The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts 9781474499910

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction. Ways of Seeing / Don DeLillo and the Arts
Part I: DeLillo and Aesthetics: Art as Experience
1. A Tender Experience: Aesthetics of Death in DeLillo’s Fiction
2. The Art of Feeling
3. The Art of War
4. The Art Encounter
Part II: Visual Arts and Cultures
5. Radiance and Repetition: DeLillo’s Icons
6. L’objet trouvé and the Pressure of History: DeLillo’s Aesthetic of Found Things and the 1970s
7. DeLillo’s Photo Opportunity
8. Where Have All the Writers Gone? Art and Vision in DeLillo’s Later Works
9. DeLillo’s Landscapes
10. DeLillo in Colour
Part III: Literary Arts
11. The Art of Editing
12. Poetry
13. Ekphrasis
14. Staged Events: Don DeLillo, the Short Story, Intellectuals and the Arts
15. Joycean DeLillo
16. DeLilloesque: DeLillo’s Cultural Impact
Part IV: Film, Screens and Technology
17. DeLillo and the Cinematic Long Take
18. Thematic Equivalence and Ontological Ambivalence: Film Adaptations of the Works of Don DeLillo
19. Video Art and the Elasticity of Duration
20. Screen, Image and the Technological Sublime
21. Screening Fundamentalism, Fanaticism and Terrorism in DeLillo’s Post-9/11 Fiction
22. The Digital Physics of Reading DeLillo
Part V: Embodied Arts: Performance and Spectacle
23. Phones, Words and Silences: On Performance and Performativity in DeLillo’s Narrators
24. DeLillo Across Page and Stage
25. Transforming the Spectacle in DeLillo’s Late Novels
26. DeLillo’s Performances of Abjection
Part VI: Place, Site, Space
27. DeLillo and Land Art
28. DeLillo and the Gallery
29. Time and Loss: DeLillo and the Imagination of Archaeology
30. Going Up in the World: Architecture in the Works of Don DeLillo
31. ‘Bird Lives’: The High Art of Graffiti in Don DeLillo
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts

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Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities Recent volumes in the series The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford

The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson, Naomi Paxton and Claire Warden

The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts Edited by Roxana Preda The Edinburgh Companion to Elizabeth Bishop Jonathan Ellis The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts David Punter

The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic Rebecca Duncan The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts Catherine Gander

The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music Delia da Sousa Correa

Forthcoming The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts Juliet John and Claire Wood

The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts Catherine Brown and Susan Reid

The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts Amber Regis and Deborah Wynne

The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville

The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities Gavin Miller, Anna McFarlane and Donna McCormack

The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense Anna Barton and James Williams The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature Jeanne Dubino, Catherine W. Hollis, Paulina Pajak, Celise Lypka and Vara Neverow The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism Maud Ellmann, Sian White and Vicki Mahaffey The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay Mario Aquilina, Nicole B. Wallack and Bob Cowser Jnr The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies Laura Wright and Emelia Quinn The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology Alex Goody and Ian Whittington The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts Maureen McCue and Sophie Thomas The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals Marysa Demoor, Cedric van Dijck and Birgit Van Puymbroeck

The Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts Tom Walker, Adrian Paterson and Charles Armstrong The Edinburgh Companion to Jane Austen and the Arts Joe Bray and Hannah Moss The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900–2000 Nicola Wilson, Elizabeth Gordon Willson, Alice Staveley, Helen Southworth, Daniela La Penna, Sophie Heywood and Claire Battershill The Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals Caroline Davis, David Finkelstein and David Johnson The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies Helen Groth and Julian Murphet The Edinburgh Companion to the Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts Jakub Lipski and M.-C. Newbould The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures Bridget Crone and Bassam El Baroni

Please see our website for a complete list of titles in the series https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecl

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The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts

Edited by Catherine Gander

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Catherine Gander 2023 © the chapters their several authors 2023 Cover image: Don DeLillo viewing Richard Serra’s Rounds at Gagosian’s 24th St Gallery © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Photograph by Barbara Bennett Cover design: www.richardbudddesign.co.uk Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 9990 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 9991 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 9992 7 (epub) The right of Catherine Gander 2023 to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures viii Acknowledgementsix Introduction. Ways of Seeing / Don DeLillo and the Arts Catherine Gander

1

Part I: DeLillo and Aesthetics: Art as Experience   1. A Tender Experience: Aesthetics of Death in DeLillo’s Fiction Peter Boxall

25

  2. The Art of Feeling Alexandra Kingston-Reese

38

  3. The Art of War Margaret Scanlan

51

  4. The Art Encounter Jonathan Gibbs

65

Part II: Visual Arts and Cultures   5. Radiance and Repetition: DeLillo’s Icons Sarah Garland  6. L’objet trouvé and the Pressure of History: DeLillo’s Aesthetic of Found Things and the 1970s Tim Jelfs

81

94

  7. DeLillo’s Photo Opportunity Monika Gehlawat

108

  8. Where Have All the Writers Gone? Art and Vision in DeLillo’s Later Works Laura Barrett

122

  9. DeLillo’s Landscapes Elise Martucci

135

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vi contents 10. DeLillo in Colour Brian Jarvis

149

Part III: Literary Arts 11. The Art of Editing Tim Groenland

165

12. Poetry Catherine Gander

179

13. Ekphrasis Graley Herren

195

14. Staged Events: Don DeLillo, the Short Story, Intellectuals and the Arts Henry Veggian

209

15. Joycean DeLillo Kiron Ward

222

16. DeLilloesque: DeLillo’s Cultural Impact Andrew Hoberek

235

Part IV: Film, Screens and Technology 17. DeLillo and the Cinematic Long Take David Hering 18. Thematic Equivalence and Ontological Ambivalence: Film Adaptations of the Works of Don DeLillo Cristina Garrigós

251

264

19. Video Art and the Elasticity of Duration Catherine Morley

278

20. Screen, Image and the Technological Sublime  Joseph M. Conte

290

21. Screening Fundamentalism, Fanaticism and Terrorism in DeLillo’s Post-9/11 Fiction Liliana M. Naydan 22. The Digital Physics of Reading DeLillo Licheng Xie

303 315

Part V: Embodied Arts: Performance and Spectacle 23. Phones, Words and Silences: On Performance and Performativity in DeLillo’s Narrators Jesse Kavadlo 24 DeLillo Across Page and Stage Rebecca Rey

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contents

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25. Transforming the Spectacle in DeLillo’s Late Novels Pavlina Radia

355

26. DeLillo’s Performances of Abjection Kelsie Donnelly

368

Part VI: Place, Site, Space 27. DeLillo and Land Art Katherine da Cunha Lewin

385

28. DeLillo and the Gallery David Coughlan

401

29. Time and Loss: DeLillo and the Imagination of Archaeology David Cowart

413

30. Going Up in the World: Architecture in the Works of Don DeLillo Margaret Robson

427

31. ‘Bird Lives’: The High Art of Graffiti in Don DeLillo Michael Naas

439

Notes on Contributors 453 Index460

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Figures

Figure 20.1 Niagara Falls, 1872, steel plate engraving, 9½ x 12½ inches, after a painting by Harry Fenn, engraved by S. V. Hunt, in Picturesque America, Vol. I, frontispiece 294 Figure 20.2 Frank C. Moore (American, 1953–2002), Niagara, 1994–95, oil on canvas over wood panel with copper frame, 60 x 96 1/4 inches (152.4 x 244.48 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; General Purchase Funds, 1995 (1995:2). © Estate of Frank Moore/Gesso Foundation. Photo: Tom Loonan and Brenda Bieger for Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Courtesy Gesso Foundation and Sperone Westwater, New York, Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York 296 Figure 22.1 Screenshot of Shan Shui, 2014. © Chen Qianxun. chenqianxun. com/ShanShui/rules.html320 Figure 22.2 Electronic Literature Organization, Screen. © Noah Wardrip Fruin, Andrew McClain, Shawn Greenlee, Robert Coover, Josh Carroll and Sascha Becker 324 Figure 27.1 Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970, Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation/ Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY and DACS, London 2023. Photo: George Steinmetz, courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York.  388 Figure 27.2 Robert Smithson, Non-Site: ‘Line of Wreckage’ (Bayonne, New Jersey), 1968. Painted aluminium, broken concrete; framed map and three photo panels. Cage: 59 x 70 x 12 1/2 inches; panels: 3 3/4 x 49 inches. Milwaukee Art Museum, purchase, National Endowment for the Arts Matching Funds M1969.65. Photographer credit: John R. Glembin. © Holt/Smithson Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023. 389 Figure 27.3 Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown, 1969, Cava dei Selce, Rome, Italy © Holt/Smithson Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023 390 Figure 27.4 Robert Smithson, Glue Pour (1969). Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Sculptural event. Photograph: Christos Dikeakos. © Holt/ Smithson Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023 391 Figure 27.5 Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA © Holt/Smithson Foundation/ VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023 391

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Acknowledgements

T

he process of envisioning, writing and editing The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts coincided exactly with the most brutal years of a global pandemic (2020–22). My sincere thanks go to Michelle Houston for her compassion and editorial support throughout, and to Susannah Butler and the wonderful team at EUP. My deepest gratitude goes to the individual contributors to this volume, whose brilliance, kindness and commitment – often in the face of mounting adversity – was nothing short of inspirational. What an honour it was to work with you all, and what a dazzling book we have created! My thanks also go to the Research Development Office of Maynooth University for the grant to assist the completion of this book, to the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, for access to and permission to quote from the Don DeLillo Papers, to the readers and reviewers of this book in all its stages, and to Alessio Benavoli for his unerring faith and encouragement. Special thanks go to Robin Straus, to Barbara Bennett, who kindly provided me with the perfect photograph for this Companion’s cover, and of course to Don DeLillo, whose body of work is an astonishing gift.

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For Vito

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Introduction Ways of Seeing / Don DeLillo and the Arts Catherine Gander

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. Point Omega 13 The optic nerve is not telling the full truth. Zero K 45 No one sees the barn. White Noise 14

F

or over fifty years, Don DeLillo, indisputably one of the most important writers of our age, has been chronicling the complexity of human existence and the exigencies of contemporary American living. As a novelist, short story writer, essayist and playwright, he does this not least via a consideration of the ways in which art, in all its forms, can reflect, activate and resist the pressures of our technology-inflected lives. His fiction and plays contain numerous artists and artworks, and from his earliest interview onwards, DeLillo has spoken openly about the artistic influences on his writing, which include European film (e.g., Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini), American art (e.g., the Abstract Expressionists), American music (e.g., jazz), American poetry (e.g., Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens) and European theatre and fiction (e.g., Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch).1 For DeLillo, the arts represent ‘a form of counterhistory’ (‘The Power of History’), a way of seeing the world that involves close attention not just to the particulars of everyday life, but to the ways in which our very vision is directed by the apparatus of power. Art is one of the consolation prizes we receive for having lived in a difficult and sometimes chaotic world. We seek pattern in art that eludes us in natural experience. This isn’t to say that art has to be comforting; obviously, it can be deeply disturbing. (‘An Outsider’ 74)  1

These influences and more are referred to in various interviews, all contained in DePietro’s Conversations with Don DeLillo.

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DeLillo’s art is comforting because it points to the extraordinary things that language can achieve; disturbing because it sharpens our perception of the ordinary ways we waste our own potential, or bend it towards damaging ends. As Linda Kauffman has acknowledged, DeLillo confronts us ‘with myriad forms of misrecognition and unknowing: ignorance, amnesia, blindness, denial, disavowal’ (359), reminding us that ‘what you see depends on how it is framed’ (365). Indeed, sometimes the frame is so distracting as to inhibit vision of what is right in front of us – as Murray Jay Siskind comments to Jack Gladney regarding ‘the most photographed barn in America’, so bombarded are viewers with the significatory contexts of the barn that ‘it becomes impossible to see the barn’ (White Noise 14). As other critics have noted, one might use a similar analogy to describe DeLillo the writer (see Knight; Da Cunha Lewin & Ward). Framed by the media as an archpostmodernist to whom the 35-year-old epithet ‘chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction’ (Towers) still sticks, DeLillo is also often referred to as a publicityshy recluse, a solitary author alone in a room with a typewriter, reluctant to engage with the world. These descriptions are only partially accurate, the latter stemming from DeLillo’s own quiet insistence, first voiced in 1988, but reiterated across his career, that [t]he writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence . . . There are so many temptations for American writers to become part of the system and part of the structure that now, more than ever, we have to resist. American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous. (‘Seven Seconds’ 45–6) This stance enraged some early critics, among them George Will of the Washington Post, who accused DeLillo’s 1988 novel Libra of being ‘an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship’ (qtd. in Remnick 47). DeLillo’s response in an interview for the New Yorker is as measured as it is delicious: ‘I don’t take it seriously, but being called a “bad citizen” is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind . . . Will also said I blamed America for Lee Harvey Oswald. But I don’t blame America for Lee Harvey Oswald, I blame America for George Will’ (qtd. in Remnick 48). Indeed, how better for an artist to see clearly the world that informs their art, than to see it slant? Distance affords perspective. While Will railed against DeLillo’s position as veritable treason, Giorgio Agamben in 2008 described the contemporary author in terms very similar to DeLillo’s: those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it, nor adjust themselves to its demands . . . precisely through this disconnection and anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time. (40) As this volume explores, DeLillo’s art, and the art within DeLillo’s art – the multiple mise en abymes that offer condensed representations of his fiction’s subject – are often modulated by this contemporary characteristic of ‘dys-chrony’, of simultaneous distance and adhesion (Agamben 41). For DeLillo is just as concerned with artworks as he is with the work that art can do, the function of the artwork in relationship with

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introduction

3

the viewer or reader that brings the past into unsettling contact with the present, that un-fixes our perspective on the here and now. Oddly, for an author whose writing is in continued conversation with such a wide range of art forms, practices and perspectives, there has been very little published scholarship focused primarily on DeLillo and the arts. Graley Herren’s nuanced The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo (2019) is a recent exception, for which I am thankful, and the book-length studies of Mark Osteen, David Cowart and Peter Boxall especially have helped shape my own understanding of DeLillo’s artistry, as well as DeLillo’s critical reception, in path-breaking ways. Michael Naas’s 2020 Don DeLillo: American Original looks set to do the same. This volume, indebted to the outstanding work that has come before it and containing essays by several of the people who have changed the face of DeLillo scholarship, offers a compendium of perspectives on the depth of DeLillo’s engagement with the visual, performing, plastic and literary arts across the breadth of his oeuvre. In other words, it is the first comprehensive study of Don DeLillo and the arts. The thirty-one essays herein are interlinked by a common understanding that the arts for DeLillo are a fundamental aspect of social life. The first section of the book deals most explicitly with art as experience, examining key aspects of pervading aesthetic preoccupations across DeLillo’s oeuvre. The sections that come after focus on various genres, forms and modalities of art. The categorisation of these sections, although necessary and helpful, should not be understood to create (false) separation or compartmentalisation. As any reader of DeLillo will know, he is a writer who should not, and cannot, be pigeonholed. Yet, as any reader of DeLillo will also know, to read a DeLillo sentence is to recognise it instantly as such, and as Andrew Hoberek expertly explores in this volume, ‘DeLilloesque’ has entered literary and cultural parlance as a specific marker of style and meaning that spans art forms and mediums. So wide-ranging and sustained is DeLillo’s career-long engagement with the arts that any attempt to distil it into an introductory chapter would fail – and miss the point of this Companion. What I will offer, then, over this introduction’s remaining pages, are some ways of seeing DeLillo and the arts in relationship, and some examples of how DeLillo’s engagement with the arts opens ways of seeing our relationship with the world.2 The ways of seeing that I suggest below are by no means exhaustive, but gesture towards DeLillo’s overlapping fields of vision, as well as the interconnectedness of the essays that follow. As such, they provide something of a foundation and a guide – a gallery map, if you like – to the wonderful pieces beyond the threshold, and also outline my own position as scholar and editor – or curator, to continue the metaphor – of this volume. Knowing the etymology of curator in ‘care-taker’, I will emphasise here the extraordinary attention that has gone into this Companion, a composite work of close, perceptive readings that encourage us to see DeLillo’s own vision with fresh eyes.

 2

I am influenced, in the title and approach of this chapter, by John Berger’s pioneering work of art history and visual theory, Ways of Seeing (1972), which, in turn influenced by the works of Walter Benjamin, paved the way for more robust Marxist, feminist and postcolonial approaches to the history and criticism of Western art.

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History, Art, Terror DeLillo for decades has been lauded by critics as something of a literary seer, predicting, for example, the development of a global narrative of terrorism and the World Trade Center as a totem of terror and grief, the financial crisis and the rise of the Occupy movement, and even a global pandemic. As many of the essays in this volume attest, DeLillo’s is a prophetic vision that collapses distances – for example between technology and nature (see Joseph Conte’s insightful look at DeLillo’s technological sublime in this volume), and between the past, present and future. DeLillo does not see himself as a prophet, but rather a reader of the times. In his post-9/11 essay ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, he writes: ‘we don’t have to depend on God or the prophets or other astonishments. We are the astonishment. The miracle is what we ourselves produce, the systems and networks that change the way we live and think’ (37). Yet, as Liliana Naydan argues in this volume, DeLillo’s fiction asks us to examine the aesthetic of fundamentalism that these ‘systems and networks’ cultivate; an ideation of terror broadcast to the American public via screens that project the fantasy that terror is an external, foreign force. DeLillo’s fiction is full of such television screens, and just as full of Americans unwilling to see what they obscure. The endless repetitions of televisual commercials, images of celebrity, sex, disaster, violence, sports, weather – what Richard Elster in Point Omega (2010) calls ‘the nausea of News and Traffic’ (18) – combine often in DeLillo’s novels into a type of background white noise, seeping into the ontologies and ideologies of his characters, changing ‘the way [they] live and think’. David Bell, a filmmaker in DeLillo’s first novel Americana (1971), works for a television network that he believes at times to have subsumed its employees: There were times when I thought all of us at the network existed only on videotape. Our words and actions seemed to have a disturbingly elapsed quality. We had said and done all these things before and they had been frozen for a time, rolled up in little laboratory trays to await broadcast and rebroadcast when the proper timeslots became available. (23) The eeriness of déjà vu (and déjà dit et fait) is compounded by an underlying dread that the employees of the ‘network’ have not simply been absorbed by their creation, but are rather the creations of a much larger, unseen system, one that plays and replays their small interactions on a historical loop. For DeLillo, temporal infraction is bound up with the fear that the past’s meanings can be erased or flattened through repetition and simulation. Where mass media can dull cultural and personal memory, however, fiction can rescue it. ‘Fiction rescues history from its confusions’, DeLillo noted in a 1988 interview (‘An Outsider’ 64), an opinion that he was to finesse in 1997: ‘It is fiction’s role to imagine deeply, to follow obscure urges into unreliable regions of experience – child-memoried, existential, and outside time’ (‘The Power of History’). The emancipating effect of fiction for DeLillo here depends on an almost atavistic, atemporal imaginary, infused with childhood memory, and thus with access to a language uncorrupted by ‘the systems and networks’ of modernity. ‘Language can be a form of counterhistory’, DeLillo argues in the same essay, ‘an agent of redemption, the thing that delivers us, paradoxically, from history’s

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flat, thin, tight and relentless designs . . . that allows us to find an unconstraining otherness, a free veer from time and place and fate’. The disintegration of memory threatens self-identity, which is why, in DeLillo’s later fiction especially – fiction concerned largely, he admits, with the themes of ‘time and loss’ (PEN America) – dementia eats at the edges of narratives. In the understated apocalyptic novella The Silence (2020), Tessa Berens is a poet who also works ‘as an editor with an advisory group that answer[s] questions from subscribers on subjects ranging from hearing loss to bodily equilibrium to dementia’ (7). After her aeroplane crash-lands due to a wholesale technological blackout, memory is what guides everyone’s interactions. At the hospital to which Tessa and her husband Jim are taken, ‘everyone . . . has a story’ (59) and can’t help telling it, including the receptionist, who relates to them ‘where she was born and raised, names of parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers, schools, clinics, hospitals’ (60). As screens seem to have permanently gone ‘blank’ (16, passim), a population begins to panic at losing their ‘collective mind’ (68), previously uploaded into a now absent digital mainframe. Having also outsourced methods of human perception to technology, people have forgotten how to recognise each other and themselves: ‘The more advanced, the more vulnerable’, says the receptionist. ‘Our systems of surveillance, our facial recognition devices, our imagery resolution. How do we know who we are?’ (61, emphasis mine). However, Tessa, the poet, knows who she is (‘She thinks into herself. She sees into herself’ [91]), and knows also that she needs to return ‘home’, synonymous, to her, with writing (96). In DeLillo’s post-9/11 novel Falling Man (2007), trauma and memory are further connected. Kelsie Donnelly in this volume writes searchingly of the delicate threads that connect memory and grief, and how the performance artist known as the Falling Man in the novel provides a porous cipher that links protagonist Lianne Glenn’s late father, Jack, with the devastation of the terrorist attacks. Lianne is haunted by the memory of Jack, who killed himself to avoid ‘the long course of senile dementia’ (40). She runs a storywriting programme for a group of early-onset Alzheimer’s patients, whose written narratives, Dr Apter tells her, constitute for them ‘sweet music up to a point. Then other things will take over.’ ‘From this point on’, Apter says, ‘it’s all about loss’, but the practice of writing remains key to self-identity and expression. ‘This is for them’, Apter tells Lianne, ‘[d]on’t make it yours’ (60). While completing Underworld (1997), a novel that encompasses both a panoramic and telescopic vision of the American twentieth century, DeLillo also co-ran a writing programme for Alzheimer’s patients in Manhattan with psychologist Dr Alan Dienstag. Spurred by the diagnosis of his mother-in-law with Alzheimer’s disease, DeLillo’s goal was ‘to help Alzheimer’s patients to express, through written passages, memories that will soon fossilize, or to unlock ones that reside just beyond awareness’ (Gardner). ‘What we are trying to do’, explained DeLillo to the New York Times in 1997, ‘is offer an incentive to memory’. ‘Writing . . . can be a way of escaping loneliness and apprehension, if only temporarily. And I also think it can be a form of deep pleasure and self-enlightenment’ (Gardner). This informs the way that DeLillo sees creative writing more generally: not as a solitary escape from reality, but as a method of connection and of retrieval – retrieval of memory, of those elements of our past that combine to make the bricolage of the self. Tim Groenland in this volume writes instructively of DeLillo’s

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own relationships with his editors, noting that the practical labour of an editor is to get inside the text while respecting and preserving its internal patterns and holistic integrity. Terror, for DeLillo, comes from others writing our narrative for us. This is a key concern of Bill Gray, the novelist protagonist of Mao II (1991), who fears his own obsolescence: ‘Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory’ (41). This capacity to alter consciousness is, of course, the ‘curious knot’ that DeLillo sees, in his words, as binding ‘terrorism and art – “art” meaning “writing”’ (‘Seven Seconds’ 45), a pervading theme throughout much of his work. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, DeLillo described the ‘counternarrative’ to terror as ‘human beauty’, concluding: ‘[t]he writer tries to give memory, tenderness, and meaning to all that howling space’ (‘In the Ruins’ 39).3 For DeLillo, it is the artist (here in the guise of the writer) who is the retriever of the archives of history and the rebuilder of the future.

Archival DeLillo’s approach to fiction is connected, I believe, to an archival impulse that has shaped the arts, especially in Western Europe and North America, over the last century. In his 2015 book Bad New Days, the art theorist Hal Foster signals a recent move in the arts ‘toward a probing of the real and the historical’ (1). For Foster, the contemporary archival impulse is a reanimation of earlier iterations: the pre-war period’s extension of artistic sources to include the political and technological (e.g., the photo files of Alexander Rodchenko), and the post-war period’s combinatory formats and image appropriations (e.g., the Combines of Robert Rauschenberg or the essay films of Chris Marker). Contemporary archival artists, according to Foster, ‘are drawn to historical information that is lost or suppressed, and they seek to make it physically present once more’. Elaborating on the device of the found object, text, or image, archival artists often employ installation as a format, not least due to its ‘nonhierarchical spatiality’ (Foster 32): The art at issue here is archival in a few senses. First, it not only draws on informal archives but also produces them, and does so in a way that underscores the hybrid condition of such materials as found and constructed, factual and fictive, public and private. Then, too, this art often arranges these materials according to a matrix of citation and juxtaposition, and sometimes presents them in an architecture that can be called archival: a complex of texts, images, and objects. (35) Foster lists the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon as a contemporary practitioner of archival art, whose ‘time readymades’ project ‘glacial versions’ of famous (and thus culturally embedded) feature-length films (Foster 32). One such piece is 24 Hour Psycho (1993), a decelerated, audio-stripped video installation of Alfred Hitchcock’s film

 3

In his notes for the essay in the DeLillo Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, DeLillo’s draft of this line ran: ‘a woman or a man alone in a room . . . this is how art gives memory, tenderness, and time to all that howling space’ (‘and time’ is struck through). Container 89.6.

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Psycho, which also provides the frame and aesthetic tenor of DeLillo’s 2010 novel, Point Omega. The novel describes the piece in detail, as well as narrating an anonymous man’s sustained encounter with the artwork: This was history he was watching in a way, a movie known to people everywhere. He played with the idea that the gallery was like a preserved site, a dead poet’s cottage or hushed tomb, a medieval chapel. (Point Omega 13) As both David Hering and Catherine Morley explore in this volume, DeLillo’s ekphrastic rendering of Gordon’s artwork (an artwork in which DeLillo found inspiration for the novel after visiting the installation at MoMA several times in 2006) is a meditation on, among other things, ‘the shallow habit of seeing’ (Point Omega 13) via the durational act of looking. Morley compellingly argues that the ekphrastic sections of the novel attending to Gordon’s artwork emphasise video art’s capacity for repetition and thus provide a frame for the novel’s examination of the creation (and recreation) of new versions of reality. Hering’s equally persuasive argument on the cinematic ‘long take’ traces filmic influences on DeLillo to understand how DeLillo’s late phase redraws his relationship to cinema and the viewing subject, shifting from an emphasis on suspense to a consideration of suspension. Both approaches consider the historical, material elements that underpin the archival impulse I highlight here. While Foster points to writers such as David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers as exemplifying the archival impulse in contemporary American fiction (159 n.66), one might add DeLillo to his list. Not only is DeLillo’s view of fiction as a counternarrative to history informed by a redemptive sensibility that correlates with archival strategies to salvage the historically ‘lost or suppressed’; DeLillo’s works themselves both contain numerous instances of archival art, and are structured by archival paradigms. One could point to the soundless Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination and the consequent Warren Commission report, ‘with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words’ – an archive that DeLillo read much of, and which his protagonist, the retired CIA analyst Nicholas Branch, pores over in Libra (181). Or to Zero K’s cryogenic compound the Convergence, itself described as ‘land art’ that houses various installation and conceptual artworks (10); or the lost baseball in Underworld; or the artworks of Klara Sax in the same novel, which are made from recovered waste, and include early ‘castoffs’ (painted ‘aerosol cans and sardine tins and shampoo caps and mattresses’ [70]), and later, reappropriated weapons of war collected and painted on a grand, site-specific scale. In her informative essay for this volume, Margaret Robson takes a long look at the presentation of real and imagined towers and bunkers in DeLillo’s novels, and the perspectives they afford their inhabitants. As the subterranean spaces offer a counterhistory to the ‘progressive’ (capitalist, colonialist) narrative of American success on the ground and in the air, Robson notes how Underworld is its own kind of temporal, spatial and visual architecture. Describing examples of archival art as ‘a confrontation between real spaces and fictional subjects’ (Foster 50), Foster explains that many archival artists take their cue from the land artist Robert Smithson (1938–73), an ‘early exemplar of the artist as archivist’ (56) whose earthworks invoke ‘multidirectional travelling’ (53) and who paved the way for the staging of the archive ‘as a spatial

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unconscious where repressed histories return disruptively’ (54).4 Indeed, in her essay on land art, Katherine da Cunha Lewin in this volume details illuminating connections between Smithson and DeLillo, especially in terms of ‘nonsites’: works that exist only partially, or as part of an imaginative process. Interviewed for a documentary film on her art (anticipating Jim Finley’s proposed film of the elderly war intellectual and desert recluse Richard Elster in Point Omega), Klara Sax, aged 72, describes her project of painting decommissioned B-52 bombers in bright colours and arranging them in the desert as ‘a work in progress’ (Underworld 75; Artis Martineau will use the same phrase to describe the Convergence in Zero K in 2016). Brian Jarvis in this volume presents a highly original survey of DeLillo’s use of colour across his oeuvre, noting that in Underworld, Klara represents an erotics of colour against the drained, necrotic monotones of the novel’s undercurrent of waste and death. Reconstituting the desert as a spatio-historical site and frame, Klara insists that her endeavour ‘is an art project, not a peace project’: This is a landscape painting in which we use the landscape itself. The desert is central to this piece. It’s the surround. It’s the framing device . . . The desert bears the visible signs and no-go areas and burial markers, the sites where debris is buried. (Underworld 70–1) Archival artists do not refuse death, but find new ways to mark it on the underside of history and the margins of society. As such, Ismael Muñoz, aka Moonman 157, the graffiti artist turned social activist in the novel, is also an archival artist. Having moved from spray-painting his tag on subway trains, Muñoz and his crew of graffiti writers spray-painted a memorial angel every time a child died in the neighborhood. Angels in blue and pink covered roughly half the high slab . . . This area was called the Wall, partly for the graffiti façade and partly the general sense of exclusion – it was a tuck of land adrift from the social order. (239) Michael Naas, in the concluding essay in this volume, presents an affecting argument on the salvific and life-affirming nature of graffiti in DeLillo, noting that Underworld is itself a kind of long-form graffiti. If archival art represents a move to turn ‘excavation sites into construction sites’ (Foster 60), and is compelled by a wish ‘to probe a misplaced past, to collate some of its traces, to ascertain what remains for the present’ (59), then it’s not only Klara Sax’s site installation of 230 planes in the West Texas desert that fits Foster’s description, it is not only Ismael Muñoz’s Wall, but DeLillo’s whole novelistic enterprise in Underworld and beyond. The archival impulse is also connected to what David Cowart in this volume convincingly calls DeLillo’s archaeological imagination, an authorial vision that infuses DeLillo’s entire oeuvre and takes shape in the imagery of architectural ruins, the

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Foster discusses Sam Durant and Tacita Dean in particular as being influenced by Robert Smithson. ‘Dean has made a few pieces based on two works by Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed and Spiral Jetty, a fascination shared by Durant and others’ (Foster 46). See figures 27.5 and 27.1.

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time-eroded places of fallen or absent civilisations, and in language itself. The desert is a key player in such an imaginary, a spatio-temporal site (or frame, to quote Klara Sax) that might unearth counternarratives to official histories, or provide escape from history’s ‘brutal confinements’ (‘The Power of History’). It is noteworthy that Agamben also finds a useful frame of signification in the archaeological when discussing the contemporary. For Agamben, ‘only he who perceives the signatures of the archaic in the most modern and recent can be contemporary’, because ‘the key to the modern is hidden in the immemorial and prehistoric’ (50, 51). In an analogy that strikes a very similar chord to DeLillo’s writing on the subject, Agamben invokes the World Trade Center: Whoever has seen the skyscrapers of New York for the first time arriving from the ocean at dawn has immediately perceived this archaic facies of the present, this contiguousness with the ruin that the atemporal images of September 11th have made evident to all. (50–1) David Coughlan’s compelling contribution analyses the depiction and role of the art gallery in DeLillo’s works, finding a correlative position to Cowart’s in his tracing of the gallery to the archaeologically discovered cave, its walls painted prehistorically. Closely reading a passage from Ratner’s Star that links cave tunnelling, art, history and death, Coughlan considers how DeLillo collapses distinctions between fiction and the gallery through an archival or archaeological impulse that provides a ‘secret memory of death’ (Ratner’s Star 394). My own contribution to this volume hinges in part on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s argument that ‘language is fossil poetry’ to make a related claim for the quietly crucial place of poetry and poetics in DeLillo’s body of work. What Foster recognises as the twin compulsions of archival art – excavation and construction – surface and resurface in DeLillo’s authorial vision.

Connected/Disconnected Archival artists and many of DeLillo’s characters also have in common a guiding sense of paranoia. Critics often reach for this word when describing DeLillo’s fiction; a 2020 review in the New York Times of The Silence, for example, badges DeLillo as ‘our laureate of paranoia and dread’ (Garner). Aside from the fact that such characterisations threaten to reduce the capacious aesthetic, philosophical and affective scope of DeLillo’s work, funnelling it into the by-now obsolete container of ‘postmodern’ writing, the paranoiac is not necessarily a fearful way of seeing. As Foster notes, archival art is driven by a desire to ‘connect what cannot be connected’ (59), stressing crossings of avant-garde and kitsch, profane and religious: Its will to connect can betray a hint of paranoia, for what is paranoia if not a practice of forced connections, of my own private archive, of my own notes from the underground, put on display? . . . For Freud the paranoiac projects his meanings onto the world precisely because it appears ominously drained of all significance (systematic philosophers, he implied, are closet paranoiacs). Might archival art emerge out of a similar sense of a failure in cultural memory, of a default in productive traditions? For why else connect things if they did not appear disconnected in the first place? (60)

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What the essays in this volume all understand and address, in varying levels of explicitness, is the alternative methods of intra-human connection that DeLillo, and his fictional artists, suggest to the repetitious and dehumanising systems of modernity. In her essay, Monika Gehlawat considers that technology of archival documentation par excellence, the camera. Offering a number of astute close readings, Gehlawat examines not only the photograph but the photographic shoot as a site of connective meaningmaking and epistemological, embodied interaction. In Mao II, Gehlawat argues, the reclusive novelist Bill Gray’s sitting for the photographic artist, Brita Nilsson, hastens his demise but not without first bringing him back to life from a calcified and hermetic existence. The interaction of photographer and subject sparks an almost erotic connection between them that animates them both. At the astonishing close of Underworld, Sister Edgar enters cyberspace – that atemporal, virtual realm of hyperconnectivity. The sequence is a culmination of all references to technology in the novel referring, in some way, to the bomb; Sister Edgar senses ‘the byshadows that stretch from the awe of a central event. How the intersecting systems help pull us apart, leaving us vague, drained, docile . . . willing to be shaped, to be overwhelmed – easy retreats, half beliefs’ (826). ‘There’s a religious aspect to this . . . a false faith’, DeLillo asserted in an interview after Underworld’s publication. ‘The worship of technology ends in the paranoid spaces of the computer net’ (‘The American Strangeness’ 124). In her wonderfully connective essay for this volume, Sarah Garland explores how the radiant allure of what she calls DeLillo’s icons is intricately bound up with their ability to invest faith in and make available the idea of death, as if holding a secret just out of reach. The atomic bomb is one such secret; its image becomes a recurring icon across DeLillo’s works. Joseph Conte in turn explores the technological sublime in DeLillo’s fiction, offering astute close readings of the ways DeLillo’s characters – for example White Noise’s Jack Gladney at the ATM – are both swept up in an ostensible network of connectedness and left feeling hollowed out and isolated by its totalising effects. Licheng Xie’s innovative essay considers hyperconnectivity in DeLillo as a reading and writing process rather than an end result. For Xie, the virtual interfaces of DeLillo’s writing unveil the pervading anxieties of modern life, urging us to think more deeply about our everyday interactions with a supposedly connective consumer technology. Indeed, one might extend Xie’s argument further, to suggest that the associative patterns in individual novels such as White Noise extend, web-like, to DeLillo’s entire oeuvre, which sees concepts, spoken fragments, themes and even character names recycled and refreshed. ‘Everything is connected in the end’ (Underworld 826). The relational aesthetics of DeLillo’s work invites a kind of open, creative connectivity that is sometimes missed by critics too focused on the dread.5 In his plays, DeLillo expands this aspect of his sensibility, moving from the flat screen to the threedimensional stage. Indeed, three-dimensionality is something DeLillo often stresses as an essential aspect of all his work – the need of a sense of the tangible materiality of the artistic process as well as the product. This is the reason he continues to use the second-hand manual Olympia typewriter that he bought in 1975:

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Mark Osteen’s American Magic and Dread is an excellent study of DeLillo’s dialogue with the connective and disconnective aspects of contemporary culture.

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What I enjoy about it is that it has large type, and this allows me to look clearly at the words on the page, and so to find a visual connection between letters in the word, and words in the sentence – something that has always been important to me, and which became more important when I was working on The Names. I decided then: just one paragraph on a page so that the eyes can fully engage. (qtd. in Cooke) DeLillo was living in Greece while writing The Names; as he took regular walks around the Acropolis, the carved stones and marble slabs actuated a new, three-dimensional way of seeing letters and words. ‘It’s an aesthetic issue’, he remarked to Maria Nadotti in 1993, ‘when I work I have a sculptor’s sense of the shape of the words I’m making’ (‘An Interview’ 117). This physicality again connects to the archival impulse: I save every note and this, too, is part of the tactile dimension of writing. It’s very important to me to keep discarded pages because they form a kind of history of my efforts. And they’re connected with the sense of a familiar physical surrounding. (‘An Interview’ 117) In the familiar physical surroundings of the theatre, DeLillo’s writing quite literally comes to life – the aesthetic becomes the synaesthetic. Rebecca Rey writes expertly in this volume of DeLillo’s theatrical work, exploring it not least in terms of ephemerality: in a recorded and surveilled world where so much interaction is available for replay, each theatrical performance – of Valparaiso, for example – is a unique and collaborative art form (between the playwright, the theatre cast, crew, and each performance’s audience), never to be exactly replicated. Jesse Kavadlo’s lively analysis of performance and performativity in this volume takes apart that pervasive apparatus of global connectivity: the telephone. Approaching ephemerality from a different perspective, Kavadlo considers the non-functionality of phones in DeLillo’s work; how they become artistic in their uselessness, or ciphers of a past age, or, in the case of The Silence, something more foreboding. In a novel where all screens and phones are disconnected, the performativity of DeLillo’s characters does not halt, and yet each of the novel’s five characters drifts further from the others, speaking in television soundbites and philosophical fragments to avoid the terror of the pauses in between their speech. While at times darkly comic, DeLillo’s most recent novel reads as a cautionary tale.

Still Life At the end of The Silence, DeLillo leaves us with five characters in a room, each in their own way psychologically unravelling. All technological devices are obsolete, rendered nothing more than useless objects. In a dialogue-heavy novel that often reads more like an absurdist play than prose fiction, this lingering last ‘scene’ is strikingly visual. ‘I try to examine psychological states by looking at people in rooms, objects in rooms’, DeLillo noted in 1982: we can know something important about a character by the way he sees himself in relation to objects . . . Sometimes I feel I’m painting a character in a room, and the most important thing I can do is set him up in relation to objects . . . (‘An Interview with Don DeLillo’ 14)

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Often, the objects with which a character finds him or herself in relation catalyse philosophical meditation far beyond the ostensible dimensions of the material. This happens when an object is also a work of art (a still life painting by Giorgio Morandi, for example, or a screen print by Andy Warhol), or a photograph (of a barn, of a person, of a mass wedding), but also when the object is an everyday item of modern life (a chair, a table, a TV set). Sharing the same space as a character, an object seems to absorb an element of that character’s consciousness so that the physical border between things, human and non-human, becomes strangely porous. Again, DeLillo’s instinct here is related to the archival impulse outlined above; characters often try to locate themselves physically and metaphysically by cataloguing things, plotting their existential coordinates according to the objects with which they have interacted. ‘People getting older become more fond of objects’, Ross Lockhart in Zero K tells his son: A leather-bound book, a piece of furniture, a photograph, a painting, the frame that holds the painting. These things make the past seem permanent. A baseball signed by a famous player, long dead. A simple coffee mug. Things we trust. They tell an important story. A person’s life, all those who entered and left, there’s a depth, a richness. (150) Such cataloguing is its own kind of counter-historical curation. Tim Jelfs’s essay for this volume examines how DeLillo’s aesthetic of found things developed during the 1970s and 1980s. Jelfs astutely notes that DeLillo’s depiction of things is an act of mimetic transformation, imbuing prevailing sign systems with new cultural, historical and thematic valences. The narratological devices DeLillo employs to describe this particular way of looking often involve a painterly aesthetic that both freezes the scene into a kind of tableau and creates an unfixed perspective that emulates what might be called an artwork’s ontological shimmer, or, as Alexandra Kingston-Reese notes in her elegant essay for this volume, its glint. Kingston-Reese points out that the artwork’s glint offers a hopeful alternative to the purported affectlessness of the postmodern, and finds illuminating connections between DeLillo’s references to artworks in Players (1977) and Point Omega. The protagonists of Players, Pammy and Lyle, in many ways represent the opposite of the aesthetic; in art historian Norman Bryson’s words, they are ‘jaded, burnt-out, anaestheticized and self-anaesthetizing’ (‘City of Dis’). Yet to only see the anaesthetic in DeLillo’s ‘postmodern’ novels is to only see half the picture. Indeed, characters are often framed as if part of a larger picture – in Players, it’s an ‘[Edward] Hopper painting’ (Players 47), in Mao II, it’s something aesthetically similar, whereby the very act of viewing art is painted by DeLillo as itself an object of visual consumption: every person in the room retained an awareness of the street beyond the plate-glass windows. They were here, in a way, for the people in the street. They knew exactly how they appeared . . . They appeared to float outside the world . . . They shared a stillness, a way of looking sharply etched. This gave the incidental scene a claim to permanence, as if they believed they might still be here a thousand nights from now, weightless and unperspiring, stirring the small awe of passersby. (Mao II 133–4)

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Note how the ‘way of looking’ is itself ‘sharply etched’ in this extraordinary mise en abyme; note the push–pull relationship between permanence and immateriality that DeLillo sketches between people and/as art, between the palimpsestic layers of looking, being looked at, appearance and feeling. DeLillo here and elsewhere gestures towards art’s relationship with property and privilege (the people in the room are ‘art browsers’ and buyers), with art’s claim to immortality. As Jonathan Gibbs observes in his incisive essay in this volume, the ‘art encounter’ in DeLillo’s fiction allows for an unfolding series of aesthetic experiences that may eventually lead beyond the realms of art and aesthetics entirely. The ‘stillness’ pervading many such descriptions brings to mind the genre of still life, a visual art form that for centuries has prompted its viewer to contemplate impermanence via the artistic representation of everyday objects, often imbued with reminders of mortality (memento mori). As I have argued elsewhere, in DeLillo’s later works especially, the still life offers a narrative deceleration and temporal suspension in resistance to what the author sees as ‘the enormous force of technology, and its insistence on speeding up time and compacting space’ (PEN America; Gander). The most obvious example of still life in DeLillo’s fiction is of course the Natura morta paintings by Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) that feature throughout Falling Man, although numerous other examples can be found in more conceptual formulations, for example the noiseless, suspended set pieces of performance artist David Janiak in the same novel, or the rows of cryogenically frozen bodies in Zero K, sited in ‘land art . . . defined by stillness’ (10), or body artist Lauren Hartke’s performance piece in which she makes of herself ‘a still life that’s living’ (The Body Artist 113). In Falling Man, Morandi’s still lifes activate a way of seeing that roves between past and present, absence and presence, via the visualisation of memory. Siri Hustvedt has noted that Morandi’s paintings seem to ‘include the shifts of attention that reveal various qualities of a single thing or a group of things in the narrative of looking, including what was with what is’ (238, emphasis in original). John Berger likewise describes Morandi’s still lifes less as variations in the portrayal of solid objects than as manifestations of ‘the process of the visible first becoming visible’. In other words, the objects in Morandi’s art are ‘not objects’ at all, but ‘places where some little thing is coming into being’ (Berger, ‘Giorgio Morandi’ 144). In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Lianne Glenn, her mother Nina Bartos, and Nina’s partner Martin Ridnour stare at a Morandi painting of an array of objects ‘in unfixed perspective and mostly muted colours’: ‘kitchen objects but removed from the kitchen, free of the kitchen, the house, everything practical and functioning’; but they can only ‘keep seeing the towers’ (Falling Man 49). Three years after the attacks, and some time after the death of her mother, Lianne visits a Morandi exhibition in Manhattan and sees in their depictions not the towers, but her mother’s living room where she first saw the paintings and discussed their traumatic resonances, the bottles now transmuting into the figures of Nina and Martin. ‘Matter exists, of course’, said Morandi in an interview, ‘but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it’ (qtd. in Hustvedt 232). DeLillo understands that looking at art is not an activity removed from our being-in-the-world; our encounter with an artwork is a fully embodied and cumulative experience on the level of everyday life. Likewise, prolonged looking at

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an object reveals not more of an object’s reality, but an increased perception of one’s relationship to it.6 The ‘unfixed perspective’ of Morandi’s still lifes is thus key to DeLillo’s own aesthetic, functioning both temporally and spatially. Art critic Gottfried Boehm relates this quality of Morandi’s art to ‘a temporal order that is optimistic and immaterial at the core of its experience. The objects are disembodied as they embody themselves’ (19).7 Mieke Bal, writing on the variations of narratological focalisation in fiction, calls the ‘still life effect’ an epistemological and aesthetic dialectic created in the mediation between visuality and language of a roving focalisation between the fixating remote view and the sickening close-up (and often found in the work of Proust) (70). As ‘she step[s] back and move[s] close’ to the artworks, Lianne feels this effect, along with the reader, resulting in an extreme sense of absorption: She was passing beyond pleasure into some kind of assimilation. She was trying to absorb what she saw, take it home, wrap it around her, sleep in it. There was so much to see. Turn it into living tissue, who you are. (Falling Man 210) This is one of many examples of DeLillo’s employment of still life as concept and method, form and effect. The framing of this gallery set piece, the descriptions of the still lifes and their relational affect, culminate in an authorial intervention implicitly directed at the outsider beyond the frame – that is, the reader. The imperative form of the phrase ‘turn it into living tissue, who you are’ implicates the reader in the ethical responsibility of looking hard at what one sees, assimilating its associations. The transmutation hinted at here and in Jelfs’s and Gibbs’s essays is explored in a different way by Pavlina Radia in her analysis of embodiment in DeLillo’s late works. In her intricate examination, Radia draws on the theories of Judith Butler, Guy Debord and Paul De Man to consider how DeLillo ‘queers’ the body in its artistic transformations, and how art provides the potential for queering the spectacle of mortality that imbues our image economy. Many of the examples Radia employs are manifestations of the embodied still life – Hartke, Artis, for example – which, framed linguistically by DeLillo, require a responsive, ethical way of seeing the other.

Possession and Property There are many characters in DeLillo’s works who, in their ways of seeing others, imagine themselves as artists, or at least in possession of an artistic licence. Point Omega’s Richard Elster is one such example: a post-9/11 ‘defence intellectual’ who

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Before settling on Morandi’s still lifes to feature so prominently in Falling Man, DeLillo considered inserting other artworks that had been in exhibition during the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath, as well as in the years after. Among them are Richard Serra’s ‘Torqued Spirals, Toruses and Spheres’ (at the Gagosian 18 October–15 December 2001) and Robert Gober’s exhibition at the Matthew Marks Gallery (5 March–23 April 2005). Container 126 of the DeLillo Papers contains reviews, press releases and early drafts featuring the works. Clippings and notes in the same container of the DeLillo Papers indicate that the Morandi exhibition that Lianne visits is most likely Giorgio Morandi: Late Paintings, which ran at the Lucas Schoormans Gallery, Chelsea, 23 September–3 December 2004.  7 DeLillo’s archives include handwritten notes from this essay (Container 128.5).

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aims to aestheticise war first by reducing it to ‘advertising slogans . . . that would yield pictures eventually and then become three-dimensional’, and then by distilling it into imagist poetry (29). Similar to Cosmopolis’s multi-billionaire and murdering antihero Eric Packer, Elster chooses poetry as his primary reading material – ‘Zukofsky and Pound, sometimes aloud, and also Rilke in the original, whispering a line or two only, now and then, from the Elegies’ (25). By reading these poems, Elster tells filmmaker Finley (who, as the novel’s narrator, tells us, such that we are compelled to believe it), he is ‘rereading his youth’ (25). While Zukofsky and Pound evoke an objectivism and imagism that go some way to concretising the war in Elster’s imagination, Rilke’s Elegies in the original German language inject his subject with a lyrical ineffability. Hence, Elster declares: I wanted a haiku war . . . I wanted a war in three lines. This was not a matter of force levels or logistics. What I wanted was a set of ideas linked to transient things. This is the soul of haiku. Bare everything in plain sight. See what’s there. Things in war are transient. See what’s there and then be prepared to watch it disappear. (29) Elster’s muddled appreciation for the haiku as a poetic form of fleeting crystallisation adheres more closely to Ezra Pound’s early appropriation of the haiku than to its Japanese origins (‘three lines’, for example, is an English interpretation). Indeed, the triad of poets Elster reads sit in uneasy tension, at least politically – the Jewish Louis Zukofsky was a friend of Pound, although Pound’s antisemitism and eventual fascism would strain their relationship; the Austrian Catholic Rainer Maria Rilke was a pacifist whose conscription during the First World War had profoundly damaging effects on his creativity.8 But more than misplaced aestheticism, Elster’s speech here underlines the (American) individualist ego at the helm of this, and more sinister, ‘extraordinary’ renditions: ‘I wanted . . . I wanted . . . I wanted’. In a slim novel so profoundly concerned with the aesthetics of attention, Elster’s way of seeing is markedly myopic. His double affirmation that we must ‘see what’s there’ in preparation for watching it ‘disappear’ haunts the novel’s later plot development: the disappearance, and possible murder, of his daughter Jessie. Described by Finley as ‘her father’s dream thing’ (56) and ‘sylphlike’ (49) with a look that apparently has ‘an abridged quality’ (59), Jessie is sketched for the reader only lightly, and almost exclusively via the overlapping gazes of the men who surround her. Each of these men wish to possess Jessie in different ways: her father, in his ‘possessiveness, his enclosing space’, wants ‘her near him all the time’ (39); the anonymous man in the art gallery ‘imagine[s] turning and pinning her to the wall with the room emptied out except for the guard who is looking straight ahead, nowhere, motionless’ (112); Finley watches Jessie constantly, including while she lies in bed (73), gazes at her unmade bed daily (49), and on one occasion stands uninvited at the bathroom door while she is washing her face in the basin and fantasises about taking her sexually from behind (55).

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As I discuss at greater length in this volume’s chapter devoted to poetry in DeLillo’s fiction, references to Rilke’s Duino Elegies appear in the pages of DeLillo’s novels at intervals throughout his entire oeuvre, most prominently in End Zone, where recitation of the Ninth Elegy in German is a requirement of a course ‘in the untellable’ at Logos College (60).

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Unsurprisingly, some contributors to this volume write insightfully of Jessie’s role in Point Omega. Elise Martucci reads Jessie as an embodied example of ongoing masculinist, colonial objectifications of the American landscape, drawing convincing parallels between traditions of landscape and figural painting as expressions of male ownership and consumption. Laura Barrett argues persuasively that Jessie manages to elude the narrative constructions imposed on her by the novel’s three men. In her habit of really looking at the faces and lips of people speaking, Jessie is able to pre-emptively read words as if they are images, inhabiting the role of author and art critic. Graley Herren has written eloquently of DeLillo’s ‘art stalkers’ elsewhere, and in this volume of the misogyny of the ekphrastic tradition. His observation that Jeffrey Lockhart in Zero K is so driven by scopophilia as to be almost a caricature of the male gaze is evidenced by Jeffrey’s sexual encounter with an unnamed woman known only as ‘the escort’ (a situation ‘arranged’ by Jeffrey’s father, Ross). Herren notes that Jeffrey mounts the woman on the wall like a painting: ‘I stood and moved into her, smearing her into the wall, imagining an imprint, a body mark . . .’ (Zero K 78). The moment is eerily similar to the anonymous man’s fantasy in Point Omega; in both cases, the woman is not named, and is not only an object of scopophilic desire, but rendered an art object that becomes an extension of male authority – of authorship and ownership. Jeffrey wishes his purchase on this woman’s flesh to leave ‘an imprint’ on the wall; the anonymous man imagines ‘pinning [the woman, likely Jessie] to the wall’, at the same time ensuring that she continues to ‘watch’ the artwork he has been previously enthralled by: Douglas Gordon’s slowed-down version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Tellingly, in the seconds before this fantasy, he thinks ‘about watching the shower scene with her’ (Point Omega 109). That Jessie is viewed semi-naked in bed or at her ablutions, that she is associated with the famous shower scene’s nakedness and violence, that the ‘escort’ is ‘smeared’ (like blood or paint) naked on the wall, connects both women with a history of the nude in Western art. As Berger pointed out in 1972, and as countless others, including, importantly, Griselda Pollock and Laura Mulvey, have further explored, the tradition of the nude situates women as objects of consumption and display for male spectatorship and flattery in a patriarchal, capitalist system.9 ‘To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for one’s self’, writes Berger. ‘A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude’ (Ways of Seeing 54). Finley’s lingering gazes at Jessie, often from just beyond thresholds and doorways, situate her within a frame of desire, like those in which such Renaissance subjects as Susannah and the Elders were enclosed.10 And yet Jessie resists such framing, an impenetrability that only serves to irritate and disempower Finley: ‘Her look had an abridged quality, it wasn’t reaching the wall or window. I found it disturbing to watch her, knowing that she didn’t feel watched’ (Point Omega 59–60). Finley cannot hold Jessie in place (in fact, he can barely even bring himself to hold her hand), and she disappears – from the house, the desert, the story.

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Whether the male is heterosexual or not does not reduce the power relations established by the tradition. A ‘favourite subject’ of European oil painting (Berger, Ways of Seeing 50), Susannah and the Elders depicts two elderly men spying on Susannah while she bathes. They both lust after her, and after failing to sexually accost her, falsely accuse her of adultery and want her condemned to death.

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Another woman in DeLillo’s late fiction whose trajectory takes her from the city to the desert and eventually out of sight is Zero K’s Artis Martineau, an ex-archaeologist whose failing health prompts her to decide on her own cryogenic preservation. How are we to see Artis, a character with a name too provocative not to try to decipher? David Cowart reads her name as an embodiment of ‘ars gratia artis, art for the sake of art’ (‘Don DeLillo’s Zero K’ 148); many reviewers have understood it as an abridged version of ‘artist’; I have argued elsewhere that ‘Artis represents the prevailing misunderstanding amid characters in Zero K of what art is – she exists [in the end] as a version of still life stripped of its qualities of memento mori and life affirmation; a human vanitas hidden from view’ (Gander 276). All of these are, I think, true. But encased in her cryogenic pod, Artis is also the frozen embodiment of a history of Renaissance art in which wealthy patrons believed that they could, in the words of Ross Lockhart, ‘own the end of the world’ (Zero K 3) – or at least pay their way past purgatory by purchasing, and in many cases inserting their own likenesses into, religious art. The practice was more a gesture of self-preservation (both of one’s physical likeness as a timeless object and of one’s immortal soul as belonging to Christ) than of moral fortitude. Yet Ross’s last words, ‘gesso on linen’ (251), suggest that the picture has not yet been painted, and that the preparation of his body for premature cryogenic freezing (as a ‘herald’, in the parlance of the Convergence) is only the first step in the making of the final artwork.11 Artis’s name is therefore also an unfinished sentence, a noun without a predicate, an incomplete concept. Art is . . .

The Triumph of Death? Is there any concept so incomplete to the living as death? Jack Gladney’s oft-quoted observation in White Noise that ‘[a]ll plots tend to move deathward’ (30) has come to colour much of the critical writing on DeLillo; indeed, death, and humanity’s fear of death on a singular or mass scale, infuses the pages of most of his works, and Cristina Garrigós in this volume makes the astute point that despite DeLillo’s novels being often described as ‘cinematic’, filmic adaptations of DeLillo’s work have only succeeded aesthetically when the central theme of the adaptation is death. In DeLillo’s later writing, as the above sections of this introduction go some way to describe, death seems everywhere present and yet (almost) infinitely postponed; the still life artwork becomes an aesthetic and conceptual emblem for both the suspension of several characters between life and death, and for humanity’s desire-led consumer economy. (The still life genre has since the seventeenth century held implications of vanitas; it is an art form designed to reveal the vanity of material ownership, but, as Bryson asserts, it is ‘permanently undermined by internal contradiction’: ‘[h]owever much vanitas pieces may try to deny it, they cannot escape being pictures, that is, indulgences’ [Looking 116]). But as Peter Boxall begins this volume by exploring, death in DeLillo is not necessarily fearful. Boxall’s insightful treatment of DeLillo’s ‘aesthetics of death’ takes us back to the near beginning, DeLillo’s second novel End Zone (1972), in which the

11

Gesso is a substance used to prime canvases for the application of paint. An unprimed canvas can soak up paint, causing some of it to disappear from the picture.

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protagonist Gary Harkness and his teammates play a game called ‘Bang You’re Dead’, involving a lot of mock shooting, killing and – more importantly – dying. As Harkness lies down and pretends to die, he imagines ‘death could be a tender experience’ (34), and in this small but significant imaginative act, Boxall recognises the crux of the novel, and a foundational element of DeLillo’s entire oeuvre. This condition of living death, Boxall observes, receives its most explicit treatment in Zero K. Indeed, all the forms of art discussed in this introduction come together in Zero K in the aptly named Convergence, the cryogenic human freezing compound that Artis Martineau (via her husband Ross Lockhart) describes as ‘a work-in-progress, an earthwork, a form of earth art, land art’ (10). Hovering somewhere between mirage and nightmare, the Convergence emerges from the desert near Kazakhstan as its own conceptual creation, a capsule of human conceit in which the aesthetic and the anaesthetic combine. Internal hallways contain a series of trompe l’oeil doorways and lead to dead ends in which descend screens that show noiseless footage of various human atrocities and environmental catastrophes; some windowless rooms are painted as copies of themselves, others contain kitsch skull art (reminiscent of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God [2007]); a ‘plastic or fiberglass’ garden provides an uneasy meditative space (Zero K 122), and numerous mannequins, some faceless, some headless, some made of real human flesh (reminiscent of the plastination of cadavers for exhibition by Günter von Hagens in the late twentieth century) line the corridors and linger like sentinels at thresholds. A ‘huge cratered enclosure’ (248) rising from the dust of ‘desert waste’ (124), the Convergence is itself a liminal space, a conjunction of becoming and ending: ‘return to the earth, emerge from the earth’, asserts Ross (10); ‘Dust thou art . . . and to dust thou shalt return’ (15), muses Jeffrey. Despite its claims to lofty principles and ‘stillness’ (10, passim), the Convergence is soaked through with brutality. The violence done to Artis’s and Ross’s bodies in the name of a higher art is a cloistered, anaesthetised version of the graphic violence played out on the compound’s various screens, many of them detailing foreign wars so intimately that, as Jeffrey watches, men and women from the film footage come charging towards him, ‘images bodied out, spilled from the screen’ (153). The numerous encounters Jeffrey has with such screenings during the course of the novel culminate in an astonishing six-page episode in which Jeffrey is bombarded with image after image of global warfare; a horrifying montage of familiar violence, destruction and death that ends with the on-screen death by rifle fire of his girlfriend’s son Stak, a rebel fighter in Ukraine (259–64). As Linda Kauffman has noted (and David Coughlan explores herein), ‘the art museum is also a war museum: whether one thinks of Brueghel, Goya, or Picasso, art memorializes warriors and innocents, holy crusades and massacres, the whole history of bloody atrocities and scorched earth’ (366). Margaret Scanlan, in her incisive essay for this volume, traces the ‘art of war’ in DeLillo’s writing in its diverse iterations, from the violence of early pictogrammic inscription on stone in The Names through the allusions to the Iraq War in Point Omega. Scanlan’s analysis is probing and sobering; she notes how DeLillo’s own art acknowledges the limits of art faced with violence. As in End Zone and Underworld, the hydrogen bomb casts a shadow over the narrative of Zero K. Situated south of ‘where the Soviets tested their nuclear bombs’ (Zero K 35), the Convergence brings to mind another of DeLillo’s mise en abymes, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death (1563) in the opening section of

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Underworld. In the stands of the 1951 National League Final between the Dodgers and the Giants, a torn page from Life magazine lands on J. Edgar Hoover. On it is printed Bruegel’s famous scene of gruesome havoc: ‘Men impaled on lances, hung from gibbets, drawn on spoked wheels fixed to the tops of bare trees, bodies open to the crows’. Hoover ‘can’t take his eyes off the page’ (Underworld 41). But as he looks at the image, Hoover sees ‘Death elsewhere, Conflagration in many places, Terror universal . . . and he thinks of a lonely tower standing on the Kazakh Test Site, the tower armed with the bomb . . .’ (50). Indeed, the relentless images of death and destruction that Jeffrey is compelled to watch on a site not too far from where the test tower stood seem to visually echo the carnage of Bruegel’s painting, the dead endlessly arrayed for the eye’s consumption, the land razed by skeletal agents of death. Does this mean that death triumphs over art in the end? In DeLillo’s last novel to date, an apocalypse seems to loom, but if death is imminent, we are unaware of it. At the close of The Silence, the five people in a room – Diane, Martin, Max, Tessa, Jim – each seem lost, five characters in search of an author. We see a slightly unhinged Max Stenner ignoring those around him, staring at a blank television. The novel thus ends by taking us back to the beginning of DeLillo’s oeuvre (and his career before that as a copy writer for an advertising agency); Max is what filmmaker David Bell and advertising executive Glenn Yost discuss in Americana as the archetypal American consumer: ‘We begin, simply enough, with a man watching television. Quite possibly he is being driven mad, slowly, in stages, program by program, interruption by interruption. Still, he watches. What is there in that box? Why is he still watching?’ (270) Max’s earlier bizarre (and darkly humorous) verbalisations of commercial soundbites and taglines from an imaginary broadcast are the residue of what Yost describes as the consumer effect on the viewing public: the shift ‘from first person consciousness to third person’ (270). But if a large portion of DeLillo’s work from 1971 onwards has explored the deadening effects of mass media, Max hasn’t read it. Max is not listening. He understands nothing. He sits in front of the TV set with his hands folded behind his neck, elbows jutting. Then he stares into the blank screen. (116) However, while Max loses himself in a blank television set, the other characters grope for understanding in memory, in science, in fragments of poetry and fiction. Tellingly, it is the fiction of James Joyce, specifically Finnegans Wake, that Diane reaches for. Kiron Ward in this volume makes a persuasive case for Joyce’s persistent impact on DeLillo’s fiction, contending that Joyce provides a frame for understanding the potentiality of literature, and, by extension, DeLillo’s approach to art. The speech of the other four characters may at times slip into streams of consciousness (à la Joyce), but their consciousness remains first person, and in that, there is hope. Henry Veggian, in his perceptive and at times personally inflected essay for this volume, discusses DeLillo’s short fiction – a category in which The Silence might well be included – in terms of the staged event, unpicking the nuances in DeLillo’s own choices of public readings and interventions. Veggian’s own experience of DeLillo’s readings as

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unsettling events for their audience can be usefully applied, I think, to the seemingly out-of-context interventions of the characters at the close of The Silence, which, like Veggian’s description of DeLillo’s short works, seem to ‘explore, transfigure and defend the “arts” writ large’. In a review of The Silence, Veggian notes that in a seemingly pessimistic book, the font in which it is published – the ‘typescript’ look meant not least to emulate the visuality of DeLillo’s own typewritten drafts – suggests an optimism. ‘The older mechanical technologies won’t fail us when the screens stop emitting signals’, Veggian writes. ‘Tessa will write in her notebook. Memory will survive. We won’t need our phones. Life, expression, art will continue after the crash’ (Veggian). In the end, digital technology, and the fall of such technology, will not spell the death of the arts because it is art, not technology, that connects us. The essays in this Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts offer new ways of seeing the connections between DeLillo and the arts, and in so doing, offer illuminating perspectives on the practical, mystical, life-affirming ways in which art works.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. ‘What is the Contemporary?’ What is An Apparatus? And Other Essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford University Press, 2009, pp. 39–54. Bal, Mieke. A Mieke Bal Reader. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Berger, John. ‘Giorgio Morandi.’ The Shape of a Pocket. Bloomsbury, 2001, pp. 139–45. ——. Ways of Seeing. BBC and Penguin, 1972. Boehm, Gottfried. ‘Giorgio Morandi’s Artistic Concept.’ Morandi, edited by Ernst Güse and Franz Morat. Prestel, 2008. Boxall, Peter. Don DeLillo. The Possibility of Fiction. Routledge, 2006. Bryson, Norman. ‘City of Dis: The Fiction of Don DeLillo.’ Granta 2, 1 March 1980. https:// granta.com/city-of-dis-the-fiction-of-don-delillo/. Accessed 7 February 2023. ——. Looking at the Overlooked. Four Essays on Still Life Painting. Reaktion, 1990. Cooke, Rachel. ‘Don DeLillo: “I Wondered What Would Happen If Power Failed Everywhere”.’ The Guardian, 18 October 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/18/dondelillo-i-wondered-what-would-happen-if-power-failed-everywhere. Accessed 7 February 2023. Cowart, David. Don DeLillo. The Physics of Language. Rev. edn, University of Georgia Press, 2002. ——. ‘Don DeLillo’s Zero K and the Dream of Cryonic Election.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 143–58. Da Cunha Lewin, Katherine, and Kiron Ward. ‘A Trick of the Light: Don DeLillo in the Twentyfirst Century.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 1–16. DeLillo, Don. ‘The American Strangeness: An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ Interviewed by Gerald Howard in The Hungry Mind Review, 47, 1997, pp. 13–16. Reprinted in Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro. University Press of Mississippi, 2005, pp. 119–30. ——. Americana. 1971. Penguin, 2011. ——. ‘The Art of Fiction No. 135.’ Interview by Adam Begley. Paris Review, 128, 1993. https:// www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo. Accessed 7 February 2023. ——. The Body Artist. Picador, 2001.

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——. End Zone. 1972. Picador, 2011. ——. Falling Man. Picador, 2007. ——. ‘In the Ruins of the Future. Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September.’ Harper’s, December 2001, pp. 33–40. ——. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ Interviewed by Thomas LeClair. Contemporary Literature, 23, no. 1, 1982, pp. 19–31. Reprinted in Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro. University Press of Mississippi, 2005, pp. 3–15. ——. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ Interviewed by Maria Nadotti. Salmagundi, 100, Fall 1993. Translated by Peggy Boyers. Reprinted in Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro. University of Mississippi Press, 2005, pp. 109–18. ——. Libra. Viking, 1988. ——. Mao II. 1991. Picador, 2016. ——. The Names. 1982. Picador, 2011. ——. ‘An Outsider in This Society.’ An Interview with Don DeLillo by Anthony DeCurtis. South Atlantic Quarterly, 89, no. 2, 1988, pp. 281–304. Reprinted in Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro. University Press of Mississippi, 2005, pp. 52–74. ——. Players. 1977. Picador, 2016. ——. Point Omega. Picador, 2010. ——. ‘The Power of History.’ New York Times, 7 September 1997. https://archive.nytimes.com/ www.nytimes.com/library/books/090797article3.html. Accessed 7 February 2023. ——. Ratner’s Star. 1976. Picador, 2016. ——. ‘Seven Seconds.’ An Interview with Don DeLillo by Ann Arensberg. Vogue, August 1988, pp. 336–39, 390. Reprinted in Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro. University Press of Mississippi, 2005, pp. 40–6. ——. The Silence. Picador, 2020. ——. Underworld. 1997. Picador, 2015. ——. White Noise. 1985. Picador, 2011. ——. Zero K. Picador, 2016. DePietro, Thomas, editor. Conversations with Don DeLillo. University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Foster, Hal. Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency. Verso, 2015. Gander, Catherine. ‘Time: Still Life.’ Don DeLillo in Context, edited by Jesse Kavadlo. Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 270–9. Gardner Jr., Ralph. ‘Writing that Can Strengthen the Fraying Threads of Memory.’ New York Times, 30 January 1997. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/30/garden/writing-that-canstrengthen-the-fraying-threads-of-memory.html. Accessed 7 February 2023. Garner, Dwight, ‘Don DeLillo, An Old Hand at Paranoia and Dread, Meets Us Where We Are.’ New York Times, 12 October 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/books/reviewsilence-don-delillo.html. Accessed 7 February 2023. Herren, Graley. ‘Don DeLillo’s Art Stalkers.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 61, no. 1, 2015, pp. 138–67. ——. The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo. Bloomsbury, 2019. Hustvedt, Siri. ‘The Drama of Perception. Looking at Morandi.’ Living, Thinking, Looking. Sceptre, 2012, pp. 232–44. 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, pp. 353–77. Knight, Philip. ‘DeLillo, Postmodernism, Postmodernity.’ The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, edited by John N. Duvall. Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 27–40. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Palgrave, 1989. Naas, Michael. Don DeLillo, American Original. Drugs, Weapons, Erotica, and Other Literary Contraband. Bloomsbury, 2020. Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

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PEN America. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ 15 September 2010. https://pen.org/aninterview-with-don-delillo/. Accessed 7 February 2023. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference. Feminism, Femininity, and Histories of Art. Routledge, 2003. Remnick, David. ‘Exile on Main Street. Don DeLillo’s Undisclosed Underworld.’ The New Yorker, 15 September 1997, pp. 42–8. Towers, Robert. ‘From the Grassy Knoll.’ Review of Libra by Don DeLillo. The New York Review, 18 August 1988. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1988/08/18/from-the-grassyknoll/. Accessed 7 February 2023. Veggian, Henry. ‘In Flight: Don DeLillo’s The Silence.’ Ransom Center Magazine, 20 November 2020. https://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/2020/11/20/in-flight-don-delillos-thesilence/. Accessed 7 February 2023.

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Part I DeLillo and Aesthetics: Art as Experience

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1 A Tender Experience: Aesthetics of Death in DeLillo’s Fiction Peter Boxall

‘We were basically stateless.’ Don DeLillo, ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’

I

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here is a children’s game, played by the members of the college football team in Don DeLillo’s 1972 novel End Zone, that prefigures his thinking about the relation between death and fiction as it develops over the course of his writing. The game takes place over six or seven days, on the silent, empty campus of the remote college in West Texas where the protagonist, Gary Harkness, is a student on a football scholarship. It’s ‘extremely simple-minded’, Harkness says. ‘Almost every child has played it in one form or another.’ The game is called ‘Bang You’re Dead’: Your hand assumes the shape of a gun and you fire at anyone who passes. You try to reproduce, in your own way, the sound of a gun being fired. Or you simply shout these words: Bang, you’re dead. The other person clutches a vital area of his body and then falls, simulating death. (End Zone 31–2) At first, Harkness says, the game seemed silly and childish, ‘even for a bunch of bored and lonely athletes’; but as the game stretches on, over the long, empty days, he begins to understand that ‘beneath its bluntness’ it was ‘compellingly intricate’: ‘It possessed gradations, dark joys, a resonance echoing from the most perplexing of dreams’ (32). As a killer, Harkness derives a rich cinematic pleasure from the game. ‘I shot Terry Madden at sunset from a distance of forty yards’, he says. ‘He held his stomach and fell, in slow motion, and then rolled down the grassy slope, tumbling, rolling slowly as possible, closer, slower, ever nearer, tumbling down to die at my feet with the pale setting of the sun’ (32). But it is in dying rather than killing that Harkness experiences the more intense joy. ‘I died well’, he says, ‘and for this reason was killed quite often’: One afternoon, shot from behind, I staggered to the steps of the library and remained there, on my back, between the second and the third step at the approximate middle of the stairway. (33) Supine on the stairs, Harkness feels a lifted emptiness, a tingling, aroused non-being, nearly erotic, that perhaps many of us remember from playing the game ourselves – the

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unbound ecstasy of lying dead, of being gone, as we hear those around us, living on. ‘It was very relaxing’, he says, ‘despite the hardness of the steps. I felt the sun on my face. I tried to think of nothing. The longer I remained there, the more absurd it seemed to get up’ (33). The game brings Harkness to some dismantled state, some being towards death, in which he is able to approach an underlying condition of nothingness, and to believe that one might gain some shaped proximity to the death that lies within us, to ‘pretend that death could be a tender experience’ (34). It is this intuition of a living death, of pretend death as tender experience, that is the crux around which End Zone turns, and which lies at the foundation of DeLillo’s writing, from Americana to The Silence. Many of DeLillo’s readers and critics have observed that his writing is deeply preoccupied with death, and that his aesthetics are determined by this preoccupation. The various approaches taken to his writing have tended to shape themselves around the philosophical, theoretical and theological implications of the place and meaning of death in his oeuvre. Cornel Bonca, for example, tunes his influential Heideggerian reading of The Body Artist to his perception that DeLillo’s work exhibits a ‘focus, even reliance, on death as epistemological and ontological mooring’ (60). Death is the key to DeLillo’s Heideggerianism; it lies too at the root, for Amy Hungerford, of his literary Catholicism. It is his investment in the beauty of language, the sense that language is the container of a form of immanent transcendence, that allows him to approach what Hungerford calls the ‘idea of a human soul that persists beyond bodily death’ (376). Language for Hungerford, as it is for David Cowart, is the medium in which DeLillo can approach the death that is the epistemological and ontological mooring of his thinking, and make of it a kind of infinity, a kind of persistent state.1 This is the state that DeLillo maps out most fully in his 2016 novel Zero K, the state in which death is given unending life, and life enters into death, the Augustinian state (referred to in the title of Nathan Ashman’s essay on Zero K) in which ‘death itself shall be deathless’.2 How, these critics have asked, does DeLillo exploit the resources of the arts at once to approach the condition of death, and to make of this non-being, this negation of life, the grounds of a kind of experience, a kind of state? In End Zone, early in DeLillo’s career, one can see the beginnings of his attempt to characterise this condition, the condition of a living death that is given its most explicit treatment forty-five years later in Zero K. And here too one can see, in outline, the contradictions that gather around DeLillo’s aesthetics of death, the tension between the expansive and the contractive, the immanent and the transcendent, the tender and the violent, that makes DeLillian death so hard to focus, so resistant to critical expression. The approach to this condition is oddly weighted at this point in his career, balanced as it is by the unlikely oppositions of which End Zone is made. The yearning for embodied death that Harkness feels when playing Bang You’re Dead is part of the novel’s ascetic urge towards diminishment, towards silence and meditative retreat.

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For an extended reading of language and transcendence in DeLillo’s fiction, see Cowart. See Augustine, City of God, where he writes that humans will never be more disastrously ‘in death’ that ‘in that state where death itself will be deathless’ (521). See Ashman for a discussion of how ‘St. Augustine’s words illuminate the ontological and semantic ‘no man’s land’’ that lies in Zero K between living and dying (Ashman 302).

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The remoteness of the university campus, lost as it is in the boundless desert, instils in the students (and their teachers) a devotion to slow, empty time, to evacuated, undernourished forms of being. The classes that Harkness and his fellow students take are taught by gnomic, Jesuitical professors, and dedicated to abstruse, abstract philosophy. Billy Mast is taking a course on ‘The Untellable’, in which, Billy says, ‘we delve into the untellable’ (181) (‘How deep?’, Bobby Iselin asks, and Billy replies, ‘It’s hard to tell. I don’t think anybody knows how deep the untellable is. We’ve done a certain amount of delving. We plan to delve some more. That’s about all I can tell you.’) While DeLillo’s sprawling first novel Americana turns around the fantasy of a novel consisting of ‘blank pages’, written in ‘words of the same color as the paper on which they were written’ (Americana 347), so End Zone tends towards the unspoken, the untold, towards blank minima, towards the perception that ‘what we must know must be learned from blanked-out pages’ (89). This is the desire for subtraction that compels the football team’s head coach – Coach Creed – to retreat mid-way through the season to a monastic cell, where he reads St Teresa of Avila on last things. This is the impulse, too, that leads Harkness and his teammate, the African American running back Taft Robinson, to meditate, sitting in their own bare rooms, on ‘varieties of silence’, on ‘rectangular planes of stillness’, ‘the spaces between things, the endless silence of surfaces’ (191). But, of course, the subtractive urge in End Zone is balanced, at all times, against the novel’s will to power, to expansion, its immersion in the big brash violence of America, manifest in the muscularity of football on the one hand, and of US military power on the other. The urge towards a private, personal death – the tender death that Harkness clings to as he lies sunwarmed on the library steps – is balanced against the thuggish violence of football (Harkness was involved, before the novel’s opening, in a tackle which killed his opponent) and the mass death implicit in the prospect of nuclear war. The centrepiece of the novel – a play-by-play description of a brutal game of football in which Harkness’s team are mauled by their steely rivals, a team called Centrex – is rhymed with the war game played between Harkness and the university’s military historian, Major Staley, in which an imaginary nuclear confrontation between COMRUS and AMAC ends in global devastation. And in these images of weighted, embedded violence, the inadequacy of language returns, not as a shrouded, meditative investment in the untellable – not as a mindful approach to a suspended inner non-being – but as a failure of language to approach the sheer vastness of American power, its heave and glut. As Harkness says to Major Staley, ‘There’s no way to express thirty million dead. No words. So certain men are recruited to reinvent the language’ (85). As football coaches stay up late at night inventing the names of their plays, organising the violence of the football field with empty jargon, so military strategists invent the language of nuclear war, through which we might contemplate the ‘spectacle of megadeath’ (85). ‘Thermal hurricane, overkill, circular error probability, post-attack environment, stark deterrence, dose-rate contours, killratio, spasm war’ (21). The mode in which End Zone negotiates between these antinomies – the minimal and the maximal, meditative withdrawal and dumb aggression – is comic. The tone of the novel is set by the derangement that occurs when big, muscular football players, vacuum packed into their uniforms, spend their evenings memorising Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy in German (64). The prospect of the meditating football player tends to collapse the opposition between the weighty and the ethereal into the farcical. The line

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kicker Bing Jackman has a revelation during a game, in the heat of battle. A ‘strange feeling came over me’, he tells Harkness: I was looking at the football. It was up on the tee. I was standing ten yards away, looking right at it, waiting for the whistle so I could make my approach, and that’s when I got this strange insight [. . .] I sensed knowledge in the football. I sensed a strange awareness. The football knew what was happening [. . .] It was aware of its own footballness. (37) If there is any developed interest here in a shifted distribution of consciousness, in the possibility that being might be lodged in inanimate things, it can’t survive the comedy. ‘Are you serious, Bing?’, Harkness asks, and Bing is deflated. ‘Go ahead Gary’, he says, ‘play around, I knew you wouldn’t understand. It was too unreal. It was uneverything, man’ (37). But if End Zone is not serious (unlike Bing Jackman), it invents the structural relation between death and being, between nothing and everything, that powers the rest of DeLillo’s writing career, and that impels his most magisterial acts of historical expression and assimilation. At the heart of End Zone is the perception that force – the kinetic global forces that shape the historical relation between the US and the USSR, between Africa and America – is bound up with weightlessness, with the slowed, antigravitational experience of non-being that Harkness feels as he lies sublimely dead on the library steps. As Harkness and his teammates watch a football game on television one evening, this convergence finds a cinematic form which links the weightlessness of slow motion to the tender experience of death that is granted to Harkness when he plays Bang You’re Dead. ‘In slow motion’, the narrator says, ‘the game’s violence became almost tender, a series of lovely and sensual assaults’ (98). Slowed film opens the field of brutally opposing forces to the tender weightlessness that it contains, as, for Dorothy Richardson, the most beautiful gift of film is that it can separate the components of being in time, and so serve as a ‘vehicle for revealing to mankind that in man which is unbounded’ (Richardson 183). A slowed film of Mr Jones performing the high jump, Richardson writes, allows us to see how spirit inhabits the floating, suspended body, as we watch Mr Jones ‘rise as if dreaming, slowly through the air’, as we see on his face the ‘look of blissful concentration’ that would elude us at normal speed, and so are granted magical access to the ‘spirit withdrawn, within the body it was operating’ (183). In the midst of movement, slow motion tells us, is stasis; in the midst of matter is spirit; in the midst of violence is quiet. As Coach Creed puts it – the football genius who is also an ascetic who purifies himself by fasting and solitude, who lives ‘in an inner world of determination and silence’ – ‘football is only brutal from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquillity’ (End Zone 199).

II DeLillo’s major, assimilative works of his middle period – The Names, Libra, Mao II, Underworld – are all shaped by this uncovering of a hidden continuity between the dead and the living, the still and the moving, the minimal and the massive. As The Names turns around the discovery that a willed death lies at the junction between names and the things they name – at the place where language and being are knotted

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together – so all of these novels trace a deathly seam running through post-war global history, the far streak of morbidity that it is the task of DeLillo’s aesthetics to unearth, so that we can see that it is non-being that powers the most urgent and brutal acts of being. The whirl of history, its chaotic force, its variousness, its carelessness, DeLillo suggests in Libra, in Underworld, has at its centre a lifted, suspended emptiness that is the real substance both of history and of language, the disappearing stuff that binds word to thing, the saying to the said. In Libra, it is the word ‘whirl’ itself that captures this binding force, this knotting together which is also an unknotting. Libra emerges, in its entirety, from a historical coincidence that turns around that word – ‘whirl’. In 1963, the year of his assassination, John F. Kennedy took to carrying with him, on a slip of paper in his wallet, some lines from Shakespeare’s play King John – in which Blanche expresses her fear that opposing political forces will destroy her, that they will ‘whirl asunder and dismember me’ (Shakespeare 410). DeLillo’s narrative recovers this detail, as it intricately plots Kennedy’s ineluctable path towards the assassination. As he heads in his motorcade up Elm on 22 November – as he is driven by the unstoppable convergence of historical forces to the moment that breaks the back, as DeLillo puts it, of the American century – DeLillo’s Kennedy remembers the line from Shakespeare. ‘For weeks’, Kennedy thinks, ‘he’d carried a slip of paper with scribbled lines of some bloody Shakespearian ruin. They whirl asunder and dismember me’ (Libra 393). Kennedy thinks of this whirl as he heads towards his death, and it is one of the many balanced elements of this finely balanced novel (the word libra deriving from the Latin for balance) that Kennedy’s Shakespearean whirling reappears as Lee Harvey Oswald contemplates his own death. In the ‘Historic Diary’ in which he records his political radicalisation (and which becomes evidence of Oswald’s guilt in the Warren Commission report on the assassination), Oswald gives a painfully dyslexic account of the evening in 1959 on which he attempted suicide. Marooned in a Moscow hotel room, unable to enter into the weighty historical role he had envisaged for himself, Oswald writes, at 7 p.m. in the evening of 21 October, ‘I decide to end it. Soak rist in cold water to numb the pain’ (151). ‘I slash my left wrist’, he writes, and then DeLillo’s narrator imagines the scene. ‘The first line of blood came seeping out’, the narrator says, ‘droplets running down in sequence from the careful slit’, before the narrative switches back to Oswald’s voice, to his own account recorded in the Historic Diary: ‘somewhere, a violin plays, as I watch my life whirl away’. ‘I think to myself’, Oswald writes, ‘How easy to die’ (152). Libra, like Underworld, is caught in the vortex of this historical whirling, producing an extraordinary sense of its power, its capacity to draw people and things into its eddy, while also discovering, at the heart of the turning gyre, a kind of vanishing, a kind of lifted non-being. Oswald reflects, early in the novel, on the power of history, what he calls the ‘whirl of time’; and his conviction that he is destined to become part of that history, to fulfil a revolutionary destiny, is part of that whirling motion. He believes that the ‘whirl of time’ is ‘the true life inside him’ (46). But, of course, that centrifugal whirl does not take him to his own historical becoming, the true life inside him, but to the emptiness that lies at the heart of DeLillo’s novel, the crux between the balanced halves of which the novel is made. The novel stages a meeting, in its interleaved chapters, between Oswald’s arduous, misspelled passage through life – his struggle to become historical – and the terms in which the conspirators, the architects of the assassination, set him up to be the patsy, the lone gunman responsible for Kennedy’s death. As the

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novel draws to its extraordinary climax, in which Oswald’s sections meet with the conspirators’ sections in the heat and light of Texas on 22 November, the novel enters into this empty space, this deathly space that underlies history, but that does not become itself historically palpable. This is the withdrawn moment of Oswald’s death – the whirl of time inside him becoming the twisted round of his mouth as the bullet enters his body from Jack Ruby’s gun, and he says ‘“Oh” or “no”’ (446). Lying in an ambulance, as his life whirls away, he watches himself die on the television news, in the footage that is repeated, again and again and again (‘he could see himself shot’, he thinks, ‘as the camera caught it’). Death is captured here on film, in slow motion, as Kennedy’s own death is captured in the Zapruder film (in what DeLillo calls its ‘six point nine seconds of heat and light’ [15]), and as Eric Packer’s death is held proleptically ‘inside the crystal of his watch’ in DeLillo’s much later novel Cosmopolis (209). The Zapruder film – the jumpy home movie, uncanny in its auratic brilliance – shows Kennedy in the yellow sunshine rounding the corner of Elm in his limo, lifting his elbow as he is shot once, before a second shot bursts open his head, red brains appearing suddenly like a magician’s bunch of flowers. The stretch of laden footage, summoned from nothing by the remotest chance, a man standing on a street with a movie camera long before such things were routine, runs through Libra like a twisty ribbon, as it runs, too, through Underworld. If Kennedy’s death breaks the back of the American century, then the Zapruder film is the flimsy tie that holds the broken halves of time together. Slow motion, the stilled movement of the film, frame by frame, allows us to reach into what DeLillo calls, in Great Jones Street, the ‘unstuck components’ of the moment (121) – allowing us, as Nicholas Branch puts it in Libra, to ‘separate the elements of each crowded second’ (15). The vastness of Underworld, its capacity to gather together the historical mass of half a century of American power, rests on that thin ribbon of film. Death is contained there, preserved in the crystal throes of its occurring. But if this is so, what Libra tells us, what Underworld tells us, is that the death that inhabits fiction, that inhabits film – the death that powers history in all its weight and power – remains unincorporable, unsayable, the thinnest wisp of non-being threaded through heavily gathered time. As Klara Sax thinks, in Underworld, the Zapruder film ‘seemed to advance some argument about the nature of film itself’: The progress of the car down Elm Street, the movement of the film through the camera body, some sharable darkness – this was a death that seemed to rise from the streamy debris of the deep mind, it came from some night of the mind, there was some trick of film emulsion that showed the ghost of consciousness. Or so she thought to wonder. She thought to wonder if this home movie was some crude living likeness of the mind’s own technology, the sort of death plot that runs in the mind, because it seemed so familiar, the footage did – it seemed a thing we might see, not see but know, a model of the nights where we are intimate with our own dying. (496)

III Zapruder’s film, DeLillo’s fiction; they both make darkness sharable, giving a lit form to the night of the mind. They show us the spirit withdrawn, as Richardson puts it, within the body it operates. But the cost of this revelation is the recognition that such

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lucidity, such articulacy, is not the overcoming of that silence that falls over the desert in End Zone, but an element of it. The eloquence of Underworld rests not on the eradication of the unknown, but on its preservation – on the novel’s capacity to merge the eloquent with the withheld, the said with the unsaid (‘the withheld work of art’, Scott says in Mao II, ‘is the only eloquence left’ [67]). The scale of these middle works, their expressive capacity, arises from that junction that DeLillo finds in End Zone between minima and maxima, between violence and tenderness. Their novel bodies grow fat on their ascetism, as the football player Anatole Bloomberg, in End Zone, thinks of weight-gain as a kind of monasticism (‘to weigh three hundred pounds’, Harkness says. ‘What devout vulgarity. It seemed a worthwhile goal for prospective saints and flagellants. The new ascetism’ [49]). Bloomberg thinks of himself as ‘overwritten prose’, a swelling of language that seems to him to be the ‘opposite of death’ (49); but at the heart of End Zone, at the heart of Underworld, is the knowledge that beneath the heft of the prose there is a dying starveling, a version of Franz Kafka’s Hunger Artist who feels that there are ‘no limits to his capacity for fasting’, who feels that his art of starving is a ‘performance beyond human imagination’ (Kafka 292). It is in obeisance to such an art that Harkness’s girlfriend, Myrna, sets out to starve herself in End Zone, and that Harkness himself ends the novel on hunger strike (‘In the end they had to carry me to the infirmary and feed me through plastic tubes’ [242]). And it is a simple, nearly inevitable expression of its underlying minimalism that DeLillo’s prose, after the extravagance of Underworld, should reveal its naked form, the bare bones that have lain always beneath the prosy flesh. In The Body Artist, the first novel that DeLillo completed after Underworld, one can see that the urge to denude, the will to expose the framework of the imagination, is caught in that same current, that same whirling eddy that turns in Libra. As the ‘whirl of time’, for Oswald, is the ‘true life inside him’, so Lauren, the protagonist of The Body Artist, wants to feel ‘the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was’ (124). But whatever shift occurs in DeLillo’s writing after Underworld, whatever change takes place in the metabolic rate of his thinking, this whirling, flowing time no longer runs underground, in the underworld, but rather comes to the surface, running in plain sight, like the road that Lauren drives along near the opening of the novel, the highway that ‘lifts to a drained sky’, that ‘runs in a white hum’, cars ‘coasting smoothly on the level surface’ (31). Here, in these works that seem barely to happen – not only The Body Artist, but Point Omega, ‘The Starveling’, The Silence – there is a peculiarly intense access to the structure of fictional being, one which threatens, at all times, to stall that being itself, as if the viability of imagined life relies on disguise, on the burying of its conditions of possibility within the form of its own embodiment. ‘Time seems to pass’ (7) the narrator says at the opening of The Body Artist, as if it is possible to set fictional time in motion and to reveal its dynamics, the mechanics of its ‘seeming’, at the same time, in the same instant. ‘Everything is slow and hazy and drained and it all happens around the word seem’ (31). But the doubled stuttering of these works, their tripping over themselves (see how that phrase, ‘Time seems to pass’, doubles and divides, grows and shrinks) suggests that this compulsion towards revelation leads also to a kind of erasure, a kind of elusive non-encounter with the vanishing point of imaginative possibility, that omega

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point where the structure of visibility, of ‘seeming’, meets with the invisibility that powers it. The slow motion that runs through DeLillo’s oeuvre – from Harkness watching Terry Madden’s corpse roll in slow motion towards him, ‘slowly as possible, closer, slower, ever nearer’ (End Zone 32), to Klara Sax watching the head shot at Zapruder frame 313, ‘the terrible mist of tissue and skull, so massively slow’ (Underworld 496) – returns here, becoming the medium itself of late fictional life. In The Body Artist, it takes the form of a falling paperclip (‘The paperclip hits the floor with an end-to-end bounce, faint and weightless, a sound for which there is no imitative word’ [89]) or of a suspended, turning leaf (‘She saw a twirling leaf just outside the window. Just the leaf in midair, turning’ [41]). In Point Omega it takes the form of the art installation that opens and closes this agonisingly brief novel – Hitchcock’s Psycho super-slowed so that it runs over twenty-four hours. The stretched film opens time itself to view, the watching man thinks. ‘Anthony Perkins’ head swiveling over time on his long thin neck’ (Point Omega 6). ‘The slightest camera movement was a profound shift in space and time’ (5), ‘the actor’s eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets’ (9). It seems to Klara Sax, in the very heaving midst of Underworld, that the slowed Zapruder footage brings film into some coincidence with itself – ‘the movie’, she says, ‘was completely steeped in being what it was, in being film’ (Underworld 495) – and Point Omega is set in this time, time that is steeped in itself, at once full and empty. ‘What he was watching’, the man thinks, ‘seemed pure film, pure time’ (Point Omega 7). This is film absorbing itself, this is film starving itself into life. As the fanatical cinemagoer in DeLillo’s short story ‘The Starveling’ puts it, this is ‘being at the movies to be at the movies’ (188). All of these late works share this uncovered quality, this difficult sense that the hidden principle, the death drive, has lost its disguise, so that it has, as Lauren puts it, ‘no protective surface’ (The Body Artist 90). The junction between the starved and the obese that is first established in End Zone, and that runs through DeLillo’s major phase, has here been laid bare, in a way that challenges the very principles of imagining, that threatens the balance between the said and the unsaid upon which all fictional worlds rest. Here, the principle that powers DeLillo’s aesthetic, that makes of deathly withdrawal the possibility of a new kind of imagining, a new kind of being, is brought out of hiding. In the clear light of these attenuated works, as in the quick light of a strong bright day after a storm, it is as if, Lauren thinks, ‘time is something like itself, sheer and bare and empty of shelter’ (The Body Artist 92). And if one can sense the afterlife of End Zone in all of these late, minor-scale works, then it is in the short, elusive tale ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’ that the feeling of déjà lu is most pronounced. In this story, about a student marooned in a remote university campus, DeLillo painstakingly recreates the elements of End Zone, reanimating them, as if to ask what the intervening four decades, and thousands of pages, have done to its exploration of death in prose, death as tender experience. Gary Harkness reappears here as Robby, Myrna as Robby’s fellow student Jenna. Gary’s various buddies – Billy Mast, Bobby Iselin, Bing Jackman, Anatole Bloomberg – are condensed into Robby’s friend, Todd (death, of course). The quirky, out-of-focus professors of End Zone (Alan Zapalac, Major Staley, the [aptly] unnamed tutor of the course on ‘The Untellable’) reappear here in the figure of a deranged philosophy professor, teaching Wittgensteinian logic, who goes by the name of Ilgauskas. And, as DeLillo reassembles the cast, he approaches the same question

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that drives End Zone – what is the junction between words and things? How does fiction gain access to the peculiarly vanishing space of that junction? How can it make of the death that lies there a kind of life? For Robby, in ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’, this question turns around the tension between naming a thing and inventing it, between language that refers to the world and language that creates it – the tension that is there, in End Zone, in the game of Bang You’re Dead. ‘Your hand assumes the shape of a gun’, Harkness says. ‘You try to reproduce, in your own way, the sound of a gun being fired. Or you simply shout these words: Bang, you’re dead’ (31–2). The words become the thing – the word ‘bang’ becomes the shot, the bullet passing through the body, as, in DeLillo’s late play The Word for Snow, the word for snow becomes the snow. Similarly, for Robby, his obsessive need to name the landscape he is in, ‘to register what was out there’ (‘Midnight’ 122), to observe, to count, to point, shades always into his desire to invent it, to ‘recreate’ it, to ‘let the words be the facts’ (122). Standing with Todd in the one-street town in which his college is located, he watches a freight train rattling past, namelessly en route from somewhere to somewhere else, servicing some unknown need, obeying some obscure law of supply and demand, and he feels the urge to count, to check off the boxcars as they clatter by. ‘It seemed the kind of history that passes mostly unobserved’, Robby thinks, ‘a diesel engine and a hundred boxcars rolling over remote country’ (119), and so his vocation is to categorise, to itemise, to count the cars and to compare his figure with Todd’s. Or standing on the town’s single street, Robby hears ‘aircraft from the military base’. ‘I turned and looked up and they were there and gone, three fighter jets wheeling to the east’ (126). There are forces at work, criss-crossing the land and the air, forces that hold this lost tract of upstate land within a network of real economic and military relations, within what Ilgauskas calls a ‘causal nexus’ (122). Robby and Todd together count the cars, name the flora and fauna, competing with each other for accuracy, consistency, plausibility, so they might make this stretch of ground, this space and this time, appear real. ‘Feel the air’, Todd says to Robby. ‘I say minus nine Celsius’ (128). ‘I gestured toward a pair of large trees’, Robby says, ‘bare branches forking up fifty or sixty feet. “Norway maple”, I said’ (125). But even as Robby and Todd compete to name, to inventory, they know, really, that they’re playing, they’re inventing, that this is a game of Bang You’re Dead. ‘I was pretty sure the trees were maples’, Robby says. ‘Norway was another matter. I could have said red maple or sugar maple but Norway sounded stronger, more informed’ (126). All of Robby’s and Todd’s acts of naming shade, in this way, into acts of imagining. ‘The Norway maples didn’t have to be Norway’, Robby concedes. ‘We worked spontaneous variations on the source material of our surroundings’ (138). But it is in their response to an old man they encounter in the street one aimless day that this vacillation touches, with a peculiar intensity, on some uncovered ground, the ground that it is the gift of DeLillo’s late, fleeting fictions to reveal, to dwell in. ‘This was the day we saw the man in the hooded coat’, Robby says. ‘He was well ahead of us and walking slowly, hands clasped behind his back, a smallish figure, turning now to enter a residential street and fade from view’ (120). They argue about the man, about who he is, what kind of coat he is wearing, playing their game of description and embellishment. Was he wearing a loden coat, or an anorak, or a parka? ‘A loden coat doesn’t have a hood’, Todd says, ‘it’s a parka or an anorak.’ Todd goes for anorak, because ‘Anorak

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is an Inuit word’ (120), but Robby (a partisan of the parka) ‘uses his Inuit lore against him’ (121). ‘Consider the origin of the word’, Robby says, ‘wouldn’t an Inuit use fur to line his hood?’ The game goes on in this way, growing, enlarging. Was the hood furlined? Did the coat have toggles? What are toggles? Over the course of the story, the boys’ fascination with the man grows into an obsession, an obsession that branches in two directions. In one direction, they are led to search for the man, to find him again, so they can match their idea of him to the man himself. ‘We went walking but did not see the man’, Robby says (139). ‘I walked up and down the street where he lived and it seemed only fitting that he was not to be seen’ (135). ‘We walked the same streets, obsessively’ (141) ‘trying to induce an appearance through joint force of will’ (140). In the other direction, their obsession turns not around the man himself, but around the idea they have of him, an idea that floats free, that grows in word and thought, so the man becomes a fiction of the boys’ devising. ‘Think of the hat he’d be wearing if he was wearing a hat’, Robby says. Todd resists the idea; ‘He’s wearing a hood’, he says. But the hat has been proposed, and neither can resist it. It is Todd who gives in: There’s only one kind of hat he could conceivably wear. A hat with an earflap that reaches from one ear around the back of the head to the other ear. An old soiled cap. A peaked cap with a flap for the ears. (128) They work up the details of his appearance, and they set about making for him a biography, situating him in the landscape, and in the broader global context. Then, during a cold, sleepless night, Robby has an idea, an inspiration. The old man, living in this tiny placeless town, is Ilgauskas senior. He is the father of their deranged philosophy professor. Robby has learned that Ilgauskas junior is a reader of Russian literature, as Jenna saw him in town, sitting in a diner, reading Dostoevsky (he reads Dostoevsky ‘day and night’, Ilgauskas tells Jenna, and she replies with the line from Frank O’Hara that provides the title of the story: ‘like midnight in Dostoevsky’ (‘Midnight’ 34; O’Hara 197). Robby builds a theory from the detail, Ilgauskas reading Dostoevsky day and night. He speculates that Ilgauskas reads Dostoevsky in the original, which means he’s Russian. So the old man is Russian too, a Russian man, living in far exile with his son, after the death of his wife back home. Todd pushes back against the idea. ‘Russia was too big for the man’, he says. ‘He’d get lost in the vast expanse. Think about Romania. Bulgaria. Better yet, Albania. Is he a Christian, a Muslim? With Albania, he said, we deepen the cultural context’ (140). But Robby is emphatic. ‘They’re Russian. Father and son’ (137). As the story continues, the gap between these two branches of inquiry grows wider. The non-appearance of the man allows him to fall into Robby’s fiction, and allows that fiction to wind itself into the figure of their teacher Ilgauskas, and whatever dismantled philosophy he preaches in his cellblock classroom. Ilgauskas junior, son of the missing man, speaks to his students of a kind of language, a kind of world, which tends towards the invisible – which tends towards the untellable, that course taken by Billy Mast in End Zone, whose reading list comprises of Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy (a poem dedicated, itself, to the texture of the unthinkable, the untellable). ‘Imagine a surface of no color whatsoever’ (‘Midnight’ 131), Ilgauskas says to his students, opening the classroom to some untold, unpictured, uncoloured dimension, one that resists Ilguaskas’s demand that the students’ imagine it. ‘Can we

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ask this question?’, Ilgauskas asks, and the students wait obediently for the question to come, before they realise that the question is the question – ‘could he ask the question he was asking’ (124). The question is opening on to the vanishing, self-obliterating space of questioning itself, the fleeting possibility of thinking or imagining, the space into which the students themselves are drawn. He ‘makes us feel’, Robby thinks, ‘that we were becoming what he saw before him, an amorphous entity’ (131). He makes them understand that ‘we were basically stateless’ (131). In Ilgauskas junior’s gaze, Robby, Todd, Jenna tumble into the non-space of fiction, the deathly space in which they share their being with Gary Harkness, with Bloomberg and Myrna, the space of Rilke’s Elegy, in which ‘Things’ are ‘better unsayable’ (Rilke 171), in which the ‘Things we might experience are falling away’ (171). This is a world, Rilke writes, whose ‘desire’ is ‘to arise within us, / invisible’, whose ‘dream’ is ‘that of being / some day, invisible’ (173) – a world of no colour whatsoever. And this is the world, too, into which the man that Robbie and Todd have imagined vanishes, a world that is made up fiction and of death – that lies in the tender place where fiction and death meet. ‘Do we make him dead?’, Robby asks himself, as he fails to match the fiction he has made to the man himself, walking in the street in his hooded parka. ‘Do we keep assembling the life posthumously? Or do we end it now, tomorrow, the next day?’ (‘Midnight’ 141). To stand in the presence of the missing man – the man who wears his cap with the earflaps, and lives in exile with his son; the man, Robby thinks, who has soup for lunch every day, ‘homemade, and he holds his big spoon above the soup bowl, the old-country bowl’ – is to stand in the stateless place of an unmade fiction. It is to ‘stand quietly in the presence of the dead’ (142). In becoming fiction, the man enters into the death that Harkness feels within him, as he lies on the library steps. But the story has a final twist, a tingling climax, in which the uncovered quality of DeLillo’s late work reveals itself, in which death rises from the night of the mind into the strong light. Robby is standing in the presence of the dead, he thinks, and then, ‘minutes later, approaching the railroad tracks, we saw him’ (142). ‘It was enormously satisfying, it was thrilling, to see the thing happen’: It was an interval taut with detail. We were close enough to see the sunken face, heavily stubbled, pinched in around the mouth, jaw sagging. He saw us now and paused, one hand gripping a button at the front of his coat. He looked haunted inside the shabby hood. He looked misplaced, isolated, someone who could easily be the man we were in the process of imagining. (142–3) What kind of meeting is this? What kind of confirmation? The man that Robby is in the process of imagining, who comes from some far-flung place in the east – the east to which those military jets were heading when they went wheeling overhead – matches up with the man who we see before us, the man with the stubble and the haunted look. Fiction realises itself, death becomes a picture. The man, as Rilke puts it, ‘dies into a Thing – serenely / slipping far past the violin’ (173) (the violin, perhaps, that Oswald hears as he watches his life whirl away). DeLillo’s fiction, ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’, holds Robby’s fiction within it, making it real, making statelessness part of the world, part of the causal nexus in which freight trains rumble by, passing from somewhere to somewhere else, and fighter jets criss-cross the sky. But in doing so, in holding this

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fiction within itself, in bringing man and idea into an edgeless contact, it summons death into a continuity with life in a way that is almost skinless, so uncovered is it, so bare of shelter. ‘Look, I live’, Rilke’s poet says, in the stunning climax to the Ninth Duino Elegy. ‘I live’: But on what? Neither childhood nor future, for neither diminishes . . . Superabundant being wells up in my heart. (173) Superabundant being has always welled up, in DeLillo, from a spring of non-being. The sayable has always arisen from the unsayable. Death has always powered his acts of fictional life. But here, in DeLillo’s late prose, being and non-being, the visible and the invisible, come together, wriggling on the word surface itself. Can I ask this question? The question becomes itself, as film becomes itself in the slowed rendition of Hitchcock’s Psycho. The underside is on the surface as we look at the man’s stubbly face, fiction and reality both in the same frame, one becoming the other, a living likeness of the mind’s own technology. It is an element of DeLillo’s late style that this should happen, that the oppositions that have powered his thinking should turn out to be identical; but it his response, too, to the world that we look upon now, a world in which the relation between the living and the dead has become estranged, a world in which we can no longer understand how our fictions become real. DeLillo is trying to see a world where being is distributed differently in things, and we have to learn to see with him, even if it involves a derangement in our seeing. Even if it’s too unreal. Even if it’s un-everything.

Works Cited Ashman, Nathan. ‘“Death Itself Shall Be Deathless”: Transrationalism and Eternal Death in Don DeLillo’s Zero K.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 60, no. 3, 2019, pp. 300–10. Augustine. Concerning the City of God against the Pagans. 1467. Translated by Henry Bettenson. Penguin, 2003. Bonca, Cornel. ‘Being, Time and Death in DeLillo’s The Body Artist.’ Pacific Cast Philology, 37, 2002, pp. 58–68. Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. University of Georgia Press, 2003. DeLillo, Don. Americana. 1971. Penguin, 1990. ——. The Body Artist. Scribner, 2001. ——. Cosmopolis. Picador, 2003. ——. End Zone. 1972. Penguin, 1986. ——. Great Jones Street. 1973. Picador, 1992. ——. Libra. 1988. Penguin, 1989. ——. Mao II. 1991. Vintage, 1992. ——. ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky.’ 2009. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. Picador, 2011. ——. The Names. 1982. Picador, 1999. ——. The Silence. Scribner, 2020. ——. ‘The Starveling.’ 2011. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. Picador, 2011. ——. Underworld. Picador, 1997. ——. The Word for Snow. Karma, 2014. ——. Zero K. Picador, 2016.

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Hungerford, Amy. ‘Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass.’ Contemporary Literature, 47, no. 3, 2006, pp. 343–80. Kafka, Franz. ‘A Hunger Artist.’ 1922. The Complete Stories, edited by Nahum N. Glatzer, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. Vintage, 2005, pp. 289–99. O’Hara, Frank. ‘Meditations in an Emergency.’ The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen. University of California Press, 1995. Richardson, Dorothy. ‘Slow Motion.’ Close Up, edited by James Donald et al. Cassell, 1998, pp. 182–3. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Selected Poems. Translated by Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland. Oxford University Press, 2011. Shakespeare, William. King John. The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford University Press, 1988.

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2 The Art of Feeling Alexandra Kingston-Reese

The Swirl

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on DeLillo is the poet of entropy.’ This was the assessment of fellow novelist John Banville in his review of DeLillo’s 2010 novel Point Omega for the New York Review of Books. ‘The world he sets up in his fictions’, he continued, ‘is a tightly wound machine gradually running down, and in it all action is a kind of lapsing drift.’ Even in those ‘immense works such as Libra (1988) or Underworld (1997) or Mao II (1991), with plots as intricate and murky as the New York sewer system, stories do not so much unfold as become blurred; everything grows vague, attenuated, detached’ (Banville). Though Banville does not refer specifically to emotion here, this assessment encapsulates the affective complexity of DeLillo’s novels. Sharply distinct affective modes are hard to locate, and readers are instead left in affective confusion. Emotional states are consistently denied, reduced, minimised, or undermined. This we see playing out in the opening scene of one of his earlier novels, Players (1977), where one affective judgement about a live score accompanying a silent film – ‘the simple innocence of this music’ – works to ‘undermine’ a grander, more intense state: ‘the photogenic terror, reducing it to an empty swirl’ (8). Such swirls of affect disperse the hope of clearly defined feeling to mere atmosphere, the murky haze in which, in scholar Teresa Brennan’s formulation, affect is transmitted. Affect transmits between us as lightly as a fresh summer breeze or with the turbulence of a building storm, in which, in Brennan’s words, ‘the environment literally gets into the individual’ (1). Socially produced and socially influenced, ‘the transmission is also responsible for bodily changes’, which, ‘if only for an instant, alters the biochemistry and neurology of the subject’ (1). We might map the affective tension and interaction of a text as we would meteorological systems, with bars of pressure shifting, reducing, or increasing. Or, indeed, to use DeLillo’s imagery from Players, like the internal mechanisms of an aeroplane, whose ‘many systems of mechanical and electric components’ exert a fine ‘management of stresses, power units, consolidated thrust and energy it has taken to reduce the [. . .] sensation of flight’ (3). In other words, forces both large and minuscule have enough impact to produce affective nuance. The first scene of Players seems to play out a lesson on how to read atmosphere; though it opens on a plane, where there is, ironically, very little of it. As the lights dim in the cabin before the movie begins, the scene’s players are thrust into a darkness that is ‘enough to intensify the implied bond which, more than distance, speed or destination, makes each journey something of a mystery to be worked out by the combined

‘

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talents of the travelers, all gradually aware of each other’s code of recognition’ (3). Reading this ‘implied bond’ in Brennan’s terms would be to call this the affective contract of social interaction, that which produces and influences atmosphere. The spell of tension remains as the plane’s ‘players’ move in orchestrated motion, and is only ended when the air steward disrupts the scene to serve drinks. The spell is broken and ‘there is a sense of feelings turning inward’ (10). The ‘implied bond’ here is only strengthened by the anonymity of the ‘players’. No one is named, ‘[f]our men, three women’ are simply counted. In a move that has come to be typically DeLillo – and some would argue, typically postmodern – such feelings sit always outside the personal.1 The push to depersonalise begins in the very first line: ‘Someone says: “Motels. I like motels. I wish I owned a chain, worldwide. I’d like to go from one to another to another. There’s something self-realizing about that”’ (3). Self-realising to whom? Which body is speaking? Even without the social markers of personality, the ‘social in origin but biological and physical in effect’ (Brennan 3) quality of affect comes to full fruition. Affect can only swirl here if there are no bodies to which it can stick. This affective depersonalisation is mirrored in a formal flattening, where the different characters – and indeed, different realities – of the scene are levelled into a single ‘frame of arrested motion’ (3). In part, this is suggested by the narrator’s use of a thirdperson plural to describe the characters (one, for instance, is ‘indifferently dressed. We know nothing else about her’ [Players 4]). Crucially, the narrator also fails to mark shifts in focus from the scenes playing out in the film and the scenes of ‘real life’ in the cabin, gliding in the same paragraph from ‘the people in the piano bar’ to the ‘early light, some haze, surfaces burnished with moisture’ of the film. This is the formal corollary of the novel’s affective swirl. And much like the novel’s affective functions, this is framed in terms of art – or, more specifically here, in terms of film. The narrator notes that ‘it’s worthwhile to point out that the characters and landscape are being seen through the special viewpoint of a long lens’ (6). This camera-eye perspective both emphasises the depersonalisation (it is hard to distinguish between individuals seen at a distance, after all) and creates a flattening between planes within the plane. The narrator calls this ‘a lesson in the intimacy of distance’ – a mingling that occurs when people and scenes are reduced and start to blur. I submit that the affective turn, dated to the mid-1990s and sweeping a vast array of interlocking fields, requires us to look again at the emotion generated and stilted in DeLillo’s fiction. Affect theory seems to have passed DeLillo studies by, with much of the work published on postmodernist and contemporary literature and affect, such as Rachel Greenwald Smith’s Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (2015), choosing cultural objects other than DeLillo’s. This is not to say that DeLillo studies is not concerned with emotion, feeling and affect – it is – but that the two fields have largely remained separated.2 In what follows, I outline how postmodernism’s complicated relationship with affect is often misunderstood, via the most reliable way we can read affect in DeLillo’s novels: somatic displays and tonal shifts often forgotten about in work on emotion all too ready to veer towards the thematic. Under this method, I continue to read Players alongside Point Omega, dovetailing between an

 1  2

See Rachel Greenwald Smith on impersonal feelings (Affect). See, for example, Houser.

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early and a more recent work often categorised as possessing a ‘late style’.3 Together, Players and Point Omega are exemplary of why Andrew Hoberek argued that DeLillo was ‘central to American literary history of the late 1970s and 1980s’ and why he continues to be now (Hoberek 121). Much like Joan Didion’s, DeLillo’s early work ‘bridge[d] the explicitly political and historical interests of the high postmodernists with the ostensibly apolitical domesticity of the minimalists’ (Hoberek 121). While Players skirts the banal politics of terrorism and the ‘compromise aesthetics’, to use a term from Greenwald Smith (‘Six Propositions’), of corporate city living, Point Omega’s apoliticism intensifies the kind of domesticity exemplified in his early novels. Both novels here show how DeLillo’s quintessential ‘formal strategy’ – ‘the exploration of concrete things as sites of meaning’ – is ultimately affective (Hoberek 121). My aim is not to diagnose his characters’, and novels’, specific affective states but to show how, despite traversing a large chronological gap, we might be able to draw a singular affective line across DeLillo’s oeuvre. By looking at gesture, expression and tone, we find that negative affects – such as detachment, attenuation, withdrawal, inertia, drift and even those associated with entropy – are gathered around a singular affective function: minimalism. These somatic displays, I argue, don’t just service plots concerned with trauma, loss and fear, but have significant aesthetic, formal and stylistic implications within DeLillo’s oeuvre; implications that, when lost for what to say about DeLillo and emotion, can offer us some answers.

Tone For readers familiar with Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989), Banville’s description of DeLillo’s negatively charged novelistic atmospheres evokes what Jameson famously called postmodern culture’s ‘waning of affect’ (61). Much attention has been given to this diagnosis, which accounted for a rising disassociation with the styles and ontological depths of high modernity. Taken out of context, which it so often is, Jameson’s diagnosis might suggest that postmodernity extinguished feeling altogether. There was, as he himself argued, a preference for surfaces evinced in a new ‘flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense – perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms’ (60). One could argue that feeling is by its very nature deep – occurring in the depths of the mind before surfacing in our expressions, speech and gestures – and in such a world, wherein depth is expunged, so too is affect. But despite this version of misreading, postmodern culture, in Jameson’s argument, saw affect succumb to two effects born from a liberation of the singular subject (what he called ‘the bourgeois ego’; or from another point of view, an attenuation of subjectivity). The first, a process of diminishment: if ‘there is no longer a self present to do the feeling’ then feeling itself becomes weakened. And the second: a process of abstraction that saw emotion translate to ‘emotional ground tone’ (58). Abstracted from the subject, feeling was no longer the feeling we recognised; it swirled nameless, detached from the cultural forms, causes and responses with which emotion can be identified. Emotions became

 3

First used by Adorno on Beethoven, ‘late style’ was adopted by Edward Said in On Late Style (2008).

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‘intensities’, ‘now free-floating and impersonal . . . tend[ing] to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria’ (64). Taken together, intensity, atmosphere and impersonality all impact a cultural object’s ability to communicate its affective power. For a literary text, affective power is transmitted in large part via tone. As Sianne Ngai argued in Ugly Feelings (2005), tone is a text’s ‘global or organizing affect, its general disposition or orientation toward its audience and the world’ (28). Working against the concurrent divorce of tone and emotion and elision of tone and attitude in the New Critics’ formulation of feeling – as I. A. Richards argued in Practical Criticism (1929), tone is merely a speaker’s ‘attitude to his listener’ – Ngai argues for a theory of literary tone less utilitarianly invested in the implied reader, and more formally integral to literary aesthetics. Tone is both global, in the way it allows cultural historians to ‘invoke . . . the concept of collective mood . . . (“Cold War paranoia” and so forth)’, but it is also rigidly specific, ‘pos[ing] the additional difficulty of aesthetic immanence, of being something that seems ‘attached’ to an artwork’ (Ngai 43). As ‘the affective “comportment” of a literary text’, to use Ngai’s terms, tone performs a remarkably more tricky affective dance than we might expect (43). Literature’s tonal cues thus extend far beyond a text’s ability to construct rounded characters with deep interiority, or, as I will argue shortly, its reliance on crispness in patterns of speech. In her assessment of collective moods, Ngai draws attention to Jameson’s description of postmodernity’s new-found ‘euphoria’. In his argument, the shiny surfaces of postmodern city architecture come to represent the affective frisson of technological advancement, bringing back the sublime of enlightenment philosophy: Now we need to complete this exploratory account of postmodernist space and time with a final analysis of that euphoria or those intensities which seem so often to characterize the newer cultural experience. Let us stress again the enormity of a transition which leaves behind it the desolation of Hopper’s buildings or the stark Midwest syntax of Sheeler’s forms, replacing them with the extraordinary surfaces of the photorealist cityscape, where even the automobile wrecks gleam with some new halluncinatory splendour. The exhilaration of these new surfaces is all the more paradoxical in that their essential content – the city itself – has deteriorated or disintegrated to a degree surely still inconceivable in the early years of the 20th century, let alone in the previous era. How urban squalor can be a delight to the eyes, when expressed in commodification, and how an unparalleled quantum leap in the alienation of daily life in the city can now be experienced in the form of a strange new hallucinatory exhilaration – these are some of the questions that confront us in this moment of our inquiry. (Jameson 76) Reconciling the abstract with the specific is always the dilemma of theory, but it is also the dilemma of tone. Here, Jameson telescopes between the newer architectural styles (possessing both a new content and new tone) and a general feeling of the city produced by these new styles. Walking around the postmodern city makes him giddy; he feels it in the air. In Players, the players feel it too: Pammy looks out from her office in the World Trade Center, where she works as a consultant for the Grief Management Council, to ‘the landfill, the piers, the western extremities of anonymous streets’ to observe ‘even at this height . . . the sweltering intensity, a slow roiling force. It moved

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up into the air, souls of the living’ (24). The odd location for the Grief Management Council, which ‘served the community to understand and assimilate grief’, doesn’t go unremarked. Where ‘regional offices were small and located in squat buildings’, ‘[i]t was her original view that the World Trade Centre was an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this’ – presumably not just because it also serves as the home of market manipulation and financial wealth but because of its shiny surfaces. ‘But she changed her mind as time passed.’ In a jarring moment of prophecy, she remarks: ‘Where else would you stack all this grief?’ (18) Though my intent is not to show a one-to-one relation between Jameson’s euphoric postmodern city and Players, the fact that not all interactions with the city map on to this sweltering scintillating vision is significant. Elsewhere, Pammy does not feel euphoria but what we could categorise as the opposite: Of late she’d found herself professing to be bored fairly often. She knew it was a shield for deeper feelings. Not wishing to express conventional outrage she said again and again, ‘How boring, so boring, I’m bored.’ Pornography bored her. Talk of violence made her sigh. Things in the street, just things she saw in her day to day, forced her into subtle evasions, her body would automatically relax. To feel this slackening take place was to complete another weary detour. (51) DeLillo’s emphasis here reveals an agency latent in apparently passive boredom. These responses are ‘evasions’, ‘detours’. In other words, Pammy is rerouting her affective response through habitual gestures. But is this a defensive mechanism – a ‘shield’ – as Pammy herself believes? Or is she over-stimulated, so overcome with euphoria that her affective senses shut down to the most minimal of responses? Historically, the sublime has been categorised by the inability to name the intense feelings produced by a quintessential mixture of terror and pleasure. Pornography and violence might both give rise to this mix, depending on the subject perceiving them; with different prevailing conditions, those same subjects might also yawn at them. Crucially, rather than spiralling outwards in the expansive gesture of the sublime, Pammy’s response is to minimise. Affective minimisation is a typical response to uncomfortable emotions, and Pammy is no exception: earlier she ‘remember[s] what had been bothering her. The vague presence. Her life. She hated her life. It was a minor thing, though, a small bother. She tended to forget about it’ (32). Pammy’s boredom is a tonal dilemma for us. ‘Her life. She hated her life. It was a minor thing, though, a small bother.’ These are short sentences devoid of emotion, and if we aren’t paying attention, they also sound inconsequential. Perhaps as a result we don’t take Pammy seriously, passing off her existential reflection as merely flippant. Herein we find the tonal deviance of DeLillo’s fiction, which purposely asks us to misread the emotion of the revelation. But misreading tone causes issues when we extrapolate from the individual to formal considerations; it is especially important when affective resonance is so often given as the reason for an artwork’s aesthetic and ethical value, and when it is flattened unnecessarily, so too is the potential for broader cultural significance. Rachel Greenwald Smith has called this the ‘affective hypothesis’: ‘the belief that literature is at its most meaningful when it represents and transmits the emotional specificity of personal experience’ (Affect 1). But what happens when a text’s affects are harder to read? When its tone is flat, cold, and unwelcoming? Such a

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dilemma is common to postmodern literature, which critics have tended to characterise as all of the above. As Deborah Nelson drew attention to in Tough Enough (2019), female writers during the late twentieth century were often ‘called to account for failures of feeling’, whereas coldness for male counterparts such as Thomas Pynchon and DeLillo constituted an aesthetic choice (2).4 As Pammy’s minimal care makes clear, thin affect is not a result of personal failings on the part of the author, but a deliberate strategy implicating the reader in a process of mis- or re-interpretation. Treated as a whole, DeLillo’s fiction – and his novels in particular – often succumb to this same tonal diagnosis. They are cold because they are (like Point Omega): ‘distant, confused, catatonic’ with a ‘glacial aesthetic’ (Anderson); ‘coldly intellectual’ because they are ‘dense with cerebration but humanly thin’ (Harvey). Often, plot relies on tone alone. In Players, dialogue is not the useful ontological device that novels tend to use it for. Instead, tone compensates for plot: ‘There’s no wine, Jack. You’re free to look around.’ ‘It’s in the cab’, Ethan said. Jack said: ‘The cab.’ ‘We left it in the cab. I remember distinctly that we had it when we got in the cab and I don’t recall seeing it after that.’ ‘Because you drank it’, Pammy said. ‘Because I drank the wine in the cab.’ ‘Do I hear diet cola?’ Jack said. (Players 38) The circular nature of this exchange is not so only because it mirrors the circularity of drunk conversations. ‘[T]alking quickly’, the parties to this conversation are ‘getting laughs on intonation alone’ (38). This is a conscious choice on the part of these players – the conversation becomes a game of tone, where a real exchange of thoughts is replaced with mere tonal interplay. To be sure, tone is not just tone of voice, but here tone comes to replace content, itself wending its way to nothing. This weak exchange is built upon ‘[t]he prospect of wit’ (38) rather than the reality of it. It proceeds on gimmick; involving no work and no substance, the repetitive dialogue is empty speech, hollowed out of meaning or personality. While it is most often style that is placed in opposition to content, here it is tone. And here, it is affectlessness that causes the conversation’s contributors to become so giddy with the comedy of it. We can characterise many of DeLillo’s clipped, circular dialogues by their impersonality, but the impulse towards depersonalisation doesn’t stop there. Impersonality in affect studies tends to refer to the ability of affect to propel itself from bodies and circulate between subjects and objects in a depersonalised state. Affect’s impersonality is what allows theorists and cultural historians to study political and public affects such as depression (Ann Cvetkovitch), shame (Sara Ahmed) and, of course, euphoria (Jameson). It is a term that has also been taken up by Greenwald Smith to refer to types of feeling that do not conform to those ‘personal feelings’ that ‘are managed by

 4

As Nelson notes, ‘Mary McCarthy was “pitiless”; Simone Weil, “icy”; Diane Arbus, “clinical”; Joan Didion, “cold”; Susan Sontag, “impersonal”’ (2).

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the individual but they are augmented by connections with others’ – impersonal feelings ‘do not straightforwardly conform to a market model, because they are not easily codifiable or recognizable; they do not allow for strategic emotional associations to be made between readers and characters; and they emphasize the unpredictability of affective connections’ (Affect 2). Returning to the Grief Management Council, we can observe Players refusing to reconcile the impersonality of such an entity with the specific ‘personality’ of grief’s emotional mannerisms. ‘Somebody anticipated that people would one day crave the means to codify their emotions. A clerical structure would be needed’, we are told – implying that emotional response might exist as externalised, codifiable data. Mapped out on to the city, emotion becomes pure structure, pure surface, pure tone. No depth, no personality, required.

The Gesture All this now seems familiar, even quaint, to historians of literature, art and culture. At an aesthetic level, a flattening of affect in cultural objects and production, and an attendant tendency, that of form without content, have all become key signifiers of postmodern culture. For DeLillo, these tropes continue into later works, and even become more pronounced. Set in an unnamed museum in 2006, the opening and closing sections of Point Omega (2010) play Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) on a blank wall.5 Echoing Players’ fragmentation of the human figure, these sections see not only the alienation of the film’s form via an extreme dilation of time, but the overdetermination of gesture: The slightest camera movement was a profound shift in space and time but the camera was not moving now. Anthony Perkins is turning his head. It was like whole numbers. The man could count the gradations in the movement of Anthony Perkins’ head. Anthony Perkins turns his head in five incremental movements rather than one continuous motion. It was like bricks in a wall, clearly countable, not like the flight of an arrow or a bird. Then again it was not like or unlike anything. Anthony Perkins’ head swiveling over time on his long thin neck. (Point Omega 5–6) Across this section, DeLillo’s quintessential long sentences lose momentum, clipped to short declarative descriptions: Anthony Perkins does this, does that. We are gifted unornamented specificities – ‘five incremental movements’, ‘like bricks in a wall, clearly countable’ – with an emphasis on numerical or quantifiable data analytics rather than affective, emotive, embodied movement. What we are not gifted with is this head’s face, its expressiveness. What is the mouth doing? Where are the furrows in the skin? And the eyes – where are they glancing? Why home in on gradations of silhouetted movement, when the body is moving so slowly that expression could be dissected as well? We’re told ‘[w]hen an actor moved a muscle, when eyes blinked, it was a revelation’ (10), and yet what is revealed is never mentioned. Perhaps it was because ‘[e]very action was broken into components

 5

Though unidentified, the museum is likely MoMA, which housed an exhibition of Gordon’s work, including 24 Hour Psycho in 2006: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/76.

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so distinct from the entity that the watcher found himself isolated from every expectation’ (10). Even though we are told that the watcher felt ‘it was impossible to see too much’ – ‘[t]he less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw’ – his act of close seeing is seemingly much more remarkable than what is taken in. So, while ‘[i]t takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you’ (16), the object of this attention is drastically curtailed in what is reported in favour of long descriptions of the frame of vision. Here is a novel, in a similar fashion to one earlier in DeLillo’s career, that skims along the surface of perception ‘[t]o 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’ (6). The human body attached to this motion, disembowelled of content, is less of a concern. Where does this lack of interest in the human figure come from? Postmodernity – and its attendant art movements – heralded new ways of representing the body. Arguing that ‘it seems clear that for the newer aesthetic the representation of space itself has come to be felt as incompatible with the representation of the body’, Jameson described postmodern art as ‘radically anti-anthropomorphic’ (76). At first glance, this might seem an unusual descriptor – both for the ultrarealistic sculptures of everyday people caught in mundane actions that Jameson is describing here, and for an artwork such as 24 Hour Psycho, which also seems to focus so intently on the human form. Yet as Jameson goes on to explore in his analysis of an uncertain encounter with the uncanny humans sculpted by Duane Hanson, the very intensity and magnification of the human form has a depersonalising – even dehumanising – effect. The viewer’s initial ‘doubt and hesitation as to the breath and warmth of these polyester figures’, Jameson argues, ‘tends to return upon the real human beings moving about you in the museum, and to transform them also for the briefest instant into so many dead and flesh-coloured simulacra in their own right’ (76). In Point Omega, DeLillo uses the opening scene, with its minute observation of the human figures in 24 Hour Psycho, to create a similar depersonalisation – for the reader, the figures in the gallery become flattened by the lack of expression of the figure on the screen. A similar flattening of human, environment and artwork is evident in Players’ opening scene aboard the aircraft. Both scenes occupy a nebulous structural relationship to the subsequent novel that amplifies their lack of affective thickness – should we read these on the same ontological and diegetic terms as the remainder of the novels? And as in Players, Point Omega’s magnification and overdetermination of human gestures paradoxically empties these movements of expressive power, shifting our attention from the human to a wider, extended surface. Jameson notes a parallel affective flattening in Hanson’s simulacra – watching them, the gallery ‘momentarily loses its depth and threatens to become a glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a rush of filmic images without density’ – but he is uncertain what kind of response this levelling should elicit: ‘is this now a terrifying or an exhilarating experience?’ (Jameson 76). DeLillo complicates this relatively straightforward sublime response by emphasising the affective vacancy of gestures, redirecting the reader’s attention back towards the forms of the gestures themselves. This focus is a product not simply of the narrative amplification of gesture, and its affective emptying, but also of the characters’ own attention and even mimicry of such actions – as when the watcher of 24 Hour Psycho ‘standing alone moved a hand towards his face, repeating, ever so slowly, the action of a figure on the screen’ (Point Omega 4).

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In DeLillo’s novels, the representation of affect takes place on the level of the index, rather than figuring affect through character response. In Players, emotion, when it appears, regularly does so indexed against a recognisable visual cue. We see this when an unnamed woman is described like this: ‘Her shoulders hunched in a way that indicated a special depth of solitude, he thought, like a figure in a Hopper painting’ (Players 47). Lyle, through whom the narrative is focalised at this point, uses body language and visual art to explain her affective disposition. Edward Hopper’s quintessential style of American loneliness is itself here – and in culture more generally – indexing white American loneliness, becoming the referent for anyone wishing to call to mind what mid-century white loneliness looks like. We can see across much of the turn to affect in literary studies that many are interested in affect only in terms of the representation of emotion. He is angry; she is scared; and so on. Here, however, the representation takes on a new relationship to the subjective experience of that emotion. When characters such as DeLillo’s struggle to understand and express their own feelings, and turn towards a visual referent such as a Hopper painting, this simultaneously reminds us that not only does visual art index emotion more readily than a difficult medium such as text, but that affect, especially when it refuses to be expressed verbally, is itself figural. It contorts in the body, affecting countenance, expression, tension and energy, betraying emotions we wish to keep hidden. Figuring emotion, of course, can also be susceptible to manipulation. Lyle knows, for instance, that the only way he can be reassuring is when he visualises looking reassuring: ‘he spoke through a reassuring smile. He concentrated on this expression to the degree he could visualise his own lips moving. It was a moment of utter disengagement’ (49–50). Lyle is nevertheless caught between the knowledge that he can dissemble and the fear that he is otherwise completely transparent, worrying that his thoughts are legible to others but that ‘he didn’t know any of theirs’ (22). Even worse: ‘as if that message in greenish cipher that moved across the board represented the readouts of Lyle Wynant’ (22). Gesture in DeLillo can at once mask and betray us. Lyle’s base horror here ignores the very indexicality on which his gestures so rely. If he depends upon figural representations of emotion in order to orchestrate his own gestures, then the ‘read-outs’ he conveys are similarly communal. This aligns with Brennan’s observation that ‘our thoughts are not entirely independent’, a fact that ‘we accept with comparatively ready acquiescence’ (2). Indeed, thought in Brennan’s affective formulation is socially influenced, reflecting the way that Lyle’s thoughts are externally sourced, not entirely his own to hide. Lyle’s fear relies on a logical association that Jameson draws between expression and ‘a whole metaphysics of the inside and the outside, of the wordless pain within the monad and the moment in which, often cathartically, that “emotion” is then projected out and externalized, as gesture or cry, as desperate communication and the outward dramatization of inward feeling’ (61). To illustrate this traditional logic that binds expression and individuality, Jameson turns to ‘Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream . . . a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude and social fragmentation and isolation’ (61). But as much as Munch’s painting seems to reinforce a model of expression tied to singularity, the painting also works as ‘a virtual deconstruction of the very aesthetic of expression itself, which seems to have dominated much of what we call high modernism, but to have vanished away – for both practical and theoretical reasons – in the world of the postmodern’ (61). Lyle’s crisis of expression, then,

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and his reliance on an outdated model of self and expression, draws attention back towards DeLillo’s refusal of the aesthetic of expression in the novel. The emptiness of many of DeLillo’s characters’ deliberate actions is not lost on them. At another point in Players, Lyle becomes ‘aware of his studied passage down the corridors of his firm’s offices’ (72). Rather than fearing the possible revelation this could entail, Lyle ‘happily . . . parodied his own manner, swiveling toward a face and beaming an anemic look right past it’ (72). Lyle’s hollow repetition of his gestures points to a second somatic depersonalisation that DeLillo effects: through repetition, even apparently expressive gestures become ambivalent, or even parodic. Pammy’s recurring gesture of covering her ears is characteristic of this: ‘she put her hands over her ears and watched Lyle’ (58); ‘Pammy looked out a window at the back of the room. Traffic moved swiftly . . . Her hands were over her ears’ (79). At first, the action seems telling, even sympathetic. But as it is repeated, its expressive function becomes increasingly ambivalent. Is Pammy simulating expression here? Refusing to express? Rather than adding affective depth, such gestures become flat, even abrasive. Point Omega frames this process from a viewer’s perspective when the watcher in the opening scene begins ‘to move along the adjacent wall to the other side of the screen so he could watch the same action in a flipped image’ (4). Repeated, and flipped, Anthony Perkins’s gestures become disorienting – ‘Anthony Perkins using the left hand, the wrong hand’ – then ambivalent: ‘what made this side of the screen any less truthful than the other side?’ (5). Such ambivalence of expression – seen in the use of artistic gesture as an explanation of human form, the calibration of gesture to convey an impression of internal life, even the parodying of one’s own movements – doesn’t weaken the power of gesture in and of itself. Indeed, by redirecting our attention away from interior lives towards the only surface DeLillo offers his reader, foregrounding the somatic field makes affect all gesture. But in depersonalising these movements, DeLillo does weaken his characters’ subjectivity. Lyle’s lack of substantial interiority is exposed by his reliance upon shared external cues. The unspecified watcher of Point Omega’s opening section is even more abstracted; the longer he watches 24 Hour Psycho, the more he feels like a type, rather than a discrete individual – ‘the film made him feel like someone watching a film’ (13) – visually represented in his own indexing of Perkins’s movements. For Brennan, this is the crucial ‘problem of expression’: that a correlation between external action and internal life is ‘itself closely linked to some conception of the subject as a monad-like container, within which things are felt which are then expressed by projection outwards’ (63). Naturally, the depersonalisation of gestures undermines this logic. DeLillo presents feelings as already external, negotiated by individuals as in a gallery space. The implications of flattened, overdetermined gesture go beyond the individuality of characters’ specific affective responses, however – as the watcher’s obsession with the revelation of a deeper meaning. In 24 Hour Psycho suggests, a failure in affective expression raises questions about the function and validity of artistic form and style. Traditional models of authorial identity – to say nothing of personal stylistics – ‘stand or fall along with that older notion (or experience) of the so-called centred subject’ (Jameson 63). But across Players and Point Omega, DeLillo’s coordination of an affective swirl, an exchange of substance for tone, and sequences of ambivalent gestures all work to depersonalise both individual subjects and the texts themselves. On one level, this would suggest that such strategies shift a text’s emphasis on to formal structures.

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Just as the ‘waning of affect’ can be connected to what Jameson called elsewhere the ‘waning of content’ through the thread of form (with regard to another postmodern writer – this time concerned with history rather than the present – E. L. Doctorow), on a larger level, works such as DeLillo’s offer textual, artistic, or human forms as the predominant logic by which cultural forms produce meaning (Jameson 70). But I would go further than this. For in DeLillo’s works, a shift towards forms can only expose the emptiness of the idea of artistic style per se. Style’s very substantiation on the grounds of singularity means that destabilising concepts of the individual as monad ‘means the end of much more – the end for example of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brushstroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction)’ (Jameson 64) – and it is telling that each of these novels’ affective worlds rely on overdetermined engagements with over-exposed artworks, Psycho and an Edward Hopper painting, and the hollow replications of their expressive gestures.

The Glint Despite the purported affectlessness of postmodern culture, when it comes to art there remains some hope. There is, for example, ‘a strange compensatory decorative exhilaration’ in Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (1980), for Jameson; a ‘glitter of gold dust, the spangling of gilt sand, which seals the surface of the painting and yet continues to glint at us’ (61). What is this glint? Not the physical presence of reflection, as ‘a faint or momentary appearance of light or of some lustrous object’.6 Metaphorically gleaming, a work of art’s glinting is affective. Like Hopper, or Psycho, Warhol’s shoes are ubiquitous, over-exposed, and (like most of Warhol’s art) mechanically reproduced. Yet there can still be something affective in being exposed to them again. Giving another example, Jameson turns to the Symbolistes. ‘Think’, he implores, ‘of Rimbaud’s magical flowers “that look back at you”, or of the august premonitory eye-flashes of Rilke’s archaic Greek torso which warn the bourgeois subject to change his life: nothing of that sort here, in the gratuitous frivolity of this final decorative overlay’ (61). Things that glint, in Jameson’s formulation, tend to be artworks. This is not surprising, when art has long held a special aesthetic quality that both inspires expression while also defeating it. What glints at DeLillo’s characters? Hopper’s loneliness, inscribed in artificial lighting spilling out into the falling night, does. Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, too – but not to everyone. The opening watcher’s experience, which we saw above, proclaims ‘revelation’, but the experience is ultimately much more muted than Jameson’s exhilaration. When Richard Elster, a retired secret war advisor and the subject of protagonist Jim Finley’s film, encounters it, crisis ensues. To Finley’s eye, ‘Elster was resisting’ the experience. ‘Something was being subverted here, his traditional language of response. Stillborn images, collapsing time. An idea so open to theory and argument that it left him no clear context to dominate, just crisp rejection’ (Point Omega 78). While for Finley, experiencing 24 Hour Psycho was procedural, for Elster, it glinted: ‘it was like watching the universe die over a period of about seven billion years’ (59).

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OED: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/78962?rskey=JamfZF&result=1#eid.

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More tantalising for DeLillo than the distance between their two experiences is the possibility that such a glint might be shared. As two figures enter the gallery and become engrossed in 24 Hour Psycho too, the opening watcher ‘felt they shared something, we three, that’s what he felt. It was the rare fellowship that singular events engender, even if the others didn’t know he was here’ (11). In such moments, the glint becomes more than a personal aesthetic response – it is an externalised ‘event’. In both novels, art appears briefly enough that it could feel insignificant. But given the attention that DeLillo’s characters give it, the paucity of example is just as interesting as if faced with abundant ekphrasis. While a generic painting by Hopper is all that is afforded in Players, Point Omega’s characters visit galleries often. But it is only Gordon’s installation that receives descriptive attention. Perhaps, without wanting to undermine my own conclusions here, art does not glint enough to claim more of DeLillo’s characters’ attention. Landscapes glimmer more for them, whether those appraised from the heights of the World Trade Center or deep in the desert – perhaps because, like art it should be said, these landscapes not only capture the sublime terror Jameson described as being resurrected by postmodern culture, but are, in Elster’s terms, human. ‘To Elster, sunset was a human invention, our perceptual arrangement of light and space into elements of wonder. We looked and wondered. There was a trembling in the air as the unnamed colors and landforms took on definition, a clarity of outline and extent’ (Point Omega 22). To be sure, the desert or the cityscape offer a broader surface on which to appreciate the swirling, depersonalised affects of DeLillo’s novels than do film screens or canvas, and offer an alternative to the often peculiar, fleeting glints of visual art. Indeed, novelistic description is as much an art-making form as those media used by the visual arts. Perhaps what glints in DeLillo’s novels doesn’t glint within, but outwards, to us. With this in mind, there is no doubt that this glint is aesthetic, formal and, significantly, allegorical, providing us a useful analogue for the difficulty of DeLillo’s affect, wherein emotion is reified but never felt. We can see this at work in The Names (1982), The Body Artist (2001), and in his most recent novel The Silence (2020), a novel that features two couples who in many ways mirror Pammy and Lyle in Players: upwardly mobile, intelligent, bored. Early in the novel, one of these couples is on a plane. Following a series of alarming events – severe bouncing, the screens going black, tightening seatbelts, a ‘massive knocking somewhere below them’ – and before it crashes, Tessa asks her husband, ‘Are we afraid?’ (The Silence 17). So far, a natural sequence of events. But the affective problem here is that Tessa did not ask her husband – she ‘said’ it. Said, not asked. That afterwards Jim ‘let the question hover’ is a red herring. This is no question – DeLillo tells us so. ‘“Are we afraid?” she said’ is an illustration of how in DeLillo’s novels style captures, in five insignificant words, affective and linguistic crisis. ‘“Are we afraid?” she said’ is, conflictingly, affectively self-explanatory – fear numbs – and affectively inscrutable – being numb belies expression. ‘“Are we afraid?” she said’ thus stylistically undermines, intensifies and confuses feeling. And for all these reasons, ‘“Are we afraid?” she said’ glints.

Works Cited Anderson, Sam. ‘White Noise.’ New York Magazine, 21 January 2010. Banville, John. ‘Against the North Wall.’ New York Review, 8 April 2010. https://nybooks.com/ articles/2010/04/08/against-the-north-wall/. Accessed 7 February 2023.

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Brennan, Teressa. The Transmission of Affect. Cornell University Press, 2014. DeLillo, Don. Players. Picador, 1977. ——. Point Omega. Picador, 2010. ——. The Silence. Picador, 2020. Greenwald Smith, Rachel. Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism. Cambridge University Press, 2015. ——. ‘Six Propositions on Compromise Aesthetics.’ The Account. https://theaccountmagazine. com/article/six-propositions-on-compromise-aesthetics. Accessed 7 February 2023. Harvey, Giles. ‘Missing Persons from Don DeLillo.’ The National, 28 January 2010. Hoberek, Andrew. ‘Foreign Objects, or, DeLillo Minimalist.’ Studies in American Fiction, 37, no. 1, 2010, pp. 101–25. Houser, Heather. ‘“A Presence Almost Everywhere”: Responsibility at Risk in Don DeLillo’s The Names.’ Contemporary Literature, 51, no. 1, 2010, pp. 124–51. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991. Nelson, Deborah. Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil. University of Chicago Press, 2017. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Duke University Press, 2005.

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3 The Art of War Margaret Scanlan

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o better gloss on Walter’s Benjamin’s characterisation of fascism as ‘the logical result of the entrance of aesthetics into politics’ (241) exists than the scene in Don DeLillo’s White Noise where Jack Gladney and Murray Siskind riff on the uncanny affinities between Hitler and Elvis (71). As the Nazi dictator and the hillbilly rock star become twin ‘mama’s boys’ obsessed with death, we enter a nightmare where public figures are all celebrities, their aura glinting before an audience ignorant of history and sociology. In 1994 John Duvall noted DeLillo’s view that ‘giving oneself over to formal contemplation of the image matrix of either television or the supermarket denies one’s assertion into the political economy . . . is learning how to be a fascist’. DeLillo shows that Jack and Murray consistently fall ‘into [this] suspect formal method when they interpret events in their world’ as if they were happening on television (Duvall 129). Yet in recent years, many readers, including Duvall, have complained that DeLillo has excised concrete history from politics, reducing 9/11 to an event in the emotional lives of middle-class Americans or glossing over the differences between cities that look like Beirut. Tracing the evolution of DeLillo’s stance on politics and history requires following the link between art and violence through his novels. DeLillo’s artists often conflate their instruments with weapons, as Bucky Wunderlick does when he muses, ‘I might actually kill someone with my music’ (Great Jones Street 105). Almost antiphonally, Richard Elster, thirty-seven years later in Point Omega, interprets Jim Finley’s request for an interview filmed against a wall as an assault: ‘Up against the wall, mother fucker!’ (45).1 The Names, ‘Baader–Meinhof’ and Point Omega all raise questions about art’s relation to political violence. In The Names, James Axton, a freelance writer, becomes an unwitting CIA source and a collaborator with America’s neo-colonial presence in the Middle East. Both ‘Baader–Meinhof’ and Point Omega revolve around exhibitions that DeLillo visited at New York’s MoMA. DeLillo’s persistent conviction that the aesthetic impulse is itself violent or is easily made to serve the goals of terrorists and militarised regimes runs through all three works. In The Names, this suspicion of art is counterbalanced by a romantic affirmation of language and art as creating community, preserving the good from oblivion, and consoling suffering. ‘Baader–Meinhof’ focuses on Gerhard Richter’s paintings of the German terrorists, intended to foster understanding of their failure to make the world better. One character responds to Richter’s intention, but the other responds to

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Elster is quoting ‘Black People’, Amiri Baraka’s 1968 poem.

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its violent subject, casting doubts on the artist’s success. In Point Omega, the central work is Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, a video that transforms Hitchcock’s film by eliminating its soundtrack and lengthening its playing time to twenty-four hours. Jim Finley abandons a film that promised insight into the responsibility of intellectuals and writers for the Iraq war, and turns into a voyeur of Elster’s daughter. While the novel suggests Hitchcock’s skill in reading the American character, it is pessimistic about art as a transformative force.

The Names In Athens, where James Axton has followed his estranged wife Kathryn and their son Tap, an insurance conglomerate offers him a job as their Middle Eastern risk analyst because of a book he ghost-wrote for an Air Force general. His supervisor, George Rowser, admires Axton’s ability to organise the original text, which ‘was a living wilderness’, blurring the line between imitating military jargon and actual strategic expertise (The Names 48). The risk Axton assesses is terrorism, for over the previous decade corporations have paid a ‘quarter of a billion dollars in ransom money’. As Axton reports on local shortages, ‘nonperforming loans’ and ‘fifteen-year old girls shot for politics’, he essentially gathers intelligence, and unsurprisingly, his reports flow back to the CIA (46). While in Athens, Axton and his filmmaker friend, Frank Volterra, come to share the obsession of his wife’s employer, the archaeologist Owen Brademas, with an abecedarian cult of obscurely Middle Eastern origin whose members murder people who stray into places with initials matching their own. A contemporary reader winces as this 1982 novel evokes names and places that are now part of American history: ‘Dawa . . . stockpiling weapons in the Gulf’, ‘car bombings in . . . Ramallah’, ‘oilfields burned and . . . sirens sounded through Baghdad’ (233). Though the Americans joke uneasily that their life ‘is like the Empire . . . adventure, sunsets, dusty death’, they do not understand how their zeal for tracking the cult masks the desire to master the East that their day jobs as excavators, documenters and analysts demand (7). As Theophilus Savvas notes, we can only speculate about whether DeLillo reads the postmodern theorists whose ideas jibe with his fiction (40). Certainly The Names follows Edward Said’s arguments in Orientalism that Western study of Islamic cultures illustrates Foucault’s power–knowledge nexus as ‘a discourse of the powerful about the powerless’ (Shatz).2 Like Said, DeLillo recognises what the Arabists of the nineteenth century owed to their compatriots’ conquest of Egypt or Syria. Brademas admires old Rawlinson for being so committed to deciphering cuneiform that he sent a Kurdish boy inching across a cliff face with ‘only the faintest indentations . . . for finger grips’ (The Names 80). Kathryn, however, calls the story a ‘political allegory’, ‘the impulse to “subdue and codify”’ (80).

 2

See also Adam Thurschwell’s application of Maurice Blanchot to the same issue: ‘After insisting on a perfect analogy between literary writing and revolution, Blanchot further tightens the knot . . . by locating within language . . . the same absolution negation characteristic of terrorism. Linguistic meaning . . . presupposes the total annihilation of its signified object’ (286).

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The hermeneutics of suspicion, in full flower in the 1980s, also leaves traces in The Names. In Tristes tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss regretted that ‘the primary function of writing . . . is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings. The use of writing for disinterested ends . . . in . . . science or the arts is a secondary result of its invention – and may be no more than a way of . . . dissimulating its primary function’ (292). Jacques Derrida argued that romantics were deluded to seek a poetic language as fresh and spontaneous as speech, for all language suffers from the conditions of writing. Always secondary, it points towards, but never embodies, the elusive meaning it seeks. In a remarkably persuasive narrative, DeLillo follows this link between language and violence back to its origins in the alphabet, showing how horribly effective as murder weapons the primitive hammers and chisels that incised the first letters into stone were. Gourgouris analyses the line leading back from the ‘cultural imploding’ of recent ‘globalization’ to the ‘original dissociation within language that led from hieroglyph to alphabet’ (Gourgouris 295). The pictograph that resembles the horns of an ox turns upside down into an alpha, an abstract symbol. This apparently benign move illustrates ‘the sublime violence inherent in . . . the shattering of nature’s undifferentiated whole by . . . abstract representation’ (298). Choosing its victims through alphabetic coincidence, the cult ‘translates names into pure signs . . . restoring their arbitrariness’ (301). Gourgouris finds ‘the cult’s murderous performance’ ‘forensic proof’ for ‘the foundation of contemporary culture’ (301). Although Axton has a special affinity for the abecedarians, calling the cult ‘the only thing I’ve been right about’, DeLillo distinguishes him from them (The Names 300). Axton’s visceral response to eating pigeon in Jerusalem with an Armenian informant on the cult, ‘an eager spew, burbling out like some chemical death’, marked a ‘clear separation, a space between ways of seeing’ (211). When Axton discovers how the CIA has used him, his writer’s knowledge of language’s link to violence makes his guilt greater for being ‘unwitting’ (317). Although Axton phrases his return to writing ironically, as ‘some kind of higher typing’, his reflections suggest a turn to fiction rather than ghost-writing (319). He proposes a book much like The Names, in which his Athenian friends will be ‘among the people I’ve tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language’ (329). Rather than suggesting that the second version will negate reality, substituting ‘the world of the fictional work for the actual’ (Thurschwell 285), Axton aspires for it to ‘accrue to a rounded truth, a second life for me as well as for them’ (The Names 329). This linkage between second, shared experience and meaningful understanding lends an affirmative tone to the final chapter, as Axton concedes that Kathryn’s criticisms ‘were all retroactively correct . . . shining a second light on . . . everything’. He recognises himself ‘as the object of her compassion and remnant love’, strengthened to keep on living (317). ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ restates a familiar DeLillo theme, building ‘a counternarrative . . . to all that howling space’; in The Names Owen Brademas speaks of building ‘a system against the terror in our souls’ (308). Richard Elster in Point Omega (2010) also evokes ‘terror . . . The thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story’ (45). At least since Mao II (1991), DeLillo has doubted whether novelists can still write that counternarrative, but The Names, a traditionally social novel, dotted with conversations over meals and drinks, persuasively advocates it. The novel affirms ordinary human relations, family life, and the eye’s interest in undramatic domestic details, the laundry on a neighbour’s line, a strange fishing boat in the harbour. Remembering his own father quizzing him about school day details,

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such as ‘the amount of time we took for recess’, Axton regrets how little he knows about his son’s recent life (The Names 311). This ‘is what love comes down to’, what he still needs from Kathryn and Tap, ‘the seeping love of small talk and family chat’ (312). The Names also affirms the pleasure of narratives with recognisable characters and dialogue, quoting the formula Brademas heard Punjabi audiences cry out whenever their storyteller paused: ‘Show us their faces, tell us what they said!’ (276). For all the time its archaeologists spend deciphering stone inscriptions, The Names frequently celebrates Greek as a modern, spoken language and contemporary Greeks as gifted, joyous conversationalists; they demonstrate ‘a way of speaking that takes such pure joy in its own openness and ardour that we begin to feel these people are discussing language itself’ (52). Yet as colourfully natural as Athens seems, it is ‘a denial of Greece’, ‘an invention of people from lost places, people forcibly resettled, fleeing war and massacre . . . exiled home’ (104). Axton’s final revelation is the humanity of the Parthenon, not ‘aloof, rational, timeless, pure’ but ‘a part of the living city below it’. Its beauty is enduring and human, ‘a cry for pity . . . a voice we know as our own’ (330). Yet violence re-enters the novel; Axton, jogging, freezes before a man with a gun, who then turns and runs. Gazing into the woods, he sees David Keller, a banker for whom he was once mistaken, lying wounded on the ground. As Keller recovers, Axton wonders whether they had been confused again. At gunpoint, the only word he could think was ‘American’ (328), the twenty-seventh of the ‘Depravities’, the catalogue of Kathryn’s criticisms of him (17). ‘How do you connect things?’, he asks and decides to ‘learn their names’ (328). What does it mean to be an American? America, Axton asserts, is the world’s ‘living myth’ (114, 317). For others, ‘America’ focuses fears of a future where the global economy reproduces colonial repression and introduces technologies for which ‘the death-dealers’ must take responsibility (114–15). ‘Shooting Americans’ is understandable if unproductive: ‘Wasn’t there a sense, we Americans felt, in which we had it coming?’ (41). While the novel focuses on language and narrative, on Axton as writer, it is DeLillo’s ‘most optimistic’ work (Spark 86). When it insists that Axton take responsibility for being American, it darkens. We admire Axton for leaving his job, but he never does anything to allay the anxieties America arouses in Afghanis or Syrians. The novel’s epilogue, ‘The Prairie’, is a story by Tap based on a childhood memory Owen Brademas has described to Axton. Axton finds Brademas in Peshawar, badly shaken from an encounter with the abecedarians. Brademas trailed them for weeks only to find them on the verge of committing a new murder, which he fled. Hiding in an earthen silo smelling of animal feed carried him back to a childhood trauma that may be the source of his obsession with the cult. At church, terrified by the congregation’s incomprehensible babbling in tongues, Brademas had run out the door. Axton concludes that in Peshawar, Brademas is diminished and exhausted, consenting to ‘the crushing belief that nothing can be done’ (The Names 308). This bleak view follows logically from the abecedarians’ acceptance of ‘the terror in our souls’ as the human condition and conclusion that ‘the means to contend with death has become death’ (308). As for himself, Axton leaves ‘feeling I’d been engaged in a contest . . . Whatever he’d lost in life-strength . . . I’d won’ (309). Although the Greek plot ends at the Parthenon, with Axton affirming language and community, the epilogue, ‘The Prairie’, cast in his son’s words, introduces an ominous note. True, Tap’s version affirms how language communicates deep emotion, catching

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the depths of Owen’s terror. Its language too is vital: as ‘whirlwind’, the ‘invisible spirit’s voice’, becomes ‘the worldwind’ and his inability to assume ‘the spirit’s voice’ turns into an unpunctuated question, ‘where was the whurl of his ignorant tongue’ (337). Yet its America is bleak. We are in the mythical locus of America’s innocence, a rural Christian church, and yet the preacher who speaks in tongues does so ‘without love’.3 As he touches Owen, ‘gripping him with hot terrible hands . . . anger . . . stamped in his eyes’ (336–7), the reader feels the child’s panic. Bringing nature to mind, ‘the wild flowers and the sun hovering heavenly’ will not soothe ‘the dredful woe of incomprehension’ (338). The child runs out into a world from which kindly Lonnie Wright, who ‘would have opened his door to any young wafe’ is ‘long gone’; what remains ‘is worse than a retched nightmare . . . the nightmare of real things’ (339). The nightmare of primal America has the novel’s last word.

‘Baader–Meinhof’ Graley Herren analyses DeLillo’s recurring fascination with ‘art stalkers’, men who follow women around museums, projecting varying degrees of sexual menace (147). Although art theory assumes that a viewer communes privately with a work, we mostly see art in museums, public spaces where others impinge. Although ‘art offers the allure of total communion . . . perfect harmony’ (163), the museum is no ‘sanctuary’ from ‘the world of others or the inner turmoil of the self’ (164). It facilitates instead ‘aesthetic promiscuity, encouraging spectators to shuttle from one intensely intimate experience to the next’ (164). Both ‘Baader–Meinhof’ and Point Omega explore what happens when the male viewer’s obsessive and predatory gaze shifts from art to a living woman. In ‘Baader–Meinhof’, the exhibition features Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977, a cycle of fifteen paintings based on news and police photos of the terrorists. Some depict inanimate objects, a prison cell or a tape recorder; some show the terrorists alive; others their bodies, found dead in their cells; yet another records the funeral of three of them. Violence, then, is already an issue in the paintings, not an artefact of the museum experience; as in The Names, representation, rather than originality, is crucial. Richter worked from photographs, initially reproducing them, but afterwards blurring, painting over, erasing and otherwise altering them ‘as a way to concentrate on the essential’ (Prikker 169). Where the photograph shows a corpse with a dark mark around the neck where the noose was cut away, the painting requires a closer look, suggesting that the mark might be a ribbon or a necklace. Ambiguity creates distance, allowing viewer responses to develop. When an interviewer suggested the artist’s intent to convey ‘loss’, Richter agreed; ‘a reality that is unreachable’ forms its subject (Prikker 172). Further, ‘Every painting automatically includes my inability, my powerlessness, my relation to reality’ (173). ‘Baader–Meinhof’ appeared in the 1 April 2002 issue of The New Yorker, and was DeLillo’s first published story after 9/11. A nameless man and woman encounter each other at a retrospective exhibition, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, at

 3

‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am become as a sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.’ 1 Cor. 13:1.

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the Metropolitan Museum of Art in spring 2002.4 Although both are unemployed, possibly because of the attacks, they never link their comments about terrorism to the local context, which would have been inescapable for New Yorker readers in 2002, as menacing in the background as their unstated loneliness and the woman’s growing fear.5 Interviewed about these paintings, Richter sounds like DeLillo talking about ‘counternarrative’.Where the police photos inspire ‘horror’, Richter intends his art to convey ‘grief’, even ‘hope’ (Richter 189, 193). We ‘can’t simply discard and forget’ a story as horrific as the terrorists’ crimes and deaths; ‘we must try to find a different way of dealing with it’ (194). Whatever we call it, ‘an alternative world, or a . . . model for something different’, art ‘create[s] meaning’ (194). DeLillo’s story begins as the woman, apprehensive at knowing ‘there was someone else in the room’, contemplates Richter’s picture of Ulrike Meinhof with her ‘rope-scorched’ neck. The stranger intrudes when she is so absorbed that she feels as if ‘in a mortuary chapel, keeping watch’ and asks: ‘Why do you think he did it this way?’ Annoyed at his presumption, she responds, ‘I don’t know’, without looking at him (‘Baader–Meinhof’ 105–6). Later they engage in a dialogue revealing her as the more experienced, empathetic viewer. The man poses defensively as one without the ‘special training to look at these pictures’ (107) who never listens to her answers. Accusation creeps in as he guesses that ‘you teach art’ (110). He asserts his judgements of terrorists as self-evident: ‘When they’re not killing other people, they’re killing themselves’ (106). The man wants a relationship but understands that she does not: ‘You want me to shut up. Shut up, Bob. Only my name’s not Bob’ (108). He does not distinguish the paintings from their subject; police photos would elicit the same comments, ‘That one’s smiling’ (107) or ‘No colour. No meaning’ (110). When he says he can’t tell the figures apart, she responds, ‘You can. Just look. You have to look’ (107). Our sense of menace deepens as the women unfortunately reveals that the paintings make her ‘feel how helpless a person can be’. Looking at the last painting, ‘Funeral’, she does not tell him that she sees a cross in the background, suggesting ‘that the terrorists were not beyond forgiveness’ (109). Over lunch, however, she opposes his view that the paintings mean nothing: ‘What they did had meaning. It was wrong but it wasn’t blind and empty. I think the painter’s searching for this’ (110). Here she echoes Richter, who felt ‘compassion’ for ‘the death the terrorists had to suffer’ and because ‘an illusion of being able to change the world has failed’ (Richter 205). Outright rudeness or a call for help might extricate her from his company, but conditioning in politeness collaborates with her loneliness. Only a sentence separates ‘She didn’t want to tell him where she lived’ from ‘And then she did’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’ 112). Her rejections become more pointed as his intentions become clearer: ‘You said,

 4

The post 9/11 context made the exhibit controversial (see Kramer, ‘MoMA Helps Martyrdom’). Kramer blamed ‘liberal guilt among the affluent’ for the museum’s 1995 purchase of Richter’s cycle. For the 2002 exhibition, see also Kramer, ‘Jewish Museum Show’, which includes a swipe at ‘Gerhard Richter’s loathsome pictures of the Baader–Meinhof gang’ appearing simultaneously at the Met.  5 For unemployment in the wake of 9/11, see Bureau of Labor Statistics. ‘The layoffs involved 145,844 employees in thirty-four states, including 10,000 in New York.’ An additional irony: the Met purchased the paintings in 1995, when the RAF’s activities in Frankfurt, still fresh in the memory, reduced the interest of German museums in acquiring them; ‘Americans didn’t know that history’ (Richter 202).

