Don DeLillo

The Possibility of Fiction

Peter Boxall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134391059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

One of the few available books of criticism on the topic, this monograph presents the fullest account to date of Don DeLillo's writing, situating his oeuvre within a wider analysis of the condition of contemporary fiction, and dealing with his entire work in relation to contemporary political and economic concerns for the fist time.

Providing a lucid and nuanced reading of DeLillo's ambivalent engagement with American and European culture, as well as with modernism and postmodernism, and globalization and terrorism, this fascinating volume interrogates the critical and aesthetic capacities of fiction in what is an age of global capitalism and US cultural imperialism.

Part I
The 1970s

Figure 1 The self-immolation of Quang Duc. Photograph by Malcolm Browne.

1 Americana

Americana, End Zone, Great Jones Street

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.

John F. Kennedy, June 10, 1963¹

Boosh, boosh, boosh. Thwack, thwack.

Don DeLillo, End Zone²

Silent with answers: early DeLillo and the canon

It is a feature of the process of canonisation that, at a certain point, the word ‘early’ is introduced to bracket a number of works by the author who is being canonised. So, as DeLillo enters the academic marketplace as a major contemporary writer in the wake of White Noise, critics turn to a number of his novels and suggest that they have been written by ‘early DeLillo’. Which novels are placed in this bracket depends upon how the emerging oeuvre is divided up. Perhaps the six novels up to and including Running Dog, all written during the 1970s, might be thought of as his early period. Then we might hazard that the string of novels written through the 1980s and the 1990s, and which culminate in Underworld, could be thought of as his middle period. Perhaps, in this scenario, The Body Artist, first published in 2001, might be thought of as the introduction to a late DeLillo, a DeLillo whose boundaries we have yet to imagine, and who addresses himself to a century and a millennium which remains so far unrevealed to us.

This kind of bracketing, as I have suggested, is a feature of canonisation, and is difficult to avoid as a critical industry grows up around any cultural phenomenon. Indeed, this book itself is partly structured by the fantasy of a completed oeuvre, which yields itself up to such demarcations. The parts of the book correspond to the decades in which DeLillo has been writing, as his work wheels its way into focus and clarity, becoming, over this time, a ‘body’ of texts which offers us, in turn, a poetic articulation of the decades that have produced it. History and DeLillo move forward together, falling into chapter sized chunks as they do so. Pleasing and tempting as such a projection of textual and authorial becoming is, however, it is clearly fantastic, and, like all fantasies, to be enjoyed with a certain amount of scepticism. Early DeLillo wasn’t early DeLillo when he was coming into being as such, he was now DeLillo, and in the gap between early and now many compromises can be made, many falsehoods welcomed for their power to illuminate. The descriptor ‘early’, in this respect, contains a degree of untruth. In servicing this untruth, in wresting from it the new truth of the canonical DeLillo, the edges of the novels are chiselled away by all those readers who sculpt the contours of the oeuvre. For Neil Isaacs, for example, Americana can be read only as a precursor to a later DeLillo that we can more readily recognise as DeLillo. The novel is a kind of clearing house, in which DeLillo stores material that ‘could be put to better use in more carefully crafted, focused, structured work later on’.³ This moulding of the novels, to conform to the aesthetic and structural demands of the emerging body, leads to a kind of redrafting, in which what are effectively new works are retroactively produced. The early novels suffer the fate of Benjamin’s ‘beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off ’, and which is reduced to ‘nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one’s future must be hewn’.⁴ If this structural problem is present in the reception of all authors, then it is given an extra dimension if the author in question is still alive, and still writing. The body of work produced by a still living writer has an open end, a kind of uncauterisable wound, through which its blood and guts threaten to leak. It is only death and final cessation that guarantees the lasting contours of the body, that seals it off, and consigns it to a written history in which early is early and late is late. Imagining the territory and boundaries of an ‘early DeLillo’ requires us to plug up the wound, in order to keep the innards in position, and in doing so we pre-empt the death that forms the far horizon of the oeuvre. An incomplete body of work is inhabited by its unrealised possibilities, in the way that a life is inhabited by the death that it has not yet died. The canonisation of a living author tends to drive out those possibilities, and to drive out the immanent, unrealised death of the author by prematurely evoking it.

