45 In this sense, we might find in Packer’s purgation and suicidal journey an impulse toward sacrifice dictated by his quasi-divine status, one that Levin recognizes when he tells him, “I wanted you to heal me, to save me” (204). Packer’s self-destruction may even be a prelude to remaking community through loss and reciprocity: it may be an extravagant, though misguided and perhaps ultimately futile, gift.46 Even if Packer’s losses ultimately prove his prestige, the impulse to lose himself swims against the current because sacrifice places him within a gift economy. As several scholars have persuasively demonstrated, gift relations involve us in complex skeins of interlocking obligations that bespeak our nature as social beings and testify to the embeddedness of selfhood, an embeddedness that even Eric Packer craves and cannot escape. Gift-based societies, and gift practices in contemporary societies, foster what Margaret Radin describes as a “thick” concept of self, one that controverts the “thin” selfhood of Western economic thinking, in which objects (and, increasingly, humans) are entirely fungible.47 Radin describes how gifts emerge from and engender a “contextual personhood,” whereby individuals are understood in terms of what Marilyn Strathern calls their “enchainment” with others.48 Understanding and practicing gift rituals may generate a richer and more complex picture of subjectivity and sociability by redeeming qualities, such



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as altruism, spontaneity, risk, pleasure, and playful extravagance, that Packerian rationality and economistic thinking seek to wash away.49 Gift relations expand the self by solidifying connections among human beings, contravening Packer’s megalomaniac fantasies of cybernetic immortality. Gifts also enrich humans’ relations with objects because gifts tend to retain vestiges of inalienability—that indelible association between material things and the persons who exchange them. Inalienability is the quality, as defined by Annette Weiner, of objects’ “exclusive and cumulative identity with a particular series of owners through time.”50 Heirlooms, for example, are inalienable insofar as they embody a family’s history: their value lies outside of monetary exchange. Hints of inalienability appear during Packer’s visit to Anthony’s barbershop as he glimpses “the oil company calendar on the wall. The mirror that needed silvering” (161). Indelibly associated with his father, these objects resist the totalizing commodification that otherwise characterizes Packer’s world.51 Indeed, just as counterfeit money ratifies the value of “legitimate” currency, so alienable possessions like Packer’s car acquire value only when other objects, like that mirror, remain inalienable. Unlike disembodied money, inalienable possessions may not truly be given away for; even if relinquished, they preserve some essence of their original owner. Insofar as they retain an element of inalienability, then, gift objects root exchange in the bodies and social lives of the humans who hold and exchange them. Lurking in the penumbra of inalienability lies a deeper association between humans and some entity beyond the individual—whether it be the divine or the collective. This intangible presence constitutes the “aura” of the gift, one that glows even in twenty-first-century Western societies. As Mauss noted, gift relations involve not just obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate; they also mandate that humans give to gods.52 That is, objects’ inalienability derives from a story—about a family, clan, or nation—that relates how these objects were originally bestowed by gods or their agents. By invoking objects’ divine (or quasi-divine) origins, the concept of inalienability reattaches economic behavior to history through narrative.53 In this sense, as Margot Finn writes, gift relations provide a “counter-narrative to both liberal and socialist theories of exchange”: they reattach us to history and to our social and physical being.54 In this regard, gift relations preserve a spiritual component in economic life and produce a radiance that may outshine—if only fleetingly—that of postmodern money; they do so, paradoxically, through their necessary connection with physicality. In all these ways, gift relations plunge givers and takers into the stream of social interaction and impel a countercurrent. They are counterfeit money, a currency of opposition—a rat, if you will—that pushes against the trends toward depersonalization and selfishness that characterize twenty-firstcentury social life. In electing to sacrifice himself, even if his motives are

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self-serving or conflicted, Packer inserts himself into a gift economy, invokes the humbling mortality of his own body, and thereby intimates an alternative to the soulless capitalism that he otherwise exemplifies. His body, in the final analysis, can never be fully de-realized. Many readers reacted with disappointment when Cosmopolis was first published, its Menippean rendering of finance capital seeming dated, even irrelevant, in the wake of September 11, 2001.55 It does not seem so now. Indeed, although the origins for Packer’s fortune and the causes of his fall derive from currency trading rather than from bundles of mortgages, Cosmopolis seems not merely current but as prescient as Packer’s watch. First, it trenchantly depicts the logic of financial constructions: when one domino goes down, the entire structure—built, like a temple, on faith—crumbles. As Underworld reminds us, “[e]verything is connected,” and despite his corklined limo, Packer and his money are living parts of the cosmopolis.56 Second, in Packer’s yen to unbuild, in his seemingly perverse desire to fail, we may discern the political unconscious of our current crisis: although investment bankers seem to subscribe wholly to fantasies of invulnerability and eternal growth, perhaps they too, like Eric Packer, secretly longed to fail, to see it “all come down.” Third, DeLillo’s glancing invocation of the economies of the body and of the gift imply, albeit cursorily, potential alternatives to the manipulations of de-realized money. Ultimately, the novel’s portrayal of the insularity, greed, and vaingloriousness of the super-rich, their conscienceless gaming of the system, and their denial of their own irrationality, testifies to DeLillo’s uncanny touch on the pulse of the present day. In its incisive analysis of the psychology of trading, its depiction of the irrationality of “rational” actors, and its disclosure of contemporary capitalism’s imbrication in financial history, Cosmopolis evinces its timeliness. Poised, like Packer, on the cusp between futurity and fatality, the novel in which he lives not only possesses currency—it is currency. More than mere paper coated with chlorophyll, Cosmopolis constitutes a counterfeit money of the mind. This chapter originally appeared as “The Currency of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis” by Mark Osteen in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55 (3): 291–304. DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2013.783783. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis, LLC (http://www.tandfonline.com) NOTES 1. Wallace Stevens, “Adagia,” in Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Knopf, 1957), 165. 2. Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, trans. E. F. J. Payne, volume 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 590; Frederick



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Turner, Shakespeare’s Twenty-First-Century Economics (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 10; James Buchan, Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), 19. 3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead, trans. Constance Garnett, ed. Jenny Bak (New York: Dover, 2004), 14. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Zahir,” trans. Dudley Fitts, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 159. 4. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 136. 5. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy (1848), III, VII, par. 8, http://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/ mlP36.html#.8, accessed July 22, 2016. 6. Ray Charles, “Greenbacks,” by Renald Richard, Ultimate Hits Collection, Rhino, 1999, CD. 7. Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), 47–48. In his recent work, Goux has abandoned the term “imaginary,” used in Symbolic Economies, in favor of the word “archetypal.” See Jean-Joseph Goux, “Ideality, Symbolicity, and Reality in Postmodern Capitalism,” in Postmodernism, Economics, and Knowledge, eds. Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio, and David F. Ruccio (London and New York: Routledge, 2001, 166–67, and Goux’s The Coiners of Language, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 34–36. 8. See David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 37, and Buchan, Frozen Desire, 80–83. 9. Hawkes, Idols, 39. 10. Indeed, although the gold or silver (or bimetallist) standards remained in effect (at least theoretically) until the twentieth century, by then paper money had, for all practical purposes, already ousted precious metals as instruments of exchange. For a succinct discussion of the economic effects of the gold standard and its abandonment, see Niall Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700–2000 (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2001), 319–32. 11. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1900), ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, second enlarged edition (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 179. 12. Gary Shoup, Currency Risk Management: A Handbook for Financial Managers, Brokers, and Their Consultants (New York: Glenlake/AMACOM, 1998), 48. This is not to say that one cannot buy and sell gold. However, gold is now a commodity like any other, rather than the transcendental signifier it once was: in other words, it is no longer either a measure of value or a medium of exchange. 13. Marc Shell, Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982), 7. Similarly, Goux states, “a mode of writing is representative of a mode of signifying exchange” (Symbolic 72; italics in original). 14. Simmel, Philosophy, 427, 125.

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15. Ibid., 128; Buchan, Frozen Desire, 33. 16. Buchan, Frozen Desire, 269. 17. I draw my section epigraphs from poems in Zbigniew Herbert’s Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems, trans. John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter (New York: Ecco, 1985); the first is from p. 72. A line from the collection’s title poem serves as the epigraph to Cosmopolis. “Debir” is a Hebrew word referring to a sanctuary or innermost room of a temple (see Carpenter’s “Translator Note,” 81). All subsequent citations to poems from this book are made in the body of the essay. 18. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (New York: Scribner, 2003), 28. 19. Ibid., 30. 20. Ibid., 78. 21. Ibid., 24. 22. Marc Schell, Art and Money (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), 53. Alison Shonkwiler refers to DeLillo’s use of the “financial sublime,” in “Don DeLillo’s Financial Sublime.” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 2 (2010), 249. 23. DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 80. 24. Ibid., 77. She is quoting Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Ernest Barker, revised, with an Introduction and Notes by R. F. Stalley (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), 1258a–b; 28–30. Aaron Chandler explains that “unnatural” acquisition, for Aristotle, is founded upon nomos or culture, rather than upon physis, or nature: “‘An Unsettling, Alternative Self’: Benno Levin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.” Critique 50, no. 3 (2009): 246. For a helpful discussion of Aristotle’s attitudes toward money and commerce, see Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), 89–95. 25. DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 77. DeLillo may be implying a parallel between Rothko’s abstract art and Packer’s dematerialized, abstracted money, for neither of them aims to represent any real object. 26. Goux, “Symbolicity,” 177, 180. 27. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 114. 28. Shoup, Currency, 21; the term “floating battlefield” is from Gregory J. Millman, The Floating Battlefield: Corporate Strategies in the Currency Wars (New York: American Management Association, 1990). 29. Borges, “The Zahir,” 159. 30. Shonkwiler, 249. 31. Shonkwiler, 264. 32. Aristotle 28; 1258a. 33. Brian P. Cooper and Margueritte Murphy, “‘Libidinal Economics’: Lyotard and Accounting for the Unaccountable,” in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, eds. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 239. 34. Jerry A. Varsava, “The ‘Saturated Self’: Don DeLillo and the Problem of Rogue Capitalism,” Contemporary Literature 46, no.1 (2005), 95. Two of Varsava’s examples seem pertinent: in 1992 George Soros broke the Bank of England and netted a billion dollars; in 1997 the collapse of the Thai baht (a currency that also represents Benno Levin’s dispossession in Cosmopolis) produced global shock waves (95).



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35. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 11. 36. Cooper and Murphy, “Libidinal Economics,” 236. 37. Packer exemplifies what David F. Ruccio and Jack Amariglio describe as a trend in twentieth-century economics: a “disavowal of the significance of the body”: Postmodern Moments in Modern Economics (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003), 95. These economists argue that the unified body of classical political economy has been supplanted by neoclassicism’s “fragmented body,” in which “various functions . . . do not necessarily impinge upon or govern each other” (110): the result is a “postmodern body.” 38. Cooper and Murphy, 236. 39. This plot development is but one of the novel’s many allusions to Joyce’s Ulysses, which, we recall, portrays Stephen Dedalus’s daylong circulation through a city and his encounter with a surrogate father, Leopold Bloom. As if to make this literary debt concrete, near the end, Packer’s assassin calls him “Icarus falling,” invoking Stephen’s self-description in Ulysses and A Portrait. 40. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 4, 47–48. 41. Russell Scott Valentino helpfully discusses the Packer/Levin relationship’s resemblance to those in Dostoevsky’s The Double: “From Virtue to Virtual: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the Corruption of the Absent Body,” Modern Fiction Studies 53, no.1 (2007), 154–55. 42. Chandler (252) finds Packer’s flaw in his incapacity to accept asymmetry; but this peculiarity is a product of the body and its material reality, not of asymmetry itself. 43. Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star (New York: Knopf, 1976), 426. 44. On the potlatch see Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1950), trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Norton, 1990), Mauss 33–46 and Mark Osteen, “Introduction: Questions of the Gift,” in Osteen, ed., The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 4–6, 18. 45. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Vol. 1. Consumption. trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books 1988), 21, 72. 46. Bataille cautions that the real potlatch today “falls to the poverty-stricken, . . . to the individual who lies down and scoffs”—to someone like Benno Levin (76). But even Levin is not truly outside the system, for he is, like the rat, at once an opponent of Packerian capitalism and its product. 47. Margaret Jane Radin, Contested Commodities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), 62. 48. Radin, 60; Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 139. 49. For a discussion of these principles in gift exchanges, see Osteen, “Introduction,” 25–6. 50. Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-WhileGiving (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 33. 51. For a pithy comparison between inalienable and alienable possessions and the economies with which they are associated, see C. A. Gregory, “Kula Gift Exchange and Capitalist Commodity Exchange: A Comparison,” in The Kula: New Perspectives

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on Massim Exchange, eds. Jerry W. Leach and Edmund Leach (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 104. 52. Mauss, The Gift, 13–14. 53. For a fuller treatment of this idea, see Mark Osteen, “Gift or Commodity,” in Osteen, ed. Question of the Gift, 240–41. 54. Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 44–45. 55. I was among these readers, writing that Cosmopolis seemed “a bit dated” at the moment of its publication. Mark Osteen, “Don DeLillo,” in A Companion to TwentiethCentury United States Fiction, ed. David Seed (Maldon, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 502. 56. DeLillo, Underworld, 825.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. The Politics. Trans. Ernest Barker. Rev., with an Introduction and Notes by R. F. Stalley. Oxford University Press, 1995. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Vol. 1. Consumption. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1988. Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Zahir.” In Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Writings. Translated by Dudley Fitts. Edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, 156–64. New York: New Directions, 1964. Buchan, James. Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997. Chandler, Aaron. “‘An Unsettling, Alternative Self’: Benno Levin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.” Critique 50, no.3 (2009): 241–59. Charles, Ray. “Greenbacks.” By Renald Richard. Rec. 18 Nov. 1954. Ultimate Hits Collection. Rhino, 1999. CD. Cooper, Brian P. and Margueritte Murphy. “‘Libidinal Economics’: Lyotard and Accounting for the Unaccountable.” In The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. Edited by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, 229–41. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003. ———. Ratner’s Star. New York: Knopf, 1976. ———. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The House of the Dead. Translated by Constance Garnett. Edited by Jenny Bak. New York: Dover, 2004. Ferguson, Niall. The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700– 2000. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2001. Finn, Margot C. The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740– 1914. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Gotthelf, Philip. Currency Trading: How to Access and Trade the World’s Biggest Market. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2003. Goux, Jean-Joseph. The Coiners of Language. Translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.



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———. “Ideality, Symbolicity, and Reality in Postmodern Capitalism.” In Postmodernism, Economics, and Knowledge. Edited by Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio, 166–81. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. ———. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud. Translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Gregory, C. A. “Kula Gift Exchange and Capitalist Commodity Exchange: A Comparison.” In The Kula: New Perspectives on Massim Exchange. Edited by Jerry W. Leach and Edmund Leach, 103–17. Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hawkes, David. Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Herbert, Zbigniew. Report From the Besieged City and Other Poems. Translated by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter. New York: Ecco, 1985. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. 1950. Trans. W. D. Halls. New York: Norton, 1990. Print. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Mill, John Stuart. Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy. 1848. Accessed March 8, 2012. http://www.econlib.org/library/ Mill/mlP36.html#. Millman, Gregory J. The Floating Battlefield: Corporate Strategies in the Currency Wars. New York: American Management Association, 1990. Osteen, Mark. “Don DeLillo.” A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction. Edited by David Seed, 497–504. Maldon, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. ———. “Gift or Commodity?” The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines. Edited by Mark Osteen, 229–47. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. ———. “Introduction: Questions of the Gift.” The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines. Edited by Mark Osteen, 1–41. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Radin, Margaret Jane. Contested Commodities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Ruccio, David F., and Jack Amariglio. Postmodern Moments in Modern Economics. Princeton University Press, 2003. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays. 1851. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Shell, Marc. Art and Money. University of Chicago Press, 1995. ———. The Economy of Literature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. ———. Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Shonkwiler, Alison. “Don DeLillo’s Financial Sublime.” In Contemporary Literature 51.2 (2010): 246–82. Shoup, Gary. Currency Risk Management: A Handbook for Financial Managers, Brokers, and Their Consultants. New York: Glenlake/AMACOM, 1998. Print. Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. 1900. Edited by David Frisby. Translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. 2nd enlarged ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

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Stevens, Wallace. “Adagia.” In Opus Posthumous. Edited by Samuel French Morse. New York: Knopf, 1957. Strathern, Marilyn. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California P, 1988. Valentino, Russell Scott. “From Virtue to Virtual: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the Corruption of the Absent Body.” In Modern Fiction Studies 53, no. 1 (2007): 140–62. Turner, Frederick. Shakespeare’s Twenty-First-Century Economics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Varsava, Jerry A. “The ‘Saturated Self’: Don DeLillo and the Problem of Rogue Capitalism.” Contemporary Literature 46, no. 1 (2005): 78–107. Weiner, Annette B. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Part II

“HERE AND GONE”

Chapter 3

‘Here and Gone’: Point Omega’s Extraordinary Rendition Jesse Kavadlo

In 2010, New York Times bestselling author Whitley Strieber released The Omega Point, a conspiracy thriller about the impending end of the world where, according to the book jacket, “It all comes down to one man … who may hold the power to save the world … . The end is The Omega Point: where time stops.”1 The Omega Point’s title, like its content, is a reversal of another novel released in 2010 by another New York Times bestselling author: Don DeLillo.2 Strieber’s Omega Point is a long, quasi-religious adventure with lines like this: “And now for the latest on the end of the world, let’s go to Marty.”3 It is not a comedy. DeLillo’s Point Omega is also not a comedy, it is also concerned with stopping time, and it often feels more like a sketch than a novel, the outline or draft of what could have been far longer. (At 318 pages, Strieber’s novel could have been much shorter.) But DeLillo’s 117 page novel, novella, maybe even short story, is all there is, and it doesn’t seem compacted, to take an image from White Noise, as much as empty, riddled with elisions, a canvas much like its desert setting.4 The Omega Point is a conventional if ridiculous mystery, which is to say that its uncertainties are methodically and sequentially unspooled as protagonist/psychologist David Ford solves the case of the end of the world, learning in the process that Jesus, Moses, and Osiris were really time travelers from a lost civilization. If only DeLillo’s Point Omega offered as much narrative or psychological comfort, closure or certainty. Instead, Point Omega is as remarkable for what is there as what is absent, mirroring the novel’s chief image and plot point of presence and absence itself. Even in its brevity—because of its brevity—Point Omega creates a powerful political protest by resisting the conventions and underpinnings of the novel itself, cultivating a powerful and disturbing sense of uncertainty. 67

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Thematically, the novel allows DeLillo to revisit familiar tropes and character types, now in the context of a post-9/11 world, where previous themes and subtexts of war and terrorism have become more immediate. As Mark Osteen describes, Point Omega is unmistakably a work by DeLillo, reconstituting elements from many of his earlier books. For example, its desert setting recalls the desolate scenes in his early novel End Zone, and Elster’s quasi-spiritual retreat replicates the withdrawals undertaken by numerous DeLillo characters, from Bucky Wunderlick’s abandonment of rock stardom in Great Jones Street and Glen Selvy’s monkish mortifications in Running Dog to the grief-stricken transmutations of Lauren Hartke in The Body Artist. DeLillo also has repeatedly placed his characters in motel rooms—his symbol of soulless postmodern America— where they frequently come face to face with their buried desires (see, for example, the end of Players). The interview format Finley conceives for his film (itself borrowed from Jean-Luc Godard’s early films) reuses the methods of Americana’s filmmaking protagonist David Bell. The ubiquity of cameras and their effect on behavior is a primary subject of Running Dog and many other DeLillo works. Point Omega, then, also is a ruthless rendering—an extraction of the essence—of DeLillo’s career.5

Similarly, David Cowart suggests that “[w]hen [main character Richard] Elster retreats to this unfriendly country [the Southwestern desert], he realizes a favorite DeLillo conceit, for the author of Americana, End Zone, Running Dog, The Names, and Underworld often evokes the desert as a place to which, by ancient tradition, one repairs to simplify and purify.”6 Yet even in a career filled with isolated characters and desert settings, Point Omega is an outlier, an experiment departing from previous works while stretching DeLillian’s stylistic traits and themes to their own omega point. In its minimalism and particular kind of mystery, in the ways in which Elster’s exile is more mortifying than purifying, the novel seems very different from previous novels, especially the frequently taught and analyzed White Noise, Libra, and Underworld, where DeLillo wove together multiple, intricate narrative threads and developed recurring, redoubled imagery.7 Instead, Point Omega offers a series of vignettes, where any relationship between them is up to the reader’s conspiratorial imagination, sparsely peopled by characters who are barely more than voices. The novel resists the reader hoping for the black comedy of White Noise, the paranoiac and psychological intrigue of Libra, or the powerful historical symmetries of Underworld; it does not even provide the surreal elements of DeLillo’s other short novel The Body Artist, or the elegiac poetry of Falling Man.8 Instead, Point Omega centers on “defense intellectual” Richard Elster, a seeming composite of U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who championed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq;



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Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, chief architect of the Vietnam War; and Bill Gray, the aging, reclusive writer of DeLillo’s Mao II.9 War planner, author of an essay called “Renditions,” father of Jessie (a distant, sylph-like twenty-something woman), Elster retires to the desert but is visited by Jim Finley, his name a near phonetic cryptogram of White Noise’s “Jack Gladney.” Like Americana’s David Bell, Finley hopes to make a film. Together, Elster, Jim, and Jessie form a strange triad, reminiscent of the Bill/Scott/ Karen (later, Bill/Scott/Brita) dynamic of Mao II. But shortly after Finley arrives, Jessie disappears, her whereabouts never revealed, and Finley’s movie, it seems, will never be completed. It is hard to tell whether it is truly started. Yet this summary of the novel leaves out the seemingly incongruous beginning and ending—the opening, “Anonymity,” and movie sequel-like conclusion, “Anonymity 2”—describing a visit to a real-life installation at the Museum of Modern Art called 24 Hour Psycho, whose title may or may not apply to the last section’s unnamed and never-revealed narrator himself, who may or may not be responsible for abducting Jessie, if indeed she has been abducted at all.10 The novel is, then, as noteworthy for what it does not say as for what it does—for, in a phrase repeated in different ways throughout the novel, what is here and what is gone. In its short span, readers do not learn the full identity of important characters, are left unclear about the motives and intentions of others, never discover what happened or what happens to Jessie—or Elster or Jim Finley, for that matter—and omits other seemingly crucial plot and character details, including the precise relationship between the bookending “Anonymity” movie sequences and the unmade film about Elster. The narrative and linguistic mysteries become inextricably intertwined with DeLillo’s concern for the role of art and literature after September 11, 2001, particularly through the novel’s unease over the term “rendition”—a word analyzed at length in the novel even as other points remain unresolved. Elster’s essay, “Renditions,” then, becomes central to the novel: “The essay concentrated on the word itself,” and DeLillo sees its power, but also its internal ambiguity and even potential contradiction between artistic and novelistic meanings—“interpretation, translation, performance.”11 Elster/ DeLillo then takes the word back to its etymological, literally concrete root meaning of “a coat of plaster applied to a masonry surface,” which Mark Osteen notes “metaphorically points to the more disturbing connotation of a cover-up or camouflage that applies to the government’s ‘extraordinary renditions’” before moving on to more sinister denotations, what Elster “called enhanced interrogation techniques, that was meant to induce a surrender (one of the meanings of rendition—a giving up or giving back) in the person being interrogated.”12 Artists and theorists use “rendition”—and academics use the word “interrogate”—freely, but here, DeLillo forces the reader to confront

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the word’s physical origin and, worse, and illiberal multiple meanings. Thus, at different points in the story, “rendition” suggests “torture by proxy” and information surrendered after questioning, the American post-9/11 practice of transferring suspects to other countries for harsh interrogation—perhaps, the kinds of questions that Finley asks of Elster, or even the questions the reader is left with at the end.13 Point Omega thus serves as the intersection between each of these meanings, and it forces the reader to consider how we gather information and tell stories, through absence and extradition and not just what we can see. While DeLillo’s work has long trafficked in ambiguity, Point Omega shifts, slightly but meaningfully, to paradox. It is, on the one hand, an end point, a coda, to DeLillo’s previous novels, in particular Mao II and Falling Man. It even feels like the end to a career, from Americana to Point Omega, even as it is also a kind of departure. The phrase “Omega point” comes from The Future of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest—shades of DeLillo’s Fordham University education and long-time fascination with Catholic theology.14 Even as “[e]arth has many millions of years of habitability ahead of it, so that Man is still only on the threshold of his existence,” Teilhard fears that the very knowledge of our inevitable future extinction “destroys” any possible comfort, leaving only the image “of mankind growing old and disillusioned on a chilling globe.” Instead, Teilhard proposes a “universal center,” an “Omega point” or “irreversible essence of things” and undying object of ultimate complexity.15 While futurists and science fiction writers, including Humayun Ahmed in a similarly named 2000 novel Omega Point, have taken this notion to be threatening and used it in conjunction with the Singularity—the point where artificial intelligence surpasses and threatens humanity—Teilhard intends the idea to be comforting.16 Without naming Teilhard, Elster alludes to his ideas and indeed seems to take comfort: “Consciousness accumulates. It begins to reflect upon itself. Something about this feels almost mathematical to me. There’s almost some law of mathematics or physics that we haven’t quite hit upon, where the mind transcends all direction inward. The omega point,” he said. “Whatever the intended meaning of this term, if it has a meaning, if it’s not a case of language that’s struggling toward some idea outside our experience.”17

Yet as appropriate—as DeLillian—as the concept seems, Elster calls for it but also its opposite, the possibility that the concept is meaningless—”if it has a meaning”—or else cannot be disentangled from our linguistic experience of it. And as David Cowart points out, “What Richard Elster speculates about is something like the denial or mockery of Teilhard’s thinking.”18 Indeed,



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it seems paradoxical to find Teilhard’s idea that consciousness continues to evolve toward more and more complex forms in DeLillo’s shortest, least narratively complex novel. But Point Omega may also be DeLillo’s most inert novel, which is the very idea that Elster believes consciousness is working toward: not Teilhard’s complexity, but rather “paroxysm,” and not in the sense of explosiveness, but that “we pass completely out of being”—the ultimate extraordinary rendition.19 Elster takes solace in passing completely out of being, but the reader may not. While any extraordinary renditions—including, possibly, Jessie’s—happen off the page, and while the novel does not directly contend with nuclear war (as in End Zone and Underworld), environmental contamination (White Noise), the Kennedy assassination (Americana and Libra), terrorism (the 1970s novels and then Mao II) or the events of September 11, 2001 (Falling Man), Point Omega once again seems inclined toward the intertwined politics of personal, national, and global disaster.20 Just after 9/11, critic James Wood wondered, “Who would dare to be knowledgeable about politics and society now? Is it possible to imagine Don DeLillo today writing his novel Mao II—a novel that proposed the foolish notion that the terrorist now does what the novelist used to do, that is, ‘alter the inner life of the culture’?”21 For DeLillo, it is both possible and necessary. Yet his overt 9/11 novel Falling Man offers one answer, while his veiled 9/11 novel Point Omega offers another. Taken together, we can see the ways in which people inclined toward both art and war indeed do “alter the inner life of the culture,” but not in the ways that Wood seemed to grasp at the time.22 In Falling Man, it is not the inner life of the culture that is altered, but rather the inner culture of our lives. Though longer than Point Omega, Falling Man is nevertheless a smaller novel, focused on the local, the domestic. Aside from a subplot involving bomber Hammad taking fewer than twenty pages, Falling Man is, by design, limited in its scope to the family the marriage and of Keith and Lianne Neudecker. As Richard Gray suggests of the first wave of 9/11 novels and Falling Man specifically, “What is notable about these texts … is the presence of, and in fact and emphasis on, the preliminary stages or trauma: the sense of those events and a kind of historical and experiential abyss, a yawning and possibly unbridgeable gap between before and after.”23 After further analysis, Gray concludes by calling for American novelists to enlarge their scope, to insert themselves into the space between conflicting interests and practices and then dramatize the contradictions that conflict engenders. Through their work, by means of a mixture of voices and a free play of languages and even genres, they can represent the reality of their culture as multiple, complex, and internally antagonistic . ... They have the chance, in short, of getting “into” history, to participate

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in its processes and, in a perspectival sense at least, of getting “out” of it too—and enabling us, the readers, to begin to understand just how those processes work.24

While Point Omega does not quite fit Gray’s precise prescription, it does seem “internally antagonistic.” If Falling Man represents Don DeLillo’s novelistic exploration of September 11, 2001, Point Omega, in many ways, is interested in the world that 9/11 ushered in. 9/11 may be the fall, but Point Omega is the result, the Omega point, as DeLillo also suggested of his own interest in the Kennedy assassination in his 1982 essay “American Blood”: What has become unraveled since that afternoon in Dallas is not the plot, of course, not the dense mass of characters and events, but the sense of a coherent reality most of us shared. We seem from that moment to have entered a world of randomness and ambiguity, a world totally modern in the way it shades into the century’s “emptiest” literature, the study of what is uncertain and unresolved in our lives, the literature of estrangement and silence.25

Libra displays Richard Gray’s sentiments of what the post-traumatic novel should look like, but, with its multiple plot lines, teeming cast, and speculative perspective, not the narrative form of emptiness, estrangement, and silence that DeLillo suggests the assassination ushered in. Point Omega does. Yet neither Point Omega nor Falling Man is a 9/11 conspiracy story; eschewing Libra’s paranoia to concentrate on 9/11 survivor Keith Neudecker’s troubled marriage to Lianne, Falling Man’s narrative is recursive, retelling Keith’s escape from the World Trade Center throughout the narrative, and poetic. In contrast, Point Omega breaks from this lyrical approach. Falling Man’s final page includes this description and conclusion, in an imagistic passage filled with alliteration, lyrical phrasing, beautiful intonation and effective cadences: They came out onto the street, looking back, both towers burning, and soon they heard a high drumming rumble and saw smoke rolling down from the top of the tower, billowing out and down, methodically from floor to floor, and the tower falling, the south tower diving into the smoke, and they were running again. The windblast sent people to the ground. A thunderhead of smoke and ash came moving toward them. The light drained dead away, bright day gone… . The only light was vestigial now, the light of what comes after, carried in the residue of smashed matter, in the ash ruins of what was various and human, hovering in the air above. Then he saw the shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life.26

This description, with its inevitable refrain of falling, lends itself more to poetic than narrative analysis. The look of the letters on the page seems



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like quasi-cryptograms, the letters repeating and nesting, as one word transforms into another, just as the people in the street, and the day in history, are transformed. The first sentence rises and falls on its commas, running grammatically as its people run, while the staccato and harsh onomatopoeia of the second reminds us of the blunt shock and damage. Finally, the last sentence, like a haiku, unites the descriptions of the previous lines, the clauses, like the voices, hovering, the sound, again like the voices, humming. In this way, Falling Man belies Wood’s point, not through overt politics but through poetry. The opening of Point Omega does not pick up where Falling Man ends, however. Rather, the beginning offers only the anxiety of prosaic, if cryptic, disinterested description: There was a man standing against the north wall, barely visible. People entered in twos and threes and they stood in the dark and looked at the screen and then they left. Sometimes they hardly moved past the doorway, larger groups wandering in, tourists in a daze, and they looked and shifted their weight and then they left. There were no seats in the gallery. The screen was free-standing, about ten by fourteen feet, not elevated, placed in the middle of the room. It was a translucent screen and some people, a few, remained long enough to drift to the other side. They stayed a moment longer and then they left.27

Despite the vagaries of “there was a man”—his identity never is revealed; the chapter is titled “Anonymity,” after all—“people,” and “groups,” in the exhibit, “it was impossible to see too much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. This was the point.”28 And this seems the point of Point Omega as well. Rather than offering Falling Man’s poetic if melancholic comfort, its eventual revelations of identity, Point Omega takes an overt less-is-more take, as opposed to DeLillo’s usual more-is-more, narrative approach. In contrast to Falling Man’s poetic language, Point Omega emerges as a metanarrative about renditions of all kinds: artwork, transformations, and the many ways in which things, and people, go missing. Even the title seems self-referential; in addition to the DeLillo-esque trait of telling readers throughout that “this is the point,” the letter Omega, in Microsoft Word and other applications, has become the symbol used to represent the concept of symbol itself. While the novel’s language seems simpler, the sentiment returns DeLillo to his earlier, more urgent sense of mystery that was largely absent from Falling Man. There is no mystery to Keith’s trauma, no secrets—to the reader, at least—in the Neudecker marriage, and certainly no suspense in a novel that begins with the Towers’ collapse. Instead, DeLillo maintains a tight, dramatic focus on a small set of characters. Yet even with its renewed sense of secrecy,

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Point Omega remains a minimalist counterpoint in form and language to the encompassing, decade-spanning Underworld. Neither encyclopedic nor a Tom LeClair “systems novel,” the book is the novelistic equivalent of the haiku—as I suggested of Falling Man’s conclusion as well—its three main characters, or perhaps the novel’s three parts, with the middle section the longest, like the haiku’s three lines. The haiku comes up by name in Falling Man: “Lianne used to read haiku, sitting crosslegged on the floor, in the weeks and months after her father dies. She thought of a poem by Basho, or the first and third lines. She didn’t remember the second line. Even in Kyoto—I long for Kyoto. The second line was missing but she didn’t think she needed it”29 But soon, after seeing the Falling Man performance artist for the first time, Lianne thinks, “Even in New York … . Of course she was wrong about the second line of the haiku. She knew this. Whatever the line was, it was surely crucial to the poem. Even in New York—I long for New York.”30 The missing line is notable for its absence, in this case mirroring the way in which the absence of the Towers marks their presence. Lianne, like other New Yorkers, is living, to borrow the title of Art Spiegleman’s graphic novel, in the shadow of no towers.31 DeLillo is still thinking of haiku and disappearance in Point Omega, but the form, like the later post-9/11 world, has grown suspicious and ominous, the absence of the second line no longer something forgotten as much as officially redacted. Departing from Lianne, Point Omega’s Elster says that “Haiku means nothing beyond what it is. A pond in summer, a leaf in the wind. It’s human consciousness located in nature. It’s the answer to everything in a set number of lines, a prescribed syllable count. I wanted a haiku war.”32 In one sense, Point Omega is less about haiku than it is a haiku, but a disturbing Lianne-style haiku, with an absence at its center and the frightening implication that we cannot, yet must, understand the poem without it. In another sense, though, Elster’s interpretation of the haiku is revealing, since it seems clear that the man who wants a haiku war does not understand haiku at all. According to the Haiku Society of America, “A haiku is a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition.”33 This definition seems crucially different from “human consciousness located in nature,” in that Elster does not see the poem’s centrality in language. For DeLillo, although not Elster, the haiku is another rendition, and it certainly means something beyond what it is. The Haiku Society adds that “the definition of haiku has been made more difficult by the fact that many uninformed persons have considered it to be a ‘form’ like a sonnet or triolet (17 syllables divided 5, 7, and 5). … Actually, there is no rigid ‘form’ for Japanese haiku. … To the Japanese and to American haiku poets, it is the content and not the form alone that makes a haiku.”34 Again, Elster is wrong—he believes that it is the



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form and not the content that determines haiku. And, far worse, that it is the form and not the content that determines war. Here, DeLillo seems influenced by the now infamous New York Times Magazine essay by Ron Suskind, who reported the ways in which an anonymous Bush administration aide, now generally thought to be Karl Rove, explained “reality” in a way that Suskind “now believe[s] gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency”: The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”35

Similarly, Elster, in what seems more like a Fog of War-style interview with Finley’s camera than a genuine argument, expresses his misgivings about the possibility of language to do anything but prescribe a form, suggesting, in undertaking his war, that “There were times when no map existed to match the reality we were trying to create” “What reality?” “This is something we do with every eyeblink. Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation. Lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can’t be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of worlds that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability. These were words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three-dimensional. The reality stands, it walks, it squats. Except when it doesn’t.”36

Elster similarly suggests earlier that “[t]he true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreaming self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.” Finley thinks, “I believed him when he said such things.”37 But does he? Does DeLillo? Must we? Each statement seems fraught with the possibility that, like the ephemeral nature in and of haiku, the elided line from Falling Man, or even Jessie herself, it is at best temporary and at worst imagined, a construct of words rather than things. DeLillo’s post-9/11 novels at first seem sober, even enervated, perhaps suggesting that domestic disaster, later in his own life, striking his hometown, had subdued DeLillo in ways that James Wood would welcome. Yet if anything, Point

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Omega has surpassed even Mao II’s imagining of novelists and terrorists. For DeLillo, the post-9/11 state—Elster’s “Renditions” begins by saying that “[a] government is a criminal enterprise”—has taken to rewriting reality in ways that the novelist, the artist, or even the terrorist can only dream of.38 The artist’s power to render has been far surpassed, not by the terrorist fighting the state, but by the state itself. Art and war together become renditions of reality in both the best and worst senses of the word—except that Finley’s movie remains forever in the unwritten future, and Elster’s war may never end. Even in its depiction of the falling towers and a failing marriage, Falling Man offers the security and certainty of language that Point Omega challenges. Midway through Falling Man, Lianne says, “People read poems. People I know they read poetry to ease the shock and pain, give them a kind of space, something beautiful in language,’ she said, ‘to bring comfort or composure. I don’t read poems. I read newspapers. I put my head on the pages and get angry and crazy.”39 In the novel’s concluding descriptions, DeLillo is ready to show that Lianne’s, and possibly our own, inclination toward newspapers is misguided, just as Underworld’s triumphant New York Times cover juxtaposing the ball and the bomb and White Noise’s tabloids only express the need for certainty, not its realization. Instead, perhaps poetry can provide, if not composure, than the possibility of contemplation. And indeed, the last pages are poetry. Not so in Point Omega. Instead, DeLillo provides only unreconciled contraries, captured by seemingly innocuous idiomatic contradictions, that remind the reader of the perpetual presence and absence the narrator of “Anonymous,” Finley’s movie, Elster’s targets of extraordinary rendition, and, most disturbingly, of Jessie’s ontological status. When Jim and Elster see 24 Hour Psycho, Jim says “We were there and gone, ten minutes, he fled and I followed.”40 Later, Elster remarks that “a moment, a thought, here and gone, each of us, on a street somewhere, and this is everything.”41 When Jim begins to doubt his own movie’s process, he realizes that “the reason for being here had begun to fade. He [Elster] knew I was only talking.”42 Elster too feels “Time falling away … . Time becoming slowly slower.”43 And, in narrative and personal catastrophe, Elster and Jim discover, referring to Jessie, that “When we got back to the house she was gone.”44 Like Schrödinger’s cat, Jessie is both alive and dead at the same time, because they, and we, cannot know the truth, which remains, as Elster hoped yet now must rue, a mere “saga of created reality.”45 Jessie is here and gone, first in the literal sense of chronology, but worse, in the paradoxical sense of being two contradictory things at once. For all its concision, Point Omega is a slow and demanding read, another way in which it resists the reader. Yet again, that resistance, and the pace—to use one of DeLillo’s favorite phrases—is the point. The reader is reminded that “[A]t night the rooms were clocks.



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The stillness was nearly complete, bare walls, plank floors, time here and out there, on the high trails, every passing minute a function of our waiting.”46 Slowed down enough, the plot of the novel, like the plot of Psycho rendered as 24 Hour Psycho, becomes dangerous with possibility: “The dull parts of the movie were not dull anymore. They were like everything else, outside all categories, open to entry.” Watching the film again, the anonymous narrator—perhaps Jessie’s ex-boyfriend, perhaps “Dennis,” who is perhaps also her abductor—decides that “[r]eal time is meaningless. The phrase is meaningless.”47 Time becomes a human construct, here and gone, but even our language for time is revealed as a façade, not a thing and not even a “real” idea. But the narrator’s view of time now also resembles Elster’s, who has suffered professional catastrophe in Washington, and then personal catastrophe in his retreat from Washington with Jessie’s disappearance. In a state of despair, Elster seems to enact the slow-motion rendering of 24 Hour Psycho, finally understanding that perhaps Jessie’s “friend, the man she’d been seeing,” is behind her disappearance: He sat in the bed, one hand raised in a gesture I could not interpret. What’s the use or what’s the connection or leave me alone. He wanted pure mystery. Maybe it was easier for him, something beyond the damp reach of human motive. I was trying to think his thoughts. Mystery had its truth all the deeper for being shapeless, an elusive meaning that might spare him whatever explicit details would otherwise come to mind.48

Here, DeLillo’s use of the word “mystery” breaks sharply from the literary definition, a thriller with a solution, but also from the word’s spiritual connotation, which suggests the need for faith, or the American mystery of White Noise, which provides the source of Murray J. Siskind’s and Jack Gladney’s ruminations. Mystery here means only unknowing. Yet even then, we don’t hear Elster’s words directly. Instead, they are rendered by observer Finley, who may or may not be a reliable interpreter: “But these weren’t his thoughts. I didn’t know what his thoughts were. I barely knew my own.”49 Jessie’s disappearance is crucially different from the silence, cunning, and exile of previous DeLillo characters as well. In Great Jones Street, rock star Bucky Wunderlick, like Elster, aspires toward paroxysm and tries to disappear, but he is found, repeatedly and almost immediately, to comic effect.50 Bill Gray seek to disappear and, as far as the other characters at the end of Mao II are concerned, may still be alive in further hiding; in dramatic irony, the reader learns his death even as those who thought themselves closet to him do not. But in Point Omega, the reader is left as unknowing and impotent as Elster and Finley. Silence has none of the Modernist romance of the James Joyce’s artist. Mystery has none of Flannery O’Connor’s religious awe. Jessie

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may have undergone the kind of DeLillian self-imposed exiles of other characters, or she may have been kidnapped—or something else entirely. Earlier, expressing no contrition for promoting a haiku war that becomes an unending epic, Elster tells Finley, “What you want, my friend, whether you know it or not, is a public confession,” and “You want to film a man breaking down … I understand that. What’s the point otherwise?”51 But by the end, Elster does seem broken. The filmmaking process combines multiple meanings of rendition, interrogation and performance, yet it fails on both counts. Instead, Elster experiences a cruel irony: the man who advocated rendition for other people, other people’s children, has his own daughter taken from him. Or does he? Does she simply leave on her own? Elster never finds out, and neither does the reader. As David Cowart notes, Point Omega reverses not just the words but also the sentiment of Teilhard’s Omega point: “the unfamiliar syntax … enacts … the reversal of Teilhard de Chardin’s most well-known concept.”52 The novel does not move toward a center of ultimate knowledge, but to a marginal place of pure uncertainty. Jessie’s disappearance—her own extraordinary rendition—mirrors the extraordinary rendition that is Point Omega. Reality, like war, like art, resists Elster’s, and DeLillo’s, attempts to shape it using language. And so perhaps Point Omega, like a haiku, does more than condense or elide. The novel, unlike its coincidental twin, Streiber’s The Omega Point, and even unlike DeLillo’s previous work, actively resists the reader’s attempts to interpret it, to transfigure it from a novel into criticism, to turn it from one thing into another: to render it. But this resistance should not come as a surprise. The symbol Omega, as the last letter of the Greek alphabet, of course suggests Teilhard’s endpoint. But it also represents the Ohm, which stands for electrical resistance and was worn, in keeping, by protestors against the Vietnam War. To the Richard Elsters of the world, Point Omega is Don DeLillo’s own resistance, his own rendition, his own tortured protest. But DeLillo is not just protesting a war, or even the mindset and language that could lead to one. Point Omega is also a small protest against the relentless machinations of the novel itself, of plot—a word that has always remained loaded in DeLillo’ s novels—character, and, despite its title, end points. Here, DeLillo seems as indebted to Andre Breton as Teilhard. Teilhard sees his Omega point as a “phenomenon perhaps outwardly akin to death: but in reality a simple metamorphosis and arrival at the supreme synthesis” while Breton, in his “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” shifts slightly but significantly: “Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now, search as one may, one will never find another motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point.”53 DeLillo has given us Point Omega, a



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novel of rendition in the contradictory senses of both art and absence, what is here and gone at the same time. It is up to the reader to fix the point where we cease to perceive its contradictions—or better, to celebrate them. NOTES 1. Whitley Strieber, The Omega Point (New York: Tor, 2010), 12. 2. Don DeLillo, Point Omega (New York: Scribner, 2010). 3. Whitley Strieber, The Omega Point, 12. 4. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1985). 5. Mark Osteen, “Extraordinary Renditions: DeLillo’s Point Omega and Hitchcock’s Psycho,” in Clues: A Journal of Detection 31, no. 1 (Spring 2013), 111; Don DeLillo, End Zone (New York: Penguin Books, 1972); Great Jones Street (New York: Penguin Books, 1973); The Body Artist (New York: Scribner, 2001); Players (1977; repr., New York: Vintage Books 1989); Americana (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971); Running Dog (1978; repr., New York, Vintage Books, 1989). 6. David Cowart, “The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.” Contemporary Literature 53:1 (2012), 44; Don DeLillo, The Names (New York: Knopf, 1982); Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997). 7. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1985); Libra (New York, Viking, 1988); Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997). 8. Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (New York: Scribner, 2001); Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007). 9. Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Penguin, 1991). 10. Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho, 2003. 11. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 33, 34. 12. Ibid., 33; Mark Osteen, “Extraordinary,” 104. 13. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 33. 14. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, trans. Norman Denny (New York: Doubleday, 1950). 15. Ibid., 126, 127. 16. Humayun Ahmed, Omega Point (Dhaka, Bangladesh: Somoy Prakashan), 2003. 17. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 72. 18. David Cowart, “The Lady Vanishes,” 47. 19. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 73. 20. Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Penguin, 1991). 21. James Wood. “Tell me how does it feel?” Guardian, October 6, 2001, http:// www.guardian.co.uk/books/22001/oct/06/fiction. 22. Don DeLillo, Mao II, 41. 23. Richard Gray, “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis.” American Literary History 21, no. 1 (2009), 130. 24. Ibid., 147. 25. Don DeLillo, “American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK” Rolling Stone, December 8, 1983, 22.

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26. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 246. 27. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 1. 28. Ibid., 5–6. 29. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 32. 30. Ibid., 34. 31. Art Spiegleman, In the Shadow of No Towers (New York, Viking, 2004) 32. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 29. 33. The Haiku Society of America, “Definition,” http://www.hsa-haiku.org/ archives/HSA_Definitions_2004.html. 34. Ibid. 35. Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004, Sect. 6: 44. 36. Ibid., 28–29. 37. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 17. 38. Ibid., 33. 39. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 42. 40. Ibid., 47. 41. Ibid., 63. 42. Ibid., 71. 43. Ibid., 72. 44. Ibid., 75. 45. Ibid., 28. 46. Ibid., 88, italics added. 47. Ibid., 88, 115. 48. Ibid., 83. 49. Ibid. 50. Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street (New York: Penguin, 1973). 51. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 53, 54. 52. David Cowart, “The Lady Vanishes,” 47. 53. Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, 127; Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Anne Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 123–124.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahmed, Humayun. Omega Point. Dhaka, Bangladesh: Somoy Prakashan, 2003. Breton, Andre. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Anne Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969. Cowart, David. “The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.” Contemporary Literature, 53, no. 1 (2012): 31–50. “Definition.” Haiku Society of America. Accessed August 31, 2016. http://www.hsahaiku.org/archives/HSA_Definitions_2004.html. DeLillo, Don. Americana. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.



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———. “American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK.” Rolling Stone, December 8, 1983. ———. The Body Artist. New York: Scribner, 2001. ———. End Zone. New York: Penguin Books, 1972. ———. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007. ———. Great Jones Street. New York: Penguin Books, 1973. ———. Libra. New York: Viking, 1988. ———. Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991. ———. Players. 1977. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1989. ———. Point Omega. New York: Scribner, 2010. ———. Running Dog. 1978. Reprint, New York, Vintage Books, 1989. ———. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. ———. White Noise New York: Viking, 1985. Gray, Richard. “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis.” American Literary History 21, no. 1 (2009): 128–151. Osteen, Mark. “Extraordinary Renditions: DeLillo’s Point Omega and Hitchcock’s Psycho.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 31, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 103–113. Spiegleman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Viking, 2004. Strieber, Whitley. The Omega Point. New York: Tor, 2010. Suskind, Ron. “Without a Doubt.” New York Times, October 17, 2004. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Future of Man. Translated by Norman Denny. New York: Doubleday, 1950. Wood, James. “Tell me how does it feel?” Guardian. October 6, 2001. Accessed August 30, 2016. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/22001/oct/06/fiction.

