Don DeLillo 9781350040861, 9781350040892, 9781350040878

Citation preview

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Don DeLillo

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CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES Series Editors: Jeannette Baxter, Peter Childs, Sebastian Groes and Kaye Mitchell Guides in the Contemporary Critical Perspectives series provide companions to reading and studying major contemporary authors. They include new critical essays combining textual readings, cultural analysis and discussion of key critical and theoretical issues in a clear, accessible style. Each guide also includes a preface by a major contemporary writer, a new interview with the author, discussion of film and TV adaptation and guidance on further reading. Titles in the series include: Ali Smith edited by Monica Germana and Emily Horton Andrea Levy edited by Jeannette Baxter and David James Hilary Mantel edited by Eileen Pollard and Ginette Carpenter Ian McEwan (2nd Edition) edited by Sebastian Groes J. G. Ballard edited by Jeannette Baxter Julian Barnes edited by Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs Kazuo Ishiguro edited by Sean Matthews and Sebastian Groes Salman Rushdie edited by Robert Eaglestone and Martin McQuillan Sarah Waters edited by Kaye Mitchell David Mitchell edited by Wendy Knepper and Courtney Hopf John Burnside edited by Ben Davies

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Don DeLillo Contemporary Critical Perspectives

EDITED BY KATHERINE DA CUNHA LEWIN and KIRON WARD

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Katherine Da Cunha Lewin, Kiron Ward and Contributors, 2019 Katherine Da Cunha Lewin, Kiron Ward and Contributors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Nan Zhong / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lewin, Katherine Da Cunha, editor. | Ward, Kiron, editor. Title: Don DeLillo / edited by Katherine Da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward. Description: London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Series: Contemporary critical perspectives | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018012766 (print) | LCCN 2018013716 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350040885 (ePub) | ISBN 9781350040878 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350040861 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: DeLillo, Don–Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PS3554.E4425 (ebook) | LCC PS3554.E4425 Z644 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.54–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012766 ISBN: HB: 978-1-350-04086-1 PB: 978-1-3501-6006-4 ePDF: 978-1-350-04087-8 eBook: 978-1-350-04088-5 Series: Contemporary Critical Perspectives Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents Series editors’ preface  vii List of contributors  viii Acknowledgements  x Chronology of Don DeLillo’s life  xi

Introduction: A trick of the light: Don DeLillo in the twenty-first century Katherine Da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward  1

1 ‘I’m sure you must be somebody’: White masculinity in Don DeLillo’s Americana and White Noise Tim Engles  17

2 Apocalyptism, environmentalism and the other in Don DeLillo’s End Zone, Great Jones Street and Ratner’s Star Katherine Da Cunha Lewin  33

3 Libranth: Nicholas Branch’s Joycean Labyrinth in Don DeLillo’s Libra Graley Herren  49

4 Unstable bodies in Don DeLillo’s Mao II and The Body Artist Rebecca Harding  65

5 ‘We came for the dirt but stayed for the talk’: Don DeLillo’s theatre Mark Osteen  79

6 Don DeLillo’s Italian American: The early short stories and Underworld Maria Lauret  95

7 Staging the counter-narrative in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man Ronan McKinney  111

8 The art of being out of time in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega Catherine Gander  127

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Contents

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9 Don DeLillo’s Zero K and the dream of cryonic election David Cowart  143

Interview: The edge of the future: A discussion with Don DeLillo Peter Boxall  159

Further reading  165 Index  195

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Series editors’ preface T

he readership for contemporary fiction has never been greater. The explosion of reading groups and literary blogs, of university courses and school curricula, and even the apparent rude health of the literary marketplace indicate an ever-growing appetite for new work, for writing which responds to the complex, changing and challenging times in which we live. At the same time, readers seem ever more eager to engage in conversations about their reading, to devour the review pages, to pack the sessions at literary festivals and author events. Reading is an increasingly social activity, as we seek to share and refine our experience of the book, to clarify and extend our understanding. It is this tremendous enthusiasm for contemporary fiction to which the Contemporary Critical Perspectives series responds. Our ambition is to offer readers of current fiction a comprehensive critical account of each author’s work, presenting original, specially commissioned analyses of all aspects of their career, from a variety of different angles and approaches, as well as directions toward further reading and research. Our brief to the contributors is to be scholarly, to draw on the latest thinking about narrative, or philosophy, or psychology, indeed whatever seemed to them most significant in drawing out the meanings and force of the texts in question, but also to focus closely on the words on the page, the stories and scenarios and forms which all of us meet first when we open a book. We insisted that these essays be accessible to that mythical beast, the Common Reader, who might just as readily be spotted at the Lowdham Book Festival as in a college seminar. In this way, we hope to have presented critical assessments of our writers in such a way as to contribute something to both of those environments, and also to have done something to bring together the most important qualities of each of them. Jeannette Baxter, Peter Childs, Sebastian Groes and Kaye Mitchell

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Contributors Peter Boxall is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His books include Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (2006), Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (2009), Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (2013), and The Value of the Novel (2015). A co-editor of The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume VII: British and Irish Fiction since 1940 (2016), he has edited the journal Textual Practice since 2009. His most recent book is The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life (Cambridge University Press, 2020). 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 (1992–3) and at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense (1996–7). In addition to his two monographs on the work of Thomas Pynchon, he is the author of Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language, Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Writing in Contemporary America, and The Tribe of Pyn: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period. He is working on a book exploring the novels of Cormac McCarthy. Tim Engles is a Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, USA. He is the author of White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature, as well as co-editor of Approaches to Teaching DeLillo’s White Noise (with John N. Duvall) and Critical Approaches to Don DeLillo (with Hugh Ruppersburg). Topics of his recent research have included systemic racism in the criminal justice system and racialized social media slacktivism, as well as the work and contexts of Gloria Naylor, Tim O’Brien, Oliver Stone and Walter Dean Myers. Catherine Gander lectures in American literature at Maynooth University, Ireland. Her research addresses the interrelations of word and image in modern and contemporary American literature and culture. Her publications include Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary:  The Poetics of Connection (2013; IAAS biennial book prize winner), Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices (with Sarah Garland, 2016), and several journal articles and book chapters on American avant-gardes, radical form, literature, art and photography. Rebecca Harding is a doctoral researcher in the School of English at the University of Sussex. Her CHASE-funded PhD project investigates the complex status of the body in Don DeLillo’s fiction. She co-edited the 2017 issue of Excursions, an interdisciplinary journal, and undertook four months’ placement to study the DeLillo papers at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, in 2018.

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Contributors

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Graley Herren is Professor of English at Xavier University. He is the author of The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo (2019) and Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television (2007), as well as many articles on various modern writers. He has served for many years on the board of the annual Comparative Drama Conference, and he edited five volumes of the conference’s ‘Text & Presentation’ book series. Maria Lauret is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Sussex, where she teaches American Studies from colonial to contemporary times. A specialist in minority literatures, she is the author of Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America (1994), Alice Walker (2011), co-author of Beginning American Ethnic Literatures (2001), and Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature (2014). She has published articles on African American, feminist and ethnic topics, as well as on American immigration, and she is one of the founding editors of the journal Atlantic Studies. Currently she is writing a monograph entitled African American Literature in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter. Katherine Da Cunha Lewin is a writer, tutor and researcher. Her PhD investigated spatial aesthetics and interiority in the work of DeLillo and J.M. Coetzee. She wrote the biographic entry on DeLillo for the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twenty First Century Novelists (2018). Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The White Review, The London Magazine and Los Angeles Review of Books among others. She has taught literature, film and theory at the University of Sussex as well as across London at a variety of institutions. Ronan McKinney is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sussex. His research focuses on trauma and violence in contemporary literature and visual culture. Mark Osteen is a Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Humanities at Loyola University Maryland. He has published dozens of articles and eleven books on modern literature, music, disability and film. Among his works are American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture (2000); Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream (2013); a memoir, One of Us: A Family’s Life with Autism (2010); and, most recently, The Beatles through a Glass Onion: Reconsidering the White Album (2019). Kiron Ward is Visiting Associate Professor of English in the Department of English, German, and Romance Studies at University of Copenhagen. He researches encyclopaedism in modern and contemporary fiction, with a particular focus on the works of James Joyce, Leslie Marmon Silko, Roberto Bolaño, and Karen Tei Yamashita. He recently co-edited a special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly, entitled ‘Encyclopedia Joyce’ (with James Blackwell Phelan, 2019), and is currently writing a monograph on totality in contemporary fiction, and co-editing a special issue of Textual Practice that will mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses (with E. Paige Miller).

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Acknowledgements T

his collection came into being as the result of a conference at the University of Sussex in 2015. Entitled ‘Don DeLillo: The State of Fiction in the 21st Century’, the conference sought to bring together new thinkers and new approaches on the work on Don DeLillo for the contemporary moment. The critical spirit of this volume emerges from that conference, and we would like to thank everyone who attended and contributed. Moreover, we are grateful to the University of Sussex’s School of English, Doctoral School, Centre for American Studies and Centre for Creative and Critical Thought, each of which generously supported the event. We would also like particularly to thank our co-organizers, Camilla Bostock and Rebecca Harding, and Professor John N. Duvall, for being both our keynote speaker and a great friend in his support for this volume. Many thanks also to the series editors, especially Sebastian Groes, David Avital, Clara Herberg, Emma Payne and Kate Lloyd, for their support and patience during the preparation of this collection. We offer our sincere thanks to the Wallace Literary Agency and the Harry Ransom Center and its staff, particularly Rick Watson, for granting our contributors permission to quote from their material. We owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Peter Boxall for his advice at every stage in the process of editing this volume, as well as for agreeing to conduct an interview. Moreover, special thanks are due to Daniel Daly, Katherine Kruger and Ryan Powell, whose constant support has made this project what it is. Finally, we are supremely grateful to Don DeLillo for supporting this project and for providing us with a wonderful interview.

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Chronology of Don DeLillo’s life 1936

Donald Richard DeLillo was born on 20 November in the Bronx, New York, to Italian immigrants; his mother was a seamstress and his father was a clerk at the Metropolitan Life insurance company

1954

Graduated from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx

1958

Graduated from Fordham University, a Catholic university in New York, majoring in communications studies

1959

Started work at an advertising agency, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather

1960

Publication of first short story, ‘The River Jordan’, in Epoch

1964

Left Ogilvy, Benson & Mather to focus on his writing, working freelance and living in a small studio apartment in Manhattan

1966

Begins work on Americana

1971

Publication of Americana and ‘The Game Plan,’ a short story in The New Yorker

1972

Publication of End Zone

1973

Publication of Great Jones Street

1975

Marriage to Barbara Bennett, a banker-turned-landscaper

1977

Publication of Players

1979

Awarded John Simon Guggenheim fellowship, which he uses to travel in the Middle East and Greece; lives in Greece for the following three years

1982

Publication of The Names

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Chronology of Don DeLillo’s life

1983

Publication of an essay, entitled ‘American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK’, in Rolling Stone on the assassination of John F. Kennedy

1985

Publication of White Noise, winning the 1985 National Book Award

1986

The Day Room premiered at the American Repertory Theater in April

1987

Publication of The Day Room

1989

Publication of Libra; University of Illinois Press publishes the first monograph dedicated to DeLillo’s work, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel, written by Tom LeClair, an academic and friend of DeLillo

1990

Duke University Press publishes the first collection of essays dedicated to DeLillo’s work, Introducing Don DeLillo, edited by Frank Lentricchia

1991

Publication of Mao II, which wins the PEN/Faulkner Award; BBC airs documentary Don DeLillo: The Word, The Image, and The Gun, directed by Kim Evans

1992

Publication of ‘Pafko at the Wall’ in Harper’s

1994

Publication of Salman Rushdie Defense Pamphlet with Paul Auster; a stage adaptation of Libra, directed by John Malkovich, premieres at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in May

1997

Publication of ‘The Power of History’ in New York Times Magazine, followed by Underworld

1999

Awarded the Jerusalem Prize for Underworld; he was the first American writer to receive the award and gives a speech entitled ‘A History of the Writer Alone in a Room’. Publication of a special issue, edited by John N. Duvall, of academic journal Modern Fiction Studies dedicated to his work

2001

Publication of The Body Artist; an essay on 9/11, entitled ‘In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September’, published in Harper’s

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Chronology of Don DeLillo’s life

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2003

Publication of Cosmopolis

2004

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin acquires DeLillo’s papers

2005

DeLillo’s third play, Love-Lies-Bleeding, was premiered in Idaho at the Boise Contemporary Theater, directed by DeLillo

2006

Writes the screenplay for Game 6, a film directed by Michael Hoffman and starring Michael Keaton and Robert Downey, Jr

2007

Publication of Falling Man; DeLillo was commissioned to write the play The Word for Snow for the Chicago Humanities Festival, which was premiered that October and performed by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company

2010

Publication of Point Omega and award of the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction

2011

Publication of a collection of short stories entitled The Angel Esmeralda

2012

David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Cosmopolis, starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche and Samantha Morton, was released

2014

Publication of The Word for Snow with photographs by Richard Prince

2015

Awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

2016

Publication of Zero K

2017

Publication of a short story, ‘The Itch’, in New Yorker

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Introduction: A trick of the light: Don DeLillo in the twenty-first century Katherine Da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward

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n a famous moment in Don DeLillo’s seminal White Noise (1985), the protagonist, Jack Gladney, is taken by a fellow academic, Murray Jay Siskind, to visit ‘The Most Photographed Barn in America’: Soon the signs started appearing  . . .  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. ‘No one sees the barn’, he said finally. (12) Siskind, who, as Gladney observes, is ‘immensely pleased’ by the barn, explains what he means: ‘Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn . . . We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain

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one . . . 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 the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now.’ (12) The reality of the barn cannot be seen: it is hidden by the aura of its reputation as ‘the most photographed’; just as the tourists are ‘taking pictures of taking pictures’, the barn itself becomes a simulation of an ‘authentic’ barn, its reality inaccessible to its viewers. This set-piece, often read as a satire of the impossibility of authenticity in the age of postmodernism, has become for many scholars of postmodern fiction also something of a critical set-piece. Indeed, for DeLillo’s many readers, it seems to sum up more than any other moment in his wide-ranging oeuvre his relationship to postmodernism; as Philip Knight has commented, it could be called the ‘Most Discussed Scene in Postmodern Fiction’ (Knight 2008:  39). But, as Knight goes on to point out, the scene is surely more complicated than the ‘rush to claim DeLillo as a homespun American theorist of postmodernism’ suggests: Siskind’s commentary ensures that the characters themselves (and hence readers) experience the scene through the lens of postmodern theory. This primal scene of postmodern mediation is thus itself mediated through its own built-in analysis . . . As with the barn itself, it is virtually impossible to remember what reading DeLillo was like before he came to be engulfed by the aura of postmodernism. (39) Knight’s comment references the plethora of criticism that establishes DeLillo as postmodernist par excellence, and through which DeLillo’s work has been both celebrated but also, perhaps, misattributed. Tom LeClair’s In the Loop, the first study dedicated solely to DeLillo, looked to make central ‘the quality and range of DeLillo’s vision’ to the study of contemporary fiction by considering how his work makes clear the importance of ‘systems theory’ to postmodernism as it was then understood – a move that put him in league with such arch-postmodernists as Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Robert Coover (1987:  2). Though DeLillo himself has voiced little interest in the label – and more readily discusses the influence of modernist writers1 – it is difficult to deny the family resemblance between his work of the 1970s and early 1980s with that of writers named above. The overarching critical tendency has been to view DeLillo’s observations of ideology, history and globalization through this lens. John N. Duvall and David Cowart have provided exemplary interpretations in this vein. Duvall, for example, argues that White

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Noise exposes the proto-fascist basis of American consumer culture through the novel’s frequent ‘meditation on television as a medium constructive of postmodernity’ (1994:  130). David Cowart develops this angle, claiming that while DeLillo is ‘the exemplary postmodernist’ it is in a fundamentally ‘double sense’:  though one can point to particular examples of his work as postmodernist  – Cowart names Ratner’s Star, The Names and White Noise – DeLillo ‘resists what can be a hegemonic tendency in postmodernist thought and practice’ by ‘chart[ing] new territory for literary art in fictions that constantly probe language for evidence of an epistemological depth largely denied by poststructuralist theory’ (2002:  12). For others, such as Marc Schuster (2008), DeLillo’s critique of consumer culture must be read through Jean Baudrillard:  the ‘ambivalence’ Schuster detects in Baudrillard’s theory of postmodernity is encapsulated in DeLillo’s narrators, whose experience as American citizens is founded and mediated through consumption. Nevertheless, as Peter Boxall notes, it is also crucial that we not let this discourse subsume our understanding of DeLillo: ‘The tendency to read him with or against the grain of postmodernism and of poststructuralism has skewed his critical reception, and occluded some of the most important and delicate ways in which his fiction offers to rethink culture from the post-war to the present day’ (Schuster 2006: 15). This volume of essays takes as its guiding principle the importance of understanding DeLillo’s exceptional contribution to Anglophone letters beyond the aura of postmodernism. Central among the ideas that connect each essay is our conviction that DeLillo’s categorization as ‘one of the masters of postmodern literature’ (Kellogg 2016), to borrow a commonplace most recently repeated by the Los Angeles Times, is no longer consequential, or even relevant or pertinent, in the study of contemporary fiction. Rather, DeLillo’s fiction has manifested, across the whole of his oeuvre, a remarkable reflection on how it is that we apprehend reality – what it is that we see when we think we are seeing a barn, to take the hint from White Noise. This is not to say that DeLillo is not a writer, or even a master, of literature with identifiably ‘postmodern’ traits; but it is to insist that, when taken as a whole, DeLillo’s fiction provides a unique set of tools for perceiving the contemporary moment – tools which go beyond exercises in ‘postmodern’ narrative. By insisting on this step beyond the critical lens of postmodernism, we seek to follow the signs DeLillo himself has put in his most recent fiction – to allow, that is, the critical direction of DeLillo himself to provide the tools with which we study the contemporary. In his two most recent plays, Love-LiesBleeding (2005) and The Word for Snow (2014), as much as in a recent short story like ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’ (2009) or his latest novel Zero K (2016), we see the evolution of the pared-back ‘late style’2 of The Body Artist (2001) and Point Omega (2010)  – those novels that DeLillo describes as ‘bare-skinned

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narratives’ in his discussion with Peter Boxall in this volume (see Chapter 10). How does DeLillo’s latest work refigure or retool the way we understand both his oeuvre and the contemporary itself? What does it mean to ‘not see the barn’ when, as the protagonist of ‘The Starveling’ thinks, ‘All human existence is a trick of the light’ (DeLillo 2011: 195, emphasis in original)? DeLillo’s latest work can seem at odds with the ‘postmodern’ poetics of his ‘major’ work in the 1980s and 1990s: the focus on grotesque body-horror in The Day Room (1987) and Valparaiso (1999), for example, is replaced by the body’s mundane, if no less unsettling, terminal processes in Love-LiesBleeding and ‘The Itch’ (2017); likewise, the metahistorical tools employed in novels like Libra (1988) and Underworld (1997) take a very different form in the meditation on the Second Gulf War in Point Omega; looking to Zero K, the dark humour of The Convergence strikes a rather different note to Field Experiment Number One, its screwball predecessor in Ratner’s Star (1976). Yet, for all the variety of DeLillo’s fiction since he first began publishing short stories fifty years ago, each of these texts asks, in more or less oblique ways, how it is that we see the reality existing around us beyond those opaque auras that delimit our perception – from the miserably porcine spectacles that define immigrant New  York in ‘Spaghetti and Meatballs’ (1965) to the mysterious individuals who stand with closed eyes in the midst of the chaos of millennial New York in Zero K. Metaphors of vision – analyses of how we see through and beyond the aura of the barn – are not particular to White Noise: they unify DeLillo’s oeuvre. In what follows, we frame the importance of DeLillo in modern and contemporary fiction, and the intervention this volume is making in the field of DeLillo Studies, by briefly tracing the evolution of these metaphors from Americana (1971)3 to Point Omega to ‘The Starveling’.

‘An image made in the image and likeness of images’ In an interview with the Guardian in 2010, DeLillo summarized his approach to writing in suggestive terms: ‘When I work, I’m just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that’s not familiar. But I’m not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear’ (McCrum 2010). His suggestion that writing is a way of ‘translating’ reality asserts the primacy of his subjective experience of the world  – the world as perceived through his senses. This idea is reformulated in a line from ‘The Starveling’, that ‘All human existence is a trick of the light’ (DeLillo 2011: 195): the writer becomes a photosensitive entity, simultaneously producing and recording the effects of light, yet all the

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while knowing that what is seen now is as contingent as the barn in White Noise. At its most elemental, DeLillo’s fiction makes visible the fleeting nature of reality as captured by an imperfect recorder. In this, it is impossible not to note the significance to DeLillo of the key twentieth-century technology for recording light  – film  – and its principle media – cinema and television. Frank Volterra, in The Names, articulates its fundamental importance to DeLillo: ‘Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, film is implied in the thing itself’ (DeLillo 1982: 200). Indeed, cinema, as a medium constituted by tricks of the light, has always had a critical role in DeLillo’s understanding of the potential of fiction. His fascination with cinema has straddled both its ‘high’ and ‘low’ aesthetic achievements and popularity, especially in the way it reaches into our daily lives, as he explained in an interview with Adam Begley in 1993:  ‘Film allows us to examine ourselves in ways earlier societies could not  – examine ourselves, imitate ourselves, extend ourselves, reshape our reality. It permeates our lives, this double vision, and also detaches us, turns some of us into actors doing walkthroughs’ (Begley 2005:  105). Recalling Volterra’s comment that film is the ‘world seen from the inside’, DeLillo insists on the newly exploratory ways of seeing that it has enabled. In the ‘double vision’ it provides, we find new means of conceptualizing the interior and the exterior simultaneously  – and in this he echoes the central tenets of Lacanian film theory, in which the screen becomes the mirror, a way for us to see the fragmented self as a whole.4 Indeed, that DeLillo specifically notes how film allows us to ‘imitate’ ourselves and turn ourselves into ‘actors’  – appeals, that is, to a desire to see ourselves reflected back at us by the screen  – highlights his understanding of film’s implication in the logic of mimicry. By tracing the trajectory of DeLillo’s fascination with film, it becomes apparent that while his early writing envisioned the possibilities of film in terms of its effects on identity and subjectivity, his later work refocused attention on the processes elemental to looking at film. Even in his earliest work, DeLillo has focused on the relationship between film and text; in, for example, ‘The Uniforms’ (1970), an early short story not collected in The Angel Esmeralda, he attempted to rewrite Jean-Luc Godard’s iconic New Wave film Week-end (1967). His first novel, Americana, develops this interest significantly. Written in the four-year period following his stint at the advertising firm Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, the novel takes as one of its key themes the nature of reality in a society whose identity is increasingly mediated by film images. While the protagonist, David Bell, works as a television executive, it is cinema and the literal and figurative enormity of its image that contains, for him, the most profound power – particularly in the system of stars and celebrities that orbits it. Strobe

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Botway, David’s boss, professes his love of Humphrey Bogart, discussing the ‘Bogart mystique, using Germanic philosophical terms no one understood’ (DeLillo 1989:  12). But for Bell the ‘Bogart mystique’ is too ambiguous:  he prefers men like Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, explaining that ‘These were the American pyramids. They were monumental . . . They were men of action, running, leaping, loving with abandon’ (12). Rather than Bogart’s sly wit and slow looks askance, Bell admires the decisive action and apparent simplicity of Douglas and Lancaster; they manifest a confident, unambiguous masculinity that he finds at once reassuring and inspiring. In a conspicuous moment, Bell describes his experience as a teenager watching Lancaster in Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953): He stood above Deborah Kerr on that Hawaiian beach and 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 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 an icon of a new religion. (DeLillo 1989: 12) Set in a Hawaiian military base, the film features Frank Sinatra and Montgomery Clift as well as Lancaster – three of Hollywood’s most celebrated leading men. Nevertheless, it is Lancaster, once famously described as ‘a great specimen of hunkus Americanus’ (Kael 1986: 173), who appeals to Bell. Moreover, it is not his iconic (and oft-parodied) embrace with Kerr in the waves that holds his attention, but rather Lancaster’s muscular body as it towers over her, literally dominating the screen-space. Bell conflates his enormity on screen with a type of perfection: Lancaster is abstracted into a living embodiment of ideal masculinity – ‘true power’. Randy Laist has noted that, for Bell, Lancaster becomes ‘a living image, seemingly available as a shape of selfhood’, and that this is ‘not because of his personality and character traits exactly, but for his ontological capacity to combine the qualities of consciousness and object-hood’ (Laist 2010:  33). Bell’s attraction to Lancaster’s version of ‘hunkus Americanus’ is due to what he perceives as Lancaster’s ability to synthesize the ideals of American masculinity into a complete package  – to make visible the possibility of perfection. Reminiscing about the summer he watched From Here to Eternity twice, Bell dwells on the ‘immensity to Burt which transcended plot, action, characterization’, thinking that, for him, Lancaster ‘would be forever caught in that peculiar gray silveriness of the movie screen, his body radiating a slight

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visual static’ (DeLillo 1989: 135). Lancaster’s image transcends the confines of the cinema screen, becoming a place to which Bell continually returns – becomes to Bell, that is, almost palpable, in his radiant ‘gray silveriness’. But if Lancaster’s image offers a promise, it is a seemingly paradoxical one. If cinematic images provide a common, public focal point, it is because those images are a space for private introspection; as Bell thinks, ‘I was glad I had not asked anyone to come to the movies with me. This was religion and it needed privacy’ (135). The cinematic image becomes a mode for transforming one’s private self into a public ideal – a trick of the light becomes the occasion for harmonizing identities. Though the studio and contract system had essentially ended by the 1960s, and certainly by the point of the novel’s publication, the creation of the Hollywood actor and its subsequent effects on the image and image culture are central to David’s experiences. Richard Dyer, in his famous study of Hollywood stardom, argues that the culture around celebrities exposes the complexity of individuality and selfhood: A series of shots of a star whose image has changed – say, Elizabeth Taylor – at various points in her career could work to fragment her, to present her as nothing but a series of disconnected looks; but in practice it works to confirm that beneath all these different looks there is an irreducible core that gives all those looks a unity, namely Elizabeth Taylor. (Dyer 2004: 9) We could call this ‘irreducible core’ the celebrity’s aura: rather than hiding the individual, the constant transformation of the star reveals the promise of a self that lies underneath. The actor becomes an anchor within the filmic space as a marker of an idealized unity. In Bell’s description of Lancaster as a monument, he observes the profound reach of Lancaster’s aura of ideal masculinity – an aura perpetuated, like that of the most photographed barn in America, by a shared belief in that masculinity. By inscribing the gaze of Bell in this way, DeLillo lays bare its artificiality – and envisions its ability to be disseminated and replicated. Though the novel is often conceived of as an Oedipal struggle in which Bell attempts to rectify his sense of self with his taboo sexual desire for his mother,5 the cinematic experience refigures the image of masculinity as one created through repetition, men looking at men in the movies – an idea that Tim Engles builds on in his contribution to this volume (see Chapter 1). In his later work, DeLillo’s interest in film has clearly evolved beyond Americana’s focus on its relationship to identity. Though film is a consistent feature of his work  – from the missing reel in Running Dog (1978) to the Zapruder film in Libra (1988) to the footage of the Hillsborough disaster in Mao II (1991) – his most recent texts explicitly problematize the nature of seeing, as they look to imagine new experiential possibilities that move beyond, or

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counter, dominant narratives. This is most obviously the case in a text like Point Omega, which Catherine Gander discusses in detail in this volume (see Chapter  8). The central narrative of Point Omega is bookended by sections in which an anonymous character watches Douglas Gordon’s installation 24 Hour Psycho. This piece, which slows the running time of Hitchcock’s 1960 classic to two frames per second so that the film lasts exactly twenty-four hours, problematizes the experience of watching a film. Hitchcock’s film plays with gaze and with spectatorship, especially in the character of Norman Bates who, akin to the film’s viewer, voyeuristically watches his guests at the Bates motel. However, as 24 Hour Psycho is a video-installation, its setting in the gallery as opposed to the cinema poses additional questions about the complexity of watching, looking and public space. DeLillo explores the experience of watching an experimental film as a means of investigating its transformative effects on our sense of self. If, in Americana, film affords ways of understanding the protagonist, in Point Omega, though the narrator may start to gain some understanding of himself, the reader can never really learn who he is. The titles of the bookending sections, ‘Anonymity 1’ and ‘Anonymity 2’, reveal only their chronology and nothing about what they contain. Though we may later presume the anonymous watcher to be the mysterious ‘Dennis’, thought responsible for Jessie’s disappearance, the novel never provides enough evidence to confirm this. In Americana, DeLillo explores the monumental certainty provided by Lancaster’s image, but in Point Omega, the need to find new ways of seeing that go beyond those old paradigms becomes his salient point. Part of the draw for the anonymous watcher is the movement of individuals around the film, as visitors to New York’s Museum of Modern Art slip in and out of the gallery space. Rather than the particular attention of the space of the movie theatre, here individual ‘tourists in a daze  . . .  looked and shifted their weight and then they left’ (DeLillo 2010: 3). The ‘Anonymity’ of the title not only refers to the character watching, but also the gaze itself. Here cinema no longer offers aspirational images of perfection, but becomes a marker of duration, making palpable the temporality of watching. The man becomes absorbed in the meta-cognitive process of marking his own watching:  ‘The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also depended on it . . . The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw’ (6). Looking is not a question of identifying with the images anymore, but thinking about how and why you watch, as a way ‘to feel time passing’ (7). In Gordon’s own words on the film:  ‘Cinema is dead’ (quoted in Marcus 2013:  174). The most that cinema can do now is to seek out new ways of molding the material itself in order, as Gordon notes, ‘to get back some enjoyment’ (174). The nostalgia, in Americana, for wholesome, healthy bodies in mass culture is superseded, in Point Omega, by a desire for

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visual newness – a recapturing of the thrill of watching. Though DeLillo still namechecks the main stars of the film, Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, it is specifically in these roles. Unlike Americana, in which the awesome power of Lancaster overwhelms young Bell, in Point Omega, it is the inscribed gaze of Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates that grabs the anonymous viewer’s attention. Rather than Bell’s quotidian attendance at the movie theatre, here this man’s watching becomes a pathological need to watch and re-watch. In 2011’s ‘The Starveling’  – that story in which ‘All human existence is a trick of the light’  – this is taken even further. Unlike Americana and Point Omega, it is neither actor nor film that becomes central to the plot: rather, DeLillo transforms the desire to merge with a cinematic image into a desire to live perpetually as a cinema-goer. DeLillo maintains the language of religion and awe, as the cinema experience becomes a way of denuding the self, and creating a new kind of life dominated by cinematic time. Spectatorship becomes, for the protagonist Leo Zhelezniak, a way of being. DeLillo has described the story as being ‘about an incomplete man and his acquiescence to a static life’ (Igarashi 2012). It opens on the description of the protagonist sitting alone in a room, a central setting in DeLillo’s narratives,6 looking around at the ‘single window, shower, hotplate, a squat refrigerator’ (DeLillo 2011: 183). In the next paragraph, years in the future, the same man now looks at a woman as she undertakes daily chores in their shared house. There are details reminiscent of The Body Artist’s opening description of intimate domesticity  – but DeLillo’s description is overloaded with verbs of looking – ‘staring’, ‘watched’, ‘watching’, ‘looked’, ‘see’ (183). This ‘static life’ is defined by its relationship to spectating. And indeed, Leo’s life is dominated by the movies: ‘Wait now, hurry later, these were the rules of the day. Days were all the same, movies were not’ (186). This appears to be an extension of Bell’s earlier desire for the film star to shape him, but rather than the star it is the activity of cinema-going doing the shaping. This is, in his and his ex-wife’s term, a ‘vocation’: ‘This is everyday life, this is the job, day to day. Your head is folded into a newspaper or plugged into a telephone so you can measure movie times against estimated travel times. You make the slate, keep the hours, remain true to the plan’ (186, 199). Leo traces an alternative map of New York that is ruled by movie theatre timetables. Cinema becomes a marker of time and place – a way of understanding time in the city. Flory, speculating as to the reasons Leo has decided to undertake this path, echoes the religious language of Americana: ‘He was an ascetic . . . She found something saintly and crazed in his undertaking, an element of self-denial, an element of penance . . . Were his parents Catholic? Did his grandparents go to mass every day, before first light, in some village in the Carpathian mountains’ (DeLillo 2011:  187). The possibilities of asceticism, as a way of living deliberately at odds with the reaches of consumer capitalism, have

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always been of interest to DeLillo. Many of his early characters, such as Gary Harkness of End Zone (1972) and Bucky Wunderlick of Great Jones Street (1973), demonstrate their penchant for purgative rituals, whether by refusing to eat or living in barely furnished accommodation. For Leo, this dedication seems to come from a desire he does not quite understand. Nevertheless, and like Flory, his description of himself and the other moviegoers errs towards the religious: ‘Moviegoers were souls when there were only a few of them  . . .  They would remain solitary even as they left the theatre, not exchanging a word or a glance, unlike souls in the course of other kinds of witness, a remote accident or threat of nature’ (186). While movie-going ran in tandem with real life in Americana  – Bell remembers that ‘The war was on television every night but we all went to the movies’ (DeLillo 1989: 5) – the watchers of ‘The Starveling’ ‘would remain solitary even as they left the theatre’. The awe of earlier novels is now replaced by a saintly commitment to a reconceived bare life. In this conflation of being at the movies with simply being, these watchers attempt to imbue their lives with cinematic depth as a way of conceiving of a meaningful life. It is only when he starts following another one of these moviegoers that he starts to think more clearly about his life. This young woman, whom he names ‘The Starveling’ due to her thinness, is characterized by Graley Herren as someone ‘so devoted to film, to the uncompromising discipline of her devotion that she cannot even be bothered to eat’ (Herren 2015:  159). Not quite the ‘somebody’ (DeLillo 1989: 13) of Americana that Engles unpicks in this volume (see Chapter 1), these characters become simply some ‘bodies’ – under strain, hovering at the edge of illness. Just as in the earlier Point Omega, DeLillo troubles the concept of the male gaze and the relationship between action on screen and the passivity of watching. If the anonymous watcher of the Gordon installation feels an affinity with Norman Bates, here Leo’s watching becomes even more disquieting as he follows the young woman through the city. Laura Mulvey notes, of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, that it is only when Grace Kelly’s Lisa becomes an object to be looked at that she becomes an object of attraction for James Stewart’s Scottie (Mulvey 1989: 24). In a reversal of this, the young woman takes on an erotic dimension because she watches in the same bare, pathological way as Leo. Moreover, this erotic dimension is compounded by his description of the viewing experience as being ‘barefaced, bare-souled’ (DeLillo 2011: 206); there is some intimacy in their shared viewing, even if it is only proximity in the same room. They share a new kind of nudity, ‘stripped of the faces that come naturally to others’ (206). As the narrative moves to an unsettling climax, the reader begins to suspect that the motivations of an apparently affectless character may be rather more insidious, as he follows her into the bathroom after the end of a film. As he ‘drift[s]‌toward a state of neutral observation’ (DeLillo 2011: 207),

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he no longer has to worry about fitting in. He can instead wait for the events to take place: ‘There were gaps in the silence, a feeling of stop and go. She was looking past him. She had the face and eyes of someone distant in time, a woman, in a painting, curtains hanging in loose folds. He wanted one of them to say something’ (207). At this moment, she is a character in a movie that Leo watches, a character whose eyes do not quite meet the eye line of the audience member. In this way, his whole life becomes a movie, and he can finally apply the feeling of safety he outlined earlier, in real life. Leo reverses Daniel Dayan’s assertion that a viewer’s relationship with the camera comes to be characterized by a partial possession of the space between characters and objects, and, that therefore the watcher ‘feels dispossessed of what he is prevented from seeing’ (1974: 29), by finding the limitation imposed by the frame of the screen empowering. While, to this point, the story has contained the unsettling threat of potential sexual violence, in their ultimate meeting, Leo attempts to perform a moment of pure cinema, in which he both narrates and watches a film of his life. This confrontation is highly ambiguous, particularly in its depiction of the power dynamic between a man and a vulnerable young woman. However, in his repeated problematizing of the gendered nature of the gaze, DeLillo thinks through questions of agency and passivity, in which cinema can circumvent the oversimplified dichotomy of ‘looking’ and ‘being looked at’. In his return to the home he shares with Flory, he is again watching a woman’s body, but this time it is a body that is preparing itself to be watched. As he watches her pose, in preparation, we presume, for an acting job, her body takes on ‘a meaning, even a history’ (DeLillo 2011:  211). After his earlier encounter with the young woman, he is now confronted by Flory’s ability to contort her body; it is no longer a question of a series of events in which he searches for linear cause and effect, but an image ‘dead still’ (211). Though the dark of the movie theatre is a sacred space for these characters in that it affords them a new kind of privacy, DeLillo’s depictions of the underlying ambiguity of this privacy suggests he does not seek to prize cinematic seeing simply as the most valuable form of looking. Film facilitates a certain kind of scrutiny, but that scrutiny is as much a way of shaping reality as revealing it. As Leo learns, it is the ‘trick of the light’ in which people live – blink and you might miss it. DeLillo’s texts trace the transformation of film: from Hollywood and the star system to new forms of video art, his work echoes the changes that cinema has seen in the late twentieth century, extending across culture from the popular to the avant-garde. In the midst of all these metaphors of vision is an exploration of the limits of spectatorship. DeLillo seeks to disrupt the linear development of a book by complicating the spatial and temporal make up of his prose, mimicking the competing modes of attention one

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undertakes from day to day. Rather than just ‘slowing down’, DeLillo’s latest work is attempting to make visible new ways of seeing reality beyond our immediate experience. The cinematic experience as one of the metaphors of vision that unifies his oeuvre takes on increasingly complicated forms of time and space, asking its reader to contemplate the transformative nature of spectatorship.

Contemporary critical perspectives Building on the work of the veritable industry of DeLillo scholarship, this volume seeks to provide the reader, above all, with a sense of how DeLillo’s fiction has shaped our relationship with the contemporary – that is, not just what we think we understand of the contemporary, but the tools with which we approach it. As such, each of the essays that constitute this volume is an example of the new and compelling lenses that scholars are bringing to the study of contemporary fiction in general and the work of DeLillo in particular. Moving more or less chronologically through his oeuvre, the essays each offer an example of the core critical perspectives on DeLillo’s work that are open to us in this contemporary moment. For Tim Engles, who builds on his ongoing research on white masculinity in US culture, Americana and White Noise remain novels of tremendous significance not simply for their satires of media-generated identities, but for DeLillo’s canny sense of the politics of white masculine identity; indeed, just as Americana begins with an anti-black joke, the title White Noise makes sly fun of its white characters. Taking a more eco-critical angle, Katherine Da Cunha Lewin looks at End Zone, Great Jones Street and Ratner’s Star in order to explore how DeLillo’s earliest work can help us think about the role of apocalyptism in climate change, not only through those texts’ depictions of varying disasters but for the wider conversations they develop in thinking about otherness. In ‘Libranth:  Nicholas Branch’s Joycean Labyrinth in Don DeLillo’s Libra’, Graley Herren offers a timely reading of DeLillo’s relationship to the autology of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In this, Herren nuances our understanding of the relationship of Libra’s famously metahistorical account of the Kennedy assassination with Joycean modernism. Rebecca Harding looks to what she describes as the ‘recent turn to the body’ (see Chapter 4) in DeLillo studies by examining the continuities between Mao II and The Body Artist  – a little-made and highly suggestive comparison. For Harding, approaching both texts by way of Julia Kristeva and Paul Schilder helps to reveal how both texts negotiate the ‘mutual incommensurability’ (see Chapter 4) of our bodies and our minds.

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Mark Osteen, whose numerous publications on DeLillo’s fiction over the last twenty years have had enormous influence on DeLillo studies, turns his focus to DeLillo’s theatrical works.7 Offering a clear narrative from ‘The Engineer of Moonlight’ (1979) to The Word for Snow, Osteen posits that DeLillo’s plays represent a sustained investigation of how theatre can create a community that ‘sustains authentic human contact’ (see Chapter 5). This focus on community is complemented subtly by Maria Lauret’s essay on DeLillo’s early short stories and Underworld, which looks back to his linguistic heritage – that is, the Italian and Italian American argot of his neighbourhood in the Bronx, as well as US English. Lauret builds on Wanderwords (2014), her groundbreaking study of language migration in US literature, by drawing a compelling connection between his authorial style and his linguistic background. In the analyses of Ronan McKinney and Catherine Gander, the countercultural possibility of art is central to DeLillo’s millennial work. McKinney, drawing on Judith Butler and Leo Bersani, looks at how Falling Man (2007) stages the post-9/11 counter-narrative that DeLillo calls for in ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, theorizing particularly how such a counter-narrative must work to unsettle the boundaries of self and other. Not dissimilarly, Gander considers how Point Omega responds to ‘DeLillo’s contention that art can provide a counter-narrative to our technologically-inflected century’s ‘spacetime compression’, and builds particularly on the documents of his research materials housed at the Harry Ransom Center (see Chapter 8). In this, Gander draws out the ways that Point Omega addresses ‘the ethical implications of our interconnected material existence, and the inseparability of matter and meaning’ (see Chapter 8). Finally, David Cowart, whose Don DeLillo:  The Physics of Language has had a tremendous impact on the shape of DeLillo scholarship, offers a reading of Zero K. Cowart, focusing on the religious elements of the text, unpicks the ways it finds in the desire for immortality an ultimate death wish. This segues neatly into Peter Boxall’s discussion with DeLillo, in which they discuss technological advances, environmental catastrophe, and the contemporary novel in light of Zero K. In their conversation, DeLillo infers something like his perspective on the critical possibility that the novel as a form enables: ‘The idea is that the novel, our contemporary novel, is able to contain the kind of implausibility that some people believe only belongs to reality’ (see Chapter 9). How DeLillo’s fiction handles the implausible is intimately bound to the critical tools his work enables in the study of the contemporary. With this in mind, we hope that scholars will use the essays in this volume to continue to approach DeLillo with an eye open to those implausibilities that secrete themselves beneath the auras shaping and proscribing the trick of the light that we know as reality.

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Notes 1 McCrum notes that DeLillo sees himself ‘as part of a long modernist line starting with James Joyce’ (McCrum 2010). DeLillo has made mention of Joyce in several interviews, suggesting to Adam Begley: ‘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 had a life and a history’ (2005: 88). Along with Joyce, DeLillo has also professed a deep appreciation for Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka: in a response to Gary Adelman for a seminar on Beckett, DeLillo noted: ‘Beckett is a master of language. He is all language. Out of the words come the people instead of the other way around. He is the last writer whose work extends into the world so that (as with Kafka before him) we can see or hear something and identify it as an expression of Beckett beyond the book or stage’ (Adelman 2004: 55). 2 Our use of this term builds on that of Edward Said, who in turn develops his theory of ‘late style’ from Adorno’s writing on Beethoven. In Said’s usage, a ‘late style’ is the writing produced by an author in their later years, formed through a new attention to their body, written in the face of their death. See Adorno (1998) and Said (2006). For an accessible introduction, see Said (2004). 3 In 1989, DeLillo revised Americana, removing what David Cowart has described as ‘minor instances of rhetorical overkill’ (Cowart 2002: 95). We cite page numbers in the newer edition. 4 Psychoanalysis, and particularly Lacanian theory, was immediately influential in the burgeoning film studies of the 1960s and 1970s. See, for example, Jacques-Alain Miller (1977–8) and Christian Metz (1982). 5 See, for example, Cowart (2002), Boxall (2006) and Herren (2016). 6 This has been the case since the beginning of DeLillo’s writing career, for example, Taft Robinson’s room in End Zone, Lee Harvey Oswald’s cell in Libra or Bill Gray’s room filled with paper in Mao II. 7 Osteen’s numerous and significant work on DeLillo is listed in this volume’s ‘Further Reading’.

References Adelman, G. (2004), ‘Beckett’s Readers: A Commentary and Symposium’, Michigan Quarterly, 54 (1): 54–70. Adorno, T. (1998), Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music; Fragments and Texts, ed. R. Tiedemann, trans. E. Jephcott. Cambridge: Polity Press. Begley, A. (2006), ‘The Art of Fiction No. 135: Don DeLillo’, in Thomas DiPietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 86–108. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Boxall, P. (2006), Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. London: Routledge.

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Cowart, D. (2002), Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Cowart, D. (2012), ‘The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega’, Contemporary Literature, 53 (1): 31–50. Dayan, D. (1974), ‘The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema’, Film Quarterly, 28 (1): 22–31. DeCurtis, A. (1991), ‘The Product: Bucky Wunderlick, Rock n Roll, and Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street’, in F. Lentricchia (ed.), Introducing Don DeLillo, 131–41. Durham: Duke University Press. DeLillo, D. (1965), ‘Spaghetti and Meatballs’, Epoch, 14 (3): 244–50. DeLillo, D. (1970), ‘The Uniforms’, Carolina Quarterly, 22 (1): 4–11. DeLillo, D. ([1982] 2011), The Names. London: Picador. DeLillo, D. ([1985] 2011), White Noise. London: Picador. DeLillo, D. ([1989] 2006), Americana. London: Penguin. DeLillo, D. (2010), Point Omega. London: Picador. DeLillo, D. (2011), Angel Esmeralda. London: Picador. Duvall, J. N. (1994), ‘The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo’s White Noise’, Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 50 (3): 127–53. Dyer, R. (2004), Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Herren, G. (2015), ‘Art Stalkers’, Modern Fiction Studies, 61 (1): 138–67. Herren, G. (2016), ‘American Narcissus: Lacanian Reflections on DeLillo’s Americana’, Orbit, 4 (20). Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.16995/orbit.87. Igarashi, Y. (2012), ‘Don DeLillo: Interview’, Granta, January 10. Available at: https://granta.com/interview-don-delillo/. Kael, P. (1986). Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars. Kellogg, C. (2016), ‘Don DeLillo’s Deep Freeze: Zero K  Takes on Death, Futurists, and Cryonics’, Los Angeles Times, 29 April. Available at: www.latimes.com/ books/la-ca-jc-delillo-zero-k-20160501-story.html. Knight, P. (2008), ‘DeLillo, Postmodernism, Postmodernity’, in J. N. Duvall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, 27–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laist, R. (2010), Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’s Novels. Oxford: Peter Lang. Lauret, M. (2014), Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature. London: Bloomsbury. LeClair, T. (1987), In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Marcus, L. (2013), ‘The Death of Cinema and the Contemporary Novel’, Affirmations, 1 (1): 160–77. Metz, C. (1982), Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McCrum, R. (2010), ‘I’m Not Trying to Manipulate Reality’, The Guardian, 8 August. Available at: www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/ don-delillo-mccrum-interview. Miller, J. (1977–1978), ‘Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)’, trans. J. Rose, Screen, 18 (4): 23–34. Mulvey, L. (1989), Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

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Said, E. (2004), ‘Thoughts on Late Style’, London Review of Books, 26 (5): 3–7. Said, E. (2006), On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. London: Bloomsbury. Schuster, M. (2008), Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum. New York: Cambria Press.

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‘I’m sure you must be somebody’: White masculinity in Don DeLillo’s Americana and White Noise Tim Engles

Chapter summary: This chapter examines two among many instances of DeLillo’s middle-class, heterosexual, white American male protagonists. As with such actual individuals, these protagonists initially strike many readers as merely ordinary or normal Americans. However, as DeLillo demonstrates in his first novel, Americana ([1971] 1989), and in his breakout novel, White Noise (1985), this ordinary norm is instead a specific social role, and an empowered one, as well as a role that such men often enact anxiously, and even fearfully. These two fictional stories dramatize the fictions of white American male identity, exposing the irony of its hyper-individualism. They do so by depicting the dependence of postmodern white American male identity on mediagenerated role models, as well as its historically resonant dependence on group-bound conceptions of other subordinated people.

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owards the end of DeLillo’s eighth novel, White Noise (1985), middle-aged white male protagonist Jack Gladney decides to hunt down and kill Willie

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Mink, the man with whom his wife has been having an affair. As Gladney travels towards the motel in which Mink lives, he realizes that he has fallen into enacting a clichéd part in a movie-like revenge plot. Nevertheless, his masculinity truly feels bruised, and careful readers will realize that his more subdued sense of white racial superiority has been challenged as well. As Gladney hovers over his victim, who strikes him as an unsettling racial ‘composite’ with a ‘spoon-shaped face’, his own racial status is explicitly labelled for the first time in the novel: ‘Why are you here, white man? . . . You are very white, you know that?’ (1985:  307, 310). Once Gladney and Mink manage to put bullets in each other, Gladney’s hunger for masculine revenge collapses, along with his sense of himself playing a character in a familiar cinematic scene; he takes the more severely injured Mink to a hospital, real blood having provoked in him something like real sympathy. More to DeLillo’s point regarding two of the novel’s structuring social paradigms, racial whiteness and heterosexual masculinity, Gladney’s conceptual divisions between himself and Mink also dissolve, if only temporarily. In Americana ([1971] 1989),1 28-year-old TV executive David Bell is the first of many white male protagonists in DeLillo’s novels, most of whom veer towards ultimately thwarted violent release from their seemingly inauthentic lives. In Bell’s case, potentially cathartic violence – in the form of a drunken, abusive orgy – also seems to promise release from a stultifying existence, though again, only temporarily. What is it, these novels invite us to wonder, that gnaws away at those who would seem to have it relatively easy, as successful, conventionally appealing, financially secure white American men? DeLillo provides his most thorough depiction of common white male proclivities in White Noise (a topic also accorded detailed attention in Underworld [1997]), in which Gladney performs a seemingly stable, secure white masculine identity, as a family-oriented college professor. That his topic is ‘Hitler Studies’, and that he has little interest in the genocidal racism that fundamentally grounds his professional subject matter, seems to strike no one in the novel as off key, let alone alarming. DeLillo has been widely recognized as an incisive diagnostician of postmodern inauthenticity,2 and for both Bell and Gladney, one source of growing discontent is their understanding that people like themselves fit all too well into an idealized script, in which they have been fulfilling an expected role. Aside from the fact that these two men have personal reasons for feeling unhappy, each also realizes that not unlike the sounds produced by a bell, the details of his prescribed role in life, and of its settings, are merely a series of echoes – clichéd ways of living, consuming, and relating to others. These repetitive echoes originate as directives of a conformist social order, which pushes them to act and even think in the same sort of consumerist, corporate-branded ways that others around them do. What bothers both Bell and Gladney is not the fact that the privileges handed

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to them because of their idealized role are made possible by the subordination and deprivation of others; instead, it is their private angst about a seemingly pervasive American inauthenticity. Their plot-driving discomfort arises from a sense that their own socially sanctioned performances negate whomever they might otherwise prefer to be. While both Bell and Gladney make some progress towards freedom from delimiting social expectations, what each fails to see  – despite the racially explosive era in which Bell lives, and despite the racist ideology of the fascist dictator whom Gladney mostly pretends to study – is that in addition to capitalist consumerism, white masculinity also functions in the United States as a structured set of directives, deeply shaping not only who white men commonly think they are, but also how they tend to perceive and treat others. As DeLillo also illustrates, while this role has its perks, living up to its demands can be nerve wracking, confidence challenging, and exhausting, as can searching for some way to break free. More broadly, the extremities of both Bell and Gladney’s frustrated efforts to find and resuscitate their own selves beneath the layers of others’ conceptions of themselves function as satiric warnings about not only media-driven threats to authentic experience, but also about their social order’s centuries-long, patriarchal white supremacist refusal to appreciate and nourish fundamental connections between disparate yet mutually reliant groups and individuals. Both White Noise and Americana dramatize and expose gendered, racialized (and to a lesser extent, classed) forces that strike many readers as merely incidental, forces that have always divided people in the United States from each other, as well as white men from themselves. While these two novels are not ‘historical’ fiction, the facts of ‘American’ history nevertheless loom large, primarily because for men like Bell and Gladney, the historical realities that account for their staged eminence have been repressed, more or less erased from daily consciousness.

Ethnoracial contexts While such intellectual realms as theology, philosophy, linguistics, and psychology clearly underpin thematic concerns in DeLillo’s fiction, he usually writes as a social novelist. Most of his novels focus as much or more on the context of his characters’ lives as on the characters themselves – indeed, the two come across as inseparable. In the title of Americana, DeLillo announces what has become a primary career-long subject, the United States itself, or rather, prevailing conceptions of it as a country, and thus of its citizens as various kinds of people. While discussing his own origins as the Bronx-born son of Italian immigrants, DeLillo has said that his ethnicity itself gave him

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‘a perspective from which to see the larger environment. It is no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture’ (Begley [1993] 2005:  88). This novel ostensibly relates a westward road-trip taken by David Bell and three acquaintances, but like White Noise, its deeper thematic concern is the country’s representations of itself. As told by an older Bell from a state of self-imposed exile on an island off the coast of Africa, Americana follows him from an earlier gluttonous existence as a womanizing, hard-drinking network TV executive; back further in time to scenes from his early years in a suburb of New York City, and at a college in California; to his journey to Fort Curtis, a Midwestern town where ‘even the bibles are white’; to a drunken, violent orgy and his flirtations with work at a tire-testing track; and finally, circling back to his ex-wife and New  York City (1989:  312). Bell’s original impetus for travel is a network assignment, that of producing a documentary on living Navaho Indians.3 Significantly, Bell never films nor even contacts the nation’s first inhabitants, let alone expends any interest in their stories and current circumstances. Instead, Bell spends several weeks in Fort Curtis on a Bergmanesque project, filming actors who imitate people from his past, including himself, all reciting monologues or interviews written by Bell. In his portraits of both novels’ protagonists, DeLillo reveals what always arises from a zoomed-in consideration of American white masculinity  – its malleability into specific forms of regional and class-based specificity (as opposed to other identities, which are marked in terms of homogenized difference). Prior to recalling the Fort Curtis episodes, the older Bell relates memories of his family of origin and its setting in suburban Old Holly. In terms of social class, the men there earned not only enough money to afford large houses, but also enough so that their wives could avoid remunerative labour. In terms of ethnicity, both of Bell’s parents evinced their attachment to roots in England and in precolonial America, in such forms as cherished family lore and material accoutrements.4 In this Northeastern Eisenhower-era setting, such people were often perceived as white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), a dominant ethnic group that openly declared its cultural and political eminence in the 1800s.5 WASPs did so by asserting first-American status when other provisionally white groups began arriving in large enough numbers to clamour for privileged recognition as ‘white’. The claim to whiteness asserted superiority and entitlement over not only other races, but also over supposedly darker and inferior European immigrants. The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ asserted a genetic and cultural connection to the United States’ English colonial origins, and ‘Protestant’ was an exclusionary marker wielded primarily against adherents to Catholicism and Judaism. This broader ethnoracially and religiously charged geopolitical setting impinges on Bell’s specific originary

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grounding as a shaping historical context, the significance of which Bell’s later status as a quintessentially all-American man discourages him from recognizing. As for Professor Gladney, White Noise reveals almost nothing of his past, yet his whiteness is also specified, again in class-based terms. Gladney measures himself on the novel’s first page against the wealthier (presumably white) parents of those who send their children to his place of work, and, when a train accident releases a threatening toxic cloud, against (again presumably white) working-class residents of ‘mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county’ (1985: 117). With both protagonists, DeLillo demonstrates that the dominance of idealized white masculinity encourages the repression of any particular white American man’s specific social context and origins, a normalizing, empowering process that falsely situates white men as both ordinary and the standard by which others are judged. Although Bell casts Old Holly as a sleepy locale somehow untouched by time, the modern world nevertheless seeped in, via newspapers and radio, but especially movies, television and advertising. These intrusions impressed upon young Bell not only a sense of the American scene at large, but also of himself as a certain kind of person, one paradoxically who lacks grounded specificity. Due to both his gendered, racialized status and his ‘ “conventionally” handsome’ appearance, the adult Bell half realizes that he matches at a purely symbolic level the media-generated avatar of his era’s mainstream American ideology (1989: 12). As a result, and despite any actual fame, Bell is occasionally stopped by people seeking his autograph. ‘I don’t know who you are’, one such person says, ‘But I’m sure you must be somebody’ (13). The older Bell reports that as a teenager he recognized his resemblance to such somebodies (that is, to conventionally handsome celebrities), and that he emulated iconic masculinity in the form of movie star Burt Lancaster, especially as he appeared in the film From Here to Eternity (1953). Lancaster’s cinematic presence impressed upon Bell not only his own potential as an apparent embodiment of such an ideal, but also more generally, the ‘true power of the image’ (12). Influential as well in the latter regard was Bell’s father, a highly successful advertising executive. The elder Bell was so obsessed with discerning the successful methods of previous promotional campaigns that he subjected his children to extended evening screenings from his vast archive of TV commercials. Having accepted his father’s nepotistic deployment of social capital toward the acquisition of a high-level entry position in broadcasting, Bell’s work as a producer of TV programmes further exposes him to the relentlessly commercial forces that drive mainstream American imagery. As with Gladney and many other DeLillo protagonists who enjoy the perquisites accorded a person who obediently enacts the role of a conventionally appealing American white man, Bell is also clever and curious,

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enough so that he often recognizes the automatized charades that constitute much of postmodern life. As with DeLillo himself, the young Bell’s affinity for European art film seems to help; such auteurs as Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman made similar points with their self-consciously performing characters about the mere, hollowed-out performance that much of ordinary twentiethcentury Western life had come to seem. In another DeLillo novel, The Names (1982), a character intones, as if speaking for DeLillo himself, ‘The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves’ (1982: 200, emphasis in original). Gladney also evinces an interest in cinema as it relates to performed identities, in particular the newsreels and propaganda films that played such a large part in Hitler’s charismatic rise to power.6 In such terms, DeLillo also satirizes the heights of egotistical excess that academia can reach, by cladding the professors of White Noise in black robes and sunglasses, and by having Gladney insert a pompous additional initial in his name: ‘J. A. K. Gladney, a tag I wore like a borrowed suit . . . I am the false character that follows the name around’ (1985: 16–17). As Bell leaves New  York, having apparently decided to abandon his corporate identity, his artistic ambition is to use film to process troubles from his own past that have influenced who he now is. Bell does so by using local theatre actors in Fort Curtis to examine various people he has known. In effect, and as DeLillo reveals more elaborately in White Noise, white masculinity has consciousness-shaping powers, and in response, Bell solipsistically uses the project, and the people currently around him, merely to sort through his own, narrowly focused problems – rather than to examine what interests DeLillo, his own life’s broader sociohistorical context. Bell thus fails to realize, or perhaps fails to care about, something that Jack Gladney points out at one point:  ‘Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood is complicated by technology’ (1985: 22). In Bell’s case, image-driven corporate media, with its near-constant focus on spectacles and ephemera, and on the future to be had by buying this or that product, is the technology that obscures the relevance of national history in explaining how he had come to be the man he is now trying not to be. Therein lies the irony of his using the distancing medium of film (and in the later, island-dwelling version of himself, of literature) in his attempt to sort through a personal past that itself was distorted by media-generated imagery. While Bell does to some extent recognize ‘the power of the image’ in shaping his era’s personal identities and their social context, he ultimately fails to escape from it. Indeed, as he writes and films his movie script, Bell unwittingly deploys a standard white male gaze, though in conceptual rather than visual terms, by attempting to capture something profound merely by creating isolated monologues for individuals from his own past.

