Death, Time and Mortality in the Later Novels of Don DeLillo

Philipp Wolf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000587791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book offers the first systematic study of death in the later novels of Don DeLillo. It focuses on Underworld to The Silence, along with his 1984 novel White Noise, in which the fear of death dominates the protagonists most hauntingly. The study covers eight novels, which mark the development of one of the most philosophical and prestigious novelists writing in English.

Death, in its close relation to time, temporality and transience, has been an ongoing subject or motif in Don DeLillo's oeuvre. His later work is shot through with the cultural and sociopsychological symptoms and responses death elicits. His "reflection on dying" revolves around defensive mechanisms and destruction fantasies, immortalism and cryonics, covert and overt surrogates, consumerism and media, and the mortification of the body. His characters give themselves to mourning and are afflicted with psychosis, depression and the looming of emptiness.

Yet writing about death also means facing the ambiguity and failing representability of "death." The book considers DeLillo's use of language in which temporality and something like "death" may become manifest. It deals with the transfiguration of time and death into art, with apocalypse as a central and recurring subject, and, as a kind of antithesis, epiphany.

The study eventually proposes some reflections on the meaning of death in an age fully contingent on media and technology and dominated by financial capitalism and consumerism. Despite all the distractions, death remains a sinister presence, which has beset the minds not only of DeLillo's protagonists.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003289937-1

When it comes to death and killing, popular forms of narrative entertainment (TV features, crime thrillers) are primarily interested in the person of the deceased, the reason for their demise or the plot of the whodunit, including the motives or craziness of the (psycho-)killer. Not so Don DeLillo. In an interview, following the publication of Underworld, DeLillo remarks:

People talk about the killing, but they don’t talk about what it does to them, to the way they think and feel and fear […]. They don’t talk about what it creates in a larger sense. The truth is, we don’t quite know how to talk about this, I don’t believe. Maybe that’s why some of us write fiction.¹

The effects of killing and, more generally, death, whether of natural or non-natural causes, have indeed been an ongoing subject in Don DeLillo’s fiction, notably in End Zone, White Noise and, of course, the recent Zero K. When asked in 1993 about the meaning of the “accelerated but vague mortality” in some of his novels to date, DeLillo responded: “Who knows? If writing is a concentrated form of thinking, then the most concentrated writing probably ends in some kind of reflection on dying.”² (Conversations, 102) It is not only that people die in his novels, death is also a looming presence, which has beset the minds of the protagonists, who either respond with defensive mechanisms, with subliminal death and destruction phantasies, or both. In 1987, after having returned from a three-year sojourn in Greece, he had to learn that “[d]eath seems to be all around us […] I can’t imagine a culture more steeped in the idea of death.”³ (Conversations, 24)

In the present study, I want to focus on DeLillo’s “reflection on dying” in his later novels from Underworld to The Silence along with his 1986 novel White Noise, in which the fear of death dominates the protagonists most markedly and “death,” as a human idea, phantasma or construct, is dealt with throughout. But before going into the novels, it seems appropriate to put the “fear” and the “idea of death” into a historical and larger sociopsychological context.

The Culture of Death: Fear of Death, Responses to Death and the Management of Death, or “Terror Management”

Surely, death, mortality, and their concomitant time and transience have always been “natural” themes and subjects of literature, philosophy and theology (not to mention medicine and esotericism). Death was paramount to classical antiquity from Plato to Epicurus to Seneca; it was and is pivotal to the medieval and early modern ars moriendi ⁴ or the morality play (Everyman), to Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial or the highly successful Carpe Diem/Memento Mori genres, to novels such as Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or Nabokov’s Pale Fire and to the recent work of Julian Barnes (Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Levels of Life) – to drop only a few names. These texts, generally speaking, reflect on dying, on death as a (ontological) fact, and, of course, the way the consciousness of death determines life. Yet the way we deal with death is also very much a historical phenomenon, omnipresent, supratemporal and pertinent as it is.⁵ While the 19th century developed, as often claimed, a highly complex and publicly visible culture of death and mourning, modernity is much more inclined to repress or even deny and hide away death. The reasons are manifold: secularization and the waning belief in an afterlife (but also in purgatory and hell), the decreasing likelihood that you or one of your children might die early, the separation of the location where one dies (in a hospital) from one’s home, the immediate removal of the corpse, the technologizing and medical rationalization of death, to name only a few. Yet the fact that people are more likely to attain old age, as well as the displacement and covering up of the phenomenon, has not led to its disappearance, on the contrary. The late 20th and the early 21st centuries have shown an unheard-of wealth of publications on death and mourning.⁶ The waning of public forms of mourning, of sepulchral culture, and the tabooing of public expressions of pain and grief has not only brought forth more clandestine and individualized ways of dealing with it, but it has also resulted in more or less conscious surrogate strategies, ersatz religions or compensatory means (such as (self-)destructiveness and anticipatory or preemptive, but often forlorn defenses, as, e.g., fame) to repress, escape or deny the inevitable. In fact, the 1980s of the past century, when Don DeLillo’s White Noise appeared, and its author felt that death was “all around us,” were more prone to the fear of death than the preceding decades. In those years, the feeling of social insecurity among many Americans was increasing; self-esteem, however, was decreasing. Ronald Reagan’s neoliberalism (“Reaganomics”) and social cuts, his Manicheism, a reinforced risk of a nuclear clash with the Soviets as well as a depreciation of one’s significance after the disaster of Vietnam (or e.g., the Challenger catastrophe in 1986) led to a sustained sociopsychological destabilization. In addition, after the technological disasters and a new awareness of ecological and economic scarcity, the optimism of modernism was ceasing. It gave way not only to political conservatism but also to a new historical pessimism and even apocalyptic thinking.

