Don DeLillo, American Original

Drugs, Weapons, Erotica, and Other Literary Contraband

Michael Naas

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501361814
• eBook ISBN: 9781501361838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Don DeLillo, American Original is a startlingly original and provocative reinterpretation of one of the most important novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Adopting a direct approach that steers clear of debates with secondary literature and covering the full arc of Don DeLillo's career from A to Z – Americana (1971) to Zero K (2016) – Michael Naas shows that the extraordinary power, authority, insight, and inventiveness of DeLillo's fiction are the result of the way it traffics everywhere in contraband goods and narratives, in doubleness or duplicity of every kind, in multiple voices, story lines, times, places, and media that at once interrupt and complement one another. This is a book that invites skimming and dipping, structured into easily digestible sections on everything from weapons and drugs to erotica, nuclear waste, and secret societies, each preceded by humorous and incisive epigraphs from DeLillo's novels. Michael Naas reads DeLillo's fiction as a way of life or as equipment for living, rather than as a critical puzzle to be solved – and thereby opens up new horizons for thinking about why literature matters in the 21st century.

1

Controlled and Uncontrolled Substances

The customs men checked the cab for contraband and breezed through our bags and we were in our rented car in a matter of minutes.

U 589

Drugs

Thingness. If you’re interested in things, either take dope or travel to an ancient country.

GJ 62

Hashish. Interesting, interesting word. Arabic. It’s the source of the word assassin.

L 342

You know what’s in my medicine chest. What secrets are left?

WN 62

In publishing a work with the proper name “Don DeLillo” coupled with “drugs,” “weapons,” “erotica,” and, finally, “contraband” in its title, it was not at all my intention to try to tip off the TSA or Homeland Security or customs agents anywhere else in the world to anything Don DeLillo himself, Don DeLillo the author, may have hidden on his person or put in his luggage, whether in the bags he has checked in or those he has tried to fit under the seat in front of him or in the overhead compartment above. I was not trying to suggest that he or anyone associated with him is, will be, or ever should be placed on some no-fly list for smuggling illegal goods of any kind. In speaking of contraband, I was simply trying to encapsulate in a single and no doubt slightly illegitimate word DeLillo’s unique narrative style or technique, his genius for smuggling into prose incongruous if not illicit items that contribute to both the poignancy and power of his work and its inimitable inventiveness and infectious humor.

In speaking of contraband, then, I was not referring to anything DeLillo or his characters could have gotten in trouble for by smuggling across state lines or international borders, things like pot, the kind Gary Harkness gets stoned on while playing football in End Zone (EZ 172; see U 397, 487)—not a good idea, by the way—or hashish, which Bucky Wunderlick has a hankering for in Great Jones Street (GJ 137) or that David Ferrie in Libra smokes with Lee Harvey Oswald one night as he is trying to get into Oswald’s head and groom him for the assassination of JFK (L 331–332), or the microdot that appears later in Great Jones Street (GJ 155), or the drug Novo that is all the rage during “The Last Techno-Rave” in Cosmopolis (C 125), or, in Ratner’s Star, Robert Hopper Softly’s assortment of “stimulants, relaxants, euphoriants, deliriants, sedative-hypnotics, local anesthetics and animal tranquilizers” (RS 327) or his “most extreme deliriant,” which he breaks out during a solar eclipse, “a sudsy composite of lighter fluid, paint thinner, airplane glue, nail polish remover and several types of aerosol propellant” (RS 436). Not any of those, then, and not “DMT, the quick-acting chemical superhigh devised by NASA to get us to the moon and back whether we want to go or not” (U 624), or crack cocaine, “supposedly the cravingest form of substance abuse” (U 268; see 264), or the drug that Matt Shay smokes one night with friends and colleagues involved in weapons research, “either a rogue strain of hashish or standard stuff laced with some psychotomimetic agent” (U 421; see 465), a drug that causes him to sit in a chair “studying someone’s shoe” (U 422; see 465) and that makes him unable, despite his close study, to figure out whose foot the shoe—and shoes, as we will see, will be just as revealing as drugs in DeLillo—was on.

And I was especially not talking about heroin (see WN 60), which is all over Underworld, whether under the name “smack” (U 462), which dopster comic Lenny Bruce says “comes from the Yiddish shmek. … Dig it, he’s got a two hundred dollar shmek habit” (U 594), or the brand name “Wall Street” (U 231), or “doojee,” “one of the ninety-nine names of heroin” (U 502)—like “the ninety-nine names of God” in The Names (N 272)—whether that heroin is sucked through a straw (U 258), like Marian Shay, who feels pretty “lazy-daisy, you know” (U 261), afterward, or shot up with a needle, a high that comes with “the lure of critical risk, the little love bite of that dragonfly dagger” (U 242), the kind that soldiers got hooked on in Vietnam (U 462), or the kind that, already back in the 1950s, at once attracted and repelled Nick Shay, who was “scared of needles and drugs” (U 502) but fascinated when George the Waiter “reached into the drawer and came out with a box of kitchen matches and a spoon” and “a hypodermic needle” (U 725–726), the same George whom Nick finds sitting in the same shabby basement room on the day that would forever change both of their lives.