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At the end of the novel, while flying back to New York, Bell is once again approached by an autograph seeker. Such people are certain that because he embodies so closely the white masculine ideal, Bell must be ‘somebody’, and his apparent continued receptiveness to this form of attention suggests that although he has declined to utilize Native Americans to consumerist ends by producing a corporate-serving documentary about them, he has not escaped the script into which his patriarchal, white supremacist social order seeks to insert him. Later in life, as an exiled author still sorting through his past, he writes that ‘it was literature I had been confronting these past days’ (1989: 377). However, his account’s repeated echoes of such works as Jack Kerouac’s popular Beat novel On the Road (1957) demonstrate that what he has mainly gathered from literary precedents is but another set of clichéd characters, plots and themes, which resonate as such within the context of an overarching, cliché-driven social order.7 In sum, Bell’s frustrated efforts to find and heal his genuine self beneath the layers of others’ conceptions of him function as DeLillo’s satiric warning about not only media-promulgated threats to authentic experience, but also about the patriarchal white supremacist refusal to appreciate and nourish constitutive connections between disparate yet mutually reliant peoples. Like White Noise, Americana exposes the fundamentally empty and self-interested heart of masculine whiteness that has driven the nation’s raced and gendered antagonisms not only during the war-torn Civil Rights era, but always.

Ironically parasitic individualism The basic vacuity of Bell’s identity  – born as it is, and emblematic as it is, of the all-American fealty to pure symbolism that is image-driven American capitalism – does have a traceable, tangible foundational reality. That reality, though, is itself grounded in symbolism and myth, and one part of it that seems to interest DeLillo is the idea of quintessentially American men as supposedly free of connections to, let  alone dependence on, those whom they have cast as subordinated others, especially in terms of race and gender. In this foundational, ongoing mythos, white men cannot be ‘men’ without conceptions of ‘women’ with which to define themselves in contradistinction, and white Anglo Saxons cannot be ‘white’ (nor Anglo Saxon) without ‘dark’ people (and ethnic/darker-white people) to do the same. The repression of such facts, which ironically enable hyper-individualistic and solipsistic white male self-conceptions, constitutes a repressed darkness lurking within white masculine identity. Gladney’s sense of himself as the performer of a cinematic white male role in hunting down Willie Mink is not solely informed by cinema; cinema itself is informed by historical context, as is Jack’s white male American

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consciousness. White men are encouraged to act out appropriate roles in order to be taken as admirable, successful individuals, but they also need others whom they can conceive of as appropriate recipients of their actions, others who must therefore be conceived of in certain stereotypical ways. In a contemporaneous review of Americana, Joyce Carol Oates saw within it ‘an insistence upon the authenticity behind the stereotypes’ (Oates 1971: 5-E). However, DeLillo recognizes not just the usual stereotypical figurations of others that help the majority subjugate its minorities; he also depicts those stereotypes enacted by the majority, demonstrating that stereotyping is a necessarily, though usually unacknowledgedly, reciprocal process. In both novels, this use of ‘others’, not just to get them to do things for oneself but also to establish oneself as a certain kind of self, is repeatedly portrayed as among the most egregious manifestations of performed fealty to the expectations of white male identity. Americana opens with Bell attending a party with a black woman, B. G. Haines, whose presence prompts the racist surprise of an acquaintance of Bell’s that he would even date a ‘nignog’ (1989: 5). Another guest subjects Haines to an increasingly vile series of racist jokes, to which she laughs uproariously, a satirical suggestion of what it can take for black people to get along in such settings. A revelation of the emotional costs arises as well, when Bell detects a ‘convulsive broken sob at the crest of [her] every laugh’ (6). Bell, also willing to do what it takes to fulfil his proper place in such settings, then utilizes the gendered blackness of Haines for his own purposes. He does so initially by bringing her to the party, thereby establishing himself as a daring young man who dates outside of his race, and then as a caring young man who feels for the travails of another race, by lecturing her for laughing along with racist jokes, and then ‘on the responsibility she had toward her people’ (6). That he does not actually care about such matters, because he cares more about his own image, is suggested elsewhere by his repeatedly staring into a mirror, and by beginning and ending his own film project with an image of himself holding a camera, filming himself in front of a mirror. The fundamental narcissism of idealized, media-generated white masculinity could hardly be more appropriately represented. Bell uses other women to self-constituting ends as well, repeatedly seeking their attention in order to confirm his sexual appeal, and demonstrating as well a modicum of self-awareness by accurately labelling such events in terms of his ego: ‘I hoarded such ego-moments, remembering every one. The nod. The pretty smile. The deep glance over the tip of the cigarette’ (17). Bell’s conceptions of and relations with a woman he knows only as Sullivan (or Sully), a traveling companion who works as an artist and who recounts historical realities that Bell refuses to hear, are no less self-interested, as he primarily uses her as a screen, and then as a sex doll, onto which he projects feelings about his own deceased mother.

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Gladney is less prone in White Noise toward seeking self-bolstering attention from conventionally beautiful women whom he does not know, content as he is to get it instead from his wife Babette. Ever in pursuit of a feeling of security (a need he hides because admitting to it would undermine his stoic masculine façade), Gladney describes and interacts with Babette in ways that demonstrate the entirely instrumental nature of his conception of her. Indeed, in his eyes, what she means to him is the entire ‘point’ of her existence: ‘The point is that Babette, whatever she is doing, makes me feel sweetly rewarded’ (1985: 5). In another moment, during which Babette has confessed to occasional depression, Gladney expresses dismay not for her pain, but for himself: ‘The whole point of Babette is that she speaks to me. She reveals and confides’ (191). Self-affirmation is also the point of many encounters that Gladney has with other people, including colleagues, health workers and his own children. During a shopping trip with the latter, he encounters a fellow professor, who expresses surprise at the off-campus, and thus de-robed and de-sunglassed sight of him:  ‘You look harmless, Jack. A  big, harmless, aging, indistinct sort of guy’ (83). Suddenly feeling even more insecure than usual, Gladney’s response is to keep shopping, but to do so in a way that affirms his own white male sense of self, that is, a way that re-establishes his empowered relations to others. Like a European explorer/colonizer, Gladney sends his children scouting ahead for likely purchases, while seeing himself, the family breadwinner, as ‘the benefactor, the one who dispenses gifts, bonuses, bribes, baksheesh’ (84). That Gladney narcissistically regards the entire episode in terms of self-renewal in response to withering exposure before the discerning eyes of a colleague is underlined by his mirrored image, the same symbol that DeLillo uses to indicate Bell’s solipsism: ‘I kept seeing myself unexpectedly in some reflecting surface’ (83).8 Such self-constituting dominance also happens in terms of race and ethnicity. Gladney and Bell live in overwhelmingly white environments, but their particular eras induce undeniable reminders of various darker others. Most events in Americana occur during the late 1960s Civil Rights era as the United States also continued its brutal, ultimately losing effort in Vietnam, while the early 1980s setting of White Noise included more subdued incursions into mainstream white American consciousness of ethnoracial difference. These reminders took such forms as increased residential, educational and media integration in terms of race, the recent hostage crisis in Iran, and Japanese automobile imports, which corporate media at the time depicted as a threat to American industry and jobs. The marginalized yet undeniable existence of actual people connected to such phenomena is symbolized in Gladney’s case by his repeated perception of ‘colored spots’ on the edge of his vision (39), and more directly for Bell, by an actual non-white person, or rather the filmed image of one. In a segment of his autobiographical film, Bell plays an

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interviewer interrogating his own father, who tells a story about producing an elaborate mouthwash commercial. The elder Bell relates this episode as an example of having felt regret at one point in his career, for agreeing to ‘pre-empt the truth’ (1989: 272). The entire commercial is a series of staged events – cheerful young people, flamboyant kisses and flaming car crashes, all filmed in front of crowds of hired extras, and all performed by people we know are white because their race is unidentified. Except for the race of one man, an extra that Bell’s script has his father identify as an elderly ‘Oriental’, and thus as a person who counters the commercial’s otherwise all-American wholesomeness. The client corporation insists on pre-empting the truth of this man’s presence at the commercial’s filming, by having the scenes in which he appears reshot without him. What Bell’s father seems to regret, if only briefly, is having agreed to the racist deletion of a man’s presence, a deletion that highlights for DeLillo’s readers the glaring whiteness of corporate media fare. The broader truth here, that the United States has always been ethnoracially diverse, is a reality that empowered white male purveyors of the American Dream have long sought to suppress. While pondering letters that his wife Merry sends from a trip to history-laden England, Bell reflects for a moment on his own struggles with historical fact, then muses that ‘Americans cannot keep track of the centuries’ (32). This line is easy to read as another among many more casual aphorisms offered by Bell, seemingly written as much or more for how they sound than for what they add to his story. And yet, common white male (mis)conceptions of history arise in these novels with a regularity that suggests thematic significance. The primary significance for most of DeLillo’s white male characters is that of absence, a lack of genuine historical awareness and connection. This lack is suggested almost poignantly when Gladney takes a detour while driving home one day to visit an old local graveyard. He apparently has no particular connection to anyone buried here, having instead been driven to visit by increasingly irrepressible thoughts and feelings about death. Gladney tells us three times that he stands there and listens, apparently for some sort of message or sign from the dead, but he hears nothing. He then utters what amounts to a secular prayer, a wish that white American men seem more prone than others to harbour:  ‘May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan’ (1985:  98). DeLillo dramatizes in both novels how the American Dream, as projected by corporate media and lived by its ideal white middleclass citizens, has a certain stasis to it, an eternal present-tenseness that discourages awareness of mortality, while concurrently instilling the suspicion that one’s own existence is a sort of living death.9 In the midst of Bell’s zombie-like existence as a backstabbing, ladderclimbing office worker, a relevant aphorism by St Augustine arrives, delivered by a colleague who secretly distributes such conundrums as memos:  ‘And

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never can a man be more disastrously in death than when death itself shall be deathless’ (1989: 21). This paradoxical statement (also alluded to in DeLillo’s most extended meditation on mortality, Zero K) has multiple implications for contemporary American life. For those who follow the dictates of white masculinity, it points not only to their repressed awareness of death, but also to their fearful denial of the many deaths of others at the hands of people like oneself. As the especially astute diagnostician of American white psychology James Baldwin noted a few years before DeLillo began writing Americana, ‘white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them’ (Baldwin 1962: n.p.). White American men know of course that they will eventually die, but an array of factors can render them especially averse to contemplation of the ends of both themselves and others.

Dependent independence One such factor is the historical truth that white male eminence has been achieved at the expense of white masculinity’s perceived others. Bell tells us that while in college, he revelled in the ability of a filmmaker to wrench an image of something from its context and place it in a new one: ‘A hawk glanced off the sun and I plucked it out of space and placed it in the new era, free of history and death’ (1989: 33). In this ‘new era’, the one in which Americana posits the enhanced power of the image as perhaps the greatest power, Bell remembers making a student film in which an undoubtedly white man is buried up to the neck in desert sand, and a ‘bunch of Mexicans come along and sit in a circle around his head’ (32). This is a succinct visual summary of a lurking white male nightmare in regard to history  – that of being held accountable for the abuses that produced one’s own casually accepted, yet anxiously felt, eminence. The ‘era’ feels more like an exciting new one for its most vaunted, idealized occupant, the conventionally attractive, well-funded white man, but in order to feel securely ensconced within it, he represses awareness of his group’s historical and current relations to less favoured others. Such men do so, DeLillo suggests, because such an awareness would expose the myth of their claims to earned or otherwise deserved social superiority, and at the same time, paradoxically and quite stupidly, to their supposed independence. As a student, Bell felt excited by film’s creative possibilities, but he was soon pushed into corporate work by his father, who quickly secured him a position. DeLillo satirizes particularly WASP male pretensions to independence by having Bell and his new wife agree that he should start in the broadcasting company’s mailroom, where he poses as a scrappy beginner for a mere four months, because ‘Independence is everything  . . .  especially when you’re starting out in life’ (34).

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Such declarations of independence ring especially hollow when aligned with the actual dependence of their declaimers on others, and especially with the history of their group’s self-serving and fear-quelling figurations of others. During an era in which men commonly referred to grown women as ‘girls’ and usually gauged them first and foremost in terms of sexual desirability, DeLillo figured Americana’s most insightful speaker of truth as a woman. While agreeing to pose as a surrogate mother for Bell so that he can work through what feels to him like a nagging Oedipal Complex, Sullivan tells him two lengthy bedtime stories. One describes her encounter with an American Indian named Black Knife, and another with her Uncle Malcolm, who impressed upon her the significance of her own ancestral European past. In both cases, Bell complains that the stories lack interest, but each reveals that which white American men have collectively refused to acknowledge:  their brutal treatment of others, including their use of conceptions of others in order to construct flattering, empowering counterclaims about themselves. As Sullivan says of her uncle, ‘And I knew then that the war is not between North and South, black and white, young and old, rich and poor, crusader and heathen, warhawk and pacifist, God and the devil. The war is between Uncle Malcolm and Uncle Malcolm’ (331). Men like her uncle (who actually reveals himself to be her father) who have enacted the role of ‘American white man’ have established themselves as such by projecting onto others undesirable qualities that lie within their own psyches. The results have included not only abuse of others and their own suffering, half-human selves, but also – and as DeLillo repeatedly depicts in his protagonists’ interactions with women and non-white others – both a fear of and a longing for the more vibrant forms of life that they perceive in others, while repressing or denying their own such liveliness. As one of hitchhiking Bell’s drivers points out, ‘Mystery is the white man’s enemy’ (376). Pinning down and naming what seems to be mysterious in others, then claiming to both know it and own it, has been the white male collective’s way for many centuries  – centuries of which they consequently have more trouble keeping track, despite the relative brevity of their nation’s history. Late in White Noise, Gladney seems temporarily freed from such a mindset by the sight of both his and Willie Mink’s blood, but he soon falls back into another clichéd, self-inflatingly relational perception of himself, that of honourable rescuer of the grievously injured. As the novel ends, Gladney is back with his family, basking in the no-longer worrisome glow of another chemically enhanced sunset, and apparently no closer to genuine selfawareness than he was while implicitly comparing himself to the participants in the novel-opening station wagon disgorgement ceremony. By the end of Americana, Bell might seem to have established a less self-involved interest in his collective’s others as well, as he politely quizzes some Indian-loving

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hut-dwellers on their way of life and then plays catch with an Apache boy. However, Bell’s brief time at a tire-testing track reads as an allegory about the life he’ll apparently go back to in New  York:  he requests of his grotesquely sexist and racist potential boss, Clevenger, that he be allowed to work along with the segregated black and Mexican workers, but he then joins in a drunken orgy with Clevenger and the white workers, treating three presumably hired Mexican women like trash, women who represent in both their gender and their ethnoracial status the kind of people subordinated and in effect trashed in corporate life by people like Bell. Although Bell rejects Clevenger’s offer of a job, the mindless circularity of the hired drivers testing tires on the oval track reflects both the loop he will make back to New  York and the automatized circularity of the daily corporate grind. Bell’s actions suggest that he will continue to act as an echo, absorbing the vanity-feeding attention and opportunities available in such settings for a conventionally attractive, well-connected man like himself (including an allAmerican prize like Merry, to whom he sends an amendatory gift). Some time later, in the novel’s narrative now, he again performs in what amounts to a white male script, apparently living alone while continuing to pretend that he is an island, and thinking of moving on from his actual island to further exploits in Africa – Bell is the first of many artist characters in DeLillo’s fiction, people who usually coil inward contemplatively, only to coil outward into action. As warnings of some of the ways that American culture encourages Americans to feel, think and act, both novels demonstrate not only that the allure of abusive white masculine hyper-individualism should be resisted, but also how difficult such resistance can be.

Notes 1 For a 1989 Penguin reprint of Americana, DeLillo revisited it, editing occasional passages and cutting, as David Cowart notes, ‘minor instances of rhetorical overkill’ (Cowart [1996] 2000: 95). In this chapter, I cite page numbers in the newer edition. For more on DeLillo’s edits of Americana, see Cowart ([1996] 2000: 95, n. 1). 2 On the works of DeLillo in regard to postmodern inauthenticity, see Cantor (1991) and Knight (2008). 3 DeLillo uses a variant spelling here of this group’s name, more commonly spelled ‘Navajo’. Regarding such nomenclature, historian Roxanne DunbarOrtiz points out that ‘citizens of Native nations much prefer that their nations’ names in their own languages be used’, including ‘Diné (Navajo)’ (xiii). 4 At one point, Bell’s mother says, ‘We’ve had doctors and ministers in our family all the way back to Jamestown’ (Jamestown being the continent’s first permanent English settlement) (DeLillo 1989: 139). The habitual purchases of

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5 Regarding the history of white Anglo-Saxon self-declarations as such, see Horsman (1981) and Jacobson (1998). I use the concept of ethnicity here to refer to a group of people who identify with each other on the basis of such perceived similarities as ancestry, culture, mores, traditions and so on. While ‘ethnic’ is a term that White Anglo-Saxon Protestants have used to label members of other immigrant groups in order to distinguish them from themselves, ‘WASP’ can also be considered an ethnicity, albeit a dominant one. For a useful discussion of whiteness itself in this sense as a ‘dominant ethnicity’ in the US context, see Doane (1997). 6 On his early affinity for avant-garde European cinema, DeLillo has said, ‘Probably the movies of Jean-Luc Godard had a more immediate effect on me than anything I’d ever read’ (LeClair [1982] 2005: 9). On the significance of film for DeLillo’s work, see Boxall (2008) and Osteen (2000). 7 For a critical analysis of the much less nuanced depiction of white masculinity in Kerouac’s On the Road, see Holton (1995) and Trudeau (2011). For a parodic dissection of the masculine underpinnings of ‘the whole ethos of the road’, which was largely initiated by Kerouac’s novel, see DeLillo’s White Noise, p. 68. On other literary references and allusions in DeLillo’s Americana, see Cowart ([1996] 2000). 8 For further consideration of this scene and others in White Noise in relation to racial whiteness, see Engles (1999). 9 As Mark Osteen puts it in an especially insightful analysis of Americana, Bell ‘fears his own living death’ (Osteen 2000: 26).

References Baldwin, J. (1962), ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind’, The New Yorker, 17 November. Available at: www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17/letterfrom-a-region-in-my-mind (accessed 27 May 2017). Begley, A. ([1993] 2005), ‘The Art of Fiction CXXXV: Don DeLillo’, in T. DiPietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 86–108. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Boxall, P. (2008), ‘DeLillo and Media Culture’, in J. Duvall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, 27–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cantor, P. A. (1991), ‘Adolf, We Hardly Knew You’, in F. Lentricchia (ed.), New Essays on DeLillo’s White Noise, 39–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cowart, D. ([1996] 2000), ‘For Whom Bell Tolls: Don DeLillo’s Americana’, in H. Ruppersburg and T. Engles (eds), Critical Essays on Don DeLillo, 83–96. New York: G. K. Hall. DeLillo, D. ([1971] 1989), Americana. New York: Penguin. DeLillo, D. (1982), The Names. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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DeLillo, D. (1985), White Noise. New York: Viking. Doane, A. W., Jr. (1997), ‘Dominant Group Ethnic Identity in the United States: The Role of “Hidden” Ethnicity in Intergroup Relations’, Sociological Quarterly, 38 (3): 375–97. Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2014). An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press. Engles, T. (1999), ‘ “Who Are You, Literally?” Fantasies of the White Self in White Noise’, Modern Fiction Studies, 45 (3): 755–87. Holton, R. (1995), ‘Kerouac among the Fellahin: On the Road to the Postmodern’, Modern Fiction Studies, 41 (2): 265–83. Horsman, R. (1981), Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jacobson, M. F. (1998), Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Knight, P. (2008), ‘DeLillo, Postmodernism, Postmodernity’, in J. Duvall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, 27–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LeClair, T. ([1982] 2005), ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo’, in T. DiPietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 3–15. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Oates, J. C. (1971), ‘Young Man at the Brink of Self-destruction’, Detroit News, 27 June: 5-E. Osteen, M. (2000), American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Trudeau, J. T. (2011), ‘Specters in the Rear-View: Haunting Whiteness in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road’, Text and Performance Quarterly, 31 (2): 149–68.

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2 Apocalyptism, environmentalism and the other in Don DeLillo’s End Zone, Great Jones Street and Ratner’s Star Katherine Da Cunha Lewin

Chapter summary: Throughout his writing, Don DeLillo has demonstrated a proclivity for thinking about the end. This subject emerges in various ways: through the discussion of nuclear war and chemical spills as well as an individual’s fear of their inevitable demise. However, though DeLillo’s fiction may explore multiple meanings of ‘end’ and though our anxiety for the end may remain, the ability for us to understand or predict the end is constantly changing. In contemporary eco-criticism, critics suggest that apocalyptism paves the way for new forms of thinking about our environment, as well as our relationships with others. This essay will look at three novels from the 1970s – End Zone (1972), Great Jones Street (1973) and Ratner’s Star (1976) – to trace how DeLillo creates fictions that think through the ethics of representation, in which ‘ending’ means to rethink our relationship to others. In doing this, he suggests that we must adapt our nuclear anxiety to form new social and ethical connections.

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‘Everyone wants to own the end of the world’ The opening line of Don DeLillo’s 2016 novel Zero K reads ‘Everyone wants to own the end of the world’ (2016: 3, emphasis in original). Though this seems to be an extension of Eric Packer’s thinking in Cosmopolis (2003), that the rich may indeed get to own the world in an age of ever-increasing wealth and inequality, this line also reveals DeLillo’s interest in reconceiving how it is the that the ‘end of the world’ does affect ‘everyone’. In this novel, protagonist Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, a wealthy businessman, and his stepmother, an archaeologist, are cryonically frozen; for them their ‘end of the world’ or, in effect, their death, is something they have chosen for themselves. They have been able to partake in an experimental extension of life through this voluntary procedure. However, the novel is also filled with other individuals, victims of wars and disasters, projected onto a screen in the facility in which this new science is taking place. For those individuals, who owns the end of their worlds? And how can fiction represent them? This opening sentence reveals the evolving concerns of a writer who has developed a keen interest in exploring the intersections of economy, environment and representations of the other over the course of his career. In this chapter, I reassess DeLillo’s use of an end-point to think about the cultural preoccupation with death on an individual and mass scale. Though DeLillo’s late fiction is often discussed in terms of its suspended temporality and attention to the experiential in the twenty-first century (see Boxall 2012; Viermuelen 2015; Gander in this volume:  Chapter  8), I  suggest that DeLillo’s early novels demonstrate his desire for a fiction that thinks through the ethics of representation, in which ‘ending’ means to rethink our relationship to others. By looking at three early novels, End Zone (1972), Great Jones Street (1973) and Ratner’s Star (1976), I demonstrate how DeLillo’s interest in endings has always involved thinking about who is represented in that ending and how our anxiety for our own deaths can be transformed into a greater sense of shared humanity.

Fiction and endings The novel as a form, in its own replica of the end through a literal forward movement of pages, or expressed as a percentage on an e-reader, unavoidably contains a beginning, a middle, and an end, in which the experience of the end is foreshadowed not only in the very process of reading, but in the physical lessening of pages. The material object of the book cannot help but echo our own experience of a linear movement in time, ending in death. Frank Kermode’s The

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Sense of an Ending, an eschatologically focused study, explores how fiction and the structures of fiction engage with the dread of apocalypse. For him, Christianity in Western philosophy has produced a death-obsessed canon. He suggests that: In so far as we claim to live now in a period of perpetual transition we have merely elevated the interstitial period into an ‘age’ or saeculum in its own right, and the age of perpetual transition in technological and artistic matters is understandably an age of perpetual crisis in morals and politics. And so, changed by our special pressures, subdued by our scepticism, the paradigms of apocalypse continue to lie under our ways of making sense of the world. (Kermode [1967] 2000: 28) For Kermode, ‘the paradigms of apocalypse’ underscore all Western writing, subverted into an anxiety for the end-point of the novel. Reading becomes a way of making sense of the world by replaying our concerns for its continuation within narrative. Kermode identifies that this ‘sense of an ending’ (98) is the manifestation of our desire to be able to know the temporal limits of our existence. He suggests an ever-present fear, an ‘eschatological anxiety’ (95) in response to this ‘perpetual crisis’. Throughout his oeuvre, DeLillo thematizes the knowledge of the end, in the descriptions of a myriad of events that may hasten it. In White Noise, Jack Gladney tells a class of students that ‘All plots tend to move deathward’; later, Jack’s colleague Murray asserts that ‘To plot is to live’, a way of forming ‘a shape, a plan’ ([1985] 2011: 26, 291). In both phrases a plot becomes a marker of time, a progression that both extends and limits existence. Like Kermode, DeLillo questions how our underlying knowledge of death necessitates the manifestation of the end in a fictional guise as a way of recasting our anxieties. But, as Winnie Richards in White Noise also suggests, these end-points necessarily shape our existence: ‘You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit’ (228–9). Borders, limits and endpoints abound in DeLillo not just as conceptual indicators but as real and literal markers that determine our lived experience. But, in his consistent refiguring of implicit death, one starts to wonder if DeLillo’s interest is not in the inevitability of death but its difficulty to predict in the face of Kermode’s ‘perpetual crisis’. Though DeLillo was famously called ‘the chief shaman of the paranoid school of American literature’ (Towers 1988),1 in this essay I propose to think about fictions not through paranoia, but through anxiety. Mark Osteen notes that ‘DeLillo’s novels resist the terminality they so desperately seek: they almost invariably end by not ending, sometimes circling back to their beginnings, sometimes offering ambiguous epilogues that cast doubt on their apocalyptic denouements, and sometimes trailing off indeterminately’ (2000:  32). This

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ambiguity and indeterminacy, I suggest, evokes an existential anxiety, or what Osteen terms ‘postmodern dread’, through which DeLillo’s fictions are brought to bear. By playing on our ‘universal desire for fictional closure’ (32), DeLillo’s fiction continually refigures it, exposing society’s basis on the ‘perpetual crisis’ of which Kermode speaks. This simultaneous movement towards and away from an end-point is, for Peter Boxall, characteristic of the earlier period of DeLillo’s writing. He states that ‘DeLillo’s work up to Underworld (1997) is angled toward an historical terminus due to arrive somewhere at the end of the century, and the rhythm and balance of his prose is shaped, at its most intimate level, by this movement both toward and away from such a moment of finitude’ (2012:  686). If the end is necessary to allow us to understand meaning, to narrow our anxiety to a specific point which we both crave and reject, how then is our anxiety attenuated when we do not have a specific moment on which to focus it?

The apocalypse and the environment Thus far, I have considered DeLillo’s attention to the end in the abstract. But how does his fiction represent specific end-points? Elizabeth K. Rosen has argued that ‘the atomic bomb haunts Don DeLillo’s novels’ and ‘remains for this author the ultimate symbol of the end’ (2008:  143). This is hardly surprising for a novelist who grew up during the Cold War and came of age while the bomb existed as both a very real threat and as a symbol of struggles between global ideologies. The effects of that time were referred to as a pervasive ‘nuclear anxiety’: children were taught to ‘duck and cover’, adults cheerfully sold bomb shelters and the population was generally told to prepare for the worst.2 DeLillo depicts the bomb in various novels:  in White Noise, Jack Gladney and his family have to be evacuated from their suburban town after a so-called ‘airborne toxic event’, a gaseous black cloud that appears after toxic leak caused by a train accident; in Underworld, the novel portrays two events from 3 October 1951: the so-called shot heard around the world that took place in the baseball match between the Dodgers and the Giants, and Russia’s nuclear test. Nuclear and chemical apocalypses abound, figured and refigured, but never causing complete destruction. Instead, this nuclear fear hangs over his novels, as part of the very fabric of his writing. If, as Kermode suggests, history has proved eschatological predictions wrong so that ‘no longer imminent, the End is immanent’ ([1967] 2000: 25), not a moment about to arrive, but a moment always present, how does this affect the representation of an end-point in fiction? The plethora of complex environmental issues affecting the planet provide a new framework through

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which this end-point is made present. Within eco-criticism, apocalypticism and environmentalism are conceptually linked: Lawrence Buell acknowledges the importance of apocalyptic thinking for the furtherance of environmental action:  ‘Apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal . . . The rhetoric of apocalyptism implies that the fate of the world hinges on the arousal of the imagination to a sense of crisis’ (1995: 285). Buell’s description vocalizes the dominance of certain types of discourses, anxieties that might be most readily available even if they are not the most pressing. We may, for example, be anxious about the reawakened threat of nuclear war in light of Donald Trump’s antagonism of North Korea, but the concurrent hurricanes, wildfires, and earthquakes of August and September 2017 have less readily available individuals to blame. As Molly Wallace has recently discussed: If we may once have believed that the end of days would come in a blaze of nuclear firestorm (or the chill of the subsequent nuclear winter), we now suspect that the apocalypse may be much slower, creeping in as chemical toxin, climate change, or bio- or nanotechnologies run amok, and in this new company, it is perhaps not the fiery blast but the radioactive spill that moves to the fore. In the age of risk, the apocalypse cannot be avoided through the ‘rational’ deterrence of mutually assured destruction, for destruction in this case is unintentional, coming as a consequence less of dramatic decisions of the strategists than of the mundane results of peaceful business as usual – the push of aerosol spray, the flick of a light switch, the disposal of a laptop computer. (2016: 29) Not only are the causes of climate change more difficult to understand and see than we may want, but its victims are sometimes made invisible. Rob Nixon’s study Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor looks to ‘calamities that are slow and long lasting’ confronting the ‘representational bias’ of those who suffer the most (2011: 6, 13). He comments that ‘Casualties from slow violence – human and environmental – are the casualties most likely not to be seen, not to be counted’ (13). In this, the ‘slow violence’ enacted is both physical and representational, a process of systematic oppression. Naomi Klein’s work demonstrates the rapaciousness of corporations in times of political and environmental upheaval. In The Shock Doctrine, she notes that tragedies have become immediate opportunities to deregulate, where politicians and corporations use ‘moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering’ (Klein 2007: 8). For Klein, environmental politics are deeply entrenched with neoliberal capitalism, and the inequalities they generate. In her subsequent work she has also suggested that ‘The climate crisis, by presenting the species with an existential crisis and

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putting us on a firm and unyielding science-based deadline, might just be the catalyst we need to knit together the great many powerful movements bound together by the inherent worth and value of all people’ (2016: 11). Klein’s proposition about the climate crisis speaks suggestively to the emergence of a greater attention to environmentalism in DeLillo studies. Elise Martucci’s monograph The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo looks at the way DeLillo’s fictions interact with the environments that produce them. Martucci notes that ‘DeLillo’s characters exhibit an often repressed awareness of the natural world underlying their image-dominated environment. It is this awareness and the subsequent desire to connect with their material world that illuminates environmental consequences and challenges the conditions of our postindustrial society’ (2008:  3). Using the work of Buell, Martucci suggests that DeLillo’s ‘environmentalism’ is not immediately recognizable as eco-criticism, but is instead a way of vocalizing an ‘environmental unconscious’, a way of reconceiving of ourselves in the world that gives greater attention to the ethical and political repercussions of our daily life. Rebecca Rey also notes DeLillo’s interest in the environment in his 2007 play, The Word for Snow. Like Martucci, she notes that ‘there is no mention of the science behind the environmental changes described; rather, a sense of awe at omnipotent power pervades the play’ (Rey 2016: 400). In this play, as well as in a range of his other fiction, Rey recognizes a new attention to the environment as a way of encouraging debate in the American populis. Michael Jones also reads DeLillo’s late fiction through climate change, suggesting that his late short stories express a new kind of ‘realist locality’; through moments of sudden exposure to the possible lives of others, his writing becomes a way of ‘extending the reach of human empathy to an object as big as the Earth’ (2017: 7). Martucci and Jones evoke the problem of scale, in the difficulty thinking environmentally poses, whether in connecting with ‘the material world’ or ‘extending the reach of human empathy’. All three writers note the issue of locality, or indeed proximity, in environmental action, posing the question:  what is an environmental consciousness if it does not take into account the intersections between poverty, race and gender?

Transformative anxiety: End Zone, Great Jones Street and Ratner’s Star White Noise is often thought of as DeLillo’s apocalyptic novel par excellence, for its depiction of the ‘airborne toxic event’ and pervasive nuclear anxiety. Underscoring the novel, however, is a question about representation:

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These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornados. I’m a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don’t happen in places like Blacksmith. ([1985] 2011: 114) Nixon and Klein have noted that environmental catastrophes primarily affect the most vulnerable within a society, whether it is victims of natural disasters, deforestation, or globalization. In this extract, Jack suggests that the very location of a suburban town functions as a talisman against disaster; if they do not happen in Blacksmith, where do they happen? In DeLillo’s second novel End Zone, he proposes a relationship between war and American football, exposing the obfuscating jargon that dominates contemporary warfare and the euphemisms created to mask its real horrors. The novel’s protagonist Gary Harkness, a dropout from several colleges across the United States, has ended up at Logos College, in West Texas. The novel is haunted by the language of violence and mass extinction. In his use of football, the supreme American pastime, DeLillo exposes the implicit violence within what appears wholesome. At one point Gary asserts that ‘the football player travels the straightest of lines . . . his actions uncomplicated by history, enigma, holocaust or dream’ ([1972] 2011: 3). However, in the course of the novel DeLillo demonstrates how easily the language of the game slips into the language of apocalyptism, as Gary and his colleagues become increasingly concerned with the threat of nuclear disaster and mass extinction. The novel’s title places the narrative in a literal ‘end zone’, both the place on a football pitch and also a place of ending. Gary Harkness becomes obsessed with nuclear holocausts after coming across a book about the subject at the University of Miami. He develops a taste for reading and thinking about the possibility of destruction: I liked reading about the deaths of tens of millions of people. I  liked dwelling on the destruction of great cities. Five to twenty million dead. Fifty to a hundred million dead. Ninety percent population loss. Seattle wiped out by mistake. Moscow demolished . . . I liked to think of huge buildings toppling, of firestorms, of bridges collapsing, survivors roaming the charred countryside. Carbon-14 and strontium-90. ([1972] 2011: 20) In Gary’s detailed imaginings, he enacts a simultaneous desire for and fear of the end, chiming with Boxall’s reading of DeLillo’s pre-Underworld fiction. In

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reading about these deaths, Gary suggests his own ability to instigate them, a kind of wish fulfilment. Reading and imagining these atrocities affords him a form of agency in the face of an unknown and unquantifiable threat. Moreover, his thinking is formed in lists, catalogued numerically. In the terms that he uses, the figures that he imagines, and indeed the chemicals he names, there are no specifics as to what a nuclear atrocity might look like. Though he may think of ‘Five to twenty million dead’, the victims of this imagined attack are homogenized. In making victims merely numbers, Harkness imagines only uniform, abstract bodies. Though Gary’s individual fear and longing for the end occupy the main narrative, circling around his fantasies are the bodies of others. Gary is notably absent from what he describes, choosing Milwaukee as a site for these obliterations, a place to which he has never been ([1972] 2011:  41). The irony that underscores this, of course, is that there can be no separation between individuals during nuclear warfare because an atomic bomb does not discriminate. The novel hints at this early on in an aside:  ‘(Exile or outcast:  distinctions tend to vanish when the temperature exceeds one hundred)’ (6). If history is the ‘placement of bodies’ (43), then in End Zone, DeLillo asks: whose bodies? Though Harkness’s ethnicity is not specified (we read him as white), DeLillo is also concerned with representing the anxieties of his Jewish roommate Anatole Bloomberg and Taft Robinson, star player and ‘first black student to be enrolled at Logos College’ ([1972] 2011: 3). For Bloomberg his huge weight becomes a way of making himself larger than his own history, in order to ‘unjew’ (71) himself. Bloomberg proposes this as a way of existing ‘beyond guilt, beyond blood, beyond the ridiculous past’ (72). In going ‘beyond’ Bloomberg suggests new expansive ways of being that surpass one’s particular identity, a way of asserting himself as an individual free from a historical past. However, when colleague Andy Chudko responds with a ‘seminar on the future of the earth’ (72), which he delivers in the first person plural, he presents another way of going ‘beyond’ that means no individual has bear the weight of inherited trauma. Instead, in his pronouncement that ‘soon we’ll harvest the seas, colonize the planets, control every aspect of the weather’ (72) he counteracts Bloomberg’s worry about his identity, with a new united community of individuals who have complete control of their environment. Taft Robinson, like Gary, has been gradually losing interest in playing football and is isolated for much of the novel. When Gary goes to visit Taft in his bare room, they discuss their idiosyncratic reading choices. While Gary reads about ‘mass destruction and suffering’ ([1972] 2011:  229), Taft reads about ‘atrocities  . . .  the ovens, the showers, experiments’ (229–30) of the Nazis during the Holocaust. In their shared horror of these real catastrophes,

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Gary asks ‘There must be something we can do’ (230). Taft delivers a powerful response:  ‘A name’s a name. A  place could just as easily be another place. Abraham was black. Did you know that? Mary the mother of Jesus was black. Rembrandt and Bach had some Masai blood. It’s all in the history books if you look closely enough’ (230). Though Taft, like Gary, may read as a way of alleviating his anxiety for nuclear warfare, reading what has come before as a way of deadening the horror of what may be to come, he also looks for a way of understanding a history that could represent him. In DeLillo’s attention to Bloomberg’s Jewishness, as well as Taft’s reading, he seems to be harking back to the origin of the word ‘Holocaust’, used now to describe the effects of a potential nuclear warfare. By reminding the reader of the history of this word, he draws attention to other kinds of human disasters that haunt the present moment as a way of making other kinds of suffering visible. In linking together the Holocaust with the historic subjugation of African Americans, DeLillo explores the relationship between genocides, exposing the nuclear crisis as a moment to, as Klein suggested, ‘knit together’ different communities. In Gary’s desire to do ‘something’ DeLillo suggests forming new ethical bonds between people, as opposed to suffering individually. What Martucci terms DeLillo’s ‘environmental unconscious’, here might be termed as an expansive anxiety for the other, an ethical psychic solidarity. In his subsequent novel, Great Jones Street, DeLillo’s attention has moved away from the Texan desert and back to his home city of New York. DeLillo has often returned to this city as a setting for his novels, but what makes this novel particularly important is his specificity; unlike End Zone, DeLillo furnishes this novel with exact detail from New York at that time, specifically rooting it in the impoverishment of the 1970s. In an early interview with Tom LeClair he commented of New York: The streets are full of disturbed people. For a long time I wondered where they were coming from, so many, at once. We now learn they’ve been let out of asylums and hospitals and into halfway houses and welfare hotels. I’ve always thought New  York was a medieval city and this is another sign of that . . . In the subway arcades under Fourteenth Street you hear mostly Spanish and black English with bits of Yiddish, German, Italian, and Chinese, and then there’s this strange, broken language. The language of the insane is stronger than all the others. It’s the language of the self, the pain of self. (LeClair [1982] 2005: 13) The landscape of New York is, for DeLillo, dominated by the people who live there (see McKinney in this volume:  Chapter  7). In this description DeLillo implicitly comments on the care of the mentally ill; their presence becomes a marker of the lack of available resources for them. Simultaneously, he also

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notes the linguistic make up the city, made not only of multiple languages (see Lauret in this volume: Chapter 6), but also of ‘the strange, broken language’ that voices the ‘pain of self’. This observation seems to come directly from DeLillo’s experience at the time, as he later comments to Adam Begley: When I  was working on the book 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. (Begley [1993] 2005: 94–5) After substantial investment during the New Deal, which led to the development of an advanced public sector, New  York in the 1970s reached a period of crisis. Though the very early 1970s did not see the same fullscale austerity inflicted by the President Gerald Ford after he was elected in 1974, New  York’s landscape was severely impoverished during this period. Moreover, the title itself also makes a comment about that time:  though Anthony DeCurtis commented that ‘Great Jones Street is no different from Main Street or Wall Street:  it offers no haven, no safe retreat’ (1991:  134), I suggest that the street itself shapes the concerns of the novel; only covering two blocks, Great Jones Street is nestled between Broadway and the Bowery. Though small, it is still a part of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, historically home to many artists such as Jean Michel Basquiat and Charles Mingus, as well as New York’s large homeless population. In the opening, following on from the ‘end zone’ of the previous novel, DeLillo situates the novel in ‘endland’ ([1973] 2011: 5). Bucky explains: ‘I was interested in endings, in how to survive a dead idea’ (5). In looking for ‘certain personal limits’ (5), Bucky has come to a place among artists and drug addicts. In these preliminary sentences, the novel contrasts celebrity, one which lauds excess as part of the accoutrements of fame, with a different kind of excess, found in the drug users of a financially starved Manhattan. Bucky seems to sense some oncoming danger: ‘I was preoccupied with conserving myself for some unknown ordeal to come’ (19–20). This is perhaps due to the effects of the Cold War; when Bucky notes ‘Great Jones, Bond Street, the Bowery. These places are deserts too’ (90), he seems to be implicitly unifying New York with the desert landscape of the previous novel, suggesting Great Jones Street as a troubling echo of the Texan desert. However, as noted above, DeLillo suggests that poverty is part of the landscape of the city: ‘New York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of a plague’ (5). In this perpetual crisis, DeLillo conceives of

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the effects of a decimated public sector in the language of disaster, an everpresent ‘plague’. Though many critics have noted DeLillo’s exploration into systems of excess through the drug/tape plot,3 the underlying economy of the novel is engaged with a form of laissez-faire neoliberalism that, post-2008 crash, we would now term austerity. Through repeated attention to the homeless and the mentally ill, it seems DeLillo specifically wants to draw attention to crowds of individuals who are disenfranchised and actively prohibited from participating in global capital. Like Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, released four years before this novel, DeLillo questions the achievements of counter-culture; by borrowing the guise of a counter-cultural movement, the Happy Valley Farm Commune distort the aims of earlier, more optimistic collective action. Instead, by easily co-opting musicians into nefarious organization, DeLillo suggests how musicians become mere purveyors of products. Though Bucky’s retreat to Great Jones Street may have come from a sincere desire to reject extremes, the ability of any individual to merely remove themselves from systems they find distasteful is nigh on impossible. As Osteen comments of both DeLillo’s early and later writing, ‘it remains politically charged and self-critical because it dramatizes how aesthetic and ascetic withdrawal may easily be transformed into apologies for violence, consumer numbness, and exploitation’ (2000: 59). In the last chapter, in Bucky’s enforced silence, he can hear the words of these others who have been made invisible by market forces and austerity politics. To return to DeLillo’s earlier comments he notes of the final ­chapter that: I think this is how urban people react to the deteriorating situation around them – I think we need to invent beauty, search out some restoring force. A writer may describe the ugliness and pain in graphic terms but he can also try to find a dignity and significance in ruined parts of the city, and the people he sees there. Ugly and beautiful  – this is part of the tension of Great Jones Street. (Begley [1993] 2005: 94) DeLillo attempts to reinvent not only the language of the novel, but also the formal constraints of the novel that had been hitherto subsumed in character and plot. In this final chapter, Bucky’s wandering around New  York is also a way of affording space for those marginalized individuals to speak. In his descriptions of the people he sees, Bucky provides the most beautiful language in which he gives voice to the poor and homeless who have always been present: This one day of late rain I saw a toothless man circle a cart banked with glowing produce. He bellowed into the wind, one of nature’s raw warriors,

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flapping around in unbuckled galoshes. A few people huddled nearby. One would now and then extend a hand toward the cart, finger-pricing, as the man wailed to the blank windows above him. It was a religious cry he produced, evocative of mosques and quaking sunsets. ([1973] 2011: 245) Here we see an example of DeLillo’s ‘broken’ language, giving voice to the ‘pain of self’; Through this man’s bellowing, he evokes ‘mosques and quaking sunsets’ quasi-spiritual and prophetic noises that seem to reach beyond language. The language of plagues and disaster then are used not to predict imminent endings, but to render the individual experiences of the homeless community in the Bowery more visible. By considering its setting, the novel is readily understood as a critique not only of what he later terms ‘fame-making apparatus’ (DeLillo 1997: n.p.) but also of the austerity politics that DeLillo saw decimating his home city. In Great Jones Street, DeLillo transforms the nuclear anxiety of End Zone, into a rally against the devastating effects on a diverse community that, for DeLillo, are essential to the foundation of New York. Though Ratner’s Star is a departure for DeLillo in its focus on mathematics and its ostensibly science fiction plot, it still meditates on the relationship between anxiety, ending and death. Billy Twillig, a 14-year-old Nobel laureate and mathematics genius, is recruited to decipher a message that has apparently been sent from another planet, a message that is predicted to tell ‘us something of importance about ourselves’ ([1976] 1991: 91). However, in the course of the novel, the message is discovered to be the coordinates for an eclipse, a prediction that has come from an ancient unknown civilization. Though this may not be a disaster in a conventional sense, DeLillo uses the eclipse, and indeed uncertainty in the face of the unknown, to think through connections forged between individuals and communities. The novel is propelled by a range of characters fluent in the language of various forms of mathematics but it is also underscored by a furious anxiety to understand the meaning of the code. Field Experiment Number One, the facility in which the novel takes place, is built for scientific knowledge, housing, according to one of the scientists, ‘Single Planetary consciousness. Rational approach. World view’ ([1976] 1991: 21). However, in Billy’s conversations with several different individuals with multiple specialities (including, the history of mathematics, red ants, and Aboriginal mysticism), exchanges that often descend into nonsense, DeLillo satirizes this idea of rationality as the most important form of communication. In the second part of the novel, ‘Reflections’, Billy joins a team attempting to create ‘a universal logical language’ (285). This language, which aims to be literally universal  – intelligible even to extraterrestrials – is also ‘not designed to be spoken’ (289). Like Bloomberg’s logical approach to his own identity, this language of universal logic renders the human beings it is supposed to represent invisible.

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At the end of the novel, after the revelation about the real content of the message, DeLillo explores the effects of this miscalculation. Remarkably like the last chapter of Great Jones Street, DeLillo returns not just to crowd scenes, but descriptions of poverty. Introduced with the phrase ‘system interbreak’ ([1976] 1991:  429), a way of suggesting a marked change in tone from the ‘system’ of the novel, DeLillo follows the eclipse through Asia in close detail. The novel has been formally diverse throughout, but here these paragraphs are addressed to a ‘you’, inviting an implied dialogue between ‘you’ and ‘I’. In these descriptions, DeLillo varyingly contrasts the effects of the eclipse on remote areas of the world, including both hardships and pleasures of day-today life: ‘this nearly sunset occurrence, shadow moving toward the eastmost Ganges, choleroid feces, choleroid dehydration, choleroid vomit, girls with finger-cymbals laughing in a mango grove’ (430). Even though the eclipse darkens the world momentarily, DeLillo uses it as a way of cast light on a part of the world that would have been otherwise invisible in the discourse of the novel, and the language of the scientists. For Charles Molesworth the focus on place here is particularly important, as ‘the poverty of India and Bangladesh shatters the “placeless” virtues of the scientific project that has been the novel’s focus for the preceding four hundred pages’ (1991: 144). Of course, for these individuals in India and Bangladesh, though an eclipse is palpably not the end of the world, it is experienced as an unexplained event in the world in which they live. The scientists in the facility may seek to explore connections, but these are only in the abstract; they maintain a distance between themselves and others, perpetuating hierarchies of knowledge that exclude the less economically advantaged. By including this scene at the end of the novel, as Molesworth outlines, DeLillo asks the reader to rethink the extraterrestrial message that was supposed to tell ‘us something of importance about ourselves’. Osteen also notes the importance of this scene, suggesting ‘The experience certainly will dislodge Billy Twillig’s formalism, and may push him towards a more humane awareness of his fellow creatures’ (2000:  96). Martucci agrees, suggesting that DeLillo attempts to ‘awaken a global sense of place’ (2008: 145). In these important pages, DeLillo asks how the message Billy has been aiming to decipher all along might be reimaged as a ‘life-cry’ ([1976] 1991: 433) of those made invisible in languages or discourses that ignore them.

‘The democratic shout’ As Rosen notes, ‘DeLillo’s interest has always been the role of apocalyptic sensibility in our lives’ (2008:  144). In DeLillo’s earliest fiction, we can plot the emergence of a more expansive attention, in which the fear of a threat

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to oneself is recalibrated to become increased care for others. In each of the three novels I  have mentioned above, DeLillo seeks to balance the interests of the protagonist with the world around them. In the final chapter of Zero K, as Jeffrey rides a bus, he sees what is colloquially referred to as the ‘Manhattanhenge’, the moment at sunset when the sun falls exactly between the enormous skyscrapers of Manhattan: ‘the streets were charged with the day’s dying light and the bus seemed the carrier of this radiant moment’ (2016:  273). Like the eclipse of Ratner’s Star, this is another kind of environmental event, a moment that allows the individuals experiencing it to rethink their connection to their surroundings. Travelling alone, except for a few other people on the bus, Jeffrey is ‘startled by a human wail’ (273). He realizes that it is coming from a young boy, sitting at the back of the bus. They are united in a moment of shared wonder: ‘I didn’t know what this event was called but I was seeing it now and so was the boy, whose urgent cries were suited to the occasion, and the boy himself, thick-bodied, an oversized head, swallowed up in the vision’ (273–4). He is reminded of the novel’s opening words and, in the boy’s disability, Jeffrey wonders if ‘this was what the boy was seeing?’ (274). The ambiguity of this moment characterizes the central claim of my argument: in this moment of contact, in which Jeffrey imagines an environmental event from the perspective of a vulnerable individual, he expands his fear for the end to become a fear for humanity. Jeffrey modifies his reading of the boy:  ‘I told myself that the boy was not seeing the sky collapse upon us but was finding the purest astonishment in the intimate touch of earth and sun’ (274). In his reframing of the boy’s vision, his shout becomes a kind of salvation: ‘I didn’t need heaven’s light. I had the boy’s cries of wonder’ (174). In Mao II ([1991] 1992) DeLillo specifically engages with the politics of representation: Do you know why I believe in the novel? It’s a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street . . . Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it. Something so angelic it makes your jaw hang open. The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. (156) The possible novel, existing in everyone, is a messy, clashing thing, made up of ‘ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints’, but the novel is itself ‘a democratic shout’ a means of representing everyone. While reading as a Whitmanic call to arms, it also speaks to another concern about representation; the boy’s cry, like the earlier ‘bellow’ in Great Jones Street, or the ‘life-cry’ in

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Ratner’s Star, functions as the ‘democratic shout’ from Mao II, calling out for a radical solidarity within fiction.

Notes 1 Much of DeLillo’s fiction has been read through a paranoiac lens, through which the reader and character are united in their desire to find some underlying causality for often complex and interweaving plots. We can see this as part of DeLillo’s larger strategy of analysing feelings of cultural anxiety, exacerbated by some of the events of the late twentieth century such as the assassination of JFK, the Cold War, the Vietnam War and Watergate. In DeLillo’s early fictions like Running Dog and Players, he explores the cultural malaise of the middle classes through plots influenced by spy thrillers. In later work such as Libra and Underworld, this paranoia becomes a formal strategy as a means of questioning the formation of national history and myth. For more discussion on paranoia in DeLillo, see Knight (1999), O’Donnell (2000) and Allen (2000). 2 For more on the cultural and psychological effects of the Cold War, see Seed (2012). 3 For example, Anthony DeCurtis suggests that ‘the drug and Wunderlick’s music, no matter how authentically conceived or individually created, are both products, and the buying and selling of products is what makes the world of Great Jones Street turn’ (1991: 137).

References Allen, G. S. (2000), ‘The End of Pynchon’s Rainbow: Postmodern Terror and Paranoia in DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star’, in T. Engles and H. Ruppersburg (eds), Critical Essays on Don DeLillo, 115–34. Boston: G. K. Hall. Begley, A. ([1993] 2005), ‘The Art of Fiction CXXXV: Don DeLillo’, in T. DiPietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 86–108. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Boxall, P. (2012), ‘Late: Fictional Time in the Twenty First Century’, Contemporary Literature, 53 (4): 681–712. Buell, L. (1995), The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture. London: The Belknap Press of Harvard Press. DeCurtis, A. (1991), ‘The Product: Bucky Wunderlick, Rock n Roll, and Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street’, in F. Lentricchia (ed.), Introducing Don DeLillo, 131–41. Durham: Duke University Press. DeLillo, D. ([2003] 2011), Cosmopolis. London: Picador. DeLillo, D. ([1972] 2011), End Zone. London: Picador. DeLillo, D. ([1973] 2011), Great Jones Street. London: Picador. DeLillo, D. ([1991] 1992), Mao II. London: Vintage.

