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:
The effects of killing and, more generally, death, whether of natural or non-natural causes, have indeed been an ongoing subject in Don DeLilloâs fiction, notably in End Zone, White Noise and, of course, the recent Zero K. When asked in 1993 about the meaning of the âaccelerated but vague mortalityâ in some of his novels to date, DeLillo responded: âWho knows? If writing is a concentrated form of thinking, then the most concentrated writing probably ends in some kind of reflection on dying.â2 (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 â[d]eath seems to be all around us [âŠ] I canât imagine a culture more steeped in the idea of death.â3 (Conversations, 24)
In the present study, I want to focus on DeLilloâs âreflection on dyingâ 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 âdeath,â as a human idea, phantasma or construct, is dealt with throughout. But before going into the novels, it seems appropriate to put the âfearâ and the âidea of deathâ into a historical and larger sociopsychological context.
The Culture of Death: Fear of Death, Responses to Death and the Management of Death, or âTerror Managementâ
Surely, death, mortality, and their concomitant time and transience have always been ânaturalâ 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 Browneâs Urn Burial or the highly successful Carpe Diem/Memento Mori genres, to novels such as Tolstoyâs The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Faulknerâs As I Lay Dying or Nabokovâs Pale Fire and to the recent work of Julian Barnes (Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Levels of Life) â 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 oneâs 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 DeLilloâs White Noise appeared, and its author felt that death was âall around us,â 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 Reaganâs neoliberalism (âReaganomicsâ) and social cuts, his Manicheism, a reinforced risk of a nuclear clash with the Soviets as well as a depreciation of oneâs 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 âcultural worldview,â a sense of âpersonal significanceâ and an appropriate degree of âself-esteem,â we may well be protected from the âfear of inevitable death.â7 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. (63â81) Through all ages to the present, human beings have aspired to literal immortality or after symbolic immortality. (82â123) 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 â most graphically â by cryonics (96) with companies such as the âAlcor Life Extension Foundationâ or âThe Cryonics Instituteâ (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 âterror managementâ (IX, 9 et passim) becomes more varied. My death-transcending and death-managing worldviews are more likely to be called in question by competing âbelief systems.â (131) They relativize oneâs 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 âthe axis of evil.â In fact, the terrorist attacks on the âWestâ by radical Muslims â often under the motto âdeath to the unbelieversâ â 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 âcivilizationâ 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 âUnderworldâ â as in Don DeLilloâs 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 âworking outâ and excessive running. It becomes a reified and malleable instrument for overcoming death.
Interestingly, Solomon et al. also point out what they call âdistal and proximal defenses.â Proximal defenses are probably the most banal, if efficient, way to deal with the fear of death. When conscious of death, we make ârational (or rationalizing) effortsâ to ârepressâ the thought about death; we âtry to distract ourselvesâ or âpushâ the problem into a âdistant future.â (171) Corresponding formulas are âI am still very fitâ or âI still have a long time to live.â (173) Distal defenses are more intricate and more relevant on a cultural scale. They have âno logical or semantic relation to the problem of death,â yet once we think we may have resolved our fear of death (by means of proximal defenses) âour distal defenses kick in.â Distal defense mechanisms basically consist of what constitutes culture. They make people want to believe they are âvaluable contributor[s] to a meaningful cultural scheme of things.â (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 â and, one may add, gambling and computer addiction). Clearly, people who were exposed to death very closely and dramatically are prone to develop âpost-traumatic stress disorders.â 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 ârole of death in life.â 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 â culturally and individually highly diverse â 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 âcultural valuesâ (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 â a fount and a measure of all tasks â 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 oneâs 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 âhighâ 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 â art â 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 oneâs body alone. Boredom â or exposure to time â 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, âthe event,â 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 âterror management.â Yet ever so often, when we think we can abandon ourselves to those objects or crowds, the prospect of nothingness â or empty time â 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 âThe End of Historyâ (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...