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“Tell me what you want.” I want you to leave’ (114). He responds defensively: ‘I don’t try to control people. This is not me’ (115). After he ‘holds her in some loose kind of containment’, she heads to the bathroom, but leaves its door unlocked because locking it ‘would make him angry’ (116). She hears the unmistakable sound of his unzipping, and then his ‘nasal and cadenced breathing’ (117). After he finishes, he comes to the door and says, ‘Forgive me’; she remains there until he leaves. The man violates her sense of home: ‘She saw everything twice now . . . what it was and the association it had’ (117). Though that double effect recalls Axton’s ‘second life’, this trauma threatens her personal integrity and drains away, rather than enhances, vitality. The story ends with a single sentence separated from the text by three asterisks. The woman returns to the museum the next morning and sees the man already seated in the gallery, his back to her, gazing at ‘the largest . . . most breathtaking’ painting, ‘the one with the coffins and cross, called Funeral’ (118). The narrator turns the cross into a fact, as significant a change as making the woman the man’s watcher. Linda Kauffman believes the woman’s earlier speculation that the ‘terrorists are not beyond forgiveness’ was either ‘innocent or blind’. Now, Kauffman says, the woman feels ‘rage’, making ‘forgiveness . . . preposterous’ (361). Let us agree that people do not feel forgiving so soon after trauma; however, if we think of forgiveness as healing, we sense a positive move. Perhaps the painting will help the woman understand her abjection. Why does the man return to the museum? Though he might be looking for another victim, his apology the day before conveyed humiliation. Hilton Kramer’s accusation that Richter and the museum were glorifying terrorists as martyrs reflects the conventional response to art depicting violence. Richter, too, sees his subject as disturbing, mainly because it provokes identification: There’s something else that puts an additional fear into people, namely that they themselves are terrorists. That that is forbidden. So the 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. (Richter 186) Without accepting censorship, Richter identifies the violence as our own, felt also in response to art. Perhaps the man sincerely believes that his bad behaviour was ‘not me’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’ 110); does he wonder if the pictures stimulated it? DeLillo reintroduces the question of forgiveness simply by placing a man who asked a woman to forgive him in front of a painting in which she sensed forgiveness, leaving her silent behind him. This simple arrangement of figures suggests a possibility the story does not explore.

Point Omega Point Omega is framed by two episodes, ‘Anonymity’ and ‘Anonymity 2’, set in an unspecified art museum (likely the Museum of Modern Art) on consecutive days in September 2006. Between them are four chapters set in Anza-Borrego, California, that describe the upshot of Jim Finley’s request to interview Richard Elster about Iraq, and the subsequent visit and disappearance of Elster’s daughter Jessie. Douglas Gordon’s

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24 Hour Psycho is running at the museum, closely watched by a nameless and increasingly menacing art stalker. The consciousness through which we see the ‘Anonymity’ sections is his, and the framing story explores concerns about how art depicting violence affects viewers. Finley and Elster briefly walk through the Gordon exhibition in ‘Anonymity’, and a woman, probably Jessie, appears in ‘Anonymity 2’. Though the frame is largely disconnected from the inner narrative, the theme of Hollywood violence in Psycho and how it might or might not connect to the Iraq War circulates through both. In a Guardian review, James Lasdun called Point Omega ‘an object lesson in the methods of late-phase literature . . . where the high-gloss production of the imagination in full spate give way to a sparser, stonier art of suggestion and juxtaposition’. Lasdun was alluding to Theodor Adorno’s ‘Late Style in Beethoven’, which Edward Said developed in On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. As Said says, we might imagine the golden years as serene and wise, but ‘age and ill health’ may produce ‘intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction’ instead (7). The late style, far from culminating and synthesising the themes of a lifetime, may produce works that contradict it, characterised by ‘fragmentation, provisionality, and dissonance’ (Mahon 447). The writer ‘no longer desires to persuade’ the reader; seems ‘not to construct nor to edify but demonstrably to undo or to unsettle’ (Mahon 448–9). Let us look briefly at the ‘Anonymity’ sections and Gordon’s variation on Psycho. Like Richter’s October cycle, Hitchcock’s Psycho had a real-life source, Ed Gein, the ‘Butcher of Plainfield’, a 1950s murderer and grave robber, who lived alone with his mother in rural Wisconsin. He died in 1984 in a psychiatric hospital in Madison, having been ruled ‘innocent by reason of insanity’ after two murder convictions. Hitchcock’s film debuted in 1960, a year after Robert Bloch’s best-selling novel Psycho. Familiar DeLillo themes emerge. The ‘Butcher of Plainfield’ story, like Tap’s ‘The Prairie’, is an American dystopia, at odds with sentimentality about rural innocence. Psycho became ‘The Mother of All Horror Films’ (Jones), endlessly cited as an exemplar of Hollywood violence; one easily imagines Murray Siskind’s lecture. By glacially extending its running time, Gordon points up details otherwise imperceptible: ‘Anthony Perkins turns his head in five incremental movements rather than one continuous motion’ (Point Omega 5). More importantly, the video makes time a theme, suggesting to the stalker an ‘array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things’ that also obsess Richard Elster (5–6).6 The stalker’s menace grows, raising the possibility, as in ‘Baader–Meinhof’, that violent art encourages actual violence. Watching, the stalker moves his hand to his face, ‘repeating, ever so slowly, the action of a figure on the screen’ (3). Seeing Elster and Finley, he senses that he and they share ‘something’. Unsure of his own identity, he enjoys watching unobserved: ‘he looked like what his mother saw when she

 6

The idea that slowing down a film’s pace, as Gordon does in 24 Hour Psycho, might affect its content is anticipated in DeLillo’s 1972 novel, End Zone. The football players watch a replay of a Minnesota Vikings–Detroit Lions game: ‘In slow motion the game’s violence became almost tender, a series of lovely and sensual assaults . . . It was a loving relationship with just a trace of mockery . . .’ (98). Some might find the violence of the game sexual even at the normal pace, but here it is subtler, perhaps more seductive. One can easily imagine a dangerous, voyeuristic viewer standing alone in the back.

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looked at him’, but she ‘had passed on . . . What was left of him for others to see?’ (8). As he counts rings in the shower scene, his obsession with film technique becomes undisguised voyeurism. By the end of ‘Anonymity’, the stalker realises that ‘he’d been waiting for a woman to arrive’ (14). When he imagines her in a ‘pale summer dress’, he cuts off the thought, as though it were tantamount to assault: ‘Jerk’ (14). The resemblance to Norman Bates vocalising Angry Mother after inviting Marian Crane to supper is striking. In ‘Anonymity 2’, the stalker, standing against the wall because ‘the standing man participates’, seems more dangerous (102). He fantasises about compelling people to watch all twenty-four hours; ‘once out, you do not re-enter’ (104). Then ‘somebody’ is speaking to him, a woman, just as he had fantasised. She, probably Jessie, starts a conversation that seems harmless; they exchange childhood anecdotes, in his case a lie; she gives him her phone number but after she leaves, he realises he does not have her name. The menace lies in his thoughts, ‘pinning her to the wall’, wishing the museum guard armed: ‘There is priceless art to protect and a man with a gun would clarify the act of seeing it’ (112). The fantasy darkens; the guard shoots himself, leaving the stalker alone ‘with the body’ (116). He tells himself that ‘he is not responsible for these thoughts’, but ‘they’re his thoughts, aren’t they?’ (116). At the end, the stalker is absorbed in the screen: ‘he wanted complete immersion . . . the thing he sees tunnelling into the blood, into dense sensation, sharing consciousness with him’ (115). 24 Hour Psycho intensifies ‘the thing’, perhaps psychotic violence, already alive in him. Identification complete, he waits ‘to dissolve into the figure of Norman Bates’ (116). As he recalls living with his mother in a small flat, we are unsure whether it is Norman or he who ‘sometimes . . . sits by her bed’ and ‘sometimes just looks’ (117). Floating free of time and place, the lyrical final line recalls Hitchcock’s imagery: ‘Sometimes a wind comes before the rain and sends birds sailing past the window, spirit birds that ride the night, stranger than dreams’ (117). Neither in the Bates Motel nor the MoMA, we enter the world of myth. DeLillo’s readers will find Anza-Borrego familiar, the bleak West of End Zone and Running Dog, the contaminated landscape of nuclear testing. Here particularly we may feel what Peter Boxall describes as ‘the late fictional style in contemporary writing performing the exhaustion of a culture, the growing old and tired of Western modernity itself’ (682). More specifically, we have elements out of which, as Boxall says, DeLillo has crafted a sense of ‘apocalyptic catastrophe’ just waiting to spring. Lying on the boundary between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates, it has distinctive ‘alluvial fans’, created by centuries of earthquakes; fresh floods churn up older layers.7 This activity, along with its Death Valley climate, makes Anza-Borrego a palaeontologist’s dream, yielding teeth and bones from sabre-tooth cats, camels, horses, bears and other Pliocene–Pleistocene inhabitants. For Elster, this place where ‘seas and reefs of ten million years ago’ leave ‘a shark’s tooth marked on desert stone’ evokes geological time (Point Omega 20, 96). The desert produces a sense of ‘enormous . . . time that precedes us and survives us’, permitting escape from the ‘terror’ of urban time, always ‘counting down’ (44, 45). Like Isaac Watts’s familiar paraphrase of Psalm 90, ‘a thousand ages

 7

More familiar as the San Andreas Fault, the local line is wonderfully named the ‘Elsinore Fault’.

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in thy sight are as an evening gone’, his vision evokes the Judeo-Christian tradition of finding spiritual solace in a widened perspective on time.8 Elster’s stroll through the Gordon exhibition suggests that DeLillo will integrate the vision of time associated with 24 Hour Psycho and geological time. Yet, in a way characteristic of the late style, DeLillo refuses synthesis. Elster turns his back, ‘resisting . . . an idea so open to theory and argument that it left him no clear context to dominate, just crisp rejection’ (61). In leaving the Pentagon, Elster demonstrated an impulse attributed to the abecedarians: finding a ‘place where it is possible for men to stop making history’ (The Names 209). As David Cowart points out, Elster’s interpretation of Teilhard de Chardin’s omega point, ‘we want to be the dead matter we used to be’, corresponds better to Freud’s death wish than the theologian’s theory of spiritual evolution (50).9 Elster, however, says he went to the Pentagon ‘because we have a living history and I thought I would be in the middle of it’ (Point Omega 30). His idea of history, however, betrays a desire like Bill Gray’s to shape narrative: ‘We can’t let others shape our world, our minds’ (30). The Bush administration engaged in ‘extraordinary rendition’, kidnapping suspects to send them to prisons in countries that permitted torture.10 Pentagon officials contacted Elster because of an essay he wrote that catalogued at least seven paradoxical connotations of the word ‘rendition’. These range from the violent to the artistic, and one artistic analogy even justifies the US practice. The tortured and their tormenters are ‘actors . . . in a revenge play that reflects the mass will and interprets the shadowy need of an entire nation, ours’ (34). They are not 19-year-old Jason from South Dakota and 18-year-old Rashid from Kabul; they are anonymous figures in a psychodrama played out for some undefined America, appalling to imagine. Nowhere, as Finley observes but does not say, does the essay object to using rendition ‘as an instrument of state security . . . concealing the shameful subject it embraced’ (35). The first line of Elster’s essay, ‘A government is a criminal enterprise’, suggests his usefulness to the War on Terror (33). Like extraordinary rendition, the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay camp for terrorism suspects and of black sites abroad, Bush’s policies were transparently designed to evade the US Constitution and scrutiny at home. In the immediate wake of 9/11, the US Congress enthusiastically passed the Patriot Act, greatly expanding the government’s surveillance and deportation powers; a year later it voted overwhelmingly to authorise war in Iraq.11 These public steps, although briefly popular, also raised grave constitutional issues that are still debated. Nor was the Constitution the only roadblock Bush loyalists discounted. In a Nietzschean gesture, presidential advisor Karl Rove assured a New York Times interviewer that ‘the realitybased community’ needed to recognise that ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality’ (Suskind).

 8

See Gander for a full analysis of time as a theme in late DeLillo, understood in terms of ‘theorizations of time proposed by general relativity and by quantum mechanics’ (131).  9 Teilhard’s theory suggests hope that the human soul will evolve to a higher level, joining the divine: ‘everything that rises must converge’. 10 For a summary of recent debates on its constitutionality, see Laperruque. 11 For a summary of recent debates on the Patriot Act’s constitutionality, see Laperruque.

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In his Anza-Borrego retreat, Elster accuses Pentagon strategists of failing to distinguish reality from representation: ‘Their war is . . . abstract . . . they’re sending an army into a place on the map’ (Point Omega 28). Yet although the first phase failed, Elster remains nostalgic for ‘creating new realities overnight’. Still using an artistic metaphor, he insists that ‘I wanted a haiku war . . . a war in three lines’ (29). An absurd aspiration but not for that reason inconsistent with US policy. Haiku is art as timeless abstraction, ‘human consciousness located in nature’, and therefore at odds with realism’s impulse to construct plausible narratives occurring over time (29). A ‘haiku war’, as Matthew Shipe argues, reflects the Bush administration’s belief ‘that the invasion of Iraq would be a succinct and neatly self-contained conflict whose meaning – the democratization of the Middle East – would neatly emerge’ (13–14). As a political model, the lovely Japanese art form is as dangerous as other abstractions, the mathematics and maps of a power that overlooks the actual lives it wrecks. In Mao II, Bill Gray celebrated the realistic novel as the ‘great democratic shout’ (159), a view entirely consistent with Axton’s ‘second life’ and the tribal people’s demand to know what characters ‘looked like, what they did next’. Point Omega, as its advocates and detractors agree, is closer to poetry and philosophy than realistic fiction; it evinces ‘an extraordinary lack of spatial or temporal awareness’ (Boxall 690). This ‘drastic failure of the bonds that hold us in time and space’ produces ‘a thin, simultaneous time in which it is hard to gain a narrative purchase’ (690). This newly thin time, along with the book’s inattention to sociology, and its indulgence for Elster’s ‘liturgical’ voice and ponderous monologues, further illustrates the late style’s impulse to contradict earlier work (Point Omega 30). This point becomes even clearer when the focus shifts to its most refracted figure, Jessie, whose unexplained disappearance violates the detective conventions it evokes. We see the stalker’s thoughts; Jim Finley as narrator discloses his own, and Elster’s monologues show the drift of his ideas and disintegration. Jessie, however, is never glimpsed from inside; when she reveals that she found walking up and down the streets of Chelsea a deeper experience than seeing the art inside the galleries, we are baffled. If she were a character in a realistic novel, we would have hints about what damaged her, but here we can only speculate. Apparently in her twenties, she still lives with one parent or the other; we do not know if she attended a university, though we know she is unable to drive and volunteers as an attendant to old people, her apparent qualification that ‘she liked waiting rooms’ (40). She is almost apparitional; the woman who appears before the stalker just as fantasised, her father’s ‘dream thing’, which he may not understand ‘was not him’ (56). To Finley, ‘she was sylphlike, her element was air’; she provokes sexual fantasies that go no further in reality than briefly holding her hand (49). Because our access is so limited, Jessie becomes a device for identifying the failures of her father and Jim Finley. Elster wants her to ‘see a bighorn sheep’ but never asks what she might want (67). Finley’s projected variant of Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, with Elster as Robert McNamara, is implicitly critical. Yet in their conversations ‘he rarely challenges’ him and abandons the film as his disturbing voyeuristic obsession with Jessie grows (Shipe 14). Although Jessie’s disappearance remains unexplained, it follows a night when Finley watched at her door until he realised she was awake, looking back at him. When, searching the house the next day, Finley throws ‘back the shower curtain’, he almost anticipates finding her lying, like Marion Crane, in a pool of blood (Point Omega 76).

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In defining Beethoven’s late style, Adorno noted its straightforward evocation of musical ‘conventions’ that the earlier work always assimilated to his own style. Yet in late works, the conventions, such as ‘decorative trill sequences’ and florid operatic embellishments, appear ‘bald, undisguised, untransformed’ (Adorno 565). DeLillo always has an ironic relationship to popular culture, but in Point Omega the clichés of the made-for-TV-movie are flatly obtrusive. Any television viewer knows that the mysterious ‘Dennis’, who may or may not be the anonymous art stalker, will be revealed as Jessie’s murderer, once the fingerprints on the knife found at the bottom of a canyon not far from the ‘Impact Area’ have been identified and their DNA traces analysed. After all, the possibility of her stabbing arises when Finley pulls back that shower curtain. Instead, the discovery of the clean knife is inconclusive, confirming Boxall’s argument that ‘the rhetoric of apocalyptic finality against which the rhythms of DeLillo’s writing have so often been tuned is succeeded by a rhetoric of disembodied enigma’ (696). After the inconclusive discovery of the clean knife, Finley tells Elster they are going back to New York. He has assumed a vaguely menacing caretaking role, evident as he recklessly cuts Elster’s hair: ‘I just kept cutting, combing out and cutting’ (Point Omega 91). ‘Funnelled down to local grief’ (97), Elster has abandoned his lofty metaphysical themes, his body too ‘drawn down to sparest outline, weightless’ (99). Driving to the airport, Finley ponders calling Elster’s ex-wife, to whom he intends to return this ‘man past knowing’ (99). Finley reflects on his projected film: ‘the story was here, not in Iraq or in Washington, and we were leaving it behind and taking it with us, both’ (99). Here the Anza-Borrego story ends. What does Point Omega add to the question of art, war and violence? Certainly, it seems bleak, as we see Jim Finley, so committed to questioning Elster about ‘the shameful’ (35) war in Iraq, so critical of his failure to identify ‘crime or guilt’ (34) in extraordinary rendition, abandoning his project. When Elster’s daughter joins them, Finley’s critical faculties further deteriorate, and he drifts into a voyeuristic obsession that recalls Norman Bates. When the made-for-TV elements of Point Omega’s plot fail to cohere, Finley has just enough skill left to know that the story is over. We should listen, however, when Finley tells us that his never-to-be-made film remains at Anza-Borrego but also follows him home to New York. Why artists cannot prevent American catastrophes such as the Iraq War, or even offer understanding or consolation, remains a troubling question. Point Omega acknowledges the limits of art faced with violence. Artists and thinkers share with Pentagon strategists the impulse to simplify and abstract, to bend real people to ideological ends. Perhaps the American Gothic, embodied in Hitchcock’s Psycho, tells us more about our wars and failures than the novel articulates. As we have seen, accounting for Point Omega as a ‘late’ work helps articulate its nature and readers’ dissatisfactions. DeLillo will not synthesise his themes; he uses elements of conventional plotting but refuses to resolve them. His images are similar: if we imagine that the ‘spirit birds’ of the novel’s beautiful last sentence have Catholic echoes, we search in vain for confirmation. Perhaps Boxall is right to suggest that the narrator is signalling a transition ‘into a century that the narrator can experience only as a spirit, or a spectre’ (699). Point Omega will not explain itself and lacks elements of realism and irony, a sense of life lived in families and communities, that we enjoyed in earlier works. It presents an America in isolation, determined to impose its will on a world that its leaders do not understand, and that

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its artists cannot transform. It is as if American history were on a doomed track from Nixon and Vietnam to Bush and Iraq and then to Trump and the botched assault on Covid-19. This view does not console, but we recognise it easily enough.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. ‘Late Style in Beethoven.’ 1937. Essays on Music. University of California Press, 2002, pp. 564–8. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ Translated by Henry Zohn. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 217–51. Boxall, Peter. ‘Late: Fictional Time in the Twenty-First Century.’ Contemporary Literature, 53, no. 4, 2012, pp. 681–712. Bureau of Labor Statistics. ‘Extended Mass Layoffs and the 9/11 Attacks.’ Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, The Economics Daily, 10 September 2003. https:// www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2003/sept/wk2/art03.htm. Accessed 7 February 2023. Cowart, David. ‘The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.’ Contemporary Literature, 53, no. 1, 2012, pp. 31–45. DeLillo, Don. ‘Baader–Meinhof.’ 2002. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. Scribner, 2011, pp. 105–18. ——. End Zone. 1972. Penguin, 1986. ——. Great Jones Street. Houghton Mifflin, 1973. ——. ‘In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September.’ The Guardian, 21 December 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/dec/22/ fiction.dondelillo. Accessed 7 February 2023. ——. The Names. Vintage, 1982. ——. Point Omega. Scribner, 2010. ——. White Noise. Penguin, 1985. Duvall, John N. ‘The (Super) Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo’s White Noise.’ Arizona Quarterly, 50, no. 3, 1994, pp. 127–53. Dyer, Geoff. ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ New York Times, 5 February 2010. https://www.nytimes. com/2010/02/07/books/review/Dyer-t.html. Accessed 7 February 2023. Gander, Catherine. ‘The Art of Being Out of Time in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 127–42. Gourgouris, Stathis. ‘DeLillo in Greece Eluding the Name.’ Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood. Princeton University Press, pp. 289–310. Herren, Graley. ‘Don DeLillo’s Art Stalkers.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 61, no. 1, 2015, pp. 138–67. Jones, Malcolm. ‘The Mother of All Horror Films.’ Newsweek, 154, no. 3, 18 January 2010. Gale Onefile. Communications and Mass Media. Gale.com/databases/gale.com. Accessed 7 February 2023. 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, pp. 353–77. Kramer, Hilton. ‘Jewish Museum Show, Full of Vile Crap, Not to be Forgiven.’ New York Observer, 1 April 2002. ——. ‘MoMA Helps Martyrdom of German Terrorists.’ New York Observer, 3 July 1995, 1, 23. Laperruque, Jake. ‘Patriot Act Morass: Gains and Stalled Reforms.’ The Project on Government Oversight, The Constitution Project, 17 March 2020. https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2020/03/ patriot-act-morass-gains-and-stalled-reforms. Accessed 7 February 2023. Lasdun, James. ‘Point Omega by Don DeLillo’, review. The Guardian, 26 February 2010. https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/27/don-delillo-point-omega. Accessed 7 February 2023.

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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes tropiques. Atheneum, 1963. Mahon, Áine, and Fergal McHugh. ‘Lateness and the Inhospitable in Stanley Cavell and Don DeLillo.’ Philosophy and Literature, 40, no. 2, 2016, pp. 446–64. Prikker, Jan Thorn. ‘Interview with Gerhard Richter.’ Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting, edited by Richard Storr. Museum of Modern Art, 2003, pp. 161–85. Richter, Gerhard. ‘Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker concerning the Cycle 18 October 1977, 1989.’ Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting Writings and Interviews 1962–1993, edited by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, translated by David Britt. MIT Press, 1995, pp. 183–207. Said, Edward. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. Pantheon, 2006. Savvas, Theophilus. American Postmodern Novelists and the Past. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Shatz, Adam, ‘Orientalism: Then and Now.’ New York Review of Books, 20 May 2019. Shipe, Matthew. ‘War as Haiku: The Politics of Don DeLillo’s Late Style.’ Orbit: Writing around Pynchon, 4, no. 2, 31 May 2016, pp. 1–23, http://dx.doi.org/10.16995/orbit 102. Spark, Benice. The Ethical Work of Literature in a Post-Humanist World: Don DeLillo, Arendt, and Badiou. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018. Suskind, Ron. ‘Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George Bush.’ New York Times Magazine, 17 October 2004. Thurschwell, Adam. ‘Writing and Terror: Don DeLillo on the Task of Literature After 9/11.’ Law and Literature, 19, no. 2, 2007, pp. 277–302.

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4 The Art Encounter Jonathan Gibbs

I

t is more or less axiomatic that the novels and short stories of Don DeLillo feature art and artists in abundance – to the extent that it would be fair to consider the nature of art, and its role and purpose in society and culture, as one of his major themes, alongside technology, death and language. For his characters, art is a way of interacting with the world, whether creating or – for want of a better word – consuming it. In this chapter I will be considering the specific instances in DeLillo’s novels and short stories when a work of art is encountered and experienced from the ‘receiver’ side, that is, by a character or characters who are not the creator of the work in question, who are encountering the work as we might, as a civilian. This will involve careful policing of boundaries, for the attention DeLillo applies to the experience of artworks in his writing he also applies to things that are not, strictly speaking, artworks at all. Is a photograph of the most photographed barn in America an artwork, for instance? Or a snippet of Super 8 film shot by a child through the rear-view windscreen of a car that randomly captures a random murder? Or live webcam footage of a Finnish highway? Certainly, DeLillo is alive to the continuity and crossover between art and not-art, between what John Dewey called ‘the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience’ (2). This chapter will focus primarily on those art encounters that take place within a formal or traditional or accepted sociocultural art-world context, defining an art encounter as an engagement with an artwork that includes the social and cultural context of that engagement – although this doesn’t mean it must necessarily be an institutional setting. The role that art encounters play in DeLillo’s inherently expressive, narrative art means that my discussion of aesthetic experience will tend to be evaluative, rather than ontological: that his characters are having an aesthetic experience when they encounter these artworks seems in the context of this chapter to be worth accepting as a given; more interesting is the nature and quality of the experience they are having, and what these things tell us about them, and the role of art in their life. Thus, while I am happy to accept Dewey’s definition of aesthetic experience as ‘appreciative, perceiving and enjoying’ (49) and ‘a process consisting of a series of responsive acts that accumulate toward objective fulfilment’ (54), I find Monroe Beardsley’s response to Dewey in a series of essays on aesthetic experience over a number of years more valuable. In particular, his ‘Aesthetic Experience’ suggests that we define and classify with reference to a set of five central criteria: most importantly ‘object directedness’ (or ‘object focus’, as it can also be framed) and then at least three of the following: ‘felt freedom’, ‘detached affect’, ‘active discovery’ and ‘wholeness’ – where ‘wholeness’ refers

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not to the completeness of the experience itself, as per Dewey, but to the person, in psychological terms, (‘a sense of integration as a person, of being restored to wholeness [. . .] and a corresponding contentment’) (Aesthetic Point of View 288–9). Of course, this aesthetic goal of the art encounter is often an ostensible one, and can hide another: for example, a financial or a social one, as at an art auction or a launch party. I will use Beardsley’s criteria as a way of measuring the quality of the art encounter as aesthetic experience – not how good the artwork is, but how well the encounter has allowed the viewer to truly engage with it – even if, contra Dewey, the experience doesn’t necessarily ‘[run] its course to fulfilment [such that it] is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency’ (Dewey 36–7). It makes sense to start my examination with the most conventional example possible: looking at a painting in an art gallery. The gallery experience, generally, is one of seeming individual freedom, with cultural norms only superficially reinforced by the uniformed staff seated against the walls. The gallery is a space set aside purely for the aesthetic experience; the viewer can walk around at their own pace, choosing which pictures to look at, and for how long. The design of the room, the learned conventional behaviour, the presence of information panels are all intended to help the viewer meet Beardsley’s criteria. DeLillo’s 1991 novel Mao II contains three very different gallery scenes. In the first, Bill Gray’s factotum Scott Martineau uses a day trip to New York as an opportunity to ‘look at the Warhols’ in, presumably, the Museum of Modern Art (20). His is a typical contemporary metropolitan museum experience. He is one of many visitors (the exhibition rooms are characterised by ‘anxious milling’, with enough people for the ‘surge [of their] bodies [to make] its own soft roar’) but not too many to seriously affect his ability to attend to the paintings (20–1). He is able to walk past the canvases he is not interested in, and to stand long enough in front of the ones he is interested in to engage with them. We seem to be able to tick off at least three of Beardsley’s criteria: ‘He found it liberating. Had he ever realised the deeper meaning of Mao before he saw these pictures? [. . .] He stood and looked a while longer, feeling a curious calm’ (21). Nevertheless, there is an ambivalence about DeLillo’s treatment of Scott’s experience. The narration of the visit is as cursory as the visit itself is brief, especially when compared to the treatment of aesthetic experience in other novels. It is hard not to think of Dewey’s dismissal of the art beholder who is ‘too lazy, idle or indurated in convention’ to do the necessary work. ‘His “appreciation” will be a mixture of scraps of learning with conformity to norms of conventional admiration and with a confused, even if genuine, emotional excitation’ (56). The novel’s second gallery scene features the photographer Brita Nilsson attending the opening party of a group show. Here the room is packed, and the social aspect predominates (‘she felt the interplay of glances, the way eyes consume their food, taking in faces, asses, tapestry jackets, raw-silk shirts’ [133]), to the extent that Brita considers that the event is itself a performance put on by the attendees for those able to see them from the street through the plate-glass windows. Compared to the ‘anxious’ gallery-goers at the Met, hoping for enlightenment, the party attendees here, Brita thinks, know they appear ‘privileged and inviolate, transcendent souls lighted against the falling night’ (134). Nevertheless, Brita is able to find one painting worth laboriously crossing the room for. It is a Warhol pastiche, titled Gorby I, and on close inspection (DeLillo devotes most of a page to a description of the work and to Brita’s

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thoughts on it), she finds it ‘[not] funny at all’ (134). This is not an edifying aesthetic experience, but it is the fault of the artwork, not the gallery setting. Brita shows us that, even at a busy opening party, dominated by social behaviours, it is possible to carve out the time and space needed to engage with the art. The third gallery scene features Karen Janney, the lost girl who wanders through the novel, addicted to news images, eager to help and happy to be co-opted, and latching on to most of the main characters at different times. The gallery here is a much smaller-scale operation than the others (major public museum and successful commercial space) and the only artwork mentioned in the ‘totally bared down’ room is a large mixed-media piece covering a wall (173). Karen’s interaction with the piece is limited to itemising the elements that go to make it up: ‘metal, burlap, glass, there was clotted paint on the glass, a ledge of weathered wood, there were flashlight batteries and postcards of Greece’ (172–3). When she sees a food-encrusted spoon attached to the burlap, she reaches out to touch it and it comes away in her hand. ‘She held the spoon in her hand, standing totally frozen. She didn’t know when she’d been so scared’ (173). Dazed, she leaves the gallery still holding it. Quite apart from the lack of propriety in Karen’s act (breaking the biggest unwritten rule of the art encounter: not to touch or damage the artwork), it is clear that her behaviour runs against at least one of Beardsley’s criteria for aesthetic experience, that of detached affect (which of course goes back to Kant’s ‘disinterestedness’): ‘a sense that the objects on which interest is concentrated are set a little at a distance emotionally’ (Aesthetic Point of View 288). While Karen doesn’t engage with the artwork intellectually, her intuitive, childlike response is presented as genuine, despite her terror at having overstepped a boundary, and indeed it evolves over the following days and weeks. She takes the spoon home with her and puts it on a shelf in Brita’s loft, where it becomes a talisman more powerful than the usual souvenir from a gallery visit (postcard, print, fridge magnet): ‘She stood just looking at the spoon sometimes. She told Brita she didn’t want to take it with her when she left. It had a new setting now, detached from the burlap, and she was afraid that moving the spoon again might damage it in some mysterious inner way’ (Mao II 186). Again, it is possible to measure this relationship against Beardsley’s criteria, and again it does look somewhat like an aesthetic experience; but the spoon’s magical properties for Karen bring it closer to the examples of ritualistic objects found elsewhere in DeLillo’s novels, such as Nick Shay’s baseball in Underworld (1998) or the Hitler film in Running Dog (1978), where meaning and value are found in ownership rather than understanding. It’s hard, looking at Beardsley’s criteria, to see quite where the religious experience of a talisman differs from the aesthetic experience of an artwork. Perhaps it comes down to the ‘intelligibility’ that is the goal of his active discovery (Aesthetic Point of View 288), and which he further describes as ‘insight into connections and organizations – [combining] making sense of something with making something make sense’ (292). We don’t know what insight Karen draws from the spoon, or what sense she makes of it, but more importantly nor do we know whether she truly considers the spoon itself a genuine artwork, and thus her experience an aesthetic one. She is an ambiguous character in the novel, standing for the unsophisticated addiction to images of the general population, but given a personal psychology that remains opaque compared to those of the other main characters. As Laura Barrett points out, Karen ‘suffers from

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a peculiar lack of perimeters’ (789). She seeks transcendence but does not know how to achieve it. Perhaps the clearest lesson to be drawn from the episode is how much questions of definition of aesthetic experience can rely on cultural norms: it is the art gallery setting that tells us we are having an aesthetic experience, not our own awareness of changes to our mental and physiological states. These three gallery scenes offer a variety of examples of the contemporary art encounter, but within the scheme of the novel they are – despite Karen’s infraction – safe. If one of the themes of Mao II is, famously, the novelist’s loss of status as unacknowledged legislator of the world, to the benefit of the terrorist, and that literature is, for those who take part in it, existentially highly dangerous, then fine art is shown to be a private–public ritual that has no real impact on the ‘inner life of the culture’ (Mao II 41). The same cannot be said of the two other major art gallery scenes in DeLillo’s fiction: those in the short story ‘Baader–Meinhof’ (2002) and the novel Point Omega (2010). In both, the subject of the artwork is violent death, and in both an encounter in the gallery setting leads (or can be conjectured to lead) to an act of violence or aggression in the world of the novel. ‘Baader–Meinhof’ opens with an unnamed woman in a gallery that is showing what we can deduce to be Gerhard Richter’s 15-strong series of paintings October 18, 1977, based on photographs of the members of the German terrorist group the Red Army Faction. Regarded as an art encounter, it is easy to say that this visit has been thus far a positive one for the woman. She is moved by the paintings, and seems to be able to think imaginatively about the complex historical subject of the works: ‘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’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’ 105). She is drawn particularly to the two women depicted, and is moved also by a detail in a funeral scene: what might be a tree at the edge of the canvas that looks like a cross. As Graley Herren points out, ‘DeLillo is particularly interested in characters drawn to engage repeatedly with the same artworks or art venues’ (139), and this is the third successive day on which she has come to the gallery to look at, or be with, the paintings; and it has taken her two days to notice the cross. That she does so marks the encounter as one of ‘active discovery’, described by Beardsley as ‘exhilaration in seeing connections between percepts and between meanings’ (Aesthetic Point of View 288–9). This is most clearly demonstrated when she interprets the tree/cross as being ‘an element of forgiveness in the picture, that the two men and the woman, terrorists, and Ulrike before them, terrorist, were not beyond forgiveness’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’ 109). The woman is clearly having a more developed and engaged aesthetic experience than any of those described in Mao II. Calm, extended exposure to art in a bespoke, controlled environment is after all what most art galleries promise, no matter that many visitors’ experiences are closer to Scott’s, jostling with crowds in the hope of a moment’s clarity or illumination. (A more dismissive response is offered by the unnamed gallery-goer in Point Omega: ‘Almost no one entered the room alone. They came in squads, shuffling in and milling briefly near the door and then leaving. One or two would turn and leave and then the others, forgetting what they’d seen in the second it took to turn and move towards the door’ [9].) Certainly, we might consider a three-day visit to a single room or installation beyond most people’s definition of a normal art encounter (in fact the woman comes back the following day, making it four) but it is easy to read this as something more

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positive than Karen’s quasi-cultish devotion to her spoon. ‘I realize now that the first day I was only barely looking’, the woman in the story says. ‘I thought I was looking but I was only getting a bare inkling of what’s in these paintings. I’m only just starting to look’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’ 109). It is naïve to think of art encounters as individual, solitary and discrete entities. In his book The Sight of Death (2006) the art historian T. J. Clark documents a four-month period in which he visited two Poussin paintings at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles almost daily. The book, written up from notes, is ‘a record of looking taking place and changing through time’ (5), but Clark also suggests that it offers a critique of the received idea of the singular art encounter, as exemplified by Scott with his Warhols: Can it be that there are certain kinds of visual configuration, or incident, or play of analogy, that simply cannot be retained in the memory, or fully integrated into a disposable narrative of interpretation: so that only the physical, literal, dumb act of receiving the array on the retina will satisfy the mind? (8) ‘Disposable narrative of interpretation’ is what we could accuse Scott of settling for, for there is no indication that his personal revelation (that ‘work that was unwitting of history appealed to [him]’, and that this was the ‘deeper meaning of Mao’) follows him into the rest of the novel (Mao II 21). Irrespective of the value of the woman’s aesthetic experience in ‘Baader–Meinhof’, the gallery visit has a dramatic component that is entirely different to anything in Mao II’s gallery scenes. The story opens partway through her third-day visit, when she is approached by a man who addresses her about the art, then turns the conversation to her personally. He persuades her to join him for a drink, and then they are in her studio apartment, where he – increasingly threateningly – attempts to compel her to have sex with him, despite her asking him to leave. She hides in the bathroom, while he – we infer – masturbates on her bed, then asks for forgiveness and leaves. But the lack of physical violence doesn’t mean this is not akin to terrorism. The woman’s studio apartment, once he has gone, is infected by his presence. ‘She was where she wanted to be, and alone, but nothing was the same. Bastard’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’ 117), and it is possible to link this back to their shared art encounter itself. The art gallery after all is an ambivalent space, where we are encouraged to have personal and private aesthetic experiences, but in public. Normally, gallery-goers undergo their individual aesthetic experiences separately and in parallel, but the inherent liberality of the environment means that connections can be made. We are open to the artworks, so why shouldn’t we be open to other people who are also opening themselves to the art? The moment the gallery-going woman in ‘Baader–Meinhof’ admits her helplessness to the man, she leaves herself open to his intimidatory tactics. A very similar dynamic plays out – more extensively, more brutally – in Point Omega, published eight years after ‘Baader–Meinhof’. Here again a central character returns day after day to view a gallery exhibit with a conceptual take on violent content; a man and a woman strike up conversation; after the shared encounter they develop some kind of a relationship, at the end of which he – possibly; it is left deliberately unclear – murders her. Again, the artwork described in the gallery scene is easily identifiable (and named as such in an acknowledgement) as 24 Hour Psycho by Douglas

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Gordon, in which the Hitchcock film is projected at a slowed-down rate of two frames per second rather than 24. Again, the central character (the man here, rather than the woman) visits the exhibit again and again, six days in a row, spending hours immersing himself in the installation, and it is open to question whether this is a result of serious, Clark-like critical engagement, or of psychological aberration. There are two gallery scenes in the novel, a prologue and epilogue that take place on subsequent days, but both of them prior to the main action of the novel. In the prologue, any sense of aberration is only suggested: in the length of time the man – whose name might be Dennis – has been there; the unnerving fixedness of his attention; his eagerness to re-watch the shower scene in which Janet Leigh’s character is killed; his lack of sense of self since his mother’s death (a link to Psycho’s Norman Bates). In the prologue, ‘Dennis’ imagines that all the time he is there in the gallery he is ‘waiting for a woman to arrive, a woman alone, someone he might talk to’ (Point Omega 14); in the epilogue she appears. This is Jessie, the woman whom he – we suspect – will follow to the desert in the main section of the novel, abduct and murder. Unlike in ‘Baader–Meinhof’, it is she who approaches him, her conversational gambits more outré than those of the man in that story: ‘I want to die after a long traditional illness. What about you?’ is the third thing she says to him (106). His response to her seems in part typical (he is surprised to be approached; he imagines the words he would use to ask if she wants to get some food with him) but later he imagines himself pinning her to the wall with the room emptied out except for the guard who is looking straight ahead, nowhere, motionless, the film still running, the woman pinned, also motionless, watching the film over his shoulder. Museum guards should wear sidearms, he thought. There is priceless art to protect and a man with a gun would clarify the act of seeing for the benefit of everyone in the room. (112) There is an interesting non sequitur here, regarding the guard’s need for a gun. The suggestion that is not quite made is that the act of seeing (the basis of this form of aesthetic experience), if not ‘clarified’, might lead to violence, either against the art or directed elsewhere. This seems like a satirical exaggeration of the stance taken by writers such as John Berger to the status of artworks in museums, when he decries ‘the bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent on their market value, which is what has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible’ (23). This link between public aesthetic experience and male violence (and the ease with which cultural spaces, with their insistence on the openness of the art encounter, can facilitate this) is one that is played out again and again in DeLillo’s fiction, as itemised by Herren. Another short story, ‘The Starveling’ (2011), sees compulsive all-day cinemagoer Leo stalking a woman he finds overlapping his itinerary, eventually following her into the women’s toilets of a cinema. Here he finds that his imagined affinity does not miraculously blossom into connection, but still he must ‘make himself known, tell her who he was, for both of them to hear’, which he does, at length, before she is able to escape (208). Del Nearing in The Names (1982) says, ‘I don’t like museums. Men always follow me in museums. What is it about places like that? Every time I turn there’s a figure watching me’ (147). In a short, late gallery scene in Falling Man (2007), Lianne is distracted from her contemplation of a series of Morandi still lifes by an

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unnamed man who ‘was interested in looking at her before he looked at the paintings. Maybe he expected certain freedoms to be in effect because they were like-minded people in a run-down building, here to look at art’ (210). She finds that she can’t look at the art with him there, and is forced to leave. Clearly the positivity or otherwise of shared art encounters is subject to a variety of factors: individual vulnerability, gendered interpersonal relations and communality. (There is safety, as well as wisdom, in crowds.) When Lianne, earlier in Falling Man, witnesses David Janiak preparing one of his guerrilla art performances, it is to the other random people present that she turns for reassurance: ‘All she wanted to share was a look, catch someone’s eye, see what she herself was seeing’ (163). In ‘The Starveling’, Leo’s female housemate Flory knows that ‘a film can be undermined by the person you’re seeing it with, there in the dark, a ripple effect of attitude, scene by scene, shot by shot’ (187). More positively, journalist Moll Robbins in Running Dog tells her lover Glen Selvey that she never forgets who she saw a particular movie with (61). Although film is central to Running Dog, with two film screenings occurring at pivotal moments in its narrative, there are also significant art encounters that take us out of the public into the private sphere – and, as with all art encounters in the novel, into the commercial and monetary. The novel’s ‘MacGuffin’ is a purported sex film made in Hitler’s bunker near the end of the Second World War, which various parties strive to acquire. After its untitled prologue the book’s first part opens with a private viewing in the gallery of an art-erotica dealer named Lightborne, where he exhibits his latest acquisitions to potential buyers and their agents. Where the opening party Brita attends in Mao II was a performance of informality, with fancy clothes and ‘silver cocktails’ in a ‘rambling white space set on several levels, under ducts and sprinklers and track lights’ (Mao II 133), Lightborne’s viewing hides its transactional nature under more humble dressing. The gallery ‘wasn’t the usual clinical space of right angles and clever little ramps. It resembled instead an antique shop in serious decline.’ Lightborne serves his guests ‘Wink in paper cups’ (Running Dog 14). The description of the artworks/objects is detached and euphemistic, and seems to come from the point of view of Robbins, though her rather distanced approach perhaps matches the attendees’ unwillingness to show too much interest in individual articles, either out of buyer’s discretion or from not wanting to seem overly lascivious. ‘Moll Robbins roved a bit uncertainly through all of this, fingering the lid of a porcelain teapot (Chinese emperor with concubine, apparently), peering at a coin under glass (Greeks, male, dallying)’ (15). This lack of engagement beyond superficial classification suggests that for Robbins this art encounter involves no aesthetic experience whatsoever. The same lack of affect is present in a small private auction Lightbourne holds later in the book: ‘Lightborne showed a carved wood fertility figure. Noted its characteristics and advised as to period, handiwork involved, where found and how [. . .] A copper statuette with a lesbian theme also went without competitive bidding.’ A large stone phallus is described as ‘variously chipped, pockmarked and discolored. It had character. Lightborne invited the bidders to take a closer look, and most did. Then he delivered a brief interpretation of the piece and opened the bidding’ (47–8). Aesthetic experience (that ‘brief interpretation’ suggesting at least a modicum of the making of ‘connections between percepts and between meanings’ from Beardsley’s ‘active discovery’ [Aesthetic Point of View 289]) is but necessary, grudging foreplay to the consummative act of selling and buying.

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Later in the novel Robbins discovers the secret private gallery of erotica belonging to Senator Lloyd Percival. As in other gallery-based scenes special attention is given to the architectural and decorative particulars of the exhibition space before we see any art: ‘She found she was standing on a grillwork balcony overlooking an enormous room of Mediterranean design. She walked down a closed staircase lined with stained glass panels, abstract. The floor below was parquet with a centred rectangle of peacock tiles. There were large tropical plants’ (Running Dog 79). Again, the art is listed in a way that engages neither with the aesthetic nor the erotic content (‘A stone fountain depicted a woman on her knees before an aroused warrior’ [80]), although DeLillo does allow Robbins, in his free indirect narration, one qualitative comment: ‘Moll moved first along the walls, looking at the paintings and drawings. Very nice, most of them, all labeled’ (80). Niceness, the lowest possible term on the ladder towards beauty, is only as important as provenance. Ironically the only person to mention the aesthetic quality of the erotic art in the novel is Percival, who complains to Selvey, his buyer: ‘Jesus Christmas, what happened to the esthetic element? The subtlety, the complexity, the simple charm. All he seems to show us are junkyard pieces’ (45). The narrative tone of the entire novel is so detached, so cynical, that it is hard to draw firm conclusions about its presentation of the erotic art it details. The distance could be linked to the overwhelmingly commercial nature of the discussions that pertain to the art, or it could be linked to the erotic content, just as Nadine, the nude storyteller encountered later, is blasé about the narrative content of her stories: ‘Naomi is this buxom Israeli girl who we find bathing one day in a stream that runs through her kibbutz. She has giant white breasts, etcetera etcetera, nipples, etcetera’ (128). The only artwork to which the narrative of Running Dog gives any kind of genuine aesthetic attention is the finally discovered Hitler film, which turns out to present not a fascist orgy but a home movie in which Hitler impersonates Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp character for a collection of children and adults. There is bathos, certainly, in this final revelation, but the narrative ekphrasis rises above the characters’ response to the film depiction of ‘Hitler humanized’ (Robbins’ words, 237) as ‘disgusting’ (Lightborne’s response, also 237). It is noteworthy also that the passage describing the film and the viewers’ responses to it is intercut with passages in which Robbins’ lover Selvey is attacked, killed and beheaded in the desert. As with ‘Baader–Meinhof’ and Point Omega, the potentially positive aspects of the aesthetic encounter – starting, in Beardsley’s formulation, with object focus, and ending with wholeness, involving ‘selfacceptance and self-expansion’ (Aesthetic Point of View 289) – is starkly contrasted with the violence that exists elsewhere in the world, and that aesthetic contemplation, it is suggested, must block out or ignore if it is to achieve its goals. The tension or dichotomy established in Running Dog between seeing and owning a work of art is explored in a different way in Falling Man (2007). While the most dramatic art encounters in the novel are those featuring the titular performance artist (real name David Janiak), I want to focus for a moment on another more domestic series of art encounters: those with a pair of still life paintings by Italian artist Giorgio Morandi that hang in the Upper East Side apartment of Nina, the elderly mother of Lianne, one half of the novel’s central couple, and given to Nina by her art dealer lover Martin Ridnour. In one passage Martin contemplates the two Morandi paintings before linking their depictions of groupings of bottles, jugs and biscuit tins to the twin towers of the World

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Trade Center, saying, ‘I must be even more disoriented than usual after a long flight [. . .] Because I keep seeing the towers in this still life’ (Falling Man 49). DeLillo’s treatment of the Morandis is one of the fullest explorations of the nature of the aesthetic experience, and is made more compelling for the subtle, carefully extended way it is presented over the course of the novel. This chimes with what Clark records in The Sight of Death of ‘looking taking place and changing through time’ (5). The paintings are not part of a narrative set piece, as in the gallery visits in Mao II, Point Omega and ‘Baader–Meinhof’; instead they are introduced into the novel in increments, first by a general reference to the art in the apartment (‘Her mother’s apartment was not far from Fifth Avenue, with art on the walls, painstakingly spaced, and small bronze pieces on table and bookshelves’ [Falling Man 8]), then mentioned by Lianne as something that she loves about her mother’s apartment, and described in a way that lays the groundwork for Martin’s later reading of it. She says that ‘there was something in the brushstrokes that held a mystery she could not name’: Natura Morta. The Italian term for still life seemed stronger than it had to be, somewhat ominous even, but these were matters she hadn’t talked about with her mother. Let the latent meanings turn and bend in the wind, free from authoritative comment. (12) We as readers are helped to ‘know’ the Morandis before we are offered Martin’s reading of them, and the possibility of their latent meanings is established before they themselves are seen. Nevertheless, Nina herself rejects Martin’s reading: ‘These shapes are not translatable to modern towers, twin towers. It’s a work that rejects that kind of extension or projection. It takes you inward, down and in’ (111). Lianne will pick up on and develop this reading later, as we shall see. The domestic nature of these shared, side-by-side viewings (which stand in contrast to those in ‘Baader–Meinhof’, Point Omega and elsewhere) is also contrasted by the other art encounters in Falling Man: Lianne’s encounters with David Janiak, the performance artist who throws himself unannounced off structures in New York, held only by a rope and harness, referencing the people who threw themselves to their deaths from the World Trade Center after the planes hit. Janiak bypasses the formal channels of the art world to force his work into the lives of the unsuspecting public (a case of compelled rather than the ‘willingly guided’ object focus that Beardsley mandates). He hopes to jolt them into the forging of connections, and the rising above dark and terrible things that, Beardsley contends, can lead to ‘self-expansion’ (Beardsley, Aesthetic Point of View 288–9). Janiak’s audience is consistently repelled, rather than drawn in, shouting and jeering at him, threatening to call the police. (This ‘compelled’ art encounter is prefigured somewhat by the samizdat looped projection of the Zapruder footage of Kennedy’s assassination at an artist’s studio in Underworld, unannounced and unexpected, which leaves some viewers unmoved, others shocked to despair [Underworld 488].) As with the Morandis, the narrative gives us (or Lianne) multiple viewings of Janiak, introducing him to us gently. The first time Lianne sees him he has already jumped, and is hanging motionless above the street. Later, she witnesses a second performance, and this time sees Janiak’s preparation in full: behind the scenes, as it were. Janiak has set himself up to fall vertically past a moving elevated train, so that the passengers will

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see him fall but not see him land, that is, they would have no indication that he hadn’t died. At this point performance art shades into a form of terrorism, making ‘raids on human consciousness’ as Bill Gray has it in Mao II (41). Nevertheless, Lianne is moved by it, if not in a way she is able to process and assimilate; it makes her think of her father, who committed suicide, and she runs from the scene, ending up ‘drained and wasted’ (Falling Man 169). Later still, Lianne reads Janiak’s obituary, and researches him online. This retroactively expands her and our understanding of those art encounters, but not enough for her to feel she is able to synthesise all she has actively discovered about him and his art. She finds the transcript of a panel discussion titled ‘Falling Man as Heartless Exhibitionist or Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror’ but cannot read more than a few lines (220). Janiak himself refused to give any explanation or rationale for his performances. There is no sense of intelligibility: ‘The man eluded her’ (223) and the wholeness of an aesthetic experience eludes her. What Beardsley’s criteria fail to accommodate is the possibility that an artist might not want their art to be intelligible, might not want the viewer to ‘rise above’ any terrible things the art contains, to find closure, resolution, catharsis, wholeness. It’s worth mentioning briefly the role of journalism, criticism and ekphrastic writing in DeLillo’s art encounters. Textual elements can inform aesthetic experiences (e.g. galleries’ information panels), report on them, or offer an analogue for them. What Lianne reads about Janiak is little more than news reports, but they share something with the review/feature article of Lauren Hartke’s performance Body Time that we read, inserted between chapters, in The Body Artist (2001). This piece of arts journalism, mixing interview, report and criticism, makes it clear that the art encounter involves more than the purely perceptual aspects of the aesthetic experience, but these different aspects are muddled, just as our processing during an aesthetic experience is muddled: perception is mixed with reflection and analysis. The ongoing process of synthesis and re-synthesis is so instinctual, so deeply integrated, that it becomes impossible to separate out the discrete elements. Foreknowledge is not always necessary or useful. The little that Klara Sax in Underworld knows about the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, before she visits, does not prepare her for the visceral experience of encountering them: ‘She had no idea. She didn’t know a thing so rucked in the vernacular could have such an epic quality. All she knew about the towers was that the man worked alone, an immigrant, for many years’ (492). Nick Shay is better prepared for his encounter with Long Tall Sally, Klara’s monumental piece of land art in the same novel, the 230 B-52 bomber planes, arrayed in ranks in the desert and painted. First there is the magazine article he reads, but more importantly, once he arrives at the location he is able to listen in as Klara gives a television interview, in which she gives a reasonably full explanation of the process, history and intention of the work. When Nick sees it the next morning, he is ready for the work of synthesis, just as much as if he were walking into a gallery. The ledge from which Nick observes the work puts him, he says, ‘at a natural vantage in relation to the aircraft’ (83). His narration of the experience foregrounds the perceptual, the colours and scope of the work, but also integrates analysis and interpretation. There is a definite sense of Beardsley’s felt freedom in Nick’s description, and of wholeness: ‘I felt a kind of wildness all around me [. . .] the fittingness of what she’s done, but when I’d seen it all I knew I wouldn’t stay an extra second’ (83). An aesthetic experience can after all be singular

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and self-contained, as when Klara happily leaves the Watts Towers before her allotted hour is up, despite the fact that she found it ‘a place riddled with epiphanies [. . .] she was weak with sensation, weak with seeing and feeling’ (492). The cutting short of an art encounter can be proof positive of the success of the aesthetic experience, as felt by the beholder, rather than dictated by artworld norms. It’s odd then to read, 40 pages after Nick’s first viewing of Klara’s land art, about a second visit. He takes his wife, Marian, on a trip in hired hot air balloon, as a surprise. It is a surprise to the reader too: we don’t know what we’re there to see until the planes begin ‘to emerge out of distance and haze’ (124). It is another example of a shared art encounter, and unlike those in ‘Baader–Meinhof’, Point Omega and even Falling Man, it is a joyous one. There seems a risk that their exhilaration militates against Beardsley’s ‘detached affect’ of the aesthetic experience, with Nick and Marian’s somewhat exaggerated exclamations ‘I can never look at a painting in the same way again’ and ‘I can never look at an airplane’ (126). However, the encounter ends with a clear indication of self-expansion; Nick’s narration joins him and his wife in a communal ‘we’, noting that seeing hawks floating on air currents ‘makes you think they’ve been up there, the same two birds since Biblical time’, and that ‘Everything we saw was ominous and shining, tense with the beauty of things that are normally unseen’ (126). In this chapter, I have briefly considered a variety of art encounters in DeLillo’s oeuvre, in settings ranging from the gallery to the private home, to public interventions of land art and guerrilla performance art, to show that these different settings produce a range of aesthetic experiences that can depend on the professional expertise of the viewer, the social and cultural framing of the encounter, and whether the encounter is solitary or shared. This variety of examples demonstrates, at the very least, that sophisticated engagement with art does not equate with moral probity. Graley Herren has written more widely on what he calls ‘DeLillo’s art stalkers’: a repeated scenario in which ‘a male predator gazes upon a female spectator gazing at an artwork, stalking his prey back and forth between the presumed sanctuary of the art venue and the vulnerable world outside’ (139). He rightly points out the ambiguous nature of the cultural settings in which we are nudged towards our individual aesthetic experiences: DeLillo, he says, ‘considers ways in which artworks and art venues can subvert the higher impulses traditionally attributed to them [. . .] Art venues also facilitate a kind of aesthetic promiscuity, encouraging spectators to shuttle from one intensely intimate experience to the next’ (163). However, it’s worth noting that these art stalkers may be similar in their effect on the women they encounter (if not the extremity of that effect), but they are different in terms of their aesthetic character. The man in ‘Baader– Meinhof’ has superficial similarities with ‘Dennis’ in Point Omega, but the quality of the aesthetic experience he is able to produce in himself is not one of them. Conversely, it is the American senator who has the strongest aesthetic response to the erotica in Running Dog. Equally, DeLillo allows genuine aesthetic experiences (or, to use Beardsley’s rather glum ‘instrumentalist’ phrase, aesthetic experiences ‘of fairly great magnitude’ [Aesthetics 530]) to flower in a range of settings. The unnamed woman in ‘Baader–Meinhof’, Nick and Marian in their hot air balloon in Underworld, Lianne with the Morandis in Falling Man, all achieve ‘active discovery’ and something of the ‘wholeness’ that Beardsley hopes for, and seem to do so – at the risk of invoking the Intentional Fallacy – in a way that at least doesn’t run counter to the prevailing notions of the ‘meaning’ of the artworks. But

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the most interesting response to the function and process of the art encounter in the books comes from Lianne’s mother, Nina, in whose apartment Martin’s Morandis hang. She says, ‘I think these pictures are what I’ll look at when I’ve stopped looking at everything else. I’ll look at bottles and jars. I’ll sit here looking.’ And then: ‘I’ll look and I’ll muse. Or I’ll just look. After a while I won’t need the paintings to look at. The paintings will be excess. I’ll look at the wall’ (Falling Man 111–12). It’s not that the paintings will have run out of meaning, will have lost their ability to signify, but that Nina, at the end of her life, will have no more need of their prompting. Admittedly, she comes close, here, to Karen Janney and her spoon, who treats her keepsake more as a mandala, a focus for meditation, than an artwork, with latent elements to ‘actively discover’. Nina’s aesthetic experience here has transcended the need for the first – and supposedly the only non-negotiable – of Beardsley’s criteria: object focus. Nina shows you can have an aesthetic experience without the need for an artwork, although like certain religious states, this can only come with long practice, as for Max Stenner in The Silence (2020), who with no Super Bowl to watch on television is able to (re)create a football commentary from scratch, staring into the blank screen and extemporising. It is left to Lianne, in Falling Man, to demonstrate the earlier part of that lifelong process of encountering and re-encountering art that her mother has evidently undergone. When we first see her looking at the Morandis, early in the novel, we are told ‘there was something in the brushstrokes that held a mystery she could not name’ (12). Then, after the return of the paintings to Martin, and after her mother’s death, she goes to see an exhibition of similar Morandis in a gallery in New York. She looked at the third painting for a long time. It was a variation on one of the paintings her mother had owned. She noted the nature and shape of each object, the placement of objects, the tall dark oblongs, the white bottle. She could not stop looking. There was something hidden in the painting. Nina’s living room was there, memory and motion. The objects in the painting faded into the figures behind them, the woman smoking in the chair, the standing man. (210) Next, she examines the drawings. She wasn’t sure why she was looking so intently. She was passing beyond pleasure into some kind of assimilation. She was trying to absorb what she saw, take it home, wrap it around her, sleep in it. There was so much to see. Turn it into living tissue, who you are. (210) Lianne is clearly engaged in ‘active discovery’ here, and geared towards ‘self-acceptance’ and ‘self-expansion’. This is what the art encounter offers: the opportunity for an ongoing series of aesthetic experiences, that might lead eventually to somewhere beyond aesthetics, beyond art. But this is where Lianne’s experience is spoiled by the lurking man in the gallery. She went back into the main room but could not look at the work in the same way with the man there, watching her or not. He wasn’t watching her but he was there, fifty and leathery, a mugshot monochrome, probably a painter, and she went out of the room and down the corridor, where she hit the elevator button. (210)

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Even here, where DeLillo presents one of the most moving examples of aesthetic experience in his writing, he reminds us that the public art encounter contains the potential for other encounters of a more dangerous kind. There are two ways of interpreting this: through the shadow of gendered violence that haunts his art writing (as opposed to the political terrorism, which is usually male-on-male), and the seeming desire, in narrative terms, to hobble the possibility of aesthetic experience itself, even as his characters draw close to its ideal consummation.

Works Cited Barrett, Laura. ‘“Here But Also There”: Subjectivity and Postmodern Space in Mao II.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 45, no. 3, 1999, pp. 788–810. Beardsley, Monroe. The Aesthetic Point of View. Cornell University Press, 1982. ——. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. Hackett, 1981. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin, 2008. Clark, T. J.. The Sight of Death. Yale University Press, 2006. DeLillo, Don. ‘Baader–Meinhof.’ 2002. The Angel Esmeralda. Picador, 2011, pp. 105–18. ——. The Body Artist. Picador, 2001. ——. Falling Man. Picador, 2007. ——. Mao II. Picador, 1991. ——. The Names. Picador, 1999. ——. Point Omega. Picador, 2010. ——. Running Dog. Knopf, 1978. ——. The Silence. Picador, 2020. ——. ‘The Starveling.’ 2011. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. Picador, 2011, pp. 183–211. ——. Underworld. Picador, 1998. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. 1934. The Berkeley Publishing Group, 2005. Herren, Graley. The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo. Bloomsbury, 2019.

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Part II Visual Arts and Cultures

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5 Radiance and Repetition: DeLillo’s Icons Sarah Garland

‘Not a thing to study but to feel’

T

o describe something as ‘an icon’ suggests an image that crystallises a set of ideas and feelings, often a historical moment. To describe something or someone as ‘iconic’ marks its persistence in reproductions across time and space. The iconic picture or person is marked by its initial ability to fascinate, to amplify the type of call to attention we might refer to when we speak of ‘the power of the image’. There is no image that is inherently iconic; instead, an image, or a person whose image is repeated, becomes iconic when the familiarity caused by duplication makes of them cultural symbols with a rich and recognisable range of reverberations. James Axton in The Names (1982) puts off visiting the Acropolis because he thinks he is required to respond to ‘the question of its renown’: that is, to those aspects of its status that allow us to think of it as an icon, a vessel for ideas about Western civilisation. ‘The weight and moment of those worked stones promised to make the business of seeing them a complicated one’, ‘so much converges there’, DeLillo has Axton write (The Names 3). DeLillo has said that ‘my mind works one way, toward making a simple moment complex’ (De Pietro 100). The iconic in his novels often acts, as the breathtaking sunsets in White Noise (1985) do, as a prompt for the narrative, or sometimes the character, to stop, discover, study and describe these moments of complexity. In the pages that follow I argue that DeLillo’s meditation on the iconic locates the power of many of these images or figures in their ability to hold and make available the idea of death. This feels to the attracted as though the icon holds an impenetrable secret – the secret glamour of charisma, or the secret of political power, or the power over life and death of a suicide, or a dictator, or of the atomic bomb. The icon’s ability to fascinate is figured in these texts in the image of a radiant light, a visual call to attention which is often amplified further by borrowing from the sublimity of death and of the sacred. In keeping with this, Axton’s eventual visit to the Acropolis is very different to his anticipated experience of the citadel as already-read. ‘What ambiguity there is in exalted things. We despise them a little’, he thinks at the start of the novel (The Names 3). At the novel’s end, he is raw enough to be stripped of his presumptiveness and can cut through the monument’s renown. Instead, narrating from a future point in time, he recalls the liveliness and complexity of his response in 1979 to the mixture of world languages, when for a transcendent moment ‘the Parthenon was not a thing to study but to feel’, a living, ‘human feeling’ and ‘a cry

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for pity’ experienced before the violent international fallout from the Iranian hostage crisis (330).1 The distinctive mark of the iconic in DeLillo’s vision, I argue below, is not just the long duration of its symbolic and visual repetition through time, but an affective charge which attaches to the iconic image or person; a feeling of heightened, and often contradictory, meaningfulness which goes alongside the recognition of this repeated image (‘so much converges there’). Secular icons do not always partake in what we might call beauty, but in the way they can arrest attention they may nonetheless be thought of as functioning in a similar manner to that which Elaine Scarry theorises for beauty: ‘Beauty brings copies of itself into being’, she argues, ‘it makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people’ (3). The Acropolis, for example, might compel its own reproduction; it prompts the beholder to dwell with it, and to produce versions, echoes and iterations which underpin the Western historical imagination. In Scarry’s Kantian argument, and in Axton’s experience, the experience of beauty produces a feeling of conviction which prepares us to recognise other moments of truth. Another version of Scarry’s pause might instead, though, take the suspension of thought prompted by beauty and see parallels in the pauses prompted by traumatic or horrific images. The interleaved photographs in Mao II (1991) – of a Unification Church mass wedding ceremony, of the Hillsborough stadium disaster, of Tiananmen Square, of a crowd in front of a photograph of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and of two boys in a trench labelled ‘In Beirut’ – separate that novel’s sections with a literal suspension of the written text. They interrupt the narrative, ask us to look if we can bear it, or to register our looking away. Many of the cultural images which pattern DeLillo’s oeuvre are figures of violent death: there is the figure of Adolf Hitler in Running Dog (1978) and White Noise, the recurrence of images of the atomic mushroom cloud in End Zone (1972) and its echoes in White Noise, the iterations of the images of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Players (1977), Underworld (1997) and Falling Man (2007), Libra’s use of the Zapruder footage (1988), the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức echoed in suicides in Players and Zero K (2016), as well as 9/11’s ‘falling man’ himself. Even Axton’s experience of the Acropolis gains its quality from its delicate suspension in memory against the coming of a year where a ‘blind might’ seems to shake the region with car bombings, department store explosions and office bombings, and where ‘no one claims credit for the worst of the terror’ (The Names 330) Part of the affective impact of an icon might thus be a feeling of the image’s aesthetic rightness, or the desire we attach to it; but equally the meaningfulness that these figures have in DeLillo’s novels is linked to a felt sense of history, and, within that, to a shock and deathliness which comes with being part of the violence of history. Alongside these portentous feelings there are also more domesticated ones which we associate with recognising another occurrence of the repeated image: irritation, a numbness perhaps, a sense that the iconic image might be too obvious to notice, or so well-known it can be taken as read. Thus, these images which seem to carry the weight of cultural meaning have frequently also passed into visual cliché – they can seem meaningless too. DeLillo’s novels work in the area between these strangely contradictory feelings.

 1

For more on the transcendent in DeLillo’s work, see Carson.

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DeLillo also creates fictionalised versions of the public figure as iconic, all of which have a vexed and complex relationship with their own renown. Mao II’s Bill Gray is a writer whose self-imposed exile has left his figurative image as well as his actual person open to exploitation and interpretation in a manner that he no longer has any purchase on. He agrees to Brita Nilsson’s request to photograph him partly as an intervention into his reputation, to take control of his metaphorical ‘image’ by means of the dissemination of literal images. The figure of the reclusive rock star, Bucky Wunderlick, in Great Jones Street (1973) provides a first iteration of this withdrawal from celebrity; Wunderlick’s acceding to the Happy Valley Farm Commune’s plans to silence him in order to control his meaning allows him only a brief mental isolation among the dispossessed of New York harbour before the drug wears off and returns him to the burden of public meaning. The iconic here denotes a kind of cultural familiarity which permeates the imagination of those who, like the terrorists of Happy Valley, have never met the person. The repetition of the iconic creates its own redundancy as we cease to notice and feel empathy for the repeated – what DeLillo refers to as the ‘cultural drama’ and ‘white-hot consumption and instant waste’ of celebrity and news images (‘The Power of History’ 60). This is part, he says, of the evanescence of contemporary life, which produces serial images to deliver an individual or event to ‘abrupt prominence’, but without a corresponding singularity of meaning: ‘a face appears, a movie actor’s, say, and it seems to be everywhere, suddenly’, ‘and you can’t figure out who the person is inside the name or what the context is that gave such abrupt prominence to the name, but it never actually matters and this is the point’ (62). The recovery of history’s hidden details in novels such as Underworld and Libra provides a commentary on this, partly correcting it by replacing the shorthand of myth with the details of narrative, as DeLillo does for Lee Harvey Oswald, and partly underscoring it by replacing that myth with a new fiction, as he does in the baseball game that opens Underworld. The difficulty of living inside this icon-producing mechanism is commented on through the deliberate manipulations of Bill Gray’s image by Scott Martineau. The doubling, tripling and quadrupling of Mao Zedong’s image in Mao II is parallel with Martineau’s parasitic role in determining, controlling and disseminating a new life narrative for Gray by continuing to withhold his work. Martineau in effect produces Bill Gray II, a perverse version of what Martineau, ‘quoting Bill’, refers to as life’s ‘second chances’ (224): After a time he might take the photographs to New York and meet with Brita and choose the pictures that would appear. But the manuscript would sit, and word would travel, and the pictures would appear, a small and deft selection, one time only, and word would build and spread, and the novel would stay right here, collecting aura and force, deepening old Bill’s legend, undyingly (224).

American Icons DeLillo’s books and interviews engage explicitly with the consequences of the reproduction of images which go into making up the iconic, commenting on the ways in which repetition and reproduction are self-generating ends in themselves, and on the ways in which the repetition of an event or image creates, abstracts and changes the ways in which those images are felt as meaningful. White Noise’s ‘Most Photographed Barn

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in America’ is the most critically well-rehearsed of these discussions (see Landgraf). The barn is literally and figuratively empty of meaningful content outside of the ways in which it binds observers into its autotelic reproduction – ‘We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception . . . a religious experience in a way, like all tourism.’ ‘They are taking pictures of taking pictures’, the McLuhanesque Murray Jay Siskind remarks. ‘We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.’ The barn is an ironic icon, but its obvious ironies do not mean that it is any less marked an experience for Siskind or Jack Gladney: ‘Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn’ (White Noise 12). The argument I am building here about the role of these repeated images in DeLillo’s work is based on an understanding of his enterprise as a meditation on (as the title of his first novel suggests) Americana. Siskind’s description of an ‘accumulation of nameless energies’ is akin to the ways in which DeLillo has described the circulation of American news stories: ‘A Mathew Brady photograph, a framed front page – “Men Walk on the Moon.” These things represent moments of binding power. They draw people together in ways that only the most disastrous contemporary events can match’ (‘The Power of History’ 63). The iconic marks the site of a consistently generative moment, an image resonant enough to prompt copies which, in their shared experience, produce ‘moments of binding power’ in the national imagination: ‘Think about the images most often repeated. The Rodney King videotape or the Challenger disaster or Ruby shooting Oswald’, DeLillo has said. ‘These are the images that connect us the way Betty Grable used to connect us in her white swimsuit, looking back at us over her shoulder in the famous pinup. And they play the tape again and again and again and again’ (De Pietro 105). Instead of truthfulness in the moral or philosophical sense, though, as DeLillo’s tone intimates, intense copying of secular icons shades them with the hackneyed feeling of the overfamiliar. We might experience a ‘fittingness’ looking at an iconic image, but also, after its first burst of visibility, perhaps a suggestion of used-upness – a suspicion that, as with The Most Photographed Barn in America, we might be unable to see the iconic fully because of its iterations. In this model, the iconic combines meaningfulness with the numbness of a cliché. Americana’s (1971) central character, David Bell, self-consciously explores his own condition as a six-foot-two, blonde, blue-eyed WASP cultural cliché of the seventies, a self-described ‘extremely handsome’ (11) man whose sense of himself is as an image, built on the foundations of ‘the American pyramids’ of Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster: For the first time in my life I felt the true power of the image. Burt was like a city in which we are all living. He was that big. Within the conflux of shadow and time, there was room for all of us and I knew I must extend myself until the molecules parted and I was spliced into the image. Burt in the moonlight was a crescendo of male perfection but no less human because of it. Burt lives! I carry that image to this day, and so, I believe, do millions of others, men and women, for their separate reasons. Burt in the moonlight. It was a concept; it was the icon of a new religion (13). Bell’s residual deification of these ‘men of action’ with ‘chromium smiles’ becomes a prompt for self-consciousness about his formation by the image, ending in an attempt

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to use the imagined authenticity of the American heartland to penetrate behind the accretions of his father’s Madison Avenue career and of his own in television: ‘after the movie, driving my father’s car along the country roads, I began to wonder how real the landscape truly was, and how much of a dream is a dream’ (13). ‘Burt in the moonlight’ frames Bell’s consciousness; the ‘power of the image’ sets the imaginative parameters of his dreams of a good life as well as his sense of the sweep and meaning of contemporary America. ‘America is the world’s living myth’, Axton in The Names proclaims (114), and Bell is looking to use one set of myths, of the road trip and of the kunstlerroman, to deconstruct other myths of consumerism and upward mobility. There is a frisson between the absolute knowingness these texts present about the ways in which their characters’ thinking is bound up with the clichéd symbols and images of mass culture, and the subtle and serious qualities of that engagement. Duplication effects an emptying out of meaning of the repeated image; the images of the Texas Highway Killer in Underworld fade in affect as they proliferate across the airways. The black humour of White Noise stems from this treatment of images of death, with academics and disaster specialists forgetting the human cost of this meaningfulness – not just ‘Where were you when James Dean died?’, ‘Ask me Joan Crawford’, ‘Ask me Gable, ask me Monroe’, ‘Ask me Jeff Chandler’, ‘Ask me John Garfield, ask me Monty Clift’ (White Noise 69), but also the satire of intellectual dehumanisation in musings such as Alfonse Stompanato’s that Japan and India are ‘pretty good for disaster footage’ (66). However, there are also many occasions when duplication underscores an image. Bell finds a residual and ambiguous meaningfulness in the creation and multiplication of commonplaces: For the rest of us, the true sons of the dream, there was only complexity. The dream made no allowance for the truth beneath the symbols, for the interlinear notes, the presence of something black (and somehow very funny) at the mirror rim of one’s awareness. This was difficult at times. But as a boy, and even later, quite a bit later, I believed all of it, the institutional messages, the psalms and placards, the pictures, the words. Better living through chemistry. The Sears, Roebuck catalog. Aunt Jemima. All the impulses of all the media were fed into the circuitry of my dreams. One thinks of echoes. One thinks of an image made in the image and likeness of images. It was that complex (130). The presence of ‘something black’ and ‘somehow very funny’ in the American dream of a good life suggests its irresistibility as well as its fundamental elusiveness (as well as providing a neat description before the fact of White Noise’s exploration of the daily life of America). Increasingly as DeLillo’s work emerges, and as the anti-globalisation and anti-American protests in The Names, Mao II and Cosmopolis (2003) suggest, it explores how this intersects with the more ominous lures of Americana in a time of fiercely contested globalisation. In ‘The Power of History’ the news tapes are played ‘again and again and again and again’ because ‘this is the world narrative, so they play it until everyone in the world has seen it’ (De Pietro 105), but clearly the American narrative, despite the assumptions of the news networks, is not world narrative. This conflict is inherent in the iconic in a globalised world – if an icon is marked by its proliferation beyond the usual bounds of an image, it will proliferate outside of its initial

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cultural context. In this reading, the availability of an iconic image for meaningfulness does not function as a marker of its inherent emptiness as a sign. Instead, the iconic is a marker of the capacity these repeated images have to function as palimpsests for culturally specific and personal meaning, to become grounds for hybridisation and contestation. In Mao II, Brita Nilsson draws a parallel between the ways in which a political movement makes its presence known in the repetition and accretion of symbols and the ways in which a product is advertised: Now there are signs for a new soft drink, Coke II, signs slapped on cement-block walls, and she has the crazy idea that these advertising placards herald the presence of the Maoist group . . . These are like the big character posters of the Cultural Revolution in China – warnings and threats, calls for self-correction. Because there is a certain physical resemblance. The placards are stacked ten high in some places, up past the second storey, and they crowd each other, they edge over and proclaim, thousands of Arabic words weaving between the letters and Roman numerals of the Coke II logo (230). In this comparison, a Warholesque repetition of Coke II marks the aggressive penetration of global markets by Western brands as well as the equally forceful use of iconography to create a coherent identity by paramilitary groups, and mirroring of this in the entwined ‘rage in crayon and paint’ of graffiti artists. Abu Rashid in that same novel seeks to galvanise group action against the Western presence by duplicating his own image on the tee-shirts of his followers, looking to create a coherence of intent and vision out of a militia of children. ‘Whereas Warhol understands the aesthetic and economic implications of the marketability of his image, Abu Rashid follows in the wake of Mao in his comprehension of the political power latent in the image and the ability to magnify that power through careful manipulation and proliferation’, David Clippenger argues (150).

The Icon’s Glow, the Solus To call a photograph or person ‘iconic’ is to borrow connotations from the histories of religious and sacred imagery, even as designating a person ‘an icon’ marks the heights of secular renown. Bissera V. Pentcheva’s work on the Byzantine icon is useful here. In Byzantium, she explains, an icon was a devotional and portable image of Christ, the Virgin or the saints, richly decorative and rendered in a precious material such as ivory, metal or mosaic. According to Byzantine theory, the icon was not to be thought of as a mimetic image but more directly, as ‘the imprint (in Greek, typos) of Christ’s visible characteristics (appearance) on matter’. The icon is permeated by divine favour and grace, charis, the root of charisma, and was a part of a ‘whole body experience’. An icon was a subject to be contemplated, kissed and prostrated to, appealing to touch, taste, sound and smell as well as sight. The moment of contemplation was saturated to excess both materially and sensorially, Pentcheva explains; the relief icon had a ‘radiance and shimmer’ which flickered in and out of the shadows when it was lit by candles and oil lamps (631). In its ritual and personal function its radiance held the imprint of the sacred, acting as a container for belief and an opportunity to enact the rituals of supplication (Pentcheva 638). The affective quality of these icons was aesthetic, emotional and spiritual.

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My point in gesturing here to the rich history of the ancient relief icon is to widen the debate about the images that underpin DeLillo’s novels, and specifically to nuance the discussion of belief. DeLillo’s depiction of these loaded cultural images is seldom in the service of demystification, nor does he depict belief as naive.2 It would be wrong to read the shimmer of the icon as misleadingly empty glitter; in their residual sense of presence and sacredness DeLillo’s icons echo the religious icon. The glamour of these repeated iconic images might be taken as visual equivalents to the scene in White Noise where the words ‘Toyota Celica’ chanted by a sleeptalking child become ‘beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder’, striking Gladney ‘with the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence’ (151). I read scenes like these, and like the ‘unbearably beautiful’ sunsets over the overpass, as John McClure does, as carefully leaving open the question of whether these moments when ‘the sky would ring like bronze’ (173) are a sacred or a pseudo-sacred moment. The deadpan and shifting ways in which irony patterns White Noise do not lead us to easily condemn Gladney for this moment of awe. The moment is mixed – ‘Toyota Celica’ is bathos, ‘splendid’ is hyperbole, but ‘gold-shot with looming wonder’ works too well for irony: it rings as Joycean rather than pastiche, a version of Ulysses’ Sirens’ ‘bronze by gold’. Echoing the bittersweet response one might have to the breathtaking, smog-soaked sunsets in Los Angeles, another of the novel’s philosophers, Jack’s son Heinrich, stays away from these events ‘either because he distrusted wholesome communal pleasures or because he believed there was something ominous in the modern sunset’ (61). The iconic might be both radiant and dangerous. The meaningfulness of an icon in DeLillo’s fiction withstands the pressures of the secular. The ability of the image or figure to condense, amplify and hold a significant experience does not disappear when the iconic is positioned as function of context, or of the viewer’s psychology, or of history, or of myth – ‘there must be something, somewhere, large and grand and redoubtable enough to justify this shining reliance and implicit belief’, Gladney reasons (154). This is part of what is happening in the sunsets of White Noise, but it is also present in the more sombre novels, in Sister Edgar’s contemplation of the likeness of the murdered Esmerelda in the shadows and reflections on the Minute Maid billboard, and in Adolf Hitler’s image in Running Dog. The final viewing of the bunker film in Running Dog does not demystify Hitler. Instead, the film is ‘primitive and blunt, yet hypnotic, not without an element of mystery’, almost ‘charming’, almost ‘touching’ (Running Dog 227). Ending Running Dog with a film that none of the questers can sell is not an iconoclastic gesture but a deliberate foregrounding and disruption of the myth of Hitler by merging it with the myth, aura and cultural meanings of Chaplin’s Little Tramp. The sense of Hitler’s image as retaining its aura of history, meaning, atrocity, brought back to us through the text’s reminders that the bunker’s children were poisoned, wins out against the domestication of the film. Lightborne calls it ‘disgusting’ because it is ‘Hitler humanized’ (237), all the while the novel’s wider narrative ironies condemn Lightborne for looking so single-mindedly for pornography that he misses the horror that is actually present: ‘I expected something

 2

Here he might be thought of as part of what critics have called ‘the post-secular’. For an overview, see Ludwig.

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hard-edged. Something dark and potent. The madness at the end. The perversions, the sex. Look, he’s twirling the cane. A disaster’ (237). In arguing that DeLillo’s icons retain their relationship to ideas of the sacred in a manner which is not cynical or iconoclastic, I (alongside Amy Hungerford) am treating DeLillo as a Catholic writer, not in the sense of an unshakable belief or as an adherent of the doctrines of the Vatican, but as a writer whose consciousness bears the indelible imprint of both his southern Italian upbringing in Belmont, the Bronx, and his education at Roman Catholic schools and by Jesuits at Fordham University (Hungerford 344). It also filters through his immersion in the writing of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. As we have already begun to see in White Noise, one of the images DeLillo repeats across his work is a version of the aura or halo which visually marks the sacred in religious art. His secular icons mirror the ‘radiance and shimmer’ of religious iconography, to borrow again from Pentchera’s description (631). The use of Andy Warhol’s work and persona as an intertext for Mao II and Underworld echoes this parallelism between secular and sacred icons. Recent work has also repositioned Warhol as a Catholic artist, pointing out parallels between the framed gilt saints on the altarpiece of St John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church in Pittsburgh that Warhol would have contemplated over long Masses as a boy, and his repeated screenprints of Hollywood stars – some, such as his pictures of Marilyn Monroe, the Mona Lisa and, tellingly, Jackie Kennedy, gilded too.

Death’s Authority The glow of the iconic is the glow of public renown, often of desire or adoration, created and perpetuated by the repetition of the image, but it is also the glow of cultural meaningfulness. Libra is punctuated by the radiance of John F. Kennedy’s fame: ‘You could photograph a Kennedy all right. That’s what a Kennedy was for. The man with the secrets gives off the glow’ (141). Kennedy’s Lincoln in the motorcade also ‘seemed to glow’ as ‘sunlight flashed from the fenders and hood, made the upholstery shine’ (392). The ‘burnished surface of the car mirrored scenes along the road’, while the ‘First Lady appeared in a glow of rosebud pink’ (391). The watchers are held in this illumination, ‘faces caught in some stage of surprise resembling dazzled pain’ (391). Libra suggests that this luminance is the light of a more general glamour, rather than just of Camelot – Oswald also sees John Wayne’s visit to the army mess hall as an experience of radiance and repetition. Oswald wonders if his own image will be repeated in the photos of Wayne; reflecting Wayne’s smiles, Oswald feels the star as ‘doubly real’, a figure who ‘practically disappears in his own glow’ (93). In Moscow, Lee Harvey Oswald also views the bodies of ‘Lenin and Stalin in an orange glow’, and, as Peter Boxall reminds us, Warhol’s work also examines the transformations of framing, printing and repeating on more obviously disturbing works such as Atomic Bomb (1965), where ‘the violence of mass production and of the photographic image mirrors the violence of an atomic explosion’ (Boxall 7). Scott walks past Warhol’s ‘electric-chair canvases, the repeated news images of car crashes and movie stars’ to ‘Chairman Mao. Photocopy Mao, silk-screen Mao, wallpaper Mao, synthetic-polymer Mao’, musing on how, he thinks, Warhol’s work is ‘indifferent to the effect it had on those who came to see it’, and its isolation of Mao’s face, ‘pansy purple here, floating nearly free of its photographic source’ and ‘unwitting of history’ (Mao II 21).

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Scott, however, is misguided by the ‘marvelous flat-eyed gaze’ and the ‘fleeting media catastrophe’ (21) of the paintings themselves. Warhol’s persona may have played with flat-eyed gazes and the oxymoron that is a fleeting catastrophe, but the work itself was intensely knowing about its own historicity – Warhol painted his gold Marilyns, for example, in 1962, within weeks of her suicide (Crow 53). The connotations of that picture are not Monroe’s timeless charisma and beauty as much as the acute emotional resonance of a painful present, and a comment on a very contemporary and highly ambiguous canonisation of Monroe. This flickering between historicity and the feeling of timelessness created by the image is modulated disquietingly in DeLillo’s description of Hitler in the bunker movie, who seems to be both present in the viewing of the film, in the 1970s, and in the bunker, in the 1940s. Hitler also carries the flash of the now ominously iconic: ‘Briefly the man is flooded in light – the bleached and toneless effect of overexposure . . . his lifeless eyes acquire a trace of flame’ (Running Dog 236, italics in original). This halo is not just a way of describing the deification of a public figure; it is linked to the transformations that becoming the subject of narrative performs on a life or an event. This is writ large in the case of celebrity where, DeLillo argues in ‘The Power of History’, ‘a person sufficiently original and lustrous inspires his own transcendence, his space-launch out of strictly historical levels and his reimagining in fiction, myth, fairy tale and cartoon’. ‘Not so lustrous was Richard Nixon’, DeLillo continues, but nonetheless Nixon had ‘the glow of prodigious power’ (62). The dazzle of the icon is bound up with charisma, but also with a person or event’s conversion through narrative and image into myth, and into public meaningfulness. It is common in DeLillo studies to cite the shared ground between DeLillo’s invocation of an ‘aura’ created by the technologies of mass communication, and Walter Benjamin’s notion of an aura imparted to an original work by the ‘mechanical reproduction’ of that work in photographs and on film. Indeed, part of what Brita in Mao II dislikes about the Warhol pastiche, Gorby I, is its perhaps self-accusatory suggestion that that artist’s intent is ‘to steal auras, Gold Marilyn’s and Dead-White Andy’s’, ‘the very echo of Marilyn and all the death glamour that ran through Andy’s work’, and (reprising the merging of Hitler and Chaplin in Running Dog) to fuse the iconic images of Mikhail Gorbachev and Marilyn Monroe (Mao II 134). What is also salient, though, is the connection of a radiance, glow or aura to the idea articulated in another essay of Benjamin’s, ‘The Storyteller’, that the meaningfulness of narrative is drawn from death. ‘Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death’ (94), Benjamin writes (Orr 35). Benjamin argues that: Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end – unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it – suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. This authority is at the very source of the story. (94) The overfamiliarity of the icon, then, does not preclude its meaningfulness. In these novels, the repetition of the iconic and of narrative often ushers in a transcendence and a moment of significance in deathliness even as the ostensible content of the image

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remains hackneyed. In this it functions as an equivalent to the verbal cliché in DeLillo’s novels. Boxall notes how End Zone’s Gary Harkness, forced to live with a bedroom poster which reads ‘when the going gets tough the tough get going’, manages to find beauty in the words and letters themselves, ‘through looking at it, through living within it, it can open to him, can reveal the depths that it hides’ (Boxall 47). Mao II’s Bill Gray moves from a writerly quest for the unique phrase into ‘the uninventable poetry, inside the pain, of what people say’. The vernacular clichés which populate family memory are given to us as intimate and meaningful in the moments of Bill’s death: His father. Can you wait two shakes. His father. I keep telling you and telling you and telling you. His mother. I like it better with the sleeves rolled down. He could hear his breathing change, feel a slowness come upon him, familiar though never felt before, an old slow monotone out of the history of shallow breathing, deeply and totally known. Measure your head before ordering. His father. We need to have a confab, Junior. He knew it completely. The glow, the solus. And it became the motion of the sea, the ship sailing morningward toward the sun. (216) Other novels contain characters who assert a version of Benjamin’s paradigm, too: ‘All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots’, Jack Gladney finds himself lecturing in White Noise (26), and Win Everett in Libra thinks that ‘the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot’ (221). What appears as ‘authority’ in Benjamin’s essay, and with a mythic glow in DeLillo’s work, is related to the ways in which the closure of death transforms life into a narrative with what Everett calls plot’s ‘compression and numinous sheen’ (Libra 78). Libra puns on the double sense of ‘plot’. The connection between storiedness and the halo of the iconic is figured in the links between luminosity and the perception of harboured secrets – ex-FBI man Guy Bannister rails against Kennedy and ‘what people see in him . . . the glowing picture we keep getting’. ‘He actually glows in most of his photographs. We’re supposed to believe he’s the hero of the age’, he rages. ‘Do you know what charisma means to me? It means he holds the secrets . . . Take his secrets and he’s nothing’ (Libra 67).3 ‘Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination, the static crackle of some libidinous thing in the world’, thinks J. Edgar Hoover in Underworld, as he watches the ball game with Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor (17). Here, the glamour of the icon marks a reading of the image which takes its ability to fascinate and affect the viewer as the effect of a secret, as a kind of mystery. Cosmopolis’s suggestion of the ‘pure spectacle, or information made sacred’ as being ‘ritually unreadable’ (80) intimates that this quality of sacredness emanates from an ontology of the image which finds it to be resistant or unexplained in some way. In Libra the conspirators read this as capturing the power of the state, and establish their own cascade of secrets to effect a transfer of power back to ex-CIA and underworld men, while, much more comically, in White Noise the university’s chancellor advises Jack Gladney to ‘grow out’ into Hitler,

 3

See ‘The Theology of Secrets’ in Osteen, American Magic 142–64.

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that is to cultivate the mystique of the image and a sense of presence by gaining weight and becoming more ugly (17). Gladney’s response, to wear dark glasses all the time, both provides a figure for his lack of insight and an attempt to cultivate the charisma of secrets, influence and power which, White Noise suggests, drew Gladney to study Hitler in the first place. This connection between death and the iconic in DeLillo’s writing is not just reserved for the famous. Klara Sax in Underworld thinks of Albert’s mother in related but gentler terms: ‘the illness, the drama of a failing body, the way impending death made her seem saintly, with an icon’s fixedness, a stern and staring and enameled beauty’ (683). In Mao II Bill Gray, himself near death, looks at ‘a curious set of metal emblems strung beneath an icon of some armor-clad saint’, a ‘democracy of icons’ where each body part is represented and placed under the icon to petition for healing (168). The icon acts as a version of the gothic double where, in Otto Rank’s formulation, the double, as a copy generated by the psyche to stave off death, contains within itself that fear of mortality too. The quest for the secret of charisma highlights here a much darker desire; the icon is magnetic because like Warhol’s manipulation of newspaper footage of Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s death, the ontology of the iconic image tacitly contains the intensely affective power of death. (DeLillo has said that Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death was an influence on White Noise, and Becker quotes Rank in that work [Sierra 19].) The most uncanny double in DeLillo’s work is the figure of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, which are depicted as harbouring death from Players onwards. Pammy’s employment by the Grief Management Council in offices in the World Trade Center originally strikes her as strange: ‘an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief?’ (Players 18). In Mao II, Brita remarks on the towers’ unreadability: ‘Having two of them is like a comment, it’s like a dialogue, only I don’t know what they’re saying’ (40). Later, of course, this connection structures Falling Man: ‘Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice?’ (116).

Conclusion: Atomic Secrets The iconic partakes of a spectral life as its continual reproduction makes it a vehicle for cultural meaning. In White Noise, as Murray Jay Siskind points out, television gives off its glow too. ‘Sealed-off, timeless, self-contained, self-referring . . . like a myth being born right there in our living room’, television offers ‘incredible amounts of psychic data’, Siskind enthuses: ‘in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras. “Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it”’ (51, italics in original). Importantly – and here I’d suggest that the tone is playful, but the content contains a truth about television’s ability to enter the lives and psyches of the novel’s characters – ‘the medium practically overflows with sacred formulas if we can remember how to respond innocently and get past our irritation, weariness and disgust’ (51). Siskind’s rhapsodic labelling of an initial response as ‘innocent’ is something we might wish to question, but the admixture of the sacred and the irritating is a telling note,

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and one we might take as a description of the potential of not just television, but of the mark of the iconic itself. In ‘The Power of History’ DeLillo writes of one more sublime icon – the ‘aloof and awesomely regal’ ‘light of history’ as it is encapsulated in ‘the final iconic flash’ and ‘the final iconic fury’ of the mushroom cloud (63). His mid-career novels modulate this power, iterating and permutating the image of the atomic bomb through mundane and sublime to underscore the potentially dangerous capacity for ambiguity and numbness at the heart of repeated representation. Myna’s dress in End Zone is appliquéd with a mushroom cloud, echoing that novel’s simulated war games, but pointing forward to the realities of nuclear waste and the Cold War.4 The mythic dimensions of Underworld resonate in a dangerous confluence of glowing images too; research scientist Matt Shay remembers that, despite working on the actual tools of mass destruction, he ‘did not think along the systems track to the culmination of his tedious little labors’, slipping instead between the mushroom shape of the ‘fiery cloud’ and the psychoactive mushroom-induced visions of a spirit ‘underworld of images’ (466). The iconic seems lifted out of history because death, the sacred and repetition lend its images their force – ‘You make it sound like God. Or some starker variation thereof’, Janet says – but the image is more like a condensation and accretion of history, and all the more in need of the balancing forces of human empathy because of that (Underworld 458). Sister Edgar’s rapture, as she merges into the cybersoul of J. Edgar Hoover – keeper of the secrets of the hydrogen bomb – is thus given to us in the final pages of Underworld radiant with the glow of the religious icon, but as a reversal of its glamour too, resonating with the realisation that the atomic cloud, ‘dripping christblood colors, solar golds and reds’, could ‘blind a person with its beauty’ (825).

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the “Works of Nikolai Leskov.”’ Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. Schocken Books, 1969. Boxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. Routledge, 2006. Carson, Jordan. ‘Transcendence in an Age of Tabloids and Terror.’ Religion and the Arts, 23, nos. 1–2, 2019, pp. 50–75. Clippinger, David. ‘“Only Half Here”: Don DeLillo’s Image of the Writer in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ Literature and the Writer, edited by Michael J. Meyer. Rodopi, 2004, pp. 135–53. Coyle, John. ‘Don DeLillo, Aesthetic Transcendence and the Kitsch of Death.’ European Journal of American Culture, 26, no. 1, 2007, pp. 27–39. Crow, Thomas. Modern Art in the Common Culture. Yale University Press, 1996. DeLillo, Don. ‘American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK.’ Rolling Stone, 8 December 1983, pp. 21–2, 24, 27–8, 74. ——. Americana. 1971. Penguin, 2006. ——. Cosmopolis. 2003. Simon and Schuster, 2004. ——. Falling Man. Simon and Schuster, 2007

 4

As Peter Boxall points out, Warhol’s epochal images of the mushroom cloud fade as, newspaper-like, they are screen printed over and over, but the explosive power of the atomic bomb does not (7). Boxall also outlines the ways in which God and the bomb come together in End Zone (46).

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——. ‘The Image and the Crowd.’ Creative Camera, April/May 1993, pp. 72–3. ——. Libra. Penguin, 1988. ——. Mao II. 1991. Random House, 2011. ——. The Names. 1982. Picador, 1987. ——. Players. 1977. Random House, 1989. ——. ‘The Power of History’. New York Times Magazine, 7 September 1997, pp. 60–3. ——. Running Dog. 1978. Picador, 1999. ——. Underworld. 1997. Simon and Schuster, 1998 ——. White Noise. 1985. Picador, 2002. DePietro, Thomas, editor. Conversations with Don DeLillo. University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Green, Jeremy. ‘Disaster Footage: Spectacles of Violence in DeLillo’s Fiction.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 45, no. 3, 1999, pp. 571–99. Hardack, Richard. ‘Two’s A Crowd: Mao II, Coke II, and the Politics of Terrorism in Don DeLillo.’ Studies in the Novel, 36, no. 3, 2004, pp. 374–92. Hungerford, Amy. ‘Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass.’ Contemporary Literature, 47, no. 3, 2006, pp. 343–80. Karnicky, Jeffrey. ‘Wallpaper Mao: Don DeLillo, Andy Warhol, and Seriality.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 42, no. 4, 2001, pp. 339–56. Kemp, Martin. Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon. Oxford University Press, 2012. Landgraf, Edgar. ‘Black Boxes and White Noise: Don DeLillo and the Reality of Literature.’ Addressing Modernity: Social Systems Theory and U.S. Cultures, edited by Hannes Bergthaller and Carsten Schinko. Rodopi, 2011, pp. 85–112. Ludwig, Kathryn. ‘Don DeLillo’s Underworld and the PostSecular in Contemporary Fiction.’ Religion & Literature, 41, no. 3, 2009, pp. 82–91. McClure, John A. ‘DeLillo and Mystery.’ The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, edited by John N. Duvall. Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 166–78. Orr, Leonard. Don DeLillo’s White Noise: A Reader’s Guide. Continuum, 2003. Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. ——. ‘Becoming Incorporated: Spectacular Authorship and DeLillo’s Mao II.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 45, no. 3, 1999, pp. 643–74. Pentcheva, Bissera V. ‘The Performative Icon.’ The Art Bulletin, 88, no. 4, 2006, pp. 631–55. Rank, Otto. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study. University of North Carolina Press, 1971. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton University Press, 1999. Sierra, Erick. ‘“Threshold of Revelation”: Don DeLillo, Tony Kushner, and an Epistemics of the Encounter.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 57, no. 1, 2016, pp. 16–28. Wilcox, Leonard. ‘Terrorism and Art: Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Jean Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism.’ Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 39, no. 2, 2006, pp. 89–105.

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6 L’objet trouvé and the Pressure of History: DeLillo’s Aesthetic of Found Things and the 1970s Tim Jelfs

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rom collectors and sorters-through of waste to alienated ascetics retreating into sparsely furnished rooms as if in flight from the world of objects itself – for decades, Don DeLillo’s characters have lived fictional lives in which finding, curating and contemplating things appears central to the material and existential practice of American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Those of us who read DeLillo, meanwhile, encounter in his work denotations of both everyday things and objets d’art recycled from other times and places in the aesthetic culture of (post) modernity: the eponymous Warhol triptych in Mao II (1991); the Morandi still lifes in Falling Man (2007), imported from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). Partly for these reasons, this chapter turns to DeLillo’s early novels of the 1970s, the theoretical oeuvre of Fredric Jameson, and developments in conceptual art inaugurated by Marcel Duchamp, to consider what it might mean to think of DeLillo as an artist of the found object, a category of art-making that has long sought to trouble any presumed distinction between ordinary, everyday things and objets d’art. For the fact that DeLillo is a novelist who has his characters curate things while doing something analogous in the making of his own art points to an intriguing parallel in aesthetic practices, albeit one that must be approached with some care. It is one thing, after all, to note the emergence of an aesthetic of ‘found things’ in a writer whose work assumed more mature form in the 1980s and 1990s; it is another to confuse the art of literature with the aesthetic practices of other arts. With this in mind, I pursue in what follows a generative analogy between DeLillo’s early curatorial literary aesthetic of the objet trouvé and similar aesthetic practices in other media, based on the premise that there is, in DeLillo’s aesthetic of found things as it was developing over this period, a fundamental tension between transposition and transformation. For while DeLillo is an artist, his medium remains language, and as he has himself insisted, he is above all a maker of his own written things: sentences, paragraphs, books (DePietro 91, 107). As such, his rendering of things is never simply an act of aesthetic transposition but one of transformation: a mimetic transformation that sees the things of the world rendered as a series of linguistic signs, but also the transformation of those signs as they become imbued with fresh cultural, historical and thematic valences in DeLillo’s writing in this period. At the same time, the literary figuration of objects in DeLillo – in this chapter I focus on an ironic fable, a list and a series of interior and exterior scenes – is just part

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of a wider aesthetic project characterised by two signature features. The first of these is a multivalent engagement with subject–object relations themselves. The second is a supra-capitalist historical consciousness that eventually serves to ‘volatilize’ all objects in time, from Coca-Cola wall clocks to DeLillo’s own novels (Jameson, ‘Aesthetics’). For, as we will see, DeLillo’s treatment of the dreck that Gore Vidal argued was a characteristic presence in much American literary postmodernism makes such stuff the object matter of existential meditations in novels such as Americana (1971), End Zone (1972) and Ratner’s Star (1976), in which DeLillo arranges representations of objects in space in a fashion best understood as curatorial. But the things thus curated also index a sense of US power as predicated upon a militarised system of commodity production doomed by its own historical unsustainability. While DeLillo would explore these themes more explicitly in later works, I show in what follows how there was already in his novels of the 1970s an acute sense that even the lowliest fragments of the objective culture of the United States might speak to the historical contingency of a whole way of life.

The Found Object: From Duchamp to DeLillo There is a degree of consensus about what Duchamp was up to when he turned to ‘readymades’ such as Bicycle Wheel (1913), and most famously Fountain, the urinal signed ‘R. Mutt 1917’ that he submitted to the inaugural exhibition of New York’s Society of Independent Artists that year. By taking a mass-produced object from its usual circuit of production and use and signing it, Duchamp challenged accepted notions of what constitutes art.1 He also disrupted the circuit of commodities themselves, transposing this one example of mass-produced modern convenience from its normal currents of flow to recontextualise it in time and space, transforming it as he did so into an example of the kind of ‘gimmick’ that Sianne Ngai has identified as the aesthetic site of colliding notions of value (4). As one contemporary supporter wrote, ‘Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful [sic] significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object’ (Anon.). Duchamp’s readymades inaugurated conceptual art as such through an act of curation, his example being a challenge to those who theorised that art, including anti-capitalist art, ought to be wrought in that high modernist vein that explored the psychic interiority of the artist confronted with the conditions of modernity. If the latter reached its apogee in Abstract Expressionism (which DeLillo has claimed as an important influence on his work), the Duchampian readymade was a form of protopop art, already troubling aesthetic categories decades before the ‘new realism’ of the 1960s emerged in all its problematic, Brillo-Boxed radiance.

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As Adina Kamien-Kazhdan puts it, the readymade ‘challenged the status, value, and aura of the original work of art’, rendering art-making itself less a question of ‘manual execution’ and more one of choice or selection (69, 70). David Banash goes further: ‘The rise of the readymade in art is thus not simply an investigation of limits of art, but rather a comprehensive engagement with the problems of making meaning in a culture of mass production and consumption’ (30).

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But there is more to the art of the found object than the conceptual disruptions of Duchamp. Compare the account given by André Breton, Duchamp’s fellow surrealist and collaborator, in Mad Love (1937), of the two objects he and the sculptor Alberto Giacometti once found at a Parisian flea market. A mask and spoon compelled their attraction and became their respective possessions; but they were, in Breton’s telling, less the material fruits of a chance encounter than they first seemed. For they spoke, Breton came to understand, to unarticulated desires of which the artists themselves were not initially aware, suggesting an only apparently contingent encounter, in which the precise nature of the call of the found object, the way it speaks to the alienated monad of industrial modernity, is muffled, obscured, occluded by ignorance of that monad’s own unconscious desires (Breton 25–38). In this reading, the random sprawl of objects is subject to the ordering powers of the unconscious, whose mysteries are forever resistant to final articulation. Breton subjects his own account of the episode at the flea market to successive addenda, as if the encounter itself must be endlessly rewritten as ever deeper, ever subtler, ever more complex than the conscious mind itself can fathom. Breton finds in the junk of the flea market more than mere contingency; he finds, instead, external portals into internal orders as psychically deep and perplexing as those interiorities later plumbed by the Abstract Expressionists. In this light, found objects begin to look much more fluid and much less stable in their significations than they at first seem. This bespeaks the philosophical substrate of subject–object relations that lies beneath the various interpretations and aesthetic approaches that found objects mobilise. One reason that the ‘thing theorists’ of the late twentieth century and the related ‘material turn’ in literary studies found that ‘however materially stable objects may seem, they are [. . .] different things in different scenes’ is that, at least since Descartes, the subject–object divide has provided remarkably fecund terrain not just for philosophy but for art, culture, literature and human meaning-making at large (Brown, ‘Thing Theory’ 9). In a work that anticipated some of the preoccupations of ‘thing theory’ by several decades, Fredric Jameson wrote of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943): almost everything in it can be reduced to a single idea, which coming into contact with problems of ever different kinds reveals more and more of its possible riches; and this idea is the simple opposition, expressed in the title, between consciousness and things. This is the only certain fact, this radical difference in being, against which to check all of our ideas, and more than that – since a book of philosophy is also a language experiment – against which to check all of our formulations. (Sartre 67) Riches is the keyword. For the arid opposition between subjective consciousness and ‘things’ is, in fact, packed with conceptual life; it is a ‘radical difference in being’ that is philosophically and aesthetically generative. Moreover, as the examples of Duchamp and Breton show, the subject–object divide is one that artists of the found object have long used to trouble the category of art itself; to critique or otherwise comment upon the circulation of commodities in the capitalist mode of production; or to explore the complexities of consciousness. No wonder. As Jameson puts it, paraphrasing Edmund Husserl, ‘Consciousness is always consciousness of something . . . consciousness arrives back at the things which it is not but without which it could not exist at all: it

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is a kind of radiance playing over the solid being of things which would vanish utterly if they were no longer there to support it’ (Sartre 67–8). The subject–object divide, in other words, may only be a seeming divide, rather than an ontological one; and yet it is one that has, for that very reason, often appeared symptomatic of modernity itself, from Marxist accounts of alienation, through Sartre’s own existential philosophy, to ‘new materialist’ work on various object-oriented ontologies. This way of thinking about the philosophical substrate and aesthetic possibilities of found things, and about how fluid, fertile and unstable the conceptual and aesthetic terrain of subject–object relations can therefore be, is worth bearing in mind as we approach the historical context of DeLillo’s work. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, following the emergence of Pop Art and minimalism, numerous artists in the United States and Europe were advancing the Duchampian ‘collision’ of different forms of value by, as Lucy Lippard puts it, attempting to ‘dematerialize’ the art object as such (5). Just at that moment when DeLillo began publishing his work, artists such as Joseph Kosuth, the N.E. Thing Co. art collective, and others were experimenting with new versions of both the original kind of ‘readymade’ that, according to Edward F. Fry, ‘involves in itself no element of time or temporal flux’, and an even newer form that ‘involves elapsed time’ (144). In its most extreme iteration, according to Fry, that second kind of readymade – which might take the form of a mere ‘happening’ – had the potential to destroy ‘any barrier whatsoever between art and life’ (145). Lippard proposes that these experiments achieved no more than a few ‘minor revolutions in communication’, and notes the irony of such work eventually selling for large sums, after it had seemed at first ‘that no one . . . would actually pay money, or much of it, for a xerox sheet referring to an event past or never directly perceived, a group of photographs documenting an ephemeral situation or condition, a project for work never to be completed, words spoken but not recorded’ (263). There is irony not only in the rapidity with which Lippard describes these attempts to resist the tyranny of market relations by dissolving the art object themselves dissolving, but also in the fact that such experiments were launched at a moment when capital was apparently intensifying its own tendency towards dematerialisation. This was a quite different juncture from that which had seen the emergence of the work of artists such as Duchamp or Breton, with the 1970s, the decade in which DeLillo published Americana, End Zone, Great Jones Street (1973), Players (1977), Ratner’s Star and Running Dog (1978), marking a transition from the political economy of the Bretton Woods era to that of the decades that followed, whether we describe the latter period as postmodern, neoliberal, late capitalist, or post-Fordist. As early as the mid-1960s in some accounts, one long cycle of capital accumulation was coming to an end; the global capitalist order would in due course reconfigure itself, with increasing proportions of production capital leaving the United States to relocate elsewhere, and computerisation, containerisation and the fall of the Soviet Union all helping capital achieve an eventually globe-encompassing mobility. Theoreticians and scholars across the disciplines have deployed a rhetoric of liquidity and immateriality to signify this change, and I have argued elsewhere that for all its explanatory power, there is something at least potentially misleading about some of this rhetoric, emphasising as it does important changes at the expense of no less important continuities. For even in the new late and liquid (post)modernity, resoundingly material things endured, not least in the form of the waste generated by the

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consumption of the commodities that late capitalism continued to produce, even if such things were far less frequently ‘made in America’. This stubborn materiality in an age in which the global capitalist system was beginning a major reconfiguration that redefined the role of the United States as a site primarily of consumption rather than production was registered in different ways in the national culture, even while artists such as Douglas Huebler were insisting, of their own efforts in the realm of conceptual art, that the ‘world is full of objects, more or less interesting: I do not wish to add any more’ (qtd. in Lippard 74). As Rachele Dini has shown, representations of material waste objects, or what the novelist William Gass called dreck, already sat at the centre of a work such as Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1967), calling into question ‘capitalism’s ascriptions of worth’ (Dini 17). For Gore Vidal, writing in 1976, a preoccupation with such matter proved characteristic of that whole school of literary experimentalism we now recognise as American postmodernism. Vidal, assessing the work of Barthelme, John Barth, Grace Paley, Gass and Thomas Pynchon, was unimpressed by all but Paley and Gass, recognising the perils faced when ‘the author tries not to be himself a maker of dreck but an arranger of dreck’ (qtd. in Dini 2). But dreck was precisely what these authors and other artists were faced with; or to put it another way, the materials of the artist of the objet trouvé are those given by History. A writer such as DeLillo, emerging amid what Marx famously called ‘circumstances existing already’, works with and on whatever goods or garbage the conjuncture happens to throw up. In his late 1990s magnum opus Underworld (1997), DeLillo would dwell on how Simon Rodia and the fictional Klara Sax repurposed junk, from soda bottles to B-52s, to make art. But as early as the 1970s DeLillo was already having his characters register both new forms of computerised capital and the continuities with older forms of capital accumulation implied by the streams of waste matter that capitalism continued to produce. In Players, Lyle contemplates the nature of his work on Wall Street: This was solid work, clear and sometimes cheerful, old-world in a way, men gathered in a square to take part in verbal exchange, openly, recording figures with pencil stubs, the clerks having to puzzle over handwriting. Paper accumulated underfoot. Secret currents, he thought, recollecting Marina’s concept of electronic money. Waves, systems, invisibility, power. He thought: bip-bip-bip-bip. (157) The ‘paper accumulating underfoot’ is as representative of late capital as the ‘bip-bipbip-bip’ that renders the immateriality of ‘electronic money’, and Lyle’s simultaneous apprehension of both is representative of an acute historical consciousness on the part of DeLillo to which I will return. For now, it is sufficient to acknowledge the role that objects (pencil stubs, paper on the verge of becoming waste) play in underpinning the acuity of that vision, especially if we consider it alongside that story of ‘a wise old holy man of the Oglala Sioux’ that the sculptor Sullivan relates in DeLillo’s first novel, Americana (1971). Reflecting on whether ‘things had changed much since he was a boy’, Sullivan explains, the holy man reportedly replied with an indictment of capitalist modernity as it had played out on the North American continent: Things had changed hardly at all. Only materials had changed, technologies; we were still the same nation of ascetics, efficiency experts, haters of waste. We have

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been redesigning our landscape all these years to cut out unneeded objects such as trees, mountains and all those buildings which do not make practical use of every inch of space. The ascetic hates waste. We plan the destruction of everything which does not serve the cause of efficiency. Hard to believe, he said, that we are ascetics. But we are, more than all the fake saints across the sea. (117–18) Framing the United States as characterised less by its propensity for trash-making, less by its habit of throwing up a superabundance of everything from soda bottles to B-52s, and more by a counterintuitive and ascetic hatred of waste, this ironic fable toys with an apparent contradiction between asceticism and waste-making central to capitalism. As Lyle sees in Players, different forms of waste are produced at different points along the circuit of capital accumulation, and the reproduction of finance capital that the regime of ‘electronic money’ facilitates is itself just a later stage in a longer process of value creation that began back in the ‘old world’. For as the holy man avers, commodity production, consumption and disposal had already reordered the continent over the course of centuries, at inarticulable cost to ‘trees, mountains’ and many millions of other indigenous occupiers of space, including the Sioux. An ascetic hatred of waste thus takes on the ironic status of something like the ideological basis of dreck itself, driving the destructive value-production that the indigenous sage narrates, which in turn drives the consumption and disposal of increasingly ecologically indigestible consumer goods made out of the materials of what the Sioux holy man calls ‘Megamerica. Neon, fiber glass, Plexiglass, polyurethane, Mylar, Acrylite’ (Americana 119). This list serves an important purpose. Ralph Waldo Emerson might have once called for a poet for whom ‘[b]are lists are found suggestive’, and who boasts a ‘tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials’ (250, 262). By the 1970s such were the American materials in question, even as capital began to computerise and digitise: the synthetic innovations of the plastic and military-industrial ages, the kind that Kosuth in 1966 called ‘completely synthetic, completely unnatural’ and that provided the basis for his own work with found things (qtd. in Lippard 24). DeLillo lists those materials, oscillating between the neologisms of the new substances themselves and the brand names by which they were better known, to summon by their very invocation a whole national culture. This ‘bare list’ of materials that appears so early in DeLillo’s oeuvre is important, then, not only because it anticipates the lists that would become prominent in his later work (from the litany of objects arriving with students on campus with which White Noise opens to the ‘argument of things’ with which Underworld closes), but also because of how it lays out the key facts and lineaments of a culture in which capital and technology were not so much vaporising things out of existence as reordering them at the level of both chemistry and geostrategic space, deepening the logics of rupture and alienation inaugurated by modernity ever further (Underworld 827). Moreover, the Sioux holy man’s list isolates these wordobjects from their regular discursive contexts in a manner analogous to the practice inaugurated by Duchamp with his ‘readymades’. But they are not simply transposed or recontextualised: as print, as words on a page, they are, in fact, transformed so as to figure a whole way of life, one characterised equally by utilitarian asceticism on the one hand and what Tom LeClair aptly characterised as the ‘glut and blurt’ of late twentieth-century American consumer culture and its endless streams of waste on the other (207).

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In his study of Sartre, Jameson wrote that ‘the only absolutely static kind of language is the mere naming of something, the saying that it is and no more’ (Sartre 76), and it is in DeLillo’s tendency, evident already in Americana, to use such lists of the defining materials and objects of US civilisation that we can observe one very important way in which he might be helpfully understood as a literary artist of the objet trouvé. For naming a culture’s materials is one way of ‘naming the system’, to invoke a slogan of the 1960s (Jameson ‘Marxism’), and a list is a mimetic array that has not only a long, joyously democratic American literary heritage, as Stephen Fender has written, but considerable evocative power (Fender 1–4). DeLillo’s list in Americana renders as static figurations on the space of the page material innovations that, once layered atop the climate-altering platform of fossil fuel capitalism, characterise by more than their names modes of living that we have known for decades to be inherently unsustainable. Sullivan herself, praised by the narrator of Americana for her sculptures ‘in mahogany, epoxy and automobile paint’ (106), produces work that seems to invoke similarly sedimented layers of industrial production and destruction (‘wheels inside wheels, scythes rising from the rounded edge of a ludicrous shield, men or burial urns, industrial menace of cogs and inner clocks, a massive butter churn’), but the treatment of her art in the novel feels gratuitously ironic, ludic, arch (107). There is no real sense that such work might salvage something valuable from the wreckage of capitalist civilisation, recycle it into something better, purer, or more humane, for all DeLillo’s narrator’s insistence that he considered her work ‘one of the essential measures in the salvation of the republic’; indeed, there is a wry certainty that it cannot, and that it has already been contained, ‘[a]t least thirty’ of her works having already been bought ‘by various corporations’ (106).

The Dialectic of Being and Nothingness Subsequent work by DeLillo in the 1970s further develops his literary aesthetic of the found object. End Zone, his second novel, offers explicit meditations on ‘static forms of beauty’ and a subplot on a found object in a text that sees DeLillo representing things in a decidedly curatorial fashion. If the list in Americana is a transformation into print of selected elements of a culture via the literary technique of parataxis, it is striking that Taft Robinson in End Zone should outline to Gary Harkness, the narrator and Taft’s teammate on the Logos College football team, some of the principles of his own aesthetic philosophy: ‘I believe in static forms of beauty’, he said. ‘I like to measure off things and then let them remain. I try to create degrees of silence. Things in this room are simple and static. They’re measured off carefully. When I change something slightly, everything changes. The change becomes immense. My life in here almost resembles a certain kind of dream. You know the way objects in dreams sometimes acquire massive significance. They resound somehow. It’s easy to fear objects in dreams. It gets like that in here sometimes. I seem to grow smaller at times and then the room appears almost to lengthen. The spaces between objects become a little bit frightening.’ (234) Here we have a character speaking up for an aesthetic asceticism as if in retreat from the teeming flows of dreck that characterised ‘Megamerica’. Carefully selected, ‘chosen’,

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as the anonymous admirer of R. Mutt put it in 1917, the very few objects in his room are held in balance, such that the slightest change, according to Taft, might upset the entire web of relations and threaten to de-compose the mise en scène. This sense of coiled tension is not just external to but also apparently resides within the things in the room, which occasionally acquire, Taft says, the massive, resounding significance of objects in dreams. One might recall here Rene Magritte’s manipulations of scale in work such as ‘Personal Values’, in which everyday objects assume gigantic proportions in the bounded space of a room. Or DeLillo’s own observation, in a 1982 interview with LeClair, that ‘we can know something important about a character by the way he sees himself in relation to objects’ (DePietro 14). In either case, the referent is that fertile, fluid realm of subject–object relations of which Jameson wrote in his work on Sartre. Why and how do the objects in Taft’s room ‘resound’? Where does the interiority of consciousness end and the objective exteriority of rooms (interiors themselves) and the things within them begin? Such questions themselves resound because of the aesthetic rearrangement of dreck into what Taft calls ‘static forms of beauty’. In this, they are analogous to DeLillo’s own aesthetic practice, in which his writing of objects oscillates between meditations on the teeming flow of things under late capitalism and the curatorial impulse dramatised here by Robinson. To curate objects, to transpose and arrange them in space, and to thereby demonstrate how such transpositions and arrangements transform, somehow, the things themselves, as if the subject–object relation had been fundamentally rewired purely by spatial recontextualisation, has long lain at the heart of the aesthetic practices of Duchamp and other artists of the objet trouvé. Many of DeLillo’s characters seem to follow the same curatorial impulse: in Running Dog, Glen Selvy, who also ‘preferred life narrowed down to unfinished rooms’ (54); and later, in The Names (1982), Owen Brademas, who finds himself ‘overwhelmed by the powerful rush of things, the raw proximity and lack of common measure’ he encounters on the Indian subcontinent. ‘It was one more list, wasn’t it?’, he is imagined asking, of one of his own descriptions. ‘All he could do, all he could make. His own primitive control’ (The Names 285). To exercise control by winnowing down the teeming dreck of Megamerica is also part of what the writer-curator of found things does. It is a practice mirrored in the evident shifts in DeLillo’s prose style throughout his career, from what one early reviewer casually dismissed as the ‘heaping mass of tossed word-salad’ of his first novel (Levin) to the ever-sparser austerities of his later work, in which the spaces between words seem as important as the words themselves. But no less important, at least conceptually, are the different kinds of spaces in which DeLillo had his characters exercise their own curatorial impulses in his work of the 1970s, arranging their objects and materials in space. In Taft Robinson’s room, objects and interior space exist in delicate balance; but outside, in the desert of West Texas, similar arrangements appear to have been made too, in language crafted to render the peculiar phenomenology of a singular object in a given space: Something sudden, a movement, turned out to be sunlight on paint, a painted stone, one stone, black in color, identifiably black, a single round stone, painted black, carefully painted, the ground around it the same nameless color as the rest of the plain. Some vandal had preceded me then. Stone-painter. Metaphorist of the desert. (End Zone 40–1)

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Thus Gary Harkness narrates finding an object he later learns was painted and placed in the desert by a college teammate, with prose that keeps returning to the stone, its blackness, its painted-ness, its blend of the natural and artificial. Later, Harkness will encounter as a symbolic counterpart of this proto-art a literal pile of shit in the desert, ultimate signifier of the dreck of late capitalist culture in the desert Southwest, a military-industrial zone and the site of the development and testing of atomic weapons. For if DeLillo was an artist of the objet trouvé in the 1970s, he was an artist of the objet trouvé in a late capitalist Megamerica whose global pre-eminence was underwritten by an absolute advantage in the delivery systems of ‘megadeath’. This is why, for DeLillo and his narrator in End Zone, desert space is characterised by its nullity and serves as an appropriate setting for the suggestive dramas of finding and curating objects that feature in the novel. Logos College itself, we learn, was ‘built . . . out of nothing’ (6–7) ‘in the middle of the middle of nowhere’ (29). When Gary encounters that pile of shit in the middle of the desert, DeLillo might be drawing inspiration from work such as N.E. Thing Co.’s A Portfolio of Piles (1968), with its ‘photographs of found “piles” ranging from dirt to chains to breasts to doughnuts to barrels, etc.’ (Lippard 36). But when he contemplates what he calls ‘shit’s infinite treachery, everywhere this whisper of inexistence’ (End Zone 85), we cannot help but think of Robert J. Oppenheimer’s description of the bomb – later echoed and expanded upon in Underworld – as ‘shit’ (qtd. in Norris 158). For what does the bomb represent if not the ‘whisper of inexistence’, the technological reification of ‘the dialectic of enlightenment’? That dialectic is itself one of being and nothingness, and the way the representations of objects found and curated in End Zone often seem as full of nothingness as the desert itself (at least in the ascetic Eurocentric imagination) speaks of an aesthetic inflected by its author’s consciousness of that ‘underside’ of ‘postmodern’ culture that Jameson framed as characterised by ‘blood, torture, terror, and death’, and which is itself entirely contiguous with the Sioux holy man’s vision of the longue durée of European civilisation as experienced by his people (Jameson, Postmodernism 9). DeLillo will later depict such desert spaces as littered with the waste produced by the military-industrial complex, the detritus of global power projection, from the abandoned barracks at Marathon Mines in Running Dog, a facility ‘surrounded by debris of various kinds, kitchen and plumbing equipment, a gutted jeep, a useless windmill, anonymous junk’ (191) to the gargantuan exercise of the curatorial aesthetic encountered when, in Underworld, Nick Shay drives across the desert to view a piece of art that Klara Sax is in the process of making out of hundreds of abandoned B-52 bombers. The latter are military-industrial waste in a novel profoundly concerned with the ways art might be made from such stuff, but once again, it is not just the objects themselves but the spaces that surround and frame them that DeLillo has his narrators and characters dwell upon: ‘The desert is central to this piece’, Sax says. ‘It’s the surround. It’s the framing device’ (Underworld 70); she has agreed with the military authorities, moreover, that ‘[n]o other objects, not a single permanent object can be located within a mile of the finished piece’ (69). In Running Dog, Levi Blackwater frames the point succinctly: ‘The less there is, Glen, the more you’re tested to find the things that do exist’ (231). What there is, in other words, against the spatial grounds of nothingness; less the dematerialisation of the object than its concentration as a means of dwelling on both being and nothingness. Such formulations recall Brand, ‘the writer of blank pages’ in Americana, and remind us that renderings of both what is and what is not sit at the heart of DeLillo’s aesthetic of found things in the 1970s.

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The Pressure of History Thus far, I have emphasised the multivalence of the subject–object relations inherent in DeLillo’s representation of the object matter that Americans live among in his novels of the 1970s. I have been trying to show how thinking of DeLillo as an artist of the objet trouvé opens generative perspectives on this multivalence. But to press the argument further, I want to propose that there is an underlying thematic that is consonant with the acts of transposition and transformation that order DeLillo’s literary aesthetic of found things in the 1970s. That thematic extends some way beyond the critique of ‘consumer capitalism’ instantly recognisable in his engagement with supermarket culture and waste-making in his work in the 1980s, especially in his now-canonical White Noise. DeLillo’s multi-tiered aesthetic curation of objects in space – as we have seen, his characters encounter and organise objects in interior and exterior space; he renders his own objects as words on the page – seems to make of those objects ‘different things in different scenes’, but another force also helps to determine the specific form of the aesthetic, ontological and thematic constellation emergent in DeLillo’s early work. That force is History, which ultimately does far more than simply furnish the materials on which the artist of the objet trouvé must work, for it also presses DeLillo’s engagements with objects into a constellation of aesthetic and thematic preoccupations that would develop further in his more obviously ‘major’ works of the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, it is History, and with it that sense of historicity that Jameson has argued tends to be absent from much postmodern art, that imprints DeLillo’s aesthetic of found things in his work of the 1970s with a sense of the contingency of US civilisation itself, clarifying an awareness no less true today than it was in the 1970s, that whatever ‘Megamerica’ is, it cannot and will not last. By 1972, the year End Zone was published, the ‘Doomsday clock’ conceived and maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set to a relatively respectable twelve minutes to midnight. Above-ground nuclear tests had been banned for nearly a decade. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty had been signed in 1969 and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty would be signed in the same year the novel was published. And yet, even at this historical moment of relative détente, the bomb appears in End Zone as a presence of enormous force, capable of transforming (at least in the young minds of characters Harkness and Robinson) both ordinary objects and desert spaces into resonant reminders of its continued presence, a point emphasised by the fatalistic assertions of General Staley, a veteran of the Nagasaki bombing, who assures Gary that ‘the thing won’t go away. The thing is here and you have to face it’ (78). In things and the spaces between things, in that thing (the bomb) and the spaces that it emerges from, creates and threatens destructively to rearrange, including the desert spaces of the military-industrial complex and national security complex – in all of these, it seems in DeLillo’s novels of the 1970s, there resides that ‘whisper of inexistence’ that stalks not just the alienated men shut up in their barely furnished rooms, but the whole nuclear-armed, ecologically unsustainable, capitalist mode of production at the apex of which the United States once sat as ‘leader of the free world’. It is this implication of a whole way of life in the dialectic of being and nothingness via an aesthetic that repeatedly frames what is there against what is not that allows DeLillo’s depiction of the ordinary objects of late capitalist culture to take on multiple simultaneous valences. For the arrangements of objects in a room, or those encountered in the eloquent vacancies of the desert Southwest, can never be entirely separated

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from either the endless flows of dreck on which capitalist culture seems to depend or those objects that, even in his novels of the 1970s, DeLillo habitually and proleptically imagined outlasting the civilisation he was writing about. In Great Jones Street, Bucky Wunderlick, speculating on his culture’s predilection for tall buildings, predicts that they might come to be seen as symbolic of its decadence. He imagines ‘counterarchaeologists’ of the future not ‘digging into the earth’ to study US civilisation, but instead ‘climbing vast dunes of industrial rubble and mutilated steel’ (209). In Ratner’s Star (1976), the archaeologist Duncan Wu uncovers artefacts which, below a certain depth, reveal civilisations ‘more advanced the deeper we dig’ (360), while in Players, Pammy thinks that the twin towers of the World Trade Center then under construction ‘didn’t seem permanent’ (18). Such early expressions of what I have elsewhere called ‘archaeological consciousness’, which fall short of outright apocalypticism, demonstrate that it is not just in space that DeLillo is curating things, but also, and no less importantly, in time. In Running Dog, collectors collect because, the smut-dealer Lightborne proposes, ‘History is so comforting . . . and we seek consolation in durable things’ (104). Compare Jameson’s near-contemporaneous and now-canonical theoretical assertion that ‘History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis’ (Political Unconscious 88). DeLillo’s curation of objects in his work of the 1970s seems to chart a course between these two positions. In White Noise, he would render subject–object relations across the terrain of mid-1980s consumer culture in ways that never lose sight of the contingency of US culture, but even his earlier work contains these proleptic glimpses of ruins of the future, making of such found-objects-to-be not just things transposed and transformed from their contemporary circuits of production, consumption and disposal, but matter adrift in time. That historical certainty is glimpsed as early as Americana, in the form of a tyre test track imagined as future evidence of the existence of a ‘crazed or childlike people’ (375). Moreover, the Sioux holy man’s vision with which I began ends with the possibility that Megamerica might somehow shed ‘the ascetic curse, letting the buffalo run free, knowing everything a nation can know about itself and proceeding with the benefit of this knowledge and awareness that we have chosen not to die’ (120). The evidence of the intervening decades suggests that the chances of such a choice being made are perhaps even slimmer now than in the 1970s. But if the found object is an unstable category in DeLillo’s work, dissolving into other categories of object (the ruin, the archaeological find), this again has everything to do with the pressure of History itself. For his work of the 1970s shows a writer consistently arranging objects in space – and having his characters arrange objects in space – because he and they are all bound up in that dialectic of being and nothingness that ultimately, inevitably occurs not just in space but in time too. Compare this with the experiments in conceptual art that were taking place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Lippard records the photographer Robert Smithson’s insistence that ‘there is no tomorrow, nothing but a gap, a yawning gap’, and that ultimately, ‘[e]verything just vanishes’ (90). One could scarcely imagine a blunter illustration of Jameson’s point about the end of temporality under the cultural logic of late capitalism. But DeLillo’s work of this era evinces sufficient trace of historicity or temporality both to never lose sight of the contingent nature of US capitalist civilisation and to imply that there might be more to the future than a wholesale vanishing.

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We can observe what this sense of historicity does in DeLillo’s aesthetic of found things if we turn to the last of a series of interiors he wrote into Ratner’s Star, and that moment when Billy discovers that the mathematician Endor’s room is not how he imagined it at all, but remarkably similar in its sparseness to Robinson’s in End Zone: The room had hardwood floorboards that needed waxing. From the ceiling hung a single light bulb, unshaded. There was a rocking chair, plain in appearance, located in the far corner. A rectangular segment on one wall was cleaner than the rest of the wall. The imprint of whatever had been there indicated that the object extended from a line a few inches above the floor to a parallel line several feet below the ceiling and that it was about as wide as a pair of men standing abreast. The only other thing in the room was a Coca-Cola wall clock. (379–80) Billy comes to realise that there is ‘something about the bareness and the relative placement of the objects violating this bareness that made him feel that the ‘inexpressiveness’ of the room had been designed in highly precise terms’; that, as he concludes, the ‘more bare an area . . . the deeper we see’ (384). This is a reformulation of a claim about the curatorial arrangements of objects in space already made elsewhere in DeLillo’s oeuvre. That claim, which we might think of as the fundamental aesthetic principle that connects DeLillo’s writing of objects with the techniques practised by artists of the found object working in other media, acquires heightened significance here in relation not only to the depiction of some unidentified object that was no longer there, but also the Coca-Cola wall clock. A material signature of Megamerica, a piece of ephemeral consumer junk-cum-Pop Art without the prompting of whose stopped hands Billy proves unable to crack his mathematical code, the clock appears as expressive of a whole culture as the list of post-natural materials in Americana. Since DeLillo’s work of the 1970s, including Ratner’s Star, is so saturated with a sense of the contingency of that culture, from the ruminations on the ‘ascetic curse’ in Americana to the expressions of archaeological consciousness throughout the decade, one cannot help but wonder whether the Coca-Cola wall clock might survive as an archaeological relic too. ‘We find objects. They tell us something’, Kathryn Axton will say of her work as an archaeologist in The Names (73). What will a Coca-Cola wall clock say? Or DeLillo’s books? * * * The conceptual artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s whose work Lippard documented never dispensed with all material trace of the art object. Something remained, even if only a photograph of a pile of found dirt, a xerox sheet. This rendered Lippard’s use of the term ‘dematerialization’ contentious. But DeLillo never seems to have been aiming for dematerialisation in the first place. On the contrary, he appears, like his narrator David Bell in Americana, ‘a maker of objects’ (347), drawn in many ways to the apparent monumentality that his own written objects curating the found objects of Megamerica might paradoxically achieve. In this, he seems from the outset of his career engaged not just, as Philip Nel pointed out in a reading of The Body Artist, in a project to bridge ‘the gap between word and world’ (736) but in what Bill Brown has called the ‘effort to fathom the concrete, and to imagine the work of art as a different mode of mimesis – not one that serves to represent a thing, but one that seeks to

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attain the status of a thing’ (A Sense of Things 3). And yet such things don’t last – or if they do, they are likely to do so as ruins or fragments rather than durable objets d’art, DeLillo’s work of the 1970s insists. In 2015 Jameson wrote in one of his periodic defences of the concept of the postmodern that one of its features was the ‘volatilization of the art object’ in an era in the history of capitalism that has seen the preponderance of ‘those floating and dissolving constellations of strange objects we still call art’ (‘Aesthetics of Singularity’). He was describing the legacy of precisely the kind of conceptual art that Lippard catalogued decades earlier, while also noting the rise in the same period of the ‘emblematic figure of the curator’. By curating his own aesthetic objects in both space and time in his work of the 1970s, and thereby enabling the dialectic of being and nothingness to play out along both spatial and temporal axes in his writing of that decade, DeLillo gave, as I hope to have demonstrated, a distinctive charge to the already multivalent circuitry of subject–object relations, the depiction of which has remained central throughout his career. Of course, thus ‘volatizing’ his objects in time hardly constituted any more effective resistance to capitalism than the legatees of Duchamp achieved during the conjuncture in which DeLillo’s writing emerged. But this is no slight on his artistry. The tyranny of the commodity form is impossible to resist in capitalist society, and the role of art in such a society is an intractable problem of which DeLillo himself has spoken advisedly. But what DeLillo’s early aesthetic of the found object was able to bring to bear on that problem in the 1970s was a vision that, in retrospect, looks not so much anticapitalist, or even post-capitalist, but supra-capitalist, capable of widening its temporal frame just far enough to imagine a future in which unspecified others might find the things left behind by late capitalist life. Jameson’s observation that it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism is near-ubiquitous these days, but DeLillo’s engagement with objects in the 1970s shows, at least, that this was not always the case. Back then, the end of Megamerica need not necessarily have meant the end of the world.

Acknowledgements I thank Elliott Weiss, Jorrit Lettinga, and my colleagues in the Post-Capitalist Reading Group at the University of Groningen for their advice, assistance and thoughtful conversations.

Works Cited Anon. ‘The Richard Mutt Case.’ Blind Man, no. 2, May 1917, 5. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/ artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573. Accessed 7 February 2023. Banash, David. Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption. Rodopi, 2013. Breton, André. Mad Love. 1937. Translated by Mary Ann Caws. University of Nebraska Press, 1987. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. University of Chicago Press, 2003. ——. ‘Thing Theory.’ Critical Inquiry, 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–22.

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DeLillo, Don. Americana. 1971. Penguin, 1990. ——. End Zone. 1972. Penguin, 1986. ——. Great Jones Street. 1973. Vintage, 1983. ——. The Names. 1982. Picador, 1999. ——. Players. 1977. Vintage, 1991. ——. Ratner’s Star. Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. ——. Running Dog. 1978. Vintage, 1989. ——. Underworld. 1997. Picador, 1999. DePietro, Thomas, editor. Conversations with Don DeLillo. University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Dini, Rachele. ‘The Writing of “Dreck”: Consumerism, Waste and Re-use in Donald Barthelme’s Snow White.’ European Journal of American Studies, 11, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1–17. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Portable Emerson. Penguin, 1981. Fender, Stephen. The American Long Poem: An Annotated Selection. Edward Arnold, 1977. Fry, Edward F. ‘Book Review: Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972.’ The Print Collector’s Newsletter, 4, no. 6, 1974, pp. 144–5. Jameson, Fredric. ‘The Aesthetics of Singularity.’ New Left Review, 92, March/April 2015. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii92/articles/fredric-jameson-the-aesthetics-of-singularity. Accessed 7 February 2023. ——. ‘The End of Temporality.’ Critical Inquiry, 29, no. 4, 2003, pp. 695–718. ——. ‘Marxism and Postmodernism.’ New Left Review, 1, no. 176, July/August 1989. https:// newleftreview.org/issues/i176/articles/fredric-jameson-marxism-and-postmodernism. Accessed 7 February 2023. ——. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell University Press, 1981. ——. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso, 1991. ——. Sartre: The Origins of a Style. Yale University Press, 1961. Kamien-Kazhdan, Adina. Remaking the Readymade: Duchamp, Man Ray, and the Conundrum of the Replica. Routledge, 2018. LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. University of Illinois Press, 1987. Levin, Martin. ‘Americana by Don DeLillo.’ New York Times, 30 May 1971. Lippard, Lucy. The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Praeger, 1973. Nel, Philip. ‘Don DeLillo’s Return to Form: The Modernist Poetics of The Body Artist.’ Contemporary Literature, 43, no. 4, 2002, pp. 736–59. Ngai, Sianne. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. Norris, Margot. Writing War in the Twentieth Century. University of Virginia Press, 2000. Vidal, Gore. ‘American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction.’ New York Review of Books, 15 July 1976. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1976/07/15/american-plastic-the-matter-of-fiction/. Accessed 7 February 2023.

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7 DeLillo’s Photo Opportunity Monika Gehlawat

I don’t think any attempt to understand the way we live and the way we think and the way we feel about ourselves can proceed without a deep consideration of the power of the image. (DePietro 125)

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onventionally speaking, a photo opportunity is an arranged event that assembles notable figures to have their picture taken. Arrangement, as a formal precondition of ekphrastic writing, empowers an author to correlate visual and linguistic forms in order to represent the effects of a non-discursive medium such as photography. Across his body of work, Don DeLillo uses narrative to investigate the ‘power of the image’ in contemporary culture, and specifically, the pervasive and complex influence of photography on ‘the way we feel about ourselves’. This chapter examines how and why DeLillo turns to photography to pose questions about subjective freedom, perceptual and affective experience, as well as collective trauma. Using language to mediate the prerogative of the image, DeLillo effectively controls its reception. His ekphrastic writing presents, describes and frames multiple features of photography, including the photographer and her subject, the site of photography, the image and its circulation, and finally, the viewer’s, and thus reader’s, experience of the picture. With this comprehensive scope, DeLillo’s novels at once introduce and govern photography using the medium of language. This tension, in turn, reflects the author’s deep ambivalence about the power of photography, an ambivalence that I argue is inherent to the medium itself. The history of photography theory is anchored in the question of whether and what makes photography art. Both the indexicality and the unintentionality of the effects inherent to photography have led some critics to argue that it falls outside the traditional realm of art because it is neither an entirely made-up object independent of the world, nor an image completely controlled by its maker. Alternatively, photography theorists suggest that it is precisely these differences that define the mediumspecificity, and therefore legitimate the singular aesthetic category of photography as an art form. Added to these formal arguments is the fact that, while there have been many influential artists who work in photography, the photograph and picturetaking as such remain largely co-opted by the contemporary visual regime, which circulates images for the purposes of commodification, media communications, and individual and corporate self-promotion. In order to grapple with this abiding paradox, DeLillo dramatises a host of photographic encounters that consider both the opportunities and the dangers posed by its powers of representation. As Peter Schneck observes:

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On the one hand, there is an almost radical rhetoric against the media image and its fatal effects on human culture and communication. On the other hand, however, there is also an obvious fascination not only with the image technology of modern media but also with the image as the fundamental modality of cultural meaning and signification. In all of DeLillo’s novels the careful description of visual depictions in general acquires a central strategic and poetic function; images have become an integral part of DeLillo’s literary imagination and therefore have turned into a central component of his own literary imagery. (104–5) To better assess the ‘central strategic and poetic function’ of photography in DeLillo’s oeuvre, this chapter will examine three novels that span his career and help to elaborate his thinking about the power of this medium. White Noise (1985), Mao II (1991) and Falling Man (2007) cover a roughly thirty-year span which saw the rise of digital media and thus an acute intensification in the way that photography is used, seen and manipulated. DeLillo’s narrative intervention, then, highlights how the photographic object is anything but stable; rather, it is bound to temporality and thus to intersubjective experience. Notably, DeLillo prefers to write about the public photograph, rather than the private pictures people take of themselves or their friends and families. Still more significant, the public photographs he represents are rarely seen in the public story world, thus negating their primary function of circulation or exhibition. This consistent, if perhaps unconscious, containment of the visual authority of the photograph shows DeLillo using narrative to dominate the image. The mystery he explores is what happens when photographs made for public consumption remain undisclosed. While he occasionally includes actual images in a novel such as Mao II, the most important photographs in his books are rarely seen, but only described by the author’s own literary efforts. Thus, language serves as the picture’s origin and its trace; it is literary art, and not photography, that creates the image and expresses its power in DeLillo’s work. Early in White Noise, there is a small but often-discussed scene in which two of the novel’s main characters go to see ‘The Most Photographed Barn in America’ (12). Among other moments in the novel, this scene is said to reflect DeLillo’s interest in what Jean Baudrillard theorised as ‘the simulacra’ in his groundbreaking book Simulacra and Simulation (1981). For Baudrillard, the oversaturation of media in contemporary culture has completely eroded the distinction between representation and reality. When Murray and Jack go to see the most photographed barn in America, they observe tourists taking obligatory pictures and Murray effectively restates the premise of Baudrillard’s argument: ‘No one sees the barn’, he said finally. A long silence followed. ‘Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.’ (12) The signs advertising the barn and the foregoing activity of photographing it mediate the collective perceptual experience such that ontological reality disappears. While this reading is certainly persuasive and by no means original, I recommend that we broaden the scope of the scene in order to discover a more subtle perspective at play in DeLillo’s narration. Due to the singularity of the scene’s ironic tableau, the reader

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almost overlooks the fact that not everyone at the landmark site is photographing the barn. Jack and Murray stand apart. They do not have cameras and view the scene in its near entirety. Once we distinguish Jack’s and Murray’s perceptual activity from that of the rest of the spectators, we discover that DeLillo grants the scene a degree of embodied integrity. For example, he describes their route to the site: We drove twenty-two miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides – pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. (White Noise 12) The 22-mile drive, the scenery along the way, the counted signs, the landscape at the site, and the people there are all real in terms of how Jack focalises them. Thus, DeLillo represents his narrator directly perceiving reality with the ability to catalogue authentic sensory details that reveal the world as such. While the scene he describes – the tourists, the souvenir booth and the capacious technology of photography – testifies to the simulacra, Jack himself does not participate in it. Standing ‘near a grove of trees’, he and Murray occupy a liminal space between complete absorption in the simulacra and total autonomy from it. After all, the one thing DeLillo doesn’t describe is the barn, which suggests that, like the picture-takers, having seen the signs, Jack also now fails to see the barn. As Murray comments: ‘What was the barn like before it was photographed?’ he said. ‘What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now.’ (13) Jack can see everything about the scene but the barn, presumably because, following Baudrillard, the signs that advertise it as the superlative ‘most photographed barn’ displace the original object. What’s interesting, then, is that while the subject of the photograph vanishes, the narrator’s ability to observe the rest of the scene with careful attention remains intact. DeLillo’s implication, then, is that far from capturing an object, the photograph makes it disappear. The lost object is replaced by the collective aura of spectatorship, recalling Susan Sontag’s observation that ‘Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation’ (10). Importantly, DeLillo neither describes the photographs of the barn that are being made or sold at the landmark site, nor does he suggest a narrative or pictorial afterlife for ‘the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advance the film’ (White Noise 13).

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What I want to emphasise in this scene, then, is the degree to which Jack and Murray are able to give ‘an appearance of participation’. On the one hand, they are part of the scene’s aura because they, like everyone else, don’t see the barn. On the other hand, they stand apart from the scene and retain the capacity for critical observation of it. Because they lack the ‘principal device’ of the camera, they see only with their own eyes. Thus, DeLillo invests the scene with a visual hybridity that belies its apparent critique and introduces a degree of ambivalence towards photography that I believe deepens in his later novels. Here, he distinguishes the practice of looking from the practice of image-making, indicating that the latter may not wholly corrupt or negate the former. While Murray’s smugness and the narrator’s silence are far from enlivening, the former’s claim that ‘We’re here, we’re now’ is, quite literally, true. In Mao II, DeLillo makes photographic activity and the power of photographs a central thematic concern. Not only does DeLillo insert actual pictures into the book, he makes one of its primary characters a photographer. He also includes scenes of characters viewing photographs, which in turn requires ekphrastic prose to describe what they see. The novel’s comprehensive representation of various acts and subjects related to photography enables a broader philosophical inquiry about its influence in contemporary life. Specifically, I argue that in Mao II, DeLillo stages a debate about the virtue of this medium by exploring the potential of the embodied site of the photographic shoot. The novel’s protagonist is the reclusive author Bill Gray, modelled after writers such as Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger for their strict code of privacy and resistance to being photographed. In one interview DeLillo describes Gray as ‘a very literary writer who agrees to have his picture taken’ (DePietro 111). In fact, he glosses over a crucial plot point in this phrasing, for it is Bill Gray himself who initiates contact with the photographer. He and his assistant read an article in Aperture magazine about Brita Nilsson and decided she is the right photographer to take his pictures. They approach her. The passing reference to Aperture indicates a shrewd awareness of photography as an art form and complicates our sense of Bill as merely image-averse. Well before the arrival of Brita, then, Bill Gray sets the stage for a radical departure from his disciplined privacy, a shift that he somehow intuited to require the intervention of photography. In the pivotal scene that jumpstarts his protagonist’s plot trajectory, DeLillo represents the practice of photography as far from the flat, commodified simulacra seen in White Noise. At first considered a form of self-exposure so extreme as to liken it to a death threat, the photographic shoot in Mao II develops into an artistic space of desire and collaborative meaning-making. In one interview, DeLillo said: Mao II is a sort of rest-and-motion book, to invent a category. The first half of the book could have been called ‘The Book.’ Bill Gray talking about his book, piling up manuscript pages, living in a house that operates as a kind of filing cabinet for his work and all the other work it engenders. And the second half of the book could have been called ‘The World.’ Here, Bill escapes his book and enters the world. It turns out to be the world of political violence. I was nearly finished with the first half of the book before I realized how the second half ought to be shaped. I was writing blind. It was a struggle up to that point, but once I understood that Bill had to escape his handlers – the most obvious things tend to take the form of startling revelations – I felt a surge of excitement because the book had finally revealed itself to me. (DePietro 100)

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Using uncannily visual metaphors, DeLillo describes his writing process and summarises the plot structure of Mao II. He was ‘writing blind’, until he neared the end of the first half of the book, unable to see where it was supposed to go. What helped him to see his way? And more specifically, what comes between ‘The Book’ and ‘The World’? The answer is ‘The Photographer’. The book ‘revealed itself’ to DeLillo precisely as he developed the photographic shoot, for with the arrival of Brita Nilsson, the story changes, and there is a ‘surge of excitement’ felt by both the author and his protagonist in ‘the form of startling revelations’. There is a good deal of suspense built up before the encounter between Brita and Bill, as his assistant Scott goes to New York City to pick her up and drive her out to their home under cover of night. The secrecy and mystery of the approach, as well as the sharp disruption to Bill’s long confinement, make Brita’s arrival a much-anticipated event that produces unexpected results and echoes the way in which DeLillo felt he was ‘writing blind’ up to that point in the novel. Mark Currie writes that the category of the unexpected is actually produced by anticipation, expectation, and prediction. The unexpected event is more prominent in a world that is methodical and accurate and expert in its predictions, and the degree of unexpectedness is proportional to the extent to which we are accustomed to seeing things coming. (99) The highly controlled atmosphere of Bill Gray’s home, where his activity is monitored and largely dictated by his assistant Scott, also extends to rigid ways of thinking about privacy, photography and the public sphere. Because Bill and Scott are convinced that obscurity is the only way to protect his reputation and craft, they believe that the photographer’s arrival will sound a kind of death knell for him. DeLillo dialectically reveals this expectation to be both true and false. While meeting Brita does lead Gray to re-enter the world and thus hastens his death, the photographic shoot itself brings him back to life in the narrative present, animating him out of the calcification that had been his hermetic existence. What is unexpected for Bill and Scott, then, are the radical effects of interacting with a spontaneous and dynamic artist, one whom DeLillo has notably chosen to be a photographer. The ‘still life’ that had heretofore characterised Bill Gray’s existence, not to mention his progress on his unfinished book, is suddenly animated by the collaborative nature of the photographic shoot. Ironically, even as he is energised by the encounter, Bill says that he believes it will be the cause of his death: ‘Remember they used to say, This is the first day of the rest of your life. It struck me just last night these pictures are the announcement of my dying.’ ‘Close your mouth. Good, good, good, good.’ She finished the roll, reloaded, reached for her cigarette, took a drag, put it down, then moved toward him and touched a hand to his face, tilting it slightly left. ‘Stay now. Don’t move. I like that.’ ‘See, anything you want. I do it at once.’ ‘Touching Bill Gray.’ ‘Do you realize what an intimate thing we’re doing?’ ‘It’s in my memoirs, guaranteed. And you’re not cloddish by the way.’ ‘We’re alone in a room involved in this mysterious exchange. What am I giving up to you? And what are you investing me with, or stealing from me? How are you

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changing me? I can feel the change like some current just under the skin. Are you making me up as you go along? Am I mimicking myself? And when did women start photographing men in the first place?’ ‘I’ll look it up when I get home.’ ‘We’re getting on extremely well.’ (Mao II 43) In a bravura scene that spans nearly fifteen pages, DeLillo tracks Brita and Bill as they perform a kind of improvised dance on the stage set of the story. Moving around one another, exchanging dialogue, at times physically touching, they are mutually invigorated and are, as Bill puts it, ‘getting on extremely well’. The remote stasis that had defined Bill’s existence for years is suddenly transposed into intimate and mobile proximity with another artist. Far from stealing Bill’s humanity, the shoot delivers intersubjective gratifications such as curiosity, desire, responsivity, observation, improvisation, dialogue and self-reflection. He feels the change as it occurs, although he questions whether Brita is giving or taking something away from him. That doubt lies at the very core of human vulnerability, the one emotion Bill has long kept at bay. In fact, the scene, which is appropriately focalised through Brita, reveals that she is neither giving nor taking, but is instead searching for Bill. For a man whose most ardent wish is to disappear, Bill becomes more vital and legible under the scrutiny of her gaze: Through the viewfinder she watched him smile. He looked clearer in the camera. He had an intentness of gaze, an economy, and his face was handsomely lined and worked, embroidered across the forehead and at the corners of the eyes. So often in her work the human shambles was remade by the energy of her seeing, by the pure will that the camera uncovered in her, the will to see deeply. (37) Both Brita and Bill look intently into and through the camera. This reciprocal responsivity is mirrored by their unaffected conversation and seemingly instinctive rapport. Through Brita, DeLillo seems to suggest that photography actually heightens the senses and, far from reifying its subject, creates it anew. This act of creativity goes beyond the physical field of visibility and includes affective, psychological and emotional development as well. Elizabeth Freeman writes that Work in psychology on animal and infant communication, and in neuroscience on mirror neurons, has established that the capacity to synchronize one’s movement and/or the rhythm of one’s vocalization with another person’s facilitates a form of what Anna Gibbs calls ‘affective attunement’, or feeling – and being-with another, and what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus. (Freeman 130) In a novel that depicts, like many of DeLillo’s books, human beings in a state of social atomisation, this central scene anchored in photographic practice offers a glimpse of another possibility: an almost utopian meeting of the minds and a synergistic atmosphere that gives unexpected, because sincere, meaning to Murray’s laconic statement in White Noise, ‘We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now’ (226). The moment-by-moment narration of the shoot also represents Brita as a craftsperson with carefully honed technical skills that rival those of her subject. Far from a mere peddler of wares for the image regime, Brita is represented as a creative artist

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of the highest order, deeply absorbed in her aesthetic labour. Her technique recalls the ‘snapshot aesthetic’ of Gary Winogrand, whose style is referenced in the book as a photographic equivalent to Bill’s prose. In ‘The Book’ part of Mao II, we learn that Bill’s endless revisions of the same manuscript have led to a kind of recursive paralysis that deprives him of the unexpected discoveries that occur when an artist works with freedom and spontaneity. By contrast, the ‘snapshot aesthetic’ depends precisely upon the power of contingency, the unintentional capture of the right image, a chance event that is rooted in photography’s medium-specificity. DeLillo describes this practice as Brita’s long-honed technique: She inserted another roll. She was sure she already had what she’d come for but a hundred times in her life she thought she had the cluster of shots she wanted and then found better work deep in the contact sheets. She liked working past the feeling of this is it. Important to keep going, obliterate the sure thing and come upon a moment of stealthy blessing. (Mao II 41) Brita balances the freedom of the unforeseen with rigorous formal precision and the endurance to continue past the point of satisfaction. In order to ‘come upon a moment of stealthy blessing’, she knows that she must remain in the spell of the shoot as long as possible. This patience also serves her ambition to produce a complex portrait of Bill. Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen explain how technical choices in photography influence representation: We will use the words ‘characterization’ and ‘characterize’ to describe both individual steps and aspects of the photographic process (a given lens characterizes things in greater or lesser detail than another lens) and also the end result of the process (a photograph is a characterization of something) . . . A photographer – even a Sunday snapshooter – makes a number of characterizations by his choice of equipment and how he uses it. (149–50) In this sense, Brita ‘characterizes’ Bill during the shoot, creating the author through the myriad technical choices she makes. DeLillo uses Brita to create Bill as a character, to bring him out of hiding, and ultimately project him into ‘The World’ of the novel. For her part, Brita’s characterisation is anchored in searching for the author Bill Gray in the man who stands before her. Thus literary and photographic techniques coordinate in the scene as well as in relation to the novel as a whole. The shoot becomes at once expansive and controlled, at both formal and psychological levels, expressing a hybridity in keeping with its liminal position in the plot structure. In this scene, Brita and Bill are both in and out of the world at once. DeLillo writes: Space was closing in the way it did when a session went really well. Time and light were narrowed to automatic choices. Bill stood before the odd notations on his chart and she knew she had everything she might want or need. Here was the old, marked and melancholy head, the lost man of letters, and there was the early alphabet on the wall, the plan of his missing book in the form of lopsided boxes and felt-tipped scrawls and sets of directional signs like arrows scratched out by a child with a pencil in his fist. And he was animated, leaning and jabbing as he

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talked. His hands were blunt and nicked. There was a doggedness to him, a sense of all the limits he’d need to exceed, getting on top of work that always came hard. She was trying to place him in context, fit the voice and body to the books . . . Bill was slowly beginning to make sense to her, to look reasonably like his work. (Mao II 38–9) Here DeLillo builds a cooperative atmosphere of acute observation and imaginative responsivity. The photographer’s craft depends upon the creative writer’s aura and materials; the two artistic enterprises intertwine even as the subject of the shoot begins ‘to look reasonably like his work’. Brita’s attention to Bill’s body, her instructions for how to move, and her physical touch also generate an unspoken tension of mutual desire that lingers well after the shoot in their respective gendered activities: Brita lay nearly flat in the long tub, hearing someone chopping wood just below the window. Steam rose up around her. First the crack of the ax, then the soft topple of split logs . . . The temperature of the bath was perfect now, almost too hot to bear. She felt sweat break out on her face and she moved more deeply in. Isn’t this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? Steam hung in the room. The heat was profound, deep-going and dulling and close to stopping the heart. She knew he was strong, saw it in his hands and girth, that dockworker’s density of body . . . How could she keep a distance if she’d already taken his picture? This was the partnership, the little misery. Bill was tossing split logs toward the corded wood set under a sagging canopy at the side of the house. (67) Here the distinctive but proximate elements of water and wood echo the intermediality of creative art forms during the photographic shoot. The scene is overtly sexualised to indicate Brita’s arousal and awareness of the desire that the nearby presence of Bill’s body stimulates in her, just as earlier, Bill fantasises about a life in New York City with Brita: ‘He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows’ (54). DeLillo underscores that the ‘ceremonial’ aspect of the photography shoot yields this intense libidinal urge in both characters. The intimacy generated during the shoot resounds afterwards, even as both characters fear that its intensity could not be reproduced in future encounters. Jesse Matz explains that aesthetic time is ‘not just the temporality of aesthetic engagement or art’s ontological time; it asserts the further possibility that art makes time meaningful’ (226). The sexual desire as well as the ‘dull misery’ both characters feel in the hours following the shoot reflect its exceptional significance and how the creative process made their time together meaningful. Without question, then, DeLillo treats photography as art in Mao II, even as he interrogates the power of the image itself to reify its subject. Despite his creative and sexual attraction to Brita, Bill mourns afterwards, ‘Got what she came for, didn’t she? I’m a picture now, flat as birdshit on a Buick’ (54). While DeLillo represents the photographer as artist and the photographic site as enlivening aesthetic time, the photograph itself still hovers as a threat, a theft, a mere object. He uses this long and decisive interlude in the novel to elaborate on his ambivalence about the medium, advancing a dialectical argument that assumes nothing except for photography’s incredible power to give or take human life. Indeed, soon after Brita’s visit, Bill Gray escapes his reclusive cocoon and embarks on an unpredictable path that spirals inevitably to his death. In a

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sense, he truly disappears because he dies in another country without any identification, so for all intents and purposes he is considered missing. Meanwhile, the photographs Brita took of him – which he assumed would doom him through public exposure – remain uncirculated and unpublished. Instead, Brita gives the contact sheets from the shoot to Scott. In Bill’s absence, they become a souvenir of his presence in the home: They took turns looking at the sheets. Because the frames followed each other in the original order of exposure, they were able to see how Brita had established rhythms and themes, catching a signal, tracking some small business in Bill’s face and working to enlarge it or explain it, make it true, make it him. The pictures of Bill were glimpses of Brita thinking, a little anatomy of mind and eye. Scott thought she wanted something undesigned and casually come-upon, a familiar colloquial Bill. He took the magnifier to frame after frame and saw a photographer who was trying to deliver her subject from every mystery that hovered over his chosen life. She wanted to do pictures that erased his seclusion, made it never happen and made him over and gave him a face we’ve known all our lives. But maybe not. Scott didn’t want to move too soon into a theory of how much meaning a photograph can bear. (221) Having dramatised the figure of the photographer and the activity of the shoot, DeLillo turns to the act of viewing photography. Here Scott discerns both the subtleties of the picture’s subject as well as the path of the photographer’s thought process. While he was not in the room during the shoot, Scott can sense the energy co-produced by the two artists in that private space. Ariella Azoulay, whose theory of photography emphasises the intersubjective dynamic between the photographer, her subject and the viewer, succinctly observes that ‘[t]he photograph is the site where the collaboration coughs up its secret’ (411). The network of desire generated between Brita, Bill and Scott in their brief time together resonates as the latter studies the pictures, getting as close to them as possible using a magnifying glass. Like a lover or a voyeur, Scott follows the movements of the shoot. ‘The pictures of Bill were glimpses of Brita thinking’, so that the collaborative intimacy that arose during the shoot, at once somatic and creative, leaves its residue in the photograph itself. Scott senses how closely Brita was responding to what she saw in Bill by how she tracked ‘rhythms and themes’ in his movements. Thus, the contact sheets reveal how she characterised her subject and how, in doing so, she created him anew. In place of Bill’s missing body, these pictures memorialise him and stand as a visual analogy for the body of work he left behind. Far from flat or reified, the pictures store the affective energy that arose from this influential scene dictated and documented by the photographer. Rarely seen without her camera, Brita is character-as-image-maker. She is absorbed by her role and rarely motivated outside of it. In the photographic shoots he narrates, DeLillo often describes Brita looking through the viewfinder of her camera, which becomes a kind of technical apparatus, or extension, of her gaze. Her visual acumen is highly trained and sensitive; she sees all. I want to argue that Brita in fact serves as the novel’s ‘viewfinder’, or the focaliser of its primary ethical, philosophical and aesthetic preoccupations. To that end, and despite the emotions she feels towards her subjects, Brita remains apart from the scene, always its observer, scanning for significant details that reveal an untold story. Sontag explains:

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Insofar as photography does peel away the dry wrappers of habitual seeing, it creates another habit of seeing: both intense and cool, solicitous and detached; charmed by the insignificant detail, addicted to incongruity. But photographic seeing has to be constantly renewed with new shocks, whether of subject matter or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision. (99) Arguably, Brita’s shift from photographing writers to terrorists could be interpreted as an effort to renew the shock of photographic seeing. The final section of the novel has Brita in Beirut to photograph an Islamic terrorist. Having built her archive of pictures of writers, she turns to a new, more dangerous subject that makes fresh demands on how she sees and interacts with her subjects. DeLillo represents her precisely as ‘intense and cool, solicitous and detached’ in her encounters with photographic subjects, no matter how complex her emotions may be below the surface. The photographer’s surface is thus as important as that of the images she produces. DeLillo’s critical turn to terrorism in Mao II only deepened after 9/11. In Falling Man, he attempts to narrativise the personal and collective trauma of survivors who were in and out of the World Trade Center that day. The title Falling Man refers to the infamous 9/11 photograph of a man plunging to his death after he jumped out of one of the twin towers. It was published the next day in the New York Times and, following widespread public outcry, was immediately taken offline. In Falling Man, DeLillo takes up photography again, this time with his central concern being the power of the image itself. Having explored the site of photography and the figures of the photographer and her subject in previous novels, he now reflects upon the prevailing force of a singular photograph. Yet again he is intrigued by a public photograph that is kept out of circulation, in this case due to its traumatic content. When Lianne, one of the novel’s main characters, searches for the image online, her study of the taboo picture is rendered through ekphrastic prose. She did not read further but knew at once which photograph the account referred to. It hit her hard when she saw it, the day after, in the newspaper. The man headlong, the towers behind him. The mass of the towers filled the frame of the picture. The man falling, the towers contiguous, she thought, behind him. The enormous soaring lines, the vertical column stripes. The man with blood on his shirt, she thought, or burn marks, and the effect of the columns behind him, the composition, she thought, darker stripes for the nearer tower, the north, lighter for the other, and the mass, the immensity of it, and the man set almost precisely between the rows of darker and lighter stripes. Headlong, free fall, she thought, and this picture burned a hole in her mind and heart, dear God, he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific. She clicked forward and there was the picture. She looked away, in the keyboard. It is the ideal falling motion of a body. (Falling Man 221–2) In his representation of the photographic encounter, DeLillo effectively resurrects the repressed image by dramatising its power to disturb the viewing subject as she examines it. The conditions of spectatorship are at once measured and stirring; the boredom or distraction typically associated with the online viewing of images is here challenged by the signifying power of the picture. Even as she ‘clicks forward’ in the habitual

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manner of digital users, Lianne is so moved by what she sees that she must look away from the very photograph she sought. DeLillo’s ekphrastic prose is one of two artistic reproductions of the original photograph and its subject in the novel. The other comes from the performance artist the Falling Man, who stages his own free fall in various public sites around the city. Indeed, it is after she witnesses one such performance that Lianne goes in search of the original image. The performance artist himself eventually dies, presumably from pre-existing health issues and injuries sustained in the multiple enactments he rigged up with only very rudimentary cables that fail to cushion the sudden blow of the free fall on his body. The photograph, the performance and DeLillo’s prose, like Russian nesting dolls, together gesture towards a subject that is irreparably lost. The original photograph was shunned by the public because it testified to the fundamental condition of photography’s medium-specificity: indexicality. The photograph, in other words, bespeaks its content. Walter Benn Michaels, explaining the formal distinction between photography and other visual art forms, writes: What distinguishes the photograph from the drawing in other words, is its dependence on the thing it’s a photo of. And it’s this physical connection to its subject – the literality of its relation to the world outside itself – that has made the photograph both an emblem of the inseparability of the work from the world and, as we have already begun to see, a test case for the effort (by making the work a ‘whole’) nevertheless to separate them. (9) The picture is indelibly linked to the event it captures, and yet floats free of it, allowed to ‘live’ in a sense that its subject does not. The survival and circulation of the image is what the collective mass instinctively balked against when it was first published in newspapers around the world. Unlike the performance artist or the prose, the picture embodies the catastrophic event by documenting that, on the day of the attack, a man fell from a burning building to his death. That this event was not unique, if uniquely captured, further explains its triggering effect on ordinary viewers. The artistic renderings created by the performance artist and DeLillo’s prose thus follow as approximations after the original photograph and the event it captured. As Aaron Mauro explains, DeLillo’s novel enacts the loss of this image from the public domain by translating it into a written form. In this way, Falling Man leaves gaps between the titular subject of the novel, the photograph, and the event. Like the disappearance of the towers, this moment in history is only gestured at through absences that demand attention. (585) Everything that the falling man photograph captures is now gone, so that it is as much a picture of a man falling from the towers as it is a picture of destruction, violence and terror. If, as Roland Barthes wrote, ‘Every photograph is a certificate of presence’ (87), then this picture functions as a death certificate. In Falling Man, DeLillo thus thematises the temporality of photography. If, in Mao II, he probed the spatiality of photography by narrativising the photographic shoot, then in Falling Man, he tells a story about the past, present and future of the image and how it lives eternally in the digital archive, reimagined each time a new viewer sees it. This particular picture also represents the durational fact of mass trauma, which makes it a

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visual corollary for the novel itself. Here Johanna Drucker contests the notion of the photograph as merely a static record of an event: Temporality destroys the fiction of singularity and bounded-ness on which our idea of an entity, of an image-thing that acts as if it were complete, depends. Not only can we see more, since the extension and duration show much more than any single image could, but the character of what we see is different. The image is no longer defined on an ontological plane, but is part of an epistemological field. (23) The power of the falling man photograph is precisely that it summons an epistemological field that incorporates cultural, historical and psychological experience. Despite the radical stillness of the image, it expresses a duration of time because it documents a gravitational free fall and captures what has since vanished. The viewer cannot see the picture without being aware of its temporality, both in the frightful seconds of the fall and in the broader historical context of the before and after of the 9/11 attacks. Because it highlights temporality, this picture also expresses narrative power, and thus conjoins to the work of the novel. As such, this particular photograph also demands a close reading in order to grasp its dialectical force. The picture is not only powerful because of the horrific event it documents, but also because of the tension it expresses between utter contingency and formal precision. This tension, still further, lies at the heart of debates about photography’s status as an art practice. Can, in other words, an image captured more or less randomly still be deemed aesthetic, especially when the subject it documents is so traumatic? Photographer Richard Drew snapped pictures of the World Trade Center that morning before the towers collapsed, but could not have deliberately staged this now infamous picture. Unlike Brita Nilsson in Mao II, he was not working with a subject that could be characterised through various technical and formal decisions. The speed and brevity of the picture’s subject would indicate that it was by sheer chance that he captured the image as he did. And yet its formal composition strikes the viewer as anything but accidental. A photograph of near-perfect symmetry, the falling man picture situates the figure precisely between the two towers with one striped darker than the other. A lack of perspectival depth creates a virtually abstract image of geometric flatness and physical stasis. The falling man is falling and not falling, a visual paradox echoed by the performance artist in DeLillo’s novel. Beyond its formal power as a balanced and striking image, the falling man photograph serves as an allegory for DeLillo’s narrative lament. While the victim in the picture is literally falling, the characters in Falling Man are also, in a sense, falling, failing, flailing, disappearing from life. As world-historical events meet violence with still more violence, DeLillo shows the disintegration of family, love and spiritual motivation. Denying his characters the possibility of healing, either personal or collective, DeLillo describes the image of the falling man to be the ultimate embodiment of the contemporary subject suspended in free fall after 9/11. His astute awareness of photography’s temporality enables him to shore up the dialectical tension between the intensity of the moment captured by the photograph and the ongoing trauma it continues to reflect. Emily Hyde develops this complex reading of photography accordingly: First, if you can suspend your inclination to read the photograph as evidence then you can read for a slower opening, a disclosure that takes in the experience of seeing

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as well as what’s seen – a disclosure that countenances other participants in that seeing. Second, if you can shift your temporal understanding of the photograph away from the idea that it captures or freezes a moment in the past, then you can see the multiple, unrealized futures it contains, and you can speculate about undetermined, alternative futures that might yet unfold. Indeed, we must read the falling man photograph as more than evidence of what was captured that morning by Drew. With a ‘slower opening’, its allegorical meaning for the novel, as well as its relationship to the performance artist’s work, can be disclosed. The participants of the seeing then extend beyond the photographer to include the performance artist, Lianne, and countless others who saw and were shaken by the trauma imbued in the picture. The ‘multiple, unrealized futures’ of the original photograph comprise, in large measure, the narrative of Falling Man. In this sense, DeLillo once again places photography at the heart of his novel. Whereas in Mao II, the photographic shoot becomes the pivotal episode of the plot, here the subject of the photograph sends shockwaves through all those who survived the precipitating event of the novel. With a temporal understanding of its long afterlife, we come to see how DeLillo relates it to the aesthetic, philosophical and psychological questions he attempts to ask in Falling Man. In a dramatic reversal of Murray’s observation that ‘no one sees the barn’ because they are taking pictures of it, here we may argue that everyone sees the man because of the photograph. We are, effectively, haunted by the falling man. DeLillo’s inclination to understand the contradictions of the contemporary period in terms of the crisis of the visual image achieves its starkest conclusions when he takes up the medium of photography. Because photography involves embodied space and temporality, it also situates itself within intersubjective contexts that correlate world-historical individuals, site-specific events and symbolic signification. As such, photographs, photographers, viewing subjects and photographic sites provide rich material for the author to delve into the desires and effects created by this medium. It is no coincidence that DeLillo contends with his own ambivalence about the medium by representing public photographs that are never displayed or else, as in the case of the falling man picture, are singular because considered singularly taboo for public consumption. As a literary artist, then, he at once controls the image and becomes the image-maker. He uses this ‘photo opportunity’ to make an ethical or social argument, but he also curtails its insidious power to render the world banal through mere circulation and blind consumption. In DeLillo’s dialectical vision, photography is neither corrupt nor heroic, neither corrosive nor redemptive, but rather a medium that can be both art and artefact, and thus an embodiment of the pervading tension that defines the power of the image in contemporaneity.