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DeLillo, D. (1997), ‘The Power of History’. New York Times. Available at: www. nytimes.com/library/books/090797article3.html?mcubz=0 DeLillo, D. ([1976] 1991), Ratner’s Star. London: Vintage. DeLillo, D. ([1985] 2011), White Noise. London: Picador. DeLillo, D. (2016), Zero K. London: Picador. Jones, M. (2017), ‘The Other Side of Silence: Realism, Ecology and the Whole Life in Don DeLillo’s Late Fiction’, Textual Practice, 1–19. Available at: www. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2017.1284890 Kermode, F. ([1967] 2000), The Sense of an Ending, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klein, N. (2007), The Shock Doctrine. London: Penguin. Klein, N. (2016), ‘Let Them Drown’, London Review of Books, 38 (11): 11–14. Knight, P. (1999), ‘Everything Is Connected: Underworld’s Secret History of Paranoia, Modern Fiction Studies, 45 (3): 811–36. LeClair, T. ([1982] 2005), ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo’, in T. DiPietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 3–15. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Martucci, E. (2008), The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo. London: Routledge. Molesworth, C. (1991), ‘Don DeLillo’s Perfect Starry Night’, in F. Lentricchia (ed.), Introducing Don DeLillo, 143–56. Durham: Duke University Press. Nixon, R. (2011), Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. London: Harvard University Press. O’Donnell, P. (2000), Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia in Contemporary US Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press. Osteen, M. (2000), American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rey, R. (2016), Staging Don DeLillo. Oxon: Routledge. Rosen, E. K. (2008), Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Seed, D. (2012), Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives. Kent: Kent State University Press. Towers, R. (1988), ‘From the Grassy Knoll’, New York Review of Books, 18 August. Available at: www.nybooks.com/articles/1988/08/18/ from-the-grassy-knoll/. Viermuelen, P. (2015), ‘Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, the Anthropecene, and the Scales of Literature’, Studia Neophilogica, 87: 68–81. Wallace, M. (2016), Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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3 Libranth: Nicholas Branch’s Joycean Labyrinth in Don DeLillo’s Libra Graley Herren

Chapter summary: Libra is a metafictional labyrinth. CIA historian Nicholas Branch is not only a character in the novel but also the embedded author of the narrative. James Joyce used this autological approach in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Libra (1988) replicates this metafictional structure, borrowing a number of themes and motifs from Stephen Dedalus and the mythical artificer Daedalus along the way. Although Dedalus succeeds in using his art as wings to escape his imprisonment, Branch ultimately fails. The artifice he creates becomes his metafictional prison.

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ibra (1988) is a labyrinth. It is modelled in part after the original Labyrinth built by Daedalus, the cunning artificer immortalized by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. More specifically, Libra follows the labyrinthine blueprint of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Joyce canonized Daedalus as the patron saint of artists by metamorphosing him into Stephen Dedalus. Don DeLillo is a literary descendent in the Daedalus-Joyce-Dedalus line. At the beginning of his first published interview, when Tom LeClair

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asked why he was so reluctant to speak about himself and his work, DeLillo explained with a quote from Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait: Silence, exile, cunning, and so on. It’s my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work. When you try to unravel something you’ve written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery, in part  . . .  If you’re able to be straightforward and penetrating about this invention of yours, it’s almost as though you’re saying it wasn’t altogether necessary. The sources weren’t deep enough. (LeClair [1982] 2005: 4) The present essay aims to unravel some of Libra’s mysteries, following Ariadne’s thread back to the labyrinth’s source. In his piece titled ‘DeLillo’s Dedalian Artists’, Mark Osteen argues, ‘DeLillo’s artists repeatedly re-enact this pattern of seclusion and emergence, entrapment and escape, and their metamorphoses render them temporarily monstrous, malformed, or moribund before they die or emerge in a new guise. DeLillo’s artists embody both the Minotaur and Daedalus, who leaves the labyrinth but loses something priceless in his flight to freedom’ (Osteen 2008:  137). Osteen focuses on three of DeLillo’s artistic characters:  rock musician Bucky Wunderlick from Great Jones Street (1973), novelist Bill Gray from Mao II (1991) and performance artist Lauren Hartke in The Body Artist (2001). But the DeLillo canon also includes several covert artists who surreptitiously lay claim to this same inheritance. DeLillo frequently features characters that function as creative agents of their narratives, even though they are not ostensibly artists by profession. For example, mathematician Billy Twillig (Ratner’s Star, 1976), waste management executive Nick Shay (Underworld, 1997), unemployed currency analyst Benno Levin (Cosmopolis, 2003), documentarian Jim Finley (Point Omega, 2010), and compliance and ethics officer Jeff Lockhart (Zero K, 2016) each serve sub rosa as metafictional artificers; that is, as the authors, narrators, conceivers or dreamers of all or parts of the narratives in which they are embedded. One of DeLillo’s most imbricated artificers is Nicholas Branch. Overtly he is ‘a retired senior analyst of the Central Intelligence Agency, hired on contract to write the secret history of the assassination of President Kennedy’ (DeLillo 1988:  15). Covertly he is a double agent, an insurgent novelist who has penetrated the citadel of history. Branch, in the words of Ovid, turns his mind to unknown arts; and in the process he converts his CIA historical archive into a creative writer’s workshop, a ‘room of theories and dreams’ (14). There he conceives a labyrinthine fiction about the Kennedy assassination. The result is the book Libra. DeLillo cunningly

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frames Nicholas Branch as the artificer of the narrative we read. DeLillo invents arch-fabulator Branch, who invents arch-conspirator Win Everett, who invents a prototype for the shooter eventually cast as Lee Harvey Oswald, who is constantly inventing aliases and imagining doubles. Branch identifies deeply with Oswald and the rogue CIA conspirators. He depicts them as his doppelgangers, his secret sharers. He abandons history in favour of fiction, which gives him creative licence to project his thoughts, experiences, and condition onto his characters. Nicholas Branch’s chief literary exemplar for this creative process is James Joyce. T.  S. Eliot famously referred to Joyce’s modernist technique as ‘the mythical method’, appropriating ancient models as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ ([1923] 1975: 177). Branch uses Joyce’s A Portrait as paradigm for Libra in much the same way that Joyce used Homer’s Odyssey as superstructure for Ulysses. Like the mythical Daedalus, Branch is an exile who attempts to invent his way out of prison. Like Stephen Dedalus, Branch constructs a Künstlerroman and attempts to use his fiction as wings to fly past the nets cast to ensnare him. However, unlike them both, Branch ultimately fails. The fiction he 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.

Metafictional self-portraits Nicholas Branch explicitly invokes Joyce in relation to the Kennedy assassination. Reflecting on the Warren Report, ‘Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred’ (DeLillo 1988: 181). Expanding his scope to encompass all the data in his Library of Babel, his room of theories about the assassination and dreams about the perpetrators, Branch reflects, ‘This is the Joycean Book of America, remember – the novel in which nothing is left out’ (182). It may sound as if Branch has Ulysses in mind as his touchstone, but he ends up channelling A Portrait instead, that seminal modernist chronicle of the dark arts cunningly conceived under conditions of silence and exile. Branch’s Joycean Book of America is the Joycean Book of the Labyrinth. In 1983 DeLillo wrote a Rolling Stone article on the assassination titled ‘American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK’. Already he was working through nascent themes that would gestate over the next five years into Libra. Notice, for instance, how his historical understanding

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of this American assassination bleeds into the European modernist literature best suited to express it: What has become unraveled since that afternoon in Dallas is not the plot, of course, not the dense mass of characters and events, but the sense of a coherent reality most of us shared. We seem from that moment to have entered a world of randomness and ambiguity, a world totally modern in the way it shades into the century’s ‘emptiest’ literature, the study of what is uncertain and unresolved in our lives, the literature of estrangement and silence. A European body of work, largely. (1983: 22) Taken in tandem with that telling reference to ‘the Labyrinth’ in the subtitle, it seems that DeLillo already has his sights on Daedalus-Joyce-Dedalus as the Orion’s Belt pointing him toward Libra. I am not the first critic to notice Libra’s echoes of A Portrait. Jesse Kavadlo describes DeLillo’s novel as ‘an inverted kunstlerroman, not a portrait of the artist as a young man but the portrait of the assassin. Oswald the would-be artist lays down the pen and picks up the sword, or worse, the gun with the telescopic sight’ (2004:  69). Peter Boxall draws analogies to A Portrait in Oswald’s struggles for a mode of expression through which to assert self-autonomy. He argues, ‘Oswald, like Dedalus, attempts to forge his own consciousness. His recurrent image of himself as a man of action, walking in the night in the “rain-slick streets”, is one that is driven by the idea that he might be able, through a kind of covert, personal insurrection, to forge himself in the smithy of his own revolutionary soul’ (2006:  135–6). Boxall sees Oswald’s plans as thwarted by other author-figures who conspire to limit his actions, thwart his agency and conscript him into their plots. He detects Branch as the authorial agency above and behind all the others:  ‘Of all the controlling figures in the novel, Nicholas Branch is perhaps the most powerful. Branch can appear to be the novel’s uber-narrator, retrospectively choreographing the development both of Oswald’s convoluted career, and of the Everett/ Parmenter/Mackey plot to implicate Oswald in the assassination’ (137). The term ‘uber-narrator’ perfectly captures Branch’s role of central intelligence in the novel. Boxall adds that ‘the narrative is balanced and tuned in such a way that, even as the cast of assassination characters move and speak, we can sometimes see, stirring behind the fabric of their lives, visible through the taut skin of the bright hot skies, the outline of Branch, at his computer, in his room of theories in 1988’ (138). The present essay seeks to peel away the concealing fabric and fill in Branch’s authorial outline. There is a long tradition among Joyce scholars of reading Stephen Dedalus as the uber-narrator of A Portrait in ways which are instructive for readers of Libra. For instance, in Ulysses and the Metamorphosis of Stephen Dedalus,

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Margaret McBride reads Stephen Hero, A Portrait and Ulysses as ‘a series of increasingly self-conscious artifices’ in which Stephen – not Joyce – is the intratextual author: ‘within every tale there appears a character who is, quite distinctly, a writer, and this writer-artist may be telling the tale. In essence, the three stories follow an identical paradigm:  the text creates the writer who in turn creates the text’ (McBride 2001: 13). McBride understands such metafiction ‘not as autobiographical but as autological, as a sophisticated, self-reflexive system dramatizing its own conception and development’ (30). My understanding of Libra is autological. Nicholas Branch is not merely an avatar and pseudonym for Don DeLillo. By the final lines of A Portrait Stephen has embarked upon the odyssey that will lead him to reconstruct his artistic genesis – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – the story the reader just finished reading. By the conclusion of Libra Nicholas Branch has likewise reached the end of his tether as historian and has made the fateful decision to reconstruct the story instead as fiction, one which not only delivers a fantastic assassination conspiracy, but which also doubles as his Künstlerroman, the story we just finished reading. Tim Engles argues that there are two protagonists in Libra: ‘not only the central character in a story that is being told [Lee Harvey Oswald], but also the teller of that story, an unnamed figure who sorts through incomplete and conflicting bits of evidence in a narrative effort that becomes its own drama’ (2015: 254). Engles is right about there being a second protagonist; I  would argue, however, that we do know the identity of this ‘unnamed figure’ – and it is not the name on the book’s cover. Nicholas Branch is as narratologically distinct from Don DeLillo as Stephen Dedalus is from James Joyce. An autological approach to Libra reveals Branch as the internal teller of the story. A Portrait serves as the blueprint for Branch’s metafictional künstlerroman.

From the nightmare of history to the dreams of fiction Both A Portrait and Libra cross the minefield from history to fiction. As a boy, however, Stephen is enthralled by history and feels destined for historic greatness. Even as a disaffected and disillusioned teenager, he privately clings to the faith that he is bound for glory: ‘The hour when he too would take his part in the life of that world seemed drawing near and in secret he began to make ready for the great part which he felt awaited him the nature of which he only dimly apprehended’ (Joyce [1916] 2007: 54). But Stephen’s relationship to history shifts dramatically over the course of the novel. As he heeds the calling of his true artistic vocation, he comes to regard history not as the

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proving ground for his future success but as an obstacle to be overcome, a fatal trap he must avoid. He tells Davin in ­chapter 5, ‘When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I  shall try to fly by those nets’ (179). Stephen fits himself with sturdier wings and fixes his sights towards cosmopolitan Europe and a future in art. As an artist he hopes to look back on the past in his own terms, not those prescribed by his history, and finally become free ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’ (224). In his 1997 essay, ‘The Power of History’, DeLillo pits fiction against history. He asserts, ‘Against the force of history, so powerful, visible and real, the novelist poses the idiosyncratic self. Here it is, sly, mazed, mercurial, scared half-crazy. It is also free and undivided, the only thing that can match the enormous dimensions of social reality’ (1997: n.p.). The ‘power’ of history in this sense is restrictive and coercive; history as state-sponsored institution for controlling the individual. The novelist’s irrepressible weirdness and creative liberty provide the antidote. ‘It is almost inevitable that the fiction writer, dealing with this reality, will violate any number of codes and contracts. He will engineer a swerve from the usual arrangements that bind a figure in history to what has been reported, rumoured, confirmed or solemnly chanted’ (n.p.). DeLillo’s rhetoric in ‘The Power of History’ is relentlessly incarcerational:  history imprisons and fiction breaks free. Idiosyncratic, disobedient novelists ‘will sooner or later state their adversarial relationship with history’ (n.p.). Nicholas Branch is initially identified as a CIA historian, but he gradually metamorphoses into a fiction maker. Unlike Stephen, however, Branch ultimately discovers that one can be trapped in fiction’s nets as securely as those of history. Nevertheless, he does manage to assemble a compelling counter-narrative to the history he was charged to write. In the process he also chronicles his own transformation by proxy through various avatars, historical figures lured away from history by the dreamscapes of fiction. How does a CIA historian learn how to build a metafictional labyrinth? By apprenticing himself to Stephen in A Portrait. From a young age, Lee Harvey Oswald, like Stephen, believes he is destined for historic greatness. He immerses himself in Marxist literature and becomes convinced that his wretchedness is historically determined by capitalism. He vows to join the struggle against this system of exploitation and thus become swept up in history. From Lee’s perspective joining history entails sacrificing individuality. Lee writes in the epigraph to Part One:  ‘Happiness is not based on oneself, it does not consist of a small home, of taking and getting. Happiness is taking part in the struggle, where there is no borderline between one’s own personal world and the world in general’ (DeLillo 1988: 1).

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At times he freely embraces self-sacrifice for a greater good. In military prison at Atsugi he reflects: Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction . . . History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. He knew what Trotsky had written, that revolution leads us out of the dark night of the isolated self. (101) Much later, after his defection and return to America and his growing involvement in the assassination conspiracy, a part of him still clings to the romance of surrendering to history: ‘Summer was building toward a vision, a history. He felt he was being swept up, swept along, done with being a pitiful individual, done with isolation’ (DeLillo 1988: 322). Lee’s desire to lose himself in history is at odds with his counter-impulse to achieve personal notoriety. This individualist aspiration is expressed through dreams, fantasies, films, and fiction. The self-mythology of Stephen Hero is echoed by Oswald Hero. As an adolescent Lee dreams, ‘He lay near sleep, falling into reverie, the powerful world of Oswald-hero, guns flashing in the dark. The reverie of control, perfection of rage, perfection of desire, the fantasy of night, rain-slick streets, the heightened shadows of men in dark coats, like men on movie posters. The dark had a power’ (DeLillo 1988: 46). He imagines himself as hero of a spy-thriller or film noir, and this tendency to invent more interesting alter egos expands and diversifies over time. He creates multiple aliases and views his own actions from a detached perspective. As he dips his toe into real espionage by divulging secrets about the U-2 spy plane, Lee conceives of his performance like a spectator:  ‘He was not connected to anything here and not quite connected to himself  . . .  He barely noticed himself talking. That was the interesting part. The more he spoke, the more he felt he was softly split in two’ (89, 90). One should resist the temptation to diagnose such dissociation as a symptom of schizophrenia. Within Libra’s world-inside-the-world this splitting impulse suggests the development of a fiction writer’s frame of reference, an impulse to double the self as other, to convert first-person into third-person. As such, it should come as no surprise that Lee eventually becomes drawn to writing fiction. Plotting an exit strategy from the Marines and from America, he fills out an application where he lists his vocational interest as ‘To be a short story writer on contemporary American life’ (DeLillo 1988: 134, emphasis in original). He tries his hand at writing in the Soviet Union, producing with great effort a few essays and a longer memoir. But as his haughtily titled ‘Historic Diary’ suggests, Lee still regards himself as a servant of history in these early efforts. It takes the Mephistophelean David Ferrie to lead Lee (whom he calls

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Leon) down a different path. One can almost see Branch peeking from behind the curtain and hear him whispering in Ferrie’s ear as he counsels, ‘There’s something else that’s generating this event. A  pattern outside experience. Something that jerks you out of the spin of history. I  think you’ve had it backwards all this time. You wanted to enter history. Wrong approach, Leon. What you really want is out. Get out. Jump out. Find your place and your name on another level’ (384, emphasis in original). Lee does not find his new place and name until he lands in jail after the assassination. Detained in a Dallas prison cell, he has an epiphany. His calling is not to sacrifice himself to history or to be a patsy in someone else’s plot. No, he must seize control of his own story by deliberately reconstructing the assassination on his own terms: ‘Lee Harvey Oswald was awake in his cell. It was beginning to occur to him that he’d found his life’s work. After the crime comes the reconstruction’ (DeLillo 1988: 434). He plans to use his imprisonment as an opportunity to craft a self-portrait of the assassin. The metafictional mind-merge with Branch is uncanny here. It becomes nearly impossible to distinguish where author ends and character begins:  ‘They will give him writing paper and books. He will fill his cell with books about the case. He will have time to educate himself in criminal law, ballistics, acoustics, photography. Whatever pertains to the case he will examine and consume . . . His life had a single clear subject now, called Lee Harvey Oswald’ (434–5). Is this the raison d’être for Oswald or Branch? At this point that can seem a distinction without a difference. Identical as they may appear, there are crucial differences between what Lee and Branch forge in the smithies of their respective souls. Lee is eager to start afresh:  ‘The more time he spent in his cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now. This charged him with strength. There was clearly a better time beginning, a time of deep reading in the case, of self-analysis and reconstruction. He no longer saw confinement as a lifetime curse’ (DeLillo 1988: 435). Branch knows better. Prison is not Lee’s Bethlehem but his Golgotha. Branch knows Lee will not live to begin ‘his life’s work’ but will be killed the next day. He also knows that the chore of reconstruction will eventually be assigned to Branch himself. Fifteen years into that impossible historical task, and thoroughly sapped of all strength and zeal for the job, Branch turned instead to fiction, the results of which are Libra. There he tells the story of Oswald, the assassination conspirators, and the beleaguered CIA historian sentenced to hard labour in the archival labyrinth. Lee’s ecstasy echoes that of Stephen at the end of A Portrait, but Branch negates such optimism through his reconstruction. A Portrait concludes with Stephen’s flight to freedom through art, and Lee is deluded enough to think a similar fate awaits him. He is wrong. Libra offers instead a myth of The Fall to complement the master trope of the Labyrinth. Branch borrows A Portrait’s

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palette but turns the canvas upside down to portray a spiralling descent into exile, imprisonment, and death.

The Fall The Labyrinth represents more than artistic ingenuity and inscrutable complexity. It is a sinister emblem steeped in secrecy, shame, and guilt. King Minos had Daedalus build the Labyrinth to conceal the Minotaur, the unholy offspring of Queen Pasiphaë’s sex with a bull. The god Poseidon was responsible for making Pasiphaë desire the bull, but consummation was made possible by Daedalus, who put his cunning to perverse use by constructing a device to enable their bestiality. This was not Daedalus’ first abominable act. Before his notorious exploits in Crete, he was a renowned artist in Athens. He was so envious of a rival artist, his nephew Perdix (sometimes called Talos), he hurled him off the Acropolis. In some versions of the myth, Athena saved Perdix by turning him into a partridge so he could fly to safety. Others maintain that Daedalus succeeded in murdering Perdix and was banished from Athens. Either way, he was a criminal fugitive long before he built the Labyrinth and devised those prison-break wings. Perhaps the profane Labyrinth could only have been conceived by an artificer as devious as he was inventive. No great stretch of the imagination is needed to link the criminals in Libra with Daedalus. They are his rightful heirs as diabolical artificers, killers, and exiles. The rogue CIA agents who conspire against President Kennedy begin their plots in exile. Win Everett, Larry Parmenter, and T. J. Mackey are veterans of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Afterwards these anti-Castro diehards were each reprimanded and ostracized by the CIA. These outcasts were once devout worshippers of the Agency. Larry Parmenter’s wife, Beryl, recognizes his devotion as religious zealotry:  ‘Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God’ (DeLillo 1988:  260). Even as they devise their plots against the commander-in-chief, they convince themselves that they are not traitors but purists. Win Everett foresees the day when his plot will be exposed and he will be held accountable; still, he seeks the approval of his superiors and believes he will ultimately be vindicated: What’s more, they would admire the complexity of his plan, incomplete as it was. It had art and memory. It had a sense of responsibility, or moral force. And it was a picture in the world of their own guilty wishes. He was never more surely an Agency man than in the first breathless days of dreaming up this plot. (364)

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One detects the outline of Branch behind such passages. He knows what it is like to be exiled and yet remain, as Cranly puts it to Stephen, ‘supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve’ (Joyce [1916] 2007:  212). Branch also knows what it is like to rebel against ultimate authority:  non serviam: I will not serve. Branch borrows the ancient Greek prototype of Daedalus as guiding spirit from A Portrait, but he also borrows the Christian iconography of The Fall, associated with the revolt of Lucifer’s band of rebel angels and with the sin of Adam and Eve. This foundational myth is delivered most vividly by Father Arnall in his chapter III sermon: Lucifer, we are told, was a son of the morning, a radiant and might angel; yet he fell: he fell and there fell with him a third part of the host of heaven: he fell and was hurled with his rebellious angels into hell. What his sin was we cannot say. Theologians consider that it was the sin of pride, the sinful thought conceived in an instant: non serviam: I will not serve. That instant was his ruin. He offended the majesty of God by the sinful thought of one instant and God cast him out of heaven into hell forever. (Joyce [1916] 2007: 103, emphasis in original) The rebel angels’ fall into exile and imprisonment in hell is replicated by defiant humans’ fall into exile from the Garden of Eden into this veil of tears called the world; a legacy inherited by us all, according to Catholic theology, in the form of original sin. Young Stephen trembles at his postlapsarian fate. He poignantly reflects: The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard: and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling but not yet fallen, still unfallen but about to fall. (Joyce [1916] 2007: 142) Soon after, however, Stephen renounces his inheritance of original sin and instead lays claim to his redemptive artistic birthright from Daedalus, innocently ignoring all the sinister elements also associated with the cunning artificer. The old dispensation guaranteed his fall, but his new artistic faith sets him soaring free. No longer fearing damnation, Stephen comes to identify with Lucifer as a kindred rebel against God’s yoke. He intentionally echoes Lucifer’s non serviam in his declaration of artistic independence to Cranly: I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some

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mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I  allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning. (Joyce [1916] 2007: 218) Branch again employs the Joycean mythical method in his appropriation of falling iconography from A Portrait. Win Everett first introduces the theme. Contemplating the Cuban catastrophe, he echoes Lucifer’s fallen angels: ‘Then the long slow fall. I wanted to sanctify the failure, make it everlasting. If we couldn’t have success, let’s make the most of our failure’ (DeLillo 1988: 27). Branch structures the chapters in such a way that several end with falling imagery and then segue directly into falling again at the beginning of the next chapter. These chapters ostensibly take place at different times and places and involve different plots. But Branch’s presiding genius as uber-narrator is insinuated through his arrangement of the materials. For instance, at the end of the ‘26 April’ chapter Win drifts off to sleep: ‘It was all part of the long fall, the general sense that he was dying’ (79). The next chapter, ‘In Atsugi’, wakes with the same imagery: ‘The dark plane drifted down, sweeping out an arc of hazy sky to the east of the runway’ (80). The ‘dark plane’ refers to the U-2 spy plane. Branch bookends ‘In Atsugi’ with the slow descent of an ejected pilot from a U-2 plane, the most evocative description of falling in the novel: ‘He is coming down to springtime in the Urals and he finds that his privileged vision of the earth is an inducement to truth. He wants to tell the truth. He wants to live another kind of life, outside secrecy and guilt and the pull of grave events’ (116). In fact, as the novel soon reminds us, ejected U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers falls into secrecy and guilt, not out of it. He lands in the Soviet Union, in prison, and in history. Defector Lee Oswald visits him there and intuits the non serviam camaraderie of a fellow fallen angel: ‘Paid to fly a plane and incidentally to kill himself if the mission failed. Well we don’t always follow orders, do we? Some orders require thought, ha ha. He wanted to call to the prisoner through the door, You were right; good for you; disobey’ (196, emphasis in original). Branch returns to this imagery at the end of Oswald’s life. Drifting into delirium after being shot by Jack Ruby, Branch equips Oswald with these dying thoughts: ‘It is the white nightmare of noon, high in the sky over Russia. Me-too and you-too. He is a stranger, in a mask, falling’ (440). Revealingly, Lee’s dying fall transitions directly into the final Branch section of the novel. You-too and Me-too.

Libranth Libra is a highly resonant title. Peter Boxall hears in the title ‘a balanced tension between liberty and zodiacal predestination’ (2006: 132). The root of ‘liberty’ is

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the Latin ‘liber’, which is indeed a near cognate of ‘Libra’, and for that matter of ‘Labyrinth’, too. But ‘liber’ also lies at the root of the French livre and the Spanish libro, all of which might be housed in an English ‘library’ (or the Texas School Book Depository). I am referring to the etymology of Book. The ‘liber’ of liberty and of the labyrinth hangs in the balance of the book. A pound one way or the other can tip Libra’s scales (‘libra’ is Latin for ‘pound’, which is why it is abbreviated ‘lb’). The central conflict of the book Libra is between fiction and history, in Boxall’s formulation a conflict between the free flux of fiction’s continuous becoming and the intransigent bind of history’s fixed narrative. DeLillo told interviewer Kevin Connolly: In a theoretical sense I think fiction can be a refuge and a consolation. In Libra the national leader still dies, but for one thing, at least we know how it happens. Beyond that, fiction offers patterns and symmetry that we don’t find in the experience of ordinary living. Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world. (Connolly [1988] 2005: 31) Fiction certainly allows an author to impose pattern and symmetry, which theoretically might provide refuge and consolation. Not always, however, and not successfully in Libra. Branch may have turned away from history toward fiction in hopes of achieving Dedalian liberty. But instead he constructs a book which itself functions as a prison  – not a historical one, but a metafictional one. He and his characters are inextricably trapped inside the Libranth. There are no emancipatory flights of escape as in A Portrait. No one gets out of Libra alive. The arch-conspirator Win Everett is the first to recognize the metafictional deathtrap: Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it. (DeLillo 1988: 221) Death is etched into the very structure of Libra. To a certain extent this death is historically predetermined: the real Kennedy was killed on 22 November 1963; the real Oswald was killed on 24 November 1963. But in other ways death between the covers of Libra is aesthetically engineered, numerologically encoded, and discreetly stamped with the authorial signature of Nicholas Branch. For instance, the Oswald chapters are titled with geographical markers

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and the conspiracy chapters with temporal markers. Had those chapters been numbered as in other DeLillo novels, there would be eleven chapters in Part One and thirteen in Part Two. A reader who notices this demarcation might wonder why the novel is not divided evenly into two sections of twelve chapters each. In the chapter before ‘22 November’, Branch slyly hints at the answer:  ‘It’s not surprising that Branch thinks of the day and month of the assassination in strictly numerical terms – 11/22’ (377). The following chapter detailing the assassination is the 11th in Part Two and the 22nd overall: 11/22, the date of Kennedy’s death. The chapter detailing Oswald’s assassination is the 24th overall:  not only the day in November he died but also his age in years at the time. The novel begins with Lee underground in the New  York subway and ends by returning him underground with his Fort Worth burial. In so many ways Branch plants secret codes and shapes perfect symmetries in his reconstruction of events. These fictional manoeuvres are cunning, but they are not redemptive. The characters are all condemned to death within Libra. Everett intuits his metafictional bind:  ‘We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely. He would show the secret symmetries in a non-descript life’ (DeLillo 1988: 78). He inscribes these secret symmetries as an author, but he is also inscribed by them as a character. The same holds true for Branch himself, and he knows it. He is responsible for building this labyrinth, but he is also one of its metafictional inmates. He inserts a coy self-allusion to that effect when describing Oswald’s Atsugi incarceration: In the prison literature he’d read, Oswald was always coming across an artful old con who would advise the younger man, give him practical tips, talk in sweeping philosophical ways about the larger questions. Prison invited larger questions. It made you wish for an experienced perspective, for the knowledge of some grizzled figure with kind and tired eyes, a counselor, wise to the game. (DeLillo 1988: 99) Branch surely has Libra in mind as ‘prison literature’, and he has himself in mind as ‘the artful old con’ who knows how this game is played. He might have made a wise counsellor for Lee had they been fellow prisoners in Atsugi – as opposed to fellow prisoners in Libra. In 1988 DeLillo spoke to Washington Post reporter Jim Naughton: ‘I think Nicholas Branch has reached the point he has because he is so haunted by the story itself and by the people who are part of it’, DeLillo

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says. ‘I think he is almost immobilized by sadness, compassion, regret and by the overwhelming sense that he is never going to be able to do justice to the enormity of this story.’ (Naughton 1988: n.p.) He added, ‘Once you have read in the case I think you do become trapped forever . . . In fact I’m sure you do. This is certainly the most deeply haunting experience of my life, working on this book’ (n.p.). He ingeniously devised a literary hall of mirrors for depicting this haunting (and haunted) trap. DeLillo created uber-narrator Nicholas Branch who, after years of studying the case as a historian, attempted to break free through fiction. He turned to an ideal model for achieving freedom through art, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and tried to use it as a skeleton key to unlock his cell. The result is endlessly fascinating for readers  – but judged by Branch’s own standards, Libra is a failure. ‘He knows he can’t get out. The case will haunt him to the end’ (DeLillo 1988: 445). That is, to the end of his life and to the end of the novel  – which for a character stuck in a book amounts to the same thing. Near the middle of Libra Branch has a revelation: ‘This is the room of dreams, the room where it has taken him all these years to learn that his subject is not politics or violent crime but men in small rooms’ (181). This prompts him to ask, ‘Is he one of them now? Frustrated, stuck, self-watching, looking for a means of connection, a way to break out’ (181). The answer  – obviously, pathetically, metafictionally, irrevocably  – is yes. He has insinuated himself into the deadly plot and consigned himself to the conspirators’ fate. He is one of them, and they are part of him, now and forever, as prisoners of the Libranth.

References Begley, A. ([1993] 2005), ‘The Art of Fiction CXXXV: Don DeLillo’, in T. DePietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 86–108. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Boxall, P. (2006), Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2006. Connolly, K. ([1988] 2005), ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo’, in T. DePietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 25–39. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. DeLillo, D. (1983), ‘American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK’, Rolling Stone, 8 December: 21–2, 24, 27–8, 74. DeLillo, D. (1988), Libra. New York: Penguin. DeLillo, D. (1997), ‘The Power of History’, New York Times Magazine, 7 September. Available at: www.nytimes.com/library/books/090797article3. html?mcubz=3 (accessed 22 May 2017).

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Eliot, T. S. ([1923] 1975), ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, in F. Kermode (ed.), Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, 177–8. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Engles, T. (2015), ‘ “Proof of the Loop”: Patterns of Habitual Denial in Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods and Don DeLillo’s Libra’, in R. C. Evans (ed.), Tim O’Brien, 254–73. Ipswich: Salem Press. Joyce, J. ([1916] 2007), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Norton Critical Edition, ed. J. P. Riquelme. New York: W. W. Norton. Kavadlo, J. (2004), Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief. New York: Peter Lang. LeClair, T. ([1982] 2005), ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo’, in T. DePietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 3–15. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. McBride, M. (2001), Ulysses and the Metamorphosis of Stephen Dedalus. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Naughton, J. (1988), ‘Don DeLillo, Caught in History’s Trap’, Washington Post, 24 August. Available at: www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ lifestyle/1988/08/24/don-delillo-caught-in-historys-trap/48a5b0b1-8bd9-412f8426-843a405896fe/?utm_term=.8105919d8c58 (accessed 20 May 2017). Osteen, M. (2008), ‘DeLillo’s Dedalian Artists’, in J. N. Duvall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, 137–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Remnick, D. ([1997] 2005), ‘Exile on Main Street: Don DeLillo’s Undisclosed Underworld’, in T. DePietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 131–44. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

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Unstable bodies in Don DeLillo’s Mao II and The Body Artist Rebecca Harding

Chapter summary: In Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) and The Body Artist (2001), the protagonists attempt to reckon with the destabilizing effects of anxiety and trauma by focusing on the processes of their bodies. In Mao II, author Bill Gray views gas pains, skipped heartbeats and mucus as his ‘true biography’, and imagines his incomplete novel as a monstrous body. In The Body Artist, performance artist Lauren Hartke is shored up in a time of grief and loss by bodily performance and her encounters with the ambiguous Mr Tuttle. In both texts, the desire to sustain subjectivity is counter-acted by the instability, vulnerability and contingency of the bodies they inhabit. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Paul Schilder’s understanding of body-image speak suggestively to DeLillo’s use of bodies in these texts, and serve as a generative theoretical framework. I propose that DeLillo gestures towards an alternative and unique ‘language of self’, and expresses the necessity of abjection in negotiating the mutual incommensurability of our subjectivities and our unstable bodies.

C

ritical interest in the role of the body in DeLillo’s fiction has grown in recent years, particularly in response to the centrality of the body to his work since The Body Artist. Scholars such as Laura Di Prete, Anne Longmuir, Russell Scott Valentino, and Linda Kauffman have all worked to theorize the

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ways in which DeLillo’s latest fiction envisions the conditions under which the body exists in the new century. The central proposition of this essay is that these bodily concerns exist in DeLillo’s fiction before the turn of the century, albeit in a more nascent form; by taking The Body Artist (2001) together with Mao II (1991), I  suggest a way of understanding the idiosyncratic and compelling figurations of the body that permeate his oeuvre. Mao II and The Body Artist mark the end and the beginning of two very different styles of fiction in DeLillo’s oeuvre. While the former feels very much of a piece with what critics have called his ‘middle period’, or ‘major DeLillo’, the latter leaps into something rather more spare – the sort of ‘late style’ that DeLillo himself describes as ‘bare-skinned’ in his interview with Peter Boxall in this volume (Chapter  10). Yet, in spite of their palpable differences, the protagonists of each share a core similarity: both Mao II’s novelist Bill Gray and The Body Artist’s performance artist Lauren Hartke are preoccupied with how subjectivity relates to and is maintained by the body and its processes. Gray views his body’s emissions and his writing as one and the same: gas pains, skipped heartbeats and mucus represent his ‘true biography’ (1991:  135). Equally, Hartke, as she struggles to shore herself up against the uncertainties of her environment and the figures she encounters in the wake of her husband’s death, inspects and maintains her body, reimagining it as a tool of expression. In the relationship each has with the body and embodiment, it is possible to see that Gray and Hartke are not two opposing poles in DeLillo’s oeuvre; rather, they are thematically entwined. This essay thus follows Katrina Harack, who explores the interrelation of body, space and time, reading Falling Man alongside the earlier White Noise.1 Looking at an example of both a ‘late’ and ‘major’ text, Harack describes DeLillo as ‘invoking an embodied ethics that examines the individual’s relationship to place, to the body, and to others’ (Harack 2013: 304–5). So how does the body work in each text? Wherein resides the significance, for DeLillo, of Gray and Hartke’s struggles with embodiment? Both seek solace in the routine and repetition of bodily functions and movements, as the everyday experience of the worlds they inhabit is imbued with the sense of terror they detect as an integral part of the fabric of existence.2 The attention that both pay to the body’s boundaries resonates with Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, in which selfhood is expressed as an ongoing process of othering, and with Paul Schilder’s definition of body-image. In conjunction with their analyses, we can begin to understand DeLillo’s discourse on the body as key to the uncertainty with which his characters navigate their worlds. Within a psychoanalytic framework, the body is both communicative and troubling; bodily processes and symptoms are viewed as expressions of the psyche, and much of psychoanalysis is concerned with the struggle to correctly or generatively interpret these signs. Kristeva, in her famous

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psychoanalytic treatise Powers of Horror, outlines a theory of abjection that speaks suggestively to the recent turn to the body in scholarship on DeLillo’s fiction. The term ‘abjection’ refers literally to a condition that is low or downcast; for Kristeva, the ‘abject’ is that which is expunged from subjectivity in order to make life manageable – that which is so traumatic as to disrupt the very stability and coherence of the embodied self. Indeed, she explains that it is ‘not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). Imagining an encounter with a corpse, Kristeva likens the abject to being faced with the presence of death – ‘what I permanently thrust aside in order to live’ (3). As suggested in this image, matter expelled from, or thrust aside by, the body is bound up with the abject; not only does it provoke feelings of horror and repulsion, but it troubles the distinction between the body and the external world  – between the self and the other. In Kristeva’s formulation, bodily fluids and wastes act as signifiers of death and disease, reminding us of the permeability and porousness of our bodies. To manage this disruption, the subject must be engaged in a continuous process of othering, expelling what is ‘not me’ (2), to maintain a stable sense of selfhood. Kristeva’s conception of selfhood as at once embodied, and defined by its capacity to process and expel that which it is not, provides a suggestive framework within which to understand how DeLillo figures the concerns of Gray and Hartke, both of whom experience a troubling of subjectivity that is grounded in the stuff of the body. Importantly, this frame for understanding the relationship between subjectivity and embodiment insists that whatever is excluded and designated ‘not me’ remains part of the self; to borrow from psychoanalyst Paul Schilder’s theory of body-image, ‘whatever originates in or emanates out of our body will still remain a part of the body-image. The voice, the breath, the odour, faeces, menstrual blood, urine, semen, are still parts of the body-image even when they are separated in space from the body’ (Schilder 1950: 213). Just as Harack examines how DeLillo’s embodied subjects deal with trauma and strive for stable identity, this essay argues that the role of abjection is central to DeLillo’s conception of the self and embodiment. The protagonists of Mao II and The Body Artist are engaged in a struggle to attain, and maintain, a stable subjectivity rooted in the material body, but such stability is illusive, and the bodies in the texts defy attempts to control or contain them.

Mao II: The novelist and the monstrous body Bill Gray has completed two short works of fiction in his lifetime. Living in self-imposed isolation and dogged by rumours of his death and his

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disappearance, he struggles to complete his long delayed third novel. Trapped in anxious inaction throughout the narrative, Bill constantly revises  – or puts off revising – his stagnated text, later abandoning it completely. As he reflects on the unfinished work it becomes personified, taking form in his mind as a grotesque, near-human being:  ‘He looked at the sentence, six disconsolate words, and saw the entire book as it took occasional shape in his mind, a neutered near-human dragging through the house, humpbacked, hydrocephalic, with puckered lips and soft skin, dribbling brain fluid from its mouth’ (DeLillo 1991: 55). Bill’s work is manifested as a bizarre and horrifying creature that stalks the corridors of his home. Its monstrosity lies in its list of ailments, which together form a picture of a body with multiple flaws and failings.3 The novel, perpetually unfinished, is composed of lines of text that Bill is ‘always whiting out and typing in’ (55), and his anxieties towards it are rendered visible in the shape that it assumes, a monstrous composite of malformations and symptoms. In a rambling answerphone message, Bill elaborates on the form in which it appears to him: I keep seeing my book wandering through the halls. There the thing is, creeping feebly, if you can imagine a naked humped creature with fileddown genitals, only worse, because its head bulges at the top and there’s a gargoylish tongue jutting at a corner of the mouth and truly terrible feet . . . A cretin, a distort. Water-bloated, slobbering, incontinent . . . It tries to cling to me, soft-skinned and moist, to fasten its puckery limpet flesh onto mine. (92–3) This description of the being revels in further details of its emissions – moist, slobbering, incontinent – forming a picture of an unbearably leaky being. In this strange and incomplete form, the integrity of the material body seems to be under threat. DeLillo repeatedly refers to its flawed boundaries, as its body expresses fluids uncontrollably. The presence of this trope seems to suggest that Bill’s creativity has become bound up with that which is rejected – that it has become abject. Indeed, it evokes Kristeva’s focus on bodily fluids and wastes, and her attention to the body’s border. Kristeva describes an ongoing process of othering which is necessary to maintaining a stable sense of self: A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay  . . .  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. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until,

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from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit – cadare, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. (1982: 3, emphasis in original) Kristeva’s emphatic foregrounding of the need to ‘thrust aside’ death, bodily wastes, and symptoms of disease carries a striking resonance with Bill’s inner reflections. Bill’s self-understanding is grounded in the monitoring of his own excretions, his attention directed inward to his body’s material processes, and in his ruminations, bodily wastes are strongly aligned with creative work: He lay in bed open-eyed in the dark. There were intestinal moans from his left side, where gas makes a hairpin turn at the splenic flexure. He felt a mass of phlegm wobbling in his throat but he didn’t want to get out of bed to expel it, so he swallowed the whole nasty business, a sick syrupy glop. This was the texture of his life. If someone ever writes his true biography, it will be a chronicle of gas pains and skipped heartbeats, grinding teeth and dizzy spells and smothered breath, with detailed descriptions of Bill leaving his desk to walk to the bathroom and spit up mucus . . . He walked down the hall to piss or spit . . . His book, smelling faintly of baby drool, was just outside the door. He heard it moan solemnly, the same grave sound that welled in his gut. (DeLillo 1991: 135–6) Here Bill is preoccupied with his body’s processes. As he strives to isolate himself completely from the outside world – to secure the boundaries of his self-identity – these details are brought into sharper focus, as ‘in the solitary life there was a tendency to collect moments that might otherwise blur into the rough jostle, the swing of a body through busy streets and rooms’ (DeLillo 1991: 136). His sphere of experience is narrowed to the production of writing and the production of bodily wastes. He expels gas, phlegm, and urine in the same manner as the ‘spray of ideas’, the ‘shitpile of hopeless prose’ (159). This kind of considered attention to the expression of matter invokes Kristeva’s formulation of selfhood as an ongoing process of exclusion, expelling what is ‘not me’ (Kristeva 1982: 2). Yet we see that, in Bill’s formulation, this matter occupies a central space within the body-image, rather than being successfully cast out from it.4 Schilder gives voice to this difficulty by describing the ambiguous position of urine and faeces, stating that ‘what has once been part of the body does not lose this quality completely . . . psychologically they remain a part of ourselves. We are dealing with a spreading of the body-image into the world’ (1950:  188). Beyond the pairing of writing and bodily wastes, Bill’s

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attention to his own bodily functions is further complicated in relation to his monstrous novel, as the creature is met with a response from within his body, when he sneezes onto the page in front of him, ‘noting blood-spotted matter’, and as he ‘heard it moan solemnly, the same grave sound that welled in his gut’ (DeLillo 1991:  55, 136). When Bill beholds his monstrous novel, he is confronted with an extreme, exaggerated reflection of his own small signifiers of disease. The creature recalls a particular trope of the monstrous abject that is a mainstay of horror films; as Rina Arya explains, ‘the monster that is archetypally abject and occupies interstitial states between different categories thereby [transgresses] the idea of a discrete boundary’ (2014: 15). The monster in Mao II plays into this confounding of categories of human and non-human, and furthermore presents a visceral challenge to the skin as a boundary separating inside from out. As Bill strives to maintain control over his own sense of self by paying attention to his bodily functions, he is pursued by this monstrous archetype of abjection, in which the body’s conventional boundaries have broken down.

Pain and selfhood While Mao II’s narrative centres on Bill’s isolation, orbited by the subplots of the characters he encounters, it is broken up by depictions of crowds at recent historic events, such as at the Hillsborough disaster and the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini. These events are juxtaposed with Bill’s solitude throughout the novel, setting him in direct conflict with the ominous proclamation, in the novel’s prologue, that ‘the future belongs to crowds’ (1991: 16). Mao II opens with an account of a mass wedding of members of the Unification Church, a spectacle in which the participants seem to become a new unit of being, or a kind of monstrous form. The anxiety attached to ideas of bodily integrity that we have seen in the figure of the monstrous body similarly emerges here, as ‘the music draws them across the grass, dozens, hundreds, already too many to count. They assemble themselves so tightly, crossing the vast arc of the outfield, that the effect is one of transformation. From a series of linked couples they become one continuous wave, larger all the time . . . They’re one body now, an undifferentiated mass’ (3). This is the first of the crowd scenes that punctuate the narrative, and in these portrayals of mass gatherings experiences of fear, religious feeling and grief are collectively felt. The opening wedding ceremony is told in part from the perspective of Karen, one of the participants. The ‘thin-boundaried’ Karen strives to transcend distinctions between self and other, immersed in ‘these chanting thousands  . . .  in the middle of their columned body . . . immunized against the language of self’ (119,

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7–8). Karen longs for an imagined transformation in which discomforts, ‘all the small banes and body woes, the daylong list of sore gums and sweaty nape and need to pee, ancient rumbles in the gut’ (8) are excised from experience. Yet, as we later learn, she is unable to achieve any such state, as she cannot escape the prevailing experience of pain. Wrestling with her participation in the Church, Karen ‘began to think she was inadequate to the strict plain shapes of churchly faith. Head pains hit her at the end of the day. They came with a shining, an electrochemical sheen, light from out of nowhere, brain made, the eerie gleam of who you are’ (78). Despite her desire to experience ‘the body common’ (77), here Karen glimpses the intimate meshing of personal identity and sensation, the connection upon which Bill relies in his attempts to make sense of his experiences. The body’s sensations assert themselves, and Karen’s ‘eerie’ headache is made strange, imbued with a mystical quality of its own, its oddly enticing ‘sheen’ and ‘gleam’ drawing her away from her affiliation with the Church. In opposition to the menacing movement in the text towards crowds of collective being, Bill strives for solitude. His stalled project is aligned with his selfhood, which in turn is clearly linked to the matter of his body. In the mundane activities of maintaining that body  – spitting up mucus, expelling gas  – he works to maintain a stable sense of self, through processes that are key to Kristeva’s formulation of subjectivity. Bill’s relationship to his novel is one of a strange double bind, at once life-sustaining and deadly. As he explains, ‘I write to survive now, to keep my heart beating’; yet writing is simultaneously ‘Killing work’, ‘the reason I’m dying’ (DeLillo 1991:  48, 75, 128). As we have seen, the disfigured body of Bill’s monstrous companion acts as an externalized representation of two ideas which are intimately connected: Bill’s anxieties about his work as a fiction writer, and his struggle to maintain a sense of self as a distinct individual. As Mao II’s plot progresses, the ambiguity of Bill’s body and the matter it expels, at once suggesting disease and indicative of the body’s fight against that disease, leads into a more extreme set of contradictions. Bill becomes embroiled in the plight of another writer who is being held hostage in Beirut, and in working to secure the man’s release he becomes a target of the terrorist group responsible. As he narrowly escapes a targeted explosion, the detailing of unpleasant yet harmless sensations gives way to violence: Bill felt a stinging pinpoint heat, a shaped pain in his left hand, bright and slivered  . . .  [he] picked a fragment of glass out of his hand. The others watched. He understood why the pain felt familiar. It was a summer wound, a play wound, one of the burns and knee-scrapes and splinters of half a century ago, one of the bee stings, the daily bloody cuts. (129)

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In this peculiar formulation, Bill experiences the wounding of his hand as a fulfilling and grounding process that binds him to a sense of self. A  shard of glass acts as a kind of Proustian madeleine, evoking the knee scrapes of childhood play and providing a link between pain and personal history. Bill later embarks on an ill-fated journey to Beirut, lapses into heavy drinking and is struck by a car. His response to the collision, which causes a fatal laceration of his liver, is once again jarringly positive; he felt ‘joined to the past, to some bloodline of intimate and renewable pain’ (DeLillo 1991: 196). Sensations that bring Bill back to a sense of being-in-the-body are experienced as a renewal, even as they indicate the body being wounded and destroyed, in a striking departure from the characterization of pain in critical thought. Elaine Scarry asserts that pain is fundamentally inarticulable and uniquely isolating for the sufferer because it is impossible to relate the experience through language, and because it literally extinguishes language, as the subject is reduced to inarticulate cries (Scarry 1985: 3) – and it is in this context that the solace and nostalgia experienced by Bill, in an apparent misreading of his body’s signals, is made all the more strange. The isolating nature of pain is reformulated in Bill’s experience as a recuperative force. For him, any sensation, even that of a fatal blow, brings him back to the body, providing a vital counter to visions of collective being and the loss of the self in the crowd.

The Body Artist: Body artistry and body-image The Body Artist, while primarily concerned with speech and bodily movement rather than writing, resonates with Mao II in terms of its preoccupation with the body’s communicative capacity. The narrative follows Lauren Hartke, whom we encounter as she attempts to process the suicide of her husband Rey. Sparsely plotted, the text follows her grieving process as she isolates herself in the home they once shared. As she tries to process her trauma she carries out ‘bodywork’, a ‘regimen of cat stretch and methodical contortion’ that she uses to prepare her body for performance art (DeLillo 2001: 36). While she intends to grieve in solitude, Lauren encounters a strange man whose presence is unexplained and with whom she is unable to communicate in a conventional sense. The man, whom she names Mr Tuttle, engages in eerie mimicry, speaking her own words back to her and then seeming to repeat fragments of conversation once spoken by her late husband. Tuttle’s speech is stilted and incomplete – one of his more cogent statements reads; ‘I know how much . . . I know how much this house. Alone by the sea’ (48). As Lauren listens, ‘she began to understand what she was hearing . . . It wasn’t outright

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impersonation but she heard elements of her voice, the clipped delivery, the slight buzz deep in the throat, her pitch  . . .  She wasn’t sure it was her voice. Then she was’ (51). Later, as she attempts to process this, she similarly recognizes ghostly echoes of her husband: ‘she kept hearing the voice and seeing the hand gesture, unmistakably Rey’s, two fingers joined and wagging’ (53). In the figure of Mr Tuttle we are presented with a disruption of the speaking subject, as words seem to come from the wrong body. This sense of displaced voices reverberates throughout the text, for instance, when Lauren compulsively calls a friend’s answering machine to hear the recorded message, ‘words . . . not spoken but generated’ by a disembodied voice (71). Though Andrew Bennett notes that ‘speech is held to be natural, immediate, unmediated, living, present and meaningful’ as opposed to the ‘deferred, unnatural, supplementary, even dangerous’ qualities of the written word, Tuttle’s voice is eerie in its very lack, spoken by a subject who does not appear to understand language as a vehicle for meaning (Bennett 2015: 74). Voice is divorced from a speaking subject, and the supposed unity of the body-image is undone. Does the voice still belong to Lauren’s husband, to Lauren, to Tuttle? Or, alternatively, can voice really belong to anyone, or does it disavow the concept of ‘ownership’ the moment it passes from inside to outside? To Lauren, Tuttle engenders a supernaturally charged transcendence of selfhood, confounding the delineation of ‘me’ and ‘not me’ that is vital to Kristeva’s formulation of the subject. The connection between her late husband and Tuttle is expressed not as mimicry but something more profound. Regarding Tuttle, Lauren refers to ‘the material place where Rey lives in him, alive again, word for word, touch for touch’ and concludes that ‘He violates the limits of the human’ (DeLillo 2001: 108). This sense of disruption in the text extends beyond the problematized role of voice, as Lauren misidentifies a collection of objects as a man with a personality and a history. It is worth quoting this section at length: She was in town, driving down a hilly street of frame houses, and saw a man sitting on his porch, ahead of her, through trees and shrubs, arms spread, a broad-faced blondish man, lounging. She felt in that small point in time, a flyspeck quarter second or so, that she saw him complete. His life flew open to her passing glance. A lazy and manipulative man, in real estate, in fairview condos by a mosquito lake. She knew him. She saw into him. He was there, divorced and drink-haunted, emotionally distant from his kids, his sons, two sons, in school blazers, in the barest blink. A voice recited the news on the radio. When the car moved past the house, in the pull of the full second, she understood that she was not looking at a seated man but at a paint can placed on a board that was placed between two chairs. The white and

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yellow can was his face, the board was his arms and the mind and heart of the man were in the air somewhere, already lost in the voice of the news reader on the radio. (DeLillo 2001: 74–5) In an image that she misreads as a body, Lauren conjures a rich narrative of a stranger, which in the next moment is revealed as artifice. The sudden negation of this life creates pathos in her certainty that ‘She knew him. She saw into him. He was there’. As in her interactions with Mr Tuttle, wherein Lauren tries and fails to understand where he came from and how he came to be in her home, here the idea of failed connection is taken to an extreme, as the figure into whom she invests so much nuance and affect slips away entirely. Lauren’s momentary empathy towards a subject of her own imagining serves to undermine the possibility of understanding bodies as stable signifiers, rendering the attempt ridiculous. The individuals to whom she struggles to relate are not stable identities; they are disrupted as they shift under her gaze, speaking the words of others or disappearing entirely. In her readings of these problematic bodies, she exposes a deep uncertainty as to how a body is constituted or made whole. The Body Artist features details that unsettle identity, disrupting the boundaries between selves. Mr Tuttle is bound to Lauren and to her late husband through the voice, and Lauren views him as kind of transcendent being, operating outside time (DeLillo 2001:  68). As Philip Nel asserts, Mr Tuttle is ‘a man with transparent ego boundaries’ (Nel 2002:  747) through which he cannot come into being:  ‘He had no protective surface. He was alone and unable to improvise, make himself up  . . .  Maybe he was just deranged . . . A nutcase who tries to live in other voices’ (DeLillo 2001: 96). In Lauren’s words, Mr Tuttle ‘falls . . . he slides into her experience’, and ‘laps and seeps, somehow, into other reaches of being’, invoking Kristeva’s comments on the status of the self when confronted with the disintegration of the imagined border: ‘How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I  hallucinate so that I  might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you  – it is now here, jetted, abjected, into “my” world . . . I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders’ (88, 98; Kristeva 1982: 4). In his apparent lack of self, Mr Tuttle challenges Lauren to acknowledge her own fragile sense of how the ‘self’ might be meaningfully constituted, and by revealing the precarity of markers of selfhood, DeLillo confronts the troubling uncertainty that lies in every exchange between bodies. This uncertainty, however, is challenged by the way that Lauren uses her body; in contrast to Bill’s sedentary reflections in Mao II, she not only employs it as the primary medium of expression but also as the only canvas for her art. Though her interest in documenting the particular details of her body is similar to Bill’s, her attention is more ritualistic, found in methodical

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grooming: ‘She studied her fingers and toes. There was a way in which she isolated a digit for sharp regard’ (DeLillo 2001: 81). Using a pumice stone on the soles of her feet, there is a sense that her body is primed for movement and exertion, ‘coiled in a wholeness of intent’, in contrast to Bill’s litany of ‘skipped heartbeats’, and while we have seen Bill derive a positive comfort from sensations of pain, for Lauren the same effect is achieved by scraping at a callus on her foot with ‘the kind of solemn self-absorption that marks a line from childhood’ (DeLillo 1991: 135; 2001: 80). Lauren carries out the work of maintaining her body’s boundary, her ritual grooming located at the surface of the skin. In completing and performing her piece ‘Body Time’, not only is her artistic project more successful than Bill’s, but she actively engages with, and enacts, the possibilities and limitations of her body. In the piece, Lauren transforms herself into a figure that resembles Mr Tuttle. By putting her body to use, consciously and explicitly performing another’s mannerisms and movements, she in fact recapitulates her own body’s status as a carrier of meaning. Lauren demonstrates her body’s expressive capabilities, and while, in the performance, she works to embody a succession of different characters, her success relies not on her body’s capacity for imitation, but on its status as a singular object. As Longmuir notes, ‘Lauren’s art exemplifies the resistant semiotic or bodily aesthetic. It is conflated with her bodily presence and is hence unreproducible by the dominant order’ (Longmuir 2007: 532). As Louise Steinman writes in The Knowing Body, ‘Performance is a path towards knowledge . . . [it] is a live form, by which I mean enlivening. In the energy exchange between performer and audience there is potential for a tremendous amount of learning, potential to stir up powers beyond evident human capacity’ ([1986] 1995:  vii). It is these enlivening qualities which Steinman celebrates that enable Lauren to emerge from her grief, while Bill is condemned to a journey towards death. Bill believes that meaning lies in observation of the body’s sensations, and that simply being aware of them enables access to a kind of embodied reality. In contrast, the medium of performance art allows Lauren to engage her body in creative labour. She does not simply narrate her embodied experience, rather she uses her body to create a narrative, which, in contrast to Bill’s fate, carries the possibility of change and redemption.