Chapter 4

Place as Active Receptacle in Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories Elise Martucci

In Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, E.V. Walter writes: “For Plato, place is a matrix of energies, the active receptacle, in contrast to Aristotle’s later idea of the neutral container. […] Plato’s doctrine of place asserts the real connections among ultimate realities. Everything in the receptacle gives a place its qualities, and the qualities of a place cannot be abstracted from the things contained in it. People and things in a place participate in one another’s natures.”1 The stories in The Angel Esmeralda demonstrate this idea of place as active receptacle.2 Throughout the stories, place is often foregrounded, characters often experience a place-based epiphany that makes them question their perceptions and realities, and the characters’ ideas of identity are reliant on the places where they stand. These stories demonstrate how DeLillo’s emphasis on physical place and the way in which it informs his characters’ thoughts and actions complicate the major themes of postmodern ontology and simulacra and simulation that many critics focus on in their discussions of DeLillo. The emphasis on place is significant considering what philosopher Edward Casey critiques as the modern demise of the sense of place. Casey notes that modern thinkers have been conditioned to work from the primacy of time, and to overlook the significance of place.3 He explains, “in the past three centuries in the West—the period of ‘modernity’—place has come to be not only neglected but actively suppressed.”4 Addressing “postmodern” ontological concerns, Casey explains that the priority of place “is phenomenological as well as ontological: places are primary in the order of description as in the order of being.”5 The stories in The Angel Esmeralda demonstrate this relationship between place and being as many of DeLillo’s characters describe themselves and their search for identity in relation to the place in which they exist and the place from which they come. Furthermore, the stories emphasize 83

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the idea of place that Walter insists on—an active receptacle—a place filled with meaning and significance connected to culture and society, whether it is a natural, suburban, or urban, or even the personal space of one’s home. In “Don DeLillo’s Perfect Starry Night” Charles Molesworth explores the author’s emphasis on place, proclaiming, “Don DeLillo’s novels begin, again and again, with a solitary man being propelled headlong into a sealed chamber,” citing Libra, Ratner’s Star, and Players among others.6 He adds: “in other novels […] the main character is often enclosed in a room, isolated from almost everyone and very definitely cut off from society at large,” presenting Great Jones Street as an example.7 However, I would argue that there are also a comparable number of DeLillo’s works that begin in open, public spaces: Americana on a busy Manhattan street during Christmastime; The Names in Athens: “the modern city, imperfect, blaring”; and Underworld in the stands of the famous October 3, 1951, Dodgers-Giants baseball game.8 And while there is an obvious recurrent theme of men in small rooms, which DeLillo himself discusses, there is also a recurrent theme in his works of places that are filled with meaning and that are part of the human experiences that occur there. DeLillo’s work can be meaningfully approached through Walter’s notion of “expressive space,” which he defines as the spirit of a place constructed by the “structure of morale … expressive energies … passions, myths, and fantasies” of that locale.9 In other words, expressive space is not just the physical location of a place, but the way humans perceive and interact with a place. It is very important to highlight and emphasize these types of locations in order to achieve what Walter refers to as “topistic consciousness,” or an awareness of place in all its complexity. Walter explains, “a growing number of thoughtful and concerned people want to recover an environmental awareness that is not lost but driven underground” and the way to recovery, he states, is “to experience the world in a radically old way.”10 While the stories in Angel Esmeralda are unlike many of DeLillo’s novels in that only a few present ecological ideas,, they still allow a critical perspective of DeLillo’s fiction that goes beyond postmodern themes of simulacra and simulation which are oppositional to environmentalism and can lead to neglect of the ethical component of DeLillo’s fiction.11 The stories provide an opportunity to experience the world in the “radically old” way, Walter suggests, because they emphasize the role that the environment plays in establishing a sense of self and one’s relationship to the larger world. Providing a sampling of his writings that spans from 1979 to 2011, the stories in The Angel Esmeralda offer a way to look at the recurring theme of place in DeLillo’s work and to consider its evolution. In Beyond Grief and Nothing, Joseph Dewey discusses DeLillo’s work chronologically through three lenses: The Street, The Word, and The Soul as the “three strategies for



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restoring the self to authenticity that DeLillo has tested.”12 Dewey’s point is well taken as the stories in The Angel Esmeralda demonstrate that a focus on place (The Street) is viable and important because it emerges as a career-long theme. This essay will discuss the stories in the chronological order that they are presented in The Angel Esmeralda, grouped together in three parts. For each group, I will consider the similarities and differences of place representation and also offer a connection to DeLillo’s other works appearing around the same time. The first two stories of the collection, “Creation” and “Human Moments in World War II” have in common a contrast between empty space and expressive place; the characters view place as an abstraction or an idea rather than a concrete, physical location in which people are grounded. When they disassociate in this way, they ignore the expressive energies of a place and, consequently, remain detached from the people who live there. “Creation” serves as an introduction to a discourse about human interaction with place.13 The story presents characters who attempt to connect in a very superficial way. In order to avoid any type of ethical responsibility that comes with attachment, they willingly, adamantly avoid any connection with what Walter refers to as an archaic “theoria that grasped the whole experience of a place.”14 The travelers in “Creation” are clearly not interested in experiencing the island. The story is set on an unnamed Caribbean Island and begins with a journey through the hills to an airport. The narrator blandly notes the surrounding area and his wife Jill purposely avoids it: “It was an hour’s drive, much of it a climb through smoky rain. I kept my window open several inches, hoping to catch a fragrance, some savor of aromatic shrubs. […] At intervals the bordering vegetation was less thick and there were views of pure jungle, whole valleys of it, spread between the hills. Jill read her book on the Rockefellers.”15 The narrator seeks some bookish ideal of this tropical island by desiring the scent of flowers. Immersed in her book, Jill (whom we later see as desperate to escape this island) has no interest in the landscape; instead she is immersed in a book about American wealth. Walter notes: “Originally, theoria meant seeing the sights, seeing for yourself, and getting a world-view, but it involved all the senses and feelings. Disintegrating this whole experience degrades the intangible, nonphysical, human energies of a place.”16 Ignoring its various energies, the couple clearly sees no value in the place or its people. Only when they arrive at the hotel, secluded from others in a space created with modern comfort in mind, does the wife cheer up, saying it’s “not half bad.”17 But this space, as the narrator notes, “was a modern product, this hotel, designed to make people feel they’d left civilization behind.”18 Despite his knowledge that this is a man-made representation of nature, the narrator shows admiration and appreciation in his description: “This spot was so close to perfect we would not even want to tell ourselves

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how lucky we were, having been delivered to it.”19 His description of his surroundings, in contrast to his earlier description of the jungle, is now filled with minute detail and a sense of awe: The cooling touch of the freshwater on my body, and the ocean-soaring bird, and the speed of those low-flying clouds, their massive tumbling summits, and my weightless drift, the slow turning in the pool, like some remote-controlled rapture, made me feel I knew what it was to be in the world. It was special, yes. The dream of Creation that glows at the edge of the serious traveler’s search.20

Ironically, his detachment from the native people and immersion in the comfort and luxury of his hotel suite make him feel that he knows what it is to be in the world. The couple are relieved when they arrive at the hotel suite that represents for them an idealized nature. In The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx comments on American writers’ representation of culture as a “vivid contrast” to nature’s “sense of all encompassing harmony and peace.”21 He explains that this contrast is “a variation upon the contrast between two worlds, one identified with rural peace and simplicity, the other with urban power and sophistication.”22 We see this idea complicated in the story, as the “nature” the narrator experiences at the hotel is sanitized, Disney-fied; it is a product of economic power and affluent society, yet it is in this artificial environment where he feels peaceful. On the other hand, the other more rural parts of the island that the couple encounter represent conflict and chaos for them, reversing Marx’s dichotomy between culture and nature. Interestingly, the narrator himself notes, this is not nature in its pristine form. He admits, “I wasn’t foolish enough to think I was in the lap of some primal moment.”23 He says he would not consider such a thing, yet he clearly feels it. This scene makes palpable the distinction between space and place as defined by Walter: “a place is immediate, concrete, particular, bounded, finite, unique. Abstract space is repetitive and uniform.”24 While the pool suite at the hotel may appear to be more finite, concrete, and immediate than the natural environment described earlier, the space is clearly repetitive and uniform. There are other pool suites and there are other hotels with similar design although these spaces are created to make a person feel as though he or she is in touch with nature and at a primal moment of Creation. But it is an empty space. The narrator’s joy in his removal from the reality of the island and into this constructed idyll demonstrates a purposeful disconnection from others. It is no coincidence that it is at the suite that he breaks his marriage vows with no apparent guilt or reservations. Displaced, he appears to have moved himself into a moral vacuum. The difference between an expressive place and an abstract space, touched upon in “Creation,” is emphasized in the next story in part I of Esmeralda,



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“Human Moments in World War III.”25 Here, DeLillo’s emphasis on place and its impact on human perceptions, feelings and sense of self are demonstrated through the comments and thoughts of the narrator and his partner Vollmer, two World War III soldiers orbiting the earth in a space craft and gathering intelligence. The story is filled with meditations about life on earth and its impact on the psyche. The men are removed from any physical contact with the earth and yet they seek “human moments” to make them feel as if they have a connection. As the story progresses, there is a change in Vollmer as the narrator describes him. At first, he seems young, naïve, and still seriously connected to the life he has left behind. He brings artifacts with him, including rocks from the soil of his hometown. He also remembers details of his childhood experiences, and these experiences are emphasized through the place in which they occurred, Minnesota. Significantly, “he feels he can see himself there.”26 Vollmer reflects on the physical experiences and sensations of life on earth and his memories are not abstract occurrences, but are tightly bound to his place of origin. However, as he spends more time away from earth, his place connection as well as his sense of self becomes more abstract. He focuses on large geographic areas, stating “It’s almost unbelievable when you think of it, how they live there in all that ice and sand and mountainous wilderness.”27 He talks about immanent natural disasters and the power of storms in the landscape but his discussion of people is abstract, referring to the cities’ “crime and violence” and the respiratory disorders from the “smoke pall hanging low.”28 At the end of the story, we learn that “Vollmer has entered a strange phase. He spends all his time at the window now, looking down at the earth. He says little or nothing.”29 The narrator tells us that Vollmer has become consumed by the vision of the earth, and he believes his partner’s obsession accrues because “the view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.”30 The narrator explains that the view answers all questions and quells all desires: “all these are satisfied, all collected and massed in that living body, the sight he sees from the window.”31 In other words, Vollmer’s final words reduce all the complexity of life on earth to a mere visual stimulation. He finally speaks to say, “It is just so interesting […] the colors and all.”32 Similar to the situation of the narrator in “Creation,” Vollmer’s removal from real physical places diminishes his connection to other human beings. For him, the removal from earth into a condition that is ultimately placeless has reduced Vollmer’s thinking to very rudimentary perceptions and ideas. The story had begun with Vollmer’s attempts to use metaphor and imagery to describe the earth: “a library globe or a map that has come alive, as a cosmic eye staring into deep space” and these descriptions include a sense of the earth as a place with history and meaning.33 But his removal from terra firma

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and from the “human moments” experienced on it reduces the earth to a spectacular vision of colors and nothing more. Placelessness, as it were, trivializes his humanity and diminishes his identity. Such a view of earth calls to mind Claudius Ptolemy’s Geographic Guide, written during the second century A.D. Ptolemy begins with a distinction between geography and chorography. E.V. Walter explains: Ptolemy shows us that places may be represented by two different methods, but the mathematician and the artist stand for two great perspectives. They reflect [a] distinction between symbolic forms: on the one hand, a logical, geometric, scientific worldview, the domain of precise determination and rational knowledge; on the other hand, the realm of imagery, myth, magic, religion and artistic imagination. Moreover, places are not only represented but also shaped by these two different principles: geometric rationalization on the one hand; indeterminate expressive energies on the other—the logic of space or the spirit of place.34

The two men orbiting earth seek human moments not just because they are isolated from other people—they can communicate with others via radio and even receive broadcasts from earth—but because they are literally, physically isolated from any expressive place. They are outside of history and time. In the beginning of Vollmer’s service, he gets excited when the place he sees on the earth below matches the map he has of the earth—Ptolemy’s mathematical version of place. The map is representational, but since he can hold it and feel it, the representation becomes more tangible and thus more alluring than the earth itself. Eventually, though, all his psychological and physical connections to the earth fade away as he loses contact with life at home. This reaction relates to the inability of maps to truly represent a place in all its meaning. Being removed from earth makes Vollmer lose his sense of place as an active receptacle and to see it as a mere object composed of “colors and all.” Significantly, as he loses his sense of place, he loses his sense of self. He loses his humanity. In part II of Angel Esmeralda, the way in which the characters engage or disengage from their physical environment, including the people and culture of the place, also affects the way the characters see themselves. The main character in The Runner is an example of a DeLillo character, like James Axton of The Names or Nick Shay from Underworld, who attempts to stay detached and distanced from the expressive energy of his place.35 The story begins with a detailed description of a runner in motion, who notes landmarks and people at each turn of the loop he follows, as well as his body’s responses to the physical strain of the exercise. As he runs, all the things he sees are described in an equally flat, observational tone: a little girl and her father on a bridge feeding ducks, an old couple gathering up their newspaper from a bench, purple loosestrife coming into bloom, and a car “bouncing onto the



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sloped lawn” heading toward a woman and child sitting on the grass.36 Despite the fact that the runner senses “a disturbance back there,” and sees that the woman is “in distress,” he still concentrates on running, thinking he will do four more laps.37 The reader can interpret this banal observation and focus on the running as a metaphoric retreat from the matrix of energies of the place. His detachment is even more intense than that of James Axton, who believes that tourists are immune from accountability: “together with thousands you are granted immunities and broad freedoms.”38 But the runner is not a tourist; he lives across the street. He reluctantly stops when confronted by his neighbor’s friend, who tells him that the car came onto the field, a man jumped out and grabbed a child, and then he drove off, leaving the mother screaming for her stolen baby.39 The runner asks how she knows it was the father and the woman responds, “it’s all around us, isn’t it? They have babies before they’re ready. They don’t know what they’re getting into. It’s one problem after another. Then they split up or the father gets in trouble with the police. Don’t we see it all the time?”40 The woman removes herself and the runner from the “they” in her description, distancing herself from the crime, even though it happened in the park across the street from her friend’s building. She demonstrates the idea that “[a]dvantaged groups (and individuals) seek to put distance between themselves and the less advantaged. The very idea of ‘neighborhood’ is not inherent in any arrangement of streets and houses, but is rather an ongoing practical and discursive production/­imagining of a people.”41 This kind of discourse can and often does eliminate Walter’s “topistic consciousness,” an awareness of a place in all its complexity, and overlooks or ignores real events and people in order to maintain the sanitized vision of a locale. Neither the woman nor the runner comes from a lower-income family, so they believe they are invulnerable to such a crime. The runner and his interlocutor demonstrate the same insular mentality in that, after a police officer tells him that the man was not a complete stranger to the woman, he nevertheless looks for his neighbor’s friend in order to lie to her. “You had it just about totally right,” he says, thus perpetuating her sense of protection from the crime. As he states this comforting lie, the runner “had a sudden sense of himself, rank and panting, cartoonish in orange shorts and a torn and faded top, and he felt a separation from the scene, as if he were watching from a place of concealment.”42 He has an epiphany of self, but a self completely disconnected from the place to which he should feel attached. The story ends with the runner riding the elevator “up alone through the heart of the building.”43 The unnamed protagonist is representative of the “men in small rooms” present in other DeLillo fiction. The scene at the park drew him into culture—the matrix of energies—but he willfully withdraws, and aligns himself with the type of DeLillo character whom Curtis Yehnert describes as “striv[ing] not to forge their souls in agonistic struggle, but to

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deceive, forget, flee themselves, who seek not to discover but to eliminate their inwardness.”44 The runner self-servingly achieves order by playing into the media image of the lower-income family the woman projected earlier in the story. In so doing, he is able to separate himself from the scene, to escape chaos and randomness. His willful dismissal of the reality of his neighborhood brings him a sense of safety and offers freedom from responsibility. His psychological and moral displacement relates back to the characters in “Creation” and “Human Moments” who also avoid responsibility through their detachment from place. The main character in The Ivory Acrobat stands in contrast to the runner; Kyle is immersed in the culture and society of the place where she lives, Athens, Greece.45 Published six years after The Names, The Ivory Acrobat also features a main character living abroad in Greece. However, unlike James Axton—who desires to be a perennial tourist, never learns the language, and avoids intimacy with native Athenians—Kyle walks the streets of the city, and after an earthquake “wondered what she could say to [the woman selling eggs] that might make them both feel better, in her fairly decent Greek.”46 Despite her initial engagement with the place and its people, after the earthquake she begins to lose her sense of place, and its relation to her own history. While she remains physically unharmed, the quake metaphorically disconnects her from the place and fragments her sense of being. She tells her colleague Edmund that she liked it in Athens, “at least until now. The trouble with now is that we could be anywhere. The only thing that matters is where we’re standing when it hits.”47 Her sense of place becomes elusive. She feels that she “was deprived of the city itself” and notes that “we could be anywhere, any lost corner of Ohio.”48 Her embrace of the expressive energies of this place loosens as she becomes increasingly fearful of another earthquake occurring. What finally offers a sense of comfort and protection is a gift from Edmund—a “reproduction of an ivory figurine from Crete, a bull leaper, female, her body deftly extended with tapered feet nearing the topmost point of a somersaulting curve.”49 The attraction for Kyle is that it is Minoan Art. Minoans are “outside a knowable past, some shared theater of being […] lost across vales of language and magic, across cosmologies.”50 Because of its removal from history, language, and culture, Kyle is able to lose herself in the piece. She feels that “her self-awareness ended where the acrobat began.”51 She begins to carry it everywhere. Kyle desires to escape an acute sense of self; she desires an end to self-awareness. She constantly sees herself in the third person, standing over her food, waiting for another quake, and picturing herself as “a vague gray oval, floating over the room” as she experiences another quake.52 The acrobat appeals to her because it offers a sense of freedom from self-awareness. To identify with the acrobat is to identity with



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someone who is not in physical connection to any knowable place; it has no knowable history and Kyle has no sense of the language or the culture that created it. The piece of art represents for Kyle a separation from any particular place and therefore a freedom from self-awareness. The third story in this section, “The Angel Esmeralda,” also presents place awareness and demonstrates most effectively the way place informs a sense of self in relation to the world.53 It begins with the old nun Sister Edgar rising from bed, acutely aware of the aches and pains of her body and looking outside to think: “that’s the world out there, little green apples and infectious diseases.”54 It’s made clear early in the story that Sister Edgar suffers from mysophobia. She wears latex gloves so that she doesn’t come in contact with other people’s skin and wonders how to disinfect the bleach bottle she uses to disinfect other items. Despite her syndrome, she frequently travels with another nun, Sister Gracie, into the South Bronx to work with Ismael Munoz—a former renowned graffiti artist who is afflicted with AIDS—in order to deliver food to the indigent. They walk through buildings filled with garbage, decay, and disease, but here, the scenes of poverty, charity, and resistance exemplify the significance of place in DeLillo’s writing. DeLillo describes the section of the South Bronx as “a landscape of vacant lots filled with years of stratified deposits—the age of house garbage, the age-of-construction debris and vandalized car bodies. Many ages layered in waste.”55 DeLillo’s reference to the various layers in the landscape is an acknowledgment of his topistic consciousness. Through its decay, DeLillo emphasizes its history. Its residents refer to the place as The Bird, “short for bird sanctuary, a term that referred in this case to a tuck of land sitting adrift from the social order.”56 The people who live in The Bird demonstrate the viability of Gieryn’s point: “Without naming […] identification, or representation by ordinary people, a place is not a place.”57 The naming of this place by the poor and the homeless, and the uses they find for it emphasize the significance of place: “Places are endlessly made, not just when the powerful pursue their ambition through brick and mortar, not just when design professionals give form to function, but also when ordinary people extract from continuous and abstract space a bounded, identified, meaningful, named, and significant place.”58 The residents name the place, and add meaning and significance to it through the creation of a memorial. Through death-defying rappels from the roof, Ismael Munoz and his helpers spray paint angels on the wall below to represent the neighborhood children who have been killed or have died of diseases and afflictions of the poor. This graffiti wall is significant in demonstrating the human connection to place. Walter discusses how graffiti expresses subjective experience and represents the particulars of a place. Walter explains that those who manage the poor spaces would prefer to have these spaces “neutral, invisible, and

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inexpressive,” but “the artists of the vulgus, by covering the surface with monuments of the experience within and making an emotional impact that forces outsiders to turn away, claim the power to represent their own subjective space. They modify their topistic diet by painting the walls with marks, stains, names, and symbols.”59 We see in Munoz’s memorial an attempt to render visible the pain and hardship of the children who live here. They may be overlooked by the media and politicians, but their struggles are announced on this wall, making their lives—and deaths—visible to all who see it. The painters announce themselves and their individual existences in the place where they live. They create an expressive space. DeLillo emphasizes that the lives within The Bird are invisible to outsiders when the two nuns witness a tour bus with a sign reading “SOUTH BRONX SURREAL” stuck to its window. Gracie screams at the European tourists, “It’s not surreal. It’s real, it’s real. You’re making it surreal by coming here. Your bus is surreal. You’re surreal.”60 Gracie’s indignation is due to her recognition of the lives within The Bird. Her interactions with the people who live within its decaying walls demonstrate to her the reality of the place and relate to Walter’s “expressive space” that refers not only to the physical location of a place, but also its myths and fantasies and the way humans interact with and perceive that locale.61 DeLillo gives voice to those myths and interactions when he chooses to present the miracle of the appearing face of Esmeralda, the homeless girl who was raped and thrown off a roof, in a setting that would be intensely familiar to him. The imagery, precision, and beauty of DeLillo’s language are strongest when he’s describing the Bronx, the place from where he originates. He describes the locale as, a windy place between bridge approaches […] a traffic island in the bottommost Bronx where the expressway arches down from the terminal market and the train yards stretch toward the narrows, all that industrial desolation that breaks your heart with its fretful Depression beauty—the ramps that shoot tall weeds and the old railroad bridge spanning the Harlem River, an openwork tower at either end, maybe swaying slightly in persistent wind.62

We can see in this description the manifestation of the “expressive place” that Walter refers to; it exudes a sense of a history and a culture of grand plans and great failures. It ties together the natural with the man-made. The image of Esmeralda had to appear precisely here, in part because this place has a strong impact on Sister Edgar. She becomes a changed woman in this place at this time. The nun describes the residents of this place as “working women, shopkeepers, maybe some drifters and squatters but not many,” people to whom she formally felt no connection.63 After she sees the image, Edgar moves closer to the image and into the crowd, overcoming her mysophobia. As she



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moves through the press, the people “saw her and embraced her and she let them.” She sees the image again and “felt something break upon her […] she embraced Sister Jan. They shook hands, pumped hands with great-bodied women who rolled their eyes to heaven […] she thumped a man’s chest with her fists.”64 She becomes one with these people: Everything felt near at hand, breaking upon her, sadness and loss and glory and an old mother’s bleak pity and a force at some deep level of lament that made her feel inseparable from the shakers and mourners, the awestruck who stood in tidal traffic—she was nameless for a moment, lost to the details of personal history, a disembodied fact in liquid form, pouring into the crowd.65

It is significant that Edgar becomes “nameless” and “disembodied” when her “personal history” is removed.66 Her dispersion into the crowd suggests that what replaces her personal history is a cultural or societal history inseparable from place. Sister Edgar embraces the history of pain and faith that is felt by the neighborhood people, everyone present at the site of the miracle, the ones who knew Esmeralda for years. The momentary loss of herself results in Edgar gaining a deeper understanding by connecting with others. Earlier in the story, when asked by Gracie why she doesn’t move upstate and do “development work for the order,” Edgar thinks, “this is the truth of the world, right here, her soul’s own home, herself— she saw herself, the fraidy-child who must face the real terror of the streets to cure the linger of destruction inside her.”67 She does her work as some sort of penance, yet has been missing a connection to the Bronx because she does not connect with the people. We learn, “Edgar stopped hitting children when the neighborhood changed and the faces of her students became darker. […] how could she strike a child that was not like her?”68 Then, after the rape of Esmeralda, she is even more estranged. Edgar cannot bear to face the neighborhood residents: “when Gracie and the crew took food into the projects, Edgar waited in the van, she was the nun in the van, unable to face the people who needed reasons for Esmeralda.”69 Walter explains that “the quality of a place depends on a human context shaped by memories and expectations, by stories of real and imagined events—that is, by the historical experience located there.”70 Until her experience at the billboard, where the image of Esmeralda’s face appears when the lights from the train hit it, Edgar seems disassociated from the quality of this place, seeing it as “the streets,” filled with people “not like her.” Whether the image was really a miracle or just a trick of light (as Edgar imagines Gracie would argue) is not important. Walter explains, we build a structure of consciousness by supporting the features of experience that we acknowledge. We make the obvious world by building it, and in

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constructing the world, we build ourselves, including the structure of consciousness. We build to support certain features of experience and to suppress others, and these decisions to acknowledge or deny them give form to the dominant structure of consciousness.71

Significantly, Sister Edgar acknowledges and keeps this experience as part of her structure of consciousness. She chooses to acknowledge the horrible rape of Esmeralda by remembering and cherishing her image and, most importantly, by seeing herself in Esmeralda. She discards the idea that the people here in the Bronx are “not like her.” After the billboard is painted over and the excitement wears off, the narrator asks what is remembered, whether “the power of transcendence lingers.” The answer for Edgar is “yes.” “Edgar held the image in her heart, the grained face on the lighted board, her virgin twin who was also her daughter.”72 Her vision of Esmeralda, shared by the people of the neighborhood, brings Edgar into union with them and makes a neighborhood child both her sister and her daughter. By connecting with its people and sharing their myths, she has come to embrace the spirit of the neighborhood. The Bronx is more than just a representation of danger for her now; it is an expressive place. And through this recognition, she gains a stronger sense of self. Similar to the characters in Creation and The Runner, those found in the last part of The Angel Esmeralda once again represent personalities “deceive, forget, flee themselves, who seek not to discover but to eliminate their inwardness to live on the surface,” as Curt Yehnert notes.73 However, in these latter stories, each protagonist comes to a clear recognition of self, which is brought on by his or her relation to place. Interestingly, the settings of these stories are mostly public, temporary, often impersonal spaces—a museum, a college, a prison— yet, they each have a powerful impact on or resonance for the characters. The first story in this part, “Baader-Meinhof,” is set primarily in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City where the protagonist views Gerhard Richter’s Baader-Meinhof Cycle.74 The unnamed main character meets a man here and takes him back to her apartment.75 There is some critical discussion of the implications of the artwork and the museum setting in this story; however, if we examine the story through the lens of place attachment, the woman’s relationship to her apartment becomes quite significant. We learn that she is admittedly “a nomad” since her failed marriage, suggesting that, like many other DeLillo characters, she attempts to lose herself by losing her sense of place. She lives “in a faded brick building whose limitations and malfunctions she’d come to understand as the texture of her life, to be distinguished from a normal day’s complaints.”76 The place represents her situation in life—it’s part of who she is, the “texture” of her current life, and that texture is purposely devoid of personal history. The studio apartment is



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described as mundane with a “bright Berber robe, the only object in the room of slight distinction.”77 Nevertheless, once she is faced with a trauma—when the man she meets at the museum threatens her with sexual violence and masturbates on her bed as she hides in the bathroom—“she saw everything twice now […] nothing was the same […] nearly everything in the room had a double effect—what it was and the association it carried in her mind.”78 Here we see that despite her attempts to live in an empty space, because it was her apartment, this space does have meaning; it is an expressive space. However, after the attempted rape, the place is now charged with negative associations that she cannot discard. Her desire to carve out a place of her own in an attempt to heal from her divorce is destroyed by a man who has designated a negative meaning onto her private space. Gieryn notes that “[p]lace attachments result from accumulated biographical experiences: we associate places with the fulfilling, terrifying, traumatic, triumphant, and secret events that happened to us personally there. The longer people have lived in a place, the more rooted they feel, and the greater their attachment to it.”79 Based on this theory, the man’s actions have ironically made her more attached to the place due to the traumatic event that occurs there. The protagonist was trying to avoid place attachment by being a “nomad” and having nothing personal in her home. But the man’s attack has made her realize that this type of detachment is impossible. The story ends with her return, the next morning, to the museum. It can be inferred that she anticipates the man would be there again. He is looking at the last painting in the series “called Funeral.”80 The story ends in the museum and the reader is left to decipher the reason for the woman’s return and for the emphasis on the Funeral painting. The only overt connection is that when viewing this work earlier, the woman believes she sees a cross at the top of the painting. From this image she feels, “right or wrong, that there was an element of forgiveness in the picture that the two men and the woman, terrorists, and Ulrike before them, terrorists, were not beyond forgiveness.”81 These thoughts are eerily echoed when the man, after threatening the woman and masturbating on her bed, leans against her bathroom door and pleads for forgiveness: “Forgive me […] I’m so sorry. Please. I don’t know what to say.”82 After he leaves, the woman hates the man for giving the objects in her room a meaning filled with vile significance, and she calls him a bastard to herself. But the reader is left to question if her return to the museum, where she knows she will encounter the man, suggests that she does forgive.83 It is an interesting question, especially when considering the publication of this story in 2002, its New York City setting, and the subject matter of terrorists in the paintings. Does her comment that the terrorists in this painting are not beyond forgiveness suggest that no one is beyond forgiveness? Or does the very idea of forgiveness of this man who violated her suggest that there are

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actions that are beyond forgiveness? DeLillo leaves this question for his readers to answer. Either way, the place of this story, post-9/11 New York City, is essential to its meaning. In “Midnight in Dostoevsky,” DeLillo presents Robby, a narrator who does not try to ground himself in place; instead he tries to know others through such a grounding.84 He feels he is firmly situated in an “obscure” location, describing it only as “a small town way upstate, barely a town, maybe a hamlet […] or just a whistle-stop […] filled with low skies and bare trees, hardly a soul to be seen.”85 The narrator’s phenomenological questioning of being is firmly attached to place. This place for him is not worth naming and is “obscure.”86 Consequently, Robby and his walking companion Todd refer to the residents of the town as souls: “this is how we spoke of the local people: they were souls, they were transient spirits.”87 The location seems groundless to Robby, and so the people have no real identity. That is, until Robby and Todd’s attention is caught and their imagination is sparked by an old man walking the streets. The boys attempt to construct an identity for the man, but it becomes clear that his identity is solely dependent on his place of origin. The second time they see him, Robby firmly concludes “he’s not from here […] he’s from somewhere in Europe.”88 The boys continue to look for the man when they go for their walks, riddling out his life-story. They find the house in which he lives. When Todd projects that the man sits on a bed in a barren bedroom, Robby wonders “if this was a space that Todd expected us to fill” with fictional stories about the man.89 During winter break, Robby stays on campus and one night he has an idea that the man comes from Russia and is the father of his philosophy professor, Ilgauskas. The professor is as mysterious to Robby as the old man is and it makes sense to him that they are connected. They both seem out of the ordinary in this nameless place. “Placelessness” allows them to forge whatever identity they want. When Todd returns to campus, they begin to fantasize about the connection between the two mysterious men, and through the claim of a fictional place of origin, the boys construct a whole identity for the perambulator, including the minute details of his life. He lives with his son and wife and their three children, he doesn’t speak much, he has an odor about him that none but one of the grandchildren notices, “he drinks coffee black, from a small cup, and spoons cereal out of a child’s bowl […] he never reads a newspaper,” etc.90 All these details are contingent on his place of origin, regardless of the fact that this place of origin is fictional. Robby’s need for this fabrication is demonstrated when Todd decides that it’s time for “the next step,” which is to talk to the man and to ask him a few questions. Robby argues, telling Todd that if they talk to him, “we kill the idea, we kill everything we’ve done.”91 He is fearful that the fiction he created will be destroyed if they ask the man for the truth. What they have done is



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constructed an idea of a man that Robby needs to believe in. In fact, he is so adamant about not destroying their story that when Todd tries to move toward the man in order to speak to him, Robby physically attacks him. Todd gets away and Robby then questions his violent reaction, wondering “what it was that caused this thing to happen. [Todd] only wanted to talk to the man.”92 The same question remains for the reader: why is Robby so intent on keeping the fictional history he has created? The answer may be that Robby feels more attached to Dostoevsky’s Russia than to his current location. Dostoevsky’s Russia is where existential longing belongs. Yet this realm is fictional and in some ways, not related to the specifics of place, just as the college town where Robby temporarily resides is unnamed. It’s just “way upstate.”93 But during the winter break, he had remained on campus and spent his time reading Dostoevsky. But it is more than reading that he does: “we seemed to assimilate each other, the characters and I, and when I raised my head I had to tell myself where I was.”94 It’s almost as if he feels his own place is in the novels, in the Russian setting where these characters reside, reacting to his own lack of home and family setting. “I knew where my father was—in Beijing, trying to wedge his securities firm into the Chinese century. My mother was adrift, possibly in the Florida Keys.”95 In reaction to his own homelessness, he finds a sense of place and self when reading Dostoevsky. Perhaps this is why he is so compelled to place the old man in Russia and so fearful for that fantasy to be destroyed. Edward Casey explains the emotional symptoms of placelessness: “homesickness, disorientation, depression, desolation.”96 Robby exhibits these characteristics, his disorientation manifest in the final scene, when he “couldn’t make sense of it” and feels “completely detached.”97 Many of DeLillo’s novels present similarly placeless characters (e.g., David Bell from Americana, Gary Harkness from End Zone, and an assortment of characters from Underworld).98 However, these characters remain attached to some sense of their place of origin or departure, most often in their memories of home. Casey explains this desire for place: “as Freud, Bachelard, and Proust all suggest, to re-find place—a place we have always already been losing—we may need to return, if not in actual fact then in memory or imagination, to the very earliest places we have known.”99 Robby has no such hometown, he has no place to call home, no sense of origin or belonging; he therefore remains utterly placeless and seeks meaning by attaching someone else, the old man, to a specific place of origin. The narrator in the penultimate story in the collection, “Hammer and Sickle,” also has no place to call home, but for much different reasons. The story begins: “we walked across the highway bridge, thirty-nine of us in jumpsuits and tennis sneakers with guards front and back and at the flanks, six in all,” firmly placing the story in some sort of prison, but also starting

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with attention to physicality, the walking, the outfits, the formation of men.100 The narrator pays attention to his senses and uses them to enter the world beyond his physical limits: “Beneath us the cars were blasting by, nonstop, their speed magnified by our near vantage and by the sound they made passing under the low bridge […] each time we walked across the overpass I wondered again who those people were, the drivers and passengers, so many cars, the pressing nature of their passage, the lives inside.”101 In this low-security, white-collar crime prison called a camp, the narrator searches for meaning and a sense of belonging in the world. The story ends where it begins, on the overpass to the parkway. The narrator slips out of bed at predawn to sneak out of the camp, stand on the overpass, and watch the cars. This encounter with physical reality confirms his existence within an enduring capitalist system. As he watches the vehicles pass underneath, he marvels at how they can all move so easily, that there aren’t more accidents when it all depends on fallible human manipulation to keep things running smoothly. Then he thinks, “this is civilization […] the thrust of social and material advancement, people in motion, testing the limit of time and space. Never mind the festering stink of burnt fuel, the fouling of the planet.”102 This traffic is part of the real world, damaging it, but unstoppable. He concludes with an assertion of his identity. The drivers underneath may look up and wonder who he is and what is he doing there. The answer: “he is Jerold Bradway […] and he is breathing the fumes of free enterprise forever.”103 Bradway’s assertion of self is linked to place in a broader context; his place is America. In his reading of Don De­Lillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future,” Sven Cvek argues: DeLillo suggests that it is precisely the ability to accommodate all cultural difference that distinguishes “us” from “them.” Coming to the heart of the globalized world from outside, the terrorists are defined by their enmity towards the multicultural project that is emblematic of a global, cosmopolitan society. The ruins of the World Trade Center and the colorful streets of New York City are for DeLillo the sites of reconstruction of a traumatized national polity based on an unconditional accommodation of difference, a multiculturalism that is itself emblematic of globalization. Here, once again, we witness the discursive conflation of the United States and globalization.104

Despite its post-9/11 publication date and setting, there is no mention or allusion to terrorism in “Hammer and Sickle.” Instead, the narrative harkens back to the Cold War dichotomy of “us” and “them” as represented by the Soviet Union and the United States, communism versus capitalism. Taking place in a prison filled with men who have made millions illegally by cheating unfortunate others, the story nevertheless suggests the strength of America’s capitalist system. Although it is often corrupt and inequitable, it is inseparable



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from the freedoms and diversity America also offers. When Jerold removes himself from the prison filled with millionaire criminals, he places himself in the “real” America, an overpass of a highway where people are driving to work early in the morning. In this location, he is brought to an awareness of others that has been absent up to this point. He thinks about “the fundamental differences among drivers, sex, age, language, temperament, personal history.”105 The differences among people are what brings him to his final affirmation of self and the system of “free enterprise” which will “forever” remain despite its faults. The story at once lauds and criticizes America. The final story of the collection, “The Starveling,” is about a man called Leo Zhelezniak who lives to view movies.106 The movie theater, like the museum, college, and prison from the other stories in this section, are all temporary, shared spaces. From morning till night, Leo does nothing but navigate around Manhattan to see one film after another, making his frame of reference a fictional construction of place. Leo clearly suffers from a psychiatric disorder: he remembers important events in his life in relation to what film he saw at the time. Walter explains that psychiatric patients searching for an identity express the old question asked by Oedipus: “‘Who am I?’ But the next Oedipal question, ‘Where do I belong?,’ does not find any ground in psychoanalytic theory, which constructs the mind as its own place.”107 “The Starveling” emphasizes the significance of this second question. It begins, “when he started […] he lived in one room […] this is where he belonged,” emphasizing how the protagonist, at first, had a strong sense of how a place fits a person.108 But he is uneasy with his own identity. “His name was Leo Zhelezniak. It took half a lifetime before he began to fit into the name. Did he think there was a resonance in the name, or a foreignness, a history, that he could never earn?”109 At times, he tries to find his identity through films: [H]e imagined himself being foreign, walking stooped and unshaven along the sides of buildings […]. He could see himself in another life, some nameless city in Belarus or Romania. […] He saw himself walking past cafés in black-andwhite cities, with trolley cars going past, and lipsticked women in pretty dresses. These visions would fade in seconds but in a curious way, a serious way, they had the density of a lifetime compressed.110

Zhelezniak imagines a sense of self that is firmly attached to a place, yet the place is drawn from movie images; it’s not real. This fiction is similar to Robby’s in “Midnight,” who imagines himself living within novels and is suggestive of Jerold Bradway’s condition in “Hammer” who is immersed in the Marketplace and the television broadcasts of his children. Nevertheless, for Zhelezniak, identity has everything to do with place. This idea is further demonstrated when he begins to track a woman whom he believes to be a

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fellow obsessive movie-watcher. As he follows her, he constructs a life-story. However, Leo becomes confused and disoriented by a subway ride out of Manhattan and into the Bronx; the residence of the woman he follows makes him wonder, “did it contradict everything he’d come to believe about her?”111 Similar to Robby’s idea of the old man in “Dostoevsky,” the life Leo makes up for this woman and her personality is contingent on where she lives. Toward the end of the story, he discovers “the crux of being who he was and understanding why he needed this” total immersion into film, and it has to do with the safety of the image versus the dangers of living in the real world. “[He was] bare-faced, bare-souled, and maybe this is why [he was] here, to be safe. The world was up there, framed, on the screen, edited and corrected and bound tight, and [he was] here, where [he] belonged, in the isolated dark, being what [he was], being safe.”112 The movie theater is a place that offers comfort because it is not an actual place; he therefore does not need to know himself or deal with the chaos of life that occurs in the real world; it is a way to avoid the self by avoiding any real expressive place. Shortly after this epiphany, he follows the woman into the ladies’ room and checks that it is empty. He senses that his actions are threatening, that he has gone in there to touch her, as he thought about doing earlier while in the theater. As he faces her, he has no sense of himself: “he tried to imagine what he looked like to her, man of some size, some years, but what did he look like to anyone? He had no idea.”113 He has neglected the real world for too long to enter it now. His attempt to reach out to this woman, through stalking her and threatening her, is a result of his place detachment; he lives in the movies and therefore sees himself only as an actor. When he faces off with her, his only thought is “neither person moved,” referring to himself in the third person. When he speaks, his comments are about the films he has seen and the movie theaters he has seen them in. He tells her that his “memory’s shot.”114 As a result of his purposeful placelessness, he has become empty with no memory or sense of self. Literary analyses of contemporary and postmodern fiction have often referred to the end of the significance of place. However, in a 1982 interview, DeLillo asserts its significance: [S]o much modern fiction is located precisely nowhere. […] Fiction without a sense of real place is automatically a fiction of estrangement, and of course this is the point. As theory it has its attractions, but I can’t write that way myself. I’m too interested in what real places look like and what names they have. Place is color and texture. It’s tied up with memory and roots and pigments and rough surfaces and language, too.115

A close look at the collection of stories in The Angel Esmeralda, which span the decades (1979–2011), demonstrates the ongoing significance of place to



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society, to literature, and to DeLillo. Walter argues that “Sophocles, in the Oedipus tragedies, explored the mythology of place as the expression of a profound need and as an effective reality as well. The wisdom in his last play responded to the Delphic maxim, ‘Know thyself,’ with the message that to know yourself you must know your place.”116 DeLillo’s body of work in The Angel Esmeralda sends the same message. Many of the characters in this collection become acutely aware of themselves by acknowledging their connection to place, or they actively and purposely avoid knowing themselves through a deliberate disengagement with their physical environment. The stories stress the importance of place on forming identity, establishing empathy for others, and comprehending our culture. NOTES 1. E.V. Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1988), 492. 2. Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). 3. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 13–14. 4. Ibid., xiv. 5. Ibid., 31. 6. Charles Molesworth “Don DeLillo’s Perfect Starry Night” in Introducing Don DeLillo, ed. Frank Lentricchia (Durham: Duke University, 1991), 143; Don DeLillo, Libra (New York: Viking, 1988); Ratner’s Star (New York: Knopf, 1976); Players (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1989). 7. Molesworth, 143; Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street (New York: Penguin, 1973). 8. Don DeLillo, Americana. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971); The Names (New York: Vintage, 1989) 3; Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997). 9. Walter, “Placeways,” 9. 10. Ibid., 3. 11. See Elise Martucci for a discussion of the environmental themes in some of DeLillo’s major novels. Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo (New York: Routledge, 2007). 12. Joseph Dewey, Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo (University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 8. 13. Don DeLillo, “Creation,” in Esmeralda, 33–23. 14. Walter, 9. 15. Don DeLillo, “Creation,” 3. 16. Walter, 3–4. 17. Don DeLillo, “Creation,” 8. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid.

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20. Ibid., 8–9. 21. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 13. 22. Ibid., 19. 23. Don DeLillo, “Creation,” 8. 24. Walter, 143. 25. Don DeLillo, “Human Moments in World War III,” in Esmeralda, 25–44. 26. Ibid., 38. 27. Ibid., 39. 28. Ibid., 40. 29. Ibid., 43. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 44. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 25. 34. Walter, “Placeways,” 115. 35. Don DeLillo, “The Runner,” in Esmeralda, 47–54; The Names (New York: Knopf, 1982); Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997). 36. Don DeLillo, “Runner,” 47. 37. Ibid., 48. 38. Don DeLillo, Names, 44. 39. Don DeLillo, “Runner,” 49. 40. Ibid. 41. Thomas F. Gieryn, “A Space for Place in Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 472, accessed October 26, 2013, JSTOR. 42. Don DeLillo, “Runner,” 53. 43. Ibid., 54. 44. Curtis A. Yehnert, “’Like Some Endless Sky Waking Inside’: Subjectivity in Don DeLillo.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 42, no. 4 (2001): 5. 45. DeLillo, “The Ivory Acrobat,” in Esmeralda, 55–72. 46. Ibid., 61. 47. Ibid., 65. 48. Ibid., 70. 49. Ibid., 65. 50. Ibid., 72. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 68. 53. DeLillo, “The Angel Esmeralda,” in Esmeralda, 73–102. 54. Ibid., 73. 55. Ibid., 75. 56. In some senses this lot of land, filled with decades of debris, represents nature in a way that other areas of the Bronx do not. It is filled with wildlife: weeds, trees, dogs, hawks, owls, and vermin. The Angel Esmeralda raises the issue of environmental degradation much more overtly than the others in the collection. Of course, it is an excerpt from Underworld, the most overtly environmental text DeLillo has written.



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57. Gieryn, 465. 58. Ibid., 471. 59. Walter, “Placeways,” 153. 60. Don DeLillo, “Esmeralda,” 85. 61. Walter, 9. 62. Don DeLillo, “Esmeralda,” 94. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., 99. 65. Ibid., 99–100. 66. Ibid., 98. 67. Ibid., 87. 68. Ibid., 74. 69. Ibid., 93. 70. Walter, 117. 71. Ibid., 13–14. 72. Don DeLillo, “Esmeralda,” 101. 73. Yehnert, “Endless Sky,” 5. 74. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” in Esmeralda, 105–118. 75. This story, published in 2002, is strikingly similar to DeLillo’s Point Omega (New York: Scribner, 2010). The exhibition which bookends the story is different, but both invoke a sense of violence and “helplessness.” The chance meeting here gives way to an actual scene of aggression while in Point Omega, DeLillo only hints at the result of the museum encounter and the reader must draw inferences from the rest of the novel. 76. Don DeLillo, “Baader,” 112. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., 117. 79. Gieryn, 481. 80. Don DeLillo, “Baader,” 118. 81. Ibid., 109. 82. Ibid., 117. 83. See Crawford for an insightful discussion of the meaning of the paintings and the idea of forgiveness in this story. Karin Crawford, “Gender and Terror in Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 and Don DeLillo’s ‘Baader-Meinhof,” in New German Critique, no. 107 (2009): 207–230. 84. Don DeLillo, “Midnight in Dostoevsky,” in Esmeralda, 119–145. 85. Ibid., 119. 86. Ibid., 134. 87. Ibid., 119. 88. Ibid., 127. 89. Ibid., 130. 90. Ibid., 139. 91. Ibid., 143. 92. Ibid., 145. 93. Ibid., 119.

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94. Ibid., 135. 95. Ibid., 135. 96. Casey, x. 97. Don DeLillo, “Dostoevsky,” 145. 98. Don DeLillo, End Zone (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972). 99. Casey, x. 100. Don DeLillo, “Hammer and Sickle,” in Esmeralda, 147–181 101. Ibid., 147, emphasis added. 102. Ibid., 179. The reference here is about the marketplace, an interesting term because, like the Internet, it is not a place at all. The “virtual” nature of the marketplace suggests that its placelessness fosters a cavalier attitude toward real people who live there. There’s no sense of spatial reality and therefore no sense of the human beings who inhabit that space. 103. Ibid., 181. 104. Don DeLillo, “In the ruins of the future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September,” Harper’s (Dec. 2001), 33–40; Sven Cvek, “The Market Moves Us in Mysterious Ways: Don DeLillo on 9/11,” in Towering Figures: Reading the 9/11 Archive (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2011), 123–150. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 336 (Detroit: Gale, 2013), accessed Nov. 17, 2013. Literature Resource Center. 105. “Hammer,” 179. 106. DeLillo, “The Starveling,” in Esmeralda, 183–211. 107. Ibid. 114. 108. Ibid., 183. 109. Ibid., 186. 110. Ibid., 193. 111. Ibid., 202. 112. Ibid., 206. 113. Ibid., 207. 114. Ibid., 209. 115. Don DeLillo “An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview by Thomas LeClair, Contemporary Literature 23 (1982): 31. 116. Walter, “Placeways,” 114.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Casey, Edward S. Getting Back Into Place. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993. Crawford, Karin. “Gender and Terror in Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 and Don DeLillo’s ‘Baader-Meinhof,” in New German Critique, no. 107 (2009): 207–230. Cvek, Sven. “The Market Moves Us in Mysterious Ways: Don DeLillo on 9/11,” in Towering Figures: Reading the 9/11 Archive (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2011), 123–150. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Edited by Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 336 (Detroit: Gale, 2013), accessed Nov. 17, 2013.



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Don DeLillo, Americana. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. ———. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. ———. End Zone. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. ———. Great Jones Street. New York: Penguin, 1973. ———. “An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview by Thomas LeClair, Contemporary Literature 23 (1982): 31. ———. “In the ruins of the future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September,” Harper’s (Dec. 2001). ———. Libra. New York: Viking, 1988. ———. The Names. New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. Players. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1989. ———. Point Omega. New York: Scribner, 2010. ———. Ratner’s Star. New York: Knopf, 1976. ———. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. Dewey, Joseph. Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo. University of South Carolina Press, 2006. Gieryn, Thomas F. “A Space for Place in Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 463–496. Accessed October 26, 2013. http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/ abs/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.463?journalCode. Martucci, Elise. Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo. New York: Routledge, 2007. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Molesworth, Charles. “Don DeLillo’s Perfect Starry Night,” in Introducing Don DeLillo. Edited by Frank Lentricchia (Durham: Duke University, 1991). Walter, E.V. Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1988. Yehnert, Curtis A. “’Like Some Endless Sky Waking Inside’: Subjectivity in Don DeLillo.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 42, no. 4 (2001): 5.

Chapter 5

Mourning Becomes Electric Performance Art in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Falling Man Jacqueline A. Zubeck

The eponymous artists in The Body Artist and Falling Man demonstrate the nature of performance art—artistic form and aesthetic practice bodied forth in time and space in a live presentation, enacted within the very contours of the artist’s frame.1 Lauren Hartke, the Body Artist, and David Janiak, Falling Man, explore the impact of human tragedy and translate its unutterable incongruity and palpable significance into live performance, an event which calls forth vigorous demands on each one’s physical body. They bring to their work a cellular sentience, recounted in novels which are compressed and molded to the human form, taking shape according to the artists’ physical transformations. In this essay, I argue that Hartke and Janiak share what I consider to be Don DeLillo’s own standards of art and ethics—constancy to the artistic task at hand, a deliberate concentration on quotidian existence, and a sense of responsibility for one’s time-and-space coordinates in the everyday world. Anne Longmuir speaks to this intersection between art and ethics: “DeLillo has . . . always recognised that an effective political aesthetic must strive to maintain its autonomy while engaging directly with the culture in which it is produced.” This sensibility may be applied “to DeLillo’s own fiction, which has always striven . . . to be ‘equal to the complexities and excesses of the culture.’”2 In a similar vein, Mikhail Bakhtin speaks of an “attitude of consciousness” toward everyday life—the prosaic realm that the Russians refer to as “byt”—that urges a sense of “answerability” for one’s “unique place in Being” precisely because “[t]hat which can be done by me can never be done by anyone else.”3 DeLillo’s artist-heroes actively embody a sense of responsibility for their unique humanity and embrace the aesthetic-ethical construct that Bakhtin puts thusly: “I have to answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood in art, so that everything I have experienced and 107

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understood would not remain ineffectual in my life.”4 Klara Sax (Underworld) and Brita Nilsson (Mao II) are two DeLillo artists who exemplify this dynamic; they mine the riches of the quotidian and thus mold themselves ethically and aesthetically.5 Artists’ aesthetic and ethical positions are particularly important, because twenty-first-century art often considers the state of the union after 9/11 and the catastrophe which “broke the back of [this] American century.”6 Like the Holocaust, the terrorist acts of 9/11 provoke questions regarding the role of art in the wake of massive tragedy and moral abomination. Many critics cite the crisis of representation that follows 9/11. These questions attach themselves with particular emphasis to DeLillo’s work, perhaps because Mao II’s protagonist cavalierly asserts that “[t]here’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists” so that writers “become famous effigies as [their] books lose the power to shape and influence . . . to alter the inner life of the culture.”7 Oddly, DeLillo is often taken to task for this perspective, as if he espouses the thinking of his crippled author rather than narrates a trend in human culture.8 “[T]he world narrative is being written by men who orchestrate disastrous events, by military leaders, totalitarian leaders, terrorists, men dazed by power,” DeLillo explains to Adam Begley in an interview from 1993 but still pertinent: “[t]he novel’s not dead, it’s not even seriously injured.”9 Bill Gray comes to espouse this very point, after a series of events which bring him to consciousness. His extended conversation with photographer Brita Nilsson prompts him to look at himself as a man and as an artist and then, he “escapes his handlers,” as DeLillo puts it.10 In London, he pries a sliver of glass out of his hand after an explosion and this bodily assault prompts him to contemplate the physical actuality and painful vulnerability of the hostage Jean-Claude, held somewhere in Beirut. Later, Bill visits the terrorist-PR man George Haddad in Athens (a city which exemplifies enlightenment), and hears his own words in Haddad’s mouth. In response, Bill “found he was angry, unexpectedly.”11 Their conversation, circling around the troubling concept that “terror is the only meaningful act” crystalizes Bill’s thinking.12 The very idea that fiction is no longer viable or significant “begins to live . . . to take shape, to develop” and yields up its “various facts, nuances, [and] possibilities.”13 He suddenly realizes the implication of his earlier language and understands, clearly, that his dismissal of art and romanticization of terrorism are utterly wrong. Following this epiphany, Bill vigorously affirms that terrorism’s “absolute authority” cannot create art because “total control wrecks the spirit.” The novel, on the other hand, is “a democratic shout” and unlike terrorist acts, can accommodate “[a]mbiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints.”14 From this point, Bill backs up his words and heads to Beirut, unmediated and unmedicated, ready to offer himself as a more valuable hostage so that the unknown poet might go free.15



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What is the role of art in the post-9/11 world? DeLillo, in his December 2001 essay, “In the Ruins of the Future,” affirms that the terrorist’s “narrative ends in the rubble, and it is left to us to create the counter-narrative.”16 In the palpable absence of the Towers, “[t]he writer tries to give memory, tenderness, and meaning to all that howling space.”17 It is my contention that the two performance artists Lauren Hartke and David Janiak answer the call for a counter-narrative, and provide an artist’s “tenderness” and “meaning” to the “howling space” of disaster. The Body Artist addresses the unutterably solitary realm of widowhood-via-suicide and Falling Man, the public realm of localized national disaster. The artist-protagonists tell the tale by altering their own flesh in order to communicate to small, live audiences the nature of grief and the cellular impact of trauma—by transforming themselves into art. Taking insight from Cornel Bonca’s “How (and How Not) to Write About 9/11,” I would say that these artists function with a kind of silence, “a withdrawal into private space,” which Bonca describes using John Keats’ idea of Negative Capability: “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”18 Thus they ponder the mystery of death and loss and imply, like DeLillo himself, that there is “something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability.”19 It may be telling that both The Body Artist and Falling Man emphasize time and the physical body vis-à-vis characters who “died by their own hand.”20 In the abrupt and violent cessation of human life, a self-chosen finalization somehow rewrites a whole biography and forces a reconsideration of all aspects of a person’s life. Such deaths have a profound impact on survivors as well. We, the ones left behind, are somehow implicated, forced to look at ourselves and our own discouraging deficiencies in love and labor. Perhaps it is the hyperconsciousness that violent death creates in survivors that drives these artists to commemorate and acknowledge the dead, embodying the impact of loss in their own bodies. Performance art seems especially attuned to this call, and suggests DeLillo’s twenty-first-century choice of artist-character—for their disturbing live art reflects quotidian life in the new millennium. In The Body Artist, Lauren (“heart key”) Hartke lives intensely in the aftermath of her husband’s demise. Her already attuned attention is concentrated in the vise of grief, and bears down on the physical world with an intensified focus that becomes the source of Body Time, her performance piece. If “loss is the metonym of time” as Jesse Kavadlo rightly affirms, Lauren shows us the grieving widow’s temporal experience in the space of her own body, relative to the absence of her spouse.21 Widows in particular know the awful cellular vacuum accruing from the absence of marital intimacy—that howling inner space—manifested by the Body Artist as an attrition of the self,

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the body is severed from the oneness of marriage.22 A widowed spouse feels this absence in sentient consciousness, a phantom limb shadowed forth in the quotidian practice and cadence of the year, an experience that is “obscure, slow, difficult and sometimes agonizing.”23 By the time of the performance, Lauren’s dramatic physical transfiguration makes manifest the emotion that has left her pared down to lacerated sinew, her pumiced flesh and ragged hair the objective correlatives of her grief. She looks “well, wasted.”24 Like Lauren Hartke, David Janiak bears the brunt of his performance in his body as well. Janiak leaps from various New York City structures and endures the impact with particular agony along his deteriorating spine. Important to performance art, his method of expression is borne out in the presence of a live audience, who manifests the impact of the tragedy, and is brought to pity and fear within a performative space (an interaction that was the norm, as we know, for ancient Greek tragedy.) Falling Man’s torment communicates itself as wonder and horrified engagement for the audience who cannot turn away from his non-mediated performance. His vivid fall communicates to them and for them the pinprick particularity of the “worst day” and frames its tragic encounter by way of their own associations with 9/11.25 The palpable experience of theatre, translated in the novel as performance art, is perhaps the artistic genre most suitable to the sense of incarnation and particularity that DeLillo seeks to evoke. His artists’ “practiced and disciplined attention to the body” suggests that DeLillo thinks “carefully about embodied knowledge as potentially privileged,” an assertion that pertains to Falling Man’s performance, and in particular, Janiak’s allusion to one specific person who descended out of the Towers.26 Evoked by ekphrasis in the novel, the novel’s Falling Man recapitulates Richard Drew’s famous image of a human being in wildly incongruous descent, a photographic image that drew the most hostile reactions in September 2001 and seemed to initiate the strict, self-imposed censorship of all images of falling bodies that followed.27 One can certainly understand the impulse that demanded shelter from these pictures. Yet, as Tom Junod suggests, the picture of the man, “airbrushed from the day” seems to negate the “witness of these images.”28 Junod, a journalist who sought out the identity of the man in Drew’s photograph, found this erasure particularly painful and paradoxical, especially as the censorship that it entailed crept into the very Coroner’s Office, whence he was told that “nobody jumped.” Saddened by the dismissal of the real, Junod suggests that we might “accept the witness” of Drew’s photograph and its still-unidentified subject as something that exists as kin to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in which “one is made to stand for many.”29 The artist Falling Man strives to capture this particular person in his last moments, and transcribes that black-and-white figure into a living still-life. David Janiak animates the mise en abyme—the actual falling man, captured