Works Cited Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. Zone Books, 2008. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, 1980. Burges, Joel, and Amy J. Elias, editors. Time: A Vocabulary of the Present. NYU Press, 2016. Currie, Mark. ‘Anticipation/ Unexpected.’ Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, edited by Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias. NYU Press, 2016. DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. Scribner, 2007.

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——. Mao II. Penguin, 1991. ——. White Noise. Penguin, 1984. DePietro, Thomas, editor. Conversations with Don DeLillo. University of Mississippi Press, 2005. Drucker, Johanna. ‘Temporal Photography.’ Philosophy of Photography, 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 22–8. Freeman, Elizabeth. ‘Synchronic/Anachronic.’ Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, edited by Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias. NYU Press, 2016. Hyde, Emily. ‘Photographic Futures.’ Post45 Peer-Reviewed, 3, 2019. https://post45. org/2019/08/photographic-futures/. Accessed 15 April 2021. Matz, Jesse. ‘Aesthetic/Prosthetic.’ Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, edited by Joel Burgess and Amy J. Elias. NYU Press, 2016. Mauro, Aaron. ‘The Languishing of the Falling Man: Don DeLillo and Jonathan Safran Foer.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 57, no. 3, 2011, pp. 584–606. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy. University of Chicago Press, 2015. Schneck, Peter. ‘“To See Things Before Other People See Them”: Don DeLillo’s Visual Poetics.’ American Studies, 52, no. 1, 2007, pp. 103–20. Snyder, Joel, and Neil Walsh Allen. ‘Photography, Vision, and Representation.’ Critical Inquiry, 2, no. 1, 1975, pp. 143–69. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Picador, 2001.

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8 Where Have All the Writers Gone? Art and Vision in DeLillo’s Later Works Laura Barrett

The Death of the Author in DeLillo’s Early Works

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n Mao II (1991), acclaimed writer Bill Gray laments that ‘[w]hat terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought’ (157). That novel also chronicles a profound anxiety about the loss of writers’ powers in the face of the increased influence of visual culture. It is significant, then, that Mao II is also the last DeLillo novel in which novelists play a central role. During DeLillo’s early career, much of his work chronicled a tension between words and images. After ‘spen[ding] twenty-eight years in the movies’, David Bell, the ‘[child] of Godard and Coca-Cola’, as Mark Osteen felicitously described the protagonist of DeLillo’s first novel, Americana (1971), takes up his pen after failing as a filmmaker (Americana 283; Osteen 8). As if to counteract the odious effects of pervasive visual media that ensure that our daily lives ‘[exist] only on videotape’, the novel offers ‘schizograms’ and bedtime stories whose elusiveness is their charm (Americana 23). Running Dog (1978) chronicles the collision of investigative journalism and the world of erotic art, and the very title of The Names (1982), a novel that announces the importance of film in the twentieth century, establishes the primacy of language. By Underworld (1997), however, writers in the conventional sense have all but disappeared from DeLillo’s novels. Words are still important, of course, but primarily embodied by the controversial improvisations of Lenny Bruce or the stylised graffiti of Moonman 157. Subsequent novels yield an even bleaker terrain for the writer who doesn’t even bother to show up, save for a brief appearance by The Body Artist’s (2001) Rey Robles, a filmmaker who kills himself while trying to complete his memoir. Even the spareness of DeLillo’s prose in the past twenty years suggests that the written word is disappearing. Depictions of art and artists are certainly pervasive in DeLillo’s later work, with art increasingly limited to visual and performance art, a sleight of hand that seems to have gone unnoticed. It is as if Bill Gray’s prognostication has proven true: writers have ceded their place to terrorists – or to visual artists. The disappearance of the writer, however, is not a statement about the privileged value of visual art. DeLillo’s suspicions about the seductive powers of all representation are illustrated by the connection between violence and visual art and the dehistoricising effects of mechanical reproduction made explicit in his first novel when David Bell describes ‘the pistol grip’ of the camera ‘pluck[ing the hawk] out of space

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and plac[ing] it in a new era, free of history and death’ (Americana 33). Language is no less culpable, a point made by End Zone’s Gary Harkness: ‘[T]here’s no way to express thirty million dead. No words. So certain men are recruited to reinvent the language’ (85). Our mediated relationship with the world is emblematised by ‘The Most Photographed Barn in America’ as well as by Jack Gladney’s loss of an argument about the weather because of the slipperiness of the adverb now. ‘Words and meanings [are so] at odds’ in Americana that Bell’s friend and road trip companion Bobby Brand decides to ‘eliminate language itself’ from the novel he’s writing (36, 288). Paraphrasing Matisse, Klara Sax in Underworld bluntly insists that ‘[p]ainters must begin by cutting out their tongues’, but the writer is ever-present in the novel’s ‘rhyming slang of life’, which illuminates the threads tenuously connecting the book’s vast swath of time and place and the serendipity of the counterpoised articles in the New York Times chronicling the famous pennant game and the infamous Russian atomic bomb testing (Underworld 78, 105). The novel’s attention to lexical detail in its literal rhymes (bomb/Om, Glassic/classic, rant/chant, rat/chat) and the sheer abundance of puns (Lucky Strike, Volkswagen bug, scotch, waste) make clear the author behind the curtain, manifested in Nick Shay, who indulges in the ‘enduring stuff of narrative’ to describe his father’s disappearance (454). Recreating big league games from ‘a piece of paper filled with letters and numbers’, sportscaster Russ Hodges is another stand-in for authors: ‘You create the weather, flesh out the players, you make them sweat and grouse and hitch up their pants, and it is remarkable, thinks Russ, how much earthly disturbance, how much summer and dust the mind can manage to order up from a single Latin letter lying flat’ (25). The drive to write largely fails in DeLillo’s works, but writing itself – as a means of observing and understanding – triumphs. Running Dog’s Moll Robbins doesn’t recognise that the eponymous magazine for which she writes is no longer radical, and for most of The Names, risk analyst James Axton has no idea who is reading his reports on political instability abroad. David Bell and Bill Gray represent the essential tension for novelists whose disengagement from society renders them obsolete or whose attempts to change the course of history fail. DeLillo has stated that writers should work in opposition to culture: The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence . . . There are so many temptations for American writers to become part of the system and part of the structure that now, more than ever, we have to resist. American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous. (Arensberg 390) Perhaps acknowledging that writers cannot simultaneously serve as subjects and critics, DeLillo has literally moved the writer to the margins in his later novels. In Falling Man (2007), Point Omega (2010) and Zero K (2016), the writer is replaced by the diffused voices of characters navigating their own alienation while reckoning with the failure of vision and the imperfection of representation. In these novels, art, both visual and verbal, illustrates our propensity to see what we want to see but also dramatises the need ‘to give memory, tenderness, and meaning to all that howling space’ (‘In the Ruins’ 39).

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The Latent Author in Late DeLillo The three novels that preoccupy this chapter share a bustling New York City setting that is counterpoised against a place or event that demands deceleration and contemplation. In Point Omega and Zero K, the ‘force of geologic time’ and the unrelenting silence experienced in the deserts of California and Central Asia require visitors to ‘do nothing [. . . but] sit and think’ (Point Omega 19). In Falling Man, however, characters need not leave the city in order to experience a radical shift in perspective because a singular event – the 2001 World Trade Center attack – compels them to consider how they perceive the world. A World Trade Center employee who survives the attack, Keith Neudecker is a classic DeLillo protagonist; his perennial drift and rejection of responsibility manifest in a gambling addiction and estrangement from his wife and son. We meet Keith as he wends his way home after the collapse of the towers, a point at which ‘he beg[ins] to see things, somehow, differently’, suddenly noticing details in his apartment: ‘He’d lived here for a year and a half, since the separation, finding a place close to the office, centering his life, content with the narrowest of purviews, that of not noticing . . . But now he looked . . . He saw the place differently now’ (Falling Man 5, 26). In contrast to Hammad, one of the hijackers who teaches himself not to see because acknowledging people would interfere with his plot, Keith moves from blindness to sight. Back home with his wife and son, ‘[h]e stands at the window and sees what’s happening in the street. Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into night, if you stand a while and look’ (66). It takes the entire novel for Keith to recall a 9/11 experience so traumatic that he represses it thoroughly, much like his description of absentmindedly picking up Florence Givens’ briefcase in his escape from the tower and carrying it home: ‘It wasn’t even a case of forgetting. I don’t think I knew’ (53). While Keith is a witness to the tragedy of 9/11, the perspective that opens and concludes the story, he is not the novel’s central observer. That role belongs to his wife, Lianne Glenn, a character so visually attuned that she notices minor changes to the placement of art in her mother’s apartment: ‘The standing hand, a small bronze normally on the bamboo end table, was now on the wrought-iron table, laden with books, near the window’ (42). However, even for characters for whom meticulous observation is second nature, selective sight is inevitable. Lianne is drawn to Basho’s ‘In Kyoto’ in part because the haiku acknowledges her longing for New York City before 9/11, but it also expresses the sense that our own perceptions of places (and people) prevent us from seeing what is before us. Lianne’s mother, art historian Nina Barton, can spend hours looking ‘at what was unfailing in its grip on the eye and mind, on memory and identity’ in a handful of paintings in the Metropolitan Museum, but she looks away from her lover’s radical past as a member of Kommune One and even from any identity or name he might have outside of her presence (11). Context, then, is one of the most important elements of seeing in Falling Man, a novel awash in visual art, ranging from Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes to David Janiak’s spectacles. A postcard featuring a reproduction of the first-edition cover of Shelley’s Revolt of Islam that Lianne receives in the mail three weeks after the attacks captures her attention in a much more dramatic way that it would have on 10 September. Passport photos, ‘aged documents, stamped and faded, history measured in inches’, that adorn the walls of Nina’s apartment now serve as art rather than the travel

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documents they once were (46). How representations are employed and how viewers respond to them are central to the novel, which, as Devin Zuber notes, explores ‘the highly charged and contested public debates about the re-presentation of 9/11 and its aesthetics of memorialization’ (202). Depending on when and where you’re standing when David Janiak makes his dramatic and unsettling leaps, you might notice the preparation and safety gear or you might assume the worst. No less clear is whether these performances are meant to forestall forgetting or to reject the censorship that occurred after 9/11, which essentially banned the photographs of the victims who fell to their deaths. But it is a Morandi still life painting, depicting ‘kitchen objects . . . free of the kitchen, the house, everything practical and functioning’, that is a litmus tests for viewers (Falling Man 49). Martin Ridnour, Nina’s lover, begins to doubt his senses as he ‘keep[s] seeing the towers’ in the still life’s ‘seven or eight objects’ including ‘huddled boxes and biscuit tins’, ‘a long-necked bottle’ amid ‘two dark objects, too obscure to name’ (49). While Lianne also sees the World Trade Center, Nina insists that ‘[t]hese shapes are not translatable to modern towers, twin towers. It’s work that rejects that kind of extension or projection. It takes you inward, down and in. That’s what I see there, half buried, something deeper than things or the shapes of things’ (111). Ultimately, what Nina sees in the paintings, gifts from Martin, is personal because what this novel makes clear is that art is never simply an aesthetic experience. It is, like literature, intertextual, filled with references to culture, politics and people, a repository of memory. Martin’s initial assessment of Morandi, a ‘Marxist critique’ that defines the artist as ‘[e]mpty, self-involved, bourgeois’, gives way, with some help from Nina, to an aesthetic appreciation in which he ‘sees form, color, depth, beauty’ (145). When Nina argues that Martin ‘sees the light’, her daughter, speculating that his newfound vision is ‘less an advance in aesthetics’ than the ‘[r]emarks of a property owner’, bluntly insists that ‘[h]e also sees the money’ (146). Years later, while visiting a Morandi exhibit in a Chelsea gallery, Lianne is pulled back to the ‘thrust of arguments, perceptions, deadly politics, her mother and her mother’s lover’ by the innocuous ‘bottles and jars, a vase, a glass, simple shapes in oil on canvas, pencil on paper’ (209). Sensing that ‘something [is] hidden in the painting’, Lianne discovers her mother’s living room, recognising that even the titles of the paintings, ‘Natura Morta’, ‘yielded her mother’s last days’ because there was ‘[n]othing detached in this work, nothing free of personal resonance’ (210, 211). So tempered by context is the experience of viewing art that Lianne ‘could not look at the work the same way’ just minutes later because of the presence of a man who is more ‘interested in looking at her’ than the paintings (210). Personal resonance is precisely what we see when we look at the world and representations of it. While viewing the passport photos on Nina’s wall, Martin reveals the shock of seeing his ageing face in his most recent photo, and Nina can only exacerbate his fear of death by reminding him that much of what we see of ourselves is affected by context: You think you see yourself in the mirror. But that’s not you . . . That’s the composite face . . . What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years . . . Only other people see [your face]. And the camera of course. (114–15)

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While Lianne doesn’t see herself in the passport photos, she also doesn’t really see what’s there. Instead, she invents stories for the faces from state documents: There was something in the premeditation of these photographs, the bureaucratic intent, the straightforward poses that brought her paradoxically into the lives of the subjects . . . She saw people feeling, there to here, with darkest hardship pressing the edges of the frame . . . Such beauty in faded lives, she thought, in images, words, languages, signatures, stamped advisories. (142) Lianne’s desire to provide stories for the strangers whose passport photographs adorn her mother’s walls bespeaks her affinity for both art and writing, as does her work as editor of a book on ancient alphabets, ‘[p]ictorial writing’, which is ‘typed on an old manual machine with textual emendations made by the author in a deeply soulful and unreadable script’ (149, 23). Her storyline sessions with patients whose minds are ‘beginning to slide away from the adhesive friction that makes an individual possible’ provide more than solace; they offer a way for these characters to ‘sing their lives’, opening the door to narrative creation, the stitching together of events through the ‘crossing points of insight and memory that the act of writing allows’ (155, 30). Language provides a way of negotiating the landmines of trauma, whether it is the imminent loss of the past through Alzheimer’s or the ineluctable intrusion of a repressed memory. The ‘revelation of writing itself’ has a counterpart in conversation, which enables Florence Givens, another survivor of the attack on the World Trade Center, to recall the hazy events of 9/11: ‘She went through it slowly, remembering as she spoke, often pausing to look into space, to see things again’ (31, 55). ‘Now that I’m talking’, Florence observes, ‘it’s coming back a little bit’ (55). Keith and Florence’s conversation is painfully detailed, their recitations repetitive, but they are essential ‘to hear what [was] lost in the tracings of memory’ (91). ‘“What we carry. This is the story in the end”, she said remotely. She wanted her feelings to register, officially, and needed to say the actual words, if not necessarily to him’ (91). Saying the words, writing the sentences and telling the stories is essential for survival in Falling Man. Looking in Falling Man requires a recognition that what you’re seeing is only half the picture, a position perhaps best captured by Lianne’s recollection of David Janiak’s fall from the elevated train tracks: ‘There were no photographs of that fall. She was the photograph, the photosensitive surface. That nameless body coming down, this was hers to record and absorb’ (223). But her photosensitive recording is blurry and unfocused, capturing instead the background details. While [t]he man eluded her . . . [a]ll she knew was what she’d seen and felt that day near the schoolyard, a boy bouncing a basketball and a teacher with a whistle on a string. She could believe she knew these people, and all the others she’d seen and heard that afternoon, but not the man who’d stood above her, detailed and looming. (224) The witnesses and passersby during Janiak’s act are the heart of the story, not unlike the background noises during the storyline sessions. As if describing a Mass, Lianne observes ‘the resolute hush that fell over the room when members took up pens and began to write, oblivious to the clamor around them’, but instead of cacophonous

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intrusion, we hear the rhapsody of ‘rap singers down the hall, barely school age, polishing their lyrics, or workers drilling and hammering on the floor above’, all contributing to the language of daily life (232). Art, in Falling Man, raises questions and stirs memory; it is less an interpretation of life than a path to it. While careful attention generally leads to increased self-awareness in Falling Man, looking in Point Omega has a more sinister connotation as the reader is uncomfortably complicit in the proliferation of spying and stalking in the novel. Point Omega’s central plot, set in the California desert, is framed by chapters, ‘Anonymity: September 3’ and ‘Anonymity 2: September 4’, that describe an unidentified man’s experience at a MoMA exhibition of Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, an installation in which Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is slowed down to approximately two frames per second, taking nearly twenty-four hours to view, and encouraging what Catherine Gander refers to as ‘the sustained looking at the overlooked’ (131). ‘The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw’, observes the anonymous man in Point Omega (5). Like Falling Man’s Justin Neudecker, who appreciates a school project that requires speaking in monosyllables because ‘[i]t helps [him] go slow when [he] think[s]’ (Falling Man 66), the anonymous viewer believes that deceleration provides more to comprehend, a position that DeLillo seems to take as well, as he notes in a conversation with Thomas DePietro: ‘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’ (qtd. in Zubeck 115). Yet the novel suggests otherwise, as the anonymous man sees what he wants to see: ‘In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much’ (Point Omega 5). The absence of a soundtrack allows the film to come closer to the pure experience that he seeks, one removed from time and unadulterated by memory, including the memory of the original film, but he desires an experience devoid of language, in which he wouldn’t have ‘to think in words’, where he might feel the ‘heartbeats of images’ (10). We have met variations on this man in other DeLillo works, especially Leo Zhezelniak, another obsessive filmgoer from the short story ‘The Starveling’, who shifts his attention from the screen to a woman upon whom he projects a fiction. For these characters, ‘[a]ll human existence is a trick of the light’, vulnerable to misperception, especially in the eyes of a solipsistic viewer (‘The Starveling’ 195). Like Keith, the anonymous man is a witness, but the central story’s point of reference and first-person narrator is Jim Finley, a documentarian who aims to persuade defence intellectual Richard Elster to be the sole subject, a ‘[m]an at the wall’, in a film examining the latter’s role in justifying the Iraq War by way of a semantic shell game (Point Omega 45). Elster is wise to be wary of Finley’s proposal, since the filmmaker’s previous project placed Jerry Lewis, during his early muscular dystrophy telethons, ‘outside the moment, in some larger surround, ahistorical, a man on a mission from God’ (26). Despite being ‘assembled completely from documents, old film footage, kinescopes of TV shows from the 1950s’, the documentary transcends its parts, ‘well beyond the limits of information and objectivity’ (25). Finley endures his film as a religious experience (in which he becomes ‘Jerry’s frenzied double’) in much the same way as the anonymous man at the MoMA exhibition experiences Gordon’s project (27). Moreover, Finley’s contemplation of what others saw in his film (‘“I did it, I finished

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it, people saw it but what did they see?”’ [25]) evokes the anonymous man’s suspicion that he is experiencing 24 Hour Psycho differently than others: ‘[H]e wondered if [the two men at the exhibition] were seeing what he was seeing. Even if they were, they would draw different conclusions’ (8). The preoccupation with looking in the novel’s framing device is carried over into the central story by Finley, who stalks Elster at a Dada exhibition, using language that echoes the methodical plotting of the anonymous man: ‘I followed him for half an hour. I looked at the things he looked at . . . I told myself to be calm, be civilized, speak slowly’ (61). In pursuit of his subject, Finley accompanies Elster to his home in Anza-Borrega, and they are soon joined by Elster’s daughter Jessie, who leaves New York City in order to avoid a persistent suitor who may be the anonymous man from the MoMA exhibition. A commitment to observation is a theme shared by Finley and the anonymous man, the latter of whom reveals that he is ‘waiting for a woman to arrive, a woman alone . . . finding her way to a place at the wall, an hour, half an hour, that was enough, half an hour, that was sufficient, a serious person, soft-spoken, wearing a pale summer dress’ (14). Discussing the exhibition with Jessie, Finley is satisfied to hear that she stayed for half an hour, coincidentally the amount of time that he follows her father in the museum: ‘“That’s good. Half an hour’s good”’ (47). Finley’s preoccupation with Elster soon transitions to a preoccupation with his daughter, whom he watches obsessively, imagining leaning into Jessie as she washes her face at the bathroom sink, his ‘hands slipping under the T-shirt, [his] knees moving her legs apart so [he] could press more tightly’, evoking the anonymous man’s fantasy of ‘pinning her to the wall’ (55, 112). For both men, Jessie is a cypher, a blank page, described by Finley as ‘missing’, ‘imaginary to herself’, emanating a ‘blandness that seemed willed’, and by the anonymous man, who doesn’t even know her name when they part ways after the exhibition, as ‘a shadow unfolding from the wall’ (60, 71, 42, 111). From Finley’s first-person perspective, Jessie is his construction, a character in his narrative: ‘She kept appearing in some inner field of vision, indistinct, like something I’d forgotten to say or do’, or, we might add, write (76). The dearth of attention to her or of any dialogue prompts the author-figure to invent a gestural language for Jessie, in which her bodily movements are signifiers: ‘This would tell me what she wanted, the way she turned, the look on her face, or what I wanted’ (68). Again, we’re reminded of Finley’s connection to the anonymous man who writes a script for Jessie: ‘He was still waiting for her to ask him how many times he’d been here . . . What’s your favorite scene, she’d say’ (108). So thoroughly does Finley forget to write her that she disappears, inevitably: ‘Passing into air, it seemed this is what she was meant to do, what she was made for’ (81). Peter Boxall describes Jessie’s evanescence as a ‘failure to yield herself to narrative’ (697). What she eludes, however, is the narrative ascribed to her by the male characters. While these men are busy putting words into her mouth, Jessie has a far richer relationship with language than they understand. Her father points out that, as a child, she ‘heard words from inside them’, a sensibility that gives rise to an odd childhood quirk (Point Omega 40): ‘When she was a child, she used to move her lips slightly, repeating inwardly what I was saying or what her mother was saying . . . Her lips would move in nearest synchronization with mine . . . She was right in my face, trying to define the words I was uttering, to absorb them and process them. She was looking, thinking, repeating, interpreting. Looking at my mouth, studying my lips, moving her lips.’ (48)

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Not surprisingly, Jessie’s description of her childhood habit differs from her father’s: ‘“I used to read what people were saying on their lips. I watched their lips and knew what they were saying before they said it. I didn’t listen, I just looked”’ (113, italics mine). Here Jessie links the visual and the verbal, reading words as if they are images. Her ability to predict the words before they are spoken suggests that she is the progenitor of the utterances, her lack of ostensible interest in the characters less the symptom of stunted emotional capacity than a suggestion of authorship. Gander describes Jessie as ‘exist[ing] in liminality, between no longer and not yet . . . embody[ing . . .] that artful meditative space . . . necessary to the consideration of our contemporary moment, accessible only via the imaginative release from its constraints’; inhabiting, in other words, the role of the author (139). Jessie’s questions, unlike Finley’s or the anonymous man’s, are not mere reflections of her own preoccupations. She is an apt critic, suggesting that the film that Finley is so intent on creating is better suited to a magazine article: ‘“But isn’t there a real movie you’d rather do? Because how many people will want to spend all that time looking at something so zombielike?”’ (46). When she strikes up a conversation with the anonymous man at the MoMA exhibition, she asks a series of seemingly random questions (including ‘What am I looking at?’ and ‘What would it be like, living in slow motion?’ [105, 107]), which have to do with perception and time. Her assessment of Gordon’s film challenges the anonymous man’s understanding of the experience: ‘“Some movies are too visual for their own good”’ and ‘“You’re sure this isn’t a comedy?”’ (109, 111). Her response to his final question (‘“What about doing this sometime at a real movie with seats to sit on and people on the screen who laugh and cry and shout?”’) is another – more cryptic – question that sounds like a writer evaluating possible plots: ‘“Would that be an improvement?”’ (113). We have been led to believe that Jessie is a parallel for Marion Crane, Janet Leigh’s character in Psycho, a mere plot device, without whom the novel amounts to a ‘zombielike’ three men against a wall (46). Jessie, however, operates in opposition to what we would expect of a plot. Her disappearance has, as Macey Maslowski notes, more in common with Antonioni’s L’Avventurra than Psycho because we are left without an explanation of what happened. Point Omega is the novelistic equivalent of the antifilm that David Bell tries to create in Americana, a novel that resists its own genre and rejects any sense of closure. Too long for a short story and too short for full-length novel, Point Omega resembles Finley’s ‘freakish fifty-seven-minute movie’ (which is counterpoised against Gordon’s freakishly long movie) (27). The novel ultimately rests on a demolished plot, not unlike the ‘demolished logic’ that holds such fascination for Elster, offering sometimes flimsy threads connecting the framing device with the narrative, refusing to provide definitive answers, placing an extraordinary burden on the reader, and ultimately ending with an elliptical – and demolished – haiku, a broken seventeen syllables that seems to have drifted away from both the frame and narrative of the novel, perhaps offering a picture of the anonymous man’s fusion with Gordon’s film but certainly adhering to Elster’s description of haiku as ‘human consciousness located in nature’ (61, 29): ‘[S]ailing past the window, / spirit birds that ride the night, / stranger than dreams’ (117). Here, words conjure an image in much the way as the spinning rings on the shower curtain in Marion Crane’s motel room offer, in the words of the anonymous man, ‘a stray poem above the hellish death’ (9). Creating, as Elster does, ‘new realities . . . that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability’ through ‘words that would yield pictures eventually

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and then become three-dimensional’, characters in Point Omega project their distorted visions into the world so that words and images are both weapons of mechanical reproduction (28–9). How we look is central to Zero K, a novel that begins with Jeffrey Lockhart studying the abstract art in his father’s New York office. Characters in Zero K suffer from various degrees of blindness, self-willed or superimposed. ‘[B]ringing the night indoors’, Ross Lockhart wears vintage sunglasses during the conversation with this son, telegraphing a penchant for secrecy that is soon demonstrated in his choreography of Jeff’s visit to a remote cryogenics facility with maximum security (Zero K 3). Jeffrey describes travelling to the Convergence in an ‘armored hatchback with smoked side windows, blind both ways’ to a series of ‘low structures . . . barely separable from the bleached landscape [. . .] buildings in hiding, agoraphobically sealed [. . .] blind buildings, hushed and somber, invisibly windowed’ (3, 4). Knowing DeLillo’s appreciation of James Joyce, it’s hard not to think of ‘Araby’, whose young narrator begins the tale of his misunderstanding and epiphany with a description of his neighbourhood: North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces. (Joyce 29) Like the young boy who chronicles the skewed sight of his parochial Dublin community, Jeff peppers his narrative with references to darkness and blindness. Instead of Catholicism, the Convergence offers another kind of control over death, another way of owning the end of the world. Still wearing ‘his dark glasses, nostalgically called KGBs – polarized, with swoop lenses and variable tint’, Ross tries to quell his son’s disorientation, a result of ‘traveling blind’, unclear of geographical locales, time zones, transportation methods and states of consciousness (Zero K 27). Jeff is only mildly perturbed, perhaps even amused, by his disadvantage, since it’s a version of a game he has played with himself since childhood: ‘“Sometimes in a dark room . . . I will shut my eyes . . . Is this a surrender to the dark? . . . Is this an accommodation? Let the dark dictate the terms of the situation . . . Am I testing myself by doubling the dark?”’ (18). Ultimately, however, Jeff recognises the need for light, and in the face of his father’s advice to ‘“get beyond your experience [. . . b]eyond your limitations”’, Jeff retorts, ‘“I need a window to look out of. That’s my limitation”’ (35). A window, while useful, isn’t necessarily an antidote to the short-sightedness that preoccupies DeLillo’s later works. Zero K, like its predecessors, is concerned with how little we see when we think we see, evoking Elster’s assertion that ‘sunset was human invention, our perceptual arrangement of light and space into elements of wonder’ (Point Omega 18). As Artis observes: ‘I’m aware that when we see something, we are getting only a measure of information, a sense, an inkling of what is really there to see . . . I do know that the optic nerve is not telling the full truth. We are seeing only intimations. The rest is our invention, our way of reconstructing what is actual, if there is any such thing, philosophically, that we can call actual.’ (Zero K 45)

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The natural limitations of human sight and thought are not sufficiently narrow for the Convergence, a business that proffers propaganda and video screens displaying global disasters and human tragedies – floods, tornados, war, self-immolation – all ‘immediate and real’, in lieu of windows (11). The projections further disorient Jeff, who isn’t quite sure what he’s seeing, a disorientation abetted by the absence of sound and the slow-motion effects, both of which connect these videos to 24 Hour Psycho: ‘The camera lingered on the bodies. The detail-work of their violent end was hard to watch. But I watched, feeling obligated to something or someone, the victims perhaps’ (36). In these and other encounters, Jeff refers to himself as a witness, ‘lone witness, sworn to the task’, ‘the only witness’, ‘always the lone witness’ (36, 153, 214). His preoccupation with looking is in contrast to other characters’ rejection of seeing, like Falling Man’s Hammad. Jeff describes the man in the monk’s cloak as having the ‘drifter’s inclination to be impervious to names or faces . . . He did not talk so much as narrate’ (42). Later, that same man twice asks Jeff who he is, ignoring the responses and chillingly replying: ‘“I’m looking right through you”’ (93). Stak, the son of Jeff’s lover, Emma, shares his philosophy with Jeff: ‘Let the faces pass through the vision box and out the back of your head. See them all like one big blurry thing’ (213). Further obfuscating sight in Zero K is the erosion of distinction between reality and illusion. Jeff only learns that the ‘shrouded women standing motionless’, draped in chadors, near the entrance to the Convergence are mannequins when his father identifies them as ‘“[t]he first glimpse of art”’ (5, 52). The Convergence is filled with mannequins and heralds, inanimate objects and formerly animate beings serving as ‘postmortem décor’ that blurs the line between living and dead (232). The disorientation that Jeff experiences watching the video screens is exacerbated by ‘[t]he dead or maybe dead. Cryogenic dead, upright in their capsules’, noting that ‘[t]his was art in itself, nowhere else but here’ (74). If a common criticism of visual art is its immediacy, an accessibility that is not so easily accomplished by words, then Zero K ups the ante considerably, offering a world in which the distinction between nature and art is elided. But if the pervasiveness and inevitability of art in Zero K suggests the diminution of writing, we must look again. Time and time again, the reader is reminded that Jeff is carefully curating the material that we receive. In an environment about which he knows little, imagination is his method of control. After being escorted to a viewing slot to hear the philosophy of the Convergence, another act of choreography by his father, Jeff rebels by creating back stories and motivations for the actors. He imagines that the Stenmark twins ‘were street anarchists of an earlier era, quietly dedicated to plotting local outrages or larger insurrections’, and decides that the woman in a tunic and head scarf has ‘no family, no strong involvements, no hobbies, no particular place she was obliged to return to’ who ‘spent early time in Britain and the U.S., enveloped in her studies, learning how to withdraw, how to conceal herself’ (75, 67, 65). Jeff’s tendency to reduce people by renaming them is, by his own admission, childish and petty, but it is also the act of an author, as is his interpretation of Artis’s experience in cryogenic suspension. He compares himself to Orpheus, noting that he ‘corrupted the moment by looking back’ for his escort, ‘like an ordinary person’, and he evokes Charles Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness, relating what he hears ‘about the philosophical heart of the Convergence’ (63, 64). In the Convergence, Jeff ‘register[s]’ the faces, bodies, and

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apparel of the individuals he encounters, wondering if he ‘failed to do this, would the individual disappear?’ (236). As an author, Jeff’s lack of attention to that kind of detail would result in a disappearance of sorts, but the question also suggests that we edit the world around us by not paying attention. Recalling the disabled boy in the Convergence, Jeff notes that assigning a name ‘would not have helped me interpret his speech, the sounds that bounced out of him, but I would have perceived something as I listened, a fragment of identity, a tiny shaping element to ease the questions that whirled about him’ (95). Jeff has crafted himself through words no less than he creates others. ‘I was beginning to understand that every act I engaged in had to be articulated at some level, had to be performed with the words intact’ (89). He defines himself as a wordsmith in opposition to his father’s obsession with money: ‘I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books’ (26). Those words carry memory, as demonstrated by Jeff’s encounter with the word ‘fishwife’ in a European novel that ‘swe[eps him] back into the marriage’, into a moment when his father’s use of that word sends Jeff down the rabbit hole of language, in which definitions use words that themselves must be researched for meanings (26). His disorientation at the Convergence can only be countered by language: ‘I looked at whatever there was to see and touch and then I spoke the word for each thing . . . I looked in the mirror over the sink and said my name aloud’ (96). After an argument with his father, Jeff looks out of a window but begins to narrow his sight, reducing it ‘to the limits of the window frame’ and then ‘window itself, tall and narrow, top-ended by an arch. A lancet window, I thought, recalling the term, and this brought me back to myself, to a diminished perspective, something steadfast, a word with a meaning’ (116). All of this is not to say that Zero K overlooks the limitations of language that DeLillo confronts in his other works. When Jeff sees Artis alone at the Convergence, he asks, ‘What do I say? How do I begin?’ (13). He recognises that the game he plays in which he creates alternative names for people is reductive, and understands that his questions of the woman frozen in place near Lincoln Center might be a violation of her ‘will toward a decisive silence’ (211). Ross’s refusal to acknowledge his first wife, Jeff’s mother, by name is diminishing. ‘She was essentially one thing. She was your mother’, Ross insists when Jeff demands that he ‘[s]ay her name’ (32). Ross’s faith in a language 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’ sounds cultish, naïve and authoritarian in its desire to remove ambiguity and mystery, and is evocative of his earlier announcement that ‘Everybody wants to own the end of the world’, a statement that describes his desire both for bodily and linguistic control (33, 3). David Cowart conjectures that Jeff occupies the role of namer in the novel, but the Adamic figure is Ross: ‘Ross talking, recalling things, near to babbling now. Animals and birds they’d seen close-range, and he named them, and plant species, and he named them’, just as he names himself, shifting from Nicholas Satterswaite to Ross Lockhart in an attempt to change the course of his life (50). There are limited ways to ‘own the end of the world’. One is to become a major stockholder in a cryogenics company; another is to construct a narrative. Ross corners the market in the former, but Jeff, as Cowart notes, ‘transform[s] experience . . . into narrative, give[s] it artistic form’ (152).

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The author as authority has never had much currency in DeLillo’s novels. Like his other artists and questers, DeLillo’s authors tend to be drifters, operating on the edges of society, working within and against the cultural grain. ‘To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, the close the writing’, writes Barthes in ‘The Death of the Author’ (147). The ambiguity inherent in the Babel of our discourse, the limitations of our vision and the frailties of our representations is, after all, the antidote to an authoritative language like the one desired by the anonymous museum-goer in Point Omega, or the Convergence staff in Zero K. In an analysis of DeLillo’s essay ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, Marco Abel observes that ‘[s]eeing is less a matter of (in)correct perception than a question of how subjects can respond to events . . . [T]he 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’ (1238, 1239). DeLillo’s response to 9/11, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ confronts the limits of language in the face of such tragedy: ‘The event itself has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile. We have to take the shock and horror as it is’, but he insists that ‘living language is not diminished’ (39). The writer has moved to the margins in DeLillo’s later works neither in retreat nor defeat, but as a metaphor for DeLillo’s refusal to provide the comforts of answers to the most pressing narrative questions and his celebration of ‘[a]mbiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints’ (Mao II 159).

Works Cited Abel, Marco. ‘Don DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future”: Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11.’ PMLA, 118, no. 5, 2003, pp. 1236–50. Arensberg, Ann. ‘Seven Seconds.’ Vogue, August 1988, pp. 336–9, 390. Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author.’ Image/Music/Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. Noonday, 1977, pp. 142–8. Boxall, Peter. ‘Late: Fictional Time in the Twenty-First Century.’ Contemporary Literature, 53, no. 4, 2012, pp. 681–712. Cowart, David. ‘Don DeLillo’s Zero K and the Dream of Cryonic Election.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 143–58. DeLillo, Don. Americana. Penguin, 1971. ——. End Zone. Penguin, 1972. ——. Falling Man. Scribner, 2007. ——. ‘In the Ruins of the Future.’ Harper’s, December 2001, pp. 33–40. ——. Mao II. Penguin, 1991. ——. Point Omega. Scribner, 2010. ——. ‘The Starveling.’ The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. Scribner, 2011, pp. 183–211. ——. Underworld. Scribner, 1997. ——. Zero K. Scribner, 2016. Gander, Catherine. ‘The Art of Being Out of Time in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 127–42. Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1914. Edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. The Viking Critical Edition. Penguin, 1996. Maslowski, Macey. ‘Cinematic Time, Geologic Time, Narrative Time.’ DeLillo After the Millenium: Currents and Currencies, edited by Jacqueline A. Zubeck. Lexington Books, 2017, pp. 191–208.

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Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Zubeck, Jacqueline. ‘Mourning Becomes Electric.’ DeLillo After the Millennium: Currents and Currencies, edited by Jacqueline A. Zubeck. Lexington Books, 2017, pp. 107–34. Zuber, Devin P. ‘9/11 as Memento Mori: Still-Life and Image in Don Delillo’s Ekphrastic Fiction.’ Radical Planes? 9/11 and Patterns of Continuity, edited by Dunja Mohr and Birgit Dawes. Brill/Rodopi, 2016, pp. 200–18.

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9 DeLillo’s Landscapes Elise Martucci

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rom the desert, to the city, to parks and suburban spaces, landscape is a crucial element of Don DeLillo’s fiction. Analysis of the ways he presents landscapes enables a richer understanding of many of the dominant themes in his fiction, including art, consumerism, simulacra and simulation, imperialism, patriarchism and violence. Interestingly, as Dianne Harris explains in ‘The Postmodernization of Landscape’, the interplay of landscape with culture and people was not fully realised until the end of the 1980s and early 1990s (436), a decade or more after DeLillo’s first books and stories were published. While such an interplay undoubtedly had been previously acknowledged and celebrated by many indigenous peoples, Harris notes the shift of white Western perspectives due to theoretical developments that included ‘feminist and postcolonial theories that focus on recovering the voices of the oppressed and others on the margins of society’ (434). Harris further explains how a shift in studies could not occur until these white Western ‘scholars stopped seeing landscape as passive and started seeing it as active – what [W. J. T. Mitchell] described as the shift from landscape-as-noun to landscape-as-verb’ (436). This shift is found in DeLillo’s fiction from his first novel, Americana (1971), and is just another example of how his work is distinct from the white male postmodern novelists with whom he is so often compared (e.g., Coover, Pynchon and Wallace). A study of landscape in DeLillo’s fiction reveals how he has continued to present landscapes as ‘important documents for understanding the development of national, social, and personal identities’ (Harris 437). Just as cultural geographers do, DeLillo brings to light the way landscapes ‘are at once personal as well as political, ecological, and ideological’ (Harris 437). In an interview, DeLillo notes that ‘I do feel a need and a drive to paint a kind of thick surface around my characters. I think all my novels have a strong sense of place’ (qtd in DeCurtis 62). This chapter explores the presentation of various landscapes throughout DeLillo’s oeuvre with a focus on the representations of the city in Underworld and Cosmopolis, and the American West – in particular desert landscapes – in Americana, End Zone, Underworld and Point Omega, examining how these landscape perspectives are rooted in a white male patriarchal construction. Landscape studies suggest that even the natural world is in one way or another either designed by or imprinted with culture (Apostolos-Cappacona 1205). In his extended study of landscapes, John Wylie notes, ‘clearly, landscapes are human, cultural and creative domains as well as, or even rather than, natural or physical phenomena’ (8). He stresses that landscapes are ‘cultural representations’, including ‘descriptions in novels’ (8). Such concepts of landscape enable a fruitful investigation of the way in which landscape is presented in DeLillo’s fiction, with an eye towards not just how

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DeLillo describes them, but how various forms of landscape in his fiction reflect and shape the characters who experience these landscapes, and reveal the way that the male production of landscape differs from the female. In ‘Lines of Sight: When a Literary Landscape Comes to Life’, Francisco Cantú writes about how Frederic Olmsted – often regarded as the father of American landscape architecture, notably for his design of New York City’s Central Park – believed that wild spaces ‘could provide an antidote to the profound violence and madness that had come to define the continent, offering a place to calm one’s spirit [. . .] Above all else, Olmsted wrote, “What we want to gain is tranquillity and rest to the mind”’ (158). DeLillo’s fiction acknowledges this traditional American perspective on the natural world, but goes beyond these ‘wild spaces’; in fact, evidence of this search for tranquillity can be found in his characters’ journeys into various landscapes. In Americana, David Bell expounds how he wants to leave the city to ‘do something more religious. Explore America in the screaming night. You know. Yin and Yang in Kansas. That scene’ (10); in White Noise (1985), we find a suburban resident seeking solace in an old burial ground, as narrator Jack Gladney describes how he stood there, ‘waiting to feel the peace that is supposed to descend upon the dead, waiting to see the light that hangs above the fields of the landscapist’s lament’ (97); and in Zero K (2016), we find a narrator, Jeffrey Lockhart, who, in the midst of a terrifying clash with an inhuman future of cryogenics, yearns for a landscape that will bring him peace. When he inadvertently enters a doorway leading to a garden, he explains, ‘Here was a walled garden, trees shrubs, flowering plants [. . .] This is what I needed, away from the rooms the halls the units – a place outside where I might think calmly about what I would see and hear and feel in the scene to come’ (122, emphasis added). The irony is that in each of these scenes there is an underlying message of the cultural construction of landscape that precludes true tranquillity or peace of mind, and often there is consumerism, violence and oppression behind these landscapes of hope. David Bell’s journey into the American West leads him into scenes of rape and abuse of women; the cemetery Gladney experiences is presented as yet another marketing scheme, consciously labelled as ‘The Old Burying Ground’; Jeffrey Lockhart’s garden turns out to be made from metal and plastic, and not outdoors at all. Cantú explains that ‘Olmsted’s thinking about public lands continued to define American discourse and policy on these matters well into the [twentieth] century’ and that ‘[d]espite the genocide and removal that underlay all federal land ownership, the notion of hope would for generations define the dominant cultural discourse around the American outdoors’ (158). The landscapes in DeLillo’s fiction – both rural and urban – present the irony Cantú alludes to regarding this perspective of hope and tranquillity; characters seek one, the other, or both in landscapes that are clearly historicised in violence, capitalism and materialism.

The City While the term ‘landscape’ is more popularly assigned to discussions of the natural world and rural areas, being synonymous with terms such as geography, topography and countryside (Apostolos-Cappacona 120), I will begin this critique with what is termed an urban landscape through a consideration of how cityscapes are presented in DeLillo’s fiction. That cityscapes are landscapes is demonstrated by DeLillo characters’

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application of the term. Within the first few pages of Running Dog (1978), the reader is provided with an image of a desolate area in 1970s New York City about which the character, Del Bravo, ‘expected a certain picture to present itself’; this image includes ‘stacks of crates and cardboard boxes. A construction scaffold fronting an old building. Trucks and earth-moving equipment. Derelicts around a fire.’ Del Bravo, a NYC police officer, admits that ‘experience told him this is what he’d see’ (4). But when the image of what he thinks is a woman, attractive and glamorously dressed, appears, he calls her ‘a discrepancy in the landscape’ because ‘she didn’t fit the picture’ (4, emphasis added). Here we see a character who is more than simply observing the landscape, but constructing it in his mind in the way he expects it to appear, and his expectations are rooted in his cultural formation.1 In Falling Man (2007), the word ‘landscape’ is also used in terms of expectations. When the protagonist, Keith Neudecker, sees a woman in the middle of the street on horseback he thinks ‘it was something that belonged to another landscape, something inserted’. This unexpected image makes ‘the witness wonder what has happened to the meaning of things, to tree, street, stone, wind, simple words lost in the falling ash’ (103). He ties the alteration of the expected landscape to the horror he experienced on 9/11 as he walked through the ashes of burning buildings and bodies. The repetition of the term landscape in these descriptions demonstrates the evolution of its usage discussed by landscape theorists, from a span of land in nature to what John Wylie explains as ‘not only something we see, [but] also a way of seeing things, a particular way of looking at and picturing the world around us. Landscapes are not just about what we see but about how we look’ (7). Of course, how we look depends on who we are, and the perspectives presented here are white, male, Western perspectives that take for granted what does and does not belong in a landscape; this follows an imperialist claim to the land as it prioritises the male gazers’ expectations over alternative views or readings of the landscape. In fact, basing his argument on the work of Denis Cosgrove, archaeologist Julian Thomas asserts that ‘landscape painting and the idea of landscape emerge hand-in-hand with capitalism’ (22). Drawing from Foucault, in particular his theory of the panopticon, Cosgrove concludes that vision in the twentieth-century Western world has ‘investment in particular strategies of social control’ (Thomas 23). We can see in the examples above how the gazers determine what ‘belongs’ and what is ‘inserted’, which figures and people should appear, and which ones shouldn’t. With this concept of landscape as a way of asserting or maintaining power, we can look at the ways in which cityscapes are described and with whom they are associated in DeLillo’s fiction, in particular the ways in which buildings are presented as a landscape of self-conscious power. Arguably one of DeLillo’s most narcissistic, ruthless and power-hungry characters, Eric Packer from Cosmopolis (2003) has these thoughts about the skyscraper that houses his multi-roomed penthouse apartment: He went outside and crossed the avenue, then turned and faced the building where he lived. He felt contiguous with it. It was eighty-nine stories, a prime number, in an undistinguished sheathe of hazy bronze glass. They shared an edge or boundary,

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His expectations are further disrupted when the individual he assumes is a woman turns out to be a man.

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skyscraper and man. It was nine hundred feet high, the tallest residential tower in the world, a commonplace oblong whose only statement was its size. It had the kind of banality that reveals itself over time as being truly brutal. He liked it for this reason. (8–9) The boundary between Packer and building is blurred in his description of the landscape, which is dominated by his residential building. For him, the building is the landscape; nothing else is of note, and he ‘shared a boundary with it.’ In her essay on Cosmopolis, Marie-Christine Leps notes the symmetry of man and building, tied to capitalism, when she states that Packer’s ‘perspective on the world is the dominating gaze produced by excessive wealth and power: the novel opens with the bird’s eye view afforded by the $104 million, 48-room penthouse’ (309). Leps notes that ‘Packer’s own banal brutality similarly reveals itself over a matter of hours, as he not only wreaks havoc in the world’s financial system but also kills his chief of security, for no particular reason, if not simply to feel “fantastic . . . Lose the man, shed the gun”’ (309). If landscapes include, as Wylie explains, descriptions in novels (8) and are, as Harris claims, documents that reveal national, social and personal identities (437), then we can see Packer through the way he presents and reads the landscape, as well as the message DeLillo sends through this particular presentation of landscape. Leps argues that ‘DeLillo’s novel adopts the overall strategy of governmentality, proceeding through a “tricky combination” of mechanisms of totalization and individualization, which make the protagonist and his entourage both embodiments of the globalizing forces of cybercapitalism, and particular instantiations of desires and ambitions, memories and assurances, and (growing) doubts’ (308). The drive of capitalism and its move towards cyber-capitalism is reflected in another scene where Packer describes his landscape through a focus on the buildings in front of him: The bank towers loomed just beyond the avenue. They were covert structures for all their size, hard to see, so common and monotonic, tall, sheer, abstract, with standard setbacks, and block-long, and interchangeable, and he had to concentrate to see them. They looked empty from here. He liked that idea. They were made to be the last tall things, made empty, designed to hasten the future. They were the end of the outside world. They weren’t here, exactly, they were in the future, a time beyond geography and touchable money and the people who stack and count it. (Cosmopolis 36) Packer’s description of the landscape builds on and is informed by his own desires for power beyond the present time, for immortality and control over others. He sees a meaning in the building that is premised on how he sees the world. The role of cybercapital is emphasised through Packer’s reading of buildings that ‘weren’t here, exactly’, and were ‘beyond geography and touchable money’. But they are also, like Packer, ‘made empty’; his encounters over the course of the day reveal a character who is seemingly devoid of sympathy or humanity. Erik Heyne convincingly argues that Erik Packer is, in fact, a ‘supervillain’: He’s human enough to have the same experience many of us do when we’re helplessly awake at night – thinking of death – but he thinks of it this way: ‘When he

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died he would not end. The world would end’ (6). Insomnia is not his failure, and death is not his end. The combination of such intellectual gifts and such a vast ego gives us our first clue that we may be dealing with a supervillain. (439) If landscape is a combination of objective and subjective, as I’ve already established, then Packer’s reading of the cityscape reflects his subconscious. But the passages are also DeLillo’s suggestion of what the landscapes represent in terms of globalisation and capitalism. A stark contrast between Packer’s reading of city landscapes is the reading of landscape by Klara Sax from Underworld (1997). Both characters take note of and interpret the buildings around them. Yet Sax is an artist, and so her description of the landscape focuses on very different elements, and she draws different conclusions from what she sees. Part Four of Underworld begins in the summer of 1974 and the first section describes Sax and her ‘rooftop summer’ of parties and dinners in New York City. Sax recognises the details, the beauty and the history of the buildings she sees: She stood at parapets and wondered who had worked the stones, shaped these details of the suavest nuance, chevrons and rosettes, urns on balustrades, the classical swags of fruit, the scroll brackets supporting a balcony, and she thought they must have been immigrants, Italian stone carvers probably, unremembered, artists anonymous of the early century, buried in the sky. (373) Sax sees in the details of the landscape more than her present time; she sees Italian immigrants, perhaps reminiscent of her first marriage to Alfred Brozini, and in her statement is the suggestion of the hardships endured by such immigrants as they are ‘unremembered’ and ‘buried in the sky’. Sax’s landscape perception includes recognition of a marginalised group. Throughout this section, what Sax sees in her landscape is beautiful, and reminiscent of other cultures and places, such as ‘the stepped pyramid atop a building on Wall Street’ or the ‘south face of the Hotel Pierre like some scansion of rooftop Paris’ (379). She sees the influence of other cultures in the landscape of these buildings. However, while Sax enjoys seeing these landscapes, she also realises how rare it was to see what stands before you, what a novelty of basic sensation in the grinding life of the city – to look across a measured space and be undistracted by signs and streetlights and taxis and scaffolding, by our own bespattered mind, sorting the data, and by the energy that hurrying people make, lunch crowds and buses and bike messengers, all that consciousness powering down the flumes of Manhattan so that it becomes impossible to see across a street to the turquoise tiles of some terra-cotta façade, a winged beast carved above the lintel. (379) In contrast to Packer, who ‘had to concentrate to see’ the buildings, Sax seems to effortlessly notice the details of the cityscape. She notes how the beauty of the landscape is often impossible to see beyond its other elements, such as signs, taxis, buses and hurrying people, indicators of the onslaught of advertising, technology and, by extension, consumerism that the city represents. In fact, the twin symbols of New York City and US commerce, the World Trade Center, also figure in her meditations. The narrator describes the buildings as almost omnipresent: ‘The world trade center

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was under construction, already towering, twin-towering, with cranes tilted at the summits and work elevators sliding up the flanks. She saw it almost everywhere she went’ (372). Sax speaks to a man at a party about the towers, noting ‘I think of it as one, not two [. . .] even though there are clearly two towers. It’s a single entity isn’t it?’, to which the man responds, ‘very terrible thing but you have to look at it, I think’ and she agrees: ‘yes, you have to look’ (372). The note of submission here is interesting. Viewers seem to be forced to acknowledge the towers, in contrast to the way that other aspects of the landscape can be seen or ignored depending on who is viewing. This forced view is suggestive of the power of the building and its capitalist symbolism. The towers are presented by DeLillo as all-consuming, taking up the landscape, interpreted by Sax as something that contrasts with the beauty and enjoyment of the other elements of her city landscape.2 At one point, Sax notes her love for the water tanks she saw from the roofs, perched everywhere, old brown wood with tops like coolie hats [. . .] and of course the twin towers in the distance, a model of behemoth mass production, units that roll identically off the line and end up in your supermarket stamped with the day’s prices. (377–8) She sees beyond the landscape of the buildings to their representation, and beyond that, to the way in which they shape the present economy, down to the daily purchase of necessities such as food. David Cowart notes that ‘Klara Sax [. . .] is the artist whose work, which involves the recycling of cast-off or waste materials, reflexively mirrors that of the author’ (63). That Klara Sax, an artist, sees the landscape differently from Erik Packer, a venture capitalist, is a significant indicator of the various ways landscapes can be perceived, and how such perceptions are tied to power and control that is represented by a mostly male capitalist system. Sax sees history, culture and beauty in parts of the landscape, along with the reality beyond the gleaming façade of the newer additions to the landscapes. She thinks to herself that she cannot follow the ‘do-it-now, the fuck-the-past’ American art, although she can ‘respect it’ (Underworld 377). She will eventually become a landscape artist, working with discarded B-52s in the desert, and it is this work and its link to the geographical and geopolitical landscape that demonstrates most profoundly the significance of landscape in DeLillo’s fiction.

The American West and the American Desert DeLillo has stated that ‘the sweeping range of American landscape and experience can be a goad, a challenge, an affliction and an inspiration, pretty much in one package’ (‘The Power of History’). As we move into an analysis of the landscapes of the American West and the American desert in DeLillo, what is revealed is not just that landscapes are ‘human, cultural and creative domains as well as, or even rather than, natural or physical phenomena’ (Wylie 8), but also that subjective readings of landscapes are informed

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What the towers symbolised – for DeLillo as for most Americans – was drastically altered after the attacks on 9/11 that destroyed them. In his essay, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, DeLillo refers to them as ‘a giantism that eased over the years into something a little more familiar and comfortable, even dependable in a way’.

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by the images and narratives that have already formed them. For instance, from Americana to Point Omega (2010), DeLillo’s characters retreat to the American West in search of a culturally constructed image of it. Similar to how in DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), Murray Jay Siskin announces that the tourists cannot see the barn for itself because they have seen the signs for the barn, and they can now ‘see only what the others see’ (12), the American West has been produced and reproduced through American narratives, images and historiographies to the extent that it cannot be seen for itself. In particular, as Thurgar-Dawson notes, the American desert, like Oscar Wilde’s famous fog, has taught us how it should be perceived – via dust-bowl narratives, beat poetry, Reagan movies and Area 51 conspiracy theories. This is inevitably ‘all mixed in with nation and spaciousness’ so that the Arizona desert becomes a construct, even a chronotope (see Bakhtin 1990), of the event-laden narratives of nationhood. (369) The desert landscapes presented in DeLillo offer a postmodernist reading of the land in that it is self-referential, image-obsessed and offers no single, grand narrative. As John Beck explains, ‘from the overarching conception of the desert as a vacancy, at least five main rhetorical tropes emerge’ (64); these are: desert as empty, useless and therefore available for ‘unhindered experimentation’; desert as metaphor for apocalypse/wasteland; desert as ‘limit to reason’, challenging comprehension; desert as ‘an escape from modernity’; and desert as ‘representative of aspects of contemporary capitalism [. . .] unhindered and unregulated by old practices and habits’ (64). The body of DeLillo’s fiction represents these tropes in one way or another. But what becomes apparent is the characters’ knowledge, whether consciously or subconsciously, of the idea of the desert that precedes their own interaction with it. DeLillo presents characters who engage with the desert through already established concepts of its meaning, its origin and its previous references. In End Zone (1972), the protagonist Gary Harkness ventures to the desert to seek a new beginning, to re-forge his identity. He explains, ‘exile in a real place, a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one’s own history. I found comfort in West Texas’ (31). However, DeLillo demonstrates that this is not the remote locale Harkness believes it to be; there is a heavy military presence on campus, and the desert is the site of military testing. Beck explains that between 1952 and 1992, ‘the military-industrial complex set up weapons test sites throughout the Southwest, sank installations into mountains, relocated entire communities, and created new ones of scientists and soldiers’ (68). Harkness’s misrepresentation of the desert landscape in this section of the novel demonstrates the false narrative created by white imperialists. As I have argued elsewhere, ‘while the myth of the West of an Eden-like place of rebirth and renewal has been sustained through literature and popular culture, it is actually the place where the American government murdered and displaced Native Americans and, more recently, established military bases and weapons test sites’ (Martucci 150). From Americana to much of his recent fiction, DeLillo often suggests the violence beyond the myth of the American West and the American desert. In fact, a central theme of Americana is the contrast between the myth of the West and its reality. The characters are overwhelmed by the ways in which the actual landscape

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they encounter does not conform to their expectations. Wylie asserts that ‘in alluding to the manner in which art and literature serve to “sustain mystification” . . . and above all in speaking of landscape as a “way of seeing”, [William Cosgrove presents] a critical account of the complicity of artistic and literary genres with evolving capitalist systems of production and property ownership’ (63). Americana expresses this idea as the characters have a set image of the American landscape that is culturally produced. During his journey into the American West, David Bell visits his ex-wife’s cousin Edwina, who tells him about her travels through the Middle West, stating, ‘not that I’m complaining about the likes of Little Rock, mind you [. . .] but, really, David, the spectacular filth. I mean one reads about the Middle West and one expects to see all sorts of Shakers and Mennonites dashing about the countryside with brooms and paintbrushes’ (Americana 261). Edwina has a preconceived notion of the landscape, one that does not match the poverty she encounters in the area. Bell also has a preconceived notion of the landscape, and it includes not just the physical land, but cultural elements of music along with the fourth trope mentioned by Beck: escape from modernity. During a boardroom meeting at a New York City advertising agency, Bell thinks to himself, ‘I wanted to be with Sullivan in some lunar western wilderness [. . .] going flat out against the northern plains, climbing, Bartok in the Rockies, cowboy songs and the nasal grassy drawl of banjos, and there is Oregon, the seal-slick distant sea’ (72). He envisions a landscape, seeing it without ever having been there because it has already been represented, and this representation of the landscape is his reality. Also of note is his association of the land with Sullivan, his female colleague who is also an artist, and who is thought to have Native American roots. It is when he looks at her that Bell has the idea of a road trip, and his whole trip is contingent on her accompanying him. In fact, Bell repeatedly associates the landscape with femaleness. In college, he tries to evade the real world’s intrusion by losing himself in ‘the warm female grass’ (17). The associations he makes allude to the common metaphor of the land as woman. In The Lay of the Land, Annette Kolodny analyses the ongoing metaphor of the land as female in American literature, stating that the problem with it is ‘the inevitable tension it suggested between the initial urge to return to, and join passively with, a maternal landscape and the consequent impulse to master and act upon that same femininity’ (27). As his narrative continues, it becomes clear that Bell seeks to be both nurtured by and to penetrate Sullivan; Sullivan becomes conflated with the land in which Bell seeks to submerge himself. Despite the fact that Bell’s initial image of the West ignores the history of Europeans’ violent appropriation of the land, dismissing the displacement of Native peoples, he eventually senses that ‘there was a vein of murder snaking across the continent, beneath highways, smokestacks, oilrigs and gasworks’ (Americana 124). As he travels westward, his conduct towards women and reliance on packaged images show how instead of escaping the past through this journey, he merely repeats the violence he engaged in back East and further engages in capitalist exploitation; he represents this same ‘vein of murder’ as he physically assaults Edwina during intercourse, engages in a day of debauchery with prostitutes (372–5), and continually objectifies the women he meets. Bell never lets go of the idea of packaging the West into an ad-like film. He thinks to himself, ‘through it all an idea had haunted me, a vision of mesas and buttes, the cut of the dry winds, long cool shadows and horses’ faces hung on fences, Navahos

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tending their sheep, the stitched earth of Arizona’ (236–7). Bell senses the trouble with his trip when he notes, 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, an attempt to find pattern and motive, to make of something wild a squeamish thesis on the essence of the nation’s soul. (349) Despite his sense that he is trying to capture an image that never really existed, noting during his trip that ‘the past returned in plastic. Ecological balances were slipping and things seemed not quite the sum of their parts’ (348), he never connects his role – as male aggressor and Madison Avenue advertising executive – to the destruction of the landscape. On the other hand, before their journey even begins, Sullivan tells him a tale told to her by ‘a wise old holy man of the Oglala Sioux’ who stated, ‘we have been redesigning our landscape all these years to cut out unneeded objects such as trees, mountains and all those buildings which do not make practical use of every inch of space’, and who suggested that only after attaining ‘complete realization’ can we ‘return to firm land and begin again’ (120). DeLillo has stated that ‘art is one of the consolation prizes we receive for having lived in a difficult and sometimes chaotic world. We seek pattern in art that eludes us in natural experience. This isn’t to say that art has to be comforting; obviously, it can be deeply disturbing’ (DeCurtis 66). This tale, retold by Sullivan, of whom Bell states ‘many seemed to think [. . . she] might be an American Indian’ (Americana 9), demonstrates how the Indigenous American as well as the female artist are able to see through the images and myths of America. The truth is revealed through the voice of a member of the dispossessed group. In this way Americana uses descriptions of the landscape to reveal the destructive forces of industrialism and capitalism and links the urge to master the land with the abuse of women. Bell seeks only to control the landscape and is disappointed to find that it is not the place of purity with promises of renewal that he envisioned. The fact that the American West, and the desert in particular, is far from empty, that it is a complex combination of natural environments, government projects and personal perspectives, is no better illustrated than in Underworld, particularly the scene where Nick Shay’s younger brother Matt goes camping in the American West with his girlfriend in order to mend their strained relationship. In this section, the reader can see how it is the idea of the landscape that enhances Matt’s enjoyment more than his articulated joy at how he will engage with the landscape, including the possibility of seeing bighorn sheep or spotting kestrels (449): The landscape made him happy. It was a challenge to his lifelong citiness but more than that, a realization of some half-dreamed vision, the otherness of the West, the strange great thing that was all mixed in with nation and spaciousness, with bravery and history and who you are and what you believe and what movies you saw growing up. (450) More than just entering pristine nature, Matt feels as though he is entering into American history, a history told to him through the Westerns that were popular when he was

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growing up in the 1950s, films of white male domination over women, the land and its indigenous peoples. While Matt is blind to the falsehood of this history, DeLillo is clearly pointing to it in this scene. The fact that this location is both a wildlife preserve and a military site is a clear indication of the violence behind the trope of the pristine landscape where one goes to be alone and rediscover oneself; it is one demonstration of the claim critic Marni Gautheir makes that ‘Underworld vividly depict[s] how the myth of the West as virgin land endures today despite the fact that this myth is repeatedly shattered’ (278). Matt’s immense pleasure in the landscape, his belief that this retreat will undo the wrongs he has done to his girlfriend, along with his complete disregard for the cultural impacts on this landscape, all give us yet another example of the complexity of landscape, how it is read, how it is more than a physical location, but rather something culturally constructed and highly subjective. As with the juxtaposition of Sax and Packer’s readings of the city landscapes, we see how Klara Sax, as artist and as woman, reads the landscape differently to Matt. Her final art project depends on the landscape. She explains, ‘This is a landscape painting in which we use the landscape itself. The desert is central to this piece. It’s the surround. It’s the framing device. It’s the four-part horizon’ (Underworld 70). While it can be argued that Sax is ‘using’ the landscape, she is also offering an alternative reading of the landscape as virgin land. By painting over B-52 long-range bombers, ‘planes that used to carry nuclear bombs, ta-da, ta-da, out across the world’ (70), in bright, radiant colours, she is exposing the military’s presence in this landscape, displaying with these bombers a history of US violence and destruction. In fact, as Matt Shay reflects on his time serving as an analyst during the Vietnam War, he admits, ‘there were rumours about a secret war, bombs in unnumbered tons dropped from B-52’s. Laos, Chaos, Cambodia’ (462). Thus, through her work Sax is revealing the false notion of the ‘virgin landscape’ of the desert. It has in fact been used to test bombs and to develop warfare which, in turn, destroyed the landscapes of other countries that the US wanted to control. W. J. T. Mitchell claims that ‘we need to explore the possibility that the representation of landscape is not only a matter of internal politics and national or class ideology but also an international, global phenomenon, intimately bound up with discourses of imperialism’ (qtd in Wylie 123). The B-52 bombers represent such imperialism. Sax’s art installation demonstrates how the way we view the landscape determines how we act upon the landscape. She uses the landscape not for profit or gain but to reveal American imperialism and militarisation. Joanne Gass argues that ‘we still believe in the promise of the American frontier where we can remake ourselves in whatever image we choose [. . .] we still look out across our American landscape and see opportunities; we do not see ourselves as a part of the landscape; we see it as a commodity’ (128–9). While Gass presents a discussion of Nick Shay as the American Adam, such a description fits well with many DeLillo characters who travel westward into America to forget their pasts and forge a new identity, among them David Bell, Gary Harkness, Nick Shay, Matt Shay and Jim Finley of Point Omega. Point Omega focuses on landscape, indicated by the cover art for the US edition of the novel, which features a photograph of the desert in the foreground and mountains in the background. In opposition to Underworld, Point Omega is sparse in length, in characters, in plot. Nevertheless, we can see similar themes emerging in terms of the

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American landscape and what it represents. The narrator, Jim Finley, is constantly commenting on the landscape and its impact on his thoughts and feelings, despite the fact that he describes where he is as ‘somewhere south of nowhere in the Sonoran Desert or maybe it was the Mojave Desert or another desert altogether’ (Point Omega 20). From this, DeLillo suggests the idea of the desert as somehow placeless, what Jean Baudrillard has described as ‘a brilliant, mobile, superficial, neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profundity, a challenge to nature and culture, an outer hyper-space, with no origin, no reference points’ (123–4). In fact, Finley notes that his companion, Richard Elster, was ‘here to eat, sleep and sweat, here to do nothing, sit and think. There was the house and then nothing but distances, not vistas or sweeping sightlines but only distances’ (Point Omega 18). That Elster was instrumental in the planning of the US war in Iraq coincides with his desire to leave behind all civilisation and enter this empty space. For him, as for so many other DeLillo characters, the desert offers escape from responsibility and culpability for the crimes he has committed. The instrumental part that landscape plays in this novel is revealed when Finley observes of the desert that ‘the landscape inspired themes. Spaciousness and claustrophobia. This would become a theme’ (20). As in Underworld, the reader is presented with two contrasting characters who reflect on the desert landscape. Both Matt Shay and Richard Elster are intellectuals whose abilities have been used by the military. Both Klara Sax and Jim Finley are artists interested in reconceptualising the military through their art: Sax through the painted B-52s and Finley through his documentary film featuring nothing but Elster talking about his part in the war; Finley says it doesn’t matter what Elster winds up saying, but Elster tells him, ‘what you want my friend, whether you know it or not, is a public confession’ (53). In this way, just as Sax’s project will be revelatory, so too will Finley’s. However, the similarities between Sax and Finley end there. One can argue that, like David Bell in Americana, Finley is also a failed artist. He has a vision for a film that never comes to fruition. We can also see a similarity to Bell in how he misinterprets the landscape. Finley sees a similar nothingness to what Elster sees; he believes that ‘time was blind here’ and that the landscape is ‘clairvoyant’, ‘knows future as well as past’ (87), but he doesn’t focus on or ruminate about the past that this particular landscape displays in the way that Sax, a female artist, does. Sax suggests that Americans have seen the desert as unconducive [. . .] to industry and progress and so forth. So we use this place to test our weapons. It’s only logical of course. And it enables us to show our mastery. The desert bears the visible signs of all the detonations we set off. All the craters and warning signs and no-go areas and burial markers, the sites where debris is buried. (Underworld 71) She sees the violence and desecration enacted upon the landscape, which coincides with the metaphor of landscape as female, as something passive to be looked at and acted upon. In Gillian Rose’s study of landscape, she argues that ‘the landscape way of seeing is [. . .] a particularly masculine visual gaze’ (qtd in Wylie 84). According to Rose, ‘the metaphor of landscape as text works to establish an authoritative reading, and to maintain that authority whenever emotion threatens to erupt and mark

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the author as a feeling subject’ (qtd in Wylie 83). So, when Finley concludes that ‘spaciousness and claustrophobia’ (Point Omega 20) are themes of the landscape, he is projecting the altered feeling both he and Elster will have about the landscape after the disappearance of Elster’s daughter Jessie. Of the three residents of the remote desert home, that it is Jessie who disappears is significant, especially when we consider how she is presented in the novel. While it becomes clear that both Elster and Finley have gone to the desert to escape responsibilities and memories (Finley confesses, ‘I wanted to lose the notion of going back there, to responsibility, old woes’ [71]), Jessie is sent there by her mother due to concerns over a male friend who has exhibited unsettling behaviour. Unlike Elster and Finley, Jessie does not engage in interpretations of the landscape. Finley notes how ‘she gave the impression that nothing about this place was different from any other’ (49). Additionally, that Jessie is objectified and presented as something to be owned becomes clear through Finley’s narrative. He notes that in the first days of her arrival, ‘I thought of her as the Daughter. Elster’s possessiveness, his enclosing space, made it hard for me to set her apart, to find some semblance of an independent being’ (39). While Finley is apparently giving himself credit for seeking the individual beyond the role of ‘the daughter’, his thoughts about and actions towards her are hardly any better. He admits, ‘I stared at her sometimes, waiting for what, a return look, a show of discomfort’ (42). At another point, he sees her standing in the bathroom wearing only a T-shirt and briefs and he explains, I didn’t imagine walking in and standing behind her and leaning into her, didn’t see this clearly, my hands slipping under the T-shirt, my knees moving her legs apart so I could press more tightly, fit myself up and in, but it was there in some tenuous stroke of the moment, the idea of it, and when I moved away from the door I made no special effort to leave quietly. (55) Finley says that he doesn’t imagine taking over her body; the idea just existed, as if it is his natural right to do so. He later confesses, ‘I felt it disturbing to watch her, knowing that she didn’t feel watched’ (60); he seeks the power of the male gaze, but it is lessened by her lack of reaction to it. Later, Finley eases Jessie’s bedroom door open so that he can look at her sleeping (70–3). After her disappearance, Finley begins to understand the magnitude of these actions: ‘I was the man who’d stood in the dark watching while she lay in bed. Whatever Elster’s sense of implication, the nature of his guilt and failure, I shared it’ (88). This passage indicates that the two men are somehow responsible for the disappearance and, most likely, death of Jessie due to their male aggression towards her. Jessie has suffered the male gaze; she has been objectified and made into a fantasy of male domination similar to the ways the landscape has been objectified and dominated. Julian Thomas asserts that, ‘like landscape, women are painted by men to become visual commodities, consumed by other men. The male gaze is thus the gaze of the voyeur, taking pleasure without engagement, and the objectivity which it promotes as the basis of a privileged knowledge becomes questionable’ (24). It is then interesting to note how DeLillo links the destruction of the landscape to the destruction of Jessie. After her disappearance, the only thing the police find is a knife,

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which is, significantly, located ‘in a deep ravine not far from an expanse of land called the Impact Area, entry prohibited, a former bombing range littered with unexploded shells’ (Point Omega 91). The connection between violence against the land and violence against women is made clear here. After the discovery of the knife, Finley goes to the location where it was found. While there he states, ‘I’d never felt a stillness such as this, never such enveloping nothing. But such nothing that was, that spun around me, or she did, Jessie, warm to the touch’ (94). Here we see how Finley links the landscape to Jessie. Kolodny notes, ‘We may indeed have long ceased to self-consciously or attentively think about the feminine in the landscape, but that does not mean that we have ceased to experience it or to act in such a way that our behavior apparently manifests such experience at its deepest level of motivation’ (148). While neither Elster nor Finley apparently harmed Jessie directly, Finley’s comment about his guilt indicates the harm of the male objectification of women. The novel suggests that her killer is a man who was obsessed with an art installation that features Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho; the man focuses on Norman Bates stabbing his female victim. While the suggestions of landscape-as-woman are much more tenuous in this novel than in Americana, where Sullivan clearly represents the landscape that Bell wants both to penetrate and to be nurtured by, the connections between violence towards the landscape and violence towards women are clearly present. While the desecration of the landscape by the military-industrial complex is not as explicit in this novel as it is in Underworld, the role of the military, presented both through Elster’s role in the Iraq War and by the ‘Impact Area’ where the knife was found, still exists, and is linked to the female through the disappearance of Jessie, a woman who is objectified by both men in the novel. In his study of landscape, Wylie explains how landscapes have been used to ‘convey and cement certain ideological narratives’ (72). Furthermore, the tropes of the desert that Beck presents are a way of dismissing the misuse of the land. However, through his presentation of how particular characters view the landscape – how they reflect their own characteristics, or how they see only previously presented images of the landscape – DeLillo’s fiction challenges the way landscape is presented. I submit that his fiction does what Wylie insists is the charge of cultural geographers. We can read his fiction as ‘exposing and laying bare the mechanisms through which dominant ideas and beliefs are reproduced via landscapes, and [. . .] supplying alternative readings’ (Wylie 72). Of significant note is that it is quite often DeLillo’s female characters who provide such alternative readings. The analysis here demonstrates how Sullivan in Americana and Sax in Underworld offer counternarratives of landscape that resist the readings offered by male characters throughout DeLillo’s oeuvre, challenging the established white, male, Westernised view of the landscape.

Works Cited Apostolos-Cappacona, Diane, ‘Landscape in the Arts.’ New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, edited by Maryanne Cline Horowitz, vol. 3. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005, pp. 1205–23. Baudrillard, Jean. America. Translated by Chris Turner. Verso, 1988. Beck, John. ‘Without Form and Void: The American Landscape as Trope and Terrain.’ Nepantla, 2, no. 1, 2001, pp. 63–83. Cantú, Francisco. ‘Lines of Sight: When a Literary Landscape Comes to Life.’ The Virginia Quarterly Review, 96, no. 1, 2020, pp. 152–61.

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Cowart, David. ‘Shall These Bones Live?’ Underwords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s Underworld, edited by Joseph Dewey et al. University of Delaware Press, 2002. DeCurtis, Anthony. ‘Interview with Don DeLillo.’ Introducing Don DeLillo, edited by Frank Lentricchia. Duke University Press, 1991. DeLillo, Don. Americana. Penguin, 1971 ——. Cosmopolis. Scribner, 2003. ——. End Zone. 1972. Penguin, 1986. ——. Falling Man. Scribner, 2007. ——. ‘In the Ruins of the Future.’ Harper’s, December 2001, pp. 33–40. ——. Point Omega. Scribner, 2010. ——. ‘The Power of History.’ The New York Times, 7 September 1997. archive.nytimes.com/ www.nytimes.com/library/books/090797article3.html. Accessed 7 February 2023. ——. Running Dog. Penguin, 1978. ——. Underworld. Scribner, 1997. ——. White Noise. Viking, 1985. Gass, Joanne. ‘In the Nick of Time: DeLillo’s Nick Shay, Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, and the Myth of the American Adam.’ Underwords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s Underworld, edited by Joseph Dewey et al. University of Delaware Press, 2002. Gauthier, Marni. ‘Better Living through Westward Migration: Don DeLillo’s Inversion of the American West as “Virgin Land” in Underworld.’ Moving Stories: Migration and the American West 1850–2000, edited by Scott E. Casper. The Nevada Humanities Committee, 2001. Harris, Dianne. ‘The Postmodernization of Landscape: A Critical Historiography.’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 58, no. 3, 1999, pp. 434–43. Heyne, Eric. ‘“A Bruised Cartoonish Quality”: The Death of an American Supervillain in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 54, no. 4, 2013, pp. 438–51. Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Leps, Marie-Christine. ‘How to Map the Non-Place of Empire: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.’ Textual Practice, 28, no. 2, 2014, pp. 305–27. Martucci, Elise. The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo. Routledge, 2007. Thomas, Julian. ‘The Politics of Vision.’ Landscape, edited by Barbara Bender. Berg, 1993. Thurgar-Dawson, Chris. ‘Fated Landscape: Choropoetic Practice in Don DeLillo’s Underworld.’ Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie, 126, no. 2, 2008, pp. 363–79. Wylie, John. Landscape. Routledge, 2007.

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10 DeLillo in Colour Brian Jarvis

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n an interview for the Paris Review, Don DeLillo responded as follows when asked whether he read as a child: ‘No, not at all. Comic books. This is probably why I don’t have a storytelling drive’ (Begley). In addition to its impact on DeLillo’s well-established renunciation of conventional plot structures, the comic book genre may have had a formative influence on a less widely recognised aspect of his writing. Colour was one of, if not the defining, characteristics of American comics during its Golden Age in the 1940s. A garish gallery of superheroes in harlequin hues – Superman and Captain Marvel, Batman and Robin, the Flash and the Green Lantern – captured the roving eyes and imagination of an impressionable audience. DeLillo, of course, did not go on to become a graphic novelist, but it is important to acknowledge the extent of his literary engagement with colour. To date, the DeLillo oeuvre includes approximately three and a half thousand colour terms. Around a quarter of these references are to the colour that combines all wavelengths from the visible light spectrum. White is the most conspicuous (over 900 references) and complex presence on the DeLillo colour wheel. The second most prominent colour is another achromatic hue: black (almost 600 references). After white and black, DeLillo’s ‘primary’ colours we might say, a second tier includes the following (listed in order of frequency with each between 200 and 350 references): blue, red, green, grey (not counting the two ‘Mr Grays’ who appear in White Noise and Mao II) and brown. A tertiary tier of colour (appearing between 50 and 100 times and again listed in order of prevalence) comprises those associated with the precious metals silver, gold and bronze alongside pink, yellow and orange. Finally, DeLillo’s fiction is flecked with intermittent references to a range of minor colours (fewer than twenty appearances) such as copper, lime, magenta, ochre, purple and scarlet. DeLillo’s colours are often nuanced by modifiers. Two characters in the film Game 6 discussing their favourite colours plump for ‘burnt sienna’ and ‘cobalt blue’. The yellows of Underworld include shades of ‘Mikado’ and ‘Rust-Oleum’ while the greens are ‘mustard’, ‘patina’ and ‘sage’. An assiduous precision of tone is accompanied by a painterly attentiveness to the quality of light. When Lauren Hartke enters her bedroom at the end of The Body Artist (2001), she encounters a space ‘roiled in morning light, in webby sediment and streams of sunlit dust . . . The light was so vibrant she could see the true colours of the walls and floor. She’d never seen the walls before’ (124). Space in DeLillo is rendered and felt through colour. Interiors and exteriors, rooms and buildings, cityscapes and landscapes, sea, sky and outer space are refracted through a prismatic phenomenology. Bodies and objects located in these spaces are meticulously coloured. The tint and tone of skin, hair and eyes is foregrounded and so too the specific pigmentation of clothing. Colour is also pivotal to DeLillo’s extensive

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ekphrasis. The voluminous verbal representation of visual practices in film, television, photography, painting, sculpture, installation, street art, magazines and advertising is always deftly variegated. The DeLillo palette is awash with specific colour terms, and ‘colour’ itself is a key word. Including variants such as ‘coloured’, ‘colouring’ and ‘colouration’, this term appears over four hundred times in the author’s work. As we shall see below, DeLillo’s characters are sometimes arrested by the significance of a particular colour or of colour qua colour. In Amazons, Cleo Birdwell confesses that she is ‘no good at doing colour. Colour is hard. What is colour, anyway?’ (157). This question has been posed since antiquity by science and philosophy, but when it comes to definitive answers, there is little consensus aside from a recognition that colour is hard. Much of the modern understanding can be attributed to Newton’s Opticks (1704), which sought to challenge classical and renaissance models with empirical science. The Newtonian paradigm was contested in turn by Goethe in Theory of Colours (1810). Goethe insisted that the subjective experience of colour involved complex physiological, psychological and emotional dynamics which exceeded mere scientific measurement of wavelength and the physical properties of objects. Different branches of modern science have reformulated the question of colour from a matter of what to where (and even whether) it is: chemists scrutinise the molecular composition of objects; physicists measure wavelengths; physiologists examine the intricate operations of photoreceptor cells in the retina; while neuroscientists consider the ways in which the brain processes visual data transmitted from the eye. In ‘Eye and Mind’, Merleau-Ponty cites Paul Cézanne’s description of colour as the place where ‘our brain and the universe meet’ (180). Philosophy and psychology have also found the meeting place called ‘colour’ hard. Merleau-Ponty poses the following conundrum in Phenomenology of Perception: ‘consider a white wall in the shadows and a grey piece of paper in the light. It cannot be said that the wall remains white and the paper grey’ (318). Lauren Hartke believes that she sees the ‘true colours of the walls and floor’ in her bedroom bathed in vibrant light, but how can colour be true when it is always a fiction written by light? Strictly speaking, the colour of an object is a composite of the wavelengths that cannot be absorbed by its surface and are reflected back to the eye. In a sense, then, an orange is every colour except orange. According to Wittgenstein, ‘if we were to imagine an orange on the blue side or green on the red side or violet on the yellow side it would give us the same impression as a north wind coming from the southwest’ (Remarks on Colour 28). Colour is contradictory, contingent and elusive. Wittgenstein’s seminal work on the subject illustrates how ‘[c]olours spur us to philosophise’ (Culture and Value 66). The list of theorists drawn to the enigma of colour is long and distinguished and includes, among others, Adorno, Barthes, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Cavell, Deleuze, Derrida, Kristeva and Taussig. Their collective body of work is supplemented by copious studies in the visual arts, but work on colour in literary criticism is patchy at best. There have been some pioneering contributions to this field (for example, Nicholas Gaskill’s Chromographia), but in general terms, colour has been filtered out, perhaps because it seems too easy and obvious. The painting by numbers approach of colour symbolism might be tainted by a vague whiff of nursery school where children first learn about and play with colour. Part of the justification for my approach in this chapter is that DeLillo’s early experiences with comic books may have encouraged a sensitivity to colour. I intend to offer

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a sketch of colour – of necessity in broad brushstrokes – in each of DeLillo’s novels in relation to perception and power, mood and meaning, art and technology, history and cultural politics. * * * ‘Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year.’ The first sentence of Americana (1971), DeLillo’s debut novel, has an ending vexed by adjectival ambiguity (3). A year that was both boring and sensational also has colour connotations which mix to produce an unnatural effect. While colour is only implicit in this opening line, it becomes increasingly manifest in what follows. Americana, in fact, includes almost five hundred colour references. White and black are foremost, followed by blue, green, grey and red. Certain chromatic motifs introduced in Americana are repeated throughout DeLillo’s subsequent work, such as the dazzling and distracting Day-Glo colour scheme of consumer culture. The first third of Americana centres on Madison Avenue – a setting synonymous in the post-war period with the burgeoning industries of advertising, media and fashion. This was a milieu which DeLillo knew well, having worked on Madison Avenue from 1959 to 1964 at OBM under David Ogilvy, the ‘Father of Advertising’. DeLillo’s decision to turn his back on advertising to become a writer is echoed by the protagonist in Americana. David Bell leaves behind mainstream media society to pursue his dream of making an independent film. The aspiring auteur’s decision to shoot in monochrome is crucial to an aesthetic rebellion which pitches art against adverts (the official art form of capitalism). Fashion on Madison Avenue is characterised by a superficial chromaticity where all the men wear the same shade of orange tie: ‘the establishment having learned that every colour is essentially grey so long as everyone is wearing it’ (35). Power relations within the corporate hierarchy appear to be colour-coded and mapped onto office space: ‘[t]he door of Quincy’s office was orange and his sofa was dark grey. Some of us in Weede’s group had doors of the same colour but sofas of a different colour. Some had identical sofas but different doors. Weede himself was the only one who had a red sofa’ (88). Bell studies these combinations as well as shades of ‘ecru’, ‘maroon’ and ‘royal blue’ office furniture, but the visual riddle remains unsolved (88–9). The association of the media industry with technicolour excess is underscored by a series of gaudy advertising images and jingles: ‘[o]ur lipstick of the month is salmon puree’ (275). In consumer society colour is mere packaging for the commodity – a spectral simulacrum designed to manage consumer affect. Americana plots a course away from the fake kaleidoscope of consumer culture in New York towards the muted tones of the mid- and south-west captured on blackand-white film. On his road trip west, Bell travels with a sculptor who works exclusively with ‘dull blunt colours’ (105). A stark and potentially problematic opposition begins to emerge here. An authentic art which is monochrome and minimalist appears as an antidote to the bilious ornamentation of commodity culture. In Chromophobia, David Batchelor critiques the tradition in Western society of demoting and even demonising colour. From antiquity to modernity, a powerful aversion to colour has manifested in different forms. In philosophy and the arts, colour has routinely been classified as secondary (to form) and even superficial (a matter of cosmetic appearance rather than substance). Colour has also been weaponised by the dominant culture through association with those it deems different, inferior or dangerous: ‘the oriental,

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the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological’ (Batchelor 23). The discourses of cultural hegemony often daub the feminine, the racial and the ethnic ‘other’ alongside the lower classes with brassy hues to suggest an affinity with the sensual, the decadent and unruly. It would be a mistake, however, to diagnose the cleansing of the palette (sic) in Americana as a symptom of chromophobia. The achromatic hues of black and white are valorised, but this takes place alongside an antipathy not towards colour per se, but rather towards the specific corruption of colour in consumer culture. In different contexts, other hues appear with affirmative albeit complex effects. After white and black, blue is the most discernible colour in the novel. The ‘blue-eyed David Bell’ (Americana 11), afflicted with the ‘Stephen Dedalus Blues’ (234), sets off into the ‘big blue yawning country’ (204). The colour blue is also associated in DeLillo with the feminine. While David’s father is screening colourful commercials to the children, his mother is left upstairs ‘small and blue, a question mark curled on the bed’ (199). Blue also has conventional connotations in DeLillo with the spiritual and heavenly: ‘[t]he blue of the water was an angel’s blue’ (324). In Americana, however, the Christian resonances of blue as the colour of the Virgin Mother are tainted by an Oedipal stain rooted in Bell’s erotic (blue can be a ‘hot’ as well as a ‘cool’ colour) memories of his mother. Bell also has ‘blue’ dreams: one image in particular stayed with me, a blue bus moving down a highway in the desert . . . that flash of bright blue metal across the lionskin desert. For the first time in my life I could be certain that I dreamed in colour. I don’t know why but this cheered me tremendously. (235) Colour has strong associations with dream and fantasy. The chromophobe fears that colour is a sensory diversion and even derangement, but it has also been embraced by artists and others precisely because of its unruly possibilities. The edict that is threatened with violation in Bell’s dream is the Oedipal injunction. The allusion here is to the sixties anthem ‘The End’ by The Doors, which invites its listeners on a trip west on the ‘blue bus’ which climaxes with the murder of the father and sex with the mother. End Zone (1972) takes us back to the bleached desertscape with its main setting at an isolated college in West Texas. DeLillo’s second novel is not as heavily saturated with colour as Americana, but it does mirror its spectrum: half of the colour references are to white and black followed by blue, green, red and grey. The blinding white light of the desert sun resonates with imagery of nuclear blasts and ‘atomic mushroom’ clouds (41), and this is twinned with funereal images of a painted black stone, ‘soft black insects’ (31) and ‘black bones’ (43). Against the deathly backdrop of this Cold War chiaroscuro, the novel’s other obsession – college football – offers lively splashes of colour featuring animated figures in ‘red jerseys with silver pants and silver helmets’ (107) moving across green and white playing fields. Colour is equated again with female characters, particularly Myna Corbett, whose fashion sense is described as ‘colour-abundant’ (66) and includes a pair of ‘tricoloured hockey shorts’ (148). At one point, Myna recounts the plot of a science fiction novel about an alien species transformed by its encounter with a ‘powdery black light. It’s a form of electromagnetic radiation that’s semi-black and has weird texture . . . So then the light becomes sort of infused into the complex brain apparatus of the

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nautiloid . . . The thing sees itself seeing what is outside it being seen by itself’ (169). This fantasy functions as a phenomenological allegory of the dynamic and transformative imbrication of seer and seen which underpins the encounter with light and colour in DeLillo. A parallel might also be drawn here between DeLillo’s perspective and the work of a philosopher with whom he is familiar. The idea of the object’s ability to look back at the observer was pivotal to Walter Benjamin’s influential concept of aura. Benjamin, like DeLillo, was enchanted by colour, from his early essays to the final Theses, which were originally written on the backs of envelopes in shades of orange, blue, yellow, green and cream. In a characteristically gnomic aphorism from ‘A Child’s View of Colour’, Benjamin insists that ‘[c]olour must be seen’ (50). In ‘The Rainbow: Dialogue on Phantasy’, Benjamin further insists that ‘[c]olours see themselves, they have in themselves pure seeing and are simultaneously the object and organ of vision’ (qtd. in Caygill 12). Myna’s science fiction scenario crystallises the drive in DeLillo, as in Benjamin, to make colour seen and make the reader see themselves seeing. At one stage in End Zone, the melancholic protagonist, Gary Harkness, withdraws from the world: ‘[t]hings in this room are simple and static . . . I like the colours in here, the way they never move, never change’ (43). In DeLillo’s next novel, Great Jones Street (1973), a similar gesture of contemplative retreat is performed by a jaded rock star. The antithesis between art and the market from Americana is also repeated. When Bucky Wunderlick seeks sanctuary in his Manhattan apartment, the marginalised artist positions himself against a mainstream culture industry ‘spinning like a big wheel, full of lights and colours’ (Great Jones Street 48). To assist his escape from the sensory overload of consumer culture, one of Bucky’s friends offers to paint the ‘whole floor of [his] building a dark grey’ (253). The choice of colour here might recall Adorno’s insistence at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt that the lecture hall in which he taught be painted grey to in order to minimise distraction and promote rumination. As a musician, Bucky is attuned to sounds, but he also displays an attentiveness to colours, including grey. From his window he observes ‘grey cats [sleeping] in the sun’ (247) and a man unloading minimalist paintings from a truck: ‘canvas after canvas, about a dozen, grey every one with a white line down the middle’ (239). White and black are the dominant colours in Great Jones Street, but uncharacteristically for DeLillo, the former is eclipsed by the latter in terms of frequency of reference. Many of the mentions have an explicit racial connotation. In conversation with a member of his band, Bucky considers the meaning of ‘blackness’: ‘[b]lack everything . . . Blackness as such . . . being into blackness’ as a white man singing the blues and whether ‘you have to shed your whiteness first’ (122). Throughout his fiction, DeLillo displays an acute sensitivity to skin colour. In White Noise, a character’s ‘complexion [is] of a tone I want to call flesh-coloured’ (32). The flesh is coloured in by DeLillo in black and red and olive and yellow and white. In Zero K (2016), Jeff Lockhart studies ‘body colour’ and asks ‘is it possible to be precise about skin colour in any situation? Yellow brown black white, all wrong except as convenient labels. Did I want to resort to nuances of tone, to amber, umber, lunar?’ (143–4) As Steven Connor notes, the etymology of chroma can be traced back to the Greek word for the surface of the body, and colour itself is often understood as ‘a kind of skin’ (Connor 141). While we do not have the space here to do justice to DeLillo’s extensive engagement with race and ethnicity, it is important to acknowledge the extent to which these subjects intersect with questions of skin colour and colour

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itself as a type of skin. For much of its history, ‘colour’ has been synonymous in the American racial imagination with ‘black’. In DeLillo’s writing, conversely, there is a fierce insistence on white as a racial category. In response to the challenge that she has ‘no colour’, Cleo Birdwell in Amazons insists ‘I have white. I’m a white person’ (197). In Falling Man (2007), Lianne takes part in a demonstration against the War in Iraq and the multiracial crowd enhances her sense of being white: ‘[s]he became her face and features, her skin colour, a white person, white her fundamental meaning, her state of being . . . She was privileged, detached, self-involved, white’ (184). Tim Engles has been at the forefront of scholarship exploring the ways in which DeLillo’s fiction encourages us to see whiteness and indeed White as a powerfully racialised colour rather than an absence of colour. In Ratner’s Star (1976), Orang Mohole is described as a man of ‘ambiguous pigmentation’ (178). Literally one of DeLillo’s most colourful minor characters, Mohole is a green-pill-popping guru of alternative physics whose wardrobe boasts a ‘gold mohair smoking jacket [. . . with] platinum lapels and a bit of drizzly silver saddle-stitching on each pocket’ (178) as well as a ‘turquoise cravat’ (180) and two-tone shoes. Mohole is joined among a gallery of eccentric scientists by a silver-haired priest who has devoted his life to the study of the secretion patterns of red ants for clues to the mysteries of the universe. There are some explosions of colour in Ratner’s Star, and red is prominent in multiple mentions of ‘red giants’ and ‘red dwarves’, but overall the novel is dominated by black and white as it gravitates inexorably towards a solar eclipse. DeLillo’s seriocomic science fiction odyssey features distant suns glistening against the glutinous blackness of deep space, and is structured around binary pairings of dark and light, night and day, mysticism and science. The world of science consists largely of ‘white-veiled men’ (Ratner’s Star 22) in sterile white labs aiming to banish the figurative darkness with the ‘white flash’ (126) of mathematics. Mysterious pulses from the eponymous Ratner’s Star are ‘represented as black squares, the gaps or intervals as white squares’ (62), and this reflects the scientific credo that ‘for every black hole there’s a white hole’ (114). Beyond the tidy symmetry of scientific orthodoxy, however, Ratner’s Star considers animist visions of black as more than simply the inversion of white: ‘not just complete absence of light but a state of its own . . . that aspect of nightlikeness which makes distinctions impossible. This dark had a special presence. It was far from empty . . . It had a nature that dated back. It had intrinsic characteristics. It was animal’ (391). The apocalyptic tone as darkness falls at the end dispels the slapstick sci-fi and ironic mysticism evident elsewhere. While Ratner’s Star closes with penumbral darkness, Players (1977) opens in brilliant sunshine and apocalyptic violence. Passengers on a plane watch an in-flight silent movie which depicts a bloody massacre on a ‘sweet green morning’ (7). A group of middle-aged white golfers appear onscreen wearing ‘the kind of rampantly bright sports clothes that suburban men favour on weekends, colours so strident they might serve as illustrations of the folly of second childhood’ (5). When the golfers are slaughtered by terrorists, blood is splattered onto golf bags and white shoes. This scene introduces a tricolour symbolism: white privilege and power; green as the colour of money (the ‘green numbers on the board’ [107] at the Stock Exchange); and the ‘meaty bloom’ (85) of blood-red as the insignia of revolutionary violence. If this sounds close to painting by numbers, it is worth underlining how colours on DeLillo’s prose palette typically acquire shades of ambiguity. A character’s poliosis, for example, becomes ‘the white sign of something . . . Strange, the unnatural whiteness, a pure grade of chalk’ (166). In

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an adumbrated allusion to The Great Gatsby, another New York novel about money and violence, a character claims to see a strange green light across a bay: ‘[i]t was pulsing. Maybe not as bright this time. Greenish. The same green . . . Blue-green light. But solid behind it. An object’ (171). Various explanations are considered including a ‘turquoise helicopter’ or pigeon, an ‘electrical discharge’ or ‘Saint Elmo’s Fire’, but the mystery of this vision remains unsolved (172). The tricolour patterning of white, black and red that featured in Ratner’s Star is repeated in Running Dog (1978). In this instance, colour inspiration comes from two blended sources: Nazis and film noir. The central quest in the novel is for an apocryphal pornographic film of the last days in the Führerbunker. Accordingly, the iconography of National Socialism is prominent, as for example in the appearance at a brothel of a dominatrix wearing ‘black boots, a long black military shirt and an iron cross . . . The shirt included a red armband with a black swastika set inside a circular field of white’ (Running Dog 124). When the ‘master film’ of Hitler’s final days is uncovered, it is handled by an art dealer wearing ‘white gloves’ and inserted into a ‘black projector’ (241). Instead of the anticipated blue movie, however, the audience are treated to a rather sombre home movie in which the climax is an ageing Führer entertaining his grandchildren with an impersonation of Chaplin (who of course impersonated Hitler in The Great Dictator). Monochrome filmic memories in DeLillo are often imbued with an aura of authenticity, but elsewhere in Running Dog black-and-white is simultaneously associated with the stylised shadow play of noir (the film genre that emerged in the US during the Second World War as an influx of European filmmakers fled the Nazis by emigrating to Hollywood). The opening scene, for example, takes place at night in the city by the docks and involves the discovery of a murder victim dressed in a black trenchcoat over a red dress soaked in blood (who is then revealed to be a man in drag). Towards the end of Running Dog, outside the dark city, the resonance of red is extended during an unexpected encounter between an assassin and ‘a red-tailed hawk . . . the transcendent beauty of predators . . . The sky was saturated with light. Everything was colour’ (223). In DeLillo’s next novel, The Names (1982), the identity of a murderous cult is discovered by translating Greek words scrawled in blood-red on a white rock: ‘Ta Onómata’. Language is a primary concern here, but colour continues to play a vital role. DeLillo’s most cosmopolitan novel in terms of setting opens with a gaudy procession in Athens: ‘[s]lowly, out of every bending lane, in waves of colour and sound, came tourists in striped sneakers, fanning themselves with postcards’ (The Names 3). The narrator, James Axton, eschews the plagiarised phenomenology of the tourist, which relies on the reproduction of place in postcards and photographs, in favour of unmediated immersion in the tactile immediacies of colour and light: ‘a textured pigment on the hills . . . passageways captured the eye with one touch, a sea green door, a handrail varnished to nautical gloss’ (8). The iconic Grecian pairing of white and blue is eye-catching: white churches with ‘blue talc domes’ (8), white buildings, villages and cities in the ‘September sun’ (129) are juxtaposed with the azure Mediterranean sea and sky. The spectrum is expanded as the setting switches to Jerusalem and Lahore. In the alleyways of the Punjabi capital, the narrator is overwhelmed by ‘colours I’d never seen, brilliances, worlds . . . minicabs painted pink, fuchsia, peacock blue’ (269). Beyond the city, [t]he cows had painted horns. Blue horns in one part of the countryside, red or yellow or green in another . . . There were cows with tricolour horns. There was a woman in a magenta sari who carried a brass water pot on her head, the garment and the

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container being the precise colours of the mingled bougainvillea that covered the wall behind her, the dark reddish purple, the tainted gold . . . The epic material had to refine itself in these delicate aquarelles, or he needed to see it as such. (278) Axton’s desire to transcend the optic of tourism still risks a conventional Orientalist equation of the ‘East’ with colour. At the same time, there is a challenge here to ‘the grand ordering imperial vision as it is overrun by the surge and pelt of daily life’ (269). The Western traveller invokes postcolonial critique, Homeric allusion (the ‘epic’) and the conventions of nineteenth-century European landscape painting (the ‘aquarelle’) in part as a series of defensive manoeuvres as pure colours threaten to overwhelm their names. The experience of witnessing colour outside the filter of language is repeated during an epiphanic moment of violence in White Noise (1985). Jack Gladney shoots ‘Mr Gray’ in the guts and watches ‘blood squirt from the victim’s mid-section . . . I marvelled at the rich colour, sensed the colour-causing action of nonnucleated cells . . . I saw beyond words. I knew what red was, saw it in terms of dominant wavelength, luminance, purity’ (White Noise 312). The dominant wavelengths in White Noise belong, once more, to white and black. The college town of Blacksmith is full of ‘white houses with . . . white stones in driveways’ and ‘white picket fence[s]’ (272). The protagonist, an academic in a black gown and glasses with ‘black heavy frames’ (17), discovers that his wife is being supplied by a ‘Mr Gray’ with small white tablets designed to conquer the fear of death. Death in White Noise is conventionally associated with black in various guises ranging from clothing (Nazi uniforms and ‘black-habited, black-veiled’ nuns [315]) to environmental disasters (a ‘black billowing cloud’ [127]). The inhabitants of Blacksmith seek sanctuary at the supermarket where black death is banished by ‘all the colours of the spectrum’ (38). As Jack follows his colleague Murray around the aisles, he is bombarded by ‘blasts of colour’ (288) from the shelves and carts stocked with ‘brightly coloured goods’ and ‘brightly coloured food’ and ‘brightly coloured plastic utensils’ (125) and the ‘brightly coloured stack of supermarket tabloids’ (142). At home, Jack receives ‘brightly coloured mail for coupons, lotteries and contests’ (110), hears radio commercials for credit cards with a ‘rainbow hologram’ (122) and discovers in the garbage that comprises the ‘dark underside of consumer consciousness’ that all of the ‘product colours [are] undiminished in brightness and intensity’ (258). It seems unsurprising in this glitzy ambience that Jack starts seeing ‘coloured spots out of the corner of [his] right eye’ (14). These visual auras are an after-image produced by the visual glut of consumer culture. ‘All the colours of the spectrum’, when combined, produce a synaesthetic white noise which is symptomatic of sensory overload and hints at fears of homogenisation and the loss of individual identity. White noise is a crowd of loud colours in which it becomes impossible to differentiate a distinctive frequency. The ‘towering, ruddled visionary skyscapes’ with their ‘dynamic colours [and] a deeper sense of narrative sweep’ (227) which appear over Blacksmith at the end of White Noise seem to offer an alternative vision: ‘the bands of colour reach so high, seem at times to separate into their constituent parts’ (324). A conventional opposition between society and nature, however, collapses on closer inspection. The sunsets are a product of industrial pollution, and for the crowd of onlookers, nature is still framed by technology: ‘[w]e stood there watching a surge of florid light, like a heart pumping in a documentary on colour TV’ (227).

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In Libra (1988), Lee Harvey Oswald and his mother watch TV together in their basement: ‘[s]he’d bought a tinted filter for their Motorola. The top third of the screen was permanently blue, the middle third was pink, the band across the bottom was a wavy green’ (4). In the 1950s transparent plastic filters offered a cheap upgrade to black-and-white televisions, and the appearance of this device in Libra is one of many occasions on which Oswald is associated with the transformative powers of colour as well as ambivalent hues. Nicholas Branch’s inability to determine Oswald’s eye colour – ‘Oswald’s eyes are grey, they are blue, they are brown’ – symbolises his subject’s protean indeterminacy (299). Was Oswald a red spy or a double agent and ‘true-blue Oswaldovich’ (167)? While the government curator is forlornly attempting to chronicle the truth of the Kennedy assassination, Oswald’s diary recalls ‘dreams with runny colours [which] can seem a state of purer knowledge’ (211). The colours of the Stars and Stripes run through the phantasmagoria of the assassination scene. The presidential Lincoln convertible is ‘deep blue, an iridescent peacock gleam’ (392) with a ‘nice light blue’ interior and red ‘roses on the seat between Jack and Jackie’ (398). The impact of the bullet is captured on the Zapruder film as a ‘white glare’ and ‘white burst in the middle of the frame’ (399). The colours run in surreal slow motion as ‘two pinkwhite jets of tissue’ explode from the president’s head (400). Kennedy was routinely labelled a ‘Pinko’ by his critics, but in DeLillo’s portrait the primary colour association for the president is his iconic ‘[p]erfect white teeth’ (68) and ‘white smile’ (392). White in Libra is aligned with power – its architectural symbol is the White House and American executives ‘living in large white houses’ (126) – but also with death. As he moves towards his own assassination, Oswald is progressively blanched out: ‘sad and pasty, decoloured’ (340). In military prison, Oswald wears white prison overalls and is confined by white lines: ‘[y]ou do not step on white paint at any time . . . Do not touch white’ (94). While Kennedy’s assassination is captured in colour, Oswald’s plays out in noir monochrome: ‘[s]potlights came on. Everything was black and white, highlights and heavy shadows’ (437). When he is shot by Jack Ruby, Oswald’s features are ‘whited out by glare’ (445). This recalls the glare when Kennedy is shot, and a dream Oswald had in Russia of a ‘dead white glare burning down’ (248), thus transposing nuclear blast with a flashbulb memory of the ‘seven seconds that broke the back of the American century’ (180). In Libra, the black-and-white melodrama of Cold War geopolitics is refracted through a prism of oneiric intuitions before finally fading to white: He is white. Oswald white. Lying in the ambulance [. . .] Flashing red lights. Young Oswald rushed out. He is white, white. (438) Mao II (1991) opens with a black-and-white photo and an account of a Moonie mass wedding involving hundreds of black-suited grooms with their brides in white gowns amassed before the Reverend Moon, wearing ‘a white silk robe’ (6) and ‘frozen in his whiteness’ (15). Subsequent sections of the novel are prefaced by black-andwhite photos and accounts of the Hillsborough disaster and the funeral of Ayatollah

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Khomeini (‘[t]he black turban, the white beard’ [192]) witnessed on TV. The implication seems to be that history is documented in black-and-white. The gravitas of these shades is reinforced by association with aesthetics. Brita Nilsson is a photographer who is curating a collection of black-and-white images of living authors whose stock in trade is black print on white paper. Her main subject in the novel is the reclusive Bill Gray, who DeLillo claims was inspired by an infamous photograph of an angry J. D. Salinger taken without permission by a journalist. The colourings in this sketch of the serious and solitary artist at the margins of society recall Adorno’s aesthetic injunction to embrace an ‘asceticism against colour’ (185), to abandon a ‘childish delight in [those] bright colours’ (58) which compose the deceitful sensuality of the culture industry, and instead embrace a ‘dark’ art whose ‘primary colour is black’ (53). Mao II might appear to offer a chromophobic model of the modernist artist opposed to the market and the crowd, but on closer inspection, things are not so black-and-white. To begin with, the writer is Gray. At his typewriter, Bill Gray notices the ‘accumulating hair, all his lost strands settled in the mechanism, the greyness and tumble, the soft disorder, everything that is not clear and sharp and bright’ (201). Brita experiences a similar recognition when examining a proof sheet after photographing Bill Gray. At a distance the twelve sheets look like ‘one picture repeated, like mass visual litter’, but up close the undifferentiated crowd reveals subtle but significant gradations of Gray (222). Moving beyond greyscale, a similar pattern is evident as other colours run in Mao II. The red of communism bleeds into consumerism as twin threats to individual autonomy and difference. When Brita arrives in Beirut, Mao’s Little Red Book is doubled with an advert for Coke II where ‘the lettering is so intensely red’ (230). Previously, Brita recalled a photograph of Andy Warhol ‘tourist-posing in Beijing before the giant portrait of Mao in the main square’ (135). Warhol is a complicated presence in the novel, the title of which is borrowed from one of his artworks. Utilising the psychedelic spectrum of pop art, Warhol gives Mao an irreverent make-over: ‘a pansy purple here, floating nearly free of its photographic source’ (21). The same effect is evident in Gorby I which Brita goes to see in a New York gallery: the president’s ‘skin was the ruddy flush of TV makeup and he had an overlay of blond hair, red lipstick and turquoise eye shadow’ (134). Beyond the obvious camp humour is a carnivalesque subversion that deploys colour to erase the aura of political leaders and summon the shadow of death. In his ‘Gold Marilyn’s and Dead-White Andy’s’, Brita detects a ‘death glamour’: ‘play-death cosmetics, the caked face-powder and lemon-yellow hair colour’ (134). In Camera Lucida, Barthes describes colour as ‘a coating applied later on to the original truth of the black-and-white photograph . . . a cosmetic (like the kind used to paint corpses)’ (81). In a similar vein, Fredric Jameson detected a skull beneath the powdered skin of Warhol’s silkscreen paintings: ‘it is as though the external and coloured surface of things – debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to glossy advertising images – has been stripped away to reveal the deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them’ (9). In Mao II, colour bleeds into black-and-white while monochrome becomes multi-hued. A chromatic dialectic between black-and-white and colour is palpable across the vast and variegated canvas of DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). As in Libra, Cold War geopolitics are played out in black-and-white. Tensions between the US and USSR are mapped on to the motif of chess and an advert featuring a race between a white car and a black car. Secret military facilities are hidden in ‘the white places on your map’

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(Underworld 404) and the ‘white bomb’ causes children to be born ‘with eyes that are pure white. No discernible pupil or iris’ (420). In DeLillo’s fictionalised account of the famous Black and White Ball held at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1966, this key colour combination is underscored as the insignia of the elite: ‘[a] godlike gathering of five hundred, a masked affair, invitation only, dinner jacket and black mask for men, evening gown and white mask for women’ (560). Protestors outside scream ‘[w]hite killers in black tie!’ (569) and then gatecrash to stage a surreal demonstration: ‘[t]hey formed a death rank on the dance floor . . . a masque of silent figures, a plague, a spray of pathogens . . . skeleton men and raven women’ (575–6). One of the witnesses to this dance of death is J. Edgar Hoover, and a second Edgar haunts the scene. The allusions to a gathering of the powerful at a masked ball, a plague, a dance of death and raven women conjure Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, although the multicoloured suite of rooms in Prospero’s castle is missing from the Plaza. A vibrant array of colours is evident elsewhere in Underworld, and in general terms it is the banner of marginalised groups including women, ethnic minorities and the young. One of the attendees at the Black and White Ball, the artist Klara Sax, is appalled by an old photograph of herself in ‘a long black sheathy dress . . . a little white feline mask’: I want to paint it over, paint the photograph orange and blue and burgundy and paint the tuxedos and long dresses and paint the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel and maybe this is what I’m doing, I don’t know, it’s a work in perpetual progress. And let’s not forget pleasure. The senses, the pleasures, the body juices. But strata blue yes. But yellow and green and geranium red . . . But magenta yes. But orange and cobalt and chartreuse. (79) Sax describes herself as ‘drunk on colour. I am sex-crazed. I see it in my sleep. I eat it and drink it. I’m a woman going mad with colour’ (70). The artist embodies an erotics of colour in contrast to the necrotic black of the dominant order aligned with Hades on his ebony throne in the underworld. Sax’s magnum opus is an epic installation at an artist commune in the desert, which involves painting a fleet of decommissioned military aircraft: ‘sweeps of colour, bands and spatters . . . The air was colour-scrubbed, coppers and ochres burning off the metal skin of the aircraft to exchange with the framing desert’ (83). Witnessing this work from a hot air balloon, Nick and Marian Shay are ‘heart-shaken’: bursts and serpentines of colour, a power in the earth . . . The reds were dampened . . . beautifully mixed blues and flat blues and near blues. The piece had a great riverine wash, a broad arc of sage green or maybe mustard green with brushy grey disturbances . . . The tension of our pressed bodies was heightened by the physical fact of colour, painted light pouring toward us. (125) The concupiscence of colour is juxtaposed with the technology of death in a vision that recalls Walter Benjamin’s description of colour not as ‘a lifeless thing and a rigid individuality, but as a winged creature that flits from one form to the next’ (50). Underworld offers further examples of winged colour in recycled art by marginalised groups ranging from the ‘bright oddments and household colours’ (276) of

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Sabato Rodia’s Nuestro Pueblo, or Watts Towers, to the graffiti ‘bombing’ of Ismael ‘Moonman’ Muñoz and his crew sprayed on subway trains: ‘metallic silver and blue and cherry-bomb red and a number of neon greens’ (395): ‘cartoon figures and bright and rhyming poems, flashing those colours in your face – like I’m your movie, motherfucker’ (440–1). Muñoz’s street art constitutes an act of resistance and remembrance: ‘his crew of graffiti writers spray-painted a memorial angel every time a child died in the neighbourhood. Angels in blue and pink’ (239). One of the children commemorated on the wall is Esmeralda Lopez, a homeless orphan who was raped and thrown from a rooftop. The description of Esmeralda recalls Benjamin’s trope: she is a ‘a winged figure in a pink sweatshirt and pink and aqua pants and a pair of white Nike Air Jordans’ (Underworld 815). Esmeralda’s name comes from the Spanish for emerald, and during an epiphanic scene she is also mixed with orange when her image miraculously appears on an advertising hoarding. Under ‘a madder orange moon’, a crowd gathers in anticipation of an angelic apparition when the lights from an elevated train illuminate a billboard promoting orange juice: ‘a vast cascade of orange juice pouring diagonally from top right into a goblet’ (820). The hand pouring the juice belongs to a model ‘Caucasian female’, but the palimpsestic vision seen by the crowd is the face of the Hispanic girl (820). DeLillo’s diptych displays conventional romantic colourings as sacred art is juxtaposed with the plastic profane of the market. The ‘six-ounce cans of Minute Maid arrayed across the bottom of the board . . . [have] the convivial cuteness of little orange-and-black people’ (820). The choice of brand here recalls Charlie Wainwright’s attempts earlier in Underworld to secure the Minute Maid account and perfect ‘the visual hit . . . women’s eyeballs reach high levels of excitation when they see bright orange cans in the freezer, gleaming with rime ice . . . a glass of juice, a goblet brimming with particulate matter, like wondrous orange smog’ (532–3). The bold use of colour to capture the gaze of female consumers is repeated in references to ‘Jell-O desserts in a number of colourful diagonal stripes . . . lime Jell-O, and then maybe orange, and then strawberry or strawberry-banana’ (514). This saccharine and synthetic spectrum blends with allusions to chemicals to suggest synergies between consumerism and the military-industrial complex. The orange-and-black cans of juice recycle the ‘black drums that had identifying orange stripes’ in US military compounds in Vietnam: ‘how can you tell the difference between orange juice and agent orange if the same massive system connects them at levels outside your comprehension?’ (465). While cargo planes overseas are ‘spraying the jungles with a herbicide’ (463), on the home front the spray cans of Ismael Muñoz are being neutralised by ‘orange juice, man. This was the new graffiti killer, some weirdshit chemical from the CIA’ (438). Colour in Underworld is a winged thing, flying from one pattern to the next to form a forceful collage of chromatic connections. But where is it flying to? In the mythological register which DeLillo and Benjamin excavate from beneath the surface of modernity, the destination is the scene of an epic confrontation between Eros and Thanatos: the life-affirming chromaticism of marginalised groups (people of colour, women, youths, artists) pitted against the necrotic black-and-white of the dominant order (associated with capitalism and the military-industrial complex). The convergence of colours, bodies, images and technology produces a space in which this struggle is recognised in a moment of profane illumination. The wasteland cannot be redeemed, but the drama of colour in Underworld uncovers latent energies buried within the detritus

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of lost and abandoned people, places and objects to enable new ways of seeing. While capitalism promotes a fetishised optic of voyeurism which fixates on the part rather than the whole, the object detached from the history of its production, the colour vision of Underworld insists, repeatedly, that ‘everything is connected’. * * * There are more references to colour in Underworld than in all of DeLillo’s subsequent fiction combined. Crude psychobiography might wish to link the draining of colour from late DeLillo’s minimalist prose to the impact of 9/11. Whether this relationship is causal or coincidental, the desaturation of the twenty-first-century prose is incontestable. White continues to dominate, but is deployed more sparingly and often in a nihilistic vein. In Cosmopolis, white retains its familiar association with power, especially in the iconic image of the white stretch limo, but elsewhere the washed-out whitescapes of death come to the fore: the ‘white shrine . . . an iceblink memory’ (62) of grief in The Body Artist, the flash of a flapping white shirt in Falling Man, and the blank screens, sterile mausoleum and funereal flowers (‘white amaryllis . . . single white orchid’) of Zero K (203). There are, however, exceptions in the late fiction where colour returns and is linked, albeit tentatively, to the possibility of revitalisation. In Zero K, it is difficult to avoid the metafictional implications of a character called Artis being terminally ill, but as we have seen before in DeLillo the feminine is also aligned with chromatic fecundity. Following eye surgery, Artis removes a protective shield and is astonished by what she sees: everything looked different . . . What was I seeing? I was seeing what was always there. The bed, the windows, the walls, the floor. But the brightness of it, the radiance. The bedspread and pillow cases, the rich colour, the depths of colour, something from within . . . A sky of the sheerest wild blue . . . And the rug, my god, Persian was only a pretty word until now . . . I became mesmerised by the rug and then by the window frame, white, simply white, but I had never seen white such as this . . . a white of enormous depth, white without contrast, I didn’t need contrast, white as it is . . . I thought, Is this the world as it truly looks. Is this the reality we haven’t learned to see . . . The world that belongs to hawks, to tigers in the wild. (45) The allusion to Blake’s romantic vision is immediately eye-catching, but the choice of hawks is also pertinent as this avian predator stands at the apex of the colour vision pyramid in the animal kingdom. The perspective offered in this essay on colour in DeLillo has, of necessity, been somewhat less than hawk-eyed. The attempt to survey so many novels in rapid succession may even have left the reader with a sensation of flicking through one of the comic books which DeLillo read as a child. More granular and sustained consideration is required for us to see what was always there. DeLillo’s work exhorts us to see colour, to see more and better and more unforgettably. Through deft deliberations and the fresh depiction of uncommon impressions, DeLillo liberates colour from the merely decorative, promises a way of seeing beyond the instrumentalised sensorium of consumer capitalism, and leaves us on the verge of vision.

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Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. 1970. Bloomsbury, 2013. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Hill and Wang, 1981. Batchelor, David. Chromophobia. Reaktion, 2000. Begley, Adam. ‘Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction. No. 135.’ Paris Review, 128, 1993. https:// www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo. Accessed 7 February 2023. Benjamin, Walter. ‘A Child’s View of Colour.’ Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Vol. 1 (1913– 1926), edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 50–1. Caygill, Howard. Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience. Routledge, 1997. Connor, Steven. The Book of Skin. Reaktion, 2004. DeLillo, Don. Amazons. Granada, 1982. ——. Americana. Penguin, 1971. ——. The Body Artist. Picador, 2001. ——. Cosmopolis. 2003. Picador, 2011. ——. End Zone. 1972. Penguin, 1986. ——. Falling Man. Picador, 2007. ——. Great Jones Street. Picador, 2011. ——. Libra. 1988. Penguin, 1988 ——. Mao II. 1991. Vintage, 1992. ——. The Names. 1982. Picador, 1987. ——. Players. 1977. Picador, 2016. ——. Point Omega. Picador, 2010. ——. Ratner’s Star. 1976. Vintage, 1989. ——. Running Dog. 1978. Vintage, 1989. ——. Underworld. 1997. Picador, 1999. ——. White Noise. 1985. Picador, 1999. ——. Zero K. Picador, 2016. Engles, Tim. ‘Denying White Male Nostalgia: Don DeLillo’s Underworld.’ White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 147–84. ——. ‘“Who Are You, Literally?”: Fantasies of the White Self in White Noise.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 45, no. 3, 1999, pp. 755–87. Game 6. Directed by Michael Hoffman, screenplay by Don DeLillo. Serenade Films, 2005. Gaskill, Nicholas. Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Colour. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Theory of Colours. 1810. MIT Press, 1970. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. ‘Eye and Mind.’ The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Translated by William Cobb. Northwestern University Press, 1964. ——. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge, 2014. Newton, Isaac. Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light. 1704. Dover Press, 2012. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Blackwell, 1980. ——. Remarks on Colour. University of California Press, 1978.

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Part III Literary Arts

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11 The Art of Editing Tim Groenland

W

hen Don DeLillo spoke with interviewer David Marchese in late 2020 as part of the promotional campaign for The Silence, he was quickly confronted with a bibliographical puzzle. Marchese had been sent an advance copy of the novel, but had subsequently been informed by the publisher that a change had been made, and was then sent an updated galley. Why, he wondered, was there a discrepancy between these galleys? Specifically, why was a past-tense reference to Covid-19 absent from the text of the published version?1 His question invited DeLillo to explain this as an authorial decision: ‘Why did you take it out?’ DeLillo’s reply was curt: ‘I didn’t put Covid-19 in there. Somebody else had. Somebody else could have decided that it made it more contemporary. But I said, “there’s no reason for that.”’ When Marchese expressed shock that ‘an editor or whoever had the chutzpah to jam anything, let alone a Covid-19 mention, into one of your books’, the author snapped back, ‘It wasn’t going to stay, that’s for sure’ (Marchese). The admission of this textual change was unusual enough to be worthy of comment. The audacity of the change was noteworthy in itself, but the idea of editorial interference in the prose of DeLillo, an author long revered as a meticulous craftsman, was more jarring: as Emily Temple remarked, ‘who is going around dropping things into DeLillo novels in 2020?’ (Temple). Anne Enright, reviewing the novel, posed a similar question, before following it with others whose escalating absurdity indicated the book’s eerie atmosphere as well as the unlikelihood of such an editorial intervention in the work of a writer she describes in the same review as a ‘master stylist’: ‘Who would do such a thing? Are we sure it wasn’t the Russians? Was it a bot? Is there a virus now infecting new novels with lines about The Virus?’ (Enright). The question of responsibility for the change was, as we have seen, elided by both DeLillo and his interviewer (‘an editor or whoever’), and the mystery has, at the time of writing, not been resolved. The unusual nature of the edit, however, and the shock provoked by the notion of DeLillo being subject to editorial interference, might prompt us to consider an aspect of his career that remains largely undiscussed: his numerous professional relationships with editors. During the almost five-decade-long span of his career, DeLillo has worked with some of the most prominent editors of his era. After

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In the uncorrected proof, the sentence read: ‘But remaining fresh in every memory, the virus, the plague, Covid-19, the march through airport terminals, the face masks, the city streets emptied out’ (88). In the final text, the name of the virus was removed. Some reviewers clearly filed their copy without being notified of the change (Day).

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publishing his first three novels at Houghton Mifflin with Philip Rich, DeLillo moved to Knopf, where he was edited by Robert Gottlieb until 1982; at Viking, his three novels (White Noise [1985], Libra [1988] and Mao II [1991]) were edited by Elizabeth Sifton, Gerald Howard and Nan Graham respectively. When Graham moved to Scribner’s in 1994, DeLillo followed, and she has remained his editor from Underworld (1997) to the present. Two of the aforementioned editors (Graham and Howard) are recipients of the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for excellence in editing; Gottlieb is one of the most distinguished editors in post-war publishing. Studies of DeLillo’s oeuvre have, by and large, tended to consider the author as (to borrow his own phrase), a ‘writer alone in a room’. Along with the large volume of scholarship on DeLillo’s fiction’s relationship to postmodernism and its contribution to the formal development of the novel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (see, for example, LeClair and Boxall), critics have been attentive to DeLillo’s depictions of global markets, his treatment of authorship and publicity, and of the dilemmas attendant upon artistic production in a capitalist society (Crosthwaite; Osteen; Moran). However, there has been little sustained critical attention to the social processes involved in the production of his books, and editorial relationships have appeared only tangentially in DeLillo scholarship. In what follows, I survey DeLillo’s relationships with his editors and consider the author’s own conceptualisation of editorial labour in Mao II to situate his work in relation to the dramatic changes in the publishing industry throughout the late twentieth century.

DeLillo’s Editors DeLillo’s archives make it possible to bring the frequently invisible figures of his editors and publishers into view. Indeed, the papers show DeLillo – who, as critics have observed, has taken pains to avoid representing himself as a literary insider (Alter) – corresponding with a range of publishing figures, including luminaries such as Sonny Mehta, George Plimpton and Robert Silvers. Documents range from letters about the publication of DeLillo’s own books, to those from editors and publishers of the magazines in which his work was excerpted, to requests for blurbs and suggested commissions for reviews and non-fiction pieces. My focus here will be on the editors of his books. It is worth noting, however, that DeLillo’s early publications were in magazines, and letters from the 1960s and 1970s show rejections from editors at literary journals – for example, Roger Angell at the New Yorker and Rust Hills at Esquire – as well as acceptances from Epoch and the Kenyon Review. Houghton Mifflin was the first publisher to which DeLillo sent the manuscript of his debut novel Americana (Passaro), and the publisher would go on to acquire End Zone and Great Jones Street. DeLillo’s primary editor here was Philip Rich, although in practice the editorial process appears to have been handled by a team. DeLillo has credited this team with the patience to develop the manuscript, contrasting the editorial process with the possibilities available in the ‘narrowed’ publishing industry of the twenty-first century; ‘I don’t think my first novel would have been published as I submitted it today. I don’t think an editor would have read 50 pages of it [. . .] It was very overdone and shaggy, but two young editors saw something worth pursuing’ (Alter). Several editors discussed the full draft of Americana; a letter from Ellen Meyer (20 March 1970) contains a 15-page list of suggested revisions put

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together by Rich based on a discussion between Rich, Meyer and another unnamed editor. DeLillo’s one-word pencilled replies are visible in many cases: most of the edits to which DeLillo agrees are cuts, either of individual sentences or of paragraphs.2 It was only after the publication of Americana that DeLillo acquired an agent; Lois Wallace began to represent him in 1971 on the basis of the manuscript for The Self-Erasing Word (the original title for End Zone [1972]), and she soon began to communicate directly with Rich and Houghton Mifflin. The available correspondence relating to End Zone and Great Jones Street (1973) suggests an author growing in confidence in his approach, and suggestions from Rich on the latter do not appear to have resulted in significant changes. For his fourth novel Ratner’s Star (1976), DeLillo moved to Alfred A. Knopf, where he would work with editor-in-chief Robert Gottlieb. Gottlieb had initiated contact in 1972 with an admiring letter, passed on by Wallace as ‘a letter from one of the publishers who would like to steal you from Houghton Mifflin’. Gottlieb would go on to edit Ratner’s Star, Players (1977), Running Dog (1978) and The Names (1982) – with, according to DeLillo, ‘the substantial assistance of Lee Goerner’, who was Gottlieb’s assistant in those years (Bing). While these novels continued to grow the author’s reputation, it was evident that there was some dissatisfaction on both sides. Gottlieb discusses DeLillo in a brief section of his memoir devoted to the authors who switched publishers and ‘floated away’ for one reason or another (177). His recollections suggest an imperfect fit between editor, author and agent. Gottlieb writes of being ‘stung when an author I valued moved on’, before singling out the case of DeLillo: I had read and admired his first three novels, then published four more, then was cold-shouldered. I liked him but wasn’t at ease with him – and sensed that he felt that way about me, too. I disliked his agent, and no doubt she reciprocated. For a few weeks I felt badly used when he decamped, then remembered how many writers had come to me under similar circumstances. (176) DeLillo’s next three novels were published by Viking, which had been acquired by the Penguin Publishing Group in 1975. DeLillo’s time with the publisher would be marked both by increasing success – White Noise represented a commercial breakthrough, and Libra became his first best-seller – as well as editorial flux. Elisabeth Sifton was the editor of White Noise, Gerald Howard edited Libra, and Nan Graham edited Mao II. DeLillo has recalled that: ‘In each case at Viking, after I published a novel, the editor left. I got along very well with all of them and I’m still friendly with all of them. But this is something that happens in the business. I didn’t consider it an enormous problem’ (Bing). As with Gottlieb’s comments above, these remarks indicate a certain acceptance of the realities of publishing and the fluidity of the working relationships entailed therein. In 1984 Viking Penguin created an imprint, Elisabeth Sifton Books, which indicated the respect in which Sifton was then held at the firm, with White Noise one of the first

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Letter to Don DeLillo, 20 March 1970, Don DeLillo Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, correspondence with Philip Rich, Container 103.1.

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books published through it in 1985 (Langer). Publishers’ imprints flourished throughout the 1970s and 1980s; as Evan Brier notes, they offered a compromise between the tradition and small-scale administration of a small publisher and the funds and distribution network of a larger corporation (97). This arrangement helped to mitigate concerns about conglomeration, allowing corporate owners to retain the prestige of curated traditional publishing, and the editor the opportunity to do something akin to what Charlie Everson promises in Mao II: ‘to establish a solid responsible thoughtful list and give it the launching power of our mass-market capabilities’ (127). Viking’s size and ‘launching power’ would play an important role in the reception of the novel, helping to ensure the immediate success that would contribute to its subsequent canonisation. As Henry Veggian points out, Viking would ultimately publish three editions of White Noise, including a 1998 critical edition and a 2009 anniversary edition (the first of DeLillo’s novels to be reissued in this manner). After Sifton left to become executive vice-president of Knopf in 1987, Gerald Howard became DeLillo’s editor. This collaboration was evidently harmonious, although the editor has downplayed his contribution, referring to Libra as an example of a book that didn’t ‘need any fiddling’ (Yanigahara and Howard). His comments indicate DeLillo’s shift in status and, presumably, authorial confidence since the involved back-and-forth visible in the editing of Americana. Howard moved to Norton after the publication of Libra, but clearly continues to hold the author in high esteem. The editor interviewed DeLillo in 1997 and would continue to be a public advocate for the author, most recently in the pages of Bookforum, where he advanced the case for DeLillo as a deserving Nobel candidate (Howard, ‘The American Strangeness’; ‘Stockholm, Are You Listening?’). Howard would also persuade the author to allow the reissue of his first novel as a Penguin paperback (Howard and Kaldheim), which would take its place in a wide range of DeLillo novels that were printed and reprinted in the wake of his breakthrough successes; Veggian identifies the years 1985–97 as ‘a remarkable period in the printing and sale of DeLillo’s works’ (22). The role of individual editors is important to note here. Gary Fisketjon’s acclaimed Vintage Contemporaries, for example, a paperback imprint of Random House, successfully published several of DeLillo’s novels in the late 1980s. Key to the success of the imprint was the striking cover design, which created an immediately recognisable visual model (following a uniform De Stijl template by designer Lorraine Louie) that would be used to sell fiction by authors such as Jay McInerney, Raymond Carver and Cormac McCarthy. Fisketjon later recalled that the covers for The Names, Ratner’s Star and Great Jones Street, each of which featured striking black-and-white photography, were created ‘using an English designer whom I’d met who also designed album covers’ (Marc Tauss), indicating the way in which the series successfully marketed to a younger audience in a way that drew upon the energy of other media (Manning). The history of DeLillo’s relationship to the publishing industry also encompasses behind-the-scenes activity such as that described by Howard in an article about his own editing of Gordon Lish’s novel My Romance (1991). Here, Howard reveals that DeLillo initially contacted him with the suggestion he take on Lish’s novel (‘I Was Gordon Lish’s Editor’). This again suggests DeLillo’s insider status in the publishing world, but also points more specifically to DeLillo’s long friendship with Lish, which

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has received little scholarly notice.3 Lish has become, in recent decades, perhaps the most notorious American editor of the post-war era, as I have explored elsewhere (Groenland), and while he did not edit any of DeLillo’s books, his close friendship with the author merits further study. The pair have been friends since the early 1970s, and both Lish and DeLillo’s papers contain ample correspondence showing them reading and commenting on one another’s work, discussing the work of other authors, engaging in film criticism (keyed to what appears to have been a regular movie night) and gossiping about the literary world. In one notable example, DeLillo counsels Lish against making any public claim upon Raymond Carver’s writing, suggesting that any revelation of Lish’s editorial contribution to what he describes as Carver’s ‘best work’ would simply cause resentment among readers (Max). DeLillo’s friendship with Lish became a matter of public record in 1991, when he dedicated Mao II to the editor. Indeed, in the summer of 1991, when Mao II and My Romance were published within months of each other, James Wolcott profiled the two men for Vanity Fair; he not only noted the dedication but suggested that the character of Charlie Everson bore some similarity to Lish.

‘I’m adjusting to the new style’: Mao II and the Conglomerate Era Mao II is, then, a novel dedicated to a famous editor, as well as being DeLillo’s most extensive portrayal of an editor in his fiction. The charismatic figure of Charlie Everson, who badgers the reluctant Bill Gray for the manuscript of his next novel even as he draws him into an increasingly dangerous attempt to free a Swiss poet held hostage in Beirut, is key to the book’s plot, but peripheral to most criticism on the text. DeLillo’s portrayal of the publishing world has been analysed in terms of its clear allusions to the Rushdie Affair (cf. Scanlan), and his portrayal of a reclusive author in terms of the rise of celebrity culture and the dominance of image-based media (Osteen; Moran), but Everson tends to be mentioned only in passing. The editor is, though, an essential figure in terms of both plot and the novel’s symbolic landscape. It is Everson who convinces Bill to travel to London to take part in an ill-fated attempt to mobilise the author’s cult status against the terrorists, but his importance also lies in his position at the centre of the changing world of literary publishing. At key points in the novel, we see Scott – who functions as a kind of agent for the author, albeit one whose aim is to withhold rather than sell the work – observing archetypal scenes of literary production and consumption. The first chapter in Part One, as Veggian has noted, sees Scott walking among the shelves of a bookshore in a way that focuses his scrutiny

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An exception is Jess Row’s White Flights, which argues that much US fiction of the post-war era is marked by a retreat from the subject of race. In one chapter, Row links Lish and DeLillo together, noting their association and suggesting that some of their signature stylistic traits – in Lish’s case, a linguistic ‘aphasia’ that functions to erase the public realm, and in DeLillo’s, an avoidance of ethnic roots and the elevation of ‘facelessness’ to an aesthetic problem – evince a deep shame about whiteness that works against the recognition of race (Row 66–88). It is worth mentioning that all of DeLillo’s editors have been white, a situation that has been (and remains) the norm in the US publishing industry, as scholars such as Richard Jean So have shown.

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on ‘the commerce of books’ (19); the scene portrays, in Veggian’s description, ‘the heyday of the large retail bookseller, that class of national bookstores that adopted the franchise model of corporate development during the 1970s and thereby dominated the book business’ (68). Against this, we find Scott lingering in Bill’s office after the latter’s disappearance, blowing ‘dust and hair’ from the author’s typewriter, sitting with the biological traces of the solitary author (Mao II 140–3). Everson is, in this schema, the hinge between the private world of the writer and the outside world of politics and publishing – the mediator between the typewriter and the bookstore. Everson’s importance to Bill’s world becomes clear from his first, second-hand appearance in the novel. Brita’s mention of Everson during her photo session with Bill immediately prompts a diatribe from the author that places editors on the side of ‘the industry’ whose ‘compulsion’ is ‘to make writers harmless’, and he describes Charlie in parasitical terms: ‘Always new writers, you see. They sit in their corner offices and never have to worry about surviving the failed books because there’s always a new one coming along, a hot new excitement. They live, we die. A perfectly balanced state’ (47). Nevertheless, it is not long before we see Bill in New York; if Bill considers Charlie to be his nemesis, he is still unable to resist the editor’s summons. We see Bill enter the publisher’s building, where he is greeted by security officers sitting behind ‘a bank of telephones, TV monitors and computer displays’ (94); he is then summoned to the building’s top floor, where he meets ‘Charlie Everson in a bright tie’, whereupon the men walk past ‘a long corridor lined with book jackets’ and into ‘a large sunny office filled with plant life and polished surfaces’ (94–5). Bill’s request for whisky is rebuffed, and it soon becomes clear that Everson functions partly as an index of the changes in the publishing business in the decades since the men first entered it. The conspicuously modern publisher’s office, combining ‘polished surfaces’, security protocols and professionalised codes of behaviour with the carefully maintained aura of the literary (in the form of curated book jacket displays), is reflected in Charlie’s own appearance; he wears a ‘custom suit’ along with a ‘traditional loud tie that preserved a link to collegiate fun, that reminded people he was still Charlie E. and this was supposed to be the book business, not global war through laser technology’ (96). This custom suit contrasts with the editor’s old tweed jacket, which Bill adopted during their years of friendship; the author wears it to the meeting, in a gesture seemingly pitched somewhere between provocation and nostalgia. Bill and Charlie’s chat also indicates a palpable yearning for the homosocial world of postwar book publishing, which had only recently opened up to women to any significant extent (Coser et al. 148–74). Charlie’s shirt was given to Bill by one of the women in their circle, and the men’s conversation is sustained by repeated questions about Bill’s ex-wives and lovers (Mao II 95–6). The men begin to reminisce, before Charlie seamlessly moves to the business at hand – a press conference designed to free the ‘captive writer’, based on Charlie’s conviction that ‘a shift in rooted attitudes and hardline positions’ can be brought about through ‘public events that show us how to imagine other possibilities’ (99). This conviction is conveniently inseparable from the editor’s desire to ‘create a happy sensation’ through Bill’s public appearance, and indeed the author seems swayed as much by how ‘beautifully balanced’ the editor’s plan is as by the plight of the imprisoned poet (99). Charlie has, it is clear, managed to maintain his position by adapting to the increasing conglomeration and professionalisation of the publishing industry, as well as by his

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charismatic management of his temperamental authors. This process of conglomeration, already the central feature of the publishing industry from the 1960s onwards, accelerated dramatically in the 1980s (through what John B. Thompson calls a ‘growth’ phase driven by the expansion of retail scales and a concomitant increase in sales potential, costs and risks [108–13]) and reached what Albert N. Greco describes as a ‘frenetic’ pace in the 1990s (51–5). Among the effects of this process was the growing importance, for editors at large firms, of producing ‘big books’, often produced by heavily marketed ‘brand-name authors’ (Thompson 215). This dramatically changed the context in which editors worked, and accentuated some of the fraught dynamics inherent to the author–editor relationship. Editors faced new pressures brought by the demand that each book be able, commercially, to ‘carry its weight’; for authors, the pressure to succeed had intensified, and the expectation to engage in ‘career management’ was increased by the growth of agents (Thompson 96–9). When Bill comments ironically on the editor’s patience with writers, noting that ‘it must be hard for you, dealing with these wretches day after day’, Charlie responds: No, it’s easy. I take them to a major eatery. I say, Pooh pooh pooh pooh. I say, Drinky drinky drinky. I tell them their books are doing splendidly in the chains. I tell them readers are flocking to the malls. I say, Coochy coochy coo. I recommend the roast monkfish with the savoy cabbage. I tell them the reprint bidders are howling in the commodity pits. There is miniseries interest, there is audiocassette interest, the White House wants a copy for the den. I say, the publicity people are setting up tours. The Italians love the book completely. The Germans are groping for new levels of rapture. Oh my oh my oh my. (Mao II 101) We learn little about Charlie’s textual editing of these writers, or of Bill’s work (there are allusions to a falling out between them, but it is suggested that this was as much a matter of personality as of the treatment of the author’s manuscripts). The satirical treatment of the literary world here resides precisely in the fact that we see Charlie’s profession as one that seems primarily to combine the roles of event manager, diplomat and impresario.4 One of the most significant factors in 1970s mergers was the emergence of multimedia conglomerates, with interests spread across ‘film, television, cable TV, newspapers, magazines, home video equipment’ as well as book publishing, prompting a new search for ‘multimedia tie-ins’ (Coser et al. 29). The editor’s art, here – at least in the top-floor conglomerated publishing world that Charlie inhabits – appears to reside in a combination of personal management skills and an ability to manage and invoke the varied forms of distribution (chain stores in malls), adaptation (audio and visual translation) and cultural and political capital (the White House den) in which the profitability of literary fiction now resides.

 4

If Evenson is partly based upon Lish, then the main similarity resides in their respective positions in the publishing world at the turn of the 1990s. Lish was a senior editor at Knopf, who also supported his little magazine The Quarterly; his flamboyant public persona and ‘charismatic authority’, as David Winters puts it, were key to his publicity efforts as well as his teaching (128–31). An outlier in the changing corporate environment of Knopf, Lish was fired in 1995.

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There is a clear shift here, from the post-war culture in which editors were granted a relative degree of freedom to acquire and edit books, to one in which, as Michael Pietsch has said of contemporary publishing, much of the editor’s labour involves ‘managing processes on the author’s behalf’ (Pietsch); in Sinykin’s comic summation, ‘smoking cigars with Ralph Ellison has given way to filling out profit and loss forms’ (471). This kind of freedom in the pursuit of literary values still lingers in Charlie’s memory, and – he suggests – the institution’s. Later, Charlie claims that he alone knows how to publish Bill’s work: You need a major house that also has a memory. That’s why they hired me. They want to take a closer look at tradition. I represent something to these people. I represent books. I want to establish a solid responsible thoughtful list and give it the launching power of our mass-market capabilities. We have enormous resources. If you spend years writing a book, don’t you want to see it fly? (Mao II 127) Charlie’s brash confidence and faith in the compatibility of tradition with the mass market (the ability of the ‘major house’ to maintain a ‘memory’) are, of course, undercut by Bill’s refusal to give his editor the manuscript. The editor, though, also obliquely acknowledges the tension between his literary aims and the mass-media landscape in which he now works. When Bill asks him how he is, Charlie’s curt replies indicate the precarity of his own situation as well as that of the traditional publishing houses, whose conglomerated ownership structures come to seem as diffuse and shadowy as the terrorist organisation targeting the men: ‘And yourself, Charlie.’ ‘I’m adjusting to the new style.’ ‘How long have you been here?’ ‘Two years.’ ‘Who owns this company?’ ‘You don’t want to know.’ ‘Give me the whole big story in one quick burst.’ ‘It’s all about limousines.’ (101–2) Margaret Scanlan describes Charlie as a ‘thriving participant in the new literary scene’ (240), but we might just as easily read him as a doomed relic from a bygone era: an embattled representative of ‘the old dusty lovable skinflint house’ (Mao II 102) in its final throes.5 Charlie and Bill’s conversation is indicative of a mournful attitude to literary publishing that was common at the time, as Evan Brier outlines in his identification of a widespread ‘editorial critique’ of conglomeration during the 1980s and 1990s. During these years, several high-profile editors and publishers wrote essays and books that presented a negative account of the development of book publishing in the post-war years, one that combined anxieties over the future of literature with the ‘professional and economic anxiety’ attendant upon growing corporate power (Brier 86–8). The  5

Charlie’s mortality is alluded to on several occasions; the editor’s post-operative sterility has been read as ‘a disquieting analogue for the literary scene as DeLillo imagines it’ (Scanlan 245; Mao II 127, 199).

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professionalisation and rationalisation of the industry, in this account, places a distinct pressure upon the tension between the editor’s perennial dual role as artist’s ally and as ‘middle-management employee of a profit-seeking enterprise’ (97). Charlie’s scheme to deploy Bill’s reclusive celebrity to free a hostage, then, might be seen as an attempt to broker a compromise by staging an event that maintains the prestige of high literary values (a reclusive author reading poems in French) while simultaneously drumming up publicity for that author’s long-awaited novel. Bill’s commitment to this scheme is never convincing (as signalled by his continued refusal to reveal to Charlie where he is staying), but it is arguably the scheme’s failure that leads to his demise; the direction of Mao II’s plot suggests that ‘the romantic notion of the novelist as solitary culture hero’, as Brier writes in his description of the editorial critique, has become ‘unthinkable’ (Brier 91). The novel’s final section subtly cements the link between author and editor. While Charlie is left behind in London as Bill proceeds to Lebanon, the editor remains present in the form of his tweed jacket, which Bill wears to his death (Mao II 170–1). This fact is ambiguous; does Bill’s death in his editor’s jacket signal Charlie’s complicity in coaxing his author out of hiding in a way that ultimately leads to his death, or does it undercut Bill’s stubborn attachment to the romantic individualism of the artist?

‘Nan said now’: DeLillo and Graham When Gerry Howard moved from Viking to W.W. Norton shortly after the publication of Libra in August 1988, DeLillo found himself once again without an editor.6 The author was already corresponding with Graham at that stage; in September 1988 she sent him a galley of The Satanic Verses, a novel that she had edited and was doing much to promote (Elie). Indeed, Mao II’s interest in publishing and editorial dynamics could be said to have its roots in Graham’s editorial work with other authors. DeLillo’s response to the galley is unrecorded, but letters elsewhere in the pair’s correspondence refer again to Rushdie, and DeLillo read at a 1989 event in New York in support of the author (Bernstein). The fate of Rushdie’s novel would deeply inform the plot of Mao II, the first book of his that Graham would edit. DeLillo’s working relationship with Graham coincided with his deepening interest in the changing status of authorship in late twentieth-century capitalism, and bridges what are often seen as the two major phases of his career (pre- and post-Underworld). It also marks the author’s increased engagement with the publicity machinery of the publishing industry. Scribner would go on to pay 1.3 million dollars for English-language rights to the manuscript of Underworld, an amount that indicated an elevation of the author’s commercial status and necessitated a level of publicity that Veggian describes as ‘an astounding advertising “blitz”’ (79). At the time of the novel’s publication, Publishers Weekly noted the ‘corporate packaging’ of the novel, with screen and audio rights being sold almost simultaneously in a flurry of ‘lateral marketing plans’; the author noted that while DeLillo still refused to appear on television, he was participating in a ‘seven-city reading tour’ and sitting for major profiles and photographs with major magazines (Bing).

 6

DeLillo’s status was, at this point, such that an editor from Doubleday was writing to the author’s agent with the words ‘I’d kill to work with him’ (DeLillo Papers, Container 104.2, p. 47).

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The textual editing of Underworld itself appears to have been relatively minimal. One of the clearest pieces of correspondence concerns the book’s marketing: in a onepage letter, DeLillo objects to a sample design in which the book’s cover has been made to resemble a packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes, arguing that this design reduces the book’s status to a secondary object. We can see in this exchange, perhaps, the urge to preserve distinctly literary values against the conglomerated urge towards ‘lateral marketing’ and diffuse commodification. As a product, the book was presented as a conspicuously literary blockbuster, with a significant sales push carefully calibrated to maintain a ‘traditional and non-sensational’ (in Bing’s words) approach. The rise of conglomerates, as Sinykin argues, brought intense pressures that prompted writers and publishers to ‘negotiate’ their ‘complicity’ with market demands (465), in ways that have visible implications for aesthetic form; the publication of Underworld, with its reluctantly emergent author and prestige-conscious marketing blitz, can be seen as one outcome of these negotiations. Correspondence relating to subsequent novels suggests that Graham’s contribution to these texts was subtle and generally focused on the micro rather than macro scale of developmental editing. During the editing process for Cosmopolis, for example, DeLillo made edits in response to what Graham saw as sentence-level issues: the overuse of alliteration in a particular sentence, unwanted repetitions of particular words and phrases, and typos. Their letters show a mix of these kinds of detailed editorial queries and discussions relating to design and marketing materials such as cover designs and blurbs. References to phone conversations show that these letters were part of an ongoing dialogue, and the two often share news, social updates and indeed industry gossip: in 1994, for example, Graham described her difficulties in working with Bill Gates on what would become his book The Road Ahead (published by Viking Penguin in 1995 after she had left the company), and subsequently her new working environment at Scribner’s. Graham also relays news and rumours around the sale of publishers, divisions and book auctions, often with an implied note of mutual horror at the scale of commercial activity described. In 2011 Graham’s career was recognised with the award of the Maxwell E. Perkins Award (later renamed the Medal for Editorial Excellence), given annually by the Center for Fiction to ‘an editor, publisher, or agent who over the course of his or her career has discovered, nurtured and championed writers of fiction in the United States’. DeLillo’s most public acknowledgement of Graham’s contribution to his work – indeed, his most extended public statement on any of his editors – came in December 2011, when he presented a speech to mark this occasion at the Center for Fiction in New York. DeLillo’s speech7 opens with a brief anecdote about how, as a young writer, he ‘saw Hemingway one day on Forty-eighth street’, watching the older writer as he turned and walked towards the Scribner bookstore and offices nearby. He then turns to meditate on the fame of the publishing house and its most famous editor Max Perkins, quoting a letter from Thomas Wolfe in which he describes the editor as ‘a heroic figure . . . one of the rocks to which my life is anchored’;8 this exchange evokes an image of Scribner’s

 7

DeLillo’s speech is viewable, at the time of writing, on the Center for Fiction’s YouTube channel. DeLillo’s typescript copy is held in the DeLillo Papers at the University of Texas (‘Maxwell E. Perkins Award’, Container 147.9). 8 DeLillo may have encountered these words in A. Scott Berg’s biography of Perkins, in which Wolfe is quoted.

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offices, with their ‘old wooden desks, tall filing cabinets, pipe smoke in the air, and a number of well-educated older men, in suits and ties, stooped over handwritten manuscripts’. This segues into a description of Graham’s offices in the present-day Scribner buildings, ‘an action-packed movie in 3-D’, filled with editorial clutter: ‘manuscripts stacked on the floor’ in advance of being taken home, books in multiple genres lying everywhere; ‘this is an editor’s life and times, her career in paper and print’. DeLillo’s portrait includes mention of the many photographs and personal objects in the room, the most notable of which is ‘Hilary Rodham Clinton’s Christmas card’.9 The author then turns to Graham’s editorial qualities: What kind of editor does a writer want? I’ve always thought of myself as a writer of sentences. This is where everything begins. Language, rhythms, words on a page, what they sound like, even what they look like. Nan understands this. She edits, at the outset, on the level of words and sentences. She sees things that I’ve missed. She finds clumsy writing that I can’t quite believe is there until I look more closely and see more clearly. Once, we sat in a nearly deserted restaurant going through a manuscript, page by page. Food arrived, sentences disappeared. She gets inside the text, and then inside the characters and the narrative itself. (‘Center for Fiction’) The speech oscillates between writerly praise and biographical sketch, with the latter revealing something of the combination of labour and leisure in an editor’s social existence: ‘She plays tennis against young, hard-serving, best-selling writers [. . .] She uses Stephen King’s seats at Red Sox games.’ He praises Graham for being ‘enormously good-humored and good-natured. This matters to a writer.’ Graham, according to the author, ‘believes in the books she publishes with a genuine fervor. I like to imagine her presenting a book to the sales force, or marketing people, whoever and wherever they are, in secret rooms on Sixth Avenue or at a sales conference in Tahiti’ (‘Center for Fiction’). These last lines are interesting for what they suggest about the value of an editor as ally and as commercial representative; DeLillo values Graham both for the ‘belief’ and ‘fervor’ needed to win over a sales force and convert aesthetic value into commercial support, and for the distance this gives him from the scene of these industry negotiations, the details of which he can remain unconcerned with (‘whoever and wherever they are’). There is an echo here of DeLillo’s protagonists and their mysterious assignments at the centre of political and cultural change, operating in ‘secret rooms’ in Manhattan as well as in exotic locales. DeLillo then mentions that he has ‘witnessed her persuasiveness first-hand’; thus begins the speech’s penultimate section, which contains its most specific information about the editorial process. This section describes Graham’s creation (as it appears) of The Angel Esmeralda, an account that acts as a tribute to her vision, power to convince and status as custodian of DeLillo’s late-career presentation. He explains that Graham had recently suggested ‘that this would be a good time to publish a collection of my stories’. DeLillo’s own conception of such a collection remained ‘vague’ and

 9

Graham edited Clinton’s memoir Living History, published by Scribner’s in 2003. Indeed, Robert Gottlieb edited Bill Clinton’s memoir My Life (published 2004), another demonstration of the permeability of the borders between literary publishing, commerce and politics.