‘The language of self’ In Mao II, Bill Gray is engaged in a struggle against multiple threats to his stability. He strives to complete his novel, which in its unfinished form is monstrous and menacing. He simultaneously struggles to comprehend his identity as an individual, rooted in a body, and to remain distinct from the collective. Writing

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is expressed in tandem with the body, particularly through the strange form that the unfinished novel takes on, and through Bill’s reflections on his own sensations and bodily functions as his ‘true biography’. The monstrous novel is a striking example of DeLillo’s investment in problems of the body:  its systemic workings, its boundaries, the matter it is made up of and the matter that it expels. The Body Artist, meanwhile, is concerned with a disruption of subjectivity, and the possibility that the embodied practice of performance art can counter such a disruption. The bodies in these texts, which, as we have seen, elude stable meaning when considered by the protagonists, are similarly slippery to us as readers, resisting neat theorization. What does clearly emerge from both works is that thematic anxieties are consistently enacted at the body’s contested border:  in the monstrous novel and the ineffective boundary of its leaky body; in Bill’s flesh, as his wounded hand acts as a carrier of childhood memory, pain connecting him to his personal history; in Mr Tuttle, a figure with ‘no protective surface’ who ‘violates the limits of the human’ and the mismatch between his voice and his unformed identity (DeLillo 2001: 96, 108). Meanwhile in Lauren’s activities, most explicitly in her ritual exfoliation, we can see an attempt, through embodied practice, to resist the slippages that Tuttle represents. DeLillo returns repeatedly to a troubling of bodily and subjective boundaries and a concern with, in Kristeva’s words, the ‘other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be’ (Kristeva 1982: 3). For Bill Gray, in Mao II, abjection presents itself as the promise of stable identity, but this promise is revealed as false, as his attempt to embody the role of the novelist in an age of mass culture becomes increasingly and detrimentally focused on his abject monster-novel, leading inexorably to his death. Conversely, for The Body Artist’s Lauren Hartke, abjection functions as a means to an end, as her encounters with Mr Tuttle enable her to come to terms with her husband’s death and to express something like the ‘language of self’ that Bill and Karen desire, but never achieve. Where Bill’s writing takes on a fantasized body of its own, Lauren works out her trauma through a performance that is a kind of writing with, or on, her body. These bodies are able to tell us something of ourselves that language cannot, and by tracing the evolution of DeLillo’s formulations of embodiment, from Mao II to The Body Artist, so too can we trace the possibilities for creative and critical thought that the body manifests across his oeuvre.

Notes 1 Philip Nel provides another useful inroad into addressing the body in DeLillo’s earlier fiction, in his 2001 article ‘Amazons in the Underworld: Gender, the Body, and Power in the Novels of Don DeLillo’.

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2 Bill, for example, asserts that ‘Stories have no point if they don’t absorb our terror’, while Lauren’s husband warns her of ‘the terror of another ordinary day’ (1991: 140; 2001: 12). 3 A detail in William Gaddis’s 1955 novel The Recognitions, which DeLillo has praised as ‘a revelation’ (DeLillo 2017) offer a clue as the genesis of this image. Wyatt, a character who creates counterfeit paintings, mocks the desire to ‘meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter’: What is it they want from a man they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done with his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? The human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology. ([1955] 2012: 95–6) Here Wyatt undermines the idea of looking to a writer or painter as a figure of admiration or a source of authority on their own work, as the sheer effort of production reduces them to ‘dregs’. Mao II’s ‘near-human’ creature, ‘creeping feebly’ echoes Gaddis’s ‘human shambles’. 4 This sentiment is echoed with humour in The Body Artist in Lauren’s reflection that ‘There’s nothing like a raging crap . . . to make mind and body one’ (2001: 35).

References Arya, R. (2014), Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bennett, A. (2015), ‘Language and the Body’, in D. Hillman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, 73–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeLillo, D. (1991), Mao II. London: Jonathan Cape. DeLillo, D. (2001), The Body Artist. London: Picador. DeLillo, D. (2017), ‘I Remember the Bookstore, Long Gone Now. . .’, Conjunctions, 41, n.p. Di Prete, L. (2005), ‘Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist: Performing the Body, Narrating Trauma’, Contemporary Literature, 46 (3): 483–510. Gaddis, W. ([1955] 2012), The Recognitions. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press. Kauffman, L. (2011), ‘Bodies in Rest and Motion in Falling Man’, in S. Olster (ed.), Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man, 135–51. London: Bloomsbury. Kristeva, J. (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Harack, K. (2013), ‘Embedded and Embodied Memories: Body, Space, and Time in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Falling Man’, Contemporary Literature, 54 (2): 303–36. Longmuir, A. (2007), ‘Performing the Body in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist’, Modern Fiction Studies, 53 (3): 528–43. Nel, P. (2001), ‘Amazons in the Underworld: Gender, the Body, and Power in the Novels of Don DeLillo’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 42 (4): 416–36.

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Nel, P. (2002), ‘Don DeLillo’s Return to Form: The Modernist Poetics of The Body Artist’, Contemporary Literature, 43 (4): 736–59. Scarry, E. (1985), The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Schilder, P. (1950), The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energies of the Psyche. New York: International Universities Press. Steinman, L. ([1986] 1995), The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Valentino, R. S. (2007), ‘From Virtue to Virtual: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the Corruption of the Absent Body’, Modern Fiction Studies, 53 (1): 140–62.

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5 ‘We came for the dirt but stayed for the talk’: Don DeLillo’s theatre Mark Osteen

Chapter summary: Although Don DeLillo’s five major plays differ in form and focus, they all emphasize and promote the value and necessity of conversation. This chapter argues that DeLillo’s plays dramatize how theatre can create a community that sustains unmediated interaction and intimacy in an absurd and mediated world. ‘The Engineer of Moonlight’ (1979) and The Day Room (1986) demonstrate that talking with others frees us from the prison of self. In The Day Room performative conversation combats mortal fear, but in Valparaiso (1999) intimacy has become a relic in the hyper-mediated world symbolized by the TV remote control. Love-Lies-Bleeding (2005) and The Word for Snow (2014) lament the loss of meaningful language in the face of individual and mass death. Yet the plays suggest that staging our plight may restore intimacy. In DeLillo’s theatre, words animate our tongues with the sole magic that can relieve our dread.

‘O

ther people’s voices keep us company’ (DeLillo 1986: 8). So declares Budge (aka Arno Klein), in Don DeLillo’s play The Day Room. At once a character, commentator, and actor within the play’s metatheatre, Budge/

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Klein here states the principal motive and thesis underlying DeLillo’s dramatic practice. Indeed, although his five major plays – ‘The Engineer of Moonlight’ (1979), The Day Room (1986), Valparaiso (1999), Love-Lies-Bleeding (2005) and The Word for Snow (2014) – are quite different in form and focus, they share a set of themes that bind them to each other and to DeLillo’s other works: the quest for order and clarity both against and through madness and dread; the relationship between performance and identity  – indeed, they suggest that identity is always a performance; and above all, the value of language and human dialogue.1 His plays dramatize how theatre can create a community that sustains authentic human contact – that is, unmediated conversation and intimacy – in an absurd and profoundly mediated universe.

Levels ‘The Engineer of Moonlight’ orbits like a satellite around DeLillo’s 1976 science fiction novel Ratner’s Star; it is the ‘shadow book’ or miniature companion that he described in a 1993 interview (Begley [1993] 2005: 95). With its cast of four consisting of an aging genius and his acolytes, it also anticipates Love-Lies-Bleeding and the novella Point Omega (2010). In ‘Engineer’, the distinguished mathematician Eric Lighter, having recently spent seven weeks in a psychiatric hospital, has enlisted the aid of his fourth wife, Maya, and fellow mathematician James Case to transcribe the fragmentary remarks he calls his notes on madness. The minimal plot hinges on whether Diana Vail, Lighter’s third wife, will assist the others in this project. Although the play has never been performed and DeLillo has described it as not stageworthy (Lavey 2006), it nonetheless encapsulates many of his signature themes. As befits a play about mathematics, its structure is binary: Act One, set on the lower level of a sundeck, is filled with light; Act Two takes place indoors, on an upper level, in the evening. These dualities embody the play’s theme of levels. Like most DeLillo characters, these four are great talkers, but their speech seems more a way of deflecting their emotions than of delving into them. As Maya, whose name echoes the Sanskrit word for ‘illusion’, states, ‘Everything we do is an appearance. . . . It’s all layers. . . . You put on, you take off’ (DeLillo 1979:  25). James is especially fascinated by levels, yet his words remain wilfully on the surface. His inability to plumb depths is accompanied by a self-consciousness so crippling that, when once in mortal danger, instead of shouting for help he softly said, ‘loud and prolonged cries for help’ and ‘urgent shouts’ (44). A reflecting surface, he is a mirror for Lighter, as indicated by the way that he and Diana hold reflectors to their faces as they sunbathe (24). In contrast, James declares, Eric’s work possessed ‘deep strata’, revealing ‘what we’d always known was there, at some untapped level’ (32). For Diana,

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however, mathematics was always ‘an occasion for faith. [She] could penetrate just so deeply and then no more’ (33). Lighter, by contrast, penetrated so deeply that he lost his grip on sanity. Now he comprehends that the ‘mad are everywhere. So many, you’ll have to learn their language’ (DeLillo 1979: 29); learning Lighter’s language is the goal of the transcriptions. Insanity is thus defined by loquacity, for the mad ‘like to talk. They talk out to people’ (30) – which means that they are indistinguishable from the sane. But was Lighter’s breakdown a result of his obsession with mathematics? Or is ‘insanity’ another mode of visionary perception? According to Diana, Lighter believes that ‘obsession cures or cleanses’, enabling one to ‘throw off disguise and ambiguity. Come smooth’ (43). As self-conscious as James, Lighter is obsessed with his own mental illness, and believes that by plunging inward he may find ‘the way out’ (43). In both ‘Engineer’ and The Day Room DeLillo seems to concur with Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, who declares in Psycho (a key intertext for Point Omega), ‘we all go a little mad sometimes’ (Hitchcock 1960). DeLillo’s notes for the play make an even more radical claim, stating that ‘Sanity [is] an illusion . . . Madness the truth’ (quoted in Rey 2016: 29). In placing madness and mathematics at the centre of his drama, DeLillo implies that both allow us to ‘play toward the infinite’ (1979: 45). Mathematics, in other words, is not just a science; it is a religion and a performance, and as such it involves rituals. Hence, throughout Act Two the characters ritually recite the seven sacraments (1979: 41), recall their school days (Underworld’s Sister Edgar makes a cameo appearance in James’s memory; 42), and play an obscure board game (the play’s title, referring to Eric, derives from the game). Like both ‘Engineer’ and the engineer himself, the game is a riddle that challenges players and spectators to find deeper meaning.2 But the real game here is the dialogue, through which DeLillo and his characters gesture toward – but never quite attain – more powerful emotions and higher aspirations. When Eric exits (ascending one level to the sleeping loft), Diana and James talk; James reveals his loneliness and his desire for Diana’s help. After she departs, Eric and Maya indulge in another ritual  – counting to ten in Sanskrit (46)  – and then restart their allconsuming rite: reading Eric’s notes. Two of those notes assert that ‘Matter is consciousness’, and that ‘Boundaries become part of the things they divided’ (47): that is, people and ideas – and even matter itself – are, as a Buddhist or a mathematician might say, all one. Although DeLillo has deemed ‘Engineer’ unsuccessful, it nevertheless introduces the dominant theme of his dramatic works: that playing, particularly in a theatre, enables us to connect with others, find companionship, engage in genuine, unmediated conversation. Toby Zinman criticizes ‘Engineer’ as merely containing ‘a novel’s dialogue read aloud by different and embodied voices’ (1990:  77), but that trait is not necessarily a flaw. As DeLillo has

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observed, ‘Engineer’ is all about ‘people talking’, thereby laying bare ‘the awesome power of their loving’ (LeClair and McCaffrey 1983:  89). The four characters – and the audience – thus come to constitute a family knit together by contests, camaraderie and conversation. Talking touches all levels; it is what we do in a theatre, and no matter how seemingly insignificant, it lets us play toward the infinite.

Company Watching the people at the hospital was for Eric ‘classic theater’ (DeLillo 1979: 39). By this logic, The Day Room is a classic, for like ‘Engineer’, it creates drama – or rather, comedy – out of madness. The first act of this metatheatrical piece is set in a hospital, but as the characters exit and enter, each doctor or nurse is exposed as a patient; in other words, they are all actors, even within the frame of the play. The Day Room indeed presents human identity as a performance, a theme DeLillo has advanced at least since his 1978 novel Running Dog and to which he returns in Valparaiso. The Day Room’s self-reflexive qualities recall the work of Pirandello and Samuel Beckett, as Judith Pastore (1990: 431) and Rebecca Rey (2016: 40–4) have noted. But its emphasis on the value of conversation, its involuted structure, and its insightful analysis of the relationship between acting and mortal fear lend it a cachet of originality. Budge, who is later revealed to be the mysterious Arno Klein, provides commentary on the play as it unfolds with remarks such as, ‘But aren’t we here, in a sense, to talk?’ and ‘The whole point is to keep each other company’ (DeLillo 1986: 6, 8). Ostensibly he is referring to how his conversation with another patient, Wyatt, reassures them both, but he is also explaining the importance of theatre itself, where ‘Other people’s voices keep us company’ (8:  recall that a theatrical troupe is also referred to as a company).3 Budge describes a dirt-floored café in Cairo where slumming tourists ‘came for the dirt but stayed for the talk’, once they sensed the ‘intimacy in the sound of those voices’ (28). Likewise, in the hospital Budge observes how ‘every word fills a void. We only have to talk . . . to keep the world turning’ (47). It does not matter whether the interlocutors are who they claim to be; what matters is that the dialogue continue. That is fortunate, for as various characters present themselves as nurses and doctors, they are soon unmasked as inmates: ‘the mad’ are everywhere here too. One obvious point is that being a doctor or nurse – or a mentally ill person – is a performance: it is no accident that medical practitioners wear costumes (called uniforms) as they work. A  second point, held over from ‘Engineer’, is that the ‘mad’ are not only indistinguishable from the ‘sane’ but may have much to teach them. The broader theme, however, takes the pulse

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of theatre itself: there is no division between the stage and ‘real’ life, because we all perform all the time, remaking our identities through interaction with others. Yet such a recognition may upset the foundations of our agreedupon reality. Thus the unveiling of Wyatt’s long-time friend Dr Bazelon as a patient threatens Wyatt’s tenuous hold on existence. However, for DeLillo, the inescapability of performance is not just an unfortunate condition of postmodern life but a path toward liberation. Act Two places the metatheatrical elements of the play in the foreground, as we initially watch two actors assuming the roles of motel desk clerk and maid while they set up the stage as a motel room. As DeLillo commented in an interview, Act Two is ‘the play about the play’ – and about plays as an art form (Rothstein [1987] 2005: 22). Thus, although we know it is not a motel (or a day room), we accept the pretence because the performers do. Soon Gary and Lynette check in, taking a respite from their pursuit of the elusive Arno Klein Group, whose performances apparently incorporate the very quest to see them perform. Gary is ‘satisfied just imagining they exist’ (DeLillo 1986: 70), which is what everyone does, for the troupe performs primarily in the minds of the actors and their audience. Those lucky enough to witness a physical Klein performance, such as the character Freddie, find themselves changed forever, less because of the performance itself than because of how the Klein troupe annihilates the boundaries between the real and the representation. An actress calling herself Jolene later explains that ‘Everything we do is Klein. We only do one play. We do it over and over’ (88). We eventually learn that the one play is the play we have been watching. Thus, although Zinman (1990: 81) observes that the characters ‘looking for the Arno Klein Group are looking for themselves’, that is only half of the story:  actually, these characters are the Arno Klein Group, which means that their search for identity is always in process, as they reinvent themselves  – and their audience  – with each performance. Their search is ours. Lynette protests that ‘theater is not my life’ (DeLillo 1986: 81), but DeLillo corrects her: life is theatre. In White Noise, a novel propelled by the fear of death, narrator Jack Gladney famously avers that ‘all plots tend to move deathward’ (DeLillo 1985: 26). This theme emerges forcefully near the end of The Day Room via a long speech by Jolene. Actors, she asserts, are more attuned to the mortal dread that underlies human life. They ‘develop techniques to shield [them] from the facts. But . . . the fear is so deep [they] find it waiting in the smallest role. [They] can’t meet death on [their] own terms’, so they perform (DeLillo 1986: 90). Actors embody the human response to mortality. As DeLillo recalled, while writing the play he sensed a connection ‘between the craft of acting and the fear we all have of dying. It seemed to me that actors are a kind of model for the ways in which we hide from the knowledge we inevitably possess of our final extinction. . . . Actors teach us how to hide’ (Rothstein [1987] 2005: 21).

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His notes put it more succinctly:  ‘Actors immune to death as long as they are someone else’ (quoted in Rey 2016: 57). How so? Because through play they demonstrate how we remake ourselves through communality. As Jolene admits, ‘Our only hope is other people’ (DeLillo 1986: 90): this statement, an inversion of Jean-Paul Sartre’s notorious maxim in No Exit that ‘hell is other people’ (‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’) ([1945] 1955:  47), reveals that acting is less about earning applause than about finding company. Conversation is the magic that wards off dread. Like the rest of us, then, actors come for the dirt – the plaudits, the celebrity, the escape from quotidian existence – but stay for the talk. Theatre is the place to hear voices, to sense the presence of others, at once to recognize our shared daily performances and to re-enact them. Before exiting, Jolene explains that the troupe goes on tonight in a hospital day room. At this moment we realize that we have been watching the Arno Klein players all along. On cue, enter Arno Klein  – whom we recognize as Budge. He turns on the television; its lines are spoken by the actor who played Wyatt in Act One. As in White Noise, in Act Two the television inserts snippets commenting on the main action. For example, when Gary remarks that they should have eaten on the road, the television interjects a description of a car accident (DeLillo 1986: 78). The intrusions also include instructions, arguments, lines from talk shows, infomercials and public service announcements (78–9), but despite their varied subjects, they are all monologues. No conversation occurs. Likewise, the final TV program offers detailed directions for viewing an eclipse that metamorphose into a commentary on television itself. We are told to slip a viewing box over our heads, then reminded that ‘some people never remove the box’ (100): that is, some people seem to live inside the television. Watching television may seem similar to viewing a play, but DeLillo suggests that they are opposites. In the theatre, we talk with each other; on television, voices talk at us. We can change the channel, but doing so never brings us any closer to genuine intimacy. With boxes on our heads, we live remotely, but when witnessing or performing a play, we are all in the same room, feeding off each other’s responses. Indeed, finding company is one reason that DeLillo welcomes writing plays. In a letter he noted that ‘the collaborative aspects of theater are an antidote to the solitude and total control that a novelist experiences in his work’ (quoted in Rey 2016: 143). He stays for the talk. Like the speech therapist’s client in one of the television’s excerpts, actors, audience and author all come to the theatre to ‘learn to talk all over again’ (DeLillo 1986: 64).

Remote ‘In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man’ (DeLillo [1971] 1989:  270). Since

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writing these words in his first novel, Americana, DeLillo has expanded this definition to encompass the realities of our media-saturated world. Thus, in Valparaiso, Michael Majeski’s seemingly innocuous transportation error  – flying to Valparaiso, Chile instead of to Valparaiso, Indiana – becomes fodder for a glut of media attention. He is interviewed repeatedly until, as DeLillo remarks, he experiences the ‘complete absorption’ of his identity (Feeney [1999] 2005: 171). Having become the universal third person, Michael ends up as nobody at all. Indeed, every character in Valparaiso lives at a distance from genuine human interaction, dislocated from their deeper selves and from their own bodies. The television remote control, one of which Michael’s wife Livia keeps ‘velcro’d to her ankle like an off-duty gun’ (DeLillo 1999: 19), symbolizes this mediated domain. Nor is it an accident that the remote control is likened to a weapon, for the play dramatizes how such remoteness can be deadly. In Scene 8, an interviewer asks Michael, ‘Ever do a remote hookup?’ (53). In Valparaiso, all hookups are remote. During the first interview, Michael confesses that upon first realizing his mistake, he felt ‘remote’, sensing a ‘tremendous separation’ (DeLillo 1999: 15) from his former life and from himself.4 It was as if ‘someone has been superimposed on me’ (16)  – the media version of Michael Majeski.5 As the interviews mount up, he responds dutifully to the interviewers’ prompts to be charming, to repeat the story in the same words, yet each session further alienates him from himself and Livia, even while he divulges prurient details about their marriage. As she watches one televised interview, Michael recollects or invents a sexual encounter with her, then wonders, ‘does she even know it’s me? Does she remotely care?’ (23). Answer: she cares – remotely, as if it happened to someone else. Michael also begins to realize that in this new existence, nothing transpires outside of the media: as one interviewer puts it, ‘Everything is the interview’ (25). Michael has been subsumed by his avatar. He remembers witnessing his plane’s ascent on video: ‘I look at the monitor and the plane is taking off. I look out the window and the plane is taking off’ (32). He is in two places at once – in ‘reality’ and on the screen – but they are really the same place. Likewise, it hardly matters which Valparaiso one touches down in, for they are all equally remote. Just as everything is the interview, so everything is recorded. Indeed, the observation made in DeLillo’s novel Running Dog that ‘Everybody’s on camera’ (1978: 150) is even more pertinent to and pervasive in Valparaiso. For example, one interviewer wants to shoot a ‘self-commenting super vérité in which everything that goes into the making of the film is the film. . . . A film that consumes itself even as the audience watches’ (1999:  36). The movie superficially resembles The Day Room, but with a key difference:  whereas the play merely recycles itself, the electronic media feed not only on their subjects’ yearning for self-glorification, but on themselves. This cannibalistic

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regime engenders an existence that is neither exactly life nor exactly death; it is undeath, a suspended or zombie-like condition that DeLillo repeatedly depicts in his late works. Michael eagerly embraces this undeath, quitting his job (a suitably generic and self-referential one as ‘an analyst’ for a company that ‘analyses other companies’; 50)  to immerse himself in this new (non) identity. Transfigured into his mediated self, he feels a ‘complete man’, newly ‘connected to other people’s pain’ (52). As the subject of media obsession – at once hero and sacrificial victim – he believes that his life has ‘taken on a luminous quality’ (51). Indeed, Alex Macklin’s treasured phrase in Love-LiesBleeding, quoted from Giuseppe Ungaretti’s World War I  poem, ‘Mattina’, captures Michael’s condition:  ‘M’illumino dimenso’  – I  bathe myself in light (2005: 64). But this light emits no heat, so Michael ‘can’t find a way into some ordinary warmth’, even during breakfast with his wife (DeLillo 1999:  55). Mechanically riding her stationary bike, Livia watches him announce his transfiguration on television and ask again, ‘Does she remotely care?’ (56). Remotely. Everything is literally an interview in Act Two, which is entirely taken up with Michael’s appearance on Delfina Treadwell’s Oprah-like talk show. Delfina is Michael multiplied:  she has no existence outside of her TV persona (‘I’m live, I’m taped, I’m run, I’m rerun’; DeLillo 1999: 91), and her job, along with her announcer, Teddy, is to entice audience members into that same undeath, which they present as a ‘plane of transcendence’ (64). She needs them, because otherwise she cannot remember who she is; their voices can bring her back to life (65). But unlike the voices in DeLillo’s other plays, these are as artificial as the studio lights, as stereotyped as the canned phrases uttered by the eerie chorus, which intervenes from ‘another dimension’ to offer slightly skewed announcements quoted from flight attendants and airport PA systems (68). Delfina’s aim to bare her subjects’ ‘true nature’ (80) bears fruit when Livia confesses that the unborn child she carries is not Michael’s; Livia assures viewers, however, that the hookup was ‘not remote’, but ‘totally knowing the person’ (fittingly, her encounter with a documentary filmmaker took place in a ‘cheapo motel’; 81, 82). Now, according to Teddy, she seeks ‘redemption’ from her husband on television, because this is the only place where he is ‘really deeply there’ (85). Michael, in turn, justifies his air travel ‘mistake’ by saying he ‘felt submissive’ to the ‘all-powerful and all-knowing’ systems (86). But now when he looks in the mirror, he sees ‘somebody somewhere else’  – that universal third person accessed by remote control (92). He tries to turn the tables on Delfina, but she has already accepted that she exists entirely in the ‘state of endless replication’ that supplies her ‘only way to have a conversation’ (94). Yet her hyperreal version of conversation is fragile, contingent upon viewers’ hitting ‘the channel button on their remotes, repeatedly’ (94). Michael shares

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her condition. The company so valued in DeLillo’s previous plays has been transformed into a troupe of the undead. Then Michael divulges his secret:  the video projected during the play’s opening scene of a man attempting to asphyxiate himself by putting a plastic bag over his head is of himself trying to commit suicide in the airliner’s bathroom. ‘I realized I was improvising a journey that had its own stone logic’, he says. ‘Meant to end one way only’ (DeLillo 1999:  98):  all plots tend to move deathward. But this plot was unconsummated, for when turbulence commenced, he docilely returned to his seat (103). Yet his revelation discloses a deeper truth: that Michael’s mistake was not really a mistake, that not only did he want to vanish, but he had already recognized that he was ‘nobody’ (102), that he was, in effect, already (un)dead. But, Delfina tells him, ‘it’s over now’ (105). Ironically, in his death Michael receives the ‘human sharing’ (108) he craves, as Delfina gives him what he has wanted all along, forcing the microphone – one of the ‘sex toys of [his] transcendence’ – down his throat, choking him to death (105, 108).6 Facing the camera, she pronounces his eulogy:  ‘Someone dies, remotely known to you. . . .  Who is he? An image aloft in the flashing air’ (108). We view that image at the end – Michael, his head in a bag, a visual echo of The Day Room’s concluding image of a person with a box over his head. It makes sense that Michael dies by microphonic consumption since, as DeLillo has commented, Valparaiso is really about ‘cameras, microphones, and audio recording equipment’ (Feeney [1999] 2005: 171) – all the technologies that cloak our alienation in phony electronic intimacy. This is the ‘magic’ (DeLillo 1999:  109) that masks our dread; yet it offers not real company but the remoteness of mediated, stereotyped interaction. Valparaiso implies that we have all become third persons, as undead as Michael’s video image.

Vegetative If Michael moves from undeath to death, Love-Lies-Bleeding moves in the opposite direction. In the play’s first scene (set a year before the main action) Alex Macklin recalls seeing a dead man on a subway; this figure foreshadows his plight for most of the play, except that the subway man is ‘finally and absolutely dead’ (DeLillo 2005: 8).7 In contrast, Alex, onstage but unresponsive throughout the play’s present, remains frozen in a ‘persistent vegetative state’ (27). Graley Herren has recently argued that the entire play takes place in Alex’s mind, dramatizing his dying reveries, enacting debates and ‘fantasiz[ing] potential scenarios’ involving his demise (138). In such a ‘memory play’, Macklin becomes a ‘Prospero-like author/director’ choreographing the events we witness (Herren 2017: 139).8 Whether or not we accept Herren’s intriguing

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thesis, Love-Lies-Bleeding suggests that there are degrees of death, and the play limns death’s dirty edges. Revisiting the situation of ‘Engineer’, albeit with higher stakes (Polley 2011:  238), DeLillo presents Lia, Macklin’s current wife; his second wife, Toinette; and son Sean debating about whether to ‘let’ Alex die, in the process exposing their jealousies, longings, hatreds and self-delusions – that is, their love, their lies and their bleeding. Their wait consummates the life (or nonlife) each has had with Alex. Sean, for example, has spent years waiting for his father ‘to show up. Waiting for his mood to improve’ (DeLillo 2005: 44) – waiting for him to display love. Now he insists that Alex ‘can’t think. He doesn’t know what you’re saying to him. . . . He is not Alex’ (15). The embodiment of Alex’s lifelong emotional absence, Sean has become a vulture or vampire feeding on his dying dad for emotional calories. To Toinette, Sean represents the Alex she never truly possessed.9 ‘We’re here to help him die’, she states, but ‘not because we feel indebted in any way’ (DeLillo 2005: 24, 23). Alex’s death will prove her right in leaving him. Lia, however, maintains that Alex is ‘not gone. He’s there’ (30). Yet her compassion camouflages selfish motives: thriving in her caregiver role, she finds meaning in martyrdom. She says, ‘He has the right to suffer. This is what being in the world means’ (41). Alex’s condition justifies her philosophy of self-abnegation in which living equals bleeding. If, earlier in life, Alex treated his intimates as unfinished works on which he could impose his personality, now his survivors use him as a blank canvas on which to paint their own portraits, reconstituting him to serve their needs: Sean’s for retribution, Toinette’s for vindication, Lia’s for martyrdom. During the memorial service in Act One, Scene 7 (which takes place, if at all, in the future), Sean declares that his father ‘consumed and absorbed’ other people (DeLillo 2005: 25), just as Alex is now being consumed and absorbed by his survivors. Ten years from now, Sean announces later, ‘We’ll be suffocated by his living. Not that he’s alive. Not that he’s dead’ (48). As Toinette points out, ‘We’re also trapped in a way. Stuck with each other because of him, and stuck with him’ (45). Alex’s condition, then, represents theirs: each one abides in a persistent vegetative state, waiting for the growth spurt that his death will fertilize. Strikingly, during the play’s present Alex never utters a word, yet he dominates the action, for virtually every sentence spoken is about him. He is still consuming them. In Scene 10 of Act One DeLillo presents a signature moment in which the characters recite the names of desert plants (2005: 34–7).10 Alex delighted in these names, and the others’ recitation not only revives him in their minds but furnishes a form of oral medication. Fittingly, many of these plants possess mythological associations or medicinal functions that enrich the play’s themes. For instance, the larkspur, or delphinium (34), features beautiful

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purple blooms but is toxic to humans. Its flowers, which allegedly sprang from the blood of Ajax after his suicide, are supposed to keep away ghosts – but not, apparently, all species of the undead (‘Larkspur’ 2010). The sacred datura (DeLillo 2005: 36), so called because of its hallucinogenic properties, is used by many Native American tribes in rite-of-passage and other spiritual ceremonies (‘Datura wrightii’ 2017; ‘Sacred Datura’ 2017). More to the point, Caribbean practitioners of Obeah use datura to induce a zombie state akin to Alex’s condition (‘Datura wrightii’ 2017). Most significant, of course, is the title plant, Amaranthus caudatus, or love-lies-bleeding. Many cultures have considered the amaranthus a sacred plant. Ancient societies in India, China and Japan believed that it bestowed good health and longevity. As the ‘flower that does not wither’ (‘Grain’ 2014), the amaranthus resembles the vegetative Alex, who will never die because his essence has been absorbed by those around him. During the recitation of names, Lia recollects a trip she made with Alex to India during which they viewed a field of amaranthus flowers. ‘So beautiful’, she says, ‘Cuts like a knife’. Toinette adds:  ‘Shoots like a gun’, and recalls how Alex shot himself in her presence. For her, ‘Alex will always be bleeding at the other end of the loft’ (DeLillo 2005: 38) – alive but suffering. In Act Three, Sean administers the sublingual morphine injections that are supposed to induce somnolence, then a slow fade, but instead have no effect until Alex finally stops breathing. This terminal sedation may be ‘an act of mercy’ (DeLillo 2005: 73) for Alex, as Sean insists, but the injections do not deaden the others’ pain.11 As they discuss the procedure, Rey astutely notes, their vocabulary shifts from the informality of the first two acts to more formal, medical diction (2016:  112). The survivors’ language, that is, both creates a bond between them and veils their motives and emotions in scientific jargon:  their talk covers up the dirt. While tensely waiting for the shots to take effect, Sean and Toinette reprise the recitation of plant names (DeLillo 2005: 79–81), as if to remind us that morphine derives from poppies. Yet even after Alex expires, he lives within the survivors like a poisonous plant they have eaten, as is suggested by the final scene, which returns to the beginning, with Alex and Lia discussing the corpse on the subway. ‘What good is a life that doesn’t experience some trace of all possible lives?’ she asks. ‘What’s the point of being only who we are? . . . Shouldn’t I be able to be in his life, be who he is, even for half a minute?’ (DeLillo 2005: 93). Alex replies, ‘You want to experience a life remote from your own. Even for a moment’ (94). This call to overcome remoteness through empathy is the play’s point omega, and restates DeLillo’s advocacy for art and, particularly, for theatre, which engenders a community in which we may find ourselves bathed in light (64). Without such company, we do not live – we merely vegetate.

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Tongues ‘People are speaking in tongues’, says the Scholar, one of the three allegorical figures in DeLillo’s latest play, The Word for Snow (2014:  4). A  ‘theologian of last things’ (1)  like many DeLillo characters (Point Omega’s Elster and several figures in Zero K [2016] come to mind), the Scholar utters cryptic pronouncements that do and do not answer the anxious questions posed by the Pilgrim. This play’s ritual naming of plant and animal species reveals the cleavage of signifier from signified that results from anthropogenic climate change: these species will go extinct so that ‘only names remain’ (18). In other words, DeLillo portrays global warming (‘When there is no more north’; 6) as an assault on language itself. When words lose meaning the foundations of civilization collapse, for withered language cannot be a conduit for genuine communication: we may stay for the talk, but the talk will no longer matter. Frightened and confused by the Scholar’s forecasts, the Pilgrim reverts to memories of his grandmother’s bucolic home (2014:  7). Although he is attempting to outline what else will be lost, the Scholar dismisses his memories as mere nostalgia: it is ‘too late now for drivelling reminiscence’ (10). The Pilgrim then offers additional conventional responses: that we know it will happen someday, but not now (24); that dire warnings might induce paralysis (25). But he is ‘thinking at sea level’ (25), unable to perceive the full picture. Required instead is a rededication to hearing how the ‘planet speaks’ (12) – concretely, though the extinction of species such as the ‘Shasta salamander’, ‘the hawksbill sea turtle’, and ‘the polar bear’, and one not explicitly named, Homo sapiens sapiens (19, 24). ‘Feel the loss’, the Interpreter remarks, as ‘things disappear into words’ (19). ‘All names one name’, intones the Scholar (3), emphasizing the oneness of humanity and indeed of all living things threatened by climate change and mass death. ‘Tongues’, says the Interpreter. ‘Tongues’, replies the Pilgrim (22): that is, only by joining all human tongues in concord can we respond to the call in the planet’s speech. At the end the three chant what seem to be meaningless words,12 but what matters is the ritual itself, the unison litany, the act of conversing, which affirms our condition as fellow beings who recognize our shared responsibility and common obligation. DeLillo’s plays, like his novels and stories, affirm and enact the power of language. But the accent on language takes a slightly different direction in his plays, where narrative voice and sculpted prose are supplanted by lively dialogue. Moreover, his perceptions and prognoses have grown darker over the years. Thus, although ‘The Engineer of Moonlight’ emphasizes dialogue at the expense of action, both it and The Day Room dramatize how conversation can free us from the prison of selfhood: playing with language, that is, brings us closer both to the infinite and to each other. But if in The Day Room

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performative conversation combats mortal fear, in Valparaiso intimacy has become a relic in the hyper-mediated world symbolized by the TV remote. Likewise, both Love-Lies-Bleeding and The Word for Snow lament the actual or potential loss of meaningful language in the face of individual and mass death. The result is a liminal state – a condition of undeath. And yet the plays also suggest, paradoxically, that staging our plight may restore intimacy – if, that is, we stay for the talk. For in DeLillo’s theatre, words are not only the primary mode of human interaction and connection; they also animate our tongues with the sole magic that can truly relieve our dread.

Notes 1 Rebecca Rey likewise locates ‘an intense focus on language’ in DeLillo’s plays (2016: 139). Among the other principal themes she finds in DeLillo’s theatrical writings are the fear of death and the ‘slipperiness of human identity’, which, as I demonstrate, have also motivated the action of all his plays since The Day Room (140). Daniela Daniele (2011: 167–8) helpfully divides the theatrical works into two groups: the ‘televisionary plays’ (The Day Room, Valparaiso) and the ‘plays of silence’ (‘Engineer’, Love-LiesBleeding, etc.). The second group, she writes, ‘illuminates untrodden paths of cognition and desire hardly accessed by the media’ (167). For reasons of space, I do not consider DeLillo’s two ‘playlets’, ‘The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven’ (1990) and ‘The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life’ (2000). 2 The obscurity of the game is, as DeLillo acknowledges, the main reason why the play ‘could not work even remotely with an audience’ (Lavey 2006). 3 Rey writes that there are two levels here: first, the actors playing the characters; and, second, the characters playing patients, doctors, etc. (2016: 59). But there’s a third level, which emerges from the audience’s awareness that the actors are all pretending – a metalevel in which we know that they are in a masquerade and the actors know that we know – and we know that they know that we know. And so on. 4 DeLillo has used the interview format since the beginning of his career. David Bell’s movie in Americana, for example, largely consists of interviews with actors playing figures from his own life. The format befits DeLillo’s skill with dialogue and betokens his debt to filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, as I have argued elsewhere (Osteen 2000: 22–4). 5 After he is arrested for killing President Kennedy, Libra’s Lee Oswald similarly protests, ‘They superimposed his head on someone else’s body’ (DeLillo 1988: 418). 6 Rey states that Delfina and Michael work together to wind the microphone cord around his neck until he strangles (2016: 97), and corrects another critic who describes the death scene as I have. But DeLillo revised the method of death in later editions of the play, which means that there are two different

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7 DeLillo recalls that the entire play bloomed from its first line, ‘I saw a dead man on the subway once’ (Lavey 2006). 8 Herren does not decide whether the play is a ‘fantasized prelude’ to Alex’s death, or whether the euthanasia plot unfolds independently though ‘filtered through his dying perspective’ (143), but perhaps this difference does not really matter. He also helpfully traces the influence of Samuel Beckett’s work, particularly Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape, on this play (141–3). 9 Sean is not, as Rebecca Rey claims (2016: 98), Toinette’s son; Toinette was having an affair with Alex when his first wife became pregnant with Sean. See DeLillo (2005: 16–17, 44). 10 Similar scenes appear in DeLillo’s The Names (1982: 222–3), Underworld (1997: 541–2) and End Zone (1972: 21) as well as in The Word for Snow. 11 Rey (2016: 104–5) outlines the ethics of euthanasia involved, apparently accepting Sean’s argument that this merciful death will benefit Alex. But, as I have suggested, Sean’s claim that he is sparing his father suffering is belied by his (at best) ambivalent feelings about Alex, just as Lia’s seemingly altruistic position is undermined by her need to be a sacrificing martyr. 12 Although I suspect that these words are Old Church Slavonic (OCS), a language cited several times in the play and which seems to represent a purer form of speech that taps into the sacredness of life, I have been unable to find them in any OCS dictionary.

References Begley, A. ([1993] 2005), ‘The Art of Fiction CXXXV: Don DeLillo’, in T. DiPietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 86–108. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Daniele, D. (2011), ‘The Achromatic Room: DeLillo’s Plays One and Off Camera’, Italian Americana, 29 (2): 166–80. ‘Datura’. (2017), B & T World Seeds. Available at: http://b-and-t-world-seeds.com/ Datura.htm (accessed 21 July 2017). ‘Datura wrightii’. (2017), Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Datura_wrightii (accessed 20 July 2017). DeLillo, D. ([1971] 1989), Americana, rev. edn. New York: Penguin. DeLillo, D. (1972), End Zone. New York: Houghton Mifflin. DeLillo, D. (1976), Ratner’s Star. New York: Knopf. DeLillo, D. (1978), Running Dog. New York: Knopf. DeLillo, D. (1979), ‘The Engineer of Moonlight’, Cornell Review, 1: 21–47. DeLillo, D. (1982), The Names. New York: Knopf. DeLillo, D. (1985), White Noise. New York: Viking. DeLillo, D. (1986), The Day Room. New York: Penguin. DeLillo, D. (1988), Libra. New York: Viking.

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DeLillo, D. (1990), ‘The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven’, Harper’s, December: 44. DeLillo, D. (1997), Underworld. New York: Scribner. DeLillo, D. (1999), Valparaiso: A Play in Two Acts. New York: Scribner. DeLillo, D. (2000), ‘The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life’, Zoetrope: All Story, 4 (4): 70–71. DeLillo, D. (2005), Love-Lies-Bleeding. New York: Scribner. DeLillo, D. (2010), Point Omega. New York: Scribner. DeLillo, D. (2014), The Word for Snow. New York: Karma/Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. DeLillo, D. (2016), Zero K. New York: Scribner. Feeney, M. ([1999] 2005), ‘Unmistakably DeLillo’, in T. DiPietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 169–72. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ‘Grain Amaranths: History and Nutrition’. (2014), Kokopelli Seed Foundation. Available at: www.kokopelli-seed-foundation.com/amaranths.html (accessed 3 March 2017). Herren, G. (2017), ‘Love-Lies-Bleeding: Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Dying Man’, in J. Zubeck (ed.), Don DeLillo after the Millennium: Currents and Currencies, 137–55. Lanham: Lexington Books. ‘Larkspur Flower Facts and Meaning’. (2010), Hubpages. Available at: https:// hubpages.com/living/larkspur-flower-facts-and-meaning (accessed 25 July 2017). Lavey, M. (2006), ‘Set on Stage’. Available at: www.steppenwolf.org/articles/seton-stage/ (accessed 12 July 2017). LeClair, T., and L. McCaffrey. (1983), Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Osteen, M. (2000), American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pastore, J. (1990), ‘Pirandello’s Influence on American Writers: Don DeLillo’s The Day Room’, Italian Culture (8): 431–47. Polley, J. S. (2011), Jane Smiley, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo: Narratives of Everyday Justice. New York: Peter Lang. Psycho (1960) [Film], Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Paramount. Rey, R. (2016), Staging Don DeLillo. New York and London: Routledge. Rothstein, M. ([1987] 2005), ‘A Novelist Faces His Themes on New Ground’, in T. DiPietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 20–24. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ‘Sacred Datura’. (2017), Desert Alchemy. Available at: www.desert-alchemy.com/ flower-essence/sada/ (accessed 21 July 2017). Sartre, Jean-Paul. ([1945] 1955), ‘No Exit (Huis Clos)’, trans. Stuart Gilbert, in No Exit and Three Other Plays, 1–47. New York: Vintage. Zinman, Toby Silverman. (1990), ‘Gone Fission: The Holocaustic Wit of Don DeLillo’, Modern Drama, 34 (1): 74–87.

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6 Don DeLillo’s Italian American: The early short stories and Underworld Maria Lauret

Chapter summary: In recent years Don DeLillo has increasingly identified himself in interview as Italian American, but his work is rarely read in this light. Focusing on DeLillo’s language, this chapter examines his use of Italian and Italian American in two early short stories and in Underworld (1997), as well as a broader bilingual sensibility evident in his twenty-first-century fiction. Drawing on linguistic and psychoanalytic theories of bilingualism, it demonstrates the formative nature of DeLillo’s early short stories, and shows how strategies for representation of linguistic and cultural difference used there inform the later work. Close analysis of Italian and Italian American lexis in Underworld then reveals how these ‘foreign’ elements enable ideology-critique and invoke subliminal intertextuality. This analysis shows how DeLillo’s language is the subject as well as the medium of his art and concludes that metalinguistic reflection in Point Omega (2010), Falling Man (2007), The Body Artist (2001) and Zero K (2016) is ultimately rooted in DeLillo’s Italian American.

I was, like New York, American but not too American.1 For a long time I’ve believed that writing, the pure thing on the surface of the white page, is the least looked-at element in any piece of fiction.2

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think of myself as a kid from the Bronx’, the Guardian announced in a surprise headline in May 2016, quoting from ‘a rare interview with Don DeLillo’ (Brooks 2016: 1). Here was the author of Libra (1988) and Underworld (1997) coming out as an Italian American, ‘the Bronx’ being short for the Little Italy of Arthur Avenue in New York City. This was news because, up until the millennium, DeLillo had ‘kept an almost eerie silence about his Italian American past’, as Fred Gardaphé observed; Daniel Aaron could therefore write that ‘nothing in his novels suggests a suppressed “Italian foundation”:  . . .  his name might as well be Don Smith or Don Brown’ (Gardaphé 1998: 131; Aaron 1991: 67–8).3 To be sure, both critics were writing before Underworld, whose memorable scenes in Part Six, set in the Bronx, clearly evoke DeLillo’s own upbringing. Yet and still, even after Underworld DeLillo’s critics have attended to almost anything but his Italian American beginnings, always assisted and abetted by the author’s notorious reticence on that subject.4 After all, his decision in the late 1960s to become an American novelist with the publication of Americana (1971) − a programmatic title for a first novel if ever there was one − had been a conscious effort to leave Italian Americana behind.5 Lately all this has changed. In another interview of 2016, this time on Underworld specifically, DeLillo characterized Nick Shay’s early years as ‘essentially my life’ and he talked at some length and with gusto about his memories of the Bronx, its people and the languages he left there (Mullan 2016:  n.p.). Reminiscing about growing up in a bilingual environment, with Italian and Italian American around him, he explained that the language of his childhood was not the ‘pure thing’ of the epigraph to this chapter, but its antithesis: ‘the Italian I heard was not standard Italian. It was dialect, so it didn’t teach me anything beyond dirty words. I  spoke Bronx English. The only Italian I spoke was slang with my friends’ (Brooks 2016: 2–3). All three linguistic varieties DeLillo distinguishes here − standard Italian, ‘dialect’ or ‘slang’ Italian, and ‘Bronx English’, an Italian American hybrid fit for the Italian American culture immigrant kids in the Bronx grew up with − make cameo appearances in Underworld, and I will analyse them later.6 In describing his early exposure to immigrant Italian in pejorative terms, DeLillo followed American culture’s scorn for the ‘foreign tongues’ of its erstwhile immigrants in the post–World War II period. For obvious reasons of the war, but also because of the ‘Americanization’ (ethnic assimilation) agenda that had been in place since the beginning of the twentieth century, Italian and Italian American (and Yiddish and Puerto Rican and Mexican Spanish and any number of other immigrant tongues) were looked down upon, even in multilingual New York City.7 Nor did the people who spoke these languages necessarily value their heritage. Unlike the pride evident in today’s hyphenated ethnic American identities, being Italian American was up until the 1970s, as Gardaphé writes, ‘an obstacle to the entrance into mainstream American

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culture’ and even a source of shame (2004: 5).8 Leaving Little Italy therefore was a condition of becoming an American writer for DeLillo in the 1960s, and what Gardaphé has called DeLillo’s ‘ethnic masquerade’ – that is, effectively passing as simply ‘white’ – a necessity for mainstream success (1996: 180). By 2016 DeLillo admitted as much; being Italian American had made him ‘feel an interloper in literary society, a borderline fraud playing the role of great writer’, but he added that now ‘I’ve reached the age when that [Italian American] identity becomes more accessible’ (Brooks 2016: 2). Age is not the whole story for DeLillo of this recent identification with Italian America, however. DeLillo’s status as ‘interloper’ equipped him with an outsider/insider perspective on US society that means he has earned the right − in Gayatri Spivak’s words − ‘to critique both places’, Italian and mainstream America (1990: 83).9 One of the ways he does this in his fiction is in critically examining both languages, Italian American and American English, along with the cultural and ideological baggage they carry. For one of the questions arising from DeLillo’s early linguistic formation in languages other than ‘pure’ English, is whether Italian American, full of − as he claims − ‘unspellable curse words’ and long since overtaken by time and social change, might be read as an obsolete, ‘wasted’ language in Underworld, the toxic remnant of an immigrant past (Mullan 2016: n.p.).10 Or is it the reverse: could Italian American be the immigrant remnant, on DeLillo’s pages, of a toxic Cold War that demanded wholesale assimilation to US values and to English? Doris Sommer has argued that bilingualism leads to ‘the mutual respect that comes from never presuming to be at the center’; another question then is how DeLillo’s early exposure to Italian and Italian American might have shaped his development as a writer critical of the post-war United States (2003: n.p.). And I  might go even further:  children who grow up in a bilingual environment are often better able than monolinguals to ‘distance themselves from the form of a word’, according to linguist François Grosjean, who also claims that such children tend to understand Saussure’s arbitrariness of the sign almost intuitively (2010:  99). Could DeLillo’s interest in the materiality and sensuality of language − its look and its sound as well as its meaning − spring from his bilingual youth?11 If indeed ‘in the monolingual discourse of a plurilingual subject, other languages are waiting’, as a psychoanalytic study of bi- and multilingualism has argued, then how do these other languages inform DeLillo’s prose (Amati-Mehler et al. 1993: 42)? Finally, since DeLillo’s desire to create ‘a unique language’ is the main driving force of his work, as David Cowart (2002) has abundantly demonstrated, is it not worth exploring DeLillo’s creative process and metalinguistic tendencies in light of his originary bilingualism (Mullan 2016: n.p.)?12 Bearing these questions in mind, I  shall read DeLillo below in three stages. First, I  discuss the appearance of what I  have elsewhere called

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‘wanderwords’:  Italian or hybrid Italian American lexis amidst the standard English of DeLillo’s work. There is little enough of it: as Gardaphé has noted, there is in contemporary literature by Italian Americans ‘a near abandonment’ of Italian, except for the odd word here and there, a sign of the second generation of immigrants’ loss of, or alienation from, their ancestral culture (Gardaphé 2007: 184). DeLillo’s oeuvre, from Americana onwards, seems to follow this trend:  it does not seem to fit the category of Italian American literature at all and has rarely been read as such. However, in examining what little of DeLillo’s Italian American there is in his work, one might wonder why, against the odds of Americanization, traces of the language and the cultural/ ideological freight it brings with it have survived. At stage two I then regard wanderwords as heterolingual verbal forms, which import cultural difference into the English of their surroundings, and consider how these lexical immigrants look and sound and what business they have in DeLillo’s highly self-reflexive writing. It may be that − and this is stage three − Italian American informs his abiding research in and commitment to the art of fiction, which has language not only as its instrument, but also as its object. This research starts with the defamiliarization − what the Formalists called ostraneniye − that is often taken to be characteristic of modernism, but equally typifies children’s language games (a DeLillo trope) and the workings of the bilingual unconscious.13 Traced chronologically, I will show in DeLillo’s Italian American a development from what seems to be straightforward, mimetic use of wanderwords in the early short stories, to more complex eruptions of the linguistic unconscious in Underworld, and then to a more generalized metalinguistic interest in what happens to languages when they are divorced from their cultural, ‘street-level’ base in later works like Falling Man (2007), The Body Artist (2001), Point Omega (2010) and Zero K (2016). In the end, I return to the question whether DeLillo’s desire to write ‘on street level’ and at the same time to use writing as ‘a concentrated form of thinking’ is ultimately rooted in the poetic and critical sensibility of a bilingual writer, made in the Bronx (Desalm 1992: n.p.; Passaro 1991: n.p.).

Self/othering: Italian American in the early short stories DeLillo’s Italian American is so unfamiliar because the early, Italian-accented short stories are so hard to find that they are generally not regarded as part of his oeuvre.14 ‘Take the “A” Train’ (1962) and ‘Spaghetti and Meatballs’ (1965) are all there is of the young ‘Donald’ DeLillo’s Italian American period; by the time of ‘Coming Sun. Mon. Tues.’ (1966) and ‘Baghdad Towers West’ (1968)

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the accent has gone and Italian Americans appear only in bit-parts. What remains of cultural difference is a wariness of ‘othering’; early in Americana, for example, David Bell’s response to someone telling ethnic jokes is to cringe, and then realize that ‘if you were offended by such jokes . . . or sensitive to particular ones which slurred your own race or ancestry, you were not ready to be accepted into the mainstream’ (1971: 5–6). Reading the early stories DeLillo’s distinctive language can be seen to emerge from Little Italy into a world where the Italian American is an ‘other’. In ‘Take the “A” Train’ the protagonist, Angelo Cavallo’s alienation from both Italians and the ‘young men with bacon-fat complexions’ who are headed for Harlem’s jazz scene is mirrored in the story’s linguistic texture. Quasi-phonetic transcription of Italian-accented English turns Cavallo’s landlord, for example, into a comic stereotype:  ‘You no pay, you no live here no more’ (1962:  9). Cavallo’s own thoughts in the present are rendered in standard English, but his memories are Italian-inflected, as when he remembers ‘the happy dance of the paisanos’, the Tarantella of his wedding day: ‘many sly pinches of bottom . . . heads thrown back, hands clapping, feet stamping’ (1962: 22, 12). This scene gives us Italian America writ large in folkloric dance and music, including the hybrid language − ‘paisanos’ is an Italian American word − and even a glimpse of Italian American literary tradition.15 In Christ in Concrete, a bestseller to rival Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, Pietro Di Donato wrote of a wedding feast in strikingly similar carnivalesque style. Not only does Di Donato mimic Italian-inflected speech (‘Where yuh been alla time?’) but his Tarantella too aims to make the Italian cultural life-world visible and audible in English: ‘Jump and joy oh women’s lovely heavy breasts! . . . Faster tambourine! Faster guitar! Faster accordion! Packed and drunk and raging swifter and swifter go the Tarantellers’ (Di Donato 1993: 171, 203). Of the four ways in which writers commonly represent linguistic and cultural difference, identified by Meir Sternberg, the first, selective reproduction of heterolingual discourse (‘foreign’ wanderwords, or accented speech) uttered by fictive speaker(s), is obviously used by Di Donato and DeLillo both (Sternberg 1981: 226). In ‘Spaghetti and Meatballs’ the untranslated interjection ‘Salute!’ is also of this kind; it does not need translation since its meaning is clear from the context of two Italian American men having a drink (DeLillo 1965: 246). Verbal transposition, Sternberg’s second category, means literal translation from another language, causing ‘an interlingual clash’ resulting in grammatical and lexical mistakes in English (1981: 227). In the dialogue of ‘Take the “A” Train’, ‘you no pay’ is an example, since Cavallo’s landlord speaks an Italianinflected English that messes with English grammar (1962: 9). Both strategies make Italian (American) audible and visible in English for mimetic, realist effect. Sternberg’s third category, conceptual reflection, refers to characters commenting on the heterocultural/heterolingual situation they find themselves

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in. Cavallo’s thinking of himself as out of step with the ‘bacon-complexioned’, above, exemplifies this category (23). His alienation is conveyed more effectively and imaginatively however, when, moving away from Little Italy, he starts to read the names of subway stops backwards: Canal Street becomes ‘lanaC teertS’, as if to highlight the materiality and arbitrariness of English street signs as mere letters, characters signifying nothing.16 In ‘Spaghetti and Meatballs’, Sternberg’s final strategy for representation of linguistic and cultural difference is encountered: explicit attribution of the language characters are supposedly speaking. We are told that the protagonist, Santullo, normally speaks a ‘relentless, growling English’, but here and now he speaks Italian, in deference to ‘the old man’ D’Annunzio, another Italian American with whom Santullo passes the day − but there is little sign of this in the text (DeLillo 1965: 244).17 Unlike the verbal transposition of accented speech or literal translation from Italian seen in Di Donato’s work and ‘Take the “A” Train’, in ‘Spaghetti and Meatballs’ the men already speak recognizably DeLillo, a half ironic/comic language of simplicity (‘Life is politics. It’s politics and no money’) and contrivance (‘That terrain, his face, had highways’) (DeLillo 1965: 249, 250). This short story is particularly formative of DeLillo’s signature style in its concision and in the almost complete absence of plot. Opening with Santullo, who has just been evicted with his furniture all over the sidewalk, it ends at sunset with him and D’Annunzio still sitting there, as the radio reports on the day’s stock market activity, as if pointing forward to Underworld (which repeats the eviction) and Cosmopolis (which has the fluctuating currency markets as its refrain). Both short stories are about failing families and the falling, fallen men of Italian America, now part of a vanishing world. Whereas ‘Take the “A” Train’ shows them ‘othered’ by American modernity, ‘Spaghetti and Meatballs’ displays them deprived of the privacy (omertà) that gave them their masculine honour and of the language in which it was secured.18

Underwords: Italian American in Underworld By the time of ‘Baghdad Towers West’, DeLillo had left Little Italy in his work, not to return there until Underworld, where most of his Italian American is found. Now it was clear that he saw language less as vehicle than as source of ideas, telling Adam Begley in 1993: ‘Before everything, there’s language . . . the sheer pleasure of making it and bending it and seeing it form on the page and hearing it whistle in my head – this is the thing that makes my work go’ (297).19 Emphasis on the sensuality of language is striking here; David Cowart later called attention to a cognitive dimension when he argued that DeLillo’s work is engaged in the ‘interrogation of language’ to ‘make [it] yield up its secrets’: writing is a mode of thinking (2002: 6).