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in Richard Gray’s photograph widely referred to as “The Falling Man” now depicted in performance art by Falling Man in the novel Falling Man. Anne Longmuir points out that Janiak’s “art presents a specific challenge to the narrative of terrorism that the American mainstream media disseminated in the years following September 11” and argues persuasively that DeLillo’s character “offers a strategy for re-imagining and re-presenting the attacks outside the boundaries established by the media and government.”30 It is through Janiak’s performance that “DeLillo once more specifically identifies art as a locus of resistance against dominant cultural narratives.”31 In his performance, Janiak brings the actual person and his awful descent back to the present tense, in the space of his own body in free fall. Like Morandi’s Natura Morta which also appears in the book, “it’s all about . . . [b]eing human, being mortal.”32 And, like the Body Artist’s work, “it is never the grand agony of stately images and sets. It is about you and me.”33 Thus we see Janiak in repeated witness of one man’s human dignity and ultimate vulnerability. One leg is cocked and he drops head first, “a falling angel,” “horrific” in “his beauty.”34 When Lianne Glenn reads his obituary toward the end of the novel, Falling Man’s name and background are made known. David Janiak’s education had begun at the “Institute for Advanced Theatre Training in Cambridge, Massachusetts” and continued in Moscow as well.35 DeLillo reproduces, practically verbatim, what was once found on the school’s website regarding course content for the American Repertory Theatre’s Acting Program in Cambridge, specifically its section on “Movement.”36 “Students at the Institute create their own movement vocabulary . . . Study includes psychophysical exercises, Meyerhold’s biomechanics, Grotowski training, Vakhtangov’s plasticity training . . . Dalcroze eurythmics, impulse work, slow motion, fencing, armed and unarmed stage combat.”37 Notable are the dramatic techniques, aesthetic philosophy, and rigorous physical training which translate prosaic consciousness into emotive power. In relation to these principles, Kristine Stiles introduces “Performance Art,” writing: [T]he artists who began to use their bodies as the material of visual art have repeatedly expressed their goal to bring art practice closer to life in order to increase the experiential immediacy of their work. Their powerful declaration of the body as form and content insisted on the primacy of human subjects over objects . . . . Emphasizing the body as art, these artists amplified the role of process over product and shifted from representational painting and sculpture into real time and movement in space.38

Artistic techniques listed in the novel are named for the artists, teachers, and directors who revolutionized training for actors. The techniques of Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940), Eugene Vakhtangov (1883–1922), and

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Michael Chekhov (1891–1955) emerged because “artists needed to move away from the mere ‘photographic’ representation of life by seeking truth in more inspiring ways.” They wanted to test the body and its limits in order to demonstrate the “undeniable connection between the body and psychology, movements and principles that generate various sensations and emotions,” according to the website of the school of acting named for Michael Chekhov (nephew of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov and student of Method Acting originator Constantine Stanislavski).39 The idea behind these psychophysical techniques relates to trusting the body to evoke and communicate emotion rather than drumming up emotion in the mind and then creating movement to complement it. It is a “physiological” approach rather than an “inspirational” approach, as one University of Iowa graduate student explains it.40 “Psychophysical exercise” considers the generic quality of movement, and attempts to “understand movement in an objective way, free from the personality.”41 Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999) argued that such techniques established “the actor’s expressive and imaginative freedom through the discipline of physical structure.” What is important is the escape from merely habitual response through a will to discipline oneself to be “fully in the immediate moment” as Alison Hodge explains. 42 One aspect of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s “motor-symbolism” that is particularly relevant to Falling Man is the director’s rejection of “conventional stage settings” and replaced by “[p]latforms on different levels, scaffolds, ramps, elevators, cranes, moving staircases, and revolving wheels.”43 If one has the opportunity to see an ensemble work through Meyerhold’s exercises and techniques, one is struck by the demands of strength and agility and sheer courage required for its demanding choreography. The stage itself is set in motion—a performance space which implies something about the human condition—and functions almost as a live component of the work. In Falling Man, the artist falls from New York City superstructures and demonstrates that the city itself—the symbolic center of global capitalism and the source of terrorist rage—is what his art depends on (or from). His performance style embodies “motor-symbolism” literally in that it is linked to the machinery of contemporary city life and tethered to his body. With a similar attention to the workings of the human figure and the symbolic value of physical action, we might also note the demands of Hartke’s practice routine, which she enacts naked in a cold room. Its overwrought repetition and painstaking rigor is found in “the gyrate exaggerations, the snake shapes and flower bends . . . . First breathe, then pant, then gasp. It made her go taut and saucer-eyed, arteries flaring in her neck.”44 Critic Mariela Chapman, in the review at the end of the novel, helps the reader to see Body Time’s seizure intensity, its far-flung physical hyperbole. “In a series of electro-convulsive motions, the body flails out of control, whipping and



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spinning appallingly.”45 Hartke’s lacerating performance shows us the extent of her trauma and its emotional impact on her day-to-day existence, also whipped and spun appallingly. Hartke seems to explore a version of Meyerhold’s biomechanics, as well, through a rigorous methodology which trains the performer to work with a “physical, spatial, and rhythmical vocabulary.” 46 Picture the Body Artist as she “stood and swung slowly about . . . half her body wheeling with the arc of the left arm . . . and the head cranking incrementally like the second hand on the missing watch.” Mariella Chapman reports, in her review: “The power of the piece is Hartke’s body” as she captures time as it might be experienced “[i]n dreams or high fevers or doped up or depressed. Hers is post-suicide time, when the clock “slow[s] down or seem[s] to stop” making manifest the temporal nature of grieving.47 Correctly, Laura DiPrete affirms: “DeLillo confers on corporeality a central role in his tale of loss and recovery. For DeLillo, it is as important to take notice of what transformed bodies, physical sensations, and corporeal performances tell us as of what actual voices say.” The Body Artist discovers that “the body knows about the truth of [a traumatic] experience long before the mind can process it” and “it is to her own body that she turns in her struggle for resistance and survival.”48 The performance artists’ prosaic attention to the body and reference to familiar time-and-space coordinates, as I noted in the introduction, is not simply a concern with the subject matter of art. Their artistic work relates specifically to an ethical attitude, an “answerability” which emerges in the intersection between art and morality. Bakhtin conceives of ethics as an art form in which we “undersign” our behavior as if it were a creative expression.49 Lauren Hartke may be tempted to throw herself into an abyss following Rey’s death: “Why shouldn’t the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin?” she speculates.50 Why, indeed. But she resists the lethargy of despair—that Rey could not—and endures a courageous self-examination. She holds herself responsible, not for Rey’s death, but her own late comprehension of love. “You don’t know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.”51 Body Time objectifies Lauren’s grief and depicts that scorching emotion in her flesh, a work in which she is neither distanced nor sparing of self. Lauren Hartke’s responsiveness to life and art, it is important to note, is related to love and seems to embody the beautiful insight that Bakhtin brings to aesthetics, with its careful attention to time and the mindfulness of the artist: The valued manifoldness of Being as human . . . can present itself only to a loving contemplation. Only love is capable of holding and making fast all this

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multiformity and diversity . . . without leaving behind a mere skeleton of basic lines and sense-moments . . . Lovelessness, indifference, will never be able to generate sufficient power to slow down and linger intently over an object, to hold and sculpt every detail and particular in it, however minute. Only love is capable of being aesthetically productive.52

This marvelous interweaving of aesthetic power and the ethical “ought” is an attitude that the Body Artist demonstrates throughout the novel.53 She does indeed linger intently, paying close attention to the elements of her world and her own place in it, moment to moment. Peter Boxall notes that Hartke proceeds “from an extraordinarily sharp and precise occupation of the fibres of passing time” because she is “marooned in a time which no longer passes or seems to pass.”54 David Cowart argues that, like the novel itself, Lauren’s performance piece Body Time “engage[s] time and its representation as the central artistic problem. Each artist devises strategies whereby time’s texture and duration may be perceived by the reader or viewer.”55 Thus, Lauren demonstrates how it feels to bear the gravity of the clock, as happenstance and grief linger in inescapable presence; she lingers intently, holding and sculpting every detail. In both novels, the performance artists’ perspectives are also framed and highlighted by characters who demonstrate a diminished self. Mr. Tuttle and Rey Robles are two such foils in The Body Artist. Mr. Tuttle speaks in aphasic language shook free of context and content, a character who exemplifies the effects of Rey Robles’s suicide. This strange little man, whom Lauren discovers living in her attic, speaks with a post-suicide syntax, and gives expression to the way that language has been made strange, decontextualized, and radically severed from the prosaic contexts in which it occurred. Mr. Tuttle represents Rey Robles—toppled, topped off, totaled, and his words echo inanely. Similarly, Falling Man explores the character of Keith Neudecker, gambler Terry Cheng, and art dealer Ernst Hechinger/Martin Ridnour who all proffer what Bakhtin calls an “alibi-in-Being.”56 Each functions with a duplicity that Keith refers to as being “double in himself.”57 In contrast to the various fallen men who populate the novel, Falling Man works with the Body Artist’s dedication and the same refusal to spare the self. He reproduces the terrifying leap of one World Trade Center victim, without benefit of an ameliorating shock absorber. The violent impact of his art is signified by “[t]he jolting end . . . [t]he jolt” so abrupt that Lianne Neudecker feels it in her own flesh.58 Performance artist and theorist Suzanne Lacy explains that performance art is conceived “in collaboration with [the] . . . audience.”59 Thus it seems appropriate that in this scene, Lianne experiences a renewed pity and fear in relation to the event which scarred the opening years of the American century. When she sees Falling Man “keel



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forward . . . headfirst,” she “felt her body go limp.”60 Afterward, the impact of the performance stays with her and she thought “of him back there, suspended, body set in place, and she could not think beyond this.”61 Janiak’s electrifying art responds powerfully to what DeLillo has called “the massive spectacle that continues to seem unmanageable, too powerful a thing to set into our frame of practiced response,” a reference found in his “[r]eflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September.”62 Janiak, as performance artist, takes on the wounded sensibility of Americans—particularly New Yorkers—and addresses the concerns that DeLillo voices in his Harpers essay, published three months “after the planes.”63 As such, Janiak renounces spectacle and the mediation that it demands, and harnesses his own body in a live performance, in order “to communicate with a[n] . . . audience about issues directly relevant to their lives.”64 As such, he demonstrates “the sensibility of [this particular historical] time,” a context that also “makes possible an assumption of the physical style” in the performance itself.65 Allan Kaprow, originator of 1960s Happenings (a precursor to performance art as we know it today), describes the prosaic attention that nourishes what he calls public art. Kaprow writes that public art “involves the artist’s disciplined effort to observe, engage, and interpret the processes of living, which are themselves as meaningful as most art, and certainly more grounded in common experience.”66 Like Andy Warhol making his audience look twice at a Campbell’s soup can and noticing its graphic interest, the creator of “lifeworks” impels the audience to regard everyday life as if it too were an art form. Editor Jeff Kelley explains: “For [Kaprow], the contents of everyday life—eating strawberries, sweating, shaking hands when meeting someone new—are more than merely the subject matter of art. They are the meaning of life.”67 The reader may recall the elements of Hartke’s Body Time and its everyday contents: the executive checking her watch and hailing a cab or the aphasic man “trying desperately to tell us something.”68 Lauren takes to heart this kind of prosaic experience and is “looking for analogues of art in nonart experience.”69 Significantly, Lauren’s performance piece also seems to incorporate DeLillo’s point regarding slowness and attention, found in a discussion about Point Omega. Inspired by Douglass Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, DeLillo tells Thomas DePietro that the bookend chapters of his 2010 novel depict Gordon’s version of the Alfred Hitchcock movie slowed to an entire day’s viewing, that is, running only two frames per second, rather than the conventional twenty-four. DeLillo explains its attraction: “With motion slowed so radically, one experiences another way to see, another way to think. Things seem intensely what they are, broken down into atoms, into motes of light, as if seen for the first time.”70 Hartke breaks down quotidian life into atoms as well—eliciting some impatience by readers and Body Time audience members also, but Hartke, like DeLillo, “clearly wanted [the] audience to

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feel time go by, viscerally, even painfully.” DeLillo and his heart-key artist want the audience to linger intently and thereby get to the “best stuff.”71 Jesse Kavadlo writes perceptively about Lauren Hartke’s temporal experience in The Body Artist: “Taking time and loss together, the book is about the way in which time passes differently when one loves than when one mourns.”72 Time slows down for the grief stricken, perhaps because each passing moment is achingly fraught with sorrow or regret or palpable loss. Particularly painful, however, is the mourning related to suicide. Suicide reworks time. The present seems suddenly predicted by the past; the future belongs to yesterday. At what point does a man decide to violently end his own life? How does this decision relate to his existence as a child, a man, an artist? All of the stages of life come under review, revamped in the light of self-murder. What was once true or applicable to daily existence is now blasted into fragments and radically rewritten in terms of its blunt and irrevocable ending. The child-man mimicry of Mr. Tuttle suggests the way that Roble’s expression has been made into nonsense, exploded through the barrel of a gun. When Tuttle spoke, “[t]his was not some communication with the dead. It was Rey alive in the course of a talk he’d had with her, in this room, not long after they’d come here . . . . and how he’d told her that she was helping him recover his soul.”73 But this conversation is ludicrous in the present context, and reverberates in Lauren’s memory, shucked free of its actual “time sense.”74 In its place, Mr. Tuttle speaks “unadjusted words” which no longer belong to Rey, but are Rey-ified into the “strange . . . discontinuity” of the answering machine, in a voice “not spoken but generated” and “separated by . . . deep dimensions.”75 Lauren reevaluates her husband’s life and “his bullshit autobiography. The hard copy sat there, stark against her sense of his spoken recollections, the tapestried lies and contrivances, stories shaped out of desperations not always clear to her.”76 Body Time is the performance piece that depicts the artist’s experience under the impact of her husband’s suicide. But her performance also testifies to his art, those films “where extreme situations become inevitable and characters are forced toward life-defining moments.”77 Rey’s suicide becomes Hartke’s “life-defining moment.” Working both sides of the subjective-objective divide, Lauren transforms mourning into art. She will not allow herself to fall into the intoxicating abyss of despair; instead she will courageously “[t]ake the risk” and plumb the reality of her own life as well as Rey’s.78 Thus she manifests the answerability that Rey was not able to muster. He could not “answer with his own life for what he has learned in art.”79 That is Hartke’s role. While The Body Artist, named for its protagonist, mainly depicts the life and art of Lauren Hartke, Falling Man depends entirely upon its foils to express the nature of its eponymous hero and the impact of his art. ­Specifically, we come to visualize David Janiak’s performance through the



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experience of Lianne Glenn who embraces the same sort of answerability that characterizes the artist himself. She shows herself to be an ideal audience for the art in the novel because her appreciation emerges from her own quotidian alertness and moral faithfulness. Her traits establish her willingness to behold “a mystery she could not name,” a quality particularly prized by the author himself.80 Lianne is important in the novel because she is witness to two Falling Man performances and translates the experience for the reader. Schooled by her mother Nina Bartos, an art historian and teacher, and influenced by her father Jack Glenn, “an architect, an artist,” Lianne is attuned to prosaic radiance and to art.81 She proceeds with a kind of quotidian fascination, a responsiveness to the “coin of actual seething lives.”82 A woman “with large eyes and wide mouth,” she proceeded “with an eagerness that could be startling to others, a readiness to encounter an occasion or idea. Her mother was the template for this.”83 Thus it seems appropriate that we witness the performance of Falling Man through Lianne’s eyes and perceive the quiet splendor of the Morandi paintings and the old passport photographs as well. Morandi depicts bottles and containers used in everyday life. Deceptively simply, Lianne “loved” them because “there was something in the brushstrokes that held a mystery . . . some reconnoiter inward, human and obscure.”84 These carefully observed vessels suggest the richness of quotidian life, its small but satisfying pleasures. For Lianne, the paintings “carried an odd spare power” although, after the attacks, the “dark and somber” figures remind her of the “towers.”85 Feeling the attraction of the paintings’ human dimension, she visits a Morandi retrospective after Nina’s death, and feels that the artist’s “Natura Morta . . . yielded her mothers’ last days.” In response, her inclination was “to absorb what she saw, take it home, wrap it around her, sleep in it . . . . Turn it into living tissue, who you are.”86 Lianne’s characteristic ability to be moved by art and her skill in discerning its power is also suggested by her reaction to the “old passport photos.” Although they were “snapped anonymously,” she realizes that they brought her “paradoxically into the lives of the subjects.”87 In thoughtful deliberation, she vivifies them, and imagines the subjects’ “human ordeal set against the rigor of the state,” the individuals “fleeing, there to here, with darkest hardship pressing the edges of the frame.” The photographs capture their “innocence and vulnerability . . . in the deep texture of the past itself.” It is her empathy that translates the “images, words, languages, signatures, [and even the] stamped advisories” into the “beauty in faded lives.”88 The photographs suggest that individuals rendered distinct in imagery oppose the facelessness of mass migration and political upheaval, their personhood set against the anonymous power of governments. Lianne’s willingness to be moved by art is echoed in her reaction to Falling Man’s performance. She recognizes the “[w]hite male . . . [w]hite shirt, dark

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jacket,” and realizes who he is. “Falling Man was known to appear among crowds or at sites where crowds might quickly form.”89 Her proximity to Janiak the second time she witnesses his performance tells Lianne that he is more than a performer, however. She recognizes his humanity—a “man in fear, looking out of some deep pool of concentration into lost space, dead space.”90 She also understood that he was positioning himself to be seen fleetingly, by “an audience in motion, passing scant yards from his standing figure” as he falls from a train platform.91 She imagines the impact on the witnesses, the “people” who “had not seen him attach the safety harness . . . speaking into phones . . . to spread the word . . . intimately, as in the towers and in the hijacked planes.”92 The fall itself is described in present tense prose that occurs three separate times in the chapter even as time proceeds sequentially in the intermittent sections.93 Lianne herself is brought to a standstill, captured by the intensity of the performance and riveted in time and space. Falling Man would replicate that impossible sight, impressed on the vision for only a few seconds, a body falling freely. Although disturbed, Lianne “did not think of turning and leaving.”94 Characteristically, Lianne also translates the performance into what she knows of Keith’s escape from the North Tower. Vividly, as she is watching Falling Man, she imagines that “she saw her husband somewhere near. She saw his friend . . . in a high window with smoke flowing out.”95 And her beloved father also comes to mind: “Died by his own hand.”96 Thunderstruck by the sight of the performance, she and “the old threadbare man” nearby were “seeing something elaborately different from what [they] encountered step by step in the ordinary run of hours. [They] had to learn how to see it correctly, find a crack in the world where it might fit.”97 Profoundly moved, Lianne finds herself “drained and wasted” by the fall and its associations, “thirty six days after the planes.”98 Lianne’s sensitivity to art is related, I would argue, to her ethical stance, just as it is for the artists. She too would live in order to demonstrate that what she has learned in art “would not remain ineffectual in [her] life.”99 Her active conscience prompts her, for example, to voice concern about the identity of Martin Ridnour, her mother’s lover. Known as “Martin” rather than “Ernst Hechinger,” he had been a participant in “Kommune One,” an actual revolutionary group in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. “First they threw eggs. Then they set off bombs,” admits Nina.100 Lianne worries: “Maybe he killed someone. . . . Did you press him on this?” she asks Nina. How could her mother ignore these facts? “All these years. Never forcing the issue.” Lianne wonders if Nina’s dismissal of Hechinger’s real identity indicates “some frailty of character or compromise of hard clear judgment” (147). “Don’t you pay a price for not knowing?” she asks her mother.101



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Nina, on the other hand, seems to excuse Martin on the strength of a poster he showed her once, “[a] wanted poster. German terrorists of the early seventies. Nineteen names and faces’” but “[h]e’s not one of the faces on the poster.”102 In the novel, Lianne worries that Martin has romanticized terrorist activity. Do the hijackers “make him nostalgic?” she asks her mother, and Nina admits: “he thinks they have something in common with the radicals of the sixties and seventies . . . their visions of world brotherhood.” In these conversations, Lianne hammers her mother. “She was ready to bleed the moment, bearing in, ripping in,” but her questions do not portend some gratuitous violence or sadistic power over Nina; they are related to issues of integrity and selfhood.103 “She wanted to punish her mother but not for Martin or not just for that. It was nearer and deeper and finally about one thing only. This was what everything was about, who they were, the fierce clasp, like hands bound in prayer, now and evermore.”104 The late conversations with her daughter appear to have an impact on Nina, and she severs her twenty-year relationship with Martin. Before she dies, she has Lianne pack up and return the beautiful Morandi paintings and the passport photographs as well. Although she knows their considerable value, Lianne complies with her mother’s last wishes and returns the items to Martin. For herself, Lianne retains contact with the man after Nina’s death because he—like the Morandi paintings—evokes her mother. “He was a link to her mother . . . he helped Lianne think of her in clearer outline.” He could “lif[t] her into artists’ lofts, Byzantine ruins, into halls where she’d lectured, Barcelona to Tokyo.”105 Martin loves Nina, and she him, but significantly, Nina regains her moral courage in her own “exalted time” in the days before her death—and sends Martin away, in recognition of the self and the demands of integrity.106 Lianne, of course, will have to make the same decision regarding her husband Keith. Like the Body Artist, Lianne’s responsiveness to different art forms, as well as her ethical stance, is related to her prosaic sensibilities, a quotidian awareness that nourishes her insights. She is currently editing a book “on ancient alphabets,” a work that is “typed on an old manual machine with textual emendations made by the author in a deeply soulful and unreadable script.”107 Beside a wink from DeLillo, who uses similar tools, we learn that what Lianne really wants to do is work on the book that “seems to predict what happened” on 9/11, “a book detailing a series of interlocking global forces that appeared to converge at an explosive point in time and space . . . early in the twenty-first-century.”108 Like Lauren Hartke, Lianne is willing is investigate difficult material, to dig into that which affects her deeply, to plumb her own depths for an insight into tragedy. Lianne’s idiotic boss, Carol Shoup—her lack of insight signaled by the clothing she wore which “belonged to another body type, another skin

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color”—claims that Lianne couldn’t handle the tension of line editing such a project. Shoup would rather discuss the private details of Keith’s unexpected return to the marriage. The homecoming, precious to Lianne, was “too intimate for telling” and she denies Shoup the satisfaction of her salacious curiosity. Glaring at her, Lianne tells her boss that she “hit a woman in the face the other day”—implicitly a warning—and then explicitly: “You don’t know anything. . . .You don’t know anything.”109 Lianne’s fierce faithfulness also finds expression in her writing group for Alzheimer’s patients. Jack Glenn had committed suicide because of his own diagnosis with this disease, and “bearing her father’s mark,” she comprehends tenderly the human loss involved. With Carmen G, in particular, she saw “the crime of it, the loss of memory, personality and identity, the lapse into eventual protein stupor” an insight which allows her to forgive her father for his fatal final act. When the Alzheimer patients demand a story from her, she tells them what she denied Carol Shoup: “Keith in the doorway,” miraculously escaping the North Tower, “Keith in pieces, in small strokes.” Like a writer, she summons the delicate details, bringing her attention to a pinpointed time and space, relative to the body. “She recalled things she didn’t know she’d absorbed, the fragment of spangled glass on the lid of his eye, as if sewn there.”110 She is poised, like Falling Man, on the edge of memory, not “talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funneled stretch of recent past.”111 Later, when this recent past is rebroadcast on television, and she sees the planes entering the second Tower, she knew that “this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone’s, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.” When Keith reaches for her hand, Lianne relives the event in memory and in imagination. “They would all be dead, passengers and crew, and thousands in the towers dead, and she felt it in her body, a deep pause, and thought there he is, unbelievably, in one of those towers, and now his hand on hers, in pale light, as though to console her for his dying.”112 Keith’s “dying” in Lianne’s reverie is not related to his physical death, obviously, but may suggest a certain moral apathy in the wake of 9/11. A man only “half there,” Keith seems incapable of taking quotidian value seriously and is likely to slip away again.113 Cool and ironic, Keith is a man “built for weekends,” as Nina knows, and like James Axton (The Names) or Nick Shay (Underworld), his allure is sexual.114 Lianne thinks about her early days with him. “Sex was everywhere at first, in words, phrases, half gestures, the simplest intimation of altered space.”115 When he returns after the planes, they slowly resume marital intimacy. “Come out wearing something, so I can watch you take it off,” Keith says to his wife. But in the very next scene, the gambler is shuffling a new deck, and he “stood looking at . . . mattresses” with



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his lover of a week or two, “Florence Givens.”116 Remote, charming and even somewhat insightful, Keith shares with Florence the traumatic experience of escaping the Towers. Florence says that Keith has “saved [her] life” and she is, clearly, falling in love with him.117 He, for his part, wonders whether these meetings with Florence “contradicted what he’d lately taken to be the truth of his life . . . lived seriously and responsibly.”118 His is a “passive consciousness,” without “faithfulness” or a sense of “being-true-to” which involves a performance of loyalty and a determination “to undersign-acknowledge” his behavior, “but only in correlation with the decision to undertake an obligation,” as Bakhtin says.119 Keith deserts Florence after three or four interludes, “ready to say what someone always says,” that is, whatever adulterers utter on their way out the door.120 More suited to him are other narcissists, women who gaze at themselves in tall mirrors at the gym, “women arched and bent,” the only “ones he could stand with in the days after” the planes.121 The truth is that in every venue, Keith walks through, “seeing essentially no one.”122 Keith’s inability to satisfyingly reunite with his family—or to make a commitment to Florence, for that matter—seems related to his game playing. He reserves his most engaged attention for poker and thinks nostalgically of the weekly game in his pre-9/11 apartment, “the one anticipation that was not marked by the bloodguilt tracings of severed connections. Call or fold. Felt or baize.”123 After the planes, Keith and Terry Cheng, another player from the friendly amateur games, devote their lives to the airless space and timeless absorption of professional poker, attracted to “the crucial anonymity of these days and weeks, the mingling of countless lives that had no stories attached.”124 Their communication can be described according to the theory of Jean-François Lyotard, who considers human expression in terms of game playing. “Firstly, the rules of language games do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are subject to a ‘contract’ between ‘players.’ Secondly, if there are no rules there is no game and even a small change in the rules changes the game. Thirdly, every utterance should be thought of as a ‘move’ in a game.”125 The novel seems to explore these tenets, demonstrating, first, the fascination of the game for Keith and the other players, who, in the early days, play according to funny, agreed-upon sets of rules, their only sense of value or rectitude related to those guidelines. For a while, “food was out. No food.” Then, the “intake” of alcohol was restricted to “darkish liquors . . . the manlier tones and deeper and more intense distillations.” Keith thought the rules “stupid,” but capitulated because most of the others figured, “[r]ules were good . . . the stupider the better.” They would test themselves against their own arbitrary limits, assessing not only their playing skill but the capacity to maintain adherence self-imposed restrictions. Furthermore, there was the game pleasure of “rolling their shoulders, hoisting their balls” and “testing

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the forces that govern events”; part of the appeal was the chance “to shred the other’s gauzy manhood.” Strictly segregated from domestic considerations, the games represent “a structure [constructed] out of willful trivia.”126 More disturbing than his observations about the rules of the game is Lyotard’s assertion that “every utterance should be considered a move in a game.” This point of view suggests that the context for human expression relates only to establishing a “winning” position, a need to dominate other “players,” and a willingness to pointedly neglect every other context that is not part of the game. Such a code of conduct “severs the jugular” of prosaic life, as poker concentrates solely on its own choreography, the thrum of the shuffle and the slide of the deal, hypnotic in its rhythm and charge.127 The players’ self-imposed limits and renunciation of domestic life liken their focused attention to that of the terrorists. In an interview with DeLillo, Mark Binelli connects the “absurd limitations” of the early amateur card games to the rules of the terrorists and DeLillo concurs.128 But he also suggests the comic nature of the card players’ antics, their game grandiose in its “freeflowing energies and gestures . . . posed against the single counterforce, the fact of self-imposed restriction” and “ordered from within.”129 Such selfimposed restrictions turn deadly, however, in the hands of terrorists, men who, like Keith, are only “half there.”130 Consider. Each terrorist depicted in the novel recapitulates the intensity of the poker players, who played . . . in a glazed frenzy . . . in naïve expectation and calculated deceit . . . to entrap the others and fix limits to his own false dreams . . . these games were the funneled essence, the clear and intimate extract of their daytime initiatives . . . They regressed to preliterate folkways, petitioning the dead.131

Like the poker players, the terrorists are determined to shut out the quotidian world in favor of the arbitrary rules agreed upon among them. In particular, Hammad “had to fight against the need to be normal,” to get married and “have babies.” Even the growth of his beard is subject to regulation. He realizes that his “beard would look better if he trimmed it,” but dismisses this small individual preference in favor of the strict guidelines that subsume prosaic decisions. “[T]here were rules now and he was determined to follow them. His life had structure. Things were clearly defined.”132 The “contract between players” as Lyotard says, has no “legitimation” outside the “contract between players” but its constraints are so powerful that Hammad and the hijackers not only commit a mass murder but suicide in the name of the rule itself. Mikhail Bakhtin, who lived through the entire Soviet era, knew intimately how utter concentration on an “abstractly theoretical selfregulated world” could metastasize into a “terrifying, deadly, and destructive force” because it “seeks to pass itself off as the whole world.” In that world,



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the individual is “determined, predetermined, bygone, and finished, that is, essentially not living.”133 DeLillo interprets the terrorists’ activity in the same vein: “It’s a kind of blood bond with other men. And the intensity of a plot, which narrows the world enormously . . . makes it possible for men to operate without a sense of the innocent victims they plan to destroy.”134 Individual merit and singular human worth are extinguished in relation to the “terrifying, deadly, and destructive force” of the 9/11 attacks, and, writ small, in the gradual but deadly impact of professional poker, where the players seem “essentially not living” and the game itself is “[l]ike a séance in hell.”135 Lianne recognizes that the mechanistic anarchy of the cards is right up there with the “automated teller sex” Keith would likely engage in during his long absences from his family.136 Like Del Nearing calling out film maker Frank Volterra for his obsession about the cult murders — “Film . . . [f]ilm, film. Like insects . . . [r]ubbing their front wings together”—Lianne chides Keith: “People sitting around a table going shuffle, shuffle.”137 But more importantly, “‘[w]hat happens after months of this? Or years? Who do you become?’”138 Her words anticipate the devolution of Terry Cheng, a player from the early group known for his mathematical brilliance, now a shuffling, slipper-clad haunt, lost everywhere except at the poker table, where he, nevertheless, “owns their souls.” “Have to get back to my coffin by sunup,” he quips when he slides by Keith in a Las Vegas casino.139 In contrast to the players who function in death-grip realms outside of prosaic time and domestic space, Lianne is aligned with lingering attentions of the artist and characterized by the same quotidian answerability. “Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge,” Father Paulus instructs Nick Shay in Underworld. “Quotidian . . . a gorgeous Latinate word, an extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace.”140 Lianne subscribes to this perspective and is moved by the art of Falling Man, perhaps, because he makes manifest “the impact of history on the smallest details of ordinary life.”141 Like the Body Artist, Lianne also realizes something about the nature of unique physical materiality and the nature of time. “It was the body and everything it carried” that mattered, “inside and out, identity and memory and human heat . . . The child was in it, the girl who wanted to be other people, and obscure things she could not name.”142 Lianne, like the performance artists, appreciates the sacred quality and mystery of individuals in a particular time and space and lives in opposition to those who diminish the quotidian or gamble it away for a lesser value. As Linda Kaufmann rightly argues, “the way that one responds to art” in DeLillo’s fiction is, as in Henry James, “an index of moral character.”143 The artists in the novels—and Lianne with them—mourn their losses, and are blessed, perhaps, because they feel deeply. They know the tragedy of loss, yet given the choice between “grief and nothing,” they pay tribute to the

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departed by their longing and lingering attention.144 Lauren Hartke and David Janiak seize the day, and create finer selves in the embrace of love, loss, and sorrow. As the Body Artist and Falling Man, they sign their names to their art and to quotidian life concomitantly, because, as Underworld’s Klara Sax knows, “[i]t’s one thing.”145 Finally, the value of art and the vast distance that it maintains from terrorist activity is suggested by a fairly recent cover of the New Yorker.146 Depicting the World Trade Center Memorial, Adrian Tomine shows most of the crowd in tourist attraction mode. Amidst the souvenir tee-shirts and baseball caps, shopping bags and selfies, one man runs his fingers thoughtfully over an engraved name, one woman covers her face with her hand. Like these figures touched by grief and memory in the midst of a crowd, Falling Man and the Body Artist are marked by their regard for the catastrophe; yet out of the ashes of calamity, they create art. Neither terrifying nor trivial, the artists charge us to look inward and discover there our own mystery and that of other individuals. They show us what DeLillo sees as the “radiance of dailiness” that is “almost holy or sacred,” accompanied by “a sense of something extraordinary hovering just beyond our touch.”147 It is significant, I think, that DeLillo uses this description early in his career in a discussion about White Noise, yet, it indicates, in my opinion, the animating principle of his work overall. Mystery informs the twenty-first-century work, as it does the twentieth. The difference is that the later works are refined and focused into body-sized texts. Indeed, DeLillo and all of his artists seem charged with the task of showing us mystery through manners, the bright transcendence implied in the human body as it proceeds in the quotidian realm. The artist electrifies his or her audience in live performances in which each pays heed to the intertwined demands of a prosaic ethics and an art form to which they can “sign their names.”148 Falling Man dies of natural causes, having “[s]uffered from a heart ailment and high blood pressure,” (220) a medical condition connoting a surrender to the body work which defines him.149 But the effect of his art reverberates in the memory and experience of his audience. Lianne, for one, “was the photograph, the photosensitive surface. That nameless body coming down, this was hers to record and absorb.”150 The impact of his work echoes at the end of the novel as well, when the narrator recalls Keith, miraculously escaped from the Towers into a gray world of pulverized modernity, who sees the white shirt—like the one worn by Falling Man— coming “down out of the sky,” its “arms waving like nothing in this life.”151 Animated, signaling that which is unique and unrepeatable, DeLillo’s fiction draws us back to one bright artifact, and gestures beyond the “falling ash and near night” into human mystery magnified by catastrophe.152 Released from the terrible sorrow of her husband’s suicide, the Body Artist also summons us back to the living body and the here-and-now. Lauren



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discovers “[t]ime is the only narrative that matters. It stretches events and makes it possible for us to suffer and come out of it and see death happen and come out of it.”153 In her body work, Hartke forges her own emotional and moral resurrection “with a call to the body,” the conscious material form which is “bound inextricably with who she is and how she perceives the world.”154 “She wanted to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was.”155 As such, she “make[s] sense out of randomness” and “give[s] form to formlessness.”156 Even more importantly, she “at once announces and shapes a new self.”157 What is the role of art after 9/11? Performance artists seem to speak for the author, in their courageous, difficult, and bodied-forth art, living up to the call for answerability and a prosaic engagement in life and in art. Like Don DeLillo, they continue to electrify, challenge, and speak to us, calling forth our pity and fear, and providing the experience of catharsis that helps us to be whole again. NOTES 1. Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (New York: Scribner, 2001); Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007). 2. Anne Longmuir, “‘This was the World Now’: Falling Man and the Role of the Artist after 9/11.” Modern Language Studies 41, no.1 (Summer 2011), 48, accessed May 14, 2015, https://modernlanguagestudies.org/2011/06/20/41-1-summer-2011. 3. M.M. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist, trans. by Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 6, 40. 4. M.M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov, supplement trans. Kenneth Brostrom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 1. A sense of answerability is important to DeLillo. He speaks of contemporary “writers of conscience” like Robert Stone and Joan Didion, “painstaking workers of the sentence and paragraph” and the “beauty and honor” of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; DeLillo insists “that the novel is still spacious enough and brave enough to encompass enormous areas of experience,” a description of the writer’s role that sits well with Bakhtin’s standards. See: Don DeLillo, “The Art of Fiction CXXXV: Don DeLillo,” Interview by Adam Begley in Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 96. (Cited as Conversations.) 5. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997); Mao II (New York, Penguin, 1991). 6. Don DeLillo, “Seven Seconds,” Interview by Ann Arensberg in Conversations, 42. 7. DeLillo, Mao II, 41. 8. See Jesse Kavadlo in this volume.

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9. Don DeLillo, “The Art of Fiction,” in Conversations, 96. 10. Ibid., 101. 11. Don DeLillo, Mao II, 159. 12. Ibid., 157. 13. Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Idea in Dostoevsky,” in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 88, 89. 14. Don DeLillo, Mao II, 159. 15. DeLillo develops the idea of “art and terror” in Mao II in a way that has a remarkable affinity to Dostoevsky’s approach to societal concepts or ideologies depicted in fiction, as Bakhtin describes it. “Like the word, the idea is by nature dialogic. . . . It is . . . a live event, playing itself out between consciousness-voices.” (“The Idea,” 88.) Like DeLillo, “Dostoevsky often divined how a given idea would develop and function under certain changed conditions, what unexpected directions it would take in its further development and transformation.” To this end, “Dostoevsky placed the idea on the borderline of dialogically intersecting consciousnesses” (91). Thus we see Bill Gray first with the martinet Scott Martineau, then in conversation with Brita Nilsson, later with Charlie Everson, and finally, with George Haddad, his own idea entertaining various inferences according to the conversations with each of these characters. In the process of novel-writing, “[t]he idea ceases to be an idea and becomes a simple artistic characterizing feature” and “is combined with the hero’s image” (“The Idea,” 79). 16. Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December, 2001, 34. 17. Ibid., 39. 18. Cornel Bonca, “How (and How Not) to Write About 9/11,” Modern Language Studies Nine-Eleven + Ten In Literature, Popular Culture, and the Classroom, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Summer 2011), 134, 135. 19. Judith Butler, qtd. in Longmuir, 53, from Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004), 30. 20. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 218. 21. Jesse Kavadlo, Balance at the Edge of Belief (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 149. 22. Laura DiPrete rightly speaks of the “language of bereavement” which serves to give expression to “an experience lived primarily within the skin” although she locates this articulation of trauma in Mr. Tuttle rather than in Lauren’s performance art. See “Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist: Performing the Body, Narrating Trauma,” Contemporary Literature Vol. 47, No. 3 (Autumn 2005), 483–510. 23. Don DeLillo, Body Artist, 111. 24. Ibid., 25. Kahlil Gibran affirms that the cup which holds one’s joy is the same vessel that contains one’s sorrow, love’s capacity for emotion etching its way into cellular sensibility of absence. See: “On Joy and Sorrow,” http://www.katzanddogz.com., accessed February 2, 2015. Similarly, Theo Decker, the protagonist of 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner The Goldfinch, bears witness to this embodied sensibility when he refers to the bomb blast which killed his mother: “The worst thing about the explosion was



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how I carried it in my body—the heat, the bone-jar and slam of it.” See Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (New York: Little Brown, 2013), 280. 25. As Oskar Schell the child-protagonist in Foer’s 9/11 novel puts it. See Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005). 26. Jon D. Rossini, “DeLillo, Performance, and the Denial of Death.” Death in American Texts and Performances: Corpses, Ghosts, and the Reanimate, ed. Lisa K. Perdigao and Mark Pizzato (Surrey England: Ashgate, 2010), 60. 27. Richard Drew, “The Falling Man,” https://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/tag/ richard-drew/, accessed September 6, 2015. 28. Henry Singer, director, Tom Junod screenplay. 9/11: Falling Man, Documentary, 2006. Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain persuasively demonstrates that the sensation of pain, irrevocably palpable within the body, is tremendously difficult to communicate to others, in part, because it is so difficult to hear or visually witness. See The Body in Pain (London: Oxford UP, 1985). 29. Henry Singer, 9/11: Falling Man. Documentary. 30. Anne Longmuir, “This was the World Now,” 49, 50. 31. Ibid., 51. Frank Lentricchia realized early in DeLillo’s career that such resistance was essential to his work. He writes that DeLillo is a writer who “conceive[s his] vocation as an act of cultural criticism. . . a kind of anatomy, an effort to represent the culture in its totality.” See “The American Writer as Bad Citizen,” in Introducing Don DeLillo, ed. Frank Lentricchia (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1991), 2. 32. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 111. 33. Don DeLillo, Body Artist, 111. 34. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 222. Janiak’s art calls to mind DeLillo’s play Love-Lies-Bleeding, in which an artist facing imminent death is said to be “in a place that is blessed by death[.] He is in last life. This is exalted time.” See Love-LiesBleeding (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2007), 16. 35. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 220, 222. 36. DeLillo produced The Day Room (New York: Knopf, 1987) in 1997 and Valparaiso: A Play in Two Acts (New York: Scribner, 1999) in 1999 in Cambridge at the American Repertory Theatre. 37. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 223. 38. Kristine Stiles, “Performance Art,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 679, italics mine. 39. “About Michael Chekhov’s Technique,” accessed October 3, 2016, http:// www.michaelchekhovactingstudio.com/technique.htm. 40. “Meyerhold’s Biomechanics and Scenes from The Magnanimous Cuckold” performed by the University of Iowa Graduate acting class, http://monsods.ismonline.org/tag/meyerhold/., assessed August 29, 2016. 41. Lenard Petit, “Translating the Inner Event to an Outer Expression: Working with Michael Chekhov’s Acting Technique.” Accessed October 3, 2016, http://www. michaelchekhovactingstudio.com/articles.htm.

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42. Alison Hodge, Introduction, Twentieth Century Actor Training, ed. Alison Hodge (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 4, 7. 43. Edwards, Christine. The Stanislavsky Heritage: Its Contribution to the Russian and American Theatre (New York University Press, 1965), 94. 44. Don DeLillo, Body Artist, 59. 45. Ibid., 110. 46. Allison Hodge, Introduction, 8. 47. Don DeLillo, Body Artist, 111. 48. Laura DiPrete, “Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist,” 501, 503. 49. M.M. Bakhtin, Act, 51. 50. Don DeLillo, Body Artist, 118. 51. Ibid., 118. 52. M.M. Bakhtin, Act, 64. Italics in the original. 53. Ibid., 25. 54. Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo: The possibility of fiction (London: Routledge, 2006), 217. 55. David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens, GA. U of Georgia P, 2002), 207. 56. M.M. Bakhtin, Act, 42. An alibi-in-being ignores “answerability” which is related to “the fact of an actual acknowledgment of one’s own participation in . . . once-occurrent Being . . . unique and never-repeatable, a place that cannot be taken by anyone else” and “actualized by me as uniqueness” (Act 40, 41). 57. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 157. 58. Ibid., 168. 59. Suzanne Lacy, “Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys,” Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, ed. Suzanne Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 19. 60. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 168, italics mine. 61. Ibid., 169. 62. Don DeLillo, “In the ruins,” 35. 63. Noted throughout the novel are references to specific time spans “after the planes.” These suggest that Lianne and New Yorkers in general measure time from the point of view of the attacks, an event which creates a temporal ground zero. See Falling Man, 34, 69, for example. 64. Suzanne Lacy, “Cultural Pilgrimages,” 38. 65. John Harrop and Sabin R. Epstein. Acting with Style (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982), 3. 66. Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, editor and Introduction, Jeff Kelly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), xxi. 67. Ibid., xii–xiii. 68. Don DeLillo, Body Artist, 108, 107. 69. Allan Kaprow, Blurring, xvi. 70. Don DeLillo, “A Conversation with Thomas DePietro,” Interview, Barnes and Noble Review, Feb. 1, 2010, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/don-delillo, accessed April 5, 2015. 71. Don DeLillo, Body Artist, 106.



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72. Jesse Kavadlo, Balance, 149. 73. Don DeLillo, Body Artist, 63. 74. Ibid., 68. 75. Ibid., 67, 69. 76. Ibid., 34. 77. Ibid., 31. 78. Ibid., 124. 79. M.M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 1. 80. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 12. 81. Ibid., 232. 82. Don DeLillo, “The Power of History,” New York Times Magazine, Sept. 7, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/library, accessed Sept. 7, 2015, 62. 83. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 129. In the notes for Falling Man found in the Ransom Center, DeLillo has underlined “The SELF” and then writes beneath it “NINA.” 84. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 12. 85. Ibid., 49. 86. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 211, 210. Anne Longmuir suggests an entirely different view of the Morandi paintings, which, she says, “illustrate . . . the potentially devastating impact of 9/11 on traditional art works” in part because Martin/Ernst and Lianne both “saw the towers” (FM 49) in the paintings; thus the art has become “as ominous as . . . natura morta [ ] suggests” (46). Longmuir cites evidence that Morandi was both “working at the margins of a totalitarian regime” and conversely (contra Linda Kauffman), that he “repeatedly benefited from state appointments, awards, and exhibitions” under Mussolini (47). She sees him as “an artist whose withdrawal from the world signals not resistance, but complicity” (48), a guilt that she says is linked to Martin in the novel and the “stolen art” (FM 146) which “may have funded terrorism” (48). Biographical confusion aside, Longmuir’s point is that the post-9/11 world demands new art and new means of expression and cites David Janiak as “more likely to produce oppositional art than Morandi” (48). See Anne Longmuir, “This was the World Now.” 87. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 141, 142. 88. Ibid., 142. 89. Ibid., 163–4. 90. Ibid., 164. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid., 165 93. Ibid., 158–160; 162–165; 167–169. 94. Ibid., 164. 95. Ibid., 164. 96. Ibid., 170. 97. Ibid., 168. 98. Ibid., 169, 170. 99. M. M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 1. 100. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 146.

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101. Ibid., 147, 148. 102. Ibid., 146, 147. 103. Ibid., 147. 104. Ibid., 148, emphasis mine. 105. Ibid., 192, 193. 106. Don DeLillo, Love-Lies-Bleeding, 116. 107. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 22, 23. 108. Ibid., 138, 139. 109. Ibid., 141, 142. 110. Ibid., 126. 111. Ibid., 127. 112. Ibid., 134, 135. 113. Ibid., 213. 114. Ibid., 12. 115. Ibid., 7. 116. Ibid., 131. 117. Ibid., 108. 118. Ibid., 137. 119. M. M. Bakhtin, Act, 38. 120. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 138. 121. Ibid., 143. 122. Ibid., 198. 123. Ibid., 27. 124. Ibid., 204. 125. Jean-François Lyotard, “The Postmodern Condition,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/lyotard/, accessed on Sept. 7, 2015. 126. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 97-98. 127. Ibid., 95. 128. Don DeLillo, “Intensity of a Plot,” Interview by Mark Binelli, Guernica. July 17, 2007, https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/intensity_of_a_plot/, accessed March 16, 2015. 129. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 98. 130. Ibid., 213. 131. Ibid., 97. 132. Ibid., 83. 133. M. M. Bakhtin, Act, 7, 9, italics mine. 134. Don DeLillo, “Intensity,” Interview with Binelli. 135. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 216. 136. Ibid., 233. 137. . Don DeLillo, The Names (New York: Knopf, 1982) 203; Falling Man, 216. 138. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 216. 139. Ibid., 202, 230. 140. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 542. 141. Don DeLillo, “Intensity,” Interview with Binelli. 142. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 236.



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143. Kauffman, Linda S. “The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future,’ ‘Baader-Meinhof,’ and Falling Man” in Modern Fiction Studies 54, no. 2, (2008) 360. 144. The title of Joseph Dewey’s volume of essays: Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo (University of South Carolina Press, 2006). 145. Don DeLillo, Underworld, 380. 146. July 7 & 14, 2014. 147. Don DeLillo, “‘An Outsider in this Society’: An Interview with Don DeLillo,” Interview by Anthony DeCurtis in Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 70–71. 148. M.M. Bakhtin, Act, 48. 149. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 220. 150. Ibid., 223. 151. Ibid., 246. 152. Ibid., 3. 153. Don DeLillo, Body Artist, 94. 154. Jesse Kavadlo, Balance, 152. 155. Don DeLillo, Body Artist, 124. 156. Curtis A Yehnert, “‘Like Some Endless Sky Waking Inside’: Subjectivity in Don DeLillo” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42, no. 4 (2001), 366. 157. Mark Osteen, “Echo Chamber: Undertaking The Body Artist,” Studies in the Novel 37, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 64.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bakhtin, M.M. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. ———. “The Idea in Dostoevsky.” In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, 78–100. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ———. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Edited by Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. (Cited as Act.) Bonca, Cornel. “How (and How Not) to Write About 9/11.” Modern Language Studies 41, no. 1 (Summer 2011): 132–140. Boxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. London: Routledge, 2006. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. London: Verso, 2004. Chekhov, Michael. http://www.michaelchekhovactingstudio.com. Web. July 9, 2014. Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002. DeLillo, Don. “The Art of Fiction CXXXV: Don DeLillo.” Interview by Adam Begley. In Conversations with Don DeLillo. Edited by Thomas DePietro, 86–108. Jackson. University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

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———. The Body Artist. New York: Scribner, 2001. ———. The Day Room. New York: Knopf, 1987. ———. “Don DeLillo: A Conversation with Thomas DePietro.” Interview by Thomas DePietro. Barnes and Noble Review Feb. 1, 2010. Accessed April 5, 2015. http://bnreview/barnes andnoble.com/t5/Interview/Don-DeLillo/ba-p/2144. ———. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007. ———. “Intensity of a Plot.” Interview by Mark Binelli. Guernica, July 17, 2007. Accessed March 16, 2015. https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/ intensity_of_a_plot/. ———. “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September.” In Harper’s, December 2001. ———. “‘An Outsider in this Society’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview with Anthony DeCurtis. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro, 52–74. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. ———. “The Power of History.” New York Times Magazine. Sept. 7, 1997. Accessed September 7, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/library. ———. “Seven Seconds.” Interview by Ann Arensberg. In Conversations with Don DeLillo. Edited by Thomas DePietro, 40–46. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. ———. “An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview by Maria Nadotti. In Conversations with Don DeLillo. Edited by Thomas DePietro, 109–118. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. ———. Love-Lies-Bleeding. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2007. ———. Mao II. New York: Penguin, 1991. ———. The Names. New York: Knopf, 1982. ———. Point Omega. New York: Scribner, 2010. ———. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. ———. Valparaiso: A Play in Two Acts. New York: Scribner, 1999. ———. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1985. Dewey, Joseph. Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo. University of South Carolina Press, 2006. DiPrete, Laura. “Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist: Performing the Body, Narrating Trauma.” Contemporary Literature 47, no. 3 (Autumn 2005): 483–510. Drew, Richard. “The Falling Man.” Accessed September 6, 2015. https://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/tag/richard-drew/. Edwards, Christine. The Stanislavsky Heritage: Its Contribution to the Russian and American Theatre. New York University Press, 1965. Foer, Jonathan Safer. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Gibran, Kahlil, “On Joy and Sorrow.” Accessed February 2, 2015. http://www.katzanddogz.com. Harrop, John and Sabin R. Epstein. Acting with Style. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:: Prentice-Hall, 1982. Hodge, Alison, Editor. Introduction. Twentieth Century Actor Training. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.



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Kaprow, Allan. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Edited and Introduction, Jeff Kelley, xi–xxvi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Kauffman, Linda S. “The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future,’ ‘Baader-Meinhof,’ and Falling Man.” Modern Fiction Studies 54, no. 2 (2008): 353–377. Kavadlo, Jesse. Balance at the Edge of Belief. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Lacy, Suzanne. “Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys.” In Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Edited by Suzanne Lacy, 19–30. Seattle: Bay Press, 1995. Lentricchia, Frank. “The American Writer as Bad Citizen.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Edited by Frank Lentricchia, 1–6. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1991. Longmuir, Anne. “‘This Was the World Now’: Falling Man and the Role of the Artist After 9/11,” Modern Language Studies 41, no. 1 (Summer 2011): 43–57. Accessed May 14, 2015. https://modernlanguagestudies.org/2011/06/20/41–1-summer-2011. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “The Postmodern Condition.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed September 7, 2015. http://www.iep.utm.eud/lyotard/. “Meyerhold’s Biomechanics and Scenes from The Magnanimous Cuckold.” Perf. University of Iowa Graduate Acting Class. YouTube. Web. May 16, 2013. Osteen, Mark. “Echo Chamber: Undertaking The Body Artist.” Studies in the Novel 37, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 64–81. Rossini, Jon D. “DeLillo, Performance, and the Denial of Death.” Death in American Texts and Performances: Corpses, Ghosts, and the Reanimated Dead. Edited by Lisa K. Perdigao and Mark Pizzato, 45–62. Surrey England: Ashgate, 2010. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. London: Oxford University Press, 1985. Singer, Henry, Director. Tom Junod screenplay. Documentary. 9/11: Falling Man. Stiles, Kristine. Introduction to “Performance Art.” In Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings. Edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, 679–694. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Tartt, Donna. The Goldfinch. New York: Little Brown, 2013. Yehnert, Curtis A. “’Like Some Endless Sky Waking Inside’: Subjectivity in Don DeLillo.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42, no. 4 (2001): 357–366.