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‘distant’ but, according to his lightly comic account, ‘Nan said now.’ The editor then ‘named a publication date, discussed the stories that could be included, determined the order of the stories, worked out a three-part structure, with an illustration for each part, and humored me as I wondered aloud about a possible title’. Graham ‘already knew the title’, in fact, and worked behind the scenes until, as DeLillo describes it, One day the book came floating my way. Wonderful cover photograph. Handsome jacket design. Embossed letters, silhouetted angel, beautiful sky blue background. Typo on page two hundred and five. It happens. Everything happens. (‘Center for Fiction’) Again, it is striking how the author moves into a kind of grateful passive voice when describing the editor’s practical labour; the book ‘came floating’ to him, just as the ‘food arrived’ and ‘sentences disappeared’ in their restaurant meeting; the book itself takes on an angelic cast in this description, as (by extension) does the editor who made it appear. This language, of course, partly bespeaks the status of an author who has long since become a priority for their publishing house, and whose prestige and sales guarantee them a certain remove from the realities of sales, marketing and distribution. It also, though, suggests something of the appreciation held by any author whose editor successfully combines the ability to get ‘inside a text’ with the nous to navigate the ‘secret rooms’ of conglomerate power structures. In a 2016 essay, Howard suggests that the editor in the conglomerated book industry needs to read with a kind of bifurcated consciousness, split between a ‘private arena’ in which the editor responds to the work’s quality, and ‘another cognitive plane’ in which the book’s appeal is ‘reality tested’ against factors such as market trends, the charisma of the author and other publishing realities (‘The Open Refrigerator’). This ability to compartmentalise the literary-critical and corporate management elements of editing, particularly in a way that insulates the author from the latter concerns, is strongly implied in DeLillo’s praise of Graham. The final paragraphs of the speech return to the opening memory of Hemingway on the streets of midtown Manhattan, drifting into the wistful question of how it came to be that the young observer would one day find himself not only published by Scribner, but ‘presenting the Maxwell E. Perkins Award to a Scribner editor – the skillful, steadfast and irreplaceable Nan Graham’.

Conclusion The art of Graham’s editing, as we have seen, involves the successful balancing of the writer’s need for subtle textual support and a more hard-nosed negotiation of the world of literary commerce (symbolised, perhaps, by the ability to hold one’s own in tennis matches with ‘young, hard-serving, best-selling writers’). The textual editing of The Silence – to return us to this essay’s opening – takes on a different cast in this context. It is for future scholars to determine the exact circumstances of the textual change, and to gauge the extent to which it might be a product of its publishing moment: the result, perhaps, of an irrepressible urge to render a text ‘relevant’ in the midst of an all-encompassing pandemic, or of a deeper anxiety over DeLillo’s marketability in a changed literary landscape. The unwanted nature of the edit, though, allows us to see it as a kind of reverse image of the seamless, almost protective editorial presence described in DeLillo’s homage to Graham. Here, we see editorial activity getting

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‘inside the text’ in a way that is experienced by author and readers as invasive, shocking; the pressure of the marketplace, in the form of the publicist’s relentless demand for relevance, has forced its way into the text itself, requiring the author not just to reverse the change but to subsequently answer for it in public. The goal of the editor is invisibility: when the author finds himself discussing changes to the text, the editor’s art has been misapplied.

Works Cited Alter, Alexandra. ‘What Don DeLillo’s Books Tell Him.’ Wall Street Journal, 30 January 2010. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704094304575029673526948334. Accessed 2 February 2022. Bernstein, Richard. ‘Passages in Defense of a Colleague: Writers Read and Speak for Rushdie.’ New York Times, 23 February 1989. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/23/world/passagesin-defense-of-a-colleague-writers-read-and-speak-for-rushdie.html. Accessed 2 February 2022. Bing, Jonathan. ‘The Ascendance of Don DeLillo.’ PublishersWeekly.Com, 11 August 1997. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/19970811/22663-the-ascendance-of-dondelillo.html. Accessed 2 February 2022. Boxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. Routledge, 2006. Brier, Evan. ‘The Editor as Hero: The Novel, the Media Conglomerate, and the Editorial Critique.’ American Literary History, 30, no. 1, 2018, pp. 85–107. Coser, Lewis A., et al. Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing. Basic Books, 1982. Crosthwaite, Paul. The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 2019. Day, Jon. ‘The Silence by Don DeLillo – beyond White Noise.’ Financial Times, 12 October 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/ddf4f750-3be4-478b-9d84-4711e383393f. Accessed 2 February 2022. DeLillo, Don. ‘The Center for Fiction Benefit & Awards Dinner 2011: Don DeLillo and Jeannette Walls.’ Speech, 6 December 2011, The Center for Fiction, New York. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=FRA8TYqiobU&t=133s. Accessed 2 February 2022. ——. Mao II. New edn, Vintage, 1992. ——. The Silence. Picador, 2020. ——. The Silence. Uncorrected Proof Copy. Picador, 2020. Elie, Paul. ‘Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Martin Amis Recall Surviving the Satanic Verses Fatwa.’ Vanity Fair, April 2014. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/05/salman-rushdieian-mcwean-martin-amis-satanic-verses-fatwa. Accessed 2 February 2022. Enright, Anne. ‘The Silence by Don DeLillo Review – the Machine Stops.’ The Guardian, 22 October 2020. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/22/the-silence-by-don-delilloreview-the-machine-stops. Accessed 2 February 2022. Eve, Martin Paul. Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Stanford University Press, 2019. Gottlieb, Robert. Avid Reader: A Life. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. Greco, Albert N. The Book Publishing Industry. 2nd edn, Routledge, 2005. Groenland, Tim. The Art of Editing: Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace. Bloomsbury, 2019. Howard, Gerald. ‘The American Strangeness: An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ Hungry Mind Review (via the Wayback Machine), 43, 1997. http://web.archive.org/web/19990129081431/ www.bookwire.com/hmr/hmrinterviews.article$2563. Accessed 2 February 2022. ——. ‘I Was Gordon Lish’s Editor.’ Slate, October 2007. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ politics/book_blitz/2007/10/i_was_gordon_lishs_editor.html. Accessed 2 February 2022. ——. ‘The Open Refrigerator.’ Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century. Milkweed Editions, 2016, pp. 190–201.

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——. ‘Stockholm, Are You Listening?; Why Don DeLillo Deserves the Nobel.’ Bookforum, 27, no. 1, 2020. https://www.bookforum.com/print/2701/why-don-delillo-deserves-thenobel-23926. Accessed 2 February 2022. Howard, Gerry, and Peter Kaldheim. ‘From Pick-Up and Pynchon to a Lifetime in Publishing. Discussion between Gerry Howard and Peter Kaldheim.’ Literary Hub, 29 July 2019. https:// lithub.com/from-pick-up-and-pynchon-to-a-lifetime-in-publishing. Accessed 7 February 2023. Konstantinou, Lee, and Dan Sinykin. ‘Literature and Publishing, 1945–2020.’ American Literary History, 33, no. 2, 2021, pp. 225–43. Langer, Emily. ‘Elisabeth Sifton, Revered Book Editor and Publisher, Dies at 80.’ Washington Post, 21 December 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/elisabeth-sifton-reveredbook-editor-and-publisher-dies-at-80/2019/12/21/a482ded8-22d1-11ea-a153-dce4b94e4249_ story.html. Accessed 2 February 2022. LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. University of Illinois Press, 1987. Manning, Sean. ‘Vintage Contemporaries.’ Talking Covers, 12 September 2012. https://talkingcovers.com/2012/09/12/vintage-contemporaries/. Accessed 2 February 2022. Marchese, David. ‘We All Live in Don DeLillo’s World. He’s Confused by It Too.’ Interview with Don DeLillo. New York Times Magazine, 12 October 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2020/10/12/magazine/don-delillo-interview.html. Accessed 2 February 2022. Max, D. T. ‘The Carver Chronicles.’ New York Times, 9 August 1998. https://www.nytimes. com/1998/08/09/magazine/the-carver-chronicles.html. Accessed 2 February 2022. Moran, Joe. ‘Don DeLillo and the Myth of the Author-Recluse.’ Journal of American Studies, 34, no. 1, 2000, pp. 137–52. Osteen, Mark. ‘Becoming Incorporated: Spectacular Authorship and DeLillo’s Mao II.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 45, no. 3, 1999, pp. 643–74. Passaro, Vince. ‘Dangerous Don DeLillo.’ New York Times Magazine, 19 May 1991, p. 35. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-delillo.html. Accessed 2 February 2022. Pietsch, Michael. Phone interview by Tim Groenland, 16 August 2017. Row, Jess. White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. Graywolf Press, 2019. Sample, Mark L. ‘Unseen and Unremarked On: Don DeLillo and the Failure of the Digital Humanities.’ Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold. University of Minnesota Press, 2012, pp. 187–201. Scanlan, Margaret. ‘Writers Among Terrorists: Don DeLillo’s Mao II and the Rushdie Affair.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 40, no. 2, 1994, pp. 229–52. Sinykin, Dan. ‘The Conglomerate Era: Publishing, Authorship, and Literary Form, 1965–2007.’ Contemporary Literature, 58, no. 4, 2017, pp. 462–91. So, Richard Jean. Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction. Columbia University Press, 2020. Temple, Emily. ‘An Editor Snuck Covid-19 into Don DeLillo’s New Novel – but DeLillo Took It Out at the Last Moment.’ Literary Hub, 13 October 2020. https://lithub.com/an-editorsnuck-covid-19-into-don-delillos-latest-novel-but-delillo-took-it-out-at-the-last-moment. Accessed 2 February 2022. Thompson, John B. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. 2nd edn, Polity, 2012. Veggian, Henry. Understanding Don DeLillo. University of South Carolina Press, 2014. Winters, David. ‘Theory and the Creative Writing Classroom: Conceptual Revision in the School of Gordon Lish.’ Contemporary Literature, 57, no. 1, 2016, pp. 111–34. Yanigahara, Hanya, and Gerald Howard. ‘Hanya Yanagihara in Conversation with Her Editor.’ Slate Magazine, 5 March 2015, https://slate.com/culture/2015/03/hanya-yanagihara-authorof-a-little-life-and-her-editor-gerry-howard.html. Accessed 2 February 2022.

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12 Poetry Catherine Gander

Language is fossil poetry. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Poet’ 190 Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page? Does the beauty and variability of our language depend to an important degree on the medium that carries the words? Does poetry need paper? Don DeLillo, PEN America

T

‘

here’s a zone I aspire to’, Don DeLillo admitted in a 1993 interview. ‘It’s a state of automatic writing, and it represents the paradox that’s at the center of a writer’s consciousness – this writer’s anyway’: First you look for discipline and control . . . You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there’s a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger . . . It’s a kind of rapture . . . I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do. (‘The Art of Fiction’) DeLillo describes the push–pull of this writerly paradox again in 1997, associating it once more with a poetic sensibility: ‘I think that poets must know this feeling, the feeling of being willing to sacrifice meaning to pure language, let language press meaning upon you, and it’s an odd thing’ (‘City Arts’). A change came in DeLillo’s writing practice, he attests, while he was living in Greece and writing The Names (1982). Taking regular walks around Athens, DeLillo saw among the ruins of an ancient civilisation a new way to shape his writing practice. The ‘inscribed words and sentences on stone and marble’ (‘City Arts’) at the Parthenon began to translate to the pages of his workin-progress: DeLillo switched to typing each new paragraph on a fresh sheet of paper; small blocks of text surrounded by paginal space that resembled more the pages from a book of poems than the draft of a novel. DeLillo has employed the same creative practice ever since, with the same, secondhand typewriter, whose solid letter-hammers he says give his writing a ‘sculptural quality’ that echoes the abstract, visual art of those ancient carved stones (‘The Art of Fiction’). Speaking again in poetic terms, DeLillo describes the ‘odd correspondences’ between the typed words on the page, which ‘match up not just through meaning but through sound and look’ (‘The Art of Fiction’). Guided as much by the sound and rhythm of the words as their meaning, DeLillo admits that if a word in a sentence has ‘one syllable too many,

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I look for another word . . . I’ll consider altering the meaning of a sentence to keep the rhythm, the syllable beat. I’m completely willing to let language press meaning upon me’ (‘The Art of Fiction’). This poetic practice has had the effect of slowing DeLillo’s writing pace and inviting intellectual contemplation. If, DeLillo admits, in the 1970s he was ‘writing too fast’, the art of the alphabet he found among the Greek ruins ‘forced [him] to think more deeply about what [he] was putting on the page’ (‘The Art of Fiction’). For DeLillo, the analogue technology of the manual typewriter remains crucial to the art of fiction. Indeed, DeLillo has spoken about his typewriter in curiously historical, archaeological terms: I began to see an odd connection between those afternoons on the Parthenon and this old, scarred, battered manual typewriter I use. It’s an Olympia, as it happens. Imbedded beneath the keys of this typewriter, in a kind of swamp bed, a deposit that’s been there for many years, there are dead strands of hair, dead bodies of insects, flaked skin, dandruff, drool. (‘City Arts’) The fingertips of the author press the keys, the hammers strike the page; the author’s body sheds skin, hair, saliva in the act of constructing narratives over years and decades. These small corporeal deposits combine with the bodies of insects to create a microcosmic layered history in the frame of the writing machine. With this knowledge, and with the ‘odd connection’ of his typewriter and the Parthenon in mind, we might think about how DeLillo’s art is a form of composition and excavation both – a radical reconnection of language with meaning, which, as DeLillo attests, relies on experiencing words first as visual, then as something wholly ‘sensual’; at the same time abstract and concrete (‘The Art of Fiction’). Over the following pages, I want to probe this poetic paradox inherent in DeLillo’s writing. While this chapter’s word limit does not allow me to explore the depth and scope of DeLillo’s engagements with poetry and poetics, I hope to offer an original contribution to DeLillo scholarship in part by considering the ways his use of language moves between the twin impulses of poetry: to (re-)attach words to physical things via the act of naming, and thus revitalise relationships between the self and non-self (i.e., to re-establish one’s place in the here); and to elevate felt experience beyond the bounds of spatio-temporal confinements (i.e., to transcend temporal measurement into a suspended, atemporal now). I see DeLillo in this regard as working just as much in an established (European) lyric tradition as in the Emersonian poetic tradition (that is influenced by European Romanticism, and moves through William James to the modernism of Gertrude Stein, James’s student of ‘automatic writing’), as well as within the precincts of postmodern poetics. Related to this inquiry is the question of how, and to what extent, poetry can extend beyond the individual to have a social function. An advocate of human rights, DeLillo has made clear his belief that ‘[w]riters who are subjected to state censorship, threatened with imprisonment or menaced by violent forces in their society clearly merit the support of those of us who enjoy freedom of expression’ (PEN America). Participating in several PEN-sponsored events at which literature is shared publicly as an example of such freedom and as a tool against state oppression, DeLillo has often chosen to read poetry. Examples include a gathering in support of the Chinese dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, sentenced to eleven years’ incarceration for inciting subversion of state power,

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and a protest at the US government’s post-9/11 PATRIOT Act, both in New York City. More than addressing the formal and lyric poetics of DeLillo’s craft, then – a subject that has received some scholarly attention in the twenty-first century, although not as much as is deserved1 – this chapter examines the role and function of poetry in DeLillo’s fiction – a subject that has drawn barely any critical attention at all. While DeLillo’s novels, stories and plays are littered with artists and artworks, poets and poems also play quietly significant roles. One might think, for example, of the crucial figure of the Swiss poet Jean-Claude Julien, the political hostage in Mao II (1991), or the recurring figure of Eric Packer’s (also Swiss) wife Elise Shifrin in Cosmopolis (2003), or Tessa Berens in The Silence (2020), or even the scattering of amateur poets in Americana (1971). Poems and poetic forms also recur across DeLillo’s body of work: haiku in Point Omega (2010), whose form underpins the novel’s structure, its lucid imagery and narrative suspension; song lyrics in Great Jones Street (1973); rap lyrics in Cosmopolis; elegy in End Zone (1972); graffiti in Underworld (1997); the persistent spectre of modernist poetics in The Body Artist (2001), a novel whose temporal disorientation echoes the syntactic experiments of Stein and the simultaneously circular and transcendent eloquence of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets; the homage to Frank O’Hara’s ‘Meditations in an Emergency’ in the title (and subtext) of ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’ (2009); the painfully relevant title of Percy Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam on a postcard that arrives in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in Falling Man (2007). I award the bulk of this chapter, however, to a close reading of DeLillo’s first novel after the 9/11 attacks, Cosmopolis, which, I contend, engages profoundly with poetry’s place not only in the private life of the lyric subject in relation to the ordered harmony of ‘the starry firmament’ (cosmos, from the Greek kosmos),2 but the communal life of the social subject in the disordered environment of the city-state (polis, also of Greek origin). * * * Ralph Waldo Emerson’s assertion that ‘[a]s we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry’ (Nature 36) relies, broadly speaking, on the understanding that words have become uncoupled from their origins in nature, and corrupted by men who wield them for political, personal and financial gain. ‘Language is fossil poetry’ for Emerson because digging into the etymological past of words unearths ‘images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin’: ‘the etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture’ (‘The Poet’ 190). Emerson’s faith in the representative figure of ‘the poet’, a ‘wise man’ who will ‘pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things’ (Nature 37), might find its modern correlative in the idea, posited often by DeLillo, that the fiction-writer (and perhaps more deeply, the poet, as

 1

David Cowart is a scholar who has consistently seen the influence of poets on DeLillo’s work; Philip Nel has written an excellent sustained study of The Body Artist’s modernist poetics.  2 Pythagoras is said to have been the first to apply this word to ‘the universe’, perhaps originally meaning ‘the starry firmament’, but it later was extended to the whole physical world, including the earth. See https://www.etymonline.com/word/cosmo-

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the above quotations attest) offers an antidote to ‘what has been reported, rumored, confirmed or solemnly chanted’ (‘The Power of History’). ‘Language’, according to DeLillo, ‘can be an agent of redemption’; it ‘exposes the past to painterly textures’ (‘The Power of History’). The salvific ‘painterly’ or ‘picturesque’ character of language for both DeLillo and Emerson, then, is bound up with the creative writer’s responsibility to provide a ‘counternarrative’ to the way history is recorded. This involves digging into the ‘swamp bed’ of human experience and finding ‘a language to reinvigorate the senses’ (‘The Power of History’) – an archaeological impulse which has at its heart the desire to bring the past back to life: ‘fiction is all about reliving things’, as DeLillo puts it in the same essay. This impulse, so deeply part of DeLillo’s theory of language, manifests across much of his work.3 The archaeologist Maurice Wu in Ratner’s Star (1976), for example, disinters artefacts to reveal a human past ‘more advanced the deeper we dig’ (321, 360). DeLillo’s characters often enjoy inventing names and back stories for people they encounter, and are often fascinated by etymology and linguistic definition, discovering in the dictionary a kind of safety (Fife in End Zone, passim), or sensuality that leads to sexual desire (Gary and Myna in End Zone, 206), or childhood memory (Jeffrey in Zero K, 25, 55), or soothing beauty (Billy in Ratner’s Star, 7). ‘The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty’, writes Emerson (‘The Poet’ 185), a sentiment that was taken up by American modernists such as William Carlos Williams, whose dictum ‘no ideas but in things’ (Williams 6) was informed by a conviction that seeing and naming are fundamentally linked, and that to ‘stay in touch with the real we constantly have to renew our language, in and outside poetry’ (Halter 113). DeLillo has expressed a very similar sentiment, noting that ‘Mathematics and astronomy are full of beautiful nomenclature’: Science has given us a new language to draw from . . . To me, science is a source of new names, new connections between people and the world. Rilke said we had to rename the world. Renaming suggests an innocence and a rebirth. Some words adapt, and these are the ones we use in our new world. (‘An Interview’ 9) DeLillo’s blending of science and poetry here points to a profound connection between these two seemingly disparate disciplines that underpins his entire oeuvre, and while the poetic lineage DeLillo draws from includes mostly American poets,4 it is, as we shall see, the Austrian lyrical poet Rainer Maria Rilke who remains a constant presence in his work. Indeed, the evocation of Rilke in DeLillo’s fiction itself becomes something of a poetic refrain, from his first novel Americana (21) to Point Omega (25) and beyond. * * *

 3

For more sustained scholarly examination of DeLillo’s linguistic archaeology, see Osteen’s American Magic and Dread and David Cowart’s chapter in this volume.  4 In various interviews, he has spoken in passing of Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein (see, for example, ‘An Interview’, and a segment of ‘The Art of Fiction’ interview for Paris Review, cut from publication [DeLillo Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, Container 91.1]).

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Eric Packer, the protagonist of Cosmopolis, is a 28-year-old asset manager and multibillionaire who has trouble sleeping. At the novel’s opening, we learn that in the small hours of the ‘scrolling dawn’, he reads ‘science and poetry’, which have for him the opposite of a soporific effect. We also learn that Packer prefers spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice. This was the nuance of every poem, at least for him, at night, these long weeks, one breath after another, in the rotating room at the top of the triplex. (Cosmopolis 5) What are we to make of Packer’s appreciation for poetry, ‘sited’ on the novel’s first page as a signpost to his character? He is, it transpires, a highly unpleasant person, an adulterer, a murderer, a man seemingly devoid of remorse or compassion. David Cowart suggests that the selection criteria Packer favours for poems – their brevity and paginal appearance – strike the reader as ‘precious’ (221). To this reader, however, they indicate an inherent contradiction to Packer which in turn denotes DeLillo’s ongoing preoccupation concerning literature’s lyric impulse and place in the world. ‘Spare’ poems are almost impossible to skim-read; they enact an aesthetics of attention that decelerates the practice of interpretation to something more akin to meditation (one thinks of William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow on which ‘so much depends’). Packer’s absorption in poetry is thus, in the opening pages of the novel, described as a resistance to the kind of ‘thoughtless reading’ that Cowart warns against; reading that might equate aesthetic taste with moral merit, or assume that DeLillo’s sympathies align with either Packer or with the people and institutions that oppose Packer (222). It also reflects a physical stillness and a mental concentration that many of DeLillo’s novels, especially (but not only) from his late phase, explore as antidote to the increasing pace of modern life, with its endless and confusing streams of information. A little later in the novel, Packer enters Gotham Book Mart and heads to the ‘poetry alcove’, perusing pamphlets and ‘choosing poems to read based on length and width’: He looked for poems of four, five, six lines. He scrutinized such poems, thinking into every intimation, and his feelings seemed to float in the white space around the lines. There were marks on the page and there was the page. The white was vital to the soul of the poem. (Cosmopolis 66) ‘It does not need that a poem should be long’, writes Emerson in ‘The Poet’. ‘Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word’ (189). Packer’s compulsion to probe each word for its connotations signals a profound interest in language’s capacity not only to relate but to create. Like DeLillo (and the modernists), Packer recognises that the white space surrounding a poem’s words (which become reduced to ‘marks’) can be as important to the poem’s meaning as the words themselves. As noted, DeLillo’s method of drafting his novels, which has remained the same since he wrote The Names, involves a similar understanding of paginal space. He describes devising this ‘new’ method:

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When I finished a paragraph, even a three-line paragraph, I automatically went to a fresh page to start the new paragraph. No crowded pages. This enabled me to see a given set of sentences more clearly . . . The white space on the page helped me concentrate more deeply on what I’d written. (‘The Art of Fiction’) Attracted first by the physical dimensions of a poem (its block-like ‘length and width’), Packer chooses what DeLillo might call poems with a ‘sculptural quality’ not because they are quick to read, but because their brevity requires sustained attention and concentrated thought. One might go further, to suggest that Packer’s selection criteria owe something to DeLillo’s own attraction to the ‘art of the alphabet’ he found ‘carved on stones all over Athens’, which, he says, ‘gave me fresh energy and forced me to think more deeply’ (‘The Art of Fiction’). The poems Packer reads, like the carved stone and marble slabs that DeLillo admired at the Parthenon, are concrete monuments to language’s abstract art. Packer’s encounters with poetry’s marks and absences lead first to an embodied consciousness, to an attention to the rhythms of his own corporeal existence (his ‘breath’), and then to a kind of disembodiment, a ‘floating’ free from the materiality of language. This doubleness echoes through the novel. The twin, seemingly opposing forces governing Packer – on the one hand, as a key player in the accelerated hyperreality of cybercapital, his impatience with the clunky, analogue nature of things; on the other hand, his regular attempts to suspend time via immersion in poetry that ‘bare[s] the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice’ – reflects the novel’s helix-bound currents of dialectical temporalities, and has much to do, I think, with the poetic paradox DeLillo highlights between the wish to order language and the will to be carried away by it. ‘We used to know the past but not the future’, Packer’s ‘chief of theory’, Vija Kinski, opines as she and Packer sit in his stalled limousine discussing the relationship between capitalism and clocktime. ‘This is changing . . . We need a new theory of time’ (Cosmopolis 86). Their dialogue is highly conceptual, threaded through with allusions to the theory of Paul Virilio, whose book Open Sky DeLillo took notes from as a source for Cosmopolis.5 Indeed, DeLillo appears to have shaped his novel at least partly according to Virilio’s notion that the ‘instantaneous telescoping of reality’ wrought by modern technologies of global communication and surveillance has created ‘two orders of time’ (Virilio 37). Each order, Virilio contends, is ‘as real as the other: that of presence here and now, and that of telepresence at a distance, beyond the horizon of tangible appearances’ (37). ‘No more here; everything is now’, reads a line from DeLillo’s notebook on Open Sky;6 an abbreviation of Virilio’s lamentation: How can we really live if there is no more here and everything is now? . . . How can we rationally manage the split, not only between virtual and actual realities but, more to the point, between the apparent horizon and the transapparent horizon of a screen that suddenly opens up a kind of temporal window for us to interact elsewhere, often a long way away? (Virilio 37, emphases in original)

 5

DeLillo Papers, Container 9.8. The DeLillo Papers in the Harry Ransom Center reveal that DeLillo took several notes from throughout Open Sky.  6 Ibid.

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These two orders of time are revealed in the temporal aberrations that occur at intervals in the novel. Packer – a man who is both ‘telepresen[t] at a distance’ on the global market and physically stalled in a traffic jam on Manhattan’s 47th Street – catches glimpses of his future self, mostly on the phalanx of digital screens inside his limousine. One such aberration is also witnessed by Kinski, who suggests that Packer’s consciousness, being ‘hypermaniacal, may have contact points beyond the general perception’ (Cosmopolis 95). Yet Kinski has also proposed that ‘something will happen soon, maybe today . . . to correct the acceleration of time’ (79). Her words foreshadow the ultimate sequence of interfaces between Packer’s two temporal orders: in the final pages of the novel, he sees his future self in the crystal of his own watch7 as a lifeless body in a succession of clips: first face-down on the floor of his ex-employee Benno Levin’s filthy room, then in a jostling ambulance, and lastly labelled as ‘Male Z’ in the stillness of a hospital morgue. Virilio’s query about whether we can survive the severance of ‘here’ from the ‘now’ seems to be answered. Words, for Packer, are often their own kind of fossils, obsolete remnants of a predigital world that no longer has any use for them: he thinks it ‘time to retire the word phone’ (88); he thinks that the term Automated Teller Machine is ‘aged and burdened by its own historical memory’ (54). Despite expressing distaste for ‘historical memory’, Packer has a habit of imagining the possible histories of the people and words that he encounters. He is moved by the ‘pathos of the word satchel’ (42); the finger stub of a Sikh taxi driver he interprets as ‘a body ruin that carried history and pain’ (17); the hangnail on the finger of his currency analyst Michael Chin prompts him to muse on the etymology of ‘hangnail’: ‘It’s an alteration of agnail, which is Middle English, Eric happened to know, from Old English, with roots in torment and pain’ (37). If history and etymology carry such negative valence for Packer, one may query why, rejecting all warnings, he spends almost the entirety of the novel travelling to the place of his childhood – the immigrant, multilingual neighbourhood in which he learned to speak. ‘It is fiction’s role to imagine deeply’, writes DeLillo in ‘The Power of History’, ‘to follow obscure urges into unreliable regions of experience – child memoried, existential, and outside time.’ Packer makes the day-long odyssey to his ‘child memoried’ place of existential origin ostensibly for a haircut, but more metaphysically in the paradoxical hope that it will offer him both rootedness and the transcendence he seeks beyond the world he now inhabits, helping him to achieve his wish ‘to become quantum dust, transcending his body mass’ (Cosmopolis 206). Thou art dust, and to dust thou shall return.8 Packer’s attempts to escape the virtual world he has helped build also involve returning, repeatedly, to the human body, whether via sexual intercourse (he has sex with four women; three of them physically, one metaphysically), medical examination (he has an asymmetrical prostate), mass communal nakedness in the pursuit of art (a scene for a film whose financing, likely due to Packer’s global investments, suddenly collapses), violence against others and himself (leading to his bodyguard Torval’s death, and his own excruciating pain via a stun gun and, later, a handgun), or a haircut (the [false]  7  8

Also a screen. DeLillo appears to have predicted the Apple smartwatch twelve years in advance. Genesis 3:19. There are numerous religious associations with Packer, poetry and human existence in the novel, which include allusions to the word made flesh and the Fall of Man, and blend prophetic references to the Arab Spring (a catalyst for the Occupy Movement) and Christian mythology. The novel’s proceedings take place on ‘A Day in April’. See Garrigós on Packer’s death drive.

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crux of the novel). The human body in Cosmopolis, as in many of DeLillo’s novels, is often curiously depicted as a type of linguistic-corporeal composite that blurs the distinction between consciousness and the material. One thinks of Bill Gray’s abject book-monster hybrid in Mao II; or Mr Tuttle’s sensuous manifestation of language in The Body Artist that brings Rey Robles back to life, through ‘air to sounds, sounds to words, words the man’ (65); or even the sexist taxonomy of female genitalia among the football players of End Zone, which leads to Gary Harkness’s fantasies of a woman who is ‘a body of perfect knowledge, the flesh made word’ (52) and his eventual sexual encounter with Myna as ‘the knowable word, the fleshmade sigh and syllable’ (207); or Artis Martineau’s devolution in Zero K (2016), whose consciousness unravels as her body is cryogenically frozen: ‘This is my body . . . The words float past . . . Am I just the words’ (162). When Packer sees his own beating heart on the screen of an ECG machine, he feels ‘dwarfed’ by ‘the passion of the body . . . the poetry and chemistry of its origins in the dust of old exploding stars’ (Cosmopolis 44). There is an inextricability to Packer’s favourite subjects of ‘science and poetry’: an ancient, interdependent relationship between mind and body, words and the world. The ‘passion’ of the anti-capitalist street protestors who Packer witnesses from inside his limousine culminates in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice to a higher principle. As the activists chant lines from ‘poetry and Karl Marx’, one man self-immolates. As Mark Osteen writes, ‘“trembling in a length of braided flame” . . . this man lies beyond the market’s reach. The suffering of human bodies alone eludes commodification. Such bodies are a countercurrency’ (Osteen, ‘Currency’ 296). Many of them dressed as rats and willing to die or be beaten and arrested, the activists represent bodies that refuse to be fungible. * * * In his limousine, Packer remarks to his young currency analyst Michael Chin, ‘there’s a poem I read in which a rat becomes the unit of currency’. The pair engage in a darkly humorous exchange on the impact of the ‘rat’ on the world economy, in which they both note that ‘the name says everything’ (Cosmopolis 23), and Packer concludes with a mock forecast of complete social and economic collapse: ‘Stockpiling of dead rats called global health menace’ (24). The poem in question is ‘Report from the Besieged City’ by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, whose line fragment ‘a rat became the unit of currency’ also forms the epigraph of Cosmopolis. Herbert’s poem is formally a departure from Packer’s usual tastes, ‘one of the few longer poems he had chosen to investigate’, and a ‘chronicle of a city under siege’ (97). A lyrical blend of cool irony and deep compassion, the poem reflects Herbert’s own experiences under Soviet dictatorship and in the resistance movement against Nazi occupation. Poetically portentous, rats teem all over Cosmopolis. A woman in grey spandex, perhaps a performance artist, holds a dead rat aloft on the median strip at Park Avenue (38); two men in grey spandex (rat suits, Packer realises) swing live rats by the tail in a Diamond District luncheonette, releasing them mid-air while ‘shouting something about a specter’ (74); a Styrofoam rat, twenty feet tall, weaves through traffic at Seventh Avenue and Broadway, where ‘four or five people in rodent spandex’ (87) give way to a bus-load of ‘figures in riot gear, wearing snouted masks’ (88), who begin ‘smashing the windows of chain stores and loosing battalions of rats in restaurants and hotel lobbies’

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(89), and decrying the ‘specter of capitalism’ (96) in a variation of the first line of the Communist Manifesto. These rats are all, of course, related; emblems of political protest and representatives of the destruction of life wrought by global capitalism. In a novel that takes pains to register and give due space to the ‘cross roar of accents and languages’ (69) spoken along New York’s 47th Street alone – a world (cosmo) in a city (polis) – the rat also becomes in Cosmopolis a type of lingua franca, a ‘universal language’, as Osteen notes of the rat in Herbert’s poem (‘Currency’ 291). As the protestors perform ‘the tactical coup of reprogramming stock tickers with poetry and Karl Marx’ (Cosmopolis 99), the facades of investment banks leap with the literature of resistance. The moment Packer realises, with some exhilaration, that ‘they’d been reading the same poetry he’d been reading’, he immediately orders more yen, borrowing ‘in dumbfounding amounts’ (97), and seemingly wilfully sparking a global market crash. The famous lines from W. H. Auden’s poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ would appear to be challenged here: ‘For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper’ (Auden 82). Despite the satirical and sometimes farcically humorous incidents that occur throughout Cosmopolis (see Andre Petrescu, the French ‘pastry assassin’ clad in a Disney World T-shirt, who custard-pies world leaders and the mega-rich), the novel’s intricate braiding of anti-capitalist protest movements (anticipating the global Occupy Movement of 2011), street politics, immigrant culture, cyber-capital and theories of the hyper-networked new world order (notes from Hardt and Negri’s Empire are in the DeLillo papers for Cosmopolis), threaded through with politically inflected poetry, gives us significant pause to consider the connections DeLillo explores between literature and political rebellion. DeLillo has read Herbert’s poem at (at least) two public events: the first in New York Town Hall on 11 October 2001, commemorating those who perished in the 9/11 terrorist attacks,9 and the second on 4 August 2004, in the Great Hall of Cooper Union, NYC, at an event sponsored by the PEN American Center, introduced by then PEN president Salman Rushdie, entitled ‘State of Emergency: Unconventional Readings’. The latter event was organised to launch PEN’s ‘Campaign for Core Freedoms’, to urge the review of the US PATRIOT Act and other ‘anti-terrorism’ legislation in force since 11 September 2001.10 DeLillo’s choice of poem on both occasions (two years before, and a year after Cosmopolis’s publication) blurs the distinction between what the audience might assume to be besieged cities at the time of reading – the first, New York, the second, a city in Iraq or Afghanistan. ‘Everyone here suffers from a loss of the sense of time’, runs a line in Herbert’s poem, ‘all we have left is the place the attachment to the place / . . . if we lose the ruins nothing will be left’ (Herbert 76). The lines seem to be recalled and reshaped in DeLillo’s post-9/11 essay ‘In the Ruins of the Future’: ‘Time is scarcer now. There is a sense of compression, plans made hurriedly, time forced and distorted’ (39). In his overtly post-9/11 novel Falling Man, DeLillo returned to the idea of time compressed, or disordered. His copious notes for the book contain a folder on which DeLillo had pasted a reminder

 9

I am grateful to Curt Gardner’s website ‘Don DeLillo’s America’ for this information: http://perival.com/ delillo/ddevents.html 10 See Edward Hirsch’s archived Washington Post article, ‘I attended an event last month . . .’

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to himself: ‘structure of the book reflects a sense of time that has become more dense, more compact, forced and distorted, compressed’.11 These ideas had already shaped Cosmopolis, which although set a year and a half before the fall of the World Trade Center, and written the year after, is – as some critics have already noted (see especially Laist) – distinctly a post-9/11 novel in its exploration of American hubris and global economic hegemony. Herbert’s poetry has been described by his compatriot Czesław Miłosz as ‘crystalline and austere’ (qtd. in Hass), and by Robert Hass as work of ‘fierce, steady moral imagination’ (Hass). ‘Report from the Besieged City’, like many of Herbert’s poems, charts in bare, striking imagery the interminable atrocities enacted by human beings on others, and the efforts made by the oppressed to resist them. The language, even in translation, cuts cleanly to a brutal truth. Indeed, Herbert’s poetic style adheres to what he termed, after Edmund Husserl, ‘semantic transparency’; his writing strives towards ‘the pristine word that holds against modern debasements of language’ (Hirsch). This is not to say that Herbert eschews metaphor or other figures of speech; rather that, as the critic Stanisław Barańczak notes, his poetry is ‘a defense of language against deformations resulting from sociotechnical manipulation’ (66). ‘Language is an impure tool of expression’, Herbert wrote in the introduction to his Poezje Wybrane (Selected Poems): It is tortured, banalized, subjected to shabby tricks every day. Therefore, the poets’ dream is to reach to the words’ pristine sense, to give the proper word to things, as Norwid says. ‘Let words mean only what they mean and not who they were used against.’ (qtd. in Barańczak, 65–66) The poet’s insistence that words ‘mean only what they mean’ harks back to Emerson’s lamentation that ‘old words are perverted to stand for things which they are not; a paper currency is employed when there is no bullion in the vaults’ (Nature 37). Emerson believed that ‘wise men’, represented by the archetypal figure of the poet, ‘pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God’ (Nature 37). Far from Emerson’s ideal poet, Packer, as previously observed, repeatedly notes the ‘anachronistic quality’ (Cosmopolis 9) of various naming words to technologically infused contemporary experience (‘skyscraper’ [9], ‘office’ [15], ‘handgun’ [19], ‘automated teller machine’ [54], ‘phone’ [88]). His observations on the obsolescence of nouns are made not in an effort to reconnect things with language, but through a desire to transcend the need for the materiality of both. He believes in ‘the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions’ (24). In Packer’s binary imaginary, there is diminishing space for the physical. In a twisted version of Emerson’s poetic ideal of a ‘picturesque language’ by which the poet ‘re-attaches things to nature and the Whole’ and ‘sees them fall within the great Order not less than the beehive or the spider’s geometrical web’ (‘The Poet’ 189),

11

DeLillo Papers, Container 128.2. Underlining in original.

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Packer attempts to read capital’s patterns of growth via ‘organic patterns’ such as those of ‘birdwing and chambered shell’ (Cosmopolis 24): The other screens showed money moving . . . He knew there was something no one had detected, a pattern latent in nature itself, a leap of pictorial language that went beyond the standard models of technical analysis and out-predicted even the arcane charting of his own followers in the field. There had to be a way to explain the yen. (63) Unable to recognise the corruption of nature in this digitised ‘pictorial language’, Packer is reminded by Levin at the end of his life that he ultimately failed to read the markets because he failed to account for nature’s own asymmetries, ‘the importance of the lopsided. The thing that’s skewed a little’ (200). Nature and language will, as the true poet knows, defy predictability. In his book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, the Italian radical philosopher and theorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi posits that the European economic collapse of 2008 and the subsequent ‘European uprising’ was ‘more of a crisis of social imagination than mere economics’ (8). Like Virilio, with whose ideas he engages, Berardi sees the accelerating pace of modern technology enacting a kind of temporal compression that scatters thinking and automates language. ‘The disproportion between the arrival rate of new information and the limited time available for conscious processing generates hypercomplexity’ (10), he argues, under which conditions, ‘human beings tend to act as a swarm’ (15). (It’s worth noting that the two most common collective nouns for rats are ‘swarm’ and ‘pack’, the latter reminiscent of Eric Packer’s name and parasitic nature.) As the financial economy keeps pace with information technology to create cyber-capital, Berardi notes that ‘signs fall under the domination of finance’ (17): The production of meaning and of value takes the form of parthenogenesis: signs produce signs without any longer passing through the flesh. Monetary value produces more monetary value without being first realized through the material production of goods. (17–18) Drawing on cross-currents between poetic and financial lexicons, Berardi argues that if the history of capitalism is inseparable from the construction of ‘cultural and psychic habits of dependence’, then resistance to capitalist conformism arrives through ‘social insolvency’: ‘From a linguistic and affective point of view’, argues Berardi, ‘insolvency is the line of escape from the reduction of language to exchange’ (17). The answer, Berardi posits, is to be found in poetry, which is ‘the here and now of the voice, of the body, and of the word, sensually giving birth to meaning’ (21). The power and joy of poetry is in its excesses, its refusal of fungibility: Poetry is the language of nonexchangeability, the return of infinite hermeneutics, and the return of the sensuous body of language. I’m talking here about poetry as an excess of language, a hidden resource which enables us to shift from one paradigm to another. (139–40) Immediately after this affirmation, Berardi quotes from Rilke’s Fifth Duino Elegy: ‘lovers, who never / Could achieve fulfillment here, could show / Their bold lofty

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figures of heart-swings, / Their towers of ecstasy’ (140, 148). Rilke’s Elegies provide both ‘a metaphor for the condition of precarity’ and ‘an annunciation of a place that we don’t know’ (148) – an alternative to the fragile architectures of collective social life that contemporary reality provides. Poetry necessarily, then, spills from the page and into social life. Linguistic and bodily excess take form in ‘street demonstrations’ for Berardi and in Cosmopolis, which constitute ‘the reactivation of the body of the general intellect’ dulled by finance’s automation of words (Berardi 143). Berardi’s treatise may read as a reformation of Audre Lorde’s eloquent defence of poetry not as a luxury but as ‘a vital necessity for our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action’ (37). And perhaps it reads as idealistic. But DeLillo’s insistence throughout the novel on poetry as a space and force of resistance to cyber-capital’s spatio-temporal hypercomplexity, to its corruptive reduction of language solely to a system of exchange, aligns Cosmopolis with Lorde’s and Berardi’s interventions. If ‘debt is actually future time – a promise about the future’, as Berardi argues (84), then Packer sees his debt being paid in increments and then wholesale on the screens of his limousine and watch. He dies at the hands of Benno Levin (real name Richard Sheets), his disenfranchised ex-employee. Packer’s wish, in his dying moments, to ‘extend human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment’ is cut short by the excesses of bodily experience: ‘But his pain interfered with his immortality’ (Cosmopolis 207). * * * If – to adapt a refrain from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets – in our beginning is our end, then the completion of Packer’s life in the grime of his childhood immigrant neighbourhood of Hell’s Kitchen is a fitting – one might say poetic – death. Even the way in which Packer is called to his fate by Levin blends violence and poetry: Then another shot followed by a man’s voice howling his name in a series of trochaic beats and at a cracked pitch that was more chilling than gunfire. ERIC MICHAEL PACKER (Cosmopolis 181) In a passage redolent of a scene from a classic film noir, Packer enters a moonlit and derelict tenement building in which his assassin, Levin, is waiting. Inching his way along the third floor with a gun, Packer appreciates the mise en scène of two rats scavenging for food from Levin’s meal trays as ‘thematically sound’ (183). Rats are not only the leitmotif of Packer’s narrative, a symbol of his origins and greed and a portent of his death; in their very name, rats contain a poetics of prolepsis that infuses the entire novel. Reverse the word ‘rats’ and you are looking at ‘star’.12 The affectless Packer and the disaffected Levin, true to the established literary tradition

12

Rats and stars are closely linked elsewhere in DeLillo’s oeuvre, perhaps most obviously in Ratner’s Star. See also Michael Naas’s chapter in this volume.

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of doppelgangers, are interdependent, the rising star and the sinking rat. Yet Packer’s ascent in capitalist society has reached its peak, and Levin’s obsession with the man will inevitably lead to disaster (‘disaster’, from the Italian disastro, meaning ‘ill-starred’). The reader encounters Levin’s confession to killing a man who we can assume to be Packer proleptically, in the interruptive chapter ‘The Confessions of Benno Levin: NIGHT’, which begins: ‘He is dead, word for word’ (55). (Note the interchangeability of the word and the thing in this description: Packer’s fate is ineluctably sealed – he is and is always already, dead.) In the second interruptive chapter of Levin’s confessions, titled ‘MORNING’, Levin deliberates on whether he should carry out the assassination we already know him to have committed (but which has not yet happened in the novel’s primary narrative arc). Levin resolves to murder Packer in order to infuse his own life with meaning – ‘But how do I live if he’s not dead?’ – and concludes his confessions with a philosophical problem: ‘There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?’ (155). Packer is, of course, the dead-already ‘star’ in whose delayed light Levin strives to stand. Reversed this way, he is, as Levin calls him, ‘Icarus falling’ (202; Icarus Falling was a title that DeLillo toyed with for the novel)13 and Icarus fallen, a man whose careless greed has harmed countless lives, and whose hubristic descent wrecks the global economy. Packer’s fall, ‘in the year 2000’ on ‘a day in April’ (Cosmopolis epigraph, n.p.) cannot help but proleptically evoke the fall of the twin towers on 11 September 2001. Indeed, scholar Randy Laist has gone so far as to name Eric Packer ‘a kind of third twin tower’ (258). Packer’s spiralling descent is also spun through with echoes of classical and biblical falls: the fall of Icarus, leading to death (thanks to hubris and Earth’s closest star, the sun); the Fall of Man, leading to the severance of language from God and his works (thanks to temptation and the devil); the fall of the tower of Babel, resulting in the shattered hope of a single language for humankind (thanks to an angry God).14 Discourse of the fall from innocence to experience was rife in the years immediately following the 9/11 attacks, during which Adorno’s famous statement that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ was often reappropriated, and several poets and novelists, DeLillo included, noted the difficulty of locating adequate words to express the enormity of the situation.15 * * * Buried in one of the folders for Falling Man in the DeLillo Papers at the Harry Ransom Center are several handwritten notes by DeLillo, on pieces of paper approximately 4 x 2.5 inches. They contain imagistic ideas for the novel, scraps of dialogue or fragments of description. Among these are notes for Lianne’s recollection of a Bashō haiku (‘Even in Kyoto – I long for Kyoto’) and another poetic quotation: ‘Rilke: Under the stars, what then? The more deeply untellable stars. – The 9th Elegy’.16 While these

13

DeLillo Papers, Container 9.8. Cosmopolis is dedicated to Paul Auster, whose novel City of Glass explores the implications of humankind’s attempts to reverse the Fall of Man and retrieve a prelapsarian language. 15 ‘The event itself has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile’ (‘In the Ruins’ 39). 16 DeLillo Papers, Container 127.1. The quotation features several more times throughout typed notes and drafts for Falling Man. 14

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lines from an [unknown] translation of Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy never made it into the final version of Falling Man, the note indicates that the poem was on DeLillo’s mind when writing the novel, itself a meditation on art’s capacity to answer, contain and process devastating loss. Playing a spectral, if crucial, role in DeLillo’s second novel End Zone, Rilke’s Ninth Elegy hovers in the consciousness of the Logos College football team as a kind of poetic key to the transcendental rapture referred to at the start of this chapter. Reserve back Billy Mast memorises the poem in its original German for a course he is taking ‘in the untellable’ (End Zone 60) – a course that, paradoxically, everyone hears about but ‘nobody talks about’ (173). Billy, who doesn’t speak German (‘knowledge of German is a prerequisite for being refused admission’ [69]), bemoans the ‘hazards’ of the course: that some understanding of the German language inevitably transmits to its students (173). Rilke’s poetry, even when (especially when?) its lines transpire to be lists of everyday nouns, evokes an ineffable positive valence in the students. (Emerson again: ‘[b]are lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind’ [‘The Poet’ 188]). Are we on this earth to say:   House       Bridge Fountain     Jug Gate       Fruit-tree Window at best:     Column . . .       Tower .  .  .? but to say these words    you understand       with an intensity the things themselves    never dreamed they’d express. (Rilke 161) ‘When I asked for a translation’, Gary Harkness recalls of Billy Mast, ‘he said it was just a simple listing of things . . . He said the German words gave him comfort, though not as much as they used to when he didn’t know what they meant’ (End Zone 136). In the tensile relationship between the material and the linguistic, Billy Mast achieves the ‘zone’ that DeLillo aspires to, losing himself in language, carried by the metalinguistic meaning that the shapes and sounds of the words convey. The course ‘in the untellable’ works to the theory that ‘if any words exist beyond speech, they’re probably German words, or pretty close’ (End Zone 173). English is, of course, largely Germanic at root; by this logic, the deeper you dig into its etymology, the further you move ‘beyond speech’. The transcendence such language summons is, according to Emerson, as close as humans can get to God, channelling as it does an original unity with nature. For Emerson, therefore, those among us most attuned to the meanings of ‘fossil poetry’ are ‘children and savages’, because they ‘use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts’ (Nature 35). Perhaps this is why children, as well as poets, are frequent, and frequently underacknowledged, players in DeLillo’s fictive worlds.

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Indeed, in many of his works, DeLillo pushes language back to infancy, the prelinguistic, to what he calls ‘babble’: The ‘untellable’ points to the limitations of language. Is there something we haven’t discovered about speech? Is there more? Maybe this is why there’s so much babbling in my books. Babbling can be a form of frustrated speech, or it can be a purer form, an alternate speech. (‘An Interview’ 8) One could find numerous examples of how ‘childlike babbling’ in DeLillo’s books bears ‘an element of mystical sophistication’ (Ratner’s Star 366). I’ll end this chapter, however, by recalling Zero K, whose narrative concludes with another sinking star – the sun – setting in perfect, quasi-megalithic alignment with the Manhattan grid, in an event that blends the ancient with the modern, ‘Manhattanhenge’. Sharing a bus with a young boy who is both mentally and physically challenged, Jeffrey watches the boy as the boy watches the approaching ‘tide of light’ (274). After the clinical coldness of the Convergence cryogenic centre and its happenings, the encounter is a surprisingly tender one. Jeffrey finds comfort and hope in the child’s ‘prelinguistic grunts’, understanding his ‘howls of awe’ to be ‘far more suitable than words’ (274). He returns to his seat to ‘face forward’, and the book thus closes: ‘I didn’t need heaven’s light. I had the boy’s cries of wonder’ (274). The moment is fleeting, as all sunsets are, but concluding the book as it does, it lasts forever, a moment of rapture, of lyrical intensity, punctuated only by the poetry of the boy’s sounds, a language that expresses the seemingly inexpressible.

Works Cited Auden, W. H. Selected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson. Vintage, 1979. Barańczak, Stanisław. A Fugitive from Utopia: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert. Harvard University Press, 1987. Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’. The Uprising. On Poetry and Finance. Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series, 14, 2012. Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Rev. edn, University of Georgia Press, 2003. DeLillo, Don. Americana. 1971. Penguin, 2011. ——. ‘The Art of Fiction No. 135.’ Interview by Adam Begley. Paris Review, 128, 1993. https:// www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo. Accessed 7 February 2023. ——. The Body Artist. Picador, 2001. ——. ‘City Arts and Lectures, San Francisco, 10/16/97.’ Transcript. DeLillo Papers, Container 91.4. ——. Cosmopolis. 2003. Picador, 2011. ——. End Zone. 1972. Picador, 2011. ——. Falling Man. Picador, 2007. ——. ‘In the Ruins of the Future.’ Harper’s, December 2001, pp. 33–40. ——. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ Interviewed by Thomas LeClair. Contemporary Literature, 23, no. 1, 1982, pp. 19–31. Reprinted in Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro. University Press of Mississippi, 2005, pp. 3–15. ——. Mao II. 1991. Picador, 2016. ——. ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky.’ The New Yorker, 22 November 2009. ——. The Names. 1982. Picador, 2011. ——. Point Omega. Picador, 2010.

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——. ‘The Power of History.’ New York Times, 7 September 1997. https://archive.nytimes.com/ www.nytimes.com/library/books/090797article3.html. Accessed 7 February 2023. ——. Ratner’s Star. 1976. Picador, 2016. ——. The Silence. Picador, 2020. ——. Zero K. Picador, 2016. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. 1836. Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, edited by Joel Porte and Saundra Morris. W. W. Norton, 2001, pp. 27–55. ——. ‘The Poet.’ 1844. Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, edited by Joel Porte and Saundra Morris. W. W. Norton, 2001, pp. 183–98. Garrigós, Cristina. ‘Death Drive and Desire in Cronenberg’s Adaptation of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 56, no. 5, 2015, pp. 519–30. Halter, Peter. ‘The Poem on the Page, or the Visual Poetics of William Carlos Williams.’ William Carlos Williams Review, 32, 2015, pp. 95–115. Hass, Robert. ‘Poetry.’ Washington Post, 21 July 1985. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ entertainment/books/1985/07/21/poetry/3d935ee4-2dbd-40c1-a627-606bc5b11c74/. Accessed 7 February 2023. Herbert, Zbigniew. Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems. Ecco Press, 1985. Hirsch, Edward. ‘I attended an event last month . . .’ Washington Post, 19 September 2004. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/2004/09/19/i-attended-anevent-last-mont/e947ec82-8b06-4e73-a64b-971bea82a433/. Accessed 7 February 2023. Laist, Randy. ‘The Concept of Disappearance in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 51, no. 3, 2010, pp. 257–75. Lorde, Audre. ‘Poetry is Not a Luxury.’ Sister Outsider. Crossing Press, 2007, pp. 36–9. Nel, Philip. ‘Don DeLillo’s Return to Form: The Modernist Poetics of The Body Artist.’ Contemporary Literature, 43, no. 4, 2002, pp. 736–59. Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. ——. ‘The Currency of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 55, no. 3, 2014, pp. 291–304. PEN America. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ 15 September 2010. https://pen.org/an-interviewwith-don-delillo/. Accessed 7 February 2023. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies. Bilingual edition, translated by David Young. 1978. W. W. Norton, 2006. Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Translated by Julie Rose. Verso, 1997. Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. Book One. 1946. New Directions, 1995.

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13 Ekphrasis Graley Herren

D

on DeLillo is a word-painter. This is not merely a generic label touting his skill for visualisation as a writer, but rather a specific identification of his fundamental approach as an artist. He declared as much in his seminal interview with Thomas LeClair. Responding to LeClair’s question about spatial analysis in his work, DeLillo explained: It’s a way to take psychology out of a character’s mind and into the room he occupies. I try to examine psychological states by looking at people in rooms, objects in rooms. It’s a way of saying we can know something important about a character by the way he sees himself in relation to objects. People in rooms have always seemed important to me. I don’t know why or ask myself why, but sometimes I feel I’m painting a character in a room, and the most important thing I can do is set him up in relation to objects, shadows, angles. (LeClair 14) Students and scholars of DeLillo’s work have probably encountered this passage before, maybe once too often, so that we might forget to pay close attention to what the artist is saying here. But slow down and look again, because it is tremendously revealing. DeLillo gets inside his character’s mind from the outside. He envisions a figure in a room. He sees that figure in relation to objects in that room; indeed, at the initial stage, the figure is essentially just another object. Through careful observation and contemplation, however, DeLillo begins to fathom certain inner depths by examining how that figure sees himself or herself in relation to those other objects. In this way, the flat figure, all surface at first, gradually accrues layers and volume – in short, the object acquires subjectivity. By describing what and how the figure sees, by considering why these objects matter to the emergent subject, by tracing the evolution of the subject’s relation to these objects as time passes and contexts change, and by capturing this nexus of visual relations and perceptions through language – this is how a word-painter creates art. Although DeLillo is unusually adept at producing this sort of art, he did not invent the technique. In fact, dating back to classical antiquity and continuing through the present, there is a vibrant tradition of literature constructed according to these principles: ekphrasis. The most succinct and widely cited definition is offered by James Heffernan: ‘ekphrasis is the verbal representation of visual representation’ (3). Words about images. It would be a mistake to assume, however, that the job of the ekphrastic writer is secondary and derivative, verbally describing a pre-existing visual image. On the contrary, the best ekphrasis involves deep meditation, focusing at least as much on

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the subject gazing as on the object gazed upon. As Renate Brosch observes, ekphrasis typically involves inserting an emotionally affected observer confronted with sparse but carefully selected details, which serve as building blocks for a personal vision. Most ekphrastic passages do not tell us so much what an image looks like exactly as describe its affective impact in order to provide tinted lenses that may color our own visualization of it. (238) The image that matters most in ekphrasis is not the one viewed externally but the one reconstituted by the observer internally. Ekphrasis often stages conflict. In drawing attention to differences between verbal and visual expression, such writing tends to expose underlying tensions between competing signifying systems. Stephen Cheeke notes, ‘The history of ekphrasis as a literary mode and practice is intimately bound up with the body of thought and theory upon the broader relation of the sister arts’ (20). Beginning with Plutarch’s famous assertion that ‘painting is mute poetry and poetry speaking picture’, Cheeke chronicles a tradition locked in artistic competition. Ekphrasis animates a struggle between words and images over what each art lacks in relation to the other: the silence of paintings (or as ‘mute’ suggests, the inability of paintings to speak, which is not the same as a refusal to speak); and the pictorialism of poetry: the way poetic language may strive to produce pictures or images for the mind’s eye. (21) Cheeke goes on to add that, as a means of investigating the nature of each art through thinking about what they cannot do, and through assuming that each art is therefore driven by a desire to do what it cannot do, as if the nature of the rivalry were a means of illumination, this debate has proved extraordinarily fertile. And the notion of a paragone, a struggle, a contest, a confrontation, remains central to all thinking about ekphrasis. (21) This conflict is often gendered. In traditional ekphrasis, a male writer gazes at a still and silent female figure, or an object that has been feminised and eroticised. The writer attempts to speak for the image, but the image often resists or frustrates his efforts. Heffernan observes, Ekphrasis speaks not only about works of art but also to and for them. In so doing, it stages – within the theater of language itself – a revolution of the image against the word, and particularly the word of Lessing, who decreed that the duty of pictures was to be silent and beautiful (like a woman), leaving expression to poetry. In talking back and looking back at the male viewer, the images envoiced by ekphrasis challenge at once the controlling authority of the male gaze and the power of the male word. (7) The classic example of ekphrasis as a gendered conflict is John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. The poet frames his encounter in terms of erotic pursuit from the start, addressing

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the urn as ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time’ (Keats 223). Like the two lovers painted on the side, the man in pursuit of the woman, the poet’s relationship with the urn is one of seduction. As Grant F. Scott puts it, the urn ‘serves as an irresistible challenge to the speaker. He will ravish it with his gaze, unlock the mysteries that have stymied so many before him. A modern day Perseus, he will skillfully capture the urn/Medusa and convert her into his own specialized masculine discourse of language’ (139). At least that is his goal. By the end of the poem, however, the only words the poet manages to ventriloquise through the urn are these closing lines: ‘“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”’ (Keats 223). Some readers find this dictum to be wise and poignant, but for others it reads like a tautological dismissal, as if to say, ‘You know what you know – now leave me alone.’ As W. J. T. Mitchell wryly observes, ‘If the poet is going to make the mute, feminized art object speak, he could at least give her something interesting to say’ (171). DeLillo frequently incorporates ekphrasis into his fiction. These interactions between the verbal and the visual sometimes replicate the dominant tradition outlined above, and at other times resist or subvert the tradition in interesting ways. There are dozens of examples of ekphrasis spanning throughout DeLillo’s career, so an exhaustive treatment lies beyond the scope of the present chapter. Instead, this essay will selectively focus on three novels from three different decades: Mao II (1991), Falling Man (2007) and Zero K (2016). Not only is ekphrasis pervasive and crucially important in each of these novels, but all three also feature prototypical replicas of the ur-scene where DeLillo gazes at a subject in relation to objects in a room.

Mao II DeLillo has included thoughtful engagements with other artworks ever since his first novel Americana (1971), but Mao II represents a quantum leap forward in his ekphrasis. The novel is named after a piece by Andy Warhol, whose colourful renderings of Chairman Mao adorn the book’s front cover. Between the covers, the novel incorporates five photos, as well as a number of ekphrastic narrative passages. DeLillo told interviewer Vince Passaro that his inspiration for Mao II came from two photos in particular. One was from a mass wedding conducted by Reverend Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church; the other was captured by an unscrupulous photographer who ambushed the self-exiled writer J. D. Salinger and published the photo against his will. According to DeLillo, ‘I didn’t know it at the time, but these two pictures would represent the polar extremes of Mao II, the arch individualist and the mass mind’ (Passaro 81). Reflecting upon the first of these images, he recalled, ‘I realized I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it. For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking’ (Passaro 80). What DeLillo describes here are the basic ingredients for ekphrasis: a writer is drawn to an image, contemplates it deeply, and then thinks meticulously and reflexively in words about the effect the image has upon the observer-writer. There are several noteworthy ekphrastic passages in Mao II, but the one that best encapsulates DeLillo’s assiduous yet transgressive approach to the tradition appears in the photo shoot scene. Bill Gray is a notoriously reclusive writer who has hidden away from the public spotlight for over twenty years while working on an unwieldy novel. He invites Brita Nilsson, a Swedish photographer who specialises exclusively in

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portraits of writers, to visit his hideaway and take his picture. The third chapter of the novel depicts the photo shoot and culminates with this ekphrastic description of the most striking image from the session: She watched him surrender his crisp gaze to a softening, a bright-eyed fear that seemed to funnel out of childhood. It had the starkness of a last prayer. She worked to get at it. His face was drained and slack, coming into flatness, into black and white, cracked lips and flaring brows, age lines that hinge the chin, old bafflements and regrets. She moved in closer and refocused, she shot and shot, and he stood there looking into the lens, soft eyes shining. (Mao II 49) Bill comes across here like a deer caught in the headlights, or in the scope of the hunter’s gun. Indeed, when DeLillo published this excerpted chapter as a short story in Esquire, he gave it the predatory title ‘Shooting Bill Gray’. DeLillo adopts the familiar setup of ekphrasis but conspicuously reverses the usual gender roles by portraying a woman sizing up and objectifying a man through her predatory gaze. Not that Brita is an unsympathetic character; in fact, she and Bill are well matched and strike up an instant rapport. Nevertheless, they both recognise that the image-maker, not the wordsmith, is calling the shots in this situation. When first describing her project to Bill’s assistant Scott, Brita sounds like a big game tracker on safari: ‘“I will just keep on photographing writers, every one I can reach, novelists, poets, playwrights. I am on the prowl, so to speak. I never stop traveling and taking pictures. This is what I do now. Writers”’ (25). Bill would be her biggest trophy yet: she knows it, and he knows it, too. The scales of power and possession are tilted to Brita’s advantage. Sitting for his portrait, Bill muses, ‘We’re alone in a room involved in this mysterious exchange. What am I giving up to you? And what are you investing me with, or stealing from me? How are you changing me? I can feel the change like some current just under the skin. Are you making me up as you go along? Am I mimicking myself? And when did women start photographing in the first place? [. . .] I’ve become someone’s material. Yours, Brita.’ (43) Interestingly, DeLillo responded in similar fashion when he sat for an interview with Maria Nadotti: ‘When is it that women began to photograph men? [. . .] And was it important? In short, did the world change when women began watching men, becoming spectators rather than objects?’ (Nadotti 112) Answering his own questions, he added, I think that the basic thing is that women have begun to put their eyes behind cameras. Whatever is on the other side that becomes the object will now be seen in a different way from the way it would be seen otherwise, especially if the object on the other side of the view finder is a man. (Nadotti 113) DeLillo embeds this gendered perception into the ekphrasis of the photo shoot scene. Brita is wholly in charge of the shoot. She chooses the lenses, adjusts the lights, determines the angles and moves Bill’s head to achieve the aesthetic effects she desires.

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In this re-enactment of DeLillo’s prototypical scene, with objects placed in revelatory relation inside a room, Brita is the director, set designer and choreographer. This is an exercise in power, but it is also a performance. DeLillo concludes the chapter with an ekphrastic description of a striking tableau, but he also dramatises the vivant process through which that image was staged. The third chapter of Mao II captures the flux, contingency, collaboration, resistance, artifice and serendipity that go into creating and mediating art. Not only is Brita in control of the visual stagecraft of this dynamic process, but she is also the controlling narrative consciousness of the chapter. The photo shoot is dominated by dialogue, and Bill can certainly punch his weight when it comes to verbal sparring. However, it seems extremely telling that, when it comes to the narrative passages inserted among the dialogue, all are told from Brita’s perspective and none from Bill’s. The reader has privileged access to Brita’s private inner thoughts in this chapter, but we only know Bill from the outside, through what he says and how he looks. Brita alone is granted full agency. Granted, Bill speaks his mind at length. But what he verbalises are primarily pronouncements about his dwindling potency, eroding relevance and pending demise. At one point he morosely observes, ‘“Something about the occasion makes me think I’m at my own wake. Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn’t begin to mean anything until the subject is dead [. . .] It’s like a wake. And I’m the actor made up for the laying-out”’ (Mao II 42). His observations jibe with Susan Sontag’s about the elegiac nature of photography: ‘All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt’ (Sontag 15). As Bill talks away during the photo shoot, it is as though he is haemorrhaging words, being steadily drained of subjectivity, before finally being stuffed and mounted on the wall. He is not the subject of the photo shoot, he is the object, both visually and narratively. Bill believes that his whole profession is in its death throes. He worries that novelists are losing a zero-sum contest against terrorists, and Mao II lends credence to those concerns. By the end of the novel, the Salingeresque champion of the individual and the novel’s ‘democratic shout’ (Mao II 159) is dead, and Brita has shifted her focus from photographing writers to photographing terrorist leaders. When we finally meet Abu Rashid, he demonstrates certain unexpected similarities to Bill, hounded by his own set of doubts and insecurities. Brita gets the better of her exchange with both men, and both photo shoots are narrated entirely from her perspective. The most quoted line from Mao II is ‘The future belongs to crowds’ (16), but that is not the only thesis of the novel: the future also belongs to images. At least that’s what the novel shows. However, there is serious friction between content and form in the ekphrasis of Mao II. The novel appears to herald the imminent defeat of words and the triumph of images, but the medium undermines that message. Brita the image-maker may prevail against Bill the book-maker and Abu Rashid the bomb-maker, but all three are contained within a work of art by DeLillo the wordpainter. The novel’s ekphrastic interventions are innovative and subversive. DeLillo thrives where his characters flounder, not in spite of the proliferating image industry but through it: if you can’t beat them, appropriate them. Mao II is simultaneously an obituary for the fallen novel and a counterstrike in its defence.

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Falling Man When militant jihadists hijacked aeroplanes and crashed two of them into the World Trade Center towers on 11 September 2001, these attacks marked a major milestone in the ascent of global terrorism. In his essay for Harper’s published in December 2001, ominously titled ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, DeLillo conceded, ‘Today, again, the world narrative belongs to terrorists’ (33). He envisioned a crucial role for writers in responding to these acts of terror: ‘The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counternarrative’ (34). The challenge for the writer, and also the moral responsibility, would be to confront what happened in the towers on 9/11, gaze into that human terror, contemplate it deeply, penetrate the experience and/or be penetrated by it, and then reconstruct a counternarrative. ‘We have to take the shock and horror as it is’, DeLillo asserted. ‘But living language is not diminished. The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us’ (39). DeLillo takes up this challenge and fulfils this responsibility in Falling Man, where ekphrasis proves the ideal technique for gazing into 9/11 and trying to understand what it did to us. The central characters of Falling Man are spouses Keith Neudecker and Lianne Glenn. The estranged couple briefly reunite after dust-covered, glassy-eyed Keith shows up on Lianne’s doorstep on 9/11, having narrowly escaped death in the WTC tower where he worked. The beginning and end of the novel reconstruct Keith’s sensory impressions in the minutes after the plane’s impact. These scenes are harrowing, but they take us only so far. Access is limited because, as the experience unfolds, Keith finds it impossible to assimilate what is happening. In the days, weeks and eventually years after 9/11, access remains blocked because Keith suffers acutely from post-traumatic symptoms and avoids those memories. Since the main character who was actually there is so unwilling or unable to confront what happened, Falling Man’s counternarrative depends upon Lianne to find an alternate route into 9/11. Like DeLillo, and like almost everyone impacted by the 9/11 attacks, Lianne was not in the towers that day. Nonetheless, she feels compelled to enter into the experience and be entered by it, if only through indirect, occluded, deflected and speculative means. Ekphrasis provides Lianne, DeLillo and his readers with this necessary inroad to 9/11. Lianne’s ekphrastic engagements in Falling Man fall into two categories of starkly different register: responses to the so-called ‘jumpers’ who leaped from the towers to their deaths rather than be burned alive; and responses to the still-life paintings of Giorgio Morandi. Although Linda Kauffman does not examine the novel in terms of ekphrasis per se, she does make telling connections between Lianne and that ekphrastic exemplar John Keats by way of negative capability, the ability to enter imaginatively into the subjectivity of another person or thing. As Keats describes it, his own personality disappears in the process of imagining the Grecian urn or the nightingale. Lianne possesses this quality: ever since she was a little girl, she has imaginatively absorbed the sensations around her, as if her body were a permeable membrane. (Kauffman 136) Lianne’s propensity for imaginative absorption is epitomised by her response to footage of the second plane crashing into south tower:

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Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, 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. (Falling Man 134) DeLillo writes against the grain of typical ekphrasis by once again featuring a woman as the subject gazing rather than the object gazed upon. That said, the ekphrastic description of ‘the footage that entered the body’ has unmistakable sexual connotations, and in this respect replicates the familiar pattern of woman as vessel to be filled, bride to be ravished, or membrane to be permeated. For a reader familiar with DeLillo’s fiction, one hears echoes of the satirical scene from White Noise where Jack and Babette use erotic literature as foreplay. Babette draws the line at lame descriptions of sex in terms of ‘entering’: ‘“Enter me, enter me, yes, yes”’ (White Noise 29). That line is crossed in Falling Man, however, when the video footage of 9/11 enters Lianne like a sordid simulation of the planes penetrating the towers. The novel’s title contains multiple frames of reference and levels of representation. First there is the ‘jumper’ (later identified as Eric Briley), one of the estimated two hundred people who leaped from the burning towers on 9/11. This particular suicide became emblematic by way of a famous photo labelled ‘The Falling Man’, shot by Richard Drew and disseminated by many news outlets before being quickly suppressed as too disturbing and/or exploitative. Then there is DeLillo’s fictional performance artist known as the Falling Man (a character later identified as David Janiak). This performer periodically appears unannounced at locations across New York City and re-enacts the leap and pose of the suicide captured in Drew’s iconic image. Finally, if only metaphorically, there is Keith as a falling man, one who survived the attacks on 9/11 but who subsequently plummets in a slow-motion descent towards equally assured self-destruction. Lianne responds through ekphrasis to various images of these falling men. She recalls her initial reaction to Drew’s notorious photo in ekphrastic detail: It hit her hard when she first saw it, the day after, in the newspaper. The man headlong, the towers behind him. The mass of the towers filled the frame of the picture. The man falling, the towers contiguous, she thought, behind him. The enormous soaring lines, the vertical column stripes. The man with blood on his shirt, she thought, or burn marks, and the effect of the columns behind him, the composition, she thought, darker stripes for the nearer tower, the north, lighter for the other, and the mass, the immensity of it, and the man set almost precisely between the rows of darker and lighter stripes. Headlong, free fall, she thought, and this picture burned a hole in her mind and heart, dear God, he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific. (Falling Man 221–2) Lianne grieves the suicide, but her response chiefly entails aesthetic appreciation for the beautiful visual composition. Because she cannot get inside this falling man’s subjectivity, she is left to consider the image from the outside like an art object. She admires what she sees, but she is denied admission to the depths of experience and the terrible truths concealed behind the glossy surface. If ‘The Falling Man’ photo

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could speak, that foster-child of silence and slow time might say, ‘Terror is truth, truth terror, – that is all / You know about 9/11, and all you need to know.’ Lianne’s responses to the performance artist the Falling Man are subtly but importantly different. Like Lianne, David Janiak confronts 9/11 from the outside and at a distance in time and space. Although her horror at these performances resembles her reaction to Drew’s photo, Lianne can identify with the performer in a way she could not with the jumper and his image. Lianne and Janiak are equidistant from the scene of the crime and the site of trauma. If Briley falls along the axis mundi of Ground Zero and Drew’s photo is surveyed from Ground Minus-One, then Janiak and Lianne both occupy Ground Minus-Two. From this remove, neither the performer nor the gazer can pierce the membrane of alterity and subjectivity to get inside the jumper’s experience. Instead, through the transformative alchemy of their separate perceptions, they appropriate ‘The Falling Man’ as, respectively, a stage on which to re-enact trauma and a screen on which to project preoccupations with death. The first time Lianne sees Janiak’s performance, she observes, ‘There was a blankness in his face, but deep, a kind of lost gaze. Because what was he doing finally? Because did he finally know? She thought the bare space he stared into must be his own, not some grim vision of others falling’ (167). Lianne makes this bare space her own, too, a tabula rasa on which she inscribes her worries over traumatised Keith: ‘But why was she standing here watching? Because she saw her husband somewhere near [. . .] Because she felt compelled, or only helpless’ (167). She feels obliged to gaze at the Falling Man and to contemplate the jumper’s unfathomable experience. This is her civic responsibility, but more personally it is a debt she feels she owes to Keith. Lianne thinks she is honouring her husband through this post-9/11 vigil, but her response to the Falling Man is also wrapped up in unresolved feelings about her father. As she watches a second performance by Janiak, ‘She thought, Died by his own hand’ (169). This is a phrase linked in her mind with Jack Glenn’s suicide. Lianne’s father shot himself during the early stages of dementia, preferring suicide to the worse fate of completely losing control of his life and becoming a stranger to those he loved. It is not merely that one image of suicide triggers associations with another. What binds the Falling Man so closely to Jack’s death is the comparable calculus involved. Both the jumpers and her father looked at the situation, confronted the hard facts, gamed out the deadly scenarios, and chose a quick and comparatively painless death to a death involving greater suffering. The plane entered the tower and the bullet entered Jack’s brain: the results were immediate death for some and lingering devastation for the survivors, on both global and individual scales. Lianne’s ekphrastic engagements with various falling men functions as a process for better assimilating her own traumas. A similar yet distinct function is served by Lianne’s ekphrastic encounters with Giorgio Morandi’s still-life paintings. Her mother, Nina Bartos, is a retired art professor and collector. Lianne has long been enamoured with two Morandi paintings hanging in Nina’s apartment: What she loved most were the two still lifes on the north wall, by Giorgio Morandi, a painter her mother had studied and written about. These were groupings of bottles, jugs, biscuit tins, that was all, but there was something in the brushstrokes that held a mystery she could not name, or in the irregular edges of vases and jars, some reconnoiter inward, human and obscure, away from the very light and color of the paintings. Natura morta. The Italian term for still life seemed stronger than

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it had to be, somewhat ominous, even, but these were matters she hadn’t talked about with her mother. (12) DeLillo again arranges a gender-reversed reprise of classic ekphrasis, here with a woman gazing intently at images wrought by a man, though the objects themselves (bottles, jugs, biscuit tins) are vessels that retain feminine signification, like Keats’s urn. In her initial response above, Lianne is content to let Morandi’s containers remain empty. She resists interpretation, insisting ‘Let the latent meanings turn and bend in the wind, free from authoritative comment’ (12). She lifts her moratorium on imposing meaning in the wake of 9/11. Soon after the attacks, Martin Ridnour (aka Ernst Hechinger), a German art dealer and Nina’s longtime lover, declares, ‘“I keep seeing the towers in this still life”’ (49). Lianne looks again and agrees: Two of the taller items were dark and somber, with smoky marks and smudges, and one of them was partly concealed by a long-necked bottle. The bottle was a bottle, white. The two dark objects, too obscure to name, were the things that Martin was referring to [. . .] She saw what he saw. She saw the towers. (49) But Nina disagrees: ‘These shapes are not translatable to modern towers, twin towers. It’s work that rejects that kind of extension or projection. It takes you inward, down and in. That’s what I see there, half buried, something deeper than things or shapes of things [. . .] It’s all about mortality, isn’t it?’ (111) At first it may seem that the professor emerita contradicts herself. Nina claims that Morandi’s Natura morta rejects projection, and then she proceeds to project meaning: it’s all about mortality. However, the key link is her middle assertion about the paintings guiding the observer inward, not into the painting but into the self. Yes, when Nina looks at the Morandi still life she sees death; but she recognises that this harbinger is not contained in the image but rather within herself as viewer. His bottles, jugs and biscuit tins refuse to be pried open, but this does not shut off the artistic circuitry. Instead, contemplation of the Natura morta leads Nina to gaze within, and what she confronts there is her own encroaching death. Art = the object itself + the observer’s subjective response + context + time. In one sense, Morandi’s still-life renderings of humble domestic items, or the pastoral figures painted on the sides of Keats’s urn, are permanently fixed and unchanging. In another sense, however, every observer encounters a different work of art based upon what each brings to the encounter. Furthermore, shifting contexts in space and time may alter one’s view, so that a painting that seemed to signify one thing on 10 September is transformed into something remarkably different on 12 September. Lianne communicates the mutability of art through her later ekphrastic engagement with Morandi’s paintings in 2004, after her mother’s death. Walking through an exhibition, she is struck by one still life in particular: She looked at the third painting for a long time. It was a variation on one of the paintings her mother had owned. She noted the nature and shape of each object, the placement of objects, the tall dark oblongs, the white bottle. She could not stop

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looking. There was something hidden in the painting. Nina’s living room was there, memory and motion. The objects in the painting faded into the figures behind them, the woman smoking in the chair, the standing man. (210) Exiting the gallery, she muses, ‘All the paintings and drawings carried the same title, Natura Morta. Even this, the term for still life, yielded her mother’s last days’ (211). Lianne has come around to sharing Nina’s view that these paintings are all about mortality, specifically her mother’s mortality. However, the two women gazers still see art in fundamentally different ways. Nina looks for meaning within herself, while Lianne still projects her meaning on to or into the artwork. Lianne begins with an ekphrastic description of the Natura morta in front of her. In the aftermath of 9/11 Lianne projected images of the twin towers on to the canvas, and in the aftermath of her mother’s death she projects recollections of her mother. But then her focus shifts from Morandi’s painting to a correspondent counter-image of her own creation, a still life housed in her memory. The two images become indistinguishable and interchangeable for her. As Lianne stands before the painting in 2004, she is transported back to 2001, when she, Nina and Martin were all together observing, reflecting and commenting upon Morandi: The two dark objects, the white bottle, the huddled boxes. Lianne turned away from the painting and saw the room itself as a still life, briefly. Then the human figures appear, Mother and Lover, with Nina still in the armchair, thinking remotely of something, and Martin hunched on the sofa now, facing her. (111) She superimposes this memory on to the canvas: the two dark objects represent Nina and Martin, and the white bottle is Lianne. This self-reflexive imagery works like a hall of mirrors: Morandi’s material still life of bottles, jugs and biscuit tins is reflected in Lianne’s mental still life of Mother, Lover and Daughter, which in turn replicates DeLillo’s ur-scene of objects in relation to one another in a room. All of these visual representations of trauma and mortality, and the matrix of gazes through which they are perceived, performed, rearranged and reconstituted, are etched verbally on the page and incorporated into the word-painting Falling Man.

Zero K Zero K is relentlessly ekphrastic. Scarcely a chapter goes by without one or more detailed encounters with art or aestheticised objects told from the perspective of firstperson narrator Jeffrey Lockhart. For a novel ostensibly about cryogenics, it is striking how much emphasis DeLillo places upon art. The Convergence essentially doubles as both cryogenics facility and avant-garde museum. Jeff’s stepmother Artis, preparing to be frozen alongside his father Ross, describes the Convergence as one giant work of art: ‘“We ought to regard it as a work-in-progress, an earthwork, a form of earth art, land art. Built up out of the land and sunk down into it as well. Restricted access. Defined by stillness, both human and environmental. A little tomblike as well”’ (Zero K 10). Jeff picks up on this theme when he describes ‘the sense of enclosure and isolation, a new generation of earth art, with human bodies in states of suspended animation’ (16). To be inside the Convergence is at once to be incorporated into an outsized artwork and to be sealed away in futuristic catacombs.

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Dystopian novels often critique totalitarian tendencies in the present by extrapolating those trends into the future, where shadowy forces have secured unlimited power by reducing the masses to mindless machines in service to the state. Zero K descends in part from this lineage. Jeff is highly sceptical of the means and motives of the Convergence’s masterminds, as well as the wealthy moguls (like his father) who seek immortality there. Contemplating some clients already frozen in their cryogenic pods, Jeff thinks, ‘It occurred to me that these were humans as mannequins’ (146). Plastic mannequins are scattered in curious poses throughout the facility, and Jeff intuits that the agenda of the Convergence is to reduce humans to mannequins, converting subjects into objects: ‘I wondered if I was looking at the controlled future, men and women being subordinated, willingly or not, to some form of centralized command. Mannequinized lives’ (146). The deeper Jeff penetrates into the place, the more his fears are confirmed. Late in the novel he encounters several cryogenically preserved bodies, with their heads removed, serving as statuary decorations. No attempt is made to hide this blatant dehumanisation; on the contrary, Ross and Jeff receive a guided tour through a wing of human statues. An escort explains, ‘“This is not a silicone-andfiberglass replica. Real flesh, human tissue, human being. Body preserved for a limited time by cryoprotectants applied to the skin”’ (231). Jeff observes, ‘There were several other figures, some female, and the bodies were clearly on display, as in a museum corridor, all without heads. I assumed that the brains were in chilled storage and that the headless motif was a reference to pre-classical statuary dug up from ruins’ (232). No heads, no thoughts, no agency. Jeff muses, ‘This was their idea of postmortem decor and it occurred to me that there was a prediction implied in this exhibit. Human bodies, saturated with advanced preservatives, serving as mainstays in the art markets of the future’ (232). The future belongs to those who can convert crowds of minions into collections of mannequins. Jeff is sensitive to the totalitarian pretensions of the Convergence, but he is far less attuned to his own objectifying tendencies. He exhibits some of the scopophilic desires and voyeuristic behaviour characteristic of the other ‘art stalkers’ who creep throughout DeLillo’s late works. Jeff looks at women as sex objects, and he looks at objects in fetishised ways. When he spies his first mannequin at the Convergence, his instinctive response is arousal: I saw that it was a mannequin, naked, hairless, without facial features, and it was reddish brown, maybe russet or simply rust. There were breasts, it had breasts, and I stopped to study the figure, a molded plastic version of the human body, a jointed model of a woman. I imagined placing a hand on a breast. This seemed required, particularly if you are me. (24) He fantasises that this mannequin is helplessly fending off his advances: The head was a near oval, arms positioned in a manner that I tried to decipher – self-defense, withdrawal, with one foot set to the rear. The figure was rooted to the floor, not enclosed in protective glass. A hand on a breast, a hand sliding up a thigh. It’s something I would have done once upon a time. (24–5) Later, Jeff encounters a silent, anonymous woman who escorts him back to his compartment for sex. She is apparently a ‘gift’ from his father, ordered as effortlessly as a

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room-service hamburger. This woman is human, not a mannequin, but she is granted no more voice or agency than a blow-up doll. Here Jeff is exposed as the one turning a human into an art object. He mounts her on the wall like a painting: ‘I stood and moved into her, smearing her into the wall, imagining an imprint, a body mark that would take days to melt away’ (78). In Mao II and Falling Man, DeLillo swims against the stream of typical ekphrasis by focusing on women gazing at men or objects made by men. In Zero K, however, he leans into the misogyny of the tradition, presenting Jeff as so driven by scopophilia that he is practically a caricature of the male gaze. Jeff isn’t a sexual predator, though. His predominant desire is to enter the minds of women more than their bodies. The primary focus of his attention is mothers rather than lovers, and his most telling ekphrastic encounters don’t lead sexwards but deathwards. Like Lianne in Falling Man, Jeff fails to penetrate the membrane of alterity and get inside the unmediated experience of the other. So instead, he resorts to filling in the silence with his own words. This classic ekphrasis is exemplified by the centrepiece of Zero K, the section titled ‘ARTIS MARTINEAU’, in all caps like a gravestone epitaph. The stream-of-consciousness patter and ontological groping in this bewildering section represents the thought process of Jeff’s stepmother, frozen in her futuristic urn, like an encephalographic readout of a mind in limbo. The section is written in the first person, except for periodic narrative interjections which are italicized and written in the third person: ‘She is first person and third person both’ (158). Artis seemingly alternates between depicting her experience from without and within, recording her subjective sensations and then stepping outside herself to offer detached self-commentary. But this portrait of Artis is all artifice. Late in the novel, Jeff more or less admits his authorship of the section, providing this ekphrasis of his imaginary snapshot of Artis’s mind: 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. (272) If she will not surrender intimate details about her experience in the pod, then he will simply invent her testimony, sign it in her name, and bury it in the centre of his own narrative. The reference to Artis’s ‘virgin solitude’ sounds like a direct allusion to Keats’s opening characterisation of the urn as a ‘still unravish’d bride of quietness’ (Keats 223). ‘ARTIS MARTINEAU’ is Jeff’s ‘Ode on a Cryogenic Pod’. Artis’s cryogenic preservation represents her attempt to achieve immortality, an effort Jeff regards as doomed hubris. She is not definitively dead, but neither is she really alive in any worthwhile, meaningful sense. His speculative fiction exposes her suspended existence as self-imposed solitary confinement in a solipsistic prison without any realistic hope for parole. Jeff’s meditations on his stepmother’s mortality propel him deeper inwards to memories of his mother’s death. He was very close to his mother Madeline Siebert, and their bond only strengthened after she divorced Ross Lockhart. As an awkward, alienated, idiosyncratic kid, Jeff felt abandoned by Ross, but he felt understood and

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appreciated by Madeline. Jeff frequently remembers sitting beside his mother as she lay dying, accompanied by one of her devoted friends. Much like Lianne’s mental still life of Mother/Lover/Daughter, Jeff retains a framed visual memory of Mother/Friend/ Son gathered around the deathbed. He clings to this image as a talisman, returning to it again and again. His first flashback occurs as he and Ross assemble around Artis’s bed at the Convergence. This similar image prompts Jeff to remember: When my mother died, at home, I was seated next to the bed and there was a friend of hers, a woman with a cane, standing in the doorway. That’s how I would picture the moment, narrowed, now and always, to the woman in the bed, the woman in the doorway, the bed itself, the metal cane. (9) This memory stands as a quotidian emblem of natural death, starkly at odds with the stylised sheen and death-defying delusions offered by the Convergence. Jeff has pared down the composition of this idée fixe to its essential ingredients: Madeline lying in bed, the friend leaning on her cane in the doorway, Jeff sitting in a chair by the bed. Jeff is both the gazer and the gazed upon, third person and first person, subject and object. ‘It’s all about mortality’, just as Nina observed of the Morandi still lifes (Falling Man 111). Jeff’s preoccupation with his own mental still life is no morbid obsession, however, for he also finds calm, tenderness, solace and ballast in contemplating this veronica, this sacred relic of his mother’s death. Late in Zero K, having fallen asleep in his chair (another trigger), Jeff awakes in his compartment at the Convergence and immediately senses his mother’s aura in the room. This ghostly visitation prompts his final ekphrastic response to the talismanic deathbed image: I’d never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be ‘only human’, subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief. There were memories, everywhere, unsummoned. There were images, visions, voices and how a woman’s last breath gives expression to her son’s constrained humanity. Here was the neighbor with the cane, motionless, ever so, in the doorway, and here was my mother, an arm’s length away, a touch away, in stillness. (248) Jeff imbues the image with pathos, affection and reverence. But there is also an element of appropriation. Jeff tends to co-opt others into serving his needs. Madeline suffered and died, yet her son focuses chiefly on the tutelary benefit her death had for him, expanding him with grief and making him more human. All the while, in classic ekphrastic fashion, she is depicted as an inscrutable figure of stillness and silence. Nevertheless, to Jeff’s credit, he seems willing in this final encounter to honour his mother’s quotidian mystery. When it comes to the artificial quasi-death of Artis, he cannot resist the temptation to seek explanation and resolution by composing an ode on her experience in the pod. However, he resists this temptation when it comes to Madeline, permitting the silence to speak for itself. Rather than fill her up with his own interpolations, Jeff respects her loving life with an inner Natura morta of her natural death, an image he curates and revisits in the memory gallery of his mind.

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Works Cited Brosch, Renate. ‘Ekphrasis in the Digital Age: Responses to the Image.’ Poetics Today, 39, no. 2, 2018, pp. 225–43. Cheeke, Stephen. Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis. Manchester University Press, 2008. DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. Scribner, 2007. ——. ‘In the Ruins of the Future.’ Harper’s, December 2001, pp. 33–40. ——. Mao II. Penguin, 1991. ——. Zero K. Scribner, 2016. Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. University of Chicago Press, 1993. Kauffman, Linda S. ‘Bodies in Rest and Motion.’ Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man, edited by Stacey Olster. Continuum, 2011, pp. 135–51. Keats, John. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ 1818. The Poetical Works of John Keats, edited by H. W. Garrod. Oxford University Press, 1962, p. 223. LeClair, Thomas. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ 1982. Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro. University of Mississippi Press, 2005, pp. 3–15. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. University of Chicago Press, 1994. Nadotti, Maria. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ 1993. Translated by Peggy Boyers. Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro. University of Mississippi Press, 2005, pp. 109–18. Passaro, Vince. ‘Dangerous Don DeLillo.’ 1991. Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro. University of Mississippi Press, 2005, pp. 75–85. Scott, Grant F. The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts. University of New England Press, 1994. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1977. Picador, 2001.

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14 Staged Events: Don DeLillo, the Short Story, Intellectuals and the Arts Henry Veggian

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on DeLillo’s public readings have a way of unsettling an audience. It is not so much that his manner of reading is itself particularly notable: his voice is deliberate and even paced, his body language understated, and he calmly turns the pages at intervals. He evenly reads the work he has chosen for the occasion. What is often unsettling, however, is the relation between the writing from which he reads and the occasion itself. Attentive listeners will note that the subdued manner of delivery pushes the words to the foreground. As they fill the room and resonate with the occasion, the effect is one of a performative intervention. The effect I am describing is not limited to public readings, however. It is also a characteristic of short works that he publishes, as they too are selected strategically at times to function in their context of publication as a performance of sorts, in which the writing comments on the occasion of publication. I would offer two examples from public readings I have attended (one of which is available to view online) as well as a published short story to explain how DeLillo’s short works use the instruments of fiction writing to transform a reading or publication into an event in which his shorter writings explore, transfigure and defend the ‘arts’ writ large. Here I have in mind not only varied forms of written expression, or the fine arts, or modern cinema and so forth, but also what were once politely known as the ‘industrial arts’ of printing, graphic design and other techniques that reproduce the arts as commodity forms. An example of the unsettling effect: in the spring of 2013 DeLillo read excerpts from Underworld in a small conference room at Duke University. He selected the passages describing Nick Shay’s life, which included Nick’s accidental murder of George Manza and the ennui of his retirement. The occasion for the reading was also a retirement – that of the literary critic Frank Lentricchia. The effect of the selected passages was not lost upon anyone – the room was so quiet that you could hear DeLillo’s fingers lift the pages from which he read. A small, intimate event, on the occasion of a friend’s retirement, might seem an exception. One might say DeLillo took liberties with the daring selection of passages because he was comfortable doing so: he knew the intellectual audience of students and faculty would be sympathetic; the focus of the selected passages was a fellow ItalianAmerican’s retirement rather than a fictional Italian-American’s murder (a high-wire act, to say the least). But the uncomfortable implications of the content were strategically well-chosen beyond any personal sentiment or morbid joke: DeLillo had chosen to read from a work about the end of a world-historical era, the Cold War, and appeared

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to have done so to commemorate the achievements of an intellectual of that era. The contact points between fiction and occasion were staged to maximum effect. In this regard, I would argue that the strategic selection of the fiction in relation to the occasion transformed a rather routine rite of passage in American labour (‘Here’s a watch and a card from your colleagues’, ‘Good luck Jen!’, ‘Thank you for your service’, etc.) into an intervention that offered a provocative political commentary regarding intellectuals who worked at prestigious, influential institutions during a certain era in American history – an era, one might add, that is ending but not yet over. I will return to these terms below and explain how they make possible a distinction between publication and performance in ways that help us more fully position DeLillo’s short stories in a manner that does not limit them as ‘previews’ of the longer novels, in which the writer merely drafts ideas that are granted more sophisticated rendering in those novels. Before proceeding, however, I would urge that my aim is not to divide the longer novels from the short stories. As I have shown in the example above, DeLillo will sometimes read sections of longer works in public, rearranging them perhaps in a manner that makes them appear to be somewhat complete short works (a technique that is not uncommon among novelists who read in public). Rather, to re-evaluate DeLillo’s short fiction is not merely to elevate one form above another (the preceding example was from a novel, of course), but to direct attention to the critical elements of selection and performance in the relation between reading and occasion so as to explore the unsettling effect that, invoking DeLillo’s interests in theatre and performance art, I call the ‘staged event’. To emphasise the point, I would offer a second example, where DeLillo read a work of creative non-fiction at the New York Public Library in 1997. In this instance, he again appeared among other intellectuals (several academics also spoke at the previously mentioned event), albeit of different kinds. The occasion was a book launch, not by a literary writer, but by the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng. The book was The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and Other Writings. It consists of letters that Jingsheng had composed between 1981 and 1993, during his first prison sentence, as well as letters published in various Hong Kong and Taiwanese newspapers, an essay he composed on democracy in 1978, his written account of his 1979 trial and various appendices. In addition, editors, translators and commentators contributed writings to the book that contextualised Jingsheng’s writings, as he was considered the most important Chinese dissident of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Sophia Woodman noted in a biographical essay that concludes the book: ‘Although Wei has had little opportunity to work with fellow dissidents or develop a career, his unswerving commitment to universal principles has made him the paramount symbol of the fight for human rights and democracy in China’ (271). The international pressure from liberal-democratic governments and human rights organisations was prolonged and intense, and following a second trial and imprisonment in the mid-1990s, Jingsheng was released on ‘medical parole’, as Woodman notes, and flown to the United States in September 1997. Jingsheng later wrote in his preface to the paperback edition of The Courage to Stand Alone: ‘When this book first appeared, in May 1997, I was still in prison’ (xi). The announcement of the publication of The Courage to Stand Alone was part of a broad human rights campaign to free Jingsheng and draw attention to the plight of Chinese dissidents and democratic activists. Amnesty International, Human Rights

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Watch, PEN International and other organisations were involved; Kristina M. Torgeson, the book’s editor and translator, listed the Transnational Radical Party in the book’s Acknowledgements as one of those organisations. The TRP, as it is known, is an Italian political party that also advocates for human rights, and it is perhaps best-known in academic circles for its successful campaign to have the Italian intellectual Antonio Negri released from prison in the 1980s. During the 1990s the TRP kept a small office at UN Plaza North on Manhattan’s East Side. The office was registered as a non-governmental organisation, and advocated for a variety of causes, one of them being the plight of Tibetan people, the other the release of dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng. I began working as an editor and translator in that office in late 1996, when I was in my mid-twenties and shortly after completing my master’s degree, for which I had written a thesis on Don DeLillo and novels of the Vietnam War. Not long after I was hired, a colleague who shared my interest in contemporary American literature informed me that he could obtain a pass for me to attend a reading from Wei Jingsheng’s book at the New York Public Library. He noted that my attendance would be beneficial to my understanding of the office and its projects, then he winked and said there would be a surprise. Indeed, there was. I kept a diary during those years, and in the entry for that day I noted that I entered the New York Public Library’s iconic entrance after work one evening and heard a man, who I described as a ‘hippy’, ask a guard where ‘the Human Rights Watch’ reading was being held. Apparently, I introduced myself to the hippy, a nice man named Steve, and I noted that we walked downstairs to a long hall near the west side of the building and found ourselves near the head of the queue, just outside a closed door. Two tall gentlemen stood next to us discussing, in rather animated manner, the state of the New York Yankees after the strike-shortened 1996 baseball season. When I turned, I recognised that the two interlocutors were Arthur Miller and E. L. Doctorow. Steve and I chatted a bit about the reading, about Brooklyn, and as he started to discuss DeLillo’s novel The Names, DeLillo himself said, ‘Excuse me’, and, as I wrote in the entry, ‘cuts the line bright between us [and the two writers]’. Shortly thereafter the doors opened, my new friend Steve and I showed our passes and we entered; after sitting in the centre of row A, I noted that then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was seated nearby. Most applauded when he was introduced, one person whistled, and then Giuliani spoke about the dissident ‘Wei Jingjong’. I then understood why my colleague had warned me not to wear jeans to work that day. Clearly, this was not a routine literary book release, with book signings, a moderately renowned moderator and a Q&A session. It was a formal event of some geopolitical consequence, the world’s news media would be present, and phrases such as ‘security clearances’ were spoken around our office that week. I still have the publisher’s press release from the event, which was held on Tuesday 13 May 1997. It lists musician Peter Gabriel, author Rose Styron, Penguin group chairman Michael Lynton, journalist/writer and activist Bette Bao Lord and John Shattuck of the US State Department as speakers; Rudy Giuliani is not listed, but he does appear in the archived C-Span video recording of the event, titled ‘Stand-In for Wei Jingsheng’, because most of the speakers ‘stood in’ for the imprisoned dissident, reading from his letters on his behalf, their substitution for the prisoner an act of protest. DeLillo was introduced at the halfway mark. Unlike the other participating readers, he did not read from Jingsheng’s letters. Instead, he read an original work of creative non-fiction. It begins with the same opening line as

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that printed one week later in the New Yorker magazine: ‘Last month there was a man in a cage in Soho . . .’ (the man was Russian artist Oleg Kushik, who DeLillo uses to set up a description of Kafka’s ‘The Hunger Artist’). I had a memory of DeLillo speaking for longer than most speakers, and after checking the video recording against the printed text, I found this to be true. The spoken version from which DeLillo read at the event is not only longer, it also reads more like a work of short fiction. The prose uses more figural language (‘whirling frenzy’ is contrasted with ‘stillness’), phrases missing from the published version join to form longer, sprawling sentences, and other descriptive phrases (‘hair cropped, clothes discarded’) are present in the speech (these edits are mostly marked by ellipses in the published version). A longer section about the Russian artist several sentences in length was left out of the printed essay. The speech begins ‘A real dog entered the gallery, a boxer, well trained . . .’, and ends with ‘When an art critic entered his cage, in Sweden, the performance artist bit him.’ I remember the crowd reacted audibly to this line – a murmur can be discerned on the video recording.1 As I noted above, the spoken version DeLillo read at the event is not only longer and more digressive, it also contains more descriptive prose and figural language. The breaks between sections are clear, the pivots and parataxis sharp, but the protagonist – the caged/imprisoned ‘artist’ – is also blurry, the silhouette of a character. Jingsheng, Kafka, Kafka’s artist, Kushik in Soho, the ‘writer’, a dissident in a cold prison cell, are transformed into a singular and universal protest from confinement, an abject figure of state oppression. In my diary, I noted ‘the audience applauds him [DeLillo] longer than any other speaker.’ In a single, combative and experimental text, DeLillo used the instruments of fiction to combine elements of literary criticism with political commentary. One might classify ‘The Artist Naked in a Cage’ among the writer’s many uncollected works of non-fiction, I suppose, but such classification tames the act. I hesitate even to call it a ‘text’, a word that is too neutral and static to capture the effect it had in the moment when DeLillo took the stage before celebrities and dignitaries and, with Munkacsy’s The Blind Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to His Daughters hanging on a nearby wall, hushed a restive crowd. Whether DeLillo is reading from a work of fiction or non-fiction, it is clear that the brevity and effect are calculated and calibrated to the occasion. DeLillo had taken the stage after a US State Department official had spoken, and the contrast could not have been more dramatic. DeLillo is no bureaucrat. He is not an advocate, in the traditional, literal sense of the word, nor does he make the arguments typical of the political activist. He is an artist, and the form of the intervention must be considered as distinct, the points of contact aligned along other surfaces. This is not to say that the writer’s intervention is not political, or his advocacy of a cause ineffective – the interventions are

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The published text of DeLillo’s intervention appeared, in altered and truncated form, in the 26 May 1997 issue of the New Yorker. In addition to several cuts and changes to the text, the New Yorker version also contains an error; in the spoken version, DeLillo reads the phrase ‘bony arms and bared ribs’, but the published version contains the phrase ‘bony arms and bared arms’. A C-Span2 video of the 13 May 1997 ‘Stand-In For Wei Jingsheng’ can be found on the C-Span.org online archive, at https://www.c-span.org/ video/?81224-1/the-courage-stand-alone.

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indeed political and effective, perhaps even more so because of the manner by which they cut through the noise of convention and cliché, hypnotise the crowd and punctuate the significance of an occasion. As with the commentary on Cold War intellectuals implied by the reading at Duke, in the case of the Wei Jingsheng book launch, every writer in the room felt the figure of the naked artist in their own skin that day. DeLillo had projected the ‘Stand-In’ on to the crowd. I want to draw comparison between the events described above and the publication of some of DeLillo’s short fiction. I will attempt to do so with the understanding that the writer might not always place the work himself, and that agents, editors, publishers and other figures might be involved along the way. I do not mention this only to recognise a caveat, but to affirm the value of DeLillo’s short works within a broad constellation of artistic activities. There is a critical point, too, insofar as short works published in periodicals have often been regarded by critics as less worthy of sustained critical attention. DeLillo’s short fiction belongs to a tradition in American publishing that has offered writers relative freedom to work in public spaces that are not confined by the more expensive and unwieldy format of the printed book. The short story, as we know it, is the child of the American periodical publication, and as such its medium is always transitory by contrast to the more permanent longevity (both physical and canonical) of the printed book. Yet the short story is also more conducive to public readings, and popular, in the true sense of the term, in that it is a form that is not burdened by the forbidding prestige of the novel. However difficult to access DeLillo’s short fiction of the 1960s remains (it is not only uncollected but also scattered across small journals that must be tracked down in libraries or purchased, at some expense, from dealers of rare books), this rarity is also evidence of my point: the story is an ephemeral form, consumed by readers on subway cars and buses, by people on lunch breaks, or for a quick evening read. It is a transitory art, and because its production and publication may require less time, it can be fitted more deliberately to an occasion. Engaging in public life through periodicals, magazines and newspapers, short story writers often mingle with other artists and intellectuals. Consider the panorama of American intellectual types on the stage with DeLillo that day in 1997: the publishers represented the corporate world, journalists the mass media, policy experts think tanks, activists NGOs, and bureaucrats represented governmental institutions. They played the diverse roles performed by intellectuals. And there was variety among the artists who read from Jingsheng’s letters – the celebrity playwright, the historical novelist, the progressive rock icon and MTV star, the academic, activist and poet. DeLillo and his short works stand apart to a significant degree – he is unaffiliated with academia, and with the exception of the occasional foray into screenwriting or theatre, he seldom works in mass entertainment. He and Doctorow represented perhaps the old view of the writer as an outsider who, largely unaffiliated with institutions, speaks primarily as an ‘artist’ (although Doctorow took a position at NYU during that period). I acknowledge that this view risks placing DeLillo in the obsolete position of the artist as a figure in a Romantic pantheon disengaged from the public world, and that furthermore his intervention at the event invoked the isolated artist. However, DeLillo often stages such characters as captives (see, for instance, Mao II) or conversely as artists who ironically recreate isolation, thereby asking readers to confront the artifice (and complex politics) of hagiography and

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myth; I would add that a review of DeLillo’s activism on behalf of the silenced, the disabled and the oppressed should dispel any Romantic notions regarding his work. In sum, his narrative performance on that day reminds us that on such occasions he speaks as an artist, using the instruments of his craft – narrative technique, character, figure and sentence (not to mention a critical independence of mind) – to portray and engage the world in a manner that the policy expert, the corporate publisher and the mayor would not. To borrow Edward W. Said’s term for this sort of figure, DeLillo read from the stage as an ‘amateur’, who ‘is moved neither by rewards nor by the fulfillment of an immediate career plan but by a committed engagement with ideas and values in the public sphere’ (109). I quote here from Said’s Representations of the Intellectual (1993), a work focused on the secular figure of the intellectual. The book remains definitive in many ways, but for one reason most of all: in every chapter, Said discusses artists as intellectuals who also portray intellectuals. Virginia Woolf’s self-portrayal and representation of women, Naipaul’s exiles, Turgenev’s young rationalist, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, etc. are some of the organising examples from a book that, to use an important key word from it, situates the artist in relation to other constituencies within modern societies. In particular, the section I have in mind here is from Lecture IV, entitled ‘Professionals and Amateurs’, where, in discussing a work by Régis Debray about modern French intellectuals, Said notes the role that publishers and editors played in providing a space for artists and public intellectuals that was outside the academy and not yet harnessed to mass media. By placing the figure of Said’s amateur within the context of the staged event, I am proposing here another framework within which to understand DeLillo’s shorter writings, including his short stories, and that is one in which they become expressions of a class of intellectuals whose works appear in magazines, periodicals and newspapers, works that are also more amenable to the occasion of a public reading. In this way, I hope to diminish the academic prejudice that in some way regards the short story as the younger (and lesser) sibling of the novel, a stigma that, we should admit, has often granted privilege to DeLillo’s novels and rendered the short fiction either an afterthought or as something to be regarded as rudimentary – a pre-novelistic form of his work, as it were. By recognising DeLillo’s role within this class of intellectuals (and as amateurs, they are distinguished from other types of intellectuals, particularly those described by Gramsci as of the organic variety), we can also begin to recognise a number of other matters. First, DeLillo’s ‘short works’, which comprise essays, speeches, short fiction, memoir and even plays, can be grouped together not only by genre but by virtue of their expression of the artist’s commitment to contributing, in that idiosyncratic manner that affirms the individual life and expression, to public discourse. Second, by suspending the generic categorisation of the works to this end, we can also begin to see how strong a role prose fiction plays even in his writing of non-fiction. I made the case that ‘The Artist Naked in a Cage’ was a work of experimental non-fiction that, in its longer, spoken form clearly utilised the fictional techniques found in the short story; a similar case could be made for other works of non-fiction by DeLillo. As examples, I would offer ‘Where were you when’, his paratactic recollection of writing Libra and his personal memory of 22 November 1963, or even his memorial tribute to Norman Mailer, entitled ‘The Writer in Opposition’. While both are works of non-fiction, DeLillo’s use

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of narrative perspective, temporal shifts, character, setting and syntax all bring to mind his short fiction and his prose style more generally. Finally, I would add that understanding the short stories in their periodical context anchors DeLillo’s career in secular history, and in doing so dispels the mythology of the artist and removes the shine from the commodity. Here, we see the writer in the world, a figure of the newspaper streets, a reader among readers, an artist among peers, and a citizen with something to say, albeit differently than most. This is a work best achieved by discussion of the shorter works, and I do not refer only to the short works that are published evidence of those ‘strategic’ public interventions reviewed earlier on; nor would I suggest a false distinction between the role played by the shorter works in those pointedly political interventions and the novels (would anyone doubt that Mao II is one of the major political works written by an American author, an argument punctuated by DeLillo’s own advocacy on behalf of Rushdie prior to that novel’s release?) I refer here instead to how the short fiction and other shorter writings create a more thorough (and I would argue more interesting) timeline of the writer’s career, as there are hundreds of such uncollected publications that in their sum provide a comprehensive account of DeLillo’s engaged public artistry. Defining the short fiction in relation to the writer’s specific public appearances is, of course, too narrow a criterion. This is why I have used the term ‘staged event’, which I understand as an artful and ironic sort of intervention, to describe DeLillo’s role as an amateur who writes and speaks beyond any professional prospect or institutional coercion. In this more open-ended view of the shorter works, his short fiction is not necessarily motivated by occasion or obligation, but by participating as an artist and through writing in the modern, secular work of public discourse. This quality perhaps explains the timeliness of DeLillo’s publications, and also their untimely abstraction when, unharnessed from a specific occasion, the staged event occurs regardless of audience. As such, to single out a specific, representative story is risky, as their numbers are many and the reprints perhaps more so.2 Yet each is unique, published in its own time, and each can be understood regardless of motive or occasion, along a continuum of publications that make up the story of a writer’s long career. And some are more occasional than others. Using the generic criterion of ‘short form fiction published in a periodical publication’, most would agree that DeLillo has published at least 19 short stories to date (the most recent at the time of writing being ‘The Itch’, in 2017). Of those, nine have been collected in a book (The Angel Esmeralda, 2011), and the other ten remain uncollected. Eight of DeLillo’s uncollected short stories are from the earliest decade or so of his career (roughly 1960–72). Several of those early stories were, however, reprinted in anthologies. There are perhaps a dozen or so other works of short fiction that occupy an ambiguous position in DeLillo’s oeuvre. ‘Videotape’ originally appeared in the final issue of Antaeus in 1994. It was then reprinted in a 1996 anthology entitled Sudden Fiction: 60 New Short-Short Stories. It was printed both times with the explicit label of ‘short story’. It reappeared in revised form in the autumn of 1997, in Part 2 of Underworld,

 2

A recent volume of Short Story Criticism edited by Darien Cavanaugh and Dennis Poupard (vol. 261) surveys DeLillo’s short fiction and reprints representative examples of critical works devoted to their study. I refer readers to it for its well-edited and wide-ranging discussions.

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as chapter 1 of that section. Later still, on New Year’s Day 2000, the Washington Post reprinted it in abridged form with the baffling title ‘This Was Good Writing’. Some would debate whether ‘Videotape’ constitutes a stand-alone work of short fiction. Like ‘The Angel Esmeralda’, it was published as a short story prior to its inclusion in the novel Underworld. ‘The Angel Esmeralda’ exists in two forms, as both a short story and as part of a novel, one text a revised version of the other, and so there is no reason to exclude the others, I would argue, as stand-alone works of short fiction. If we grant them a status as both a stand-alone work of short fiction and also as a part of a longer novel, then DeLillo’s short stories roughly double in number; in this case, it might also indicate that DeLillo was writing Underworld at least three years prior to its publication (or it might not). Many years before publishing ‘Videotape’, DeLillo had published another short story in Antaeus entitled ‘Creation’ (1979) (reprinted The Angel Esmeralda). The publication of ‘Videotape’ marked an occasion, in the unsettling manner I noted above, insofar as it was a story about technology and murder, published on the occasion of a magazine’s demise. Antaeus held a special place among the literary magazines of its era. The writer-musician Paul Bowles and poet Daniel Halpern founded Antaeus as a literary quarterly in 1970, and Halpern continued as its editor for nearly a quarter of a century, founding the Ecco imprint as an independent publisher in 1971 to publish the magazine (Deahl). Prior to becoming a publisher specialising in non-fiction (largely after Ecco was bought by Harper Collins in the late 1990s), the press was primarily known for Antaeus and for publishing reprints of literary paperbacks. Antaeus became known in the 1970s for its role as an independent literary publisher that bridged generations. Describing the magazine in the New York Times in 1974, J. D. O’Hara noted that its editorial board included W. S. Merwin, Tennessee Williams, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Paul and Jane Bowles, to name just a few significant post-war artists. O’Hara also noted several factors that distinguished Antaeus: its strong record of publishing works written by women, its commitment to writers from varied national traditions, its publication of both emerging and better-known figures, and its habit of reprinting from published works or publishing excerpts from soon-tobe-published works. I would add that the publication’s dedication to short fiction is notable (Bowles, a prolific writer of short stories for more than five decades, published his own stories in the magazine, for example). DeLillo had yet to become a widely celebrated and commercially successful writer when in 1979 Antaeus published his seventh short story, ‘Creation’, in issue 33. At the time Antaeus had yet to move its offices to New York City, and it was an important international space for emerging literary voices such as DeLillo’s. DeLillo had, of course, published six novels over the previous eight years, the most recent being Running Dog (1978). The publication of ‘Creation’ marked the end of DeLillo’s first productive, if not commercially successful, phase as a novelist. No other work of DeLillo’s fiction would appear until 1982, when his seventh novel, The Names, was published, a work that most scholars consider the pivot to his most important phase as an artist.3

 3

I am skipping over the disputed, and disowned, 1980 novel Amazons here, because it opens a number of tangents that are not relevant to the immediate topic.

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‘Videotape’ has, however, a particular history with respect to my earlier point about DeLillo’s short works being examples of his belonging to an amateur class of artists and intellectuals. Whereas ‘Creation’ appeared when Antaeus was at its independent best, ‘Videotape’ was published in the magazine’s 1994 ‘farewell’ issue. In the fifteen years between, DeLillo had become a best-selling novelist, had expanded his work into theatre, and had begun publishing occasional works of non-fiction, as well as granting interviews and making public appearances. His work had been discovered in the 1980s by important literary critics, and a canon of secondary writings had emerged. Ecco Press had begun to shift its editorial focus to non-fiction, with emphasis on memoir, science writing and food writing (the publisher’s emphasis on outsiders remained admirably consistent in these new genres – it brought literary stardom to the musician Patti Smith and introduced the world to the late Anthony Bourdain, for example). The publication of the final issue of Antaeus was treated as a newsworthy literary event. To some, it signalled the end of an era of independent publishing (such eras are always ending, it would seem), but the list of contributors to the magazine’s final issue suggests the magnitude of the occasion. Other than DeLillo, who was then one of the most widely discussed literary writers among English-language readers, the issue also featured Margaret Atwood, Sandra Cisneros, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Bowles and Stephen King, as well as an excerpt from then US President Bill Clinton’s notebooks (written before he became president). Writer Jim Krusoe noted in the Los Angeles Times that ‘the loss of Antaeus will be felt deeply’. ‘Videotape’ may seem an odd story to offer to a journal whose final issue was entitled The Pleasures of Farewell; then again, the story’s subject matter and themes are characteristic of DeLillo’s idiosyncratic, occasional interventions. The story’s narrative perspective is that of an anonymous husband, who is annoying his wife Janet by insisting that she watch a replay of a video of a motorist’s murder captured from the back seat of a family vehicle by an anonymous young girl (later in the story, readers are told that she becomes known as the ‘Video Kid’). An important sub-text of the plot is the implication that the video is often being viewed, either on home video or as a broadcast, because it captures a crime committed by the ‘Texas Highway Killer’ (95). One is tempted to perhaps anachronistically describe the video as what we know in the digital age as a ‘viral’ clip, but the phrase is not entirely out of time – the World Wide Web was already available to some in 1994, and there were already discussions, some accompanied by hand-wringing, of what it foreboded for the world of print publishing. If video killed the radio star, what would this new technology mean for print? As a short story, ‘Videotape’ is focused on spectatorship, with emphasis on male subjectivity and its technological expression through home video recording. In broader terms, the title’s eponymous technology is an extension of the wave of more portable consumer technologies of the post-war era. Revised and integrated into Underworld, the story becomes part of that novel’s exploration of an entire epoch of American mass media and technology that runs from radio and television to the World Wide Web. As John Duvall noted in his useful Reader’s Guide to the novel, Underworld uses early mass media technologies and figures to trace how ‘the country was already becoming postmodern in its relation to the electronic media’ (40). More recently, Michael Naas has discussed the ‘Texas Highway Killer’ section of Underworld derived from the ‘Videotape’ short story in relation to the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, linking it to the intersection where the incidental home movie captures an event and is

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thereby transformed into both evidence of a crime as well as a mass media commodity (120–2). Ranging still farther back into the secondary literature, the story would belong to a long-standing tradition of discussing DeLillo’s depictions of mass media, spectatorship and the influence of film in his writing, all of them important, continuing lines of scholarly inquiry during the first wave of scholarship on his writings. But what of the short story in its moment and physical appearance in and as print? Publications can be immune to thematic analysis because the commodity form of the periodical or book communicates other histories that are not part of an individual work printed therein; if anything, the individual work is part of the physical history of the commodity, and to extract from it abstractions of thematic content is in some way to erase that history, to blur the public role played by artists as producers of content within an industry, and also to reinforce, at times unwittingly, the figure of the reclusive, individual writer who functions in some mythical sphere beyond the world we inhabit. The role of the critic should also be considered in this dynamic. DeLillo’s short fiction has often been regarded by his critics as an incubator of content and technique that is more fully elaborated in the longer novels. This is partly due to the first wave of DeLillo scholarship recovering his early short fiction in the 1980s in a reasonable effort to reconstruct the previous two decades of his career. Rich with insight into DeLillo’s fiction, this secondary literature often explored, either explicitly or implicitly, how the writer’s early short fiction served as a precursor to the later novels.4 There is also the matter, noted above, of how literary critics and academics have generally regarded the short story as the lesser kin of the more prestigious novel. In this view, which I will not explore at length here, the short story is a periodical phenomenon and more commercial form. And perhaps for good reason – in the American canon, for example, The Scarlet Letter is esteemed because, in the canonical view, it announced the maturity of a national literature. But are the tales of Washington Irving, published a generation earlier, no less important? I have emphasised DeLillo’s short works, and his short stories, so as to propose a discussion of the writer that is less heavily reliant upon the novel. I do not wish to argue that the short stories are entirely separate entities (indeed, the publication history of ‘Videotape’ confirms that they cannot ever be entirely separated), but rather that they can be understood separately. Furthermore, by prioritising the short fiction and understanding it in relation to DeLillo’s role as a public intellectual, we gain a more ample understanding of the artist as working writer, citizen and activist. I made mention earlier of Said’s Reith lectures, published as Representations of the Intellectual, for their useful discussion of the modern writer as an intellectual and ‘amateur’. Drawing on Joyce and Turgenev, Wilde and Woolf, C. L. R. James’s reading of Melville and Frantz Fanon’s reading of Aimé Césaire, as well as the career of musician Glenn Gould, Said’s lectures remind us with characteristic, iconoclastic grace that the artist who speaks against patriarchy, racism and other forms of violent oppression functions, to use Gramsci’s phrase, as a traditional intellectual. Rather than speaking

 4

Consider, for example, Fred Gardaphé, who argued in 1996 that contrary to the dominant understanding of DeLillo as an ‘American’ writer, early short stories such as ‘Take the A Train’ (1962) and ‘Spaghetti and Meatballs’ (1965) place DeLillo in fruitful conversation with a tradition of Italian-American ‘ethnic’ writers (172–92).

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for institutions, such artists speak as individuals in the service of traditions (law, art, etc.) and peoples against systems of bondage and control. By integrating their art into comment on other discourses, or by integrating other discourses into art, Said regards the artist, in their intervention, as a figure capable of unique contributions to civil debate, and recognises the distinction between the artist and other intellectuals without mythologising either type. DeLillo has, of course, depicted artists and intellectuals in his fiction, and in the novels more than elsewhere. Consider Lauren in The Body Artist and Klara in Underworld or Jack in White Noise (or, for contrast, Nicholas Branch in Libra and Richard Elster in Point Omega). I would add that a compelling body of analysis devoted to DeLillo’s portrayal of art and artists has also appeared during the past decade.5 But I have made a different case, about how DeLillo’s short works (which also depict art and artists), and specifically the short stories, offer us a view of the artist as a performative intellectual who not only speaks on behalf of the rights of writers, but who by contributing his writings to small, independent publications strategically supports industries and professions vital to sustaining the independent arts in a civil society increasingly dominated by a handful of major corporations and their subsidiaries. When one such independent entity closes its doors, the short fiction may offer a pointed if indirect commentary, as was the case with ‘Videotape’ and Antaeus. In conclusion, I would return to the earlier example of DeLillo reading ‘The Artist Naked in A Cage’ at the 1997 ‘Stand-In for Wei Jingsheng’, and specifically a moment in the reading when DeLillo turned to address his audience and fellow writers, noting that ‘In the West, every writer is absorbed, turned into breakfast food or canned laughter.’ It was a pointed jab, to say the least, as well as an admission of complicity. There is no misanthropy, however, in DeLillo’s irony; it is critical self-awareness, and one that strongly suggests that he and his agents do not place his short works without some consideration for the stage – a publication or occasion – on which the writer’s shorter works appear. There is a twist to the portrait of DeLillo I have painted here as a strategic performer whose short works indicate, by public reading and publication, his role as an independent artist who works also through his art in the Gramscian role of a traditional intellectual. While he depicts and speaks on behalf of art and artists, collaborating with them, advocating for their rights and integrating other arts and media into his own written art, DeLillo’s career is now also the property of institutions. This is not to say that he can or should be defined as an organic intellectual who spouts policy, jargon and other specialised language, as did some of his fellow speakers at the ‘Stand-In for Wei Jingsheng’. But in the case of that institution, the New York Public Library is a representative space for free intellectual inquiry, research and writing as well as political activism, as it was on that day in 1997 (and often is). While writing this essay, I came across the digital listing of the publisher’s archive of Ecco Press, which includes Antaeus and is currently at the New York Public Library. It contains materials by DeLillo from the 1970s (around the time of his first contribution to the magazine), and later materials from the 1980s and, although undated,

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See, for example, Hendin; the ‘Arts of Duplicity’ section of Michael Naas’s aforementioned book; as well as the broader work of Graley Herren, Mark Osteen and Catherine Gander on DeLillo and art.

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apparently his correspondence and typescript of ‘Videotape’, from the early 1990s. I was unable to visit the library,6 yet I was struck by this trace of DeLillo’s career that was fittingly housed in an institution that has a prominent place in the geography of his career. Given the global horror and tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic, amplified as it was by political interests and systems that persecuted writers, journalists and scientists in the United States and elsewhere, I was reminded of the interdependence of artists, independent publishers and public institutions who function and persist. Interdependent entities, they are a fitting metaphor for the constellation of matters I have engaged above, whereby in reading the short fiction in its varied contexts and occasions we gain a broader view of DeLillo’s relationship with the arts, understood here not only as writing, painting, film, etc., but also as industries of expression that include publishers, printers, bookstores and libraries. If there is a note of solace to be heard in their recent, precarious survival, there is also a cautionary note to be recognised, and repeated, regarding continued threats to their vitality. It is in such moments that DeLillo in his activism for free speech, in public readings and shorter publications, most clearly steps out from the chorus, as dissonant soloist.

Works Cited Cavanaugh, Darien, and Dennis Poupard, editors. ‘Don DeLillo.’ Short Story Criticism, 261, 2019, pp. 1–136. C-Span2. ‘The Courage to Stand Alone.’ C-Span, 13 May 1997. https://www.c-span.org/ video/?81224-1/the-courage-stand-alone#. Accessed 20 June 2021. Deahl, Rachel. ‘Halpern Reflects on 40 Years of Ecco.’ Publisher’s Weekly, 25 November 2011. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/ article/49642-halpern-reflects-on-40-years-of-ecco.html. Accessed 3 June 2021. DeLillo, Don. ‘The Artist Naked in a Cage.’ The New Yorker, 26 May 1997, p. 6. ——. ‘Videotape.’ The Pleasures of Farewell: Antaeus, 75/76, Fall 1994. Reprinted in Sudden Fiction: 60 New Short-Short Stories, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas. W. W. Norton, 1996, pp. 90–6. ——. ‘Where Were You When.’ Brick: A Literary Journal, 99, summer 2017, pp. 53–5. ——. ‘The Writer in Opposition.’ The Mailer Review, II, no. 1, 2008, pp. 49–50. Duvall, John. Don DeLillo’s Underworld: A Reader’s Guide. Continuum, 2002. Gardaphé, Fred. Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative. Duke University Press, 1996. Hendin, Josephine Gattuso. ‘Underworld, Ethnicity and Found Object Art: Reason and Revelation.’ Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man, edited by Stacy Olster. Continuum, 2011, pp. 99–115. Jingsheng, Wei. ‘Author’s Note to the Penguin Edition.’ The Courage to Stand Alone: Prison Letters and Other Writings, edited and translated by Kristina M. Torgeson. Penguin, 1997, pp. xi–xiv. Krusoe, Jim. ‘The Pleasures of Farewell.’ Los Angeles Times, 2 October 1994. https://www. latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-10-02-bk-45330-story.html. Accessed 10 June 2021. Naas, Michael. Don DeLillo, American Original: Drugs, Weapons, Erotica and Other Literary Contraband. Bloomsbury, 2020.

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The library was closed during my writing of this essay due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Associated restrictions also impeded my ability to travel.

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The New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division. ‘Guide to the Ecco Press Archive: 1963 2014.’ The New York Public Library, 2015. http://archives.nypl.org/uploads/ collection/generated_finding_aids/mss111.pdf. Accessed 28 June 2021. O’Hara, J. D. ‘Antaeus Magazine.’ New York Times, 20 October 1974. https://www.nytimes. com/1974/10/20/archives/antaeus-magazine.html. Accessed 25 June, 2021. Said, Edward W. Representations of the Intellectual. Vintage, 1994. Torgeson, Kristina M. ‘Acknowledgments.’ The Courage to Stand Alone: Prison Letters and Other Writings by Wei Jingsheng, edited and translated by Kristina M. Torgeson. Penguin, 1997, pp. vii–viii. Woodman, Sophia. ‘Wei Jingsheng’s Lifelong Battle for Democracy.’ The Courage to Stand Alone: Prison Letters and Other Writings by Wei Jingsheng, edited and translated by Kristina M. Torgeson. Penguin, 1997, pp. 249–72.

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15 Joycean DeLillo Kiron Ward

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idway through Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988), Nicholas Branch, a retired CIA analyst who has been contracted to write ‘the secret history of the assassination of President Kennedy’, thinks to himself that the Warren Commission report, ‘with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words . . . is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to a hundred’ (15, 181). In an interview for Rolling Stone on Libra’s publication, DeLillo elaborated on this funny and suggestive line: I asked myself what Joyce could possibly do after Finnegans Wake, and this was the answer. It’s an amazing document. The first fifteen volumes are devoted to testimony and the last eleven volumes to exhibits, and together we have a masterwork of trivia ranging from Jack Ruby’s mother’s dental records to photographs of knotted string. (DeCurtis 62) There is much to say about DeLillo’s invocation of Joyce’s post-Wake trajectory in Libra, not least as a reflection on his own career trajectory. But taken as a face value comment on the genesis of Libra, this remark is a little unusual. In an interview on how he wrote Libra, DeLillo does not say, as one might expect, that his experience with the Warren Report reminded him of Joyce: he says that thinking about what Joyce could do after Finnegans Wake put him in mind of the Warren Report. The implication is that DeLillo’s concern with Joyce predates, or perhaps even led to, his interest in the Warren Report. Without getting lost in unprovable claims about authorial intention, I contend that the primacy DeLillo attributes to Joyce in this moment speaks of his own deep and career-spanning engagement with Joyce: Joyce is, throughout DeLillo’s work, one of the smithies in which he forges his art. He has not been especially coy about this: in his very first interview as a writer, with Tom LeClair in Contemporary Literature, DeLillo famously attributed his apparent reclusiveness to ‘Silence, exile, cunning, and so on’ (LeClair, ‘An Interview’ 4) – a knowing reference to Stephen Dedalus’s famous lines at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Moreover, DeLillo elaborated on his interest in Joyce in a later interview with Adam Begley in the Paris Review: ‘it was through Joyce that I learned to see something in language that carried a radiance, something that made me feel the beauty and fervor of words, the sense that a word has a life and a history’ (Begley 88). It is not surprising, then, that foundational studies of DeLillo, such as those by LeClair, Mark Osteen, David Cowart and Peter Boxall, have all drawn, to greater or lesser extents, on DeLillo’s uses of Joyce, while Catherine Morley, Andrea Ciribuco

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and Graley Herren have established a small field of work focused on DeLillo’s repurposing of Joyce (LeClair, In the Loop; Osteen, American Magic; Cowart; Boxall; Morley; Ciribuco; Herren). Indeed, as Philip Nel has observed, it is pretty clear that Joyce ‘looms largest’ among DeLillo’s modernist influences (13). Nonetheless, what makes DeLillo’s attention to Joyce so noteworthy, as much in terms of his own oeuvre as in the study of US fiction since modernism, is the depth and range of that attention. The Joyce of DeLillo is not just a yardstick against which the innovations of postmodernism (particularly in terms of pastiche, metafiction and maximalism) can be measured; indeed, DeLillo’s invocations of Joyce are not limited to a small range of recurrent themes, but expand to frame a wide range of concerns. Joyce, I contend, underwrites DeLillo’s entire approach to his art. Thinking about Joyce has been as integral to nearly everything DeLillo has written – from Americana (1971) to The Silence (2020) – as it was to his reading of the Warren Report. In this, Joyce stands as a unique criterion for studying DeLillo: he transcends each of the ‘phases’ or ‘stages’ into which DeLillo’s work is usually divided. As such, reading DeLillo’s work with an eye to the Joycean elaborates key ideas across his oeuvre. What follows does not seek to review comprehensively DeLillo’s use of Joyce, but to give significant examples of the range and forms of his Joyceanism. Looking at texts from each stage of his career, I demonstrate how DeLillo uses Joyce to explicate themes such as artistry (Americana), belonging (Underworld, 1997), the body (Zero K, 2016), and, finally, his equally career-spanning use of podiatric imagery (The Silence).

‘The Stephen Dedalus Blues’: Artistry and Americana Thanks particularly to the work of Osteen and Herren, the theme of artistry has become a touchstone in reading DeLillo’s use of Joyce. In ‘DeLillo’s Dedalian Artists’, Osteen posits that ‘DeLillo’s novels about artists – Great Jones Street (1973), Mao II (1991), and The Body Artist (2001) – sustain a dialogue with . . . modernist, “Dedalian” aesthetic principles’ (137). Osteen infers these principles from Stephen Dedalus’s pronouncement that he ‘will not serve in that which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church’ and that he will marshal to his defence ‘silence, exile, and cunning’ (Joyce, Portrait 268–9). Accordingly, ‘Each novel depicts the lure of silence and exile, as each artist figure coils inward in order to spring outward, often with a new work that references his or her artistic practice’ (Osteen, ‘DeLillo’s Dedalian Artists’ 137). Structurally, Osteen notes that these novels share a pattern of ‘seclusion and emergence, entrapment and escape’ as the metamorphoses of Bucky Wunderlick, Bill Gray and Lauren Hartke ‘render them temporarily monstruous, malformed, or moribund before they die or emerge in a new guise’ (137). As Herren notes, this observation could be extended to include ‘several covert artists who surreptitiously lay claim to this same inheritance’ – such as Billy Twilig of Ratner’s Star (1976), Benno Levin of Cosmopolis (2003) or, most importantly for Herren, Nicholas Branch of Libra (Herren 50). Nonetheless, what for Herren makes Libra such a notably Dedalian text in DeLillo’s oeuvre is that it disrupts the pattern that Osteen identifies. In Herren’s reading, Branch is the Dedalian artist, and his unfinished history of the JFK assassination is the artifice, just as music, the novel and performance art are the artifices of Wunderlick,

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Gray and Hartke respectively. However, rather than ‘die or emerge in a new guise’, Branch fails: the labyrinth he builds to ensnare the history of the assassination ends up imprisoning him. Herren, drawing on the autological tradition of approaches to Joyce’s Portrait, proposes that Branch be understood as the ‘internal teller’ of Libra, and that therein Branch uses Portrait as a model for ‘achieving freedom through art’ (Herren 53, 62). Where Stephen climactically finds his voice, Branch ‘feels disheartened, almost immobilized . . . But he persists, he works on, he jots his notes. He knows he can’t get out . . . That’s why they built this room for him, the room of growing old, the room of history and dreams’ (Libra 445). For Herren, ‘The fiction [Branch] constructs as counter-narrative to history does not free him. On the contrary, the book itself becomes a labyrinth, a prison-house of language from which none can escape, including the artificer who created it’ (51). If DeLillo’s understanding of Joyce shaped his reading of the Warren Report as the ‘Joycean Book of America’ (Libra 182), then, as Herren suggests, DeLillo presents Libra as Branch’s ‘Joycean Book of the Labyrinth’ (51). Between Osteen and Herren, then, DeLillo’s sense of the Joycean is tied directly to his sense of the artist’s potentiality. Although, as Michael Naas has noted (123), Americana is exceptional in the scope and range of its literary allusions, it is certainly no exception in its use of Joyce to explicate artistry. In a key moment, David Bell, recounting his education at a liberal arts college in California, mentions reading Ulysses, wanting to be known as Kinch, Stephen Dedalus’s nickname, and eventually bonding over ‘collegiate blasphemies of word and deed, using as our text the gleeful God-baiting of Buck Mulligan’ (Americana 143, 145). As such, Bell’s narration is replete with Joycean echoes: to the oftnoted similarity between Bell’s recollection of ‘the vast white silence of my mother’s deathbed, candlewax and linen, her enormous eyes, the breathing shallow and bad’ and Stephen’s nightmare vision of his dead mother, ‘her wasted body . . . giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes’, one could add the scene in which Bell stages his Nausicaa-esque revelation of a girl’s ‘slight limp’ that causes ‘a strange kind of shift in [his] thinking’, or Bell’s Dedalian reflection, from his silent exile on an African island, that he has ‘not been cunning enough’ and that the ‘first lamp to be lit [when the century turns] will belong to that man who leaps from a cliff and learns how to fly, who soars to the tropics of the sun and uncurls his hand from his breast to spoon out fire’ (Americana 97, 284, 308, 346–8; Joyce, Ulysses 1.270-3). Bell seems to use Joyce as a lens through which he interprets and narrativises his life – and, in this capacity, DeLillo establishes as Bell’s equal and opposite the radio personality Warren Beasley. Just like Bell, Beasley draws heavily on Joyce in his monologues and his conversation, and, just like Bell, his art reframes ‘Americana’ in a way that relates to something primal in the ‘mamaland’ (Americana 231). Monologues from Beasley’s radio show, ‘Death Is Just Around the Corner’, bookend Bell’s autobiographical film project in Fort Curtis, refiguring his narrative through its dark glass. In the first broadcast, which Bell hears in the camper early during the stay in Fort Curtis, Beasley’s ‘electrical transmission of wordsex into America’s silent bedrooms’ parodies a sermon, as he enjoins his listeners to ‘Bow down to the god of your choice and pray for the end of yourself’ in a litany that evolves into a call to return to the at-once civilisational and psychosexual Oedipal moment: ‘Vulva! Vulva! Vulva! [. . .] Return to the primeval fertile crescent. Dar es

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Salaam! Abu Simbel! Chou-Kou-Tien!’ (94, 233). Beasley elaborates this trajectory in explicitly Joycean terms: But the truth, I fear, is that I fear the dark days of the Arabian nights. I’ve got the Stephen Dedalus Blues and it’s a long way to Leopoldville. Black panic in the filter of my kingsize Kent. We have awakened from the nightmare of history. Put your logical fork to the mushroom omelette. An unpleasant interruption in the assuring continuity. (234) Beasley claims that he fears the Oedipal return because it portends annihilation – submission to the logic of the mushroom cloud’s omelette. To have the ‘Stephen Dedalus Blues’, then, is to have finally awoken from ‘the nightmare of history’1 only to find oneself longing for Leopoldville – a name that darkly recalls the colonial name of Kinshasa until only five years before Americana’s publication at the same time as it alludes to Leopold Bloom’s predilection for fantasising eponymous homesteads in ‘Circe’ and ‘Ithaca’.2 For Beasley, to reach Leopoldville is, by implication, to achieve a libidinal release that is both death and orgasm. In the world of Leopold Bloom, it means returning to Molly who, in his final vision of her at the close of ‘Ithaca’ ‘in the attitude of Gea-Tellus’, is at once the beloved, the mother and the Earth; in the world of Beasley, who has recently returned from ‘Mollycuddling [his] bloomless bride’ in Dublin, it means ‘Returning to the primeval fertile crescent’ that is both the origin of civilisation and the vulva (Joyce, Ulysses 17.2313; Americana 232). It is in this light that Beasley’s use of Joyce illuminates Bell’s narrative: after all, Bell’s abominable final words as he enacts with Sullivan the incestuous return to his mother that he was denied by his father are those of an Odyssean wanderer: ‘home at last’ (334).3 The way DeLillo uses Joyce in Beasley’s broadcasts is rather different to what Osteen and Herren see in his later works. The Joyce of Americana, especially in Beasley’s usage, affords a framework for explicating the otherwise unsayable bases that the death drive and the Oedipus complex give to the American experience. That Beasley consistently refers to himself on air as ‘Beastly’ reiterates this: Beasley makes of himself a ‘Buckmulliganism’, adopting a moniker that reminds us that Stephen’s mother, like Bell’s, is ‘beastly dead’ (Americana 368; Joyce, Ulysses 1.218). Combined with his jocoserious warning not to do ‘anything detrimental to the national incest’ (Americana 369), Beasley’s broadcasts bring into relief the supremely animating capacity of the mother for the artist of Americana. This is not as removed from Portrait and Ulysses as it might seem: while Bell remembers his mother as ‘an assertion of order in the universe’, Stephen muses that ‘Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life’ (Americana 237; Joyce, Ulysses 9.842–3). For Bell and Stephen equally, the mother is the baseline of human experience: the key intellectual difference

 1

The ‘Stephen Dedalus Blues’ are readily linked to awaking from ‘the nightmare of history’, since one of Stephen’s best known comments is that ‘History . . . is a nightmare from which [he is] trying to awake’ (Joyce, Ulysses 2.377).  2 For an analysis of the relationship between Bloom’s homecoming fantasies in ‘Circe’ and ‘Ithaca’, see Ward.  3 Douglas Keesey notes that first edition’s version of this scene alludes heavily to ‘Penelope’ – to the point of being ‘patently derivative’ (28–9, 213 n.8).

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between them is that Bell finds in the possibility of reunion with his mother a homecoming that Stephen famously forsakes. Indeed, while Stephen looks outwards, trying to fly by the nets of nationality, language and religion, Bell turns inwards, staging his elaborately transgressive return to his mother.

Nostos: Underworld While David Bell may be a portrait of the artist as patriotic American returning ineluctably ‘home’ to his mother, the return home is not always so transgressive in the rest of DeLillo’s work. That said, the homecoming, or nostos, plays as important a role in the rest of DeLillo’s oeuvre as it does in any other literature that engages with epic conventions. This is especially evident in Underworld, in which DeLillo’s scenes of homecoming are constructed in explicit dialogue with Joyce’s spin on the Odyssean nostos in the ‘Ithaca’ episode of Ulysses, demonstrating DeLillo’s use of Joyce to elaborate the ideological appeals of feeling-at-home. As Morley and others have observed, Underworld is replete with references to Ulysses. For example, the waste container that floats from shore to shore is quietly reminiscent of ‘the corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow’ (Joyce, Ulysses 3.472–3) on Sandymount Strand that circulates throughout Ulysses, and Albert Bronzini shares numerous traits with Leopold Bloom (an incorrigibly earnest flâneur, a star-gazer, a second-generation Italian immigrant, 38 years old, in the throes of marital trouble). Equally, the narrative of the protagonist, Nick Shay – another second-generation Italian immigrant, but one whose surname echoes the French preposition for ‘home’ – begins by establishing a subtle dialogue with ‘Ithaca’. Nick begins the novel proper, in ‘Long Tall Sally’, by narrating his trip to meet Klara Sax at her installation in the Arizona desert, and this trip establishes at the novel’s very beginning something uneasy about Nick’s bourgeois, suburban life in Phoenix in the early 1990s. Indeed, as the novel progresses, it works backwards chronologically in a way that unpicks the history that leads to the ‘home’ at which Nick arrives. Nick describes his life as being ‘Like [that of] someone in the Witness Protection Program’ (Underworld 66), as if it might be premised on some fundamental denial, which I contend is legible in its parallels with ‘Ithaca’. In their conversation, Klara suggests to Nick that her installation is a response to the ‘unreal turn’ life seems to have taken – a point she elaborates in her interview with the French broadcasting company: I don’t want to disarm the world . . . Or I do want to disarm the world but I want it to be done warily and realistically and in the full knowledge of what we’re giving up [. . .] I’ve thought hard about the weapons they carried and the men who accompanied the weapons and it is awful to think about. But the bombs were not released. You see. The missiles remained in the underwing carriages, unfired. The men came back and the targets were not destroyed. You see. We all tried to think about war but I’m not sure we knew how to do this. The poets wrote long poems with dirty words and that’s about as close as we came, actually, to a thoughtful response. Because they’d brought something into the world that out-imagined the mind [. . .] But I’m making a whole megillah out of this. What I really want to get at is the ordinary thing, the ordinary life behind the thing. Because that’s the heart and soul of what we’re doing here. (73, 76–7)

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Klara’s installation offers itself as a meditation on reality and the imagination: if nuclear weapons give humans the ability to end the world, then the world on which our abilities depend is forever changed. What then becomes of the world, of life behind the possibility of total war and mutually assured destruction? Nick has no time for these questions: I lived responsibly in the real. I didn’t accept this business of life as fiction, or whatever Klara Sax had meant when she said that things had become unreal. History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood – read the speeches of Mussolini – at least we’ve known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousands wisps of disinformation. (82) For Nick, Klara’s attempt to see through the ways that the twentieth century has altered reality is irresponsible and indulgent: ‘I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives’ (82). While this impatience with the abstract and the unseeable is what we might expect from someone living in a simulacrum of bourgeois life, it does not quite match the Nick we come to know in the following pages. At his job, for example, he seems extremely conscious of people’s alienation from their own lives: I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions. Did I do this myself? You maintain a shifting distance between yourself and your job. There’s a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it’s not that you’re pretending to be someone else. You’re pretending to be exactly who you are. That’s the curious thing. (103) Nick is aware that he is guilty of this too, particularly when he affects the speech of the Italian mobsters: Think of a young man or woman, think of a young woman speaking a few words in a movie gangster’s growl. This is something I used to do for pointed comic effect to get things done on time [. . .] Or I picked up the phone in the middle of a meeting and pretended to arrange the maiming of a colleague, a maneuver that drew snide laugher from the others in the room. (87) That Nick feels that he is play-acting and that he needs to perform stereotypes of his Italian American heritage belies his claim that he is not in some sense ‘excluded from [his own] life’; indeed, when he asserts that he lives ‘responsibly in the real’, it seems that he is protesting too much – as if rather than living in that ‘single narrative sweep’ of ‘collected knowledge’, he is in fact repressing those ‘missing minutes on the tape’, those incommensurable ‘wisps of disinformation’, that, disinformation or not, make him who he is.

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Nick’s fixation on authenticity – with being the ‘real thing’ and repressing or evading complicating ‘unreal’ factors – is arguably one of the recurrent features of DeLillo’s male protagonists, from David Bell to Eric Packer. In Nick’s case, however, something about his implied feeling of inauthenticity and unreality is negated by returning ‘home’; indeed, as Nick leaves Klara’s installation, he describes himself, suggestively, as ‘look[ing] for a sign that would point [him] home’ (82). Here, Nick’s idea of ‘home’, which has been unsettled by Klara and her installation, takes on a significance that is highly reminiscent of Leopold Bloom: home as a space that both accommodates and depends upon the repression of all those complicating ‘unreal’ factors into an identity that is ‘responsibly real’. Nick’s and Bloom’s respective ideas of their homes are similarly fraught, or at least similarly dependent on a level of cognitive dissonance.4 Nick is secretive about his youth with his family, and yet to be acknowledged between him and his wife is her substance abuse and affair with his co-worker; Nick’s ‘responsibly real’ life at home is hardly straightforward. Similarly, Bloom’s homecoming, in ‘Ithaca’, is deeply bathetic: while Odysseus reunites with Telemachus and faithful Penelope, restores order to Ithaca by dispatching her suitors and fulfils Athena’s wish for peace, Bloom returns home to a wife he knows to have been unfaithful, Stephen declines the paternal offer of shelter, and the slaughter of the suitors takes place in the near-parenthetical assurance that Bloom ‘would . . . have smiled’ (Joyce, Ulysses 17.2126) if he had dwelt on the infidelity, which he does not. But while Nick sustains his life by continuing to play-act and by effectively denying unreality, Joyce has Bloom sustain himself by retreating into fantasy. Once Stephen has left Bloom’s home, he launches into an extremely vivid picture of bourgeois aspiration, envisioning his ideal home, a ‘thatched bungalowshaped 2 storey dwellinghouse’ named ‘Bloom Cottage’ that he is ‘not to inherit . . . but to purchase’ (Joyce, Ulysses 17.1499–1505, 1580). Among the ways this reverie works is as a fantasy of Bloom’s maximum potential in ‘meritocratic’ British society. If Odysseus’ nostos is heroic, and Bloom’s actual homecoming is bathetic, then there is something pathetic about Bloom’s fantasy home – not least in the way that Bloom Cottage, as it is imagined, is a home in which Bloom himself would not fit. Bloom’s ideal home fantasy is categorically linked to his imagined ascent to the British ruling class, as he imagines himself appointed ‘resident magistrate or justice of the peace with a family crest and coat of arms and appropriate classical motto’ (Joyce, Ulysses 17.1610–11): only Bloom of Flowerville could exist in Bloom Cottage, and not Bloom of 7 Eccles Street. Bloom’s ideal home is a home not for him, but for an idealised and non-existent version of himself that is contingent on the achievement of his full potential within the putatively meritocratic system in which he wants to believe. If Nick Shay’s sense that he is play-acting at life belies his protest that he is not excluded from his own life, Bloom’s fantasy home makes clear that he too is on some level excluded from his life. But what makes them behave in this way? What are they both hiding, or hiding from? And how does it shape their senses of ‘home’? Bloom’s justification for his retreat to aspirational fantasy sheds highly suggestive light on Nick:

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Indeed, the link between them is subtly hinted by the similarity between their wives’ names: Marian Shay and Marion, or Molly, Bloom.

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It was one of [Bloom’s] axioms that similar meditations or the automatic relation to himself of a narrative concerning himself or tranquil recollection of the past when practised habitually before retiring for the night alleviated fatigue and produced as a result sound repose and renovated vitality. (Joyce, Ulysses 17.1754–8) In this, Bloom tacitly acknowledges that the fantasy is less about a set of achievable desires than a pragmatic sublimation of desires, as if a vision of bourgeois aspiration fulfilled is the best preparation for another day of personal potential unachieved. But this fantasy is also more than just that: if the fantasy offers Bloom a carrot, in the shape of ‘renovated vitality’, it also provides a stick by which he forces himself to keep his ideas in check. The fantasy, we learn, is bound up with a fear of what might happen if it is not incorporated into Bloom’s nightly routine: ‘The committal of homicide or suicide during sleep by an aberration of the light of reason, the incommensurable categorical intelligence situated in the cerebral convolutions’ (17.1766–8). It is this idea – that at home one can renovate vitality by repressing one’s deepest fears – which DeLillo uses to structure Nick Shay’s relationship to his ‘home’: for Nick, ‘home’ is a commitment that is just the positive side of the deep-seated fear of what might happen if you’re not committed.5 This dynamic is at its clearest in a key moment near the end of ‘Long Tall Sally’ that echoes Bloom’s fear. Waking up in the middle of the night in one of his frequent ‘chill sweats’, Nick goes and sits by his bookcase, holding on to the baseball from the 1951 pennant that ties together all the novel’s various strands. He holds the baseball and thinks: How the hand works memories out of the baseball that have nothing to do with games of the usual sort [. . .] Marian caught me once looking at the ball. I was standing at the bookshelves with the ball in my hand and she thought it was like Hamlet gazing on Yorick’s skull or maybe Aristotle, even better she said, contemplating the bust of Homer. That was nice, we thought. Rembrandt’s Homer and Thomson’s homer. We smiled at that. (Underworld 132) This suggestive moment explicitly recalls Hamlet, the Odyssey and Rembrandt – but it implicitly echoes Bloom’s fear in Ulysses by functioning to revitalise Nick while reminding him of what he should be afraid of: ‘I hefted the weapon and pointed it and saw an interested smile fall across his face, the slyest kind of shit-eating grin’ (132). Just as Bloom’s fear is bound up with the suicide of his father, Nick’s fear is connected to the guilty innocence of his youth, when he semi-accidentally killed his friend. For Bloom and Nick both, home becomes the place where all anger and tension and fear and anxiety can be repurposed into ‘renovated vitality’ – identity and memory trimmed to fit the ‘responsible real’.

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Falling Man, in the history of DeLillo’s use of Joyce, is notable in this light: it takes the homecoming scene, and the baggage Joyce associates it with, and uses it to frame its central traumatic event (the September 11 attacks). Indeed, the novel ends with Keith Neudecker walking away from the attacks and begins with him arriving, unthinkingly, at the apartment of his estranged wife, Lianne. Homecoming in Falling Man is suspended, much like the Falling Man himself – and, as such, DeLillo situates his narrative of 9/11 in a traumatic disruption to the affective processes by which home is understood.

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DeLillo clarifies this in the novel’s epilogue in a scene that mirrors his nocturnal meditations at the end of ‘Long Tall Sally’: I stand helpless in this desert place looking at the books. I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself. (810) In Underworld, the heedless real is repressed by the responsible real, and the appeal of its lost authenticity is transformed into a nostalgia that alienates Nick from his own life. While at the beginning of the novel he claimed not to stand helpless before history, by the end he stands helpless before his own bookshelf – rather like Bloom when faced by his disordered bookcase in 7 Eccles Street (Joyce, Ulysses 17.1357–60). Bloom’s fear and repression becomes the guiding paradigm for DeLillo’s representation of Nick Shay’s contemporaneous alienation: Nick’s narrative seems to suggest that if the US is a homeland for multiple diasporas, it is one that is conditional on the estrangement of oneself from oneself.

‘How’s the body?’: Zero K If in Americana and Underworld DeLillo uses Joyce to think through issues of creativity and belonging respectively, in The Body Artist and Zero K he goes on to provide his clearest engagements with Joyce’s celebrated writing of the mind’s embodiment in Ulysses. As Nel has cannily observed, the ‘gustatory language’ (14) of The Body Artist’s opening scene echoes the Blooms’ breakfast in ‘Calypso’ very clearly (and, I would add, thereby invites a reading of Lauren Hartke’s body artistry that draws on Joyce’s writing of bodily routine). The beginning of Zero K makes an even more conspicuous nod to ‘Calypso’, when Jeffrey Lockhart is reunited with Artis Martineau at the Convergence, in a way that invites us to read the novel’s meditation on technology and embodiment through a Joycean lens. In ‘Calypso’, Molly asks Bloom to define a word she has read in Ruby: the Pride of the Ring: – Here, she said. What does that mean? He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail. – Metempsychosis? – Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home? – Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls. (Joyce, Ulysses 4.337–42) DeLillo restages this scene when Artis is discussing with Jeffrey her optimism about the Convergence’s cryogenic suspension project: ‘Ross and I have a running joke. Who will I be at the reawakening? Will my soul have left my body and migrated to another body somewhere? What’s the word I’m looking for? Or will I wake up thinking I’m a fruit bat in the Philippines? Hungry for insects.’ [. . .] ‘The word is metempsychosis.’ ‘Thank you.’ (Zero K 48)

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Just as Bloom gives Molly the word ‘metempsychosis’, so does Jeffrey Artis – perhaps unsurprising, since we learn that Jeffrey is himself an avid reader of ‘lengthy and intense European novel[s]’ (Zero K 26). The key difference, of course, is that while ‘metempsychosis’ names the process by which Homer’s characters transmigrate to Dublin in 1904, in Zero K it names a process that the Convergence, in its efforts to realise ‘Life after death’ (9), is trying to forestall. As Jeffrey says to his father: ‘We’re not talking about spiritual life everlasting. This is the body’ (8). By framing the novel’s conceit according to its divergence from this key Joycean term, DeLillo invokes Joyce as one of the norms that the Convergence is looking to break. This dynamic is at its clearest during the assembly to which Jeffrey is brought early in the novel. A woman in a headscarf, for whom Jeffrey struggles to imagine a name, reflects for the audience on what ‘being alone and frozen in the crypt, the capsule’ might mean in Cartesian terms: Will new technologies allow the brain to function at the level of identity? This is what you may have to confront. The conscious mind. Solitude in extremis. Alone. Think of the word itself. Middle English. All one. You cast off the person. The person is the mask, the created character in the medley of dramas that constitute your life. The mask drops away and the person becomes you in its truest meaning. All one. The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others? (67) In the capsule, the suggestion goes, a new kind of identity beyond the messiness of relationality and otherness will become possible. In the world of the Convergence, this is a challenge to be conquered; as the so-called Stenmark twins contend, its activity is about ‘stretch[ing] the boundaries of what it means to be human . . . do[ing] whatever we are capable of doing in order to alter human thought and bend the energies of civilization’ (71). For the Stenmark twins, a body ‘colonize[d] . . . with nanobots’ and ‘Embryonic stem cells’ will reveal that ‘Death is a cultural artifact, not a strict determination of what is humanly inevitable’ (71). The message that these speakers seem to push is that identity and the self are limited by embodiment, and will achieve a new individualised transcendence when those limitations have been erased. This is a conception of the self that is entirely at odds with Joyce’s own while he was writing Ulysses; he famously commented to Frank Budgen that in Ulysses, ‘the body lives in and moves through space and is the home of a full human personality. The words I write are adapted to express one of its functions then another [. . .] If they had no body they would have no mind. It’s all one’ (Budgen 21). For Joyce, ‘all one’ does not and cannot signify the mind alone, as it does for the woman in the headscarf; rather, the mind can only be known by way of its embodiment and the ways its embodiment embeds it in the networks of relations that make up the world. To not consider this is to not know the mind; as Joyce puts it, this has major implications for any attempt to represent the activity of the mind as a ‘stream of consciousness’ or interior monologue: ‘Walking towards his lunch my hero, Leopold Bloom, thinks of his wife, and says to himself, “Molly’s legs are out of plumb.” At another time of day he might have expressed the same thought without any underthought of food’ (Budgen 21). The central section of Zero K, ‘Artis Martineau’, experiments with writing the disembodied interior monologue – and, as a monologue by a woman that is otherwise

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set aside from the rest of the novel and begins with the words with which it ends, its formal resemblance to ‘Penelope’ indicates that it can be approached as an experiment in a Joycean mode. Where the section differs most obviously from ‘Penelope’ is in its use of the third person, which occurs in italicised lines interspersed throughout the section; Artis ‘is first person and third person both’ (Zero K 158). In this, DeLillo figures the behaviour of a consciousness disembodied to the point of singularity and therefore, since consciousness requires relationality to articulate itself in language, attempting to make of itself a narratable other against which it can define itself. As she thinks, ‘Artis is first person and third person with no way to join them together’ (160). While ‘Penelope’ gives form to a consciousness sleeplessly thinking and remembering, it consistently draws attention to the world outside; as Maud Ellmann argues, Molly’s habit of naming places when recalling ‘ecstatic moments’ always re-embodies her: ‘For Molly, there was Dolphins Barn, there was the Moorish wall, there was the hill of Howth: these place-names anchor her in language and memory’ (Ellmann 109). By contrast, Artis cannot remember moments or name things; the question ‘But am I who I was’ (Zero K 157, 160, 161, 162) emerges as her refrain. For Artis, ‘trying to understand what has happened to her and where she is and what it means to be who she is’ leads to a recursive, tautological language that cannot accommodate any proper noun besides ‘I’: ‘I only hear what is me. I am made of words’ (158). As such, Artis’s monologue is definitively opposed to the language of Jeffrey, who we learn early on is fixated on names and naming, even if, as in the case of Miklos Szabo, the Stenmark twins or Zara, he has to decide on the names himself. It is as if, for Jeffrey, proper nouns, and by extension the game he plays with himself defining common nouns, embed the human body’s existence in the systems of the world. In this light, the restaged scene from ‘Calypso’ at the beginning of Zero K takes on an added layer of significance: Molly responds to Bloom’s hasty definition of metempsychosis with resonant exasperation: ‘O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words’ (Joyce, Ulysses 4.343). While, for Joyce, Molly’s rocks are, among other things, an invitation to think forward to Dublin’s ‘Wandering Rocks’, for DeLillo, they inform Jeffrey’s decision to take Emma and Stak to see an ‘interior rock sculpture’ (Zero K 214) in a New York gallery. While for Artis and Ross metempsychosis is a ‘running joke’, for Molly, Bloom and Jeffrey it is a reminder of the world beyond the ‘grim limits of self’ (Zero K 48, 160). To take the hint of Jeffrey’s Heideggerian framing, the ‘interior rock sculpture’ becomes, like Joyce’s ‘Wandering Rocks’, a reminder of our thrownness [Geworfenheit] – a point he implicitly invites Stak to consider when he asks him, in front of the sculpture, to ‘Define rock’ (Zero K 216).

Conclusion: The Silence and the Wake In DeLillo’s latest novel, The Silence, the invocation of Joyce is rather less involuted than the examples I have detailed in Americana, Underworld and Zero K. During the monologues of the second part, Diane Lucas quotes Joyce: ‘Before I shut up I will quote a stray line from Finnegans Wake, a book I’ve been reading on and off, here and there, for what seems like forever. The line has stayed secure in the proper mind slot, the word preserve. Ere the sockson locked at the dure’ (The Silence 105). Evoking the possibility of an invasive Saxon at once knocking at and locking the door, this line speaks suggestively across the novel and its concern with cataclysm and war. Nonetheless, in terms

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of DeLillo’s oeuvre as a whole, this usage is notable for the way it links with one of the other recurrent features of his work: podiatric imagery. Indeed, Diane’s invocation of Joyce’s ‘sockson’ speaks implicitly to Martin’s frenetic image of global surveillance and satellites that are able to see ‘the socks we are wearing’ (90). But it also resonates in images right across DeLillo’s oeuvre – through the ‘faint wheaty stink with feet mixed in’ of Lauren Hartke’s soya granules in The Body Artist (10), Father Paulus’s demonstration of the ‘physics of language’ on Nick’s shoe in Underworld (542), Jack Gladney’s self-revealing shoes in White Noise (83), the alienated Gary Harkness trying to remove an opponent’s shoe in End Zone (169), and Sullivan’s ‘empty shoe’, so redolent of his mother’s single discarded shoe on the night of his debut, in Americana (10), to offer an incomplete survey. For DeLillo, imagery of shoes, feet and socks is a recurrent touchstone for identity and rootedness. I began this chapter by proposing that Joyce is a criterion that can be productively applied to DeLillo’s oeuvre in its entirety. The recurrence of podiatric imagery is a clear reminder that Joyce is not the only such criterion – and in The Silence’s integration of an allusion to Joyce with podiatric imagery, DeLillo seems to be reflecting on his own career’s trajectory in the same way that Libra reflected on Joyce’s: what could DeLillo possibly do next? In The Silence, it seems, we see the convergence of at least two artifices that have underpinned his oeuvre. For DeLillo, Joyce provides an exceptional system for understanding the potentiality of literature as such. Indeed, in the Salman Rushdie Defense Pamphlet, DeLillo and his co-author Paul Auster borrow a phrase from Mao II’s Bill Gray when they characterise literature as ‘the democratic shout’ (Mao II 159; Auster and DeLillo). In this statement of commitment to free expression is detectable, once again, the Joycean echo that underwrites DeLillo’s approach to art. In ‘Nestor’, Stephen Dedalus responds to the fascistic headteacher Mr Deasy’s odious and antisemitic comments about the ‘manifestation of God’ by gesturing to the unruly schoolchildren playing outside the window: – That is God. Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee! – What? – A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders. (Joyce, Ulysses 2.383–6) Just as DeLillo’s reading of Joyce framed his reading of the Warren Report, and thereby its transformation into Libra, reading DeLillo with an eye to the Joycean reveals the depth and complexity of his reading of Joyce, to the extent that, as the Salman Rushdie Defense Pamphlet implies, Joyce informs his understanding of the potentiality of literature as a whole.

Works Cited Auster, Paul, and Don DeLillo. Salman Rushdie Defense Pamphlet. The Rushdie Defense Committee USA, 1994. http://www.perival.com/delillo/rushdie_defense.html. Accessed 7 February 2023. Begley, Adam. ‘The Art of Fiction No. 135: Don DeLillo (1993).’ Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro. University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Boxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. Routledge, 2006.