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Both the primacy of language and the idea of probing it to ‘yield up its secrets’ make perfect sense if they are thought of in the context of DeLillo’s bilingualism, since his standard English had to be actively learned and was never transparent. Besides, English not only named the world differently from Italian/American, but it also brought different social relations with it. V. N. Voloshinov wrote in this connection that ‘a word is the purest and most sensitive medium of social intercourse’ which ‘functions as an essential ingredient accompanying all ideological creativity whatsoever’ (1986:  85, 14–15, emphasis in original). Voloshinov enables us to analyse DeLillo’s American English and his occasional Italian/American wanderwords as linguistic material with its own, culturally specific, ideological charge, which is interrogated and critiqued in the fiction, often by characters themselves.20 In Underworld, DeLillo explores the relationship between twentiethcentury American history and the multiplicity of American identity from the critical distance an insider/outsider, partly through metalinguistic reflection and by using wanderwords. Gone are the Italian accent to mimic speech and the literal translation to signal foreignness; instead, words like ‘lontananza’ and ‘tizzoon’ are now examined for their hidden secrets, rather than used in dialogue in the service of realism (1997: 275, 768, emphasis in original). Here, for example, is Nick Shay’s attempt to open up to his wife about his habitual reticence: There’s an Italian word, a Latin word, that explains everything. Then I tell her the word. She says, What does this explain? And she answers, Nothing. The word that explains nothing in this case is lontananza. Distance or remoteness, sure. But as I use the word, as I interpret it, hard-edged and fine-grained, it’s the perfected distance of the gangster. (275) Note how Nick withholds the word in question even from the reader in the first instance. Then, in spite of his attempt at translation, it turns out that ‘lontananza’ explains precisely nothing to Marian because she does not know or share the Italian American (man’s) world evoked by it. Nick associates it with his father, the Italian American gangster of his (and American culture’s) fantasy, whose reserve and self-containment do not ‘need the constant living influence of sources outside yourself’ – like a wife (DeLillo 1997: 275). ‘Lontananza’ in Nick’s imagination evokes power backed by violence, and connotes not only a certain definition of Italian (American) masculinity related to the omertà mentioned earlier, but also enacts in its foreignness a cultural/ emotional difference that distances Nick from his wife. Translation does not help here. This is also what we see in Part Six of Underworld, when Albert Bronzini overhears the conversation of Italian American men in the Bronx who are

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witnessing an eviction. Their speech unwillingly and unwittingly takes him back to an immigrant past he would rather forget. It is the early 1950s, and The men spoke mostly English but used the dialect when an idea needed a push, or shove into a more familiar place  . . .  Albert, barely nearing forty, could feel his old-manness within him  . . .  as the voices took him back to earliest memory, the same slurred words, the dropped vowels, the vulgate, so that English was the sound of the present and Italian took him backwards . . . a language marked inexhaustibly by the past . . . Porca miseria. (DeLillo 1997: 767–8, emphasis in original) With ‘porca miseria’ the change of language (to Italian or Latin is hard to tell) is marked in italics to signal use of ‘the dialect’, but it is not clear who speaks these words, nor what they mean. Automatic translation on the Internet comes up with the literal ‘sow misery’, which cannot be right in this context. Neither is the freer translation of ‘what a wretchedness it was’, provided by the narrator in the next line, satisfactory for this urban Italian phrase (so the Internet tells us too) since it loses the porcine reference and the misery even a reader who does not know Italian can recognize. For the point of ‘porca miseria’ is that it makes the old country − and the old language − visible in the new, something mere ‘wretchedness’ cannot convey. Selective reproduction of urban Italian here vividly invokes the stench and the mess of pigs −and perhaps of ‘living like pigs’ − in the context of an eviction, a ‘complete humiliation of the spirit’ with ‘a man’s shoes on the sidewalk’ (DeLillo 1997:  768).21 And the Italian slang is so effective because it represents not just the old world, but − critically – names the poverty and disgrace of this new world too. Recycled from ‘Spaghetti and Meatballs’, the scene of the eviction is a traumatic one in these immigrants’ lives, the shipwreck of their American dreams with their household effects out in the open for all to see, ‘like a museum of poverty. People walk by and look’ (768). Significantly, the passage reminds us of the eviction in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where old photographs, knocking bones and even a man’s Free Papers are strewn onto the street (Ellison 1965:  219). That this silent intertextual reference is African American links it to Cotter and Manx Martin, the African American characters in Underworld; furthermore, since the eponymous invisible man lives underground, Moonman’s observation that ‘the subway’s where the races mix’ (434) gains resonance and in turn ties Underworld to ‘Take the “A” Train’ and its ‘invisible man’, Angelo Cavallo. Yet more of such undercurrents are revealed as the passage continues: There was always the neighborhood and who was leaving and who was moving in, showing up on the fringes. Tizzoons. A word Albert wishes they

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wouldn’t use. A  southern dialect word, a corruption, a slur, an invective, from tizzo, he assumed, a firebrand or smoldering coal, and broadened to human dimensions in tizzone d’inferno, scoundrel, villain . . . But they spoke it of course, these men, these immigrants or sons of immigrants . . . they half hissed the word in a way that made Albert wish he hadn’t heard. (DeLillo 1997: 768, emphasis in original) ‘Tizzoons’ here, other than ‘porca miseria’ and ‘tizzone d’inferno’, is unitalicized to show it is not a foreign word. Instead, ‘tizzoon’ is an Italian American hybrid that expresses the speaker’s hatred, contempt, and fear of a black other; it is one of the ‘unspellable’ curse words mentioned in DeLillo’s interview with Mullan (2016: n.p.). Archival evidence from DeLillo’s correspondence with his friend (and fellow Italian American) Frank Lentricchia shows its oral provenance, as DeLillo is not sure how to spell it: ‘I’ve decided (for now) to spell tizzun in a more phonetic fashion. Tizzoon. Less subject to mispronunciation this way. But also less genuine – so I could change my mind again’.22 Neither DeLillo’s comment on spelling nor Bronzini’s etymological explanation of ‘tizzoon’ register its true impact as racist invective, however, which is implied as we read on: ‘the word they used suggested a hellishness . . . that made it more unspeakable, in a way, than nigger’ (1997: 768). This use of the n-word is shocking to English readers and mimics the shock Bronzini suffers on hearing ‘tizzoon’. It acts as, what I would call, a ‘trapdoorword’ that takes him back to ‘earliest memory’ and into the unconscious, where − as noted earlier – ‘the plurilingual subject’s other languages are waiting’: a dark and ‘hellish’ past before his Americanization through education and English. A trapdoor-word thus works the opposite way from the euphemistic ‘push-button’ words of advertising in the Sputnik section of Underworld (513– 21). Whereas 1950s inventions like the ‘crisper’ are ‘words to believe in and live by’ because they create what they name, the dysphemistic trapdoor-word articulates what is normally disavowed – here, Italian American racism (517). Both trapdoor and push-button words show DeLillo interrogating language and disclosing its secrets and the secret of ‘tizzoon’ is one of the bilingual mind. According to the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, taboos and obscenities hit home more forcefully when voiced in the multilingual patient’s first language, because they revive early, painful memory (Amati-Mehler et al. 1993: 33–4). This is exactly what happens to Bronzini when he hears ‘tizzoon’. ‘Nigger’, although a taboo (‘n’-) word, is less offensive than ‘tizzoon’ to his ears not because it does not apply to himself (he may not be black, but he is ‘bronz-ed’) but because it is an English word, whereas against the Italian echo of ‘tizzoon’ he has no linguistic or memory defence. ‘Tizzoon’, unitalicized, is an unwelcome intruder in Bronzini’s present American English world, a shameful reminder of an Italian American racism that divided people of the same class,

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sharing the same space, in the Bronx when he was growing up. In his view, Italian Americans ‘slur’ their words doubly: in their pronunciation and in their racial abuse. Wanderwords here, like ‘lontananza’ above, carry cultural difference as they represent immigrant memory and embody an untranslatability that the English of the text both acknowledges and disavows. The English-only reader, confronted with the occlusion of these foreign shapes and sounds, is invited to read them for the resonances they afford semantically but primarily textually, that is: as ‘writing . . . on the white page’. For the ‘tizzone d’inferno’ that ‘tizzoon’ is derived from in Bronzini’s thinking, is the trapdoor that takes us to Dante’s Inferno and the linguistic unconscious of Underworld in turn, connecting it with the novel’s symbolic project and DeLillo’s magisterial literary ambition.

After Underworld: Metalinguistic reflection and writing ‘on street level’ In investigating DeLillo’s Italian American in Underworld one might also think of cultural tropes − call them stereotypes – that work unobtrusively and in a similar way to the buried reference to Invisible Man. Nick Shay’s occupation as a nuclear waste management executive and his fantasy that his father was in the mob, for example, are in-jokes: just like Tony Soprano after him, Nick is a waste management consultant. In DeLillo’s later work such tropes are displaced onto other ethnic groups (the closed community of diamond-trading Jews in Cosmopolis, for example, recalls the old Italian America of the Bronx) or broadened into a New  York state of mind attuned to immigrant cultures generally. Such awareness is often represented through Sternberg’s explicit attribution of languages, as various characters in Falling Man, The Body Artist, Point Omega and Zero K are reported to be speaking in Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish or even Pashto. Only very rarely does verbal transposition or selective reproduction of those languages make us see and hear them in the way we experience Italian/American in Underworld and the early short stories. Instead of enhancing verisimilitude by representing linguistic diversity in New York City, DeLillo’s later fiction thematizes multilingualism to underline the artifice of all mediation through language, and perhaps especially that of English’s ‘presuming to be at the center’, as Doris Sommer put it earlier. Even so, and very much in a Voloshinovian sense, DeLillo insists on the concrete, social basis of his writing:  ‘I strictly work, as I  call it, on street level  . . .  I  listen to people, I  watch them walking, gesticulating. Everything stems from that’ (Desalm 1992: n.p.). It is this street-level view of language that

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informs and inspires DeLillo’s wordmaking, sentence-creating art, composed in an English that is always shadowed by the other languages (Italian, Italian American, but also Greek) within and around him.23 Strikingly, Zero K contrasts this ‘street-level’ existence of multicultural, multilingual, thronging and terror-stricken New  York City with the Convergence, a non-place (u-topia in the true sense) designed to transcend current human limitations and to build a future ‘outside the narrative of what we refer to as history’ (2016:  237).24 Here the experimental subjects for cryogenics are speaking ‘Global English, yes, but other languages as well’ in anticipation of a new artificial language designed to solve the problems of multilingual (mis)communication once and for all (33).25 DeLillo thus parallels the hubristic cryogenic fantasy of eternal life with a mode of communication that aspires to ‘the logic and beauty of pure mathematics in everyday speech. No similes, metaphors, analogies’ (130). Obviously, this cannot be a literary language; although it would enable humanity ‘to . . . see things we can’t see now’ (33) the ideal language of the Convergence is engineered to obviate translation and interpretation, thereby removing language’s social dimension altogether. Like so much of DeLillo’s fiction, Zero K is thus a meditation on the role of art and literature in post-postmodernity and the arid Überlanguage of the Convergence is a useful provisional end point from which to look back to his Italian American beginnings. First off, I noted how DeLillo’s attitude towards Italian America(n) shadows that of the nation, as it moved from twentiethcentury disavowal of ethnic difference to its re(dis)covery in the twentyfirst. I then showed that in the self/othering of the early short stories, Italian America(n) is gradually displaced and then submerged in Americana, until Underworld. As DeLillo endeavours ‘to write himself out of his neighbourhood and into the broader culture’ in the 1970s and 1980s, metalinguistic reflection on American English often exposes the language’s political unconscious and becomes a hallmark of his style (Chénetier and Happe 2001:  n.p.). Italian American returns, however, in Underworld as both subject, embodied in wanderwords, and as conduit to the text’s subliminal literary references (Di Donato, Ellison, Dante). After Underworld, twenty-first-century multiculturalism is increasingly figured as multilingualism in the wake of 9/11 (in Falling Man, Zero K) and live, ‘street-level’ speech contrasted with technological modes of language (re)production, such as the tapes in The Body Artist and Zero K’s mathematically precise language-as-code. Ideology-critique through thinking about words − for example, the extraordinary excursus on ‘rendition’ in Point Omega − continues throughout. Italian (the ‘vulgate’) and Italian American on DeLillo’s pages do not give access to ethnic authenticity so much as they serve as remnants of languages, now displaced or overtaken by history, imbued with a way of living, thinking

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and feeling, unlike the push-button American English of advertising and politics and unlike the relentless logic of the unnamed language of the Convergence in Zero K. When Italian American as such disappears, the bilingual sensibility remains alive in DeLillo’s self-created and self-creating American English, not only in his characters’ reflections on the power of words, but most of all in his conviction that language can ‘alter our perceptions’, as he explains to Peter Boxall in this volume (Chapter 10). Asking after DeLillo’s Italian American then − where did it go, what remains of it − is not a niche pursuit. Nor is it some essentialist attempt to enlist him in the cause of ‘a generation or an ethnic clan’, ‘mamma mia stereotypes’ DeLillo evidently still feared while writing Underworld, as his archived correspondence with Frank Lentricchia shows.26 Instead, (re)reading the early short stories and Bronx-based passages in Underworld led me to conclude that DeLillo’s language, as message and medium of his art, may well be so distinctive and able to do critical work because it originates, ultimately, in that other tongue, that ‘dirty’ language in which the kid from the Bronx grew up to become a great writer: DeLillo’s Italian American.

Notes 1 Don DeLillo, ‘Baghdad Towers West’ (1968: 202). 2 Don DeLillo, letter to Frank Lentricchia, 4 September 1996, DeLillo Papers (container 97.8). Many thanks to Kiron Ward for allowing me to use his research on the DeLillo papers. 3 Apart from well-known Jewish American writers like Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, few twentieth-century minority writers made it into the literary mainstream before the 1990s. 4 With the exception of some Italian American critics: Frank Lentricchia addressed and then dismissed the question of DeLillo’s ethnicity in ‘The American Writer as Bad Citizen’ (1991: 2), while Judith Pastore (1990) and especially Fred Gardaphé (1996: 172–92; 1998: 131–51), to whose pioneering work this essay is indebted, have documented instances of Italian Americana in DeLillo’s workup until the mid-1990s. 5 Indeed, as Tim Engles explores in this volume, the novel’s very title ‘announces what has become a primary career-long subject, the United States itself, or rather, prevailing conceptions of it as a country, and thus of its citizens as various kinds of people’ (Chapter 1 in this volume). 6 The Dictionary of American Italian defines it as follows: ‘American Italian [sic] is an Italian-American pidgin language developed in the early 20th century by Italian immigrants settling in American cities and metropolitan areas, especially in New York and New Jersey. It is based on the Italian language, but it contains a mixture of Sicilian- and Neapolitan-inspired dialect words and phrases as well as English words’ (2009).

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7 For the Americanization campaign see Lauret (2016); for Italian during World War II, see Nancy C. Carnevale (2003). 8 For ethnic shame see Haller (1997) and Lauret (2016). 9 For the outsider perspective see also DeCurtis (1991). 10 These words may literally have been ‘unspellable’ because they belonged to an oral discourse. Probably DeLillo only ever learned to write in English, like so many immigrant children in the United States whose home languages were considered backward and obsolete. See also Haller’s research on negative attitudes towards Italian American (1981: 394). 11 I use the designation ‘bilingual’ for DeLillo himself here in the modern sense of someone with two languages, who does not necessarily use them across all four dimensions of speaking, listening, reading and writing, nor to a level of ‘native’ (or ‘can pass for native’) competence. See Lauret (2014: 36–40). 12 Mullan interview: ‘My role as a writer is to create language, a unique language’ (42 mins). See also LeClair (1982) and Cowart (2002). 13 For DeLillo’s indebtedness to the modernists, see Boxall (2006), Cowart (2002), and Graley Herren in this volume (Chapter 3). For children’s language games, in which DeLillo is also interested (for example, in Falling Man when Justin attempts to speak in monosyllables only, as well as in Part Six of Underworld) see Grosjean (1982: 207; 2010: 203–4). 14 ‘The River Jordan’ (1960), ‘Take the “A” Train (1962), ‘Spaghetti and Meatballs’ (1965) and ‘Baghdad Towers West’ (1968) originally appeared in Epoch magazine and were never republished, are not available online and are not anthologized in DeLillo’s recent collection of reprinted short stories, The Angel Esmeralda. 15 The Italian would be ‘paesani’ (Gardaphé 2004: 22). 16 Canal Street, as the space where Little Italy, Chinatown and Koreatown meet, is famously multicultural; as Ronan McKinney’s discussion of ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ in this volume makes clear, the significance of Canal Street as such for DeLillo has spanned his career (see Chapter 7). 17 The name D’Annunzio cannot but recall Gabriele D’Annunzio, known both as a great Italian writer and the fascist demagogue who led the occupation of Fiume after World War I. 18 Gardaphé explains omertà as ‘the code of male behaviour’ (2004: 86). 19 See also interview with Tom LeClair: ‘I began to suspect that language was a subject as well as an instrument in my work’ and ‘What writing means to me is trying to make interesting, clear, beautiful language’ and ‘it’s possible for a writer to shape himself as a human being through the language he uses’ (1982: 20, 23). 20 That it is American English matters to DeLillo. In an interview with KCRW about Underworld he spoke about his pleasure in a French translation of Underworld ‘from the American’ (KCRW Bookworm 1998: 6 mins). Underworld begins with the sentence ‘He speaks in your voice, American’ (1997: 11) echoing John Dos Passos’ U.S.A., whose prologue ends ‘U.S.A. is the speech of the people’ ([1938] 1988: 7).

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21 Pigs also connect this scene with an earlier one in the Bronx when Albert Bronzini and Rosemary Shay visit a butcher’s store and encounter ‘a gothic cathedral of pork’ (214). 22 DeLillo Papers, container 97.8. He adds, amusingly: ‘These are the kinds of things that make me mutter, Porca Madonna a thousand times a day’. 23 The Greek is evident in The Names. See also Foster (1991) and Kalospyros (2016), where DeLillo explains: ‘My stay in Greece turned out to be crucial to my writing . . . I was rediscovering the alphabet’ (n.p.). 24 There are, however, hints that the Convergence is in or near Chelyabinsk in Kazakhstan, which was struck by a meteor in 2013. 25 This is akin to the common fantasy of a universal language, ‘with its transparent and immediate adherence to the object’, as the psychoanalysts write in The Babel of the Unconscious (Amati-Mehler et al. 1993: 199). 26 DeLillo to Frank Lentricchia about a request from Fred Gardaphé for DeLillo to contribute to – presumably − a publication or event on Italian American literature, 12 October 1995, DeLillo Papers (container 97.8).

References Aaron, D. (1991), ‘How to Read Don DeLillo’, in F. Lentricchia (ed.), Introducing Don DeLillo, 67–81. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Amati-Mehler, J., S. Argentieri, and J. Canestri (1993), The Babel of the Unconscious: Mother Tongue and Foreign Languages in the Psychoanalytic Dimension, trans. J. Whitelaw-Cucco. Madison: International Universities Press. American Italian Dictionary (2009). Available at: https://americanitalian. net/2009/04/14/italian/ (accessed 8 August 2017). Begley, A. (1993), ‘The Art of Fiction CXXXV: Don DeLillo’, Paris Review, 35 (128): 274–306. Boxall, P. (2006), Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. New York: Routledge. Brooks, X. (2016), ‘ “I Think of Myself as a Kid from the Bronx”: A Rare Interview with Don DeLillo’, The Guardian, 6 May: 1–3. Carnevale, N. C. (2003), ‘ “No Italian Spoken for the Duration of the War”: Language, Italian-American Identity, and Cultural Pluralism in the World War II Years’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 22 (3): 3–33. Chénetier, M., and F. Happe (2001), ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo’, Revue française d’études américaines, 1: 102–11. Available at: www.cairn.info/revue-francaise-detudes-americaines-2001-1-page-102.htm (accessed 14 August 2017). Cowart, D. (2002), Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: University of Georgia Press. De Curtis, A. (1991), ‘ “An Outsider in this Society”: An Interview with Don DeLillo’, in F. Lentricchia (ed.), Introducing Don DeLillo, 43–66. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Di Donato, P. ([1939] 1993), Christ in Concrete. New York: Penguin. DeLillo, D. (1962), ‘Take the “A” Train’, Epoch, 12 (1): 9–25.

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DeLillo, D. (1965), ‘Spaghetti and Meatballs’, Epoch, 14 (3): 244–50. DeLillo, D. (1966), ‘Coming Sun. Mon. Tues.’, Kenyon Review, 28 (3). Available at: www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/don-delillo-342846/ (accessed 17 August 2017). DeLillo, D. (1968), ‘Baghdad Towers West’, Epoch, 17 (3): 195–217. DeLillo, D. (1971), Americana. New York: Scribner. DeLillo, D. (1982), The Names. New York: Knopf. DeLillo, D. (1997), Underworld. London: Pan MacMillan. DeLillo, D. (2001), The Body Artist. New York: Scribner. DeLillo, D. (2004), Cosmopolis. London: Pan Macmillan. DeLillo, D. (2007), Falling Man. London: Pan MacMillan. DeLillo, D. (2010), Point Omega. London: Pan MacMillan. DeLillo, D. (2011), The Angel Esmeralda. New York: Scribner. DeLillo, D. (2016), Zero K. London: Pan MacMillan. Desalm, B. (1992), ‘Interview with DeLillo’, Kölner Stadtanzeiger, 27 October, trans. T. Z. Perival. Available at: http://perival.com/delillo/interview_desalm_ 1992.html (accessed 17 August 2017). Don DeLillo Papers. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Dos Passos, J. ([1938] 1988), U.S.A. London: Penguin. Dragan, R. (2014), ‘Leaving the Bronx: Depicting Urban Spaces in Don DeLillo’s “Baghdad Towers West” and His Early Short Stories’, Journal of the Short Story in English, 62: 79–93. Available at: http://jsse.revues.org/1429 (accessed 17 August 2017). Ellison, R. ([1947] 1965), Invisible Man. London: Penguin. Fairclough, N. et al. (eds) (2007), Discourse and Contemporary Social Change. Berlin: Peter Lang. Foster, D. A. (1991), ‘Alphabetic Pleasures: The Names’, in F. Lentricchia (ed.), Introducing Don DeLillo, 157–73. Durham and London: Duke University Press. García, O., and J. A. Fishman (eds) (1997), The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Gardaphé, F. L. (1996), Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press. Gardaphé, F. L. (1998), ‘(Ex)Tending or Escaping Ethnicity: Don DeLillo and Italian/ American Literature’, in P. A. Giordano and A. J. Tamburri (eds), Beyond the Margin: Readings in Italian Americana, 131–51. London: Associated University Presses. Gardaphé, F. L. (2004), Leaving Little Italy: Essaying Italian American Culture. Albany: State University of New York. Gardaphé, F. L. (2007), ‘Language in Fiction: Italian at Work in Italian American Novels’, in N. Fairclough et al. (eds), Discourse and Contemporary Social Change, 173–92. Berlin: Peter Lang. Grosjean, F. (1982), Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Grosjean, F. (2010), Bilingual: Life and Reality. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Haller, H. W. (1981), ‘Between Standard Italian and Creole: An Interim Report on Language Patterns in an Italian-American Community’, Word, 32 (3): 181–91.

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Haller, H. W. (1997), ‘Italian in New York’, in O. García and J. A. Fishman (eds), The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City, 119–42. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. Harasym, S. (ed.) (1990), The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. New York and London: Routledge. Kalospyros, L. (2016), ‘Don DeLillo on This Crazy, Puzzling World We Live In’, Ekathimerini, 12 March. Available at: www.ekathimerini.com/206855/article/ ekathimerini/life/don-delillo-on-this-crazy-puzzling-world-we-live-in (accessed 17 August 2017). KCRW Bookworm (1998), ‘Don DeLillo: Underworld’, [Radio] KCRW,15 January. Available at: www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/bookworm/don-delillounderworld#.WYRI8TuegaI.email (accessed 17 August 2017). Lauret, M. (2014), Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature. New York: Bloomsbury. Lauret, M. (2016), ‘Americanization Now and Then: “The Nation of Immigrants” in the Early Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries’, Journal of American Studies, 50 (2): 419–47. LeClair, T. (1982), ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo’, Contemporary Literature, 23 (1): 19–31. Lentricchia, F. (ed.) (1991), Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Lentricchia, F. (1991) ‘The American Writer as Bad Citizen’, in F. Lentricchia (ed.), Introducing Don DeLillo, 1–6. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Mullan, J. (2016), ‘Don DeLillo on Writing His Novel Underworld’, Guardian Books Podcast, 10 June. Available at: www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2016/ jun/10/don-delillo-on-writing-his-novel-underworld-books-podcast (accessed 8 August 2017). Passaro, V. (1991), ‘Dangerous Don DeLillo’, New York Times Magazine, 19 May. Available at: www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/16/lifetimes/del-v-dangerous. html (accessed 17 August 2017). Pastore, J. (1990), ‘Marriage American Style: Don DeLillo’s Domestic Satire’, Voices in Italian Americana, 1: 1–19. Available at: www.oocities.org/enza003/ Via/ViaVol1_2Pastore.htm (accessed 17 August 2017). Sommer, D. (ed.) (2003), Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Spivak, G. C. (1990), ‘Postmarked Calcutta, India’, in S. Harasym (ed.), The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, 75–94. New York and London: Routledge. Sternberg, M. (1981), ‘Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis’, Poetics Today, 2 (4): 221–39. Voloshinov, V. N. (1986), Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

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7 Staging the counter-narrative in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man Ronan McKinney

Chapter summary: The 9/11 attacks provoked an intensified sense of individual and collective vulnerability in the United States, and a corresponding effort to reassert the integrity of the body politic  – to clearly demarcate self and other, friend and foe. In his 2001 essay ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, DeLillo proposed a ‘counter-narrative’ that would disrupt the fantasized clarity of such boundaries. This chapter presents DeLillo’s 2007 novel Falling Man as a more developed articulation of that ‘counter-narrative’. Using the work of Leo Bersani and Judith Butler, I show how, in Lianne Neudecker’s interactions with the paintings of Giorgio Morandi and with the performance artist ‘Falling Man’, art mediates trauma by constructively repeating it. This allows Lianne to reconceive vulnerability not as a threatened violation of her psychic or bodily integrity, but as its fundamental condition. As such, Falling Man offers a redescription of subjectivity that undermines the fictions of sovereignty and security that sustain neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies.

F

alling Man begins with a classic DeLillo set piece, situating the reader with virtuoso skill amidst a moment of world-historical significance. Keith Neudecker wanders dazed from the World Trade Center as it collapses behind him; he is covered in ash and carries a briefcase which is not his own. For

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reasons unclear to himself, he arrives at the apartment of his estranged wife Lianne. The novel follows them through the days and years after ‘the planes’ as they rekindle the embers of their marriage then gradually drift apart again, neither able to fully articulate their trauma. The book’s title refers both to Richard Drew’s famous photograph of a man falling to his death from the towers, and to a fictional performance artist who jumps from various locations around New York and then dangles in mid-air, held aloft by a harness, mimicking the posture of the man in Drew’s photograph. In this chapter I shall argue that, in Lianne’s encounters with Falling Man and with the paintings of Giorgio Morandi, DeLillo explores the fragility which is a fundamental condition of selfhood. The sudden awareness of vulnerability, at both an individual and collective psychic level, was one deeply traumatic effect of 9/11. It induced as a reaction an attempt to reassert the integrity of the body politic, to clearly demarcate self and other, friend and foe  – as witnessed, for example, in President George W Bush’s address to Congress nine days after the events, when he warned ‘Every nation, in every region’ that they had to make a decision: ‘either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’ (2001: n.p.; see also Faludi 2008). Lianne’s encounters with art in Falling Man disrupt the fantasized clarity of this boundary, showing how her subjectivity is shaped by what exceeds it – by other subjects and by her own past. These encounters thus offer an example of what DeLillo has called ‘the counternarrative’, opposing official (and deeply ideological) narratives of 9/11 which sought to reinforce the autonomy of the subject. Instead, the counter-narrative offers an account of subjectivity as deeply embedded in what exceeds it, and therefore subject to a primary vulnerability which cannot be eradicated and which demands an ethics of care for the other. For John N. Duvall, ‘part of the problem facing DeLillo in addressing 9/11 is that the terrorist has usurped the role of politicizing the image’ (2011: 155). 9/11 showed how thoroughly terrorists have outstripped the writer’s capacity to ‘make raids on human consciousness’, as one of DeLillo’s fictional alter egos, the writer Bill Gray, puts it in Mao II (DeLillo 1992: 41). Duvall places the novel in the context of DeLillo’s career-long examination of the political function of the artist, and the significant role of performance art in his later work. However, where Duvall addresses the role of Falling Man as artist, the novel continues a shift of focus in DeLillo’s work, begun in The Body Artist, from the politics of artistic production to the phenomenology of spectatorship. This essay follows Linda Kauffman (2008) in focusing on Lauren as beholder, and in framing the novel as an exploration of the ethics of spectatorship. In exploring the novel’s account of aesthetic experience I  will focus on a few key moments wherein Lianne’s awareness of the permeable boundaries of her subjectivity is dramatized in her reactions to the paintings of Morandi and to Falling Man’s performance art. My analysis of these scenes will be

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framed by a psychoanalytic account of the aesthetic as a replication of the initial constitution of the subject. In this reading, art can mediate trauma by constructively repeating it, and allow Lianne to conceive vulnerability not as a threatened violation of her psychic or bodily integrity, but as its fundamental condition. First, though, we will need to examine the context of DeLillo’s response to 9/11 and the politics of the ‘War on Terror’.

‘Our world, parts of our world, have crumbled into theirs’ Such is his association in public consciousness with themes of terror and spectacle that it seemed DeLillo had to respond to 9/11 in some fashion. His initial response, an essay entitled ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ (2001a), appeared in December 2001. In its conjunction of multiple modes, narratives, and voices, the essay disrupts the then-developing ‘official’ narrative of 9/11 as an act of war perpetrated by madmen, part of a global ‘clash of civilizations’, and/or the final act of the Cold War. It also ‘deconstructs the very dichotomies others reinforce’ (Kauffman 2008:  356), particularly the insistent effort to separate ‘us’ and ‘them’. DeLillo suggests that the attacks were motivated by resentment of the relentless worldwide extension of ‘American’ values: ‘It is the high gloss of our modernity. It is the thrust of our technology. It is our perceived godlessness. It is the blunt force of our foreign policy. It is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life, and mind’ (2001a:  33). However, the attacks momentarily reversed this cultural imperialism, breaching the divide between a rich but paranoid West and its others: ‘Our world, parts of our world, have crumbled into theirs’ (33).1 9/11 thus changed America’s view of itself and its position in the world, awakening a perhaps unprecedented sense of vulnerability and posing the question of the United States’, and by extension the West’s, capacity to accommodate cultural difference. DeLillo invokes ‘the daily sweeping taken-for-granted greatness of New  York’, the city which ‘will accommodate every language, ritual, belief, and opinion’ (40), represented in the figure of a young Muslim woman praying on a rug amidst the cosmopolitan chaos of Canal Street.2 It is an image of difference accommodated, the opposition of West and nonWest undermined in a moment utopian in its very banality:  yet it is also a lost utopia, a memory from a month before ‘the planes’. ‘Ruins’ poses the question of how to respond to difference, and of the extent to which identity is conditioned by rejection or recognition of otherness. ‘Today’, writes DeLillo, ‘the world narrative belongs to terrorists’: however, ‘The narrative ends in the rubble, and it is left to us to create the counter-narrative’ (33, 34). In a context

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where distinctions between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ had become deeply politicized, and in which the power of images had been made horrifically apparent, DeLillo proposes a more complex relationship of self and other as the beginning of that counter-narrative. The image of the praying Muslim woman becomes a symbol of the West’s capacity to tolerate difference as part of its identity, and of literature’s power to provide a language for that capacity. In Falling Man DeLillo would explore that capacity in greater depth.

‘It was what there was between them’ In Falling Man, the stakes of identity are visual:  its numbed survivors are haunted by what they have seen. This is apparent in the fragmented scene revolving around an argument between Lianne’s mother Nina and her lover Martin about the cause and meaning of the attacks. Nina is a retired professor of art history, Martin a German art dealer who seems to have been involved with Leftist terrorist groups in the 1970s. Their dispute restages the themes DeLillo had rehearsed in ‘Ruins of the Future’  – politics, religion, ontology, history – and marks the beginning of the end of their relationship. Afterward, while Nina dozes, Lianne chats with Martin about ‘the things everyone was talking about’: the attacks, who and how and why (2007: 42). Nina wakes, and meets Lianne’s gaze: She opened her eyes, finally, and the two women looked at each other. It was a sustained moment and Lianne did not know, could not have put into words what it was they were sharing. Or she knew but could not name the overlapping emotions. It was what there was between them, meaning every minute together and apart, what they’d known and felt and what would come next, in the minutes, days and years. (48) Meanwhile, Martin turns to scrutinize two still life paintings by Giorgio Morandi which hang on the wall of Nina’s apartment. He claims to see the towers of the World Trade Center in two tall, dark shapes amidst the group of objects in one painting. Lianne looks: she too sees the towers. No longer timeless, aloof from politics and history, the painting is remade as Lianne stands before it, suddenly seeming to reflect an event that occurred half a century after its production. In Duvall’s analysis, ‘For Martin to comment on this painting in terms of 9/11 terrorism is to grant the terrorist a role similar to that of the artist’ in remaking perception (2011: 158). It also reveals the extent to which Lianne’s subjectivity both determines and is determined by the world around her; the boundary of self and world is figured as a site of transaction rather than exclusion. Turning back to the room, Lianne briefly sees the scene as a still life before ‘the

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human figures appear, Mother and Lover’ (2007: 111). Some aspect of Lianne’s identity – her relations with others and with otherness – is being staged, and perhaps shifting, in these twinned encounters with painting and parent. In the first, Lianne and Martin share a moment of recognition. In the second, Lianne recognizes how much of herself is shared with, or bound up in, Nina. Lianne’s dialogue with the Morandis permeates Falling Man, framing the novel as a discourse on looking and interiority, on the interpenetration of perception and memory, subject and object. It is also a meditation on the primacy of loss and the corporeal and psychic fragility of the subject. Lianne has lost her father, has almost lost her husband and will lose her mother over the course of the novel. The paintings both stage and mitigate that loss, summon its pain and enable Lianne to mourn. Through looking at the paintings Lianne is led to renewed awareness of her own vulnerability, and the losses both real and imagined which structure her identity. For Judith Butler, in the experience of loss, ‘something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us’ (2006: 22). For Butler, following Levinas, the ethical relation begins in acceptance of one’s dependence upon the other, which includes the possibility that one may be the object of the other’s violence. Butler suggests mourning can renew awareness of our primary dependency upon the other: Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation and is, in that sense, depoliticizing. But I think it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility. (22) Where Freud conceives mourning as a process of withdrawing one’s psychic dependency upon an other (or an imagined ideal other, such as an idea), Butler argues that in the experience of loss we are brought to the realization that the self is always permeable, incomplete and in dialogue with an outside. Vulnerability is the irreducible price of agency. Significantly, Butler extends her thesis to the level of culture to describe the United States’ collective reaction to 9/11. According to Butler, as a result of the attacks the United States suffered the cultural loss of ‘the prerogative, only and always, to be the one who transgresses the sovereign boundaries of other states, but never to be in the position of having one’s own boundaries transgressed’ (2006: 39). This echoes the argument made in sections of the Left that 9/11 represented a ‘fall into history’, marking the end of America’s apparent immunity to the violence associated with processes of globalization of which it is one of the principal agents (see Žižek 2002; Baudrillard 2003).

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For Butler, ‘grief contains the possibility of apprehending a mode of dispossession that is fundamental to who I  am’ (2006:  28). In Falling Man, the image seems to offer a means of staging that dispossession rather than attempting to overcome or disavow it. Even in Lianne’s solitary confrontation with the artwork, the temporal and social nature of her being is revealed. In Falling Man, the image stages the subject as always coming undone, predicated upon what exceeds it. Yet the realization of this dispossession leads not to crisis, as in trauma, but to a renewed appreciation of the mutual dependence of self and other:  ‘It was what there was between them’ (2007:  48). In her encounters with Morandi’s paintings Lianne is able to project the crisis outward onto the artwork, and so encounters the limits of her self-possession. In Falling Man, self-shattering  – the ‘mode of dispossession’ which Butler argues is induced by loss – produces humility in Lianne’s awareness of her dependence on a world that exceeds her and to which she is irremediably exposed. This response contrasts starkly with the bellicose public discourse around sovereignty in the post-9/11 United States, and offers a possible counter-narrative to it. If loss reveals a primary vulnerability, ‘a mode of dispossession that is fundamental to who I  am’, how can art mediate that dispossession as something other than trauma? To answer this question, and understand the significance of self-shattering in the formation of the subject, we must draw upon Freud’s psychoanalytic account of the subject’s initial separation of itself from the world and its relationship to that world. This will show how art can mediate the traumatizing awareness of vulnerability by repeating it as aesthetic pleasure.

‘I am not sure where one ends and the other begins’ In The Freudian Body Leo Bersani traces the textual movement which escapes Freud’s attempt, in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, to fix sexuality in teleological stages and defined areas of the body. Bersani instead locates its genesis in a masochistic response to trauma, to the infant’s overwhelming and shattering experience of the mother’s love. The infant initially lacks ‘ego structures capable of resisting or . . . binding the stimuli to which it is exposed’ (Bersani 1990:  38). Masochism, as the process whereby the unpleasure aroused by excessive stimulation is converted into sexual pleasure, not only allows the infant to survive this crisis:  it provides the basic coordinates of adult sexuality. We desire what we lack, yet this privation is experienced as a kind of pleasure known as jouissance. Intriguingly, Bersani suggests that

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adult erotic and aesthetic experiences attempt to recapture and repeat that libidinized primary self-shattering: If the sexual is, at the most primitive level, the attempted replication of a shattering (or psychically traumatizing) pleasure, art  . . .  is the attempted replication of that replication. That is, it repeats the replicative movement of sexuality as a domesticating and civilizing project of self-recognition. (111) Both sexual and aesthetic experiences are rooted in the mediation of a selfshattering trauma as masochistic pleasure. For Freud trauma results from a failure of mediation, in which the psyche’s defences are overwhelmed by a violent stimulus from the external world. In Bersani’s account masochism offers a structure capable of mediating that traumatizing force, whether it be aggressive or erotic, by making the two equivalent. Furthermore, the aesthetic is a formalized repetition of the primary masochism of sexuality, the repetition of a repetition, which ‘repeats the replicative movement of sexuality as a domesticating and civilizing project of self-recognition’ (Bersani 1990:  111). Bersani thus links repetition and self-recognition through the aesthetic. In Bersani’s terms, self-recognition arises from self-shattering; the repetitions of a primary self-shattering in sexuality and then art induce a movement from trauma to agency and finally to reflective self-recognition. DeLillo makes the same connection in Falling Man. Siri Hustvedt has described the experience of prolonged looking at Morandi’s clusters of objects: ‘Shapes begin to bleed into one another or appear to push against the objects next to them, invading their space . . . I am not sure where one ends and the other begins’ (2009: 26). This blurring of boundaries seems to occur not only within the image, but between image and world (the towers ‘appear’) and between image and beholder. On seeing the towers or her mother ‘in’ the painting (2007: 49, 111, 210), Lianne is faced with the question of where that spectral image is located:  in her mind, in the painting, or somewhere in between. The image stages the shifting connections and dislocations which define and disrupt Lianne’s identity:  ‘It was what there was between them’ (48). Nonetheless, in figuring the interpenetration of self and world the paintings allow for a reconstitution of Lianne’s subjectivity around that experience of dislocation. Fractured and complex it may be, but the encounter with the paintings is Lianne’s. Her very absorption in the image provokes a certain theatricality in which she recognizes herself as vulnerable, contingent and embedded in the world. This arises through the overlaying in the painting of echoes of ‘the planes’ and of Lianne’s relationship with her mother, whose mortality is becoming ever more apparent. In this way, Lianne’s response to the paintings supports what Bersani calls ‘a domesticating and civilizing project of self-recognition’, even while it dramatizes the contingency of

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that self. Not for nothing do we speak of being ‘lost in contemplation’ of a painting or ‘absorbed’ in a book. And yet this loss of self is also a form of self-consciousness, a way of recognizing the self in its interaction with, even its ravishment by, an external non-self. Through the disruption of her psychic interiority provoked by her experience of art, Lianne comes to recognize herself as irreducibly vulnerable, always threatened by self-shattering in her primary exposure to the other. This exposure is dramatized most powerfully in the novel in Lianne’s central encounter with the performance artist known as Falling Man.

‘This was hers to record and to absorb’ Performance art occupies a prominent place in DeLillo’s later work, often providing a way to explore the psychic and corporeal experience of time and loss (for example in The Body Artist).3 This is evident in Falling Man, described by Linda Kauffman as ‘a novel obsessed with the corporeal body’ (2011: 135). This obsession is most visibly enacted in the performances of Falling Man himself, which stage trauma as a profound disruption of corporeal as well as psychic autonomy. He appears in each of the novel’s three sections: once near the beginning as Lianne picks up Nina from Grand Central Station; at the end of the central section as she leaves her weekly storyline session with Alzheimer’s patients in Harlem; and again in the final section when she comes upon his obituary in a newspaper. Lianne’s second encounter with Falling Man forms the novel’s fulcrum. Heading homeward, Lianne becomes aware of a suspension of activity on the street, people’s attention drawn to something directly above her. A man, ‘white male in suit and tie’, is climbing onto a maintenance platform alongside the elevated train line: ‘This is who he had to be’ (2007: 159, 160). As a train passes, he jumps and is held twenty feet up with ‘blood rushing to his head, away from hers’ (168). The dangling man seems to invade Lianne’s bodily and psychic space, yet remains other, beyond understanding: There was something awful about the stylized pose, body and limbs, his signature stroke. But the worst of it was the stillness itself and her nearness to the man, her position here, with no one closer to him than she was. She could have spoken to him but that was another plane of being, beyond reach. (168) Falling Man’s performances clearly recall both the people who jumped from the blazing towers on 9/11, and Richard Drew’s photograph of one such man in mid-fall. As ‘Falling Man’ the performer doubles for the figure in

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the photograph and for the thousands of unburied dead whose pulverized bodies literally hang in the air of New York in the weeks after ‘the planes’. Like Drew’s photograph, the performances are both singular and part of a series (Drew shot twelve frames of the ‘falling man’, only publishing one). Each performance both recalls and reframes the others, along with the photograph they cite and the desperate act it records. Yet they are not photographic, but produce instead a tableau vivant that restores what the photograph elides:  the  corporeal presence of a body in space and in lived time. For Peter Boxall ‘the body of the artist, suspended in mid fall, and occupied overwhelmingly by the absent body of an unnamed other, suggests that the narrative time in which recovery might take place has been suspended, arrested’ (2011:  175). This is true insofar as Falling Man enacts the recurrence of the traumatic past, disrupting the onward thrust of narrative. Yet one should not underestimate the presence of Falling Man as performer, nor the durational ‘body time’ his dangling figure performs. As much as the performance ‘brings the event back, as if in a kind of déjà vu’ (175), it does so in a powerfully realized present shared by performer and audience as they, no less than he, hang suspended in time. His fall provokes in Lauren an intense awareness of her own body and its physical relationship to the body dangling in space above her head:  ‘She was the photograph, the photosensitive surface. That nameless body coming down, this was hers to record and to absorb’ (2007: 223). The moment becomes for Lianne something like what Lauren Hartke, bereaved protagonist of The Body Artist, calls a ‘living still life’:  it seems to ‘stop time, stretch it out, or open it up’ (2001b:  107). Lauren is describing her performance piece ‘Body Time’, the title of which applies equally to the effect of Falling Man’s performance upon Lianne. This is part of the counter-narrative inasmuch as the performance reintroduces the temporal, and by implication narrative, into the static image. It is a notable instance of the interest in duration and slowness evident in late DeLillo (Lauren Hartke’s performance in The Body Artist, Richard Elster’s obsession with geologic time in Point Omega), and a counterpoint to the hyperacceleration DeLillo has identified elsewhere (as for example in Cosmopolis) as a defining feature of modernity. Finally, the performance insists upon the corporeal vulnerability of the falling body, an element repressed in narratives of 9/11 dominated by the image, and in the suppression of the narratives of those who fell or jumped from the towers (see Junod 2002). Psychic trauma often manifests itself as temporal disruption whereby a memory of the traumatic event recurs beyond the subject’s control. According to Cathy Caruth, the pathology of the traumatic event consists ‘solely in the structure of its experience or reception:  the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it’ (1995:  4, emphasis in original).

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Trauma represents the eternal return of the same:  in Beyond the Pleasure Principle ([1920] 2001) Freud links it with the death drive’s tendency toward an inert, non-differentiated state. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan summarizes Freud’s argument for the existence of two qualitatively different kinds of repetition:  ‘Constructive repetition emphasizes difference, destructive repetition emphasizes sameness (i.e., to repeat successfully is not to repeat)’ (1980:  153). To be constructive and serve the pleasure principle, repetition must somehow transmute the event repeated, giving the subject some degree of control over the process of iteration and thus relaying the trauma of loss into the pleasure of reproduction. Freud gives the example of the ‘fort-da game’ played by his grandson, wherein the infant repeatedly threw a cotton reel over the side of his pram, each time pulling it back in with a delighted noise that Freud interpreted as ‘Fort  . . .  Da!’, German for ‘Gone . . . There!’ ([1920] 2001: 15). In Freud’s reading of the episode, the boy achieves a degree of mastery over the absence of his mother by replaying it in a scenario of which he is in control. It is the difference of his game with the cotton reel from the experience of his mother’s absence, together with the infant’s control over the pattern of repetition, which allows it to become pleasurable. The infant recognizes himself through his repetitive throwing and recovery of the reel. To put it in Bersani’s terms, the aesthetic (the infant’s game) mediates trauma by restaging it, but differently, and this difference (the distance between art and life) is what recodes the traumatic incident as recuperative. This contrasts with the traumatic repetition that possesses the subject and returns him to the traumatic moment, inscribing him in a scenario over which he has no control. Repeatedly throwing himself off buildings and then dangling in space suspended by a rope, Falling Man repeats the child’s gesture of throwing the cotton reel over the edge of his cot. Where the child repeats the disappearance of his mother, Falling Man repeats the horrific sight of bodies falling from the towers, and its repetition in Drew’s photograph. Freud points out that in the fort-da game the child is in fact staging a double absence: that of the mother and of the repression which ‘absents’ the episode from the child’s consciousness (Rimmon-Kenan 1980: 155). The game thus brings to presence an absence. Similarly, Falling Man repeats the absence of the dead, whose bodies were largely invisible except in the images of those who jumped from the towers, and the repression or repetition of this absence in the censorship of those images.4 Of course, whereas the child gains pleasure by causing the reel’s reappearance, Lianne is not in control of Falling Man’s performances. However, they do provide an image for the trauma, or more accurately the traumas, which Lauren is trying to assimilate. The performances dramatize what we might call Lianne’s subjection to history  – the fact that as an embodied subject she is embedded within, and subject to, a world which she

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cannot control – and her frightening vulnerability to its violence. In staging this vulnerability, the performed falls open up the possibility of coming to terms with it, rather in the way the psychoanalytic process exorcises the symptom by integrating it within a narrative. The event she refers to as ‘the planes’ is not the only trauma staged for Lianne in Falling Man’s performance. Before jumping, the man turns toward the train, looking ‘into his death by fire’ (2007: 167). The phrase evokes the memory of Lianne’s father, who nineteen years earlier ‘gazed into the muzzle blast’ (130) of his shotgun on discovering he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. As she runs blindly downtown after fleeing the performance, Lianne is seized by the thought that he ‘Died by his own hand’ (169). In seeking ‘a crack in the world’ (168) into which to fit her encounter with Falling Man, Lianne is also striving to assimilate the death of her father. The performance repeats in displaced form her inability to predict or prevent her father’s death, or to absorb his loss in the years since; her father’s ghost has been hanging above her ‘with no one closer to him than she was’, yet still ‘beyond reach’ (168). In struggling to ‘absorb what she saw, take it home, wrap it around her, sleep in it’ (210) as she later does with a drawing by Morandi, Lianne is equally struggling to finally accept the loss of her father. Her encounter with Falling Man becomes for Lianne a ‘living still life’ in a very different way from the Morandi, yet one which is ultimately connected through its disruption of the boundaries between inside and outside, past and present, body and image, loss and mourning.

‘Turn it into living tissue, who you are’ The novel’s final section is set three years after ‘the planes’. Nina is dead, Martin once again somewhere in Europe; the Morandis have been returned to him at Nina’s insistence. With mixed feelings Lianne visits an exhibition of Morandi’s work. As she looks around the gallery one painting holds her attention: 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. (2007: 210) Nina haunts the painting as did the towers three years previously. As before, looking takes Lianne ‘inward, down and in’ (111) yet also outside of herself,

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melding perception and memory, world and psyche, art and life. This becomes clear in her response to the drawings hanging in the gallery’s office: She examined 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) Compare the description above with Siri Hustvedt’s account of looking at Morandi’s work: If I . . . give myself over to what I am seeing, there will be an accompanying feeling of strangeness and utter muteness, even transcendence . . . Indeed, if you look long enough at a single object, you yourself, your ‘I-ness’ will vanish into the fullness of the image you are looking at. (2009: 28) These encounters enact a displacement of the psychic boundaries of selfhood, such that both Hustvedt and Lianne are left wondering where they end and the world begins. In Lianne’s effort to assimilate the Morandi into her very being she is learning to absorb the impact of her parents’ deaths. The staging of loss in her response to the painting is not traumatic for Lianne but allows her to recognize the loss as part of who she is. In this moment, as in Falling Man as a whole, art fosters self-recognition through the staging of a prior selfshattering. It allows Lianne to recognize the ineradicable vulnerability arising from her constitutive openness to the world of which she is a part: her identity is paradoxically affirmed in the experience of its contingency. Lianne’s acceptance of her vulnerability is fragile and contingent, however. The novel leaves her ‘ready to be alone, in reliable calm, she and the kid, the way they were before the planes appeared that day’ (2007:  236). This suggests a lingering desire to return to a time untainted by trauma, and to isolate the mother–son dyad from the wider world. One can detect the same nostalgic desire for security present in her effort to ‘absorb what she saw, take it home, wrap it around her, sleep in it’ (210). In an essay on the post-9/11 novel, Richard Gray laments ‘the groping after a language to say the unsayable that characterizes much of the fiction devoted to the new forms of terror’ (2009: 132). For Gray, the crisis of imagination provoked by 9/11 is registered in the widespread recourse to the language of trauma in the first wave of post-9/11 literature, which draws on ‘the sense of those events as a kind of historical and experiential abyss, a yawning and possibly unbridgeable gap between before and after’ (130). This gap appears in 9/11 literature as a disjunction between the world-historical scale of the event and

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the domestic narratives that have arisen from it. Unable to articulate a new language in which to narrate 9/11, writers fell back into the familiar structures of domestic crisis and resolution, thereby ‘reducing a turning point in national and international history to little more than a stage in a sentimental education’ (134). True to Gray’s criticism, Lianne appears to be retreating into an identity, and DeLillo into a novelistic framework, defined in familiar and familial terms. The ‘enigmatic traces of others’ (Butler 2006: 46) which constitute Lianne’s identity as a social subject seem to exclude those whose otherness is more deeply marked, such as Elena, the neighbour whose Middle Eastern music provokes an aggressive reaction from Lianne. However, Gray’s assumption that the domestic is insignificant in comparison to the world-historical scale of 9/11 itself trivializes the domestic and the personal. The strength of DeLillo’s writing is to draw a connection between the two, showing how the collective trauma of 9/11 reshapes the relationship between private and public at the most intimate level and exploring the forms of self-recognition that shift makes possible. Where DeLillo’s best known work delineated the conditions of modernity which made 9/11 possible, even inevitable, Falling Man explores the experience of survival, the time when ‘Everything . . . is marked by after’ (2007: 138). Early in the novel DeLillo provides a visceral metaphor for the invasiveness of trauma. The doctor treating Keith for his injuries suffered in the towers tells him of a grisly aftereffect of suicide bombings: The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who’s in striking range  . . .  Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into the skin. They call this organic shrapnel. (2007: 16) The gruesome phenomenon literalizes Cathy Caruth’s assertion that in trauma ‘the outside has gone inside without any mediation’ (1996: 59). Trauma is here figured as the result of corporeal porosity, implying by extension that recovery involves exfiltration of the otherness that has invaded the subject: hence the emphasis on clearly demarcating self and other in the post-9/11 discourse of the Bush administration. Drawing on Bersani and Butler, I have suggested that Falling Man proposes another version of mourning, and a different conception of subjectivity – one based on acknowledging our primary vulnerability and the presence of the other in the self. Furthermore, this mourning, contingent subject is mediated in the novel by the aesthetic and staged in Lianne’s response to the paintings of Morandi and the performance art of Falling Man. Terrorism presents the body’s fragility and permeability as a source

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of horror:  in Falling Man, by contrast, the contingency of the subject is a source of connection, even wonder. This, ultimately, is the counter-narrative, refuting the fantasy that we are autonomous subjects capable of insulating ourselves from an external other imagined as threatening and invasive  – a fantasy that underpinned the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, looking allows Lianne to conceive vulnerability not as a crisis of selfhood but as its fundamental condition. This is the basis of Butler’s claim for the ethical value of mourning. Trauma can serve as the point of departure for a reconceptualization of political community: To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways . . . the dislocation from First World privilege, however temporary, offers a chance to start to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized, in which an inevitable interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community. (Butler 2006: xii–xiii) This is the fragile promise of the ‘counter-narrative’ DeLillo proposed in ‘Ruins of the Future’; in exploring a primary vulnerability to which we are all equally subject – even if, as Butler recognizes, that vulnerability is globally distributed in ‘radically inequitable ways’ (2006:  30)  – the possibility of a recalibration of our relationship to the other is held open. Any understanding between the privileged Western writer and the young Muslim woman he watches praying must proceed from recognition of a shared humanity based upon their common exposure to loss, however differently the risks are distributed. Art, whether visual or literary, offers a powerful medium for such recognition. In its complex, elusive meditation on the constitution of subjectivity, Falling Man offers one version of that counter-narrative and the promise it contains of an accommodation with otherness. ‘We are neither present in the world nor absent from it’, writes Bersani (2006: 161); presumably, then, the world is neither absent from nor fully present in us. Through art Lianne recognizes herself as always in touch with an outside, as thrust into a world of which she is a part and yet from which she is apart.