No, I wasn’t talking about any of those illegal or non FDA-approved drugs or even about the use and abuse of prescription medications, which DeLillo also packs his novels with, all those drugs arranged, as they are described in Falling Man, in their little “mystic wheel, the ritualistic design of the hours and days in tablets and capsules, in colors, shapes and numbers” (FM 48), drugs that require the daily rituals of counting and dividing, coding and classifying, medications with “brand names … like science-fiction gods” (M 184; see 122–123), Eric Packer’s “sedatives and hypnotics” for insomnia and who knows what else (C 6) or Bill Gray’s “medications for ailments unknown to science” (M 52), or the three drugs for ailments well known to science that Albert Bronzini in Underworld sets out “next to his plate on the table, lined up for consumption. His heart pill, his fart pill and his liver pill” (U 230), or Jack Ruby’s Predulin, the “obesity drug” (L 251, 351) he is popping obsessively in the days leading up to his murder of Oswald. And then there is, of course, in White Noise, the contrast—the contrabanding, to be more precise—between Jack Gladney’s everyday medications, “blood pressure pills, stress pills, allergy pills, eye drops, aspirin. Run of the mill” (WN 62), and the new psychotropic his wife Babette is taking in the latest rogue clinical study by Big Pharma, the “super experimental and top secret drug, code-name Dylar,” a drug that promises to cure our most ancient and deep-rooted fear, our fear of death (WN 193; see 62).

I wasn’t talking about any of that, and not even about the language-inhibiting super-drug concocted by the Happy Valley Commune in Great Jones Street, an “extreme substance” that “attacks a particular region in the left hemisphere of the brain. … the verbal hemisphere,” “where the words are kept” (GJ 171, 228), even though, as we will see, language, words, will be central to the kind of contraband I wish to highlight here. So not that and not even the little tab of acid that, in Americana, Bobby Brand—the first figure of a writer in DeLillo, and that is perhaps not a coincidence, though he is a failed writer, a fake writer, a contrabrand writer—gives to David Bell, that “ticket to unapproachable regions” that allows the twenty-eight-year-old Bell to catch sight of himself some thirty years later, “at the age of sixty, mangled larvae clinging to [his] bleak flesh” (A 114).

The contraband I wish to talk about is different than, though not unrelated to, all these substances that promise some kind of communion or forgetting, some sort of death or the forgetting of death, or else some insight into the nature of things. As someone says in Great Jones Street, “If you’re interested in reading about things, you might as well take a little sniffy now and again. In the long run that’s where thingness lies” (GJ 61). It’s where thingness lies, but perhaps also, and especially, where wordness lies, or, better still, the relationship, the double-banded or contrabanded relationship, as we will see, between words and things.

Alcohol

Tod Morgan handed me what he called a real drink. It was scotch and water. It made me feel very warm and I didn’t like the taste much. But I seemed to be having a good time.

A 188

I’m at that certain stage in a night of drinking and talking when I see things clearly through a small opening, a window in space. I know things. I know what we’re going to say before we say it.

N 226

The important thing is to sit and wait, to be patient. The other important thing is not to vomit. You see a man every so often standing over a curbstone vomiting. He did not want to think of himself as that kind of man.

U 709–710

In speaking of contraband, then, I wasn’t referring to any of DeLillo’s drugs of choice, whether illegal, legal, or inventions of another kind, and I wasn’t referring to drinking either, which is technically not contraband, at least not any more in the United States, but is also supposed to produce an altered or paranormal or counter-normal state and has always been, at least in American letters, part of the myth or the mystique of the writer. As Bill Gray says to his editor in Mao II, “Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid” (M 122). That kind of literature may well be a thing of the past, as Gray suggests, but writers still drink and still write about drinking, and DeLillo is no exception, from the opening party in Americana to the drunken orgy of its closing pages, with David Bell’s sloppy overindulgence at the Drake Hotel in Chicago sandwiched somewhere in between (A 265), and from the uproarious dormitory beer party in End Zone to Lyle with Rosemary in a series of New York bars in Players (P 58, 74) or Selvy with Moll in “Frankie’s Tropical Bar” in Running Dog (RD 62), or, in the same novel, Selvy alone with Jim Beam in an Irish bar on Eighth Avenue (RD 115), or Nick Shay in Underworld not in the Red Rose or the White Rose or the Blarney Stone but, wouldn’t you know it, back in Frankie’s Tropical Bar, on the Lower East Side, where he says he’ll drink whatever his old grammar school friend Jerry is drinking, which turns out to be a stinger, just before the lights go out on November 9, 1965 (U 617–623). Later in the novel, we find the same Nick drinking “vodka tonics” among managers at a business conference (U 281) and then, by the very end, it’s the mid-1990s, “aged grappa” while listening to jazz at home in Phoenix (U 810), because these things tend to change over time.