Part III

“ONTOLOGICAL CROSSINGS”

Chapter 6

Love-Lies-Bleeding Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Dying Man Graley Herren

Reviewing the Steppenwolf Theatre’s premiere of Love-Lies-Bleeding, Thomas Adler of the Chicago Reader stated a view of DeLillo’s drama shared by many: “As a playwright, Don DeLillo makes an excellent novelist.”1 The indictment against novelists attempting to translate their literary success to the stage is so familiar that one could almost write the review before seeing the play: the pace is slow, the action static, the exposition excessive, there’s too much telling and not enough showing. According to Adler’s bill of particulars, “Love-Lies-Bleeding is essentially a fiction in dialogue form. You can close your eyes, listen, and never feel as if you missed anything important. Indeed, you may find your eyes closing against your will. With nothing crucial to feed on despite highly competent acting and beautiful stage pictures, the optic orb all too easily opts out.”2 Unquestionably, there are enough bad plays already being written and produced without novelists quitting their day jobs to exacerbate the problem. But in the case of DeLillo’s third produced play and first of the new millennium, critics and spectators have too hastily opted out with their optic orbs, because there is much more to the play than meets the inattentive eye. Given its contemporaneity with the notorious Terri Schiavo case, LoveLies-Bleeding is typically pigeonholed as a “euthanasia play.” To be sure, much of the main action revolves around the looming death of artist Alex Macklin (who is bound to a wheelchair in a permanent vegetative state after two massive strokes) and the efforts of his son Sean and second wife Toinette (with reluctant cooperation from his current wife Lia) to hasten his death by administering morphine. Judged purely in terms of its contributions to the national debate spurred by the Schiavo case—issues concerning the quality of life, the right to die, and the controversy over who should make those ultimate decisions when the patient has lost the ability to reason or 137

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communicate—Love-Lies-Bleeding is a thoughtful but otherwise unremarkable drama. DeLillo has no aspiration to become Ibsen or Shaw, however, let alone a Lifetime Movie hack. The realist standards of the social problem play are the wrong criteria for taking the full measure of Love-Lies-Bleeding. The euthanasia plot is a MacGuffin, a narrative contrivance which partially obscures DeLillo’s deeper interests. Instead of replicating the popular paradigm for approaching this topic, DeLillo begins from an alternative premise: what might these ethically provocative and personally wrenching end-of-life decisions look like filtered through the perspective of a dying artist? What goes on in the mind of a creator at the end of life? To adapt the Elton John/ Bernie Taupin line, we might think of the drama as “Love Lies Bleeding in My Head.” The play dramatizes the dying reveries of Alex Macklin, a seventy-year-old man who is physically immobilized and incommunicative. Yet Alex is still lucid enough to be aware of his dilemma and curious enough to meditate upon his own mortality, to remember previous encounters that have shaped his attitudes toward death, to enact debates and fantasize potential scenarios whereby an ensemble cast of his loved ones collaborate to enact his end. In an interview promoting his first produced play, The Day Room, DeLillo reflected upon the intrinsic connection between the craft of acting and the human propensity for denying death: I began to sense a connection, almost a metaphysical connection, between the craft of acting and the fear we all have of dying. It seemed to me that actors are a kind of model for the ways in which we hide from the knowledge we inevitably possess of our final extinction. There’s a sense in which actors teach us how to hide. There’s something about the necessary shift in identity which actors make in the ordinary course of their work that seems almost a guide to concealing what we know about ourselves.3

By the time DeLillo progresses to Love-Lies-Bleeding, he interrogates the links between acting and mortality with increased precision, sophistication, and metatheatrical self-awareness—as a playwright, that is, and not merely as a moonlighting novelist. Furthermore, the later play extends DeLillo’s initial interests, exploring how theatrical performance can serve as a vehicle for confronting death, not just avoiding it, and doing so in ways that acknowledge both the fear and the allure of death under conditions in extremis. From the moment the dim lights rise on Love-Lies-Bleeding it is apparent that we are not witnessing a traditional realist play. The opening stage directions explain, “Two actors appear as Alex. One plays the character in three episodes that precede the main action. The other plays Alex in extremis, a helpless figure attached to a feeding tube.”4 Aside from the “three episodes that precede the main action,” Love-Lies-Bleeding may seem like



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a straightforward drama about family-assisted suicide. However, those three crucial episodes establish the hermeneutic codes by which the entire play should be understood. The present study will focus primarily upon the interpretive implications of those scenes at the beginning, middle, and end of the play. There is nothing unusual in casting separate actors to play a character at different stages of his life. However, the opening scene and its continuation in Act Three, Scene Nine feature both incarnations of Alex on stage at once, occupying the same boards but located in entirely distinct spatiotemporal dimensions from one another within the drama’s narrative. The classical unities of time, place, and action are blatantly violated from the start. Act One, Scene One features “Alex and Lia, one year before the main action of the play.” In this scene Alex, debilitated by a first stroke but still fully communicative, recalls a childhood memory of seeing a dead man on the subway. Meanwhile, throughout the first scene, “Across the stage, in scant light, barely visible, there is the sitting figure of a man”—that is, the elder catatonic Alex; for clarity’s sake, think of him as Alex-70.5 The sitting figure’s dusky lighting sets him apart from the action. Furthermore, his placement vis-à-vis the scene between Lia and his younger self (call him Alex-69) suggests a play-within-the-play framework. Alex-70 is the Claudius-like spectator of a mousetrap commenting portentously upon his own condition; or even the Prospero-like author/director presiding over a scene he himself conjures and choreographs. Alex-70 has an overtly spectral, other-worldly demeanor, but the more mundane scene between Alex-69 and Lia is also staged on a “spare and semi-abstract” set that subtly undercuts its realism.6 All of these dramaturgical techniques conspire from the start to expose the artifice of the performance and to demarcate the various zones of the stage as separate planes of consciousness. The agency behind that consciousness belongs unmistakably to Alex Macklin. The opening scene is drawn specifically from Alex’s past, and it is selected for restaging precisely because of its relevance to his present condition. “I saw a dead man on the subway once. I was ten or eleven, riding with my father. […] He sits there, and I’m the only one that sees him. I see him so clearly now I could almost tell you things about his life.”7 Were it not for Alex-70’s faintly visible wheelchair and feeding tube, the audience might easily mistake the sitting figure on stage as a representation of the dead man on the subway. And for all practical purposes they are the same, or soon will be. Alex is dying, and he knows it. This recognition prompts him to recall his first encounter with a dead person, a sitting figure who now serves as a mirror of his own pending death. As a human, the clock started ticking on Alex’s death the moment he was born. But he seems to have come into full possession of this cursed human birthright—the foreknowledge of his own mortality—that day on the train as a child. Alex-10 boarded the train

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bound for death when he saw a premonition of his future condition, and now Alex-70 is nearing the end of the line where the prophecy will be fulfilled. It is interesting, however, that DeLillo chooses not to stage the foundational encounter on the subway, but instead stages Alex-69 struggling to recount details of that distant memory to his wife. The point of this convolution is to foreground the slippery mechanics of memory, of calling back distant events to the mind’s eye, of converting experience to narrative, of spectatorship (as a boy he watched the dead man as he now watches his previous self, and as Lia watches his former self, and as the audience watches them all), and of imagination (as a boy he imagined details of the dead man’s life, much as the audience is preparing to view details of Alex’s death). Far from the amateur bumblings of a novelist who should stick to his typewriter and stay out of the theater, DeLillo’s opening scene is the work of a mature dramatic technician at the height of his powers. Act One, Scene One is a marvel of complexity, economy, and highly sophisticated theatricality, establishing not only the key themes that will dominate the rest of the play, but also demonstrating how the entire play should be viewed as refracted through the prism of Alex Macklin’s dying perspective. Love-Lies-Bleeding should also be viewed within the broader theatrical context, particularly rich in American drama, of the “memory play” subgenre. When Tom Wingfield announced “[t]he play is memory” at the beginning of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, he sounded the clarion call for a distinct new brand of American theater.8 A “memory play” is not simply a remembrance of things past but is fundamentally a meditation upon memory itself. Memory plays are extended dramaturgical experiments in how to capture the mercurial, distorted, biased, unreliable, and mutinous nature of individual memory within the restrictive material conditions of live performance on a fixed stage. Many prominent playwrights have taken up this challenge, creating a vibrant tradition which is as innovative as it is venerable. Diverse variations of the American memory play in recent decades include David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, and Margaret Edson’s Wit. The greatest of them all remains Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Love-Lies-Bleeding traces its theatrical lineage most directly from Miller’s standard-bearer, which haunts DeLillo’s memory play with acute poignancy.9 Both Miller’s and DeLillo’s protagonists are men facing the end of their dwindling lives with regrets about their professional accomplishments and guilt over the personal wreckage they caused their loved ones. In Willy Loman’s end-of-life drama he is surrounded by his wife and two sons, all trying ineffectually to prevent his death. On the other hand, Alex Macklin is surrounded by a son and two wives, all ultimately cooperating to precipitate his death. Needless to say, the story of a post–World War II salesman’s



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death differs markedly from a post-millennial artist’s death. Nonetheless, Miller’s models for opening up the spatiotemporal capacities of the stage, for carving out a space for the enactment of memories and fantasies, and for allowing the audience privileged access into the mind of the protagonist are all influential prototypes for DeLillo in Love-Lies-Bleeding. Miller originally planned on titling his play Inside His Head, actually envisioning the stage as an open cranium. Although he ultimately abandoned that idea, Death of a Salesman retains the front apron of the stage as a distinct space for the free play of Willy’s reveries. DeLillo borrows this concept, specifying that “[i]n several scenes a limited sector of the stage functions as playing area,” including the memory scenes in both the first and third acts.10 Another integral factor in Miller’s play that can scarcely be overstated is the unreliability of Willy Loman’s perspective and the ramifications this has for the entire play. The audience is granted admission into the inner workings of his mind; no one but Willy and the spectators see these scenes from the past reenacted in the present. However, Willy has proven elsewhere to be so deceptive, self-deluded, and senile that we have little cause to trust the veracity of his flashbacks. Nor can we ever be sure that the seemingly realistic scenes in the present are untainted by Willy’s warped perspective. After all, Miller draws attention to the artifice of his set [“The entire setting is wholly or, in some places, partially transparent”], and he remarks at the beginning, “An air of the dream clings to the place, a dream rising out of reality.”11 Just because Miller dispensed with the skull motif on stage does not mean that he entirely abandoned the expressionist premise of filtering everything through Willy’s perspective, as if set inside his head. In short, as with so many works in the memory play tradition, categorical boundaries become blurred between present and past, between reality and illusion, between reliable memory, speculative recreation, wishful thinking, and paranoid delusion. The other abiding theatrical figure casting a long shadow over Love-LiesBleeding is Samuel Beckett. DeLillo has acknowledged admiration for Beckett throughout his career. However, he has also been careful to distinguish his own artistic approach from that of Beckett, and he has resisted critical attributions of direct influence. DeLillo told Tom LeClair in 1979, “So much modern fiction is located precisely nowhere. This is Beckett and Kafka insinuating themselves onto the page. Their work is so woven into the material of modern life that it’s not surprising so many writers choose to live there, or choose to have their characters live there.” DeLillo concedes his attraction to this kind of fiction, but adds, “I can’t write that way myself. I’m too interested in what real places look like and what names they have.”12 DeLillo’s literary sensibilities have evolved significantly since 1979, and I doubt that he would still fully ascribe to the disclaimer above. Consider for instance his post-millennial The Body Artist, with its spare, remorseless, Beckettian prose as verbal vehicle

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for the Kafkaesque “hunger artist” Lauren Hartke. DeLillo’s late fiction has increasingly reclaimed Beckett and Kafka as viable models. More to the point, and without getting sidetracked into discussing either writer’s fiction, DeLillo’s earlier assessment was patently inaccurate with respect to Beckett’s drama. Beckett’s plays are always located quite precisely somewhere: on the stage and in the theater. He persistently incorporates the material conditions of performance on stage and the phenomenological effects of spectatorship in the theater, making them the recurrent subjects of his plays. Beckett’s plays are doggedly epistemological in their reflexive interrogation of form: how can we know what we think we know from theatrical performance and spectatorship? DeLillo may downplay Beckett’s influence in interviews, but internal evidence from Love-Lies-Bleeding suggests that he has learned important dramaturgical lessons from Beckett and begun developing them in his own mature drama. The predominance of “sitting figures” alone makes Beckett an inescapable reference point. No fewer than eight Beckett dramas for various media conclude, as does Love-Lies-Bleeding, with silent seated figures: Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, Film, Eh Joe... but the clouds ... Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, and Nacht und Träume. As a novelist turned playwright, Beckett was susceptible to the usual complaints about static action and sluggish pace. However, rather than bending to conventional expectations, he responded with austere minimalism, frequently grinding his action down to near paralysis and slowing the pace to seemingly glacial duration. The silent sitting figure is the epitome of this aesthetic, but Beckett’s purpose was not merely (or at least not entirely) to defy his critics and torture his actors and audiences. The enduring appeal of this figure is metatheatrical, for it serves as a reflection of the individual spectator, similarly rooted in his or her seat, gazing silently from the darkness at this avatar or mirror-image double on stage, engaged in the same (in)action. Beckett’s characters tend to be abject failures, more like passive spectators of their own lives than active agents. They are mentally proficient at reliving their experiences through compulsive memories and repeated fantasies, but utterly inept at actually living and loving outside the confines of their inner sanctums. In the interests of brevity, let us consider only two representative Beckettian sitting figures, Hamm and Krapp. “Do you believe in the life to come?” asks Clov in Endgame; Hamm replies, “Mine was always that.”13 Hamm, who is blind and can no longer stand, has retreated into his refuge, withdrawn into his mind, where he sits and presides as unassailable tyrant over his own solipsistic world of endless repetition. The other characters who populate this mindscape—his servant/foster-son Clov, who can neither sit nor leave, and his parents, Nagg and Nell, who are confined to ashbins—are played by separate actors, but as characters they all function essentially as mental projections upon a



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mindscape. Hamm is a storyteller who likens his creative process to “the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three, so as to be together, and whisper together, in the dark.”14 Krapp is a failed author who essentially sacrificed his chances at love and happiness in exchange for an artistic career that never panned out. So he holes up in his hovel, listening to tapes of his own voice commenting upon his past—Krapp-69 listens to Krapp-39 who reflects upon listening to Krapp-29.15 The washed up, alcoholic, lecherous, and constipated Krapp spends each birthday in sedentary contemplation of a life well documented but not well lived. Nevertheless, like Hamm, bounded in a nutshell yet a king of infinite space, he exercises considerable control over his vicarious reenactments of the past, selecting reels of memory, forwarding and rewinding at whim, recording a new tape to revise and critique the views of his former selves. Along with being mentally dexterous while physically confined, Beckett’s moribund protagonists share with Alex Macklin an acute awareness of their imminent deaths. Krapp’s play dramatizes his last tape after all. And yet, close as they are to achieving the cherished end of their agonized existences, there remains a counter-impulse to go on, just a little farther, just a bit longer. “Enough, it’s time it ended, in the refuge too,” Hamm announces in his opening speech. “And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to … to end. Yes, there it is, it’s time it ended and yet I hesitate to—[he yawns]—to end.”16 Thus, in a play where the central sitting figure and all of his so-called “creatures” seemingly agree that the elusive end is near at hand and should be hastened by any means available, the “endgame” has only just begun. In terms of his treatment of memory and fantasy, his metatheatrical self-awareness of performance and reception conditions, his exploitation of the auditorium as a mutable mindscape, his ruthless examination of the human costs associated with a life devoted to art, and his coopting of the stage as a rehearsal space for preparing the protagonist’s end, Beckett’s influence is pervasive throughout DeLillo’s play. Resituating Love-Lies-Bleeding within the memory play and Beckettian traditions yields a drama very different than the one damned with faint praise by drowsy reviewers. Rather than playing the sacrificial victim of unwarranted family intervention or the beneficiary of a serene reprieve from suffering—the only two roles available to Alex in extremis within the topical euthanasia paradigm—Alex imaginatively shapes the entire performance through his ubiquitous consciousness. It is unclear whether Alex invents the main action entirely as a fantasized prelude to his death (à la Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”), or whether the euthanasia plot unfolds independent of him but is filtered through his dying perspective (à la Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”). Either way, Alex exerts a vital degree of control over the staged performances, not

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only in the opening and closing memory scenes, but also in the main action. This parallax view of Love-Lies-Bleeding through Alex-tinted glasses reveals rich new levels of meaning in almost every scene. For instance, Toinette’s speech to Lia in Act One, Scene Six sparkles with a glint of metatheatrical humor when held up to this new interpretive light. Ostensibly the scene depicts an older ex-wife trying to convince the younger current wife to participate in euthanizing her husband. But refracted through the prism of Alex, who recognizes both the urgency and the farce of these staged proceedings, the exchange sounds more like one weary character complaining to another about the tedious plot device in which they’re both stuck. Why are we clustered around him? Not because he’s a loving husband and father whose lifelong devotion. Not because he’s the patriarch of a teeming family. Look at us. The three survivors. Bare bones in triplicate. Not because we feel indebted in any way—I don’t. Or morally, somehow, obligated—I’m not. Or need his final blessing—too late for that. It’s much more elemental, isn’t it? We’re here to help him die.17

Why are we here? We’re waiting for Godot, waiting upon Alex, per usual. We’re pawns in someone else’s game, expedient tools to advance the plot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stuck in Hamlet’s play. Toinette’s self-reflexive lines recall Endgame’s Clov, likewise one of three survivors waiting upon a dying patriarch. Clov continues serving against his will because that is what “creatures” do, that is his part in the play: Clov:  I’ll leave you. Hamm: No! Clov:  What is there to keep me here? Hamm: The dialogue.18

Lia for her part responds in kind, acknowledging the theatrical artifice in which they are both bound by retorting, “He’s not ready yet. Go home and work on your speech.”19 These lines and their embedded metatheatrical subtext were always there lying close to the surface in Love-Lies-Bleeding, it just requires digging with the right tool to churn them up. Interpreting the main action as projected from Alex’s consciousness also helps illuminate the two monologue scenes. The first monologue (Act One, Scene Seven) features Sean at a lectern addressing an arts conference. The second (Act Three, Scene Five) features Lia at the lectern eulogizing Alex at his memorial service (mind you, this is three scenes before his death is staged in the play’s main action). By any interpretive standard, these monologues must be regarded as non-diegetic, taking place outside the main action, if not



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fantasized entirely. They are explicitly metatheatrical since they are delivered across the footlights, through the so-called fourth wall, and directed straight at the audience. These are not soliloquies, however, since there is no pretense of solitude. Not only are the spectators addressed as such, but the audience is even given a part to play: in the first we are treated as a crowd of artists and academics, in the second we are fellow mourners. Truth be told, from the start the audience has been addressed as more than an anonymous collection of spectators; we are also a sequestered jury of peers. Yes, a jury charged to weigh the ethical merits of euthanasia, but more importantly to evaluate the life decisions and judge the character of Alex Macklin. Within this context, Sean effectively offers an opening statement for the prosecution against Alex the artist and father, while Lia offers a closing statement for the defense in favor of Alex the husband and man. It is one thing for a bitter son to rail against his deadbeat dad, but quite another for the father to imagine all the indictments his abandoned son would charge him with if he only had the opportunity. Sean’s statement for the prosecution begins to look more like a guilty confession and fantasy of self-persecution, reminiscent of “the 27 depravities” in DeLillo’s novel The Names.20 “He was an artist. Look at his work. The work’s what matters, isn’t it?” Sean asks rhetorically, knowing that the imaginary assemblage of art snobs value the work above the life, since they didn’t have to endure Alex Macklin as a father. There is grim justice, however, in the limitations of Alex’s artistic success: “But he wasn’t great and he wasn’t famous. And we share, somewhere lurking, some of us, a small, dismal pleasure in this knowledge. Don’t we? I think we do.”21 His argument is the reverse of Linda Loman’s famous speech defending her husband despite his lack of fame: “I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog.”22 Sean rates Alex as an artist about the same as Biff rates Willy as a salesman: a dime a dozen. Or so Alex assumes. Motives of self-persecution and self-denigration lurk behind this fantasized monologue. “He absorbed certain people, consumed and absorbed them. You know this. Those he didn’t consume he left standing in the street somewhere. Say nothing good of the dead.”23 The verdict: Alex Macklin was a mediocre artist and a lousy man; he knows it and uses Sean as a mouthpiece to condemn himself. Elsewhere, as in Lia’s rousing defense in the third act, Alex is defended against slander and vindicated. If Sean’s monologue echoes the heated Loman debates over the value of Willy’s life choices, then Lia’s eulogy resonates with Linda’s requiem speech, likewise directed across the footlights directly at the audience. Both Linda and Lia find themselves in posthumous

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possession of a house with no husband left to share it. Linda marvels that, even in death, no one respects Willy, he is not properly mourned, and no attention is paid. Lia accuses those assembled of misunderstanding, gathering for the wrong motives to memorialize the wrong person: “People tell stories, exchange stories. I don’t know any stories. You know things about him that I never knew. This means nothing to me. There are no stories. You’re here for the wrong reason. If you’re here to honor his memory, it’s not his memory, it’s your memory, and it’s false.”24 Lia’s eulogy suggests that the deep heart’s core of Alex can be found in his art, particularly his unfinished magnum opus in the mountains outside their home. “I’ll go back home and climb into the burning hills, where he worked, and scatter his ashes there. He goes nowhere now, into nothing. That powerful work he had it in mind to make. Untitled, unfinished. But not nothing.”25 Unlike Sean’s monologue, which disparages Alex’s artistic underachievement, Lia’s monologue valorizes Alex’s artistic reach, if not his grasp. His inchoate power is best represented by his enigmatic abandoned project. We learn about this ambitious artwork in Act Two, the most revealing memory scene of the entire play. It is literally “revealing” in the sense that it is the only brightly lit scene in the play: “The room is open to late-afternoon light, a sense of blazing sky, revealing colors and objects not clearly visible in the dimmer setting of Act One.”26 This flashback is also enormously revealing in terms of Alex’s character. For the only time in the play we see him healthy, mobile, articulate, passionate, and seductive—in short, we see the man that four different women wanted to marry. The scene features Alex-64 and Toinette reminiscing, flirting, accusing, explaining, and getting drunk for the first time in years. Like Nick Shay’s journey into the desert to reunite with Klara Sax at the site of Long Tall Sally in DeLillo’s epic Underworld, Toinette is motivated to visit Alex partially out of curiosity about his latest art project in the remote West. Alex haltingly describes his plans, explaining why he has a crew blasting through a mountain: “A room, a cube. I don’t have a name for it. First we cut a passage in. A tough narrow entranceway, cramped, with jutting rock. […] A chamber, a cubical room. Fashioned out of solid rock. Precise dimensions. A large empty room. Six congruent square surfaces. Painted. Ocher and amber. Old colors. Burnt brick. Lampblack. All six surfaces, every square inch.”27 He seems utterly absorbed in the project, but he is also racked by self-doubt. “You understand this will never happen. It’ll never get that far. I don’t want to describe the paintings anyway. Wouldn’t be able to.”28 He assumes that Toinette will dismiss the plan as deranged, but she actually reminds him that he had mentioned this idea to her years earlier while talking in bed: “Art that’s hidden in a mountain. An incredible, you said, sort of stone enclosure that you would drench with paintings of your dreams.”29 But Alex is as changeable in his artistic vision as he is in his love life. No sooner does



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Toinette give voice to his dreamscape vision than he launches into a crisis of self-effacing scruples, second-guessing, disavowing, revising, and dismissing his previous plans: Should the room be painted at all? I have my doubts. I always have my doubts. The paint’s a mistake. The paint is excess. A bare room inside a mountain. I trust what’s real. Rock. You can’t socialize it. But why do I think there’s something sad and frail in this work? You think I’m crazy but I’m not crazy enough. I want to throw off doubt, stop thinking, stop caring, just be, just work. Throw off who I am, goddamn it. A bare room without a signature. Just there. Except it won’t be there.30

And indeed, judging by Lia’s eulogy, Alex never did follow through with the project: “What powerful work he had it in mind to make. Untitled, unfinished. But not nothing.”31 Alex may not have finished his perfectly proportioned room in the middle of a stone mountain, but the vision itself is highly suggestive of primal drives. Within the context of a play about his pending death, it is impossible to ignore the artwork’s resemblance to a tomb, more specifically a passage tomb (e.g., Newgrange in Ireland). Alex-64 could not have known then that he would be rendered catatonic only six years later, but Alex-70 knows it now. By restaging this memory at the center of the play, Alex ruminates on the possibility that he had been subconsciously planning and constructing his own grave for years, a project which necessarily remained incomplete until he was finally prepared to cross the threshold and inhabit it. But there are other evocations buried here. The vivid features Alex envisions for his personal mausoleum— a perfect room, perhaps animated by dreams or perhaps a sedate sensory deprivation chamber, accessed by a cramped passageway, where one might escape the world and one’s identity—simultaneously conjures up a related set of associations, namely the primal fantasy of regression back to the womb. Freud first diagnosed the uncanny psychological connection between tombs and wombs in The Interpretation of Dreams, where he observes, It was not for a long time that I learned to appreciate the importance of phantasies and unconscious thoughts about life in the womb. They contain an explanation of the remarkable dread that many people have of being buried alive; and they also afford the deepest unconscious basis for the belief in survival after death, which merely represents a projection into the future of this uncanny life before birth.32

Freud’s protégé Otto Rank later developed this line of thought into the most extensive study of regression fantasies, The Trauma of Birth. Rank identifies the biological attachment of the fetus to the mother in the womb as the

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primal libidinal attachment. The forcible detachment of that life-sustaining attachment amounts to an eviction from paradise, the “trauma of birth.” One way or another, Rank argues, every human longs to reverse that process and restore the idealized conditions of perfect security and unity which once pertained in the womb. As Rank puts it, “just as the anxiety at birth forms the basis of every anxiety or fear, so every pleasure has as its final aim the re-establishment of the intrauterine primal pleasure.”33 DeLillo has frequently indulged in regression fantasies in his fiction, depicting characters who seek “re-establishment of the intrauterine primal pleasure” diagnosed by Rank. David Bell, the mother-haunted protagonist of DeLillo’s first novel Americana, is driven throughout the novel to restore his libidinal connection to his dead mother, acting out his desires for reunification with an artist and mother-substitute named Sullivan. In a particularly memorable scene, David curls up and falls asleep in Sully’s dark and membranous art studio known as “the Cocoon.” He awakes in the middle of the night as if reinstalled in the womb: “The loft seemed endless, a scene lifted from the sandy bottom of a dream. A shape in the shape of my mother was forming in the doorway.”34 Ratner’s Star offers multiple variations on the regression trope, including Henrik Endor’s hole-inside-a-hole, Maurice Wu’s cave, Billy Twillig’s dark room and blanket-draped table, and the antrum which houses the Logicon project beneath the cycloid of Field Experiment One. Wu practically quotes Otto Rank when he observes, “The birth of a baby equals the death of a fetus. This experience recreates itself throughout our lives.”35 At one point Billy Twillig, the fourteen-year-old math genius at the center of Ratner’s Star, explicitly fantasizes about delivery from and regression back into the womb: Billy tried to imagine the birth of Cyril’s wife’s baby. It would happen in grim lights violently. A dripping thing trying to clutch to its hole. Dredged up and beaten. Blood and drool and womb mud. How cute, this neon shrieker made to plunge upward, odd-headed blob, this marginal electric glow-thing. Dressed and powdered now. Engineered to abstract design. Cling, suck and cry. Follow with the eye. Gloom and drought of unprotected sleep. Had there been a light in her belly, dim briny light in that pillowing womb, dusk enough to light a page, bacterial smear of light, an amniotic gleam that I could taste, old, deep, wet and warm? Return, return to negative unity.36

DeLillo’s diverse treatments of the theme also include considerations of rebirth, where the womb serves as a way station on the journey out of one life and into the next. In Americana Carol Deming informs David Bell, “‘I can talk myself into almost anything. When I die I’ll talk myself into another womb and start all over. That’s what they do in Tibet—people who couldn’t even get into Princeton entering fresh wombs like crazy.’” David responds, “‘Through a womb-door,’” and she agrees: “‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘And



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there are good wombs and bad wombs.’”37 Murray Jay Siskind makes a similar point in White Noise, identifying the American supermarket as a rejuvenating good womb: “Tibetans believe there is a transitional state between death and rebirth. Death is a waiting period, basically. Soon a fresh womb will receive the soul. In the meantime the soul restores to itself some of the divinity lost at birth. […] This place recharges us spiritually, it prepares us, it’s a gateway or pathway.’”38 Murray’s identification of the supermarket as an express lane for metempsychosis is dubious, but DeLillo finds a viable artistic vehicle for regression, transmigration, and reincarnation in the theater itself. Again, Beckett sets the standard for exploiting theater’s capacity as a “wombscape.” The best example is his play Not I, featuring the rapid speech of a spotlighted Mouth shrouded in the insulating darkness of the auditorium. Mouth begins with a description of the birth trauma: “… out … into this world … this world … tiny little thing … before its time.”39 On one level she is describing her expulsion from the womb and the semiotic chora of chaotic infancy in an unwelcoming external world. On another level, however, she is describing with phenomenological precision the conditions of being reborn, night after night, out of the darkness and into the light, as an entity onstage—out into this world, namely the hermetically sealed womb-world of the theater. The theater not only constitutes a sanctuary from the outer world but also an escape from selfhood, a negation or suspension of the “I” in favor of free play in the various guises of “Not-I.” Note that this regressive ideal is exactly what Alex seeks in his unfinished artwork: “I want to throw off doubt, stop thinking, stop caring, just be, just work. Throw off who I am, goddamn it. A bare room without a signature. Just there. Except it won’t be there.”40 Maybe it won’t be there, carved into a mountain, but might it be here—in the theater itself. Within the solipsistic parameters DeLillo establishes in Love-Lies-Bleeding, Alex-70 succeeds where Alex-64 failed by carving out a perfect room—not in a desert mountain, but in his mind, in his fantasized womblike tomb and tomblike womb, and above all in the concrete material world of the theater. Love-Lies-Bleeding also activates another dormant fantasy that Alex has harbored for years. Alex-64 confides to Toinette, “I always thought I’d kill someone. I don’t know why it didn’t happen. I think I wanted it to happen.” He never acted on this sadistic urge, but adds ruefully, “I ought to feel lucky it didn’t happen. But here I am, paying for it anyway.”41 DeLillo’s fascination with killers and would-be killers has remained constant throughout his career. He is one of the most astute chroniclers of the murderer’s mindset, from domestic terrorists in Great Jones Street and Players and international terrorists in Mao II and Falling Man and a murderous cult in The Names, to the genocidal Adolf Hitler in Running Dog and White Noise and the serial killer Richard Henry Gilkey in Underworld, and including several character studies

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of central protagonists who were killers—Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra, Nick Shay in Underworld, and Eric Packer in Cosmopolis—not to mention characters who longed to become killers but never followed through, like Jack Gladney in White Noise and Alex Macklin in Love-Lies-Bleeding. Monet had his water lilies, and DeLillo has his murderous men in small rooms. In White Noise Murray draws a bright line between “killers” and “diers.” “‘I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don’t have the disposition, the rage or whatever it takes to be a killer. We let death happen. We lie down and die. But think what it’s like to be a killer.’”42 Carpe mortem. A killer is someone who seizes the reins of death: “‘It’s a way of controlling death. A way of gaining the ultimate upper hand. Be the killer for a change. Let someone else be the dier.’”43 Alex-64 claims never to have killed a man, but can Alex-70 say the same? By staging his own death in Love-Lies-Bleeding, appropriating the stage as a fantasy forum for (re)imagining his own euthanasia, Alex in extremis effectively operates as both killer and dier. For that matter, if we regard the entire play as a performance staged in Alex’s mind, he is not only the killer and the dier but also the very scene of the crime. One might normally expect a euthanasia play to culminate in the death of the patient. Love-Lies-Bleeding does stage Alex’s death in Act Three, Scene Eight. However, the play then continues onward with two more scenes. As in several of his novels, DeLillo favors a narrative trajectory that bends back on itself, connecting the end with the beginning. Scene Nine continues that pattern by returning to the opening exchange between Alex and Lia. Once again Alex-69 reflects upon the dead sitting figure on the subway, while the dimly lit Alex in extremis sits apart on the periphery. DeLillo does note “feeding tubes not visible” for the sitting figure, which potentially indicates that Alex70 is now dead.44 This interpretation jives with Alex’s reported death in Scene Eight, yet it is difficult to reconcile his death with the continuation of his memory in Scene Nine. An alternative is that the sitting figure occupies some shadowy zone between life and death—“No longer and not yet,” as Sean once put it, a quotation from Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil.45 Perhaps the most harrowing possibility is that, as in Beckett’s Play, physical death does not mark the end of consciousness but only the beginning of a new phase, where the body wastes away but the mind motors on unabated, ceaselessly revolving laps around the remembered past life. The Cartesian split of mind and body, and the widening chasm separating them, emerges as one of Alex-69’s chief preoccupations after his first stroke. Lia persistently tries to reassure her husband, insisting “Your mind is strong” and “Your mind is alive.”46 She also continues to stimulate him sensually, reminding him “You can feel my hand on your body” and “My breath on your face. That’s what you feel and who you are, now, this instant. You



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need to hold hard.”47 But Alex feels increasingly unmoored from the present, alienated from his body and pulled irresistibly backwards in his mind. He tells Lia, “Everything’s collapsing backwards. I can’t feel what’s here. […] Everything’s running backwards now. This is what consciousness is beginning to mean. Objects in rooms in dying light. I live in old objects, things turned gray.”48 This reflection echoes his description from the first scene of the dead man on the subway: “Gray like an animal. He belonged to a different order of nature. The first dead man I’d ever seen and there’s never been anyone since who has looked more finally and absolutely dead.”49 Now the “gray animal” of death is devolving further down the order of nature, down to gray “[o]bjects in rooms in dying light.” In short, Alex is becoming divested of his humanity, following his death drive back to the inorganic state, becoming less a man and more a lifeless object—less a character and more a prop. As he bluntly puts it to Lia, “I’m carrying around a corpse and we both smell him.”50 Alex-69’s premonition of what he will become is followed by a stark depiction of what Alex-70 is now. The script for the final Scene Ten reads in its entirety: “The sitting figure in isolation. / Black.”51 For all its simplicity and silence, this closing image is rich with suggestive possibility. The directions do not specify if the sitting figure is alive or dead, presumably leaving that choice to the discretion of each production. Playing him as alive would lend credence to the interpretation that Alex is the source and site of the preceding action, although playing him as dead certainly does not negate that interpretation. Even if the production sends signals that Alex is deceased, this still leaves open the question of how best to understand that death. To the extent that Alex longed for release, longed to be unfastened from the dying animal of his body and reprieved from physical and mental suffering, he seems to have gotten his wish: his life—and the play—have reached the end. From the standpoint of his abiding fantasy of regression into a womb-tomb of perfect solitude and silence, the final image would seem to represent an ideal consummation of both his life and his art. However, such definitive resolutions ring false. Had DeLillo wanted to tie up the loose ends of the dramatic conflict so tidily, he could have proceeded straight from the report of Alex’s death in Scene Eight to the closing vignette of the sitting figure in perfect repose. Instead, he inserts Scene Nine, a fretful scene that highlights the growing disconnect between the mind and body, implying that relief to one by no means guarantees relief to the other. Furthermore, the backward propelled inertia of the scene suggests less the end of a line, a terminal destination, and more a cyclical orbit, a return to the beginning for another circuit. Indeed, this latter trajectory is far more consistent with the metatheatrical paradigm DeLillo establishes from the start and applies rigorously throughout Love-Lies-Bleeding. For no ending is truly “the end” in theater. Beckett notoriously draws attention to this bedrock principle

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in Play by inserting my favorite stage direction of all time at the end of the script: “[Repeat play.]”52 And they do! The “dead” characters (performed by live actors buried up to their necks in urns) start from the top and launch into a second performance of the entire play. For unprepared spectators, the gradual realization that they have heard these words before, that this bizarre play has rewound to the beginning and started over, is both startling and horrifying. How long will this go on? How many times will the play be repeated? Will I be stuck in my chair, as the characters are stuck in their urns, mutually bewildered and disoriented forever? In theory Beckett’s Play forms a Möbius strip that could go on ad infinitum, or at least until the actual deaths of the actors playing the characters. In practice, however, the play is only repeated once—enough to make its point that plays never really end in the theater. Tonight’s performance may have ended, but the play itself remains frozen in suspension, reset and ready to be activated again. Come back tomorrow night, and we’ll do it all over again. All plays share this inherent cyclical nature, but few draw reflexive attention and exploit this fact as much as Beckett’s Play— or Don DeLillo’s Love-Lies-Bleeding. The closing image of Alex as a sitting figure in solitude, fading into black, is essentially the same position and condition he occupied from the start. Indeed, if the entire play has represented an interior drama playing out in his mind, he may have been sitting physically undisturbed the whole time. The audience enters tonight’s performance through Alex, and perhaps the final vignette points the way toward exiting Alex before we exit the auditorium. In any case, like Hamm at the close of Endgame, the sitting figure returns full circle to a resting position, prepared effectively for tomorrow night’s performance, where he will revolve through all his memories, fears, and fantasies again, ineluctably reliving his life and death before a new audience. DeLillo published Love-Lies-Bleeding in 2005, the same year his friend and fellow writer David Foster Wallace delivered the commencement address at Kenyon College. Wallace’s address was published posthumously under the title This Is Water, and the centerpiece of the speech is a joke that DeLillo also uses in his play. Here is DeLillo’s version, told by Sean to his catatonic father: “All right, here’s a joke. It’s a philosophical joke. I told it to my seniors in geophysics. Goes like this. Two tiny young fish are swimming in the sea. They come upon an older fish. He says to them, Hey, fellas, how’s the water? The two young fish swim on past. They swim for many miles. Finally one fish says to the other, What the fuck is water?”53 Wallace explains, “The immediate point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”54 Wallace uses the story in an effort to expose the unconscious “default settings” with which most contemporary Americans are hard-wired, settings which train us to worship ourselves and put our own interests above all others, instincts that



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Wallace urges us to become conscious of so that we can resist and reprogram them. I wonder if Wallace had read Love-Lies-Bleeding, or if he had discussed the solipsistic tendencies of Alex Macklin with his mentor Don DeLillo. It is certainly tempting to think Wallace was inspired by his reactions to Alex when he counseled the graduating seniors of Kenyon College against the temptations of false freedom, “The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.”55 It is likewise tempting to hear echoes of Alex in Wallace’s peroration, where he proclaims, “None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death.”56 The good life before death, one well lived in humility and empathy and kindness to others instead of narcissistic self-absorption, requires vigilance, “awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: ‘This is water.’”57 Perhaps Alex Macklin could have benefited from the wisdom of David Foster Wallace, rather than withdrawing from the world and his loved ones into his art and his mind, his skull-sized kingdom where he sits at the center of his creations. Critics and audiences of Love-Lies-Bleeding could also learn a lesson from the joke about the fish. We are so accustomed to realism as the default mode of American theater, so accustomed to viewing social problem plays and family dramas through limited conventional paradigms, that Love-Lies-Bleeding might easily be misperceived as just another topical play debating the merits and repercussions of euthanasia. However, if one sets aside these conventional blinders and examines the play with more careful scrutiny, one can appreciate Love-Lies-Bleeding for what it really is: a subjective distillation of death from Alex Macklin’s perspective, a metatheatrical self-portrait of the artist as a dying man. NOTES 1. Don DeLillo, Love-Lies-Bleeding (New York: Scribner, 2005); Tony Adler, “DeLillo Off the Page,” Chicago Reader, May 11, 2066, www.chicagoreader.com, accessed June 21, 2013. 2. Tony Adler, “Off the Page.” 3. Don DeLillo, The Day Room (New York: Knopf, 1987); Mervyn Rothstein, “A Novelist Faces His Themes on New Ground,” in Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 21. 4. Don DeLillo, L-L-B, 1. 5. Ibid., 7. 6. Ibid., 3. 7. Ibid., 7. 8. Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, ed. Robert Bray (New York: New Directions, 1999), 4.

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9. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem (New York: Penguin, 1998). 10. Ibid., 3. 11. Ibid., 1. 12. Don DeLillo, “An Interview with Don DeLillo,” Interview by Thomas LeClair, in Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 15. 13. Samuel Beckett, Endgame, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 116. 14. Ibid., 126. 15. Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 213–24. 16. Samuel Beckett, Endgame, 93. 17. Don DeLillo, L-L-B, 23–24. 18. Samuel Beckett, Endgame, 120–121. 19. Don DeLillo, L-L-B, 24. 20. Don DeLillo, The Names (New York: Knopf, 1982), 16–17. 21. Don DeLillo, L-L-B, 25. 22. Arthur Miller, Salesman, 40. 23. Don DeLillo, L-L-B, 25. 24. Ibid., 82. 25. Ibid., 83. 26. Ibid., 51. 27. Ibid., 59. 28. Ibid., 60. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 61. 31. Ibid., 83. 32. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey. Volume V. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 401–2, n3. 33. Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth. (London: Kegan Paul, 1929), 17. Rank’s emphasis. 34. Don DeLillo, Americana (New York: Penguin, 1971), 110. 35. Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star (New York: Vintage, 1979), 356. 36. Ibid., 36. 37. Don DeLillo, Americana, 312. 38. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York, Viking, 1985), 37. 39. Samuel Beckett, Not I, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 376. 40. Don DeLillo, L-L-B, 61. 41. Ibid., 58. 42. Don DeLillo, White Noise, 277. 43. Ibid. 44. Don DeLillo, L-L-B, 92. 45. Ibid., 48. 46. Ibid., 94, 95.



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47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 94. 49. Ibid., 8. 50. Ibid., 94. 51. Ibid., 97. 52. Samuel Beckett, Play, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 317. 53. Don DeLillo, L-L-B, 77. 54. David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 8. 55. Ibid., 117. 56. Ibid., 129. 57. Ibid., 131–132.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adler, Tony. “DeLillo off the Page.” Chicago Reader (11 May 2006). www.chicagoreader.com. Web. Accessed June 21, 2013. Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1986, 89–134. ———. Krapp’s Last Tape. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1986, 213–24. ———. Not I. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1986, 373–84. ———. Play. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1986, 305–20. DeLillo, Don. Americana. New York: Penguin, 1971. ———. Love-Lies-Bleeding. New York: Scribner, 2005. ———. The Names. New York: Knopf, 1982. ———. Ratner’s Star. New York: Vintage, 1979. ———. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1985. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Volume V. London: Hogarth Press, 1953. Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem. New York: Penguin, 1998. Rank, Otto. The Trauma of Birth. London: Kegan Paul, 1929. Rothstein, Mervyn. “A Novelist Faces His Themes on New Ground.” 1987. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Edited by Thomas DePietro. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 20–24. Wallace, David Foster. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. New York: Little, Brown, 2009. Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. Ed. Robert Bray. New York: New Directions, 1999.

Chapter 7

“The Art, the Artist, the Landscape, the Sky” Ontological Crossings in Love-Lies-Bleeding Randy Laist Following the epic sweep of Underworld, the narrow focus on liminal moments of being in The Body Artist identifies that thin volume as a turning point in DeLillo’s career.1 Whereas DeLillo’s twentieth-century works adopted as their dominant theme the globalized immensity of vast commercial, economic, military, and communications systems, his twenty-first-century novels follow a trajectory of phenomenological reduction, focusing in on the minutest flickers and nuances of perception. Even when these novels point toward mass-cultural subjects—the global financial system in Cosmopolis, 9/11 in Falling Man, and the Iraq War in Point Omega—DeLillo’s stylistic thrust has been inward and minimalist.2 In its project of stripping language and perception down to their most elemental units, The Body Artist is a kind of prolegomenon to DeLillo’s twenty-first-century body of work. Under ­DeLillo’s intense phenomenological microscope, conventional understandings of self and other, of real and imaginary, and of life and death disappear into patterns of ambiguity and misrecognition. The Body Artist’s central mystery—the identity of Mr. Tuttle—is amplified and extended by the myriad mysteries of everyday perception that populate the novella. “The dead squirrel you see in the driveway, dead and decapitated, turns out to be a strip of curled burlap, but you look at it, you walk past it, even so, with a mixed tinge of terror and pity.”3 The dead squirrel that is not dead and is not a squirrel nevertheless lives on in a netherworld of perceptual reality that makes no distinction between organic and inorganic entities, or between entities that are imagined and entities that are real. In another instance, Lauren is driving through town when she sees “a man sitting on his porch, ahead of her, through trees and shrubs, arms spread, a broad-faced, blondish man, lounging … . His life flew open to her passing glance … She knew him. She saw into him.” A second later, however, “she understood that 157

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she was not looking at a seated man but at a paint can placed on a board that was balanced between two chairs.”4 If the intuitive sense of recognition on which we rely to organize perceptual reality into ontological categories of animate or inanimate, living or dead, imaginary or real, is unreliable, the entire system of perception is thrown into doubt. Lauren can never be sure how much of her lived experience takes place in the margin of ontological misrecognition. The basic ontological categories of animate and inanimate which have always been central pillars of Western philosophy phase into a profound indeterminacy, a development which affects Lauren’s comprehension of Mr. Tuttle’s uncanny identity, DeLillo’s approach to novelistic representation, and the reader’s ability to rely on the foundational premises of Western culture. The dilemma of ontological categorization that characterizes Lauren’s encounter with the paint can man in The Body Artist becomes the central focus of DeLillo’s third play, Love-Lies-Bleeding, which orbits entirely around the ontological identity of the figure in the straight-backed chair.5 In the same way that Cosmopolis, Falling Man, and Point Omega refer to political events even as they seem to shrink away from the social world toward introspection, Love-Lies-Bleeding takes place within a historical context of a social debate concerning assisted suicide, but it approaches the subject with an obliqueness that is vintage late-phase DeLillo. Rather than moving outward into the systems of politics, medicine, and religion that shape the public discourse about euthanasia, Love-Lies-Bleeding focuses on four characters who have deliberately attempted to remove themselves from the influence of lawyers, doctors, and clergy. With its terse dialogue and its impressionistic structure, Love-Lies-Bleeding similarly strips away any theatrical superfluities in its laser-like penetration into the minimal limits of what constitutes a human being. Is Alex Alex or a statuesque “figure”? Is he conscious? Is he human? These questions take the play to the borders of ontology—What constitutes the division between the “for-itself” and the “in-itself,” the subject and the object, the living and the dead? What DeLillo discovers in this ontological no-man’s land is not a direct answer to the social problem of assisted suicide (Alex is or isn’t alive, euthanasia is right or wrong), but a network of relationships which weave together the categories of animate and inanimate entities. Love-Lies-Bleeding echoes The Body Artist’s preoccupation with embodiment as a point of intersection between life and non-life. In Love-LiesBleeding, the cerebrovascular accident which fells Alex is the play’s central metaphor for the manner in which human consciousness is reliant on a physical substratum of biochemical architecture. Lia recalls how Alex would hold her hand to his heart when they were hiking together to shock her with the pure visceral power of his biology, but now, after two strokes, Alex has been reduced to nothing but a heartbeat. Rather than symbolizing the vitalistic



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principle, Alex’s heartbeat becomes a sign of life as a meaningless inertia, a kind of postmortem life that is completely indifferent to humanistic values or individual egos. The bodily organ that is most central to Love-Lies-Bleeding is not the heart, however, but the brain. The play opens and closes with Alex’s narrative of the time he saw a corpse on the subway. The dead man on the subway who seems to move despite his lifelessness is an image that combines the dynamism of electrical energy shooting through tubes (like action potentials coursing along neural axons) with an image of a corpse endowed with simulacral life. Alex is clearly obsessed and disturbed by this vision. In particular, his line “When the train rocked” is punctuated by a stage direction to pause, indicating that it is precisely this violation of the boundaries of life and death, the mechanically induced, Frankensteinian, artificial animation of the corpse, that is most troubling to Alex.6 As in Libra and Underworld, the subway is a site of mysterious meaning.7 In this case, the dynamic network of connections that undergirds the urban space and the civilizational project is associated with a blind momentum of living death. Alex feels as though the subway corpse “belong[s] to a different order of nature,” and his move to the desert can be understood as a flight away from the mechanistic, deterministic powers of urbanization and technology.8 Alex cannot see, however, what the audience can, which is that he himself is fated to become a mirror image of the animated corpse. In addition to the obvious parallel between the commuting corpse and poststroke Alex, the construction of the play manipulates the neurological imagery of the brain as a network of inertial impulses to reflect Alex’s own sense of memory and time. Alex’s memory of seeing the dead man on the subway includes the memory of his father reading a sports column in the newspaper. Despite the confidence with which Alex reports the minute details of this childhood memory, he admits to a final uncertainty concerning whether the mustache that is “burning a hole in his brain” belongs to his father or to the photograph of the sportswriter.9 The confusion between Alex’s living father and the inanimate picture of the mass-media figure embeds another degree of ontological ambiguity into this image, while simultaneously implying that neither of these figures is quite alive in that they only exist in Alex’s unreliable memory. Of course, even when memory is confident of its accuracy, it is capricious in its workings. Alex’s admission that “The memory ends here. I draw a total blank” both depicts the apparently random, inscrutable independence of the memory-function of consciousness—a process that takes place outside the orbit of conscious intention—and looks forward to the more profound “blank” that Alex will “draw” from his brain when it falls victim to another variety of random and inscrutable falling away.10 In the context of the play as a whole, these imperfections in Alex’s memory prefigure the imperfections endemic to brain-based consciousness altogether, along with

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all of the thousand shocks that cerebral tissue is heir to. Likewise, the framing narrative in which Alex tells Lia about his subway memory also suggests the importance of the neurological paradigm to the perception of time itself. The time of the frame-narrative is an in-between time, not only because it is between Alex’s two strokes, but more importantly because it is positioned in a parallax between two temporal registers. The time between when Alex says that the name of the columnist “will come to me in a minute” and the time he remembers the name at the end of the play elapses both in the living minute of Alex’s subjective experience as well as in the “dead” time of DeLillo’s arrangement of the scene, the time-sense in which Alex already exists as a living corpse even as he remembers and speaks. All of these details feed in to the common impression that the body, and more specifically, the brain, is a site in which the categories of life and death collapse into an interdependent network of associations which make it impossible to define the place where physiology ends and consciousness commences. Rather, the two terms reveal themselves to circulate Mobius-style into one another. The convergence of electro-chemical forces and the simulation of life is exemplified by Lia and Sean’s twin interpretations of Alex’s response to the lightning storm. According to Lia, “His head raised up and he was in awe, I know he was—purest living wonder,” whereas Sean insists that “He’s just showing meaningless body response. There’s no awareness, no consciousness.”11 As a teacher of geophysics, Sean is used to considering reality in terms of matter and forces, and his response to his father’s condition relies on maintaining the perception that Alex is a mannequin, quintessentially exiled from the category of living human beings. Alex determines that his post-stroke father “looks like that guy who had a kids’ show on TV. Mister somebody. Mister Mister Mister.”12 This conceptualization puts the seated figure at several removes from living humanity, rendering Alex as a stereotype of a media image that has vanished into an echo chamber. Ironically, Sean’s description of Alex as a simulacral echo effect itself echoes a description Toinette had provided of Sean a minute or so previously in play-time: “He’s like someone who’s like someone.”13 Sean finds it easy to identify his father as a simulacral echo-person because Sean himself is a simulacral echo-person. Sean sees in Alex a reflection of his own inner mannequin. The lack of human life Sean perceives in his father is simply a projection of Sean’s own lack of “awareness” and “consciousness” regarding the continuity between his style of life and Alex’s. Lia’s description of Alex’s response to the lightning storm suggests a more nuanced approach to Alex’s condition. Her ecstatic description of Alex’s “purest living wonder” emphasizes the vitality she perceives in his response, but it also gestures beyond coarse definitions of vitality to suggest that overwhelming awe contains an element that transcends bodily life altogether,



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forming a circuit with the inorganic landscape and a level of human identity that bypasses the quotidian banality of a definition of life that is based on being able to carry on small talk and tie your shoes. Indeed, it is precisely this variety of consciousness that Alex came to the desert to explore. In response to Toinette’s inquiry into his motives for secluding himself in an elemental landscape, Alex responds, “I’m just here. In winter the sharp-shinned hawk comes down to the scrub. I can sit and watch a hawk in a tree for unnumbered hours. I’m on his time. He don’t move, I don’t move.”14 The desert is a place where Alex can achieve a level of subjectivity that is beyond “consciousness” and “awareness,” a kind of animalistic body-life that is integrated in a fundamental way with the non-human entities in the landscape. For Alex, geophysics is not a classroom discipline, but a subjective enterprise of bodily integration into the earth. Considered within this context, Alex’s neurological response to the lightning storm is a strange fulfillment of Alex’s desire to refine away any impurities, be they civilization or human consciousness itself, which might interfere with his perfect communion with the landscape. The electricity in the sky communicates directly with the electricity in his neurons. Alex’s stroke results in both the complete effacement of the personality of the artist and a blissful implosion of the binary poles of subject and object. DeLillo’s preoccupation with the potency of the neurobiological body as a site for this kind of transcendence goes back at least as far as End Zone, which concludes with Gary Harkness withdrawing into a condition reminiscent of Alex’s: “In the end they had to carry me to the infirmary and feed me through plastic tubes.”15 Gary’s self-induced catatonia is an extreme example of the theme of ascetic self-diminishment that is one of the dominant notes in DeLillo’s fiction. Other DeLillian crypto-catatonics such as Ratner in Ratner’s Star and Shaver in Amazons achieve a kind of heightened existence, and DeLillo’s many other victims of neurological impairment, including the Micklewhite Boy of Great Jones Street, Willie Mink in White Noise, Liane’s mother in Falling Man, and the actor with the brain virus in Game 6, to name a few examples, become emblems of the haunting mystery of embodied consciousness.16 In DeLillo’s fiction, these characters do not stand for fringe situations or outlying possibilities; rather, they represent a basic fact of human existence, the fact that human existence is contingent on a glitch-prone bundle of biochemical circuitry. Sean explains to Toinette that he wasn’t aware of what was happening between his father and his mother when he was in the womb because he was a fetus, suggesting a catatonic prehistory shared by all human beings. “I was curled up in my pouch. I was floating. I had gills and fins.”17 Sean’s strangely vivid description of his fetal existence evokes the uncanny strangeness of animalian biology. Fetal Sean’s absorption in the oceanic oblivion of total embodiment and his morphological blending with non-human species set him apart from engagement in the affairs of human