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Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ and Other Writings. Oxford University Press, 1989. Ciribuco, Andrea. ‘“I’ve Got the Stephen Dedalus Blues”: Joycean Allusions, Quotes and Characters in Don DeLillo’s Americana.’ Polymorphic Joyce: Papers from the Third Joyce Graduate Conference, Dublin 22–23 January 2010, edited by Franca Ruggieri and Anne Fogarty. Edizioni Q, 2012. Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. University of Georgia Press, 2012. DeCurtis, Anthony. ‘“An Outsider in This Society”: An Interview with Don DeLillo (1988).’ Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro. University Press of Mississippi, 2005. DeLillo, Don. Americana. 1971. Penguin, 1990. ——. The Body Artist. 2001. Pan Macmillan, 2011. ——. End Zone. Picador, 1972. ——. Libra. 1988. Penguin, 1989. ——. Mao II. Vintage, 1991. ——. The Silence. Picador, 2020. ——. Underworld. Picador, 1997. ——. White Noise. Picador, 1985. ——. Zero K. Simon and Schuster, 2016. Ellmann, Maud. ‘“Penelope” Without the Body.’ European Joyce Studies, 17, 2006, pp. 97–108, 198. Herren, Graley. ‘Libranth: Nicholas Branch’s Joycean Labyrinth.’ Don DeLillo, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2018. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Penguin, 1992. ——. Ulysses. 1922. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler et al. Vintage, 1986. Keesey, Douglas. Don DeLillo. Twayne, 1993. LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. University of Illinois Press, 1987. ——. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ 1982. Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro. University Press of Mississippi, 2005, pp. 3–15. Morley, Catherine. ‘Excavating Underworld, Disinterring Ulysses: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with James Joyce.’ Comparative American Studies: An International Journal, 4, no. 2, 2006, pp. 175–96. Naas, Michael. Don DeLillo, American Original: Drugs, Weapons, Erotica, and Other Literary Contraband. Bloomsbury, 2020. Nel, Philip. ‘DeLillo and Modernism.’ The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, edited by John N. Duvall. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. ——. ‘DeLillo’s Dedalian Artists.’ The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, ed. John N. Duvall. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Ward, Kiron. ‘Paradise and the Periphery: The New Bloomusalem and Bloom Cottage.’ James Joyce Quarterly, 55, no. 1, 2017, pp. 115–33.

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16 DeLilloesque: DeLillo’s Cultural Impact Andrew Hoberek

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onsider the conclusion of the 2019 HBO miniseries Watchmen. Damon Lindelof – previously the showrunner of ABC’s Lost (2004–10) and HBO’s The Leftovers (2014–17) – created Watchmen as a contemporary sequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986–87 graphic novel of the same name, which was set in 1985 on an alternative earth on which superheroes existed and where Richard Nixon was in his fourth term as president of the United States. Lindelof’s version stars Regina King as Angela Abar, a detective on the Tulsa police force who adopts the costumed identity Sister Night after surviving a coordinated 2016 attack on police officers’ homes by the members of a white supremacist group named the Seventh Kavalry. Over the course of the series, Abar discovers that her murdered boss and mentor Judd Crawford was secretly a member of the Seventh Kavalry, and that he was killed by her own grandfather, Will Reeves, who survived the 1921 Greenwood Massacre as a child, joined the New York Police Force in the 1940s, and became the world’s first costumed vigilante after discovering that the force had been infiltrated by a racist group. In the seventh episode of the series, viewers learn that Abar’s husband, Cal, is in fact the formerly godlike being named Dr Manhattan, who relinquished his power and memories to marry Abar after the two met in Vietnam. The final episode of the series culminates with Manhattan and other characters foiling two plots to steal his powers, although he dies in the process. The final two scenes offer an epilogue of sorts focused on Abar, who – to the accompaniment of minor key piano music – contemplates an egg that remained unbroken when she smashed a carton on the floor during a final confrontation with Cal. She recalls a conversation in Vietnam, after he had first revealed himself as Dr Manhattan, when he produced an egg and told her that someone could acquire his powers by consuming organic material into which he had transferred his ‘atomic components’. We then see her taking off her shoes and walking outside to her home’s swimming pool. The piano music ends, replaced by the sound of birds. Abar breaks the egg and swallows its insides, then places a hand on her chest. She places the shell on the ledge of the pool and hitches up her trousers. As she walks to the edge of the pool new music begins, the opening guitar chords of Spooky Tooth’s 1970 cover of the Beatles’ ‘I Am the Walrus’. In slow motion she breathes deeply and then begins lowering her foot towards the water. Fade to black. Roll end credits, as the lyric ‘I am the eggman’ makes the joke clear to anyone who hasn’t already got it. This is a distinctly DeLilloesque moment both in its interest in the possibility of the miraculous erupting into everyday life and its refusal to decide whether such eruptions are possible. For examples from DeLillo’s own body of work, we might look to his

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1985 White Noise, for instance a passage early in the novel which seems to reference the title in its description of the noise in a grocery store where Jack Gladney and his family are shopping: ‘The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension’ (36). The distancing mechanism of the simile here shouldn’t distract us from the fact that the idea of some other world shimmering just out of reach of the everyday one is a leitmotif in all of DeLillo’s fiction – even as the simile marks DeLillo’s deep commitment to ambiguity or, from another perspective, his refusal to commit to the bit. And of course, it is in the most banal of settings, a Midwestern college town supermarket, where we hear what Gladney calls, on the book’s final page, ‘the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living’ (326). In its final paragraph, the novel returns to the grocery store, concluding an epilogue that begins with Gladney’s son Wilder’s improbably safe tricycle ride across a six-lane expressway, an event that in no way departs from strict realism, yet seems in its implausibly benign conclusion as though it might itself be a miracle. It’s surely no accident on the part of the Catholic DeLillo that Gladney bases his account of Wilder’s ride on the report of two old women who witness it. DeLillo’s world is one in which the miraculous and other systems of meaning may or may not exist alongside the quotidian world his characters inhabit, and in which evidence of such meaning is always imperfect or second-hand. If the innovation of Moore and Gibbons’ revisionist superhero story was to imagine a world in which only one character – Dr Manhattan – had superpowers, then from one perspective the project of Lindelof’s version is to move the story even further in the direction of ambiguous realism, to shift it into the other mid-1980s of White Noise. It does this first by hiding Dr Manhattan in the figure of Abar’s husband Cal, and then by refusing to decide whether Abar has become someone who can walk on water. But it’s not just Watchmen: we might note here how well this account of the DeLilloesque functions as a description of at least one major strand of what we call ‘prestige television’. Especially early on, most accounts of prestige television focused on its relationship to strict realism, as in the numerous comparisons of The Sopranos and The Wire to Charles Dickens and other nineteenth-century novelists.1 But a whole body of more recent prestige television offers something much closer to DeLillo’s characteristic blend of the quotidian and the anomalous. Lindelof’s The Leftovers, for instance, adapts Tom Perrotta’s (DeLilloesque) novel about an Ohio community dealing with the aftermath of what appears to be the biblical Rapture. And Noah Hawley’s Fargo (2014–present) punctuates its titular homage to the Coen brothers’ 1996 movie about Midwestern criminals with multiple appearances of what seem to be UFOs, a bar patron who claims to be God, and an unlikely tornado straight out of The Wizard of Oz. In the case of Hawley, a novelist as well as a showrunner, the connections with DeLillo and his work are explicit: he optioned DeLillo’s 2016 Zero K for adaptation

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For a late discussion of this line of thinking by two novelists, see Adam Kirsch and Mohsin Hamid. While Kirsch is critical of the whole premise, Hamid tellingly quotes Sheila Heti to argue that now that television has taken over the role of the realist novel, novelists are freed for other, more experimental tasks: ‘Television is not the new novel’, he writes. ‘Television is the old novel.’

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(‘Speaking with Novelist-Screenwriters’) and has interviewed DeLillo in a rare public appearance by the older author (Hawley). Citing DeLillo for the ‘In My Library’ feature of the New York Post, Hawley says, ‘What was fascinating about the [JFK] assassination is that we have it on film, but we still don’t know what happened. This is DeLillo’s take on the conspiracy, or lack of, the perfect marriage of plot as story device and plot as cultural phenomenon. DeLillo looks beneath the surface of the world we’re in’ (Hoffman). Here in brief are the features of the DeLilloesque as I have been describing it: the quotidian world, the possibility of some system of meaning underlying it, the strict ambiguity about whether this system really exists. In DeLillo’s work, these characteristics appear alongside a distinct, flat tone which we might, following Fredric Jameson, describe as ‘the withholding of emotion or affect’ (191). In his 2013 book The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson describes the history of realism as a dialectical struggle between two competing imperatives: on one hand, narrative, and on the other, affect, which Jameson describes as a ‘nameless and unclassifiable’ feeling tone, distinct from named emotions, which ‘seems to . . . float above experience without causes’ and in this way to evoke a kind of pure present opposed to narrative’s linear ordering of time (33, 35, 27–44). The realist novel, Jameson argues, emerges from other forms of storytelling via the introduction of affect, and disappears into modernism when the latter mode privileges affect more than the balance of the two terms. What comes after modernism is, of course, harder to pinpoint, but in trying to work through this question, Jameson turns to the work of German writer Alexander Kluge as an example of what he calls ‘realism after affect’ (186). Describing the tone of Kluge’s story ‘A Mass Fatality in Venice’, in which most of the residents of a home for the elderly die during a heatwave and the survivors then kill the home’s staff and establish a dictatorship, Jameson argues that in the story, as in Kluge’s other fiction, there is nothing, not even a judgement on one of the players. We could imagine a denunciation of state bureaucracy, or an indictment of the irrepressible lust for power of human nature, or an arraignment of the social services which confine the elderly in this way, let alone a more metaphysical lament about man’s vulnerability to natural catastrophe or to the elements; but none of these themes or interpretations takes with any plausibility on the icy surfaces of the text. (191) While Jameson does not discuss DeLillo, this description should sound familiar to readers of his novels. A similarly distant, non-judgmental, cold tone characterises, for instance, the scenes of Mao II (1991), whether they involve the novelist Bill Gray having dinner with his publisher (‘About an hour later the two men sat under the vaulted skylight in a dining room at the Chesterfield, eating the sole’ [125]) or the process whereby Karen Janney is extricated from the Unification Church (‘The two men deprogrammed her eighteen hours a day for eight days. They cited case histories. They repeated key phrases’ [79]) or Bill’s eventually fatal experience with a car in Cyprus (‘He stepped off the curbstone and took about seven strides and when he heard the car braking he had time to take one step in reverse and turn his head’ [167]). In these very DeLilloesque sentences, banal details take the place of any emotional response or judgement about what is going on. In what follows, I will argue that this signature element of DeLillo’s style constitutes what we think of as ‘the Delilloesque’ in contemporary mass culture and popular media such as television. Perhaps more

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surprisingly – and in contrast to what we might expect from the racial and gender politics of a practitioner of what Tom LeClair memorably dubbed ‘the systems novel’ – I will also argue that DeLillo’s greatest influence has been not on the white male novelists sometimes associated with him, such as David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, but on female and especially Black writers and showrunners. For the latter in particular, I will suggest, DeLillo’s style provides a powerful tool by which to slip the expectation of representing Black characters as possessed of a rich, full human subjectivity that was one of the hallmarks, for Ken Warren, of African American literature – his term for the historically specific formation that arose in the US after Emancipation to contest Jim Crow segregation and its investment in ‘black difference or inferiority’ (What Was? 110, passim). * * * DeLillo, along with Thomas Pynchon, was an obvious go-to for reviewers and others describing young, white, male authors writing big, ambitious, not-quite-realistic novels in the mid-1980s, and so it’s easy enough to find references to DeLillo in accounts of the careers of David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen. In his biography of Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, for instance, D. T. Max argues that Wallace, at work on his first novel The Broom of the System (1987), ‘took the flat, echoing tone of his dialogue from DeLillo, whose novels he had been reading while working on his book’ (47). And more recently, Edmund Gordon writes in his review of Franzen’s Crossroads (2021) that DeLillo’s influence is hard to miss in Franzen’s early work: The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992) are classic systems novels, concerned less with psychology than with societal forces, their characters at the mercy of complex, paranoiac plots involving left-wing terrorism, environmental conspiracy and religious fundamentalism. Yet both novelists diverge from DeLillo as much as they draw upon him, in large part because they belong, as Adam Kelly has argued, to a generational cohort of writers committed to what Kelly calls the New Sincerity. This cohort, which also included Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers and George Saunders, was concerned with ‘how sincerity can continue to operate between people in [a world where the category of reality no longer holds out the promise of orientating the self] and how one can write “sincere” fiction after postmodernism’ (158). Thus, while Graham Foster notes DeLillo’s influence on Wallace’s descriptions of the game of Eschaton in Infinite Jest (1996) (9), the flatness and technospeak of these descriptions in fact contrast with the chaos of the game’s unravelling. And while the novel takes up the difficulty of asserting sincerity in language, most notably in the Boston AA sections – ‘Sincerity with an ulterior motive is something these tough ravaged people know and fear, all of them trained to remember the coyly sincere, ironic, self-presenting fortifications they’d had to construct in order to carry on Out There, under the ceaseless neon bottle’ (Wallace 368) – the novel implicitly adopts the AA slogan ‘Fake It Till You Make It’ as its own credo (368), while Wallace’s own trademark inelegance of language seems designed to imply the sincerity of a mind wrestling with concepts. Meanwhile, Kelly is

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probably too severe when he distinguishes Franzen from the proponents of the New Sincerity in fiction by saying that ‘there is very little formally or conceptually “new” about the sincerity explored in his work’ (160 n.5). Franzen’s The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) is decidedly DeLilloesque both in its theme (a mysterious South Asian conspiracy to take over St Louis) and in the way it unfolds this conspiracy via concrete details (‘A week later the sightings began. An Indian family of ten was seen standing on a traffic island one block east of the Cervantes Convention Center’ [5]). DeLillo’s 1982 The Names is always hovering in the background here. But of course, Franzen’s subsequent career constitutes a trajectory away from DeLillo as a model and towards a putatively more natural realism associated with the Victorians and the mid-twentieth-century Australian novelist Pauline Fox (Gordon). DeLillo’s influence would, arguably, only begin to flourish at the end of the century, among a different (and perhaps surprising) constituency of women writers and writers of colour. Consider, for instance, the work of A. M. Homes. Homes published her first novel, Jack, just a year after The Twenty-Seventh City appeared, when she was still an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence. In 1996 she published her third novel, the controversial The End of Alice, about an imprisoned paedophile and child-killer who corresponds with a 19-year-old girl intent on seducing a 12-year-old boy. The novel’s lyrical, first-person narration from the imprisoned killer’s perspective, no less than its interest in paedophilia, make clear its debt to Vladimir Nabokov: ‘And perhaps you wonder who am I to be running interference’, the narrator tells the reader early on, ‘to be acting as her translator and yours. Mine is the speech, the rhythm and rhyme of an old and peculiar man who has been locked away for too long, punished for pursuing a taste of his own’ (Homes, The End 11). It was only in 1999, with her subsequent novel Music for Torching, that Homes would move into her fully DeLilloesque style. The opening offers a heightened version of DeLillo’s way with domestic scenes. A couple cleans up after a dinner party, barely repressed rage and suggestions of rape and violence swirling everywhere around their conversation but never breaking its flat tone, even after the wife ‘accident[ally]’ cuts the husband’s neck with a kitchen knife: She finishes in the kitchen. He holds an ice pack against his neck. ‘To keep the swelling down’, he says. ‘What swelling?’ She asks. ‘It’s a cut, not a bite.’ ‘What do you know about it?’ They go upstairs. ‘The light in the hall is out’, she tells him. ‘We’re out of bulbs’, he says. ‘Put it on the list’, she says. They undress. There is nothing more to say. (Homes, Music 4–5) While Music for Torching includes allusions to DeLillo at the level of content – during the opening fight, the couple’s son comes in and makes himself a caviar sandwich; at one point their house is cleaned by a crew wearing yellow hazmat suits – it is this tone that marks the novel as DeLilloesque, particularly as it stands in contrast with the frequently horrific events recounted. The other great DeLilloesque novel of 1999, although this was perhaps not quite so evident at the time, was Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. As a reviewer of Whitehead’s 2016 The Underground Railroad noted, the author’s first novel ‘opens with the

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Don DeLillo-ish [line] “It’s a new elevator, freshly pressed to the rails, and it’s not built to fall this fast”’ (Brockes). But in fact, the novel shows DeLillo’s influence through and through, both in its blend of realism and speculative fiction – it follows the noirish adventures of an elevator inspector named Lila Mae Watson in an unnamed midtwentieth-century city divided between Lila Mae’s Intuitionist camp and their rivals the Empiricists – and in its flat tone. Here form follows content, with the novel’s narration frequently taking the form of affectless descriptions of technique. This is the case, as we might expect by this point, whether Whitehead is describing Lila Mae inspecting an elevator, or the work of the two men whom she arrives home to find searching her apartment following an accident in one of the buildings for which she is responsible: Jim and John do not take the time allowed by Lila Mae’s clicking and fumbling to clamber down the fire escape, or hide in the closet, or pull out their guns and recline on Lila Mae’s couch in a rather labored we’ve-got-you-covered pose, no, they continue to shake the joint down and that’s how Lila Mae finds them, John scrutinizing a pile of receipts from the middle left hand drawer of Lila Mae’s sad afterthought of a kitchenette . . . and Jim scraping a finger through the jar of peach preserves Lila Mae received last Christmas from her mother’s sister, checking for little treasures like bus station locker keys and microfilm, microfilm, which Jim has never encountered in all his searches through so many apartments, but will one day, he’s sure of it. (The Intuitionist 32) This passage does more than focus on mundane details, moreover: note how it disavows theatricality at the level of its own narration of genre conventions, focusing instead on the mundane details of repetitive labour, only to find theatricality again in Jim’s self-perception. In all these ways it is superbly DeLilloesque. Whitehead has not declared an explicit debt to DeLillo in the manner of Homes, whose 2012 novel May We Be Forgiven featured a protagonist who is a professor of Nixonology and a cameo from DeLillo himself.2 But Whitehead’s early novels, such as John Henry Days (2001) and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), feature ‘the early DeLillo’s sense for the sinister underside of Americana’ (‘Review of John Henry Days’), and this underside erupts into full horror in his 2011 novel Zone One, a post-apocalyptic zombie novel set in a New York City struggling to return to normalcy. Zone One features all the generic trappings of the zombie genre familiar from multimedia successes such as The Walking Dead (a comic book series written by Robert Kirkman from 2003 to 2019, and a television series since 2010) and World War Z (a 2006 novel by Max Brooks and a 2013 film directed by Marc Forster). But as reviewers on Amazon continue to note, ‘Almost nothing happens’ in Whitehead’s book – that is to say, the book offers very few of the plot satisfactions of the genre, but instead devotes itself to ‘the protagonist’s musings on the fall of civilization due to a zombie plague and his experiences surviving the first few years of the aftermath’ (Amazon reviewer). Especially in its account of the beginnings of the zombie plague, Zone One’s DeLilloesque deployment of concrete

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Kasia Boddy offers a thorough account of DeLillo’s influence on May We Be Forgiven in her essay ‘Making it Long’.

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details becomes a mechanism for representing the conceptual gap that accompanies the incursion of horror into everyday life: They finally arrived at Mark Spitz’s corner. A small team of boys played basketball at the other end of the street . . . Were they playing basketball? There was a small round shape on the pavement and they bent into a huddle. He didn’t recognize their faces, only that deflated curl of the shoulders that marked Sunday night’s recurring epidemic: Back to work. (Whitehead, Zone One 68) Here, returning from a casino trip to the beginnings of a zombie invasion of which he is not quite aware, Whitehead’s protagonist Mark Spitz struggles to make sense of a new and horrific epidemic within the recurring terms to which he is accustomed. In an essay focused on Homes’s May We Be Forgiven and its efforts to reclaim the category of the Great American Novel from its masculinist associations, Kasia Boddy notes DeLillo’s surprising influence on female novelists including Dana Spiotta, Rachel Kushner, Egan and Homes. Citing DeLillo’s desire not to be considered a postmodernist but ‘a novelist, period’, Boddy writes that ‘DeLillo made it acceptable for twenty-first century women writers to identify themselves in the same way’ (323–4). With Whitehead in mind, we might suggest that DeLillo’s example provides something similar for Black writers interested in moving beyond the imperative to produce what Warren calls ‘expressive activities asserting the value of black humanity against a centuries-old project of dehumanization or antiblackness’ (Warren ‘Blackness’). This is perhaps especially true in a twenty-first-century literary field in which Black writers increasingly come from places other than the US. The Jamaican-born Marlon James, for instance, cited Libra (1988) as one of the books he was reading while working on what would become his own novel set amid the transnational politics of the global Cold War, A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) (James). To sum up, one appeal of DeLillo’s example is that it frees women writers and writers of colour from the burden of writing as women or people of colour, not only thematically (writing as ‘a novelist, period’ about subjects other than gender and race) but also formally (insofar as the fiction of identity was commonly associated, for various complicated reasons, with a lyrical first-person voice). This happened, not coincidentally, at a time when DeLillo’s stylistic signature of flatness in the midst of disaster and possibility also began to resonate with readers and viewers more broadly. Recently Homes remarked that she admired DeLillo ‘for his blending of fiction and history’ (Ciabattari), and in the remainder of this chapter I will argue that this means something more than just that DeLillo provided a template for writing historical fiction. DeLillo’s fiction also provides a fundamental model for an experience – new in the wake of the 1990s and the so-called ‘end of history’ that that decade ushered in – of once again living very intensely within history. This is an experience that, as we shall see, both was and wasn’t continuous with a broader history of race in the United States. * * * The twenty-first century began, of course, with a real-life event that would come to be described as paradigmatically DeLilloesque: the destruction of the World Trade Center by Islamist terrorists. This was the case both because of the odd coincidence that

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the cover of DeLillo’s 1997 Underworld seemed to pre-emptively depict the attacks, and because of the way in which the author, given his long-time thematic obsessions with ‘terrorism, finance, and the Twin Towers themselves’, seems ‘to have repeatedly theorized [the 9/11 attacks] as a work of art in advance’ (Harris). This is probably a specific reference to the many conversations in Mao II about the ‘curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists’ (41), the way in which ‘[w]hat terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought’ (157). But terrorism is a thread that has been running through DeLillo’s work from the beginning, to the extent that by 21 December 2001 he was able to publish his long essay on the attacks, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’. In this essay he ruminates on the difficulty of assimilating such a ‘singular’ ‘event’, and on the writer’s ability ‘to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space’. Responding to this need, he offers a narrative that he himself seems to recognise might be too determinate: ‘Two forces in the world, past and future’; ‘The terrorists of September 11 want to bring back the past.’ But more tellingly, he enacts his signature style as a way of simultaneously acknowledging and beginning to encompass the sheer unexpectedness of the event: The cellphones, the lost shoes, the handkerchiefs mashed in the faces of running men and women. The box cutters and credit cards. The paper that came streaming out of the towers and drifted across the river to Brooklyn backyards, status reports, résumés, insurance forms. Sheets of paper driven into concrete, according to witnesses. Paper slicing into truck tyres, fixed there. These are among the smaller objects and more marginal stories in the sifted ruins of the day. We need them, even the common tools of the terrorists, to set against the massive spectacle that continues to seem unmanageable, too powerful a thing to set into our frame of practised response. (‘In the Ruins’) The falling paper here would, of course, return at the beginning of DeLillo’s 2007 novel about 9/11 and its aftermath, Falling Man. The consonance between DeLillo’s writing and 9/11 helps us to begin to understand the pervasive presence of the DeLilloesque in twenty-first-century media. Here I’m not suggesting that, say, Zone One is a covert 9/11 novel, although people have read it that way; but rather that 9/11 was the first of a series of real-life events – to which one might add the 2008 recession, Brexit, the Trump presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine – that restored the sense of sudden, jarring change that we speak of in vernacular terms, inadequately, as living in history. As Whitehead told an interviewer in 2012, I wasn’t directly writing about 9/11 in Zone One. I think it is in there within a larger notion of disaster. Our disasters are communal sometimes, felt by our whole communities, or private, a death in the family or losing your job. (‘Q and A: Colson Whitehead’) Realist fiction in the twentieth century had, of course, provided nothing if not tools for exploring private disaster; what Whitehead needed, and what I have been arguing he got at least in part from DeLillo, was a tool for linking such private events to a zombie

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apocalypse that can be read as a metaphor for 9/11, but also for, say, climate change. This is a tool that DeLillo had been honing for the entire late twentieth century, in novels that are domestic fictions with death cults and airborne toxic events and terrorist kidnappers and, eventually, 9/11 itself. Disaster isn’t just one thing in Zone One, but it’s less overdetermined than underdetermined: which is to say, it’s less the content of disaster than its foreboding form. It’s a form that’s become increasingly familiar to all of us in the last twenty years, which helps to motivate the move I will now discuss: the shift of the DeLilloesque from serious fiction into mass entertainment. Of course, asserting such a shift might seem strange to anyone familiar with the one film made from a DeLillo novel, David Cronenberg’s 2012 adaptation of the author’s 2003 Cosmopolis, which was both a box office disaster, earning back just over 7 million dollars of its production costs (Box Office Mojo), and an aesthetic failure. As Todd McCarthy accurately wrote for the Hollywood Reporter after the film’s debut at Cannes, it is ‘lifeless’ and ‘stagey’. I would suggest that this is in part because the subject matter of the movie – which, like DeLillo’s novel, tells the story of the day-long journey of billionaire hedge fund manager Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) through Manhattan traffic to get a haircut, only to find himself at the end in a violent encounter with a former employee (Paul Giamatti) – allows viewers to mistakenly understand the flatness of its dialogue, and of Pattinson’s acting, as an expression of his character. Thus Justin Chang’s Variety review suggests that the movie ‘probes the soullessness of the 1%’, employing a ‘dialogue heavy strategy’ that is ‘distancing by design’ and reinforced by the manner in which the camera work ‘plays up Eric’s monstrous callousness and arrogance by emphasizing his physical distance from the hovering crowds’ outside his car. But the problem with this reading is that, because the dialogue is adopted liberally from the novel, everyone speaks in the same ‘distancing’ manner, including characters who are not members of the 1%. In this way, the film seems unable to distinguish between an element of the world that it is depicting, and the world as such. Moreover, as I have been suggesting, DeLillo’s flat dialogue isn’t meant to be socially mimetic. Cosmopolis is distinctive in his oeuvre for its focus on the super-wealthy, and in fact most of his characters are what we would refer to as middle-class. A more significant problem with Cronenberg’s movie might, then, be a medium-specific problem of pacing. We expect a film to give us a world in two hours or so, whereas DeLillo’s alternation of banality and violence or transcendence is actually much more suited to a serial medium such as television, where DeLilloesque flatness in fact works quite well. Consider that other development of the twenty-first century, which we call by the name prestige television and which we can loosely date, as a recognised phenomenon, to the 1999 debut of The Sopranos. In the early 2000s it became conventional to describe shows such as The Sopranos and The Wire as equivalents in another medium of nineteenth-century realist novels. But as Adam Kirsch, contesting this comparison, pointed out in 2014, ‘Televised evil . . . almost always takes melodramatic form: Our anti-heroes are mobsters, meth dealers or terrorists’ (Kirsch and Hamid). This is of course the reason why Charles Dickens, and not, say, George Eliot or Henry James, was the author most commonly referenced by those – including The Wire’s creator David Simon – who compared these shows to novels. Like Dickens’s novels, these shows blended long stretches of domestic drama with occasional, jarring interruptions of the violent or unexpected.

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Here we have the basic narrative structure of the DeLilloesque, with a different affective range: both more sentimental in its domestic scenes and more histrionic in its melodrama. Yet it was precisely in 2014 that, I would argue, the first wave of prestige television was giving way to a second wave that could more accurately be called DeLilloesque. It was 2014, in particular, that saw the debuts of both Lindelof’s The Leftovers and Hawley’s Fargo. As Perrotta told Hawley in a published conversation from 2017 (in which DeLillo comes up and they share their admiration for A. M. Homes), he and the others working on The Leftovers spent the first season ‘searching for the tone of the show’: It wasn’t like any other apocalyptic show that we could think of, and we erred on the side of maybe being too dark. Then, slowly, we discovered that there was a certain kind of comedy and a certain kind of movement between very grounded writing and very wild writing. By the third season the room really understood what a Leftovers story was, what a Leftovers scene was; the room really started to hum. (‘Speaking with Novelist-Screenwriters’) One solution to this technical problem of finding a tone to match the swing between ‘grounded writing’ and ‘wild writing’ is melodrama, but Perrotta and Hawley find a different solution, indexed in part by Hawley’s comments that whereas fiction writers emphasise ‘internal monologues and interior states’, the television medium requires emphasis on the ‘actions that [characters] take’. A scene from ‘Off Ramp’, the third episode of The Leftovers’ second season, explicitly thematises Perrotta and Hawley’s solution. This scene focuses on Laurie Garvey (Amy Brenneman), the wife of police chief Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) and a former psychotherapist. Following what the show calls the Sudden Departure, Laurie had joined a cult whose members have taken a vow of silence, leaving it only after a fire destroyed its building and nearly killed the Garveys’ daughter Jill (Margaret Qualley). Laura’s former profession and post-Departure trajectory directly invoke the problem of losing access to subjectivity, although the show itself has fulfilled Hawley’s assertion about ‘actions’ by showing her obsessively washing her car. In ‘Off Ramp’ she meets with a publisher (Mark Harelik) to discuss the book she has written about her experiences. This is one of many instances of The Leftovers’ commitment to the chilly normalcy of its post-apocalyptic story, which – despite Perrotta’s claim about the show’s idiosyncratic handling of its genre – echoes Whitehead’s treatment of the zombie novel in Zone One. The publisher asks Laurie to ‘put some feeling into this thing’. He mentions a key detail of the events described, but makes a mistake in doing so, and then says, ‘If you want people to connect with it, you have to tell them how it felt’, finally concluding by saying, ‘What I don’t know, Laurie, and what I need to know, is how you feel about it.’ Through this string of suggestions, Laurie sits expressionlessly and mostly silently, until she finally leaps out of her seat and throws the publisher to the ground. Here the publisher is obviously the sort of reader who misses how precise details convey emotions, and instead wants an author to spell things out. He would be a bad reader of DeLillo. Hawley’s Fargo thematises its own tonal flatness from another angle, with its concern with the Midwest as a place – also central to the Coen brothers’ 1996 film, of course – in which a stereotypical normalcy belies depths of feeling and extremes of

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behaviour. Both shows capture, I would argue, a general twenty-first-century zeitgeist in which extreme events become increasingly normal as US power breaks down, capitalism throws off the benign trappings it took on in the mid-twentieth century, and the environment continues to degrade. As we all know too well by now, we are less likely to meet these changes, in their sheer persistent everydayness, with melodrama than with a kind of dull shell shock. This is to suggest that post-apocalypse has become a kind of universal feeling. Yet at the same time that it is widely shared, it very precisely isn’t: if history is what hurts, to quote Fredric Jameson’s famous phrase, it hurts some more than others. This is an important driver behind the rise – in the DeLilloesque phase of prestige television – of shows with Black showrunners and/or significantly Black casts, such as Lindelof’s Watchmen and Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of Whitehead’s 2016 The Underground Railroad for Amazon Prime. In part, this development is simply an economic one, as HBO and other platforms seek their share of a significant Black audience. But these shows likewise work within the formal terms of the DeLilloesque in ways that connect what I have been describing as its flatness and mix of narrative extremes to a larger history of Black life in the US and elsewhere – a history characterised by the relative frequency and regularity of trauma. This is the point, I would argue, behind the way both Lindelof’s Watchmen and Misha Green’s very loose HBO adaptation of Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel Lovecraft Country invoke the 1921 massacre of the Black citizens of Tulsa’s Greenwood section. In doing so, they ground their fantasy horrors in a very real historical event that was, until Watchmen’s 2019 run, relatively littleknown. Jenkins’s adaptation of The Underground Railroad, like its sources, is on one level a catalogue of the horrors of African American history, which the novel and the television series spatialise on to a map of the US. Both versions approach these horrors not with melodrama or lyricism, but with a kind of straightforwardness that, it’s worth mentioning, is also the tone of nineteenth-century slave narratives. If, as I have been arguing, the post-apocalyptic generic frame offers a displaced realism for twentyfirst-century life more generally, The Underground Railroad, in framing these events as a kind of alternative history and treating them as elements of everyday life for its characters, performs the work of casting post-apocalypse backwards as a description of African American history more generally. And here too, as in Whitehead’s previous work, the DeLilloesque provides the tonal and narrative form for this move. Yet I would like to end where I started, with Watchmen’s final suggestion not of horror but of transcendence. Here is a third level of DeLilloesque narrative form: not quotidian banality, or normalised violence, but a transcendence that can only be intimated. Of course, if we live in DeLilloesque times, and those times are characterised by a renewed sense of living with historical change, then this dialectically implies that change might not only be bad but also good – that history is somehow at least potentially under our control. In a discussion of The Underground Railroad, Anna Kornbluh stirringly writes that ‘with the syncretism of its formal elements’, Whitehead’s novel intones that the general history of America is not just the ongoingness of racial oppression but also the grace of striving. Crucially, there is more to this critical insight than the negative pole of diagnosis; the novel infrastructures of the dialectic also furnish the projective synthesis of a utopian pole. (406–7)

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Here it is crucial to remember that utopia is quite literally ‘no place’, and thus outside representation. And while it’s too simple to suggest that this was what DeLillo was getting at all along, it’s worth noting that for Whitehead and others, this was at least one possible lesson of DeLilloesque form – the form that makes it suitable to the present moment, in its combination of everydayness, despair and very fragile hope.

Works Cited Amazon Reviewer. ‘Introspective and Dull with No Action.’ amazon.com, 5 March 2016. https://www.amazon.com/Zone-One-Colson-Whitehead/product-reviews/0307455173/ ref=cm_cr_arp_d_paging_btm_next_2?pageNumber=2. Accessed 8 December 2021. Boddy, Kasia. ‘Making it Long: Men, Women, and the Great American Novel Now.’ Textual Practice, 33, no. 2, 2019, pp. 324–30 Box Office Mojo. Cosmopolis. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl525174273/. Accessed 13 December 2021. Brockes, Emma. ‘Colson Whitehead: “To deal with this subject with the gravity it deserved was scary”.’ The Guardian, 7 July 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/07/ colson-whitehead-underground-railroad. Accessed 8 December 2021. Chang, Justin. ‘Review of Cosmopolis.’ Variety, 25 May 2012. https://variety.com/2012/film/ markets-festivals/cosmopolis-1117947638/. Accessed 13 December 2021. Ciabattari, Jane. ‘A. M. Homes on Her New Novel May We Be Forgiven.’ Daily Beast, 14 July 2017. https://www.thedailybeast.com/am-homes-on-her-new-novel-may-we-be-forgiven. Accessed 10 December 2021. DeLillo, Don. ‘In the Ruins of the Future.’ The Guardian, 21 December 2001. https://www. theguardian.com/books/2001/dec/22/fiction.dondelillo. Accessed 9 December 2021. ——. Mao II. Penguin, 1991. ——. White Noise. Penguin, 1985. Foster, Graham. ‘A Deep Insider’s Elegiac Tribute: The Work of Don DeLillo in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.’ Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon, 4, no. 2. https://doi.org/10.16995/ orbit.127 Franzen, Jonathan. The Twenty-Seventh City. 1988. Picador, 2018. Gordon, Edmund. ‘Divorce, Doubt, and Doobies: Jonathan Franzen’s Morality Tale.’ TLS, 1 October 2021. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/crossroads-jonathan-franzen-bookreview-edmund-gordon/. Accessed 30 November 2021. Harris, Malcolm. ‘Don DeLillo Did 9/11.’ The New Inquiry, 6 July 2016. https://thenewinquiry. com/don-delillo-did-911/. Accessed 9 December 2021. Hawley, Noah. ‘Don DeLillo in Conversation with Noah Hawley.’ Literary Arts, 27 November 2016. https://literary-arts.org/archive/don-delillo-in-conversation-with-noah-hawley/. Accessed 6 July 2021. Hoffman, Barbara. ‘In My Library: Noah Hawley.’ New York Post, 5 December 2015. https:// nypost.com/2015/12/05/in-my-library-noah-hawley/. Accessed 6 July 2021. Homes, A. M. The End of Alice: A Novel. Scribner, 1996. ——. Music for Torching. Harper Collins e-books, 2007. James, Marlon. ‘Bedside Books.’ Marlon James Among Other Things, 10 May 2007. http:// marlon-james.blogspot.com. Accessed 10 December 2021. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. Verso, 2013. Kelly, Adam. ‘Jennifer Egan, New Sincerity, and the Genre Turn in Contemporary Fiction.’ Contemporary Women’s Writing, 15, no. 2, 2021, pp. 151–71. Kirsch, Adam, and Mohsin Hamid. ‘Are the New “Golden Age” TV Shows the New Novels?’ New York Times, 25 February 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/books/review/ are-the-new-golden-age-tv-shows-the-new-novels.html. Accessed 6 July 2021.

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Kornbluh, Anna. ‘We Have Never Been Critical: Toward the Novel as Critique.’ Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 50, no. 3, 2017, pp. 397–408. LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: DeLillo and the Systems Novel. University of Illinois Press, 1988. Max, D. T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. Penguin, 2012. McCarthy, Todd. ‘Cosmopolis: Cannes Review.’ Hollywood Reporter, 25 May 2012. https:// www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/cosmopolis-review-robert-pattinsoncannes-329230/. Accessed 13 December 2021. ‘Review of John Henry Days.’ Publisher’s Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0385-49819-7. Accessed 8 December 2021. ‘Speaking with Novelist-Screenwriters Tom Perrotta and Noah Hawley.’ Literary Hub, 9 August 2017. https://lithub.com/speaking-with-novelist-screenwriters-tom-perrotta-and-noahhawley/. Accessed 15 December 2021. Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest: A Novel. Back Bay Books, 1996. Warren, Kenneth W. ‘“Blackness” and the Sclerosis of African American Cultural Criticism.’ nonsite, 28, 10 May 2019. https://nonsite.org/blackness-and-the-sclerosis-of-african-american-cultural-criticism/. Accessed 10 December 2021. ——. What Was African American Literature?. Harvard University Press, 2011. Whitehead, Colson. The Intuitionist: A Novel. 1999. Anchor, 2000. ——. ‘Q and A: Colson Whitehead’. Interview with David Naimon. TinHouse.Com, 12 September 2012. https://tinhouse.com/q-and-a-colson-whitehead/. Accessed 7 February 2023. ——. Zone One: A Novel, New York: Doubleday, 2011.

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Part IV Film, Screens and Technology

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17 DeLillo and the Cinematic Long Take David Hering

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he long take, a cinematic device that consists of a lengthy, unbroken shot, is present in Don DeLillo’s fiction from his first novel, Americana (1971). In the opening scene, during a party attended by television executive David Bell, a character is heard to remark of the gathering, in reference to one of cinema’s most famous exponents of the long take, ‘It’s like an Antonioni movie’ (4). Bell’s own passion project, which he carries out discreetly during a road trip to shoot a documentary about the Navaho tribe, is ‘a long unmanageable movie’ (205) consisting of a series of long takes, shots ‘extended to [their] ultimate limit in time’ (263), which for Bell approximates something approaching autobiography. The reference to Michelangelo Antonioni in the first pages of his first novel indicates that DeLillo is positioning his work in relation to film directors as much as to other novelists. Antonioni’s films belong to a specific moment in cinema when the prevailing European post-war form of neorealism was curdling into something stranger and more existential. Antonioni’s unofficial trilogy, L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962), broke with his beginnings in neorealism to depict the lives of aimless middle-class Italians benefiting from the post-war boom. In these films Antonioni allegorically stages the existential boredom of post-war Italian modernity through a series of oblique scenarios, most famously the unresolved disappearance of a young woman on a boating trip in L’Avventura. One of Antonioni’s signature methods of creating this atmosphere is lengthy, unbroken shots, which downplay action and melodrama in favour of a sense of social and temporal dislocation. This shift in filmmaking is famously theorised by Gilles Deleuze in his two-part study Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, albeit in a strongly Eurocentric fashion, as the difference between ‘movement-images’ and ‘time-images’ (Cinema 1 12). For Deleuze, this change occurs when European filmmakers break with earlier traditions of depicting action through montage (though he sees this process continuing in American cinema) and move towards ‘a mystery of time, of uniting image, thought and camera in a single “automatic subjectivity”’ (Cinema 2 56). Deleuze cites Andrei Tarkovsky’s assertion that ‘what is essential is the way time flows in the shot, its tension or rarefaction, “the pressure of time in the shot”’ (42) as fundamental to the development of the timeimage. In the creation of this categorical split, Deleuze is also strongly influenced by Henri Bergson’s model of durée, which conceptualises time as simultaneous, generative and differential as opposed to monadic, successional and spatialised. Put simply, Deleuze sees a strong post-war shift from films that privilege putatively objective action and narrative chronology to those that foreground time as experienced subjectively.

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This tension between movement- and time-images is present in much of DeLillo’s earlier work. Deleuze’s argument that the appearance of the time-image in European cinema precedes its adoption in Hollywood also speaks to how DeLillo’s narratives and characters are often uneasily located between an Eisenhower-era inflected notion of fast, voracious American progress and the more existential, temporally unstable longue durée of post-war European sensibility. This tension is present too in the work of the filmmakers most often cited by DeLillo; in the films of JeanLuc Godard, who self-consciously blends movement-image era American cinematic tropes with time-image metafiction and narrative rupture, and the commitment of Andy Warhol, DeLillo’s most frequently referenced American filmmaker, to what Michael Walsh calls ‘durational films’ (59), which consist of events – a static shot of the Empire State Building, a man sleeping – drawn out without narrative action to hours on end.1 In DeLillo’s earlier fiction, notably Americana, Great Jones Street (1973), Players (1977), Running Dog (1978) and Libra (1988), this Euro-American tension is frequently present at the level of narrative structure. These novels evoke the temporal dislocation of these European directors in their stories of isolated and alienated characters ensnared in complex conspiracies and plots; however, this is generally nested within a characteristically American motion towards terminal, resolutive action, often of the same suspenseful, violent nature that characterises the Western or the noir thriller: ‘There is a tendency of plots to move toward death’, muses Win Everett in Libra (221). This tendency manifests as a subjection of character to external force; DeLillo’s early descriptions of television and cinema describe the viewing subject as passively constructed or deceived by spectacle, incapable of being moved to decisive action. DeLillo’s characters thus resemble the ‘hurried spectator’ described by Raymond Bellour (123), a figure unable to ‘add to the images’ (119) onscreen because of the speed of cinematic editing and montage, and doomed to be swept towards a violent resolution to the plot. Indeed, much of the suspense in DeLillo’s earlier fiction is derived from the understanding that a character’s temporal resistance can only push for so long against the cause-and-effect trajectory of the narrative’s deathward current. This temporal effect reaches its culmination in Underworld (1997), which of all DeLillo’s novels displays this tension most clearly in its alternating forwards- and backwards-bound timestreams. After the apparent exhaustion of this method, DeLillo’s post-Underworld fiction moves towards the primacy of a different temporal narrative model, one in which the time-image has substantially superseded the movement-image. In The Body Artist (2001), Cosmopolis (2003) and Zero K (2016), the drive towards action – in the case of Cosmopolis, a literal car journey – is either arrested, deferred or despatialised. In their timeframes, these novels move towards a more explicitly durational form. If the earlier fictions, with their deathward plots, can be characterised by suspense, then the temporal character of the post-Underworld fiction might best be described as suspension. Nowhere is this more evident than in the focus on the durational image in DeLillo’s

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DeLillo’s references, like Deleuze’s, tend to be centred around Western Europe and America. It is notable that contemporary cinematic practitioners of the long take, who increasingly come from elsewhere in the world (Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul, China’s Jia Zhangke) and who interrogate the postcolonial mechanics of globalisation, are not referenced by DeLillo.

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2010 novel Point Omega, in which he substantially redraws his relationship to cinema and the viewing subject. However, in order to analyse this shift in DeLillo’s writing, it is necessary to first return to his initial characterisation of the long take.

‘Montage of speed’: Earlier Takes Part of David Bell’s ‘long unmanageable movie’ in Americana consists of a lengthy shot of Bell ‘interviewing’ volunteer Glenn Yost about television and advertising. In fact, both sides of the interview have already been written by Bell, and Yost is positioned out of frame, disrupting the apparently impromptu, dialogic nature of the scene. As part of this contrived conversation, Yost says ‘Advertising is never bigger than life’ (Americana 271). In the case of Bell, this statement is complicated by the fact that advertising is commensurate with his life; even as a child his time was spent watching his father’s reels of TV commercials (84–5). In Americana, the brief, rapidly edited commercial stands in opposition to the long takes that Bell uses for his movie; he wishes to make something that, if not bigger than his life, can at least attempt to encompass it. However, Bell’s motive is compromised at its source. His life and background in television, a medium beholden to its sponsors and advertisers, compromises his ability to cohesively create a long-take autobiography, and his stated preference for actors who are ‘men of action’ (12) betrays his lack of understanding of the timeimage. DeLillo embeds a cinematic in-joke in this scene; Yost’s line evokes the title of Nicholas Ray’s 1956 melodrama (and favourite film of Godard’s) Bigger Than Life, in which James Mason plays a terminally ill man who misuses the medication he is taking to extend his life and suffers a psychotic episode. Mason’s fate parallels that of Bell, in that the apparent cure for his condition leads, through misapplication, to violence and chaos. In Bell’s case, the disease is the ‘montage of speed, guns, torture, rape, orgy and consumer packaging which constitutes the vision of sex in America’ (33) and his film offers an opportunity to transcend montage (a term pointedly associated with the movement-image by Deleuze) in favour of a large, baggy project with no temporal limits, characterised in part by a series of long takes; a move, then, from movement-image to time-image. Unfortunately for Bell, since commercials and his life are so thoroughly imbricated, he cannot escape montage through autobiography, and his project becomes an elongated self-advertisement, emptied of content. Bell’s delusion extends to the long-take filmmakers he envisions as antecedents of his movie; he namechecks, variously, Miklós Jancsó, Yasujirō Ozu, Shirley Clarke, Robert Bresson (263) and Akira Kurosawa (248). However, the long takes in these directors’ films operate either to display suffering and self-sacrifice – the Christlike donkey in Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, the widowed daughter-in-law in Ozu’s Tokyo Story, the charitable actions of the terminally ill clerk in Kurosawa’s Ikiru and the Marxist retelling of myth in Jancsó’s Electra My Love – or the story of another’s life, as in Clarke’s Portrait of Jason, which like Bell’s film is structured around the longtake interview. Bell’s film does neither of these things; it is a strangely disjointed and depthless spectacle of absurd length – the final film runs ‘nearly a week’ (346) – which ends, tellingly, with a Narcissus-like shot of Bell reflected in a mirror (347). This final shot also serves ‘as a beginning’, which gives the film the properties of a Moebius strip; it does not have teleological properties because it loops endlessly around, the mirror shot its beginning and end. In sum, the long takes of Bell’s film in Americana aim for a

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profound sense of duration associated with the subjective time-image, but the project is doomed because Bell remains mired in the language of commercial television and its connections to montage and the action-image. Like televisual programming, Bell’s project operates only as, in Fredric Jameson’s famous phrase about postmodern temporality, ‘a series of pure and unrelated presents in time’ (Jameson 27). DeLillo implies that the film’s failure in Americana is not just down to Bell. The American society in which the film takes place, that ‘montage of speed, guns, torture, rape, orgy and consumer packaging’, is depicted as a fundamentally compromised, even failed, project. Bell’s initial commission to make a documentary about the Navaho tribe evokes the genocidal violence that long precedes the deterritorialised postmodernism of the mediated American landscape; the genocide of Native Americans. Bell’s obsession with his own film eclipses the attention paid to the Navaho documentary, overwriting an engagement with the true longue durée of American history with a myopic focus on the technicality of the long take. The long take, in this context, becomes a fallacious iteration of duration. Tellingly, when Bell remembers the climactic scene of Ikiru, in which the dying Takashi Shimura sits on a swing in the children’s playground he has helped to build, he focuses instead on how the aesthetic of the scene frustrates his ability to remember the technical aspects of the take; ‘Did he shoot the whole scene without cutting?’ (Americana 248). When his interlocutor, Simmons, responds by saying ‘I’ve never seen Ikiru’, Bell responds with ‘That’s impossible’ (248), the irony being that it is he who has failed to see the act of selflessness communicated in Kurosawa’s film. In his failure of perception, Bell is drawn back towards the very montage of violence that he seeks to escape, and Americana ends with him participating in a drunken bacchanal of sex and violence relayed in a rapid-fire single block of text. Both Bell and the reader are aligned in this final overwhelming montage with Bellour’s hurried spectator, or Walter Benjamin’s endlessly overwhelmed cinemagoer in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (‘no sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed’ [Benjamin 238]), borne along by a flow of movement-images to which they cannot contribute. This terminal movement towards violence and chaos is embedded in Americana from the first sentence, which begins ‘Then we came to the end’ (3). The reader of Americana is permitted a clearer view of Bell’s failed project than Bell himself, engendering a scenario characterised by continuous suspense rather than sudden surprise at the novel’s violent climax. I use suspense here in the definition given by Alfred Hitchcock during his conversation about filmmaking with François Truffaut: Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock [. . .] In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second case we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. (Truffaut 52) In Libra, DeLillo takes this concept of suspense and applies it to one of the most famous long takes in American culture; the minute-long shot of the assassination of

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President Kennedy filmed by Abraham Zapruder. Because of its necessary emergence after the fact of the assassination itself, Zapruder’s film is always characterised in public consciousness by suspense rather than surprise; the only person who experienced surprise at the footage was Zapruder himself at the moment of filming. To watch the Zapruder footage is to constantly anticipate its bloody ending or to scan, frame by frame, for retrospective clues as to the location of the assassin. Of course, the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination also features a second on-camera shooting; that of Lee Harvey Oswald, the protagonist of DeLillo’s novel, by Jack Ruby. While the initial surprise at this shooting was more widespread, as many Americans saw it unfold live on television, to view it now is to participate in the same feeling of suspense engendered by the Zapruder film. DeLillo builds this sense of suspense into the structure of Libra, as the novel’s multiple timestreams eventually converge in descriptions of both the Zapruder footage and the film of Oswald’s murder. The suspense that a reader feels in reading Libra is in the unspooling of an irreversible historical event. However, DeLillo does more than simply reproduce the archive of historical materials and conspiracies around the assassination. By inventing the CIA archivist character Nicholas Branch, who is tasked with reviewing the labyrinthine footage and literature surrounding Kennedy’s murder, and embedding Branch’s present-day quest within a narrative that moves back and forth through time from Oswald’s birth to his death, DeLillo dramatises his own attempts to historicise this traumatic moment in the American consciousness; Branch devotes his life ‘to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second’ (Libra 15). Through this process DeLillo responds, either directly or indirectly, to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s assessment of how the long take operates historically. In ‘Observations on the Long Take’, Pasolini argues that the Zapruder footage, ‘the most typical long take imaginable’, constitutes the ‘only possible film of Kennedy’s death’ as ‘all other points of view are missing’ (Pasolini 3). For Pasolini, the long take, in its temporal structure, is always in the ‘present tense’. Pasolini then performs a thought experiment: Suppose, then, that we have not only one short film of Kennedy’s death, but a dozen such films, as many long takes as subjectively reproduce the President’s death. When, for example, for purely documentary reasons (during a screening for a police investigation) we see all these subjective long takes in sequence, that is, when we splice them, even if not materially, what do we have? A type of montage, albeit extremely elementary. And what do we get from this montage? A multiplication of ‘presents’, as if an action, instead of unwinding once before our eyes, were to unwind many times. This multiplication of ‘presents’ abolishes the present, empties it, each present postulating the relativity of all others, their unreliability, imprecision, and ambiguity. (3–4) This might suggest the kind of postmodern temporal model suggested by Jameson, a series of ‘pure and unrelated presents in time’, but for Pasolini there is a difference between a simple juxtaposition of these long takes and a more controlled coordination. ‘Unlike their juxtaposition, their coordination is not, in fact, limited to destroying and emptying the concept of the present (as in the hypothetical projection one after the other of the various films at FBI headquarters) but to rendering the present past’

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(Pasolini 5). In Libra, DeLillo moves towards this model of coordination in a lengthy montage depicting Kennedy’s death from the perspectives of different witnesses, presented in roughly chronological order (394–406). At the end of the novel, the description of Oswald’s shooting is refined even further, as a series of rapid-fire single lines (438–9). Like Americana, the plot is characterised by suspense; the reader knows it must move towards violence and chaos, but here DeLillo uses montage not to depict an atemporal postmodern scenario, but the embedding and continuous unfolding of a traumatic historical event in the nation’s consciousness. This use of montage is held within a broader narrative structure which moves continuously back and forth through time to create a history of the event. In this sense, Libra is perhaps DeLillo’s first move towards a durational novel; it recognises the trauma of Kennedy’s assassination as a moment permanently lodged in the American mind, and by mapping its origins and consequences affords the reader a long view of that moment’s extension both back and forth through time. Underworld, the last thus far of DeLillo’s long novels, broadens this durational model by reversing Libra’s structure; the epochal event is placed at the beginning of a narrative which relies on the historical tension between two timestreams running against each other, creating a durational model of history even broader than Libra’s.

‘Pure film, pure time’: From Suspense to Suspension DeLillo’s post-Underworld fiction has tended to take the form of shorter novels that depict a small number of locations; Cosmopolis, The Body Artist and Point Omega take place principally in a car, a house and a desert respectively. In this later work the set pieces of the earlier fiction shrink into less historically consequential scenarios; a long breakfast, a ride downtown, the viewing of an artwork. These scenarios, unlike those in the earlier work, stretch to fill the entirety or at least a substantial portion of the novel. With their shorter length, these novels can also be read in a single sitting, meaning that the duration of the events depicted sometimes squares roughly with the amount of time spent reading; the novel form, then, becomes experienced as a single long take. While these novels still encompass a movement towards death, the violent acts depicted in Americana and Libra are now withheld from the narrative. At the end of Cosmopolis, Eric Packer may or may not have been murdered by the aggrieved Richard Sheets; in The Body Artist, Lauren Hartke’s husband’s suicide is reported only indirectly; and in Point Omega, the disappearance of Elster’s daughter Jessie is completely unresolved. In their brevity and specificity of location, the ‘long takes’ of these later novels bear resemblance not only to the languid mystery of L’Aventurra but also the more durational narratives of later filmmakers such as Bela Tarr and Chantal Akerman; the 200-minute running time of Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles consists largely of single long takes of domestic tasks and food preparation similar to the beginning of The Body Artist, while the climactic murder by Jean of one of her male clients is seen obliquely through a reflection. Tarr’s monumental 439-minute Sátántangó, which contains shots of up to twelve minutes in length, ends with the implication that an entire village may have been murdered, but the only evidence is a series of lengthy shots of the deserted village. This withholding of the expected death-climax in the later fiction performs a shift from that earlier definition of suspense, in which we are aware that an act will eventually take place, to something more akin to suspension. The death we are primed to

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receive is either denied direct depiction or permanently deferred, leaving us without the finality of the terminal act, waiting for a closure that will not arrive; when Bell says in Americana that he wants the shot ‘extended to its ultimate limit in time’ he might be imagining something like the temporal structures of the later fiction. DeLillo takes this further in Zero K, which contains a section narrated by a consciousness in cryogenic suspended animation. This sequence is placed in the middle of the narrative but could be taking place at any moment, including thousands of years into the future, and thus performs a simultaneous analeptic and proleptic extension across the narrative by relaying the memories of a character who is suspended between life and death. This single sequence, which can be read in ten minutes, could therefore be taking place in anything from an instant to millennia. However, while Zero K might present the logical conclusion of DeLillo’s durational narratives, it is Point Omega that ties this concept of duration most directly to DeLillo’s interest in film, and particularly the long take.

‘Pure film, pure time’: Point Omega In Point Omega, Jim Finley, a young filmmaker, visits ageing academic Richard Elster in his desert home to make a film about his life. Elster has moved to the desert after working for the US military to help strategise the War on Terror. Elster agreed to the consultancy despite his stated belief that a government is a ‘criminal enterprise’ (Point Omega 33); his contribution came from a desire to ‘retake the future’ (30). Elster’s hypocrisy is illustrated by DeLillo’s use of the word ‘rendition’, which fluctuates between aesthetic and political definitions. It can indicate ‘a coat of plaster applied to a masonry surface’ (33), a performance, or a political kidnapping and torture. Finley wants to make a long single-shot film consisting of Elster recounting his experiences; ‘Just a man and a wall’ (21). Finley’s mise en scène is remarkably similar to Bell’s failed film in Americana, but the compromising of the project in Point Omega – unlike Bell’s, Finley’s film is never completed – is occasioned not by television but by Elster’s co-optation into the neo-conservative interventionism of the second Bush administration. Here, Finley’s shooting of Elster against a wall (45) recalls verbatim Bell’s instruction to one of his actors in Americana: ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker’ (309). Bell’s line is also the name of the 1960s American anarchist and anti-war affinity organisation, and the echo of this scenario in Point Omega indicates the coming public ramifications of the administration’s catastrophic foreign policy errors during the War on Terror. Finley’s long, locked-off take ironises Susan Sontag’s argument that the still image ‘is essentially an act of non-intervention’ (Sontag 11); here the inaction of Finley’s mise en scène contrasts sharply with the occluded ‘offscreen’ carnage occasioned by Elster’s participation in interventionism. Elster’s actions, and Finley’s attempts to capture them on film, are accordingly characterised throughout Point Omega as failures of vision. Lutz Koepnick, in an analysis of the novel’s approach to slowness, suggests that DeLillo’s novel gives the reader plenty of reasons to think of both Elster’s and Finley’s project as failures of sorts [. . .] But this sense of failure, in the final analysis, might actually testify to what slowness, as a strategy of the contemporary, is all about [. . .] slowness at its best invites the subject to recognize its own limitations while exploring the unstable space between the unique and the reproducible, between the ephemeral and the seemingly timeless. (On Slowness 273)

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While I agree with Koepnick that both projects are depicted as failures, I’m less convinced that the environment of the novel occasions any recognition by Elster and Finley of their limitations; the problem with both men’s projects is their continual failure to see. Both men can perceive the potential value of slowness – Elster in the desert’s geological time and Finley in the long take – but this does not necessarily lead to an understanding of self-limitation, and both men are, in different ways, short-sighted. Elster’s lack of long-sightedness is most clearly illustrated when he attempts to describe the value of the landscape to Finley and his daughter Jessie: ‘Look at all this’, he said, not looking at it, the landscape and sky, which he’d indicated with a backwards sweep of the arm. We didn’t look at it either. (Point Omega 44) This seeing-but-not-seeing, which carries a trace of Plato’s allegory of the cave, suggests how the apparent ability to perceive can, paradoxically, become limited by the paucity of one’s own personal vision; elsewhere, Elster describes his life as taking place while ‘staring at a blank wall’ (17). Towards the end of the novel, after Jessie’s disappearance, DeLillo suggests that Finley, searching for Jessie in the desert, might be on the verge of breaking through this visual limitation, in a sequence that refers implicitly to the cinematic shot: Every so often I’d stop and look up and see a sky that seemed confined, compressed. I spent long moments looking. The sky was stretched taut between cliff edges, it was narrowed and lowered, that was the strange thing, the sky right there, scale the rocks and you can touch it. I started walking again and came to the end of the tight passage and into an open space choked at ground level with brush and stony debris and I half crawled to the top of a high rubble mound and there was the whole scorched world. (92) The sky, taut and touchable between the cliffs, resembles nothing so much as the material of the cinema screen stretched across the wall of the theatre. This synthesis of sky, wall and screen suggests the paradox inherent in Finley’s cinematic project; his wall-bound long take reduces the horizon of his vision. Like Elster, the world is taking place behind him. After his climb to the top of the mound, Finley is afforded his clearest vision in the novel: I looked out into blinding tides of light and sky and down toward the folded copper hills [. . .] Could someone be dead in there? I could not imagine this. It was too vast, it was not real, the symmetry of furrows and juts, it crushed me [. . .] the indifference of it, and the longer I stood and looked the more certain I was that we would never have an answer. (93) This moment marks Finley’s transition to a long view. Previously bewitched by Elster’s concept of war-as-haiku – the compressing of a huge abstract concept into a controlled and small form – Finley’s vision of the landscape transitions from compression to

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vastness and irresolution. Finley has experienced a moment of spatial and temporal synthesis, which is mirrored in his syntax; ‘I spent long moments looking’ and ‘the longer I stood and looked’. His description of this synthesis begins in the first-person singular and ends in the first-person plural. Finley’s epiphany is a movement from faith in the accumulated life-wisdom of the individual – he wants Elster to tell the audience of his film ‘what you know that no one knows’ (27) – to a more durational understanding of not-knowing as an intrinsically human quality. This, as with so much of DeLillo’s late fiction, is a move from suspense (the search for Jessie’s body) to suspension (the endless deferral of knowledge). Rather than a terminal point, Jessie’s unsolved disappearance is instead seen as a moment located within the long take of geological time. Finley’s simultaneous vision of the minuscule temporal moment of Jessie’s disappearance and the vast epoch of the desert enacts something like the famous reverse-zoom-dolly shot in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, where the foreground and background of the frame seem to be moving in opposite directions at the same time. Elizabeth Grosz argues that the present ‘is not an instant, a measurable and regulated moment; it is a dynamic concept that extends itself to include the fringes that touch both past and present’ (177); on this view, then, the present can be perceived as a constitutive moment in a vast, panoramic long take, one that extends around and beyond the audience’s field of vision in a manner akin to the giant curved Cinerama screens of the 1950s which required three simultaneous projectors, or the past–present–future triptychs in the finale of Abel Gance’s 330-minute silent epic Napoleon. Jessie’s vanishing seems to echo the fate of Anna in Antonioni’s L’Avventura, but it is Hitchcock, and his interlocutor Douglas Gordon, to whom DeLillo ultimately turns to develop a durational temporal structure. The desert narrative in Point Omega is framed by two sections set on consecutive days in an art gallery where patrons view Gordon’s artwork 24 Hour Psycho, in which Hitchcock’s film is slowed down to two frames per second rather than the usual twenty-four. These sections are narrated from the free-indirect perspective of an unnamed man obsessively watching the exhibition and the other patrons in the darkened screening room, always returning to ‘physical touch’ with the gallery wall, in an echo of Finley’s planned long take of Elster (Point Omega 102). In the first section Elster and Finley enter the room briefly before leaving, and in the latter the man strikes up a conversation with an unnamed woman whom he pursues for a date in a rather predatory fashion. Gordon’s work stretches the individual frame towards the status of the long take, working in tandem with the rapidity of Hitchcock’s editing; while the famous shower scene is often slowed down to its component shots for study in film schools and editing masterclasses, Gordon extends that process to the entire film. 24 Hour Psycho also achieves much of its effect from the existing public knowledge of the film, as even those who aren’t familiar with it are likely to know about the iconic shower murder. The artwork also inverts the sensational advertising that accompanied the film upon its release, when audiences were told that latecomers would not be admitted, by allowing patrons to wander in and out at their leisure. In this way 24 Hour Psycho provides the perfect analogue for DeLillo’s move from suspense to suspension, as it takes perhaps the most famous cinematic work of suspense and, through prolonging its shots, draws it out to apparently interminable length. This change is also encoded at the level of projection; Gordon’s work is a video

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installation of a celluloid film. Lutz Koepnick argues that the arrival of video allowed artists a new temporal medium: As they invisibly refreshed themselves dozens of times a second across the space of the screen, video’s scan lines defined the new medium as one favoring an aesthetic of flow and perceptual continuity, of observational attentiveness and durational extension. Contrary to film’s language of rupture, fragmentation, and displacement, video’s initial promise was therefore to allow filmmakers to capture ephemeral images of mere life and time passing by – to provide a medium whose artistic potential rested precisely on its seemingly unaesthetic or aesthetically reduced formal operations. With its ability to offer direct visual feedback, video not only encouraged experimental applications. In so doing, it also moved the language of moving images beyond the grammar of montage and fragmentation so prevalent in modernist film theory. (On Slowness 189) Durational extension, and a move beyond the grammar of montage; by framing the central narrative of Point Omega with 24 Hour Psycho DeLillo affirms his commitment to the primacy of the time-image and the durational narrative. Gordon’s elongating of Hitchcock’s film has a Bergsonian quality as it plays upon the temporal rupture already present in Psycho, where the key death takes place not at the end of the film but – as in Zero K – at the halfway point, with the film’s denouement revealing instead Norman Bates’s continuous temporal zig-zagging between the role of child and parent. Laura Mulvey suggests that Hitchcock’s use of the detective genre in Psycho is itself also temporally multidirectional: While the movement of the journey story is across space and looks forward, that of the detective story looks backward and into time. The detective story necessarily brings with it a certain abstraction. Since its aim is to expose a hidden secret, its backward look involves repetition, a literal retracing of the victim and villain’s steps and movements. (90) Rather than its plot tending towards death, Hitchcock’s conclusion, then, is a durational revelation; the persistence of the past in the present. Gordon elongates this narrative and encodes it in the constantly overlapping and interlacing visual ‘refreshment’ of video projection, and DeLillo subsequently frames Gordon’s work within his own durational narrative, where the generative relationship between the framing and central stories is deliberately uncertain.2 Catherine Gander reads DeLillo’s beginnings and endings in the late fiction as adhering to ‘the quantum principle that neither as such exist, or, to phrase it differently, both exist at once, now, and always’ (130), while Koepnick reads the desert narrative as ‘nothing more or less than a product of the man at the wall’s imagination: a half-developed narrative sketch that emerges and vanishes again somewhere in the long pause between individual frames of 24 Hour Psycho’s radically decelerated display’ (On Slowness 259). On these views it is then unsurprising, given his failure of

 2

For more on Point Omega, Hitchcock and Gordon, see Cowart.

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vision, that Elster feels only ‘crisp rejection’ from the artwork; it gives him ‘no context to dominate’ (Point Omega 61). Like Marion Crane in the shower scene, Elster looks away from the crucial action; both face the wall. Elster’s failure to integrate with Gordon’s artwork speaks to a shift in DeLillo’s fiction commensurate with the move from suspense to suspension and movementimage to time-image. While characters in the earlier fiction find themselves subjected to the rapid-fire montage of plot action that characterises Bellour’s ‘hurried spectator’, pinned to their seat and unable to ‘add’ to the image in front of them, the use of the long take in video art rather than cinema opens up a new, multidirectional generative relationship between the viewer and the image. To conclude, I want to examine how DeLillo enacts this change, and in order to do so I will return to a novel from early in his career, Running Dog. The shaggy plot of Running Dog concerns the hunt for a quintessentially Hitchcockian ‘MacGuffin’, in this case a purportedly pornographic home movie of Adolf Hitler in his bunker at the end of the Second World War. When the film is eventually revealed, it confounds the expectations of its viewers. The film consists of a series of long takes that appear to feature Hitler dressed as Charlie Chaplin – a reversal of Chaplin’s portrayal of Hitler in The Great Dictator – while entertaining family members. For one of the viewers, Lightborne, the long single takes carry that same sense of the present identified by Pasolini: ‘We’re getting the one and only take of each scene [. . .] maybe that’s why the thing seems so real. It’s true. It’s happening.’ (Running Dog 228–9) However, the ‘truth’ of the scenario is then undercut by its obvious visual contrivances, particularly a subjective shot that is evidently supposed to be from Hitler’s point of view, with the viewing family ‘attempting to pretend’ that they are really responding to his performance (237). Here, the mise en abyme of an audience watching an audience pretending to watch provides a characteristic image of the long take in DeLillo’s early work. Both sets of viewers are subject to the machinations of the filmmaker, rather than being productive figures in the scene; audience faces audience in a non-generative feedback loop, resembling Bellour’s hurried spectator or Benjamin’s overwhelmed cinemagoer. This might be contrasted with the long, static, final shot of Michael Haneke’s film Caché, which features a set of tiered steps that mirror the emptying cinema auditorium and requires the audience to actively identify certain individuals in order to understand the central mystery of the film. However, while the viewers of Haneke’s film might move towards Bellour’s figure of a ‘pensive spectator’ who finds time to ‘add to the image’ (Bellour 123), it is arguable that the positionality of the viewer of Haneke’s film is not significantly different from that of the viewer’s in Running Dog; they remain static and prone before the long take. DeLillo’s use of the long take in a video installation in Point Omega offers the viewer greater liberty over physical position. In The Emancipated Spectator Jacques Rancière imagines how a spectator might, like Bellour’s viewer, become constitutive of the performance: We [. . .] need a different theatre, a theatre without spectators: not a theatre played out in front of empty seats, but a theatre where the passive optical relationship implied by the very term is subjected to a different relationship – that implied by another word, one which refers to what is produced on the stage: drama. Drama means action. Theatre is the place where an action is taken to its conclusion by

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bodies in motion in front of living bodies that are to be mobilized. The latter might have relinquished their power. But this power is revived, reactivated in the performance of the former, in the intelligence which constructs that performance, in the energy it generates. (Rancière 3, emphases original) This mobilisation of the spectatorial body is actualised in Point Omega by the gallery in which 24 Hour Psycho plays out. While DeLillo’s earlier fiction, primarily located in the deathward plot of the action-image, tends towards making the viewer the subject, the durational narrative of Point Omega is enacted in the positionality of the gallery patrons; they can move around at any angle to the screen, even behind it, ‘casting shadows’ on the image in a reconfiguring of Plato’s cave whereby the viewers themselves constitute the spectacle (Point Omega 13); Gordon’s film is, accordingly, ‘open to entry’ (102). Koepnick describes the use of 24 Hour Psycho in Point Omega as erecting ‘a screen-based environment in which screenic images, architectural volumes, bodily movements, and perceptual processes join together to allow the viewer calmly to ponder the copresence of multiple temporalities in the space of the present’ (The Long Take 50). This durational co-presence moves towards a model of Rancière’s theatre without spectators, in which the emancipated viewer is newly mobilised. Furthermore, this mobility is multidirectional; in an arresting image, the man in Point Omega stands in front of Gordon’s work ‘watching, thinking into the film, into himself. Or was the film thinking into him, spilling through him like some kind of runaway brain fluid?’ (Point Omega 109). It is this multidirectionality, engendered by the long take on video, that makes Point Omega the most durational of DeLillo’s works thus far. It abandons even the putatively durational back-and-forth of mid-period works such as Libra and Underworld in favour of endlessly deferred, extended and imbricated temporalities, from montage to the rendering of ‘pure time’ (Point Omega 6) in a take that extends beyond the viewer’s ability to absorb its beginning and end.

Works Cited Akerman, Chantal, director. Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. 1975. Antonioni, Michelangelo, director. L’Avventura. 1960 ——. L’Eclisse. 1962. ——. La Notte. 1961. Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Pensive Spectator.’ The Cinematic, edited by David Campany. Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2007. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. Bodley Head, 2015. Bresson, Robert, director. Au Hasard Balthazar. 1966. Clarke, Shirley, director. Portrait of Jason. 1967. Cowart, David. ‘The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.’ Contemporary Literature, 53, no.1, 2012, pp. 31–50. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1. Bloomsbury, 2005. ——. Cinema 2. Bloomsbury, 2013. DeLillo, Don. Americana. 1971. Penguin, 2006. ——. The Body Artist. 2001. Picador, 2002. ——. Cosmopolis. Picador, 2003. ——. Great Jones Street. Houghton Mifflin, 1973.

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——. Libra. 1988. Penguin, 2018. ——. Players. 1977. Vintage, 1991. ——. Point Omega. 2010. Picador, 2011. ——. Running Dog. 1978. Vintage, 1989 ——. Underworld. 1997. Picador, 1998. ——. Zero K. Picador, 2016. Gance, Abel, director. Napoleon. 1927. Gander, Catherine. ‘The Art of Being out of Time in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Kiron Ward and Katherine da Cunha Lewin. Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 127–42. Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Duke University Press, 2004. Haneke, Michael, director. Caché. 2005. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Psycho. 1960. ——. Vertigo. 1958. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso, 1991. Jancsó, Miklós, director. Electra My Love. 1974. Koepnick, Lutz. The Long Take: Art Cinema and the Wondrous. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. ——. On Slowness. Columbia University Press, 2014. Kurosawa, Akira, director. Ikiru. 1952. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. Reaktion, 2005. Ozu, Yasujirō, director. Tokyo Story. 1953. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. ‘Observations on the Long Take.’ October, 13, 1980, pp. 3–6. Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Verso, 2009. Ray, Nicholas, director. Bigger Than Life. 1956. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Penguin, 1979. Tarr, Bela, director. Sátántangó. 1994. Truffaut, François. Hitchcock. Simon and Schuster, 1967. Walsh, Michael. ‘The First Durational Cinema and the Real of Time.’ Slow Cinema, edited by Tiago De Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

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18 Thematic Equivalence and Ontological Ambivalence: Film Adaptations of the Works of Don DeLillo Cristina Garrigós

Adapting Don DeLillo

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any film directors and producers worldwide have expressed an interest in adapting Don DeLillo’s works, although not all of them have been successful in fulfilling the project.1 Of the prolific US author’s oeuvre, to date, a short play ‘The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven’ (1990), two novels, The Body Artist (2001) and Cosmopolis (2003), and the short story ‘Baader–Meinhof’ (2002) have been brought to the screen with the titles The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven (Keith Bogart, 2007), À Jamais (Benoît Jacquot, 2016), Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012) and Looking at the Dead (Jean-Gabriel Périot, 2012), respectively, while Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of White Noise is in production at the time of writing.2 The relationship between cinema and DeLillo’s works has been widely studied. For David Banash, who follows David Kellman’s concept of the cinematic novel, DeLillo’s novels can be described as cinematic, since the author strives to create a prose style that emphasises ‘not only images, but the very production and mediation of those images by camera angles, and framing, camera moves, the effects of editing, the role of projection and huge screens, and most importantly, the reception of those images in the spaces of theatres’ (Banash 6–7). Likewise, DeLillo’s fascination with the visual, his admiration for cinema as an art form, and especially European cinema, have been remarked upon by several critics (Banash; Boxall; Cowart; Keesey; LeClair; Osteen, among others). However, despite their cinematic quality, DeLillo’s works seem to be challenging in terms of adaptability.

 1

A George Ratcliff adaptation of End Zone was planned, but since 2007 it has remained in pre-production, while Alex Ross Perry’s adaptation of The Names is still unmade. There have been many failed attempts to adapt White Noise since Barry Sonnenfeld first optioned the novel in 1999. Michael Almereyda announced plans to adapt it in 2016 but they never materialised (Guardian, 18 October 2016).  2 Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of White Noise for Netflix, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, was released in movie theatres on November 25, 2022 and started streaming on Netflix on December 30, 2022, after this essay was written. Film producer Uri Singer, who produced Baumbach’s film, also secured the rights to The Silence, DeLillo’s latest novel, and Underworld (Sheenan). The Silence is to be adapted by Jez Butterworth (Lang) and Underworld by Ted Melfi (Sheenan).

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Deborah Cartmell notes that ‘A list of “unfilmable” novels, compiled in 2007, places at the top of the list Joyce, Proust, and Kafka, paradoxically novelists who have been observed to explicitly replicate cinematic devices in their writing’ (4).3 Like these writers, who DeLillo has mentioned as influences on his writing,4 DeLillo creates works that are complex and cinematic, but are they, in Cartmell’s words, ‘unfilmable’? The list of works already adapted seems to prove that they are not. However, the most aesthetically successful adaptations of DeLillo’s work to this day are not those based on his novels, or at least, not those that aim at reproducing the whole text. Johan Grimonprez’s documentary video Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), based on DeLillo’s narratives, specifically Mao II, and the short films Looking at the Dead and The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven were exhibited in museums and festivals to a warm reception, while the two feature-length films were released in cinemas; David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis was a commercial failure and Benoît Jacquot’s À Jamais received negative critical reviews. Jean-Gabriel Périot, the director of Looking at the Dead, the film adaptation of ‘Baader–Meinhof’, does not think that DeLillo’s texts are difficult to adapt. In his opinion, even though DeLillo is undoubtedly one of the most important contemporary writers, he is not what could be considered a ‘popular’ writer. According to Périot: If you want to adapt one of his books, it becomes complicated because commissioners or cinema producers don’t really know him, and when they know him, they mostly all consider his writing ‘anti-cinematic.’ I really believe the reason there are so few adaptions of his writings is because [adapting DeLillo] is complicated in terms of production, money-wise, not in terms of filmmaking. (Garrigós, email interview) In this chapter, I discuss the five film adaptations of DeLillo’s works to this date to explore how successfully they adapt the texts on which they are based. However, it is not the purpose of this chapter to consider the fidelity of the adapted text as the criterion of judgement or the focus of analysis, but rather the thematic and ontological equivalences. As Linda Hutcheon points out, Many professional reviewers and audience members alike resort to the elusive notion of the ‘spirit’ of a work or an artist that has to be captured and conveyed in the adaptation for it to be a success . . . Sometimes it is ‘tone’ that is deemed central, though rarely defined (e.g., Linden 1971: 158, 163); at other times it is ‘style’ (Seger 1992: 157). But all three are arguably equally subjective and, it would appear, diffcult to discuss, much less theorize . . . Themes are perhaps the easiest story elements to see as adaptable across media and even genres or framing contexts. (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 10)

 3

The article that Cartmell cites is no longer available. www.screenhead.com/reviews/theunfilmables-a-listof-the-hardest-novels-to-film/  4 DeLillo says, ‘it was through Joyce that I learned to see something in language that carried a radiance, something that made me feel the beauty and fervor of words, the sense that a word has a life and a history’ (Begley).

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It is also this chapter’s purpose to highlight that all the adaptations that have been made of DeLillo’s texts to date have death as a central theme. DeLillo wrote in White Noise that ‘all plots tend to move deathward’ (26). In the pages that follow, I discuss the relevance of death, memory and history, often related to terror and violence, as key threads that connect the literary texts with their cinematic versions. My contention is that the way in which the reflection on death is cinematically carried out determines whether a film adaptation of DeLillo successfully conveys what André Bazin calls the ‘equivalence of meaning of the forms’ (20). In other words, although text and film are two separate products, there should be a common link between both texts regarding the conveyance of meaning and the audience’s aesthetic experience. As my analysis demonstrates, such equivalence has worked better in the short adaptations of DeLillo’s works than in the feature-length films.

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y As noted above, death, terrorism and the role of the media in contemporary history are the subjects of many of DeLillo’s works, including White Noise (1984) and Mao II (1991), which is why Belgian video artist Johan Grimonprez chose passages from these two novels to include in his documentary video Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997). The film depicts the history of skyjacking from the 1960s onwards as reported on television, combining different types of archival and non-archival footage – historical documentaries, television commercials, news, cartoons and music. As the website of the film says, ‘Playing on Don DeLillo’s riff in the novel Mao II: “what terrorists gain, novelists lose” and “home is a failed idea”, he [Grimonprez] blends archive hijackings with surreal and banal themes including fast food, pet statistics, disco and his quirky home movies’ (www.johangrimonprez.be). The film is a postmodernist pastiche, an intertextual artefact, where, according to its creator, ‘the juxtaposition [of images] shows how memory works: domestic banality coexists with TV; intimate, domestic stuff is also part of history’ (Bernard 7). This juxtaposition of the banal with the transcendent is central in DeLillo’s narrative where, as Heinz Ickstadt indicates, ‘history is understood as the unstructured mass of data, facts, things, the raw material of reality, the terrors of life and death which create the need for order and design’ (387–8). Excerpts narrated as a voiceover from White Noise and Mao II provide the film’s philosophical frame – an innovative approach that produces a new ontological reality (in Hutcheon’s sense of adaptations, that being a new or different creation), fusing the artistic sensibility of both writer and video artist. Inspired by DeLillo’s aesthetics, Grimonprez’s work employs experimental audiovisual elements from popular culture combined with historical testimonials. Although the author never explicitly refers to skyjacking in White Noise and Mao II, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y establishes a relationship between concepts and categories related to terrorism and contemporary history.5 As the film artist said in an interview, ‘I traced the history of hijacking from the first passenger flight onwards, and how it has changed through the course of history, but this is just a cover under which to talk about the story of the media and the representation of hijacking itself’ (Bernard 8).

 5

DeLillo’s last novel to date, The Silence (2020), begins with a couple flying on a plane, a technological blackout, and the beginning of World War III.

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According to Eben Wood, DeLillo’s texts are present in Grimonprez’s film not as a visual, but as an aural image, as sound, so that ‘reframed from voice-to-voice-over the irony of DeLillo’s lines is transformed’ (115). Grimonprez has deprived the words of their original characters and contexts. DeLillo’s readers may recognise the voices of Bill Gray, Brita Nillson, George Haddad and Jack Gladney merged into one impersonal, generic (male) narrator, but this disembodiment implies a dissolution of the characters’ opinions into one voice, which plays the role of the film’s omniscient narrator: the words frame the images and, according to Wood, provide the ‘resolution’ that Grimonprez wishes to convey (114). Hence, the film opens with a voiceover from White Noise: ‘Shouldn’t death be a swan-dive, graceful, white-winged and smoothed, leaving the surface undisturbed?’ (18). This question, uttered by a smooth-voiced narrator over a piece of pleasant music, gives ‘resolution’ to the grainy image of a descending aircraft (Wood 115). By opening the film with these words superimposed on these images and music, the director establishes the ironic tone that is so characteristic of DeLillo’s works, linking such a grave matter as death with the image of a plane landing gracefully. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y confronts its viewers with their complicity in terrorism and the shift in our mentality from the romanticised view of the 1960s skyjackers to the current situation after 9/11, by interspersing footage of propagandistic political documentaries (for instance, on the Cuban Revolution)6 with contemporary images. Interviews with passengers and crew members involved in skyjacking episodes who, rather than displaying the effects of trauma, speak lightheartedly of the ‘adventure’ element, reinforce this image of superficiality and relativism. This vision, however, changes from the 1980s onwards, after Ronald Reagan’s presidency. As Bernard points out, the film portrays how ‘the media is more and more implicated as a key player; the image of the individual is substituted by a flow of crowds; hijacking is replaced by anonymous suitcase bombs. The image of the hijacker has vanished’ (7). Grimonprez is interested in the idea that terrorists seek to manipulate the media and by doing so influence contemporary culture. In this sense, the terrorist takes over the role that the novelist had played traditionally, an idea made explicit by DeLillo in Mao II. Also, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y suggests that the media’s power is responsible for a terrorism that, as Ickstadt indicates, ‘depends exclusively on the public (and the publicly consumed) image’ (378). Thus, the film becomes a reflection on the role of television, especially TV news, in the presentation and recreation of reality that blends public history and personal memory, with the spectator becoming the protagonist of history. As we can see, the fusion of DeLillo’s narrative world with Grimonprez’s artistic use of audiovisual elements works to produce the synchrony of voices between both artistic projects and achieves a similar aesthetic effect on the audience.

Looking at the Dead The thematic elements present in Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (terrorism, memory and the role of the spectator/viewer in the construction of history) are also at the core of Jean-Gabriel Périot’s Looking at the Dead, a film adaptation of DeLillo’s short story

 6

Cuba and Castro: First Films from Behind Rebel Lines, Universal International News. Cuba, 1958.

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‘Baader–Meinhof’. Périot himself acknowledges that he was attracted to DeLillo’s oeuvre after watching Grimonprez’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, and by the time he made Looking at the Dead, he ‘had read all DeLillo’s books translated into French’, admiring the unique way [DeLillo] interlaces the present/factual situations of his characters and questionings about history/memory, politics and arts . . . the way he uses the dialogue or the inner voice of the protagonists, that are often jumping from one topic to another, rarely in a straight or clear way but rather in echoes, with delay. (Garrigós, email interview) Despite its title, DeLillo’s 2002 short story ‘Baader–Meinhof’ does not deal directly with the history of the West German terrorist group, the Red Army Faction (RAF) but with the visual representation of the members’ deaths in their cells. The characters in the story, an anonymous woman and man, contemplate the work of German artist Gerhard Richter, entitled 18 October 1977: a series of repainted photographs of the gang members and their deaths.7 Périot discovered Richter’s painting series during the ten years it took him to make his full-length film A German Youth (2015), and it was through Richter that he came upon DeLillo’s short story: I was really struck by this story. The dialogue and the inner voice of the main character were clearly expressing the questions I myself had when I was thinking of my project about the RAF, and when I was spending so much time looking at footage or pictures of the group . . . The ways this character is looking and questioning were really close to my own way of looking and questioning the visual material of the Baader–Meinhof group story. As A German Youth was built without voiceover, I couldn’t phrase myself into it, I couldn’t clearly express what I was looking for by doing the film. So, to do Looking at the Dead was a way to express myself, through the voice of this fictional character created by Don DeLillo. (Garrigós, email interview) The director acknowledges that adapting DeLillo’s story allowed him to express what he felt about Richter’s paintings and the RAF – that is, his ambivalent feelings and doubts about the mix of horror and idealism that are part of the terrorist identity, and how detached from, or part of, their actions we all are, as well as being part of the systems that condemn them. Richter had acknowledged his mixed feelings about the Baader–Meinhof group – something he tried to convey in his portraits: ‘I was impressed by the terrorists’ energy, their uncompromising determination and their absolute bravery, but I could not find it in my heart to condemn the state for its harsh response’ (Danchev 95). At the core of the artist’s reflection lie several of the issues conveyed in DeLillo’s story and its film adaptation, issues that connect the painter, the writer and the film director, such as the role of the spectator before terror in the construction of history.8

 7

DeLillo was inspired to write the story after his visit to the 2000–01 MoMA exhibit. Gerhard Richter sent Périot high-resolution photographs of the paintings so that Périot could make copies as film props, with the instruction that the fake paintings were to be destroyed after the film was complete and the props no longer needed. When Périot sent him photographic proof of the destroyed fake paintings, Richter remarked that, despite his request, he found the images very distressing (Garrigós email interview).

 8

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Périot specialises in making films that reveal the thin line between documentary and fiction, and that deal with issues of history and violence, two issues at the core of DeLillo’s work, where the relationship between reality and fiction, especially as they are presented through screens and, in this case, painting and photography, is central. The title of the film, Looking at the Dead, different from that of the short story, marks a distinction between Périot’s and DeLillo’s work as separate products and highlights the act of gazing. In a sequence of gazes, Périot’s film gazes at DeLillo’s gazing at Richter’s gazing at the photographs of the dead terrorists. Moreover, in DeLillo’s short story, the word ‘viewing’ acquires a double meaning both as looking at something and watching over a dead body at a funeral. DeLillo’s ‘Baader–Meinhof’ opens with a woman in a museum, contemplating Richter’s paintings. The woman is described as someone ‘in a mortuary chapel, keeping watch over the body of a relative or a friend’.9 Périot’s adaptation maintains the same scenario and the same two characters, with a literariness that was praised by DeLillo himself: I’ve looked at the film and I find a number of things to admire, such as the intervals between lines of dialogue, particularly in the opening scene; the contrast between the paintings and the general color tones of the gallery, although the woman’s lipstick seems too vivid a contrast and her wardrobe in general too elaborate for a museum-goer. The monochrome surfaces in the apartment are impressive, and the abrupt transitions between the scenes work well, as does the sparse dialogue. (DeLillo, qtd. in Garrigós, email interview). The aspects of the film that DeLillo admires are aesthetic: the use of silence, colour, pacing and editing. Such attention to detail is a characteristic of what Kellman and Banash have labelled DeLillo’s cinematic prose. Adapting a short story often involves adding supplementary material, but Périot retains DeLillo’s text almost entirely as the script, keeping the dialogue verbatim. For the director, the story was attractive to adapt because it was written like a script: The text is built as a series of short moments separated by strong time and/or spatial cuts. We simply jump from one time to another, from one place to another, and we always need to read a few lines ahead to understand where and when we are, and to discover the changes that have occurred in the two characters’ relationship. As a filmmaker, this very cinematographic construction of the story really impressed me. (Garrigós, email interview) Périot makes minor changes in the narrative – for instance, there are references in DeLillo’s story to other people entering the gallery, but the film keeps the two protagonists by themselves, which strengthens the visual focus and suggests that the characters are part of the exhibition. We, as spectators of the film, observe them together with the paintings and elucidate the meaning of their interaction with them. Art thus becomes part of history and life. This is a constant in DeLillo’s narrative world, where, in

 9

This connection of art and the chapel is repeated in Cosmopolis, a novel contemporary to this short story, when Eric Packer contemplates buying the Rothko Chapel in Houston in his desire to possess control over death (see Garrigós, ‘Death Drive’ 521).

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Ickstad’s words, ‘The realm of art, language and consciousness cannot be so clearly separated from the realm of history and life, that they, in fact, interact and intermingle – or seem to do so’ (388). As Karen Crawford writes when discussing the canvases, ‘Richter triangulates image, terror, and narrative to nullify what he sees as the affinity between language and terror and to move toward a nonpolitical, narrative image. In this triangulation, terrorism connects directly to the narrative, with both acting on the media image’ (208). Likewise, both DeLillo and Périot triangulate image, terror and narrative. Périot follows DeLillo’s translation of Richter’s ambiguous representation of the dead terrorists, or at least his ambivalent response to them, in the figure of the woman, who is aware of her epistemological limitations: ‘The first day I was barely looking. I thought I was looking, but I was only getting a bare inkling of what’s in the paintings. I am only starting to look now’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’). Both in the film and the short story, while the man feels nothing looking at the pictures, the woman is aware of the vulnerability of human beings, their complexities,and contradictions. She can contemplate two ideas at the same time: ‘They committed suicide. Or the state killed them’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’). However, such ambiguity can easily be misconstrued. In the film, the voice of the man is assertive, giving her commands and imposing his presence on her. Périot intensifies this sense of imposition by retaining the voice of the man while his image stays outside the shot.10 The fact that the woman agrees to have a drink with a man she has just met and that they end up in her apartment is understood by the man as an invitation to have sex. When the woman realises his intentions, she tries to stop the process, but cannot. He becomes assertive, then aggressive: ‘Let’s be friends’ becomes ‘Be friends’, a command. He does not leave, but instead forces his presence in her apartment. She hides in her bathroom while he stays and masturbates in her bed, and although he does not physically rape her, he effectively violates her most intimate space. Périot’s film adapts the scene in the apartment by adding force to the tension through the use of the camera. Violent menace and tension are built up in the film scene verbally and physically. Although the man insists he is not controlling, he issues commands and exerts spatial violence on her by refusing to go. A close-up of the woman’s head against the door in the bathroom in which she has locked herself reveals a tear falling from her eye while the man leaves after asking for forgiveness through the closed door. When the woman returns to the gallery the following day, DeLillo places the man sitting looking at the painting of the coffins with his back to the entranceway. However, Périot has the woman enter the scene, and it is her back we observe, while we see the profile of the man. The woman had previously stated, speaking of the terrorists, that the painting seemed to communicate they were not beyond forgiveness. Likewise, the man who had almost raped her and violated her space is sitting there, presented almost like an artwork, part of the gallery, and she looks at him from a distance. Périot’s film succeeds in representing DeLillo’s linguistic ambivalence and the idea that, as Ickstadt

10

Interestingly, imposition is also present in the paintings, since the photographs of Ensslin were taken against her will at the police station through a peephole in a picture of a flower on the wall in the interrogation room (Danchev 100).

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says, ‘you can grasp the concreteness of things only when you are distant from them, at the same time that, in being distant they are also forever beyond your grasp’ (391).

The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven The representation of death, memory and permanence, together with a reflection on American culture, are the main themes of DeLillo’s play ‘The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven’, first published in The Quarterly in 1990.11 The short film adaptation of the same name (2007; running time 5 minutes) was directed by Keith Bogart. The plot of the film, which received a positive critical response after being featured in the official selections of several festivals,12 is that of the play: a sports journalist interviews a star tennis player who has achieved his greatest success on the last day of his life. Prior to Bogart’s film, DeLillo had refused to allow any adaptation of the play, including that proposed by Bruce Sheridan, who wanted to replace tennis with rugby to please his New Zealand audience: DeLillo declined the proposal since he did not agree with adapting the play to local conditions. The play has therefore remained, as Rebecca Rey points out, wholly American, with all its US cultural references, such as Buick cars, rock and roll, etc. (62). Of all the film adaptations of DeLillo’s works, Bogart’s was the only one by a US director until Baumbach’s White Noise. Amy Hungerford provides a religious interpretation of the play, analysing the references to rapture and the religious connotations that she sees throughout DeLillo’s oeuvre as deriving from the author’s Catholic upbringing. For her, DeLillo models rapture on the Assumption of Mary (351). Hungerford believes that the overtly religious portrayal of the athlete kneeling under the spotlight, with his arms extended as if about to be raised into heaven, makes the athlete inaccessible to the audience other than as a spectacle. She likewise sees the figure of the enraptured athlete as an allusion to the enraptured author, converted into a spectacle by his own work (352). Likewise, for Daniela Daniele, in DeLillo’s ‘televisionary plays’, intimate and private matters become part of the ‘society of the spectacle’ through the media (168).13 For Daniele, in ‘Rapture’ DeLillo stresses ‘the intellectual thinness of celebrities prepared by the media and consumed by an idle audience greedy for the next sensation’ (169–70). Thus, the author reinforces the destructive power of television. Hungerford’s remarks on the religious aspects of the novel and Daniele’s view of the role of the media in the construction of celebrities can be combined in my reading of Bogart’s adaptation, where, in my opinion, the literal use of DeLillo’s words, and the use of lighting and camera zoom, stress the construction of celebrities by the media as martyrs of a new religion to be presented, consumed and adored by the audience. The camerawork allows Bogart to emphasise aspects of DeLillo’s work that the

11

DeLillo’s piece was commissioned and first performed at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA, as part of a festival of one-minute plays, where it won the ‘Most Likely to be Produced’ award. 12 It was featured in the official selections of the SXSW, Mill Valley, Williamstown and LA Shorts film festivals in 2007, and the Atlanta, Vail and Sonoma Valley film festivals in 2008. 13 According to Daniele, ‘DeLillo reformulates the classical notion of the “sublime” to the context of the “society of the spectacle”, defined by Guy Debord as a stage of capitalism that has achieved a total colonization of social life, turning money itself into an abstract image that “merely contemplates itself”’ (Daniele 180).

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distance of the theatrical representation cannot convey. In the play, the athlete is mute before the verbosity of the Interviewer. He is presented as an offering to the viewers, bathed in light and subjugated by the monologue of a person who should supposedly listen to him, not speak over him. Bogart’s film reproduces verbatim DeLillo’s poetically alliterative text, and the actor is careful to pronounce each relevant word with intensity, thereby reinforcing the diction of the juxtaposition of words (‘a vindication, an affirmation’, ‘the doubters and skeptics, the pundits’, ‘a restoration, an eternalization’ ‘obsessed, depressed’ [‘Rapture’ 89]). His tone alters from the energetic, dynamic tone of a sports journalist when he is narrating the Tennis Player’s success, becoming soft when he refers to his coming death: ‘your skin loses heat and energy and hair and nails’ (89). When the Interviewer says, ‘You are the culture that contains us’, he emphasises the word ‘you’ while the camera focuses in close-up on the face of the Tennis Player, who looks as if he is about to cry. When he says, ‘We’re running out of time, so tell us quickly, time is short, tell us now’ (89), the Interviewer moves out of frame, leaving the Tennis Player alone and seen from a high angle. No words, just a shot of light. The verbatim reproduction of the monologue, as well as the use of light and the camera, make it possible to maintain the nuances of the author’s original text and his critique of the superficiality of US contemporary culture, while reinforcing the notion of the pressing urgency of the society of the spectacle, to use Debord’s concept, obsessed with mythical permanence. The idea that the media can defeat death and achieve immortality by making people ‘mythical’ comes to replace the role that religion had in the past. These ideas are important for DeLillo in the play, and they are especially relevant in the adaptation.

Cosmopolis David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis was the first adaptation of a DeLillo novel.14 According to Cronenberg, the result was ‘a fusion between the sensibility of two authors’ (‘David Cronenberg Interview’). In this case, as Robert Pattison (who plays Eric Packer) acknowledges, the director wanted to be extremely faithful to the text, to the point that ‘he insisted that they had to say the dialogues exactly as they were written, to the letter. He wouldn’t tolerate any variation. The screenplay depends to a large extent on rhythm, we had to comply with that as far as elocution was concerned’ (‘Robert Pattison Interview’). However, despite his intention to follow DeLillo’s words, as we will see the director introduced several changes in his adaptation that modified the thematic equivalences and ontological ambivalences in the novel. Cosmopolis the novel and the film adaptation epitomise the notion that ‘all plots move deathward’ (White Noise 26), via the symbol of the limousine that drives Eric Packer through a gridlocked Manhattan and ultimately to his death. Cronenberg films most of the movie in or around the limousine. He even transfers to the limousine a scene which, in the novel, takes place in Packer’s apartment. The film thus reinforces Packer’s death drive, to use the psychoanalytical term, by literally driving him towards his death.

14

Cosmopolis was produced by Paulo Branco, who asked Cronenberg to direct following his adaptations of other ‘difficult’ works such as William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1991) and J. G. Ballard’s Crash (1996).

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Cronenberg’s film is divided into two parts: Packer moving towards his destiny (the first 76 minutes), and Packer meeting his murderer, Benno Levin aka Richard Sheets (the last 20 minutes). According to several literary critics, Benno is a product of Packer’s imagination, a sublimation of his desire to die, his death drive personified (Laist 271–2). In DeLillo’s works, the real and the imaginary are often thus enmeshed. To understand the author’s complex conception of reality, we have to accept the fantastic as interacting with the real, and this is what is lacking in Cronenberg’s film adaptation. The director consciously eliminates the more fantastic elements, such as the hundred people lying naked on the street as a living artwork. In the novel, Packer removes his clothes, leaves the limo and joins the people to merge with them and feel their humanity. Cronenberg explained that he left this scene out because he did not ‘believe it’; he thought that it existed only in Packer’s imagination (‘David Cronenberg Interview’). Cronenberg sees the fantastic elements as delusions of Packer, ‘unlikely and artificial’; by eliminating those episodes, he reinforces the story’s realism. However, the most important omission in the film is the total erasure of references to Benno’s diary. There are two chapters in the novel titled ‘The Confessions of Benno Levin’: ‘NIGHT’ (Cosmopolis 55) and ‘MORNING’ (149). In the former, Benno explains why he has killed a man we assume to be Packer, so the reader knows proleptically that Packer is dead. In the latter, it is the beginning of the day when he has decided to kill him. The presence of Benno in the novel is central, but in the film, the character played by Paul Giamatti appears only once, at the end. Cronenberg replaces the diary with a scene with Beckettian resonances in which the two characters face each other and talk for twenty minutes. (Their conversation may be a recreation of a confrontation between capital and the proletariat.) The film closes with Benno standing behind Packer to shoot, but the spectator is kept in doubt until the end as to whether he dies, since the movie fades to black after Benno’s last words: ‘I wanted you to save me’ (Cosmopolis 204). This, however, is not the last sentence in the novel, where after these words, Packer sees his death in the face of his watch, which leads him to reflect on his past life, the present and the future, and to imagine his own funeral: we read, ‘His murderer, Richard Sheets, sits facing him’ (209). Rather than using voiceover, Cronenberg replaces Packer’s inner monologue before his death with the confrontation, thus reinforcing the dialectical relationship between them, but removing the proleptical relationship. If DeLillo’s ending implies a concept of time as simultaneous – ‘He is dead inside the crystal of his watch but still alive in original space’ (209) – by leaving Packer alive, Cronenberg points to a linearity in time where Packer will or will not die in the future, although he still longs for it. The death drive continues since the desire of the subject for his death is still present. In DeLillo’s case, Packer’s desire has already been fulfilled. He knows he will die, and as such, he is deprived of any desire for the future. Aware of the inevitability of his physical death and the uncertainty of his immortality, he understands that what is lacking in him is the life drive, the force that impelled him forward: ‘Maybe he didn’t want that life, after all . . . What did he want that was not posthumous? He stared into space. He understood what was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be’ (Cosmopolis 209, emphasis added). DeLillo’s novel is thus far more pessimistic than Cronenberg’s version of it, since the realisation of the self-destructive penchant of the death drive is the ultimate nihilism.

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When the desire to die is destroyed, the subject is annihilated. Both book and film close with Packer waiting for the shot to sound, but by eliminating the reference to Benno’s diary and by suppressing the moment at which he sees his face in the watch, Cronenberg seems to obliterate the relationship between past and present that is central to DeLillo’s text. Thus, even if there is synchrony between the two authors, their works are two different ‘life-forms’, in the words of DeLillo himself.15 Both texts are reflections on the death drive of capitalism, but Cronenberg’s version points to a rather more referential scenario, since the director seems to indicate that the destruction of the past will bring about the possibility of future change. This creates an ontological shift from DeLillo’s novel, since as Hutcheon says, ‘this transposition, that is, telling the same story from a different point of view . . . can create a manifestly different interpretation’ (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 7). Even though the novel and the film share many features, the manipulation of important narrative devices not present in the cinematographic version implies a different interpretation of the story in its adaptation.

À Jamais Death and immortality are also the main themes of À Jamais (2016), the film rendering of The Body Artist. This was producer Paulo Branco’s second adaptation of a DeLillo novel after Cosmopolis.16 Film critics have observed that the film fails to convey the emotional power of DeLillo’s novel. Neil Young, in his review for the Hollywood Reporter, complained: ‘a very loose and extremely limp adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 2001 novella The Body Artist, it palpably aspires to be a classily highbrow kind of romantic ghost story with psychological thriller undertones, but falls laughably short of its goals’. Young calls the film an ‘undercooked metaphysical trifle’ more interested in showing the décor of the Portuguese house where the couple lives than in portraying the characters’ inner lives. Additionally, the script adaptation, written by the lead actress Julia Roy, pays more attention to explaining the origins of the relationship between Rey (Mathieu Almaric) and Laura, and the possible cause of Rey’s death, such as Rey’s attachment to his ex-wife (played by Jeanne Balibar, Almaric’s real-life ex), than to leaving the door open for ambiguities, as is DeLillo’s style. As mentioned above, DeLillo’s prose might be described as containing cinematic elements. Henry Veggian likens the first scene of The Body Artist to slow-motion cinematography, similar to that used in the last scene of Cosmopolis, the opening sequence of Falling Man and the opening of Point Omega (82). The ‘set design’ of the first chapter is simple: a kitchen and two people speaking. According to Veggian, the narration ‘assumes a modular, “stacked” quality, not unlike a cinematic montage’ (82). However, Jacquot’s decision to give the film a teleological structure, suppressing

15

DeLillo spoke about the similarities and differences between the book and the film and said that they were two very different life-forms at the presentation of Cosmopolis at the Cannes festival in 2012. YouTube ‘DeLillo titles Rothko and Pollock’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQlYnbWR3pI (accessed 20 April 2022). 16 Initially announced as to be directed by Luca Guadagnino and to star David Cronenberg and Isabelle Huppert, it was finally directed by Benoît Jacquot with Mathieu Almaric as Rey and Julia Roy as Laura.

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the ambivalences implicit in DeLillo’s interchapters, suggests an interest in providing the reader with supplementary information to help them make sense of the characters and plot. Undoubtedly, Jacquot is more interested in a classical cinematic story design than in DeLillo’s challenges to traditional notions of narrative causality. An important difference between the novel and the film is the representation of Mr Tuttle. Again, as in Cosmopolis, the director fails to convey the blend of reality and strangeness that characterises DeLillo’s works. Thus, chapter two of the novel closes when Lauren Hartke finds the creature in the attic. He is described as ‘smallish and fine-bodied and at first, she thought he was a kid, sandy-haired and roused from deep sleep, or medicated maybe’ (40). Even though the presence of this being, whom she calls ‘Mr Tuttle’, is central to the narrative, DeLillo never presents him as a ghost17 – he is a living being who has appeared in the house. Peter Boxall describes Mr Tuttle as a ‘naked, prehistorical’ figure (220). However, in Jacquot’s film, the connection between Mr Tuttle and the ghostly presence of Rey is made explicit, with Almaric playing the roles of both Mr Tuttle and Rey. Mr Tuttle’s presence in the film is thus explained as his being a projection of Laura’s memories of Rey. Thus, even though the film tries to adapt DeLillo’s story, by erasing any ambiguous nuances about identity construction and focusing only on love and loss Jacquot ‘digests’ DeLillo’s text to make it more accessible; but in the process, the final product does not achieve the ‘equivalence of meaning of the forms’ (Bazin 20) necessary to consider the adaptation of the novel artistically meaningful. * * * To conclude, I would argue that Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven and Looking at the Dead are examples of successful adaptations that convey the themes of the works on which they are based, specifically, reflections on death, memory, history and the role of the media, while keeping the ambiguities of the texts and transmitting an aesthetic experience for the audience comparable to that of the reader of DeLillo’s texts. However, in the case of the adaptations of the two novels, the elimination of the ambiguities in DeLillo’s narrative, and the use of a classical cinematic story design, imply a significant variation from DeLillo’s poetics. This departure, which is extreme in the case of Jacquot’s film, and important in the case of Cronenberg, establishes a wider distance between text and film. Despite Cronenberg’s film being a rather more Cartesian reflection on the death drive of capitalism than that of DeLillo, it proposes a narrative exercise that immerses the viewer in an aesthetic and philosophical experience that conveys certain features akin to DeLillo’s narrative, something that is completely absent from Jacquot’s film. There are reasons to consider that, in adapting DeLillo’s novels, the decision to follow a narrative that tries to resolve the ambivalences of the original texts and the ontological challenges that his works pose to the readers can only result in oversimplification, even if the approach to the themes might be similarly oriented. DeLillo’s ambiguous use of language to reflect on human concerns such as memory and history

17

When asked about this at the ‘Fiction Rescues History’ conference in Paris (18–20 February 2016), DeLillo said that ‘Mr Tuttle is real.’

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asks readers to question our deeply ingrained certainties, even the only certainty that we have in this world, which is death. This is, for DeLillo, the social and aesthetic obligation of the contemporary writer. It is to be desired that the film adaptations of his works should achieve the same effect on the film audience.

Works Cited À Jamais. Directed by Benoît Jacquot with performances by Mathieu Almaric, Julia Roy and Jeanne Balibar. Alfama Films, France, 2016. Banash, David. ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and the Cinematic Novels of Don DeLillo and Manuel Muñoz.’ Literature/Film Quarterly, 43, no. 1, 2015, pp. 4–17. Bazin, André. ‘Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest.’ Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore. Rutgers University Press, 2000, pp. 19–27. Begley, Adam. ‘Don DeLillo. The Art of Fiction No. 135.’ Paris Review, 128, 1993. https:// www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo. Accessed 20 April 2022. Bernard, Catherine. ‘Supermarket History: Interview with Johan Grimonprez.’ Parkett, 53, 1998, pp. 6–18. http://www.johangrimonprez.be/main/interviews_DH_st4.html. Accessed 20 April 2022. Boxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. Routledge, 2006. Cartmell, Deborah. A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Chandler, Aaron. ‘An Unsettling, Alternative Self: Benno Levin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 50, no. 3, 2009, pp. 241–60. Cosmopolis. Directed by David Cronenberg with performances by Robert Pattinson, Sarah Gadon and Paul Giamatti. Alfama Films, Canada, 2012. Cowart, David. ‘The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.’ Contemporary Literature, 53, no. 1, 2012, pp. 31–50. ——. The Physics of Language. University of Georgia Press, 2002. Crawford, Karen L. ‘Gender and Terror in Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 and Don DeLillo’s “Baader–Meinhof”.’ New German Critique, 107, 2009, pp. 207–30. Danchev, Alex. ‘The Artist and the Terrorist, or the Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the “Baader–Meinhof” Group.’ Alternatives, 35, 2010, pp. 93–112. Daniele, Daniela. ‘The Achromatic Room: DeLillo’s Plays On and Off Camera.’ Italian Americana, 29, no. 2, 2011, pp. 166–80. ‘David Cronenberg Cosmopolis Interview.’ Female.Com.Au. https://www.female.com.au/davidcronenberg-cosmopolis-interview.htm. Accessed 20 April 2022. Debord, Guy. La societé du spectacle. Buchet/Chastel, 1967. DeLillo, Don. ‘Baader–Meinhof.’ New Yorker, 1 April 2002. https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2002/04/01/baader-meinhof. Accessed 20 April 2022. ——. The Body Artist. Scribner, 2001. ——. Cosmopolis. Scribner, 2004. ——. Mao II. Penguin, 1992. ——. ‘The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven.’ After Yesterday’s Crash: The AvantPop Anthology, edited by Larry McCaffery. Penguin, 1995, pp. 88–9. ——. White Noise. Penguin, 1986. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. Directed by Johan Grimonprez. Funded by the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, New Media Department, Paris, France, and the Kunstencentrum STUK, Leuven Belgium, 1997. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSWxIy5Z7tA. Accessed 20 April 2022.

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Garrigós, Cristina. ‘Death Drive and Desire in Cronenberg’s Adaptation of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 56, no. 5, 2015, pp. 519–30 ——. Email interview with Jean-Gabriel Périot, 17 March 2020. Grimonprez, Johan. ‘Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y.’ http://www.johangrimonprez.be/main/Film_DAIL_ HISTORY_Synopsis.html. Accessed 20 April, 2022. Hungerford, Amy. ‘Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass.’ Contemporary Literature, 47, no. 3, 2006, pp. 343–80. Hutcheon, Linda, and Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2013. Ickstadt, Heinz. ‘The Narrative World of Don DeLillo.’ Faces of Fiction. Essays on American Literature and Culture from the Jacksonian Period to Postmodernity, edited by Heinz Ickstadt, Sabine Sielke and Susanne Rohr. Heidelberg Universitätsverlag, 2001, pp. 375–93. Keesey, Douglas. Don DeLillo. Twayne, 1993. Kellman, David. ‘The Cinematic Novel: Tracking a Concept.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 33, no. 3, 1987, pp. 467–77. Lang, Brent. ‘Jez Butterworth Adapting Don DeLillo’s The Silence.’ Variety, 12 October 2021. https://variety.com/2021/film/news/jez-butterworth-don-delillo-the-silence-indianajones-5-1235087278/. Accessed 30 April 2022. Laist, Randy. ‘The Concept of Disappearance in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 51, no. 3, 2010, pp. 257–75. LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. University of Illinois Press, 1987. Linden, George. ‘The Storied World.’ Film and Literature: Contrasts in Media, edited by Fred H. Marcus. Chandler, 1971, pp. 157–63. Looking at the Dead. Directed by Jean-Gabriel Périot with performances by Miranda Colclasure and Arron Kelly. Local Films, France, 2012. Montagnon, Florence. ‘Reality Mistaken for a Commercial Break: An Interview with Johan Grimonprez.’ 2003. http://www.johangrimonprez.be/main/Film_DIALHISTORY_Story_8. html. Accessed 20 April 2022 Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven. Directed by Keith Bogart with performances by John Larroquette and Tyler Hoechlin. Parallax Group, United States, 2007. Rey, Rebecca. Staging Don DeLillo. Routledge, 2016. ‘Robert Pattison Cosmopolis Interview.’ Female.Com.Au. https://www.female.com.au/robertpattinson-cosmopolis-interview.htm. Accessed 20 April 2022 Seger, Linda. The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into Film. Henry Holt, 1992. Sheenan, Dan. ‘The Netflix–Don DeLillo Romance Continues with Underworld.’ https://lithub. com/the-netflix-don-delillo-romance-continues-with-underworld/. Accessed 30 April 2022. Veggian, Henry. Understanding Don DeLillo. University of South Carolina Press, 2015. Wood, Eben. ‘Grimonprez’s Remix.’ Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo, edited by Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser. Bloomsbury, 2012, pp. 111–29. Young, Neil. ‘Never Ever (À Jamais) Film Review Venice 2016.’ Hollywood Reporter, 9 September 2016. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/never-ever-a-jamais-926204/. Accessed 20 April 2022.

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19 Video Art and the Elasticity of Duration Catherine Morley

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on DeLillo’s novel Point Omega (2010) opens in an unnamed gallery in late summer/early autumn 2006 with a description of visitors entering and leaving an exhibition of Douglas Gordon’s 1993 video art installation 24 Hour Psycho. Gordon’s work used Hitchcock’s 1960 film and slowed the action to two frames per second, so that the film extended to a 24-hour running time, rather than the usual 109 minutes. As DeLillo’s opening scene unfolds, the screen is described as ‘free-standing, about ten by fourteen feet, not elevated, placed in the middle of the room’ (Point Omega 3). The detail of the description, including the carefully noted dimensions of the frame containing the images, which are themselves ‘freestanding . . . in the middle of the room’, presents something at once concrete and abstract, contained within yet transcending parameters. That the screen is also translucent means that viewers can move to either side, observers yet also observed, subject and object, as they enter, linger and drift out of the room. This initial, brief description introduces one of the primary observations about video art, which is what Gordon’s installation essentially is: it is neither plastic nor entirely ethereal, neither tangible nor incorporeal. Video art is an electronic form which presents an audiovisual theme, a form subject to manipulation. As an art form, video art occupies a curious space between states and is in constant flux in its motion between these states. This flux is mimicked in the scene described above in the movement of the spectators, their varying speeds as they wander in and out of the gallery. Motion, speed, ambiguity, temporal displacement, subjectivity, objectivity and relativity: a tumble of nouns and adjectives that might reasonably be drawn upon in describing video art itself, but also words that might be called upon when describing the novel that then unfolds. Indeed, all of these ideas and concepts inform this chapter, which looks at the way in which time, repetition and process, as informed by Teilhard de Chardin’s theory of evolution, and mirrored within the ekphrastic 24 Hour Psycho, are at the heart of DeLillo’s consideration of video art. Point Omega, in part at least, follows the relationship between Richard Elster, the intellectual architect of the War on Terror, and a young documentary maker, Jim Finley, who is interested in creating a single-take, piece-to-camera documentary focused solely upon Elster. In a way, Finley’s putative film would be a stripped-down rendition of Errol Morris’s award-winning documentary The Fog of War (2003), which offered a treatise on the life and times of former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, one of the key architects of the Vietnam War. Morris’s film was put together from over twenty hours of interviews with McNamara, using a device called the ‘Interrotron’, whereby the interviewer and the interviewee speak to each other through the lens of

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the camera, the interviewer’s image being imposed on to the lens. For Morris, what this achieved was a pure first-person experience, giving the sense that the speaker is speaking directly to the person upon whom their vision is locked, involving the viewer in the documentary and the events being described. While this is not explicitly referenced in the novel, it is clear that Finley wants to produce a film that is simply ‘a man and a wall’ (21). He wants Elster to speak to the camera, without adornment or artifice: in other words, to speak directly to the viewer about his experience. This description, the ‘man and a wall’, mirrors that with which the reader is presented in the opening scene of the novel, the ‘man against the north wall’ (3) in the gallery, the unknown, unnamed man who watches 24 Hour Psycho and the gallery visitors as they come and go. And this, in itself, is a rendition of the way in which Norman Bates is presented in Hitchcock’s original film, at once passive and active, viewer and protagonist, a man pressed against a wall. The proliferation of renditions of the man against a wall image (which recurs in the coda to the novel, which returns to the gallery) is a formal embodiment of one of the most obvious characteristics of video art: its capacity for repetition. And with this repetition comes the creation (and recreation) of new versions of reality. This is what Elster has been commissioned to do in his work for the government, since his role seems to have involved the conceptualisation of the new reality of the war. The fictional young filmmaker, in his turn, wants to produce a new reality in his documentary – a form based on facts, but which necessarily alters the facts by virtue of the frames that encase them. And of course, each version of the film that opens the novel, Hitchcock’s Psycho and Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, is itself a rendition of Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel Psycho, which is itself a variation on a previously published short story, taking its general premise from the real-life mass murderer Ed Gein. Of course, this proliferation of various realities, or versions of a reality, is familiar to DeLillo’s readers. Since his first novel, Americana (1971), he has been interested in the capacity of filmmaking technology and art to alter the perception and workings of reality itself, as well as an individual’s memory or interpretation of reality. In the later novel Mao II (1989), for example, the writer Bill Gray objects to the capturing of his image on celluloid. Discussing the power of the writer’s image, he notes to his photographer: There is a curious knot that binds novelists to terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence . . . Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness . . . We’re giving way to terror, to news of terror, to tape recorders and cameras, to radios, to bombs stashed in radios. News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. (Mao II 41) While the reference to terrorists and bomb-makers is not immediately relevant to Point Omega, Gray’s sense of the writer in conflict with the terrorist for control of narratives, for control of the ‘inner life of the culture’, clearly reflects DeLillo’s sense of the writer as a figure who is complicit in the creation of realities. For DeLillo, as for many other writers and critics, reality is itself a kind of grand narrative; and the author of a narrative is also the author of a cultural reality. Elster’s position in government in creating the

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narrative around the new methods of modern warfare places him in a similar position to the writer. And by the same token, the person who controls the camera (video or photographic) also has the power to create, dismantle and recreate realities. Let me turn now to the interplay of reality and time. The question of the construction of realities is, of course, at the heart of all creative endeavours. Every writer, filmmaker, artist or documentary maker is in some way involved in the construction of new or conflicting realities. Bill Gray laments the failure of books to influence or shape a culture. However, Elster’s presence in the War Cabinet stands as a direct address to that which Gray outlines: here the academic is given the power to shape a new reality and wrest power back from the antagonistic terrorist figure. And this power over the way in which reality is shaped, articulated and understood is, in Point Omega, wrapped up in the way in which time is foregrounded and manipulated in the text. The retardation of time for the purposes of art is foregrounded at the beginning of the novel with Douglas’s video art installation. We later learn through a conversation between Jim and Elster’s daughter Jessie that the installation is located in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. And the afterword to the novel situates it more firmly in this location. In the summer of 2006, 24 Hour Psycho appeared in an exhibition of Douglas’s work entitled Timeline (yet another reference to the importance of time as a theme and a methodology in his work). Douglas’s use of the film raises questions about the difference between experienced, organic time and technologically manipulated time. One might ask what an immersion in technologically manipulated time does to human consciousness, or what it does to a given individual’s understanding of reality. Ken Johnson’s review of Timeline for the New York Times observes that ‘time is as much a fact of the mortal body and the human world as it is an artificial construct or a fantasy of the mind’ (Johnson). This tension between these different perceptions of time in Gordon’s work reflects a similar tension in Point Omega itself, which in many ways is an exercise in the coexistence of these different versions of time: time speeded, time slowed, time experienced, time manipulated.1 For example, Jim Finley recalls happening upon Elster in an exhibition of the Dadaists, ‘a major show of objects created in the name of demolished logic’ (Point Omega 61). While Salvador Dalí is not mentioned specifically, it is surely no coincidence that Douglas’s work was housed in the same museum which is home to Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931), an artwork which famously presents a series of limp clocks draped over strange surfaces in a surreal landscape combining desert features with water, ants and grotesque human body parts. Dalí’s unearthly painting, from his so-called ‘mad’ stage of art-making, offers a meditation upon time, giving what is concrete and supposedly ‘hard’ a more porous identity. Time, as represented by the clocks, is made flaccid and slow. It is deliberately altered by the artist; and indeed Dalí described the work as helping to ‘discredit completely the world of reality’. Once again, therefore, what we are presented with here is an attempt to present a different version of reality through a distortion of time. The link with Dalí is not a random detail. Dalí was particularly enthused by the ideas of the Jesuit thinker and palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and unsurprisingly, Elster mentions Teilhard in conversation with Finley early in the novel:

 1

For an excellent study of the centrality of time in this work, see Gander.

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I studied the work of Teilhard de Chardin . . . He said that human thought is alive, it circulates. And the sphere of collective human thought, this is approaching the final term, the last flare . . . The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars, because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question, do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field. (51–3) As scholars such as Peter Boxall and David Cowart have observed, the notion of humanity or collective human thought ‘as approaching the final term’ is a central part of DeLillo’s later work. Certainly, since the capacious and historically expansive Underworld (1997), DeLillo’s work has turned inwards, focused on interior lives, death and the end of history. Point Omega offers a sustained meditation on these topics with a plot based on absence, disappearance and retreat: ‘Look at us today. We keep inventing folk tales of the end’ (51). While only fleetingly mentioned, Teilhard de Chardin is an enormously significant figure for the novel more generally, and, indeed, his ideas about the shape and destination of time can be linked to the ways that video art, which since its inception has experimented with the representation of progressive time and offered multiple versions of reality, is deployed by DeLillo. A theologian, priest and palaeontological scientist, Teilhard sought to present a theory that might reconcile Christianity with evolutionary science. A member of the excavations group at the prehistoric cave paintings in the Cave of el Castillo (c. 1913), Teilhard also served in the First World War as a stretcher bearer. The war was to have a profound effect on him; he described it as ‘a meeting . . . with the Absolute’ and he went on to join the Jesuits in 1918 (Kassman Sack 7). Teilhard’s war experience and his musings upon it are not unlike those of Elster, who chants liturgically that ‘war creates a closed world and not only for those in combat but for the plotters, the strategists. Except their war is acronyms, projections, contingencies, methodologies’ (Point Omega 28). What both Teilhard de Chardin and Elster seem intent on discovering is a new theory of reality. While one might surmise that Teilhard saw in the First World War the end of human life as we know it, a ‘leap out of our biology’, for Elster, the war in which he participates (and like Teilhard he does so in a non-violent capacity, claiming to be horrified by violence) is a kind of end point. Elster notes Teilhard’s notion of the ‘omega point’, from which the novel takes its name and which the thinker held to be the end point of human consciousness as we understand it. According to Teilhard, the omega point is the end point of human evolution. It is the point where human existence and consciousness reunites with God or with the divine holy trinity. Taken from the Book of Revelation, in which Christ describes himself as ‘the Alpha and the Omega’, the omega point is the natural end point of the evolution of human consciousness and the cosmos as a whole. Acknowledging and deeply influenced by the biological aspect of Darwinian evolutionary theory, Teilhard and his followers believed that concurrent with the evolution of the biosphere is a level of human consciousness known as the ‘noosphere’ which is a cognitive layer of existence. This cognitive layer is the result of human interaction and communication, which develops and expands over time and space. With the aid of science or technology, the noosphere can eventually be unmoored from the biosphere to exist independently and thus what occurs is a ‘return’ to an inorganic existence. This

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noosphere is comprised of radial energy, which is a kind of spiritual energy, and just as organic matter continues to evolve (according to Teilhard and his thinkers, evolution is an ongoing process heading towards a final destination), so too does the radial energy of the noosphere. At the point when the world comes to an end, and the biosphere disappears, the noosphere with its radial energy is sucked into the omega point and converges with the divine. It is both the end and the beginning, the ‘alpha and the omega’ of Revelation (Sage 78). It is precisely this idea, that of an inorganic human existence, that Elster alludes to in his conversation with Finley: ‘do we have to be human forever?’ (Point Omega 53). That Elster is employed by the government as a kind of communications engineer, creating a new means of communicating the reality of the war, demonstrates his complicity in the extension of what Teilhard would describe as the noosphere. He directly refers to language, words and communication in his description of those who ‘plot’ the war: ‘acronyms, projections . . . We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words 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’ (28–9). The regressive evolutionary image presented here is especially interesting. Typical pictures of evolution, the famous ‘March of Progress’, move through depictions of homo sapiens as squatting, walking and then standing tall. Here, Elster offers the process in reverse, through to the point of non-existence or nothingness: ‘except when it doesn’t’ (29). At various points throughout the novel, Elster offers demonstrations of this interest in a form of communication untethered from any physical object or physical reality in terms of a sign/signified relationship. Instead, he is drawn to the notion of contiguity, with both sign and signified object or subject as one. Again, it is useful to draw from the text: 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. (29) This is the idea at the heart of Imagism, of course, the modernist attempt to break the gap between the signified and the signifier. DeLillo’s interest in the relationship between language and reality is evident throughout his work, and scholars Mark Osteen and David Cowart have made compelling observations about his interest in Wittgenstein and the idea of language games. However, what we are presented with here is, I believe, somewhat different. The understanding of language that DeLillo offers via Elster is not Wittgensteinian, but rather a vision of language as embedded within the reality it might otherwise be seen as signifying. For Elster, language and communication are unstable, shifting and ultimately predestined towards some higher point. In describing his ideas about the war, he intones: ‘This was not a matter of force levels or logistics. What I wanted was a set of ideas linked to transient things . . . See what’s there and then be prepared to watch it disappear’ (29). This idea of ‘disappearance’ is not obliteration, but a kind of absorption into something else, something greater, the omega point. Elster’s career, though presented as vague and unclear in the novel, seems to have involved the study of the evolution of language. Finley notes his research into Elster’s scholarly work when preparing to

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approach him for the documentary. He talks to Elster about his study of the word ‘rendition’, a word freighted with meaning through the United States’s enormously controversial use of the practice of extraordinary rendition during the War on Terror. And while ostensibly concerned with the military practice, arrest and interrogation, Elster’s academic article focuses less on the political or human rights associations of the word than the evolution of the language: The essay concentrated on the word itself, earliest known use, changes in form and meaning, zero-grade forms, reduplicated forms, suffixed forms. There were footnotes like nested snakes. But no specific mention of black sites, third-party states or international treaties and conventions. He compared the evolution of the word to that of organic matter. He pointed out that words were not necessary to one’s experience of the true life. (33–4) Elster’s comparison of the evolution of the word ‘rendition’ to the evolution of organic matter seems a methodological approach based on Teilhard de Chardin’s philosophy. It introduces some intriguing questions, evident from the outset of the novel, about the nature of reality. From the passage above, it would seem that language is comparable in its metamorphoses over time to biological entities. Similar to Elster’s musing on the distillation that goes into the making of a haiku, language it seems becomes more refined over time, to the point that it evaporates, disappears, yet nonetheless remains existent and unifying on some higher plane. In another revealing passage, Finley notes that Elster goes back to one of the more prosaic (or at least more concrete) meanings of the word ‘rendering’, the application of plaster to a masonry surface: From this he asked the reader to consider a walled enclosure in an unnamed country and a method of questioning, using what he 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. (33) And so we return to the blank wall: the putative documentary with Elster standing against a blank wall, talking to the camera, and also the blank wall of the gallery against which an anonymous man stands day after day watching 24 Hour Psycho. It calls to mind those unspoken men against walls, offering up their stories, their renditions of a reality, under ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. This latter reference takes us back to the very beginning of this chapter, where I mentioned Robert McNamara and Errol Morris’s pioneering use of the ‘Interrotron’ interview technique in order to entice the subject to ‘give up’ his thoughts and to give a personal rendition of the wartime reality he helped to create. Each rendition is a layer, not simply a linguistic layer, but a layer of both time and reality. Each rendition, each wall, each version offers us a different temporal landscape, and DeLillo flits backwards and forwards during the course of the novel, presenting in the text itself an understanding or a journey which is not predestined or linear, but one in which time slows, quickens and folds back upon itself. Thus, we return at the end of the novel to the beginning, to another rendition of 24 Hour Psycho.

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This experimentation with the shape of time and reality as mediated through video art is also evident in The Body Artist (2001). Throughout the novella, the ever-present tape recorder (Rey Robles, Lauren Hartke and Mariella Chapman all use the device) measures empty time and occupied time, voices and silences, presences and absences. But it is a live-stream video feed from Kotka, in Finland, which offers one of the most interesting meditations upon temporal realities and which is integrated into Lauren’s performance near the end of the novel: It was the middle of the night in Kotka, in Finland, and she watched the screen. It was interesting to her because it was happening now, as she sat here, and because it happened twenty-four hours a day, facelessly, cars entering and leaving Kotka, or just the empty road in the dead times . . . It was simply the fact of Kotka. It was the sense of organization, a place contained in an unyielding frame, as it is and as you watch, with a reading of local time in the digital display in the corner of the screen. Kotka was another world but she could see in it a realness, in its hours, minutes and seconds. (The Body Artist 37) Eventually, Lauren enfolds the live-stream recording into her performance, bringing the digital ticker, the ‘other world’ that is Kotka and indeed the viewer, the spectator, into the artwork. Video art and body art collide in Lauren’s performance. The result is the presentation of multiple realities at once: New York and Kotka; two roads with travellers going in opposite directions; the digital ticker counting seconds with a hollow urgency (38) and the seemingly agonising duration of the performance. In a way, the video-stream at Kotka offers a 24-hour artwork. What we seem to have, therefore, throughout DeLillo’s writing, is the deployment of video art as a kind of philosophical tool, or at least an experimental device, to explore the means whereby an artist might manipulate reality or create new realities through the exploitation of time. Famously, in Underworld, the reader is asked to consider the nature of the Texas Highway Killer footage: there is something about videotape, isn’t there, and this particular kind of serial crime? . . . You sit there and wonder if this kind of crime became more possible when the means of taping an event and playing it immediately, without a neutral interval, a balancing space and time became widely available. Taping-and-playing intensifies and compresses the event. It dangles a need to do it again. You sit there thinking that the serial murder has found its medium, or vice versa – an act of shadow technology, of compressed time and repeated images, stark and glary and unremarkable. (159) In this instance, the video recording is created by an unnamed girl, nicknamed ‘the Video Kid’ by the wider culture. There is a suggestion that at least one of the Texas Highway Killer’s crimes may have been committed by a copycat killer influenced by the recorded images. Thus, the video recording has, at some level at least, engineered a new reality. As the narrator observes, the video recording compresses time and space, altering the way in which an event is apprehended. But what is more, it has facilitated and provided a model for a new reality: another murder which is a copy of the original, which itself will have been based upon at least one previous version of itself.

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The murder, its recording, its viewing, reviewing and repetition, compress the temporal duration of normal reality, offering an event that snakes back upon itself only to repeatedly uncoil and extend over and over again. Of course, as mentioned, critics such as Catherine Gander and Cowart have already written about the meditation upon time in the later DeLillo texts and specifically in Point Omega. Indeed, the writer himself noted the concern in his work from 2000 onwards, noting the complicity of technology in ‘speeding up time and compacting space’ (‘In conversation at the PEN Center’, qtd. in Gander 128). Gander has explored DeLillo’s engagement with classical and quantum physics, his interest in the ‘theoretical positions of general relativity and quantum mechanics, the former describing the properties of matter and the universe on a macro scale, and positing the directional flow of spacetime; the latter describing the microscopic worlds of atoms, molecules, and discrete, interconnected units of spacetime’ (130). When this is brought to bear on the deployment of Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho at the beginning and end of Point Omega, Gander compellingly argues that the effect is a perpetual ‘nowness’: a series of temporal ‘nows’ in which a moment is slowed to the extent that it seems to last for an inordinately long time (134). Similarly, Cowart, focusing on DeLillo’s lifelong engagement with film and cinema, offers a terrific reading of the writer’s engagement with Hitchcock: the mirroring of characters and scenes in the original film and in Point Omega, as well as the considerations of time, duration and framing which are brought to the fore by the Gordon installation. Towards the end of Cowart’s piece, the author picks up on the reference to Teilhard de Chardin and notes that DeLillo ‘devises a fiction that faults the famous Jesuit’s wishful theology . . . What Richard Elster speculates about is something like the denial or mockery of Teilhard’s thinking’ (Cowart, ‘The Lady Vanishes’ 47). Cowart is undoubtedly right to suggest that the novel ultimately presents Elster as an intellectually compromised character, and his quest for meaning ends in the confrontation of the howling absence represented by his missing daughter. Yet at the same time, the novel takes seriously Elster’s consideration of Teilhard de Chardin and his musings upon the convergence of the human and the divine. Indeed, there is surely a powerful case that DeLillo himself takes this utopian theology seriously, too. And when coupled with Gander’s observations on DeLillo’s interest in theories of relativity and quantum physics, DeLillo’s use of Teilhard surely offers an enormously useful way to consider his engagement with video art. As mentioned, video art has almost always deliberately experimented with the representation of time. In Point Omega this is evident in the account of Gordon’s retardation of a classic Hollywood film. The use of Psycho instils a kind of cinematic temporal logic, which is often at odds with the logic of video art, which can freeze, fast-forward or rewind. This of course is the artistic logic evident in the aforementioned Texas Highway Killer footage, or the Zapruder footage which plays such an important part in Underworld. Here, the deceleration of a film does not alter the horizontal nature of time in the classic Hollywood film; instead, it slows it to the point of near stillness. The critic Laura Mulvey notes that this kind of experimentation with Hollywood film breaks the narrative hierarchy of the original film and shifts the emphasis from the plot of the film to the spectator, who is compelled to examine their own position and response to the piece of video art, their own position in the voyeurism at the heart of the original film (116–17). In Point Omega, the implication of the viewer in the artwork comes explicitly in the third and final section, ‘Anonymity 2: September 4’, in

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which the anonymous spectator considers his own position in relation to the exhibit which consumes him: Standing was part of the art, the standing man participates. That was him, sixth straight day he’s been here, last day of the installation. He would miss being in this room, free at times to walk around the screen and to observe from the reverse side, to note the left-handedness of people and objects. But always back to the wall, in physical touch, or he might find himself doing what, he wasn’t sure, transmigrating, passing from this body into a quivering image on the screen. (102) As the piece goes on, the anonymous spectator considers the ‘complexities of editing’ and the discrepancies between the film in its original format and the slowed-down version that he believes gives a more accurate insight into perception, and the way the ‘brain processes images’ (103). For the anonymous spectator, the decelerated artwork enables a more authentic perception of reality. But more than this, it integrates the spectator, bringing him into the artwork such that the actions of ‘Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. Norman Bates as Mother’ (104) seem to blend with his own as he considers the woman with whom he interacts at the gallery. Mulvey also notes the temporal experimentation in Gordon’s artwork. The slowing of the film asserts a ‘nowness’ to the picture that enables the viewer and the artist to also contemplate its ‘then-ness’, its relation to a point in the past in terms of its initial release (102–3). In my view, this element of relationality, the proximity of the everunfurling now from a point in the past, takes us back to Teilhard de Chardin, whose metaphysical evolution towards the omega point is relational, organic, progressive and slow. One might take this idea of a slow-moving, progressive evolution and apply it to Gordon’s video art itself, not only in terms of its composition but its dependence on an original artwork from the 1960s, which itself was dependent upon various other sources. This then raises many of the questions that are at the heart of theoretical discussions about video art, including that crucial question about authenticity and authorship. Who, we might ask, is the author of 24 Hour Psycho? Indeed, who is the author of the film version of Psycho? For DeLillo, the question of authorship and creative control is, of course, colossally important. The book has at its heart an academic who has lost control of his own authored creation. Alongside him we have another individual who in some ways wishes to author a version of that story, by which I mean Finley’s version of Elster’s involvement in the war. And of course, the idea of authorial control reminds the attentive reader of the warnings of Bill Gray from Mao II about the impossibility of maintaining control of the narrative. DeLillo’s deployment of the Gordon piece, not unlike his use of whole range of other pieces of art throughout his entire fictional corpus, is an extended instance of ekphrasis. The embedding of a piece of art within a larger piece of art is not a new technique or device to DeLillo, and many critics have explored the significance of the various artworks in his writing. The use of a specific piece of video art in this novel allows DeLillo to explore the theoretical ideas at the heart of video art, from its inception to contemporaneity: questions regarding authenticity, authorship, relationality, reality, perception and time. Indeed, Cowart beautifully traces the ways in which Point Omega draws on specific moments from Psycho (and indeed from 24 Hour Psycho), from the precise dating of sections, which recalls the precise date at

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the beginning of Hitchcock’s film, to the affinities between Finley and Norman Bates. Gander, too, notes the significance of the spinning curtain hooks in the original film, in the video artwork and their relation to Finley’s frenzied pulling back of the shower curtain while searching for his daughter Jessie. The general effect of ekphrasis is to halt narrative time – we see it in a range of other writers and writings, as far back as The Aeneid. While the narrative proceeds in a generally horizontal temporal manner, the ekphrasis creates a pause, a temporal pocket that freezes narrative time to facilitate an immersion in some of the wider issues of the text. Often the ekphrastic artwork is a version of the wider piece, that is, a more concentrated meditation upon a particular issue within the wider narrative. While in the past DeLillo’s embedded artworks might have included more traditional representative works, such as Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death in Underworld or Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings in Falling Man, he has also demonstrated a sustained interest in more innovative or experimental types of visual artistic representation. Graffiti art features in Underworld, performance art appears in The Body Artist (2001), and street art is at the heart of Falling Man (2007). The use of video art in Point Omega, while not new, allows DeLillo to engage with a medium that is, as Yvonne Spielmann observes, an ‘art object’ that is fluid, changeable and, by virtue of its own specific features, concerned with the process of motion and transformability (115). Philippe Dubois offers a similar emphasis on process, observing that while other artistic media are mostly concerned with an activity and a product, video is a means of communication (Westgeest 2). Surveying these and other descriptors, Helen Westgeest posits four primary aspects of video art: ‘time, space, representation and narrative’. She notes that from a temporal angle, video deals with immediacy and real time, but also with past and remembered time; from a spatial perspective video can apply three dimensionality or its immateriality; from the vantage point of its contents it can represent a world not only as a sequence of moving images but also as static contemplative images; and from a concern for narrative, video can simultaneously appropriate and subvert conventional film stories. (8) Westgeest’s description of video art seems especially applicable to the concerns of Point Omega, a book that is interested in process, the means whereby an entity moves from one state to another, a book that is interested in the temporal span of processes, especially the evolutionary process of human consciousness. This chapter opened with a description of the concurrent materiality and immateriality of 24 Hour Psycho, and looked at the embedded artwork as a contemplative meditation upon issues in the wider novel. So, I would argue that DeLillo’s engagement with a famous piece of video art, a work that appropriates and alters a classic Hollywood film, demonstrates the shared concerns and interconnectedness of the visual and the verbal, the contiguity and continuity of art’s pressing concerns. But video art specifically as an art form enables DeLillo to consider the intertwined concepts of process and time, perhaps the overarching themes of the novel. These linked ideas take us back to Teilhard de Chardin and his centrality to the novel. Teilhard’s notion of the continual evolution of humankind towards the noosphere, the sphere wherein human consciousness merges with a divine consciousness, clearly draws from the Victorian ideas and images of evolution, the so-called ‘March of Progress’

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drawings, which were themselves based on the frontispiece images originally created to illustrate Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863).2 Again, we should note the convergence of narrative and visual image, but also the proliferation, appropriation and subversion of an original image.3 And it is precisely these twin emphases of video art, time and process, that allow DeLillo to consider the question of the evolution of human consciousness. Cowart observes that Finley and Elster, by the end of the novel, are faced with a kind of empty nothingness represented by the disappearance of Jessie. This is indeed the case. Jessie, a woman seemingly without material substance, eventually vanishes, apparently absorbed into the desert landscape. But for DeLillo, I suggest, the final destination is not the point of the inquiry. Nor indeed is it the point of the ekphrastic artwork. Like 24 Hour Psycho, Point Omega considers themes of voyeurism and complicity, authorship and authenticity, but above all it considers the processual nature of time and what that means for humanity. Coupled with Teilhard’s sense of a continual and ongoing evolution (however flawed in its vision of humanity and the primacy of the human mind), 24 Hour Psycho and the tenets of video art as a medium enable DeLillo to question the seemingly horizontal nature of time and art’s ability to interrupt and subvert that ceaseless march of progress.

Works Cited Boxall, Peter. ‘Interview: The Edge of the Future: A Discussion with Don DeLillo.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 159–64. ——. ‘Late: Fictional Time in the Twenty-First Century.’ Contemporary Literature, 53, no. 4, 2012, pp. 681–712. Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. University of Georgia Press, 2002. ——. ‘The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.’ Contemporary Literature, 53, no. 1, 2012, pp. 31–50. Dawson, Gowan. Monkey to Man: The Evolution of the March of Progress. Yale University Press, 2023 DeLillo, Don. The Body Artist. Picador, 2001. ——. ‘In Conversation at the American PEN Center.’ 10 March 2011. https://www.pwf.cz/rubriky/ pwf-2011/authors/featuring/don-delillo-do-we-still-exist_8338.html. Accessed 30 June 2022. ——. Mao II. Vintage, 1991. ——. Point Omega. Picador, 2010.

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Huxley, a self-taught comparative anatomist, was an ardent Darwinian, earning the name of ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ for his public support of Darwin’s ideas on evolution. Many of his ideas preceded the publication of The Descent of Man (1871) and were based upon anatomy rather than Darwin’s field naturalism. It is perhaps also notable that Huxley was a member of the Metaphysical Society (1869–80), a debating society that included clergymen and theological scholars as well as scientists, politicians and evolutionary biologists. As Catherine Hajdenko-Marshall observes, the society sought ways to reconcile religious faith and the tenets of Darwinism. This, of course, recalls the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin and his faith in the ultimate omega point.  3 See Dawson, which examines the origins of the ‘March of Progress’ image, tracing them back to the illustrations in Thomas Henry Huxley’s proto-Darwinian book, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1963), and explores the difficult birth of the images and their subsequent absorption into Rudolph Zallinger’s ‘The March of Progress’, originally titled ‘The Road to Homo Sapiens’ (1965).

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——. Underworld. Picador, 1997. Gander, Catherine. ‘The Art of Being Out of Time in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 127–42. Hajdenko-Marshall, Catherine. ‘Believing after Darwin: The Debates of the Metaphysical Society.’ Cahiers, 76, autumn 2012, pp. 69–83. Johnson, Ken. ‘At MoMa, Douglas Gordon: The Hourglass Contortionist.’ New York Times, 9 June 2006. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/arts/design/09gord.html. Accessed 30 June 2022. Kassman Sack, Susan. America’s Teilhard: Christ and Hope in the 1960s. Catholic University of America Press, 2019. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. Reaktion, 2006. Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Sage, Alan. Catholic Christianity in Evolution: The Spiritual Prophecy of Teilhard de Chardin. Sussex University Press, 2021. Spielmann, Yvonne. ‘The Visual Flow: Fixity and Transformation in Photo- and Videographic Imagery.’ Heterogeneous Objects: Intermedia and Photography after Modernism. Leuven University Press, 2003, pp. 101–17. Westgeest, Helen. Video Art Theory: A Comparative Approach. Wiley, 2015.

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20 Screen, Image and the Technological Sublime Joseph M. Conte

cable health, cable weather, cable news, cable nature Don DeLillo, White Noise

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he fiction of Don DeLillo presents the particular irony of our media ecology, in which the saturation of archived, broadcast and digital information miserably fails to explain the iridescent sheen of the Airborne Toxic Event in White Noise (1985), the gunman/men in Dealey Plaza on 22 November 1963 in Libra (1988), the ‘Shot(s) Heard Round the World’ on 3 October 1951 in Underworld (1997), or the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 11 September 2001 in Falling Man (2007). While the biosphere ecology of the Anthropocene might be characterised by extreme shortages and extinctions – of petroleum-based energy sources, potable water, the ozone layer, the Arctic icecap and biodiversity – twenty-first-century media ecology suffers from an explosive surfeit of information. The novels of DeLillo’s high period, especially White Noise and Mao II (1991), are expressions of the postmodern sublime, defined by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1984) as the post-industrial, technological successor to the natural or Romantic sublime that was posited by Edmund Burke in the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Immanuel Kant in The Critique of Judgment (1790). The total saturation of visual media in our culture instantiates that postmodern sublime. Friedrich Kittler observes that all streams of information once had to pass through ‘the bottleneck of the signifier’, or the ‘alphabetic monopoly’ of print (Kittler 4). But in the age of digital media, any content form – audio, video, text – is converted into patterns of binary digits without discrimination, which destroys the perceptual monopoly of print. While the literary author was once engaged in shaping the principal medium of communication, now the writer might no longer be regarded as practising in the dominant medium of the post-war period. DeLillo accepts the challenge that televisual and digital media present to the writer, both recuperating and critiquing various forms of visual media in his novels. Whereas Jack Gladney in White Noise or Scott Martineau and Brita Nilsson in Mao II appear to fall prey to visual projections of reality, DeLillo’s fiction establishes a hermeneutic space around these protagonists in which the politics of our visual culture might be ironised; it is the subject in which and against which he writes. Confronted by our cultural imaginary, DeLillo resists the absorption of the aesthetic experience of the sublime into televisual and digital media.

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The Postmodern Sublime In his now familiar analysis of the origins of postmodernity, Lyotard offers a discussion of the Kantian sublime that turns on the presence or absence of the corresponding object between the faculty that conceives of something and the faculty that presents it (The Postmodern Condition 77). T. S. Eliot would have recognised such a corresponding object as an ‘objective correlative’ (‘Hamlet and His Problems’ 92). At those times when such a corresponding object can be discovered between the capacity to conceive and the capacity to present, we are treated to instances of fine taste, or beauty; the lush representation in an oil painting of a hydrangea in full blossom in a summer garden, perhaps. But in an instance in which no such corresponding object can be discovered, ‘when the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept’, we encounter the sublime (Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition 78). Lyotard carefully suggests that such a disjunction can occur at any scale and that each historical period puts forward its own instances of the sublime. Evoking the sense of awe that accompanies sublimity, Lyotard presumes that we can ‘conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to “make visible” this absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate’ (78). Such Ideas are unpresentable. Totalising information is one such instance of the postmodern sublime. The saturation of our technological environment with information, the extensibility of information into every nook and cranny of experience, the vast quantity of information that can never be presented in its totality, and the impossibility of presenting its absolute power, qualify information as a form of the postmodern sublime.

White Noise; or, Television is Sublime While it critiques many aspects of postmodernity, DeLillo’s White Noise cries out like an Old Testament prophet against the worship of the false gods of electromagnetic and digital technocracy. Waves and radiation saturate the environment; they are inescapable. Because such signals are extrasensory – passing unbidden and unfelt through our bodies – they are also inexpressible. Jack Gladney reflects on the ‘awful’ aspect of the postmodern sublime when he sums up his anxieties regarding the Airborne Toxic Event: ‘The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear’ (White Noise 161).1 Jack is possessed of the Idea that he has been ‘entered’, or signed upon, by the supersensual by-products of advanced technology. Although he expresses a ‘natural’ fear of death, he is concerned by his inability to identify the corresponding object, or source, of his fear: microwave radiation, high-tension electrical transmission, the ‘state of the art’ toxic chemical Nyodene D or the digital interface of the computer; each forebodes an impalpable opponent in the struggle for survival (161). Nothing to fight, nowhere to flee. Forced to take refuge in a Boy Scout camp outside Iron City staffed by the Baudrillardian corps of SIMUVAC engineers, Gladney observes a man carrying a portable  1

In a letter to Jon Jackson dated 23 October 1995, DeLillo echoes his character’s misgivings regarding technology: ‘all I can say about White Noise from this distance is that the book is driven by a connection I sensed between advanced technology and contemporary fear. By the former I don’t mean bombs and missiles alone but more or less everything – microwaves, electrical insulation, etc.’ Don DeLillo Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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TV set making a speech. ‘He held the TV set well up in the air and out away from his body and during the course of the speech he turned completely around several times as he walked in order to display the blank screen to all of us in the room’ (161). Raised in an Italian-Catholic household in the Bronx, NY, and having attended the nearby Jesuit-administered Fordham University, DeLillo obviously refers to the moment in the Catholic Mass, immediately after the consecration of the host, when the priest displays the transubstantiated Body of Christ to the congregation by holding it aloft, outstretched in worshipful arms. This priest of the Information Age holds up the monstrance of his deity, but questions why the gathered faithful have been forsaken. The TV’s blank screen displays no idol, no image of the network god. Where is the coverage of their tribulation in the wilderness? Where is the live report? ‘Elohim, elohim. Lama sabacthani?’ Only the acknowledgement of the network lends meaning to their suffering in the televisual age. How do we ‘make visible’ the absolute power of the information nexus? Should we not lament the always inadequate signs of the network’s presence? In contrast to this scene of abandonment, Jack’s successful withdrawal of cash from an automated teller machine elicits a sense of beneficence: ‘The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city’ (46). Interaction with the digitised financial network confirms the individual’s right to being; no valid actions may occur that are not ‘accountable’ within its management of data. Far from objecting to this control over his identity, Jack expresses his appreciation for the sublimity of the unpresentable network: ‘The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies’ (46). Marvel though he might at his own ‘connectedness’ within the system, that he is, for the time being, one of the digital ‘elect’, Jack realises only a few empirical clusters of the infinite network. He will never be more than a pathetic ‘end user’, another jack in the endless coil of coaxial cables, routers and electronic transactions. He mentions twice in his brief homily that ‘the system’ is invisible and vaguely transcendent. Information – here not limited to financial data – is, in Fredric Jameson’s terms, an ‘absent, unrepresentable totality’ (‘Totality as Conspiracy’ 341). Information is a totality that he cannot speak; and Jack is possessed of an Idea for which he can find no corresponding representation. His failure of expression, or rather the ineffability of the Idea, causes pain, a ‘disquieting’ sensation, even as he enjoys a moment of pleasure in the ‘support and approval’ of the system. Gladney experiences the pathos of sublimity, ‘as opposed to the calm feeling of beauty’. As Lyotard reminds us, ‘infinity, or the absoluteness of the Idea can be revealed in what Kant calls a negative presentation, or even a non-presentation’ (‘The Sublime’ 204). Let us recall that Jack Gladney is the insecure and fearful head of the Department of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill. It would be a mistake to think that his experience of the pathos of sublimity is shared by DeLillo. Critics such as Paul Maltby, Joseph Tabbi and Julian Henneberg have observed that White Noise expresses instances of the postmodern or technological sublime (Maltby 84; Tabbi 169–207; Hennenberg 52). But it is also clear that the author establishes an ironic, critical distance from the various attempts by Gladney or his colleagues in the Department of American Environments, Murray Jay Siskind and Alphonse Stompanato, to find their place in an information society. In the passage cited above, no reader can miss the pathos of a man for whom ‘communication’ lies in the approval of his PIN by an electronic teller.

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DeLillo regards the totality of information, and the technocracy that supports it, with irony and trepidation. His critical distance from his character illustrates two differing modes of the sublime. Lyotard distinguishes between a modern aesthetics of the sublime that is nostalgic, and a postmodern aesthetics of the sublime that is innovative, or avant-garde; the one views sublimity with a backward, longing glance, while the other looks forward to the new. The aesthetics of modernism ‘allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents’ (Postmodern Condition 81). Jack’s pleasure in his ‘connectedness’ with the network only reflects the nostalgia that he feels for an absolute communication within the social nexus and which he acknowledges is no longer presentable to him. Jameson speaks of ‘the dialectical intensification of information and communication as such . . . which the hardening into technology problematizes’ (‘Totality as Conspiracy’ 341). This is to say that the crisis of communication is modern (the requisite example is T. S. Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’: ‘If one, settling a pillow by her head, / Should say: “That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.”’ [Complete Poems 6]). The crisis of information, however, in its scale and surfeit, is postmodern. Jack is awed by the absolute power of the network, but DeLillo presents that wonderment with irony. DeLillo’s postmodern aesthetics ‘puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself’ (Lyotard, Postmodern Condition 81). Such an aesthetics is necessarily self-conscious, always aware of the impossibility of presentation, not just of the impossibility of presenting certain Ideas. To recapitulate, Gladney expresses the modern sublime; he asserts the ‘negative presentation’ of an Idea, in this case, the network of financial data to which he is tenuously connected but which he cannot apprehend in its totality. DeLillo, however, expresses a postmodern sublime because he offers an ironic presentation (of the negative presentation) of Gladney’s sublime moment. E. M. Forster in Howards End (1910) urged his fellow moderns to ‘Only connect!’ (159) and Jack, nostalgic and anxiety-ridden individual that he is, thinks he has done so. We know that DeLillo treats this scene with irony because he presents Jack as uncritically accepting the ‘support and approval’ of the network when his ratification is no more than an illusion of communication. In fact, Jack’s identity has been digitally encoded, processed and absorbed within the leviathan of information. Far from being ‘blessed by the system’, he has been assimilated by its very unpresentability. The Airborne Toxic Event that looms over part II of White Noise can also be described as an instance of the postmodern sublime. This section of the novel parodies the conventions of the ‘disaster’ genre in films and novels produced for a mass audience. Large-scale disasters conveniently involve a broad cross-section of American society, allowing film producers an opportunity to commingle under duress the sorts of individuals who would normally prefer not to be caught dead together. Let us call this the Gilligan’s Island Effect. Other cultures have epic encounters between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Odysseus and Circe, and the Napoleonic heroes and villains of Tolstoy’s War and Peace; Americans have the all-star casts of Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). The tasteless decade of the 1970s seems to have specialised in these spectacular productions. For this reason, Jack’s immediate response to reports of the drifting cloud of an insecticide derivative is governed less by the threat of toxicity than by his televisual media conditioning. He objects that, as a college professor and department head, ‘I don’t see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That’s for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the country’ (White Noise 117). It’s a ridiculous response, precisely because

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we know that the disaster genre exists to bring disparate social classes into uneasy, grimy and desperate juxtaposition. When the Airborne Toxic Event (the cloud whose acronym ATE the small town of Blacksmith) appears on the horizon, Jack’s description of it draws directly from the vocabulary of Burke or Kant on the sublime:2 The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings. We weren’t sure how to react. It was a terrible thing to see, so close, so low, packed with chlorides, benzenes, phenols, hydrocarbons, or whatever the precise toxic content. But it was also spectacular, part of the grandness of a sweeping event . . . Our fear was accompanied by a sense of awe that bordered on the religious. It is surely possible to be awed by the thing that threatens your life, to see it as a cosmic force, so much larger than yourself, more powerful, created by elemental and willful rhythms. This was a death made in the laboratory, defined and measurable, but we thought of it at the time in a simple and primitive way, as some seasonal perversity of the earth like a flood or tornado, something not subject to control. Our helplessness did not seem compatible with the idea of a man-made event. (127–8) Jack’s experience of an almost religious awe again waxes nostalgic. He longs for an encounter with the natural sublime of precipitous cliffs, wild glades and fierce storms that enlivened the landscapes of the Hudson River School, such as Asher B. Durand’s

Figure 20.1  Niagara Falls, 1872, steel plate engraving, 9½ x 12½ inches, after a painting by Harry Fenn, engraved by S. V. Hunt, in Picturesque America, Vol. I, frontispiece  2

Maltby (80) shows the relevance of Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime to this passage of White Noise.

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iconic Kindred Spirits (1848), which depicts the American Romantic poet William Cullen Bryant and the painter Thomas Cole high in the Catskill Mountains. The many engravings included in Bryant’s own edition of the two-volume Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In (1872–74) provided ‘elaborate pictorial delineations’ of the country’s pristine natural beauty, including, of course, Niagara Falls (Bryant iii). But its naturalist imagery no longer represents an ‘American environment’ in the age of post-industrialisation. The content of the toxic cloud in White Noise is not predominantly water vapour but an indescribable soup of man-made chemical compounds. Frank C. Moore’s Niagara (1994–95) provides the postmodern correlative to the natural sublime. Onto the waters and mist of the Horseshoe Falls he has silkscreened the chemical formulae for benzene and other contaminants, seen from the perspective of the videographer in the foreground on Table Rock. It’s The Most Photographed Falls in the World! Mark Osteen points out, in his critical edition of the novel, that the publication of White Noise followed shortly after the Bhopal disaster in India on 3 December 1984, in which methyl isocyanate (a component of pesticides such as the fictional Nyodene D) was released from a Union Carbide plant, killing more than 2,500 people (‘Introduction’ vii). Jack relies on a model of the natural sublime elaborated in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy, literature and the arts to describe the indescribable. When large-scale forces of destruction are the product of industrial toxicity, DeLillo’s presentation of the postmodern sublime must be self-conscious, a function of irony. Once we stood awe-struck before the deathdealing, uncontrollable forces of Nature, as for example in the drowning of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Gulf of Spezia in 1822, whose beach cremation was famously depicted by Louis Édouard Fournier in his painting, The Funeral of Shelley (1889). Now humanity wreaks far more deadly revenge on the natural ecology. Jack’s nostalgia for the natural sublime makes him ill at ease with the appearance of a manufactured, technological sublime.3 Perhaps the sickly-sweet smell of sublimity substitute disturbs him. Saccharine, NutraSweet, Aspartame. This is ‘death made in the laboratory’. Still, he recognises the transition from natural to artificial experience. He is, after all, a department head. The experience of an artificial sublime maintains a structural similarity with its original formulation. When he is examined by the SIMUVAC technician, Jack generates a ‘massive database tally’ due to his brief exposure to Nyodene D (White Noise 141). Yet the surfeit of digital data cannot be parsed into meaning. The Airborne Toxic Event – a euphemism of ‘state-created terminology’ (117) that avoids the more descriptive term ‘disaster’ – remains inexpressible. The computer processes technological data but fails to describe the effect that exposure will have on Jack’s mortality. This episode serves as an instance of DeLillo’s critique of an overbearing information society. DeLillo maintains authorial distance from his first-person narrator through irony. The prospect for political critique lies in the gap or fissure that opens between the two perspectives. The knowing smirk with which DeLillo invites the reader to greet Jack’s foolishness enlists that reader in an examination of the uncritical reliance on ‘advanced technology’ and its handlers’ assurances. Although Jack regards his experience of the

 3

Tabbi considers how a paranoid response to the threat of technology gives rise to an expression of the technological sublime in DeLillo, Pynchon, Joseph McElroy and Norman Mailer.

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Figure 20.2  Frank C. Moore (American, 1953–2002), Niagara, 1994–95, oil on canvas over wood panel with copper frame, 60 x 96 1/4 inches (152.4 x 244.48 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; General Purchase Funds, 1995 (1995:2). © Estate of Frank Moore/Gesso Foundation. Photo: Tom Loonan and Brenda Bieger for Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Courtesy Gesso Foundation and Sperone Westwater, New York, Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York



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toxic cloud as bordering on the religious, DeLillo regards the event as a sacrilegious violation of the natural order of things. Carbon dioxide emissions and climate change, genetically modified crops such as glyphosate-resistant corn and wheat, BGH-treated livestock, mountaintop removal mining, fracking and underground nuclear testing are awe-inspiring indeed, not for what they teach of humility before the power of nature, but for the devastation that they enable humanity to wreak on the environment. The postmodern sublime in DeLillo acknowledges the transition from nature to technology as the basis of anthropocentric experience. But it is always a negative sublime – the ironic presentation of negative presentation – in which the grounds for critique are made operative. To be inspired by that which might destroy us befits Kant’s natural sublime; to critique ironically our newly realised power for self-destruction is postmodern.

Mao II; or, the Sublimity of the Image The multiple silkscreens of Chairman Mao that dot the dust-jacket of Mao II (1991) glow like pixels on a television or computer monitor, the various hues in red, green and blue resolved by the eye into a single image. Kodak’s George Eastman House in Rochester, NY (which doubles as a museum of the history of photography and a now bankrupt corporation’s preservation of its founder’s personal effects) displays composite portraits that are generated using images selected and combined by computer algorithms. Andy Warhol’s serigraph series Mao (1972–74) likewise turns variegation into singularity. Robert Hughes charges that Warhol ‘loved the peculiarly inert sameness of the mass product: an infinite series of identical objects’ that render ‘sameness within glut’ (348). On this point the Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson agrees with the Australian art critic: ‘Warhol’s work in fact turns centrally around commodification, and the great billboard images of the Coca-Cola bottle or the Campbell’s soup can, which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements’ (Postmodernism 9). In his analysis of Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (1980), however, Jameson argues that Warhol’s art is complicit with consumer capitalism and fails to render the powerful critique that an appropriation of advertising media might provide. The Mao series reproduces the official state portrait of a world leader. Must it too be void of political statement, and if so, how would Warhol accomplish this feat? A political critique of advertising media, such as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) billboard campaign, ‘Got Cancer?’, appropriating the image of prostate cancer sufferer, art censor and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani in a parody of the American Dairy Association’s campaign, ‘Got Milk?’, has to function as parody with a unidirectional reading of the source text or image (first-order representation); there is only one correct interpretation of the parody’s (second-order representation) political intent.4 The ‘original’ image depicts healthy individuals drinking milk; its parodic ‘copy’ contends that the use of bovine growth hormone in dairy cattle can have adverse health effects: ‘Studies show a link between drinking cow’s milk and prostate cancer.’ Warhol’s Mao is obviously not a unidirectional parody, but neither

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PETA subsequently apologised for the unauthorised use of Giuliani’s image but did not retract the billboard advertisement’s claim that a link between BGH-treated cow’s milk and increased risk for prostate cancer in men was established in clinical studies (Lueck).