One may assume, on the other hand, that the new social and political insecurity called for new mechanisms of self-protection. If, according to the psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, we can cling to a stable “cultural worldview,” a sense of “personal significance” and an appropriate degree of “self-esteem,” we may well be protected from the “fear of inevitable death.”⁷ In order to maintain these protective shields, premodern society, they claim, was relatively well equipped with the supernatural, with ritual, myth, religion, forms of art (and, one might add, organic memory) that serve to ban the terrible. (63–81) Through all ages to the present, human beings have aspired to literal immortality or after symbolic immortality. (82–123) The first one tries to achieve by evocation of the eternal soul (and resurrection) or by means of alchemy (panaceas or nostra, secret cure-alls, etc.). The latest attempts in respect thereof are made by high-tech immortalists in Silicon Valley and – most graphically – by cryonics (96) with companies such as the “Alcor Life Extension Foundation” or “The Cryonics Institute” (the subject of Zero K). Symbolic immortality one tries to attain through fame (by creating literary works, as e.g., John Keats did) or other public achievements, through procreation, family and children, heroism and nationalism, wealth and the acquisition of scarce and apparently lasting objects, and (conspicuous) consumption in general, an almost ongoing topos in DeLillo. The identification, or at least fascination, with a (seemingly) charismatic leader who appears to be the master of death (like Hitler) and who pretends to make his followership stand out forever, has also been helpful.

These protective shields are still working, but in modernity “terror management” (IX, 9 et passim) becomes more varied. My death-transcending and death-managing worldviews are more likely to be called in question by competing “belief systems.” (131) They relativize one’s own convictions, thereby undermining my self-esteem. We react with the discrimination, inclusion/exclusion, humiliation or dehumanization of the other. We instigate (updated) crusades, Jihads and go to war against “the axis of evil.” In fact, the terrorist attacks on the “West” by radical Muslims – often under the motto “death to the unbelievers” – may well be put down, according to Pankaj Mishra,⁸ to a deeply felt humiliation of Muslim identity. Terrorism may thus be seen as a kind of retaliation and a discharge of sustained resentment. But bringing death to Western “civilization” is also, I think, an attempt at restoring the validity of (radical) Muslim beliefs which are to ensure symbolic immortality by also shattering the death-managing self-esteem of the West.

But precisely because the old mythological, religious or supernatural systems have been weakened (or relativized), we have turned much more to the natural, this-worldly or earthy side of existence. From here we try to exclude, taboo and negatively fetishize anything material and chthonic that seems to be reminiscent of death. We try to suppress our animality, our excretions and excrementitious matter, and we have developed intricate systems of doing away with our waste and refuse and bury it underground or in the “Underworld” – as in Don DeLillo’s novel of the same name. On the other hand, we mortify and manipulate our bodies. We purify it, and with the aid of health food, sports and cosmetics we try to evade portents of mortality and death. We shun our vegetative-animal nature and castigate our body by “working out” and excessive running. It becomes a reified and malleable instrument for overcoming death.

Interestingly, Solomon et al. also point out what they call “distal and proximal defenses.” Proximal defenses are probably the most banal, if efficient, way to deal with the fear of death. When conscious of death, we make “rational (or rationalizing) efforts” to “repress” the thought about death; we “try to distract ourselves” or “push” the problem into a “distant future.” (171) Corresponding formulas are “I am still very fit” or “I still have a long time to live.” (173) Distal defenses are more intricate and more relevant on a cultural scale. They have “no logical or semantic relation to the problem of death,” yet once we think we may have resolved our fear of death (by means of proximal defenses) “our distal defenses kick in.” Distal defense mechanisms basically consist of what constitutes culture. They make people want to believe they are “valuable contributor[s] to a meaningful cultural scheme of things.” (172) Pursuing a mission, accomplishing an ambitious project, identifying and defending a worldview, altruism, social commitment but also challenging death by reckless behavior, a shooting or driving rampage, may convey the illusion of power. But those activities will also bolster self-esteem and cover up the unconscious death fears, that, according to the findings of Solomon et al., are always present in your subconsciousness.