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civilization in a way that suggest a vivid parallel with post-stroke Alex. The juxtaposition of the fetus and the stroke victim presents a glimpse of the arc of human life as a Conradian “flicker” from a resting state in which consciousness is subsumed in embodiment. Even in the flush of life, the characters in Love-Lies-Bleeding achieve only a limited variety of self-awareness, and the play’s ultimate vision is one in which consciousness itself is a product of that same abstruse facticity that characterizes the sharp-shinned hawk or the cerebrovascular accident. The motives of Lia, Toinette, and Sean for responding as they do to Alex’s incapacitation are all fundamentally ambiguous, even to themselves. Do Lia’s ministrations constitute an expression of love or a strain of masochism? Does she want to keep Alex alive for his comfort or for her own? These questions about her motives are unanswered and, moreover, the play suggests that they are unanswerable, that human psychology exposes such simple distinctions as meaningless. Toinette similarly questions her own motives for making this visit to see Alex. Is she acting out of sympathy, or out of an urge to punish herself? Is she trying to do the right thing, or is she in desperate flight from her own loneliness? The question of motive is most pressing in Sean’s case. Is his insistence on euthanizing his father rooted in rationality and compassion, or is it an expression of his filial hostility, the centerpiece of an elaborate plan to “punish,” as Toinette puts it, both his father and his father’s wives. Is Sean motivated by devotion or revenge? The only answer to any of these questions proffered by DeLillo’s play is that the questions are irrelevant; they represent a kind of idle chatter that floats around human motives but does not penetrate or affect them in any way. The characters play out their actions from a neurological soup of desires, fears, and whims that well up from the facticity of who they happen to be. In their own way, they are just as unconscious as post-stroke Alex, acting out the code of their inscrutable neurochemical impulses. Pre-stroke Alex had commented on the strange otherness at the heart of selfhood. “Something bears in on me,” he explains to Toinette. “Who I am, that’s what it is, and there’s no end to it.”18 Alex’s conflation of the pronouns “I” and “it” does more than prefigure the question of whether, after his stroke, he is still the “figure” seated in the chair; his turn of phrase suggests that this subject-object ambiguity is a fundamental element of human being. When Toinette offhandedly asks Lia, “What do you know about being in the world?”, the unintentional Heideggerian echo invests the question with a heightened meaning, the question of what any human being can really know about the basic coordinates of lived experience.19 Lia herself articulates a similar aporia when, describing the nature of grief, she refers to “The stark fact. The thing that turns us into children, alone under the sky. When it stops being unbearable, it becomes something worse. It becomes the air we breathe.”20 What is closest to us and most all-pervasive is precisely what is



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impossible to perceive, as expressed in Sean’s “philosophical joke” about the fish who don’t know what water is. Immersed in themselves, in the world, in existence, DeLillo’s characters experience in their subjective existence an alienation from themselves and their motives that parallels the comatose inertia represented by post-stroke Alex, even as it makes Alex’s form of total immersion into the world seem purer and more honest by comparison. Indeed, Alex’s stroke can be interpreted as the culmination of his life’s work, the artistic motivation that drove him to the desert in pursuit of clarity and simplicity. In his paintings, Alex had managed to achieve a synthesis of his living personality with the inanimate materials of his craft that is so compelling that Toinette tells him that she held on to his canvases because “I wanted you breathing from the walls.”21 The visual arts constitute a style of presence in which the charisma, will, and identity of a living artist appear in the form of inanimate matter. Although art testifies to a human presence, it is a kind of presence that is notoriously mute, posing questions without answers and provoking a dialogue in which it does not participate. This unsettling blend of intimacy and otherness that is characteristic of the visual arts is perhaps most perfectly emblematized by paleolithic cave paintings. The walls of Lascaux and Chauvet testify not only to the existence of the paleolithic artists, but to their personalities and their worldviews, even as the historical distance between our world and theirs shrouds these images in an impenetrable cloak of mystery and indeterminability reminiscent of that which veils the natural world itself. Similarly, Alex’s late-phase masterpiece is a postmodern variety of cave art that strives to both reverse the timeline of art history back to its anonymous, prehistoric origins even as it pursues the artistic avant-garde trajectory described by Duchamp, Cage, and Smithson: “A chamber, a cubical room. Fashioned out of solid rock. Precise dimensions. A large empty room. Six congruent square surfaces.”22 Alex’s original intention is to paint the walls of his geometric cave with images from his dreams, suggesting a parallel between cave paintings and dreams, both of which seem to originate from a primeval and undecidable meeting point between prehistory and history, unconsciousness and consciousness, and biology and subjectivity. Alex’s decision to omit the paintings, however, indicates that his artistic-ascetic project is taking him beyond the psychoanalytic model of consciousness and toward a starker conception of art and identity. His turn from painting to landscape art is a turn away from the abstract and conceptual to the physical. Alex explains, “I want to throw off doubt, stop thinking, stop caring, just be, just work. Throw off who I am, goddamn it. A bare room without a signature. Just there. Except it won’t be there.”23 His unfinished masterpiece has no theory, no explanation, it doesn’t even exist—it is an uncanny object balanced between the physical earth and the human imagination. The question of whether Alex’s cubic room will ever exist reflects the question of whether Alex himself

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exists in his post-stroke state, a metaphoricity which further associates the human project as exemplified in the figure of the artist and the non-human world represented by the landscape. The minimalism of the unpainted cubical cave-room is a three-dimensional correlative of Alex’s aspiration toward the most elemental style of existence he can imagine; a consciousness of an empty, featureless, anonymous space buried under a mountain. Alex’s work barely qualifies as landscape art, since it is not so much a reshaping of the landscape as a tunneling into it. The cave doesn’t change any visible feature of the terrain; aside from the “rough narrow entrance way, cramped, with jutting rock,” a crack in the landscape’s surface that would be virtually invisible to the uninitiated. The only alteration Alex’s work makes to the landscape is conceptual. The room’s Euclidean shape declares its human origin, but its concealment within the earth itself suggests the total extent to which Alex’s vision of humanity is one in which the creative urge and consciousness itself are entirely embedded within a geophysical substrate. The staging of the play, which juxtaposes pre-stroke Alex’s description of his cave project with the dimly lit figure of post-stroke Alex silently occupying another area of the stage, accentuates the parallel between Alex’s cave buried in the desert and Alex’s identity buried in the seated figure. In both cases, the existence of the “room” is indeterminable; it exists in the form of something which might not exist, deriving its conceptual potency from this very indeterminacy. Lia elaborates on the metaphor of the buried room and on the ontological ambiguity of this symbol when she reflects, “[w]e’re in a room, hidden away from all that sky and light, and this is where everything is.”24 Lia’s comment echoes a theme that runs throughout DeLillo’s works—the small room as a crucible of ascetic energies. But rather than acting as a site of alienation as it had in Players, Libra, and Mao II, Lia’s small room is a place of companionship, engagement, and human meaning.25 At the same time that Lia’s room pares away the “sky and light,” reducing the human sensorium to a narrowly delimited setting, it paradoxically hollows out a niche for “everything,” a cradle of phenomenological value on a human scale. In Lia’s turn of phrase, the concept of “everything” is redefined from a transcendence to an immanence, from something fundamentally inaccessible to something that is fundamentally all that we have access to, the tactile lifeworld of everyday consciousness. Alex’s cave and Lia’s room are spaces in which memory and identity have become folded outward into six congruent inner surfaces. In such a space, consciousness is not an observer of the physical world; rather, subjectivity is embedded in material objects of perception. Alex articulates this perspective in his statement toward the end of the play, “This is human consciousness. I live in the shoes braced by the shoe trees.”26 Alex’s sense of himself is revealed through the minor details of perceptual experience, an insight which explains his movement from the abstracted space of the



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canvas to the physical spaces of the desert. While the conventional westward American pilgrimage signifies a gesture toward a transcendent mastery of the land, for Alex, the movement into the desert, as a home and as an artistic medium, pursues the project of effacing the separation between self and world in a way that simultaneously depersonalizes the individual and personalizes the landscape. Toinette eloquently surmises: “I know why you’re here. Risk everything. There’s no safety here. It’s all one thing. The art, the artist, the landscape, the sky.”27 Alex’s development from canvases to landscapes echoes DeLillo’s development from an artist known chiefly as a novelist into one increasingly recognized for his skills as a playwright. Whereas a novel, like a painting, takes place in the abstract space and time of a conceptual world, a play is a kind of fusion of landscape art and body art that utilizes as its medium the physical objects on the stage and the natural facticity of the actors’ voices and faces. For this reason, live theater is uniquely suited to convey the matter in which consciousness is irretrievably grounded in presence. One of the play’s most prominent symbols of intersection between the animate and the inanimate and between the individual and the landscape is the desert plant-life which fascinates Alex. The vegetable kingdom notoriously straddles the borderline between animate and inanimate. Plants are alive, but in a manner that is so minimal and inert by human standards that they barely register as living organisms; in conventional landscape art, plants appear as ground rather than as figures. The name that science has given to Alex’s post-stroke condition is “persistent vegetative state,” a term which uses a botanical metaphor to equate Alex’s ontological status with that of larkspur, sweetbush, and love-lies-bleeding. As in the parallel between Alex’s art-cave and Alex’s brain, the metaphoricity implies a real correspondence between man and landscape. The integrity of this correspondence is reinforced in a number of ways during Lia, Sean, and Toinette’s conversation about Alex’s favorite plants. Lia explains that the parish larkspur “Hides its nectar in the spur of the flower to protect it from insects that aren’t honest-to-god pollinators. Bumblebees are okay. And they like the color blue. And larkspurs are blue. And bumblebees are strong enough to push apart the petals and get at the nectar. It all works.”28 In addition to attributing agency to the vegetable, Lia’s rehearsal of Alex’s botanical discourse demonstrates the coevolutionary relationship between the individual and the environment. The flower and bee are reciprocally subject and object for one another, their genetic identity— their most foundational expression as individual organisms—is shaped in interaction with the ambient ecology. Coevolution suggests a powerful image of the organism as genetically woven into a deep history of geophysical phenomena. More directly, the interrelationship between human beings and the non-human landscape is suggested by the phenomenon of psychoactive plants such as sacred datura which provide vivid evidence of the biochemical

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affinity between human consciousness and the non-human landscape. Sean says that ingestion of sacred datura can cause a person to “fall down and weep,” and Lia adds, or “fall down and die.”29 In this dialogue, as in the one about lightning, Sean and Lia once again suggest an ambiguous area of overlap between ecstasy and death, achieved through an act of psychic participation with the natural landscape. Sean’s use of the plant-based narcotic morphine to euthanize his father alludes both to the dream-like uncanniness of the relationship between chemistry and consciousness, as well as to the extent to which humans and vegetables share a chemical language that deconstructs their superficial differences. Language itself constitutes another important point of intersection between life and death. Like plants, words have a liminal ontological status, emblematizing at once both the subjective voice of selfhood and the impersonal linguistic architecture of the language itself in all its historical contingency. A word is a dead thing, a physical object, and a phenomenon that exists independently of any individual human being, yet a word is also a psychological event, a means of self-orientation, and a living presence for a human speaker. At the conclusion of DeLillo’s first book, Americana, as David Bell drives out into the desert, he reports feeling that “Literature is what we left behind, more than men and cactus … . Whether the novels and songs usurped the land, or took something true from it, is not so much the issue as this: that what I was engaged in was merely a literary venture.”30 In Love-Lies-Bleeding, however, DeLillo seems to sympathize with Alex’s opinion that human beings “didn’t create the names of plants. They discovered them.”31 Human language, in other words, does take something true from the landscape. Rather than effacing the natural landscape, human language and, by extension, the human presence itself, is consonant with nature. Language discloses nature in the Heideggerian sense, revealing its truth to human understanding, and the truth it reveals is precisely the sense in which human beings are always already in communion with nature, speaking the same biochemical, geophysical language of ecological interrelatedness. It is more than just a “lovely coincidence” that Magellan discovered the Straits of Magellan.32 Interrelatedness is an expression of the principle that as we move away from ourselves into the physical world of nature, we simultaneously reach inward into the most basic facts of our identity as organisms, as entities that always already dwell within the interstitial spaces between life and death, agency and passivity, subjectivity and objectivity, and the basic binaries which supply the coordinates of Western ontology. Structuring his play around the ontological identity of a living corpse provides DeLillo with an opportunity to reveal the contradictions and correspondences that undermine the objectivist grounds for distinguishing between basic categories of being. The conceptual architecture of Love-Lies-Bleeding



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enacts a typical post-structuralist move of identifying binary oppositions and deconstructing them, but DeLillo performs a significant ecological reappropriation of this formula in that the terms that are deconstructed in LoveLies-Bleeding are no less than human being and world. Human beings are “deconstructed” into the texture of the natural, non-living, non-organic world, and vice versa, a development which lends ecocritical, psychobiological, and ontological dimensions to the conceptual language games of post-structuralist critique. In Love-Lies-Bleeding, DeLillo represents the relationship between self and world, between body and mind, and between reality and representation not as bipolar encounters but as webiform networks of interdependence and interpenetration. NOTES 1. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997); The Body Artist (New York: Scribner, 2001). 2. The Body Artist (New York: Scribner, 2001); Cosmopolis (New York: Scribner, 2003); Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007). 3. Don DeLillo, The Body Artist, 113. 4. Ibid., 72. 5. Don DeLillo, Love-Lies-Bleeding (New York: Scribner, 2005). 6. Ibid., 8. 7. Don DeLillo, Libra (New York: Viking, 1988). 8. Don DeLillo, Love-Lies-Bleeding, 8. 9. Ibid., 96. 10. Ibid., 8. 11. Ibid., 14, 15. 12. Ibid., 19. 13. Ibid., 18 14. Ibid., 52. 15. Don DeLillo, End Zone (New York: Penguin, 1972), 242. 16. Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star (New York: Knopf, 1976); Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980 (published under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell); Great Jones Street (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973); White Noise (New York: Viking: 1985); Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007); Game Six (screenplay), dir. by Michael Hoffman (Santa Monica, Calif.: Serenade Films, 2006). 17. Don DeLillo, Love-Lies-Bleeding, 44. 18. Ibid., 58. 19. Ibid., 41. 20. Ibid., 83. 21. Ibid., 55. 22. Ibid., 59.

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23. Ibid., 61. 24. Ibid., 90. 25. Don DeLillo, Players (New York: Knopf, 1977); Mao II (New York: Viking, 1991). 26. Don DeLillo, Love-Lies-Bleeding, 95. 27. Ibid., 63. 28. Ibid., 35. 29. Ibid., 36. 30. Don DeLillo, Americana (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 349. 31. Don DeLillo, Love-Lies-Bleeding, 39. 32. Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cleo Birdwell [pseud.]. Amazons: An Intimate memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. DeLillo, Don. Americana. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. ———. The Body Artist. New York: Scribner, 2001. ———. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003. ———. End Zone. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. ———. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007. ———. Game Six. Screen play by DeLillo. Directed by Michael Hoffman. Santa Monica, Calif.: Serenade Films, filmed 2004, released 2006. ———. Great Jones Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. ———. Love-Lies-Bleeding: A Play. New York: Scribner, 2005. ———. Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991. ———. Players. New York: Knopf, 1977. ———. Ratner’s Star. New York: Knopf, 1976. ———. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. ———. White Noise. New York: Viking, 1985.

Part IV

“TIME, TIME, TIME”

Chapter 8

Don DeLillo, the Contemporary Novel, and the End of Secular Time Scott Dill

Don DeLillo’s 2001 novel The Body Artist opens with a terse sentence, “Time seems to pass.”1 The novel’s last sentence again invokes the movement of time, expressing the protagonist’s need “to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was.”2 As it unfolds between these two ruminations, The Body Artist itself “seems to pass” with a deliberate attention to the experience of time. The sentences plod across the page with direct, intentional ponderousness—as if the point of reading was to feel the time go by. DeLillo is a novelist known for sprawling, ambitious novels, but this one reads like a refusal of the genre’s impulse to rove and collect. It willfully excludes, narrowing its focus so as to better exert its powers of prosaic concentration. When we read that the novel’s eponymous body artist “clearly wanted her audience to feel time go by, viscerally, even painfully.”3 DeLillo’s reading audience has already undergone a similar experience in the very pace of his prose. Both the body artist and The Body Artist insist on an intrinsic value to feeling time pass. Since the turn of the century, the feel of time passing has become an increasingly prominent concern in DeLillo’s work. It preoccupies a character in the 2010 novel Point Omega who aspires, “To see what’s here, finally to look and to know you’re looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion.”4 This self-exhortation comes while he is watching the infinitesimal movements of Douglas Gordon’s film installation 24 Hour Psycho, a work of art that slows down Hitchcock’s classic film so that it takes twenty-four hours to watch from beginning to end. The installation echoes the disciplined tedium of the performance piece at the center of The Body Artist, aptly titled Body Time. Like The Body Artist, Point Omega operates as a kind of narrative ekphrasis, embellishing a slow moving work of art with the details of an unhurried story. Both novels strive 171

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toward a sleek but measured and uncluttered meditation, involving only a handful of characters in predominantly domestic scenes. Yet DeLillo’s earlier novels would stretch across the country to trace the tentacles of the entertainment industry (Americana 1971) or the intricacies of political plots (Libra 1988). Some stretched far beyond national boundaries, reaching across the globe to follow scientific research (Ratner’s Star 1976), the movements of multinational corporations (The Names 1982) or international terrorism (Mao II 1991). Those novels sped along with the clipped, deadpan banter of noir detective fiction so artfully perfected in White Noise (1985). While artists and works of art have long been conspicuous components of DeLillo’s fiction, why this sudden slowdown, this narrowing of the narrative purview? While these two post-millennial DeLillo novels are shorter in length and smaller in scope than their predecessors, in another sense they are longer in duration. In them, DeLillo explores the full gamut of cultural values implicit in our renderings of contemporaneity. Time is rendered neither as an epoch nor a fleeting epiphany, but as “an undivided moment on an ordinary morning.”5 Underworld (1997) may span several decades and take much longer to read, but the slimmer novels succeeding it seem slower, like an undivided moment. Point Omega, for example, concentrates on people in the terribly undramatic act of waiting. When whatever it is they are waiting for finally happens, it happens offstage and the characters only continue waiting. This change in style and focus, this emphasis on the subjective experience of embodied duration, raises a particular formal question for DeLillo’s work— how can the contemporary novel adequately address the cultural experience of contemporary time? Of all of the novelist’s available tools for representing temporality, DeLillo has turned toward writing shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs, even shorter novels, that seem to elongate the reading experience rather than compress it. Why? Is there a correlation between this abrupt style and the novels’ preoccupation with time?6 On the one hand, this change produces a more human scale. The critic James Wood criticized DeLillo’s Underworld for its hysterical storytelling and inhuman characters.7 Shorter may simply mean more manageable, less manic. Perhaps slowed time in the contemporary novel might offer an antidote to the numbing pace of television’s quick-cutting images and noise. Perhaps DeLillo’s interest in submitting his readers to the experience of slowness indicates that he finds something intrinsically valuable in the act of reading slowly, thoughtfully. Yet DeLillo’s recent novels are all too aware that reducing the novel’s temporal imagination to a present tense duration risks erasing any sense of historical awareness, and hence any hope for its role in genuine social change for the future. Though characters in The Body Artist and Point Omega try to contentedly abide within the immediate moment, other characters in



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Cosmopolis (2003) and Falling Man (2007) feel entirely overwhelmed by its inescapable enormity. Fredric Jameson has famously associated the loss of historical awareness with late capitalism and Cosmopolis jarringly invokes that disorientation.8 The Zbigniew Herbert poem quoted throughout Cosmopolis, “Report from the Besieged City,” informs us, “everyone here suffers from a loss of the sense of time.” If not everyone in the novel, certainly its protagonist Eric Packer suffers that loss. Yet Cosmopolis uncomfortably construes Packer’s sleepless wandering through a world abstracted from the constraints of embodiment as spiritually invigorating though ethically careless. The unstructured time of late capitalism is baptized with sublime mysteriousness, as if to transfigure Packer’s disorientation into numinous awe. Trading the specifics of history for the awe of mystery, however, would be a disastrous exchange. The concentrated present overwhelms Packer as its duration expands into an unchanging, futureless time in which he loses any ethical responsibility (until death returns it). In Falling Man characters use the small rituals of daily jogs and repeated wrist exercises to hold at bay the disturbing possibility of an undifferentiated eternity in which God simply is, “Because once you believe such a thing, God is, then how can you escape, how survive the power of it, is and was and ever shall be.”9 God in Falling Man sounds a lot like the late capitalism of Cosmopolis—God’s time is an eternal now that threatens human particularity with sublime abstractions.10 As in The Body Artist and Point Omega, Cosmopolis and Falling Man are preoccupied with questions of time and deliberately restrict themselves to a few characters in confined settings, but in these two novels an immeasurable time looms ominous. They assert the terror of an ahistorical, eternal present tense. If the body registers passing time in The Body Artist and Point Omega, then the spirit is unable to gain purchase on the slick temporal terrain of Cosmopolis and Falling Man. Consequently, the slow time of the undivided moment cannot be read as an antidote to contemporary culture’s limited imagination when it is equally a symptom of its failings. Perhaps this is why temporal confusion also haunts The Body Artist and Point Omega, though to a lesser degree. The Body Artist’s unnerving stranger who “violates the limits of the human” lacks any sense of chronology.11 He befuddles Lauren Hartke, the book’s eponymous body artist, because she thinks there “has to be an imaginary point, a nonplace where language intersects with our perceptions of time and space, and he is a stranger at this crossing, without words or bearings.”12 This stranger’s appearance confronts Hartke with the trauma of her husband’s death as her own pure disorientation. She is forced to ask herself if she has the right words to give her sense of time its bearings. Point Omega, too, loses track of time insofar as it does not proceed in sequential order. Its characters try to slow time down, but one invokes geological time scales that involve apocalyptic visions of a final catastrophic

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End of Time. Moreover, Point Omega addresses the same slippery relationship between words and the human perception of time that disturbs Hartke. As much as all four of these novels represent a turn in DeLillo’s work from unearthing submerged connections to intensifying the subjective differences of temporal experience, each one offers a complicated and contradictory set of values. While it is not clear to what extent the contraction of slow time is affirmed as valuable, it is certainly clear that these novels intend to expand as well as intensify our temporal imagination. The day-to-day events of modern life that they describe provide uncanny repetitions of religious rituals from the ancient past. The more their characters concentrate on either embodied or spiritual contemporaneity, the more those characters are construed as participating in the mysterious meanings of ancient, sacred rituals. While the style of these novels certainly marks a new direction for DeLillo’s novels, the juxtaposition of the ancient and modern, or mystery and history, is in fact nothing new to his fiction. DeLillo has what John Duvall calls “a rare gift for historicizing our present,” as well as an insistence on “the novel as a counterforce to the wound of history through the persistence of mystery.”13 DeLillo’s work often portrays primal forms of spirituality erupting in transmuted form right in the midst of our technological society and its political travails, showing how the secular habits of contemporary life reiterate the sacred rites of prior periods.14 He has long been interested in interrogating what supposedly separates the ancient from the modern and his turn toward the question of contemporary time preserves this skepticism. Perhaps the best way to understand these last four novels is that DeLillo has turned his emphasis from serendipitously weaving the lives of disparate characters together to stretching temporalities out until they cannot but overlap one another. These novels are less about connecting across space and more about connecting through time. Between their historicized present and the mystery its incompleteness provokes, DeLillo’s last four novels evince his enduring interest in the novel’s relation to secular culture. The attention he has given to more richly imagining contemporary experiences of time exemplifies how the novel—the literary genre most associated with the rise of secular modernity and the value of individual experience—might wrestle with what I here call the “end of secular time.”15 By that I do not mean something like a “post-secular” moment of renewed religious vitality out of step with the supposed cultural hegemony of secularism. Such linear notions of historical change are precisely what ­DeLillo’s work complicates. Instead, I argue that DeLillo’s novels are pushing back against one of the most emphatic effects of secularization—the rationalization of clock time, what Point Omega calls “News and Traffic”— with a decisive reinterpretation of, or even return to, the cultural values that have inspired the processes of secularization.16



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Instead of its more widespread reference to an open public sphere, DeLillo’s sense of the secular demonstrates a deep affinity for the concept’s original usage—what Christian theology coined as the saeculum, the present age of everyday life. The saeculum is the period of waiting for Christ’s return. DeLillo’s recent novels address contemporary experience through this kind of secular timescale, one in which the end of the present is entirely indecipherable yet absolutely imminent. The abrupt endings of his late style—its shortened sentences, shortened paragraphs, shortened novels—focus on the meaning of endings, or rather, on how an end can create the meaning of the present. DeLillo’s latest novel, Point Omega, presents his fullest treatment of this mode of secular temporality. In it a secular timescale saves contemporaneity from sacrificing either ethical subjectivity or historical awareness to the sacredness of cultural expression. Point Omega’s secular time does not blindly affirm nor stridently exclude the sacred, but tempers and therefore protects it as a vital component of the contemporary novel. To put this claim in its strongest terms—the end of secular time in Point Omega represents the very end of human culture. WAITING IN THE SAECULUM Time in Point Omega is experienced as waiting and watching. Some of the novel’s characters want to escape what they view as the superficial rush of modern time. Others are forced to wait. Yet everyone in the novel is out there in the desert waiting and watching for a revelation of some kind, including the reader. The novel begins with “a man standing against the north wall, barely visible,” watching a film installation in a gallery of the Museum of Modern Art.17 This anonymous figure watches Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho with single-minded devotion because the “nature of the film permitted total concentration and also depended on it.”18 The installation is full of meaning for him, because the “less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.”19 The slowing down of the frames enables a wealth of revelations, but that wealth is only available to a disciplined few. It takes commitment to plumb the depths hidden in the screen’s surface movements: “It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at. He was mesmerized by this, the depths that were possible in the slowing of motion, the things to see, the depths of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing.”20 The man, much later in the novel we will learn his name may be Dennis (for expedience I will call him that), is dedicated to making the “pious effort” it takes to get beyond “the shallow habit of seeing.” Is Dennis not the ideal audience for any work of art?

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In opening with Dennis’s meditations, Point Omega immediately troubles that assumption while introducing a familiar figure in DeLillo’s fiction. Paul Elie recently characterized the “true believer” in DeLillo’s novels as “a man in a small room, nurturing a scheme.”21 Dennis is no exception, insofar as he thinks film, one of the most public and communal of art forms, “is solitary” and himself one of the select few disciplined enough to stay in this “secluded room” and study its insights.22 Film becomes a thing of obsession in this novel and it exemplifies the risks that art can involve. Jim Finley, a young documentary filmmaker, claims, “Every project becomes an obsession, or what’s the point?”23 His estranged wife, who becomes alienated from him because of that obsession, asks a question more to the point. “Why is it so hard to be serious,” she asks, yet “so easy to be too serious?”24 Obsession and religious-like devotion often characterize the lonely schemer in DeLillo’s work, and the true believers of this novel all converge, like so many ascetics, in the desert. Point Omega tells the story of Jim’s time at Richard Elster’s house in the desert of the Anza-Borrego Wilderness in southern California. Both New Yorkers, it is a significant change of scenery for them. Elster’s daughter Jessie eventually adds a fourth character to the “too serious” trio of Dennis, Jim, and Elster, and perhaps because she is blithely uninterested in cultural production she becomes the story’s innocent victim. Jim is in the desert because he wants to make a film of Elster talking about his role in creating “the blat and stammer of Iraq” at the Pentagon.25 Elster was the intellectual who supported the war, whose writing gave it credence; “the outsider, a scholar with an approval rating but not experience in government.”26 He first refuses Jim’s request, but then invites Jim to visit him in the desert to discuss the project. Jim waits for Elster’s final word and his stay turns from days into weeks. Whatever Elster’s role in the nation’s rushing to war, he is trying to slow things down now, taking—as he calls it—“a spiritual retreat” in the desert in which Jim and Jessie join him.27 If war and obsession threaten the revelatory possibilities of film in Point Omega, the desert promises small refuge. Elster has come to the desert “to feel the deep heat beating into his body, feel the body itself, reclaim the body from what he called the nausea of News and Traffic.”28 He tells Jim, “Time slows down when I’m here. Time becomes blind. I feel the landscape more than see it. I never know what day it is. I never know if a minute has passed or an hour. I don’t get old here.”29 Time has slowed to the point of seemingly ceasing to pass for Elster. Thus, despite his ability to “feel the body itself,” time loses even the most basic metrics in the desert: “There were no mornings or afternoons. It was one seamless day, everyday, until the sun began to arc and fade, mountains emerging from their silhouettes.”30 The frenetic pace of what Elster calls “News and Traffic” fades into a seamless



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unity of wakefulness. Elster takes satisfaction in this unmeasured time insofar as it gives the feeling of “deep time,” the “epochal time” of the desert. “Time falling away. That’s what I feel here, he said. Time becoming slowly older. Enormously old. Not day by day. This is deep time, epochal time. Our lives receding into the long past. That’s what’s out there. The Pleistocene desert, the rule of extinction.”31 This seamless day stretches back into the Pleistocene and then forward into a final end for the human species that first emerged from it. Elster’s desert-bound lucubration echoes the third-century Desert Fathers, who fled the decadence of Rome’s waning imperial empire. Like them, Elster’s visions of time are haunted by the realities of warfare, destruction, murder, even extinction. The desert is no more an ideal spiritual sanctuary from the violent consequences of Elster’s warmongering than Dennis is the ideal viewing audience. Point Omega suggests deep and disturbing correlations between Dennis and Norman Bates, the murderous psychotic of Hitchcock’s famous film. DeLillo’s novel goes further than Hitchcock’s film, however, in linking the mere act of watching, and of thoughtful culture in general, to Bates’ psychotic sickness. Even Jim, at Elster’s vacation home in the desert to convince Elster to be captured on film—“up against the wall” as he later puts it—begins to indulge in voyeur-like behavior toward Elster’s daughter Jessie.32 Moreover, these obsessions are all linked together in the plot’s central event—Jessie’s abduction and probable murder. As much as we might assume close attention and slow consideration unquestionably good and worthy cultural values, Point Omega is not so sure. The ambiguous value of slow time—even art itself—is further obfuscated by the fact that the narrative voice of DeLillo the cultural critic comes through in the very same short, weighty maxims as Elster’s pompous proclamations. The style of the prose invites the reader to wait, to think, perhaps even to obsess over this slow moving novel much like Dennis watches the film, meditating on it. It is written in a calm, if grave, terse indicative mood. The laconic rigidity of its parataxis creates the effect of gnomic maxims demanding further concentration. For instance, the first section of the novel’s haiku-like structure ends with a glimpse outside the small gallery33: “Light and sound, wordless monotone, an intimation of life-beyond, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that’s not the movies.”34 The phrases slowly accumulate with philosophical force. Phrases such as “life-beyond” and “world-beyond” are not those of everyday speech, but the sentence is content to end with just such everyday speech when it calls them “the thing that’s not the movies.” Well, what is this thing that’s not the movies and how does it relate to the movies? The sentence introduces such questions but does little to explain them. Instead, it abruptly cuts off with its philosophic intimations left reverberating in the silence.

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The novel’s short paragraphs, too, provide breaks that urge the reader to stop, to wait a moment and think back on what has been read. One paragraph will suggest a thesis without considering it, only for another to pick it up pages later. The short descriptive sentences that usually compose these paragraphs, unlike short dialogue, open a space for the reader’s reflective thought processes without the coercive force of speed. The silent pause of white space on each page becomes an essential part of Point Omega’s stylistic effect. Indeed, there is a cathedral-like calm in this house of prose. Is the reader expected to attend on it with the devotion demanded by a sacred text, imitating Dennis’s “pious effort”? This question has vexed DeLillo’s critics. On the one hand, Amy Hungerford has argued for the sacramental trappings and transcendent experiences to which DeLillo’s language aspires.35 Moreover, David Cowart has argued that for DeLillo, language “subsumes virtually all human experience.”36 Cowart admits to befuddlement at Elster’s view that “true life is not reducible to words spoken or written,” suggesting that its value as a truth claim is denied by Elster’s status in the novel as a discredited figure.37 On the other hand, Laura Barrett is right to claim that language “is less a quasi-mystical vehicle to transcendence in DeLillo’s recent novels.”38 Despite this qualification, however, Barrett thinks the question of language remains at the center of these later novels. “If these recent novels seem to wallow in the inadequacy of language,” Barrett writes, “the reader is faced with the irony that the failure of words can only be communicated by words, a paradox not unlike Lianne’s Zen koan in Falling Man: “God is the voice that says, ‘I am not here.’”39 The positive way of putting the same point is that the sacred power of language in Point Omega is ironically undercut in order to protect it from the devotion of dogmatic obsession that the novel portrays in its characters. Take, for example, how slowly even the dialogue moves. Jim and Elster enjoy riffing off of each other’s phrases, but their banter quickly falls into moments of silence. Though the dialogue is at times clipped, it never moves with the speed and wit inspired by characters like White Noise’s Murray Siskind (indeed, Point Omega has little to no background noise at all). A onesentence paragraph at the end of one of Jim and Elster’s exchanges reads, “We sat and thought.”40 DeLillo’s characteristically abrupt deadpans are here rendered as momentary murmurs in the skein of a much longer silence. The syntactical lacunae haunting several of the lines of dialogue insinuate similar pauses within the act of speaking itself. When Jim tells Elster about his proposed film and its single long take against a blank wall, he says “‘You’ll have every opportunity to talk about these things […] . Talk, pause, think, talk. Your face,’ I said. ‘Who you are, what you believe. Other thinkers, writers, artists, nobody’s done a film like this, nothing planned, nothing rehearsed, no elaborate set up, no conclusions in advance, this is completely sort of barefaced,



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uncut.’”41 These paratactic enumerations, succinct in their various phrases but grammatically adrift, suggest the litany-like rhythms of religious language— but one poignantly undercut with that insouciant “completely sort of.” At one point Jim reports Elster’s dialogue in explicitly religious terms: “He chanted the words, he intoned liturgically.”42 The parallelism of this sentence is the trademark of litany in liturgical worship, doubling the sentence as both an invocation of liturgical style as well as its exemplar: he “chanted the words, he intoned liturgically.” Insofar as sentences like this formally repeat their content, does Jim’s observation refer merely to Elster? Or does it include the whole novel’s pervasive litany-like style? Jim is the narrator at this point, but the novel provides little reason to think liturgy Jim’s style of thought or expression. On the other hand, Elster is at turns lampooned. There are good reasons to see him as a comic figure, and Elster succeeds Jerry Lewis as a subject in Jim’s filmmaking repertoire. There is a satirical tint to Jim’s reporting of Elster’s pompous declamation; the alignment with Lewis suggests that excessive gravity may be its own form of histrionics. Yet the novel employs Elster’s maxim-dropping wisdom in a variety of ways that seem to refer back to the very style of Point Omega, as when Jim narrates Elster’s view that “we become ourselves beneath the running thoughts and dim images, wondering idly when we’ll die.”43 Is there not some truth to this? If the novel’s language seems to suggest its own wisdom and revelatory potential, Cowart is right to point out that Elster’s culpable association with the war undercuts the rhetorical effect. Yet Elster confesses that the magical power he once attributed to language was proved ineffectual by the war, thereby directly associating the sacred status of language with an unwarranted war’s death and destruction.44 While literary language can at times sound sacred in the style of Point Omega’s sentences, the novel provides several reasons to avoid investing artistic culture with an unchecked, sacred significance. Both the literary word and the camera’s images are rendered as suspicious fetishes. At one moment in the novel Jessie tells Jim about an elderly couple she used to take care of.45 The two would sit down to watch television, except that the woman would watch the man watching television. Apparently, his reactions to the television were more interesting than the television programming. Jessie realizes at a certain point, however, that she, too, is caught up in this cycle of watching— for she is watching the woman watching the man who is watching television. The image viewed is lost in the recursive act of watching. Like the most photographed barn in America from White Noise, Jessie’s story questions whether or not there is in fact anything there to see other than people seeing. The reader, in a sense, watches Jessie watching, and becomes complicit in this tangle of watching. DeLillo pushes the reader to acknowledge his or her own complicity in this unsettling charade, reflecting on Psycho’s closing

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scene: “the eyes of Norman Bates, the face coming closer, the sick smile, the long implicating look, the complicit look at the person out there in the dark, watching.”46 Dennis was in the dark, inconspicuously viewing the film; but of course, up above the printed page, so is the reader. Is it that all the ocular scrutinizing and helpless waiting of this novel, so intent on the promise of wisdom, conveys nothing more than the “sick smile” of watching others watch? And yet, the novel revels in the uncertainty of this experience, how it feels when the unrelenting proximity of the unknown continues to hint at a pending disclosure. Point Omega tells a story about people waiting, waiting for what promises to be a violent ending. Insofar as it sustains DeLillo’s assessment of the contemporary experience of time as an experience of limits, of being aware of both one’s limited knowledge as well as one’s limited power to make things happen, Point Omega explores the time of the contemporary novel from within the framework of secular time. Though it is more often used today to refer to a nonsectarian government or the exclusion of religion from politics, the concept of “the secular” originated in Christianity as a temporal concept.47 In the theology of Augustine of Hippo, the saeculum is first and foremost a new temporal identification initiated by Christ’s ascension and the postponement of his second coming. The word saeculum is his Latin translation of the New Testament’s Greek word aion, or age. Augustine thinks of the saeculum as the age of suspended judgment in which Christians must wait. The saeculum requires, to appropriate Jesse Kavadlo’s fine phrase, balance at the edge of belief.48 Despite the current tendency for “secularism” to refer to the removal of religious faith and practice from the public sphere, the reputable Augustine scholar Robert Markus points to the term’s neutrality in Augustine’s thought: “Secular does not have such connotations of radical opposition to the sacred; it is more neutral, capable of being accepted or adapted […] . It will be the shared overlap between insider and outsider groups, the sphere in which they can have a common interest and which—from the Christian point of view—need not be excluded or repudiated.”49 While the sacred (set aside) and profane (everyday) are oppositional categories, Augustine’s saeculum encompasses both the profane and sacred, the period of time in which Christians must judiciously make use of the profane. In the deeply Augustinian theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to which the book’s title refers, the end of that period of time is also the end of evolution—the point Omega. Yet before turning to Point Omega’s use of Teilhard’s theology of secular culture, I want to underscore the ethical stakes informing Augustine’s understanding of it. In DeLillo’s early novel Americana, David Bell is taken with Augustine’s line from the City of God (the book in which Augustine most thoroughly develops his view of the saeculum): “And never can a man be more disastrously in death than when death itself shall be deathless.”50 While



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DeLillo uses the line to expose the paucity of spiritual resources available in David’s corporate office, it captures the extent to which Augustine’s saeculum is ethically motivated. Secular time is the moment of suspended judgment that precedes the deathless death of eternity. Crucially, the saeculum intensifies ethical responsibility through its faith in a future judgment that necessarily remains indiscernible from within the present.51 Secular time is the time of decision. Peter Boxall has noted that DeLillo’s “fascination with life at the end” has lately begun to incorporate “the endedness which marks the very conception of a globalized world.”52 Point Omega revives that fascination by linking one individual’s death with eventual global destruction. Yet what the novel’s rendering of endedness reveals is not morbidity but the experience of meaning. In The Sense of An Ending Frank Kermode writes that “our end determined fictions” are “what gives each moment its fullness,” noting that the loss of the Christian belief in an imminent end (Christ’s second coming) shifted to an immanent end in fiction’s attention to the momentary.53 Kermode’s point is apropos insofar as, in Point Omega, the end is always near but never resolved. Thus a novel named after an end point refuses to provide what its title ostensibly assures—the resolution one expects in an ending. The reader is left with several questions in regards to both plot and theme. It is not clear whether or not the crux of the novel’s plot, Jessie’s murder, has even happened. As much as its unresolved problems proliferate, Point Omega is something of a funneling down of the early DeLillo novel about apocalyptic preoccupations, End Zone (1972): we go from an entire zone to a very precise point in which to end. A point, however, is actually zero-dimensional, used entirely for orientation. The end of Point Omega is just such a point of subjective orientation; it is a point from which to value time, more than to measure it. Indeed, no chronological resolution to the muddle of Point Omega’s plot time is ever reached. LOVE IN THE TIME OF APOCALYPSE DeLillo’s stylistic endings point toward a guarded humility about the contemporary novel’s capacity to truly redeem contemporary time from either its rationalized violence or its frantic speed. In refusing to affirm any vision of time outside of the time of possibility, Point Omega finally points beyond itself. In this novel it is not a novel’s words or a film’s images or any other creative cultural form that finally provides meaning, but the human contact that comes with human love. The central event of the novel is a violent abduction that echoes the missing Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in Psycho. Rather, it is the central nonevent

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since the novel never describes it, never even uses Jessie’s point of view, and never directly authorizes it. Someone appears to have taken her from the house while Jim and Elster were out grocery shopping. This sudden disappearance destroys the retreat Elster had sought in the desert. It is a personal tragedy that brings a very different meaning to Elster’s musing about extinction and the end of the world. Elster’s sagacious bluster tends toward cataclysmic visions. Demeaning the calamity of the Iraq war he championed, Elster claims, “Iraq is a whisper.”54 “Something’s coming,” he mysteriously predicts to Jim, a paroxysm of much greater consequence for the planet. “But isn’t this what we want? Isn’t this the burden of consciousness? We’re all played out. Matter wants to lose its self-consciousness. We’re the mind and heart that matter has become. Time to close it all down. This is what drives us now.”55 Elster thinks a final extinction is coming, one presaged by a longing in human consciousness for its own destruction. Fittingly, the house to which Jim, Elster, and Jessie have come was originally Elster’s first wife’s house, a paleontologist. It is to the paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that Elster goes for explaining his theory of The End. Teilhard, a famous scientist who was also a Jesuit priest, died in New York City on Easter Sunday of 1955, during the spring semester of DeLillo’s freshman year at the Jesuit university in New York City, Fordham. It is hard not to assume that the event and the posthumous publishing later that year of Teilhard’s hitherto banned book, The Phenomenon of Man, would not have in some way attracted the young DeLillo’s attention. Teilhard’s work was also crucial to one of DeLillo’s influences, Flannery O’Connor—Everything that Rises Must Converge is a phrase from Teilhard’s work and refers to the same spiritual interpretation of evolutionary theory as the title of DeLillo’s novel. Whether or not Teilhard’s thought was an immediate influence on the young DeLillo, his 2010 novel takes Teilhard’s theory of the Omega point for its title and developed theme, just as it takes up O’Connor’s religious overtones and the figure of the violent outsider. According to Elster, Teilhard “said that human thought is alive, it circulates. And the sphere of collective human thought, this is approaching the final term, the last flare.”56 The “Omega point” is Teilhard’s name for this last flare, a final transformation beyond the human as we now know it; in Elster’s terms, “a leap out of our biology.”57 In Teilhard’s theory, things become more and more complex, drawn on to their ultimate end in the Omega point. The human species has been remarkable for its ability to maintain itself, to avoid proliferating into other species. His explanation is that the evolutionary process has turned inward—the geogenesis and biogenesis of earlier eras have become the psychogenesis of an increasing complex collective thought. Of this turning point Teilhard asserts, “without prejudice to what may still be



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developing slowly and secretly in the depths of the nervous system, evolution has since that date overtly overflowed its anatomical modalities to spread, or perhaps even to transplant its main thrust into the zones of psychic spontaneity both individual and collective.”58 These “zones of psychic spontaneity” continue the evolutionary processes; they are what Elster is referring to when he says, “We’re the mind and heart matter has become.” In Elster’s rendering, “Consciousness accumulates. It begins to reflect upon itself.”59 This accumulated consciousness is what Teilhard called the “noosphere”—from the Greek word for mind or intellect, voʋς. The noosphere is an ontologically substantial but immaterial crust, or spherical overlay, of accumulated consciousness wrapping around the world. More than any single destructive End Point, the noosphere is Point Omega’s more subtle and familiar DeLillovian theme, which suggests Underworld’s oft-repeated line “everything is connected.” The mystical internet of Underworld’s closing section could serve as one of the noosphere’s more provocative illustrations. As evinced in those final pages of that epic-spanning novel, the connections in consciousness that weave together the noosphere are not merely ephemeral ideas but very real products of human culture. For Teilhard, such forms of cultural meaning should not be separated from the processes of evolutionary theory. In The Phenomenon of Man Teilhard approvingly cites Julian Huxley’s phrase that human culture is nothing other than “evolution becom[ing] conscious of itself.”60 Elster, true to his tendency to equivocate, seems to misconstrue the creative aspects of Teilhard’s noosphere. For instance, in place of increasing psychogenesis as we draw nearer the “point Omega” (as the sketch of evolutionary eras in The Phenomenon of Man calls it), Elster asserts a death drive more akin to Freud’s pessimistic theory of culture than Teilhard’s.61 To Elster, conscious humans “want to be stones in a field.”62 But conflating the dynamism of Teilhard’s cultural noosphere with extinction is precisely the ambiguous attitude toward culture that Point Omega portrays. While the noosphere might herald the achievements of human culture since the Pleistocene, we have now entered an Anthropocene that pronounces human culture’s disastrously destructive tendencies. The Anthropocene is what some scientists have begun calling the new geological era they contend we now inhabit, when humans have reached the point of influencing geological time. Indeed, rather than the increasing diversity of the noosphere, the Anthropocene is characterized by manmade extinctions. While we may want to distinguish between the effects of artistic culture and industrial manufacturing, Point Omega is not confident an ethical distinction between them can hold. The gap between, on the one hand, Teilhard’s actual view of an increasing complex web of cultural consciousness and, on the other hand, the death drive with which Elster conflates it, opens a vital space for the novel’s sober

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affirmation of the ethical responsibility assumed in secular time. For Point Omega the novel is not a polemical warning against any coming extinction as much as a creative gesture toward the experiences of meaning portrayed in its human relationships. In its rendering, secular time is a time of waiting together. The rites of domesticity fill much of the novel’s limited action, as Jim duly notes, “I wondered if we were becoming a family, no more strange than most families except that we had nothing to do, nowhere to go, but that’s not so strange either, father, daughter and whatever-I-was.”63 These developing relationships are crucial to the novel, but it has no interest in the nuclear family or the clichés that sometimes parade under the banner of “family values.” Whether it is the immigrants dying in the deserts surrounding Elster’s house, or Jim’s silent anxiety for his neighbor who walks down the stairs backward, or for that matter Jim’s neglected and now estranged wife; whether it is Jessie who talks to strangers but cannot talk freely with her own father and mother, or Elster who needs company in order to be alone; whether it is Dennis desperate to speak with someone, or even the mouse caught in a trap that brings Jim and Elster’s company to three—Point Omega takes the premise of a man alone in a room and concludes, like the Biblical Creator, that it is not good for man to be alone. Moreover, the novel offers an astonishingly tender image of unexpected compassion. Jim’s ministrations to the grieving Elster surprise the reader with their attentive concern. Jim attends to Elster’s body. He feeds him. He cuts his hair. When Elster coughs on the way to the airport, and Jim goes so far as to wipe Elster’s discharged phlegm from Elster’s motionless hand, Jim realizes that he has—for the first time—forgotten his film.64 In giving his days to caring for the humiliating needs of a man whom his film would have humiliated, Jim has learned how to be serious but not too serious. He has escaped the prison of his obsession. Elster learns too, through grief, about the misplaced relevance of his apocalyptic fears. For the catastrophe that finally arrives is not the end of the universe, but the unsolvable murder of his single cherished daughter. Jessie joins Elster and Jim in the desert because her mother believes she has fallen into an unhealthy romantic relationship that needs to end. One day while Jim and Elster are in town getting groceries, she suddenly disappears, having left all her belongings and no clues behind her. Dennis, from whom her mother hoped to save Jessie by sending her to the desert, has probably abducted her. Jim and Elster report her as missing but find little cause for hope of discovering anything. A knife is discovered by a search team, but without blood and no other traces as to its carrier or its use. After Jessie’s disappearance, however, Jim and Elster’s need to watch and wait takes on a very specific subject. “One of us was always on the deck, keeping watch,” Jim narrates. “We did this well into the night. It became a ritual, a religious observance.”65 Waiting is no longer a theoretical approach to the end of the universe; Elster’s



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leisurely reclamation of his body is suddenly overwhelmed with incapacitating emotions. Elster loves his daughter dearly, and the disappearance is traumatic. Jim reflects on how this loss focuses Elster’s theorizing: I thought of his remarks about matter and being, those long nights on the deck, half smashed, he and I, transcendence, paroxysm, the end of human consciousness. It seemed so much dead echo now. Point omega. A million years away. The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body. All the man’s grand themes funneled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not.66

The Omega point may be millions of years away, but here and now a single life has ended and that single life holds a universe of meaning for Elster. What Jim here calls “funneling down” is what DeLillo’s novels have been doing since Underworld—paring down the narrative structure of the contemporary novel to the most basic forms of cultural meaning. Point Omega has funneled down its narrative to the point at which language meets love and death—the single “point of a knife as it enters a body.” In fact, this funneling down of the entire universe to the disappearance of a single consciousness is foreshadowed in Elster’s response to Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho that it was like watching the universe die. Elster and Jim come in during the famous “shower scene” when Janet Leigh’s character is about to die and Elster reacts to her impending death as much as to the slowing down of the film for it “was like the contraction of the universe”—to one life ending.67 For all the careful watching and waiting, for all the musing on the possible potency of word and image, human relationships become the predominant source of missed meaning in Point Omega. One of the most important characteristics of secular time, as theorized from Augustine to Teilhard, is that it cannot be quantifiably measured. We often think of the contemporary as the contraction of available time and we often complain that we never have enough time in the hurry of modern life. Yet DeLillo’s novel eschews quantity in order to qualitatively contract its focus and thereby expand its representation of the human experience of time beyond the measurements of modern clock time. In the saeculum there is always enough time because time is characterized by waiting. That cultural experience is the lost art to which Point Omega so artfully points—learning to wait with each other in peace.

NOTES 1. Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (New York: Scribner, 2001), 9. 2. Ibid., 126. 3. Ibid., 106.

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4. Don DeLillo, Point Omega (New York: Scribner, 2010), 6. 5. DeLillo, Body Artist, 26. 6. Garret Stewart has recently argued for the need of narratography to supplement narratological analysis of the novel. Narratology’s study of structure misses the surface effects of a novel’s reading time, thus ignoring of one of the novel’s most effective means for creating temporal effects. In attending to the stylistics of DeLillo’s sentences, this essay takes up Stewart’s argument and offers a narratographical reading of time in the contemporary novel. See Novel Violence, 1–11. 7. James Wood, “Human, All Too Inhuman.” The New Republic, July 24, 2000. https://newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-all-too-inhuman. 8. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 21. 9. Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007), 235. 10. Alison Shonkwiler thoroughly contextualizes this experience in her essay on Cosmopolis, calling it the “financial sublime.” See “Don DeLillo’s Financial Sublime,” 248–249. 11. DeLillo, Body Artist, 102. 12. Ibid., 101. 13. John N. Duvall, “The power of history and the persistence of mystery,” in The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, ed. John N. Duvall. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 2, 3–4. 14. Perhaps the most explicit statement of this juxtaposition comes from a moment in Ratner’s Star. Early in the novel one character tells another, in what could stand-in as a thesis for how all of DeLillo’s novels approach the question of secularization, “we’ve got to admit the possibility that what we think of as obscure ritual and superstition may be perfectly legitimate scientific enterprises. Our own view of the very distant past may be the only thing that needs adjusting. This past, after all, continues to live not only in remote cultural pockets but more and more in the midst of our supercivilized urban centers. Simply admit the possibility. That’s all I say.” See Ratner’s Star, 35–36. 15. Ian Watt’s influential study The Rise of the Novel argues that the realist novel hardened modernity’s emerging secular episteme into the ideology of a worldview. Watt’s point, now questioned by a host of literary scholars working on the relationship between the novel and secularization, often passes as an unexamined assumption. For instance, Jameson assumes the novel’s special ideological relationship to this aspect of the secular when he makes the questionable assertion that its realism is a “new value, contemporaneous with the secularization of the world under capitalism.” It is a point he more or less reiterates in the opening of his newest study of realism in the novel. For Watt, see The Rise of the Novel, 13. For Jameson, see “Reflections in Conclusion,” 198, and Antinomies of Realism, 4. 16. Peter Boxall has made the case that DeLillo’s fiction seeks to offer “a means of redeeming the culture that he depicts.” DeLillo certainly seems to reserve some redemptive task for his novels, and the experience of their slow style is part of that. Yet DeLillo is equally suspicious of attributing entirely benign powers to the novel. I argue here that his work suggests the novel’s participation in cultural change can be damning as likely as salvific. See “Media Culture,” 45.