Notes

I am grateful to the volume editors for their perceptive comments upon draft versions of this chapter, and to Vicky Lebeau, Liz Sage and Anthony Leaker for their insights in previous discussions about the role of art in Falling Man.

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1 For a reading of how Point Omega works also as a form of ‘counter-narrative’, see Catherine Gander’s essay in this volume (Chapter 8). 2 Canal Street has functioned across DeLillo’s oeuvre as a symbol of urban multiculturalism; see Maria Lauret’s reading of ‘Take the “A” Train’ in this volume (Chapter 6). 3 See Rebecca Harding’s essay on The Body Artist in this volume (Chapter 4), as well as Duvall (2011), Kauffman (2011) and Osteen (2008). 4 The controversy surrounding the photograph’s publication in the New York Times on 12 September 2001, and its subsequent censorship, is detailed in Junod (2002).

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Gray, R. (2009), ‘Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis’, American Literary History, 21 (1): 128–51. Hustvedt, S. (2009), ‘The Drama of Perception: Looking at Morandi’, Yale Review, 97 (4): 20–30. Junod, T. (2002), ‘The Falling Man’, Esquire. Available at: www.esquire.com/ news-politics/a48031/the-falling-man-tom-junod/ (accessed 26 June 2017). Kauffman, L. S. (2008), ‘The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future”, “Baader-Meinhof” and Falling Man’, Modern Fiction Studies, 54 (2): 353–77. Kauffman, L. S. (2011), ‘Bodies in Rest and Motion in Falling Man’, in S. Olster (ed.), Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man, 135–51. New York: Continuum. Osteen, M. (2008), ‘DeLillo’s Dedalian Artists’, in J. N. Duvall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, 137–50. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rimmon-Kenan, S. (1980), ‘The Paradoxical Status of Repetition’, Poetics Today, 1 (4): 151–59. Žižek, S. (2002), Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso.

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8 The art of being out of time in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega Catherine Gander

Chapter summary: Don DeLillo has stated that his twenty-first-century writing is preoccupied with the philosophy of time. This essay argues that DeLillo’s ‘late phase’ is characterized by the lived condition of what DeLillo calls, after Hermann Broch and Hannah Arendt, ‘between no longer and not yet’, and examines the slim, strange novel Point Omega (2010) in light of his contention that art can provide a counter-narrative to our technologically inflected century’s ‘space-time compression’. Narratively and historically suspended, Point Omega crafts a pocket of ‘non-time space’ that both escapes and enacts the transitional disorientation produced by shifts in era, or changes of phase. Akin to poet Wallace Stevens’s approach to a contemporary, accelerated reality, DeLillo activates the imagination in resistance to its pressures by engaging with classical and quantum theories of our existence in spacetime. Constructing a narrative according to quantum gravity, Point Omega addresses the ethical implications of the inseparability of matter and meaning.

It is one of the peculiarities of the imagination that it is always at the end of an era. Wallace Stevens

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‘A free veer from time and place and fate’ In 2010, the year Point Omega was published, Don DeLillo talked about the ‘more philosophical’ direction of his recent novels (quoted in McGrath 2010:  n.p.), stating that ‘the theme that seems to have evolved in my work during the past decade concerns time’ (PEN America 2010:  n.p.). In terms reminiscent of the cultural theory of Paul Virilio and David Harvey, DeLillo explained that this thematic evolution was directed by the way ‘the enormous force of technology’ has insisted on ‘speeding up time and compacting space’, compressing the precincts in which the ‘depth and richness’ of language can engender sustained, meditative thought (n.p.).1 DeLillo made similar claims before the turn of the millennium. In a 1997 interview with David Remnick for the New Yorker, he lamented that ‘news is the narrative of our time’: It has almost replaced the novel  . . .  replaced a slower, more carefully assembled way of communicating  . . .  [News videos] repeat, and it’s as though they’re speeding up time in some way. I  think it’s induced an apocalyptic sense in people that has nothing to do with the end of the millennium. (48) Likewise, in an interview for Paris Review in 1993, DeLillo noted that the rolling media of ‘world news’ was a key threat to the imaginative role of the novel as a measure of our times: ‘the world has become a news story . . . And the world narrative is being written by men who orchestrate disastrous events, by military leaders, totalitarian leaders, terrorists, men dazed by power’ (Begley 1993: 101). In the same interview, cut from publication, DeLillo admits his admiration for the poet Wallace Stevens: ‘I like to read Wallace Stevens. I like now and then to pick up a volume and read two or three poems, sometimes two or three volumes.’2 Stevens’ wartime lecture ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’ (1941) bears striking similarities to DeLillo’s position.3 The imagination, Stevens argues, is the crucial apparatus of resistance to ‘the extraordinary pressure of news’, the ubiquitous cycle of which has become ‘the pressure of reality  . . .  of an external event or events on the consciousness to the exclusion of any power of contemplation’ (1997: 655, 654). For Stevens, such compression is ‘great enough and prolonged enough to bring about the end of one era and the beginning of another’ (656). It is the poet’s job to both adhere to that reality and ‘abstract himself’ from it, ‘and also to abstract reality, which he does by placing it in his imagination’ (657). ‘Pressing back against the pressure of reality’, the writer, Stevens maintains, can carve a

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contemplative space for the ‘interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals’ (665, 659). DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld, whose 827 pages teem with the myriad spectacles, exigencies and paranoias of Cold War America, indicated in DeLillo’s writing, and in American history, an impending era shift, marked by a feeling of historical suspension. DeLillo relates this condition to a phrase he admires in Hermann Broch’s 1945 novel The Death of Virgil: ‘He uses the term “no longer and not yet” . . . I think of this . . . in terms of no longer the Cold War and not yet whatever will follow . . . The germ of something really new has not yet shown itself’ (Remnick 1997: 48). I have argued elsewhere, in relation to my thesis concerning DeLillo’s late-phase employment of the aesthetics and concepts of still life, that this state of in-betweenness characterizes DeLillo’s fiction after Underworld – a lived condition of what Hannah Arendt, also in response to Broch’s arresting phrase, recognizes as ‘the position of the artist in the world and in history’ ([1946] 1994:  161).4 Arendt describes the realm between no longer and not yet as a spatialized historical schism between global pre- and post-war existence – a ‘small non-time space’ that nevertheless might contain ‘the moment of truth’, if only we were ‘equipped or prepared for this activity of thinking, of settling down in the gap between past and future’ ([1961] 2006: 9, 13). In his Arendtian essay,5 ‘The Power of History’, DeLillo highlights his era’s ‘impatient craving for time itself to move faster’, noting that the novel’s force, ‘existential and outside time’, sets it apart as ‘the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements’ (1997: n.p.). ‘Language’, DeLillo maintains, ‘can be a form of counter-history’, an ‘agent of redemption . . . that allows us to find an unconstraining otherness, a free veer from time and place and fate’ (n.p.). Writing for Harper’s Magazine three months after the World Trade Centre attacks on 11 September 2001, DeLillo rehearses a similar credo, noting that the gap between past and future has been actualized at Ground Zero. In the ‘age of terror’, where ‘time is scarcer now’, and the ‘two forces in the world, past and future’ have converged, ‘the writer tries to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space’ (DeLillo 2001: 39, 40, 39). The first novel in DeLillo’s ‘ “late” phase’ (Boxall 2012: 689) is The Body Artist (2001), a work whose syntactical twists, Aleph-like characters, and narrative elasticity defy temporal linearity. In a letter to DeLillo in December 2000, David Foster Wallace praised the novel as perhaps the author’s ‘best thing’, wondering whether it represented ‘the start of a certain type of inquiry for you, or the end?’ DeLillo has long woven concerns regarding the relationship between constructions of material subjectivity and measurements of time into his writing, and Wallace is right to note synchronic/diachronic connections between The Body Artist and DeLillo’s earlier novels, Ratner’s Star (1976), Great Jones Street (1973) and End Zone (1972).6 However, The Body Artist

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marks a moment in DeLillo’s oeuvre  – the contours of which reveal it as less a linear chronology than a temporal loop, or what I  will explore as a composite of ‘Nows’7 – in which time becomes the principle structuring and meaning-making element of the novel. The answer to Wallace’s question, then, is ‘both’. As I  hope to demonstrate, beginnings and endings  – alpha points and omega points – in DeLillo’s fiction adhere to the quantum principle that neither as such exist, or, to phrase it differently, both exist at once, now, and always. It is this essay’s contention that Point Omega, by synthesizing poetic and scientific methods of understanding human experience, represents a convergence of DeLillo’s interest in and experimentation with the subject of time. Narratively and historically suspended, the novel crafts a pocket of ‘non-time space’ that both escapes and enacts the transitional disorientation produced by shifts in era, or changes of phase. Responding to postulations of what defines the contemporary, accelerated real, Point Omega activates the imagination in resistance and relation to its pressures. It does this by engaging with notions of our existence in space and time shaped by theories of classical and quantum physics.8 DeLillo’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, reveal his extensive notes on 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 world of atoms, molecules, and discrete, interconnected units of spacetime.9 DeLillo undertook this research in preparation for writing both The Body Artist (2001) and Cosmopolis (2003)  – two novels for which he also considered the title Point Omega. In ways that these previous fictions do not permit, however, Point Omega inhabits and opens ‘a free veer from time and place and fate’ through which a ‘counter-narrative’ (DeLillo 2001:  34) to news-led history might be made in the gap between past and future.10 Split into what DeLillo calls a ‘triptych’ (McCrum 2010:  n.p.) depicting ‘2006 Late Summer / Early Fall’, Point Omega is a slim book in which nothing happens, thrice.11 Set in a gallery room of New  York’s Museum of Modern Art, where an unnamed man immerses himself in the experience of watching Douglas Gordon’s video installation 24 Hour Psycho, the sections ‘Anonymity 1: September 3’ and ‘Anonymity 2: September 4’, occur chronologically before the (non)events of the book’s untitled central section, set in the Anza-Borrego desert. The sections happen in what we might call, after Einstein, different spacetimes determined by relativity:  the slow-motion time of Gordon’s artwork; the timeless subjectivity of the man’s enjoyment of it; the frenetic, urban time of the city outside the gallery walls, representing the time of ‘News and Traffic’ that the central section’s key protagonist, ‘defence intellectual’ Richard Elster, is keen to escape; the geologic time of the desert (18, 28).

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‘Depths that were possible in the slowing of motion’ DeLillo’s choice to begin and end Point Omega with 24 Hour Psycho  – a drastically decelerated (to two frames per second), silent running of Hitchcock’s masterpiece – originated in his own fascination for the artwork. Similar to the novel’s anonymous man, who returns daily to the gallery, DeLillo found Gordon’s installation ‘oddly compelling’:  ‘I went back four times, and by the third time I knew this was something I had to write about’ (McCrum 2010: n.p.; quoted in McGrath 2010: n.p.). Engaging ideas ‘of time and motion and the question of what we see, what we miss when we look at things in a conventional manner’, Gordon’s work encourages what art historian Norman Bryson asserts is the key metaphysical directive of the still life: the sustained looking at the overlooked (McGrath 2010:  n.p.; Bryson [1990] 2012). As the anonymous man immerses himself in the artwork’s stalled aesthetic, he grapples with elements of memory that have been dislodged from the past to an anticipated future: ‘He wanted to forget the original movie or at least limit the memory to a distant reference, unintrusive. There was also the memory of this version, seen and reseen all week . . . impossible to sort out the days and viewings’ (DeLillo 2010: 11). Gordon’s intention for his work was indeed to suspend the viewer within an inexorable present: I was concerned above all with the role of memory. While the viewer remembers the original film, he is drawn into the past, but on the other hand also into the future, for he becomes aware that the story, which he already knows, never appears fast enough. In between, there exists only a slowly changing present. (quoted in Brown 2004: 26) The effect is an unbounded time-sense that eschews temporal frames by overlapping a succession of present moments. Paradoxically, each one of these moments seems to endure for eternity. As Harald Fricke comments: ‘Every shot seem[s]‌to last longer than all the paintings you’ve seen in your life’ (quoted in Brown 2004: 21). For Elster, watching 24 Hour Psycho for ten minutes is unbearable, ‘like watching the universe die over a period of about seven billion years’ (DeLillo 2010: 47). The anonymous man’s temporal experience is more absorbing: he becomes ‘mesmerized’ by ‘the depths that [are] possible in the slowing of motion’ (13). His perception of the piece oscillates between the fluid and the particular; that is, between theorizations of time proposed by general relativity and by quantum mechanics. DeLillo’s copious notes on theoretical physics contain several references to black holes: regions of space where a star has collapsed to a small, dense mass

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creating an extreme gravitational field. According to Einstein’s 1915 General Theory of Relativity, time must be considered ‘with the way matter is distributed in a given region of space, with motion and the speed of light’ (Campbell 1986: 38). Gravity is therefore a curvature of four-dimensional spacetime, which is distorted in the vicinity of massive bodies (planets, stars), not only due to the fact that ‘light has further to travel at the same speed, because space is stretched and distances are increased’, but also because ‘gravity makes time pass more slowly’ (37). Toward the edge of a black hole, time moves slower, until it ‘stands still’ (38). In the ‘Anonymity’ sections of Point Omega, DeLillo writes the man’s encounter of 24 Hour Psycho in such terms. In the darkened gallery dominated by a screen that commands the perception of time to run at a dramatically reduced pace, the man finds the artwork’s pull irresistible and all-consuming. Relativity theory dictates that although time moves more slowly at the mouth of a black hole, a person would not feel time pass differently, until (hypothetically) they returned to a different region of spacetime, and found the calendars there significantly ahead, people and environments aged or disappeared. The anonymous man’s perception of time adjusts to Gordon’s artwork, so that ‘the film’s time scheme absorbed his own’ (6). He rejects the ‘original’ film’s ‘twenty-four frames per second . . . the speed at which we perceive reality’, to embrace two frames per second as ‘real lived experience’ (103, 13): Would he be able to walk out into the street after an unbroken day and night of living in this radically altered plane of time? . . . Would it be possible for him to live in the world? Did he want to? Where was it, the world? (12–13) Despite taking place a day apart, elements of the two ‘Anonymity’ sections reveal the unending nature of their experience. On page  11, for example, Arbogast is ‘on the stairs, falling forever’. On page  104, ‘Arbogast is still falling down the stairs’. The loop back to Arbogast’s perpetual, ‘still’ fall, while reminding the reader of the permanently suspended ‘falling man’ in DeLillo’s preceding novel of the same name, hints toward the man’s eventual surrender to the pull of the screen. But if 24 Hour Psycho is a black hole, it is also a rabbit hole.12 Gordon’s film opens paths to other points of the novel: the slow, desert time of the central section, in which one similarly feels that ‘suspense is trying to build but the silence and stillness outlive it’; the sudden disappearance of Elster’s daughter Jessie; the increasingly disquieting character of filmmaker Finley, whose fascination with Jessie triggers the reader’s memory both of the anonymous man and of Norman Bates, whose own ‘complicit look at the person out there in the dark, watching’ implicates the reader/onlooker as voyeur (Campbell 1986: 14, 107). ‘Film, film, film’, Finley remembers his wife telling him. ‘If you were any more intense, you’d be a black hole. A singularity’ (27).

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Yet DeLillo suggests an alternative to the black hole’s ‘singularity’, which in general relativity theory would mean certain death. Quantum gravity theory (about which DeLillo took several notes) seeks to combine the opposing theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics to explain how our perception of time emerges from the microscopic level to the macroscopic. Positing that no information can ever be lost from the universe, loop quantum gravity theory proposes that although the gravitational field increases at the edge of a black hole, within it, the field eventually reduces, leading not to a crushing singularity, but a portal to another universe (see Moskvitch 2013). At the end of Point Omega, the man finally ‘separates himself from the wall, and waits to be assimilated, pore by pore, to dissolve into the figure of Norman Bates, who will come into the house and walk up the stairs in subliminal time’ (2010:  116). This passage, like so many in the novel, defies definite interpretation. Yet its eerie, backward resonances, which shift from present to future tense, alert the reader, like Bates’s ‘complicit look’, to their own entanglement in the interwoven narratives of looking, overlooking, and looking away. Removed from the frame of ‘life-beyond’ the artwork (15), the anonymous man seeks to situate himself materially by pressing himself against the gallery wall. At the novel’s close, surrendering to the screen’s pull, the man crosses boundaries and states, his material subjectivity lost in a total immersion that untethers him from reality. Is this an escape from the phenomenal interdependencies of existence that leads to the man’s kidnapping, or killing, of Jessie? A final release from the physical equation that ties matter to meaning? ‘We want it to happen’, says Elster, of Teilhard de Chardin’s omega point: ‘We pass completely out of being’ (2010: 73). But Point Omega is littered with unfulfilled wants: denied conclusions, thwarted desires, unresolved mysteries, frustratingly gnomic statements. Failing to recognize the necessity of the ‘interdependence of the imagination and reality’ (Stevens 1997:  659) leads to an escape from one’s ethical responsibility to the world. One of DeLillo’s ‘men dazed by power’, Elster’s ruminations on the meanings of ‘rendition’ fail to indicate satisfactorily how the word was ruptured and refigured extraordinarily in the post-9/11 enactment of violence against the perceived threat of ‘others’. DeLillo employs quantum theory in part to address the unavoidably ethical implications of our interconnected material existence.

‘Not like the flight of an arrow or a bird’ Throughout Point Omega, there are stalled moments, static units of spacetime that collect to facilitate a heightened awareness of mortality in the characters that experience them. This interpretation of timelessness, introduced in

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‘Anonymity 1’, and pervading the desert expanses of the central section, corresponds to the quantum gravity theorization of time first posited by John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt (1967). By describing the universe – both atoms and galaxies – in a unified manner, the Wheeler–DeWitt equation began the now common assumption among theoretical physicists that ‘time truly does not exist’ (Barbour 1999: 39). The same applies to motion. As Julian Barbour describes it, ‘if we could see the universe as it is, we should see that it is static. Nothing moves, nothing changes,’ despite it seeming to teem with change and motion (39). According to quantum gravity, the concept of a spacetime frame is redundant; ‘the world does not contain things, it is things. These things are Nows that, so to speak, hover in nothing’ (16). Describing the properties of ‘experienced time’ as instant ‘snapshots’ that are ‘three-dimensional’ (a favourite epithet of DeLillo’s), Barbour notes that a ‘movie’ could easily be assembled from their linear configuration, in which evidence for time’s duration is held in their particulars (‘many contain memories of other snapshots’) (19). ‘Time’, asserts Barbour, drawing on Newtonian and Boltzmannian laws, ‘is inferred from things’ (20). But Barbour suggests that ‘the brain in any instant always contains, as it were, several stills of a movie. They correspond to different positions of objects we think we see moving. The idea is that it is this collection of “stills”, all present in one instant, that stands in psychophysical parallel with the motion we actually see’ (29). Time’s arrow, then, does not connect a line of instants, it is simultaneously in each instant, each Now, and ‘material things . . . are simply parts of Nows’ (49): Our memories are pictures of other Nows within this Now, rather like snapshots in an album. Each Now is separate and a world unto itself, but the richly structured Nows ‘know’ about one another because they literally contain one another in certain essential respects. (55–6) Watching Anthony Perkins turn his head on the screen is ‘like whole numbers’ for the anonymous man, who counts the movement in incremental Nows, ‘rather than in one continuous motion’:  ‘It was like bricks in a wall, clearly countable, not like the flight of an arrow or a bird’ (2010: 5). As the discrete, particle elements of material relations are made clear to the man through the slow-motion artwork, ‘ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things’ rush to fill his consciousness:  ‘it was impossible to see too much’ (5). The paths the black hole of the artwork provides to other parts of the narrative, then, might be better described as Point Omega’s Nows within Nows, composite spacetime ‘memories’ contained within the suspended specious presents of the novel’s universe. This challenging aspect of DeLillo’s late style, that both permits and demands, like Gordon’s installation, ‘total concentration’, encourages us ‘to think of one thing’s relationship to another’

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(13). Thus, 24 Hour Psycho’s shower scene, ‘the rings spinning on the curtain rod . . . the knife, the silence’, contains Finley’s gesture of throwing back the shower curtain in his search for Jessie; contains the knife that is found in the ravine, the stillness and silence of which cause Finley to lose himself in the compression of spacetime, recalling the man’s similar experience in the gallery (13, 76, 91 94). Thus, the man’s counting, and eventual forgetting of how many days he has been to the museum, of how many curtain rings spin above Janet Leigh’s body, contain Finley’s enumeration, and eventual losing count of, the days he has spent in the desert shack; contain Elster’s admission that in the desert, he ‘never know[s]‌what day it is . . . if a minute has passed, or an hour’ (9, 36, 66, 24). Days, meals, moments become indistinguishable for characters in Point Omega: uncertainty reigns; ‘stillness reigns’ (Barbour 1999: 14). What are we to make of all this? Cognizant of DeLillo’s established literary role as an astute, often prescient, commentator on American cultural mores, how possible – or helpful – is it to cohere the ‘philosophical’ turn of his late fiction, its structural and stylistic experimentations with time theory, to a broader concern for our contemporary condition? While I  am leery of drawing analogous parallels between scientific and cultural paradigms – that is, between the indeterminacy embedded in theoretical physics13 and the uncertain, suspended quality that DeLillo has described as characterizing American socio-political reality in the long wake of the Cold War, there is a certain sense that the trajectory of DeLillo’s work has for decades been toward a formal omega point, a convergence of general relativity and quantum theories of time and space and matter. Speaking to the Guardian in 1998, DeLillo described how the structure of Underworld was influenced by its thematic concern for the atomic bomb, perhaps the most readily available example to the public imagination of the use of quantum physics: It’s about memory, and the way in which the past is constantly with us. To me, the most interesting aspect of the book’s structure, and the one I found most satisfying, is the way in which there are two time structures. There is a huge mass of time sweeping backwards from the 1990s to the 1950s, but at the same time there are these little quantum pieces . . . They’re set apart from the rest of the book by black pages, so that you can hold the book shut with the spine away from you and actually see these demarked fragments. And these chapters move forward, like a sort of underground stream, a time-line, representing not a huge sweeping period of time, but just one day. What happens is that at the end of the third episode, these two time-lines connect, so that there is a dovetailing of these two otherwise completely different schemes. And this, finally, is the kind of thing I write for. (Williams 1998: n.p.)

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In Point Omega, there are echoes  – ‘too many goddamn echoes’ (2010: 21) – of an atomized war. Elster’s escape to the desert to elude them ultimately fails:  he continues to be haunted by his participation in the Iraq War, a war whose visual shock and violence were strikingly absent from mainstream media, and from whose physical conflict he was spared. A man who has abstracted violence and intellectualized death without ever looking at them, Elster speaks incomprehensibly of wanting a ‘haiku war’, a capsule conflict that creates and enacts its own image through ‘words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three-dimensional’ (29). Elster’s unequivocality, his insistence on the American need ‘to retake the future’, dislocates him from 24 Hour Psycho’s spacetime, which he flees because, Finley speculates, it communicates ‘an idea so open to theory and argument that it left him no clear context to dominate’ (30, 61). Peter Boxall has asserted that the 9/11 attacks gave way to ‘an uncertainty about the nature of cause and effect in contemporary political culture’, wherein it is ‘very difficult to frame an ethical response to the horror either of the attacks, or of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are to some extent a consequence of them’ (2006: 230). DeLillo challenges the notion of causality to its nth degree, artfully stretching and atomizing time in similar ways to Gordon to create a type of lyric space in which to contemplate the interrelated nature of the real:  ‘cause and effect so drastically drawn apart that it seemed real to him, the way all the things in the physical world that we don’t understand are said to be real’ (2010: 14). As Karen Barad has convincingly argued, and Elster fails to recognize, ‘our understanding of the world hinges on our taking account of the fact that our knowledge-making practices are social-material enactments that contribute to, and are a part of, the phenomena we describe’ (2007: 26). Matter and meaning are therefore inseparable, and contemporary physics, which emphasizes, after Niels Bohr, a quantum complementarity, demonstrates ‘the inescapable entanglement of matters of being, knowing and doing, of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, of fact and value’ (3).14 If the ‘dovetailing’ of two ‘completely different schemes’ of spacetime measurement is ‘finally’ the kind of thing DeLillo writes for in 1998, by 2010, the entangled schemes do not so much dovetail as, to recall Barbour’s phrase, ‘hover in nothing’. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent, and more beautifully imagined, than in Finley’s ravine search for Jessie.

‘The sky right there, scale the rocks and you can touch it’ Having parked his vehicle in a ‘dead end’ (2010: 92), Finley traverses a rocky terrain on foot, picking through boulders before arriving at a point of such

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stillness and silence that his perception of his coordinates within spacetime shifts to a sense of his being at one with it. He spends ‘long moments looking’ at the sky, which seems both ‘confined, compressed’ and ‘stretched taut’; he climbs to a lookout and is made breathless by the landscape’s sheer ‘beauty’ and ‘indifference’, more convinced than ever at this moment ‘that we would never have an answer’ (92, 93). His experience becomes both geological and cosmological, affected, perhaps, by the wrong-headed musings of Elster on the omega point, but shaped above all by the desert’s spacetime suspension, and described in quantum terms. Even the water Finley drinks to quench his thirst is ‘chemical, broken down to molecules’ (93). As Finley touches his hand to the wall of ‘tiered rock’, he perceives ‘horizontal cracks or shifts’ that make him ‘think of huge upheavals’: I closed my eyes and listened. The silence was complete. I’d never felt a stillness such as this, never such an enveloping nothing. But such nothing that was, that spun around me, or she did, Jessie, warm to the touch. I don’t know how long I stood there, every muscle of my body listening. Could I forget my name in this silence? I took my hand off the wall and put it to my face. (94) In this extraordinary passage, Finley locates himself according to what Barbour calls ‘special Nows’, or ‘time capsules’  – fixed patterns that create or encode the appearance of motion, change, or history, and that allow us ‘to see perfect stillness as the reality behind the turbulence we experience’ (1999: 30, 32). ‘All geological formations’, notes Barbour, ‘rock strata in particular’, constitute a ‘record’ (30) of deep, epochal time, and as such, are time capsules par excellence. Positing that the human body and brain can also be considered time capsules, Barbour argues for a quantum understanding of temporality and matter that might ‘unravel’ the secret of time (34), suggesting that ‘the phenomenon of the specious present’, as well as ‘the actual seeing of motion’, are embedded in the special structure of such individual Nows. Elster’s pronouncements that ‘we want to be stones in a field’ (2010: 53) are, as Cowart has noted, skewed interpretations of Chardin’s omega point (2012: 45), which does not indicate a ‘leap out of our biology’ into inanimate objects (2010: 52), but rather the culmination of intelligence on earth that would result in a noosphere – a thinking layer that is both an extension and transformation of the biosphere. Yet they indicate the novel’s engagement with notions of relationality and complementarity, with the tools we employ to measure our lives, with the phenomenological structures of existence. DeLillo’s interest in time capsules is reflected elsewhere in his work. Much of the narrative of his sixteenth novel, Zero K (2016), is set in a desert-located

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compound called the ‘Convergence’, in which patients suspend their biological time in cryonic preservation capsules, a process that restores and maintains their physical forms but seemingly erodes their consciousness. The novel features a memorable set-piece in a Manhattan art museum, the walls of which are dismantled to allow entry of the gallery’s central exhibit:  a large rock, whose overwhelming geological time heightens the visitors’ awareness of the relative brevity of their own. DeLillo’s fascination in the rock’s static encoding of time and communication is not new. 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.15 In Point Omega, the rock as time capsule facilitates in Finley a sense of an enveloping ‘nothing’ that, while disorientating, is replete with meaning and substance. This is ‘such nothing that was’, a special Now encapsulating a collection of past, remembered Nows that bear Jessie’s imprint, and reminding the reader of a famous line from Stevens’s poem ‘The Snow man’, whose narrator, exposed to nature’s elements, listens to ‘the sound of the land’ and, ‘nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’ (Stevens [1954] 1997: 8). Finley, like Stevens’s snow man, perceives that he is part and particle of the moment he is living. In Barbour’s words, ‘the instant is not in time – time is in the instant’ (1999: 34). As I  noted at the beginning of this essay, Stevens’s influence on DeLillo reveals interesting parallels between both authors’ engagements with philosophies of language, phenomenology and time, and the developments in theoretical physics that move from Einstein, through Bohr, to quantum mechanics. Joan Richardson’s observation that ‘woven into the texture of [Stevens’s] poems are experiments mimicking an uncertain universe in uncertainties of predication and meaning’ (2007: 22) might be similarly said of DeLillo, whose late-style abstract, poetic prose necessarily both contradicts and reaffirms Elster’s announcement that ‘the true life is not reducible to words . . . [but] takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments’ (2010: 17). Like Stevens, DeLillo often indicates that the meeting point – and extension – of philosophy and science is in a linguistic art that affords an ‘unconstrained’ apprehension of the world – an open-ended thought-space; a sharper vision. And like Stevens, whose recurring image for the phenomenological touchpoint of existential and aesthetic experience was ‘the rock’, DeLillo explores, through his oeuvre, scientific and mysterious notions of human subjectivity’s ineluctable relation to materiality. For DeLillo, for Stevens, and for Elster, albeit it in a different way, the rock is ‘the starting point of the human and the end’ (Stevens [1954] 1997: 447).

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Finley’s moment in the ravine opens cognition to such a point. In the suspended Nows of his quantum experience, he is likely to lose the markers of his identity: his name, his corporeality. His consciousness of experienced time, and thus the measurement of his place in it, is returned to him by the intrusion of an apparently moving materiality. ‘Then something made me turn my head’, narrates Finley, ‘and I had to tell myself in my astonishment what it was, a fly, buzzing near’ (2010:  94). ‘And then it was / There interposed a fly  –’. Emily Dickinson’s immortal poem 465 (‘I heard a Fly buzz  – when I  died  –)’, containing and reaching far beyond the ‘stillness in the air’ that comes between life and death, between ‘the Heaves of Storm’ of the lived and unknowable moment, is lyrically evoked in Finley’s moment of uncertainty (Dickinson [1862] 1976: 224). The fly’s intervention induces Finley to relocate himself, to stumble his way back to the ominous ‘dead end’ of the path, and he leaves the ravine with no clearer understanding of what has happened to Jessie. Yet these lyrical moments, these absolute, poetic spacetime suspensions in some ways give more clues to the conundrum of Jessie than is immediately apparent.

Coda: ‘The dream release’ Utterly unknowable, a woman whose ‘element’ is ‘air’, who inhabits space and time without ‘gauging the course of the next hour or minute’, Jessie is Point Omega’s most important quantum rendition (2010: 49, 60). Materializing and disappearing without arriving or leaving, Jessie’s encapsulated selfhood becomes the coordinate against which all other characters in the novel measure themselves – and measure time. She is her father’s ‘dream thing’ (56), Finley’s fantasy, the anonymous man’s longing. Interchangeable and coexistent with the warm ‘nothing’ that spins around Finley in the stillness of the ravine, Jessie seems to exist in liminality, between no longer and not yet. As such, she both embodies and inhabits what Arendt calls the ‘suprasensuous realm’ ([1961] 2006: 11) of historical and artistic suspension: that artful, meditative space that Stevens and DeLillo see as necessary to the consideration of our contemporary moment, accessible only via the imaginative release from its constraints. This ‘dream release’, as DeLillo has it, creates the counternarrative humanity needs for the imagination to, in Stevens’s words, ‘help people live their lives’ (1997:  661). There is no final omega point in Point Omega, but there are transcendent nows, brief moments, poetic and real, that lift us from history’s ‘brutal confinements’ like the wind that moves the novel’s last, enduring image of ‘spirit birds that ride the night, stranger than dreams’ (2010: 117).

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Notes 1 Harvey terms contemporary temporality ‘space-time compression’ (1989: 240–59); Virilio contends that time is ‘compressed’ by modern technologies (1997: 68). Virilio’s Open Sky was a resource for Cosmopolis (DeLillo Papers, container 9.8). 2 DeLillo’s references to poetry were cut, but the DeLillo Papers reveal the original interview was over three times the length of the published piece. 3 DeLillo Papers, container 91. 4 Gander, ‘Between no longer and not yet, there’s still life: art and time in Don DeLillo’s late fiction’, plenary lecture, Cambridge University (13 May 2017) and Queen’s University Belfast (22 February 2017). Peter Boxall claimed that the stalled narrative quality of DeLillo’s post-9/11 fiction reflects a similar political landscape: ‘the response to the attacks on September 11 is suspended in the space of an uncertain juncture, a transition between one historical era and the next, that does not even know whether it is a transition’ (2006: 230). 5 The DeLillo Papers contain numerous notes from Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) was a resource for Falling Man and beyond. 6 DeLillo Papers, container 101.10. 7 Wallace: ‘I like to imagine you’d “already” written Body Artist when you wrote “Pee Pee Maw Maw” ’. 8 Coale (2012) first gave DeLillo’s enduring fascination with quantum theory the attention it deserves. Alberts (2016) has recently extended the discussion to examine quantum entanglement in Cosmopolis. 9 Most prominent among the texts DeLillo consulted are Julian Barbour’s The End of Time (1999), Paul Davies’s About Time (1996) and Other Worlds (1980), Jeremy Campbell’s Winston Churchill’s Afternoon Nap (1986), Richard Morris’s Time’s Arrows (1986) and Ilya Prigogine’s The End of Certainty (1997). 10 Ronan McKinney’s essay in this volume (Chapter 7) explores DeLillo’s theory of ‘counter-narrative,’ as outlined in ‘In the Ruins of the Future,’ in some detail. 11 My reference to Vivian Mercier’s review of Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, connects to DeLillo’s ongoing fascination with Beckett. Papers for The Body Artist contain notes from Beckett’s 1930 essay Proust (container 6.5). What Beckett said about Waiting for Godot can be said about Point Omega: that silence pours into it like water into a sinking ship. 12 A key image in Ratner’s Star, whose two sections, ‘Adventures’ and ‘Reflections’, are structured according to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass (LeClair [1982] 2005: 11). 13 Stemming from the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. See Barad (2007: 7). 14 See Alberts for more on quantum entanglement in DeLillo.

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15 DeLillo spoke of this inspiration at ‘Don DeLillo: Fiction Rescues History’, Paris Diderot and Sorbonne, France, 18–20 February 2016. References are from my personal notes.

References Alberts, C. (2016), ‘ “Freud Is Finished, Einstein’s Next”: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, Chaos Theory and Quantum Entanglement’, Orbit, 4 (2): 1–28. Arendt, H. ([1946] 1994), ‘No Longer and Not Yet: A Review of The Death of Virgil, by Hermann Broch’, trans. J. S. Untermeyer, in J. Kohn (ed.), Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism, 158–62. New York: Schocken Books. Arendt, H. ([1961] 2006), ‘The Gap between Past and Future’, in Between Past and Future, 3–15. London: Penguin. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barbour, J. (1999), The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe. London: Phoenix. Begley, A. ([1993] 2005), ‘The Art of Fiction CXXXV: Don DeLillo’, in T. DePietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 86–108. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Boxall, P. (2006), Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. London: Routledge. Boxall, P. (2012), ‘Late: Fictional Time in the Twenty-First Century’, Contemporary Literature, 53 (4): 681–712. Brown, K. M. (2004), Douglas Gordon. London: Tate Publishing. Bryson, N. ([1990] 2012), Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. London: Reaktion. Campbell, J. (1986), Winston Churchill’s Afternoon Nap: A Wide-Awake Inquiry into the Human Nature of Time. New York: Touchstone. Coale, S. C. (2012), Quirks of the Quantum: Postmodern and Contemporary American Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Cowart, D. (2012), ‘The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega’, Contemporary Literature, 53 (1): 31–50. DeLillo, D. (1997), ‘The Power of History’, New York Times Book Review, 7 September. Available at: www.nytimes.com/library/books/090797article3.html DeLillo, D. (2001), ‘In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September’, Harper’s Magazine, December: 33–40. DeLillo, D. (2010), Point Omega. London: Picador. DeLillo, D. (2016), Zero K. London: Picador. Dickinson, E. (1976), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. T. H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown. Don DeLillo Papers. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Harvey, D. (1989), The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. LeClair, T. ([1982] 2005), ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo’, Contemporary Literature 23 (1): 19–31; rpt. in T. DePietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 3–15. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

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McCrum, R. (2010), ‘Don DeLillo: “I’m Not Trying to Manipulate Reality” – This Is What I See and Hear’, The Guardian, 8 August. Available at: www.theguardian. com/books/2010/aug/08/don-delillo-mccrum-interview. McGrath, C. (2010), ‘Don DeLillo, A Writer by Accident Whose Course Is Deliberate’, New York Times, 3 February. Available at: www.nytimes. com/2010/02/04/books/04delillo.html. Moskvitch, K. (2013), ‘Quantum Gravity Takes Singularity Out of Black Holes’, New Scientist, 29 May. Available at: www.newscientist.com/article/ dn23611-quantum-gravity-takes-singularity-out-of-black-holes/. PEN America (2010), ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo’, 15 September. Available at: https://pen.org/an-interview-with-don-delillo/. Remnick, D. (1997), ‘Exile on Main Street’, New Yorker, 15 September: 42–8. Richardson, J. (2007), The Natural History of Pragmatism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stevens, W (1997), Collected Prose and Poetry, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: The Library of America. Virilio, P. (1997), Open Sky. London: Verso. Williams, R. (1998), ‘Everything under the Bomb’, The Guardian, 10 January. Available at: www.theguardian.com/books/1998/jan/10/fiction.dondelillo.

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9 Don DeLillo’s Zero K and the dream of cryonic election David Cowart

Chapter summary: Described by its publisher as, among other things, an ‘ode to language, a meditation on death, and an embrace of life’, Zero K (2016) reframes the subject matter of White Noise (1985), Underworld (1997), The Body Artist (2001) and Point Omega (2010)  – fictions in which Don DeLillo anatomized the timor mortis he identified as the signature anxiety of late twentieth-century American life. In his sixteenth novel, DeLillo imagines a remote facility devoted to cryonics, the science of freezing the newly dead against the day when cures exist for whatever has brought about their end. The author undercuts the cryonic premise, which his narrator characterizes as ‘science awash in irrepressible fantasy’. To borrow a word that figures prominently in Libra (1988), Zero K is a serious book, the humour and irony ‘damped down’ as DeLillo anatomizes the ‘dark yearning’ of the twenty-first century  – the desire for immortality that seems, paradoxically, to cloak a death wish.

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escribed by its publisher as, among other things, an ‘ode to language, a meditation on death, and an embrace of life’, Zero K reframes the subject matter of White Noise (1985), Underworld (1997), The Body Artist (2001) and Point Omega (2010) – fictions in which Don DeLillo anatomized the timor mortis

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he identified as the signature anxiety of late twentieth-century American life. Himself disinclined to go gentle into that good night (as one might expect of a great writer on the eve of his eightieth birthday), DeLillo resists, too, the logic of what Barthes, Foucault, and their followers called ‘the death of the author’, a subject literalized and exorcized in the fate of Mao II’s (1991) Bill Gray. Whether or not bomb makers and terrorists have usurped the writer’s cultural authority (as Bill Gray famously observes), DeLillo continues to insist on his own autonomy and on the power of words, strategically deployed, to afford glimpses of the sublime. In Zero K as in Ratner’s Star (1976), moreover, he refuses to embrace the dream of a metalanguage – a language of pure, scientific denotation, wholly uncompromised by figurative expression. Language remains, for DeLillo, a secular yet redemptive mysterium. In Zero K, DeLillo imagines a remote facility devoted to cryonics, the science of freezing the newly dead against the day when cures exist for whatever has brought about their end. Located, apparently, in Kyrgyzstan, near or on the border with Kazakhstan, the facility houses an elaborate, well-funded, ostensibly scientific project called the Convergence. The name, ‘which sounds religious’ (2016: 9), would seem to come from the same lexicon that provided the title for DeLillo’s previous novel, Point Omega. Like Flannery O’Connor before him, DeLillo engages and subverts Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of an evolution ‘ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love’, the culmination being the Omega Point, a transcendent union ‘with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge’ ([1931] 1965:  13). Implicit in this heterodox eschatology is convergence with godhead and immortality. Teilhard’s Jesuit superiors forbade publication of such an heretical idea. O’Connor, one understands, shared their theological scepticism; DeLillo’s doubts stem from a more straightforward, secular tough-mindedness. Thus Nathaniel Rich, reviewing Zero K in the New  York Review of Books, calls it the author’s ‘most determined effort yet’ to engage ‘the questions that lie beneath our lives and the life of our culture as it marches implacably toward its Omega Point’ (2016: 13). Viewing cryonics as dubious science, bastard spawn of cryogenics, DeLillo depicts the Convergence as a kind of ultimate bait-and-switch: consumers are sold a pod or capsule that turns out to be just a coffin after all. DeLillo’s novel is divided into two major parts, ‘In the Time of Chelyabinsk’ and ‘In the Time of Konstantinovka’, with a kind of intermezzo, ‘Artis Martineau’, between them. The place names signal natural disaster and political disorder, respectively: the enormous Chelyabinsk meteor fell in 2013; Ukraine ousted its president, a Russian puppet, the following year, only to see the Bear seize the Crimea and foster a separatist rebellion in Konstantinovka and elsewhere in the Donetsk region. The references to East European disquiet call to mind Herman Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos, as quoted in T. S. Eliot’s notes to The Waste

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Land: ‘Already half Europe, at all events half Eastern Europe, is on the road to Chaos. In a state of drunken illusion she is reeling into the abyss’ ([1920] 1922:  618). The ‘in the time of’ formulation may also constitute a small homage to the author of Love in the Time of Cholera (the events remembered in the titles of Zero K’s two parts were contemporaneous with the death, in 2014, of Gabriel García Márquez). More broadly, ‘in the time of recent events’ is another way of saying ‘in our time’, itself a phrase replete with dark associations. Hemingway, in making it the title of his early (1925) collection of stories and sketches, intended an ironic echo of the Anglican Prayer Book supplication, ‘Give peace in our time, O Lord’. At Chelyabinsk in 2013, as in 1908 on the Podkamennaya Tunguska river in Siberia, the impact of an asteroid-size meteor reliteralized the original meaning of disaster:  the destruction of a star. In the political realm, the dissolution of the Soviet Union (and the dangerous dream of putting it back together) is asteroidal impact or starfall in the political sphere. Depicting the political and climatological disasters that seem to be proliferating around the planet, the video footage screening in the corridors of the Convergence is a brilliant stroke on DeLillo’s part – it contextualizes, with perfect economy, the foregrounded drama of cryonic election (the elect, in theology, are those saved from perdition; here science would usurp the divine prerogative). The reader registers not only the videographic catalogues of cataclysm, but also the diversion of vast wealth and scientific expertise to the ‘myth of immortality’ (2016:  117). Those who serve this dream make up an army of misdirected research: ‘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’, not to mention ‘translators’ and the ‘philologists’ charged with ‘designing an advanced language’ suited to such a grand enterprise (33). A parable, as it were, of the ways planetary resources and scientific research can be so disproportionately monopolized by desperate plutocrats and easily co-opted science. Jeffrey Lockhart, DeLillo’s narrator, tends to represent himself as something of a slacker, but he ends up with a job that might enable him to correct errant science in a small way. Late in his narrative, he signs on as Compliance and Ethics Officer at a small college. Although he does not explain what compliance and ethics he is tasked with monitoring, the terms imply an indictment: the Convergence, to which the wealthy and their scientific experts flock to waste time and resources needed by a planet in peril, seems always, hired ethicists notwithstanding, to be skirting the most basic questions of morality. Especially in Zero K, the ‘special unit’ (2016:  112) devoted to cryogenic euthanasia: freezing the body before death. Some devotees of the Convergence – including, eventually, Jeffrey’s father, Ross – opt to become

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‘heralds’, those ‘chemically induced to expire’ and be frozen betimes (139). The Zero K facility takes its name from Lord Kelvin’s computation of ‘absolute zero, which is minus two hundred and seventy-three point one five degrees Celsius’ (142), yet ‘the temperature employed in cryostorage does not actually approach zero K. The term, then, was pure drama’ (143). An unspoken irony remains: the term’s ‘drama’ subsumes the idea of death as its own version of absolute zero – however caloric one’s ante-mortem fantasies of continuing existence. Tomb as womb. ‘The merger, breath to breath, of end and beginning’ (2016:  255), the Convergence invites acceptance as the cutting edge of science that strives to extend and enhance life, but it is also the latest in ark thinking, deliverance for a privileged few, all others suffering the more or less apocalyptic convulsions depicted on its video screens. As Jeffrey recognizes the pretensions to ‘eschatology’ (144) in the Convergence, the reader discerns a distillation of every religion that promises life eternal – or rather the forced marriage (‘convergence’ indeed) of science and religion. Evidently given to what James Axton, in The Names, calls ‘rockbound doubt’ (DeLillo 1982: 92), Jeffrey cannot imagine himself caught up in religious emotion  – much less the frenzy of those gathered in St. Peter’s Square or thronging the Ganges or circling the Kaaba: ‘I tried to imagine myself among the countless clenched bodies brought together in awed wonder but could not sustain the notion’ (2016: 63–4). Unable, by the same token, to embrace the secular, ostensibly scientific version of religion’s perennial vision, he refuses to countenance the Convergence dream and characterizes it, from the outset, in bitterly sceptical terms. Fond of his stepmother, Artis, he knows that ‘she would die, chemically prompted, in a subzero vault, in a highly precise medical procedure guided by mass delusion, by superstition and arrogance and self-deception’ (50).

Ars longa, vita brevis DeLillo is the master of ekphrasis.1 No other writer is as attentive to fiction’s fellow arts  – especially those that extend aesthetic ends and means. His allusions run to land art, body art, performance art, art film, and mouldbreaking photography such as that of Spencer Tunick, who arranges hundreds of naked bodies before his lens. DeLillo also, as will be seen, invokes or reinscribes such classic works as The Divine Comedy and Gulliver’s Travels. The density of ekphrasis and artistic allusion in Zero K is especially high, perhaps because art provides a natural corrective to or subversive context for immortalist pretension  – the subject of this novel. Art is, as André Malraux once observed, un anti-destin, ‘a revolt against  . . .  fate’ ([1951] 1953:  639), humanity’s challenge to mortality. Thus the designers of the Convergence

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facility, having sought to aestheticize its every feature, seem bent on claiming the authority of ars longa as they attack its traditional corollary, vita brevis. Documenting as it does the world’s accelerating slide into environmental and political chaos (fire, flood, earthquake, war, rising sea levels, global warming, climate change and the more individualized horrors of self-immolation and the death of a particular boy soldier in the Donetsk region of Ukraine), the video footage that appears at random on drop-down screens in the corridors of the Convergence is, however horrific, one of many aesthetic features of the vast facility erected by Ross Lockhart and his fellow investors. The art here includes, as Ross’s dying wife observes, ‘the painted walls, the simulated doors, the movie screens in the halls’, and the ‘other installations’ throughout the complex (2016:  51). The reader, thus prompted, notes the ubiquity and prominence of odd or startling artwork:  the ‘oversized human skull’ (63) in a conference room, the ‘murals of ravaged landscapes  . . .  disfigured hills, valleys and meadows’ (257), the many ‘mannequin’ sculptures, some of which seem in fact to be ‘the cryogenic dead, upright in their capsules. This was art in itself’ (74), ‘art that haunts a room’ (77), ‘art that belongs to the afterlife’ (119). This feature becomes vertiginous in the description of an Escheresque ‘room in which all four walls were covered with a continuous painted image of the room itself’ (252). Art, one should remember, is itself a kind of cryogenic suspension, and Ross Lockhart’s last words  – ‘gesso on linen’ (251, 268)  – suggest that what crosses his mind on the cryonic threshold is not personal immortality but the perpetuity of art. Jeffrey, too, referring ironically to ‘the still-life future of father and step-mother in cryonic suspension’ (271), borrows from the art lexicon. Viewing the complex from the air, he sees a monumental, architectural piece of ‘visionary art’ (23, 256), ‘a model of shape and form, a wilderness vision, all lines and angles and jutted wings’ (229). In short, a Sydney Opera House of the desert. Or New Age temple. Religion has always conscripted art in its service, but some civilizations aestheticize their death-oriented belief systems more than others. Ancient Greece and Rome had their funerary art, but one seldom thinks those civilizations as death-centred as those of, say, the Egyptians or the Etruscans. Christianity, with its vast iconography of martyrdom, leads all the rest in this regard. As religion fades, however, art becomes more sceptical, more topical, more politicized, and more resistant to dogma. The art of the Convergence disturbs with the recognition that it serves, at best, a dangerous illusion and, at worst, a cult of life-in-death. But art in service to a pseudo-religion and its dubious ‘eschatology’ – the art of the Convergence – may prove subversive, and DeLillo suggests that art, naturally resistant to illiberal, inhumane, and totalitarian ends, often undermines the ideology it nominally serves. Whether or not the Convergence artwork functions subversively, one can easily enough

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affirm the powerfully ironic undertow of DeLillo’s own art. The author’s irony serves truth, enables us to see reality behind its illusory veil, as the reader is reminded in an exchange between Jeffrey and his moribund stepmother, whose name, Artis, may be intended to recall or echo the familiar motto ars gratia artis, art for the sake of art (not, that is, for the sake of ideology or politics or commerce or New Age superstition). ‘I have every belief that I will reawaken to a new perception of the world’, declares the dying woman. ‘The world as it really is’ (2016: 47), says Jeffrey, feigning agreement but knowing in his heart that the world is in fact a place where death is inevitable, irreversible, and permanent – and unlikely to afford post-mortem anagnorisis. What does, at its best, reveal ‘the world as it really is’ is art – even, strangely, art devoted to belief systems that have passed into spiritual obsolescence. That of the ancient Egyptians, for example. Or John Milton. Or Dante. The narrator’s tours of the Convergence complex, as it happens, restage those of Dante in the nether regions. Thirty-four when he first visits the facility, Jeffrey returns two years later, the two sojourns bracketing the year when, like Dante in the famous opening lines of the Commedia, he arrives at the middle of his life’s journey. Like Dante, too, DeLillo’s narrator is supposed to bear witness to the celestial promise of death defeated. Instead, he hears a good deal of promotional discourse and encounters a certain density of cowls, chadors, cloaks, cassocks, and ‘long hooded garments’ (2016: 52): a whole semiotics of Dan Brown claptrap. The explainers and cicerones who conduct Jeffrey through the corridors of the Convergence include no wise Virgil, no chaste Beatrice (indeed, he has casual sex with one of his guides, who remains curiously nameless). The place is teeming, however, with false counsellors, including the ironically named ‘Ben-Ezra’, whom he meets in an artificial ‘walled garden’, ghastly simulacrum of the one nestled, as etymon, in the word ‘paradise’. ‘I could not invent a name for him’, he remarks (132). What he means, one suspects, is that he could not invent a better name than the one borrowed from a famous poem about a rich longevity. Browning’s ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ begins with an oft-quoted exhortation rather at odds with Convergence thinking:  ‘Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be’. Parting from this dubious master, this ‘crackpot sage’ (131), Jeffrey strolls among sculptural ‘mannequins’ that seem to represent the cryonic dead, only to arrive at a kind of hell pit: Further along, beyond the two rows of bodies, there was a floating white light and I needed to put a hand to my face when I drew near, deflecting the glare. Here were figures submerged in a pit, mannequins in convoluted mass, naked, arms jutting, heads horribly twisted, bare skulls, an entanglement of tumbled forms with jointed limbs and bodies, neutered

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humans, men and women stripped of identity, faces blank except for one unpigmented figure, albino, staring at me, pink eyes flashing. (2016: 134) Dante, in the Paradiso, shields his eyes from heavenly effulgence; Jeffrey, departing Ben Ezra’s ersatz paradise, shields his from a hellish glare, beneath which this tableau dramatizes the difference between the cryonically saved and the unredeemed masses of those who simply die and rot.