Toward the end of their study, (185) Solomon et al. go into a number of psychological disorders that may also be caused by death anxiety (schizophrenia, phobias, depression, suicide, obsessions, compulsive disorders, drug, alcohol abuse – and, one may add, gambling and computer addiction). Clearly, people who were exposed to death very closely and dramatically are prone to develop “post-traumatic stress disorders.” This became only too significant after 9/11 (the subject of Falling Man). It frequently occurs to people directly involved in military action or those who lose their spouses or near relatives through accident or suicide (as in The Body Artist).

It is noteworthy that Solomon et al. are not occupied with states and acts of mourning and grief. This is perhaps because mourning seems to be directed toward the other more than to oneself. Mourning denotes, however, a highly variable subjective response to the “role of death in life.” Mourners are not only painfully reminded of death, they also claim that a part of themselves has passed away, too; and they often melancholically want to reintegrate what has been lost. Mourning, on the other hand, is one of the most crucial – culturally and individually highly diverse – ways of coming, more or less, to terms with death. Rituals of mourning have been globally ubiquitous. DeLillo gives us an impressive example in Cosmopolis.

It seems a little oversimplified to describe culture or the aspiration to the significance and fortification of “cultural values” (183) as a means of channeling and limiting the death drive. One could well have second thoughts about such a reductionism, which can be traced back to Schopenhauer and Freud. Arguably, we simply become fascinated by categories of novelty and difference just for their novelty and difference (and not for the sake of self-delusion). Spatio-temporal extension, symmetry or beauty are attractive in themselves along with the desire to be creative and to overcome the given. Thus, many cultural activities can develop a dynamic and flow of their own that we simply enjoy. Nonetheless, human beings want continuity, permanence and durability,

which life, by itself, so sorely misses. But death (more exactly, awareness of mortality) is the ultimate condition of cultural creativity as such. It makes permanence into a task, into an urgent task, a paramount task – a fount and a measure of all tasks – and so it makes culture that huge and never stopping factory of permanence.⁹

Culture is, after all, the mode and space through which we go beyond ourselves. By taking a position outside and toward one’s self, one cannot help realizing that the body and the whole framework of our being are transient, perishable and bound to nothingness. Yet by the same token, we add a timeless or time-transcending value to objects (from money to trivial collector items to “high” art and not least to our bodies), which is not inherent in those objects. Commodities and art appear to open up what death precisely cuts and closes down, namely the prospect of new, indefinite and other possibilities. The fetishization of consumer goods and the transfiguration of the common into something everlasting – art – have furnished culture with the tenacious illusion of deathlessness in this life.

One should, moreover, keep in mind that especially postmodern humans seem to have become incapable of enduring boredom and emptiness, empty spaces or empty time. It is hardly bearable to be simply there with one’s body alone. Boredom – or exposure to time – gives a premonition of nothingness and, by the same token, death. The portent of emptiness has certainly led to an increasing urge for ekstasis and intensity (through sports, speed, “the event,” sex).¹⁰ People not only get hooked to, or lost in, computer screens, there is also a strong desire to merge with masses of people and to get absorbed into a crowd of other bodies. This seems evident enough to suggest a need for and the omnipresence of “terror management.” Yet ever so often, when we think we can abandon ourselves to those objects or crowds, the prospect of nothingness – or empty time – returns most threateningly. In an age, moreover, in which the only historical alternative to consumption (and work) appears to be consumption (and work), the feeling of tedium and surfeit has become much more virulent. Since the 1980s and “The End of History” (Francis Fukuyama), that is, the disillusionment of progressivist (critical) thinking and future expectations, the present has come to be without alternative. But the lack of historical meaning has once again brought forth eschatological scenarios, doom, gloom and the desire for some ending, or at least, the disruptive event. White Noise, Underworld, Cosmopolis, Point Omega and The Silence are informed by this mindset. The clinical psychologists Solomon and his colleagues do not really go into what accordingly could be called historical mentality (or the temporal consciousness of particular historical phases), they also only touch upon (meta-)historical consciousness at large. In spite, or precisely on account of Western secularization, intellectuals (such as the main figure in Point Omega) are spinning out spatio-temporal ideologies and projections to counter the limitation of our time on earth: geological time, apocalyptical, teleological, messianic time, eternal recurrence, cosmological space-time (Martin in The Silence), e...