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17. DeLillo, Point Omega, 3. 18. Ibid., 5. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 13. 21. Paul Elie, “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” The New York Times, December 19, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/books/review/has-fiction-lost-its-faith.html?_r=0. 22. DeLillo, Point Omega, 9, 4. 23. Ibid., 40. 24. Ibid., 55. 25. Ibid., 21. 26. Ibid., 19. 27. Ibid., 23. 28. Ibid., 18. 29. Ibid., 24. 30. Ibid., 36. 31. Ibid., 72. 32. Ibid., 45. 33. At one point in their conversations, Elster pontificates on the representative significance of haiku to Jim and the novel seems to have taken up his point (29). First, it is structured in three parts. It begins and ends with two short, scene-setting monologues from Dennis with a longer section in between, narrated by Jim. Second, it resembles a haiku’s brevity and concern with seasonal time and place. And third, it uses something like the classic trope of the haiku’s middle section, the kireji or “cutting word,” when Jim refers the novel’s title, Point Omega, to the point of a knife edge in the middle section of the novel. 34. DeLillo, Point Omega, 15. 35. Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 53. 36. David Cowart, Don DeLillo: the Physics of Language, (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 225–226. 37. DeLillo, Point Omega 17; David Cowart, “The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega,” Contemporary Literature 53.1 (2012): 45. 38. Laura Barrett, “Don DeLillo,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction After 1945, ed. John N. Duvall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 252. 39. Barrett, “Don DeLillo,” 253. 40. DeLillo, Point Omega, 31. 41. Ibid., 53. 42. Ibid., 28. 43. Ibid., 17. 44. Ibid., 29. 45. Ibid., 69. 46. Ibid., 107. 47. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), 1. 48. Jesse Kavadlo, Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 10.

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49. Robert Markus, Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 6. 50. Don DeLillo, Americana 1971 (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 21. 51. The secular in this original sense is the space of discriminating distinctions. One of the first scholars to point to the rich relationship between religion and secularization in DeLillo’s work, John A. McClure, has recently put it like this: “DeLillo’s work urges the reader to perform a discrimination of mysteries—to check his or her fascination with forensic and esoteric mysteries and explore the possibility of apophatic and sacramental modes of being.” See “Mystery,” 167. 52. Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo: the Possibility of Fiction, (London; New York: Routledge, 2006), 4. 53. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction: With a New Epilogue (New ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6. 54. DeLillo, Point Omega, 50. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 51. 57. Ibid., 52. 58. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (2nd ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 203. 59. DeLillo, Point Omega, 72. 60. Teilhard, Phenomenon of Man, 221. 61. David Cowart has noted the reversal of “Omega point” to “point Omega,” implying that DeLillo is in fact utterly changing Teilhard’s ideas. I would be wary, however, of overdetermining this switch since Teilhard does in fact use the phrase “point Omega.” Most significantly, it is how Teilhard labels his diagrammatic illustration of the view of geological history put forth in The Phenomenon of Man. Julian Huxley, too, thought nothing of calling it simply the “point Omega” in his introduction to Teilhard’s thought. For Cowart, see “The Lady Vanishes,” 47. For Huxley’s usage, see “Introduction,” The Phenomenon of Man 18–19. 62. DeLillo, Point Omega, 53. 63. Ibid., 55. 64. Ibid., 99. 65. Ibid., 87. 66. Ibid., 98. 67. Ibid., 47.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barrett, Laura. “Don DeLillo.” The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction After 1945. Edited by John N. Duvall. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Boxall, Peter. “Media Culture.” The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Ed. John N. Duvall. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ———. Don DeLillo: the Possibility of Fiction. London; New York: Routledge, 2006.



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Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2002. ———. “The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.” Contemporary Literature 53, no. 1 (2012): 31–50. DeLillo, Don. Americana. 1971. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. ———. The Body Artist. New York: Scribner, 2001. ———. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003. ———. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007. ———. Point Omega. New York: Scribner, 2010. ———. Ratner’s Star. 1976. New York: Vintage, 1989. Duvall, John N. “The power of history and the persistence of mystery.” The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Ed. John N. Duvall. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Elie, Paul. “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” The New York Times. 19 December 2012 http:// www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/books/review/has-fiction-lost-its-faith.html?_r=0 Hungerford, Amy. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Huxley, Julian. “Introduction.” The Phenomenon of Man. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. 2nd ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. ———. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. ———. “Reflections in Conclusion.” Aesthetics and Politics. Theodor Adorno et al. London: Verso, 2007. Kavadlo, Jesse. Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction: with a New Epilogue. [New ed.]. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Markus, Robert. Christianity and the Secular. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. McClure, John A. “DeLillo and Mystery.” The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Ed. John N. Duvall. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991. Shonkwiler, Alison. “Don DeLillo’s Financial Sublime.” Contemporary Literature. 51.2 (2010): 246–282. Stewart, Garrett. Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. 2nd ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. 2nd American ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Wood, James. “Human, All Too Inhuman.” The New Republic. 24 Jul 2000. Accessed January 3, 2015. https://newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-all-too-inhuman

Chapter 9

Cinematic Time, Geologic Time, Narrative Time Maciej Maslowski

In a 2012 interview for The Observer, DeLillo remarked: “This is the age of consumer fiction. People want fiction that’s easily assimilable. . . . Point Omega challenged me in the writing and I assume it will challenge some readers as well.”1 Judging from the numerous reviews posted online by both readers and professional critics, he was right—Point Omega has been repeatedly described as an “unreadable” novel, a “painful, slow, dull, boring read,” and a story full of “boring and incidental details.”2As all these comments imply that at least part of the reason behind the negative reactions to the novel is the way in which it conceptualizes and manages narrative time. What follows is an exploration of precisely this—the temporal aspect of Point Omega. More specifically, the present reading will be oriented around two works that inform the structure and the plot of the narrative, namely Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993), whose extended ekphrasis brackets DeLillo’s text and which DeLillo himself cites as the primary source of inspiration for his work on the novel, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura, a film that DeLillo mentions in recent interviews.3 Despite DeLillo’s assertion that “there is no prevailing directorial spirit informing the novel,” I argue that L’avventura does indeed haunt the narrative in question.4 Like Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho, also released in 1960, L’avventura narrates the story of an enigmatic disappearance of a young woman. In the film, Anna (Lea Massari) inexplicably disappears during a trip she and her friends make to Lisca Bianca, an uninhabited volcanic island off the coast of Sicily. Unlike Hitchcock’s film, however, where the narrative movement gradually brings the viewer to the solution of the mystery of Marion’s (Janet Leigh) death, in L’avventura the vanishing is never explained, although the plot seems initially to be constructed around this character. In fact, as Pascal Bonitzer famously points out in his review of the film, what 191

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L’avventura really thematizes is “the disappearance of the disappearance of Anna.”5 Indeed, after the initial confusion over the vanishing wears off, the “importance and density” of the event “evaporate little by little” from the story, as Anna’s friends gradually return to their old routines of disaffected love affairs and seemingly endless, jaded conversations that betray the urban ennui of their lives.6 And yet the frustration of the audience’s expectation of a definitive resolution, aroused by an inexplicable event at the heart of the story, only partly explains the reaction of initial viewers of the film. During the official premiere at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, the audience booed the film amidst bursts of laughter, and repeatedly shouted “Cut!” Antonioni and actress Monica Vitti left the theater. Despite this hostile reception, L’avventura went on to win the Jury Prize and soon proved to be a moderate financial success and an enormous critical one in France, England, Italy, and the United States. Eventually, it was hailed as “the second best film of all time” by the British Film Institute.7 Speculating, years later, on the reasons for the audience’s initial rejection of L’avventura, Antonioni pointed to the way in which time in the movie is measured, managed, and represented. “Why do you think L’avventura, in its day, caused a scandal? Because it had a rhythm that was more true to life,” he explained.8 Antonioni and DeLillo share a fascination with time and what one might call here, to use the phrase that opens Jim Finley’s narrative in Point Omega, “the true life,” whose temporal movement is ineluctably falsified by “the artificial mechanisms of conventional . . . narration” canonized in both Hollywood cinema and commercial literature.9 In both, time functions as a derivative of plot development, an effect of the linear succession from one scene to another rather than the very condition of the plot itself. For Antonioni, as well as for DeLillo, this instrumental treatment of time as a tool for seamlessly propelling the action from the exposition to the resolution at a uniformly high speed comes at the cost of the narrative’s faithfulness to actual experience, however. “Life,” Antonioni asserts, speaking of Hollywood cinema, “has a completely different pace, sometimes fast, sometimes extremely slow.”10 It is the latter, the tediously dragging temporality of the everyday, that came to characterize Antonioni’s most well-known works, recognizable by their distinctive use of long and oftentimes static single shots, an approach much like DeLillo’s in his later novels, with their patient attention to the minutiae of the everyday. Both Antonioni’s and DeLillo’s narrative endeavors thus seem to be driven by the imperative to resist the “embalmed ideas and clichés” represented, for Antonioni, by “that enormous bureaucratic machine, Hollywood” and for DeLillo, by the “consumer fiction” of the age.11 Eventually at stake in Antonioni’s and DeLillo’s art are, however, not “just . . . opposite methods, but an opposite approach to life itself.”12 Their opposition



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to the dominant modes of storytelling constitute, in other words, not merely aesthetic choices—although, inevitably, they are enacted within the realm of representation—but are, primarily, ethical gestures, rooted in the decision to respect the subtle complexity of “[t]he true life” which is “irreducible to words spoken or written” because of the “sheer unimaginableness” of “ordinary life on this planet,” forever evading all attempts at inscribing its rhythm into any easily utilizable measure of time.13 The affinities between DeLillo’s and Antonioni’s artistic perspective appear not to be accidental. As is well known to scholars and fans of his fiction, DeLillo has acknowledged the influence that Antonioni’s work exerted on his development as a writer, along with other classic high modernists— Bergman, Fellini, and Godard.14 As if confirming the special place he holds in DeLillo’s writerly biography, Antonioni appears in person in an early short story, “Baghdad Towers West” (1968), where, in a dream scene, he “emerges from the darkness and kisses [the narrator’s] hand,” an image that distantly reverberates, perhaps, three years later, in Americana, in a passage in which David Bell, a budding movie director, fantasizes about “James Joyce and Antonioni and Beckett sitting in [his] living room.”15 Antonioni’s name is also mentioned at the very beginning of Americana, where it functions as an emblem of modern existential weariness and alienation explored in such movies as L’avventura, La Notte (1961), or L’eclisse (1962). Walking among jaded executives at a “cocktail party,” whose torpid aura makes it similar to the one from La Notte’s finale, Bell describes it as “one of those parties which are so boring that boredom itself soon becomes the main topic of conversation. One moves from group to group and hears the same sentence a dozen times. ‘It’s like an Antonioni movie.’”16 Indeed, boredom is the quality perhaps most commonly ascribed to Antonioni’s films by both amateur moviegoers and trained viewers. None other than Orson Welles, for example, admits in a conversation with Peter Bogdanovich to being “so bored with Antonioni . . . . He gives you a full shot of somebody walking down a road. And you think, ‘Well he’s not going to carry that woman all the way up that road?’ But he does. And then she leaves and you go on looking at the road after she’s gone.”17 Like the initial response to Point Omega cited at the beginning of this paper, the problem with the reception of Antonioni’s works seems to come down to the question of time. In his 1985 study Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze identifies as one of the defining features of Antonioni’s oeuvre as his technique of rendering time, exemplary of what he calls the “time-image.”18 As Deleuze understands it, time-image is a direct presentation of time, liberated from the rigors of storytelling that were developed before World War II and reaching its extreme in Hollywood productions, where, Deleuze argues, time is not thematized in itself but “remains the object of indirect representation.”19 That is to say,

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while in classical cinema, time is a secondary phenomenon whose existence has to be inferred from the taken-for-granted fact of plot development, in time-image the relation between time and story is “reversed.”20 As a result, time is no longer “derived” from a narrative which smoothly progresses toward resolution but rather, “rises up to the surface of the screen” and can be sensed “in itself.”21 This potentially frustrating experience, as the initial reaction to L’avventura demonstrates, is no longer subject to artificial and “easily assimilable” expressions of more conventional cinematic forms.22 Part of this frequently voiced exasperation with Antonioni’s mode of representing temporality—and this seems to be true of also DeLillo’s novel—results, arguably, from a loss of control over the most fundamental facts of our time-bound existence. By revealing time as operating beyond the power of both the protagonists and the audience, L’avventura necessitates a radical shift in our understanding of subjectivity. In accordance with the logic developed by Deleuze, in L’avventura, as well as in other movies that incorporate the time-image, the self ceases to be an agent who subordinates time to human needs and becomes instead a being given over entirely to a temporality that gradually grinds it down. In the end, as Deleuze asserts, “even the body is no longer exactly what moves; subject of movement or the instrument of action, it becomes rather the developer of time . . . it shows . . . through its tiredness and waiting.”23 Significantly, this “tiredness and waiting, even despair” affects not only the protagonists of L’avventura, who aimlessly wander around, unable to undertake any meaningful action, but also the viewers of the movie, temporarily immobilized in their seats and forced to watch the slow procession of virtually disconnected images. Deleuze insists, “no one has gone further than Antonioni in this direction.”24 Similarly, according to film scholar Hamish Ford, Characters and viewers alike feel the sheer duration of on-screen events . . . . This process leads to a painful reflexive awareness of bodies and their ties to a universe in which time, allied to the materiality of the immanent world, reigns supreme in all its unpredictability.

Referring to L’avventura’s “relentless, non-teleological” temporality, Ford concludes: “We cannot see it, we are at its mercy,” and are thus exposed, like the protagonists whose lives we witness, to its inhuman vastness.25 Douglas Gordon imposes a similar interminable quality in his recasting of Hitchcock’s classic film in a 1993 installation, first conceived while Gordon was freeze-framing Psycho in order to find a scene he thought deleted from its television version. What he found instead, as he himself recollects, were “beautiful images that Hitchcock couldn’t have been conscious of and couldn’t have controlled.”26 In 24 Hour Psycho, the installation that followed



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his realization, Gordon slows down the original Psycho to roughly two frames per second so that the viewing takes a whole day and night. Gordon also projects the film onto a screen hung in in the middle of a darkened gallery, enabling viewers to walk around the piece and watch it from either side of the translucent surface.27 Through this violent intervention into the long familiarized narrative, Gordon “render[s]” the viewers “helpless,” in Richard Flood’s words, and turns them into “impotent participant[s], caught in a prolonged, comatose awareness not dissimilar to being trapped in a car that is spinning out of control while seconds thud by like hours.”28 Referring to the same incapacitating effect, Klaus Biesenbach compares Gordon’s installation to the works of the performance artists of the 1960s and 1970s, involved—like Lauren Hartke in The Body Artist—with lived time.29 As Biesenbach notes, “This experience, spending an excess of time somewhere with something that doesn’t pass quickly enough, can create moments of strong anxiety. It is a feeling of being held down or kept still, of losing the freedom to move.”30 Like L’avventura, Gordon’s piece addresses the viewer as a fully embodied subjectivity that discovers its own temporality through and against the thickness of the body, “the fatigue . . . in [one’s] legs . . . the weight of the body standing.”31 In other words, 24 Hour Psycho enables the audience to experience time at the very core of its own living flesh, where it “tunnels into the blood, into dense sensation,” “spilling” through the body “like some kind of runaway brain fluid.”32 By immersing the audience in what Philip Monk refers to as “excruciating slow motion,” Gordon makes the viewers “feel time go by, viscerally, even painfully,” to quote The Body Artist’s Mariella Chapman.33 For the anonymous viewer of 24 Hour Psycho found in the two sections that bracket Point Omega, watching Gordon’s piece amounts to “a test of endurance and personal forbearance” and even “a kind of punishment” for unnamed sins.34 And yet, as he realizes, absorbing the “slow pulse of projection,” the “film’s merciless pacing ha[s] no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness, the individual whose absolute alertness did not betray what was demanded.”35 From this chiasmic interaction between the viewer and the image, however, a new experience of embodied existence is born. The man in the gallery finds the installation “paradoxically real, bodies moving musically, barely moving, twelve-tone, things barely happening, cause and effect so drastically drawn apart that it seemed real to him, the way all the things in the physical world that we don’t understand are said to be real.”36 Exposed to the monumental time of the movie, the viewers of 24 Hour Psycho—and, arguably, of L’avventura—ultimately gain access, as if in recompense for their patience, to “what we miss seeing under normal circumstances,” as DeLillo explains, or to “the hidden side of what appears to the naked eye” in Antonioni’s

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words. 37 Slowness brings us to the lining of reality that remains outside the scope of consumer fiction, literary, and cinematic alike. These considerations bring us back to the notion of the “true life.” For Point Omega’s Richard Elster, who is first introduced into the narrative precisely through a reference to this concept, “the true life” occurs in the “submicroscopic moments,” impossible to contain even in “an eight-hundredpage biography.”38  Part of the reason for the “true life’s” irreducibility to “words spoken or written” is its embeddedness in the fleshy substance of the body.39 In his long conversations with Finley, Elster describes himself as a man who, like Michael Chin in Cosmopolis, “[b]ites the skin off the edge of his thumbnail.”40 “[T]hat’s how I know who I am,” Elster explains. “Not my books, lectures, conversations, none of that. It’s the goddamn hangnail . . . that’s where I am, my life, there to here.”41 The locus of “the true life” is thus, for Elster, the raw materiality of flesh which he consciously inhabits in the Anza-Borrego Desert, where he comes “to stop talking” and “feel the deep heat beating into his body, feel the body itself, reclaim the body from what he called the nausea of News and Traffic.”42 In the desert, Elster rediscovers the body in its primeval subjection to “the force of geologic time”—a phrase that is itself deeply embedded in the complex geology of DeLillo’s fiction.43 Like the anonymous man in the gallery, Elster senses time “palpably” and “absorb[s]” it “through his pores.”44 For although the “vast meditative time of the desert” differs markedly from the “scrupulously refined time of the 24-hour videowork” these two temporalities seem to invite, in their distinct ways, careful meditation on the nature of transience and open before the subject’s eyes new levels of experience impossible within the temporal framework of the everyday, associated in the novel with the urban milieu.45 Unlike “city time,” “geologic time” is not comparable to “time passing, mortal time. There’s none of the usual terror” inspired by the “minute-to-minute reckoning, the thing [one] feel[s] in cities” with their “dimwit,” “inferior time.”46 In Elster’s view (echoing Bill Gray and Mao II’s urban vision), the city constitutes a giant mechanism constructed to fragment time so that it can harnessed to human needs, a monstrous clock involved in an “endless counting down” of “the hours and minutes.”47 “Cities,” Elster asserts, “were built to measure time, to remove time from nature,” leaving us, as a result, with “time draining out of our lives, inevitably approaching their ultimate deadlines.48 In the desert, this artificially constructed urban time dissolves in the surrounding vastness.49 “Time slows down when I’m here. Time becomes blind. . . . I never know what day it is. I never know if a minute has passed or an hour. I don’t get old here,” Elster says.50 Yet, this desert temporality, this “dead time” which slowly grinds all flesh to sand, and leaves behind only “weathered bone,” is a foreshadowing of the tragedy in the novel.51 The disappearance of Elster’s daughter Jessica is a mystery that is never solved nor explained.



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But in his own subsequent experience of time, Elster begins to understand at a profound level the nature of “dead time” and endless grief that is, indeed, “deep, epochal.”52 The agonizing nature of Elster’s temporal experience after Jessica vanishes sends the reader back to the cold, dark space of the art gallery where the story began.53 The dead time of Point Omega is precisely the temps morts that determines the narrative movement of L’avventura. In his study of modernist cinematic practices, András Bálint Kovács identifies L’avventura as an example of what he refers to as “radical continuity,” a late-modern mode of representation that relies on depicting the uninterrupted flow of existence in which events are linked together by the mere fact of belonging to the flux rather than by the artificially conceived relationship of cause and effect organizing the mainstream cinema.54 An example Kovács offers to illustrate radical continuity is quite appropriate to the context of Point Omega, that of “the same ever-changing substance like fire, water, or sand blowing in the desert,” the contemplation of which, similarly to watching the Antonioni’s movies, “liberates the mind from the binding of any fixed mental constructions and usual articulations of time.”55 Kovács’s reading of Antonioni clearly echoes Deleuze, who points out that the liberating effect of films such as L’avventura is achieved partly by suspending the difference between “the banal” (the mundane scenes of everyday life that do not contribute in any meaningful way to plot development) and “the extreme” (the disappearance of a girl on a remote island). The cancellation of this fundamental distinction, Deleuze claims, “reap[s] the consequences or the effect of a remarkable event which is reported only through itself without being explained.”56 As such, it creates a “temporal universe” in which no “privileged moments” are allowed.57 24 Hour Psycho creates the same kind of temporal experience. The time that structures Point Omega is the “[t]ime that precedes us and survives us.”58 Hamish Ford’s reading of L’avventura pertains to DeLillo’s novel as well: the “heavy kind of moment-by-moment duree,” a “relentless, barely moving time that hangs and hollows the subject from within,” gradually extinguishing all life and, with it—or so it would appear—the possibility of the narrative itself.59 Yet if the desert experience inspires Elster to “unhumanize [his] views a little,” it also suggests a radically de-anthropomorphized perspective on death.60 In Elster’s meditations on “extinction,” a “current theme of his,” human mortality is inscribed into a larger history of the global dying out of the species, “happy camels and giant zebras, mastodons, sabertooth tigers.”61 What Elster refers to in his formulations as “the rule of extinction” however, is more than a statement of the inherent perishability of all organic life.62 Death becomes for Elster a teleological goal of existence, or, to phrase it in psychoanalytical terms, the object of a drive. “Matter wants to lose its self-consciousness. We’re the mind and heart that matter has become.

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Time to close it all down. This is what drives us.”63 In this, Elster echoes Freud on the “death-instinct,” defined as the “most universal tendency of all living matter—to return to the peace of the inorganic world” in order to recover from the violent disruption of self-conscious subjectivity.64 Freud’s ruminations on the thanatic drive provide other conceptual links among the three texts, Point Omega, Psycho, and 24 Hour Psycho. Gordon’s installation is inspired by the “beautiful images” of Hitchcock’s classic which denotes the film’s “unconscious” flashing between the frames. Film scholar Laura Mulvey delves deeper into the structure of the movie—whose title itself appears to invite a psychoanalytic approach—and identifies Thanatos itself at the heart of Hitchcock’s work. Psycho, she writes, is “[i]n a literal sense . . . a death-drive movie” which narrates the heroine’s journey toward the ultimate stasis. Mulvey argues that the final scene, in which Marion’s car is pulled from the swamp, “encapsulates movement stilled, the animate transformed into the inanimate, the organic into the inorganic.” This metamorphosis, she suggests, needs to be considered alongside a “more disturbing conflation” in the movie, namely the one “between Norman and Mother that blurs the boundary, not only between mother and son, but also between the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead.”65 This conflation is denoted specifically in the image of Bates’s mother’s skull superimposed on Norman’s face—or rather, situated as palimpsest underlying his image—just before the film dissolves into the end titles. In a similar vein, Philip Monk takes note of the same image as it appears in 24-Hour Psycho, and compares it to “the anamorphically distorted skull floating in the foreground of Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors,” a “slow-motion suspension” that “functions as a vanitas emblem.”66 In other words, if Gordon’s installation is “a memento mori,” it is not because of the skull that emerges is a reminder to us: “remember you will die.” Rather, “What seduces us is more than a symbol. Something else operates in the image to fulfill the function vanitas painting could only represent: time in the image. In 24-Hour Psycho slow motion is memento mori.”67 As if in accordance with this deathly logic, the conception central to Elster’s reflections on time, the Omega Point, is borrowed from the writings of Jesuit archaeologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, is informed in the novel by both the religious and the psychoanalytical discourses, whose impossible combination leads to the reversal of de Chardin’s cosmology. For de Chardin, the Omega Point marks the moment in the evolution of the universe when mankind achieves absolute unity while individual uniqueness is preserved and amplified as “hyper-personalisation.”68 Elster, however, imagines the Omega Point in thanatic terms—the “introversion” of consciousness in “a leap out of our biology . . . back . . . to inorganic matter.”69 Ironically, towards the end of the novel, his “dream of extinction” is almost realized.70 Devastated by the inexplicable loss of his daughter, Elster moves “beyond



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memory and its skein of regret” and becomes “a man drawn down to sparest outline,” as if turning into a “stone [] in a field.”71 This dream of deadly surrender, a desire to move beyond biology and, as Albert Camus puts it in an early novel, “stone among the stones, . . . return [] to the truth of motionless worlds” is representative of a more general tendency structuring the modern culture.72 As Agata Bielik-Robson argues in a study entitled, appropriately, “In the Desert”: Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity (2008, in Polish), this thanatic impulse manifests itself, in various ways yet with irresistible consistency, in the elevation of death, by authors as diverse as Socrates and Martin Heidegger, and Samuel Beckett and Cormac McCarthy, to the status of the highest principle of being and life’s ultimate truth.73 In fact, according to Nietzsche, death is equated with the domain “wherein ‘truth’ reigns” in its “absolute exactness.”74 “With the organic world,” Nietzsche claims, “imprecision and appearance begin,” an idea voiced also by Elster, who describes “[h]uman perception” as “a saga of created reality.”75 For Elster, conscious life constitutes a local, transitory phenomenon, “the last billionth of a second” in the history of the universe, and an error that needs to be corrected by life’s other, which restores the primeval unity disturbed by the appearance of the self and its fictions.76 As Bielik-Robson argues, this thanatological narrative of late modernity constitutes, in fact, “a paraphrase of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” The “close relationship between man and God” is replaced by the subject’s relationship to death, Hegel’s “absolute master,” who unfailingly corrects the error of life, returning the “beautiful complexity of mind” to the “brute matter” from which it evolved.77 This lethal logic is exemplified also in Elster’s desert meditations, in which, as has been argued, the originally Christian conception of time as historical progress toward the final fulfillment in the universal redemption of man is inscribed into the thanatic pattern. For Elster, de Chardin’s notion of salvation, rephrased in late-modern vocabulary, eventually becomes a postulate of a regress to the lifelessness of inorganic matter in the terminal “paroxysm” of consciousness.78 Within this paradigm, the only authentic form of subjectivity is what Bielik-Robson refers to, in her reading of Lacan, as “a subject that perishes among the rocks.”79 In other words, this self, having accepted the death sentence hanging over its every move, gives up the futile struggle to stay alive and adopts the stoic strategy of “wondering idly when we’ll die.”80 Elster claims: “It’s what we call self, the true life . . . the essential being. It’s self in the soft wallow of what it knows, and what it knows is that it will not live forever.”81 This moment of acknowledgment of the radical finitude of existence is, according to Elster, precisely also the moment when we finally “become ourselves” and thus, in a final twist, indifferent meditation on mortality is placed at the very core of the “true life” that so intrigues him in his musings.82

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Elster’s is, in fact, a latter-day version of the “tragic view of the world” reintroduced into modernity by Nietzsche, who, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), recounts the unsettling wisdom forced out of Silenus by King Midas: “the very best thing is . . . not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing.”83 A practitioner of this inherently tragic knowledge, Elster wants to rid himself of “the burden of consciousness” and “pass completely out of being” and like Owen Brademas, to “burn away [his] self in the sandstone hills.”84 These characters would act in accordance with Nietzsche’s recommendation— “[s]lowly, slowly, to become hard like a precious stone—and at last to lie there, silent and a joy to eternity.”85 Despite his efforts, however, Elster becomes not so much a stoic sage as a miserable old figure “who might live in a shack on an abandoned mining site, unwashed man, shaky, stubbled, caution in his eyes.”86 After Jessie’s “passing into air,” Richard starts eating “sparingly” and “stop[s] shaving,” as if severing the remaining ties that might still link him to the world of the living, but there is nothing of heroic detachment in his slow decline into helpless senility, which leaves him “frail and beaten,” and, ironically, “inconsolably human” in his overwhelming grief.87 Having lost a daughter, Elster, rather than reaching the sublime indifference of the rock or at least the sterility of the “dead skin” at “the edge of his thumbnail,” where, he claims, his “life” is really rooted, finds himself bound to the vulnerable flesh, “carr[ying] a sour odor” and “coughing and gasping, struggling to bring up phlegm.”88 In the end, his progressive disintegration thus reveals all the more starkly the flipside of Elster’s thanatic desire that, eventually, proves to be merely yet another incarnation of modern ennui, the Stoic apatheia turned apathy, a “zombielike” state repeatedly thematized also in Antonioni’s oeuvre.89 Most notably, perhaps, has this state of existential exhaustion been depicted in the “trilogy on modernity and its discontents,” inaugurated in 1960 in Cannes by L’avventura, whose final sequence conveys, as Bert Cardullo aptly points out, a sense of an “almost unbearably painful acceptance: of our having to be what we are, of there being no fiction that will exonerate or console us, no ending.”90 In a curious way, it is impossible for either the protagonists in L’avventura or its audience to transcend the suffocating immanence of the here and now depicted in the film. This reaction also characterizes viewers of Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, where occurrences are not held together in a web of meaningful relationships set up by the plot, but exist as a series of tableaux. Arguably, the film loses its power to signify and disintegrates into “snatches and staticky fragments, flurries of trembling light.”91 Laura Mulvey, in her reading of Gordon’s installation, notes that by slowing down Psycho to two frames per second, Gordon turns the movie—a moving, living thing—into a series of dead stills, returning it to “its own



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materiality,” that of the celluloid strip.92 The result of Gordon’s intervention in Hitchcock’s work constitutes, in a certain sense, a realization of Elster’s dream of regress to the primal, meaningless matter of the inanimate world. Perhaps this laying bare the materiality of the medium is also at play in Point Omega, which borrows heavily from 24 Hour Psycho not only at the thematic but also at the formal level. Watching Gordon’s installation, the anonymous man in DeLillo’s novel senses in the piece “suspense” that is “trying to build but the silence and stillness outlive it”—a remark which perfectly describes the narrative movement of Point Omega itself.93 Indeed, Sam Anderson is right when he observes in an early review that the novel “brings us . . . as close to pure stasis as we’re ever likely to get,” at least in a work of fiction.94 In Point Omega—as in L’avventura and 24 Hour Psycho—the  narrative virtually grinds to a halt at the brink of dissolving amidst the “desert of plotlessness,”—as Owen Brademas learns in The Names—language begins to shed meaning and reveals itself in its material opacity.95 With only shattered remnants of the story preserved, words themselves, no longer harnessed to plot, come to the fore, hardly managing to stop at the point beyond which “[t]he silence [i]s complete.” And yet, despite this almost irresistible, lethal logic leading to silence, the novel allows for escape from the circularity of the temps morts of the desert, just before we are thrown back to the cold picture gallery at MoMA. Elster and Finley manage to reach “nonstop New York,” with its “faces, languages, construction scaffolds everywhere, the stream of taxis at four in the afternoon” depicting the city’s deeply human rhythms.96 Their drive back from the barren landscape of Southern California marks the moment when the narrative’s backward crawl is reversed and time appears to accelerate, “history . . . run[ning] past the window, mountains forming, seas receding” until the city, and with it a promise of life, “happening.”97 Elster, reduced to a dead present “beyond memory,” can hardly speak.98 But Finley, affected by “a stillness” that he will “carry with him . . . from this day on,” lives to tell the story.99 This survival testifies to the novel’s uncertain openness to the future, to the “unknown weeks and months ahead” that, in the end, constitute the fragile possibility of narrative.100 NOTES 1. Don DeLillo, “I’m Not Trying to Manipulate Reality—This Is What I See and Hear.” Interview by Robert McCrum in The Observer, August 7, 2010, http://www. theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/don-delillo-mccrum-interview. 2. Miami Maid “Sandy Shores.” “It’s Very Dry . . . Bring a Drink.” October 6, 2010. Amazon.com. Customer Reviews. .

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N. pag; Roger, “Point Omega.” April 19, 2011. Goodreads. . N. pag. 3. Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho, 1993; Don DeLillo, “Dancing to the Music of Time,” Interview by Kevin Rabalai in The Australian, March 6, 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/books/dancing-to-the-music-of-time/ storye6frg8nf-1225836068982.; Don DeLillo, “I’m not trying,” Interview by Robert McCrum. 4. Don DeLillo, “A Conversation with Thomas DePietro.” The Barnes and Noble Review, February 1, 2010, http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Interview/ Don-DeLillo/ba-p/2144. 5. Pascal Bonitzer, “The Disappearance (On Antonioni),” in L’avventura: Michelangelo Antonioni, Director, eds. Seymour Chatman and Guido Fink. Chris Beyer, Gavriel Moses, and Seymour Chatman, trans. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 216. 6. Ibid. 7. Seymour Chatman and Guido Fink, Introduction to “Reviews and Commentaries,” L’avventura, 185-186. 8. Michelangelo Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema, eds. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi, trans. Marga Cottino Jones (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1996), 376. 9. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 17; Michelangelo Antonioni, Architecture, 271. 10. Michelangelo Antonioni, Architecture, 271. 11. Ibid., 92; Don DeLillo, Interview by Robert McCrum. 12. Michelangelo Antonioni, Architecture, 92. 13. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 17, 65. Compare a similar passage in “The Starveling,” where Leo Zhelezniak, an obsessive moviegoer, passes the time between screenings in his ex-wife’s apartment, “star[ing] into the columns of the radiator, thinking whatever he’s thinking, none of it reducible to words.” Don DeLillo, “The Starveling,” in Granta 117, Autumn 2010, 72. 14. Don DeLillo, “An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview by Kevin Connolly in Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 39; “‘An Outsider in this Society’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview by Anthony DeCurtis in Conversations, 75. 15. Don DeLillo, “Baghdad Towers West,” in Epoch 17.3 (Spring 1968), 205; Don DeLillo, Americana (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 220. 16. Don DeLillo, Americana, 6, 4. 17. Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich. This Is Orson Welles (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 104. 18. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997). 19. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), ix. 20. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, xi. 21. Ibid., xii. 22. Don DeLillo, Interview by McCrum. 23. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, 182.



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24. Ibid. 25. Hamish Ford, “Antonioni’s L’avventura and Deleuze’s Time-image.” Senses of Cinema 28. September-October 2003, http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/ featurearticles/l_avventura_deleuze/. 26. Amy Taubin, “Douglas Gordon,“ in Spellbound: Art and Film, ed. Philip Dodd and Ian Christine (London: Hayward Gallery and British Film Institute, 1996), 70. 27. Two years later, 24 Hour Psycho was not as radical an intervention as it might have seemed in 1993. Gordon’s 1995 work 5 Year Drive-By, exists as an “extended footnote” to his experiment with Hitchcock’s movie, and repeats the same move, in a grotesquely exaggerated form, by slowing down John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), so that its new length matches the duration of the story narrated in the film. During the impossible five-year projection of the piece—imagined by Gordon as a drive-in movie located in the desert in Monument Valley in Utah. The viewer is presented with “a set of stills” from which all remnants of movement have been eliminated, as “[e]ach frame of the film is held for about sixteen minutes, and thus each second of film takes about a working day to project.” Philip Monk, Double-Cross: The Hollywood Films of Douglas Gordon (Toronto: The Power Plant and Art Gallery of York University, 2003), 80, 81. 28. Richard Flood, “24 Hour Psycho.” Parkett 49 (May 1997), 38. 29. Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (New York: Scribner, 2001). 30. Klaus Biesenbach, “Sympathy for the Devil,” in Douglas Gordon: Kidnapping, ed. Marente Bloemheuvel (Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1998), 15. 31. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 12. 32. Ibid., 115, 109. 33. Philip Monk, Double-Cross, 59; Don DeLillo, Body Artist, 104. 34. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 104. 35. Ibid., 111, 5. 36. Ibid., 14. 37. Don DeLillo, “Conversation with Thomas DePietro”; Michelangelo Antonioni, Architecture, 231. 38. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 17. 39. Ibid. 40. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 43; Cosmopolis (New York: Scribner, 2003), 37. Michael Chin, like Elster, is also an analyst. 41. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 43. 42. Ibid., 17-18. The above-quoted passage echoes, perhaps, in a distant way, the beginning of Underworld’s “Long Tall Sally,” in which Nick Shay, “driving a Lexus through a rustling wind” (63) in the New Mexico Desert, “turn[s] off the air conditioner and lower[s] the windows” in order “to feel the heat on [his] face and arms” (64); further in Underworld, Nick’s brother Matt and his girlfriend Janet go hiking in the desert, where—much like Elster (PO 67)—they “want to see bighorns in the wild” (449). Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997). 43. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 20. For the first time the phrase appears in DeLillo’s work in 1982, in The Names, where the narrator meditates on the peculiar quality of the mountains of the Mani Peninsula, which, as he notes, “contain[] a sense of time, geologic time” (The Names (New York: Knopf, 1982), 180). Almost three decades

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later, the notion returns in Cosmopolis, in a description of the ecocardiographic image of the Eric’s heart: “It throbbed forcefully . . . . The image was only a foot away but the heart assumed another context, one of distance and immensity, beating in the blood plum raptures of a galaxy in formation. What mystery he glimpsed in this functional muscle. He felt the passion of the body, its adaptive drive over geologic time, the poetry and chemistry of its origins in the dust of old exploding stars” (44). More recently, the phrase reappears in “The Starveling” when the protagonist listens to his ex-wife’s traffic reports: “She spoke fantastically fast, words and key phrases expertly compressed into coded format, the accidents, road repairs, bridges and tunnels, the delays measured in geologic time” (68). 44. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 44, 19. 45. Don DeLillo, Interview with Thomas DePietro. 46. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 44, 45. 47. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 45; In Mao II, “The elevators climb and fall, the clock rotates, the bar slowly turns, the signs appear once more, the traffic lights change, the yellow taxis come and go” (27), notes the narrator in Mao II, describing the view from the revolving restaurant where Scott meets Brita to discuss her “photo essay on Bill Gray” (26). “Magno, Minolta, Kirin, Sony, Suntory. What does Bill say? The city is a device for measuring time” (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 27. 48. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 45. 49. An idea voiced also by Underworld’s Matt Shay, who realizes during his hiking trip, the desert poses “a challenge to [one’s] lifelong citiness” (Underworld, 449). 50. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 23–24. 51. Ibid., 36, 19. 52. Ibid., 72. 53. As Kovács argues, what makes such radically slowed-down, circular narratives watchable is “suspense,” which suggests to the viewer that the movement of the plot leads to its imminent unraveling that, eventually, never takes place, leaving all the questions seemingly driving the narrative unanswered. Perhaps not too surprisingly, as a paradigmatic example of such a use of suspense Kovács cites L’avventura, where Anna’s disappearance (mis)leads the viewer to believe that an attempt at explaining the mystery constitutes the rationale behind the story. See The Cinema of Béla Tarr: The Circle Closes (London: Wallflower Press 2013). 54. András Bálint Kovács, 126. 55. András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950– 1980 (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 129, italics added. 56. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, 7. 57. Philip Monk, 76. 58. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 44. 59. Hamish Ford, “Antonioni’s L’avventura and Deleuze’s Time-image,” n. pg. 60. Robinson Jeffers, Hungerfield and Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1954), 97. Jeffers is another American enthusiast of barren landscapes, who, in words not unlike Elster’s, enjoins “mix[ing] one’s mind with geological / Time” as a corrective to skewed human perception. The Beginning and the End and Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1963), 18.



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61. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 20. 62. Ibid., 72. 63. Ibid., 50. 64. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. C. J. M. Hubback (London: The International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1922), 181. 65. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 86. 66. Philip Monk, Double-Cross, 75–76. 67. Ibid., 208. 68. Teilhard De Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 259. 69. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 52–53. 70. Ibid., 36. 71. Ibid., 97, 53. One is reminded of Alex Macklin in DeLillo’s Love-Lies-Bleeding, a play whose cover art depicts eroded rock in the midst of a desert. 72. Albert Camus, A Happy Death, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 151. 73. Agata Bielik-Robson, “Na pustyni”: Kryptoteologie późnej nowoczesności (Kraków: Universitas, 2008), 151. 74. Nietzsche quoted in Michel Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 199), 116. 75. Michel Haar, Nietzsche, 116; Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 28. 76. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 50. 77. Bielik-Robson, “Na pustyni,” 54, trans. mine; Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 52. 78. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 72. 79. Agata Bielik-Robson, 249, Maslowski’s translation. 80. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 17. 81. Ibid., 63. 82. Ibid., 17. 83. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Roland Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 76, 23. 84. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 50,73; Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 214. 85. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 214. 86. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 87. 87. Ibid., 81, 86, 85, 96. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 43, 91, 97. 88. Ibid., 43, 91, 97. 89. Ibid., 46. 90. Stephen Holden, “Antonioni’s Nothingness and Beauty,” New York Times, June 4, 2006, accessed September 4, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/ movies/04hold.html; Bert Cardullo, Screen Writings: Partial Views of a Total Art, Classic to Contemporary (London: Anthem Press, 2010), 179. 91. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 6. 92. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x, 102. 93. Ibid., 14.

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94. Sam Anderson, “White Noise.” Rev. of Point Omega (New York Magazine, January 24, 2010) . . 95. Ibid. 96. Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 100. 97. Ibid., 100. 98. Ibid., 97. 99. Ibid., 99. 100. Ibid., 98.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Sam. “White Noise.” Rev. of Point Omega. New York Magazine January 24, 2010. Accessed September 4, 2016. http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/63210/ Antonioni, Michelangelo. The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema. Edited by Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi. Translated by Marga Cottino Jones. New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1996. Bielik-Robson, Agata. “Na pustyni.” In Kryptoteologie późnej nowoczesności. Kraków: Universitas, 2008. Biesenbach, Klaus. “Sympathy for the Devil.” Douglas Gordon: Kidnapping. Edited by Marente Bloemheuvel, 10–31. Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1998. Bonitzer, Pascal. “The Disappearance (On Antonioni).” L’avventura: Michelangelo Antonioni, Director. Translated by Chris Beyer, Gavriel Moses, and Seymour Chatman. Edited by Seymour Chatman and Guido Fink, 215–218. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Camus, Albert. A Happy Death. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. Cardullo, Bert. Screen Writings: Partial Views of a Total Art, Classic to Contemporary. London: Anthem Press, 2010. Chatman, Seymour Benjamin. Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Chatman, Seymour and Guido Fink. “Reviews and Commentaries.” L’avventura: MichelangeloAntonioni, Director. Translated by Chris Beyer, Gavriel Moses, and Seymour Chatman. Edited by Seymour Chatman and Guido Fink, 185–186. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ———. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. DeLillo, Don. Americana. London: Penguin Books, 2006. ———. “The Art of Fiction CXXXV: Don DeLillo.” Interview by Adam Begley. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Edited by Thomas DePietro, 86-108. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. ———. “Baghdad Towers West.” Epoch 17, no. 3 (Spring 1968): 195–217. ———. The Body Artist. London: Picador, 2002.



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———. Cosmopolis. New York: Picador, 2003. ———. DeLillo, Don . “A Conversation with Thomas DePietro.” The Barnes and Noble Review, February 1, 2010. Accessed Sept. 4, 2016. http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Interview/Don-DeLillo/ba-p/2144 ———.“Dancing to the Music of Time,” Interview by Kevin Rabalai in The Australian, March 6, 2010. Accessed Sept. 4, 2016. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/ books/dancing-to-the-music-of-time/story-e6frg8nf-1225836068982 ———. “Don DeLillo Talks Cosmopolis.” Movie City News, May 13, 2012. Accessed Sept. 4, 2016. http://www.moviecitynews.com/2012/05/don-delillo-talkscosmopolis-spoilers/cosmo. ———. “I’m Not Trying to Manipulate Reality—This Is What I See and Hear.” Interview by Robert McCrum. The Observer, August 7, 2010. Accessed September 4, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/don-delillo-mccrum-interview. ———. “An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview by Kevin Connolly. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Edited by Thomas DePietro, 25–39. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. ———. Mao II. London: Jonathan Cape, 1991. ———. The Names. London: Picador, 1999. ———. “‘An Outsider in this Society’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview by Anthony DeCurtis. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Edited by Thomas DePietro, 52–74. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. ———. Point Omega. New York: Scribner, 2010. ———. “The Starveling.” Granta 117: 65–90. ———. Underworld. London: Picador, 1999. Fink, Guido. “L’avventura and the Critics,” in L’avventura: Michelangelo Antonioni, Director. Translated by Chris Beyer, Gavriel Moses, and Seymour Chatman. Edited by Seymour Chatman and Guido Fink. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Flood, Richard. “24 Hour Psycho.” Parkett 49 (May 1997): 37–39. Ford, Hamish. “Antonioni’s L’avventura and Deleuze’s Time-image.” Senses of Cinema 28 (September–October 2003). Accessed September 4, 2016. http://www. sensesofcinema.com/2003/featurearticles/l_avventura_deleuze Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by C. J. M. Hubback. London: International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1922. Haar, Michel. Nietzsche and Metaphysics. Translated by Michael Gendre. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. Holden, Stephen. “Antonioni’s Nothingness and Beauty.” New York Times June 4, 2006. Accessed September 4, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/ movies/04hold.html Jeffers, Robinson. The Beginning and the End and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1963. ———. Hungerfield and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1954. Kovács, András Bálint. The Cinema of Béla Tarr: The Circle Closes. London: Wallflower Press, 2013. ———. Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.

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Maid, Miami. Review of Point Omega. “It’s Very Dry ... Bring a Drink.” Amazon. com. Customer Reviews, October 6, 2010. Accessed March 4, 2013, http://www. amazon.com/review/R3GHWZTR5APP5I. Monk, Philip. Double-Cross: The Hollywood Films of Douglas Gordon. Toronto: The Power Plant and Art Gallery of York University, 2003. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books: 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Translated by Roland Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ———. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Rancière, Jacques. Béla Tarr, The Time After. Translated by Erik Beranek. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013. Roger. Review. “Point Omega.” Goodreads. Accessed March 19, 2014. http://www. goodreads.com/review/show/ April 19, 2011. 162167229 Tarr, Béla. “Back to Zero.” Cargo. Accessed September 4, 2016. http://cargocollective.com/carmengray/Features ———. “Bela Tarr On ‘The Turin Horse’: The Hungarian Director Discusses His Last Film.” Huffington Post October 2, 2010. Accessed Sept. 2, 2016. www.huffingtonpost.com/.../bela-tarr-the-turin-horse_n_126639 ———. “An Interview with Béla Tarr: Why He Says The Turin Horse Is His Final Film.” Interview by Eric Kohn. Indiewire February 9, 2012. Accessed September 4, 2016. http:// www.indiewire.com/article/bela-tarr-explains-why-the-turin-horse-is-his-final-film ———. “Why I Make Films.” Translated Kati Baranyi et al. Béla Tarr: A Cinema of Patience. Accompanying booklet to Béla Tarr’s Damnation. Chicago: Facets Video, 2006. Taubin, Amy. “Douglas Gordon.” Spellbound: Art and Film. Edited by Philip Dodd and Ian Christine, 68–75. London: Hayward Gallery and British Film Institute, 1996. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. Translated by Bernard Wall. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. Welles, Orson, and Peter Bogdanovich. This Is Orson Welles. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998.

Part V

“POETICS OF SURVIVAL”

Chapter 10

“The Rough Shape of a Cross” Chiastic Events in Don DeLillo’s “Baader-Meinhof” Karim Daanoune

Published in 2002, the short story “Baader-Meinhof”1 was inspired by DeLillo’s visits to the Gerhard Richter’s exhibit Open Ends2 hosted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The 1988 exhibition gathered fifteen canvases collected around the title 18. Oktober 1977 which featured the 1970 German political group Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF),3 also known as the Red Army Faction or Baader-Meinhof Gang. Founded by Andreas Baader, with the help of Gudrun Ensslin, the RAF also included militants Ulrike Meinhof, Holger Meins and Jan-Carl Raspe.4 The Baader-Meinhof group, corresponding to the so-called “first generation” was constituted in order to respond nonviolently to authoritarian and tyrannical regimes (in particular, that of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s, whose 1967 official visit in West Germany turned into a riot). They were also opposed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the war in Vietnam. However, the group resorted more and more systematically to violence. Its members were arrested and sent to Stammheim Prison in June 1972. The date of the Richter series refers to the day when Baader, Ensslin and Raspe were killed in that prison, a day commonly called Totnacht (Death Night), the climactic point of a series of operations (abductions, hijacking and assassinations) attributed to the RAF during what is known as Deutscher Herbst (German Autumn). Richter himself briefly commented upon the works’ subject matter in his “Notes for a press conference, November-December 1988” (held at the Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, February 1989): 7 December 1988. What I have painted. Three times Baader, shot. Three times Ensslin, hanged. Three times the head of the dead. Meinhof after they cut her down. Once the dead Meins. Three times Ensslin, neutral (almost like pop stars).