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can it be relegated to the category of pastiche, or ‘blank parody’, to which Jameson assigns much postmodern art; that is, ‘a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter’ (Postmodernism 17). If that were the case – that the series is mere pastiche devoid of political repercussions – how to explain the fact that the Mao portraits in a retrospective exhibition of 300 works, Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal (curated by the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh), were specifically banned from display in Shanghai and Beijing by China’s Ministry of Culture in 2012 (Cohen). Rather, Warhol’s series musters a bidirectional critique as both representation and reflexivity that participates in the postmodern irony of presentation. The state portrait of Mao is as ubiquitous in China as advertisements for consumer products are in the West. Warhol recognises that billboard-sized posters of Mao reinforce the authority of the state. The first American ‘popular art’, such as Stuart Davis’s Odol (1924) and Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928), utilise (and do not merely mimic) the graphic style of the advertising poster. State portrait and advertising billboard collapse into media type. The billboard debases Mao’s image from that of world leader to celebrity pitchman for a distinctive, if somewhat drab, couture; or, our collection of Mao posters is like a souvenir from a study-abroad semester. Or, again, the political adversary is rendered as an affable Asian tourist in New York City with a garishly coloured visage, a minstrel mockery of the former leader of the world’s most populous nation. On the other hand, Warhol inserts Mao’s official portrait, icon of the communist system of governance, into the graphical code of consumer advertisement. Mao’s screen-printed, ambivalently beneficent and reproachful gaze subtly corrodes the object of consumer capitalism: unquestioning ‘brand loyalty’ to ‘M’m! M’m! Good!’ Campbell’s soup. Mao’s demands for allegiance from the masses and corporate America’s demands for brand loyalty from consumers are conflated. Warhol’s Mao series is neither a parody of the state portrait nor the advertising billboard; rather it is a bidirectional critique of both media. Jameson takes Warhol as representative of the ‘waning of affect in postmodern culture’ (Postmodernism 10), the leeching of feeling and emotion in postmodernity – especially those affects related to racial, class and economic injustices – and the collapse of critical distance between the artist and his subject. The bidirectional critique that I describe in Warhol’s Mao series is usually mistaken for indifference towards its subject. Hughes, usually blunt in his criticism, states that ‘Warhol projected an ironic and affectless cool, which let everything be itself’ (346). Warhol’s rendering of Mao is not a caustic parody, though Osteen rightly observes that the painting-over of Mao’s portrait in clownish colours ‘would in other circumstances be called vandalism and in China would be harshly punished’.5 Descrying the irony in Warhol’s portraits, or even

 5

Mark Osteen’s comment on the political context within which Warhol’s Mao would be regarded as vandalism or protest – i.e., in communist China rather than in New York – appears in the journal version of his essay, ‘Becoming Incorporated: Spectacular Authorship and DeLillo’s Mao II’, but not in the version subsequently published in American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. When I presented an earlier and different reading of Mao II at Fudan University in Shanghai on 4 June 2009, displaying images of Warhol’s Mao series was regarded as apostasy. Ironically, my talk was held on the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June 1989. My host told me privately that the total absence of representation of that day in Chinese media, its sublime unpresentability, would only be lifted when all those officials associated with the decision to forcibly put down the protest were dead.

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the degree to which his political affect has waned, may be the chief challenge to the critic of his work. In DeLillo’s Mao II we have something like a third-order representation of Mao’s image: not the official state portrait; not Warhol’s florid painting-over of the silkscreened photograph; but a description of the series hanging in a museum in New York City. Scott Martineau, personal assistant to the reclusive novelist Bill Gray, drops in to have a look at the Warhols: Scott had never seen work that was so indifferent to the effect it had on those who came to see it. The walls looked off to heaven in a marvelous flat-eyed gaze. He stood before a silk screen called Crowd. The image was irregular, deep streaks marking the canvas, and it seemed to him that the crowd itself, the vast mesh of people was being riven by some fleeting media catastrophe. He moved along and stood finally in a room filled with images of Chairman Mao. Photocopy Mao, silk-screen Mao, wallpaper Mao, synthetic-polymer Mao. A series of silk screens was installed over a broader surface of wallpaper serigraphs, the Chairman’s face a pansy purple here, floating nearly free of its photographic source. Work that was unwitting of history appealed to Scott. He found it liberating. Had he ever realized the deeper meaning of Mao before he saw these pictures? (Mao II 20–1) In the same way that DeLillo offers an ironic presentation of Jack Gladney’s experience of the postmodern sublime, so he presents Scott’s favourable appraisal of Warhol’s Mao series in an ironic fashion. If one asserts that Warhol’s work is ‘indifferent’ to its subject, then it is resolutely apolitical. If one asserts that it is ‘indifferent to the effect’ it has on the spectator, then one can claim only that it lacks agency. Hughes contends that Warhol’s images of electric chairs, car crashes and movie stars have one subject in common: ‘the condition of being an uninvolved spectator’ (351). Prior to entering the museum, Scott watches impassively while a homeless, and possibly deranged, man is escorted from a bookstore by security personnel for wanting to autograph ‘his’ books. An impostor author, but at least one who still desires to leave a personal imprint on his handiwork. After leaving the museum, Scott hurries to evade a bizarre woman who attempts to bequeath him a stray animal. ‘Just another New York moment’ (Mao II 20). Survival in New York requires a studied indifference, and Warhol serves as Scott’s instructor. In contrast to Scott’s indifference, the novelist Bill Gray ventures out of seclusion to participate in a reading for an unknown Swiss poet and UN worker taken hostage in Beirut – a symbolic political act, but one taken at significant personal risk. DeLillo himself delivered a short talk, ‘The Artist Naked in a Cage’, on 13 May 1997 at the New York Public Library’s ‘Stand-In for Wei Jingsheng’, organised to protest the author Wei’s imprisonment and human rights abuses in China generally.6 DeLillo here offers both a presentation and a critique of postmodern culture. Scott finds the gaily coloured serigraphs appealing because they are liberated from historical narrative. The bright smears of paint render the post-war conflict between systems of political economy as a depthless surface, a free-floating signifier. DeLillo, however, does not share Scott’s sense of relief at this feat, stating in similar language that he is disturbed by Warhol’s ability to flatten his subject, ‘liberating it from history’ (‘An Interview’ 96).

 6

DeLillo’s talk was subsequently published in the New Yorker, 26 May 1997, pp. 6–7.

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Warhol’s silkscreen series combines two media: the mechanical reproduction of a photograph of Mao Zedong that never changes (representation); and a painterly surface that has been described as ‘deliberately artless’, refusing to stay within the lines of the portrait, calling attention in its variation to the wash of colour itself (reflexivity). Scott misreads the painterly surface as an unwitting, or naïve, emptying of the political affect of the portrait. But that is in fact not the case. Linda Hutcheon remarks that such works move ‘toward a critical return to history and politics through – not despite – metafictional self-consciousness and parodic intertextuality. This is the postmodernist paradox, a “use and abuse” of history’ (61). Warhol both appropriates and manipulates Mao Zedong’s image, using and abusing history. DeLillo presents Scott’s false epiphany of the ‘deeper meaning’ of Mao as a symptom of postmodern culture, and he critiques any embrace of postmodernity that precludes political affect. Jameson objects that the ‘waning of affect’ in postmodernism is more evident in its presentation of the human figure, so that the ‘commodification of objects holds as strongly for Warhol’s human subjects: stars – like Marilyn Monroe – who are themselves commodified and transformed into their own images’ (Postmodernism 11). DeLillo appears to agree with this assessment, remarking, ‘In the same way that soup is packaged, Warhol packages his Maos, his Marilyn Monroes, and his Elvis Presleys’ (‘An Interview’ 97). Hughes credits Daniel Boorstin with the quip that the celebrity is ‘famous for being famous – nothing else; hence his gratuitousness and disposability’ (346). DeLillo understands the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’, but whereas Jameson accuses postmodern art of total complicity with commodification, DeLillo employs irony and intertextuality in Mao II to simultaneously demonstrate and critique the association of postmodernity with commodification. Warhol’s seriality deliberately adopts the techniques of marketing and mass production, and DeLillo worries that when ‘the images are identical to each other consumerism and the mass production of art in their most explicit form take over’ (‘An Interview’ 97). In a passage that partly explains the novel’s title, Scott gives his partner Karen ‘a reproduction of a pencil drawing called Mao II’ that he purchases in New York. Karen observes, It was by a famous painter whose name she could never remember but he was famous, he was dead, he had a white mask of a face and glowing white hair. Or maybe he was just supposed to be dead. Scott said he didn’t seem dead because he never seemed real. Andy. That was it. (Mao II 62) As the reproduction of reproductions, Warhol’s works are instantly convertible into kitsch souvenirs. And ‘Andy’ himself becomes a simulacrum, a copy for which there is no original. As print became increasingly supplanted by televisual and digital media in the postwar years, the writer who once dreamed of shifting the cultural zeitgeist with a single book, like Bill Gray in Mao II, must consider whether absorption by global capitalism and information technology is inevitable, or whether it is possible to maintain a resistant, if marginalised, position in media culture. In his interview with Anthony DeCurtis, DeLillo states that he has ‘an idea of what it’s like to be an outsider in this society’ (‘An Outsider’ 50). He recognises the totalising convergence of global capital and media networks, and yet he takes up the near impossible task of providing an objective correlative, which can never be a presentation of the monstrous whole that is

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media culture, but which can, in the minds of readers who are subject to its excesses, actualise the conception of it. In his latest novel, The Silence (2020), DeLillo returns in his pared-down late style to a Zen meditation on the hold that screens and technology have over us. He tells David Marchese that he began with ‘the idea of a blank screen’ (‘We All Live in Don DeLillo’s World’). Whether the existential crisis of our dependence on technology in the twenty-first century arrives as the result of a cyber-warfare attack, an extreme electromagnetic pulse from sources unknown, or the failure of the grid that cradles us in its embrace, the mortality of our race will be figured in this profound and instantaneous loss of signal. Once we might have mourned the death of Shelley in a storm at sea and all the poetry that he had yet to write, swallowed up in his heroic and yet unrecorded experience of the natural sublime. Now like Jim Kripps and his wife Tessa Berens on a transatlantic flight from Paris to New York, we fall out of the sky as the overhead screens go blank in collective submission to the technological sublime. Although we have passed out of nature and into a construct of our own electronic devices, our attraction to sublimity must be tempered by a critical and lifepreserving awe of its terrible beauty.

Works Cited Bryant, William Cullen. Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In. D. Appleton, 1872–74. Cohen, Patricia. ‘Warhol’s Mao Portraits Banned from a Show in China.’ New York Times, 24 December 2012. artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/warhols-mao-portraits-bannedfrom-a-show-in-china/. Accessed 26 July 2017. DeLillo, Don. ‘The Artist Naked in a Cage.’ New Yorker, 26 May 1997, pp. 6–7. ——. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ Interview with Maria Nadotti. Salmagundi, 100, fall 1993. ——. Mao II. Penguin, 1991. ——. ‘“An Outsider in This Society”: An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ Interview with Anthony DeCurtis. Introducing Don DeLillo, edited by Frank Lentricchia. Duke University Press, 1991. ——. The Silence. Scribner, 2020. ——. ‘We All Live in Don DeLillo’s World. He’s Confused by It Too.’ Interview with David Marchese. New York Times Magazine, 12 October 2020. www.nytimes.com/interactive/ 2020/10/12/magazine/don-delillo-interview.html. Accessed 18 July 2022. ——. White Noise. Penguin, 1985. Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. ——. ‘Hamlet and His Problems.’ The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. Methuen, 1920, pp. 87–94. Forster, E. M. Howards End. 1910. Edited by David Lodge. Penguin, 2000. Hennenberg, Julian. ‘“Something Extraordinary Hovering Just Outside Our Touch”: The Technological Sublime in Don DeLillo’s White Noise.’ as|peers: emerging voices in american studies, 4, 2011. www.aspeers.com/2011/henneberg. Accessed 18 July 2022. Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. Knopf, 1991. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. Routledge, 1989. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991. ——. ‘Totality as Conspiracy.’ The Jameson Reader, edited by Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Blackwell, 2000, pp. 340–58. Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford University Press, 1999.

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Lueck, Thomas J. ‘PETA Offers an Apology to Giuliani for Milk Ads.’ New York Times, 2 September 2000. nytimes.com/2000/09/02/nyregion/peta-offers-an-apology-to-giuliani-formilk-ads.html. Accessed 26 July 2017. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ——. ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde.’ The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin. Blackwell, 1989, pp. 196–211. Maltby, Paul. The Visionary Moment: A Postmodern Critique. SUNY Press, 2002. Osteen, Mark. ‘Becoming Incorporated: Spectacular Authorship and DeLillo’s Mao II.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 45, no. 3, 1999, pp. 643–74. ——. ‘Introduction.’ White Noise: Text and Criticism, edited by Mark Osteen. Penguin, 1998. Tabbi, Joseph. Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk. Cornell University Press, 1995.

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21 Screening Fundamentalism, Fanaticism and Terrorism in Don DeLillo’s Post-9/11 Fiction Liliana M. Naydan

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s Don DeLillo suggests in a 15 April 2003 Los Angeles Times interview with David L. Ulin, terror ‘is now the world narrative, unquestionably’. Describing the attacks of 9/11 in the same interview, DeLillo observes that ‘[w]hen those two buildings were struck, and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an extraordinary blow to consciousness, and it changed everything’ – even though, or perhaps because, most Americans only witnessed the attacks on television (‘Finding Reason’). In a notably digitising world at the onset of what Thomas L. Friedman terms ‘Globalization 3.0’ (10), there exists a knot that binds not just ‘novelists and terrorists’, to cite DeLillo’s words from his fin de millénaire novel, Mao II (41). There also exists a knot that binds screen culture (which invites non-religious and non-terrorist fanaticism) with terrorism (which regularly gets conflated with fundamentalism, or devout textual literalism) and with religious or terrorist fanaticism. As DeLillo intimates in ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, a December 2001 Harper’s essay on the 9/11 terrorist attacks that focuses heavily on the subject of digitisation, ‘Technology is our fate, our truth. It is what we mean when we call ourselves the only superpower on the planet. The materials and methods we devise make it possible for us to claim our future’ (37). And as DeLillo continues, notably invoking religious language on which fundamentalist believers rely, ‘We don’t have to depend on God or the prophets or other astonishments. We are the astonishment. The miracle is what we ourselves produce, the systems and networks that change the way we live and think’ (37). This chapter explores the complicated knot that binds fundamentalism, fanaticism, terrorism and screen culture in Don DeLillo’s literary fiction of the twenty-first century, an era that cultural critics have simultaneously termed the age of terror and the digital age. Through readings of ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ (2001), Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man (2007), ‘Hammer and Sickle’ (2010), Point Omega (2010), ‘The Starveling’ (2011) and The Silence (2020), I argue that DeLillo critiques post-9/11 screens (for instance, television and cinema screens) for the ways in which they encourage Americans to see fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism as external Islamic threats. Screens prime Americans to see an excess of these phenomena and feel as though they understand them as a result. In turn, DeLillo suggests that these complex phenomena exist in home-grown varieties that Americans fail to see fully, despite or perhaps because of the intensely visual culture in which they live. For instance, he

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draws attention to the fanatical veneration of screens. He also draws attention to market fundamentalism, a complement to religious fundamentalism that arguably fuels international hostility towards America. Ultimately, he implicates screen culture in the problematic polarisation of American society that resulted after 9/11 amid widespread corporate claims of vast interconnection through digitisation and globalisation. Through his aesthetic critique, he invites Americans to deepen their understandings of economic inequality and enduring imperialist impulses as social problems that contribute to this polarisation. He invites them to see and try to screen out market fundamentalist ideology and corporate media and to integrate social responsibility into the twenty-first-century American narrative. In the process, he reinvigorates literary fiction as a revolutionary force in seemingly post-text, visual times. * * * For DeLillo, the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 function, paradoxically, as highly visible and yet incomprehensible events – ones that most Americans witnessed through the circumscribed, flattened and aestheticised perspective of television. To reference John Updike’s 24 September 2001 contribution to the New Yorker about 9/11, ‘the destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers’ had ‘the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception’ (28). In other words, 9/11 was an event made for television, a point towards which the controversial artist Damien Hirst gestured when he observed in a 10 September 2002 Guardian interview with Rebecca Allison that the attacks were ‘devised visually’. As a result, as DeLillo suggests in ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, 9/11 ‘dominated the medium’ of television (38). Yet, as DeLillo remarked to Ulin in 2003, terrorism such as the attack on the World Trade Center exists ‘outside the absorption machinery’ (‘Finding Reason’). It produces an effect that resembles the one that manifested following the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald. It results in obsessive replay and enchantment of an unsettling sort, and also in persistent mystery of the kind that John McClure theorises in ‘DeLillo and Mystery’. As McClure argues, ‘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’ (167). Indeed, the 9/11 terrorist attacks become staples of twenty-first-century televisual replay and subconscious post-traumatic rumination, much as the Kennedy and Oswald assassinations were in the twentieth century. Just as Beryl Parmenter watches news footage of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald ‘[o]ver and over’ and just as CIA archivist Nicholas Branch studies the Zapruder frames of Kennedy’s assassination in Libra (445), characters in Falling Man (representative of early twenty-first-century Americans) make ‘mechanical’ the ‘horror’ of history, to appropriate the narrator’s words from Libra (447). Lianne Glenn, the estranged wife of 9/11 survivor Keith, ‘kept on watching’ footage of 9/11 despite feeling an impulse to stop (Falling Man 134), suggesting that there exists repetition in her life that echoes what Joseph M. Conte calls a structural ‘retrograde loop’ in Falling Man (Conte 568). And like Parmenter and Branch, Lianne fails to come to a clear understanding of the violent act that she incessantly replays, despite her repeated watching of it. DeLillo suggests that the highly visible, aesthetic and yet incomprehensible 9/11 terrorist attacks are a symptom of a period in history that is defined by knowing more and

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understanding less, to quote part of the subtitle of Michael Patrick Lynch’s The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data.1 And 9/11 leads Americans to limited understandings of fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism, phenomena that take on a notably Islamic aesthetic in post-9/11 American life. DeLillo reflects those limited understandings through his representation of the psychology of the fanatical, fundamentalist, Islamic terrorist Hammad in three vignettes in the novel Falling Man. Hammad is an outsider to American culture, which DeLillo characterises as a largely white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture in accord with Philip Roth’s characterisation of it. Hammad is an Islamic Other who white Christian Americans might fail to understand, perhaps feel curious about, and might benefit from understanding. DeLillo represents Hammad as opposing all things Western, echoing in fictional form the terrorist versus American binary that President George W. Bush helped to put in place. As Bush indicated in his televised 20 September 2001 address to an audience of Congress and the world, ‘[e]ither you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’. Like Bush, Hammad thinks in binary terms, viewing the West as ‘twisted’ and ‘corrupt of mind and body, determined to shiver Islam down to bread crumbs for birds’ (Falling Man 79), and therefore deserving of the attack that he helps to perpetrate after he boards American Airlines Flight 11 in Boston. Similarly, DeLillo acknowledges the polarising post-9/11 rhetoric of us versus them in ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, broadening the terms of the American versus terrorist binary to involve technology, modernity and religion. As DeLillo asks, acknowledging the problematic existence of distinctions between insiders to American culture and Islamic outsiders to it, If others in less scientifically advanced cultures were able to share, wanted to share, some of the blessings of our technology, without a threat to their faith or traditions, would they need to rely on a God in whose name they kill the innocent? Would they need to invent a God who rewards violence against the innocent [. . .]? (37–8) And as he continues, ‘For all those who may want what we’ve got, there are those who do not’ (38). DeLillo complements his representation of post-9/11 binaristic thinking with often screened (as in less mediated, less visible, or invisible) representations of post-9/11 American life that speak to Amy Hungerford’s discussion of his Catholicism2 and subvert the problematic binaries that fuel Islamophobia. For instance, in Falling Man, DeLillo showcases non-fanatical, counter-fundamentalist and non-terrorist varieties of religious experience (to appropriate the title of William James’s seminal work on religion). He reveals religious experiences that counter the idea that, in Karen Armstrong’s

 1

According to Lynch, ‘Information technology, while expanding our ability to know in one way, is actually impeding our ability to know in other, more complex ways; ways that require 1) taking responsibility for our own beliefs and 2) working creatively to grasp and reason how information fits together’ (6). As a result, as Lynch explains, ‘information technologies, for all their amazing uses, are obscuring a simple yet crucial fact: greater knowledge doesn’t always bring with it greater understanding’ (6).  2 In ‘Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass’, which focuses on DeLillo’s Libra, Mao II and The Names, Amy Hungerford argues that DeLillo ‘transfers a version of mysticism from the Catholic context into the literary one [. . .] through the model of the Latin mass’ (343). As Hungerford explains, critics of the Latin Mass describe it as involving ‘“screens” and “barriers” and lack of transparent meaning’ (357).

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words, fundamentalists are ‘fighting for the survival of their faith in a world that is inherently hostile to religion’ and ‘conducting a war against secular modernity’ (vii). DeLillo draws attention to the ways in which religious experience pervades everyday modern life, despite efforts such as Lianne’s ‘to snuff out the pulse’ of ‘shaky faith’ (Falling Man 65). The world of DeLillo’s novel shows signs of the sacred, for instance in a laundry room that resembles a ‘monk’s cell with a pair of giant prayer wheels beating out a litany’ (151), and believers locate their faith between the poles of fundamentalist devotion and staunch secularism in the novel. For example, Hammad appears to be a hypocritical fundamentalist as he steps ‘over the prone form of a brother in prayer’ to make ‘his way to the toilet to jerk off’ (80). Lianne is equally hypocritical as a secularist, given that in church, she feels ‘stuck with her doubts’ but also feels ‘a sense of others’ and the notion that ‘[c]hurch brings us closer’ (233). For her, a connection with God remains ‘possible’ through people as opposed to a holy place, and thus through unconventional means (236), as it does in the world of ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, which concludes with a poignant representation of a modernised Muslim-American experience. In the final paragraphs of his essay, DeLillo portrays a Muslim believer who discerns the location of Mecca by using the Manhattan street grid. And in representing her sunset prayer on her prayer rug amid the bustle of Canal Street, DeLillo underscores the hybridity of New York – the ways in which the ‘city will accommodate every language, ritual, belief, and opinion’ (‘In the Ruins’ 40). He underscores the ways in which religion and modernity can and do coexist in harmonious interplay. For DeLillo, home-grown American varieties of fundamentalism complement Islamic fundamentalism as Americans fixate on it because of media representations and a culture of constant and aestheticised replay on screens. Most notably, DeLillo draws his readers’ attention to what numerous cultural critics have termed economic or market fundamentalism, a non-religious form of fundamentalism that involves the deification of global capitalism and, according to Malise Ruthven, ‘deregulation and tight fiscal restraints on the economies of developing nations, with dire consequences for the poorest sections of society’ (21). Slavoj Žižek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates compares ‘international terrorist organizations’ with ‘big multinational corporations’, intimating that 9/11 constitutes what Tariq Ali calls a ‘clash of fundamentalisms’ (47). Žižek deconstructs the East– West binary, observing that ‘the global capitalist liberalism which opposes Muslim fundamentalism is itself a mode of fundamentalism’ (65). He and cultural critics like him, including Jacques Derrida, whom Žižek cites as discussing the ubiquity of guilt following 9/11, thereby reallocate culpability for the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Žižek 72). They gesture towards the notion that Western economic policies create conditions that contribute to the rise of terrorist organisations such as al Qaeda, which targeted the Twin Towers because they functioned as great symbols of capitalism. To quote the narrator in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 9/11 was a spectacle in large part because of ‘the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees’ (73). DeLillo suggests that market fundamentalism is a phenomenon that thrives because of screen-obsessed market fundamentalists while also producing these fundamentalists. And he positions Cosmopolis, the first novel he published after 9/11, as his most sustained meditation on the subject of market fundamentalism. He exposes its connection to screen culture and religious fundamentalism through his representation of the esoteric

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behaviours of Eric Packer, a 28-year-old billionaire protagonist who spends most of his time looking at near-spiritual and notably art-like ‘medleys of data on every screen, all the flowing symbols and alpine charts, the polychrome numbers pulsing’ (Cosmopolis 13). In his technologically enhanced white limousine, Packer engages in risky acts of faith in the face of insufficient data, ignoring the logos-based advice of most of his advisors by single-mindedly and obsessively betting against the Japanese yen through digital means. He attempts to accrue capital by behaving as religious fundamentalists do when they engage in acts of faith that put a premium on myths that, for them, according to Armstrong, morph into ‘factual logoi, the only form of truth that many modern Western people could recognize’ (138). Packer, too, resembles single-minded religious fundamentalists in that he sustains an obsessive commitment to getting a haircut at his childhood barbershop, owned by Anthony Adubato, despite the US president’s visit to Manhattan and increased security measures due to a ‘credible threat’ against the president’s life (Cosmopolis 19). Like religious fundamentalists, who obsess over ‘Bible prophesy’ as ‘history written in advance’, to quote the pastor from the first Left Behind novel, Packer is obsessed with re-enacting the movie-like script of his history and sits in hours of gridlocked traffic on Manhattan’s 47th Street to do so (LaHaye and Jenkins 214). While at Adubato’s shop, he watches history play out much as religious fundamentalists believe they see scripture – a blueprint for God’s plan – play out in an ever-apocalyptic present. As the narrator explains, ‘Eric knew what the man would say when he opened the door’ upon his arrival (Cosmopolis 160). And while there, Packer hears the same story of his father contracting and dying from cancer that he has heard ‘a number of times’ in nearly ‘the same words’ (161). DeLillo likewise shows the ways in which market fundamentalism intersects with the fanaticism that forms in relation to screen culture. In ‘Hammer and Sickle’, a December 2010 Harper’s short story, he portrays the disconnected experiences of 38-year-old Jerold (Jerry) Bradway, a market fundamentalist who resembles Packer, who has been convicted of fraud and who is serving time in a minimum-security prison for white-collar criminals. Incarceration in large part isolates him from screens of the kind that pervade Packer’s corporate life. Bradway is left ‘staring into empty hands’ as opposed to a cell phone, and feeling that ‘[e]verything seemed flat’ – notably like a flat digital screen (‘Hammer and Sickle’ 68, 70). As a result, a wall-mounted flat-screen television located in his dorm’s common room appeals to him. He visits it ritually on weekdays at four in the afternoon to watch his 10-year-old daughter Laurie and his 12-year-old daughter Kate read and poeticise a market report of the kind that he venerates. They do so in a faux news broadcast on a children’s channel. Through the rhetorically ambiguous broadcast, his daughters themselves become objects of veneration and the only ‘faith or truth’ that Bradway perceives (65). The girls prophesy ‘[e]nd-of-the-world bad’ economic collapse (73). They mystify the Muslim world against which the United States conducts its War on Terror through word games. And they reveal the mechanised means by which global capitalism as a system works, much as cars on the highway below Bradway’s prison move in ‘implicit accord’ (74). They lead DeLillo’s readers to wonder whether they have playful intentions or not. Readers also wonder (as Bradway’s fellow inmate Norman suggests) whether the girls’ mother is using them to confront Bradway with his crime and his agency in America’s decline. Indeed, DeLillo intimates that because of the capitalist system that market fundamentalists such as Bradway fuel – a system that is evocative of the many systems that Tom

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LeClair sees as giving shape to DeLillo’s oeuvre3 – America exists as a wasteland in which schools close ‘because the county’ lacks ‘resources to maintain them’ (‘Hammer and Sickle’ 66); employers ‘[s]crew the worker’ (69); and Americans such as Bradway are left with no alternative but to breathe ‘the fumes of free enterprise forever’ (74). DeLillo’s representations of the interplay of screen culture and market fundamentalism speak to his representations of religious or terrorist fanaticism and fanaticism as fandom of the kind that the mass media tapped into on 9/11. As Amy Reynolds and Brooke Barnett intimate in ‘“America under Attack”: CNN’s Verbal and Visual Framing of September 11’, the news media made an aesthetic spectacle of 9/11, for instance showing fifty minutes straight of ‘live images of the World Trade Center towers burning and smoking from a variety of angles and distances’ (97). And as DeLillo suggests in Point Omega, Americans love the look of screen-based spectacles and venerate them – even when they fuel Islamophobia and American nationalism of unsettling proportions. In the frame tale of Point Omega, which takes place in the noteworthy month of September five years after 9/11, DeLillo aestheticises Americans’ disconcerting fascination with screens in general and with screen-based violence in particular by representing an unnamed man’s obsession with Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho. The man’s fandom is apparent through his ritualistic trips to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. He goes there to see the 1993 art installation, which slows down Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller Psycho to a speed of two frames per second as opposed to the typical twenty-four, on a large, translucent screen around which viewers can walk. His fandom, too, serves as critical commentary on the kind of peculiar fandom that characterised the American masses who watched mesmerised as the towers fell on 9/11. It points to the perverse ways in which violence of the kind that Psycho showcases occupies the American imagination as mysteries of faith occupy the imagination of religious believers, especially Catholics, or apparently lapsed Catholics such as DeLillo. It also points to the ways in which seeing violence on screen creates a paradox for viewers. On the one hand, in the narrator’s words, the ‘film’s merciless pacing had no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness’, and ‘[t]he less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw’ (Point Omega 5). On the other hand, the man ‘kept feeling things whose meaning escaped him’ because regardless of the ‘pious effort’ that he demonstrates, he is implicated in the widespread ‘shallow habit of seeing’ that DeLillo critiques in the digital age (11, 13, 13). DeLillo’s critique of superficial ways of viewing near-ubiquitous and inherently aesthetic screens in the digital age functions as a critique of apathy and inaction after 9/11 in the face of authoritarian and xenophobic actions by a conservative American government. In part, this apathy is evident in the frame tale of Point Omega, as ‘tourists in a daze’ shuffle into and out of the gallery with a peculiar mindlessness (3). To appropriate the words of Jessie Elster, DeLillo’s critique of apathy is part and parcel of the ‘whole point of nothing happening’ in Point Omega (47). In other words, DeLillo perhaps showcases nothing happening in the novella because not enough happens

 3

As Tom LeClair argues in In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel, DeLillo’s ‘orientation toward the world, as well as toward fiction, is influenced by and parallels the ideas of “systems theory”, a contemporary scientific paradigm that concentrates on the reciprocal – looping – communications of ecological systems (including man)’ (xi).

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in life after 9/11. Americans fail to flex the muscle of their citizenship in meaningful ways, opting instead for the passivity of gazing near-endlessly at the screens that surround them and that also screen them from meaning and engagement. This critique of apathy and inaction is also evident in DeLillo’s ‘The Starveling’, a story in which, to quote its narrator, ‘[t]here is a kind of uneventfulness that resembles meditation’ (183). In ‘The Starveling’, DeLillo juxtaposes the overweight, inactive and notably ‘literal-minded’ and ‘monkish’ middle-aged protagonist Leo Zhelezniak with Flory, an active albeit failed actress and radio announcer who is Zhelezniak’s ex-wife and flatmate (presumably because he is too lazy to move out) (194, 200). Zhelezniak, a literal and figurative glutton who consumes three to four movies in different cinemas daily, feels monotony in real life. He feels that ‘there was nothing much to see that had not been seen in previous hours, days, weeks and months’ (184). For him, nothing really happens in real life, so he opts against fully living it. By contrast, he sees movies, including violent ones such as Apocalypse Now (which he remembers watching over thirty years prior to the story’s present), as paradoxically filled with action even though he is inactive as he watches them. As the narrator remarks, ‘[d]ays were all the same, movies were not’ (186). And movies allow him to ‘see himself in another life’ instead of living his own life (193). Zhelezniak antecedes the devotees to blank screens in DeLillo’s The Silence, a near-future fiction about a paralysing, mysterious and widespread systems outage on Super Bowl Sunday in 2022. He has a quasi-fundamentalist and fanatical devotion to movies because they make his ‘moons of disquiet and melancholy [. . .] evaporate’ – even though they do the same to his capacity for meaningful agency in and engagement with the post-9/11 world in which he lives (‘The Starveling’ 186). In turn, DeLillo critiques home-grown as opposed to Islamic fanatical fundamentalist varieties of terrorism in post-9/11 fictional narratives that explore human relationships with screens. Most notably, in the narrative that complements Point Omega’s frame tale about the unnamed man, DeLillo portrays Iraq War strategist and ‘defense intellectual’ Richard Elster as a home-grown terrorist, revealing that terrorism is a matter of perspective much as the controversial Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro did when he identified former American President George W. Bush as a terrorist in March 2015 (Point Omega 28).4 In the novella, Elster acknowledges his post-9/11 American exceptionalist ideology and imperialism as his motivations for orchestrating a War on Terror that terrorised the Muslim world. In Elster’s words, ‘A great power has to act. We were struck hard. We need to retake the future. The force of will, the sheer visceral need. We can’t let others shape our world, our minds’ (30). Elster resists novice filmmaker Jim Finley’s efforts to persuade him to star in a documentary film that would resemble Errol Morris’s The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, perhaps because he sees that ways in which such a documentary would have power to counter mass-media frames of good and evil in the War on Terror. Like Morris’s award-winning documentary, which presents an unsettling portrayal of former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as a bad architect of an ill-thought-out, unnecessarily violent and imperialistic war in Vietnam, Finley’s film would have the potential to create a screenbased counternarrative to the narrative that the mass media propagate about the War on

 4

See Girish Gupta’s ‘Bush, Cheney Banned from Venezuela’, published on 4 March 2015 in USA Today, which quotes Maduro as accusing Bush and Cheney of ‘terrorism and grave human rights violations’.

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Terror. If made well, it would reveal Elster’s hypocrisy as a warmonger who hates violence and ‘won’t watch violent movies’ (50). And it could function to incriminate Elster, undermining his identity as an American hero and revealing the injustices of the second war in Iraq as a war that fights terrorism with terrorism of a sanctioned sort, a point that Noam Chomsky makes in 9-11: Was there an Alternative? In Chomsky’s words, ‘we should recognize that in much of the world the U.S. is regarded as a leading terrorist state, and with good reason’ because, for example, ‘in 1986 the U.S. was condemned by the World Court’ for ‘international terrorism’ (55). Furthermore, DeLillo showcases and critiques less political forms of home-grown terrorism, which, in his fiction, tend to take the form of violence – or at least the threat or possibility of violence – against women. For instance, in Point Omega, he generates speculation about the mysterious disappearance of Elster’s daughter Jessie, while figuratively screening his readers from any clear sense of the truth of what happens to her. He invites readers to imagine the possibility that the unnamed man from the frame tale feels inspired by his viewing of Norman Bates in 24 Hour Psycho and kills her. In other words, DeLillo invites readers to consider the validity of arguments such as the one that Craig A. Anderson, Douglas A. Gentile and Katherine E. Buckley make in Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents: the argument that there exists a correlation between ‘media violence’ and ‘increased aggression or violence’ in life (4). Along the same lines, DeLillo highlights home-grown terrorism in ‘The Starveling’, intimating that movie-watching shapes Zhelezniak as awkward and threatening in his real-world interactions. In the story, Zhelezniak poses a threat to the Starveling – the thin, unnamed serial moviegoer who emerges as the new and living object of Zhelezniak’s voyeuristic fanaticism. After stalking her around New York City, Zhelezniak follows her into a women’s bathroom in a cinema and paralyses her in a state of fear. In her paralysis, the Starveling resembles the unnamed woman of ‘Baader–Meinhof’, who is trapped in her own New York City apartment’s bathroom by an unnamed man who masturbates on her bed after she rejects him. In her paralysing fear, the Starveling is also evocative of fearful viewers of Hitchcock’s Psycho, Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, or 9/11 as a screenmediated event. And as Zhelezniak presents her with an awkward monologue about his assumptions of their affinity to one another, DeLillo’s readers must come to terms with the range of monsters that screens seemingly have power to make in real life. They must come to terms with terrorism and terror as hazy terms that, to quote the story’s narrator, encompass ‘whatever it was that was happening here’ (‘The Starveling’ 209). DeLillo’s presentation of less-screen-mediated forms of fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism as existing in a non-digital network of sorts helps him to give metaphorical screen time to an important counternarrative – the narrative that runs counter to the mainstream, mass-mediated and exceptionalist post-9/11 one about America and its place in the world. His presentation of them helps him develop a counternarrative that notably thrives in the largely unwebbed world of his literary fiction, which stands in juxtaposition to the webbed, flat world of digital screens. Specifically, DeLillo invites his readers to deepen and texturise their media-based understanding of globalisation, which is akin to fundamentalism in that it has religious origins,5 and which is defined

 5

In the words of Frank J. Lechner and John Boli in The Globalization Reader, ‘[l]ong before the current phase of globalization, religious communities globalized’ (387). And each ‘religion had its own kind of mobile messenger, each its own universal message, and each its own impulse to include new adherents’ (387).

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by Manfred B. Steger as ‘the myriad forms of connectivity and flows linking the local (and national) to the global’ and ‘the West to the East, and the North to the South’ (Steger 2). Although DeLillo acknowledges in ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ that there is a ‘utopian glow’ to ‘cyber-capital’, a term that comes to stand in for globalisation in his essay, his fiction works to expose the problem with ‘the surge of capital markets’ coming to dominate discourse, shape ‘global consciousness’ and render multinational corporations as perhaps ‘more vital and influential than governments’ (‘In the Ruins’ 33). His fiction works to expose the problem with globalisers’ values, which create a binaristic world of haves and have-nots, a world in which, as DeLillo puts it in ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, ‘[w]e are rich, privileged, and strong, but they’ – namely the terrorists – ‘are willing to die’ (34). Beyond simply fuelling terrorists’ anger towards the West and capitalism, globalisation as a phenomenon that relies on and generates digital screen culture creates injustices in DeLillo’s America – injustices that are not readily visible and that perhaps get purposefully screened out of mass-media representation, but injustices that DeLillo texturises through the art of fiction. Most notably, in the subtle backdrop of Cosmopolis, apparently good and hard-working people suffer because, as Jung-Suk Hwang suggests in an analysis of the novel, ‘the utopian vision of cybercapitalism continues to produce the poor Other, while another U.S.-led vision – terror and the war on terrorism – turns global consciousness into anxiety and fear and produces more excluded Others who are labeled as potential and suspected terrorists’ (38). Likely as a result of impulses to capitalise on an underprivileged class, immigrants and people of colour such as Ibrahim Hamadou, the driver of Packer’s limousine, or Shifrin’s Sikh taxi driver, show bodily evidence of suffering. For example, Packer is fascinated by the foreign sight of Hamadou’s ‘collapsed eye’, which ‘twisted away from the nose’, and a ‘seam of scar tissue’ that ‘traversed the lid’ (Cosmopolis 163, 164). Shifrin’s taxi driver is ‘missing a finger’, having only a ‘stub’ that Packer regards as ‘impressive, a serious thing, a body ruin that carried history and pain’ of a kind that he seeks but fails to understand (17). As Martina Sciolino argues, ‘the self/other paradigm is not inflected as colonizer/colonized but as employer/employee, American financier/displaced professional, neocolonizer/immigrant. The novel’s imagery of whiteness connects violence to capital in particular ways that elucidate the neoliberal order of things’ (223). DeLillo also uses the art of his post-9/11 fiction to expose the ways in which, on occasion, human tools and beneficiaries of the capitalist system become victims of their own figurative devices in the age of literal digital devices and screens. For instance, in Cosmopolis, Richard Sheets, aka Benno Levin, moves up the social ladder in the United States when he leaves his position as an assistant professor of computer applications at a community college for a job as a currency analyst at and metaphorical tool of Packer Capital. Yet his inability to predict the behaviour of the Thai baht, which resembles Packer’s inability to predict the behaviour of the Japanese yen, leads to his professional and personal collapse, albeit not to the kind of broader economic collapse that Packer’s reckless betting against the yen seemingly helps cause. For reasons that are unclear, Levin loses his position at Packer Capital and his wife leaves him. He squats in an abandoned building in Hell’s Kitchen and contemplates murdering Packer, perhaps succeeding in his objective. And as he writes in his ‘Morning’ confession, ‘My life was not mine anymore’ (153). Even though he largely attempts to opt out of the global capitalist system, the system continues to own him because it owns everything and anything in the webbed world of DeLillo’s novel. Along the same

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lines, Zhelezniak in ‘The Starveling’ functions as a beneficiary of the capitalist system because he is able to live a slothful life of movie-watching ‘full-time’ after inheriting ‘his father’s bequest’ (200). He sees money as freeing him to ‘leave his job at the post office’, but in reality, money traps him in a vicious cycle, a meaningless existence in which ‘one day’s end’ collapsed ‘into the other’ (210). By contrast, DeLillo uses the art of fiction to showcase the ways in which criminals elude any real punishment in the globalised world because of their insider American status – because, to quote the narrator of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, an important post-9/11 literary work, they are, like those who gave birth to digital screen culture by ‘developing the dream of the ARPANET’, ‘[w]hite men, all’ (McCann 83). Indeed, ‘Hammer and Sickle’ showcases the problem with the American justice system, which, as evidenced by Bradway’s largely comfortable incarceration experience, fails to fully punish privileged white men. As the narrator describes it, the camp in which Bradway serves time is ‘not enclosed by stone walls or coiled razor wire’ but with ‘a scenic artifact’: a ‘set of old wooden posts that supported sagging rails’ (‘Hammer and Sickle’ 63). In addition, as the narrator continues, ‘There were four dormitories with bunk-bed cubicles, toilets, and showers. There were several structures to accommodate inmate orientation, meals, medical care, TV viewing, gym work, visits from family and others’ (63). Likewise, the conditions for arguable war criminals such as Elster in Point Omega are even more comfortable. Elster’s only punishment for orchestrating the second war in Iraq is his own apparent guilt for his actions, which manifests in the form of excessive consumption of alcohol in the California desert heat and obsessive rumination over the omega point of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s theological writings. In large part because he functions as the architect of systems that are designed to oppress Others to American culture, he never emerges as a victim of his own system in any formal sense. Ultimately, the real terror, for DeLillo, is a world governed by screens – the globalised, single-minded world towards which we move at a relentless pace and a world that terrorises the kind of print culture in which DeLillo continues to participate through crafting the art of fiction. Certainly, as a relative luddite who continues to write on his typewriter and who pointedly uses a typewriter-like typeface in The Silence to invoke the tension between the materiality of history and the virtuality of the digital age, DeLillo has no evident desire to ‘live permanently in the future’ as technophiles might want to live in it (‘In the Ruins’ 33). He likewise has no desire to ‘hold off the white-hot future’ as he thinks protesters against global capitalism desired and continue to desire to do (‘In the Ruins’ 34). And he has no apparent desire to ‘bring back the past’, as the 9/11 terrorists arguably desired to bring it back by toppling the Twin Towers and by attempting to topple America as a global superpower (‘In the Ruins’ 34). He seems to cast the collapse of technological connections in The Silence as apocalyptic not only because computers and smartphones fail and aeroplanes crash, but because purportedly evolved humanity is no longer equipped to live in the absence of technology, as best demonstrated by Max Stenner. Max ‘is not listening’ and ‘understands nothing’ as he ‘sits in front of the TV set with his hands folded behind his neck, elbows jutting’, staring ‘into the blank screen’ at the novella’s apocalyptic end (The Silence 116). Instead, DeLillo seems to recognise a transcendent nature of human interconnection in its various forms, which are both non-fanatically digital and non-digital. To quote the end of Underworld, genuine interconnection has the potential to become ‘a thing

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in the world’ beyond the limits of ‘a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen’ (827). It has the potential to supplant the illusion of connection that internet-based screen culture creates, particularly for digital fanatics who wholly fail to function without their devices and media. Fiction of the kind that DeLillo writes can function to connect readers in a vision of meaningful community. It can help them transcend the limits of apparently post-text times that appear to be governed by visual culture to see one another, and to unearth alternative, more meaningful and more responsible modes of living in the world, thus subverting the narrow visions of both technophiles and terrorists.

Works Cited Ali, Tariq. The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. Verso, 2002. Allison, Rebecca. ‘9/11 Wicked but a Work of Art, says Damien Hirst.’ The Guardian, 11 September 2002. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/sep/11/arts.september11. Accessed 27 February 2020. Anderson, Craig A., Douglas A. Gentile and Katherine E. Buckley. Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents: Theory, Research, and Public Policy. Oxford University Press, 2007. Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism. Random House, 2000. Bush, George W. ‘President Bush Addresses the Nation.’ Washington Post, 20 September 2001, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_ 092001.html. Accessed 28 February 2020. Chomsky, Noam. 9-11: Was there an Alternative? Seven Stories Press, 2011. Conte, Joseph M. ‘Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and the Age of Terror.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 57, no. 3, 2011, pp. 557–83. DeLillo, Don. ‘Baader–Meinhof.’ The Angel Esmeralda and Nine Stories. Scribner, 2011, pp. 105–18. ——. Cosmopolis. Scribner, 2003. ——. Falling Man. Scribner, 2007. ——. ‘Finding Reason in an Age of Terror.’ Interview with David L. Ulin. Los Angeles Times, 15 April 2003. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-apr-15-et-ulin15-story.html. Accessed 28 February 2020. ——. ‘Hammer and Sickle.’ Harper’s, December 2010, pp. 63–74. ——. ‘In the Ruins of the Future.’ Harper’s, December 2001, pp. 33–40. ——. Libra. 1988. Penguin, 1991. ——. Mao II. 1991. Penguin, 1992. ——. Point Omega. Scribner, 2010. ——. The Silence. Scribner, 2020. ——. ‘The Starveling.’ The Angel Esmeralda and Nine Stories. Scribner, 2011, pp. 183–211. ——. Underworld. Scribner, 1997. Friedman, Thomas L. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Gupta, Girish. ‘Bush, Cheney Banned from Venezuela.’ USA Today, 4 March 2015. https:// www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/03/04/venezuela-attacks-usa-amid-economicchaos/24365057/. Accessed 28 April 2020. Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007. Hungerford, Amy. ‘Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass.’ Contemporary Literature, 47, no. 3, 2006, pp. 343–80. Hwang, Jung-Suk. ‘Staging the Uneven World of Cybercapitalism on 47th Street in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 59, no. 1, 2018, pp. 27–40.

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James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. 1902. Edited by Martin E. Marty. Penguin, 1982. LaHaye, Tim, and Jerry B. Jenkins. Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. Tyndale House, 1995. Lechner, Frank J., and John Boli, editors. The Globalization Reader. 4th edn, John Wiley & Sons, 2012. LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. University of Illinois Press, 1987. Lynch, Michael Patrick. The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data. Liveright, 2016. McCann, Colum. Let the Great World Spin. Random House, 2009. McClure, John. ‘DeLillo and Mystery.’ The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, edited by John N. Duvall. Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 166–78. Reynolds, Amy, and Brooke Barnett. ‘“America under Attack”: CNN’s Verbal and Visual Framing of September 11.’ Media Representations of September 11, edited by Steven Chermak, Frankie Y. Bailey and Michelle Brown. Praeger, 2003, pp. 85–102. Ruthven, Malise. Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2007. Sciolino, Martina. ‘The Contemporary American Novel as World Literature: The Neoliberal Antihero of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 67, no. 2, 2015, pp. 210–41. Steger, Manfred B. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2013. Updike, John. ‘The Talk of the Town.’ New Yorker, 24 September 2001, p. 28. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. Verso, 2002.

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22 The Digital Physics of Reading DeLillo Licheng Xie

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imulating a reader’s experience of quickly browsing the novel in a bookstore, Michael Sippey’s mid-90s hyperfiction White Noise on White Noise highlights the changing physics of reading Don DeLillo through the marriage of codes and words. As with many digital generators, this work presents randomly selected passages from the original text of White Noise (1984) and presents the textual fragments on hyperlinked pages, in order ‘to provide an experience akin to quickly browsing through the novel in a bookstore’ (White Noise on White Noise landing page). The traditional mode of linear reading is replaced by a series of random selections and small body movements, leaving a multidimensional, navigable space for readers. The jumping, hopping and skipping of their fingers on touchpads or mouses creates a trajectory that simultaneously joins the fragments and becomes an immanent part of digital reading. Taking the long view, the internet is changing our behaviour by encouraging a digital way of life: children born in the age of touchscreen technology may naturally move their fingers on the glass of a fish tank to check if it is a screen with multi-touch function. With more ebooks being purchased by academic and public libraries, readers can easily access the target information from virtual shelves. The logic behind the transition from the print to the digital seems to be irreversible: user experience and the call of a paperless environment are leading the way to a more digitalised world. This process is also accelerating: digital devices are upgraded to be faster, to provide a smoother user experience, to promise a more interconnected world. Children who will join DeLillo’s future readership are already well equipped with e-reading products. Their brand-new reading experience is shaped by the ever-changing literary market, in which traditional narratives and new media art are trying to find a symbiotic (but maybe not balanced) way of coexistence. This makes readers aware of a potential change – not of the visible motions from page-turning to clicking, but towards a different understanding of DeLillo: with his texts released to playable open space, the writer’s postmodern landscape easily collapses in a sea of constantly refreshed data. As a future-oriented writer with a certain prophetic prowess, DeLillo has reflected on the future of the novel. In 1993 he admitted that technology will inevitably change our traditional narrative aesthetics, and reminded us of the changing texture of language across digital media, asking ‘Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page? Does the beauty and variability of our language depend to an important degree on the medium that carries the words? Does poetry need paper?’ (Begley 107). Here, DeLillo does not promise a quick answer. His artistic insight and instinct is to take a step back, to observe from

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a distance the increased human–technology interaction, and to find a way for art to collaborate better with its e-future. In Underworld (1997), for example, DeLillo tries to conduct an electronic language experiment by hyperlinking the titles of the two ending sections as ‘Keystroke 1’ and ‘Keystroke 2’, giving readers a small taste of web-surfing reading experience. When readers surf the web, the characters simultaneously enter cyberspace and act out as online players in virtual reality. Having their shared name encoded as the same piece of information, Sister Edgar and her namesake J. Edgar Hoover are connected through screens, and their meeting is the result of a simple one-click search. In his seventh novel, The Names (1982), DeLillo also leaves a separate space for language innovation. He makes Tap’s non-fiction ‘The Prairie’ the last chapter, in which the nine-year-old boy’s intuitive assembling of letters, words and sentences resembles the free flow of data. Both DeLillo and Tap, as the book’s co-authors, enjoy this process of automatic writing as a language game to explore the possibilities of future literature. However, DeLillo is aware that a forced digital revolution can sometimes be harmful. His 2016 novel Zero K ironically criticises the arrogant delusion that classic works of literature can be fully digitalised and implanted in the human brain: ‘They will be subjects for us to study, toys for us to play with [. . .] Nano-units implanted in the suitable receptors of the brain [. . .] Russian novels . . . You reread the plays of Ibsen, revisit the rivers and streams of sentences in Hemingway’ (72). His latest (at the time of writing) novel The Silence (2020) even presents a scenario of digital apocalypse in 2022: the world is in a sudden and unpredicted crisis, in which ‘everything in the datasphere [is] subject to distortion and theft’ (59). As Nicholas Negroponte reminds readers in Being Digital: ‘Interactive multimedia leaves very little to the imagination. Like a Hollywood film, multimedia narrative includes such specific representations that less and less is left to the mind’s eye’ (17). Indeed, the pre-set colours, sounds and motions programmed by the multimedia platform occupy readers/players with external sensual stimulations, leaving limited time and space for simultaneous imagination. Written words, on the contrary, evoke images and meanings from within: readers’ personal experiences provide various hermeneutical solutions in understanding texts. As language is gradually shaped by the electronic environment through a complicated process of reaction, the coexistence of physical and digital text in our digital ecology calls for more discussions that can bridge the traditional and the new, in the same way as the ‘digital humanities scholars [who] draw on the imagination of Jorge Luis Borges [. . .] to analogise the internet’s expanding and looping, infinite information structure’ (Gander and Garland 204). In this sense, it is interesting to study the digital physics of reading DeLillo by investigating the ways in which he engages with the digital age and the impact that his writing has on his future readership. The motions of writing and reading, instead of the final display of the finished works, will be the focus of this chapter. I will examine why and in what ways DeLillo and his writing are connected to hypertexts, visualised texts and bodily interactive texts. To explore these digital features in DeLillo’s fictional postmodern world is to examine its affinity with other digital literary works through the interaction between print and digital textuality and to see whether DeLillo’s art can continue to be a valid response to the age of cyberspace.

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Future-seeking Hypertext In the Epilogue of his 1997 masterpiece Underworld, DeLillo imagines that readers enter a fictional cyberspace through his design of a hyperlinked interface. To explore this space, readers open the main page by simply clicking on the website address http:// blk.www/dd.com/miraculum and view the two ending sections entitled ‘Keystroke 1’ and ‘Keystroke 2’ by clicking on the hyperlinked titles (810, 817, 824). When readers surf the web, the characters simultaneously enter cyberspace and act out as online players in virtual reality. For example, characters from different social and historical communities are connected through screens in the way of a nuclear chain reaction: ‘Shot after shot, bomb after bomb [. . .] A click, a hit and Sister joins the other Edgar. A fellow celibate [. . .] hyperlinked at last to Sister Edgar – a single fluctuating impulse now, a piece of coded information [. . .] Everything is connected in the end’ (826). Sister Edgar and her namesake J. Edgar Hoover have their shared name encoded as the same piece of information, and their meeting is the result of a simple one-click search. Surprisingly enough, DeLillo seems to forecast the prototype of today’s social media networks such as Facebook and WeChat, in which everyone is connected as virtual citizens of cyberspace, getting ready for a brand-new experience of metaverse ‘in the end’ where ‘everything is connected’: what you need to be alive is to be online (826). DeLillo does see the other side of this e-future coin. Early in his 1985 novel White Noise, he depicts a panorama of a postmodern world, in which the invisible web of data is lingering in the city as white noise: ‘Everything is concealed in symbolism [. . .] All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering, rearranging, peeling off the layers of unspeakability’ (37, 38). Here, the web of data, concealed and hidden as the background white noise, penetrates people’s private, family life through radios, televisions, ATMs and computers. Machines collect people’s data as codes to replace their individual subjectivity. The ‘waves and radiation’ of the city create an invisible cyberspace; people are plagued with an unspeakable fear of death, and seek to justify their existence through shopping (1). As Michael Valdez Moses observes, technology is ‘a deeply ingrained mode of existing and way of thinking’ in White Noise; DeLillo questions society’s over-dependence on technology, and tries to unveil people’s fear and anxiety by presenting a clearer view of the invisible web (63). His latest novel The Silence shows the writer’s continuing concern with this e-future: what will happen when the whole world is offline? What else can we do to help preserve the integrity of human consciousness when the most advanced and powerful technology becomes unreliable? In DeLillo’s novels we see a postmodern narrative that involves a debate on human consciousness and our digital age. Intentionally or not, the writer leaves this debate inconclusive: he does not predict a more certain future, nor does he introduce a potential solution. Instead, he uses texts to test and simulate different fictional scenarios for readers to peek into the future. For example, DeLillo ends White Noise with a symbolic scene of shopping, in which confused shoppers wander through the rearranged shelves in the supermarket, finding no familiar logic and pattern in the layout of goods: ‘It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles [. . .] They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go [. . .] There is a sense of wandering

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now, an aimless and haunted mood’ (325, 326). Although the shoppers are lost in the aisles, they still try hard to fill up their carts and restore their pride and dignity in a consumer-driven world. However, the disorder and uneasiness the shoppers experience reflects more than their consumption behaviour. What DeLillo seems to highlight at the end of the novel is the unspeakable fear of the human future, with a strong sense of failure when people are troubled by this ever-evolving society. Interestingly in White Noise on White Noise, Sippey uses digital technology to simulate a very similar shopping experience through digital reading: while the rearranged shelves become the randomly selected fragments as hyperlinks, Sippey’s readers, as the shoppers who struggle to find the goods on the shopping lists, choose their individual reading path by clicking on the links without logical order. As Sippey released the work early in 1995, some links have expired and are not found today, which further symbolises the rearrangement of information and adds a sense of loss and confusion to the work. As the creator of the digital work, Sippey shares his own feelings as a reader of DeLillo’s original novel: ‘For me, reading the novel White Noise is a hypertext experience to begin with. Building White Noise on White Noise was a way to make those associations explicit’ (‘White noise on white noise’). White Noise brings a hypertext experience partly because it is non-sequential as cross-genre writing, or, in Kavadlo’s words, ‘a collage novel’ instead of a ‘college novel’ (17). With fragments of dialogue throughout the novel, the three parts are mostly independent from each other in telling fragmented stories, in which the text ‘is dotted with snippets of TV voice-overs’, radio broadcasting, supermarket tabloid and bank notices to constitute the broken images of postmodern American life (Conte 125). Sippey’s work is to reproduce this hypertext experience digitally and share with his readers a virtual tour of DeLillo’s hypertextuality. As the randomly selected words are hyperlinked to relevant websites, such as the official website of the CIA and local weather reports, DeLillo’s text find its virtual counterpart for annotation with the help of the large quantity of information on the internet. In this way, the digital work becomes an extension of the novel by explaining, actualising and reinforcing the fictional details, and gradually forms a sprawling hypertextual web. Sippey also simulates a ubiquitous DeLilloesque consumer society, in which the pervasiveness of media and advertisements form the lingering white noise. Slightly different from DeLillo’s readership, the digital readers are able to see themselves as both readers and consumers through Sippey’s internal and external hyperlinks. For example, the words ‘washed’ and ‘glove’ are in Sippey’s design hyperlinked to online advertising sites selling personal care products and gloves, which makes Sippey’s digital platform also a shopping centre, leaving readers with a mixed experience of reading and shopping at the same time. Additionally, some domains of the target websites are now for sale, thus becoming a part of the commodity. This process of searching, selecting, buying and switching the web pages in reading sends readers in and out of DeLillo’s novel, and triggers anxiety and confusion. Here, while the hyperlinks symbolise the invisible and unrecognisable white noise that blurs the lines between the virtual world and the real, the readers, as the confused and lost shoppers in the secular city, experience a non-linear fragmented reading, likely accompanied by a feeling of frustration and failure. This digital work simulates the citizens’ experience of boiled frog syndrome in White Noise, by which people fail to recognise the potential changes to their self-consciousness

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in the commercialisation process. While the supermarket is rearranged, the white noise comes to an abrupt halt. As a result, technology and consumer culture continuously transform people’s life pattern towards an unknown future. Facing a world that is full of uncertainty and dynamic changes, DeLillo raises an ontological question in The Silence: ‘What if we are not what we think we are? What if the world we know is being completely rearranged as we stand and watch or sit and talk?’ (87) Different from his fictional cyberspace in Underworld, DeLillo creates an end in White Noise and The Silence where everything is disconnected: a failed metaverse in an offline future. It is such an irony in White Noise that the only way to be prepared for the Airborne Toxic Event is to create a real event. For the e-future we are entitled to, however, there is no rehearsal. As DeLillo points out later in White Noise, ‘in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see [. . .] this is where we wait together, regardless of age’ (326). Sippey’s hyperlinks and DeLillo’s hypertextual text provide a possible way of ‘deciphering, rearranging, peeling off’ people’s fear and anxiety, and make us think more seriously of the future interaction between human consciousness and the technocratic and consumer society (White Noise 38).

The Visualised Texts In Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi introduces research on cognition conducted by German scientists: children were asked to rate three different versions of a film they watched on a ‘happy–sad’ scale and a ‘pleasant–unpleasant’ scale. The results indicated that the children found the original wordless version both the most pleasant and the saddest. ‘What comes out here is that there is no correspondence or conformity between qualities and intensity’, Massumi writes (25). Here, the social linguistic quality of the image through verbal expression does not help strengthen its intensity or affect. As Massumi explains, the content (quality) of the image does not make direct connection to the strength or duration (intensity) of the image: ‘The original nonverbal version elicited the greatest response from [children’s] skin [as measured by] galvanic skin response’ (24). It was the image, rather than language, that directly and effectively aroused the children’s bodily response. Since the 1960s engineers have been busy exploring the potential of computers and the internet for a better performance of images in terms of human–machine interaction. The human eye is the direct receptor of the intensity of images. As one of the ways to represent reality on new media platforms, the image is processed and simulated to help computer users construct their own understanding of the internet world. Following this logic, many digital literary works use the image as an interface to communicate and interact with readers. Although DeLillo’s renowned refusal to use computers to write may seem oldfashioned, and his old Olympia typewriter will never make him an e-lit writer, he describes himself as a writer who ‘creates a picture’: ‘I have an acute visual sense. I am not an opponent of the proliferation of pictures in our culture, I am just trying to understand its impact. I like photography, I like to look at photographs and paintings’ (Desalm). In a 1982 interview with Thomas LeClair, he expresses his appreciation of Jean-Luc Godard’s film images and admits that the director has had an immediate effect on his own works: ‘the strong image, the short ambiguous scene [. . .] The power of images’ (LeClair 25). In a 1993 interview, DeLillo explains how he begins to work on a novel: ‘I think the scene comes first, an idea of a character in a place. It’s

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visual, it’s Technicolor – something I see in a vague way’ (Begley 91). For example, his creation of Mao II began with two separate photographs: one was the front-page picture from the New York Post in 1988, showing the writer J. D. Salinger being caught by two journalists while walking out of the supermarket, with desperate shock and rage on his face. The other was of a mass wedding in the Unification Church in Korea, presided over by Sun Myung Moon. Here the logic between the two photographs reflects the polar extremes of Mao II: the individual’s inescapable failure to be absorbed by the image culture of society, and the future of crowds, in which one is willing to be a copy of others. In this sense, the two pictures form a ‘vague’ scene that comes before language and work as the interface of the novel. They help locate characters against changing backdrops and enable DeLillo to (re)visualise the world as a space for imagination. In digital literary works, presenting an interface with images is much easier and more straightforward with the help of new media platforms. Chen Qianxun’s new media artwork Shan Shui (2014; see Figure 22.1) is a typical work that uses paintings as the medium of expression. This is a computer program that automatically generates Chinese Wujue poems (quatrains with five syllables per line) and corresponding classical Shan (山, mountain) Shui (水, water) paintings with every click on the page. Checking the source code of the artwork, we can find that the poems are generated through the permutation and combination of 38 Chinese characters and words according to some fixed tone patterns. Every reordering of these characters and words intelligently depicts a meaningful Shan Shui painting. In this way, the calligraphy of the poems in the top-right corner of the screen is superimposed on the paintings and becomes an inseparable part of the background image. As a part of the natural landscape, the poems’ social linguistic quality is gradually reduced and replaced by the growing intensity of the paintings, with every click on the interface. In Underworld, with every click on the hyperlinks through the second keystroke, Sister Edgar, as a digital reader, feels the strong visual impact of the video on the screen

Figure 22.1  Screenshot of Shan Shui, 2014. © Chen Qianxun. chenqianxun.com/ShanShui/rules.html

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and gains an impossible visionary experience: she not only witnesses the explosion of an atomic bomb, but also sees ‘God’: She sees the flash, the thermal pulse [. . .] She sees the spray plume. She sees the fireball climbing, the superheated sphere of burning gas that can blind a person with its beauty, its dripping christblood colors, solar golds and reds. She sees the shock wave and hears the high winds and feels the power of false faith, the faith of paranoia, and then the mushroom cloud spreads around her, the pulverized mass of radioactive debris, eight miles high, ten miles, twenty, with skirted stem and smoking platinum cap. The jewels roll out of her eyes and she sees God. (Underworld 825, 826) As Guy Debord notes in The Society of the Spectacle, ‘[w]here the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings’ (9). The video footage of the 1961 Soviet nuclear test is displayed on the screen as a series of hyperreal images that are connected by the recurring phrase ‘she sees’. What she sees gradually replaces the real surroundings and makes her feel involved: ‘She stands in the flash and feels the power’ (Underworld 825). Surrounded by this hyperreal visual world, Sister Edgar not only sees the bomb, but also hears the wind and feels the power. The vision brings a sense of reality that sweeps one’s spiritual world: the ‘God’ she sees is the visual power of the sublime that strikes her eyeballs. In this sense, ‘the triads inside the pixels that form the on-screen image’ make ‘the web’ a ‘real miracle [. . .] where everybody is everywhere at once’ (825, 808). As Qianxun’s work digitally reshapes language in images, and presents both the sayable and the seeable in an interactive flash, DeLillo’s fictional cyberspace simulates a 3D virtual reality, in which sister Edgar and the reader can walk into the moving footage and feel the power of every object, voice, emotion through images. Similarly to what Qianxun does in Shan Shui, DeLillo also presents language as a superimposed part of the natural landscape in The Names. For example, the archaeologist Owen Brademas tries to appreciate the beauty of the longest Sanskrit epic poem through the view rather than the text itself: the carved stone of the poem makes him recognise that it is not for interpretation but for reading as a pure visual experience. A very similar example is the boustrophedon presentation of the code of law carved in a Dorian dialect on a stone wall, which mimics the way the ox ‘turns’ and ‘plows’ from left to right and continues from right to left in the next line. To Owen, boustrophedon is more suitable for reading because it is closer to what the world really looks like. Both Owen’s observation and Qianxun’s practice show the reshapeable feature of language as inscriptions or drawings through the very expressive shapes and patterns of the letters. While DeLillo foregrounds visualised language in the aquarelle-like Indian backdrop, Qianxun’s work presents a panoramic view of the encounter between traditional Chinese culture and digital technology in a harmonious vision of nature. DeLillo’s highlighting of the seeable over the sayable relates to what W. J. T. Mitchell calls ‘the pictorial turn’. As Mitchell explains, our current visual culture makes us realise that ‘spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding, interpretation . . .)’ (16). The age of cyberspace poses threats to traditional writing and reading, but it also provides possibilities for the

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vivid visualisation of a writer’s imagination. DeLillo’s pictorial space provides a similar e-reading environment and invites his readers to spectate and feel what is seeable.

Bodily Interactive Texts Since the 1970s Australian performance artist Stelarc has performed with his body and modern technological devices, to create a new form of art that connects the body and machine and employs virtual reality, robotics, prosthetics and the internet. For example, his cyborg experiment ‘Exoskeleton’ remotely controls his body with devices connected to the internet: ‘the body plugs into the mass of information [. . .] it feels the future force of information [. . .] It composes a virtual center for the internet series of events’ (Massumi 124). The information from the internet resonates with his body, both conceptually and physically, to increase the intensity of the artwork. Massumi has studied Stelarc’s works extensively and considers that the artist’s body presents an ‘extendability’ in the additional dimension of the web: the open, interactive body becomes an indispensable part of the machine by sending out and receiving data: ‘The body-self has been plugged into an extended network. As fractal subject–object, the body is the network – a self-network’ (127). Stelarc’s body is a section of the network that extends both the internet and itself, and his performance becomes a coexistence of experience and expression of the body as a self-network. Also from the 1970s, DeLillo’s second-hand manual Olympia typewriter has helped the author create a technology-proof space, and protected the writer from being distracted by the digital wave. Different from Stelarc, as a writer who simply does not email or own a mobile phone, DeLillo reserves a pure offline space between his typewriter and iPad for artistic creation. In a letter to David Foster Wallace, DeLillo explains his habit of working on a manual typewriter: ‘The reason I use a manual typewriter [. . .] concerns the sculptural quality I find in words on paper, the architecture of the letters individually and in combination.’1 Tapping on his typewriter, DeLillo places himself in an artist–machine interactive space for his body to physically join the artistic creation process. Here, the typewriter, in Andy Clark’s ‘The Extended Mind’ hypothesis, is an ‘external entity’ that actively interacts with DeLillo and becomes a part of the writer’s cognition process (Clark and Chalmers 7). Attracted by the tapped words with their sculptural quality, the readers follow DeLillo’s cognition process and enter a human– machine reading mode. This is very similar to Johanna Drucker’s observation on the human–computer interaction in a ‘web-based reading’ that readers ‘put [their] bodies – eyes, ears, hands, heads – and [their] sensory apparatus – into relation with rapidly changing modes [. . .] in this new [reading] environment’ (15). In this sense, although DeLillo keeps himself outside the digital working environment, his manual typewriter can still be seen as a computer keyboard, only without screen and power supply. His seemingly traditional method of artistic creation can be regarded as performance art, in which his active bodily involvement in the whole process of writing calls for a sensory approach to reading, in order to appreciate DeLillo’s different combination of shapes and sounds of words.

 1

Letter to David Foster Wallace, 5 February 1997, Don DeLillo Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, Container 101, Folder 10, 1.

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In The Names, writing is represented through the motion of tapping, in which language is mapped on to the dimension of physics. The narrator-protagonist, James Axton, a former American freelance writer, lives alone in Athens as a risk analyst. His estranged wife Kathryn lives with their nine-year-old son Tap on a fictional island called Kouros and volunteers on an archaeological dig. The only child in the book, Tap, plays an important role as a non-fiction writer. In his parents’ eyes, Tap is an ‘unqualified’ writer who makes too many mistakes in writing: James considers that his son is only ‘scribbling’ (The Names 8). In Kathryn’s words, ‘[Tap] absolutely collides with the language [and] the spelling is atrocious’ (33). However, DeLillo holds a different view: by making the boy’s non-fiction an independent chapter of the novel, he invites Tap to join his narrative as a co-author. In Paul Giaimo’s view, DeLillo puns on the name Tap with ‘the tapping of the writer’s keyboard, uniting signifier and signifier as both the product and process of writing’ (78). In his letter to Wallace, DeLillo expresses the gratification he gets from using a manual typewriter: ‘finger striking key, hammer striking page [. . .] a gratification I try to soak my prose in’.2 Tap’s creative process is thus a full sensory experience that satisfies DeLillo’s gratification of tapping out prose on a keyboard. Specifically, Tap’s intuitive assembling of letters, words and sentences is similar to the functions of computational literature generators: while the linguistic segments are transformed into datasets, language becomes the images of the generated free flow of data. Tap’s bodily interaction with his novel through the motion of key-tapping makes his body a part of the work, or the work a part of his body. While tapping, the writer’s body is extended by the texts (both the grammatically correct and incorrect ones) as a selfnetwork. The connection between the typewriter and the body creates a new dynamic system, in which the motions of the body are partially controlled by the machine’s capacity for information (for example, the amount of symbols in the alphabet(s) and their arrangement on the keyboard). By connecting to the machine, the body provides the space for the resonation of information and thus proves its extendability. In the same way, Massumi argues in Parables for the Virtual that the posthuman body functions beyond the human’s biological boundaries. The typos reflect the irrational aspect of this human–machine connection, which proves the dynamic feature of this self-network. The idea of the posthuman body as a self-network is widely practised as the reader– machine interaction in electronic literary works. Like Tap, readers of such digital works act as co-writers in their bodily interaction with the texts. As one of the co-founders of the Electronic Literature Organization, the postmodern novelist Robert Coover invites writers to create digital literary works in the CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) at Brown University. Screen (2003; see Figure 22.2) is one of their collaborative works that allow readers to bodily interact with the text and words in a surrounding virtual environment. It digitally simulates the body’s active participation in data reorganisation. At the beginning of the work, readers are given a three-wall reading task, until suddenly the displayed words start to peel away. To prevent the words from falling to the floor, readers are encouraged to hit them back on to the wall to preserve the semantic integrity of the text. However, the work is designed to simulate a frustrating reading experience. Some of the hit words do not return to the original place and contribute to a randomly formed

 2

Letter to David Foster Wallace, 5 February 1997, 1.

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Figure 22.2  Electronic Literature Organization, Screen. © Noah Wardrip Fruin, Andrew McClain, Shawn Greenlee, Robert Coover, Josh Carroll and Sascha Becker new text. The peeling of the words accelerates until the readers can no longer catch them, leaving the CAVE a ruin of words in broken pieces. Screen reminds its readers that the conventional evaluation of letters is not always practical. The bodily interaction with the texts provides an experimental and experiential reading experience; readers are able to feel, touch and play with language, although, due to the loss and resemblances of the semantic units, the text is not always readable. In Massumi’s explanation of football games, he suggests that the affect/intensity of the game is not from the interaction between the rules/regulations and the players, but from the movement of the football through every transaction of energy. This energy is produced by the collision of the football and the players as a self-networked body. In the same way, both Screen and Tap’s writing enables writers and readers to enter a virtual/imaginary space, with their bodies and the texts jointly moving through the creation and appreciation process. While the reader/participant of Screen is overwhelmed by the feeling of urgency, helplessness, anxiety and panic, facing the constant collapse of the texts, they are forced to move along with the unstable words and are driven out of their comfort zone. Similarly, for the characters (the archaeologists, the language cult, the writers) in The Names, and for Tap’s non-fiction readers, their attempt to put words back together and to resume an order within a disconnected context turns out to be a futile performance of reconstruction. Using different platforms, DeLillo and digital writers both simulate this dramatic change to traditional reading methods. The key to their simulations is not the work itself, nor the writing or reading regulations, but the physical and psychological collision between the works, their creators and their readers.

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Perhaps Paul Maltby’s words on The Names can best conclude our discussion about DeLillo’s bodily interactive texts: ‘The novel suggests that the visionary power of language will only be restored when we “tap” into its primal or pristine forms, the forms that can regenerate perception, that can reveal human existence in significant ways’ (263, emphasis in original). Tap with his tapping practice reminds readers of an unusual textuality beyond books: the random combination and recombination of words shows the arbitrary nature of interactive texts. By extending the reader’s sensory fields and connecting them to interactive texts, DeLillo creates a virtual space for the constant collision between words and readers. Together they form a posthuman self-network as a techno-art of freedom from capitalist power, in which we regenerate our perception of language and ourselves as a more powerful existence than what we may imagine.

Conclusion DeLillo predicted the future of narratives in his 2010 PEN America interview, stating that novels will be ‘user-generated’ due to their inevitable negotiation with technology (‘An Interview’). He believes that novels will exist as a ‘flourishing’ and ‘the most accommodating form’ of art that ‘fit[s] in with this technological culture’ (O’Connell). Although DeLillo is never a digital writer, he is not an outsider to this digital culture. His continuing concern about human consciousness in the e-future informs an inconclusive debate, in which a fully connected metaverse could one day face a system crash when everything goes offline. His texts present different scenarios for readers, either through fictional hyperlinks or the simulated and symbolic apocalypse (the power outage in The Silence and the supermarket scene in White Noise), to explore the possibilities of the future. DeLillo also highlights the visual aspect of his novels as many digital literary works do. Through the image as a fictional interface, DeLillo helps both characters and readers to see his imagination. His pictorial space provides a similar e-reading environment that makes the seeable more visible; the novel The Names also features an extendable space for people’s bodily engagement with words in both the process of writing and reading. By extending the reader’s sensory fields and connecting them to interactive text, DeLillo shows a possible solution for literature to continue to exist as a flourishing form of art in the digital age.

Works Cited Begley, Adam. ‘Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction No. 135.’ Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro. University Press of Mississippi, 2005, pp. 86–108. Binelli, M. ‘Intensity of a Plot – Interview with Don DeLillo.’ Guernica, 17 July 2007. www. guernicamag.com/intensity_of_a_plot/. Accessed 23 July 2018. Bryant, Paula. ‘Discussing the Untellable: Don DeLillo’s The Names.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 29, no. 1, 1987, pp. 16–29. Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. ‘The Extended Mind.’ Analysis, 58, no. 1, 1998, pp. 7–19. Conte, Joseph. Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction. University of Alabama Press, 2002. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Notting Hill Editions, 2013. DeLillo, Don. The Body Artist. Scribner, 2001. ——. Falling Man. Scribner, 2007. ——. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ PEN America, 15 September 2010. pen.org/an interviewwith-don-delillo. Accessed 11 October 2017.

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——. The Names. Vintage, 1982. ——. ‘The Power of History.’ New York Times, 5 October 1997. www.nytimes.com/1997/10/05/ magazine/l-the-power-of-history-368806.html. Accessed 17 July 2018. ——. The Silence. Picador, 2020. ——. Underworld. Scribner, 1997. ——. Zero K. Scribner, 2016. DePietro, Thomas, editor. Conversations with Don DeLillo. University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Desalm, Brigitte. ‘Masses, Power and the Elegance of Sentences.’ Interview. Translated by Tilo Zimmerman. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 23 July 2001. perival.com/delillo/desalm_interview. html. Accessed 16 June 2018. Drucker, Johanna. ‘Humanities Approaches to Interface Theory.’ Culture Machine, 12, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–20. Duvall, John. Don DeLillo’s Underworld: A Reader’s Guide. Continuum Contemporaries, 2002. Gander, Catherine, and Sarah Garland. ‘The Idea, the Machine and the Art: Word and Image in the Twenty-first Century. Envoi.’ Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices, edited by Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland. Manchester University Press, 2016, pp. 200–16. Giaimo, Paul. ‘The Names and White Noise: A New Faith in the Power of Language.’ Appreciating Don DeLillo: The Moral Force of a Writer’s Work. Praeger, 2011, pp. 67–92. Gleich, Lewis S. ‘Ethics in the Wake of the Image: The Post-9/11 Fiction of DeLillo, Auster, and Foer.’ Journal of Modern Literature, 37, no. 3, 2014, pp. 161–76. Harack, Katrina. ‘Embedded and Embodied Memories: Body, Space, and Time in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Falling Man.’ Contemporary Literature, 54, no. 2, 2013, pp. 303–36. Hayles, N. Katherine. ‘Deeper into the Machine: The Future of Electronic Literature.’ Culture Machine, 5, 2003. www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/245/241. Accessed 20 June 2018. Heim, Michael. The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. Oxford University Press, 1993. Kavadlo, Jesse. Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief. Peter Lang, 2004. LeClair, Thomas, and Don DeLillo. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ Contemporary Literature, 23, no. 1, 1982, pp. 19–31. Maltby, Paul. ‘The Romantic Metaphysics of Don DeLillo.’ Contemporary Literature, 37, no. 2, 1996, pp. 258–77. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press, 2002. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. University of Chicago Press, 1994. Moses, Michael Valdez. ‘Lust Removed from Nature.’ New Essays on White Noise, edited by Frank Lentricchia. Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 63–86. Mullan, John. ‘How Time Flies.’ The Guardian, 16 August 2003. www.theguardian.com/ books/2003/aug/16/dondelillo. Accessed 20 July 2018. Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. Hodder and Stoughton, 1996. O’Connell, Mark. ‘The Novel Still Exists: The Millions Interviews Don DeLillo.’ The Millions Interview, 5 May 2016. themillions.com/2016/05/delillo.html. Accessed 12 June 2018. Osteen, Mark. DeLillo’s American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Qianxun, Chen. Shan Shui. 2014. chenqianxun.com/ShanShui/rules.html. Accessed 3 June 2021. Sippey, Michael. White Noise on White Noise, 17 March 1997. http://www.theobvious.com/ noise/toc.html Accessed 22 February 2022. ——. ‘White Noise on White Noise: theobvious.com Announces New Website, bringing “the language of waves and radiation” to the Internet.’ https://delillo.englsem.unibas.ch/www. theobvious.com/noise/press.html. Accessed 22 February 2022.

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Part V Embodied Arts: Performance and Spectacle

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23 Phones, Words and Silences: On Performance and Performativity in DeLillo’s Narrators Jesse Kavadlo

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reat Jones Street, Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel about fictional rock star Bucky Wunderlick, features one of his most lyrical, elegiac descriptions:

A telephone that’s disconnected, deprived of its sources, becomes in time an intriguing piece of sculpture. The business normally transacted is more than numbed within the phone’s limp ganglia; it is made eternally irrelevant. Beyond the reach of shrill necessities the dead phone disinters another source of power. The fact that it will not speak (although made to speak, made for no other reason) enables us to see it in a new way, as an object rather than an instrument, an object possessing a kind of historical mystery. The phone has made a descent to total dumbness, and so becomes beautiful. (31) It is a telephone that both is and is not a telephone, retaining form but not function, a phone-shaped sculpture and, for Bucky, beautiful because, in keeping with Oscar Wilde’s dictum about art, it is useless. Bucky describes and admires the phone that will not speak; DeLillo describes, and seems to admire, the performer who, like the detached and mute telephone in his apartment, will not perform. What, then, becomes of such a phone? What, then, should become of Bucky? What does DeLillo mean by speak, and, by extension, by perform? Similarly, after learning that he cannot have immediate access to his savings because the money is ‘working’, Bucky replies, ‘I don’t want it working . . . I’m the one who works . . . While I work and sweat, I want to think of my money resting in a cool steel-paneled room’, repeating himself immediately: ‘I don’t like to think of money working. I’m the one who works.’ He is met, however, with this hostile rejoinder: ‘Except you don’t seem to be’ (44–5). The word that might best describe how they – both the phone and Bucky – now work, or do not work, is no longer performance, which might have described their previous incarnations, but, rather, performative, a word that gender theorists such as Judith Butler have used since 1990, drawing upon the framework of sociologist Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in 1959 and philosopher J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words in 1962. Yet the term has only entered the popular lexicon recently, used almost entirely pejoratively, suggesting mere words as substitutes for action, language as signalling rather than doing. A cursory news search of ‘performative’ yields articles

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and editorials condemning ‘performative vaccine outrage’, ‘performative antiracism’, ‘performative activism’, ‘performative politics’ and more (see Sheneman, McWhorter, Bryant, and Keeling, respectively). Yet performance scholars use performativity not just differently, but quite nearly in the opposite way to contemporary journalists. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick introduce the idea of performativity in this way: ‘When is saying something doing something? And how is saying something doing something?’ (1). Saying, then, is not just saying; it is also doing, as opposed to, say, the charge of ‘performative activism’, or the mere appearance of activism without requisite action. As this chapter will discuss, ‘while philosophy and theater now share “performative” as a common lexical item, the term has hardly come to mean “the same thing” for each’ (Parker and Sedgwick 2). Nevertheless, the overlapping ideas behind ‘perform’, ‘performance’ and ‘performative’, in different senses of the word, provide a novel framework for understanding how DeLillo represents the struggle to speak and perform, and to speak and perform authentically. Great Jones Street’s Bucky, as a rock star, provides the most overt example, but other DeLillo characters, most notably Jack Gladney in White Noise, who is not a performer in any conventional sense of the word, engage in what critics have categorised as postmodernism, and what two decades into the twenty-first century might also be understood using the language of performance. Bucky Wunderlick and Jack Gladney, along with Eric Packer in Cosmopolis and Bill Gray in Mao II, blur the boundaries between saying and doing, in keeping with Marvin Carlson’s notion that ‘performance is a specific event with its liminoid nature foregrounded’ (qtd. in McKenzie 27). Their words become not just inseparable from their roles, performances and actions, but actions unto themselves. Yet at the same time, DeLillo also draws further distinctions: sometimes, saying nothing is doing something. And sometimes, saying something is not, or at least not enough. DeLillo would go on to write more about telephones, his go-to metonym for postmodern and performative speech acts, as well as silences. Jumping ahead, from Great Jones Street’s beautiful-because-it-is-dumb telephone to DeLillo’s 2003 novel Cosmopolis, billionaire financier Eric Packer seems an anti-Bucky: ‘It was time to retire the word phone’, Eric imagines (Cosmopolis 88). Like the automated teller machine earlier, Eric thinks of phones, even the very word for phone, and seemingly all hardware, as ‘aged and burdened by its own historical memory . . . part of the process that the device was meant to replace. It was anti-futuristic, so cumbrous and mechanical that even the acronym [ATM] seemed dated’ (54). ‘Historical memory’ is Eric’s flipside of Bucky’s ‘historical mystery’. Uselessness, lack of performance, does not render the object beautiful but, rather, lessens it, even retroactively. Later, Eric ‘saw a police lieutenant carrying a walkie-talkie. What entered his mind when he saw this? He wanted to ask the man why he was still using such a contraption, still calling it what he called it, carrying the nitwit rhyme out of the age of industrial glut into smart places built on beams of light’ (102); later still, Eric thinks, ‘[e]ven the word computer sounds backwards and dumb’ (104), overlapping Bucky’s ‘dumbness’ of the telephone but using the other sense of the word. The phone in Great Jones Street in its uselessness becomes art; the phone in Cosmopolis, anachronistic in its very materiality, exists as a floating, performative signifier for an age Eric would leave behind. And in the time since the novels were published, Bucky’s landlines have been superseded by wireless communications, ATMs have largely been supplanted by online banking,

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and phones – the word, as Eric wants, nearly replaced by ‘cells’ and ‘mobiles’ – are frequently used for silent, not spoken, text messaging and dumb communication. The duality of Mao II, published only twelve years earlier in 1991, between words and actions seems, as Eric would say, backwards and dumb. In Mao II, ‘“People who make phone calls don’t set off bombs. The real terrorists make their calls after the damage is done. If at all”’ (122). In Cosmopolis, the messages on phones – or, in Eric’s case, a smartwatch, predating the Apple Watch’s 2015 debut by over a decade – whether spoken or tapped out, provide the clearest overlap between words and actions. Eric’s electronic keystrokes, his digital manipulations of currency, lead directly to a global financial meltdown. Phones are now used for false bomb threats that trigger real evacuations, as well as to set off real bombs themselves. Their words affect the world, for the worse. In between the dumb phone of Great Jones Street, the dumb-sounding computer of Cosmopolis and the dated dichotomy between phone calls and bombs in Mao II lie the many phone calls, electronic interruptions more akin to the ever-present television than human communication, in White Noise: ‘The phone rang and I picked it up. A woman’s voice delivered a high-performance hello. It said it was computer-generated, part of a marketing survey aimed at determining current levels of human desire’ (48). The surprise combination, in 1985 anyway, of a ‘high-performance hello’ with the revelation that the voice is computer-generated suggests that Bucky’s dead phone can be brought back, if not to life, then to some kind of simulated afterlife: a phone that speaks, not with a human voice, but one that is programmed to perform – high perform – as such. The miraculous phone/computer then engages in a task as ordinary as market research, on a topic as extraordinary as human desire. Once Steffie is ‘occupied by the computerized voice’, she drops out of the human conversation that she had initiated, saying only ‘virgin acrylic’ (48–9), now a non sequitur, to the non-human phone. It is not surprising, then, that DeLillo’s most recent novel to date is titled The Silence (2020), a meditation on the end of technology that, in the hands of another writer, would be a science fictional dystopia lamenting the post-apocalyptic loss of technology, but in DeLillo’s hands is more ambivalent. As Max in The Silence asks, ‘What happens to people who live inside their phones?’ (52), so that the dead phones are not beautiful, but the end of everything. Here, Bucky’s phone’s descent into dumbness is complete. The world’s phones are now all dumb, incapable of performance, let alone a ‘high-performance voice’. The world’s bombs can no longer detonate, but they no longer need to. The blank screens are stripped of memory, history and mystery. * * * Based on DeLillo’s protagonists – Bucky Wunderlick, Eric Packer, Jack Gladney, Bill Gray – silence seems desirable, and desired, yet unobtainable. Instead, even silence becomes another kind of performance, another kind of speech. Bucky wants to stop playing, in the musical, theatrical sense, but cannot, in the sociological sense, ever stop performing. His seclusion becomes a performative act for an audience unwilling to let him go. What DeLillo’s narrators seem to want is not merely silence – not the end of language, but of pretence; not the end of performance, but of performativity. As Judith Butler explains in the 1999 Preface to her seminal treatise Gender Trouble, ‘Performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects though the naturalization in

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the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration’ (xv). Great Jones Street, at first seemingly counterintuitively, like The Silence, does not depict any of the events that a different novel, by a different novelist, might have included. There’s little sex; the drugs at the centre of its plot don’t have any recreational value; and, as DeLillo said in an interview with Anthony DeCurtis, ‘there’s very little about rock music in Great Jones Street, although the hero is a musician’ (‘An Outsider’ 57). Contrary to DeLillo’s underplaying to interviewer DeCurtis, Great Jones Street has a lot to say about performance, if we examine the ways in which Bucky does in fact feel the need to perform beyond the music: the rituals of self-destruction, the conspiracies inherent to fame, the contradictions between authenticity and commerce, and the cultural expectations of what it means to perform, in the performative rather than musical sense – in general, the cultural construction of ‘rock star’. DeLillo develops what David Shumway would later, well after the novel, call the ‘cultural practices’ of rock and roll: its signs, and those aspects of rock beyond, outside of or in addition to the music, ‘since neither records nor lyrics nor written music can be regarded as primary . . . Rock & roll as a discursive practice cannot be identified with any one of its many codes or products’ (Shumway 118). Great Jones Street, contrary to DeLillo’s assertion, depicts the cultural performances and performativity of rock & roll. Still, Great Jones Street features just one reference to an actual musical performance. The example arrives early in the novel, as Bucky, in seclusion, hiding from his band members, the press, his manager and his record company, ‘remembered a night on the West Coast from some months before . . . We were the one group that people depended on to validate their emotions, and this was to be a night of above-average fury’ (Great Jones Street 14). Here, then, is a concert that the reader does not get to experience, with the final phrase ‘above-average fury’ rendering it facetious, DeLillo remaking the usually fiery descriptions of performance as hyphenated corporate jargon. We see none of the journalistic or kinaesthetic language of the concert, only DeLillo’s characteristically icy abstractions: ‘In our own special context we challenged the authenticity of the crowd’s passion and wrath, dipping our bodies in coquettish blue light, merely teasing our instruments for the first hour or so. Then we caved their heads with about twenty thousand watts of frozen sound’ (14). This single description of a performance is narrated as a memory. Even as Bucky attempts to cease live musical performance, however, he cannot escape his cultural performance, in part because, in self-fulfilling logic, it is what the culture expects of him, as the famous opening paragraph of the novel establishes: Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public’s total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public’s contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity – hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide. (Is it clear I was a hero of rock ’n’ roll?) (1)

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Bucky equates being a ‘hero of rock and roll’, even parenthetically, as though it’s not crucial to his main point, with performative violence, performative sexuality, performative drug use, performative madness, even performative suicide – and, also, it seems, with limousines (presaging Cosmopolis) and concerts. He thinks he can end his fame through isolation, by ending the rituals of the stage, only to continue to re-enact his rock-star rituals on the set of his titular, TV sit-com-studio-like apartment with each of the many characters who comes to visit him in his supposed isolation. His attempt to hide, of course, only works because he is already famous, as he learns through conversation with his neighbour Ed Fenig, an obscure writer who craves Bucky’s fame. Ed lives in the same building as Bucky but is not hiding, because no one is looking for him. Ed, who writes voluminously (‘Some writers presume to be men of letters. I’m a man of numbers’ [51]), finds his counterpart, as Bucky’s is Eric Packer, in Mao II’s Bill Gray, an actually famous author living in true seclusion, who discovers that he cannot stop playing the role of author simply by disappearing, or even, as opposed to hypergraphic Ed, by withholding his work. As foreshadowed by Bucky, who does not want to release his Mountain Tapes, Bill’s final ‘manuscript would sit . . . and word would get out, and the manuscript would not go anywhere . . . The manuscript would sit . . . and the novel would stay right here, collecting aura and force, deepening old Bill’s legend, undyingly’ (Mao II 224). Ironically, by withholding the novel and concealing Bill (and his death), Scott – the withholder – knowingly elevates Bill’s stature, cementing his performance in the role of solitary genius author. Marvin Carlson asks, ‘If we mentally step back for a moment . . . and ask what makes performing arts performative, I imagine the answer would somehow suggest that these arts require physical presences or trained or skilled human beings whose demonstration of their skills is the performance’ (71). And yet Bucky and then Bill show that they do not even need to demonstrate their skills, and what is more, do not even need to be present at all, to perform. Silence is their performance; absence, their presence. Carlson continues, ‘Even if an action on stage is identical to one in real life, on stage it is considered “performed” and off stage merely “done”’ (72). In this sense, then, Bucky merely substitutes one stage for another. He discovers that he no longer needs to perform as a rock star to perform the role of ‘rock star’. Performativity, he learns, trumps and supplants the stage itself. As sociologist Mimi Schippers discusses in her book Rockin’ Out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock, drawing upon the works of Butler, Candace West and Don Zimmerman, ‘All day, every day, as we occupy different roles as students, teachers, parents, or friends, we are expected to also perform gender. We all continue to “do” masculinity and femininity because we are rewarded in our everyday interactions by others for doing so’ (xi). Schippers then suggests that these performances are not limited to gender or these example roles, so that she can discuss, in language that resembles Carlson’s, ‘“doing” rock star’ (1 and passim), or the idea that by the 1980s and into the 1990s, the cultural expectations of rock-star behaviour were already clearly understood and circumscribed. Unlike Schippers’s opening example of Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx wanting to dive into a female genitalia-shaped swimming pool (whatever that means) – that is, ‘“doing” rock star’ by knowingly revelling in sexist tropes and bad-boy behaviour – Bucky is seeking a way out. But there is no way out – anything he does, such as hiding, or can do, such as suicide, becomes another example of ‘“doing” rock star’, of

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reinforcing his own aura, as DeLillo repeats with Bill Gray. In 1959 Erving Goffman wrote that when an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be. (61) But somehow, by 1971, for DeLillo, the relationship between performer and observer seems to have reversed: rather than Goffman’s ‘matters are what they appear to be’, for Bucky’s and Bill’s audiences, what matters appear to be is what they are. As Bucky explains to the reporter from the Rolling Stone-proxy Running Dog magazine about the possibility of inaccuracies in the story, ‘“Make it all up. Go home and write whatever you want and then dent it out on the wires. Make it up. Whatever you write will be true”’ (Great Jones Street 21). Bucky reiterates: the rumours ‘“are all true”’ (21); ‘“I’m wherever you want me to be”’ (23). It is reasonable to read this exchange as ironic, as wry postmodernism – truth is relative and determined by the media, as opposed to the press printing that which is true; the signifier is the tail that wags the signified. But in terms of performative utterances, Bucky is right. The saying becomes the doing, and, what is more, Bucky, feigning passivity and victimhood, is himself still performing. Bucky develops the idea of performance further, this time by suggesting, seemingly facetiously, ‘“There is no house as such. There’s the facsimile of a house”’ (24); ‘“That wasn’t Globke [Bucky’s manager] you talked to. That was the facsimile of Globke . . . At this precise moment in duplicate time, Bucky Wunderlick is having his toenails clipped in the Waldorf Towers. You’ve been conducting this interview with his facsimile”’ (24). In his hubris, Bucky is still doing rock star: petulant, contrarian and ego-driven, as his final exchange with the Running Dog reporter affirms: ‘Peace.’ ‘War.’ (24) In a sense, Bucky is right: there is no aspect of Bucky that isn’t a metaphorical copy, an impersonation, a performance. When he is around others, and, in the central irony of the novel, even in his supposed hiding, everyone – his girlfriend, manager, bandmates, friends, neighbours, associates, even the Happy Valley Commune, which supposedly admires Bucky for upholding its own dedication to ‘returning the idea of privacy to American life’ (17) – knows where he is and invades his privacy. His every action becomes another part of his performance, his understanding of the cultural practices of ‘“doing” rock star’; even: ‘When I went downstairs I had to content myself with fashioning an impersonation of sleep, eyes closed, body lax, a studied evenness to my breathing’ (29). Bucky’s opening paragraph about fame makes his protestations of modesty sound precisely like something a rock star might say. Even Bob Dylan, upon whom Bucky is based,1 told Rolling Stone in 1984: ‘I never really liked the Basement

 1

Or so Anthony DeCurtis (132) believes.

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Tapes . . . They were used only for other artists to record those songs. I wouldn’t have put ’em out’ (Browne). Only Dylan could say such a thing about Dylan. Bucky eventually gets what he wants, sort of. He is injected with the product, the drug that takes away ‘“the ability to make words . . . They won’t come into your mind the way they normally do and the way we all take for granted they will”’ (Great Jones Street 255). But of course, much of Bucky’s appeal as a rock star – more in keeping with, say, the unintelligible Ozzy Osbourne than Bob Dylan – and a further irony, is that Bucky barely speaks to begin with. While it’s easy to read Bucky as eloquently DeLillian based on his first-person narration – about fame, about the telephone – most of his dialogue, as opposed to what he narrates or thinks, is short, simple and monosyllabic. His side of the conversation with Skippy, another ambassador for Happy Valley, consists almost entirely of phrases such as ‘What is it?’, ‘What’s that?’, ‘What am I doing?’ and ‘I know’, leading Skippy to say, of Bucky, well before he is injected, ‘I’m nonverbal just like you’ (17). The appeal of Bucky’s hit ‘Pee Pee Maw Maw’ is not, clearly, its eloquence, but its pure performativity. The words to the song enact, bring into existence, the very point of the song, and the song itself: Blank mumble blat Babble song babble song . . . The beast is loose Least is best Pee-pee-maw-maw (118) In any case, the drug’s effects are temporary, and so for Bucky, in the novel’s final pages, language’s return strikes him as a double defeat, first a chance not taken to reappear in the midst of people and forces made to my design and then a second enterprise denied, alternate to the first, permanent withdrawal to that unimprinted level where all sound is silken and nothing erodes in the mad weather of language . . . But I see no reason to announce the news . . . When the season is right I’ll return to whatever is out there. It’s just a question of what sound to make or fake. (264–5) ‘What sound to make or fake’ feels at first like another of Eric Packer’s ‘nitwit rhymes’, a more inspired version of Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 single ‘Fakin’ It’: ‘And I know I’m fakin’ it, I’m not really makin’ it’, and presaging the truism of ‘fake it ’til you make it’ by a few decades. Unlike Bill Gray’s permanent, mysterious and undignified disappearance, however, Bucky’s last words represent an acknowledgement that his life, not his music, is a performance, and therefore more open to possibility than perhaps he had imagined. The novel that opened with the near-promise of another rock star corpse – in 1971, coming just after the hazy, ambiguous deaths of Jimi Hendrix (1970), Janis Joplin (1970) and Jim Morrison (1971), along with Dylan’s own mysterious motorcycle accident (1966) – concludes with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a choice. * * * Great Jones Street seems the obvious novel through which to discuss DeLillo’s engagement with performance and performers. But again, the intertwined notions of performativity

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and performance allow another way of rethinking DeLillo’s narrators – in particular, Jack Gladney of White Noise. Decades of literary criticism since the novel’s 1985 publication have understood his self-observation that ‘I am the false character that follows the name around’ (White Noise 17) under postmodernist parameters of simulation and simulacrum or narrative unreliability. Yet that phrase also evokes, and refutes, Goffman’s central idea that people ‘are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess’ (61). What if Gladney does not? What if people do not? In summarising previous postmodern-centred criticism, Peter Knight writes that ‘critics have found numerous instances of the topsy-turvy world of life imitating art in DeLillo’s writing, most notably in White Noise, whose publication in the mid1980s coincided with great academic interest in the ideas of Baudrillard and other theorists of postmodernism’ (30). Knight then provides the examples of SIMUVAC – the simulated evacuation team using real-life disaster as practice for their simulations, rather than the more intuitive other way around – and most significantly, the nuns near the novel’s conclusion ‘who fake their belief to correspond with people’s sentimental fantasy of what a nun should be’ (30–1). But rather than see it only in this way, I suggest we now also see the ways in which Jack performs, in the Butlerian, Goffmanian sense, his roles of college professor, father and husband, but also, by the end, the crucial ways in which DeLillo draws a hard line between words and the materiality of the human body that Parker and Sedgwick – ‘how is saying something doing something?’ – do not. DeLillo does not shy away from suggesting that J. A. K. Gladney – the acronym, with its invented middle initial, phonetically identical to the original ‘Jack’, the everyman name, ‘a tag I wore like a borrowed suit’ (White Noise 16) – puts on a costume and consciously performs a role in order to ‘be taken seriously as a Hitler innovator’ (16). Calling out Goffman’s most famous work by name, Jack works against his ‘tendency to make a feeble presentation of self’ (17, my italics), gaining weight, donning dark glasses and his academic robes, and flourishing his watch, that metonym of both money and mortality. Of course, as decades of critics have noted, Jack ironically speaks no German; more importantly, he strives to ‘conceal the fact that I did not know German’ (31), in keeping with his role-playing. When he eventually must address his colleagues, his speech consists primarily of cognates, a performative act: ‘I talked mainly about Hitler’s mother, brother, and dog. His dog’s name was Wolf. This word is the same in English and German. Most of the words I used in my address were the same or nearly the same in both languages . . . My remarks were necessarily disjointed and odd’; thinking of the actual Germans at the conference, Jack feels ‘feeble’, the same word he used to describe his presentation earlier, ‘in their presence’ (274). Jack is speaking the language expressly to show that he speaks the language, the content of the speech following the words’ proximity to English and therefore showing the opposite of what he intended, in a kind of ironic performativity. The only source of ‘sensation’ Jack feels is from the gun he is concealing. Even Hitler studies itself is an exercise in performativity, in both senses of the word: Jack’s only course, the dramatically ironic, punningly titled ‘Advanced Nazism’, places ‘special emphasis on parades, rallies and uniforms’ (25), outer trappings, without delving into historical context, let alone moral philosophy. But of course, the glaring chasm of Gladney, and the novel, is that the supposed founder of Hitler studies, who ‘reads Hitler

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well into the night’, the subject of that conference and the entire invented field, indeed focuses on ‘parades, rallies and uniforms’ themselves – the trappings of performance – but ignores the Holocaust; Jack fixates on death, but only, ever, his own.2 Hitler studies becomes performative in the worst sense of the term. Gladney believes that his invented, performed identity exists in a moral vacuum, outside social or historical context, when, of course, it does not. In doing so, and in his movement towards physical violence and beyond roles and performances, Jack becomes an embodiment of the Nazism that he imagined could be studied dispassionately and disinterestedly, as a series of nothing more than carnivals and costumes. Other characters in White Noise are rendered performers as well, in the seemingly benign ways in which Jack and Babette profess to ‘“lie to doctors all the time.” “So do I.” “But why?”’ (77). Their conversation ends there, but readers learn why: because they are performing the role of good patient, even if it involves lying, just as they are performing the role of good spouse – since Wilder is under two and not biologically Jack’s, they are relative newlyweds – but concealing everything that matters: Jack’s ‘(. . . fear of death)’ is hidden, even from himself, in parentheses (30), and Babette hides her fears and attempts to quell them. Later, when Jack visits the doctor after his exposure to the Airborne Toxic Event, he continues to lie, to play the role of the good patient, which his doctor appreciates (260), until the materiality of Jack’s alarming tests come to light. His performance and role cannot change the evidence of contaminants in his blood; saying cannot always be doing. Babette, in her role as the loving wife, is performing as well. When she eventually reveals her illicit procuring of Dylar, Jack stops addressing her as ‘you’, and switches to the third person: ‘“Is this why I married Babette?”’ (199), as though he wants the performer, not the real woman speaking to him, back. He does it again later when they argue over Babette’s running, of course a pretext for Jack’s anger at her infidelity: ‘“Babette doesn’t speak like this”’ (301). Jack’s idea of Babette, and Babette’s expected Goffmanian performance of wife and mother, guileless, earthy, does not match this other, masked version of herself, so much so that she literally puts on a ski mask, the symbol of a criminal, for her liaisons with Mr Gray. Babette performs her roles so well that Jack fails to see that they are roles at all. Yet at the same time, her performance is rooted in her body – her eating, her exercise, her sexuality, and ultimately her fear of death. Even the nuns, who, as journalists would now write, engage in ‘performative religion’, may be doing something more complex, and more redemptive. To say that Jack, Babette or the nuns are performative in only the negative sense of the word, rather than the philosophical or sociological sense, ultimately misses much of DeLillo’s point. The novel’s climatic scene, when Jack confronts Willy Mink, née Mr Gray, in the hotel room, might best be understood as a science-fictional rendering of the idea of performance itself. DeLillo, more so in White Noise than Great Jones Street, not only represents the idea of everyday life as a series of performances; he also seeks to interrogate this idea, with the materiality of human bodies and death providing a hard stop to role-playing and a hard separation between words and actions.

 2

For further analysis on morality and White Noise, see Kavadlo chapter 1.

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When Jack approaches Mink, Mink says, ‘You are very white, you know that?’ ‘That’s because I’m dying.’ ‘This stuff fix you up.’ ‘I’ll still die.’ ‘But it won’t matter, which comes to the same thing.’ (310) But of course, it does matter, and it does not come to the same thing. Taking the idea of performativity to its extreme, Mink can no longer tell the difference between words and things at all, so when Jack, knowingly, says ‘Hail of bullets’, Mink ‘hits the floor’ and crawls away (311). But then, when Jack, previously emboldened by carrying the gun at his conference, with its intimations of violence and power, really shoots Mink, Jack’s senses are overwhelmed, and Mink really, not performatively, bleeds: ‘I watched blood squirt from the victim’s midsection’ (312). Jack wants Mink to put on a new role of ‘victim’, but the sound of the gunshot and sight of the blood leads Jack to say, ‘I saw beyond words’ (312). Later, the nuns indeed acknowledge that they are performing the role of nuns, and, in keeping with Goffman, performing it for the sake of others. When Jack learns of their unbelief, he protests: ‘Other nuns wear dresses . . . Here you still wear the old uniform. The habit, the veil, the clunky shoes. You must believe in tradition’ (318). Jack is, as ever, focused on the costume, even though he should have learned by now that wearing a robe and mouthing cognates does not make one a true scholar of German. The nun retorts, ‘You would come in bleeding from the street and tell me six days it took to make a universe?’ (318); and later, after Jack accuses her of ‘pretense’ (319) and ‘pretending’ (320) – versus performing – the nun concludes, ‘You could come in here from the street dragging a body by the foot and talk about angels who live in the sky’ (320). It seems to Jack, and maybe readers, that the nun’s lack of true belief makes her religion performative in the contemporary journalistic sense. But whether she believes or not, her words and rituals, as Butler suggests, and, crucially, her actions as a caregiver and healer bring religion into the world. The nuns repair broken bodies, including that of Mink, a real person, not static, not a composite, not ‘Mr Gray’, who is shot by real, not linguistic, bullets. Heinrich’s friend Orest Mercator wants to train to break a world record made of words in a book, but in the end he is bitten, almost immediately, by a real snake. Near the end of White Noise, just before he enters the rearranged supermarket for the last time, Jack describes his new avoidance of Dr Chakravartly, who ‘wants to talk to me but I am making it a point to stay away . . . I am taking no calls’ (325). Yet more than White Noise, more than Great Jones Street, DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, and his last (as of this writing), The Silence, feature the most frequent mention of telephones. Americana narrator David Bell’s very name evokes the telecommunications monopoly Bell Telephone, and the novel features no fewer than sixteen refences to telephones. The most symbolically significant one, though, seems to be this: ‘There were thirty-six small holes in the mouthpiece of my telephone. They were arranged in three circles of six, twelve, and eighteen holes each. There were only six holes in the earpiece. This disparity seemed significant but I didn’t know exactly why’ (Americana 96). Bell might not know why, but DeLillo does. From Americana to The Silence, DeLillo’s entire oeuvre

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has depicted people who narrate more than they listen, who perform roles even as they seem to yearn for less performance. Such a yearning, however, cannot be fulfilled, even by the end of phones themselves. In The Silence, characters talk and talk, and when they’re not talking, the narration talks in their voices. Sometimes it’s the ready-made, prefabricated language of television soundbites. After the football game disappears from the screen, ‘Max said, “This team is ready to step out of the shadows and capture the moment”’ (The Silence 45, italics in original). Sometimes they talk mockingly: ‘“Is this the causal embrace that marks the fall of world civilization?”’ (36). Sometimes, as detractors of DeLillo have alleged for decades, they sound like replicants attempting human speech: ‘“In class you quoted footnotes. You vanished into footnotes. Einstein, Heisenberg, Gödel”’ (29). With technology wiped out, Max wonders, ‘Think of the many millions of blank screens. Try to imagine disabled phones. What happens to people who live inside their phones?’ (52). It’s this lingering question that will haunt readers, not because their screens are blank, but because they are full; not because phones are gone, but because they remain ubiquitous. The Silence imagines an end of technology that should lead to the end of performance and performativity, for better and worse, yet does not. Language persists. Even then, much of that language is less about communication – Max’s dialogue is laden with ready-made signifiers such as ‘football food’ – than it is about connection. The only mentions of the silence of the title are not stark or absolute, but liminal: ‘the pauses were turning into silences and beginning to feel like the wrong kind of normal’ (67), and, later, ‘Tessa notes the silence that attends her pauses’ (88). The silence is not utter, but during pauses; in between, a state of indeterminacy, unsettling, awaiting resolution. The novel’s conclusion refuses to provide it. Instead, it gives us the technological equivalent of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, where Vladimir and Estragon decide, ‘Yes, let’s go’, but ‘they do not move’, as the curtain falls (61): Max is not listening. He understands nothing. He sits in front of the TV set with his hands folded behind his neck, elbows jutting. Then he stares into the blank screen. (The Silence 116) Even without phones, there remains plenty of talking in The Silence, but still little listening. It shouldn’t take Bucky’s dead and dumb phone, or Jack’s refusing to take his doctor’s calls as a means to perform his way out of death, or The Silence’s world-ending blackout to realise that the problem is not technological. With the television gone, Max begins performing its lines and its role, even as life attempts to go on around him. Bucky’s phone cannot speak. Jack is not taking calls. Max is not listening. But DeLillo is. And, perhaps, so are we.

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. Grove Weidenfeld, 1954. Bial, Henry, editor. The Performance Studies Reader. 2nd edn, Routledge, 2004. Browne, David. ‘Bob Dylan’s Secret Masterpiece: The Untold Story of “The Basement Tapes.”’ Rolling Stone, 15 November 2014. www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/the-untoldstory-of-bob-dylans-basement-tapes-inside-the-new-issue-44611/. Accessed 23 September 2021.

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Bryant, Cierra. ‘“Slacktivism”: The Issue with Performative Activism.’ Baker Orange, 31 August 2021. thebakerorange.com/36415/opinion/slacktivism-the-issue-with-performativeactivism/. Accessed 23 September 2021. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. 1990. Routledge, 2006. Carlson, Marvin. ‘What Is Performance?’ The Performance Studies Reader, edited by Henry Bial. 2nd edn, Routledge, 2004, pp. 70–5. DeCurtis, Anthony. ‘The Product: Bucky Wunderlick, Rock ’n’ Roll, and Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street.’ Introducing Don DeLillo, edited by Frank Lentricchia. Duke University Press, 1991, pp. 131–41. DeLillo, Don. Americana. Houghton Mifflin, 1971. ——. Cosmopolis. Scribner, 2003. ——. Great Jones Street. Houghton Mifflin, 1973. ——. Mao II. Viking, 1991. ——. ‘“An Outsider in this Society”: An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ Interview with Anthony DeCurtis. Introducing Don DeLillo, edited by Frank Lentricchia. Duke University Press, 1991, pp. 42–66. ——. The Silence, Scribner, 2020. ——. White Noise. Penguin, 1985. Goffman, Erving. ‘Performances: Belief in the Part One is Playing.’ The Performance Studies Reader, edited by Henry Bial. 2nd edn, Routledge, 2004, pp. 61–5. Kavadlo, Jesse. Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief. Peter Lang, 2004. Keeling, Lee. ‘Performative Politics Are on the Rise.’ Victoria Advocate, 24 August 2021. www.victoriaadvocate.com/opinion/guest-column-performative-politics-are-on-the-rise/ article_4c16ca70-04d9-11ec-b894-63d804ba499f.html. Accessed 23 September 2021. Knight, Peter. ‘DeLillo, Postmodernism, Postmodernity.’ Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, edited by John N. Duvall. Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 27–40. Lentricchia, Frank, editor. Introducing Don DeLillo. Duke University Press, 1991. McKenzie, Jon. ‘The Liminal-Norm.’ The Performance Studies Reader, edited by Henry Bial. 2nd edn, Routledge, 2004, pp. 26–31. McWhorter, John. ‘The Performative Antiracism of Black Students at the University of Wisconsin.’ New York Times, 24 August 2021. www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/opinion/antiracism-universitywisconsin-rock.html. Accessed 23 September 2021. Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. ‘Introduction.’ Performativity and Performance, edited by Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Routledge, 1995, pp. 1–18. Schippers, Mimi. Rockin’ Out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock. Rutgers University Press, 2002. Sheneman, Drew. ‘Performative Vaccine Outrage.’ NJ.com, 10 September 2021. https://www. nj.com/opinion/2021/09/performative-vaccine-outrage-sheneman.html. Accessed 1 February 2023. Shumway, David. ‘Rock & Roll as a Cultural Practice.’ Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture, edited by Anthony DeCurtis. Duke University Press, 1992, pp. 117–34.

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24 DeLillo Across Page and Stage Rebecca Rey

[T]he theatre’s greatest failing is also its most triumphant quality – its vulnerability to Time. Like all living flesh, it yields, but also like flesh, it is pulsing and alive. (Brustein 312) Ephemera, ephemera. (Clurman 504)

I

t is 1987. Two men chat about a play opening that night. One admits that ‘theatre is really mysterious and alluring for someone who has written a novel’ (Rothstein 5). He elaborates: ‘For one thing, when you’re finished with a play, you don’t have an object you hold in your hand and say, “This is what I’ve done.” You’re not quite sure what you’ve done’ (Rothstein 5). As DeLillo explains the difference between writing a play and writing a novel to Mervyn Rothstein of the New York Times, we notice the varied ‘writer’ roles he inhabits. When he chooses his literary form – novel, novella, short story, play, screenplay – so he chooses from the accompanying tradition, elements and styles, donning the relevant authorial costume. The results have had mixed receptions. What DeLillo has indeed done, when he has finished with a play, is contribute to an ephemeral art form, one that relies on actor and audience energy, and one that can never be exactly repeated. Taking a literary form-based angle on Sarah Wasserman’s discussions on ephemera, this chapter seeks to explore the effects of the dramatic form’s ephemerality. Wasserman asks, ‘What happens if we recognize that even our most enduring objects and values are liable to vanish – and continue vanishing without ever fully disappearing? [. . .] If even material forms are mutable, what is left to hold onto?’ (201). Having been taken through the lens of an ephemeral production of a play, we may wonder what is left to hold on to after travelling home from the theatre. What memories, possibilities, movements, impulsions? This chapter will move through DeLillo’s various literary roles, and tease out the threads of form: how does the private blanket of a novel differ from the public curtain of a play, and what does that mean for this writer and his audiences? Continuing the interview with Rothstein, DeLillo prudently acknowledges the intangibility of theatre: ‘[It]’s very elusive to try to determine a definitive performance, even a definitive moment, because they change all the time’ (Rothstein 5). While DeLillo’s novels have been dissected in myriad ways by literary critics, cultural theorists and students, his plays have been sidelined, consciously or otherwise. In fact, few DeLillo readers know that he has written for the theatre.1 Apart from the rare critical mention and a few dozen performance reviews, it seems that DeLillo’s fans and critics alike are also  1

See Curt Gardner’s well-known site ‘Don DeLillo’s America’ for a comprehensive, though incomplete, summary of play performances and reception: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html.

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not quite sure what he has done when shifting form to the stage. This is more astounding when we realise that he has made the shift a not insignificant number of times; with seven published plays under his belt and many global performances, it would be remiss not to recognise the importance of this writer’s choice of form.2 Like his well-known and lauded novels, DeLillo’s plays are topical, playful, humorous, brave and – vitally – regularly staged and experienced by the public. In Staging Don DeLillo, I summarise his trajectory as a playwright: DeLillo’s progress as a playwright maps onto a typical trajectory of a writer learning the craft of a new genre form: from ‘The Engineer’ to The Word for Snow, DeLillo first trials the [form] to learn its boundaries, imitates the greats, writes for entertainment and external validation. Then, comfortable with the genre, he writes for sociopolitically-minded spectators about ethical subjects of personal interest to him. [He is] simply making his way through a new medium, following the general patterns of writers who forge through a new [form]. (Rey, Staging Don DeLillo 143) For a writer such as DeLillo, who is most comfortable with the novel form, indeed being one of his own beloved ‘men in small rooms, hiding or plotting or thinking obsessively about something’,3 the theatre must have a significant enough pull to change art form entirely. DeLillo notes that ‘another enormous difference is that when you write a novel, you have the published book, and that’s your novel, for better or worse. When you write a play, the feeling is much more elusive’ (McAuliffe 611). This difference between writing dialogue and staging it is precisely the element that separates theatre from fiction: while the novel is an entity in itself, the play is both play-text and production, with the textual words coming alive only when performed. Interestingly, of DeLillo’s dramatic oeuvre, only ‘The Engineer of Moonlight’ (1979), which he has described as ‘strictly a private experiment’ (Lavey), has remained unperformed, existing solely in play-text form.4 This chapter is about the art form of drama, and, in particular, the elements of theatre that differ from fiction. Here, I’ll consider the following: what makes one of the leading living American novelists pivot towards writing for the stage every ten years or so? And how should we critique his plays differently to his novels, given the ephemerality of production? Beginning with the live nature of performance, and how it transforms spectators, we will move on to the visual origin of plays, how playwrights must relinquish ownership of the play-text for it to be performed, and what it means to write for a live audience. Finally, I will suggest that the theatre is ripe for sociopolitical influence, making the play a potential political act.

The Liveness of Performance: You and Me, Here and Now Even if we arrive at the theatre alone, we come essentially to join with others. A play does not require an audience, but rarely does it lack one; for most of us, going to a play

 2

See Rey, Staging Don DeLillo for an expansive, full analysis of all published play-texts. Letter to Lino Belleggia, 2002, Don DeLillo Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, Container 109, Folder 3.  4 In an interview with Martha Lavey, DeLillo admitted his first play ‘was something I published in a small literary journal and forgot about, because I didn’t think it was stage-worthy’ (Lavey).  3

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means seeking a collective experience. The ‘theatre’ is a group event whereby spectators, actors, crew and creatives come together to collaborate on a performance that is a oneoff: it can never be relived or entirely recorded. The experience of seeing a play’s performance is the literary form of physical ephemera. Where ephemeral objects slowly fade, so too does performance: it is temporary, ungraspable after the fact, elusive in form, and living on only in memory. Wasserman deftly reads DeLillo as a ‘writer of ephemera’, an ‘uncanny chronicler, not just of objects, but of the process by which these objects are always being lost’, reconciling the conflict in his work between ‘preservation and elegy, realism and de-realization’ (Wasserman 200). His novels feature many catalogues of objects, both ‘stockpiling stuff’ and also ‘dissolving’ things in the ‘solvent of elaborate prose’ (200). I take Wasserman’s reading into the field of form by encouraging play-text readers and performance spectators to consider the play itself as one of Wasserman’s intangible ‘objects’, DeLillo’s theatre oeuvre as one of her ‘catalogs’, and his stage as their ‘solvent’. The stage is the enemy of the historiographer and the chronicler – it is a microcosm in which disguise is fundamental, time need not be linear, and the only remaining evidence after the curtains close is fading memory. A play’s production, like the ephemera of bus tickets, photographs and stamps, fades with the passing of time. The liveness of performance is particularly thrilling because it ‘cultivates a sense of presence, and because risk is unavoidable where accident cannot be edited out’ (Allain and Harvie 168–9). Whereas a recording can be manipulated in post-production, live performance exists solely in the immediate moment. What is irreproducible is also, of course, valuable in its originality.5 Since it ‘cannot be captured, performance is “nonreproductive”; theatre resists becoming commodified, objectified and appropriated, and it maintains instead the dynamic possibility of being continuously creative’ (Allain and Harvie 169). In our age of on-demand streaming and daily social media chronicling, this art form is unique: it is based on the primacy of contiguity, three-dimensionality and the inability to replicate the moment. Only those at the 2008 Melbourne performance of Love-Lies-Bleeding can truly know that iteration of the play-text. In essence, you had to be there. This point bears examination, since it cannot be stressed enough when it comes to the crux of form difference between DeLillo’s novels and plays. With rare exceptions, the experience of a novel is largely individual – an interpretation of narrative and creation of meaning by a singular reader. White Noise (1985), Americana (1971) and The Body Artist (2001) have been purchased or borrowed and read by hundreds of thousands of individuals. Conversely, the liveness of performance is social – it is a shared, reciprocal experience among the audience and between audience and performers. All of DeLillo’s plays ‘emphasize and promote the value and necessity of conversation’, effectively dramatising ‘how theatre can create a community that sustains unmediated interaction and intimacy in an absurd and mediated world’ (Osteen 79). Theodore W. Hatlen too describes this process of merging, emotional trustfulness and verisimilitude beautifully: Although an audience comes together as individuals, the theater is a group effort. Through mutual stimulation in the release of emotions, the group may become a crowd. This has important psychological implications, because as individuals

 5

Walter Benjamin famously explores the ‘authenticity’ of an original work of art in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935).

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merge themselves into a crowd, marked changes take place. They lose their identity, becoming more susceptible to emotional appeals and more easily swayed than the single person in isolation. They relax their discrimination and become more gullible. (Hatlen 333) While I am not entirely convinced of the loss of identity that Hatlen claims – identity is, rather, expanded – the general point remains: ‘The members of a crowd experience a heightened state of suggestibility’ (Bogardus 255, my emphasis). As theatre spectators, we tend to collectively bond into a mass audience and are more likely to adopt a herd mentality. When Nurse Baker enters and Dr Bazelon suddenly ‘slumps, becomes passive and uncomprehending’ in The Day Room (39), for example, the audience bonds in narrow-eyed murmuring, collectively wondering: is Dr Bazelon an impostor, a runaway from the Arno Klein Psychiatric Wing? We join Wyatt’s disbelief – ‘The face, the gestures, the voice. He can’t be one of them. I refuse to believe it’ (40) – and move towards a transformation, a questioning of identity and truth.

The Transformative Spectator Experience Taken further, audience suggestibility makes the theatre ripe for planting the seeds of intellectual and social upheaval. The collective experience of the theatre lends itself particularly well to the collective experience of reform and revolution. As I will claim later in this chapter, DeLillo makes the genre shift to theatre with the intentional purpose of making societal points about identity, euthanasia and climate change. DeLillo considers himself a social critic: of ‘[w]riters’, he says, ‘some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren’t noticed’ (Alter). This self-named ‘novelist’ uses the dramatic form not in spite of, but because of its immediacy, to reach his audiences through the most dynamic, transformative and revolutionary means. Theatre’s qualities of immediacy, collective experience and uniqueness lend themselves well to DeLillo’s discussions of personal identity, euthanasia and climate change. Do readers of such similarly socially focused novels come away with the visceral buzz and emotional turbulence that theatre spectators embody? For what better way to showcase an ‘Everyman’ dealing with a crisis of identity than in front of an audience of ‘Everypeople’, and what better way to evoke the stricken melancholy of euthanasia decisions than in front of an audience of friends and loved ones who experience the play together? For instance, in Love-Lies-Bleeding (2005) when Sean and Lia discuss a compassionate end to Alex’s life, we likely find ourselves sympathetically contemplating what we would do in their place: You want to believe that he’s there, somewhere, in that sitting figure. But he isn’t. There’s no one there. He can’t recover the slightest shred of identity. His eyes are cold ash. No longer and not yet. It’s wrong to keep him suspended. Do the hard thing, out of love, not despair. Let the man die. (47–8) Sitting beside our friends, spouses, loved ones and community members in the theatre, we cannot help but be moved to consider end of life. Would we? Could we? As Osteen warmly writes, ‘Conversation is the magic that wards off dread’ (84). Words not only bind us to one another as a kind of salvation, but further impel us together in a shared

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call towards sociopolitical change. In essence, seeing a play about euthanasia means you not only consume the ephemeral interactions on stage, but likely interpret and reproduce them outside the theatre through conversations, thereby manifesting some greater sense of permanence and allowing for spectators – now returned as ‘citizens’ in the world – to oppose the systems against which the playwright is writing. Likewise, DeLillo prompts sympathetic responses through Valparaiso (2004). When talk-show host Delfina presses guest Michael Majeski, ‘What are you hiding in your heart?’, Michael takes a meta view: ‘We’re dealing with the important things here. Our faith, our health. Who we are and how we live. And I’m beginning to think that people need my story’ (75). Here DeLillo is speaking to the ‘pulse of theatre itself: there is no division between the stage and “real” life, because we all perform all the time, remaking our identities through interactions with others’ (Osteen 83). Acting – the disguises, dramatic ‘masks’ on stage – is a reflection of the concealing, impersonating and masquerading that audience members revel in outside the theatre. DeLillo explicitly draws the connection between the ephemerality of actors’ roles and the harsh reality of our continuing self-deceptive disguises: ‘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’ (Rothstein H19). We hear this through Jolene in The Day Room (1986): Dying is what we’re all about [. . .] We show you how to hide from what you know [. . .] We develop techniques to shield us from the facts. But they become the facts. The fear is so deep we find it waiting in the smallest role. We can’t meet death on our own terms [. . .] This is our mystery, our beauty, our genius, our sickness. (90)6 We watch ephemeral theatre to escape – or perhaps to meet head-on our mortal dramas. As we sit in the dark theatre with our people, appraising the actions on the stage, we may well be moved to consider our own domestic complacency. What is my partner hiding in their heart? Will they discover what I hide in mine? And more importantly, how can we learn from the Majeskis’ tale to protect ourselves from being pushed to such extremes? We exit the womb of the theatre and make our way home shedding echoes of Michael and Livia. Moving beyond sympathy, spectators are of course also empowered to shift the performance through unexpected reactions. Consider Robert Brustein’s following recognition of an audience’s power, and the effects that audible reactions to the dialogue above could have had on the performance of Love-Lies-Bleeding: An audience that rustles programs or coughs or displays other forms of restlessness can throw actors as much as a late entrance or a misplaced prop. Similarly, the audience’s healthy laughter or rapt attention can charge a performance with electrical energy. For these reasons, actors speak of audiences as if they had collective personalities or a single identity – friendly or hostile, young or old, bored or attentive, intelligent or dumb. (Brustein 275)

 6

I explore the connections between mortality and acting in Staging Don DeLillo, pp. 82–90.

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An unreactive audience can leave a performance flat and lifeless, with the play’s premise sunk. We might wonder if this was the case during The Word for Snow’s 2012 Purcell Room performances in London, where reviewer Paul Taylor emerged from the theatre thoroughly unimpressed. One would have hoped that after a positive build-up by Alison Flood in the Guardian for the play’s European premiere at a London festival, in which director Jack McNamara declared he was ‘going all out, bringing in a choir, live music, video’ (Flood), the play was ripe for positive reaction. Indeed, the play – which dissects the human effects of climate change – was, one would assume, written with the intention of making a clear and moving point. Not so; Taylor rained on the proverbial parade with his review’s guillotine conclusion: ‘DeLillo, you reckon, would be unwise to give up the day-job’ (Taylor).

Theatre as a Political Act DeLillo considers writing to be an act of intellectual rebellion and ‘a form of personal freedom’,7 a point repeated in numerous interviews. He has unequivocally affirmed the revolutionary power that writers have in society, endorsing this by continuing to publish on topics in the modern milieu, such as euthanasia, cryogenics, terrorism and assassinations: Writers must oppose systems. It’s important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments [. . .] I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us. (Bou and Thoret n.p.) While seemingly writing in opposition (and in solitude), he seems fairly unconcerned about the external reception of his novels or about accolades. Instead, he derives value from being Graham Greene’s ‘grit in the state machine’ (DeLillo, ‘City Arts’). When White Noise won the National Book Award in 1985, DeLillo’s acceptance speech simply consisted of, ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be here tonight, but I thank you all for coming’, delineating the difference between the sociable celebrity expected by the audience and the solitary rebel he identifies as. When Fordham University wished to confer on him an honorary doctorate of letters, he politely declined, responding, ‘My sense of the novelist as an oppositional figure in the culture makes it difficult for me to accept awards not specifically bestowed by a panel of fellow writers.’8 What, then, does DeLillo do with this power to influence audiences? For one, he has delved into sociopolitical topics: in Valparaiso, the cult of the celebrity; in Love-LiesBleeding, the familial struggle and aftermath of euthanasia; in The Word for Snow, the utter devastation of climate change; in The Day Room, the slipperiness of personal identity; in The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life (2000), the comfortable banality of domesticity. He has absorbed the cultural milieu at the time of writing and produced social commentary play-texts, opportunities for readers and spectators to consider the issues with captive empathy. We are bound to our seats, impelled to

 7  8

Letter to Jonathan Franzen, 18 August, no year, DeLillo Papers, Container 95, Folder 4. Letter to Father Joseph A. O’Hare, 13 April 1998, DeLillo Papers, Container 109, Folder 3.

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participate in celebrity interrogations, end-of-life discussions, laments over environmental devastation. In her exploration of ephemera, Wasserman notes the distinction that Anne Cheng makes between ‘grief’ and ‘grievance’, and claims that ‘[t]he language of loss that DeLillo locates in his ephemeral objects represents his attempt to express private grief while simultaneously joining in a shared call for political visibility and agency’ (203). Through a reading of form, I interpret Wasserman’s point to situate the ephemerality of theatre as representing the nexus between privately grieving over the social issues presented in the play, and joining with the likeminded audience in a shared call for sociopolitical change. The context and topics of DeLillo’s plays, combined with the collective experience of the theatre, indicate a drive to, at the least, social commentary, and at the most, social change.9 Love-Lies-Bleeding, for instance, was written in close proximity to a very similar case playing out in the United States, when 26-year-old Terri Schiavo from Florida fell into a persistent vegetative state and her husband battled for the right to remove her feeding tube. It is clearly a pro-choice, pro-end-of-life play. The Word for Snow also coincided with the world’s most significant reports on climate change, with the premiere of the play happening eight months after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in February 2007. The play-text was later published in 2014, the same year as the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. With the play’s overt environmental focus and the acknowledgement of scientific consensus (‘Yes, things are measurable’, ‘Yes, the world is changing, physically, verifiably’ [16]), we can confidently assert that DeLillo recognises climate change, and is accepting of the scientific consensus. These plays are examples of DeLillo writing against power, bringing these social issues to the fore and encouraging spectators to join discussions and perhaps even participate in social change.

The Visual Origin of Dramatic Works Those familiar with Luigi Pirandello’s work will recognise parallels between his and DeLillo’s origin stories for their plays.10 Pirandello was strongly attached to his characters, developing a personal relationship with them and feeling an uncontrollable compulsion to bring them to life. DeLillo too sees prose characters and drama characters differently: ‘In a novel, it’s a room, it’s a restaurant, it’s a field’ (Lavey). He explains that in his novels, ‘Character and place tend to happen naturally. When I imagine someone he is usually somewhere, and it’s usually pretty specific’ (Lavey). Writing for the theatre, however, he says, ‘I tend to see a set on a stage – although quite vaguely – but it seems to be that way’ (Lavey). There seems a clear demarcation between the forms and the writer’s imagining of characters and places; from the outside, visually, he pictures his plays’ characters on stages. Likewise, when asked about his first foray into playwriting, ‘The Engineer of Moonlight’, DeLillo responds, ‘I’m not quite sure how to explain what brought it about. I think I saw people on a stage,

 9

For a more comprehensive analysis of the plays’ contexts, see Rey, ‘Plays and Performance’. It should be noted DeLillo has confessed to Robert Brustein that ‘Pirandello was his theatrical guide – but not limited to Pirandello’ (letter from Brustein to Judith Laurence Pastore, 9 February 1989, DeLillo Papers, Container 15, Folder 3).

10

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actually, and began to follow them and to listen to them’ (McAuliffe 609). We see strong echoes of Pirandello here, in particular his famous visceral and visual inspiration for Six Characters in Search of an Author: ‘These creatures of my brain were not living my life any longer: they were already living a life of their own, and it was now beyond my power to deny them a life which was no longer in my control’ (Pirandello). For both Pirandello and DeLillo, ‘[i]t is not the drama that makes the characters, but the characters who make the drama’ (Pirandello, qtd in Caesar 13); they see characters on the stage – active, body-hot, three-dimensional in space and time – and feel compelled to tell their story. We can confidently conclude that the liveness of theatre is a necessary condition for DeLillo’s story origins in this form: the three-dimensionality of a performance is significantly different enough from a novel to warrant a change of form.

The Relinquishing of Textual Ownership Moving on from a text’s conception, when considering its ‘ownership’, we must consider the power exchange between writer and consumer. Here we uncover another variable between the form of the novel and the play, and one that DeLillo is acutely aware of: whereas the novel is ‘owned’ by the author – and after publication, by the reader – the play is a different beast. In an interview with the Guardian’s Xan Brooks, DeLillo explains how the process and ownership differs from his writerly point of view: ‘When I’m working on a novel’, he says, ‘I tend to glide from one sentence to the next. The sentences help me reveal the character. In theatre, it’s more complicated, because I don’t know who the actors are. But that’s all part of a play’s evolution.’ He makes the process sound like passing on a baton. ‘Before anyone takes the stage, the play belongs to the playwright. In the rehearsal period, it’s the director’s play. But then, during the performance, it belongs to the actors.’ (Brooks) This ‘passing on a baton’ is a transference of ownership and power; and, to take the concept further, while it may seem to DeLillo that the play belongs to the actors during the performance, in reality – as we’ve heard from Brustein – it belongs to the audience. DeLillo has, in the past, sat in the audience when a play has premiered, noting that ‘it’s interesting to get a sense of the audience reaction [. . .] what I sensed most recently with Valparaiso was a thoughtfulness . . . a sense in which they were very receptive, line by line’ (McAuliffe 612). The same year as McAuliffe’s interview (2000), DeLillo showed significant contentment with proposed changes to his playtext for the purposes of production. When Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company director Frank Galati ‘changed the order of scenes, cut them internally, and reduced a two-act play to a simple, brisk act, DeLillo unblinkingly approved it all’ (Hickman 55). A year after sharing these thoughts, DeLillo opened up further, giving creative licence to Valparaiso director Hal Brooks. When the two workshopped the 2001 production for the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, Brooks was struck by the writer’s humility and generosity: ‘He provided an outline for me and allowed me to fill it’ (Hickman 55). The director of the American Repertory Theater’s premiere performance of Valparaiso, David Wheeler, likewise found DeLillo’s openness remarkable: ‘He’s open to every suggestion that comes his way [. . .] Instead of rejecting, negating,

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fighting it, he says, “Let’s see what it’s like?” It’s extraordinary’ (Hickman 55).11 The 2002 Blue Heron Theatre production by the Rude Mechanicals Theater Company and directed by Hal Brooks also received DeLillo’s blessing (Weber). In 2006 DeLillo was so impressed by Jack McNamara’s ideas for the production in London that the writer got in touch (Lam). DeLillo even directed the 2005 world-premiere reading of Love-Lies-Bleeding himself in the Fulton Street Theater in Boise. He had ‘spent a week rehearsing the cast & hanging out at Bar Gernika’, and subsequently ‘seemed very pleased with the reading and with the reception given the play (the full house laughed in all the right places)’ (Holmes). Then there are the doors the writer has slammed shut. He has opened up to his friend David Foster Wallace about the vulnerability felt as a playwright, as opposed to as a novelist: ‘The novel is different. The playwright doesn’t begin to die until after he writes his play; that’s when the fuck-ups happen.’12 Interestingly, in the same year, director Bruce Sheridan asked DeLillo’s permission to adapt ‘The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed Into Heaven’ for New Zealand audiences, changing the athlete’s sport from tennis to rugby. DeLillo responded unequivocally in the negative: ‘I don’t believe that adapting the piece to local conditions is a good idea [. . .] I think a new work ought to be done as written [. . .] I understand your reasons for wanting to alter the piece but I’m afraid I have to say no.’13 Despite reserving the occasional right to textual faithfulness, DeLillo does, on the whole, realise the need to let go. As he notes, ‘much of the work will be done by others eventually [. . .] what will happen when it moves into three dimensions: this is the test and the surprise’ (Freeman). As noted above, the audience too has significant clout during a production. The performance is not a pre-recorded film, but a collaborative exchange, as Brustein further explains: ‘Unlike movie stars, who are unconscious of how the audience is responding, or even if it is there, stage actors consider the audience as collaborators in the process, responsible in no small part for the quality of the performance’ (275). DeLillo makes a common and forgivable omission as a self-identifying novelist; keeping the fourth wall solidly in place, he has rarely acknowledged the audience at all when discussing his work for the theatre. In fact, he continues his interview with Brooks by mentioning a performance of Valparaiso when ‘one of the actors suddenly decided to say the lines in a thick French accent [. . .] if you mess around with my sentences in a novel, you’re going to get in trouble. Whereas with a play, you have to hand it over. It finally becomes more theirs than mine’ (Brooks). Again, this description of the bequeathing of ownership ends prematurely. On completing the play-text, DeLillo confers the play to the actors for rehearsals and performance, but later, during the performance, the actors accede ownership of the play to the audience. It is the spectators who react, critique and deliver immediate feedback to the actors, creating a feedback loop of cooperation and alliance. The spectators also, of course, include reviewers, who, if they decide the play isn’t ‘worth the $80 ticket price’ (‘Review of Love Lies Bleeding’) may well influence the play’s ticket sales and reception. 11

Unfortunately for Wheeler, the premiere was coolly reviewed as ‘flawed and only mildly provocative’ in the New York Times, ‘not so much a play as a conversation piece’ belonging in a Harvard lecture hall (Marks E1). 12 Letter to David Foster Wallace, 6 November 1995, DeLillo Papers, Container 101, Folder 10, 2. 13 Letter to Bruce Sheridan, 1995, DeLillo Papers, Container 86, Folder 6.

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Naturally, the collaboration that founds theatre includes the rehearsal process. Rehearsals are the intermediary between play-text and performance, bringing playwrights, directors and actors together in a stimulating exchange of power. For a play to be performed, many hours are needed from the creative and technical crew for staging and lighting, and for actors to rehearse the text. The 1987 production of The Day Room, directed by Michael Blakemore at the Manhattan Theater Club, gave DeLillo the opportunity to interact with the numerous people bringing his words to life – an experience unknown to novelists, unless they are involved in screenplay adaptations. DeLillo enjoys these rare interactions, saying ‘it is a wonderful thing, if you’re a novelist, to periodically come into direct contact with other artists of various kinds: cast, director, lighting and sound people’ (Bigsby, ‘In Conversation’ 125). As we’ve seen, the collaborative nature of production is one that takes getting used to for a novelist accustomed to an internal locus of control. The conveyance of the ownership of meaning between writer, director, actor and audience is unique to the form of drama, and a creative trade-off which all novelists-turned-playwrights must first make peace with, and then – ideally – revel in.

Writing for a Live Audience DeLillo claims that he does not rely on readers for his novels. He is moved simply to write; the ‘reader is only distantly present, at the farthest reaches of the room’.14 One can’t help but wonder, would he continue to write if his works were not read? He concedes that perhaps in the process of editing, the writer ‘may consider how a paragraph or chapter will strike the reader’, but it ‘happens only remotely’, as the ‘page is what counts’.15 In essence, DeLillo’s novel-writing objective is ‘to create clear, strong and beautiful language and to let the reader work out the terms of his or her response’.16 Even in his playwriting, DeLillo attempts to maintain the novelist’s separation between creator and consumer – to keep play-text and performance discrete – though ‘[i]t is not the worst thing in the world’, says DeLillo, ‘for a writer to meet his readers every so often’ (Bigsby, ‘In Conversation’ 125). Theatre relies on spectators in a way that novelistic fiction does not rely on readers, since the fictional form ends at the page. We have seen how theatre spectators must do part of the work to interact with the performance that follows the play-text page. As Bigsby explains elsewhere, the play is incomplete without spectators: [D]rama does differ radically from the novel and poem in the degree of incompletion necessary to its survival. It is not simply that the written work exists to be amplified [. . .] it is that the text announces and displays its necessary incompletions – necessary because the text has to allow for the impress of performance and the interaction of the audience. (‘A View’ 132) Whereas a work of fiction is not reliant on its readers, a play-text can only fully be realised through performance by its audience. Indeed, ‘the audience and/or the spectator 14

Letter to Vance Morgan, 21 February 1996, DeLillo Papers, Container 109, Folder 3. Ibid. 16 Ibid. 15

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fundamentally constitute theatre and performance by witnessing it and at least partially producing its meanings’ (Allain and Harvie 132). As we have noted, the spectators form a vital part of the text’s production of meaning. Owing to the difference in form, it is inevitable that DeLillo must consider the audience when writing plays more often than he considers readers when writing novels, and we have evidence of this. First, we have production suggestions in the form of stage directions and explanations. In The Word for Snow, the Pilgrim ‘addresses the audience’ (1), and in Love-Lies-Bleeding, DeLillo indicates to the audience a eulogy through the directions, ‘Room set is dark. Lights up on lectern, downstage, left. Sean enters and takes up a position behind the lectern’ (25). Secondly, there are self-referential moments in the plays where DeLillo is purposely bringing the audience’s attention to the illusory nature of theatre. In The Day Room, for instance, Nurse Walker metatheatrically exposes the roles they are acting: What I wonder about is the narrow scope of the roles we have to play. Can’t we stop being doctor and nurse for just a minute? Can’t we give you a glimpse of the people behind the uniforms? People with their own doubts, fears—(21) As C. K. Munro wrote in the 1930s, ‘when we, as a dramatist, sit down to write our play, we shall inevitably be doing something for ourselves, and yet we shall need to inquire how to do it so that an audience can successfully watch it’ (15). We must remember that a play-text is written to be performed in front of a live audience. The play-text, then, is written intentionally for someone other than the writer to consume. While DeLillo maintains that he writes his novels primarily for himself, his forays into the theatre indicate a necessarily outward refocus towards an external locus of control. DeLillo works on plays with a greater sense of openness than when writing a novel because of the knowledge that he’s ‘just involved in the first stage of something that isn’t going to be realized until it begins to operate three-dimensionally on a stage with living actors’ (McAuliffe 610). When a play-text is published, it is an object-inthe-world and the writer’s work is done, but the play ‘is never quite done somehow’ (Feeney 171). Theatre giant Brustein, however, strongly diverges from DeLillo here. Brustein would consider the play-text itself meaningless; to him, ‘a drama, like a musical composition, really has no ultimate meaning until it has found some embodiment in the fleshy corporeality of gifted, trained performers’ (316). The text and the performance require each other: ‘The text is often still readable after the performance has died. It is a paradox of the theatre that a text has no real life until it is acted, yet the text is the one thing about the performance that manages to survive’ (311).

Lowering the Curtain While enjoying being encircled by the theatre life at various times, DeLillo considers these dramatic islands discrete from his primary continental focus: the novel. After collaborating on the 2000 Steppenwolf production of Valparaiso, he disclosed in correspondence the way he felt pulled and pushed between forms: For a writer who works in both forms [theatre and fiction], the collaborative aspects of theater are an antidote to the solitude and total control that a novelist

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experiences in his work. But after spending several weeks with a director and an actor in rehearsals and early performances, the writer looks forward to being alone again, in a small room, working on a novel.17 We have seen that DeLillo’s plays are altogether different beasts than his novels: for one, his plays’ geneses are visual in nature – he sees ‘a set on stage’ (McAuliffe 609), and unlike a novel, a play ‘is never quite done somehow’ (Feeney 171). Reading a novel is most often a personal, individual endeavour, whereas a play performance is live, a group effort, potentially transformative and ripe for political action against the powers that be, as long as the playwright is able to give up ownership of the text and set it free through performative interpretation. We know there are equal limitations to performance – the main being its transience. ‘The months of preparation’, writes Brustein, ‘the weeks of rehearsal, the days or weeks or months or (if the play is successful) even years of performance – intense as they may have been at the time – lose their physical life the moment the show closes’ (310). So what does this mean for DeLillo’s oeuvre? For one, the dramatic form lends itself to bringing DeLillo’s visions to life: fixed claustrophobic spaces (hospital room, living room, TV set, mountain top), limited characters (families, troupes, small teams and groups), and intensely emotional, focused social issues (celebrity, madness, identity, euthanasia, climate change). Secondly, the play-text is the ultimate litmus test for relevance – the playwright must let the text go, and, if not a commissioned work, watch the uptake by directors. His adoption of the dramatic form necessitates his backing away and a level of comfort with interpretation not required by novel-writing. Thirdly, a body-hot audience comes hand-in-hand with performance. Unlike a novel, the audience of the dramatic form are together in groups, live, shuffling in their seats, hearing each others’ immediate reactions. Their attention is precious, easily lost. Their experience is a solid block of allocated time to the ‘cause’ of the play; not so with the novel, which is likely picked up and put down according to opportunity. Fourthly, this collective experience, combined with values-driven themes, is ripe ground for impelling change. We will never know whether DeLillo wrote in the dramatic form with the intention of creating the necessary conditions for bringing together likeminded individuals to encourage change, but, regardless, the artistic form set it up as a communal exercise full of potential. We return to 1987. A 51-year-old DeLillo riding on the success of White Noise speaks with the New York Times and Playbill writer Mervyn Rothstein. Perhaps they’re in a bar, perhaps in a diner booth. ‘Rehearsals vary, performances vary’, explains DeLillo. ‘The play will be in book form, but that’s not really the play – this is the play.’ Indeed, the play – The Day Room – will open that evening in Manhattan Theater Club, directed by Michael Blakemore and designed by Hayden Griffin. The audience will watch a character travel backwards on a track, wearing a straitjacket, spotlight beaming down on his face, while hospital beds appear from side walls. ‘[A]fter I’m finished writing, the true work is only beginning’, says DeLillo (Corbett). What follows the performance, what is remembered, and what lives on in ephemera, lies solely with those spectators in New York sitting in the dark on 20 December 1987. This is the bittersweet magic of theatre. 17

Letter to Ioanna Kleftoyianni, 2002, DeLillo Papers, Container 109, Folder 3.

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Works Cited Allain, Paul, and Jen Harvie. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance. Routledge, 2006. Alter, Alexandra. ‘What Don DeLillo’s Books Tell Him.’ Wall Street Journal (Online), 30 January 2010. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704094304575029673526948 334. Accessed 2 December 2021. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ 1935. Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. Schocken Books, 1969. Bigsby, Christopher William Edgar. ‘In Conversation with Don DeLillo.’ Writers in Conversation, The Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies, Norwich 2000 and 2001. ——. ‘A View from East Anglia.’ American Quarterly, 41, no. 1, 1989, pp. 128–32. Bogardus, Emory S. ‘Crowds and Mobs.’ Fundamentals of Social Psychology. Century, 1924. Bou Stéphane, and Jean-Baptiste Thoret. ‘A Conversation with Don DeLillo: Has Terrorism Become the World’s Main Plot?’ Panic, 1, November 2005, pp. 90–5. http://perival.com/ delillo/interview_panic_2005.html. Accessed February 2023. Brooks, Xan. ‘Don DeLillo on Trump’s America: “I’m not sure the country is recoverable.”’ The Guardian, 5 November 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/nov/05/don-delillotrumps-america-love-lies-bleeding. Accessed 12 June 2021. Brustein, Robert. Who Needs Theatre? Dramatic Opinions. The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. Caesar, Anne Hallamore. Characters and Authors in Luigi Pirandello. Oxford University Press, 1998. Clurman, Harold. ‘Theatre: “A Life in the Theatre.”’ The Nation, 12 November 1977, pp. 504–6. Corbett, William. ‘Destination: Valparaiso. Don DeLillo Moves from Page to Stage.’ Boston Phoenix, 28 January–4 February 1999. https://web.archive.org/web/20081123084159/https:// bostonphoenix.com/archive/theater/99/01/28/VALPARAISO.html. Accessed 26 November 2021. DeLillo, Don. ‘City Arts & Lectures, San Francisco, 10/16/97.’ Don DeLillo Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. The Day Room. Penguin, 1986. ——. ‘The Engineer of Moonlight.’ Cornell Review, 5, winter 1979, pp. 21–42. ——. Love-Lies-Bleeding. Picador, 2005. ——. ‘The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life: A One-Minute Play.’ South Atlantic Quarterly, 99, nos. 2/3, 2000, pp. 601–3. ——. Valparaiso. Picador, 2004. ——. The Word For Snow. Karma, 2014. Feeney, Mark. ‘Unmistakably DeLillo.’ Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro. University Press of Mississippi, 2005, pp. 169–72. Flood, Alison. ‘Don DeLillo’s The Word for Snow to take London Stage by Storm.’ The Guardian, 5 July 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/04/don-delillo-word-snow-londonstage. Accessed 19 June 2021. Freeman, John. ‘Lurking around Society’s Edges.’ The Age, 22 February 2006. https://www. theage.com.au/entertainment/books/lurking-around-societys-edges-20060222-ge1sxj.html. Accessed 26 November 2021. Hatlen, Theodore W. Orientation to the Theatre. Prentice-Hall, 1981. Hickman, Christopher. ‘DeLillo’s Chile Dish.’ Village Voice, 16 July 2002, p. 55. Holmes, Janet. ‘DeLillo in Boise.’ Humanophone.com, 3 May 2005. http://web.archive.org/ web/20060629075320/http://www.humanophone.com/comments.php?id=181_0_1_0_C. Accessed 26 November 2021. Lam, Jeinsen. ‘Valparaiso @ Old Red Lion, London.’ Music OMH, 1 April 2006. https://www. musicomh.com/theatre/valparaiso-old-red-lion-london. Accessed 26 November 2021.

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Lavey, Martha. ‘Set on Stage.’ Steppenwolf, 2005–06. https://www.steppenwolf.org/articles/seton-stage/. Accessed 25 November 2020. Marks, Peter. ‘Airline Ticket Mix-up Gives a Man 15 Minutes of Fame.’ New York Times, 24 February 1999, p. E1. McAuliffe, Jody. ‘Interview with Don DeLillo.’ South Atlantic Quarterly, 99, nos. 2/3, 2000, pp. 609–15. Munro, C. K. Watching a Play. Gerald Howe, 1933. Osteen, Mark. ‘“We came for the dirt but stayed for the talk”: Don DeLillo’s Theatre.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 79–93. Pirandello, Luigi. ‘Pirandello Confesses . . .’ VQR, spring 1925. http://www.vqronline.org/ articles/1925/spring/Pirandello-confesses. Accessed 26 November 2021. ‘Review of Love Lies Bleeding [sic] (Sydney Theatre Company).’ 19 July 2007. https://web.archive. org/web/20130515152726/http://www.sydneytheatre.net/review-of-love-lies-bleeding-sydneytheatre-company. Accessed 26 November 2021. Rey, Rebecca. ‘Plays and Performance.’ Don DeLillo in Context, edited by Jesse Kavadlo. Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 117–25. ——. Staging Don DeLillo. Routledge, 2016. Rothstein, Mervyn. ‘A Novelist Faces His Themes on New Ground.’ New York Times, 20 December 1987. http://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/20/theater/theater-a-novelist-faces-histhemes-on-new-ground.html. Accessed 26 November 2021. Taylor, Paul. ‘The Word for Snow, Purcell Room, London.’ The Independent, 12 July 2012, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/the-word-forsnow-purcell-room-london-7938641.html. Accessed 25 November 2020. Wasserman, Sarah. The Death of Things. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Weber, Bruce. ‘Theatre Review; He’s Famous (Briefly), Therefore He Is (Briefly).’ New York Times, 25 July 2002. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/25/theater/theater-review-he-sfamous-briefly-therefore-he-is-briefly.html. Accessed 26 November 2021.

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25 Transforming the Spectacle in DeLillo’s Late Novels Pavlina Radia

The overall effect of an ever-increasing quantity of images is the radical alienation of consciousness and its isolation and separation, its inability to convincingly ‘language’ reality and thus its reduction to something on the order of a free-floating hallucination, cut away as it is from all ground. Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production (15)

Spectacle and/as Performance: A Critical Prelude

T

he commodity principle of what Guy Debord called, in the book of the same title, the ‘society of the spectacle’ has preoccupied Don DeLillo’s writing for decades. In his late novels, The Body Artist (2001), Point Omega (2010), Zero K (2016) and his most recent at the time of writing, The Silence (2020), DeLillo frequently evokes Debord’s notion of spectacle as an ‘autonomous movement of the non-living’ (Debord 2), a movement mediated by screens, images and automation.1 Critiquing the trappings of our increasingly digitised and automated commodity culture of human disconnection and alienation, DeLillo’s recent novels query whether art, too, has fallen victim to what Debord views as spectaculist drives, pondering whether ‘[t]his is what we want, this separation’, this commodification, as one of the characters in Zero K notes (30). This separation materialises as a detachment that eats away at the characters’ sense of agency and embodiment. Not surprisingly, waning bodies pervade DeLillo’s late novels: from The Body Artist’s Lauren Hartke, the body-artist-turned-artform, Point Omega’s Jessie and her ‘abridged quality’ (59), to Zero K’s fading Artis awaiting some ‘lyric intensity’ in her cryogenic vault (39). The Silence transforms the Super Bowl screen gone black into a blank canvas of quiet relativity. Although DeLillo’s characters frequently stage their own disembodied spectacles through performative acts that cannot help but reinscribe their commodification, his late novels refuse to deploy spectacle as a unilateral medium. Challenging normativity of any kind, DeLillo’s late novels encourage us to think beyond the consumer drive of passive watching, beyond the spectacle that alienates,

 1

In this chapter, I expand on my previous work on DeLillo’s representation of the spectacle and its increasing co-optation of art and culture. See Radia, Ecstatic Consumption. For other readings of DeLillo’s critique of consumer culture’s reliance on spectacle, see Boxall and Baya.

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entertaining the notion that it is the very nature of ‘performatives’ to straddle the normative and transformative realms. To explore the fluid nature of performatives, this chapter employs Judith Butler’s theory of performative acts as polymorphous and dynamic. As Butler emphasises, a performative act, despite its reinforcement of the power dynamics that have created it, can also generate an alternative agency that is neither-nor, that is, to use Butler’s words, ‘queer’ (Gender Trouble 226). Butler defines the term ‘queer’ as ‘an interpellation that raises the question of the status of force and opposition, of stability and variability, within performativity’ (226). What Butler intimates here is that while performatives are ‘forms of authoritative speech’ (225), they are also, by their very nature, transformative. As Butler writes: ‘what is exteriorized or performed can only be understood through reference to what is barred from the signifier and from the domain of corporeal legibility’ (234). A similar idea can be applied to the notion of the culture of spectacle by which DeLillo’s more recent novels are both informed and framed. In his engagement with consumer culture and its reliance on spectaculist dynamics, DeLillo contemplates the role that art can play in not necessarily reversing, but rather re-strategising our ways of being, perceiving and knowing in the age of information overflow and spiritual wasteland. As Boxall suggests, DeLillo’s ‘writing does not reject, delete, eliminate but . . . absorbs, recycles, accommodates’ (44). His writing exposes how art and commodity culture can create alternative spaces of knowing and experiencing the world. While engaging in and with spectacles of various kinds, DeLillo’s characters are caught in diverse convergences of doubt and uncertainty where life and death are entwined. Whether they are in search of a perfect body or language, their existential angst denotes the multiversal nature of life caught in a digital stratosphere of technology as nature, nature as technology. His late novels ask: what is humanity without media, without its aspirations for an everlasting future, or as Marshall McLuhan calls it, the pursuit of ‘the extensions of man’ to give life another form, another meaning, ‘to provide new transforming vision and awareness’ (11)? Accordingly, DeLillo’s late novels probe into the contemporary zeitgeist of the culture of spectacle, its desire for separation that also paradoxically connects, and its dreams of a futuristic singularity that multiplies through endless extensions of media devised by humans (be it art, culture, or technology). Taking inspiration from The Silence, partly a minimalist footnote, partly an apostrophe to the image-sound culture gone blank due to a possible apocalypse or blackout, the following pages propose that DeLillo’s novels, The Body Artist, Point Omega and Zero K explore spectacle as a performative act that is not simply normative or subversive, but potentially queer. Furthermore, drawing on Butler’s notion that ‘speaking [or performance] is always in some way the speaking [performance] of a stranger through and as oneself’ (Gender Trouble 242), this chapter also deploys DeLillo’s representation of spectacle as an ambiguous performative act that materialises in the form of another, or through the characters’ detachment from and embrace of the self as an other, as a form of address to contemporary culture, but also as a provocation, a call for a counter-response. Whether it is Lauren Hartke trying to ‘shake off the body’ while embracing her male body double in The Body Artist (106); Point Omega’s leveraging of Richard Elster’s reflections on extinction, his daughter’s sudden disappearance and her ‘sylphlike . . . space within’ (49), and Jim Finley’s desperate attempt at a cinematic haiku that will do justice to ‘see[ing] what is here’ (6); Zero K’s cryogenic spectacle;

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or The Silence’s emphasis on the importance of silence and absence of speech, the novels examine how spectacle performs the transfiguration of the body whereby inaccessible ‘depths of things’, as DeLillo puts it in Point Omega (6), can emerge as a new, ‘voiceless’ speech (de Man 75). This voiceless speech is a form of a ‘prosopon’, which Paul de Man defines as a ‘mask or a face’, a kind of ‘voice-from-beyond-the grave’ that speaks to the unspoken (77). While referencing DeLillo’s latest novel The Silence, this chapter focuses primarily on The Body Artist, Point Omega, and Zero K to map the ways in which DeLillo frames spectacle not only as a figure of visual domination and surveillance, but also as a site for potential ethical engagement. Building on de Man’s notion of prosopopeia as a ‘an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity’ that is also ‘the art of delicate transition’ (76), Guy Debord’s theory of the ‘society of the spectacle’, and Judith Butler’s concept of performative queering, this chapter hopes to add a new perspective to the critical discussion of DeLillo’s transformative figuration of consumer culture and its convergent spectacles of audiovisual noise.