‘No similes, metaphors, analogies’ Unfortunately, the insights of art are subject to méconnaissance and rhetorical manipulation. Repeatedly disarming objections by pretending they have already taken them into consideration, the pinguid, fast-talking ‘Stenmark twins’ (as the narrator calls them) pose the obvious question about ultimate longevity before anyone else can:  ‘Won’t we become a planet of the old and stooped, tens of billions of toothless grins?’ (2016: 69). One thinks of Petronius’s endlessly aging Cumaean Sibyl, or of the desiccated title character in Ratner’s Star, or of Swift’s undying Struldbruggs, who ‘[a]t Ninety lose their Teeth and Hair; they have at that Age no Distinction of Taste, but eat and drink . . . without Relish or Appetite’ ([1726] 1962: 213). The gustatorily neuter cuisine at the Convergence, dispensed by ‘food units’ (2016: 134), seems made to order. Generic and bland, it may put the reader in mind of what the academicians of Swift’s Grand Academy of Lagado might achieve in their attempts to return excrement to its prior condition as food. Swift’s academy seems to loom (like a Flying Island, not to put too fine a point on it) over both Field Experiment Number One in Ratner’s Star and over the Convergence in this later fiction. Most important of the Swiftian parallels is the scepticism regarding calls for a scientific language, a language perfectly, mathematically suited to the denotative representation of reality. In Zero K as in the earlier novel, DeLillo presents the idea of such a language as tendentious fantasy. The Convergence features its own ‘advanced language . . . that will enable us to express things we can’t express now. See things we can’t see now, see ourselves and others in ways that unite us, broaden every possibility’ (33). Those who enter the pods ‘will speak a new language  . . .  a language isolate, beyond all affiliation with other languages’, a language scrupulously free of ‘similes, metaphors, analogies’ (130). This is ‘the language I’d been told about  . . .  a developing language system far more expressive and precise than any of the world’s existing forms of discourse’ (233). The idea that rhetorical ornamentation in language (‘similes, metaphors, analogies’) precludes scientific precision goes back to the Royal Society of Swift’s day, but the great satirist (and rhetorician) understood and respected his own medium too well to accept such a premise. He mocks it

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in the academicians of Lagado who, reasoning that words merely substitute for the things they name, attempt to do without the former altogether. They carry packs containing the things they want to ‘discuss’ – things they dig out, one after another, and hold up in an absurd attempt to obviate the putative messiness and imprecision of spoken language. No such literalism for Swift or DeLillo, nor for the narrator of Zero K. Sensitive to language (like DeLillo himself), Jeffrey savours words and often recurs to the mechanics of definition and etymology. His respect for language emerges as the chronicle of a life-long surveying of linguistic terrain. Recalling from his earliest years a compulsion to ferret out the precise meaning of words, he understands that definitions involve the marking of semantic ends, limits, boundaries. ‘Determined to find the more or less precise meaning of a word, to draw other words out of the designated word in order to locate the core’ (2016: 216), Jeffrey engages, early and late, with the mystery of language, and in his keenness for definition one discerns a larger question about ends, or limits, or boundaries. Define life. Define death. To do so, one sees, requires that one determine the end, the finis, the complementary boundaries of each. Instinctively, then, Jeffrey recognizes the Convergence, devoted to blurring those boundaries (not to mention those of science and religion), as zombie research. During his visits to the Convergence, Jeffrey mocks its earnest apologists and promoters by mentally giving them names. At once playful and subversive, this practice signals a repudiation of the entire cryonic enterprise. Fanciful nomination supplies an almost obsessive diversion for him  – he resists, thereby, the cult’s dubious claim to have perfected a special language, exclusive to those who ‘buy in’. ‘The language we’ve developed here will enable you to understand’ the advanced ‘concepts’ of the Convergence, ‘those of you who will enter the capsules’. The cultists of DeLillo’s earlier novel The Names would revel, one imagines, in the Convergence promise:  ‘the name of the language will be accessible only to those who speak it’ (2016: 245). With his mental game of names and naming (with language at its most basic, that is), the narrator undercuts linguistic pretensions that appear crucial to the Convergence agenda. The thematic prominence of names and naming reveals two complementary features here. First is the idea of the name as embryonic language; second is the gradual unveiling of the narrator, obsessed with names and naming, as the storyteller-artist who recognizes in language the instrument essential to his calling. Plato (in Cratylus) and St Augustine (in The Confessions) saw in naming the foundational concept of language. In the Old Testament, naming the creation is the first task of Adam. Literary art  – which also names the creation  – is nothing if not unending Adamic assertion. Even the humblest storyteller must also determine the mix of real and fictive, and DeLillo’s Jeffrey seems to do so by subversive naming in one part of his tale, acceptance of

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actual names (or respect for anonymity) in the other. Occasionally, Jeffrey reproaches himself for his levity. ‘These were shallow responses . . . I needed to discipline myself’ (2016:  72). The desiderated discipline may lie in an emergent distinction between names that are authentic and those that mock. Jeffrey wants, as it were, to avoid the kind of onomastic extravagance that figures in Ratner’s Star, which features a whole phonebook of outlandish appellation:  Elux Truxl, Viverrine Gentian, Peregrine Fitzroy-Tapps, U.  F. O.  Schwarz, Rahda Hamadryad, Timur Nüt, Shirl Trumpy, Othmar Poebbels, Desilu Espy, Siba Isten-Esru, Orang Mohole, Cheops Feeley and Schlomo Glottle. Thus the straightforward names of those Jeffrey comes to know in his American world (not to mention those allowed their anonymity) are different from the exotic, fanciful names of those who, in the part of his story that is itself exotic or fanciful, merit mockery. An exception is ‘Volodymir’, the Ukrainian name that he seizes upon as suitable for Stak’s foster father, yet even as the name comes to him, he reminds himself ‘how wasteful this was, thinking this way, at this time, wasteful, shallow, callous, inappropriate’ (223). He overdoes the self-reproach. The inability to resist naming Emma Breslow’s estranged husband suggests the something disturbingly relevant, in the fate of one adopted Ukrainian orphan, to the death temple in the East, the Ark of the Convergence. Late in the story, he declines to make up a name – or to ask for it. ‘This was my version of progress. Time to go home’ (2016: 254). Again, ‘home’ is where you don’t have to make up mocking names, where, for example, a younger Jeffrey abandons an attempt to rename his mother’s friend Rick Linville. She refuses to identify another friend, possibly a romantic interest, and Jeffrey lets it go. The twice encountered ‘woman in the stylized pose’ (209) also remains nameless. ‘I watched her, knowing that I could not invent a single detail of the life that pulsed behind those eyes’ (175). One discerns a trace of what the cultists of The Names resist in Jeffrey’s distress at finding, quite close to himself, the fluidity or instability of names: his own patronymic is factitious. If ‘Ross Lockhart is a fake name’ (2016: 81), his own must be inauthentic twice over. Abandoned by his father in childhood, Jeffrey seems to recognize the Ukrainian orphan Stak as a brother self, his own Stenmark twin – or a son who, like Ross the father, journeys to the East to throw his life away. (Stak has a foster mother, the narrator a stepmother. Both Stak and Jeffrey have lived with paternal abandonment and parental divorce. Precocious Stak teaches himself Pashto at age fourteen, realizing an ambition like that of Jeffrey when he was that age, to read Gombrowicz in the original Polish.) Like Chaucer’s persona, the credulous Geoffrey, DeLillo’s similarly named narrator presents himself as guileless, the largely passive witness to the goings on in the Convergence. As storyteller, however, he is hardly disinterested.

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His insistence on naming  – and occasionally disposing of  – his ‘characters’ in front of the reader reveals the art of a novelist (a postmodern novelist, at that, for traditional storytellers disguise their artifice). Zina? Zara? No, ‘Nadya Hrabal’. He sketches the glib apologists he calls the Stenmark twins as a kind of Lewis Carroll duo, ‘Jan and Lars, or Nils and Sven’ (2016: 71). Occasionally he supplies speculative back stories as well. `Miklos Szabo’ comes with a thumbnail mitteleuropäisch profile: `Old World professor  . . .  in a three-piece suit, someone from the 1930s, a renowned philosopher having an illicit romance with a woman named Magda’ (68). Jeffery’s speculation about the mystery man his divorced mother occasionally saw modulates into a character sketch:  ‘I imagined a married man, a wanted man, a man with a past, a foreigner in a belted raincoat with straps on the shoulders’, and presently he settles on his fate: ‘I decided to terminate the man in the crash of a small plane off the coast of Sri Lanka’ (107). Jeffrey’s name game is at once an important defence mechanism and a hint that he will transform experience, however bizarre, into narrative, give it artistic form. The distinction between invention and documentation, between names that are accepted or uninterrogated and the lively game of inventing names, is in part the distinction between reality and fiction. It is not strict, for the line between the real and the fancied is often blurred in art. Moreover, the art here disguises, over and over again, the ‘tricks and games’ by which the narrator, going beyond compulsive nomination, seeks ‘to subvert the dance of transcendence’ (2016:  242). One discerns this subversive agenda at its subtlest in certain motifs  – closed eyes, the compulsion to define, and of course the cryogenic limit that provides the novel its title  – that may elude the reader’s radar. Slyly, DeLillo introduces subtle figurations of mortality, unsettling memento mori, into his account of a grand attempt to thumb the scientific nose at death. I have already mentioned the irony of the definition imperative (death ‘defining’ the boundary of life) and the irony of the absolute zero concept (death as ultimate entropy), and I  will presently consider the closed eyes so frequently evoked in this text.

Komm du, du letzter The grandiose claims of the apologists and motivational speakers of the Convergence are significantly scattered and inconsistent. Will one’s ‘second life’ (2016: 20) commence in the cryonic pod – or is that when one thaws out? Will one, like Underworld’s Sister Edgar, ‘emerge in cyberhuman form’ (67), or will one, like Eric Michael Packer in Cosmopolis, merely dream of such a consummation? Why will the pods feature a whole library of intellectual stimulation (72) if mental activity falls to near zero (238, 272)?

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One of the most puzzling features of the novel is its five-page middle section, ‘Artis Martineau’, which seems to document the obtunded consciousness, in the pod, of Jeffrey’s stepmother. The reader is not told whether this is a privileged glimpse of the promised continuation of mental activity – or simply speculation on the part of Artis’s bemused but sympathetic stepson. It is, in any event, a far cry from the consciousness conjured by pitchman ‘Sven’: Nano-units implanted in the suitable receptors of the brain. Russian novels, the films of Bergman, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky. Classic works of art. Children reciting nursery rhymes in many languages. The propositions of Wittgenstein, an audiotext of logic and philosophy. Family photographs and videos, the pornography of your choice. In the capsule you dream of old lovers and listen to Bach, to Billie Holiday. You study the intertwined structures of music and mathematics. You reread the plays of Ibsen, revisit the rivers and streams of sentences in Hemingway. (2016: 72) The woman on whom Jeffrey confers the name Nadya is less extravagant: ‘You will have a phantom life within the braincase. Floating thought. A passive sort of mental grasp’ (2016: 238). Jeffrey remains sceptical to the last: 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) This passage would seem to be the delayed explanation for the five-page ‘Artis Martineau’ that divides ‘In the Time of Chelyabinsk’ from ‘In the Time of Konstaninovka’. It represents an attempt on Jeffrey’s part to imagine minimal cerebral activity as sympathetically as possible (‘she is the residue, all that is left of an identity’ [2016: 160], emphasis in original). He imagines his father’s brain, too, ‘geared to function at some damped level of identity’ (258). Early and late, Jeffrey resists the apologists of the Convergence, especially the Stenmark twins, who deliver a stichomythic lecture (or sermon) that becomes an exercise in prokatalepsis (the rhetorical anticipation of objections to one’s argument). Evidently mindful of Wallace Stevens’s affirmation that ‘Death is the mother of beauty’, they feign consideration of his insight in a series of rhetorical questions, but like Sir Francis Bacon’s Pontius Pilate, they will not stay for an answer. ‘Isn’t death a blessing? Doesn’t it define the value of our lives, minute to minute, year to year’? ‘Does literal immortality compress our enduring artforms and cultural wonders into nothingness?’

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‘What will poets write about’? (2016: 69). One irony of this sequence is that, as prokatalepsis, it is double-edged:  by introducing characters who deflect argument by this rhetorical means, DeLillo deflects their advocacy, forestalls their agenda, their premises, their assertions. Indirectly, he invites the reader to join his narrator in doubting their glib affirmations of the Convergence philosophy. Meanwhile, the reader is expected to ask a rhetorical question of her own: What is the difference between the ‘minimal consciousness’ (2016: 272) or the ‘damped level of identity’ (258) supposedly obtaining in the capsule and that of, say, Faulkner’s Benjy (not to mention ‘Mr. Tuttle’ in The Body Artist or the Micklewhite boy in Great Jones Street or the damaged boy with whom Jeffrey shares a crosstown bus ride at the end of the present tale)? Or might cryonic suspension be some such living interment as one associates with the stories of Edgar Allan Poe? Indeed, a viewing of the first, Franco-Dutch version of The Vanishing (1988), that most terrifying of films, would deflect anyone seriously contemplating the idea of consciousness in the cryonic capsule. ‘On and on. Eyes closed. Woman’s body in a pod’ (162, emphasis in original). The entire drift of her stepson’s musings calls into question the ‘second life’ (2016: 20) on which Artis expects, at some indeterminate moment in the future, to open her eyes. Jeffrey rather thinks that, once dead and frozen, she will never open her eyes again, and in fact, the closed eyes of struthious avoidance are mentioned with great frequency. Nearly all the characters close their eyes on occasion. Jeffrey mentions his own habit of doing so in dark rooms. Noticing more and more examples, one wonders about the emphasis. Ross’s ‘vintage’ sunglasses may be stylish but are probably hard to see out of. They shield his eyes, in the first chapter, from the effulgence evoked in the last. The ‘woman in the stylized pose’ (209) has her eyes shut, and eventually the narrator, again noticing ‘people standing with eyes shut’, wonders: ‘Was I part of an epidemic of closed eyes?’ (235). The reader is invited to run through various meanings:  are the eyes closed to evoke mental concentration? To summon up recollection of the eyes as windows of perception, intellect, the soul? Is it some ubiquitous anguish or fear (of global warming, for example) that dictates the closing of the portals of dread perception (along with the obsessive checking for keys and wallet, the repeated testing of burners, door locks, zippers, and so on)? Should one think of the ‘eyes wide shut’ conundrum? (The films of Kubrick will be included, ‘Sven’ suggests, in the mental library implanted in the brains of those in the pods.) All of these possibilities are relevant, no doubt, but perhaps the definitive meaning of closed eyes is starker and simpler. As noted before, virtually every character blocks vision this way at some point or other, but when sixteen-year-old ‘boy soldier’ (267) Stak does so at the end of his troubled life, one realizes that all of the eye shutting rehearses nothing more than sightless death – or, at best,

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some moment of resignation at which, like the German poet Rilke, one says, ‘Komm du, du letzter’ (511). Come, thou last thing. *** In Zero K, then, DeLillo undercuts the cryonic premise, here characterized as ‘science awash in irrepressible fantasy’ (2016:  257). To borrow a word that figures prominently in Libra, Zero K is a serious book, the humour and irony ‘damped down’ as DeLillo anatomizes the ‘dark yearning’ (145) of the twenty-first century  – the desire for immortality that cloaks a death wish like a tampon in a banana peel. But like White Noise (source of that banana peel figure) or The Names, Zero K ends with a cautious evocation of wonder at surprising beauty in the midst of our distress, our fallen state. Riding a crosstown bus, ‘west to east’ (273), the narrator becomes aware of the sun setting behind him, but the tableau, which also features the response of a boy possibly ‘impaired in some way, macrocephalic, mentally deficient’ (victim, in the time of Zika and microcephaly, as it were, of some defective gene), does not become a glum reminder of either ‘the end of the world’ (274) or the culture-wide falling off heralded as Untergang (‘downfall, decline’) by both Hesse and Spengler just after the Great War. Hesse speculated on Der Untergang Europas (1920); Spengler, in a more poetic, crepuscular figure, on Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918, 1922, 1923). Decline of the West has the merit of unpretentious economy, but Going Down of the Evening Land summons up a whole history of German Romanticism and gestures prophetically towards a war yet more terrible than the one just ended. Zero K, however, ends on a note less apocalyptic than elegiac, even though it responds to ‘the widespread belief that the future, everybody’s, will be worse than the past’ (2016: 200) – that the horrific wars of the twentieth century may have left the great Untergang incomplete. For a Stonehenge-like, solsticial moment, the sun hangs suspended between Manhattan’s great towers, its ‘rays aligned with the local street grid’ as happens ‘once or twice a year’ (273). The city becomes, for a moment, a vast solar temple inspiring inarticulate awe, ‘prelinguistic grunts’, in the narrator’s young fellow passenger. However truly infans, the boy at the back of the bus figures as a reminder – perhaps one that DeLillo, rhapsodist of the word, provides for himself – that every human being, with or without the ability to speak or cerebrate, shares in the fate of other human beings amid ‘elements of planetary woe’ (127) that occasionally, as here, give way to a splendid ‘tide of light’ (273), a circumambient radiance. Jeffrey faces forward again, but not in resignation. He turns his back on the illusory promise of heaven, comforted and strangely heartened by the audible experience of the sublime behind him. ‘I didn’t need heaven’s light. I had the boy’s cries of wonder’ (2016: 274). Denied the vast light of Dante’s medieval empyrean, in other words, the narrator seems to recognize what

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Wordsworth (who also discerned the sublime in setting suns) would call ‘abundant recompense’ in the natural world’s unflagging capacity to create astonishment. One thinks again of ‘Mattina’, that four-word Ungaretti poem invoked in Love-Lies-Bleeding, DeLillo’s previous engagement with the euthanasia theme: M’illumino d’immenso (Ungaretti [1919] 1997: 102, quoted in DeLillo 2005: 63) In English:  ‘I grow radiant / in the immensity of it all’ ([1919] 1997:  103). A character in the play translates: ‘I glow, I shine, I bathe myself in light. I turn luminous in this vast space’ (DeLillo 2005:  64). But the radiance evoked in the closing sentences of Zero K is not that of daybreak. Crepuscular, rather, it precedes a darkness that, given the state of the world, may be especially portentous.

Note 1 Ekphrasis is the representation in a work of art of another work of art. Thus a novelist may incorporate a description, more or less elaborate, of some painting or piece of music or film. A good example is the famous scene in Howards End in which Forster’s characters attend and respond to a wittily evoked performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Similarly, authors from Nabokov to Gaddis include descriptions of paintings – as DeLillo does in Mao II, Underworld and Falling Man. Much of the critical discussion of DeLillo concerns his interest in and frequent ekphrastic incorporation of the extra-literary arts. Early and late, dissertations are devoted to this subject. See, for example, Paul Mumford Price, ‘Don DeLillo’s Artist Figures: ‘A Way of Thinking’ in The Names, White Noise, Libra, and Mao II’ (University of South Carolina, 1995) or Jonathan Gibbs, ‘Randall, or The Painted Grape and Beyond Ekphrasis: The Role and Function of Artworks in the Novels of Don DeLillo’ (University of East Anglia, 2013). Other noteworthy contributions include Hamilton Carroll, ‘ “Like Nothing in This Life”: September 11 and the Limits of Representation in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’, Studies in American Fiction, 40 (2013): 107–30, and Graley Herren, ‘Don Delillo’s Art Stalkers’, Modern Fiction Studies, 61 (2015): 138–67. I devote considerable attention to the theme of art and the artist in my Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language, 2nd edn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003) and in a later article, ‘The Lady Vanishes: DeLillo’s Point Omega’, Contemporary Literature, 53 (1) (2012): 31–50.

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References DeLillo, D. (1982), The Names. New York: Knopf. DeLillo, D. (2005), Love-Lies-Bleeding. New York: Scribner. DeLillo, D. (2016), Zero K. New York: Scribner. Hesse, H. ([1920] 1922), ‘The Brothers Karamazof – the Downfall of Europe’, trans. S. Hudson, The Dial, 72: 607–18. Malraux, A. ([1951] 1953), Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Doubleday. Rich, N. (2016), ‘When High Technology Meets Immortality’, New York Review of Books, 9 June: 13–14. Rilke, R. M. (1963) ‘Komm du, du letzter’, in Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 2. Frankfurt: Insel-Verlag. Swift, J. ([1726] 1962), Gulliver’s Travels, ed. H. Davis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Teilhard de Chardin, P. ([1931] 1965), Building the Earth, trans. N. Lindsay. Wilkes-Barre: Dimension Books. Ungaretti, G. (1997), A Major Selection of the Poetry of Giuseppe Ungaretti: A Bilingual Edition, trans. D. Bastianutti. Toronto: Exile Editions.

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Interview: The edge of the future: A discussion with Don DeLillo Peter Boxall

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n February 2016, in a cold and briefly snowy Paris, Don DeLillo attended a three-day conference on his own work, entitled ‘Fiction Rescues History’. His latest novel, Zero K, was complete and in press, but had not yet been released. I had read an advanced copy, so the novel was icily fresh in my mind, but I felt it would be inappropriate to talk about it at the conference, as one feels reluctant to name a baby before it is born. DeLillo’s presence at the conference had a transformative effect on the discussion, across the three days. This is perhaps partly because of the aura that has been generated by his supposed reclusiveness. When asked, by a Sorbonne undergraduate, why he was only now appearing in public to talk about his work, the answer was eerily DeLillian: ‘How do you know this is me?’ The conference, coming at a critical moment in the reception of DeLillo’s oeuvre, was dominated by this arrival of the author at the scene of his own reading – as if Bill Gray had suddenly come out of hiding. But the major force of his being there, I felt, was to suggest to us, close readers of his fiction, that the work was ours as much as it was his, that the connection between DeLillo’s person and his vivid, teeming oeuvre was mysterious, not evident or straightforward. Was his presence at the conference part of his attempt to understand where this work comes from, what its relationship is to him, and

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to us? Did he somehow mean it when he wondered if the slight man in the leather jacket was really him? It was with this impression still with me – and with the experience still fresh of having his new novel complete in my mind, while it was not yet quite a thing in the world – that I decided to write to him, to ask him the series of questions about the novel that I had not felt able to air in Paris. I was not sure what I was expecting, but the response – seven typed pages of searching reflection on the writing of Zero K – took me by surprise. It is not that the writer was here explaining his work; DeLillo’s presence in Paris had already suggested that he has no such proprietorial relationship with his fiction. Rather, it offered a way in to the space of writing itself, the space of slightly smudged type, where writer and reader meet on terms always to be decided. His response did nothing to resolve the impression that Paris left me with, that the relation between a writer and his or her work – and between writer and reader – is mysterious. But it opens a new seam in that relationship, and as such, might add something to the body of work that is growing around DeLillo’s oeuvre. I here reproduce, with DeLillo’s permission, my questions and DeLillo’s responses, as they stood in the original correspondence. Peter Boxall (PB): Zero K seems to me both to belong to the group of your novels written after Underworld, and to mark a departure from them. The language of the novel has some of the desert sparseness that has been so central to your prose since The Body Artist. One might think of that beautiful edging towards bare tautology, as Jeff observes of his room in The Convergence that ‘the bed was bedlike, the chair was a chair’. A tendency towards a sparse, tautological minimalism has been a feature of your prose since your early work  – most clearly, perhaps, in End Zone – but the fiction after Underworld seems to me to have explored more closely the texture of the pared back sentence. Zero K, though, seems to combine this minimalism with a new kind of lyricism, that is perhaps more luminous than the bleached poetry of Point Omega, or of ‘The Starveling’. The prose seems to me, particularly in that ‘radiant moment’ with which it ends, to carry something like that expansion that Nick Shay feels on the birth of his granddaughter in Underworld (the sight of his granddaughter ‘swimming in a ribbon of light’ grants Shay a ‘moment of expansive ease, an unthrobbing of some knot in my body’). Do you feel that the lyricism of Zero K has a different quality to that of your other recent novels, and if so, does this signal a new relationship to the sentence in your work? Don DeLillo (DD): Yes, Zero K is a leap out of the bare-skinned narratives of Point Omega and The Body Artist. I  ought to add that there is no advance planning (or very little) in the way a given novel proceeds idea by idea, sentence by sentence, page by page. Jeff Lockhart’s room becomes what it

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is as I write the sentences. I see the man (vaguely) in the room (clearly). The empty hallways become visual realities, more or less instantaneously, rather than preconceived settings. I think that I’ve always depended on three-dimensional space. I see people in rooms, or on the street, or in a desert waste. (Other kinds of fiction, by other writers, tend to maintain a distance, and I think of this work as essaylike.) The halls and doors in this novel, and Jeff’s room, assumed a kind of cinematic reality from one moment to the next as I thought and as I wrote – and the screenings (Jeff always a one-man audience) tended to emphasize this visual approach. The first paragraph of Zero K: Ross and Jeff in an office, paintings on the wall. I needed this sense of three dimensions. The sentences I  am working on generate the ideas that tend to lead to more sentences. This novel took a long time to write, roughly three-and-ahalf years. Average length; more first draft pages than usual; no outline, just note paper with scrambled words or phrases – ideas, impulses, character’s names. The centrepiece (Artis in her capsule) was the last passage that I  wrote. Came out of nowhere. (But there is a paragraph on page  272 that describes her inner monologue, or duologue. I  did not write this paragraph after I wrote the centrepiece – but I may have altered a sentence or two in order to accommodate the structure of the centrepiece. I  don’t remember, and all of the first-draft pages are in an archive in Texas, or will be on the way very soon; in any case they are blessedly beyond my reach.) With this novel I  felt a clear sense of departure from the novels of the earlier decade. I was not exactly back in the 1990s but the prose had a range, a sort of lyrical thrust that felt distantly familiar. Does this tell me something about future work? I don’t know yet. PB:  One of the most extraordinary gifts of Zero K is its capacity to imagine a shifted relationship to mortality, to the experience and temporality of ‘life’. Reflecting on the idea of artificially extended life, as explored in the novel, I am reminded of a comment made by your fictional novelist Bill Gray, in Mao II. On being told that his novels are written on acid free paper, Gray says that ‘I’d just as soon have my books rot when I do. Why should they outlive me?’ Zero K seems to me to respond to the real and imminent possibility that life, under contemporary technological conditions, need no longer be bounded by death, but might extend indefinitely, in ways currently difficult to imagine (thus putting an end to the trial of ‘living within the grim limits of the self’). Is the novel nostalgic for the term of mortal life, the three score years and ten? Or does it see, in the stretched and altered rhythms of artificial life, a new kind of poetry, and a new kind of consciousness? How does this relate to your

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exploration in Point Omega of the idea that ‘consciousness is exhausted’, that we are ready for a ‘leap out of our biology’? DD: I  think I’ve said this before, maybe in Paris:  whatever technology is capable of doing becomes what we desperately need it to do. I’m not sure where the desperation exists in the science and technology of life extension. Maybe the fact that healthy people (in the novel) are willing to die in order to be (theoretically) reborn. I did not intend to convey a nostalgia for mortality. Jeff’s negative response to the idea of life extension is directed toward his father in particular, a continuation of an old grievance. I don’t have a defined attitude toward the ambitions of the Convergence. This endeavour (grand, futile, desperate, arrogant, futuristic) was an idea that built itself page by page. I listened to what the characters had to say, without rendering judgement. The installation, from the outset, seemed to belong in an extremely remote area, beyond the reach of law enforcement and sheltered, to a degree, from natural calamity. Artis was the character who inspired a kind of poetic breeze to whisper through the novel. Certainly if the process of life extension gains momentum as the years pass, the existential leap will strike some people as timely science and visionary drama – a significant change in global consciousness. But there is also the inevitability of a great divide. Those in favour, those opposed philosophically. And those who can manage to buy their immortality, those who cannot. I should add that I  did limited research for this novel. I  preferred not to spend an extended period of time reading and note-taking when I could be writing. (It’s fiction after all.) I  don’t know what recent advances may have been made, but the spectre of Donald Trump living and talking through the entire length of the twenty-first century is an argument in favour of traditional mortality. PB:  In the UK at present, and I think in the US too, one can see a transformation in the way that we understand the relationship between culture and counterculture, or in terms that you have used in the past, between narrative and counter-narrative. Perhaps this transformation is related to the turn of the century, and to the sense that the lines of conflict that shaped twentieth century political and world history are shifting under twenty-first-century conditions. I am struck, in this regard, that Zero K offers a series of partially evacuated images of countercultural protest  – such as the image of selfimmolation that recurs so vividly in your writing – images that seem strangely remodelled in the odd spaces of The Convergence. Does the novel suggest that the form and the very possibility of counter-narratives will be different under contemporary biopolitical conditions? Is the novel itself a response, of

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a kind, to the need to reshape the terms in which we imagine the relationship between compliance and resistance? DD: Twenty-first-century conditions:  toward the end of the novel one of the Stenmark twins comments forcefully that there is war everywhere, interspersed with one or another form of terrorism. Is this to be the new century’s persistent narrative, counterbalancing the possibility of life extension? It can’t be that simple. There is general dissatisfaction nearly everywhere, it seems, and there is also the simple and sometimes brutal force of nature. Cyberattacks, cyberwars, the unseen ‘terror’ of the Internet – thrusts and counterthrusts, the concept of the unknown enemy. And the possibility that the game-like nature of the antagonisms will shift to three dimensions. In this country the daily disasters of TV newscasts. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, wildfires. This is routine, the powerful images, the toll of dead and missing. Then the commercial. Zero K edges into the future, only to return to street-level life. Taxis, trucks and buses. The Convergence may be an attempt to reshape the terms of plausibility in the current narrative. The empty halls, the screenings that take place only when Jeff is approaching one of the furled screens, the inexplicable transition that the runners make (at the end of Part One) from the screen to the hallway. Stak, onscreen, firing a weapon and then being shot, and Jeff trying to reduce his isolated sense of participation by imagining other screens showing the same images on different levels of the complex. This is what I brought to the page, and it is just another moment in which the Convergence and the novel itself locate their twin identities. PB:  A last question, and one that looms over the others, has to do with Zero K’s relationship to eco-crisis. Your work has become increasingly interested, to my mind, in the relationship between human and environment, and in the terms in which this relationship might be rethought, as our species and the planet become increasingly incompatible with one another. Can we think of Zero K as an attempt to conceive of a different model for the human inhabitation of the planet? Can the beautiful middle section of the novel be regarded as a kind of eco-poetry? What is the role, more broadly, of the novel, or of the literary imagination, in providing new conceptions of the relationship between human and planet? DD:  ‘Planetary woe.’ Jeff uses this term during his encounter with Ben-Ezra. When I was working on the novel I had to remind myself once or twice that the Convergence is not only the site of life-extension ambitions but also a refuge from environmental disasters of one kind or another.

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The complex itself is not described very thoroughly. That seemed the work of another writer with a different set of intentions. I  felt no compulsion to dispel implausibility. The idea is that the novel, our contemporary novel, is able to contain the kind of implausibility that some people believe only belongs to reality. (Or to science fiction.) And there is Jeff Lockhart, a kind of human implausibility meter. If he accepts what he sees and experiences, I could do the same, and maybe the reader as well. Madeline with her kitchenware. Emma in her schoolroom. Scenes such as these gave a certain kind of validity, in my reckoning, to the Convergence itself. I can imagine the Convergence as a possible model for future inhabitation of the planet. But can it be more than a model? The complexity of competing interests, corporate and national, and the realities of war, terror and poverty and the refugee status of enormous numbers of people – these make it hard for me to see an enterprise such as the Convergence assuming more than an isolated role in society. What about the novel? The novel in the embrace of new technologies will be the novel that writes itself. Will there still be the lone individual seated in a room trying to create a narrative that is equal to the advancing realities of the world around us? It may be that the fragile state of the planet will summon a new kind of novel with a language that alters our perceptions. Great novels reveal consciousness. But a final question lingers, beyond the man or woman seated at the writer’s desk. Will advancing technology revitalize human consciousness or drown it forever?

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Further reading Works by Don DeLillo Novels

US editions Americana. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. End Zone. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Great Jones Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Ratner’s Star. New York: Knopf, 1976. Players. New York: Knopf, 1977. Running Dog. New York: Knopf, 1978. The Names. New York: Knopf, 1982. White Noise. New York: Knopf, 1985. Libra. New York: Viking, 1988. Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. The Body Artist. New York: Scribner, 2001. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007. Point Omega. New York: Scribner, 2010. Zero K. New York: Scribner, 2016.

UK editions Americana. London: Penguin, 1990. End Zone. London: Penguin, 1972. Great Jones Street. London: Penguin, 1973. Ratner’s Star. London: Vintage, 1991. Players. London: Picador, 1991. The Names. Brighton: Harvester, 1983. White Noise. London: Picador, 1986. Libra. London: Penguin, 1989. Mao II. London: Vintage, 1991. Underworld. London: Picador, 1997. The Body Artist. London: Picador, 2001. Cosmopolis. London: Picador, 2003. Falling Man. London: Picador, 2007. Point Omega. London: Picador, 2010.

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The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. London: Picador, 2011. Zero K. London: Picador, 2016.

Plays US editions The Day Room. New York: Knopf, 1987. Valparaiso. New York: Scribner, 1999. Love-Lies-Bleeding. New York: Scribner, 2006. The Word for Snow. New York: Karma and Glenn Horowitz, 2014.

UK editions The Day Room. London: Picador, 1999. Valparaiso. London: Picador, 2004. Love-Lies-Bleeding. London: Picador, 2006.

Short fiction and plays ‘The River Jordan’. Epoch 10, no. 2 (1960): 105–20. ‘Take the “A” Train’. Epoch 12, no. 1 (1962): 9–25. ‘Spaghetti and Meatballs’. Epoch 14, no. 3 (1965): 244–50. ‘Coming Sun. Mon. Tues’. Kenyon Review 28, no. 3 (1966): 391–4. ‘Baghdad Towers West’. Epoch 17 (1968): 195–217. ‘The Uniforms’. Carolina Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1970): 4–11. ‘In the Men’s Room of the Sixteenth Century’. Esquire (1971): 174–77, 243, 246. ‘The Engineer of Moonlight’. Cornell Review 5 (1979): 1–47. ‘The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven’. The Quarterly 15 (1990): 15. ‘The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life’. Zoetrope 4, no. 4 (2000): 70 The Angel Esmeralda. New York: Scribner, 2011.

Filmography Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image, and the Gun. Film. Directed by Kim Evans. London: BBC, 1991. Game 6. Screenplay. Directed by Michael Hoffman. Santa Monica: Serenade Films, 2005.

Non-fiction essays ‘Towards a Definitive Meditation (By Someone Else) on the Novel Americana’. Epoch 21, no. 3 (1972): 327–9. ‘Notes on “The Uniforms” ’. In Cutting Edges: Young American Fiction for the 70s, edited by Jack Hicks, 532–3. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973.

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‘American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK’. Rolling Stone, 8 December 1983, 21–2, 24, 27–8, 74. ‘Silhouette City: Hitler, Manson and the Millenium’. Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies 4, no. 3 (1988): 29–34. With Paul Auster. Salman Rushdie Defense Pamphlet. New York: Rushdie Defense Committee, 1994. ‘The Artist Naked in the Cage’. The New Yorker, 26 May 1997, 6–7. ‘The Power of History’. New York Times Magazine, 7 September 1997, 60–63. ‘In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September’. Harper’s Magazine, December 2001, 33–40. ‘Counterpoint: Three Movies, a Book, and an Old Photograph’. Grand Street 73 (2004): 36–53. Available at: www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_ magazine/volume-3-issue-1-spring-2006/counterpoint-threemovies-a-book-and-an-old-photograph/

Personal papers DeLillo, Don, Papers. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre. The University of Texas at Austin. Catalogue available at: http://norman.hrc.utexas. edu/fasearch/findingaid.cfm?eadid=00313.

Major interviews with Don DeLillo Arensberg, Ann. ‘Seven Seconds’. In Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DiPietro, 40–46. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Begley, Adam. ‘The Art of Fiction No. 135: Don DeLillo’. In Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DiPietro, 86–108. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Binnelli, Mark. ‘Intensity of Plot’. Guernica Magazine, 17 July 2017. Available at: www.guernicamag.com/intensity_of_a_plot/. Brooks, Xan. ‘I Think of Myself as a Kid from the Bronx’. The Guardian, 6 May 2016. Available at: www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/06/ don-delillo-kid-from-the-bronx-interview-xan-brooks. DeCurtis, Anthony. ‘An Outsider in this Society’. In Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DiPietro, 52–74. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Igarashi, Yuka. ‘Don DeLillo: Interview’. Granta, 10 January 2012. Available at: https://granta.com/interview-don-delillo/. LeClair, Thomas. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo’. In Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DiPietro, 3–15. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. McCrum, R. ‘I’m Not Trying to Manipulate Reality’. The Guardian, 8 August 2010. Available at: www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/ don-delillo-mccrum-interview Nadotti, Maria. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo’. In Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DiPietro, 109–18. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

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Nance, Kevin. ‘Living in Dangerous Times’. The Chicago Tribune, 12 October 2012. Available at: www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-1014-don-delillo20121012-story.html

Critical material on Don DeLillo Recent dictionary and encyclopaedia entries Da Cunha Lewin, Katherine. ‘Don DeLillo’. In Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twenty-First-Century, Vol. 382. Detroit: Gale, 2018. Osteen, Mark. ‘Don DeLillo’. In A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction, edited by David Seed, 497–504. Chichester and Maldon: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Book-length studies Boxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. London: Routledge, 2006. Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language, 2nd edn. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Dewey, Joseph. Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. Duvall, John N. Don DeLillo’s Underworld: A Reader’s Guide. New York and London: Continuum, 2002. Giaimo, Paul. Appreciating Don DeLillo: The Moral Force of a Writer’s Work. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011. Kavaldo, Jesse. Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Keesey, Douglas. Don DeLillo. New York: Twayne, 1993. Kessel, Tyler. Reading Landscape in American Literature: The Outside in the Fiction of Don DeLillo. New York: Cambria Press, 2011. Laist, Randy. Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’s Novels. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Martucci, Elise. The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo. London: Routledge, 2007. Orr, Leonard. Don DeLillo’s White Noise: A Reader’s Guide. New York and London: Continuum, 2003. Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Pass, Phill. The Language of Self: Strategies of Subjectivity in the Novels of Don DeLillo. Bern: Peter Lang, 2014. Rey, Rebecca. Staging Don DeLillo. Oxon: Routledge, 2016. Schuster, Marc. Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard and the Consumer Conundrum. Youngstown: Cambria Press, 2008.

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Veggian, Henry. Understanding Don DeLillo. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014.

Book-length studies Comparative studies in which DeLillo is a key, if not single, focus Adelman, Gary. Sorrow’s Rigging: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Robert Stone. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2012. Chodat, Robert. Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Civello, Paul. American Literary Naturalism and Its Twentieth-Century Transformations: Frank Norris, Ernest Hemingway, Don DeLillo. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Ebbeson, Jeffrey. Postmodernism and Its Others: The Fiction of Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Gourley, James. Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Green-Lewis, Jennifer, and Margaret Soltan. Teaching Beauty in DeLillo, Woolf, and Merrill. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Halldorson, Stephanie S. The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Hantke, Steffen. Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1994. Morley, Catherine. The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Polley, Jason S. Jane Smiley, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo: Narratives of Everyday Justice. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Tanner, Tony. The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Taylor, Mark C. Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Weinstein, Arnold. Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Wolf, Philipp. Modernization and the Crisis of Memory: John Donne to DeLillo. Amesterdam: Rodopi, 2002.

Edited collections Bloom, Harold (ed.). Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Don DeLillo’s White Noise. New York: Chelsea House, 2002. Dewey, Joseph, Steven G. Kellman, and Irving Malin (eds). Under/Words: Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002.

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Duvall, John N. (ed.). Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Lentricchia, Frank (ed.). Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Lentricchia, Frank (ed.). New Essays on White Noise. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Olster, Stacey (ed.). DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man. London: Continuum, 2011. Ruppersburg, Hugh, and Tim Engles (eds). Critical Essays on Don DeLillo. New York: G. K. Hall, 2000. Schneck, Peter, and Philipp Schweighauser (eds). Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo. London: Continuum, 2010. Zubeck, Jacqueline (ed.). Don DeLillo after the Millennium: Currents and Currencies. Maryland: Lexington, 2017.

Book chapters Ahearn, Edward J. ‘Epilogue: “DeLillo’s Global City” ’. In Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science, 1848–2001: European Contexts, American Evolutions, edited by Edward J. Ahearn, 181–203. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Annesley, James. ‘Underworld’. In Fictions of Globalization. Consumption, the Market and the Contemporary American Novel, 60–76. London: Continuum, 2006. Antoszek, Andrzej. ‘ “Who Will Clean Up All This Waste?” Post-Cold War America in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. In Post-Cold War Europe, Post-Cold War America, edited by Ruud Janssens and Rob Kroes, 171–7. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2004. Atwill, William D. ‘Terror in a Lonely Place: Anomie and Anomaly in Ratner’s Star’. In Fire and Power: The American Space Program as Postmodern Narrative, 139–56. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Bachner, Sally. ‘The Hammers Striking the Page: Don DeLillo and the Violent Politics of Language’. In The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962– 2007, 123–41. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Baker, Stephen. ‘ “Now More Than Ever”: Death and Cultural Consumption in Don DeLillo’. In The Fiction of Postmodernity, 81–122. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Banita, Georgiana. ‘Falling Man Fiction: DeLillo, Spiegelman, Schulman, and the Spectatorial Condition’. In Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11, 59–108. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. Benzon, Kiki. ‘Spatial Narrative, Historical Revision: Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. In American Mirrors: (Self) Reflections and (Self) Distortions, edited by Felisa López Liquete, 55–61. Lejona, Spain: Basque Country University Press, 2005. Berman, Neil David. ‘End Zone’. In Playful Fictions and Fictional Players: Game, Sport, and Survival in Contemporary American Fiction, 47–71. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1981.

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Boxall, Peter. ‘Slow Man, Dangling Man, Falling Man: Beckett in the Ruins of the Future’. In Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism, 166–99. London: Continuum, 2009. Breitbach, Julia. ‘Liminal Realism: Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (2001)’. In Analog Fictions for the Digital Age: Literary Realism and Photographic Discourses in Novels after 2000, 72–114. London: Camden House, 2012. Clippinger, David. ‘ “Only Half Here”: Don DeLillo’s Image of the Writer in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. In Literature and the Writer, edited by Michael J. Meyer, 135–53. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Coale, Samuel Chase. ‘Don DeLillo: Mystic Musings in a Paranoid’s Paradise’. In Paradigms of Paranoia: The Culture of Conspiracy in Contemporary American Fiction, 87–134. Tucsaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. Codebo, Marco. ‘Libra by Don DeLillo’. In Narrating from the Archive Novels, Records, and Bureaucrats in the Modern Age, 137–57. New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010. Colebrok, Martin. ‘Whole Families Paranoid at Night Don DeLillo’s White Noise’. In Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon: From Joseph Conrad to Zadie Smith, edited by Nicola Allen and David Simmons, 235–50. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2014. Consonni, Stefania. ‘ “A Sculptor’s Sense of Words”: Don DeLillo’s NeoRealism and the Three-Dimensionality of Narrative Plots’. In The Hand of the Interpreter: Essays on Meaning after Theory, edited by G. F. Mitrano and Eric Jarosinski, 329–60. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009. Conte, Joseph. ‘Noise and Signal: Information Theory in Don DeLillo’s White Noise’. In Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction, 112–39. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Courtwright, David T. ‘Why Oswald Missed: Don DeLillo’s Libra’. In Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other), edited by Mark C. Carnes, 77–91. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Cowart, David. ‘Anxieties of Obsolescence: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis’. In The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction, edited by Peter Freese and Charles B. Harris, 179–91. Normal: Dalkey Archive, 2004. Daanoune, Karim. ‘Dialectics of Possibility and Impossibility: Writing the Event in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’. In European Perspectives on the Literature of 9/11, edited by Sylvie Mathé and Sophie Vallas, 70–80. Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2014. Deneen, Patrick J. ‘Hearing Tocqueville in DeLillo’s White Noise’. In Democracy’s Literature: Politics and Fiction in America, edited by Patrick J. Deneen and Joseph Romance, 207–34. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Den Tandt, Christophe. ‘Pragmatic Commitments: Postmodern Realism in Don DeLillo, Maxine Hong Kingston and James Ellroy’. In Beyond Postmodernism: Reassassments in Literature, Theory, and Culture, edited by Klaus Stierstorfer, 121–42. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003. Dewey, Joseph. ‘The Eye Begins to See: The Apocalyptic Temper in the 1980s – William Gaddis and Don DeLillo’. In In a Dark Time: The Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel of the Nuclear Age, 180–229. Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1990.

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Dini, Rachele. ‘ “Most of Our Longings Go Unfulfilled”: DeLillo’s Historiographical Readings of Landfill Waste and Nuclear Fallout’. In Consumerism, Waste, and Re-Use in Twentieth-Century Fiction: Legacies of the Avant-Garde, 143–80. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Dillingham, Thomas F. ‘Don DeLillo’. In Beacham’s Popular Fiction: 1950–Present, edited by Walton Beacham, 307–17. Washington, DC: Beacham, 1986. Donn, Katharina. ‘Precarious Bodies: Dom DeLillo’s Falling Man.’ In A Poetics of Trauma after 9/11: Representing Trauma in a Digitized Present, 136–75. London: Routledge, 2017. Eaton, Mark. ‘Inventing Hope: The Question of Belief in Don DeLillo’s Novels’. In The Gift of Story: Narrating Hope in a Postmodern World, edited by Emily Griesinger and Mark A. Eaton, 31–49. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006. Ferguson, Robert A. ‘Don DeLillo and Marilynne Robinson Mourn Loss’. In Alone in America: The Stories That Matter, 201–30. London: Harvard University Press, 2013. Fiedorczuk, Julia. ‘Against Simulation: “Zen” Terrorism and the Ethics of SelfAnnihilation in Don DeLillo’s Players’. In Ideology and Rhetoric: Constructing America, edited by Bozena Chylinska, 41–50. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Fujii, Hikaru. ‘Time and Again: The Outside and the Narrative Pragmatics in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist’. In Outside, America: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary American Fiction, 83–93. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Gardaphé, Fred L. ‘Don DeLillo’s American Masquerade: Italianità in a Minor Key’. In Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative, 172–92. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Gardaphé, Fred L. ‘(Ex)Tending or Escaping Ethnicity: Don DeLillo and Italian/ American Literature’. In Beyond the Margin: Readings in Italian Americana, edited by Paolo Giordano and Anthony Julian Tamburri, 131–51. New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. Gauthier, Marni. ‘Better Living Through Westward Migration: Don DeLillo’s Inversion of the American West as “Virgin Land” in Underworld’. In Moving Stories: Migration and the American West, 1850–2000, edited by Scott E. Casper. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001. Gordon, Avery. ‘Masquerading in the Postmodern’. In Cross Currents: Recent Trends in Humanities Research, edited by Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, 65–82. London and New York: Verso, 1990. Gourley, James. ‘ “Whenever Said Said Said Missaid”: Diminishment in Beckett’s Worstward Ho and DeLillo’s The Body Artist’. In Literature and Sensation, edited by Anthony Uhlmann, 215–26. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Gourley, James. ‘The 9/11 Novel: Eternal Return in Pynchon and DeLillo’. In Literature and Politics: Pushing the World in Certain Directions, edited by Peter Marks, 166–77. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Greenspan, Daniel. ‘Don DeLillo: Kierkegaard and the Grave in the Air’. In Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art, edited by Jon Stewart, 81–100. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Halliday, Iain. ‘Beyond Immigration: Don DeLillo’s Displaced Persons from Americana (1971) to Underworld (1997)’. In America Today: Highways and Labyrinths, edited by Gigliola Nocera, 363–70. Siracusa: Grafia, 2003.

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Hamdy, Noha. ‘Revisiting Transmediality: 9/11 between Spectacle and Narrative’. In Semiotic Encounters: Text, Image and Trans-Nation, edited by Sarah Säckel, Walter Göbel, and Noha Hamdy, 247–62. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Haney, William S., II. ‘Don DeLillo’s White Noise: The Aesthetics of Cyberspace’. In Culture and Consciousness: Literature Regained, 136–55. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002. Hannemann, Dennis. ‘Global City Turns Local Street Theater: The Dynamics of Character and Setting in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis’. In Territorial Terrors: Contested Spaces in Colonial and Postcolonial Writing, edited by Gerhard Stilz, 295–312. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Happe, Francois. ‘Fiction vs. Power: The Postmodern American Sports Novel’. In Narrative Turns and Minor Genres in Postmodernism, edited by Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens, 157–75. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. Heffernan, Teresa. ‘Can Apocalypse Be Post?’. In Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, edited by Richard Dellamora, 171–81. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Heller, Arno. ‘Simulacrum vs. Death: An American Dilemma in Don DeLillo’s White Noise’. In Simulacrum America: The USA and the Popular Media, edited by Elisabeth Kraus and Carolin Auer, 37–48. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. Helyer, Ruth. ‘Taking Possession of Knowledge: The Masculine Academic in Don DeLillo’s White Noise’. In Masculinities in Text and Teaching, edited by Ben Knights, 205–19. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Hodgkins, John. ‘An Epidemic of Seeing: DeLillo, Postmodernism, and Fiction in the Age of Images’. In The Drift: Affect, Adaptation, and New Perspectives on Fidelity, 53–76. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Hornung, Alfred. ‘Terrorist Violence and Transnational Memory: Jonathan Safran Foer and Don DeLillo’. In Transnational American Memories, edited by Udo Hebel, 171–83. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. Hungerford, Amy. ’The Latin Mass of Language: Vatican II, Catholic Media, Don DeLillo’. In Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960, 52–75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Heffernan, Nick. ‘National Allegory and the Romance of Uneven Development: The Names’. In Capital, Class and Technology in Contemporary American Culture, 179–204. London: Pluto Press, 2000. Hunt, Crosby. ‘ “An Offense against Memory”: The Buckner Moment in Don DeLillo’s Game 6’. In Baseball/Literature/Culture: Essays, 2008–2009, edited by Ronald E. Kates and Warren Tormey, 96–101. Jefferson and London: McFarland, 2010. Hutchinson, Stuart. ‘ “Past the School Book Depository, through Dealey Plaza and Beneath the Triple Underpass”: Place in Don DeLillo’s Fiction’. In Literature and Place 1800–2000, edited by Peter Brown and Michael Irwin, 167–78. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006. Ickstadt, Heinz. ‘Loose Ends and Patterns of Coincidence in Don DeLillo’s Libra’. In Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature, edited by Bernd Engler and Kurt Muller, 299–312. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schningh, 1994. Ickstadt, Heinz. ‘The Narrative World of Don DeLillo’. In Faces of Fiction: Essays on American Literature and Culture from the Jacksonian Period to

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Postmodernity, edited by Susanne Rohr and Sabine Sielke, 375–92. Heidelberg: Tübingen, 2001. Johnson, Diane. ‘Terrorists as Moralists: Don DeLillo’. In Terrorists and Novelists, 105–10. New York: Knopf, 1982. Johnston, John. ‘Fictions of the Culture Medium: The Novels of Don DeLillo’. In Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation, 165–205. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Johnston, John. ‘Representation and Multiplicity in Four Postmodern American Novels’. In Critical Essays on American Postmodernism, edited by Stanley Trachtenberg, 169–81. New York: Hall, 1995. Keating, AnaLouise. ‘Reading “Whiteness”, Unreading “Race”: (De)Racialized Reading Tactics in the Classroom’. In Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response, edited by Patrocinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn, 314–43. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004. Kelman, David. ‘Politics in the Age of the Imaginative Leap’. In Counterfeit Politics: Secret Plots and Conspiracy Narratives in the Americas, 49–86. Bucknell University Press, 2012. Kerridge, Richard. ‘Small Rooms and the Ecosystem: Environmentalism and DeLillo’s White Noise’. In Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, edited by Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells, 182–95. London: Zed, 1998. Keskinen, Mikko. ‘The Ghost in the Tape Machine: Posthumous Voice and Residual Presence in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist’. In Audio Book: Essays on Sound Technologies in Narrative Fiction, 93–119. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008. Keskinen, Mikko. ‘Posthumous Voice and Residual Presence in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist’. In Novels of the Contemporary Extreme, edited by Alain-Philippe Durand and Naomi Mandel, 31–40. London: Continuum, 2006. Kociatkiewicz, Justyna. ‘Trying to Exercise One’s Freedom: Mrs. Oswald’s Voice in Don DeLillo’s Libra’. In American Freedoms, American (Dis)Orders, edited by Zbigniew Lewicki, 23–30. Warsaw: American Studies Center, 2006. Kociatkiewicz, Justyna. ‘Don DeLillo’s Rhetoric of Exhaustion and Ideology of Obsolescence: The Case of Cosmopolis’. In Ideology and Rhetoric: Constructing America, edited by Bozena Chylinska, 29–40. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Kociatkiewicz, Justyna. ‘History as Loss, History as Waste: American Twentieth Century in the Novels of Bellow and DeLillo’. In The American Uses of History: Essays on Public Memory, edited by Tomasz Basiuk, Sylwia Kuzma-Markowska and Krystyna Mazur, 235–44. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011. Kociatkiewicz, Justyna. ‘The Problems of Language and Communication in Don DeLillo’s The Names’. In New Developments in English and American Studies: Continuity and Change, edited by Zygmunt Mazur and Teresa Bela, 333–46. Krakow: Universitas, 1997. Knight, Peter. ‘Beyond the Cold War in Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Underworld’. In American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections of History and Culture, edited by Jay Prosser, 193–205. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. Ladino, Jennifer K. ’Don DeLillo’s Postmodern Homesickness: Nostalgia after the End of Nature’. In Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American

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Literature, 163–87. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012 Landgraff, Edgar. ‘Black Boxes and White Noise. Don DeLillo and the Reality of Literature’. In Addressing Modernity: Social Systems Theory and U.S. Cultures, edited by Hannes Bergthaller, 86–112. Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2011. Lentricchia, Frank, and Jody McAuliffe. ‘Literary Terrorists’. In Crimes of Art + Terror, 18–40. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Lindner, Christoph. ‘Shop Till You Drop: Retail Therapy in DeLillo’s White Noise’. In Fictions of Commodity Culture: From the Victorian to the Postmodern, 137–67. Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate, 2003. Löffler, Philipp. ‘ “No Longer and Not Yet”: Don DeLillo and the Aftermath of the Cold War’. In Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War, 34–65. New York: Camden House, 2015. Marks, John. ‘Underworld: The People Are Missing’. In Deleuze and Literature, edited by Ian Buchanan and John Marks, 80–99. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Martín Salván, Paula. ‘The Rhetorics of Waste in Don DeLillo’s Fiction’. In Figures of Belatedness: Postmodernist Fiction in English, edited by Javier Gascueña Gahete and Paula Martín Salván, 201–23. Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba, 2006. Martín Salván, Paula. ‘Community and Otherness: The Representation of Terrorists in Don DeLillo’s Fiction’. In European Perspectives on the Literature of 9/11, edited by Sylvie Mathé and Sophie Vallas, 81–96. Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2014. Maslowski, Maciej. ‘ “Like Nothing in This Life”: The Concept of Historic Time in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’. In The American Uses of History: Essays on Public Memory, edited by Tomasz Basiuk, Sylwia Kuzma-Markowska and Krystyna Mazur, 245–54. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011. Maucione, Jessica. ‘Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the Nostalgic SpatioLinguistics of America’s Global City’. In Literature of New York, edited by Sabrina Fuchs-Adams, 151–66. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. McCallum, E. L. ‘Contamination’s Germinations’. In Perversion and the Social Relation, edited by Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis Foster and Slavoj Žižek, 187–209. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. McClure, John A. ‘Systems and Secrets: Don DeLillo’s Postmodern Thrillers’. In Late Imperial Romance, 118–51. London: Verso, 1994. Melley, Timothy. ‘Secret Agents’. In Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America, 133–59. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Melley, Timothy. ‘Double-Mediated Terrorism: Gerhardt Richter and Don DeLillo’s “Baader-Meinhof” ’. In Literature and Terrorism, edited by Michael C. Frank and Eva Gruber, 175–94. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Michael, Magali Cornier. ‘Don DeLillo’s Falling Man: Countering Post9/11 Narratives of Heroic Masculinity’. In Portraying 9/11: Essays on Representations in Comics, Literature, Film and Theatre, edited by Véronique Bragard, Christophe Dony and Warren Rosenberg, 73–88. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. Mieszkowski, Sylvia. ‘Disturbing Noises – Haunting Sounds: Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist’. In Thamyris/Intersecting Place, Sex and Race, edited

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by Sylvia Mieszkowski, Joy Smith and Marijke de Valck, 119–45. Amsterdam: Rodopoi, 2007. Moran, Joe. ‘Silence, Exile, Cunning and So On: Don DeLillo’. In Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America, 116–31. London and Sterling: Pluto Press, 2000. Mottram, Eric. ‘The Real Needs of Man: Don DeLillo’s Novels’. In The New American Writing: Essays on American Literature since 1970, edited by Graham Clarke, 51–98. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990. Mullen, Bill. ‘No There There: Cultural Criticism as Lost Object in Don DeLillo’s Players and Running Dog’. In Powerless Fictions? Ethics, Cultural Critique, and American Fiction in the Age of Postmodernism, edited by Ricard Miguel Alfonso, 113–39. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. Muller, Christin. ‘Fate and Terror in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’. In Engaging Terror: A Critical and Interdiscplinary Approach, edited by M. Vardalos, G. K. Letts, H. M. Teixeira, A. Karzai and J. Haig, 167–74. Boca Raton: Brown Walker Press, 2009. Naas, Michael. ‘Autonomy, Autoimmunity, and the Stretch Limo: From Derrida’s Rogue State to DeLillo’s Cosmopolis’. In Derrida from Now On, 147–66. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Nadeau, Robert. ‘Don DeLillo’. In Readings from the New Book on Nature: Physics and Metaphysics in the Modern Novel, 161–81. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. Nel, Philip. ‘ “Amid the Undeniable Power of the Montage”: Modern Forms, Postmodern Politics, and the Role of the Avant-Garde in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. In The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks, 96–115. Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. O’Donnell, Patrick. ‘Under History, Underworld’. In Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia in Contemporary U.S. Narrative, 43–60. London: Duke University Press, 2000. Olster, Stacey. ‘A Mother (and a Son, and a Brother, and a Wife, et al.) in History: Stories Galore in Libra and the Warren Commission Report’. In Productive Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies, edited by John N. Duvall, 43–60. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. Parrish, Timothy. ‘History after Henry Adams and Ronal Reagan: Joan Didion’s Democracy and Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. In From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction, 193–231. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Phillips, Dana. ‘Don DeLillo’s Postmodern Pastoral’. In Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment, edited by Michael P. Branch, Rochelle Johnson, Daniel Patterson and Scott Slovic, 235–46. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1998. Phillips, Thomas. ‘Echenoz, Fabre, DeLillo’. In The Subject of Minimalism: On Aesthetics, Agency and Becoming, 73–92. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pifer, Ellen. ‘The Child as Mysterious Agent: DeLillo’s White Noise’. In Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture, 212–32. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Portelli, Alessandro. ‘ “We Do Not Tie It in Twine”: Waste, Containment, History and Sin in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. In America Today: Highways and Labyrinths, edited by Gigliola Nocera, 592–609. Siracusa: Grafia, 2003.