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Then a big, unspecific burial—a cell dominated by a bookcase—a silent, grey recorder player—a youthful portrait of Meinhof, sentimental in a bourgeois way—twice the arrest of Meins, forced to surrender to the clenched power of the State. All the pictures are grey, mostly very blurred, diffused. Their presence is the horror and the hard-to-bear refusal to answer, to explain, to give an opinion.5

CROSS #1—COMING ACROSS TERROR The dark tone and the feeling of loss that permeate Richter’s paintings are borne out in Don DeLillo’s short story “Baader-Meinhof” which takes place in MOMA. In the museum, two anonymous protagonists, a woman and a man, unknown to each other, engage in a conversation about Richter’s works which they pursue at the museum’s cafeteria until the woman ends up inviting the man to her apartment. In the privacy of her home, the man scares the woman who locks herself in her bathroom. From behind the door, she can only surmise that the man is masturbating. After degrading and disgracing her home and her bed, he apologizes, ashamed and contrite, and leaves the apartment. The following day, the woman returns to the museum and the same man is seated contemplating Richter’s work. If DeLillo’s title anchors the story historically, the content of the story emphasizes the rather anonymous dimension of the encounter between the woman and the man. This discrepancy points to Richter’s own title. Although 18. Oktober 1977 is the name of the painting series which pinpoints a discrete moment in German history, one cannot but notice that within the series, the title of each work tends to dehistoricize it, or at least, anonymize the whole series by its universality and mere factuality.6 The historical dimension is consequently affected, not to say effaced. This erasure paradoxically connects the viewer back to history, for in universalizing a specific aspect of terrorism, it concomitantly permits readers, and Americans readers in particular, to call to mind their immediate experience of terrorism, one unquestionably brought about by 9/11.7 Just as Cosmopolis is enshrouded in the veil of 9/11 without directly alluding to the events, the same camouflage is at work in “Baader-Meinhof.”8 Terrorism and the deaths it leads to unmistakably binds “Baader-Meinhof” to 9/11. The theme of death pervading all the canvases, whether literally with the display of dead bodies or more obliquely with the reflection on mourning they propose. In fact, DeLillo frames the whole story according to a feeling of loss and sorrow, which suggests the ghost of 9/11. Other evidence tends to suggest the ghost of 9/11. Both protagonists are unemployed. We learn that “now that the job and the company no longer existed” (111), and it is tempting to read her stark remark literally, as if the attacks had disintegrated the company. The mobile phone provides other hints at 9/11 as it is now more



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than ever associated with “[t]he total life-altering call” (113) that the victims made during their last living moments. “Baader-Meinhof” links different kinds of terrors together—state terror, religious terror, personal and interpersonal terror—as much as it enables a mise en abyme of DeLillo’s œuvre which is thoroughly imbued with terror and terrorism.9 Narrated from a heterodiegetic source, the story alternates with a third person narration and dialogue between the female and male protagonists. The misleadingly simplistic and monotone style attempts to reproduce as faithfully and factually as possible the recalcitrant ekphrasis of Richter’s series and its effects on the viewers. “[P]ainted, picture to picture, in nuances of obscurity and pall” is how DeLillo transcribes the idiosyncratic Richterian blurring effect.10 The description of the gigantic Funeral exposes the laborious operation of decipherment: In the painting of the coffins being carried through a large crowd, she didn't know they were coffins at first. It took her a long moment to see the crowd itself. There was the crowd, mostly an ashy blur with a few figures in the center-right foreground, discernible as individuals standing with their backs to the viewer, and then there was a break near the top of the canvas, a pale strip of earth or roadway, and then another mass of people or trees, and it took some time to understand that the three whitish objects near the center of the picture were coffins being carried through the crowd or simply propped on biers.11

The perfect balance between “and” and “or,” evenly occurring in turn renders the following paradox: a resoluteness to show what resists showing. The wavering between addition and alteration results in an impression of “staccato” for it requires that viewers adjust the focus in order to cope with a persistent blurriness of the image. The story duplicates the spatial ebb and flow—the oscillating eyes but also the moving body—and the temporal hesitation—the delaying, the slowing down—that both the art and the story require. What happens visually foreshadows what will happen at the reading level. In this sense, the persistent demand that viewers look at the paintings—the verb “look” appears twenty-seven times in all—echoes DeLillo’s insistence that readers dedicate themselves to reading and to making sense. Constantly blurring reference, DeLillo prolongs the poetics of indeterminacy initiated by Richter. Facing Ulrike’s macabre portrayal in Dead, and filtered by the heterodiegetic voice, the woman “didn’t know for certain what had been used in the hanging.”12 When she asserts that she doesn’t know, readers cannot ascertain whether the woman’s hesitation arises from the indeterminacy caused by a frustrating ekphrasis or from her own unfamiliarity with the facts concerning Ulrike’s suicide. This indeterminacy resides in the

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handling of contradictory antagonistic themes that are asserted and denied, as if they were written to be crossed out at once. CROSS #2—CROSSING OUT: PATTERNS OF INDETERMINACY In his excellent article, Ulrich Meurer insists very persuasively upon the idea that the “gap [is] the lieu of the invisible. Blanks and vacancies of any sort, he argues, determine the text’s plot and structure.”13 Before attempting to show how such gaps are predicated upon the prior force of the chiasmus, I shall, following Meurer, dwell on instances of indeterminacy. Richter’s exhibition is all black and white. The colors best associated with the anonymous man would be the unnuanced black and white colors since they echo assertion, mastery and totality. Indeed, one is either something “or” its opposite but one cannot be both: “They committed suicide. Or the state killed them” and “You’re a grad student. Or you teach art.”14 Gray, on the other hand, as “a symbolic middle term,” best defines the woman.15 She often begins her sentences with “I don’t know.” Even Gudrun Ensslin’s portrait, Confrontation 2 which, according to the man, is “the clearest image in the room. […] She’s smiling”—even that is contested by the woman who “[does]n’t know if that’s a smile.”16 She contends there are many gaps and doesn’t know what really happened the night the prisoners died at Stammheim Prison or why the artist did not resort to color—an issue swiftly dismissed by the man: “No color. No meaning.”17 The few elements she is positive about have to do with history, and the archival material Richter used to paint his series. However, it seems that the known facts are imperiled by another historical element, itself uncertain, to wit, the death of the protagonists. If the man is in a quest for knowledge—“‘Tell me what you see. Honestly, I want to know’”—the woman accepts indeterminacy.18 She leaves room for a certain mystery and in doing so, she sides with the painter, who, in answer to the question “So perhaps uncertainty is the overriding theme?” answers: “Maybe. At all events, uncertainty is part of me, it’s a basic premise of my work. After all, we have no objective justification for feeling certain about anything. Certainty is for fools, or liars.”19 Contemplating the two paintings of Andreas Baader lying dead in his cell, Man Shot Down 1 and 2, the woman cannot help comparing them: “she concentrated on the differences, arm, shirt, unknown object at the edge of the frame, the disparity or uncertainty.”20 Richter reaches this painterly indeterminacy thanks to the “blurring” technique and his use of gray— two key idiosyncrasies DeLillo fuses in the phrase, “ashy blur”—a color Richter defines as representing the “absence of opinion, nothing, neither/nor […] a means of manifesting my own relation with apparent reality. I didn’t



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want to say: ‘It is thus and not otherwise.’ And then perhaps I didn’t want anyone to confuse the pictures with reality.”21 Richter further explains that he “blur[s] things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant.”22 For Richter, gray is equated with irresolution or dubiousness; as he puts it, “[g]ray ... operates as the agency and emblem of doubt.”23 Accomplished Imminence Spatial indeterminacy is on a par with the temporal in-betweenness wherein the protagonists evolve. The first paragraph of the story immediately signals intermediate temporality by implying mourning. As the ghost of 9/11 looms over the story, the protagonists, as New Yorkers, may themselves be mourning losses. When the woman contemplates the paintings, she feels “she was sitting as a person does in a mortuary chapel, keeping watch over the body of a relative or a friend.”24 The same feeling is predominant toward the end of the story, only this time mourning is transferred to the man who is “looking at the last painting in the cycle […] the one with the coffins and cross, called Funeral.”25 Mourning is for those who remain in an intermediary state, wherein the living negotiate their separation from the dead. It is precisely because it is a process—hence, the work of mourning, or Trauerarbeit— that the idea of an interzone is a valid paradigm to make sense of the story. Mourning is not only hinted at in its psychological dimension; it also appears as a social event in the painting entitled Funeral. The topic of Richter’s paintings is death and mourning but the depicted facts preclude mourning from taking place insofar as they remind viewers of the uncertainty hovering over the shadowy conditions of the prisoners’ deaths while the depicted effects on viewers stress indeterminacy. Richter’s art thereby announces the death of absolute knowledge when it comes to knowing and representing death. Another correspondence between the paintings and the story further complicates the issue of time. A parallel is drawn between the anonymous female protagonist in the story and the historical woman in the paintings, the journalist Gudrun Ensslin. The anonymous man enables the blurring of the two female figures: “He was looking at her but she was looking past him to the figure of Gudrun.”26 The Gudrun triptych entitled Confrontation 1, 2 and 3 invites viewers to look for an adequacy between the chronological sequence of the photographs and the order indicated by each title in the story: “Three portraits of Gudrun, maybe smiling, smiling and probably smiling.”27 The smile serves as the center, inducing what precedes and what follows. Yet, the uncertainty marked by the words “maybe” and “probably” weakens the existence of the smile rendering any idea of centering or balance inoperative. Because indeterminacy thickens, the eye of the viewer must keep on oscillating to determine when the smile begins, when it ends, or even, whether

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it is there or not, in the first place. DeLillo further obfuscates meaning by somehow fusing the two women by means of the smile—one may note, in passing, the paronomastic effect between “Gudrun” and “grudging.” If the woman’s smile is twice mentioned—“[she] saw herself in the window wearing a grudging smile” and “[s]he saw herself smile”—one can argue that both cannot be sustained, forcing the chronological sequence to crumble: is a smile given reluctantly still a smile?28 Twice mediated—the painting of a photograph—not to say thrice if we include its literary translation, how can one be sure that it is a smile? Spatial blurriness gives way to chronological blurriness. In-betweenness is death itself as Richter depicts it both consummated, pertaining to the past, and on the verge of taking place in an imminent future. Barthes’ concept of the “punctum” synthetizes the idea perfectly: “I read at the same time: This will be and this has been, I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose […] [T]he photograph tells me death in the future.”29 Both protagonists are caught in this chronological midpoint. In the midst of “job interviews,” the man is at the museum “to pass the time.”30 The fact that the woman had “been here three straight days,” compelled to return and repeat implies an unsuccessful mourning as she is trapped in the intermediary zone of a past time that refuses to pass.31 Such reading would be corroborated by the story’s symmetrical opening and closing on mourning with “the last painting in the cycle […] called Funeral.”32 Perhaps, the text performs a looping structure of grief that will not cease, one suggestive of melancholia. Incidentally, Richter notes that “the photograph provokes horror, and the painting—with the same motif something more like grief. That comes very close to what I intended.”33 The problematic temporality of an event that makes it both the archè and telos of what happens resembles the temporality of reading. The pivotal moment DeLillo wished to dwell on, the woman’s violent and degrading epiphany, recalls the moment that readers feel “abused” by a meaning that was already there—already read—latent, and that resurfaces bluntly with the force of an event worthy of that name. The reading process reenacts the hiatus existing between the story as we know it and the story as we uncannily (re) discover it, as if it had been withheld without us knowing. Yet, didn’t the man warn us in a metatextual comment: “You have to find yourself on the verge of something happening before you can begin to prepare for it.”34 Or, to put it differently, the event consists in a dialectics of remembering and forgetting that befits the trope of the chiasmus, as we shall see, insofar as it enacts temporal circulation and confusion. When the story begins, the sole thing the woman knows—paradoxically— reverberates as the very thing that has not yet happened to her: “She knew there was someone else in the room.”35 The unknown referent of “room”



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prevents us from identifying the place straightaway, but on second reading, it resonates not simply as the place indicated by the third clause—“the gallery with the paintings”—but as the “studio apartment, with the kitchen only partly walled off and the bed in a corner of the room,” that is to say, the locus where the event took place.36 This may be regarded as a first proof that the event not yet encountered was already legible in the first line. The second line supports the first: “There was no outright noise, just an intimation behind her, a faint displacement of air.”37 Isn’t that “displacement of air” an analogous way to describe the onanistic man “breathing, a sound of concentrated work, nasal and cadenced”?38 Spatially and temporally, the middle area—whether it be defined as uncertainty, death or mourning—helps us comprehend the intentions of DeLillo, as they double Richter’s aims and enact one feature of the chiasmus that Nänny labels “non-progression, stasis, deadlock.”39 However, the zone we try to delineate can also be viewed not as merely juxtaposed contradictory elements but as dynamic interacting ones that originate from the mechanism of the chiasmus as the temporal approach has already begun to reveal. Those elements then become not so much dead-ends as they signal patterns of circulation and exchange. They force readers to abandon the stalling view of uncertainty, to perform the necessary comings and goings that the reading process highlights and that the chiasmic picture heightens. CROSS #3—CHIASTIC ARRANGEMENT OR THE SHAPE OF A CROSS Although I agree with Meurer’s analysis of indeterminacy as a “lieu of the invisible,” my contention is that the indeterminacy can only be made visible by the prior efficacy of the chiastic structure.40 In other words, the chiasm precedes the chasm. The configuration of “Baader-Meinhof” is based on a chiastic pattern positing an overarching design of paradoxically amalgamated opposites. Alternate situations of encounter and separation choreograph the design and thus confirm Nänny’s remark whereby chiasm is “an emblem of two contrary movements, either toward each other, or away from each other.”41 The strength of the story relies on its ability to generate a sense of structural indeterminacy, or to use an oxymoron from the text, a “loose containment.”42 Indeed, a rigorous stylistic and thematic grid governs the indefiniteness. One has the feeling, after reading “Baader-Meinhof,” that some distinct compositional echoes resound within the general sense of vagueness. The story demands more reading so as to restore the picture and it does so, by revealing gradually its inner mechanism, namely its overall chiastic design. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the chiasmus as a “rhetorical

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or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order.” Etymologically, chiasmus comes from the Greek χιάζω, meaning, “shaped like the letter chi,” that is to say, χ. Literally then, a chiasmus is an X, or a cross. Incidentally (or not), the woman in DeLillo’s short opus makes a direct reference to an “object at the top of the painting, just left to the center, a tree perhaps, in the rough shape of a cross.”43 Reversals and Reversions Another key feature of chiasmus lies in its propensity to operate as an “icon of reversal or inversion.”44 The relationship between the man and the woman is originally characterized or rather felt by unilateral power as only the man exerts pressure on the woman. His will to subdue her is manifested in different ways. Physically, he exhibits an oppressive and dominating force that translates in the way he “took up space, a tall broad man” and in the way “he seemed to use up the room […] he was bigger than ever.”45 A form of theatricalization succeeds in containing and subjugating the woman. He plays a part, and in doing so, assigns one to the woman, secluding her in a written script, “You’re supposed to say, ‘Who are you?’ […] ‘I set you up beautifully and you totally miss your cue.’”46 He wants to fit her forcefully in a position of expertise that would rationally explain her presence at the museum and reduce her to neat categorical archetypes: “You teach art. Or you’re a grad student.”47 Doubt or confusion is just impossible to conceive for the man for it would go against any kind of authoritative stabilization of meaning that his search for mastery induces. He wants to freeze meaning by eradicating doubts. His rationale is fueled by a will to access a form of power. The fact that he resorts to a voice other than his own partakes in the dramatization mentioned above. “He said [marriage] in a modified version of the baritone rumble he’d used earlier for ‘the state’”—minimizes, or worse, rules out what first appeared as an alternative: “They committed suicide. Or the state killed them.48 He said, ‘The state.’ Then he said it again, deepvoiced, in a tone of melodramatic menace.”49 The dramatic and parodic tone discloses his incredulity as to any potential implication of the government in the killing of the prisoners.50 Clearly, state terrorism is out of the question for him. The consequence of his obtuseness is to oversimplify the complex definition of terrorism and reduce it to a univocal reading.51 His behavior tends to underline his affiliation, not to say his blind adherence, to an authoritarian model typically inclined to mastery and control, one that befits a police state. Most of the dialogues verge on police interrogation. The man asks numerous questions, harassing the woman and exhorting her to “[t]ell the truth” as if he wanted a confession from her.52 He seems then to speak on behalf of a state tainted with totalitarianism, and slowly switches from the position of a police



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officer that ensures that the established order with its fixed concepts is to be perpetuated, to that of a terrorist who violates the intimacy of the other and instills terror. DeLillo might have come across the following text by Richter: [T]here’s something else that puts an additional fear into people, namely that they themselves are terrorists. And that is forbidden. So this terrorism inside all of us, that’s what generates the rage and fear, and that’s what I don’t want, any more than I want the policeman inside myself—there’s never just one side to us. We’re always both: The State and the terrorist.53

When the woman reminds him of his three o’clock appointment, he corrects the time and adds: “But that’s a long way off. That’s another world, where I fix my tie and walk in and tell them who I am.’”54 Which other world? For, if he belongs to two worlds, he might be affiliated to a form of terrorism in one of them, maybe of the financial type.55 Even though the victimizer does not literally turn into a victim,56 a certain form of textual haziness prevails, thanks to reversals. For instance, if the story opens with the woman alone offered like a prey for a potential predator, by the end, it is the man who is now alone, and the anonymous woman is in a position to surprise him from behind. In addition to that, the attributes of knowing and not knowing subsequently switch. The woman now knows. The once inquisitive man now contritely begs for forgiveness, and the text performatively silences him when he utters his final words: “I don’t know what to say.’”57 Reduced to silence, he is dislodged from his usurped hegemonic position of knowledge. The chiastic pattern continues with the reversal of the threat. As the man’s aggressiveness increases, he gains physical domination by “look[ing] at her so levelly, with measuring effect” the woman proportionally shrinks and “seem[s] to disappear.”58 Then he ends up “sinking at the door.”59 The voices follow the exact pattern, crisscrossing each other. Characterized at first as “so fluted and small,” the woman’s voice becomes unrecognizable.60 Conversely, the once imposing and self-confident man has lost his vehemence, and now looks sheepish and vulnerable speaking in a “barely audible [voice], close to a moan.”61 The effective violence is doubled verbally via the chiasmic structure of the story. The stature and violence of the man deflate after the facts whereas the innocence and fragility of the woman give way to anger, disgust and verbal violence, and toward the very end to her revenge in potentia. If the man authoritatively imposes a monological definition to the works to have the woman policed and contained, she surreptitiously flirts with his tonality “hear[ing] a note of slight reprimand in her voice.”62 The lexical vicinity between “reprimand” and “repression” is not fortuitous. On second reading, the profusion of negative clauses for the most part allotted to the

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woman takes a new turn for they now sound like hermetic and harsh answers, shutting off any possibility of ethical exchange. For instance, she reacts to the man’s first words by ignoring him, “She did not turn to look at him.”63 If the man’s later intrusion is unquestionably terrifying and reprehensible, readers may thus legitimately wonder about the woman’s cold reluctance. The shift in the reading forces us to consider anew the prescribed and determined categories of victims and victimizers, of innocence and guilt. Suddenly, the position of the victim occupied by the woman is shaken, as Kauffman underlines: “The ending makes us reevaluate the beginning, when the heroine was still innocent—or blind. […] What are we to make of her harsh transformation?”64 Those stabilizing labels deconstructed by the text are doubly undermined by the treatment the narrative makes of thematic chiasmus as well as proper textual chiasmus. Textual Chiasmi Not only does “Baader-Meinhof” display a chiastic plot structure, it also harbors countless chiasmi, both in writing and sounding, at different levels.65 One could begin with the most blatant chiasmus of the story: “When they’re not killing other people, they’re killing themselves.”66 The perfect symmetry achieved thanks to repetition suggests the calcified and clichéd image used by the man and a sort of tautology, akin to Nänny’s idea of “annular structure” or “circularity” inherent to chiasm.67 Chiasm here is that which gives a sense of unverifiable veracity to the man’s words, as if he were reciting a commandment, a dictum directly issued from the power structure, but [it is] also, paradoxically, that which disparages the saying for its naïve and formal oversimplification. This blatant example coexists with more evasive chiastic parallelisms such as, “cross the room and close the door” or “ranking her”/“marking her” which enable DeLillo to disseminate structuring echoes in the story.68 I would like now to focus on three specific examples that respectively correspond to three key passages in the story: Example #1: THE CROSS It was a cross. She saw it as a cross, and it made her feel, right or wrong, that there was an element of forgiveness in the picture, that the two men and the woman, terrorists, and Ulrike before them, terrorist, were not beyond forgiveness.69

Again repetition (see italics) is unavoidable, and so is symmetry. The rapport between micro- and macro-chiasmi appears in the two opening sentences, “It was a cross. She saw it as a cross,” in the way they contain, and therefore,



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announce in the mode of the analepsis the broader chiasm at the level of the full paragraph. The pronoun it is not just repeated, it both occupies subject and object positions. From the pivotal She enabling the shift from one side to the other, one may notice in passing the palindromic pair was/saw as well as the echo of as already comprised in was. The rest of the paragraph purports to perfect the chiasm phonetically, by dint of the homogenous distribution of the alliterative consonant /f/ and the double instance of /ɪk/ that lend rhythm and balance to the sentence. On the surface, the pair right/wrong referring to the woman’s correct or incorrect reading of the painting implies deeper considerations of ethical matters that transpire in the way the words forgiveness frame the double—somehow unexpected, almost irruptive, not to say irrational—occurrence of the words terrorist.70 The doubling of terrorist anticipates the vehement epiphanic reaction of the woman without belittling its surprise or force. The perfect equilibrium in this passage already hints at the relation between terrorism and the possibility to forgive its deadly exactions. Example #2: TERROR She saw everything twice now. She was where she wanted to be, and alone, but nothing was the same. Bastard. Nearly everything in the room had a double effect—what it was and the association it carried in her mind. She went out walking and when she came back the connection was still there, at the coffee table, on the bed, in the bathroom. Bastard. She had dinner in a small restaurant nearby and went to bed early.71

Graphically, the words “Bastard,” posted like guards, mirror each other and ensure the left and right framing of the textual event simultaneously inscribed and crossed out by the dash which embodies the event of terror. Phonetically, the predominant alliterative sound /b/ literalizes in a performative manner the double and opposite movement of the lips that must be joined to be parted to expel the plosive bilabial consonant /b/. It is tempting to analyze this choice as a direct evocation of one of terror and terrorism’s most emblematic weapon, the bomb—hence, a plosive sound for an explosive weapon. If the effect is that of the bomb, the text performs its detonation visually and acoustically. The overt chiastic pattern of the paragraph (abC—Cba where C stands for “Bastard”) is further extended to other micro-chiastic echoes within. For instance, the opening palindrome (was/saw) parallels the ending paronomasia (nearby/bed early) which in turn reinforces the pair “wanted to be” and “went to bed early.” The chiasmic arrangement not only expresses and enacts adequately the double and doubling character of the event, it also epitomizes the effect the story as a whole provokes on readers. Just like for the woman, something isn’t quite right after we return to the text.

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Example #3: opening and closing paragraphs She knew there was someone else in the room. There was no outright noise, just an intimation behind her, a faint displacement of air. She’d been alone for a time, seated on a bench in the middle of the gallery with the paintings set around her, a cycle of 15 canvases, and this is how it felt to her, that she was sitting as a person does in a mortuary chapel, keeping watch over the body of a relative or a friend.72 When she went back to the museum the next morning he was alone in the gallery, seated on the bench in the middle of the room, his back to the entranceway, and he was looking at the last painting in the cycle, the largest by far and maybe most breathtaking, the one with the coffins and cross, called “Funeral.”73

In the third example, the most striking correspondences are in the repetitions, whether strict (see italics) or loose (displacement of air/breathtaking, mortuary/funeral, canvases/painting). A whole series of locative prepositions in both paragraphs partakes in further asserting the symmetry of the texts. Those space markers feature the omnipresence of each part within its respective twin pointing metatextually that the first is already saturated with the last paragraph, and vice versa. As in the hysteron proteron, a figure not unrelated to chiasmus one could conclude that the beginning is in the end, and the end is in the beginning. As a result readers are taken aback by what we have termed an “accomplished imminence.”74 Far from exhausting all the resources of the text, suffice it to say that the comprehensive chiastic structure contrives successfully to transfer the “double effect” undergone by the woman toward readers who have been led into considering things uncritically for what they seemed to be, misunderstanding them, so to speak, mirroring the woman’s own misunderstanding. “She found she was shaking her head, trying to disbelieve the moment, to make it reversible, a misunderstanding.”75 The chiastic arrangement urges us to an ever-renewed appraisal of the text, one stemming from an ethical demand. CROSS #4 “X”: THE UNKNOWN IS FORGIVENESS— THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF FORGIVENESS Theorizing terrorism entails a reflection upon the correlative issue of forgiveness. Can the American people envisage forgiving the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks? Are the Baader-Meinhof Gang crimes ever to be forgiven? What about the German State vis-à-vis the members of the RAF? What effect does the timespan have on the entrenched reaction to terrorism? The interweaving of terrorisms crystalizes in the short story in the terror felt by the woman. Neither the woman nor readers may eschew forgiveness. Will she



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ever forgive the man? Is forgiveness even possible? The woman introduces forgiveness along with the icon of the Christian cross, which she believes, is a detail of the painting Funeral.76 The cross recalls one key feature of the punctum: “whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.”77 Forgiveness, on that account, seems equally possible and impossible because of that calibrated indeterminacy process whereby an interstitial space opens up and enables a circulation between contradictory terms. Yet, the same intermediary space hosts the problematic closure of the text, itself reiterating the problematic stake of forgiveness.78 How is the intricate issue of forgiveness handled considering the fact that the man apologizes for what he has done?79 Predictively, it resurfaces at the end of the story which refuses to settle forgiveness once and for all, leaving one with the possibility of either a new encounter or a new confrontation, one, possibly, of revenge. The openness of this scene leaves readers at a hazy crossing equally defined by the impossibility and the possibility of forgiveness. In a scene to come, in “[t]his solitude of two, in the scene of forgiveness,” the man and the woman would come face-to-face for when she sees him again his back is turned: “he was alone in the gallery, seated on the bench in the middle of the room, his back to the entranceway.”80 Linda Kauffman reflects that the woman “wants to see an element of forgiveness in Richter’s paintings, but, by the end, forgiveness seems preposterous.” According to her, forgiveness crumbles because she is not, in fact, in a position to forgive the man: “Are we to conclude that forgiveness is fine in the abstract, but impossible once one’s territory has been invaded? Or that such noble sentiments are only possible in art, not in life? Or that they only apply to those long dead?”81 Kauffman rightly points to DeLillo’s refusal to preclude those options. Yet, isn’t that precisely the locus—necessarily intermediate and indeterminate—where the issue is best dealt with? I would like to argue, along the lines of Derrida, and within the context of the short story, that forgiveness may be apprehended in the light of the notion of event, that is, in the way it articulates a dialectics of possibility and impossibility: I can only forgive, if I do forgive, when there is something unforgivable, when it isn’t possible to forgive. In other words, forgiveness, if there is any, must forgive that which is unforgivable otherwise it is not forgiveness. Forgiving, if it is possible, can only come to be as impossible. But this impossibility is not simply negative. This means that the impossible must be done. The event, if there is one, consists in doing the impossible.82

The Derridean event is always concerned with the articulation between unconditionality (the purity of the concept as such) and conditionality (its application

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in societies, through institutions, laws, etc.), and the threshold where DeLillo leads us, or, rather, leaves us, symbolizes the crossroad where the unconditionality and conditionality of forgiveness remains to be negotiated. Derrida suggests that forgiveness “must forever remain, if there is such a thing, undecidably equivocal, by which I do not mean ambiguous, shady, twilit, but heterogeneous to any determination in the order of knowledge, of determinate theoretical judgment, of the self-presentable appropriable sense.”83 DeLillo’s text does attain such equivocality by heralding an impossible forgiveness without blocking the prospects of its possibility. One may rightfully ask: why did he choose to stop in midcourse, avoiding either to confirm or invalidate forgiveness? If one is to reckon some vindictive actions from the woman—the violence of her epiphany inclines us to do so—the possibility of forgiveness cannot yet be nullified. On the contrary, forgiveness is a proportionally valid alternative considering its very disproportionate power. It is possible because readers are maintained within the intermediary and suspended space of a reconciliation scene which, we must insist, has not yet been initiated.84 Despite themselves, DeLillo places readers in what seems at first a comfortable position, theoretically at ease to judge the conditions of possibility or impossibility of forgiveness. The deliberate suspension of choice amplifies undecidedness and in-betweenness in the story and displaces onto readers’ shoulders a heavy responsibility. The crucial, not to say, excruciating response it involves from readers, may lead them to take on the mantle of the State, thus substituting for a policing role to the detriment, possibly, of one pertaining to the realm of justice. There is indeed a risk involved in that decision which is inherent to what is at stake in the question of forgiveness: If we want to embody an unconditional forgiveness in history and society, we have to go through conditions. We have to negotiate between the unconditional and conditional. They cannot be dissociated, although we know they are absolutely heterogeneous and incommensurable. It is because these incommensurable poles are indissociable that we have to take responsibility, a difficult responsibility, to negotiate the best response in an impossible situation.85

Indeed, we must ponder and ask about the arduous question of justice. Yet, if it truly is a personal task, a detail in the text intimates that the narrator believes in the possibility of forgiveness. The narrator implies that a cross has indeed been seen among the treetops, uncritically supporting the woman’s point of view: “he was looking at the last painting in the cycle, the largest by far and maybe most breathtaking, the one with the coffins and cross, called Funeral.”86 Can we then be sure that the text does not impose an authoritative reading? Does the man autonomously consent? Doesn’t DeLillo demonstrate



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how surreptitiously one can model an opinion? Isn’t the writer encouraging us to distrust the numerical upper hand on forgiveness (hence dismissing quantity and calculability) that would ultimately jeopardize the intermediary zone of gray by switching it, ever again, toward the definite patterns of black or white? Or is it another way of criticizing, along with Richter, the intrusion of ideology? There are no definite answers to these questions. NEGOTIATING CROSSING “Baader-Meinhof” crosswise arrangement forces readers to experience the text as a critical space. Meurer rightly argues that DeLillo’s story “tries to invent a literary as well as ethical mode to counteract the possibility of terrorism itself.”87 I believe that DeLillo does so by opening up a locus of exchanges established by chiasmus. The obliterating arbitrariness of terrorism is thwarted by the possibility of forgiveness thanks to the fluctuating pattern installed by chiasmus. In fact, both ends of the textual continuum echo and mirror each other, as if one was already contained within the other, and vice versa, producing an impression of wholeness, completion, and closure. Yet, thanks to the same trope, that impression is always already endangered by the ethical question of forgiveness which is pressed upon reading and ultimately undoes closure. If, as we are inclined to believe, the ultimate concern of the story is forgiveness, and by extension, a certain idea of justice, it seems fitting that chiasmus should structure the story.88 The text refuses to usurp the position of the judge that implies a sovereign stance that cancels the possibility of forgiveness.89 “It is because forgiveness seems to become impossible, writes Derrida, that forgiveness becomes a starting point, a new starting point.”90 Reading performs that new starting point, and it does even more, it reiterates it again and again. In fact, reading is a poetics of negotiation and as such, it may be entitled to be also an ethics.

NOTES 1. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (New York: Scribner, 2011), 105–118. 2. The exhibition took place from September 28, 2000 to March 4, 2001. It included the following works: Erhängte (Hanged), Tot 1, 2 und 3 (Dead 1, 2 and 3), Plattenspieler (Record Player), Jugendbildnis (Youth Portrait), Erschossener 1 und 2 (Man Shot Down 1 and 2), Zelle (Cell), Gegenüberstellung 1, 2 und 3 (Confrontation 1, 2 and 3), Beerdigung (Funeral which represents the public burial of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe) and Festnahme 1 und 2 (Arrest 1 and 2). All can be seen on Gerhard

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Richter’s website. Last accessed February 18, 2016 URL: http://www.gerhard-richter. com/art/paintings/photo_paintings/category.php?catID=56 3. The chapter entitled “What Happened” of Robert Storr’s book provides an excellent introduction to the historical context (Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter. October 18, 1977 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2000), 41–67. 4. Those five names are the first among the 19 portraits posted by the German police in 1972 on a wanted poster where one could read: “Anarchist Violent Criminals—Baader/Meinhof Gang.” The poster can be seen on the Federal Archives website. Last accessed February 18, 2016 URL: http://www.bundesarchiv.de/oeffentlichkeitsarbeit/bilder_dokumente/00933/index-29.html.de. DeLillo relates this poster to the 19 Arabic terrorists wanted poster issued by the CIA. Last accessed February 18, 2016. URL: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~giri22m/classweb/worldpolitics/ suicideattacks/page2.html. The link between the two posters is explicit in Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2006), 19, 147. 5. Hans Ulrich Obrist, ed. Gerhard Richter. The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962–1993. Translated from the German by David Britt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 175. 6. However specific, the reference remains cryptic if one is not German as Rainer Usselman asks: “The title 18. Oktober 1977 mystifies. Will visitors to MoMA know what makes this date so special, worthy of receiving homage in a series of paintings?” Rainer Usselman, “18. Oktober 1977: Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning and Its New Audience,” Art Journal 61, no. 1 (Fall 2002), 4. 7. Richter refuses to call them “history paintings”: “I’m not really very interested in history painting” (Ulrich Obrist, Gerhard Richter, 227). 8. Linda S. Kauffman rightly points to their link by underlining the fact that “the connection […] resurfaces in Falling Man [which] features a German art dealer who was once a member of Kommune 1.” Linda S. Kaufman, “The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future,’ ‘Baader-Meinhof,’ and Falling Man,” in Peter Schneck and Philip Schweighauser, eds, in Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction. Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo (New York: Continuum, 2010), 26. 9. “[O]ne is tempted to posit terror itself as the ground for the psyche in DeLillo, an indwelling creatural horror that underlies all the codes and systems.” Arnold Weinstein, Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 294. 10. Don DeLillo, ”Baader-Meinhof,” 105. 11. Ibid., 108, italics added. 12. Ibid., 105. 13. Ulrich Meurer, “Double-Mediated Terrorism: Gerhardt Richter and Don DeLillo’s ‘Baader-Meinhof,’” Literature and Terrorism. Comparative Perspective. Michael C. Franck and Eva Gruber, eds. Studies in Comparative Literature 66 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 186. 14. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 106, 107. 15. Robert Storr, Gerhardt Richter: October, 112. 16. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof, 117. 17. Ibid., 110.



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18. Ibid., 108–109. 19. Ulrich Obrist, Gerhard Richter: Daily Practice, 215. 20. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 106, italics added. 21. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 108 ; Ulrich Obrist, Gerhard Richter: Daily Practice, 215. 22. Ulrich Obrist, Gerhard Richter: Daily Practice, 37. 23. Robert Storr, Gerhardt Richter: October, 112. 24. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhoff,” 105. 25. Ibid., 118. 26. Ibid., 107. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 110, 112. 29. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Notes on Photography (London: Vintage, 1993), 96. 30. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 107, italics added. 31. Ibid. 32. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 118. It was not the case at the first exhibition of 18. Oktober 1977 at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt. The same is true of the inventories of Richter’s works which do not situate Funeral as the last piece of the series (Usselman 5). 33. Ulrich Obrist, Gerhard Richter: Daily Practice, 189. 34. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 114. 35. Ibid., 105. 36. Ibid., 105, 112. 37. Ibid., 105. 38. Ibid., 117. 39. Max Nänny, “Chiastic Structures in Literature: Some Forms and Functions,” The Structure of Texts. Udo Fries,ed. Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 3. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1987, 85. 40. Ulrich Meurer, “Double-Mediated Terrorism,” 186. 41. Max Nänny, “Chiasmus in literature: Ornament or function?” Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 4, no.1 (January-March 1988), 53. Meurer suggests the structuring pattern built around the encounter-separation dyad: “as DeLillo cuts out the joint between the story’s two main section, the very structure of the text centers on the interstice between the encounter-scene in the gallery and the separation-scene in the apartment, located precisely in the middle of the text and harboring an undisclosed moment of decision (growing trust, or lust, or both.)” (“Double-Mediated,” 186). 42. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 82. 43. Ibid., 108–109. 44. Max Nänny, “Chiasmus in literature,” 53. 45. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 110, 116. 46. Ibid., 111, 112. 47. Ibid., 107. 48. Ibid., 113. 49. Ibid., 106.

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50. Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: October, 28. 51. “[T]here are many terrorisms, differing among themselves as to their means, ends, motives, and circumstances as well as to the diverse kinds of targets—symbolic and real—against which they are aimed and the diverse audiences that the symbolism of violence is intended to reach.” Robert Appelbaum and Alexis Paknadel, “Terrorism and the Novel, 1970-2001,” Poetics Today XXIX 3 (Spring 2008), 390. 52. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 110. 53. Ulrich Obrist, Gerhard Richter: Daily Practice, 185–186. Arendt comes immediately to mind: “What totalitarian rule needs to guide the behavior of its subjects is a preparation to fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim. This two-sided preparation, the substitute for a principle of action, is the ideology.” Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland: Meridian, 1962), 468. 54. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 111. 55. Linda Kauffman, “Wake of Terror,” 24. 56. Of course, it is not my intention to suggest that readers will not side with the woman. In their massive study on the relationship between fiction and terrorism, Appelbaum and Paknadel reach one of the following conclusions: “But the novels in our sample are united in this: they take the side of the victim: they see the significance of violence in the harm it causes” (Robert Appelbaum and Alexis Paknadel, “Terrorism and the Novel, 1970-2001,” Poetics Today XXIX/3 (Spring 2008), 422. 57. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 117. 58. Ibid., 115. 59. Ibid., 117. 60. Ibid., 116. 61. Ibid., 117. 62. Ibid., 107. 63. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof, 105. Oddly enough, the text designs and shapes our criticism. Kauffman deciphers the parallel structure by resorting to a chiasmic structure: “[T]he paintings are an objective correlative for blindness and insight: she studies the canvasses, but is blind to the man’s motives, he is blind to the paintings, but shrewdly sizes her up” (Linda S. Kauffman, “Wake of Terror,” 24). 64. Linda S. Kauffman, “Wake of Terror,” 25. 65. “The chiastic patterning (abba) is now seen to occur on all levels of both poetic and prose texts and not just on the syntactic level: on the level of sounds (including rhymes) and graphemes (inclusive of punctuation), words, sentences, lines, stanzas, chapters, books, on the level of narrative (plot, character, diegesis, mimesis) and dramatic elements (scene, act, setting, time) as well as on the level of theme or concept” (Max Nänny, “Chiasmus in literature,” 51). 66. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 106. 67. Max Nänny, “Chiastic Structures,” 78, 84. 68. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinfhof,” 117, 116. 69. Ibid., 109, italics added.



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70. Linda Kaufman asks: “Finally, is the word ‘terrorist’ repeated in order to suggest correspondences between September 11, 2001 and October 18, 1977?” (“Wake of Terror,” 26). 71. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 117. 72. Ibid., 105, italics added. 73. Ibid., 117, italics added. 74. Max Nänny, “Chiasmus in literature,” 52. 75. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 115–116, italics added. 76. “A ‘detail’ attracts me. I feel that its mere presence changes my reading, that I am looking at a new photograph, marked in my eyes with a higher value. This ‘detail’ is the punctum.” (Roland Barthes, Camera, 42.) 77. Ibid., 55. 78. Interstice already problematized by the conjunction of both respective visual media: “In sum, we are not dealing with documentary photography and we are not dealing with painting photography either. Instead, we are confronted with a continuum of representations stretched taut between the abstract concepts of photography and painting, each of which by asserting its own conventional reality implicitly questions the conventions and the truth of the other” (Storr 106). 79. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 117. It is one of the axiom Derrida deconstructs: “The first [axiom] is that forgiveness cannot be granted, or at least one cannot imagine the possibility of granting it, of forgiving thus, unless forgiveness is asked for, explicitly or implicitly asked for.” “To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible,” in Questioning God. Edited by John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, Michael J. Scanlon, trans. Elizabeth Rozenberg. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 2001, 27. 80. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 118. Jacques Derrida, “To Forgive,” 25. 81. Linda Kauffman, “Wake of Terror,” 25–26. 82. Jacques Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” translated by Gila Walker. Critical Inquiry 33, no. 2 (Winter 2007), 449–450. 83. Jacques Derrida, “To Forgive,” 36. 84. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge, 2001), 49. 85. Jacques Derrida, “To Forgive,” 58. 86. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 118. 87. Ulrich Meurer, “Double-Mediated,” 193. 88. Even though he does not elaborate on forgiveness, Meurer is convinced that it remains the main issue of the short story: “[I]t is forgiveness which demands special artistic handling. Much more fragile, exigent, and able to move the thematic core from the blunt fact of dying to a moral quality, it might be forgiveness, not death, that has to be made visible in the media’s interspace” (Ulrich Meurer, “Double-Mediated,”190). 89. Because forgiving someone supposes a sovereign and dominating stance that impedes forgiving: “Do not forgive. Forgiveness accuses before it forgives” Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans., Ann Smock. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 53. 90. Jacques Derrida, “To Forgive,” 55.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Appelbaum, Robert and Alexis Paknadel. “Terrorism and the Novel, 1970–2001,” Poetics Today XXIX/3 (Spring 2008): 387–436. Arendt, Hanna. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland: Meridian, 1962. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Notes on Photography. London: Vintage, 1993. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. DeLillo, Don. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, New York: Scribner, 2011. ———. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event.” Translated by Gila Walker. Critical Inquiry 33, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 441–461. ———. “To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible,” in Questioning God. Edited by John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, Michael J. Scanlon, 21–51. Translated by Elizabeth Rozenberg. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. ———. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. New York: Routledge, 2001. Kaufman, Linda S. “The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future,’ ‘Baader-Meinhof,’ and Falling Man.” Peter Schneck and Philip Schweighauser (Eds.), 19–39. In Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction. Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo. New York: Continuum, 2010. Meurer, Ulrich. “Double-Mediated Terrorism: Gerhardt Richter and Don DeLillo’s ‘Baader-Meinhof.’” Literature and Terrorism. Comparative Perspective. Michael C. Franck and Eva Gruber (Eds.), Studies in Comparative Literature 66. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012, 175–194. Nänny, Max. “Chiasmus in literature: Ornament or function?” Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 4, no. 1 (January-March 1988): 51–59. ———. “Chiastic Structures in Literature: Some Forms and Functions.” The Structure of Texts. Udo Fries (Ed.), Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 3. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1987, 75–97. Obrist, Hans Ulrich, ed. Gerhard Richter. The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962–1993. Translated from the German by David Britt. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995. Storr, Robert. Gerhard Richter. October 18, 1977. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2000. Usselman, Rainer. “18. Oktober 1977: Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning and Its New Audience.” Art Journal 61, no. 1 (Fall 2002): 4–25. Weinstein, Arnold. Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Chapter 11

DeLillo’s Poetics of Survival A Case Study Jennifer L. Vala

Time is a problem for those who survive. When does the timer start, marking the second survival begins? Is it at the end of a traumatic event? If so, then when do the grains of sand trickle to the bottom of the hour glass and end the ending that began all of this? And what is to be done in the meantime as we wait for the end or even just for the next threat to unfold? Along with time, the materiality of survival is open to question. After all, how exactly do we select a single object from a short list of items with the capacity to tether us to survival? Would we select a life vest? A pair of running shoes? Or is all that is required a beating heart? Perhaps, as DeLillo’s most recent novel to date, Zero K, suggests, we can subsist even with just the brain’s synapses wavering like the northern lights, guiding cognition toward the poles of an event’s “before” and “after.”1 Time conflates as the past is brought into the present and the future is colored by what has been. Beginning in his early works and intensifying in his post-millennium pieces, the problem of survival gradually proves itself a central meditation of DeLillo’s writing, whether novel, drama, or short story. Survival becomes materially manifest, serves as marker of the historical present, as organizer of time and experience, and finally, in Zero K, sounds an existential warning. Thus this article’s task: study the debris from crisis that constitutes survival and then postulate a few shaping principles for living on. In DeLillo’s fiction, conceptions of persistence and holding one’s ground seep from an event’s blast radius, surfacing as challenges for those of his characters who stand in the changing currents of the meantime.

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DELILLO’S POETICS OF SURVIVAL Though DeLillo’s later texts certainly render examples of survival, the works themselves are not representative of a genre of survival stories. The genre I refer to as “survival narratives” at first seems easy to spot; we know them when we see them, do we not? Many classic survival stories feature iterations of the OED’s definition 1.b. “survival of the fittest,” making them easy to recognize. For example, we might agree that the following texts are reasonably illustrative of the survival genre: Lord of the Flies, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Into the Wild, Life of Pi, and even World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.2 But upon consideration, the question arises: “Which characteristics precisely do these texts share that identify them as survival narratives?” It is challenging to identify with consistency specific generic markers of survival narratives, but in the case of the novels listed above, heroism, singularity, and biological privilege undergird representations of survival. Survival, as represented in these texts, is limited in access and achieved only by the exceptionally strong/wise/diligent/inventive. In contrast, this article discusses the lasting power of DeLillo’s later works, their stories indelible for the challenge they present to heroic conceptions of survival. DeLillo’s later works present characters struggling toward new models of survival. They are unexceptional individuals making their way in limited, unremarkable activities. These characters, culminating in Jeff Lockhart of Zero K, live on despite lacking the privilege of heroic psychological or physiological gifts. For DeLillo’s characters, survival is simply a matter of time. Characters must negotiate time successfully, take note of quotidian pleasures, contemplate their own place in the continuum. Don DeLillo himself notes his increasing interest in time. His depictions of people relating to the temporal found in his later works, I contend, are enmeshed with reflections on survival. A March 2010 article in The Australian and a September 2010 interview for the PEN American Center both present DeLillo’s remarks on the shifts in form and focus in his post-2000 work. In his conversation with PEN, DeLillo explains, “The theme that seems to have evolved in my work during the past decade concerns time—time and loss.”3 Specifically, his post-millennium texts place their attention on time and loss after a crisis in the form of a terrorist attack, natural disaster, suicide, and death. Falling Man, The Body Artist, Zero K, and The Word for Snow are focused meditations on the moments after loss, as thoughts, memories, and anxieties extend time and return it to the past, with the result that survivors attempt to anchor themselves with particular objects as structures of security. In DeLillo’s later works, objects are the currency of survival, the symbols of living on.



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OBJECTIFYING SURVIVAL: FALLING MAN A critically underrated text, DeLillo’s 2007 novel Falling Man reflects on the events of 9/11 without professing to interpret them or assign them the sweeping meaning given by politicians and pundits after the tragedy.4 Instead of welcoming the novel’s suspension of meaning, the reviews that followed its publication expressed disappointment in the novel. Many critics were searching for a ringing proclamation from New York’s own writer about the event itself. They pressed him to consider in fiction a tragedy permanently inscribed in American cultural memory and cast aspersions on his so-called failure to do so. Andrew O’Hagan of The New York Review of Books said that even “inquiries however acute, however felt, cannot make up for DeLillo’s failure to imagine September 11.”5 Laura Miller of Salon.com complimented DeLillo on “some gorgeous writing” in Falling Man, but complained: “I wish I could say that DeLillo’s new novel … offers some unique insight into that day.”6 The novel even received outright condemnation by The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani who deemed it on par with Cosmopolis, which she termed “a terrible disappointment.” Kakutani inadvertently drills to the very core of the novel, survival after catastrophe, in her critique of characters Keith and Lianne, describing them as “two not very compelling figures adrift in the anonymous sea of humanity, bobbing alone in their own little life preservers.”7 Kakutani’s metaphor is apt in that Keith and Lianne are at sea in abruptly disorganized lives, searching for meaning in the aftermath of crisis and constructing their own models for living on. These reviewers misconstrued the thrust of DeLillo’s project, which presents characters submerged in the same struggle writers themselves face post9/11: the very impossibility of communicating the meaning of the traumatic events of September 11, 2001, and the resulting challenge of organizing what remains of life. A reviewer with more insight, Martin Randall expresses himself persuasively: “Indeed, what could possibly be added to the reality of the events that hadn’t already been revealed in the TV footage, the testimony of survivors and witnesses and the data that began to emerge about the hijackers’ motivations?”8 In Falling Man, DeLillo represents survival rather than offering the “reality” of the event. His contributions are depictions of characters who are caught in time after catastrophe, clinging to objects as though they are items in a personal survival kit, while waiting in the meantime between crisis and what is yet to come. At first glance, shoes are an unlikely part of a survival kit. These quotidian objects, however, feature repeatedly in DeLillo’s texts from White Noise to Libra to Zero K. In Falling Man, shoes are connected to crisis and survival. In the days following the 9/11 attacks, Keith is consumed with the compulsion to return to his apartment, located close to Ground Zero and thus

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cordoned off by the police for safety. Specifically, Keith feels compelled to retrieve particular items from his apartment, and he tries various entry points to the neighborhood, fine-tuning his story for the police stationed at intervals until he eventually wins access to his apartment building. Upon entering his home, “[h]e put some things in a suitcase, a few shirts and trousers and his trekking boots from Switzerland and to hell with the rest. This and that and the Swiss boots because the boots mattered.”9 Rather than collecting as many of his possessions as he can carry, Keith pares down to the essentials; items like shirts and trousers are absorbed into the flotsam and jetsam of “this and that,” but the boots are special. Of significance is the absence of a history surrounding the boots, a narrative that might explain some sort of nostalgia or sentimental value for Keith; absent, in other words, is the reason for the boots’ necessity. Keith alone sees their significance for his present circumstances and the boots become part of his survival kit. Keith’s subconscious calculates that after his escape from the towers “through rubble and mud,” the world in which he now walks requires the protections afforded by trekking boots.10 After successfully fleeing the North Tower on 9/11, Keith exists in what theorists term a condition of hyperarousal caused by the experience of trauma and leading him to expect danger at any moment.11 As has been noted of survivors of trauma, Keith’s “system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert”; his retrieval of the boots indicates his preparation for negotiating a world of danger requiring the protection and stability of wilderness gear.12 DeLillo’s survival narratives challenge notions of the “exceptional” hero found in many traumatic survival stories. Laura Berlant’s analysis is pertinent here. She also challenges conceptions of the term “trauma” with her assertion that “most such happenings that force people to adapt to an unfolding change are better described by a notion of systemic crisis or ‘crisis ordinariness’ and followed with an eye to seeing how the affective impact takes form, [or] becomes mediated.”13 Much of Berlant’s work builds on the proposition that crisis is ordinary, and the promise of “the good life” is a cultural mechanism she calls “cruel optimism.”14 Berlant goes on to explain, “Crisis is not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming.”15 Though the experience and effects of crisis can be traumatic and should be acknowledged as such, for the purpose of studying representations of survival as “living on,” the term crisis is best used to designate emerging events in the historical present, events which challenge Western cultural notions of vulnerability and establish what I call the meantime of survival. This kind of temporal endurance or emotional durability does not simply designate the period after crisis, but refers to the historical present; it reveals unacknowledged vulnerability and offers space to reimagine living on in mundane practices of resilience.