‘Shaking off the body . . . to tell us something’: Staging the Spectacle to See Better? The Body Artist is framed by a live-stream of traffic in Kotka, a small Finnish town. Lauren Hartke, the main protagonist, watches the traffic on repeat while mourning her husband, Rey Robles, a cinematographer, who shot himself to death in his exwife’s apartment. Blending with the sparrows pecking seeds outside the house in which Lauren lives, the 24/7 news and traffic flow on the screen both punctuates and assuages her grief while allowing for a space to ‘create her future, not enter a state already shaped to her outline’ (The Body Artist 100). The novel follows Lauren’s transformation from a mourning wife to a body artist who re-forms her corpus to find a new way of being by becoming another, ‘an ancient Japanese woman on a bare stage’ and ‘a naked man, emaciated and aphasic’ (107). While her art plays on her own disembodiment, in what follows I ask whether, in making a spectacle of herself and pointing to that which cannot be expressed through language, but rather through an intimate gesture, Lauren also creates a space for challenging the very objectification that her spectacle performs as it simultaneously queers her subjectivity by becoming multiple. How to understand and express grief, both publicly and intimately, is a question that underpins the novel. DeLillo explores the public and the private through spectacle as a contemporary medium of making sense of things: as a means of numbing the pain but also as a potential means of engaging with it in new ways. As Marshall McLuhan argues, ‘all media as extensions of ourselves serve to provide new transforming vision and awareness’ as they extend our ability to see through other means by engaging other senses (60). In examining The Body Artist further, McLuhan’s notion of media as ‘extensions of ourselves’ but also as means of transforming grief can prove useful when considering alternative capacities of spectacle. Throughout the novel, DeLillo weds perceptions of grief with time passing, noting how the human mind stages life experiences, framing them, screening them as ‘a patchwork of disconnected states’, to quote Jonathan Crary (1), that are mediated by images, noise, visuality and various stagings of corporeality. Similarly, Lauren Hartke’s body art strives to capture this complex ‘patchwork’ of ‘states’ from which she feels

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disconnected and severed by the image-sound culture and its persistent noise. As I note elsewhere, Lauren’s art becomes her way of manifesting grief both internally and externally. In preparation for her performance, she ‘sands her body’, ‘rubbing in the cream to erase herself’ (The Body Artist 78; 86, emphasis added). On the one hand, the creative process of Lauren’s art evokes a ‘showdown of a tortured body’ that Paul Virilio associates with the spectaculist voyeurism of contemporary performance art, in which bodies in pain are on display in ways reminiscent of the mass media deployment of images of suffering as entertainment (Art 24). Virilio, for example, critiques the contemporary artist Stelarc for his frequent presentations of a tortured body as pandering to, rather than subverting, the culture of spectacle. Virilio views this form of art as aestheticising brutality by simulating rather than critiquing violence and self-mutilation. However, DeLillo’s novel suggests that while the risk of co-optation is perhaps unavoidable, art provides a potential for queering the spectacle: it can also reframe and transform. Longmuir, for example, goes so far as to suggest that Lauren’s bodily performance constitutes a form of ‘political resistance’, an ‘effective political aesthetic’ (542), but DeLillo tends to resist such politicisation of art to avoid homogenisation. As Lauren mounts her performance, becoming many, she not only demonstrates that grief can be a ‘path to understanding entangled shared living and dying’ (Haraway 39), but that it can also deploy spectacle as a medium that provides a space for what Donna Haraway calls ‘sustained remembrance’, a way of ‘grieving with’ (39). Furthermore, DeLillo’s emphasis on Lauren’s need for dialogue, a pluralist perspective to redefine her ‘outline’ as she calls it, challenges the very concept of the body and/as art and its many intersections. In this, Lauren’s exercising of her body not only provides her with an opportunity to stage the normative facets of (gendered) spectacle, but also allows her to expose its very transformations, limits and limitations. Mr Tuttle, a stranger who is part real, part recollected memory of her late husband, plays an important role in Lauren’s grief as an analogy of her grieving self, her sense of being disconnected (Radia, Ecstatic Consumption 28). In this context, Mr Tuttle can be viewed as the McLuhanesque medium through which Lauren can materialise her grief by extension, through analogy and relationality. Stressing the importance of ‘griev[ing] with’, to use Haraway’s words (Haraway 39), Lauren’s performance becomes a concatenation of performances that connect corporeal expression with the ‘bedtime language of childhood’ (The Body Artist 103). She takes on Mr Tuttle’s and Rey’s voices, othering herself but simultaneously getting in touch with that which escapes her when she is not performing, ‘shadow-inching through a sentence’ out of the ‘book-walled limit of the self’ (50). In other words, Lauren deploys the spectacle as a performative that both includes and excludes, that is both normative (in making her ‘femaleness so mysterious’) and subversive (in ‘encompass[ing] both sexes and a number of nameless states’ [111]), but also as a frame or form that connects and separates, thus converging characters’ inner and outer worlds and experience. Here, Lauren aligns with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion that performatives are both ‘kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic’ (Sedgwick 14). As Sedgwick emphasises, performances are not static; instead, they provide ‘alternatives’ (14). In staging her own (dis)embodiment, Lauren comes upon a different, more fluid body/form that allows her to experience the world and herself as symbiotic but layered. One of the main aspects of the spectacle, as defined by Debord, is its emphasis on alienation and isolation or exclusion, a persistent separation of the inner and outer

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where the preoccupation with surfaces ‘tells us a story we want to believe’, to use DeLillo’s words (The Body Artist 82). Challenging the spectacle as entertainment and deploying it as a space of alternative becomings that query normativity by troubling the separation of the inner–outer, gender–transgender and human–transhuman, Lauren performs the confluence of the two, thus queering gender and cultural norms, as well as social expectations of grief and mourning. Her art is preoccupied with seeing the unseen, but also with capturing a sense of being that escapes socialisation into a particular normative/narrative frame. She is consciously ‘acting, always in the process of becoming another . . .’ (107). Indeed, in the conscious re-enactment of becoming spectacle, Lauren connotes time passing but also the ‘ecstasy’ of self-displacement that expands the limits of corporeality and human sexuality beyond its bodily frame, ‘encompass[ing] both sexes and a number of nameless states’ (111). In thus staging her transhumanity, she creates new spaces for understanding the perplexing complexities and convergences of spectacle and grief. Through her art, Lauren exposes the intersectionality, non-linearity and nonteleology of the mourning process. Her becoming-spectacle creates a rupture that paradoxically also allows her to enter a state of temporary rapture that helps her overcome social expectations of widowhood as well as her frustration with the remaining fragments of her late husband’s memory while she strives to get to the core of that which remains ‘unseen’, a ‘blankness, a body slate erased of every past resemblance’ (86). Anticipating Richard Elster’s musings on Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘omega point’, a vision of collective consciousness where all individual selves will become one, inverted into ‘a centre of consciousness’ (Teilhard 263), Lauren’s body art is an attempt to transform the spectacle from within, by externalising the selves that cannot be ‘classically’ seen (The Body Artist 86). But it is also a screen that exposes the ‘agonizing’ complexities of societal norms that inform and, frequently, curtail the grieving process by pushing one’s expression of grief inward so that it remains a private affair, hidden from the public (111). The Body Artist weds these two rather contradictory states together to showcase the ambiguities of the culture of spectacle in which we as a spectating audience both produce and consume the very realities that we construct about ourselves and others. The body as screen, and the screen as body, also underpin DeLillo’s Point Omega. The novel opens with an anonymous viewer watching the video-montage of Douglas Gordon’s 2006 installation 24 Hour Psycho, presumably in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The viewer-narrator notes the ‘film’s merciless pacing’, Norman Bates about to kill Janet Leigh, ‘the shower curtain spinning slowly over the fallen figure of Janet Leigh’, and ‘the bloody water curling and cresting at the shower drain’ (Point Omega 9). Narrated primarily from the perspective of Jim Finley, a cinematographer, the opening of the novel, titled ‘Anonymity’ and narrated by an anonymous man, begins as a commentary on the violence of media culture, its reliance on the persistent flow of images that have increasingly become ‘an ammunition supply’, to use Virilio’s words (War 1), blurring the line between news, art and entertainment, but also highlighting the viewer’s sense of isolation by and immersion in the culture of spectacle. Point Omega is concerned with media spectacles as forms that frame everyday reality. The novel exposes how cinematography and media have become complicit in the justification of warfare. But it also asks: can cinema as art serve as ‘the vector of human experience’ that resists violence and infotainment to ‘render human presence

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visible’, as Alain Badiou suggests (Badiou 6–7)? From the very beginning of the narrative, DeLillo links, albeit subliminally, the violent images of 24 Hour Psycho projected and monumentalised on the screen with weaponry and warfare. This link sets up the novel’s inquiry into the ways in which globalisation has transformed technology but also cinema and/as war. For example, this inquiry is manifested in Finley’s dialogue with Richard Elster, a retired war intellectual and scholar, who reminisces about when the government employed him to ‘conceptualize . . . to apply overarching ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counterinsurgency’ (Point Omega 19). As Elster emphasises, ‘he sat at a table in a secure conference room’ as the war happened in an ‘unnamed country’ (33). ‘Realities’ are constructed ‘overnight’ through ‘careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability’ (29). Through Elster’s theoretical musings, DeLillo exposes contemporary culture’s reliance on spectacle as a means of shaping the perception of public and private events. As Point Omega reveals, globalisation has not only rendered war transhuman (as unmanned weapons and drones perform the killing of targets and citizens in countries far removed from the dispatch site where strikes are initiated), but it has also co-opted cinematography and media as spectacle to frame wars as tragic constructs that justify violence in the name of social justice. In her critical reflection on contemporary necropolitics, Rosi Braidotti argues that such a convergence is an integral component of our globalised world, where ‘[n]ew forms of warfare entail simultaneously the breathtaking efficiency of “intelligent”, un-manned, technological weaponry, on the one hand, and the rawness of dismembered and humiliated human bodies on the other’ (122). In their studies of contemporary media culture, Kellner and Virilio further emphasise how much technology as/and war informs and is informed by media spectacle, where images are deployed as figurative weapons. Evoking this notion, the anonymous ‘eye’ of the narrator takes on the form of a secret weapon or ‘watching machine’, to use Virilio’s terms (War 4). In Point Omega, DeLillo thus takes the very notion of performance art to another level. While in The Body Artist grief and tragedy are increasingly informed by the culture of spectacle, in Point Omega war and technology function as performative acts that rely on a strategic display of images to construct and guide perception – both public and private – suturing the war mediated by the spectacle of screens as the tragic entertainment of gore. But the novel also troubles binaries and unilateral perspectives by examining, to echo Butler, whether ‘the visual [can] also become the field in which we are solicited to assume responsibility to resist unjust war [and violence]’ (Frames xviii). Consequently, the novel asks whether violence mediated by the screen has the capacity to elicit any form of resistance. Only to a point, DeLillo suggests. As the opening chapter of Point Omega reminds us, images and screens not only surround us, but they also increasingly frame our social relations, since ‘everyone [is] watching something’ (8). Deploying watching as a form of consumption, DeLillo links media culture with technology and/as war through the watchful camera eye of the narrator, who notes that the very act of watching ‘had no meaning without “the corresponding watchfulness”’ (5). This notion is further personified in the figure of the narrative eye/I as it merges with the watchful eye of the cinematographer, Finley (Radia, Ecstatic Consumption 34), whose dream is to make a film that will consist of ‘one continuous take’ (Point Omega 22). The subject of his film is Elster, who is disillusioned with the US government’s reductive perception of war as an abstraction,

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as a virtual spectacle of ‘contingencies’ and ‘advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability’ (28, 29). In linking a war defence intellectual and a cinematographer in pursuit of pure cinema, DeLillo creates a schism between the commodification of war as spectacle on the one hand, and art as entertainment on the other, through Elster’s and Finley’s dreams of (aesthetic) purity. While Elster dreams of reducing wars to a haiku, Finley is consumed by his desire for making pure cinema. Initially, the two dreams seem in contradiction to one another, only to end up being inverted as a point omega of human nostalgia. Contextually, the post-9/11 US political intervention in Iraq and the military use of rendition to fight terrorism serve as an important context for the novel’s preoccupation with extinction and violence. This context materialises in the link between an image as weapon and its relationship to military power that Elster makes in his own work on rendition. In an essay titled ‘Renditions’, Elster philosophises on the art of war as a poetic performance, a sublimated haiku whereby technology is inverted into an ‘oracle’ of extinction (52). Military power, as Elster puts it, is tied up in fictional narratives and drama, ‘a saga of created reality’ that is ‘abstract’ and full of ‘projections’ (28). He writes: ‘somewhere in seclusion, a drama is being enacted, old as human memory . . . actors naked, chained, blindfolded, other actors with props of intimidation, the renderers, nameless and masked’ (34). Images here mediate and dramatise. However, they also simultaneously neutralise war by means of hyperbole, repeatedly showing footage and images of war sites, casualties and imprisoned bodies, as was the case with the abuse of the Abu Ghraib prisoners being shamed by the US military physically, but also figuratively through the news and media channels that mercilessly regurgitated the scandalous shaming (see Butler, Frames xviii). Retiring to the desert, Elster frequently questions humanity’s own ‘desert storm’, the pursuit of (self-)extinction and its opposite: a drive to create, to reach beyond one’s limitations. His essay on rendition is a pointed critique of the government as a ‘criminal enterprise’ (19). Noting the lust for revenge as an intrinsic part of human nature, Elster dreams of a state beyond human limitations, proposing Teilhard’s omega point introversion as a ‘leap out of our biology’ and a way ‘back to inorganic matter’ (53). In his dream of supreme consciousness that will overcome bodily limitations, Elster echoes The Body Artist, and specifically Lauren Hartke’s body art as a search for a different, post-anthropomorphic way of being. This desire is embodied in Finley’s dogged pursuit of a pure film that will capture Elster’s consciousness as an anonymous, nameless ‘man at the wall’ (22). Joining Elster in the desert where he meditates on his renditions of extinction, Finley blends with his artwork to the point of absolute disappearance, his ‘scrawny’ body ‘sucked up by the film’ (24). An artist consumed by his art, Finley’s dedication to his art evokes Hartke’s working towards ‘shaking off her body’ to get to ‘some third person in her mind’ (The Body Artist 65). Like The Body Artist, Point Omega ties the subject’s dissolution to a desire for alternative ways of being in the world, but also to a dream of renewal by other means or media. Zero K explores this dream further by tapping into recent debates on whether technologies such as genomics, genomic editing, biogerontology and cryogenics can indeed pave the way to immortality and a complete transformation of humanity by means of technological enhancements. Zero K is set in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, in the futuristic compound of a cryogenics company called Convergence, owned by Ross Lockhart (originally, Nicholas Satterswaite), a ‘simulated man’ and a global tycoon, who ‘want[s] to own the end of the world’, figuratively speaking, by defeating mortality

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through the technological advancements of cryogenics (Zero K 3, emphasis in original). Narrated from the perspective of his son Jeffrey, with his ‘little felonies of perception’ (108), the novel retains the theme of the third-person narrative ‘eye’ roaming the novel like a surveillance camera or a weapon. At the heart of the novel is the slow disappearance or transformation of Artis, Ross Lockhart’s second wife, into a Zero K herald, who is about to ‘make a certain kind of transition to the next level of [human life]’ through cryogenic freezing (112). Artis suffers from multiple sclerosis and hopes to be ‘reborn into a deeper and truer reality’ by embracing cryogenics as a way to achieve the ‘promise of a lyric intensity outside the measure of normal experience’ (45). Prepared to embrace the ‘future’, Artis is ready to join the ‘festival of immortality’ and subject herself to ‘forevermore’ (258). As in DeLillo’s previous novels, the female subject here functions as an important figure of the culture of spectacle. As a figure, it serves as a techné or form that mediates relationships between inside and outside, or perception and misperception, but it also exposes how medical science has been co-opted by technology as an art form of sorts. In exploring this link further, Virilio’s critique of contemporary art and its inscription of science to add shock value to the body turned necrotised image-commodity can shed further light on the increasing co-optation of art by science and technology. Virilio argues that ‘the science of biology has become a major [extreme] art’, an ecstasy of thanatophilia and necro-technology (Art 30). For example, Virilio recalls the 1998 exhibition at the Manheim Museum of Technology titled The World of Bodies, where the artist Günter von Hagens showcased ‘over 200 corpses preserved through plastination as sculptures’ (24). Virilio writes: ‘Standing tall like statues of antiquity, the flayed cadavers either brandished their skins like trophies of some kind or showed off their innards in imitation of Salvador Dali’s Venus de Milo with drawers’ (24). In a similar manner, Zero K brandishes the convergence of a nano- and biotechnological dream of the immortal body as an ‘earth art’ (Zero K 10), as an organic evolution of humanity to the ‘vision of undying mind and body’, ‘outside the range of combative instincts’ where bodies and minds are ‘virtualized’ and ‘unfleshed’ (242, 245). Brutalised bodies ‘in states of suspended animation’ and ‘shaved naked in pods’ pervade Zero K (16, 142), blurring the line between advertising as art and technology as religion. The cryogenic facility is a technological paradise, where humans turned cryogenised dummies are transformed into ecstatic puppets, controlled by the techno-crazed opium of automation and surveillance by screens. Upon his arrival in the so-called Convergence, Jeffrey notices the display of headless bodies, screens showing tornadoes killing people, men immolating themselves with kerosene, the camera ‘linger[ing] on the bodies’ (36), a spectacle that is further enhanced by the décor of the facility: ‘the screens, the catacombs, the skull on the wall’ (144). But unlike his father, Jeffrey questions the rather tight (power) relationship between global companies and modern technology’s potential. Refusing to be a mere viewer-consumer of the violence displayed on the screens, Jeffrey invokes Butler’s notion of a ‘solicitation to apprehend’ (Frames xviii), as he watches the flood of violent images. Instead, he feels ‘obligated’ to bear witness.2 He says: ‘But I watched, feeling obligated to something or someone,

 2

As Jiena Sun proposes, ‘[a]s a commitment to his father’s invitation, Jeffrey keeps emphasizing his duties of witnessing’ (5).

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the victims perhaps, and thinking of myself as lone witness, sworn to the task’ (Zero K 36). In his refusal to neutralise what he sees by turning away from the imagery, he acknowledges the victims, turning ‘seeing’ into an ethical responsibility and thus also exposing the recalcitrant aspects of the spectacle as a site of temporary apprehension. But as in DeLillo’s previous novels, this site of apprehension is juxtaposed with its very opposite: a phallic panopticon whose gaze is ever-present and deadly. As in Point Omega, where DeLillo highlights the roaming gaze of the narrator as centred on a female subject, Elster’s daughter Jessie, Zero K focuses on the transformative disappearance of Artis into a cryogenized dummy. Invoking Laura Mulvey’s essay on cinema and its gendering of the gaze, DeLillo queers the gaze by, on the one hand, reinscribing the female subject as ‘otherwordly’ (Zero K 36), or in the case of Artis, ‘ephemeral’ (51), and, on the other hand, exposing it as a clichéd counterpart to the ecstatic gaze of surveillance and domination by separation and automation. As Mulvey has argued, a cinematic gaze relies on the female character as a figuration of the patriarchal unconscious wherein she serves as a ‘bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning’ (834). In other words, the female functions as a screen for male desire by projecting it back in the form of spectacle (837). In her preparation for eternal life, Artis is the ultimate techno-experiment, the spectacle of humanity’s dream of immortality, as wars and atrocities figuratively adorn the Convergence, serving as a negative counterpoint to the eternal bliss awaiting the so-called Zero K heralds in the nitrogen vaults filled with cryogenised humans. The Convergence is both a monument to technological progress and to a whole body of literature cataloguing the human obsession with self-extending automata and simulacra of the organic world, with its clock ticking to the omega point of life and death. Invoking E. T. A. Hoffman’s ‘Sandman’, Sigmund Freud’s ‘Uncanny’, Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. or Milan Kundera’s Immortality, Zero K is an orgy of intertextual convergences, but also an intriguing reflection on transhumanism.3 Cryogenised humans serve as the avatars of the future-to-come, but also as the ultimate ecstasy of abstraction, a form of living art, or as Ross calls it, ‘visionary art’ (Zero K 23). As Ross explains to Jeffrey: What’s happening in this community is not just a creation of medical science. There are social theorists involved, and biologists, and futurists, and geneticists, and climatologists, and neuroscientists, and psychologists, and ethicists, if that’s the right word. (33) In its ultimate synthesis of scientific progress, the Convergence is, nonetheless, nothing more than a ‘dead center where every system crosses this subtle limit of reversibility’, to use Baudrillard’s words (Baudrillard 33). As Jeff enters the preparation room where the heralds are transitioned to the next stage of life, he sees their bodies shaved and naked on a slab, like a ‘gesso on linen’ (Zero K 251), ‘columns of naked men and women in frozen

 3

In ‘“Why Not Follow Our Words Bodily into the Future Tense?” Life, Death and Posthuman Bodies in Don DeLillo’s Zero K’, Adele Nel comments on the novel’s engagement with posthuman theories, specifically its critique of humanism and anthropocentrism. I examine DeLillo’s critique of biotechnology and cryogenics through Anya Bernstein’s lens of transhumanism as outlined in her study of cryogenic experiments in Russia, The Future of Immortality. For another reading of DeLillo’s engagement with transhumanist theories, see Furjanic.

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suspension’ awaiting their post-apocalyptic life in a techno-bliss (256). With its promise of post-apocalyptic paradise and a dream of an upgraded life eternal, the Convergence aligns the worldly dystopia with a utopian dream of a better future. But this future, as DeLillo suggests, might not be much better, especially if it is conceived in the spirit of further domination and global devastation. The novel exposes the human quest for meaning as entwined with a search for power(ful) extensions and perfected doubles. Twins, puppets and mannequins populate the Convergence, evoking what Zero K’s Stenmark twins refer to as a ‘grotesque nostalgia’ (241). Or, as Jeffrey puts it, the whole project is ‘pure spectacle, a single entity, the bodies regal in their cryonic bearing. It was a form of visionary art, it was body art with broad implications’ (256). This visionary art evokes the futurist dream of war as renewal, but also as a manifestation of humanity’s lust for world dominance. Zero K thus engages with the question of technology as an art of scientific reproduction, transformation and manipulation whereby life can be re-edited and reformulated. As Ross reminds Jeffrey, the Convergence is ‘not just a creation of medical science’ (33), it is an attempt to ‘leap into total acceptance’ through a (trans)human(oid) upgrade (34). Given its ‘Cosmist’ context, it is not surprising that this so-called leap is to be materialised in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, where Zero K’s dreams align with the futurist views of the Russian Fedorov movement. Also referred to as Cosmists, the Fedorov movement was founded by Nicolai Fedorov, a mid-nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox philosopher, to encourage a ‘technological resurrection of the dead’ through the ‘colonization of space to accommodate this new population’ (qtd. in Bernstein 37). Often referred to as transhumanism, this movement has evolved into an ‘international intellectual and cultural movement that aims to transform the human condition by developing tools to accomplish a “radical upgrade” of the human being’ through cryogenisation of the brain or the whole body (Bernstein 36).4 Unlike posthumanism, transhumanism believes in an organic evolution of humankind to a ‘future reanimation’ in which the human body will be emancipated from its physical inadequacies and empowered by technology (38). In other words, contrary to the posthumanist emphasis on parting with the paradigm of anthropomorphic superiority, transhumanists highlight the ‘radical transformation of the human condition through technological advancement’ (19). To put it differently again, as Zero K reveals, the dream of immortality cannot escape its ties to the history of world domination, wealth and a global fantasy of superiority as it strives to subjugate death to the marvels of technology. The novel ends with Artis journeying into the cryogenic vault to disappear into her (hoped for) reanimation. While Ross is initially preparing to join her, he opts out at the last minute, as ‘to go with her would be the wrong kind of surrender’ and an ‘abuse of privilege’ (Zero K 143). Instead, he continues to ‘maintain [himself] on the puppet drug of personal technology’ (55). Like Point Omega’s Jessie, Artis disappears into a vat of frozen time. Similar to Lauren Hartke in The Body Artist, Artis is accompanied

 4

See Bernstein’s description of KrioRus, a cryogenics facility in Russia, founded by Valerija Pride, Daniela Medvedev and Igot Artiukhov. Nothing in comparison to DeLillo’s high tech-Convergence facility, the offices of KrioRus are housed in a small apartment in Moscow, while cryogenised bodies are stored in large pods in a nearby storage facility (‘dacha’) in Sergiev Posad, not far from Moscow (Bernstein 44). Another cryogenics facility is in the Cryonics Institute in Michigan and Alcor in Arizona (44).

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on her journey by a convoy of doubles, the Stenmark twins, the man in the monk’s cloak whose pyjamas are showing, two women in chadors, and puppets and mannequins. Echoing Lauren’s body art, Artis’s preparation for her journey to ‘forevermore’ requires a bodily transformation to a cryogenised ‘earth art’ (Zero K 10). As she says: ‘the only thing that is not ephemeral is art . . . It’s made simply to be here’ (52). She feels ‘artificially herself’, noting: ‘I’m twins, joined at the hip, and my sister is speaking’ (52). In the meantime, the Convergence experts work on developing a new, ‘advanced’ language that will allow for new ways of understanding. As DeLillo’s most recent novel (at the time of writing) The Silence (2020) suggests, words or language might not be an answer to the woes of contemporary society, as language, too, has been co-opted by globalisation, as it has been reduced to advertising slogans and tweetable moments. Perhaps the only answer to the consumer hell is the apocalypse where the screens go blank, a reversal of noise into an absolute silence. As two couples gathered to watch Super Bowl 2022 in a Manhattan apartment cogitate on the significance of such an event, joined by a former physics student who contemplates Albert Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity, the reader is brought back to the omega point of spectacle: its ability to transform itself, screenful or screenless. The Silence ends with blank screens mimicking the blanking of the characters who find themselves in a ‘tumbling void’ (96) of primordial silence.

An Epitaph to Mortality: From Language to Silence The desire for primordial silence, a kind of epitaph to mortality, informs DeLillo’s late novels. As Paul de Man notes, ‘the stylistics of epitaph . . . proceed by gliding displacements’, which assume the form of a ‘prosopon’ or a ‘voiceless entity [mask]’ (76). From The Body Artist and Point Omega to Zero K and The Silence, the narrative presence of the ‘voice’ that hears and mis-hears and the ‘eye’ that sees and mis-sees serve an important ethical function: as a figure of the culture of spectacle, but also as an address to an anonymous reader-viewer-consumer to confront the image-noise-craze head on, to refuse to be desensitised, to take responsibility for the present and the future by acknowledging the past. DeLillo’s novels urge us to ‘see what’s here’ (Point Omega 6), but also to probe into ‘the depths of things so easy to miss’ in the spectacular frenzy of images and noise (31). In his late novels, DeLillo juxtaposes the screened world of spectacle with the potential of language to both include and exclude. But as DeLillo’s novels suggest, language is increasingly ‘privative’ (de Man 80), especially when it has been reduced to an endless chatter of screens. Searching for a new way of engaging with the unsaid, the narrative presence framing the novels persistently points to that which cannot be seen or verbalised as a harbinger of the inevitability of death, as a ‘prefiguration of one’s own mortality’, to use de Man’s words (76). To put it differently, the novels’ gaze puts on display its own spectacle of mortality that is simultaneously queered by that which escapes it, by that which requires willingness to see differently and ethically, echoing Butler’s emphasis on deploying frames as alternative spaces where the spectacle can also be ‘another solicitation’, ‘a solicitation to apprehend’ with accountability and care (Frames xviii). In the novels I have discussed, DeLillo deploys this solicitation as the figure of a masked address, be it in the form of Mr Tuttle’s ‘thinness of physical address’ (The Body Artist 48), Jessie’s ‘space within’ (Point Omega 49), Artis’ ‘inner monologue . . .

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the open prose of a third-person voice’ (Zero K 18), or The Silence’s ‘tumbling void’ (96), to invoke a sense of responsibility and resistance to the dominance of the image. Using prosopopeia as an ‘apostrophe to an absent . . . entity’, to use de Man’s words (75), DeLillo enfaces the hidden, giving it a ‘garb-body-soul’ (de Man 80) of character doubles who represent the inseparable chiasmus of life and death, through staging a spectacle where the body turned commodity is transformed into an immortal text-art.

Works Cited Badiou, Alain. Cinema. Translated by Susan Spitzer. Polity, 2010. Baudrillard, Jean. Fatal Strategies. Translated by D. Pettman, Semiotex(te), 2008. Baya, Adina. ‘“Catastrophe Is Our Bedtime Story”: The Media-Fueled Obsession with Death in Don Delillo’s Zero K.’ Romanian Journal of English Studies, 16, no. 1, 2013, pp. 9–15. https://doi.org/10.1515/rjes-2019-0002. Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Dartmouth College, 2006. Bernstein, Anya. The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia. Princeton University Press, 2019. Boxall, Peter. ‘DeLillo and Media Culture.’ The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, edited by John N. Duvall. Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 43–52. Braidotti, Rosi. The Postmodern Knowledge. Polity, 2019. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable. Verso, 2016. ——. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. Crary, Jonathan. Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. MIT Press, 2021. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Black & Red, 1983. DeLillo, Don. The Body Artist. Scribner, 2001. ——. Point Omega. Scribner, 2010. ——. The Silence. Scribner, 2020. ——. Zero K. Scribner, 2016. De Man, Paul. ‘Autobiography as De-facement.’ The Rhetoric of Romanticism. Columbia University Press, 1984, pp. 68–81. Furjanic, Lovro. ‘The Spectre of Death in DeLillo’s Zero K.’ Anafora, VI, no. 2, 2019, pp. 493–512. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016. Hardack, Richard. ‘World Trade Centers and World-Wide-Web: From Underworld to OverSoul in Don DeLillo.’ American Quarterly, 69, no. 1, 2013, pp. 151–83. Kellner, Douglas. ‘Media Culture and the Triumph of the Spectacle.’ Fast Capitalism, 1, no. 1, 2005, pp. 58–71. Longmuir, Anne. ‘Performing the Body in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 53, no. 3, 2007, pp. 528–43. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press, 1997. Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 833–44. Nel, Adele. “Why Not Follow Our Words Bodily into the Future Tense?”: Life, Death and Posthuman Bodies in Don DeLillo’s Zero K.’ Literator, 42, no. 1, 2021, a1748. Radia, Pavlina. ‘Doing the Lady Gaga Dance: Postmodern Transaesthetics and the Art of Spectacle in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist.’ Canadian Review of American Studies, 44, no. 2, 2014, pp. 194–213.

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——. Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2016. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. ‘Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel.’ GLQ, 1, 1993, pp. 1–16. Sun, Jiena. ‘Ekphrasis and Ways of Seeing in DeLillo’s Zero K.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 63, no. 2, 2021, pp. 176–89. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. Harper Torcher Books, 1961. Virilio, Paul. Art and Fear and Art as Far as the Eye Can See. Translated by Julie Rose. Bloomsbury, 2003. ——. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Translated by P. Camille. Verso, 1989.

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26 DeLillo’s Performances of Abjection Kelsie Donnelly

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rawing on Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of abjection as the subjective experience of the porosity between self and other, and of what is cast out of the symbolic order, this chapter examines Don DeLillo’s engagement with abject art in his later fiction, focusing primarily on his 2007 novel Falling Man. Although the novel has assumed canonical status as an exemplary ‘9/11 novel’, it is a novel of crisis and continuity, not a novel of exception. Engaging with broader questions of ontological existence, the limits of human consciousness, and enduring themes in DeLillo’s pre- and post-9/11 work, Falling Man is a timeless counternarrative to tired trauma narratives of 9/11. Following a brief exploration of the recurring ruin and rubble in DeLillo’s oeuvre, this chapter critiques the abject body art of the Falling Man’s predecessor: The Body Artist’s Lauren Hartke. It then turns to its primary concern, the ‘marginal story’ of Lianne’s grief and experiential encounter with abject art in Falling Man. Following DeLillo in ‘thinking along the margins’ of abject bodies, the chapter also thinks along the margins of Zero K, drawing some points of connection and continuity between the novels. Despite stylistic differences, abject aesthetics form connective tissue across DeLillo’s literary corpus, revealing the miracles of the marginal and the ‘awful openness’ of grieving bodies.

The Abject In her seminal text Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), Kristeva defines the abject as ‘the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ that ‘does not respect borders, positions, rules’ and ‘draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’ (4, 2). The abject confronts the individual with the insistent materiality of death rather than the knowledge and meaning of death, both of which can emerge from the symbolic order. She writes: The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death – a flat encephalograph, for instance – I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. (3)

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DeLillo refines Kristeva’s theorisation of abjection as protective rituals that repair broken borders and restore cohesion and wholeness, as his abject artists rupture boundaries to facilitate communion between ‘self’ and ‘other’, and the living and the dead. For Kristeva, religious rituals are processes of abjection that protect the sacred and pure sphere of the symbolic from the defilement, sin and impurity of the abject: ‘As abjection – So the Sacred [. . .] the function of these religious rituals is to ward off the subject’s fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother [. . .] risking the loss not of a part (castration) but of the totality of his living being’ (64). Yet, as this chapter argues, in The Body Artist and Falling Man an encounter with the abject is an encounter with the dead and the divine. By virtue of the affective power and physical presence of abject bodies, both Lauren and Lianne communicate with the dead and enter elevated planes of existence.

Writing Ruins In his essay ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, published in Harper’s magazine in December 2001, DeLillo wrote: ‘The Bush Administration was feeling a nostalgia for the Cold War. This is over now. Many things are over. The narrative ends in the rubble, and it is left to us to create the counternarrative.’ True to his word, DeLillo’s counternarrative begins in the rubble, an ashen amalgam of obliterated buildings and bodies that exemplifies ‘the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ nature of the abject (Kristeva 4). The opening scenes of Falling Man depict the immediate aftermath of the ‘fall’: ‘It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night [. . .] The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets’ (3). The towering inferno, the ruin, wreckage and wafting ash represent what was and what is no longer. The Twin Towers were monuments to capitalism and America’s steadfast devotion to progress, but, when they fell, the progress they stood for ground (temporarily) to a halt. The metaphorical ruins of the future leave DeLillo’s characters teetering on the edge of what is ‘over’ and what is yet to come. Although Keith narrowly escapes the rubble at Ground Zero, and briefly returns to his estranged wife Lianne, he finds himself in another wasteland by the end of the novel – the Nevada desert – where he arguably wastes the rest of his days playing in poker tournaments. Lianne, meanwhile, struggles with the primary source of grief in the novel: the suicide of her father, Jack Glenn, which predates 9/11 and influences her perception of the Falling Man’s abject art. Short episodes intercut the main narrative, which follow Hammad and his progression from a mosque in Hamburg to his violent death in the cockpit of a hijacked plane on 9/11. The teleological plot of terror and Jack’s suicide plot end in rubble, leaving Keith and Lianne to pick up the pieces and live in the ruins. Falling Man marks the convergence of DeLillo’s explorations of art and abject ruin in White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), Underworld (1997) and The Body Artist (2001). In White Noise, DeLillo associates the ‘Law of Ruins’ with the Nazi architect Albert Speer, who wanted to ‘build structures that would decay gloriously, impressively, like Roman ruins’ (257). Twelve years after White Noise, DeLillo published Underworld, his most extensive exploration of waste and art. Nick Shay, the novel’s protagonist, is a waste-manager who, like Falling Man’s Keith, flees from New

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York to a desert to bury the contents of his own underworld, his subconscious mind. During his time in the desert, Nick is joined by Klara, who unearths waste to create art. Falling Man shares Underworld’s belief in the art of abject waste and ruin: falling bodies inspire the Falling Man’s performance art; and the rubble, where the narrative of the terrorists ended, is where DeLillo’s counternarrative begins. Rebecca Harding reads The Body Artist alongside Mao II, drawing on Kristeva’s theory of abjection to explore DeLillo’s representation of ‘unstable bodies’ (65). In Mao II, Bill Gray incorporates his abject body into his textual corpus, concluding that his ‘true biography’ will be a ‘chronicle of gas pains and skipped heartbeats’ (136). In this novel, as in Falling Man, abject waste, what is ostensibly ‘opposed to I’, is not only art, but a reflection of the human subject (Kristeva 1). DeLillo would later continue to pursue themes of grief, abjection and terror in Point Omega (2010) and Zero K (2016). Point Omega follows filmmaker Jim Finley’s journey into the desert, where he attempts to produce a documentary about Richard Elster, a former US government advisor with a persistent phlegmy cough, while Zero K explores the creation of deathless lives in the Convergence, a cryogenic suspension facility beneath the sands of the Uzbekistani desert. This liminal space is host to an abject art exhibition, consisting of ‘naked, hairless’ bodies that, for Jeff Lockhart, are ‘dead, or maybe dead, or whatever’ (Zero K 24, 74). The ‘small human figure, motionless’ displayed in a marble tomb-like room is ‘a living breathing art-form’, an abject still life that leaves Jeff unable to ‘to think or imagine’ within symbolic frames of reference (149). Not content with the imperfections and limits of embodied subjectivity, the ailing Artis, Jeff’s stepmother, turns her body into art, believing that ‘faith-based technology’ will facilitate her rebirth into ‘a deeper and truer reality’ where ‘every material thing’ is perceived ‘in its fullness, a holy object’ (9, 47). Unlike Artis, Jeff Lockhart (the characters’ names are no accident) looks at the human condition with the eye of an artist and refuses to believe in the promise of ‘a lyric intensity outside the measure of normal experience’ (48). Rather than saving himself from a slow and inevitable fall into abjection, he exposes himself to the materiality of death and is reminded of his humanity: ‘I never felt more human than when my mother lay in bed, dying’ (248). He is not limited but ‘expanded by grief’, as it inspires his appreciation of the artistry of abjection and the silent wonders of still lives (248). Reusing and recreating these abject motifs in his novels, DeLillo therefore engages in artistic recycling of his own. For him, and for his fictional artists, ruin and rubble are creative fodder from which new creations emerge. Before examining Falling Man, I will consider one artist in DeLillo’s oeuvre with whom the Falling Man shares artistic DNA: The Body Artist’s Lauren Hartke.

The Body Artist Falling Man is not the first of DeLillo’s forays into abject performance art: his 2001 novel The Body Artist is a portrait of grieving body artist Lauren Hartke. Like Lockhart, Lauren’s name suggests that art is at the centre of her being. Befitting a novel about the body and soul, The Body Artist is the first of DeLillo’s ‘bare-skinned’ novels (Boxall 160). Magnifying the minutiae of the mundane, it opens with a painstakingly perceptive portrait of newlyweds Rey and Lauren preparing a seemingly routine breakfast in a rented house that is neither their own nor theirs alone to inhabit. While there,

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Rey (like Bill Gray) works on a ‘bullshit autobiography’ and mulls over another entity he does not own: the soul (The Body Artist 32). In Lauren he finds a saving grace, as DeLillo writes: they ‘dropped into a night of tossing sensation, drifts of sex, confession’, confession ‘as belief in each other, not unburdenings of guilt but avowals of belief, mostly his and stricken by need’ (61). Performing this routine, Rey believes Lauren is ‘helping him recover his soul’ (61). His faith in the sanctity of their embodied union fatally falters, however, as he shoots himself in the head like Falling Man’s Jack Glenn (15). Before this, Rey shaves his moustache because he ‘want[s] God to see [his] face’ (14). This is his final confession: an act of purification and revelation that lays bare his body and soul before God in anticipation of redemption and eternal salvation. In the months that follow, Lauren is left struggling to grasp the meaning of his death and the man she thought she knew. Feeling ‘as if’ she lived with a stranger in her midst, it is perhaps unsurprising – or ‘inevitable’, as she puts it – that the sudden arrival of another stranger in her midst shortly follows her estranged husband’s sudden departure (41). The enigmatic Mr Tuttle is the embodiment of the abject, as he is ‘outside the easy sway of either/or’ (The Body Artist 69). According to Kristeva, the abject is beyond the ‘scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable’ (1) and, as such, Mr Tuttle’s embodied existence defies the laws of time, space, and human reason. As David Cowart notes, Mr Tuttle is a ‘great mystery − a being directly in touch [. . .] with what ordinary people cannot see, hear, experience’ (203). Zero K’s Convergence ‘stretches the boundaries of what it means to be human’ (Zero K 71), and Mr Tuttle ‘violates the limits of the human’, drifting ‘uneasily in space, indoors or out, as if the air had bends and warps’ (The Body Artist 45). While Falling Man’s characters live in the ruins of the future, ‘the future comes into being. But not for [Mr Tuttle]’ (99). Suspended in an equally liminal state of grief, Lauren believes that Mr Tuttle hails from ‘a kind of time that had no narrative quality’ (99). If the eye ‘tells us a story we want to believe’, then Mr Tuttle, whose ‘eye was [not] able to search out and shape things’ (80), cannot tell a believable story (or his-story) – just as Rey struggles to write his ‘bullshit autobiography’ (32). In contrast, body artist Lauren ‘puts her hands on [Mr Tuttle’s] shoulders and look[s] into his eyes [. . .] searchingly’, such that he becomes her latest project – or, possibly, her projection (85). She loses herself in her new creative project, trying to find Rey and flesh out a story of his life and death that will restore her faith and clear the clouds that render everything ‘doubtful – not doubtful but ever changing, plunged into metamorphosis, something that is also something else, but what’ (36). Hers is both a creative process of grief and a process of redemption for lost souls, ‘trapped’ in time and space (63). If Mr Tuttle is ‘her husband’s tonal soul’, then Rey is, in Lauren’s mind’s eye, a soul in Purgatory, suspended in a liminal space between Heaven and Hell (87). In time and in body, or in ‘body time’, she demonstrates the redemptive power of abject art. It is the abject body where lost souls are found, the purged are purified and the divinity of the abject artist is revealed. The process of incorporating Mr Tuttle into time and space is, like Lauren’s performance, ‘slow, spare and painful’ (103). This is because the abject is ‘radically excluded’ from the symbolic order, the social network of linguistic communication (Kristeva 2). The abject Mr Tuttle is a ‘stranger at [the] crossing’, stranded ‘without words or bearings’ at a ‘nonplace where language intersects with our perceptions of time and space’ (The Body Artist 99). To familiarise this stranger, Lauren gives him the surname of her school science teacher, a surname he shares with the American post-minimalist

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artist Richard Dean Tuttle. In the latter’s work, ‘less is unmistakably less’, such that art critic Hilton Kramer ‘is tempted to say, where art is concerned, less has never been as less than this’. Arguably, Lauren’s Mr Tuttle is lesser again. He is minimal in size and stature, small and childlike, with ‘no protective surface’ (90). Wordless, timeless and homeless, he is an orphan, like Rey, until he becomes Lauren’s foundling. Once she names him, she gives him words to record and repeat, narrating – or breathing – him into an existence she can access. She believes that their monologic conversation is ‘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’ (61). Naming and talking aloud, she breathes him into being, such that he is no longer a still life; rather, he is still living. Reminiscent of the language used to describe Christ’s Incarnation, when ‘the word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us’ (John 1:14), Lauren marvels at how Mr Tuttle ‘knew how to make her husband live in the air that rushed from his lungs into his vocal folds – air to sounds, sounds to words, words the man, shaped faithfully on his lips’ (The Body Artist 62). This is more than a process of inhalation or, in medical terms, inspiration; rather, it is a process of divine inspiration and reincarnation that reveals the power of Lauren’s abject body art. While God made man in his image and likeness, Lauren, in turn, remakes Rey in the image and likeness of Mr Tuttle. In various languages and religious traditions, breath has long been associated with creativity, the soul and the spirit. The Latin spiritus derives from the verb spirare, meaning ‘to breathe’, and the ancient Greek for ‘soul’ derives from the verb psuchô, also meaning ‘to breathe’. According to the biblical story of creation, God ‘formed man of the slime of the earth: and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul’ (Gen. 2:7). Before his ascension into Heaven, Christ ‘breathed on [the apostles] and said “Receive the Holy Spirit”’ and soon after they began to speak in foreign tongues (John 20:22). Mr Tuttle speaks in several ‘foreign’ tongues: his own strange tongue and the tongue of Lauren and Rey. Lauren interprets his foreign tongue as art, as a ‘pure chant’ and (divinely) ‘inspired poetry’, that speaks the language of the semiotic, the matriarchal order that communicates unspoken drives and impulses (The Body Artist 75). Kristeva calls the pre-verbal rhythms of the semiotic ‘the chora’ (derived from the Greek khoreia, meaning ‘to dance’), rendering it a dancing body of sorts. Fluent in the language of fluidity, Mr Tuttle stutters and shuffles in accordance with his (m)other, whose grieving body is in a state of ‘metamorphosis’ or, as Kristeva puts it, ‘dancing’ (The Body Artist 36; Kristeva 104). While Jeffrey Lockhart interprets ‘pre-linguistic grunts’ as ‘cries of wonder’, Lauren intimates that the body that strays from logic and reason strays towards God (Zero K 274). Mr Tuttle’s non-sensical speech has an oracular quality: ‘Being here has come to me, I am with the moment, I will leave the moment’ (The Body Artist 74). This is comparable to a farewell or a prophecy forewarning Lauren that he will leave the moment that his (pre-ordained) departure time comes. It is the farewell she never received from Rey, who secretly knew that his ‘leaving the moment’ would be, like his gun, close at hand. Mr Tuttle’s prophetic utterings speak to the tortured soul of Rey and to the now tortured soul of Lauren, who struggles to believe how and why Rey could be here one moment and gone the next. Embodying the ‘composite’ nature of the abject and dissolving the boundaries between self and (m)other, Mr Tuttle is an amalgamation of these two tortured – and tongue-tied – souls.

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As narrative time passes – or, in Lauren’s mind, ‘seems to pass’ – Mr Tuttle and Lauren absorb and record an increasing amount of each other’s words and bodily movements (7). Lauren realises that ‘she heard elements of her voice’ coming from ‘someone else, from him’ and hears him ‘assuming her part in a conversation with someone’ (50, 51). That someone, of course, is Rey, as she had ‘said these things to Rey, here in the house, or things similar’ (50, 51). The voice, like the house she inhabits, is not Lauren’s own to possess. Rather, the uncanny voices emanating from Mr Tuttle reveal the ‘thinness of physical address’ (46). Though Mr Tuttle’s very existence seems to suspend the bounds of reason – and, initially, Lauren’s belief – it paradoxically reveals the reality of the openness of embodied consciousness while casting doubt on the validity of the laws of language, time, space and subjectivity. The reality of vulnerability and dispossession is, for Lauren, an epiphany, a revelation, that ‘recovers’ lost souls without resorting to death. As noted above, in preparation for his soul’s salvation, Rey shaves his moustache to make himself more visible – or more ‘transparent’– to God (57). Lauren, during her process of soul-searching, reasons, like Rey, that the ‘body ma[kes] everything transparent’ (57). Following Rey’s logic, she shaves and bleaches her body before exfoliating dead skin and residual body waste. The process of ‘scour[ing] the body right down to the back of the tongue – a slurry of food, mucus, and bacteria’ is not a process of abjection that acts as a ‘defense against the natural works of the body’ (97, 84). It is simply ‘her work’: ‘to disappear from all her former venues of aspect and bearing and to become a blankness, a body slate erased of every past resemblance’ (84). Through her ‘bodywork’ she exposes and enhances her open pores, rendering her body more receptive and hospitable to foreign bodies (57). She performs this routine on her foreign foundling, making him easier to see (through) or more ‘transparent’. If he is ‘her husband’s tonal soul’, then she baths and bares Rey’s (lost) soul before finding its home and final resting place: the time and space of her body. Disappearing from familiar ‘venues of aspect and bearing’, Lauren loses her bearings in time and space to imagine, if not identify with, the embodied existence of a lost soul. Contrary to self-absorption, this act of self-erasure, of selflessness, is empathetic and facilitates Lauren’s and Rey’s reunion and redemption.1 The routine rituals comprising her ‘bodywork’ climax in her ritualistic art performance entitled Body Time. During this abject performance piece, she incorporates Mr Tuttle into her being and effectively becomes him, or, as one reviewer puts it, a ‘naked, emaciated and aphasic man, trying desperately to tell us something’ through spluttered verbs and pronouns (105). In words that might well describe The Body Artist, the critic concludes: ‘[w]hat begins in solitary otherness becomes familiar and even personal’ (110). Lauren’s abject art translates into flesh the words Rey once told her after sex: ‘I gain possession

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Laura DiPrete argues that Mr Tuttle’s ‘phantom-body’ materialises ‘similarly to how traumatic memories that occupy the psyche without being absorbed or assimilated’ (485). I argue that Mr Tuttle is not the embodiment of a traumatic memory that has not yet been absorbed into consciousness. Rather, he embodies the traces of Rey that Lauren has recorded and absorbed through her attachment to him. Sara Ahmed writes, ‘each of us, in being shaped by others, carries with us “impressions” of those others’, including bodily gestures, turns of phrases and ‘certainly memories of this or that others’ (160). When the self is affected by others, traces of those others come to exist within, consciously or otherwise. Mr Tuttle embodies Lauren’s ‘impressions’ of Rey and, in so doing, keeps them alive.

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of myself through you’ (62). Having morphed into the ‘naked’ man, her/his body then ‘jumps into another level. In a series of electro-convulsive motions, the body flails out of control, whipping and spinning appallingly [. . .] It is a seizure that apparently flies the man out of one reality and into another’ (114). This is the ecstatic moment of salvation: when Rey re-enters and his body and soul are at one – and at home – within Lauren. Reminiscent of the non-fictional Mr Tuttle’s ‘less than less’ art, Lauren’s abject performance strips down language, bares the body and soul, and raises the question: ‘What’s left? Who’s left?’ (105). Through her abject art, she finds the answer: ‘I am Lauren but less and less’ (105). Finding Rey, she ultimately finds herself, realising that ‘he’d been in there with her’ all along (98).2 On return to the rented house, Lauren is greeted by its owners: a husband and a wife whose name is ‘Alma’, derived from the Latin anima, meaning ‘soul’. Lauren enters the bedroom she shared with Rey and throws ‘the window open’ to ‘feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was’ (124). Each body is home and host to all (un)welcome visitors that pass into its pores and, analogously, each house is fitted with windows and doors that expose the inside to guests and intruders from the outside. Through her abject body art and wide-open ‘eye that shapes’, Lauren opens metaphorical and literal windows to the soul, a word that derives not only from ‘breath’, but also from the Old English sáwol, meaning ‘coming from or belonging to the sea’. She welcomes the sea spray and all the traces of strangeness contained therein, housing them in her abject body of grief, which plays host to a communion of souls. DeLillo continues The Body Artist’s exploration of souls in communion and open bodies of grief through his portrait of another abject artist: the eponymous ‘Falling Man’.

Falling Man On the morning of 11 September 2001, Richard Drew captured the image of a man ‘falling’ from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Drew’s photograph, titled ‘Falling Man’, was published on the front page of the New York Times on 12 September 2001, much to the outrage of readers. This photograph and other images of bodies suspended on the edge of death were, according to Thomas Junod, ‘“taboo” – the only images from which Americans were proud to avert their eyes’. They were censored

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A note on trauma and grief. In my reading, Lauren is not necessarily ‘working through’ trauma, but attempting to recover Rey’s lost soul. Arguing in a similar vein to DiPrete, Alan Marshall aptly notes that Falling Man, like The Body Artist, is poised on the moment ‘when the subject begins to say goodbye to grief’, but at times he teeters on the edge of conflating grief and trauma, writing that ‘Falling Man explores the inevitability of forgetting as a vital part of the recovery from trauma’ (628, 631). While he contends that grief in the novel is ‘organized around an exceptional historical event’ – not ‘a man’s suicide’ – I am arguing precisely the opposite (Marshall 635). Although often mistaken for each other, grief is not the same as trauma. Grief is an experience consisting of an array of sensations and behaviours specific to the individual that are not reducible to a standardised set of diagnostic criteria; grief is neither an unprecedented experience without a history nor a temporal rupture; and grief inspires rather than resists narrative representation. In Falling Man and The Body Artist, grief is a time of suspension and deep feeling – distinct from the circuitous loop of traumatic repetition – during which the bereaved dwell reflectively on (and with) the dead.

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by mainstream media outlets in the US and subsequently became ‘jettisoned objects’ (Kristeva 2). The abject ‘does not respect borders, positions, rules’ and, as such, DeLillo’s abject performance artist in the novel Falling Man flouts the censorship laws and social rules that cast the memory of falling bodies into oblivion (Kristeva 4). He builds a three-dimensional model of Drew’s forbidden image, staging suspended ‘falls’ from elevated structures in New York City. His performance transgresses social as well as corporeal borders: it refuses the ‘erasure of non-representative traumatised bodies’ and brings back into public focus a body that had been banned from sanctioned responses to the events (Cvek 49). In one of the novel’s many ekphrastic passages, DeLillo describes how ‘the jolting end of the fall left [the Falling Man] upside-down’ with his ‘arms at his sides, one leg bent at the knee’ (Falling Man 168). Kristeva explains that ‘the corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance’ (3). The Falling Man performance artist ‘violently’ upsets his unsuspecting audience because he proves that art is presence rather than mere representation: he is not an image, but the physical embodiment of a body that has ‘irremediably come a cropper’. As his headfirst falls are neither ‘announced in advance’ nor ‘designed to be recorded by a photographer’, they are especially shocking (Falling Man 220). It is not a question of whether this ‘notorious figure’ will attack, so to speak, but when (219). When he does, he figuratively holds his unwitting audience captive in a living diorama where they must witness ‘those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump’ (33). Arrested in mid-air, he is positioned on ‘the border of life and death’ where ‘death infect[s] life’, as he awaits his impending demise (Kristeva 4). Forcing his audience to endure the unmitigated shock of a raw confrontation with the falling body ‘without makeup or masks’, he commits an act of ‘primal terror’, tightening the knot binding art and terror that DeLillo ties in Mao II and Libra (Kristeva 3; DeLillo, ‘In the Ruins’ 39). Lianne partakes in the Falling Man’s project of terror. During his performance, she experiences jouissance, an ambiguous feeling of ‘repugnance’ and ‘joy’ that explains why ‘victims of the abject are its fascinated victims – if not its submissive and willing ones’ (Kristeva 9). Lianne senses the ‘awful openness’ of the Falling Man’s abject performance but does ‘not think of turning and leaving’, feeling ‘compelled’ and ‘helpless’ (Falling Man 164, 167). She is not traumatised but captivated by the Falling Man and the jouissance his performance elicits, noting that his ‘beauty was horrific’ (222). Since, according to Kristeva, the abject theoretically precedes the development of language and conceptual meaning, it moves beyond representation, producing an unmediated feeling of horrific beauty that conflicts with the moralising censure and aversion to images of falling bodies. The Falling Man’s fall from grace is thus, for Lianne, paradoxically, a moment of grace and beauty. The sudden jolt of his jump quickly turns into a moment of stillness, during which he is suspended between life and death. Lianne recalls the ‘blankness’ of his face and his ‘kind of lost gaze’ (167). Gazing aimlessly into the abyss, he is, in Kristevan terms, ‘at the border of [his] condition as a living being’ (3). As such, he is a ‘physical memento mori’, a living reminder that neither nations nor people are immortal (Zuber 210). The memento mori is linked to the still life genre of art, a genre concerned with ‘looking at the overlooked’: ‘those things which lack importance, the unassuming material basis

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of life that “importance” constantly overlooks’ when the world is viewed through cursory, inattentive glances (Bryson 61).3 The Falling Man is what The Body Artist’s Lauren calls a ‘living still life’, as his ‘stationary fall’, like her performance, appears to ‘stop time, stretch it out, or open it up’ (The Body Artist 107). Hanging in a state of still-suspension, the Falling Man throws his ‘audience in motion’ upside down, compelling them to pause and look at the overlooked: the mortality of human beings as well as the disembodied deaths of the 9/11 ‘jumpers’ (Falling Man 164). In ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, DeLillo writes: ‘We seem pressed for time, all of us. Time is scarcer now. There is a sense of compression, plans made hurriedly’ (39). The most hurried plan was declared on 20 September 2001, when President George W. Bush stated that grief had turned to anger and, in turn, resolution in the form of ‘our war on terror’. The ‘compression’ of time privileges reflex and reaction, leaving little time for a sustained reflection on the vulnerability of embodied subjectivity and grief. Contrary to the censorship of bodiless deaths from public memory, the Falling Man remembers them, flouting the rules that regulate who can appear in the public sphere. Slowing down the sped-up time of ‘plans made hurriedly’, he stretches out the temporal (and spatial) compression of grief, inviting sustained engagement and identification with the dying body and the interminable falling of man. Art historian Norman Bryson explains that still life paintings portray ‘the everyday world of routine and repetition, at a level of existence where events are [. . .] the smallscale, trivial, forgettable acts of bodily survival and self-maintenance’ (14). Catherine Gander applies Bryson’s theory of still life in her perceptive reading of DeLillo’s handling of time in his late novels, and in Point Omega in particular, and this chapter applies it to Falling Man, where DeLillo works like a still life painter to look at the overlooked extraordinariness of the quotidian, ‘small-scale’ or ‘marginal stories’ of grief (Gander, ‘The Art’ 131; Bryson 14; DeLillo, ‘In the Ruins’). Lianne experiences the fall of the Twin Towers, not as a life-changing trauma, but as an event that reinstitutes her unresolved grief for a pre-9/11 fall that has changed her life: the fall of her father. Kristeva asserts that the abject is accompanied by a ‘massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness’: a ‘weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me’ (2). Lianne’s uncanny experience of the Falling Man’s abject art is inextricable from her experience of grief. In her eyes, his suspended body reveals ‘something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all’ (Falling Man 33). The artist reveals something more than the ‘horrific beauty’ of Drew’s censored image: he reveals the terrifying decision to jump or fall made by those trapped in the Twin Towers, and by her father, Jack. Contrary to what Kristiaan Versluys argues, the Falling Man does not represent ‘the people who had no choice but to submit to their fate’ (23); rather, he recreates the moment the 9/11 ‘jumpers’ and Jack took fate into their own hands. When Lianne was younger, her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Reminiscent of Rey and the frozen bodies preserved in Zero K’s Convergence, Jack was unable (and unwilling) to face his inevitable ‘slow and certain decline’ (Falling Man 125). Preferring not to slide into advanced memory loss, he took his own life.

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See Catherine Gander on still life in DeLillo (‘The Art’; ‘Time’).

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Although Lianne watches the Falling Man’s performance with spellbound fascination, she eventually flees the scene. As she does so, her bag, containing a binder of narratives written by Alzheimer’s patients, ‘[keeps] time, knocking against her hip, giving her a tempo, a rhythm to maintain’ (169). The textual fragment, ‘died by his own hand’, resurfaces while she runs (169). This sequential memory ties together Jack’s decision to kill himself and Lianne’s fixation with the Falling Man’s agency, whether he ‘jumps or falls’ (168). The experiential connection she intuits between the Falling Man and Jack stems from her father’s decision to ruin the rampant stride of the future and to halt his slow submission to death at the hands of Alzheimer’s disease. Shooting himself, he chose an instantaneous death, much like the 9/11 ‘jumpers’. In Lianne’s eyes, then, the Falling Man is an uncanny embodied cipher for Jack, as well as the 9/11 ‘jumpers’. When he ‘looks into it (into his death by fire)’, she sees her father look into his death by gunfire (167). The figurative blood transfusion she and the Falling Man undergo, when she feels ‘blood rushing to his head, away from hers’, is significant, as it symbolises the blood tie she shares with her father (168). In the years since his death, Lianne, like Lauren, has been grieving and ‘grasping after her father’ to understand his suicide and reconcile herself to his death (155). Lianne’s search leads her to Søren Kierkegaard, with whom she hung on the ‘spiritual brink’ during her college years (118). In a letter to Daniel Greenspan, DeLillo writes that he too owns ‘an old Anchor paperback and a Kierkegaard anthology, second hand, falling apart, and, as described in the novel’ (qtd. in Greenspan 81). He was drawn less to the philosophical and theological content of Kierkegaard’s writings than the ‘titles of his work [. . .] the immensity of vision, the will to be equal to eternal themes – fear, trembling, sickness, death’ (qtd. in Greenspan 81). Significantly, Kierkegaard is both an artist and a philosopher who explores aesthetics, ethics and religion in his work, which includes a book, Prefaces (1844), consisting only of prefaces because its ‘author’ had been banned from writing novels. While Kierkegaard’s fictional author shares similarities with DeLillo’s banned artist, the themes of his work also speak to Lianne, who feels a sense of ‘danger [. . .] beyond the limits of a safe understanding’ while reading the ‘brittle pages’ of her Kierkegaard anthology (Falling Man 118). The thrill of feeling ‘dangerously alive’ is a feeling she ‘associate[s] with [her] father’ and the man she married, whose name shares with Kierkegaard’s the ‘hard Scandian k’ that she loves (11, 118). Her marriage to Keith, a man who is ‘sheer hell on women’, was ablaze with ‘cut and burn’: heated arguments and infidelity, which left unsatisfied her (conflicting) need to feel safe yet dangerously alive (59, 35). Following the dismemberment of another figure of masculine authority, the phallocentric Twin Towers, Lianne’s passion for physical and emotional ‘contact’ drives her back into Keith’s arms (35). Since the attacks, however, her estranged husband has ‘not quite returned to his body yet’ (59). Searching for fulfilment in a figure of male impotence, Lianne finds herself abandoned once again. The Falling Man’s abject body, however, pushes her to the edge of death, causing her to feel ‘dangerously alive’. During his performance, she (momentarily) experiences the death of herself, as his blood figuratively flows through her veins. Thus, each time she witnesses the devilish ‘falling angel’ hanging in mid-air, she feels that she too is hanging, by association, on the ‘spiritual brink’ with her father (222). Lianne inherits her interest in religion and spirituality from her father, a Catholic who ‘believed that God infused time and space with pure being, made stars give light’

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(232). Jack believed in a ‘force behind [human existence], a principal being who was and is and ever shall be’ (231). These words recall those of the Catholic doxology, ‘Glory be to the Father’, that states: ‘as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end’ (qtd. in Storey 12). Jack put his faith in an eternally present Father. Lianne’s relationship with fathers is more complex, however, as she has been abandoned by several: her biological father, Jack; Keith, the father of her son; and God, the Father Almighty, who she describes as ‘the voice that says, “I am not here”’ (Falling Man 236). Like Lauren, she teeters on the edge of belief: inclined not to, but still prepared to, and wanting to, believe. In one of her many reveries on God, she reveals that she has been ‘dreaming toward’ a ‘plane of being, out beyond logic and intuition’ (232). Through the Falling Man, whose performances, like Mr Tuttle’s, surpass the limitations of logic and ‘safe understanding’, she realises this dream (63). When the Falling Man’s suspended body hovers in the air, he is, for Lianne, a channel to both of her fathers: the dead and the divine. For the duration of his abject performance, she is unable to ‘think her own thoughts’, signalling her entrance into ‘another plane of being’, a ‘plane of pure being’ that she shares with the Falling Man and her celestial fathers (165, 168, 232). The Falling Man’s abject performance is thus, for Lianne, a silent ritual that makes present her father as well as the ‘hovering possible presence of God’: the ‘thing, the entity existing outside space and time’ (236). While Amy Hungerford argues that DeLillo ‘imagines the ritual aspects of language [. . .] in sacramental terms modelled by the Latin mass’, it is in the silence of abject art that Lianne enters a state of ‘pure being’ (xiv). Her engagement with abject art is imbued with sacredness and constitutes a form of silent prayer: a transcendent form of communication with the father she has been ‘grasping after’, and the Almighty Father she has spent her life ‘dreaming toward’ (Falling Man 155, 232). Through her prolonged engagement with the Falling Man’s still body, Lianne finally finds a sense of communion – just as Lauren is (re)united with Rey through her abject, aesthetic encounter with Mr Tuttle. John McClure argues that DeLillo’s novels, ‘including Players, The Names, White Noise, Mao II, and Underworld, climax in dramatic episodes of worshipful communion that recall the religious “mysteries”’ (166). The climactic moment of communion and religious mystery at the end of Falling Man is not a ‘dramatic episode’ but a moment of stillness and silence. Towards the novel’s end, Lianne sits in church, where she is gathered in holy communion with the living and the dead. Lianne looks on as ‘the priest celebrate[s] the mass, bread and wine, body and blood’ (Falling Man 233). The Communion ritual is a commemoration that obeys the command Christ gave his followers on the night of his death: ‘do this in memory of me’. This is the moment of transubstantiation, when the sacrificial offerings of bread and wine are transformed into the physical body and blood of Christ through prayer and divine intervention, without changing their physical appearance. The physical presence of Christ takes the form of bread and wine during Mass but, for Lianne, it also takes place when she watches the Falling Man perform. Through him, with him and in him, she feels the presence of her fathers (the dead and the divine) and the moment Jack willingly gave himself to death. Although the artist physically ‘falls’ (rather than rises) – and transubstantiation is associated with the resurrection of Christ – the Falling Man’s ‘fall’ is simultaneously a rise. The abject artist resurrects the memory of the 9/11 ‘jumpers’ and, for Lianne, conjures the living presence of the dead and God. Seen through her eyes,

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the performance is a ritual that commemorates the sacrifice, death and ‘resurrection’ of her fathers, and offers a sense of communion with them. At the same time, however, Lianne reserves doubts about God’s very existence. What she experiences as the living presence of God is the sense of communion she feels when she is at one with others on a ‘plane of pure being’ (232). She appreciates the communal power of the church, a space all the more sacred because it is shared by the masses. While there, she experiences an epiphanic revelation: ‘it was not something godlike she felt but only a sense of others. Others bring us closer. Church brings us closer. What did she feel here? She felt the dead, hers and unknown others’ (233). Rather than relegating the dead to the past or rendering them abject, she experiences grief and the lingering presence of the dead in the living body as a blessing. Sitting in prayer, she is at one with the ‘dead in the walls, over decades and centuries’: ‘It was a comfort, feeling their presence, the dead she’d loved and all the faceless others who’d filled a thousand churches. They brought intimacy and ease, the human ruins that lie in crypts and vaults or buried in churchyard plots’ (233). Contrary to the forward momentum of terrorist plots, physical plots of the dead are sacred spaces where time stands still and resting bodies lie. Commemorating the dead in a way that resembles the cultural veneration of architectural ruins, Lianne elevates abject ‘human ruins’ to the status of culturally rich, if not sacred, relics. Rather than fearing mortality, she now ‘breath[es] the dead in candlewax and incense’, all of whom have shaped the present (234). Suspended between the past and the present, and the living and the dead, she appreciates the porousness of embodied subjectivity, as it enables her to breathe in the dead and communicate with them on the level of ‘pure being’. Breathing is, as Lauren Hartke notes, ‘prayerful’, as an intimate mouth-to-mouth exchange where the lingering traces of others are inhaled, and abject waste materials exhaled into the air and open bodies nearby (The Body Artist 57). This sacred form of embodied communication is a process of abjection that sustains and revives life. It is, as Jeffrey Lockhart puts it in Zero K, one of the ‘[o]rdinary moments [that] make the life [. . .] I inhale the little drizzly details of the past and know who I am’ (109). For Lockhart, Lauren and Lianne, suspension in the experiential realm of grief – suspension in the ruins of the future – reveals the sanctity of abjection and life in the quotidian. Lianne’s reflections on communion recall DeLillo’s own in his 2001 essay, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’. Writing about ‘the hadj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca’, he notes that the faithful all recall ‘in prayer their fellowship with the dead. Allahu akbar. God is great’ (‘In the Ruins’ 40). For DeLillo, the dead are ‘their own nation and race, one identity, young or old, devout or unbelieving’ (40). Before the attacks, the greatness of God had an equivalent: the ‘daily sweeping taken-for-granted greatness of New York. The city will accommodate every language, ritual, belief and opinion’ (40). Both the greatness of God and of New York shine through the ‘union of souls’ (40). Writing in 2001, DeLillo contends that the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment and divisive rhetoric threatens to overshadow the greatness of New York, but, by 2007, the year of Falling Man’s publication, his faith in New York appears to have been restored. The ashen air is now a union of souls, an open grave for pulverised bodies of various beliefs, languages and creeds. The greatness of New York resides not in its status as the centre of global trade but in the abject ruins of the World Trade Center and the ruins, or relics, of the dead scattered through the city air. The ‘openness’ of the abject is thus ‘awful’

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indeed: it is a source of horror that makes palpable the wonder and awe of the ‘daily taken-for-granted greatness of New York’. Following her new-found appreciation of abject ruins and her (imagined) communion with the Falling Man, Lianne finally completes her metaphorical fall in grief. Lianne does not detach herself from the dead to return to an illusory state of autonomy. Rather, she becomes at one with herself only by becoming one with others, especially the dead. By the end of the novel, she feels comfortable in her own skin. Following a daily run, she catches a whiff of her grieving body, from which abject materials ooze, and fulfils DeLillo’s own search to ‘find mystery in commonplace moments’ (DeCurtis 59): ‘It was the body and everything it carried, inside and out, identity and memory and human heat [. . .] She was ready to be alone, in reliable calm, she and the kid’ (Falling Man 236). Reminiscent of Lauren, who ‘wanted to feel [. . .] the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was’ (The Body Artist 124), Lianne, in a final moment of transcendence, embraces the permeability of her grieving body. She, like Lauren, realises that all she has recorded and absorbed has turned into living tissue; her body is bound to who she is and how she perceives the world. There are echoes of these epiphanies in Zero K, when Jeffrey Lockhart wonders: ‘If I’d never known Emma [his partner], what would I see when I walk the streets going nowhere special [. . .] I’d see what is there’ (196). Having been ‘expanded by grief’, he realises that ‘it’s different now [. . .] I know that she occupies something within me that allows these moments to happen’ (196). Although Emma returns to her ex-husband, Lauren Hartke is widowed, and Lianne is left with Justin following Keith’s departure, all three characters are not lonely. By virtue of the ‘awful openness’ of their grieving bodies and their continuity with the world of the living and the dead, they know that they are never truly alone. If, as DeLillo portends, the ‘extraordinary wonder of things is somehow related to the extraordinary dread, to the death fear we try to keep beneath the surface of our perceptions’, then Falling Man, The Body Artist and Zero K – and their revelations of the ‘awful openness’ of the abject – are truly wonderful works (DeCurtis 63).

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Boxall, Peter. ‘The Edge of the Future: A Discussion with Don DeLillo.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 159–64. Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. Reaktion, 2013. Bush, George W. ‘An Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People.’ The Guardian, 20 September 2001. theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/21/september11.usa1321. Accessed 1 January 2014. Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. University of Georgia Press, 2002. Cvek, Sven. Towering Figures: Reading the 9/11 Archive. Rodopi, 2011. DeCurtis, Anthony. ‘“An Outsider in This Society”: An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ Introducing Don DeLillo, edited by Frank Lentricchia. Duke University Press, 1999, pp. 43–66. DeLillo, Don. The Body Artist. Simon and Schuster, 2001. ——. Falling Man. Simon and Schuster, 2007. ——. ‘In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September.’ Harper’s, December 2001. harpers.org/archive/2001/12/in-the-ruins-of-the-future/. Accessed 14 September 2014.

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——. Mao II. Viking, 1991. ——. White Noise. Penguin, 1985. ——. Zero K. Simon and Schuster, 2016. DiPrete, Laura. ‘Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist: Performing the Body, Narrating Trauma.’ Contemporary Literature, 47, no. 3, 2005, pp. 483–510. Drew, Richard. ‘Falling Man.’ TIME, 11 September 2001. 100photos.time.com/photos/richarddrew-falling-man. Accessed 8 May 2015. Gander, Catherine. ‘The Art of Being Out of Time in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 127–42. ——. ‘Time: Still Life.’ Don DeLillo in Context, edited by Jesse Kavadlo. Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 270–9. Greenspan, Daniel. ‘Don DeLillo: Kierkegaard and the Grave in the Air.’ Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism, and Art: The Anglophone World, Volume 4, edited by Jon Bartley Stewart. Ashgate, 2013, pp. 81–98. Harding, Rebecca. ‘Unstable Bodies in Don DeLillo’s Mao II and The Body Artist.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 65–78. Hungerford, Amy. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton University Press, 2010. Junod, Thomas. ‘The Falling Man: Part II.’ The Guardian, 7 September 2003. www.theguardian. com/theobserver/2003/sep/07/featuresreview.review. Accessed 10 March 2017. Kramer, Hilton. ‘Tuttle’s Art on Display at Whitney.’ New York Times, 12 September 1975. https://nytimes.com/1975/09/12/archives/tuttles-art-on-display-at-whitney.html. Accessed 1 February 2021. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Samuel Roudiez. Columbia University Press, 1982. Marshall, Alan. ‘From This Point on It’s All about Loss: Attachment to Loss in the Novels of Don DeLillo, from Underworld to Falling Man.’ Journal of American Studies, 47, no. 3, 2013, pp. 621–36. McClure, John. ‘DeLillo and Mystery.’ The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, edited by John N. Duvall. Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 166–78. ‘Soul.’ www.etymonline.com/word/soul. Accessed 3 May 2021. ‘Spirit.’ Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com/oed2/00233657;jsessionid=DEF8B874470F 48D1C0A9AFD05289D459. Accessed 4 May 2021. Storey, William G. A Beginner’s Book of Prayer: An Introduction to Traditional Catholic Prayers. Loyola Press, 2009. Versluys, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. Columbia University Press, 2009. Zuber, Devin P. ‘9/11 as Memento Mori: Still-Life and Image in Don DeLillo’s Ekphrastic Fiction.’ Radical Planes? 9/11 and Patterns of Continuity, edited by Dunja M. Mohr and Birgit Däwes. Brill/Rodopi, 2016, pp. 200–18.

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Part VI Place, Site, Space

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27 DeLillo and Land Art Katherine da Cunha Lewin

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on DeLillo has always been deeply invested in visual culture. Americana, published in 1971, established what would be a lifelong concern with image-making, through the novel’s engagement with Hollywood cinema and advertising. Since then, each novel has adapted and retooled those early concerns, exploring the ways that images are created and manufactured and the subsequent effects this has on human subjectivity, agency and consciousness. DeLillo’s writing also incorporates specific works of visual art – as evidenced by several of the chapters in this collection – to depict aesthetic encounters that trouble the boundary between self and art object. From the Warhol screen prints in Mao II (1992) to the Morandi paintings in Falling Man (2007), artworks abound in the DeLillo oeuvre. Though DeLillo’s relationship with art is intricate and complex, we can read his embedding of specific artworks within his writing as a means of problematising what it means to look at and be moved by art. Crucially, DeLillo seems increasingly concerned with the profound transformational possibility of looking at art, in which the ripples of its influence are felt far beyond the immediate moment of the encounter, into new reaches of the self. Critics have noticed that DeLillo often uses his artworks to provide an echo of the central concerns of his novels; David Cowart suggests that ‘[o]ne can often – perhaps always – discern in such material a reflection or mise en abyme of the DeLillo work in which it appears’ (33), and Brian Chappell concurs, finding that ‘many of DeLillo’s artist figures, such as Klara Sax and Lauren Hartke, produce works that become a mise-en-abyme for the text that contains them’ (11). Art then is communicative, providing a crucial structuring dimension, a way of offering additional conceptual architecture. DeLillo’s muddy aesthetic encounters are amplified and given new dimensions in works that are made out of natural materials and are situated outside the home or gallery space, what I will call in this chapter land art, but can also be termed earthworks. The gallery space has particular import in DeLillo’s work (see Herren, ‘Art Stalkers’; Phillips; and Coughlan’s chapter in this volume), but, as I will argue, artworks that exist outside of the gallery have increasingly emerged in his post-2007 work, artworks particularly made of stone, and sometimes with architectural components. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has written in his essential study on the narrative possibilities of stone in the medieval and early modern period, ‘[s]tone offers a stumbling block to anthropocentrism and a spur to a ceaseless story’ (6). In my examination of DeLillo’s stony works, I want to think about how they might function as a ‘stumbling block’ to questions of human expression. We can trace some of these emergent ideas about land art and its function in a short conversation in 2003’s Cosmopolis. The novel’s protagonist, 28-year-old billionaire

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Eric Packer, suggests to his art dealer Didi Fincher that rather than buy a Mark Rothko painting that has recently come on to the art market, he would like to buy another work that is decidedly not for sale: a piece located in Houston, Texas, called The Chapel. The Chapel, filled with Rothko’s signature coloured canvases in purples, blacks and blues, was created to function as a non-denominational religious space by John and Dominique de Menil and is a site-specific work. Packer explains: ‘If they sell me the chapel, I’ll keep it intact. Tell them.’ ‘Keep it intact where?’ ‘In my apartment. There’s sufficient space. I can make more space.’ ‘But people need to see it.’ ‘Let them buy it. Let them outbid me.’ ‘Forgive the pissy way I say this. But the Rothko chapter belongs to the world.’ ‘It’s mine if I buy it.’ (Cosmopolis 27–8) Given Packer’s staggering wealth and enormous 48-roomed apartment in Manhattan, it is not inconceivable that he could find a way to bring the building into his house. But Packer’s bullish attitude towards the piece uncovers an interesting question about large-scale public artworks and the boundaries between public and private: though Didi asserts that ‘people need to see it’, intimating a general audience of potential spectators, Packer brings it back to the financial, suggesting that if these ‘people’ were so intent on seeing the work, they could use their own buying power. For Packer, as we see throughout the novel, everything has a price. The Chapel itself combines many distinctive aesthetic features that appear in the works I will be discussing in this chapter, such as the conflation between art and building and painted walls, as well as suggesting an overt relationship between art and religion. For the purposes of my argument, however, the most salient aspect of Packer’s exchange with Didi about the Rothko is in how he describes it spatially. He suggests that, though the piece was commissioned and designed for the specific place, it is in fact movable. His comment that his apartment contains not only ‘sufficient space’, but that he can ‘make more space’ is a suggestive one, as if space can be conjured through sheer will. Though DeLillo is a keen visitor of galleries – many of the works shown at the biggest galleries in New York end up in his novels – he is also deeply attuned to the perversities of the function of artworks and the artist in capitalism. In this scene we see DeLillo skewering the art-buying world of millionaires and billionaires intent on owning artworks as pure expressions of wealth, even those that were conceived of as public places of prayer and contemplation, and far too large for display in the home. It is no wonder, then, that as his post-millennium work documents new, sparser ways of seeing and thinking, DeLillo turns his attention to land art, a form of art that makes different demands of its viewers through its materiality, scale and relationship to space, a kind of art that cannot be commodified in the same way as smaller and more portable work. Though land art or land-inspired artworks are mentioned less frequently than other kinds of art across DeLillo’s oeuvre, it is significant that these references have emerged in various guises since the beginning of his career, as I will show in my discussion of a scene from End Zone (1972). The most explicit works of land art have occurred in a few scant years, in his play Love-Lies-Bleeding (2008), in Point Omega (2010), and then realised most fully in Zero K (2016). Still more significant is that these artworks are of his own creation, altering their purpose in the

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text quite considerably. There is, I would argue, a distinct difference between being moved by an artwork and integrating it into a novel and inventing and describing a completely new work; this distinction cannot help but move away from ekphrastic paradigms into more obscure issues relating to art making itself. Cohen suggests that ‘[t]he stories we know of stone will always be human stories, even if the cosmos they convey makes a problem of that category rather than celebrates some specious natural dominion’ (9–10). DeLillo, I argue, concurs with this reading, finding that natural materials, specifically stone, are always delimited in their meaning by human perception. Though several critics have looked to read Point Omega and Zero K through a posthumanist lens (see Herbrechter; Enteghar and Guendouzi), I suggest that DeLillo shows that no amount of desire on our part can transform inhuman materials into tools of the human.

Land Art and Robert Smithson The land art or earth art movement emerged out of the minimalist sculptures of the 1960s, and first came to prominence through an exhibition entitled Earthworks that took place in 1968 at the Dwan Gallery in New York. Many practitioners of this form of art, who included Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Water de Maria and, as I discuss below, Robert Smithson, often used materials that came directly from the earth, such as stone, sand or soil. Ron Graziani gives a summary that earthworks are objects made in and of the natural environment. Nonetheless, the notion earthworks (as the term artwork does also) has as much to do with nature as culture. Although strategic distinctions in their own right, the categorical function in the use of both words has relied on a binary distinction between the manufactured environment (cultural materials in general) and that of the natural. Yet if one includes any type of human-factured activity as part of the natural environment – and in today’s world of bio-cyber technologies it is becoming more difficult not to – then what would not be in and of the natural environment. (4) It is across this faultline that many earthworks sit, in that knotty distinction between nature and culture. Robert Smithson,1 most famous for his work Spiral Jetty (1970), was particularly interested in desert and post-industrial landscapes, and developed a practice in which artworks were made of and in those spaces. In his early career he mostly produced small-scale, abstract work, but as the 1960s progressed Smithson looked for alternative ways to envision both the placement and production of his pieces. This seems

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Though there is no evidence that the two ever met, there seems to be profound crossover, echo and intersection between them, beginning with their biographies: Smithson was born in 1938 in New Jersey, while DeLillo was born in 1936 in the Bronx; both were studying in New York in the 1950s, DeLillo at Fordham, and Smithson at The Art Students League of New York; both were young men in New York in the 1960s, and as Smithson began to move away from his earlier work and develop his artistic practice in what became his earthworks, DeLillo was quitting his job in advertising at Ogilvy and Mather to begin writing in earnest. There is also the significant shadow of the Cold War; the fact that both artists were preoccupied with desert spaces seems all the more suggestive given the frequency with which the desert was a site of nuclear testing programmes during the 1950s and 1960s.

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Figure 27.1  Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970, Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY and DACS, London 2022. Photo: George Steinmetz, courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York



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to have emerged in part from his employment in 1966 as an artist-consultant by Tippetts–Abbett–McCarthy–Stratton, an architecture firm designing the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. As well as encouraging an ‘important shift in vantage point from a ground perspective to an aerial one’ (Tsai 25), his examination of the airport site from a helicopter brought about a new awareness of the possibilities for site-specific works. As the artist became increasingly uncomfortable with the codified space of the gallery, and the repercussions this had on not only the reception of his art but the general relationship between artist and institution, he found new artistic freedom through the transformation of perspective, coupled with the new possibility for the sheer size and scale of works that could be done outdoors, leading to the development of what Smithson would call his ‘Nonsites’. Writing in 1968 about his work from the same year, Nonsite ‘Line of Wreckage’, Bayonne, New Jersey, he describes the Nonsite (or indoor earthwork as he terms it in the piece) as ‘a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in N.J. (The Pine Barrens Plains). It is by this three dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it – thus The Nonsite’ (364). The most crucial part of the Nonsite is its reference to its counterpart, a location always at a profound remove, both spatially and conceptually. Daniel Katz suggests that the ‘the famous “site/nonsite dialectic” aims [to create] a work of art which is always inevitably “elsewhere”, suspended between a site and a nonsite which can never coincide, in a dialectic in which each can only be a part of the other in a movement which defeats all totality’ (330). This ‘elsewhere’ is evident

Figure 27.2  Robert Smithson, Non-Site: ‘Line of Wreckage’ (Bayonne, New Jersey), 1968. Courtesy of Milwaukee Art Museum. Photographer credit: John R. Glembin. © Holt/Smithson Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023.

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in Smithson’s most famous work and its different iterations: Spiral Jetty consists of the jetty itself in the salt flats in Utah, a film from the same year, and an essay published in 1972. In this, Smithson creates an artwork that is not one thing, and that jostles across forms. These ‘suspended’ works offer a new way of engagement for the spectator, beyond a simple momentary glance, to a new and messier realm that traverses place and time. The size of the piece works to another kind of scale; ‘For me’, Smithson writes, ‘scale operates by uncertainty. To be in the scale of the Spiral Jetty is to be out of it’ (‘Spiral Jetty’ 147). Smithson creates work that cannot be owned by a single owner, nor viewed by a single viewer. The artist not only believed in working with ‘natural’ materials, but also with the materiality of language, evidenced by his enormous library and collected writing; he wrote several critical essays, and when he died aged 35 in 1973, he left behind much unpublished material. This remarkable body of work poses a challenge to the ways we might readily understand artistic output. His writing, sketches and maps were not only done in preparation for his full-scale works, but formed a crucial dimension to his artistic practice, so that idea of an art piece or object as fully completed, or indeed existing as one object, is radically revisited; as he writes in ‘Spiral Jetty’: ‘No sense wondering about classifications and categories, there were none’ (146). For Smithson, this notion of a finished or completed work seems to stem from the way he conceived nature itself, ‘Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development. Nature is never finished’ (155). This does not mean, however, that Smithson conceives of nature as inexhaustible or limitless, and in fact, Smithson was concerned by entropy – which meant that the eventual decay and destruction of

Figure 27.3  Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown, 1969, Cava dei Selce, Rome, Italy © Holt/Smithson Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023

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Figure 27.4  Robert Smithson, Glue Pour (1969). Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Sculptural event. Photograph: Christos Dikeakos. © Holt/Smithson Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023

Figure 27.5  Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA © Holt/Smithson Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023

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his works was often part of how they were conceived. Weathering, burial and damage were all crucial dimensions to his pieces; though he used materials that could potentially endure long past human existence, Smithson actively wanted his works to be changed and altered by time. The works Asphalt Rundown (1969), Glue Pour (1969) and Mirrors and Shelly Sand (1969–70) were all built with eventual degradation in mind. For Smithson, art does not live forever, but is continually changing and transforming, until it might eventually disappear (as his piece Partially Buried Woodshed [1970] did). Smithson refashions art, so that it is not only symbolically related to the endurance of human creativity beyond human time, but also subject to it.

DeLillo’s Land Art Taking Smithson as the land artist par excellence, the remainder of this chapter will consider how DeLillo’s own creations seem to echo some of the same concerns. Though this chapter might be the first to consider the relationship between DeLillo and land art explicitly, I am not the only critic to look at DeLillo’s relationship to stone: Catherine Gander notices that there have always been stones circling round DeLillo’s writing in one way or another: ‘He had considered Rock of Ages as a title to The Body Artist, a name that contains the inspiration for his 1982 novel The Names: a framed picture of the Rosetta Stone, that has hung in his office for several decades’ (138). Reading DeLillo’s work through the physicist Julian Barbour, Gander finds that the particular materiality of rock and stone allows for a vehicle through which DeLillo can conceive of quantum time, and finds rocks to be ‘time capsules par excellence’ (137). By reframing this discussion of stone not as a capsule for time, but as a kind of land art, I suggest that DeLillo troubles the possibilities of human and artistic expression. In his often incomplete or unfinished artworks, we see that the desire to find forms that will live beyond us are only ever conceived through our own human limitations. Though it is in his later fiction and plays that DeLillo includes the most explicit works of land art, he has hinted at his interest in it from very early in his writing career; DeLillo’s second novel, End Zone, establishes his preoccupation with both the desert and stone. Robert Smithson wrote that ‘the desert is less “nature” than a concept, a place that swallows up boundaries’ (‘A Sedimentation’ 109), and DeLillo’s deserts are also spaces that radically reimagine distinctions between things. Drifting football player Gary Harkness finds himself at Logos College, a remote institution in the middle of Texas with easy access to the desert that surrounds it. While undertaking unusual classes in the theory and language of American football and its relationship to war and nuclear arms, Harkness becomes increasingly drawn to the desert, often going out to walk on his own while obsessing over the possibility of mass extinction from nuclear warfare. On one of his walks, Harkness comes across an object that I would suggest is DeLillo’s first piece of land art: Something sudden, a movement, turned out to be sunlight on paint, a painted stone, one stone, black in color, identifiably black, a single round stone, painted black, carefully painted, the ground around it the same nameless color as the rest of the plain. Some vandal had preceded me then. Stone-painter. Metaphorist of the desert. (End Zone 40–1)

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It is striking that this inactive object is first seen by Harkness through its apparent movement; as he says a few lines earlier, ‘Motion was strange. Motion consisted of sunlight on particular stones’ (40). In this uniquely still place, it is only light that provides any movement, using the painted stone as its canvas. Through a confluence of the natural and the man-made then, Harkness sees that he is not alone in the landscape. This ‘vandal’ becomes a ‘stone-painter’ and finally ‘metaphorist’, suggesting this anonymous individual as a combination of all three. But how can one vandalise open space? It seems for Harkness that this mini-earthwork intrudes on his conception of the desert as fundamentally unpeopled; or in reality, it functions as a psychic trespass, entering into his consciousness without his ready acceptance. As he conceives of mass death he is reminded, momentarily, of the life of someone else. We see, then, that stone begins to be a vehicle for meaning, both standing in for the person who made the work of art, and for the artwork itself. DeLillo considers this collapse between art and artist in his 2008 play Love-Lies-Bleeding, in which we meet DeLillo’s first and only explicit land artist, Alex Macklin. Having suffered a massive stroke, Alex is now in a persistent vegetative state, and sits motionless in his living room while his second wife Toinette, his current wife Lia, and son Sean sit around him, discussing their relationships to him, and eventually deciding to euthanise him. Though we only ever see Alex speak in flashback, his artistic practice pervades the play. His son Sean, giving the eulogy at his funeral, describes him as a ‘large figure’ (Love-Lies-Bleeding 25), noting that his giving up of painting on an easel in favour of land art made complete sense: ‘A scale to match the man’ (25). His second wife Toinette also sees his choice of medium as fully in line with the artist himself. In a flashback she tells him, ‘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’ (63). Like Sean, Toinette suggests some equivalence between the man and his surroundings, breaking down the boundary between expression, medium and artwork. The desert, then, is intimately related to Alex as an artist. In that same flashback, Toinette asks Alex to describe what he is working on to her, and he does, explaining the remoteness of the site, the team of labourers he is using to build it, and the final image he has for the piece: Alex  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. Lamp-black. All six surfaces every square inch. Toinette Painted. Alex Painted. Toinette  And the paintings. What do I see exactly? Alex  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. (LoveLies-Bleeding 59–60) This working practice, reminiscent of Smithson, who also used labourers to help him build his larger projects, reframes the question of creator. Toinette asks to have this piece described to her but as they continue to discuss it, Alex emphasises that this piece ‘will never happen’, even as the work is taking place. This is significant given that the only

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major piece of land art presented to the audience in this text is one that exists in theory. The artwork, then, seems to be inaccessible in more than one sense – physically, psychically and to us as the audience. In Alex’s resistance to either finishing or describing the work, he gives only an impression of the work, a partial viewpoint. Toinette summarises the work simply as ‘Art that’s hidden in a mountain’ (60) and Alex echoes this sentiment a few sentences later, seemingly preoccupied by how best to achieve that simplicity: 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? [. . .] 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. (61) Alex seems to fall into a trap of imagining rock as the most ‘real’ of materials, unspoiled by humanity in its lack of ‘socializing’. He then goes further and imagines art ‘without a signature’. The audience is told that Alex was not particularly successful as an artist; according to his son’s eulogy, ‘he wasn’t great and he wasn’t famous’ (25), but this seems to have very little relevance for Alex himself. DeLillo hints at the logic of the art market here, suggesting the anonymity and incompletion of the room as a complete disavowal of the mechanics of buying and selling art, ‘the signature’ functioning as a stand-in for the identity of the artist and therefore the marketability of the artwork. Instead, Alex envisions a much purer work that is tied to the space in which it exists, an untainted and anonymous expression of creativity that cannot be bought or sold, much like Harkness’s painted rock. Interestingly, for Randy Laist: Alex’s work barely qualifies as landscape art, since it is not so much a reshaping of location 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 would be virtually invisible to the uninitiated. The only alteration Alex’s work makes to the landscape is conceptual. (n.p.) I would counter this claim, and suggest that DeLillo seems to echo the Nonsites of Smithson in creating a work that exists only partially, or only as an imaginative process. For Alex, this is a mode of art that can situate itself directly in its moment of creation, allowing for the disintegration of boundaries between making and being. This means that though the work would exist in one place, there is something profoundly mobile in this imagined piece, echoing Smithson’s descriptions of the interplay between his Pine Barren piece and the accompanying Nonsite in the gallery, a space he describes as one of ‘metaphoric significance. It could be that “travel” in this space is a vast metaphor. Everything between the two sites could become physical metaphorical material devoid of natural meanings and realistic assumptions’ (‘Provisional Theory’ 364). The Nonsite contains a vast capacity not only for meaning, but for strange and challenging interplay between its different versions. In Alex’s creation, DeLillo remodels the kinds of ekphrastic writing we see in his other novels, by refusing to fully describe the work he has himself invented. Like Smithson’s Nonsites, this unpeopled and unseen room exists across media, in action, in the conversation between Toinette and Alex, as well as in the lines of the play itself.

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This question of expression and materiality is interestingly contrasted with the play’s central theme of death. Both Laist and Herren (Self-Reflexive Art) comment on the significance of the opening line ‘I saw a dead man on the subway once’ (LoveLies-Bleeding 7) in that it prefigures Alex’s own death, meaning that everything that happens in the play is infused with this preoccupation; discussions of art are overlaid with the end of life, as in the scene from End Zone, where death and art are linked. In scene 11, Alex’s current wife Lia and his son argue over this problem: Lia  [. . .] Not everyone wants to choose the time. There’s another level and that’s what he chose. Die in nature’s time. Yield to nature. Sean  Nature. Does anyone know what that is? I see polyethylene tubes that carry a chemical solution. You’re protecting him from nature. (40) Lia’s resistance to hastening Alex’s death underpins the whole play, as the three characters sit around him, Beckett-style, wondering when he will die. Though Lia tries to argue that by allowing them to continue his life, Alex has ‘chose[n]’ this method of death, Sean finds an important contradiction in Lia’s statement, given that Alex’s life is already artificially preserved in the aftermath of two strokes. DeLillo contrasts the possibility for an artwork that might endure, even in the partial form that Alex describes, to the end of human life itself that is protracted artificially. Though Point Omega (2010) does not contain any explicit works of land art, its setting in the desert and discussions of stone suggest that DeLillo was still working through the ideas he established in the works described above. As in the first scene of Love-LiesBleeding, Point Omega also has two framing scenes that shape the central section, each of which contain an anonymous character’s increasingly unsettling response to Douglas Gordon’s installation 24 Hour Psycho, in which the artist slowed down the frames of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho so that the film lasts a full day. Where Gordon’s work attempts to mark duration, suddenly making visible the mechanics of seeing, DeLillo’s narrative extends these ideas into the materiality of life, looking at the relationship between consciousness and matter. Richard Elster, defence intellectual, responsible for an article on the word ‘rendition’, an idea that became crucial to the Bush government in its war against terrorism, decides to head to a house in the desert, ‘somewhere south of nowhere in the Sonoran Desert or maybe it was the Mojave Desert or another desert altogether’ (Point Omega 25). This retreat to the desert is reminiscent of Gary Harkness’s self-imposed exile in the Texan desert, in that both characters seek to use the desert as a kind of psychic escape. But as with Harkness, Elster’s desire for a space that is free from the constraints of the city, or indeed other people, is shown to be ethically fraught, as he attempts to find a place in which his part in war and destruction can be forgotten. Elster’s skirting around his role in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by the US and UK after 9/11– his immediate response to Finley’s question about whether or not he had ever been to Iraq is to say, ‘I hate violence’ (Point Omega 63) – leads him to pontificate on consciousness in the face of ‘folk tales of the end’ (64). For him, it is the work of Teilhard de Chardin, the originator of the idea of the ‘omega point’, that speaks most suggestively to him: not the multiple ways in which humans could meet their demise, but the degradation of consciousness. He tracks matter in ‘[a]ll the stages’ until ‘[w]e’re a crowd, a swarm’ (Point Omega 66). The omega point would see us ‘leap out of our biology’ and transform ‘back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in the field’ (67). This extraordinary suggestion of a collective wish tells us more

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about Elster’s desire in the face of his actions than it does anything else. Though Elster is suggesting stones as the most alien object from human consciousness, by invoking them as a state of being, he implicitly includes them in his reverse evolution. This desire reads all the more strangely when we consider the earlier scene in End Zone, when Harkness comes across the single stone and finds it to be a vehicle of meaning, even if the meaning is obscure. DeLillo suggests that there is a contrapuntal force going on here, that even in our desire for inertness, or some kind of completely other life, there will always be a search for expression. Though Elster seems to find solace in his unachievable suggestion, by the end of the novel this ‘leap’ is undermined by the disappearance of his daughter, so that his dreams of transcendence are brought right back to earth: ‘The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body’ (124). This relationship between the stone, art and the possibilities of expression finds fullest illustration in Zero K. The novel opens with Jeffrey Lockhart arriving in the middle of a desert at a strange building named the Convergence, where he is to meet his father, billionaire Ross Lockhart, and his stepmother Artis Martineau. In this facility, various experimental procedures are taking place in which humans are induced into death-like comas until some unknown future point when they will be revived and potentially cured of chronic diseases and illnesses. As with Love-Lies-Bleeding and Point Omega, DeLillo’s late deserts are never set in a specific place, ensuring that the narrative always occurs in an ‘elsewhere’, as in Smithson’s continually deferred artworks. Jeffrey is driven up to the building, and tries to describe what he sees: The number of structures was hard to determine from my near vantage. Two, four, seven, nine. Or only one, a central unit with rayed attachments. I imagined it as a city to be discovered at a future time, self-contained, well-preserved, nameless, abandoned by some unknown migratory culture . . . These were buildings in hiding, agoraphobically sealed. They were blind buildings, hushed and somber, invisibly windowed, designed to fold into themselves, I thought, when the movie reaches the point of digital collapse. (Zero K 4–5) This striking description is, like Alex’s room in a mountain, partially conceived. The building’s actual structure is ‘hard to determine’, while the different parts of the building seem in ‘hiding’, as if resisting being read. But more than this, Jeff notes that the building seems to be folding in on itself. Is the building collapsing through the sheer weight of the experimental procedures going on inside it, or is it something else, to do with the pressure of those humans whose lives are circulating around it? Or, as with Alex, is this more to do with the breaking down of boundaries between human, space and expression? It seems that for DeLillo, as with Smithson, everything tends towards its own decay, even in its moment of creation. This possibility of collapse is echoed by Ross, Jeff’s father, as he explains his own reading of the Convergence: This place was designed by serious people. Respect the idea. Respect the setting itself. Artis says we ought to regard it as a work-in-progress, an earthwork, a form of earth art, land art. Built up out of the land and sunk down into it as well. Restricted access. Defined by stillness, both human and environmental. A little tomblike as well. The earth is the guiding principle . . . Return to the earth, emerge from the earth. (Zero K 10)

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It is Jeffrey’s stepmother Artis – whose name several critics have noted seems to be a riff on either the word ‘artist’ (Herren, Self-Reflexive Art) or ‘ars gratia artis, art for the sake of art’ (Cowart, ‘Don DeLillo’s Zero K’ 148) – who describes the building as four concurrent things: ‘work-in-progress, an earthwork, a form of earth art, land art’. Though her name may indeed seem to evoke this association with a maker of art, it is significant that DeLillo does not make her an artist but an archaeologist, a job intimately related with human history as it is found in the earth. This means that her reading of the building as a work of art feels more than speculation, but rather a professional judgement. As ‘earthwork’, ‘land art’ and ‘earth art’ are all essentially synonyms, it seems that Artis is suggesting the first descriptor ‘work-in-progress’ as a synonym too, as if the possibility of continuity is an essential characteristic of this form of art – an idea that chimes with Smithson’s own. Ross’s description of the building that is both ‘built up out’ and ‘sunk down into’ suggests an important interplay between the landscape and the building: recalling the phrase ‘dust to dust, ashes to ashes’, taken from the Book of Common Prayer, Ross implies that the building facilitates a ‘return to the earth, emerge[nce] from the earth’ as if the individuals who enter into this Convergence process are enacting some alternative death that is equivalent to organic decay. But there is elision here: in actuality, the bodies are placed into pods in which they hang suspended in time, frozen through a complex scientific process – not quite the organic process he seems to imply to his son in his description of earth and the environment. This ‘return’ into the ‘tomblike’ building is conceived of as a reverse death, ‘Die a while, then live forever’ as Herren puts it (Self-Reflexive Art). Jeffrey echoes his father’s language a few pages later, when he recounts a visit to a church on Ash Wednesday. He describes how ‘[t]he priest approached and made his mark, a splotch of holy ash thumb-printed to my forehead. Dust thou art’ (Zero K 15), returning to this image a few sentences later to complete the quotation from Genesis 3:19: ‘But the robed priest and the small grinding action of his thumb implanting the ash. And to dust thou shalt return’ (15). DeLillo links this strange building with Ash Wednesday, finding in both a way of using natural materials to serve as a reminder of human mortality, and as markers of belief. As Ross comments earlier, the building holds ‘Faith-based technology’ (9), which gives the promise of a future life, but without evidence. As in Love-Lies-Bleeding, DeLillo’s land art is always tied to futurity, even if it based on faith and hope alone. These opening pages establish this linkage between art, the human and the nonhuman, and as the novel continues, this relationship is furthered by the contents of the building itself. Art litters the hallways, screens emerge suddenly from the ceiling, but Jeff is never quite certain if what he is seeing is art. Somehow, this appeals to Jeff; he finds that it ‘met standards of unlikelihood, or daring dumb luck, that can mark the most compelling art’ (23–4). Like Harkness’s stone, these chance encounters alter his being in the space, transforming each moment of being into a possible form of spectatorship. They also potentially evidence the existence of an artist who lies behind them. At one point, Jeff and his father enter a large and empty marble room: An art gallery, I thought, with nothing in it. The gallery is the art, the space itself, the walls, the floor. On an enormous marble tomb, a mass gravesite emptied of bodies or waiting for bodies. No ornamental cornice or frieze, just flat walls of shiny marble. (148)

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Here we see the collapse between the spaces of the building happen most fully, where just being in a room becomes akin to being in a gallery. Jeff asks, ‘Was it just a site or an idea for a site’ (148), seemingly echoing Smithson’s descriptions of the Nonsite as a metaphor or vehicle, in which the art and the place of the art are interpenetrative. Like much of Smithson’s work, the Convergence does not take one form, but several; inside, rooms and corridors are painted like themselves. For Peter Boxall, DeLillo’s late works can be characterised by tautologies, individuals caught within loops of language; here the building speaks in architectural tautologies, in which the distinction between inside and outside cannot be made. The final piece of land art is found at an exhibition visited by Jeff, his girlfriend Emma and her adopted son Stak: ‘The object on exhibit was officially designated an interior rock sculpture. It was a large rock, one rock’ (213–14). The ‘lone object’ (212) in the gallery has sat there for two decades, and Jeff notes that he is a repeat visitor, a characteristic he shares with other DeLillo characters who are compelled to return to particular artworks again and again. The word ‘interior’ seems to signal a double meaning: both the rock’s placement inside, and also the kind of response the rock is supposed to engender in its audience. For Stak, it is both visual and tactile; Jeff’s response is through language. Before they reach the gallery, Jeff tells Stak about Heidegger’s phrase ‘rocks are but they do not exist’ (213), but refrains from going into detail about the philosopher’s membership of and long association with the Nazi party, because it would mean that ‘even the most innocent words, tree, horse, rock, [had] gone dark in the process’; he wants Stak to be able to ‘imagine an uncorrupted rock’ (214). As with Alex’s rock that has not been ‘socialized’, Jeff hopes to keep this rock ‘uncorrupted’ by Heidegger’s personal history. This, however, proves an impossibility, as he asks Stak to ‘[d]efine rock’ once they are standing in front of it, demonstrating that no rock can be ‘uncorrupted’ by the desire to place the non-human in human terms. When Stak describes it as ‘a chunk of material that belongs to nature, shaped by forces such as erosion, flowing water, blowing sand, falling rain’ (216), and provides a kind of biography of the rock, DeLillo once more exposes the necessity of human language to understand the non-human. Although Boxall shows, through Heidegger, that in order to move beyond the human we have to use stone as a means of ‘think[ing] outside the terms of our own “world picture”’ (548), each iteration of natural material in Zero K always comes back to human desire, for life or for knowledge. As I have written elsewhere, DeLillo’s writing of the environment has always sought to relate to the human, attempting to reconceive of the problem of imagining the end of the world through fostering a new solidarity across different groups (Da Cunha Lewin). Where Smithson rejects the artificial distinctions between natural and manmade, so too does DeLillo, showing time and again that landscapes that might seem untouched or unpeopled are never free of human presence. It is no wonder, then, that his land art is always partial, given his scepticism of any mode of expression that can fully live beyond human conceiving. Although Boxall suggests that DeLillo’s late fiction advocates that ‘we must find a way to give expression to a consciousness that is already moving beyond the terms in which we recognize and humanize ourselves. We have to learn how to see the empty syntactical and biomaterial frameworks that lie at the fringes of our forms of apprehension’ (553), each of the works of land art I have shown here continually returns to the human limitations we cannot help but impose on non-human objects, even as we hope to find objects that can exist beyond human

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understanding: Harkness’s stone is a metaphor; Alex’s stone cave conceived of outside the social; Elster’s stony existence to absolve him of his implications in war crimes; the stone in the gallery that Jeff and Stak cannot help but try to define. But as I also noted earlier, each one of these artworks is an invention of DeLillo himself; though simple and spare, and in Alex’s mind free from signature, these works offer a meta-commentary on the possibility of human expression. If, as I mentioned at the beginning, art in DeLillo’s work is always there as an additional structuring apparatus, then his land art creations speak to the novel itself, at once expanding and delimiting the possibility for longevity in art making.

Works Cited Boxall, Peter. ‘“A leap out of our biology”: History, Tautology, and Biomatter in Don DeLillo’s Later Fiction.’ Contemporary Literature, 58, no. 4, 2017, pp. 526–55. Chappell, Brian. ‘Death and Metafiction: On the “Ingenious Architecture” of Point Omega.’ Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 4, no. 2, 2016. https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.133. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. University of Minnesota Press. 2015. Cowart, David. ‘Don DeLillo’s Zero K and the Dream of Cryonic Election.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 143–58. ——. ‘The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.’ Contemporary Literature, 53, no. 1, 2012, pp. 31–50. Da Cunha Lewin, Katherine. ‘Apocalyptism, Environmentalism, and the Other.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 33–48. DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. Picador, 2011. ——. End Zone. Picador, 2004. ——. Love-Lies-Bleeding. Picador, 2005. ——. Point Omega. Picador, 2010. ——. Zero K. Picador, 2016. Enteghar, Kahina, and Amar Guendouzi. ‘A Heideggerian Reading of the Posthuman Treatment of Death in Don DeLillo’s Zero K.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 62, no. 1, 2021, pp. 44–56. Flam, Jack, editor. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. University of California Press, 1996. Gander, Catherine. ‘The Art of Being out of Time.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 127–42. Graziani, Ron. Robert Smithson and the American Landscape. Cambridge University Press, 2004. Herbrechter, Stefan. ‘Posthuman/Ist Literature? Don DeLillo’s Point Omega and Zero K.’ Open Library of Humanities, 6, no. 2, 2020. https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.592. Herren, Graley. The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo. Ebook. Bloomsbury, 2019. ——. ‘Don DeLillo’s Art Stalkers.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 61, no. 1, 2015, pp. 138–67. Katz, Daniel. ‘WHERE NOW? A Few Reflections on Beckett, Robert Smithson, and the Local.’ Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, 22, 2010, pp. 329–40. Laist, Randy. ‘“The Art, the Artist, the Landscape, the Sky”: Ontological Crossings in Love-LiesBleeding.’ Don DeLillo After the Millennium: Currents and Currencies, edited by Jacqueline A. Zubeck. Ebook. Lexington Books, 2017.

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Phillips, Matt. ‘Curating Modernism: Don DeLillo, T. S. Eliot, and Postmodern Museality in Zero K.’ Intertexts, 22, no. 1, 2018, pp. 126–51. Smithson, Robert, ‘A Provisional Theory of Non-sites.’ Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam. University of California Press, 1996, p. 364. ——. ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects.’ Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam. University of California Press, 1996, pp. 100–13. ——. ‘Spiral Jetty.’ Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam. University of California Press, 1996, pp. 143–53. Tsai, Eugene. ‘Robert Smithson: Plotting a Line from Passaic, New Jersey, to Amarillo, Texas.’ Robert Smithson, edited by Eugene Tsai and Cornelia Butler. University of California Press, 2004, pp. 11–32.

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28 DeLillo and the Gallery David Coughlan

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he gallery as represented in Don DeLillo’s work will seem familiar to many. He captures the mundane details of the gallery experience: the crowded ‘museum lobby’ (Mao II 20); the ‘rambling white space set on several levels under ducts and sprinklers and track lights’; ‘edging sideways’ from wall to wall (Mao II 133); ‘the display of explanatory material’, the ‘bench in the middle of the gallery’, the ‘tour guide’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’ 108, 105, 109); the ‘museum guard’ (Point Omega 4); ‘the taped border’ around the art that one should not cross (Zero K 215); the bright or dimmed lights, the chill, the silence. And he captures the mundanity of the gallery experience itself; after all, people just ‘look at a painting, they just sit there or stand there’ (Great Jones Street 100). They look and stand, or they ‘[s]ee it and leave’ (Underworld 83). And yet this unremarkable act of looking at the walls of a gallery appears repeatedly in DeLillo’s writing, receiving more pronounced attention in his later works. As Graley Herren observes, ‘DeLillo has remained persistently engaged with art, artists, and the creative processes through which various artworks are made’, but ‘his focus has increasingly shifted toward the other end of the artistic transaction, examining the reception processes through which artworks are perceived, assimilated, deconstructed, and reconstructed to suit the needs of individual viewers’ (139).1 DeLillo is concerned with the ways in which we receive, perceive, appreciate and are affected by works of art and with what it means to ‘love the paintings’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’ 109). He advises, ‘Just look. You have to look’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’ 107); ‘See what’s here. Think about it clearly’ (Zero K 153). The gallery allows DeLillo not just to look at art but to look at the significance of looking at art. This chapter, therefore, asks, ‘What does DeLillo see when he looks at the gallery?’2 How can it be that you’re ‘alone in a room, looking’ (Falling Man 210), you’re ‘looking at a picture on a wall. That’s all. But it makes you feel alive in the world’ (Cosmopolis 30)? What follows examines the part that the gallery plays in DeLillo’s narrative and formal structures, and it shows how the gallery relates to DeLillo’s insights into our mundane existence, ‘[b]eing human, being mortal’ (Falling Man 111).

 1

This shift can perhaps be seen as an extension of the two different angles on the image that Peter Schneck identifies in DeLillo’s work, one ‘a discourse on or about images’ and the other ‘a discourse with images’ (107). Relatedly, Patrick O’Donnell, connecting aesthetics and politics, argues that, for DeLillo, ‘we can’t, for the most part, choose which images we see . . . but we do have some choice over how we see them’ (70).  2 The word gallery scatters and refracts through DeLillo’s work, in the shooting gallery, for example, and the galleria or mall, but this chapter will concentrate on the art gallery.

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DeLillo’s work features both private (individual and corporate-owned) and public (institutional and commercial) gallery spaces. The former category includes, in Americana (1971), the lobby of a chemical firm in Muncie that buys art as ‘a tax gimmick’ (106); the Senator’s private gallery of erotic art in Running Dog (1978); Sidney Glass’s apartment in Amazons (1980) with its ‘dozens of paintings. Mostly abstract. The real thing. Just lines. Just squares. Just circles’ (Birdwell 99–100); Nina Bartos’s apartment in Falling Man (2007) ‘with art on the walls, painstakingly spaced’ (8); and in Zero K (2016), Ross Lockhart’s ‘room of monochrome paintings’ (183) and the cryopreservation facility that is the Convergence, with its ‘painted walls, the simulated doors, the movie screens in the halls. Other installations elsewhere’ (51), its ‘visionary art’ (23, 256). Significant public galleries in DeLillo’s work include (though no doubt I am missing or forgetting some) the Lightborne Gallery in Running Dog; in Mao II (1991), the (unidentified) Museum of Modern Art, New York, exhibiting Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, which in reality ran from February to May 1989, and later in the novel, a gallery showing ‘works of living Russians’ (133), including Alexander Kosolapov’s Gorby I, which is likely the Eduard Nakhamkin Fine Arts Gallery in Manhattan and the exhibition Transit: Russian Artists Between the East and West, on view in November and December 1989 (shared with the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island); in ‘Baader–Meinhof’ (2002), the gallery in the (again unnamed) MoMA, exhibiting Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 from November 2000 to January 2001 and again, as part of a Richter retrospective, from February to May 2002; the Rothko Chapel in Cosmopolis (2003), which ‘belongs to the world’ but which, Eric Packer asserts, is ‘mine if I buy it’ (28); in Falling Man, the unnamed gallery exhibiting Giorgio Morandi in Chelsea, New York (Herren identifies the actual show as Giorgio Morandi: Late Paintings 1950–1964 at the Lucas Schoormans Gallery, September– December 2004 [243 n.7]); in Point Omega (2010), MoMA again, this time showing Douglas Gordon’s video art installation 24 Hour Psycho, which ran from June to September 2006; and in Zero K, the art gallery displaying ‘a large rock, one rock’ (214).3 DeLillo’s employment not just of recognisable museums but of identifiable shows creates a fascinating situation. As Herren notes, ‘Since the latter [Richter] show ran contemporaneously with the original publication of the story, readers of “Baader– Meinhof” could still go to MoMA and view the series for themselves’ (243 n.5) but in a gallery surely now coloured or framed by its fictional representation. The gallery space in DeLillo’s later work may tend to conform to ‘the usual clinical space of right angles and clever little ramps’ (Running Dog 14), but not all of the galleries in his work are immediately recognisable. Arguably the earliest gallery exhibition in DeLillo’s work, both in the context of his oeuvre and of human prehistory, appears in Ratner’s Star (1976). This is the cave art that features in the account of archaeologist Maurice Xavier Wu’s exploration of the caves lying beneath the curving cycloid shape of Field Experiment Number One above and set in the sloping walls of the mirroring, concave, excavated ‘inverted cycloid’ below (Ratner’s Star 283). During his potholing, Wu becomes stuck in a narrow crawlway, either physically wedged or frozen in fear of the total darkness when his headlamp goes out. But once his wailing hysteria wanes, Wu realises that he is not, after all, wedged:

 3

There are also brief references to the Whitney Museum in Americana (106) and Running Dog (275).

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It was obvious. All he had to do was squirm back out, get a match from his coveralls, light the match, find his way to the backpack, remove a candle from the pack, light the candle, get the extra carbide, refill the lamp. This he did, all of it in a matter of minutes, and it was simple and done and over, all fiction, Jean thought, wondering what it would take to ‘remember through’ the ochre and soot of cave art to the very reason why these earliest of artists descended to the most remote parts of caves and applied their pigments to nearly inaccessible walls, the intricate journey and the isolated site being representative perhaps of the secret nature of the story told in the painting itself, all fiction, she thought, all fiction takes place at the end of this process of crawl, scratch and gasp, this secret memory of death. (394) Jean, here, is Jean Venable, journalist turned novelist, whose thoughts converge with Wu’s repeatedly in this second part of Ratner’s Star, ‘Reflections’. This particular musing on fiction echoes an earlier point where ‘Writing is memory, she thought, and memory is the fictional self, the powdery calcium ash waiting to be stirred by a pointed stick . . . the successive reflections’ (362). And this reflection is realised when, in the ‘powdery dung’ (388) of the bats in the cave, Wu traces a V-shaped figure, his version of the otherwise wholly imagined cave art of fiction. In this rocky, unreachable place, home to bats and their guano, littered with the remains of civilisations and bat prey alike, we are obviously far from the clinical space of the usual gallery. And yet, in the space of Wu’s and Venable’s pre-gallery, so silent, so enclosed, so charged with the force of experience, with the sense of an end or arrival, we can see the defining aspects of DeLillo’s galleries. Most notably, the gallery does not simply hold or make present the art. Instead, the gallery represents or reflects the art in some way. Somehow all galleries, and not just cave galleries, are distant from other places, almost unreachable, and the complex passage towards the artwork is itself a preview of the art, a foretaste of a recollection of death. And if all fiction takes place at the conclusion of this difficult journey, then it is as if all fiction happens in that remote gallery. To read DeLillo, we must crawl, scratch and gasp in his wake, like Softly scrabbling down Endor’s ‘hole’s hole’ (437) at the end of Ratner’s Star. A further notable aspect of this pre-gallery is that cave art is, of course, applied to the very surfaces of the cave gallery, so that the gallery is drawn into the art, providing wall space, frame and ‘canvas’, somehow both apart from and part of the art, its bare walls visible but unseen (because unlooked at) and its painted walls looked at but invisible (because only the art is seen). In this context, ‘the rock sculpture, the natural artwork’ (215) of Zero K, while asking in general what can properly be seen as art, more specifically asks how easily the line can be drawn between the (cave) art and the (cave) wall on which it appears. Painted spaces comparable to cave galleries recur throughout DeLillo’s work: we might include the result of David Bell in Americana ‘slopping white paint on the dull green walls of my hotel room and then, using a much smaller brush, printing the two thousand words of the next part of the script in black paint over the white’ (292); the room with the mural in Zero K (252); and the projected artwork in Love-Lies-Bleeding (2005), which, as Herren notes, ‘harkens back to the caves of Ratner’s Star’ (133) since it is ‘hidden in a mountain’ (Love-Lies-Bleeding 60), this ‘cubical room. Fashioned out of solid rock. Precise dimensions. A large empty room. Six congruent square surfaces. Painted. Ocher and amber’ or perhaps left as ‘a bare room without a signature’ (59, 61). This move towards a finally bare cave, left

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unpainted, where the gallery is not just the place of art but in place of the art, arguably finds its apotheosis in Zero K’s white marble room, a ‘large room, a couple of men standing and looking. A woman at the entrance, dead still. An art gallery . . . with nothing in it. The gallery is the art, the space itself, the walls and floor’ (148).4 But if the art gallery is the art, this complicates further the journey towards the art because it complicates any sense of arrival or end: the passage through the gallery somehow no longer means previewing but actually viewing art, while what might be considered the proper art, the art itself, remains out of reach, a fiction. With Ratner’s Star, therefore, DeLillo relates an experience of the gallery to an experience of fiction, so that the two aspects of the gallery discussed above – the ‘intricate journey’ and ‘being representative’ – become central to the formal structures of this and other DeLillo narratives. In this case, and remembering that the two parts of Ratner’s Star relate to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass respectively, we can further think of these structures in terms of the (rabbit) hole and the mirror. More specifically, the hole is a funnel or vortex. The V that Wu draws with a trowel on the floor of the cave marks the point of a funnel that circles out to include the medallion he wears, on which the V shapes of ‘[b]ats with their wings extended . . . form a sort of circle’ (Ratner’s Star 337); the ‘circular bronze mirror’ (387) that he finds in the cave with its ‘geometric patterns’ creating a ‘ring of figures’ (388) that remind Wu of previously uncovered markings that resemble ‘[b]ats in flight’ (322); and Wu himself, because the letters of his initials, MXW, comprise six (or ten, depending) such Vs, circling each other. And Wu is the scientist who has discovered ‘Man more advanced the deeper we dig’ (321), or has discovered a human history pre-prehistory, so that the V is also a graph of human complexity, dropping from a peak of accelerated human evolution in the distant, unremembered past down to our period of cave dwelling and back up again to our present selves. The cave and its art, therefore, occupy a place between two histories, one the mirror image of the forgotten other; cave art is both at the very centre of history and outside it, the mark of a species writing from an unwritten time, the mark of the survival of a species in the face of death and extinction. In Zero K, therefore, a veer downwards leads to ‘murals of ravaged landscapes . . . meant to be prophetic’ and to forms of art that are ‘nearly prehistoric’ (257, 256). And when, in The Silence (2020), a plane spirals out of the sky and crash lands in a time witnessing ‘the fall of world civilization’ and ‘the total collapse of all systems’, the structure of the V points to this as the end of human history and the beginning of a post-history that will see us return to ‘a prehistoric context. A flagstone image, a cave drawing’ (35, 107, 115).5 Or, looking again at the form of Ratner’s Star, we could imagine viewing the novel through the mouth of its funnel, illusorily collapsing the distance between its loops

 4

DeLillo observes, ‘I see people in rooms . . . paintings on the wall. I needed this sense of three dimensions’ (‘Edge of the Future’ 161); when the three-dimensional space is itself the art, it requires us to think clearly about what we are ‘actually seeing, here and now’ (Zero K 148) when we see people in the room.  5 The links between Ratner’s Star and The Silence are underlined by the phrase ‘Umbrella’d ambuscade’ (The Silence 69), which can be read as shaded ambush, as the word ‘umbrella’ comes from the Latin umbra, meaning ‘shade’. In astronomy, however, the umbra is the (funnel-shaped) darkest shadow cast during an eclipse, so that the phrase can be interpreted as referring to the unexpected eclipse of Ratner’s Star that presages a collapse of systems.

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so that the point of the V appears centred within the circle of Wu’s medallion, which is in turn within the ring of the mirror. Such nested structures appear throughout the novel – for example, Billy Twillig is quartered within the concave walls of a canister within the concave interior of FENO, and in the title of the novel, the word Star is housed in the word Ratner’s – and they inform its readings. Peter Boxall interprets it as ‘a dream within a dream’ (61), in which Wu’s cave fear is a displacement of Billy’s ‘cavernous fear’ (Ratner’s Star 249); and Mark Osteen comments that it can appear ‘as if “Reflections” is all Jean’s fiction and her writing a form of cave art’ (87), a fiction within a fiction. As Tom LeClair observes, ‘DeLillo elicits a systemic awareness of frames within frames’ (62), and frequently, DeLillo employs the gallery to produce such nested, framing structures, where the work of art is held in a gallery that is held in a work of art, the novel. At the same time, the ‘representative’ nature of the gallery means that these structures also give us artworks held in artworks and galleries within galleries: in Zero K, the Convergence houses art but is also itself ‘a form of earth art, land art’, and the ‘interior rock sculpture’ can be recast as the exterior view of a nested (cave) gallery (10, 214). Such structures are especially clear in Running Dog, although in this case the work screened in the Lightborne Gallery is not a piece of art as such but rather a film shot in Adolf Hitler’s bunker under the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in April 1945, days before his suicide and the end of the Second World War in Europe. Rumoured to be a pornographic movie featuring Hitler, it is instead a kind of home movie capturing a performance by Hitler put on for those in the bunker, which is an impersonation of Charlie Chaplin. Here we have a performance in a room in a bunker in a film in a gallery in a novel (in which the character Moll Robbins seems to narrate the italicised account of the film), but the effect of this framing is not to isolate the performance in the remote past but instead to enfold it into the present: ‘The footage has the mysterious aura of an event that cuts across time’ (Running Dog 265). As Boxall argues, the film effects ‘a continuously collapsing separation between now and then’, revealing a ‘dialectical relation between historical continuity and discontinuity’ (77, 81). One of the purposes of DeLillo’s galleries, therefore, is to bring us face-to-face with other times, with ‘various kinds of time, all different from the system in which real events occur’ (Running Dog 254), and our experience of time cannot remain unaffected by the encounter. Point Omega, and its engagement with Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, makes this point explicitly. Because the ‘original movie had been slowed to a running time of twenty-four hours’ (Point Omega 6), it is out of step with lived time. When one character wonders what it would ‘be like, living in slow motion’, the response is, ‘If we were living in slow motion, the movie would be just another movie’ (107). The disjuncture between relative times is key to enabling us to ‘feel time passing’ (6) in the gallery.6 The film of Hitler’s performance, however, is not just integral to the formal structures in the novel but to the form of the novel, too: the account of the bunker movie in the final chapter of Part 3 of the novel is matched by an account of Chaplin’s film

 6

Catherine Gander details the ways in which Point Omega engages with ‘notions of our existence in space and time shaped by theories of classical and quantum physics’, so that ‘sections happen in . . . different spacetimes determined by relativity’ (130).

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The Great Dictator (1940) in the final chapter of Part 1. This is indicative of the way in which galleries or works of art frequently feature in the embedded and inset texts in DeLillo’s novels and in the prologues and epilogues that bookend or frame the text or sections of the text. We can consider, for example, ‘The Movie’ that opens Players (1977), in which the concluding ‘The Motel’ completes the frame; the images marking the title and section pages of Mao II and the three parts of The Angel Esmeralda; the ‘Artis Martineau’ section of Zero K, which is like a work of art hanging in the gallery of the novel; and, most obviously, ‘Anonymity’ and ‘Anonymity 2’ in Point Omega, which ensure that we enter and exit the novel via the gallery in MoMA showing Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho. To these I would add The Body Artist (2001), which exhibits a perfect, nesting form: five chapters at the centre are bordered on either side by an obituary and interview, which are themselves preceded and followed respectively by the two parts of the framing narrative. The body artist, Lauren Hartke, rehearses her piece, Body Time, in those central chapters, and the performance is recounted as part of the interview. As in Running Dog and Point Omega, and as the title of the body art indicates, this structure allows DeLillo to relate different experiences of time to each other, but with the disjuncture between artwork and gallery transferred to the parts of a narrative form modelled on the art experience: ‘time becomes the principal structuring and meaning-making element of the novel’ (Gander 130). Therefore, in the framing narrative of The Body Artist, ‘[t]ime seems to pass’ or there is ‘the flow of time’, but the framed text occupies itself with ‘dead times’ (7, 124, 39). Similarly, the monumental ephemerality of 24 Hour Psycho asks us ‘to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening’ (Point Omega 6), to note the imperceptible passage of a fleeting moment, of a life, and therefore to be alive to the possibility of death, of no longer being in time. Confronted in this way with his own mortality, Richard Elster resists the piece’s ‘collapsing time’, describing it as like watching the ‘contraction of the universe’ (61, 47). Elster instead desires a state of existence that ‘transcends all direction inward’, that transcends time itself, so that time is no longer collapsing in on us but ‘falling away’ as we rise above it (72). ‘We pass completely out of being. Stones’, he says (73), so that, no longer ‘being’ in time, he can simply ‘be’, like a stone, as if this were not another form of death, an erasure from existence. After all, ‘Rocks are, but they do not exist’ (Zero K 213). Indeed, it is exactly the disappearance and likely murder of Elster’s daughter Jessie that prompts a sad reappraisal of his worldview: ‘transcendence . . . 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’ (Point Omega 98). Here and now, we are at the sharp end of the V drawn on the floor of a cave gallery. Point Omega’s structure draws attention to a peculiar but recurring juxtaposition in DeLillo’s work of the gallery (the scene of the novel’s framing narrative) and the desert (the scene of the central narrative). If the gallery is distant, then the desert is distance: it is ‘nothing but distances’ (Point Omega 18), so that we are ‘immersed in distance’ (Running Dog 214). In the desert, watch ‘a raven soar . . . beyond the limits of what is possible in the physical world – imperceptible transitions that left the watcher trying to account for missing segments of space or time’ (Running Dog 251); in the gallery, ‘Anthony Perkins turns his head in five incremental movements . . . clearly countable, not like the flight of an arrow or a bird’ (Point Omega 5), the wave of movement collapsing into moments. If the gallery is at the point of the funnel, the

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desert is at its mouth, so that it can be said of any gallery piece, as it is said of Klara Sax’s Long Tall Sally in Underworld (1997), ‘The desert is central to this piece. It’s the surround. It’s the framing device’ (Underworld 70). In this way, Zero K’s Convergence is a ‘desert apparition’ (Zero K 14–15), and the Lightborne Gallery in Running Dog is also framed by the desert, not in the world of the novel but on the pages of the novel, as the scene of the film’s projection is intercut with the account of Glen Selvy preparing for a fight to his death in the desert, ‘where plots end’ (Osteen 34). In his deliberate preparation, Glen had ‘travelled the event. He’d come all the way down the straight white line’ that stops, somehow, both in the ‘pure landscape’ of the desert and in a gallery in which others ready themselves to watch a pornographic film (Running Dog 216, 276). The lines of violence and sex, death and life, funnel down into the gallery; everything that falls must converge at a point in the cave of the gallery, its floor like the desert ‘land [that] was a raked paint surface’ (Running Dog 276), set for the fresh inscription of a V.7 Tumbling down through the vortex of Ratner’s Star, through its ‘cycles of expansion and contraction’ (49), we have passed through the frame of the desert into the enclosing gallery to stand within its walls and look. But we shouldn’t forget that Wu’s and Venable’s cave relates to two structures in DeLillo’s fiction, both the hole and the mirror. In the novel, therefore, and around the cave, the curve of FENO above ground mirrors the curve of the antrum below; but LeClair shows that even the novel ‘around’ FENO reflects its shape, that ‘Reflections’ is ‘the mirror history’ of ‘Adventures’, and that ‘the mirror space of Ratner’s Star is curved’ itself (116). But the message from the stars that prompts the novel’s action is also key to understanding the mirror’s nature. The message consists of 101 bits of information in the form of a sequence of 14 pulses, a space, 28 pulses, a space, and 57 pulses. DeLillo draws attention both to the fact that 142857 are the first six recurring decimals of pi, which ‘endlessly exceeds itself’ (Boxall 57), and that 101 is a palindrome ‘not only when looked at directly but also when reflected in a mirror’ (Ratner’s Star 99). As a result, as Boxall identifies, ‘the message speaks, in this way, of the uncontainability of number, of a kind of wilful numerical disobedience, [but] it also suggests an opposite tendency, the tendency for number to become self-referring, self-duplicating, and hermetically sealed’ (57). Indeed, it turns out that the message from the stars is really from our earlier, evolved selves, so that we are talking only to ourselves, but selves whom we don’t recognise; for all its symmetry, the palindrome is somehow unbalanced or incomplete because the one is oblivious of the other one. The novel is about what is ‘at once knowable and unknowable, readable and unreadable, revealed and unrevealed’ (Boxall 56). By repeatedly placing his characters before an artwork, DeLillo foregrounds the act of looking, of reading a visual image that somehow reveals more and less than it shows.8 In Falling Man, as Lianne and Martin ‘at the wall . . . looked together’ at a

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Herren, too, observes, ‘DeLillo has long been intrigued by art . . . as the crossroads where life and death – or more pointedly, sex and death – converge’ (149). And Paula Martín Salván notes DeLillo’s general ‘notion of plotting as a sinuous intertwining of several lines leading toward a convergence point’ (150).  8 See, for example, Linda Kauffman’s discussion of ‘forms of misrecognition and unknowing: ignorance, amnesia, blindness, denial, disavowal’ in ‘Baader–Meinhof’ (359). She concludes, ‘What you see depends on how it is framed’ (365).

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Giorgio Morandi painting in her mother’s apartment, they see ‘seven or eight objects, the taller ones set against a brushy slate background’, but what is striking is that the pair also ‘keep seeing the towers in this still life’ (49), the image reflecting the lookers’ 9/11-inflected perspective. Lianne’s mother Nina, meanwhile, will insist that they are seeing too much, that the ‘shapes are not translatable to modern towers, twin towers’ (111). But in Point Omega, the looker believes ‘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. To see what’s there, finally to look and to know you’re looking’ (5–6). In this way, he also comes to know that he is looking forward to something: ‘He began to understand, after all this time, that he’d been . . . waiting for a woman to arrive, a woman alone, someone he might talk to, here at the wall’ (14). Finally, a woman does enter. She ‘seemed to slide along the wall invisibly, in little fixed increments’, moving as if in the film he has been looking at for so long, and yet when ‘somebody said something’, he is surprised to find it is the woman talking to him (104, 105). Although he had awaited her arrival, he fails to see her coming in the end. This blind spot even in the eye of one who sees what’s there is like the eclipse that closes Ratner’s Star and that was foreseen by our earlier selves but never expected by our present selves. It is like the future that was ‘never supposed to happen’ but comes all the same (105). The looker in Point Omega is blind to other things as well. He is most likely a man named Dennis, Jessie’s stalker ex-boyfriend and the prime suspect in her disappearance. While he ‘watched Anthony Perkins’, therefore, he does not recognise his own resemblance to Norman Bates or see how he is reflected in the screen, even as he is ‘repeating, ever so slowly, the action of a figure on the screen’ (4, 3). Dennis unconsciously conforms to what Herren terms the ‘mirror principle’, which refers to ‘strategies employed by spectators, either to conceptualize art as an external reflective surface for their internal preoccupations or to reconfigure their inner makeup to conform more perfectly to the ideal images depicted on canvas or screen’ (155). The mirroring aspect of the gallery, in which the work reflects the gaze of the viewer who stands or sits before it as before a mirror, is also evident in the screening scene in Running Dog. Even as Robbins is ‘sitting in a hard straight chair in a shabby gallery before a small screen’, so the members of the audience for the performance in the bunker, ‘all seated . . . face the camera head-on’ (254, 256). A gallery of spectators sits on either side of the screen, each apparently looking at the other, providing a neat symmetry, but the mirrored relation here is as unbalanced as in the palindromic 101: neither is truly looking at the other, as one faces a camera and the other a screen. The unsettling nature of mirrors is considered by Martin Dekker in The Silence, who says, ‘I look in the mirror and I don’t know who I’m looking at . . . Is the mirror a truly reflective surface? And is this the face that other people see? . . . People looking. But seeing what?’ (50–1). What are people seeing as they look at an artwork that obliquely mirrors the gallery around it? In this context, the ‘rock, one rock’ (214) in the gallery in Zero K is a spherical mirror reflecting the walls of the (cave) gallery around it or the desert landscape around that. Or instead, perhaps the walls are the mirrors, reflecting the rock in the gallery, as in that room in Zero K ‘in which all four walls were covered with a continuous painted image of the room itself . . . depicted from several angles’ (252). The mirroring and mirrored together produce the ‘curious sense of preview’ that we have encountered before, where it is hard to say if gallery or artwork appears first (Running Dog 265); for example, if Players ‘replicates itself as

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in a small mirror’ in ‘The Movie’ (Cowart 45), to what extent is the chapter a preview of the novel or the novel a review of the chapter? The gallery has become a house of mirrors that mirrors all it houses. Such structures are complicated even further by their association with the nesting forms discussed previously; note that the first example given of a funnelling, nesting structure – from Wu to the mirror to the medallion to the V – is notably also a mirroring form, as each part reflects the bat-like aspect of the other. Another example is provided by the screening scene in Running Dog, at the centre of which is Hitler’s ‘accurate reproduction’ (267) of a Charlie Chaplin pantomime. But if we place Charlie Chaplin at the centre, the mirroring continues, as Chaplin famously performed ‘an impersonation’ of Hitler in The Great Dictator, a film itself about ‘the dictator’s lookalike’ (68). The looker in the gallery stands amid its ‘successive reflections’ (Ratner’s Star 362), and the gallery, therefore, is a place of both looking at and being looked at alike, a site of asymmetrical mirrorings (Hitler looking at and imitating Chaplin, Chaplin looking at and imitating Hitler) that repeat across expanding and contracting circles of nested gazes in which the looker, always between mirrors, can be looked at from any or all sides. Before Hitler performs before his audience, he can be seen behind them, ‘standing beyond the doorway . . . not yet visible to the audience’ (Running Dog 265), looking on rather than being looked at. Similarly, when Dennis is first identified in Point Omega, he is ‘standing against the north wall, barely visible’ to the people who enter the gallery and move beyond the doorway, towards the screen, and into his line of sight to be looked at: ‘Everybody was watching something. He was watching the two men, they were watching the screen, Anthony Perkins at his peephole was watching Janet Leigh undress. Nobody was watching him’, he thinks (3, 8). In this way, the structure of the gallery gives rise to what Herren calls DeLillo’s ‘art stalkers’, where ‘a male predator gazes upon a female spectator gazing at an artwork’ (140, 139). Herren traces the stalker from an early reference in The Names (1982) – ‘I don’t like museums. Men always follow me in museums. What is it about places like that? Every time I turn there’s a figure watching me’ (175) – to ‘Baader–Meinhof’ – ‘She knew there was someone else in the room’ (105) – to Falling Man – ‘A man came in. He was interested in looking at her before he looked at the paintings’ (210) – to Point Omega and ‘The Starveling’ (2011) where, in a cinema on this occasion, ‘he was watching her’ (189).9 In her analysis of ‘Baader– Meinhof’, Linda Kauffman comments on the effect the encounter has on the woman: ‘The man insinuates himself into her territory and utterly transforms it’ (361). It is a story about ‘unexpected guests’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’ 112), as the man invades first her personal space and then her domestic space, but it is also a story about hostile hosts, as it addresses the ways in which a state might treat its citizens. Identifying a threatening intimacy (115), even as Point Omega touches on murderous fidelity, the story details the ways in which lines are crossed or what was meant to be outside finds its way in, so that ‘all things are present in all other things. Each in its opposite’ (Ratner’s Star 219). Again, the nested, mirroring form of the gallery enables this because it blurs the clean lines of frames that should set one space or area apart from another. For example, in

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In Point Omega, the first-person narrator, Jim Finley, provides another version of this scene as he stalks Richard Elster through MoMA: ‘I followed him for half an hour. I looked at the things he looked at’ (61).

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Running Dog, ‘The camera faces the audience head-on. The members of the audience are attempting to pretend that the Chaplinesque figure is still performing at a point directly behind the camera’ (268), which is to say on the other side of the screen, in the dark room of the gallery in New York, years later. The line between viewer and viewed, therefore, is not set by the walls of the gallery but is somehow a function of the act of looking that the gallery hosts and unsettles. In the exhibition in Point Omega, the ‘screen was freestanding, about ten by fourteen, not elevated, placed in the middle of the room. It was a translucent screen’ that Dennis circles, always within the walls of the gallery and yet also ‘on the other side’ of the screen, as if in the film, ‘transmigrating, passing from this body into a quivering image on the screen’ (3, 4, 102). A comparable screen appears in Zero K, ‘stretching wall to wall and reaching nearly to the floor’, from which ‘images bodied out, spilled from the screen’ (11, 153). In ‘Baader–Meinhof’, the logic of the gallery extends to the scene following the woman’s and man’s visit to the exhibition, so that it is ‘their faint reflections paired in the glass’ of a snack bar window that reframe their relation (112). The risk inherent in any gallery visit is signalled by the presence of the ‘museum guard stood just inside the door’ (Point Omega 4), who represents the many institutional and other forces that police the line between outside and inside, between what is art and what is not, between what can be touched and what cannot (whether art or a woman), between who can be trusted and who cannot, between what belongs and what does not: ‘The guard purified the occasion, made it finer and rarer’ (Point Omega 102). But ‘Baader–Meinhof’, of course, examines exactly how such forces are complicit not in their failure to maintain the fine line between one side and the other but in their efforts to act as if any one thing could be purely itself, sovereign and untouchable. As Dennis in Point Omega talks to Jessie, he imagines ‘turning and pinning her to the wall’ and immediately observes, ‘Museum guards should wear sidearms . . . and a man with a gun would clarify the act of seeing for the benefit of everyone in the room’ (112): the figure of the guard in the gallery folds together the acts of protecting and threatening or of preservation and destruction, revealing that, as Kauffman comments, ‘the art museum is also a war museum’ (366). To say that the gallery is both art and war museum is to say again that the gallery sees us standing at the line between life and death, responding to our own mortality. Wu believes that ‘religion and art probably began in caves’ (Ratner’s Star 386), and they remain intertwined in the gallery, which emerges in DeLillo’s work as ‘a temple, a sanctuary . . . a secular cathedral’ (Kauffman 366) but especially as a place to hold a vigil for the dead: it is ‘a mortuary chapel’ where the woman is ‘keeping watch over the body of a relative or a friend’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’ 105); the chapel in Cosmopolis; a ‘hushed tomb’ in Point Omega (12); and in Zero K, a ‘little tomblike’ (10) and then a ‘soaring mausoleum’, in which ‘a figure in stillness . . . a living breathing artform’ (149) is therefore not unconnected to a dying mother, ‘a touch away, in stillness’ (248). Elsewhere in the novel, the way in which the gallery reflects the tomb is seen also in the shift from the statuesque mannequin on view in the hall to the ‘mannequins as preserved corpses’ in a catacomb to the ‘cryogenic dead . . . art in itself’, to human ‘bodies . . . clearly on display, as in a museum corridor’ (133, 74, 232). As a site of veneration, the art gallery invites rituals of devotion, ‘work, pious effort’ (Point Omega 13), so that the routines and repeated visits of the woman and man in ‘Baader–Meinhof’, of Dennis in Point Omega, and of Leo Zhelezniak in ‘The Starveling’

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align these characters with DeLillo’s other ascetics, including Glen in Running Dog and Lauren in The Body Artist. Paula Martín Salván outlines how the ‘ascetic pattern is usually triggered by a character who is involved in a search for some form of transcendence’ and includes ‘ritual repetition [and] reclusion in closed places or deserted landscapes’; asceticism works ‘to tame the ultimate terror of death by turning one’s life into a preparation for it’ (145, 145–6, 147), to the extent that, Osteen argues, DeLillo’s obsessives manifest ‘an ascetic desire . . . for a purification that conquers the dread of death, paradoxically, by bringing it about’ (33). Glen is ‘preparing to die’ in the desert, therefore, but there remains the belief in his ‘escape, the separation of the deceased from his body’ so that he might transcend this world (Running Dog 206, 277). Except, there is no way to confirm that Glen has passed from life to the afterlife because his friend Levi Blackwater is sure that you begin to ‘determine whether the spirit had indeed departed . . . by plucking a few strands of hair from the top of the dead man’s head’ (277), and as he will soon discover, Glen has been decapitated (like the displayed bodies in Zero K). ‘You think you’re about to arrive at some final truth’, Levi had told Glen. ‘You’ll only be disappointed’ (263).10 Wu is also an obsessive, tracing a fine line between preparing to die and preparing to survive. ‘All he had to do was squirm back out, get a match from his coveralls, light the match, find his way to the backpack, remove a candle from the pack, light the candle, get the extra carbide, refill the lamp. This he did’ (Ratner’s Star 394); and he was only able to do it because of his practised repetitions and routines: he ‘relighted the lamp . . . He snuffed the candle. He put the candle back in the pack’ (303–4; see also 351, 355, 390). For Wu, the V does not represent a path beyond death to an afterlife but signifies a reflection on death at that point where there is still(ed) life, a reflection that delivers ‘reanimation’, Wu ‘returned to life’ (Zero K 240, 8): ‘always in caves he felt he was here to remake himself’ (Ratner’s Star 381).11 Apparently wedged in the narrow crawlway, as if in the closing vice of the V, Wu, at the point between life and death, finds himself crying like one of the undead, sounding ‘part [vampire] bat . . . or a wailing male banshee’ (394). Then the ‘cave is silent’ (393), silent as death, because this is common to DeLillo’s galleries: ‘the film was projected without sound’ in Point Omega, so that Dennis wonders ‘what was [the guard] guarding? The silence maybe’ (7, 102). But Wu is not himself silenced. He squeezes back out of the crawlway, and remade again, he witnesses the ‘spiralling flight’ or vortex of the bats above the cave floor, and he sits, lamenting nothing, ‘dazzled’ by the bats’ ‘reflecting mechanism’, and ‘laughing into the night’ (Ratner’s Star 395). The 101 of Ratner’s Star might be a figure for the gallery itself. It is the ‘0’ of the artwork held between two walls; it is the rock art between the mirrored walls of the cave gallery. It is also the ‘day’s dying light’ at the end of Zero K, the ‘full solar disk . . . lighting up the towers to either side’ (273, 274); and by extension, it is an image of Zero

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Osteen states, ‘This is the ascetic dream: to destroy everything and start over, but now to make everyone perfect, that is, identical’ (33); this could be the Convergence’s dream of human bodies in pods: ‘Here, there were no lives . . . This was pure spectacle, a single entity’ (Zero K 256). The only life belongs to Artis, where art is. 11 It is significant that Wu’s experience of being remade in the V can be considered in the context of what Schneck identifies as ‘re-mediation’ (107), as Wu’s and Venable’s perspectives converge here. The ‘Artis Martineau’ section of Zero K, with its ‘third-person voice that is also her voice’ (272), is another such example, as is the novel’s final translation of ‘heaven’s light’ into ‘the boy’s cries of wonder’ (274).

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K itself, its two parts flanking the section dedicated to Artis Martineau, whose name, as Herren has identified (209), is an anagram for ‘a miniature star’. The 101 might also be a numerical visual representation of the lines of life and death funnelling into the cave, from which one might perceive, through the reflective rings of the vortex above, the desert sun, soon to be eclipsed. This dying light, uncontainable and unknowable, survives in the differential relation between a gallery and its art. Standing there, looking, we can see the sun and be dazzled but not blinded; we can preview the death we will never finally know.

Works Cited Birdwell, Cleo. Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. Boxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. Routledge, 2006. Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Rev. edn, University of Georgia Press, 2003. DeLillo, Don. Americana. 1971. Penguin, 2006. ——. ‘Baader–Meinhof.’ The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. Picador, 2012, pp. 105–18. ——. The Body Artist. 2001. Picador, 2002. ——. Cosmopolis. 2003. Picador, 2004. ——. ‘The Edge of the Future: A Discussion with Don DeLillo.’ Interview by Peter Boxall. Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 159–64. ——. Falling Man. Picador, 2007. ——. Great Jones Street. 1973. Picador, 2011. ——. Love-Lies-Bleeding. Scribner, 2005. ——. Mao II. 1991. Vintage, 1992. ——. The Names. 1982. Picador, 2011. ——. Point Omega. Picador, 2010. ——. Ratner’s Star. 1976. Picador, 2016. ——. Running Dog. 1978. Picador, 2011. ——. The Silence. Picador, 2020. ——. ‘The Starveling.’ The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. Picador, 2012, pp. 183–211. ——. Underworld. 1997. Picador, 1999. ——. Zero K. Picador, 2016. Gander, Catherine. ‘The Art of Being Out of Time in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.’ Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Katherine da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 127–42. Herren, Graley. The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo. Bloomsbury, 2019. 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, pp. 353–77. LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. University of Illinois Press, 1987. O’Donnell, Patrick. ‘Obvious Paranoia: The Politics of Don DeLillo’s Running Dog.’ The Centennial Review, 34, no. 1, 1990, pp. 56–72. Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Salván, Paula Martín. ‘Terror, Asceticism, and Epigrammatic Writing in Don DeLillo’s Fiction.’ Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction, edited by Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser. Bloomsbury, 2012, pp. 145–57. Schneck, Peter. ‘“To See Things Before Other People See Them”: Don DeLillo’s Visual Poetics.’ Amerikastudien/American Studies, 52, no. 1, 2007, pp. 103–20.

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29 Time and Loss: DeLillo and the Imagination of Archaeology David Cowart

It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth. Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work I have . . . imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’

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t is instructive to view one’s historical moment as archaeology’s raw material. What artefacts of the present will enchant the future? Which will occasion pity and contempt for an era’s spiritual and aesthetic poverty? These questions loom over one of DeLillo’s most oft-invoked essays, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, which, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, offers archaeologically inflected observations on America’s weight in the scales of history. Like the earlier essays ‘American Blood’ and ‘The Power of History’, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ showcases DeLillo’s eloquent ability to place the present in its larger temporal context – as have literati from Shelley to Yeats and Eliot. ‘Time present and time past’, says the last, ‘Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past’ (Eliot 189). The lines invite parody as ersatz sententiousness or ponderous tautology, but they capture something that occurs to anyone who thinks about the course of civilisation – especially to anyone who reflects that every great empire must one day collapse, whether from cultural entropy, tangled-bank geopolitics or simply imperial hubris. Moralists discern lessons in the ruins of such empires, historians and archaeologists perpend the mechanics of decline, and poets affect romantic melancholy: ‘I sometimes think that never blows so red / The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled’ (FitzGerald 4). Those who think ruins romantic or charming would do well to imagine the actual process of societal collapse, especially the event or events that prove catalytic – failure of the water supply, breakdown in crucial technology, sacking of the imperial city. Emily Dickinson observes that ruin should proceed ‘[c]onsecutive and slow’ (904), but at a certain point it speeds up vertiginously. Like bankruptcy, according to that classic line in Hemingway, ruin happens in two ways: gradually and then suddenly. The

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events and processes that eventuate in societal heat-death exercise not only historians such as Gibbon and Spengler or archaeologists such as Howard Carter and Heinrich Schliemann but also novelists: the Evelyn Waugh, whose work includes the suggestively titled Decline and Fall, the Don DeLillo, who observes that ‘fiction rescues history from its confusions’ (DeCurtis 56). In what follows, I propose to examine an authorial vision that manifests itself in the imagery of ruins, archaeological exploration, deserts and language. I hope to gauge what might be called DeLillo’s archaeological imagination, which, in addition to unusual conceits in Great Jones Street (1973) and Ratner’s Star (1976), figures importantly in 1982’s The Names (in evocations of the Parthenon and accounts of a minor excavation on an island in the Cyclades). In work following the 9/11 climacteric, by the same token, DeLillo seems haunted by the swiftness with which America might join ancient Athens and other superannuated empires in the dustbin of history. The longue durée is never far from the author’s thoughts, and in the Homeric spectacle of toppling towers he sees a strange modern tendency to instantaneous ruin, ruin superimposed on dynamic contemporaneity. Because it took only a single, harrowing day to reduce the Twin Towers to that ‘smoky remnant of filigree’ (‘In the Ruins’ 38), the events of 9/11 seem to announce a speeding up of the pace normally followed by a civilisation’s decline and fall. The author’s sensitivity to the past extends as well to language as indexed in time: epigraphers and palaeolinguists curate ancient tongues just as archaeologists shore sherds against temporal oblivion. Languages flourish for a millennium or two, then die, leaving behind cuneiform tablets or hieroglyphic inscriptions to be excavated amid the ruins of once-mighty empires. The ruins of language yield their secrets in artefacts such as the Rosetta Stone, a photograph of which hung for many years in DeLillo’s study. Grammatically, withal, language accommodates the play of present and past.

Ruins and Ruination From land artists to filmmakers to photographers to novelists to painters of derelict aeroplanes, variously inspired or troubled creative spirits figure importantly in DeLillo’s fiction, but archaeologists turn up frequently as well: Maurice Wu in Ratner’s Star, Owen Brademas, Anand Dass and Kathryn Axton in The Names, Artis Martineau in Zero K. Artists aspire to creation that will ‘outbrave time’, and archaeologists often second that enterprise, delivering ancient artwork from the tombs and middens of antiquity. Sometimes the artist anticipates archaeology: in the play Love-Lies-Bleeding, Alex Macklin’s remembered project – painting the walls, floor and ceiling of a cube-shaped antrum carved out of solid rock – was palpably a bid to create a small penetralium to which some future Belzoni might make his arduous way. Zero K, by the same token, evokes its cryogenic facility, the Convergence, as a kind of futuristic faux-ruin that must sooner or later become its antithesis, an actual necropolis. Artis Martineau aspires, supposedly, to outlive a fatal disease, but what she will actually accomplish is her own cryogenic mummification. One day, perhaps, bride of silence and slow time, she will be unearthed, unfrozen, X-rayed, carbon-dated and exhibited: the archaeologist archaeologised. DeLillo’s occasional remarks about the personal experience of time have bearing on humanity’s collective relationship to the remote past that archaeology seeks to uncover. As he observed upon winning the PEN/Saul Bellow Award in 2010, ‘The theme that seems to have evolved in my work during the past decade concerns time – time and

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loss’ (‘An Interview’). This evolution would have begun at the turn of the millennium (in the wake of 9/11, presumably), though the subject matter has figured, I think, from the beginning of this author’s literary career. Subsequently, invited to speak at the 2016 conference on his work in Paris, DeLillo foregrounded an interest in temporality as it figures in the mind of the individual. According to Jacqueline Zubeck, present at the conference, ‘[h]e thinks of the past as a palimpsest clearly visible through subsequent decades of life’. DeLillo continued with the reflection that, ‘according to physics, a distinction between “past, present, and future” is only an illusion’. Paradoxically, however, ‘it is time that defines your existence’ (Zubeck). As Lauren Hartke thinks in The Body Artist, ‘You are made out of time’ (92). Lianne Glenn, in Falling Man, muses on ‘the way time swings in the mind, which is the only place it meaningfully exists’ (105). Civilisations, too, are temporal phenomena, the past palimpsest to a present that must represent, at least to casual perception, some kind of advance over what went before. Modern civilisation must be better – if only technologically – than whatever in the past made life less nasty, poor, brutish and short. But what if this were wholly or partly false? What if archaeological time were as malleable as time in the individual mind? For DeLillo, I suspect, archaeology and palaeolinguistics partake of a conundrum only a little different from the paradox the author commented on in Paris: time’s arrow may not be pointing in the direction assumed by popular opinion. I would argue, in fact, that an idiosyncratic concept of archaeology – archaeology as postmodern conditions of knowing warp its traditional definition, methodology and purpose – figures as one of the most interesting and revealing ideas in DeLillo’s quiver of thematic arrows. Among the terrible sights he remembers from the 9/11 catastrophe: ‘the huge antenna’ atop a collapsing tower ‘falling out of the sky, straight down, blunt end first, like an arrow moving backward in time’ (‘In the Ruins’ 39). The archaeologically imagined setting or tableau figures, moreover, with some frequency. As Graley Herren has shown, the ‘Manhattanhenge’ phenomenon described at the end of Zero K – the eerie effect of the sun’s twice-yearly setting in perfect alignment with New York’s east–west grid – momentarily and suggestively turns modern skyscrapers into the dolmens that will exercise and mystify archaeologists of the future. That is, Herren suggests, one can see the proximity of the primitive at such moments, rehearsal for the Götterdämmerung that will leave in its wake ruins to titillate or edify some later civilisation, equally oblivious, no doubt, to its own provisionality (Herren 226–9). Elsewhere, DeLillo imagines that ruin-sifting might change direction altogether. Thus Bucky Wunderlick, in Great Jones Street, predicts the ‘counter-archaeology’ of the future, in which humanity, dwelling Morlock-like in the bowels of the earth, will be obliged to excavate upwards to learn about antiquity. Back in their universities in the earth, the counter-archaeologists will sort their reasons for our demise, citing as prominent the fact that we stored our beauty in the air, for birds of prey to see, while placing at eye level nothing more edifying than hardware, machinery and the implements of torture. (209) Maurice Wu, in Ratner’s Star, discovers artefacts that become progressively ‘more advanced the deeper we dig’ (321, 360). In a way, this reversal of the basic archaeological premise is simply another of the inverted binaries of what Ihab Hassan called the ‘postmodern turn’, part of the pattern that subsumes the thing displaced by its simulacrum, writing as anterior to speech,

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history as a form of fiction, the assertion as containing its own contradiction, and so on. ‘More advanced the deeper we dig’, in other words, is not whimsy, not a jeux d’esprit, but part of the larger fabric of contemporary interrogations of the real. And archaeology may in fact show us our inferiority to the past, our devolution. For all their present modernity, citizens of Athens or Rome must at times, like those of Cairo or Angkor Wat, invidiously compared their present to their storied and more splendid past. Perhaps, too, like Russell Hoban in Riddley Walker, citizens of great power nations imagine the future unearthing of the present’s leavings, be they large or small (in Hoban’s celebrated novel, characters in a post-nuclear-holocaust iron age try to understand ‘time back way back’: the era, some 2500 years earlier, when ‘boats in the air and picters on the wind’ vied with other marvels [46 and passim, 199]). What one notices about Maurice Wu’s discovery, however, is that ‘Man more advanced the deeper we dig’ evidently does not pertain to some unique, overlooked, one-of-kind civilisation in the great world chronicle. Rather, it is the discovery that, in the aggregate, humanity is more, not less, primitive now than of yore. Archaeologists are chastened by the recognition that provides the ideational armature of ‘In the Ruins of the Future’: they recognise that the civilisation framing their present will one day survive only as ruins, fodder for the science of unearthing the past and its relics. DeLillo’s archaeological imagination reveals itself in other ways as well. The reference, in White Noise, to Albert Speer’s aspiration ‘to build structures that would decay gloriously, impressively, like Roman ruins’ (246) has been pointed out by Aaron DeRosa, who traces the precept – the ‘Law of Ruins’ – to Ruskin (DeRosa 48–50). In The Names, more concretely, an ancient Greek edifice (the Parthenon) and an excavation on an island in the Cyclades contextualise the foregrounded tale of some hapless cosmopolitans coming to grips with the dangers of being perceived as representatives of the modern world’s most exalted, feared and hated empire. Here and elsewhere, the DeLillo narrator leaves history’s great lesson unspoken yet clear enough: as Nineveh, Thebes, Knossos and many others are now, so in the fullness of time shall America be. As an exercise in civic archaeology, Underworld fits this pattern as well: much of its appeal, for author and reader alike, lies in the quasi-archaeological sifting of the already remote American reality, with emphasis on American speech, of the middle decades of the twentieth century. (One of the things DeLillo undertakes in Underworld, as he remarks in his essay ‘The Power of History’, is an archaeology of urban discourse, though here again readers encounter that project throughout this author’s work, with continuing attention to what in Falling Man he calls ‘the locally honed cosmocentric idiom of New York’ [69].) In Libra, DeLillo characterises the Kennedy assassination as the event that ‘broke the back of the American century’ (181); in later fictions, from Mao II to Point Omega and from Falling Man to Zero K and The Silence, he chronicles a nation’s drawn-out twilight, the flagging of energies that built and sustained a world power. Time and loss. The pervasive anxiety and dread in his work notwithstanding, DeLillo has resisted explicit dystopia – this in contradistinction to the numerous late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century writers who have tried their hand at Orwellian augury. Some thirtyfour years after she published The Handmaid’s Tale, one of the most disturbing texts of the late twentieth century, Margaret Atwood would imagine, in The Testaments (2019), the downfall of the fundamentalist theocracy of Gilead, which had replaced the United States of America. But Atwood has had little company in imagining a sunnier future. Dystopian vision proliferates in twenty-first-century letters: one thinks of

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Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Emily St. John Mandel’s Station 11 and Changrae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014), Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible and Jonathan Lethem’s The Arrest (2020), not to mention the fictions of historian, popular novelist and Newt Gingrich collaborator William Forstchen, who has contributed extensively to this genre. Don DeLillo, meanwhile, writes what one might call proto-dystopian fiction, fiction centring on the slipping rather than the slipped, with attention to moments of acceleration through industrial accident, political assassination, the proliferation of waste. More than once, he has looked hard at terrorism and the creeping rot that, by turns, sap the strength of peaceful democracy. DeLillo’s dystopia is the more striking for not being literalised – it looms, rather, as what will succeed whatever cataclysm brings on the new dark age. Sometimes DeLillo merely documents current ruin: one thinks of the urban wasteland around the baseball stadium of the prologue to Mao II and, at the end, the desolation of war-torn Beirut. James Axton, narrator and principal character of The Names, reflects on the ruins of antiquity, but elsewhere in DeLillo’s pages readers sense a kind of archaeological prolepsis, the author’s grave awareness that the future will dig through and pick over the ruins of the present. Less obliquely, there are the evocations of 9/11’s Ground Zero in Falling Man and in ‘the sifted ruins of the day’ (35) contemplated in ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, the title of which strikes a note of ambiguity: will it address itself, one wonders, to the deterioration of some idea of the future – or merely contemplate the inevitable dereliction of our current civilisation’s proud edifices? (One cannot pause over the latter meaning without conjuring up a famous image from the movies: the Statue of Liberty heeled over and half-immersed in sand, cinematic complement to Shelley’s Egyptian colossus, reduced by the centuries to ‘two vast and trunkless legs’ in the desert [Shelley 92].) But the essay in fact comes to focus, disturbingly, on a culture’s newly ruined relation with futurity: ‘We like to think America invented the future’, says DeLillo. ‘We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it’ (‘In the Ruins’ 39). After 9/11 that idea lay in ruins, and in the years since the conviction that the future might smile with generous affection on America has only deteriorated further. Twenty years on, in his late, spare fiction The Silence (2020), DeLillo imagines another catastrophe, another 9/11 moment, a whimper not a bang this time, as, without warning, the world’s elaborately digitised infrastructure suddenly and disastrously and (it seems) irremediably goes offline. The catastrophe, replete with plummeting airliners and dead screens and rooms unheatable in February, reifies the climacteric theorised by historian (and archaeologist) Joseph A. Tainter: ‘in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return’, leading to collapse (Tainter 120, emphasis in original). ‘Technology’, DeLillo observes in his post-9/11 essay, ‘is what we devise . . . to claim our future’ (‘In the Ruins’ 37). But technology is nothing if not one of the increasingly complex systems that, according to Tainter, sooner or later buckles disastrously. The imagery of ruin and ruins subsumes or complements the desert settings that recur in the fictions of this author. Sometimes ruins dot a desert landscape once fertile but rendered arid by imperial thirst, but more commonly, at least for DeLillo, the desert provides the traditional refuge of anchorites who flee urban corruption – or merely urban complexity (the occasional Bucky Wunderlick, of course, need only retreat to some derelict neighborhood such as Manhattan’s Great Jones Street). This flight, like that of vermin from a sinking ship, becomes an indictment of the society thus abandoned. The state is a grand vessel, in other words, that at a certain point begins to list

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and take on water. Just as rats abandon it before it goes down with all hands, the societal outcasts of a decaying civilisation take to the hills – or, especially in DeLillo, to the desert. His oft-noted evocations of sandy or rocky wastes are recognisably part of the ideational spectrum of ruin and ruins, for the present destruction of the imperial city is implicit in the flight of its self-exiled desert fathers. Obscurely prophetic, this solitary migration augurs the day when the city will itself become ruin-dotted desert. To the ancient trope of the hermit who flees corruption, however, DeLillo adds the unsettling suggestion that anchorites – the cultists of The Names, say, or Richard Elster in Point Omega – can be carriers of the disease or diseases that corrupt and destroy. Even the more or less legitimately troubled – the Nick Shays, the Bucky Wunderlicks, the Owen Brademases, the Alex Macklins – find purity elusive.