But that is really just a taste of the many varieties of alcohol in Underworld alone, everything from potato vodka, brandy, tequila, Tanqueray martinis, and homemade wine from the Bronx (U 115, 357, 768; see 224, 484, 473) to Seagram’s “in a short glass with a single ice cube” (U 356; see 649) and “Old Mr. Boston, a rye whiskey unknown to the Cabots and the Lodges” (U 708). For each drink there is, of course, a profile and an attitude, the Madison Avenue advertising type, for example, who drinks “gibsons straight up” and says “thanks much” (U 527) or who “inhales a Cutty on the rocks” before jumping on “the last express to Westport” (U 534–535; see N 261, V 34).

Or just in Libra, there’s Laurence Parmenter’s Beefeater martini on a flight from Dallas back to Washington after meeting with former CIA officials planning an attempt on the life of President Kennedy (L 30), David Ferrie’s scotch and soda with mafia boss Carmine Latta (L 173), Wayne Elko in Little Havana in Miami, ready to train for the assassination of JFK but stopping off first for a “cerveza Schlitz” (L 176)—not his smartest move—and Guy Banister in New Orleans with his Early Times™ bourbon (L 61), or Oswald himself in a Moscow hospital, recovering from a feeble suicide attempt by drinking “vodka with cucumber bits” (L 153). Or in Amazons, not to be undone, the generous servings of Scotch (AZ 9, 58, 260, 275), Seagram’s V.O. (AZ 212), Moët Champagne (AZ 319), red wine in gallon jugs (AZ 275), those drinks you get in Polynesian restaurants that are “so devastating the management limits the number you can order” (AZ 41), and those Tanqueray martinis again (AZ 170, 228, 236). Amazons also features a couple of truly novel forms of alcohol delivery, such as “a water pistol full of ouzo” (AZ 269) and, elderly take note, a hollow cane that can be filled with scotch and soda and emptied over the course of a long walk through the streets of Manhattan: “We finished the cane” (AZ 378).

There’s thus sedentary drinking and then drinking on the run, drinking on the road—Eric Packer in Cosmopolis knocking back vodkas in his all-day limo ride across Manhattan (C 89)—even bicoastal or comparative drinking, if you will allow the expression, Jackie Gleason ordering an umpteenth beer for himself, Frank Sinatra, Toots Shor, and J. Edgar Hoover (who usually prefers “a tumbler of scotch” (U 556)) at the famous Giants-Dodgers game in 1951 at the Polo Grounds in New York (U 28, 34) and then, decades later, Nick Shay and his colleagues ordering rounds of sour mash whiskey—way more shi shi than beer—at Dodger Stadium in LA (U 91–92, 99). And then there’s intercontinental drinking, James Axton in The Names drinking arak in Jerusalem (N 150), ouzo or red wine on the Greek island of Kouros (N 74), and another American, maybe CIA, maybe not, “inhaling short Scotches” (N 261 V 34) in Athens, or Bill Gray from Mao II in Cyprus, after drinking Metaxa—“a medicine dating nobly to the nineteenth century” (M 196)—unable to recall how he got back to his hotel (M 211–212), or else, in Underworld, Nick and his colleague Brian Glassic sharing a bottle of Chivas Regal on their way to Kazakhstan, after all the vodka and warm beer during their layover in Semipalatinsk (U 789, 795, 799).

That’s a decent amount of drinking, to be sure, though it could be worse. Indeed, there are American writers where it’s a lot worse (think Hemingway, Kerouac, or Mailer), but there’s still a lot of drinking, almost always related, and there should be no surprise here, to a kind of self-destructive, suicidal drive that is not unrelated to contraband. It could be worse, I say, but only a man who knows his drink could have concocted this sentence about a late-night glass of vodka and orange juice, commonly known as a screwdriver, in Point Omega: “The drink was at that stage in the life of a drink when you take the last bland sip and fade into rueful introspection, somewhere between self-pity and self-accusation” (PO 30–31). One would do well to keep an eye on all these alcohols in DeLillo, but also on that orange juice, which, in Underworld, will be not only a life-giving liquid but the ultimate contraband substance.

Erotica and Stolen Art

Do you want to read about Etruscan slave girls, Georgian rakes? I think we ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface: Don DeLillo’s Contraband: Taking Stock, from Americana to Zero K
• 1 Controlled and Uncontrolled Substances
• 2 Underworlds and Undercurrents
• 3 Counterpoints and Counternarratives
• 4 Media and Mediatization
• 5 Arts of Duplicity
• 6 Double Takes
• 7 Writing in Tongues
• 8 Words for Words
• Countersignature
• Acknowledgments
• Imprint