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Pozorski, Aimee. ‘Don DeLillo Performance Art: Failure Bears Witness to Falling’. In Falling after 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Randal, Martin. ‘ “Everything Seemed to Mean Something”: Signifying 9/11 in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’. In 9/11 and the Literature of Terror, 119–30. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Redding, Arthur F. ‘Dying for a Common Language’. In Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence, 213–52. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Reeve, N. H. ‘Oswald Our Contemporary: Don DeLillo’s Libra’. In An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in English since 1970, edited by Rod Mengham, 35–49. Cambridge: Polity, 1999. Rosen, Elizabeth K. ‘All the Expended Faith: Apocalyptism in Don DeLillo’s Novels’. In Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination, 143–73. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008. Rossini, Jon D. ‘DeLillo, Performance, and the Denial of Death’. In Death in American Texts and Performances: Corpses, Ghosts, and the Reanimated Death, edited by Lisa K. Perdigao and Mark Pizzato, 45–62. Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. Rozelle, Lee. ‘Eerie Cartographies in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. In Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones: Ecocriticism and the Liminal from Invisible Man to The Walking Dead, 30–57. Tusclaloosa: University of Alabama, 2016. Ruckh, W. Eric. ‘Theorizing Globalization: At the Intersection of Bataille’s Solar Economy, DeLillo’s Underworld and Hardt’s and Negri’s Empire’. In European Culture in a Changing World: Between Nationalism and Globalism, edited by Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, 117–39. Amersham: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2004. Russo, John Paul. ‘Don DeLillo: Ethnicity, Religion, and the Critique of Technology’. In The Future Without a Past: The Humanities in a Technological Society, 211–42. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2005. Saltzman, Arthur M. ‘Deregulating Histories’. In Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction, 45–51. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Saltzman, Arthur M. ‘The Figure in the Static: Don DeLillo’s White Noise’. In This Mad ‘Instead’: Governing Metaphors in Contemporary American Fiction, 33–48. Columbia: South Carolina University Press, 2000. Saltzman, Arthur M. ‘Fluent Mundos: Ratner’s Star and Plus’. In The Novel in the Balance, 83–96. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Sample, Mark L. ‘Don DeLillo and the Failure of the Digital Humanities’. In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, 187–201. Minneapolis: University of Minneota Press, 2012. Scanlan, Margaret. ‘Don DeLillo’s Mao II and the Rushdie Affair’. In Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction, 19–36. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Schryer, Stephen. ‘Don DeLillo’s Academia. Revisiting the New Class in White Noise’. In Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II Amreican Fiction, 167–92. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Shapiro, Michael J. ‘American Fictions and Political Culture: DeLillo’s Libra and Bellah et al.’s Habits of the Heart and “The Politics of Fear: DeLillo’s

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Postmodern Burrow” ’. In Reading the Postmodern Polity: Political Theory as Textual Practice, 68–85, 122–39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1992. Shonkwiler, Alison. ‘Financial Sublime: Virtual Capitalism in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis’. In The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Simmons, Philip E. ‘Don DeLillo’s Invisible Histories’. In Deep Surfaces: Mass Culture & History in Contemporary American Fiction, 41–81. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Smethurst, Paul. ‘The Trope of Placelessness: Graham Swift, Out of This World, Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star and The Names’. In The Postmodern Chronotope, edited by Theo d’Haen and Hans Bertens, 267–309. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Soltan, Margaret. ‘From Black Magic to White Noise: Malcolm Lowry and Don DeLillo’. In A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century, edited by Frederick Asals and Paul Tiessen, 200–222. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Stockinger, Michael. ‘Experiments on Living Matter or How to Save the Narrative from Extinction: The Unfinished Story of Jean Baudrillard’s and Don DeLillo’s Cultural Pathology’. In Simulacrum America: The USA and the Popular Media, edited by Elisabeth Kraus and Carolin Auer, 49–67. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. Storhoff, Gary. ‘A Deeper Kind of Truth: Buddhist Themes in Don DeLillo’s Libra’. In Writing as Enlightenment: Buddhist American Literature into the Twenty-First Century, edited by John Whalen Bridge, 109–32. Albany: SUNY Press, 2011. Storhoff, Gary. ‘The Failure of Games in Don DeLillo’s End Zone’. In American Sport Culture: The Humanistic Dimensions, edited by Wiley Lee Umphlett, 235–45. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985. Tabbi, Joseph. ‘From the Sublime to the Beautiful to the Political: Don DeLillo at Midcareer’. In Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk, 169–207. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Tate, Greg. ‘White Magic: Don DeLillo’s Intelligence Networks’. In Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, 220–28. New York and London: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Versluys, Kristiaan. ‘American Melancholia: DeLillo’s Falling Man’. In Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel, 19–48. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Vukovich, Daniel F. ‘DeLillo, Warhol, and the Specter of Mao: The “Sinologization of Global Thought” ’. In China and Orientalism. Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C., 87–99. London: Routledge, 2012. Wallace, David Foster. ‘E. Unibus Pluram: Television and U. S. Fiction’. In A Supposedly Fun Thing That I’ll Never Do Again, 21–82. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997. Webb, Jen. ‘Fiction and Testimony in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’. In International Life Writing. Memory and Identity in Global Context, edited by Paul Longley Arthur, 91–105. London: Routledge, 2013. White, Patti. ‘Toxic Textual Events’. In Gatsby’s Party: The System and the List in Contemporary Narrative, 7–27. Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1992.

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Wilcox, Leonard. ‘Don DeLillo’s Underworld: American Nationhood and the Troubling Remainder’. In From Z to A: Žižek at the Antipodes, edited by Lawrence Simmons, Heather Worth and Maureen Malloy, 199–214. Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 2005. Wood, James. ‘Against Paranoia: The Case of Don DeLillo’. In The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, 213–26. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999. Yehnert, Curtis A. ‘The Image of Violence in the Novels of Don DeLillo’. In The Image of Technology in Literature, the Media, and Society, edited by Will Wright and Steve Kaplan, 437–42. Pueblo: University of Southern Colorado, 1994. Yuknavitch, Lidia. ‘Nuclear Ideology and Narrative Displacement’. In Allegories of Violence: Tracing the Writing of War in Twentieth-Century Fiction, 55–73. New York and London: Routledge, 2001. Zuber, Devin P. ‘9/11 as Memento Mori: Still-Life and Image in Don DeLillo’s Ekphrastic Fiction’. In Radical Planes? 9/11 and Patterns of Continuity, edited by Dunja M. Mohr and Birgit Däwes, 200–18. Leiden and Boston: Brill/ Rodopi, 2016.

Journal articles 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): 1236–50. Adelman, Gary. ‘Original Sin: The Ineradicable Stain in the Novels of Don DeLillo’. TriQuarterly 135/136 (2009): 434–45. Alberts, Crystal. ‘ “Freud Is Finished, Einstein’s Next”: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, Chaos Theory, and Quantum Entanglement’. Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 4, no. 2 (2016). Available at: www.pynchon.net/articles/10.16995/ orbit.196/. Alberts, Crystal. ‘On Influence’. Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 4, no. 2 (2016). Available at: www.pynchon.net/articles/10.16995/orbit.198/. Allen, Glenn Scott. ‘Raids on the Conscious: Pynchon’s Legacy of Paranoia and the Terrorism of Uncertainty in Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star’. Postmodern Culture 4, no. 2 (1994). Alworth, David J. ‘Supermarket Sociology’. New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 41, no. 2 (2010): 301–27. Anker, Richard. ‘Mutability as Counter-Plot: Apocalypse, Time, and Schematic Imagination in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist’. Angles, no. 4 (2016). Available at: http://angles.saesfrance.org/index.php?id=743. Annesley, James. ‘ “Thigh Bone Connected to the Hip Bone”: Don DeLillo’s Underworld and the Fictions of Globalization’. Amerikastudien/American Studies 47, no. 1 (2002): 85–106. Apter, Emily. ‘On Oneworldedness; Or Paranoia as a World System’. American Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006): 365–89. Atchley, J. Heath. ‘The Loss of Language, The Language of Loss: Thinking with DeLillo on Terror and Mourning’. Janus Head 7, no. 2 (2004): 333–54. Aubry, Timothy. ‘White Noise Generation’. Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and Culture 12, no. 1–2 (2000–2001): 148–73.

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Baelo-Allué, Sonia. ‘9/11 and the Psychic Trauma Novel Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’. Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 34, no. 1 (2012): 63–79. Balter, Marie. ‘Secret Agency: American Individualism in Oswald’s Tale and Libra’. Mailer Review 3, no. 1 (2009): 133–72. Barrett, Laura. ‘ “Here But Also There”: Subjectivity and Postmodern Space in Mao II’. Modern Fiction Studies 45, no. 3 (1999): 788–810. Barrett, Laura. ‘ “How the Dead Speak to the Living”: Intertextuality and the Postmodern Sublime in White Noise’. Journal of Modern Literature 25, no. 2 (2001–2): 97–113. Bartczak, Kacper. ‘A Certain Amount of the Unknown – The Argument of the Bodily in Don DeLillo’. Folia Litteraria Anglica: Acta Universitas Lodziensis 5 (2001): 5–18. Bartczak, Kacper. ‘Technology and the Bodily in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Cosmopolis’. Polish Journal for American Studies 5 (2011): 111–26. Bassett, Jonathan F. ‘Necessary Madness in Don DeLillo’s White Noise: Becker’s Twin Ontological Motives and the Quest for Symbolic Immortality in the Postmodern Age’. PsyArt (2009). Available at: http://psyartjournal.com/article/ show/f_bassett-necessary_madness_in_don_delillos_white_. Batchelor, Bob. ‘Literary Lions Tackle 9/11: Updike and DeLillo Depicting History through the Novel’. Radical History Review 111 (2011): 175–83. Bauer, Sylvie. ‘ “Thinking along the Margins”: The Choreography of Trauma in The Body Artist by Don DeLillo’. Sillages Critiques 19 (2015). Available at: https:// sillagescritiques.revues.org/4244. Bawer, Bruce. ‘Don DeLillo’s America’. New Criterion 3, no. 8 (1985): 34–42. Beckman, Frida. ‘Cartographies of Ambivalence: Allegory and Cognitive Mapping in Don DeLillo’s Later Novels’. Textual Practice (2016). Available at: http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2016.1238005. Begley, Adam. ‘Don DeLillo: Americana, Mao II, and Underworld’. Southwest Review 82, no. 4 (1997): 478–505. Bell, Pearl K. ‘DeLillo’s World’. Partisan Review 59, no. 1 (1992): 138–46. Benton, Jill. ‘Don DeLillo’s End Zone: A Postmodern Satire’. Aethlon 12, no. 1 (1994): 7–18. Berger, James. ‘Falling Towers and Postmodern Wild Children: Oliver Sacks, Don DeLillo, and Turns against Language’. PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005): 341–61. Billy, Ted. ‘The Externalization of the Self in American Life: Don DeLillo’s White Noise’. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 19, no. 3–4 (1998): 270–83. Bird, Benjamin. ‘Don DeLillo’s Americana: From Third- to First-Person Consciousness’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47, no. 2 (2006): 185–200. Bizzini, Silvia Caporale. ‘Can the Intellectual Still Speak? The Example of Don DeLillo’s Mao II’. Critical Quarterly 37, no. 2 (1995): 104–17. Burke, William. ‘Football, Literature and Culture’. Southwest Review 60 (1975): 391–8. Bjerre, Thomas Ærvold. ‘Post-9/11 Literary Masculinities in Kalfus, DeLillo, and Hamid’. Orbis litterarum 67, no. 3 (2012): 241–66. Bloom, James D. ‘Cultural Capital and Contrarian Investing: Robert Stone, Thom Jones, and Others’. Contemporary Literature 36, no. 3 (1995): 490–507.

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Bonca, Cornel. ‘Being, Time, and Death in DeLillo’s The Body Artist’. Pacific Coast Philology 37 (2002): 58–68. Bonca, Cornel ‘Don DeLillo’s White Noise: The Natural Language of the Species’. College Literature 23, no. 2 (1996): 25–44. Boling, Ronald J. ‘Escaping Hitler in DeLillo’s White Noise’. Philological Review 28, no. 2 (2002): 63–81. Born, Daniel. ‘Sacred Noise in Don DeLillo’s Fiction’. Literature and Theology: An International Journal of Theory, Criticism and Culture 13, no. 3 (1999): 211–21. Bosworth, David. ‘The Fiction of Don DeLillo’. Boston Review 8, no. 2 (1983): 29–30. Boxall, Peter. ‘ “There’s No Lack of Void”: Waste and Abundance in Beckett and DeLillo’. SubStance 37, no. 2 (2008): 56–70. Boxall, Peter. ‘Late: Fictional Time in the Twenty-First Century’. Contemporary Literature 53, no. 4 (2012): 681–712. Boyagoda, Randy. ‘Digital Conversion Experiences in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis’. Studies in American Culture 30, no. 1 (2007): 11–26. Brent, James. ‘The Unimaginable Space of Danilo Kis and Don DeLillo’. Review of Contemporary Fiction 14, no. 1 (1994): 180–88. Bryson, Norman. ‘City of Dis: The Fiction of Don DeLillo’. Granta 2 (1980): 145–57. Bryant, Paula. ‘Discussing the Untellable: Don DeLillo’s The Names’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 29 (1987): 16–29. Bryant, Paula. ‘Extending the Fabulative Continuum: DeLillo, Mooney, Federman’. Extrapolation 30 (1989): 156–65. Bull, Jeoffrey S. ‘ “What about a Problem That Doesn’t Have a Solution?” Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise, DeLillo’s Mao II, and the Politics of Political Fiction’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40 (1999): 215–29. Burn, Stephen J. ‘Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street and the Science of Mind’. Modern Fiction Studies 55, no. 2 (2009): 349–68. Butterfield, Bradley. ‘Baudrillard’s Primitivism & White Noise: “The Only AvantGarde We’ve Got.” ’ Undercurrents 7 (1999). Available at: http://web.archive. org/web/20030212113534/http://darkwing.uoregon.edu:80/~ucurrent/uc7/7brad.html. Caesar, Terry. ‘Motherhood and Postmodernism’. American Literary History 7, no. 1 (1995): 120–40. Cain, William E. ‘Making Meaningful Worlds: Self and History in Libra’. Michigan Quarterly Review 29 (1990): 275–87. Callus, Ivan. ‘Enigmas of Arrival: Re-imagining Non-urban Space in Contemporary American Narrative’. Litteraria Pragensia 20, no. 40 (2010): 115–33. Caporale Bizzini, Silvia. ‘Resisting the Postmodern Historical Vision: Imag(in)ing History in Don DeLillo’s Libra’. Atlantic Literary Review 2, no. 1 (2001): 119–36. Caracciolo, Marco. ‘Another Fusion Taking Place: Blending and Interpretation’. Journal of Literary Semantics 40, no. 2 (2011): 177–93. Carmichael, Thomas. ‘Buffalo/Baltimore, Athens/Dallas: John Barth, Don DeLillo and the Cities of Postmodernism’. Canadian Review of American Studies 22, no. 2 (1991): 241–9. Carmichael, Thomas. ‘Lee Harvey Oswald and the Postmodern Subject: History and Intertextuality in Don DeLillo’s Libra, The Names, and Mao II’. Contemporary Literature 34 (1993): 204–18.

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Carmichael, Thomas. ‘ “Of All Art. . .”: The Twentieth-Century Image or, on a Certain Elegiac Feeling in Late-Century Narrative’. Wascana Review of Contemporary Poetry and Short Fiction 37, no. 1 (2002): 76–80. Carter, Steven. ‘The Rites of Memory: Orwell, Pynchon, DeLillo, and the American Millenium’. Prospero: Rivista di culture anglo germaniche 6 (1999): 5–21. Castle, Robert. ‘DeLillo’s Underworld: Everything that Descends Must Converge’. Undercurrents 7 (1999). Available at: http://web.archive.org/ web/20030306071409/http://darkwing.uoregon.edu:80/~ucurrent/uc7/7-cast. html. Carroll, Hamilton. ‘ “Like Nothing in this Life”: September 11 and the Limits of Representation in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’. Studies in American Fiction 40, no. 1 (2013): 107–30. Caton, Lou F. ‘Romanticism and the Postmodern Novel: Three Scenes from Don DeLillo’s White Noise’. English Language Notes 35 (1997): 38–48. Chandler, Aaron. ‘ “An Unsettling, Alternative Self”: Benno Levin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50, no. 3 (2009): 241–60. Chang, Chi-Ming. ‘Death as the Other in Don DeLillo’s White Noise: From the Sensibly Immediate to the Technologically Mediated’. Tamkang Review 37, no. 3 (2007): 145–75. Chappell, Brian. ‘Death and Metafiction: On the “Ingenious Architecture” of Point Omega’. Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 4, no. 2 (2016). Available at: www.pynchon.net/articles/10.16995/orbit.133/. Civello, Paul. ‘Undoing the Naturalistic Novel: Don DeLillo’s Libra’. Arizona Quarterly 48 (1992): 33–56. Clippinger, David. ‘Material Encoding and Libidinal Exchange: The Capital Culture Underneath Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 39 (1999): 79–91. Clissold, Bradley D. ‘Don DeLillo’s Anagogic Postcards: Thematic Inscriptions Writ Small’. Canadian Review of American Studies 45, no. 3 (2015): 375–99. Coale, Samuel Chase. ‘Quantum Flux and Narrative Flow: Don DeLillo’s Entanglements with Quantum Theory’. Papers on Language & Literature 47, no. 3 (2011): 261–94. Cohen, Joshua. ‘Dying to Watch TV: Film, Postmodernity, Systems and DeLillo’s White Noise’. Over Here: Reviews in American Studies 13, no. 1 (1993): 115–24. Collins, Cornelius. ‘ “Gathering Facts for the End of the World”: Don DeLillo’s Archive of Global Turbulence’. Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 4, no. 2 (2016). Available at: www.pynchon.net/articles/10.16995/orbit.177/. Connolly, Andrew. ‘Counterpoint and Counternarrative: Baseball, DeLillo’s “Pafko and the Wall”, and Harper’s Folio’. American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism 26, no. 1 (2016): 25–43. Conroy, Mark. ‘From Tombstone to Tabloid: Authority Figured in White Noise’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 35, no. 2 (1994): 97–110. Conte, Joseph M. ‘Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and the Age of Terror’. Modern Fiction Studies 57, no. 3 (2011): 557–83. Conniff, Brian. ‘DeLillo’s Ignatian Moment: Religious Longing and Theological Encounter in Falling Man’. Christianity and Literature 63, no. 1 (2013): 47–73.

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Cowart, David. ‘The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega’. Contemporary Literature 53, no. 1 (2012): 31–50. Cowart, David. ‘DeLillo’s Intertexts: Some Observations on Love-Lies-Bleeding’. ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Revisions 22, no. 1 (2009): 48–50. Crawford, Karin L. ‘Gender and Terror in Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 and Don DeLillo’s “Baader-Meinhof” ’. New German Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies 107 (2009): 207–30. Crosthwaite, Paul. ‘Fiction in the Age of the Global Accident: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis’. Static: Journal of the London Consortium 7 (2008): 1–13. Crow, Dallas. ‘Amazons, Don DeLillo’s Pseudonymous Novel’. Notes on Contemporary Literature 28, no. 5 (1998): 2–4. Cruz, Daniel. ‘Writing Back, Moving Forward: Falling Man and DeLillo’s Previous Works’. Italian Americana 29, no. 2 (2011): 138–52. D’cruz, Adrene Freeda. ‘The Postmodern Cultural Matrix and the Post-industrial Social Structure: Don DeLillo’s White Noise’. Literary Paritantra (Systems) 1, no. 1–2 (2009): 77–82. Daniele, Daniela. ‘The Achromatic Room: DeLillo’s Plays On and Off Camera’. Italian Americana 29, no. 2 (2011): 167–80. Daniele, Daniela. ‘The Missing Father, and Other Unhyphenated Stories of Waste and Beauty in Don(ald) DeLillo’. RSA Journal 21–22 (2010–11): 111–17. Davidson, Ian. ‘Automobility, Materiality and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis’. Cultural Geographies 19, no. 4 (2012): 469–82. Deardorff, Donald L., II. ‘Dancing in the End Zone: DeLillo, Men’s Studies, and the Quest for Linguistic Healing’. Journal of Men’s Studies 8, no. 1 (1999): 73–82. De Marco, Alessandra. ‘Late DeLillo, Finance Capital and Mourning from The Body Artist to Point Omega’. 49th Parallel 28 (2012). Available at: https:// fortyninthparalleljournal.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/3-demarco-late-delillo. pdf. De Marco, Alessandra. ‘ “Morbid Tiers of Immortality”: Don DeLillo’s Players and the Financialisation of the USA’. Textual Practice 27, no. 5 (2013): 875–98. Devetak, Richard. ‘After the Event: Don DeLillo’s White Noise and September 11 Narratives’. Review of International Studies 35, no. 4 (2009): 795–815. Di Prete, Laura. ‘Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist: Performing the Body, Narrating Trauma’. Contemporary Literature 46, no. 3 (2005): 483–510. doCarmo, Stephen N. ‘Subjects, Objects, and the Postmodern Differend in Don DeLillo’s White Noise’. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 11, no. 1 (2000): 1–33. Duvall, John N. ‘The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo’s White Noise’. Arizona Quarterly 50, no. 3 (1994): 127–53. Duvall, John N. ‘Introduction: From Valparaiso to Jerusalem: DeLillo and the Moment of Canonization’. Modern Fiction Studies 45, no. 3 (1999): 559–68. Duvall, John N. ‘Baseball as Aesthetic Ideology: Cold War History, Race, and DeLillo’s “Pafko at the Wall” ’. Modern Fiction Studies 41, no. 2 (1995): 285–313. Edmundson, Mark. ‘Not Flat, Not Round, Not There: Don DeLillo’s Novel Characters’. Yale Review 83, no. 2 (1995): 107–24.

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Eid, Haidar. ‘Beyond Baudrillard’s Simulacral Postmodern World: White Noise’. Undercurrents 7 (1999). Available at: http://web.archive.org/ web/20030212113311/http://darkwing.uoregon.edu:80/~ucurrent/uc7/7-eid. html. Eid, Haidar. ‘White Noise: A Late Capitalist World of Consumerism’. Consumption, Markets & Culture 3, no. 3 (2000): 215–38. Engles, Tim. ‘ “Who Are You, Literally?”: Fantasies of the White Self in White Noise’. Modern Fiction Studies 45, no. 3 (1999): 755–87. Evans, David H. ‘Taking Out the Trash: Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Liquid Modernity, and the End of Garbage’. Cambridge Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2006): 103–32. Fernandes, Giséle Manganelli. ‘Don DeLillo’s Novels and a “McDonaldized” Society’. Ilha do Desterro 39 (2000): 147–65. Fest, Bradley J. ‘Geologies of Finitude: The Deep Time of Twenty-FirstCentury Catastrophe in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega and Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 57, no. 5 (2016): 565–78. Finigan, Theo. ‘ “There’s Something Else That’s Generating This Event”: The Violence of the Archive in Don DeLillo’s Libra’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55, no. 2 (2014): 187–205. Foster, Graham. ‘A Deep Insider’s Elegiac Tribute: The Work of Don DeLillo in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest’. Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 4, no. 2 (2016). Available at: www.pynchon.net/articles/10.16995/orbit.127/. Gatenby, Bruce. ‘A Disturbance of Memory: Language, Terror and Intimacy in Don DeLillo’s The Names’. Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 4 (1995): 345–55. Gaughran, Richard. ‘Contrasting Communication Styles in Don DeLillo’s The Names’. Athens Journal of Philology 3, no. 2 (2016): 75–82. Gravano, Alan J. ‘New York City in Don DeLillo’s Novels’. Italian Americana 29, no. 2 (2011): 181–9. Green, Jeremy. ‘Disaster Footage: Spectacles of Violence in Don DeLillo’. Modern Fiction Studies 45, no .3 (1999): 571–99. Green, Jeremy. ‘Last Days: Millennial Hysteria in Don DeLillo’s Mao II’. Essays and Studies 48 (1995): 129–48. Greenwald Smith, Rachel. ‘Organic Shrapnel: Affect and Aesthetics in September 11 Fiction’. American Literature 83, no. 1 (2011): 153–74. Goldman, Derek. ‘What Was That Unforgettable Line? Remembrances from the Rubbleheap’. South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 1 (2004): 45–55. Gunzenhauser, Randi. ‘ “All Plots Lead toward Death”: Memory, History, and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy’. Amerikastudien/American Studies 43 (1998): 75–91. Hamilton, Geoff. ‘Between Mailer and DeLillo: The “Affectless Person” in Robert Stone’s A Hall of Mirrors’. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 65, no. 2 (2009): 99–116. Haney, William S., II. ‘Culture, History and Consciousness in DeLillo’s White Noise: The Aesthetics of Cyberspace’. Journal of American Studies of Turkey 6 (1997): 11–24. Hantke, Steffen. ‘ “God Save Us from Bourgeois Adventure”: The Figure of the Terrorist in Contemporary American Conspiracy Fiction’. Studies in the Novel 38 (1996): 219–43.

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Happe, François. ‘ “Jade Idols” and “Ruined Cities of Trivia”: History and Fiction in DeLillo’s Libra’. American Studies in Scandinavia 28, no. 1 (1996): 23–35. 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): 303–36. Hardack, Richard. ‘Two’s a Crowd: Mao II, and the Politics of Terrorism in Don DeLillo’. Studies in the Novel 36, no. 3 (2004): 374–92. Hardin, Michael. ‘Postmodernism’s Desire for Simulated Death: Andy Warhol’s Car Crashes, J. G. Ballard’s Crash, and Don DeLillo’s White Noise’. LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 13, no. 1 (2002): 21–50. Hardin, Michael. ‘What Is the Word at Logos College? Homosocial Ritual or Homosexual Denial in Don DeLillo’s End Zone’. Journal of Homosexuality 40, no. 1 (2000): 31–50. Harding, Wendy. ‘New York Writing: Urban Art in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Anglophonia 29 (2009): 467–78. Hayles, N. Katherine. ‘Postmodern Parataxis: Embodied Texts, Weightless Information’. American Literary History 2 (1990): 394–421. Heffernan, Nick. ‘Money Is Talking to Itself: Finance Capitalism in the Fiction of Don DeLillo from Players to Cosmopolis’. Critical Engagements 1 (2007): 53–78. Heise, Ursula K. ‘Toxins, Drugs, and Global Systems: Risk and Narrative in the Contemporary Novel’. American Literature 74, no. 4 (2002): 747–78. Helyer, Ruth. ‘Refuse Heaped Many Stories High: DeLillo, Dirt and Disorder’. Modern Fiction Studies 45, no. 4 (1999): 987–1006. Hemming, Jeanne. ‘ “Wallowing in the Great Dark Lake of Male Rage”: The Masculine Ecology of Don DeLillo’s White Noise’. Journal of Ecocriticism 1, no. 1 (2009): 26–42. Henneberg, Julian. ‘ “Something Extraordinary Hovering Just Outside Our Touch”: The Technological Sublime in Don DeLillo’s White Noise’. aspeers 4 (2011): 51–73. Herren, Graley. ‘Don DeLillo’s Art Stalkers’. Modern Fiction Studies 61, no. 1 (2015): 138–67. Herren, Graley. ‘American Narcissus: Lacanian Reflections on DeLillo’s Americana’. Orbit: Writing around Pynchon 4, no. 2 (2016). Available at: www. pynchon.net/articles/10.16995/orbit.87/. 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): 438–451. Higginbotham, J. K. ‘The “Queer” in Don DeLillo’s End Zone’. Notes on Contemporary Literature 19, no. 1 (1989): 5–7. Hoberek, Andrew. ‘Foreign Objects; Or, DeLillo Minimalist’. Studies in American Fiction 37, no. 1 (2010): 101–25. Houser, Heather M. ‘ “A Presence Almost Everywhere”: Responsibility at Risk in Don DeLillo’s The Names’. Contemporary Literature 51, no. 1 (2010): 124–51. Howard, Gerald. ‘Slouching towards Grubnet: The Author in the Age of Publicity’. Review of Contemporary Fiction 16, no. 1 (1996): 44–53. Huang, Han-yu. ‘Trauma, Paranoia, and Ecological Fantasy in Don DeLillo’s Underworld: Toward a Psychoanalytic Ethics of Waste’. Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 35, no. 1 (2009): 109–30.

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Huehls, Mitchum. ‘Knowing What We Are Doing: Time, Form, and the Reading of Postmodernity’. Cultural Critique 61 (2005): 55–86. Hughes, Simon. ‘Don DeLillo: Mao II and the Writer as Actor’. Scripsi 7, no. 2 (1991): 105–12. Hungerford, Amy. ‘Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass’. Contemporary Literature 47, no. 3 (2006): 343–80. Hutchinson, Stuart. ‘DeLillo’s Libra and the Real’. Cambridge Quarterly 29 (2001): 117–31. Hutchinson, Stuart. ‘What Happened to Normal? Where Is Normal? DeLillo’s Americana and Running Dog’. Cambridge Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2000): 117–32. Ickstadt, Heinz. ‘Replacing the “Urban Sublime”: The City in Contemporary American Fiction’. Anglophonia 25 (2009): 249–58. Isaacson, Johanna. ‘Postmodern Wastelands: Underworld and the Productive Failures of Periodization’. Criticism 54, no. 1 (2012): 29–58. Jelfs, Tim. ‘ “Something Deeper Than Things”: Some Artistic Influences on the Writing of Objects in the Fiction of Don DeLillo’. Comparative American Studies 9, no. 2 (2011): 146–60. Johnson, Stuart. ‘Extraphilosophical Instigations in Don DeLillo’s Running Dog’. Contemporary Literature 26, no. 1 (1985): 74–90. Johnson, Stuart. ‘Obvious Paranoia: The Politics of Don DeLillo’s Running Dog’. Centennial Review 34, no. 1 (1990): 56–72. Johnston, John. ‘Generic Difficulties in the Novels of Don DeLillo’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 30 (1989): 261–75. Johnston, John. ‘Post-Cinematic Fiction: Film in the Novels of Pynchon, McElroy and DeLillo’. New Orleans Review 17, no. 2 (1990): 90–97. Johnston, John. ‘Superlinear Fiction or Historical Diagram? Don DeLillo’s Libra’. Modern Fiction Studies 40 (1994): 319–42. Karnicky, Jeffrey. ‘Avian Consciousness in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist’. Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People & Animals 22, no. 1 (2009): 5–18. Karnicky, Jeffrey. ‘Wallpaper Mao: Don DeLillo, Andy Warhol, and Seriality’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42, no. 4 (2001): 339–56. Kauffman, Linda S. ‘The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future”, “Baader-Meinhof” and Falling Man’. Modern Fiction Studies 54, no. 2 (2008): 353–77. Kavadlo, Jesse. ‘Celebration & Annihilation: The Balance of Underworld’. Undercurrents 7 (1999). Available at: http://web.archive.org/ web/20030111030429/http://darkwing.uoregon.edu:80/~ucurrent/uc7/7-kava.html. Kavadlo, Jesse. ‘Recycling Authority: Don DeLillo’s Waste Management’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42, no. 4 (2001): 384–401. Kavadlo, Jesse. ‘The Terms of the Contract: Rock and Roll and the Narrative of Self-Destruction in Don DeLillo, Neal Pollack, and Kurt Cobain’. Studies in Popular Culture 30, no. 1 (2007): 87–104. Keeble, Arin. ‘Marriage, Relationships, and 9/11: The Seismographic Narratives of Falling Man, The Good Life and The Emperor’s Children’. Modern Language Review 106, no. 2 (2011): 355–73. Keskinen, Mikko. ‘To What Purpose Is This Waste? From Rubbish to Collectibles in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. American Studies in Scandinavia 32, no. 2 (2000): 63–82.

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Kessel, Tyler. ‘A Question of Hospitality in DeLillo’s The Body Artist’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 49, no. 2 (2008): 185–204. bin Khalifa, Salah Elmoncef. ‘Historiographer, Archaeologist, Diagnostician: Don DeLillo’s Underworld and the Inscriptions of the Commonplace’. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 13, no. 1 (2008): 149–65. King, Noel. ‘Reading White Noise: Floating Remarks’. Critical Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1991): 66–83. Knight, Peter. ‘Everything Is Connected: Underworld’s Secret History of Paranoia’. Modern Fiction Studies 45, no. 3 (1999): 811–36. Kronick, Joseph. ‘Libra and the Assassination of JFK: A Textbook Operation’. Arizona Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1994): 109–32. Kohn, Robert E. ‘Heteroglossia, and Chronotope in Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Streets’. Style 39, no.2 (2005): 206–16. Kohn, Robert E. ‘Tibetan Buddhism in Don DeLillo’s Novels: The Street, The Word and The Soul’. College Literature 38, no. 4 (2011): 156–80. Kontoulis, Cleopatra, and Eliza Kitis. ‘Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist: Time, Language and Grief’. Janus Head 12, no.1 (2011): 222–42. Kucich, John. ‘Postmodern Politics: Don DeLillo and the Plight of the White Male Writer’. Michigan Quarterly Review 27, no. 2 (1988): 328–41. Ladino, Jennifer. ‘ “Local Yearnings”: Re-Placing Nostalgia in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Journal of Ecocriticism 2, no. 1 (2010): 1–18. Laist, Randy. ‘The Concept of Disappearance in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 51, no. 3 (2010): 257–75. Laist, Randy. ‘Oedison Rex: The Art of Media Metaphor in Don DeLillo’s Americana’. Modern Language Studies 37, no. 2 (2008): 50–63. Landgraf, Edgar. ‘Black Boxes and White Noise. Don DeLillo and the Reality of Literature’. Postmodern Studies 45 (2011): 85–112. Leggatt, Matthew. ‘Deflecting Absence: 9/11 Fiction and the Memorialization of Change’. Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 18, no. 2 (2016): 203–21. Lentricchia, Frank. ‘Don DeLillo’. Raritan 8, no. 4 (Spring 1989): 1–29. Leps, Marie-Christine. ‘Empowerment Through Information: A Discursive Critique’. Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 179–96. Leps, Marie-Christine. ‘How to Map the Non-place of Empire: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis’. Textual Practice 28, no. 2 (2014): 305–27. Levesque, Richard. ‘Telling Postmodern Tales: Absent Authorities in Didion’s Democracy and DeLillo’s Mao II’. Arizona Quarterly 54, no. 3 (1998): 69–87. Little, Jonathan. ‘Ironic Mysticism in Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star’. Papers on Language and Literature 35, no. 3 (1999): 301–32. Longmuir, Anne. ‘Performing the Body in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist’. Modern Fiction Studies 53, no. 3 (2007): 528–43. Longmuir, Anne. ‘Genre and Gender in Don DeLillo’s Players and Running Dog’. Journal of Narrative Theory 37, no. 1 (2007): 128–45. Longmuir, Anne. ‘The Language of History: Don DeLillo’s The Names and the Iranian Hostage Crisis’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46, no. 2 (2005): 105–22. Ludwig, Kathryn. ‘Don DeLillo’s Underworld and the Postsecular in Contemporary Fiction’. Religion & Literature 41, no. 3 (2009): 82–91. Luter, Matthew. ‘Resisting the Devouring Neon: Hysterical Crowds and SelfAbnegating Art in Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 53, no. 1 (2012): 16–29.

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Luter, Matthew. ‘ “Weekend Warriors”: DeLillo’s “The Uniforms”, Players, and Film-to-Page Reappearance’. Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 4, no. 2 (2016). Available at: www.pynchon.net/articles/10.16995/orbit.134/. Mahony, Áine, and Fergal McHugh. ‘Lateness and the Inhospitable in Stanley Cavell and Don DeLillo’. Philosophy and Literature 40, no. 2 (2016): 446–64. Maltby, Paul. ‘The Romantic Metaphysics of Don DeLillo’. Contemporary Literature 37, no. 1 (1996): 258–77. Marinaccio, Rocco. ‘Slow Food/White Noise: Food and Eating in DeLillo’s Postmodern America’. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 26, no. 1 (2015): 62–84. 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): 621–36. Martín Salván, Paula. ‘Abstract Structures and Connective Patterns: Science and Fiction in Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star’. Working Papers on English Studies 12 (2005): 171–86. Martín-Salván, Paula. ‘ “A Language Not Quite of This World”: Transcendence and Counter-linguistic Turns in Don DeLillo’s Fiction’. Babel-Afial 18 (2009): 71–92. Martín-Salván, Paula. ‘ “The Writer at the Far Margin”: The Rhetorics of Artistic Ethics in Don DeLillo’s Novels’. EJAS: European Journal of American Studies 2, no. 1 (2007). Mauro, Aaron. ‘The Languishing of the Falling Man: Don DeLillo and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Photographic History of 9/11’. Modern Fiction Studies 57, no. 3 (2011): 584–606. McCann, Sean. ‘Training and Vision: Roth, DeLillo, Banks, Peck, and the Postmodern Aesthetics of Vocation’. Twentieth Century Literature 53, no. 3 (2007): 298–326. McClure, John A. ‘Postmodern/Post-Secular: Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality’. Modern Fiction Studies 41, no. 1 (1995): 141–63. McCormick, Casey J. ‘Toward a Postsecular “Fellowship of Deep Belief”: Sister Edgar’s Techno-spiritual Quest in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54, no. 1 (2013): 96–107. McDonald, Brian J. ‘ “Nothing You Can Believe Is Not Coming True”: Don DeLillo’s Underworld and the End of the Cold War Gothic’. Gothic Studies 10, no. 2 (2008): 94–109. McGowan, Todd. ‘The Obsolescence of Mystery and the Accumulation of Waste in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46, no. 2 (2005): 123–45. Melnyczuk, Askold. ‘Shadowboxing: The Falling Trees, The Burning Forest’. Agni 71 (2010): 209–14. Merola, Nicole M. ‘Cosmopolis: Don DeLillo’s Melancholy Political Ecology’. American Literature 84, no. 4 (2012): 827–53. Messmer, Michael W. ‘ “Thinking It Through Completely”: The Interpretation of Nuclear Culture’. Centennial Review 23, no. 4 (1988): 397–413. Mexal, Stephen J. ‘Spectacularspectacular! Underworld and the Production of Terror’. Studies in the Novel 36, no. 3 (2004): 318–35. Michael, Magali Cornier. ‘The Political Paradox within Don DeLillo’s Libra’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 35, no. 3 (1994): 146–56.

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Millard, Bill. ‘The Fable of the Ants: Myopic Interactions in DeLillo’s Libra’. Postmodern Culture 4, no. 2 (January 1994). Mohr, Hans Ulrich. ‘DeLillo’s Underworld: Cold War History and Systemic Patterns’. European Journal of English Studies 5, no. 3 (2001): 349–65. Moran, Joe. ‘Don DeLillo and the Myth of the Author-Recluse’. Journal of American Studies 34, no. 1 (2000): 137–52. Moraru, Christian. ‘Consuming Narratives: Don DeLillo and the “Lethal” Reading’. Journal of Narrative Technique 27, no. 2 (1997): 190–206. Morley, Catherine. ‘Don DeLillo’s Transatlantic Dialogue with Sergei Eisenstein’. Journal of American Studies 40, no. 1 (2006): 17–34. Morley, Catherine. ‘Excavating Underworld, Disinterring Ulysses: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with James Joyce’. Comparative American Studies 4, no. 2 (2006): 175–96. Morris, Matthew J. ‘Murdering Words: Language in Action in Don DeLillo’s The Names’. Contemporary Literature 30 (1989): 113–27. Morris, David B. ‘Environment: The White Noise of Health’. Literature and Medicine 15, no. 1 (1996): 1–15. Mott, Christopher M. ‘Libra and the Subject of History’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 35, no. 3 (1994): 131–45. Mottram, Eric. ‘The Lethal Believer and the Lethal Society: Don DeLillo’s Investigation of Leader and Crowd’. Talus 9 (1997): 6–29. Mraovic-O’Hare, Damjana. ‘The Beautiful, Horrifying Past: Nostalgia and Apocalypse in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Criticism 53, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 213–39. Muirhead, Marion. ‘Deft Acceleration: The Occult Geometry of Time in White Noise’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 402–15. Mullin, Matthew. ‘Objects & Outliers: Narrative Community in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 51, no. 3 (2010): 276–92. Mutter, Matthew. ‘ “Things That Happen and What We Say about Them”: Speaking the Ordinary in DeLillo’s The Names’. Twentieth Century Literature 53, no. 4 (2007): 488–517. Naas, Michael. ‘House Organs: The Strange Case of the Body Artist and Mr. Tuttle’. Oxford Literary Review 30, no. 1 (2008): 87–108. Nagano, Yoshihiro. ‘Inside the Dream of the Warfare State: Mass and Massive Fantasies in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 51, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 241–56. Naydan, Liliana M. ‘Apocalyptic Cycles in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 23, no. 2 (2012): 179–201. Naydan, Lilian M. ‘Media Violence, Catholic Mystery, and Counterfundamentalism: A Post-9/11 Rhetoric of Flexibility in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega’. Critique: Sttudies in Contemporary Fiction 56, no. 1 (2015): 94–107. Nel, Philip. ‘Amazons in the Underworld: Gender, the Body, and Power in the Novels of Don DeLillo’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42, no. 4 (2001): 416–36. Nel, Philip. ‘Don DeLillo’s Return to Form: The Modernist Poetics of The Body Artist’. Contemporary Literature 43, no. 4 (2002): 736–59.

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Nel, Philip. ‘ “A Small Incisive Shock”: Modern Forms, Postmodern Politics, and the Role of the Avant-Garde in Underworld’. Modern Fiction Studies 45, no. 3 (1999): 724–52. Noble, Stuart. ‘Don DeLillo and Society’s Reorientation to Time and Space: An Interpretation of Cosmopolis’. aspeers 1 (2008): 57–70. Noland, William. ‘The Image World of Mao II’. South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 1 (2004): 5–19. Noon, David. ‘The Triumph of Death: National Security and Imperial Erasures in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Canadian Review of American Studies 37, no. 1 (2007): 83–110. Noya, José Liste. ‘Naming the Secret: Don DeLillo’s Libra’. Contemporary Literature 45, no. 2 (2004): 239–75. O’Donnell, Patrick. ‘Engendering Paranoia in Contemporary Narrative’. Boundary 2: An International Journal on Literature and Culture 19 (1992): 181–204. Orr, Leonard. ‘Palomar and Gladney: Calvino and DeLillo Play with the Dialectics of Subject/Object Relationships’. Italian Culture 9 (1991): 331–42. Oriard, Michael. ‘Don DeLillo’s Search for Walden Pond’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 20, no. 1 (1978): 5–24. Osteen, Mark. ‘Extraordinary Renditions: DeLillo’s Point Omega and Hitchcock’s Psycho’. Clues: A Journal of Detection 31, no. 1 (2013): 103–13. Osteen, Mark. ‘Echo Chamber: Undertaking The Body Artist’. Studies in the Novel 37, no. 1 (2005): 64–81. Osteen, Mark. ‘The Currency of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55, no. 3 (2014): 291–304. Packer, Matthew J. ‘ “At the Dead Center of Things” in Don DeLillo’s White Noise: Mimesis, Violence, and Religious Awe’. Modern Fiction Studies 51, no. 3 (2005): 648–66. Parish, Mary J. ‘9/11 and the Limitations of the Man’s Man Construction of Masculinity in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 53, no. 3 (2012): 185–200. Parrish, Timothy L. ‘From Hoover’s FBI to Eisenstein’s Unterwelt: DeLillo Directs the Postmodern Novel’. Modern Fiction Studies 45, no. 3 (1999): 696–723. Parrish, Timothy L. ‘The Lesson of History: Don DeLillo’s Texas Schoolbook, Libra’. Clio 30, no. 1 (2000): 1–23. Pastore, Judith Laurence. ‘Marriage American Style: Don DeLillo’s Domestic Satire’. Voices in Italian Americana 1, no. 2 (1990): 1–19. Pastore, Judith Laurence. ‘Pirandello’s Influence on American Writers: Don DeLillo’s The Day Room’. Italian Culture 8 (1990): 431–47. Petersen, Per Serritslev. ‘Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the Dialectics of Complexity and Simplicity in Postmodern American Philosophy and Culture’. American Studies in Scandinavia 37, no. 2 (2005): 70–84. Peyser, Thomas. ‘Globalization in America: The Case of Don DeLillo’s White Noise’. Clio 25 (1996): 255–71. Pincott, Jennifer. ‘The Inner Workings: Technoscience, Self, and Society in DeLillo’s Underworld.’ Undercurrents 7 (1999). Available at: http://web.archive. org/web/20030202075234/http://darkwing.uoregon.edu:80/~ucurrent/uc7/7pin.html. Pirnajmuddin, Hossein, and Abbassali Borhan. ‘Postmodern Orientalized Terrorism: Don DeLillo’s The Names’. The Journal of Teaching Language Skills 3, no. 2 (2011): 58–84.

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Polatinsky, Stefan, and Karen Scherzinger. ‘Dying Without Death: Temporality, Writing and Survival in Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54, no. 2 (2013): 124–34. Radford, Andrew. ‘Confronting the Chaos Theory of History in DeLillo’s Libra’. Midwest Quarterly 47, no. 3 (2006): 224–43. 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): 194–213. Reeve, N. H., and Richard Kerridge. ‘Toxic Events: Postmodernism and DeLillo’s White Noise’. Cambridge Quarterly 23, no. 4 (1994): 303–23. Regnier, Paul. ‘Writing from the Center and from the Periphery of the Culture: Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo’. Mailer Review 7, no. 1 (2013): 260–71. Rettberg, Scott. ‘American Simulacra: Don DeLillo’s Fiction in Light of Postmodernism’. Undercurrents 7 (1999). Available at: http://web.archive.org/ web/20030306205015/http://darkwing.uoregon.edu:80/~ucurrent/uc7/7-rett.html. Rizza, Michael James. ‘The Dislocation of Agency in Don DeLillo’s Libra’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 49, no. 2 (2008): 171–84. Robinson, Sally. ‘Shopping for the Real: Gender and Consumption in the Critical Reception of DeLillo’s White Noise’. Postmodern Culture 23, no. 2 (2013). Rosen, Elizabeth. ‘Lenny Bruce and His Nuclear Shadow Marvin Lundy: Don DeLillo’s Apocalyptists Extraordinaires’. Journal of American Studies 40, no. 1 (2006): 97–112. Rowe, John Carlos. “Mao II and the War on Terrorism”. South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 1 (2004): 21–43. Rozelle, Lee. ‘Resurveying DeLillo’s “White Space on the Map”: Liminiality and Communitas in Underworld’. Studies in the Novel 42, no. 4 (2010): 443–52. Russo, John Paul. ‘DeLillo: Italian American Catholic Writer’. Altreitalie 25, no. 4 (2002): 4–29. Ruthrof, Horst. ‘Narrative and the Digital: On the Syntax of the Postmodern’. AUMLA 74 (1990): 185–200. Saltzman, Arthur M. ‘The Figure in the Static: White Noise’. Modern Fiction Studies 40, no. 4 (1994): 807–26. Salyer, Gregory. ‘Myth, Magic, and Dread: Reading Culture Religiously’. Literature & Theology: An International Journal of Theory, Criticism and Culture 9, no. 3 (1995): 261–77. Sarmento, Clara. ‘The Angel in a Country of Last Things. DeLillo, Auster and the Post-Human Landscape’. Arcadia International Journal for Literary Studies 41, no. 1 (2006): 147–59. Savvas, Theophilus. ‘Don DeLillo’s “World Inside the World”: Libra and Latent History’. European Journal of American Culture 29, no. 1 (2010): 19–33. Scanlan, Margaret. ‘Writers among the Terrorists: Don DeLillo’s Mao II and the Rushdie Affair’. Modern Fiction Studies 40, no. 2 (1994): 229–52. Scherzinger, Karen. ‘ “A Deep Fold in the Grain of Things”: Mourning in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’. Scrutiny 2 15, no. 2 (2010): 17–30. Schneck, Peter. ‘ “To See Things before Other People See Them”: Don DeLillo’s Visual Poetics’. Amerikastudien/American Studies 52, no. 1 (2007): 103–20. Schlosser, Joel Alden. ‘The Polis Artist: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the Politics of Literature’. Theory & Event 19, no. 1 (2016).

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Shonkwiler, Alison. ‘Don DeLillo’s Financial Sublime’. Contemporary Literature 51, no. 2 (2010): 246–82. Shipe, Matthew. ‘War as Haiku: The Politics of Don DeLillo’s Late Style’. Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 4, no. 2 (2016). Available at: www.pynchon.net/ articles/10.16995/orbit.102/. Simon, Roger I. ‘Altering the “Inner Life of the Culture”: Monstrous Memory and the Persistence of 9/11’. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 30, no. 3 (2008): 352–74. Simmons, Ryan. ‘What Is a Terrorist? Contemporary Authorship, the Unabomber, and DeLillo’s Mao II’. Modern Fiction Studies 45, no. 3 (1999): 675–95. Smith, Aaron. ‘Poetic Justice, Symmetry, and the Problem of the Postmodern in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis’. GRAAT 7 (2010): 238–52. Smith, Rachel. ‘Grief Time: The Crisis of Narrative in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist’. Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics 18 (2006): 99–110. Spahr, Clemens. ‘Prolonged Suspension: Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, and the Literary Imagination after 9/11’. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45, no. 2 (2012): 221–37. Spencer, Nicholas. ‘Beyond the Mutations of Media and Military Technologies in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Arizona Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2002): 89–112. Stormbeck, Andrew. ‘The Limousine and Technicity in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis’. Modern Fiction Studies 63, no. 1 (2017): 146–67. Tanner, Tony. ‘Afterthoughts on Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Raritan 17, no. 4 (1998): 48–71. Taylor, Anya. ‘Words, War, and Meditation in Don DeLillo’s End Zone’. International Fiction Review 4 (1977): 68–70. Thurgar-Dawson, Chris. ‘Fated Landscape: Phoropoetic practise in DeLillo’s Underworld’. Anglia 126, no. 2 (2008): 363–79. Thomas, Glen. ‘History, Biography, and Narrative in Don DeLillo’s Libra’. Twentieth Century Literature 43, no. 1 (1997): 107–24. Thornton, Z. Bart. ‘Linguistic Disenchantment and Architectural Solace in DeLillo and Artaud’. Mosaic 30, no. 1 (1997): 97–112. Thurschwell, Adam. ‘Writing and Terror: Don DeLillo on the Task of Literature after 9/11’. Law & Literature 19, no. 2 (2007): 277–302. Tufail, Burhan. ‘Moholes and Metaphysics: Notes on Ratner’s Star and A Brief History of Time’. Imprimatur 1, no. 1 (1995): 46–54. Valletta, Clement. ‘A “Christian Dispersion” in Don DeLillo’s The Names’. Christianity and Literature 47, no. 4 (1998): 403–25. Valentino, Russell Scott. ‘From Virtue to Virtual: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the Corruption of the Absent Body’. Modern Fiction Studies 53, no. 1 (2007): 140–62. Varsava, Jerry A. ‘ “The ‘Saturated Self”: Don DeLillo on the Problem of Rogue Capitalism’. Contemporary Literature 46, no. 1 (2005): 78–107. Velcic, Vlatka. ‘Reshaping Ideologies: Leftists as Terrorists/Terrorists as Leftists in DeLillo’s Novels’. Studies in the Novel 36, no. 3 (2004): 405–18. Vogel, Shane. ‘By the Light of What Comes After: Eventologies of the Ordinary’. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19, no. 2 (2009): 247–60. Wacker, Norman. ‘Mass Culture/Mass Novel: The Representational Politics of Don DeLillo’s Libra’. Works and Days 8 (1990): 67–87. Wakui, Takashi. ‘Abstract Animation, Conceptual Art, and Don DeLillo’s Underworld: Collectibles and Non-Collectibles in Art’. Studies in Language and Culture 22, no. 2 (2001): 263–77.

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Walker, Joseph S. ‘A Kink in the System: Terrorism and the Comic Mystery Novel’. Studies in the Novel 36, no. 3 (2004): 336–51. Walker, Joseph S. ‘Criminality, the Real, and the Story of America: The Case of Don DeLillo’. Centennial Review 43, no. 3 (1999): 433–66. Wallace, Molly. ‘ “Venerated Emblems”: DeLillo’s Underworld and the History-Commodity’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42, no. 4 (2001): 367–83. Webb, Jen. ‘Fiction and Testimony in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’. Life Writing 8, no. 1 (2011): 51–65. Weekes, Karen, ‘Consuming and Dying: Meaning and the Marketplace in Don DeLillo’s White Noise’. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 18, no. 4 (2007): 285–302. Wegner, Phillip E. ‘October 3, 1951 to September 11, 2001: Periodizing the Cold War in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Amerikastudien/American Studies 49, no. 1 (2004): 51–64. Whalan, Mark. ‘The Literary Detective in Postmodernity’. Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 4, no. 9 (1998): 119–33. Whitebrook, Maureen. ‘Reading Don DeLillo’s Mao II as a Commentary on Twentieth-Century Politics’. European Legacy: Toward New Paradigm 6, no. 6 (2001): 763–69. Wilcox, Leonard. ‘Baudrillard, DeLillo’s White Noise, and the End of Heroic Narrative’. Contemporary Literature 32, no. 3 (1991): 346–65. Wilcox, Leonard. ‘Don DeLillo’s Libra: History as Text, History as Trauma’. Rethinking History 9, no. 2/3 (2005): 337–53. Wilcox, Leonard. ‘Don DeLillo’s Underworld and the Return of the Real’. Contemporary Literature 43, no. 1 (2002): 120–37. Wilcox, Leonard. ‘Terrorism and Art: Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Jean Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism’. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 39, no. 2 (2006): 89–105. Willman, Skip. ‘Art after Dealey Plaza: DeLillo’s Libra’. Modern Fiction Studies 45, no. 3 (1999): 621–40. Willman, Skip. ‘Reframing “Official Memory”: Don DeLillo’s Libra and the House Select Committee on Assassinations’. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 71, no. 3. (2015): 139–68. Willman, Skip. ‘Traversing the Fantasies of the JFK Assassination: Conspiracy and Contingency in Don DeLillo’s Libra’. Contemporary Literature 39, no. 3 (1998): 405–33. Wolcott, James. ‘Blasts from the Past’. New Criterion 16, no. 4 (1997): 65–70. Yehnert, Curtis A. ‘ “Like Some Endless Sky Waking Inside”: Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42, no. 4 (2001): 357–66. Ziegler, Robert. ‘Mourning and Creation in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist’. Notes on Contemporary Literature 35, no. 3 (2005): 7–10. Zimmerman, Lee. ‘Public and Potential Space: Winnicott, Ellison, and DeLillo’. Centennial Review 43, no. 3 (1999): 565–74. Zinman, Toby Silverman. ‘Gone Fission: The Holocaustic Wit of Don DeLillo’. Modern Drama 34, no. 1 (1991): 75–87. Zubeck, Jacqueline A. ‘ “The Surge and Pelt of Daily Life”: Rediscovery of the Prosaic in Don DeLillo’s The Names’. LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 18, no. 4 (2007): 353–76.

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Websites Don DeLillo’s America, edited by Curt Gardner. www.perival.com The Don DeLillo Society, edited by Karim Dannoune. https://delillosociety. wordpress.com/bibliography/literary-criticism/