DeLillo’s first published novel Americana is structured around this problem. The narrative is divided, like Great Expectations or A la recherche du temps perdu, between narrator as character, and narrator as narrator. David Bell as character embarks on his furious Bildungsromanic journey across America, his religious, mythic, filmic pilgrimage to ‘explore America in the screaming night’ (A 10), to blast ‘through New Mexico in the velvet dawn’ (A 27). Meanwhile, David Bell the elder sits in the calm of a tropical island, wearing ‘white flannel trousers’ (A 348), watching the film in which his younger self records his Joycean journey westwards, and writing the appealingly clean and bulky manuscript in which the younger David’s frantic struggles are narrated. Where Great Expectations is structured around the eventual ethical and aesthetic convergence of narrator and character, however, DeLillo’s novel is more violently maimed by a hostile separation between the two, which the narrative is unable or unwilling to close. David Bell the recklessly failed TV executive and avant-garde filmmaker, driven by the dangers and the risks of an artistic enterprise that is uncompleted and uncompletable, looks forward to the complacent, beflannelled David Bell, with something like contempt. In a section of Bell’s film, in which Austin Wakely plays the part of David, an extremely uncomfortable encounter between the two is played out on the page and on the screen. The young Bell focuses his camera tightly on Wakely, and speaks an offscreen message to the later Bell, the Bell who is narrating the novel, and watching the film:

The year is 1999. You are looking at a newsreel of an earlier time. A man is standing in a room in America. It is you, David, more or less. What can the two of you say to each other? How can you empty out the intervening decades? . . . You barely remember the man you’re looking at. Ask him anything. He knows all the answers. That’s why he’s silent. He has come through time to answer your questions. He is standing still but moving. He is silent with answers. You have twenty seconds to ask the questions.

(A 309)

The confusions in this encounter are multiple and giddying, in a manner that is typical of DeLillo’s first novel. David speaks in his filmic incarnation to a later David, in 1999, who is yet to come. But David’s message to himself, his entire, week-long film, and his personal and aesthetic struggles, are all contained within the narrative that the later David has written. The unknown future to which the young David speaks, and into the vacuum of which he pours his confusions and convictions, is cycled back, through the structural loop that is fashioned here, into a known past, a written history, in which the young David’s hostility to his later incarnation is itself a projection. David as narrator is writing in 1999, so the young David’s evocation of himself at the turn of the millennium looks forward to the very future from which the older David is looking back, recounting and remembering. And the cycling movement of this relation between narrator and character is contained itself by the authorial frame provided by the ‘young’ DeLillo. If young David, at the dawn of the 1970s, is imagining, and being imagined by, an older David who stands at the threshold of the twenty-first century, then surely such an engagement with a future reception reaches out to DeLillo in 1971, himself the fledgling author of a loose-limbed and frantically blurred journey into the heart of America. And, if so, then the author that is fantasised from within the work itself is looking forward to himself as canonical DeLillo, saying ‘look what you left out, look what you can’t see from your white flannel, island perspective’. And ‘old’ DeLillo is looking back, from the end of his middle period, having just published Underworld, saying ‘yes, but I’ve imagined you, young DeLillo. You owe your shape and your very existence to me’.