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Crisis creates for Keith what Lauren Berlant calls an “impasse or transitional moment” that breaks his assumptions or expectations for his life, so that his worldview now dominated by “a mounting sense of contingency.”16 Though critics describe the plot of Falling Man as a narrative about a failed marriage, to the contrary, this text represents the time of post-crisis in which characters Keith Neudecker and Lianne Glenn register the failure of their worldview and begin to establish life in new circumstances of precarity. The novel is less about a dissolving relationship between two people than about dissolving relationships to the life they led before crisis and their initial improvisations in order to form new ways of living on. Almost immediately after the event, Keith spends his time making pilgrimages to see Florence, the woman whose briefcase he carried out of the tower in the moments following the attacks. In contrast to Keith, Florence’s relations to shoes as objects representing security can be read as evidence of their differing responses to crisis. During scenes in which the two survivors meet and share their experiences of 9/11, the narrative recounts Florence’s intrusive memories of the event.17 Her memories are disorganized, disoriented. “She’d lost her shoes or kicked them off and there was water like a stream somewhere, nearby, running down a mountain.”18 Florence loses any security she might have had using these objects and senses herself in the midst of the natural world. Keith shared the same sense of disorientation as Florence when he left the towers, though his experience is inflected with an element of emotional distance.19 He reports on his walk away from the towers, recording observations without commentary or response. Keith simply notes people “running past, losing shoes and money.” He has become detached, observing with a delayed reaction that “[h]e could not find himself in the things he saw and heard.”20 He does, however, register a strangeness to what he sees, reporting that the people in the lower Manhattan streets “had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him,” though he does not recognize the world in which he lives nor does he synthesize his observations into a judgment about the event.21 Observation and sight, as vehicles for understanding, are critical components of the meantime. In Marco Abel’s “Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future’: Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11” Abel establishes a connection between DeLillo’s essay and André Bazin’s theory of cinema. Abel asserts, “for DeLillo as well as Bazin, the critical task is to render visible the acts of seeing that generate specific representations, not to declare, mourn, deny, or judge the (im)possibility of representing or attaining the real.”22 Acts of seeing the present after crisis are critical to formulating a life in the meantime. In Falling Man, the “acts of seeing” are highlighted as characters register out-of-context objects in all their strange presence within what Abel calls “force relations” of an event.23 These force relations, heralded by

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objects, shape life after crisis into a both a response and a fresh creative act. Abel again, on the style shared by DeLillo and Bazin: “This aesthetic stance begins and ends in the middle, positions the act of viewing amid the event’s force relations, and, leaving the act there, tries to habituate the subject to encountering the middle so that the subject becomes able to see the world— itself always a becoming-middle—as it ‘is’ before judging it.”24 Objects draw Keith’s eyes in Falling Man. He sees them through their strangeness, and they hold him in the middle, between crisis and meaning, in the meantime of his survival. Objects become signifiers alternately of risk, vulnerability, and ultimately, living on. Thus, when Keith reports a woman who has taken off her shoes in the middle of the street, we understand her survival hinges on her ability to literally run for her life. This woman, likely a businesswoman who worked in or around the towers, hobbled by the high heels that were a part of her office dress, rids herself of the shoes when they impede her mobility. We come to understand that the world of lower Manhattan has become a place in which her pre-crisis shoes must be removed in order to survive, mid-crisis. Here the action of survival accrues from paring down—shedding objects in order to pursue the project of living on. The barefoot woman runs to safety until she can discover her own “trekking boots” and survive in the meantime. LIVING IN THE MEANTIME: DELILLO’S “THE IVORY ACROBAT” As the story opens, the protagonist finds herself on her Athens street, having stumbled downstairs in the aftermath of a 6.6 earthquake. She is caught unaware and ill-prepared, standing outside her apartment building in “funnylooking moccasins she only wore indoors.”25 The people around her, each appearing as “a jutting face, a body slowly turning, searching,” lend her reassurance in their performances of shared experience: “It was the same for everyone.”26 Standing on the street, “[s]he thought the scene resembled some landscape in the dreaming part of us, what the city teaches us to fear.”27 The protagonist’s description here resonates with another of DeLillo’s short stories published in 1988 and also featured in The Angel Esmeralda. In “The Runner,” reference to a “dreaming space” offers options for belief, choices to be made about how to make sense of the senseless. Specifically, when witnesses see a child abducted from the park, the eponymous protagonist hears their varying accounts built around questions of belief: was the abductor the child’s father or a stranger performing a random act of violence? Watching people’s reactions, the runner, also nameless, decides faulty belief is a form of protection chosen and carried, like an amulet, by the witnesses. He ponders, “What would you rather believe, a father who comes to take his own



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child or someone lurching out of nowhere, out of dreaming space?”28 Though he learns the incident’s reality from the policeman investigating the case— a stranger indeed had abducted the child—when he sees his neighbor, he chooses to confirm her belief that the child had been taken by the father. He deems the “stranger out of dreaming space” a more frightening reality and he opts to “protect” his neighbor from it. The female protagonist of “The Ivory Acrobat,” in contrast, will ultimately allow for the intrusion of fear into the daily reality of her experience of the physical spaces of the city, fear arriving from the dream world, the unknowable approaching from deep history and “across dream cosmologies.”29 Over time, she will experience release from her clutching fear and will exist in contingency. Yet, in the early moments after the quake, fear indeed dominates her survival experience, organizing space and time. She climbs the stairs to her apartment and proceeds to outfit herself as though for wilderness exploration: “She changed into walking shoes, put on a padded ski jacket and turned off the lights except for a lamp by the door.”30 Ready to act, she is unable to relax, and is caught in a liminal realm between stillness and flight, signified by her sleeping arrangements. “She placed herself on the sofa between a sheet and blanket, her head resting on an airline pillow.”31 Restless, “[s]he lay in a kind of timeless drift, a mind work spiral, carried on half-formed thoughts.”32 Post-earthquake, “something had basically changed. The world was narrowed down to inside and outside.”33 And “[a]ll the danger was inside.”34 This “inside” to which she refers corresponds with the physical vulnerability of her apartment, and simultaneously, to a kind of interiority that can continue beyond catastrophe. These two simple categories of traumatic space withhold mooring for the protagonist as she lives with her fear of aftershocks or another, even larger, earthquake. She turns to strategies for escape. “She visualized her exit from the room”; and again, “[s]he pictured her sensible exit from the room.”35 Repetition here signals the impact of the traumatic event that will always exist in present time. On alert, the protagonist “lived inside a pause. She was always pausing, alone in her flat, to listen.”36 The woman is in the aftermath of force relations and the results are not entirely unlike those depicted in Keith’s confined experience of high alert, of hyperarousal in Falling Man. Relief from the paused time of traumatic experience comes to the protagonist in the form of the ivory acrobat, an object signifying survival, given to her by Edward, whom she calls “the English Boy.”37 He gives her the sculpture, telling her: “It’s your magical true self, mass-produced.”38 He remembers the protagonist in the days before the earthquake, once “lithe,” now “lumbering,” because she “wear[s] clothes and change-of-clothes simultaneously. Just to be ready.”39 Edward’s gift is a small sculpture which represents a Minoan woman posed in mid-air tumble:

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“She’s bull leaping.” “Yes.” “And she will live to tell it.” “She has lived. She is living. That’s why I got this for you really. I want her to remind you of your hidden litheness.”40

The figure of the bull-leaper draws the protagonist out of the pause in which she has been living. It replaces a decorative terra-cotta image of Hermes shattered in the earthquake, which the protagonist in the final moments of the story comes to see as “flower-crowned, looking out at her from a knowable past, some shared theater of being,” while the Minoan statue figures for her a new position: “The Minoans were outside all this. Narrow-waisted, graceful, other-minded—lost across vales of language and magic, across dream cosmologies.”41 Here the dream cosmologies are redeemed from nightmare, brought into a realm of possibility that will be explored in Zero K. The protagonist rejects historical time (represented by the broken Hermes), considering instead a deep, unknowable time of the Minoans as she regards the statue: “This was the piece’s little mystery. It was a thing in opposition, defining what she was not, marking the limits of the self.”42 Though the story leaves its protagonist still waiting and listening, it is not for the next earthquake tremor. Now her senses are directed toward the object in her hand: “She closed her fist around it firmly and thought she could feel it beat against her skin with a soft and periodic pulse, an earthliness. Her self-awareness ended where the acrobat began. Once she realized this, she put the object in her pocket and took it everywhere.”43 In a thoughtful review appearing in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Liesl Schilling argues that “the rootless female expat” who serves as the story’s protagonist “learns the limits of her detachment when an earthquake shakes Athens.”44 In other words, the woman in the story had once thought herself remote from the city and its inhabitants, but finds herself irrevocably affiliated with Athens and its people, as she and they contend with the aftershocks of the disaster.45 Schilling aligns the trajectory of the story with what she sees as the project of the collection as a whole: “[DeLillo] turns fear into strength by confronting it, converting it into a kind of protective amulet.” Schilling is even closer to the mark, however, when she notes that all the stories in The Angel Esmeralda “serve as oddly liberating reminders that terror existed before there was a war on it; that human frailty is not a phase, is not avoidable, is not exceptional.”46 Crisis is ordinary, as Laura Berlant argues, it is not a unitary experience. And the figure of the bull leaper gives expression to this meantime temporality. Captured in mid-flight and catapulting to clearance, the little statue implies safety, material endurance, and the condition of living on that the protagonist desires but doubts she can achieve. By the end



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of the story, the woman comes to synthesize time, identity, and ontological possibility; the ivory acrobat becomes a symbol of her survival. IN THE CURRENT: DELILLO’S ZERO K Don DeLillo, captain of an epochal writing career, survives in part on his observations of the currents moving and being moved by American culture. Not one to float, DeLillo steers in the force of those currents, finding words to describe them as they approach and pass, in his own authorial language which critic Joshua Ferris recently crowned “individual genius.”47 The critics featured in this collection likewise deploy their words to catch currents, whether they spring from the pressure applied by DeLillo’s post-millennium fiction or effuse through the momentum of contemporary American culture. Specifically, they signal channel openings DeLillo provocatively merges in Zero K, his most recent work at the time of this book’s publication.48 Zero K dips below the surface of silence, giving voice to the thoughts of the dead, the preoccupations of the living, and the conflict of those waiting on the threshold of the merging of life and death. In the novel, this liminal location is called the Convergence, a subterranean construction of seemingly endless levels of windowless rooms and video-screened halls where life and death commingle and the latter is medically induced upon request. The Convergence is equal parts design super-achievement, land art, lab, hospice, hotel, and charnel house. Its exact location is coded in the text with references to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. The novel’s narrator, thirty-something Jeffrey Lockhart, drifts through the facility’s halls and rooms that are all alike despite their art installations and viewing screens. Jeffrey’s observations are channeled by the constraints of the architecture and the overarching power of his father Ross’s plans. Ross is the rock beneath the waters, financially and philosophically supporting the Convergence’s project: to sustain life in death by preserving the bodies of the dead until such time as the resident scientists’ hungry search for technology delivers the means to reassemble bodies and brains, indeed, even reinvigorate individual identities after suspension in liquid-filled pods. This is a survival meantime through belief in technology, of response to disease, of willed resistance to the now, of the embodied, abstracted art of living (or of ending life). Aptly described by The Washington Post’s Ron Charles as “a slim, grim nightmare in print,” Zero K frightens us with its unblinking gaze at a developing technology of death, while the novel’s characters, its believers, envision their own future-driven projects as the means to surviving the environmentally, culturally, and personally apocalyptic now.49 Zero K also reinvigorates Ursula Heise’s take on the term chronoschism. In Chronoschisms: Time,

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Narrative, and Postmodernism, Heise coins the term to label literary representations of temporal rifts which “create a very different sense of time that in its discontinuity, its fragmentation into multiple temporal itineraries and its collisions of incommensurable time scales highlights and hyperbolizes certain characteristics of a culture of time that is shared by a whole range of other, non-literary discourses and practices.”50 In simplest terms, Heise is interested in “representational rupture.”51 She alternatively describes this postmodern narrative style as featuring “a split between alternative temporalities.”52 Her argument evolves beyond Alvin Toffler’s “future shock.”53 Heise considers the effect of both “future shock” and the temporal “compression” that it implies through her conception of chronoschism—time fracture or varied sense of the temporal being brought to collusion. DeLillo’s post-millennium Zero K illustrates the intersection of time frames, not only in the scenes running in loops on screens in the halls in the Convergence, but most notably in Artis’s terrifying monologue, after she undergoes “Convergence.” In this section of the novel, Artis, from her “pod” assumes both a first-person and third-person perspective that suggests the survival of her consciousness after cryogenesis, yet operating in a strange and foreign milieu. “Is this my body.” “I will try to wait.” “Everything I don’t know is right here with me but how do I make myself know it.” “I am trying to become someone.”54 This temporal fracture or chronoschism is brilliantly imagined by the author and suggests that those frozen in Zero K perhaps maintain consciousness but without outlet or expressive ability. Consciousness without expression, perpetually waiting for release. In Zero K, the insertion of Artis’s monologue presses on the unanswerable question of the novel: whether the suspended bodies on view in the depths of the Convergence are “lives in abeyance. Or the empty framework of lives beyond retrieval.”55 Artis Martineau gives expression to a personal experience of timelessness so that “When?” “How?” “What?” are unanswerable queries. It’s just “mind” without the weight of the body or the distinctions of now and then, present and future. Heise’s chronoschism pertains, in relation to Artis’s experience “in its discontinuity, its fragmentation into multiple temporal itineraries and its collisions of incommensurable time scales.”56 DeLillo divides the text into three parts: “In the Time of Chelyabinsk” (ten chapters), “Artis Martineau” (one chapter), and “In the Time of Konstantinovka” (ten chapters). The first of the three sections begins with Jeffrey’s journey to meet his father and stepmother in the Convergence, and it ends with Artis’s death and cryopreservation. After touring the facilities and viewing the bodies on display in their pods, Jeffrey acknowledges, “I wanted to see beauty in these stilled figures … not trying to tell us something but suggesting nonetheless the mingled astonishments of our lives, here, on earth.”57 He is only midway on his journey of understanding (approximately halfway through the narrative), however, he is drawn toward skepticism: “Instead I



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wondered if I was looking at the controlled future, men and women being subordinated, willingly or not, to some form of centralized command.”58 He is pressed so far as to question: “when does utilitarian become totalitarian”?59 Jeffrey reports what he sees for the reader’s judgment. Just as his time at the Convergence exists in a kind of suspension of waiting, so is any conclusion he might draw from the secrets revealed to him. Instead, memories float to the forefront of his consciousness, as though he is taking inventory of his own life in this place of death. The second part of the book is its anomaly, an imagined internal monologue after Artis’s death. Terrifying and poetic, this brief section is Jeffrey’s creative construction, a moment of empathy with his dead stepmother as he imagines her consciousness floating in cryopreservation. I think of Artis in the capsule and try to imagine, against my firm belief, that she is able to experience a minimal consciousness. I think of her in a state of virgin solitude. No stimulus, no human activity to incite response, barest trace of memory. Then I try to imagine an inner monologue, hers, self-generated, possibly nonstop, the open prose of a third-person voice that is also her voice, a form of chant in a single low tone.60

Jeffrey’s imaginings allow space for the technicians of the Convergence’s greatest claim—the continuance of identity beyond death. However, the monologue Jeffrey crafts also opens the possibility of the most frightening aspect of this cryopreservation project: that Artis is suspended for an indefinite number of years, indeed perhaps for eternity, in a state of limited awareness—enough for cognition, but without her senses, questions without answers circle forever through her consciousness. Artis’s thoughts split the narrative, voiced in both first and third person, offering further evidence of the multiple perspectives of chronoschism, and most importantly, sounding the depths of a soul’s meditation. Her thoughts extend a lifetime beyond death, floating in an unmarked experience of the present. This chronoschism heralds the third and final section of the book. In this portion of the narrative, Jeffrey’s thoughts linger over his relationship with Emma his “lover” and her teenage son Stak, in particular, now fourteen but adopted from the Ukraine as a child of seven or eight.61 It is two years since Artis’s death, and Ross asks Jeffrey to return with him to the Convergence. Ross has decided to follow Artis into cryopreservation. This final portion of the narrative whirls with the power of the sandstorm that envelops their plane as the two men return for a final time to the Convergence. As the storm buffets the small plane, Ross translates the words of their guide who suggests they are experiencing “[t]he complications of awe.”62 By the end of the novel, these four words shine relative to the storms of life. At the poles of the “incommensurable time scales” of Zero K are geologic time in the unfathomable eons of the earth’s rocks surrounding the

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Convergence and individual human life marked in seconds.63 Ross wants Jeffrey to understand that he and Artis are committed to “the leap into total acceptance” they believe the Convergence represents.64 And he explains it in terms of time: “Seconds, he said. Start counting. Your life in seconds. Think of the age of the earth, the geologic eras, oceans appearing and disappearing. Think of the age of the galaxy, the age of the universe. All those billions of years. And us, you and me. We live and die in a flash.”65 The complexity and conflicted humanity of Ross’s character surface as he wrestles with the decision to follow Artis into a state of suspension, even though he is still in vigorous health; simultaneously he reprimands his son, saying, “All you do is pass the time.”66 It is Artis, however, who deepens Ross’s observations on the passing seconds that constitute life. She describes a moment from her past, a moment of complete absorption in the movement of a drop of water down a shower curtain. She recalls it in minute detail, admitting that her attention in these, her final days, is filled with memories of “[s]mall things, then smaller.”67 The sense of suspension or hovering in The Word for Snow, The Body Artist, and Point Omega, appears in Zero K in a disturbing, paralytic form of waiting. The narrator, Jeffrey Lockhart, appears anti-heroic by intention (his father Ross would claim heroism for himself); Jeffrey has cultivated his identity in opposition to his dynamic, charismatic, successful father. Ross Lockhart discarded his birth name, Nicholas Satterswaite, for a more robust alias, an act Jeffrey’s mother Madeline revealed to her son when he was nineteen. Jeffrey’s thoughts linger on his father’s name, revisiting it with a kind of obsession, imagining the implications of the changed name for himself. “With the name Satterswaite, who would I have been and what would I have become,” he asks himself.68 Arguably, it is the novel’s project to describe Jeffrey at his heart (Lockhart)—and yet, is he one who sits and waits (Satterswaite)? As someone who waits, Jeffrey is not one to lead his readers to understanding of the Convergence project. Instead he focalizes and offers readers the opportunity to come to their own response to the Convergence’s mission. Jeffrey is not unlike the ubiquitous DeLillo museum security guard, a presence, a reminder, but not a director of vision (the Director, of course, is DeLillo, beneath the layers of his text). For much of the novel, Jeffrey appears to wait in the narrative stream eddies, watching the current move past him carrying his father, Artis, and all those who make their pilgrimage to the Convergence. In this twenty-first-century America united in its fear that the future will be worse than the past, Zero K portrays characters such as Ben Ezra who, in the pressing current of the Convergence, believes time can be manipulated by “‘ideas that attempt to confront a decimated future.’”69 Ben Ezra speaks from one of the deep undercurrents of DeLillo’s post-millennium



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writings: “‘Try to understand. This is all happening in the future. This future, this instant … . We’ve fallen out of history.”70 But then, DeLillo’s post-millennium characters tend to fall in and out of history. Cosmopolis’s Eric Packer drops into his traffic-bound car and lands in a stop-and-go future now. Lauren’s methodical preparations for her body art send her sailing between grief and creation. Falling Man’s performance artist David Janiak floats at the end of a cord, eternally in performance in tragic free fall. Alex of Love-Lies-Bleeding drifts in “last life.”71 Point Omega’s Jessie Elster exists in a disappeared, unknown, indeterminate point of possibility. These are all versions of convergence of incommensurable time scales, akin to Zero K’s “compressed reality that would be mystifying if it weren’t so abruptly real.”72 Mysteries that have confronted Jeffrey in the form of life experiences converge into perception and purpose after he boards a Manhattan bus at sunset, noting the sun’s light aligning with the streets and the bus as “the carrier of this radiant moment.”73 But his own response to the vision pales in comparison to that of a young boy standing and bouncing on his seat, uttering “howls of awe” and “finding purest astonishment in the intimate touch of earth and sun.”74 Filled with a new purpose, Jeffrey narrates: “I went back to my seat and faced forward. I didn’t need heaven’s light. I had the boy’s cries of wonder.” The boy’s awe, the awe of the sandstorm he flew through, and his father’s description of the Convergence’s pilgrims’ “[a]nticipation and awe intermingled” (9) become Jeffrey’s survival plan for facing forward into an unknown, uncontrollable future.75 CONCLUSION: THE CURRENT Can DeLillo’s post-millennium literature, whether fiction or drama, craft a life raft to keep us afloat? Do the works, when read together by the critics in this text, design and deliver an overarching philosophy for survival? Can we resist the temptation to look for a simplistic laminated fold-out card with safety instructions for navigating amid the global wreckage in which we may be walking? Ever the master of suspended meaning, DeLillo offers options in his post-millennium fiction but doesn’t make our choices any easier. We can place our gamble on currency in Cosmopolis, train our bodies into performance art in The Body Artist, free-fall in Falling Man, argue over the fate of others in Love-Lies-Bleeding, or submerge ourselves in silence in The Word for Snow. Whatever we do, we mustn’t, as Zero K warns, lose ourselves and our planet in waiting. DeLillo’s post-millennium works call us to see with awe “the mingled astonishments of our lives, here, on earth” to ponder what reserves of resilience we might find in this vulnerable state in which we all live, as we count the currency of our own meantime.76

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NOTES 1. Don DeLillo, Zero K, (New York: Scribner, 2016). 2. William Golding, Lord of the Flies (London: Faber and Faber, 1954); Scott O’Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960); John Krakauer, Into the Wild (New York: Anchor Books, 1997); Yann Martel, Life of Pi (New York: Harcourt, 2001); Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (New York: Crown, 2006). 3. Don DeLillo, “Dancing to the Music of Time,” Interview by Kevin Rabalais, The Australian, March 6, 2010, accessed June 3, 2015, http://www.theaustralian. com.au; Interview with PEN American Center, September 15, 2010, accessed June 3, 2015, http://pen.org. 4. Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007). I am indebted to Marco Abel’s illuminating reading of DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future” and his identification of DeLillo’s methods of “[r]esisting the demand to speak with moral clarity and declare what the event means.” See “Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future’: Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11,” PMLA 118, no. 5 (October, 2003), 1236. 5. Andrew O’Hagan, “Racing Against Reality,” in New York Review of Books, June 28, 2007, accessed February 5, 2010, http://nybooks.com. 6. Laura Miller, “Falling Man,” Salon, May 11, 2007, accessed February 5, 2010, http://salon.com. 7. Michiko Kakutani. “A Man, A Woman and a Day of Terror,” May 9, 2007, accessed February 5, 2010, http://nytimes.com. 8. Martin Randall, 9/11 and the Literature of Terror (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 11. 9. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 27. 10. Ibid., 3. 11. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, (New York: Basic Books, 1997). Herman breaks the trauma victim’s response into three aspects: hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction, explaining that “[h]yperarousal reflects the persistent expectation of danger; intrusion reflects the indelible imprint of the traumatic moment; constriction reflects the numbing response of surrender” (35). 12. Ibid. 13. Laura Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 10. 14. Ibid., 3, 1. 15. Ibid., 10. 16. Laura Berlant, Cruel, 11. 17. The memories are fragmentary, presented in short paragraphs of one or two sentences. Structurally, these memories recall Judith Herman’s description of “intrusion,” which she characterizes as “intense focus on fragmentary sensation, on image without context, [giving] the traumatic memory a heightened reality.” These intrusive memories “resemble the memories of young children.” (Judith Herman, Trauma, 38). 18. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 55.



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19. Keith demonstrates what Judith Herman calls “constriction” caused by a feeling of overwhelming powerlessness. Per Herman, constriction can manifest as “perceptual changes” (43). These changes in perception can be experienced as “loss of particular sensations,” “a sense of slow motion,” and the resulting feelings may include “indifference” or “emotional detachment” (43). 20. Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 246. 21. Ibid., 3. 22. Marco Abel, Ruins, 1239. 23. Ibid., 1238. Abel’s invocation of “force relations” also draws his argument into dialogue with affect theory. 24. Ibid. 25. Don DeLillo, “The Ivory Acrobat,” in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (New York, Scribner, 2011), 55. 26. Ibid., 55, 56. 27. Ibid., 56. 28. Don DeLillo, “The Runner,” in The Angel Esmeralda, 52–53. 29. Don DeLillo, “Acrobat,” 72. “The Ivory Acrobat” and “The Runner” also offer parallel descriptions of sound in the after-moments of event. In “The Ivory Acrobat,” the protagonist hears the sound of car horns: “The noise spread along the streets and reached a final mass denial, a desolation” (56). Similarly, in “The Runner,” the woman whose child was abducted voicelessly responds: “A sound came out of her, a desolation” (51). 30. Ibid., 56. 31. Ibid., 56, 57. 32. Ibid., 57. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 60. 35. Ibid., 67, 70. 36. Ibid., 60. 37. Ibid., 59. 38. Ibid., 66. 39. Ibid., 63. Like Keith’s heavy trekking boots, these extra layers demonstrate her need for protection. 40. Ibid., 66. 41. Ibid., 72. 42. 41. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Liesl Schillinger, “Don DeLillo and the Varieties of American Unease,” The New York Times Sunday Book Review, November 17, 2011, 11. 45. Don DeLillo, “The Ivory Acrobat,” in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (New York: Scribner, 2011). 46. Liesl Schillinger, “Unease.” 47. Joshua Ferris, “Joshua Ferris Reviews Don DeLillo’s ‘Zero K,’” The New York Times, May 2, 2016, accessed May 4, 2016, http://nytimes. 48. Don DeLillo, Zero K (New York: Scribner, 2016).

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49. Ron Charles, “Don DeLillo’s novel ‘Zero K’ captures the swelling fears of our age,” The Washington Post, April 26, 2016, accessed June 3, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com. 50. Ursula K. Heise, Chronoschisms: Time Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 6. 51. Ibid., 21. 52. Ibid., 29. 53. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), 11–19. 54. Don DeLillo, Zero K, 159 55. Ibid., 141. 56. Ursula K. Heise, Chronoschisms, 4. 57. Don DeLillo, Zero K, 146. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 147. 60. Ibid., 272. 61. 60. Ibid., 187. 62. Ibid., 230. 63. Ursula K. Heise, Chronoschisms, 6. 64. Don DeLillo, Zero K, 34. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 115. 67. Ibid., 19. 68. Ibid., 21. 69. Ibid., 128. 70. Ibid., 128-129. 71. Don DeLillo, Love-Lies-Bleeding (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 30). 72. Don DeLillo, Zero K, 127. 73. Ibid., 273. 74. Ibid., 274. 75. Ibid., 9. 76. Ibid., 146.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abel, Marco. “Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future’: Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11,” PMLA 118, no. 5 (October 2003):1236–1250. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011. Brooks, Max. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. New York: Crown, 2006. DeLillo, Don. The Body Artist. New York: Scribner, 2001. ———. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003. ———. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007. ———. “An Interview with Don DeLillo,” PEN American Center. September 15, 2010. http:// www.pen.org. Accessed June 3, 2015.



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———. “The Ivory Acrobat,” in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. New York: Scribner, 2011. ———. Love-Lies-Bleeding: A Play. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2007. ———. Point Omega. New York: Scribner, 2010. ———. “The Runner.” In The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. New York: Scribner, 2011. ———. The Word for Snow: a reading. New York: Karma, 2014. ———. Zero K. New York: Scribner, 2016. Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. London: Faber and Faber, 1954. Heise, Ursula K. Chronoschisms: Time Narrative, and Postmodernism. Cambridge University Press, 1997. Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Krakauer, John. Into the Wild. New York: Anchor Books, 1997. Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. New York: Harcourt, 2001. O’Dell, Scott. Island of the Blue Dolphins. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Randall, Martin. 9/11 and the Literature of Terror. Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. New York: Random House, 1970.

Index

9/11, 1, 6, 71, 72, 110, 119, 123, 212– 13, 215, 222, 233, 234, 235; post-9/11, 12, 29, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74–76; 96, 98, 108, 109, 111, 120, 125, 233; pre-9/11, 121 18. Oktober 1977, 211, 212 24 Hour Psycho, 4, 5, 69, 76, 77, 115, 171, 175, 185, 191, 194–98, 200 “27 depravities,” 145 Abel, Marco, 235–36 absence, 70, 74, 76, 110 “active receptacle,” 3, 83, 88 actor/acting, 139, 142 aesthetic(s), 12, 108, 193, 236 Albee, Edward, 140 “alibi-in-Being,” 20, 114 Alzheimer’s (disease), 120 “American Blood,” 72 American Repertory Theatre, 111 Anderson, Sam, 201 “Anonymity,” 69, 73 answerability, 9, 12, 107, 113, 116–17, 123, 125 Anthropocene, 7, 183 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 191–95, 200 arbitrage, 35

Aristotle, 48, 49, 50, 83 art, 12, 71, 73, 76, 78, 107, 108, 109, 112, 118, 124, 125, 146, 176, 177, 223, 239; public, 115; as resistance, 111 artist(ic), 12, 15, 69, 76, 77, 88, 214; credo, 12, 15, 69, 76, 77, 88; culture, 179; dying, 11, 12, 138; imagination, 88, 108, 109, 113, 123, 124, 145, 161; medium, 165; motivation, 163; perspective, 193 Athens, 90, 108, 236, 238 (St.) Augustine (of Hippo), 53, 180–81, 185 asymmetry, 39, 40 asymmetrical prostate, 39, 51–52, 54 audience (reader, viewer), 5, 12, 110, 115, 117, 124, 141, 142, 150, 152, 159, 171, 175, 194, 195, 200, 212, 213, 215 aura, 46, 57, 192, 193 baht, 54 Baader, Andreas, 211, 214 Baader-Meinhof Cycle, 94 249

250 Index

Baader-Meinhof Gang, 211, 222. See also Rote Armee Fraktio; Red Army Faction (RAF) Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 9, 107, 113, 121–23 Barrett, Laura, 178 Barron, John, 29 Barthes, Roland, 216 Bataille, Georges, 56 Bazin, André, 235–36 Beckett, Samuel, 141–44, 149, 151, 193 Begley, Adam, 108 Berlant, Laura, 234–35, 238 Beyond Grief and Nothing, 84 Bielik-Robson, Agata, 199 Biesenbach,, Klaus, 195 Binelli,, Mark, 122 Biomechanics, 111 (The) Bird, 91–92 Blair, Jayson, 33 Bonca, Cornell, 29, 109 body (bodies), 32, 39, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 91, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 120, 123, 124, 125, 150, 151, 1159, 160, 161, 167, 171, 173, 176, 184, 185, 194, 195, 196, 222, 240, 243 body artist, 5, 171, 243 Body Time 5, 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 171 Bonitzer, Pascal, 191–92 Borges, Jorge Luis, 49 Boxall, Peter, , 114, 181 Breton, Andre, 78 Broch, Hermann, 150 Bronx 92, 93, 94, 100; South Bronx 91; SOUTH BRONX SURREAL, 92 Buchan, James 46 bullionism/ist, 45, 46 bull leaper, 90, 238 burning man 28, 52 Bush, George W., 75

Camus, Albert, 199 capitalism/ist, 28, 52, 98; investment, 7; late, 173; liberal, democratic, 30 Cardullo, Burt, 200 Casey,, Edward, 83, 97 Chaos (James Gleick), 33 Charles, Ray, 45 Charles, Ron, 239 charting, 33 Chekhov, Michael, 112 chiasmus, 14, 214, 216–18, 220–22, 225; chiasmic interaction, 195; chiastic pattern (structure), 219, 221, 222 Chrimatistikos, 48, 50 Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism, 239–40; chronoschism, 239–41 chronotope, 3, 5, 6, 14 cinema. See film (movies) Cinema 2, 193 Cold War, 30, 31, 98 collateral, 34, 36, 40; collateral crisis, 10, 11, 27–39 (The) Communist Manifesto, 52 consciousness, 70, 71, 94, 108, 139, 150, 151, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 182, 183, 185, 197, 199, 200, 234, 240, 241 consumer fiction, 191, 192, 196 (The) Convergence, 239–43 Cooper, Brian, 50 cosmology, 29, 198, 237 cosmopolis, 30–31, 52; cosmopolitical, ideal, 39; cosmopolitical justification, 11 Cosmopolis (film), 8 counterfeit currency/money, 8, 46, 53, 55, 57 Cowart, David, 68, 70, 78, 114, 178, 179

Index

Cronenberg, David, 8 Cross, 6, 16, 95, 211, 212, 214, 215, 217, 218, 220, 223, 224 Crowd, 93, 213 “cruel optimism,” 234 cryopreservation, 241 culture, 3, 56, 71, 84, 86, 88, 90, 92, 101, 107, 158, 173, 239; cultural critic 77; cultural values 172 currency, 46, 48, 243; analysis, 51; markets, 27, 48, 50, 51; postmodern, 47; trade(r), 2, 49, 50; relation to time, 54; of survival, 232; trading 49 Cvek, Sven, 98 cyber-capital(ism), 7–8, 30, 31, 37, 38, 39, 48, 55; critique of, 29, 54; ideology of, 33, 40 cyber-currency, 7, 52 cyberspace, 31, 37 cyborg(ian), 1, 7, 11, 16, 51 Dalcroze, Emile Jacques, 111 Dead, 213 death, 1, 78, 138, 139, 140–41, 143, 151, 152, 153, 157, 159, 160, 166, 180, 197, 199, 212, 214, 216, 2176, 232, 239, 241; drive, 183, 197–98; movie, 198; instinct , 198; sentence, 199; technology of, 239; wish, 53, 54 Death of a Salesman, 140–41, 145–46 (The) Death of Virgil (Broch), 150 debt, 46 Deleuze, Gilles, 193–94, 197 DeLillo, Don:

251

Americana, 68, 69, 70, 84, 97, 148, 166, 172, 180, 193; The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, 3–4, 6, 83–101, 238; “The Angel Esmeralda,” 91–94; “Baader-Meinhof”, 6, 94, 211–25; “Creation,” 9, 85–87, 90; “Hammer and Sickle,” 97–99; “Human Moments in World War III,” 9, 85, 87–88, 90; “(The) Ivory Acrobat,” 90–91, 236–39; “Midnight in Dostoevsky,” 96–97, 99, 100; “(The) Runner,” 9, 88–90, 236–37; “Baghdad Towers West,” 193; (The) Body Artist, 5, 9, 10, 12, 68, 107, 109–10, 112–25, 157, 158, 171, 172, 195, 232, 243; Cosmopolis, 7, 10, 13, 27–40, 47, 149, 157, 158, 172, 173, 212, 243; initial critical reception of, 27–29, 58; End Zone, 68, 97, 161, 181; Falling Man, 9, 10, 12, 68, 70, 1, 72, 73, 76, 107, 110–12, 114–24, 149, 157, 158, 161, 172, 173, 232, 233–36; Great Jones Street, 68, 77, 84, 149, 161; “In the Ruins of the Future,” 29, 98, 109, 115; Libra, 68, 72, 84, 149, 159, 164, 172, 233; Love-Lies-Bleeding, 15, 137–53, 158–67, 243; Mao II, 69, 70, 75, 77, 108, 149, 164, 196; (The) Names, 9, 13, 68, 84, 88, 120, 145, 149, 172; Players, 68, 84, 149, 164; Point Omega, 4, 5, 6, 10, 67–79; 158, 171, 172–185; 191, 195, 196, 197–201, 243; Ratner’s Star, 55, 84, 148, 161, 172;

252 Index

Running Dog, 68, 149; Underworld, 15, 29–31; 50, 68, 76, 84, 88, 97, 107, 120, 123, 124, 146, 149, 157, 159, 172, 183; White Noise, 68, 76, 77, 124, 149, 150, 161, 172, 178, 179, 233; The Word for Snow, 1–4, 6–7, 9, 12, 232, 243; Zero K, 1, 15, 231, 232, 233, 238–43 Don DeLillo Characters: Alex Macklin, (LLB), 137, 138–40, 143–47, 149–53, 158–66; Andre Petrescu, (Cos), 53; Artis Martineau, (Zero), 16; Benno Levin/ Richard Sheets, (Cos), 33, 54; Bill Gray, (Mao), 69, 77, 108 Billy Twillig, (RS), 148 (The) Body Artist, (BA), 107, 123 Brita Nilsson, (Mao), 69, 108 Bucky Wunderlick, (GJS), 68 Carol Deming, (Amer), 148 Carol Shoup, (FM), 119–20 David Bell, (Amer), 68, 69, 97, 148, 166, 180, 193 David Janiak, (FM), 107, 109, 110, 111, 115, 116–18, 124 Del Nearing, (Name), 123; Dennis, (PO), 77, 175–77, 184; Didi Fancher, (Cos), 28, 47–48; Elise Shifrin, (Cos), 47; Eric Packer, (Cos), 13, 27–40, 47–50; Ernst Hechinger, (FM), 114; Esmeralda, (AE), 92, 93; Falling Man, (FM), 107, 123, 124; Father Paulus, (Und), 15, 123; Florence Givens, (FM), 121; Frank Volterra, (Names), 123; Gary Harkness, (RD), 97, 161; George Haddad, (Mao), 108; Glen Selvy, (RD), 68; Hammad (FM), 122; (The) Interpreter, (Snow), 2, 3, 13; Ismael Munoz, (Und), 91;

Jack Gladney, (WN), 77, 150; Jack Glenn, (FM), 117; James Axton, (Names), 9, 88, 89, 90, 120; Jean-Claude Julien, (Mao), 108; Jeff[rey] Lockhart, (ZK), 16; Jerold Bradway, (PO), 97–99; Jessica Elster, (PO), 4, 69, 76, 176–77, 179, 182–84; Jim Finley, (PO), 68, 69, 70, 76, 176–184, 192; Karen Janney, (Mao), 69; Keith Neudecker, (FM), 10, 71, 72, 114, 118, 120–24; Klara Sax, (Und), 108, 123, 146; Kyle, (AE), 90; Lauren Hartke, (BA), 5, 68, 107, 109, 112–14, 123, 157–58, 173; Lee Harvey Oswald, (Lib), 150; Leo Zhalezniak, (AE), 99–100; Lia, (LLB), 137, 144–45, 147, 150–51, 160, 162, 164, 165; Lianne Glenn, (FM), 71, 72, 111, 117–21, 123; Mariela Chapman, (BA), 5, 112, 113; Martin Ridnour (FM), 10, 114, 118–19; Micklewhite Boy, (GJS), 161; Mr. Tuttle, (BA), 114, 116, 157– 58, 173; Murray Jay Siskind, (WN), 76, 149, 150, 178; Nick Shay, (Und), 15, 88, 120, 123, 146, 150; Nina Bartos, (FM), 117–20, 161; Owen Brademas, (Names), 10; (The) Pilgrim, (Snow), 2, 3, 4, 9, 13, 15; Rey Robles, (BA), 113, 114, 116; Richard Elster, (PO), 4, 5, 6, 10, 68, 70, 76, 176–84; Richard Henry Gilkey, (Und), 149;

Index

Robby, (AE), 96–97, 100; Ross Lockhart, (ZK), 239, 241–42; (The) Scholar, (Snow), 2, 3, 9, 10, 13; Scott Martineau, (Mao), 69; Sean Macklin, (LLB), 137, 144– 45; 160, 161, 162, 163, 165; Sister Edgar, (AE), 91–94; Sister Gracie, (AE), 91; Sullivan (Sully) (Amer), 148; Tap Axton, (Name), 13; Todd, (AE), 96–97; Terry Cheng, (FM), 114, 121, 123; Toinette, (LLB), 137, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165; Vija Kinski, (Cos), 7, 28, 31, 32, 38, 48, 49, 50, 52–53; Vollmer, (AE), 87–88; Willie Mink, (WN), 161 Derrida, Jacques, 223–25 derivatives, 40 Dery, Mark (Escape Velocity), 33 desert, 5, 67, 68, 69, 159, 161, 163, 165, 166, 175, 176, 177, 182, 184, 196, 197; Anzo-Borrego, 196; Fathers, 177 Deutscher Herbst (German Autumn), 211 Dewey, Joseph, 84 Di Ciaccia, Antonio, 38 DePietro, Thomas, 115 DiPrete, Laura, 113 “Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future’: Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11”, 235 “Don DeLillo’s Perfect Starry Night,” 84 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 8–9, 97 dramaturgical, 139, 140, 142 Drew, Richard, 110 Dunbar, Nicholas, 34 Duvall, John, 174

253

economic literary criticism, 46, 47 economic model of the mind, 37. See also pleasure principle Edson, Margaret, 140 efficient market hypothesis, (EMH), 34, 35, 37 ekphrasis, 110, 171, 191 Elie, Paul, 176 embodiment, 4, 7, 8, 13, 158, 162, 173, 174, 195, 221, 239 end/endedness/ending, 2, 4, 12, 16,, 116, 143, 151, 152, 174, 175, 177, 180, 181, 182, 200, 220 Endgame, 142–44, 152 (The) End of History and the Last Man (Francis Fukuyama), 30 Ensslin, Gudrun, 211, 214–16 environment, 84 epiphany, 3, 48, 83, 89, 108, 216, 221, 224 epistemological, 142 Escape Velocity (Mark Dery), 33 “Eschatological Forebodings of Mr. Cogito,” 54 ethics/ethical responsibility, 84, 85, 108, 113, 118, 145, 173, 180, 193, 222; exchange, 220; matters, 221; questions, 225 euthanasia, 12, 17, 137, 144, 145, 150, 158, 162, 166; euthanasia plot, 138, 143, 150, 153 Everything That Rises Must Converge, 182 expressive place (space), 85, 94, 100 expressive energy, 85, 88, 90 exposure, 50 extinction, 4, 7, 182, 197, 198 “extraordinary rendition,” 69, 71, 78 False Dawn (John Gray), 33 Ferris,, Joshua, 239 film (movies), 5, 68, 69, 99, 100, 176, 177, 178, 179, 191, 194, 198

254 Index

Film (Beckett), 142 finance; postmodern, 4; as symbolic, 29 financial; crisis, 47; exposure, 50; metaphysics, 10, 28 Flood, Richard, 195 Fog of War, 75 Ford, Hamish, 194, 197 forgive[ness], 6, 95, 96, 219–25 Freud, Sigmund, 37, 97, 147, 183, 198 Fukuyama,, Francis, (The End of History and the Last Man), 30 Funeral, (Gerhard Richter), 6, 95, 213, 215, 216, 222, 223, 224 friction (financial), 34 futures, 31 (The) Future of Man, 70 game[s], 121–22 Gieryn, Thomas F., 89, 91, 95 gift/gift economy/gift relations, 56–58 Gleick, James (Chaos), 33 global capitalism, 30, 51, 112; economy, 36, 39; financial crisis, 29; market, 28 globalization, 37, 98 global warming, 2 Godard, Jean-Luc, 68 Goldman Sachs, 36 gold standard, 46 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 45, 46, 48, 53 Gordon, Douglas, 5, 115, 171, 175, 185, 191 Gowan, Peter, 36 graffiti, 91 Gray, John (False Dawn), 33 Gray, Richard, 71, 11 Greenspan, Alan, 46, 50 grief, 5, 6, 12, 16, 109, 113, 123, 124, 162, 184, 185, 215, 243. See also Trauerarbeit

Grotowski, Jerzy, 111, 112 haiku, 73, 74, 78, 177; haiku war, 10, 74, 78 haircut, 10, 27, 28, 33, 36, 40, 47 Harpers, 115 Harry Ransom Center, 32 hedge funds, 33, 36; hedged, 34, 50 hedged out, 31, 35; Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 199 Heise, Ursula, 239–40 Herbert, Zbigniew, 8, 52, 173 history, 50, 71–73, 173, 174 Hitchcock, Alfred, 115, 171, 177, 191, 194, 198, 201 Hodge, Alison, 112 Holden, Stephen, 200 Hollywood, 193 How I Learned to Drive, 140 Hungerford, Amy, 178 Huxley, Julian, 183 Hwang, David Henry, 140 identity, 3, 13, 28, 54, 83, 88, 98, 101, 123, 163, 164, 166, 241, 242 inalienability, 57 in-betweenness, 216, 224 incarnation, 7, 110 interrogation, 69, 70, 78, 218 “In the Desert”: Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity “irrational exuberance,” 50 Jameson, Fredric, 37, 173 Kafka, Franz, 141, 142 Kaprow, Allan, 115 Kavadlo, Jesse (Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief), 109, 116, 180 Keats, John, 109 Kennedy, John F., assassination, 1, 71, 72 Kaufmann, Linda S., 123, 220, 223 Kermode, Frank, 181

Index

killer[s], 54, 149, 150 Kovács, András Bálint, 197 Krapp’s Last Tape, 142, 143 Lacan, Jacques, 39 Lacy, Suzanne, 114 language, 15, 16, 75, 76, 90, 157, 166, 173, 178–79; language games, 167; poetic, 73 L’avventura, 191–94, 197, 200 “law of one price,” 34 LeClair, Thomas (Tom), 3, 141 Leeson, Nick, 33 Lehman Brothers, 36 leverage (financial), 27, 28, 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 50, 51 liturgy, liturgical, 179 Longmuir, Anne, 107, 11 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), 33–37 Lowenstein,, Roger (When Genius Failed), 33, 36, 40 Lyotard,, Jean-Francois, 121–22 The Machine in the Garden, 86 MacKenzie, Donald, 35 Man Shot Down 1 and 2, 214 market, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 39, 40, 50, 52; culture, 28; currency, 47, 48; free market system, 49; global, 29. See also efficient market hypothesis (EMH); friction Markus, Robert, 180 Marx, Karl, 52 Marx, Leo, 86 Mauss, Marcel, 56, 57 M. Butterfly, 140 McNamara, Robert, 69 Meinhof, Ulrike, 211–13 Meins, Holger, 211–12 “memento mori,” 198

255

memorial, 91–92 memory, 18, 75, 87, 93, 97, 100, 109, 116, 120, 123, 124, 125, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147, 150, 152, 159, 160, 164, 201, 216, 233, 235, 241; memory play, 140–44 “m[e]n in small rooms,” 84, 89, 150, 164, 175 mercantilism, 46 Meriwether, John, 34 Merrill Lynch, 36 metatheatre/ical, 138, 142, 143, 145, 151, 153; humor, 144 Meurer, Ulrich, 214, 217,225 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 111, 112, 113 Miller, Arthur, 140–41 Möbius, 11, 152, 160 Molesworth, Charles, 84 money, 45–48; postmodern 7, 47, 48, 57 monologue, 144, 145 moral, morality, 8, 12, 17, 117; detachment, 9, 46–47; 86 Morandi, 111, 117, 119 mortality, 39. See also death motor-symbolism, 112 mourning, 6, 212, 215, 216, 217. See also Trauerarbeit movies. See film (movies) “Mr. Cogito-Notes from the House of the Dead”, 47, 53 “Mr. Cogito on the Need for Precision,” 52 “Mr. Cogito-The Return”, 49 “Mr. Cogito’s Soul”, 55 Mulvey, Laura, 198, 200 Murphy, Margueritte, 50, 51 Museum of Modern Art, (MOMA), 6, 69, 94, 175, 201, 211 mysophobia, 91, 92 mystery, 68, 69, 73, 77, 109, 117, 123, 124, 157, 161, 163, 173, 174, 191, 196, 214, 238, 243

256 Index

Nänny, Max, 217, 220 Natura Morta, 111, 117 nature, 32, 196; force of, 30, 32; human, 83; idealized, 86; of money, 48; relation to culture, 86, 92; representation of, 85; natural rhythms 50 “Negative Capability,” 109 neoliberalism, 29, 30 New Economy, 29, 30 “News and Traffic,” 174, 176, 196 New York (City), 3, 6, 47, 49, 74, 94, 95, 96, 98, 110, 201, 211; New Yorkers 115, 176, 182, 215, 233 (The) New Yorker, 124 (The) New York Times, 238 Nietzsche Friedrich, 199, 200 nominalism, 48 “noosphere,” 183 Not I (Beckett), 149 “(An) Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” 143 O’Connor, Flannery, 77, 182 Occupy movement, 29 Old Church Slavonic, 2, 13 omega point, 4, 6, 13, 68, 70, 72, 78, 182, 185, 198 ontology (ontological), 76, 83, 157, 158, 165, 166, 167; ambiguity, 159, 164, 183; possibility, 239 Open Sky (Paul Virilio), 33 performance, 69, 78, 124, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 150; performance art(ist), 4–5, 9, 12, 13, 107, 109, 110, 123, 125, 195, 243 “persistent (permanent) vegetative state,” 137, 165 phenomenological, 96, 149, 157, 164 The Phenomenon of Man, 182–84

(The) Philosophy of Money (George Simmel), 46 “(the) physics of language,” 15 place, 83, 86, 91, 93, 95, 98, 100, 141; placelessness, 88, 96, 97, 100; sense of, 83, 90, 94, 97 Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, 83 Plato, 83 play, 141, 152, 159, 162, 165, 166 Play (Beckett), 150, 152 play-within-the-play, 139 pleasure principle, 37–38 plot, 78 Plummer, Tony (Psychology of Technical Analysis), 33 poker, 121–23 postmodern 78; money 53 potlatch, 56 presence, 4, 67, 74, 76, 163, 165, 166 prosaic, 73, 171 psychology/ical, 39, 46, 47, 50, 51, 162 Psychology of Technical Analysis (Tony Plummer), 33 Psycho, 112, 179–81, 191 Ptolemy, 88 quotidian (value), 2, 5, 12, 107, 108, 109, 115, 117, 119, 120; banality, 161; terrorist rejection of, 122, 124 Radin, Margaret, 56 Rank, Otto, 147, 148 (Harry) Ransom Center, (University of Texas at Austin), 32 rat, 52, 53, 54, 55 “[a] rat becomes the unit of currency,” 28, 52 reality principle, 37–40 Red Army Faction (RAF), 211, 222. See also Baader-Meinhof Gang “Renditions,” 69, 76 rendition, 69, 70, 73, 74, 78, 79.

Index

See also “extraordinary rendition” “Report from the Besieged City,” 8, 52, 173 Richter, Gerhard, 6, 14, 94 risk, 31, 34, 36 risk management, 35 Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), 211. See also Baader-Meinhof Gang; Red Army Faction (RAF) Rothko, 33, 47–48 Rove, Karl, 75 saeculum, 173–75. See also secular/secularity Schilling, Liesl, 238 Schiavo, Terri, 137 Schopenhauer, 45 Scrooge McDuck, 46 “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” 78 secular/secularity, 16, 174–75, 180–81 self[hood], 56, 57, 84, 85, 87–91, 94, 97, 109, 113, 119, 125, 157, 162, 165, 166, 167, 194, 199 [The] Sense of An Ending, 181 Shell, Marc, 46 Shonkwiler, Alison, 39, 49 silence, 72, 201, 219, 239, 243 Simmel, Georg, 46 SOUTH BRONX SURREAL, 92 Space, 3, 85, 164, 165; and time, 237; abstract, 86; middle area, 216; traumatic, 237 spatial: ebb and flow, 213; indeterminacy, 215 spatio-temporal (dimension), 139–41 Spiegleman, Art, 74 spirituality, 74 stage, 140, 142, 165; staging, 164 Stanislavski, Constantine, 112 Steppenwolf, Theatre Company, 2, 137 Stevens, Wallace, 45

257

Stiles, Kristine, 111 Strathern, Marilyn, 56 subjective: experience, 91, 160, 172, 174; orientation, 181; space, 92, 153, 162, 164, 175; voice, 166 subjectivity, 56, 161, 194 suicide, 1, 5, 109, 114, 116, 118, 120, 122, 139, 158, 218, 232; survivors, 109, 144 survival, 231, 243; of consciousness, 240; kit, 233, 237; narratives, 232, 234; of trauma, 234 Suskind,, Ron, 75 Taylor, Mark, 39 technical analysis, (information), 29 technological: development, 3; devastation, 10; and, ideology, 30; progress, 7; resurrection, 16; society, 174 technology, 3, 6, 37, 159; of risk management, 34; state-of-the-art, 28; unidirectional, 30 Teilhard de Jardin, Pierre, 4, 6, 70–71, 78, 180, 182–85, 198, 199 temporal/ity/–ities: alternative, 240; aspects of grief, 5, 191; confusion, 173; currency, 1, 45–58; of the desert, 5; endurance, 234; experience, 5, 109; framework of the everyday, 196; meantime, 238; problematic, 216; representations of, 194;

258 Index

rifts, 240 (see also chronoschism); universe, 197. See also “time” temps morts, 197, 201 terror, 1, 30, 93, 108, 213, 221, 128; terrorism, 6, 29, 68, 108, 212, 213, 218, 219, 222, 225; distance from art, 124; narrative of, 11; romanticization of, 119; terrorist(s), 76, 95, 98, 108, 109, 122, 149, 219, 220, 221; attack, 232; rage, 112; refusal of quotidian, 122 Thanatos, 198; Thanatic, 198, 199, 200; thanatological narrative, 199 theater, 110; of being, 238; theatricality, 140, 149; theatricalization, 218 Three Tall Women, 140 time, 2, 4, 76–77, 83, 109, 113, 114, 116, 123, 125, 141, 159, 171, 174, 185, 198, 215, 216, 231, 232, 237, 238, 240, 241, 242, 243; acceleration of, 201; Christian conception of, 199; city, 196; dead, 197; desert, 4, 176; disjunction, 40; experience of, 16, 171, 180, 197; future, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 45, 49, 50, 55, 58, 140, 147; geologic, 173, 183, 196, 241; grief, 116; in-between(ness), 160, 215; limit, 98; lived, 195; loss of sense of, 52; meantime, 231, 234, 235, 236, 239, 243;

monumental, 195; performance art, 111; postmodern money, 47; process of abstraction, 49; “radical continuity,” 197; representation of, 114, 192; secular, 180; in seconds, 241–42 slowness, 5–6, 76, 77, 115, 175, 176; sluggish pace, 142, 192; value of, 172, 174, 177 and space, 3, 5, 6, 12, 13; stopping, 67; submicroscopic moments, 196; waiting, 184, 185. See also temporal “time-image,”193, 194 tomb, 147, 149 “topistic consciousness,” 84, 89, 91 Totnacht (Death Night), 211 tragedy, 32, 182, 233; tragic knowledge, 200 Trauerarbeit, (“grief work”), 6, 215 trauma, 71, 109, 112, 173, 185, 231, 234; of birth, 148; post-traumatic novel, 72; traumatized nation, 98 (The) Trauma of Birth (Otto Rank), 147 Tunick, Spencer, 54 (Twin) Towers, 109, 117, 121 “unconditional interchangeability,” 46 Underground Man, MO, 54 Vakhtangov, Yevgeny, 111 value[s], 174 vanitas, 198 Varsava, Jerry, A., 50 Virilio, Paul (Open Sky), 33 Vogel, Paula, 140 Wallace, David Foster, 152–53 Walter, E. V., 2–3, 83, 84, 86, 88, 91– 94, 99, 101

Index

war, 52, 71, 75, 76, 78, 176, 177, 179; Iraq, 10, 68–69; 176, 182; Vietnam, 69, 78 When Genius Failed, (Roger Lowenstein), 33 Weiner, Annette, 57 Williams, Tennessee, 140 Wit, 140 Wolfowitz, Paul, 68

259

womb (wombscape), 147–49, 161 womb-tomb, 149, 151 World Trade Center, 72, 98, 124 yen, 27, 28, 32, 39, 50, 51, 53, 54 Yehnert, Curtis, 89, 94 [“The] Zahir” (Jorge Luis Borges), 49 Žižek, Slavoj, 37

About the Contributors

Karim Daanoune is Assistant Professer of American Literature at the Université Bretagne Sud in Lorient, France. He is the author of a monograph in French on Falling Man (Atlande, 2015) and several articles on Don DeLillo. He is currently reworking his PhD dissertation (Writing the Event in Don DeLillo’s Fiction) into a book to be prefaced by Michael Naas and published by the Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne. He hosted an international confernce on Don DeLillo in the presence of the writer at the Universities of Paris-Diderot and Paris-Sorbonne in February 2016. He is DeLillo’s bibliographer for The Don DeLillo Society and a member of the French Association of American Studies (AFEA).  Scott Dill is a Lecturer in the Department of English at Case Western Reserve University, where he teaches secularization and contemporary forms of belief. His writing has appeared in boundary 2, Critique, Christianity and Literature, Literature and Theology, and Religion & Literature, as well as other collections. He is working on a book entitled, A Theology of Sense: John Updike, Embodiment, and Postsecular Aesthetics. Graley Herren, PhD, is Professor and Chair of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He is the author of a book and numerous articles on Samuel Beckett. He has published widely on several other modern writers, including Don DeLillo. He serves on the board for the Comparative Drama Conference and edits its annual book series Text & Presentation. Jesse Kavadlo, PhD, is President of the Don DeLillo Society and Professor of English and Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Maryville University in St. Louis. He is the author of American Popular Culture in the 261

262

About the contributors

Era of Terror: Falling Skies, Dark Knights Rising, and Collapsing Cultures (featuring chapters analyzing DeLillo’s work; Praeger, 2015); Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief (Peter Lang, 2004); and coeditor, with Bob Batchelor, of Michael Chabon’s America: Magical Words, Secret Worlds, and Sacred Spaces (Rowman, 2014). Matt Kavanagh teaches in the Department of English at Okanagan College, where he also serves as chair. His essay on DeLillo has its roots in his doctoral dissertation (2007), which examines DeLillo’s critique of cyber-capital as a typer of capitalist realism. In addition to his work on DeLillo (supported by several stints at the Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas, which holds the author’s archive), Matt is interested in the strategies employed by contemporary writers like John Lanchester, Peter Mountford, Aifric Campbell, Joanthan Franzen, and others to make sense of and represent the financial abstractions that structure everyday life. His writing has appeared in American Book Review, College Literature, English Studies in Canada, The Globe and Mail, Maisonneuve, The Millions, and elsewhere. Randy Laist is Associate Professor of English at Goodwin College in East Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo's Novels (2010) and Cinema of Simulation: Hyperreal Hollywood in the Long 1990s (2015). He is also the editor of Looking for Lost: Critical Essays on the Enigmatic Series (2011), Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies (2013) and College in the Movies: Representations of Higher Education in Cinema (forthcoming). Elise Martucci received her PhD in English from Fordham University in 2005, with a concentration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction and Ecocriticism. Her book The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo presents an ecocritical reading of DeLillo’s novels in an attempt to mediate between the seemingly incompatible influences of postmodernism and environmentalism. She has written and presented on environmental themes in works of fiction by authors such as Margaret Atwood, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jane Smiley and Dana Spiotta. She is currently Associate Professor of English and Curriculum Chair of the Liberal Arts and Sciences Humanities A.A. Degree program at Westchester Community College in Valhalla, New York, where she teaches writing and literature. Maciej Maslowski earned his PhD in 2013 from the University of Wrocław for a thesis titled Invisible Presence: Corporeality and Community in the Novels of Don DeLillo. Having taught at a university for two years, he now continues his research as an independent scholar.



About the contributors

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Mark Osteen is Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Humanities at Loyola University Maryland, is the author of dozens of articles on modern literature, theory, disability and music. Among the ten books he has written or edited are American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture (2000), Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream (2013) and Autism and Representation (2008), and a memoir, One of Us: A Family’s Life with Autism (2010). His current projects are an edited essay collection on the Beatles’ White Album, forthcoming from University of Michigan Press in 2018, and a book about fictions of forgery. With profound sorrow, we report that Jennifer L. Vala (nee Jen Apgar) died in February 2017. She had served as Assistant Director of Lower Division Studies at Georgia State University, where she taught American literature, World literature, and Writing. She received her BA from Emory University and her MA from Georgia State and was woking on a PhD in Literary studies. Jen worked for twelve years at Atlanta Ballet Centre for Dance Education and was a theater professional for over twenty years. Her projects include articles in The Neglected West: Contemporary Approaches to Western American Literature, “Writing through Culture” in Guide to First-Year Writing, 2nd ed., and “Into Culture: Research and Writing beyond the Classroom” in Guide to First-Year Writing, 3rd ed. Most notably, Jen was a beloved wife and mother of twins. The publication of Don DeLillo After the Millennium owes much to her encouragement, sense of wonder, and enthusiasm. She will be sorely missed. Jacqueline A. Zubeck is Associate Professor of English at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale (Bronx), New York. Her publications include articles on Don DeLillo, Flannery O’Connor and Dostoevsky from the perspective of Eastern Orthodox iconography, and war stories vis-à-vis just war standards. She also ran Riddled with Epiphanies: DeLillo, New York, a 2012 conference based on DeLillo’s work, which included a staged reading of Love-Lies-Bleeding and a bus tour of sites in the city which appear in DeLillo’s fiction.