Desert Fathers: The Persistence of Religious Myth The desert landscapes to which these characters are drawn (Rooster, Texas, the wastes of Arizona, Alamogordo, New Mexico, Anza-Borrego, the ‘salt flats and stone rubble’ of Zero K’s Convergence [4]) resemble those that figure in the later fictions of Willa Cather. Enamoured of the desert Southwest, Cather tells stories – Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Professor’s House, The Song of the Lark – that offer striking parallels with those of DeLillo, for she, too, thinks historically. Cather reads building well or poorly as an index, at once architectural and archaeological, to the health of a culture. Her archbishop outbraves the death that comes for him as he erects his cathedral. More to the point, Cather perpends and moralises ruins in the Tom Outland narrative that bisects The Professor’s House (rather as the Artis Martineau section bisects Zero K). Tom tells of swimming his horse across a cold river beneath a looming mesa one Christmas Eve to recover some errant cattle. Once on the other side, he looks up through gathering snowflakes to behold a cliff city, frozen in time. The scene anticipates Jeffrey Lockhart’s initial perception of the Convergence in Zero K: ‘I imagined it as a city to be discovered at a future time, self-contained, self-preserved, nameless, abandoned by some unknown migratory culture’ (4). Similar language figures in James Axton’s description of the Mani. ‘On a plateau in the distance, separated by open sky’, he relates, were two clusters of tower houses, long gray forms rising out of the rocks and scrub. The houses were set at varying heights so that in aggregate they resembled a modern skyline seen from a certain distance, a certain elevation, in the rain and haze, in ruins. I felt we were coming upon something no one had approached in a thousand years. A lost history. A pair of towered cities set at the end of the continent. (The Names 185) Cather finds in antiquity and in the pristine state of the ruins discovered by Tom Outland (based on those of Mesa Verde) a reproach to modern building that no longer even feigns permanence, no longer aspires to embody the long-term aspirations of a culture – as does Chartres or the Taj Mahal or the Chaco Canyon dwellings erected over five centuries. The ruins Tom happens upon house more than artefacts: when he and his boon companion Roddy Blake begin to explore them, they find in one of the chambers the mummified remains of a young woman. Possibly the victim of some ancient crime of passion, ‘Mother Eve’, as she is presently named, seems to embody an idea of postlapsarian mortality, as if her cliff dwelling had once been another Eden

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destroyed by Original transgression. The splendid ruins and their artefacts become the occasion of a quarrel between Tom, who knows that ancient things must be preserved and cherished, and Roddy, who thinks of the artefacts as commodities to sell. Their discord complements the grim testimony of Mother Eve, mummified signifier of Edenic collapse. Tom Outland, whom the reader might mistake for another American Adam, would seem to be part of that pair of brothers whose falling out becomes archetypal. The maternal mummy, meanwhile, models the figure that Jeffrey Lockhart’s stepmother, Artis Martineau, will cut when unearthed (and, if necessary, unfrozen) by some future practitioner of her own archaeological calling. The ancient cliff dwelling defines the spiritual heart of Cather’s novel – indeed, the spiritual heart of Cather herself. It suggests that a civilisation will be measured by what it leaves behind, what endures. What, she asks, do we Americans build that will outlast us? Will posterity see us as Sparta or Athens? It also shows the delicacy and brevity of civilisation vis-à-vis barbarism. It is a metaphor, withal, for the excitement of disinterested exploration, study and knowledge – the pursuits to which Tom commits himself under the influence of Godfrey St. Peter, the professor of the novel’s title. These are the ideals of liberal education, a concept even more embattled now than in Cather’s day (the steady decline in the real scholarly and educational mission of the university that employs St. Peter emerges as an important sub-theme). The grey area where archaeology verges into myth exercises DeLillo as well. Most obviously in The Names, but also, more obliquely, in the late novels, the author risks being taken for religion’s apologist as he appropriates and exploits doctrines that, derived from orthodoxy, remain cogent shorthand for elements of the human condition uncontested by secularism: the primal flaw, the fructive power and primal essentiality of the word (capitalised or not), the tension between Babel and Pentecost (between a dream of a unitary language and the reality of many languages). In other words, one finds in DeLillo much engagement with religious thought, though he remains an outsider to the tribe of believers. In this, he resembles Martin Dekker in The Silence, who, though susceptible to the ‘aura’ of spirituality, ‘did not belong to a particular religion and did not feel reverence for any being of alleged supernatural power’ (43). I make this point because the author’s Catholic background and remarks about the Latin Mass, not to mention allusions to mystical or inspirational texts (The Cloud of Unknowing, Urne Burial) and the inclusion of nuns and priests among his characters (Father Paulus is perhaps the most positive figure in Underworld, and even Sister Edgar is treated with respect), might leave some readers seeing affinities with Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy or (again) Evelyn Waugh, rather than with such tougher-minded secularists as Thomas Hardy and the great Victorians or, especially, James Joyce.1

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The transmutation of DeLillo’s Catholic upbringing and Jesuit education, along with the exact character of his ‘mysticism’, has of course received considerable attention, notably in McClure, Hungerford and Naydan. ‘To get a fix on Don DeLillo’s novels’, especially with regard to traces of theistic thinking, Gary Adelman reads the author (as I do) against certain of his literary peers and precursors, notably ‘Beckett’s vision in The Unnamable trilogy and Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree  and  Blood Meridian’ (Adelman 73). Adelman sees DeLillo as staunchly resistant to religious supernaturalism, the Catholic background notwithstanding. A reviewer of Adelman’s study for America: The Jesuit Review offers a succinct contextualisation: ‘In the years following World War II and continuing after the Second Vatican Council, to be an American Catholic novelist often meant to be lapsed . . . What remains of the faith is made secular, in the service of art: appreciation of ritual and the aesthetics of the Mass, acceptance of paradox and repurposed biblical

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In The Names, narrated from a spiritual perspective of ‘rockbound doubt’ (92) by James Axton, DeLillo frames his contemplation of language and antiquity in terms derived from the stories of Babel, in the Old Testament, and Pentecost, in the New. The novel’s cultists, who call themselves, Axton surmises, ta onómata, The Names, perform bizarre and violent rituals triggered by onomastic coincidence (persons and places with matching initials), rituals evidently aimed at something like the definitive marriage of signifier and signified, the thing and its name, that supposedly obtained as words emerged from the mouth of Adam. They greet Owen Brademas with a question – how many languages do you speak? – that seems to signal some heteroclite aspiration to the gift of tongues that, descending on the disciples at Pentecost, delivers them from the curse of Babel. Brademas, who was haunted in childhood by his inability to speak in tongues (as could his parents and others in their prairie church), will find himself strangely susceptible to the twisted charisma of the cultists. But it is Axton who experiences a redemptive brush with the paraclete as only DeLillo could imagine it. In the course of the novel, Axton comes to see in the multiplicity of languages something of immense power and beauty. As with the previous excursus on Willa Cather, one grasps the meanings here more readily by considering the work of a related artist, in this case DeLillo’s friend Paul Auster. In his City of Glass, published only three years after The Names, Auster revisits (and thus throws into relief) some of the themes that figure in the DeLillo novel. Treating The Names as a theme for variations, Auster pays homage, makes his own miglior fabbro gesture. City of Glass, that is, reads like a gloss on the earlier text, or at least an exercise in ideational and conceptual cross-fertilisation. In engaging and deconstructing the myth of prelapsarian discourse (and matching it, as does DeLillo, with the story of Babel and its tower, fatally compromised not by hijacked airliners but by God as linguistic saboteur), the younger author reframes the onomastic crux of DeLillo’s story. Auster imagines the case of one Peter Stillman, who had in infancy been consigned by his father, a crazed scholar of esoteric theology, to a locked room and there raised, for nine years, without language. The elder Stillman’s monstrous expectation was that the child would somehow grow up with a natural knowledge of the Adamic word. The reader learns more about the paternal obsessions in a quotation from the book in which the elder Stillman lays out his ideas about Edenic speech: Adam’s one task in the Garden had been to invent language, to give each creature and thing its name. In that state of innocence, his tongue had gone straight to the quick of the world. His words had not been merely appended to the things he saw, they had revealed their essences, had literally brought them to life. A thing and its name were interchangeable. After the fall, this was no longer true. Names became detached from things; words devolved into a collection of arbitrary signs; language had been severed from God. The story of the Garden, therefore, records not the fall of man, but the fall of language. (Auster 52) narratives. Belief is something to recover from, to react against. Sorrow’s Rigging, Gary Adelman’s recent study of three such novelists, operates under this assumption. Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo and Robert Stone fit the bill. Baptized and raised Catholic, they have become “renegade[s].” Now, as former Catholics, they are not quite literary atheists, but their agnosticism is complete, and their characters feel the profound absence of God’ (Ripatrazone).

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Thus the narrative, a few chapters later in Genesis, of Babel’s citizens and their comminated tower represents an iteration of linguistic catastrophe, not the confusion of tongues at its inception. (Indeed, the Babel story in Genesis 11 comes after the diaspora of Noah’s multilingual descendants, dispersed ‘every one after his [own] tongue’ [Gen. 10:5]). The ruined, fabled edifice ‘stands’, nonetheless, according to Stillman, ‘as the last image before the true beginning of the world’, scripture’s own archaeological site, the place where ‘the very last incident of prehistory in the Bible’ transpired (53). For DeLillo, the language theme of The Names is one culmination of a long-time fascination with and questioning of the relation between language and time, whether biblical or archaeological. Does temporality subsume language, or is it the other way around? The words present, past and future name temporal states as well as the verb declensions that make time dance to the sometimes graceful, sometimes discordant music of grammatical tense. Language, meanwhile, has its own archaeology: beneath modern English lie successive palaeolinguistic strata going back to Old Frisian, IndoEuropean and the crude patois of hominid grunts and gestures. But linguists have long speculated that beneath the ability to speak lies some instinctive proclivity to language, something hard-wired in the human brain, and DeLillo owns himself fascinated by what in Americana he calls ‘the river which is language without thought’ (189). What if language as spoken by adults were merely the less perfect form of a faculty innate at birth? ‘Is there another, clearer language?’, DeLillo wonders out loud in an interview. ‘Will we speak it and hear it when we die? Did we know it before we were born?’ (LeClair 83–4). Thus Edna Lown, a character in Ratner’s Star, mulls an idea DeLillo finds intriguing: that infant babbling is not so much inchoate language as language at its most pure and primal, what palaeolinguistics or ‘linguistic archaeology’ (Osteen 138) may yet discover beneath all the other strata, long before this or that Germanic dialect (for example) began to evolve into the idiom most English speakers take for granted. Might language, whether in the individual or the collective, devolve, might the parable of Babel apply somehow to a falling-off in linguistic acuity in the very process of learning to speak? ‘The codes to language contained in play-talk are the final secrets of childhood’, thinks Edna. ‘When . . . taught how to use words’, the child sets course, verbally, ‘in the wrong direction’. Edna suspects, even, that ‘play-talk’ is ‘a form of discourse about language’, that ‘babbling is metalanguage’ (Ratner’s Star 365). Recognising that language itself (the ‘physics’ of language, as it were) partakes of an archaeological economy, DeLillo marries two disciplines that methodise the study of antiquity, hinting, even, that antiquity and its ruins display an affinity with etymology and what in The Names he calls ‘semantic rudiments’ (180). In that novel, DeLillo introduces an archaeologist, Owen Brademas, whose fascination with epigraphy – ancient inscriptions – gradually undermines any commitment he may once have had to the business of digging into ancient sites (I have suggested elsewhere that this preference for surfaces over depth anticipates Fredric Jameson’s negative description of postmodernism). That commitment is displaced onto a keen volunteer, James Axton’s estranged wife Kathryn, whose labour on the island of Kouros seems to sublimate a deferred delving into the ruins of her marriage. Brademas takes particular interest in languages that exist only vestigially. He gravitates to writing systems that must be rescued from oblivion by the palaeolinguistic heirs of Sir Henry Rawlinson, whose work at Behistun led to the decoding of cuneiform, and Jean-François Champollion, whose work with the Rosetta Stone enabled the reading of hieroglyphics. Another character

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muses on the linguistic occlusion by which Aramaic (the language spoken by Jesus) gives way to Arabic, the linguistic partner of crescive Islam. Vosdanik, the Armenian guide Axton and his friend Volterra meet in Jerusalem, notes that ‘the language Jesus spoke’ (The Names 170) has actually survived into the modern world, but has steadily lost ground as the last native speakers embrace Islam and its vehicle, Arabic. ‘It is religion that carries a language’, he says, adding an obscure corollary: ‘The river of language is God’ (152). Vosdanik’s disaffirmation notwithstanding, one discerns here the suggestion that the spiritual richness embodied in an ancient prophet might survive intact in the language he or she spoke, the language that subsists beneath the many translations that adulterate the pristine seedtime of belief. Maurice Wu’s precept – ‘Man more advanced the deeper we dig’ – defines a revisionist archaeology less, perhaps, than a kind of mythology of devolution. Yet Axton’s arrival at the Parthenon, as rich a DeLillo passage as the more frequently invoked visit by Jack Gladney and Murray Jay Siskind to ‘the most photographed barn in America’ (White Noise 12), is replete with spiritualised apperception, keyed, withal, to the Greek ethos. In his last observation before the long-postponed encounter with one of antiquity’s most famous monuments, Axton explains that his story has featured individuals he has ‘tried to know twice’, once in person, ‘the second time in memory and language’, and ‘[t]hrough them, myself’ (The Names 329). In the Parthenon-centred valedictory that follows this statement, Axton reveals the aetiology of such an enterprise. The reader may notice how he circumambulates the great structure as he describes and interprets it. He approaches the western façade, proceeds around to the southern, then eastern, and at last northern. He orbits, human planet to still-radiant archaeological sun (at his story’s beginning, he had characterised the great pile as ‘floating in the dark, a white fire of such clarity and precision’ [4]). The circular movement around this quadrangular icon of ancient Greek civilisation resembles certain dreams and rituals as interpreted by Jungian psychoanalysts, who would recognise the Parthenon here as a mandalic centre representing ‘psychic wholeness’, the integrated Self.2 Thus one discerns in Axton’s somewhat overdetermined circuit a metaphor for the narrative’s recently declared rationale. He aspires to comply with one of the oldest and most Hellenic of philosophical imperatives: gnothi seauton. Know thyself. Committed to his visit at last, Axton affirms that this embodiment of the past is not separate and intact from the modern city below (again, the temporal palimpsest). Like Faulkner, he seems to be saying, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’ (Faulkner 73). Once he had alternated between smug superiority to touristic obligation and a recognition that ‘[s]o much converges there. It’s what we’ve rescued from the madness. Beauty, dignity, order, proportion’ (The Names 3). Hearing the many tongues around him now, he experiences a splendid epiphany: ‘This is what we bring to the temple, not prayer or chant or slaughtered rams. Our offering is language’ (331). Offering: the word intimates a spiritual continuity, a reclaiming of religious practice going back millennia. But how remarkable to imagine language as tithe, something  2

According to the Swiss psychoanalyst Aniela Jaffé, ‘[e]very building, sacred or secular, that has a mandala ground plan is the projection of an archetypal image from within the human unconscious onto the outer world. The city, the fortress, and the temple become symbols of psychic wholeness, and in this way exercise a specific influence on the human being who enters or lives in the place.’ She adds that, ‘even in architecture’, such ‘projection of . . . psychic content was a purely unconscious process’ (243).

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that, laid on an altar, might garner spiritual favour, please a deity or deities. DeLillo’s figure spiritualises his medium, renders his calling as wordsmith sacerdotal. Only now does Vosdanik’s cryptic observation that ‘[t]he river of language is God’ make sense. The many tongues that Axton hears give the lie to the dark parable of Babel, which lies behind the warped chiliasm of the cult members and their obscurely Pentecostal interrogative: how many languages do you speak? The narrative ends with a rhapsodic passage from the ‘nonfiction novel’ (based on the early travail of Owen Brademas) that Axton’s precocious son Tap is writing. Tap’s naive spellings and unsophisticated phrasing reframe and transfigure the archaeologist’s story of failed prairie glossolalia. That is, like DeLillo, Tap artistically secularises Pentecost’s mythic compensation for the putative disaster of Babel.3 (In nine-year-old Tap’s orthographically unmoored writing, one catches something of what young Peter Stillman, in Auster’s City of Glass, might sound like when, his nine years of Kaspar Hauser-like isolation ended, he enters the symbolic order and begins at last to verbalise.) From the perspective of the still-compelling myth of Eden and its loss (a myth repeatedly rewritten in the course of American literary history), postlapsarian humanity dwells in the ruins of a creation fatally impaired by Original Sin. Paradise Lost ends on what sounds like a hopeful note – but the reader knows that the fallen Adam and Eve carry their moral contagion out into a world as damaged as they. One need not embrace literalist theology to see the validity of this myth, though those educated as Catholics (however lapsed) might be especially susceptible to its framing of human experience. Most readers, incidentally, assume that the title of DeLillo’s later novel Falling Man refers to the tragic figure photographed as he plummeted from the north tower of the World Trade Center (the figure impersonated, over and over, by performance artist David Janiak); but the idea of fallen man ought also to be considered, along with the theological economy that accounts for the essential human flaw at the heart of postlapsarian existence, seedbed of all violence, all error, all ‘fallibility’. In two more of his late novels, Point Omega and Zero K, however, DeLillo briefly entertains the unorthodox counter-myth promoted by the Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – the idea that humanity is not progressively fallen (as traditional theology would have it) but evolving towards a ‘convergence’, an ‘omega point’ of union with godhead. ‘In his book The Phenomenon of Man’, DeLillo remarks in an interview, ‘Teilhard de Chardin suggests that many of his readers would finish the book wondering whether they’d been led “through facts, through metaphysics or through dreams”. [Point Omega’s Richard] Elster is attracted to Teilhard’s ideas on all three counts’ (DeLillo, ‘A Conversation’). Thus, DeLillo peels away Teilhard’s spiritualised Darwinism to reveal, for Elster in Point Omega and for Ross Lockhart and Artis Martineau in Zero K’s cryogenics facility (actually called the Convergence), a version of the less sanguine omega hypothesised by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:

 3

Adducing Talmudic commentary, James Berger argues that Axton’s epiphany at the Parthenon suggests some recognition that Babel may not represent, as is commonly thought, ‘the beginning of the split between word and thing that brought into the world lying, ambiguity, irony, negation, artifice, the unconscious, ideology, the subject, the other, and all the other various woes and pleasures we now associate with language’ (341). The idea of a primal, perfect Adamic language might in fact constitute a kind of linguistic fascism – a divine mistake, even, from which the Babel incident delivers humanity.

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the ‘prior inorganic state’ vectored by Todestrieb or the death drive (Freud 16, 23, 36). Like anchorites of old, these characters fly to the desert, but they err to think that ruin will not overtake them, along with the rest of humanity. For what I have been synecdochising as corrupt imperial city is really the larger idea of civilisation itself, doomed by planet-wide catastrophe, whether the apocalyptic bloodbath envisioned by the Moonies of Mao II, the climate disasters that in Zero K appear on the wall-sized drop-down screens of the Convergence, or the mysterious communications implosion of The Silence. The characters in the last surmise that the long-dreaded cataclysm, World War III, has in fact started with an act or acts that have taken down the digital infrastructure of media and communication that composes, from the first world to the third, the whole grid of contemporary life. According to its epigraph (also quoted by Martin Dekker [The Silence 114]), the novel looks forward to yet another global conflict, as augured in a famous Albert Einstein observation: ‘I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones’. DeLillo’s novel, which reminds one of Sartre’s relentlessly claustrophic Huis clos, is the more powerful for its restraint – unlike, say, William Forstchen’s sensational One Second After series, in which terrorists deploy electromagnetic pulse weapons to plunge America into chaos and darkness. (Thomas Pynchon, in Bleeding Edge, imagines the same weapon appropriated and turned against the masters of discord: it disables, at least for a while, the machinery of war and surveillance.) Time and loss. Daniel Aaron points out ‘a remark attributed to Carlos Fuentes’: that in ‘[l]iterature’ we discern ‘what history conceals, forgets, or mutilates’ (Aaron 73). Archaeology often partners with literature in this enterprise, and together these disciplines not only bring to light ruins of the past, they augur the ruins yet to be. Thus, my argument has been that DeLillo’s attention to such matters emerges with particular clarity in archaeological figures that naturally historicise and contextualise (at various levels and in various registers) ideas of decline and fall. DeLillo seeks to parse the fate, in time, of persons and nations and the planet they despoil. As figures of devolutionary ontogeny repeat those of devolutionary phylogeny, he deconstructs the hysterias of cultists and religious zealots of every stripe: the omega point, when it comes, will have nothing to do with ‘convergence’, only the dotting of a planetary desert with toppled towers, derelict fanes and trunkless legs of stone. DeLillo once remarked that, ‘in theory, art is one of the consolation prizes we receive for having lived in a difficult and sometimes chaotic world. We seek pattern in art that eludes us in natural experience’ (DeCurtis 66). One situates DeLillo’s meditations on time and loss, then, within a long tradition. For centuries poets and storytellers have echoed Virgil’s Optima dies . . . prima fugit: the best days are the first to fly (theologians, too, as the best days were those in the Garden). Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 and Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ echo the Virgilian theme. Cather quotes Virgil’s phrase as epigraph to My Ántonia (it applies equally to such fictions as The Professor’s House and A Lost Lady). Frost’s sonnet ‘The Oven Bird’ is among its most affecting restatements: the rhyming couplet with which the Shakespearean form culminates appears instead at the beginning of the poem, thereby signalling – indeed, performing – the falling off that is the fate of the world and all things in it. As the bird asks what to make of the ‘diminished thing’ that is nature in the dog days, the poet contemplates the larger diminishment that is the human condition as time wears inexorably on (Frost 27). The temporal arc of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy traces its heroes,

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John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, from their adventuring, heroic youth to the sordid, untimely death of the one and, for the other, aged dereliction under a highway overpass. These and other such texts, however sober their message, join those of Don DeLillo in providing art’s comforting vision of beauty and order, compensation for humanity’s anguished bondage to time.

Works Cited Aaron, Daniel. ‘How to Read Don DeLillo.’ Introducing Don DeLillo, edited by Frank Lentricchia. Duke University Press, 1991, pp. 67–81. Adelman, Gary. Sorrow’s Rigging: A Study of DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy and Robert Stone. McGill, 2013. Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room. Penguin, 1990. Berger, James. ‘Falling Towers and Postmodern Wild Children: Oliver Sacks, Don DeLillo, and Turns against Language.’ PMLA, 120, no. 2, 2005, pp. 341–61. DeCurtis, Anthony. ‘“An Outsider in This Society”: An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ Introducing Don DeLillo, edited by Frank Lentricchia. Duke University Press, 1991, pp. 43–66. DeLillo, Don. Americana. Houghton Mifflin, 1971. ——. The Body Artist. Scribner, 2001 ——. ‘Don DeLillo: A Conversation with Thomas DePietro.’ Barnes & Noble Review, 1 February 2010. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/don-delillo/. Accessed 7 February 2023. ——. Falling Man. Scribner, 2007. ——. Great Jones Street. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973. ——. ‘In the Ruins of the Future.’ Harper’s, December 2001, pp. 33–40. ——. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ 2010. https://pen.org/an-interview-with-don-delillo/. Accessed 7 February 2023. ——. Libra. Viking, 1988. ——. The Names. Knopf, 1982. ——. Ratner’s Star. Knopf, 1976. ——. The Silence. Scribner, 2020. ——. White Noise. Viking, 1985. ——. Zero K. Scribner, 2016. DeRosa, Aaron. ‘The Law of Ruins and Homogenous Empty Time in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man.’ 9/11: Topics in Contemporary North American Literature, edited by Catherine Morley. Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 41–60. Dickinson, Emily. ‘Crumbling is not an instant’s act.’ 1865. The Poems of Emily Dickinson Variorum Edition, edited by R. W. Franklin. 3 vols. Harvard University Press, 1998, vol. 2, pp. 903–4. Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909–1962. Faber and Faber, 1962. Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. 1951. Vintage, 2012. FitzGerald, Edward. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Quaritch, 1859. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey. 24 vols. Hogarth, 1953–74, vol. 18. Frost, Robert. ‘The Oven Bird.’ Mountain Interval. Henry Holt, 1916. Herren, Graley. The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo. Bloomsbury, 2019. Hoban, Russell. Riddley Walker. 1980. Indiana University Press, 1998. Hungerford, Amy. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton University Press, 2010. Jaffé, Aniela. ‘Symbolism in the Visual Arts.’ Man and His Symbols, edited by Carl G. Jung. Doubleday, 1964, pp. 230–71.

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LeClair, Tom. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists, edited by Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery. University of Illinois Press, 1983. McClure, John A. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. University of Georgia Press, 2007. Naydan, Liliana M. ‘Media Violence, Catholic Mystery, and Counter-fundamentalism: A Post-9/11 Rhetoric of Flexibility in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 56, no. 1, 2015, pp. 94–107. Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Ripatrazone, Nick. ‘Shards of Faith.’ America: the Jesuit Review, 9–13 December 2013. https:// www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2014/03/12/shards-faith. Accessed 7 February 2023. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. ‘Sonnet. Ozymandias.’ Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems. Ollier, 1819, p. 92. Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press, 1988. Zubeck, Jacqueline. ‘Don DeLillo: Fiction Rescues History, University Paris-Diderot, 18–20 February 2016’, Don DeLillo Society Newsletter, 9.1, 2016, https://delillosociety.com/ archive/newsletter-9-1-2016/. Accessed 7 February 2023.

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30 Going Up in the World: Architecture in the Works of Don DeLillo Margaret Robson

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orn in the Bronx and a lifetime inhabitant of the city, Don DeLillo is one of the great novelists of New York. Even before one opens the pages, DeLillo’s recurring preoccupation with New York’s iconic skyline, and with the literal size of the buildings, is shown on the dust-jackets of the novels in their first published form. The jacket of Libra (1988) depicts skyscraper architecture; Cosmopolis (2003) features the Empire State Building; Falling Man (2007), an inverted residential street-scene with a passing train pictured to look like a skyscraper; and on the jacket of The Silence (2020), the Chrysler Building. All are shots of skyscrapers taken from low camera angles, so that the viewer/reader feels the smallness of people. Most famously, the original jacket of Underworld (1997), DeLillo’s most celebrated novel, shows the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It is only on the jacket of the first edition of Ratner’s Star (1976) that the pictured skyscrapers are seen from above. Vantage points are crucial to how DeLillo examines the world. In these novels, DeLillo explores the dilemmas of living with the past and the future, of success and failure, bigness and smallness, and of the transformation from immigrant to American. This is seen most clearly in the case of Underworld’s protagonist Nick Shay, and it is a trajectory that is evidenced by the physical spaces in which the characters live and hide, bury and contain their secrets and their trophies. This chapter will look at the built environment, the space and spaces we imagine, construct and occupy, and how DeLillo’s portrayal of the physical city atomises the immigrant dream of going up in the world.

Building New York Architecture is about space and how we use it. As Gaston Bachelard argues in his influential study The Poetics of Space, the containment of space offers protection from heat, cold – any and all elemental forces. In creating protective shells, architecture demarcates the difference between inside and outside (Bachelard 227–46). The barriers that are erected suggest safety from forces that are hostile to the individual, be those enemies, neighbours (foreign or domestic), weapons or pathogens. Architecture is also about power. Those who wield the power without scruple, totalitarian rulers, despots of all kinds, self-identified Titans, demonstrate the scale of their importance in the size of their buildings. The architectural critic Deyan Sudjic writes: ‘Totalitarians use architecture as part of their strategy to present themselves as being in a position to control events, and to demonstrate that the application of their will alone is enough to reshape the world’ (66).

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DeLillo’s New York is, first, a city of immigrants. ‘Who’s better than me?’ is the immigrant’s question posed by the inhabitants of the tenements in Underworld (698). (The answer is simple: those who are bigger, who occupy bigger spaces, take up more air, those who look down on citizens, are classed as ‘better’.) For those living in the city, the demand for space, air and shelter rub up against each other, often in the most physical of ways. As I shall discuss more fully in the next section, the great American urban theorist and activist Jane Jacobs maintained that cities (and her native New York most particularly), should be spaces of ‘flourishing diversity’, full of ‘unpredictable uses and peculiar scenes’ (Jacobs 311). In a similar vein, in an essay written after the shock of the attacks on New York on 9/11, DeLillo wrote of ‘the daily sweeping taken-for-granted greatness of New York. The city will accommodate every language, ritual, belief and opinion’ (‘In the Ruins’ 40). Living together in cities is a difficult feat, and part of this has been addressed in more recent times by ideas of urban planning, the shapes and lifestyles forced on to the city by Jacobs’s nemesis, the New York city planner Robert Moses (see Caro). The planned city provides a stark contrast to the organically evolved ‘hodgepodge’ that was such a source of scorn to planners and architects such as Le Corbusier (Le Corbusier 196). The immigrant is someone very literally in transit; while the world’s Titans lord over all they view, the newcomer to the land can establish only the scantest of protective dwellings, the lowest unit of which is the tented structure occupied by refugees. Mao II’s Karen is the witness of this in New York: ‘A tent city. Huts and shacks, she was thinking of the word; lean-tos; blue plastic sheeting covering the lean-tos and the networks of boxed and shipping containers that people lived in. A refugee camp or the rattiest edge of some dusty township’ (149). This construct, the ‘lean-to’, the ‘tented structure’ thrown up by the impoverished, the foreign, barely lifts above the skyline at all, in huge contrast to the identifiable buildings that feature on the jackets of the novels. There are those who live, very literally, on the land, and those whose reach is greater and who are able to colonise both the air above, in the form of skyscrapers, and the bedrock beneath, through the application of planning and technologies. Planning contains within it an ideology; whose needs will be part of an infrastructure; what informs its size and reach? If the skyscraper occupants and planners live in what Le Corbusier habitually referred to as the ‘Radiant City’ of the future, those who fail to go up in the world live not just in the dark, shadowy spaces, but in the past. Interviewed in 1993, DeLillo spoke of living in a one-room apartment with a stove in the corner and the fridge in the bathroom in New York in the early 1970s: there were beggars and derelicts in parts of the city they’d never entered before. A sense of failed souls and forgotten lives on a new scale. And the place began to feel a little like a community in the Middle Ages. Disease on the streets, insane people talking to themselves, the drug culture spreading among the young. We’re talking about the very early 1970s, and I remember thinking of New York as a European city in the fourteenth century. (DePietro 95) This real-world memory informs Bucky Wunderlick’s room in Great Jones Street, which contains a bathtub and refrigerator, while in the streets outside, New York’s ‘transient population’ are depicted as living in ‘these middle ages of plague and usury’, and ‘speaking in languages older than the stones of cities buried in sand’ (248). DeLillo

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frequently invokes the medieval in his fiction and his interviews. In Underworld, in the heart of New York, the nuns Sister Edgar and Sister Grace gather groceries to distribute around the ‘derelict tenement’ known as the Wall, a ‘tuck of land adrift from the social order’ (239). They, along with the monks who run the friary, feed the needs of those who are busy dying, and certainly not consuming: ‘Beyond these South Bronx streets people may look at her and think she is a quaintness of ages past. But inside the strew of rubble she was a natural sight, she and the robed monks. What figures could be so timely, costumed for rats and plague?’ (240). Where and how space is contained becomes, with the advance of capitalism, not about the kinds of primitive need for shelter and protection, like the snail’s shell that both Bachelard and Le Corbusier cite (Bachelard 126; Le Corbusier 294), but addresses the question, should we fit ourselves to the landscape, or should we dominate the landscape with our technology? Capitalism’s answer to this is very clear – bigger is better, growth is good (along with greed), and American growth is predicated on planning that ignores everything except the capacity to measure. The architectural historian William Curtis writes: ‘Nothing expresses the instrumentalism of American growth more directly than the land ordinance grid of the late eighteenth century mapping out future national territory for colonial expansion and occupation: a total abstraction ignoring differences of topography and obliterating all traces of indigenous memory’ (34). With twentieth-century technology, architecture evolved along with economies. Instead of the civic buildings of the past, and the cathedrals, monasteries and palaces of the Middle Ages, the period between the First World War and the Wall Street Crash of 1929 saw the growth of the big corporations, the banks and businesses that needed to have developments of a size concomitant with their own idea of their importance. As Curtis writes, ‘[n]ew corporations of unprecedented size . . . required giant headoffices in the city centres. They needed tall buildings which could also project persuasive images of themselves and their products’ (218–19). The philosophy of perhaps the largest-looming figure in twentieth-century architecture, Le Corbusier (1887–1965), is fundamental to these ideas of urban planning, with its matching ideology of capitalist social organisation. Le Corbusier is the architect-visionary of automobile-age planning, and the originator of the idea of the ‘Radiant City’ in which ‘cities will be ordered instead of chaotic’ (259). His ideas relied on new building materials and technology – reinforced concrete and steel and the Isis elevator – because these made possible the ‘immense structures, 60 storeys high’ which would ‘provide vertically what has until now been spread over the ground’ (125). In building vertically rather than horizontally, the human scale is dwarfed, lost, challenged. Bachelard wrote that elevators do away with ‘the heroism of stair-climbing so that there is no longer any virtue in living up near the sky’ (48). This heroism proved a dramatic feature of 9/11, where so many of the firefighters who tried to rescue those fleeing the destruction were themselves immolated. In The Silence, a novel that explores the consequences of the breakdown of modern technology, the really important question is: ‘Is the elevator working?’ (34). Le Corbusier’s architecture also encodes an attitude towards families, working men and social order, which he suggested should be a meritocracy in which ‘anyone who has the stuff of an administrator will not long remain in unskilled labour: every position is accessible to all . . . The father no longer teaches his son the myriad secrets of his craft; an unfamiliar foreman strictly controls the rigorous performance of a limited and circumscribed task’ (Le Corbusier 295). Le Corbusier had no place for the buildings

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thrown up to provide some small cover, nor for tradition – all must be cleared away so that cities could become linear and ‘ordered’ (259). The work of the body and the hands especially is a subject of scorn in the ‘Radiant City’: in the past, men cut, dressed and fitted stone with measurements using the human body (the foot, the hand, the forearm), and it took two years to build a house, whereas now, ‘we build apartment buildings in a few months’ (259). DeLillo’s work offers many instances of resistance to this dehumanising modernity. Several insistently individualistic artists flit through his novels, perhaps most notably the conceptual sculptor Klara Sax in Underworld, through whose eyes we see the Twin Towers being built. As I will argue, DeLillo is a writer who repeatedly insists on the importance of the anthropocentric scale, of the work of hands, of the importance of individuals, small communities and neighbourhoods. In Mao II, Brita Nilsson comments on the contrasts and the rifts between New York’s towers and its streets, and the chasm between the big and the small, the owners and renters: What makes this city different is that nobody expects to be in one place for ten minutes. Everybody moves all the time. Seven nameless men own everything and move us around on a board. People are swept out into the streets because the owners need the space. Then they are swept off the streets because someone owns the air they breathe. Men buy and sell air in the sky and there are bodies heaped together in boxes on the sidewalk. Then they sweep away the boxes. (88) The towers and the streets: these form the poles of city living, and it is to the construction of New York’s, and indeed America’s, most defining tower that I will turn now.

The World Trade Center Of all New York’s skyscrapers, it is the twin towers of the World Trade Center that fix our sense of past and future: we locate ourselves in time and place according to their presence. Does King Kong retreat to the top of the Empire State Building (as he did in the 1933 film), or the WTC, to which he was relocated in the 1976 remake (Darton 100)? Even more significant, though, is the absence of the towers. Is this a before absence, or an after? Where are we now? What times are these? The contest between past and future in DeLillo’s writing can also be conceived as a contest between the sacred and the commercial worlds. For DeLillo, the sacred is that which cannot be bought or traded, it is absolutely non-negotiable: it cannot be replicated. Sacred space, sacred language, old traditions, customs and practices, ritual foods, even haircuts: all these belong to that old world. In his meditation on post-9/11 New York, the essay ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, DeLillo recalls watching a young woman rolling out a prayer mat for the sunset call to prayer while surrounded by vendors’ carts as he walked along Canal Street some months before 9/11. In DeLillo’s New York, the sacred and the commercial are also cheek by jowl: the past lives alongside the future. After 9/11 DeLillo wrote about the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists: ‘They want what they used to have before the ways of western influence . . . Now a small group of men have literally altered our skyline. We have fallen back in time and space. There is something empty in the sky’ (‘In the Ruins’ 38). ‘It was America that drew their fury’, DeLillo concludes. ‘It was the high gloss of our modernity. It was the thrust of our technology’ (33).

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The same technology that allowed the building of such domineering structures is attacked by those hostile to capitalist culture. This is a theme that occurs much earlier in DeLillo’s works. In his 1982 novel The Names, the protagonist James Axton muses: I thought I sometimes detected in people who had lost property or fled, most frequently in Americans, some mild surprise that it hadn’t happened sooner, that the men with the six-day beards hadn’t come much earlier to burn them out, or uproot the plumbing, or walk off with the prayer-rugs they’d bargained for in the souk and bought as investments – for the crimes of drinking whiskey, making money, jogging in shiny suits along the boulevards at dusk. Wasn’t there a sense, we Americans felt, in which we had it coming? (41) But before they come down, we watch the towers going up. In Underworld, in the summer of 1974, the artist Klara Sax watches the building of the World Trade Center: ‘under construction, already towering, twin-towering, with cranes tilted at the summit and work elevators sliding up the flanks’ (372). Although in 1974 the towers were not fully occupied, they had reached their full height, the north tower being completed in 1970 and the south in 1971. Tenants began moving in in 1971, while the official opening ceremony took place on 4 April, 1973, with New York state governor Nelson Rockefeller delivering a triumphant speech (Darton 139, 16). There is no sense of this completion, or triumphalism, in Underworld though, where, through Klara’s eyes, we are watching a building being erected, ‘a model of behemoth mass-production, units that roll identically off the line, and end up in your supermarket, stamped with the day’s prices’ (Underworld 377). This consumerist mass production is also highlighted by Sudjic, who observes: ‘Most towers have all the charisma of an upended loaf of sliced bread. We are expected to get excited about skyscrapers simply on the basis of their height, an attribute that is supposed to make us overlook the fact that everything about them is banal and exceptionally uninteresting’ (425). The system-built towers and the mass-produced sliced bread are linked symbols of an unsatisfying capitalist culture. This description of the World Trade Center’s construction emphasises the corporate identity of such an edifice, in contrast to the individual, artistic endeavour that produces unrepeatable art, such as the Watts Towers in Los Angeles that Klara visits soon after watching the WTC being built (Underworld 492). Nothing about the Watts Towers is suggestive of success – they are made of rubbish, and were built between 1921 and 1958 by the Italian immigrant Sabato Rodia: ‘the man worked alone, an immigrant, for many years, a sort of unimaginable number of years, and used whatever objects he could forage and scrounge’, Klara notes (492). The Watts district of Los Angeles, notoriously the site of urban riots in 1965, is the subject of a discussion in Great Jones Street (1973), which again focuses on street life on a human scale: ‘It’s the self-identification of the people on the street. Watts is a whole big bunch of streets’ (119). By contrast, skyscrapers are repeatedly represented in DeLillo’s fiction in terms that are inhuman. The Pan Am building in Americana (1971) is obstructive and belittling, instilling Old Testament terror: a mile high and half a mile wide, every light blazing, an impossible slab of squaredoff rock hulking above me and crowding everything else out of the way, even the sky.

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It looked like God. I had never seen the Pan Am Building from that particular spot and I wasn’t prepared for the colossal surprise of it, the way it crowded out the sky, that overwhelming tier of lights. I swear to you it looked like God the Father. (274) This hulking squared-off rock is a Le Corbusier-like vision (though actually designed by the trio of similarly big-name twentieth-century architects, Richard Roth, Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi, and opened in 1963): with its vertical dominance and light it shows clearly just how unimportant the human individual is. The very idea of the individual is similarly dwarfed in Le Corbusier’s created, exclusively male world: All men have the same organism, the same functions. All men have the same needs. The social contract that evolves through the ages determines standard classes, functions, and needs, yielding products for standard uses. (Le Corbusier 182) Pammy Wynant in Players (1977) views the World Trade Center as tyrannous: ‘Four times a day she was dwarfed, progressively midgeted, walking across that purplishblue rug’ (24). Dominating the city’s skyline, there was, from the beginning, something oppressive, even monstrous, about the World Trade Center. Sudjic writes: Apart from its impact on the skyline of Manhattan, the most memorable physical aspect of the World Trade Center was the sheer weight of all those storeys pressing down on you as you tried to negotiate the plaza between the two towers. To do it required a measure of determination. Standing up on the World Trade Center’s Plaza, you could feel the pressure of two sheer towers rising up into the sky to either side of you. To move across it was like passing through a narrow gap in the thickness of a monolithic wall. Their mute mass was enough to put the air between them into compression, and to force your muscles to push back against them. As you moved towards the entrance of the North Tower you could feel the pressure build up as you came closer and closer. The weight above you grew more and more intense, even as the building itself appeared to become more and more transparent as your point of view shifted to look head-on at the aluminium fins rising the height of the towers. Negotiating the threshold required the greatest psychological effort of all. The door seemed to carry the weight of the entire building. It trapped you for a moment as you summoned up your courage. (403–4) This architecture creates fear and hostility, a sense of being pressed and oppressed by the weight of the structure. Ernö Goldfinger, another of the Titans of modernist architecture, very consciously intended his own towers to ‘impart a delicate sense of terror’ (Warburton 157). The fear induced by the WTC is emphasised by the design of the towers’ windows. What is striking about the windows is that they were not the plate-glass sheets we have come to associate with massive office blocks, or even the blackened, tinted windows of the plutocrat; they were, in fact, tiny. All but a handful of the thousands of windows in the towers were only 22 inches wide. The effect of this design was to make the 18-inch-wide steel columns that supported them look like bars, so that the view created was, as Darton remarks, ‘prisonlike’, and ‘from outside, under most conditions, it is hard to tell whether, above plaza-level, the towers have

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any windows at all’ (Darton 129). Throughout his novels, DeLillo scatters references to the in-built terror of huge buildings. ‘Godzilla Towers, he thought they ought to call it’, Underworld suggests of an unnamed, gigantic skyscraper overlooking Central Park (388). In Falling Man, tower blocks create ‘their own weather systems, with strong currents of air sometimes shearing down the face of the building and knocking old people to the pavement’ (71), and in Mao II, the ‘chaos’ of people’s lives have been ‘flattened’ to make room for the construction of towers (39). While the materials and technology allowed for this upward thrust into the sky, the idea of city planning became a measure of how forward-looking a city or an individual could be. DeLillo has remarked: ‘We like to think that America invented the future. We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it’ (‘In the Ruins’ 39). Perhaps more importantly, he also wrote: ‘The WTC towers were not only an emblem of advanced technology but a justification, in a sense, for technology’s irresistible will to realise in solid form whatever becomes theoretically allowable. Once defined, every limit must be reached’ (38). Onward and upward are the literal directions for progress. As towers grew taller and taller, so the area needed to secure them grew ever larger and deeper, thus diminishing the space available to those leading altogether smaller lives. Cities that are land-poor, such as New York (four of its five boroughs are on islands, only the Bronx is part of the US mainland), show both poles of immigrant achievement, from overcrowded tenement to shining tower. In Underworld, all of Klara Sax’s observations are made from rooftops. This is a space that allows the artist to see and offer a comparison between the mechanical nature of the new twin towers, and the richness and the individual endeavour of the grand financial centres of yesteryear. DeLillo has remarked that the writer should belong ‘on the margins of the culture . . . a perfect place to observe what is happening at the dead center of things’ (DePietro 130). It is also from this liminal space that the photographer Brita Nilsson comments in Mao II: Where I live, okay, there’s a rooftop chaos, a jumble, four, five, six seven storeys, and it’s water tanks, laundry lines, antennas, belfries, pigeon lofts, chimney pots, everything human about the lower island – little crouched gardens, statuary, painted signs. And I wake up to this and love it and depend on it. But it’s all being flattened and hauled away so they can build their towers. (39) In an interview about Underworld, DeLillo has spoken about this ‘hidden . . . rooftop world’ of Lower Manhattan: Downtown is where things lay hidden, waiting for people to find them. And one of the hidden things, not only downtown, is the rooftop world – the water towers, gardens, architectural ornaments – and this is the world I tried to explore in Part Four, in the rooftop summer sequences. And of course the fact that Klara Sax is a painter and sculptor helped me see Manhattan in those terms. (Howard 129) Klara’s studio similarly contains jumble that recalls these views: ‘floorboards stacked in the corner. Streaked brown wood, sort of drenchingly dark brown like the staved towers on the rooftops, the tanks filled with water and mostly bare to the elements but sometimes enclosed in elaborate churchly structures with lancet arches and great

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eagled ornamentation’ (Underworld 382). The artistic vantage point that DeLillo and his fictional artists employ is emphasised repeatedly throughout the ‘rooftop summer’ in Underworld (371), where everything is seen from a height that allows panoramic vision, but that is not so far removed from the streets that the individual becomes invisible. In sharp contrast, the artist or individual is evident neither in the building of the World Trade Center towers nor its tenants. The plans for the World Trade Center were approved and unveiled in 1964 and construction began in 1966, on land owned by the Port Authority. The idea behind the Center was to ‘unite under one roof a grand ensemble of integrated commercial activities vital to a thriving port city: import–export firms, customs’ brokers, freightforwarders, commodity exchanges; international banks and a newly-transported stock-exchange’ (Darton 94–5). Yet in reality, and from the beginning, the World Trade Center was a massive two-towered gesture of division and contempt. Before any concrete was poured, the site clearance necessary for the building saw the destruction of homes, lives, streets: the small, the independent, cheek-by-jowl immigrant culture of city life. Sudjic writes that World Trade Center was ‘bitterly criticized for its antiurban qualities’: The 5-acre public square at its centre, which the architect fondly compared to Siena’s Campo and St Mark’s Square in Venice, was regarded by many as a poor substitute for the scruffy vitality of the fourteen blocks with their radio stores and tailors and bars, that were demolished to build it. (401) These are the streets that form the locus of ‘Arrangement in Gray and Black’, Part 6 of Underworld, viewed for us by Klara’s first husband, Albert Bronzini. More generally, the streets of New York’s immigrant communities are where DeLillo himself belongs. David Remnick conducted his 1997 interview with DeLillo while they walked the streets of his childhood: On a stifling, fly-blown morning this summer, DeLillo led me down Arthur Avenue, the heart of the Italian Bronx, past grocery stores and pasta joints, and said: ‘There was a mob hit here when I was a kid – a mobster killed while he was buying fruit . . . On summer nights the area was dense with games – stickball, softball, stoopball, bocce – and radios were playing and the fire hydrant sprayed and on the roof the women yelled down at the kids for killing the water pressure.’ (DePietro 137) At the heart of The Death and Life of Great American Cities is Jane Jacobs’s tireless activism on behalf of the small, the local, the authentic. As I suggested in the previous section, this is directly opposed to the ideas of modernists such as Le Corbusier, whose vision ‘was pervaded by a spirit of almost obsessive rationality and discipline’ (Curtis 247). Jacobs wrote: ‘The whole idea of doing away with city streets, insofar as that is possible, and downgrading and minimizing their scales and their economic part in city life is the most mischievous and destructive idea in orthodox city planning’ (115). ‘Arrangement in Gray and Black’ depicts the street-level New York of these small, individual lives and businesses: a city of butchers, barbers, removal men, rubbish men, funeral parlours. These are the kinds of lives that Jacobs saw being uprooted or squashed. They are also, importantly, the lives of New York’s ethnic communities,

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which planners sought to displace or even efface. It is generally estimated that the city planner Robert Moses, in his dual capacity as chair of the Committee on Slum Clearance from 1948 to 1960, and New York City construction co-ordinator, displaced more than 100,000 people, 40 per cent of them Black or Latino. Less than 10 per cent of those evicted were found to be ‘qualified’ to live in the housing built on the sites of their old homes. This was described by contemporary commentators as a form of ‘Negro removal’ (Darton 66). It had at one point, indeed, been proposed that the WTC itself should be located in Harlem, where it could function as ‘an architectural beacon of faith’ (Darton 101). In fact, Harlem’s only landmark piece of statement architecture from this period is the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building, constructed between 1967 and 1974. Underworld has its own Black ghettoes, embodied in the physical artefact of the book itself, its literal black pages. Catherine Morley has discussed the racial politics in Underworld and the physical segregation that the book as a material object embodies, where there are ‘just three 15-page chapters dealing with black America’ (Morley 146). DeLillo draws attention to this in two interviews, one given to Kim Echelin in 1997 (DePietro 149) and another to Maria Moss in 1999 (DePietro 159). While the rest of the novel conducts its experimental time-shifts, moving backwards and forwards, in these ghettoed pages the streets of the Bronx are static in time – and almost no one ever leaves: only Rose Meriweather Martin escapes to become an insurance adjustor and a protestor in the summer of 1968 on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi (Underworld 521–6). In Cosmopolis, the protagonist Eric Packer is a mixed-race billionaire hedge-fund manager, who spends the novel stuck in traffic in Manhattan, on his way to get a haircut in his childhood neighbourhood. Massive corporate success has enabled Packer to move away from street-level New York: he now lives in a palatial triplex apartment, in what the critic Joseph M. Conte has called ‘the residential complement of the Twin Towers’ (Conte 181). Crossing Tenth Avenue, Packer’s limo enters a world of small groceries, empty truck lots, ‘garages and body shops sealed for the night, steel shutters marked with graffiti in Spanish and Arabic . . . His father had grown up here’ (Cosmopolis 159). These are the streets that the corporatisation of America, as powerfully symbolised by the World Trade Center, attempts to efface. Whereas these streets teem with life, the WTC provided an astonishing example of the illusion of power, control and wealth, because in the 1970s the buildings were often empty. The ten million square feet of rentable space was hugely surplus to the needs of the city and whole floors remained deserted, while the state, under Governor Nelson Rockefeller, paid over the odds to rent its space for public employees: In a flat downtown real-estate market, where the vacancy rates were already higher than in the Great Depression, Nelson rented, at rates well-above the market standard, the entirety of Tower 2 as a New York state office building. In 1972, as an army of state functionaries prepared to occupy their warrens in 100-plus prairielike floors of the WTC, Nelson was packing his bags – heading for Washington DC. (Darton 82) This split between private and public workers and the spaces they occupied is recognised in the World Trade Center’s first appearance in DeLillo’s fiction, in Players (1977),

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whose protagonist Pammy Wynant works in the twin towers and keeps getting confused as to which tower she is in. Pammy repeatedly returns to the wrong tower after lunch and in turn is confused by an old school acquaintance: ‘You work for the state, being here?’ ‘I’m in the wrong tower’, she answers (Players 15). In July 1985, when most of the state employees moved out, Dean Witter, a brokerage and securities firm, later amalgamated with banking house Morgan Stanley, consolidated its operations over 24 floors of Tower 2 under a twenty-year lease, in premises that were kept spotless. Meanwhile, on adjacent floors occupied by multiple tenants, the paintwork was dingy, the fixtures broken, the carpets stained, and ‘the listing of a company on the directory did not reliably indicate that a company was still there’ (Darton 191). Players emphasises this state of instability: the firm for which Pammy works, the Grief Management Council, is ‘constantly being reapportioned. Workmen sealed off some areas with partitions, opened up others, moved out file cabinets, wheeled in desks and chairs. It was as though they’d been directed to adjust the amount of furniture to levels of national grief’ (Players 19). For Players, presciently, the WTC is a building full of grief: ‘where else would you stack all this grief? . . . A clerical structure would be needed’ (18–19). In Mao II, Brita Nilsson speaks for DeLillo when she says of New York, ‘Someday, go walk those streets . . . Sick and dying people everywhere with nowhere to live and there are bigger and bigger towers all the time, fantastic buildings with miles of rentable space. All the space is inside’ (40). Uncontained space, including the streets, is an affront to capitalism’s prime venture, the task of making money. In an interview with Maria Nadotti, DeLillo remarked: ‘If you could write slogans for nations similar to those invented by advertisers for their products the slogan for the US would be “Consume or die”. The consequence of not having the power to consume is that you end up living in the streets’ (DePietro 115). Empty towers, teeming streets: in these contrasting visions, the tropes that the reader recognises as DeLillo’s territory are revealed. The history of the construction of the World Trade Center is emblematic of the divisions and the history of America itself: it dramatises, literalises architecturally the battle between the immigrant past and the ‘American’ future.

Going Underground As its title implies, Underworld counterpoints the soaring, airy, moneyed space of the skyscraper with its invisible subterranean double, the basement or bunker. ‘Cocksucker Blues’, Part 4 of the novel, set in the summer of 1974 in the shadow of the twin towers’ construction, moves between New York and ‘the Pocket’ (Underworld 401), a bunker system in a nuclear installation in New Mexico. This is a protected space designed against threats of radiation. Specifically, it is a windowless space. I have already noted the apparent windowlessness of the World Trade Center towers when viewed from ground level. I want now to turn briefly to examine the meaning and significance of windows. Bunkers and basements, underground spaces: these are places that you cannot see out of to see where you are; you cannot be in touch with the real. You need windows for that. The word ‘window’ comes from Old Norse vindauga, first recorded in the early thirteenth century. It is a compound of vindr (wind) and auga (eye). It is where the wind looks through the house, originally an unglazed hole in the roof to let in light and air. In Underworld, while Klara Sax is watching from the rooftops during the summer of 1974, Matt Shay is working in the Pocket, ‘in his cubbyhole in a concrete space about the size of a basketball court, somewhere under the gypsum hills of southern

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New Mexico’ (401). The complex contains everything needed for living: ‘classrooms, the bedding, the canned food, the morgue . . . No window breakage. That’s one of the features. Because there aren’t any windows of course’ (411). This space offers a version of real life lived on the surface, emphasised by the crayoned pictures of piglets and cows pinned to the walls, creatures that suggest open spaces, grazing, grubbing the earth. The Pocket is not Underworld’s only subterranean architectural space. In a section of the novel set during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, we hear the comedian Lenny Bruce talking about the bunker to which John F. Kennedy will be removed in the advent of a nuclear war. The bunker, Bruce tells us, has curtains, which conceal ‘[a]rched windows, okay we’re twelve stories underground but the curtain fabric was irresistible so just shut up’ (505–6). The curtains give the illusion of freedom, indicating the presence of functioning windows. But the most important of DeLillo’s subterranean spaces is the basement in Underworld where Nick Shay shoots and kills the Italian immigrant waiter George Manza in the early 1950s, when Nick is a 17-year-old on the verge of being drafted into the Korean War. In a novel full of doubles, shadows and analogues, this is the subterranean space counterpointed with the Pocket, the nuclear bunker in which Nick’s brother, Matt, does his own form of ‘weapons work’ (401–2). Manza is himself a kind of double: he very clearly functions as a substitute father for Nick in the novel. Nick shoots him in an underground storage room which Manza uses as ‘a home away from home’, and which contains ‘a cot, a table, a rat trap, a couple of chairs, a couple of dangling lightbulbs and an array of paint cans and plumbing equipment’ (721). The description of what the shot does to Manza’s body is visceral: ‘He stood above the spraddled body in the blood muck of the room, not that he clearly saw the room, and he thought he heard a sucking sound come out of the man’s face, the afterbirth of face, the facial remains of what was once a head’ (781). The language is deeply suggestive here: the sucking sound and the afterbirth, even the blood muck; all features of the beginning of life, as this proves to be for Nick Shay. Nick is taken from this basement room, up the steps, and the next time, chronologically, that the reader encounters him is in upstate New York in November 1952, further away from the city than he has been in his whole life. In order to rise in the world, Nick must commit an act of ritual violence, the killing of his deadbeat immigrant father-substitute. In an interview given to Antony DeCurtis in 1988, when asked about ‘some specific American realities [which] have a draw for you’, DeLillo responded: Certainly there are themes that recur. Perhaps a sense of secret patterns in our lives. A sense of ambiguity. Certainly the violence of contemporary life is a motif. I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America. Again we come back to these men in small rooms who can’t get out and who have to organize their desperation and their loneliness, who have to give it a destiny and who often end up doing this through violent means. I see this desperation against the backdrop of brightly coloured packages and products and consumer happiness and every promise that American life makes day by day and minute by minute everywhere we go. (DePietro 65–6) Who is Underworld’s ‘man in a small room who can’t get out’? At various points it might be John F. Kennedy or Matt Shay, or any one of a number of other characters, but here, in 1951, in the novel’s primal scene, it is not Nick Shay – who, in his encounter

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with Manza (simultaneously the novel’s first and last) begins his ascent into success, and a world of light and towers and space; it is George Manza. The very form of Underworld could be described as architectural, from the ghettoes of its black pages to the recurring symbols of the twin towers. It is a novel in which the past and the present collide, one which moves simultaneously backwards and forwards in time, and prompts us to ask, where are we now? For DeLillo, I have argued, architecture is the emblematic American cultural form. Consistently throughout his writing, architecture dramatises the experience of modern America. It is both the place and the means through which America locates its successes, its failures – and its artists.

Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge my debts of gratitude to Dr Catherine Gander, for the invitation to contribute to this volume and her judicious editing: to Dr Stephen O’Neill, for the years of conversations about DeLillo and much else: and to my husband, Professor Darryl Jones, as always my best and sharpest critic.

Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Translated by Maria Jolas. Penguin, 2014. Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Knopf, 1974. Conte, Joseph M. ‘Writing Amid the Ruins: 9/11 and Cosmopolis.’ The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, edited by John Duvall. Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 179–94. Curtis, W. J. R. Modern Architecture Since 1900. 1982. Phaidon, 1996. Darton, Eric. Divided We Stand: A Biography of The World Trade Center. 1999. Basic Books, 2011. DeLillo, Don. Americana. Penguin, 1971. ——. Cosmopolis. Picador, 2003. ——. Falling Man. Picador, 2007. ——. Great Jones Street. Picador, 1973. ——. ‘In the Ruins of the Future.’ Harper’s, December 2001, pp. 33–40. ——. Mao II. Vintage, 1991. ——. The Names. Picador, 1982. ——. Players. Vintage, 1977. ——. Ratner’s Star. Vintage, 1976. ——. The Silence. Picador, 2020. ——. Underworld. Picador, 1997. DePietro, Thomas, editor. Conversations with Don DeLillo. University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Duvall, John, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Howard, Gerald. ‘The American Strangeness: An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ 1997. Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro. University Press of Mississippi, 2005, pp. 119–30. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 1961. Modern Library, 2011. Le Corbusier. Toward an Architecture. 1928. Translated by John Goodman. Frances Lincoln, 2008. Morley, Catherine. The Quest For Epic in Contemporary American Fiction. Routledge, 2009. Sudjic, Deyan. The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World. Penguin, 2005. Warburton, Nigel. Ernö Goldfinger: The Life of an Architect. Faber and Faber, 2005.

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31 ‘Bird Lives’: The High Art of Graffiti in Don DeLillo Michael Naas

Signatures of all things I am here to read . . . James Joyce, Ulysses

B

‘

ird Lives’: it’s a single note, played just once near the middle of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), but it resonates with almost every other note in the entire novel, and it leads to pretty much every theme and character in the work. Even shorter and sweeter than that famous Second World War graffiti ‘Kilroy was here’, the tag ‘Bird Lives’ says, like all other graffiti, to cite Jean Baudrillard, ‘I am so-and-so and I exist!’; that is, it is ‘free publicity for existence’, an ontological shout in the streets, an affirmation of life and existence (Beauchamp). But ‘Bird Lives’ can also today be read, precisely, as saying something rather different from ‘I exist’ or ‘Kilroy was here’. It can be read as the affirmative trace of a life that lives on now only in writing, a trace of what exists now only as writing, as graffiti, but also, and this is perhaps the sweetest part, as a signature form of literature. There is much debate in the secondary literature on DeLillo about the role played by graffiti in his work. Indeed, there is almost something of a turf war over the role and function of graffiti in his corpus, with those on each side marking their territory with their unique argumentative tags. There are some who, as we will see, consider it to be a form of resistance to the dominant culture of capitalist consumerism, an art form that challenges the assumptions of older forms of art and the power structures that support them, and others who see DeLillo to be resisting and contesting this form of art, and embracing only the forms of social activism sometimes promoted by its practitioners. But then there are those who, and I will be among them by the end, wish to consider DeLillo’s work itself as graffiti, and DeLillo as using the techniques of graffiti to craft his own novels, beginning with Underworld. We begin, then, with ‘Bird Lives’ because that is in fact the tag with which it all begins – both historically and in DeLillo. As one writer has succinctly put it, ‘Modern graffiti was born when bebop king Charlie Parker tragically died at the age of 34 on March 12, 1955’ (Ouellete). It was not long after the death of Parker, nicknamed ‘Bird’, that jazz poet and aficionado Ted Joans started writing ‘Bird Lives’ in chalk on the streets, pavements and walls of New York City. The tag caught on, and people started writing those two little words all over the city with crayons and paint and in freshly poured concrete. As graffiti itself became an art form in the 1960s and 1970s, the tag

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‘Bird Lives’ continued to appear as a homage to Parker and, by extension, to the origins of the art form itself, a ‘two-word call to freedom’ in both cases (Ouellette).1 ‘Bird Lives’ is thus the appropriate epicentre, the right ground zero, for graffiti in Underworld; it is the tag that provoked Ismael Muñoz to become a graffiti artist. We are told about the origins of Muñoz’s art about halfway through the novel: he saw a spray-paint scrawl, maybe five years ago, down under Eighth Avenue. Bird Lives. It made him wonder about graffiti, about who took the trouble and risk to walk down this tunnel and throw a piece across the wall, and how many years have gone by since then, and who is Bird, and why does he live? (435) The iconic tag ‘Bird Lives’, stumbled upon in the subway, below ground, in the underworld as it were, inspires Muñoz to begin thinking about graffiti, putting him on the path to becoming an artist. Graffiti is thus linked from the beginning to both the underground and to jazz. DeLillo himself makes this connection in an interview from 1999: Why are there specific references to jazz in this book? Well, it’s personal, because that’s when I discovered it back in the 1950s and early 60s and because the men who played that jazz are part of a history that is subterranean in a certain sense: one took subways and kept seeing graffiti about Charlie Parker, ‘Bird lives’; jazz at that time was in part an underground experience . . . You always had to go down a long flight of stairs and the musicians tended to be hooked on heroin. (Chénetier and Happe 110) But while ‘Bird Lives’ is the origin of graffiti in Underworld, the novel that explores this art form most fully and vividly, it is not the origin of the art form in DeLillo. Graffiti has in fact been in his work from the beginning. DeLillo’s first novel, Americana (1971), practically opens with it. On the second page of the novel, David Bell is at a party in the apartment of a TV executive: I decided to go into the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. Six framed graffiti were hanging on the bathroom wall. The words were set in large bold type, about 60-point, on glossy paper; they were set in a scripted typeface to look real. Three of the graffiti were blasphemous and three were obscene. The frames looked expensive. I noticed some dandruff on my shoulders. (4) Already, then, graffiti appears, not quite in an underworld but in a bathroom, already ‘framed’, commercialised, already doubled, as it were, like the protagonist in the mirror, a contrast already being drawn between the ‘content’ of the graffiti (blasphemy, obscenity) and the ‘frame’ (art, commodity). DeLillo was thus already in 1971 drawing attention to the framing and commodification of what is supposed to be a rebellious or resistant form of art (Martucci 133–4). Already he was using graffiti in the context of his own art of contraband, his own art of contrast or juxtaposition, as a way of achieving shock, surprise and, often, wonder.2  1

Bird Lives! is the title of a 1973 biography of Charlie Parker by Ross Russell, as well as the title of a 1973 album by trumpeter Red Rodney featuring musical performances by, or associated with, Charlie Parker.  2 I develop this notion of narrative ‘contraband’ in Don DeLillo, American Original, especially chapter 3.

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Before any examples of painting, sculpture, photography, cinema or television in DeLillo’s fiction, there was, therefore, graffiti. Just fourteen pages later we are treated to another reference, located in a similar setting, as one of Bell’s co-workers speaks about ‘the graffiti in the ladies’ rooms of various restaurants around town’ (Americana 18). There is thus graffiti in bathrooms, in the subway tunnels and streets of New York City, and, in Mao II, on the walls of a war-ravaged neighbourhood of Beirut: ‘The driver translates the wall writing and it is about the Father of Skulls, the Blood Skulls of Hollywood U.S.A., Arafat Go Home, the Skull Maker Was Here’ (Mao II 229). This is political graffiti, serving at once to promote a cause and mark a territory, the geopolitical here getting parsed out from block to block: ‘On a wall across the street there are layers of graffiti, deep deposits of names and dates and slogans’ (239). But, again, the fact that this graffiti is juxtaposed with advertisements for American consumer products returns us to the relationship between graffiti and capital: ‘Now there are signs for a new soft drink, Coke II, signs slapped on cement-block walls, and she has the crazy idea that these advertising placards herald the presence of the Maoist group. Because the lettering is so intensely red’ (230, 150). The message can thus be personal, or social or political, or sociopolitical, or even religious. They sent him to Vietnam . . . a flourish of spray-paint graffiti on the wall of a supply shed. Om mani padme hum. Matt knew this was some kind of mantra, a thing hippies chanted in Central Park, but could it also be the motto of the 131st Aviation Company? (Underworld 462) It thus seems impossible, already from the beginning, to completely distinguish graffiti, whose purpose is supposedly to resist capital, from the advertising slogans and corporate logos of capital itself. Impossible to completely distinguish in the work of Don DeLillo graffiti from advertising and consumer culture; impossible to draw an impermeable line between certain personal or political tags and the corporate logos of the Aqua Vela Man, Camay Soup or Balantine Beer; impossible to distinguish once and for all ‘Bird Lives’ from ‘Light up a Lucky. It’s light-up time’ (Underworld 304), or ‘Kilroy was here!’ from ‘Common Sense, Uncommon Chemistry’ – ‘Dow’s catchy ad slogan’ (601). They are tag lines all, and the person who best delivers this truth in Underworld is not the novel’s celebrated graffiti artist, Ismael Muñoz, but advertising executive Charlie Wainwright. ‘There is only one truth’, says Charlie. ‘Whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world’ (530). Whether it be a Madison Avenue executive or a terrorist leader in Beirut, the point is to use art and technology to control the one who consumes your message. In both cases, the point is to ‘get the consumer by the eyeballs’ (531), to ‘get inside people’s heads and vandalize their eyeballs’ (435). The graffiti tag, the political slogan, the corporate logo, the trademark, the advertising jingle, the highway billboard: these are all about getting you by the eyeballs and not letting go. From ‘Bird Lives’ to ‘Arafat Go Home’ to ‘The Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus’ (the meaning of Om mani padme hum), there’s graffiti for almost every occasion. But what links them all, or most of them, is language, for a tag is usually not just a spray of colour but some kind of code, some combination of letters and numbers. As always in DeLillo, it’s about language, words and names. It is thus no coincidence that at the heart of the novel The Names, the name of the cult devoted to language is graffitied across a giant rock. The graffiti is spelled out and translated from Greek in

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a conversation between the protagonist James Axton (a perfectly cutting name for a main character) and his ten-year-old aspiring novelist son Tap (a perfectly good typing name in the world of Panasonics): It was a fallen rock, a ten-foot boulder standing by the roadcut to our left, a flatfaced reddish block with two white words painted across its width, the pigment running down off the letters in rough trickles, the accent mark clearly in place. Ta Onómata. ‘Do you know what it means?’ ‘The Names’, I said. (The Names 188) The cult was thus making a name for itself, and the name it was making through graffiti was ‘The Names’, the graffiti becoming itself the name of DeLillo’s novel. In a collection of essays devoted to DeLillo and the arts, it makes sense for graffiti to have a prominent place next to film, video, television, literature, painting, sculpture, performance art and so on. But graffiti (from the Italian graffio, meaning a ‘scratching’) is perhaps an even more appropriate art form for DeLillo than all these others. For graffiti is a curious combination of low and high art, an art form that combines – or contrabands, that is, juxtaposes as two competing narrative tracks, strands or ‘bands’ – rebellion and resistance with corporate culture and capitalism, one of the oldest art forms known to humankind with some of the newest. It uses letters and numbers that often seem to belong to the work of art in the age of technological reproduction and yet it often makes these by hand, with a hand that often signs, and whose style is often the signature itself. And while chalk or crayon or markers are all used, aerosol spray paint became in the 1970s and 1980s the medium of choice. Graffiti, it could be said, is what gives texture to a city, depth to a world, though it is also an art of the underworld, an art best practised underground. Hence, graffiti also vacillates between legitimate artworks and acts of vandalism and defacement, artistic creations in public spaces and the destruction of public or private property, its practitioners grouped together by artistic schools (freehand or stencilled, old style or Zoo York style) or else simply identified by gang affiliation. Often acting illegally, or at least without permission, graffiti art is at once done secretly and in public, as a way of making a statement, personal or political or some other. The tag is thus itself a kind of signature, the spoor with which an individual or a gang might mark its territory, or a way for an individual or group to make its mark. Graffiti is full of contradictions; it scrambles all the hierarchies, turning high (Bird) to low (Bird Lives), and vice versa; it is a medium of contraband par excellence. One can thus see graffiti as a minor art form that supplements all the others in DeLillo, or one can see it as the drive or impetus, the instinct, behind all art. That seems to be the thesis advanced early in Underworld by Klara Sax, who is describing her work on decommissioned B-52s, a homage to the way in which Second World War fighter pilots used to personalise and decorate the fuselages of their planes with images of so many Long Tall Sallys: See, we’re painting, hand-painting . . . and maybe there’s a sort of survival instinct here, a graffiti instinct – to trespass and declare ourselves, show who we are. The way the nose artists did, the guys who painted pinups on the fuselage. (Underworld 77)

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Sax and her crew use not exactly aerosol cans but ‘automotive spray guns . . . to prime the metal’ (68), creating artwork in the desert that seems to borrow the techniques of the assembly lines of Detroit or Flint, artwork that brings together the military-industrial complex and Soho. Moreover, Sax’s art project of the 1990s appears to have been inspired by the graffiti art of New York artists of the 1970s and 1980s, and particularly that of Ismael Muñoz. Both the means of applying the paint and the celebration of colour suggest Muñoz’s influence on Sax (Martucci 134). A cross between Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and other graffiti artists from the times, Ismael Muñoz, aka Moonman 157, is the master graffiti artist of Underworld. A ‘legend of spray paint’ (Underworld 245) by the age of sixteen, that is, ‘not too old and not too young’ for this kind of art, Muñoz, in the early parts of the novel, was ‘determined to kill the shit of every subway artist in town’ (433). Inspired by the ‘Bird Lives’ tag in the subway below Eighth Avenue, he is motivated not by fortune but by fame, the kind that would come through the highest form of flattery, imitation. Although he wants to ‘stay totally low and out of sight’, his motto being ‘do not get your name or face in the papers’ (436), Muñoz nonetheless seeks a certain notoriety among his peers. This begins to happen around the centre of the novel, at the very same time that his art is attracting interest from Esther Winship, owner of a New York City art gallery and Klara Sax’s friend and art dealer: He knew he was getting fame because he had imitators, first, and because other writers did not disrespect him by spraying over his work, except some of them did, and because two women came to look for him in the Bronx. (436) One can call it co-optation or commercialisation, but Esther Winship has an eye for art and an appreciation of the kinds of things Muñoz is able to do. She introduces him to Sax, who has her own theories of the ‘graffiti instinct’, in this way: ‘A kid who does graffiti. He does trains, subways, whole trains, he does every car in a subway train. I want to sign him up and show his work. But I have to find him first . . . I don’t know his name. I only know his tag. Moonman 157 . . . You’ve seen it. Everybody’s seen it. The kid’s a goddamn master.’ (377) Sax considers the graffiti-plastered trains as ‘slapdash and depressing . . . She did not like the idea of tagging trains. It was the romance of the ego, poor kids playing out a fantasy of meretricious fame’ (394). But the kid is, she must admit, a ‘goddamn master’. It is thus Klara Sax’s art dealer who first draws her attention to Muñoz. DeLillo is reflecting here the fact that, in the 1970s and 1980s, illegal graffiti became a genuine object of interest and speculation, not just in the New York art world but all around the world, even in far-flung places such as Sweden: ‘The man was photographing the piece and the writer both, completely unknown to himself, from someplace like Sweden he looked’ (434). Moreover, Muñoz is not just an individual graffiti master but the head of a whole school, with its own recognisable style and acolytes studying under him: ‘His crew consisted of hopefuls, of course . . . They kept lookout while he painted’ (437). The crew stands watch for police and subway security guards, but they are also there to prepare the master’s palette: ‘They had dozens of cans out and ready, all by prearrangement, and he called a color and they shook the can and the ball went

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click’ (440). When DeLillo’s narrator describes Muñoz’s art, one can almost hear him too going a little freeform: this is the art of the backstreets talking, all the way from Bird, you can’t not see us anymore, you can’t not know who we are, we got total notoriety now . . . we’re getting fame, we ain’t ashame, and the train go rattling over the garbagy streets and past the dead-eye windows of all those empty tenements that have people living there even if you don’t see them, but you have to see our tags and cartoon figures and bright and rhyming poems . . . (440)3 Of course, if graffiti is a way of achieving some kind of celebrity and temporary immortality, there are always forces being mobilised to combat that immortality, to erase one’s name from the archive by removing one’s graffiti from the wall. So it is in Underworld, where the orange juice of the Minute Maid miracle of the billboard where Esmeralda Lopez will appear is countered by the agent orange graffiti-remover of the New York City Transit Authority, ‘an orange juice mixture because there’s an acid in the juice that eats into paint’ (433). It eats away at the paint and thereby kills the name. Forget orange juice, man. This was the new graffiti killer, some weirdshit chemical from the CIA. It’s like you knock a picture off a shelf and someone dies. Only this time it’s you that’s in the photo. That’s how some writers felt about their tags. (438) Orange was thus already the new black in Underworld, a life-giving, miraculous force, and the opposite, just as an orange is about the size of both a baseball and the core of a nuclear weapon filled with Uranium 238 (just add the numbers and you get 13). Letters and numbers, Moonman 157: ‘The whole point of Moonman’s tag was how the letters and numbers told a story of backstreet life’ (434), ‘a story of tenement life, good and bad but mostly good’ (440). ‘Moonman 157’ – a combination of letters and numbers: ‘Add the digits and you get thirteen. But that’s the street where he lives, or used to live’ (439). And, of course, the number 13 is central to the novel, from the date of the infamous baseball game at the novel’s core (October 3 – 10/3 – 1951), to the number of the pitcher (Ralph Branca) who gave up the winning home run, to the number of letters in the name of the broadcaster who announces that home run, ‘Russell Hodges’. Moonman 157 makes a name for himself as an artist, his name becoming his art, a combination of letters and numbers: overlapping letters and 3-D effect, the whole wildstyle thing of making your name and street number a kind of alphabet city where the colors lock and bleed and the letters connect and it’s all live jive, it jumps and shouts – even the drips are intentional, painted supersharp to express how the letters sweat, how they live and breathe and eat and sleep, they dance and play the sax. (433) However, the true force and genius of Muñoz’s art is the way it tells his story not simply on walls or buildings but on New York City subway cars, so that the colour  3

Martucci quotes E. V. Walter who, in Placeways, calls graffiti ‘monuments of the poor’ (152; qtd Martucci 133).

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and movement of the letters and numbers becomes amplified and transformed by the speeding train. Muñoz’s art is made fast, in the middle of the night, as Muñoz and his crew try to evade the police, and it is made to move fast, to be art on the fly. If you don’t have access to cameras and film and all the other technologies of the moving image, you make do – you can maybe even make more of an impact – with paint thrown across a moving surface, like a subway train. Here’s the narrator again, catching a ride on the internal monologue of the graffiti artist: ‘this is the art that can’t stand still, it climbs across your eyeballs night and day, the flickery jumping art of the slums and dumpsters, flashing those colors in your face – like I’m your movie, motherfucker’ (441). This is the graffiti artist’s way of negotiating with the modern imperative of art expressed in Running Dog: ‘The modern sensibility had been instructed by a different kind of code. Movement. The image had to move’ (Running Dog 80). Muñoz thus gets in ‘our movie’ by producing a movie of his own, a silent film or motion picture in as many frames as there are subway cars. As we read a bit earlier in Underworld, again in a description that begins to mirror what is being described: the other train was one of his, Moonman’s, every car spray-painted top to bottom with his name and street number. And Klara had to admit this particular kid knew how to make an impact. The train came bopping into the old drab station like some blazoned jungle of wonders. The letters and numbers fairly exploded in your face and they had a relationship, they were plaited and knotted, pop-eyed cartoon humanoids, winding in and out of each other and sweaty hot and passion dancing – metallic silver and blue and cherry-bomb red and a number of neon greens. (Underworld 394–5) The reactions to Muñoz’s transformed subway cars suggest that they are at once an abomination and a revelation to riders and onlookers: ‘They reacted to the train, their heads went wow. Some shocked looks too, they’re seeing hell on wheels, but mostly the eyes go yes and the faces open up’ (434). In Muñoz’s graffiti, the letters and numbers already begin to move through the plaiting and interlacing, pulsating with colour. But when all that is put on to a moving train, the effect becomes electric. A writer of movement and gesture par excellence, DeLillo could not have failed to be taken by such an art form: But you have to stand on a platform and see it coming or you can’t know the feeling a writer gets, how the number 5 train comes roaring down the rat alleys and slams out of the tunnel, going whop-pop onto the high tracks, and suddenly there it is, Moonman riding the sky in the heart of the Bronx, over the whole burnt and rusted country, and this is the art of the backstreets talking, all the way from Bird . . . (440) Muñoz’s art rises up from out of the underworld into the light, right up into the sky, taking what is low and making it high. All you have to do is rearrange the letters to get art from out of those rat alleys, an art that emerges from the underground and elevates toward the stars.4  4

The relation between stars and rats, the highest and the lowest, is central to Ratner’s Star. As Martucci comments: ‘His art comes from out of the earth, from the underworld, and travels into the sky, expressing the reality of the underworld’ (132).

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So it is that graffiti that moves begins to move into or merge with other art forms, film or video or performance art, or the daily market report on the business channel. Here is Muñoz watching one such business report, the letters moving across the ticker tape – the under-band, as it were – like a series of subway cars tagged with numbers and letters: He loves the language of buying and selling and the sight of those clustered sets of letters that represent enormous corporate entities with their jets and stretches and tanker fleets . . . Electronics slightly up, transports down, industrials more or less unchanged. (814) Again, graffiti blurs the boundaries between high and low (the bird in the burrow of the rat), art and vandalism, high- and lowbrow art (while Muñoz’s work begins in the subway, it is sought out by Manhattan art dealers); it is done by hand, like classical painting, with masters founding ‘schools’, and yet the canvases are highly unconventional (public buildings and subways), with tools and techniques born of the age of mechanical reproduction (the aerosol can). It is hardly surprising that this art form would become a bone of contention in popular culture and in the reading and interpretation of that culture; hardly surprising that there would be a debate in the secondary literature over DeLillo’s ultimate attitude towards graffiti, a debate over whether DeLillo himself celebrates graffiti as an art or wishes to demonstrate its dangers and limitations. Though there are, to be sure, differences and nuances in various interpretations that should not be neglected, from a bird’s-eye view the various takes on graffiti can be divided into two camps. In the first we find, for example, Mark Osteen, who argues that there is a redemptive value to graffiti, a resistance to capitalism and corporate culture. For Osteen, the kind of art done by Muñoz, Sax and others is able to transform and redeem the waste and garbage of American consumer culture. According to Osteen, ‘DeLillo suggests that it is possible – indeed, necessary – to salvage something from the wreckage’, and ‘the artists depicted in Underworld perform more valuable recycling, transforming the very physical debris left by weapons and waste into objects that testify to the uncontainability of human aspiration’ (Osteen 245). For Osteen, artists such as Muñoz ‘begin the process of salvage by writing a new, underground history from the waste of the past’ (245). As such, these artists, says Osteen quoting DeLillo, are ‘“the source of art and of political resistance” (‘Power’ 62)’ (245). Hence ‘Ismael’s work is multiply subversive: in writing his name with stolen materials, he ironically appropriates the consumer society’s fixation on brand names and transforms it into an attack on private property’ (254). For Osteen, then, the art of Muñoz ‘celebrates the marginalized, the backstreet life of those invisible people who live in the shadows’ (254). Osteen ultimately concludes that DeLillo is on the side of Muñoz, writing as an advocate for this subversive but also redeeming art form: ‘Underworld’s hope for renewal lies in the work of artists like Muñoz and in the collective faith of the disenfranchised communities for which he speaks’ (254). One of the messages of Underworld is that we can, in the end, ‘find transcendence in unlikely places, as the very emblems of capital are transmuted into an economy of grace’. Underworld thus dramatizes most forcefully how counterhistory is scripted on the undersheet of waste, and how uncontainable yearnings emerge from within and below to challenge and

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redeem the devastations wrought by the makers of official history. The true makers, [DeLillo] suggests, are not the Hoovers of the world, but the Ismael Muñozes, Sabato Rodias, and Klara Saxes who transform those Minute Maid cans, Canada Dry bottles, and B-52s – waste and weapons – into weapons against waste’. (258–9) Critics such as Elise Martucci and Wendy Harding argue something similar. Martucci suggests that the works of Muñoz and others ‘succeed because of their inability to be consumed by commercial society and their ability to affect and move the characters in the novel’ (125). Drawing the parallel suggested above between Klara Sax’s project of painting decommissioned B-52s in the desert and Muñoz’s painting of subway cars in NYC, Martucci writes: Muñoz and Klara are both from poor neighborhoods in New York. Also similar is their medium. Both paint over commercial items, immense symbols of American technology and industrialization. The planes and the subway cars invoke images of power and force, and each artist expropriates this power. Each artist is marginalized (Sax as a Jewish female and Muñoz as a Latino bisexual) from the white male leaders of the country, and each more or less successfully gains power through reappropriation of the symbols of American economic and military strengths. (131) There is thus something redemptive or at least recuperative and resistant in both Muñoz’s graffiti art and Sax’s recycling of decommissioned B-52s. Both artists, argues Martucci, ‘show the ability to reclaim the waste of culture and make from it something beautiful’ (134). For Harding, too, there is a ‘subversive force’ in graffiti as DeLillo depicts it (474). According to Harding, DeLillo wishes to emphasise the way in which graffiti at once repeats, exploits and attempts to intervene in contemporary consumer culture. He wishes to show how artists such as Muñoz reclaim public spaces typically ‘dedicated to commercial and political ends’ (471): The artists of Underworld work to counter the saturation of public and private space and to impose their own forms of communication. They have to reappropriate available surfaces and superscript them with their own images. In this struggle, the novel’s most contestatory figure is the graffitist, Ismael Muñoz, although he shares common features with the novel’s other artists. (468) In a world where signs and advertising have taken over our public spaces, graffiti is an attempt to intervene in our everyday corporate culture, a point made by Marc Schuster as well in a work devoted to DeLillo and Jean Baudrillard (Schuster chapter 7). Both Harding and Osteen note the connections between the art of Muñoz and that of the other artists in the novel, from Sabato Rodia, who creates the Watts Towers out of trash, to Klara Sax, who makes her art out of recycled or repurposed objects. For Harding, DeLillo’s artists are resisting and fighting against consumer culture and the waste it produces. There is thus a ‘subversive thrust’ to this art, ‘for it reveals what the authorities want hidden’ (472). Harding hears, for example, in Sax’s description of her B-52 project something ‘like a manifesto for graffiti art, and more generally, like

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an expression of the aesthetic and political impulses motivating all of DeLillo’s artist figures’ (472). Here is that passage again, cited at greater length: See, we’re painting, hand-painting in some cases, putting our puny hands to great weapons systems, to systems that came out of the factories and assembly halls as near alike as possible, millions of components stamped out, repeated endlessly, and we’re trying to unrepeat, to find an element of felt life, and maybe there’s a sort of survival instinct here, a graffiti instinct – to trespass and declare ourselves, show who we are. (Underworld 77) By ‘reclaiming space from “the system”’, says Harding, ‘the graffiti artist commits an act of vandalism, but at the same time, he renews the ancient connection between art and place that Walter Benjamin felt had been lost once art could be mechanically reproduced’ (473). The graffiti artist is thus trying to ‘unrepeat’ what the machines of repetition have produced, using that ‘graffiti instinct’ to ‘repersonalize social life, striking a blow for human agency and creativity in an era of alienation’. By ‘bringing color, individuality, and humanity to the surfaces occupied by hegemonic powers, graffiti constitutes a gesture of revolt against the order that “burns off the nuance in a culture” (Underworld 785)’ (Harding 472). That’s the pro-graffiti contingent. At the other end of the spectrum, in the other camp as it were, is Paul Giaimo, who (though far outnumbered) forcefully argues that DeLillo is hardly glorifying ‘postmodern’ kinds of expression such as graffiti, but rather putting them on display in order to demonstrate their shortcomings or their bankruptcy. Giaimo ultimately wants to save DeLillo both from postmodern interpretations of his work and, especially, from interpretations that would claim that DeLillo is himself an advocate of postmodern forms of art. Identifying the postmodern with a dangerous relativism in the realms of both literary interpretation and morals, Giaimo sees in postmodernity’s ‘radical resistance to pinning down particular texts to particular meanings’ (1) a mode of reading that is akin to the ‘aimless, drifting lifestyle of sequential polygamy’ (4). Giaimo sees in DeLillo not some wide-eyed, postmodern iconoclast but a writer working squarely in the Catholic tradition, a proto-Jesuit with an ethical vision and a moral mission. The transformation of Ismael Muñoz over the course of Underworld would be the clearest proof of this vision. Here, then, is where the two camps of DeLillo interpreters overlap to some degree, despite their essential differences regarding the value of graffiti itself. Both camps ultimately place a great deal of emphasis on the trajectory of Ismael Muñoz over the course of Underworld. For by the end of the novel Muñoz has more or less given up his life as a graffiti artist tagging subway cars and has devoted himself to social causes. He takes in and mentors kids in a little area of the Bronx called ‘the Wall’, named ‘partly for the graffiti façade and partly the general sense of exclusion’ (Underworld 239). Interestingly, in the short story ‘The Angel Esmeralda’, which DeLillo revised and included in Underworld, this area was called not ‘the Wall’ but, ‘in jocular police parlance’, ‘the Bird’, ‘short for bird sanctuary, a term that referred in this case to a tuck of land sitting adrift from the social order’ (The Angel Esmeralda 75), a term that also, of course, underscores the connection to graffiti, as in ‘Bird Lives’. It is there, on ‘the six-story flank of a squatters’ tenement’, that ‘graffiti writers spray-paint an angel every time a local

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child dies of illness or mistreatment’ (Underworld 811), ‘a memorial angel every time a child died in the neighborhood’, so that ‘angels in blue and pink covered roughly half the high slab’ (Underworld 239; The Angel Esmeralda 76). Graffiti has thus not completely disappeared from Muñoz’s life but has been radically transformed, repurposed, or finally given a true purpose. Instead of sneaking down into the subways at night to tag trains, students of Muñoz are now lowered down from the roof by a rope, left to ‘drift to and from the wall, leaning in to spray the interlaced letters that mark the great gone era of wildstyle graffiti’ (Underworld 815). When Esmeralda Lopez dies, ‘Ismael and others bend over the ledge attempting to shout correct spellings’ down to the student apprentice dangling below. The result – letters and numbers once again – is not the tag of the artist (e.g., ‘Moonman 157’) but an epitaph for the slain girl: ‘Esmeralda Lopez 12 year Petected in Heven’ (Underworld 815–16). (You can forgive a spelling error or two, it seems, when the intentions are this pure.) We’ve moved from ‘Bird Lives’ down in the subway to ‘Petected in Heven’ up on the Wall. Muñoz’s art has moved upwards, it seems, transformed, metamorphosed, converted. And it is an ‘ungraffiti’d’ train, we are supposed to notice, ‘an ordinary commuter train, silver and blue’, that, at the end of the novel, reveals the face of Esmeralda beneath a billboard advertisement for Minute Maid orange juice, a train that has not been tagged that leads to the novel’s final revelation, even if it is nothing other than ‘a trick of light. Not a person at all. Not a face but a stab of light’ (Underworld 821). Both those who praise the art of graffiti and those who condemn it are pleased with this transformation in Muñoz. Giaimo, while condemning the art of graffiti as such, praises Muñoz’s transformation from artist to social activist, and he sees this transformation as a reflection of DeLillo’s own commitments. Intent on showing the ‘underlying moral lessons of DeLillo’s work’, that is, intent on carrying out a salvaging mission of his own on DeLillo himself, Giaimo wishes to unite in DeLillo ‘a respect for knowledge with a drive to help serve other people’ (Giaimo v). It is thus not Ismael Muñoz the graffiti artist that Giaimo says DeLillo privileges but Muñoz the saviour of poor children from his Bronx neighbourhood. Giaimo can therefore appreciate, for example, the way pro-graffiti Marc Schuster understands DeLillo to be offering ‘a hopeful faith in the power of the individual subject to “alter the ideological framework of society”’ (Schuster 145, qtd in Giaimo 12), but he claims that Schuster has located this faith in the wrong place. It is to be found not in Moonman 157’s graffiti but in his social activism, and in particular his newfound collaboration with Sisters Alma Edgar and Grace Fahey: ‘This is the particular kind of social engagement the artist needs, to be reminded of what is most important’ (Giaimo 17).5 For the individual’s artistic vision must ultimately be in the service of some greater social cause (Giaimo 13), and Giaimo seems to find some corroboration of his thesis in DeLillo’s own public support of certain causes, for example, his ‘participation in the 2009 PEN New Year’s Eve rally for the release of Chinese writer and crusader for freedom Liu Xiaobo and his participation in the public reading of the testimonies of victims of U.S. torture also sponsored by PEN on October 13, 2009’ (179).

 5

‘For DeLillo’, writes Giaimo, ‘Baudrillard’s vision of the artist’s role does not pan out. Shock value is not enough to nurture Moonman’s artistic career or vision’ (12).

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As for Osteen and others, they see the positive aspects of graffiti being illustrated and extended by Muñoz’s later social activism and engagement. Osteen speaks of DeLillo’s ‘continued fascination, even celebration, of the way that hope emerges out of large-scale ruin’ (258), and he sees evidence of this in the transformation of Muñoz’s own work. In short, Muñoz’s earlier, subversive labor has matured into a communal project that more explicitly tells of backstreet life: whenever a child dies in the neighborhood, his crew spraypaints a memorial ‘angel’ on a wall . . . The ‘angels’ rescue dignity from death, and remind those driving by of the human leftovers of capital’s bounty. (256) Martucci again follows Osteen in celebrating Muñoz’s newfound social activism, his desire no longer simply to make a name for himself but to give back to his community. She sees ‘signs of hope and endurance’ in Muñoz’s work in the Wall. ‘Having long since given up his subway graffiti art, Muñoz now works with poor children in a burned-out portion of the Bronx . . . The significance of Muñoz’s latest work is in the children he salvages through it, the recycling of wasted lives’ (137–8). Such a view seems to be confirmed by passages such as this from near the end of Underworld: Isn’t he one of the affirmative forces in the Wall, earning money with his salvage business, using it more or less altruistically, teaching his crew of stray kids, abandoned some of them, pregnant one or two, runaways, throwaways – giving them a sense of responsibility and self-worth? And doesn’t he help the nuns feed the hungry? (813) In the end, it is not so much the graffiti as such that counts here but the social cause to which it is put, the move from painting subway cars to angels on a wall in the Bronx. Citing a phrase from the end of Underworld, Osteen argues that the recuperative, redemptive, but also social-political art of Muñoz offers the ‘possibility of a new kind of connection, one that replaces massive, dehumanizing systems with “the argument of binding touch” (Underworld 827)’ (254). Forced to choose between those who believe that DeLillo admires and celebrates graffiti as such and those who believe he is condemning it and advocating for a transformation of it into a social cause, I would surely throw my support – and take out my aerosol can – for the former. For it is hard to imagine DeLillo spending so much narrative time and energy depicting an art form that he does not believe has some kind of power or force – and perhaps even a redemptive force – in and of itself. But even more important, it might be argued, is the fact that DeLillo appears to consider his own art to be a sort of graffiti, a conjunction that might be the art form’s ultimate sanction. For not only might all art be the product, as we have seen, of a sort of ‘graffiti instinct’, but DeLillo’s particular way of writing seems to owe something to graffiti. Recall the way in which his descriptions of Muñoz’s art began to mirror the movement and power of that art. The same thing could be said of DeLillo’s work as a whole. Osteen argues very persuasively that DeLillo writes in a way that mirror’s Muñoz’s art, having ‘designed Underworld as a similar act of artistic resistance and redemption, using the same techniques of montage and bricolage to generate

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artistic grace’ (246). Harding, for her part, cites a passage in the novel that clearly ‘positions graffiti at the juncture of image and text’ and so invites a comparison between Muñoz’s graffiti and DeLillo’s writing: ‘There’s a kid she’s looking for. Graffiti artist.’ ‘Graffiti writer.’ ‘Yes, well, it’s so completely everywhere, this writing.’ (Underworld 381)6 The graffiti artist is a kind of writer, and a writer like DeLillo a kind of graffiti artist. And while the writing of the former was so completely everywhere in the New York City of the time, it is today remembered or reinscribed in the writing of DeLillo, who has his own signatures, his own recurring characters and refrains, his own ‘tags’, as Harding calls them (476).7 Looping and interlacing patterns of letters and numbers: this describes both Munoz’s graffiti and DeLillo’s ‘visual and spatial art’, especially in Underworld. As Harding nicely phrases it, ‘in representing facets of American culture and history that are missing from official accounts, DeLillo’s art has the subversive force of the graffiti writer’s signature’ (474). Echoes, repeated patterns, letters and numbers that loop around to one another, the signatures of all things: this is a description of DeLillo’s own writing. Take just the name of the graffiti artist himself, Moonman 157: there’s the moon, so central to all of DeLillo’s work, from the ominous moonrise near the end of The Names (320) to the Moonie wedding of Mao II and the ‘orange moon’ that hangs over New York City during the apparition of Esmeralda Lopez; and then there’s that 13 again (1 + 5 + 7) that is so central to Underworld, the same 13 letters of Donald DeLillo and, to return to the place where we began, Charlie Parker. ‘Because everything connects in the end, or only seems to, or seems to only because it does’ (Underworld 465). Bird Lives: it is, as I noted at the outset, a single note in the middle of Underworld, a note that is struck just once and left to resonate with all the others in the jazz composition or long-form graffiti that is Underworld. It is in this way that Bird Lives, a piece of graffiti thrown up on a wall, becomes, through DeLillo’s writing, ‘Bird Lives’. ‘Bird was dead at thirty-four’ we read, and yet ‘Bird Lives’ lives (Underworld 436). You can write it on a wall or a pavement, or down in the subway with an aerosol can that you shake so that the ball goes click, and you can even type it today on to your screen, as the narrator does at the end of the novel, saving the final click not for ‘Peace’, the last word to appear on the page, but for ‘Save’, the word that redeems all the others, or at least lets them appear and live for a time in our own graffiti’d Underworld.

 6

Harding goes on to comment: ‘In referring to this distinctively urban art form as “writing”, the novel insists on the kinship between the artist persona and the writer himself. The invitation to comparison allows us to make a step forward in understanding DeLillo’s art. Repeatedly in interviews and articles the writer has stated the importance of the visual dimension of his own writing’ (474).  7 Harding argues, ‘The aesthetic pleasure of reading DeLillo’s prose lies not only in its precise and loving evocation of human voices but also in the patterns created from the recurrences of characters’ signature refrains. As readers notice these repetitions, they experience the pleasure of recognition . . . Each character has his or her private obsessions or memories that return regularly within the interior monologues, like the graffiti writer’s recurring tags’ (475–6).

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Works Cited Beauchamp, Scott. ‘Kilroy Is Still Here.’ Paris Review, 12 November 2015. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/11/12/kilroy-is-still-here/. Accessed 7 February 2023. Chénetier, Marc, and François Happe. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo.’ Revue française d’études américaines, 87, January 2001, pp. 102–11. DeLillo, Don. Americana. Houghton Mifflin, 1971. ——. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. Scribner, 2011. ——. Mao II. Viking, 1991. ——. The Names. Knopf, 1982. ——. Underworld. Scribner, 1997. Giaimo, Paul. Appreciating Don DeLillo: The Moral Force of a Writer’s Work. Praeger, 2011. Harding, Wendy. ‘New York Writing: Urban Art in Don DeLillo’s Underworld.’ Caliban, French Journal of English Studies, 25, 2009, pp. 467–78. Martucci, Elise A. The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo. Routledge, 2007. Naas, Michael. Don DeLillo, American Original: Drugs, Weapons, Erotica, and Other Literary Contraband. Bloomsbury, 2020. Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Ouellette, Dan. ‘Bird Lives Forever – Modern Graffiti Makes Its Debut in New York.’ Huffington Post, 24 August 2016. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bird-lives-forever---mode_b_11682728. Accessed 7 February 2023. Russell, Ross. Bird Lives! The High Life and Hard Times of Charlie (yardbird) Parker. Da Capo Press, 1996. Schuster, Marc. Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum. Cambria Press, 2008.

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Notes on Contributors

Laura Barrett, Professor of English, is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at SUNY New Paltz. Her essays on photography and literature, the uncanny, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writers can be found in Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in the Novel, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, PLL: Papers on Language and Literature, Literature and History and other journals and collections, including The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945 (ed. John Duvall, 2012) and Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld and Falling Man (ed. Stacey Olster, Continuum, 2011). Peter Boxall is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His books include The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life (2019), The Value of the Novel (2015), Twenty-first Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (2013) and Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (2009). He has published several articles on DeLillo, most recently ‘A Leap out of our Biology: History, Tautology and Biomatter in Don DeLillo’s Later Fiction’, in Contemporary Literature. He is the co-editor of Volume 7 of the Oxford History of the Novel (with Bryan Cheyette), and editor of the journal Textual Practice. Joseph Conte is Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry (1991), Design & Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction (2002), which was awarded the Agee Prize in American Literary Studies, and most recently, Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel (2020). Among many essays on post-war literature and media, he has published ‘Writing amid the Ruins: 9/11 and Cosmopolis’, in The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo (ed. John Duvall, 2008); ‘Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and the Age of Terror’ in Modern Fiction Studies; ‘Virtual Reality’, in American Literature in Transition: 1990–2000 (ed. Stephen Burn, 2017); and ‘The Deep Web of Conspiracies: Under the Shadow of Trump Tower in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge’, in Trump Fiction: Essays on Donald Trump in Literature, Film, and Television (ed. Stephen Hock, 2019). David Coughlan is Lecturer in English at the School of English, Irish and Communication, University of Limerick, Ireland. He has guest co-edited special issues of Derrida Today and Parallax and is the author of Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction (2016). He has published on contemporary literature, graphic narrative and

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critical theory in various edited collections and in the journals College Literature, Critique, Cultural Critique, ImageTexT and Modern Fiction Studies. David Cowart, Louise Fry Scudder Professor Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, has been a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and held Fulbright chairs at the University of Helsinki (1992–93) and at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense (1996–97). In addition to his two monographs on the work of Thomas Pynchon, he is the author of Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language (2002, rev. edn 2003), Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America (2006) and The Tribe of Pyn: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period (2015). He is working on a book exploring the novels of Cormac McCarthy. Katherine da Cunha Lewin is Lecturer in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature at Coventry University. She and Kiron Ward co-edited the collection Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives which was published in 2018. Her essays and reviews have been published widely, and she is currently working on a non-fiction book about writing rooms, to be published in 2025. Her new project considers representations of writing labour in the millennial novel. Kelsie Donnelly holds a PhD from Queen’s University Belfast, where she is an early career researcher and learning development consultant. Her thesis examined the aesthetics, ethics and sociopolitics of grief and abject bodies in the post-9/11 work of Don DeLillo, Mohsin Hamid and Claudia Rankine, applying new methodologies to break the solidified ties of extant 9/11 literary scholarship to trauma theory. She has published essays on trauma, grief, counternarratives and the aesthetics of abjection in the Irish Journal of American Studies, C21: Journal of Twenty-First Century Writings and Contemporary Aesthetics, and guest-edited a special issue of Comparative Critical Studies on the theme of ‘Randomness’. Catherine Gander is Associate Professor of American Literature at Maynooth University, Ireland. She is the author of the award-winning Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), and co-editor of Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices (with Sarah Garland, 2016), and has published several pieces on DeLillo, most recently in DeLillo in Context (ed. Jesse Kavadlo, 2022). Her research addresses the intersections of visual culture and literature across fiction, poetry and art, and she is completing a book called Extending the Document: Contemporary Transmedial Poetics (forthcoming). She is Chair (2019–) of the all-island Irish Association for American Studies (IAAS) (2019–). Sarah Garland’s research works between, and theorises the relationship between, literary and art forms. Her work looks at the intersections of literary and visual style, and at the functions of the author, artist, reader and audience in acts of interpretation. As well as visual and literary styles, she also has an emerging expertise in more popular ‘lifestyle’ discourses, that is, the ways in which dress and interior design function as makers of meaning, particularly in artistic communities. She has

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published in international collections and peer-reviewed journals on Gertrude Stein and food writing, on Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and aestheticism, on baroque and modernist style, on Henry Miller, and on the American bestseller. She is coeditor with Catherine Gander of Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Verbal and Visual Practices (2016) and a special edition of the European Journal of American Culture on the ‘American Imagetext’ (2013). She is currently working on ‘Packaging Experience’, an interdisciplinary project on the American avant-garde multimedia magazine in a box, Aspen (1965–71). Cristina Garrigós is Professor of American Literature at UNED (National University of Distance Education) in Spain. Her research interests include US contemporary literature, film, music, postmodernism, memory and gender studies. She has published on Kathy Acker, Gloria Anzaldúa, Rabih Alameddine, John Barth, Giannina Braschi, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, Ruth Ozeki and Helena María Viramontes, among others. Her last book was a monograph titled Alzheimer’s Disease in Contemporary US Fiction: Memory Lost (2021). Currently, she is co-editing a volume on Women in Rock Memoirs: Music, History and Life-Writing (forthcoming). She is President of the Spanish Association for American Studies (2023), and Chair of the organising committee of the 34th conference of the European Association for American Studies (EAAS 2022-Wastelands) held at the UNED in Madrid. Monika Gehlawat is Associate Director of the School of Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she teaches courses on contemporary and world literature, critical theory and visual art. Her book In Defense of Dialogue: Reading Habermas and Postwar American Literature (2020) reads the work of Frank O’Hara, James Baldwin, Grace Paley and Andy Warhol alongside Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action. She has published essays in Post 45: Peer-Reviewed, The James Baldwin Review, Contemporary Literature and Literary Imagination. She also serves as critic for the Center for Writers and Series Editor for Literary Conversations. Jonathan Gibbs is a novelist and academic. His first novel, Randall, or The Painted Grape (a fictional treatment of the lives of the Young British Artists), was published in 2014 and has been translated into French and Dutch. His second novel, The Large Door, set at an international academic conference, was published in 2019. Spring Journal, a book-length poem written in response to the coronavirus pandemic and modelled on Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, was published in 2020. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at City, University of London, where he is programme director for the MA and MFA Creative Writing programmes. He also curates the online short story project A Personal Anthology. Tim Groenland is the author of The Art of Editing: Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace, published in 2019. His writing has appeared in publications including Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Dublin Review of Books, as well as in edited collections on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature and on

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book history. He is co-editor of IJAS (Irish Journal of American Studies) Online, the scholarly publication of the Irish Association for American Studies. David Hering is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool, where he co-directs the Centre for New and International Writing. His writing has recently appeared in publications including The Los Angeles Review of Books, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Orbit, The London Magazine and 3:AM Magazine. He is the author of David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form (2016) and editor of Consider David Foster Wallace (2010). Graley Herren is Professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He is the author of Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television (2007), The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo (2019) and Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind (2021), as well as numerous articles on various modern writers. He serves on the board for the Comparative Drama Conference and edited five volumes of its Text & Presentation book series (2012–16). Andrew Hoberek is a Professor of English at the University of Missouri. He is the author of The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work (2005) and Reconsidering Watchmen: Poetry, Property, Politics (2014); the editor of The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy (2015); and the co-editor (with Jason Gladstone and Daniel Worden) of Postmodern, Postwar – And After: Rethinking American Literature (2016). Brian Jarvis is a Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Film at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. He is the author of Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture (1998), Cruel and Unusual: Punishment and U.S. Culture (2004) and co-editor of The Contemporary American Novel in Context (with Andrew Dix and Paul Jenner, 2011), as well as numerous essays on aspects of US writing and cinema. He is currently working on a study of Don DeLillo and the Visual (2024). Tim Jelfs is Assistant Professor in American Studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He is the author of The Argument about Things in the 1980s: Goods and Garbage in an Age of Neoliberalism (2018), which won the 2019 Arthur Miller Institute First Book Prize from the British Association for American Studies. Jesse Kavadlo is a Professor of English at Maryville University, in St Louis, Missouri. He is the author of numerous publications, including the books American Popular Culture in the Era of Terror: Falling Skies, Dark Knights Rising, and Collapsing Cultures (2015) and Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief (2004). He is also the co-editor of Michael Chabon’s America: Magical Words, Secret Worlds, and Sacred Spaces (with Bob Batchelor, 2014), editor of Don DeLillo in Context (2022), and president of the Don DeLillo Society. Alexandra Kingston-Reese is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of York. She is the author of Contemporary Novelists and the

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Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life (2020) and the editor of Art Essays (2021). She is the editor of ASAP/J, the open-access platform of ASAP/Journal, the scholarly publication of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. Her essays and reviews have recently appeared in Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Post45 and The Times Literary Supplement. Elise Martucci is Professor and Department Chair of English at SUNY Westchester Community College in New York, where the interplay of environment and nature with literature and writing are at the heart of her research and teaching. She is the author of The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo (2007). In 2017 her essay ‘Place as Active Receptacle in The Angel Esmeralda’ appeared in Don DeLillo after the Millennium: Currents and Currencies (ed. Jacqueline Zubeck), and in 2022 her essay ‘The Environment: Postmodern Ecology in Don DeLillo’s Fiction’ appeared in Don DeLillo: In Context (ed. Jesse Kavadlo). She has presented ecocritical readings of fiction by Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Jeffrey Eugenides and Jane Smiley, among others. In her position at Westchester Community College she developed and taught a course titled ‘Literature and the Environment’, participated in a teaching sustainability initiative, and is heading an interdisciplinary project that calls for environment to be a central theme across the General Education curriculum. Catherine Morley is Associate Professor of American Literature and Head of the School of Arts at the University of Leicester. She is the author of The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Literature: John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo (2007), Modern American Literature (Edinburgh University Press Critical Guides, 2012), and editor of American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century (co-edited with Martin Halliwell, Edinburgh University Press, 2008), American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (co-edited with Alex Goody, 2009), 9/11: Topics in American Literature (2016) and of a scholarly edition of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (2024). She has published a range of scholarly articles and chapters on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature. Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. He works in the areas of Ancient Greek philosophy and contemporary French philosophy. His most recent books include Plato and the Invention of Life (2018), Don DeLillo, American Original: Drugs, Weapons, Erotica, and Other Literary Contraband (2020), Class Acts: Derrida on the Public Stage (2021) and Apocalyptic Ruin and Everyday Wonder in Don DeLillo’s America (2022). He is the co-translator of several works by Jacques Derrida, including Life Death: Seminar 1975–76 (2020), and is a member of the Derrida Seminar Translation Project. He also co-edits the Oxford Literary Review. Liliana M. Naydan is Associate Professor of English at Penn State Abington. She is author of Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First-Century America (2021) and Rhetorics of Religion in American Fiction: Faith, Fundamentalism, and Fanaticism in the Age of Terror (2016). She is co-editor of Terror in Global Narrative (2016) and Out in the Center (2018). Her articles on twenty-first-century literature have appeared in journals including Studies in the Novel, Critique and Studies in American Fiction.

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Pavlina Radia is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science and Professor of English Studies at Nipissing University. She is also the director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Collaboration in the Arts and Sciences at Nipissing University. She is the author of Nomadic Modernisms and Diasporic Journeys of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles: ‘Two Very Serious Ladies’ (2016) and Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature (2016). She is also a coeditor of two collections of essays: Food and Appetites: The Hunger Artist and the Arts (with Ann McCulloch, 2012), and The Future of Humanity: Revisioning the Human in the Posthuman Age (with Sarah F. Winters and Laurie Kruk, 2019). She has also published work on Don DeLillo. Rebecca Rey is a research communications professional with a doctorate from The University of Western Australia. She has published in The Conversation and Cultural Studies Review, and her monograph Staging Don DeLillo (2016) is the first booklength study of DeLillo’s plays. Margaret Robson received her doctorate from the University of York. She moved to Dublin in 1995 and since then has lectured at UCD, NUI Maynooth, Dublin City University and Trinity College Dublin, where she is a Teaching Fellow. She has written a number of articles on medieval Romance and Arthurian literature. A medievalist scholar, she has developed a research and publishing interest in the works of Don DeLillo. Margaret Scanlan is Emerita Professor of English at Indiana University South Bend. She is the author of Traces of Another Time: History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction (1990), Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (2001), Culture and Customs of Ireland (2006) and Understanding Irene Nemirovsky (2018). Henry Veggian is Assistant Professor of Teaching at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He is the author of Understanding Don DeLillo (2014) and his writings on American postmodernism have appeared in a variety of publications, among them several edited collections and the journal boundary 2. Most recently, he was advisory editor of Short Story Criticism (vol. 261), which was devoted to the short fiction of Don DeLillo. Kiron Ward is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of St Andrews. His recent publications include Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (co-edited with Katherine da Cunha Lewin, 2018), Encyclopedia Joyce (co-edited with James Blackwell Phelan, James Joyce Quarterly, 2019), and James Joyce’s Ulysses at 100 (co-edited with E. Paige Miller, Textual Practice, 2022). His monograph, Encyclopaedism and Totality in Contemporary Fiction, is forthcoming in the series ‘New Horizons in Contemporary Writing’. Licheng Xie graduated with a PhD in English from Lancaster University in 2019 with the thesis ‘The Artfulness of DeLillo’s Novels: Artworks and Artists’. Her research interests span American literature, digital literature, new media art, cultural and

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creative industries and ‘One Belt One Road’ cross-cultural studies. She is currently working on developing her doctoral research on print/digital textuality and creating collaborative digital works with e-lit writers. She has a particular but not exclusive interest in Chinese text-based artworks.

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Index

abjection abject performance art in The Body Artist, 370–4, 380 art and abject ruin in Falling Man, 368, 369, 374–80 in DeLillo’s works, 369–70 notion of, 368–9, 371, 375 Abstract Expressionists, 1, 95, 96 adaptation ‘Baader-Meinhof,’ 264, 265, 267–71 The Body Artist, 264, 265, 274–5 Cosmopolis (Cronenberg), 243, 264, 272–4 of DeLillo’s works, 264–5, 275–6 Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 265, 266–7 ‘The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven,’ 264, 265, 271–2 Adorno, Theodor, 58, 62, 150, 153, 191 advertising American popular art, 298 in Americana, 19, 151, 253 DeLillo’s career in, 19, 151 in Mao II, 86 for the Most Photographed Barn in America, 109–10 in Point Omega, 14–15, 129–30, 282 political critique and, 297–8 for Psycho, 259 aesthetics of the art encounter, 13–14, 65–6, 71, 75–7 of art galleries, 66–7, 69 of beauty, 82, 101 Dedalian aesthetics, 223 definitions, 65–6, 67, 68 of DeLillian death, 26–7, 28–9, 32 of found objects, 12, 94, 101, 105–6 male violence and, 70 of political violence, 51 snapshot aesthetic, 114

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textual elements, 74 see also sublime affect the affective glint, 48–9 affective minimisation, 40, 42–3 in DeLillo’s works, 38, 39, 43 in ekphrastic writing, 196 of found objects, 96 of the iconic, 81–2, 86 impersonality, 43–4 in Players, 38–9, 40, 42–3, 44, 45, 46, 47 in Point Omega, 40, 44, 45, 47, 58 in postmodernism, 39, 40–1, 48 realism and, 237 in The Silence, 49 somatic displays, 39, 40, 44–8, 58 tonal shifts, 39, 40–4 visual referents, 46–7, 48 African American fiction, 238 Agamben, Giorgio, 2, 9 Alzheimer’s disease, 5, 126, 376–7 Amazons, 150, 154 Americana advertising, 19, 151, 253 artistry and Joyce, 224–6 the blank pages, 27 colour in, 151–2 editorial process, 166–7 graffiti in, 440–1 the iconic public figure, 84–5 the ironic fable, 98–9, 104, 143 landscapes, 136 the long take, 251, 253–4, 257 material lists, 99–100 myth of the American West, 141–3 the Pan Am building, 431–2 telephones, 338–9 the television network, 4 temporal character, 252, 253–4, 257

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index 461 Angel Esmeralda, The, 175–6, 215, 448 Antaeus, 216–17, 219–20 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 251 archaeological imagination archaeologist figures, 413, 424 archaeology/myth intersection, 419–24 civilisational decline, 413–19, 424, 430–1 concept, 8–9 the desert in, 8, 9, 59–60, 102 dystopic visions, 416–17 imagery of ruins and ruin, 8–9, 104, 413–18 temporality of, 9, 415–16 architecture Manhattanhenge in Zero K, 193, 415 New York in DeLillo’s works, 427, 428–9 the Pan Am building, 431–2 postmodern city architecture, 41–2 power and, 427, 428, 429, 430 rooftop spaces, 433–4, 436 skyscrapers, 427, 428, 431 spatiality of, 427, 436 urban planning and, 428–30, 433, 434–5 Watts Towers, 74, 75, 160, 431, 447 windowless spaces, 432–3, 436–7 the World Trade Center, 91, 139–40, 427, 430–6 archival art archives in Libra, 7 cataloguing of objects, 12, 33, 99 contemporary archival artists, 6–7 in DeLillo’s works, 7–9 excavation/construction dialectic, 9 found objects, 6, 12 physicality, 11 (re)connections within, 9 Robert Smithson’s land art, 7–8 turn to, 6–7 in Underworld, 8 in Zero K, 7, 12, 130 art American popular art, 298 art of starvation, 31 art’s relation to political violence, 51, 62–3, 68, 70, 72, 361 in DeLillo’s works, 1–3, 65, 385 violent art and violence relationship, 56–7, 58–9, 269, 308, 310, 359–60 as a way of seeing, 1–3

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art galleries the aesthetic experience of, 66–7, 69 art as fiction, 402, 403, 404 art stalkers, 55, 70–1, 75, 409 in ‘Baader-Meinhof,’ 68–9 cave art of Ratner’s Star, 402–4, 407, 411 in DeLillo’s works, 9, 385, 401–2, 403, 406 Gerhard Richter’s October 1 cycle, 51–2, 55–6, 68 as guarded spaces, 410 the Hitler film in Running Dog, 71–2, 405–6, 408, 409, 410 juxtaposed with the desert, 406–7 in Mao II, 12–13, 66–8, 69, 71 mirroring aspects of, 403, 404–5, 407, 408–10 as nested spaces, 405–6, 408, 409–10 101 figure and, 411–12 in Point Omega, 15, 57–9, 68, 69–70, 408 public/private galleries, 402 rituals of devotion, 410–11 temporality of, 405–6 as tombs, 410 the viewing subject and, 68, 401, 407–8 art stalkers in art galleries, 55, 70–1, 75, 409 in Falling Man, 70–1, 76 gendered gaze of, 55, 75, 409 in The Names, 70 in Point Omega, 15, 58, 61, 62, 127, 128, 279, 408, 409 ‘The Starveling,’ 70, 127 in Zero K, 205–6 artworks the act of viewing, 12–13 affect indexed to visual referents, 46–7, 48 affective glint in, 48–9 the art encounter, 13–14, 65–6, 68–9 still life, 13–14 atomic bomb imagery, 10, 18, 92, 102, 103 audience the collective experience, 343–6, 347, 351–2 performance/audience relationship, 350–1 for plays, 342–3, 348, 349 readership for the novels, 350 theatre as a transformative experience, 344–6 theatre without spectators, 261–2

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462 index Auster, Paul, 191 n.14, 233, 420–1, 423 authors author-editor relationships, 167, 171–2, 176 in DeLillo’s works, 122–3, 132 digital co-writing practices, 323–4 digital media’s threat to, 290, 300–1 fiction/drama distinctions, 341, 342, 343, 348, 351–2 role of the contemporary author, 2, 123, 213–14, 215, 218–19, 346, 433 ‘Baader-Meinhof’ adaptation as Looking at the Dead, 264, 265, 267–71 art galleries in, 68–9, 409 art’s relation to political violence, 51–2, 68, 69, 72 Gerhard Richter’s October 1 cycle, 51–2, 55–6, 68, 268 male predatory gaze, 55, 75, 269 narrative overview, 55–7 violent art and violence relationship, 56–7, 269, 409 Banville, John, 38, 40 Barthes, Roland, 118, 133, 150 Baudrillard, Jean, 109, 110, 145, 150, 336, 363, 439 Beardsley, Monroe, 65–6, 67, 68, 75 Benjamin, Walter, 51, 89, 150, 153, 254 Berardi, Franco (Bifo), 189–90 Berger, John, 3 n.2, 13, 16, 70 Bergson, Henri, 251–2 bodies bodily interactive texts, 322–5 the body and Joycean references in Zero K, 230–2 brutalised bodies in Zero K, 362–3 in Cosmopolis, 185–6 embodiment of the mind, 230–2 podiatric imagery, 232–3 in postmodernism, 45 queer bodies, 14 somatic displays of affect, 39, 40, 44–8 spectacle and bodily transfiguration, 356–8, 361, 363–5, 380 Body Artist, The abject performance art, 373–4 adaptation as À Jamais, 264, 265, 274–5 colour in, 149, 150 death in, 26, 274, 357–8 the Dedalian artist figure, 223

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embodiment of the mind, 230 grief in, 357–9, 370–3, 380 performative queering, 358–9 plot structure, 357 spectacle and bodily transfiguration, 356–8, 361, 373, 380 temporal character, 31–2, 252, 256, 284, 406, 415 Boehm, Gottfried, 14 Bogart, Keith, 264, 265, 271–2 Boxall, Peter, 3, 59, 62, 88, 90, 128, 222, 281, 405, 407 Branco, Paulo, 264, 265, 274–5 Brennan, Teresa, 38, 39, 46 Breton, André, 96, 97 Brosch, Renate, 196 Bruegel the Elder, Pieter, 18–19 Brustein, Robert, 345, 348, 349, 351, 352 Butler, Judith, 331–2, 356 Cantú, Francisco, 136 capitalism anti-capitalism protests in Cosmopolis, 186, 187 control of the landscape and, 137–9, 142, 143, 429 cyber-capitalism, 138, 184, 189, 311–12 the dreck of late capitalism, 95, 97–9, 100, 101, 102, 104 graffiti and, 441 market fundamentalism, 306–8 poetry as an antidote to, 189–90 supra-capitalist historical consciousness, 95, 97–9 temporal character, 184 Cather, Willa, 418 Chardin, Teilhard de, 278, 280–2, 283, 285, 286, 287–8, 359, 361, 395–6, 423 Cheeke, Stephen, 196 Chen Qianxun, 320, 321 colour alongside space, 149 in Amazons, 150, 154 in Americana, 27, 151–2 aura concept, 153 in The Body Artist, 149, 150 chromophobia, 151–2 colour symbolism, 150–1 in comic books, 149, 161 in Cosmopolis, 161 in DeLillo’s works, 8, 149

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index 463 dreams and, 152 in ekphrastic writing, 150 in End Zone, 152–3 in Falling Man, 154 female characters and, 152, 161 in Great Jones Street, 153 in Libra, 157 in Mao II, 157–8 monochrome film, 151, 155, 158–9 in The Names, 155–6 in Players, 154–5 in the post-9/11 works, 161 in Ratner’s Star, 154 in Running Dog, 155 skin colours, 151–2, 153–4 terms, 149, 150 theories of, 150 in Underworld, 8, 158–61 in White Noise, 153, 156 in Zero K, 161 comic books, 149, 150, 161 conceptual art, 95, 104, 105, 106 connection archival art’s (re)connections, 9 in DeLillo’s works, 10 visuality of the words on the page, 10–11, 20 Cosmopolis anti-capitalism protests, 186, 187 colour in, 161 cyber-capitalism, 184, 189, 311–12 the death drive, 272–4 editorial process, 174 history and etymology, 185, 188 the human body, 185–6 land art’s function, 385–6 market fundamentalism, 306–7 New York in, 435 pictorial language, 188–9, 330 plot structure, 183 poetry in, 183–90 as a post-9/11 novel, 187–8 rat imagery, 186–7, 189, 190–1 telephones, 185, 330, 331 temporal character, 184–5, 252, 256 urban landscape, 137–9 Cosmopolis (Cronenberg), 243, 264, 272–4 Cowart, David, 3, 26, 60, 132, 140, 183, 222, 281, 282, 285, 288, 385 Cronenberg, David, 243, 264, 272–4 Currie, Mark, 112

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Dalí, Salvador, 280 Day Room, The, 344, 345, 346, 352 death the abject and, 368, 375 in adaptations of DeLillo’s works, 266 archival art and, 8, 9 art galleries as tombs, 410 in The Body Artist, 26, 274 condition of living death, 18, 25–7 continuity with the living, 28–9, 35–6 cryogenic preservation, 17, 18, 205, 230–1, 361–2, 363 the death drive, 32, 225, 272–4, 275, 424 deathless death in Zero K, 26 DeLillian aesthetics of, 26–7, 28–9, 32 in DeLillo’s works, 10, 17–18, 26 in End Zone, 18, 25–7, 28, 32 grief in The Body Artist, 357–9, 370–3, 380 iconic images and, 10, 81, 88–91 the language of, 26 momento mori, 13, 17, 199, 375–6 natural death in Zero K, 206–7 and a new kind of being, 32 plot and narratives journey towards, 89–90, 252, 255–7, 260, 262, 266, 272 queering of, 14, 365–6 suspended in still lifes, 13–14, 17 as a tender experience, 25–6, 27, 28, 32 The Triumph of Death (Bruegel the Elder), 18–19 Debord, Guy, 272, 321, 355, 358–9 Deleuze, Gilles, 251–2 DeLillo, Don agent, 167 archives, 166, 169, 173, 174, 191 career in advertising, 19, 151 Catholicism, 236, 271, 292, 305, 308, 419 childhood love of comic books, 149, 150, 161 friendship with Gordon Lish, 168–9 human rights advocacy, 180–1, 187, 210–14, 219 in 1970s New York, 428 on the personal experience of time, 414–15 as a postmodern writer, 3, 9, 12, 38, 40, 135, 241 prophetic vision, 4 public persona, 2

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464 index DeLillo (cont.) relationship with Nan Graham, 174–6 relationships with editors, 5–6, 165–6, 167 relationships with publishers, 167–9 time spent in Greece, 11, 179 use of typewriters, 2, 10–11, 179–80, 312, 319, 322 visual sense, 1–2, 15, 319–20, 347–8, 352 DeLilloesque ambiguous realism, 237 in Colson Whitehead’s works, 239–41, 244 fiction and history in, 241–3, 245 flat tone, 237, 238–9, 240, 241, 243, 245 influence on A. M. Homes, 239, 241 influence on female writers, 238, 239, 240, 241 influence on writers of colour, 238, 239–41 the miraculous alongside the quotidian, 235–6, 237, 266 in New Sincerity fiction, 238–9 9/11 and, 241–3 prestige television and, 236–7, 243–4 term, 3 deserts of American mythology, 141, 143 in the archaeological imagination, 8, 9, 59–60, 102 End Zone, 59, 101, 141, 392 imagery of ruins and ruin, 417–18 juxtaposed with art galleries, 406–7 Klara Sax’s art project in Underworld, 7, 8, 74, 98, 102, 140, 144, 159–61, 226–7, 370 as placeless, 145 Point Omega, 59–60, 145, 361, 395, 406–7 religious myth and, 418–24 in Running Dog, 102, 407 in Underworld, 102, 143, 226 in Willa Cather’s works, 418–19 digital media bodily interactive texts, 322–5 digital co-writing practices, 323–4 the future of the novel and, 315–16, 325 globalisation and, 311 hypertext, 317 image-text interfaces, 319–22 impact on language, 316 the postmodern sublime and, 290 threat to the author, 290, 300–1 see also screen culture

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Drew, Richard, 119–20, 201, 374–5 Drucker, Johanna, 119 Duchamp, Marcel, 94, 95, 96, 97, 101 editors for Americana, 166–7 for The Angel Esmeralda, 175–6 author-editor relationships, 167, 171–2, 176 for Cosmopolis, 174 DeLillo’s relationships with, 5–6, 165–6, 167 for Libra, 168 portrayed in Mao II, 169–73 for Ratner’s Star, 167 textual changes to The Silence, 165, 176–7 for Underworld, 174 Eggers, Dave, 7 ekphrasis affect, 196 colour descriptions, 150 definition, 195–6, 197 in DeLillo’s works, 195, 197 in Falling Man, 117–18, 197, 200–4, 375 gendered perception and, 196–7, 198–9, 201, 203–4 in Mao II, 111, 197–9 narrative ekphrasis, 72 and the nature of art, 196 photography in, 108, 111, 117–18 in Point Omega, 7, 286–7 in video art, 286–7 in Zero K, 197, 204–7 Electronic Literature Organization, 323–4 Eliot, T. S., 181, 190 embodiment see bodies Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 9, 99, 179, 181, 182, 183, 188, 192 End Zone the atom bomb, 103 colour in, 152–3 condition of living death, 18, 25–7 death as tender experience, 25–6, 27, 28, 32 desert setting, 59, 101, 141, 392 dualities of, 27–8, 31 embedded violence, 27 found objects in, 100–2 junction between words and things, 33, 192 land art in, 392–3, 395 reanimated in ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky,’ 32–3 Rilke’s Ninth Elegy, 27–8, 35, 192

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index 465 faith/religion DeLillo and Catholicism, 236, 271, 292, 305, 308, 419 in DeLillo’s works, 419 of desert settings, 418–24 in Falling Man, 305–6, 377–9 false faith of technology, 10 the sacred vs the commercial, 430 Falling Man art and abject ruin, 368, 369, 374–80 art stalkers, 70–1, 76 colour in, 154 disordered time, 187, 376, 415 ekphrasis in, 117–18, 197, 200–4, 375 the ‘Falling Man’ photograph, 117–20, 200–1, 374–5 the figure of Hammad, 305, 306 Natura morta paintings by Morandi, 13, 14, 70–1, 73, 75–6, 94, 124, 125, 200, 202–3, 408 Nina as writer, 126 performance art, 13, 71, 72, 73–4, 118, 124, 125, 126–7, 201, 202, 287, 375–9 photography in, 109, 117–20, 125–6 plot structure, 124 poetry in, 191–2 as postlapsarian, 423 religious experiences in, 305–6, 377–9 spectacle and bodily transfiguration, 380 televisuality of 9/11, 304 urban landscape, 137 the viewing subject, 124–6, 407–8 the World Trade Center, 369 film adaptations of DeLillo’s works, 17 black-and-white film, 151, 155, 158–9 camera-eye perspectives, 39 cinematic novels, 264, 269, 274 Cronenberg’s adaptation of Cosmopolis, 243, 264, 272–4 disaster genre, 293 filmic influences on DeLillo, 7 the Hitler film of Running Dog, 67, 71, 72, 82, 87–8, 89, 155, 261, 405–6, 408, 409, 410 Italian neorealism, 251 the Kennedy assassination film, 30, 73, 88, 90, 157, 254–6 the long take, 7, 251 long-take filmmakers, 253, 254, 255 movement-images, 251–2, 260, 261

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slow motion film, 28, 30, 32 suspense vs suspension, 252–3, 254 time-images, 251–2, 260, 261 see also video art Fisketjon, Gary, 168 Foster, Hal, 6, 7, 8, 9 Foucault, Michel, 137 found objects aesthetics of, 12, 94, 101, 105 in archival art, 6, 12 curation of, 94, 95, 100–1, 104, 105–6 in DeLillo’s works, 94–5 the dreck of late capitalism, 95, 97–9, 100, 101, 102, 104 Duchamp’s readymades, 95, 96, 101 emotional pull of, 96 in End Zone, 100–2 historicity of, 103–5 the ironic fable in Americana, 98–9, 104 lists of materials, 99–100 l’objet trouvé, 94, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103 material waste objects, 98, 99, 369–70, 446–7 mimetic transformation, 12, 105–6 in Ratner’s Star, 105 second wave of readymades, 97 subject-object divide, 95, 96–7, 101, 103 supra-capitalist historical consciousness, 95, 97–9 tension between transposition and transformation, 94, 103 of Underworld, 102 Watts Towers, 74, 75, 160, 431, 447 Franzen, Jonathan, 238–9 Freeman, Elizabeth, 113 Gander, Catherine, 127, 260, 285, 376, 392 gender ekphrasis and gendered perception, 196–7, 198–9, 201, 203–4 gendered gaze, 15, 16, 55, 70, 75, 146, 196, 201, 206, 363 gendered violence, 77, 310 land as female metaphors, 142, 145–7 Giacometti, Alberto, 96 Godard, Jean-Luc, 1, 252, 319 Goffman, Erving, 334 Gordon, Douglas, 16, 359 24 Hour Psycho, 6–7, 16, 32, 36, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51, 57–9, 60, 69–70, 127, 129, 259–61, 262, 278, 280, 283, 285–8, 308, 405, 406

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466 index Gordon, Edmund, 238 Gottlieb, Robert, 166, 167 graffiti as an affirmative action, 439 in Americana, 440–1 as an art form, 442–6 ‘Bird Lives’ tag, 439–40, 443, 451 in DeLillo’s works, 8, 439, 442, 446 language of, 441–2, 444–6, 449, 451 in Mao II, 441 in The Names, 441–2 parallels with corporate logos, 441 parallels with DeLillo as a writer, 450–1 as postmodern expression, 448 redemptive potential of, 449–50 subversive potential of, 446–8 in Underworld, 8, 160, 287, 440, 441, 442–51 Graham, Nan, 166, 167, 173, 174–6 Great Jones Street colour in, 153 counter-archaeology, 415 the Dedalian artist figure, 223 the iconic public figure, 83 the mute telephone, 329, 330 New York in, 428 performance and performativity, 329, 330, 332–5 Greenwald Smith, Rachel, 39, 40, 42, 43–4 Grimonprez, Johan, 265, 266–7 ‘Hammer and Sickle,’ 307–8, 312 Haneke, Michael, 261 Hanson, Duane, 45 Harding, Wendy, 447–8, 451 Harris, Dianne, 135, 138 Hatlen, Theodore W., 343–4 Hawley, Noah, 236–7, 244–5 Heffernan, James, 195, 196 Herbert, Zbigniew, 186, 187, 188 Herren, Graley, 3, 55, 68, 70, 75, 223–4, 225, 401, 408, 409, 415 Heyne, Erik, 138–9 history alongside politics, 51 archaeological impulse of poetry, 181–2 chaotic whirl of, 29–30, 31 and etymology in Cosmopolis, 185 fiction’s counterhistorical role, 4–6, 7, 9 historicity of found things, 103–5 in Point Omega, 60

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ruined civilisations, 413–19, 424 supra-capitalist historical consciousness, 95, 97–9 Hitchcock, Alfred, 58, 62, 127, 129, 254, 260 Homes, A. M., 239, 240, 244 Hopper, Edward, 12, 46, 48 Howard, Gerald, 166, 167, 168, 173 Husserl, Edmund, 188 Hutcheon, Linda, 265, 266 Hyde, Emily, 119–20 iconic, term, 81, 86 iconic images affective impact, 81–2, 86 the atom bomb, 10, 92 Byzantine icons, 86 in DeLillo’s works, 81, 82, 87 within a globalised world, 85–6 the glow of the iconic, 88–9, 90 Hitler’s image in Running Dog, 87–8, 89 the idea of death and, 10, 81, 88–91 the Kennedy assassination film, 88, 90 in Mao II, 83, 88–9, 111, 297, 299–300 The Most Photographed Barn in America, 2, 12, 83–4, 109–11, 123, 141 in the national imagination, 83–6 of public figures, 83, 84–5, 88–9, 111 reproduction and repetition of, 83–4, 85–6, 88 the sacred and, 86–8 term, 81 in White Noise, 81, 82, 85, 86, 90–2 identity alienation of the self, 227–30 Americanness in The Names, 54 expressed through landscapes, 137–9 icons in the national imagination, 83–6 imagery of shoes and feet, 233 post-cryogenic preservation, 231 technology’s diminishment of, 5 of a theatre of audience, 343–4 writing and self-identity, 5–6 Imagism, 282 ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ civilisational decline, 412, 413, 417, 430 on communion, 379 counternarrative in, 4, 200, 368 disordered time, 187, 376, 430 futurity in, 4 language’s limits, 133

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index 467 the sacred vs the commercial, 430 shared experience and meaningful understanding, 53, 133 televisuality of 9/11, 304 the twin towers in, 140 n.2, 412 us versus them rhetoric, 305 Jacobs, Jane, 428, 434 Jameson, Fredric on expression and affect, 46, 237 on history, 245 on postmodernism, 40, 41, 45, 48, 102, 106, 254, 255, 298, 300 on Sartre, 100, 101 on technology, 293 thing theory and, 96–7 on Warhol, 296 jazz, 1, 439 Jenkins, Barry, 245 Joyce, James artistry in Americana, 224–6 belonging in Underworld, 226–30 Dedalian aesthetics, 223 DeLillo’s engagement with, 1, 19, 222–3, 233 Dubliners, 130 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 214, 222, 223–4 referenced in Libra, 222 Ulysses, 87, 225, 226, 228–31 as unfilmable works, 265 Kafka, Franz, 1, 31, 265 Kauffman, Linda, 2, 56 Keats, John, 195, 200 Kennedy, John F., 29, 30, 73, 88, 90, 157, 254–6, 437 Kierkegaard, Søren, 377 Kluge, Alexander, 237 Koepnick, Lutz, 257, 260, 262 Kosuth, Joseph, 97, 99 Kristeva, Julia, 368, 371, 372, 375 Kurosawa, Akira, 253, 254 land art in DeLillo’s works, 385, 386–7, 392, 398–9 in End Zone, 392–3, 395 function of, 385–6 influence on archival art, 7–8 in Love-Lies-Bleeding, 393–5

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in Point Omega, 395–6 Robert Smithson’s land art, 7–8, 387–92, 393, 394, 396, 398 spatiality of, 386 in Zero K, 7, 396–8, 405 landscapes capitalist control of, 137–9, 142, 143, 429 in DeLillo’s works, 135–6, 147 images and narratives of, 140–1, 142, 147 land as female metaphors, 142, 145–7 myth of the American West, 140–4 readings of, 140–1 urban landscapes, 136–40 ways of seeing and, 137 see also architecture; deserts language acts of naming, 33, 132, 182, 185, 188 aesthetics of the words on the page, 10–11, 20, 101 Americana’s blank pages, 27 childlike babbling, 193, 421 cinematic prose, 269, 274 of death, 26 DeLillo’s theory of, 4–5, 181–2, 222 in the digital age, 315–16 emancipatory potential, 4–5 flat tone, 237, 238–9, 241, 243, 245 as fossil poetry, 9, 179, 181–2, 192–3 of graffiti, 441–2, 444–6, 449, 451 Imagism, 282 junction between words and things, 33–5, 122–3, 319 in The Names, 53–5, 316, 421–3, 441–2 paginal space and, 179, 180, 183–4 palaeolinguistics, 413, 421 photography and, 108, 109 pictorial language, 181–2, 188–9, 330 poetic practices and, 179–80, 184 in Point Omega, 282–3 rhythm and, 179–80 in The Silence, 365 violence of, 27, 53 Le Corbusier, 428, 429–30, 432, 434 LeClair, Thomas, 99, 101, 195, 222, 238, 308, 319, 405 Leftovers, The (HBO), 235 Leps, Marie-Christine, 138 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 53

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468 index Libra the archive in, 7 colour, 157 critical reception, 2 the Dedalian artist figure, 223–4 editorial process, 168 influence on Marlon James, 241 Joycean references, 222 the Kennedy assassination film, 30, 73, 88, 90, 157, 254–6 suspense and the temporal narrative, 254–6 whirl of history, 29–30, 31 Lindelof, Damon, 235, 244, 245 Lippard, Lucy, 97, 104, 105, 106 Lish, Gordon, 168–9 Lorde, Audre, 190 Love-Lies-Bleeding the archaeological imagination and, 413 audience collective experiences of, 344, 346, 347 audience-performance relationship, 345 DeLillo’s engagement with, 349 land art, 393–5 liveness of performance, 343 Lyotard, Jean-François, 290, 291, 292, 293 magazine publications, 166 Magritte, Rene, 95 Man, Paul de, 357, 365, 366 Mao II art gallery scenes, 12–13, 66–8, 69, 71 art of abject waste and ruin, 370 cold, flat tone of, 237 colour in, 157–8 cultural images in, 82 the Dedalian artist figure, 223 dedication to Gordon Lish, 169 Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y adaptation, 265, 266–7 the editor figure, 169–73 ekphrasis, 111, 197–9 graffiti, 441 the iconic public figure, 83, 88–9, 111 New York in, 428, 436 parallels between marketing and iconography, 86 photographic images, 82, 109, 111, 157–8, 197, 320 photography in, 109, 111–17, 197–8 plot structure, 111–12

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the postmodern sublime, 296–301 role of the writer, 68, 199, 279 Warhol triptych, 89, 94, 158, 197, 297–300 words-actions duality, 331 Martucci, Elise, 447, 450 Massumi, Brian, 319, 322, 323, 324 Mauro, Aaron, 118 memory art’s function and, 125, 126–7 dementia, 5, 126, 377 of natural death in Zero K, 206–7 visualisation of in still lifes, 13 writing’s function and, 5–6, 126 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 150 Michaels, Walter Benn, 118 ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’ death’s continuity with the living, 35–6 End Zone reanimated in, 32–3 junction between words and things, 33–5 Mitchell, W. J. T., 135, 144, 195, 321 Moore, Frank C., 295, 296 Morandi, Giorgio, 12, 13–14, 200, 202–3, 408 Mulvey, Laura, 260, 285, 286, 363 Munch, Edvard, 46 Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life, The, 346 Naas, Michael, 3, 224 Names, The archaeology/myth intersection, 419, 420 art stalkers, 70 art’s relation to political violence, 51, 52–3 carved words, 11, 179, 184, 321 colour in, 155–6 graffiti in, 441–2 the iconic in, 81–2 language theme, 53–5, 316, 421–3, 441–2 narrative overview, 52 visuality of the words on the page, 11, 179 writer-machine interactive space, 323, 325 Negri, Antonio, 211 New Sincerity fiction, 238–9 Ngai, Sianne, 41, 95 9/11 counternarratives to, 310–11 critiques of post-9/11 screens, 303–4 the DeLilloesque and, 241–3 DeLillo’s post-9/11 works, 4, 5, 6, 51, 133, 140 n.2

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index 469 ekphrasis and access to, 200–4 post-9/11 works, 4, 5, 6, 51, 133, 140 n.2 televisuality of, 303, 304, 308 understandings of fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism, 304–6 Underworld and, 242 us versus them rhetoric, 305 see also Falling Man; ‘In the Ruins of the Future’; World Trade Center objects the archival impulse and, 12 the barn in White Noise, 2, 12, 83–4, 109–11, 123, 141 junction between words and things, 33–5 mimetic transformation, 12, 105–6 nude women as, 15–16 plays as, 343 ritualistic objects, 67 subjectivity of, 12, 195 within the visuality of a scene, 11–12, 100–1, 195 see also artworks; found objects Olmsted, Frederic, 136 Osteen, Mark, 3, 122, 186, 187, 224, 225, 282, 295, 298, 344, 411, 446, 447, 450–1 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 2, 29–30, 31, 35, 83, 88, 255 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 255, 261 PEN American Center, 179, 180–1, 187 Pentcheva, Bissera V., 86 performance of drama, 342–4 the liveness of performance, 343 performance/audience relationship, 350–1 see also theatrical works performance art abject performance art in The Body Artist, 370–4 artist-machine interactive space, 322, 358 DeLillo’s typewriter as, 322 in Falling Man, 13, 71, 72, 73–4, 118, 124, 125, 126–7, 201, 202, 287, 375–9 staged events of short fiction, 19–20, 209 see also public readings performative, term, 329–30

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performativity the artist as performative intellectual, 213–14, 217, 218–19 in Great Jones Street, 329, 330, 332–5 performative acts, 355–6 performative queering, 356, 357, 358–9, 365–6 in The Silence, 11 spectacle as a performative act, 356 telephones, 11, 330 term, 330, 331–2 of war and technology, 360–1 in White Noise, 330, 336–8 see also public readings Périot, Jean-Gabriel, 264, 265, 267–71 Perrotta, Tom, 236, 244 photography affective development, 113 as an art form, 108, 111, 113–15, 119 creative sexual attraction in Mao II, 115, 116 in DeLillo’s works, 108–9 in ekphrastic writing, 108, 111, 117–18 elegiac nature of, 199 in Falling Man, 117–20, 125–6 the ‘Falling Man’ photograph, 117–20, 200–1, 374–5 the gendered gaze and, 198 images of terrorism, 117, 199 and the lost object, 109 in Mao II, 109, 111–17, 197–8 The Most Photographed Barn in America, 2, 12, 83–4, 109–11, 123, 141 photographic seeing, 116–17 the practice of photography, 109–11, 112–15 snapshot aesthetic, 114 temporality of, 109, 118–20 unpublished public images, 109, 116, 117–19 see also ‘Baader-Meinhof’ Pirandello, Luigi, 347, 348 Players affect in, 38–9, 40, 42–3, 44, 45, 46, 47 artwork’s glint, 12 capitalism’s material waste, 98, 99 colour in, 154–5 postmodern city architecture, 41–2 the World Trade Center, 41, 91, 104, 432, 435–6

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470 index plays see theatrical works poetry as an antidote to capitalism, 189–90 contemplations on time, 424–5 in Cosmopolis, 183–90 in DeLillo’s works, 9, 181 Emerson’s fossil poetry, 179, 181–2, 192–3 Emerson’s ideal poet, 179, 181, 182, 183, 188 the haiku form, 15, 61, 129, 181, 361 in Point Omega, 15, 61 references to Rilke, 15 n8 social function of, 180–1 the writer’s poetic paradox, 179–80, 184 Point Omega advertising, 14–15, 129–30, 282 affect, 40, 44, 45, 47, 58 American home-grown terrorism, 309–10 archaeology/myth intersection, 423 art galleries, 15, 57–9, 68, 69–70, 408 art stalkers, 15, 58, 61, 62, 127, 128, 279, 408, 409 art’s relation to political violence, 51, 62–3, 68, 70, 72, 361 critique of apathy, 308–9 desert setting, 59–60, 145, 361, 395, 406–7 durational image, 252–3 ekphrasis, 7, 286–7 Elster’s way of seeing, 14–15, 60, 61 the gaze and, 127–9 grief and abjection, 370 haiku, 15, 61, 129, 181, 361 interview of Richard Elster, 8, 48, 57, 61, 62, 127–8, 129, 257, 278–9, 309–10, 360–1 Jessie’s role, 15–16, 57, 59, 61–2, 70, 128–9, 146–7, 258, 259, 310 land art, 395–6 landscapes, 144–7 language, 282–3 late fictional style, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62 male predatory gaze, 15, 16, 55, 70, 75, 146 media spectacle, 359–60 notions of history, 60 performativity of war and technology, 360–1 plot structure, 129 poetry, 15, 61

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reviews, 38, 58 screen culture, 308 spectacle and bodily transfiguration, 356–7, 361–3 spectacle as a performative act, 356 stone imagery, 395–6 Teilhard de Chardin references, 278, 280–2, 283, 285, 287–8, 359, 361, 395–6, 423 time and realities of, 32, 127, 257–61, 262, 279–82, 285–6 24 Hour Psycho (Gordon), 7, 16, 32, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51, 57–9, 60, 69–70, 127, 129, 259–61, 262, 278, 280, 283, 285–8, 308, 359, 405, 406 US extraordinary rendition policy, 60, 257, 283, 361 violent art and violence relationship, 58–9, 308, 310, 359–60 word/image relationships, 128–30 politics alongside history, 51 art’s relation to political violence, 51–2, 62–3, 68, 70, 72, 361 the image’s political power, 86 literature and political commentary, 186, 187, 212–13 political critique and advertising, 297–8 theatrical works as political acts, 344–5, 346–7 postmodernism affect in, 39, 40–1, 48 art, 297–8 city architecture, 41–2 DeLillo as a postmodernist writer, 3, 9, 12, 38, 40, 135, 241 dreck, 98 Fredric Jameson and, 40, 41, 45, 48, 102, 106, 254, 255, 298, 300 the human form in, 45 postmodern sublime, 290, 291–3, 295, 297, 299 Pound, Ezra, 1, 15 Proust, Marcel, 265 Psycho (Hitchcock), 58, 62, 127, 129, 260 public readings ‘The Artist Naked in a Cage,’ 210–12, 214 audience responses/unsettling effects, 209–10 by DeLillo of Herbert’s poetry, 187

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index 471 of short fiction, 213 the staged event and, 19–20, 209–10, 215 ‘Stand-In for Wei Jingsheng,’ 210–11, 219 Underworld, 209–10 publishing industry Antaeus, 216–17, 219–20 the conglomerate era, 170–3, 174 DeLillo’s relationships with, 168–9 imprints, 167–8 multimedia channels, 171–2, 173 publicity and marketing strategies, 169–70 short fiction format, 213 Pynchon, Thomas, 43, 98, 111, 238, 424 queer performative queering, 356, 357, 358–9, 365–6 queer bodies, 14 term, 356 Rancière, Jacques, 261 Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven, The, 264, 265, 271–2 Ratner’s Star archaeological imagination, 415, 416 the art gallery as mirror, 403, 404–5, 407 the art gallery as (rabbit) hole, 403, 404, 407 cave art, 402–3, 407, 411 childlike babbling, 193, 421 colour in, 154 editorial process, 167 found objects in, 105 realism, 236, 237 religion see faith/religion Rich, Philip, 166–7 Richter, Gerhard, 51–2, 55–6, 68, 268–70 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 15 n8, 27–8, 35, 36, 182, 189–90, 191–2 Running Dog the aesthetic experience, 71–2 art gallery, 71–2, 405–6, 408, 409, 410 colour in, 155 desert setting, 102, 407 the Hitler film, 67, 71, 72, 82, 87–8, 89, 155, 261, 405–6, 408, 409, 410 narrative ekphrasis, 72 plot structure, 261 Rushdie, Salman, 169, 173, 187, 233

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Said, Edward, 52, 58, 214, 218–19 Salman Rushdie Defense Pamphlet, 233 Scarry, Elaine, 82 Schneck, Peter, 108–9 screen culture deadening effects of mass media, 19, 312–13 DeLillo’s critique of apathy, 308–9 in DeLillo’s works, 4 globalisation and, 310–11 glow of, 91 market fundamentalism, 306–8 performativity of war and technology, 360–1 in Point Omega, 308 Screen, 323–4 on-screen violence in Zero K, 18 the systems and networks of modernity, 4–5, 51, 291–2, 317 technological breakdown, 11, 331, 339, 365, 424, 429, 36511 televisuality of 9/11, 303, 304, 308 terrorism’s screen culture, 303 Shan Shui (Chen), 320, 321 short works The Angel Esmeralda, 175–6, 215, 448 in Anteus, 216–17, 219–20 the artist as performative intellectual, 213–14, 217, 218–19 critical attention, 213, 214, 218 by DeLillo, 214, 215 fiction-non-fiction dynamics, 214–15 the staged event, 19–20, 209–10, 215 ‘Videotape,’ 215–16, 217 Sifton, Elizabeth, 166, 167–8 Silence, The affect in, 49 civilisational decline, 417 deadening effects of mass media, 19 editorial textual changes to, 165, 176–7 out-of-context interventions of the characters, 20 podiatric imagery, 232–3 reviews, 165 spectacle and transfiguration of the body, 356–7 technological breakdown, 11, 331, 339, 365, 424, 429 telephones, 11, 331, 338–9 threat of the digital age, 316 visuality and, 11

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472 index Sippey, Michael, 315, 318 Smithson, Robert, 7–8, 104, 387–92, 393, 394, 396, 398 Sontag, Susan, 116–17, 199 space site/nonsite dialectic, 389–90, 395, 398 spatiality of architecture, 427, 436 spatiality of land art, 386, 387–92 spectacle in DeLillo’s works, 355, 356 media spectacle in Point Omega, 359–60 notion of, 355, 358–9 as a performative act, 356 spectacle and bodily transfiguration, 356– 8, 361, 363–5, 380 Stelarc, 322, 358 still life Natura morta paintings by Morandi, 13, 14, 70–1, 73, 75–6, 94, 124, 125, 200, 202–3, 408 as suspended between life and death, 13–14, 17 vanitas pieces, 17 sublime definition, 42 of the Hudson River School, 294–5 the Kantian sublime, 290, 291, 292, 294 in Mao II, 296–301 the natural sublime, 294–5, 296 the postmodern sublime, 290, 291–3, 295, 297, 299 in White Noise, 292–7 technology deadening effects of mass media, 19 and loss of identity, 5 performativity of war and technology, 360–1 spectacle and bodily transfiguration in Zero K, 362–5 systems and networks of, 4–5, 10, 51, 291–2, 317 technological breakdown in The Silence, 11, 331, 339, 365, 424, 429, 36511 the technological sublime, 10 temporal impact, 184–5, 189, 285 ‘Videotape,’ 215–16, 217 see also digital media; screen culture telephones in Americana, 338–9 in Cosmopolis, 185, 330, 331

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in Great Jones Street, 329, 330 as outdated technology, 11, 330–1 performative speech acts, 11, 330 in The Silence, 11, 331, 338–9 in White Noise, 331 television in DeLillo’s works, 4, 19, 30, 51, 76, 91–2, 157, 252, 253–4, 267, 271, 297, 307, 339 Fargo, 244–5 The Leftovers, 235, 244 prestige television, 235, 236–7, 243–4 The Sopranos, 236, 243 Watchmen, 235, 236, 245 The Wire, 236, 243 see also screen culture terrorism American home-grown, 309–10 Baader-Meinhof, 51–2, 55, 268 Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 265, 266–7 ideation of, 4 links with screen culture, 303 the media and, 267 photographs of in Mao II, 117, 199 post-9/11 works, 4, 5, 6, 51, 133, 140 n.2 skyjackings, 266, 267 writing’s counternarratives, 6, 279, 303 see also 9/11 ‘The Artist Naked in a Cage,’ 210–12, 214 ‘The Engineer of Moonlight,’ 342, 347–8 ‘The Starveling’ American home-grown terrorism, 310 art stalkers, 70, 127 the communal art experience, 71 critique of apathy, 309 the structure of fictional being, 31, 32 theatrical works collective experiences of, 343–6, 347, 351–2 contrasted with fiction, 341, 342, 343, 348, 351–2 The Day Room, 344, 345, 346, 352 DeLillo as a playwright, 341–2, 348–9, 350–1 ‘The Engineer of Moonlight,’ 342, 347–8 ephemerality, 11, 341, 343, 345, 347 Love-Lies-Bleeding, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 349, 393–5 The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life, 346 performance of, 342–4, 349, 350 performance/audience relationship, 350–1

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index 473 as a political act, 344–5, 346–7 ‘The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven,’ 264, 265, 271–2 Valparaiso, 345, 346, 348 visual origins of, 347–8, 352 The Word for Snow, 33, 346, 347 time in Americana, 252, 253–4, 257 the archaeological imagination, 9, 415–16 in art galleries, 405–6 in The Body Artist, 31–2, 252, 256, 284, 406, 415 in cinematic shots, 251–2 civilisational decline, 413–19, 424, 430–1 in Dalí’s works, 280 in DeLillo’s works, 414–15 directionality of, 415–16 disordered time in Falling Man, 187, 376, 415 entropy in Robert Smithson’s land art, 390–2 fiction’s counterhistorical role, 4–6, 7, 9 of the long take, 253, 254, 255 palaeolinguistics, 413, 421 photography’s temporality, 109, 118–20 poetic tradition of, 424–5 signification in the archaeological, 9 slow motion film, 28, 30, 32 technology’s temporal impact, 184–5, 189, 285 temporalities of capitalism, 184 time in Point Omega, 32, 127, 257–61, 262, 279–82, 285–6 24 Hour Psycho (Gordon), 7, 16, 32, 58, 285–6, 405, 406 video art’s temporal narratives, 285–6 see also history Transnational Radical Party (TRP), 211 Underworld archaeological imagination, 416 archival art, 7, 8 art encounters, 74–5 art of abject waste and ruin, 369–70 authenticity of the self, 227–8 belonging and Joyce, 226–30 ‘Bird Lives’ graffiti tag, 439–40, 443, 451 colour in, 8, 158–61 desert setting, 7, 8, 74, 98, 102, 144, 159–61, 226–7, 370 editorial process, 174

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embodiment of the mind, 230 graffiti, 8, 160, 287, 441, 442–51 hyperlinked interface, 316, 317, 320–1 jazz references, 439 the Kennedy assassination film, 30, 32, 73 material waste objects, 98, 369–70, 446–7 myth of the American West, 143–4 public reading, 209–10 publicity for, 169–70 racial politics, 435 references to Ulysses, 226, 228 the said and the unsaid, 31 subterranean spaces, 436–7 Texas Highway Killer section, 85, 217–18, 284–5 The Triumph of Death (Bruegel the Elder), 18–19 urban landscape, 139–40, 429, 433–4, 436 ‘Videotape’ and, 217 Watts Towers, 74, 75, 160, 431, 447 windowless spaces, 436–7 the World Trade Center, 139–40, 427, 430, 431, 434 Valparaiso, 11, 345, 346, 348 Veggian, Henry, 168, 169–70, 274 Vidal, Gore, 95, 98 video art definition, 278 ekphrasis in, 286–7 and the manipulation of realities, 279–84 primary aspects of, 287 repetition in, 279 temporal narratives, 285–6 Texas Highway Killer film in Underworld, 85, 217–18, 284–5 24 Hour Psycho (Gordon), 7, 16, 32, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51, 57–9, 60, 69–70, 127, 129, 259–61, 262, 278, 280, 283, 285–8, 308, 359, 405, 406 violence art’s relation to political violence, 51–2, 62–3, 68, 70, 72, 361 cultural images of, 82 in DeLillo’s works, 437 gendered violence, 77, 310 instruments as weapons, 51 of language, 53 the myth of the American West, 141, 142 violent art and violence relationship, 56–7, 58–9, 269, 308, 310, 359–60

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474 index Virilio, Paul, 184, 189, 358, 360, 362 vision the arts as a way of seeing, 1–3 connection with the words on the page, 10–11, 20, 179, 180 DeLillo’s visual sense, 1–2, 15, 319–20, 347–8, 352 digital image-text interfaces, 319–22 prophetic vision, 4 and social control, 137 the viewing subject, 7, 12–13, 68, 124–6, 401, 407–8 Wallace, David Foster, 7, 238, 349 Wallace, Lois, 167 war the art of war, 18 Elster’s haiku war, 15, 61, 129, 181, 361 the Iraq war, 61, 62 language of nuclear war, 27 performativity of, 360–1 as slogans in Point Omega, 14–15, 129–30, 282 war game in End Zone, 27 Warhol, Andy art of, 12 Catholicism, 88 Diamond Dust Shoes, 48 films, 252 image as brand, 86 Mao triptych in Mao II, 89, 94, 158, 197, 297–300 museum experiences of, 66 Wasserman, Sarah, 341, 343, 347 Watchmen (HBO), 235, 236 Wei Jingsheng, 210–11, 219 Westgeest, Helen, 287 White Noise the Airborne Toxic Event, 290, 291, 293–4, 295–7, 319 art and abject ruin, 369 colour in, 153, 156 consumer culture, 317–19 death in the narrative journey, 266 Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y adaptation, 264, 265, 266–7 fear of the human future, 317–18 iconic images, 81, 82, 85, 86, 90–2 landscapes in, 136 the miraculous alongside the quotidian, 236

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The Most Photographed Barn in America, 2, 12, 83–4, 109–11, 123, 141 performance and performativity in, 330, 336–8 the postmodern sublime in, 292–7 publication of, 167–8 technology’s systems and networks, 51, 291–2, 317 White Noise on White Noise (Sippey), 315, 318 Whitehead, Colson The Intuitionist, 239–40 The Underground Railway, 245 Zone One, 240–1, 244 Will, George, 2 Williams, William Carlos, 182, 183 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 150 women association with colour, 152, 161 gendered violence, 77, 310 mother figures, 225–6 objectification of women, 15–16 as sex objects in Zero K, 205–6 see also gender Word for Snow, The, 33, 346, 347 World Trade Center in DeLillo’s works, 427, 430–6 in Falling Man, 369 in Players, 41, 91, 104, 432, 435–6 in ‘In the Ruins of the Future,’ 140 n.2, 412 in Underworld, 139–40, 427, 430, 431, 434 see also 9/11 writing the artistic process, 10 in DeLillo’s works, 123 and the enslavement of human beings, 53 imagination and, 131–2, 206 poetic practices, 179–80 to store memories, 5–6, 126 as a tactile process, 10–11 the writer’s paradox, 179, 180, 184 see also authors; ekphrasis; poetry Wylie, John, 135, 137, 138, 147 Zero K the archaeological imagination and, 413 archaeology/myth intersection, 423–4 archival art, 7, 12, 130 art galleries, 402, 403, 408

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index 475 art stalkers, 205–6 Artis Martineau, 17, 161, 206, 230, 231–2, 362, 363–4, 370 atomic bomb, 18 the body and Joyce, 230–2 childlike babbling, 193 colour in, 161 cryogenic preservation, 17, 18, 205, 230– 1, 361–2, 363 death, 18, 26, 206–7 ekphrasis, 197, 204–7 embodiment of the mind, 230–2 gendered gaze, 206, 363

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grief and abjection, 370, 371 land art, 7, 396–8, 405 landscapes, 136 Manhattanhenge, 193, 415 naming, 132 sight and looking, 130–1, 205 spectacle and bodily transfiguration, 356–7, 363–5 television series option on, 236–7 temporal character, 252, 257 threat of the digital age, 316 writing and imagination, 131–2, 206 Zukofsky, Louis, 15

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