Reading early DeLillo, then, involves reading through this confrontation between a canonical DeLillo, and a pre-canonical DeLillo who stands heavy with answers that have been silenced by the incorporation of the author into his own critical context. It requires us to follow the rhythm, played out in Americana, in which the novels are brought under the constraining and illuminating figure of a shaped and perfected oeuvre, whilst also resisting such a figure, casting themselves beyond readability, and beyond a critical literary history. It requires us to read with the spirit of Heidegger’s insistence that ‘the work belongs, as work, uniquely within the realm that is opened up by itself ’.⁵ The turn of the millennium, the phantasmal final vantage point from which the uncertainties of the novel are viewed, is a privileged moment in Americana. The novel travels not only into the centre of America, but also towards a millennial revelation, a moment projected in Revelations as the end of history. When this moment arrives, the gulf between past and future will be closed, as we are welcomed into the knowledge and power of a fully realised God. Late DeLillo and early DeLillo meet, at this summit of recorded time, in the spirit of a transcendent, holy DeLillo who knows no difference from himself. But such a moment of revelation is both dreaded and longed for in Americana, and in DeLillo more generally. The end of history offers the culmination at which possibility is both realised and extinguished. Approaching the early novels, from our own post-millennial vantage point, requires us to develop a form of reading that can gain access to this tidal movement in the works themselves, both towards and away from a moment of historical revelation, and of historical closure. As the jostling elements in DeLillo’s oeuvre start to fall into shapes that are produced by the process of his critical reception, the early novels require us to read in two directions. We have to gain access to the modes of resistance offered by the young David towards his older self, whilst recognising that both versions of David are ineluctably bound to each other by virtue of their sameness, which it is the function of history both to guarantee and to disavow. We have to read with the rolling, accelerating, accumulative movement towards fullness of being, whilst reading the continuing collapse of the novels into moments and pieces which resist the drive towards oneness, sameness, and monistic self-realisation.

American Bethlehem: art as redemption

The demand that we read in this way is produced, as I have suggested, by the process of canonisation, and by the novels’ own reflection on such a process. But the textual effects that spring from early DeLillo’s dialogue with his emerging critical contexts are not confined to issues of readership and canonicity. Rather, Americana’s engagement with the process of its own cultural production and reception produces an overarching frame through which the early novels can be read.

DeLillo’s first three novels, Americana, End Zone and Great Jones Street, are all centrally concerned with producing a portrait of America. Americana presents a selective encyclopaedia of American life, of geography, geopolitics and corporate culture. It struggles to evoke the sheer, sublime vastness of the country, repeating like a mantra the names of states – ‘Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona’ – until it is possible to ‘hear America singing’ (A 27). And onto the huge spaces that it evokes, the novel seeks to paint in an American cultural identity, forged out of Hollywood myths, advertising slogans, the popular, clichéd ephemera of American life. Similarly, End Zone reads America through the cultural discourse that surrounds American football and the myth of US military supremacy that grew up with the escalation of the cold war, and Great Jones Street offers us America through a sketch of commodified rock ’n’ roll superstardom. But all of the portraits of America that are found in the novels are filtered through the double movement that I have described, both towards and away from a historical becoming. The fate of a fully realised American identity in the novels is read through, and entangled with, their ambivalent bid to produce a stable authorial voice. There is no more a cultural or material artefact called America to be grasped in these novels, than there is an essential David Bell, or Don DeLillo. Rather, the millennial moment that is characterised as the end of history in Americana is cast as the eternally deferred moment in which the America that inhabits all of these novels might come fully into being. The novels are speeding towards the mythical moment at which Bell, DeLillo and America reach a point of religious becoming. They tell the story of the development of America as an incomplete project. The internal aesthetic logic of the novels points towards the completion of the project, the founding of America as a fully self-authored work – simultaneously the parent and offspring of itself. But whilst the novels accelerate towards this moment of apocalyptic American becoming, they also chart an opposite movement away from an overarching, pan-American identity. ‘America’ sucks the diverse material of American culture towards itself, to imagine itself as a founded and completely self-sufficient entity, but it also falls away from itself, breaking down into the various constituent parts from which America was forged. The novels are caught in a drive towards the production of America as an absolute global power, in which the materials that produce it are fully incorporated into an American identity that knows only itself. Like the Monadanom that features in the science fiction novel contained in End Zone, or Warren Beasley’s tapeworm that feeds on itself in Americana, the novels move towards the prospect of a culture that has absorbed entirely the history that has gone into its making, and become so fully itself that no time and no place can resist its centripetal pull. But held against this drive towards a global America is an insistent refusal of centralised power, and a tenacious attachment to the specific material and cultural histories that have produced America, and that are threatened with extinction within corporate American consciousness. As the young David Bell both resists and succumbs to the narrative sweep that cancels out his difference from his older self, so the America that is imagined in these early novels is both sucked into the vortex of a dematerialised, global capital, and strives to maintain its diverse cultural history, its roots in cultural spaces beyond the horizons of the nation state.

Of DeLillo’s early novels, it is perhaps Americana that deals most explicitly with this struggle between a self-authored corporate America, and the various cultural histories that have gone into its making. Despite the sense that Americana is a loose and ragged work, it is held together by a number of finely detailed and crafted repetitive networks, which overlap, resonate, and cross over in obedience to a complex, precise rhythm. It has many nodal points, many beginnings and endings, around which the narrative is strung and balanced. One of the most dominant of these structuring principles corresponds to the geographical shape of the USA itself. If Bell’s pilgrimage takes him into the heartland of America, the east and west coasts hold the novel in place like book ends. And in counterpoise to Bell’s movement from east to Midwest and back, the narrative is framed by two stories, told to Bell by his travelling companion Sullivan at the beginning and the end of the journey, stories which David Cowart calls the ‘twin centers’ of the novel’s ‘public meanings’.⁶ The first is anchored in the Midwest, in the South Dakota hills, and involves a character named ‘Black Knife’, a ‘wise old holy man of the Oglala Sioux’, who ‘was a hundred years old’ and ‘looked like the stump of an oak tree’ (A 117). The second takes place in the east, in the sweep of the Atlantic, in a yacht off the Maine coast.

Both of these stories conform to stereotypical American narratives. The first, the story of the wise old Sioux, is a formulaic construction of the native American as timeless, noble protector of old truths, a yarn about ‘the great golden West and the Indians and the big outdoor soul of America’ (A 117). The second is a ‘bedtime story’ (A 322) about a boat journey into becalmed waters, in which the archetypal fog comes down, and a great revelation is at hand. It is a ghost story in which Sullivan learns the dark, sordid truth of her Scotch-Irish ancestry. But despite the parodic nature of these stories, they have an edge and a darkness to them that resonates throughout the novel, and that provides a narrative which informs Bell’s journeying from New York, in search of the Arizona Navaho, and of his own childhood.

The story of Black Knife looks to a pre-colonial American landscape that is almost unimaginable from the corporate perspective shared by Bell and Sullivan. Speaking from his ‘shack located on a windy mountaintop’, Black Knife offers Sullivan a cautionary tale, born from the ‘wisdom of the old world, the culture we so badly lack’ (A 119). The great American project, he claims, involves the destruction of all old things, all the difference and diversity that is written in stone in the land, in favour of an artificial landscape, built out of ‘neon, fiber glass, Plexiglass, polyurethane, Mylar, Acrylite’, containing motels that are ‘identical in every detail’ (A 119). In this vision of a fully founded, megametropolitan America, ‘the coast of Maine would be indistinguishable from Des Moines, Iowa’ (A 119), and American culture would replicate itself in the identical guise of itself without any reference to a cultural truth outside of its shiny, fibre glass shell. Predicting DeLillo’s later satires on the decline of the university as a counter-ideological space, Black Knife’s story includes a vision of what will become of the university in his version of a self-replicating America. Tuition, Black Knife suggests, will take place in a sealed room, containing nothing but two televisions. On one television will be played a video of ‘the entire student body’ (numbering ‘at least five hundred thousand students’), on the other would be played the video of an instructor. When class begins at nine o’clock on Monday morning, ‘the videotape of the students would then watch the videotape of the instructors. Eventually the system could be refined so that there would be only one university in the whole country’ (A 119–120). In opposition to this dystopian vision of a fully self-referential, closed American culture, Black Knife offers the possibility of a wild western Amer...